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

by Richard Wolin

How Maoism captured the imagination of French intellectuals during the 1960s

Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who's who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China's Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless expos� of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful story of this legendary period in France. Richard Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of the Cultural Revolution, and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life.

Wolin's riveting narrative reveals that Maoism's allure among France's best and brightest actually had little to do with a real understanding of Chinese politics. Instead, it paradoxically served as a vehicle for an emancipatory transformation of French society. Recounting the cultural and political odyssey of French students and intellectuals in the 1960s, The Wind from the East illustrates how the Maoist phenomenon unexpectedly sparked a democratic political sea change in France.

Genres: History, Philosophy, France, Politics, China, Nonfiction, 20th Century

464 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

Reviews

[Bertrand · Rating 2 out of 5]

Living in West London, I seem to be faraway from everything, most of all from my friends who predominantly live in the North and the East. The upside of this exile is that my local tube station has a 'self-service' book exchange, a little shelf were people leave their books and pick new ones, a touchingly successful show of local solidarity. Among low-grade fictions (Daniel Steele to JK Rowling) there is regular gems popping up, and my friend picked up an exciting book on manuscript marginalia just the other day.

I have found a few interesting books there over the past few months, and when I saw Wolin's book on the shelf just as I was embarking on short 'China-themed' reading spree, I was very excited: a nice, clean and sturdy hard-back with a snappy wrapper, at the cross-road of two appealing themes (the sixties and Maoism). The back cover, with its endorsements by Martin Jay and Tony Judt sounded promising, and the summary, promising a chronicle of the Maoist moment in French radical politics, delusional warts and all, and an account of its paradoxical outcomes, was more than enticing: even knowing as little as I do about the politics and factions of May 68, I had read enough about the Cultural Revolution to see how unlikely a standard-bearer for libidinal politics Mao was.

Wolin writes well, and his book is an very readable piece of popular intellectual history - he returns to human interest stories every other page, and his cast of larger-than-life celebrity thinkers (Sartres, Foucault, Kristeva, etc.), wriggling out of the ivory tower of academia, is both at times endearing, and occasionally comical.
The oral and free-flowing tone of the book even manages to smooth out the wrinkles of his poorly structured argument, which translates in many repetitions. Repetitions I find often excusable in popular history, and since I don't often read books in one sittings, they are even often welcome reminders of a book's general thrust. In Wolin's case however, they tend to highlight the author's main failing, namely the superficiality of his argument and the poverty of his critique:

Here's the main problem of the book: its relentlessly unsympathetic, patronising and smug tone. Wolin is a social democratic defender of Western liberalism, and he has carved his niche lampooning the excesses of the Left, Marxism and post-structuralism in particular. Though I am probably less convinced than him that actually existing democracies represent the end of history, I am quite aware of the short-comings of revolutionary rhetoric, and of the self-undermining aspects of post-structuralism. I am also more than willing to hear a historically informed take-down of those movements, especially in their late sixties incarnation, which I know little about but vaguely sense as the turning point in radical politics were identity and recognition overtook institutions and redistribution.
Wolin's critic however, seems to revolve around two main themes: on the one hand, the 'fashionable' character of sixties radicalism, and on the other the upper-class origins of its actors.
I work in the clothing industry, so I might be more attentive to questions pertaining to 'fashionable' ideas than others: when one reduces someone else's adoption of ideas as a 'fashion', a 'trend', or qualifies a doctrine as 'chic' or 'up-and-coming', one avoids the problem of actual causes for this move. Social factors are dismissed, and decision are reduced to opportunism. It is a lazy (if still widespread) reduction, and Wolin's book is literally littered with this sort of sleight of hand, every other page or so.
As a result, don't expect to learn much about Maoism in this book: you do have one or two mentions of the great crimes of the CCP, but how it differed from Stalinism, or why it appealed to the French radicals (orientalism aside) is never really tackled. For Wolin Mao is a convenient place-holder and little more, a badge for intellectuals vying for radical-chic. Similarly, I knew much about the ebbs and flows of Tel Quel's allegiance at the close of the chapter concerned with them, but virtually nothing on their own ideas, beyond a few condescending nods to structuralism and its crumbling.

Finding a silver lining to the failures of the the May 68 revolution is not an easy task - the betrayal of the Communist Party did achieve some gains for the workers, and certainly gay rights did eventually benefit from the visibility gained during the period. Changes in the law on contraception in France predate the May events. If I am glad all powers never went to the soviets, I cannot shake the impression that those transferred to the imagination were never put to great use. Wolin, however, is keen to salvage to legacy of May 68 for his own reformist agenda: the splintering of the Left, and the crippling of its radical wing, is celebrated as the birth of a new idea of 'participatory democracy', translating into the empowerment of NSMs and civil society. Identity politics is seen as a the salutary sign of a new individualism, which transcends class boundaries to embrace universal human rights. With the benefit of hindsight, it would maybe be unfair to smirk at Wolin's enthusiasm, had he not been so smug throughout the book: but as today the radical right is increasingly appropriating the identitarian logic, and as the impotence of carnivalesque, 'everyday life' protest is blatant, I think Wolin's thesis can be safely consigned to the dustbin of history.

Not everything is dismal in the book: Foucault and Sartres are portrayed with somewhat less malice than the rest of the cast (as is Cohn-Bendit, Wolin's unsung hero) and the book does offer a nice chronological outline of the events. I even learned a few interesting tid-bits, such as Sartres late turn toward levinasian ethics, while Foucault's eventual enthusiasm for human rights is nicely contextualised. On the whole, though, the book is 'annoying', more because of its tone than because of its thesis, though the later did little to alleviate my irritation.
Wolin's 'The Seduction of Unreason' has long been on my reading list, but although the subject of that book (and the acclaim it received) still very much appeals to me, I am not sure I can stomach another shrill and righteous popular reduction like the one in 'The Wind from the East'.

[Andrew]

So within the past year, I became aware of the annoyingly vocal contingent of American teenagers who, understandably seeking a remedy for the neoliberal hellscape in which we live, have foolishly turned to China for inspiration, and quote Xi Jinping on their Twitter feeds and dismiss any criticism of the phony-Maoist, state capitalist order as US propaganda.

Turns out a bunch of French kids were doing the same 50 years ago, which I was more or less aware of -- I'd seen those clunky Godard films, I'd read the various dialectical hemmings and hawings of the time that enraptured too many good thinkers, even my beloved Barthes. Wolin's message is as follows: seeking alternatives to standard-form Marxism, existentialism, and structuralism, the culture-obsessed and hopelessly ivory-tower lefties of post-May '68 France turned to Mao for guidance, and from there abandoned Marxism entirely in favor of a more cultural politics.

The thing is those cultural politics are fucking stupid. That's how you get neoliberalism at its worst.

Wolin tries to distance himself from any kind of ideological position. While he (for example) rightly mocks Kristeva's celebration of foot-binding as female empowerment, as based on the theology of Lacanian theory, and he admires the best efforts of Sartre and Foucault, he also seems annoyingly OK with the politics of self-improvement brought on by the 1960s transformation, and he refrains from taking a stand on the mix of status-quo dullardry and obnoxious posturing of the nouveaux philosophes. As far as storytelling in the history of ideas goes, Wolin is an absolute master, but I would like a bit more of a clear stance.

[Jay Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this. A more in-depth tale is there to be told, but this was good craic.

[graceofgod · Rating 2 out of 5]

not good. repetitive. condescending.

[Sandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

To begin with, I must recommend against reading this book unless you have a high tolerance for disorganized, repetitive, second-hand descriptions of intellectual currents that you would probably do better to glean from primary sources. The chapters have the flavor of different lectures that cover a lot of overlapping ground, such that there are many sentences and even full paragraphs that explain concepts and trace arguments that have already been established in almost the exact same language earlier in the book. It is also filled with Franglish jargon and references to the field of ’68 studies that a neophyte will struggle to understand. But all told, these are minor issues.

The more central problem is that the work is openly biased, to the point that we get nothing resembling a charitable study of the ideologies and ideologues that the book is supposed to be about. The prose here is crawling with editorial adverbs, such as “justly,” “foolishly,” “correctly,” and “naively.” On any given page you can find this author holding forth about “excesses” and “delusions,” and handing down judgment about which political projects have and have not been “historically discredited.” Maoism is repeatedly described as “radical chic,” a fascination of overeducated “mandarins,” and its adherents are ridiculed, wherever possible, for their bourgeois backgrounds. (Actual working-class militants from the time and place under study are rather frantically ignored.) Leftist intellectuals who, after reading Solzhenitsyn, finally repent of their communist fidelities are characterized as penitents opening their hearts at last to “more productive” concerns like “democracy,” “human rights,” “libidinal politics,” and “the politics of everyday life.” All this, in service of Wolin’s core argument that, though the French Maoists were prisoners of an intellectual fad, their newfound focus on “cultural issues” and their departure from Marxist orthodoxy ended up dovetailing nicely with the libertarian moral character of France’s post-May ’68 political transition.

Okay, it’s a thesis, so be it. But as a natural consequence of his vehement anti-communism, Wolin holds his nose at certain concepts and phrases, among them “Leninism,” “proletariat,” “seizure of power,” “violence,” and “means of production.” He hastens to excoriate figures like Frantz Fanon, Alain Badiou, and Louis Althusser wherever they show a greater tolerance for these words than he himself can muster. In the later chapters on Sartre, Kristeva and Foucault, the reader cannot help but groan as Wolin laboriously rolls up his sleeves each time to defeat these thinkers with a few well-chosen left-libertarian truisms. He claims that postwar modernization and affluence in France have rendered the working class a non-entity. He opines that Leninism self-evidently leads to tyranny. He denounces all forms of revolutionary violence, mewling that “negotiated solutions” present the only off-ramps to such conflicts as the Algerian War—and never sparing a thought for how it comes to be that colonizers are induced to negotiate at all. These are all tendentious premises, but what is worse is that they are irrelevant. Their absence would be no impediment to a clear narrative of Maoism’s rise and fall in French intellectual circles. Wolin’s constant retching at the subject of his own book is a serious distraction.

The author’s refusal to endorse left politics more militant than his own is not the problem; my personal politics align much more closely with Wolin’s than with Chairman Mao’s. But the refusal to see any sophistication or moral urgency in communist thought renders the analysis facile in many places. Routinely Wolin will set out an invidious introduction for a block quote, preparing the reader for yet another bit of driveling post-structuralist foolishness, and then the quote itself will be much more interesting than that, rich in ambiguities that Wolin seems not to perceive.

The book thus shares an ironic commonality with the tour that the Tel Quel staff took of Mao’s China—rather than a full and subtle exploration of the political landscape, we get a weirdly elliptical and heavily editorialized tour of only the things that our guide finds appropriate, with nothing but stentorian condemnations for everything that doesn’t mesh with his priors. One would hope for a little more intellectual flexibility in a work of intellectual history.

[J. Moufawad-Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

The fact that the author sympathizes with "the New Philosophers" demonstrates the level of his ability to think through the problematics of history and theory. Not surprising for someone whose academic career crystallized within the Telos journal which became more and more conservative the more it "appropriated" the philosophy of Carl Schmitt. Dhruv Jain's review at *Marx & Philosophy Review of Books* adequately sums up my thoughts on this anecdote-based "history":

http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/revie...

[Tomislav · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a mix of social and intellectual history. The titular Maoism is not really the main subject but only one of the topics mentioned. First few chapters are a lengthy overview of postwar French society and main reasons for student dissatisfaction and events of May 1968. Second part deals with the famous intellectuals of the era and is more focused on philosophy.

Postwar society was characterized by extraordinary growth of living standard and political fragility due to wars in Indochina and Algeria which led to Gaullist consolidation of power. Demographic trends led to an increased proportion of young people and a high number of students. Well-off young people became increasingly bored with consumer society, traditional hierarchies and technocratic politics; they realized that old-fashioned Marxism was also really boring and started to look for other ways to rebel. Besides its proclaimed anti-authoritarian egalitarianism, Maoism became attractive because it provided voluntarist, romantic view of revolution and focus on cultural issues rather than economics. Mao rejected traditional Marxist view that base defines superstructure and argued for their complex interaction.

The book describes numerous sects and activists who participated in politics of the era; some of them were quite ridiculous. Upper-class young Maoists spent years working in provincial factories in order to better understand proletarian life. They were still dismissed by leftist intellectuals, many of them also from wealthy families, for not being proletarian enough. Radical feminist groups rejected traditional politics and ended up as pointless gatherings in which their leaders would discuss their personal problems and relationships; most members got bored and they quickly fell apart. Some artists saw Mao as a great poet and philosopher who will open the doors for all kinds of avant-garde cultural innovation. There were even homosexual groups inspired by Maoism. All of them had no idea about what was really going on in China due to scarce information and just engaged in wishful thinking. When the negative news started to arrive they bravely ignored them until it became impossible.

The upheaval came mostly from the margins, rather than from established leftist intellectuals. Students disliked the establishment, especially structuralists, and many leftists dismissed students as spoiled rich kids unable to make any political change because the prophecy said that only workers can do to that. Sartre was the only one revered by student leaders and he took the opportunity to revive his career. Although he was somewhat reserved towards Maoism, his general support for revolutionary youth helped popularize the new radical chic. Foucault missed the main events in France but soon became more politically engaged. His new analysis of power and culture was welcomed as more appropriate radical paradigm for disparate minority interests than outdated, rigid Marxism. Alain Badiou, Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva are also presented in more details as examples of more eccentric extremists.

Wolin dismisses Marxist and conservative criticisms that 1960s upheavals were just about youthful narcissism and inane hedonism, noting how they seriously transformed education, politics and culture. He ridicules excesses, opportunism and dishonesty of revolutionaries but acknowledges their impact. They were so successful in inciting reforms and change of social attitudes that by 1980s they lost all of their militancy, and most of the intellectuals renounced Maoism. After Munich Olympics, publications by Eastern European dissidents, and especially when faced with Cambodian disaster, they became advocates of human rights and opponents of totalitarianism. Wolin speculates that the subsequent decline of the social role of French intellectuals happened both because of the democratization of educational system and because of the serious political blunders that many of them made. Overall, the book could have been better organized, some parts are longer than necessary, there are digressions and repetitions, but it was an interesting read. It provides a balanced view on the 1960s, noting the excesses but going beyond simplistic ideological criticisms.

[Yupa · Rating 4 out of 5]

C'è un po' di tutto dentro questo libro, un libro che forse non sapeva bene cosa voleva essere.
Dal titolo, dalla copertina, e un po' anche dal riassunto, prometteva di illustrare come gli intellettuali francesi degli anni Sessanta, gli anni della contestazione, si fossero innamorati di una Rivoluzione Culturale cinese di cui a conti fatti sapevano molto poco, ma che proprio grazie a questo travisamento portarono avanti istanze libertarie ed emancipatorie difficilmente condannabili (almeno per me).
Certo, il libro racconta anche questo, di questa singolare creatura che fu il maoismo in Francia, ma in modo piuttosto marginale, perché la sua è soprattutto una storia dell'intellettualità francese alternativa del dopoguerra (Sartre, la Kristeva, Foucault sopra tutti), vista nel suo più ampio contesto.
E così ben un quarto del volume è dedicato ai quasi venticinque anni che hanno portato fino al maggio del '68, un altro quarto alla storia politica e sociale di quel periodo, e solo nella seconda metà si affrontano finalmente questi intellettuali, ma anche qui l'autore si diffonde nel tracciarne l'intera vita più che la questione specifica del loro rapporto col maoismo, reale o immaginario che fosse.
È comunque un libro davvero ben scritto (pur con alcune ripetizioni) e interessante, in cui traluce il rapporto ambiguo dell'autore per i suoi oggetti di studio, a cui non risparmia severe critiche per le loro vicende, tra cui anche la giustificazione della lotta armata, se non persino del terrorismo, ma cui sa comunque concedere i loro meriti e il loro spessore teorico.
Ed è utile anche per comprendere un periodo che da una parte può risultare oggi lontano e scarsamente comprensibile, con le sue diatribe teoriche tra strutturalismo e poststrutturalismo, tra umanesimo e antiumanesimo, e poi con tutte le infinite sottigliezze ideologiche delle varie sette marxiste, ma che dall'altra parte permette di vedere dove affondino determinate radici, come l'attenzione agli stili di vita e all'emancipazione non più della classe operaia ma dei marginali nella società, tutte cose che poi, con la fine dei paesi del socialismo reale, sarebbero diventate dominanti nella politica di sinistra e non solo di sinistra, e di cui praticamente dibattiamo ancora oggi.

[Dylan Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

In some ways the relation of the characters in this book to actual Maoism is trivial and expressed by Wolin’s frequent reference to China as a “Rorschach test.” These people had absolutely no knowledge and even less interest in the actual circumstances of the Cultural Revolution; embracing Mao was a way of saying you were a more participatory, democratic (lol), dynamic Marxist than a typical Stalinist. But also you weren’t a weak-kneed social democrat.

The Sartre and Foucault chapters are interesting (they’re interesting men!) but notably light on actual engagement with Maoist ideas. It’s clear that neither figure was really a Maoist at all; they just found them to be good company.

I have some pedantic quarrels. There are odd factual errors (Magnus Hirschfeld did not coin the term “homosexual” and he certainly did not do so in the 1860s, when he was an infant) and the chapters are so obviously repurposed journal articles that Wolin sometimes forgets to excise introductions of people that are unnecessary in a book. I don’t need to be reminded who Sartre is after a 60 page chapter on him, but the Tel Quel chapter was originally a different article so there you go, here’s a Sartre intro.

But overall it definitely answers the “why were French people so into Mao” question.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

okay, but it could be a better discussion of the obsession with China that pervades a lot of French cultural history rather than a chastisement of a few Maoists

[Vincent · Rating 2 out of 5]

reactionary bullshit!

[Dustin Kurtz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid source of gossip, but be ready to wade through an ocean of disdain.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wolin argued that the French Maoists helped effect much of the cultural changes of the French left. Central to his argument is that most of the Maoists were attracted to the writings and militant imagery of Maoism and not so much the actual events of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, since little details about China escaped to outsiders. In the absence of that information, French Maoists imagined it to be a place of anti-imperilist true socialism. Wolin traces the rise of French Maoism to its start as “gauchistes”, or to the left of the Communist Party, which was a “party of order” that followed Moscow’s directives strictly. With the events of May 1968, when massive student protests were joined by workers in a huge general strike that forced De Gaulle from power temporarily, the Maoists sat out because of ideological purity. However, the events forced them into action by criticizing the actions of the CP and arguing from bottom up socialism (again, reading into Mao as opposed his actual actions). The Maoists adopted “going to the people” and began heavy organizing with those on outskirts of society, including immigrants, the unemployed, prisoners, and gay people. Many of their leaders were imprisoned, which enabled further sympathy, as intellectuals like the older Sartre and Foucault joined the Maoists. This site based resistance made them effective organizers into the 1970s, though eventually they lost steam and began less ideological and more reality based left organizing.

Key Themes and Concepts:
-Influence of Maoists is concentrated in universities, the site of massive protests in 1968.
-The French Right blames Maoism for the degeneration of France.
-The Chinese model was very indirectly influencial but had no direct communication, as China was isolated and attempted no rival Communist International to the Soviet Union.
-French Maoists projected what they liked onto Maoism, as being anti-authoritarian and total liberation.