Preface to the 1996 edition I arrived in Berkeley for the first time in August I968, a twenty-four year old graduate student, invited by Leo Lowenthal to examine hi extensive personal archive of materials from the Institute of Social Re- search. As I spent long hours poring over years of letters and unpub- listed manuscripts, amassing questions about figures, events and ideas that Lowenthal patiently answered, the world outside was convulsed by a series of cataclysmic events. On the 21st of August, tanks from the Soviet Union and its allies rumbled into Prague, violently ending the experiment in"Marxism with a Human Face"that had so capti vated the imaginations of non-doctrinaire leftists earlier that year. Only a few days later as"the whole world was watching, "the Democratic convention in Chicago was disrupted by protestors enraged by both President Johnson's policies in Vietnam and the likelihood that the party's nominee, Hubert Humphrey, would continue his predecessor's sorry course On the daily walk from my apartment to Lowenthals office, I passed the forlorn, now empty Berkeley campaign headquarters of Robert Kennedy, whose assassination two months earlier had meant the end for many of the hopes that fundamental change might come, in the catch- phrase of the time, by"working within the system. The Berkeley cam- pus was itself a site for escalating confrontations between students and authorities egged on by a state administration headed by then gover- nor Ronald Reagan. In the surrounding community, the Black Panther Party was an insistent presence, bearing witness to the still volatile