On 4 April 1989 Abbie Hoffman said of the sixties: ‘We were young, we were reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong – and we were right! I regret nothing’. He was on a panel reviewing the decade's aftermath at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, along with Bobby Seale and Timothy Leary. It was during a time when the debate about the nature and legacy of the sixties was at its most fervent in the United States. This was to be Abbie's last public appearance. Eight days later he committed suicide.

The breach between the wild enthusiasms of Hoffman's public utterances and his private despair in some respects stands as emblematic of the axes of enchantment and disenchantment, of hope and of loss, around which so much of the discussion of the radicalism of the sixties revolves. This book addresses some of the ways in which this polarized thinking shapes commonplace connections made between sixties radicalism and the current political field. In the most familiar depictions of the decade, a trajectory moves from the emancipatory promises of the sixties to the apparent end of all possibility of a transformative politics. This end is seen to represent the contemporary situation. I am concerned to disrupt this narrative and to examine some of the political consequences of these taken-for-granted understandings.

While the definition, the periodization, the categorization, the location (national or global) and the outcomes of the sixties can all be contested, the decade nevertheless is invoked as though its meaning is common, shared and self-evident.