You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. I fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a few radical clichés; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and it's crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence.

The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America