Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals: Agitators, Hippies, Urban Guerrillas, and Germany’s Youth Revolt of the 1960s and 1970s is now available for purchase in our online store. Save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process. Also available in ebook format at Amazon.com (Kindle) and Barnes & Noble (NOOK).
“The idea of a revolutionary, ‘post-materialistic’ subject, personified by marginal actors, was popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre, who viewed outcasts and criminals, like the writer and petty criminal Jean Genet, as enlightened critics of bourgeois society. In Germany, Frankfurt School theorists like Claus Offe proposed that in ‘late capitalism’ ever more social groups—the unemployed, the mentally ill, the lawbreakers—would be pushed to the margins and could eventually pose a real threat to the social order. The problem, as one wit put it, was that ‘late capitalism’ kept arriving too late.”
—Elliot Neaman, Free Radicals: Agitators, Hippies, Urban Guerrillas, and Germany’s Youth Revolt of the 1960s and 1970s
Praise for Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals
“Neaman’s book is truly a tour d’horizon through the magical years of awakening in the sixties, which started in the San Francisco Bay Area and didn’t stop when it came to Germany, as well as covering the depressing slide into years of terrorism that followed.”
—Wolfgang Kraushaar, Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur
“A much-needed, careful, and well-researched history of the leftist radicalism of West Germany’s 1960s and its aftereffects on the leftist terrorism of the 1970s. Free Radicals the best English-language examination of the intersection of ideas, lives, and politics in these tumultuous and very violent years in West Germany.”
—Jeffrey Herf, Distinguished University Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland
“Its pages steeped in vast learning, Free Radicals is both accessible and diverting, offering a wonderful reenactment of a fascinating and fateful period in recent history.”
—Samuel Moyn, Harvard University, Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History, Harvard University
