Perhaps most prominently associated with the counterculture movement in the 1960s, Roszak was born in 1933. He received his B.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1955 and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1958. Roszak began his career as an instructor in history at Stanford University and is currently professor of history at California State University, Hayward. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1971.

Like his mentor Lewis Mumford, Roszak combines political and cultural criticism with a thoroughgoing critique of technology and technological society. Published in 1969, his first book was an effort to understand the counterculture movement. In The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition, Roszak criticizes consumer society, the military-industrial complex it supports, the increasing concentration of populations in unclean, unsafe, and ungovernable cities, and the technocratic and...