Abstract
This chapter takes its title from a quote that has been attributed to 1960s radical and member of the infamous “Chicago Seven,” Jerry Rubin. Rubin supposedly stated “never trust anyone over 30” sometime in 1968,1 although recently this has become disputed and the more likely origin of the quote is civil rights leader Jack Weinberg from a 1965 interview with a San Francisco Chronicle reporter. But the fact that Rubin didn’t originally say it is even more relevant to a chapter on generational analysis. For one, it shows how the memory of an event (in this case a statement) can transform for individuals the particular details as they really happened. Rubin himself never dissuaded the public that he coined the term, or at least used it, and in many ways provide us an example of Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion about memory yielding to pride.2 For another, when reflecting back upon its use, Rubin demonstrated the flip side to the coin of generational conflict on his 50th birthday, mentioning to a New York Times reporter that: “I used to say don’t trust anyone over 30,” he said. “Now I say don’t trust anyone under 50.”3
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Notes
Morley Winograd, and Michael D. Hais, Millennial Makeover (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Tides of American Politics,” Yale Review 39 (1939): 219–224.
Frank Klingberg, “The Historical Alternation of Moods in American Foreign Policy,” World Politics 4, (1952) 239–273.
Michael Roskin, “From Pearl Harbor to Vietnam: Shifting Generational Paradigms and Foreign Policy,” Political Science Quarterly 3, 89 (1974): 563–588.
Kratochwil notes that such a historical enterprise then rests not upon finding transhistorically valid phenomena, but rather locating (and I do like these terms) the “pockets” or “holes rather than in the averages or generalities.” Friedrich V. Kratochwil, “Constructivism as an Approach to Interdisciplinary Study,” in Constructing International Relations: The Next Generation, ed. Karin M. Fierke and Knud Erik Jorgensen (New York: ME Sharpe, 2001), 13–35, 32.
W. Strauss, and N. Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: Morrow, 1991); and Winograd and Hais, Millennial Makeover.
Robert Jervis, “Hypotheses on Misperception,” World Politics 20 (April 1968): 454–479.
Yacov Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990), 315.
Hugo Reinert and Erik Reinert, eds., Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) (New York: Springer, 2006).
Joseph, A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial, 1962), 83.
See Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1984).
Douglas Copeland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin 1991), 23.
Jeff Gordinier, X Saves the World (Viking Press, 2008), 47.
I have discussed in my other work the aesthetic element of generational memory (Steele, Defacing Power [Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2010], chapter 2). Such memory can also be reinforced via artistic expressions such as music and film. The Gordinier quote hits on this a bit—but one could go further to discuss the fictional representations of the 1960s, and Vietnam especially, that began to emerge in US pop culture with movies such as The Deerhunter, Apocalypse Now, to 1980s films such as Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, and Born on the Fourth of July.
Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), 155–156.
Thomas, S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 158.
For a complex take on how this worked in Eastern Europe, including Germany, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, see Roland Bleiker’s approach to “transversal dissent,” Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Mark Randal Brawley, Power, Money and Trade (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 118.
See Francois Debrix’s, (Re)envisioning Peacekeeping (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
See Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations (London, UK: Routledge, 2008), 18–20.
See Anthony, F. Lang, Agency and Ethics (New York: SUNY, 2002).
The notion of “proteges” at the elite level helps provide an intellectual continuity to this tribalism. The neoconservative movement in the United States has been especially adept, even entrepreneurial, in its ability to transfer tropes about internal, decadent US “others” from one generation to another, see Brian Schmidt, and Michael, C. Williams, “The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives versus Realists,” Security Studies, 2008, 17, 2: 191–220.
John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Henry Holt and co., 1922).
Keith, R. Billingsley and Clyde Tucker, “Generations, Status and Party Identification,” Political Behavior 9, 4 (1987): 305–322.
Ernst Bertram, with Robert Norton, Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology (Champagne-Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 123.
Yacov Vertzberger, “The Practice and Power of Collective Memory,” Review of Trauma and the Memory of Politics, International Studies Review 7, 1 (2005): 117–120, 120.
Brian Schmidt, “On the History and Historiography of International Relations,” in Handbook of International Relations, ed. Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth, A. Simmons (London: Sage, 2002), 3–22, 9.
See, of course, the first statements on the transnational possibilities for academic synthesis in (Haas 1989), and for critiques of the uniformity of such communities (Youde 2005; 2007). Peter, M. Haas, “Do Regimes Matter? Epistemic Communities and Mediterranean Pollution Control” International Organization 43, 3 (1989): 377–403,
Jeremy Youde, “The Development of a Counter-Epistemic Community: AIDS, South Africa, and International Regimes” International Relations 19, 4 (2005): 421–439;
and Youde, AIDS, South Africa and the Politics of Knowledge, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007).
Valerie Hudson, “Foreign Policy Analysis: Actor-Specific Theory and the Ground of International Relations,” Foreign Policy Analysis 1, 1 (2005): 1–30, 8.
Ken Booth, “Three Tyrannies,” in Human Rights in Global Politics, ed. Tim Dunne and Nicholas J. Wheeler (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge, 1999), 31–70, 44.
Tony Smith, Pact with the Devil (Routledge, 2007), 85.
Nils Peter Gleditsch, “The Liberal Moment Fifteen Years On: Presidential Address, 49th Convention of the International Studies Association,” International Studies Quarterly 52, 4 (2008): 691–712.
Martin Shaw, “The Unfinished Global Revolution: Intellectuals and the New Politics of International Relations,” Review of International Studies 27, 3 (2001): 627–647.
James Rosenau, “Courage versus Caution: A Dialogue on Entering and Prospering in IR,” International Studies Review, 6, 3 (2004): 511–526.
Vibeke Schou Tjalve, Realist Strategies of Republican Peace (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 3;
see also Lang, Agency and Ethics, and Steele, “Of Witch’s Brews and Scholarly Communities: The Dangers and Promise of Academic Parrhesia,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 23: 1, 49–68 (March 2010).
Benjamin Herborth, “Everyday Exceptions: The Paradox of a Perpetual State of Emergency,” Chapter presented at the “Uses of the West” conference, Bad Homburg, Germany, October 2009, 11.
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© 2012 Brent J. Steele and Jonathan M. Acuff
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Steele, B.J. (2012). Never Trust Anyone Who Remembers Jerry Rubin: The Promise of Generational Conflict. In: Steele, B.J., Acuff, J.M. (eds) Theory and Application of the “Generation” in International Relations and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011565_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011565_2
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