In the 1970s, Guy Hocquenghem, who referred to himself as a “homosexual activist for revolutionary action” (89), conceived of revolution “as a personal transformation in daily life” (95). In state socialist Yugoslavia, meanwhile, feminists “placed the personal back into public space” (124) and formed a sort of “inner resistance” by using “space offered by … state institutions to resist and criticize the state” (114). In a refreshingly heterogeneous anthology entitled The Politics of Authenticity, editors Joachim Häberlen, Mark Keck-Szajbel, and Kate Mahoney have collected twelve case studies focused on activists’ efforts to be themselves, to speak for themselves, and thus to reimagine the relationship between themselves and politics. The volume aims to change the way we think about movements on both sides of Cold War Europe during the 1970s and 1980s in two ways. First, and most fundamentally, it shows how “political struggles … moved to the self” (11) between 1968 and 1989. In so doing, it provides an alternative interpretation of postwar protest's significance, which steps away from historical master narratives of “political democratization or cultural liberalization” (11). Second, the volume reassesses this move to the self by emphasizing the ways activists and members of countercultures used and understood authenticity. The twelve chapters provide copious examples of “how contested questions of authenticity were” (11), even within countercultures and activist groups themselves.

The importance of the self is intertwined with the concept of authenticity throughout the volume. In the introduction, Häberlen and Keck-Szajbel credit Sven Reichardt with first applying the term authenticity to 1970s and 1980s movements in his seminal study Authentizität und Gemeinschaft, which argues that German leftists wanted to be both “authentic and autonomous subjects” (8). Clear examples of activists’ desire—and their efforts—to act on their own and to speak for themselves find pride of place in each chapter of The Politics of Authenticity. Strivings for authenticity are, however, harder to pin down. In part, the ambiguity of authenticity is precisely what the volume is intended to show because, as the editors explain, there were “several and often competing visions of what it meant to be authentic and how one can be authentic” (8). The tensions over the meaning of authenticity also stem from the term's ahistoricity. Several contributors note that the actors they study never used the term authenticity, even if their actions seem in retrospect to have been informed by the pursuit of it. Particularly innovative chapters, then, focus on the collection's second aim: contributors explore authenticity's contested nature, consider just what the term authenticity might have meant in the context of the movements and countercultures they study, and thus offer poignant explanations of what is to be gained by applying it retrospectively.

Kate Mahoney's provocative look at the English Women's Liberation Movement, for example, disentangles subjectivity from authenticity. She argues that rather than enabling every woman to be true to her own self, “consciousness-raising groups had the capacity to promote a specific form of authenticity that participants felt compelled to adhere to” (65). In other words, Mahoney shows that, like the patriarchal society that English feminists sought to overcome, the women's movement itself prescribed a certain, “authentic” role for women—one that was at odds with the way that many women in the movement wished to live their lives or practice politics.

In his comparative study of punk subcultures in East and West Germany, Jeff Hayton also explores the relationship between authenticity and subjectivity, arguing that for German punks, that relationship changed over time. Subjectivity and authenticity went hand in hand for punks when the subculture emerged in the late 1970s. They celebrated individuality, wore creative and “unrestricted” fashions (223), and saw participation in the punk subculture as “a means of pursuing authentic living” (212). And yet, by the 1980s, the subculture “succumbed [to] conformity and uniformity” (226). Even punk fashion was standardized: mohawks and leather jackets were now de rigueur. Authenticity itself was, at its core, “unstable” (226).

The tremendous challenge of combining “authentic” individual subjectivities with a collective movement or counterculture, which the case of German punk subcultures exposes, is further discussed by Benjamin Möckel in his chapter on what he terms humanitarian pop music. Möckel focuses on the consequences of efforts to bring authentic countercultures into the mainstream. In the 1980s, having “ ‘authentic’ experiences” (236) and expressing “authentic feelings” (237) were conceived as “apolitical” acts; politics itself, therefore, was to be perceived as inauthentic. Thus, Möckel suggests that, when compared with the pop music events of the 1960s (epitomized by Woodstock), 1980s pop events such as the 1985 “Live Aid” concerts revealed a transformation from “authentic protest” to “commodified dissent” (247). Radical movements’ and countercultures’ pursuit of authenticity, it follows, may have contributed to neo-liberalism's ascendancy across Europe in the final third of the twentieth century.

By emphasizing activists’ striving for subjectivity and their grappling with authenticity, The Politics of Authenticity offers a series of interesting new interpretive perspectives and questions. It provides a way of interrogating the internal conformity of oppositional movements seemingly focused on the self, offers valuable insights into the institutionalization and the broadening of subcultures, and thus helps us to think about the complicated relationships among subjectivity, autonomy, and opposition. In so doing, the volume makes an important contribution to the recent outpouring of historical research on the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, which has challenged, among other things, the longstanding social-scientific classification of these movements as single-issue movements, concerned only with particular, narrow problems. Precisely because of its heterogeneity, as well as its impressive geographical and temporal scope, the volume makes a strong case that seemingly disparate movements and countercultures had something in common—namely, their shared interest in “searching for an authentic subjectivity and trying to practice and express this authenticity” (8). It follows that undertakings as diverse as women's movements, squatters’ movements, or punk subcultures could, indeed, be viewed as a sort of collective endeavor.

And yet, focusing so closely on authenticity also challenges the central tenets of the recent historiography and raises new questions about these movements’ effects on society as a whole. By setting aside historians’ portrayals of postwar protest as part of a “political and cultural success story that ends with the stable liberal democracies that characterized Europe … at the beginning of the twenty-first century” (6), the volume moves beyond historical master narratives of democratization and liberalization. Doing so fulfills the historian's obligation to question such narratives—an obligation that has only been reinforced by recent events. Yet, in setting the democratization narrative aside, this approach also implies that the protests of the 1970s and 1980s were either too self-absorbed to affect society as a whole or that they contributed to the withering of liberal democracy rather than its fulfillment.

The Politics of Authenticity raises a number of meaningful—and provocative—interpretive questions, which makes it valuable reading for students of postwar social movements and countercultures, as well as those seeking to understand the recent history of democratic cultures and political participation in Europe.