The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974 [Hardcover]

Arthur Marwick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 5, 1998

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 from 1958 to 1974, Arthur Marwick argues that this long decade ushered in nothing less than a cultural revolution--one that raged most clearly in the United States, Britain, France, and Italy. Writing with wit and verve, he brilliantly recaptures the events and movements that shaped our lives: the rise of a youth subculture across the West; the impact of post Beat novels and New Wave cinema; the sit ins and marches of the civil rights movement; Britain's surprising rise to leadership in fashion and music; the emerging storm over Vietnam; the Paris student rising of 1968; the new concern for poverty; the growing force of feminism and the gay rights movement; and much more. As Marwick unfolds his vivid narrative, he illuminates this remarkable era--both its origins and its impact. He concludes that it was a time that saw great leaps forward in the arts, in civil rights, and in many other areas of society and politics. But the decade also left deep divisions still felt today.
Written with tremendous force of insight and narrative power, The Sixties promises to be the single most important account of the single most important decade of our times.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

These days it seems obligatory to be either for or against the 1960s. Arthur Marwick, Professor of history at the Open University, is definitely for them. He likes them so much that this massive account of the decade starts in 1958 and doesn't finish until 1974--but this unorthodox time frame is well chosen, with a view that extends from the end of postwar austerity to the crunch of the mid-'70s oil crisis. It allows Marwick not only to place all the famous sixties incidents--including the Paris riots, the Vietnam war, the anti-war protests, and the fight over abortion rights--in historical context, but then to follow them through to their various conclusions.

While the cultural developments remain in the memory, it was the economic progress, allied to the baby boom, that really invigorated this decade. In America, the percentage of the population below the poverty line halved in the years between 1965 and 1975; in Italy the number of families with television sets and fridges doubled over the same period. "There has been nothing quite like it", Marwick persuasively argues; "nothing would ever be the same again." --Nick Wroe

From Kirkus Reviews

A scholarly, earnest, sometimes dense cultural history of the decade. English historian Marwick (Britain in Our Century, 1985, etc.) seems determined to rescue the 1960s, both from orthodox leftist historians (who view the era as an explosion of the youthful bourgeoisie) and from conservatives (who believe that it brought about the decline and fall of Western civilization). Marwick enumerates the periods cultural, artistic, and political achievements, which, he believes, really began in 1958 (the year big business headed full-tilt at the youth market, and the year popular music shifted to rock 'n roll) and ended in 1974, when the oil crisis reached consumers around the world and set off a wave of conservative reaction. The authors viewpoint is European. Much of what he says will be unfamiliar to American readers (as, for instance, when he discusses the role of upper-crust English schools in shaping political radicalism). Much else, however, concerns common ground, especially when Marwick writes about music. Hes also perceptive about the literature of the time and how it influenced other forms of expression. For example, he includes an interview with ex-Beatle Paul McCartney, who reminisces about the influence of Jack Kerouacs autobiographical novel On the Road on British youth in the late 1950s. And Marwick has a lot to tell us about the student revolt in France and Italy of 1968 and 1969. Occasionally, he gets a little too pedantically encyclopedic for his own good, as in examining the miniskirt, which, almost always worn with tights, was a very popular, and even tenacious, fashion, being worn and argued over after the advent of hot pants . . . and then, in the classic fashion pattern of extreme innovation followed by extreme reaction, the maxiskirt, which reached to the ankles. Even then, however, he offers a fine resource for students of the era. And for those who remember Marcuse, McLuhan, and Marx fondly, Marwicks tome will offer a stimulating stroll down memory lane. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 950 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Edition edition (November 5, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019210022X
• ISBN-13: 978-0192100221
• Product Dimensions: 10.7 x 6.4 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #394,645 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars They still get fooled again-- or did they?, August 25, 2009

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John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974 (Hardcover)

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 there is for the existence of 'the Holy Ghost'." (12)

Confronted with such a wealth of detail, what emerges are such spirited moments of contention, and the archival eye for the telling remark. Much of this does read at times as if a write-up of the scholar's notes, but he's able, when accounting in one long paragraph for the success of the Beatles, for instance, to use the example to stand for the whole. Their eclectic, experimental, and extremist mood, in lyrics and in music that for its variety always sounded "like the Beatles," best characterized the decade's "expressive mode."

Even the fabled Paris uprisings in '68 showed that while stylistic and aesthetic exuberance counted for a lot of evident change, that our world's power structures were too embedded to be easily overturned by Western protesters in scarves and jeans. "In the end France was not that different, since the whole theory that revolution 'ought' to take place was simply false. Everybody piled in with their particular fads and philosophies, then just left it to happen. A badly typed statement from the 'Children's Cell of the Revolutionary Communist (Trotskyist) Party' declared that children were part of the struggle." (614) The stylistic assembly of statement, observation, and supporting fact delivered with deadpan "dispassionate analysis" (20; his term for being an "atheist" towards glib jargon and tired theory I welcomed) shows the tone of this social-political history.

This study shines in such moments amidst the perhaps inevitable amassing of evidence that may overwhelm. As a Californian, I did catch a few slips betraying the author's British base. He repeats the familiar claim that black casualties in Vietnam were "grossly disproportionate" but gives no statistics. (535) (In fact, 10.6% of enlisted men were black, 12.5% of those killed; this compares to blacks of military age being 13.5% of the U.S. population at that time.) James "Chancy" was not killed as a Freedom Rider, but "Chaney" was. There is no "County of Oakland," Alameda County encompassing the city of Oakland within county limits. The San Francisco Giants, cited by "Ebony" here, boasted not Willie "McCorey" but "McCovey." The L.A. riots in "Watts 1993" were in 1992. And, while no native would call it "the Big Sur" using an article, it may be technically correct to locate this beauty spot "north-west" of Los Angeles. Yet it's two-thirds up the coast nearer San Francisco, its more fitting geographical neighbor and a better culturally aligned designation.

I read this straight through, but others may wish to dip in and roam about the chapters, thematically arranged along a chronological framework from '58-63 as the foundation for a cultural revolution, the "High Sixties" from '64-'69, and the coming down into the early seventies, ending the postwar affluence boom in '74. Marwick, like his decade, perhaps shines best in the British New Wave and then in the upheavals of '68; the last stretch of the book's anticlimactic even as gay rights, antiwar demonstrations, feminism, and environmental causes at last start to work smaller, often less dramatic, but still astonishing and longer lasting feats of eroding the power base. He closes his chapter on '68 pondering how the student protests could be chronicled, for such events are important to sort out, whereas "it is much easier to pontificate about 'hidden structures', since nobody can possibly tell whether you are right or wrong". (675)

He finds the protesters show the idealism and bravery inherent in the decade's uprisings; they also show "the folly of their obedience to the great Marxisant fallacy; the absurd faith that there was a promised land ready-- given sufficient protest, sufficient violence, sufficient unconventionality, sufficient vulgarity-- for the taking." Yet, Marwick, who was there, or close by, humanizes his critique. "I do not mock the protesters; I salute them, recognizing that they never had a hope of success in their revolutionary aspirations. I do mock commentators since, who, looking for the revolution decreed in the Marxist scriptures, have gone and on picking over their failure, missing the real cultural revolution."

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars rather stilted and humdrum effort for an exciting decade, June 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974 (Hardcover)

A lot of the material is great, but stylistically the book is strained--like reading through a pile of thesis notecards.