1. Born at the University of Nanterre, this Movement, with Daniel Cohn-Bendit as an emerging spokesperson, embodied the very spirit of May 1968. Libertarian and spontaneous, it opposed all rigid and hierarchical political organization. Its interventions and deliberately provocative, ironical, but also poetic slogans were not only attention-getters, but had an almost contagious, mobilizing impact on the public. It soon transcended the confines of the universities to reach the trade unionists and factory workers, and the general strike that ensued almost toppled the government.

2. The brasserie hangout of the Left-Bank, left-wing intelligentsia, led by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and also the usual meeting and eating spot for many psychoanalysts.

3. The ‘Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale’ at the University of Paris, was mostly experimental in outlook. Located at 18 rue de la Sorbonne, just opposite the Sorbonne, it was, from the outset, at the very centre of the May 1968 events.

4. And to our own perspective on ‘active minorities’, as described (and constructed) to that point in social psychology (see Moscovici, 1979).

5. ‘All power to the imagination’ was one of the most popular slogans of May 1968.

6. Michel Plon had been, and Michel Pecheux still was, a member of the laboratory at that time.

7. The duplicated French version of the 1979 chapter had begun circulating in the laboratory in 1974.

8. Is it really surprising that some social psychologists, like Morton Deutsch (1976), have seen this as just a simple stance of ‘cursing the darkness’? See, for a general assessment of this period, AFFER, especially the section on ‘Feminist Critique of Sciences: The Problematics of Gender Differences’ (1984: 742-831).

IV. I Remember the 1970s: Historically,Politically and Personally Contextualizing a Non-Recognized Psycho-Sociological Object

Abstract

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