Symposium 1968: Mitchell Cohen

Nineteen sixty-eight was a formative year for a generation of the left. Later, some observers (and participants) of philosophical bent thought to capture “the events” in a comment made long before by Hegel. After seeing Napoleon enter town following the battle of Jena in 1806, he wrote to a friend that the Weltseele (World-Soul) had just ridden by “on horseback.” Where Napoleon came, Old Regimes and their Old Ideas fell, clearing the way for—such was the anticipation—a reasonable world.

Did the protests and protesters of 1968, all together, make up the Weltseele on pavements? Those Old Regimes fell in the early nineteenth century only to be resurrected, re-overthrown and re-resurrected, re-invented and . . . and . . . and . . . . A lot happened before a stable, Western constitutional order emerged after 1945. Look only at the Big Historical Picture, you’ll miss contingencies. Nineteen-sixty-eight challenged the post-1945 order. Many people were surprised because what had seemed sound rattled. There was much original in the 1960s, but not this surprise. People (especially intellectuals) often mystify what is in front of them, imagining the past leads inevitably to it or that it opens an inevitable future. Recall the “end of history” riffs in the decade or so before 1968. Some reveled in what was perceived to be the end to challenges to the One Big Idea (liberalism). Others despaired. We were reduced to (circle one or more): lonely crowds, organizational men, one-dimensionality, or structures. There was truth in all this, but only some.

For then came 1968. Contestation!, as the French say. It was needed. But the left didn’t win. There are at least two ways to think of “1968”: as twelve intense months or as an emblem of a tumultuous period. Those twelve months were bleak. The period produced some very real good (such as social idealism) and enough bad things:

The United States: At the year’s start, we had Lyndon Johnson. At its end, Richard Nixon. In between? The deaths of countless Vietnamese and thousands of Americans. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Turmoil in cities and on campuses. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. The antiwar movement was beaten, politically and physically, at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. The liberal coalition that had furthered socioeconomic reform for decades cracked. Parts of the left descended into crackpot sectarianism or mistook anti-Americanism for an alternative political idea.

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Winds blew America rightward for four decades.

France: Students and workers mounted barricades and raised their voices on behalf of alternative visions of society. Then Gaullists pushed them down. The right won the ensuing legislative elections. Left parties lost badly, including left foes of the ’68ers, like the French Communist Party. Charl...