Chapter 9 describes the revolt at the University Institute of Social Sciences at Trento. It demonstrates the importance of protest about Vietnam in the first closure of the Institute. I argue that in the course of the revolt, the students discovered themselves as passive subjects of the university system and sought to reinvent themselves as active subjects via protest. In the third occupation at the Faculty of Sociology at Trento, they developed a charter of demands that sought to create structural spaces within the university and perpetuate the student movement without integrating it within the university. The protest movement successfully paralysed the Institute of Sociology without managing to impose itself, until the contestation spread to the Catholic Church in the Anti-Lent of 1968 which, although it culminated in the successful transformation of the institute, nonetheless left the protest movement with a question of what direction it should take.

Chapter 10 describes the development of student protest at the university of Nanterre. The chapter demonstrates how the politics of space, in particular the university residences, provided the basis of conflict between the administration and the protest movement. The university administration perceived the struggle as a problem of order, while the protest movement increasingly understood it through a language of autonomy and democracy. Police intervention was the most important mobilising factor, and Vietnam provided the theme through which the movement escalated. The chapter traces the creation of the vacuum of authority at Nanterre through a dynamic of provocation and repression, culminating in the birth of the 22 March Movement in the occupation of the administrative tower at Nanterre.

Chapter 3 analyses the cultural politics of protest in the 1960s. It examines the transformed understanding of high culture created by a mass market for paperback books.The chapter challenges the idea that the protest movements of the 1960s had their origins in a particular set of intellectual texts – often summarised as Mao, Marx, Marcuse. It traces the history of mass-circulation books in the 1960s and their perceived challenge to the organisation of high culture. I argue that the protest movements of the 1960s first promoted open access to high culture, then attempted to recast the meaning of high culture and developed a critique of commodification. I argue that this transformation did not democratise knowledge as expected, but it did contribute to the desacralisation of high culture and an old regime of elite culture.

Chapter 5 describes the decline and apathy of student and youth politics in the mid-1960s in political and religious institutions. I argue that the protest movements of the late 1960s emerged in response to the attenuation of student politics and the decline of traditional organisations. The protest movements sought to make politics possible via a model of provocation and protest rather than debate, critique and compromise. In western Europe, fears of authoritarianism, disappointed hopes for democratisation and disillusion with electoral compromise provided the background for protest. In each location, a mix of socialism, anarchism and anti-authoritarianism marked the nascent protest movement, in particular the German Student Socialist League (SDS) in West Germany, the Movement of 22 March in France, and the Anti-Authoritarian Student Movement at Trento in Italy.

Chapter 4 analyses the cultural politics of the protest movements. It traces the way students sought to democratise access to high culture, revise the content of high culture for a new era and abolish the distinction between high and low culture altogether, while also succumbing at times to the temptation of anti-intellectualism. I argue that the cultural drives of the protest movement – democratisation of access, desacralisation and anti-intellectualism – proved contradictory, ultimately leaving unfulfilled the diverse goals of the movement. The period of the late 1960s was marked by both a collapse of the traditional idea of high culture and the inability to find a consensus on what should replace it.

Chapter 7 examines the prominence of speech in the student revolts of the 1960s. The experience of speaking was extremely important to the students, a marker of a subjective transformation. However, speech was not always emancipatory. Practices of speech followed three modes: desacralisation, the demand for debate and provocation. Protest speech was characterised by vulgarity, jargon, informalisation and opacity. The deployment of speech occurred in unequal and gendered forms. Student assemblies were simultaneously democratic forums and arenas of intimidation and exclusion. The model of rational public debate with which the student movements often began failed and gave way to a model of provocation.

Chapter 1 analyses the meaning of higher education expansion in the 1960s. It describes how the university came to be perceived as an engine of economic growth, democratisation and social mobility. These aspirations proved disappointing. The underlying tension between technocratic, liberal and egalitarian rationales for university expansion transformed into an open conflict in the mid-1960s. I argue that, instead of understanding the student revolts of the late 1960s as a response to university overcrowding, the most important cause of revolt was the narrowing of the promise of educational reform.

Chapter 11 traces the history of the 'critical universities' created in the wake of the peak of student mobilisation around 1968 – in particular, the Kritische Universität of West Berlin and the Università Critica of Trento. Plans for a université critique at Nanterre failed as conflict escalated rapidly and the French government moved most quickly to enact reform within higher education. These experiments attempted to draw on the mobilisation created by confrontations with police and society to transform the university. However, they were beset by problems of poor attendance, inequalities and divergences within the protest movements over the purpose and value of university reform. I argue that the internal contradictions of the movement and the politicising drive of events ultimately led to the collapse of these experiments.

Chapter 8 describes the protest movement at the Free University of Berlin, and in particular a series of conflicts over free speech. I argue that two versions of autonomy confronted each other in the Kuby Affair and the Krippendorff Affair at the FU, pitting a democratic self-conception of the student body versus administrative power. Speech provided the ostensible rationale for a struggle over student self-government, autonomy and democracy. The public use of criticism demanded by the protest movement sapped the FU rector’s authority in a cycle of provocation, overreaction and protest.

Chapter 2 analyses the meaning of sociology in the 1960s. It traces the creation of the sociology degree in France, West Germany and Italy, and describes in detail the origins of the University Institute of Social Sciences in Trento. The chapter describes the first occupations in Trento over the discipline of sociology. The chapter shows how technocrats and modernisers envisaged in sociology a discipline that would provide managerial staff to administer and control social change. Students, however, most frequently chose sociology as a discipline that embodied a critical vision of contemporary society, personal emancipation and political change. I argue that this conflict explains the centrality of sociology to the revolts of 1968.

Chapter 6 describes the crisis of representative politics in the mid- to late 1960s, at the national level, the level of youth organisation, and within the university. This crisis prompted a turntowards the occupation as a political tactic, the general assembly over representative organisations, and a preference for forms of direct democracy. The protest movements demanded autonomy, although they were not always clear how this would operate. However, forms of direct democracy such as the occupation had a short life-span and generated criticism for demagogy and its domination by student leaders. I argue that the protest movements found it difficult to reconcile their anti-hierarchical drive and the intense politicisation that led towards formation of a new political party.