32
PETER BROOKS
toward redefining the
agregation
and the doctorate, but they are prob–
ably insufficiently radical. Most promising was Faure's plan for several
new experimental institutions in the Paris suburbs, which were to mix
disciplines, define their own programs, recruit special faculties (includ–
ing some foreigners all unprovided with the
agregation)
-
but this ex–
periment may succumb, at least temporarily and in part, to the battle
of the franc. In fact, the drastic budget cuts of the new austerity pro–
gram tend to jeopardize all of Faure's progressive projects.
At the moment, the University is necessarily
in
a twilight zone of
uncertainty as to what its reform really means, what new structures
will really come into existence and perhaps especially, what difference
reform will create in the student condition. Although a fringe of the
radical left continues agitation, and calls forth dire threats of repression
from the Ministry of the Interior, nothing decisive is likely to emerge
for some time. Certainly the brave new world instituted by the soviets
last spring is not an immediate possibility. Yet a return to the full des–
pair of the old order also seems precluded, because, although the poli–
tical revolution failed, a revolution of mentalities was set in motion,
and is probably continuing in muted, local forms. That is, for those who
lived the Reign of Imagination in May, 1968, the old ways of doing
things - which in France has traditionally meant the surrender of
power to bureaucratic hierarchies - no longer seems completely tolera–
ble; they have substituted for the old ways a new sense of the possi–
bility of direct local initiatives, and where this is given some scope–
as it is within the present fluid, twilight-zone University - it may
promise something of new value.
The May Revolution was in intent an anarchist revolution, renew–
ing a deep-rooted French tradition reaching back to Rousseau and
most fully voiced by Proudhon, a tradition which sees the power of the
people expressed, not, as in Marxism, through state ownership of the
means of production, but through direct ownership and management
of the tools of their profession by workers of all categories. This tradi–
tion of "creative anarchy" is based on an historical mistrust of the state
as the inevitable betrayer of the social contract, on a desire to re–
organize the economy and society in such a way that power is never
alienated from those directly concerned by its exercise. Cohn-Bendit and
other student leaders, and the anonymous authors of hundreds of tracts
distributed in May, all manifested a lucid mistrust of totalitarian state
socialism, where the state's technological apparatus would infringe
individual liberty as much as does capitalism, and proposed instead the
direct communism of anarchy, based on the anti-hierarchical, anti-
