Social science and American liberalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Hendrick
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
New Left ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Liberalism ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Liberal Individualism

The chapter begins by surveying the social, economic and political developments that led to the decline of American liberalism in the 1960s in the face of a conservative revival. It argues that, largely under the influence of the New Left, feminism, and identity politics, one response of American liberalism was to reconfigure classical liberal individualism. A principal feature of this process was the creation by psychologists of an alternative parenting 'style' to the so-called 'permissiveness' (and individualism) of the Spock years. In explaining this transition, the chapter discusses the interrelationships between the collapse of liberalism, the reaction against authority, and the emergence of the 'new behaviorism'. It argues that these were instrumental in the creation and popularization of an alternative to the alleged failure of 'permissive' parenting (which was held to have weakened liberalism), namely that of psychologist Diana Baumrind's 'authoritative' style, which created a contractual 'interdependence' between parents and children, thereby stigmatizing an 'unconditional' approach to child rearing.

The ‘long sixties’: 1958–1974

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Hendrick
Keyword(s):  
Juvenile Delinquency ◽  
Primary Education ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
New Left ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Children's Rights ◽  
Children’S Rights ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
The Social

The theme of this chapter is the emergence by the late 1960s of an environment that gradually became more hostile to the social democratic family and to liberal progressive child rearing. The key themes of the chapter focus on the concerted political attempts to undermine 'Bowlbyism' (including the influence of Winnicott), particularly by feminists and Bowlby's enemies in the psychological/psychoanalytic community. In order to contextualize the 'dethroning' of Bowlbyism, the chapter considers the emergence of new social problems in relation to the changing perception of children (through the re-discovery of poverty and the spectre of juvenile delinquency), the failure of the Children's Rights movement, the ending of progressive primary education, and the hostility of the New Left to many of the values of old style social democracy.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Hendrick
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Parenting Styles ◽  
Adult Child ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Democratic Ideal ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Central Thesis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Democratic Ideals ◽  
Methodological Considerations

The chapter introduces the reader to the book's argument, themes, broader context, and methodological considerations. It discusses the central thesis, which is in two parts. First, between the 1920s and the late 1960s the culture of parenting progressed away from being characterized mainly by disciplinary attitudes towards one that was increasingly psychoanalytically informed and, particularly from the 1940s through to the early 1970s, also began to emphasize liberal social democratic ideals. Second, from the 1970s to the present, under the influence of neoliberalism, feminism, social liberation (permissiveness and identity politics), and structural economic/political reconfigurations, the social democratic ideal declined and popular child-rearing came to be represented by 'authoritative' ('tough love') parenting styles reflecting neoliberal and narcissistic values expressed through a form of adult-child relations governed by childism - 'a prejudice against children.’

Identity Politics and the Fragmenting of the 1970s Evangelical Left

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Swartz
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Social Action ◽  
New Left ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Cultural Conservatism ◽  
Religious Cultures ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Evangelicals For Social Action ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Economic Injustice

AbstractIn the early 1970s, a group of progressive evangelicals challenged the mid-century cultural conservatism of their tradition. Activists associated with Reformed, Anabaptist, and neo-evangelical institutions denounced militarism, racism, sexism, economic injustice, and President Richard Nixon's “lust for and abuse of power.” When this coalition met in 1973 to issue the Chicago Declaration, delegates effused a profound sense of optimism. The evangelical left held very real potential for political impact.Within a decade, however, the movement seemed to be in disarray. This article suggests the centrality of identity politics to evangelicalism in the 1970s and outlines the fragmentation of the progressive evangelical coalition along gender, racial, and theological lines. The formation of the Evangelical Women's Caucus, the growing stridency of the National Black Evangelical Association, and the divergence of Anabaptist-oriented Evangelicals for Social Action and the Reformed-oriented Association for Public Justice sapped the evangelical left of needed resources and contributed to its impotence into the 1980s. The forces of identity politics, which also plagued the broader political left, were powerful enough to sabotage even a group of evangelicals with remarkably similar theological convictions, religious cultures, and critiques of conservative politics. The story of the fragmenting evangelical left, however, reflects more than broader culture's preoccupation with identity. It points to often-overlooked religious elements of the broader left. And alongside the New Left and the New Right, the evangelical left's debates over racial, sexual, and theological difference added to the disruptions of the liberal consensus in the 1960s and 1970s.

scholarly journals Student Life in Canadian Universities: The Lessons of History

1990 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Paul Axelrod
Keyword(s):  
Male Students ◽  
Student Life ◽  
Student Culture ◽  
Downward Mobility ◽  
Academic Quality ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Feminist Movements

This article explores the relationship between the history of the student experience and contemporary student life. It identifies enduring patterns in three areas: the social origins of students, student culture and activism, and the perceived academic quality of students. Reflecting their predominantly middle class backgrounds, university students have craved social status and feared the prospect of downward mobility, particularly in hard economic times. They have forged a student culture which serves to relieve academic tensions and strengthen their claim to social distinctiveness. Sexist outbursts by male students, past and present, speak to fundamental feelings of insecurity in the face of feminist movements. Political activism among a sizable minority of students, which predated the 1960s, now shows signs of re-emergence at a time when students sense that their long term goals may be frustrated. Finally, the professorial contention that students are academically less competent than ever has been heard before. A historical perspective, brought to this and other issues, should deepen understanding of the nature of student life.

Conceptual Art and identity politics: from the 1960s to the 1990s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nizan Shaked
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gay Liberation ◽  
Alternative Spaces ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Action Groups

This chapter asks how a precisely articulated set of practices, defined by artists in the 1960s as Conceptual Art, evolve into a broad notion of conceptualism, and how the latter had expanded into its present forms. It shows how, in the United States context, some of the most important strategies of conceptualism developed through the influence of contemporaneous politics, more specifically the transition from Civil Rights into Black Power, the New Left, the anti-war movement, feminism, and gay liberation, as well as what later came to be collectively named “identity politics” in the 1970s. A range of artists who have self-defined as conceptualists synthesised Conceptual analytic approaches with an outlook on identity formation as a means of political agency, and not as a representation of the self, a strategy that significantly expanded in the 1970s. Two major aspects of identity politics have impacted the field. The first, activist and administrative, consisted of protests against existing institutions, the developments of action groups and collectives, and the subsequent formulation of alternative spaces. The second was the bearing that it had on artistic strategy, form, and subject matter. This chapter focuses on practices that took a critical outlook on identity formation.

scholarly journals Documentary Radio and the Radical Origins of Public History

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Donaldson
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Academic History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Social Views ◽  
Contemporary Practice

The origin story of public history in the United States dates this profession, practice, and field of study back to the social movements and social/cultural turn of academic history of the 1960s and 70s, directly tying the emergence of professional public history to the political ethos of the New Left. However, exploring earlier efforts in professional public-facing historical work reveals the formative influence of the Old Left on the various fields that would come to fall under the purview of public history. This article traces that connection specifically through the Radio Research Project (RRP), a large-scale series of history-oriented programs produced by the Library of Congress beginning in 1941 that were designed to educate Americans in US history, to encourage citizens to embrace civic ideals such as cultural and political democracy, and to thwart the spread of fascism. Disconnecting the rise of public history from its perceived origins in the New Left through exploring programs like the RRP not only reveals a longer history of the profession, but also challenges accepted interpretations of the types of political and social views that provide the historical foundation of contemporary practice.

as Experimental Theater

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Savran
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Experimental Theater ◽  
Stephen Sondheim ◽  
Musical Comedy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anyone Can Whistle ◽  
Cultural Contradictions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Liberal Individualism

Stephen Sondheim and his critics usually ascribe the failure ofAnyone Can Whistle, Sondheim’s most revered flop, to the volatile social and political context in the United States, claiming that it was ahead of its time. This chapter argues, in contrast, that it is very much of its time and that no other musical of the period epitomizes the social and cultural contradictions of the mid-1960s as vividly asWhistle. Attempting to bring the kind of theatrical and political provocation that was flourishing Off-Off-Broadway to Broadway audiences unfamiliar with experimental idioms,Whistlerepresents a determined hybrid: part satire, part romance, part musical comedy, part Broadway razzle-dazzle, part political polemic. It is also symptomatic of the contradictions inherent in the dominant political philosophy of the 1960s, liberal individualism, in its opposition to standardization and conformism and its inclination toward an arrogant egocentrism. ThatWhistlehad to wait decades to find an audience is a tribute less to Sondheim’s prescience than to his ascendency since the 1970s as his generation’s preeminent architect of experimental music theatre.

Herbert Marcuse and the Promesse Du Bonheur

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-47
Author(s):  
Malcolm Miles
Keyword(s):  
French Literature ◽  
Political Change ◽  
New Left ◽  
Herbert Marcuse ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Intelligence Services ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Aesthetic

In an essay on French literature in the period of Nazi occupation, Herbert Marcuse argues that a literature of intimacy—love poems and romantic novels—is the last resort of freedom in totalitarian conditions. Written in 1945 and revised in the 1970s, Marcuse’s essay argues that in the face of totalitarianism, a literature of intimacy opens a realm of human experience that is outside the control of the regime. Because it carries a memory of joy, it is radically other to the ethos of the regime. Later, in The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), Marcuse returns to the role of aesthetics when political change is unlikely to occur. The article revisits Marcuse’s 1945 essay and his reading of the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Eluard. It begins by relating Marcuse’s interest in love poetry to the work of other critical theorists who see a radical role for aesthetics and the pursuit of happiness in periods when political change is blocked. It examines the 1945 essay, puts it in context of Marcuse’s work for the US intelligence services in the 1940s, and looks at the similarities between the 1945 essay and Marcuse’s later writing. Finally, it asks whether Marcuse’s arguments matter today (as the dreams for which the New Left of the 1960s went in search appear as remote as ever).

scholarly journals Cicero Versus Socrates: The Liberal Arts Debate in the 1960s at the University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus

2003 ◽  
pp. 101-129
Author(s):  
James M. Pitsula
Keyword(s):  
General Education ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
New Left ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Student Power ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The University

The liberal arts debate among the faculty at Regina Campus in the 1960s reflected the social and political movements of the day, especially the rise of student power and the New Left. At the same time, it revived a much older debate about the nature of liberal education, which historian Bruce Kimball traces back to the thought of Socrates and Cicero. Kimball’s typology of “orators” versus “philosophers” brings order and clarity to what otherwise appears as a jumbled mix of conflicting viewpoints. The “oratorical” tradition favors general education based on knowable truth as a means to prepare youth for responsible and active citizenship. The “philosophical” or “liberal-free” ideal emphasizes the freedom to search for truth, an eternal quest that never attains its goal, and has led to the dominance of scientific research and the fragmentation of knowledge. The “orators” lost the sixties debate, and the “liberal-free” ideal is now almost uncontested.

The dilemmas of social democracy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kennedy ◽  
Rob Manwaring
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Party System ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Electoral Support ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

This concluding chapter details the dilemmas of social democracy. There is a strong strain throughout the social democracy literature that highlights the range of dilemmas facing the movement. These include Przeworski and Sprague's (1986) seminal work on the dilemma of electoral support. In the wider sweep of the history of socialism, there was a long-standing dilemma about how to reconcile with Marxism, and how to respond to the social changes and emergence of identity politics in the 1960s. Perhaps the most recent set of dilemmas is the synthesis of the ‘Third Way’. The chapter then suggests that a renewal of the centre-left might well rely on a more sustained effort to address the following issues: re-balancing principles and pragmatism; responding to the changing electoral sociology; meeting the populist challenge; responding to structural changes in the party system, and new forms of participation; and redesigning its political economy.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document