Abstract
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 exceptionalism.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, confirming 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
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Mark Lilla, “The Other Velvet Revolution: Continental Liberalism and Its Discontents,” Daedalus, 123 (1994): 129–157, 133–135.
Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), 205–210, 207.
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: George Allen & Unwin, [1942] 1946), 401.
Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 1–4; Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 159, 238–241; Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (London: Yale University Press, 1993), 135–136; Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 33–64, 207–230. For a survey of recent work on the intellectual history of French liberalism, see Michael C. Behrent, “Liberal Dispositions: Recent Scholarship on French Liberalism,” Modern Intellectual History (May 2015), 1–31.
Raymond Aron, Mémoires. 50 ans de réflexion politique (Paris: Julliard, 1983).
On the origin of notion that it was “better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron,” see Jean Daniel, La Blessure (Paris: Grasset, 1992), 225. Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 137. On the importance of Raymond Aron, see also Emile Chabal, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 135–157.
Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 32; Daniel Lindenberg, Le Rappel à l’Ordre: Enquête sur les Nouveaux Réactionnaires (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002); François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 309–327.
Here we mark our disagreement with Samuel Moyn’s claim in 2006 that “above all, it is a mistake to interpret the anti-totalitarian moment as a ‘liberal moment.’” For this quote see Moyn’s introduction to Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 1–28, 11.
Furet’s interest in Tocqueville was similar to Lefort’s: “En France aussi, toutes ces dernières années, on a redecouvert l’importance de l’abstraction democratique, c’est-a-dire le rôle joué par la representation egalitaire du rapport social dans l’imaginaire collectif, et on assiste a un retour de la pensée de Tocqeuville pour cette raison même. Si bien qu’il serait tout a fait interessant d’organiser un seminaire suruur un des problemes que vous proposez, democratie formelle/démocratie réelle, en prenant comme pôles principaux Tocqueville et Marx.” Quoted in Christophe Prochasson, Francois Furet. Les chemins de la mélancolie (Paris: Stock, 2013), 183. It is worth noting that this comment also bears a sharp similarity to Merleau-Ponty’s conception in Le visible de l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
Laurence Guellec, “La complication: Lefort lecteur de Tocqueville,” Raisons Polititiques, 1 (2001): 141–153.
In Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie (Paris: Julliard, 1982), Pierre Manent famously suggested that democracy needs to be embraced “moderately.”
Mark Lilla (ed.), New French Thought: Political Philosophy (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). On the reception of this project, see Cusset, French Theory, 309–328.
For the argument that anti-totalitarianism was primarily a response to the Common Program signed by the French communist and socialist parties in 1972, see Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left. The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn, 2004).
For another, left revisionist reading of Aron which downplays his hostility to the events of 1968 and their legacy, see Serge Audier, Raymond Aron: La démocratie conflictuelle (Paris: Michalon, 2004).
Julien Freund, L’Essence du politique (Paris: Sirey, 1965).
This issue is touched upon in Warren Breckman’s important recent book Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). See also Samuel Moyn, “Concepts of the Political in Twentieth-Century European Thought,” in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt ed. Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Prochasson, François Furet. For a summary of Prochasson’s argument in English, see his “The Melancholy of Post-Communism: François Furet and the Passions,” in France since the 1970s: History, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty, ed. Emile Chabal (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 83–96.
See, for example, Serge Audier, La pensée anti-68. Essai sur les origines d’une restauration intellectuelle (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), 119–125.
Jean-Fabien Spitz, Le Moment républicain en France (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).
The main target of Spitz’s polemic is Pierre Rosanvallon, who was the leading theorist of the autogestionnaire second left in the 1970s, a participant in the intellectual “revival” of liberalism in the 1980s, and who is currently a professor of the conceptual history of the political at the Collège de France. In the interest of intellectual equity it is worth noting that Spitz does not discuss Rosanvallon’s more recent work, which has nuanced his critique of republican illiberalism and paid increasing attention to the problem of social inequality. On these subjects see Pierre Rosanvallon, Le modèle politique français. La société civile contre le jacobinisme de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004); La société des égaux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2011).
Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: cours au Collège de France, 1978–79 (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). Key French texts on the intellectual history of neoliberalism are François Denord, Néolibéralisme version française (Paris: Demopolis, 2007) and Serge Audier, Néo-libéralisme(s): une archéologie intellectuelle (Paris: Grasset, 2012). Foucault’s lectures have informed a new wave of critical writing on neoliberalism which includes Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault. Sur le néolibéralisme, la théorie et la politique (Paris: Fayard, 2012); Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (London: Verso, 2013); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); Serge Audier, Penser le “néolibéralisme.” Foucault, le moment néolibéral et la crise du socialisme (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2015). For a critical reevaluation of Foucault’s late politics in the light of his engagement with neoliberal ideas, see Daniel Zamora, Critiquer Foucault: les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale (Bruxelles: Les Éditions Aden, 2014).
See, for example, Michael C. Behrent, “Accidents Happen: François Ewald, the ‘Antirevolutionary’ Foucault, and the Intellectual Politics of the French Welfare State,” Journal of Modern History 82 (2010), 585–624; “Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976–1979,” Modern Intellectual History 6 (2009), 539–568; “A Seventies Thing: On the Limits of Foucault’s Neoliberalism Course for Understanding the Present,” in A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 16–29.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2016 Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sawyer, S.W., Stewart, I. (2016). Introduction: New Perspectives on France’s “Liberal Moment”. In: Sawyer, S.W., Stewart, I. (eds) In Search of the Liberal Moment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137581266_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137581266_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-72072-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-58126-6
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)