Neo-transcendentalism in the New Left Counter-culture: A Vision of the Future Looking Back

The student movement of the 1960s has been characterized as the dawn of a new national consciousness and a new counter-culture, ‘the passionate revolution of creative intelligence’, and ‘the saving vision our endangered civilization required’. The New Left spokesmen for the movement have proclaimed themselves the vanguard of a unique cultural and political rebellion against what they consider the evils of capitalist-pluralist America. They present their arguments in Hegelian terms as a new and profound synthesis of the progressive elements embodied in America's political and intellectual history. Yet a more probing analysis of American history indicates that the values inherent in the New Left counter-culture are not very new at all. In fact, apart from their rhetoric, the New Left cultural and political attitudes bear a striking similarity to certain nineteenth-century Utopian outlooks. The most direct antecedent of the modern counter-culture appears to be the New England transcendental- ist movement which emerged in the 1840s. This relationship between a New Left counter-culture, credited by its supporters with messianic characteristics for national salvation, and a nineteenth-century utopianism that made no significant impact on the unfolding of history raises many questions about the credibility and future of the counter-culture.