Between Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-1980

In the 1960s and 1970s, Western Europe's "Golden Age," a new youth consciousness emerged which gave this period its distinctive character. Offering rich, new material, this volume challenges and moves beyond the easy conflation of European youth culture and "Americanization." It instead sets out to show, for the first time, how international developments fused with national traditions to produce specific youth cultures that then became the leading trendsetters of emergent postindustrial Western societies. This important new study presents a multifaceted portrait of European youth cultures, colored by differences in gender, class, and education, and explores the tension between emerging consumerism and growing politicization, succinctly expressed by Jean-Luc Godard in his 1965 pairing of "Marx and Coca-Cola."