The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition

Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969 (both hardcover and Anchor paperback edns.). "Portions of chapters I, II, IV, V and VI originally appeared in The Nation in March and April 1968 and have been revised for publication in this volume."

In Modern society, all are "locked into" a figurative "leviathan industrial apparatus" ruled by possessors of "technical expertise" who justify their rule by appeals to "Reason, material Progress," and "the scientific world view." In a resurgence of the Romantic movement, "by way of a dialectic" Karl "Marx could never have imagined, technocratic America produces a potentially revolutionary element among its young": the counterculture of the 1960s and its opposition to technocracy (Anchor edn., 21, 146, 34). See for real-world referents for fictional mechanized environments. (See entry for Roszak's Bugs, under Fiction, and for R. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, this Category.)[1] It is significant that TR and most others observers of the time saw the Counter Culture opposing technocratic society primarily in Western secular youth movements and largely missed the beginnings of more profound reactions in religious revivals.

RDE, Title, 28Aug19