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The Politics of the Peace Corps

Elizabeth Hoffman has given more than a critically sophisticated history of the Peace Corps and of the volunteerist commitments that at the same time moved contingents of people in other countries. (Australian youth, acting outside of government, had beat the Peace Corps by several years, and the Canadians purposely got a program going just before that of their southern neighbor.) All You Need is Love is a sensitive and rounded study of the cultural and intellectual phenomena and contradictions of the age. One of the most interesting portions of the book discusses the ethos that at the dawn of the sixties motivated Peace Corps volunteers and their counterparts abroad. It drew upon a rendering of existential philosophy that in place of a formal system of ethics prompts individuals to find and create their identity through active involvement in the world. The result may be proportionate to the difficulty of the action. The author centers on this way of thinking as it inspired Peace Corps volunteers. But a whole history is to be told of the humane ethos of self-discovery in action and community as it also appeared in the early Students for a Democratic Society as well as in the Mississippi civil rights movement. The early Peace Corps, then, embodied a persuasion at radical odds both with Soviet and Maoist ideology and with the left politics that later were to define race, ethnicity, and gender as ultimate categories of self-identity and political discourse. The Peace Corps was founded in a belief that human beings should be concerned for one another. The idea did, of course, include the notion that participation would bring self-definition and fulfillment to the volunteer: yet that is a realm of self-concern that is ordinarily ranked as virtuous. But you cannot sell Congress and the opportunistic portions of the public on the