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Neo-transcendentalism in the New Left Counter-culture: A Vision of the Future Looking Back

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Martin Schiff
Affiliation:
John Jay College

Extract

The student movement of the 1960s has been characterized as the dawn of a new national consciousness and a new counter-culture, ‘the passionate revolution of creative intelligence’, and ‘the saving vision our endangered civilization required’. The New Left spokesmen for the movement have proclaimed themselves the vanguard of a unique cultural and political rebellion against what they consider the evils of capitalist-pluralist America. They present their arguments in Hegelian terms as a new and profound synthesis of the progressive elements embodied in America's political and intellectual history. Yet a more probing analysis of American history indicates that the values inherent in the New Left counter-culture are not very new at all. In fact, apart from their rhetoric, the New Left cultural and political attitudes bear a striking similarity to certain nineteenth-century Utopian outlooks. The most direct antecedent of the modern counter-culture appears to be the New England transcendental- ist movement which emerged in the 1840s. This relationship between a New Left counter-culture, credited by its supporters with messianic characteristics for national salvation, and a nineteenth-century utopianism that made no significant impact on the unfolding of history raises many questions about the credibility and future of the counter-culture.

Type
Counter-Culture
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1973

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References

1 Reich, Charles A., The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970).Google Scholar

2 Keniston, Kenneth, ‘You Have to Grow Up in Scarsdale to Know How Bad Things Really Are’, The New York Times Magazine, 04 27, 1969, p. 128.Google Scholar

3 Roszak, Theodore, The Making of a Counter Culture (Garden City: Doubleday, 1968), p. 1.Google Scholar

4 For a sympathetic, coherent statement of New Left goals, see Keniston, , op. cit., pp. 27–9 and pp. 122–30.Google Scholar

5 Black Power groups may be considered part of the New Left in tactics, but their socio-economic roots and objectives preclude their classification as part of the counter-culture. In their striving for upward social mobility, black Leftists are motivated by the deprivation of the economic and political opportunities to which white Leftists have long been accustomed. The socio-economic roots of the counter-culture are examined in detail later in the analysis.

6 Keniston, Kenneth, Young Radicals (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 93.Google Scholar

7 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, ‘Revolution and Counterrevolution’, The New Republic, 07 1, 1968, pp. 23–5 at p. 25.Google Scholar

8 Keniston, , ‘You Have to Grow Up in Scarsdale to know How Bad Things Really Are’, p. 122.Google Scholar

9 Roszak, , op. cit., pp. 205–38.Google Scholar