Abstract

Discussions of the nature of American life during the last twenty years have often relied upon the simplistic distinction between the sixties as a decade of intense concern with public matters as opposed to the preoccupation with the self and personal life so evident in the seventies. In America's Quest for the Ideal Self, Clecak challenges this “sentimental” view of the last two decades, a “framework of nostalgia” which ignores their essential “thematic and ideological continuities” that are characterized as “a quest for personal fulfillment, a pursuit of a free, gratified unalienated self within one or more communities or valued others” (pp. 4–5).