Global 1968

Why should we study the revolutions of 1968 today? At first glance, the answer to this question seems self-evident. Looking back on the tumultuous events that transpired more than a half century ago, one can hardly avoid raising the topic of revolution. Over the extended period that we associate with this year—roughly the mid-1960s to the early 1970s—this was a time of intense confrontation between the new and the old. During these years, societies were engulfed by conflicts over every seemingly in- contestable convention and practice. Students and workers protested against what they viewed as the unjust and corrupt institutions that held sway over their lives. Intellectuals and activists demanded that the ruling classes address systematic discrimination against marginalized social and political groups. Writers and filmmakers experimented with controversial themes and innovative forms of artistic expression. Remarkably, this explosive assault on the perspectives and practices that preceding generations had taken for granted was not limited to specific political systems,countries, or continents. It was a global phenomenon. In the words of Paul Berman, a student radical at Columbia University in 1968, “the weird quality of 1968 was the way that, for the first time since 1848, things took place nearly simultaneously all over the world.”

Because of this striking conjunction of events, scholars across a wide range of disciplines, from the social sciences to literature and the arts, have sought to capture the manifold dimensions of this period by speaking of the “Long ’60s.” In fact, some observers contend that these years marked the transition to a new age. Historian Arthur Marwick concluded his landmark study The Sixties with the following pronouncement. These years, he remarked, were “no transient time of ecstasy and excess, fit only for nostalgia or contempt.” In Marwick’s judgment, “there has been nothing like it.” And, he added, “Nothing [will] ever be quite the same again.” Other scholars have come to similar conclusions. For a group of German and American historians writing in the late 1990s, these events were evidence of “a world transformed.” Even onlookers who view these developments negatively have not disputed their influence. For the political theorist Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., “the late sixties were a comprehensive disaster,” an epoch, it seems, that is best expunged from liberal democratic society “like a powerful toxic waste.” In a campaign speech on April 29, 2007, the center-right French politician Nicolas Sarkozy declared that the memory of 1968 should be “liquidated” for having imposed “intellectual and moral relativism” on his country. Two weeks later, Sarkozy was elected France’s president.

Nevertheless, however contemporary scholars assess the events of the 1960s, positively or negatively, they must all confront an unavoidable question. Given the vast body of scholarship that already exists on the topic, are there issues on which there remains significant room for disagreement? The most fruitful way of responding to this challenge is to treat it as three separate questions: Can a given event or activity legitimately be called “revolutionary”? Has the event had the transformative effect that we typically associate with revolutions? Was this event a manifestation of a unitary set of developments, that is, evidence of a universal 1968?

The first question is the easiest of the three. It is also the least controversial. In the tradition of social theorists from Max Weber to Émile Durkheim, a revolutionary act is necessarily destructive. Unlike most challenges to authority, its instigators seek to overturn entrenched institutions, roles, and ideas and replace them with new ways of thinking and acting. In line with this approach, revolutionary events have been, if not frequent, at least recurrent features of the modern era. All of the best-known cases between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the North American, French, and Bolshevik revolutions, took the form of full-scale assaults on the status quo. Their proponents reveled in the opportunity to overthrow long-standing aristocratic regimes, upend seemingly impregnable class and social structures, and introduce new conceptions of justice and human worth.