H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Pol@h-net.msu.edu (October, 1997)
James J. Farrell. _The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar
Radicalism_. New York: Routledge, 1997. 360 pp. Notes, bibliography,
index. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-415-91385-3; $26.50 (paper), ISBN
0-415-91386-1.
Reviewed for H-Pol by W. J. Rorabaugh <rorabaug@u.washington.edu>,
University of Washington
'Personalism' in Sixties Social Movements
Of the many recent studies of social movements in the 1960s, James
Farrell's is among the most insightful, original, and important. He
argues that, amid a sense of spiritual crisis, a common thread of
"personalism" ran through the era's movements. He defines personalism as
the belief that an ideal society (1) should be based neither on capitalism
nor state socialism, (2) should give primacy to individual conscience, and
(3) should provide bonds of community. Although this ideal could be
construed as libertarian, personalism lacked an absolute commitment to the
individual. Deep suspicion of the state as well as individual-based moral
principle made personalism a form of anarchism, which Farrell identifies
as anarcho-communitarianism.
Farrell begins with a shrewd discussion of Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker
movement which, although founded in 1933, remained vibrant during the
1950s. Borrowing personalism from French Catholics, Catholic Workers
decried both capitalism and communism, preached rural communitarianism,
opposed war as an act of personalist conscience, and called for individual
responsibility inside an anarcho-communitarian setting. By the late 1960s
these ideas would lead Daniel and Phillip Berrigan to a militant, radical
Catholicism. Farrell's most original contribution is to demonstrate the
importance of personalist-based Catholic radicalism to the sixties.
Farrell contends, less convincingly, that the Beats represented a
personalist attack upon mainstream values. Although some evidence,
especially concerning the Catholic Jack Kerouac, sustains the argument,
the Beats never developed any coherent philosophy, personalist or
otherwise. The Beats did question conformity and, as writers, had a keen
desire for unfettered personal expression. These libertarians were not a
true community and practiced individualism in anomic ways.
Farrell also finds personalism in the Civil Rights movement and especially
in the ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr. King trained at Boston
University, which had long been a stronghold for Protestant personalism.
Farrell observes that other influences, especially the black Baptist
church, also shaped King, and King, of course, was only one leader in the
Civil Rights movement. Personalism, however, proves fruitful for
explaining the nature of the troubled relationship between King and the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. While these African American
students often disagreed with King, they shared his belief in
anarcho-communitarianism. Ironically, because both King and SNCC insisted
on restructuring society on the basis of conscience, this made
accommodation more difficult because of differences in conscience.
After World War II, most American pacifists were personalists. A. J.
Muste and others opposed war both as an act of conscience and out of
hostility to state power. In the late 1950s antinuclear groups also acted
out of personalism. So did Women Strike for Peace, founded in 1961. WSP
kept no master membership lists, nor did the national board organize or
coordinate local activities. This grassroots, bottom-up politics was one
of the era's most important innovations.
Farrell is more convincing in arguing personalism with reference to
Catholic Workers, religious-based Civil Rights activists, and pacifists
than he is with regard to students. He is correct that scholars have
tended to see the New Left, including Students for a Democratic Society,
only in terms of connections to and differences with the Old Left, and it
is true that the student movement of the sixties was more leftist in
rhetoric than in either organization or practice. Nevertheless, the
personalist strand that Farrell sees in the New Left was only one of many
threads. As Farrell notes, much student personalism came from the Civil
Rights movement.
Chapters on opposition to the Vietnam War and the Counterculture are
disappointing. The antiwar movement had many roots, and most of the
evidence does not suggest personalism as a motive. Opposition included
revolutionary fervor or seeing the war as a bad investment. The
Counterculture did have a communitarian side, but personalism was neither
the basis for hippiedom nor for the despair that lurked just beneath the
gawdy surface. While Farrell is correct that personalism played a major
role in postwar radicalism, his concentration on personalism distorts the
analysis. Because personalism applies most convincingly to Catholic
Workers, one of the lesser movements of the sixties, Farrell ends up
overemphasizing Catholic Workers in postwar history. More might be
learned by structuring the analysis around the Civil Rights movement.
Farrell's book demonstrates that personalism operated throughout the
postwar years. He shows that this idea helped shape specific radical
movements and, more important, limited their success. Movements that
embraced personalism could not develop robust philosophies, nor organize
and discipline members, nor build permanent institutional structures. The
result was a period of intense social concern that could not be sustained.
Personalism foreshadowed movement collapse.
Copyright (c) 1997 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu.
_____________________________
From: James Farrell <farrellj@stolaf.edu>
X-Sender: farrellj@mari.acc.stolaf.edu
To: sixties-l@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Spirit of the Sixties (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.96.971104191407.20435E-100000@mari.acc.stolaf.edu>
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Response to Review of _The Spirit of the Sixties_
W.J. Rorabaugh has captured the spirit of _The Spirit of the Sixties._
He gives a good sense of the focus of the book, and he understands (as I
do) some of its weaknesses. I have little to argue with, but perhaps
a little to add. [People interested in some excerpts from the book can
look at <http://www.stolaf.edu/people/farrellj/SPIRIT/spirit.htm>]
Like Rorabaugh, I think that the main strength of the book is the
definition and description of political personalism, the belief that
politics and social institutions must respect (if not enhance)the
inviolable dignity of persons (what Martin Luther King called their
"somebodiness"). This personalist perspective brings to light some
neglected aspects (especially religious and spiritual) of
the Sixties, aspects which explain clearly how the political became
personal (and vice versa) in the decade. Personalism was, I
think, not just a phenomenon of Sixties politics, but also a
redefinition of politics and the political. It gave people in the
different movements of the Sixties a common language, and a
distinctive way of thinking (and acting) about the goodness of the
so-called "good life." Too many Americans (and even too many historians)
see the Sixties manly through the stpectacles at the end of the
decade, and don't see enough of the rich philosophical and ethical
foundations of those protests. Although I agree wholeheartedly that
personalism was not the only motivation for Sixties social movements, I
think it is hard to think about the decade without considering the
communitarian anarchism of a personalist perspective.
I agree that, in looking at personalist precedents for the Sixties, my
analyses of the Catholic Workers and pacifists and the civil rights
movement are stronger than the chapter on Beat personalism. In part,
that's because the Catholic Workers and Martin Luther King were
philosophical personalists, while the Beats were philosophical
eclectics. What I had hoped to do in the chapter on Beat personalism was
to show that the early Beat movement encountered personalist ideas (mainly
through Kenneth Rexroth and some World War II conscientious objectors),
and to show how Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and Kerouac (and folk musicians
like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan) brought personalist ideas (along with many
others) to a broader audience.
Rorabaugh mentions the importance of "grassroots, bottom-up politics"
both to the book and to the Sixties. The Sixties' attempt to design
institutions so that it would be "easier for people to be good" was, as
Wini Breines puts it, a "prefigurative politics" that helps historians to
see not just the mass political protests but also the politics of everyday
life, the politics of the "here and now revolution." Throughout the
decade, personalists protested the structural injustices of America's
primary institutions, and established counter-institutions (or "parallel
institutions") that allowed people to "live the revolution now"--in soup
kitchens, coffeehouses, Freedom schools, the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party, community centers, free universities, free stores,
communes, cooperatives, consciousness-raising groups, rock festivals,
etc.
Rorabaugh says that the chapters on antiwar protest and the counterculture
are disappointing. If he means, as I think he does, that they are
disappointing because they don't encompass the complete complexity of
those movements, I would agree. I wasn't trying to do that. Other
people have already emphasized the Marxism of the New Left and antiwar
movement, and the libertarianism and hedonism of the counterculture. What
I hope I did was show that significant strands of both these movements
(and the student movement) had personalist roots, maintained personalist
perspectives, and institutionalized personalist practices in some (but not
all) of their lives.
I also agree that the civil rights movement was the most important source
of personalism for Sixties students and protesters. [Sara Evans'
_Personal Politics_ also emphasizes this point]. I emphasized the
Catholic Workers in part because they explicitly used (and still do) the
language of personalism, and because I wanted to show how they (and
radical pacifists like A.J. Muste and David Dellinger) embodied a
personalist ethic (more catholic than Catholic) that permeated the
politics of the decade.
Finally, I'm not sure how to think about personalism and "movement
collapse," and I'd be interested to hear from others on this question. On
the one hand, I think that because personalists revived "second languages"
of Social Gospel and civic republicanism, they made the Movement much
wider than it would otherwise have been. On the other hand,
Rorabaugh suggests (and rightly so) that personalists had a hard time with
group discipline and establishing lasting institutional structures.
Here's my question and part of an answer (from the book): "Which political
strategies would have been more effective? Would working within the
Democratic Party lead to social transformation? Was a third party a real
possibility? Did alliances with the established labor movement offer more
possibilities for a more personalist polity? Did democratic socialism
promise to sweep the country? . . . . Maybe so, but most of these options
required that activists tell it like it wasn't, because these alternatives
generally assumed that there were no structural problems in American
society, and almost all of them assumed that alienation, anomie, apathy
and spiritual dis-ease were symptoms of private pathology rather than
social sickness."
Thanks to W.J. Rorabough for a genuinely thoughtful review, and to H-Pol
for the chance to engage in this conversation.
____________________________
>Date sent: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 08:40:02 -0700 (PDT)
>From: "E. Wayne Carp" <carpw@plu.edu>
>
>On Tue, 21 Oct 1997, James Farrell wrote:
>
>> > Author's Response to Reviewof _The Spirit of the Sixties_
>
>> Rorabaugh says that the chapters on antiwar protest and the
>> counterculture are disappointing. If he means, as I think he does,
>> that they are disappointing because they don't encompass the
>> complete complexity of those movements, I would agree. I wasn't
>> trying to do that. Other people have already emphasized the Marxism
>> of the New Left and antiwar movement, and the libertarianism and
>> hedonism of the counterculture. What I hope I did was show that
>> significant strands of both these movements (and the student
>> movement) had personalist roots, maintained personalist
>> perspectives, and institutionalized personalist practices in some
>> (but not all) of their lives.
>
>This is a theoretical question about the writing of history. Do other
>members of the list see James Ferrill's defense of emphasizing only
>one strand of the anti-war movement as legitimate? Isn't it the
>responsibility of the historian to analyze an event in all of its
>complexity, weigh the various importance of the factors, and not
>ignore other aspects in order to ride a particular thesis? Is
>personalism one of many strands of thought in the origins of the
>anti-war movemet? The most important one? The lest important one?
>It strikes me that historians who simply say "that's not what I was
>trying to do" are simply abdicating responsibility to build on or
>incorporate the work of other scholars.
>
>E. Wayne Carp
>Pacific Lutheran University
>
____________________________
Subject: Reply: Author's Response to Review of _The Spirit of the Sixtie
To: Multiple recipients of list H-POL <H-POL@h-net.msu.edu>
Date sent: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 10:00:39 -0900 (PDT)
From: David Farber, dfarber@unm.edu
Carp wonders if Farrell has written a bad history bacause he
does not explain everything about the anti-war movement in
his book on the "personalist" underpinnings of 60s era
social change movements. In my forthcoming review essay on
Farrell's book (in American Quarterly) one of my minor
complaints, actually, is the opposite. To the degree that
Farell strays from his fascinating portrait of personalist
influences and engages in a more straightforward (and
multi-faceted) narrative, I thought he'd lost his
focus/argument and given a kind of history done better
elsewhere (Terry Anderson, for example, provides a superior
narrative of protest in the 60s). Different historical
projects offer different perspectives on complex phenomena.
Farrell's project is thematically driven; it is not and need
not be an attempt to write synthetic narratives of social
change. But from now on, anyone who aims to write a
synthetic overview of social change movements in the 60s -
or the trajectory of post-World War II social change
movements, in general, had best take Farrell's argument on
the power and pervasiveness of a "personalist" perspective
into account.
David Farber