The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960 by Richard Wolin [Book Review]

Abstract

It is difficult to locate Richard Wolin’s book neatly within existing frameworks of May ’68 scholarship. Wolin’s account is clearly ‘conservative’ as it mirrors key aspects of Raymond Aron’s account which Wolin himself classifies as “conservative” (103). Wolin’s indebtedness to Aron’s conservative account is evidenced in two ways: the first is obvious – Wolin, like Aron, argues that there was a “chasm” between the “rhetorical intentions” of the May ‘68 youth movement, and their “real intentions”, and was the French revolution’s “last dying gasp”; the second is less obvious, it is Wolin’s use of clinically-charged categories to analyse his subject material (8). Thus, Wolin spends much of his book trying to demonstrate the foolishness, hypocrisy and rhetorical intentions of the Maoist intellectual milieu. However, Aron’s account does not fully represent the position that Wolin articulates as Wolin merges the Aron account with a Lefortian emphasis on “new logics of social contestation” (104). This in turn produces an account that he sums up thus, “if pressed to define the “rational kernel” of the 1960s, I would say that it was quite simply the era that rediscovered the virtues of participatory politics. The 1950s had witnessed the triumph of political technocracy … In the United States and elsewhere, the 1960s signified an attempt to wrest control of `the political’ from elites: to counter the ills of `technological liberalism’ via recourse to logics of grassroots political engagement and thereby to restore confidence in basic democratic systems.” (x) The real significance of May ’68, specifically French Maoism, was not its attempt to capture state power, but its unintentional emphasis on direct democracy and the “revolution of everyday life”. Wolin’s book is not what it appears to be, a scholarly account of French intellectual Maoism, rather, it is a political ‘lesson’, as he himself admits, about what should be learned from May 68 (xi): i.e., that political goals like the capture of revolutionary power are the fanciful delusions, often “hysterical”, of an elite educated few and what is actually required is the achievement of real intentions, which can never include the up-rooting of parliamentarian-capitalism, through a robust public dialogue and democratic system.