In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Anti-totalitarianism, and Intellectual Politics in France since 1950

222 Pages·2016·1.46 MB·English

by  Stephen W. Sawyer

Democracy, Anti-totalitarianism, and
Intellectual Politics in France since 1950
Edited by

STEPHEN W. SAWYER & IAIN STEWART
In Search of the Liberal Moment
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In Search of the Liberal Moment
Democracy, Anti-totalitarianism, and
Intellectual Politics in France since 1950
Edited by
Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart
Palgrave
macmillan
IN SEARCH OF THE LIBERAL MOMENT
Selection and editorial content © Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart 2016
Individual chapters © their respective contributors 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-57823-5
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication
may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication
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London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published 2016 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of Nature America, Inc.,
One New York Plaza, Suite 4500, New York, NY 10004-1562.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
ISBN 978-1-349-72072-9
E-PDF ISBN: 978–1–137–58126–6
DOI: 10.1057/9781137581266
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sawyer, Stephen W., 1974– editor of compilation. | Stewart, Iain,
1979– editor of compilation.
Title: In search of the liberal moment : democracy, anti-totalitarianism, and
intellectual politics in France since 1950 / edited by Stephen W. Sawyer
and Iain Stewart.
Description: New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015032317 |
Subjects: LCSH: Liberalism—France—History—20th century. |
Intellectuals—Political activity—France—History—20th century. |
France—Politics and government—1974–1981. | France—Politics and
government—1981–1995. | Neoliberalism—France—History—20th
century. | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / France. | HISTORY / Historiography. |
HISTORY / Essays.
Classification: LCC JC574.2.F8 I6 2016 | DDC 320.510944/09047—dc23 LC
record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015032317
A catalogue record for the book is available from the British Library.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: New Perspectives on France’s “Liberal Moment” 1
Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart
1 Taking Anti-totalitarianism Seriously: The Emergence of the
Aronian Circle in the 1970s 17
Gwendal Châton
2 Plettenburg not Paris: Julien Freund, the New Right, and
France’s Liberal Moment 39
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
3 Rethinking the French Liberal Moment: Some Thoughts
on the Heterogeneous Origins of Lefort and Gauchet’s
Social Philosophy 61
Noah Rosenblum
4 “The Best Help I Could Find to Understand Our Present”:
François Furet’s Antirevolutionary Reading of Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America 85
Michael Scott Christofferson
5 On the Supposed Illiberalism of Republican Political
Culture in France 111
Jean-Fabien Spitz
6 Capitalism and Its Critics: Antiliberalism in Contemporary
French Politics 131
Emile Chabal
vi ● Contents
7 Foucault and France’s Liberal Moment 155
Michael C. Behrent
8 The French Reception of American Neoliberalism in the
Late 1970s 167
Serge Audier
Epilogue: Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Democratic Theory 191
Stephen W. Sawyer
Notes on Contributors 215
Index 217
Acknowledgments
This book originates from the conference “New Perspectives on the French
Liberal Renaissance” held at the University of London Institute in Paris on
December 7, 2013. As such it would never have come into being were it not
for the work of Dr. Anna-Louise Milne, who co-organized the conference.
Financial support for the conference was gratefully received from the Society
for the Study of French History, the University of London Institute in Paris,
Queen Mary University of London, and the American University of Paris.
We are also grateful to Professor Jeremy Jennings for his help with securing a
publisher for the book. Finally, our thanks to Kristin Purdy, Michelle Smith,
Chelsea Morgan, Ganesh Kannayiram, and Mike Aperauch at Palgrave for
their patience and support throughout the editorial and publishing process.
Introduction: New Perspectives on
France’s “Liberal Moment”
Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart
In 1994, the American historian of ideas Mark Lilla published an article
on the postwar recovery of liberal democracy in continental Western
Europe that presented an unorthodox take on the idea of French excep-
tionalism.1 This recovery, he argued, had been the product of history, chance,
shrewd political judgment, and the influence of the United States; it was
decidedly not the homegrown product of the postwar European mind.
Recently, however, France had emerged as the only continental European
nation to have finally broken free of its illiberal intellectual history, confirm-
ing the Italian historian Guido de Ruggiero’s prediction that the liberal spirit
would one day find a home on the continent. Few would have been more
surprised at this development than de Ruggiero himself, who in 1925 had
remarked of contemporary French democracy that it was “utterly unable to
grasp the idea of moral liberty, the value of personality, and the capacity of
the individual to react upon his environment.”2
De Ruggiero was neither the first nor the last foreign commentator to
remark upon the apparently endemic illiberality of French political culture.
Upon returning from a visit to France just after the Second World War, the
economist Joseph Schumpeter commented upon “a universal reluctance to
working in the democratic method” and the “practically complete absence
of ‘liberal’ groups” in the country.3 Lilla himself is one of a number of
Anglophone historians who have extended this interpretative tradition by
emphasizing the role of French intellectuals in at once exemplifying and
exacerbating the illiberality of the country’s political culture in the postwar
decades.4 Yet if intellectuals had done so much to reinforce French illiber-
alism over the course of the twentieth century, how are we to explain the
major contribution of intellectuals to France’s late twentieth-century
“liberal moment”?
2 ● Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart
In the aftermath of the Cold War, the explanatory paradigm most com-
monly applied to this problem was that of the intellectual epiphany.
According to this view, the period from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s
witnessed a dramatic ideological reorientation among France’s intellectuals
as a result of the combined impact of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag
Archipelago, humanitarian crises in the Indo-Chinese peninsula at the end of
the Vietnam War, and the suppression of dissidence in Central and Eastern
Europe. The main ideological casualty of the shock provoked by these events
was Marxism in all its forms, with the rejection of its economic determinism
extending to encompass the parallel sociolinguistic determinisms of struc-
turalist and post-s tructuralist theory. Conversely, the “anti-totalitarian turn”
in French intellectual life prompted intellectuals to rediscover their country’s
half-forgotten liberal heritage. Authors such as Alexis de Tocqueville and
Benjamin Constant were thus revived for their insights into a totalitarian
menace increasingly seen to reside not only in the communist world but also
as a latent presence within France’s own democratic political culture. A land-
mark moment in this French liberal revival came with the major critical and
commercial success of Raymond Aron’s memoirs in 1983.5 French intellec-
tual politics for most of the postwar period had supposedly followed the
maxim that it was “better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron”; in
contrast, the French liberal revival of the late 1970s and 1980s erected, in the
words of Tony Judt, “a monument to Aronian reason” upon “the funeral pyre
of Sartrean radicalism.”6
The first historians of this reorientation of French intellectual life, scholars
such as Lilla, Judt, and Sunil Khilnani writing in the early post–Cold War
years, were broadly sympathetic to the intellectual sea change described in
their work. But, of course, alternative evaluations of France’s liberal moment
have not been hard to come by. In 1983 Perry Anderson famously remarked
that Paris had in the space of a few years made the transition from being a
beacon of revolutionary politics to become “the capital of European intellec-
tual reaction,” an argument that continues to echo on the contemporary
French left in the work of Daniel Lindenberg and François Cusset.7 What is
striking, however, is that despite their radical evaluative differences, historians
such as Judt and Lilla share with critics like Anderson and Lindenberg a
common view of the French liberal revival as a sudden, transformative
moment in the country’s intellectual life.
Yet it is precisely this epiphanous narrative of France’s liberal moment,
whether ironic or celebratory in tone, that has become increasingly prob-
lematic. The reason is that while the narrative correctly identifies the late
twentieth-century liberal revival as a turning point in contemporary French