The Spirit of the Sixties (fwd)

James Farrell (farrellj@STOLAF.EDU)
Tue, 4 Nov 1997 19:18:12 -0600 (CST)

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