Sociology and the Spirit of Sixty-Eight

Abstract

The intellectual (as distinct from the cultural) legacy of the late 60s has been dissipated. Many students now entering the universities were born after 1968. Even in the social sciences they may never have heard of Marcuse. Their attitude to sociology is sometimes that of Wordsworth to the solitary reaper: 'Will not one tell me what she sings?/Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow/From old, unhappy, faroff things/And battles long ago.' But what was that intellectual legacy? Why is it still more strongly represented in sociology than in other disciplines? The 1960s was a time of unrest. In the Third World there were guerrilla campaigns and anti-colonialist revolutions, mainly under communist leadership. Mao and Castro were already successful. Ho and Guevara, the romantic 'Che', were heroic exemplars of the continuing armed struggle. In the Soviet bloc the insurrections and the momentarily successful revolt, the Prague Spring, were against police-state repression, one-party government and central 'command' control of the economy, and for communism with a human face. In the West there was riot and rebellion (in which students were prominent participants) against the fraudulence of the claims that Western pluralist democracy was either efficient, humane, just or durable. This article will deal with the student movements of the West, and with the other two only in so far as they were directly relevant to it. The two most significant causes of this student unrest concerned the USA. In Vietnam military defeat was preceded by atrocities comparable to and on a scale exceeding any committed by the regular German army during the Second World War. The nightly sight on television of unsuccessful battles waged with carpet bombing, defoliation agents and napalm, and allegations, later substantiated, of the massacre of helpless villagers increasingly radicalized the young men who were liable to be conscripted. Since the end of the nineteenth century the strategy of Booker T. Washington had predominated among influential American blacks. Improvement was attainable by self-improvement. But with the