Getting Past New Left Pastlessness

Abstract

No book has done more to shape our conventional view of radicalism in the 1960s than Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counter Culture (1969). Roszak defined the generational politics of that decade in terms of the counterculture's resistance to technocracy. Here I turn to a largely neglected legacy of that same youth culture: its blanket resistance to historical reference. Both of these putative radicalisms support a politics of the street (Lasch, Culture 151) a would-be carnivalism that turns out to be as highly mediated and "technocratic" as any party politics. Indeed, at about the time Roszak was framing his counter-technocracy argument, Norman Mailer concluded that the new generation, having been weaned on T.V. and technologically packaged affluence, "believed in technology more than any before it..." (103). The basic premise of youthful radicalism was a sense of boundless possibility-a sense that could hardly have been imagined outside a technologically oriented society.