Is “Warmth” a Mode of Social Behaviour? Considerations on a Cultural History of the Left-Alternative Milieu from the Late Sixties to the Mid Eighties

The article deals with the comprehensive counter-cultural milieu from the late 1960s until the early 1980s. Life style and habitus within this undogmatic and widely peaceful radical leftist milieu were practised according to a conduct of warmth. This alternative conduct of warmth corresponded with developments in the increasing individualized consumer society of the Federal Republic of Germany. The counter-cultural social behaviour was neither a departure into the land of freedom nor into a reign of normlessness. It was a form of self-guidance and governmentality with its own contradictions and coercions.