MembersNEWNew in the Members’ Room: James Panton gives talks defending freedom in London and in Edinburgh ; Suzy Dean has a blog on youth engagement; Josie Appleton will be debating booze bans at Sussex University; Michele Ledda's petition against banning of a poem from the school curriculum has more than 100 signatures; Dolan Cummings writes on how anti-smokers are stubbing out liberty; Josie Appleton is discussing cities at a conference in Moscow; Manick Govinda has produced a new London exhibition. New on the Vetting Blog: Tenants turfed out for refusing to fill in forms; CRB checking tooth fairy; Children’s authors under suspicion; Flats halted because balconies have ‘view of school’. Read on… |
Tuesday 22 April, CLUB NIGHT: Talkin' About a Revolution - the legacy of 1968
So was it all just hopeless naiveté and youthful extravagance? Or is the world we live in a better place for the dreamers of 1968? Could we learn from the sixties spirit of humanist optimism? Or should we just get real and explore the possibilities of our own time? Speakers (from the '68 generation and the up-and-coming generations) include: Frank Furedi, Manifesto Club member, former student radical and agitator in 1968, now agitated radical humanist and professor of sociology at the University of Kent. Look Frank's website for more. Maria Grasso, Manifesto Club member, chair of the Institute of Ideas Post-Grad Forum and Oxford University doctoral student in political sociology investigating the decline of political engagement in Western Europs. Lee Jones, doctoral student in International Relations at Nuffield College, Oxford, who has argued that the '68ers were possibly the most disappointing generation ever produced by Western Society [PDF]. See Lee's web page. Date: Tuesday 22 April Download the Talkin' About a Revolution poster for this event [PDF]. Some interesting readings: Frank Furedi takes issue with the tendency to mythologise the sixties, while editor of The New Criterion Roger Kimball thinks the sixties really was responsible for everything revolting in the world. Sociologist Mike O'Donnell interviews a number of sixties radicals, including Furedi, and concludes that the radical student movement of the 1960s was 'realistically utopian'. Sean O'Hagan reflects on the legacy of '68; and Maria Grasso, George Hoare and Lee Jones reflect on the trials and tribulations of the contemporary radical left at Oxford, plus Lee Jones on possibly the most disappointing generation ever produced by Western Society [PDF]. |
The Manifesto Club supports:Historians campaigning against 'memory laws'... 'Enlightenment is humanity's emergence from self-imposed immaturity. Dare to know! Have courage to use your own understanding!' Immanuel Kant 'What characterises man is his extreme abundance of imagination; therefore, that man is a fantastic animal and that universal history is the gigantic, continuous and insistent effort to go, little by little, putting some order into the crazy fantasy.' José Ortega y Gasset |
Compared to the politics of today, the spring of 1968 seems like a period of unbridled optimism: young people took to the streets for a better world and 'utopian' and 'radical' were not yet dirty words. But while many of those young radicals are now establishment figures in politics, media and business, the world they sought has not come about. 