The Battle of Ideas

Abstract

War often inflicts severe damage on the moral and intellectual frameworks that have previously dominated a country. It is the common experience of defeated countries, exemplified by Germany and Japan after the Second World War, and by the former Soviet Union after the Cold War. But it may also affect countries that have been victorious in war, as happened in Britain and France in the aftermath of the First World War. France emerged from the Second World War in the ambiguous position of being ‘partly victorious, partly defeated’, with the sense that the country had both lost and won the war, plucking victory from the jaws of defeat.¹ This sense was strongly felt in the field of ideas. Events had conspired to discredit the moral and philosophical frameworks that had previously been dominant, but as a result, opportunities became available for previously subaltern currents of thought, which lost no time in presenting their intellectual wares and filling the moral and philosophical vacuum. The destruction of old intellectual frameworks provided a golden opportunity to build new ones. In some respects, this was an unexpected consequence of the war, and could be considered a ‘collateral benefit’. It is well expressed in the familiar French expression, ‘qui perd gagne’ (‘the loser wins’), which captured some of the ambiguity of post-war France.²