Eggspected
What I perceive to be the relationship between the New Left, counterculture and the student movement might be summarized in an admittedly gimmicky but useful metaphor.
Consider an egg just cracked into a pan. If the entire egg constitutes the group of �youth�, then the yolk, at the nucleus of the egg, may be likened to the New Left proper � a small core thick with self-consciously radical ideology.
This core is hemmed in by the egg-white � the counterculture, a slightly more dilute form of the yolk, but constituting a relative majority and similar (in terms of substance) to the yolk core.
The intellectualists of the New Left like Marcuse and Mills, supporters of the movement but not strictly part of the youth, may be likened to the minute foreign element within a fertilized egg; indeed, these intellectuals fertilized the Movement and counterculture: Marcuse, with his abstract formulations of Marxist dialectics; Mills, with his urgent, fact-intensive polemics; Sartre, with socialist ideology; Camus, with his existential humanism, and so forth.
And finally, the student movement, a medley of spirited activists and feverish, impassioned youths, might be best likened to the egg being scrambled: an apt image of chaos, a mishmash of disparate motivations, a jumble of backgrounds, ideas and thoughts, and above all, heat.
But yes, I finished the damn thing. Thus, I am safe from coursework essays until September. Tonight, celebration.
PS: I actually put the above in my essay.