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M ix N FOREWORD N The Sixties in Perspective A Personal View DANIEL AARON Montague Farm, the subject of Tom Fels’s book, materialized in the late 1960s. It loosely cohered for the next thirty-five years “in different forms,” as he puts it, until under intense internal pressure the community disintegrated in the clash between its personal and collective missions. Even so, it lasted longer than most of the earlier communitarian experiments that sprang up and collapsed in nineteenth-century America. How did it survive as long as it did? Perhaps because it didn’t stick to a rigid set of principles and was never stiffened by ideological correctness . It remained pretty much an ad hoc operation. The Montague “farmers” figured as adjuncts in a kind of “organic farming” and “recycling ” movement—precursors of the current Green Party. Ideological issues mattered less to them than preserving the integrity of the planet. Other than that, I find no indication in Fels’s measured account of a utopian vision. Rather, it’s the story ofa small number of self-styled mavericks who from time to time found Montague Farm a workable and even enjoyable accommodation—relatively undemanding, congenial, and cheap. Montague Farm can be seen as a late episode in the long history of American communitarianism, but for me it has only a tenuous connection with the experiments in group living that sprang up even before the founding of the Republic. Nor can I liken the Montague commune to x N FOREWORD Brook Farm’s romantic enthusiasts or to the hard-headed members of Robert Owen’s “Village of Cooperation” at New Harmony, Indiana, that flickered and faded between 1824 and 1828. By 1968 I had sensed a widening gulf between a loosely defined Old Left and the New Radicals of the time. The latter, I uncharitably decided, were too full of themselves and their personal grievances to work in tandem with the antediluvians of the over-thirty generation. During my long engagement with writers and political thinkers who unabashedly challenged the assumptions of their respective “societies,” I found what I was looking for myself in nineteenth-century American dissent and in the ideas and activities of our home-grown “reformers.” Unlike the student activists of the 1960s, however, my allegiances were unharnessed and “extra-generational”: they included young and old, male and female, wild and tame. Thoreau bulked large for me, as he did for the Sixties radicals, but more so Emerson, perhaps because he could cherish the cranks and eccentrics whose yawps once resounded in the antebellum United States—and keep his distance from them. ...

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