"The Archangel of Student Revolt"

"Freedom's Orator leads us, then, into a historical paradox: the radicalism of the FSM--its disruption of campus decorum through sit-ins and the like, its assertion of students as citizens rather than charges of the university--rested on a liberal foundation that much of the FSM's rhetoric insistently undermined. From one perspective, the FSM was reanimating liberal ideals of participatory democracy--the freedoms of speech and association, exercised with consequence--that established liberals seemed to ignore in practice; it offered a true believer's liberalism. From another, it was joining with the Goldwater campaign to delegitimate postwar liberalism, rallying like the Goldwaterites against state-sponsored bureaucracy and helping to popularize the phrase 'well-meaning liberal' as a term of disrepute."

Scott Saul reviews Robert Cohen's Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s in The Nation.