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Paper short abstract

This paper examines two left thinkers, Ōta Ryū and Roger Garaudy, retrospectively positioned at the margins of the Long 1960s. It argues that their trajectories reveal blind spots in cultural turn–centered accounts while also reflecting divergent Japanese and French postwar experiences.

Paper long abstract

Ōta Ryū (1930-2009) and Roger Garaudy (1913-2012) have come to be positioned against the mainstream in retrospective accounts of the Long 1960s. Rather than viewing their later engagements with civilizational critique, anti-Zionism, and controversial representations of Judaism as ideological deviations, this paper argues that their trajectories expose blind spots in cultural turn–centered interpretations of social movements.

Both Ōta and Garaudy emerged as non-economistic Marxist thinkers who sought to overcome orthodox materialism through an emphasis on culture, subjectivity, and universal human emancipation. In postwar scholarship, however, figures whose thought moved beyond canonized cultural left frameworks—particularly academic forms of cultural critique—toward civilizational or religious perspectives have often been excluded from dominant narratives of the Long 1960s. Such exclusions are not self-evident, but are themselves products of the intellectual hegemony established by cultural-left-oriented frameworks such as cultural studies.

At the same time, these parallel trajectories unfolded within the divergent postwar contexts of Japan and France. Japan’s defeat and the critique of postwar democracy intensified by the New Left and student movements around 1968 provided fertile ground for radical reengagements with prewar thought, as seen in Ōta’s later reassessment of interwar intellectual traditions. France, by contrast, experienced the postwar period under the ambivalent legacy of occupied France, Vichy France, and de Gaulle’s reassertion of France as a victorious Allied power. In this context, political and intellectual movements largely directed their critique toward colonialism, looked to the Third World, and helped produce a configuration within which Garaudy’s turn to Islam took shape as a foundation for his critique of modernity and Western civilization.

By comparing these cases, the paper highlights how similar departures from the cultural left took form under distinct historical conditions. More broadly, it argues that the Long 1960s cannot be fully understood if confined to historically specific cultural-left-oriented frameworks alone. The cases of Ōta and Garaudy suggest that what has been labeled “against the mainstream” may instead reveal the internal limits of the cultural turn itself, and the unresolved tensions within cultural left humanism.