Arnecia Harris

03/19/2019

Sixties Utopian Movement

When one first thinks of the Sixties, you immediately think of the volatility of the Civil Rights movement, hippies, and landing on the moon. As one who minored in African-American Studies, much of my knowledge about the sixties came from a certain perspective as it relates to the civil rights era. It is with great intrigue that I picked the Sixties Utopian Movement as a topic of review. At first, I thought about all the anger and fighting and wondered how in the world Utopia models can be applied. How did the Utopian Movement grow in such a volatile era? What was the foundation for the people of the Sixties Utopian Movement? What was their motivation in pursuing a utopian lifestyle?

In Frédéric Robert’s article, The Movement’s Utopian Thoughts on Family, Work, Education, and Government in the Sixties, he explained that the Sixties Utopian movement was a combination of several groups that were created and grew during that era as the New Left. The central theme for the New Left utopian movement focused on a specific lifestyle for their family, work, education, and government that was an alternative to the American status quo. Robert’s description immediately clarified how the Civil Rights era during the sixties could be referred to as a Utopian Movement. The Utopian Movement was less about political ideologies and more about an overall social movement that was driven by a larger segment of the population.

Mike O’Donnell took it a step further and described that the people of the New Left their Utopian philosophies were radical in nature but were also less issue and constituency based than which the Movement was founded. It differed from the Old Left in that regard, which had been primarily focused on civil inequities and injustices. What stood out to me is the use of radical utopia to describe the Sixties Utopian Movement although the people never considered themselves to be radical. The goal was always about transcending the status quo, according to O’Donnell.

So where does that leave someone trying to understand the foundation of the Sixties Utopian Movement? The various readings about the Sixties Utopian Movement provided several different perspectives as to the “why” of the people who lived during that time. All seeming to provide the same conclusions as it relates to the lack of general political ideologies with no central philosophy driving the Movement. Former hippie, Deborah A. DeNicola, who lived during that era, stated that the Movement was the “pursuit of equality for Afro-Americans and women, and for that inalienable right, happiness, the goals of anti-war and environmental awareness movements--all displaying a deep longing for a more just, simpler, earth-friendly way of life.” However, she also concluded that while passionate, the people of the Sixties Utopian Movement failed due to immaturity, misguided thinking, and poor planning.

Reading about the Sixties Utopian Movement provided a different way of looking back at part of the Civil Rights era. The readings providing an understanding that the Utopian Movement was not limited to just pursuing equality for African-Americans, but also a different way of living for people, in general. I am not as pessimistic in thinking that the movement was a complete failure. I think the world has evolved a lot since the 1960s and many of the things that people in the sixties may have fought for are slowly coming to fruition now. Depending on one’s political leanings, that can be good or bad.

Works Cited

DeNicola, Deborah A. “The Utopian Dream - The Sixties' Hippies and the New Age” (2010). Online. https://ezinearticles.com/?The-Utopian-Dream---The-Sixties-Hippies-and-the-New-Age&id=4951809  

Carmichael, Thomas Joseph Daniel. "Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (review)." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 51 no. 1, 2005, pp. 236-239. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mfs.2005.0019

Kelly, Martin. "List of Major Utopian Movements in American History." ThoughtCo, Mar. 18, 2019, www.thoughtco.com/utopian-movements-104221.

O'Donnell, Mike. “Nineteen-sixties Radicalism and its Critics: Radical Utopians, Liberal Realists and Postmodern Sceptics” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. September 2008, Volume 13, Issue 3, pp 240–260. https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2008.7

Robert, Frédéric. “The Movement’s Utopian Thoughts on Family, Work, Education, and Government in the Sixties.” American International Journal of Contemporary Research. 2016. Pages 127-137. www.aijcrnet.com/journals/Vol_6_No_3_June_2016/13.pdf