Children of the Middle Class - 1960s and Cultural Leadership

Author: Cheng Wei
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: This book presents a novel theme and unique methodology, representing a bold "cultural studies" attempt concerning the cultural movement of the 1960s. The author takes the Cultural Revolution as the subject, demonstrating outstanding new approaches to cultural studies at the interdisciplinary boundary of political economy and semiotics of language, proposing an effective interdisciplinary explanatory framework. His most challenging insight is that the Western New Left student movement and its diverse anti-cultural practices of the 1960s were, in fact, the historical continuation of bourgeois political and economic revolutions in the realm of cultural thought. The author synthesizes Hegel's historical morphology, Marx's class analysis, and Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony into a historical interpretive framework, providing a historical explanation of the 1960s cultural revolution. This book is a specialized monograph offering an in-depth study of the 1960s anti-cultural movement. It not only involves extensive historical materials and theoretical literature but also proposes highly original perspectives, arguing that this was "a revolution completed in the name of rebelling against the bourgeoisie, ultimately serving the bourgeoisie itself," and that it was "the bourgeoisie regaining the cultural hegemony that had been lost to the aristocracy and the left for a century and a half." This conclusion opens up a fresh perspective for understanding the nature of the 1960s revolution and holds significant implications for comprehending contemporary theoretical trends and academic research.