On the Trail of Upheaval

...In EasternEurope it has yet to prevail anywhere...

...In his discussion of the 1848 phenomenon that took place in 1968, Robert V. Daniels proceeds by and large in the zoological fashion...

...Several of the movements were prevented from completing the revolutionary curve: The Prague Spring, resulting as it did in a brutal invasion by Warsaw Pact troops, was wholly a failure, although it helped to fan the spark of what we now see is an extremely powerful Czechoslovak national democratic sentiment...

...Merely by grouping the different '68 movements together, Daniels encourages us to reflect further on how such a worldwide convulsion could have occurred...

...Another point Daniels registers, that revolution begets counterrevolution, encompasses not only the '68 revolution but also the subsequent victories of Charles de Gaulle, Richard M. Nixon, Leonid I. Brezhnev, and the later Mao (once he decided to turn against his own Red Guards...

...Daniels' study is modest in ambition...

...It is among the great unstudied questions of human history...

...Television was very significant in the United States that year, but it was not too important in France, where it was under government control, and it played almost no role in China's Cultural Revolution...

...In China this past June, the face of Albert Einstein became something of a revolutionary symbol for the protesting students...

...No group of historians has set out to research the topic...

...Naturally, each of the '68 movements followed that course differently...

...Still, by summarizing what we know in an accessible form Daniels has done something worthwhile...

...Yet no significant school of thought has tried to analyze ho w such a thing occurs...

...In virtually every case around the world, moreover, Daniels found the classic form of most revolutions: "the protest movement that originates as a liberal reform effort, escalates in compass and intensity as it mobilizes both its following and its opposition, splits at the point of success into moderate and radical wings, loses its political momentum in the face of rising resistance, and falls back to a level of achievement somewhere between the point of departure and its climax...

...And by carefully comparing country to country, movement to movement, Daniels does come up with some worldwide features...

...Might a counterrevolution enjoy a partial success...

...One is hard pressed even to picture how such a study might begin—except, in zoological fashion, by going around and cataloging the common features of revolutions occurring at the same time in the expectation that someday a universal pattern will emerge...

...Many of these movements constituted rebellions of disaffected, reasonably well-off young people against personal and social relations based on hierarchy and subordination...

...Recent studies by writers in French and Spanish, describing what took place in Paris and Mexico City, will add considerably to our understanding of the world phenomenon when they are translated into English...

...No one reading Daniels' survey of 1968 can help harboring some dark worries about today's situation—even though, at the moment, we find ourselves witnessing what is certainly the widest, grandest, example of the 1848 phenomenon that the world has ever known...

...Does he shed much light on the current world revolution—which, to be sure, broke out after he had finished writing...

...That his book therefore cannot go beyond what is already wellknown here is unfortunate...

...We already know he was wrong...

...He hazards the guess that the next motivating force could be opposition to scientific and rational modes of thought...

...The '68 revolution was, after all, a vast and complex enterprise in Latin America alone, and very little has been written about that in our language...

...Historians, a reader might conclude, should describe and never predict...

...So far in the present world revolution, we have seen the counterrevolution in Beijing...

...He examines the radical movements that arose in the United States (in the hippie counterculture, the civil rights movement, the student movement at Columbia University, the Eugene McCarthy Presidential campaign, the streets of Chicago outside the Democratic Party's national convention, and elsewhere), together with those that developed in Paris (the May-June Events), China (the Cultural Revolution), Vietnam (the Tet Offensive), and Czechoslovakia (the Prague Spring...

...We are thus reminded that revolutions can spread even without televised images and sometimes without much in the way of radio, either...

...Daniels pauses for an instant at the end of his book to speculate about what might produce a future 1848 phenomenon...

...The phenomenon can change the world almost overnight, as we have seen in the present example of simultaneous (or nearly simultaneous) rebellions not only in Eastern and Central Europe but in China and Burma, too...

...Indeed, the virtues of describing are obvious in Daniels' book...

...How long will that be true...

...One of his observations should caution us against some of the too-easy analyses being offered of today's cataclysm—for instance, the tendency to credit it to the mass media...

...But where they were not primarily made up of privileged young people and sprang instead from the poor and the oppressed, as was true of American blacks, the principle of opposition to hierarchical social relations held fast...

...Because of its brevity and simplicity, because of its international focus, and because of the author's fundamental sympathy for the radical movements (without in any way being blind to the sometimes horrendous authoritarianism that emerged), Year of the Heroic Guerrilla is one of the first works I would recommend to anyone who is freshly coming to this topic...

...Reviewed by Paul Berman Contributor, "Village Voice," "Dissent, " "New Republic, " New York "Times Book Review" What might be called the 1848 phenomenon—the way revolutionary movements arise sometimes in separate parts of the globe at the same moment, with some of the same basic traits—has never been explained...

...the present world movement has in fact taken scientific rationality as precisely one of its central themes...

...The Chinese Cultural Revolution, more radical and intense than any of the others, soon turned into the worst disaster...

...The 1968 movements arose, Daniels shows, in spite of a sharply uneven world access to mass media...

...He has researched the various movements mostly by using the best Englishlanguage sources to reconstruct, in a journalistic manner, the events as they unfolded...