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all those problems neglected in the fifties that could no longer be
wished away-the same problems that men like Mills, Goodman , and
Marcuse-to say nothing of sociological popularizers like Vance
Packard and William Whyte-had already gone far towards identifying.
What complicated this parallel between thought and practice
was that so many of the disaffected in the sixties were the products of
affluence and education rather than deprivation. Their predecessors,
the younger generation in the fifties, had played hard to win, but
they
were challenging the rules of the game or refusing to play at all.
The intelligentsia of the fifties, centered in a few cities and a few
universities , were a self-conscious elite disdainful of mass society and
middlebrow vulgarity. But the "young intelligentsia" whom
C.
Wright Mills had identified as agents of change were to become an
amorphous mass spread out through thousands of colleges and com–
munes, in the country and the city, whose culture enshrined music
and films and dtugs more than books, but who adopted certain books
that rationalized their discontent and gave it a structure, books that
helped them articulate a new set of values . Some of these writers in
turn adopted them, visibly surprised that their own ideas, deemed
unpublishable in the fifties, should suddenly find a mass echo.
I wish to single out Marcuse , Goodman and Brown as the theo–
rists whose work had the greatest impact on the new culture of the
sixties. Their work responded deeply to the social and moral impasse
of the Eisenhower era but also went beyond criticism to a new vision
of the social order and its possibilities. The impasse of an era is re–
flected in the impasse of its criticism. The ills of American society in
the fifties were rivaled by the decadence of Marxist criticism, which
had degenerated into a metaphysic of brittle slogans and rigid histori–
cal hopes, none of which could hide two generations of moral and
political compromise . For Old Leftists society was an engine with
certain parts, going in a predictable direction. For ex-Leftists, now
under the sway of Burke, Tocqueville, or Weber, society was a deli–
cate organism whose parts could not be tampered with without grave
risk of damaging the whole. Both points of view were peculiarly
fatalistic, and unresponsive to what actually could be done in society.
The Marxism of the former was "economic" and "scientific"; it
sought "iron laws" in history and-unlike the Marxism ofMarx-left
