De jaren zestig in Nederland: Een geval van verlate modernisering?

Samenvatting

Reviews James C. Kennedy's discourse-oriented analysis of the 1960s in the Netherlands in Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw: Nederland in de jaren zestig ([Building New Babylon: The Netherlands in the Sixties] 1995) & in "New Babylon and the Politics of Modernity" (1997). It is argued that Kennedy fails to explain why the "collective discourse of modernity" which originated in the 1940s did not engender any significant social changes until the late 1960s; it is further noted that Kennedy tends to view the Dutch elites as a homogeneous group rather than as a set of subgroups. An interpretation that includes the important role of the structural, pillarized organization of Dutch institutions is deemed more adequate. It is argued that only after the gradual breakdown of pillarization & the subsequent rise of secondary elites from non-upper-class backgrounds could the collective discourse become sufficiently influenced by modern ideas to force the conservative majority of elites to adapt to new social structures. 14 References. Adapted from the source document.