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

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.