See, the idea that people could be free is extremely frightening to anybody with power.

That’s why the 1960s have such a bad reputation. I mean, there’s a big literature about the Sixties, and it’s mostly written by intellectuals, because they’re the people who write books, so naturally it has a very bad name-because they hated it. You could see it in the faculty clubs at the time: people were just traumatized by the idea that students were suddenly asking questions and not just copying things down. In fact, when people like Allan Bloom [author of The Closing of the American Mind] write as if the foundations of civilization were collapsing in the Sixties, from their point of view that’s exactly right: they were. Because the foundations of civilization are, “I’m a big professor, and I tell you what to say, and what to think, and you write it down in your notebooks, and you repeat it.” If you get up and say, “I don’t understand why I should read Plato, I
think it’s nonsense,” that’s destroying the foundations of civilization. But maybe it’s a perfectly sensible question-plenty of philosophers have said it, so why isn’t it a sensible question?

As with any mass popular movement, there was a lot of crazy stuff going on in the Sixties-but that’s the only thing that makes it into history: the crazy stuff around the periphery. The main things that were going on are out of history-and that’s because they had a kind of libertarian character, and there is nothing more frightening to people with power.