The Philosophy of Revolt

The surprise of this book is that it is a book. Most of what was issued against the Western left in these years was assembled from clippings and Party resolutions. This is a monograph.

Eduard Batalov has read Marcuse in English and in German - One-Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization, An Essay on Liberation, the Five Lectures, Reason and Revolution, and an article in the Zagreb journal Praxis. He has read Sartre's Critique de la raison dialectique in French, and Debray, and C. Wright Mills's 1960 letter to the New Left in its original New Left Review printing, and both of Theodore Roszak's books on the counterculture. He follows an argument across an author's career and notices when it changes.

The measure of the difference is countable: Marcuse is footnoted to his own editions thirty-four times against thirty-one references to Lenin. In a Moscow monograph, the man under attack is cited more often than the authority in whose name he is attacked. Debray is quoted at paragraph length with page numbers; Mills from the issue he appeared in.

What Batalov is anatomising is the theory of the New Left and the counterculture at the moment of its greatest influence - the refusal of the working class as revolutionary subject, the turn to students and the marginal, the politics of spontaneity and of revolt as an end in itself. Whatever one makes of the verdict, the survey is serious and the sources are checkable.

The argument closed around 1973: neither Chile nor Portugal appears anywhere in it.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which maps where the scholar was working and where the functionary took over.