No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
MAY ’68 AND THE ETHICAL TURN IN FRENCH THOUGHT
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
Extract
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. 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. 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.” 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.
- Type
- Review Essays
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014
References
1 Ross, Kristin, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 For a good overview of recent works on this debate, see Jackson, Julian, “The Mystery of May 1968,” French Historical Studies, 33/4 (2010), 625–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 12.
4 See Judt, Tony, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar; Judt, , The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Khilnani, Sunil, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven, 1993)Google Scholar. Along similar lines, see Lilla, Mark, New French Thought: Political Philosophy (Princeton, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Among others, see for Bourg the review by Breckman, Warren in the Journal of Modern History, 81/1 (March 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 207–9; and the H-France Forum 4/1 (Fall 2009). For Wolin see Michael C. Behrent's review in H-France, 11/47 (Feb. 2011); Frédérique Matonti in La vie des idées, 3 March 2011; and Michael Scott Christofferson, “Maoism and the French Sixties,” European Journal of Political Theory, 12/2 (April 2012), 195–204.
6 LaCapra, Dominick, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, 1983), 16Google Scholar.
7 For an example of how we might think nongovernmental politics as neither rejection nor embrace of government, in Foucault's footsteps, see Feher, Michel, Nongovernmental Politics (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.
8 It is also unclear that Kristeva and the other French “difference feminists” are actually essentialists as all. See Fuss, Diana, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Schor, Naomi and Weed, Elizabeth, The Essential Difference (Bloomington, 1994)Google Scholar.
9 See Shepard, Todd, “‘Something Notably Erotic’: Politics, ‘Arab Men,’ and Sexual Revolution in Post-decolonization France, 1962–1974,” Journal of Modern History, 84/1 (March 2012), 80–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 For a critique of this teleological vision of history in which today's gay movement would be the “heir of the 1970s,” see Gunther, Scott, The Elastic Closet: A History of Homosexuality in France, 1942–Present (London, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. According to Gunther, the 1970s gay movement did not bring about any changes in the laws affecting homosexuals. It was not until the gay movement adopted the universalist, republican discourse of sameness in the 1980s and 1990s that actual legal changes (such as civil unions and antidiscrimination legislation) occurred.
11 See, for instance, among many others, Canto-Sperber, Monique, Le libéralisme et la gauche (Paris, 2008)Google Scholar; Jainchill, Andrew, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Orgins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, 2008)Google Scholar; Nord, Philip, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar.
12 On this see Audier, Serge, La pensée anti-68: Essai sur une restauration intellectuelle (Paris, 2008)Google Scholar; Cusset, François, La décennie: Le grand cauchemar des années 1980 (Paris, 2006)Google Scholar; Eribon, Didier, D’une révolution conservatrice: Et de ses effets sur la gauche française (Paris: 2007)Google Scholar; Scott, Joan Wallach, “French Universalism in the Nineties” differences, 15/2 (2004), 32–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Bourg is especially clear about this in his conclusion (see 339, when he describes himself as a member of the “Generation X” looking to the 1960s for the good and the bad) and in his response to the H-France Forum.