If the 1950's were « the placid decade », the 1960's have been « the decade of awakening ». Whereas the 1950's fizzled out with whimpers such as peaceful co-existence and the civil rights movement after the inconclusive Korean war and the infamous McCarthy witch-hunts, the 1960's among other things, brought urban riots, the war in Viet-Nam, the student movement, and the final bankruptcy of every semblance of formal democracy with the Chicago convention and big city machine-politics. Whereas in 1959 even pessimists would have had to claim as they did, that the existing international socio-economic situation could have continued indefinitely, in 1960 the most optimistic apologists of the status quo were forced to admit that some kind of major institutional surgery is necessary to simply hold the present state of affairs.