Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion and Utopia

What Did They Think They Were Doing? The Political Thought of (the West European) 1968 Revisited

Jan-werner müller What Did They Think They Were Doing? The Political Thought of (the West european) 1968 revisited1 Nineteen sixty-eight was a year of mass violence: the Vietnam War, the crushing of student protest in mexico, the Cultural revolution in China—and, in east-Central europe, the suppression of the “Polish march” and the Prague spring. By comparison, little seemed at stake in Western europe—which nevertheless produced most of the iconic images of ’68. As was often pointed out, west of Czechoslovakia “no one died”; no government fell. Not surprisingly, then, for a number of not even especially conservative observers, ’68—and the sixties, more broadly—seemed to have been about a small minority of spoiled children playing revolution. raymond Aron was to heap scorn on what he perceived as a mere “psychodrama” (an interpretation eventually endorsed by a communist like eric Hobsbawm); ernest Gellner diagnosed the “mad logic of a family quarrel”; and even some of the protagonists thought they were just engaged in a huge “costume drama.”2 so many myths or—put more neutrally—collective memories were to surround the various “events” of the sixties that it is hard to get a real sense not just of what happened, but also what the intentions of 1 This essay draws on and extends my work in “1968 as event, milieu and ideology,” in Journal of Political Ideologies 7, no. 1 (2002); A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); “The Paradoxes of Post-War italian Political Thought,” in History of European Ideas, special issue on european social and political thought after 1945, ed. edmund Neill (forthcoming); and my book on twentiethcentury european political thought (forthcoming). i am grateful to Dick Howard for reactions to some of the arguments presented here. 2 Thomas Hecken, 1968: Von Texten und Theorien aus einer Zeit euphorischer Kritik (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008), 135–148. i4 Promises.indb 73 2010.10.18. 14:30 74 Promises of 1968 the political actors might have been. Grand narratives and ambitious macro-explanations of causes and effects abound to this day. some observers came to see it as the birth of a kind of libertarianism in europe, or at least a déblocage of society (André Glucksmann), or a laboratory for post-industrial society (Claus Leggewie). others lamented it as a return of political romanticism, or perhaps a return of anarchism, or perhaps even a return of fascism—or maybe a kind of religious revival. interpretations revolving around unintended consequences have had a particular appeal. it has often been claimed that ’68 had largely positive effects, but effects very much contrary to what student leaders thought they were aiming at: no political revolution broke out, but the “insurrection in middle-class customs”3 succeeded and culture became more liberalized; the specific objectives of protest hardly ever were realized, but dissent and even civil disobedience became more accepted as part of normal democratic politics—Jürgen Habermas was to speak of a “fundamental liberalization” of West Germany. many of the protagonists are of course comfortable with this narrative: Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the franco-German student leader often dubbed “red Danny” (today a self-declared member of the “libéraux-libertaires”), could exclaim: “When one watches footage of ’68 today, listens to the speeches, it’s a catastrophe. it really hurts.” But at the same time, Cohn-Bendit and his comrades would always insist that ’68 had started a fundamental process of democratization, political modernization, and even Americanization—the cunning of reason seemed to have ensured that anti-Americanism, which at the time appeared as a distinctive feature of the Western european ’68, turned out to be the supreme means of promoting Americanization.4 in short, retrospective dissociation by the participants could go hand in hand with the claim that history had worked behind the backs of the actors, so to speak. Conservatives, meanwhile, would not simply see ’68, with André malraux, as a “crisis of civilization”; they maintain that the ’68ers had a basic contempt for democratic institutions, because they were averse 3 Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York: Norton, 1996), 8. 4 or, for that matter, europeanization. According to Glucksmann père et fils, “Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands” was actually a call for transnational european solidarity. see André and raphael Glucksmann, Mai 68 expliqué à Nicolas Sarkozy (Paris: Denoël, 2008), 37–38...