Revolution and the Republic
Page 106
Strauss continued the anti-Sartrean theme, announcing that the ‘elimination
of the subject represents what might be called a methodological need’ and that
structuralism, by reintegrating man into nature, made it ‘possible to disregard the
subject––that unbearably spoilt child who has occupied the philosophical scene for
too long’. Existentialism, Lévi-Strauss concluded, was ‘a self-admiring activity which
allows contemporary man, rather gullibly, to commune with himself in ecstatic
contemplation of his own being’. The allotted task of structuralism, in short, was
to break with the philosophical inheritance of humanism, an aim fully articulated
in the last sentence of Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses, where the reader was
told that man was a recent invention who would soon disappear ‘like a face drawn in
sand at the edge of the sea’.
This anti-humanist position, rooted in dissatisfaction with the phenomenologi-
cal theory of the subject, found a variety of expressions in the writings of structur-
alism. Roland Barthes, championing the reader and announcing ‘the pleasure of the
text’, spoke of ‘the death of the author’. Likewise, Jacques Lacan, reworking Freud,
rebelled against the ‘ego-centred’ character of psychoanalysis and used the basic
concepts of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics to illustrate that the
conscious life of the individual did not provide the means of its own intelligibility.
Althusser, as we have already seen, spoke of history as ‘a process without a subject’.
Who exactly the structuralists were and whether they constituted a fixed and
identifiable group or school are not questions that deflect from the fact that the
1960s was a very much the structuralist decade. Their work received immense
critical (and popular) acclaim, sold in huge quantities and effectively established a
new philosophical orthodoxy or paradigm. In large part, however, this success can
be attributed to non-philosophical causes. The vogue for structuralism coincided
with France’s belated entry into the consumer society and seemed to postulate its
350 Judt, Past Imperfect, French Intellectuals 1944–1956 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1992), 154.
351 Claude Lévi-Strauss. La Pensée sauvage (1962).
352 Claude Lévi-Strauss, L’Homme nu (1971).
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
501
decisive rejection. This was most obvious in Lévi-Strauss’s explicit challenge to the
supposed superiority and universality of the categories of Western reason. ‘The
scientific spirit in its most modern form’, Lévi-Strauss wrote, will serve ‘to legiti-
mize the principles of savage thought and to re-establish it in its rightful place’.353
Similarly, the structuralist challenge to the values of the bourgeois and capitalist
society of the West was evident in Lacan’s ethics of desire and in Foucault’s ethics of
liberation. It was there too in the work of Roland Barthes. In his preface to the
1970 edition of Mythologies, for example, he wrote as follows: ‘I had just read
Saussure and as a result acquired the conviction that by treating “collective
representations” as signs, one might hope to go further than the pious show of
unmasking them and account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-
bourgeois culture into a universal nature.’ And this was the conclusion he reached
from the fifty-four short sketches that followed: ‘the whole of France is steeped
in this anonymous ideology: our press, our films, our theatre, our pulp literature,
our rituals, our justice, our diplomacy, our conversations, our remarks about the
weather, the cooking we dream of, the garments we wear, everything in everyday
life, is dependent upon the representation which the bourgeoisie has and makes us
have of the relations between man and the world’. The world of the bourgeoisie had
been constructed as if it were the world of Eternal Man.354
Nevertheless, when the student protests of May 1968 rocked France to its very
foundations, Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and the other structur-
alists responded with what J. G. Melchior described as an ‘eloquent’ silence.355 One
of the many famous student slogans of the day summed up the situation admirably:
‘Barthes says that structures do not take to the streets. We say: neither does
Barthes.’ Sartre, the intellectual hero of the hour, had his revenge.356
Ironically, the events of May 68 also sounded the death knell of the Sartrean
model of the committed intellectual.357 Most importantly, the very philosophical
foundations that had underpinned the Sartrean model of the universal intellectual
were progressively dismantled. Sartre’s Marxist humanism was jettisoned in a
philosophical revolution that, via post-structuralism, led ultimately to Jacques
Derrida and deconstruction. In its assault upon what was taken to be the ‘logocen-
trism’ at the heart of the Western metaphysical tradition, philosophy simply ceased
to be engaged in the formulation of normative theories or to concern itself with
questions of public life. And thus writers like Philippe Sollers, the influential
353 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: 1966), 269.
354 Barthes, Mythologies (St Albans, 1973), 140.
355 From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought (London, 1986).
356 These comments on structuralism are expanded upon in my ‘Structuralism’, in Simon
Glendinning (ed.), The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1999), 505–
14. See François Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme, 2 vols. (1992).
357 See François Hourmont, Le Désenchantement des clercs: Figures de l’intellectuel dans l’après-Mai
68 (Rennes, 1997). More broadly, see Pascal Ory, L’Entre-deux Mai: Histoire culturelle de la France Mai
68–Mai 1981 (1983); Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 68 and Contemporary French
Thought (Montreal and Kingston, 2007); and Serge Audier, La Pensée anti-68: Essai sur les origines
d’une restauration intellectuelle (2008).
502
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
editor of the literary review Tel Quel,358 could break with Sartre’s definition
of committed literature and argue that a writer’s commitment was displayed not
in any message to be conveyed but in the activity of writing itself. Later, Julia
Kristeva––who herself was to provide a withering description of the self-obsession
of French intellectuals359––reduced the philosophical project to an attempt to
destabilize the ‘master discourses’ constituting the existing symbolic order.360
Jean-François Lyotard, the high priest of postmodernism, could likewise argue
that ‘The responsibility of “intellectuals” is inseparable from the (shared) idea of
a universal subject. It alone gave Voltaire, Zola, Péguy, Sartre (to stay within
the confines of France) the authority that has been accorded to them.’ As, he
continued, we no longer believed that a universal subject exists, there ought
therefore no longer to be any intellectuals.361 Gone were the days when the
intellectual was able to speak out in the name of truth and, in so doing, aspire to
change the world for the better.
de gauche’ appeared to evaporate. How this occurred is a complicated story, but
there can be no doubt that the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The
Gulag Archipelago in French in 1974 produced a major shock to the whole
edifice, cruelly exposing the past errors and political misjudgements of France’s
intellectuals before Marxist totalitarianism.362 Faced with such compelling
evidence of complicity with tyranny and mass murder, the claims of the
intellectuals to superior knowledge and to a greater lucidity were mercilessly
stripped away, leaving behind only the image of a figure prone to folly and bouts
of ideological blindness.363 The picture was of a community of intellectuals in
disarray, feeling unsure of itself and of how it should act in a world in which it
no longer enjoyed automatic respect. Power and influence seemed to have
slipped from its grasp.
In those circumstances, the immediate years that followed saw the publication
of a veritable flotilla of books and articles devoted to the examination of the
intellectual’s supposed demise and its causes. Picking over the carcass of a fallen
national hero, all evinced a nostalgia for a lost golden age of heroic Dreyfusard
intellectuals battling against the forces of darkness and all agreed in their condem-
nation of a corrupted, degraded, and mediocre present. When the content of a
358 Philippe Forest, Histoire de Tel Quel, 1960–1982 (1996) and Danielle Marx-Scouras, The
Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement (University Park, Pa.,
1996).
359 Julia Kristeva, Les Samouraïs (1990).
360 See ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’, in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader
(Oxford, 1986), 292–300.
361 ‘Tombeau de l’intellectuel’, Le Monde (8 Oct. 1983). See also Lyotard, Tombeau de l’intellectuel
et autres papiers (1984).
362 See Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian
Moment of the 1970s (New York, 2004), 89–112.
363 See e.g. Michel-Antoine Burnier, Le Testament de Sartre (1982) and Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, La
Lune et le caudillo: Le Rêve des intellectuels et le régime cubain (1989).
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
503
culture had come to be so determined by the market, Régis Debray wrote,
a philosopher was not judged by his ideas but by the colour of his eyes.364
From among the wreckage, however, there appeared several alternative models of
the intellectual. Arguably the most influential of these was that fashioned by Michel
Foucault. Formulated as early as 1972 and restated on many subsequent occa-
sions––most notably in an interview given in 1977––Foucault sought to replace the
‘universal’ intellectual (with Voltaire and Sartre cast as the prototype) with that of
the ‘specific’ intellectual.365 As with Julien Benda, there was reference to ‘the great
treason of the intellectuals’, but here it was taken to be the inculcation of the values
of ‘bourgeois justice’ among the proletariat. So also there were derogatory com-
ments directed against those dismissed as ‘les intellectuels professionnels parisiens’.
But Foucault’s central argument was that the intellectual could no longer make
claim to be ‘a giver of lessons’ or to act as a ‘moral legislator’. ‘The work of the
intellectual’, Foucault argued, ‘is not to mould the political will of others.’ Rather,
the role of the intellectual was ‘to make visible the mechanisms of repressive power
which operate in a hidden manner’. This was to be done by providing ‘instruments
of analysis’ drawn from the intellectual’s own work ‘within specific sectors’.
It was, then, as ‘specialists’ and as ‘experts’ engaging in ‘specific’ and ‘local’
struggles rather than as ‘universal prophets’ or ‘the bearers of values’ that intellec-
tuals should operate. Yet in one respect at least the work of the intellectual could
take on a ‘general significance’ and have implications which were not ‘simply
professional or sectoral’. Starting from the assumption that truth was not ‘the
child of protracted solitude’ but the product of ‘multiple forms of constraint’,
the function of the intellectual, Foucault believed, was to struggle to destroy ‘the
regime of truth’ integral to the structure and functioning of present society.
Foucault himself sought to exemplify the role of the ‘specific’ intellectual not
only through his own writings, most notably Naissance de la clinique and Surveiller
et punir,366 but also through his own political commitments and interventions.
In 1971, for example, he established the Groupe d’information sur les prisons to
secure prison reform.367 A series of similar gestures linking his academic work to
contemporary social and political issues were made by Foucault in the years before
his death in 1984. It was this model that was to be taken up and developed by
thinkers on the left of the political spectrum in the years to come.
As influential as Foucault’s reformulation of the relationship of the intellectual to
politics might have been, it provided little attraction for those who had now
become––or who had always been––deeply sceptical about the supposed virtues
of the revolutionary project. For this increasingly numerous and vocal group there
364 See Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France (1979). Debray returned to this theme in i.f. suite et fin
(2000).
365 See e.g. ‘Les Intellectuels et le pouvoir’, in Dits et écrits 1954–1988 (1994), ii. 306–15; ‘Entretien
avec Michel Foucault’, ibid. iii. 140–60; and ‘L’Intellectuel et les pouvoirs’, ibid. iv. 747–52. The
quotations that follow are drawn from a wide range of sources from within the 4 vols. of Dits et écrits.
366 Naissance de la clinique (1972); Surveiller et punir (1975).
367 See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (1989), 314–28.
504
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
was another and wiser source of inspiration: Raymond Aron.368 Unlike the apoliti-
cal Sartre,369 Aron had not been blind to the dangers of the rise of fascism and in
the summer of 1940, immediately following the fall of France, he had left for
London to join the Free French and there became one of the editors of La France
libre. Following the Liberation, Aron devoted himself to journalism and to the
pursuit of an immensely distinguished academic career, quickly making known his
opposition to communism and his support for the United States and the Atlantic
Alliance. As the Cold War intensified, Aron became a leading member of the CIA-
financed Congress for Cultural Freedom. If he quickly saw the futility and the
‘tragedy’ of the cause of French Algeria, he similarly dismissed the student protests
of May 68 as a self-indulgent ‘psychodrama’ fuelled by ‘the worst form of utopian-
ism and revolutionary mythology’.370
Always an admirer of Montesquieu and Tocqueville (as well as a lifelong
reader of Marx),371 time and time again Aron returned to the themes of the
fragility of civilization and the ever-present threat of tyr
anny and totalitarianism.
If political thought in France, in his view, tended to be either nostalgic or
utopian, then, by the same token, political action was divorced from reality
and from economic necessities. The French left in particular, he believed, needed
to free itself from ‘the siren charms of ideal emancipation’ and of its faith in both
revolution and the proletariat. Both, Aron argued, were a form of ‘imaginary
compensation’ for the successive revolutionary failures that had occurred from
1789 to 1848. The intellectuals of the left, he asserted, were in search of a secular
religion.
For his pains, over many years Aron was treated as something of a pariah––better
to be wrong with Sartre rather than be right with Aron was the celebrated quip––
and his influence scarcely stretched beyond a small group of loyal friends and
former students. His intellectual itinerary was however the mark of a philosopher
and a commentator who refused to turn his back on political realities and who, in
Aron’s own words, had sought ‘to lead the life of an active witness’. It was this
willingness to look the realities of politics square in the face that underpinned his
conception of the intellectual as ‘a committed observer’.
The origins of this notion can be traced back to Aron’s experiences in Germany
during the 1930s but it was given much clearer articulation with the publication of
L’Opium des intellectuels in 1955 and then, much later, in a series of interviews
368 See Daniel J. Mahoney, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron (Lanham, Md., 1992);
Nicholas Baverez, Raymond Aron: Un moraliste au temps des idéologies (1993); Brian C. Anderson,
Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political (Lanham, Md., 1997); and ‘The Peripheral Insider:
Raymond Aron and the Wages of Reason’, in Judt, Burden of Responsibility, 137–82. Above all, see
Aron’s own autobiographical reflections contained in Mémoires: 50 Ans de réflexion politique (1983). An
excellent selection of Aron’s work in French is to be found in Penser la liberté, penser la démocratie
(2005) and in English in The Dawn of Universal History (New York, 2002).
369 On the relationship between the two men see Sirinelli, Sartre et Aron: Deux intellectuels dans le