The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom: Blake's line had become a slogan for the hippie generation. The dramatic differences between the hippies' way of life and that of most of the rest of society at the time made them a puzzling and alarming phenomenon.

Richard Mills read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1967 he joined the Institute of Community Studies and worked on the London Region Study before beginning the fieldwork for Young Outsiders.