Taken all in all, such changes constitute an underlying cultural transformation of European society; but they were hardly the ‘revolution’ envisaged in the slogans and actions of the generation of 1968.18 Indeed, that revolution had from the start been self-defeating. The same movements that purported to despise and abhor ‘consumer culture’ were from the outset an object of cultural consumption, reflecting a widespread disjunction between rhetoric and practice. Those in Paris or Berlin who aggressively declared their intention to ‘change the world’ were often the people most devoted to
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