ABSTRACT
Despite the successes of the counterculture, the "generation" that produced them has reproduced some of the culture and sensibility it ideologically disavowed, and this is a sort of definition both of a "failed" revolution and of the nature of social life. Many of the core beliefs generally associated with the counterculture constitute a peculiar mélange of old and odd traditions synthesized in eclectic and syncretic ways with radical political and personal experiments in equality, sexuality, effusive "expressiveness", and other "liberations". There is, nevertheless, an inherently uneasy relationship between political and cultural radicalism. The marriage of politically and culturally radical impulses is difficult to sustain for many reasons, which ordinary democratic politicians, faced with gathering majority coalitions, know a lot about. In established institutions that are part of a society's dominant culture, the reproduction as well as transformation of sensibility is facilitated by the relatively uncontested controls exercised by institutions over teaching, training, and the circumstances in which both take place.
