The Movement

This book provides a brief, objective survey of the New Left, defined basically as a movement of white middle-class youth mainly during the 1960s and 1970s. Exploring the intellectual and social forces that helped generate it, the authors argue that the New Left represented the advent of a new sensitivity about organized society in general that was associated with a post-war, post-depression generation unhampered—or, alternately, unsobered—by the experiences of their parents and elders. As a movement of youth it was bold and playful as well as erratic and unstable, and simply could not stick as times worsened and discouragements mounted.