Much has been written that attempts to explain why the sixties failed. Great emphasis is placed on what has been lost since the sixties, with the current era characterized by widespread political disillusionment, declining radicalism and the demise of the political in favour of personal fulfilment, private wealth and career success. This all too familiar slant on the sixties portrays this loss as marking a crisis of faith in apocalyptic revolutionary projects and is used to explain everything from the purported narcissism of the seventies, the consumerism of the eighties and the political landscape of the nineties. Yet generalized claims about the failure of sixties radicalism are empirically weak and often founded on totalizing and conventional notions of revolution. And, as we have seen, much sixties protest – particularly of the anti-disciplinary kind – sought to refute such understandings. Nevertheless, the death of the sixties narrative has a certain intuitive force to it, and resonates as one of the axioms of retrospectives of the period. It has also reached the status of a taken-for-granted truth, as commonsense, in popular representations of the topic. Any interrogation of the paradigm of success/failure should also say something about the death of the sixties narrative; about the flimsy empirical grounds on which such judgements rest.