Off the Presses

Theodore Roszak, in The Making of a Counter Culture, identified the central battle of the sixties as that between youth culture and the technocracy. Integral to the struggle for liberation was the ouster of the expert, whose regime was predicated on a tautology: "The technocracy is legitimized because it enjoys the approval of experts; the experts are legitimized because there could be no technocracy without them." So did the counterculture expose the "myth of objective consciousness," Roszak wrote, and offer a way out of the consensus cul-de-sac of that terrible decade.