H-France Review Volume 11 (2011) Page 1 H-France Review Vol. 11 (February 2011), No. 47 Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010. xiv + 391pp. Photographs, bibliography, and index. $35.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 978-0-691-12998-3. Review by Michael C. Behrent, Appalachian State University. In one of the first studies on the topic, Christophe Bourseiller set out to recount what he called French Maoism’s “mad story.”[1] This would seem at first glance a fitting characterization of a movement which, as it flashed in the pan of leftist politics between 1966 and 1974, distinguished itself by such revolutionary antics as dispatching young philosophers to work in car assembly plants, stealing delicacies from Fauchon’s in commando-like raids to distribute them in immigrant bidonvilles, and schizophrenic kidnappings in which corporate executives were held hostage with unloaded guns. That Maoist politics was a stomping ground for several figures who have risen to prominence in contemporary France (such as Serge July, the newspaper Libération’s longtime editor, and the philosopher André Glucksmann) only adds to their exotic appeal. This perspective, with its partly nostalgic, partly voyeuristic interest in the peculiar blend of extremism and earnestness that characterized the soixante-huitards, informs much writing on French Maoism, including studies by Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Paul Berman, and Bourseiller himself.[2] But while Richard Wolin’s important and thought-provoking new book contains its fair share of winks and nudges when assessing the Maoists’ political adventures, it takes a different and more stimulating approach: it contends that, for all their naïveté and confusion, French Maoists gave birth to a pathbreaking form of intellectual politics, one that knocked mandarins off their pedestals and attuned them to the passions and interests of civil society. Though Marxism was the Maoists’ birthright, their legacy, Wolin argues, was their adoption, in a post-68 idiom, of the language of democracy and human rights. Though The Wind from the East is a work of intellectual history, it is also a contribution to political theory. Over the course of his prolific career, Wolin has made a trademark of the polemical verve and moral seriousness with which he has denounced totalitarian and counter-Enlightenment tendencies in modern European thought. In The Politics of Being, he identified a commitment to National Socialism lurking in the inner riggings of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy.[3] In The Seduction of Unreason, he traced postmodernism’s disturbing fascist lineages.[4] Given his prior work, one might have expected Wolin to be withering in his appraisal of Mao’s sophisticated apologists. Yet while he is unsparing when necessary, Wolin offers a remarkably balanced account of France’s Maoist episode. Rather than considering French Maoism as a cautionary tale of intellectuals running amok, Wolin claims that it was primarily a “constructive political learning process” (p. 4)--a term borrowed from his philosophical hero, Jürgen Habermas. French Maoism, Wolin believes, was a political space in which a misguided, top- down ideology was retooled and upgraded, resulting in a surprisingly creative style of democratic politics. The hinge on which this transformation turned was the idea of “cultural revolution”: while the notion in its Chinese iteration was steeped in “workerism” and incipiently terroristic, it spurred, in post- 68 France, a productive critique of mainstream conceptions of gender, homosexuality, and deviance. Wolin writes: “Maoism, in its post-May incarnation, played the unsuspecting role of a way station or transmission belt, weaning intellectuals away from the dogmas of orthodox Marxism and exposing