A Beautiful Politics: Theodore Roszak's Romantic Radicalism and the Counterculture

Abstract

It is now almost fifty years since the publication of one of the most influential studies of 1960s youth culture, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition by Theodore Roszak. Published in 1969, it developed a number of ideas introduced the previous year in a series of well-received articles for The Nation, a weekly American journal of progressive opinion.2 Of course, an anniversary is not in itself a good enough reason to revisit a book. However, the significance of this work, not only in popularizing the word “counter culture”3 and in contributing to our understanding of protest politics during the 1960s, but, as I will argue, in developing a distinctive countercultural philosophy make it worthy of re/consideration by those interested in discourses of dissent.