Seeds of the Sixties - by Andrew Jamison & Ron Eyerman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"The Sixties." The powerful images conveyed by those two words have become an enduring part of American cultural and political history. But where did Sixties radicalism come from? Who planted the intellectual seeds that brought it into being? These questions are answered with striking clarity in Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman's book. The result is a combination of history and biography that vividly portrays an entire culture in transition.

The authors focus on specific individuals, each of whom in his or her distinctive way carried the ideas of the 1930s into the decades after World War II, and each of whom shared in inventing a new kind of intellectual partisanship. They begin with C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt, and Erich Fromm and show how their work linked the "old left" of the Thirties to the "new left" of the Sixties. Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson, and Fairfield Osborn laid the groundwork for environmental activism; Herbert Marcuse, Margaret Mead, and Leo Szilard articulated opposition to the postwar "scientific-technological state." Alternatives to mass culture were proposed by Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and Mary McCarthy; and Saul Alinsky, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr., made politics personal.

This is an unusual book, written with an intimacy that brings to life both intellect and emotion. The portraits featured here clearly demonstrate that the transforming radicalism of the Sixties grew from the legacy of an earlier generation of thinkers. With a deep awareness of the historical trends in American culture, the authors show us the continuing relevance these partisan intellectuals have for our own age.

"In a time colored by 'political correctness' and the ascendancy of market liberalism, it is well to remember the partisan intellectuals of the 1950s. They took sides and dissented without becoming dogmatic. May we be able to say the same about ourselves."-from Chapter 7

Review Quotes

"The book consists of profiles of 15 American intellectuals of the 1950s who created the groundwork for new forms of critical discourse. . . . Among these 'academic outlaws' are C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson and Margaret Mead, all whom occupied disciplinary borderlands, questioned the terms of mass culture and championed intellectual independence and political engagement. . . . The profiles are succinct, colorful and instructive. The book testifies persuasively to the power cultural myths have to shape public life and the role demythologizers can play in reawakening critical consciousness."--"Washington Post Book World

About the Author

Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman are American scholars at Lund University in Sweden. They have published two books together, The Making of the New Environmental Consciousness (1990) and Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (1991). Ron Eyerman is also an editor of Intellectuals, Universities, and the State in Western Modern Societies (California, 1987).