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Few genres are riskier than utopian writing. Few are more easily parodied, dismissed or dated. Social criticism, in contrast, can more readily stand the test of time. Consider Marx's work. His critique of bourgeois exploitation can still set the pulse to racing: the entrepreneur conjuring whole populations out of the ground, closing up the pores of the working day, squeezing the last ounce of surplus value out of the proletariat. But his utopian vision-the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the state-leaves one cold. This is not just because we know how horrifically things turned out: The vision lacks the concrete force and weight of the critique; it seems formulaic by comparison.

Still, social critics since Marx have continued to risk utopian speculation. The impulse is understandable, especially in the United States-where complaint is un-American (a form of European pessimism) unless one is prepared to affirm some alternative proposals. The result is a hybrid genre, a blend of empirical critique and utopian longing.

For 30 years, Theodore Roszak has been a leading practitioner in this field. His The Making of a Counter Culture (1969) brilliantly captured the ethical and philosophical significance of the broad social movement that has since been dismissed as mass narcissism. Roszak recognized what recent critics have forgotten: The counterculture stance was a serious form of resistance to the technocratic mentality behind the nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War; its intellectual origins lay in the romantic critique of denatured rationality, ranging from William Blake to Allen Ginsberg; its communitarian politics drew strength from a long anarchist tradition.

Roszak himself disdained countercultural rant, rejecting rosy scenarios of psychedelic liberation. But he dismissed any overriding concern with political and economic structures as a clanking, mechanistic relic of the Old Left. For him, as for many less thoughtful observers of the era, class conflict had been replaced by generational conflict. Though the young were easily misled, in Roszak's view they remained our strongest hope for a more humane culture.

Everyone knows how quickly that hope died, how smoothly counterculrural gestures were assimilated to hip consumerism. Within a very few years of its publication, Roszak's paean to hippie consciousness began to seem painfully dated. Despite its clear-eyed assault on the "myth of objective consciousness," The Making of a Counter Culture failed to construct a convincing alternative. Roszak's critique of existing realities proved more powerful than his agenda for change.

Now Roszak is back, chastened by advancing age and a near fatal illness, but still outraged by managerial inanity and full of utopian yearnings. America the Wise is a revealing sequel to The Making of a Counter Culture. Like the earlier book, it contains much hard-hitting social criticism: Roszak reveals the grotesque distortions behind the neo-conservative assault on "greedy geezers," skewers the mass-media obeisance to the 12-year-old male mind, and attacks the corporate-sponsored technophilia that "heedlessly strips the planet of its riches and its dignity as if there were no tomorrow." Roszak has produced another powerful critique of contemporary public discourse-its triviality and moral emptiness, its indifference to the deepest needs of actual human beings.

Yet in its attempt to envision a utopian alternative, America the Wise ultimately falls flatter than its predecessor. To oversimplify (but only a little), Roszak's argument runs like this: the growing percentage of old people in the American population could create an unprecedented cultural transformation and could foster a more nurturant caregiving ethos, a more faithful stewardship of the earth, an appreciation for social interdependence and cultivated leisure, a transcendence of competitive striving and status anxiety, an acceptance of aging and death - in short, wisdom. Old people have always possessed wisdom but soon they will have the numbers to make it stick. There will not only be more of them, they will be healthier and more active than ever before. Demography is destiny, or so Roszak hopes. Despite his acute perception of our current plight, and his admirable desire for a more humane set of dominant values, he has little else to say about how we get from here to there. As usual in this genre, the passage to utopia stays foggy, especially by comparison to the clarity of the social critique.

Roszak is at his best in unmasking managerial evil. He effectively takes on the foolishness of Peter Peterson and other crusaders against the Gray Peril that swelling mob of old people whose appetite for entitlement programs supposedly threatens to bankrupt the public household. Peterson and his Concord Coalition, Roszak writes, have embarked on "a remarkable campaign that would have people believe that balancing the budget is more important than providing medical care for their parents-or, at some point in the future, for themselves." Even from a narrow accounting perspective, the campaign is misguided; Roszak observes that in the coming decades "the total dependency load-youth dependency taken together with retirees carried by each working member of society will actually grow smaller," thanks to the smaller number of children under 14.

But the larger point is that in the absence of entitlements, the dependent population would not simply go away, and a much heavier burden of elder care would fall on middle-aged children who are already stretched to the limit by the demands of leaner, meaner employers. Entitlements, Roszak writes, "are the arrangement we have made as a society for pooling a collective moral obligation and discharging it as practically, dependably, and fairly as possible."

Roszak deftly dissects many corporate-sponsored fatuities. He ridicules intergenerational distrust promoted by mass media: the persistent worship of youth, even in the face of its declining demographic significance; the growing insistence on "productive aging" - a perpetual elderly Olympics-as the only alternative to senility. With convincing passion, he argues that the nihilism of cyberpunk fantasy reveals a fundamental truth about the future according to Microsoft: Blake's dark, Satanic mills have become sleeker, cleaner "corporate campuses," but they are still Satanic. Temples to technology in the service of power, they help to create a world where all experience seems to be mediated electronically, and feelings of helplessness are fed with Robocop fantasies of technetronic omnipotence. The sadistic posturing of rock groups like Nine Inch Nails, however repellent, speak to an understandable longing in their audience-a desire to feel "something real" amid a host of virtual realities.

Given this bleak picture, one is entitled to ask: What is to be done? Roszak's answer is even simpler than it was in 1969. Then, he placed his faith in the ragged army of the young, just coming of age amid the antiwar counterculture (though he admitted they might need some mature advice from time to time). Now that the " '60s generation" is facing old age, Roszak is willing to bet on them again. OK, so they didn't change the world the first time, he seems to be saying, they still have another shot-if only through an accident of demographic history. Their longevity and numerical dominance will give them an unprecedented opportunity to influence cultural values, perhaps in part by resurrecting the countercultural emphasis on "quality of life," but mostly by translating the wisdom of age into a transformative social agenda: shorter work weeks, guaranteed annual incomes, more reliable environmental protection, a more flexible attitude toward gender roles, even a more complex and rewarding popular culture (no longer attuned only to adolescent fantasy). Sounds great! Sign me up!

There is, to be sure, something truly bracing about an argument that so completely turns conventional wisdom on its head. For years now the punditocracy has played endless variations on an intergenerational theme: how the self-indulgence of the baby boomers has corroded the American moral fabric (especially in contrast to the Virtuous Ones who went before, wading ashore at D-Day and saving the world singlehandedly). In the wake of Clinton's peccadilloes, and amid the Republican putsch, the moralizing has hit an unbearable pitch. The '60s generation is the one everyone loves to hate, whose members themselves often collaborate in public rituals of self-flagellation. How refreshing to find someone willing to celebrate old hippies again.

The problem is that Roszak's argument remains unconvincing, mostly because, despite his critique of the intergenerational model, he keeps a foot inside it. To be fair, he does not claim unique virtues for the '60s generation: He acknowledges the possibility that they will be tempted from the path of wisdom by the lingering attractions of the alpha-male role, or by vendors hawking promises of perpetual youth. He also acknowledges that succeeding generations could embrace a similar transformative social role, as members of the burgeoning population of active, engaged senior citizens. But he announces his real focus from the outset: the "New People" who came of age in the '60s and who are now confronting the aging process at a crucial historical moment, the beginning of the "Longevity Revolution."

These phrases exude the aroma of pop sociology, but I am willing to grant Roszak "longevity revolution." That at least refers to a discernible historical phenomenon. "New People" is pure showbiz; it recalls the silliest posturing of the '60s ("There's a new generation/With a new explanation") and it places a red herring in the path of anyone who wants to think seriously about the relationship of increasing longevity to cultural values. The longevity revolution, according to Roszak, "has given this remarkable generation the chance to do great good against great odds." Well, maybe. But why pose the opportunity in generational terms? This not only perpetuates the divisiveness Roszak elsewhere deplores, it also overlooks the political and economic obstacles to creating a more humane culture.

No one could deny the profundity of the needs evoked by Roszak, or the capacity of old people to enhance our understanding of those needs-the need to sit still, to blend work and leisure, to contemplate and practice the arts, down to and including the art of dying. "You can't take it with you," we say. Maybe more of us could learn to mean it. But merely living gets more expensive all the time. What's to persuade affluent or even modestly fixed old people to redistribute their wealth downward, through the kind of taxation a guaranteed annual income for all Americans would require? How is such a proposal to be born (let alone survive) in our present political climate? And if such a proposal were to pass, how would its redistributive policy affect the people George Will reverently refers to as "the investing classes" (most of whom, incidentally, are over 50)?

Despite Roszak's emphasis on generational politics, class interests remain the crucial unexamined constraint on public discourse. Americans have long been willing to discuss just about anything in order to avoid mentioning class conflict. Usually we talk about racial issues; sometimes we talk about intergenerational tensions. Eventually, as Roszak's book shows, we even talk about death. Anything rather than face the real abyss. Marx would be amused.

Jackson Lears teaches cultural history at Rutgers.