1968: liberty or its illusion?

1968 looms large in the history of modern times, and in our sense of what it means to be modern. And small wonder. This was the year that saw the Tet offensive and My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the murders of Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy, Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech and the legalisation of abortion in Britain, the signing of the first nuclear non-proliferation treaty and Soviet tanks rolling into Prague, "Hey Jude" at number one worldwide and Nixon elected US president, the killing of dozens of protestors before the opening of the Mexico Olympics and rioting at the Democratic convention in Chicago… not to mention the deaths of Enid Blyton and Tony Hancock, and the births of Dad's Army and the Victoria tube line.

40 years on, the modern world is more ambivalent than ever about the significance of this year and that near-mythological decade, the Sixties. In a special symposium this month—an extended version of which appears online, featuring more than 50 leading thinkers—we invited contributors to debate everything from feminism to fascism to fashion. Were the early stirrings of postmodern thought, as Roger Scruton suggests, an appalling outburst of self-indulgence and a parody of true education; or did the anarchic energy of that decade inspire much that has been best about the years since, as Joe Boyd argues? Were the protests of May 1968 symptoms of self-indulgent bourgeois pride, as Paul Ormerod says; or a very heaven of revolt against blimpish conservatism, as Denis MacShane sees them? Is the fetishism of 1968 itself a wishful illusion, as Dominic Sandbrook argues, and the cult of the Sixties an evasion of the far more important events of a decade later: the Islamic revolution, the rise of Pope John Paul II, the birth of Thatcherism and Reaganism?

All our contributors are indexed alphabetically at the head of the symposium to aid your browsing, and every entry can be read for free. Dip into and out of our compendium this month—and do let us know your own views below.