ABSTRACT
The impression of the manageability of human affairs was the result of the coincidence of two moments, of two generations who both thought of themselves as uniquely creative and innovative. The first impulse came from the decision-makers of the decade, who had been junior officials or politicians in the 1940s. The second was the product of a youth culture in protest, which was convinced that it too could make its world, and detested the implications of an apparently inhuman science and technology. Life in the 1960s was pharmacologically transformed and enhanced. The belief that human destiny was controlled and controllable followed from the scientific application of artificial hormones. One of the consequences of the academic study of growthmanship was politicians’ conviction that education and especially higher education produced concrete gains in growth and prosperity. Atlanticism was the main alternative European foreign policy orientation to Gaullism.
