So the ignition of 1968 consisted in a mixture of a desperately serious desire to improve the world, and a cheerful disarrangement of the world. Jean-Luc Godard, who said he made his films not when shooting, but when eating, drinking, reading and dreaming, called the actors, with wicked precision, ‘The children of Karl Marx and Coca Cola’. The actions, particularly the actions of students, were aimed at the clean divisions of bourgeois life, where work, love, politics, art, pleasure and science could communicate but not intermingle. In post-war societies, which still had World War II and genocide in their bones, there was a powerful anxiety that the whole thing might otherwise come crashing down.

The soundtrack consisting of philosophy, rock, cinema and happenings

But the 68-ers, born between 1938 and 1948 couldn’t have given a damn about any of that. And in any case, as Theodor Adorno insisted, it was the inauthentic in any case. People heard the big words of this small man with the child’s eyes and knew, even though they didn’t fully understand the full import, that they were the right words. A rebellious experience was one which delivered itself up to a negative, endless dialectic which never led to the final sublation. It is part of the passion of 1968 that philosophy, rock, cinema and happening created a sound from which no one who felt young could exclude themselves. The movement thus became the movement by simply crossing boundaries which a generation before had been the conditions on the possibility of civility freedom and affluence.

But the interpretation of 1968 was disputed from the outset. Thus, for example, Jürgen Habermas and Karl Heinz Bohrer at the time put forward competing interpretations of the events playing out in front of their eyes. One as a radical democrat, the other as an absolute aesthete. What Habermas saw as models of civil disobedience, Bohrer dismissed as the self-justifications of a new left-wing ‘juste milieu’. While Bohrer saw the return of Surrealism in the best parts of 1969, Habermas drew the boundary between unprincipled activists for whom ‘direct action’ was more important than ‘dominance-free discourse’, and the bulk of those who were mostly fed up with the ‘mildew of a thousand years’ at the universities. One of them drew a long line that extends from 1968 to Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, the other insists even today on the madness of an interruption that cannot be claimed for any idea. Both referred to the inspiration of Walter Benjamin, who famously considered it a disaster that everything continued on its course.

1968 consisted in the discovery of society as a category for the understanding of the personal practice of life. For subsequent generations, who make jokes about floating signifiers such as ‘socialisation’, ‘communication’ and ‘interaction’, that is hard to understand. One needs to consult novels like Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates or television series like Mad Men to understand how the revolution, influenced by Marx and Freud, Herbert Marcuse and Louis Althusser, R.D. Laing and Shulamith Firestone, emerged from a post-war world peopled by isolated existences in an atmosphere based on the communicative silencing of Stalingrad and Auschwitz.

The concept of society was much more than an instrument for the sociological explanation of the world; it contained the promise that the self-doubting ego might overcome itself. There was a connection between personal unhappiness and social injustice. For that reason the laments of the self could become a legitimate object of political demands. Not only sociology, but also linguistics, psychoanalysis and social history or social psychiatry constituted a new kind of knowledge that combined precise description with normative demands. This new knowledge of 68, as French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it, promised a lot but demanded little.