In the 1960s the event that most dramatically divided consciences was the Vietnam War. Many middle-class students not only took to the streets to demonstrate against the war, but also began to question and even reject the moral principles on which they had been brought up. The young, many of them highly educated, began to use drugs quite openly and exhibit their sexuality even more. They turned their backs on employment in government, commerce and industry to join communities. In the universities, students rejected curricula that had served for decades and instead they demanded "relevant" courses in black or women's studies and participation in the decision-making process of the universities.

At the very core of all this was the hippie movement which originated in the San Francisco Bay area in 1964. The hippie ideological principles were grounded on non-conformism, homelessness, oriental mysticism - especially the Zen version of Buddhism - sexual freedom, an expansion of individual conscience by means of unrestricted use of alcohol and drugs - especially LSD and hashish, colourful pacifism through the so-called flower power setting all disputes. Hence the definition of flower children.

Hippies aimed at establishing a radically new model of society based on primeval self-managed communes, within which solidarity, a rejection of material possession and an authentic hedonistic life should prevail over the necessity of production and profit of consumer society.

Hippies theorised a utopistic society in which all differences in class, race, walk of life, social status, sex should disappear so that each individual could satisfy his actual needs. Flower people showed their complete rejection of the American way of life by wearing long hair parted in the middle, colourful casual clothes, eccentric attire like bell-shaped blue jeans, large Indian hemp shirts, cotton bands round their foreheads or necks.

The flower children's culture spread from Berkley university to almost all the American university campuses from October 1965 onwards throughout 1966 and 1967 generating a remarkable tide of juvenile dissent. After that, the inability to formulate actual political and social alternatives to a consumer society deprived the movement of its life force causing its final exhaustion. The hippies' life-style was turned into business: blue jeans and colourful clothes were mass - produced; LSD was replaced by heroin, drug taking by drug addiction.

In spite of its rapid integration into the establishment, the hippie movement had an undeniable merit: it represented the most authentic reaction against the American way of life, imperialism and repression of ethnic minorities: It originated liberation movements, such as that of Women. Consumer society had to become aware of the necessity also to accept what differed from the norm.