Abstract

In comparison with the buoyantly optimistic 1960s, the 1970s are often characterized as a pessimistic decade. The great hopes and ambitious ideas envisioned by the 1960s generation were replaced by a sense of doom and disappointment in modern society, with its unequal distribution of resources, environmental problems, and the threat of nuclear war.1 Among political radicals, the spontaneous movements of the 1960s grew into more organized and dogmatic forms of leftist political activity. However, as Blake Slonecker has argued, a utopian impulse, reaching from the late 1960s to the communal living experiments of the 1970s, can be traced in the American counterculture movement.2 Many of the experiments of the 1960s...