Sixties Radicalism and Social Movement Activism

'Sixties Radicalism and Social Movement Activism' explores and re-analyses major events, debates and themes from the radical developments of the nineteen sixties and relates them to contemporary social movements and issues.

This book’s four main aims are to examine: firstly, why movements happened in the socio-historical context of sixties’ radicalism; secondly, its distinctive legacy of crucial, cultural, societal and political interconnections; thirdly, continuing links between seminal ideas and movements and socio-political activism today; fourthly little-discussed national instances and divergent impacts of sixties radicalism, in relation to contemporary 'global' social movements. A conclusion traces all these dimensions from current social movements back to sixties radicalism’s pioneering upheavals.

Introduction; All Along the Watershed: Sixties Values as Defence of Community; May’s Tensions Today: France, Then and Now; The War against the War: Violence and Anticolonialism in the Final Years of the Estado Novo; From Sartre to Stevendores: The Connections between the Paris Barricades and the Re-Emergence of Black Trade Unions in South Africa; 1968 – Was It Really a Year of Social Change in Pakistan?; Nineteen Sixties Radicalism in the United States: Its Rise, Decline and Legacy; Students, Institutes and Artists: The Revolution Within; The Situationist Legacy: Revolution as Celebration; Habermas on Sixties Student Protests: Reflections on Collective Action and Communicative Potential; Sixties Movements, Educational Expansion and Cognitive Mobilisation: Postmaterialist Values and Unconventional Political Participation in Germany; Carrying the Flame Forward: Activist Legacies of 1968 in Life Story Reflections; When the Personal Became Political: A Reappraisal of the Women's Liberation Movement's Radical Idea; Conclusion