Jonbouy
I recommend anybody interested in fads of popular culture over the years read George Melly's great book 'Revolt into Style' although covering an early time-period and from a British perspective the commonaliity between all these movements whether it be 'Hippies', 'Punks' or anything in between is easy to spot.
 
Basically human nature is largely predictable it rebels against what is established and the resulting revolution then becomes the establishment itself, just rinse and repeat. Let the populist media define the name each movement should have along with a cartoon caricature of what it 'represented' then in 20 years that's what people will believe is what actually happened.
 
Yet if you asked a bunch of dudes and chicks that were holed up in some commune in Haight Ashbury in '67 and you'll get as many different perspectives as to what it was about equal to the amount of different people you ask.
 
All these movements are great to the extent they can effect a positive change, the one thing that blights them all though is the amount of pretentiousness that accompanies each one when it declares itself as being 'important'.  The kids of Kings Road toffs dressing up in Vivienne Westwood gear being championed by art school pseudo-intellectuals like Malcolm McClaren were probably bigger culprits for that type of garbage than any hippies IMO.