Reassessing the Sixties
Ed., Stephen Macedo
Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy Edited by Stephen Macedo W.W. Norton / 297 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Roger Kimball I t is one of the central ironies of our time...
...Gitlin doesn't deign to provide details, but he does make it clear that he doesn't much like Newt Gingrich...
...One is Walter Berns's gripping account of the radical takeover of the universities in the sixties, with special reference to Cornell University, where he was then teaching...
...a handful are thoughtful, most are silly...
...N evertheless, Reassessing the Sixties contains at least two essays that are necessary reading for anyone concerned with the fate of our culture...
...Berns shows, James Perkins was a study in pusillanimity, a man whose cravenness in the face of armed radicals marks one of the most inglorious episodes in all American higher education...
...The book's ten essays are divided into three sections, one on "Gender Roles, Sexuality, and the Family," one on "the Universities and Education," and one on "Race...
...The triumph of the sensibility of the sixties represents radicalism's victory over an old-fashioned liberalism that insisted on sexual propriety, intellectual standards, traditional virtues like patriotism and honesty and hard work...
...Mansfield touches on about a dozen subjects: in addition to the sexual revolution, he discusses Vietnam, feminism, drugs and crime, environmentalism, rock music, postmodern film and literature, the politicization of education, the underclass, affirmative action, and egalitarianism...
...Each section could easily have been expanded into a book chapter, some into an entire book About every subject, Mansfield has astute things to say...
...He provides a neat summary of the spiritual ills bequeathed to us by that odious decade, beginning, properly, with the sexual revolution, which, he notes, arose from "an illicit, forced union between Freud and Marx in which Mr...
...The American Spectator July r 9 9 7 73...
...One of the most useful yet to appear is Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy...
...Why should this be...
...But his account reminds us of exactly how traumatic that episode was for those who lived through it...
...Books about such questions, especially as they relate to the 1960's, have been ROGER KIMBALL is executive editor of the New Criterion...
...There are no real surprises in this volume, in which the conservative contributors call attention to the failings of the sixties while the radicals busy themselves manufacturing excuses...
...But Mansfield's larger—and deeply political—point is that the trauma of the sixties is at bottom a defeat of liberalism...
...Berns presents will be familiar...
...Gitlin would have disdained to appear in the same volume with a conservative like George Will...
...appearing almost as fast as one can turn their pages...
...The other piece of necessary reading in this volume is the lead essay, by the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield, on the legacy of the late sixties —"that assertive era," as he puts it, "which pretended to liberate and actually enthralled...
...In this sense, the crisis of the sixties is primarily a crisis not of conservatism but of liberalism...
...Gitlin concedes—and for him, this is quite a concession —that "during the sixties many of the terrible simplifiers were on the left...
...The poison has worked its way into our soul, the effects becoming less visible to us as they become more ordinary...
...In a just world, this extraordinary declaration of being without principle would serve as James Perkins's epitaph...
...Such ecumenism is itself worthy of note, since it was not so long ago that tenured radicals like Mr...
...All of us are familiar with the phenomena that Mansfield details, but our very familiarity has often become an excuse for indifference...
...They clearly impressed themselves indelibly on his mind, and one can see why...
...Thus it comes with a bracing foreword by the conservative commentator George Will and an afterword by Todd Gitlin, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society and bona fide academic radical...
...To readers of The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom's classic meditation on the fate of American universities, the overall picture that Mr...
...Perkins—unforgettable...
...The real battle today is not between liberals and conservatives, but between radicals masquerading as liberals and the only people left who still uphold the central ideals of classical liberalism—those men and women who are routinely disparaged by the left as conservatives because they dare to challenge the reigning intellectual and moral pieties...
...As with any such miscellany, the quality and sensibility of the essays vary widely: the difference between Todd Gitlin and Walter Berns, or Martha Nussbaum and Harvey Mansfield, is, well, everything...
...Freud was required to forsake his insistence that liberation from human nature is impossible...
...There is, in other words, a little something for everyone...
...Norton / 297 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Roger Kimball I t is one of the central ironies of our time that while conservatives continue to win at the polls, the radicalism of the 1960's entrenches itself ever more firmly throughout our cultural and educational institutions...
...Since the essays were written independently of one another, what we have in this volume is not so much a debate as a number of position statements...
...As Mr...
...As he notes, today the radicals are "neither so outrageous nor so violent as at first...
...Bems quotes him as saying, when confronted by an angry mob of students, that "there is nothing I have ever said or will ever say that is forever fixed or will not be modified by changed circumstances...
...But he makes that concession only as a prelude to his main point—a point that has become a strategic gambit for many on the left seeking to salvage political credibility: that today "virtually all the terrible simplifiers are on the right...
...Berns has added a great deal of new detail and has provided a synoptic view of how capitulation by certain key college administrators reverberated far beyond their own institutions...
...Why should many of society's best-educated and most articulate people glorify a period and ideological movement that have brought such havoc to our moral, spiritual, and political life...
...In particular, the portrait he draws of James A. Perkins, president of Cornell when it erupted in violence in 1969, is—unfortunately for Mr...
...Marx was compelled to yield his principle that economics, not sex, is the focus of liberation, and Mr...
...The contributors range from Harvey Mansfield ("The Legacy of the Sixties"), Walter Berns ("The Assault on the Universities: Then and Now"), and Jeremy Rabkin ("Feminism: Where the Spirit of the Sixties Lives On") on the right to Martha Nussbaum ("Women in the Sixties"), Sheldon Wolin ("The Destructive Sixties and Postmodern Conservatism"), and Martha Minow ("Whatever Happened to Children's Rights...
...Even now, nearly thirty years after the fact, the events that Mr...
...his comment that "Environmentalism is school prayerfor liberals" should be repeated daily by federal bureaucrats...
...on the left...
...If Mansfield's litany of decline is depressing, it is also a tonic, an eloquent antidote to the poison whose symptoms he has enumerated with such penetrating precision...
...Mansfield's essay is the best brief anatomy of what went wrong in the sixties yet to appear...
...Many are critical, some few are full of praise...
...Edited by Stephen Macedo, a professor at Syracuse University, this collection of essays is unusual in that it includes spokesmen from both sides of the Great Divide...
...Bems recounts—gun-toting black stuLike the Plague, the Sixties Will Always Be With Us 72 J ul y 1997 • The American Spectator dents facing down university administrators —are harrowing...
Vol. 30 • July 1997 • No. 7
