Eindeloos praten in vele tongen over het Nederlandse experiment

Samenvatting

Hans Righart's De eindeloze jaren zestig: Geschiedenis van een generatie-conflict ([The Endless Sixties: History of a Generation Conflict] 1995) & James C. Kennedy's Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw: Nederland in de jaren zestig ([Building New Babylon: The Netherlands in the Sixties] 1995) are reviewed, focusing on questions asked, explanations rejected, theories used, & compliance with sociological methodology. It is held that Kennedy's account is exceedingly rhetorical & may have been more convincing if similar ideas from Max Weber's interpretative sociology had been incorporated. Righart's explanation would have gained explanatory power if a distinction had been made between the goods market & government-supplied goods & if the attitudes caused by the government's inadequate supply of housing & pop music had been recognized. Subsequently, an attempt is made to reconcile Kennedy's & Righart's explanations in a technological-ideological evolutionary approach in which technological development is related to increasing activism; the Netherlands' eventual yielding to an expensive activist worldview is attributed to the unexpected finding of a huge natural gas deposit. International aspects are discussed briefly. 14 References. Adapted from the source document.