the selected writings of countercultural social critic theodore roszak, co-edited with peter richardson. book manuscript in progress.
This book in development, co-edited with Peter Richardson, offers a selection of key writings from the career of underappreciated social critic and historian Theodore Roszak (1933-2011). The volume fills in the picture of a writer who helps us better understand American politics and culture from the 1960s onward. Roszak’s work, however, is not merely a historical curiosity. It also has something to offer contemporary cultural and political thinkers, especially those who continue to grapple, as Roszak did, with the ongoing problems of modern society’s turn to evermore devious technocratic modes of abstracted and dehumanized control.
Roszak is best known for his bestselling 1968 book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, which is often misunderstood as a celebration. In fact, it is a sympathetic but critical inquiry into the nature of countercultural activity as a new mode of dissent. Moreover, over the rest of his career, Roszak wrote about much more than just hippies. He took on topics such as peace, technology, the environment, gender, psychology, American foreign policy, and the role not just of the young, but also of elders in American life. Roszak worked in multiple genres, from critical essays and anthology collections to science fiction novels and even comic strip drawings.
As what political theorist Michael Walzer calls a “connected critic,” Roszak paid attention to both the old and the new, tradition and the cutting edge. He was attuned and sympathetic to others, but always rigorously attentive to problems and issues on all sides. His writing was never rigid or doctrinaire. Instead he tried to identify a territory of sanity in a world whose very rationalism often seemed to lead to the brink of madness. While those in charge designed mechanisms that subverted, limited, or outright thwarted deep yearnings for autonomy and community, Roszak sought, in his words, to “flourish a tiny banner against the inhumanities of the technocracy.”