The New Criterion, April 1983

by David Gress

“If the Nobel Prize were given to historians, it would almost certainly have been awarded to Fernand Braudel.” Thus begins a recent article by a prominent American historian, Samuel Kinser, on the “Braudel phenomenon,” the methods, principles, and above all the claims made on behalf of the work of Fernand Braudel (born 1902), the French historian commonly viewed today as the grand master of twentieth-century historiography.[1]

Another, more moderate admirer, J.H. Hexter, wrote in 1972 in an issue of the Journal of Modern History dedicated exclusively to Braudel and his influence that he and his followers were “the most productive and lively school of historians practicing their art today,” while in 1975 Braudel and his work received the supreme accolade of the ruling cultural forces of the Anglo-Saxon world when the New York Times called his twelve-hundred-page book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II “the most significant work of history of our time.” And, most recently, the well-known British historian, J.H. Plumb, reviewing Braudel’s recent Structures of Everyday Life, repeated Kinser’s speculation about the Nobel Prize, adding praise of “the vigor, the éclat, the immense sense of gusto which permeates his style” and asserting that “Braudel writes an incomparable French… the vehicle for works planned and executed on a gigantic scale… His themes rival Gibbon’s.” Plumb concludes that Structures is “a book of great originality, a masterpiece.”[2]

These are strong claims indeed. To believe the scholars I have quoted (and more could easily be adduced), Fernand Braudel, native of Lorraine, lycée teacher in Algiers in the Thirties, POW in Mainz during World War II (where much of the text of The Mediterranean was written), and president during 1956-72 of the VI Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris,[3] is the uncrowned king of history of our time. He dares to grapple with great themes, his methods are revolutionary as well as revelatory, and his style is “incomparable.” I should emphasize that is almost unheard of for professional historians, especially British or American historians, to lavish such superlatives on a colleague (except when he is retiring). Whatever the intrinsic merits of Braudel’s work—and I shall come to those as well—we are clearly dealing here with an approach, a method, a temperament that has found extraordinary favor with many of the prominent practitioners of historical research and writing today.

Why this should be so must remain to some extent a matter of speculation. Reviewers and critics have usually contented themselves with the sort of praise I have quoted, sometimes combined with extensive analysis, but have rarely, if ever, tried to explain just what it is that appeals to them, or why they think that the questions Braudel poses are the true questions of history. This is all the more odd, given the fact that of all of Braudel’s many admirers in the Anglo-Saxon world few, if any, have tried to copy his methods. This in turn raises another issue: is Braudel’s work essentially unique and unrepeatable, or is it really the vanguard of the kind of history that we should be writing if we could?

I hope to show that Braudel’s work is, indeed, one of a kind, that the claims made on its behalf are inconsistent, that, despite its undeniable great and lasting qualities, it fails both in its own terms and as a kind of history supposedly more adequate and more complete than the traditional history of ideas, institutions, and conflicts, and, finally, that the picture it presents of human reality and existence is seriously flawed and abbreviated. Braudel’s problems, while interesting, are not the real problems, and the approach is totally unsuited to solving, or even asking, the kinds of questions we need to be able to ask if history is to have any role at all in helping us understand and deal with the great issues of this or any other age.

What are, first of all, the intellectual origins and characteristics of Braudel’s work? He himself claims that the general pattern of the earlier and most famous of his two great works, The Mediterranean, was complete by 1936, and that the second, Structures of Everyday Life, was essentially conceived in the early Fifties, though the gathering and sifting of facts for inclusion continued to the late Seventies. The former was originally conceived as a straightforward thèse de doctorat on some aspects of Spanish policy in the 1580s, but, while working on it, Braudel became impatient with diplomatic history, “shuttered up in its chosen area,” as he puts it, and felt drawn rather to “real life, fertile and promising.”

This idea of a “real life” richer and more satisfying than the life found in the annals of war, diplomacy, and religious strife recurs again and again in Braudel’s writings, combined with an equally fervent insistence on the primacy and indeed superiority of social and economic facts and a denial of the significance of politics and culture. It never seems to have occurred to him that this notion of “real life” is problematic or that there might be a contradiction between his espousal of a “total history,” a “history without limits” (histoire sans frontières), and his refusal to include political, institutional, and religious developments in his scheme.

This is ironic, because Braudel’s mentor, a man he always refers to even today with respect and affection, was Lucien Febvre (1875-1956), a fellow Lorrainer and founder, along with the Jewish historian Marc Bloch (1888-1944, executed by the Germans as a hostage), of the journal Annales and, by extension, of the so-called “Annales school,” with which Braudel’s name is invariably associated. Febvre’s most famous work is a book, first published in 1919, entitled Le Problème de l’incroyance, a study, as the title indicates, of religious belief in the sixteenth century, with Rabelais as its central focus. Febvre, indeed, does what Braudel has never done: he integrates the study and interpretation of past ideas, sentiments, and convictions with the study of changing social conditions and opportunities. Braudel has overshadowed his mentor, but Febvre’s work and the inspiration behind it is far more fruitful, as the best recent work on ideas and social change shows (I shall mention some examples below).

Another source of inspiration for the young Braudel was the Belgian medievalist Henri Pirenne. This is another irony, for Pirenne’s most famous contribution to scholarship, the “Pirenne thesis,” also hinges on a fact which is neither social nor geographical: the rise of Islam. Pirenne argued that the economic and cultural unity of the Mediterranean basin established in the Roman period ended, not when the Roman Empire broke apart in the fifth and sixth centuries, but when the Moslem conquests of the late seventh and eighth centuries isolated the south and east from the north and west, closing off trade routes and stopping the flow of goods and exchange of ideas. The shift in the main axis of European culture from the Mediterranean to the Rhone-Rhine valleys, the establishment of a medieval empire based in northern France and western Germany, would not have happened but for the expansion of Islam. Since nothing in later medieval or modern European history can be understood unless one grasps the meaning and importance of the idea of the Christian Empire, this thesis, whether true or false, is certainly fascinating. Again, it is an idea of the sort that Braudel’s approach ought to foster, but cannot, given its intrinsic disregard of religious, political, and other non-material factors.

The third, and in the end utterly decisive, source of inspiration for Braudel was the discovery of geography, specifically in the work of the “human geographer” Paul Vidal de la Blache, who was never a teacher of Braudel but who is quoted ceaselessly in The Mediterranean. Braudel derived from him the idea that what counts in history is the environment, the distances, the climate, the natural forces that determine the speed and ease of travel and exchange.

This led in turn to the formulation of Braudel’s basic and unshakable conviction: the idea that the basis of history is the operation of slow-moving, long-term forces, what he called la longue durée. Individual actions, beliefs, and preferences have little or no influence and cannot change the dictates of structure. They occur on the level of events, which have been given too much attention by historians who have not understood that the form and results of the events themselves were shaped by that personnage encombrant, la longue durée, and the intermediate level of the “conjuncture.” This tripartite scheme of structure, conjuncture, and event constitutes the essence of Braudel’s contribution to historical imagination.

One may be forgiven for not finding it particularly original. Its heuristic value is modest and is limited to the kinds of facts that Braudel selects: geographical, economic, and anthropological. Certainly if one is concerned with patterns of trade in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, with grain prices in Madrid or the time it took to travel from Alexandria to Venice, the importance of the natural environment is very great. Equally, if one is concerned with the pattern and form of material life, with public health, longevity, nutrition, and agricultural technology, the weight of the long term prevails. But as soon as one begins to apply the scheme to the human sphere, where politics, economics, and religious fervor interact, doubts occur. Or, rather, they should.

In fact, in Braudel’s case, they don’t. He evades the problem. This is easy for him to do, since his definition of “total history” excludes politics and religion. Thus, he can claim that his notion of history is wide and generous, partaking of “real life, fertile and promising,” while leaving out huge areas of very real life indeed. When he occasionally does deal with events of what one might call human experience, rather than with the facts and conditions of everyday life, his tripartite scheme fails ludicrously, producing generalizations, assertions, and rhetorical claims that would be immediately rejected in any undergraduate paper.

For example, in a recent piece[4] written to honor the man who is Braudel’s diametrical opposite, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Braudel purports to ask the question: why did the Reformation fail in France? He begins with the claim that the nature and development of religious belief obeys “simplifying rules” similar to the environmental and natural constraints that govern the sphere of material life. There follow some pages full of vague and unoriginal remarks, such as the observation that the Reformation did not begin on October 31, 1517, when Luther proclaimed his ninety-five theses on the doctrine of indulgences (no serious historian claims that it did).

Having established that the French Reformation, and its failure, had deep causes, he finally with considerable fanfare, makes the observation that the dividing line between Catholic and Protestant Europe, as it was finally established, closely followed the ancient Roman frontier (he does not mention Ireland, Poland, or Lithuania here, which would rather spoil the effect). “Perhaps we should invoke what might be called an extraordinary accumulation of history, remote-controlled from the distant past.” The final “explanation” of the failure of the Reformation in France is simply “inertia and religious loyalties.” Needless to say, this is an explanation that does not explain, a circular argument: France remained largely Catholic, therefore she was destined to remain largely Catholic. Evidently, when applied to the issues that really matter and change people’s lives, Braudel’s scheme is capable of only the most trivial and obvious results.

Looking closely, one finds that this is the case even in the areas of economic and social change, where the validity of Braudel’s approach is taken for granted. The Mediterranean, in its final form, consists essentially of a large number of small essays on the geography, climate, trade patterns, populations, and economic practices of the Mediterranean basin. Most, but not all, of the evidence is from the sixteenth century. The ultimate conclusion of all this, however, is rather thin: it is merely that the sixteenth century was a time of relative economic stagnation in the Mediterranean, a time of increasing disparities between rich and poor, and also that the economic decline was very unevenly distributed. Thus, Venice kept her prosperity longer than was formerly assumed, and the focal point of world trade did not move to Amsterdam and the north until around 1600.

In general the changes wrought by the great discoveries and the revival of Moslem power in the Ottoman Empire were slow and gradual rather than rapid and sudden. Now, this is no sensational discovery and was indeed an argument that could easily have been made without the eight hundred or so pages of description provided by Braudel, pages that constitute the charm and chief attraction of the work.

In fact, The Mediterranean does not offer any great new interpretations. There is no Braudelian counterpart to the “Pirenne thesis”; rather, what we have is a series of stories, of anecdotes, meditations, and traveler’s tales about a great variety of peoples, places, and conditions in a vaguely determined period of history. As such, the book is sometimes fascinating, sometimes tedious, but it is not a work of history, and in no sense is it an example of the revolutionary application of a new interpretative scheme.

This becomes clear when one examines Braudel’s “incomparable” style more closely. The Austrian historian Heinrich Lutz has suggested that Braudel uses three levels of expression: a “scientific” level, the level of the traveler’s tale, and a level of “suggestive and mythically exalted language.” I have already touched on the first two: on the first level, the “scientific” one, Braudel tries to quantify and generalize from economic data, with few decisive results; on the second level we have the great number of stories and anecdotes I have mentioned. The third level is the most interesting, because here Braudel’s stylistic quirks and his belief that history is about nature and its impact on man in general, not about the hopes and struggles of individuals, comes out most clearly:

“The Mediterranean with its creative emptiness, the astonishing freedom of its waterways … its different, yet similar shores, its towns born of the movement of men, its complementary peoples and inescapable hostility, is a task ever begun anew … All civilizations are construction, difficulty, tension, but those of the Mediterranean have fought against a thousand sometimes tangible obstacles … against the enormous continental masses surrounding the Interior Sea … and even against the immensities of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.

According to the plan and principles of my geographical observations, I have therefore sought the localizations, the permanences, the immobilities, the repetitions, the “regularities” of Mediterranean history.”

He then recalls the literary image of the Mediterranean as it has been shaped by writers such as Durrell, Giono, or Carlo Levi, whose Christ Stopped at Eboli is an evocation of the harsh life of the barren and malaria-infested interior of southern Italy, as opposed to the douceur de vivre of the coastlands, as seen by the author, a northerner from Turin, exiled by decree of the fascist authorities for two years to the remote south. But this very example shows that what Braudel is doing is not really history at all.

A historian, upon reading Levi’s book, might find the contrast of coast and interior interesting, but would want to ask questions about its causes—not environmental and natural, but social, economic, and political. And what about the narrator, the exile from Turin? Why was he exiled? This in turn would lead to questions about the fascist regime and the Italian legal system, about the intellectual’s relations to authority, and so forth. All evidently historical questions, but questions impossible to ask in Braudel’s world, though he claims to be showing “real life, fertile and promising.”

Braudel’s “total history,” then, is a very partial history. The facts chosen for inclusion are the external, the material facts: what the weather was like, how long it took to cross the Sahara desert or the Mediterranean, how much cotton passed through the ports of Leghorn or Marseilles, and so forth, or, in Structures, what people wore and ate, what their health was like, how they tilled the soil and mined for metals. In Structures more than in The Mediterranean, it is true, there is an attempt to get at how people saw the world, to describe what French historians, not all of them influenced by Braudel, have called the outillage mental.

The reason that I do not consider this blend of anthropology, geography, and national economy a truly historical account of anything is that the issues that matter, the stuff of human anguish, conflict, and ambition, are entirely missing. One would not gather from reading The Mediterranean that the two predominant developments of the later sixteenth century in southern Europe, developments that were all-important for the formation of the modern world and modern beliefs, were the Counter-Reformation and the rise of the modern state. The uneasy relations between religion and politics and the gradual replacement of the former by the latter as the means to human happiness and fulfillment is the great constant of Western history, yet it is wholly absent from Braudel’s work. There are no signs that he even perceives this great problem as an issue.

For him, there is either crude histoire événementielle, the chronicle of surface events, or there is his “total history,” but no possible third level on which the study of geography, economy, and material life might be integrated with politics, religion, and diplomacy to provide a truly broad interpretation of past epochs. Several critics have noted that the final portion of The Mediterranean, which recounts the political and military events of 1550-1600, is by far the weakest, thin and pedestrian even by the standards Braudel despises. If this section is an example of what Braudel understands by old-fashioned diplomatic history, his criticism of it is justified. Events and people are discussed flatly, textbook style, with no overarching theme or reference to underlying ideas, trends, and dynastic or religious ambitions. Braudel’s odd blindness to the higher dimensions of human existence ironically enough makes it impossible for him to see the true potential of his own notion of “real life.”

To show what can be done in the way of offering an historically relevant account of Braudel’s original problem in The Mediterranean, namely the shift in prosperity from south to north, from Mediterranean to Atlantic, I would cite Trevor-Roper’s famous essay “Religion, the Reformation and Social Change.”[5]

The problem is succinctly stated: “Why was the economic advance which, in the sixteenth century, seemed so general, and in which all Europe had its share, carried to completion only in certain areas?” Not because of some metaphysical affinity of Protestant northerners for capitalist expansion: “For us, who believe that Catholic Europe … was perfectly able to create a capitalist economy, the question is, why, in the sixteenth century, did so many of the essential agents of such an economy—not only entrepreneurs, but also workers—leave the old centres, predominantly in Catholic lands, and migrate to new centres, predominantly in Protestant lands?”

The answer to this question of economic behavior is found, not surprisingly, in the area of politics and religion. The entrepreneurs and workers, says Trevor-Roper, “were driven out not merely by priests, on doctrinal grounds, though these supplied the pretext and the agency of expulsion, but—since the religion of State is a formulation of social ideology—by societies which had hardened against them.” And this hardening was the fruit of the alliance of mutual interest between Counter-Reformation and princely State, replacing the much looser secular and religious controls of the late Middle Ages. The new State and the new Church replaced freer means of personal enrichment and promotion:

“The new State entailed a new society and the new social forms gradually strengthened themselves by investing themselves… thus the wealth and power of society would be directed into office and the Church would be the consecration not of a mercantile but of an official society.

Thus the Counter-reformation State gradually created, even in the old mercantile cities which it conquered, a new kind of society … In Venice, because it was not absorbed by or converted into a princely State, in Amsterdam, because it continued the republican society which had been suppressed in Antwerp, the old character was preserved.”

Here we have, then, an explanation of economic and social change in early modern Europe that is both interesting and relevant. By contrast, Braudel offers only the observation that the Mediterranean basin (with the exception of Venice) stagnated economically around 1600, which is repeated again and again amidst a flood of disparate facts, anecdotes, and meditations like the one quoted briefly above. Despite the claims and the much-touted tripartite scheme of immobile long-term structure, intermediate-term conjuncture, and concrete event, there is no integration—as there could be—of this economic, geographical, and anthropological substratum with the political and religious developments that, in their own concrete events and long-term structures, are the real stuff of history.

The poverty of Braudel’s scheme, which is more a function of his own personal predilections and blindnesses than of its own inherent flaws, is abundantly evident when we try to imagine how he would deal with the great issues of contemporary history: ideological conflict, the stability and durability of democratic regimes, totalitarianism, and nationalism. In fact, he could not deal with them at all. The question, for example, of how the Cold War began, so crucial to a proper and responsible interpretation of the current scene, cannot even be asked, much less answered, in Braudel’s terms.

He might be able to provide us with a great deal of undigested detail about the patterns of world trade and economic development, but if anything is clear from the history of the last few decades, it is that politics still dominate economics and that a purely economic understanding of international relations is not only seriously flawed, it is useless (which is not to say that economic understanding is not important, of course). Braudel sets out to describe the typical behavior of various groups and classes in a given environmental and material context, and this is undoubtedly interesting, as far as it goes. But the decisions, the dreams, the ambitions, and the struggles of individuals and masses that set the terms of experience and action are utterly absent.

While I certainly do not agree with Braudel that the long term always defeats the event, I also think that it might very well be possible to test this doctrine in what I have called the properly historical field. The problem is that Braudel never does so (except sporadically, as in the ridiculous essay on the French Reformation I quoted from above.) Why not? It is always hard, of course, to discuss the unstated suppositions of others, although in Braudel’s case we have a number of clear pointers.

The very fact that he considers “total history” to be the study of regularities, repetitions, and permanences in the natural and social environment is significant, or that, in a recent article[6] he considers “problem no. 1” of European history to be the “problem of the catastrophic collapse of 1350-1450,” the century of the Black Death, deteriorating climate, hunger, and war. He sees the latter problem exclusively in terms of trade, exchange, and economic activity, and ignores the fact that this period also marked the flowering of the Italian Renaissance, the beginnings of modern political thought, and the religious and intellectual ferment that was the direct forerunner of the Reformation.

His complaint that political and cultural histories are weak and thin is especially absurd here, when one considers the range of studies and interpretations of the beginnings of modernity in Europe that are truly “total history,” from Hans Baron’s The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (first published 1955) to such recent works as Stephen Ozment’s The Age of Reform 1250-1550 (1980). The question of the concrete foundations of the technical outlook, the regularization of existence by calculation and planning, and the rise of the idea of social mobility as resulting from individual effort rather than from the quirks of fate have recently been exhaustively examined by Alexander Murray in Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1978), a book which appeals to Braudel and the Annales school but which in form and execution is far closer to Bloch and Febvre than to their peculiar pupil, Fernand Braudel.

In the end, then, Braudel and his work stand as huge self-contradictions. Proclaimed as “total history,” as an exploration of “real life, fertile and promising,” the work offers a wealth of facts and speculation, but with a curious slant. “Real life,” for Braudel, is only half of life; only the life seen by the geographer, the anthropologist, the travel writer. When he says that the event is controlled by the long term, he would not mean, to choose an example from a different period, that the outcome of the Battle of Hastings was controlled by the superior strength and vigor of Norman-French culture and habits (a sustainable, if dubious, thesis), but rather that the kind of armor worn and the material habits and patterns of trade of the Normans and the Saxons were determined by the natural environment and broad social and economic conditions, which is an assertion that is either trivial and obvious or unprovable. But history is not about things or even about how things affect people or how people use things, but about passions, conflicts, and decisions that change the world. World War II changed the world, but would cause hardly a ripple in a future Braudellian account of the capitalist era. Whatever such an account might be, it would not be history.

1. “Annaliste Paradigm? The Geohistorical Structuralism of Fernand Braudel,” in the American Historical Review, 86 (1981).
2. Both works are published in the United States by Harper & Row, the French originals, by Armand Colin, Paris: La Mediterranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, first edition 1949, extensively rewritten for the second edition, 1966, now in an (unchanged) third edition, 1976; Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe siècles, three volumes, 1979, of which Structures, which was originally published without notes in 1967, is the first. The issue of the Journal of Modern History devoted to Braudel is no. 4, Fall 1972.
3. A college of advanced studies at university of post-graduate level. The VI Section was subsequently made independent at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; its current president is the noted Tocquevillian scholar François Furet.
4. “The Rejection of the Reformation in France,” in History and Imagination, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones and others; Duckworth, 1981.
5. Easily available in The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays, Harper Torchbook, 1969.
6. The afterword to the Histoire Économique et Sociale de la France, pp. 1677-1693 of volume 4, part 3, Paris, PUF, 1982.

The New Criterion, December 1986

by David Gress

The liberation of France from German occupation in 1944 marked not only the restoration of democratic political life but also the beginning of a new dominance of the Left in French cultural life. This dominance did not decline until the late Seventies. With the exception of the political philosopher Raymond Aron, who died three years ago at the age of seventy-eight, virtually every prominent French writer, thinker, film director, or journalist of the period 1944-75 was either a member of the Communist Party or Socialist Party, or a close sympathizer with one or both. The greatest intellectual battles of the period were fought over how, not whether, to justify Stalin’s genocides; over how, not whether, to destroy the United States and capitalism; over how, not whether, to subvert what was seen as the pernicious notion of individual freedom.

Since this period was also the period of French culture’s greatest influence and prestige abroad in modern times, what became known and admired throughout the West was the culture of the French Left. Writers who held positions at odds with the dominant French culture were hardly known outside France, even by specialists. As in the late nineteenth century, French culture was radically divided between an urban, internationally renowned element on the Left and a hidden, reclusive, anti-cosmopolitan element on the Right. In the period 1944-75 the former was never seriously threatened by the latter. When the Left fell, it fell by reason of its own inner contradictions and its own nihilism.

The dominant leftist culture in France was a total way of life. It included not merely political beliefs—which might, in fact, vary within the general spectrum of the Left—but also attitudes toward sex, love, marriage, the family, and work, and convictions about the relation of literature and art to politics. Ironically, this way of life was no less confining and tyrannical than the bourgeois life its adherents so despised.

In fact, its confining nature and narrow intolerance were one reason for its eventual collapse, as more and more of its proponents gave it up or adopted a double standard exactly analogous to the double standard that was said to belong to the bourgeoisie. Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre, to take two leading representatives of this dominant culture, were increasingly unable or unwilling to practice what they preached.

They preached the meaninglessness of inherited notions of decency, love, and devotion, and argued for what they regarded as a cold realism in politics and literature. This cold realism required absolute submission to totalitarian Marxism and to a style of writing which, in their view, was not a style at all but the only true representation of the reality of human life in a world struggling to free itself from the illusions of Christianity and democracy. Yet in the end they could not sustain this vision, nor could their followers. Thus the movement ended—in solipsism and disarray.

There is no entirely adequate label for the movement we are discussing. Its adherents had different concerns and compulsions, but common to them all was certainly a powerful cultural radicalism. Perhaps “cultural radicals” is the best shorthand term for them.

In the beginning, the leading cultural radical was Jean-Paul Sartre, whose philosophy was called Existentialism, a word that came to describe the larger enterprise of which he was a part. Later, beginning around 1960, structuralism, a theory concerned with the very foundations of linguistics, anthropology, and literary criticism, took over as the feature of French culture best known—and most admired—abroad.

The common message of the structuralists was, as Peter Caws described it in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, that “the condition of man is such that his meanings always come from outside himself—from elsewhere, from the Other, from the system of discourse within which he becomes aware of the possibility of meaning.” In other words, languages, myths, social institutions, poems, paintings, novels, indeed all human utterances and actions, are not ordained and expressed by men but are determined by the “structure.” And the French thinkers in question—Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida above all—claimed to be uniquely capable of unmasking this truth about culture and society, and of presenting it to the world.

Thus, French cultural radicalism had, both in its original incarnation in France and in its repercussions abroad, two overlapping phases. Or rather, it had three. In Paris, the late Seventies and early Eighties witnessed the emergence, from within the conflict-ridden and disintegrating structuralist camp, of the doctrine of post-structuralism. Though difficult to pinpoint exactly, post-structuralism has attempted to preserve the message of structuralism—that structures, however created, determine consciousness and behavior—while granting some provisional autonomy to human reflection and activity.

Jacques Derrida launched this enterprise around 1970 with the ingenious argument that, in the words of Mr. Caws, “structure emerges when language is employed to raise the question of language, when the subject raises the question of subjectivity, when man seeks the essence of man.” And this structure, though composed of bits of human action and thought, is indifferent to the materials of which it is made. Or, as Lévi-Strauss put it, structure operates at a level “at which a kind of necessity becomes apparent, underlying the illusions of liberty.”

The post-structuralist revision of the original, uncompromising approach served also to give the whole enterprise a new lease on life on American campuses. Here in the United States, Derrida in particular, but also his more rigorous forebears, enjoy even today a peculiar postmortem existence, and ghosts of ideas long-forgotten or long-ridiculed in Paris stalk the halls of graduate-school departments from Yale to Stanford.

Like all significant political or cultural movements, the movement that began with Sartre’s Existentialism in the mid-Forties and ended in Derrida’s post-structuralism in the mid-Seventies had its fundamental myths and its particular version of history by which it sought to legitimize itself. Three elements of this mythology were especially important, because they served to distinguish the world view of the cultural radicals from that of the rest of French culture.

First, the movement’s leaders had a particular vision of the Enlightenment and saw themselves as its only true heirs. Their Enlightenment was not the liberal rationalism of a Diderot or a Turgot, committed to the use of reason and determined to oppose intolerance and coercion in human affairs. Rather, their Enlightenment was the radical atheism of a d’Holbach or a de Sade, or of a Voltaire in his worst moments, combining an utter contempt for religion, both Christianity and Judaism, with an exaggerated fear of its power. Another aspect of this radical Enlightenment tradition was a thirst for violence (often satisfied vicariously), as though the acceptance of violence somehow demonstrated a greater toughness of mind. Sartre and his followers, more so than the structuralists, demonstrated this particular fascination.

Some of the fiercest battles, and deepest resentments, of the cultural radicals were directed against those whom they accused of misunderstanding or betraying the legacy of the radical Enlightenment. Raymond Aron, who was a fellow student of Sartre’s at the École Normale Supérieure in the early Thirties, was the towering example in his generation of the mainstream Enlightenment, with its faith in reason, tolerance, and democracy. From the mid-Forties to the late Seventies, Sartre refused to speak to Aron, and when he could be bothered to pay attention to Aron’s epochal publications in history, sociology, and international politics, he invariably covered them with abuse.

Aron, whose public manners were impeccable, would not reply in kind, and maintained, when asked, that Sartre was probably the more profound thinker whose reputation would no doubt outlast his own. Finally, in 1979, a reconciliation of sorts was effected, when a group of French intellectuals met for the purpose of raising funds for the boat people fleeing Communist tyranny in Vietnam. The event was largely organized by André Glucksmann, who was both a former student of Aron’s and a friend of Sartre’s. He contrived a meeting between the two at which Aron hailed Sartre, now blind and ailing, with the old greeting of the normaliens of fifty years before: “Bonjour, mon petit camarade!” Thus, what we are justified in calling the true Enlightenment forgave its false and vicious caricature.

The second myth of the Sartrean-structuralist movement was the myth of revolution. The American experience of revolution is of a primarily political process by which national and democratic rights are secured and expanded. Not so in the French radical tradition, of which (in this respect) Sartre and the structuralists were the heirs. In this tradition, revolution was only partly a political struggle for rights. Its more important aspect was the outburst of mass violence, physically and morally irresistible, by which human history was thought to move by iron necessity, and through oceans of blood, to a new and higher stage.

This notion of revolution obviously owed much to the Leninist principles put into practice in Russia in 1917-21 and again by Stalin when he destroyed the peasantry in 1930-34. But it also derived from the cultural radicals’ fascination with violence. Revolutionary violence came to be conceived of as an almost transcendental necessity—a cathartic, purifying experience. Only a deeply irrational—one is almost tempted to say sexual—focus on the need for violence explains the contempt for any merely political or diplomatic solution to the problems of the Third World displayed by Sartre and other writers in the Sixties. When the testimonies of various East European refugees and the translations of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago helped to destroy the mystique of revolutionary violence in the Paris of the Seventies, it was, therefore, a blow to the very heart of the political ideology of the French cultural radicals.

Their third myth concerned French history, particularly the history of the German occupation and the French Resistance movement (1940-44). Although Sartre himself was not in the Resistance and was not at any time threatened with prison or censorship for his teaching or his writings (his plays were even performed in Nazi-occupied Paris), he and the other members of the post-war movement later made membership in the Communist-dominated Resistance the criterion of political virtue.

Moreover, they regarded the left wing of the Resistance as the culmination of a century or more of struggle against the reactionary forces of nationalism and Catholicism. These forces, according to left-wing ideology, demonstrated their inherently oppressive and inhuman nature by failing to oppose German National Socialism or French Fascism and by collaborating with the German occupiers.

This was a gross simplification. It is true that Pétain and Laval, the chief figures of the collaborationist government of Vichy, came out of the nationalist right wing of French politics and that for them the strategy of collaboration was a strategy of national survival through accommodation with the conquering power. But there were many prominent French Catholics who fought in the Resistance for motives arguably purer than those of the Communists, who wished only to replace one tyranny with another. Similarly, many French nationalists gave their lives for their country.

The net effect of the postwar Parisian ideology, however, was to delegitimize nationalism and Catholicism as political forces by tainting them with the mark of collaboration. Of course, the two years of Communist collaboration with the Germans during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939-41 were passed over in silence.

This last myth gave the postwar Parisian Left a seemingly decisive victory in its struggle for control of French politics and culture. The struggle itself had begun long before, however. Its origins could be traced to the Revolution of 1789, when the progressive Left, the national Right, and the Church first defined themselves as the country’s principal antagonists. The conflict took place in two arenas, politics and culture, but the dominant party in one was not always dominant in the other.

The progressive Left was in political control during the Revolution itself, during the July Monarchy period of 1830-48, and during most of the Third Republic (1871-1940). Culturally, the progressive Left was dominant throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, not in the sense that all articulate Frenchmen were on the Left, but in the sense that the Left largely set the agenda of debate. This domination irritated both the nationalist Right and the Catholic forces, but they were unable to do much about it until after the defeat of France by Prussia in 1870, which brought about the fall of the Second Empire and the establishment of the Third Republic.

The Third Republic was tainted for nationalist conservatives because in their eyes it was a government founded on defeat and humiliation. They thus used every opportunity to ridicule and conspire against the Republic. The most dramatic case of their abuse was, of course, the Dreyfus Affair, whose repercussions lasted well beyond World War II. The “Affair,” as it came to be called, had begun when a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of espionage in 1894 on false evidence. It culminated in 1898-99 with his second trial, which crystallized the political and cultural forces in play. On the Right, the Dreyfus Affair led to the formation of the anti-Semitic Action Française; and on the Left, it served as a stimulus to the radical and socialist parties. In the end, the Affair could be said to have been a political and cultural victory for the progressive Left and a defeat for the nationalist Right and, to a lesser extent, for the extreme anti-republican and anti-Semitic wing of the Church.

During the Thirties, these three forces were closely matched both culturally and politically. There was a strong revival of Catholic political involvement, led by Jacques Maritain; and the progressive Left benefited from the rapid artistic and literary developments of the time, particularly Surrealism. The German occupation dampened but did not stifle these cultural developments. What it did do was to permit the postwar Left to read the national Right out of court as a legitimate force.

The rise and fall of this dominant culture of postwar France—which is to say, of postwar Paris—has now been entertainingly and sensitively chronicled by Jean-Paul Aron, a novelist, cultural critic, and historian of ideas of a type once common in Western Europe but now, alas, fast disappearing. His book, Les Modernes,[1] is made up of fifty-four short chapters, each devoted to a specific event—a conference, a publication, a public statement—in the history of what he calls, somewhat misleadingly, the “moderns.”

What Jean-Paul Aron (no relation to Raymond Aron) means by this term are the adherents, associates, and fellow travelers of the ideology of cultural radicalism I have been describing. The title of Les Modernes is slightly ambiguous, however, and not, I think, particularly well chosen. It is true that the “moderns” thought they represented the progressive forces of history and culture, forces destined for victory; but their ideas cannot be said to be an entirely accurate expression of modernism in art or politics, nor can modernism be reduced to their ideas.

Les Modernes is not strictly an analysis of cultural radicalism—rather, it is an example of a peculiarly French mode of critical writing, in which opinion and judgment are conveyed by ellipsis and allusion. The author takes great pains to avoid direct statements of what he is trying to say. The events Aron chooses to write about include the publication of books by Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and Foucault; an evening in 1952 with Pierre Boulez, the composer and conductor; the foundation in 1950 of the Club Méditerranée; the 1954 Giacometti exhibition at the Galerie Maeght; the deaths of Gide, Bataille, and Merleau-Ponty; a seminar by Jacques Lacan, the radical psychoanalyst, in 1964; and the inauguration in 1952 of the Décades de Cérisy, a conference of cultural figures which meets every year at a manor in Normandy.

The chapter on the Décades de Cérisy is a good illustration of Aron’s method, or rather lack of it. Aron starts by talking, in a very general way, about the rise of academic intellectuals to positions of dominance in modern France. He traces this rise to the time of Napoleon or, perhaps, to the restored Bourbon monarchy of 1815-30 (precise dates are not Aron’s forte). An extended discussion, which one would call a digression were it not for the fact that such discussions take up most of the book, deals with a veritable potpourri of issues: intellectuals under the Third Republic, the Dreyfus Affair, Proust, liberal Christianity, the anti-Semitism of Barrès, and, more to the point, the intellectual gatherings at Pontigny sponsored by the Nouvelle Revue Française (the mainstay of the Gallimard publishing house, without which the entire cultural movement of the Left would not have existed).

In the midst of these remarks Aron delivers himself of numerous off-the-cuff judgments, for example the observation (if that is the right word for it) that the last decades of centuries have often been bad times for France. He cites the 1390s, the 1590s, the 1690s, the 1790s, and, of course, the 1890s, when declining birth rates, economic recession, alcoholism, syphilis, urban blight, and massive psychological alienation were, supposedly, everywhere evident. What all this means is left up to the reader: Aron never offers a logical progression or a summing-up.

One purpose of Aron’s digressions into the French cultural and political past is, I think, clear: it is to show that his “moderns” were neither as modern nor as unique as they liked to think. All their foibles, their vanities, and even their antics on particular occasions were repetitions of a style characteristic of intellectuals on the rise throughout four centuries of French history. The distinctive feature of the “moderns,” from this perspective, was not so much their politics as a combination of two other articles of belief: their conviction that an objective description of human feelings must contradict all inherited canons of literary or philosophical style, and an iron consistency in applying that conviction.

Aron makes this point explicitly in another recent book, a collection of interviews by the British journalist Melinda Camber Porter entitled Through Parisian Eyes.[2] Porter is actually more interested in filmmaking than in literature, philosophy, or journalism, and she reserves her greatest enthusiasm for her interviews with François Truffaut, Louis Malle, Costa-Gavras, Eric Rohmer, or Alain Resnais, or with novelist-cineasts such as Alain Robbe-Grillet or Marguerite Duras.

Robbe-Grillet, for one, also appears in Les Modernes, but to Porter he is interesting mainly as an example of the writer as film director. With the exceptions of Jean-François Revel, Olivier Todd, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Jean-Paul Aron himself, her interlocutors are immersed in the ideology of the cultural radicals. Since they are primarily visual artists, however, they do not articulate their political assumptions as clearly as Aron’s subjects.

In his remarks to Melinda Porter, Aron refers to the tendency of the “moderns” to show “a curious taste for objectivity … the illusion that you can transcribe a so-called objective view of the world.” What Aron does not tell us directly, either in the interview or in his own book, however, is why so many of these “moderns” felt driven to this ideal of objectivity. Was objectivity not, after all, a principle of the science and politics of the status quo, the science and politics that they were committed to overthrowing? Perhaps we are dealing with two radically opposed notions of objectivity. Or is there some other, additional explanation for the peculiar temperament of the “moderns”?

To answer these questions we must identify that ideology against which the cultural radicals asserted their peculiar form of objectivity and their other standards of style; and we must examine in more detail their own history as recounted by Aron.

As we have already observed, the period from 1944 to around 1960 in French intellectual life was dominated by Sartre, and, toward the end, by his argument with Albert Camus about the justification of Marxist revolution. In this once-famous argument, Camus wound up (almost) defending liberal democracy as superior to any revolutionary regime, no matter how pure its motives.

There followed the period of structuralism, which petered out in Paris by around 1975, but which has lived on in American academia. These two stages can also be observed on the level of theory. Sartre posited a philosophy according to which there is no meaning to existence other than what emerges from one’s own struggle with it. To take this view, according to Sartre in the Forties and Fifties, was to be “objective” about reality.

At that point Sartre could have gone in either of two directions. He could have taken the Nietzschean position adopted by some later French thinkers, such as Michel Foucault (whom Aron includes prominently among the “moderns”), and advocated an essentially apolitical stance equally contemptuous of the progressive Left and the reactionary Right. Or he could do what he in fact did and argue that there was, after all, some residual meaning to existence, and that this meaning lay in revolution and the final destruction of liberal democracy and capitalism.

The structuralists started with different concerns but many of them arrived at the same position. The birth of structuralism, according to Aron, was signaled by three events that occurred between 1949 and 1953. In 1949, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss published his first major work, entitled The Elementary Structures of Kinship. In it, he interpreted exogamous marriage— and the incest taboo on which the requirement of marriage within kinship groups rests—as exemplifying a universal structure, namely the structure of exchange, in this case of women and property. This structure in turn indicated, as he put it, “that the relations between the sexes might be regarded as one of the modalities of a great ‘function of communication’ which includes language as well.”

Anthropological structuralism turned out to be an adjunct of linguistics, which is where Lévi-Strauss seemed to want it all along. He has later argued that linguistic structuralism is the only true structuralism and rejects those who try to make structuralism into a universal ideology of explanation. In this, as in his increasing tendency to political conservatism, Lévi-Strauss is decidedly an odd man out among the “moderns.”

The second and third events in structuralism’s early history were the publication, in 1953, of the first novel by Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers, and the first work of criticism by Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero. The novel—with its neutral, cameralike narration—exemplified Barthes’s argument, which was that all inherited modes of writing including the modern modes of stream-of-consciousness and expressionism, were inadequate because the writing was not “pure”: they were contaminated by association with and derivation from the dominant (bourgeois and capitalistic) culture and its ideology.

In Barthes’s view, art and literature should, as Aron paraphrases it, “go into hibernation,” become anonymous and unidentifiable, denying the individualism and definition that, for Barthes, were characteristic of the ideology of bourgeois democratic society. In later works, Barthes held that what writes a novel (or any other text) is not the author but the structure of the text itself. In literature, as in anthropology or other sciences of culture and society, the message of the “moderns” was that essentially there is no free will and no meaning other than the meaning inherent in the control exercised by “structure” over human behavior.

It needs to be asked, then: What were the Sartreans and structuralists fighting against? The clue to the cultural part of the answer is the power of the classical tradition of French rhetoric and literary style. Beginning in the Renaissance and culminating in the seventeenth century, French writers developed an armory of rhetoric, with different types suitable for every occasion—an armory that was taught to every schoolboy and inculcated in French schools up to the very recent past. Indeed, all the figures discussed in Aron’s book were trained in this tradition.

As part of their dramatic leftward turn in the Thirties and Forties they naturally came to see this rhetorical tradition as part of the structure of oppression and reaction they were determined to destroy. Thus, the notion of writing at “degree zero,” violating all the canons of the tradition and denying any relationship between form, meaning, and content in any written (or spoken) message, became an essential part of the program of the radical movement.

The political part of the answer harks back to what we have already noted: the discrepancy between the political and cultural power of the French progressive Left throughout its history. The postwar period provided, perhaps, the most striking example of that discrepancy. The Socialist Party held intermittent power during the Fourth Republic (1944-58), and again after 1981, but the Communists never obtained national power. The Parisian “moderns,” moreover, totally despised the socialist politicians, who, in their view, had sold out to the system to the extent that they actually participated in democratic politics.

With the exception of certain regions, notably the working-class suburbs of Paris known as the “red belt,” where for decades the Communist Party exercised local authority by the purest totalitarian methods, the progressive Left from 1944 to 1981 enjoyed virtually no political power, despite its stature in France’s cultural life. Thus, the political struggle of the Sartreans and structuralists was primarily with the political elite of their own country, an elite with no cultural power and few articulate spokesmen able to address the “moderns” on their own terms.

The specific events chronicled by Jean-Paul Aron are not distributed equally across the forty years after the liberation in 1944 but fall roughly into two clusters, one around 1950 and one around 1960. For the period from May 1968 to 1983, the date of his last chapter, there are only eight incidents, most of them fairly marginal to the real concerns of the “moderns.” Aron’s subjects include events from such academic disciplines as philosophy and anthropology, from literature, art, and journalism, from what is called “life-style,” and from politics. This last category contains only six incidents, but they are all crucial to the history of the movement, since they helped to determine what happened in other areas as well.

One of the early chapters in Aron’s book concerns the publication, in November 1945, of the second issue of Sartre’s house journal, Temps modernes, which had the same status in the early part of this period as the structuralists’ house journal, Tel quel, had in the Sixties. Aron uses this issue of Temps modernes to explain exactly what was wrong about the new movement’s message and methods.

“The title [of the journal] annoyed me. It was not just that it did not mark the beginning of an epoch but its end, or that in claiming to be concerned with real subjects and meanings it in fact dealt the cards of an ideology based on notions of object and structure … How could I not sense the abominable traces of a sensibility which was to dominate postwar France for decades, sacrificing objects to words and reality to illusion? It was as if the conscience of the West, in some monstrous deviation, had tasted falsehood in the concentration camps only to impose it as a noble and universally valid form of thought.”

Aron’s particular judgment in this instance is a bit unfair, for he chooses as an example of the sacrifice of reality to illusion and to totalitarian abstraction an article by the then twenty-year-old Claude Lefort. In fact, Lefort consistently opposed the cultural-radical sensibility. Calling himself a democratic socialist, Lefort in later years published the journal Socialisme ou barbarie along with the ex-Trotskyite Cornelius Castoriadis, and became the most articulate defender in France of the human rights of Central Europeans under Communist rule.

In 1980, Lefort, in a brilliant piece, castigated the government of President Giscard d’Estaing for its hostile attitude toward the Polish Solidarity movement and its policy of appeasement toward the Soviet and Polish Communist regimes. Castoriadis, for his part, became a vociferous proponent of the view that the Soviet Union had become a “stratocracy,” that is, an essentially aggressive regime governed by “military rule” and geared toward armed expansion and war. Both Lefort and Castoriadis were crucial figures in destroying residual sympathy for Communism and the Soviet Union on the French Left.

The very next entry in Les Modernes concerns the founding of the quarterly Critique by Georges Bataille, a polymath intellectual with interests in economics and anthropology who was also a friend of the Surrealists and a writer of pornographic stories and poems. The subject provides Aron with a chance to denounce “the program of substituting debate for creativity, of theory for life.” This program, he says, was typical of the “Parisian cultural clan” whose origins he traces:

“The writers, philosophers, and bourgeois savants were accepted by the aristocracy after 1730 only to become its masters, because the aristocrats had lost their faith in God … and in the monarchy … The clan gradually perpetuated, among its members, the ancient figure of the caste … To be part of it required great patience and painful initiations … The clan, moreover, behaved like a war machine, blustering and intimidating before pulverizing its adversaries … Scattered from 1945 to 1984 among disparate aesthetic and ideological tendencies, it presented itself always as a totalitarian enterprise determined to see its laws obeyed.”

March 1948 is the date of the first political event to warrant an entry in Aron’s chronicle. It describes the efforts to organize a political party, the R.D.R. (Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire) in reaction to the formation, a year before, of a new Gaullist party. The leading figures in the R.D.R. were Sartre, Camus, the fellow traveler Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the Trotskyite David Rousset, and the left-wing Catholics Emmanuel Mounier and Jean-Marie Domenach (the latter a subsequent convert to a moderate conservatism).

This was the high point of the alliance between the “moderns” and the Catholic Left, and it resulted in a curious but influential mixture of anti-capitalism, Third-Worldism, anti-Americanism, and faith in the glorious illusion of a Communist society sanctified by a renewed and revitalized Church.

The Catholic Left in France later suffered a fate analogous to that of the “moderns” as a whole. For a while, in the Seventies, it controlled the agenda and the attitudes of the hierarchy of the French Church. The election of the Polish Pope, John Paul II, in 1978, however, deprived it of Vatican support at exactly the time that the informed French Left was moving away from Marxism and the theory that Western imperialism was the cause of misery in the Third World. It is today a declining force without much influence even in what used to be its house organ, the journal Esprit.

Back in 1948, there were great hopes for the R.D.R. But they were immediately dashed thanks to a delicious irony: Rousset, who was the first man in the West to publish extensive and accurate documentation on the Soviet Gulag (in 1947)—a crime for which the hard Left, including Sartre, never forgave him—had obtained funding for the new party from, of all places, the United States! The American Federation of Labor, probably in the belief that they were supporting the anti-Communist Left, covered the cost of the first great rally and sent a representative, an American academic who closed the opening proceedings with a rousing Cold War speech. Scandal and derision—and no new party.

The “moderns” whose history Jean-Paul Aron has chronicled did not believe in “personality,” yet their clan revolved entirely around a few great egos and many lesser ones. After Sartre and Barthes, perhaps the most influential member was the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. His career began in the Thirties, but he achieved notoriety in 1953 when he engineered a dramatic split in the French psychoanalytic community.

Aron, in one of his characteristically elliptical digressions, associates Lacan’s methods and theories with those underlying the Minimalist movement in American art, with its “plastic extenuation of reality and pulverization of life, and above all that universal tendency to confusion which has deprived contemporary culture of its ability to appreciate time.” Lacan, he says, was obsessed with method and with the claim that he alone among psychoanalysts had discovered a reliable way of determining the structure of conscious and unconscious thought.

This method depended on the notion that a patient’s conscious mind and desires were unimportant, because they were really controlled by the Other. For Lacan, this Other was the structure of language, determining human thought and action. Therefore, Lacan’s psychoanalytic sessions lasted only a few minutes rather than an hour. “This minimal experience,” comments Aron, “followed the tradition of ellipsis that had affected all of Western culture since World War I.” It began in music, according to Aron, with Schoenberg and Webern, and then affected drama, with Ionesco and Beckett, and then art, with Giacometti, whose sculptures seem as though they are “drawn into themselves only to resurge insolently from nothingness.” In a later entry, concerning Lacan’s triumphant inauguration as professor at the École Normale Supérieure in 1964, Aron calls Lacan “the winter sun that has frozen French culture for more than thirty years.”

The second political entry in Aron’s book conflates two related events, namely Khrushchev’s speech in February 1956 to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on Stalin’s crimes, and the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in November of that same year. The third describes the situation in Paris in the spring of 1958, when Charles de Gaulle returned to power after twelve years, changing the constitution and inaugurating the Fifth Republic. The intellectuals of the Left—or the “clan,” as Aron calls them—were appalled. Why was there no workers’ uprising to prevent this “military dictatorship”?

In the event, de Gaulle’s regime proved to be more hospitable than the Fourth Republic to the ideology of the intellectuals. As the journalist and novelist Olivier Todd implies in his remarks to Porter, de Gaulle and the clan shared one essential political impulse or instinct, and that was anti-Americanism. For de Gaulle, anti-Americanism was a legacy of the war, of his own profound nationalism and his colossal inferiority complex, whereas for the cultural radicals it was an ideological necessity based on their political mythology. What mattered was that the two complemented each other very well.

When de Gaulle tried to undermine the unity of Canada by stirring up Francophone nationalism in Quebec in 1967, or when he denounced the Vietnam War, his motives were not those of the cultural radicals, but they were delighted. And the General reciprocated. In 1968, during the worst demonstrations in Paris, when de Gaulle himself momentarily despaired of keeping power, his chief of police suggested arresting Sartre for some particularly outrageous and incendiary statements designed to promote anti-government violence. The General’s answer was simple: “One does not arrest Voltaire.” Thus, even the political ruler of the state, condemned to the dustheap of history by the clan’s ideology, succumbed to its pretentions.

Around 1960, Aron’s list of events in Les Modemes flows thick and fast: Philippe Sollers, a young writer, founds the journal Tel quel, soon to become captive to structuralism in all its manifestations; Jean-Luc Godard releases Breathless, a film which did more than any other single work to propagate the ethos of the “moderns”; and Sartre, working toward a self-imposed deadline with the aid of masses of amphetamines, completes the first and only volume of his Critique of Dialectical Reason.

In this, his second major philosophical work after Being and Nothingness, he tried to reconcile reason and revolution. The earlier work had presented the human condition in the modern, de-Christianized era as one of existence “by and for oneself,” despite the alienation that was a necessary part of the collapse of religion and of the liberal belief in progress that had succeeded it. The death of God “condemned man to freedom.” But Sartre soon came to feel that this original Existentialism lacked a social dimension. Man’s condemnation to freedom must, he argued, entail working for the liberation of others as well.

By 1947, the goal of liberating others had become an exhortation to support the Communist Party against the democratic West. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre concluded that democratic states and institutions were congealed structures of “un-freedom.” Communist states were only conditionally unfree, because their purpose was universal liberation. Thus, their methods and practices were excused in the name of an overarching strategy.

Sartre’s attempt to justify totalitarianism failed in all but his own terms, but he remained sure of one thing. “An anti-Communist is a dog,” he wrote. “I shall never again depart from that certainty.” His conviction, and his lifelong flirtation with the Communist Party, which never ended in full conversion, reminds Aron that Sartre, like Gide and Barthes, belonged by birth to that one percent of Frenchmen who are Protestants. Perhaps Aron means to imply that there was in the stubborn philosopher an innate streak of independence.

If so, it was rarely obvious. More typical was Sartre’s insistence that the criterion of truth is what is politically correct. The primary evil, for Sartre, was the capitalist and democratic state. It represented the culmination of all oppression throughout history; it was the embodied denial of the Existentialist command to be free. The project of undermining it and replacing it with “true” freedom was both a political and a philosophical struggle, and in that struggle the criterion of truth was what served freedom (as Sartre defined it).

In the Existentialist vision, freedom (or liberation) was in itself the highest truth about the human condition. Bourgeois notions of objective scientific truth, and more particularly bourgeois notions of political truth, were part of the ideology of the enemy. That is to say, not only should certain truths (for example, concerning the Gulag) not be told, but being contrary to political necessity, they must be redefined as lies. This, if anything, is the political face of Sartrean Existentialism, and this is what finally caused Camus to break with his comrade, thereby earning the undying hatred of the cultural radicals.

Speaking to Melinda Porter, Olivier Todd describes how Existentialist truth operated in French journalism in the Sixties, preventing a true assessment of the Vietnam War:

“I did support Hanoi and the Vietcong for many years. In the Nouvel Observateur there are still some articles that I have published that make me really blush. I changed my mind much too late. It’s obvious that when I landed in Vietnam in February 1965 for the first time, that I should have known what was actually going on. It took me from 1965 to 1973 to see the light. I mean, how slow can you be? When I came back and told the paper, ‘Boys, we’ve made a mistake, these guys are Red fascists,’ all hell broke loose … Everything jelled in my mind when I walked unannounced with the Newsweek correspondent into a Vietcong zone. He spoke Vietnamese, and they didn’t expect us, so they couldn’t prepare a big show for us. And I suddenly realized that the NLF was exactly what the Vietcong experts in the States had said it was … And I came back and said so. They wouldn’t let me write it in the paper.”

One wonders, incidentally, how many American journalists would be willing to make the same admission. Perhaps the converse of the rigorous cultural radicalism of French culture in the postwar period is a certain willingness to be honest and to admit mistakes that does not sit well in American society. American media culture seems to be governed by two simultaneous if conflicting impulses: the need to impose a left-liberal world view broadly critical of American society and American political traditions, and the need to downplay disagreements or mistakes. In the media culture’s world, credibility and face are important, and to admit past errors might reveal the dark secret that journalists are, well, not immune to ideology, a pretense the French are much less likely to maintain.

Another war of the Sixties that played itself out on the French intellectual scene was the 1967 Six Day War in the Middle East. The mortal threat to Israel posed by the Arab states gave rise to massive manifestations of fear—followed, with Israel’s victory, by pride—among French Jews. Jean-Paul Aron notes, in retrospect, that he was alarmed by what he saw as the Jews’ incipient nationalism, no better than other nationalisms and potentially far more dangerous to its proponents because of the unavoidable dichotomy (as Aron sees it) of all Jewish political feeling, split between allegiance to whatever Diaspora one was living in and loyalty to Israel.

In short, he takes the traditional line of many Jews in the Diaspora, that one should not stand out, demonstrate, or otherwise put oneself forward, because it might provoke the Gentiles. He forgets that, in 1967, what Israel was compelled to do in its own defense was necessarily far more provocative than any demonstration by French Jews could ever be. And the Gentiles were, indeed, provoked. De Gaulle, taking the Arab side in another of his insidiously divisive and contentious speeches, referred to the Jews as “an arrogant and domineering people.” This caused Raymond Aron to write one of his very few polemical outbursts, a small book in defense of Israel and of the Western interest in its survival.

The Six Day War was soon overshadowed by what the French still call “the events of May 1968.” Jean-Paul Aron devotes his longest entry to it, and it appears and reappears frequently in Melinda Porter’s interviews. But neither Aron’s chronicle nor the scattered remarks in Through Parisian Eyes identify the essential components of the uprising.

In themselves, the events, the student demonstrations at the new campus of Nanterre and on the Left Bank and, later in the month, the wildcat strikes organized by the socialist and Communist union federations, were not all that dramatic. There was, for instance, no loss of life, nor did civil order really break down outside the sixth arrondissement. Moreover, the student demands were puerile and nonsensical. Those who dismissed the whole episode as an outburst of infantilism and delayed adolescence in a student population that had grown too fast for its own good were not entirely wrong. But there was more to it than that. In May 1968, three dimensions of modern Western and particularly French history fatefully coincided.

The first dimension had to do with national French politics. De Gaulle had been in power for ten years, ruling France through technocratic ministers like the young Giscard d’Estaing and by a combination of rhetoric and direct appeals to the voters which the Left, not incorrectly, denounced as “plebiscitarian Bonapartism.” The smoldering impatience with his rule was finally bringing about what most had hitherto regarded as totally impossible, namely a reunification, for electoral and domestic policy purposes, of the entire Left—socialist, radical, and Communist.

Since the fateful split of the Socialist Party at the Congress of Tours in 1920 which spawned the Communist Party, there had been few more profound enmities in world politics than that between the P.C.F. (the French Communist Party) and the S.F.I.O. (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière, the old name of the Socialist Party). In early 1968, they were speaking of a coalition, and the demonstrations and general excitement of May gave the unions controlled by the two parties a chance for a dress rehearsal of the new collaboration. The rehearsal worked, and the Union of the Left survived ten years, collapsing finally after its defeat at the general elections of 1978 when François Mitterrand decided that the declining Communist Party was becoming more of a liability than an asset. In the post-de Gaulle period of 1969-78, however, the Union of the Left served the Socialist Party well. In national political terms, therefore, May 1968 had significant consequences.

The second dimension was evident in university and student politics. Early 1968 was, for the radical student leaders and younger members of the faculty, dominated by the fascination with Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the chief organizer of the Nanterre and Left Bank rallies, preached the submersion of the students in the proletariat; yet his leadership was both intellectual and authoritarian. Next to Maoism, the dominant tendency in the universities at the time was the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser, a Communist intellectual of impeccable Stalinist credentials who decided in the Sixties to prove that all the talk of an early, more humanistic Marx—who, it was said, needed to be rediscovered and reasserted against the later, totalitarian Marx—was wrong.

There was but one Marx and one Marxism, and it was scientific and anything but humanistic. Coming to structuralism from the Communist Party, Althusser appropriated the notion that structure determines action and feelings and used it to modernize the archaic dogmas of the class struggle. Althusserianism was tremendously successful and bid fair to take over from literary and anthropological structuralism as the orthodoxy of the Left when the entire Marxist enterprise in Paris was blown sky high, beginning in 1975, by Solzhenitsyn, Leszek Kolakowski, and others who arrived from the East. Althusser himself ultimately went mad, killed his wife, and disappeared from circulation in 1983.

The importance of all this, Maoism and Althusserian Marxism, in May 1968 was not that the student leaders or young professors were fired by holy zeal on behalf of the class struggle but, as Aron notes, that they were able to use these ideologies to justify the seizure of social, cultural, and political power by their own class, the intellectual class:

“The events of May 1968 were aimed at nothing less than the solemn ratification of the professorial culture, at the occupation of the ruined edifice by sheep bleating their resentment of modernity. In discussing postwar Franco-American cultural relations I pointed out that the rout of life from thought was inseparable from the rise of the service sector in our growth societies, from the arrival in the student bodies of the children of white-collar workers, of middle managers, and of small-time functionaries. They had complete faith in the tabula rasa and no tolerance of any history which might, like a stigma of class, reveal their ancestral burden. The eviction of feeling, the empire of theory guaranteed their fortune.”

In other words, Althusser, Lacan, Foucault, Cohn-Bendit, and the others pulled the levers to grant themselves power, and the middle- and working-class students, like sheep, followed, believing that they were building a brave new world of total equality, in which there would be no distinctions between teachers and students, old and young, or competent and incompetent. To the extent that both parties in this effort succeeded, the French university collapsed. In the mid-Eighties, it is still struggling to recover. Here again, therefore, we have a legacy of May 1968.

The third dimension, which helps to explain both the sociology and the activism of the uprising, is that of psychology and motivation. Aron does not directly mention it, yet it helps to answer the obvious question of why the students were so angry, so ruthless, and so politically extreme when the society and the power structures in which they found themselves were so mild and benevolent compared to those faced by rebels and dissenters throughout all the rest of human history. The fact is that the oppression turned out to be no oppression at all, that the authoritarian state and university almost instantly conceded most of the students’ claims, and that their stone-throwing and barricade-building cost them nothing while gaining them a great deal. Why then the fury, the insistence that they were facing horrors comparable to those of the Third Reich?

The reason, it would appear, was that the students were furious precisely to the extent that their enemies were weak rather than powerful, forgiving rather than repressive. They reproduced in themselves the image of patriarchal intolerance which they did not find in the world around them or, for that matter, in their own families. Althusser, Lacan, and the others became for them ersatz fathers who taught them the oppressive tactics and intellectual coercion that they then wielded against all comers.

To explain why they needed this image of authority when nothing in their society exemplified it would lead us to an examination of the history of the family in the past two centuries, and especially since Freud, for which there is no room here. Very briefly, however, the story is that the Industrial Revolution and changes in work patterns in the nineteenth century removed the father from immediate control of the household. Particularly in the social classes mentioned by Aron as playing a leading role in May 1968, the change led, over four or five generations, to psychological compulsions which demanded compensation for what was lacking in reality, in particular, strong patriarchal authority and ruthless consistency. From this perspective, the throngs of May 1968 were to a large extent following psychological compulsions laid down by the fundamental social constraints of modern history.

After the high point of 1968 the influence and power of the “moderns” declined in French culture at large even as they consolidated their hold on the universities. New, more ephemeral concerns replaced Althusserian seriousness: pro-Palestinianism, radical feminism, semiotics, various ideologies of filmmaking, and, a particularly Parisian problem, the legitimacy or illegitimacy of male fashions in an age of sexual egalitarianism.

These are the issues addressed by most of the figures interviewed in Melinda Porter’s book, which is why, unlike Les Modernes, it is of marginal interest or importance, especially if one wants to understand the secular forces of French culture and history. As Porter herself points out, “Paris has the beauty and the life that lures her artists away from their work.” The result, at least for some, is a lack of seriousness that constantly evades the real issues and the profounder questions.

In point of fact, though, while it is difficult to do serious and sustained intellectual work in the Paris of the “moderns,” it is far from impossible. Raymond Aron wrote his major works, as well as countless essays and speeches, while providing a weekly column for Le Figaro. Partly as a consequence of his endeavors, the culture of the “moderns” collapsed in the late Seventies. What was left was, in part, the residual interests of individual figures among the “moderns” such as Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, or Regis Debray, an incorrigible Third-Worldist radical who, in 1981, became special advisor to François Mitterrand.

But there also re-emerged an anti-Left counterculture which had been hidden, but not destroyed, in the years of the radical hegemony. This counterculture followed no single guide, and its representatives displayed a variety of motivations and interests. In the field of political analysis there was, of course, Raymond Aron himself, whose views are finally, after his death, accepted virtually across the political spectrum in France as the starting point of all serious thought about international politics, military strategy, and modern history.

In the study of Marxism, there was the Greek-born Kostas Papaioannou, a close friend of Raymond Aron and of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. Papaioannou, who died prematurely in 1982, was a polymath capable of writing with equal discernment on Communist ideology and Byzantine art, and his recently re-published essays provide an introduction to modern Marxism and its political significance arguably far superior to anything Sartre or his epigones ever wrote or will write.[3]

In 1967, at the height of the radical hegemony, Papaioannou coined the phrase “cold ideology” to describe the Marxism that remains as a technique of power and a system of discipline and terror in Communist states long after anyone has ceased to “believe” its tenets. The notion that subjective belief is irrelevant to the power and the operation of Communist ideology is absolutely crucial to our understanding its persistence in the modern world; the full implications of this insight have by no means yet been understood in the West.

Jean-Paul Aron, and to a lesser extent Melinda Camber Porter, have done us a service by presenting us with the views of those who set the agenda and determined what was important and what was not, and what was politically correct, in Paris from around 1944 to around 1970. Reading these books and meditating on the monstrous inanities propounded by the cultural radicals, however, one is more than ever convinced that the really interesting cultural history of France since 1944, or even since the Revolution, remains to be written. The lasting, the characteristic, contributions of French philosophers, historians, critics, and writers to modern culture are not those of Sartre, Barthes, Foucault, Althusser, or even Lévi-Strauss, most of whose reputations are already shrinking.

Their problem was that in their determination to undermine, debunk, and denigrate, they failed to provide any positive vision of art, philosophy, or literature. Moreover, their very ideology militated against the sustained study of particular institutions, ideas, or works of art. None of the figures described by Jean-Paul Aron ever produced anything like the essays of Papaioannou, the studies in comparative mythology of Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil, the explanations of the origins of ideology of Louis Dumont, or the theology and religious philosophies of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson. It is figures like these who have made the genuine contributions to understanding and wisdom, and not the cultural radicals. Not even, despite Raymond Aron’s polite words, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose ideas did so much to shape the image of this period and the minds of its most influential representatives.

1. Les Modernes, by Jean-Paul Aron; Gallimard, 318 pages, 75 FF.
2. Through Parisian Eyes: Reflections on Contemporary French Arts and Culture, by Melinda Camber Porter; Oxford University Press, 256 pages, $18.95.
3. De Marx et du marxisme, by Kostas Papaioannou, was published by Gallimard in 1983.

The New Criterion, April 1986

by David Gress

On the late French philosopher’s intellectual career.

Michel Foucault, the French thinker, historian, and epistemologist, died in 1984 at the age of fifty-seven. In recent years his reputation has grown rapidly in American academic life. Professor Frederick Crews of the University of California, writing in The American Scholar, speaks of “an exodus from the camp of Marx to that of the late Michel Foucault, who is also the clear favorite of a new academic generation that cares little for the tortuous history of Marxist apologetics.” Crews adds:

“It is a nice question ... whether Foucauldian analysis arose in order to thwart Marxism or, rather, to save its debunking spirit from its doomed propositional content. Foucault himself, significantly, began as a Marxist and a student of Althusser’s; they were both Party members in the dreary Lysenko period … [T]he ever-shifting, self-ironic, and brilliantly original style of analysis that Foucault eventually developed can also be regarded in part as a solipsistic Nietzschean travesty of Marxism … In Foucault, perhaps, we are looking at the Marxist to end all Marxists.”

As regards the way Foucault has been received in the American academy, especially certain departments of English, history, and art, Crews is on the mark. Nevertheless, the use of Foucault in support of a Marxist stance is a dubious enterprise. One of the major impulses behind Foucault’s work was a rejection of the political “games of truth” which he knew firsthand in France in the Fifties, when Party ideology dictated what Communist academics were supposed to study and how. Foucault derived from this experience, and from the use of terror in the name of social health in the Soviet Union, the idea that definitions of sanity, health, and normality were not universal but dependent on changing power relations. He added to it the view of Friedrich Nietzsche that modern rationalism itself was no more reliable a guide to truth than premodern forms of thought.

This Nietzschean position—which is neutral toward modern rationalism in all its forms, including Marxism—is incompatible with the attitude of bourgeois academic Marxists, who certainly believe that their own stance of opposition to the Western political system is based on superior insight. Read selectively, Foucault can indeed be used to rescue Western Marxism from decay. Read properly, and with an understanding of motive and context, his ideas and propositions are no more appropriate to that purpose than those of Nietzsche himself.

Foucault’s outer life appears to have been quite uneventful. He was born 1926 in Poitiers in central France, the son of a doctor. He studied the history and philosophy of science in Paris in the 1950s under Gaston Bachelard and Louis Althusser, whose writings inspired the structuralist version of Marxist determinism that swept Paris in the 1960s.

Foucault’s dissertation was published in 1954 under the title Mental Illness and Psychology, inaugurating the first of the three major phases of his published work, that of the investigation of health, illness, and madness, and the borders and definitions among them, in the early modern period, primarily the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This phase, referred to by some commentators as Foucault’s “archaeological” phase, continued at least through the publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), in which Foucault investigated the foundations of the modern social and behavioral sciences.

In 1960, he left Paris, unwillingly one suspects, to take up his first permanent post at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, where he remained until 1968, when he returned to Paris, first to the new campus of the University of Paris at Vincennes (1968-70), then to the Collège de France, where he became professor of “the history of systems of thought.” The appointment to the College was an extraordinary honor for a man as relatively young as Foucault still was at the time. (He was forty-four.) He could with confidence have looked forward to over a quarter century of independent research and teaching.

The great advantage of the Collège over ordinary institutions of higher learning is that the faculty design their own courses in complete freedom. They are not required to repeat courses, nor is there any basic curriculum. By common consent the professors at the Collège represent the very elite of France’s academic and intellectual life.

About the time of his appointment, Foucault began publishing the works of his second phase or area of interest, namely the “genealogy” and triumph of what he called “bio-power,” the practices by which we, the inhabitants of modernity, survey and control each other. Foucault regarded this type of power as peculiar to the modern world, which is characterized by a belief in technology and the methods of natural science and by the irresistible spread of democratic and egalitarian ideas. A crucial aspect of modernity for both Nietzsche and Foucault was the rise of humanitarianism, that is, the belief that the purpose of society and the state is the improvement of life, both material and psychological.

In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche traced this humanitarianism to its roots in bourgeois notions of propriety, guilt, public morality, and common sense. Since Nietzsche’s style and method broke with the common standards of philosophical and historical argument, it is often overlooked that his critique of humanitarianism was not entirely original, but formed a crucial part of the cultural criticism of leading Western social thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Jacob Burckhardt, and Max Weber.

Foucault was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche’s aphoristic, elliptical, yet assertive style; he believed that the resulting opacity and obscurity of argument was a necessary part of Nietzsche’s message rather than an obstacle to understanding. Foucault’s own main work of this phase was Discipline and Punish (1975). Here he sought the origins of modern “bio-power” in the physical drills and corporal training of eighteenth-century armies, which were regarded as miniature images of social organization, and in the universal surveillance of the modern prison. For Foucault, the modern prison—based on the idea of rehabilitation through punishment—was the prime example of humanitarianism as coercive power. Before the eighteenth century, he pointed out, imprisonment was highly unusual; the standard types of punishment for criminal behavior were fines, flogging, banishment, or execution.

The period around 1970 was politically dramatic in France as elsewhere, and despite an often stated distaste for politics, Foucault found himself unavoidably involved in debates and discussions on the events of the day. In the 1970s, Foucault gave interviews rejecting the Communism of his youth and the persistence of radical utopianism; these statements led many to categorize him as a neoconservative. While it is true that he hailed the “new philosophers”—a loose grouping of former radicals who had rejected Marxism in the late Seventies—this label fits Foucault as badly as any other. Those of his writings that do have a topical concern are frequently as ambiguous in their recommendations as his academic work was unclear in its implications.

Fixed conclusions were nevertheless drawn from Foucault’s writings, especially by the academic Left in America, where Foucault enjoyed his greatest and most uncritical popularity in the Seventies and after. This was ironic, since his dissection of humanitarianism and of Marxist truth-claims ought logically to have prevented it. The explanation is that his admirers on the American academic Left chose what they wanted from Foucault according to their own agenda, while ignoring the context and deeper intent of his arguments. The reason they could do this was, as Frederick Crews noted, that Foucault’s wildly generalizing style lent itself to selective use. After absorbing a few chapters of one or the other of Foucault’s books, it is fatally easy to generate Foucauldian critiques of any institution, practice, or attitude one happens not to like. Conversely, Foucault’s rejection of the standard canons of scholarship means that one cannot object to selective readings in the name of such canons without risking the accusation that one is simply incapable of understanding how to read and use his work.

Even though much of the use made of Foucault in America has arguably been in violation of his own purposes, it must be admitted that his general “debunking spirit,” to use Crews’s phrase, is well suited to the leftist temperament. Foucault constantly claimed to be unmasking, in a manner unattainable by normal methods, the coercive character of social institutions ordinarily considered to have generally benevolent purposes, like hospitals, armies, or prisons.

This posture was directly borrowed from Nietzsche, who frequently used the metaphor of the mask as the true picture of a reality that is never what it seems and always conceals more than it reveals. In Nietzsche, and even to some extent in Foucault, the act of unmasking is directed with complete objectivity against all social idols, those of the Left as much as those of the Right. Foucault’s American followers, however, have happily appropriated the posture of unmasking while discarding the cool objectivity that is its necessary complement.

In a recent book on Foucault and Marxism, for example, Mark Poster, a historian at the University of California, Irvine, defines Marxism not as an economic theory but as “a critical view of domination which as historical materialism takes all social practices as transitory and all intellectual formations as indissociably connected with power and social relations.” He can then argue, with evident satisfaction and relief, that “Foucault is continuing the work of the Western Marxists by other means.”[1] Thus, Foucault’s debunking posture easily lends itself to political exploitation by American Leftists, for whom capitalist freedom is a hoax and America, especially under Reagan, is a morally inferior regime that threatens the rest of the world with oppression and war.

Foucault was at bottom a kind of anarchist; he did not want to distinguish between degrees of coercion. His institutional critiques left little room for the assertion of any real difference between various types of institutions—say, between a Nazi or Soviet concentration camp on the one hand and a Western prison on the other. Likewise, his debunking of humanitarianism as coercion hardly allowed for judging the relative merits of liberal democratic procedures and the significance of legal rights as against the arbitrary actions of despotic regimes. This refusal to acknowledge any real distinction between the intentions and the uses of power in different political systems made his arsenal of arguments very attractive to those of his American academic admirers who were less interested in the history of knowledge and power than in undermining the moral legitimacy of the democratic system.

The third phase of Foucault’s work became public in 1976 when he published the first volume of his History of Sexuality. In this book he argued against the modern idea that Western sexuality had undergone a repression in the nineteenth century from which it was only now emerging. Instead, he saw sexuality in general, both before, during, and after the Victorian era, as part of a continuous Western view of the self and its proper development and care. In volumes two, three, and four of the History he returned to classical Antiquity in order to uncover the origins of this Western idea of the self, particularly as it was expressed in ideas about sex.[2]

This enterprise was ended by his unexpected death in Paris in May 1984. Foucault had been spending the winter before at Berkeley, the last of his many visits to American campuses. He had been chronically ill; and on his return to Paris he went into hospital, where certain discoveries were made. According to James Harkness, the translator of some of his works, it is “almost certain that the so-called ‘disease of the nervous system’ that killed him was made possible by the breakdown of his immune system as a result of having contracted AIDS.”[3] Foucault was indeed a homosexual, but for most of his life he had been of the old-fashioned kind who do not regard it as the essence of their being and hence do not need to flaunt it at every turn, insisting that others recognize its superiority. His attitude changed somewhat during the era of his American success, perhaps because homosexuality on American campuses had by then become almost inevitably blatant and political. At New York University, for example, where Foucault taught in the early Eighties, he did not resist being publicly associated with homosexual activism.

Foucault was concerned with definitions of truth, self, and power, and with the uses made of these factors of human existence at various times, especially during the period that marked the breakdown of the classical episteme and the construction of modernity. The notion of episteme recurs often in Foucault’s writings. The original Greek meaning of the word is “knowledge” or “understanding.” Foucault used it to mean a combination of world view, form of knowledge, and the entire body of methods and outlooks used to apprehend and analyze phenomena. Thus, he referred to the “classical episteme,” by which he meant the ideas, sensibilities, and philosophical orientations of Western Europe that prevailed until the late eighteenth century, and to the “modern episteme” which arose in the revolutionary era of 1770-1800. The modern episteme included the extension of power from overt coercion and discipline to the hidden coercion of modern institutions and practices; in fact, Foucault argued that this new use of power was the defining characteristic of modernity. The beginnings of the classical episteme were uncertain. In the History of Sexuality Foucault appeared to be arguing that its origins were to be sought in classical antiquity.

Foucault’s concerns were posed as such by the philosophy that above all others defined the terms of modernity, that of Hegel. Foucault inherited his concerns from those who challenged the consequences of Hegel’s system, notably from Nietzsche, but also from the French tradition of Hegelianism, a tradition that, through the work and personality of Alexandre Kojève, was intimately connected with French Communism. In the Thirties, Kojève gave a widely influential series of lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, attended by Jean-Paul Sartre among others, the gist of which was that Hegel had reconciled freedom and necessity and that free human action was no longer possible because history had come to an end.

This end of history was said to be concretely exemplified in Stalin’s Russia, which therefore represented the inevitable fate toward which all modern industrial societies must move. After the war, Kojève, as a senior civil servant, devoted his career to the development of the European Economic Community, without finding this to be in conflict with his earlier determinism. Since he is also supposed to have believed that the superior man is never obliged to reveal his true opinions on anything, it remains uncertain whether his Stalinism was a mask or a genuine conviction. However that may be, it was as an apologist for Soviet totalitarianism that Kojève influenced a generation of French Communist and fellow-travelling intellectuals.

Foucault himself rejected the Stalinist tenor of Kojève’s teachings in favor of those of another, and greater, French Hegelian, Jean Hyppolite, concerning whom he wrote one of his most important articles, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”

The philosophical and political strands of Foucault’s heritage cannot be clearly separated, nor can his cultural descent, which ran from Nietzsche through the French Surrealists and their supporters, especially Georges Bataille. Nevertheless, for purposes of exposition, it must be done, and I would start with a recursion to Hegel himself. Hegel laid down the terms even for those, like Nietzsche, Bataille, and Foucault, who rejected modernity—or, rather, who decided that the premises of modernity were unsustainable.

Classical Western philosophy had three branches: ontology, epistemology, and ethics, corresponding to the questions of being, knowledge, and action. Plato and Hegel, at the beginning and end of the classical tradition, proposed systems that included all three branches. The crucial difference between the two was in the status of the knowing subject. Plato’s subject reached enlightenment by discovering what already existed in reality; Hegel’s subject reached enlightenment by changes of consciousness. These changes led to a discovery of the actions and the meaning of objective Spirit, but the process was dialectical; in some real sense the objective Spirit itself was a creation of the enlightened consciousness. It is in this sense that Hegel’s system, and the modern thought that builds on (or against) it, can be said to be the ultimate subjectivity. This notion of subjectivity was, as we shall see, crucial to Nietzsche as well as to Bataille.

Hegel produced the first and last complete attempt to reconcile reason and reality. What we would call true objective understanding was for Hegel an ultimate stage of subjectivity, the realization of the harmony that existed between the self and the world. In Hegel’s political philosophy, the paternalistic and bureaucratic state was the ideal and proper form of human social existence, the highest manifestation of objective Spirit.

Hegel’s system gave rise to disputes which have not changed their basic terms since the 1840s. The German political philosopher and leftist thinker Jürgen Habermas, with whom Foucault is often compared, defines the entire “discourse of modernity” as essentially derived from the fight over Hegel’s heritage. Since that discourse has been primarily political, all serious political argument on the European Continent since 1840 has been to some extent part of this fight.

Crudely put, the basic notion common to all who appealed to Hegel in the nineteenth century was that reality should be ruled by reason. For the Hegelians of the Left the problem with the rule of reason was that it was the rule of bourgeois reason. Hence the task was to liberate the potentialities of reason and to overcome the one-sided rationalism of the bourgeois world. Marx himself essayed this project. (And, in our own day, Georg Lukács, the Western Marxists of the Frankfurt School, and lately Habermas as well.) Hegelians of the Right, on the other hand, emphasized the need to have faith in the reasonableness of prevailing reality. They tended to regard the revolutionary tendencies of their Left cousins as subjective error, and to regard the socialist belief in the need and the logic of political change as romantic folly engendered by an exaggerated belief in their own rationality.

Nietzsche, finally, criticized the basis of both forms of rationality, the revolutionary as well as the conservative. For him, reason itself was nothing other than an expression of the will to power, which was the fundamental constant of human history and civilization. In all societies everywhere there are those who control and those who are controlled. Nevertheless, the means by which control is exercised differ. In premodern times, Christianity performed the function of denying the ubiquity of the will to power and of sublimating it; religion became the vehicle by which a certain type of person exercised power over society by moral injunction, exhortation, and guilt.

In modern times, Nietzsche continued, we believe less in Christianity and more in science, technology, and social progress; therefore, the will to power can be seen in the use of scientific claims and political arguments. This, as I have indicated, was Foucault’s view exactly. The more advanced the society, the less power is exercised as naked force and overt coercion. Instead, people internalize the will to power, and power becomes not an emanation of the state but an aspect of the most intimate relations. The distinction between the wielders and the objects of power disappears. All are at one and the same time both wielders and objects of power. This is the paradox of modern humanitarianism. It began in opposition to older forms of power, but once established as the chief principle of modern societies it could not avoid becoming the newest vehicle of the will to power, which is permanent and ubiquitous.

Foucault shared with Nietzsche the belief that the will to power was permanent and that conflict was the essential feature of human society. Foucault was fond of saying that politics is war carried on by other means. Since power is exercised through reason, moreover, he tended to argue, again in Nietzschean fashion, that all attempts at grasping reality involve power. In his work, the discourse of modernity in the Hegelian sense—that is, the attempt to bring reality in line with reason (whether revolutionary or conservative)—is turned on itself and shown to be merely another manifestation of the permanent will to power. Thus, he almost never referred to the institutional or political changes of modern times as progress, but emphasized always their paradoxical, power-enhancing effects. He exemplified this in his studies of hospitals, armies, and prisons, and in his analysis of the systems of thought that in each period determined the purpose of such institutions. The most important of these studies are Discipline and Punish and other writings of the Seventies collected in English in the volume entitled Power/Knowledge.[4]

From Nietzsche came also the method that Foucault declared to be most appropriate to his task. This was “genealogy,” as opposed to the linear evolutionary schemes of conventional historians. Foucault describes genealogy as a discovery of origins which “will never neglect as inaccessible the vicissitudes of history. On the contrary, it will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning.” Genealogy is the opposite of comprehensive analysis. The genealogist does not seek a complete explanation. Complete explanations, in Foucault’s world, are rejected precisely because they are judged to be examples of the hidden power he is concerned to unmask.

The secret revealed by genealogy is that things “have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in piecemeal fashion from alien forms.” To Foucault, finality and essences are elements of a form of domination far more comprehensive and insidious than the coercive power of political authority normally studied by historians and political scientists, which includes orthodox socialism and Marxism, with their strong beliefs in historical purpose and in a certain form of political rationalism. (Thus, Foucault felt liberated by the student rebellion of 1968 to the extent that it was not a traditional socialist movement, but rather, as he thought, an expression of the refusal to participate in traditional politics.)

Nietzsche’s thought undermined the Hegelian claims to realism and rationality as much by its style, which was aphoristic and pointillistic, as by its arguments. The inspiration found by Foucault in Nietzsche was thus both cultural and philosophical, and it was expanded by Foucault’s fascination with Georges Bataille.[5]

Bataille’s writings cover an extraordinary range, from erotic (some would say pornographic) stories to serious essays in economics and political and social anthropology. Politically he was close to the Communist Party in the Thirties and studied Kojève, but after World War II he moved away from the Stalinist Party line. In a manner probably only possible in France, he combined his dissenting Communism with a belief in the regenerative importance of liminal experiences, that is, experiences that crossed the boundaries accepted in the world of “normal life.” The following passage is crucial evidence of Bataille’s position, which came to mean so much to Foucault:

“The life of man, distinct from legal existence and as it takes place in fact on an isolated planet in the heavens, from day to night, from one country to the next, the life of man can in no way be limited to the closed systems assigned to it by rationalist conceptions. We can express the immense, turbulent labor of ever-flowing abandon that constitutes it by saying that it only begins where those systems fail; whatever order and reserve it allows only has meaning from the point where the forces that are ordered and reserved free themselves and lose themselves for ends which cannot be made subject to anything capable of rational accounting. It is only by virtue of such insubordination, however miserable, that the human race ceases to be isolated in the unconditional splendor of material things.”[6]

Foucault took from Bataille the idea that human life is richer than any possible description of it, that its very essence is not, as orthodox economists say, scarcity, but rather excess and abandon. This idea was reflected throughout Foucault’s work in two ways. First, in his constant insistence that all facets of culture, all elements in and changes of the episteme, had unforeseen and paradoxical consequences (paradoxical, that is, in terms of traditional rationality).

For example, hospitals, founded ostensibly to cure people by virtue of a particular theory of illness, became institutions of coercion and normalization. This led directly to Foucault’s most important claim, namely that in modernity, the traditional legal and political forms of power are being replaced by an even more intrusive kind of power, exercised “from below.” It was to this new form of power that he gave the name “bio-power,” since it was primarily wielded over the human body in the name of mental and physical health. The locus of power is thus no longer the “objective” rules of public authorities but the practices that define health, illness, and well-being.

The other way in which Bataille’s notion of excess was reflected in Foucault’s work was in Foucault’s deeply personal conviction that simple, positive description of any fact, idea, or institution is not only inadequate, but somehow immoral: “As for those for whom to take pains, to begin over and over again, to make mistakes, to start from scratch, and still to find reason to hesitate; as for those for whom, in short, to work in tentative apprehension is tantamount to failure, well, all I can say is that we clearly do not inhabit the same planet.”

In other words, finality is constricting and bad; discourse must be open-ended, vague, and general if it is not to be coercive. For the same reason—the belief that any simple label is unfair to its object—he distinguished between “discussion” and “polemics,” praising the former while rejecting the latter: “Has anyone ever seen a new idea come out of a polemic? And how could it be otherwise, given that the interlocutors are incited, not to advance, not to take more and more risks in what they say, but to fall back continually on the rights that they claim, on their legitimacy.”

Apart from echoing Bataille and his vision of the richness of life, Foucault was here rejecting the Party procedures familiar to him from his youth in France. But even as he rejected the Communist Party, Foucault seems to have retained the belief that Party procedures were archetypal expressions of political power—no matter what the outward character of the regime. This belief may explain Foucault’s zeal to unmask what he believed were secret coercions hidden in apparently innocuous modern social and political practices. Since the Party model is not the quintessential model of modern power, however, Foucault’s debunking approach is clearly not equipped to deal with the pluralism of democratic procedures.

The effect of Bataille’s erotic writings of the Thirties and Forties was to glorify liminality, which he also called heterogeneity, in opposition to the homogeneity of the bourgeois world. The concept, as Jürgen Habermas says, “condensed the basic experience of the Surrealists, who set for themselves the task of mobilizing as shockingly as possible the ecstatic forces of intoxication, dreams, and sexual drive against the imperatives of the useful, the normal, and the sober.” According to Habermas, Bataille’s concern, like Foucault’s, was to “break out of the prison-house of modernity, out of the closed universe of the world-historically victorious reason of the West. Both wanted to overcome the subjectivism that covers the world with its reifying power and causes it to coagulate into a totality of technically available and economically definable objects.”[7]

The opposition to a world in which all objects, including people, are “technically available” echoes the later Heidegger, who was another influence on Foucault, although much less important than either Nietzsche or Bataille. Bataille’s Communism, which came to resemble Kojève’s, sits oddly with this opposition, of course. In a world-state ruled according to Stalinist principles all men and all objects would be available for manipulation by the will of the sovereign. As we have seen, this perspective repelled Foucault. And his rejection of Kojève’s teachings extended to their interpretation by Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (In Humanisme et terreur [1946], for example, Merleau-Ponty defended the Soviet regime, arguing that true humanism and true terror were mutually necessary.)

Although Foucault rejected the political servility of Merleau, he did borrow important elements from him, particularly the notion of the human body (le corps vécu) as the stage on which power is enacted. “The body,” Foucault would write, “is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration.”

Foucault’s work in the Fifties and early Sixties—on the development of modern practices of health and on the rise of the modern understanding of physical and mental illness—turned out to have an immediate political dimension. Foucault’s membership in the Party ended when the suppression of dissent in genetics and linguistics in the USSR by decree, and the terror exercised against dissenters, shocked him by what he saw as its analogies to what he was studying. In view of Soviet practices which were not then as notorious as they have since become—but which were still something “it was better not to talk about”—the history of madness and health was not a subject likely to be popular with the politburo of the French Communist Party. Consequently, as Foucault later drily remarked, “what I tried to do in this domain was met with a great silence among the French intellectual left.”

Foucault used the word “archeology” in the titles of his three major works of the Sixties, all of which ultimately grew out of his early work on medical history: The Birth of the Clinic (1963), subtitled in French Une archéologie du régard médical (which means “an archeology of medical observation,” and not “medical perception,” as the translation has it); The Order of Things (1966), subtitled An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, and finally The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).[8] In a recent study of Foucault, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow define the archeological method as one in which “the archeologist performs on all discourse and knowledge, especially our own, the same sort of distanciation of truth and meaning [i.e., by not allowing modern meanings to influence interpretation of old ones] which we naturally bring to the medical accounts and other theories of the Classical Age … Once we treat the language and practices of a discipline from another age as mere meaningless objects, we can gain access to a level of description which shows that what remains incomprehensible is not without its own systematic order.”[9]

The connoisseur of Continental fashions will immediately recognize the resemblance of Foucauldian “archeology” to the structuralisme that was marching to victory in Paris around i960. Like Foucault, the structuralists saw human action and society as determined by their structures, which had their own autonomous existence. The pre-archeological Foucault of Madness and Civilization (1961) had been a prisoner, as he might put it, of an epistemology that promised true insight (valid for something beyond the discovery of past discursive practices themselves) based on “exegesis,” which was his term for the interpretive method of Edmund Husserl and the early Heidegger.

After Madness and Civilization, Foucault realized that, because it relied on an external standard, exegesis was the last refuge of the tradition of humanistic scholarship. Humanism as a scholarly ethos implies, first, that there is a single standard of human reason that can explain human actions, and second, that there is genuine progress of insight and enlightenment in scholarship as well as life generally. By his “archeological” phase, Foucault had already rejected both claims.

In the introduction to The Order of Things, he summarized the nature and purpose of his “archeology” with untypical clarity—untypical because, as we have seen, deliberate ambiguity was regarded as a virtual moral necessity by Foucault. The investigation, he said, “will not describe the progress of knowledge toward an objective standard recognizable by our sciences of today; the purpose is rather to bring to light the … episteme within which forms of knowledge, without regard to any criterion of rational value or objective form, display their positivity and thus manifest a history which is not that of an increasing perfection, but rather that of their conditions of possibility. What I hope will appear in this account is the configurations that … have given rise to the various forms of empirical knowledge.” The focus of interest was the mentality and entire system of perception and understanding of the classical era, seen in its own right and not merely as different from—or less adequate than—modern science.

The result of these archeological investigations was the assertion of “two great discontinuities in the episteme of Western culture.” The ancien régime believed in natural history, based on the notion of the Great Chain of Being, in universal grammar, based on the notion of an original language underlying all spoken languages, and in mercantilism, based on the idea that wealth is fixed and must be hoarded. Modernity believes, by contrast, in biology, comparative grammar, and economic growth. Foucault’s structuralist method is to elucidate the inner functions of the older period, which he called the Age of Representation, while denying any superior merit to modern science. He concluded by arguing that the idea of man as a rational entity with a mind and a body functioning in certain predictable ways was an illusion destined, though he does not say why, to fade like an image in the sand erased by the rising tide.

The Order of Things is in many ways a thrilling book. But the idea that past cultures, including the past of our own culture, had different standards of truth which are not per se inferior to our own is, of course, not original with Foucault; it was a commonplace of the historical school of the nineteenth century.

The writings of Foucault’s archeological period display to an irritating degree the all-too-frequent parochialism of certain Gallic writers, who with great apparatus and fanfare produce deep-sounding statements about facts or methods that have been perfectly well known for decades, if not centuries. No reader of Arthur Lovejoy in America or of Frederic Maitland in England would have the least trouble taking past systems of thought on their own terms or understanding such systems from within, according to their own code (as the structuralists say). As Frederick Crews has pointed out, however, the matter is tangled up with politics and temperament. No with-it professor of English or history in this country, even if he had heard of Lovejoy and Maitland, is going to admit to reading (much less admiring) them when Foucault, with his mantle of radicalism and his unmasking posture, is available to replace the blunted Marx in the great class(room) struggle.

Though much of Foucault is often as overvalued as The Order of Things, his writings on the subjects of power and self are useful for an understanding of modern forms of power that, like the concealed power-drive in the humanitarian impulse to improve life, are both “intentional and non-subjective.”

In this later period Foucault began to write and speak more openly of power in modern politics. Since his criticism of power included the intellectual power dear to the Left, he lost much of his reputation in France, at least until the turn away from Marxism took hold after 1975. By the same token, Foucault is partly responsible for the victory in much of French political culture of a critique of power that included intellectual as well as overtly political power. It remains to be seen how much of this Foucault is received in America, given the fact that the people in question are precisely those American Marxist and quasi-Marxist academics who assert the right to power of their own ideology. Unlike him, they completely lose their vaunted critical faculties when the question of their own interests arises. Whatever one can say of Foucault, such convenient blindness was never one of his faults.

Around 1968, Foucault returned to Nietzsche for the concept of genealogy. Foucault’s discussion of forms of power in his genealogical phase often displays a curious paradox. He seems on the one hand interested simply in uncovering domination in unexpected places and presenting it for observation; on the other hand, in scattered remarks, he takes it for granted that power of any kind requires resistance. To encourage resistance, or to imply that domination is immoral, seems, on the face of it, to be evidence precisely of that humanitarianism which, according to Nietzsche and Foucault, is itself a particularly insidious form of power masquerading as benevolence and emancipation.

Foucault took from Nietzsche the notion of the rise, throughout modernity, of a form of domination based on claims to superior knowledge and on the ability to set standards of knowledge and truth, as opposed to domination based on specific legal and political claims. In Germany, this notion descended from Nietzsche to Max Weber and from him to a disparate group of social theorists critical of the arrogant claims of their colleagues and of the intellectual “producers of meaning” in general. These thinkers—Arnold Gehlen, Helmut Schelsky, and Friedrich Tenbruck are the most important—stood far to the right of the center in postwar West German intellectual culture.

Their main argument was that the distinguishing characteristic of modern societies is the existence of an intellectual elite, a knowledge class of rulers who legitimize their own control in the shape of theories about society. Those who were close to the left-liberal and neo-Marxist center of West German culture, like Habermas, denounced these thinkers as neoconservative reactionaries. This was harder to do in Foucault’s case, given his political antecedents. Also, he clothed his analysis of intellectual power in a language and style wholly different from the tradition of Weberian sociology.

Foucault arrived at the nexus of knowledge, rationality, and power from his studies in the history of medicine and the treatment of disease, both of which he saw as coercive. “Take the example of philanthropy in the early nineteenth century: people appear who make it their business to involve themselves in other people’s lives, health, nutrition, housing; then, out of this confused set of functions there emerge certain personages, institutions, forms of knowledge: public hygiene, inspectors, social workers, psychologists … Naturally it’s medicine which has played the basic role as the common denominator.” In conventional sociological analysis we are used to seeing the great change coming about when, in the welfare state of the Thirties and after, the public sector eclipsed private philanthropy. For Foucault, this shift from charity as an individual social obligation to charity as a function of the bureaucratic welfare state is part of a broader process. The process was described in an essay on Foucault by the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor, known as a Hegel scholar and as a defender of a mildly socialist and egalitarian position:

“The picture is drawn … of a constellation combining modern humanitarianism, the new social sciences, and the new disciplines which develop in armies, schools, and hospitals in the eighteenth century, all seen as the formation of new modes of domination … Humanitarianism itself seems to be understood as a kind of stratagem of the new growing mode of control. The new forms of knowledge serve this end. People are measured, classed, examined in various ways, and thus made the better subject to a control which tends to normalization … Far from explaining the rise of this new technology of control in terms of the modern identity of man as an individual, Foucault wants to explain the modern notion of individuality as one of its products … What is wielded through the modern technologies of control is … not concerned with law but with normalization … with bringing about a certain result, defined as health or good function.”[10]

Here we see in part the legacy of Merleau-Ponty’s corps vécu; the focus on the body as a locus of the exercise of power makes it a secondary matter whether therapeutic power originates in the dominant sentiments of a culture or in the welfare legislation of a modern government.

The role of government in modern social development appears at a different stage in Foucault’s analysis, namely in the shape of the “well-ordered police states” of the eighteenth century. Since he was not speaking to historians, Foucault explained that the modern meaning of police was only about a hundred and fifty years old; before then, “‘police’ is the ensemble of mechanisms serving to ensure order, the properly channeled growth of wealth and the conditions of preservation of health in general.” In the sixteenth century, the words “policy” and “police” were often not distinguished from one another; gradually, “policy” came to take on meanings similar to those of today.

“Police,” on the other hand, came to mean “a program of government rationality … a project to create a system of regulation of the general conduct of individuals whereby everything would be controlled to the point of self-sustenance, without the need for intervention.” When the point of self-sustenance was reached, government could be restricted without sacrificing social control. The ideology of modern liberalism (in its European sense) defended this restriction of government on the grounds that people were better at managing their own affairs in society than a ruler was. Foucault argued that this ideology represented a ruse; in fact, the social control remained, but it was now automatic: the old-fashioned “police state” was no longer needed.

As in the case of The Order of Things, I cannot help thinking that Foucault displays more than a little historical naïveté, or at least a certain parochialism, in his discussions of the early modern “police states.” He seems to fall prey to a simple nominalism, confusing a dislike or distrust of police, in the contemporary sense of the word, with the character of police in its ancien régime sense. As historians know, in the eighteenth century “police” was an administrative term, not an element of law enforcement. This sort of confusion of contemporary connotations of a word with its meaning at an earlier stage of the episteme (as it were) is of course absolutely incompatible with Foucault’s emphasis on distance and on the equal validity of classical and modern forms of knowledge (and power).

Foucault has not been the only scholar to argue that the paternalistic governments of the Prussian and French “police states” entailed new forms of power, forms not easily captured in works of the older schools of legal and institutional history. In The Well-Ordered Police State, for example, the historian Marc Raeff argues that the social order aimed at by eighteenth-century governments was possible only because the rulers succeeded in inculcating certain values and norms that, after a certain point, no longer required positive enforcement.

Though Raeff does not use the word “power,” he is talking about exactly the same process that is described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish and elsewhere. In a different vein, Michael Oakeshott, the conservative English philosopher, has maintained that rationalist politics are a dangerous form of power precisely because in such politics the power claims are concealed by pretentions of philanthropy and benevolence. He devoted a third of On Human Conduct to the ways in which the administration of power over people grew in early modern states, and to the psychological attitudes and dispositions underlying choices of power.

The generalizing, pointillistic style and the air of revelation of long-kept secrets with which Foucault displayed ideas well known to professional scholars obscures the force of his description of modern power. The central element of that description is his insistence on the Nietzschean position that “there can be no such thing as a truth independent of its regime, unless it be that of another,” expressed in an interview on “Truth and Power” given in 1977.

“Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power … truth isn’t the reward of free spirits … nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

In societies like ours, the ‘political economy’ of truth is characterized by five important traits. ‘Truth’ is centered on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions which produce it; it is subject to constant economic and political incitement (the demand for truth, as much for economic production as for political power); it is the object, under diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption … it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses .. lastly, it is the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation…

It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of “science” and “ideology,” but in terms of ‘truth’ and ‘power.’”

Though it is clear how the Foucault who argued this way was quite welcome to some of the revolutionaries of 1968, particularly those who wanted to destroy the university, it is equally clear that they could not be really comfortable with him for long. Foucault’s strength, which is also his weakness, is that he was never able to contemplate an example of rationality or a triumph of reason without simultaneously seeing its potential for danger—danger to the very liberation or progress which it had just helped to achieve. “How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers?” This question could almost be Foucault’s life motto.

The tendency to view power as a moral problem rather than a fact with moral effects is, of course, a common trait of the modern temper, particularly of the leftist temper, as it was once defined by the Catholic existentialist Jacques Maritain. Maritain distinguished a physiological (as he called it) from a political meaning of Left and Right. The first meaning was the more important, since it circumscribed unchangeable types of temperament. “The pure man of the Left,” wrote Maritain, “despises Being, always preferring in principle, as Rousseau put it, that which is not to that which is; the pure man of the Right hates justice and charity, always preferring in principle, as Goethe put it … injustice to disorder.”[11]

Nietzsche well illustrates the difference between Maritain’s physiological and political senses of Right and Left. He was certainly by temperament an almost pure example of the Right, yet politically he despised conservatives, especially the German nationalists who engineered the process of German political unification in 1866-71. Foucault, his modern admirer, to some extent illustrated the opposite condition. His critique of the politics of truth in modern societies, and of therapeutic domination—that is, social control in the name of health, order, or universal betterment—put at least that part of him close to the “new philosophers” and to some neoconservatives.

On the other hand, his Bataille-inspired conviction that any system is limiting, and that full life begins where the systems end, was closer to Maritain’s temperament of the Left. “The questions I am trying to ask are not determined by a pre-established political outlook … I am attempting, on the contrary, apart from any totalization—which would be at once abstract and limiting—to open up problems … that approach politics from behind and cut across societies on the diagonal.”

Following Discipline and Punish, Foucault turned to what became his last major project, the History of Sexuality. It was originally planned to be a six-volume study of modern subjectivity as expressed in ideas of sexuality. In his by now standard manner, Foucault proposed to show that this idea was a constituent of the modern episteme. The notion of sexuality as something repressed in modern bourgeois society and hence deserving of liberation was, he claimed, itself imposed by a certain epistemology and psychology.

“The self-experience whereby we have a sexual nature which is held down or confined by rules and taboos is itself a creation of the new kind of power/control. In going for liberation, we see ourselves as escaping a power understood on the old model. But in fact we live under a power of the new kind.” (Namely, the “bio-power” of mutual domination.) After volume one, which unmasked Freudian and other theories of sexual health as forms of power, Foucault changed course. The three volumes he subsequently wrote concern not the modern end of the Western episteme, but its distant origins in the ancient and early Christian “care of self.” He explained the shift and its dependence on his earlier work as follows:

“The idea was to investigate how individuals were led to practice, on themselves and others, a hermeneutics of desire … In order to understand how the modern individual could experience himself as the subject of a ‘sexuality,’ it was necessary first to extricate the way in which Western man throughout the centuries came to recognize himself as a subject of desire.

A theoretical shift had seemed necessary to analyze what was often called the advance of learning; it had led me to ask questions concerning the types of discursive practice that articulated knowledge [i.e., The Archaeology of Knowledge]. A theoretical shift had also been needed to analyze what is often called the manifestations of ‘power’; it had led me rather to ask questions on the multiple relations, the overt strategies and rational techniques that articulated the exercise of power [i.e., Discipline and Punish], It now seemed necessary to undertake a third shift, to analyze what is called ‘the subject’; it seemed appropriate to find out what were the forms and means of the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself as a subject … I had to choose: either to maintain the original plan and adding to it a brief historical sketch of this theme of desire, or to reorganize the entire study around the gradual formation in Antiquity of a hermeneutics of self. I chose the latter option, reflecting that after all for many years I have adhered to the project of disentangling some of the elements that might serve for a history of truth.”

The next three volumes, which Foucault lived to complete (the fourth volume of the work is being prepared for publication in 1986), describe Greek and Roman attitudes to sexuality and point out how many of them survived into Christianity and hence into our Western episteme. The main difference was that the Greek care of self was focused on self-mastery for the sake of civic life.

James Harkness describes Foucault’s view of the Greeks this way: “Embodied in ‘techniques of the self’ and an ‘art of living,’ the usage of pleasures imposed shapeliness on sensitive, highly charged areas of life, an order independent of intrusive legal or political enforcement.” In Christianity, on the other hand, self-restraint was commanded by religion, and the care of self came to include the care of others through the Church. This care of others gradually built up, or was built up by, a system of “pastoral power,” which was occasionally contested by medieval heretical sects and later, more successfully, in the Protestant Reformation. But Protestantism continued pastoral power in other forms, one of them being the “police state” of eighteenth-century Prussia, another being the intrusive philanthropy of the Protestant Victorians. Thus Foucault (for volume four of the History stops with the earliest Christians) produced yet another turn back to his concern with forms of power.

As James Harkness points out, the History of Sexuality, especially volumes two and three, “will be widely regarded as works of ‘gay liberation,’ aimed at historically legitimating homosexual eroticism and life-styles,” because Foucault devoted considerable space to Greek homoeroticism. Foucault, however, had no interest in presenting a brief for homosexuality; such an essentially polemical procedure was alien to his principles. On the contrary, he found in the Greeks’ thought on homosexuality precisely the point at which

“they formulated the need for the most rigorous austerities … and the principle of “indefinite abstention” … We see, in Greek culture and in relation to the love of boys, the formation of some of the major elements of sexual ethics that would reject it precisely on account of this principle: the need for symmetry and reciprocity in relations of love, [and] the need for a difficult and laborious struggle with oneself … The fact is that the demand of total abstention and the privilege granted to the question of desire introduced elements that were not easy to accommodate within the search for the usage of pleasures.”

Foucault, in the end, is perhaps less ambiguous than some of his admirers will make him. He maintained a Nietzschean neutrality toward the claims of modern doctrines, including Marxism and the vague rationalist liberalism on which the political consensus of most Western countries seems to rest. His intellectual and political anarchism, however, also led him, as we have seen, to claim that his posture of unmasking and of discovering coercive elements in every single habit, institution, and idea of human society was the only responsible one.

Yet his revelations were accompanied by a personal stance that was open to abuse by persons with political agendas that, according to his own principles, ought to be rejected. His political gestures were eclectic: he was in favor of the student rebels of 1968, the New York homosexuals in the Seventies, the “new philosophers” in 1977-79, and against Soviet repression in Poland in 1982-84. Such eclecticism allows for the selective use of his ideas for political purposes.

We should probably expect the Foucault boom on the American academic Left to continue. Its object is not the disinterested study of past ideas but the “unmasking” of contemporary American society as illegitimate. The fact that Foucault’s analysis applies equally well to that leftist ideology itself will not be recognized, partly because Foucault’s own anarchism was, finally, inadequate as an instrument of political analysis of the challenges of our time.

1. The title of Poster’s book is Foucault, Marxism and History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Information; Polity Press (Cambridge, England), 174 pages. As the title suggests, Poster argues that Foucault is doing for our modern society—where the control of knowledge and information is said to be as important as the control of material resources—what Marx did for the nineteenth century. In other words, Foucault is saving what Sidney Hook called “existential Marxism” from collapse. Poster’s claim of superior insight into “domination,” however, is itself an assertion of power—the irresponsible will to power of the tenured intellectual over the society that, by ignoring or resisting his analysis, supposedly demonstrates its moral inadequacy.
2. The second volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality has just been published in English translation by Pantheon, under the title The Use of Pleasure; 293 pages, $17.95. The first volume, The History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction, was published by Pantheon in 1981.
3. The American Spectator, December 1985, page 39.
4. Power/Knowledge, edited by C. Gordon, was published by Pantheon in 1981.
5. Foucault’s article, “Preface à la transgression,” in the issue of Critique devoted to Bataille after his death (August-September, 1963), is an interesting early version of his theory of sexuality. The essay appears in English in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by D.F. Bouchard (Pantheon, 1977). On the Surrealists in general, Foucault contributed an early book, Raymond Roussel (1963), and an article on Magritte, Klee, and Kandinsky, Ceci n’est pas un pipe, which was published as a book, with illustrations by Magritte, in 1973. (The English translation, This is Not a Pipe, was published by the University of California Press in 1983.)
6. From “La notion de dépense,” quoted by Jean Piel in Critique (August-September, 1963).
7. These remarks appear in Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985). An English version of this book, in my opinion the most interesting of all Habermas’s work (based on lectures given at the Collège de France and at Cornell), is forthcoming from MIT Press.
8. The Birth of the Clinic was published by Pantheon in 1973, The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1982. The Order of Things was published by Vintage in 1971.
9. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow; University of Chicago Press, 1982 (second edition, 1983).
10. Philosophy and the Human Sciences, by Charles Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 1985): pages 157-58.
11. From Lettre sur l’indépendance (1935), which appears in the sixth volume of Oeuvres complètes by Jacques and Raissa Maritain (Paris: Editions Saint-Paul, 1984). There is much else of interest in this passage, including the remark that “the most terrible revolutions are revolutions of the Left made by temperaments of the Right,” such as Lenin.