What replaced it, Wolin contends, was a new form of politics focusing on personal identity and the transformation of everyday life. Repentant Maoists — including the so-called "New Philosophers" André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy — not only set out a defence of human rights and of humanitarian intervention but also began the process leading to calls for a regeneration of civil society. Breaking with the centuries-long tradition of State centralisation, the new politics focused on direct democracy and the expansion of associational life. Utopian hopes, Wolin concludes, were brought down to earth in the form of the ideal of democratic citizenship.

There is much that is convincing in this analysis. The French Communist Party has all but disappeared. What remains of the radical Left in France has largely redirected its activities towards a series of single-issue campaigns and protest groups (concerned with the homeless, illegal immigrants and so on). Statistics indicate that the number of associations in France continues to grow significantly every year. Yet France today is hardly a country that would have Alexis de Tocqueville jumping for joy and I doubt that David Cameron would see it as a model for the Big Society. Opinion polls indicate that the desired profession of the majority of young people is that of State functionary. Attempts at reform are met by a moral posture of resistance and a populist anti-establishment rhetoric. Anti-modernism — in the shape of hostility to what is taken to be an American-led process of globalisation, for example — is much in evidence. Liberalism — and, even worse, neo-liberalism — remains a dirty word.

As Wolin's chapter on the unrepentant (and now very fashionable) Maoist Alain Badiou illustrates, the mistake has been to believe that the collapse of communism would lead to a disappearance of anti-capitalism. For his part, Richard Wolin has provided a fascinating and dispassionate account of one of the more curious follies of recent times. Just as importantly, he avoids seeing May '68 as either the source of our modern ills or as a cause for wide-eyed romantic nostalgia. As Hegel might have said, it is just another example of the cunning of history.