Intellectuals: The Changing Shadows of May ‘68

The May 68 movement has revealed and radicalized a legitimacy crisis among intellectuals. The numerous interpretations they elaborated crystallized representations of the movement through which intellectuals were going to redefine their commitments in the aftermath of May 68 in an attempt to reconstruct a legitimate figure of the “committed intellectual.” Following the strong polarization exerted by leftist groups and the revolutionary reading of May 68, the quest for autonomy was, however, what inspired the redefinition, notably with Michel Foucault’s figure of the “specific intellectual.” Starting in the mid 1970s, this desire for autonomy brought about a break with the leading paradigms of May 68’s radicalized commitment: Marxism, support for the Third World, anticapitalism. This “disengagement” of scholars continued with the return, starting in the second half of the 1980s, of the criticism of the more cultural and societal aspects of May 68. Since the mid 1990s mounting anti free market protest has been accompanied by a reappearance of themes inherited from May 68 to such an extent that, forty years later, May 68 still casts its shadow over intellectual debates and has even again become a issue in left-right demarcation.