 The reception of the work of Sartre and Heidegger has surely contributed to the popularization of the idea of authenticity, and the decisive impact of this idea first began to manifest itself after the Second World War (Taylor 2007: 475). Rossinow contends that the politics of the 1960s were centered on questions of authenticity. Following his account, the main driving force towards political and social changes of the New Left movement in the 1960s was “a search for authenticity in industrial American life” (Rossinow 1998: 345).  Both J. Farrell (1997) and Rossinow argue that the New Left emerged partly as a reaction to traditional American liberalism and Christian existentialism, replacing the negative concept of “sin” with “alienation” and the positive goal of “salvation” with that of “authenticity”. Confronted with what they understood as alienation that “isn’t restricted to the poor” (Rossinow 1998: 194), New Left activism reached beyond civil rights to moral rights and attempted to bring about a recovery of a sense of personal wholeness and authenticity by curing the institutions of American society.