A succinct yet informative review of the spirit of dissent in the
last two decades in Europe, by Hughes (History/Univ. of Cal. at San
Diego), author of several books including The Obstructed Path
(1968) and Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of the Italian Jews,
(1983). Offering wide scope in this brief study, Hughes takes up,
in turn: Moslem workers who flooded the labor pools of West
European countries in the 1970's, creating a large underclass when
those economics faltered and they found themselves trapped by their
own children, who had become westernized; advocates of local
autonomy, such as the Bretons and the Welsh, who were not salved by
signs of British or French good will; dissident theologians Hans
Kung and Edward Schillebeeckx, squared up against a new Polish Pope
who stood four-square against the dilution of traditional theology;
the Solidarity movement in Poland; Sakharov and his dissenting
cohorts in the Soviet Union; the collapse of Eurocommunism and even
the retreat of democratic socialism in the face of the victories of
Thatcher and her partners in idealism across the continent; the
growth of the German "Greens" in their quest for building a society
on a human scale. Along with this, Hughes even finds time to
analyze some of the works of such novelists or critics as Milan
Kundera, Roy Medvedev, Adam Michnik, and Jurgen Habermas. Hughes
depicts dissenters as both angry (the Paris rebels of 1968 were
"ignorant of actual violence" but "cultivated its rhetoric") and
suffused with the feeling that "Gargantuan laughter alone could
encompass the absurdity of the century's last quarter." In sum,
Hughes reveals a dissenting spirit considerably tempered from the
revolutionary zeal of the earlier 20th century. This is an
excellent short introduction for anyone wishing to take a quick
course in the sometimes abstruse waters of European
intellectualism. (Kirkus Reviews)
Those who think otherwise, though they may fail, deserve our
attention, says H. Stuart Hughes. In "Sophisticated Rebels," Hughes
shows what happened to the revolutionary spirit after the 1968
suppressions in Prague and Paris: dissenters learned their lesson
and began to pursue their goals in patient, realistic, limited
fashion, eschewing violence and inflammatory ideological rhetoric.
Yet theirs were the voices protesting what even conformists
recognize as social evils; the manipulative routine of bureaucratic
authority, public and private; the soullessness of life in the
sprawling conurbations European cities have become; the deadening
of sensibility that allows us to screen out from consciousness the
possibility of nuclear war.
Hughes takes up in turn the innovations in dissidence during a
reactionary age: the foreign workers, especially Moslems, who
flooded the more prosperous countries of Europe in the 1970s,
creating a large underclass; the advocates of local cultural
autonomy, such as the Welsh and Bretons; the independent-minded
theologians Hans Kung and Edward Schillebeeckx and Leonardo Boff
arrayed against Pope John Paul II, who was himself rebelling
against a dilution of Catholic theology; Poland's Solidarity and
with it the longing for reunification of a sundered continent; the
frustration of Soviet dissent, from the hope of Khrushchev's "thaw'
to the sufferings of Sakharov; the collapse of Eurocommunism and
the falterings of democratic socialism; and the slow advance of the
German Greens toward a society on a human scale. Although European
dissent, with the exception of the Greens, has failed to shake the
hold of conservative rule, Hughes believes the subject matterof
dissent--notably the protest against the nuclear menace--has lost
none of its timeliness for the century ahead, and the dissenters
themselves face the future with both stoicism and hope.
Serving as markers throughout the route are brief analyses of
the relevance of novelists and social critics, among them Milan
Kundera, Adam Michnik, Yuri Trifonov, Roy Medvedev, and Jurgen
Habermas.
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