Contemporary Student Rebellions — Intellectual Rebellion and Generational Conflict

Abstract

Beyond many features which contemporary student currents share with other types of youth movements, the contemporary student movements evince also some new ones. Of these, two are perhaps most outstanding. There is, first, that probably for the first time in history at least some parts of these movements tend to become entirely dissociated from broader social or national movements, from the adult world, and do not tend to accept any adult models or association — thus stressing intergenerational discontinuity and conflict to an unprecendented extent.

Second, many of these movements tend also to combine their political activities with violence and destructive orientation which go much beyond the anarchist or bohemian traditions of youth or artistic, intellectual sub cultures and with a very far-reaching general and widespread alienation from the existing social order.

These new features of youth rebellion and student protest are analyzed as a result of the convergence and mutual reinforcement of the two major sets of conditions or processes, namely, of widespread intellectual antino mianism on the one hand, and of generational discontinuity and conflict, and of their simultaneous extension to the central zones of a society and to very wide groups and strata alike.