AustLit

'Fifty years since May ’68, and the promise, as it was understood then, of freedom. From what, and to what? The unfettering of the imagination was one cry, the flowering of the social capacities of human being another. Here was the definitive opening to ‘make our own history’—to defy the experience of alienation that was now a condition of student life, not just that of the factory. It was a revolt, or revolution, that sought to defy the structures of the received political Left as much as it was a rejection of the structures and effects of (late) capitalism. At least, this was how it largely understood itself: a revolt against authority, a flowering of possibilities, the chance for individuals to become ‘whole’. It was believed that, starting in the ‘nerve centres’ of society— the universities—this completely novel form of revolt would flow out to destabilise the whole.' (Alison Caddick :‘To the Edge of Freedom’: May ’68 and Now' Editorial)