Mainstream cultures often give rise to their “counter”: Counter-culture. This course considers the flowering of such countercultures in a variety of civilizations from Abraham and Prometheus to the present day, and reflects both on what they share in common and how they remain distinctive, in particular with regard to the proliferation of “Bohemias” within modern material civilization. The first part of the course looks at a group of early exemplifications of counterculture. It considers Socrates and the Socratic counterculture, including its ramifications in the development of Socrates’ student Diogenes and the Cynics. It evaluates the countercultural functions of early Taoism and its relation to nature, alchemy, and the elixir of immortality. It compares mainstream Buddhism to the body of countercultural features within the Buddhist tradition, including Ch’an/Zen and the Siddha tradition of Tantric India. It traces the origins and ramifications of the Sufi element in the Islamic tradition and its capacities to merge with other countercultural patterns in the regions converted to Islam. And it traces the emergence of “romantic” and “magical” Love among the medieval Troubadours and their links to the esoteric movement known as Catharism within and without Christianity. The second part then more directly considers aspects the counterculture in early modern European societies and civilizations. It follows the countercultural bent within the range of groupings and movements that came to be known as the Enlightenment during the eighteenth century and their connections to revolutionary transformation during the French Revolution. It studies the origins of the American counterculture in the New England Transcendentalist thinkers led by Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau. And it provides an account for the origins and maturation of “Bohemia” as an artistic-social siting in Paris during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The third and final part considers the explicit manifestations of counterculture in modern and postmodern societies, including its theoretical-ideological justifications. Major topics include the rise of the Beat movement in the late 1940s and 1950s, its transmutation into the Youth movement and counterculture of the 1960s, and the more recent fate of the counterculture since the 1970s as in the cases of New Age, Punk and DIY. A closing theme is the connections between counterculture and the growth of global digital society, social media, and its dissident elements in the early twenty-first century.

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