The Sixties: Cultural Transformation in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, C. 1958 - C. 1974

by Arthur Marwick

Book Overview

If the World Wars defined the first half of the twentieth century, the sixties defined the second half, providing the pivot on which modern times have turned. From popular music to individual liberties, the tastes and convictions of the Western world are indelibly stamped with the impact of that tumultuous decade.
Now one of the world's foremost historians provides the definitive look at this momentous time. Framing the sixties as a period stretching...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192881000
• ISBN13: 9780192881007
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 952 Pages
• Weight: 2.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Meet the new boss, not always the same as the old boss

People changed, not the system. Extremism enriched culture, Marxism disappointed realists. Dreamers believed in Mao and music to remake the world, but personal changes failed to sustain lasting economic or political shifts in power. This sums up the thesis from a founding professor of history at The Open University since '69: ideally placed to comment on this decade, in fact spanning 1958-74. This enormous book, published in '98, hides within its heft, its reams of data, its dutiful reporting much wisdom, many archival gems, and innovative research. Marwick favors primary texts in Britain, the U.S., France, and Italy, and these transcend expectations. "Room at the Top" and "This Sporting Life" gain in-depth analysis and comparison of text to film to illustrate the evolving mores in Britain as consumer frivolity eroded postwar frugality. Memphis State U's paper "Tiger Rag" documents student reactions to desegregation. A French Communist magazine aimed at youth (of both sexes) has its reviews of early Beatles pop records compared to those of Catholic competitors in the press (one for each gender). Diaries show how political change affected not only the young but their parents. An widowed Italian mother, who in mid-'68 picks up caramel wrappers after her radicalized son entertains boorishly his privileged comrades, over the next eighteen months starts to read the Communist Manifesto and to investigate this feminism that the boy's girlfriend carries on about. Liberalization on the personal level, as goods cheapened and wages rose, allows sexual and philosophical transformation, but Marwick stresses how the mooted "working-class awareness" distinguishes itself from "consciousness" contrary to Marxian pieties. The latter condition carries the expectation that such proles and students must be "in constant struggle against the middle class in order to overthrow it," while most working class people were content to contemplate their distinctions, rather than to work to abolish them. Theorists failed to challenge Marx's 19th. c. "epochal pattern of history" that expected a false dialectic. Marwick argues: "There was never any possibility of a revolution; there wae never any possibility of a 'counter-culture' replacing 'bourgeois' culture."(10) Trite analyses by Roland Barthes stating the obvious while overlooking the context; catch-phrases and slogans trickling down to a wider, idealistic, and often naive activist audience; impractical solutions for deeply rooted injustice: the Sixties promised more than its participants could deliver, and they lacked guidance on how the already dated concepts of class struggle could truly solve global inequality. This conflation of Marx with (post-)structuralism and social construction of roles never questioned this "lousy history" (290) any more than biologists denied Darwin. On this groundless trust in "the Marxisant fallacy," Marwick finds "there is no more evidence for the existence of 'the dialectic' than ther

A different kind of cultural revolution

In his book, The Sixties, Arthur Marwick argues that a cultural revolution took place from 1958 to 1974, "the Long Sixties,." which revolutionized artistic standards and values and changed the individual's relation to society. He further divides the Sixties into the low Sixties (1958-1963), where things began in a relatively non-violent fashion, the High Sixties (1964-1968/9), where things culminated to a crescendo of violence to 1968, and the final phase (1969-1974). He looks at four countries where this cultural revolution took place: Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States.The economic boom of the 1950's continued in the 1960's. Most families had radios, televisions, automobiles, and refrigerators. Teenagers became an economic class in themselves in that they became a target market. Most of them began buying their own clothing, toiletries, and luxury items, or influenced their parents into buying said items. Their tastes in music were a radical departure from their parents--e.g. Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley. Britain too experienced the "teenage ball" as coined in Colin MacInnes Absolute Beginners.It was from this generation that the Students for a Democratic Society emerged, led by Al Haber and Tom Hayden, the latter who composed the Port Huron Statement which was the rehearsal of the major concerns to be taken up by the New Left and the Movement in the High Sixties.I was particularly struck by the issue that only marginally succeeded in the United States (The Great Society) but was a progressive enlightened vision in Britain, "the civilized society," as coined by Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, and the welfare state. The central concern was national insurance, where every person made a flat-rate contribution and could get that same rate when they became unemployed, later amended to where higher-salaried employees would contribute an added rate in exchange for an added rate in their pensions.The five bases for the civilized society were the abolition of capital punishment (1969), the Abortion Reform Law (1967), the National Health Service (Family Planning) Act (1967) allowing local authorities to freely dispense contraceptive devices and advice, the Sexual Offenses Act (1967), which decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults, and the Divorce Reform Act (1969).The 1960's was a time of permissiveness in books and the arts. Consider the seizure of the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley's Lover by the post-master general. A district court judge ruled that the book could be sent through the mail because interpretations of censorship must change according to the attitudes of the day. The same argument was used in film censorship and in 1968, during the High Sixties, Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America instituted the four-tier code that replaced the outdated Hays Code, the same way Jack Trevelyan adjusted the film code in Britain.Marwick gives credit to my favourite group,