Wolin’s *The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s*

Reprising this worth-reading piece on the Maoism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and other fellow-travelers: Alan Schrift’s critical discussion, in Philosophy in Review, of Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s, which is now out in a second edition.

Excerpt: “For young leftists—and this was nowhere more true than among Louis Althusser’s students at the Ecole Normale—Mao’s writings offered a legitimate alternative interpretation of Marxism to the discredited Soviet version, and this was even more the case after the Sino-Soviet split became more pronounced in the 1960s. With the proclamation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in May 1966, Wolin charts how a fascination with all things Chinese overwhelmed Paris and the intellectual and cultural elite”.