Every contribution to our symposium can be accessed directly by clicking on the name of the individual author below. You can also discuss issues raised by the symposium, and by our latest issue, on First Drafts, Prospect's editorial blog.
Bryan Appleyard,Arthur Aughey,Cheryll Barron,Peter Bazalgette,Vernon Bogdanor,Rudi Bogni,Joe Boyd,Samuel Brittan,Lesley Chamberlain,Stephen Chan,Robert Cooper,Emma Crichton-Miller,René Cuperus,William Davies,Meghnad Desai,Anthony Dworkin,Geoff Dyer,David Edgerton,Duncan Fallowell,Timothy Garton Ash,Anthony Giddens,Robert Gore-Langton,David G Green,Johann Hari,David Herman,Michael Ignatieff,Pico Iyer,Josef Joffe,Alan Johnson,Eric Kaufmann,Tim King,Denis MacShane,Jean McCrindle,Edward Mortimer,Onora O'Neill,PJ O'Rourke,Paul Ormerod,Mark Pagel,Ray Pahl,Jonathan Power,Gideon Rachman,Jonathan Rée,Bridget Rosewell,Bob Rowthorn,Jacques Rupnik,Dominic Sandbrook,Roger Scruton,Jean Seaton,Anne-Marie Slaughter,Erik Tarloff,Tzvetan Todorov,Emily Young,Slavoj Zizek.
California dreaming
by Anthony Giddens
It is May 1968. I am not in Paris, but 6,000 miles away in California working as a junior lecturer at UCLA. When I arrive at Venice, a beach city where I have rented an apartment, I witness a scene out of biblical times. As far as the eye can see, the beach is covered with people wearing long robes, colourful but tatty and unkempt. The air reeks of marijuana. Behind them, on the sidewalk, there is a row of police cars, each with an officer dangling a shotgun out of the window. There is an atmosphere of menace. Just as I had never encountered marijuana, I had never heard the word "hippie" before that day. At that point, the word was barely in use in Britain.
In Europe, the radicals were pretty traditional. They were students on the rampage, and their radicalism didn't dig deep. In California, if you were a radical, you had to be a radical in everything. I had an acquaintance, a straight-laced maths professor, complete with button-down shirt, clipped hair and a wholesome wife and family. He disappeared from the campus for several months. One day I was walking to my class when a Christ-like figure appeared over the brow of the hill. He had blond hair growing to below his shoulders, a long beard and was wearing a flowing robe. I didn't recognise him until he stopped to say hello. He had given up maths, left the university, abandoned his wife and children, and moved to the desert in New Mexico where he worked as a craftsman in a commune.
It was also a time of multiple social movements. 1968 had its origins in the civil rights movement in the south, which began some years before, and the free speech movement in Berkeley. These converged with the movement against the Vietnam war, a catalysing agent for many radicals. They overlapped too with the hippies, although most hippies were against all political power and authority. There were some Maoists, although they had less influence than in Europe. Then there were the Black Panthers and other dissident black groups, some of whom had turned to Islam. And of course there was feminism, of a more all-embracing kind than had existed before. It was an offshoot of 1968 rather than part of it. Several of the new-style feminists became radicalised by the 68ers—believing that the revolution was being made by men, for men.
Moreover, the 68ers challenged some things that any decent society needs. They were anti-bureaucracy, but a degree of bureaucratic co-ordination is vital in a complex society. And no society can function just on the basis of rights.
Feminism was the main thing that survived 1968, and that is because it was provoked by 1968 rather than directly part of it. What was important about 1968 was not just the movements themselves, but the vast subterranean changes in society, beginning in the late 1950s, of which they were a reflection. We are feeling the full force of those transformations today and are still struggling to cope with them. They include: changes in the nature of the family, with a downgrading of marriage and a new emphasis upon the quality of relationships (and on sex); large-scale entry of women into the labour force; lower birth rates and the arrival of the "prized child"; the necessity of choosing a lifestyle rather than just inheriting it; the emergence of identity politics; the decline of deference and the automatic authority claimed by people or institutions.
It doesn't make sense to attribute these changes to the 68ers, who mainly rode on their back. In this sense, 1968 has a mystique to it that it doesn't deserve, and the right-wingers who blame it for our ills are equally mistaken. Yet I can't help admiring the 68ers. Theirs was a false liberation, but it was at its best a creative questioning of the things that we take for granted.
Anthony Giddens is former director of the London School of Economics
Sexual freedom
by Johann Hari
The best legacy of '68—speaking as a grandchild of the revolution, who takes so much of it for granted—is without question the rise of sexual freedom, and especially the freedom to be gay and lesbian. The worst legacy? Probably the imbecile idolisation of dictators that characterised some of the uprisings—Maoism, anyone?—and which lingers on in some small parts of the progressive movement.
Johann Hari is a journalist
The birth of ecology
by Emily Young
The 1960s gave the world a new concept of global interdependence, probably the result of seeing photos of the earth from space (as in the famous "Earthrise," pictured below, taken in December 1968). This led to a cross-fertilisation of youth culture, ecological thinking and commerce, from which grew the internet and the green movement. And hence today's battle between exploitation of resources and a sense of the earth's vulnerability.
Emily Young, a sculptor, is thought to be the inspiration for Pink Floyd's "See Emily Play"
Rites and wrongs
by Roger Scruton
In the run-up to May 1968, I spent weeks in Paris (pictured, below right, in 1968), in a flat borrowed from a friend who was hanging out with Armand Gatti and his street theatre. The community in which I found myself was one that was actively repudiating all rites of passage—in particular the rites involved in coming of age, which, for me, recently returned to Cambridge in order to begin my research, involved the acceptance of authority in all those spheres where I had hitherto been no more than an apprentice. The students of the quartier latin had not merely cast themselves free of the old rites of the Catholic religion and turned their backs on marriage. They were in the grip of an uncontrollable rage against authority in all its forms. They turned to Foucault as their intellectual leader, esteeming him not as an authority but as the voice against all authorities, the demon priest of transgression, a role that he had carved out for himself with his Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique.
When, in due course, the students put their "philosophy" into action, and began to burn cars and throw stones at policemen, it became evident that rites of passage are not merely safeguards of the community. They are the repositories of moral sense. Without them, young people not only fail to grow up, they fail to take responsibility for their actions. They live, as my companions tried to live, in a world without judgement, rejoicing in their youth and their power but without the faintest idea of what they wished to put in place of the things that they were destroying.
Most people to whom I have tried to communicate this observation have pooh-poohed it as the expression of my own conservative prejudices. But those prejudices did not exist at the time. My feelings have never been better captured than by Louis Pauwels, in his novel Les orphelins (1994), set in 1968, in which the severance between generations is brilliantly dramatised.
How did so much gobbledegook gush from the bookshops in those first heady days of the postmodern condition? All of my companions carried in their pockets the Little Red Book of Mao Zedong, poring over its empty platitudes as though over a sacred text. Scholarly literature was dominated by Louis Althusser, whose Pour Marx reads as if composed by someone who knows no French. Equally insane, and full of malign intent, was Jacques Lacan, whose séminaires were providing the 68ers with a parody of education. Under his influence all bonds of duty, obligation and respect were dissolved, and a warm gush of Me took over.
Hot on the heels of this madman came Deleuze and Guattari, whose L'anti-Oedipe manages to set the refuted theories of the psychoanalysts in a kind of delirious sub-poetic prose whose meaning is simply itself. This vatic style, in which words are cast as spells rather than used as arguments, dominated the writings that shot to eminence after 1968. Behind the mumbo-jumbo of Derrida, Kristeva and their more recent successors such as Irigaray and Cixous, lies the liberationist anti-religion of 1968: in a world without authorities there is no meaning. Even if you don't think, as I do, that les événements de mai were a moral and spiritual disaster, you might agree, after a month or two studying their written products, that they were an intellectual disaster—one comparable to the burning of the library at Alexandria, or the closing of the schools of Greece.
Young people may have little time, now, for the Parisian guerrocracy; but their ageing teachers often have nothing else to offer them. They are steeped in the ideology of liberation—liberation from the idea of the human community as something more important than yourself.
Roger Scruton is a philosopher
Freedom and infantilism
by Samuel Brittan
The best legacy of 1968 is greater stress on personal freedom of choice; the worst is an infantile "revolutionary" attitude.
Samuel Brittan is an economist
The penis problem
by Jean Seaton
In 1968 I was a state-made maiden, still immortal and blithely unaware that I was part of the luckiest generation of women in history. The 1944 Butler Act had educated me. Grey Coat Hospital was a trifle glum but it taught me history, took me to sing Bach and Britten in Westminster Abbey, and made me an argumentative head girl. My parents had pushed to get me there because they knew everything hung on it. It did. The air we breathed had been cleaned up by the benign state, while the BBC took me to faraway places, addressed me intelligently and gave me TW3 which I used to watch after everyone else had gone to bed. Oh the glamour! Then Harold Wilson winged me to one of the universities flowering under the licence that his government had given them to re-invent knowledge, and generously gave me a grant to live on. It never occurred to us girls that we would die in childbirth, or that we would not have interesting work to do.
Nevertheless, the 68ers fetishised demonstrating. Much of it was pointless and morally self-congratulatory. What were we all trying to get done? Chanting gustily in Oxford Street, I suddenly wondered: what do we want that is not negative? How do you actually change things? Anyway, I had a shameful secret: I was a patriot. The sacred cow of the left was that everything English was (and always had been) dreadful. We oppressed the empire, were superior to the Scots, had not had a "proper" bourgeois revolution. Being critical of one's nation is a good thing: one hopes for better, but I liked British art and novels and the very light of the place.
Feminism, it is said, sprung from interminable meetings where chaps autistically disagreed about the minutiae of revolutionary strategy while we roneod their damned magazines. But actually it was the long sweep of legislative and medical change, from suicide to divorce and abortion—and the contraceptive pill—which made personal lives more decent and feminism possible. It was also the product of the explosive consequences of women's move into the labour market. But it was also most usefully about sex.
My class fraction was unimaginably sexually ignorant. Mr Ruskin's horror at Mrs Ruskin's pubic hair could hardly have been greater than my own at my own: for much of the same reason, the nudes in the Tate didn't seem like me and in a respectable home I had seen no others. Why had no one told me?
We were cross about it all and wanted something better. At a famous founding 1968 feminism conference at Ruskin College, someone plonked a luridly colourful plastic model of an erect penis on the table. "This," she declared, "is the problem we face!" It was a bit alarming, but as the leggy girls from Oxford were clearly all more familiar with the problem than I was (and all had marvellously romantic names and were very eloquent), I kept quiet.
Yet the simple insistence on plain talking and the steady rolling out of women's rights did make the world more civilised. Improving the conditions of women remains the single most effective way of making the world better. Perhaps we revelled in the messy, fluidy nature of motherhood with a pleasure that feminism set free. Of course, the tsunami of "plain talking" about sex did little to help people to admit the ambiguities of desire or to do the lovely, demanding, hard work of building intimacy. Now everything is sexualised, every 10 year old knows what a blowjob is; but we wanted something grander than that. Moreover, we have so separated out the "rights" of women and the "rights" of children that we have no space in which to discuss families. 1960s individualism has had damaging consequences. Now I worry more about boys than girls. But this is not to belittle a conversation that was set going with useful idealism.
Of course it was de rigeur then to blame men for most things. But I liked men and was shyly on alert for Mr Right. Moreover, reader, I married him. But that is the story of another decade.
Jean Seaton is an author and an academic
On feminism
by Jean McCrindle
I didn't think at the time that May '68 had much relevance for the women's movement, although I was only watching it on a small television in Sheffield nursing a baby of nine months, living in that timezone of babies—waking at 4am when no one else is about and never catching up the lost sleep. The women's movement did have a brief but important influence on the new left here and in the US—where the year before, women in the civil rights movement had been told by Stokely Carmichael that: "The only position for women in the movement is prone."
But some of us were already converts to the idea of a second wave of feminism. In 1962 I had not only read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex but had organised weekly classes, based on her chapter headings, with crèches for the children. A flood of literature was already appearing by the mid-1960s: Hannah Gavron's The Captive Wife (1966), Juliet Mitchell's New Left Review article "Women: the Longest Revolution" (1966) and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1963). All looked at women's situation from many perspectives and galvanised small groups all over the country to talk and innovate, challenge and argue.
Jean McCrindle was was Treasurer of Women Against Pit Closures during the miners' strike
If…
by Robert Gore-Langton
If… came out in 1968. It was dead cool, pretty weird and no film gets the spirit of sulky school rebellion quite like it.
Robert Gore-Langton is a theatre critic
Capitalist converts
by Peter Bazalgette
The radical student movement produced some of the finest late 20th-century capitalists. There is nothing like the zeal of the convert.
Peter Bazalgette invests in digital growth companies
True beneficiaries
by Vernon Bogdanor
The immediate beneficiaries of the 1960s were Nixon, de Gaulle and Edward Heath, its long-term beneficiaries Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The real revolutionaries were not the revolting students at Essex or Berkeley, but the neoconservatives economists who were laying the ideological foundations for Thatcher and Reagan. Survey evidence from the late 1960s in the US showed that the young were disproportionately in favour of the Vietnam war. For the typical young person was either working on a building site or in a secretarial office, or, if a student, was majoring in business studies at Ohio State rather than sociology at Harvard. In the US, the newly enfranchised over-18s voted disproportionately for Nixon, just as in Britain the newly enfranchised young chose to vote disproportionately for Ted Heath in 1970.
Vernon Bogdanor is professor of government at Oxford University
Fashion explosion
by Emma Crichton-Miller
In 1968 a nanny-enforced regime of dull blue slacks and pastel-coloured smocked frocks gave way under a tide of cultural pressure to purple cord and red velvet bell-bottomed trousers, to a purple, orange and white striped frilly shirt and a white lacy romantic number with a high collar. It was the bold explosion of gaiety and idiosyncrasy on the streets, and the invitation to children to join it, that made the age.
Best and worst
by René Cuperus
The best and worst legacy of the 1960s are the pertinent but tiresome sermons of Theodore Dalrymple.
René Cuperus is senior research fellow and director for international relations at the Wiardi Beckman Foundation, the Netherlands
Violent German radicals
by Lesley Chamberlain
The violent threat to the West German state that erupted in April 1968 was real enough, but the CDU government of Chancellor Kiesinger was inept at handling the year of protest that preceded it.
In 1967 the 33-year-old future terrorist Ulrike Meinhof was still an acclaimed radical journalist, darling of the chic middle class, blending fashion and left-wing causes. Like thousands of her generation and younger, Meinhof's target was the fighting in Vietnam. Lobbing a custard pie at visiting US Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, in April 1967, she demanded in print: "Why is throwing napalm good and throwing custard bad?"
The pace of protest suddenly speeded up in April '68. Meinhof's future accomplices Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, and 20-year-old Astrid Proll, protesting against western indifference to Vietnam, set off firebombs in two Frankfurt department stores. The small-scale insurgency sparked by May 1968 would last ten years, led by Meinhof, Baader and Ensslin and imitated and carried forward by the Red Army Faction (RAF). The decade to 1977 saw all three originators die by their own hand in prison, many RAF members served long sentences, and tens of innocent people were injured and killed.
In comparison with 1968 in Britain the intensity of the German scene was striking. Opposition to Vietnam made the US the prime global political enemy. But the late 1960s also saw a passionate self-searching by a generation born into guilt which persuaded itself that the FRG could fall back into Nazism at any moment. In October '68 a young woman punched Chancellor Kiesinger because of his Nazi past and was sentenced to a year in prison. Meinhof dedicated much of her journalism to rooting out old Nazis in positions of privilege in the FRG. One justification for her oppositional leadership was that she feared a repeat performance by the supine German masses, now lulled to sleep by "big money," as they were once by Nazi oratory. She was educated to believe in cultural, and as she now saw it, political delivery of the Volk by an enlightened elite.
Communism looked like a benign counter-force to the capitalist status quo on several counts. It was the only significant pre-war German party to have opposed Hitler. Above all its theory suggested an alternative to the American freedom and prosperity ideal on which the postwar Federal Republic was modelled. In October 1968 the state relegalised the German Communist party after a 12-year ban. But this did nothing to alleviate the hatred Meinhof and Ensslin felt towards post-war German materialism. The German-born philosopher and cultural critic Herbert Marcuse, who had fled Hitler and got tenure in Berkeley, California, became guru to a generation convinced that business was the enemy of an authentic existence. An independent Marxist, Marcuse was a prototype anti-globalist with intellectual roots in high-minded German idealism.
In the four years it took the police to hunt down Baader, Meinhof and Ennslin, and despite armed incidents and bank robberies by the RAF, the terrorists enjoyed surprisingly wide support not only from old friends and university connections but also from sections of the general public. The lawyer Horst Mahler, defending Ensslin, Baader and others over the Frankfurt shop fires, claimed prison wasn't the place for such decent and moral people. (His clients were freed on appeal the following year.) Keen to atone for its shortcomings under Hitler, the Protestant church, was openly sympathetic to Meinhof's intended moral revolution and a powerful service was held beside her grave after her 1976 suicide.
Astrid Proll, the RAF member who survived a long prison sentence to reinvent herself as a photographer and agonise over her past, noted some years ago: "We hugely overestimated ourselves and gave ourselves over to the illusion that in the prosperous Federal Republic of Germany a revolution was imaginable. Seen thus, we were like people possessed, who acted in isolation in a room empty of air. We lived a kind of armed existentialism." She suggested the hysteria that translated itself into an extraordinary mixture of violence and victimhood—with the Baader-Meinhof group believing themselves persecuted as the Jews were by the Nazis—came from an absence in Germany of understanding of and respect for the state. "The real criminal is the state. We are only as illegal as the state is," Meinhof said. The latent fascist state had to be provoked into revealing its true nature. For Proll the West German state, only 20 years old and emerging out of a terrible national history, was never seen as trustworthy. Her generation felt justified in demanding explanations on equal terms. "Just as we demanded of our parents that they clarified their position vis a vis the Nazi regime, so we expected the state to clarify its position vis a vis the generation of '68."
The personal liberation element of the 1968 phenomenon also informed the German scene. But it was a sideshow compared with the passionate, maddened anti-state and anti-capitalist protests that finally brought West Germany out the shadow of the past. In a way Meinhof was right, here was a society still in semi-denial, with much to work through in the 1970s and 1980s. She and Baader forced the pace of change, but at a very high cost to themselves and many more innocent others.
Lesley Chamberlain is a writer, critic and journalist
Freedom of expression
by Onora O'Neill
Forty years on the events of 1968 still fascinate us but they don't add up to a revolution. What had been going on before 1968 went on, with adjustments. The war in Vietnam was challenged, but lasted another seven years. Soviet domination of eastern Europe was challenged, but lasted another 20 years. Capitalism was challenged from within, but 40 years later still surges forward. Yet I also think we are right to remember the 60s—although not particularly the year 1968—as a decade that reshaped life.
Philip Larkin chose 1963, but the landmark date could equally well (but less poetically) have been 1960, when the US Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill; or 1965, when the US supreme court struck down prohibitions on prescribing contraceptives; or 1968, when the Abortion Act came into force in Britain. Whichever date we pick, sex and childbirth were reliably separated, women's liberation became a possibility and wider self expression for ordinary people could be envisaged.
The social and political movements of the 1960s—the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the green movement, the anti-war movement and the incipient human rights movement—all insisted on the importance of solidarity. Yet their legacy has been a culture that is pretty indifferent to solidarity, and in which the claims of self expression extend far beyond sex and drugs and rock and roll. Cumulatively these demands have shaped a culture that often seems to set the call of duty aside, while claiming a widening array of human rights. Yet rights are not taken seriously unless the corresponding duties are acknowledged and respected. Even rights to self expression fail if no one carries corresponding duties to make them possible.
The classic arguments for freedom of expression for individuals depict it as an uncontroversial, undemanding freedom that imposes minimal duties. John Stuart Mill famously argued that individuals should therefore have very wide freedom of expression, including the right to undertake "experiments of living" and to publish their opinions. This thought could have been taken to show that rights to self expression impose quite demanding duties on others—in particular, on the media—to ensure that individuals can express themselves effectively, and that freedom of the press is not denied to those who happen not to own one. Yet this was not what happened.
It is one thing for individuals to claim a right to freedom of expression: however strangely, unintelligibly or inaccurately they express themselves, they usually do little harm to others (yet we prohibit slander, libel and incitement). It is another matter to assign powerful organisations rights of self expression that permit them to disregard the demands of truthful communication. If powerful organisations are free to disregard the routine disciplines needed to make communication intelligible, assessable and non-corrupt, they are entitled to communicate in ways likely to harm not only individuals and social solidarity, but democracy and public life.
In the era of human rights, the dangers of unconstrained state and corporate communication are rightly recognised: we do not allow powerful public bodies or companies to invent their reports and accounts. We require them to aim for intelligibility and accuracy, to correct errors and respond to complaints. Public bodies are also subject to freedom of information; those who work in them are subject to the Nolan standards for conduct in public life. Companies are subject to standards of corporate governance that require declaring conflicts of interest, and are criticised if these duties are breached.
If we think it important to constrain the freedom of expression of these powerful institutions, should we not also take another look at the supposed rights of powerful media organisations? It is risky to accord the media the same rights to freedom of expression that individuals can safely enjoy. Press freedom is not compatible with state or other forms of censorship of content, but it is fully compatible with and may demand some regulation of media process to protect individual self expression and support citizens' other rights and democratic life. Enthusiasm for self expression is not a good reason for leaving media process to the workings of the markets or the moguls. There are no adequate reasons to exempt the media from the disciplines of accuracy, from addressing conflicts of interest, or for condoning cheque book journalism or uncorrected inaccuracy. Anybody who values the legacy of the 1960s, including individual rights to self expression, has reason to prefer that the media respect and support those rights rather than demanding the same for themselves.
Onora O'Neill is a political philosopher
Read part two of our four-part symposium here
