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Ideal Minds: Raising Consciousness in the Antisocial Seventies

Online ISBN:
9781501752452
Print ISBN:
9781501752438
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

Ideal Minds: Raising Consciousness in the Antisocial Seventies

Michael Trask
Michael Trask
University of Kentucky
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Published online:
20 May 2021
Published in print:
15 November 2020
Online ISBN:
9781501752452
Print ISBN:
9781501752438
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

Following the 1960s, the decade's focus on consciousness-raising transformed into an array of intellectual projects far afield of movement politics. The mind's powers came to preoccupy a range of thinkers and writers: ethicists pursuing contractual theories of justice, radical ecologists interested in the paleolithic brain, cultists, and the devout of both evangelical and New Age persuasions. This book presents a boldly revisionist argument about the revival of subjectivity in postmodern American culture, connecting familiar figures within the intellectual landscape of the 1970s who share a commitment to what the book calls “neo-idealism” as a weapon in the struggle against discredited materialist and behaviorist worldviews. In a heterodox intellectual and literary history of the 1970s, the book mixes ideas from cognitive science, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, deep ecology, political theory, science fiction, neoclassical economics, and the sociology of religion. It also delves into the decade's more esoteric branches of learning, including Scientology, anarchist theory, rapture prophesies, psychic channeling, and neo-Malthusianism. Through this investigation, the book argues that a dramatic inflation in the value of consciousness and autonomy beginning in the 1970s accompanied a growing argument about the state's inability to safeguard such values. Ultimately, the thinkers who the book analyses found alternatives to statism in conditions that would lend intellectual support to the consolidation of these concepts in the radical free market ideologies of the 1980s.

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