David Farber

Building the counterculture, creating right livelihoods: the counterculture at work

The men and women dedicated to building an alternative society in the United States in the Sixties era began without a blueprint. These cultural rebels disdained the workaday life they believed American society demanded of them. They wanted to create a less restrained community of free individuals dedicated to new forms of wisdom and pleasure. Over time, some of these cultural radicals struggled to put their values into play by creating right livelihoods that built their sense of community and provided for economic sustainability.

Moral capitalism in the age of great dreams: the Grateful Dead’s struggle to craft right livelihoods

Abstract The Grateful Dead struggled to make their band a sustainable, economically successful enterprise while also maintaining the countercultural ethos that had set them on their path and given them their collective identity. The Dead “family’s” business practices and adaptation to the capitalist marketplace, at a time when a new post-Fordist services and information economy were overtaking America’s industrial base, are unique in their particulars. Nonetheless, they broadly represent the arc of Sixties’ rebels’ attempt to break the boundaries of the conventional workplace, escape the stultifying and oppressive work life so many in that era found wanting, and craft right livelihoods.

Le conservatisme américain : un processus politique à la recherche d'une idéologie

Pour repondre aux theses progressistes selon lesquelles le marche doit etre discipline par l’Etat, les conservateurs expliquent que ce sont les individus qui doivent etre disciplines par les forces du marche, la foi religieuse et la famille. Ces idees ont ete construites au terme d’un processus historique. Les conservateurs se sont battus pendant des decennies pour creer un mouvement suffisamment inclusif pour exercer le pouvoir au niveau national.

Trust and Power: Consumers, the Modern Corporation, and the Making of the United States Automobile Market (review)

who sense that they are valued and who have developed such traits as optimism, initiative, and perseverance, and have well-developed communication skills. Resilient children do not consider themselves victims; rather, they engage in creative problem-solving. In her latest volume, Werner draws upon diaries, letters, and reminiscences of a hundred boys and girls between the ages of five and 16 to document young peoples’ participation in the Revolution and the far-reaching ways that it altered their lives. The first-hand accounts included in the manuscript bring the period to life in a way that few other sources do. Especially noteworthy are excerpts from the diaries of Hessian teenagers who fought in the Revolution and accounts of Loyalist exiles. Despite the popular image of the Revolution as fought by citizen soldiers, in fact, the regular army depended on the poor, the marginal, and the young. For poor indentured servants and apprentices, the Revolution offered prospects of greater freedom (though in practice they often found themselves subjected to rigid military discipline). Many consider the Revolution a pretty tame affair, but as this volume underscores, the Revolution touched the lives of all segments of the population, especially the young, challenging older notions of patriarchal authority, deference, and hierarchy. It generated severe risks and disruptions (including the rape of young girls), but it also gave young people an unprecedented degree of autonomy and adult-like responsibilities. University of Houston Steven Mintz

THINKING AND NOT THINKING ABOUT RACE IN THE UNITED STATES

John Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) Richard King, Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Press, 2004) Since June 1964, all three branches of the federal government have supported the goal of racial justice in the United States. John Skrentny, in The Minority Rights Revolution , explains how that goal and related ones have been implemented over the last sixty years. He argues that key policy developments since that time were driven less by mass movements and much more by elite “meaning entrepreneurs.” Well before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was made law, in the immediate post-World War II years, a bevy of transatlantic intellectuals responded to Nazi race policy by seeking a universalist vision that would unite humanity. Richard King, in Race, Culture and the Intellectuals , explores how intellectuals pursued that anti-racist universalist vision and then how African and African-American intellectuals in the 1960s, in particular, rejected universalism and began, instead, to pursue racial justice through cultural particularism. Kings traditional intellectual history, when combined with Skrentnys sociological analysis of how elites managed ideas to pursue specific policies, reveals how American society, in pursuit of racial justice, moved from the simple stated ideals of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—equal opportunity and access—to the complexities of affirmative action and an embrace of “diversity” in American life.