These last forty years, as each decade grinds to a close, there arrives the anniversary of 1968, with its invitation to nostalgia, the reconsideration of dashed hopes, or a pondering of the paradoxes of frustrated rebellion.

Already in 1978 Régis Debray argued that the revolutionaries of ’68 were as deluded and disoriented as Columbus arriving in the New World. They thought they were headed for the China of the “cultural revolution” when really they had landed on the beaches of “New Age” California. In the 1990s Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello put a different twist on this idea. The former soixante huitards, they argue in The New Culture of Capitalism, helped to break the dead hand of corporate bureaucracy and unleash a more entrepreneurial capitalism.

Madison Avenue has long heralded improbable “revolutions” in car design, clothing, and cuisine. Today it celebrates sixties counterculture. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher turned t...

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