Abstract
How might we understand the ostensible renaissance of French liberal thought in the 1970s? Even the most cursory glance into modern French history troubles the waters of a supposed “revival”: Condorcet drafted a constitution in 1793; Benjamin Constant prepared the constitution for Napoleon’s 100 days; Adolphe Thiers and François Guizot governed for the better portion of the July Monarchy from 1830–1848; Tocqueville participated in French colonial strategy as well as the constitutional convention of 1848; the Second Empire ended as the “Liberal Empire” in 1870; writing in the 1860s, Prévost-Paradol penned one the most influential texts on the institutional structure of the Third Republic and Édouard Laboulaye presented an early version of the founding amendment of the Third Republic; some five decades later, the “Colloque Lippmann” in the interwar years established an agenda for an entire generation and beyond, while Élie Halévy maintained an intellectual project that nourished Raymond Aron, François Furet, and others.
If we were satisfied with the idea that Tocqueville never departed from an aristocratic conception of liberty, all research would be vain and the conclusion would be neither new nor fecund. Beyond this, we hope to uncover the signs of indeterminacy in his thought, which was confronted with the enigma of democracy.
—Claude Lefort, “De l’égalité à la liberté”1
The ideas of liberals set forth in the first third of the nineteenth century were potent in criticism and in analysis. They released forces that had been held in check. But analysis is not construction, and release of force does not of itself give direction to the force that is set free.
—John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action2
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Notes
“Si nous nous satisfaisions de l’idée que Tocqueville ne s’est pas départi d’une conception aristocratique de la liberté, la recherche serait vaine et la conclusion, comme d’avance, ni nouvelle ni féconde. Bien davantage nous import-t-il de relever les signes de l’indétermination d’une pensée à l’épreuve de l’énigme de la démocratie.” Originally published in Libre, 3, 1978. Republished in Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 248.
John Dewey, “Liberalism and Social Action,” in The Papers of John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University, 1987), 625.
Bertrand Jouvenel, On Power (New York: Viking Press, 1962 [1945]), 294.
On the reception of Jouvenel’s On Power, see Olivier Dard, Bertrand de Jouvenel (Paris: Perrin, 2008), who notes that the reception was more extensive and enthusiastic in the English-speaking world than in France.
This claim about Aron may only be understood from the perspective of the renewal of a new liberalism or neoliberalism in the interwar period designed to combat the influence of a state socialism. As François Denord suggests, “Lors de la Libération … le libéralisme passe pour une idéologie surannée,” in Dictionnaire historique des patrons français, ed. Jean-Claude Daumas, Alain Chatriot, Danièle Fraboulet, Patrick Fridenson, and Hervé Joly (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), 1025. For the quotation see Michael C. Behrent, “Justifying Capitalism in an Age of Uncertainty: L’Association pour la Liberté Économique et le Progrès Social, 1969–73,” in France since the 1970s, ed. Emile Chabal (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 178.
This point has been most forcefully made by Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghan, 2004). On the specificity of French neoliberalism, its birth in the 1930s and final triumph at the end of the century, see Serge Audier, Le colloque Lippmann. Aux origines du “neo-libéralisme” (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2012) and François Denord, Néo-libéralisme version française: Histoire d’une idéologie politique (Paris: Demopolis, 2007).
Christophe Prochasson’s biography of Furet suggests that even his regular critiques of the left did not amount to a betrayal of his contribution to a new leftist politics. See Christophe Prochasson, François Furet. Les chemins de la mélancolie (Paris: Stock, 2013), in particular, the conclusion, “Pour penser à gauche,” where he writes: “Voici pourquoi sa pensée politique, si nourrie d’histoire, est en mesure de fournir à la gauche contemporaine les éléments d’une doctrine renouvelée.” For arguments that Furet was clearly on the right, see Michael Scott Christofferson’s chapter in this volume.
Gauchet’s response to the question “Are you a liberal?” highlights precisely this point. “Tout ce que j’ai écrit sur Constant ou Tocqueville,” he stated, “avait pour but de circonscrire l’erreur de perspective qui les a trompés sur le monde dans lequel ils évoluaient.” Marchel Gauchet, La Condition historique (Paris: Stock, 2003), 267.
John Dewey, “Liberalism and Social Action,” in John Dewey, The Later Works, vol. II (1935–1937), ed. Jo Ann Bodyston (Normal: Southern Illinois University, 1987), 1–66, 6.
On Hayek’s Tocqueville as opposed to that of Lefort, see Serge Audier, Tocqueville retrouvé. Genèse et enjeux du renouveau du tocquevillien français (Paris: Vrin/EHESS, 2004).
Claude Lefort, “La question de la démocratie,” in Essais sur le politique XIXe–XXe siècles, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 21.
Andrew Jainchill and Samuel Moyn, “French Democracy between Totalitarianism and Solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and Revisionist Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 76(1) (2004): 107–154.
“Il y a donc les ainés du groupe Socialisme ou barbarie, principalement Castoriadis et Lefort, il y a parmi nous des tocquevilliens de droite et des tocquevilliens de gauche, mais nous nous retrouvons autour de ce thème: le totalitarisme comme révélateur de problèmes les plus énigmatique et les plus profonds de la démocratie. Ainsi, le totalitarisme, avec la menace qu’il signifiait encore à cette époque, nous conduit vers une interrogation radicale sur la démocratie.” Pierre Manent, Le regard politique (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), 111.
I define “critical” to capture a moral and political position that recognizes both the flaws and causes for dissatisfaction in “democratic” states while understanding democracy as a historical process with liberatory potential. In this sense, it builds on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School as well as Michel Foucault’s notion of “la critique” at the same time that it embraces the indeterminacy of democratic politics as a potentially liberatory power in our contemporary societies that can never be the property of any one nation or people. However, the indeterminacy that was central to this Paris School of political thinkers, prevented the uncritical adoption even of the notion of critique as Gauchet explicitly pointed out when suggested that in 1971–1973 it was necessary to formulate a “critique of the ‘critique critique’” (Marcel Gauchet, La condition historique, 46). For a different, but influential, perspective on new uses of the notion “critical” in history, see Manu Goswami, Moishe Postone, Andrew Sartori, and William H. Sewell Jr., “Introducing Critical Historical Studies,” Critical Historical Studies 1(1) (Spring 2014): 1–3.
See, for example, Louis Dumont, Essais sur l’individualisme (Paris: Seuil, 1983); Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); Marcel Gauchet, La révolution des droits de l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); Pierre Manent, Histoire intellectuelle du libéralisme: dix leçons (Paris: Calman-Levy, 1987).
On the influence of Louis Dumont on certain figures of the 1970s, including Gauchet and others, see Serge Audier, La pensée anti-68 (Paris: La découverte, 2009).
Marcel Gauchet, L’Avènement de la démocratie: La revolution moderne, Vol. 1 (2007); La crise du libéralisme, Vol. 2 (2007); A l’épreuve des totalitarismes, 1914–1974, Vol. 3 (2010) (Paris: NRF Gallimard); Pierre Rosanvallon, L’âge de l’autogestion: ou la politique du commandement (Paris: Seuil, 1976); Gauchet, La révolution des droits de l’homme; Pierre Manent, The City of Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
On Castoriadis and Lefort, see Philippe Gottraux, Socialisme ou Barbarie. Un engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de l’après-guerre (Lausanne: Payot, 1997) and Nicolas Poirier, ed., Cornelius Castariadis et Claude Lefort: l’expérience démocratique (Lormont: Bord de l’eau, 2015).
It is worth noting that this revolt against totalitarianism and generalized pessimism was stated differently, but was also shared in the late writings of the firstgeneration Frankfurt school. It was stated perhaps most clearly in Friedrich Pollock’s “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 71–94. In this essay, Pollack argues “The totalitarian form of state capitalism is a deadly menace to all values of western civilization. Those who want to maintain these values must fully understand the possibilities and limitations of the aggressor if their resistance is to meet with success. Furthermore, they must be able to show in what way the democratic values can be maintained under the changing conditions” (72). The attempt to revitalize a critical democratic project in response to this pessimism is another ambition that Lefort shared with his contemporaries such as Jurgen Habermas, who also confronted the Marxian legacy across the divide of the crisis of the welfare state. One could argue that the attempt to move beyond this pessimism was a central strut in this Paris School of political thought that participated largely in this liberal moment.
Furet, for example, completely avoids the question in his history of the nineteenth century La Révolution de Turgot à Jules Ferry, 1770–1880 (Paris: Hachette, 1989). Rosanvallon speaks very briefly in Le sacre du citoyen (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), but otherwise, does not treat this issue in his work on the nineteenth-century democracy, like Gauchet and others.
On Tocqueville in Algeria, for example, see Margaret Kohn, “Empire’s Law: Alexis De Tocqueville on Colonialism and the State of Exception,” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 41(2) (2008): 255–278; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) and Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Melvin Richter, “Tocqueville on Algeria,” Review of Politics 25 (1963): 362–398; Tzvetan Todorov, De la colonieen Algérie (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1988). For the later part of the nineteenth century, see Stephen W. Sawyer, “An American Model for French Liberalism: The State of Exception in Édouard Laboulaye’s Constitutional Thought,” The Journal of Modern History 85 (December 2013): 739–771.
Pierre Nora, Les Français d’Algérie (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2012 [1961]).
On Jacques Julliard and decolonization, see Robert Chapuis, “Le combat anticolonialiste à l’UNEF,” Pour une histoire de la deuxième gauche: Hommage à Jacques Julliard (Paris: Bnf, 2008), 25–31.
Pour un capitalisme intelligent (Paris: Grasset, 1993).
François Furet, “Les juifs et le commissaire,” Le Nouvel Observateur 17, September 1979, repris dans François Furet, Penser le XXe siècle (Paris: Lafont, 2007), 279.
See Daniel Lindenberg, Le rappel à l’ordre: enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Paris: Seuil, 2002). On the paradoxes of the promotion of democracy since the 1990s, see Florent Guenard, “La promotion de la démocratie: une impasse théorique?” La vie des idées, 2007. http://www.laviedesidees.fr/La-promotion-de-la-democratie-une-impasse-theorique.html
Edward A. Purcell Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), 269.
Marcel Gauchet and Alain Badiou, Que faire? (Paris: Philo, 2014), 85.
Lilla writes, “However great the variety and contention we find within the history of our political thought, the fact remains that coherent antiliberal traditions never developed within it. On the Continent they did. Indeed, the history of Continental political thought since the French Revolution is largely the history of different national species of illiberalism opposed to the fundamental principles listed above.” Mark Lilla, “Introduction: The Legitimacy of the Liberal Age,” in New French Thought: Political Philosophy, ed. Mark Lilla (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 4.
François Furet, Jacques Julliard, Pierre Rosanvallon, La République du centre: la fin de l’exception française (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1988), 58.
Pierre Rosanvallon, La democratie inachevée (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 390–391.
Pierre Rosanvallon, L’Etat en France, 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1990).
Pierre Rosanvallon, Le peuple introuvable (Paris: Gallimard, 1998).
Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Modèle politique français. La société civile contre le jacobinisme de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
It is worth noting that one of the most important works on inequality of the last decade, Thomas Piketty’s Le capital au XXI siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2013), also appeared in Rosanvallon’s book series with Seuil.
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Sawyer, S.W. (2016). Epilogue: Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Democratic Theory. In: Sawyer, S.W., Stewart, I. (eds) In Search of the Liberal Moment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137581266_10
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