As it passes out of memory into history, May ’68 is losing force as a signifier. Its half-centennial passed recently with publishers attempting to profit from it, of course, but it attracted surprisingly little public interest otherwise. For all that, it is difficult to escape thinking of May ’68 as anything other than a definitive event in our recent history.

It is not as though we have a consensus about what it meant, or even about what it exactly was. There are problems even about the name and denotation. France’s Mai 68 was just one uprising among many that year, let alone in the years before and after. Why single out France? Why Paris? What about Berlin, Chicago, Mexico City, New York, Prague, Rio, Warsaw, cities which also saw insurrections some time or other that same year? So maybe the event shouldn’t be called May ’68 but just ’68? Or more broadly still simply the sixties, or, as the French nicely put it, les années soixante-huit (the years sixty-eight), because in the end, don’t 1968’s insurrections need to be thought of in their larger context as protests that crystalized formations and transformations across the whole decade, if not longer?

Leaving aside questions of name and extension for the moment, all kinds of interpretations and evaluations of 1968 have been developed over the past half-century. For our purposes here, it is enough to divide them into two. On one side, there are those accounts that regard 1968 as the threshold across which an older form of modernity, still constrained by bourgeois traditions and hierarchies, passed, to become what student revolutionaries of the period, picking up on Werner Sombart, began to call late capitalism. For readings of this kind, 1968 was a shift of gear into a more supple, intense and liberal form of democratic capitalism.

As it turned out, however, late capitalism itself quickly became a fissured thing. In regard to the state, it was characterized by retreat from the market and public welfare accompanied by increasing technological surveillance and border control. In regard to civil society, it was characterized by group emancipations or what came to be known (usually dismissively) as identity politics. In regard to the economy, it was characterized by globalism, precarity, widening inequality and the extension of market rationality into all kinds of institutions and relations.

This view that, one way or another, 1968 opens out into late capitalism has become orthodox. In a fairly loose form it was popularized by French media-intellectuals such as André Glucksmann, Régis Debray, Gilles Lipovetsky and Pascal Bruckner, some of whom (such as Glucksmann and Bruckner) were associated with the New Philosophers (nouveaux philosophes) movement in the 1970s, while some (such as Debray and Lipovestsky) had been Marxist radicals themselves in the 1960s. With the publication of Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman’s bestselling, two-volumed Génération in 1987 and 1988 (see Hamon and Rotman Reference Hamon and Rotman1987; Hamon and Rotman Reference Hamon and Rotman1988), it became doxa, at least in France.

On the other side, there are those who insist that ’68 was a Badiousian event, an outbreak of liberatory possibilities to which we not only have a responsibility to remain faithful, but which provided a template for later more or less insurrectionary movements such as the massive French general strike in 1995; the anti-globalization protests in Seattle (1999) and Quebec (2001); the transnational Occupy movement (2011); and perhaps even the current French Yellow Vests (gilets jaunes) movement. Undoubtedly the strongest argument for 1968’s enduring radical meaning and potential has been made by Kristin Ross in her 2002 book May ’68 and its Afterlives (see Ross Reference Ross2002).

This article is partly committed to arguing for a middle way between these two views. I accept that les années soixante-huit triggered the development of a new kind of capitalist society while at the same time they formed the template for the radicalisms we now have. This mediation might seem to involve a contradiction, but in the end it is more accurate not to see these two views as they see themselves, namely as enemies, but rather to view them as dialectically and functionally united. Without the kind of capitalism that the 1960s triggered, there would be no radical movement politics; without radical, post-communist movement politics, no such late capitalism. To see that, we need to think about 1968 in larger contexts and terms than is usual. I will call the context I wish to bring to bear general secularization.

In coming to this position, I have taken heed of the rather different terms in which one of May’s more significant intellectual supporters from the older generation came to reflect, very philosophically, on what the event had meant. In December 1968, some six months after May, Maurice Blanchot, an ex-ultra-rightist in the years before the Second World War, and by this time a famous leftist literary critic and theorist, noted that it was possible to think ‘that the May revolution, because it was global, because it changed everything, also left everything intact’. He went on to say, however:

This is an end-of-history argument, with a twist. Blanchot is no Hegelian. As Gillian Rose (Reference Rose1981, 53) has reminded us, G. W. F. Hegel had argued that the end of history would come only when the ‘fundamental speculative proposition’ of his thought is realized, that is, to put the argument concretely and institutionally, when religion and the state were fused. An end of history which is also the end of secularity. Blanchot’s end of history is something like the opposite of that – a radical emptiness. And indeed one which is so radical that he finds it hard to believe.

After May ’68 and its opening up of an ‘absolute void’, a point has been reached from which there is no turning back. So Blanchot hypothesizes. After this, the transcendentalisms that legitimated and grounded society are vanishing. The ranks, layers and boundaries, whether religious, social or cultural, that organized it are dissolving. As Raymond Aron (Reference Aron and Clough1969, 30) said of the event soon after it happened, it was ‘a kind of disintegration of hierarchies’ or, to follow Hannah Arendt (Reference Arendt1972, 85), and quote his original French, ‘une sorte de désintégration de toutes les hierarchies’.

What I appreciate about Blanchot’s response is that he thinks of May ’68 not just as a political event (which is the frame within which Kristin Ross wishes to contain it) but as a total event. It changed everything: social and governmental forms and ideological settings, of course, but also political possibilities and experiential content. Let me give a name to this radical mutation: under this account, May ’68 stands as a signifier for a general secularization, a secularization that no longer just concerns religion but which now covers culture, society, manners, ethics and politics too. This is the framework in which Blanchot’s end of history becomes the radical opposite of Hegel’s speculative assertion of transcendence’s (that is, the church’s) fusion with immanence (that is, the state).

This big claim remains vague of course. What, we may ask, would a general secularity look like more concretely?

We already have an adequate understanding of religious secularization (the first secularization, and the one that, as it has turned out, provided a template for the others). After Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age (Reference Taylor2007), there is a consensus that religious secularization does not involve the end or subsumption of religion so much as its marginalization. Religion becomes, as Taylor famously remarks, one option among many in a smorgasbord of spiritual, ethical and lifestyle choices. At the same time, however, religion’s traces and displacements continue to organize many of the social and cultural zones it has evacuated.

Cultural secularization can be thought about in a similar way. To secularize the culture means to displace and marginalize those canons, traditions and disciplines that have been deemed to form the substance of properly and fully civilized existence. A secularized culture may – and ours indeed does – sustain principles, feelings, hierarchies and institutions (pre-eminently the academic humanities) that subtended this notion of civilization, but these principles, feelings, hierarchies and institutions are no longer generally recognized as mattering to society and culture as a whole. Inherited canons and disciplines are no longer considered to support something like the best that has been known and thought at least in Europe and across its empires and diasporas. They now become just a taste formation for small and relatively elite groups even while emulations of the old high culture continue to shape popular forms. After religious secularization, then: cultural secularization.

And political secularization? That is a more recent, indeed very much an ongoing, process. As we know, modern politics merges in a struggle between what came to be called progressive and conservative forces. We can argue about when this division first appeared: there is a case for saying that something like it shaped the late seventeenth-century English division between Whigs and Tories. But there is a stronger case to be made that it appears in its modern form only as late as the French Revolution in a politics motivated (from the left) against inherited rank and property rights in support of equality, universal rights and generalized political participation.

At any rate, les années soixante-huit mark the end of a politics organized this way around the serial contestation of a party of order and tradition against a party of social justice for the right to govern the state. And that is partly because politics had suffered a great loss, namely the presumption that the state (what Michael Oakeshott treated as a corporate association: see Oakeshott Reference Oakeshott1975) depended on the individuals identifying themselves and acting as citizens, that is to say, taking seriously their roles as public-minded, well-informed and rationally deliberative participators in the social good. Especially after ’68, the state cannot imagine itself, or be imagined as, constituted by personae of that type, and for very good reasons.

This transformation loosened and flattened old divisions and hierarchies, and today’s radical politics are organized around that political deregulation, which in its widest contexts can also, I think, be understood as a secularization.

General secularization covers more than religion, culture and politics. It seeps into everyday styles, comportments and values. To put the case simply: it means a dissolution of hard divisions such as public/private, work/leisure and ideal/real, along with the zones these boundaries sheltered. More concretely, in regards to manners, it means (as Agnès Heller once put it: see Bourg Reference Bourg, Jackson, Milne and Williams2011, 30) a switch from formality into informality. Aesthetically, it means the further immanentization of art and literature, a process that entails their closer attachment to their media as well as their retreat from mimesis (that is, from life-like imitation of so-called good or transcendental models). Affectively, it means taking experiences more seriously than offices, duties and responsibilities. Ethically, it means thinking of a life as freely chosen by an autonomous individual from an array of lifestyles. It means losing memory of those models that were clustered around the old notion of civic virtu: gentlemanliness, citizenship, honour, dignity, manliness. (One has only to read Jean Guehénno’s Vichy period diaries to see how powerfully that concept of virtu could operate even as late as the 1940s.) More concretely still, it means losing memory of the image of the noble productive worker which had sustained both working-class self-understandings and left politics from Karl Marx through Georges Sorel to the later György Lukàcs. It means, no less, an end of the figure of the woman as nurturer and bearer of domestic or familial life, and thus of the intimacy, love and cooperation supposed to be nurtured in that domain. Perhaps most importantly, it comes to mean joining others not as members of a shared community or association but as members of a shared identity, of groups based on corporeal (and affective) differences.

My argument then is that, looking back, the 1960s are to be understood as the threshold into general secularization. But I want to make two important qualifications to that thesis at once.

Blanchot invokes the void at society’s base (what I’m calling general secularization) as something ‘terrible’. He has a fear of it. So it is difficult to escape the sense that his analysis is less a dispassionate inspection of the situation than an expression of that disbelieving fear and horror. May ’68 here becomes, as it were, gothic: it happened, it failed, and its passage has torn a hole through everything so as to make it difficult to distinguish the imagined from the real, the new from the old. I remark on this not to take us further into Blanchot’s understanding of the event but to suggest that most accounts of May ’68 have the rather ambiguous epistemological status that characterizes Blanchot here. They are half analytic, half expressive – expressive of hopes, fears, regrets, contempt and so on, which end up articulating political and civic attitudes. This matters because, of course, my own remarks here – my general secularization thesis – are similarly ambiguous. The concept of general secularization is at least as much a figure of fear or desire (and in my personal case, both simultaneously) as it is an analytic tool.

The second qualification to the thesis that les années soixante-huit form the threshold to general secularization returns us to the question of temporal extension. I have noted that the Parisian May ’68 both crystallized and symbolized more general structures, mutations and tendencies. Thus, to understand les événements we need not just to have a sense of what those larger structures and tendencies were but also why it was that the happenings in Paris in particular became so powerful a symbol of broader, slower forces.

The political conditions underpinning the events are best known since the insurrection, being ‘in thrall to the possible’ (to use Henri Lefebvre’s description of revolutionary romanticism: Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre2012, 293), knew itself as a revolution, and revolutions are, however social, primarily political. In this context, May ’68 was occasioned by the left’s splitting. Clearly it was not pushed forward by social democratic movements: it had turned its back on, for example, the traditions of the French Section of the Workers’ International, Germany’s Social Democratic Party and Britain’s Labour Party. Nor was it communist: the student uprising was driven in part by disillusionment with official (Stalinist) communism and in France was disowned by the Communist Party. It was rather, as they then said, gauchiste; May ’68 was leftist.

As such, the events did not belong to formal politics at all. They had no deliberate political or governmental aims. In fact, they too were more expressive and existential than intentional, driven by energies and desires that many young educated, bourgeois people felt society could not satisfy. Conformity, alienation, affluence, inauthenticity, routinization, boredom were this expressive insurrection’s key terms – terms that are not primarily political at all.

Of course, the protest did also have formal political roots and connections. As Hamon and Rotman make clear in Génération, many of its leaders had experience in earlier very obviously political movements – mostly in the anti-colonial struggles over Algeria, Cuba and Vietnam. And the students’ uprising triggered workers’ strikes and insubordination across France, and these were often organized by unions, whether communist or Catholic. At the same time, the Parisian May ’68 drew indirectly upon the examples and structures of feeling associated with the international, post-communist New Left; the New Left emerged in the early 1950s not just out of anti-colonial politics but also out of those broader peace and anti-nuclear movements that, since the 1950s, had sheltered a new kind of movement politics across Europe and the US in organizations such as the UK’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, along with a new student activism most fully developed in West Germany’s Socialist German Student League (Sozialistischer Deutsche Studentenbund). This more or less formally organized New Left also produced sophisticated political analyses and programmes, as in The Port Huron Statement (see Students for a Democratic Society 1962) or the New Left May Day Manifesto (see Hall et al. Reference Hall, Thompson and Williams1967), to take two Anglophone examples. But such classic New Left statements were much more reformist and programmatic than May ’68 was to become. They belonged to the end of the old more than to the beginning of the new.

It is in this context too that we need to remember that the symbolically dominant moment of ’68, the student insurrection in Paris, was significant most of all for its spectacular failure. In France, the workers’ strikes that the student insurrection triggered were called off as soon as de Gaulle’s government made concessions to the unions. The student movement itself then suddenly faded. In France, the withdrawal of student protest did not even leave a terrorist residue as it did in Germany, Italy and the US. We can put this more bluntly: the Parisian May ’68 operates as a potent signifier of possibilities and transformations not because it was successful but because, on this political level, it was the 1960s’ most flaming failure.

The strange thing, then, is that that failure did not dent the glamour of 1968: it was not even felt as a failure. This is perhaps the surest sign that it did indeed mark something quite new: a politics that isn’t one.

At this point, it is useful briefly to contextualize more broadly still. Culturally and ethically, May ’68 drew on older energies, dissatisfactions and hopes, some dating back centuries, past romanticism, to figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseau, the first soixante-huitard?) with Arthur Rimbaud and Alfred Jarry, for example, standing closer to the foreground. But it would be misguided to regard the events simply as fitting into this kind of auratic lineage of heroic intellectuals and rebels. In reality it drew on wider cultural energies than that, energies that were firmly embedded in capitalism.

By which I mean that, by 1968, a culture of youthful rebellion and expression had been widely disseminated and commodified across the West for over a decade, and absorbed into industrialized popular culture. Think rock ’n’ roll (the Beatles, the Stones …) and the ubiquity of the cheap single and album; think the young Bob Dylan and the so-called protest hit; think pirate radio stations in Europe; think Marlon Brando; think the nouvelle vague; think Parisian left-bank existentialism as a life-style choice; think England’s Angry Young Men; think the mini skirt; think Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, the Beats; think the paperback revolution; think the conceptive pill; on a different register, think official efforts to expand the reach of higher education, and the push back against censorship in cases such as Britain’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial (1960).

What then marks the 1968 insurrection out, at least in Western Europe, was that it was simultaneously political, cultural, sexual and social on terms that were created or absorbed or expanded by capitalism and were an aspect of the affluent society as they then said. This is the setting in which its political failure was actually a sign of its success: political failure was the condition for the insurrection’s social and cultural success, its capacity to trigger cultural, ethical and social transformations. So this is also the setting under which secularization was to be generalized.

It is also important to note something which is often forgotten, namely that for at least a decade before 1968 a stream of more or less mainstream social and cultural analysis (and prophecy) had already articulated the dissatisfactions and hopes that spilled out in the insurrections. Indeed, this body of 1950s critique had already put forward something like a diagnosis of general secularization. In this light, let me just draw attention to three well-known contributions to this corpus.

First, from the world of high theory and from the pinnacle of academic prestige, in the late 1950s Hannah Arendt wrote a series of essays that were published in the collection entitled Between Past and Future. These essays made the case that the traditional inherited or transcendental fundaments of social order – and in particular so-called authority and tradition – had in effect disappeared in the post-war settlement in the West (and especially in the USA). In a society without tradition and authority, inherited concepts of history and nature were no longer ‘conceivable’ (Arendt Reference Arendt2006, 89). Boundaries between past and present, between the natural and the constructed were weak and labile. Likewise, culture in the old style, culture that can be transmitted across generations, could not survive mass consumer society: ‘An object is cultural to the extent that it can endure; its durability is the very opposite of functionality, which is the quality which makes it disappear again from the phenomenal world by being used and used up’ (Arendt Reference Arendt2006, 204). In this situation, the education system was unable to reproduce and celebrate inherited cultural forms. This meant that the young and the adult were becoming radically different from one another. Children were being born into a society that had no capacity to shape them according to received categories and hierarchies, this incapacity being a condition of possibility for new, post-political youth movements, although Arendt of course could not predict them. In Arendt’s analysis the processes of cultural secularization can be viewed not so much as the effect of the so-called revolutions of the 1960s as their cause.

Second, in 1960 the anarchist therapist and writer Paul Goodman published his best-selling book, Growing Up Absurd. The book made somewhat similar claims to Arendt, if from different premises. Goodman (Reference Goodman1960, ix) argued that what he called ‘the Organized System’ was failing to answer peoples’ basic needs and values, despite the generalized apathy it also engendered. Contemporary society offered no avenues towards ‘faith’ (Goodman Reference Goodman1960, 140). It provided no sense of meaning and purpose except the accrual of commodities, experience and status, themselves created by marketing machines and thus artificial. It could not produce a culture of quality. Historically, this flat, affectless, secularized culture could be understood as the outcome of the ‘missed revolutions that we have inherited’ (Goodman Reference Goodman1960, 216). For Goodman, the present was the detritus left by a couple of centuries of failed revolutions, a claim that seems to hint at failed revolutions to come.

Arendt and Goodman were both widely read and (along with many other not dissimilar texts, some belonging to Daniel Bell’s end-of-ideology school) helped form the intellectual background for 1968. But the third book I want to draw attention to had a smaller readership, among which were a few French students who came to think of it as a handbook for les événements. Raoul Vaneigem’s Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations, a 1967 book translated as The Revolution of Everyday Life, uses a different lexicon to argue that the history of religious secularization resulted in ideologies, structures (for example, mechanization) and figurations (for example, reification) which can now be seen to lack legitimacy but which nevertheless continue to insert themselves seamlessly and universally into the practices of everyday life.

For Vaneigem, the proper response to this disconnect between life and ideology is not to attach oneself to (more ideologies of) progressive politics such as socialism, revolutionary communism or even the liberal demand for equality. What is required rather is an ethical, or better, existential response involving an alternative practice of life, one in which individuals do not inhabit conventional personae, offices and duties, but live poetically, taking risks, so as to ‘release their promise of life’ (Vaneigem Reference Vaneigem and Nicholson-Smith2012, 75). Vaneigem’s understanding of society shares much with Goodman’s but he has a sharper understanding that its transformation is near, and that that transformation will not be, in the conventional sense, political at all, even though it will no doubt have political effects. It will take place in a totally secularized society by individuals freed of their ‘identities’ (Vaneigem Reference Vaneigem and Nicholson-Smith2012, 30), individuals who somehow will nevertheless spontaneously create social harmony just by giving up on the will to progress, the dignity of labour and the duties of citizenship.

A question remains: why did 1968 mutate into that form of social modernity which, thought very broadly and abstractly, consists of globalized neoliberalism, on one side, and identity politics, on the other, punctuated by explosions of protest?

Arendt, Goodman and Vaneigem help prepare us to answer that question insofar as they identify features of, and possibilities within, Blanchot’s voided society and so provide us with a stronger sense of the intellectual conditions under which neoliberalism and identity politics emerged.

The first of these conditions is, I think, the anti-statism which the ’68ers shared with the neoliberals, and which Goodman and Vaneigem were committed to as well. It is striking to see the degree to which their anarchist faith in spontaneity matches Friedrich Hayek’s market-based spontaneity, for example. The second condition is the de-hierarchization which all three theorists note (Arendt sceptically), and which both the ’68ers and the neoliberals actively promoted each in their own way: we need to remember that neoliberalism favoured market mechanisms partly on the grounds that they would disestablish experts and bureaucracies along with those who inherit cultural capital and so on. The third is the embrace of risk and uncertainty as against conformity and boredom: rooted in existentialism, 1968 thought was, despite itself, also to find common ground with thinkers such as Hayek in pursuing this path.

These three modes of thought join the 1960s insurrectionary movement to neoliberalism and make it easier for us to understand how the first led to the second. But (perhaps surprisingly) identity politics’ connection to the 1960s insurrections is harder to conceive. It is striking, although the civil rights movement and anti-colonial struggles were part of the political formation of 1968, how universalist the proclamations of the insurrection actually were, and, in particular, how little feminism found a voice there. To think a little more carefully about relations between 1968, general secularization and the emergence of identity politics we need, however, to step back some.

I have mentioned that identity politics are based in groups that are not associations: they need not involve any kind of coming together; they do not, for example, produce formal political parties. I have also asserted that they are usually based on body differences rather than, say, beliefs or traditions or even material interests. They are primarily interested in recognition as well as in the right of particular groups (identities) to participate equally or indifferently in all social and political activities. They appeal neither to the quasi-transcendental universality of the human in the humanist sense, nor to any revolutionary or otherwise radical will to change social structures for all. On these terms, they belong to what politics can become when there is no politics, that is to say, when politics adjusts itself to a totally secularized society.

These are the terms on which identity politics is to be considered as the immanentization of politics. It is a politics still insofar as it continues to pursue a liberation agenda, but it does so on a post-revolutionary social terrain in which divisions such as public/private, domestic/work or nature/artifice are dissolving. It is a politics directed more to a disaggregated civil society than to the state. It liberates what remains in such a disaggregated, unideological society: bodies which are nevertheless also social constructions (gendered bodies, ethnized or racialized bodies, bodies that feel particular sexual desires, and so on).

To push this thought a little further: under these social conditions, what is natural is no longer separated from what has been socialized (so that, for example, what belongs to sex and what belongs to gender is unclear as is what belongs to race and what belongs to ethnicity). At the same time, the division between public and private has no purchase (sexual preference in particular is no longer private). Instead of a so-called public, there are dissociated groups, identities and interests. It isn’t quite clear even who belongs to these groups. (For example, what about the people who share desires, body types, ethnicities but not the will to be recognized in such terms?) Last, there are no clear final ends in this politics: in particular, it is not generally agreed, indeed it is often ambiguous, as to whether so-called minorities want what the hegemonic groups have or perhaps something different.

This is, then, a politics (or post-politics) proper to general secularization.

Let me end this rather speculative article by myself venturing a prophecy. The triplet of neoliberalism, identity politics and protest movement, which is what the successful failure of 1968 has bequeathed us, is not, I think, sustainable. Global heating, the return of oligarchy and corruption, the global unevenness of general secularization and the bourgeoisification of identity politics will likely see to that. And this may mean that in the end we will also need to rethink the familiar secularization model which has dominated Western thought at least since Hegel, Marx and Max Weber. We may have to think of a reversible secularization or, better, of reversible secularizations. It is striking that some of those intellectuals most involved in les événements (Christian Jambet, Guy Lardreau, and so on) made a post-secular, religious turn soon after the revolution’s failure. There is a chance that they were harbingers of broader tendencies. But those tendencies are radically unpredictable not least because secularization has reached so far. General secularization, fragile and unsustainable as it looks to be, may trigger wide re-faithings as we could call them, re-faithings that will not be just rewindings and will not be just spiritual either, but also cultural, social, aesthetic and ethical. This, however, is to conceive of matters for which we as yet have no guide, which remain as yet well beyond our ken.