Publisher's Synopsis
Described as 'One of America's best exponents of recent intellectual history' by The Economist, Berman uses the case of a famous - and notorious - German politician in a dazzling dissection of radical left politics then and now. In light of the international reactions to some photographs of Joschka in a fight published in 2001, noteably what the French newspaper Liberation called 'The Trial of the Generation of 68', he launches a crucial question for Western democracies today: was the violence-tinged radicalism in America and Europe in 1968 a force for social good or ill?