ABSTRACT
Despite the grim pictures that have been painted of the 1960s, the prevailing pessimism towards their outcome has been grossly overstated. The fervour and the creativity that began in America with the rise of civil-rights struggles and went on to generate the New Left and alternative life-styles in Europe as well did not disappear in the 1970s, nor is it quite clear that they have spent themselves in the 1980s. Blanket criticisms of the past two decades as ‘narcissistic’ and ‘career-oriented’ are much too simplistic to characterize what is virtually a whole generation. Indeed, if anything, such criticisms are likely to conceal an ongoing ferment that graded slowly out of the 1960s, a unifying continuum that seems to have produced more sophisticated and more serious movements in the 1970s and 1980s.
