Timothy Scott Brown. Sixties Europe.

Abstract

Timothy Scott Brown’s book is titled Sixties Europe, but its focus is really “1968,” or rather “classical problems of revolutionary theory and organization as they were manifested in sixties Europe” (8). Unlike, however, Arthur Marwick’s influential The Sixties, which covered the United States, Britain, France and Italy, or Gerd-Rainer Horn’s The Spirit of ‘68, which analyzed North America and Western Europe, Brown’s scope is genuinely European, incorporating the states beyond the iron curtain (although excluding the Soviet Union). His book is thus the best single-volume, English-language introduction to a European-wide 1968 that treats the revolts and rebellions of that era together. Building on recent trends in the historiography, Sixties Europe aims to situate 1968 both in the long sixties—extended back to the early 1950s, but not projected much beyond the early 1970s—and in its global context. Brown makes good use of English- and German-language secondary literature and manages to provide a sixties of significant breadth without sacrificing depth. The first chapter, “Mapping Sixties Europe,” grapples with the question of what connected the diverse but simultaneous revolts of 1968. Brown’s answer is, first, the structural dilemma of the revolutionary tradition (What was socialism if not state socialism?) and second, the transnational flow of ideas and activists that transmitted a worldwide revolt against “bureaucratic and technocratic domination” (24). The year 1968 is characterized as a project marked primarily by an antiauthoritarianism that sought creative forms of political self-realization. This framework allows Brown to successfully capture the multiplicity, diversity, and simultaneity of the revolts, and effectively dispenses with facile comparisons that measure “1968” in Eastern or Western Europe against each other in order to disparage or dismiss.