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It may be extravagant of Radical Organizer Rennie Davis to describe it as "the political trial of the century." But the trial of the Chicago "conspiracy" may well rank as one of the more significant legal confrontations of the decade between authority and dissent. The proceeding, due to open this week against eight radicals accused of conspiring to incite riots at last year's Democratic Convention, represents an extraordinary convergence of all of the political currents that have convulsed the U.S. during the '60s.

The Justice Department displayed an unwonted sense of history--even of theatricality--in selecting the defendants. They represent the total spectrum of dissent and ordinarily, observes Author Michael Harrington, "they would find it difficult to agree on the time of day." As in the conspiracy trial of Dr. Benjamin Spock and four other antiwar activists, some of the Chicago "conspirators" had not met one another before they were indicted.

Among them is David Dellinger, 54, a "revolutionary pacifist" who mourns the passing of nonviolent resistance and chides the younger radicals, most of them oriented to the Students for a Democratic Society, for their hysterical rhetoric. Tom Hayden is a gifted, mercurial writer and organizer who was a founder of S.D.S. Also indicted were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, leaders of the prankishly absurd Yippies, and Davis, the son of a White House economic adviser during the Truman Administration and an organizer for the National Mobilization Committee. Black Panther Bobby Scale came to the Chicago convention almost by chance. He was filling in as a speaker for Eldridge Cleaver, whose parole board refused to let him leave California. The other defendants are John Froines, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon, and Lee Weiner, a Northwestern University graduate student.

Already beatified among protesters as "the Chicago Eight," the defendants are the first to be indicted under the antiriot provision of the 1968 civil rights act. The provision was tacked onto the bill by a conservative Senate coalition led by South Carolina's Strom Thurmond. It may, in fact, be unconstitutional. A host of local, state and federal laws already cover acts of incitement to riot. What the antiriot provision defines as criminal is the "intent" to incite to riot. Thus the law prescribes a fine of $10,000 or five years in prison--or both--for anyone who "travels in interstate commerce or uses any facility of interstate or foreign commerce, including but not limited to the mail, telegraph, telephone, radio or television, with intent to incite riot." The concept of judging a defendant's intent is not particularly unusual; there are such offenses as assault with intent to kill. In dealing with a person's frame of mind regarding civil disorders, however, large and ambiguous questions arise involving the difference between the legitimate exercise of dissent and an unlawful intent to create mayhem.

Karate Lessons. The indictments against the eight charge that they crossed state lines, wrote articles, spoke and otherwise encouraged others to come and disrupt Chicago. The defendants are accused of encouraging demonstrators "to make weapons to be used against the police and to shout obscenities at, throw objects at, threaten and physically assault policemen and National Guard troops." The prosecution, led by U.S. Attorney Thomas Foran, will emphasize that demonstrators were given lessons in karate, Japanese snake dancing and defense against police attacks. "Some of these men are highly intelligent, highly sophisticated agitators," says Foran.

The defendants base part of their case on the Walker report, which called the Chicago violence during the Democratic Convention "a police riot." On that basis, it might be said that the Chicago eight are being tried for conspiring to incite the police to riot. The defense will argue that Lyndon Johnson, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and other party leaders were, in fact, conspiring to deny them their constitutional rights of peaceable assembly and dissent. In the unlikely event that Federal District Court Judge Julius Hoffman, 74, grants a pretrial hearing to consider these arguments, the defense will subpoena Johnson, Daley and other Democratic leaders.

Eight for Eight. Indictments against the eight defendants were drawn up in the last months of the Johnson Administration by Foran, who also pursued cases against eight Chicago policemen for their conduct during the convention violence.*Attorney General Ramsey Clark refused to press the indictments against the radicals, however. Among other things, he believed that in general the demonstrators were exercising their constitutional right of free speech and that, in any case, no federal laws were involved in such offenses as attacking policemen. But Attorney General John Mitchell is pressing the case because he wants to use the antiriot law to trap what he regards as a small number of hard-core troublemakers who are distinguishable from "conventional" demonstrators. The Administration obviously believes that the "hard core" must be isolated and punished, and that failure to prosecute the Chicago eight would suggest condonation of their behavior and encourage its repetition. Mitchell's critics argue that the very process of prosecuting the "hard core" further radicalizes the "conventional."

Already there have been rumblings of a second "Chicago" to attend the trial. The defendants say that they are planning "peaceful demonstrations designed to bring across the issues," which seems reasonable enough. But some S.D.S. members would be delighted to provoke the police into a repetition of last year's violence, a tactic hardly likely to advance their cause or that of the defendants. The S.D.S., which has rejected the nonviolent protest espoused by other groups involved in the "fall peace offensive," is planning an action called "Days of Rage" in Chicago from Oct. 8 to 11. The conspiracy trial may well indicate how much the U.S. is willing to reshape traditional notions of liberty in order to achieve order. Ironically, the result of the trial may well be to provoke more disorder and, in effect, enlarge "the conspiracy."

* Three of the policemen were never acquitted in June of charges of beating a Chicago newsman. The other cases are sill pending.

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