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Class, Activism and History: Two New Books on the Sixties

THERE IS a certain pattern to the way in which distinct historical eras emerge. Initially journalists, politicians and sociologists start assessing events in the recent past. Then, as the political scientists and sociologists lose interest, historians begin to move in. Historians prefer a certain distance in time before they wade in to the discussion, at least with any serious commentary. This is formed by the nature of the research they have been trained to use, their respect for time as a key element in change and their desire to look at the significance from a certain distance. Before long they begin to create a new era – distinct from the present but instrumental in our understanding of how we got to where we are. Two recent books, Palmer’s Canada’s 1960s and Palaeologu’s The Sixties in Canada, signal the continuing evolution of that fabled decade as a subject of serious historical analysis. At the same time, the evolution is still clearly underway. Palmer is a baby boomer, as are many of the contributors to Palaeologu’s edited volume. Moreover, many were activists in the decade and bring to their analysis not only the usual historical baggage but also nostalgia for an age when all things seemed possible. So nostalgia and the mythification of an already fabled decade are an inherent part of both works. A definite left-wing perspective is another element clearly present in both works. Palmer explicitly celebrates this and uses it as a weapon to wield against the new graduate student religion of post-modernism. His approach is “more modernist than post-modernist, more historicist than textualist, and more attuned to Marxist sensibilities than it is to the reification of discursive destabilization characteristic of current theoretically fashionable premises . . .” (p. 8). As an edited collection, the ideological perspective of Palaeologu’s work is more eclectic but it too views the decade from the Left and, in the case of several contributors, the perspective of a personal experience with activism. To point out the explicit presence of nostalgia, myth and ideology is not to imply anything necessarily pejorative about either work. Mythification