Abstract
Analysis of the destinies of a group of Czech scientifically and politically engaged intellectuals born between 1920-1930 enables us to observe both the dynamics of their early self-generationalisation (during the Second World war and in the first years of construction of socialism in post-1948 Czechoslovakia) and subsequent instrumentalizations of the generational label "sixty-eighters" stuck to this group in various socio-political debates since the beginning of the 1970s until today. All along this process members of this group developed their interest in social sciences - we can thus follow their transformations from propagandists (in the 1940s) to experts called in the 1960s to contribute to the modernization of the Communist dictatorship before becoming its most determined critics after 1969.