ABSTRACT
The American consensus, incremental change and the interplay of interest groups had transformed revolutionary impulses into party politics. By overstressing the "mechanisms of social control" that guaranteed "equilibrium," liberals had deprived themselves of concepts with which they could perceive, much less understand, what was happening. Paradoxically the same was largely true of the "New Left." Emotionally, the new radicalism was indeed exquisitely attuned to the crisis. But intellectually, the new radicals made a virtue of not having an "ideology." The concept of a "radical critique" of a contemporary American society still remains more of a slogan than an achievement. Post-Marxist and post-Freudian, aware of the interplay of human development and historical change, committed to radical change but unaligned with any radical faction, they assume that we will fail to fathom the modern crisis with the formulae of the past.
