Word: feuer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...should not mistake the student movement for a youth movement. A student movement has the component, however feeble, of intellectualism. "A new idea," writes Feuer, "has all the poetry involvement and purity of a first live." Such idealism commands respect as a major means by which ethical ideas enter history...
REJECTION by the masses is not a law of history, though. Feuer points out that in developing countries, students may meet favorable circumstances. Where democratic politics are closed off, then the intellectuals--young and old alike--will make common cause. Where the older intellectuals share power or see possibilities of compromise, then the intelligentsia will experience the conflict of generations. This "localized" conflict can be more acute. For the sake of revolutionary purity, students direct their tactics against the old liberals who have "sold out to the Establishment!" And since many of them teach at the university, they are easy...
...Feuer writes an attractive kind of history, all anecdote and theory. Most of the anecdotes seem rather chilling, deliberately so, but the analysis is quite original. He clearly demolishes the old notion of student politics as one episode toward modernization. Student movements plague all types of societies and generally end in chaos without a single piece of legislation or reform to call their own. Feuer invented much of this analysis in response to current student radicalism and applied it to history retrospectively, but his case is nevertheless well argued. When he applied his categories of student revolt to the American...
...FEUER TENDS to use terms like "radicals," "students," and "activists" indiscriminately. He might easily have distinguished the New Left from the New Politics. The New Left prefers to work outside party politics. It prefers direct action for the sake of a moral principle--strikes, demonstrations, building takeovers. Any kind of long run participation in decision-making bores the radicals. It is more Nietzschean to pit one's will against the system and make it yield. Confrontation politics is not really politics...
Civil rights started as the dominant issue of the new student movement although it never became an exclusively student issue. However, Feuer shies away from making a comprehensive survey of black generational attitudes. In one sense, I think, the black radicals do not appear to be quite so alienated as the whites. They have an alternative to the "system": black studies, black culture. At Harvard, the Faculty found it far easier to deal with Afro than to pacify...