Контркультура как идеология

The article considers a sociocultural phenomenon which served as the USA ideology in the 1960s. Ideology is understood as a symbolic universum within which discredita-tion of the existing social institutions and an attempt to legitimate the new ones take place. Counter-culture becomes an "active text" which "presses through" reality by exchanging it for an alternative one. In compliance with this approach the study of semantic shifts induced by counter-culture in the language obtains great importance.