The ever-prolific Dan Mahoney revisits the revolutionary upheavals of 1968 , particularly as they manifested themselves in France, and masterfully explores their underlying philosophical significance and continuing social and political ramifications today. The commemorations of these events often reveal a self-indulgent and self-congratulatory revisionism, blinded by a faux-historical mytholgy that reinterprets the dogmatic and often authoritarian critiques of Gaullist republicanism as a libertarian repudiation of tyranny. The real legacy of 1968 is a calcified "egalitarian moralism" that reduces the complex socio-political phenomena that make democracy possible to the apriori idea of democracy, blithely rejecting any and all incarnations of authority, even those absolutely necessary to democratic forms, and even political life itself.
