A Beautiful PoliticsTheodore Roszak's Romantic Radicalism and the Counterculture

Ugly will not be made beautiful by the increase of ugliness. And beauty—the beauty of human souls reclaimed and illuminated—is the banner and power of our revolution. A beautiful politics. Despite the bastards. The technocracy will not be overthrown. It will be displaced—inch by inch—by alternative realities imaginatively embodied.¹

It is now almost fifty years since the publication of one of the most influential studies of 1960s youth culture, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition by Theodore Roszak. Published in 1969, it developed a number of ideas introduced the previous year in a series of well-received articles for the Nation, a weekly American journal of progressive opinion.² Of course, an anniversary is not in itself a good enough reason to revisit a book. However, the significance of this work, not only in popularizing the word "counterculture" and contributing to our understanding of protest politics during the 1960s, but also, I argue, in developing a distinctive countercultural philosophy, make it worthy of re/consideration by those interested in discourses of dissent.³

In a review of The Making of a Counter Culture for the San Francisco Chronicle, Alan Watts encouraged those of his contemporaries who "want to know what is happening among [their] intelligent and mysteriously rebellious children" to buy the book. "The generation gap, the student uproar, the New Left, the beats and hippies, the psychedelic movement, rock music, the revival of occultism and mysticism, the protest against our involvement in Vietnam, and the seemingly odd reluctance of the young to buy the affluent technological society—all these matters are here discussed, with sympathy and constructive criticism, by a most articulate, wise, and humane historian."⁴ Of course, not everyone who took Watts's advice and picked up the book agreed with his assessment. Some, such as Linda Herbst, found his treatment "naïve" or, like Andrew Greeley, considered him to be "preaching a new irrationality."⁵ Others, such as Clive James, while disagreeing that his analysis betrayed naïveté and irrationality nevertheless concluded that, overall, it was "not very good." Roszak can, James argued, "draw upon sufficient intellectual resources to know a problem when he sees it. Having seen it, he raises it; and having raised it, skates around it. So The Making of a Counter Culture is shallow without being naïve, which is a lot worse than [previous books on the underground] which were shallow because they were naïve."⁶ While James was arguably right to draw attention to Roszak's enthusiastic support for the counterculture without fully interrogating the implications of his position or cogently articulating a viable alternative (which he would go on to do in subsequent books), generally speaking, many disagreed that the book was "not very good." Indeed, like Watts, many at the time lauded it as "a brilliant book,"⁷ while others have since come to consider it as perhaps "the most insightful analysis of the social trends of the sixties"⁸ and arguably "the most influential contemporary account of the counter culture."⁹ Certainly, as James conceded, it is not a naïve book.

Roszak understood the counterculture better than most academic observers at the time and, for all its youthful exuberance and excess, he saw that it was, as the sociologist Bernice Martin later commented, "an index to a whole new cultural style, a set of values, assumptions and ways of living." More particularly, drawing on Roszak's analysis, she agreed that postwar cultural changes could be understood in terms of the "working out of the principles of Romanticism" that had become embedded in western culture at the dawn of the modern age.¹⁰ As the currents of Romanticism and antistructure gained ground during the 1960s, Roszak discerned "a transformation in the assumptions and the habitual practices which form the cultural bedrock of the daily lives of ordinary people," opening Western societies up to "the expressive revolution."¹¹ Hence, it has always seemed rather odd to me that otherwise excellent analyses of the period...