Contestazione studentesca: cultura del dissenso in America e in Europa negli anni Sessanta e Settanta

Abstract

Dissent is the nineteen-sixties-seventies cultural keyword both in the States and Western Europe. Dissent defines the long uninterrupted 1960s – 1970s juvenile cultural revolution both in the United States and Europe. The new time was announced by the 1964 free-speech movement at Berkley University involving from its very beginning the civil rights question, to which the protest was soon added against the American military involvement in the twenty-years long Viet-Nam war. As a matter of fact, the student movement was meant to radically change the world. Some of the roots of this revolution are to be looked for in the late forties and in the fifties. The question more or less knowingly being dealt with was first of all the radical perspective of freeing the mind from all social conditioning and received ideas. It was the same perspective defined by Ronald Laing’s and David Cooper’s new anti-psychiatric approach. Protest, and the struggle for freedom, however, was doomed to extreme radicalization, turning discussion, and utopian dreams into political violence the Weathermen, of course, in the States, die Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany, Le Brigate Rosse in Italy, turning dreams and ideological struggle into a nightmare.