In my own experience, I saw how, at the end of the sixties, the nouveaux philosophes, with André Glucksmann at their helm, concocted an intellectual apparatus destined to legitimate the brutal reactionary reversal which followed the red sequence that had begun in the middle of the sixties, a sequence whose name in China was 'Cultural Revolution', in the USA refusal of the Vietnam war, and in France 'May 68'.
Of course, there was nothing new about the general form of the reactive constructions purveyed by the nouveaux philosophes. It amounted to saying that the true political contradiction is not the one that opposes revolution to the imperialist order, but democracy to dictatorship (totalitarianism). This is what American ideologues have been proclaiming loud and clear for at least thirty years. But the intellectual ambience, the style of the arguments, the humanitarian pathos, the inclusion of democratic moralism into a philosophical genealogy—all of this was the contemporary of the leftism at the time, all of this was new. In a nutshell, only erstwhile Maoists, like Glucksmann and the nouveaux philosophes, could dress up this old pirate's flag in the gaudy colors of the day. But this innovative tint was aimed at fatally weakening the Maoist episode, at extinguishing its lights, at serving, in the name of democracy and human rights, a counter-revolutionary restoration, an unbridled capitalism, and, finally, the brutal hegemony of the USA. Which is to say that there aren't just reactionary novelties, but also a subjective form appropriate to producing the consequences of such novelty. It is not in the least irrelevant to note that, almost thirty years after the irruption of the nouvelle philosophie, Glucksmann has rushed to defend the invasion of Iraq by Bush's troops in singularly violent terms: in order to deny its creative virtue, he must daily nourish journalism with new sophisms.