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A Clear View of the Left
Thomas Molnar embarked on a voyage to the land of Utopia. Upon his return, he published a road book that bore the following title: La gauche vue d’en face.867 In it, he writes that ‘the philosophy of the Left suffers from having radically broken with reality. It promises people an earthly paradise, including a first-class ticket to access the latter. It is, in fact, a self-condemning sort of philosophy’.
Born in Budapest, fifty-six-year-old Thomas Molnar arrived in the USA in 1949. He lives in the very centre of New York City and works as a professor in the local University. He thus finds himself at the heart of the dispute, and doubly so. He teaches French literature and the history of ideas and belongs to the thought current in which Joseph de Maistre868 (Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg),869 Edmund Burke870 (Reflections on the Revolution in France), Bonald,871 Donoso Cortès,872 Plinio Correa de Oliveira873 and, to some extent, Ortega y Gasset,874 Tocqueville and Maurras have achieved great fame. In July 1969, he released an essay on the Impasse Faced by the Left (L’impasse de la gauche, published in Esprit, a magazine run by Jean-Marie Domenach)875 and, shortly afterwards, a book on the notion of utopia,876 followed by another on Sartre, the Dissenting Philosopher (Sartre, philosophe de la contestation, Sept couleurs). Soon enough, Domenach welcomed him into his Seuil editions publishing company.
As the Intelligentsia Stages Its Own Happenings
When seen for what it really is, the intellectual Left is characterised by the vastness of its promises, as well as that of its critics. Everything for everyone to immediately enjoy; unimpeded pleasures. The formula is definitely an alluring one, for only the human mind is endowed with imagination. Man is a project, according to Sartre; man must be overcome, Nietzsche proclaims.
‘This critical mindset is, in fact, a spirit that negates reality in all its specificity. Far from being materialistic, the utopian Left is profoundly imbued with idealism’.
Because he rejects the world, Marx suggests changing it instead of trying to understand it. Understanding it would only be a means of accepting it. If the Left comes across as the ‘movement party’, it is because it always keeps its Rousseauian hope of abolishing reality alive. ‘It thus shifts the debate from the sphere of reality to that of impassioned metaphysics’.
What accounts for this perennial desire to question everything, this obsession with freedom that they always confuse with liberation? Could the intellectual Left be the party that brings together those that are never content with being who they are? As noted by Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann, ‘radical freedom would be the freedom not to be oneself’. Could our essence, and the world’s as well, be the work of an evil demiurge? Not according to Reverend Cardonnel (Témoignage chrétien): ‘Nature is not synonymous with the creation. The ones that give nature its shape are but the hideous deformation of the creator at work. Who chose to follow the path of nature, very logically and to the very end? Adolf Hitler!’
In his Lettre ouverte aux hommes de gauche877 (Albin Michel), Pierre de Boisdeffre878 makes the following remark: ‘The Left has a taste for victory, but whenever it achieves one, it displays an inability to exploit it’. Thomas Molnar adopts this very same idea but explains why.
‘For 150 years, Leftist governments have been proving that their rule can indeed be a reasonable one. There is, however, a small issue here: although the Left has proven itself, it has not been in accordance with its own ideology, but rather in contradiction with the latter. This is because the Left’s ideology is the only one to radically denounce the present reality and be reluctant to make concessions towards it. It cannot be maintained in all its purity once a Leftist government seizes power’. Therein lies the eternal argument that opposes the ‘revisionists’ to the ultras: no revolution is ever as appealing as when it is still a project in the making. (Incidentally, the communist ideology is not alone to be questioned in this regard: ‘Under Johnson,879 the Democratic Party actually split into two halves, in accordance with the dichotomy between ideology and realism’.)
In another work entitled The Counter-Revolution, Thomas Molnar specifies: ‘Utopian philosophers dream of an ideal city, but do not acknowledge all the “repercussions” that make this ideal possible. What they want is Antigone without Creon,880 Beethoven without Napoleon,881 and the Hellenistic culture without Alexander.882 Daily existence, in all its complex reality, is an obstacle to them; which is why they strive to abolish time’.
In order to console itself, the intellectual Left indulges in happenings. One proceeds to burn cars, organise riots, and sacrifice expiatory victims, while resorting to verbal and dialectical magic. Soon, the psycho-dramatics come to an end and life simply goes on. That was the case at the Châtelet,883 where participants chanted ‘Let us march, let us march!’ without moving at all.
In the process, a certain part of the Left refuses to take up the challenges of technology any longer, despite having previously espoused scientism. In an essay focused on The Left and the Industrial Society (Marabout), Mr Henri Simonet884 wonders why he is not in the presence of two irremediably antagonistic forces. As for Jérôme Deshusses,885 who published a pamphlet on The Reactionary Left (Laffont, 1969), he is convinced that this is indeed the case.
In his Combat,886 Maurice Clavel exclaimed: ‘The ideologies of science and progress have now been claimed by the bourgeoisie!’
What ‘Reality’?
Mentally speaking, however, the act of defining the Left as the ‘party of non-reality’ is not entirely satisfying, as it only exhausts a certain part of the question. One still lacks an explanation as to why such a party manages to score points. Thomas Molnar writes: ‘the popularity of revolutionary writers stems from the speculative nature of their theories’. This is indeed true, but, once again, fails to resolve the problem: not all utopias have been equally successful. Why do socialist and communist ideologies continue to exert such an attraction when they have failed in the actual realisation of their projects and their very implementation has led to the greatest genocides in human history? Why is it that we regularly witness the emergence of new forms of Leftist extremism that simultaneously drive their predecessors towards the centre, as the socialists have taken over from the radicals, the communists from the socialists, and the Leftists from the communists? In which dispositions of the human soul are the roots of utopian seductiveness to be found? Mr Molnar gives no answer in this regard, perhaps because such an endeavour would involve raising the issue of values and establishing a genealogy of morality.
The term ‘reality’ itself is ambiguous. One had better speak of different levels of reality, as these levels cannot be equated to one another by means of reduction. It is also necessary to examine potential realities and specify what exactly, politically speaking, the notion of the ‘possible’ corresponds to. The imaginary is not necessarily ‘unreal’: what is unreal, on the other hand, is anything that could never come to pass as a result of its very nature. In the absence of these clarifications, ‘reality’ may well remain indistinguishable from the current state of affairs (in this regard, it is collectivism that embodies reality in the USSR). One may be a ‘revolutionary’ when striving to change the existing system in its entirety, without, however, being deprived of a sense of reality. The Left’s revolutionaries are not utopianists because they long to ‘change everything’ when it comes to social organisation, but because their social project is in contradiction with the basic facts that define the various levels of reality. There are thus some distinctions that Mr Molnar’s work says nothing about.
Last but not least, one must differentiate the ‘realism’ of one’s ends from that of one’s means. The success achieved by modern utopianists is, in part, due to the fact that they are endowed with rigorous praxis; their analyses of the present moment are so precise that they somehow manage to correct the blurriness and practical impossibility that pervade their vision of the future. It is the very opposite that applies to the Right: t
he overall project (which, more often than not, remains implicit and even non-conscious) is rooted in reality, but as regards the means of action, it is the greatest sort of unrealism that prevails (perhaps because the actual need for such means is less explicit).
Before being carried out politically, all the great revolutions of human history had already been conducted potentially: in people’s mentalities. Reiterating the views of Bernard Faÿ887 (La francmaçonnerie et la révolution intellectuelle du XVIIIème siècle,888 de Cluny, 1935), Mr Molnar makes the following observation: ‘The French Revolution was not conducted on 14th July, 1789. It had been carried out earlier in the very depths of the people’s minds and sensibility, which had been permeated by the writings of the philosophers’.
It is this very ‘metapolitical’ action which, more often than not, the Right fails to perceive. It ‘only seeks political power, leaving what it usually neglects (the press, education, popular culture) in the hands of its adversaries, which allows for the subversion of its own objectives’. Its lack of rigorousness and determination, its absence of unity, its repugnance (or laziness) as regards making efforts towards a theoretical formulation capable of determining the right line to follow, its rejection of long-term perspectives, its lack of a doctrinal synthesis which could crystalise energies (in parallel to action) — it is these traits in particular that account for its repeated failures.
Still commenting on the French Revolution but drawing a parallel to the present era, Mr Molnar highlights the responsibilities of the ancient monarchy. He quotes Rivarol,889 according to whom ‘the king no longer believed in the fundamental principles of the monarchy and was beginning to gradually accept the new ideas’. He adds: ‘We are all familiar with the representation of the Marriage of Figaro, in which the entire court, including the royal couple, applauds the verses that Figaro addresses to Count Almaviva and in which he reproaches him for not having done anything in life but taken the trouble to be born’. (Ever since Louis XIV had, once and for all, favoured the ascension of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the nobles, the very spirit of the court was, indeed, anything but aristocratic.)
At a time when the crowds of rioters had amassed before the gates of the Versailles palace, Louis XVI,890 who was being urged to sound a call to arms, responded indignantly, saying: ‘Are we to open fire against women? You can’t be serious!’ (Upon hearing of this, Bonaparte is said to have exclaimed: Coglione!) Shortly afterwards, on 7th November, 1789, the King wrote to an emigrant that had asked him to mobilise his partisans: ‘I could indeed give the battle signal, but what a horrible battle it would be, ending with an even more horrendous victory!’ Four years later, he would be guillotined.
One can only imagine what Lenin would have done in this situation.
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La gauche vue d’en face,891 an essay by Thomas Molnar. Seuil, 153 pages.
The Counter-Revolution, an essay by Thomas Molnar. UGE-10/18, 315 pages.
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Neither Marx Nor Jesus
‘The 20th-century revolution will take place in the United States. Indeed, it has already begun. It shall not spread to the rest of the world unless it succeeds in North America first’.
Mr Jean-François Revel, a fifty-three-year-old essayist, collection editor and chronicler at L’Express, has never considered the world of ideas to be that distant a universe. In La cabale des dévôts and Pourquoi des philosophes892 , as well as Histoire de la philosophie occidentale893 (of which only the first two volumes have ever been published), he welcomes the excesses of a certain philosophical speculation. As a polemist, he has released Le style du général,894 En France895 and Lettre ouverte à la droite.896 In La tentation totalitaire,897 he proceeds to highlight the necessarily oppressive character of all Marxist ideologies. He puts his conviction forward in the very first lines of Ni Marx ni Jésus.898
Lenin used to say that for a revolution to take place, it is necessary for the rank and file to no longer be willing and for the authority to no longer be able. Nowadays, adds Mr Jean-François Revel, this development must simultaneously be accompanied by a criticism of injustice, governance, political power, culture, and the ‘censorship of the previous civilisation’. In his view, these conditions have only been met (or are only being met) in the United States. This does not mean that the revolution will succeed in America, but that it has no hope of taking place elsewhere.
The USSR is no longer a central source of revolutionary impulses. The Kremlin is ceaselessly purging its Zinovievs899 and Trotskys,900 in addition to its ‘white’ Russians. Already under Stalin, the Soviet hymn had replaced the International — for the USSR is a superpower whose ambitions mirror its essence. The writings of both Solzhenitsyn and Amalrik901 have persuasively proven that ‘one can move from liberty to socialism, but not from socialism to liberty’.
In Western Europe, it all seems as if the Left were condemned to the repetition of historical phases that have already been overcome. Mr Revel writes: ‘The Left does not make its decisions on the basis of power considerations but renders them in accordance with programmatic elegance. It focuses on everything but what is within its own reach’. By burdening major parties with a bad conscience, ‘small groupings’ are said to have triggered a renewal in the topics and analyses; in most cases, however, they have contented themselves with espousing psycho-dramatics: in May 1968, at the Sorbonne, one was subjected to various adaptations of Zola’s works every single evening, believing that the imagination would somehow take over. This was not to be, however, and instead of taking over, imagination simply turned into secession. Baudelaire proposed that two additional rights be added to the list of ‘human rights’: the right to contradiction and the right to departure. There is indeed a certain form of dissent that has made ample use of these.
‘The past and their attachment to it; recurrence and rehashing — that is all one notices: the invocation of doctrines and events that history has already devoured, aborted and archived. Could imagination be synonymous with repetition? Could revolution be mere retelling?’
In Mr Revel’s eyes, ‘Third-Worldism’ is not a more appropriate solution either. Maoism is a specific model, one that seems to suit the Chinese and no one else. ‘Socialistic’ proletarian nations are only socialistic by name. Furthermore, ‘conducting a revolution in the Third World is an impossible endeavour in the absence of economic acceleration, and the latter is impossible in the absence of aid offered by a highly revolutionary developed country’. It is a vicious circle. ‘The cruel law of underdevelopment is that revolutions are equally underdeveloped in those parts of the world’.
All that we are left with is thus the United States; and in this regard, Jean-François Revel has no difficulty whatsoever in responding to America’s Leftist adversaries. All he has to do is remark that the entire arsenal of dissent at our disposal comes from the other side of the Atlantic. ‘Counter-culture’, black power, sexual emancipation, anti-authoritarian education, pop music, abstract art, Freudo-Marxism, women’s lib’, gay power, free universities and ‘communities’ are all products made in the USA. The ‘new Left’, however, which was born somewhere between Columbia and Berkeley, is nothing but an epiphenomenon: ‘The sense of revolution encountered in the USA today, even within the political Right, is greater than the one found anywhere else, even among Leftists’.
And yet whosoever speaks of revolution refers to ‘a novel event that has never taken place before and that occurs along pathways that differ from all known historical channels’. Does American dissent fulfil this definition? Mr Jean-François Revel has noticed the danger. ‘The worst fate that could befall the American free movement would be a relapse into 19th-century ideology’.
A Scenario Envisioned by Freud
And what if this had already occurred and the profound values which the current dissent refers to were not those of a novelty or revolutionary prefiguration, but those of an ‘eternal America’, an America that (joylessly) celebrated its bicentena
ry in 1976?
In The Americans — A Study in National Character (Cresset Press, London, 1948), Geoffrey Gorer902 pointed out the fact that the founding of America acted as a reproduction of the mythological scene envisioned by Freud when describing the birth of civilisation: ‘In Freud’s writings, the sons join forces to kill their tyrannical father; then, fearing that one of them could replace their murdered father, they enter into a mutual contract that establishes their legal equality, an equality that is based on having each one renounce all claims to their father’s authority and privileges. The England governed by George III thus took on the role of the despotic and tyrannical father, the American settlers that of the conspiring sons, and the Declaration of Independence and American Constitution that of the contract through which all Americans were henceforward guaranteed freedom and equality on the basis of their common renouncement of a most envied and most detested paternal privilege: authority’. (Such an interpretation would explain, at least in part, the extraordinary trendiness enjoyed by the psychoanalytical doctrine upon its arrival to the USA.)
As written by Mr Robert de Herte903 and Hans-Jürgen Nigra,904 ‘the Americans have extracted three fundamental convictions from their own origins: the belief that America, the new Promised Land, is the prefiguration of the cosmopolis, the coming universal Republic, and that the American “mission” is to set an example and perhaps even attempt to export the universal model of democratic Good; the belief that all men are equal and that each one of them can have it all (with God’s help, perhaps); and, last but not least, the belief that authority is, in itself, something both harmful and detestable and that all institutions that find themselves compelled to resort to it (the government, the army, and so on) are but necessary evils whose prerogatives are to be restricted’ (Il était une fois l’Amérique,905 in Nouvelle école, issue number 27–28, autumn–winter 1975).
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