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I suffered through the 1960s and now live with their legacy," declares Harvey Mansfield, in Stephen Macedo's Reassessing the Sixties. For Mansfield, as for other conservative contributors to this volume, the era was "a comprehensive disaster for America", the origins of every current social ill.

Inflamed with a prophetic ire worthy of any of his 1960s adversaries, Mansfield denounces "sex without inhibition", "crude, vulgar noisy" rock music (rap, he avers, is "the special contribution of blacks to American cultural degeneration"), feminism ("an ugly stepchild of the late sixties"), the "Vietnam syndrome" ("a number of disgracefully unpatriotic statements from that era require to be confessed and forgiven") and, above all, the corruption of the academy by affirmative action ("the college football team is the most honest part of the university: it cheats only to improve itself").

Mansfield's jeremiad does little to uphold the scholarly standards he claims to be defending. Similarly, Walter Berns's bitter account of the black student revolt at Cornell in 1970 plays fast and loose with dates and omits crucial facts. Surveying the depressing self-segregation all too common in today's US universities, Berns attributes it not to the endurance of racism, nor even to interracial distrust, but to "differences in aptitude" since "birds of a feather flock together". The same sneering prejudice pervades Jeremy Rabkin's attack on feminism, which he accuses of waging "an unrelenting struggle against an opponent that can't really fight back. Even strong men quail at the prospect of facing down angry women."

A more informed and challenging assessment of this era in American history can be found in David Burner's Making Peace With the 60s, which sets out to tell the story of the decade as "the history of the breaking apart of the liberal mentality". He contrasts the "moral perfection" of the civil rights movement of the first half of the decade with the "shrill", "strident", "separatist" bombast of the black power movement of the second half. He is starry-eyed about Kennedy ("his presence radiated energy informed by intellect and self-possession") and praises the liberals' "resolute and temperate" conduct of the "essentially rational" cold war, but condemns the slaughter in Vietnam and the liberal establishment's failure to extricate the country from it. He admires the courage and sincerity of draft resisters but resents "the clench-jawed earnestness" of "arrogant" student radicals drawn to "totalitarian" Marxism.

In chronicling the clash between "the temper of liberalism and the character of radicalism", Burner is handicapped by the absence of clear definitions of either term, and ends up simply claiming for liberalism those aspects of the 1960s of which he approves while disowning those he finds distasteful. His argument that Martin Luther King's "innate caution" reflected "the essential temper of American liberalism" is hard to reconcile with the track record of the defiant advocate of non-violent but decidedly illegal direct action, the internationalist who infuriated the White House by his fierce denunciation of American policy in Vietnam, or the emergent socialist who was mobilising an interracial poor people's campaign when he was assassinated.

In his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King attacked "the white moderate" who is "more devoted to 'order' than to justice, who paternalistically thinks he can set the timetable of another man's freedom". Burner quotes this passage but fails to grasp its significance as an expression of the logic and experience that motivated the impatient radicalism of the later 1960s.

Of course, this radicalism sometimes took irrational, intolerant, destructive, or self-indulgent forms, on which Paul Berman, in his Tale of Two Utopias, dwells at length. For him, the 1960s rebellions are rooted in the psychology of a generation bred in comfort and seeking in political action a sense of "authenticity".

Unlike Burner and his contributors, Berman does at least recognise that the movement was not confined to America, and refers to events in Paris, Prague and Mexico City. But in the end his perspective proves to be even more nationalistic than Burner's measured but parochial celebration of "American liberalism". For Berman, the original sin of the new left was its repudiation of rigorous anti-communism, by which he means, we gradually learn, an intransigent opposition not only to Stalin and the regimes he created, but to the entire Marxist tradition, and indeed to any attempt to improve on what he calls "liberal democracy", broadly synonymous with western capitalism, and embodied in particular in the United States, "freedom's golden cupola".

What Berman rejects are not so much the excesses as the underlying ambitions of the 1960s. After lengthy equivocation, he embraces the "end of history" thesis, and with it the cold war's certainties but without the cold war's enemy.

In the course of this unrevealing journey, Berman makes some extraordinary claims. As communist habits of thought infiltrated the New Left, "Stalin's Theory of Nationalism was everyone's favourite reading." Really? More irresponsibly, Berman asserts that "the classic quandary of modern American history" was "fighting in the name of liberal democracy against an aroused populace that had chosen something else". In what sense did American policy after 1945 promote "liberal democracy" in Chile, Turkey, Pakistan, the Philippines, Central America or Indonesia?

Like Burner, Berman disapproves of McCarthyism, but nowhere does he acknowledge its devastating impact on American politics and culture, or the radical steps required to break from the stultifying grip of 1950s-style intellectual and social conformity, or the brave humanity shown by those who rejected the mindless and often cruel "patriotism" of the day. Although all of these authors share a form of "American exceptionalism", none betrays an awareness of what really makes the American 1960s exceptional. Because of the weakness of socialist and social democratic traditions, the American new left often stumbled wildly, bereft of either ideological compass or organisational anchor. And because of the weakness of class politics, sections of that left were drawn, not surprisingly, to the "narcissistic politics of personal identity" loathed by both liberals and conservatives.

So many factors essential to an understanding of the 1960s are left out of all these books. This was a global phenomenon, the epicentre of which shifted constantly. Middle-class students were undoubtedly a significant component. But where are the industrial workers of Paris and Turin, the British shop stewards movement, or the Vietnam Vets against the war - a movement in which counter-culture, black power, working class identity and the discourse of moral witness all intersected? Even the peasants of southeast Asia, who might be considered the principal actors in the drama, hardly appear.

Above all, what is missing are the countless individuals who passed through the 1960s maelstrom and went on to work in trade unions, community groups, political parties, single-issue campaigns or academia. They have shown it is possible to learn from experience without jettisoning the restless social critique or the broader sense of human solidarity which are the best legacies of the era. In the end, these books tell us far more about the straitened political and social horizons of the mid-1990s than they do about the 1960s.

Mike Marqusee is a political journalistand author.