30
EQUALITY, FREEDOM, AND JUSTICE IN THE GREAT SOCIETY

In the spring of 1964, just weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his successor as president, Lyndon Johnson, delivered a speech on the campus of the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor. That day he outlined a massive program for social regeneration in America. The program, he said, would recognise the existence and the persistence of poverty and its links to the country’s enduring civil rights problem; it would acknowledge the growing concern for the environment, and it would attempt to meet the demands of the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. Having reassured his listeners that economic growth in America appeared sustained, with affluence a fact of life for many people, he went on to concede that Americans were not only interested in material benefit for themselves ‘but in the prospects for human fulfilment for all citizens.¹ Johnson, an experienced politician, understood that Kennedy’s killing had sent a shockwave across America, had been a catalyst that made the early 1960s a defining moment in history. He realised that to meet such a moment, he needed to act with imagination and vision. The Great Society was his answer.

Whatever judgements are made about the success or otherwise of Johnson’s idea, he was right to recognise the moment, for the 1960s saw a collective shift in several areas of thought. Often characterised as a ‘frivolous’ decade of fashion frippery, musical ‘intoxication,’ sexual licence, and a narcotics-induced nihilism, the decade was in fact the time when, outside war, more people in the West than ever before faced up to – or were faced with – the most fundamental dilemmas of human existence: freedom, justice, and equality, what they meant and how they could be achieved. Before examining what Johnson did, it is necessary first to examine the context of his Michigan speech, which went back further, and ranged far wider, than the assassination of one man in Dallas on 22 November 1963.

On 17 August 1961, East German workers had begun building the Berlin Wall, a near-impregnable barrier sealing off West Berlin and preventing the escape of East Germans to the West. This followed an initiative by Nikita Khrushchev, of the USSR, to President Kennedy of the United States, that a German peace conference be held to conclude a treaty and establish Berlin as a free city, the Soviet leader proposing simultaneously that talks be held about a ban on nuclear tests. Although talks about a test ban had begun in June, they had broken down a month later. The construction of the Berlin Wall thus marked the low point of the Cold War, and provided an enduring symbol of the great divide between East and West. Relations soured still more in January of the following year, when the three-power conference (United States, U.K. and USSR) on nuclear test bans collapsed after 353 meetings. And then, in October 1962 the Cuban missile crisis flared, after Russia agreed to provide Fidel Castro – who had seized power in Cuba in 1959 after a prolonged insurrection – with arms, including missiles. President Kennedy installed a blockade around Cuba, and the world waited anxiously as Soviet ships approached the island. The crisis lasted for six days until, on 28 October, Khrushchev announced that he had ordered the withdrawal of all ‘offensive’ weapons from Cuba. It was the closest the world had come to nuclear war.

In 1961 communism stretched beyond Russia to East Germany and seven East European states, to the Balkan countries of Yugoslavia and Albania, to China, North Korea, and North Vietnam, to Angola in Africa, Cuba in the Americas, with a major Soviet or local Communist Party presence in Italy, Chile, Egypt, and Mozambique. The Soviet Union was providing arms, education, and training to several other countries, such as Syria, the Congo, and India. The world had never before been so extensively polarised into two rival systems, the centralised, state-centred and state-led Communist economies on the one hand and the free-market economies of the West on the other. Against such a background, it is perhaps no surprise that books began to appear examining the very notion of freedom at its most fundamental. Communism involved coercion, to put it mildly. But it was being successful, even if it wasn’t being popular.

One of the central tenets of Friedrich von Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, was that there is in life a ‘spontaneous social order,’ which has grown up over the years and generations, that things are as they are for a reason, and that attempts to interfere with this spontaneous order are almost certainly doomed to failure. In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, Hayek published The Constitution of Liberty, in which he extended his argument beyond planning, the focus of his earlier book, to the moral sphere.² His starting point was that the values by which we organise and operate our lives have evolved in just the same way that our intelligence has. It follows from this, he says, that liberty – the rules of justice – ‘is bound to take priority over any specific claim to welfare’ simply because liberty and justice create that very welfare: ‘If individuals are to be free to use their own knowledge and resources to best advantage, they must do so in a context of known and predictable rules governed by law.’ Individual liberty, Hayek said, ‘is a creature of the law and does not exist outside any civil society.’ Laws, therefore, must be as universal as possible in their application, and abstract – that is, based on general, and generally accepted, concepts rather than on individual cases.³ He adds two further important points: that liberty is intimately linked to property rights, and that the concept of ‘social justice,’ which would become very much a vogue in the following years, and which certainly underpinned the Great Society, was and is a myth. For Hayek, the freedom to live as one wishes on one’s own private property, always supposing of course that one does not, in so doing, interfere with the rights of others, was the ultimate good. Being evolved, law is for Hayek ‘part of the natural history of mankind; it emerges directly from men’s dealings with each other, is coeval with society, and therefore, and crucially, antedates the emergence of the state. For these reasons it is not the creation of any governmental authority and it is certainly not the command of any sovereign.’⁴ Hayek was therefore against socialism, in particular the Soviet variety, on very fundamental grounds: the government – the state – organised the law, and had no second chamber, which Hayek thought was the natural antidote in the realm of law. Nor did Soviet communism allow any private property, by which the general principles of liberty translated into something practical that everyone could understand; and because it was centrally directed, there was no scope for law to evolve, to maintain the greatest liberty for the greatest number. Socialism, in short, was an interference in the natural evolution of law. Finally, and most controversially at the time, Hayek thought that the concept of ‘social justice’ was the most powerful threat to law conceived in recent years. Social justice, said Hayek, ‘attributes the character of justice or injustice to the whole pattern of social life, with all its component rewards and losses, rather than to the conduct of its component individuals, and in doing this it inverts the original and authentic sense of liberty, in which it is properly attributed only to individual actions.’⁵ In other words, the law must treat men anonymously in order to treat them truly equally; if they are not treated individually, serious inequities result. What is more, he argued, modern notions of ‘distributive’ justice, as he called it, involve some notion of ‘need’ or ‘merit’ as criteria for the ‘just’ distribution in society.⁶ He observes that ‘not all needs are commensurate with each other,’ as for example a medical need involving the relief of pain and another regarding the preservation of life when there is competition for scarce resources.⁷ Other needs are not satiable. It follows from this, he says, that there is ‘no rational principle available to settle the conflict’; this ‘infects’ the lives of citizens ‘with uncertainty and dependency on unforeseeable bureaucratic interventions.’⁸ Hayek’s view was – and remains – influential, though there were two main criticisms. One concerned spontaneous order. Why should spontaneous order occur? Why not spontaneous disorder? How can we be sure that what has evolved is invariably the best? And isn’t spontaneous order, the fruit of evolution, a form of panglossianism, an assumption that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and that we can do little to improve things?

Constitution of Liberty is primarily a work about law and justice. Economics and politics, though not absent, are in the background. In 1950 Hayek had left Britain when he was appointed professor of social and moral sciences and a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. It was a colleague in Chicago who took up where Hayek had left off, reflecting a similar view but adding an economic dimension to the debate. In Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Milton Friedman advanced the then relatively unpopular view that the meaning of liberalism had been changed in the twentieth century, corrupted from its original nineteenth-century meaning – of economic liberalism, a belief in free trade and free markets – and converted instead to mean a belief in equality brought about by well-meaning central government.⁹ His first aim was to regain for liberalism its original meaning, and his second was to argue that true freedom could only be brought about by a return to a true market economy, that real freedom could only exist when man was economically free.¹⁰ This view was more contentious then that it is now because, in 1962, Keynesian economics were still in the ascendant. In fact, Friedman’s arguments went much further than traditional economic interests in markets. Besides arguing that the depression had been brought about not by the Crash, but by economic mismanagement by the U.S. government in the wake of the Crash, Friedman argued that health, schooling, and racial discrimination could be helped by a return to free market economics. Health, he thought, was hampered by the monopoloy which physicians had over the training and licensing of fellow doctors. This had the effect, he said, of keeping down the supply of medical practitioners, which helped their earning power and acted to the disadvantage of patients. He outlined many ‘medical’ duties that could be carried out by technicians – were they allowed to exist – who could be paid much less than highly trained doctors.¹¹ With schools, Friedman’s ideas distinguished, first, a ‘neighborhood effect’ in education. That is to say, to an extent we all benefit from the fact that all of us are educated in a certain way – in the basic skills of citizenship, without which no society can function. Friedman thought that this type of schooling should be provided centrally but that all other forms of education, and in particular vocational courses (dentistry, hairdressing, carpentry) should be paid for.¹² Even basic citizenship education, he thought, should operate on a voucher system, whereby parents could exchange their vouchers for schooling for their children at the schools of their choice. He thought this would exert an influence on schools, through teachers, in that the vouchers would reward good teachers and ought to be transferred into income for them.¹³ Regarding racial discrimination, Friedman took the long-term view, arguing that throughout history capitalism and free markets had been the friend of minority groups, whether those groups were blacks, Jews, or Protestants in predominantly Catholic countries. He therefore thought that, given time, free markets would help emancipate America’s blacks.¹⁴ He argued that legislation for integration was no more and no less ethical than legislation for segregation.

One of the criticism of Friedman’s arguments was that they lacked the sense of urgency that was undoubtedly present in Johnson’s speech in Michigan. Kennedy’s assassination had an effect here, as did the rioting and stand-offs between blacks and law-enforcement agencies that flared throughout the 1960s. There was also the relentless aggressiveness of communism in the background. But in 1964 there was another factor: the ‘rediscovery’ of poverty in America, of squalor amid abundance, and its link to something that all Americans could see for themselves – the disfiguring decline of its cities, especially the inner areas. While Hayek’s and Friedman’s books, controversial as they were, were calm and reflective in tone, two very different works published at the same time were much more polemical, and as a result had an immediate impact. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, was ironic and argumentative. The Other America: Poverty in the United States, by Michael Harrington, was downright angry.¹⁵

The Other America must count as one of the most successful polemics ever written, if judged by its ability to provoke political acts. Published in 1961, it was taken up by the New Yorker, where it was summarised under the title ‘Our Invisible Poor.’ By the end of the following year, President Kennedy was asking for specific proposals as to what might be done about poverty in the country.¹⁶ Harrington’s style was combative, but he was careful not to overstate his case. He admitted, for example, that in absolute terms poverty in the third world was probably worse than in North America. And he granted that though the affluent society helped breed ‘spiritual emptiness and alienation … yet a man would be a fool to prefer hunger to satiety, and the material gains at least open up the possibility of a rich and full existence.¹⁷ But he added that the third world had one advantage – everyone was in the same boat, and they were all pulling together to fight their way out. In America, on the other hand, there was ‘a culture of poverty,’ ‘an under-developed nation’ within the affluent society, hidden, invisible, and much more widespread than anyone had hitherto thought. He claimed that as many as 50 million people, a quarter of the nation, were poor.¹⁸ This sparked a subsidiary debate as to what the criteria should be for drawing the poverty line, and whether poverty in America was increasing, decreasing, or static. But Harrington was more concerned to show that, despite the size of the poor, middle America was blind to its plight. This was partly because poverty occurred in remote areas – among migrant workers on farms, in remote islands or pockets of the country such as the Appalachian Mountains, or in black ghettoes where the white middle classes never went.¹⁹ Here he succeeded in shocking America into realising the problem it was ignoring in its own backyard. He also argued that there was a ‘culture of poverty’ – that the lack of work, the poor housing, the ill health, high crime and divorce rates, all went together. The cause of poverty was not simply lack of money but systemic changes in the capitalist system that caused, say, the failure of the mines (as in the Appalachians) or of the farms (as in areas of California). It followed from this that the poor were not primarily to blame for their plight, and that the remedy lay not with individual action on their part but with the government. Harrington himself thought that the key lay in better housing, where the federal government should take the lead. His book was, therefore, addressed to the ‘affluent blind,’ and his searing descriptions of specific instances of the culture of poverty were deliberately designed to remove the indifference and blindness. How far he succeeded may be judged from the fact that his phrases ‘the culture of poverty’ and ‘the cycle of deprivation’ became part of the language, and in Johnson’s State of the Union address, in January 1964, four months before his Great Society speech, he announced a thirteen-point program that would wage ‘unconditional war on poverty … a domestic enemy which threatens the strength of our nation and the welfare of our people.’²⁰

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which appeared in the same year as Harrington’s polemic, had an impact that was almost as immediate.²¹ Curiously, however, although many people did and do agree with her, the long-term impact of her book has not been what Jacobs hoped. Death and Life is probably the most sensible book ever written about cities. It is, first, an attack on Ebenezer Howard and his idea of garden cities (a contradiction in terms for Jacobs), on Lewis Mumford and his stages of city life (‘morbid’ and ‘biased’), and above all on Le Corbusier, whose ideas for a ‘Radiant City’ she blames for much of the great ‘Blight of Dullness’ that she saw around her.²² She began by stressing that the basic component of the city is the street, and in particular the sidewalk (pavement, in British usage). Sidewalks and streets are safer if busy, she points out; they are communities in themselves, entirely natural communities, peopled by inhabitants who know each other, as well as by strangers. They are places where children can learn and be assimilated into adult life (she observes that ‘street’ gangs usually congregate in parks or schools). Streets stay busy, and safe, all day long if, and only if, they are home to diverse interests – i.e., they are occupied not just by offices or shops but by a mix, which includes a residential element.²³ She argues that parks and schools are far more ‘fickle’ than streets – there is no telling whether a park will become a skid row or a hangout for perverts (her word), or which school will work and which won’t.²⁴ She thinks ‘neighborhood’ is a sentimental concept but hardly a real one. Apart from streets, cities should be divided into districts, but these should be natural districts, corresponding to the way the city is divided up in the minds of most residents. The purpose of a district is political, not psychological or personal. A district is there to fight the battles that streets are too small and too weak to fight – she quotes the case of drug peddlers moving into one street. It is the district that prevails on the police to move into a street in force for a limited period until the problem is dispersed. Districts, she says, should never be more than a mile and a half from end to end.²⁵

The essence of the street, and the sidewalk in particular, where people meet and talk, is that it enables people to control their own privacy, an important aspect of freedom. She believed that people are less than straightforward about privacy, hiding behind the convenient phrase ‘mind your own business.’ This reflects the importance of gossip – people can gossip all they like, but often pretend they don’t, or don’t approve. In this way they can retreat into their own private world, their own ‘business,’ whenever they want without loss of face. This is psychologically very important, she says, and may be all-important for keeping cities alive. Only when these psychological needs are met – a cross between privacy and community, which is a city speciality – are people content, and content to stay put.²⁶

Jacobs also identified what she called ‘border vacuums’ – railway tracks, freeways, stretches of water, huge parks like Central Park in New York. These, she said, contribute their own share of blight to a city and should be recognised by planners as ‘a mixed blessing’; they need special devices to reduce their impact. For example, huge parks might have carousels or cafés on their perimeters to make them less daunting and encourage usage. She thought that old buildings must be preserved, partly because of their aesthetic value and because they provide breaks in the dull monotony of many cityscapes, but also because old buildings have a different economy to new buildings. Theatres go into new buildings, for example, but the studios and workshops that service theatres usually don’t – they can’t afford new buildings, but they can afford old buildings that paid for themselves a long time ago. Supermarkets occupy new buildings, but not bookshops. She thought that a city does not begin to be a city until it has 100,000 inhabitants. Only then will it have enough diversity, which is the essence of cities, and only then will it have a large enough population for the inhabitants to find enough friends (say thirty or so people) with like interests.²⁷ Understanding these dynamics, she said, helps keep cities alive. Finance, of course, is important, and here cities can help themselves. Jacobs felt that too often the financing of real estate is left to professional (i.e., private) companies, so that in the end the needs of finance determine the type of real estate that is mortgaged, rather than the other way round.²⁸ Provided her four cardinal principles were adhered to, she said, she felt certain that the blight of city centres could be halted, and ‘unslumming’ be made to work. These four principles were: every district must serve more than one, and preferably more than two, primary functions (business, commerce, residential), and these different functions must produce a different daily schedule among people; city blocks should be short – ‘opportunities to turn corners must be frequent’; there must be a ‘close-grained’ mingling of structures of very different age; and the concentration of people must be sufficiently dense for what purposes they may be there.²⁹ Hers was an optimistic book, resplendent with common sense that, however, no one else had pointed out before. What she didn’t explore, not in any detail, was the racial dimension. She made a few references to segregation and ‘Negro slums,’ but other than that she wrote strictly as an architect/town planner.

The issues raised by Harrington and Jacobs were both referred to by President Johnson. There is no question, however, that the main urgency that propelled him to his Great Society speech, apart from the ‘deep background’ of the Cold War, was race, especially the situation of American blacks. By 1966 a whole decade had elapsed since the landmark decision of the Supreme Court in 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional, repudiating the doctrine of ‘separate but equal.’ As Johnson realised, in the intervening years the basic statistics of black life were dispiriting. In 1963 there were more blacks in America in de facto segregated schools than there had been in 1952. There were more black unemployed than in 1954. More significant still, the median income of blacks had slipped from 57 percent that of whites in 1954 to 54 percent. Against this background, Milton Friedman’s arguments about the long-term beneficial effects of capitalism on race relations looked thin, and in 1963, as Johnson recognised, action was needed to avert trouble.

Among the blacks themselves there was, as might be expected, a range of opinions as to the way forward. Some were in more of a hurry than others; some felt violence was necessary; others felt nonviolence ultimately had more impact. In March 1963 there had been riots in Birmingham, Alabama, when an economic boycott of downtown businesses had turned ugly following a decision by the commissioner for public safety, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, to have the police surround a church and prevent people from leaving. Among those arrested in the wake of these events (on Good Friday) was Martin Luther King, a thirty-four-year-old preacher from Adanta who had made a name for himself by rousing, rhetorical speeches advocating nonviolence. While he was in solitary confinement, King had been denounced by a group of white clerics. His response was ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ nineteen pages scribbled and scrawled on envelopes, lavatory rolls, and the margins of newspaper articles, smuggled out of the jail by his supporters. It set out in vivid and eloquent detail why the people of Birmingham (i.e., the whites) had ‘left the Negro community with no alternative’ but to take the course of civil disobedience and ‘nonviolent tension’ in pursuit of their aims.³⁰ ‘Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States…. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation…. We had no alternative to prepare for our direct action…. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving at jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.’³¹

After his release from the Birmingham jail, King achieved the peak of his fame, and he was chosen as the main speaker for an historic march on Washington that summer, designed deliberately by a variety of black leaders to become a turning point in the civil rights campaign. The march was to be massive, so massive that although it was to be peaceful, it would nonetheless convey an implicit threat that if America didn’t change, didn’t do something – and soon – about desegregation, then … The threat was left deliberately vague. About a quarter of a million people descended on Washington on 28 August 1963, between a quarter and a third of them white. The marchers were relatively good-natured, and kept in line by a team of black New York policemen who had volunteered as marshals. The entertainment was second to none: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Mahalia Jackson, with a number of other celebrities showing up to lend support: Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Lena Home, Sammy Davis Junior. But what everyone remembered about that day was the speech by King. In recent speeches he had used a phrase he had found to be effective – I have a dream’ – and on this occasion he lavished extra special care on his delivery.³² Just as some men’s face is their fortune, in King’s case it was his voice. A very distinctive baritone, its dominant characteristic was a slight quiver. Combined with a rhetorical strength, this quiver made King’s voice both strong and yet vulnerable, exactly matching the developing mood and political situation of ordinary American blacks. But it also had a universal appeal that whites could identify with too. For many, King’s speech that day would prove to be the most memorable part of the civil rights campaign, or at least the part they chose to remember. ‘Five score years ago,’ he began, announcing his near-biblical tone, ‘a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emanicipation Proclamation.’ With his first sentence he had hit his theme and rooted it in American history. ‘But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free…. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.’ And then he opened out, saying that he had a dream that one day his four little children would be judged ‘not by their colour but by their character.’³³ Even today, the recording of King’s speech has the power to move.

King lived through and helped bring about turbulent times (Vietnam was a second factor). Between November 1955, when Rosa Parks, a black American, was arrested for sitting at the front of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama (blacks had traditionally only been allowed in the back of the bus), and 1973, when Los Angeles elected its first black mayor, an enormous social, political, and legislative revolution took place. That revolution was most visible in the United States, but it extended to other countries, in Europe, Africa, and the Far East, as this list, by no means exhaustive, indicates:

1958: Disturbances in Little Rock, Arkansas, when the state governor tries to prevent the admission of black pupils to a school.

1960: The Civil Rights Act is passed, empowering blacks to sue if denied their voting rights.

1961: The Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) organises ‘freedom rides’ to enforce bus desegregation.

1962: The Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity forms, chaired by Vice President Johnson. James Meredith, a black student, gains admission to the University of Mississippi, Oxford, under federal guard. The British Commonwealth Immigrants Act limits the rights of admission to Britain of certain Commonwealth immigrants.

1963: The March on Washington. Equal-pay law for men and women in the United States is enacted.

1964: The Civil Rights Act in the United States forbids discrimination in work, restaurants, unions, and public accommodation. The Economic Opportunity and Food Stamps Acts are passed, and the U.S. Survey of Educational Opportunity carried out.

1965: Great Society initiatives includes Head Start programs to support education for the poor and minorities; Medicaid and Medicare to provide medicine for the poor and elderly; urban development schemes; and other welfare benefits. Women are accepted as judges.

1966: NOW, the National Organization for Women, is founded, along with the Black Panthers, a black paramilitary outfit that calls for ‘Black Power.’ Under the U.S. Child Nutrition Act, federal funds provide food for poor children. British Supplementary Benefit assists the sick, disabled, unemployed, and widows. Inner cities are rebuilt.

1967: Thurgood Marshall becomes the first black man appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Race riots in seventy American cities accelerate ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. Colorado is the first U.S. state to allow abortion. Homosexuality is legalised in Britain. In the United States, a report of the Commission on Civil Rights concludes that racial integration needs to be accelerated to reverse the underachievement of African-American children. Educational Priority Areas are created in Britain to combat inequality. Abortion becomes lawful in the U.K.

1968: The Urban Institute is founded. The Kerner Report on the previous year’s race riots warns that the United States is becoming ‘two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.’ President Johnson announces ‘affirmative action,’ under which all government contractors must give ‘preferential treatment’ to African Americans and other minorities. Racial discrimination in the sale and renting of houses is outlawed. Shirley Chisholm is elected the first black congresswoman. The Immigration and Nationality Act replaces quota system with skill requirements. Hispanic workers protest against their treatment in the United States. The Race Relations Act in the U.K. makes racial discrimination illegal.

1969: Supreme Court nominees are withdrawn on grounds of their ‘racism and incompetence.’ Black Panthers are killed in a police raid in Chicago. Land begins to be returned to Native Americans. The United States ends censorship.

1970: Civil rights for women; in federal contracts companies must employ a quota of women. The Equal Pay Act is passed in the U.K. Divorce is made legal in Italy. The first desegregated classes are held in the United States.

1971: Bussing introduced to ensure a ‘racial balance’ in some U.S. schools. Switzerland accepts female suffrage. Slum primary schools in the U.K. are cleared. Medicare is implemented in Canada. The first women are ordained as priests (by the Anglican bishop of Hong Kong).

1972: Andrew Young becomes the first African American elected from the South to Congress since Reconstruction. Indians march on Washington, D.C. First woman governor of the New York Stock Exchange.

1973: In the United States abortion is made legal. The first black mayor of Los Angeles is elected.³⁴

The change didn’t end there, of course (the following year saw the first Hispanic and women governors of U.S. states, and the first female bishops). But the years of turbulence were over (which was also related to the ending of the war in Vietnam, and the economic downturn following the oil crisis in 1973 – see chapter 33 below). Not that all the change was in one direction, toward greater freedom for minority groups, women, and homosexuals. An alternative list reads as follows:

1964: Bantu Laws amendment, designed to limit the settlement of Africans to peripheral areas, is introduced in South Africa.

1966: Apartheid is extended to South West Africa (Namibia).

1967: Resettlement villages are accelerated in South Africa.

1968: Humanae Vitae, papal encyclical, prohibits use of artificial contraceptives by Roman Catholics.

1969: The Stonewall police raid on a homosexual club in New York results in several days of violence after the club is set on fire while police are inside. Anti-egalitarian ‘Black papers’ are published in Britain. Arthur Jensen, in the Harvard Educational Review, argues that African Americans score consistently less well on IQ tests than do whites.

1970: In South Africa all black Africans are consigned to one or other of the ‘Bantu homelands.’ Several books about race are banned in South Africa.

1971: South African Bantu areas are brought under control of central government.

1972: South Africa abolishes coloured representatives on municipal councils.

Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, the growing illiberalism of South African society and the violence associated with the advance of the blacks in America, were increasingly seen as part of the same malaise – the same dilemma, as Myrdal had called it – circumstances that combined to produce some sharp thinking about race. Though these authors might match King in rhetoric, they rarely matched him in Christian feeling.

One of the authors James Baldwin had read when he was in Paris was Frantz Fanon, a black psychiatrist born in the French West Indian island of Martinique in 1925. After training in psychiatry in Paris, Fanon was assigned to a hospital in the North African colony of Algeria during the rising against the French. The experience appalled him; he took the Algerians’ side and wrote a number of books in which, like Baldwin in the southern states of America, he became a spokesman for those suffering oppression. In A Dying Colonialism (1959) and Black Skin, White Masks (1960), originally published in French, Fanon proved himself an articulate critic of the last days of imperialism, and his activities for the FLN (National Liberation Front), including an address to the First Congress of Negro Writers in 1956, drew the attention of the French police.³⁵ Later that year he was forced to leave Algeria for Tunisia, where he continued to be one of the editors of El Moudjahid, an anticolonial magazine. His most poignant book was The Wretched of the Earth (1961), conceived at the time Fanon was diagnosed as suffering from leukaemia, and which consumed his final strength.³⁶ Fanon was a more polemical writer than Baldwin, and a less gifted phrase-maker. But like the American his works are designed to worry whites and convince blacks that the battle – against racism and colonialism – can be won. Where The Wretched of the Earth was different was in Fanon’s use of his experiences as a psychiatrist. Fanon was intent on showing fellow blacks that the alienation they felt as a result of colonialism was a result of colonialism, and not some natural inferiority inherent in the black race. In support of his argument he reported a number of psychiatric reactions he had seen in his clinic and which, he said, were directly related to the guerrilla war of independence then being waged inside the country. In one case an Algerian taxi driver and member of the FLN had developed impotence after his wife had been beaten and raped by a French soldier during interrogation. In another, two young Algerians, aged thirteen and fourteen, had killed their European playmate. As the thirteen-year-old put it, ‘We weren’t a bit cross with him…. One day we decided to kill him, because the Europeans want to kill all the Arabs. We can’t kill big people. But we could kill ones like him, because he was the same age as us.’³⁷ Fanon had many stories of disturbances in young people, and especially among the victims of torture. He pointed out that torture victims could be divided into two – ‘those who know something’ and ‘those who know nothing.’ He said he never saw those who knew something as patients (they never got ill; they had in a sense ‘earned’ their torture), but among those who knew nothing, there were all sorts of symptoms, usually related to the type of torture – indiscriminate, mass attack with truncheons or cigarette burns; electricity; and the so-called ‘truth serum.’ Victims of electric torture, for example, would develop an electricity phobia and become unable to touch an electric switch.³⁸

Fanon’s aim, like R. D. Laing’s, was to show that mental illness was an extreme but essentially rational response to an intolerable situation, but he was also answering what he saw as oversimple arguments by European scientists and social scientists regarding ‘the African mind’ and African culture. In the mid-1950s, the World Health Organisation had commissioned a survey by a Scottish psychiatrist, Dr J. C. Carothers, on ‘Normal and Pathological Psychology of the African.’ Carothers had worked in Kenya and been medical officer in command of prisons there. His survey had concluded, ‘The African makes very little use of his frontal lobes. All the particularities of African psychiatry can be put down to frontal laziness.’ Carothers actually put forward the idea that the ‘normal’ African is like a ‘lobotomised European.’³⁹ Fanon countered dismissively, arguing that Carothers had missed the point. At that stage, he said, African culture (like black American culture, like Baldwin’s writing) was the struggle to be free; the fight – violence itself – was the shared culture of the Algerians, and took most of their creative energy. Like King, they had become ‘creative extremists.’ Fanon did not live to see peace restored to an autonomous Algeria. He had been too busy completing his book to seek treatment for his leukaemia, and although he was taken to Washington in late 1961, the disease was too far advanced. He died a few weeks after his book was published, aged thirty-six.

Polemical writing, like Fanon’s, was exactly the sustenance blacks needed in the 1960s, and in America, after James Baldwin changed his stance in a series of novels, Another Country (1962), Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), and Going to Meet the Man (1965), his place was taken by Eldridge Cleaver. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1935, Cleaver liked to describe himself as having been ‘educated in the Negro ghetto of Los Angeles and at the California state prisons of San Quentin, Folsom and Soledad.’ Though ironic, this was also true, as Cleaver had read widely in jail (he had been convicted of marijuana possession) and met several other inmates who nurtured his rebellious instincts. He eventually became minister of information in the Black Panther Party, an African-American paramilitary organisation. His first book, Soul on Ice, released the same year that King was assassinated, was a wide-ranging attack on Baldwin. ‘There is in James Baldwin’s work,’ wrote Cleaver, ‘the most gruelling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks, particularly of himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites that one can find in the writings of any black American writer of note in our time.’⁴⁰ For Cleaver, as with Fanon, the situation facing African Americans was too urgent to allow the luxury of becoming an artist in any wider sense; the problem was so all-enveloping that to turn one’s back on it, or place it in a wider context, as Baldwin attempted to do from time to time, was for Cleaver an avoidance akin to race crime. Three themes are interlaced in Soul on Ice, which was written in prison. One is the everyday brutality of whites toward blacks, highlighted by prison routine. Two, Cleaver’s thoughts on international race politics, white myths about race, Africa, black history, black food, black music, showing how to build a countervailing and sustaining myth. And three, Cleaver’s progressive thoughts about sex between the races, from the first essay, where he confesses that for him, as a young man, he found white women more attractive than black, to the last essay, a far more lyrical, near-mystical paean of praise to ‘Black Beauty’ – ‘Let me drink from the river of your love at its source.’⁴¹ Pointed as his criticisms of Baldwin were at the time, the latter’s works have survived in better shape than Cleaver’s essays.

Maya Angelou’s books are very different. Her message is that blacks are already free – not in the political sense, maybe, but in every other sense. It is her isolation of the political from the rest that is her more important, and contentious, point. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of her five-part autobiography, published in 1969, Angelou records her life until she has her first baby at the age of sixteen.⁴² We are treated to the richness of black life in Stamps, Arkansas, not a million miles from Little Rock, Cleaver’s birthplace and the scene of so much racial violence. Angelou re-creates brilliantly her childhood world ‘of starched aprons, butter-yellow piqué dresses, peanut patties, and games of mumbledypeg, with bathwater steaming on the cooking stove.’ When bad things happen, tears course down her cheeks ‘like warm milk.’⁴³ But there is more to this soft-focus world than scoops of corn thrown to the chickens. Although her father is absent for much of the time, the emotional and intellectual life of the family left behind – mother, son, and daughter – is not much impoverished. William Shakespeare ‘was my first white love’ in a world where Kipling and Thackeray jostle with Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois.⁴⁴ Maya, or Marguerite as she then was, has a genuine affection for her brother Bailey and her mother, a strong, upright, beautiful woman who is not cowed by the system. As the children grow up, the adult world of work and discrimination encroaches on their idyll – for example, in the form of the dentist who would rather stick his hand in a dog’s mouth than a ‘nigger’s.’⁴⁵ But this is not presented as tragedy. Maya and her mother retain their interest in the world, keep control of it, and keep thinking. Their lives remain rich, whatever changes fate has in store. Of course Angelou hates the system of discrimination, but her books emphasise that life is made up of two kinds of freedom: one big political freedom, and countless little freedoms that come from education, strength of character, humour, dignity, and thought. At one point her mother is asked, ‘You all right, momma?’ ‘Aw,’ she replies, ‘they tell me the whitefolks still in the lead.’⁴⁶

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings fits as easily into a canon of works written by female authors as it does one written by blacks. Women’s emancipation, though not involving violence on anything like the same scale as the civil rights movement, offered several parallels throughout the 1960s. The decade saw major changes in almost all areas of sexual liberation. In 1966 the Kinsey Institute had begun its important early study of homosexuality, which found that 4 percent of males and 2 percent of females were predominantly or exclusively homosexual, and that no fewer than 37 percent of men reported at least one homosexual experience.⁴⁷ In the same year, William Howell Masters and Virginia Johnson’s Human Sexual Inadequacy showed that about half of all marriages suffered from one sexual problem or another (inability to maintain an erection or premature ejaculation in men, inability to achieve orgasm in women).⁴⁸ A year after, in 1967, modern mass-market, hard-core pornography began to appear, produced by Scandinavian magazine publishers. In that year too Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, then selling 4 million copies a month, made the cover of Time.⁴⁹ On 3 November 1968, Al Goldstein launched Screw, the self-proclaimed aim of which was to become the Consumer Reports of the ‘sexual netherworld.’ A year later Philip Roth published Portnoy’s Complaint, exploring the ‘agony and ecstasy’ of male masturbation, and Oh! Calcutta! was produced in London and off Broadway, with full-frontal nudity and explicitly sexual dialogue. Nineteen-seventy saw the first pubic hair to be shown in a commercial magazine, Penthouse. In 1970 the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography reported that there was no substantial basis for the belief that exposure to erotica caused sex crimes. Some kind of closure was achieved in this area in 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court voted seven to two to legalise abortion, and in the same year, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic manual, declaring that gays and lesbians did not suffer from a mental disorder.

Whereas the publishing/pornography revolution, and gay liberation, were chiefly about sexual freedom (many states in the United States still outlawed homosexuality), the women’s liberation movement was about far more than the new sexual awareness of women. Though that was important, the change in women’s thinking about themselves, set in motion after World War II by Simone de Beauvoir and developed by Betty Friedan, was much more fundamental and far-reaching. In 1970, slap in the middle of the sexual revolution, three books appeared almost simultaneously, each of which took an uncompromising look at the relationship between the sexes.

Germaine Greer was an Australian who had settled in England as a graduate student and had drawn attention to herself in Suck magazine, decrying the missionary position (she thought women were more in control and had more pleasure if they sat on men during intercourse). Her book The Female Eunuch did not neglect women’s economic condition, though only one of the thirty chapters is devoted to work. Rather, it drew its force from Greer’s unflinching comparison of the way women, love, and marriage are presented in literature, both serious and popular, and in everyday currency, as compared with the way things really are. ‘Freud,’ she writes, ‘is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.’⁵⁰ From Jane Austen to Lord Byron to Women’s Weekly, Greer is withering in her criticisms of how men are presented as dominant, socially superior, older, richer, and taller than their women. (Greer is very tall herself.) In what is perhaps her most original contribution, she demolishes love and romance (both given their own chapters) as chimeras, totally divorced (an apt verb) from the much bleaker reality. In fact, she says, ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.’ A chapter headed ‘Misery’ recounts the amount of medication women take, the paraphernalia of sexual aids, leading to the resentment that she argues many women feel at being saddled with such things.⁵¹ Her diagnosis is unstinting, and her solution demands nothing else than a radical reassessment by women not just of their economic and psychological position vis-à-vis men but, more revolutionary still, a fundamental reappraisal of what love and romance really are. Greer has the grace to admit that she has not herself entirely shed the romantic notions she was brought up with, but makes it plain she suspects they are entirely – entirely – without foundation. As with all true liberation, this view is both bleak and exhilarating.

Juliet Mitchell’s Women’s Estate was hardly exhilarating.⁵² A fellow immigrant to Britain from the Antipodes, this time from New Zealand, Mitchell also studied English at a British university, though she subsequently transferred to psychoanalysis. Mitchell’s account was Marxist, claiming that although socialist countries are not very nice to women, socialism does not require the subjugation of women as capitalism does, with its ideology of ‘the nuclear family,’ which succeeds only in keeping women in their place, acquiring consumer goods and breeding ‘little consumers.’⁵³ Mitchell went on to argue that women need to undergo two revolutions, the political and the personal, and here she took the black experience as a guide but also psychoanalysis.⁵⁴ At the same time that women regrouped politically, she said, they also needed to raise their level of self-consciousness as the blacks had done, especially as in America. Women, she insisted, have been taught by capitalism and by Freud that they are the repositories of feelings, but in fact there is no limit to their experience. She favoured small groups of six to twenty-four women joining in ‘consciousness-raising’ sessions, taking a leaf out of the book of the Chinese revolutionaries’ practice of ‘speaking bitterness.’⁵⁵ Together with her survey of what has been achieved by women in other countries around the world, Mitchell’s aim was to bring about a situation where women did not feel alone in their predicament, and to spread the psychoanalytically inspired function: ‘Speaking the unspoken is, of course, also the purpose of serious psychoanalytic work.’⁵⁶

Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics was, like Greer’s book, essentially an examination of literary texts, equally erudite, equally readable, and even more thorough.⁵⁷ As her title implied, the focus of her interest was the power inherent in the relations between the sexes, though she queried whether it really is ‘inherent.’ She had herself been molested when she was thirteen and held on to her secret for a decade until, in a women’s group, she found that almost all the other members had gone through similar experiences. This had fired her up. In her book, after brief excursions into sociological, biological, anthropological, and even mythological explanations for gender differences, she reverted to late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England, to John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, William Wordsworth, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, moving on to Friedrich Engels’s and Thorsten Veblen’s theories of the family, its relation to the state, private property, and revolutionary theory. Domestication, prostitution, and sexuality are discussed, in Christina Bronte, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde (Salome), where Millett found some grounds for hope before the ‘counterrevolution’ of Nazism, Stalinism, and Freudianism. Few would need convincing that Nazism and Stalinism were bad for women, but by including Freudianism along with these two, Millett’s argument succeeded on shock value alone, as did her call to abolish the family. Millett’s full ire was reserved, however, for three writers – D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, who she compares and contrasts with a fourth, Jean Genet. In his novels D. H. Lawrence, she says, ‘manipulates’ women, Miller has only ‘contempt’ for them, and Mailer ‘wrestles’ them.⁵⁸ The force of her argument lies both in her close textual reading of the books and in the way she shows how certain themes run through several works by each author (patriarchy and employment in Lawrence, for example, murder in Mailer). In contrasting Genet with the other three, her aim was to show that the idea of femininity can exist in man, and she approved of his linking sexual and racial roles.⁵⁹ Ultimately, Millett was concerned about virility per se, the part it plays in Realpolitik as well as sexual politics. Perhaps most valuably, she pointed out that ‘alienation’ was no longer a vague word used by philosophers and psychologists; it had been revised and refined into a number of specific grievances felt by women, blacks, students, and the poor. That refinement was in itself an advance.⁶⁰

This line of thinking culminated in the work of two women, Andrea Dworkin and Shere Hite. Dworkin, who described herself as ‘an overweight ugly duckling,’ had a father who was a teacher and instilled in her a love for ideas, but in 1969 she married a fellow left-wing radical who turned out to be a ‘vicious rapist’ and frequently beat her to the point of unconsciousness.⁶¹ Eventually finding enough courage to leave him, she became a writer, taking up where Millett left off. In 1974 she published Women Hating and addressed a New York ‘speak out’ organised by the National Organization of Women, giving her talk the title ‘Renouncing Sexual “Equality.” ‘She was given a ten-minute ovation, and many of the eleven hundred women in the audience were left ‘crying and shaking.’ Dworkin concentrated on pornography, which she argued was motivated by a hatred of women, and she countered by developing a radical man-hating ideology. She herself set an example of what she saw as the only way out for women: she lived in a sexless open nonmarriage with a male homosexual.⁶²

The Hite Report appeared in 1976. Born Shirley Gregory in Saint Joseph, Missouri, Shere Hite kept the name of her husband, whom she divorced after a brief marriage. Intending to pursue a master’s degree in cultural history at Columbia University, Hite quit early and turned to a variety of jobs to survive. A Pre-Raphaelite redhead, she worked as a model and posed nude for both Playboy magazine and Oui. The real change in her life took place when she was asked to pose for an ad for Olivetti, the Italian typewriter company, where the photograph showed a secretary in front of a typewriter, with the legend, ‘The typewriter that’s so smart she doesn’t have to be.’ After posing for the ad, Hite read in a newspaper that a women’s group planned to picket the company. She joined in, and soon after embroiled herself in the women’s movement. One of the things she learned from this, which drew her particular attention, was that the medical profession at the time regarded a woman who could not achieve orgasm through intercourse as having ‘a medical problem.’ Over the next few years, she amassed enough funds to send out 100,000 questionnaires to women to see how they really felt about orgasm. She received over three thousand replies. When her Report appeared, it was a revelation.⁶³ Her most important finding was that most women did not orgasm as a result of vaginal penetration; moreover, they found that this unrealistic expectation placed a great psychological burden on women (and on men). This was not the same as saying that women did not enjoy intercourse, rather that what they enjoyed was the intimacy and the touching. Second, she found that these same women achieved orgasm fairly quickly when masturbating, but that there was a strong taboo against women touching themselves. The Hite Report made Shere Hite a millionaire virtually overnight, as its findings hit a chord in women, who found its message liberating, if only because so many women discovered that their own situation, predicament, problem – call it what you will – was not unique to them but, statistically speaking at least, ‘normal.’ Its findings carried the implication that women were much like men in sexual behaviour.⁶⁴ Hite’s statistics turned out to be a form of emancipation, a practical response to one aspect of ‘alienation.’ There was a certain amount of cynicism in Shere Hite’s work – a compendium of statistics on orgasm and masturbation was bound to be a commercial success. Even so, the report marked the end of a phase in women’s liberation, reflecting a view that genuine independence, sexual as well as economic, was available for those women who wanted it.

Not everyone was happy with this wholesale change. A 1963 report, Beyond the Melting Pot, by Nathan Glazer (a junior colleague of David Riesman on The Lonely Crowd) and Patrick Moynihan, unveiled ‘middle America,’ which they described as a ‘unifying state of mind,’ ‘characterised by opposition to civil rights, the peace movement, the student movement, “welfare intellectuals” and so on.’⁶⁵ It was against this background that President Johnson sought to launch his great experiment. He set out his agenda in a series of speeches where ‘the Great Society’ became as familiar as Martin Luther King’s ‘Dream’: Medicare for the old, educational assistance for the young, tax rebates for business, a higher minimum wage for labour, subsidies for farmers, vocational training for the unskilled, food for the hungry, housing for the homeless, poverty grants for the poor, clean highways for commuters, legal protection for blacks, improved schooling for Indians, higher benefits for the unemployed, pensions for the retired, fair labelling for consumers. Countless task forces were set up, as often as not with academics at their head. Legislation was hurried through, Johnson insisting that the Great Society would fill all the hopes and more of the New Deal.

It was, perhaps, the greatest experiment in social engineering outside the Communist world.⁶⁶ Between 1965 and 1968, when Johnson declined to stand for reelection, when the war in Vietnam was beginning to divide the nation and its cost to have a marked effect on the economy, some five hundred social programs were created, some more successful than others. (Johnson’s biographer, Doris Kearns, concluded that medicare and voting rights succeeded admirably, for example, model cities less well, and community action was ‘self-defeating.’) But the real battle, which would last for years – and is, to an extent, still with us – was the fight over education, the idea that blacks and other disadvantaged minorities should be given access to better schooling, that equality of educational opportunity was what counted above all in a society where to be free meant to be free of ignorance, where democratic attitudes of fairness and individualism meant that men and women ought to be given a fair start in life but after that they were on their own, to make of their life what they could. These ideas spawned thousands of socio-psychological studies in the 1960s and afterward, exploring the effects of a person’s economic, social, and racial background on a variety of factors, by far the most controversial of which was the IQ. Despite repeated criticisms over the years, that it did not measure what it purported to, that it was biased in favour of middle-class white children and against almost everyone else, the IQ continued to be used widely both as a research tool and in schools and the workplace.

The first major study of the issues the Great Society was meant to help rectify was Equality of Educational Opportunity, by James Coleman and others, released through the U.S. Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C., in 1966.⁶⁷ The Coleman Report, the most thorough study of naturally desegregated schools in America, concluded that the socioeconomic level of a student’s school had more effect on his or her achievement than any other measurable factor except the socioeconomic level of his or her home. In other words, blacks were better off in desegregated schools because, in general, those schools were more likely to be middle class. Blacks were not better off if desegregation merely meant they transferred to schools where the whites were as poor as the blacks. British thinking had followed American ideas and created, in the mid-1960s, what were called Educational Priority Areas; as their name implied, these aimed to boost disadvantaged groups in disadvantaged socio-economic areas. However, in one study, All Our Future, by J. W. B. Douglas and others and published in 1968, their conclusion was that the gap between middle-class and working-class pupils had not been reduced, in any appreciable way, by such social engineering.⁶⁸

The real controversy started at the end of the 1960s with an article in the Harvard Educational Review by Arthur Jensen, a psychologist from the University of California at Berkeley, headed ‘How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?’ This long review article (there was no new research material, merely a reanalysis of studies already published) began, ‘Compensatory education has been tried and apparently it has failed.’ Jensen argued that as much as 80 percent of the variance in IQ is due to genes and that therefore the approximately 15 percent difference between the average IQ score of whites and blacks was due mainly to hereditary racial differences in intelligence. It followed, Jensen said, that no program of social action could equalise the social status of blacks and whites, ‘and that blacks ought better to be educated for the more mechanical tasks to which their genes predisposed them.’⁶⁹ At times it must have seemed to blacks as if there had been no progress since Du Bois’s day.

Less contentious than Jensen but far more influential in the long run was the study carried out by Christopher Jencks, professor of sociology at Harvard, and seven colleagues.⁷⁰ Jencks, another student of David Riesman, had always been interested in the limits of schooling, about which he had written a book in the early 1960s. After the Coleman Report was published, Daniel Moynihan and Thomas Pettigrew initiated a seminar at Harvard to reanalyse the data. Moynihan, Johnson’s assistant secretary of labor, had produced his own Moynihan Report in March 1965, which argued that half the black population suffered from ‘social pathology.’ Pettigrew was a black psychologist. Jencks and others joined the seminar, which grew over the years into the Center for Educational Policy Research, of which Jencks’s book Inequality was the first important result.

It is no exaggeration to say that the findings of Inequality shocked and infuriated a great many people on both sides of the Atlantic. The main results of the Harvard inquiries, which included a massive chapter examining the effects of cognitive skills on advancement in life, its relation to school and to race, among other variables, was that genes and IQ ‘have relatively little effect on economic success’, ‘school quality has little effect on achievement or on economic success’; and therefore ‘educational reform cannot bring about economic or social equality.’ More particularly, the study concluded, ‘We cannot blame economic inequality primarily on genetic differences in men’s capacity for abstract reasoning, since there is nearly as much economic inequality among men with equal test scores as among men in general. We cannot blame economic inequality primarily on the fact that parents pass along their disadvantages to their children, since there is nearly as much inequality among men whose parents had the same economic status as among men in general. We cannot blame economic inequality on differences between schools, since differences between schools seem to have very little effect on any measurable attribute of those who attend them…. Economic success seems to depend on varieties of luck and on-the-job competence that are only moderately related to family background, schooling, or scores on standardised tests. The definition of competence varies greatly from one job to another, but it seems in most cases to depend more on personality than on technical skills. This makes it hard to imagine a strategy for equalising competence. A strategy for equalising luck is even harder to conceive.’⁷¹

The impact of Inequality undoubtedly stemmed from the sheer quantity of data handled by the Harvard team, and the rigorous mathematical analysis discussed in detail in a series of long notes at the end of each chapter and in three appendices, on IQ, intergenerational mobility, and statistics. Jensen was put in his place, for instance, the Harvard study finding that the heritability of IQ was somewhere between 25 and 45 percent rather than 80 percent, though they took care to add that admitting a genetic component in IQ did not make one a racist.⁷² They commented, ‘It seems to be symbolically important to establish the proposition that blacks can do as well on standardised tests as whites. But if either blacks or whites conclude that racial equality is primarily a matter of equalising reading scores, they are fooling themselves… blacks and whites with equal test scores still have very unequal occupational statuses and incomes.’⁷³ Regarding desegregation, the Harvard team concluded that if applied across the board, it would reduce the 15-point gap in IQ between whites and blacks to maybe 12 or 13 points. While this is not trivial, they acknowledged, ‘it would certainly not have much effect on the overall pattern of racial inequality in America.’ They then added, ‘The case for or against desegregation should not be argued in terms of academic achievement. If we want a segregated society, we should have segregated schools. If we want a desegregated society we should have desegregated schools.’ Only political and economic change will bring about greater equality, they said. ‘This is what other countries usually call socialism.’⁷⁴

Given the news about freedom and equality then coming out of socialist countries, such as Russia and China, it is perhaps not surprising that this final message of the Harvard team did not catch on. On the other hand, their notion that schools could not bring about the equality that the blacks wanted was heeded, and the leaders of the civil rights movement began to concentrate their fire on segregation and discrimination in the workplace, which, it was now agreed, had a greater effect on economic inequality than schooling.

Traditional school came under a very different kind of attack in Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, a Viennese who had studied at the Gregorian University in Rome and as an assistant pastor in an Irish-Puerto Rico parish in New York City. His main aim was to develop educational institutions for poor Latin American countries (he also worked in Mexico), and he argued that schools, far from liberating students from ignorance and teaching them to make the most of their capabilities, were actually, by 1971, merely boring, bourgeois ‘processing factories,’ organised anonymously, producing ‘victims for the consumer society.’⁷⁵ Teachers, he said, were custodians, moralists, and therapists, rather than conveyors of information that taught people how to make their lives more meaningful. Illich therefore argued for the complete abolition of schools and their replacement by four ‘networks.’ What he had in mind, for example, was that children should learn about farming and geography and botany on the land, or about flight at airports, or economics in factories. Second, he called for ‘skill exchanges,’ whereby children would go to ‘skill models,’ say, guitar players or dancers or politicians, to learn those subjects that they really felt interested in. Third, he advocated ‘peer matching,’ essentially clubs of people interested in the same subject – fishing, motorcycles, Greek – who would compare progress and criticise each other.⁷⁶ Fourth, he said there was a need for professional educators, in effect people experienced in the first three networks outlined above, who could advise parents where to send their children. But teachers as such, and schools as such, would be abolished. Deschooling Society was an unusual book in that its prognosis was as detailed as its diagnosis. It formed part of the intellectual thrust that became known as the counterculture, but it had little real impact on schools.

The Great Society lost its chief navigator, and therefore its way, in March 1968 when President Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection. One reason for this was the war in Vietnam. In 1968 America had nearly half a million troops in Asia, 25,000 of whom were being killed annually. Before he left office, Johnson announced his policy of ‘affirmative action,’ under which all government contractors had to give preferential treatment to African Americans and other minorities. He was being optimistic: 1968 descended into violence and conflict on all fronts.

On 8 February, three black students were killed in Orangeburg, South Carolina, when they attempted to desegregate a bowling alley. On 4 April Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis, and for a week there was rioting and looting in several U.S. cities in protest. In June Robert Kennedy was shot and killed in California. The Miss America contest in the United States was disrupted by feminists. But America was not alone. In Britain a new race relations act was deemed necessary. In July in Czechoslovakia, the USSR refused to withdraw its troops after Warsaw Pact exercises – this followed moves by the Czech government toward greater press freedom, the removal of censorship, easier religious assembly, and other liberal reforms. This was also the year of widespread student rebellion, rebellion against the war in Vietnam, against racial and sexual discrimination, and against rigid tuition policies in universities around the world – in the United States, Britain, Germany (where there was an attempt on the life of the student leader Rudi Dutschke), in Italy, but above all in France, where students co-operated with workers who occupied factories and campuses, barricaded the streets of major cities, forcing several changes in government policy, including a rise of 33 percent in the minimum wage.

The student rebellions were one aspect of a social phenomenon that had a number of intellectual consequences. The social phenomenon was the ‘baby boom,’ a jump in the number of births during and immediately after World War II. This meant that, beginning in the late 1950s, coinciding with the arrival of the affluent society (and, it should be said, widespread availability of television), there occurred a highly visible, and much more numerous than hitherto, generation of students. In 1963, following the Robbins Report on higher education in Britain, the government doubled the number of universities (from twenty-three to forty-six) almost overnight. Books such as Daniel Bell’s End of Ideology and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, alongside disillusionment with traditional left-wing politics after Stalin’s death and the increased publicity given to his atrocities, not to mention the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, had come together to create the New Left (with initial capitals) around 1960. The essence of the New Left, which was a force in several countries, was a fresh concern with Marx’s concept of alienation. For the New Left, politics was more personal, more psychological; its proponents argued that involvement was the best way to counter alienation, and that such self-conscious groups as students, women and blacks were better agents of radical change than the working classes. The Campaign for (Unilateral) Nuclear Disarmament, an early focus of involvement, received a massive boost at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. But the civil rights and women’s liberation movements were soon joined to the Cold War as a focus for radical engagement. The demonstrations and rebellions of 1968 were the culmination of this process. Similarly, the Woodstock music festival in 1969 illustrated the other stream of 1960s student thought – personal liberation not through politics but through new psychologies, sex, new music, and drugs, a cocktail of experiences that became known as the ‘counterculture.’

One man who distilled these issues in his writings and provided a thread running through the decade was an American figure who, in some ways, was to the last half of the twentieth century what George Orwell had been to the first: Norman Mailer. Like Orwell, Mailer was a reporter and a novelist who had seen action in war. Throughout the 1960s he produced a series of books – An American Dream (1965), Cannibals and Christians (1967), The Armies of the Night (1968), Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1969) – that chronicle, as their very titles reveal, a violent decade. In An American Dream, Steve Rojack, the central character (hero is very definitely not the word), is a much-decorated war veteran, a congressman, and at the time the story starts, a television personality with his own show – everything an American could hope to be.⁷⁷ Yet in the first few pages he strangles his wife, creeps along the corridor to have (violent) sex with the maid, then throws his wife out of the apartment window from a great height in the hope that she will be so mangled by the fall and the traffic that any evidence of the strangling will be destroyed. He is unsuccessful in this, but never punished, for strings are pulled, on others’ behalf as well as his own. He loses his TV show but in the course of the three days that the novel lasts, two other people – one a woman, one a black man – endure a much worse fate, being killed as a result of Rojack’s activities. What runs through the novel is the fact that nothing that happens to Rojack really touches him; he is a complete narcissist. This, says Mailer, is what America has come to. Another 1960s book was Henry Steele Commager’s Was America a Mistake? Mailer certainly thinks Steve Rojack was.⁷⁸

The Armies of the Night carries the subheading, ‘History as a Novel/The Novel as History.’ Ostensibly, the main part of the book tells the inside story of the March on the Pentagon on 21 October 1967, by up to 75,000 people demonstrating against the Vietnam War.⁷⁹ Mailer’s account is a novel only in the sense that he refers to himself throughout in the third person and takes the reader backstage – backstage both in the organisation for the march and backstage of Mailer as well. The other ‘characters’ in the novel are real people – Robert Lowell, Noam Chomsky, and Dr Spock among them. Mailer describes his various forms of jealousy, of Lowell for instance; his own embarrassing performance at a lecture the night before the march; his love for his wife. So what he offers is an early example of what would later be called radical chic; it is taken as read that the book-buying public will be interested in what a celebrity gets up to behind the scenes of a political event; readers will automatically understand that celebrities are now part of the picture in any political movement and will follow the story more easily if they have someone to identify with, especially someone with a confessional tone. In the course of the story the marchers are attacked; Mailer (along with about a thousand other demonstrators) is arrested and spends a night in the cells, as a result of which he misses a party in New York. This being a novel, in one chapter Mailer is able to give an account of the Vietnam War and why he thinks America’s involvement is wrong. The second, shorter section, ‘The Novel as History: The Battle of the Pentagon,’ gives a more general account of the same events, including many quotes from newspapers. In this section, Mailer shows how the newspapers often get things wrong, but he also shows how they expand and fill out what he has to say in the first part. Mailer is using the march as an example of several trends in contemporary American life and thought: how violence is very near the surface; how the media and ‘image’ matter as much as substantive events; how the press are one of the armies of the night as well as indispensable bringers of light; above all how no one method of truth-telling is enough.⁸⁰ His fundamental point, what links The Armies of the Night with An American Dream, and what finally lays to rest the pattern of thought prevalent in the 1950s, may be described in this way: Mailer was an antiexistentialist. For him, violence – boundary situations – actually dulls thinking; people stop listening to each other. Thinking is the most intense, the most creative, form of living but, surrounded by violence, views become polarised, frozen. Vietnam was freezing thought in America.

The 1960s had begun with a significant increase in tension in the Cold War. The later years of the decade saw yet another round of events that reflected the very different attitudes to freedom, equality, and justice in Communist countries.

On 10 November 1965 a young literary critic in Shanghai, named Yao Wenyuan, writing in Literary Current, attacked a play, Hai Jui Dismissed from Office, which had been written four years before by Wu Han, deputy mayor of Beijing. The play was about an honest Ming dynasty official who took exception to the emperor’s land policy and was punished simply for being so forthright. Though it was set many years in the past, Mao Zedong took the play as an attack on himself and used it as an excuse to introduce change on a massive scale. What became known as the Cultural Revolution had two aspects: it was a major political move by Mao, but it also had an important, devastating impact on the artists, intellectuals, and academics of China, who suffered extraordinary deprivations of freedom of thought and action.

Mao’s own wife, Jiang Qing, was appointed ‘cultural adviser’ to the army, and it was this move that proved decisive. Surrounding herself with young activists, she first took on what she called the ‘scholar-tyrants’ who used ‘abstruse language’ to silence the class struggle. Worse, she said that the universities kept themselves free of this dialectic by emphasising the ‘fallacy that everyone is “equal before the truth.” ’⁸¹ Although she had difficulty at first (the People’s Daily refused to publish her early pronouncements), by the end of May 1966 Jiang had enlisted the aid of a new phenomenon – ‘Hung Wei Ping,’ the Red Guards. These were essentially high school and university students, and their main aim was to attack the ‘spectacle wearers,’ as teachers and other academics were called. They took to the streets in gangs, marching first on Tsinghua University and then on others, attacking the university authorities.⁸² Later, street violence broke out, the Red Guards seizing anyone whose hair or clothes they didn’t like. Shops and restaurants were ordered to change their displays or menus that betrayed any Western bias. Neon signs were destroyed, and huge street bonfires were held, burning ‘forbidden goods’ such as jazz records, works of art, and dresses. Coffee bars, theatres, and circuses were closed down, weddings forbidden, even holding hands and kite flying. One female star of the Peking opera recounted how she went into exile in the countryside, where she would go to a remote area of the forest every day to exercise her voice where no one else would hear; she also buried her costumes and makeup until after the Cultural Revolution was over. Paul Johnson’s depressing account of the disaster continues: ‘Libraries were closed, books burned.’ In one well-known instance – the Peking Research Institute of Non-Ferrous Metals – only four scientists had the courage to use the library during the entire period.⁸³ Jiang Qing wallowed in her role, addressing countless mass rallies where she denounced, in turn, ‘jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, striptease, impressionism, fauvism,’ and every other ‘ism’ of modern art, plus capitalism itself, which she said destroyed art. She was against specialisation.⁸⁴ By the second half of 1966 virtually every important cultural institution in China was under army control. On 12 December that year many ‘public enemies,’ who included playwrights, actors, film and theatre directors, poets, and composers, were marched to the Workers’ Stadium before 10,000 people, each with a wooden placard around his or her neck. Later Jiang took over TV and radio stations and confiscated equipment, scripts, scores, and film, reediting the latter and reissuing them in revised versions. She ordered composers to write works that were then played to ‘the masses’ and changed afterward according to what the masses wanted. In the ballet she banned ‘orchid fingers’ and upturned palms, demanding instead that the dancers used clenched fists and violent movements to confirm their ‘hatred of the landlord class.’⁸⁵ The attacks on the universities and artists bred violence, and in the universities private armies were set up. Among the better known were the ‘East Is Red’ commune at the Peking Geological Institute; the ‘Sky Faction’ of the Aeronautical Institute was another.⁸⁶ In many scientific institutions professors were sent out into the countryside to make greater practical use of their findings, with peasants. At the Genetics Institute in Peking (there had been no genetics institute in China before 1949), the theories of Lysenko hung on even later than in Russia, thanks in part to the Red Guards. Perhaps the most extraordinary notion bred by the Cultural Revolution was that traffic lights should be changed. The Red Guards were worried that red, the revolutionary colour, should be for change, for forward progress – in other words for ‘Go’ rather than ‘Stop.’ Zhou Enlai killed the idea with a joke about red being better seen in fog, and therefore the safest colour. But the Cultural Revolution was no joke.⁸⁷ Before it ended, as many as 400,000 had been killed. The effect on China’s traditional culture was devastating, and in this respect strongly reminiscent of Stalin’s inquisition.

Not that the intellectual inquisition in Russia had died out with Stalin. It wasn’t as widespread as in the 1930s, but it was no less vicious.⁸⁸ The first details about the dark side of Russian psychiatric hospitals had been released to the West in 1965, with the publication of Valery Tarsis’s Ward 7, after which a number of psychiatrists in Europe and North America made it their business to investigate Soviet practices. But it was the forced hospitalisation of Zhores Medvedev on 29 May 1970 at Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital, just south of Moscow, that drew the attention of the world to what was being done in the name of psychiatry.

A Question of Madness, which was written by Zhores Medvedev and his brother, Roy, a professional historian, reads like a Kafka novel. Early on in 1970, the manuscript of a book that Zhores had written was seized by the KGB in the course of a raid on the flat of a friend. Zhores was not especially worried when he found out that the KGB had seized the book – which was unfinished and not at all secret – but he did begin to grow anxious when he was asked to attend Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital to discuss the behavior of his son, who was then giving the Medvedevs some cause for concern, going through an ‘awkward’ or ‘hippie’ phase. As soon as he arrived at the hospital, Zhores was locked in the waiting room. When, through a window, he saw his son leave, Zhores realised that he was the chief object of concern to the authorities. On that occasion he picked the lock and escaped, but a week later he received a visit at home by three policemen and two doctors.⁸⁹ From their conversations, it became clear that Medvedev had caused offence with a book he had written, originally called Biology and the Cult of Personality but later changed to The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, in which he had exposed the shameful history of Soviet genetics. This book had appeared in the West in 1969, published by Columbia University Press, while Lysenko was still alive (he died in 1976). Zhores was forcibly removed to Kaluga, where both the hospital psychiatrists and a commission sent out by the central authorities tried to make out that he was an incipient schizophrenic, about to become a danger to himself and others.⁹⁰ The authorities had, however, reckoned without Zhores’s relatives and friends. For a start, his brother Roy was an identical twin. Schizophrenia is known to be (partly) inherited, and so, strictly speaking, if Zhores showed signs of the illness, so too should Roy. This clearly wasn’t true. Many academicians complained to the authorities that they had known Zhores for many years, and he had never shown any abnormal symptoms. Peter Kapitsa, Andrei Sakharov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn all rallied to Zhores’s support, and as a result the matter received wide publicity in the West.⁹¹ But it was still nearly three weeks before he was released, and during that time, as the account the Medvedevs jointly wrote shows, the netherworld of psychiatry was exposed. Various psychiatrists claimed that Zhores showed ‘heightened nervousness,’ ‘deviation from the norm,’ was ‘ill-adapted to the environment,’ suffered a ‘hypochondriac delusional condition,’ and had ‘an exaggerated opinion of himself.’ When questioned by family relatives, these psychiatrists claimed that only experienced doctors could detect the ‘early stages’ of mental illness.⁹² Other psychiatrists were brought in as part of a ‘special commission’ to consider the case, including Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky, Professor Daniel Lunts, and Dr Georgy Morozov, head of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, which would be revealed as the worst of the Soviet psychiatric institutions involved in psychiatric-political terror. Despite this, Zhores’s friends succeeded in forcing his release on 17 June and having him reinstated to the Lenin Agricultural Academy as a senior research fellow, to work on amino acids. In this instance there was a happy ending, but later research showed that between 1965 and 1975 there were 210 ‘fully authenticated’ cases of psychiatric terror and fourteen institutions devoted to the incarceration of alleged psychiatric cases who were in fact political prisoners.⁹³

Chilling as they were, the special psychiatric hospitals in Russia only dealt with, at most, hundreds of people. In comparison, the world revealed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn concerned perhaps 66 million people and, together with the Holocaust against the Jews, must rank as the greatest horror story of human history.

The Gulag Archipelago is a massive, three-volume work, completed in 1969 but not published in English until 1974, 1975, and 1976. Solzhenitsyn’s previous books, particularly One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and Cancer Ward (1968) had made him well known in the West.⁹⁴ Born an orphan in the Caucasus in December 1918 (his father had died in a shooting accident six months before), in an area where there was a lot of White Russian resistance to the Bolsheviks, Solzhenitsyn grew up in the early 1930s, as the Communist Party strengthened its grip on the country after Stalin’s Great Break.⁹⁵ Despite poverty and hardship he shone at school, and then at university, in physics, math, and Marxism-Leninism.⁹⁶ He had a ‘good’ war (he was promoted to captain and won four medals) but was arrested by secret agents in early 1945. His letters had been intercepted and read: among his ‘crimes’ was a letter referring to Stalin as ‘the man with the moustache,’ and photographs of Nicholas II and of Trotsky were found among his belongings. Convicted as a ‘socially dangerous’ person, he was moved from prison to prison and then to Novy Ierusalim, New Jerusalem, a corrective labour camp, and to Marfino, a scientific sharashka that at least had a library. By 1955 he was living in a mud hut in Kol Terek; this was exile rather than imprisonment, and it was here that he contracted, and was successfully treated for, cancer. These experiences became his first masterpiece, Cancer Ward, not published in English until 1968.

He arrived back in Moscow in June 1956, after an absence of more than eleven years, aged not quite thirty-eight. Over the next few years, while he was teaching outside Moscow, he wrote a novel initially entitled Sh-854 after the sharashka he had been in. It was very shocking. The story concerned the ordinary, everyday life in one camp over a twenty-four-hour period. The shock lay in the fact that the camp life – the conditions described – are regarded by the inhabitants as normal and permanent. The psychology of the camp, so different from the outside world, is taken for granted, as are the entirely arbitrary reasons why people arrived there. Solzhenitsyn sent the manuscript to friends at Novy mir, the literary magazine – and what happened then has been told many times.⁹⁷ Everyone who read the manuscript was shocked and moved by it; everyone at the magazine wanted to see the book published – but what would Khrushchev say? In 1956 he had made an encouraging (but secret) speech at the Party Congress, hinting at greater liberalisation now that Stalin was dead. By coincidence, friends got the manuscript to the Soviet leader at a time when he was entertaining Robert Frost, the American poet. Khrushchev gave the go-ahead, and Sh-854 was published in English in 1963, to world acclaim, as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.⁹⁸ This marked a high spot in Solzhenitsyn’s life, and for a few years – a very few years – he was lionised in Russia. But then, in the mid-1960s, Khrushchev clamped down on the liberalisation he had himself started, and Solzhenitsyn lost the Lenin Prize he should have won because one member of the committee, the director of the Komsomol, alleged that he had surrendered to the Germans in the war and had been convicted of (an unspecified) criminal offence. Both allegations were untrue, but they showed the strength of feeling against Solzhenitsyn, and all that he stood for.

From 1965 he began to work on his history of the camps, which would become The Gulag Archipelago. Since his disillusion with Marxism he had returned to ‘some sort of Christian faith.’⁹⁹ But Russia was changing again; Khrushchev had fallen from power, and in September 1965 the KGB raided the flat of some of Solzhenitsyn’s friends and seized all three copies of the manuscript of another book, The First Circle. This described four days in the life of a mathematician in a sharashka outside Moscow, and is clearly a self-portrait. Now began a very tense time: Solzhenitsyn went into hiding and found it difficult to have his writings published. Publication of The First Circle and Cancer Ward in the West brought him greater fame, but led to a more open conflict with the Soviet authorities. This conflict culminated in 1970, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but the authorities made it clear that, if he went to Sweden to collect the prize, he would not be allowed back.¹⁰⁰ And so, by the time The Gulag Archipelago appeared, Solzhenitsyn’s life had taken on an epic dimension.

The new project was a massive exercise, as it had to be.¹⁰¹ The gulag was overwhelming, a massive intervention in so many millions of lives that only an equally vast project could do justice to what was indeed ‘the greatest horror story of human history.’ Besides the eight years he spent in the camps, it took Solzhenitsyn nine years – April 1958 to February 1967 – to compile the book.¹⁰² Parts of the story had escaped before, but Solzhenitsyn’s aim was to present such a mass of material that no one would ever again doubt the gross and grotesque abuses of freedom in Soviet Russia. Eighteen hundred pages long, it is all but overwhelming – but, as a literary work as well as a record, that was Solzhenitsyn’s aim.

The book first appeared in the West in Paris, on 28 December 1973. At the end of January 1974 the BBC World Service and its German counterpart began broadcasting excerpts from The Gulag in Russian. In the same week the German version of the book was published, and smuggled copies of the Russian version began to appear in Moscow: they were passed from hand to hand, ‘each reader being allowed a maximum of 24 hours to read the entire volume.¹⁰³ On 12 February Solzhenitsyn was arrested. At 8:30 A.M. on Wednesday the fourteenth, the Bonn government was informed that Russia wanted to expel Solzhenitsyn and asked if the Germans would accept him. Willy Brandt, the German chancellor, was at that moment chairing a session of the cabinet. Interrupted, he immediately agreed to Russia’s request. The Gulag was published in the U.K. and the United States later that spring. Worldwide, by 1976, according to Publisher’s Weekly, the first volume sold 8 to 10 million copies (2.5 million in the United States, a million-plus in Germany, and just under that in the U.K., France, and Japan). All together, Solzhenitsyn’s books have sold 30 million copies.¹⁰⁴

Gulag – GUlag in Russian – stands for Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei (Chief Administration of the Labour Camps). Throughout his long book, Solzhenitsyn is unsparing in the detail. From the techniques of arrest to the horrors of interrogation, from the ‘ships’ of the archipelago (the red-painted cattle trains that transported the prisoners) to the maps of the 202 detention camps, from the treatment of corpses to the salaries of the guards, nothing is omitted.¹⁰⁵ He tells us how the ‘red cows,’ the cattle trucks, were prepared, with holes carved out of the floor for drainage but steel sheets nailed down all around, so no one could escape.¹⁰⁶ We learn the name of the individual – Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel, a Turkish Jew, born near Constantinople – who first thought up the gulag.¹⁰⁷ We learn the death rates of the various camps and are given an unsparing list of thirty-one techniques of punishment during interrogation. These include a machine for squeezing fingernails, or ‘bridling,’ in which a towel is inserted between the prisoner’s jaws like a bridle and then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his heels, with his spine bent. The prisoner was then left for several days without food or water, sometimes having first been given a salt-water douche in the throat.¹⁰⁸

But as Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn’s biographer, says, the book is not just a series of lists or statistics. Solzhenitsyn re-creates a whole world, an entire culture. His tone is ironic, not self-pitying, as he gives us the jokes and the jargon of life in the camps – camps that, he tells us, varied widely, from prospecting camps to railroad-building camps, transit camps to collective labour camps, island camps to juvenile camps. He shows that people were sent to the camps for absurd reasons. Irina Tuchinskaya, for example, was charged with having ‘prayed in church for the death of Stalin,’ others for showing friendliness to the United States, or a negative attitude toward state loans. Then there is the jargon. A dokhodyaga is a man on his last legs, a ‘goner’; katorga was hard labour; everything that was constructed in camps was, they said, built with ‘fart power’; nasedha was ‘stool pigeon,’ and reality was deliberately reversed so that the worst camps were referred to as the most privileged.¹⁰⁹ However, as horror is piled on horror, as page after page passes – as the weeks and months pass for those in the gulag (and this is Solzhenitsyn’s intention) – the reader gradually comes to realise that although countless millions have been murdered, the human spirit has not been killed, that hope and a black sense of humour can keep those who survive alive, not thriving exactly, but thinking. In one of the last chapters, describing a revolt in the Kengir camp that lasted for forty days, the reader feels like cheering, that reason and sanity and goodness can prevail, even though in the end the revolt is brutally put down, as we know it will be.¹¹⁰ So the book, though nearly choking with bleak horrors, is not in the end an entirely bleak document, as Solzhenitsyn intended. It is a warning to all of us of what it means to lose freedom, but it is a warning to tyrants as well, that they can never hope to win in the end. The reader comes away chastened – very chastened – but not despairing. As W. L. Webb said, reviewing the book in the Guardian, ‘To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age.’¹¹¹

The un-freedoms in the Communist world, described by Solzhenitsyn and the Medvedevs, or those which took place in the Cultural Revolution in China, were far worse than anything that occurred in the West. Their extent, the vast number of their victims, underlined the fragility of freedom, equality, and justice everywhere. And, just as the 1960s had opened with Hayek’s and Friedman’s examinations of freedom, so the decade closed with other philosophers addressing the same issues, after years of turbulence in the name of civil rights.

In his 1969 book Four Essays on Liberty, Isaiah Berlin built on Hayek’s notion that, in order to be free, man needs an area of private life where he is accountable to no one, where he can he left alone, free of constraint. Born in 1909 in Riga, part of the Russian empire, Berlin had moved to Russia when he was six. In 1921 his family had moved to Britain, where he was educated at Oxford, becoming a fellow of All Souls and subsequently professor of social and political theory and founding president of Wolfson College. In his essays, Berlin made three points, the first that liberty is just that: freedom.¹¹² In a famous sentence, he wrote, ‘Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.’¹¹³ Berlin was at pains to point out that one man’s freedom may conflict with another’s; they may indeed be irreconcilable. His second and third points were that there is an important distinction between what he called ‘negative’ freedom and ‘positive’ freedom. Negative freedom is, on this analysis, ‘a certain minimum area of personal freedom which on no account must be violated; for if it is overstepped, the individual will find himself in an area too narrow for even that minimum development of his natural faculties which alone makes it possible to pursue, and even to conceive, the various ends which men hold good or right or sacred. It follows that a frontier must be drawn between the area of private life and that of public authority…. Without adequate conditions for the use of freedom, what is the value of freedom?’¹¹⁴ Berlin argued that this doctrine of negative freedom is relatively modern – it does not occur in antiquity – but that the desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, ‘has been a mark of high civilisation.’ Negative freedom is important for Berlin not merely because of what it stands for but also because it is a simple notion, and therefore something men of goodwill can agree upon.

Positive freedom, on the other hand, is much more complex.¹¹⁵ This, he says, concerns all those issues that centre around the desire of the individual ‘to be his own master.’ This concept therefore involves issues of government, of reason, of social identity (race, tribe, church), of genuine autonomy. If the only true method of attaining freedom in this sense is the use of critical reason, then all those matters that affect critical reason – history, psychology, science, for example – must come into play. And, as Berlin says, ‘all conflict, and consequently all tragedy, is due solely to the clash of reason with the irrational or the insufficiently rational’; insofar as man is a social being, what he is, is, to some degree, what others think and feel him to be. It is this, he says – this failure on the part of many to be recognised for what they wish to feel themselves to be – that was ‘the heart of the great cry’ at that time on the part of certain nations, classes, professions, and races.¹¹⁶ This is akin to freedom, he says, and it may be no less passionately needed, but it is not freedom itself. Berlin’s aim in saying all this is to underline that there can be no ‘final solution’ (his words), no final harmony ‘in which all riddles are solved, all contradictions reconciled,’ no single formula ‘whereby all the diverse ends of man can be harmoniously realised.’ Human goals are many, he says, not all commensurable, some in perpetual rivalry. This is the human condition, the background against which we must understand freedom, which can only be achieved by participation in the political system. Freedom will always be difficult to attain, so we must be crystal-clear about what it is.¹¹⁷

Both Raymond Aron, in Progress and Disillusion (1968), and Herbert Marcuse, in An Essay on Liberation (1969), believed the 1960s to have been a crucial decade, since they had revealed science and technology as real threats to freedom, not just in the form of weapons and weapons research, which had linked so many universities to the military, but also because the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the sexual revolution in general had been underpinned by a psychological transformation.¹¹⁸ For them the whole idea of freedom had been extended; in the third world in particular the traditional Marxist classes still needed to be freed; the influx of Western consumer goods – aided by widespread television – was exploiting a new raft of people. At the same time, in the developed Western democracies, people – especially the young – were experiencing a new form of freedom, a personal liberation, insight into their own character as afforded by the new psychologies. Marcuse in particular looked forward to a new ‘aesthetic’ in politics, where art and the creative act would allow people greater fulfilment, producing in the process what he called ‘prettier’ societies, more beautiful countries. It was at last appropriate, he said, to speak of utopias.

An entirely different idea of freedom – what it is and what its fate is likely to be – came from Marshall McLuhan. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada in 1911, he took a Ph.D. in Cambridge in 1943, working with E R. Leavis and I. A. Richards, founder of the New Criticism, which gave him an intellectual confidence from which stemmed his great originality. McLuhan’s chief interest was the effect of the new ‘electric’ media on man’s self-consciousness and behaviour, but he also thought this had important consequences for freedom. McLuhan’s notion of the individual, and his relation to society as a whole, was quite unlike anyone else’s.

For him there have been three all-important watersheds in history: the invention of the alphabet, the invention of the book, and the invention of the telegraph, the first of the electric media, though he also thought the arrival of television was another epochal event. McLuhan’s writing style was allusive, aphoristic, showing great learning but also obscure at times, meaning he was not always easy to understand. Essentially, he thought the alphabet had destroyed the world of tribal man. Tribal man was characterised by an oral culture in which all of the senses were in balance, though this world was predominantly auditory; ‘no man knew appreciably more than another.’¹¹⁹ ‘Tribal cultures even today simply cannot comprehend the concept of the individual or of the separate and independent citizen,’ he wrote. Into this world, he said, the phonetic alphabet ‘fell like a bombshell.’ The components of the alphabet, unlike pictographs and hieroglyphics, were essentially meaningless and abstract; they ‘diminished the role of the senses of hearing and touch and taste and smell’ while promoting the visual. As a result whole man became fragmented man. ‘Only alphabetic cultures have succeeded in mastering connected linear sequences as a means of social and psychic organisation.’¹²⁰ He thought that tribal man was much less homogeneous than ‘civilised’ man and that the arrival of the book accelerated this process, leading to nationalism, the Reformation, ‘the assembly line and its offspring the Industrial Revolution, the whole concept of causality, Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of the universe, perspective in art, narrative chronology in literature and a psychological mode of introspection that greatly intensified the tendencies towards indivi dualism.¹²¹ But with the arrival of the electric media, McLuhan thought that this process was now going into reverse, and that we would see a revival of tribal man.

The ideas for which McLuhan became famous (or notorious, depending on your viewpoint) were ‘The medium is the message’ and his division of media into ‘hot’ and ‘cool.’ By the former phrase he meant two things. One, as described above, that the media determine much else in life; and two, that we all share assumptions about media, that the way ‘stories,’ or ‘news,’ are reported is as important as the actual content of these events. In other words, content is only part of the story: attitudes and emotions too are carried by electric media, and it was in this sense of a collective experience that he meant a return to tribalisation.¹²²

A photograph is high-definition, requiring very little work by the viewer to complete its message, and it is therefore ‘hot.¹²³ A cartoon, on the other hand, requires the viewer to complete the information conveyed and is therefore ‘cool.’ Radio is hot, TV cool. Lectures are hot, seminars are cool. In television culture, political leaders become more like tribal chieftains than traditional politicians: they perform emotional and social functions, where supporters/followers can feel part of a collectivity, rather than offer intellectual leadership, thinking for their followers.¹²⁴

For McLuhan all this completely changed the notion of freedom: ‘The open society, the visual offspring of phonetic literacy, is irrelevant to today’s retribalised youth; and the closed society, the product of speech, drum and ear technologies, is thus being reborn…. Literate man is alienated, impoverished man; retribalised man can learn a far richer and more fulfilling life … with a deep emotional awareness of his complete interdependence with all humanity. The old “individualistic” print society was one where the individual was “free” only to be alienated and disassociated, a rootless outsider bereft of tribal dreams; our new electronic environment compels commitment and participation, and fulfils man’s psychic and social needs at profound levels.¹²⁵ McLuhan, who knew how to turn familiar categories on their head, foresaw a time when, for example, Italy might choose to reduce television watching by five hours a day in order to promote newspaper reading in an election campaign, or that Venezuela might lay on extra TV in order to cool down political tensions.¹²⁶ For McLuhan, the idea of a ‘public’ consisting of ‘a differentiated agglomerate of fragmented individuals, all dissimilar but all capable of acting in basically the same way like cogs in a production line’ was less preferable than a mass society ‘in which personal diversity is encouraged while at the same time everybody reacts and interacts simultaneously to every stimulus.¹²⁷

This appears to change the very notion of autonomous individuals, but then McLuhan did predict, in this new world, the demise of large cities, the imminent obsolescence of the motor car and the stock exchange, and that the concept of the job would be replaced by that of the role. In many ways, though he was strikingly original, McLuhan was (so far) wrong.

A very similar message came from France, in Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, published there in 1967 but not translated into English until much later. Debord saw the spectacle – mainly the television-dominated society, but also sports, rock concerts, stage-managed politics – as the chief product of modern society. The spectacle, he said, comprised basically the ‘uninterrupted monologue of self-praise’ of the ruling order and the passivity of the rest: ‘Spectators are linked only by a one-way relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another…. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere…. The spectacle’s function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation…. The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life … commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity.’ For Debord, far from being a form of freedom, the society of the spectacle was the final form of alienation, final because people think they are enjoying themselves but are in reality passive spectators. His book contained a long historical section, on Hegel, Marx, and George Lukács, with Debord arguing essentially that the spectacle was the final banalising triumph of capitalism. (One of his ‘texts’ was Shakespeare’s Henry IV, part 1: ‘O, gentlemen, the time of life is short! … And if we live, we live to tread on kings.’) In later editions he said that he thought Daniel Boorstin, the much-respected Librarian of Congress, who had published The Image in 1972, had got it wrong, because he had regarded commodities as ‘consumed’ in an authentic private life, whereas Debord argued that even the consumption of individual commodities in the theatre of advertising is itself a spectacle, which negates the very idea of ‘society’ as it has historically been known. So for Debord, the society of the spectacle represents the final failure of man’s progress toward ever greater self-consciousness. Man is not only impoverished, enslaved, and his life negated; capitalism, in the society of the spectacle, has deluded him into thinking he is free.¹²⁸

In Isaiah Berlin’s terms, positive freedom was not as basic as the negative variety. For John Rawls, professor of philosophy at Harvard, justice comes before liberty, if only by a short head. In A Theory of Justice, completed in 1971 and published a year later, Rawls produced what fellow philosopher Robert Nozick called the most significant work of political philosophy since John Stuart Mill. Rawls argued that a just society will in fact guarantee more liberties for the greatest number of its members and that therefore it is crucial to know what justice is and how it might be attained. Specifically arguing against the utilitarian tradition (actions are right because they are useful), he tried to replace the social contracts of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant with something ‘more rational.’ This led him to the view that justice is ‘the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought,’ and that justice is best understood as ‘fairness.’ It was Rawls’s way of achieving fairness that was to bring him so much attention. To achieve this, he proposed an ‘original position’ and a ‘veil of ignorance.¹²⁹

In the original position, the individuals drawing up the contract, the rules by which their society will be governed, are assumed to be rational but ignorant. They do not know whether they are rich or poor, old or young, healthy or infirm; they do not know which god they follow, if any; they have no idea what race they are, how intelligent or stupid, or whatever other gifts they may have or lack. In the original position, no one knows his place in society – and so the principles of justice ‘are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.¹³⁰ For Rawls, whatever social institutions are chosen in this way, those engaged in choosing them ‘can say to one another that they are co-operating on terms to which they would agree if they were free and equal persons whose relations with one another were fair’; ‘a society satisfying the principles of justice as fairness comes as close as a society can to being a voluntary scheme, for it meets the principles which free and equal persons would assent to under circumstances that are fair. In this sense its members are autonomous and the obligations they recognise self-imposed.’ Rawls further argues that, from this premise of the original position and the veil of ignorance, there are two principles of justice, and in this order: (1) each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others; and (2) social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.¹³¹ Putting it another way, Rawls writes, ‘All social values — liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect — are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage.’ His later arguments proved more controversial. For example, he discusses self-respect as a ‘good,’ something a rational man in a just society is naturally entitled to. He discusses envy and the place of shame. All this leads him into direct conflict with, say, Hayek, in that Rawls firmly believes there is such an entity as social justice; in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, there is not enough positive freedom for certain groups, since those groups are not being treated as they would be treated by rational men in the original position behind a veil of ignorance. And because the first principle of justice (justice seen as fairness) takes priority over the second principle, the basic liberties of the disadvantaged come before inequalities of wealth or income however much those inequalities benefit everyone. In other words, even supposing that blacks were better off under white rule than they would be under mixed rule (say), it is still wrong (unjust, unfair) if blacks’ liberty is more proscribed than whites. Equality of liberty comes first.

This led Rawls into perhaps the most controversial section of all in his book, ‘The Justification of Civil Disobedience.¹³² Here he argues that civil disobedience is justifiable if the majority, perhaps in the form of a political party representing the majority, refuses to grant the minority equal liberties. Attempts to have the laws changed should first be tried, he says; civil disobedience should always be a last resort and take into account the likelihood of other minorities acting in a civilly disobedient way, in which case there might be a threat to overall order, in which case there could be a risk of an overall loss of liberty, in which case civil disobedience is not justified. But these are technicalities. By arguing that self-respect is a natural good, sought and expected by rational men in a free and fair society, Rawls legitimated the idea of social justice that had suffered so much at the hands of Hayek.

Rawls assumed the original position and the veil of ignorance in order to arrive at the principles of a just – fair – society. His colleague at Harvard, Robert Nozick, took him to task for this. More grounded in the tradition of Hayek, Nozick preferred to start from a consideration of the way things are, the way society actually is organised, rather than by positing some perfect world, as Rawls had done.* In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published in 1974, partly as a reply to Rawls’s book, Nozick argued that all ‘patterned’ justice, such as affirmative action, was morally wrong, violating more individual rights than was permissible and thereby doing more harm than good as measured by the number of people helped.¹³³ Nozick pointed out what he felt were a number of logical flaws in Rawls’s arguments, but his most important substantive point was to offer the concept of ‘entitlement’ in any social situation.¹³⁴ In Rawls’s original position, the individuals contributing to the rules of society, behind the veil of ignorance, have no idea of their own attributes – their wealth, status, intelligence, and so on. But in real life, says Nozick, this can never happen, and Rawls’s position is, to that extent, inadequate. No less important logically, people do have talents that vary, and which they are born with. This is inequality, if you like, but it is a special kind, insofar as one person having more of something (say, intelligence) does not in and of itself mean that every other person in that society has less and is worse off. One person having more of a natural talent does not deprive anyone else of that talent. And so, for a society to coerce its members so that the disparity in talent, and what flows from it, is removed, is wrong, says Nozick. And it is all the more wrong when, as is often the case, that extra talent is used by the person possessing it to benefit society. Nozick uses a number of deliberately absurd examples to point up what he sees as the shortcomings in Rawls’s arguments. For instance, he compares the provision of medical care with barbering. In medical care, it is generally argued that ‘need’ is the key factor in providing medical care, over and above any ability to pay. Should this therefore apply to barbering? Should barbering services be provided first and foremost to people who are in need of a shave? In another case, assume a woman has four suitors. Do we allow her to choose who to marry, or do we put it to the vote among the suitors? Does it make sense to say that the successful suitor is the one who ‘needs’ the woman more than the others? In giving these examples, Nozick’s aim is to show that Rawls’s theoretical version of the way man arranges his affairs is far too simple; and second, to stress that many areas of life are properly left to the actions and decisions of individuals, freely exercising their naturally endowed talents, because these talents neither impinge on anyone else nor on the overall performance of society. All of which leads him to the view that only a minimal state, performing the basic functions of protection, can be morally justified.¹³⁵

A few hundred yards from the philosophy department at Harvard is the psychology building, William James Hall, named in honour of the great pragmatist. From there, in 1972, at the same time that Rawls and Nozick were in residence, B. F. Skinner produced his remarkable book about liberty, Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Skinner wrote as a psychologist, not as a philosopher, and indeed he made it pretty clear that he thought a lot of traditional philosophical ideas were wrong.¹³⁶ Yet his book was deeply philosophical in the sense that he was concerned not with equality and its relation with freedom, but with the fundamental idea of freedom in the first place. As a scientist and a biologist, Skinner saw human nature as the product of evolution (and therefore to a large extent genetically grounded) and as an adaptation to the environment. For Skinner, there was only one way to change (and by implication to improve) man, and that was to change the environment. His second point was to argue that, at base, true freedom did not, and does not, exist. Man’s nature is the result of his history – evolution – in collaboration with his environment. Therefore, man is by definition subject to a certain amount of control. For Skinner, freedom is merely the state in which man does not feel the control that is exerted over him.¹³⁷ Yet freedom does not primarily apply to feelings, he says, but to behavior. In other words, freedom is the lack of aversive stimuli in the environment, and what we call the feeling of freedom is in reality only the result of this absence. These aversive stimuli will be different for different people, with different histories, but in the concluding chapters of his book he attempted to sketch out a design for a culture where the aversive stimuli are kept to a minimum.¹³⁸ Skinner wanted to see mankind develop a technology of behavior which recognises that man’s nature, man’s collective nature as a vast number of individuals, is developed as a result of contingencies – rewards and punishments – acting on our genetic makeup. For Skinner, there is no autonomous man, or rather we should recognise the limits to our autonomy, if we wish to be truly free, in the sense of being at ease with our true nature.

Control and punishment, Skinner says, are necessary aspects of the environment where people live together in society, but they should not be understood as bad things, only as ways to achieve the maximum freedom for the maximum number of people – freedom understood as a lack of aversive stimuli. (This was written near the height of the period of student rebellion.) By creating a better environment, we shall get better men. He therefore criticises notions such as ‘a spiritual crisis’ (among students), the drug problem, and the gambling problem. These problems come not from within human nature, like a homunculus, but rather from the mismanagement of the control of society: ‘Autonomous man is a device used to explain what we cannot explain in any other way. He has been constructed from our ignorance, and as our understanding increases, the very stuff of which he is composed vanishes. Science does not dehumanize man, it dehomunculises him.¹³⁹

Skinner’s ideas have not proved anywhere near as influential as Rawls’s or Nozick’s or Hayek’s. In part that is because he did little to show how freedom might be improved. But the main reason was that, in the 1960s, in the American context of civil rights, freedom and justice were assumed by most people to be the same thing.

The ‘long 1960s,’ ending around 1973, was not at all the frivolous decade it is so often painted. A good claim can be made for saying that it was the most important postwar period, the most pivotal, when man’s basic condition – the nature of his very freedom – came under threat and under scrutiny, for the reason that his psychology, his self-awareness, was changing. The shift from a class-based sociology to an individual psychology, the rise of new groups to identify with (race, gender, students) changed not only self-awareness but politics, as Hannah Arendt had predicted. Much of what happens in the rest of this book, much of the thought in the last quarter of the century, can only be understood in that light.