When it was published twenty-five years ago, this book captured a huge
audience of Vietnam War protesters, dropouts, and rebels-and their
baffled elders. Theodore Roszak found common ground between 1960s
student radicals and hippie dropouts in their mutual rejection of what
he calls the technocracy-the regime of corporate and technological
expertise that dominates industrial society. He traces the intellectual
underpinnings of the two groups in the writings of Herbert Marcuse and
Norman O. Brown, Allen Ginsberg and Paul Goodman. In a new introduction,
Roszak reflects on the evolution of counter culture since he coined the
term in the sixties.
Alan Watts wrote of The Making of a Counter Culture in the San
Francisco Chronicle in 1969, "If you want to know what is happening
among your intelligent and mysteriously rebellious children, this is the
book. The generation gap, the student uproar, the New Left, the beats
and hippies, the psychedelic movement, rock music, the revival of
occultism and mysticism, the protest against our involvement in Vietnam,
and the seemingly odd reluctance of the young to buy the affluent
technological society-all these matters are here discussed, with
sympathy and constructive criticism, by a most articulate, wise, and
humane historian."