Richard Wolin - The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s

The Wind From the East must be regarded as a monument of committed scholarship. It is also a fascinating chronicle of people who, however ludicrous they may seem at times, did on occasion think and act with profound seriousness. For that reason the book is a valuable addition to the literature of the era. -- David Gress, Wall Street JournalEven as he is documenting the delusions of the sixty-eighters--often with considerable wit, and with a seemingly encyclopedic familiarity--Wolin grants credence to their skewed perception of the status quo in France and in the West more generally. Disagreements and exasperations aside, I found this book compulsively readable. The history of Sixties is a long way from being exhausted. -- John Wilson, Books & CultureWolin argues that fascination with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution reflected, not simply a taste for exoticism, but a delayed response to postwar capitalist modernisation. -- Scott McLemee, The National

If you can remember anything about the sixties,
you werent really there.

Paul Kantner, Jefferson Starship

According to an oft-cited maxim, all history is the history of the present. Try as they might, historians are incapable of abstracting from contemporary issues and concerns. In fact, were they to do so, their work would surely reek of antiquarian sterility. At best, historians can make their biases clear to ensure they do not exercise an overtly disfiguring influence on their presentations and findings.

The presence of the past is especially true of the 1960s. Analysts and commentators have heatedly debated their meaning and import, but nearly all agree that the decade was a watershed. Whatever their ultimate meaning, the 1960s were a caesura that signified the impossibility of returning to the status quo ante. Thus, today the 1960s remain an inescapable rite of passage for those who seek to fathom the nature of the political present. First, their range and extent was genuinely international. In an age of instantaneous, mass communication, virtually no corner of the globe could remain immune from their influence and legacy. Second, the decades effects, rather than being confined to one specific manifestation or mode, were, to invoke French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, a total social phenomenon. The 1960s and their aftereffects influencedand left permanently transformedthe realms of politics, society, fashion, art, and music.

By the same token, it would be impossible to deny that the 1960s have also become historical. Thus the decade has provided fertile ground for interpreters who are seeking to distill and comprehend the origins and bases of contemporary politics and society. Yet, as history, the 1960swhose study threatens to metastasize into another academic growth industrypossess a temporality with a peculiar and profound bearing on the historical present. As such, as a cultural and political phenomenon, the decade remains a pivotal way station on the road toward comprehending who we are and what we would like to become. Hence, to contribute to the historicization of the 1960s is at the same time a method of coming to grips with the history of the present.

According to one celebrated maxim, the 1960s are an interpretation in search of an event. Indeed, a dizzying vortex of interpretations has emerged seeking to fathom and clarify what transpired and why. Having both studied these events and lived through them as a youth (although, admittedly, many memories remain enshrouded in a Hendrix-esque purple haze), at this point, when asked about their ultimate meaning, I am often tempted to fall back on Chinese premier Zhou En-lais immortal response when asked to comment on the historical import of the French Revolution: Its too soon to tell.

Yet, 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. At the time, it had become an intellectual commonplace that government by elitesin most cases, white, male eliteswas preferable to the perils and risks of popular participation. Political mobilization from below was viewed as irrational and untrustworthy, a prelude to totalitarianism in either its right or left variant. The 1950s were a decade when the so-called welfare-warfare state was ascendant, culminating in the debacle of Vietnam and kindred foreign policy disasters that often resulted in massive and abhorrent human rights violations. (Sadly, in many cases, the promissory note on such violations remains past due.) In the United States and elsewhere, the 1960s signified an attempt to wrest control of the political from elites: to counter the ills of technocratic liberalism via recourse to logics of grassroots political engagement and thereby to restore confidence in basic democratic norms.