Word: feuer
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...MATTER what the captions on Life magazine say, Harvard has never experienced "centuries of academic calm." In fact, from 1766 to 1834, students seemed to go on a virtual rampage. Lewis Feuer has traced student politics back to the French Revolution, and his Conflict of Generations signifies a major effort to give these movements historical perspective and academic respectability. Feuer largely concentrates on the political consequences of the conflict, not the Oedipally determined struggle of sons against fathers. The element of generational conflict, he contends, has led students to amorality in the choice of political means. Given...
This analysis accompanies a leisurely executed polemic against student movements of whatever ideological flavor as they emerged throughout history. In all the major student movements documented by Feuer--the German, the Bosnian, the Russian, the Japanese, the Chinese, the French, the American--the original generosity and sacrifice for ideals ended up as criminal elitism in which the end justified any means: assassinations, thievery, strikes, destruction of property, and a heavy youth-weighted rate of suicide...
STUDENT MOVEMENTS arise in disoriented societies, a condition often reenforced by the political apathy of the masses. Feuer lists two basic requirements for a student movement: gerontocracy and "deauthorization." A gerontocracy means that the older generation possesses a disproportionate amount of economic power and status. Feuer does nor regard the United States as a gerontocracy, but perhaps he is mistaken. The younger generation has grown weaker in this country, not stronger, as a result of prolonged schooling and economic dependence on their elders well into adulthood. This gives rise to the "free floating aggression" characteristic of young adults whose emotional...
...student terrorism, he assumes, had conditioned Russia to "pathological politics," corrupting an "already corrupt and sick Russian society." Black ghetto riots: Berkeley was "the intellectual precursor for Watts." From time to time, Feuer guardedly acknowledges the id alism of the young. But his essential position is that "student movements are a sign of sickness, a malady in society...
...Feuer goes much too far, and that is a pity, for he has what his subject badly needs: scholarship. But he supplies too much of what it distinctly doesn't need: partisanship. As an angry father figure stuck with an angry-son explanation of history, he becomes in the end a victim of those excesses he describes. What makes Feuer's book ap pealing, especially to that group which may be loosely referred to as "grownup," is its easy (too easy) explanation of current woes and rages that many Americans find painful and inexplicable. What makes it potentially...