Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France

267 Pages·18.968 MB·English

by  Sunil Khilnani

ARGUING REVOLUTION
The Intellectual Left in Postwar France
SUNIL KHILNANI
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW HAV EN AND LONDON · 1993
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To Rebecca
'VALL
Copyright © by Sunil Khilnani
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in
part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107
and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the
public press), without written permission from the·publishers.
Set in Meridien by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Biddies Ltd., Guildford and Kings Lynn
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Khilnani, Sunil, 1960-
Arguing revolution: the intellectual left in postwar France/Sunil
Khilnani.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300-05745-8
1. Political science-France. 2. France-Politics and
government-1945- 3. Intellectuals-France. 4. Right and left
(Political science) I. Title.
JA84.F8K5 1993
320.5'0944-dc20 93-17376
CIP
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Contents
Preface vii
PART ONE
ONE Intellectuals and the Left 3
TWO The Languages of Political Criticism after the
Liberation 17
PART TWO
THREE Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics by Procuration 49
FOUR Louis Althusser: The Mystique of Theory 83
PART THREE
FIVE Revolution Exorcised: 1968-1981 121
SIX The Revolution is Over: Frarn;ois Furet and the
Historians' Challenge 155
Epilogue
179
Notes 187
Bibliography 228
Index 258
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Paris est la capitale de la civilisation ... Et saviez-vous pourquoi Paris est
la ville de la civilisation? C'est que Paris est la ville de la revolution.
a
Victor Hugo, 'Rent ree Paris', Actes et Paroles, III (Paris, 1871).
One would expect people to remember the past and to imagine the
future. But in fact, when discoursing or writing about history, they
imagine it in terms of their own experience, and when trying to gauge the
future they cite supposed analogies from the past: till, by a double process
of repetition, they imagine the past and remember the future.
Lewis Namier, 'Symmetry and Repetition', Conflicts
(London and Basingstoke, 1942).
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Preface
This book is intended as a contribution towards understanding the
character of political thought and argument in postwar France. But this
ambition is lent focus by means of a more specific inquiry, intended to
cast light on the extraordinary and recent shift in French intellectual
and political taste. Historically, France's intellectuals were always ac
corded an unusually prominent role in their country's politics: it
was through their public arguments that the terms which defined the
political community were forged. In the years after the end of the
Second World War until the mid-l 970s, the arguments of the intel
lectual Left weighed heavily upon the conduct of French political debate.
These arguments loomed not only over the domestic landscape, but also
further afield: they came to play a fundamental role in the entire
afflatus of Western progressive thought. Parisian fashions, styles of
language, and opinions, were transmitted with astonishing rapidity
across the globe. Rehoused in vastly different surrounds, the original
and very often intensely local obsessions and motivations of these
arguments were conveniently effaced; they came to be heard as primarily
philosophical in character, as arguments for the Left in general. But it
remains impossible to explain the sudden deflation of these forms of
argument and thought so long as they are considered purely in internal
terms. Nor is it any more helpful to reduce the arguments to indices
of extrinsic processes, whether social or economic. Such approaches
indolently evade any specification of the character of political thought
and argument in France: unable properly to account for the changes
that have occurred, they are unable to judge the significance of these
changes.
My account is not a social history of the French intellectual Left: it
pays attention to social and institutional context only where these are
judged to be relevant to its central argument. Nor does it follow the
rhythms of conventional history of ideas, systematically reconstructing
concepts and debates in their temporal sequence. It is quite explicitly
and in the original sense a biased book: it proposes a new angle of vision,
one which brings certain significant patterns into clearer focus. I do not
claim that the numerous existing studies of the French intellectual Left
which have identified other concerns or stressed different emphases are
mistaken; rather, that it is more useful to view political thought and
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viii ARGUING REVOLUTION
argument in postwar France in the way suggested here, particularly if
we wish to understand why its fundamental premises changed so
suddenly, and what the significance of this was.
This book takes the arguments as they were intended to be taken: as
arguments, advanced and conducted in very particular circumstances,
responses to questions raised by the politics of the time. For those on the
Left, these arguments centred around the idea of revolution. Intellectuals
argued about past revolutions-the French Revolution, the Soviet
Revolution, and their relation to one another-, about future revol
utions, and about the relation between past and future revolutions.
They disputed the political value of revolution, its consequences, and
who was to accomplish it. In the historically rich French language of
revolutionary politics, they discovered a vocabulary in which to describe
the political community, a characterization of France's political identity.
And ultimately it was on this terrain, where different conceptions of the
political community clashed, that a revolution in the terms of argument
was itself effected.
I have benefited from the generosity of several institutions and many
people in researching and writing this book. I am grateful to the
Studentship Electors of King's College, Cambridge for awarding me a
studentship which allowed me to conduct research in Paris. I am
enormously grateful too to the Master and Fellows of Christ's College,
Cambridge for' electing me to a Research Fellowship, which provided me
with an excellent environment in which to w.rite an earlier version of
this book. I finally completed it while a member of the Department of
Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck College, London, and I thank my
colleagues there for their patience and support. Personal debts are more
numerous. In Paris, Camilla and Valerio Adami were repeatedly the
most generous of hosts. I learnt much from conversations with Jean
Bazin, Pierre Birnbaum, Cornelius Castoriadis, Fran~ois Furet, Marcel
Gauchet, Pierre Gremion, Pierre Hassner, Claude Lefort, Bernard Manin,
Pierre Nora, Pasquale Pasquino, Michel Pion, Jacques Randere and
Jacques Rupnik. For their responses to and comments upon various
more primitive versions of the argument, I am very grateful to Perry
Anderson, Daniel Bell, Stefan Collini, Vincent Descombes, Peter Dews,
Bianca Fontana, Tony Giddens, Keith Hart, Michael Ignatieff, Quentin
Skinner, Gareth Stedman Jones and John B. Thompson. I would like
also to thank Robert Baldock and his colleagues at Yale University Press,
and my copy editor, Susan Haskins. Roy Foster gave me the essay by
Namier, from which I take one of the book's epigraphs. My largest debts
are to John Dunn, Geoffrey Hawthorn and Tony Judt: their encourage
ment and criticism has been truly invaluable. Any errors of fact or
judgement which persist are of course mine.
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PART ONE
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CHAPTER ONE
Intellectuals and the Left
I
Nowhere in the West was the collapse of the revolutionary identity of
the Left more spectacular than in its original homeland, France. For
all of three decades after the end of the Second World War, French
intellectuals attached immense importance to the idea of revolution:
Marxism, adopted as the modern theory of revolution, gained unparal
leled prestige within the intellectual culture as a whole. More completely
than in any other Western European country, intellectuals in France
revived and pressed into argument the language of revolutionary poli
tics, producing glittering theoretical novelties which came to command
the attention of both partisans and critics of the Left across the world. 1
From the mid-l 940s to the mid-l 970s, Paris stood unchallenged in its
claim to possess the most politically radical intellectual class.
This position seemed confirmed in the immediate afterglow of 1968.
The events of that year vividly revealed the extent to which the ideal
of revolution still nourished the imaginations of the intellectuals of
the Left. Marxist theory in its Althusserian interpretation achieved an
influence far beyond Louis Althusser's original stronghold, the Ecole
Normale Superieure.2 It gained unprecedented academic respectability
and acceptance (symbolically encapsulated by Althusser's delivery of a
lecture to the Societe Frarn;aise de Philosophie in 1968, entitled 'Lenine
et la Philosophie').3 This triumphal entry of theories of revolutionary
politics into the sanctuaries of the academic establishment was secured
institutionally by the foundation of the University of Vincennes in 1969,
with its declared allegiance to Marxist theoretical and political principles.
Editions of the Marxist classics and of works devoted to Marxist themes
streamed not only from the publishing houses of the French Communist
Party and small left-wing publishers like Frarn;ois Maspero and Christian
Bourgois, but also from the established bastions of Le Seuil, the Presses
Universitaires de France and Gallimard. Theoretical journals belonging,
or affiliated, to the Communist Party flourished, publishing work of a far
higher intellectual quality than anything produced in earlier decades.4
Gauchismes proliferated in dense abundance: Maoism (for many, the
practical counterpart to Althusser's theoretical chinoiseries) was writing
itself into the history of the French Left as a minor epic, while (on
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4 ARGUING REVOLUTION
separate trajectories) Trotskyist, anarchist and libertarian currents all
enjoyed strong if highly localized revivals. In the broader domain of
public opinion, programmes and policies associated with the Left won
widespread popular favour.5 and in the political mainstream the parties
of the Left made gains. The newly reconstituted Socialist Party rapidly
emerged as a plausible contender for government, and the alliance
between the Socialists and the Communists, secured in the Common
Programme of 1972, seemed to pose a genuine challenge to the declining
Gaullist state. Observers spoke of 'the "marxization" of French culture',6
and concluded that the French Left had gained for itself the intellectual
dominance which all other supporters of the Left in Western Europe had
ardently desired in their own countries.
Yet, with prodigious suddenness, everything changed. In the space
of a few years, intellectuals abandoned the language of revolutionary
politics. By the end of the 1970s, the most vociferous of them were
insisting that revolution resulted necessarily in totalitarianism and state
imposed terror. An entire intellectual consensus, founded upon a com
mitment to rapid and thorough-going social and political change through
violent takeover of state power, had dissolved. So substantial was the
metamorphosis that one of the most effective international propagators
of French radical ideas, Perry Anderson, announced in 1983 that 'Paris
is today the capital of European intellectual reaction'. 7 The language
of revolutionary politics had deflated helplessly, and Marxism with it.
What can explain this reversal in intellectual opinion? Why did it occur?
And what did it mean?
The collapse in the intellectual credit of revolutionary politics in France
was undoubtedly part of a more general exhaustion of Marxist and
socialist thought in the West.8 But the sheer haste and scale of the
decline of the French case was unique. In Italy-the only other Western
European country with a comparably developed radical intellectual and
political culture-the deflation was less acute: intellectuals there did
renege on previous political commitments, but unlike France the shift
never reached the proportions of a collective abdication on the part of
almost an entire generation. Nor did it veer towards the extremity of the
French reaction. And in Britain and the United States, it could be argued
that academic radicalism, in the form of Marxist or marxisant theories,
actually climaxed at the moment when its French counterpart was
extinguished. 9 Further, the disengagement of French intellectuals from
the hitherto accepted terms of political argument preceded by some
years the abrupt fall of the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe:
although it was undoubtedly linked to the unravelling of 'actually
existing socialism', it could not be explained simply as a direct reflex
of this. The logic of the French collapse lay within France's own poli
tical and intellectual history. In this perspective, it appeared still more
puzzling: at the very moment when, in 1981, the parties of the Left
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