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The article then goes on to offer reasons as to why such a claim was, as in the case of subculture, ill-founded.

That is to say, counterculture was cast as a class-based (in this case middle class) mode of resistance to the dominant mainstream society. Beginning with an overview and discussion of counterculture’s application in the context of the late 1960s, the article argues that many of the claims for the validity of counterculture in this socio-historical context reflect issues and shortcomings similar to those offered in relation to the concept of subculture. This article offers a critical examination of the concept of counterculture. This implicit refusal to belong can ultimately be read as an “ethics of reconnaissance”, an anti-totalitarian counter-politics or negative politics of identity led by persons or small groups that thus become a (fictionally) “significant minority”. Having as a theoretical premise the idea that “essential personal identities” do not always synchronise with the essential identity of the group they are supposed to belong to, and that this de-synchronisation can have an ethical opposition at its core, the paper focuses on the way in which Mircea Nedelciu’s typical protagonists – nomads, socially marginal individuals with confusing, “unaccomplished identities” – attempt to (culturally and morally) reconstruct their damaged personal identities by disengaging from their social and spatial appurtenance to the national macrogroup (dominated by the moral values, identity models and cultural stereotypes imposed by Ceauşescu’s regime) and phantasmatically “relocating” their identities in the Western Counterculture of “the Sixties”.