Civil rights started as the dominant issue of the new student movement although it never became an exclusively student issue. However, Feuer shies away from making a comprehensive survey of black generational attitudes. In one sense, I think, the black radicals do not appear to be quite so alienated as the whites. They have an alternative to the "system": black studies, black culture. At Harvard, the Faculty found it far easier to deal with Afro than to pacify SDS.

Mr. Feuer might also have paid more attention to the flower child strand of student militarism because it bears directly on the problems of "alienation" which provide the rationale of revolt. Many in the New Left see the answer to alienation in the mystical striving for community among comrade-students. Their philosophy of love emphasizes "touching one another." The theme of "touching one another" has somehow gotten mixed up with the ghetto concept of "soul" and the Hollywood concept of "beautiful people." What results is a syrupy emotion alleged to strike beautiful people very intensely during moments of civil disobedience.

Feuer refers to Camus as the philosopher of "alienation" and a generational hero. Feuer does not cover the cult of Che Guevara and Regis DeBray, though one passage recognizes the role of Fidelism in radical student culture. The spirit of Che synthesized all the ingredients of the New Left: an anti-American intellectual who galvanized the masses in one country and suffered glorious martyrdom in another. This vision of the radical's mission to redirect history made a somewhat turgid book called Revolution in the Revolution? a best seller. Feuer lists C. Wright Mills and Paul Goodman as the new radical heroes, though Herbert Marcuse has probably had as much influence as either at Harvard.

ONE CAN partially blame these cultural heros for "participatory democracy," the contribution of the New Left to political theory. Its advocates originally put the demands on "spontaneity." In practice spontaneity turned out to justify action by a small dictatorial elite through the language of sham non-violence. The Movement seizes power for the majority and acts as a benevolent tutor.

Participatory democracy has consequently revolutionized the concept of civil disobedience. Originally conceived by Martin Luther King as an appeal to the conscience of the community, civil disobedience reflected a basic faith in workings of representative democracy. The SDS conceives of civil disobedience as the first step in confrontation of the power structure. One must therefore provoke the authorities and hope for the violence which may radicalize the student majority. What keeps generational consciousness most intense, writes Feuer, is generational martyrdom -- "the actual experience of one's fellow student assaulted or imprisoned" by the police.

One can critcize Feuer's use of adolescent psychology as too crude. More goes into the making of a student activist than the two drives of altruism and generational hatred. But his sophisticated treatment of the generation as a historical unit compensates for this lack of couth at the individual level. The concepts of deauthorization and gerontocracy explain convincingly why generational revolt occurs at one period and not another. A more thorough discussion of student populism, however, might have included the "neighborhood effect" at Columbia and Harvard. It might also have explained how the politics of university administrations aggravate generational hatreds. The book admittedly ignores the mistakes of the older generation except in vague references to the process of deauthorization. But the sins of the Establishment have been well rehearsed elsewhere.