Phantasms of Revolution

It would be easy—and perhaps entertaining—to write a history of Maoism in France that would lampoon the misjudgments, blind spots, and grandiosity of the movement. (Maoism in the United States never attained the power or cachet that it garnered in France; Maoism in certain other places—such as Peru, as embodied in the Shining Path, and Cambodia, under the Khmer Rouge—was no laughing matter.) After all, chastising the Left of the 1960s, and blaming it for as many contemporary ills as is conceivably possible, has, apparently, become a requirement of political discourse in both the United States (see under: Bill Ayers) and France (note Nicolas Sarkozy's linkage of riots in immigrant suburbs with the student radicals of 1968). It is to Richard Wolin's great credit that he abstains from the seductions of derision—though not from the responsibilities of criticism—in The Wind from the East, his history of Maoism in the French Left and, in particular, of the influence that China's Cultural Revolution exerted on French intellectuals.