The question of anti-Semitism pushes us into even darker waters. The Nazification of the Jewish people in the collective consciousness of 1968 cannot be dismissed as an arbitrary aberration. Nor as a passing phase. One can scarcely walk onto a college campus today, in America or in Europe, without sooner or later being informed that the Jews have become Nazis. The resurgence of anti-Semitism, and the confluence of leftist anti-Semitism (usually in the guise of anti-Zionism) with the far more vulgar and instantly recognizable form of the contagion now found in the Muslim world—the former, by inevitable synthesis, re-legitimizing the latter—must be a part of the indictment of 1968. Berman notes the irony, but he does not press the point. If Hitler gave anti-Semitism a bad name, the ’68 generation did much to separate Hitler from anti-Semitism: It created the means by which one could be simultaneously anti-Jewish and anti-Nazi, the one being the prideful conclusion of the other. In doing so, it may well have committed a millennial crime against the humanity in whose defense it claimed to toil.

It may be that Berman’s writ for the defense is motivated as much by sentimentality as by reason. These are, after all, his people. And while he does not explicitly render judgment, the sum total of his criticisms is considerable. His intention is not necessarily to analyze, but to chronicle. On this level, his accomplishment is admirable. He believes, still, in his generation and their spirit. He attempts to define and critique the spirit of ’68, but also to pay tribute to it. At times Berman protests too much on behalf of his sometimes craven icons. But one has the sense that he is an author who is trying, and this has always been Berman’s greatest talent, not to deceive himself too much.

 

But there is another level to this book. It is, again, a study in practicalities, and it is in its practicalities, as opposed to its elegiacs, that this book has its finest moments. Berman is not concerned merely with his idealistic French and Germans. He counts among the children of ’68 also the likes of Nafisi and Makiya, and, indeed, they form something like an informal fellowship, one that lies in a mutual desire to grasp the nature of a new totalitarianism, and, in doing so, to break down the traditional boundaries of East and West, European and Colonial, Right and Left. In this sense, these three are Arendt’s disciples. Berman from afar, and Nafisi and Makiya from the midst of revolution. They are all trying to draw the connections, to tease out essences, and to help us understand a threat to both East and West, a global threat, and a global totalitarianism, for a global age.

Arendt herself was accused of oversimplification, and the accusations of lack of subtlety and nuance will fly against the theories of Berman and his fellows for a long time to come. But I doubt if they will succeed in undermining them. The urge towards absolute universalism, and towards the unification of power, would seem to be a natural impulse of mankind; and the resistance against it in the name of the particular and the individual is likely to continue as well. The world is not always Manichean, but it can be. Sometimes we must make a decision that it is so, in order to rouse our energies to the necessary resistance. In this, Berman, Nafisi, and Makiya are the ones to be admired and emulated in this narrative. They are its true heroes. Where the majority of this sprawling cast have chosen neither resistance nor collaboration, these three have cautiously, slowly, but nonetheless decisively, chosen resistance.

But we must ask ourselves as well, what is the full measure of the phenomenon being described? Perhaps the question is not if totalitarianism is confined solely to Europe, but whether the new totalitarianism is confined solely to the world of the Middle East. Here Berman does not venture, leaving his j’accuse incomplete, and his conclusions wanting.

We have, after all, his chronicle: The sum measure of all these lives, and the very fact of their collective disillusionments. Both Nafisi and Makiya were partisans of totalitarian revolutions. Fischer and Cohn-Bendit as well cast their lot, for a time, with the ethos of violent seizure of power. Kouchner had his romance with Castro and Glucksmann with Maoism, but Berman leaves all of these facts as mere lapses, the dirt accumulated by a generation’s worth of youthful indiscretions. But this is not enough.

When it comes to his own, Berman looks for reasonable explanations, not fearsome and all-embracing theories. These are reserved for the others, the mad, the new totalitarians. Berman, in short, abandons Arendt exactly when Arendt becomes most important, exactly when the realization looms that a grand unified theory of totalitarianism may lead him not only to the Middle East but also back home, into the dirt of ’68 which he has so skillfully chronicled.

It is here that Power and the Idealists falls short. Because Nafisi, Makiya, Glucksmann, Kouchner, and even Berman himself, all those who have chosen resistance and action rather than silence and contemplation from afar, have, in effect, left the generation of 1968. They are no longer soixante-huitards. They have become something new and, perhaps, better. Berman’s desire to acquit his generation robs him of the chance to fulfill the promise of Terror and Liberalism, the chance to be the herald of a new resistance. Rather than being the last chronicler of 1968, Berman could have been the first chronicler of a nascent intellectual movement, an anti-totalitarianism for the twenty-first century, opposed to both the totalitarianism of Islamic radicalism and the totalitarian instincts of the ’68 generation itself. A movement opposed, most of all, to that which has left the soixante-huitards mute and indecisive at a time when speech and choice are as important as ever. A movement which, through Arendt’s grasp of the essence of totalitarianism, could exemplify Camus’ ideal of moral revolt.

Instead, out of pity, nostalgia, or the desire to grant indulgences to the heroes of his youth, Berman has written an epitaph, not a call to arms. It is an exemplary epitaph, but an epitaph is still an epitaph. It belongs to the past, and what Power and the Idealists could have been, the practical extrapolation of the theories of Terror and Liberalism, makes Berman’s dirge as tragic as the generation whose disillusionment it laments.