The cultural revolution
Admixtures of hope and apprehension. For some: shocking. For others: liberating. For many: disorienting, disconcerting, discombobulating.
When Francis Parkman wrote about the European settling of America circa 1875 it was standard fare re: Indian “savagery” and settler “civilization.” By the time Francis Jennings wrote The Invasion of America in 1975 consciousness had been turned upside down. That overturn, that re-thinking, percolated and then exploded between about the mid-fifties and the mid-seventies. Not just in the United States, but in all the open societies where modernity had reigned after the industrial revolution and the world wars. That modernity had seemed Ultimate. And then, unexpectedly, all went “post-” . . . post-modern, post-industrial, post-Enlightenment, post-scientism, post-socialist, post-morality, post-Freudianism, post-gender.
Modernist mass industrial-technological society had involved too many public secrets, too much in the way of conformism and repression. The sky had gotten too heavy. Too much soul-stuff had been lost.
Much of the ferment of the cultural revolution was inchoate. It was something of a zoo. Half the population more or less embraced it. Half reacted against it. And thus there have been “culture wars” ever since.
The Sane Society (Fromm) 1955
The Power Elite (Mills) 1957
Growing Up Absurd (Goodman) 1960
The Port Huron Statement (Hayden) 1962
Silent Spring (Carson) 1962
The Other America (Harrington) 1962
The Feminine Mystique (Friedan) 1963
The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon) 1963
“I Had a Dream” speech (King) 1963
How Children Fail (Holt) 1964
One Dimensional Man (Marcuse) 1964
The Technological Society (Ellul) 1964
Unsafe At Any Speed (Nader) 1965
The Autobiography of Malcolm X 1965
Monopoly Capital (Baran/Sweezy) 1966
The Age of Imperialism (Magdoff) 1966
Who Rules America? (Domhoff) 1967
Death at an Early Age (Kozol) 1967
The Betrayal of the Body (Lowen) 1967
The Myth of the Machine (Mumford) 1967
Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (Cohn-Bendit) 1968
The Population Bomb (Ehrlich) 1968
Small Town in Mass Society (Vidich/Bensman) 1968
The Costs of Economic Growth (Mishan) 1969
The Human Zoo (Morris) 1969
The Making of a Counter Culture: Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (Roszak) 1969
Stonewall 1969
The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man (Shepard) 1969
Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth) 1969
The New Left Reader (Oglesby) 1969
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (Brown) 1970
Bodies in Revolt (Hanna) 1970
Four Changes (Snyder) 1970
The Greening of America (Reich) 1970
Ball Four (Bouton) 1970
Rules for Radicals (Alinsky) 1971
The Closing Circle (Commoner) 1971
Participatory Democracy (Cook) 1971
This Endangered Planet (Falk) 1971
Deschooling Society (Illich) 1971
Diet for a Small Planet (Lappe) 1971
The World We Have Lost (Laslett) 1971
Woman’s Estate (Mitchell) 1971
Man’s Impact on the Environment (Detwyler) 1971
Fundamentals of Ecology (Odum) 1971
The Pursuit of Loneliness (Slater) 1971
Conserving Life on Earth (Ehrenfeld) 1972
Fire In the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (FitzGerald) 1972
The Limits to Growth (Meadows) 1972
Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (Roszak) 1972
Marx, Freud, and the Critique of Everyday Life: Toward a Permanent Cultural Revolution (Brown) 1973
The Wandering of Humanity (Camatte) 1973
Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (Schumacher) 1973
Labor and Monopoly Capitalism (Braverman) 1974
In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (Diamond) 1974
The End of Affluence (Ehrlich) 1974
Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins (Lorenz) 1974
Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (Rexroth) 1974
The Modern World-System (Wallerstein) 1974
Ecotopia (Callenbach) 1975
The Selected Works of Thoreau 1975
The Invasion of America (Jennings) 1975
The Hazards of Being Male (Goldberg) 1976
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Lovelock) 1976
Plagues and People (McNeill) 1976
