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Yet another insightful and illuminitive tome. This work ties in with Bobos listed above. In it we learn of the transition from Class Aesthetics to a mercantile Cool Aesthetics. Think your dress, make-up, style, music or any other commodity is intrinsicly transgressive? Do you feel that if only enough people dropped acid and listened to Led Zepplin (or even NeoFolk), enough people would wake up and the world would move on to a new phase of utopian harmony? This book exposes the myth of the counter-culture and how it is nothing more than the Loyal Opposition. I know this was listed with Class & Social Strata, but I felt that it was appropriate here as well.
As the counterculture hippies evolved into yuppies and traded their Volkswagen Beetles in for gas-guzzling SUVs, they were not selling out; they were merely following the natural path laid out for them by the core assumptions of the counterculture. So argue Heath (philosophy, U. of Toronto, Canada) and Potter (philosophy, Trent U., Canada) in this work of cultural criticism that attacks the theory of society they believe underlie countercultural ideas. Ideas about the psychological oppression of the individual by organized society articulated by figures like Herbert Marcuse, the "society of the spectacle" decried by the French situationists, and others identified by the authors as part of the counterculture milieu are criticized and blamed for devolving into empty protest that ironically may serve to undermine efforts toward greater justice for exploited groups.
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