Debate about the 60's continues in this noisy and intelligent book of essays by nine prominent writers, including Harvey Mansfield, Walter Berns, Alan Wolfe, Anita LaFrance Allen, Randall Kennedy, Martha Minow, Martha C. Nussbaum, Jeremy Rabkin, Cass R. Sunstein, and Sheldon S. Wolin.

T.V superstar George Will provides a foreword and Todd Gitlin offers an afterward. The book essays discuss the impact of the 60's in the areas of gender roles, sexuality and the family, universities and education, and racial issues.

Most of the essayists are complainers about the sixties, but whether or not one agrees with them, one must admit they are skillful complainers, and perhaps more important, that the information they provide in the course of their arguements is valuable and memorable. Regardless of one's viewpoint about the sixties, this book is worth buying and reading.

Essays by Harvard's Harvey C. Mansfield and the American Enterprise Institute's Walter Berns are especially well done.

Mansfield's "Legacy Of The Late 60's" essay breaks the period down into twelve catagories and delivers lively "mini-essays" roughly two pages long for each catagory. Topics covered include the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, Feminism, the 60's Impact On The Family, Drugs and Crime, Environmentalism, Rock Music, Postmodern Literature and Film, the "Underclass," Education, Affirmative Action, and Egalitarianism. Mansfield socks his ideas to us in only 24 pages, and covers a lot of ground very readable and provocative form.

Walter Berns discusses the impact of the 60's on Universities, and spends a major part of his essay detailing the crisis at Cornell University in New York. He indicts key players part of that crisis, students, faculty, and administrators, and offers interesting and chilling postscript information about the later successful careers, decades later, of these players.

This book is worth buying and reading. It contributes importantly to our understanding of the most discussed decade of the twentieth century, the 60's.

Macedo is the least apologetic of the political liberals. His project is to inculcate a sense of public virtue, recognizing that political liberalism will (and should) have effects on romantic sub-communities, especially those with illiberal tendencies. Macedo, like other political liberals, focuses on producing citizens that are capable of making competent individual political judgments. Since the burden of public reasonableness is shared universally, Macedo sees a particular brand of community developing. But I doubt that Macedo says enough about what a unifying public philosophy entails or how institutions (public schools aren't enough, he acknowledges in his conclusion) can cultivate (or coerce) citizens into prioritizing their public allegiances. In so far as policies such as religious exemptions encourage the formation of deeply felt private beliefs, they might actually encourage private citizens toward public action more effectively than diffuse liberal concepts such as 'mutual respect' or even 'public reasonableness.' Perhaps conflicts arising from particularistic beliefs-even from certain brands of intolerance-are the most effective means of mobilizing citizens to take their status in the polity seriously, to perceive a connection between their private interests and the good of the state. I am suggesting that Macedo's proposed focus on public virtue at the expense of private belief systems might result in less active and critical citizens than a theory that emphasizes cultural and religious differences, when such differences (and their attendant interests) encourage political participation in the first place. If we care about politics because it implicates our private beliefs, than religious or broad philosophical anomie must result in political apathy (or even antipathy). If Americans are more likely to participate politically because of sectarian interests than public civic principles, perhaps we should focus on preserving private belief systems before inculcating public moral principles. It is not obvious that a liberal society is more likely to survive with citizens who believe nothing deeply than it is with citizens who believe in certain principles (even when they border on the illiberal) with great conviction. Columbine is a powerful metonym for the ravages of the anomie Macedo risks.