“A Setting Where Things Can Happen”: The Dialectics of Liberation Congress and the Politics of Knowledge in the 1960s

For two weeks in July 1967, several thousand people attended the International Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London, a sprawling event that is now largely remembered as a point of convergence for an unlikely roster of prominent radical intellectuals—Stokely Carmichael, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, and Herbert Marcuse among them. This article uses a broad array of sources to present the congress as a mass counterinstitution in which a variety of social actors—including not only the invited speakers, but also conference organizers and audience members—struggled to establish nonauthoritarian forms of knowledge production. The record of these efforts, and in particular the audience's demand to participate directly in the production and exchange of ideas, illuminates the ways in which radical intellectuals' challenge to dominant institutions in the global North during the late 1960s threatened to undermine their own discursive authority.