In the 1960s and 1970s, Western Europe's "Golden Age" (Eric Hobsbawm), a
new youth consciousness emerged, which gave this period its distinctive
character. Offering rich and new material, this volume moves beyond the
easy conflation of youth culture and "Americanization" and instead sets
out to show, for the first time, how international developments fused
with national traditions to produce specific youth cultures that became
the leading trendsetters of emergent post-industrial Western societies.
It presents a multi-faceted portrait of European youth cultures, colored
by differences in gender, class, and education, and points out the
tension between emerging consumerism and growing politicisation,
succinctly expressed by Jean-Luc Godard in his 1967 pairing of "Marx and
Coca-Cola."