The Making of a Counter Culture - by Theodore Roszak (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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."

From the Back Cover

In this book, the author traces the intellectual underpinnings of the 1960s student radicals and hippie dropouts in the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, Allen Ginsberg and Paul Goodman. In a new introduction, Roszak reflects on how the counter culture has evolved in the twenty-five years since he coined the term 'technocracy.'

Review Quotes

"Whether or not the dissenting young read this book, others who care about our culture, youth, technology and religion should."--"Christian Century

About the Author

Theodore Roszak is Professor of History at California State University, Hayward. Among his many books are The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (1995), The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking (California, 1994) and, as coeditor, Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind (1995).