Bertrand's Reviews > The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s

Living in West London, I seem to be faraway from everything, most of all from my friends who predominantly live in the North and the East. The upside of this exile is that my local tube station has a 'self-service' book exchange, a little shelf were people leave their books and pick new ones, a touchingly successful show of local solidarity. Among low-grade fictions (Daniel Steele to JK Rowling) there is regular gems popping up, and my friend picked up an exciting book on manuscript marginalia just the other day.

I have found a few interesting books there over the past few months, and when I saw Wolin's book on the shelf just as I was embarking on short 'China-themed' reading spree, I was very excited: a nice, clean and sturdy hard-back with a snappy wrapper, at the cross-road of two appealing themes (the sixties and Maoism). The back cover, with its endorsements by Martin Jay and Tony Judt sounded promising, and the summary, promising a chronicle of the Maoist moment in French radical politics, delusional warts and all, and an account of its paradoxical outcomes, was more than enticing: even knowing as little as I do about the politics and factions of May 68, I had read enough about the Cultural Revolution to see how unlikely a standard-bearer for libidinal politics Mao was.

Wolin writes well, and his book is an very readable piece of popular intellectual history - he returns to human interest stories every other page, and his cast of larger-than-life celebrity thinkers (Sartres, Foucault, Kristeva, etc.), wriggling out of the ivory tower of academia, is both at times endearing, and occasionally comical.
The oral and free-flowing tone of the book even manages to smooth out the wrinkles of his poorly structured argument, which translates in many repetitions. Repetitions I find often excusable in popular history, and since I don't often read books in one sittings, they are even often welcome reminders of a book's general thrust. In Wolin's case however, they tend to highlight the author's main failing, namely the superficiality of his argument and the poverty of his critique:

Here's the main problem of the book: its relentlessly unsympathetic, patronising and smug tone. Wolin is a social democratic defender of Western liberalism, and he has carved his niche lampooning the excesses of the Left, Marxism and post-structuralism in particular. Though I am probably less convinced than him that actually existing democracies represent the end of history, I am quite aware of the short-comings of revolutionary rhetoric, and of the self-undermining aspects of post-structuralism. I am also more than willing to hear a historically informed take-down of those movements, especially in their late sixties incarnation, which I know little about but vaguely sense as the turning point in radical politics were identity and recognition overtook institutions and redistribution.
Wolin's critic however, seems to revolve around two main themes: on the one hand, the 'fashionable' character of sixties radicalism, and on the other the upper-class origins of its actors.
I work in the clothing industry, so I might be more attentive to questions pertaining to 'fashionable' ideas than others: when one reduces someone else's adoption of ideas as a 'fashion', a 'trend', or qualifies a doctrine as 'chic' or 'up-and-coming', one avoids the problem of actual causes for this move. Social factors are dismissed, and decision are reduced to opportunism. It is a lazy (if still widespread) reduction, and Wolin's book is literally littered with this sort of sleight of hand, every other page or so.
As a result, don't expect to learn much about Maoism in this book: you do have one or two mentions of the great crimes of the CCP, but how it differed from Stalinism, or why it appealed to the French radicals (orientalism aside) is never really tackled. For Wolin Mao is a convenient place-holder and little more, a badge for intellectuals vying for radical-chic. Similarly, I knew much about the ebbs and flows of Tel Quel's allegiance at the close of the chapter concerned with them, but virtually nothing on their own ideas, beyond a few condescending nods to structuralism and its crumbling.

Finding a silver lining to the failures of the the May 68 revolution is not an easy task - the betrayal of the Communist Party did achieve some gains for the workers, and certainly gay rights did eventually benefit from the visibility gained during the period. Changes in the law on contraception in France predate the May events. If I am glad all powers never went to the soviets, I cannot shake the impression that those transferred to the imagination were never put to great use. Wolin, however, is keen to salvage to legacy of May 68 for his own reformist agenda: the splintering of the Left, and the crippling of its radical wing, is celebrated as the birth of a new idea of 'participatory democracy', translating into the empowerment of NSMs and civil society. Identity politics is seen as a the salutary sign of a new individualism, which transcends class boundaries to embrace universal human rights. With the benefit of hindsight, it would maybe be unfair to smirk at Wolin's enthusiasm, had he not been so smug throughout the book: but as today the radical right is increasingly appropriating the identitarian logic, and as the impotence of carnivalesque, 'everyday life' protest is blatant, I think Wolin's thesis can be safely consigned to the dustbin of history.

Not everything is dismal in the book: Foucault and Sartres are portrayed with somewhat less malice than the rest of the cast (as is Cohn-Bendit, Wolin's unsung hero) and the book does offer a nice chronological outline of the events. I even learned a few interesting tid-bits, such as Sartres late turn toward levinasian ethics, while Foucault's eventual enthusiasm for human rights is nicely contextualised. On the whole, though, the book is 'annoying', more because of its tone than because of its thesis, though the later did little to alleviate my irritation.
Wolin's 'The Seduction of Unreason' has long been on my reading list, but although the subject of that book (and the acclaim it received) still very much appeals to me, I am not sure I can stomach another shrill and righteous popular reduction like the one in 'The Wind from the East'.