It has become somewhat of a cliché to refer to May 1968 in France as an “interpretation in search of an event.” As many critics have pointed out, this designation fails to account for the real significance of the “events,” for the fact that May ’68 was one of the largest mass movement in French history—numerically, geographically, and sociologically—and one of the most acute political crises in postwar France. Yet, to refer to May ’68 as an interpretation does capture the extent to which the historiography of May ’68 has appeared, almost from the beginning, indistinguishable from its history, or, as Kristin Ross has put it, the extent to which May ’68 cannot be considered separately from its memory.Footnote ¹ At the risk of reducing some of these rich historiographical debates, we could say that, broadly speaking, two main issues have divided historians, philosophers, political theorists, and sociologists over the past forty years. The first has to do with the scope of the events, the degree to which the student leaders, the workers on strike, or the cultural legacy “mattered” more, or whether any of it mattered at all.Footnote ² The second line of contention has centered on the legacy of May ’68. According to some, May ’68 represented the acceleration of capitalism and modernization and it inaugurated an era of individualism and/or narcissism and political disengagement. In the eyes of these critics, ’68 was thus ultimately a conservative, or at least a libertarian, revolution. According to others, this was instead a truly radical period—socially, culturally, and politically—and this radicalism began to run out of steam towards the late 1970s. Instead of revolution, many intellectuals who had participated in May ’68 began to talk about ethics, morality, human rights, and the rule of law. Not surprisingly, commentators have once again differed on their reading of this “turn,” either condemning it or celebrating it, depending on their political bent. This “condemning” position has been articulated particularly forcefully by Kristin Ross in her excellent May ’68 and Its Afterlives. According to Ross, the “turn to ethics” marked a conscious “retreat from politics . . . that distorted not only May's ideology but much of its memory as well.”Footnote ³ Ross's book is thus devoted to the analysis of this political radicalism—a radicalism that she situates in the union of intellectual contestation and workers’ struggle around what she calls “a polemics of equality”—and to the critique of its betrayal after 1976. On the other side of the spectrum, historians such as Tony Judt and Sunil Khilnani have praised this “ethical turn” as the moment in which French intellectuals were finally able to exorcise the (communist) revolutionary ideal that had haunted them throughout the twentieth century and to embrace liberalism.Footnote ⁴

Julian Bourg's From Revolution to Ethics and Richard Wolin's The Wind from the East are both deeply engaged with these historiographical debates around May ’68, particularly with the last one. While Bourg wants to demonstrate that this “ethical turn” happened, Wolin takes it as a premise. Both locate it around the late 1970s. And both attempt to get beyond the paradigms set up by Ross, Khilnani, and Judt, which, despite their fundamental differences, see liberalism (whether praised or decried) as the teleological outcome of May ’68. As Bourg puts it, his “revisionist account is an attempt to steer the straits between reigning neo-liberal and nostalgic treatments of 1968 and its aftermath” (12). May ’68, Bourg argues, did not lead France towards liberalism but rather towards a renewal of “democratic ethics.” The “turn to ethics,” Bourg continues, did not mark the “defeat of the revolution,” as Kristin Ross has suggested, but rather proved 1968's success. The ethical turn thus represented neither the negation nor the logical outcome of 1968 but rather a “transvaluation of May's contestatory energies” (6, my emphasis). What was revolutionized, Bourg tells us, “was the very notion of revolution itself” (4).

In Richard Wolin's narrative, democracy is also the endpoint, although his concept of democracy appears somewhat more specific than Bourg’s. As Wolin summarizes his argument,

“The specific intellectual,” Wolin continues, “had supplanted the universal intellectual . . . the democratic intellectual would replace the vanguard intellectual of the Jacobin–Bolshevik mould” (xii, original emphasis). From this passage alone, it is clear that Wolin's notion of democracy emphasizes cultural pluralism, the right to difference, a strong civil society, and that it is, furthermore, staunchly opposed to revolution—in this case, Marxism. Both Bourg's and Wolin's books have been widely reviewed.Footnote ⁵ Instead of rehashing some of these praises and criticisms, I would like to use this essay as a forum to address three larger methodological questions raised by these two important works, first in the domain of intellectual history, second in the field of French history, and third in terms of their contribution to political theory.

According to Dominick LaCapra, one of the challenges facing intellectual historians is to “formulate as a problem what is often taken, deceptively, as a solution: the relationship between texts and their various pertinent contexts.”Footnote ⁶ While both Bourg and Wolin anchor their philosophical analyses in the history of France during the 1960s and 1970s, their approach to sources, to narrative, and to the problem of the transmission of ideas remains quite different. Bourg's book is divided into four parts, each corresponding to an individual “case study” exemplifying the tension between law (which Bourg calls transcendent) and ethics (which Bourg defines as immanent) (340). In Part I, Bourg addresses the Maoist organization, the Gauche prolétarienne, and more precisely their activism around prisons. In Part II, he turns to the “philosophy of desire” developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their 1972 Anti-Oedipus. Part III examines the reaction of French feminists and gay activists to a series of laws around sexual violence and the age of sexual consent. In Part IV, Bourg turns to the popular New Philosophers in the late 1970s. The four parts present some overlapping characters (such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault) and some overlapping themes pertaining to the ethical: “the self, others, institutions, the state, and ‘humanity’” (17). According to Bourg, these sections are meant to function as a “slide show or a collection of short stories” (17). Yet there appears to be a certain implicit chronological—even teleological—model governing the overarching structure of the book. The Maoists were confronted with the difficulty of reconciling Marxism's laws of history with the liberationist aspirations of many gauchistes. This “antinomian ethos” that Bourg locates at the heart of May ’68 thought culminated with the philosophy of desire and found a certain form of “resolution” in the ethical pronouncements of the New Philosophers who sought a “higher law.”

One of the main advantages of Bourg's “snapshot approach” is that it avoids a causal model in which the text would merely appear as a symptom of the context in which it was produced. The section on Anti-Oedipus is, in this regard, particularly impressive as Bourg elegantly interweaves philosophical exegesis, original archival research (in many archives that remain underutilized in intellectual history), reception analysis, and institutional and political history. Bourg's approach in this chapter is genealogical and it offers a model of intellectual history at its best. This multifaceted approach to the individual chapters is, however, at times difficult to reconcile with the larger structure of the work. In particular, the concept of a turn appears to inevitably flatten some of the historical and theoretical complexity in the focus on unity and coherence rather than on the things that “don't fit.” How does this notion of a turn, for instance, foreclose potential spaces of conflict? Bourg's reading of Foucault is, in this sense, indicative of this tension: is the ethical dimension in Foucault's writings, from his work on the GIP (the Groupe d’information sur les prisons, an organization designed to rethink the basis of the carceral system), his preface to Anti-Oedipus, to his appreciation of the nouveau philosophe André Glucksmann, continuous? How does this ethical Foucault relate to the Foucault interested not so much in anti-normativity as in critique, genealogy, destabilization, and the possibility of a nongovernmental politics?Footnote ⁷ At times, Bourg acknowledges that his authors might mean something different by the term “ethics,” but then what ties these various meanings together (5)? Are Foucault's ethics as a practice of freedom and of everyday life the same as the New Philosophers’? Similarly, is the concept of desire in Anti-Oedipus, which, as Bourg admirably shows, was derived from Spinoza and offered Deleuze and Guattari a powerful tool to critique Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis (especially the idea that subjectivity is premised on a constitutive lack) the same desire that the lawyers and Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) activists in Part IV referred to? My point here is not that these different contexts (intellectual, legal, political) should not coexist but rather that this coexistence should be thought through more carefully, that it should be articulated as a “problem.”

Richard Wolin's argument is also set up around a series of “case studies” of French intellectuals who, during the 1960s and 1970s, embraced or at least flirted with what came to be known as “Mao Zedong thought.” Wolin makes clear that this infatuation with China had little to do with the reality of the Chinese nation and that it served instead as “a projection screen, a Rorschach test, for their innermost radical political hopes and fantasies, which in de Gaulle's France had been deprived of a real-world outlet” (3). Yet, aside from referencing a vague Third-Worldism, Wolin never really addresses why Maoism and the Cultural Revolution specifically would offer this platform for French radicalism.

Wolin's book is divided into two parts, “The Hour of Rebellion” (Part I) and “The Hour of the Intellectuals” (Part II), with an excursus on Alain Badiou placed somewhat artificially between the two. Wolin's case studies of intellectuals seduced by Maoism (Sartre, the members of Tel quel, and Foucault) contain the more interesting and original material and they make up the second part. The first part, based mostly on secondary sources, provides the context for the book. Wolin begins with a provocative analysis of the Bruay-en-Artois incident in 1972 in which a young working-class woman was brutally murdered. The crime suspect was a local notable who was arrested but rapidly released given the relatively weak evidence against him. Various Maoist students and intellectuals (including Sartre and Foucault) took up this case to debate the merits and limits of popular tribunals as a mechanism to bypass “bourgeois justice.” According to Wolin, the Bruay-en-Artois case represented a turning point for various French thinkers who finally opted against revolutionary violence and later became staunch human rights advocates. The second chapter, entitled “France during the 1960s,” mentions everything from the Trente glorieuses, the Algerian War, De Gaulle, consumer society, centralization, the critique of everyday life, Les Halles and urbanization, Perec and Godard, but it is never clear how these separate elements contributed to the Maoist enthusiasm of the intellectuals featured in Part II. Again, how did China function as a specifically French political fantasy? How did it figure (or not figure) within the rapidly accelerating decolonization process during those years? Could France's infatuation with China perhaps operate as a deflection of its colonial worries? Along similar lines, if the Bruay-en-Artois incident does seem central to Wolin's argument that gauchisme eventually led to droit-de-l’hommisme, the purpose of the third chapter on May ’68 is less obvious since Maoism can hardly be conflated with the May ’68 movement as a whole.

Unlike Bourg, Wolin is less interested in presenting a multitude of origins for this turn to ethics and Maoism appears to operate as the single factor in this crucial transformation of French intellectual life. The treatment of Foucault is once again significant as Wolin contends that

The GIP existed from 1971 to 1972 and it is undeniable that Foucault's thought during this period was greatly influenced by his political activism. Yet, aside from relying on the method of investigations advocated by Mao, it is unclear to what extend the GIP was actually Maoist at all. Or rather, this point would require a more precise definition of French Maoism.

Furthermore, for Foucault, those years were characterized by an intense reflection on Nietzsche, Sade, and Bataille, none of whom can be taken as models of democratic thought. Personal relationships are, of course, crucial to understand the genesis of ideas, but the point of intellectual history is precisely to put in conversation these social networks with the philosophical work. Wolin mentions the interviews and Dits et écrits of this period, but he never refers to Foucault's seminars at the Collège de France where Foucault first exposed his theory of power through examples that ranged from the history of psychiatry, liberalism, and neo-liberalism to the work of Machiavelli and Clausewitz.

This attempt to unify all forms of social contestation under the label of Maoism is also problematic in the case of feminism, where Wolin argues that the feminist publication Le torchon brûle was inspired by “the credo of Maoist populism” (146). Again, Wolin is very convincing in showing us that the MLF was interested in populism, but what makes this populism explicitly Maoist? Interestingly, Wolin describes the second phase of the MLF as “anti-intellectual” because a “politics of feeling” has triumphed over a “politics of the intellect.” I am assuming here that he is thinking of the Psych et po group (Psychanalyse et politique) with which thinkers such as Antoinette Fouque were associated. The point of this group was, indeed, as Wolin writes, to move from “‘historical’ to ‘hysterical’ materialism,” but this was hardly a retreat from politics (147). On the contrary, for the women in this group, the unconscious was the primary political battleground, so finding an alternative symbolic, an alternative to phallogocentrism, was the only possibility to truly escape male domination.

More generally, the status of the individual case studies in Wolin's argument remains ambiguous. Wolin's point is to argue that “as a result of the May events and their contact with the Maoists, French intellectuals bade adieu to the Jacobin–Leninist authoritarian political model of which they had formerly been so enamored. They ceased behaving like mandarins and internalized the virtues of democratic humility” (4). Thus, if Foucault and Sartre serve as the prototypes for this shift, Badiou and the members of the Tel quel group represent the counterexamples, those who never successfully transitioned to democracy. But why was this the case? Why was their Maoism theoretically or practically different? Is Maoism even the best term to think through these various intellectual trajectories? Granted, Badiou has never, to this day, expressed any regrets about his involvement with Maoism or criticized the Cultural Revolution, but Sollers did describe Maoism as the necessary detour to human rights.

A closer look at the sections on Badiou and on Tel quel can help us understand some of the values that Wolin rejects as politically objectionable. In the case of Badiou, Wolin accuses him of neglecting “the advances that democratization and rule of law can provide” (167), of “postmodern fragmentation” (166), of “terroristic nihilism . . . Nietzschean-inspired anarchism” (162), and of violence (163). What makes Badiou's Nietzscheanism so different from Foucault’s, which Wolin praises (314)? If Badiou starts out as a “self-professed Sartrean” (159), was it Althusser's influence that derailed him? If so, what does Althusser stand for here? The philosophy of a “history without a subject” and of a “science without a subject” (160)? Structural Marxism? Or structuralism, tout court? Similarly, Wolin's main objection to the Tel quel group appears to be textual formalism but the political implications that Wolin ascribes to this mode of reading are not always clear. Close textual analysis, Wolin suggests, led these thinkers to a “narcissistic delusion” that the world could be interpreted as a text, to a “latently nihilistic negative hermeneutics—a hermeneutics of ‘absence’ rather than ‘presence’” (285). For Wolin, this meant an explicit rejection of politics just as the turn to psychoanalysis did in the context of feminism (247). Ideas, in Wolin's narrative, appear to be personalized. Thus Kristeva exemplifies this essentialist feminism that he criticizes (257). Once again, the fact that Kristeva tried to conceive of a feminism that would not be rooted in electoral politics or representation is undeniable, but whether that makes her an apolitical thinker is more difficult to sustain.Footnote ⁸

“Politics” is generally a problematic category in both books, one that leads me to my second set of questions pertaining to French history. In his reviews of these works, Michael Christofferson accuses both Bourg and Wolin of misunderstanding the role of politics, or rather of minimizing it. As I see it, the problem is not that politics is absent in these accounts. On the contrary, while neither Bourg nor Wolin focuses on electoral politics or on the structural transformations of the state or the communist party, they are both extremely convincing in showing us how the political can be articulated and expressed in other fields, particularly in culture. My own reservation with their treatment of politics is that they seem to treat the French context with an American grid in mind. More specifically, I wonder whether “democratization” is the best framework to account for the “turn to ethics” that both authors examine.

In From Revolution to Ethics, the limits of this concept are particularly evident in Part III as Bourg tries to untangle the complicated racial and sexual politics of the late 1970s. His analysis of Guy Hocquenghem, one of the key figures of the Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire (FHAR), a gay liberation group that was active in the early 1970s, is excellent. Bourg successfully connects Hocquenghem's theoretical writings to his activism and shows how his antisocial and antifamilial stance (largely inspired by Anti-Oedipus) also implied a rejection of liberalism, humanism, social integration, and recognition. However, I am not sure that the women's liberation movement (the MLF) provides the best countermodel to the FHAR. The feminist movement was, not surprisingly, deeply divided, but someone like Monique Wittig or Françoise d’Eaubonne who advocated the destruction of the social contract in which we lived can hardly be accused of falling into the traps of “identity, reform, and integration” (191). French feminism during those years was in this sense quite different from its American counterpart, for which the law-versus-norms opposition works much better, especially in the case of the 1980s antipornography laws, or even in the case of abortion, defended as a “right to privacy.” In other words, the MLF's agenda cannot be subsumed under the rubric of identity politics because identity and recognition are particularly complicated notions within the framework of French republican universalism. Similarly, race does not seem the best conceptual tool to account for the intricate cases involving Arab men and sexuality. Or rather, race figured prominently in these discussions but the terms that were used were not identity, individual rights, or privacy, but rather class and imperialism, and this is significant (195–200).Footnote ⁹ Homophobia and racism were definitely recurrent terms, but neither gay identity nor race was invoked by the actors involved in these cases.

In his treatment of FHAR, Wolin is less careful to stress Hocquenghem's fundamental antinormativity. Instead, Wolin describes the FHAR and the MLF as providing “alternative modes of self-individuation” (142) and as obtaining “broad cultural acceptance of the right to be different” (150), when in fact, for many of these thinkers, rights and individuation itself were in question. This is important because it points directly to Wolin's tendency to compare May ’68 to the civil rights movement in the US, as a “self-limiting revolution” which sought to “carve out an autonomous civil society . . . in the face of state socialism's near-total political domination” (93). There are two issues here. The first is that, to make his case, Wolin describes French political culture as intensely centralized and autocratic. There is, of course, some truth to this but Wolin bases his argument on Tocqueville (52–3) and Rousseau (94) rather than on the multiple historical studies that have examined the limits of and the tensions within this centralized political culture. Second, Wolin contends that one of the goals of May ’68 was to demand the inclusion of marginal groups (women, gays, immigrants, and prisoners) (99) and their recognition (366). But what does inclusion mean here? Many of the figures discussed, Hocquenghem most notably, argued for a radical antisociality, not for inclusion into a social that they rejected in its very essence. The paradigm was never liberalism, rights, state recognition, or identity politics.Footnote ¹⁰ This was perhaps the case in the US but not in France.

In the prologue to his book, Wolin explains that he is writing a history of the present (ix): “rather than seeking to portray the past ‘as it really was’” he wants to “‘actualize’ the epoch or event, with an eye towards its actuality or contemporary relevance” (xi). This is a perfectly legitimate endeavor but the history of the present, at least as Foucault conceived it, does not mean writing a history of the past in terms of the present. In The Wind from the East Wolin appears to be looking, in the France of the 1960s, for the kind of liberal politics that are considered “progressive” in the United States today. The political stakes of Wolin's argument become clearer in his conclusion as he compares France to Germany and Italy where, the “culture of political extremism” generated both fascism and terrorism (354).

By tracing this specifically French liberal culture (or counterculture), Wolin wants to suggest that France was different, that it was able to escape “Jacobinism, republicanism, and communism” (359). In other words, not only is liberalism the teleology here but it is a particularly American version of liberalism focused on individual rights and liberty. Again, my point is not to deny that French political culture suffered from étatisme, but many historians on both sides of the Atlantic have suggested that France did have a long-standing liberal tradition and that this liberalism, however, was one anchored in republicanism and hence fundamentally different from its British and American counterparts.Footnote ¹¹

Furthermore, it seems strange to end with human rights without mentioning antitotalitarianism, which in the French context of this time presented the most important challenge to the trio “Jacobinism, republicanism, and communism” that Wolin delineates. But perhaps one important element here is that most of the leading antitotalitarian thinkers of this period (François Furet, Pierre Rosanvallon, Jacques Julliard, Claude Lefort) had little or nothing to do with Maoism. The Second Left also plays a minimal to negligible role for Wolin and Bourg, which is odd given that both books end with the importance of associational civil life in France today, which the authors attribute to the ethical revival of May ’68. Finally, one category that is surprisingly absent in both Bourg and Wolin's account is republicanism, which during the 1980s offered an attractive platform for many French thinkers who insisted on the Republic's blindness to race, gender, and sexual orientation during the political campaigns around SOS Racisme, the Parité laws, and the PACS.Footnote ¹² It seems difficult to include this return of republicanism in the “ethical turn” if the former depends on the nonrecognition of the minority movements described by Wolin and Bourg as central to the democratic revival of France.

To conclude, I would like to highlight the contribution that these two works make to the field of political theory. Indeed, while both authors describe their projects as intellectual histories, they are also both invested in a larger debate around norms.Footnote ¹³ More specifically, both studies appear haunted by the question how to reconceptualize the normative basis of social, political, and intellectual life after the post-structuralist critique of humanism, metaphysics, language, and foundationalism. One of the most interesting aspects of these two books is that they refuse the double bind of “taking it or leaving it.” The post-structuralist critique happened and its effects were devastating. But by tracing an ethical current within this post-structuralist critique, Bourg and Wolin offer us a model to get not only beyond the nostalgia of an untainted “before,” but also beyond theoretical paralysis. Within political theory, thinkers such as William Connolly and Steven White (and even Judith Butler in her more recent work) have also turned to ethics for similar reasons. In this context, they have proposed to focus on philosophical anthropology, on the inescapability of ontology, on our shared experience of finitude, on human dignity and respect. Their aim was not to return to a liberal model of humanism but rather to propose an alternative, reconstructed humanism, which could get us beyond the violence of binary oppositions on the one hand and Schmittian pure decisionism on the other.

In this context, the works of Bourg and Wolin map out a different genealogy of this resurgence of ethics, one that avoids some of the more familiar figures (Emmanuel Lévinas, for instance) and provides radically new perspectives on figures such as Deleuze and Guattari, Sartre, and Foucault. Moreover, both accounts provide a historical narrative that locates this turn to ethics in the 1970s and presents it as a solution to the political impasses facing the two main currents within the left at this time, revolutionary communism and liberationism. In this sense, Wolin and Bourg confirm the thesis advanced by Samuel Moyn in The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, according to which human rights were born in the 1970s, as a “last utopia” in the wake of the collapse of other, prior utopias, mainly Marxism and internationalism. The 1970s discourse on human rights and ethics thus sought—very consciously—to transcend politics, to function as a “minimalist utopia,” to use Moyn's term. But as Moyn makes very clear, human rights were political from the beginning—it was just a different kind of politics. Similarly, I wonder whether the ethical turn described in these two books was not simply another way of engaging with politics without appearing to do so. Still, Bourg and Wolin have opened up a fascinating debate that will surely give us much to think about in the years to come.