For many years, historians of the post-war United States envisaged the 1960s as a stark interlude of uncharacteristic radicalism lodged between the McCarthyite repression of the 1950s and the chastened expectations of the 1970s. In the eyes of scholars sympathetic to liberalism and radicalism, in particular, ‘the sixties’ denoted a clutch of innovative social and countercultural movements which punctuated an otherwise sterile ‘Cold War era’, while the 1970s witnessed a series of reversals which proved to be a prelude to the conservative hegemony inaugurated by Ronald Reagan. In many of the classic studies, the sudden rise and equally rapid demise of 1960s radicalism were symbolized, if not constituted, by the lifespan of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS, 1960–69), whose implosion at the decade's end spawned violent if marginal offshoots such as the Weather Underground.Footnote ¹ At their most capacious, such accounts posited a slightly extended ‘sixties’ which commenced with the mass protest phase of the civil rights movement in the mid-1950s and drew to a close in the early 1970s amid the dissolution of the anti-war and black power movements.Footnote ²

The five books under review here join a host of others which, over the past decade or so, have troubled this sharp periodization. In their various, distinctive ways, these studies demonstrate that the ideas, practices, and movements associated with ‘the sixties’ did not arise spontaneously or disappear without trace.Footnote ³ Marc Stears draws attention to continuities in personnel, tactics, and principles which linked the two most notorious protest organizations of the 1960s – SDS and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) – to the union-led radicalism of the Depression years. For Grace Hale, these same organizations, together with the countercultural music and fashion of the 1960s, embodied an ideal of rebellion, the ‘romance of the outsider’, which had steadily infused American society since the Second World War and which has maintained its cultural purchase to the present day. Simon Hall disputes many elements of the familiar declension narrative that tells of a rapid and destructive demise of the social movements and radical ideals of ‘the sixties’. A multitude of protest organizations in the final quarter of the twentieth century not only continued to mobilize intensively, he argues, but also exerted a powerful influence over policy-making at local, state, and federal levels. The life of Mario Savio, who faded from national attention following his moment of celebrity as a leader of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, could easily have been moulded to the contours of the traditional declension narrative. Yet Robert Cohen's biography of Savio provides, amongst other things, a micro-study of baby-boomer activism as it persisted beyond the 1960s in less canonized but nonetheless significant forms. Linda Sargent Wood, meanwhile, situates the 1960s within a longer period, from the 1940s to the 1970s, in which ideas of holism exerted a strong appeal within American culture and animated the campaigns of civil rights activists, environmentalists, and others.

By decentring the 1960s, these studies divulge richer, more complex, less rigidly compartmentalized understandings of the United States in the post-war era. They also qualify the conventional view that the turmoil of ‘the sixties’ bequeathed an absolute political schism between American liberals and conservatives, whose incommensurability was supposedly confirmed by the ‘culture wars’ of the late twentieth century. As Hale and Hall are especially keen to stress, the post-war era was rife with ideological cross-dressing, shared vocabularies, and plagiarized tactics. Conservatives mimicked liberals’ mobilizing strategies and rhetoric of rebellion, while liberal and radical activists challenged conservatives’ self-proclaimed monopoly over patriotism. Those seeking the transnational turn in American history will need to look elsewhere, for these scholars rarely engage with the international dimensions of the post-war political, social, or cultural phenomena they describe.Footnote ⁴ Instead, whether implicitly or explicitly, they look to the second half of the twentieth century to illuminate what appear to be the most distinctive elements of American politics and culture in the twenty-first: fiercely contested debates concerning religion, sexuality, and reproductive rights; a strident and highly organized conservative populism; and a fractious, venomous political culture in which a moderate president speaking the language of reconciliation is disparaged by some as an alien, a communist, and a Nazi.

This latter problematic is addressed most directly by Marc Stears in Demanding democracy: American radicals in search of a new politics. Barack Obama's promise in 2007 of a ‘new kind of politics’ (p. 1) echoed the demands of many recent American political theorists –‘deliberative democrats’ such as Amy Gutmann and Archon Fung – for a less antagonistic politics characterized by civility and reasoned discussion. ‘Democratic realists’ (p. 3), including William Connolly and Michael Walzer, have countered that such hopes are dangerously deluded. To relinquish the politics of confrontation in the hope of drawing one's opponents (conservatives, in the discourse of these liberal and left theorists) into an idealized politics of deliberation would be tantamount to surrender. Power and propaganda, however unappealing, will remain politics’ hard currency.

The two sides of this debate, Stears argues, have drawn into a destructive enmity two impulses which, for most of the twentieth century, were held in creative and profitable tension by generations of activists and theorists who comprised the American ‘radical democratic tradition’ (p. 12). The first is the aspiration to an ideal, or improved, democracy; the second is a realistic assessment of the means by which change may be brought about within the present, imperfect political culture. The apparent clash between these impulses constitutes, for Stears, ‘the paradox of politics – the challenge of making an ideal society out of the non-ideal material of the present’ (p. 83). Stears finds within the twentieth century's radical democratic tradition a body of thought which accepted this challenge and presumed that a political order grounded in reasoned discussion and some form of common good was realizable, while conceding that such an order could not be brought into being by ideal, deliberative means alone.

Though his line of inquiry stems from political theory, Stears proves himself to be a sensitive and rigorous historian of ideas. Beginning with his analysis of progressive thinkers such as Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly in the early years of the twentieth century, he persuasively reconstructs a tradition of thought which was willing to countenance the use of coercive and manipulative tactics, such as labour strikes and propaganda, in order to bring into being a better order in which such tactics would be superseded. The key, wrote Walter Weyl in 1912, was to be ‘uncompromising in principle’ and yet ‘compromising in action’ (p. 37). Today's deliberative democrats and democratic realists, Stears argues, have failed to register that the thinkers they claim as progenitors of their respective positions were substantially in agreement with each other over the need to distinguish means from ends.

Most impressive here is Stears's reconsideration of John Dewey, whose emphasis on communication as the basis of a politics of mutuality has endeared him to advocates of deliberative democracy. As Stears demonstrates, by the 1930s Dewey's thinking about political conduct had converged with that of the hard-headed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Alarmed by industrialists’ apparent capture of the New Deal, Dewey conceded in Liberalism and social action (1935) that ‘discussion and dialectic’ were ‘weak reeds to depend upon’ (p. 96) in challenging the might of industrial capital. As committed as ever to the pursuit of a communicative democratic future, Dewey nonetheless endorsed the labour militancy which reached its apogee in December 1936 in the Union of Automobile Workers’ sit-down strike at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. For many of Stears's radical democrats, unions provided an immediate counterforce to capital and a schooling in solidarity and mutuality that would nurture the values of a new political order.

While Stears's reconstruction of the radical democratic tradition deftly accommodates chronological shifts in the balance between idealism and realism, it has its points of weakness. His account of the progressives – in particular, his claim that their ‘inconsistencies’ are ‘more apparent than real’ (p. 53) – somewhat flattens and homogenizes a notoriously diverse intellectual constellation. Foregrounding a handful of ‘New Nationalists’, Stears might have limited his claims to this tendency within progressivism, rather than hazarding broader generalizations. In the post-war period, the tradition becomes unnecessarily baggy through the inclusion of such cold war liberals as Louis Hartz and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Their scepticism concerning both idealized ends and coercive or militant means, amply witnessed by Stears, makes their designation as ‘postwar radicals’ (p. 134) and their incorporation into his radical democratic tradition somewhat curious.

Far more effective is his handling of the civil rights movement and the wider New Left. Like Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr has been lauded by deliberative democrats as an embodiment of the politics of reasoned persuasion. Yet, as Stears demonstrates, the civil rights movement deployed ‘a wide range of political strategies and behaviors, most of which would be considered undesirable, even illegitimate, in an improved future state’ (p. 147). Indeed, its tactics owed more ‘to the philosophers of coercion than to those of consensus’ (p. 155). The strategy of filling southern jails to capacity manifested King's belief, as he put it in 1963, that the purpose of direct action was ‘to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open doors to negotiation’ (p. 157). Stears also makes clear, contrary to the claims of Wini Breines and others, that SDS, even in its early years, did not wholly abjure the coercive tactics of the Old Left in favour of a ‘prefigurative politics’ (p. 185) of consensus-building and moral suasion. Internally, the organization sought to inculcate the ‘participatory democracy’ and free discussion that would define the new order; yet few of its activists believed that the ‘grasp of the power elite’ (p. 204) could be loosened by deliberative means alone.

By emphasizing SDS's inheritance from its parent organization, John Dewey's League for Industrial Democracy, Stears questions the absolute newness of the New Left and the spontaneous genesis of ‘the sixties’. Yet by concluding his narrative with SDS's implosion, and by asserting without further explanation that the New Left of the 1960s was ‘effectively the last iteration of the twentieth century's radical democratic tradition’ (p. 175), Stears unquestioningly reproduces the traditional declension narrative which consigns late-twentieth-century American radicalism to the dustbin. This is a pity. It would be fascinating to learn, for instance, how the radical feminists of the 1970s and 1980s grappled with the paradox of politics and visualized the path from an all-too-real present to an ideal future.

The persistence of radical activism throughout the late twentieth century is abundantly illustrated in Simon Hall's American patriotism, American protest: social movements since the sixties. Building on an array of recent scholarship on the women's and gay rights movements, Hall ably demonstrates that many of the hallmarks of 1960s activism – including civil disobedience, street theatre, alternative institutions, and a politics of authenticity – powerfully influenced the social movements of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The ‘rise and fall’ narrative of 1960s radicalism, Hall astutely observes, ‘privileges the story of national organizations’ such as SNCC and SDS ‘at the expense of other organizations and movements, particularly those working at the local level’ (p. 5). Training his lens on such groups as the Lawrence Gay Liberation Front of the University of Kansas and the Greater New Haven Women's Political Caucus, Hall shows how protest remained an important aspect of community life in localities across the United States. He also underscores the profound influence of the civil rights activism of the 1960s – both in its earlier phase of non-violent direct action and its later emphasis on liberation, pride, and militant resistance – on other activist tendencies from the 1970s onwards. The slogan ‘Gay is Good’ was testimony to the wide resonance of ‘Black is Beautiful’.

It was not only activists on the left who continued to mobilize and to deploy the tactics and rhetoric of ‘the sixties’, however. Hall's book also joins an emerging literature which chronicles how American conservatives, who vehemently opposed many of the movements and changes associated with the 1960s, nevertheless adopted the strategies and much of the vocabulary of 1960s radicalism in forging powerful social movements of their own. In the 1970s, the ‘silent majority’ hailed by Richard Nixon ceased to be silent. Complementing the work of historians such as Matthew Lassiter and Lisa McGirr, Hall looks beyond the national political script dominated by Nixon, George Wallace, and Barry Goldwater to locate the origins of the New Right in local, grassroots movements.Footnote ⁵ Activists opposed to the desegregation of schools by court-mandated ‘busing’ of students in the 1970s consciously emulated the language of the civil rights movement when they identified themselves as ‘second-class citizens’, attempted to organize their own ‘March on Washington’, and appropriated the unofficial civil rights anthem ‘We shall overcome’ (p. 88). The anti-Vietnam War slogan ‘Hell, no! We won't go!’ (p. 89) proved equally malleable. The Californian anti-tax revolt, which secured the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, manifested anger at the expansion of welfare and government that was seen as a legacy of the 1960s ‘Great Society’. But it also emulated the civil rights and anti-war movements, as campaigners burned their tax assessment notices and staged guerrilla street theatre, folk concerts, rallies, and marches. The anti-abortion movement initially harboured many veterans of civil rights and anti-war campaigns, before it was engulfed in the 1980s by the broader political upsurge of evangelicalism and became a key plank of the New Right.

Hall's most original contribution is his exposition of the language of patriotism and Americanism that was deployed not only by conservative activists, but also by those on the left. A mainstay of the 1960s declension narrative is that the American left, disgusted by racism and the Vietnam War, jettisoned patriotism from the 1970s and so, as Hall quotes the activist-turned-scholar Todd Gitlin, ‘lost the ability to pose convincing alternatives for the nation as a whole’ (pp. 6–7). Hall, however, finds a resurgence of patriotic appeals in the women's, gay rights, and even black power movements from the 1970s onwards. Members of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in Memphis identified with a tradition of American freedom when they carried placards which stated ‘1776 Was for Women Too’ (p. 72). In 1978, the gay rights leader, Harvey Milk, not only quoted the Declaration of Independence on human equality but even took up the conservative mantra of ‘[America:] Love it or leave it’ (p. 48).

Yet not all of Hall's examples of Americanism appear to have been so earnest. Invocations of America's democratic promise may have been more tactical than heartfelt in some cases, while in others an accusation of American hypocrisy resounds more loudly than any celebration of the republic's abiding values – as when the Black Panther Party, which routinely denounced ‘AmeriKKKa’, reminded fellow citizens that the Declaration of Independence legitimated the overthrow of tyranny. Only in his conclusion does Hall devote a paragraph to the disadvantages of a political culture which constantly distinguishes between ‘American’ and ‘un-American’ causes and ideas. In such a culture, as the rise of the Tea Party confirms, political opponents are branded not simply as erroneous or misguided, but as alien, illegitimate, and deserving of exclusion.

A number of Hall's themes – vocabularies common to left and right; the persistence of social movements beyond the 1960s; the grassroots conservative insurgency of the late twentieth century – are taken up by Grace Elizabeth Hale in A nation of outsiders: how the white middle class fell in love with rebellion in postwar America. At the heart of Hale's impressive study is the romanticization of marginal groups, most persistently of African Americans, which has saturated much of America's youth culture, counterculture, and even mainstream media since the Second World War. As Hale acknowledges, fascination with and envy of the lives and cultures of ‘outsiders’ have deep historical roots in Romantic literature, minstrelsy, and leftist veneration of ‘the folk’. What was new to the post-war period was the explosion of mass media, from photojournalism to television, radio, and paperback fiction, which ‘enabled middle-class people to eavesdrop on and peer into other people's lives, to hear their music and their stories, from the comfort and safety of their middle-class homes. In this context, people understood as outsiders seemed readily available as resources for white middle-class needs and desires’. Suburbanization, bureaucratization, and fears of nuclear war were eroding two fundamental, if uneasily coexisting, components of middle-class identity: ‘[o]rganic community (grounding in time and place and a web of human relationships) and individualism (white male self-determination disguised as a universal ideal)’ (p. 5). Disaffection with a culture of abundance which nonetheless produced these unsettling effects stoked middle-class Americans’ enthusiasm for those supposedly beyond the reaches of the mainstream, whose lives were seen as more spontaneous, more authentically sociable, and less emotionally stilted.

Many post-war youngsters, whom Life magazine in 1954 dubbed ‘the luckiest generation’ (p. 13), rejected at some level the lifestyle or cultural trappings of the white middle class and came to regard themselves, like America's marginalized minorities, as outsiders. Yet as Hale astutely recognizes, even as they outwardly rejected middle-class norms, these self-made outsiders exploited the middle-class privileges of self-determination and self-reinvention which America's economic and racial outsiders had always lacked. The ‘romance of the outsider’, Hale argues, has had the damaging effect of ‘perpetuating inequalities under the guise of identification and love’. Such identification ‘reconstitutes privileges by rejecting them and creates agency out of the disavowal of power’ (pp. 9–10).

Encompassing post-war literature, film, the folk revival, and the birth of rock and roll, the first chapters of Hale's book establish how these cultural forms both reflected and enhanced the appeal of rebellion and outsider status. Hale's detailed, sophisticated readings of J. D. Salinger's The catcher in the rye (1951) and Jack Kerouac's On the road (1957) show how these novels’ respective refrains of ‘phony’ and ‘mad’ helped to define a bipolarity between conformist insincerity and rebellious authenticity. Kerouac's jazz-loving character, Dean Moriarty, with his insatiable demand for what his creator called ‘old-fashioned spade kicks’, was the epitome of the persona Norman Mailer christened ‘The white Negro’ in his essay of that name, published in the same year as On the road. ‘Black sound in white ears or white mouths or white pens’, Hale remarks, ‘became a threshold, a symbolic ground simultaneously inside and outside white life, a medium whites could use to reinvent themselves’ (p. 51). For all the disparagement of the 1950s as an age of conformity, its mass culture was heavily implicated in the celebration of rebellion. Life magazine revelled in the iconoclasm of Jackson Pollock; Playboy launched in 1953; Elvis Presley's gyrating hips were beamed into middle-class living rooms via the Ed Sullivan show in 1956; and On the road, enthusiastically commended by The New York Times, became a paperback bestseller.

Later chapters of A nation of outsiders are devoted to Hale's claim that romanticization of the folk (especially of the southern black poor) and of black civil rights activists was critical to the successful mobilization of white middle-class youth in support of the civil rights movement. The close ties between the movement and folk revivalists such as Joan Baez and Bob Dylan lend some weight to Hale's argument, as does SNCC's deployment of its own Freedom Singers (college-educated African Americans who recorded such old-time numbers as ‘Pick a bale o’ cotton’) to publicize its campaigns. Yet Hale sometimes verges on trivializing the motivations of white student activists, who, she asserts, ‘imagined and tried to build coalitions based in shared emotions – alienation from white middle-class suburban America and love for the rebels on the margins – rather than shared class positions and political ideology’ (p. 164). Hale might have drawn a distinction between the Rebel without a cause, as the film of 1955 starring James Dean was titled, and those white students whose rebellion was demonstrably in the cause of an ideology of racial equality, who risked, and sometimes met with, death at the hands of white supremacists in Mississippi and Alabama. Many of the quotations Hale produces to evidence romanticization of the ‘other’ seem instead to testify to the depth of their authors’ political commitments. SDS's Tom Hayden, for example, contrasted the ‘emptiness’ of middle-class life not with the authenticity or emotional vitality of the black poor or of black activists, but with the ‘whole emotion’ of ‘risking your life, and testing whether you're willing to die for your beliefs’ (p. 175). Not all of those who envisioned themselves as outsiders in America were as beholden to racial romanticism as Hale implies. More persuasive are her chapters on the conservative romance of the outsider, which provide insightful commentaries on the career of William F. Buckley and on the anti-abortion movement and the evangelical New Right. Those seeking the roots of the Tea Party's self-conception as an outsider movement of the majority will certainly value this book.

Robert Cohen's Freedom's orator: Mario Savio and the radical legacy of the 1960s serves as a valuable reminder that affluence and middle-class alienation were not the only forces driving disaffection and protest in post-war America.Footnote ⁶ As Cohen remarks, ‘Savio's rebelliousness evolved … in a distinctive milieu that separates him from affluent youths on cold war America's elite college campuses.’ Born to Italian immigrants and raised in a working-class home in Queens, New York City, Savio's formative experiences included ‘being pressured to jettison his Italian heritage in an assimilationist household, navigating the blue-collar version of the American dream, and breaking with the Catholic Church’ (p. 6). Remarkably, Savio had not yet fully overcome the severe stutter he had developed in childhood when, on 1 October 1964, he stepped carefully onto the roof of a police car in Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley, and extemporized the address which instantly established him as the leading orator of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement.

Though his revolt against Catholicism was well underway by the time he entered Berkeley in 1963, the Christian moral appeal of the southern civil rights movement strongly attracted Savio, and the following year he journeyed south to join SNCC's Mississippi Freedom Summer. Having suffered beatings and risked death in notorious McComb County, a battle-hardened Savio was outraged to find on his return to Berkeley that the university authorities had clamped down on political organizing on campus. New regulations would make recruitment for future civil rights campaigns almost impossible at Berkeley. Savio joined other students who met with university officials to object to the regulations, and drew on his studies in linguistic philosophy to critique the authorities’ reasoning. When these discussions foundered, Savio quickly aligned himself with others who favoured adopting the peaceful direct action methods of the civil rights movement. From his first address at the sit-in in Sproul Plaza to his most famous speech on 2 December 1964 outside Sproul Hall, Savio made his principal contribution to the protests through what Cohen calls his ‘passionate yet logical, accessible, democratic, and at times poetic oratory’ (p. 3). (A dozen of Savio's speeches and writings, from his high school valedictorian's address of 1960 to his defence of affirmative action in 1996, are gathered as appendices to Cohen's book.)

However, lending further weight to Marc Stears's thesis in Demanding democracy, the Free Speech Movement's reverence for oratory did not denote an exclusively deliberative politics. Savio's most famous words, delivered in his address of 2 December 1964, urged fellow students to occupy Sproul Hall and etched a vivid imagery in defence of coercion. ‘There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious’, Savio intoned, ‘makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop’ (p. 3). Cohen employs the confrontation between university officials and student protesters to anatomize the acrimonious schism between American liberals and radicals which allowed conservatives to seize the political initiative, as Ronald Reagan's election as governor of California in 1966 attested. Yet Cohen diverges from the 1960s rise-and-fall thesis in a number of significant ways. His account of the red-baiting of Berkeley protesters by university authorities and members of the public demonstrates the persistence of anti-communist scaremongering well beyond Joseph McCarthy's censure by the US Senate a decade earlier. Cohen also contests the dominant view that the anti-war protests of the late 1960s marked a decisive move towards violence and hastened the student movement's demise. The ‘vast majority of student protesters of this era remained nonviolent’, Cohen insists. ‘Savio was one of the millions of left-leaning dissidents in 1960s America whose stories do not conform to the SDS/Weather implosion narrative of militancy spinning out of control’ (p. 9).

The victory of the Berkeley free speech campaign was not without cost to Savio. In the midst of an egalitarian movement which held little truck with ‘leaders’, the national media's relentless focus on Savio and his exceptional role proved acutely discomfiting to him. Bouts of severe depression dogged him in the years that followed, and only in 1984 did he receive his bachelor's degree, summa cum laude, from San Francisco State University. Yet rather than portray Savio's later life as tragic confirmation of the declension narrative, Cohen recounts in detail the little-known story of Savio's latter-day, local activism in defence of affirmative action and the rights of undocumented migrants. Savio himself regarded ‘The Movement’ of the 1960s as ‘the mother of many movements’ (p. 267). Throughout this accomplished biography, Cohen skilfully integrates Savio's quest for intellectual fulfilment, as a highly gifted student and later teacher of physics and mathematics, with his search for social and ethical fulfilment through political activism. At his memorial service, held at Berkeley a month after his premature death on 6 November 1996, his friend and fellow Free Speech Movement veteran Bettina Aptheker described his life as ‘a practicum in search of meaning, in search of wholeness, from politics to philosophy to astronomy to healing’ (p. 314).

A search for wholeness typified the lives of many Americans of Savio's generation, argues Linda Sargent Wood in A more perfect union: holistic worldviews and the transformation of American culture after World War II. Wood makes a convincing case that ‘one of the most powerful visions to guide Americans’ between the 1940s and the 1970s was a ‘holistic perspective – a view that holds that reality can only be understood as a whole, can only be understood by focusing on relationships between the parts and the whole’. It was a view which ‘emphasized unity, interdependencies, and integration’ (p. vii). Her first five chapters each profile an influential thinker or activist: the zoologist and environmentalist Rachel Carson; the engineer, designer, and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller; Martin Luther King Jr; the French émigré palaeontologist and heterodox Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; and the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow. ‘Though contested and controversial’, Wood asserts, their ideas influenced American culture to an extent which may be gauged from ‘their best-selling books; large turnouts at speeches, rallies, and marches; popular architectural designs; prominent academic work in journals and institutes; legal reforms; increases in the numbers of businesses offering holistic health; and changing practices and beliefs’ (pp. vii–viii). A final chapter looks at the Esalen Institute, founded in California in 1962 as a retreat where holistic theories could be learned and enacted.

Wood identifies a ‘long history of holistic thought’ (p. 205) encompassing an array of social and natural philosophies, of which nineteenth-century transcendentalism was the most significant American variety. The term ‘holism’, she notes, was coined in 1926 by none other than Jan Christiaan Smuts, but some of the ancient Greek usages of holos resonate with modern holistic ideals. Plato, in his Dialogues, criticized medical practices which did not treat the ‘whole’ patient, while Aristotle's Metaphysics declared that ‘The whole is more than the sum of its parts’ (p. 13). The medieval ‘great chain of being’, Vedanta philosophy, and the Chinese concept of the yin and the yang also became reference points for holism's modern proponents.

Yet, according to Wood, the ‘episodic’ (p. 205) resurgence of holistic thinking in the mid-twentieth-century United States had very immediate causes. ‘In a time of nuclear anxiety, holistic, communitarian visions flourished, no doubt aided by the era's unprecedented economic expansion and not yet stained by the suspicion, cynicism, and distrust’ (p. 19) that would burgeon in the wake of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the energy crises, and the growth of a drug subculture. It is not altogether clear why one (nuclear) cause of anxiety should nurture holistic thinking while others (war, political corruption, etc.) should suppress it. Wood further contends that the increased specialization and complexity of science, widely associated with the use of atomic weaponry and Nazi eugenics, undermined the appeal of positivism and prompted a renewed search for an integration of science and spirituality. A heightened awareness of environmental degradation, revulsion at Nazi racial ideology, and the birth of the United Nations all encouraged emphasis on the unity of mankind and its place within an integrated natural world. Wood says little about what, if anything, was distinctively American about the degree or kind of holism which took root in the post-war period. Neither does she characterize in any depth the ‘reductionistic’ (p. 152) and ‘atomistic’ (p. 92) paradigms which post-war holism partially displaced.

Nevertheless, Wood makes a significant contribution to the study of twentieth-century American thought and social movements by illuminating a neglected but evidently important component of post-war American culture. Her selection of thinkers and activists is judicious and forms an impression of holism's purchase across a wide range of disciplines and movements. Rachel Carson's bestseller Silent spring (1962) warned a generation of Americans that excessive use of synthetic pesticides had far-reaching effects throughout the ecosystem. In tracing those effects on different species and habitats, Carson wrote of the ‘wholeness’ of nature and urged her readers to recognize ‘the intricate web of life whose interwoven strands lead from microbes to man’ (p. 27). That same year, Martin Luther King Jr told the National Press Club that ‘All life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny’ (p. 84). King's ideal of ‘beloved community’ enshrined his belief that races could not ultimately profit at each other's expense, but must seek a collective harmony and redemption. Abraham Maslow, meanwhile, extended the theories of earlier gestalt psychologists with his claim that ‘self-actualized’ individuals developed an ‘integrated’ personality and experienced a ‘fusion’ (p. 158) with the world.

Though she acknowledges the political promiscuity of holism, which has sometimes been marshalled in support of authoritarian nationalism and cultural uniformity, Wood stresses her subjects’ belief that, in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's words, ‘Union differentiates’ (p. 130). Occasionally, she glosses over their inconsistencies, for example the contradiction between R. Buckminster Fuller's aversion to ‘Cold War rivalries’ and ‘military ventures’ (p. 56) and his profitable supply of geodesic domes to the US military, which used them for ‘sheltering men and equipment’ (p. 68). Wood also gets entangled in holism's vacuous rhetorical excesses when she writes that the structure of her book ‘emulates the concept of holism’ since each ‘color in the kaleidoscope becomes a fundamental part of the whole’ (p. 8). Her largely unsubstantiated claim that by the late 1970s ‘the communal ideals of the 1960s became stuck in the labyrinth of individualism’ (p. 167) is rather neatly declensionist, demonstrating, like Stears's book, how entrenched some elements of the rise and fall thesis remain. It would be instructive to know whether the later phases of women's and gay rights activism described by Hall and others in fact evidence communalist holism's enduring appeal.

Wood follows Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin in proposing a ‘long 1960s’, a ‘period stretching from the 1940s to the 1970s’ (p. 6).Footnote ⁷ Insofar as this resists the idea of an instantaneous eruption of radicalism following a decade and a half of conformity and sterility, this is to be welcomed. Yet, when historians are describing the 1940s and 1950s as part of the 1960s, the trope of decades appears to be verging on redundant and a new periodization seems in order. The value of much of the recent scholarship on post-war American radicalism and social movements lies in its willingness to query the ideological and chronological assumptions preserved in the tired notion of ‘the sixties’.