Even at a purely natural level, the battle against the destructive heritage of the Sixties is one we’re eventually going to win.

The Historical Roots of 1960s Radicalism

by James Kalb

The rebellious fervor of the Sixties, with its rejection of traditional standards and authorities, seemed a sudden break from what came before. At a deeper level, however, those developments simply brought to fruition what had long been in the works.

What happened at that time was a further step in a centuries-long process of social transformation. The French Revolution had replaced kings and priests with bureaucrats, and the Industrial Revolution turned artisans into assembly line workers. The events of the Sixties continued the process.

Their basic effect was to replace personal and family obligations by social welfare rights, and inherited community understandings by therapy and political correctness. Instead of family life based on sexual restraint and differing functional roles for men and women, we would have sexual freedom, contraception, daycare, and careers for all. The changes were marketed through appeals to freedom, but they carried forward and radicalized the replacement of local and traditional ways by bureaucratic and market arrangements. Those arrangements are not particularly free. To call them “liberation” is to say that man is essentially an employee and consumer who pursues various diversions in his time off, so that a rationally managed system of production, consumption, and private indulgence is what he needs to give him what he wants and maximize his freedom.

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