The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism

The 1960s has traditionally been seen by such commentators as Pat Buchanan as the time when the West as it has been traditionally understood moved away from traditional culture towards a completely new one which Benjamin Wiker traces to the first-century-BC philosopher Lucretius and where Man rather than God and natural law is the judge of whether a practice is right or wrong. Under this system nature was mechanistic rather than sacramental and interference was pleasure was the basis of the "good life". In contrast, Robert Inchausti and Rod Dreher argue that the 1960s was not nearly so anti-Christian as popularly thought and that many of the important heroes and heroines of the early counterculture were in fact highly conservative in their political and cultural outlook. In "The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism", James J. Farrell looks at both perceptions of the 1960s counterculture and aims to relate all of them to a philosophy known as "personalism". According to Farrell, the basis of personalism was that people had an inviolable dignity that was not the same as the rights of individuals, and assumed that everyday values needed to be applied to politics for social problems such as racism and social injustice to be solved. Farrell traces the roots of this idea to Dorothy Day, the lesser-known Emmanuel Mounier, and Quaker activist and journalist A.J. Muste and shows how these writers impacted much more socially and culturally radical idealists during the beginnings of the counterculture of the 1960s and co-operated therewith in such magazines as "Liberation". The Beat Generation of Rexroth, Ginsberg, Kerouac and Snyder also developed a form of personalism that was, like Day's and Mounier's conservative Catholic activism, a form of philosophical anarcho-pacifism that considered expressive, subversive art to be a form of subversion. "The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism" then explains how personalism influenced and infiltrated such key movements as African-American civil rights, the opposition to the Vietnam War, and the hippie counterculture. Farrell shows how the rebellion against the military-industrial complex of 1950s and 1960s was led by opposition to a mechanistic view of society and served to make personal life more political than it had ever been before, as shown by the way in which activists would spend their time protesting non-violently against the draft. The book, thankfully, does admit that to a considerable extent even during the 1960s protest did turn away from personalism towards violent protest through the influence of such philosophies as existentialism that in most ways conflict with personalism. The big problem with "The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism" is the fact that it ignored the failures of personalism when it became applied to actual North American politics under Jimmy Carter and Pierre Trudeau in the seventies, and how this and the desire to comple