To what extent are recent grass-roots protests such as ‘Occupy the City’ driven by identical motivations to the 1960’s protest movement? By Dimitar Panchev Abstract The aim of the following essay will be to a provide a cross-comparison between the recent ‘Occupy the City’ grass-roots protests and the 1960s protest movement in terms of their ideological foundations and possibility to identify common grounds between the two. Introduction The right to protest is a perceived human right arising out of a number of recognized human rights. While no human rights instrument or national constitution grants the absolute right to protest, such a right to protest may be a manifestation of the right to freedom of assembly, the right to freedom of association, and the right to freedom of speech – keystone principle upon which a liberal democratic form of governance is built. This essay will address the commonalities which can be found between two different protest movements – ‘Occupy the Streets’ and the 1960s protest movement. The 1960s Protests The post-war American liberal ideology which began to emerge in the mid-50s and reached its climax in 1960 can be characterised by several basic assumptions. First, it was assumed that American capitalism in essence works, creates abundance and had the potential to resolve any kind of social problems. Linked to this, the American society was getting more equal and class-based differences were being eliminated. John Kenneth Galbraith preached the New Economics to the ‘Affluent Society’, making Americans confident almost to a point of complacency about the perfectibility of American society (Galbraith, 1958). As egalitarian as that society was presented to be, in fact it still had a number of unresolved problems, which need to be addressed. Dissatisfied with the world they inherited and following a pattern of dissent from their parents’ generation, the youth of the 1960s formed a ‘counter- culture’ which rejected many of the fundamental values of American society (Braunstein and Doyle, 2002).