The Crisis of Culture

But this makes the book more enjoyable and interesting, not less; it offers valuable provocation.' — The New Yorker 'Elegant.' — The Wall Street Journal Are we confronting a new culture—global, online, individualistic? Or is our existing concept of culture in crisis, as explicit, normative systems replace implicit, social values? Olivier Roy’s new book explains today’s fractures via the extension of individual political and sexual freedoms from the 1960s. For Roy, twentieth-century youth culture disconnected traditional political protest from class, region or ethnicity, fashioning an identity premised on repudiation rather than inheritance of shared history or values. Having spread across generations under neoliberalism and the internet, youth culture is now individualised, ersatz. Without a shared culture, everything becomes an explicit code of how to speak and act, often online. Identities are now defined by socially