MC

Glucksmann was one of the key figures in the demobilization of the French revolutionary left in the decade after 1968. He owed his influence to both his writings and his key position at the intersection of the worlds of intellectuals and of leftist revolutionary politics.

In many respects, Glucksmann bridged two generations of French intellectuals: that which grappled with the enormous attraction of communism in the aftermath of World War II and that of decolonization and 1968. Born in France in 1937 to refugee Jewish communist parents, Glucksmann was a communist from youth who left the party in the latter half of the 1950s over differences with its positions on the Hungarian Revolution and the Algerian War.

Thus, although he had been quite young at the time, Glucksmann was in some respects a contemporary of older intellectuals like the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Claude Lefort (1924–2010) and the historian François Furet (1927–1997) for whom the question of Cold War communism was central.

Indeed, Glucksmann, like others from these earlier generations, seems to have partially disengaged politically in the years before 1968. Although he continued to participate in anti-colonial demonstrations and protests against the Vietnam War, he moved from revolutionary militancy to academia. After completing a doctoral thesis critical of the American war in Vietnam under the direction of the prominent anticommunist liberal intellectual Raymond Aron (1905–83), he became Aron’s teaching assistant.

In 1968 Glucksmann broke with Aron — who took a position frankly hostile to the upheaval — and returned to revolutionary activism. Glucksmann wrote a book on revolutionary strategy and soon joined the Maoist Gauche prolétarienne (Revolutionary Left) where he was involved in the launching of its newspaper, J’accuse, which was created to rally a larger democratic front in support of the Maoists.

It is through his work at J’accuse that Glucksmann got to know prominent intellectuals sympathetic to the Gauche prolétarienne, notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault. These connections between generations and between intellectual and militant worlds put Glucksmann at the center of era’s dramatic transformation of French intellectual and political life.

But above all else, Glucksmann had something to say that, if not entirely original, spoke to the impasse of the post-’68 revolutionary project and was communicated with a brutal intensity. Glucksmann’s politics in the aftermath of 1968 had been representative of the anti-Stalinist and anti-Leninist thrust of most pro-revolutionary intellectuals.

Although he spoke at the time of the need for a vanguard to lead workers to revolutionary consciousness, he believed that the role of revolutionary organization was limited to sparking grassroots mobilization and coordinating the autonomous centers of revolutionary activism that developed. Revolution would not result in the seizure of power by a revolutionary party, but rather the institution of direct democracy. The politics of the French Communist Party and the USSR were reactionary. If there was a model to be followed, it was not the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but rather the Paris Commune of 1871.

In the early 1970s, it became increasingly apparent that the revolutionary militants were failing to spark proletarian revolution. Although some were tempted to return to Leninist vanguardism, this was mostly rejected. Instead, militants increasingly focused on other, more marginal social groups such as prisoners and immigrants. Others invested their energies in electoral politics, notably the rapidly progressing Union of the Left alliance of the French Socialist and Communist parties. Glucksmann’s The Cook and the Cannibal came out in 1975 in these circumstances.

A commentary on the significance of the work of the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Cook and the Cannibal was also a prescription for Left. Glucksmann argued that Solzhenitsyn revealed the importance of popular resistance against the state and Marxism, which Glucksmann now condemned as a language used by the elite to control the people by justifying their oppression. Only the camp prisoners and more generally the plebeians of the East and the West see things as they are. The struggles of the gulag inmate and the marginal in France are essentially the same; indeed, the gulag is a modern version of the earlier “great confinement” studied by Foucault in his Madness and Civilization. In both East and West, resistance against normalization is the only viable politics.

In part because it was written with an insolent combination of irony and vulgarity — a rhetoric of 1968’s disillusionment, one might say — Glucksmann’s book was enormously influential. It helped launch the critique of Marxism and revolutionary politics as totalitarian and served as a model for the anti-Marxist “New Philosophy” that followed in 1977.

Indeed, Bernard-Henri Lévy, who orchestrated “New Philosophy,” said in an interview upon Glucksmann’s death that it is “difficult to imagine the earthquake” caused by the book, which he compared to Albert Camus’s The Rebel and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.