Word: gitlin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...patient and probing search for the Sixties zeitgeist, Gitlin devotes considerable space to the often uneasy relationship between radical politics and radical culture during the period. He argues persuasively that the New Left, the handful of committed student radicals who started SDS and similar groups in the early years of the decade, were the core and catalyst of the mass youth movement that powered the great civil rights and anti-war demonstrations of the mid and late Sixties, as well as the tribal orgasms of Woodstock and the Summer of Love...
...Gitlin avoids, however, the facile inference that the New Left somehow "caused" the counterculture and Sixties radicalism in general. Rather he succeeds brilliantly in distinguishing the origins of the radical student movement from those of the youth counterculture with which it frequently overlapped. He portrays the New Left as a generational reaction against the moribund remnants of 1930s labor union socialism. He is adept at tracing both SDS's breakaway from its older parent party, the League of Industrial Democracy, and the influence of "red diaper babies"--the children of Old Left families--on the political radicalization of himself...
...GITLIN FINDS the origins of the counterculture, on the other hand, in the mass, Beat-catalyzed youth reaction against the complacent cultural totalitarianism that characterized the Fifties and the economic affluence that allowed for the possibility of widespread alternative lifestyles outside the work force...
...Gitlin is a skilled sociologist, an accomplished and witty storyteller, and a scrupulous historian. He inspires confidence in his work that is rare in Sixties chronicles; like the Arab-Israeli conflict, the period seems to exert a strange, objectivity-stripping influence on those who would describe or pass judgement upon it. Most impressively, perhaps, he is able to look back honestly on the student movement and his own involvement in it without losing his sense of humor and his compassion...
...GITLIN NEEDS all his honesty and courage to tell the darker story of the Movement's fragmentation and subsequent dissolution at the end of the decade. A movement that had scorned bourgeois hierarchization and centralization throughout its history eventually reached the critical mass of a congenital inability to control and unify its own constituent groups, from radical Maoists to feminists to Black Panthers to Hell's Angels to just plain street crazies...