ABSTRACT
There have been throughout history recurrent periods of seismic change when the accepted norms and values of society have been decisively challenged and an explosion of new ideas and forms, beliefs and behaviour patterns has been touched off. The sixteenth century with its Renaissance and its Reformation; the era of Romanticism and revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and the 1960s with the rise of the counter-culture are examples. In each period, there has been a background of rising economic prosperity, growing materialism and increased leisure allowing the luxury of thought and experimentation. All have involved the idea of rebellion and rejection of the dominant ideology and all have been followed by periods of repression and retrenchment: Renaissance and Reformation were followed by absolutism and Counter-Reformation; revolution and Romanticism by, in England, the rise of evangelicalism and parliamentary democracy; and the counter-culture by the advent of Thatcherism and Reaganism. Each of these eras has centred on a rediscovery of the self and of selfhood, individuality, self-awareness and self-fulfilment. Each has seen the simultaneous assertion of asceticism and libertinism as a means of self-expression.
