| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s. Ed. by Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle. (New York: Routledge, 2002. x, 398 pp. Cloth, $85.00, ISBN 0-415-93039-1. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-415-93040-5.)

This volume seeks to correct the conservative critique of the counterculture, from Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich, that saw it leaving a legacy of individualism and consumerism. It is not a difficult task, since the counterculture rejected consumerism and sought to overcome individualism with a new kind of community. The editors declare in their introduction that the term 'counterculture' 'falsely reifies what should never properly be construed as a social movement.' They describe it instead as 'an inherently unstable collection of attitudes, tendencies, postures, gestures, 'lifestyles,' visions, hedonistic pleasures, moralisms, negations, and affirmations.' Nevertheless, they proceed to divide the counterculture in a traditional historical way into two periods, early and late. The early phase began in 1964 with the optimism represented by the Beatles and ended in 1968 with the election of Richard M. Nixon; that phase was hopeful that society was about to enter a revolutionary post-scarcity epoch that would erase the work-play dichotomy and the repressive culture associated with it. The late phase of the counterculture came in the early 1970s and was marked by a fragmentation into different cultural liberation movements seeking to fulfill radical values outside a society that seemed irredeemable. . . .

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