How different were the 1960s from the 1950s? Historians inevitably disagree. But the sense of discontinuity is given a fresh and persuasive emphasis in this study of five writers and thinkers (plus a chapter on the Esalen Institute). They challenged the experience of social decomposition and the encounters with divided selves that have been understood to be characteristic of modernity. Instead Linda Sargent Wood portrays iconic 1960s figures who conceived of humanity “holistically,” as members of a species precariously bound to one another aboard “Spaceship Earth.” The year 1962 was pivotal: Rachel Carson published Silent Spring that year to warn that pesticides endangered the ecological links upon which living things so intricately depended, and the Esalen Institute was founded in northern California as the herald of New Age healing of the mind–body split. A More Perfect Union also deftly profiles Martin Luther King Jr., whose invocation of “the beloved community” found room for whites as well as blacks, and for the Third World and not only his native land. Then there was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. A paleontologist and a priest, an evolutionist and a mystic, he was fascinated by the ages of rocks. But he was also hampered by his Church, which rigidly defended the Rock of Ages. Without formal credentials in either engineering or architecture, R. Buckminster Fuller wrought a revolution in thinking about the built environment. Finally, psychologist Abraham Maslow pushed the boundaries of his discipline past the pessimism of psychoanalysis and the reductionism of behavioral science into a “Third Force” that he believed might lead to the obliteration of hatred and war.

Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970, and by then the loose movement that Wood has so subtly and elegantly described might seem to have peaked. Its distinctive features became diffuse. Yet the realization that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” continued to attract adherents, Wood argues. The chief legatee of holism, she nimbly demonstrates, is the presidential candidate who got the most votes in 2000. Inspired by reading Silent Spring, hailing Teilhard de Chardin as one of the century's greatest theologians, sneered at by President George H. W. Bush as “ozone man,” Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize for his prescient and energetic wakeup calls that located the climate change that threatens the planet. The holistic sensibility might therefore be presumed to be progressive. After all, spirituality was supposed to be the antidote to materialism, racism was a repugnant violation of the unitary ideal of our common humanity, and the destructiveness of war contrasted most egregiously with reverence for nature and for the sanctity of life itself. But Fuller was apolitical, Carson transformed herself into an activist only at the end of her career, and Maslow remained a supporter of the Vietnam War. So deep was Teilhard de Chardin's faith in a benign universe that neither the trenches of the Great War nor the prospect of nuclear apocalypse could alter his almost goofy optimism. The crispness of Wood's thesis does not affect her capacity to notice the contradictions that are all too human.

In the United States the communitarian critics of individualism have usually been seated below the salt; solidaire has rarely achieved ideological victories over solitaire. The nemesis of the New Age, according to A More Perfect Union, has been the enduring power of, say, the “self-actualization” that was not supposed to be achieved at the expense of tighter interpersonal bonds. Many of the younger militants of the civil rights movement never really subscribed to King's vision of “the beloved community,” and it is fair to say that he would have reshaped the polity even had his struggle against racism been confined to the conventional resources of the Social Gospel and to black religiosity.

In showing how half a dozen figures found a readership and an audience for metaphors about society and the environment as an organism, Wood has carved out an intriguing slice of the nation's culture in the early to mid-1960s. The author is not antipathetic to the vision of society or of the cosmos as a gestalt. A book as splendid as this one probably could not have been written from an animus. But A More Perfect Union should not be dismissed as “To Big Sur, with Love.” She makes evident that terms like “noosphere” and “eupsychia,” which ricocheted against the walls of the rooms where the encounter groups and T-groups were conducted, were neither precise nor stable. And for all of the promise that the New Age betokened, Wood is admirably attentive to the formidable challenge that Auden laid down when he wrote, “We must love one another or die.”