Challenging Tradition: Social Movements, Cultural Change and the Ecology Question

Abstract

The twentieth anniversary of ‘1968’, the year of protest par excellence, offers an ideal vantage-point from which to survey the relationship of social movements and cultural change in contemporary Italy. The sheer number of ‘events’ designed to recall, celebrate, analyse and assess the ‘revolution-that-never-was’ reveals significant paradoxes. In 1968 the media (press, radio and television) were the objects of criticism and even physical attack by the movements, yet now ex-protagonists are the very journalists, commentators and programme-makers producing the anniversary editions; then, the parliamentary system was reviled as unrepresentative, whereas now the revolutionaries have become reformists; twenty years ago, the key developments were seen as political, now, with the wisdom of hindsight, the really significant changes are regarded as cultural (Ortoleva, 1988, pp. 7–17; Sofri, 1988). Nor is there a lack of self-consciousness among the so-called sessantottini [’68ers]. Indeed, a vein of irony runs through much of the anniversary reflections, marking a detachment not only from the experience of 1968 (now as much a part of History as of Memory), but also from the very notions of commitment and belief that first fired the movements of that period.