The Anthropological Turn: French Political Thought After 1968 0812252160, 9780812252163

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Introduction: France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology
Chapter 1. Toward a White Nationalist Europe: The Archaic Fantasies of Alain de Benoist
Chapter 2. Marcel Gauchet and the Anthropology of the State
Chapter 3. Family Ties: The Anthropology of Emmanuel Todd and the Identity of France
Chapter 4. Tracking the Sacred: The Political Anthropology of Régis Debray
Conclusion
Notes
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
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P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Z
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

The Anthropological Turn

Intellectual History of the Modern Age Series Editors Angus Burgin Peter E. Gordon Joel Isaac Karuna Mantena Samuel Moyn Jennifer Ratner-­Rosenhagen Camille Robcis Sophia Rosenfeld

The Anthropological Turn French Political Thought After 1968

Jacob Collins

U n i v e r si t y o f P e n n sy lva n ia P r e s s P h i l a d e l p h ia

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Collins, Jacob, author. Title: The anthropological turn : French political thought after 1968 / Jacob Collins. Other titles: Intellectual history of the modern age. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: Intellectual history of the modern age | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019032104 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5216-3 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Benoist, Alain de—Political and social views. | Gauchet, Marcel—Political and social views. | Todd, Emmanuel, 1951– —Political and social views. | Debray, Régis—Political and social views. | Political science—France—History—20th century. | Political anthropology— France. | France—Politics and government—1958– | France—Intellectual life—20th century. Classification: LCC JA84.F8 C64 2020 | DDC 320.01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032104

For Naomi

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Contents

Introduction: France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology

1

Chapter 1. Toward a White Nationalist Europe: The Archaic Fantasies of Alain de Benoist

37

Chapter 2. Marcel Gauchet and the Anthropology of the State

79

Chapter 3. Family Ties: The Anthropology of Emmanuel Todd and the Identity of France

124

Chapter 4. Tracking the Sacred: The Political Anthropology of Régis Debray

169

Conclusion 219 Notes 227 Index 263 Acknowledgments 275

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Introduc tion

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology

The 1970s in France were years of malaise. The 1960s had been monumental by comparison: The economy was growing at an extraordinary rate; Charles de Gaulle, a kind of living myth, was president; young radicals were protesting Western imperialism in North Africa and Southeast Asia; and a social revolution nearly toppled the government in 1968. The cinema of the New Wave, the philosophy of Louis Althusser, the fashion of Yves Saint Laurent— to name only a few—were the high cultural achievements of this decade. The 1970s, in contrast, were marked by economic recession, political fragmentation, anti-­immigrant sentiment, and the uninspiring liberal presidency of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. This change of mood had underlying structural causes: The oil shock of 1973 signaled the end of a thirty-­year period of unprecedented economic growth, and production began shifting away from manufacturing toward a service-­oriented economy. Politically, the many radical groups and movements that were created in the late 1960s were, by the mid-­1970s, disbanded, their members either “dropping out” or cleaning up their act to join more established political parties. Their hope of building new kinds of political community after 1968—more popular and egalitarian— were crushed in this atmosphere. There was, nevertheless, one promising development: In 1972, Socialists and Communists agreed to put aside their differences and run on a joint platform, striking a pact that became known as “the Union of the Left.” Shortly before the 1978 elections, however, the Communists abruptly withdrew and the coalition fell apart. The right-­wing vote had already been split between followers of de Gaulle, and President Giscard’s liberal coalition. And now with the left-­wing vote forked too, the electorate was divided almost evenly

2 Introduction

four ways, leading to a political deadlock. Thus, with the slowdown of capitalist growth and the splintering of politics, the sense of optimism that animated the 1960s’ spirit of protest evaporated and indeed left a void in the heart of French politics. The philosopher Jean Baudrillard offered an appropriate epitaph: “The loss of meaning, the end of history, the agony of politics, the transparency and indeterminacy of the social itself, the power of simulation, the omnipresence and obscenity of the media.”1 While many things were dying out in this decade, new things were taking shape too.2 In political discourse, attention shifted toward groups that had been previously marginal to mainstream politics: women, gays, immigrants, and prisoners. This was largely a product of 1960s radicalism. By the early 1970s, a wide array of feminist and gay-­rights groups brought new visibility to issues of gender discrimination and sexuality. In 1972, Michel Foucault and others, outraged by the existence of a mass carceral system, launched the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), which aimed to expose the wretched conditions of the prisons in capitalist societies: “We propose to make known what the prison is: who goes there, how and why they go there, what happens there, and what the life of the prisoners is, and that, equally, of the surveillance personnel; what the buildings, the food, and hygiene are like,” and so on.3 Finally, the most marginal of all, immigrants, succeeded in making their voices heard in France in this decade. As the historian Daniel Gordon has pointedly argued, the ex-­colonial immigrant was not only a key player in the 1968 revolts but also, for twenty years following the end of empire, the subject of sharp political controversy (around, for example, housing, labor, and immigration quotas).4 The Communist philosopher Étienne Balibar quit the party in 1980 not because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan but because a Communist municipality in the Parisian banlieues bulldozed a hostel being built for Malian workers.5 By the following decade, the indeterminacies of the 1970s began to harden, and it became clear to many that a new France was in the making. After a period marked by high unemployment, stagnant wages, and high inflation, French people were ready for a change. In May 1981, they elected for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic a Socialist president, François Mitterrand. After the bitter infighting of 1977 and 1978, this victory brought a momentary surge of excitement to the Left. Mitterrand promised a sweeping redistributive agenda that would “transform society” and “break with capitalism.” His demand-­side economic policies, however, quickly exacerbated existing problems: Deficits soared as unemployment and inflation continued

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 3

to rise. After less than two years in office, Mitterrand reversed course—the famous “U-­turn”—and implemented a number of anti-­inflationary austerity measures. Wages were frozen and transfer payments were no longer increased, contrary to Mitterrand’s promises. Even if social spending remained high by the standards of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the French had very little to show for it by the 1990s. During Mitterrand’s first seven-­year term, productivity declined, unemployment continued to rise, and social conflict was aggravated rather than pacified. In addition, membership in the mass parties of the Left, not to mention unions, had already been falling off precipitously since the late 1970s.6 After the U-­turn, these numbers tanked. The French Communist Party (PCF), once the largest party of the Left, had been reduced to a shell of its former self by the decade’s end. Between 1982 and 1987 alone it lost 100,000 members.7 Moreover, these years were characterized by a recurrent failure by the major parties to find a stable ruling coalition. The 1986 legislative elections delivered sweeping victories for the Right, forcing Mitterrand to name the conservative Jacques Chirac as prime minister. This was the first time a “cohabitation” scenario had arisen in the Fifth Republic, leaving one party in control of the executive office and another in charge of the legislature. In 1988, the parliamentary majority shifted back to the Left, and then again to the Right in 1993. The formation of solid ruling blocs has proved fleeting ever since.8 Political discourse likewise took on a more divisive, embittered tone. For the first time, Jean-­Marie Le Pen’s race-­baiting party of the extreme Right, the Front national (FN), began to achieve high returns in local, national, and European elections in the mid-­1980s. With the simultaneous formation of anti-­racist groups like SOS Racisme, the language of race, citizenship, gender, and immigration took on new importance in French public debate. On the one hand, the centrality of these issues to French discourse had been made possible by the social revolution of the 1960s, which rendered visible all the ways that the apparent consensus of the postwar miracle years had excluded women, gays, immigrants, people of color, and the incarcerated. In doing so, it demanded that new logics of the social be considered, ones that were more inclusive and egalitarian. On the other hand, the effects of this revolution were being felt at the moment when economies were slowing and budgetary pressures increasing. Once austerity measures took hold in 1983, public debate quickly assumed that some groups were entitled—at the expense of others—to a diminishing stock of welfare provisions. This was the context in which Le Pen’s movement of the Far Right gained a national foothold, pitting

4 Introduction

ethnic groups against one another and arguing that immigrants ought to be the first group excluded from these benefits. The response of Mitterrand and the Socialist Party (PS) was to push for tolerance. They defended the “right to difference” for various subgroups, and they called for initiatives supporting regional and ethnic diversity.9 Thus it happened that economic and cultural pressures—the recession and the end of empire—converged to form a new framework for talking about identity and race in the early 1980s. By the mid-­1980s, it was obvious to many French commentators that the country was moving in a certain direction: toward a neoliberal society with fragmented politics, high unemployment, and declining social solidarity. As might be expected, judgments about the 1980s—both contemporary and retrospective—were categorical and typically negative. The philosopher Félix Guattari referred to them as “winter years,” and for Alain Badiou they could be characterized as a “counter-­revolution.”10 France’s leading historian of the decade subtitled his book: “the great nightmare.”11 The 1970s were, on the contrary, indeterminate and defamiliarizing. Thus, this period can be seen as a decade in transit, one in which an old order was disappearing and a new one was emerging.12 The great ideologies that had once anchored French political identities—namely, Catholicism, communism, and Gaullism—were giving way to a new set of political logics and identities. The question I have asked myself in writing this book is, how did French thinkers write political t­ heory within this context of defamiliarization? More specifically, how did they respond to what Baudrillard called “the indeterminacy of the social”—the sense that the social, economic, and cultural bearings of France were shifting, and some new world was being made? I argue that across the political spectrum, French thinkers felt as though they were at a point zero, as though political ideas had to be invented from scratch and given new life. Thus, they turned to writing what I have called, in a loose sense, “political anthropology.”13 These were grand narratives that sought to give greater definition to “the social” by anchoring its laws and histories in the deep and sometimes archaic past. The questions they asked tended to be of a basic order: What is politics, and what are its elementary features? What constitutes a true political community? How is the individualized self to be understood in modern society? What is the French republic and what does it mean to be one of its citizens? In responding to these questions, the emphasis was always on the long unfolding of political and social concepts, and often on origins themselves. I see this as an attempt to fix meaning where it was fleeting and unstable and to overcome what must

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 5

have seemed like a troubling destabilization of social and political signifiers. Ideologically, this intellectual configuration took shape as a critique of both the PCF’s communism, now seen to be hopelessly decrepit, and the neoliberal policies implemented first by Giscard and more fully by Mitterrand. I refer to this kind of theory, first, as “anthropological” not because it was undertaken by actual anthropologists or grounded in ethnographic fieldwork but because it borrowed concepts and methodologies from the discipline of anthropology and it often purported to make universal claims about “human nature”—a term used unapologetically by some of the figures covered in this book.14 Thus, while influenced by the work of anthropologists, these thinkers were assuredly outsiders to the field, and their ideas were not likely to be accepted as legitimate by real practitioners of the discipline. Second, I refer to this type of theory as “political” not only because it focused on questions of a political nature but also because its conclusions were intended expressly as political interventions. In this way did these theories engage with a broader reading public and attempt to impact national debate and discussion. To illustrate this mode of thought, I have focused on four thinkers, each belonging to a different political-­ intellectual tradition in France: on the extreme Right, the philosopher of the “New Right,” Alain de Benoist; representing the political center, the political theorist Marcel Gauchet and the demographer-­historian Emmanuel Todd; and, on the socialist Left, the philosopher and critic Régis Debray.15 In response to the political and social impasses of the 1970s, these four thinkers developed, by the early 1980s, an elaborate political-­anthropological system, and each attempted to bring greater clarity to “the social” and define the ideal political community. Coming from diverse political backgrounds, their visions of this political order differed wildly, but the means by which they arrived at their conclusions, and the questions they asked, were remarkably similar. In what follows, I will provide a brief overview of their lives and ideas and will show how “political anthropology” has come to impact political culture in France for the last forty years.

Thinkers Alain de Benoist, born in 1943, came from a conservative, petit-­bourgeois family in the Loire Valley. As a teenager, he found his way into the ranks of the extreme Right, then dominated by ex-­Vichy collaborators and members of prewar groups like Action française and the Parti Populaire Française

6 Introduction

(PPF). At the moment of Benoist’s entry, the extreme Right was fighting to preserve the French empire in Algeria—a struggle that led a few years later to the creation of a paramilitary terrorist group, the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS). Benoist was not a member of this group but joined a student organization that had close ties with it. He spent much of the early and mid-­ 1960s writing for the far right-­wing press, especially journals like Cahiers universitaires and Europe Action, both proudly ultra-­nationalist and racist. In 1967, he decided to abandon his nationalist-­militant agenda for an intellectualized politics—“a Gramscianism of the Right” he would later call it. Pulling together friends and sympathizers, Benoist co-­founded the ultra-­ right think tank, GRECE, and launched the first issue of its flagship journal, Nouvelle école, in 1968. The movement committed itself to a philosophy of neo-­paganism, anti-­egalitarianism, and cultural essentialism. The group achieved notoriety in France in the late 1970s, and Benoist, through his hundreds of books and deep links to right-­wing movements throughout Europe, became one of the most well-­known and influential thinkers of the Far Right. By the middle of the 2010s, he was one of France’s most translated authors and a key reference for the alt-­right movement. His work and that of his associates have contributed to debates around cultural identity and belonging in late twentieth-­and early twenty-­first-­century France. Like Benoist, Marcel Gauchet’s origins were provincial and conservative. Born in 1946, he grew up in a small coastal town in Normandy. His parents were manual laborers, and Gauchet was a choirboy in the local parish. He had initially intended to earn his degree as a teacher, but, after being radicalized by university protests against the Algerian War, he decided to enroll at the University of Caen. There he studied sociology, history, and philosophy, but he also began a long intellectual collaboration with his teacher Claude Lefort. Lefort brought him into a circle of non-­and ex-­Marxist radicals, who theorized the “self-­management” movement of the early 1970s, and celebrated the democratic ethos of May 1968. Gauchet later broke ranks with this group and decided to join the political establishment. He became in 1980 a co-­founding editor, with Pierre Nora, of the centrist review, Le Débat, soon to be one of the most prestigious intellectual publications in France. Gauchet has written several commanding works of political philosophy, including The Disenchantment of the World (1985), a theory of secularization that many, like Charles Taylor, have taken to be a definitive re-­theorization of the concept. From the late 1980s, Gauchet taught political theory at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and is now recognized

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 7

as one of France’s premier thinkers. From 2007, his major undertaking was a philosophical history of democracy from the sixteenth century to the present, which occupied four volumes and some two thousand pages. In 2014, he was invited to give the keynote lecture at France’s annual history conference, that year devoted to the theme of “rebels” in history. Two young journalists at the left-­wing newspaper Libération called for a boycott of the conference on the grounds that Gauchet was too reactionary to speak on such a topic. The same year, he debated his views with the most famous living communist philosopher in France, Alain Badiou.16 Emmanuel Todd, born in 1951, is the youngest of the group, and the only non-­Catholic. He is the son of the journalist and biographer Olivier Todd— himself of Austro-­Hungarian Jewish and Anglo ancestry—and the grandson (maternally) of the French Communist writer Paul Nizan. Drawn toward communism in the 1960s, Todd joined the Jeunes communistes at age sixteen and then the Communist Party itself. A visit to socialist Hungary in 1968 changed his views, however, and he became, in his own words, “a spectacular anti-­communist.”17 His next move was to Cambridge, where, under the tutelage of Peter Laslett and Alan Macfarlane, Todd developed a deeper interest in the history and sociology of the family, inspiring him to write a doctoral thesis on pre-­industrial peasant families in Europe. Todd returned to France in the mid-­1970s and moved principally in liberal, anti-­Communist circles. In 1976, at just twenty-­five years old, Todd published La Chute finale (The Final Fall), which predicted, using bits and pieces of demographic data, the collapse of the Soviet Union. The book made waves among liberals and anti-­communists, and Todd was hailed by major intellectuals—principally historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and political scientist Jean-­François Revel—as a brilliant and promising young intellectual. He was soon given a weekly column in Le Monde, where he reviewed major publications in the social sciences. In the early 1980s, Todd found steady employment as a researcher at the Institut national d’études démographiques (INED), and his work quickly changed focus. He now looked to establish, on the basis of demographic maps and charts, a planetary atlas of kinship patterns, and to show how those patterns were correlated with political and social ideologies. The texts he wrote in this period formed the theoretical basis for all his subsequent work, including a controversial book on immigration, Le Destin des immigrés (1994); a best-­selling critique of the American empire, Après l’empire (2002); and a provocative breakdown of the “Je suis Charlie” movement, Qui est Charlie? (2015), a book that made

8 Introduction

the already well-­known Todd into a national celebrity. Todd abandoned his youthful liberalism after 1989 and devoted his energies to defending protectionist and pro-­immigrant positions. He has been a leading voice in France on both issues. Régis Debray was from a high bourgeois Parisian family with conservative politics. His parents were both top lawyers, and his mother was elected to municipal office in the late 1940s on the Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) party list. Debray rebelled and joined, like Todd, the Jeunes communistes, though a full decade earlier, as Debray was born in 1940. He was a brilliant philosophy student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1960s but was more interested in Third World politics than in the pursuit of scholarship. On the basis of an article he wrote on the Cuban Revolution in Les Temps modernes (the journal founded by Jean-­Paul Sartre), Debray was summoned to Havana by Fidel Castro himself in 1965. The next decade he spent as a political militant in Latin America, where he wrote his world-­famous pamphlet of revolutionary struggle, The Revolution in the Revolution?, and later joined Che Guevara’s ill-­fated Bolivian campaign of 1967. There, Debray was captured, tried, and given a thirty-­year sentence, though he served only three. Returning to France in 1973, he rallied to the presidential candidacy of François Mitterrand and became not only a key figure in the radicalization of the PS in the 1970s but also a staunch advocate of the Union of the Left. After serving as an adviser to Mitterrand during the latter’s first term, Debray resigned and helped start a neo-­republican movement in France, the principal aims of which were to oppose the single currency and French support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and to defend an egalitarian and secular vision of the French republic. Debray occupies a unique position within French intelligentsia: On the one hand, he is a consummate insider with close ties to powerful figures; on the other, however, an independent-­minded thinker whose positions have sometimes left him politically isolated. At turns a communist, Third World revolutionary, socialist, republican, and Gaullist, Debray has also assembled a diverse catalog of writings, which has included plays, novels, memoirs, histories of religion and art, literary criticism, political theory, sociologies of intellectuals, and satirical essays. His main theoretical text was 1981’s Critique of Political Reason, an original if often overlooked work that reevaluated, from an anthropological point of view, the religious and irrational foundations of politics. It has since guided Debray in his protean thinking about French national and cultural identity.

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 9

The four thinkers studied here are not elite thinkers on the order of Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, or Badiou. Their international reception has been, for the most part, limited. Only two of Gauchet’s works, for example, have been translated into English. Nevertheless, their impact on French political culture has been considerable. As political operators occupying key positions within the national cultural apparatus, each has found a broad readership in France. Gauchet is day-­to-­day editor of the French equivalent of the New York Review of Books; Todd is a best-­selling author and a frequent guest on France’s political talk shows; Debray has been an important opinion maker on the Left since the 1970s, sitting on influential committees, writing controversial op-­eds, and appearing constantly on French radio (especially “France Culture”); and Benoist has likewise been instrumental in making the Far Right’s voice heard in public debates, as, for instance, in the same-­sex marriage controversies of 2012‒13. Their ideas and views are considered newsworthy by the French media, and their works are typically reviewed in the leading papers and cultural magazines. If one wishes to understand the relationship between ideas and politics in France, these are the kinds of thinkers that need to be studied.

Methods of Political Anthropology The political anthropologies adopted by these thinkers shared a number of features in common, one being their common use of the “grand narrative” format of writing. The concepts, social systems, and ideologies tracked in these writers’ texts were shown to have developed over a long period of time, on the order of centuries and millennia. In Gauchet’s writing, for instance, the notion of “autonomy” was inscribed in a history that stretched back to “primeval,” pre-­Christian societies. Likewise, in Todd’s work, political ideologies could be traced back to kinship relations in premodern peasant communities. These grand narratives supposed that history was, in some basic way, meaningful; that it was not simply “one damned thing after another” but a series of interconnected events and structures that unfolded according to a certain logic. If these codes and meanings were interpreted correctly, history could be made to show the inner logic of the social and political. Famously, the philosopher Jean-­François Lyotard saw “incredulity toward metanarratives” as one of the key features of what he called “the postmodern condition.” Writing in 1979 and simultaneous with the construction of these

10 Introduction

political anthropologies, Lyotard argued that the “status of knowledge” had undergone major shifts since the dawn of modernity. Belief had been shattered in that age, making way for the rise of the sciences, which in turn introduced to Western culture new styles of argumentation and new standards of proof. Regarding the latter, Lyotard declared that “postmodern” societies measured knowledge in pragmatic terms, by how effective it was in “optimizing the system’s performance.”18 Truth procedures thus became relative to every different scientific community and were no longer subject to universal validation. Each community participated in its own “language game” and constructed “little narratives” about what qualified as knowledge. The direction of postmodern society, as anticipated by prewar Viennese thinkers like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Robert Musil, was toward a pragmatic, anti-­metaphysical outlook. Under these conditions, grand narratives could only appear as curiosities, as so many “fables, myths, and legends” that survived from the age of belief.19 While many insights are to be found in Lyotard’s short book, his main contention was overly hasty. Certainly, among French thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s, there was a movement away from grand narrative toward more experimental forms of writing. One thinks immediately of Foucault’s “archaeologies,” Derrida’s “deconstructions,” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizomes.” All of these challenged the idea that society could be comprehended by way of a single master code or structure. Likewise, anti-­metaphysical philosophers—but principally Wittgenstein and Friedrich Nietzsche—were common currency among French thinkers of this era. At the same time, however, it could not be denied that grand narrative was pervasive in French social and political theory and not only among the thinkers under discussion here. Lyotard for the most part ignored politics in The Postmodern Condition, but this was the domain in which grand narrative mattered most.20 Liberals, Marxists, radicals, and conservatives alike typically remained beholden to a style of writing that aimed to convince a wide audience of the truth of their views. They wrote to persuade beyond their immediate milieu. Even Foucault, as he came to be more politically active in the 1970s, abandoned his earlier “archaeologies,” and began to write what were obviously meta-­narratives (of, for instance, power, sexuality, and governmentality).21 Many similar examples could be cited: the political theorist Pierre Rosanvallon’s two trilogies on the history of democracy were of broad and cumulative sweep, as was the republican philosopher Blandine Kriegel’s multivolume history of the state. A similar point could be made about “structure” in this context. This term was out of fashion among France’s elite thinkers by the late 1970s, such

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 11

that thinkers like Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Foucault came to be called, with much looseness, “post-­structuralists.” Structuralism, broadly speaking, was a formalist and an objectivist way of thinking that related superficial appearances to underlying conceptual patterns.22 In structuralism’s most famous formulation, Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s structural anthropology, social institutions and customs—for example, marriage relations and myths—were linked to formal possibilities that existed in the human mind. This mode of thinking gained wide traction in French universities for much of the 1950s and 1960s, especially within the social sciences. For the post-­structuralists, however, structures were like grand narratives in that they were loaded with metaphysical assumptions and implied a sense of stability and permanence in human affairs where perhaps they were lacking. Post-structuralists thus took it upon themselves to interrogate these structures, and they typically argued that desire, power, sexuality, identity, and so on, were more convincingly seen as contingent and unstable signifiers, and hence were irreducible to pre-­given structures. Derrida’s 1967 Of Grammatology is often held to be the first major post-­structuralist text, having explicitly “deconstructed” the work of France’s two leading structural anthropologists: Lévi-­Strauss and André Leroi-­Gourhan.23 In a similar vein, Deleuze and Guattari wrote their anti-­ psychiatric theory as a refutation of Freud’s Oedipal structures; and Foucault, his theory of power against Marxist theories of history and social structure.24 Thus, it was a commonly held assumption among scholars that structuralism had been superseded and abandoned. Such announcements of structuralism’s “death” were premature however. Political and social theorists inspired by structuralism continued to search for laws and underlying patterns of thought in the 1970s and 1980s (including those post-­structuralists who had allegedly killed it). Debray’s theory of human nature in the Critique of Political Reason was undeniably structuralist in supposing that all human groups everywhere were bound by the same basic rules and procedures.25 The book was critical of Lévi-­Strauss but without calling into question the utility of structures: Lévi-­Strauss had posited the wrong laws; Debray was going to give us the correct ones. Todd’s work was likewise structuralist: All political and social ideologies were rooted in anterior kinship relations. Gauchet’s insights about the state were directly influenced by Lévi-­Strauss’s distinction between “hot” and “cold” societies (the former having both history and the state, the latter having neither).26 And Benoist’s fantasies of a rejuvenated, “white” Europe were traced back to pre-­Christian Indo-­European social structures.

12 Introduction

What the post-­structuralists disliked about structuralism—its rigidity and pretensions to objectivity—was precisely what attracted political anthropologists to it. Systems, structures, laws, and axioms were useful insofar as they could help ground political judgments in clearly delineated frameworks. In this respect, one could think of political anthropology as structuralism politicized. This procedure, to be sure, involved a degree of modification and even distortion. Lévi-­Strauss, for instance, had developed his own version of structural analysis through sophisticated linguistic and mathematical models. Myths and kinship relations were broken down into “signs” and recombined to unlock pre-­given social laws of behavior.27 The structuralism of political anthropologists, by contrast, tended to be a cruder affair: They picked and chose from its canons without worrying too much about consistency or correct usage. The historian Camille Robcis has made a similar point with regard to how psychoanalysts and policy makers in postwar France appropriated structuralist language to redefine familial and gender codes: Insofar as the concepts of Lévi-­Strauss and Jacques Lacan served their ends, they used them.28 Thus, one could say that there was a selective use of structural ideas after the 1960s but not a decisive break. Intellectually, as Peter Dews has noted, structuralism in France marked a turning away from German philosophical models toward native ones: Behind Lévi-­Strauss there lay Émile Durkheim and the entire tradition of early twentieth-­century sociological positivism, which had taken shape in opposition to what many regarded as the unscientific and literary character of the nineteenth-­century humanities.29 This was likewise true of political anthropology: Whereas the elite thinkers looked to German philosophers— especially Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Edmund Husserl—to support their post-­structural interrogations, the writers discussed here looked primarily to French anthropologists and sociologists.30 Benoist’s template for Indo-­European values was derived from Georges Dumézil, the linguistic anthropologist trained in Durkheim’s milieu in the early twentieth century. Gauchet, in collaboration with his colleagues Claude Lefort and Pierre Clastres, was steeped in the literature of French anthropology and developed his work in dialogue with Louis Dumont, Lévi-­Strauss, Durkheim, and Durkheim’s nephew, Marcel Mauss. Todd’s work was overflowing with references to native traditions in the social sciences. His classification of marriage systems was borrowed and reworked from the nineteenth-­century sociologist Frédéric Le Play, who conducted a continent-­wide survey of working families in his 1855 Les Ouvriers européens. Todd likewise incorporated the methods

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 13

of Durkheim, the Annales School of history, and Alfred Sauvy, the demographer and founder of INED, into his work. Finally, Debray was a Marxist in his early career, but by the late 1970s he was influenced more by figures like Auguste Comte, the nineteenth-­century sociologist, and André Leroi-­ Gourhan, the anthropologist and prehistorian trained by Mauss. Here, again, the preference for native thinkers reflected a politicized outlook: The search for a science of politics was at the same time a search for a French political identity. It thus made sense for these political anthropologists to cite precedents within their own intellectual tradition and build on preexisting frameworks. For instance, as the liberal tradition in France attempted to reinvent itself in the late 1970s, it established contact with its nineteenth-­century ancestors: Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Constant, François Guizot, and Edgar Quinet.31 In the methods of political anthropology, there was, in sum, an emphasis on grand narrative, structure, and native social-­scientific frameworks. One more could be added to this list: political anthropology’s “holist” approach to the study of society. Holism supposed that human collectives and their social arrangements formed a complex ensemble of “wholes”—interlocking systems were never reducible to their parts. Societies, thus, existed not as an aggregation of elementary particles but as a pre-­given organic unity. This too was a legacy of the late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century social sciences, and its leading practitioners tended to see ideas, beliefs, and practices not as a product of individual wills but as collective representations that acted on and shaped the individual. Culture and meaning were forged at the social level before becoming individual. This methodological preference disposed our thinkers toward a certain kind of analysis. For one, they tended to privilege the nonrational sources of human motivation in their political and social theory. Crucial to the work of Debray, Todd, Gauchet, Benoist, and many other thinkers in France at the time, was the idea that a political unconscious was at work, that outlooks and beliefs were formed and passed down beyond the express intention of the actors involved. For Todd, political and religious worldviews were determined within the crucible of the family. In societies where the father was domineering, political and social ideologies were likely to be authoritarian and hierarchical. Where children inherited equally, one could expect a value system that reflected egalitarian preferences. For Gauchet, social life was profoundly holist and symbolic: The key element for any group was the relationship it maintained between the “here and now”—the world of immanence—and the

14 Introduction

world “beyond.” Around this primordial division there developed a whole ensemble of political and social institutions that would incarnate and represent the sacred other.32 Only in late modernity did these symbolic structures begin to decay and lead to a society composed of individualized social atoms. Benoist, for his part, was fanatical in the belief that human beings were a function of their culture of upbringing. He proclaimed cultural belonging to be an existential and inalienable “right,” and opposed universalist doctrines on the grounds that they “strip of man of his attachments, of all the inclusive tendencies that make him share in a collective identity.”33 Debray, in terms similar to Gauchet, viewed society as a religious production, underwritten by affective and sentimental bonds. Indeed, the subtitle of his major work of political theory was “the religious unconscious.” Rationalist theories of society, in Debray’s view, had for too long overlooked the irrational core of social formations. This emphasis on holism placed our political anthropologists in an awkward relationship with two of the ideologies that had dominated Europe in the twentieth century: classical liberalism and Marxian socialism. Broadly speaking, both ideologies believed human beings to be actuated by rational self-­interest such that, in the former’s case, they would participate in a society governed harmoniously by the market; and, in the latter’s, they would band together in the interest of overthrowing the oppressive bourgeois state and institute a socialist mode of production. Neither of these traditions, it should be said, existed as strongly in France as in Britain or Germany. There were many Gallic liberals—Tocqueville, Ernest Renan, Raymond Aron—and Marxists too—Sartre, Althusser, Guy Debord—but they tended to deviate rather than conform to classical standards. Thus, when the political crisis came in the late 1970s, there was not an instinct to revert to orthodoxy. The emphasis, rather, was on reinvention, on testing new formulas. And this tended to happen on the margins of liberalism and Marxism. Benoist, coming from the Far Right, despised both liberalism and socialism, regarding them as twin faces of a coercive and spiritually bankrupt universalism. Todd and Gauchet could be considered liberals but only by stretching the term. Todd’s work had a Whiggish quality and supposed that universal literacy would push all countries toward a democratic peace. His work was liberal in this grand historical sense, but otherwise Todd was an avid protectionist who often sought to challenge liberal verities. Certainly, he did not refer to himself as one. Gauchet was also on the fringes of liberalism. His main theoretical interests were in anthropology, phenomenology, and

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 15

psychoanalysis, thus placing him at a firm distance from the Anglo-­American liberal tradition. While Gauchet kept company with French liberals in the 1980s, he was no great proponent of free markets and tended to think of himself as a “democrat” rather than a liberal. “Democracy” for Gauchet was a “social condition above all else” and referred to the difficulties modern societies faced in building a post-­religious sense of political community. His prescriptions—for toleration, a balanced arrangement of powers—could sound liberal, but they were derived from unorthodox historical and anthropological premises.34 Similarly, Debray’s Marxism was never orthodox, nor was his socialism. An avowed “Third Worldist” in the late 1950s, he was suspicious of the PCF because of its lack of opposition to French colonialism in Algeria. In Cuba, he became a leading theorist of the Cuban guerrilla army as a model of revolutionary struggle, thereby deviating from Marxist-­Leninist orthodoxies. Fittingly, the anthropological theory he produced in the late 1970s was deeply rooted in socialism but at a very sharp angle to Marxist traditions. Giving primacy to religion, nationalism, affect, and human nature eventually required him to break with this lineage altogether. In a more general sense, the holism of political anthropology made these thinkers skeptical of intellectual frameworks that accorded too much agency to the individual. “Human rights” was one of these. The concept was invoked with greater frequency in the late 1970s as anti-­communist intellectuals came to regard “the state” as an inherently totalitarian entity, against which individual freedoms needed constantly to be protected.35 Converging with this development was the emergence of “humanitarian” movements in France, organizations that aimed to provide relief for victims of political violence in the Third World. The political anthropologists treated here were hostile to these discursive formations. For Debray, who at the time was advising the Socialist Party on foreign policy, human rights talk was a means for depoliticizing the language of social conflict.36 Political actors no longer were regarded as political agents capable of effecting change but as passive victims. Gauchet wrote an influential article in an early issue of Le Débat that attacked “human rights” for pretending that the individual could be isolated from broader social categories and processes. Todd and Benoist have likewise criticized the doctrine for delegitimizing collective action. In this respect, holism was a deeply ingrained feature of the political-­anthropological imaginary. The methodologies outlined above, it should be stated, were adopted within a distinctively French set of imperatives. Historically, the articulation of different forms of political community in France has occurred in and through

16 Introduction

competing anthropologies. For instance, the many strands of Catholic political thought that developed across the nineteenth century did not merely disagree with, say, republicanism on questions of policy: rather, they espoused an entirely different conception of human beings and their place in the mundane social world. Joseph de Maistre and his fellow ultra-­reactionaries refused to grant to republicans that people could be imagined as abstract and equal entities. For him, human beings could not be stripped of and, in fact, had to be seen as inscribed within their earthly cultural attachments. Likewise, French positivism and socialism overlapped on a number of key points, but they were fundamentally at odds in their interpretations of the movement of history and the formation of political communities within it. Thus, at a basic level, modern French thinkers have understood political theory to be a cultural-­ anthropological project involving not only the formulation of policies but deeper propositions about the nature of the sociopolitical world. For this reason, French thinkers have demonstrated a marked tendency to invoke the language of the “symbolic” in their attempts to conceptualize politics. As Lynn Hunt has noted, “The exercise of power always requires symbolic practices,” but the French Revolution had a way of bringing “the process of symbol making into particularly sharp relief, because revolutionaries found themselves in the midst of revolution before they had the opportunity to reflect on their situation. . . . They invented their symbols and rituals as they went along.”37 Politics in France has required a vision not just of how to rule but also of how to institute symbolic forms (i.e., how sovereignty would be characterized and represented, what kind of religious order would be established within the polity, and so on). This is not a trivial matter in a country that, since the Revolution, has seen five republics, two empires, two German invasions, monarchical rule from two different dynasties, and a number of revolutions. Politics offers a sense of possibility in France in a way that it never has in Britain and the United States. Finally, French political theory developed in close collaboration with the social sciences. This was not unique to France, but it bears noting how strongly intertwined the two projects were. Indeed, the search for new languages of political community after the Revolution was at many points inseparable from the emergence of the modern social-­scientific disciplines: Sociology was, in the hands of Henri de Saint-­Simon, directed toward a socialist program; positivism, under the auspices of Jules Ferry, toward a republican one.38 Thus, the pattern for a particularly French political anthropology was established in the nineteenth century.

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 17

Nevertheless, the configuration I am describing in this book developed within a specific twentieth-­century conjuncture. The 1960s in France, among other things, unsettled notions of power, symbol, and community. French thinkers gave new attention to these perennial issues, and, in the process, reinvented political anthropology. There was also a new body of anthropological literature from which to draw—namely, the structuralism of Lévi-­Strauss and Leroi-­Gourhan. One can speak here of a “turn” to political anthropology in a loose sense then, as the adoption of a common set of questions and problematics, unique to the political conjuncture, and not as a spontaneous invention of the moment.39 It is not as though political anthropology will cease to exist once these thinkers stop writing. Very likely, it will assume a new shape in the next major reconfiguration of the symbolic.

Themes With these methodological positions came a set of recurrent themes in political anthropology. Most prominent among them was an emphasis on religion and the sacred. All four were professed atheists, but they nevertheless were convinced of religion’s continued relevance to the modern world. For Todd, it was “at the heart of all logical and historical interactions,” acting as the pivot between the founding matrix of kinship relations and the modern ideological patterns that grew out of them. Secularization was, in his view, structurally linked to literacy and became inevitable once this threshold was crossed. But religion was never entirely unmade according to Todd, since “men instantly replace the vanishing image of the city of God with the new image of the ideal society.”40 Political ideologies were merely secularized religious concepts. Benoist, for his part, believed religion to be foundational for the social in a different sense. He characterized himself as a “neo-­pagan” and believed, along with Nietzsche, that Europeans had once practiced a religion that was spontaneous, vital, and creative, but which had, over many centuries, been obscured and corrupted by the shallow, life-­denying morality of Christianity. Judeo-­Christian messianism uprooted local traditions and folkways and led to a bland uniformity across cultures. Only by reappropriating the sacred along pagan lines, Benoist argued, could Europe undo the damage of monotheism, and return to its authentic origins.41 Debray and Gauchet formulated theories of religion that not only were original but also were arrayed in symmetrical opposition to one another.42 In

18 Introduction

his Critique of Political Reason, Debray argued that group formation obeyed a religious logic: Communities were always organized around an absent Other, which supplied the group with a common focal point and a reason for congregating.43 In modernity, the rise of capitalism and science brought chaos and mobility to communities, straining their sense of cohesion. The effect was not, as one might suppose, to have eroded the appeal to the sacred but rather to have strengthened it. Disenchantment provoked a furious drive toward re-­enchantment. Thus, the twentieth-­century surge in religious fundamentalisms and irredentist nationalisms were not outlying occurrences for Debray but were intimately connected to the new pressures placed on the sacred. Like Debray, Gauchet thought primitive societies relied on the notion of an absent Other, but argued, in contrast to Debray, that the process of secularization had begun with the advent of monotheism around 3000 BCE and had proceeded slowly from this point forward. The key innovation of Judeo-­Christian religion was to have anthropomorphized God: Giving him a personality and, later, an incarnation, worked to familiarize and domesticate the once-­unknowable world of the beyond. By the eighteenth century, the cosmos had been thoroughly disenchanted, and human beings now had to find meaning and purpose within the terrestrial world. Echoes of a religious worldview could still be found in political discourse, notably in twentieth-­ century totalitarian movements, which sought to reproduce the collective fervor of religious sentiment. But these were no more than aftershocks of a demystified universe, bound to fade away in time. Judeo-­Christian religion had thus proved to be the “religion for exiting from religion.”44 Religion was thus figured as a central issue in this period of transition. As social bonds were felt to be disintegrating across the 1970s, thinkers reexamined the collective representations that had once held society together. Their respective analyses shared much in common, as, for example, the idea that official religion was in decline and that its death was producing mutations and pathologies in the body politic. For Gauchet, it led to an existential crisis for the individual, who was now deprived of metaphysical comforts; for Debray, it produced terrifying re-­enchantments in the form of religious fundamentalism and ethnonationalism; for Benoist, it pulled human groups farther from their sacred origins; and, for Todd, it created “zombie” forms of religion—zealotry without belief. Todd gave pithy expression to an idea they have all held implicitly: “We need to take religion seriously, especially when it starts to disappear.”45 The idea that the secularization would loosen social bonds likewise haunted nineteenth-­century French social theory. For Tocqueville, religion

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 19

was as “natural to the human heart as hope itself. . . . Disbelief is an accident; faith alone is the permanent state of humanity.” In America, Tocqueville admired how religion supported, rather than hindered the democratic spirit of civil freedom and equality. In Europe, by contrast, religion was so bound up with the Old Regime that when the latter decayed, so too did Christianity: “It is a living thing that someone wanted to attach to the dead: cut the bonds that hold it back and it will rise again.”46 The innovative sociology of Frédéric Le Play and Durkheim also viewed religion as a structure for maintaining the coherency and stability of society, and thus as a potential salve to the disorders brought by industrialization in the nineteenth century. All four thinkers discussed in this book were concerned with the nature and power of the state as they assembled their political anthropologies. During the 1968 revolts and after, this matter was posed with great urgency. Radicals agreed that it was necessary to smash the power of the state, but how? And what would replace it, if anything? Had the state almost fallen in May 1968, or had it merely wobbled momentarily? These questions echoed through the 1970s and reached a climax in the 1978 elections. Socialists and Communists supporting the Union of the Left tended to believe that the working class was too weakened to overthrow the state through collective action, thus leaving the parliamentary road as the last and only option. By working in concert, the two mass parties of the Left could win a majority in the National Assembly and institute socialist policies through democratic channels. This was the thinking of, among others, Debray, who upon returning to France from Latin America in 1973 immediately joined the political team of François Mitterrand and campaigned hard for the success of the Union of the Left. During the Union’s heyday, Debray helped the PS carve out a political strategy and later became, during his tenure as an adviser to Mitterrand in the 1980s, a leading theorist of French republican socialism. It was in this context too that socialist thinkers like Nicos Poulantzas and Blandine Kriegel published their theories of the state in the late 1970s, hoping to obtain greater clarity about what a socialist politics of state would entail.47 Members of the non-­Communist Left took a very different view of this question. For many in this camp, the state was always and everywhere an agency of domination. Thus, the main problem with the theory and politics of socialism, they claimed, was its ongoing obsession with state power. This view was argued forcefully by Gauchet’s mentors, Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis, who had been members of a sectarian Trotskyist offshoot in the 1940s, and developed through the 1950s and 1960s a virulent critique

20 Introduction

of Stalinism and state socialism.48 They greeted the May 1968 revolts with jubilation, seeing in them a break with the old statist language of the Left: Students were now expressing the desire to live without masters, to communicate openly with one another without the specter of a state looming overhead.49 Fundamentally then, 1968 was for them a democratic, libertarian revolt, and it died only after being commandeered by the old institutions of the Left—the party and its trade union (the Confédération générale du travail, or CGT). After the May revolts, this libertarian current remained politically active and developed into a larger movement known as autogestion, or workers’ self-­management. Here the idea was to encourage workers to take control of factories and make decisions—regarding production and wages— on a democratic, communal basis.50 On this grassroots model, democratic socialism could be instituted from below, and it thereby managed to circumvent the state without directly challenging it. As the Union of the Left gained momentum after the 1974 election, nearly beating Giscard in its first presidential bid, this current of the non-­Communist Left began to amplify its anti-­statist, anti-­Communist rhetoric. In 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel The Gulag Archipelago was published in France, and it immediately electrified this atmosphere. The PCF attacked the book as so much anti-­Soviet propaganda, and the non-­Communist Left responded by accusing the party of being pathological in its blindness to communism’s crimes. From Lefort and then Gauchet there followed a wave of texts denouncing the inner “totalitarian” nature of communism.51 These prompted in both thinkers a deeper consideration of the state itself, for which they drew heavily on an anthropological literature distinguishing between statist and non-­statist societies. Similar re-­theorizations were performed on the non-­Communist Left in the late 1970s, notably by Foucault and the writing pair of Deleuze and Guattari, all of whom engaged, like Lefort and Gauchet, with the evidence and analyses of anthropologists in their efforts to rethink the nature of the state. For the remainder of the decade, the anti-­totalitarian critique of Lefort and Gauchet came to dominate French political discourse, though in a cruder form. The idea that socialism always and inevitably led to the Gulag was seized on by a group of ex-­socialist thinkers—the so-­called Nouveaux philosophes (New Philosophers)—and made into a national rallying cry against the Union of the Left.52 To invoke this equation—socialism = barbarism—was a sure way to grab media attention, and thus the trope was publicized endlessly and quickly seeped into French political writing. Todd, a staunch liberal in the late 1970s, argued in his second book, Le Fou et le prolétaire (1979) (Madness

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 21

and the Proletariat), that the Communist Party was authoritarian and psychopathic and should be blocked at all costs from achieving state power. For Todd, the Left’s defeat in the 1978 elections looked as though it would hollow out the PCF and enable the French working class to once again lead a normal life.53 Finally, the Far Right also drew upon this “totalitarian” language. This political tradition was already disposed to regard the French state as an instrument of Jacobin tyranny. The anti-­totalitarian motif allowed Benoist and his circle to sharpen this line of attack: Totalitarianism was not only the product of the exercise of power but also, more pointedly, “the product of l’esprit égalitaire, and its corollary, l’esprit économique.” Even value systems, when taken over by the state, could be coercive and “totalitarian.”54 Another theme common to these thinkers was that of citizenship. In a broad sense, their work could be described as an attempt to determine which sociological group constituted the true subject of French society. Was it the working class, immigrants, a white-­collar salariat, or elites? This question too was posed by political and social theorists with a great sense of urgency in the late 1970s. As France underwent a number of sociological and economic shifts in that decade, its self-­conception began to dissolve. For one, it was now widely perceived that the working class was a disappearing force in French society.55 Some claimed that a rise in living standards during the postwar economic boom had absorbed workers into an expanding middle class. By the 1960s, blue-­collar families could afford to have a television, an automobile, and a comfortable house. Others argued that workers remained proletarianized, but in forms not readily visible as such. They now participated in a largely hidden informal economy and were unlikely to be unionized or even hired on a permanent basis. Either way, social classes were thought to be disintegrating and, with them, the familiar foundations of French political identity and discourse.56 By the mid-­1980s, it became a commonplace to argue that French society was no longer composed of anything but a collection of atomized individuals. A similar shift took place at the level of political discourse: Parties stopped relying on the language of class and class struggle. The PS referred to those “most in need” through the 1980s, and typically steered away from class-­ based rhetoric. Jacques Chirac, in his successful presidential campaign of 1995, cleverly avoided “class” by speaking of “social fracture,” which referred to a growing gap between elites and the popular classes.57 The term was taken from a policy paper written by Marcel Gauchet but wrongly attributed to Emmanuel Todd. In general, political discourse during the postwar economic

22 Introduction

miracle was structured around themes of inequality. The emphasis tended to be on how wealth and welfare provisions could be fairly distributed among large social groups. Its language was broadly inclusive, even if, in practice, certain groups benefited more than others (namely, white male wage earners). By the early 1980s, however, discourse had shifted toward exclusion and tended to favor one social group at the expense of another. This was perhaps clearest in the discourse that emerged around “immigration” in the 1970s. While migrant workers from France’s North African colonies had been a key part of the French industrial labor force since the 1920s, these were typically males who came alone to the metropole and whose presence in the country was largely invisible. After World War II, the French state encouraged family immigration from Italy and other European countries, while at the same time discouraging it from African and Asian countries. The government provided Algerian migrant workers with modest accommodations in the hopes that women and children would not be tempted to immigrate. But with the end of empire and with the growing gap in living standards between Europe and the Third World, immigrant families came to France in larger numbers than ever and became a much more visible presence in the country. In 1974, President Giscard officially halted immigration. The decision was prompted by the oil shock of 1973, which brought recession to the economy and fears of rising unemployment.58 From this point forward, immigrant families featured much more prominently, and often negatively, in national discourse around citizenship in France. It was in this climate that political anthropology attempted to redefine the basis on which political community could be conceived. For Debray, the solution lay in reviving a now-­lost republican nationalism. To be a French citizen was to swear to the Revolutionary trinity of liberté, égalité, fraternité. It was also to accept that the republican nation was the common point of identification between French citizens, the absent Other Debray had written about in his Critique of Political Reason; and thus that signs of religious affiliation needed to be removed from public space. Debray recognized that political elites were trying to scale back the welfare state and neutralize the language of class struggle. He hoped that by putting aside cultural differences and uniting in fraternal solidarity, ordinary French citizens could resist neoliberal fragmentation and reclaim their share of social wealth. Gauchet was likewise bothered by the dissolution of collectivist frameworks. The net effect of society’s disenchantment was to isolate the individual and deprive him or her of social bonds. He worried that French society

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 23

would soon be composed of nihilistic individuals with no collective purpose or vocation; that it was now facing the terrible prospect of “civic desertion.” Unlike Debray, however, Gauchet welcomed the abandonment of a class-­ oriented politics. Writing of the proletariat, he remarked, “Did it not, by and large, fulfill its real historical mission, rather in spite of . . . its ideological mission of total emancipation: to become included as a social partner in the collective process after being hitherto reduced to silence and kept outside of social decision making?”59 The destiny of the proletariat was not to make revolution but to become assimilated into bourgeois society. Now that this had occurred, French society could stop pretending that class was an important category of analysis and could adopt a different rhetoric of collective identification. For Gauchet, this has involved replacing class-­oriented language with politically liberal demands: the need for civic engagement, political debate, and a secular school that instills in citizens a sense of collective purpose. The questions of citizenship and political identity were likewise accorded special privilege in the work of Todd. For Todd, a country’s political culture typically reflected the values of the family type that was dominant in that society. In Germany, for example, an “authoritarian” family structure prevailed, which lent a certain severity to German political and social ideas. In Russia, a communitarian family structure emphasizing equality among siblings was the principal family type, thus its communist ideology reproduced these underlying values. France, however, was unique among nations in having a diverse arrangement of family types such that no single one dominated. Its political culture rested on diversity, openness, and contestation. Yet, by the 1990s, the rise of neoliberalism and the adoption of the single currency through the Maastricht Treaty began to endanger this favorable anthropological endowment. A group of inequality-­loving elites was running the country, and the culture of openness and toleration that once characterized the republic faded away. Exclusion and anti-­immigrant sentiment became more pronounced in this atmosphere, and Todd defended the rioters in the predominantly Arab suburbs of Paris from their nativist critics in 2005. In 2015, the “Je suis Charlie” movement demonstrated for Todd the hardening of these exclusionary and defensive attitudes. The millions of French people marching in sympathy with the members of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine who were murdered in a terrorist attack fit a very specific sociological description. They were white, middle-­class ex-­Catholics whose religious hatred had been reactivated by the specter of a militant and politicized

24 Introduction

Islam.60 Todd’s work in the 2000s has been devoted to challenging this sense of embattled whiteness, which he regards as a dominant feature of French political culture. Todd also came to see France’s immigrant populations as the force that will help restore the country to anthropological balance and drown out the hate-­filled voices of middle-­class whites. Finally, the theme of “identity” featured most strongly in the work of Benoist and the New Right. This was a point of obsession for the group and structured its entire cultural-­intellectual program. Benoist and his confederates believed that a new elite could one day rise in Europe and help bring about a totalizing revolution in values. This elite was not defined in social or economic terms: Europe’s capitalist grandees were, for the New Right, materialistic and morally bankrupt power brokers. Rather, Benoist preferred to see the elite in cultural terms, as a spiritual aristocracy that was in profound communication with the original and authentic values of European culture. Benoist held it to be axiomatic that one’s life only reached its full creative potential within the context of one’s group of origin. To be removed from this immersive experience or to have outside elements invade one’s culture was, for the New Right, unnatural and painful. Therefore, cultural mixing was not to be tolerated, nor were value systems to be imposed from the outside. The task for a spiritual vanguard lay in recovering Europe’s lost and original folkways, which the New Right located in an idealized and remote “Indo-­European” past. For modern-­day scholars, the idea that there was a coherent “Indo-­European” culture stretching from the Eurasian steppe to Western Europe was highly speculative. But for Benoist and the New Right it was a firm ethnographic reality, and the group regretted that the Indo-­ Europeans’ spirit of hierarchy and its emphasis on life-­affirming warrior values had been overtaken by Judeo-­Christian ideas of equality and self-­ abnegation. The group took it upon itself to disseminate ideas that referred back to and were consonant with Indo-­European values. To this end, it established publishing houses, think tanks, journals, cultural clubs, and even youth camps to revive these lost ideas. Thus, from the moment of its creation, the New Right was an elitist organization militating for the return to a white pagan European identity. It refused to compromise on these principles. When, for instance, the Front national soared in popularity from the mid-­1980s onward, Benoist refused to endorse the organization because he saw it as too vulgar and populist and too rooted in Catholic ideas. Benoist was hoping that when the New Right’s moment came, its revolution would be deeper and more paganistic.

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 25

Cultures of Anthropology What were the deeper sources of this intellectual configuration? Political anthropology as practiced by these thinkers was not entirely new in the Western tradition. In fact, modern thought began as political anthropology, its break from late medieval thought having corresponded to the “discovery” of non-­European peoples in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Americas formed a powerful backdrop to the political theory of Thomas More, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke; in France, the line of thinking that began with Michel de Montaigne and extended through Jean-­Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot was shaped around (imaginary) encounters with the non-­ European. This was more than a device for criticizing European society, as historians of the Enlightenment have emphasized.61 It was also an ingenious technique for discovering, on a universal basis, the constitution of human nature and the social modalities that could be deduced from it. Anthropology thus enabled the construction of political community from a different and compelling vantage point.62 After the Revolution and through the nineteenth century, anthropology became a much more professionalized “discipline” in France. In 1859, the leading anthropologist of his day, Paul Broca, founded the Society of Anthropology of Paris, and, in 1872, he launched the Revue d’anthropologie. Broca was trained in medicine and believed strongly in the biological, scientific vocation of anthropology.63 His own work attempted, through techniques like skull measuring, to link intelligence and behavior to racial physiology. Broca thought his findings could be useful for the purpose of carrying out social reform. French anthropology was formed powerfully in these racialized, quantitative methods. Connected to this development were the demands of a growing empire. France’s colonial bureaucracy, expanding through the 1860s and 1870s, wished to know the cultural habits and traditions of the peoples whose territory they now governed. It sponsored ethnographic studies that captured local populations in their irreducible otherness. These surveys helped the empire categorize and rank its colonial subjects, and thus informed the character of its rule over them. Many of France’s leading anthropological thinkers had been enrolled for this purpose.64 With the growth of empire and the professionalization of the discipline, there arose a popular culture around anthropology. The first anthropological museum in France (and the world) opened its doors in 1878, the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadero, which was founded by the Ministry of

26 Introduction

Public Education and housed in the grand Trocadero Palace on Paris’s right bank.65 Parisians were already able to see nature’s wonders on display in the Museum of Natural History, an institution established by the Revolution in 1793. Now they could also view the culture and artifacts of “primitive” and “exotic” peoples, exhibited in dioramas with life-­size models.66 These displays were enormously popular with the museum-­going public such that different collections within the Trocadero later became their own separate museums. Artists too drew inspiration from the exhibits they saw there. Picasso was hypnotized by the primitive power of the African masks he saw one day in its collections, and claimed to understand at last “why I was a painter.” He added, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon [Picasso’s famous painting from 1907] must have come to me that day.”67 Indeed, twentieth-­century French culture was thoroughly saturated with the imagery of the primitive and exotic, from Art Nouveau furniture to Surrealist painting to the fashion of Yves Saint-­Laurent.68 Around the time Picasso discovered African masks, anthropology was given a new intellectual direction with the work of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim. His aim was to provide a comprehensive science of society and to understand in particular what laws and institutions held society together. Durkheim was writing at a moment of great divisiveness in French society. Socialists, liberals, republicans, and conservatives were competing for dominance in the Third Republic and were resorting increasingly to sectarian political language. In this respect, the situation was not unlike the one that occurred decades later in the late 1970s. Different political ideologies came to offer wildly different and incompatible visions of the ideal French political community. These conflicts were aggravated by a number of related tensions: industrial strife, greatly feared by the ruling classes after the Paris Commune; discord between Church and State; and, of course, the calamities of the Dreyfus Affair, which brought France to the brink of civil war. These events produced, in the words of a historian of sociology, “a strong public demand for sociological expertise.”69 Durkheim responded to this call. He first drew up a general theory of social order (Division of Labor in Society, 1893), then elaborated a set of methodological principles (Rules of Sociological Method, 1895), and later applied those principles to sociological research (Suicide, 1897). In the process, Durkheim developed an impressive range of concepts to study the problem of social cohesion. He invoked the idea of a “collective consciousness,” the set of shared beliefs, ideas, and attitudes that acted as a unifying force within society, and forged bonds of “organic solidarity.” When individuals broke away from these social institutions and

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 27

began to act as atomized units, they disrupted social cohesion and introduced “anomie”—a condition of general normlessness and malaise—into the social order. Anomie was associated by Durkheim with the loss of a particular way of life. Finally, in his late summa, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim added a religious dimension to his social analysis, formulating the famous sacred-­profane dichotomy: “Sacred things are things protected and isolated by prohibitions; profane things are those things to which the prohibitions are applied and that must keep at a distance what is sacred.”70 The sacred referred to a transcendent realm beyond the here and now; and the profane to the mundane reality of the everyday. Religion was the attempt to keep these two realms separate—a process that was constantly reaffirmed through ritual. For Durkheim then, religion helped a society maintain a sense of unity and cohesion against the anomic threats of disorder. Durkheim’s impact on the French social science was far-­reaching. He invented and standardized the modern discipline of sociology and, for anthropology, he shifted its focus away from the physical and racial concerns of Broca toward the cultural and religious ones that later became more widely adopted in the twentieth century. Durkheim’s influence was spread principally through the journal he founded in 1898 with his colleagues and students, L’Année sociologique. Its purpose was to carve out an autonomous terrain for the nascent discipline of sociology and endow it with intellectual legitimacy. It soon became one of the most cutting-­edge journals in prewar France and featured the work of young and soon-­to-­be-­eminent intellectuals, including François Simiand, Robert Hertz, Célestin Bouglé, Henri Hubert, and, of course, his nephew and prize pupil, Marcel Mauss. Mauss was an anthropologist who built on and expanded his uncle’s conceptual repertoire. Durkheim often invoked “social facts” as the basis of his sociology—the modes of thinking, expectations, and behaviors that came from the broader social community and socialized individuals. In his well-­ known book from 1923, Essai sur le don (Essay on the Gift), Mauss analyzed gift exchange in primitive societies as a “total social fact”: It was “total” by virtue of its deep interconnection with moral, juridical, aesthetic, religious, and political norms. Gift exchange was more than just a swapping of items; rather, it was a “social symbol” that created different bonds and obligations among members of a society.71 Through this fragmentary glimpse of a culture, a whole world of structures and representation could be unlocked. This idea was in turn picked up by a young Lévi-­Strauss and reworked to help form the backbone of his “structural anthropology.” He was a late

28 Introduction

convert to the discipline, having first studied philosophy in the 1920s. With funding from the Trocadero museum (reopened in 1936 as the Museum of Man), he carried out his fieldwork in the 1930s in the jungles of Brazil, described memorably in his 1955 literary classic, Tristes tropiques.72 During World War II, Lévi-­Strauss was living in exile in New York, where he wrote Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1949), the book that made him famous and “created” structural anthropology. He later made clear his debts to both Durkheim, who “incarnated the essence of France’s contribution to social anthropology,” and Mauss, who “freed” it of its provincialisms and applied it to the study of society as a whole. In his own work, Lévi-­Strauss aspired to make “anthropology” a universal science, with the ability to provide an “inventory” of human nature and “to reconstruct the past of primitive societies.” Thus, the project of Rousseau and the philosophes was reborn in Lévi-­Strauss: to study, on a universal level, what human beings share in common, and how they differ, at a particular level, as members of a cultural unit.73 Lévi-­Strauss insisted that moral judgments on these differences should be suspended: Cultural relativism was preferable to the old evolutionist narratives that justified European colonialism. The feat of Lévi-­Strauss was to make anthropology both a heroic humanism, seeking to delegitimize notions of cultural and racial superiority, and a scientifically rigorous discipline that could discover “laws” of social behavior.74 The discipline’s appeal was thus widely felt in the postwar period. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu recalled of his own intellectual formation in the 1950s: “For the first time, a social science imposed itself as a respectable, indeed dominant discipline. Lévi-­Strauss, who baptized his science anthropology, instead of ethnology . . . ennobled the human science that was thus established, by drawing on Saussure [the early twentieth-­century Swiss semiotician] and linguistics, and turned it into a royal science.”75 Others, like Debray, found a certain romance in Lévi-­Straussian anthropology. He recounted an internal dialogue he had with himself during his student years: Would he remain in France and pursue a humdrum academic career, or would he venture afar and commit to “the choice made by Claude Lévi-­Strauss”?76 Thus, a whole generation of students became enamored of anthropology through this impressive figure, who was capable of writing not only a work as scientifically commanding as the Elementary Structures but also an ethnographic narrative as incomparably rich and literary as Tristes tropiques. The Swiss-­born filmmaker Jean-­Luc Godard, for instance, studied anthropology at the Sorbonne in the 1950s before becoming the greatest cineaste of postwar Europe.

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 29

The younger generation, however, was not entirely uncritical of Lévi-­ Straussian anthropology. In the 1960s, many students of the discipline felt that structuralism was still too hermetically sealed off from the world of social struggle. Pierre Clastres noted, for instance, “This elegant discourse, often very rich, does not speak about society. We want to talk about society,” insisted Clastres, “tell us about the society!”77 Responses to the political inadequacies of structuralism pushed out in two different directions. On the one hand, there developed a specialized academic literature attempting to politicize structural anthropology. Lévi-­Strauss’s most brilliant pupil, Maurice Godelier, for instance, established a bridge between structuralism and Marxist materialist analysis in the 1960s and helped strengthen a new field of French anthropology: the study of non-­Western economic systems. While Godelier’s work implied broader political judgments, it was nevertheless of a technical character and intended mainly for professional audiences.78 Similarly, the anthropology of Emmanuel Terray and Claude Meillassoux did much to reconcile ethnography with Marxist political economy in the 1970s. Their work was, like Godelier’s, rigorous and innovative but still highly specialized and limited to academic readers.79 On the other hand, there was a looser, more general movement of ideas aiming to politicize the findings and methodologies of anthropology. This was the “political anthropology” under discussion in this book and, in seeking to anchor narratives of French society in social laws and grand histories, it brought together the humanist and scientific sides of Lévi-­Strauss’s work. Those writing in this mode were not specialists; rather, they were politically minded intellectuals looking to reach broader political conclusions. The narrative techniques they found in French anthropology, the conceptual focus on collective representations and social solidarity, the attention to social laws and institutions, and the interest in the “primitive” were all useful to political theorists in framing contemporary social and political dynamics in France. The political-­anthropological systems they created in the process became key foundations and narratives for understanding the nature and direction of the French republic.

Late Twentieth-­Century Intellectual History of France There is now in the field of late twentieth-­century French intellectual history a significant and expanding historiographical literature. The development is a recent one, since for years historians in both Anglo-­and Francophone

30 Introduction

contexts preferred to write about the intellectually fertile period between the Liberation and May 1968, the decades of Sartre, Lacan, Lévi-­Strauss, and the intellectual movements associated with them. The last third of the century— the post-­1968 era—has, by comparison, received much less attention. A notable exception was the American political theorist Mark Lilla’s launching of the “New French Thought” series with Princeton University Press in 1994. While this project introduced a number of relatively unknown but significant French thinkers to English-­speaking audiences, it was framed within placidly liberal, teleological terms. In his introduction to the series, “The Legitimacy of the Liberal Age,” Lilla complained that French thought since the Revolution had considered “liberalism”—in the Anglo-­American sense— to be “unworthy of sympathetic study.” Diverse intellectual currents, from existentialism to structuralism and Marxism had “all agreed that liberalism was illegitimate.” But now at last, reported Lilla, “the French themselves have turned a critical eye toward this heritage, provoking a strong reaction against its most representative figures . . . [and] prompt[ing] serious reconsideration of a long-­standing Continental illiberalism. … Young French thinkers today sense themselves to be living at the end of something—if not at the end of history, then certainly at the end of a history that has defined their national political consciousness for nearly two centuries.” Marxism was dying out, France’s revolutionary exceptionalism could no longer be assumed, and for Lilla this signaled that “a ‘revival’ of liberalism in France” was taking place.80 Thus, the last third of the century could be seen as the much-­needed normalization and sobering up of French thought. A wave of new studies has brought a more interesting and nuanced set of perspectives to the post-­1968 period. These include two assessments of the legacy of 1968: Kristin Ross’s May ’68 and Its Afterlives (2002) and Julian Bourg’s Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (2007); Michael Scott Christofferson’s study of anti-­totalitarianism in the 1970s, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (2004); François Cusset’s history of “French theory” and its reception in 1980s America, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (2008); Camille Robcis’s study of kinship and familialism as a keystone of French republican discourse, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (2013); Emile Chabal’s analysis of political discourse in 1980s and 1990s France, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (2015); and, finally, Stefanos Geroulanos’s exploration of

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 31

the many ways the concept of transparency was deployed in the Fourth and Fifth Republics, Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (2017).81 While these original and valuable studies differ in argument and method, a few generalizations could nevertheless be offered. Most strikingly, all have given wide coverage to thinkers and political actors who are not of international renown but who are nonetheless important for understanding local dynamics. Thus, they look at publicists, politicians, bureaucrats, thinkers unjustly (or justly) neglected, and party militants, among others. For instance, in Christofferson’s history of the “antitotalitarian moment” in 1970s France, the reader spends as much time with the journalist and editor of Le Nouvel observateur, Jean Daniel, as he or she does with the world-­famous political philosopher Raymond Aron. Similarly, in Bourg’s work, Maurice Clavel and Bernard-­Henri Lévy appear alongside Foucault and Deleuze as pioneers of the post-­1968 “ethical turn.” In Geroulanos’s kaleidoscopic history of transparency, overlooked figures, such as the philosopher Dionys Mascolo and the ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, are given a new hearing, as are debates and exchanges that have long been forgotten.82 Naturally, this shift toward non-­elite and neglected thinkers has led these historians to consider different kinds of sources too: reports by think tanks, transcripts of television talk shows, the archives of obscure study groups and academic workshops, films, and detective novels. All of this has shed new light on the complex intellectual and political landscape of late twentieth-­century France. Likewise, the widened sociological and intellectual scope of these histories has opened the way for new kinds of arguments. Broadly speaking, the above-­ named studies tend to focus not on the explanation of elite thinkers’ ideas, as many intellectual histories once did, but on the formation of political ideologies and discourses in twentieth-­century France. The works of Ross, Bourg, and Robcis have, for instance, identified and historicized different forms of consensus in this period. For Ross, the history of May 1968 was just as much about the way French actors—novelists, historians, and politicians—banalized and conjured away “May,” as it was about barricades and student-­action committees. The political experiment of May ultimately became a cipher in the 1970s and 1980s: “Disembodied, increasingly vague in its contours and plural, even inchoate in its aims, it was thus more available to treatment as a purely discursive phenomenon: a set of ideas rather than a political event.”83 Thus, it was often said throughout the French public sphere that “nothing happened in May,” that it was purely a cultural phenomenon.

32 Introduction

Bourg is more upbeat about what the aftermath of May had wrought: a consensus around the importance of “ethical” attitudes, broadly conceived. In organizing new action groups and focusing their attention on local, as opposed to “macro-­systemic” issues, activists coming out of the 1968 movements effected a “transvaluation of May’s contestatory categories.”84 Foucault’s founding of GIP (Groupe d’information sur les prisons) and gay activist Guy Hocquenghem’s attempt to establish a sexual ethics were examples of how rhetoric had shifted across the 1970s to reflect an increased preoccupation with interpersonal and juridical concepts. For Bourg, the development of a “human rights” discourse in the late 1970s conformed to this new inclination toward the “ethical.” Finally, Robcis’s study tracks the making of a powerful republican consensus around questions of filiation and sexuality in France. The animating impulse behind this “republican social contract” could be traced back to the Napoleonic Code (France’s civil code), but, as Robcis shows, French anxieties about homo-­parenting and sexual difference were powerfully refueled and made “structural” in the writings of Lévi-­Strauss and Lacan. The arguments they made about the “symbolic”—the institutions and social structures that separated the human from the natural world—gave new legitimacy to these deep-­seated familialist prejudices. The potency of this implicit republican contract was revealed in the 1990s, when legislators considered passing both a bioethics law, which would regulate assisted reproductive technologies, and the Pacte civil de solidarité (PACS), which would establish a series of rights for cohabiting couples. In both cases, lawmakers were influenced by “anthropological, psychoanalytic, and legal ‘experts,’ ” who warned that such measures would erode the symbolic foundation of the republican body politic and would jeopardize France’s republican heritage.85 Thus, as these examples illustrate, this literature has specialized in unearthing intellectual structures and discourses that had been previously imperceptible. These studies have also made new arguments about the transmission and reception of ideas. Here Cusset’s French Theory is exemplary, offering a detailed account of how Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and other French philosophers were received and reinterpreted by American Comparative Literature and English departments in the 1980s. Cusset’s story is multilayered, showing not only how certain thinkers were translated under certain circumstances— how, for instance, Derrida was used by the “Yale Deconstructionists”—but also how the broader concept of “French theory,” an American invention, came to serve a wide-­ranging set of political interests during the conservative Reagan era in the United States. Cusset writes of how, for example, “Foucault’s

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 33

works . . . had an impact on the profound evolution that was taking place in the arena of American feminism, shifting from essentialist humanism to radical constructionism,” and also how “French theory” became a convenient designation for conservative pundits scapegoating the radicalism of American universities.86 In Emile Chabal’s history of the 1980s and 1990s, A Divided Republic, political ideas are constantly in circulation, moving seamlessly between professors, party officials, and journalists. To give one example, Chabal shows how the idea of a “société bloqué” (the stalled society) came to have wide currency in the last two decades of the twentieth century. It was coined by the French sociologist Michel Crozier, who had borrowed it from his erstwhile colleague at Harvard University, historian Stanley Hoffmann, and used it to designate the ills afflicting contemporary France (too much bureaucracy, lack of civic dynamism).87 By virtue of Crozier’s personal influence on Jean-­ Jacques Servan-­Schreiber, a leading journalist, and Michel Rocard, a popular politician, the idea became a commonplace of French political rhetoric in the 1980s and 1990s, employed indiscriminately by Left and Right.88 Like these other studies, The Anthropological Turn: French Political Thought After 1968 is a history of contemporary political and social ideas in France. The central chapters are devoted to four thinkers who have been overlooked in historical scholarship, but whose intellectual systems could not be understood without reference to Lévi-­Strauss, Durkheim, Dumézil, Le Play, and others. It seeks, along with the above-­named histories, to give a contextualized account of French political thought not only to explain the ideas of four different thinkers but also to show how they were conceptualized and received in France’s public sphere. In a more specific way, this book also traces the development of a certain intellectual configuration, one that has allowed thinkers of different outlook and temperament to make similar kinds of arguments about politics and society in contemporary France. Finally, The Anthropological Turn is likewise interested in how different systems of thought were translated and received in France—in particular, how late twentieth-­century theorists reworked the ideas of anthropologists to serve their own political and intellectual ends. More than any of these studies, this book indexes the formative role played by the French social sciences in contemporary political thought. Indeed, The Anthropological Turn departs from these histories in some significant ways. For instance, what I am calling “political anthropology” is of a different character from, say, Robcis’s idea of the “structuralist social contract” or Bourg’s “ethical turn.” Those designations refer to a distinct position

34 Introduction

or set of positions within French thinking about politics and society—issues around which consensus is possible. Political anthropology is more like a “paradigm” in the sense of Thomas Kuhn; that is, a shared set of beliefs and assumptions about how to interpret the social world.89 In this respect, political anthropology is a broader and more thoroughgoing intellectual structure than the ones identified by the historians named above. Indeed, there is space within it to construct widely diverging narratives and perspectives: from the extreme-­right anti-­egalitarianism of Alain de Benoist to the fraternal socialism of Régis Debray. Hence, The Anthropological Turn is the first study in this field to give systematic attention to a broad spectrum of political ideas, covering thinkers from Left, Right, and center. What advantages does this spectrum motif offer? First, it captures the sense in which thinkers are caught up within competing political allegiances. For instance, much of Benoist’s work has entailed shoring up an intellectual identity for the extreme Right against liberal and republican values. Gauchet, a centrist thinker, has typically positioned himself against the politics of the Far Left. While the scholarship described above has enriched our understanding of particular French traditions, discourses, and political issues, it has not always honored the spirit of political divisions in France, and it sometimes minimized them. Robcis’s book, for example, brilliantly demonstrates how intellectuals from widely different political backgrounds—some were conservative, some were members of the PCF—came to defend republican familialism along similar lines. But one is sometimes left to wonder if all these thinkers were likely to see themselves as “republicans” in the same way, if at all. What prior political commitments influenced their decision to take a particular stand against the bioethics law or the PACS? Second, the spectrum analogy also enables a more synoptic view of France’s political-­intellectual landscape. In providing invaluable critical histories of the center and center Left, the histories named above have passed over much of what has been happening on the ends of the political spectrum—especially the Far Right—at a time when these political forces have been highly active.90 Only Chabal, in the last few pages of his book, has devoted any space to the Right, and there he rightly acknowledges “the urgent need to tell the story of the French right since 1981.”91 Indeed, opening the study of political ideas to a wider array of traditions and thinkers is necessary for understanding the extent to which intellectual life in France is a constellation of competing forces, a “battleground” in Kant’s well-­known phrase.

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology 35

Likewise, these historians have been vague in their attempts to characterize this period politically. All have more or less agreed that the decline of a once-­vibrant Marxist intellectual tradition indelibly shaped the political contours of this era. Cusset has stated this most succinctly: “In a dozen years [roughly 1978‒1990], theory in France has moved from the Marxist dogmatism of yesterday to the abandonment pure and simple of Marxian critical thought and its relegation to the exegetes or the nostalgic.”92 What have been the political consequences of this development? A move toward a republican synthesis in the 1980s and 1990s? A resurgence of classical liberalism? The language of these historians has tended to be circumspect: for Chabal, it is an “age of uncertainty”; for Geroulanos, an era pervaded by a sense of “anxiety.”93 This book, rather, sees political and cultural developments unfolding within a neoliberal transformation that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and deepened across the 1990s and 2000s with the move toward the single currency. Insofar as there were uncertainties and anxieties, they should be tied more specifically to the implementation of this neoliberal program and the dismantling both of France’s welfare state and of the political forces that had supported it.94 With the erosion of political solidarity over these decades came a new emphasis on culture in the thought world of neoliberalism; that is, more attention was given to questions of “identity,” “community,” and religion. With a few very notable exceptions—the public-­sector strikes of 1995 and the gilets jaunes protests of 2018 and 2019, for instance—these were the issues that defined French political discourse in the neoliberal era and preoccupied the thinkers treated here. The American political theorist Wendy Brown has referred to this process as the “culturalization of politics” and suggested that, where politics becomes cultural, it “eliminates colonialism, capital, caste or class stratification, and external political domination from accounts of political conflict or instability.”95 This has been the dominant pattern in French thought since the 1970s: Indeed, the turn toward political anthropology has been a turn away from the kinds of analytics named here by Brown. The thinkers covered in this study, however, were not passive bystanders to this transformation, nor were their ideas simply “symptomatic” of it. Rather, they were key participants in a cultural dialogue that has structured and reinforced this transformation. Finally, The Anthropological Turn differs from these other histories by virtue of its methodology. Of course, no single method or technique could be

36 Introduction

said to characterize all of the above-­named studies. Geroulanos, for instance, presents a “semiotic” history of transparency, tracking more than twenty different uses of the term across theory, film, and literature; Cusset sees his book as a “genealogy . . . of a creative misunderstanding between French texts and American readers”; and Ross calls hers a “collage of individual, sometimes ephemeral, subjectivities.”96 The studies of Bourg, Chabal, Christofferson, and Robcis are structured around key themes or “moments”—readings, controversies, or events. The Anthropological Turn, by contrast, is organized predominantly on a biographical basis. It devotes separate chapters to each of the four thinkers, and it traces the development of their political anthropologies across the history of the Fifth Republic. Priority is given to their work from the 1970s and 1980s, but, as much as possible, I try to follow the broader arc of their intellectual output from the 1960s to the 2010s. In adopting this approach, I have aimed to give systematic rather than passing attention to each thinker and to show how their ideas were shaped contextually through different political and institutional commitments. My hope is that this organization of the material will highlight some of the ways that individual thinkers lived their ideas in time and fashioned a political subjectivity through them. It also offers the opportunity of viewing and criticizing a thinker’s work as a unified whole. I have refrained from commenting too directly on the ideas and texts of the authors treated here, choosing instead to accept their methodological premises and thereby allowing their contradictions and tensions to develop immanently through the presentation of their work. A brief evaluation of “political anthropology” is offered in the book’s conclusion.

Chapter 1

Toward a White Nationalist Europe The Archaic Fantasies of Alain de Benoist

Only a few weeks before the May 1968 events erupted in Paris, a group of young disaffected members of the extreme Right met in Lyon and formed the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (Group for the Research and Study of European Civilization), or GRECE (the French word for Greece). This organization, and the journals, clubs, and think tanks that were formed around it, have become known as the “Nouvelle Droite” (New Right), a term that has not been accepted by the group’s members. The group has seen itself as a “metapolitical” movement; that is, it has eschewed direct participation in official politics and dedicated itself to the spread and entrenchment of the ideas and values of the extreme Right—not only in France but throughout Europe. The New Right gained considerable traction in France through the 1970s, until two events seemed to precipitate its decline: first, a media backlash in 1979, when the mainstream press accused the group of being a thinly disguised neofascist organization looking to make an entry into politics; and, second, the meteoric rise in the 1980s of Jean-­ Marie Le Pen’s party of the extreme Right, the Front national (FN). The New Right’s leading thinker, Alain de Benoist, regarded the FN as crass populism and demagoguery, and, in his elitism, refused to endorse this mass party. It was widely thought that the New Right would disappear, as did many other groups of the postwar extreme Right.1 However, after fifty years, the New Right is still an active intellectual force and has outlasted almost every party and group that was created on the Far Left in and after 1968. Alain de Benoist is one of France’s most translated authors and a well-­known intellectual presence in the country. If anything, the group’s influence has steadily grown over time. Since the Great

38 Chapter 1

Recession of 2008, it has attracted a wide following among neo-­and alt-­ right movements in Europe and America and it has contributed stridently to recent debates in France concerning race, marriage, and religion. This chapter looks at the development of the New Right across the 1970s and 1980s and focuses on the way it has mobilized identitarian language to build a following in Europe. In contemporary political discourse, “identity” is typically associated with the politics of the Left, in particular with the efforts of marginalized groups to win social recognition. The concept has its own history and sensibility on the Far Right, and Benoist and the groups around him have accorded it a central place in the politics and worldview of the New Right. To this end, Benoist has constructed a series of complicated anthropological narratives—not always consistent—that have sought to reinforce the superiority of an original and perhaps lost white European culture. This chapter traces those lineages and also calls attention to the rhetorical strategies—often theological and magical in nature—that the New Right has adopted in service of its ideological program. Throughout, I avoid referring to the New Right as a “Fascist” movement. Though its ideology is indistinguishable from fascism on many points, the group and its thinkers have no political, and certainly no paramilitary presence to merit this label. Instead, I see the New Right as a counterrevolutionary force in the older tradition of Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, that is, as a movement seeking to negate calls for revolution on the Left and to assert its own vision of a new revolutionary order. It was in response to the leveling ideology of the French Revolution that the ultra-­conservative de Maistre and de Bonald issued their philosophy of reaction. Likewise, the New Right can be understood as formulating a reciprocal response to demands for racial and social equality in the era of decolonization and popular left-­wing mobilization. Its obsession with race and identity was at once an imitation of and an attempt to reverse radical ideas already in circulation on the Left. The New Right’s ideas were typically drawn from the Right, but its positioning and articulation of them owed much to the political conjuncture of the 1960s.2 Alain de Benoist was born in 1943 and grew up near Tours, a medium-­ sized city in the Loire Valley. Though educated in Paris, he always identified with France “periphérique” as against the cosmopolitanism of urban France. In the 1950s, Benoist’s father purchased a summer home for the family in the town of Dreux (also in the Loire), the very town where Jean-­Marie Le Pen’s Front national made a key electoral breakthrough in the early 1980s. There, Benoist met Henry Coston, a veteran of the interwar Right and author of



Toward a White Nationalist Europe 39

countless diatribes against the foreign elements supposedly polluting France: freemasons, bankers, and Jews.3 He invited a seventeen-­year-­old Benoist to contribute to a volume on French political movements. The protégé chose to write on Action française, and impressed Coston with his writing. The latter then introduced Benoist to Dominique Venner, an activist within two organizations of the extreme Right: Jeune nation (Young Nation, JN), a right-­ wing nationalist group established by ex-­Vichy collaborators in 1949 and devoted to preservation of the French empire (through both the Indochina and Algerian Wars); and JN’s student branch, the Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (Federation of Nationalist Students, FEN), founded in 1960 after President de Gaulle allowed the Algerians to decide their own fate by referendum in the fall of 1959. Through Venner’s influence, Benoist joined the FEN in 1960. This was an organization of counterrevolutionary militants fighting intensely for the preservation of French Algeria. Benoist recalled the atmosphere on the student Far Right at this time: “Every day I followed the details of this struggle as it played out in different parts of Algiers and Oran. I knew by heart the topography of Bab-­el-­Oued and El Biar [neighborhoods of Algiers].” With the battle for Algeria, Benoist and the FEN were not merely looking to hold down France’s colonial peoples but to “detonate . . . a second French Revolution.” As Benoist explained, “We wanted to use and instrumentalize this movement because we thought the principal front was not in Algeria, but the metropole. In other words, for us, it was Paris that needed to change regimes.” What exactly this entailed for the groups was left unspecified, but Benoist felt this sentiment set him and his collaborators apart from most of the partisans of French Algeria, who were fighting for patriotic reasons.4 For Benoist, the point was not to preserve something that already existed but to stage this struggle as the first theater in a much larger revolutionary war. As a militant within the FEN, Benoist took on both intellectual and activist responsibilities. He toured France, distributing flyers and leaflets in town squares, often sleeping in the woods for lack of money for proper accommodations. The FEN’s parent organization, Jeune nation, was an illegal, clandestine entity with strong connections to the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS)—a paramilitary group that formed in 1961 and carried out targeted assassinations and terrorist acts in the name of keeping Algeria French. Though the FEN was the “respectable” face of Jeune nation, there was naturally much traffic between the two groups. Benoist recalled fellow students storing weapons and explosives among their books and papers. Members of

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the FEN “knew by heart the songs sung by the parachutists (a regiment formerly serving the French Foreign Legion and now the OAS). It was the only nontraditional song FEN members were allowed to sing.”5 Indeed, many of Benoist’s friends were arrested for seditious activities in the last years of the Algerian conflict. Benoist himself seems to have had little stomach or aptitude for this side of the group’s work and managed to avoid serious legal trouble. It was Venner who was largely responsible for pushing the extreme Right in a new direction after the Algerian War. Born in 1935, Dominique Venner was a die-­hard white nationalist, rabid anti-­communist, and the son of a militant in Jacques Doriot’s fascist Parti Populaire Français (PPF) in the 1930s.6 He immediately enlisted as a volunteer in the Algerian War, serving there until 1956. Later that year, he participated in the ransacking of the PCF’s offices in Paris following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. In 1961, Venner joined the OAS and was arrested when its networks were raided by the police. After serving an eighteen-­month sentence, he was released and wrote the key manifesto for the young rightist movement in 1962, Pour une critique positive (Toward a Positive Critique). The text renounced terrorism as a political strategy—“a desperate act” that “cuts one off from the population”—and looked instead to establish an above-­ground political movement.7 It would be composed of a highly trained and dedicated corps of elite revolutionaries, whose intensive political education would allow them to penetrate the manipulations of the French state and move closer to the national revolution. The model here was Lenin: If Marx’s work was “immense, confused, and unreadable,” Lenin transformed it “into an effective tool of political warfare.”8 Indeed, Venner sought to create the party of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?—a group of disciplined, professionalized militants whose priority would always be the revolution. In 1963, Venner launched a new journal to help carry out this program, Europe Action. Benoist came on board almost immediately, as did a number of sympathetic young radicals who had been part of the FEN network. Ideologically, Europe Action broke with the “traditionalism” that had distinguished both the interwar and postwar Right. Charles Maurras’s strategy for Action française was to rally around the army, the Church, and the aristocracy. For Venner and company, however, this was no longer held to be tenable in the post-­Algerian situation. An editorial in the first issue made this resoundingly clear: “The Army has shot at children singing the Marseillaise in Algiers; the Church has blessed the conversion of its cathedrals into mosques; and notables have condemned the revolt of activists. In fact, traditionalist society is



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dead, as the great crisis in Algeria has revealed.”9 Even the hard-­line, “integral” nationalism of Action française—placing the good of the nation above all else—had been tainted during the Algerian conflict. “It was in the name of national interest and grandeur,” argued Europe Action, “that the bloody amputation of France’s colonies had occurred.” French nationalism, even at this fever pitch in the war against Algerian independence, implied a set of rational-­strategic interests that might lead to moderation and compromise. Thus, it seemed particularly urgent for the extreme Right to invent a new political language and identity. In place of Maurrassian “traditionalism,” Venner and Europe Action offered a new ideological configuration: a politics of militant, pan-­European white supremacy, directed specifically toward young Frenchmen. All positive references to Catholicism were dropped: Europe Action was to be an anti‒Judeo-­Christian, pro-­pagan outlet. In line with this revision, Venner and company embraced Teutonic culture and drew freely from German authors, whereas Maurras had memories of 1870 and saw Germany as France’s archrival. Europe Action likewise rejected the romantic individualism that sometimes appeared in the rhetoric of Action française, especially through the influence of the novelist Maurice Barrès, doyen of the French extreme Right. It was Benoist who attacked this notion, and struck the portrait of the new militant: “The party spirit, the spirit of the partisan, that is to say, the spirit of the one who takes part consists in putting his individualism at the service of the collective, and not becoming a subject within it. . . . Nothing is more contrary to it than anarchic and sterile individualism.” Benoist then drew attention to the physical characteristics of the nationalist militant. Ideally, he should be young because “the young nationalist possesses energy and enthusiasm, and also brute physical strength. Isn’t there a need for youth that is muscular and tense with a kind of cruelty that makes it beautiful and noble? We need young men who are superb and agile beasts [fauves superbes et souples] and who forget what fear and death are.”10 The true militant, he claimed, was rock hard in relentless pursuit of the cause: “The struggle for life is not child’s play: there can be no comfort.”11 Benoist’s book from 1965, Le Courage est leur patrie (Courage Is Their Homeland), valorized the OAS in similar terms: Their superior heroism and militancy had nearly managed to save French Algeria.12 Thus did Benoist endow the nationalist partisan with a hyper-­masculine ideal. Implicitly, the contrast was with women of course, but also with non-­ white men.13 Those in Benoist’s milieu and Benoist himself obsessively feared the rise of the racially oppressed through anti-­colonial struggles. Accordingly,

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they held emotional investments in the white supremacist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia—on which Benoist had written separate books14—and defended Portuguese colonialism and U.S. segregationism. Moreover, Benoist’s language was a pastiche of Nietzsche—the “superb and agile beasts” a sly reference to Nietzsche’s “blonde beasts.” If this imagery resonated with readers, it was because it had been used so frequently by writers of the interwar Right, though especially Louis-­Ferdinand Céline, Ernst Jünger, and Robert Brasillach. Their writing too had eroticized and racialized the struggle for a new a masculine ideal.15 Venner and Europe Action also transformed the meaning and emotional resonances of “nationalism.” Their “nationalist revolution” had nothing to do with Vichy, Action française, or the glory of France. Rather, it became a transnational rallying cry for the embattled white inhabitants of Europe. In the words of Jean-­Claude Valla, a member of Europe Action and Benoist’s closest collaborator until Valla’s death in 2010, “Nationalism had always been inscribed in the heritage of Maurras, Barrès, and [Édouard] Drumont, and could feel quite old-­fashioned; but the fifth issue of Europe Action provided a new definition: ‘A doctrine that expresses in political terms the philosophy and vital needs of white people.’ More than a doctrine, this was an entire world view.” For Valla, it was natural to think that the world in which white people ruled was coming to an end: “This is where our rage came from. This notion had been inculcated in our schools. I remember looking at the map of the French empire in our history books and on our classroom walls. These immense red areas were our pride!”16 For Europe Action, it was the universalistic creeds of liberalism and communism—twin faces of the same pathology—that threatened to engulf Europe: “From East to West,” the editorial read, “the transformation of men into machines of production and consumption, standardizing their needs, opinions, and behavior, is already well advanced.” In the West, which referred predominantly to America and Britain for Europe Action, there was the unbridled reign of capitalism, set in motion by Judeo-­materialist agencies: “When one speaks today of the defense of the West, how can one not invoke the names of Rothschild and Wall Shert [sic]?”17 The Soviets were worse though, for they not only directly suppressed the peoples of Europe—in Hungary, for example—but also stoked rebellion among “the colored peoples” of Asia and Africa—“people incapable of the high capacities of Europeans.”18 Europe was under siege, and it had to be defended from the barbarisms of America, Russia, and Africa.



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To wage this war, Venner and his confederates distanced themselves from the interwar Right and fashioned their movement as a generational revolt. Members of the old guard still dominated the postwar milieu of the extreme Right: Maurice Bardèche, nephew of Robert Brasillach, launched Défense de l’Occident (Defense of the West) in 1952; Lucien Rebatet, Vichy collaborator and author of Les Décombres (The Ruins), began a right-­wing newspaper Rivarol in 1951; and Action française changed its name to the much blander-­ sounding Aspects de la France after the war, but it barely changed personnel. Benoist fondly recalled lampooning these right-­wing dailies with Venner: Aspects became “Crapspects,” for example.19 The strategy of Europe Action was to lure young militants away from these organizations by appealing to their youth: The journal’s rhetoric and imagery was much more violent than that of competing publications; and the many political cartoons that adorned its pages presented a graphic and an irreverent commentary on the news. Europe Action was, nevertheless, to be a short-­lived enterprise, and collapsed in 1967 because of internal discord. The journal’s political wing— the Rassemblement européen de la liberté (European Movement for Freedom)—dissolved in the same year after posting miserable electoral results, and Venner’s publishing house, Éditions Saint-­Just, folded as well. Venner himself was a talented organizer, being, by all accounts, charismatic, intelligent, and credibly battle tested (having fought briefly in the OAS). He was also a temperamental person—Benoist calling him “demanding”20—and never remained too long in any one organization. Following the dissolution of Europe Action, Venner announced that he was quitting politics, and he founded the Institut d’études occidentales (Institute of Western Studies) under the patronage of Thierry Maulnier, a grandee of the interwar Right. In 2013, amid the protests against marriage equality, “Manif pour tous,” Venner shot himself dead in front of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris—a final act of rebellion against a France overcome by Muslims and gays. His suicide note was read aloud by a friend on Radio Courtoise: “I believe it necessary to sacrifice myself to break the lethargy that weakens us” and to combat “invasive individual desires that destroy the roots of our identity, notably the family, the intimate foundation of our multi-­millennial civilization.”21 Remarkably, fifty years after serving in the OAS, the specter of equality could still drive Venner to madness. The dissolution of Europe Action and its affiliates left a hole on the extreme Right. Benoist and others were determined to carry on with the valuable work of defending Europe, and they organized in the autumn of 1967 a

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reunion for members of the FEN in the Vendée. There they announced their intention to launch a new review, to be named after Georges Sorel’s syndicalist movement, Nouvelle école. The first issue appeared in the winter of 1968, just a few months before the student protests broke out in Paris, and shortly before the formation of GRECE. The review mapped out Benoist’s new vision for the Far Right. It renounced political militancy, which had served only, in Benoist’s view, to further marginalize the Right during the Algerian conflict. Instead, Nouvelle école aimed to focus on building a cultural movement, one that would generate and spread new ideas. For Benoist, authentic political transformation first required an intellectual one: “Cultural and intellectual work,” he claimed, “contributed to this evolution of the mind by popularizing certain values, images, and themes, and by breaking with the established order and with the values of the dominant class.”22 A fellow traveler of the New Right put the matter succinctly at a conference in 1982: Its mission was “to recognize the importance of the theory of cultural power, which is not about parties preparing for the accession to political power, but about transforming mentalities to promote a new system of values.”23 Benoist and his co-­founders referred to this program interchangeably as a “Gramscianism of the Right” and “metapolitical” action. These two coinages were themselves indicative of the New Right’s flare for canny rebranding. The allusion to Gramsci figured in a larger strategy of co-­opting the critical and revolutionary legacy of the Marxist tradition. Benoist often made passing references in his writings to Althusser and other Marxists, and even claimed that he imagined the New Right to be a kind of latter-­day Frankfurt School. Of course, the journal was at its core deliriously anti-­communist and held Bolshevism to be largely responsible for the suppression of an authentic European identity. Think of all the German art and architecture that was destroyed by the Red Army, said Valla, Benoist’s number two and the future president of GRECE. There was also the killing of German civilians: “No one ever speaks of these ‘holocausts,’ ” he wrote.24 “Metapolitics,” however, was taken from the extreme Right tradition in France. It was associated with the counterrevolutionary theory of Joseph de Maistre, who understood it to mean an alternative metaphysics of politics, one that would concede nothing to the philosophical assumptions of the revolutionaries. In this fashion, the New Right styled itself as one of the “neither right nor left” movements that had been so popular during the interwar period, the only difference being that the New Right—here Benoist displaying his talent for the vacuous rhetorical gesture—was both right and left.



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Benoist has tended to exaggerate the novelty of Nouvelle école and the degree to which it broke with Europe Action. In his memoir, he presented the founding of the journal as the outcome of a deep Cartesian examination of his ideas: “I wanted to submit all my views to a critical test, to sort out, in a way, the true ideas that could be conserved from the false ideas that had to be abandoned. I was conscious of making a double rupture: first with extreme right, second with political action. The latter seemed to lead nowhere.”25 Nevertheless, many of the founding members of Nouvelle école had taken part in Europe Action, and most of the fledgling journal’s ideas and strategies were taken straight from Venner, like, for example, the idea of building a cultural movement of the Right and of using Marxist thinkers as a positive point of reference. Benoist claimed to have renounced the nationalism of Europe Action and moved toward a pro-­European politics, but this latter point, as we have seen, had already been a key feature of Venner’s vision. Indeed, it was while writing for Europe Action that Benoist, in Valla’s recounting, “multiplied contacts with young nationalists abroad, notably the Italians, Germans, and Flemish who were in the same frame of mind as us.” The common link, Valla continued, was a certain idea of Europe, abstract, eternal, and embattled: “We imagined we could find in the most deeply rooted but dominated communities the springs of energy that could no longer be found in the hexagon.”26 Indeed, the New Right was forged as a transnational European movement, and this has been the source of its continual strength since the late 1960s. In May 1968, an organizational structure was created around Nouvelle école: this was GRECE. Its function was to be, on Benoist’s insistence, strictly metapolitical, acting as a forum for the discussion of right-­wing ideas, and a cultural meeting place for the extreme Right. GRECE held annual reunions, ran a summer school in Provence, organized film screenings, published specialized reviews—with titles like Nation-­Armée and Nouvelle éducation—and established permanent offices in Paris. Relaxed as this sounds, GRECE nevertheless saw itself as an elite society with a strictly controlled membership. Recalled Valla, “Each new adherent of GRECE became first a ‘member in name only.’ By virtue of his merits, he could hope to become ‘an associated member,’ then an ‘assistant member,’ and finally a ‘founding member.’ ”27 Many leading figures of the New Right were there at its inception: Benoist and Valla, of course, but also Charles Champetier, Jean-­Claude Rivière, Giorgio Locchi, Pierre Vial, Maurice Rollet, Pierre Bérard, and many others.28 Benoist wanted GRECE to replicate Ferdinand Tönnies’s idea of Gemeinschaft, group solidarity based on organic, rather than contractual ties: “At

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one point we proposed doing our own ceremonies for births, marriages, and deaths—always careful not to fall into sectarian practices. The ideal was not only the ‘complete man,’ which accorded with all our ideas about living life, but also Zusammenleben, living together—a term that today is a little misleading. It was about creating a counter-­culture.”29 There were rites and ceremonies of initiation, though these were soon abandoned (for reasons—chilling no doubt—left unspecified). Under the aegis of GRECE, the Mouvement de scoutisme Europe-­Jeunesse (the Young-­European Scouting Movement) opened its first camp in 1973. According to Valla, this was less a traditional “scouting” organization than a camp for political education: “It was about reuniting once a year boys ages sixteen to twenty who belonged to organizations of the ‘extreme Right’ and whom we wanted to see evolve politically. . . . It seemed wise to let them profit from our experience and to encourage them to reflect on the meaning of their engagement.”30 Likewise, GRECE pressed “for a renewal of popular cultural traditions. With a view toward re-­enracinement, great feasts were organized in every region of the country on the occasion of the summer solstice.”31 GRECE’s first years were shaky. Of its thirty-­six founding members, twenty left within the first year because, in Benoist’s view, “they were not interested in ideas.”32 Most of these early adherents—twenty-­seven—had belonged to the FEN, and were perhaps looking for a more activist organization. GRECE nearly collapsed from this initial exodus. In addition, the same groups from which Europe Action and GRECE had tried to steal members struck back vindictively. Nouvelle Action française (New Action française, NAF) planted militants posing as anti-­racist protesters at GRECE events, and distributed dossiers against GRECE at the meetings of left-­wing organizations. In the early 1970s, it launched a campaign against what it perceived to be GRECE’s pro-­abortion stance. The article in question had been written by Valla in 1969 and, in fact, took a moderate position, arguing that contraception was preferable to abortion, but that abortion should not be criminalized. A wave of denunciatory articles was written in the NAF’s journals in 1972, and some of its members apparently showed up to a GRECE seminar armed with pickaxes. GRECE filed a defamation suit and came away with 1,000 francs in damages.33 These attacks came as GRECE’s influence started to grow in the mid-­ 1970s. Maurrassian Catholics had long been dominant on the extreme Right in France and did not appreciate being outmatched by a pack of neo-­pagans. They saw the latter as dissemblers and assumed the New Right was a neofascist



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organization looking for a way into the political mainstream.34 GRECE was indeed emerging from obscurity. Benoist and Valla were now writing for a conservative weekly magazine, Valeurs actuelles, which brought their views to a wider audience and helped teach them the basics of journalism. The latter they attributed warmly to the guiding hand of Jean Loustau, former French volunteer of the Waffen-­SS, posted in the “Kurt Eggers” regiment.35 At Valeurs actuelles, Benoist and Valla were also able to recruit some of their fellow journalists into GRECE, notably Michel Marmin, an expert on cinema and the future president of the organization. Moreover, Nouvelle école became a slicker operation by the early 1970s. Its first eight issues were crude productions, mimiographed and bound together with staples. By 1969, it was a serious-­looking publication, with an attractive layout and theme-­oriented numbers, on, for example, “communism,” “Indo-­ Europeans,” and “biology.” It also had a prestigious committee of patronage that included many intellectual luminaries of the previous generation: Thierry Maulnier, Jules Monnerot, Raymond Abellio, Louis Rougier, Stéphane Lupasco, and Hans Eysenck. In 1973, GRECE transformed its internal bulletin into a monthly journal, Éléments, intended as a more popular digest of the New Right’s ideas. Soon after, it founded a publishing house, Copernic. One of its first ventures was an anthology of Benoist’s columns from Valeurs actuelles, Vu de droite (Viewed from the Right). Astonishingly, it won a jury prize from the renowned Académie française, on which sat Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Georges Dumézil, and other leading French thinkers. In 1974, the Club de l’Horloge (Clock Club) was created by three founding members of GRECE, Yvan Blot, Jean-­Yves Le Gallou, and Henry Lesquens. The club was conceived of as an elitist laboratory of ideas in the style of an American think tank and looked to recruit students from the elite Institut d’Études Politiques who were on their way to a careers in politics.36 As such, its relationship with GRECE was ambiguous; there was a broad continuity in their ideas—against equality, for the “right to difference”—but the club expressed impatience with the group’s metapolitical strategy and wanted to have a more direct influence in politics. Inevitably, this meant toning down the racist, identitarian language and embracing more conventional views. At first, the club advocated a Darwinian politics of neoliberalism—social winners emerging through an ultra-­competitive market. By the early 1980s, this was modified into a Reagan-­style neoliberalism, which saw the market as a way of reviving French national glory. For the time being, there was room enough for GRECE and the club to exist on the Far Right without conflict.

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In the 1974 presidential election, GRECE backed the liberal Valéry Giscard d’Estaing against François Mitterrand, joint candidate of the PCF and PS. This was both the politique du pire—anything was preferable to having the Communists in power—and opportunistic: “It was important,” wrote Valla, “to make GRECE an indispensable interlocutor, to build the respectability of its image. This was absolutely necessary if we were going to continue to invite top personalities to our conferences and demonstrations.”37 Courting liberal opinion at a moment of red scare was a shrewd strategy. Between the presidential election of 1974, which Giscard won by a hair, and the legislative elections of 1978, which featured losses for the Left and precipitated a deeper rift between the Socialists and Communists, GRECE’s influence was at its peak. Doors were opened for members of the New Right. In 1975, the right-­wing newspaper magnate Robert Hersant—a tried and convicted collaborator— acquired the daily Le Figaro, and delegated the paper’s cultural reporting to Louis Pauwels, a journalist and the author of a 1960s classic on the occult and Nazi esoterica, Le Matin des magiciens (Morning of the Magicians).38 Pauwels was asked to create a supplement to Le Figaro that could rival the cultural influence of the center Left’s Le Nouvel observateur. In 1977, he launched Le Figaro Magazine and asked his friend Benoist to become its first editor-­in-­ chief, a position Benoist turned down, citing his responsibilities at Nouvelle école. The job was handed off to Benoist’s close associate, Valla, who filled the magazine with contributions from GRECE members—a column for Benoist, and regular pieces from Marmin and the group’s foremost scientific thinker, Yves Christen. The more conservative elements of Giscard’s electoral coalition, the Union pour la démocratie française (Union for French Democracy, UDF), were drawn to the ideas of GRECE and especially those of the club. At this point, the club was under the patronage of Michel Poniatowski, minister of the interior and an adviser to Giscard. Benoist is widely acknowledged to have ghostwritten his book, L’Avenir n’est écrit nulle part (Nowhere Is the Future Written), in which there was much talk of Europe’s Indo-­European values and the cosmic evolution of “man.” Valla boasted that he himself was co-­signing articles with Alain Griotteray, founding member of the Républicains indépendants (Independent Republicans), Giscard’s home party before it merged with the UDF in 1978.39 For the moment, the New Right was flourishing. This all changed in the summer of 1979. Exposure increased with influence. Being harassed by fellow groups on the Far Right was one thing, but now GRECE was made to feel the fury of a hostile French media. It began



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with an article in late June by Thierry Pfister in Le Monde that denounced what it took to be the entryism of the “New Right” (the origin of the term). In early July, a similar editorial appeared in Nouvel observateur, and, by the middle of that month, every major paper in the country had published multiple stories on how the New Right was reviving fascism, with major intellectuals pronouncing against the group: Guy Hocquenghem in Libération, Mona Ozouf in Nouvel observateur, and Annie Kriegel in Le Figaro—this last one being particularly damaging because it was the parent newspaper of Pauwels’s Figaro Magazine.40 Historians weighed in, comparing Benoist’s rhetoric to that of the Nazis. At summer’s end, some five hundred articles devoted to GRECE had appeared, a few coming to its defense but most ringing the tocsin of neo-­fascism and neo-­Nazism. GRECE members were surprised by the magnitude of this attack. Valla had spent the summer in a hospital in Mexico after crashing his car into a cow in the Yucatan. He emerged from his sickbed to find GRECE the most infamous group in France. Members offered a few explanations for this backlash. For Benoist, the idea of an intelligent, thinking Right had sent the left-­ wing media into a panic. So desperately did it need to destroy this rising force that it unleashed a campaign of “Stalinist intellectual terrorism” against GRECE. This reaction, for Benoist, was the best evidence of the group’s success. He also claimed, invoking the left-­wing theories of Régis Debray and Guy Debord, that France had become a society of the spectacle such that the media now produced its own “events” instead of reporting them. The New Right was easily and conveniently made into such a spectacle.41 Valla was more or less of the same opinion: The negative media attention was a price of the group’s growing influence. Striking a more conspiratorial note, however, he added that the Left wanted to frame Giscard as an anti-­Semite in order to discredit him in the upcoming election. Thus, it took every opportunity to portray his right-­wing associates as neo-­Fascists and anti-­Semites. Valla cited the bombing of a synagogue on the Rue Copernic in 1980, which resulted in the death of four people. Mitterrand, said Valla, had been quick to point the finger at the neo-­Nazi Fédération d’Action Nationale et Européenne, even though everyone on the Far Right knew that this group was effectively “moribund” (although it took credit for the attack). Valla had no doubt that the Left cynically targeted this far-­rightist organization to “create an atmosphere of danger and turn away the Jewish vote from Giscard.”42 The results of the 1978 elections, however, likely proved decisive here. The vote was divided almost evenly among four parties: on the Left, the PS

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and PCF, now running on separate slates; and on the Right, Jacques Chirac’s neo-­Gaullist RPR and Giscard’s UDF. The latter two won a narrow majority in the Assembly, allaying fears of a red takeover, a specter raised obsessively by the press for two years running. Had the Left won, the anti-­totalitarian attacks against the Left probably would have continued. But with the Right’s victory, the media found new “totalitarian” demons to exorcise, with many of the same intellectuals—Bernard-­Henri Lévy, for one—leading the charge against the New Right. In addition, the liberal-­conservative parties had no particular desire to be associated with the New Right. The group was thus left in the wilderness, where it became easy prey for the anti-­totalitarian press. This campaign made Benoist and GRECE notorious, which had both positive and negative consequences. On the one hand, Benoist became something of an intellectual celebrity through this affair. The endless procession of interviews, round tables, and media profiles that followed gave the New Right much-­desired publicity and also a veneer of legitimacy. Leading daily papers—Le Monde, for instance—provided frequent updates on the group’s activities throughout the 1980s. During this time, Benoist’s work was published by major houses in France, like Hallier and Albin Michel—a privilege that has long since been denied to him. Indeed, the fascination with Benoist was not limited strictly to France. In the United States, he was given a sympathetic interview in Playboy magazine; while the maverick left-­wing journal Telos saw in Benoist a serious and heterodox political thinker, and began regularly translating and publishing his writing.43 On the other hand, this publicity was largely scurrilous and helped isolate the group politically. Branded as a neo-­Fascist, Benoist was quickly pushed to the margins of intellectual life. Petitions circulated among academics and intellectuals, who vowed never to work with him. Raymond Aron withdrew from a GRECE-­organized conference in 1981, along with the American neo-­ conservative, Norman Podhoretz.44 In this sense, the media affair dealt a blow to the group’s metapolitical strategy: Even if the press tended to exaggerate the entryist ambitions of the New Right in 1978, this option was going to prove more difficult to employ in the future. It also set off a split between GRECE and the club. The latter managed to keep a low profile throughout the controversy and took the opportunity to move farther from Benoist and GRECE. For some club members, this meant joining Le Pen’s Front national after its electoral surge in 1984. The club itself drifted from the extreme Right toward a liberal-­conservative politics in the mid-­1980s. Benoist, meanwhile, stayed the course and renewed his commitment to metapolitics.



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Weimar Anthropologies Equating the New Right with Nazism was perhaps the most effective way of discrediting it in 1979. There were enough connections to collaborators to make the case convincing. But in doing so, the mainstream press missed out on what was new and unique to this intellectual movement. The goal of the New Right was not to profess a positive doctrine or to revive some disgraced ideology. It was, rather, to lay out a series of anthropological alternatives to what it regarded as a spiritually bankrupt Europe. Few of these alternative visions are consistent with one another, but all suggest that the life-­degrading values of contemporary Europe—capitalist, egalitarian, and multicultural— could only be destroyed with the restoration of antique and heroic pre-­ Christian values. Benoist’s life’s work has been to endow this project with intellectual legitimacy by debunking the values of the present order—identified variably as Christian, capitalist, socialist, and liberal—and by creating a new mythology of European society. This metapolitical strategy—of laying the groundwork for a revolution always to come—has produced a particular style of writing in Benoist, one that operates through what might be called, paraphrasing Heidegger on the notion of truth, concealing unconcealment; positive positions are rarely stated as such, and are instead implied or gestured toward through the quotation of other authors. This technique has allowed Benoist, conveniently, to disavow any objectionable idea that might be attributed to him and to write his political anthropology under the cover of other thinkers’ work. Thus, the task of re-­creating Benoist’s visions for an alt-­Europe will require us to visit the diverse sources of his work. His writing is best understood as the union of two intellectual traditions, broadly conceived: Weimar conservativism and French structural anthropology. Before we come to those issues, however, it needs to be said that one of the New Right’s basic foundations came from older, nineteenth-­century thinkers. This was the idea of a philosophical “nominalism,” which Benoist traced back to the work of the original counterrevolutionary, Joseph de Maistre. Nominalism was a doctrine that denied that abstract, universalist claims about human nature could have any validity and supposed, contrary to these French Revolutionary ideas, that “there is no reality outside of what’s real.” “Ideas are not true,” contended Benoist, “unless they are incarnated, that is to say, lived.”45 Natural law abstractions posed a false equivalency between all things and erased what was unique in different peoples and cultures. On this point, Benoist quoted de Maistre’s famous saying that he had never met

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an abstract man in his life, only Frenchmen, Italians, Persians, etc. Indeed, for Benoist, diversity was “the fundamental law of the world”46 and, as such, had to be protected against attempts to homogenize cultures and traditions. Benoist has always held equality to be synonymous with a coercive sameness. This nominalism has also disposed Benoist to fixate on names in his writing, from his own experimentation with pseudonyms, to the thousands of place and author names that lard his books. Benoist has departed, however, from the ultra-­Catholic de Maistre in staking out a fiercely anti-­Christian, pagan identity for the New Right. Monotheistic religions, for Benoist, were merely another constraining universalism: “The idea of a unique God implies a unique, absolute truth to which human beings must submit because it is true in itself.”47 As such, Judeo-­Christianity was intolerant, dogmatic, and programmed to destroy all that could not be assimilated to its laws and values. Under the whip hand of the Church, argued Benoist, “all forms of ‘natural’ or cosmic religion . . . and all religions that worship mythic Gods were denounced as idolatry.”48 Here the main reference was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Citing his work, Benoist claimed that there was something unnatural and life-­demeaning about the Christianization of European society. The monotheistic projection of an all-­ powerful God stressed submission and renunciation: “No longer participating in the intimacy of the world, the man of Judeo-­Christian monotheism finds himself in a position of a minor subject, the derived subject, which . . . makes him forever an object.” It was also unnatural by virtue of its geographic origins in the Middle East, Benoist referring to it as the “Bolshevism of antiquity,” coming to exercise its empire over Europe.49 “Absolute monotheism,” he wrote, “was profoundly foreign to the European mind.”50 Benoist saw paganism as a spiritual alternative for European peoples. In Comment peut-­on être païen? (On Being a Pagan), he constructed a dramatic, Nietzschean narrative in which a sick and malevolent Christianity had come to triumph over the much healthier and naturalistic worldviews of Europe’s pre-­Christian religions. For Benoist, pagan and Christian outlooks represented two diametrically opposed ways of understanding human existence and its relationship with nature and time. Whereas pagan religion “tended to believe that the world is eternal, while gods, like men, are not; Judeo-­ Christian monotheism asserted that God is eternal, but that the world began and will end.”51 Linear time, with its irreversible sequence of now points, was imprisoning, a kind of metaphysical straitjacket. It closed off possibilities and announced an ever-­future-­oriented teleology. No freedom-­loving person



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would ever consent to such a worldview; hence, “We refuse to give any credence whatsoever to the Judeo-­Christian problematic that posits the past as a definitively passed point on a line that would necessarily conduct humanity from the Garden of Eden to Messianic times. We do not believe this has any historical meaning.”52 A more creative and vital conception of time could be found in pagan, pre-­monotheistic religions, in which history did not move toward some redemptive end. In circular time, everything was always possible: “Every present is an intersection, not a point; and each instant of the present actualizes the totality of the past and potentializes the totality of the future.”53 How this “tri-­dimensional” account of time might affect one’s day-­to-­day behavior was left unspecified by Benoist, but it embodied a certain metaphysical restlessness: “Freedom has the structure of time. Cyclical time is not sterile repetition, but the constant reorganization of things and beings.”54 This was a determination to live by a different ethical code. Indeed, for Benoist and the New Right, paganism offered a more authentic mode of being in the world. Whereas in the monotheistic religions, humans were radically separated from and dependent on God, “Pagan thought, to the contrary, regards human consciousness as being part of the world and as such it is not radically dissociable from God. Facing Destiny, man is the law of the world . . . and the measure of all things; he simultaneously expresses the totality of the world and the very face of God.”55 Paganism saw a deep interconnection between nature and god, and thus did not require believers to subject themselves to some exterior and remote agency. Humans were, in fact, another face of the divine, which, for the New Right, endowed human life with inherent religious value. Benoist developed this idea of pagan existentialism in two different directions, one philosophical, the other anthropological, both with roots in Weimar thought. The former was drawn principally from the work of Martin Heidegger and emphasized the existential freedom of human beings. Existence is never fixed or complete but by nature open and ongoing for the New Right. Wrote Benoist, “Man is nothing but a project. His consciousness is a project. To exist is to ex-­sistere, to project (to hurl oneself forward). It is this specific mobility of the ex-­tensiveness that Heidegger calls the ‘historicizing’ of human existence—a historicizing that absolutely marks ‘the very structure of human life, which, as a transcendent and revelatory reality, makes possible the historicity of a world.’ ”56 For Benoist, Heidegger was a visionary of pagan existentialism, his idea of “being” coinciding with the open-­ended structures of pre-­ Christian European religion.

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The appeal to Heidegger thus furnished the New Right with a message of existential empowerment. Benoist’s texts from the 1970s can often read like self-­help literature: “The slogan, ‘be oneself ’ is not enough. One must become what one can be—build oneself according to one’s own idea. Never be satisfied with oneself. . . . A strong will allows one to be what one wants—no matter who one is.”57 Or again, “Set one’s own standards, and stick to them. Internalize one’s own law. . . . Don’t cede. Don’t bend. Continue, even without reasons to continue.” This mode of writing had, in fact, been perfected in the writings of Nietzsche, a mutual idol of Heidegger and the New Right. A unique and forceful writer, Nietzsche had a way of placing his readers in the position of a triumphant hero, a rhetorical strategy the political theorist Malcolm Bull has identified as “reading for victory”: “Not only does reading for victory exemplify the will to power, but in reading Nietzsche our exercise of the will to power is actually rewarded with the experience of power. . . . Take Nietzsche’s boast in Ecce Homo, ‘I am not a man I am dynamite.’ Reading these words, who has not felt the sudden thrill of something explosive within themselves; or, at the very least, emboldened by Nietzsche’s daring, allowed themselves to feel a little more expansive than usual?”58 This rhetorical device likewise invited the reader to pity the weak, and establish themselves psychologically as superior agency. This writing strategy has long been favored by Benoist and sits at the core of the New Right’s intellectual project: to awaken a new sense of identity in white Europeans and convey a sense of inward superiority without really appearing to say this. In a similar vein, Heidegger’s philosophy provided the New Right with an alternative history of “being,” one that revealed the slow erosion of authentic subjectivity over the course of Western history. Wrote Benoist, “The history of all Western metaphysics can be characterized as the forgetting of being, as the incapacity to think being in its truth, and truth itself as being. Metaphysics prohibits the test of being, such that the history of being ends up beginning with this forgetting.” Reviving being in its proper sense required a return to archaic sources, a deep memory of that which had been obscured by centuries of Judeo-­Christian dominance. “To make a return,” argued Benoist, “is not to regress but to immerse oneself fully in what is original in order to find there the source of a new beginning.”59 Beneath the corrupted values of European civilization was another world, one of spiritual fulfillment and sacred communion with nature. As Christianity’s hold on the West started to weaken in modernity, this world, it could be hoped, was coming into clearer view. With Heidegger,



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Benoist believed we inhabit “the interregnum, a period both decisive and undecided [when] old gods have died, and when the new ones to come are not yet born. The present world has no gods: it is a-­theist in its proper sense.”60 The “interregnum” as a political concept was theorized by Gramsci in a central passage of his prison notebooks: “The masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”61 Fascism could thus be seen as an interlude between the decline of the post-­ Risorgimento order and the birth of a new socialist culture. The concept was given a different articulation by the Swiss-­born historian and political scientist Armin Mohler after the war. In his book from 1950, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918‒1932, Mohler wove together the diverse currents of antidemocratic thought in Weimar Germany, and he characterized them as constituting a “Conservative Revolution.” This was a revolt against the world that Bolshevism had created, and the many thinkers and poets making up the Conservative Revolution were at first attracted to Nazism but later repulsed by its popular, demagogic tendencies. These figures ended up defecting from the Nazi movement sometime after 1933 and came to be, in many cases, persecuted by the Nazi Party. As such, they constituted what Mohler called “internal emigrés.” Some of the leading thinkers of the period fell under this category: among others, the jurist Carl Schmitt; the novelist-­ philosopher Ernst Jünger, under whom Mohler was employed as secretary; the philosopher-­historian Oswald Spengler; the writer Thomas Mann, and the writer-­historian Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. A critical feature of their thought, according to Mohler, was the idea of an “interregnum,” a theological notion hailing from Medieval Christianity: The old structure of the West—a unity of antiquity, Christianity and the drives of marginal peoples entering history for the first time— has broken down. But a new unity has not yet become visible. This intermediate state, this “interregnum” we are in, comes to shape all spiritual activity. The “Conservative Revolution” is conditioned by it, and presents itself as an attempt to overcome it. It seeks to establish a new unity in a space without limits, one in which the individual components of the past and probably those of the future drift apart in a directionless and incoherent manner.62

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For these thinkers, and not for Gramsci, revolution was a spiritual notion, a theology. It promised a transformation of values in which the democratic, egalitarian doctrines of liberalism and Marxism would give way to an elite spiritual order. If the Conservative Revolutionaries spoke of nationalism, claimed Mohler, this was not in the typical sense of exalting one’s own nation but “rather a state of mind” with no overt political connotation.63 As the historian of fascism Roger Griffin has pointed out, Mohler’s text was pitched as a “handbook,” a manual of sorts for those who did not wish to lose their spiritual bearings in an age of democratic, materialist corruption.64 Mohler’s book had a deep resonance with a group like the French New Right, looking to explode Europe’s liberal-­bourgeois pieties. And, for a time, Mohler himself was an important actor in the history of the group. Born in Basel in 1920, he was called up to serve in the Swiss Army but defected to Nazi Germany in 1942, where he hoped to join the Waffen-­SS. He was denied this privilege on the grounds that he was too untrustworthy. After the war, Mohler served a brief sentence for desertion back in Switzerland and then made his way to France, where he lived during the 1950s and 1960s, working as a correspondent for different German newspapers and acting as a cultural envoy for disgraced German thinkers like Jünger and Schmitt (whom he introduced to Louis-­Ferdinand Céline). Mohler met Benoist in 1964 and struck up a friendship that lasted until Mohler’s death in 2003.65 They had considered writing a manifesto together in 1977, based on their mutual interest in Georges Sorel, but abandoned the project. Benoist claimed to have been overwhelmed by Mohler’s book, which opened his eyes to thinkers and texts he had never encountered. In this Conservative Revolution he saw “a vast family whose ideas would have constituted an alternative to Nazism if it had been more politically organized.” What drew his interest in particular was the anti-­modern, “restorationist” character of this movement: Its thinkers “knew that the ‘radical return’ to which they aspired demanded a true revolution. The ‘conservatism’ they adopted was a dynamic one, which tried to turn modernity against itself. Their ambivalence with respect to technology, machines, cities, for example, was a revelation.”66 Indeed, the ideas of the Conservative Revolution came to play a central role in the ideology of the New Right, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. The Conservative Revolution acted as a spur to the group’s metapolitical strategy, and Benoist himself devoted much effort to the dissemination of its work in France. He produced long synthetic essays summarizing the ideas of the Conservative Revolution; he created exhaustive “bio-­bibliographies”;



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and he oversaw the translation of its leading works into French. Indeed, Benoist was particularly proud to have arranged the French publication of Mohler’s “handbook” in 1993.67 Though the New Right made frequent reference to many thinkers of the Conservative Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s, including Schmitt and Moeller van den Bruck, Jünger and Spengler were most significant to the New Right’s intellectual development. Jünger provided Benoist and the New Right with a literary warrior ethic—a message of uncompromising rebellion against the hollow conventions of bourgeois society.68 Jünger’s struggle was persistently waged in cosmic terms, from the book that made him famous, Storm of Steel (1920), a gory and gripping memoir of his experience in the Great War, to his postwar novels, especially Der Waldgang (Forest Way, 1951) and Eumeswil (1977). Jünger’s singular achievement was, in the words of his most acute critic, to have joined “the language of the battlefield and the language of nature-­study”—“a fusion of command and aestheticism.”69 In this general sense, Jünger was an ideal metapolitical figure for the New Right, being both militant and resigned to the vita contemplativa; of this world, but desperate to leave society for the forest. In the early days of GRECE, it was Jünger’s image of the “Worker” that seized the group’s imagination.70 This “figure” bore little resemblance to the industrial proletarian upon whose labor the wealth of the nation resided and appeared more like a mythic warrior type: “Work is less activity itself than the will that is activated in work—the will of the will, which in becoming Work, passes from something simple to something historical.” The worker, he added, was the “vibration” of pure voluntarism, a “mythical” everyman.71 For Jünger, the solution to Weimar’s impasses lay in a broad alliance among independent trade unions, Nazi labor organizations, and the army. As commentators have noted, this was similar to the kind of fascistic social revolution radicals in the Nazi SA (Sturmabteilung) hoped to achieve in the early days of the Third Reich.72 Oswald Spengler, even more than Jünger, was the great prophet of Europe’s cultural decline. The first volume of his monumental The Decline of the West appeared in 1918 and quickly became a phenomenal success among European readers, its vaulting Nietzschean prophecies about the drying up of Europe’s creative impulses perfectly suited to the gloom of Weimar’s early years. Spengler there raged against money, democracy, and mass culture as the agents of Europe’s descent into soulless mediocrity, and he adopted a deep historical focus to account for this decline, looking back to humanity’s earliest societies. Part of what captivated readers was Spengler’s unusual historical vocabulary, drawn principally from the physical and life sciences:

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Races were “vegetative” and had roots, like plants; history was a “morphological” process, driving the movement of civilizations; and undeveloped cultures might be consigned to a “zoological” fate.73 The book’s naturalistic language was ideally suited to its intellectual aims—namely, to return to blood and soil as an alternative to the deracinating effects of money and mass culture, and to find a charismatic Caesar to lift Germany out of its doldrums. Alas, Hitler was not to be that figure for Spengler and, although his book was inspirational for the Nazi Party, he never joined the movement and increasingly operated at a distance from it.74 His book from 1933, Jahre der Entscheidung (The Hour of Decision) was sharply critical of the Nazi Party’s mass demagoguery, which for Spengler increasingly resembled the Bolshevism of the Soviets. The book was condemned by the party, and Spengler lived under a cloud until his death in 1936. The Hour of Decision was greatly admired by the New Right. In 1980, its publishing house, Éditions Copernic, provided a translation of Spengler’s text (as Années décisives), with a prefatory essay from Benoist. What excited Benoist in this book, revealingly, was Spengler’s turn away from direct political action toward the literary-­archaic: “Leaving behind politics, he became more and more interested in prehistory, and attempted to elucidate the formation and development of original cultures.”75 As with Jünger, Spengler’s turn to nature and Ur-­culture was politics by another means. Stimulating too for Benoist was the book’s racial preoccupation, Spengler asking in the opening line, “Is there today a man among the White races who has eyes to see what is going on around him on the face of the globe?” In his typical oracular mode, Spengler prophesied the future alliance of Europe’s proletariat with the “colored populations” of the colonial world to overthrow high European culture and its time-­honored codes: “ ‘Society’ implies having Culture, having ‘form’ down to the last detail of manners or thoughts, a ‘code’ that has been built up by long discipline over whole generations, a strict moral outlook on life which penetrates the whole of existence with a thousand unspoken and rarely conscious obligations and ties.”76 Benoist apologized for the crudeness of Spengler’s vocabulary and the shortcomings of his prophecy, but he defended what he took to be his “spiritual” conception of race: “With Spengler, it is much more reasonable to speak of ‘race’ in the sense of ancient European chivalry or castes in Samurai culture than it is to speak of race in the ‘zoological’ sense. The key element is always the idea, never the material. . . . ‘Race’ is purely a spiritual matter.”77 In its cosmic way, world history played out as a struggle between cultures whose identities were rooted in popular folk traditions:



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some of these naturally were nobler than others and ought by rights to take precedence over them. In this way did The Hour of Decision strike the perfect chord with the New Right: excoriating liberal values, while at the same time slyly promoting the resurgence of a white Europe. Theodor Adorno, in a penetrating essay from 1950, saw Spengler’s philosophy for what it was: “a latent philosophy of identity.”78 If Heidegger and the Conservative Revolution provided the New Right with a philosophical and historical critique of European modernity, the anthropology of Arnold Gehlen supplied it with a new theory of human nature. Gehlen’s work was, in fact, part of a larger intellectual formation known as “philosophical anthropology,” which emerged within the same Weimar context as Heidegger and the Conservative Revolution, and whose beginning is usually traced back to the programmatic text of Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Man’s Place in Nature), which appeared in 1927. It was widely held among German thinkers of this period that “man” and “science” were in a terminal state of crisis. There were political and historical sources of anxiety at work here—the vulnerability of German collective self-­understanding after 1918—but intellectual ones as well. Darwinian evolution and Freudian psychoanalysis offered different versions of an enfeebled, abject humanity; and the latest developments in the life sciences tended to place human beings on a continuum with animal life.79 Scheler looked to resolve this crisis by developing a paradigm that could show what was unique to the human without falling back on either purely empirical data (i.e., biology) or metaphysical presuppositions. The distinguishing feature of humankind, according to Scheler, was its inability to survive on instinct alone, leading it to break with its natural environment. In this respect, human beings were uniquely “world-­open”—non-­specializing creatures who could say “no.” From this point of view, Scheler’s philosophical anthropology looked to understand the ways in which human beings could negate, transform, and refuse their conditions of life. This investigation extended to the sphere of interpersonal relations, to hierarchical value systems, and to forms of social knowledge—in short, the world of culture. The breakthrough of Scheler’s phenomenologically-­oriented philosophical anthropology was to construct a theory of culture that was both scientific and spiritual: by virtue of their biological constitution, human beings were disposed toward certain kinds of cultural expression.80 As Martin Buber announced in his essay on Scheler, there were “two significant [and different] attempts of our time to treat the problem of man as an independent

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philosophical problem. . . . The first is the ‘fundamental ontology’ of Heidegger, the second is the ‘anthropology’ of Scheler.”81 It took the work of Arnold Gehlen to make philosophical anthropology into a full-­fledged social theory. Born in 1904, Gehlen joined the Nazi party in 1933 and taught philosophy at the Universities of Frankfurt, Vienna, and Königsberg before being drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943. With denazification, he could only teach at administrative and technical schools after the war, but his thought nevertheless gained wider currency in the Federal Republic, playing a central role in some of its high-­profile philosophical debates.82 His magnum opus of 1940, Mensch, seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (Man: His Nature and Place in the World) began from the idea that “Man is incapable of surviving in truly natural and primitive conditions because of his organic primitiveness and lack of natural means.” Humans were “Mängelwesen” by nature, “beings of lack.” To compensate for this original deficiency, “man” “needs to learn to cooperate and communicate with others. In order to survive, he must master and recreate nature, and for this reason must experience the world. . . . The epitome of nature restructured to serve his needs is called culture and the culture world is the human world.”83 With no specialized mechanism for coping with their dangerous natural environment, human beings act, and through action convert impulses into social behaviors. In doing so, they refashion the world around them into, as Jürgen Habermas has put it, “an objective world of perceptible and manipulable objects and events.”84 For Gehlen, following Scheler, culture becomes the second world of humans and allows them to overcome the instability of their internal nature. Gehlen’s ideas have found application in several different contexts,85 but they proved especially attractive to the outlook of Benoist and the New Right. As was typical of intellectual currents in the Weimar period, Gehlen’s system implicitly attacked the anthropology of liberalism. Liberal philosophy’s positing of a state of nature in which human beings rationally consented to the founding of political society was, in Gehlen, replaced by a framework in which human beings were biologically—and hence non-­rationally—oriented toward group formation. Gehlen’s work shifted all discussion of social and political behavior onto the terrain of culture and, in this respect, marked, in the words of one contemporary critic, an “anthropological turn,”86 one that Benoist was attempting to reproduce in France’s Fifth Republic. As Benoist wrote in a text from 1978, “Une nouvelle anthropologie” (A New Anthropology): “Man in the state of nature . . . does not exist. His specificity is his culture, and culture



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does not cancel the bases of his natural constitution; rather it builds on it, and constitutes another level of reality, one that is fully human.” From this, Benoist concluded, “Man is a cultural being and a historical one too. His historicity is implied by his culture because nature remains immutable, while culture always evolves.”87 On this latter point, Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology worked in tandem with the New Right’s appropriation of Heidegger. Even if these two thinkers presented contradictory views of human nature—as signaled by Buber—Benoist still saw them as mutually recognizing the plasticity of human beings, and its existential rootedness in culture. More important for the New Right, however, was Gehlen’s careful negotiation of the nature-­culture divide. “Race” was a central category of the early Nouvelle école, and the journal urged, in continuity with Europe Action, that race be “understood in hard-­scientific terms.” Accordingly, one was likely to encounter troubling claims about the racial comportments of this or that group, as, for instance, “All people of the Asiatic or Indo-­European race were (and still are) racially white, and all people of Chamito-­Semitic languages were (and still are) the product of an ancient mixing of Blacks and Whites.” Through the 1970s, New Right authors argued that scientific IQ findings necessitated the separation of cultures.88 Gehlen’s work allowed the New Right to abandon biological determinism for a culturalist view of human life: “Every specifically human behavior is cultural behavior. The emergence of man is itself a ‘cultural’ fact.”89 In this respect, Benoist’s thought was anthropocentric and speciesist. Whereas nonhuman animals are “perfectly complete” and stuck in a “perpetual present,” human beings lack a “specific milieu” and are therefore defined by a world openness that can be found “nowhere else in the animal kingdom.”90 On these terms, Benoist could appear as a humanistic thinker of tolerance and diversity, writing in his memoir: “The diversity of cultures is the direct consequence of the multiplicity of choices that humans are always in the process of making. It’s by creating cultures and establishing institutions that humankind can stabilize its ‘instinctual dilettantism.’ ”91 Benoist’s texts stressed openness, choice, “making,” and “creating,” and thus suggested that critics were wrong to see any racial or biological determinism in the New Right’s thinking. But these signifiers were ultimately misleading, since Benoist, following Gehlen, believed that culture could never be entirely separated from nature; that it completed the work begun in the body’s nervous system. Thus, Benoist could say that “culture is not in absolute rupture with nature” because they were in fact tightly linked.92

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This was in plain evidence in Benoist’s contribution to “marriage for all” debates of 2012 and 2013, when he pointed to the biological “facts” of sex and sexual behavior, and thereby rejected the “theory of gender.” “A unisex humanity,” he wrote, “is non-­sense by definition. One belongs to the human species as a man or a woman, and this difference is acquired in the first moments of life.”93 He then expressed the commonplace notion that men, with their millions of sperm, are biologically driven to produce as many offspring with as many sexual partners as possible. Benoist was thus comfortable with the language of sociobiology and relied on it extensively in his writing on marriage and gender.94 With questions of race, Benoist likewise could alternate between biological and cultural explanations: If accused of racism, he could point to the cultural foundations of a group’s personality; if accused of social constructionism with respect to race he could refer to the findings of modern science—for example, that “genetic diversity is the rule in all species, the human one included.”95 Gehlen—always cited in these texts— enabled Benoist to support, at his convenience, either biological or cultural explanations of social phenomena. Such were the Germanic sources of Benoist and the New Right’s thought, an assemblage of right-­wing philosophers, historians, and anthropologists from the Weimar period, who all held similar views about the spiritual destiny and cultural rootedness of human beings and who had a vexed relationship with the Nazi Party and its ideas. For Benoist, they were visionaries of another world lost, the Europe of pre-­Christian times whose inhabitants partook joyously in the culture of their origin, and lived unencumbered by values and codes imposed from without. Their work thus furnished Benoist with a theology—a corpus of texts that recast the sacred nature of human beings and their destiny on earth—and in this respect deepened the New Right’s conception of neo-­paganism as a genuine spiritual alternative to Christianity. Crucial to Benoist’s grand narrative in On Being a Pagan was the idea that the restoration of the old Europe was still possible, that the old gods had been wounded but not killed: “In truth paganism never died,” he contended. Against the materialist corruptions of the West, Benoist sought “to recall the possibility of a landscape and a spiritual re-­presentation that would resonate with the beauty of a painting, a face, a harmony—with the face of a people uplifted by hope and the will to live another beginning.” The world of Christian values was a prison—“a site of universal incarceration”—and the New Right’s texts, including those of its predecessors held up an image of liberation. This world to come would restore authentic human expression to its



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true capacities and would connect people with their culture in ways that were no longer possible. Living in the “interregnum,” this image of “the original religion of Europe” made Benoist “nostalgic for the future.”96 The German thinkers also helped Benoist translate this spiritual vision into a political theology. As the Socialists grew in strength in the late 1970s, Benoist implied more and more that Europeans were living in Weimar Germany, adrift in its sea of weak, corrupted values. His preface to Spengler closed with the specter of a Weimar “not far behind us, and in fact part of our future—but on an even grander scale! It’s not only Germany that cannot decide, but all of Europe.”97 The “années décisives” (years of decision, the title of Spengler’s book) were fast approaching. And, true to form, Benoist titled the manifesto he wrote in response to the election of Mitterrand in 1981, Orientations pour les années décisives. This was perhaps the most programmatic text ever issued by the New Right, and it synthesized the main ideas the group had been working out through the 1970s. Opposition to the Socialist government was absolute and couched in political-­theological terms. Benoist eschewed party names and actors for generic placeholders: “the ex-­majority,” for example, instead of the UDF. To reinforce the notion that a political-­spiritual crisis was at hand, he invoked once again the Weimar analogy: “We must note that the Weimar Republic has today become generalized.”98 For Benoist, the victory of socialism somehow meant that Europe was at last “occupied” by the two superpowers. The hour of conflict had arrived, but the Right was tragically too lethargic to “fight to defend its liberty.” He quoted Jünger—“ ‘Slavery can become markedly worse while the appearance of liberty is preserved’ ”—and urged his readers to mobilize: “The long term objective must be to try to remake Europe by any means necessary.” Europeans needed to draw new battle lines and distinguish between friend and enemy—a nod to Carl Schmitt’s famous idea from The Concept of the Political (1927). For Benoist and the New Right, the West now constituted Europe’s principle adversary, the American capitalist behemoth ushering in an era of consumerist nihilism. Quoting Heidegger, Benoist argued that Europe would die not from atomic warfare but from indifference toward “being.” As for “friends,” Benoist riffed on Spengler’s idea that a natural alliance existed between Europe and the “Third World,” both caught between the rival superpowers, the United States and the USSR. This did not mean, of course, that the New Right endorsed “third worldism” as an ideology, which it condemned as “neo-­biblical, rooted in the ‘humility’ of the ex-­colonizer in search of a good conscience.”99 But in Benoist’s wild

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imagination, it meant that Europe could join an anti-­imperial alliance with the nonaligned countries of the world, since the continent was, after all, occupied just as India or Algeria had been. Politics was “not a rational affair” for Benoist, so anything was possible in a time of crisis.100 Orientations pour les années décisives was metapolitics in action. The text did not attempt to provide a systematic and rational assessment of contemporary politics; rather, it attempted to generate a series of myths and counterimages to galvanize the Right into action. Vital to this work was the constant invocation of an anthropological alternative for “occupied” Europe: “Awareness of freedom is inseparable from a founding anthropology that shows man to be the artisan of his own destiny, the author of his own liberty, and the creator of his individual and collective being.” In this respect, Benoist’s texts were underwritten by an identitarian logic, encouraging readers to see themselves in the subject positions and collective formations that Benoist suggested were under threat of extinction. This textual strategy was given added depth by the spiritual and romantic character of Benoist’s writing: As with the Weimar conservatives, all was cosmic struggle against dark impersonal forces, waged in messianic terms. Of course, a new, better world was on the horizon, and this message appeared, albeit in passing, in the text’s opening lines: “I aim essentially to make an appointment [prendre date] for the dawn of a new era.”101

French Anthropologies For all of Benoist’s transnational, European pretentions, he is a profoundly French thinker, anchored in French ideas. He has devoted considerable effort to reviving interest in the ideas of French right-­wing thinkers, compiling in the early 2000s, for example, four volumes of material for his Bibliographie générale des droites françaises (General Bibliography of the French Rights).102 What also needs to be emphasized here is how Benoist has appealed to the ideas of French structural anthropology in crafting his mythologies of the present world. Drawing out these connections will help us define what positive developments Benoist and the New Right came to expect with the restoration of Europe to its pre-­Christian, pagan glory. For the New Right, the most important French figure was the linguistic anthropologist and scholar of Indo-­European studies, Georges Dumézil. Born in 1898, Dumézil studied classics at the École Normale Supérieure and wrote a doctoral thesis on comparative Indo-­European mythology under the



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supervision of Antoine Meillet, an expert on Caucasian languages and a contributor to Durkheim’s sociology review, L’Année sociologique. After suspicion had been cast on the legitimacy of Dumézil’s findings, he decided to teach abroad, first in Turkey, where he took the opportunity to master a number of Turkic, Caucasian, and Slavic languages; and then in Sweden, where he tackled the Germanic stock of Indo-­European languages. He returned to France in 1935 to teach comparative religion at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and was later elected to the august Collège de France in 1949. Dumézil enjoyed a reputation for being one of Europe’s most erudite scholars—with the ability to read more than two hundred languages, including Ossetic and Quechua—and was cited by younger thinkers like Michel Foucault as a figure of inspiration. His main contribution to scholarship was the depth he gave to the Indo-­European conjecture, the idea that the linguistic similarities of peoples from Western Europe to India, with outlying zones in Chinese Turkestan, could be traced to a common geographical area.103 The Indo-­European hypothesis had been first suggested as far back as the late seventeenth century, with a spike in scholarly interest taking place during the Romantic era of the nineteenth century. While linguists have been able to demonstrate common affinities between different languages in the Indo-­ European group, there is still no direct evidence that a single, unitary Proto-­ Indo-­European culture ever existed. Part of Dumézil’s comparative linguistic analysis was devoted to extrapolating what political and social institutions had existed in early Indo-­European cultures. He settled on the idea that these societies had imagined and perhaps constructed an ideal social order, consisting of three parts integrated within a hierarchical system, his so-­called tri-­functional hypothesis. First was the domain of the sacred, where priests carried out the function of sovereignty; second came the sphere of physical force, overseen by warriors, some of whom were chivalric and others coarse and violent; and last was the sphere of production, including agriculture and animal herding, and these tasks were performed by workers. The New Right’s interest in Dumézil’s work dated back to the Europe Action years, when Benoist had published a small volume on the Indo-­Europeans in 1966. As the philosophy of the New Right matured and coalesced over the next decade, Dumézil’s name appeared with greater frequency among its works. The tenth issue of Nouvelle école (1969) featured an interview with Dumézil; a special issue from 1972 was dedicated to his work; and Dumézil accepted Benoist’s invitation to join the journal’s committee of patronage in the early 1970s, while making it known that he did not endorse its

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politics: “Personally, I see myself as a philologist rather than a philosopher, and I do not think one can generalize my method or my results.”104 In fact, Dumézil had always maintained that his insights into Indo-­European society were linguistic in nature and not anthropological, but other scholars were not always convinced. Some pointed to the fascistic affinities of Dumézil’s work, particularly his 1939 Myths and Gods of the Germans, which is full of positive-­seeming references to Aryan culture. Here the charge was led by two Italian historians, Arnaldo Momigliano and Carlo Ginzburg, the latter of whom contended that Dumézil’s work, in attempting to report neutrally on the repopularization of Indo-­European myths under the Third Reich, “occasionally edged from a descriptive to a normative plane.”105 Dumézil was outraged by the suggestion. The fact that Dumézil had supported Action française in the 1920s did not help his case, nor did the fact that the collaborator Pierre Drieu la Rochelle used Dumézil’s work to show an unbroken continuity of the Aryan spirit from antiquity. Others drew attention to the inspiration Dumézil’s work had given to the extreme Right in the 1970s and 1980s: The Journal of Indo-­European Studies, for example, was edited by the arch-­Nazi Roger Pearson, founder of the Northern League for Pan-­Nordic Friendship and former director of the World Anti-­Communist League. In France, Études indo-­européennes (1982–) was founded by Jean Haudry, a linguist and member of the Front national; and it was published by the Institute of Indo-­European Studies, suspected by many to be a think tank for Far Right ideas.106 And, of course, Dumézil had maintained a close relationship with Benoist throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and was a sitting member of the Académie française when Benoist won his book prize in 1978. Dumézil was wounded by these accusations and tried repeatedly to clear his name.107 But Bruce Lincoln, the American historian of religion, detected a deeper reason for Dumézil’s enduring appeal for the Far Right: “What differentiates him from others of like opinion is the intricate scholarly code he developed, through which he made the arcane data of Indo-­ European mythology serve as the vehicles for his views, and through which his work came to command the attention of scholars everywhere.”108 This way of writing, as we have seen, was a common strategy among intellectuals of the extreme Right: Arguments were suggested through quotation and ellipsis such that the author could never be held responsible for a stated view, but that the knowing reader could easily discover the political message. Indeed, for Benoist, Dumézil’s Indo-­European studies “added a deeper dimension to the study of Europe’s roots, while also constituting a clear



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alternative to the ex oriente lux [light from the east] thesis”—the idea that Western culture came through Jerusalem and Rome.109 It offered a new founding myth, one that was more authentic and naturally suited to the European way of life: It is important to emphasize that the consolidation of Indo-­European structures went together with the development of a religious system, Indo-­European paganism. . . . This formed the keystone of the entire society, while endowing events with an air of finality. From the very start, the society of gods were in conformity with that of humans: religion connected members into the same social grouping. This system, a product of will and circumstance, showed itself to be so productive, so prosperous (socially, materially, and spiritually), and so adapted to the deepest aspirations of European peoples, that over time it came to seem natural, almost pre-­given. Over the centuries, its institutions could be transmitted from generation to generation.110 These were memories of a lost Indo-­European golden age. Benoist’s formal arguments about “spherical time” and the authenticity of one’s culture found their ideal content in Dumézil’s Indo-­European structures.111 The tri-­functionality hypothesis was continually deployed as a regulative model in Benoist’s work. Modern Europe, in his analysis, had been afflicted by an expansion of the productive-­economic component—too many workers: “One can see the depth of changes in social structure—and mental structure—that have taken place of late in modern Europe, where, under the influence of egalitarian doctrines, the distinction between the three ‘orders’ or ‘functions’ has essentially been erased. But also, the traditional hierarchy has been completely inverted, such that now it’s the economic function, i.e. the production of material goods, which occupies first place, and thereby shapes mentalités and determines needs and values.”112 The implication—one of Benoist’s preferred rhetorical devices—was that Europe ought to find a way to restore sovereignty, the sacred, and warrior values to their rightful positions. Also, by implication, Europe “originally” was white and tribal; in returning to this golden future, people would be reunited with their correct group of origin. To keep the Indo-­European dream alive, Benoist and the journals of the New Right published a steady stream of articles and books celebrating the authentic and original culture of European peoples. This was a crucial feature of GRECE’s metapolitical action, the legitimization of values that would be

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restored in the great revolution to come. To this end, Benoist produced a high volume of strange Indo-­European cultural propaganda in the late 1970s and 1980s. Le Guide pratique des prénoms (Practical Guide to First Names) was one of these. It provided detailed information about the genealogies of hundreds of popular European first names, from Aaron to Zoe. Ostensibly, its purpose was to furnish a menu of names from which parents could choose, but it could also be read as an attempt to reestablish cultural lineages and traditions where they had become blurred: Names should be appropriately matched to one’s culture of origin, the book implicitly suggested113 There was also Les Traditions d’Europe, a large-­format encyclopedia of pagan holidays and traditions. Like the guide to naming, it aimed to return everyday culture to its proper Indo-­European perspective. “As everyone knows,” wrote Benoist, “the Christmas holiday corresponds to the ancient Indo-­European celebration of the winter solstice.” It was, of course, adapted by the Church in the early middle ages, and made into a Christian holiday, after which it degenerated into a consumerist spectacle. Benoist devoted an entire book to this issue, as did GRECE members Jean Mabire and Pierre Vial. In this way, reappropriating Christmas for pagan ends took a key place in the group’s strategy for promoting archaic European values.114 More typically, Indo-­European culture simply figured as an ideal, if now lost, point of origin for Europe in the writings of Benoist and the New Right. This gave their texts a very clear and predictable structure: There was “today,” representing maximum intellectual confusion; Indo-­European times, vital and pulsing with life; and, bridging them, centuries of corruption, usually by way of Christianity or “monotheism,” or sometimes “egalitarianism” or “liberalism.” There was never a normative statement about the desirability of returning to Indo-­European times, just an idealized and overly coherent picture of what those times must have been like. The reader was expected to make the connection. For instance, in his book on the family, Benoist described how the Indo-­Europeans did not treat marriage as some abstract union. For them, it was simply a way of “domesticating of women [modifier la condition de la femme].”115 Benoist was not recommending that we adopt this practice. But what were the alternatives? The Christian conception? Too spiritual and abstract. Today’s conception? Divorce and same-­sex marriage had rendered it meaningless. To give added intellectual depth to his Indo-­European projections, Benoist appealed to the work of another French anthropologist, Louis Dumont. Dumont was an Indologist whose breakthrough work, Homo Hierarchicus



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(1966), drew a grand and influential distinction between two kinds of societies: those of the East, which were “holist,” hierarchical, and traditional in the sense that all individuals and institutions acquired meaning only in relation to a given whole; and those of the West, which were egalitarian, individualistic, and modern in the sense that individuals, even when separated from the whole, were considered to be complete moral persons.116 One source of Dumont’s thought was Durkheim, to whom he attributed this distinction: “As Durkheim said, roughly, our own society obliges us to be free. As opposed to modern society, traditional societies, which know nothing of equality and liberty as values, which know nothing, in short, of the individual, have basically a collective idea of man.”117 For Dumont, an orientalist, this was a rather attractive feature of non-­Western societies. The other main source of his thought was the Indian mystic philosopher, René Guénon, a teacher of Dumont, who contrasted the bankruptcy of the modern West to the great spiritual richness of “traditional” Eastern cultures. After spending most of his career as a narrowly focused anthropologist of India, Dumont acquired a second life in the 1970s as a heavyweight critic of modern European individualism. Gauchet, for one, seized hold of Dumont’s work and used it to sharpen his attack against human rights, newly ascendant in the late 1970s, and, for Gauchet, the exaltation of an individualist ethos.118 Benoist too gravitated toward Dumont’s ideas. As with Gauchet, they furnished a weapon against the nihilistic individualism that seemed to be overtaking Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. But Dumont helped Benoist’s case for resurrecting an archaic past. He thus occupied a key place in Benoist’s manifesto, Orientations: “European civilization is by origin a holist civilization; society is there conceived as a community, an organic whole to which one belongs by heritage and by affinity.”119 Benoist held Christianity responsible for the rise of individualism in European society and encouraged his readers to see, through Dumont, that another kind of society was possible, one that was collective and authentic to Europe. Dumont’s work had the added virtue of destigmatizing the idea of hierarchy, which for most Europeans was associated with the top-­down social model of feudalism. For Dumont, “hierarchy” was a synonym for “holism,” and it signified not rank ordering but the priority of whole over part. Invoking this concept through Dumont—a scholar of impeccable academic credentials (who was interned in a German prisoner of war camp for the entire war)—gave these ideas a patina of legitimacy and anchored them more securely within the language of the social sciences.

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Finally, Dumont’s writings on India were easily coded in the political-­ anthropological vernacular of the New Right. This was achieved in a long overview of his work that appeared in a 1982 issue of Nouvelle école. There, the author, Pierre Bérard, a founding member of GRECE, adapted Dumont’s vision of traditional Indian society to the ideas of both the Conservative Revolution and Dumézil. In Indian society, the “concept of the political”—here echoing Schmitt’s famous phrase—took priority over the economic, and remained fused with the religious. Traditional society was thus protected from the pathologies of Western development, in which the economy was given full reign, bringing disenchantment and consumerist nihilism. “In this sense,” wrote Bérard, “India remained true to the Indo-­European tri-­ functionalism revealed in the works of Georges Dumézil.”120 Political and religious affairs—both symbolically oriented—took precedence over shallow economic affairs in these societies. Implicit here too was the suggestion that Indian and Germanic cultures shared common affinities, and perhaps even a common origin. In principle, Benoist was not interested in ranking or comparing different cultures: Each had its own rites, traditions, and institutions, which shaped the outlook of its members in a unique way. This was the basis of the New Right’s media-­friendly claim to support the “right to difference”121 and to celebrate the “diversity” of cultures. As many of the group’s critics were quick to point out, these claims did not sit well with its valorization of Indo-­European culture. Nor did the phrase seem honest, since it thinly veiled what in actuality was a horror of racial and cultural mixing. Benoist and fellow members of the New Right often referred to the idea of “enracination,” a deep sense of rootedness in one’s own culture. This language harkened back to the extreme Right of the late nineteenth century and could be found frequently in the writing of Maurice Barrès. For him as for the New Right, it signified that cultures have one authentic mode of expression that is both original and timeless: outside elements pollute and destroy it. Even so, Benoist continued to insist, there was nothing to suggest that one culture was superior to another: They were equal in their distinctness from one another. And to support his view of diversity and cultural relativism, he invoked a more contemporary thinker, the greatest of all structural anthropologists, Claude Lévi-­Strauss. This involved an interpretive sleight of hand. Benoist latched onto a distinction between two kinds of racism described in Lévi-­Strauss’s work: the first, more extreme, was the attempt to “suppress that which is different from us; the second, more subtle but no less harmful, consisted of denying



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difference on the basis that ‘we are all the same.’ In the first case, one tries brutally to suppress difference. In the second, one causes alterity to disappear by subsuming the Other to the Same on the assumption that what distinguishes us from others is not in the final instance all that important. It’s the second that has been most often practiced by Western culture in the name of universalism.”122 Here, Benoist was suggesting that Lévi-­Strauss was primarily a thinker of difference, and that he shared Benoist’s own antipathies for universalist Western values. This interpretation was not entirely unfounded. As early as Race and History (1952), Lévi-­Strauss cautioned against the erasure of different cultures in a globalizing world and insisted that each culture had the right to express its own unique values.123 In the closing pages of that book, Lévi-­Strauss wrote, “We have sought . . . to show that the true contribution of a culture consists, not in the list of inventions which it has personally produced, but in its difference from others.” However, Benoist took this to mean something far more absolute, namely that cultures ought not to mix or exchange. While Lévi-­Strauss could be made to sound this way, the principal argument of Race and History was that “diversity depends less on the isolation of the various groups than on relations between them.”124 Diversity, in other words, was a function of contact and exchange. This layer of complexity was, however, ignored in the work of Benoist and the New Right, for whom cultures are splendid in their isolation from one another. Thus, here too a complicated and nuanced set of ideas was made to serve a concealed political project and provide cover for the group’s essentialist view of culture. Indeed, the phrase “right to difference” was associated with the Socialist Party and its efforts to present a culturally tolerant alternative to Le Pen’s xenophobia in the early 1980s.125 That it was mimicked by the New Right illustrates not only how deceptive the group’s tactics could be but also how slippery the categories of identity politics were in this moment. There was, finally, in Benoist’s work an affinity with the sociology of Émile Durkheim. His French sources pointed in this direction, all having developed their ideas, though in very different ways and forms, in response to Durkheim’s pioneering work. For once, this was not an intellectual kinship loudly proclaimed by Benoist or any other member of GRECE, nor has it been detected in the scholarship on the New Right. Durkheim was, after all, a Jew, a Dreyfusard, and an important figure in the republican pantheon of thinkers— thus not an obvious precursor of the New Right. Nevertheless, the array of concepts invented by Durkheim—“collective consciousness,” “social anomie,” “collective representations,” not to mention his dichotomies of sacred-­profane

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and social-­individual126—could be made to serve variable political ends. In highlighting the importance of social integration and collective solidarity, Durkheim could appear as a socialist reformer, looking to redress social inequalities and restore bonds of collective solidarity. In another sense, however, these same ideas could justify, in general anthropological terms, the kinds of social models long favored by Catholic legitimists in France: the idea of society as an organic entity, profoundly anti-­individualist, and rooted deeply in tradition.127 Durkheim’s sacred was elastic, accommodating both secular political ideologies and communitarian religious worldviews. Benoist gave his own gloss on Durkheim’s conception of the sacred. Indeed, the first pages of his Éclipse du sacré (Eclipse of the Sacred) were drawn directly from Durkheim and quoted a key passage from the Elementary Forms of Religious Life: “ ‘Religious force is none other than the feeling that the collectivity inspires in its members, but that is projected outside the minds that experience them, and is objectified. To become objectified, it fixes on a thing and thereby becomes sacred.’ ” For Benoist, that “thing” was none other than the “foundational” matrix of Indo-­European folkways. Curiously, he cut off Durkheim in a sentence that concluded, “Any object can play this role.”128 This would have made Indo-­European values seem too arbitrary and constructed for Benoist’s liking, for they must appear absolutely original and necessary. If Durkheim’s theory of the sacred supplied the general form of Benoist’s enchanted political theory, Dumézil’s Indo-­European prescriptions furnished its pagan contents. This reliance on Durkheim placed Benoist in closer contact with the other figures treated in this book. With Gauchet and Debray he shared the idea that politics was an affair of the sacred and that the key challenges of modernity had been shaped by historical-­religious dynamics. In his memoir, Benoist cited both thinkers on precisely this point: quoting Gauchet, “ ‘Belief is a part of human functioning, a component of the mental equipment of humankind’ ”; and then Debray, “ ‘It is possible to have a society without God, but it is not possible to have a society without religion.’ ”129 All three thinkers made different uses of Durkheim’s theory. For Gauchet, the problem was for modern societies to effect a safe passage from the world of the sacred to that of the secular. Could the collective bonds underwritten by the sacred be converted into political action once the world had been disenchanted? And could this be achieved without sliding into totalitarianism—a perverted form of religious politics? For Debray, the sacred was the



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motor force behind republican fraternity, acting as a secular myth around which all French people could gather. Benoist, rather, found the sacred in an antique Europe, whose peoples were linked through a common Indo-­ European past. Finally, if we add Todd into this mix, we can also say that all four thinkers borrowed from Durkheim the idea that the weakening of social cohesion led to a disillusioned, atomized society. This was the basis for their common rejection of human rights,130 which they all saw as a framework for elevating the isolated individual to the center of political life and thereby for undoing Durkheim’s “lien social” (social bond). France’s future was bound to look American: fragmented, consumerist, and hedonistic—a postmodern dystopia. In 1995, so pervasive were these fears that Jacques Chirac ran on a promise to restore the “lien social,” an idea attributed to Todd, although its origins lay in a policy paper written by Gauchet. The same year, Benoist gave a talk, “The Dissolution of the Lien Social and the Return of Communities,” which, as its title suggests, searched for ways to revive community amid individualist nihilism.131 As peripheral as Benoist could often seem in France’s public arena, his analyses were another version of a (Durkheimian) story that France was constantly telling itself—though his story was stranger and racist.

Toward a White Nationalist Europe: Redux The trajectory of the New Right changed with the electoral success of Jean-­ Marie Le Pen’s Front national in the legislative elections of 1984. The earlier media backlash against GRECE in 1979 had forever tarnished the organization’s public image and had also bred internal discord, requiring members of the Club de l’Horloge to disassociate themselves from the group. Even so, the message and strategy of the New Right remained clear: to use metapolitical action against the twin threats of liberalism and socialism, with the hope of attracting the young and disillusioned (of both the Right and the Left). By 1985, however, leading members of the Club de l’Horloge had gone over to the FN, and used the club as a bridge into the FN’s electoral machine. There were defections within GRECE too, though Benoist remained steadfast in his opposition to the party, excoriating what he took to be the FN’s narrow-­ minded French nationalism, underlying Catholic messianism, and populist ethos.132 He once remarked, “Personally, I find that there is strictly no debate

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over ideas in the FN.”133 In 1986, one of GRECE’s most notorious members, Guillaume Faye, left the group under a cloud and, on his way out, publicly ridiculed Benoist and GRECE for being too soft on questions of race and immigration. After a decade in the wilderness, when he acted in the occasional porn film and played the character of “Skyman” on right-­wing radio, Faye rejoined the group in 1997, only to be expelled in 2000 for using openly xenophobic and race-­baiting language.134 The effect of all this in the mid-­1980s was to isolate Benoist and GRECE. From 1968 to the election of Mitterrand—the “entre deux mai” (between the two Mays)—political battle lines were loose, with the liberal Right, extreme Right, and non-­Communist Left finding common ground in their opposition to the Common Program. These lines hardened by the mid-­1980s, with the formation of a definable center, represented by the liberal thinking of Furet and Gauchet; a republican-­Socialist Left that became increasingly critical of Mitterrand—that is, Régis Debray and Didier Motchane; and a hard line extreme Right represented by the surging FN. The New Right had perhaps profited from the disorder of political affiliations in this earlier period but now slipped through the cracks once new alignments were set. Benoist must have felt even closer to his Weimar idols at this point, for his metapolitical action had led his followers into the wrong party (the FN). Who was his audience now? In 1988, Benoist launched a new journal, Krisis, aiming to distance the New Right from the FN, and perhaps to establish a dialogue with the Left. It ran articles on and occasionally interviews with major left-­wing intellectuals like Jean Baudrillard and Régis Debray, and it dealt with issues of a more topical nature than Nouvelle école, which Benoist continued to publish. Clearly, Benoist was attempting to gain a stronger foothold within the respectable political establishment while also remaining true to the metapolitical foundation of the group. The focus of his work changed very noticeably at this juncture: The strong theological and cultural character of his writings from the 1970s and early 1980s was replaced by greater attention to political concepts—sovereignty, federalism, the state, and so on. As Roger Griffin has noted, abandoning talk of “the interregnum” and the glories of original Indo-­European folkways was a condition for entering the space of respectable French public discourse.135 Likewise, Benoist toned down some of the more elitist rhetoric of his previous work and began to speak more positively of concepts once maligned by the New Right, like “democracy.”136 Benoist’s French sources were useful here too, enabling him to pass more easily as a



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respectable thinker (in a way that his German, Nazi-­sympathizing sources did not). Moreover, they lent a certain currency to the work of Benoist: Lévi-­ Strauss, Dumont, and Durkheim were frequently invoked by French political and social theorists of the post-­1968 era. By no means, however, did this signify Benoist’s retreat from his cultural-­theological views. He simply chose a new way to present them. His vision for Europe was now predicated on a “federalist” solution to its problems. The New Right’s federalism rested on the idea that the nation-­state was a Jacobin mechanism for imposing unity from above and thereby for erasing all cultural difference. Europe, in the New Right’s mythology, was a great cultural unity, but it also had hundreds of different local subcultures. Thus, a decentralized framework was needed in which cultures could be linked through an overarching federal structure but also given the autonomy to govern themselves and fully express their uniqueness. This idea had been implicit in the philosophy and (meta)politics of GRECE since its founding in 1968. In breaking with the national patriotism of the old Right, GRECE opened the way toward a politics of regionalism and attracted members with strong views on the need for regional separatism. This applied both to France, where Breton separatism still existed, and to Europe more broadly, where, for example, Basque and Flemish separatist groups were also active. As the sociologists Jean-­Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg have pointed out, from the earliest years of GRECE, Benoist made contact and established strong ties with like-­minded groups in Belgium, Italy, and Germany.137 While questions of political structure had typically taken a back seat to GRECE’s emphasis on cultural identity, the conjuncture of the 1990s—the Soviet Union collapsing and the West entering into a monetary union with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty—presented an occasion for Benoist to revive these discussions, and re-­mythologize the New Right’s political vision. To achieve this, Benoist set in motion his usual machinery for myth making: new distinctions and concepts, new author-­totems, new enemy-­ideas. “Sovereignty,” as handed down by the Renaissance tradition, was one such site of neo-­rightist contestation. The concept had been given its key formulation in the sixteenth century by Jean Bodin, who argued that sovereignty cannot be divided or alienated and that sovereign power tended to be compromised by intermediary bodies standing between the ruler and the ruled. According to Benoist, this conception was soon favored by the Bourbon monarchy, and eventually the Jacobins, who made it the underlying basis for the autonomy of the nation-­state and the brutal centralization of the French state. From

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there proceeded a string of modern barbarisms: “The Bodinian conception of sovereignty inspired, in turn, the absolutist monarchy, revolutionary Jacobinism, statist nationalism, republican ideology, fascism, and the totalitarian regimes.” There was, of course, an alternative on the horizon: the Federalist lineage of sovereignty, descending from the work of a German jurist of the seventeenth century, Johannes Althusius. In this tradition, sovereignty was always divided and shared among a confederation of communities or groups. The state naturally consisted of two governing bodies, one tending to the needs of the local community, which tried to “retain as much power as it can realistically exercise,” and, the other, situated at a higher level, regulating the needs of the confederation.138 “Empire” also required a reformulation, having been understood mistakenly in the modern period as a territorial, expansionist unit. However, if one were to consult more antique usages—the Roman one, for instance—empire would appear as a “spiritual idea,” one that “aimed to reconcile the one and the multiple, the universal and the particular.” The Roman model showed that it was possible to unite different peoples under a common basis of citizenship but “without converting them or suppressing their identities”—an empire of perfect tolerance.139 The basis was thereby laid for a neo-­rightist alternative to the post-­1989 Atlantic order, led by Washington, and served by the newly formed European Monetary Union (EMU). The latter came into existence with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, and Benoist pilloried the text for devoting only a scant few lines to “cultural” questions.140 Money, the great deracinating force, would now reign unchecked across the continent. To counteract this, the New Right needed to formulate its own version of European unity. The moment was fortuitous since, with the fall of the Soviet Union, history was “open” in the East, and the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states might be pressed to rejoin the grand Eurasian political space.141 The Russians, of course, were an Indo-­European people with deep racial, linguistic, and cultural ties to Western Europe, and they could not easily be bought or conquered by the West. Benoist reached into his Weimar reserves, using the work of Carl Schmitt to mythologize a new struggle between East and West, the former a land-­ born power, seeking enracination and cultural expression; the latter a sea-­ born one, seeking mobility and profits.142 He recalled the work of another Conservative Revolutionary, Ernst Niekisch, who advocated in the 1930s an Ostorientierung (Eastern orientation) in German policy so as to create a front against Western capitalism. Likewise, for Benoist in the 1990s, Russia had come to figure as Europe’s main hope of liberation and the savior of a



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pan-­European white empire.143 Benoist has become a leading apologist for Putin’s Russia in France and has maintained a long friendship with the Russian neo-­Fascist Alexander Dugin. As a follower of Benoist’s in America has proclaimed, “It would not be at all ‘unnatural,’ then, if European and Russian destinies should merge and an ‘Empire of the Sun,’ spanning fourteen time zones, arise.”144 A federation of sovereignties under the hegemony of a renewed Russian empire, this was the latest incarnation of the New Right’s archaic fantasy for Europeans. This vision was sufficiently esoteric and bizarre to keep Benoist on the margins of French intellectual life for the 1990s and much of the 2000s, even as he tried to pass as a less fascistic and more anodyne antiestablishment intellectual. In the second decade of the twenty-­first century, however, Benoist has come to have a new following, both internationally and in France. Abroad, Benoist is one of France’s most translated intellectuals.145 The alt-­ right in America has hailed Benoist as a prophet and precursor of its white nationalist movement, even if his writings are sometimes “too French” and too anti-­American for their taste.146 Benoist’s work has informed the worldview of the Swedish media magnate and neo-­Nazi, Daniel Friberg—an identitarian who advocates ethnopluralism and the right to difference. Friberg made his start in the music industry, founding a company that sold the music of white power bands. He has since partnered with the American alt-­right in editing the European domain of the website and launched a publishing house, Arktos, which is rapidly translating Benoist’s very large corpus of work into English, as well as that of Dugin and other key figures within the transnational networks of the New Right and alt-­right. It is difficult not to see the alt-­right as an outgrowth of the New Right: The “alternative” upon which the “alt” movements are staked—including the surging Alternative für Deutschland in Germany—was, as I have argued, foundational to the worldview and strategy of the New Right in France. Metapolitics was, at its very core, a mechanism for the production of alternative realities, premised on a culturalist, identitarian conception of human nature. As a theology, it made a virtue of waiting, and reveled in its own marginality, for one day, all would be transformed. Since the 1980s, it looked as though Benoist might forever remain on those margins, but this changed very rapidly as the neoliberal center has crumbled in the West. Benoist’s books now appear on display in Paris’s major bookstores, and Benoist is frequently invited to speak at the country’s most respected institutions.147 Le Monde has referred to this period as Benoist’s “second youth.”148 How Benoist chooses to wield this

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newfound influence remains to be seen. On a few occasions, he has appeared in public with Florian Philippot, the great young hope of France’s Far Right and the former number two of Marine Le Pen. With this union, metapolitical strategy may have finally found its political operator, and Benoist his long-­ awaited entryist moment. More likely, Benoist will continue to act behind the scenes, a gray eminence to a younger and newly empowered radical right.

Chapter 2

Marcel Gauchet and the Anthropology of the State

Marcel Gauchet has long been considered one of France’s preeminent political thinkers. He was a founding editor of the influential magazine Le Débat, for which he continues to act as editor in chief; and for more than twenty years he taught political philosophy at the renowned École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), retiring in the mid-­2010s. Politically, Gauchet has been a habitué of the political center, though operating independently of any party. During Mitterrand’s presidency in the 1980s, Gauchet helped lead a liberal revolt against socialist ideas; and, in the 1990s and after, he became a critic of neoliberal capitalism and the sense of nihilism and anomie it brought to French society. In these years, Gauchet was politically close to the right wing of the Socialist Party (PS). Intellectually, his output has been steady and wide ranging, with major texts on religion, psychiatric philosophy, law, and political theory. His 1985 book on secularization, The Disenchantment of the World, has been hailed as a milestone treatment of the subject and enjoyed a warm reception both inside and outside France. In 2017, Gauchet published the fourth, and last, volume of his monumental history of democracy, which has likewise been recognized as a significant intellectual achievement. Across more than fifty years of writing, Gauchet has developed an original and a distinctive approach to the political theory of democracy. As this chapter argues, this project was informed by a prolonged engagement with the literature of anthropology and ethnology. Looking back over his early work, Gauchet remarked in 2005, “I was convinced that the enigma of primitive politics . . . contained the keys to the intelligence of our political condition. It’s on this wager that I staked my intellectual career. The rest came as a solution that I believed could answer this problem.”1 What impelled Gauchet

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to make this wager, and what would be its eventual outcome? What could the “primitive” reveal to us about our political situation that was previously unknown or hidden? This chapter attempts to answer these questions by offering a genealogy of Gauchet’s political-­anthropological work from the 1970s and 1980s. It gives special consideration to his shifting conceptualization of the state, and it shows how Gauchet, in starting from his “primitivist” foundations, came to pose the question of the state in a unique way. Gauchet was born in 1946 to a modest family in the Normandy countryside, his father a road worker, his mother a seamstress. The household was deeply Gaullist and Catholic, and the young Marcel sang in the church choir and planned to pursue a career in education. However, at age fourteen he read the Communist Manifesto and experienced “a moment of sheer exhilaration.”2 Marx opened Gauchet’s eyes to the world of politics, and in 1961 he abandoned his “peasant apoliticism” and joined with the university syndicalist movement to protest the war taking place in Algeria. “My initiation experience was the repression of the anti-­war demonstration that resulted in a number of deaths at the Charonne Metro station in Paris on February 8, 1962”—a notorious incident in which Communists demonstrating against the OAS were attacked brutally by the police. And yet, Gauchet’s entry into politics was also marked by an immediate suspicion of Communists: “I had never seen communists in flesh and blood, and it only took observing two or three at work for me to be permanently cautioned against seduction from the Party.”3 As Gauchet went deeper into history, philosophy, and sociology, he dropped his teaching ambitions to pursue these studies more seriously. He met the philosopher Claude Lefort in 1966, and enrolled at the University of Caen, where Lefort was then teaching. He called this “the most important intellectual encounter of my life,” opening up to him a world of new ideas, but, principally, “the irreducibility of democracy, the centrality of the political, [and] the necessity of thinking democracy and totalitarianism together in their convergences and divergences.” As a young radical, Gauchet identified with and participated in the 1968 revolts: “I was, if I may say so, in full subversive effervescence. May 68 in my memory was about meetings and incredible and exhausting journeys between Caen and Paris. . . . We discovered suddenly that there were tons of people who thought like us, sometimes just like us. We needed to bridge the gap between these scattered individuals and grouplets.”4 With Lefort, Gauchet saw in the 1968 protests an “explosion



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of public speech” and a sense that a “breach” had opened in French society and might lead to a new form of democracy. After completing his degree at Caen, Gauchet began to collaborate with a small Belgian journal of philosophy, Textures, founded by two young philosophers with interests in phenomenology. Soon after, the editorial committee brought on board Lefort and his close collaborator, the Greek-­born philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. With this change of personnel, the focus of the journal shifted toward questions of political theory. This turn was announced in an unsigned editorial in the 1971 issue, which was devoted to the theme of “the political.” Lefort and Castoriadis were the founding members of an independent-­minded avant-­garde Marxist group, Socialisme ou Barbarie, which had broken up just before the 1968 protests. For them, Textures presented an opportunity to revise their theoretical commitments in light of those events and to “pursue a critique that is as radical as possible, and that does not give in to any of the concessions that are too often and too easily granted to the ‘good conscience’ of the ‘man of the left’ or to the ‘revolutionary.’ ” The editorial went on to specify, “It’s in the field of politics where, paradoxically, the traditional schemes of thought remain the most deeply anchored. . . . If there is a lesson that May 1968 imparted, it’s that professional politics is the monopolization of politics, and that no one has the right to speak in the name of political truth.”5 The journal, with Lefort and Castoriadis steering its politics, sought to carve out an independent space on the non-­Communist Left and to capitalize on the democratic, anti-­authoritarian ethos that for them defined 1968. Textures was principally an avant-­garde journal of experimental theory. Its contents were esoteric, and articles ran sometimes up to seventy or eighty pages, with a theoretical density that made finding readers difficult. What few copies sold were at François Maspero’s radical bookstore in the Latin Quarter, La Joie de Lire. Gauchet looked back fondly on those days—the entry into the world of ideas, and of infinite theoretical possibilities. Joining Textures marked a turning point for Gauchet. As of the late 1960s, Gauchet’s initial plan had been to pursue the “philosophy of philosophers.” An article from 1971 showed him wrestling with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-­Ponty. He soon changed his mind, however, and in his autobiography-­interview from 2003, La Condition historique (The Historical Condition), Gauchet attributed this turn away from “philosophy” to his fascination with ethnology:

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Like many people of my generation, I was very struck by reading the classics of this discipline. I believe I read every title in the “Terre Humaine” series. . . . Ethnology opened for me the royal road out of a structuralism that could hold none of its promises. Between the prodigious material that the structuralists brought to light—the greatest among them in particular, Lévi-­Strauss in his Mythologiques—and the use they made of them, there was an arresting disjunction. I read the Mythologiques, pencil in hand, line by line. During my reading, I could not help but be seized by the idea that the author had magisterially passed over what was of true interest in these societies. If they were nothing but an internal play of myths, then why go to so much trouble to establish their grammar and rules? . . . Ethnographic documentation presented for me something of deeper interest, something political, with a view to a critique of Marxism.6 Gauchet’s first articles in this direction were written in close association with Lefort. In the 1971 issue of Textures, they coauthored a lengthy text establishing the journal’s change of theoretical program, “Sur la démocratie: La Politique et l’institution du social” (On Democracy: The Political and the Institution of the Social). A footnote declared that Gauchet had written the text from Lefort’s lectures at the University of Caen in 1966. Thus, if we are to appreciate the complexity of Gauchet’s thought, we will first have to review the work of Lefort.

Lefort and Socialisme ou Barbarie Lefort was born Claude Cohen in Paris in 1924 and raised by his single mother, who worked as a seamstress in a clothing shop. He attended the Lycée Carnot in the early 1940s, where he was taught by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, who gave Lefort an appreciation for phenomenology, the study of the structures of experience and consciousness, and thereby helped lay the foundations for Lefort’s own philosophy. Lefort claimed also to admire Merleau-­Ponty’s open-­mindedness, how his work drew freely from the social sciences, anthropology and psychology in particular. This too became an important model for Lefort to imitate, his own philosophy making connections with sociology and anthropology. Finally, Merleau-­Ponty was



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responsible for politicizing the young Lefort, who was interested in Marxist ideas, but who displayed a hatred for the French Communist Party. Lefort complained of the party’s “domineering manner, its dogmatism, its demagoguery toward the petty bourgeoisie, and its nationalist, flag-­waving mentality.”7 When Merleau-­Ponty heard this, he nudged Claude—now “Lefort” after the Nazi occupation—toward Trotskyism. In 1943, Lefort joined the Trotskyist Comité Communiste Internationaliste, which merged in 1946 with the Parti Ouvrière Internationaliste to form the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (ICP), the French section of the Trotskyist Fourth International.8 In the ICP, Lefort met Cornelius Castoriadis, a Greek-­born Communist who had won a scholarship to write a philosophy dissertation at the Sorbonne. Castoriadis was one day lecturing on the problem of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union of Stalin, and Lefort reported being “overwhelmed [and] convinced by him before he even reached his conclusion.” They struck up an enduring friendship and founded a fraction within the ICP in 1946, the so-­ called Chaulieu-­Montal Tendency (which referred to their pseudonyms in the party). This deviationist line held that the Soviet Union was a new variation on a class-­based, exploitative society, and not, as the Trotskyist orthodoxy argued, a degenerated workers’ state.9 The two thinkers soon determined Trotskyism to be “incapable of perceiving the nature of bureaucracy.” They exited the party in 1948 and established, with a handful of comrades from the ICP, the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, and published a journal of the same name. Promoting a libertarian brand of socialism, the group became a radical and independent organ of Marxist thinking on the French Left, operating at a distance from the major parties. The main sources of their thinking were not, like the PCF, in orthodox Leninism but in the ultra-­left “council communist” tradition represented by figures like Anton Pannekoek, a Dutch Marxist, and Paul Mattick, a German Communist. For them, capitalism was to be dismantled by workers taking direct control of the factories and organizing themselves into deliberative councils. As a worker-­led movement, councilism rejected the Leninist party form, which for these thinkers inevitably brought political domination. In Socialisme ou Barbarie, Lefort and Castoriadis came to develop intersecting philosophies of liberation that were in dialogue with, but increasingly critical of classical Marxism. For both thinkers, Marxism failed to take stock of the central feature of postwar capitalism: the growth of the state and the increasing bureaucratization of society. While it was undeniable that capitalism continued to reduce the overwhelming majority of the population to

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wage earners, this was happening not only at the bottom levels of society, as classical Marxism had predicted, but also, according to Lefort and Castoriadis, in the middle layers too, as white-­collar and professional work became subjected to factory-­like conditions.10 Where one might have expected to find pauperized workers, instead “we find,” wrote Lefort, “clerks without real qualifications, employees whose professional training is rudimentary or non-­ existent. Between these employees and the managing director of the firm, the hierarchy of jobs is the hierarchy of power.”11 In this respect, Marxism was operating with the wrong social model: As Castoriadis wrote in 1963, “Proleterianization differs essentially from the classical image, where society was supposed to have evolved in two opposite directions, toward an enormous pole of industrial workers and toward an infinitesimal one of capitalists. On the contrary, as it has become bureaucratized, and in accordance with the underlying logic of bureaucratization, society has been transformed into a pyramid, or rather a complex set of pyramids.”12 Misrecognizing the political-­bureaucratic character of modern capitalist society and the social complexity and striation it generated, Marxism naturally became a dead letter; it “quite simply no longer exists historically as a living theory.”13 This held true for its political practice too, as the main organs of socialism—the parties and their unions—likewise became bureaucratized, and, ultimately, agents of reaction. For Lefort and Castoriadis then, it was necessary for revolutionaries to think beyond classical Marxism and conceive a new relationship between the classical revolutionary organization and the worker. Their writings from this period revealed an ongoing fascination with anthropological themes and concepts. In 1962, Castoriadis circulated a text within the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, “For a New Orientation,” where he posed a new problematic: “The group has arrived at a decisive turning point in its history. . . . With the end of the Algerian War, we can no longer continue to avoid answering the following question: In a modern capitalist country, in what does revolutionary activity consist?” Castoriadis gave nothing like a definitive answer to this question; rather, he gave a sketch of the kinds of texts and topics to which the group should be devoting itself. The main emphasis should be on the lived experience of proletarians, not just in the workplace but in their private daily lives as well; and the journal, in “order to break with the conceptions and practice of bureaucratic organizations,” should eliminate its didactic, expository style, and establish a looser, more open-­ended relationship with proletarians.



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The group was aiming to provide an ethnography of the working classes: Only by deepening its knowledge of proletarian life could the group help the working class liberate itself from bureaucratic domination. “Our sources in this work,” wrote Castoriadis, “ought to be concrete documents, bringing out the ways in which people live the crisis of society in the various aspects of their lives and the ways in which they react against it.” This involved doing interviews—with, for example, “public housing residents,” with “African and other students in Paris”—so as to reveal “the disintegration of people’s forms of life and existence” under capitalism.14 It likewise involved educating themselves on these conditions and producing texts that would clarify and contextualize them. To understand the raising of children in capitalist countries, for instance, Castoriadis proposed doing a text on “education in ‘primitive’ societies, starting with Margaret Mead’s books Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea, Sex and Temperament in the Three Primitive Societies.” Since Castoriadis believed, as he wrote elsewhere, that capitalist societies were undergoing “a profound crisis, anthropological in character,”15 with the “crumbling and frameworks and values,” it would be necessary to produce texts underscoring “the revolutionary signification of ethnology.”16 Lefort’s engagement with anthropological thinking was of a deeper and more theoretical order than Castoriadis’s. He claimed to have been “infatuated with ethnographic literature” in his youth, and his earliest philosophical essays dealt directly with the work of leading French anthropologists, Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-­Strauss in particular.17 Though Lefort was still a Marxist, he saw in their writing a challenge to the rationalist-­historicist approach to the study of society: “I acquired the conviction that the phenomena of so-­called primitive societies called into question the principles of the philosophy of History—those of Hegel and Marx.”18 These latter frameworks assumed that human social behavior was programmed for dynamic change, and thus that primitive societies were merely less developed versions of modern ones (i.e., “lacking” in sophistication). What Lefort took from Mauss and Lévi-­Strauss— even though he was critical of both thinkers—was the idea that primitive cultures were qualitatively different from “historical” ones; that they were defined not by a lack but by a distinct arrangement of institutions. Whereas historical societies were organized around events—finding a way to “convert them into moments of experience”—nonhistorical societies preferred to assimilate them into a larger static framework, and resisted “ceding to the attraction of the new.”19 In other words, nonhistorical societies were highly complex entities,

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and their “lack” of advanced institutions was in reality more like refusal of them; they were constituted in such a way as to resist change. To read the French anthropologists carefully was, for Lefort, to appreciate the density of primitive social relations. Mauss’s reflections on gift exchange, for instance, revealed a complex mechanism for balancing the demands of the individual subject against those of “the other”: “the idea that the gift must be returned presupposes that the other is another me who must act as I do; and this gesture in return must confirm for me the truth of my own act, which is to say my subjectivity.”20 Primitive social institutions suggested an entirely different way of thinking about subjectivity, alterity, and collective representation and, as such, opened new perspectives on the phenomenology of social being. For Lefort, they served as evidence that culture was foundational to the establishment of human societies and that this dimension had been too quickly dismissed by rationalist historical paradigms. Thus, both Lefort and Castoriadis had turned to anthropology and ethnography to help forge a radical politics of working-­class emancipation. Using the work of Mauss and Lévi-­Strauss on the one hand and the ethnographic techniques of the workers’ inquiry on the other, the two thinkers sharpened their critique of modern capitalism and its bureaucratic domination of society. What they had discovered, in effect, was that classical socialism, in focusing on issues of class, party, and economics, had overlooked culture and consciousness as key fronts in socialist struggle. Liberation from bureaucracy was not solely a material process but a mental one as well. When the revolts of 1968 erupted, Castoriadis and Lefort excitedly found a confirmation of their heterodox radicalism: These were the emancipatory soundings of a society suffocating under the weight of bureaucratic power. Both thinkers set down texts immediately during the events, which came to be collected in the now-­canonical Mai 68: La Brèche (May 68: The Rupture). For Castoriadis, May 1968 was the continuation of a revolutionary trajectory that passed through “the Paris Commune, 1917, Catalonia 1936, Budapest 1956.” In the matter of a few days, the student movement “has challenged the hierarchy and is beginning to pull it down where it seemed unassailable: in the field of knowledge and education. It has called for, and is beginning to bring about, the autonomous and democratic self-­management of collectivities. . . . It is putting into question not the details but the very foundations and the substance of contemporary ‘civilization.’ ” Castoriadis believed that the students, demonstrating “indissoluble unity” in action, were on the verge of taking power and, once they did, “the immense creative potential of society, which



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bureaucratic capitalism had bound and gagged, [would] explode forth. . . . Language, which had been flattened and emptied by decades of dull dronings emanating from the spheres of bureaucracy, advertizing, and culture, shines forth fresh and resplendent. People reappropriate it in its fullness.”21 With the eradication of bureaucratic power would come free democratic self-­ management (autogestion) and the full expression of human culture. Lefort was likewise intoxicated by the events of May 1968. His “Le Desordre nouveau” (The New Disorder) rejoiced at the prospect of the French people rising up to protest the repression they faced under bureaucratic capitalism. He wrote, “In a society of official discourses and organizations, where speech and action are placed under house arrest, where everyone has his or her place, to refuse these identities and to demand the right to speak and act is to open up a new space.”22 This was “la brèche” (the rupture) referred to in the volume’s title: the long-­dormant desire to break down hierarchies and bureaucracies, and to demand a more equal and participatory basis on which to conduct their lives. Politically, the 1968 events helped bring the anti-­statist ideas of Lefort and Castoriadis into the mainstream of the Socialist Left. During the Algerian War, a small number of Socialists had broken away from the SFIO in protest of the party’s failure to condemn the war and created the Parti socialiste unifié (PSU) in 1960. Under the leadership of Michel Rocard in the late 1960s, and in close alliance with the Catholic trade union, the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), the PSU came to embrace a politics of autogestion, the idea that society could be run without the interference of mediating institutions, especially the state. This “Second Left,” so called because of its critical stance against the statism of the PCF (i.e., the “First Left”), became a major force on the French Left during and after the 1968 events, in which the PCF played a mainly conservative role. Thus did Castoriadis and Lefort begin to find a much larger readership with a younger generation. Even so, they remained independent of the PSU and between themselves often disagreed over the political implications of 1968. Where, for instance, Castoriadis inscribed 1968 in the great revolutionary tradition and believed the students could have successfully taken power, Lefort rhapsodized a movement “without a program and without leaders.” “For the first time,” he later reflected, “it became apparent to me that people could struggle without being haunted by the idea of overthrowing the power structure.”23 Students and workers were challenging not just the state but any and all structures—parties, unions, and leaders—that attempted to

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speak in their name. The strikes that broke out in 1968 were “wildcat strikes,” initiated without the consent and therefore in spite of the union leadership. They showed a desire for workers to be free of leaders. Students, in speaking of sexual and cultural liberation, were striking against the foundations of the social order. One struggle was not subordinate to the other, but both had converged out of a deep sense of social discontent. The analytical tools of political economy, Marxism, and even history were insufficient to capture the essence of such an exceptional event: “It’s useless to examine the mechanisms of these demands and to find causes to explain their sudden acceleration.”24 From this point forth, revolutionary struggle would be improvised and break permanently with the structures and organizational forms that attempted to control and master it. In the aftermath of 1968, Lefort drew further away from the official Left and adopted a radically new theory of politics—one with demonstrably cultural and anthropological foundations. This new program emerged in what many consider to be Lefort’s masterpiece, Le Travail de l’oeuvre: Machiavel (Machiavelli in the Making in translation), an eight-­hundred-­page commentary on the Florentine thinker that was presented to Raymond Aron (and others) as a thèse d’état in 1972. There, Lefort asserted that all societies, primitive or modern, were primordially divided into social groups. Accordingly, politics was the art of managing the original divisions of society, of generating institutions and discourses that could represent the body politic to itself. This is what Lefort termed “the political,” a foundational element of human society. In reading Machiavelli, Lefort saw that the people identified themselves as a unity only in reference to power, which provides them with a symbolic representation of themselves. Thus, in addition to being primordially split, societies were also symbolically constituted. Machiavelli’s prince figured as a model in this operation, functioning as a distorting mirror and thus enabling the people to imagine themselves in a fictional way. Lefort considered it axiomatic that society and its self-­representation could never overlap, that there had to be a gap between the people and society’s symbolic self-­image. If politics were to represent primordial social divisions as they actually were—if fictions could no longer be maintained— society would lose its symbolic structure and collapse into immanence. Politics, in this case, would lose its ability to organize and affiliate. What societies needed, therefore, was a power that would reflect and re-­present social division, without either trying to resolve that conflict, or represent it as it really was. Power, when instituted correctly, was not an “organ of domination” but



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“an agency of legitimacy and identity,” and the prince performed an invaluable function when he, according to Lefort, “both figured and masked the social division.”25 Thus, the genius of Machiavelli was to have understood the inherently conflictual and theatrical nature of politics and to have demanded that the prince encourage disagreement and conflict in order to prevent the body politic from degenerating. Conversely, the modern temptation to make society present to itself, to overcome all conflict, was, for Lefort, the agency of totalitarianism. The latter concept, linking fascist and socialist regimes under one heading, had been a commonplace of European thought since the 1940s, and its theorists typically highlighted the utopian ideology of the Nazis and Soviets as the essence of the phenomenon. Lefort’s theory, taking shape across the 1970s, was unique for making totalitarianism a threat that inhered specifically in the political and symbolic structures of democratic societies. In the Old Regime, the unity of the people could be projected onto the figure of the divine-­right monarch. In breaking with this older logic of representation, however, democracies came to conceptualize power in a fundamentally different way, as “an empty place [un lieu vide],” where “those who exercised it [were] simple mortals who held it temporarily or took it by force or by deceit.”26 The tendency in democratic polities was for societies to see themselves as homogeneous, transparent units that had broken off all ties with, and indeed had no need for, the divine realm once symbolized by the king. This set democracies down a dangerous road toward negating the primordial divisions of society. Once that denial takes place, according to Lefort, another “division is being affirmed, on the level of phantasy, between the People-­as-­One and the Other.” From there, it becomes “necessary to convert, at the level of phantasy, real adversaries of the regime or real opponents into the figure of the evil Other.” And under these conditions, societies begin persecuting entire segments of their populations. Democracy, therefore, was perpetually haunted by its denial of social divisions and the specter of its own transparency. For law and power to function smoothly, they cannot be seen “to belong to the order of things which are socially (or indeed psychologically) conceivable.”27 A society of pure immanence, of complete demystification, is bound to reproduce the symbolic division of society in pathological ways—hence, the drift toward totalitarianism. “Unity,” as Lefort stressed, “can never erase social division.”28 Castoriadis’s thinking moved in a similar direction after 1968, toward the writing of a new political anthropology. Like Lefort, Castoriadis claimed

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that the “symbolic” lay at the core of all human societies: What determined the nature of a society’s institutions was not the economy or the restrictions imposed by nature; rather, it was an interlocking system of significations that assigned meaning to particular behaviors and actions. Castoriadis’s book from 1975, L’Institution imaginaire de la société [The Imaginary Institution of Society], posed his problematic in the following way: Every society up to now has attempted to give an answer to a few fundamental questions: Who are we as a collectivity? What are we for one another? Where and in what are we? What do we want; what do we desire; what are we lacking? Society must define its “identity,” its articulation, the world, its relations to the world and to the objects it contains, its needs and its desires. Without the “answer” to these “questions,” without these “definitions,” there can be no human world, no society, no culture—for everything would be an undifferentiated chaos. The role of imaginary significations is to provide an answer to these questions, an answer that neither “reality” nor “rationality” can provide.29 Like Lefort, Castoriadis was preoccupied with the symbolic foundations of human society, that hypothetical moment when the human group endowed its world with its own distinct set of meanings. He similarly attacked the evolutionary-­historical claims of Marxism and criticized Lévi-­Straussian structuralism for assuming that social institutions adhered to some inner or hidden rationality. Both methodologies neglected the creative and nonrational origin and function of a society’s institutions. Castoriadis also insisted that societies always needed to be conscious of their own self-­making. For human groups to think their society had been made by an outside agency was a form of alienation that Castoriadis called “heteronomy.” “Autonomy,” by contrast, was the group’s ability to “recognize in its institution its own self-­ creation.”30 This project required the group to constantly review its process of becoming—what Castoriadis termed the “social-­historical” dimension of collective existence. Castoriadis’s political analyses were thus reproduced in his abstract social theory: Collectivities were like individuals, perpetually disinclined to see themselves as free, self-­making entities. A self-­managing society was one in which subjects could exercise autonomy with and around others, where the self was in full possession of its creative powers.



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But again, there were key differences between Lefort and Castoriadis. Principally, Castoriadis did not believe in the primordial splitting of the social body, nor, therefore, in society’s need to find coherence in representation. Though Castoriadis’s work, from the mid-­1970s onward, became increasingly preoccupied with problems of the psyche and psychoanalysis, he never abandoned the idea that autonomy could be achieved through direct—and not representative—democracy. The old councilist view, that the abolition of capitalism would take place through the formation of self-­managing worker councils, could be generalized, thought Castoriadis, to society as a whole. This revolution was still possible.31 Gauchet’s early writing was profoundly marked by these ideas. He reported being an avid reader of Socialisme ou Barbarie in the early 1960s, and he worked closely with Lefort from 1966 onward. Thus, in the long article they wrote together in Textures in 1971, the ideas were mainly from Lefort. Reaffirmed there were Lefort’s position on the absent foundation of all societies and the corresponding need to “institute the social” in such a way that society never closes around that absence: “Social identity threatens to be lost with the attempt to complete itself; social space threatens to disappear with the attempt to enclose it.”32 It likewise compared historical to nonhistorical societies, attempting to understand how each had instituted the social differently, and thus established distinct relationships with time, history, and social division. And in keeping with Lefort’s work on Machiavelli, the text proposed that “the inaugural act on which the democratic regime is founded is the recognition of the legitimacy of conflict in society.”33 Politics without division and disagreement is fated to degenerate and to lapse into totalitarian domination. In the same issue of Textures could be found Gauchet’s first major solo article in his role as a political theorist, “Figures de la souveraineté” (Figures of Sovereignty), a consideration of Émile Benveniste’s Vocabulaire des institutions indo-­européenne, a pioneering work of structural linguistics. There Gauchet attempted to show how notions of the political had been at work long before the development of Greco-­Roman democracy and the formal separation of politics from the sphere of religion. Gauchet first considered early Roman conceptions of sovereignty. He claimed that Roman kingship— the rex—was sovereign by virtue of its role as the founder of Roman society: “The symbolic dimensions of . . . the collective’s identity are tied explicitly to the meaning of the founding gesture, . . . and the power holder is thereby guaranteed to be maintained and recognized as symbolic.”34 In this respect,

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there was no separation between the rex and society: As the founder, he was the pure expression of the history and identity of his people. This abolished the distance between the outside and inside of Roman society, and it violated Gauchet and Lefort’s injunction that no society should ever be present to itself. In other words, the symbolic constitution of society, which relied on the production of fictional representations of the people, was in danger of collapsing and therefore of leading to some social or political pathology. Meanwhile, the ancient Greeks and Persians had developed a notion of sovereignty that invested power in a chosen person. This allowed for the emergence of a representative conception of power—something that was conferred by one agency and held by another—and thus opened a space for the political (i.e., the management of society’s relationship with “the beyond”) to flourish. Even this, however, was not sufficient to ensure the proper arrangement of powers. The Persians tended to invest too much of it in their holder, thereby erasing in the imaginary society’s connection to the beyond. The leader was seen to be powerful in and of himself, and came to be worshiped as a god. The result was “the advent of coercive power in Iran . . . that we call today totalitarian power.”35 The Greeks, in Gauchet’s story, struck the right balance between the being and having of power, principally by creating ornaments of royalty—scepters and crowns. Under this arrangement, it was not the king who ruled but the crown and scepter, for these made the king and existed in perpetuity. By virtue of this innovation, the Greeks established an ideal mediator between this world and the one beyond that could be represented but never made actual. The essay was still in the thrall of Lefort’s political ontology, but it showed a greater interest in religion and history than his mentor’s work did, and also a penchant for sweeping philosophical-­historical judgments of an orientalist stripe. Gauchet’s next major engagement was with the anthropology of Pierre Clastres—one of the most significant encounters of his intellectual life, since it led to the development of his own ideas about the origins of the state and religion.

Clastres’s Political Anthropology Born in 1934, Pierre Clastres was a member of the Union des étudiants communistes (Communist Youth) and, like Gauchet, an avid reader of Socialisme ou Barbarie.36 At the Sorbonne in the 1950s, Clastres took classes with Lefort,



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when the latter was still a Communist. Like many party members, Clastres broke from the PCF after 1956 and searched for alternative intellectual models. He dabbled in philosophy for a few years before deciding to train as an anthropologist. He wanted to write a philosophical kind of ethnology on the model of Lévi-­Strauss’s Tristes tropiques.37 In 1963, Clastres went to South America and did an eight-­month stint of fieldwork among the Guayaki Indians of Paraguay—one of the most isolated and under-­studied forest cultures of the Americas. This mission formed the basis of Clastres’s doctoral dissertation and, subsequently, his ethnography of the Guayaki, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1972). The work that established Clastres’s reputation in France, however, was La Société contre l’état (Society Against the State), a collection of essays, philosophical in temper, published in 1974. There, Clastres set out to elucidate a program of political anthropology, one that would place power at the core of human societies and, in so doing, effect a “Copernican revolution” in the social sciences: “Political anthropology appears to have made it abundantly clear that a complete reversal of perspectives is necessary.” “Political power,” Clastres argued, “is universal [and] immanent to social reality.” As such, it was irreducible and provided “the first motor of social change” in human societies.38 Lefort and Castoriadis, it will be recalled, had been arguing a version of this thesis for years. Like theirs, Clastres’s political anthropology attempted to carve out a space between Marxism and structuralism. His attacks against the former could be quite bitter. He criticized its evolutionism, its reduction of political and social structures to economic ones, and also—a new one—its “ethnocentric” belief in the superiority of modern industrial societies. Added in were personal barbs against Marxist anthropologists who “sorely lack talent, by definition.”39 In comparison, Clastres was much softer on structuralism, having studied under Lévi-­Strauss, and adopted many of Lévi-­Strauss’s ideas and concepts. While structuralism was to be credited for taking “savage thought” seriously, it was too formalistic with respect to social questions: “Whether one approaches structuralism from its summit (the work of Lévi-­Strauss), whether one considers this summit according to its two major components (analysis of kinship, analysis of myths), an observation emerges, the observation of an absence: this elegant discourse, often very rich, does not speak about the society. It is a structuralism like a godless theology: it is a sociology without society.”40 Structuralism had to be radicalized and politicized, and this is precisely what Clastres’s work proposed to do: “A demand had thus

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emerged among researchers and students: we want to talk about the society, tell us about the society.”41 In this way, he positioned his work as consonant with the values of a post-­1968 society: political anthropology would do away with abstract theoretical models and address questions of greater currency, those of power, inequality, and the necessity of delegitimizing and breaking with the state. What did power in primitive societies look like? The problem, for Clastres, was that indigenous societies had always been defined in terms of what they lacked—principally, the state. His signal contribution to anthropology was to dispute this notion, and to argue, on the contrary, that primitive societies did not lack a state so much as refuse it. The argument had two components. The first simply held that while American Indian societies typically had chiefs, the chiefs had no authority: “Humble in scope, the chief ’s functions are controlled nonetheless by public opinion. A planner of the group’s economic and ceremonial activities, the leader possesses no decision-­making power.”42 The second, the explanation for why this was the case, involved a more complex set of assumptions. Clastres believed, following Lévi-­Strauss, that societies are defined by the exchange of signifiers. In the case of American Indian societies, the key “signs” were typically women, words, and goods. Clastres noticed that all of these signifiers tended to flow in one direction—from the group to the chief—and that the chief was constantly in debt to his people. What this signaled, for Clastres, was the chief ’s role in disrupting the logic of exchange: Society could never be a perfect circuit of exchange since there would always be a point exterior to it, one in which goods could not be put back into circulation. With this, “a new relationship between the domain of power and the essence of the group now comes to light: power enjoys a privileged relationship toward those elements whose reciprocal movement found the very structure of society. But this relationship, by denying these elements an exchange value at the group level, institutes the political sphere not only as external to the structure of the group, but further still, as negating that structure.”43 The point here is so close to Lefort’s work that it seems impossible that Clastres was not influenced by it: Societies need some external reference point in order to be “instituted” as a group. Power came from this “beyond” and was typically associated with nature. For a group to invest that power in a single human being would have been dangerous, since any person incarnating the power of nature would exercise incredible authority over the group. Inevitably, there would come to be a perfect reciprocity between group and leader, each finding its identity in the other.



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For Clastres, the creation of the bumbling, impotent chief in South American Indian societies was a stroke of intuitive genius since, in setting up this ersatz institution, “they chose themselves to be the founders of that authority, but in such a manner as to let power appear only as a negativity that is immediately subdued: they established it . . . precisely in order to strip it of any real might. Thus, the advent of power, such as it is, presents itself to these societies as the very means for nullifying that power.”44 By venerating power in its impotence, these societies “refused” power in its coercive form and thereby blocked the emergence of social inequality. If, as Clastres wrote, “Chieftainship in primitive society is only the supposed, apparent place of power, [then] . . . it is the social body itself that holds and exercises power as an undivided unity. This power, unseparated from society, is exercised in a single way; it encourages a single project: to maintain the being of society in non-­division, to prevent inequality between men from instilling division in society.”45 With the chief as a placeholder of power, primitive societies were homogeneous, equal, free of domination, and socially empowered. The arrival of the state destroyed this primitive idyll, bringing transcendent authority, division, and submission. There were obvious weaknesses in Clastres’s deduction. For one, he held his theory to be true not just of South American forest cultures but of all non-­ statist societies—a leap that incurred the suspicion of other anthropologists.46 Much of his argument, moreover, relied on a dubious notion of “refusal:” The savages “refused” not only the state but, at various turns, “inequality,” “economy,” and “history.”47 How, though, can one refuse something of which one is unaware? We do not say of people who traveled by horse and carriage in the eighteenth century that they refused the automobile. Clastres was cognizant of this difficulty, and even asked, “Is it possible to account for this ‘decision’ by Indian cultures? Must we decide that it is the irrational outcome of fantasy, or can we, on the contrary, postulate a rationality immanent to this ‘choice?’ ” His answer was that these societies had a “premonition” of the state’s arrival—a position verging on the mystical.48 If Clastres could not give a good reason as to why Indian societies decided to refuse the state, then how was his view different from the old one: namely, that primitive societies are defined by their lack of a state? And, finally, there was a primitivist, romantic quality to Clastres’s theory: What came before the state tended to be free and equal—“The Indians devoted relatively little time to what is called work”49—and what came after was misery and domination. In perhaps his most provocative move, Clastres did not deny that violence and warfare were persistent features of primitive

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society; rather, he argued that these were mechanisms that ensured the freedom and equality of indigenous societies. The existence of external enemies worked to maintain the integrity of the group: “As long as there is war, there is autonomy: this is why war cannot cease, why it must not cease, why it is permanent. War is the privileged mode of existence of primitive society, made up of equal, free and independent sociopolitical units: if enemies did not exist, they would have to be invented.”50 With Hobbes, Clastres affirmed that primitive war is always against the state; and contra Hobbes, that primitive cultures were highly structured and sociable. Whatever the shortcomings of Clastres’s political anthropology, the lessons to be drawn from it were clear: “The political”—that is, how a society managed its relationship with transcendent authority—was an elementary structure of human societies (even where it did not seem to exist, it was there); power did not necessarily imply violence and coercion; and, normatively, human beings could only be free and equal without the state. These ideas accorded perfectly with the post-­1968 atmosphere in France, with its ideal of a self-­managed society, and also, of course, with the ideas of Lefort and Castoriadis, in part because Clastres’s were derived from theirs. Indeed, Clastres’s work confirmed an idea that was already present in Lefort’s: that societies are symbolically instituted in such a way that representation—the group’s image of itself—becomes foundational to the arrangement of its political and social dynamics. This was later acknowledged by Lefort: “Clastres recognized, as I did, that the origin of social division cannot be grasped in the realm of the real, that power cannot be summed up in its empirical operations.”51 These lines were written in memoriam of Clastres, who died in a car crash in 1977, at age forty-­three. For much of the 1970s, Clastres went back and forth between South America and France. By 1975, he had more or less settled permanently in Paris, where he was teaching in its institutions of higher learning. Shortly before his death, he launched a new journal, Libre, with Lefort, Castoriadis, and Gauchet.

Gauchet’s Political Anthropology Upon reading Clastres’s thesis on power in Indian society, Gauchet claimed, many years later, to have been “dumbfounded”: “It seemed to me to introduce an entirely new way of thinking about power: its nature, the reasons why it had always been a part of human societies, and the different ways of managing



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this universal agency. The article struck me by its way of resolving these problems of a seemingly insoluble nature: how to conceive these radical discontinuities in history without succumbing to a banal relativism? How to reconcile the generality of the facts of power with their particular variations?”52 Indeed, reviewing Society Against the State in 1974, Gauchet commended Clastres not only for breaking with the Hegelo-­Marxist “idols” of progress and “Reason in history” but also for providing an alternative model “for thinking about the social process in general” and for “preparing the ground for a new conception of history.”53 Even so, there was something unsettling for Gauchet about Clastres’s image of primitive societies. By instituting power in the form of an impotent chief, these cultures had indeed immunized themselves against the threat of tyrannical authority and the division of society into masters and subjects. In doing so, however, they also cut themselves off from the world beyond. The savages, like the Romans and Persians, could not arrange the nature of power quite correctly: One needed a mediator between the mundane and the transcendent worlds, and the savage chief came unambiguously from the former. Absent this mediating function, there was no Other in whom the savages could contemplate themselves: internally homogenous, they were the same to one another; insulated from the great beyond, they had no exterior force to reflect their collective image. Thus, for Gauchet, “The immense price paid” by the societies against the state was that they could have no self-­consciousness, no ability “to recognize themselves in their own work.”54 Gauchet had more to say about these provocative ideas and followed up his review with two long essays on Clastres in 1975, both published in Textures. There, he determined that Clastres had overlooked the most important component of primitive societies: religion. The realm of the “beyond,” the mythical time of the foundation of society: Gauchet now saw this agency as the structuring force of humanity’s first societies. The primordial division of society (splitting groups into factions) that Lefort had made the foundation of his political ontology was, in other words, given a religious interpretation by Gauchet. For primitive societies, there was this world, the one of tangible phenomena, the here and now; however, there was also the noumenal world beyond, remote and inaccessible, but whose mystery required interpretation and representation at all times by the “savages.” The beyond was seen by them to be the source of all law, custom, rite, and myth. All individuals were equally substrate before this awesome power, and thus no person could “ever be recognized as having the power to introduce something new into the order of

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things.” Their relationship to time and history was thus static: “Nothing new has happened to our society since the origin” because the mythical foundation of society could have no date, belonging as it did to a different realm of time.55 Thus, for Gauchet, religion was in no sense institutionalized in these societies; rather, it was “a ritual framing of existence . . . [that connected] every significant activity or circumstance back to the original model from which it proceeded and which it had to obey.”56 The beyond was sacred, and it infused every aspect of their lives. Evidently, Gauchet surprised himself with this analysis. He later confessed that he had never given religion much serious thought and had only faint memories of the catechism and his days in the church choir. “When I wrote that article on Clastres,” he recalled, “I remember very well my hesitations about the word religion. I decided to put an end to these and spent eight days in the library reading manuals and encyclopedias of social science, trying to figure out what religion really was.”57 In fact, the figure responsible for Gauchet’s pivot toward religion was the same whose distinction between historical and nonhistorical societies had made this entire line of inquiry possible in the first place: Claude Lévi-­Strauss. It was the passage toward the end of his La Pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind), where Lévi-­Strauss commented on the nature of nonhistorical societies, that excited Gauchet: The obstinate fidelity to a past conceived as a timeless model, rather than as a stage in the historical process, betrays no moral or intellectual deficiency whatsoever. It expresses a consciously or unconsciously adopted attitude, the systematic nature of which is attested all over the world by that endlessly repeated justification of every technique, rule, and custom in the single argument: the ancestors taught it to us. . . . Mythical history thus presents the paradox of being both disjoined from and conjoined with the present. It is disjoined from it because the original ancestors were of a nature different from contemporary men: they were creators and these are imitators. It is conjoined with it because nothing has been going on since the appearance of ancestors except events whose recurrence periodically effaces their particularity. It remains to be shown how the savage mind succeeds in overcoming this twofold contradiction.58 What Lévi-­Strauss was describing here, realized Gauchet, was not only the ontology of stateless societies but also the structure of primitive religion. The



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latter did not concern gods, priests, or rituals; rather, it was a certain manner of thought, one in which the “supernatural figured as the ancestral, the original, the time not too distant but Other. . . . The natural and social order looked back to this original absence.”59 This appropriation of Lévi-­Strauss’s thought allowed Gauchet to move away from questions of economy and exchange— Clastres’s main concern—toward questions of belief and mentalité. This new perspective also called for a readjustment of Clastres’s theory. Gauchet accepted Clastres’s idea that a “Decision” had been made by the savages to banish the state, but he believed, as he signaled in his earlier review, that this “sociological act” had come at a price that Clastres had not realized. For the savages, “the best means of keeping servitude at bay” had been “to subject themselves in thought” to a noumenal beyond.60 They thus enjoyed equality and freedom from domination but had no way of questioning the world around them or of framing collective ends, since this would imply some idea of change over time. Gauchet’s point was at root existential: How meaningful was equality if it precluded self-­knowledge and the capacity to change? How real was freedom if it was inspired by fear and awe? For Gauchet, this close-­mindedness and lack of reflexivity was a kind of ethnocentrism: “It’s the belief of all savages that their way of organizing things, their social world, is the best possible.”61 With this analysis of primitive religion, Gauchet was well on his way to his groundbreaking theses about the development of the state in history. Clastres had helped him immensely in the process. In fact, Clastres was becoming close to the Lefort-­Castoriadis-­Gauchet group just as this trio was thrust into the center of a national political controversy. In 1972, the Socialist and Communist Parties put aside their historic differences to form a joint electoral slate—the so-­called Common Program of Government, which advocated a state-­centered socialism. Their presidential candidate was the Socialist François Mitterrand, who came within a point and a half of defeating the liberal Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the second round of the 1974 election. The specter of Communists in office sent the non-­Communist French Left into a panic. Just as the events of 1968 were injecting new life into radical politics and giving it an antiauthoritarian, direct-­democratic orientation, it now seemed that bureaucratic authoritarianism on the Left was deepening its hold on French society. To discredit the PCF, intellectuals of the center and non-­Communist Left revived the concept of “totalitarianism”—a term that was popularized earlier in the Cold War, and referred to the attempt by the Nazis and the Soviets alike to force history to conform to a utopian ideology.62 During and after World War

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II, it was typically invoked by liberals to link the Soviet Union to the crimes of the Nazis and thereby to discredit socialism as an ideology. It thus figured as a key trope within Cold War liberal discourse, especially in the Anglo-­American world. In France, the liberal political thinker Raymond Aron had tried to popularize this concept in the 1950s, but his attempts made little headway. This changed, however, in 1974, when the translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago offered an opportunity to publicize the crimes of the Soviet Union—well-­known to the French Left since the 1950s—and accuse the PCF of a perennial failure to see the realities of totalitarianism. Lefort, a longtime critic, with Castoriadis, of state power in the Soviet Union, became an important character in this saga. Gauchet noted how “the anti-­totalitarian breakthrough” affected the reception of the group’s ideas, “providing a rare occasion when the review breaks out of its theoretical reserve to engage in a contemporary battle. Our work, especially that of the older members, began to make an echo.”63 It brought them more national attention than Socialisme ou Barbarie or Textures ever had. While there were significant intellectual differences between the Cold War liberalism of Aron and the libertarian political theory of Gauchet and company, their common hatred of socialism converged for the moment in this anti-­totalitarian critique. Following Lefort’s lead, the Gauchet-­ Clastres-­ Castoriadis group augmented its anti-­statist, anti-­totalitarian rhetoric in the mid-­1970s. Clastres remarked, in an interview from 1974, “We must not have any illusions, whatever the good will of certain figures [like Giscard] who must still manage the machinery of state. The State machine, in all Western societies, is becoming more statist, that is to say, more authoritarian, and with the deepest consent of the silent majority.”64 Castoriadis redoubled his commitment to the autonomous, self-­managed society in the following terms: “For me an absolutely essential element of the idea of an autonomous society, one that self-­institutes explicitly . . . [is] the necessity of abolishing the State, the legal monopoly on violence left in the hands of an apparatus separated from society.” He made polemical virtue of Clastres’s work too: His savage societies demonstrated that alternatives were possible, that society could be instituted in such a way that “political power was not separate but en meso, in the middle, . . . [and] that no one person and no particular stratum could appropriate it for themselves.” Indeed, he added, “the most important, the longest-­lasting things have been said not by the ‘civilizers’ but by ‘savages’ who arise suddenly from the depths of society.” This was a clever way of turning Clastres’s thesis into a metaphor for political struggle in France: Revolution would come from



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below, from those who refused to be assimilated into the system of bureaucratic domination.65 Gauchet, for his part, wrote a theoretical essay on totalitarianism in 1976, “L’Expérience totalitaire et la pensée de la politique” (The Totalitarian Experience and Political Thought). Conceptually, his analysis struck many of the same notes as Lefort’s. Totalitarianism he saw as the defining political phenomenon of modernity; fascism and communism alike promised closure and unity where society should always be split and divided; true democracy renounced calls to unity, and actively encouraged disagreement and difference. Gauchet emphasized the deliberative quality of this political democracy: As with Clastres’s savages, there had been a decision, “a sociological act,” to set up society in this fashion. Finally, the most distinctive note of the piece was Gauchet’s insistence on the religious character of totalitarianism. Here he borrowed Lefort’s idea that all human collectivities presupposed an absent Other, a lieu vide (empty space), and gave it a religious spin. The empty place had once been recognized, by primitive people, as the realm of the gods and ancestors. But with secularization and the demystification of the beyond, “a human power had to replace them.”66 Gauchet’s article was published in a 1976 issue of L’Esprit, an important journal of the center Left and now the leading voice of French anti-­ totalitarianism. After 1968, the journal aligned itself with the anti-­statist, self-­management currents running through the Left. It found Gauchet and Lefort’s ideas in Textures to be particularly refreshing, and it paid tribute to their work in a 1975 issue: “It’s time to quit . . . the limited field of political science in order to rethink the political in our societies, . . . to think the political against domination.”67 In its anti-­totalitarian zeal—organizing conferences on the concept, and even printing an anti-­totalitarian manifesto at the head of every issue—L’Esprit was only too happy to bring these formidable thinkers into their midst. Lefort, Gauchet, and Castoriadis were often featured in articles and interviews, and their ideas, according to the historian Michael Scott Christofferson, inspired “Esprit to develop a political philosophy of democracy that would focus, in particular, on the question of democracy’s institutional basis, understood here in relationship to totalitarianism as ‘recognition of social division’ that ‘prevents the system from closing in on itself.’ ”68 In contributing to this anti-­totalitarian project, Gauchet was placed on the map of the Parisian intelligentsia. In the same year, the circle around Gauchet embarked on a complementary project: a new edition of the sixteenth-­century masterpiece by the French

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thinker Étienne de la Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire, with supporting essays by Lefort, Clastres, Gauchet, and the philosopher Miguel Abensour, a fellow traveler of the group since the days of Textures. La Boétie was a strange and enigmatic figure: of noble birth, but orphaned; a young appointee of the Royal Parlement of Bordeaux; a poet and friend of Montaigne; dead at age thirty-­two. His short book, from 1548, began with the question, “Why do we obey?” He answered by arguing that human beings desired domination and freely submitted to the authority of a tyrant. Servitude was a condition of our own making, and we needed only to withdraw our acquiescence to become free of it. The contributors to the volume all regarded La Boétie as a prophet of modern domination. In their co-­written introduction, Gauchet and Abensour claimed that earlier readings had recognized the trenchancy of La Boétie’s political reflections but were so “terrified by the abyss which opened beneath their feet” that they applied themselves to a quick solution so as to “quit this critical space and rediscover terra firma.” For Gauchet and his co-­authors, posterity has been unable or unwilling to pose the question at the center of the Discourse, namely, “Why is there voluntary servitude instead of friendship; why, in the terms of Pierre Clastres, are there societies with a state rather than societies without a state?”69 In posing the question in this way, they naturally saw the state, rather than the individual subject, as the key source of the problem. Indeed, what La Boétie saw in 1548, before anybody else, was the presence of the totalitarian form of government in the modern development of the state. “The modern State,” argued Abensour and Gauchet, in terms now predictable, “is the State that liberates itself from every extra-­social foundation, and from every exterior justification. It’s in this sense that the State is all powerful, assigning itself the task of making social unity.” For this, it needed to eliminate religion, which posed an alternative source of legitimacy and identification: “The State is always secretly atheist. It doesn’t believe in the work of the divine, and for good reason. If it takes up religion, it’s in order to finally destroy it.” In fabricating the social according to its own interests, the state created “a new man,” programming its subjects with a new set of “psychological-­anthropological” coordinates.70 With nothing above or beyond the state, people lost any sense of transcendence, and were cut off from what Gauchet called, following Castoriadis, the “social-­historical.” There was now only submission to this worldly master. This was the source of obedience and servitude in modern societies; not anything inherent in the human subject, but the modern temptation to identify with this awe-­inspiring force of authority. Clastres struck a similarly



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naturalist interpretation of La Boétie’s work. The philosopher had “deciphered the abject sign of a perhaps irreversible decline: the new man, a product of incomprehensible misfortune, is no longer a man, or even an animal. . . . This being, which is difficult to name, is denatured. Losing freedom, man loses his humanity.”71 Human beings in their natural state were free and independent, they all agreed; whereas modernity brought the state and the production of abject and obedient subjectivities. It was time to recover that sense of independence, and find a way to break from the state.

Gauchet’s New Theory of State The following year, 1977, saw the creation of Textures’ successor journal, Libre: Politique, Anthropologie, Philosophie. It was organized by the same team, minus the Belgian contingent—thus, Abensour, Gauchet, Clastres, Lefort, and Castoriadis. Its mission was announced in its title: to theorize the conditions of human liberation within a cross-­disciplinary, political-­anthropological optic. The moment happened to be propitious for reassessing the state: The Union of the Left had just been scuppered and a shadow was cast over the PCF’s ambitious program of nationalizations and state-­led redistribution in the Common Program. Moreover, the post-­1968 politics of the “Second Left” had given new momentum to an anti-­statist politics of autogestion. Therefore, between Giscardian liberalism and the Common Program there was an immense space opened on the non-­Communist Left for rethinking the state. In the national media, this terrain was mainly filled by the New Philosophers, Bernard-­Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann, who offered the most sensational thesis, that all states were inwardly totalitarian, and efforts should be undertaken to minimize it as much as possible. The doctrine of human rights, acting as a supranational guarantee of individual liberty could, in their view, effectively replace the state. From more élite circles of the non-­Communist Left there issued the theories of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Deleuze and Guattari, both philosophers, brought an experimental approach to the writing of theory, offering not so much a coherent set of interlocking theses as an “assemblage” of different concepts and analyses: “A book has neither object nor subject,” they declared on the first page Milles plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus), “it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.” Even so, Deleuze and Guattari were centrally occupied in A Thousand Plateaus with understanding the nature and history of the

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state. Their aims ran parallel to the Textures/Libre group insofar as they too were interested in developing a philosophy of human liberation from capitalism and the state, and they likewise thought that the socialization of the means of production would likely increase the despotism of the state. Moreover, their thinking on the subject was broadly informed by an engagement with the work of archaeologists and French anthropologists, including Lévi-­Strauss, Leroi-­Gourhan, Marcel Griaule, and especially Clastres. Deleuze and Guattari commended Clastres’s attack against the “evolutionist postulate” of historical materialism, which assumed that the state was the product of economic development and increased in power over time. Clastres had thereby opened new possibilities for theorizing the state. He was wrong, however, to believe that societies could have existed without a state. Archaeological evidence had clearly shown, for Deleuze and Guattari, the existence of powerful states in Asia, Africa, America, Greece, and Rome, stretching all the way back to the Neolithic era. And even where states did not appear in evidence—hunter-­ gatherer societies, for instance—Deleuze and Guattari noted that relations between different groups already presupposed an apparatus for negotiating contact and exchange. Thus, against Clastres, they argued that “there have been States always and everywhere. Not only does writing presuppose the State, but so do speech and language. The self-­sufficiency, autarky, independence, preexistence of primitive communities, is an ethnological dream.”72 For Deleuze and Guattari, the primary function of the state was to “capture.” In its Ur-­form, the state was an imperial megamachine, similar to what Marx had once termed the “Asiatic Mode of Production.” There was no private property, and money existed only as a tax paid to the state. This led to a condition of what Deleuze and Guattari called “machinic enslavement” of the political community. Another kind of state was founded on the principle of private ownership and appropriation. Under this form, servitude took the form of a personal bond between owners and owned, and thus “machinic enslavement tends to be replaced by a regime of social subjection.”73 In a third iteration, the state-­form was dictated by the logic of capital: States consisted of productive sectors among which capital and labor were free to circulate. Here workers experienced a particularly cruel form of subjection, constantly told they were free but in actuality enslaved to the capitalist machine. As such, it combined both aspects of the other state-­forms; that is, machinic enslavement with a sense of personal subjection. These forms of capture, however, were never complete or absolute: New social movements and forces came to be created on the margins, the most



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consequential of which Deleuze and Guattari called “the War Machine.” Whereas the state was inherently conservative in its desire to make everything internal to it and permanent, the war machine was diffusionary and existed outside and against the state’s defining interiority. As such, it “brings connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination.” It undertook this resistance not by subjecting and incorporating bodies, as did the state form but through a more networked and fluid mode of organization. It was thus not bound to reproduce the structures and agencies of the state form and could develop a revolutionary logic independent of it. Signs of the war machine’s presence were in constant evidence for Deleuze and Guattari: “Each time there is an operation against the State—insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare, or revolution as act—it can be said that a war machine has revived.”74 Their attempt to theorize liberation from the state, while conducted along lines similar to those of Clastres and the Textures/Libre group, was ultimately less anarchistic and romantic. Clastres hoped that under conditions of modern domination, the political subject could mimic the savages’ conscious refusal of the state through an extraordinary act of will. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the means of resistance were embedded in the process of state-­led domination, creating political forces that might one day oppose and overthrow it. It was in this same historical moment that the philosopher Michel Foucault developed his theory of the state. He complained, in a 1978 lecture at the Collège de France, that the state had been persistently overvalued in French politics: “We know the fascination that the love or horror of the state exercises today; we know our attachment to the birth of the state, to its history, advance, power, and abuses.”75 The parties of the Left were mostly to blame here, developing elaborate plans to redistribute wealth by expanding the power of the state. Foucault publicly supported the New Philosophers in their assaults against Marxism and loudly disclaimed the election of Mitterrand in 1981, who, in his estimation, lacked the “art of governing” and whose statist policies would introduce new forms of bureaucratic control into French society.76 Thus, Foucault set out to reconceptualize the state in his lectures at the Collège de France between 1976 and 1979. The state, he argued, should be seen not so much as an entity but as a set of practices and rationalities—a “principle of intelligibility” within a given reality.77 This procedure he called “governmentality,” and, like both the Textures/Libre group and Deleuze and Guattari, he situated it within a deep-­historical genealogy.

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The first matrix of governmentality was “born from the archaic model of the Christian pastorate.” The theme of the god or political ruler as a shepherd of men, who are like his flock, was pervasive in the Eastern Mediterranean, and could be found in the cultures of the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Assyrians, and the Hebrews, who relayed it into Christianity. The pastorate conception designated a distinct form of power, not to be confused with other methods used to subject human beings to a sovereign, like politics, pedagogy, or rhetoric. Rather, in Christianity, it gave rise to an art of “taking charge of men collectively and individually throughout their life and at every moment of their existence.” The essence of the pastorate was its insistence on pure obedience: “An individual who directs and an individual who is directed is not only a condition of Christian obedience, it is its very principle.” This obedience was involuntary according to Foucault, and it had no utility or function. To obey was good in itself. Within this framework, individuals came to examine their conscience in order “to tell the director what one had done, what one is, what one has experienced.” In due course, “one will extract and produce a truth which binds one to the person who directs one’s conscience.” Obedience, submission, confession, all highly individualized in the relationship with one’s shepherd: this was the legacy of the pastorate.78 By the Middle Ages, there developed minor revolts and reactions to the pastoral mode of rule: “Counter-­conducts” was Foucault’s locution, “the sense of struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others.” He had in mind here the mystical movements that developed within medieval Christianity, which sought access to a sphere of experience beyond the control of authorities. In time, the Church learned to contend with these counter-­conducts, and developed a series of regulations and codes for managing its flock’s conduct. By the sixteenth century, a vast literature began to appear beyond ecclesiastical circles looking to establish rules of conduct for, among other things, children, families, and eventually the governing of human beings. It was out of the pastorate mode of governing that the raison d’état tradition emerged, an art of governing that found “the principles of its rationality and the specific domain of its application in the state.” Thus, for Foucault, “At the end of feudalism, a general questioning of the way of governing and governing oneself, of conducting and conducting oneself, accompanies the birth of new forms of economic and social relations and new political structures.” The upshot of this narrative, according to Foucault, was that the state, having mastered and incorporated forms of resistance to it, was much more invasive and domineering than had previously been appreciated.



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Indeed, “whether one opposes civil society to the state, the population to the state, or the nation to the state, it was in any case these elements that were in fact put to work within the genesis of the state.”79 In other words, Clastres’s idea of society against the state was a flawed thesis, since the two spheres were mutually constituting. Such was the range of options for theorizing the state on the non-­ Communist at the end of the 1970s: All agreed that the proposals being floated by the PS and PCF were overly bureaucratic and dirigiste; and all wished to articulate a new theory of the state’s role in governing and controlling the lives of its citizens. It is in this context that we need to understand Gauchet’s next major theoretical intervention, “La Dette du sens et les racines de l’État” (The Debt of Meaning and the Roots of the State). This was his first text for the newly launched Libre, and one might have expected him to continue on the path laid down in his essays on La Boétie and totalitarianism—that is, to consider the ways in which states could be challenged and resisted. This, however, was not exactly the direction his essay took. Gauchet laid out his premises, now achingly familiar to us. Societies are constituted by a primordial division: a world of here and now contrasted to a world beyond of mythical origins and inaccessible truths. In the earliest stages of human history, the split was instituted in what we might call a Platonic fashion—two worlds, one sensible, the other supersensible. In the sensible world, everyone was in an equal position vis-­à-­vis the other world— that is, equally awed by its mystical, controlling power. This was the religious decision made by the savages. Society owed a debt to the gods, without whom there could be no imaginable group. By this means, the other became the sacred Other, the giver of group identity. The state was born when this absolute separation—between worldly supplicants and divine authority—was broken. The gods began to have representatives on earth—namely, priests— who interpreted and carried out their mission. With this, the primordial split was no longer situated at the borderlands of two worlds; rather, it was brought into the heart of society: The state, claimed Gauchet, “arrived by rerouting against society the system of differences that had originally preserved society against the State.”80 The possibility of primitive equality was shattered once an authorized elite of mediators appeared. From there developed a class of masters, legitimized by their proximity to the divine, and a class of subjects, stigmatized by their distance from it. The question, thus, that all societies faced was, religion or the state?— two mutually exclusive ways of instituting the primordial split between the

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immanent and the transcendent. This, of course, was a thinly veiled reworking of Lévi-­Strauss’s distinction between historical (“hot”) and nonhistorical (“cold”) societies. Primitive societies, for Gauchet, were inherently religious, static, stateless, and equal, though also prostrate in fear of a transcendent beyond; statist societies were dynamic, historical, and unequal, though also capable of mastering the world around them, and therefore of attaining greater self-­awareness. Against Lévi-­Strauss and Clastres, Gauchet made his preference perfectly clear: The state was the true path toward liberation. The savages’ “rejection of servitude” came at too high a price, for what good were freedom and equality if they were inspired by fear and precluded knowledge of self? Of course it is easy, remarked Gauchet, to romanticize the savages and their rejection of the state, but what if “the question, why are there masters and slaves, became the question of the slaves? And what if, after millennia of refusing to see the origins of submission for what they were, an unprecedented will to confront the reasons of power were suddenly born among men? A will not to ward away domination, but to master it?”81 Gauchet was now contending that one must first accept servitude in order to master it, and therefore that one must live with the state to undertake the search for self-­realization. This was a departure from everything he had argued until this point, which saw the state as an instrument of domination, preventing human beings from realizing their own self-­making and autonomy. Gauchet was probably unaware of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, but the intellectual move he made was remarkably similar—namely, to see state and civil society not as opposites but as partners in development. With this new insight, Gauchet’s work pushed out in unforeseen directions. In 1985, came his vaulting philosophical history of the West, Le Désenchantement du monde (The Disenchantment of the World)—a work that elevated Gauchet’s reputation and became the centerpiece of his thought. Its first part restated the theses on primeval religion that we have reconstructed: “Religion is organized not as a constraint but as an instituting action, not as an obligation but as a choice. . . . [It] is the millennia-­old veil of a deeper anthropological structure, which continues to operate in another guise after the veil has disappeared.”82 This structure compelled human beings in their earliest stages to regard the invisible world beyond as all-­powerful, and themselves as having limited scope for action and development: “Nothing in the system could lead them to ask the question: why me? What am I doing here?” The second part of the book concerned a process as yet undeveloped in Gauchet’s thought, namely what happened to human societies once the state



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arrived and “disenchantment,” a term borrowed from Max Weber, encouraged humans to turn away from their ancestors and back toward themselves. First, he argued, the state transformed the social and religious structures of primitive societies. Gauchet wrote, “Once the State becomes a separate entity, part of its function is to expand and assimilate. . . . With its logic of expansion, however limited its concrete realization, the universal bursts open the scene of human experience with all its ramifications. This is a major trauma producing what is perhaps the most profound spiritual shock wave in history.” For Gauchet, this “trauma” was the forcible “relocation” of the “collective self,” which no longer looked above or beyond the mundane world for spiritual grounding but was forced to find it in the perceptible world. With the coming of the state, the monarch became a substitute for the divine, and his secular law became the agency to which people submitted. The gods had retreated, leaving people naked before the monarch. Gauchet wrote, “When the despot succeeds in passing himself off as the master of the universe, where can the gods, who give rise to the world and legitimate its course, be placed in relation to it?”83 What La Boétie had said of the modern state—that submission to it replaced submission to the divine—became true of the state in general for Gauchet: It was a mechanism compensating for the disappearance of the gods. The cosmos were not immediately disenchanted, however. Monotheism, in fact, developed as a response to the “shock waves” of the state’s emergence. People still asked themselves how things of this world differed from those of the Other one. Indeed, it was “structurally impossible to stop asking this question.” Religious beliefs now carried an air of subversion, since they implicitly challenged the monarch’s power. Thus, the temptation for political subjects was now to imagine a power capable “of freeing them from the highest power in the world” (i.e., the state).84 The originality of the Jewish solution to this problem was to reproduce the power of the monarch at the divine level: God’s power was one and omnipotent just as the king’s. Gauchet saw in the creation of monotheistic religion a desire for emancipation. “Inherent to the new understanding of the divine,” he wrote, “is an irreducible autonomy of beliefs, actions, or developments that opens onto the true face of reality. In the extreme case, the rule of faith opposes the rule of law.”85 Obeying God’s law, in other words, took priority over obeying the king’s. The development of Christianity from within Judaism introduced a new inversion into the relationship among the people, the state, and the divine. Christianity’s notion of salvation in particular encouraged believers to refocus their attention on things of the perceptible world. Jesus Christ’s status

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as a “god-­man,” partaking of both divine and human qualities, was a crucial innovation in this direction. For when God adopted a human form, it meant that “we could devote ourselves completely to attaining salvation, not by turning away from this world, not by installing ourselves outside it, but, on the contrary, by investing in it and opening up to the plenitude of its own realization.” In this respect, it was not the words of Jesus Christ or even his actions that mattered, but the “space he occupied”—a mediation between the here-­below and the beyond. Human beings could now recognize themselves in the incarnated image of god, and this transformed their conception of their own power. By this means, Christ’s mediation “implied something unutterably new—about life, truths, and values,” and, indeed, “the terrestrial sphere acquired autonomous substantiality and became ontologically complete.”86 It likewise deepened human beings’ sense of autonomy, since they were not submitting to an exterior agency but realizing their own power through it. He contrasted this with Islam, in which the emphasis was on divine law and not salvation, and thus “submission through belief was the keynote.”87 It was in this sense that Christianity proved to be, in Gauchet’s famous phrase, “a religion for exiting from religion.” Jesus Christ might not have appeared, but once he did, “the direction of his actions were clear”: The world beyond would be entirely folded into the perceptible world, and human beings would be opposed to the existence of another world. This did not fully occur until the eighteenth century, according to Gauchet. In the meantime, the relationship among the people, the state, and the divine continued to evolve. Christ’s mediation acquired institutional expression in the Roman Empire, and thus arrived the Church and its “organization of dogma and policing of souls.” From there, Gauchet traced the slow transfer of power once deemed transcendental into worldly establishments: the medieval conflicts between the Church and State over the legitimacy to rule the Christian flock; the invention of divine-­right monarchy as the politicization of religious power; and, finally, the arrival of democracy, the moment marking “the end of the principle of dependency structuring social space in all known societies prior to our own.” This did not mean that Western societies—uniquely constituted for this pattern of secularization—would see the end of all religious activity, for people would still continue to search for transcendence in daily life, and sometimes they would find it, in Proust, Buddhism, or music, for example; but it was no longer active as a collective-­social problem. Indeed, as Gauchet acknowledged in the closing pages, loss of purpose was now to be expected with the exit from religion, as the individual became deprived of its sacred



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other: “Religion’s decline is paid for by the difficulty of being-­a-­self. . . . This society is psychologically draining for individuals, since it no longer protects or supports them when they are constantly faced with the questions: why me? Why was I born when nobody expected me? What is expected of me?”88 When Christianity began to disappear, so too did its psychology of liberation and independence. New individual and collective formations were to take shape in its wake. With this work, Gauchet’s political anthropology reached its mature formulation. Disenchantment simultaneously worked his criticisms of Clastres into a philosophy of history, offered an original theory of secularization, and presented a new framework for understanding social dynamics in contemporary European societies. Christianity had recomposed the structures of time, history, and subjectivity and in a way that could never be reversed, both liberating human beings from archaic dependencies and introducing new conditions for alienation as well. Gauchet’s narrative itself had a biblical cast, characterizing the arrival of the state as “the main event in human history” and as a “ ‘cataclysmic rift.’ ”89 Though widely acclaimed, its weaknesses were obvious to reviewers: The arguments were too abstract to follow; the book gave a distorted picture of the history of Christianity and the Church; and the emergence of the state, and likewise its connection to Christianity, was assumed rather than explained. The most incisive critique came from the Marxist anthropologist Emmanuel Terray, who pointed to the internal inconsistencies and aporias of his conceptual structures.90 It also had the virtue of eliciting a reply from Gauchet, which gave him the occasion to review his own methodology. Gauchet defended Lévi-­Strauss’s distinction between historical and nonhistorical societies and also the idea that the political was an inescapable feature of human society. This was a theory of politics deeply indebted to structural anthropology, but it was not commensurate with it, since, strictly speaking, political-­ social structures were always and everywhere historically determined. “There is novelty,” he wrote, “in the way humans react to the conditions that brought them into being. . . . And thus there will always be, under radically different and transformed guises, the same anthropo-­social structures at work, those that make us the contemporaries, at some level, of the savages whose world has disappeared.”91 This was Gauchet’s epistemological alternative to structuralism and Marxism—an anthropological theory of politics that focused on how a society registered its debt to its ancestors and how, in the process, it developed a series of political and social institutions whose interaction and evolution was bound to shape its future history.

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State and Subject In the complex narrative of Disenchantment, the state played a number of roles. In its first appearance, it transformed the political and social structures of primitive societies, making possible the rise of monotheistic religions. This early form of the state confirmed what Gauchet had argued in his earlier radical phase, namely that states were oppressive in requiring absolute submission from its subjects. In its later phases, however, the state became a much more nuanced institution for Gauchet, particularly in early European modernity. With the emergence of Renaissance ideas of popular sovereignty, the relationship between the people and the state began to take on yet a new meaning. Divine-­right monarchy, in pretending to incarnate a realm of transcendent power, had presented itself as superior to the mundane world: It was made of a different substance. However, in the “age of political representation [i.e., modernity],” argued Gauchet, “power’s actions stopped being placed under the sign of the de jure dissimilarity between top and bottom. . . . It switched to realizing society’s inner adequation to its own principle, based on the coincidence between the bottom which is acted upon and the top which acts.”92 Power was conceived as immanent to society. Once this basic commonality of ruler and ruled was established, the distance between them started to close. Hence, early modern political theorists such as Hobbes could imagine a social contract originating from “the bottom.” At this point, the state was fully secularized and cut off from the transcendent realm. As a result, new possibilities were opened for the development of collective and individual identities. According to Gauchet, political subjects now placed all their “trust in the totality of the ordering mechanisms and representations at the service of this transformation.” They represented themselves through and tied up their identities in democratic institutions. Gauchet here drew heavily on Castoriadis’s language of “autonomy” and “social-­historical” being, since democracy allowed a group to take control of its own future and set its own ends. Crucially, for Gauchet, autonomy could not be achieved without the state because society was now producing itself through the state’s democratic institutions. This once-­external agency was now internal to the people and a part of their struggle for autonomy. The libertarian dream of a society without a state was fundamentally misguided: It did not apply under modern democratic conditions. In fact, suggested Gauchet, resistance to the state would only increase its power over the private lives of individuals and families. No longer awe-­inspiring and authoritarian, power was diffuse and quotidian, and



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Gauchet could sound much like Foucault when writing of modern power.93 Democracy, in other words, rendered the state both an indispensable instrument of collective self-­realization and also the potential agent of a highly invasive and bureaucratic form of domination. One should not assume, however, that the growth of the modern state necessarily entailed greater authoritarianism. That Gauchet was moving toward a greater appreciation of the state was obvious from “The Debt of Meaning.” This change of direction in Gauchet’s work led to tension with his collaborators. Clastres’s sudden death in 1977 claimed a heavy toll on the group, since he had been not only one of its leading thinkers but also a pacifying agent between the quarrelsome duo of Castoriadis and Lefort. In 1980, Castoriadis published a text on the Soviet Union without submitting it first to the group for discussion. It broke with the totalitarian thesis of Lefort by claiming that the USSR was in reality a “stratocracy”—a form of military government in which the army and the state became indistinguishable. The article became the first chapter of his 1981 exercise in Cold War paranoia, Devant la guerre (The War to Come), in which he forecast imminent world domination by the Soviet Union.94 Castoriadis’s breaking of ranks prompted Lefort to shut down Libre. The relationship between Lefort and Gauchet started to sour as well, the latter complaining of Lefort’s refusal to grant him any intellectual credit in the direction of the group’s ideas. The split was made final in 1980 after Lefort and Gauchet quarreled over the question of human rights—a hot-­button issue for Parisian intellectuals in the late 1970s. Lefort saw in human rights an independent source of appeal by which the oppressed could contest (totalitarian) state power.95 Human rights were superior to philosophies of revolution because they were immunized from the desire for power and mastery. Thus, “A politics of human rights and a democratic politics are ways of responding to the same need: to exploit the resources of freedom and creativity which are drawn upon by an experience that accommodates the effects of division.”96 When Gauchet responded in 1980, his circumstances had changed greatly. Earlier that year, he had accepted a lucrative position as co-­founding editor, along with Pierre Nora and Polish dissident Krzysztof Pomian, of the centrist journal, Le Débat. The choice of Gauchet was made jointly by Nora and the historian François Furet, who had, since the anti-­totalitarian high tide of the mid-­1970s, become close to the group around Libre. Gauchet’s first contribution to the journal was “Les droits de l’homme ne sont pas une politique” (Human Rights Is Not a Politics), which challenged Lefort’s position without naming him. There, Gauchet attacked human

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rights for exalting individual liberties at the expense of collective solidarity. In this respect, the doctrine “fell prey to the old illusion that one can build a society on individuals, on his or her needs and rights,” and ignore collective self-­determination.97 Gauchet’s entire analysis of the democratic condition precluded the possibility of an exterior point of reference for the project of individual and collective self-­making: That had been a distinctly premodern dynamic.98 Modern democracy for Gauchet was the socialization of individuals through institutional and representative channels—necessarily an open-­ended and dialogical process. Therefore, embracing a politics of “human rights” (and not “civil rights”) neutralized this democratic project of collective self-­making by encouraging citizens to think of themselves as atoms isolated from the rest of society. In doing so, the politics of human rights fixed subjectivity within a static framework and closed off the possibility of personal and collective autonomy. We can examine Gauchet’s arguments against human rights from two angles. The first is a psychoanalytic one. For Gauchet, human beings, like political societies, were primordially split. “At the heart of the self,” he wrote, “lies the possibility of discovering or mobilizing another self, of looking at one’s own normal self, and hence immediate reality, from an outsider’s viewpoint. The experience of an inner split . . . opens up a fracture in being, which . . . is the beginning of contact with a completely different and higher order of reality.”99 The “split” self—the language taken from the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan—worked much like the split society: It had to resist the temptation to become reconciled to itself. There would always be a part of the self, which Sigmund Freud called “the unconscious,” that would escape rational control. While psychoanalytic and psychiatric thinkers regarded this internal sense of alienation as a problem, Gauchet believed that this gap had to be preserved for a subject to experience a full sense of autonomy. As with democratic societies, the modern self was pluralistic and divided and should never be made to coincide with itself. Along these lines, Gauchet co-­wrote with his partner, Gladys Swain, in 1980 La Pratique de l’esprit humain (Madness and Democracy), a book examining the history of the modern self through the psychiatric practices of the early nineteenth-­century doctor and leading medical thinker, Philippe Pinel. Gauchet and Swain argued that the democratic revolution’s impact on the self and its history had yet to be fully appreciated. Once contact was broken with the transcendent world beyond, the self had nowhere to look but to itself:



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The constitutive paradox of the anthropology of democratic societies is that human beings are for the first time recognized as possessing original and inalienable rights that antedate the collective phenomenon. We are masters of ourselves before the law, externally independent in terms of the community to which we belong; and we are also, and correlatively, the first beings to discover that we are subjugated from within, internally dependent, dispossessed of ourselves by something that comes nowhere but ourselves.100 Under democratic conditions, the self was inexorably directed inward, and there thus arose a new problem: that of individuals becoming cut off from others and thereby losing the ability to engage in projects of collective self-­making. A key challenge of modernity was bringing individuals out of the hierarchical dependencies of the religious world and onto the horizontal, egalitarian playing field of democracy.101 Gauchet appreciated how psychologically wrenching this transition could be—metaphysical voids opening where religious certainties once prevailed. Indeed, a consequence of the advent of democracy was “the end of a general economy of alterity, of a system of the closure of beings in their differences; the emergence of a mode of apprehending the reality of the other that was entirely new for humans, based on the mutual opening of identities toward one another.”102 Subjectivity became unmoored and in flux with the disenchantment of the world—hence, the appeal of charismatic leaders and mass parties in the twentieth century. This was one potential consequence of the subjective revolution, the totalitarian option, in which subjects found religious comfort in joining a cult movement. The other consequence was that human beings became atomized. The danger of human rights doctrines was thus to reinforce this tendency toward individual isolation. Subjectivity needed to be drawn out of itself and reconnected with collectivities. Gauchet maintained that the project of individual autonomy, like that of social autonomy, cannot be achieved in the absence of an Other. “An individual’s becoming a subject involves self-­abandonment, which makes it possible to take on the constitutive rules of the social contract or of the formation of a general will. The political subject comes to itself by becoming actively involved in this process.”103 Thus, the state had with one hand enabled the project of human autonomy and with the other taken it away. The second angle of Gauchet’s critique of human rights was a political-­ institutional one. In the same year that La Pratique de l’esprit humain appeared

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(1980), Gauchet produced a long essay on the work of the liberal philosopher Benjamin Constant. There he argued that the principal error of classical liberalism was to have thought that the expansion of liberties in civil society curtailed the power of the state “as if there were a sum total of power or authority to be shared, and that an augmentation of one side would lead to a diminution of the other.”104 On the contrary, Constant failed to see that civil society and the state were mutually constituting in modernity. With the arrival of the state, humans became historical beings, and their self-­realization depended on the ability to change over time, to look backward in order to better contend with the future. The state, under democratic conditions, played a key role in this process of collective self-­making, for its policies and decisions acted to concretize the desires and priorities of its citizens. Once they became policy, collective decisions were reflected back to the institutions of civil society, around and against which citizens could form new priorities. The state created a framework in which “collective identity” and a principle of “inscription” could be made legible in modernity.105 Thus, the doctrine of human rights reproduced Constant’s error in assuming that rights could be demanded against the state, as if zero-­sum rules were in play. The project of autonomy unfolded according to a fundamentally different logic in modernity for Gauchet.

Democracy over Republics With this analysis, it was now clear that Gauchet was on a separate course from his former comrades at Libre. Lefort evidently accused him of “becoming a thoroughgoing democrat in breaking all ties with the extreme left”—a charge that Gauchet, twenty-­three years later, acknowledged, conceding that “the philosophy of democracy and the subversive radicalism of the imaginary make a bad couple.” “I do not share,” he continued, “this faith in the creative effervescence of the margins,” and, in breaking with Lefort, “I ‘turned to the right’ by rallying à la politique normale.”106 Gauchet indeed came to accept that change must be effected from within, and never against, the political establishment, and, fittingly, he has become one of its leading thinkers. The role of Le Débat in rebranding the intellectual as an institutional operator placed Gauchet in a position to rise in the intellectual world. The inaugural issue had Nora declaring, “The time of the intellectual as oracle is up. . . . However great his prestige, he is no longer sacerdotal. He has been largely



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secularized; his prophetism has undergone a change of style. Scientific investment has immersed him in a wide network of research teams and funds.”107 The issue appeared in early May of 1980. Sartre died on the fifteenth of April and, in case anyone missed the connection, Nora told a reporter for Le Monde that the fact that “Le Débat went to press on the day of Sartre’s death, was a symbol, the sign of a change.” Gauchet welcomed the new opportunities Le Débat opened for him, including election, with the help of Furet, to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (where Lefort and Castoriadis had also been appointed) as a full professor in 1990; book contracts with Gallimard, one of France’s prestige publishing houses; and invitations to join the Fondation Saint-­Simon and the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron, two influential liberal think tanks founded by Furet in the 1980s. He also contributed to two of the most ambitious collective research endeavors of the day: Les Lieux de mémoire (edited by Nora), and the Dictionnaire Critique de la Révolution française (edited by Furet and others). Gauchet’s entry into liberal circles affected how he conceptualized the state, and it cemented his dislike for the Jacobin-­republican state inherited from the French Revolution. He declared, along with the leading revisionist historian of the French Revolution, François Furet, that the Revolution was “lost as a political model” and that republicanism, as it had been known for the last two centuries, was defunct.108 After all, Furet had developed his ideas in close association with the Libre group and published his touchstone analysis, Penser la révolution française (Interpreting the French Revolution) in 1978, the peak of anti-­totalitarianism. In light of this discursive shift, Furet could now see that “Stalinism took root in a modified Jacobin tradition that consisted in grafting onto the Soviet phenomenon the ideas of a new beginning and of a nation in the vanguard of history. . . . Today the Gulag is leading to a rethinking of the Terror precisely because the two undertakings are seen as identical.”109 Furet’s basic analysis was that the revolutionaries of 1789 failed to reconcile direct democracy with a representative system and ended up reinstituting “the divine right of public authority” under republican auspices. For two hundred years, the Left clung to and reproduced this pathology, treating the Revolution as its “ancestral history.” In the same vein as the Libre group, Furet spoke in the name of a revived democracy, one that would preserve a tension between civil society and the state, never allowing them to collapse into one another. The true nature of the revolution “can be defined as a dialectic between actual power and a symbolic representation of it”—terms very

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similar to those of the Lefort-­Castoriadis-­Gauchet group.110 Even so, Lefort somewhat regretted the severity of Furet’s analysis, which seemed to cancel any possible positive legacy of the Revolution: “In foregrounding the political dimension of the Revolution, he invites us also to consider the extraordinary event that was the end of the monarchy—the new experience of a society that was no longer in the grip of an organic totality.”111 Gauchet, by contrast, fewer reservations about Furet’s thesis. His La Révolution des droits de l’homme arrived in the year of the Revolution’s Bicentenary and complemented in many ways Furet’s work. Gauchet identified the philosophical-­political contradictions faced by the constitution writers of 1789, 1793, and 1795, and reconstructed carefully their strained and exhaustive debates. The problem with which they continually wrestled was the nature of democratic power: What exactly was the shape of this new collective sovereign, and how could it be detached from the monarchical structure of power? Affirming Furet’s analysis, Gauchet maintained that the framers had mimetically inverted the structure of the power they were overthrowing. This led to an aporia: the general will embodied an authority that was one and indivisible but that was also, in the last instance, founded on the will of individuals who made up the nation.112 Therefore, the republican form was bound to oscillate between direct democracy and revolutionary dictatorship.113 For Gauchet, this dynamic was the key to understanding post-­Revolutionary French history. “With the new forms of political organization,” he wrote, “and the advent of suffrage, the cohesion of French republican thought [which stressed the unity of a general will], began to crumble. This is the originality of the French case: democracy had to constitute itself in opposition to the Republic.”114 The Republic (with the majuscule) replicated the one and indivisible conception of sovereignty that had preceded the democratic revolution. As such, it was merely a secular translation of monarchy. The democracy that took shape in and through the French Revolution challenged this unitary conception of power. The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 created a framework of civil (not human) rights that molded citizens through active participation in democratic institutions. Recalling his earlier (1977) discussion of the state in “The Debt of Meaning,” Gauchet referred to the “debt” owed by political subjects to the entity—the state—that enabled their pursuit of autonomy and to the duties required of citizens. Through this revisionist reading of the Revolution, thinkers like Gauchet and Furet helped redraw political-­intellectual battle lines in the 1980s. They posed a democratic tradition—open-­ended, tolerant, anti-­authoritarian, and



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liberal—against a republican one that was closed, authoritarian, and cultish. Accordingly, political positions that invoked the power of the state (over and above citizens) to redistribute wealth and set policy goals for the French people often reverted to the unitary conception of the state that preceded the French Revolution. This kind of republican politics denied the two-­way process by which subjects and the state were made. For Gauchet, anti-­capitalist struggle offered a case in point, since “to struggle against capitalism is to assume the eminent possession of the nation in its entirety”—an unacceptable affectation of social mastery.115 In this respect, he was, like Foucault, skeptical of welfare policies and state planning because they overpowered the individual and erased his or her capacity for self-­determination.116 Gauchet’s rallying to the state in the late 1970s and early 1980s was not, in other words, an endorsement of Mitterrand’s program of nationalizations and wealth transfers; it was, rather, an attempt to invent a different kind of statism, one more attuned to the psychological needs of French citizens. Gauchet believed, on the strength of his anthropological writings, that the glacial process of secularization was fated to bring human beings out of their state of primitive ignorance and to foster knowledge of the self. The state’s function was to preside over the secularization of society by creating a mode of politics in which citizens could recognize themselves through others and could obtain control over their own lives. In helping individuals transition from a world of hierarchic certainty into one of democratic uncertainty, the state could not be too domineering or too absent, since a weakened state could give way to social anomie and thereby preclude the possibility of collective self-­determination. As Gauchet wrote in Le Débat in the 1990s, “The individualist dynamic [of modern democracy] has generated a new anthropological absolute.”117 Needed was a state that could help citizens actively participate in the shaping of their own lives and combat the tendency toward social atomization. Indeed, for Gauchet, one of the great advantages of living in a statist society was the ability to adopt future-­oriented projects: “The power of society to make itself takes the form of a capacity to foresee, control, and possess, literally, the future with which it is pregnant.”118 The state was to be embraced insofar as it could help citizens master their collective destiny. But in what form exactly, and what did this look like in practice? It seems, for Gauchet, that the state oversees the process of collective self-­ making by protecting the institutions of civil society from disintegration. Gauchet has thus devoted much attention to the republican school, which, for him, carried the heavy burden of liberating students from the private

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attachments of family and religion and integrating them into the life of the body politic. In this sense, the school was the key institution of modern democratic societies, mediating between public and private, collective and individual, secular and religious. Without a national state-­led program of education, there could be no real sense of collective identity for Gauchet. Thus, in practice, this meant a strong endorsement of cultural assimilation as a national policy, beginning with a single common language: “To refuse the imposition of a national standard of language is to protect the individual from a certain violence that would be done to him or her; but it’s also to enclose that person in the ghetto of particularity and deprive him or her of the access to freedom conferred by the appropriate usage of a common language.” Too much tolerance of difference was bound to backfire, for, according to Gauchet, it is “the invariable stupidity of the idea of the ‘multicultural society’ ” that dooms immigrants “to live on the margins, in the daily humiliation of not possessing the keys to the universe in which they must thrive.” Ghettoization was the inevitable consequence of multiculturalism. Indeed, Gauchet could not blame French families for not wanting to send their children to school with immigrants, since “the level of education will be miserable.”119 Rather, for Gauchet, “to recognize the immigrants among us as fully fledged individuals is to provide them with a deep acquaintance with our culture.”120 Gauchet’s thinking has also entailed a hard-­line stance on freedom from religion. He remarked in Le Débat in the mid-­1980s, “One does not eradicate the imprint of Islam as one erased the mark of the Picardy patois or undid the Breton habit of thinking.”121 Religious difference thus presented an even larger obstacle to the project of collective autonomy than linguistic difference. Here too Gauchet’s solution was to use republican school to neutralize cultural difference and promote collective identity. Critics, however, have pointed out that while Gauchet advocated laïcité in French schools, and was himself an avowed atheist, his historical metanarrative of modern democracy is a fundamentally Christian story.122 Hence, he could remark, “Christianity remains the most relevant religion in a post-­religious society.”123 Islam, by contrast, had its own specific way of instituting the political, one that emphasized “submission” according to Gauchet, and was much more likely to end in totalitarianism. The principal source of trouble in Islam was the Qur’an: Whereas the Christian gospels consisted of four separate accounts of the life of God’s messenger and were thus open to different interpretations, the Qur’an claimed to present the word of God himself and tended thus to produce fundamentalist readings. “There follows from this radical matrix of



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Revelation a predisposition—not a determinism—toward literalism that is completely unique to Islam.”124 Hence, it is always more difficult for politics in Muslim countries to free itself from the grip of religion and transition toward democracy. Remarks of this nature have made Gauchet seem like an apologist for what Edgar Morin has called catholaïcité—a specifically Catholic and French form of secularization. For Gauchet, the state also had the responsibility of protecting the institution of the family—another cradle of collective identification—from collapsing under the weight of social anomie. He argued, “There has been an anthropological revolution: the word is not too strong. The family ceases to be what it has been for as long as we have known it, a mechanism of social order. It ceases to constitute a meaningful collectivity from the point of the establishing and maintaining of the lien social.” He added, drawing implicitly from Lévi-­Strauss’s writing on kinship, that marriage was one of the “last refuges of symbolic obligation”—“a primordial rite”—in a world almost entirely disenchanted. To blame for this profanation of the family were, on the one hand, women themselves: “Feminine emancipation . . . signaled the final step in the emergence of another mode of social cohesion, setting individuals adrift.”125 The liberation of women from dependence on the male wage earner was thus figured as a threat to the collective self-­making of the French nation as a whole. On the other hand, politicians and jurists could be held responsible for this development insofar as they promoted legislation that endangered the institution. Gauchet was here writing amid debates over the PACS bill, which offered civil protection for same-­sex marriages.126 Without directly naming the bill, Gauchet intoned against state officials for allowing this “deinstitution of the family” to take place. In doing so, they had, he charged, failed to supervise, and thereby jeopardized the project of collective self-­formation. Gauchet’s account of the state here raises a number of questions, which can be used to reflect more generally on the progression of his political theory into the 1980s and 1990s.127 In his mature work, Gauchet has written eloquently of the predicaments facing collective and individual subjects under modern conditions. The long-­arcing and traumatic exit from religion produced an anthropological mutation in modern societies such that individuals were disconnected from collective frameworks and fated to live out meaningless and alienated lives. In their atomized state, they were easily preyed upon by the market forces unleashed by neoliberal capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, and increasingly related to one another primarily as consumers, not as citizens. “Civic desertion” was now the default condition

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of modern democracies,128 and one could soon expect “the disappearance of the masses”129 and “the loss of common purpose.”130 Gauchet’s way of deriving these observations was, as we have seen, intellectually complicated and highly original. His approach to political theory has stressed the contingent historical-­anthropological unfolding of collective self-­making, and thereby diverged from the Anglo-­American tradition of political thinking, which has much deeper foundations in both legalistic and rational-­choice-­based argumentation. For Gauchet, operating in a Hegelian-­type register, it is the case that the conditions of human liberation are intricately folded within layers of historical and subjective experience. What has never been obvious or clear in Gauchet’s work, however, is why French collective self-­making had to take the form it did once modern conditions of disenchantment and atomization were in place. There seems to be little capacity for human beings to invent their own forms of collective solidarity, since, for Gauchet, the sacred and the symbolic must be drawn from the poetry of the past. This orientation has lent his work a defensive and conservative quality. If the structure of Christian history is to push relentlessly toward disintegration, then preservation of the antique and primordial becomes a matter of survival. Thus, Gauchet has tended to act as a philosopher of order and an apologist for the old way of doing things. But more than this, his work has helped delegitimize struggles seeking to challenge and reverse the very social predicaments he has diagnosed. Whenever social conflicts have arisen in French society, Gauchet has been quick to condemn them. His reaction in Le Débat to the massive public sector strikes that brought the French economy to a standstill in December 1995 was unusually vitriolic. He found “boring” the “trumped up radicalism” of the protesters, whose defense of the welfare state he claimed was outdated and unworkable. Moreover, the demonstrations were an illustration of just how individualized and market-­ oriented French society had become: The collective effervescence on display was false, “a trompe l’oeil;” and, in fact, according to Gauchet, each protester was out to defend his or her own individual self-­interest. This was the breakdown of the social and the surest sign of a “conversion to liberal politics.”131 A few issues later, Le Débat devoted an issue to rethinking the welfare state, an institution which, as the editorial announced, continued to nourish the illusion that social justice was a “matter of social stratification,” rather than a problem of a “temporal, dynamic, or intergenerational character.”132 The pattern of Gauchet’s work is thus clear: to have consistently replaced the language of social democracy with that of identity and to have insisted that



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contemporary problems are of a psychosocial and cultural order rather than a socioeconomic one. Following his mentor, Lefort, Gauchet has continued to argue that social conflict is a necessary and salutary feature of contemporary democratic politics. In his 1979 essay on Alexis de Tocqueville, Gauchet wrote, “Conflict is the essential factor of socialization. It is its eminently productive and efficacious manner of integration and cohesion,” bringing individuals in step with the collective order of society.133 But, in fact, most of his examples of a well-­ functioning polity seem to suggest a pre-­established consensus around collective norms (i.e., the school and the family); and, inversely, instances of real social conflict are chased away by Gauchet as so many illustrations of contemporary narcissism. What kind of conflict is to be desired for Gauchet—presumably something more than mere parliamentary political disagreement? Moreover, Gauchet claims to endorse forms of collective solidarity, but when they come from the Left—and conjure “class” and “revolution”—they are regarded as perversions of historical development and incompatible with the “symbolic” dynamics he has so persistently emphasized. That it was Gauchet who coined the campaign slogan of Jacques Chirac’s 1995 presidential run serves as a perfect illustration of his politics: “Social fracture” suggested a deep and alarming division within French society without naming any particular causal agency. Thus Gauchet could often sound radical in anatomizing the alarmingly bleak state of French society, only made worse, by his own recognition, through the Great Recession of 2008. Even with warning lights flashing red, Gauchet has hoped that the anthropological condition of modern anomie could be overcome through “reform,” “moderation,” and “a sense of caution.”134 But could these ever be enough to reestablish “common purpose”?

Chapter 3

Family Ties The Anthropology of Emmanuel Todd and the Identity of France

With the work of Emmanuel Todd, we find another attempt to understand politics through an anthropological lens. Like Gauchet, Todd traced the development of modern ideologies back to primordial social dynamics. In Todd’s case, however, it was neither Christianity nor the political institutions of “savages” that structured modernity; rather, it was the social and psychological unit of the family. On this basis has Todd put together a vast, planetary atlas for the study of modern political and social ideologies. Unlike Benoist, Gauchet, or any of the figures discussed so far, Todd’s work was grounded in quantitative, social-­scientific methodologies. He did not mind being called a demographer, a historian, a geographer, or an anthropologist: “The only label I reject,” he claimed, “is that of philosopher; as for the rest I couldn’t care less.”1 In focusing on Todd’s work, this chapter attempts to do three things. First, it reconstructs the making of Todd’s elaborate anthropological system through the 1970s and 1980s. Second, and in a wider frame, it situates his work within different traditions of scholarship on the family. This takes us back to the arrival of industrial capitalism to nineteenth-­century France and the work of Frédéric Le Play and then to the family-­based social history of Cambridge University in the 1960s. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how Todd’s family-­based anthropological system was parlayed into a series of bold political interventions, making him into one of France’s leading thinkers. Todd drifted far from his original anti-­totalitarian liberalism and came to embrace, in the 1990s and after, a heterodox, Left-­leaning democratic politics. This has seen him break with liberal prescriptions—broadly—and focus

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more on the relationship between native-­born French people and France’s immigrant populations. Todd is known principally for his 2015 response to the Charlie Hebdo murders, Qui est Charlie?, a spiky, no-­holds-­barred analysis that elicited howls of protest from every quarter of the country. Todd’s path to Charlie, however, was long and winding. He was born in Paris in 1951 to a highly intellectual family. His father is Olivier Todd, a well-­known journalist in France and the biographer of Albert Camus and André Malraux. On his mother’s side, he is the grandson of Paul Nizan, a leading Communist intellectual of the interwar period and a close friend of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-­Paul Sartre. Nizan died fighting fascism at Dunkirk in 1940, at just thirty-­five years old. Nizan’s wife Henriette came from a renowned Jewish family and was a cousin of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-­Strauss. The Todds were, in other words, a well-­situated family intellectually, and this gave Emmanuel a certain independence from the usual circuits of patronage in Paris. As a teenager in the mid-­1960s, Todd joined the student wing of the Communist Party, which at that moment was a hotbed of Maoism. He did not remain there for long, however, and, after visiting Eastern Europe and seeing “real socialism” in 1968, Todd decided, in his own telling, “to make a pretty spectacular anti-­communist career.”2 He completed a degree at the Institut d’études politiques and went on to pursue graduate work at Trinity College Cambridge, where his father had studied in the late 1940s. There the younger Todd joined the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and wrote a doctoral thesis under the supervision of two anthropologically minded social historians: Peter Laslett and Alan Macfarlane. While still finishing his thesis, Todd returned to France and wrote a book on the USSR, La Chute finale (The Final Fall), which predicted the imminent collapse of the Soviet empire. With this book and its 1979 follow up, Le Fou et le prolétaire (Madness and the Proletariat), Todd became a rising star of the liberal, anti-­totalitarian Left. In 1983, he took a position at the Institut National d’Études Démographiques (National Institute for Demographic Studies— INED) and published two books that established his anthropological system, completely changing the trajectory of Todd’s career (the early work will be treated in a later section of this chapter). The first of these two books was La Troisième planète (The Third Planet in literal translation; The Explanation of Ideology in its English translation), and it was staked on a bold hypothesis, that political, social, and religious worldviews had their foundations in premodern family arrangements. “The

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ideological system” wrote Todd, “is everywhere the intellectual embodiment of family structure, a transposition into social relations of the fundamental values which govern elementary human relations: liberty or equality, and their opposites, are examples. One ideological category and only one, corresponds to each family type.”3 Todd here supposed that for all place and all times ideology could be traced back to kinship patterns. How did he envision this linkage? For Todd, ideology could be graphed as intersecting axes of liberty and equality, making a Cartesian-­style grid. The vertical axis represented liberty and measured the authority of the father over the son. The horizontal axis represented equality and measured the relationship between siblings. Each quadrant of the grid, bounded by these two axes, defined the ideology of a given family structure. The family type that engendered a sense of both equality and liberty was what Todd called the “nuclear egalitarian family,” and it was native to the Parisian Basin of France, Northern and Southern Italy, Central Spain, Greece, Romania, Poland, Ethiopia, and Latin America. In these places, brothers inherited equally, and were pressured to establish their own independent households once married.4 In the quadrant where liberty and inequality met, there was the “absolute nuclear family.” Here, one saw a like pressure for filial independence, but the laws of succession favored a system of primogeniture, and thus established a sense of fraternal inequality. This type was common to the Anglo-­Saxon world (England, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), Holland, and Denmark.5 In a broad sense, both types of nuclear family featured a strong individualist ethos and maintained a clear distinction between civil society and the state. Civil society constituted the realm in which people could live freely according to their own ends; and the state was the realm in which they submitted to law and authority. Because of this separation, argued Todd, “nuclear family systems everywhere”—both the egalitarian and absolute types—“are incapable of producing political and ideological forms of totalitarianism which seek and achieve the total absorption of civil society by the state.”6 In a more specific sense, the Anglo-­American nuclear model gave rise to a liberal-­democratic political tradition in which there was a marked preference for a system of rotating elected officials. The “egalitarian” variant, however, could verge on anarchism, its passion for equality being corrosive of order and authority. The disposition toward inequality of the Anglo-­ American model made it susceptible to the kind of racism one found in the histories of both the US and the UK, while the more Latinate tradition tended to be relatively blind toward difference.

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In the quadrant defined by high levels of authority and inequality was the “authoritarian family,” and it was native to Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Bohemia, Scotland, Ireland, peripheral France, Northern Spain and Portugal, Japan, and Korea. In these regions, the father handpicked one son to be his heir, so there was a sense of inequality among brothers. This was different from primogeniture, where the oldest son inherited by virtue of a widely recognized legal code. In the authoritarian family, it was the father’s decision that prevailed, breeding a sense of competition between brothers who could inherit. From this structure came the ideologies of social democracy and Catholicism, both of which featured a vertical vision of social relations and a natural respect for bureaucracy and authority (the state for the former, the Church for the latter). The authoritarian family also favored dynastic politics, where, as in the case of Germany, Sweden, Japan, and Norway, the majority party almost never left office. Psychologically, its disinheritance of all but one son generated a high level of ambition among young men, who were left to make their own way in the world. Obedience to authority meant there was also a strong emphasis on education; for this reason, literacy rates tended to be higher in places with this kind of household. More negatively, this family type could produce high levels of neurosis and anxious self-­discipline, as brothers competed with one another for the esteem of the father. It also proved more susceptible to authoritarian political ideologies emphasizing hierarchy and difference. The fascist regimes of twentieth-­century Germany and Japan, for instance, were derived from this family structure.7 Finally, in the fourth quadrant, where authority intersected with equality, there was the exogamous “community family,” and it was native to Russia, Yugoslavia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland, Albania, Central Italy, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Northern India—in short, the Communist world. Equality was guaranteed by laws of inheritance in these societies, and married sons remained within the parental household and under the supervision of the patriarch. The dynamic produced by this family type was dangerously unstable for two reasons: on the one hand, a band of equal brothers found itself in constant conflict with the father figure, leading to a Brothers Karamazov-­like scenario; on the other, exogamy was an inherently disintegrative structure, since it introduced a stranger into the household and produced a sense of discomfort for all involved. This family type thus tended to be radical and anarchic, “proclaim[ing] the abolition of paternal power and the autonomy of the couple. Across the world and throughout history, only

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the community exogamous family arouses such a sentiment of hatred, such a will toward sociological murder.”8 On this fourfold model, there were three important variations. The most common was the community endogamous family type, in which cross-­cousin marriage between brothers’ children strengthened solidarity along the horizontal axis. Indigenous to the Arab world and also to Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, this family type was disposed religiously to Islam and politically to stateless forms of socialism. As such, it “recognized two levels of integration: the family and the community of believers, the Umma. The ideas of nation, State, and party politics are imported.”9 Another variation on the community endogamous family also displayed an asymmetrical preference for endogamy, but this time between the children of sister and brother, rather than brother and brother. This model was native to Southern India, and its closed nature, mixed with its practice of asymmetrical marriage tilted it toward a caste system in which only certain individuals were treated as equal and marriageable. In a third variation, there was an “anomic” family type, in which equality between brothers was uncertain; cohabitation of married sons with their parents was discouraged in theory but accepted in practice; and consanguine marriages were frequent. This family structure was found in Southeast Asia and among the indigenous peoples of South America. Finally, there were the “African systems” of family, an eighth type entirely unrelated to the others. Its practice of polygamy made it unstable and nearly irreconcilable with fixed forms of religion and politics. As a result, literacy rates in sub-­Saharan Africa tended to be low.10 Thus could all political and social ideologies be reduced to these eight anterior family structures for Todd. Modernity did not present any radical break with the past but was, in fact, anchored deeply in ancient habits and folkways. What was communism after all but the “transference to the party state of the moral traits and the regulatory mechanisms of the exogamous community family”? Referring back to the Russian family type, Todd remarked, “Individuals with equal rights are crushed by the political system in the same way they were destroyed in the past by the extended family.”11 In this way did modern political forms recapitulate their ancestral genetic programs. Todd’s system, however, was not to be used too deterministically. Family structures were likely, and not fated, to produce certain mental outcomes. Todd wished to show that the political ideologies assumed to be universal—like, for instance, capitalism, bureaucracy, or secularism—were, in fact, highly contingent on specific and local cultural tendencies. Diversity was

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the fundamental fact of the world such that it was better to speak of Japanese or American capitalism rather than capitalism tout court. Todd’s next work, L’Enfance du monde (The Causes of Progress in translation), was conceived as a “logical sequel” to The Explanation of Ideology, and set out to explain differentials of historical “development”—why some nations were more advanced than others. This was an issue of great moment in the 1970s and 1980s. As the economies of advanced capitalist countries lurched into recession in 1973, those of lesser-­developed countries experienced higher-­than-­usual rates of growth and looked as though they were closing the gap between the “First” and “Third World.” The latter’s share of world manufacturing production increased dramatically through the 1970s, reaching 10 percent in 1980; while the volume of manufacturing exports from the Third World rose at a phenomenal rate of 13 percent from 1974 to 1980, as compared to 5 percent in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economies.12 This triggered both anxieties about de-­industrialization in the OECD countries (as cheap imports flooded in from the global South) and, according to Todd, wild speculations about the accelerated “development” taking place in the Third World. “In their impatience to see the Third World take off,” he noted, “sociologists and politicians have looked to the analysis of purely economic parameters—investment rates, amount and value of raw materials—to explain the apparent stagnation of a large part of the planet and the relatively few cases of economic take off.”13 This line of reasoning was, however, a “cul-­de-­sac” for Todd: Real progress was reflected not in the standard of living but in the ability to think freely and not live under domination. The rate of literacy, he countered, was therefore the best gauge of progress: “Certain men can read, and thus are masters of the magic of texts. Others cannot; shut up within a limited, oral, culture, they are manipulated by the men who can write, who seem to them the owners of a mysterious knowledge.” Thus, added Todd, “Modernization of the mind is not simply the product of material wealth . . . [but] of cultural changes at work in the world.”14 In this world-­historical mode of theorizing, Todd assumed, as always, that family structures provided “the decisive explanatory variable” for understanding social systems.15 There was one key novelty here though: Whereas The Explanation of Ideology derived political values from the parent-­child relationship, the sequel volume tied rates of literacy (and, by extension, the capacity for development) to the husband-­wife relationship. In particular, the burden of literacy tended to fall toward women, who, for Todd, “created a

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climate for education, and manifested an attitude that favors the discipline of the mind and of the school.” The educational power of a family system, therefore, was determined by the strength of maternal authority, which itself was connected to the age of marriage: where high, women had more time to educate themselves; where low, they did not. From this premise, Todd drew yet another typology of global cultural systems. In places where respect for authority and the status of women were highest—like Germany, Sweden, and Japan—there was a maximum respect for education and very strong potential for development. Where those values were lowest—the polygamous societies of Africa—there was a “weak developmental potential” and a tendency toward stagnation.16 All other societies, based on different family structures, fell in the middle of this spectrum. Thus, ironically, the freedoms that came with literacy tended to emerge sooner in authoritarian systems. For Todd, a predictable set of outcomes could be expected once a society crossed the 50 percent literacy threshold. There was, first, a political revolution. Pamphlets, tracts, and books were produced and consumed; violence came with the breakdown of authority within society; and sexual and cultural norms were loosened. After all, the great European political revolutions— England of 1640, France of 1789, and Russia of 1917—arrived shortly after the male literacy rate crossed the 50 percent threshold. There was, second, a demographic revolution. Todd found a high statistical correlation between life expectancy and literacy. This led him to suppose that education tended to lower rates of both mortality and fertility, and thus produce an overall decline in population. The different family structures had their own ways of achieving lower rates of fertility: Authoritarian families favored birth control, for example, while certain community family systems preferred infanticide. Often the decline in population was preceded by a period of difficult transition, in which mortality rates were falling but fertility was still continuing at previous levels. Thus, there could be a population boom shortly before the demographic decline—precisely what the Third World was experiencing in the early 1980s.17 Finally, there was an economic revolution. Once population stabilized, wealth per capita began to rise, as did standards of living. Here too the path to literacy—determined by a given family structure—created different variations of economic modernity, some, for example, with high rates of urbanization, others without. The key point, for Todd, was that economic development typically followed from prior cultural and demographic revolutions.18 Todd regretted that strong developmental potential was often linked to authoritarianism within the family and thereby “ruled out the close adherence

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to liberal values. From this,” he added, “it appears that cultural efficiency and political freedom do not go hand-­in-­hand.” And yet, in a more global sense, Todd found reasons to be optimistic: Although there are noticeable differences in speed, literacy rates are nonetheless everywhere rising. Today’s statistical graphs make it possible to foresee a not-­too-­distant future when the world will be literate—that is to say, freed from ignorance. Such a situation will, it is clear, allow us to resolve the most pressing demographic and economic problems. . . . This future will be a highly privileged era in world history. It will mark the conclusion of a very long learning period that stretches from the discovery of writing, itself achieved several millennia ago, to mastery of it by all men. For mankind, it will bring to a happy conclusion what has been a lengthy childhood.19 Thus Todd supposed a grand teleology of universal literacy, which would sweep away in its course all social problems and intergroup conflicts. Not all communities were destined to have the same values and institutions: These were locally determined by family structure. However, all were bound to produce a stable, conflict-­free version of democracy, culminating in a global democratic peace. His interlocutors in The Causes of Progress were, appropriately, the great European liberals of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Todd saluted British political economists like Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo for working with concrete data, but he found that they presented only static models and had no concept of dynamic progress. Continental liberals—the Marquis de Condorcet, Hegel, and Comte—had richer conceptions of progress and culture but little in the way of empirically verifiable research. Hegel had been closest to the mark in his Lectures on World History, “attempting to trace the onward march of the human mind throughout its long odyssey” and drawing a “picture of the world that is both universal and differential.” His peculiar vision, however, was deemed “hopeless” by Todd, since it had no data to work from, and classified cultures with “rare brutality, relying on the notion of Volksgeist—the spirit of a nation.” To escape from these “phantoms,” one had to define “some simple rational variables that can be shorn of any romantic aura. The anthropology of family structures provides us with the tool we need.” Only then could a truly universal liberal theory be made convincing.20

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With these two books, Todd established an anthropological system that could explain all global social and political dynamics. In rooting all mental activity in the culture of the family, Todd positioned his work against Marxist and liberal conceptions of society, which typically relied on a notion of rational self-­interest and placed economic change at the center of their narratives. In a personal sense, these works were a turning point for Todd, since they “would be,” he later admitted, “the roadmap for the rest of my career.”21 How had Todd come to fashion this political anthropology, and what were the deeper political and intellectual sources informing it?22

Sociologies of the Family Todd’s decision to present family structures as the key to all ideological phenomena has its own history and can be seen as the intersection of a few key developments in the French and English social sciences. Perhaps most formative for Todd was the sociology of the family, especially as developed by the French thinker Frédéric Le Play in the 1850s. Born in 1806, Le Play was an exact contemporary of Tocqueville, and likewise a major figure in the history of the nineteenth-­century social sciences. During the Restoration, he attended the École Polytechnique, France’s most elite engineering school and, subsequently, the École des Mines, where the cream of Polytechnique engineers received three years of advanced instruction.23 There, the training was weighted toward fieldwork, each graduate expected to make two long journeys to observe and record the functioning of mines and factories. In 1829, with his friend the Saint-­Simonian, Jean Raynaud, Le Play traveled more than 4,000 miles on foot throughout Germany where he not only studied the organization of mines but also interviewed workers in an attempt to learn the metallurgic techniques that had been passed on from generation to generation. Upon his return to France in 1829, Le Play took on a full-­time position as a professor at the École des Mines. Under the July Monarchy, Le Play was an ideal candidate to serve as director of the newly created Ministry of Public Works, an agency devoted to the modernization of the country. Duly appointed, he prepared annual reports on the condition of the metals industry, and he assisted foreign governments—Spain, England, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Russia—in their own efforts to modernize. He also lent his expertise to privately owned mines, supervising, notably,

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from Paris, a complete reorganization of the Donetz Valley mines owned by the Russian Count Anatoly Demidov.24 Politically and intellectually, Le Play was pulled in two seemingly opposite directions. On the one hand, he was raised by a Legitimist uncle and came to be deeply influenced by the conservative ideology of the Restoration. His autobiographical reflections, composed in his later years, recorded a lifelong hatred for the 1789 Revolution and the abstract, system-­building ideas that underlay it.25 The most reliable knowledge, for Le Play, came from the experience of doing, and if social scientists wanted to understand the true productive potential of their country’s industries, they needed to know what the workers knew. In his treatise on metallurgy from 1848, Le Play claimed, “Further study of metallurgical workshops will inevitably lead to more accurate ideas about the real value of the processes learned through experience, and about the importance one must give—from a scientific point of view—to the workers who execute them. So far as I’m concerned, I have been quick to recognize the insufficiency of theoretical views that seem to condemn the practices of working people.”26 Though educated in the Grandes Écoles of Paris, Le Play preferred rural France, where he summered with his uncle’s family and mingled with provincial peasant and working classes. He recalled finding favor as a boy among “the agricultural workers, woodcutters, hunters and fishermen.” His “first lesson in patriotism” was hearing the tragic stories of fishermen who were ruined during the English blockade of the French coasts during the Anglo-­French Wars.27 On the other hand, Le Play moved in liberal and socialist circles and believed that experts could help the state better organize its industries and resources in a top-­down fashion. Indeed, Le Play relied heavily on statistics as an instrument of knowledge. His reports on minerals, for instance, were studded with tables and figures, and were designed to give producers the most accurate, up-­to-­date overview of the field.28 In his Vues générales sur la statistique from 1840, Le Play argued that “statistics is to politics and the art of government what anatomy is to physiology in the study of the human body.” If only France’s administrative and political elites had an “accurate sense of the state of the nation,” they could avoid sterile debates and move toward a program of sensible reform.29 In this progressive frame of mind, Le Play joined the provisional government in 1848 after the collapse of the July Monarchy and made his research freely available for state use. He sat on a number of governmental committees during his time as a public servant, notably the Commission du Gouvernement pour les Travailleurs, trenching, along with

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socialists like Louis Blanc, for limits to working hours for the laboring classes and for the establishment of information centers where workers could obtain information about housing and employment.30 Sometime after 1848, Le Play came to doubt that statistics could furnish an entirely accurate picture of human circumstance, regarding them, in a sense, as secondhand observations. The mania for numbers in French (and British) society around 1830 was closely associated with industrialization and the appearance of rapidly growing working-­class populations in the cities of Western Europe. For the polite middle classes, these proletarians were like a nation within a nation, and their attitudes, morals, and ways of life furnished a constant source of anxiety and fascination. As a leading historian of the nineteenth-­century social sciences has argued, “Statistics, with its depersonalizing tendencies, was a way of keeping the poor at a distance,” allowing researchers to measure rates of criminality and disease without requiring them to enter the Dickensian abodes of the poor.31 But the distance was too great for Le Play, who now insisted on knowledge supplied by direct, empirical investigation. An arrangement with the École des Mines gave Le Play six months of paid leave each year for research, and he used this time to travel throughout Europe and interview workers from different trades. The results were published in 1855 as Les Ouvriers européens (The European Workers), a sprawling six-­volume work composed of thirty-­six discrete “monographs” on working families from every quadrant of Europe. Ouvriers was premised on the idea that families were the basic unit of society and that social happiness was linked directly to the integrity of working families. Le Play, ever the social engineer, devised a method for collecting family data and invented, in the process, the modern social-­science monograph. He first contacted local notables to select representative families in the vicinity. Le Play then met the chosen family, interviewed the family members, and recorded in detail all the information they provided, including memories and reminiscences. He noted if they showed appropriate social deference to a superior or if one of the members was wont toward profligacy. Were the animals being mistreated? If so, other vices could be expected.32 Le Play also drew up a budget of the family’s income and expenses, and he carried out a comparative evaluation of the family’s moral health on this basis. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, Le Play aimed to provide the most exacting tableau of Europe’s working classes. For all the obvious shortcomings of Le Play’s techniques, we may note that Ouvriers, which surveyed families from Spain to the Urals, the British Isles to the Balkans, was by far the most

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comprehensive overview of Europe’s underclasses to have been produced in the nineteenth century and continued to be a key source of information for historians of the working class well into the twentieth century. The cases making up Ouvriers were organized according to what Le Play considered to be their degree of social organization. Le Play began with families from Eastern Europe, which had the highest degree of social stability; then moved on to the Scandinavian and English countries, which were less, but still fundamentally stable (these two regions were in separate categories for Todd); and finally to the Western continent, where disintegration was well underway, especially in the Mediterranean region.33 The families of the Russian steppe were stable because they were highly patriarchal. Daughters were married off, and sons tended to live under the paternal roof, even after marriage. There was no private property for peasant families, but the agricultural work was done conscientiously by the entire unit. In successful households, the patriarch’s wife was a figure who commanded respect but ultimately yielded to her husband’s authority. These family arrangements won Le Play’s admiration: “The patriarchal organization of the family, the security deriving from the seigneur’s protection, the abundance of the means of subsistence enjoyed by each family: these give social relations a propriety and dignity that is rarely found at the other end of Europe among people of the same rank.”34 Serfdom was inefficient and sometimes cruel, but it did tend to keep peasants in their place.35 Le Play also noted the positive role religion had played in reinforcing hierarchy and stability in the region, even where Islam was the local confession. Highly ritualized and ordered, it functioned just as smoothly as Eastern Orthodox and Western Christianity, working as a kind of social binding agent. Le Play worried intensely that Western disorder would creep eastward by way of railroads and corrupt the great empires from within.36 Even so, he considered these patriarchal societies to be too traditional and static for imitation by the West. More attractive for Le Play were the familles souches, or stem families, of Northern Europe and England, constituting a perfect middle ground between Western disorder and Eastern hierarchy. In these societies, unlike those of the steppe, peasants owned their own property. The father still ruled over the household, but, instead of having all married sons remain under his roof, he chose one heir to carry on the family name. Sending off married sons naturally moderated his authority at home, and Le Play lamented the weakening of religious sentiments in these households. However, the community as a whole profited from this arrangement, since patriarchs

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worked in concert to ensure social stability: In the Northern regions, “the function of the family is the principal element of social activity and constitutes a kind of sovereignty. Fathers, when they enjoy their full and natural authority, . . . sovereignly regulate the community’s social interests.”37 Stem families made sure all members of society were looked after. Poverty in effect was eliminated, so too was the train of vices that came with it; and conflict between sons was minimal, since the heir was expected to share the father’s wealth among brothers and sisters. For Le Play then, societies composed of smallholding families were the ideal. Overseen by the beneficent rule of civic-­minded patriarchs, they were flexible enough to bend with change but sturdy enough not to be destroyed by it. Here, of course, Le Play had in mind the powerful transformations wrought by industrialization—the true subject of Ouvriers. These had already devastated much of Western and Central Europe, bringing disease, mass poverty, and conflict between workers and employers to urban centers. Family structures were reduced to a powerless husk in these lands, consisting merely of a married couple whose children left the home permanently and abandoned them to an early death. Lacking strong inheritance mechanisms and familial safety nets, the “popular classes”—Le Play’s capacious term for the lower orders—were headed straight toward poverty, with “suffering progressively spreading to all parts of the social body.”38 In the increasingly rare places where stability persisted in the West, social conflict was kept at a minimum. This tended to be a product either of a community’s exceptional religious discipline or of the visionary moral leadership demonstrated by the “chiefs of industry.” The most intelligent of the latter “felt themselves in possession of a legitimizing influence that ensured the power and wellbeing of their industry; they did not fear the tedious struggles or malicious conspiracies that resulted in exaggerated wage increases.”39 Where the authority of patriarchs prevailed, working-­class unrest tended to be at a minimum. Absent these outstanding virtues, Europe was likely to become a society of “nomads.” It was normal, in Le Play’s experience, for families to prepare their children to emigrate in search of better employment. Nomads were different, however; they were rootless drifters, working for a spell on some grand industrial project before moving on to the next site. Their influence on the local population tended to be “disastrous,” especially in the countryside: “Wherever they passed, there were seduced daughters and troubled households.”40 Hence, the urgent need for Western European communities to adopt the stem family model and arrest the process of social disintegration.

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Ouvriers was many things—an anthropological survey, for one, of Europe’s peasant and working classes during the first generation of industrialization. Few researchers had undertaken this kind of inquiry. In this respect, Le Play’s work was not unlike Friedrich Engels’s Conditions of the Working-­Class in England and Henry Mayhew’s London Labor and the London Poor, two texts from the 1840s that examined the lives of the urban poor by employing participant-­observer techniques. Marx, too, valued this kind of empirical research. Though devoting his greatest effort to understanding the laws and inner workings of capitalism, he regretted that “no serious inquiry into the position of the French working class” had been undertaken. At the end of his life, he drew up a list of 101 basic questions about the daily lives of workers and published it in the Revue Socialiste, asking proletarians to mail in their responses: “Workers in town and country,” Marx argued, “understand that they alone can describe with full knowledge the misfortunes from which they suffer, and that only they, and not saviors sent by Providence, can energetically apply the healing remedies for the social ills to which they are a prey.”41 The voice of the worker could not be lost in the struggle against capitalism. And yet, the motivations behind Le Play’s inquiry into the conditions of the laboring classes had conservative, even theological sources. He shared with Saint-­Simonians, Comtean positivists, and socialists the ambition of creating “a science of society,” but he could not believe, as they did, that impersonal laws governed history. Citing de Maistre and de Bonald, the great counterrevolutionaries, Le Play saw history as the struggle of the human will against the stain of original sin. It was morality and its confederates—custom and habit, not laws and policies—that lay at the center of society. Individualism was perhaps the greatest modern evil, tearing down time-­honored hierarchies and eroding the moral foundations of society. This conservative side of Le Play only became more pronounced as he aged. After Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1851 brought an end to the republic, Le Play took on an advisory role in the government. A favorite of the emperor, he was promoted to the Conseil d’État (Council of State) in 1856 and was asked to write a book outlining the principles upon which a prosperous society could be built. Le Play’s two-­volume La Réforme sociale en France was published in 1864 to great success and was reprinted eight times in his own lifetime. In it, Le Play stepped up his theological rhetoric, warning of greater suffering to come if the working classes continued to abandon foresight and temperance. Only by strict observance of the Decalogue, he now argued, could social peace be firmly implanted in France.42 The stem family, for Le Play, was the last and

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most important social redoubt against the forces of decay: It organized the community around paternalistic, God-­fearing values (hard work and respect for property); and it ensured the transmission of wealth from one generation to the next.43 If workers remained humble and pious and if employers looked after the welfare of their workers, as they were supposed to, there was no reason why capitalism could not work for the happiness of all. For Le Play, the Paris Commune of 1871 confirmed his worst fears about the dangers of class conflict. For much of the ensuing decade, he revised Ouvriers to reflect his new theological frame of mind, publishing a second edition between 1877 and 1879. In his later writings, he suggested something that had been elided in the first edition: that the stem family was an ancient and perhaps original model of organization in Europe. “To my knowledge,” he claimed, “it is the only positive institution that has maintained itself in our lands for twenty-­five centuries through work, virtue, and the free play of interests.”44 Thus, for Le Play, the stem family was not simply a utilitarian solution to Europe’s social problems but also a spiritual remedy. It was natural to the people of Europe and was therefore something to be recovered. As the Third Republic progressed, Le Play became further convinced of the republican state’s inability to improve society. He founded the Union de la paix sociale (Union of Social Peace), a grassroots style organization that sought to spread the gospel of social reform at the local level, beyond the typical party channels. Members were forbidden to discuss the divisive subjects of religion and politics, and they were asked to think about the true nature of the moral law and how it might be “applied to actually existing society.”45 By the time Le Play died in 1882, he had amassed a small coterie of followers. Though they founded a journal around his methods and contributed to turn-­of-­the-­century debates about natalist and familial policies, their impact within the French social sciences was limited and confined principally to conservative and Catholic circles.46 Émile Durkheim, the commanding figure of French sociology, was evidently influenced by Le Play’s work but did not cite it, perhaps regarding his views as too reactionary.47 Both thinkers saw modern society as a fragile unity, haunted by forces of atomization and social disintegration. Le Play’s family functioned much like Durkheim’s sacred, as an agency of social cohesion where individualism threatened to take over. Even so, remaining out of favor with the Durkheimians, Le Play was largely written out of the history of French sociology. It did not help that Mussolini’s corporatist schemes, calling for cooperation between capital and labor, sounded a lot like Le Play’s ideas on the subject.48

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The Detour Through English Social History Perhaps then it is not so surprising that Emmanuel Todd encountered Le Play’s work not in France but in the English university system. At Cambridge, Le Play had found a new hearing in the 1960s among English social historians, principally Peter Laslett, who supervised Todd’s thesis in the 1970s. Laslett was a protean figure in English history. His first essays, written soon after World War II, tried to understand how “England,” in reality an assemblage of local actors, became a meaningful entity at the national level in the seventeenth century; how, in other words, “the community of the country” was formed out of “the community of the locality.”49 For Laslett, the family played this crucial role. English society was dominated by a network of locally powerful patriarchs who “mediated between the individual” and “English society as a whole.” Families were, as such, “units through which political attitudes were formulated and spread about; also instruments through which pressure was brought to bear on government.” They even helped knit together city and country, for “it must not be forgotten that, in marrying into a landed family, the heir of a city merchant . . . was submitting to an authoritarian system and entering into a set of relationships which would inevitably involve all the descendants of the marriage.”50 This investigation of family life did not, however, lead directly into social and demographic history, for Laslett became interested in the texts and political ideas that were circulating among members of the gentry in manuscript form.51 One of his discoveries was Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings, an important tract from the Civil War era that was lost to posterity and that Laslett published with commentary in 1949. In his edition, Laslett paid close attention to the conditions under which Patriarcha was produced, circulated, and read, both in Filmer’s lifetime and in the decades after his death in the 1650s, when the text had a wider audience.52 Naturally, his work on Filmer drew him toward the latter’s most powerful and influential critic, John Locke. Using the same style of contextual analysis, Laslett determined that Locke’s Two Treatises of Government was a tract written in response to the Exclusion Crisis of the early 1680s and not a revolutionary text written to justify 1688. Laslett’s approach marked, for historians like J. G. A. Pocock, the creation of what has become known as “the Cambridge School” of intellectual history, a contextualist mode of interpretation placing primary emphasis on the historical circumstances in which a text was produced and read.53 Before the

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“School” had even registered a presence on the intellectual scene, however, Laslett shifted again, now developing an interest in the linguistic philosophy and logical positivism overtaking Cambridge by way of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper in the 1950s. Beginning in 1957, he edited a series of books, Philosophy, Politics, and Society, in which he proclaimed political philosophy to be dead and expressed doubt that a statement could have any meaning beyond its immediate linguistic contexts.54 Laslett’s last turn was back to the family. In 1965, he published The World We Have Lost, a highly nostalgic work seeking to challenge ascendant Marxist narratives about the transformations capitalism and industrialization had brought to English life. Alienation, dispossession, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, the rise of a bourgeois class: these were all features of pre-­industrial England and thus could not be associated uniquely, as Marxists tended to argue, with the industrial form of capitalism. Rather, what distinguished industrialization for Laslett was the “transformation of the family life of everyone” and the attendant “removal of the economic function from the patriarchal family.” Industrial society ripped workers out of the household and made them into a mass of undifferentiated equals. “Time was,” sighed Laslett, “when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors.”55 With the family now placed firmly at the center of his research agenda, Laslett founded, along with E. A. Wrigley, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. In 1969, the group organized an international conference on the comparative study of the family in history. Contributions were published in the now-­classic Household and Family in Past Time in 1972, with a long polemical introduction by Laslett that set the terms of debate in family history for the next two decades. There, his principal interlocutor was Frédéric Le Play, “the strongest single influence on the historical study of the family.”56 Like Le Play, Laslett saw the co-­resident family—or, more accurately, “household,” since these sometimes included servants—as the basic unit of society. Economic production was typically centered on the single living space, and therefore kinship patterns—the rules governing marriage and familial obligations—were of secondary importance. Yet, Laslett considered Le Play’s work to have systematically misled researchers for generations. He charged the French engineer with manipulating his data to construct a highly idealized and perhaps fictive type with his “stem family.” Indeed, researchers could have “serious doubts as to what the famille

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souche actually was, and whether it corresponded to any observable family type.” But worse, under Le Play’s influence, social scientists came to assume that capitalism transformed large, complex households into small, simple ones. Here, Laslett delivered his controversial knockout blow, arguing that stem families had never existed in England and that mean household size remained constant in English society from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Therefore, “the wish to believe in the large and extended household as the ordinary institution of an earlier England and an earlier Europe, or as a standard feature of the non-­industrial world, is indeed a matter of ideology. The ideology in question, it is suggested, is not to any extent a system of norms and ideals present in the minds of the men and women of the past. . . . It has existed rather in the heads of the social scientists themselves.” The burden of proof, for Laslett, now lay with those who wished to show that anything other than the nuclear family had ever been widespread in English history. “All departures from the simple household form of the co-­resident group in England must be regarded as the fortuitous outcomes of demographic eventualities and economic conveniences.”57 Obviously, Laslett had, in refuting Le Play, committed himself to an equally implausible claim, simply inverting the Frenchman’s ideological biases to make the nuclear family the ideal type.58 Though Laslett claimed to be advancing “no theory of domestic group organization,” his research was guided by the question of whether “English familial individualism had been an exceptional or quite an ordinary thing. This was particularly important,” he added, “in view of the peculiar position of English social and economic development in relation to the process of industrialization.” For Laslett, this research was also tied to the liberal political theory to which seventeenth-­ century England had given birth, his implicit question being, was Locke’s English individualism grounded in this particular social structure, and was it therefore the true model and “standard” of modern political thought? As Laslett admitted elsewhere in the introduction, family structures were hardly worth investigating if they could tell us nothing about the systems of beliefs and ideologies that emerged from them.59 Clearly at stake then was the validity of an English exceptionalism resting on small nuclear family units and the liberty of the individual (from the authority of the patriarch). This was the basis upon which English liberalism had been founded. Predictably, it was counterposed to a French historiography that, taking its cue from Le Play, placed much emphasis on the stem family and its communal arrangements. Laslett commented tartly, “The historians of French institutions do not seem

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to have escaped the urge to believe that households in the past must have been large and complex.” Communally oriented, Le Play’s stem family left little scope for the individual, and therefore was to be rejected. These questions of ideology and family structure were likewise given special consideration by Todd’s other thesis supervisor at Cambridge, Alan Macfarlane. Macfarlane was a generation younger than Laslett, born in 1941, and was formally trained in both history and anthropology. His first book was a widely praised anthropological study of the witchcraft prosecutions in Tudor and Stuart England. It was his second book, however, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin (1970), that saw his interests draw closer to Laslett’s. Subtitled “An Essay in Historical Anthropology,” Macfarlane’s book was able to draw broad conclusions about social life in Civil War‒era England based on the meticulously kept diary of a modest clergyman. A whole “structure of feeling” could be found in Josselin’s detailed recordings of his dreams, fears, and aspirations. Macfarlane here used methods that would become central to microhistorical scholarship in the later 1970s. Josselin’s family life confirmed, for Macfarlane, what Laslett had already argued, “that the existing family structure was already appropriate for industrialization.” This “dispel[led] any lingering illusion that the peculiar nature of modern English kinship systems is entirely a post-­industrial product.”60 The analysis here was much more “cultural” than Laslett’s, but the conclusions about kinship and family structure were much the same.61 Later in the decade, Macfarlane wrote The Origins of English Individualism, in which he pushed the English nuclear family structure—and its valuation of the individual—far back into the Middle Ages.62 The point was to show, as Laslett had, that no great transformation had taken place in English agrarian society in the early modern period. A mobile, capitalist-­oriented network of nuclear families had existed since at least the thirteenth century. Thus, Todd the Frenchman came to Le Play and family structures through this distinctly English angle of vision.63 He arrived at Cambridge just as Laslett was preparing his introduction to the Household and Family in Past Time, and soon after the publication of Macfarlane’s book on Ralph Josselin. For his doctoral thesis, Todd wrote a comparative demographic analysis of seven different peasant communities in eighteenth-­century Western Europe (four from France, one from Italy, and two from Sweden). The methodology was more Laslett than Macfarlane; while he credited Macfarlane with writing “the first essay in historical anthropology” with his book on Josselin, Todd wished to understand how the lowliest peasants lived and interacted, and, for this,

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quantitative methods were required.64 His sources, like Laslett’s, were parish registers, nominative listings of inhabitants, and birth and death records. The conclusions Todd reached basically agreed with the research of Laslett and Macfarlane. He determined, for one, that the family was principally an economic, rather than a social unit in Western Europe (in contrast to what he later argued). In most cases, the agrarian economy determined the shape and functioning of the family, rather than the kinship relations that interested structural anthropologists. Furthermore, Todd found that the simple nuclear family tended to prevail where capitalist farming had made the greatest inroads. He noted, “When the agrarian system leaves the peasants free to choose their type of family organization, as is the case with capitalist farming, it seems that they naturally tend to live in simple family households.” In other words, Todd agreed with Laslett that the nuclear family was not only “a product of modernization” but, importantly, a pre-­industrial, agrarian form of modernization.65 The revolution of capitalist farming in the eighteenth century brought freedom and choice to the countryside, resulting in the adoption of simplified and less austere households. Todd likewise doubted that the stem family could have had much of a place in pre-­industrial Europe—perhaps in Sweden, but even there only in limited instances.66

An Annales History of the Present By the time he wrote The Explanation of Ideology in the mid-­1980s, Todd had changed his mind about Le Play’s stem families, and he had modified his theory of family structures in general. To appreciate this evolution, we need to look more carefully at the French currents running through his work. Here we will examine Todd’s three works leading to The Explanation of Ideology. First came The Final Fall in 1976, a book predicting, of all things, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Todd was just twenty-­five years old and still working on his thesis when the book was published. It won him instant acclaim, especially among liberal intellectuals, who, at that moment, were mounting their famous anti-­totalitarian campaign against the PCF and Union of the Left. On the face of it, the book was far outside Todd’s comfort zone, since it treated a contemporary industrialized society (in Eastern Europe) and did not focus to any degree on family structures. Methodologically, it was inspired by historical-­anthropological approaches of the Annales School, those of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in particular, which dealt exclusively with pre-­modern

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agrarian economies. Why this decision? Since, Todd argued, “communist societies intentionally conceal themselves,” knowledge of their inner workings could only be pieced together through the few scraps of data available. “Historians,” he remarked “do not let the unavoidable inadequacies of their evidence stop them. They frequently theorize about feudal society, the Old Regime, or ancient times by constructing models to fill the gaps in their sources. The first requirement of a historic model is to integrate all known facts.”67 Exemplary in this regard was Le Roy Ladurie’s pathbreaking Les Paysans de Languedoc (The Peasants of Languedoc).68 Drawing extensively on statistical data—tithe records, tax receipts, and wage books—Le Roy Ladurie was able to show that over a four-­hundred-­year stretch this region of Southern France changed very little, locked in waves of growth and decline that individual actors were powerless to change. This was the famous histoire immobile, a variation on Fernand Braudel’s longue durée, which underscored the long-­arcing demographic and environmental pressures that shaped local life. For Todd, these methods could reveal much about Soviet society in the 1970s. They allowed the historian to construct social models around limited pieces of economic and demographic data. For example, “A decline in population implies a decline in rents, and a rise in wages. This brings about a strain in the economic relations between ruling and ruled which in turn causes more general social dislocations.” Todd then added, “This very thing occurred in Europe after the great plague in 1348. In his book, The Peasants of Languedoc, Le Roy Ladurie gives empirical evidence for Ricardo’s economic theories and discourses on its social implications. Yet, Ricardo’s model is equally relevant to other places and historic periods, when only fragmentary evidence is known.”69 Using this Ricardian premise, Todd argued that the USSR was a stagnant and brittle society and that its internal strength had been greatly overestimated by the West. Economic data confirmed this picture: Employment in the agricultural sector was falling, food imports were rising, and there was a large gap between investment and growth. The hold of the ruling elite over the rest of the country was becoming more fragile, and, worse, the “satellite” countries were trading more with the West and thereby creeping away from Soviet domination. These deepening fissures would inevitably lead to the “decomposition of the Soviet sphere.” Whether Todd operated strictly within the terms of his methodology— deducing social dynamics from a few data points—is a matter for debate. Certainly, the analysis was freighted with Cold War assumptions. The United States appeared as a beacon of freedom and tolerance against the “totalitarian”

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and “fascist” reflexes of Communist societies. There were assertions of a more casual nature, like the idea, for example, that George Orwell’s 1984 provided a “truer and more objective” account of Communist society than sociological analysis could.70 Todd’s book received Le Roy Ladurie’s stamp of approval.71 But the historian was biased: Not only was he a vociferous anti-­Communist in the 1970s, he was also a friend of the family and had even given the young Todd his first history books.72 This should not lead us to believe, however, that Todd’s engagement with the techniques of the Annales School was therefore superficial. Todd, like the author of the Peasants of Languedoc, saw history as an anthropological enterprise, the point of which was to understand how human beliefs and patterns of behavior were rooted in deep immobile structures. Appropriately then, Todd admired how Le Roy Ladurie conceptualized the human being as both an active and a passive entity. On the one hand, the individual was “described in minute and loving detail: his or her development, education, professional activity, sexual and family life, fears, and ambitions.” Here Le Roy Ladurie drew from psychoanalysis (Charcot and Freud) and structural anthropology (Lévi-­Strauss) to enlarge the individual’s psyche. On the other hand, Le Roy Ladurie presented the human being as little more than “a prisoner of implacable material pressures” coming from ecosystems and long-­term demographic trends.73 Here the historian’s sources were economic thinkers like Marx, Ricardo, and Smith; demographers like Malthus; and even physical anthropologists like Paul Broca.74 For Todd then, Le Roy Ladurie’s experimental and flexible conception of methodology opened new channels of thought and enabled the historian to alternate between different registers: the global and the local, the quantitative and the qualitative, and the demographic and the social-­psychological. At the same time, Todd was looking to bring these approaches to bear on the current political situation. This was made clear in a column he wrote regularly for Le Monde from 1978 to 1983. In one column, Todd regretted that Annales had “fled the city” and confined itself to the agrarian world of pre-­Revolutionary Europe.75 In this sense, its histories could almost seem like a “dream of the past rather than a desire to understand the present.” Le Roy Ladurie’s methodology, once again, left an opening. According to Todd, the Annales historian had “rediscovered and justified the explanatory models of classical British political economists, which he preferred visibly to those of Marx. Curiously,” he added, “the political economy of Ricardo and Malthus is becoming once again useful. . . . The scarcity of natural resources that

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has blighted the West since 1974 has reproduced, in modern forms, the bad harvests of the pre-­industrial world. After thirty years of miraculous growth [referring to the postwar economic miracle], history could become once again immobile.”76 Le Roy Ladurie had himself, as Todd pointed out, suggested this line of analysis in an article on the concept of “crisis” in the mid-­ 1970s. As Le Roy Ladurie emphasized, the downturn of the 1970s was not just a question of oil but of long-­term demographic patterns too—changing rates of mortality and natality.77 For Todd, as for Le Roy Ladurie, contemporary political analysis required an appreciation of both short-­and long-­range dynamics. It was in this sense that Todd, years later, could proclaim, “I am a student of a very great French historian, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie . . . [and] a product of the Annales School.”78 In his second book, Le Fou et le prolétaire (Madness and the Proletariat), Todd attempted to realize Le Roy Ladurie’s “total history” of the crisis of the 1970s. For Todd, the study of mentalités—the intellectual and ideological dispositions that are deeply embedded in culture—had been split into too many subfields. Needed was “an integrated and simultaneous study of diverse spheres of mental activity.” This kind of totalizing analysis necessitated, pace Le Roy Ladurie, both quantitative and qualitative methods. These were supplied, respectively, in Le Fou by Durkheim and Freud: the former, in his pioneering work Le Suicide, which used rates of suicide to evaluate the degree to which a society psychologically integrated its members; the latter, in his ideas about pathological development, which Todd thought could be applied not just to individuals but to entire sociological groups. The historical materialism of Marxist theory could be safely discarded, with Todd declaring, “I do not believe in the motor role of the economy in historical development. . . . Psychoanalysis, for instance, can tell us much about the economy. We can’t forget that systematic saving (the non-­immediate consumption of revenue) and sexual repression appeared simultaneously, as unique aspects of a mental transformation that occurred during the Protestant Reformation.”79 Modern history, then, was a function of social-­psychological attitudes—mentalités—and not rational decisions or struggles between economically defined groups. To fully appreciate the crisis of the 1970s, one needed to understand the pathology of “totalitarianism” as it developed historically. For Todd, totalitarianism occurred when psychotics—violent, competitive, and disturbed individuals—took control of the state. These pathologies were bred in the nineteenth-­century classroom in Europe, where the state instituted a repressive and authoritarian national educational curriculum.

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In France, for example, “Under the Third Republic, pedagogic techniques produced a series of little robots, who were respectful of authority, sexually repressed, good soldiers, excellent workers, anxious, and very inclined toward suicide.” In times of economic crisis, these pathologies were inflamed, especially among members of the petite bourgeoisie (always with enough wealth to lose but not enough to insulate them from bad times). It was this group that took over politics in the early twentieth century and unleashed the ensuing paroxysms of violence: “Between 1900 and 1945 the inhibited and repressed bourgeoisie transferred its overflowing anxiety into political action. It produced nationalists, fascists, anarchists, Nazis, Bolsheviks, and communists.”80 Workers, by contrast, were well integrated, both socially and psychologically, and seldom inclined toward suicide or fits of hysterical violence. After World War II, a chastened bourgeoisie returned to equilibrium, and the pendulum of revolutionary disaffection now swung toward the proletariat, which absorbed the psychotic values of the prewar petite bourgeoisie. Education had opened its eyes to its own precarious existence and stirred up a sense of burning injustice. Seething with resentment, the proletariat, under the aegis of the PCF, embraced an aggressive and a paranoid worldview, emblematized by the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat. For Todd, this doctrine made sense only as false consciousness: “When a communist says, ‘the quality of life for the working class is threatened,’ it should be translated, ‘I feel cheated and threatened.’ ” If the lower classes were going to lose this sense of aggression and adopt a more balanced outlook, one of two things had to occur: either the PCF would have to become integrated within the mainstream liberal establishment; or, better yet, disappear altogether. Even if this second option “would leave to their own making tens or hundreds of thousands of unhappy individuals,” it was still preferable to the PCF’s authoritarian grip over them.81 In Todd’s psycho-­economic analysis, an economic crisis like that in 1973 should have launched these workers into frenzied action. But nothing of the sort happened. Moreover, the PCF’s poor showing in the presidential election of 1974 signaled a permanent decline of the party, as did its defeat in the parliamentary elections of 1978. Todd could rejoice that the PCF no longer “presented a serious threat to the security of liberal institutions” and was slated to disappear as an electoral presence by the year 2055. What had changed? It was the sexual revolution of the 1960s that was largely responsible for exorcising the puritanical delirium of France’s lower classes, having provided an outlet through which to sublimate their aggression. Thus, a saner, less

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psychotic France was in the making: “The explosion of 1968,” he affirmed, “made France a modern, appropriately relaxed country” and began to liberate it from some of its “archaic habits.”82 Methodologically, Le Fou was an experiment—an attempt to write an Annales history of the present using Durkheimian and Freudian concepts. Mostly the book was awkward. The psychiatric language—of “madness,” “psychosis,” and so on—tended to be applied crudely and to impossibly large sociological groups. The timescales were poorly aligned. For example, a premise of the book was to appreciate the “slow evolution” of social-­ psychological attitudes—the famous “longue durée”—but the events covered were only a few years apart.83 How could things change so quickly if they were locked into long-­term patterns of growth? Todd’s working sense of “the social” also seemed thin: Could social dynamics and political struggles be so easily deduced from statistics on suicide and education? Politically, Le Fou was deeply committed—perhaps more than any contemporary book—to the “totalitarian” thesis, the idea that the parties of the Left were reflexively psychotic and authoritarian. Todd saw British liberalism, with its emphasis on tolerance and individual liberty, as a workable alternative to continental pathologies. The UK had no tradition of petit-­bourgeois aggression and, in 1979, was making an admirable transition away from a manufacturing economy—with its anxious production schedules—to a more relaxed, postindustrial one. Todd, however, was no supporter of free trade and, in fact, concluded Le Fou with a plea for protectionism. State intervention was necessary, he argued, to fend off unemployment and to reduce the temptation among the working classes to join Communist parties. While the anti-­totalitarian language of the book was strong, it thus showed evidence too of a turning away from liberal thinking.

France profonde His third book, L’Invention de la France, was co-­authored with the demographer Hervé Le Bras and published in 1981. It moved in a different direction than both The Final Fall and Le Fou, and it found a new way to make sense of the present in the light of the deep past. The main inspiration for the book was a cartographic observation: The presidential election of 1974 and the parliamentary elections of 1978 confirmed that voting patterns had remained constant throughout the different regions of France since the founding of the

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Third Republic a century prior. Why this stubborn persistence? Class analysis was of no help in answering this question, since peasants from different regions voted differently. Nor could traditional political categories—of rational choice, interest, and so on—be absolutely reliable “for understanding this unconscious and enduring logic.” Rather, it was differences in family structures that explained these regional variations, and thus what was called for was a deep dig into the structure and psychology of the family: “This analysis of old France’s family systems, derived from the census of 1975, is archaeological as much as anthropological. It is premised on the examination of a society that is today a minority and threatened with extinction: the peasantry. Only the rural world can today reveal the very deep differences, from one side of France to the other, in the structure of family households.”84 The family was, for Le Bras and Todd, the primary nexus of the social, being both “an essential mechanism for the socialization of children . . . [and] a powerful instrument—invisible, unconscious, and silent—of social reproduction, from African tribes to the developed countries of the industrial world.” It was thus the great unmoved mover of political and social life. This discovery of the family’s foundational role had been made possible, the authors argued, both by the development of psychoanalysis, which illustrated the powerful and disturbing influence of the family on mental life; and European colonialism, which brought researchers into contact with societies where kinship relations “were in fact the only social structure in the absence of the state and a developed economy.”85 French anthropologists had, by and large, failed to notice this elementary fact of social life. If thinkers like Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl and Lévi-­Strauss were interested in the family, it was only insofar as it could lead them toward universal truths about human nature. Le Bras and Todd preferred, rather, to be guided in their thinking by empirical traditions of social anthropology, which, for them, had always been more attuned to cultural and regional particularities. In practice, this entailed, for Todd, a return to Laslett, Macfarlane, and Le Play. Central to L’Invention de la France was an idea implicit in the work of Laslett and Macfarlane: that political and social ideologies could be derived from family structures. Le Bras and Todd took this notion and made it into a hard social-­scientific principle: “To each family configuration corresponds a psychological system, an affective style.”86 The inventory of family types came straight from Le Play, who, in their view, had prompted a “revolution” in thought with his research on the family. Le Play’s three types—unstable, stem, and patriarchal—were renamed by Todd and Le Bras as “nuclear,”

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“authoritarian,” and “communitarian.” These family structures were strongly correlated with political values. The distribution of roles and authority in the household; the family’s conceptions of order and equality; the transmission of power and wealth from one generation to the next: these were the attitudes and values that informed the individual’s worldview. Authoritarian fathers, for instance, tended to produce authoritarian gods and leaders. Thus, these norms constituted, for Todd and Le Bras, a hard anthropological base on which all mental activity was constructed. In most modern nation-­ states, one type of family usually prevailed throughout the country. In England, there was the “nuclear family,” in which the children of a married couple left the parental home to form their own households. Germany had Le Play’s stem (now “authoritarian”) family, with the father selecting his heir and keeping a close watch over his children. And Italy had the communitarian version, in which married children co-­resided with the parents, creating a large and co-­dependent community. France constituted a world-­historical exception. Other countries were anthropologically diverse, but only in France—“a nation like no other”—could all three family types be found in equal proportion: the nuclear family in Normandy, the Interior West, Champagne, Lorraine, Burgundy, and the Franche-­Comté; the authoritarian family in Brittany, Basque Country, Savoy, Alsace, and the southern part of the Massif Central; and the communitarian type in Provence, the Nord, and the Southwest. With this apparatus in place, the political and social divisions of France were easily explained: “The political segmentation of France runs along very precise anthropological fault lines. Its great ideologies—radicalism, conservatism, socialism, Catholicism, communism—are each rooted in a particular system of family relations.”87 These correspondences were not limited to political ideologies. Social mores, patterns of religious belief, the status of women: these too were reducible to kinship ties. L’Invention de la France was not simply a new argument for French exceptionalism. It was also a text in search of origins and therefore of greater epistemic certainty about the nature and history of France. “France,” the authors argued, “is neither Celtic, Latin, nor Germanic. At the ethnic crossroads of Europe, it is impossible to say which of these origins is predominant.” This diversity stretched all the way back to the barbarian invasions: “The France of anthropologists was born under Clovis. Around the year 500, he unified Gaul, which was then under the domination of the Franks, and he did so with tacit permission of Roman Catholic clergy of Visigothic Aquitaine. The diverse ethnic groups which will later define France stabilized in this era.” For

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Le Bras and Todd, anthropology—“a science of mental rigidities”—presented hard evidence for the unbroken continuity of old France.88 These were determinations that could not be easily shaken off and were powerfully rooted in a particular place. Nodding to Annales, they wrote of a “France immobile,” in which the ethnographic regions of the country “refused mobility” and, in doing so, “defended their existence from the corruption of their space. It’s not the place, the climate,” added the authors, “or the industrial resources that give the regions their particular character; it’s the maintaining of a stable population that transmits its social organization and conception of human relations across time.”89 Nineteenth-­ century French anthropologists had been aware of these regional-­cultural differences, but they typically advanced racial theories and employed dubious techniques—skull measuring, for example—to “prove” their existence. The racialist work of Arthur de Gobineau, the right-­wing author of Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races), and Paul Broca, the republican physical anthropologist who founded the École d’anthropologie in Paris, had embarrassed subsequent generations of French researchers and prevented them from pursuing these anthropological insights. Likewise, France’s great tradition of historical geography had documented the profound regional variations that marked French culture and history.90 The prime example here was André Siegfried’s Tableau politique de la France de l’Ouest (A Political Picture of Western France) from 1912, a work widely considered to be the founding text of modern French political science.91 Siegfried examined, with empirical rigor and precision, the long-­term voting patterns of Western France, and likewise found tight correlations between political attitudes and regional specificities (like social structures, geological factors, land ownership, etc.). But he could not understand, according to Le Bras and Todd, how they were linked. In the absence of an explanation, he invoked race, a biological essence that was distinct to the people of the West. For Le Bras and Todd, L’Invention de la France stood as a refutation and replacement of these theories. The physical anthropologists and geographers were, in their view, correct to see France as an antique patchwork of distinct and stable cultures. They merely misunderstood the mechanism of transmission: It was not biology but family structures that set these patterns.92 With their “political atlas,” Todd and Le Bras believed they had discovered a “non-­racist” alternative to nineteenth-­century biological determinism.93 L’Invention de la France’s turn toward “hard” anthropology was meant to strike a note of reassurance for French readers. As the economy shifted away

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from manufacturing, as the “great ideologies” appeared to crumble, and as immigrants from the former colonies streamed into the hexagon, Todd and Le Bras could show that France was, and always had been, uniquely suited for diversity and tolerance. Political extremism would therefore have difficulty establishing any real roots in the country. Many feared, claimed the authors, the return of anti-­Semitism to France—this most likely in reference to the 1980 attack against a synagogue on the Rue Copernic, which left four dead and dozens injured. Such fears, though, were unwarranted: France’s unique anthropological structure “could not support xenophobia.” In this sense, “France is condemned to tolerance.”94 What of the socioeconomic identity of the country? Here, Todd and Le Bras’s newfound interest in Le Play was telling. Here was a thinker whose obsession with the disintegration of France under industrial capitalism led him to see the family as an anchoring point, an anthropological constant. L’Invention de la France offered the same analysis a century later amid France’s transition to a postindustrial society.95 The proletariat was bound to disappear, as were France’s familiar parties and ideologies, but nothing would fundamentally change about France. The book’s first line read, “Industrial society never killed the diversity of France.”96 The book found a warm reception among France’s leading historians and anticipated the wave of nostalgic books about old France that appeared in the 1980s. The great Annales historian Fernand Braudel was the author of one such work, the multivolume L’Identité de la France (The Identity of France), published in 1986. Using the long-­distance quantitative techniques that made him famous, Braudel pointed to a French identity that reached back into the remote ancient past: “There was a ‘Gaul before Gaul,’ in other words a real continuity between what preceded Gaul and Gaul itself. . . . Later invasions— particularly that of the Celts—however violent and overwhelming, and however powerful in cultural impact would gradually be absorbed into the mass of the pre-­existing populations.” Millennia later, the coming of industry had done little to alter the fundamental economic identity of France, rooted in artisanal production. Through the nineteenth century, when history essentially stopped for Braudel, “small-­scale industry still represented the lion’s share of French industry as a whole,” and large-­scale industry had made no inroads in much of the country.97 Fittingly, he was enthusiastic about Todd and Le Bras’s book, probably because, as the French sociologist Gérard Noiriel has speculated, “it identified the missing link between the most distant past and the present day”—the family.98

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The other great multivolume history of France from the 1980s, Les Lieux de mémoire (Realms of Memory), confected a similarly nostalgic image of French identity. Edited by the historian Pierre Nora, with contributions from dozens of French historians and social scientists (including Gauchet), it sought to rescue a singular and unbroken conception of the “Republic” from historical oblivion. Principally, it did so by calling attention to various “sites of memory” in French history—objects, persons, or events that had become symbolic to communal memory. Many of these were from the Third Republic, but many too were from a primordial and remote France. In all cases, there was an archaeological objective, the purpose of which was to find missing links in French identity: “The goal was to exhume significant sites, to identify the most obvious and crucial centers of national memory, and then to reveal the existence of invisible bonds tying them all together.”99 This was more about unity than diversity, but both Braudel and Nora were using historical artifacts and representations as a way to ground French conceptions of itself. The near simultaneous appearance of these three works would suggest that the existence of “France” had somehow been thrown into question in the 1970s and 1980s, sending historians and social scientists on a desperate search for its identity. The pattern was in many ways similar to the New Right’s excavation of Indo-­European and pagan antiquities, which looked to reveal hidden affinities and unbroken continuities with the present. There were key differences in the two strategies: Whereas the three examples cited above tracked a specifically French national identity over time, the New Right’s “lost” traditions pointed to a non-­French and indigenously European identity, and therefore called for a kind of spiritual renewal.

Applied Anthropology There is one final context necessary for appreciating the making and significance of Todd’s global mapping of political ideologies. Between L’Invention de la France (1981) and The Explanation of Ideology (1983), Todd became, presumably on the recommendation of Le Bras, a researcher at the Institut National d’Études Démographiques (National Institute for Demographic Studies). INED has been the leading “school” of French population and demographic studies since its founding in 1945. It employs some 250 full-­ time researchers, fifty of them tenured, and publishes the country’s premier journal of demographic research, Population. The institute’s origins were in

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Vichy. In 1941, the Fondation Alexis Carrel was established by the new government, its mission being to collect data on “human questions,” with an eye toward “improv[ing] the psychological, mental, and social state of the population.”100 The eponymous figure was a Nobel Prize‒winning eugenicist who endorsed euthanizing the criminal and insane, and who had attained a wide readership with his 1935 “classic,” L’Homme, cet inconnu (Man, the Unknown). Heading the Fondation was Alfred Sauvy, a former adviser to French prime minister Paul Reynaud in the late 1930s, and the designer of the nation’s first natalist policies. In 1945, Vichy fallen, de Gaulle’s provisional government dissolved the Fondation and created INED, appointing Sauvy as its first director.101 The eugenicist language was dropped, and the institute now claimed to focus solely on the collection and dissemination of demographic knowledge. There was no set political agenda within INED, nor was there one favored approach to the study of populations: anthropologists, economists, historians, sociologists, demographers, Malthusians, Ricardians, natalists, and familialists have all contributed to INED publications. In a broad sense, however, the institute under Sauvy was steered in a certain direction: toward a global and comparative study of “development” and population. Few paradigms in the French social sciences could compete with the geographic scope of INED under Sauvy, which commissioned a wide range of regional studies, and typically placed a nation’s developmental history in global perspective. Annales, the other great demographic school in France, was, by comparison, much less global in focus (though Braudel could sometimes figure as a large exception to this tendency). The impact of INED’s work in France and abroad has been considerable. Famously, Sauvy coined the term “Third World” in 1952, likening its situation, by analogy, to the “third estate” of the Old Regime.102 While Sauvy sympathized with the Third World’s exploitation by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, he was no radical or “Third Worldist” in the 1960s’ sense, and he confessed that it had been difficult for him to accept the loss of Algeria.103 At heart, Sauvy was always a French patriot with a long record of supporting natalist policies. If he supported migration, it was in a provisional, not an absolute sense: France needed to replenish its numbers and could not do so without the infusion of a young population of migrants.104 In later years, after the baby boom had become a recognized phenomenon, he argued that the social cost of allowing immigrants was high and that “native children must have priority over foreigners.”105 Thus, even if Sauvy and INED could be credited with opening new frontiers of research

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and bringing demographic analysis into planetary relief, their work overwhelmingly privileged the nation-­state and the native-­born as their epistemological units. On the former point, Sauvy wrote a paper in 1949 calling the idea of “world population” a “false problem.”106 Populations, after all, were controlled and determined within the borders of nation-­states. If and when demographic crises appeared, they were resolved, he argued, by a national, and not an international government. Thus, there could be no deep interconnection between global population movements. Before his employment at INED, Todd’s work dealt exclusively with European countries and East-­West conflicts. Working at the institute likely gave Todd the confidence to approach the family-­ideology couplet as a global value. The two books he wrote in this period, The Explanation of Ideology (1983) and The Causes of Progress (1984), were global histories in their own way, giving roughly equal coverage to the non-­European world. And, like the researchers at INED, Todd became interested in the dynamics of comparative development, his models and charts aiming to understand how countries moved from poverty to wealth based on family type. There were, of course, points of difference too. Given the history of INED and the direction provided by Sauvy, many of INED’s researchers approached demographic questions with a moral or policy-­oriented agenda, especially when it came to issues of natality and fertility. Todd’s work expressed little normative concern in this area and seemed more focused on establishing structural patterns of development across the world. Since a society’s capacity for development was so deeply rooted in the psychology of the peasant family, policy and legislation could do little to alter its course. Still, some were able to draw moral prescriptions from Todd’s work. Ironically, one of his greatest champions was the conservative historian and demographer, Pierre Chaunu, who praised Todd’s family-­based social analysis. Chaunu’s main worry was that the swelling surplus populations of the Global South would overtake Europe, such that he could ask, “Will the white man survive?”107 He found that Todd’s speculations about literacy and higher marriage ages might be offered as solutions to the demographic explosion in the Third World. With this vaulting, planetary apparatus in place, Todd could set about interpreting world history. He began at his own door, with France. La Nouvelle France (The Making of Modern France in translation) appeared toward the end of François Mitterrand’s first term in office, in 1987. It was clear from the first pages of the book that Todd intended to use his anthropological system as a running commentary on the present—a “tableau” in the sense of

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Siegfried, capturing the country’s current mood. Todd’s key categories—family type, literacy, population figures, geography—were variables, which could be moved around and manipulated to decipher political and social development as they happened in real time. Since the writing of L’Invention de la France, everything had changed in the country, according to Todd: “Between 1981 and 1986 the French political system imploded. Communism ceased to be an important force, and a party of the extreme Right [Le Pen’s Front national] made its appearance. The Socialist Party changed its nature, and so did the Right.” Responsible here were long-­term historical developments, principally the transition to a post-­ industrial society, always a concern of Todd’s: “The mid-­1970s saw the onset of a genuine industrial counter-­revolution, with electronics fulfilling a dream which was also nightmare—the physical disappearance of the working class. Automation, even more than immigration, disorganized the working class between 1975 and 1985.” The cultural revolution of the 1960s also played a significant part in this process. Greater access to education and contraception lowered the birth rate and “killed Catholicism in those French provinces still controlled by the Church around 1965.”108 The shock of these rapid transformations was likely to produce extremist ideological mutations, and this accounted for the emergence of the Front national as an electoral force in the mid-­1980s. After setting the scene in this dramatic way, Todd rolled out his family maps and assured that all could be easily explained. “One must look,” he wrote, “for factors in social life that are even more ancient, that have been stable for more than a thousand years, well anchored in space and capable of defying time. The family systems and agrarian structures of the various regions of France came into being and stabilized themselves probably in the Roman era. . . . By measuring the deeper roots of the traditional French political system,” he added, “one can also measure the scale of the transformation that occurred between 1981 and 1986.”109 What followed in The Making of Modern France was an impressively complex and cold history of post-­Revolutionary France, with Todd mobilizing his demographic and familial data to explain and reinterpret key national events and conflicts. Most of the arguments had a pyramidal shape: family structures on the bottom, followed by religious beliefs, then ideological systems, and finally, on top, whatever political crisis happened to be under discussion. The principal fault line in French history, he now argued, was the conflict between the stem family that dominated in the South, and the nuclear family predominant in the North. This primordial division splintered

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France’s ideological and political traditions in ways that had gone unnoticed. For instance, the political system that developed under the Third Republic was, in fact, a dual one representing two distinct cultures and conceptions of Left and Right. The upwardly mobile middle classes of postwar France were likewise of two distinct kinds, one finding a home in the public sector (from nuclear families), another in the private sector (from stem families). As might be expected, Todd’s modifications produced some strikingly odd analyses too. He referred, at turns, to the “anti-­State liberalism” of the French Revolution; the impossibility of imagining a “Catholic of the Left”; and the “authoritarian” character of the PS.110 The main function of The Making of Modern France was, as with L’Invention de la France, to reassure. The quick rise of Le Pen’s xenophobic Front national was indeed worrisome and illustrated what ideological mutations late capitalism had in store. With the shift away from manufacturing and the overnight decline of the PCF, where else could the working class and the unemployed turn? Even if the FN could capitalize on proletarian discontent, it was, for Todd, nothing more than a “transition phenomenon.” The regions in which it performed strongly—the Paris basin, the East, and Provence—all had different family types, and thus “it is impossible to establish any sort of coincidence between its ideology and the systemic values of the zones concerned.” Since its appearance could not be assimilated into the logic of family structures, “the FN has no future, because it does not really exist, or not in the same way as the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the UDF or the RPR.”111 A product merely of “social and cultural disintegration,” its prospects for survival were poor. In general, the future of the country, even amid economic and social turbulence, looked bright for Todd: “France existed before the Industrial Revolution and the 1789 Revolution. She will survive the disappearance of the working class and the terminal crisis of Catholicism.”112 For Todd, France’s exceptional diversity—a product of its pluralistic family structures—meant that no single ideology could dominate for long. It was thus destined to be an open and tolerant society. The now-­familiar threads of Todd’s work were all present here. The family types he derived from Le Play through Laslett acted as the irrational kernel of all belief systems. The Annales-­style demographic history of Le Roy Ladurie framed modern social and ideological conflicts as the confluence of long waves and patterns. Appropriately, historical actors—politicians and intellectuals—were written out of the story. The historical-­geographic ­methods of Siegfried enabled Todd to show the existence of stable voting

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patterns throughout the country. And the sociology of Durkheim furnished Todd with a conception of social cohesion. For example, the FN could be understood as “a manifestation of anomie” in French life. This was all woven together to present a history of France that was liberal in a political-­historical sense. The various convulsions of French society were, he implicitly argued, momentary disruptions in an otherwise benign formula. When left to run its course, France’s exceptional anthropological heritage would bring stability and social harmony to the country. In Todd’s next work, this same approach was applied—more ambitiously—to a study of modern Western Europe and its patterns of belief. L’Invention de l’Europe, from 1990, divided the western part of the continent into a number of distinct anthropological zones and showed how regions with different family backgrounds reacted to key stages of the modernization process. The amount of information compiled by Todd was staggering: Eighty different maps were generated from the data of ninety-­three separate monographs.113 With this arsenal of figures and charts, Todd surveyed successively the effects of the Reformation and Counter-­Reformation, literacy, industrialization, de-­ Christianization, and birth control across Western Europe. The central part of the book concerned the death of religion and the formation of modern political ideologies. The scope here too was impressive, with Todd covering everything from Finnish fascism, to Danish peasant parties, to Spanish anarcho-­syndicalism. As usual, these belief systems were anchored in family structures and literacy rates, but Todd also introduced intermediary factors into his analysis. Proximity to Germany, for example, often meant that a region in Switzerland or France might have a higher-­ than-­average literacy rate; nearness to Rome could mean a stronger Counter-­ Reformation. Reviewers called Todd’s mapping of each country’s electoral histories “extremely valuable,” and indeed L’Invention de l’Europe probably stands as the most complete overview of modern Western European political ideologies that exists to date.114 The book concluded with Todd sounding his usual notes of mixed optimism. Western Europe was losing faith and everywhere succumbing to nihilism and social anomie, but it was also becoming less violent and extremist. Xenophobic parties like the FN he continued to see as mere ideological spasms. Nevertheless, Todd began to worry about European complacency as the year 2000 approached. Low fertility rates compelled the economies of Western Europe to rely heavily on immigrant labor. As the countries of the Economic Community attempted to define a common basis of citizenship,

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would they begin to turn against immigrants? Historically, the Jew had figured as the internal Other to Europe, incarnating the idea of difference. As of the 1960s, this role had been overtaken by the Muslim immigrant, and Todd now wondered if the presence of this figure could “reactivate” old ideological conflicts. “With the year 2000 around the corner,” he wrote, “Turks, Arabs, and Pakistanis seem perfectly fit for assimilation. The real problem, where it exists, is not coming from the immigrant populations, but from those of the welcoming countries.”115 Europeans, Todd warned, would not have a stable society until they found a way to accommodate the Other.

Post-­Soviet Convulsions With the new global political conjuncture of the 1990s, Todd’s politics moved dramatically to the Left. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower, globalization, and the ratification of the European Monetary Union in the Maastricht Treaty (1992) brought about a new “ultra-­liberal” orthodoxy that Todd came to oppose virulently. Todd’s shift was part of a larger realignment happening among intellectuals in France. By the 1990s, it was now clear to many of Mitterrand’s erstwhile supporters what toll his pro-­European, Atlanticist policies had taken on France: Unemployment was rising, as were income inequalities, and France found itself fighting one of the United States’ wars in the Gulf. As the historian Sudhir Hazareesingh has claimed, the 1970s was probably the most radical phase of the Socialist Party’s history in France, with Mitterrand drawing the party toward the Left.116 Once in power, the Socialists fell back to the center, instituting a liberalizing package of reforms in 1983 and a policy of decentralization, which reduced the power of the state. By the end of the 1980s, having no links to the trade union movement, and being forced to “co-­habit” with the Gaullist Right, the PS’s electoral base collapsed, as did its support among intellectuals. Taking shape in opposition to Mitterrand’s liberal Atlanticism was a left-­ wing republican-­nationalism. Broadly, it aimed to promote national political and economic sovereignty: France needed to reject the monetary union and reassert control over its foreign policy. Only then would it be able to institute state-­led redistribution policies to reduce income gaps. Through Mitterrand’s first administration, this current of thinking had been associated with the Minister of Research and Industry (and later Minister of Defense) Jean-­Pierre

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Chevènement, but preference had always been given to pro-­European and liberal voices in the government, principally to Jacques Delors and Jacques Attali. In the 1990s, a network of neo-­republican think tanks emerged, mirroring those that had been formed by liberals in the 1980s (see Chapter 2) and often drawing direct inspiration from Chevènement’s ideas. One of these was Phares et Balises, founded in 1992 by Régis Debray in response to the Gulf War and the signing of the Maastricht Treaty (see Chapter 4). Todd became one of its early members. In 1998, he and a number of journalists and academics established the Fondation Marc-­Bloch (later renamed the Fondation du 2 Mars after it was slapped with a lawsuit from the Bloch family). Here too the goal was to combat the growing Euro-­liberal consensus in France and find a way to regain economic sovereignty. Todd’s remark to the left-­wing newspaper Libération framed the conflict in terms reminiscent of the New Right: “We are engaged in a Gramscian recapture, and are heading into a period of turmoil. We must be prepared. When a reversal of ideological hegemony takes place, the whole system will topple.”117 Todd’s work from the 1990s and early 2000s reflected this new combative national-­republican spirit. He went on record against the European Monetary Union, first in an afterword to the second edition of L’Invention de l’Europe and then in an address to the Communist Party.118 In the latter, Todd called himself a “fanatical anti-­Maastrichtian,” took a shy distance from his earlier liberal writings, and argued that the Maastricht vote had been engineered by inequality-­loving types in the Socialist Party establishment, who were pushing France in a liberal direction.119 It was up to the PCF, he argued, which had courageously opposed the vote, to rally the country against ultra-­liberalism and reassert egalitarian values. This line of attack was broadened and, of course, placed in anthropological relief in Todd’s next book, L’Illusion économique (The Economic Illusion). Appearing in 1998, it launched a full-­scale offensive against the liberal orthodoxy, showing how stagnation, inequality, and injustice had warped all advanced capitalist societies since the 1980s.120 Germany, Japan, and Sweden had better anthropological endowments, in their tighter family systems, to resist the neoliberal capitalism than did the United States or Britain, but no country had escaped it. France was looking particularly miserable, riven by inequalities and beset with an individualism that was hollowing out the social body. The pejorative term invented by Benoist to describe these ideas, la pensée unique, was so empty that it could be more accurately called la pensée zero. Todd’s solution to these problems was categorical: France needed to

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move swiftly toward protectionism and to reactivate the class struggle against the dominance of free markets.121 Only by demolishing la pensée zero could the “nation” be truly restored.122 Todd had traveled a long distance from his youthful liberalism. Todd’s next book, Après l’empire (After the Empire), took on the imperial power of the United States. American hegemony, Todd argued, had been benevolent during the Cold War, when it protected and aided freedom around the world. With the collapse of the USSR, however, it took a malign turn. The world no longer needed its military protection and, to finance its erratic spending patterns, the United States drew tribute from the rest of the world. There was a deep underlying problem here for the United States. Deregulation and free trade had so depressed global demand that only outsize US spending could keep the world economy afloat. This led to soaring trade deficits for the United States, which continued to be funded by foreign investors hoping to find a secure place to park their capital. The United States, however, was no longer the productive giant it had been after the war, and it was only a matter of time, Todd argued, before this circle was broken and the economy experienced a huge crash. Policy elites in Washington were aware of this problem and consciously stepped up military spending, as if force could prolong the extraction of tribute. Military adventurism was to be expected, and so came American aggression the Arab world.123 Thus, American empire, in its greed and recklessness, threatened democracy both at home and abroad. Todd offered two scenarios of how Europe might free itself from US dominance. The first possibility was the achievement of universal literacy (by the year 2030), bringing in its wake an era of universal democratic peace. Todd here endorsed the views of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” idea: “Modern liberal democracy,” wrote Todd “is everywhere tending toward peace. . . . That this is impossible between democracies is verified by an examination of the historical record.”124 No policies could alter this development; thus, Europe need only wait for the moment to arrive. The other option was for European elites to make a run against the United States for autonomy. Economically this was feasible, but not militarily. For this, Europe needed a nuclear arsenal of comparable size to that of the United States. Since only Russia possessed this, Europe should consider forging a partnership with its neighbor to the east. With Putin now firmly in charge, Russia was, as Todd wrote in 2002, “emerging from a decade of chaotic fallout related to the end of communism and about to return to being a stable force within the balance of world power.”125 Todd’s vision of world politics had

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become neatly inverted here: Whereas he had once seen American capitalism as a counterweight to a crumbling Soviet empire, he now saw Russian military might as a lifeline against a declining American empire. This symmetry was announced in the subtitles of the two books: Essai sur la décomposition de la sphère soviétique and Essai sur la décomposition du système américain. After the Empire was a bestseller in Europe, and it demonstrated Todd’s enduring talent for timely provocation. If L’Illusion économique had angered economic liberals in France, After the Empire, with its anti-­American Russophilia, incensed Atlanticists on both continents. Indeed, the historian Tony Judt calling Todd “a mad scientist” and his anti-­Americanism a banality—“the master narrative of our age.”126 Thus, while Todd continued to espouse a Whiggish and liberal view of history, his political positions were moving well to the left of the liberal establishment. His subsequent work began to deal more directly with the controversial issues of race and immigration.

Immigrants Immigration presented a conceptual difficulty for Todd once he adopted his family-­ideology model. “Mobility” had figured as a key focus of his doctoral thesis, where he attempted to determine which kind of familial arrangements in agrarian societies were likely to foster freedom of movement. Beginning with his work with Le Bras, however, Todd established a highly localized and enracinated theory of culture: Ideas, beliefs, and habits were place-­specific and were anchored in ancient folkways. This epistemology, as Noiriel pointed out in his critique of the French social sciences, was typical of the national pattern in that it left little room for the movement of people and ideas and it tended toward nativism. As if to correct this oversight, Todd included a short chapter on postwar immigration in The Making of Modern France and then treated the issue with more gravity in the conclusion to L’Invention de l’Europe, warning of a European backlash against Muslim immigrants. Since that moment, and corresponding to his shift toward a national-­republican politics, Todd has tried to develop a republican framework that privileges the relationship between French society and its immigrant populations. This has involved a few arguments. First, Todd has contended, again controversially, that France is exceptionally tolerant and well suited for the assimilation of immigrants. In Le Destin des immigrés (The Fate of Immigrants), from 1994, Todd held that true diversity must be measured not by

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the proportion of peoples from different ethnic backgrounds in a society but by the rates of intermarriage across races and ethnicities. Only this criterion accurately reflected a culture’s capacity for tolerance. England and the United States, two countries widely extolled for their multiculturalist ethos, showed low rates of intermarriage and demonstrated a racialist, inegalitarian attitude toward nonwhites. France, however, often maligned for its culture of intolerance toward peoples of different races, had much higher rates of intermarriage and showed itself to be far more tolerant and welcoming than the more segregated societies of the Anglo-­American world.127 Again, this was a gift of its extraordinary cultural heritage. If France was not living up to its potential, it was because cultural and economic stagnation was deepening in the 2000s, bringing soaring inequalities and a “metaphysical crisis.” Intellectuals and the media engaged in fearmongering, identifying Islam and Muslim immigrants as the source of France’s malaise. In 2008’s Après la démocratie (After Democracy), his gloomiest book yet, Todd attacked “ethno-­Atlanticists” like Samuel Huntington for popularizing the idea that Islam was genetically disposed toward hatred of the West. “Ethno-­Atlanticism is an offensive doctrine,” he wrote. “We are the aggressors. One need only count the number of dead in the United States, in Europe, and in the Muslim world to verify this. Our Islamophobia is largely endogenous, the effect of our own religious trouble.”128 At home, the myth of “a clash of civilizations” had been further fueled by Marcel Gauchet: “In France, an even older theory contributes unconsciously to the designation of Islam as a problem, that of Christianity as the ‘religion of the exit from religion,’ an idea put forward by Gauchet in 1985, but simplified by its appropriators and returned against the Muslim world. Christianity was different because it was capable of transcending itself. This vision of history conferred on the Western world a unique specificity.”129 With this notion of Christian exceptionalism, argued Todd, Gauchet had legitimized Islamophobia as an acceptable form of secular European politics. In this post-­ religious climate, the French idea of laïcité—freedom from religion in the public sphere—became “laïcism,” a secular religion predicated on “scapegoating” Islam. Thus, a new national consensus, underwritten by lingering religious resentments, took over in France and threatened to invalidate its favorable anthropological endowment. The imperative now for Todd was to challenge this new complacency. In 2005, after riots erupted in the predominantly Arab suburbs of Paris, Todd defended rioters from their official characterization as a criminal

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foreign element. These immigrant communities were victims of la pensée zéro, he argued, facing mass unemployment and ethnic discrimination. Their revolt was at once “an aspiration for equality” and a natural result of the collision of the Maghrebian family structure—communitarian—with that of the Parisian basin—nuclear egalitarian. Such flare-­ups were “inevitable,” wrote Todd, and could even be seen as a positive sign for French society. Marginalized peoples had for once figured at the center of national political debate and wrongfooted the right-­wing Minister of Interior Nicolas Sarkozy. This signaled a move toward greater understanding between France and its immigrant populations, leading Todd to suppose that assimilation was a matter of anthropological destiny: “The second and third generations of immigrants will integrate relatively well into French society, and many will join the middle and higher classes.”130 Taking a similar line of argument, Todd published with Youssef Courbage, Le Rendez-­vous des civilisations (The Convergence of Civilizations) in 2007. Political violence across the Muslim world—from Morocco to Indonesia—was evidence of a demographic revolution in progress. Literacy rates were reaching the revolutionary threshold of 50 percent and birthrates were falling in response. As this happened, the different family types of each region would produce some variation of a stable democracy after undergoing a period of violent transition. Islamism, where it existed, was thus only a passing phase. If modern Middle Eastern revolutions—in Iran, for instance— were more clerical than the French, Russian, or Chinese predecessors, it was because their family structures were warm and communal and not alienating like the others.131 Thus, there was a nostalgic, if passing, desire to preserve the power of the father throughout the Middle East. “Allah,” as Todd announced in an interview from 2011, “has nothing to do with it.”132 In short, this demographic data enabled Todd and Courbage to show that Islam was a religion profoundly compatible with modernity and that the stereotypes of Muslims in France were largely unfounded. For example, many cultures practicing Islam were matrilineal and demonstrated a strong sense of gender equality. Very few of them were polygamous and, in some countries, like Chad, polygamy was more common among Catholics than Muslims. “Ethno-­Atlanticists” like Gauchet and especially Huntington—whose title the authors inverted— were therefore wrong to suppose that Christianity was exceptionally suited to post-­religious modernity. Finally, there came the book that made Todd into a national celebrity, 2015’s Qui est Charlie? (Who Is Charlie?). It was written and appeared shortly

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after the January 2015 attacks against the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine that had repeatedly printed images desecrating the Muslim prophet Muhammad. A few days after the attacks, crowds of people followed the French government’s appeal to march in protest throughout the country. Demonstrators held pencils to symbolize freedom of the press and wore tee shirts with the slogan “Je suis Charlie” to proclaim solidarity with the magazine. President François Hollande declared a state of emergency and gave Charlie Hebdo a grant to relaunch the journal. What for the mainstream media heralded a moment of national communion was for Todd evidence of national hysteria: “Any historian who studies long-­term trends (la longue durée) and is familiar with religious crises . . . cannot fail to observe that when the French state turns an image of Muhammad depicted as a prick into a sacred image, this constitutes a historic turning point. France really is going through a religious crisis, one that follows all the religious crises that have given shape to its history.”133 The “Charlie” movement therefore called for deeper anthropo-­sociological investigation. Catholics and nonbelievers had long lived side by side in France. Todd dusted off the maps, showing that the nonbelievers came from the regions where egalitarian family structures dominated: the Paris Basin down to the Mediterranean sea front in the Southeast. There de-­Christianization had occurred in the eighteenth century and had found expression in the earth-­ shaking violence of the French Revolution. The Catholics came from the authoritarian regions, or what Todd called here “peripheral France”: the Atlantic Coast and the regions bordering Germany and Switzerland. The disenchantment of these territories, which had historically found comfort in the hierarchies of the Church, took place much later, during the postwar capitalist boom. The genius of French politics since the Third Republic was to have found a way to balance these two different value systems. In the new millennium, however, it was clear to Todd that the recently de-­Christianized regions were exercising disproportionate influence in the country. This was the phenomenon of “zombie Catholicism,” “an anthropological and social force that emerged from the final disintegration of the Church.” The term had been invented a few years earlier in another book co-­written with Hervé Le Bras, Le Mystère français,134 and Todd now saw the influence of these zombies everywhere, dragging around their inegalitarian cultural baggage. Rather than “convert to egalitarianism,” the zombies found a party that could represent their values: the authoritarian Socialist Party. Through this agency, France was, for Todd, led down a darkened path: “a surge of

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pro-­European feeling, a masochistic monetary policy, a deformation of the nature of the Republic, . . . and a particularly shifty form of Islamophobia.”135 In 2005, with riots raging in the suburbs of Paris and a “no” vote on the Lisbon Treaty, there had been a genuine opportunity to revive the class struggle and push France in an egalitarian direction. But the moment passed, and the inegalitarian reflexes regained their dominance. How does this all explain the Charlie phenomenon, which happened not only in the recently godless periphery but also in the historically godless center? In fact, argued Todd, there was a second crisis of faith at work. The final disappearance of the Church left a void in the heart of historic atheists: They no longer had anything to be against. This malaise was reflected in the steep drop off in support for the Communist Party in the late 1970s. Like the zombie Catholics, atheists were in desperate need of certainties, and they found a new “structuring enemy” in Islam. Therefore, “the demonization of Islam” figured as a point of consensus for white French people.136 The four million marchers who came out for Charlie tended to be a product of this homegrown religious fundamentalism. The Front national, whose disappearance Todd had been predicting since 1988, was a side player in this story. The maps showed that the party’s main outposts were in the egalitarian, historically godless zones of the country. For Todd, the FN’s xenophobia could be said to have had an egalitarian edge, reflecting its familial inheritance. For equality lovers, the presence of an inassimilable “other” was confusing, and they tended to respond with an absurd syllogism: “If human beings are the same everywhere, if the foreigners setting foot on our soil behave in ways that really are different, the reason is that they are not really human beings.” This, according to Todd, was a “universalist xenophobia,” focusing on the visible differences between Arabs and French whites. This was not to be confused with the more pernicious psychology of zombie Catholics, that of “differentialist xenophobia,” which thinks of the Other as different in principle. The first was Arabophobia, a working-­class universalist racism; whereas, the second was Islamophobia, the pompous, middle-­class counterpart that was now dominant in the country. The FN was simply frustrated that assimilation was not proceeding quickly enough. For Todd then, French society was increasingly defined by this cultural conflict between whites and citizens of North African descent. As long as zombie Catholics were in control of the country, the situation would continue to deteriorate, with Arabs and Muslims bearing the brunt of the PS’s segregationist, authoritarian impulses. “The neo-­Republic, closer in concept to Vichy

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than to the Third Republic, demands from some of its citizens an intolerable degree of renunciation to what they are.” Not even France’s favorable family endowment—its “ace card”—could be of help in this climate. If anyone was going to save France from itself, it was zombie Muslims, those who were no longer religious but were still animated by the egalitarian, communal values of Islam. Striking a Durkheimian note, Todd claimed, “We need to be fully aware that it is anomie, much more than communitarianism, that poses a threat to life in our towns and cities. . . . What we can imagine is a contribution on the margins of Muslim belief, one that would be of importance for some families engaged in the attempt to improve their children’s intellectual, educational, and social lot.”137 Muslims just needed to be left alone to perform their silent anthropological work. In time, they would reactivate the egalitarian values of the Parisian basin and would crowd out the hateful voices of inequality and difference. This was Todd’s last word: a sick and racist France providentially saved by its most oppressed citizens. The problem was not Islam but Islamophobia. Intellectuals of the center and Right were outraged by Todd’s polemic. The essayist and Académie française member Alain Finkielkraut called the book “grotesque” and “offensive”; others responded by calling Todd’s work fraudulent and “deceptive.”138 These reactions demonstrate a certain ingenuity on Todd’s part: the ability to convert elaborate anthropological templates into timely and provocative political judgments. Initially, in the 1980s, Todd’s construction of a rigorous and systematic anthropology sought to replace historical materialism—in its death agonies after the defeat of the Union of the Left—as science of society and history. Hence, it shadowed Marx in a number of respects, adopting, for instance, a grand Hegelian teleology, and taking as its primary focus the capitalist dislocation of peasant societies. Le Play here figured as a compelling alternative to Marx, an exact contemporary with a cultural-­psychological, rather than an economic account of industrialization. Todd’s kinship maps therefore were meant to aggravate and outmaneuver France’s Old Left when it was still an active force in French politics. As one astute commentator put it, “Those who prefer class struggles to ‘family quarrels’ will see these ideas as outdated and politically reactionary.”139 After 1989, with communism discredited across Europe, Todd considered liberalism as the new harbinger of inequality and oppression. His judgments were more straightforwardly political in this era: protectionism, “no” to Maastricht, and so on. The maps and diagrams could be pressed into supporting these conclusions, thus giving them an air of anthropological determinacy.

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Hence, with each new book, Todd has tended to rely less and less on long-­ term dynamics and has spent fewer pages explaining his kinship system. He even looked back with nostalgia on the days of grand theory, recognizing perhaps that his own work was more continuous with it than he ever realized.140 Todd’s uniqueness as a writer stems from the creativity with which he has modulated these two registers, the one structural and invariant, the other conjunctural and shifting. It has given him the ability to deliver confounding political analyses which often enough have touched the nerves of the French reading public.

Chapter 4

Tracking the Sacred The Political Anthropology of Régis Debray

Since the 1960s, the philosopher and essayist Régis Debray has consistently been one of France’s most original and provocative thinkers. The scale and range of his collected works are unmatched among contemporary writers: some one hundred books, among which have figured literary classics, like his autobiographical trilogy, Le Temps d’apprendre à vivre; hard-­hitting polemics; novels; plays; studies of religion and technology; and complex works of social and political theory. He won the Prix Fémina for one of his novels in 1977 and was elected to the prestigious Académie Goncourt in 2011. Debray has been one of the most politically engaged writers of the French Left, first as a revolutionary in Latin America in the 1960s, then as a social democrat under Mitterrand in the 1970s, and finally as a republican in the 1980s and after. In these capacities, he has played an active and often contentious role in the French public sphere. His political anthropology has centered on the notion that all human groups have a religious foundation and that people, as a matter of anthropological programming, have a need to believe. “The great question that has never ceased to torment me,” he wrote in 2018, “is what can human beings have in common? How is an esprit de corps born? How is a ‘we’ made from a heap of ‘I’s?”1 The first part of this chapter traces the development of this idea, from Debray’s revolutionary activity in Latin America to the writing of his theoretical summa in 1981, Critique of Political Reason. In that book, Debray offered a systematic theory of human nature and politics that was meant to compete with the likes of France’s other elite thinkers. Debray’s political judgments after 1981 must, I argue, be seen in light of the Critique’s ideas, and the second part of the chapter shows how Debray translated this theory into

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political practice. Overall, Debray’s work presents one of the most compelling and rigorous cases for why socialism should take religion and its accompaniments—myth, emotion, nationalism, hatred—seriously. Jules Régis Debray was born in Paris in 1940 to a high bourgeois, conservative family. Both of his parents were lawyers, and his mother, Janine Alexandre-­Debray, was elected to municipal office in 1947 as a candidate of de Gaulle’s new party, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français. Her son received the finest education that could be had in mid-­century Paris, from the Lycée Janson de Sailly—attended by Lévi-­Strauss and Merleau-­Ponty—to Louis-­le-­ Grand high school, to the École Normale Supérieure, where Debray studied philosophy. He was there tutored by the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, around whom had gathered a group of talented, soon-­to-­be-­famous thinkers: Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Jacques Bouveresse, Étienne Balibar, to name a few. The milieu, however, was not entirely to Debray’s liking. He admired Althusser the man but not Althusser the thinker: “In writing, his dry, byzantine theses bored me almost as much as did his disciples.”2 More exciting to Debray were developments in the Third World—above all, the heroic struggles of the Algerian and Cuban peoples. At age eighteen, he joined the student wing of the Communist Party and attended demonstrations regularly, but he never fully warmed to the party because of its failure to oppose French imperialism in Algeria. In the meantime, he read Lévi-­ Strauss’s Tristes tropiques3 and Paul Nizan’s memoir of Aden, with its preface by Sartre, and was drawn in by their evocations of a world beyond France. In 1960, Debray traveled to Tunisia and saw the members of the GPRA (the provisional government of soon-­to-­be-­independent Algeria).4 In 1961, he spent six months in Cuba, and was at the Plaza de la révolucion for the May Day celebration when Fidel Castro declared, just days after the Bay of Pigs invasion, “Cuban history begins here.” In 1962, he went to Venezuela, apparently to shoot a film, and then returned to South America for an entire year in 1963 and 1964, traveling throughout the continent on foot, mule, and bus. Back in Paris, he worked on his thesis—on the idea of genius in Diderot—but found it difficult: “The leader within was greedily eyeing the planet’s red belt from between two quarto tomes.”5 At the end of 1965, now graduated, Debray found himself teaching in the provincial city of Nancy. One night, he received a telegram from Castro inviting him to attend, as his personal guest, the Tricontinental Conference, scheduled to open in Havana after the new year. At this point, the Revolution



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was looking to embrace foreign Marxists who had written sympathetically of the Cuban miracle. As it happened, Debray had recently published such a text in Sartre’s journal, Les Temps modernes.6 Che Guevara read it while in Algeria and recommended that Castro summon the young intellectual, and of course Debray could not refuse. With the Revolution in full flower, Debray felt liberated in mid-­1960s Havana: “I was 24 years old: a car and driver were at my disposal day and night along with a sort of aide-­de-­camp, a balcony, private life and a white telephone. . . . It was like being in the movies.” He was allowed private meetings with Castro, who took meticulous pains to invent a “cover” for Debray, including writing to his principal in Nancy to excuse him from teaching and giving him a nominal appointment to the philosophy faculty at the University of Havana. In this exuberant atmosphere, Debray let his historical imagination run wild: “I saw myself in Havana at the Second Congress of the Communist International, welcoming . . . the American John Reed, the Frenchmen Alfred Rosmer and Raymond Lefebvre, the Dutchman Sneevliet, the Indian Roy (founder of the Mexican Communist Party), and the Hungarian Béla Kun.” At the closing session of the Tricontinental, “Bukharin, Zinoviev and Radek [i.e., Bolsheviks killed by Stalin] were on the platform, in olive-­green uniforms, speaking Spanish.”7 Fittingly, Castro gave Debray the nickname of “Danton,” and this was to be his alias during his revolutionary years in Latin America. In 1967, at Castro’s prompting, Debray wrote the book that made him world famous, The Revolution in the Revolution? In it, Debray argued that it was a mistake for civilian populations in developing countries to arm themselves for the purposes of waging revolutionary combat. Doctrines of “armed self-­defense,” powerfully rooted in both anarcho-­syndicalist and Trotskyist traditions, had led to slaughter time and again in Latin America. What was needed, therefore, was a cadre of professional fighters who could operate independently of civilian populations and whose sole task was the military defeat of the bourgeoisie. “The populace will be completely safe,” he wrote, “when the opposing forces are completely defeated.”8 The guerrilla army was ideally suited to fight this battle, since it was mobile, clandestine, and highly trained and disciplined. Meanwhile, as this struggle developed, workers needed to begin to take power from below. “In the countryside the aim should be the organization of peasant unions; occupation of the land. . . . The workers must, step by step, take control of the means of production.”9 The establishment of dual power—socialists taking control of key political and

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social institutions—would thereby finish the destruction of the bourgeois state, and lead to full-­on socialism. This was the future of revolution in the developing world, and, in formulating such a theory, Debray saw himself as “liberating the present from the past.”10 Debray’s little book had a huge reception and did much to transform the Cuban Revolution into a “model.”11 As Fredric Jameson has written, the guerrilla army was conceived by Debray “as something distinct from either the traditional model of class struggle (an essentially urban proletariat rising against a bourgeoisie or ruling class) or the Chinese experience of a mass peasant movement in the countryside (and has little in common either with a Fanonian struggle for recognition between Colonizer and Colonized).”12 But, as Jameson also pointed out, this “model” was discredited almost from the moment it appeared. Guerrilla movements failed in Peru and Venezuela in 1966 and then more gravely in Bolivia in 1967, where Guevara was captured and executed and where Debray, who had recently joined the unit, was arrested and interned in the small town of Camiri. Debray stood trial and was indicted under military law. The alleged offense (of being a guerrilla) was punishable by a maximum of thirty years in jail, as Bolivia had just abolished the death penalty. Even so, many understood Debray’s life to be in danger and, to inflame matters, General René Barrientos, the conservative president of Bolivia, incited the people of La Paz into anti-­Communist demonstrations and raised cries of “Debray must die.” Debray’s friends and family pressed vehemently for his release, and his publishers—Feltrinelli and Maspero—showed up in Camiri, only to be promptly turned away.13 What ultimately saved Debray from execution was external pressure—a media campaign organized by his mother—for a proper trial and the CIA’s insistence upon a full interrogation of Debray before sentencing. The military’s trial of Debray was a travesty by all accounts, offering little semblance of justice and allowing Debray to make a rousing speech in the dock, which only confirmed that the junior officers had let the trial get out of control. Debray was nevertheless found guilty of “rebellion, assassination, theft, and injury,” and sentenced to “thirty years of hard labor.”14 Three years into the sentence, fortune again worked in Debray’s favor, as the Barrientos regime was succeeded by the Left-­leaning, reform-­minded presidency of Juan José Torres. The latter appears to have approved the Frenchman’s release, and Debray was smuggled out of the country at the end of 1970.15



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Répaysement In exiling himself from France and committing to revolutionary struggle in Latin America, Debray had not intended to practice Lévi-­Strauss’s famous “regard eloigné,” the ethnological outlook in which one reaches a greater understanding of one’s own culture by studying another. But this was precisely what happened—Debray’s thinking drifting inevitably back toward France during his Bolivian incarceration. On a personal level, he soon came to rediscover his own Frenchness in prison, writing in Praised Be Our Lords, “I inherit a History that I may try to remake or unmake, but that I did not make. Supranationality is not a matter of volition. One does not choose a community like a watch in a shop window. And I was beginning to see those Marxist-­speaking sons of Bolivar as patriots who lacked self-­knowledge.”16 Likewise, he could now look back on his desire to escape Europe and pursue a life of militancy with some degree of irony: “A fish has no need of water while he’s in it. I used to dream on down days at the ENS of running around on dry land, embarrassed of being a little fish and of my classmates, with their smugness and insensibility, their faith in the concept . . . and their immoderate love for one another. . . . And now, here I am, a good member of that family asphyxiating on the sand, not proud at all.”17 Prison thus had a way of repatriating Debray and breaking him of his youthful internationalism. Corresponding to this personal discovery was an immediate revision of Debray’s theoretical ideas. In 1969, still in prison, he wrote a long reflection on the concept of revolutionary crisis, “Temps et politique.” It was completely different from anything he had previously written, pitched at a high philosophical level, and dealing exclusively with the European revolutionary tradition. The conclusion he reached was at striking variance with his earlier views: The movement whereby a group of militants pull themselves clear of the historical muddles of opportunism is bound to demand a strong act of will. Instead of continuing to work passively within the normal course of events, they are summoning up their forces to act as agents. By that very fact, they tend to skip the usual process of beginnings, and create for themselves a present without any past, since what is past cannot be changed. Now the people, the masses . . . only appear in the concrete reality of history as strands woven into the fabric of national traditions. The nation itself, a community of language,

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of territory and of outlook (to adopt the restricted but accurate definition given by Stalin) constitutes the evident, tangible form of tradition.18 Just two years earlier, in Revolution in the Revolution?, Debray had marked out the voluntarism of the guerrilla army and its capacity to liberate “the present from the past” as its key virtues. Now it was “tradition” that he celebrated, “the continuous movement of the past into the present, the mutual interaction of the two.” The reasoning here was straightforward: Power in bourgeois societies tended to be well fortified and diffuse, with an ability to “absorb its own crises” and fend off the divisions that might otherwise split it apart. What the party required, therefore, was not a mobile, vanguardist unit of professional revolutionaries; rather, it needed to have deep roots in proletarian culture to endure the crisis and convert it into revolutionary change. “Victory will result,” Debray argued, “from political work as it mounts up over a longer or shorter period, in the form of the Party’s experience, the way it becomes gradually more established, the number of people voting for it,” and so on.19 Debray was reading Gramsci in prison, and the Italian’s culturally inflected Marxism gave Debray a new language of revolutionary struggle. It also helped him appreciate the role of nationalism in proletarian culture.20 As Eric Hobsbawm recognized of Gramsci a few years later: “Up to the present he is the only Marxist thinker to give us a basis for integrating the nation, as a social and historical reality, into the framework of Marxist theory. He puts an end to the usual habit of seeing the ‘national question’ as something external to the working-­class movement.”21 In like terms, Debray commended Gramsci for breaking with abstract and mechanistic approaches to the study of society (inherited from the eighteenth century) and for focusing on the institutions—cultural and political—that shaped proletarian life.22 Although mentally repatriated, Debray did not yet make his return to France. Upon his release from prison in December 1970, he was flown to Chile by a special detachment and was guaranteed safe passage into Santiago by President Salvador Allende, whose socialist Popular Unity coalition had been narrowly voted into office a few months earlier. Debray was electrified by the atmosphere in the country: Bourgeois opposition was splintering, wages were rising, the economy was back to functioning at full capacity, and there were no serious tensions between Socialists and Communists in the coalition. “Anyone who did not experience the southern summer in that first year of the Popular Front,” he later wrote, “has not known the sweetness of



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life.” Moreover, the Chilean road to socialism—popular and democratic— was well suited to the evolution of his own thinking, and seemed even too good to be true: “The temptation of happiness was a new idea subversive to the mystique of armed struggle.”23 In his enthusiasm, Debray proposed doing a long interview with Allende, which would allow the president to defend Popular Unity from its left-­wing detractors, who were accusing it of reformism and bourgeois opportunism. Allende agreed, and the text was published by Maspero in 1971. With Debray playing devil’s advocate, the president spoke with eloquence and force on the revolutionary aims of Popular Unity and its grounding in proletarian demands: “We will create a government that is democratic, national, revolutionary, and popular; one that will lead to socialism, because socialism does not happen simply by decree.”24 Debray added his own thoughts on the Chilean model in the book’s introduction. Popular Unity proved, he argued, that Socialists and Communists could work together in a coalition party and also suggested that in countries with developed democratic institutions—Chile’s 1833 constitution had been modified only once—revolutionary struggle could take place within legal political structures. In Chile, “the class struggle’s center of gravity has been transposed and displaced onto the existing juridico-­political frame, neutralizing and sublimating the direct action of working-­class forces.” Its success was far from secure, said Debray, and one could easily forget how fragile and potentially explosive the situation was. But Chile was the best hope for the parliamentary road to socialism, and he called for all militants to heed its lessons.25 Meanwhile, in Europe, France was undergoing a period of heightened political struggle. While Debray was languishing in prison, May 1968 came and went; de Gaulle resigned the presidency and died the following year; and France’s historic Socialist Party, the SFIO, collapsed after obtaining a miserable 5 percent of the vote in the 1969 elections. From its ruins, a new party was formed in 1969, the modern-­day Socialist Party (PS), with the moderate Alain Savary at its head. Two years later, at the party’s Epinay Congress, an internal coup engineered by Pierre Mauroy and Gaston Defferre, situated on the right wing of the party, and Jean-­Pierre Chevènement, on the left wing, won the secretaryship for François Mitterrand. Previously, Mitterrand had run as a joint candidate of the Left in the 1965 presidential elections and put up a credible performance against a massively popular de Gaulle. His speech at the 1971 Epinay Congress proposed a radical new direction for the party, calling for a revolutionary “rupture” with capitalism and outlining a strategy

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by which the PS could outmaneuver the PCF, then the largest party of the Left, to become the main party of France’s working people.26 Under Savary’s leadership, the party had already discussed forming a “Union of the Left” with the PCF, but Mitterrand gave this idea new force by proposing immediate negotiations with the Communists. By the summer of 1972, the PS and the PCF signed the Common Program of Government and brought the Union of the Left into existence. Mitterrand’s first foreign visit as secretary of the PS was to Chile in the fall of 1971. The meeting was arranged by the buccaneering French journalist, Claude Estier, who had covered the Cuban Revolution and had been invited to Santiago in 1970 to cover Allende’s inauguration. Allende mentioned to Estier that he wanted to meet Mitterrand. The president was planning an ambitious program of nationalizations that would worry the United States, and he wanted to secure international alliances so as not to isolate Chile.27 Mitterrand was of a similar frame of mind: Chile might prove an ideal symbolic partner in the PS’s effort to break with capitalism by democratic means. An alliance with Allende would also help radicalize the image of a party with a poor record of supporting anti-­imperialist movements.28 Though Allende was a Marxist and more radical than Mitterrand, Popular Unity was much less of a political liability than was China or the Soviet Union. Moreover, the Southern Cone was free of French colonies and had been largely ignored in French foreign relations. Defferre and Estier accompanied Mitterrand to Santiago, and the two leaders spoke pointedly of the difficulties of “bringing about socialism through structural changes to the economy while still preserving democracy.”29 Mitterrand was impressed with Allende but worried that he had placed too much confidence in the loyalty of Chile’s armed forces. A few days after Augusto Pinochet’s CIA-­sponsored coup destroyed the Chilean experiment and led to the suicide of Allende in September 1973, Mitterrand wrote an elegiac tribute to the Chilean president in the pages of L’Unité (newspaper of the PS). For Mitterrand, Allende figured among the great “heroes” of Latin American revolution, one that was sweeping in a “new age” throughout the continent. Allende thus became a powerful myth and martyr for the PS.30 Debray followed these developments closely. Impressed by Mitterrand’s vision as secretary of the PS, he “rallied” to the future president in 1972 while still living in exile in Cuba.31 The country was much changed since his departure for Bolivia in 1967: “On my return I discovered a rationalized, hierarchical and ceremonious system of government—less passional, more



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imposing.”32 Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution accelerated his repatriation and his turn toward parliamentary socialism. The opportunity to meet Mitterrand, his new spiritual father, came in early 1973, Debray having been asked by Allende to carry a message to his French counterpart. In the southwestern French city of Pau, where Mitterrand was on the campaign trail, Debray was escorted to the politician and found him to be a “social-­Catholic tribune with a vivid, even emphatic, way with words.” He spent the next days with the secretary touring the South, and France suddenly appeared new to him. “I discovered,” he wrote, “a cantonal France hitherto known to me only in theory from books and wall maps.” Listening to Mitterrand recount to him the history of each town, he “reveled in the deep joy of gamboling effortlessly in my mother tongue.”33 He agreed to join Mitterrand’s team, as an adviser on “third world” strategy. In the summer of 1973, just days before Pinochet’s coup, Debray made his permanent return to France.34 In this period, Debray adopted a more or less “Eurocommunist” line but from within the PS. In keeping with the Chilean model, he saw the Union of the Left as France’s best hope of achieving a transition to socialism. His strategy was both to push the PS to the left, away from the liberal-­centrist tendencies that had always filled its ranks, and to de-­Stalinize the PCF, bringing it behind the leadership of Mitterrand in the Union of the Left. Everything was going according to plan in the mid-­1970s. The PCF backed Mitterrand in the 1974 presidential elections, and the coalition came within one point of defeating the liberal Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The Communists abandoned the “dictatorship of the proletariat” at its Twenty-­Second Congress in 1976, criticized the lack of Soviet freedoms, and affirmed the French road to socialism. It also ended its opposition to French nuclear arms. From 1974 to 1977, its membership grew from 410,000 to 600,000.35 In Italy and Spain, the “Eurocommunist” strategy of the Communist parties appeared to be working as well. Enrico Berlinguer, head of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), had drawn a lesson from Chile’s Popular Unity and decided to guide the PCI away from permanent opposition and toward participation in a broad-­based coalition government. For Berlinguer, Allende had failed because he had excluded the Christian Democrats from his union and thereby split the country in half.36 In an Italy darkened by terrorism from both the Right and the Left, Berlinguer invoked the country’s historic anti-­ fascist struggles and threw the PCI’s support behind the centrist Christian Democrats in the 1976 elections. The party thereby entered the government (but was blocked from the ruling coalition). This was the so-­called historic

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compromise, and its strategy presupposed a highly stable, entrenched bourgeoisie, and a weakened working class. In Spain, a similar path was followed. The Communist Party of Spain (PCE) had taken a greater distance from the Soviet Union after the latter’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It was still an illegal party in Francoist Spain, and its leader, Santiago Carrillo, had come to the same conclusion as Berlinguer regarding Allende’s failures. The Spanish Left needed to broaden its base and therefore push for a multiparty parliamentary democracy, independent unions, complete civil and cultural freedoms, and total independence from the USSR.37 Like Berlinguer, Carrillo evoked the heroic struggles of antifascism and managed quickly to alienate the Soviet Union with its independent-­mindedness. Debray was an admirer of Carrillo, and proposed doing a book interview with him to better acquaint the public with the history of Spanish communism. Demain l’Espagne did just that.38 If Debray took an interest in these parties and histories, it was because he thought Italy, Spain, and France constituted “the golden triangle of socialism in Europe.” Friendship between the movements was therefore essential, as was victory for the Left in France—“summit” of this golden triangle.39 In France, Debray was helping the PS master the political situation and remain at the head of the Union of the Left. Internally, he had to fight against not only “the old fools [vieux cons]” who could not put aside their instinctive hatred of the Communists but also “the young wolves” who in their excessive zeal and professionalism treated congresses “as if they were pitched battles.”40 On this latter front, there was an additional element with which Debray had to contend, the merging of Michel Rocard’s libertarian fraction of the Parti socialiste unifié (PSU) with the PS in 1974. The PSU had been formed in 1959, protesting the SFIO’s support of French Algeria. It also endorsed the student revolts of 1968 and was at the forefront of the workers’ “self-­management” movement in the early 1970s—a broad program seeking to give workers democratic control of factories. Positioning itself to the left of both the Socialists and the Communists, the PSU refused to sign the Common Program in 1972. Rocard, a leading figure in the PSU and a presidential candidate in 1969, nevertheless broke with the party line and rallied to Mitterrand for the 1974 elections, bringing his followers with him into the PS. If the “old fools” tended to use an antiquated rhetoric of social struggle, Rocardians demonstrated the opposite propensity, speaking a modernizing and democratic language that could sound overly professionalized and libertarian. After the defeat of the Left in the 1978 election, Rocard tried to



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take over the PS, attacking what he called the “archaism” of the party leadership and vowing to realign French socialism with the market economy. At an early stage, Debray was categorical in his opposition to this libertarian turn of the Rocardians: Self-­management was a “vacant theoretical terrain.” “In Chile,” he added, it was only the Christian Democrats “who spoke of self-­ management.” Debray in fact had little patience for the gauchiste (far-left student) movements coming out of May 1968, referring to them derisively as a “spectacle” and “a joke.” With Lenin, he believed that socialism had to pass in and through the state, and that ultra-­left tendencies within the socialist movement were infantile and counterproductive.41 On matters of foreign policy, Debray became a key part of Mitterrand’s rapprochement with Latin America. Few, if any, figures in France had Debray’s credentials in that part of the world. In the party’s weekly newspaper, Debray defended the relevancy of the Chilean model in 1974, arguing that Popular Unity had shown how bourgeois institutions—the parties, the armed forces, and the legal structures—would begin to crumble under the weight of popular mobilization. By 1973, the coalition found itself in a “dual power” situation according to Debray; it had only needed more time to mature before taking full power in the country.42 Pinochet’s coup did not invalidate Allende’s parliamentary strategy; rather, it offered evidence of its success. The ruling class’s resort to a US-­backed coup meant that the bourgeois state was about to topple. After the coup that destroyed Allende’s government, Debray helped Mitterrand pivot toward Cuba, which was to become the PS’s key partner in the creation of a “new international economic order.”43 In 1974, the secretary made a visit to Havana with a delegation that included Defferre, Didier Motchane, Edmonde Charles-­Roux, Antoine Blanca, and Debray. On his return to France, Mitterrand declared Cuba to be a symbol of liberty and Castro to be “a modest man, eager to be understood, open, generous, in search of a new ethic.”44 Here too the secretary was trying to push the party leftward and draw on the Third-­Worldist, anti-­imperial attitudes that had energized the student Left in the 1960s. He even wrote a tribute to Guevara, making parallels with his own effort to “break with capitalism.” Privately, Mitterrand was much cooler toward Cuba. Castro had monopolized all conversation and bored the delegation. The secretary caused Debray to flush with embarrassment when he leaned over and whispered that one “could expect little else from a dictator.”45 To his mistress, Mitterrand wrote that one’s “throat tightens” in Castro’s presence.46

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For Debray, forging these anti-­imperial partnerships became of even greater moment during the liberal Giscard presidency, which, beginning in 1974, saw France turn away from de Gaulle’s pursuit of strategic and economic independence from the Anglo-­American sphere of power. The general had withdrawn France from NATO; developed an impressive nuclear weapons program, blocking Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC); and formulated a pro-­Arab, anti-­Israeli foreign policy in the Middle East. By contrast, Giscard, within his first year in office, halted the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and opened the possibility of cooperation with conventional NATO forces. In tandem with the Baptist American president, Jimmy Carter, Giscard began to orient French foreign policy toward neocolonial interventions in the Third World. In 1977, he ordered France to airlift Moroccan troops into the Shaba (now Katanga) province of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) after revolutionary socialist forces—supported by Cuba—crossed over the border from Angola. A year later came a second deployment of troops, this one a joint effort with the United States and Belgium. These were accompanied by interventions in Chad, Mauritania, Libya, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia, all to support pro-­Western governments.47 Debray, even in this early period, was an admirer of de Gaulle and, along with the left wing of the PS, tried to steer Mitterrand toward a Gaullist foreign policy. Debray’s theoretical writings from the mid-­1970s continued to reflect this preference for national-­popular struggle. In La Guérilla du Che (1974), he reviewed his years of militancy in Latin America and reached a sobering conclusion: Che Guevara’s foco had failed on the South American continent because it had forgotten, “by unconscious repression or explicit under-­ estimation, what the Leninist tradition had called “the national and peasant question.”48 Indeed, the nation began to take on a lyrical, even mythical quality in Debray’s writings. In La Critique des armes (1974), he wrote, “The nation, which is nature made history by human labor and history made nature by what’s called a national tradition, offers an irreplaceable frame for the mobilization of the people over a long period of time.”49 Accordingly, Debray revised his imaginary history of the European Left, looking away from 1793, 1871, and 1917 toward moments of republican unity: the first years of the French Revolution, the nationalistic revolutions of 1848, and the Popular Front of 1936. Mitterrand was of the same frame of mind, as Debray explained in his “Lettre d’amour” commending the presidential candidate: “I mean to say that François Mitterrand is not a Leninist ‘revolutionary,’ but a liberal socialist. In



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forging his own path, the only candidate of the Left sets his course by the stars of 1789, 1848, and 1936. He knows the October Revolution, the Long March, and the Sierra Maestra, but they are not part of his firmament.”50 In 1976, Debray was interviewed by Michael Löwy in Critique communiste, a newly founded Marxist theoretical journal. There, Debray could be seen developing his ideas of the nation in an anthropological direction: “We should not become obsessed by the determinate historical form of the nation-­ state, but try to see what that form is made out of. It is created from a natural organization proper to homo sapiens, one through which life itself is rendered untouchable, or sacred. This sacred character constitutes the real national question.”51 The nation was a natural, organic unity that performed a certain function in human social life, a sacred bond that brought all members of the nation together. “It is my belief,” he added, “that we must locate the nation phenomenon within general laws regulating the survival of the human species. This survival is won against death, against entropy. . . . The human species necessarily sets . . . anti-­death processes which enter into all forms of society, and hence must be considered primary or anthropological determinants.” If Marxism had continually underestimated the power of the nation, it was because it had “no concept of nature.” In this respect, the nation was its “guilty conscience,” that which it was “unable to master” in theory or in practice.52 A small volume from 1975, Les Rendez-­vous manqués (Missed Appointments), adjusted his conception of individual militancy to suit his changing politics. In order to not become a liability for Mitterrand, Debray felt compelled to distance himself from language that recalled his guerrilla fighting days in Latin America. And yet, he was not willing to become merely a party intellectual either. Les Rendez-­vous manqués attempted to strike a balance. Written partly as a tribute to his comrade Pierre Goldman, a French Jew who had fought with the Venezuelan guerrillas in the 1960s and was now serving a life sentence in France for armed robbery, and also as a criticism of his own militancy in the 1960s, this “collective autobiography” was a hymn to revolutionary fraternity. “Revolution,” he wrote, “is the only idea in this century that allowed strangers to die together (in the International Brigades [of the Spanish Civil War] for example).”53 Political struggle in this sense was a kind of religious communion for Debray, a ritual coming together for a higher cause. It provided “images of perfection, which Christianity called ‘holy,’ and we call ‘heroic.’ ” It was congregative, symbolic, and monumental—“a serious affair” in contrast to the “comedy of May 68.” The religious character of fraternity was not to be confused with the monasticism typical

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of French intellectuals, with their self-­assured pronouncements and theoretical purity. “He who remains faithful to his brothers,” he wrote, “does not need to trumpet professions of faith to remain faithful to the Revolution.”54 Militancy was belief tested by action. Thus did fraternité and “faith”—with all of their religious and political connotations—come to figure as central notions in Debray’s political lexicon. It was also in Rendez-­vous that Debray sketched out an analysis of 1970s France. Its keynote was the deepening commercialization of French society that Debray had discovered on his return to France in 1973. Paris seemed more than ever a “society of the spectacle” overrun by the language and imagery of consumer capitalism. Politics, ideas, and society itself were increasingly governed by the logic of the market. Here Debray borrowed, unwittingly, a central metaphor from structural anthropology: French society was cybernetic, a vast machine of communication that ran automatically by virtue of feedback mechanisms. It tended to swallow up and normalize immanent forms of resistance. In broad terms, this kind of analysis was very much of the moment: Debord, Foucault, and Baudrillard had adopted similarly holistic ways of looking at French society in the 1960s and 1970s. For Debray, the Socialist taking of power was the only hope of stopping this process. Otherwise, “its destiny is,” he wrote, “to serve as a reinforcement and counterweight of capitalism.”55 But the Union of the Left fell apart. In September 1977, Georges Marchais, the general secretary of the Communist Party, suddenly withdrew the PCF from the coalition, alarming Debray and many intellectuals on the Left. In response, the Greek-­French political sociologist Nicos Poulantzas convened a group of intellectuals from diverse strands of the Left who were determined to repair the split and restore the Union. Debray joined this group, which included Blandine Kriegel (Maoist UJC(ml)), Christine Buci-­Glucksmann (PCF), Henri Weber (Trotskyist LCR), Jean-­Marie Vincent (LCR), Didier Motchane (PS), Catherine Clément (PCF), Dominique Lecourt (UJC(ml)), Alain Joxe (PSU), and Daniel Lindenberg (UCJ(ml)). They called themselves “Mélusine,” after a mythical French noblewoman who was half woman and half serpent, and condemned to wander as a specter until doomsday. A “cry of Mélusine” was a cry of despair. Internally, the group debated questions of strategy and doctrine, whether, for example, the CERES (Centre d’Études, de Recherches, et d’Éducation Socaliste—a Marxist think tank within the PS) had the correct line in seeing the national bourgeoisie as a pawn of American capital.56



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Externally, it resolved to oppose and discredit the anti-­totalitarian campaign against the Union of the Left, which was led by the New Philosophers, Bernard-­Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann. Attracting a huge amount of media attention, they advanced a number of damaging theses to the Union: that, for instance, Marxism had been directly responsible for the Soviet Gulag; that the state was the source of all political and social oppression; that any politics that attempted to seize state power was therefore totalitarian; and that the only safe form of politics was a staunch defense of human rights.57 Althusser had advised his students (which included not just Debray but also Dominique Lecourt and Poulantzas) to refrain from intervening publicly against the New Philosophers because, according to Lecourt, “he reckoned that there were no grounds for taking the group seriously as such.”58 Instead, Mélusine members focused on theoretical work. Poulantzas notably wrote a series of texts attempting to rehabilitate the Marxist theory of state, while Debray was preparing to write about the social role of the intellectual. They occasionally broke Althusser’s rule and polemicized against the New Philosophers. In the end, however, the Union could not be saved. In the 1978 legislative elections, the PCF reverted to its sectarian ways and ran its campaign against its former allies. In spite of this, the Socialists, for the first time since 1936, collected more votes than the Communists in the first round, 22.6 percent as against 20.6 percent. The Right was equally fragmented, with Jacques Chirac’s conservative Gaullist Rassemblement pour la république (RPR) competing with President Giscard’s recently formed Union pour la démocratie française (UDF). The combined votes of the right-­wing coalitions reported a narrow victory, taking 287 seats in the chamber, versus 200 on the Left. The Union of the Left was dead forever, and responsibility was laid at the door of the PCF. There followed a massive in-house revolt that hollowed out and destroyed the historic party in a short period. By the next vote, in 1981, a third of its members had gone. Eurocommunism suffered a similar fate in Italy and Spain. Once in power after 1976, the members of the PCI became partners in the Christian Democrats’ crackdown on civil liberties, and thereby damaged their links to the broader Left. Berlinguer was also forced to defend austerity while unemployment and worker dissatisfaction was rising. The PCI vote steeply declined in the next election and the party never fully recovered. In Spain, too, the compromises struck by Carrillo and the PCE were too extreme. In order to have the party legalized, Carrillo recognized the monarchy,

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accepted the continuity of judiciary and civil service, and, like Berlinguer, consented to a package of crippling austerity reforms. By the early 1980s, a newly ascendant Socialist Party gained the upper hand over the PCE, whose membership fell off sharply. Eurocommunism had proved disastrous for the Communist parties of Southern Europe. In France, its collapse produced disappointment, of course, and also sent intellectuals searching for new ideas and strategies.

Out of Defeat Some of Debray’s best work was precipitated by the defeat of the Union. His first response was the angered Lettre aux communistes français et à quelques autres, which upbraided the PCF for its betrayal of the pact. “If the Union of the Left, version 1977, is broken,” he wrote, “it’s because you wanted it that way. To speak frankly, because you decided this. It will not be without consequences—for you, for France, for Europe and the world.”59 The alliance was a golden opportunity for the PCF to embrace the democratic path to socialism, but it was too set in its ways to accept a new strategy. Like Pascal against the casuists, Debray picked apart the logic of the party’s positions, pointing out their absurdities and contradictions. The gravamen was the party’s refusal to learn from its own past. “One would prefer,” he wrote, “to erase this or that passage from the history of the Party rather than reread a text to figure out why and how errors were committed. Because one would then risk going from low to high. . . . To touch the past is to question the structures of the present, to assume a reversibility between base and summit.” There could be no move forward with this mentality, no partnership with another party: “Your power is inertia, and it’s a great power.”60 In desiring the ends of democratic socialism, but renouncing the means, the PCF doomed itself to extinction. It had also appeared to kill any chance of an electoral victory for socialism in France. That same year (1978), Debray’s inflammatory pamphlet Modeste contribution aux discours et cérémonies officiels du dixième anniversaire (A Modest Contribution to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary) was published. Debray had already signaled his scorn for 1968, but now, with the Union of the Left sabotaged, he collected his thoughts into a passionately reasoned, political-­historical attack on 1968. It argued, famously,



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The French way to America passed through May ’68; only a crisis could remove our handicaps. In its march towards normalization, in effect, modern French society dragged along with the rest of its baggage two very embarrassing collective values: the idea of the nation and independence, and the idea of the working class and revolution. These two concrete universals—the two last, of which we will speak to our children as of princesses in fairy tales—had for more than a century structured the “French ideology,” located the armature of our political dramaturgy and supported the material framework of a social machinery. Anchoring points for a complex of organizations, practices and agencies, they organized action on both sides. How to get rid of these values?61 In effect, France had two identities in 1968: one, industrial and technological, fast-­moving, and open to the outside world; the other, social and cultural, set to the more glacial pace of Old World customs and mores. As the first grew explosively during the postwar economic miracle, it was able to reveal all the more clearly the backward nature of the second. The fury of the 68ers’ rebellion against the France of their fathers was simply the imperative to synchronize France to the beat of American-­style capitalism: “The differential of the two circuits demanded a change of voltage; one country plugged into 110 volts, the other to 220.”62 The cunning of history had played a cruel trick on the gauchistes, who thought they were making revolution but were actually clearing away the obstacles for a more smoothly functioning neoliberal society: “Just as Hegelian great men are what they are because of the world spirit, the May revolutionaries were the entrepreneurs of the spirit needed by the bourgeoisie.”63 France was, according to Debray, undergoing a transition to a postindustrial society, relying increasingly on services and high-­tech automated labor. The reorganization of the modes and forces of production mandated a system-­wide readjustment in France’s institutional apparatus. The first site of struggle was the university because capital needed a highly trained type of white-­collar worker to manage an increasingly unskilled and disorganized labor force. The proletariat, the class struggle, and the institutions that anchored them—parties and unions—were being pushed aside to make way for the new post-industrial economy. The consequences of this were grave and far-­reaching, for without the strength of tradition to fill its political unconscious, France lived only for the moment, blindly moving forward at the pace

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of technological change. If, as Debray claimed, “The principal role of the working class in France is to reduce scandalous social inequalities,” the new regime of capital also portended the normalization of inequality.64 As for the rhetoric of 1968, it expressed a hedonistic and libertarian style of individualism that was perfectly consonant with this new spirit of capitalism: “There is a natural, but not pre-­ordained harmony,” Debray wrote, “between the individualist rebellions of May and the political and economic needs of liberal capitalism.”65 The subjective character of the students’ demands linked up easily with the Anglo-­American understanding of the human being as a rational, egoistic agent. As such, the student protests of 1968 traded the collective for the individual, the past for the present, a politics of commitment for one of flux, movement, and speed. If a dominant motif of May was to make everything political (sexuality, architecture, cinema), and to publicize all that was private, then one could just as easily conclude that nothing was political, and in fact all was private. Of post-­1968 France, Debray wrote, “The slow and wrinkled tempo of the projects of the past . . . has given way to the blow-­by-­blow temporality of ad-­men and sleazy TV personalities.”66 By way of 1968, France had entered the depoliticized, anti-­historical age of what became known as the postmodern. Debray’s was a powerful polemic against the legacy of 1968.67 The gauchiste narrative always maintained that a revolutionary student Left had been betrayed by a conservative and repressive official culture, of which the PCF proved to be a key part. Debray turned this argument on its head and argued that the students had in fact destroyed the only institutions capable of resisting American-­ style capitalism: universities, unions, parties, and others.68 Though these institutions were far from perfect, they were integrally woven into French culture and society and stood in the way of neocapitalist development. By 1978, there was ample evidence to support Debray’s thesis. The main currents of gauchisme had either died out or joined forces with Rocard’s liberal front within the PS. Moreover, many of the protagonists of the May events had already undergone a sharp turn to the Right, Glucksmann the Maoist becoming, most notably, one of the anti-­totalitarian New Philosophers. The libertarian experiments inspired by May typically ended in failure or drifted into the political wilderness. Thus, Debray’s text identified a certain tendency within the May movement, but, as many critics pointed out, it was also a crude thesis that overlooked much that was novel and genuinely radical in 1968.69 For Debray, this post-­1968 realignment toward capitalist values produced new ideological formations in France. By the mid-­1970s, it was clear



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to Debray that the Third Worldism that had once led European intellectuals to proclaim their solidarity with revolutionary causes in the global south and had inspired his own enrollment in the Cuban Revolution, was undergoing a malevolent inversion. The new fashion among intellectuals was to support humanitarian causes in Asia and Africa. This typically meant setting up aid-­ giving institutions like Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and providing relief not to political actors but to victims of political oppression and violence. The anti-­totalitarian discourse was a motivating influence here too, for many intellectuals now believed that the post-­colonial regimes of the Third World—many of them socialist—were destined for tyranny. They felt obligated therefore to end their support for left-­wing movements and to lend their assistance to those who were persecuted by these states. This was the new doctrine of human rights, and Debray was one of its first and most implacable critics. The case for human rights had been made a few months earlier by Jacques Julliard, a former member of the PSU and an activist within France’s Catholic trade union, the Confederation française démocratique du travail (CFDT). An ex-­third-­worldist, Julliard now believed that “there is only totalitarian socialism in Africa.”70 Intellectuals could no longer, in good conscience, back the nationalist regimes of Asia and Africa: “The moment has come to wake ourselves up: the right of peoples has become the principal instrument for the strangulation of the rights of man. We continue to live and reason from the 1848 idea of an indissoluble alliance between the principle of national autonomy and the principle of liberties against the State’s prerogative.” Only by drawing failed or crippled states into a solvent international order and asking them to surrender some of their sovereignty would there be any hope of preventing such perversions: “However long and narrow it is, this path is the only one possible today. Every other attitude makes us accomplices of the executioners.”71 Julliard’s plea for human rights flushed out a number of responses, including one from Debray.72 His response appeared in the pages of Le Monde diplomatique in the fall of 1978. In “Il faut des esclaves aux hommes libres” (No freemen without slaves), Debray argued that the doctrine of universal human rights was an ideology in the classical Marxist sense: a system of ideas or legal norms that obscured and thus perpetuated a relationship of domination. He was writing here specifically of the world market and its asymmetries, which enriched Western countries at the expense of the underdeveloped countries of the Third World—“the here is explained by the over-­there.” Thus, for Debray, human rights absolved

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the rich Western states from acknowledging and coming to terms with their historical responsibility for the “backwardness” of Third World states. Debray wrote acidly, “The liberal-­imperialist system needs a short memory and a low viewpoint to conceal from view the millions of bodies that both propped up its future and put it on a pedestal.”73 Human rights was thus the imperialism of the postmodern age—depoliticized, ahistorical, and aligned with capitalist interests. It was no wonder for Debray that this kind of language was embraced by Carterist America and Giscardian France: It posed no threat to their economic interests in the Third World. On the contrary, humanitarian interventions tended to weaken sovereign states to better allow the West to extract its resources and exploit its workforce under cover of humanitarian intervention. In cases where human rights did conflict with a capitalist agenda, when “the contracts of exploitation connecting the metropole to its satellites were in danger of being broken,” then “the rights of man ceased to apply.” Intellectuals who embraced human rights—the New Philosophers and anti-­totalitarians, of course, but also key members of the PS—had ultimately become, for Debray, cheerleaders of neo-­imperialism. Their role was “to reduce psychic tension to its lowest level for their clientele.”74 This was the logical development, according to Debray, of the “Third Worldist” spirit of the 1950s and 1960s, which drove European intellectuals like himself to support political causes in remote parts of the world. It was inevitable that “cracks and fissures” would start to appear in this façade, wrote Debray, for the Third World “drove thousands of radishes to its shores, red on the outside, and inconsolably white on the inside.”75 “A historian of the longue durée,” he wrote elsewhere, might see Third Worldism “as one stage among others in the slow conquest of peasants by city-­dwellers, of oral culture by written culture.”76 Still, it was important for intellectuals of the Left not only to resist the humanitarian impulse but also to endorse political revolutions in the extra-­European world. This Debray did in 1979, with the victory of the Sandinista rebels over the Anastasio Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. Apparently, Debray showed up in uniform, ready to fight: “No one pressed me to do this, least of all the Cubans, who did the best to delay me in Havana, from where the operations were being directed. In the end, I arrived in Managua on the day of victory, with nothing left to do but take part in ‘mopping-­up’ operations against Somoza’s national guard which had retreated to the north of the country.”77 He also wrote an impassioned tribute to the Sandinistas in the pages of Le Monde diplomatique. For Debray, the Nicaraguan revolutionaries had once again demonstrated that revolutions were won with a wide patriotic base: “It



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was the organization of this mass patriotic front that allowed the Sandinistas to win two battles at the same time: the military battle against the dictatorship and the political battle for a popular alternative to this dictatorship.”78 They had also proved that political struggle was this visible face of a much deeper and slower-­moving cultural rebellion. “The spectacular eruption,” wrote Debray, “allows one to indulge in a long epic of recollection. Fifty years of Sandinista struggle gave these young men the maturity of veterans. Far from obliterating the past, the Nicaraguan revolutionaries treated it with meticulous piety. Memory was for a long time their only strength. They became fighters by turning themselves into archivists of a forbidden history.”79 In 1979, Debray turned his attention to intellectuals with Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France (Teacher, Writers, Celebrities in translation). It created a minor sensation in France.80 Typically, debates surrounding the intellectual in France had been couched in humanist terms: “Betrayal,” “commitment,” and “truth” had, since the Dreyfus Affair, figured as the main conceptual units. The thread running from Julien Benda’s Trahison des clercs (1927) and Paul Nizan’s Les Chiens de gardes (1932), through to Sartre’s Qu’est-­ce que la littérature? (1948) and Aron’s L’Opium des intellectuels (1955) took the writer’s self-­ definition at face value and maintained an implicit separation between the intellectual’s power and his or her socioeconomic position. Debray moved away from this voluntarist and humanistic language and opted for a much more distanced, sociological approach. The intelligentsia was best understood as a broad “social category”: not just liberal professionals and self-­employed artisans but also civil servants and senior managerial personnel. Intellectuals existed as a quantitative force that could be counted, broken down, and studied objectively. Above all, they fulfilled a certain function in society, to act as a mediating force between the state (the subject of power) and the people (the object). For Debray, intellectuals tended merely to repackage the state’s interests in a way that was palatable for the public. The essence of a medium was to reassure. Debray’s post-­Union texts had already pointed in this direction: The gauchistes of 1968 had unknowingly been the agents of liberal capitalism; and intellectuals touting human rights had likewise become emissaries of the state. These considerations led Debray to reassess the power of the intelligentsia: “The value of an intellectual is calculated on the basis of his power of social communication.”81 Societies were cybernetically organized—vast machines for the transmission of messages. The more access a given individual had to the key channels of social communication, the more power he or she commanded.

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Capitalist societies naturally produced differentiations within this social category—a “high” versus a “low” intelligentsia, which Debray defined as follows: “That group socially authorized to express individual opinions on public affairs independently of the normal civic procedures to which ordinary citizens are subject will be referred to as the high intelligentsia, to distinguish it from the mere professionals of the intellect”82—teachers, doctors, scientists, researchers, and others. The low intelligentsia was typically attached to institutions and salaried. Like the Third Estate of the Old Regime, they were regarded with a mixture of scorn and fear by upper echelons: “The high intelligentsia despises the lower as a backward class and fears it as a dangerous one. Backward because it is still duped by dated ‘vulgates’ (Marxism, progressivism) and outdated ‘mythologies’ (laicity, the working class, public service, nationalization); dangerous because, being made up mainly of civil servants with socialist leaning, it may identify its own emergence as a ruling class with the domination of a civil society by a bureaucratic state.”83 The strongest polemical thrust of Pouvoir intellectuel was thus reserved for the highest ranks of the intelligentsia—those who were most influential and power hungry—and much of the book was devoted to a phenomenological description of the machinery of self-­promotion and corruption on which these intellectuals relied. Debray’s account of the intelligentsia bore a certain resemblance to the ideas of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu, intellectuals were motivated by economic considerations. Their “currency” was not money but “cultural capital”—a kind of prestige that could be accumulated, banked, and spent like money.84 Publishing with the best houses, for example, brought in a high amount of cultural capital, as did writing a book that was reviewed in the most prestigious publications. Implicitly, cultural life was structured like a capitalist economy, with inequalities and major power imbalances. Thus, both Bourdieu and Debray tended to see the world of ideas as a terrain of vicious economic struggle.85 Debray’s portrait was far less technical and more concrete than Bourdieu’s: He named names in Pouvoir intellectuel, not just of the most powerful intellectuals but also of the places where they ate lunch, the journals that were most esteemed. Likewise, he exposed in specific ways the economic calculations behind their decisions: “There would seem, rather, to be an inverse ratio between labor time and the volume of remuneration. A novel that cost me three month’s work may sell one hundred thousand copies and give me enough to live on for three years. A theoretical work that cost me ten years’



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work will sell one thousand copies, all but ruin my publisher and reduce my family to living on bread and water.”86 He also provided a historical sketch of the intelligentsia, one that tracked larger changes in the French cultural apparatus, its thinkers, institutions, and modes of communication. For Debray, this history began in the nineteenth century with the industrial revolution and the dawn of mass literacy, a time when the rise of the newspaper—Hegel’s substitute for morning prayers— lured intellectuals into the public domain. Here they acquired, by virtue of number and function, a sociological identity; and also, by virtue of the newspaper’s mass readership, a considerable degree of social power. Fluctuations of popularity were drastic in the age of the newspaper, however, and the Dreyfus Affair, which was fought principally in the country’s dailies, crashed the unstable newspaper market. Cultural power then shifted to the university, where an institutionally secure mandarinate acted as the main brokers of knowledge. From 1880 to 1920, professors commanded the most intellectual prestige. After World War I, power again shifted, this time away from the academy to literary reviews like La Nouvelle revue française, L’Esprit, and Les Temps modernes. For Debray, the “publishing cycle” marked the golden age of modern French culture. The virtue of the review, as opposed to the newspaper, was to have “welded together” separate fields—artistic, academic, and political—and thus to have stimulated an unprecedented period of creativity in France: Surrealism, communism, existentialism, personalism, and the New History all dated from this period.87 The review took chances and was not totally beholden to market forces. Heroic publishing companies like Gallimard and Grasset agreed to bear the cost of printing relatively unknown authors who could ill afford to self-­publish. After 1968, the publishing cycle was displaced by the “media cycle,” an age in which television dominated and personality mattered more than intellectual content. Here, the intelligentsia became atomized such that the “milieu loses its social density” and “the internal links and relations between its members lose their former strength.”88 There were no longer collective projects, as in the publishing age, and culture was delivered to consumers as an unceasing flux of information. What was widely celebrated as the democratization of knowledge was in reality the dissolution of “authors,” “works,” and cultural community. A mediatized society was doomed to produce an endless repetition of the same cultural patterns: Nothing new was created, and culture could no longer be looked upon as a source of political resistance.89

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Certainly, Debray’s vision of culture in Pouvoir intellectuel accorded with his broader political and theoretical agenda. The book was inspired by and directed against the New Philosophers, those media-­savvy celebrity intellectuals who had helped defeat the Union of the Left. The banality of their views seemed to correspond to their increased social power, confirming Debray’s suspicions about the lowering of culture in the age of television. In this sense, writing Pouvoir intellectuel was a way of continuing the work of Mélusine and delegitimizing the new anti-­socialist fashions in the higher ranks of the intelligentsia. Furthermore, his defense of the lower ranks was consonant with the strategic aims of the PS. Whereas the PCF had established strong links to trade unions and recruited its members from the working class, the Socialists had weak syndicalist ties and drew the bulk of their support from the petit-­bourgeois professions, especially teachers. Indeed, 59 percent of the Socialist parliamentary group in the 1981‒86 legislature consisted of schoolteachers.90 Debray saw these white-­collar knowledge workers as the lifeblood of the nation—left-­wing national republicans who transmitted socialist values from one generation to the next. Debray’s vindication of these proletarian intellectuals marked a change in his thinking. In his earlier Latin American writings, the theory of the foco supposed a vanguardist role for the intellectual: “To organize, promote, and develop the culture [of revolution] is a political task that belongs to the Party; to organize the Party, to organize the Marxist-­Leninist avant-­garde is the task of the intellectual: the two must work together.”91 In Pouvoir intellectuel, Debray imagined a much looser relationship between party and base, and a less elitist and less voluntarist role for the intellectual.

The Turn to Anthropology The following year, Debray published Le Scribe, another text on intellectuals. If the subject matter was the same, the methodology was completely different, for here Debray focused on the invariant function of the intellectual and the role of writing in human societies. Across space and time, what was the relationship, he asked, between the politician and the intellectual? In what sense could the intellectual be considered a medium? What did it mean to communicate, and what messages did he or she convey, and to whom? These questions had preoccupied Debray in Modeste contribution and Pouvoir intellectuel, but here they acquired an anthropological orientation, for Debray was



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not concerned merely with his own society but with all societies. “Thus we have,” he wrote in the introduction, “a history book whose plot has no history because it traverses all histories—ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary: the domination of human being by human being.”92 To suit this shift in methodology, he changed interlocutors: They were no longer Lenin and Luxemburg, but early French sociologists like Comte and Durkheim; structural anthropologists like Lévi-­Strauss and Dumézil; and “post-­structuralist” philosophers like Derrida and Foucault. In other words, French and non-­Marxist. What Debray discovered in Le Scribe was the model or formula for how all societies functioned. To express this, he proposed a “theorem of incompleteness,” the idea that for a group to constitute itself as such, and to delimit itself from neighboring communities, there needed to be an absent Other, a structuring element of the group that was itself not part of the group.93 This missing Other Debray called “the sacred,” and anything could be used to represent this foundational void: a person, an idea, or an impersonal spirit or force. Thus, wherever there was a group in formation, a principle of the sacred was at work, a binding force that was automatic and logically assumed by the act of coming together. The subtitle of Le Scribe was “genèse du politique” (the genesis of the political), and Debray was arguing, just as had Benoist, Gauchet, and later Todd, that the political and the religious could not be separated. “Religion,” as Debray wrote, “is the meta-­logic of the logic of power.”94 Since, according to Debray, a human community could never completely close in on itself, could never achieve full presence, there was destined to be a perennial gap in the constitution of a group, an existential separation between two unequal presences (i.e., an invisible and a visible). The essence of politics was to manage this separation, to negotiate between the here and the beyond. The assertion was almost identical to what Lefort, Gauchet, and Clastres were arguing in the late 1970s, the “political” being a strategy for establishing and managing social institutions. For all the thinkers concerned here, there was a sense in which the “political” was a constant of all societies and had no history, like Foucault’s notion of power, or Althusser’s concept of “ideology.” These were inbuilt features of human social formations. Intellectuals, or “clerics” and “scribes” as Debray preferred to call them in Le Scribe, were indispensable as intermediaries between power and the people. If, as Debray claimed, no social formation was conceivable without its members maintaining some imaginary connection to their real conditions of existence, then “there will always be a need for ideologues” as mediators of this symbolic order. Hence, “the cleric was the organ of this referential

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function inherent to all social formations . . . [and] is thus neither ornamental or instrumental, but the very currency of an essential intellectual collective.”95 As with the high intelligentsia of Pouvoir intellectuel, the cleric of Le Scribe came to share the objectives of power, warring against the forces of chaos and disaggregation, while ensuring the reproduction of his or her own class (“maintaining a sacerdotal corps, a caste of administrators, or a bureaucratic apparatus”).96 The scribe was a powerful agent in human societies, and his or her role was ultimately to order, pacify, and smooth over. The philosopher Julien Benda had once chided intellectuals for “betraying” their universal values by polemicizing during the Dreyfus Affair. For Debray, however, the cleric never betrayed and was, in fact, constitutionally incapable of doing so. Debray also argued that human culture was built on domination and inequality. The development of writing—Debray here contributing to a line of thinking that went through Rousseau, Lévi-­Strauss, and Derrida—always already assumed a class of “haves” and “have nots.” “The first condition for the existence of the ‘intellectual’ is,” he wrote, “that there are many others who cannot be intellectuals—who are constrained materially (wage earning) or juridically (slavery, servitude), in their condition as non-­intellectuals.” “The scribe consumes without producing,” argued Debray, and thus “consumes the time of others.”97 This gave him or her a kind of lordly privilege, the ability to act as a mediator in literate societies, and help form official orthodoxies. “At the origin of all culture, there is a conservation of signs [traces],” he wrote. “It’s a law that the one who reflects, records, or writes carries the seal of power.” Slaves, by contrast, were silent to history: “It follows that there is no culture but that of masters, for the slave’s peculiar function is to leave behind no signs.”98 Thus, as long as societies were not completely present to themselves, and therefore permitted inequalities to exist, there would be writers and intellectuals to mediate these differences, sending messages from top to bottom. As Blandine Kriegel commented, for Debray, “The humanist is, without knowing it, pro-­slavery.”99 Polemically, Le Scribe was aimed in two directions. First, at the “bourgeois idealism” of France’s intellectual elites, who believed—naively—that they could detach themselves from institutions and effect good through sheer force of will. Debray’s sobering point in Le Scribe was that intellectuals were ambiguous creatures, with one foot in the world of ideas and one in the world of power and money. Neither aspect could be ignored. He singled out the Comité des intellectuels pour la liberté (CIEL), an organization founded on the eve of the 1978 legislative elections by anti-­totalitarian liberals, with



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Raymond Aron at its head.100 It launched the stalwartly liberal journal Commentaire in the same year and succeeded in rallying a number of left-­wing intellectuals to its cause. Indeed, among others, Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva, two gauchistes from the literary magazine Tel Quel, signed CIEL’s founding manifesto, “La Culture contre le totalitarisme.” In the early 1980s, CIEL organized campaigns in support of Polish “Solidarity” and protested the inclusion of Communists in Mitterrand’s government, arguing that their presence was morally unacceptable. CIEL’s mistake, for Debray, was to believe that it could bring about change simply by publishing and circulating its ideas, and without leaving any institutional footprint. The effect of this was to reinforce the “star system” of intellectual life: What was said mattered less than who said it; and the “right” causes were those supported by the biggest names. Second, the critical force of Le Scribe was directed at Marxism. If the bourgeois idealists overvalued the power of the intellectual, the historical materialists tended to undervalue it. Debray argued that Marx had a phobia of intellectuals and a misguided faith in the auto-­liberation of the proletariat. The Marxian dialectic held that everything was already present within the system of capitalist relations—the conditions of exploitation as well as liberation. Hence, if social classes were always present to themselves—that is, if no influences came from outside the system—then there was no need for mediation in general, and certainly no need for intellectuals in particular. For Marx, “the intelligentsia is diabolic by nature, in the original Greek meaning of diabolos: it divides and separates the essence of a phenomenon, the present of the future, the class from itself.”101 This criticism led Debray to an even deeper one, namely that “Marx was unable to think mediation” and that his work was “absent of a theory of politics.”102 Human collectives, for Debray, could be understood as a series of messages in need of translation. Politics was this act of translation, of circulating messages throughout society—hence, the power but also contingency of intellectuals, mediators par excellence. There were plenty of mediations in Marx’s system, but they were all economic, like, for example, the account of money in volume I of Capital. There was more to human relations, however, than just callous cash payment, argued Debray, and thus he emphasized: “To free a theory of the State from the prejudice of the economic and restore to it its own proper sphere is a theoretical necessity, period.”103 Le Scribe marked an important shift in Debray’s work, away from an overtly Marxist theory of socialism toward one that was more faithful to his experience as a political militant. Making this transition required Debray to

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unlearn what he had read from histories and theories of socialism and to return to basics, to the very foundations of human social existence. Le Scribe covered one aspect of Debray’s nascent political anthropology, the mediating function of intellectuals. His next work, Critique de la raison politique (Critique of Political Reason), delivered a fully developed theory of human societies, and called for a new conceptualization and practice of socialism. The book was published in 1981 and appeared just after Mitterrand’s victory in the presidential election. Debray was named one of Mitterrand’s advisers and spent the next seven years in the Élysée Palace, during which time he wrote comparatively little. Thus, historically and biographically, the Critique marked the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. The book distilled Debray’s thinking about politics and society into a grand theory of human nature. As a work of political philosophy, it was, on the one hand, a transcendental account of human collectivities—here “Critique” in the Kantian or Marxian sense of understanding the inner workings and laws of something. But, on the other, it was derived from Debray’s political experience and from developments he observed in twentieth-­century global politics. Drawing on Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Debray wrote, “For the purposes of investigating the norms and forms of political incorporation, we may ascribe to homo socialisticus the role played by homo sylvestris in Rousseau’s investigation into the foundations of civil society. The difference, not all negligible, is that the former actually exists.”104 The constant making and unmaking of states in the Second and Third Worlds provided Debray with a laboratory for studying the foundations of politics, since, he argued, “the concept of the political lies within the birth of the political.” Thus, for Debray, “The Third World is in the forefront of research, as it is only there that we can see unities breaking up and separate things coming together. Nations are appearing, territories are being mapped out and ‘social systems’ are being tested in places where, only ten years ago, there was nothing but sand and grass.”105 In this respect, there was a flavor of Machiavelli’s The Prince in the Critique. It attempted, like most of Debray’s work, to come to terms with human societies as they really were. Debray wrote in the introduction, “The first duty of a socialist is to account for existing society and not to draw up yet another ‘project for a society.’ ” And, like the Florentine secretary, Debray claimed not to like the sentiments expressed in his own book: “My ideas are not my ideal. My only friends are those who share my ideal and loathe my ideas. It would be an understatement to say that I dislike the conception articulated in



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this book: I find it repulsive and contemptible. However, it seems to me the only one that conforms to the available data.”106 What laws did this militant-­ turned-­political anthropologist discover? The central idea, anticipated in Le Scribe, was the so-­called axiom of incompleteness,107 the idea that for a group to constitute itself as such, there must be an absent Other—an “au-­delà”—to give the group a sense of cohesion. There were assemblies of people in society that were random and essentially meaningless. Sartre, in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, had used the example of people gathered at a bus stop.108 The group assembled there was purely by happenstance. It was dispersed once the bus arrived. For a group to have coherence, it needed to be organized around something, and Debray insisted that this something could not be immediately present. Franciscan monks came together, for example, around the absent figure of Saint Francis. The external reference point endowed the group with an identity and allowed it to draw a boundary between a “we” and a “them.” The Franciscans, for instance, distinguished themselves from the Dominicans, who distinguished themselves from lay people, and so on. The absent Other gave them a sense of organized unity and a purpose for congregating. Debray’s principle held for all groups, irrespective of size, from local political associations, to broad religious communities, to nations. He called the absent Other the “sacred.” Naturally, the content of the sacred varied according to the group’s magnitude, as well as to its material and geographical circumstances, but the fundamental form, of uniting around an absent sacred, remained constant. What explained this imperative to belong, and why did this “need” have to be satisfied through membership in a group?109 As Debray saw it, the human being was in a natural position of weakness vis-­à-­vis the external world and was forced to make common cause with others: “In the beginning was Anxiety.” Fear and insecurity drove human beings to socialize and not to engage in the egoistic behavior described by Hobbes. Human groups were thus formed naturally, but they required structures and beliefs to remain intact: “Physical time undoes the things that the living being struggles to build.” From the beginning of human society, it was religion that provided this functional coherence, organizing space and time through ritual and communion. “Incompleteness,” he wrote, “institutes the sacred as something social, and religion is its institution.” Indeed, “Priests were the first organizers.”110 Thus, for Debray, human beings became religious in becoming social. Their political unconscious was filled with what Debray called “natural religion.” As such, history was, for Debray, “a succession of various offers of

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religious protection: the tutelary spirits of primitive polydemonism, the protective gods of polytheism, the supreme Savior and patron saints of Christianity.” Debray guessed that no one would welcome this news, clashing as it did “with the interests of both the conscious mind and politics. It is an insult to historical humanism, which constantly tells us that ‘human beings are the product of their own creation’ and . . . an insult to the scientific humanism which teaches us that any analytic focus on a general essence, rather than specific religious experiences, involves a reductionist extrapolation.”111 In its ardor to proclaim its own liberation from religious irrationalities, modern thought had continually overrated reason and undervalued emotion, sentiment, and belief. Even Lévi-­Strauss, a seeming primitivist, had committed errors of this nature in supposing that nothing inexplicable existed in primitive societies. For Lévi-­Strauss, there was always a rational foundation to primitive institutions, and thus, according to Debray, he left little room for a true understanding of the laws of nature.112 A critique of political reason, by contrast, took affectivity and irrationality as its primary objects and thus could be considered, paradoxically, a study of political unreason. From these premises, Debray set out to rewrite the history of human beings and their institutions—“a political anthropology,” as he called it. Debray argued that the organizational impulses of human societies made them naturally defensive: “If you want to stockpile things, you have to build walls. Immunization involves a filtering process. ‘You have to look after yourself.’ ”113 Groups needed to fix themselves in a determinate space to achieve coherence, and thus enclosure was a universal feature of human societies. No one understood this principle better than Rousseau when he imagined the act of enclosure as the foundational moment of human society. Thus, having been organized in this fashion, human societies tended to engage in war fairly constantly. For Debray, “War itself is a principle of delineation. There can be no really open society, no society whose essence or identity (or both) is not to some extent threatened by a neighboring or more distant society.”114 Ideology had a key part to play here as well. In the classical Marxist sense, ideology was the (super)structure of beliefs, ideas, and values that distorted and concealed underlying social inequalities. The concept had been given a new emphasis by Althusser in his well-­known essay from 1969, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” For Althusser, ideology operated principally within institutions and performed an invariant, timeless function: It commanded obedience to the ruling order for the sake of reproducing labor power. He wrote, “The school (but also other State institutions like the



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Church, or other apparatuses like the Army) teaches ‘know-­how,’ but in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its ‘practice.’ ”115 Ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) were the institutionally specific forms of this repression: There were religious, educational, and juridical ISAs, for instance, all of which had their own laws of operation but were in the final instance beholden to the state. Debray rejected the second part of Althusser’s analysis, the ISAs, claiming that the mechanistic language of “apparatus” was anti-­historical and apolitical because it obscured the question of origins. Machines were programmed to function in a certain way and then left to their own doing. But who programmed them and why were they so effective? For Debray, this metaphor “spared us from having to come to terms with the somewhat sordid realities of the organic. . . . If ideology were a question of apparatuses, it would never take anyone in. The use of the technical model is a pre-­political way of posing the political problem.”116 These objections aside, Debray thought that Althusser had discovered something essential about ideology: namely, that it was an active, organizational process, and not simply a form of reactivity, as most Marxists had supposed. “An idea becomes a material force,” Debray wrote, “when it is transformed into a meeting-­place, something capable of elevating a collection into a congregation.” Ideas with no material bearing were sterile because they had no affective draw. “Doctrines,” he wrote, “are war machines.”117 Action required belief, and it was the task of ideology to convert doxa into praxis, above all in the name of group cohesion. “By holding out an ideology,” supposed Debray, “the group offers us protection in the knowledge that we need it. The contract on offer is not with a system of ‘true’ or ‘correct’ ideas, but with a fraternity that keeps us warm. The ideas of an ideology function as a promise of belonging precisely because the group guarantees them.”118 All great historical ideologies—Christianity, Islam, Marxism, the nation— worked in a like manner, deploying hierarchies of priests, teachers, cadres, and bureaucrats who preserved the integrity of the ideology’s dogma and who facilitated its transmission from one generation to the next. For Debray, the content of ideology mattered less than its functioning: There was no system of ideas without a means of transmission, no message without a medium, no Christianity without Paul, no Marxism without Lenin. In other words, “we are free to invent as many ideas as we like, but we are not free to invent the organic process whereby the idea does or does not become a ‘material force’ ”—“a doctrinal corpus is hollow.”119 Politics in general was less a set of apparatuses than an unconscious set of dispositions.

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With his compass pointed in this direction, Debray had an easy time explaining concepts and processes that had been passed over in most modern theories of politics. If we assumed, as he did, that human groups were at bottom religious and subordinate, then of course one could expect the rise of charismatic leaders in history. If we assumed that institutions were at bottom conservative and solidaristic—giving a sense of “fraternal warmth” against chaos—then of course one could expect the emergence of coercive orthodoxies and propaganda machines. What Durkheim called moments of “collective effervescence”—when groups achieved a kind of collective emotional delirium—were for Debray the very essence of politics. So too were nationalism, religious fundamentalism, xenophobia, as well as the material forms of their expression: flags, banners, prayer books, and so on. Marx and the rest of the moderns missed all of this: “There is nothing in the thought of the great economist that allows us to understand the nature and function of banners, even in the lower phases of social development. What is a banner? An emblem we can rally around. To understand why emblems exist, we have to have a theory of . . . the group and of entropy—that is, of the bellicose constitution of fixed and inheritable territories. . . . Banners are stigmata from the prehistory of human beings.”120 The Critique was not solely an ahistorical account of group dynamics. The later chapters sketched out a history of the West, beginning with Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. In taking the title of vicar of Christ, argued Debray, the emperor effected a far-­reaching symbolic transformation: “Constantine denied himself divinity. He could then govern or speak in the name of the Other without making people laugh.” For Debray, the emperor was trying not to lose his state, and monotheism was the “only means” to save a swollen empire from centrifugal tensions (polytheism being a luxury of small republics). In aligning the Empire with the one true God, Constantine “rationalized” politics, reducing the polyvocalism of pagan Europe to a single voice. Rival heresies began to organize into parties, and a whole framework of political representation and contestation was born from this event. The Empire’s adoption of Christianity likewise made the Christian Incarnation a “central fact of our culture,” for “when he agreed to be born and to die for our redemption, the Christian God sanctified profane history by giving it a meaning—one specific meaning.”121 If it seemed obvious to Europeans that there was a single subject, direction, and end of history, these assumptions were given shape by the Christian form of monotheism, God using his only son to make laws for all human beings.



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The Critique ended by combining these two temporalities—one anthropological and static, the other time-­bound and contingent—into an overarching trans-­historical law, what Debray called “the principle of constancy.” It held that “there is a constant ratio between so-­called progressive factors and so-­called regressive factors. The history of mankind was written in a double-­entry ledger. Whenever its equilibrium is disturbed by technical progress, ethnic factors intervene to re-­establish it.” This “cybernetic” language had been a key feature of Debray’s writing since the mid-­1970s and was derived from structural anthropology. The analogy was favored by both Lévi-­Strauss and Leroi-­Gourhan, two writers Debray read closely, and it suggested that societies naturally and mechanically regulated themselves.122 In Debray’s paradigm, historical time brought chaos and dispersion to these self-­regulating systems, which tended to accelerate with each passing generation. Industrialization was a particularly critical moment, causing a mass rural exodus and uprooting communities and folkways that had existed for millennia. The technologies of modern life reinforced this growing sense of atomization; cars, phones, and computers increased mobility and thereby tested the limits of the group’s cohesion.123 According to the “principle of constancy,” the political unconscious, sensing an imbalance, would try to return the group to equilibrium. It did so by reasserting “the ethnic component,” or what might be called “the symbolic” or “sacred,” with proportional vigor. Debray wrote, “Physically, social humanity gets out of its depth as it becomes industrialized; mentally, it agrarianizes itself so as not to drown completely. Cultural territories effaced by technical progress are reconstituted in the imaginary.”124 For Debray, it was no coincidence that globalization corresponded to a sharp rise in “territorial neuroses” and religious zealotry: sectarianism, separatist nationalisms, and fundamentalisms were not mere holdovers from an earlier age but were contemporary responses to the erasure of borders and the hollowing out of communities. In Debray’s historical schema, the state of equilibrium never lasted long, and a new disequilibrium always appeared around the corner: “Tension rises until the final zero is reached. By then the various hostile tribes will have discovered nuclear fire.”125 In contrast to dialectical visions of history, there was no assurance of recovery, no Aufhebung to cancel out this downward cascade into nuclear annihilation. In texts from this period, Debray often appealed to the language of thermodynamics and the idea that entropy was an inescapable feature of human social systems. The Critique of Political Reason was not a popular book.126 This was all but guaranteed by Debray’s unique wager: to write a theory of politics from

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the debris of rationalistic theories of history. Cults, atavisms, wars, nationalist sacrifices, Führerprinzips: All this was collected by Debray and made the basis of an original political anthropology. Defeat had weighed heavily on him— Bolivia, Chile, and the collapse of the Union of the Left in 1977—and clearly he was tired of seeing these as exceptions to some otherwise beneficent law of history. In this way, the Critique was a hopeful work. It suggested that if one could master in theory those “contingencies” that had caught socialism off guard, then one could be better prepared to contend with them in the future. The Left needed to be reminded that Stalin was not a deviation: Leader cults were an elementary feature of political life. The “union sacrée” of 1914 was not an anomaly: Nationalism was better at mobilizing than socialism, because it was not afraid to appeal to the emotional and symbolic. Any sober Left strategy needed to take these into account if it was going to succeed. Defending socialism on these terms led Debray away from Marxism. This was not necessarily his intention. Nor was it an inevitable consequence of his growing interest in the sacred and in nationalism. In the Anglo world, Benedict Anderson and Tom Nairn had undertaken similar inquiries without abandoning Marxist foundations.127 And, likewise, Fredric Jameson had excavated the political unconscious while remaining faithful to Marxist premises.128 Still, it was logical enough given the direction of Debray’s work. Much of the book engaged critically with Marxism on matters of nationalism and religion, but the balance sheet of its “errors” and blind spots was fairly devastating: “The nation is Marxism’s sore point”; “There is a Marxist religion, but no Marxist theory of religion”; “The absence of any theory of representation in Marx is, as we have seen, matched by the absence of a theory of decision-­ making”; “It is typical of all utopian socialisms—Marxism included—that they exclude the factor of war from their plans”; “Although Marx was only half-­mistaken about the facts, his theory [of dialectics] was totally wrong.”129 Marxism seemed to have little to say on anything of importance for Debray. The Marxist language of class struggle, exploitation, and surplus extraction was replaced by broader appeals to inequality and justice. Debray now seemed to be entertaining the possibility that Marxism and socialism were incompatible political philosophies in the era of late capitalism. The ideas presented in the Critique were related to but nevertheless distinct from a number of currents within the post-­Eurocommunist Left. For one, many Socialists began to see in religion a potential ally of socialism in the 1980s and after. To make this case, writers typically focused on the “socialist” character of early Christian ideas. Alain Badiou, for instance,



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saluted Saint Paul as the authentic figure of a now moribund universalism, and as the one who understood the coming of Christ—Badiou’s “event”—as a “pure beginning,” to which the militant must be absolutely loyal.130 More common was the tendency to play up the socialist affinities of Jesus Christ. His generosity, his capacity for love, his rebelliousness, and the radical nature of his sacrifice: This was a simple and pure kind of communism that had been corrupted and institutionalized by a conservative Church. This was the basic narrative of thinkers like Slavoj Zizek and Gianni Vattimo.131 Debray maintained the opposite thesis. What he found socialistic in religion was not the message but the institutions that had supposedly corrupted it: the churches, hierarchies, liturgies, and so on. Socialist ideas were easy enough to come by; rarer was the agency that could convert those ideas into material forces and mobilize people into action. Instead of “political theology,” there was simply “politics,” and the nature of politics was always and inherently religious. In this respect, Debray’s ideas were more like those of Ludwig Feuerbach and Auguste Comte—neither of them socialists—than anyone in the twentieth century.132 Debray’s theses in the Critique might also be confused with what came to be known as “postmodernism.” This was a kind of thinking that rose to prominence after the defeat of the Left in 1978, and adopted a nihilistic and relativistic view of politics and history. Its two main thinkers in France, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-­François Lyotard, were, like Debray, unorthodox Marxist philosophers concerned primarily with culture and communication. For Baudrillard, politics had become fully virtual by the late 1970s: “Real political power,” he wrote in his commentaries on the Union of the Left, “had become absorbed by the spectacle.”133 Thus, the PS could not present a real alternative to capitalism, only “a simulacrum of an alternative;” nor could the PCF, which simply “occupies the space left empty in the reflux and disenchantment of the political sphere.”134 Lyotard took a similar line. For him, the critical energies of Marxism were perpetually being incorporated into “the programming of the social whole as a simple tool for the optimization of its performance.” Oppositional philosophy lost its force in the computing age and became little more than a “token” protest. Social bonds dissolved too as information technologies atomized societies: “Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at ‘nodal points’ of specific communication circuits. Or better: one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass.”135 Thus, no privileged perspective on society could be established, no “meta-­narratives.” There were only “language

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games,” context-­specific discourses in which statements had meaning for a particular network of speakers. Debray’s work was of a different order. His aim was not to cast doubt on what could be known about history and politics, nor was it to question the efficacy of political action and reason. Quite the opposite: He wished to rescue political rationality from its own weaknesses and blind spots, and he thought the only way to do so was through a critique of rationalism itself. Sartre had attempted something similar in the late 1950s with the Critique of Dialectical Reason—a Left-­sociological theory of “practical ensembles”—but had left the project unfinished. There are clues in Debray’s work, down to the title itself, suggesting that he saw the Critique as an attempt to succeed where Sartre had failed, to write a new kind of socialist theory rooted in the irrationalities of group formations. Like Sartre, and unlike most of the internationally renowned French theorists, Debray composed his political theory with one foot in the world of political struggle. The Critique in this respect was a road map. Where did it lead?

In Defense of the Republic It led to the articulation of a republican-­socialist politics. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, this program developed around three major and overlapping themes in Debray’s work: national sovereignty, political myth, and what he called “cultural transmission.” They fanned out in different directions but were connected by the underlying idea that the sacred provided the basic structure of politics.

National Sovereignty

With Mitterrand’s victory in 1981, Debray was named adviser to the president on Third World affairs and once again found himself an adjunct to power. He was, of course, savaged by the gauchistes for not refusing this appointment,136 but it was a logical continuation of his political activity during the 1970s. If he believed he could push Mitterrand’s foreign policy to the Left when the latter was a mere candidate, why would he step aside when Mitterrand reached the Élysée? In the early years, Debray, it seems, was an effective operator, helping the president realize a policy of support for social-­democratic movements



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in Latin America. When Mitterrand sent arms to the Sandinistas in 1982, Debray was called upon to quell the anxieties of Washington, then in the process of arming the Contras. The job also came with a diplomatic passport, which allowed Debray to move freely throughout the world after the United States had placed him on a terrorist list for his guerrilla fighting years. With this, and with access to the inner workings of the state, Debray became more confident in his understanding of geopolitics and military strategy. To show for it were two consecutive volumes appearing in 1984 and 1985, La Puissance et les rêves (Power and Dreams) and Les Empires contre l’Europe (The Empires Against Europe). Using the principles articulated in the Critique, these two works set out to shatter reigning myths of Cold War geopolitics, break with liberal geopolitical norms, and outline a socialist-­republican theory of Realpolitik. For Debray, the same principles at work in local politics applied at the international level. Power was not a matter of military capability, as so many believed, but “a function of belief; and its decline, a function of indifference or discredit.”137 Where governments could not speak to the hearts and minds of common people, there could be no binding power, no ability to mobilize. This observation alone nullified the typical Cold War notion of a “symmetry” between the superpowers. Socialism was dead dogma in the East, bound to unravel at any moment; American capitalism, by contrast, was thriving and had more global appeal than ever. By this standard, the United States had clearly “won” the Cold War. Debray used the same logic to undercut arguments defending the utility of supranational political and military organizations. So often the latter were justified on the basis of “collective security” and the so-­called interdependence of states. For Debray, however, this was a mistaken deduction: Power was not like money; it did not circulate, and could not cross borders easily. National interests typically prevailed where supranational ones were said to be at work. From this point of view, the “collective security” of NATO could be seen as an American ruse: “It extends the long reach of the US; and reduces our openness to the world, our ability to be an interlocutor to any and all. It is for us a subtraction of power.”138 France thus should leave it. “Interdependence” was another red herring for Debray, likewise predicated on the “asymmetry” of states: “The undeniable dependence of creditor nations on debtor nations is not exactly of the same kind as, say, Mexico’s dependence on American banks.” “Interdependence” did not signal the meeting of two powers so much as the domination of one over another. Finally, Debray judged the United Nations and its declaration of

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human rights to be shibboleths of the same order. They attempted to establish universal legal norms without sovereign power. This was not how politics worked: Law was rooted in fact, and arose from the needs of a given people in a given place.139 Such irenic visions of supranational government could be traced back to Christian utopian thought and its contempt for the struggles of this world. Regrettably, these ideas had found their way into the European socialist movement and dulled its thinking on international politics. Now that socialism was in power, a more hard-­headed approach was called for, a Realpolitik. The realism of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski had the virtue of breaking with liberal pieties, but for Debray it was still too idealistic to assume that diplomats could single-­handedly decide the fate of nations. It was also, he argued, inherently conservative, being “haunted by a metaphysics of ‘system,’ one inherited from the ‘mechanistic’ paradigms of Laplace or Newton.”140 Thus, it could in no way challenge, and was in fact geared toward stabilizing the preexisting international order. A Realpolitik of the Left could do better, for it knew that politics at the state level could not be disconnected from internal social antagonisms. “The misfortune of diplomats,” Debray wrote, “is that the movement of societies and minds . . . does not stop or limit itself by decree, convention, or treaty.” A Socialist foreign policy needed to respect the self-­determination of peoples and to help smaller states disengage from the main power blocs: “To oppose the polarization of national forces around two rival powers is to assent to a spontaneously multipolar world. Realism today means becoming fluid, melting what is congealed, and giving a chance to the marginal.”141 Each state, thought Debray, should have the opportunity to exercise national sovereignty. Thus, Socialist strategy should focus on delegitimizing the means by which great powers obtained fiefs—with institutions like NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the UN—and thereby help reduce the dependency of small states.142 These maxims were to guide Debray’s thinking on French foreign policy through the 1990s. In these years, Debray was close to Mitterrand’s one-­time minister of defense, Jean-­Pierre Chevènement, France’s leading thinker of national sovereignty. Along with Chevènement, Debray opposed vigorously France’s support for both the US war in the Gulf and the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1991. Hoping to rally opinion against the erosion of national sovereignty—from both great power chauvinism and the liberalization of Europe—Debray founded the neo-­republican think tank Phares et Balises, which Todd joined soon after.



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During the Balkan Wars, Debray was one of the lone voices in France to oppose the NATO bombardments of Serbia and to challenge the American framing of the conflict as simply a genocidal war of the Serbs against the Kosovars. The publisher Jean-­François Kahn had likewise distrusted the official version of the story and sent Debray to the region on a fact-­finding mission. Debray’s report, “Lettre d’un voyageur au président de la République,” delivered a predictably nonconforming verdict on the conflict: NATO bombs were killing innocent civilians and had been a cause of, and not a solution to the “humanitarian catastrophe”; atrocities were committed by both sides; and Milosevic was not the dictator the Americans said he was. For Debray, the conflict was a grotesque display of liberal hypocrisy, with the United States cynically disguising its aggression as a humanitarian intervention, and coercing support from its NATO allies.143 Debray’s “letter” provoked apoplectic outrage in the French media. Bernard-­Henri Lévy published an indignant response in Le Monde the following day, comparing Debray to the fascist collaborator, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and claiming that Debray was simply Milosevic’s dupe.144 Debray’s credibility was now destroyed, said Lévy, and his career as an intellectual was over. The journalist Edwy Plenel, founder of the left-­wing newspaper Mediapart, noted angrily that Debray had gone from Castro to Guevara to Mitterrand to Chevenèment.145 Naturally, he was bound to eventually support a dictator like Milosevic. Where Debray departed from these principles was in a report commissioned by Dominique de Villepin on France’s relationship with Haiti in 2004, the Bicentenary of Haitian independence. On the surface, Debray’s text was a plea for solidarity and cooperation between the two states, but the underlying meaning was difficult to miss: The Haitian state, as shown by the political crisis of 2004, was incapable of governing its own people. Thus, in no way should France consider honoring President Jean-­Bertrand Aristide’s request for reimbursement for the billions of dollars France had demanded of Haiti for its independence in the nineteenth century, an indemnity extorted for the loss to slave-­owners on the abolition of slavery. Debray wrote, “Certainly it is scandalous in our eyes that Haiti was made to purchase in Francs its international recognition after having won its independence through the price of blood, but shouldn’t it be recalled that the right of self-­determination of peoples did not exist in 1838?”146 Thus, Debray justified the Chirac administration’s decision to silence Aristide and undermine his remaining popular support.147 In no way could this be construed as helping a smaller power achieve greater national autonomy. This lapse aside, Debray has continued

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to write critically of empire and liberal foreign policy, while defending the anthropological need of small states to express their own sovereignty.148

Political Myth

Debray was perennially fascinated by the phenomenology of political authority. His experience with Castro, Guevara, and Allende had impressed upon him the importance of the symbolics and pathos of leadership. This was to be a running theme of his work from the early 1970s onward, treated at length in the Critique but most thoroughly in Praised Be Our Lords, the second volume of his autobiographies. There, Debray described his eventual disenchantment with Mitterrand. The Socialist president had famously undertaken a neoliberal turn in 1983, which greatly alienated the left wing of the PS, Debray included. After this, Debray became a marginal player in the Élysée; he was given trivial assignments and often reduced to the role of speechwriter. By the end of the first term, “I could churn out miles of pure Mitterrand,” he reported, and Mitterrand would read them out “verbatim without changing a single gasp or ‘er.’ ” At a certain point, he claimed, “I could no longer see anything socialist (something I could have lived with) or even, at base, anything republican (much more painful) in the general policy followed by my associates.”149 He offered his resignation in 1988. Now unburdened by official duties and protocols, Debray was once again free to participate in public discourse. He immediately published a polemic concerning the Bicentenary of the French Revolution, Que vive la république, which appeared at the beginning of 1989. Before his resignation, Debray had apparently been the first choice to organize the official state celebrations, but he was passed over at the last minute for Jean-­Noël Jeanneney: “We’re saving you for ’93,” quipped one of his colleagues.150 Debray was incensed by the “normalization” of the Revolution undertaken by liberal historians and political theorists, especially François Furet. His version of the events stopped in 1789 and sought to expunge any radicalism from the history of the Revolution. As such, it looked to become the basis for a new liberal-­democratic “consensus”; for them, the real legacy of the Revolution was the triumph of civil society over the state, the declaration of universal “human rights,” and the articulation of individual liberty. Everything that came after 1789 was barbaric, “ideological,” and, of course, “totalitarian.” The popular struggles waged by workers and soldiers had no place in this story, nor did the



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republican communion of the nation at arms. Politically and historiographically, this was, for Debray, nothing short of “a counter-­Revolution” and “a return of the notables.” It also happened to be the governing philosophy of the liberalized PS—hence, the need to write a new republican manifesto. In Que vive, Debray made a distinction that helped reframe the terms of political discourse in the 1990s. The revisionists—again, led by Furet— who defended consensus liberal values were “democrats.” Heirs of Tocqueville, their values were calibrated to Anglo-­American capitalism, and citizens were first and foremost consumers. Naturally then, “democrats” preferred a weak state over a strong one, an individualist ethos over a collectivist one, and political consensus over contestation and disagreement. “Republicans” like himself were their opposite number, and found their origins in the radicalism of 1791 and after. They knew that the Revolution was “not an event, but a process.” So too was the Republic, which valued struggle, fraternity, and a constant dialogue with the past over all forms of soft and presentist thinking. Republicans spoke to individuals not as consumers but as citizens. Their favored institution was not the market but the school, which trained one how to think, not how to spend. In short, the Republic was the sacred, the absent Other uniting all French people. This was the work of the Revolution, which oversaw the transfer of sovereignty from the king to the people. Debray evoked Michelet’s “ecstasy” at this crucial moment in the Revolution, “when the government of human beings desacralized the law, passing from ‘the ceremonial era’ to the ‘experimental one,’ from a naturally assumed transcendence to the obligation of performance, draping itself more than ever in ceremonies and liturgies.”151 Myth and ceremony may have seemed old-­fashioned to the democrats, but for Debray it was the soul of the Republic, capable of mobilizing collective energies in a way that capital never could. In this sense, “the Republic is not a political regime like any other. It is an ideal and a struggle. It requires not only laws but also faith.” In the interest of preserving group integrity, the revolutionary tradition had to be protected at all costs: “At its very core, the French Revolution is interminable. This is precisely what differentiates a revolution from a revolt. The revolt looks toward the past, while the revolution anticipates the future. The dynamism of its principles goes beyond the event, and this going-­beyond is called the Republic, which itself is always being remade.” The true Republic stood for “dissensus,” a civic-­minded engagement on behalf of the disempowered: “We are here to break the consensus and help the losers prevail, not the winners. . . . To disturb the slumbering,

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to unseal the cement, to sow turbulence and dissonance where all seems normal. I don’t see how republicans could have any other vocation than to enlarge the zones of dissensus. This is their sole raison d’être.”152 For Debray, the Republic was the best possible version of the sacred, being militantly secular and egalitarian. Later, in 1989, Debray sharpened this analysis in an influential article for Nouvel observateur, “Êtes-­vous démocrate ou républicain?” (Are You a Democrat or Republican?) Like Que vive la république, it was a republican rallying cry against the neoliberal, democratic turn of French politics.153 Its immediate impetus was the “headscarf affair” of September 1989, the first of many, which erupted when three middle-­school girls were expelled from a school in Creil (near Paris) for refusing to remove their Islamic dress.154 Public opinion was divided; the Front national immediately held demonstrations protesting the “Islamization of France”; and public officials, including Mitterrand, hedged and tried to carve out a middle position. Debray did not, and in his typical fashion wrote a hair-­raising attack on religious tolerance—a “democratic” value par excellence. He presented the republican ideal as an embattled underdog in a Europe that had been dominated by popes, empires, and, more recently, a transnational monetary union. The Republic was its own mythology and system of belief. There could be no competitors for the sacred, and hence all republicans were intransigently and reflexively in favor of a secular conception of the “public thing.” After all, Debray reminded his readers, one of Vichy’s first acts after the fall of the Third Republic was to reimpose a religious curriculum in primary schools. In the case of “democracies,” they could afford to tolerate all forms of religious worship because they had no strong core of beliefs. For “democrats,” human beings were merely animals who produced and consumed. The Republic, by contrast, was rationalist in its fideism: “liberty plus reason” in Debray’s formula, “the rule of law plus justice, tolerance plus will.”155 These two texts did much to redraw political battle lines in the 1990s and to entrench a neo-­republican opposition to a neoliberal PS. Debray’s powerful, if crude, association of democracy with money, empire, and American shallowness was appealing to both right-­and left-­wing critics of the Mitterrand administration. The conservative historian Mona Ozouf, for example, claimed to have been moved by Debray’s “very brilliant” analysis;156 and left-­ wing opponents of Mitterrand’s neoliberal reforms, many of whom were politically adrift with the decline of the parties of the Left, and some of whom, like Emmanuel Todd, were newly radicalized against the PS, found in Debray’s



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dichotomy a sensible politics and worldview. The influence of Debray’s cosmological distinction was perhaps most clearly seen in the debates around “laïcité” in the 1990s and 2000s. Those supporting the ban on public displays of religious affiliation had a ready-­made mythology from which to borrow: laïcité was a left-­wing republican ideal constantly menaced by money, religion, and empire. To allow the headscarf in schools was to submit to the Americanization of French culture, and to betray France’s republican heritage. Debray himself was one of the most vocal proponents of the ban and sat on the famous Stasi Commission set up by President Chirac in 2003 to explore the feasibility of a new law.157 Though he abstained from the final vote—nineteen to one in favor of the ban—Debray made his position clear in a short book. France already had a sacred—the Republic—and competing claims could not be tolerated for fear of descending the country into civil war. Ordinarily, Debray railed against consensus and lauded militancy. But where the Republic was concerned, more caution was advisable: “Wearing the veil can be taken as a militant act, with a dimension of missionary propaganda and sexual discrimination that is by nature susceptible of provoking demonstrations and reactions to the contrary.”158 Once again, Debray invoked the Popular Front era, claiming that the “sects” had replaced “the leagues” (referring to the many fascist groups of the pre‒ and post‒World War I era). A third text came in 1990, adding more fuel to the neo-­republican myth, this one a left-­wing defense of General de Gaulle, À Demain de Gaulle (De Gaulle, Futurist of the Nation). As noted earlier, Debray had been an admirer of the general since the late 1960s, but now disillusionment with Mitterrand and the PS prompted him to come into the open and revive de Gaulle as a figure of salvation for the Left. The French Left, Debray lamented, “has lost its legends. It lacks plot. It inaugurates, unveils, transfers, buries with indefatigable zeal, but it has lost its memory. This introduces a major new twist into the psychological profile of the Left, and radically alters its rules of actions. . . . What are we modernists and postmodernists going to put in place of our vanished foundation myths, our utopias?”159 Debray was unabashed in answering this question with, “a great man,” a political myth like de Gaulle. Such figures came about rarely in history—Napoleon in the nineteenth century, de Gaulle in the twentieth—and they possessed the ability to mobilize and incite. “A statesman,” Debray wrote, “who gets something going, who has followers, escapes the reality of reports and statistics to become part of the imagination. Napoleon and de Gaulle modified the state of things because they modified souls.”160 Indeed, the Left had become too bureaucratic and

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routinized, too enamored of international organizations and approval ratings. What it needed was a jolt of energy, a re-­enchantment, the one here coming by way of mythic power from above. Debray again was using the methods of the Critique, finding what had been passed over by socialist politics, and making into a key element of Socialist strategy. De Gaulle was worth another look in this respect. Was he the despot the Left had taken him to be during the 1960s? Sure, said Debray, “our great man . . . was on the wrong side, shoulder to shoulder with bishops, bosses, and bigwigs. What we call ‘winners.’ He couldn’t help it. He may well have wanted something different; he dreamed of going home on the metro every evening at six, he loathed his electorate in his heart of hearts.”161 For Debray, de Gaulle was a man of the Left, a “militant” even. There was, of course, his political program, which, in giving priority to French national autonomy, exhibited a certain froideur toward Anglo-­American capitalism and the Common Market.162 But there was also, and of greater moment for Debray, his style of rule. De Gaulle’s sense of grandeur endowed politics, the state, and culture with an air of the epic. Debray called to mind the general’s thundering speeches, his elastic conception of nation, and his respect for the written word; for Debray, de Gaulle was “the last West European statesman to take the power of the mind seriously. . . . Refusing to reprieve [the Vichy-­collaborating intellectual Robert] Brasillach—on the grounds that writing is an action, and all conscious men are responsible for their actions—is a sign of high esteem for the dignity of the printed word.”163 Political rule was about taking risks for de Gaulle and waging battles on behalf of the nation if necessary. This struggle, wrote Debray, required “an instrument: the state. ‘It is not there to give pleasure, but to generate effort. Failing that, it would lose its purpose and disappear,’ de Gaulle wrote in a letter a year before his death. The language of energy—all those quaint calls for effort, ardor, self-­denial—has an antediluvian ring in our asthenic, demotivated society.” But this was the genius of de Gaulle, who understood that a strong state was the only agency capable of instituting the sacred and of keeping away the forces of disintegration.164 People were galvanized by mythic power and needed to be led into freedom. Debray’s concluding strophe invoked the anthropological principle that underlay his work since the late 1970s: “The first thing human groups want in our post-­industrial world is to be themselves: to speak their own language, practice their own beliefs, nourish their own creativity in a preserved living environment.” De Gaulle lived by and embodied these collectivist principles, and was, as such, ahead of his time, hence the “futurist of the nation.” “Digging



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up the man of 18 June,” he added, “is a way of reviving the left-­winger inside us,” of offering new lessons for an embattled Left. The way forward was clear: “The future belongs to someone from the Left who . . . manages to persuade colleagues and others that human beings become inventive, get off the ground when they can define themselves as beings of institution, memory, and freedom.”165 In this sense, modernity was bound to be, as Debray has endlessly repeated throughout his work, “archaic.”

Cultural Transmission

Debray’s archaisms found their most thorough and original expression in the domain of culture. Here too his work was underwritten by the notion that belief—“natural for the only animal that knows it is going to die”—was the distinguishing property of human beings.166 Unemployed after his resignation, Debray wrote a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne under the supervision of François Dagognet, an eminent historian of science in France. Ambitiously, Debray looked to establish a new discipline in the social sciences, “mediology.” This he saw as the study of how technology and material culture conditioned our ability to think and feel.167 Debray was interested in how, for instance, the camera gave rise to “the instantaneous, the scoop, atmosphere,” and thereby changed not only perceptions of reality but also the state’s relationship to the people. Mediology also focused on the material conditions in which culture was appreciated and consumed: the construction of museum space, the layout of a movie theater, and so on. Debray imagined this “ology” to be its own, self-­standing discipline, overlapping with but distinct from semiotics, the history of mentalités, and Marxist material histories. Perhaps too he saw it as an alternative to Foucault’s “genealogies”: Instead of power and its “technologies” as the great historical meta-­narrative, we now had “belief ” and its technologies. Debray made it his mission to get mediology off the ground after completing his thesis. He launched a new journal in 1996, Cahiers de médiologie, and wrote a series of textbooks and primers on the subject.168 His own mediological writings developed apace too, exploring, in a way similar to that of Walter Benjamin, the relationship between art and technology.169 The most compelling applications of mediology were to be found in Debray’s treatment of socialism and religion, his two great intellectual passions. What did a “mediological” history of socialism look like? It resembled more an “ecosystem”

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than a traditional history. Instead of focusing on great political events and ideologies, it foregrounded the relationship among “men (militants, leaders, theoreticians), tools (schools, newspapers, books), and institutions (associations, factions, parties).” Special attention was given to the typographer, the one “who makes the link between proletarian theory and working-­class conditions.” The history of socialism was thus localized, understood as the product of a unique collision of technologies and institutions. If one had to single out, according to Debray, a key moment in the making of the socialist movement, it was a “winter’s night in 1831 when the carpenter Gauny had a meeting with the bookseller Thierry.” A program was drawn up to educate workers by neighborhood, leading to “a new set of encounters between hatters, clothiers, binders, cabinetmakers, tilers, etc.”170 A generation later, these developments acquired European characteristics with the creation of the First International in London in 1864, followed by the founding of the Education League in Paris (1866), and the invention of the rotary press by Marinoni (1867), which permitted a tenfold rise in the rate of impressions. In short, socialism was a politics of the printed word, a culture of the book. As Debray often repeated, “All the revolutionaries I have personally come across, from Che Guevara to Pham Van Dong, passing through Castro (not the autocrat, but the former rebel), not to mention those walking encyclopedias, Trotskyists, were voracious readers, obsessed with old books and resistant to images.”171 Most of socialism’s greatest practitioners were directly involved in the dissemination of the printed word as printers, librarians (Lucien Herr, Mao Tse-­Tung), teachers (Jaurès, Guesde), or editors (Marx, Lenin, Gramsci). Socialism was thus an ideology of print culture: More than just a set of ideas, it was also a means of communication. Naturally, it would have difficulty surviving the postindustrial video age, when image triumphed over the word. Perhaps Debray’s most original mediological text was his materialist history of monotheism, Dieu, un itinéraire (God: An Itinerary). There, he proposed to study “the paths along which God’s fire managed to be transmitted from the desert to the city”—in other words, the instruments and technologies of the sacred. Using this approach, he added, I shall not plunge into the depths of time in order to retrieve ‘things hidden since the foundation of the world’ [a reference to the French anthropologist René Girard and his famous text of that name], some dormant unspoken reality couched in the recesses of Scripture whose exhumation would supply us with the key to the future. I



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will humbly attend to flora and fauna, shapes, and materials. To the work of irrigation and storage. To question the Invisible One with naked eyes, on His ways rather than His words, is to choose the ascertainable as our guiding thread even as we attempt to avoid the delusions of interpretation.172 Debray was here operating under an assumption adopted from the anthropologist and prehistorian, André Leroi-­Gourhan, whose 1965 masterpiece Gesture and Speech rewrote the evolutionary history of the human being as a continuous dialogue between brain and hand, thinking and doing.173 With Leroi-­Gourhan, Debray believed that “technology has no less invented man than the obverse,” and that it was “the gift of the prosthesis that constituted the humanity of man, who became human by externalizing his faculties [i.e., creating tools] in a process of objectification without end.” This was culture for Debray, the cumulative history of human inventions necessitated by the hostility of the natural world. Where his previous works had merely posited the sacred as the origins of the political, the mediological texts like God explored the material and social circumstances in which the sacred was generated and transformed. For Debray, this inquiry was not meant to “demystify” religion so much as to re-­enchant science, perennially treated as the rational antidote to religion, never its accomplice. “Perhaps,” he joked, this book “does no more than put Providence back in its place.”174 As always, Debray’s narrative was functionalist. Monotheism he saw as “a defense against anxiety” born from particular geographic circumstances: “Life in the desert is a challenge for humans in that it is more random and precarious than elsewhere. There are blows of fate, abrupt shifts of climate, quarrels between clans, bandits behind the dunes.” Thus, “anarchic” circumstances summoned the need for a “Great Federator,” and the “God that is One would thus be the ultimate recourse against internal division.”175 Intersecting with this structural necessity were two historical contingencies: the transition away from nomadic societies to stable agricultural ones and the invention of writing and script. Monotheism could not have arisen without these, for it specialized in domestication, in unifying groups in a specific locale. Its material innovations were at once mental ones: “The Bible has magnificently fulfilled its role as a communitarian matrix by fabricating an origin in order to invent a destination. Avoiding dissolution requires that the present ‘fix’ the past with a glue that neutralizes dissemination.” The book was not merely the law, it was itself a form of organization: “Worshipping Yahweh is part not

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of a creed or doctrine, but a mode of existence: of cooking, washing, raising children, urinating, and so on.”176 The genius of Judaism was in finding powerful and creative ways—memory, scripture, origin stories—to keep people together through time. Christianity was more creative and effective yet in developing these techniques, beginning with the figure of Christ, a mediological revolution unto himself. His double status—an “hommedium” in Debray’s portmanteau— worked to democratize belief by increasing our identification with God: “He assimilated to the Father, and we are to be his extremely obedient subordinates. But he was also an elder brother. . . . He suffered, like us, from persecution.”177 To this incarnation was added another: the Church as the institution of the divine. As Christ’s worldly emissary, it established a whole network of offices and services to spread the faith and to preserve orthodoxy, and thus became the world’s most successful propaganda machine. The Church also learned to harness the power of images, which were proscribed among the Hebrews, but were capable of opening new affective channels. Icons became fixtures in the home, and “with the pious image, [the Church] infiltrated the domestic hearth.” Likewise, liturgy and Mass were useful as spectacle, operating as programmed moments of collective effervescence. Catechism rendered text unforgettable. In terms of writing, Christianity improved on the written scrolls of the Jews by adopting the polyptych, a rectangular tablet that could be joined together through holes—the precursor of the highly portable book.178 In this sense, Christianity became a universal and deterritorialized religion, spreading itself across the globe, beyond the desert. These were not positive qualities in Debray’s view. Indeed, Christianity turned out to have been an agency for a “depoliticized,” “denationalized,” and essentially forgotten God. Christ was, in this sense, a “parricide,” having murdered the old Jewish deity: “My intimate God subverted our ancestral God, and globalized him from within.” Religion was always an affair of enclosures: If made to stretch across borders and mental ecosystems, it would lose its ability to organize and integrate. Thus Christianity’s talent for mediation, its inclusivity and universalism, worked against it in the long run. Old and New World Christianities were now “fused in Pentecostalism or Anglo-­Saxon evangelism, whose doctrinal and liturgical elasticity makes it adaptable and adoptable at all latitudes and longitudes.” Judaism was here the model religion, with Islam not figuring at all in the story—anomalous given that there were only three monotheistic religions, all of which were practiced in France. If Christianity was empire, then Judaism was the Nation; its revelation “was



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addressed to a collective. It was ratified by an assembly.”179 It knew about enclosures, memory, and community. “The Christian people,” by contrast, “[began] with two individuals” and then conquered the world. The nation thus tended to be the unnamed referent in these mediological histories of socialism and religion. A cornerstone of Debray’s philosophy was the idea that culture, when working properly, “transmitted” values. This was different from mere “communication,” which simply passed along information and had effects that were instantaneous. “Transmission,” by contrast, took its course through time and aimed to leave behind a trace. Moreover, material things, and not just information, could be transmitted: “Commercial bills, assets and real estate, a child’s balloon can all be transmitted in the sense of handed over or down, as can order and instructions or papal power.” In this way, transmission “links the living to the dead, most often when the senders are physically absent.”180 It handed down a message without erasing it, and thereby conserved something that might have perished. Here we come to the crux and paradox of Debray’s political anthropology: If we consider that time and technology bring entropy and dispersion, then acts of conservation can be seen as acts of rupture, since they break with the natural order of things. Capital and technology would continue to rationalize, expedite, and synthesize, until something large enough stood in its way. Culture could act as this bulwark by insisting on the need for borders, memory, tradition, and myth. He wrote, “Religion, art, ideology: these variegated categories of transmission all aim to thwart the ephemeral by the ploy of drawing out. . . . Through transmission, a collective organization is immunized against disorder and aggression. A protector of the coherence of an us, it ensures the group’s survival by apportioning what individuals hold in common.”181 For Debray, the nation was the best hope of “drawing out” and bringing order and coherence to the people of France. In a sense, it combined the best features of both socialism and religion: like the former, it was secular, rationalist, egalitarian, and militant; and, like the latter, it was steeped in memory, myth, and tradition, and it found institutional expression in schools, councils, and offices. But the nation was perpetually under threat in the era of globalization and American empire, two powerful centrifugal forces. Debray trusted that Chirac—a Gaullist in his own way—could preserve the integrity of the Republic under these conditions. Debray had less confidence in Chirac’s successors, Sarkozy, Hollande, and Emmanuel Macron. In the new millennium, Debray renewed his call for militants—beings of great and uncompromising faith—to come forward and save the Republic from capital and technocracy.

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To reclaim the French nation was not to endorse the xenophobic chauvinism of the FN but to bring about the conditions under which “fraternity” and “human solidarity” could be realized.182 Internationalism was a regulative ideal for Debray, but it only made sense in a world where the nation was the universal unit of belonging. In a 2018 text addressed to his teenage son, Debray summarized his Bolivian years in one line: “In all times and all places, priority goes to the indigène.” At the same time, he recalled that “it’s ‘expats’ that make the best patriots . . . because, as Simon Leys said, ‘one cannot return to oneself without having started somewhere else.’ ”183 Indeed, for France to become “open”—welcoming of others and internationalist in its politics—it needed first to close around itself and secure a republican mode of belonging. Only the nation was truly internationalist.

Conclusion

Political anthropology, as I have defined it, was formed in the 1970s as France transitioned away from a postwar solidaristic society toward a fractured and neoliberal one. Its intellectual affinities were shaped by the postwar ascendancy of the social sciences, anthropology in particular. The disintegration of social bonds in the 1970s seemed to call for a cultural analysis of the present by political theorists, and likewise a return to anthropologists and sociologists who privileged this dynamic in their work—Durkheim especially. The conceptual frameworks developed by these political anthropologists, even where politically divergent, tended thus to be primarily sociocultural in outlook. This was reflected in the themes that ran through their work: religion and the sacred, the family, identity, and the state. And it was also reflected in the philosophically idealist character of their intellectual systems: For all four thinkers, mental events and structures—rather than materialist or economic ones—were held to be the driving forces of historical change. Only the socialist Debray made room for material determinants in his theory, and, even there, it was only one aspect of a much larger model in pursuit of old nineteenth-century ideologies: nationalism and republicanism. The glaring omission from their work has been any fully realized sense of economic developments. Todd has given them the most attention in his work, but they did not figure prominently in his original family-­kinship model. He had to bend that model to accommodate economic considerations. Otherwise, the key economic issues facing contemporary France—informalization of the workforce, high and persistent unemployment, and the ascendancy of finance—have received only passing notice in their work. Since the Great Recession of 2008, this has changed slightly, especially in the case of Gauchet. The later volumes of his grand history of democracy have devoted chapters, for instance, to postwar Keynesianism and to the globalization of capitalism.

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But even where economic matters are under consideration, the cultural reflex remains dominant among political anthropologists. For Gauchet, “the political is the key to recovery. All the phenomena I’ve pointed out—the financialization of capitalism, the unlimited expansion of individualism—are not natural facts. They’re developments with overwhelming symptoms, of course, but on which it is nonetheless possible to have an impact.”1 The economy was merely an effect of a deeper and more fundamental sociocultural dynamic. If French people found the right democratic formula, he assumed, economic problems would be solved. With the sharpening of economic contradictions in the post-­2008 context, the intellectual systems of these political anthropologists came to resemble more and more what Marx and Engels, in reference to the Bruno Bauer and other “right-­wing Hegelians,” called “the Holy Family”; that is, thinkers who believed they were demolishing religious dogma, but whose idealist notions worked to rehabilitate it in thought. According to Marx, this kind of “critical” philosophy “sees the origin of history not in coarse material production on the earth but in vaporous clouds in the heavens.”2 Likewise, in mobilizing their anthropologically grounded frameworks toward a political analysis of the present, the thinkers studied in this book consistently overlooked the materialist bases of social and political life in France. Their attention to idealist constructions—the nation-­state (Debray), imaginary kinship relations (Todd), “social-­historical” autonomy (Gauchet), and the ancestral cultural unit (Benoist)—made it increasingly difficult to understand the material conditions facing ordinary French people. For example, Todd’s anthropology of the family refers back to almost mythical archetypes and provides very little sense of how conceptions of the family and familiality function in modern French life. Kinship structures are merely the springboard for Todd to engage in grand geopolitical theorizing. Debray has, since the 1970s, insisted on the importance of collective “enclosure” and on the political necessity of drawing borders.3 But he also has remained silent on these questions during the worst migrant and refugee crisis in the European Union’s history. How does he understand his commitment to borders in light of this crisis? This judgment is not meant to imply that anthropology as a discipline is inherently idealist and uncritical. Nor does it suggest, dogmatically, that all criticism must be conceptualized within a Marxist framework.4 Rather, Marx’s judgment draws us back to the local—and particularly French—circumstances in which political anthropology was produced, and to the way these

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thinkers were compelled to write their “critical” systems along similar lines. Intellectually, political anthropology occupied an ambiguous position in post-­ 1968 France. The coming of the neoliberal society in the late 1970s began to dissolve traditions of protest and social solidarity—indeed, waging war against the social itself. On the one hand, political anthropology developed as a logical response to this weakening of social bonds, attempting to reconceptualize and clarify what had become evanescent; on the other, its preoccupation with culture—symbol, the sacred, kinship, identity, and so forth—contributed to and enabled this turn away from the social. In this second respect, there was something reactive and anxious in their turn to anthropology—an inability to fully come to terms with the sociological shifts prompted by the end of empire and the transition to neoliberalism. Rather than try to reassemble the social, they preferred to anchor it in old forms and institutions. With the Great Recession of 2008, cracks began to appear in the neoliberal façade. Growth fell, unemployment shot up, and the market-­oriented policies of center-­Right president Nicolas Sarkozy (2007‒12) appeared less palatable than ever to people at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Sarkozy was voted out after one term and replaced by the Socialist François Hollande, who pledged to fight social inequality and impose harsher regulations on finance. The Socialist failed to make good on these promises and proved to be just as business friendly and technocratic as his predecessor. When the economic picture in the country still did not improve, disillusion with Hollande became endemic, and his approval rating fell to record lows. The French, of course, had already experienced Socialist-­led neoliberalism under Mitterrand in the 1980s. Whereas Mitterrand’s U-­turn served to weaken and hollow out already existing social movements, Hollande’s policies, under much more strained economic conditions, had the opposite effect and provided new inspiration for social protest. There was, for instance, the Nuit Debout (Up All Night) demonstration in the spring of 2016. People gathered in the center of Paris and many other French cities to express their outrage at the government’s latest and most abhorrent labor policy yet, the so-­called El Khomri bill, which proposed to bring greater “flexibility” to French labor markets, effectively making it easier for employers to lay off workers and reduce their benefits. Taking cues from the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, and the “Indignados” in Spain, protesters resolved not only to overthrow the El Khomri bill and the world of austerity policies that it represented but also to institute new democratic practices in these urban spaces. They organized themselves

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into popular assemblies and commissions, and they formulated demands collectively.5 While the movement dissolved after the first few weeks of protest and failed to block the passing of the bill, Nuit Debout signaled, just as had Occupy Wall Street and the Indignados, a return of “the social.” Three decades of neoliberal policies had finally, and perhaps inevitably, called into existence the very thing they had tried to extinguish: mobilization from below. The presidential election of 2017, in which Hollande decided not to run, featured a neck-­and-­neck struggle between, on the one hand, the establishment parties—the Républicains (formerly the UMP) and the PS—that had governed France since 1981 and were mutually committed to the implementation of neoliberal policies, and, on the other, the insurgent parties of the Far Left and Far Right, Jean-­Luc Mélenchon’s France insoumise (France Unbowed) and Marine Le Pen’s Front national, respectively, both of which ran as antiestablishment, anti-­austerity populist movements. The center was able to hold in the figure of Emmanuel Macron, Hollande’s precocious thirty-­ nine-­year-­old finance minister who offered a rejuvenated and glossier version of the same pro-­business austerity measures that his predecessors had favored. Macron’s program was soon greeted, in the fall of 2018, with the largest wave of protests France had seen since 1968 in the form of the Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests). In cities and towns across France, protesters wearing fluorescent yellow vests could be seen flipping over cars and driving back riot police. The scale of the protests forced Macron almost immediately to cancel the petrol taxes that had triggered the revolts and to unveil a package of tax breaks and minimum-­wage increases for France’s working people. It looks as though a new political and intellectual conjuncture is in the making in France, one that will certainly feature greater attention to the social question and to the political economy of debt and misery. The political anthropologists discussed in this book have remained au courant with these developments. They have written extensively on the election of Macron in 2017, the explosion of popular forces since 2008, and the environmental issues that are increasingly the preoccupation of ordinary people.6 But there are signs too that political anthropology is undergoing an inversion more suited to this newly emerging paradigm. A leading thinker of a younger generation, Frédéric Lordon, has, for example, produced a body of political theory that deploys some of the same concepts and methodologies as the thinkers treated in this book but also gives wider scope to the movements of capital and to socioeconomic inequalities. Lordon teaches philosophy and economics at the CNRS and emerged as a key figure within the Nuit Debout movement. His work has run

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along two parallel tracks.7 On one, Lordon has, since the mid-­2000s, provided a running commentary on the political-­economic state of Europe. Through a popular blog on Le Monde diplomatique’s website, “La Pompe à phynance,” and a series of short polemical texts, Lordon has called for a deleveraging of financial markets, a steep tax on speculative transactions, and the institution of a socialized credit system. Lordon was trained in economic theory, having left business school at Paris’s prestigious Institut Supérieur des Affaires in the mid-­1980s to study economics at the EHESS under Robert Boyer, a Marxist economist and leading exponent of regulation theory. Lordon’s doctoral thesis attempted to model mathematically this concept of economic crisis. Lordon has also engaged in a more speculative set of political-­ anthropological inquiries, which have aimed to reconcile the political economy of Marx with the “affective” political theory of Spinoza. For Lordon, it is not enough to identify the structures of capitalist motivation à la Marx: Missing here is a sense of “what these structures ‘run on,’ ” of what ultimately makes them effective. “The Spinozist answer,” he announces, “is affects. Social life is just another name for the collective passionate life. . . . To feel mobilized, or vaguely reluctant, or even rebellious, to commit one’s labor-­power enthusiastically or grudgingly, are so many different ways of being affected as an employee. . . . It is here, at the intersection of the Spinozist anthropology of passions and the Marxist theory of wage-­labor, that it becomes possible to rethink the concepts of exploitation and alienation from the ground up.”8 From this political-­anthropological premise, Lordon has undertaken a broad range of explorations. L’Intérêt souverain, from 2006, sought to reinterpret the phenomenon of gift exchange through this Spinozist lens. Human beings, according to Lordon, are constituted by a self-­interested drive that originally prevented the emergence of a stable human society. If a state of anarchic violence was to be avoided, then this drive, or “conatus,” a term borrowed from Spinoza, had to be sublimated through institutions. Gift exchange acted as this rerouting mechanism, displacing competition onto a symbolic plane and allowing for the reproduction of a stable, civilized order.9 In Imperium (2015), his most ambitious work to date, Lordon looked to unearth the “elementary structures of politics.” His interest in doing so was to better understand both the nature of state power under neoliberalism and the kinds of emancipatory political movements that were possible within and against it. “Imperium” for Lordon signified not “empire” but a Spinozist movement of the multitude against political domination.10 The formation of a multitude occurred when desires coalesced around a shared emotion—for

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example, anger at the rapaciousness of elites. In this sense, the multitude was not a sum of individual wills but a holistic entity bound together through emotion and a powerful sense of belonging. There was no set form for the multitude: It could be a commune, federation, or nation. The goal for Lordon was to institutionalize and structure this movement in such a way that the multitude’s power could continue to pulsate without being captured by a minority or submitted to bureaucratic conformities. Lordon offered the Paris Commune as the ideal type: Its use of rotating assemblies and revocable officials kept power circulating among the people.11 The similarities of Lordon’s work to the paradigm I have developed in this book are striking: He has searched for a new language of social cohesion, insisted on the primacy of affect and symbol in political life, and drawn heavily on the language of French sociological holism (frequently invoking Durkheim and the ideas of Lévi-­Strauss). He believes “human nature” is still a meaningful concept in political theory—provided it is given its correct Spinozist reading. And, finally, like Debray and Gauchet, he sees political life as structured around an absent Other such that all political movements must acknowledge both the horizontal and the vertical dimensions of power. Indeed, there can be, for Lordon, no anarchistic revolt of society against the state, pace Clastres. The state is a perennial feature of human social life that must be controlled and democratized but certainly not demolished. What has changed with Lordon’s work evidently is the conjuncture. The political anthropologists covered in this book came of age in the postwar economic miracle, and their ideas were shaped primarily by the two greatest conflicts of the era: decolonization and the revolts of 1968, both of which had been understood predominantly in political and cultural terms. Accordingly, the frameworks they developed tended to privilege these dynamics. It could also be said that their theories were more invested in geopolitics than were those of Lordon’s era, since it was once possible, before 1989, to look beyond Western Europe for political alternatives to capitalism. In contrast, Lordon’s first writings appeared in the 1990s, when capitalism seemed to have vanquished all rival systems. For theorists of his generation and younger, the social and economic setbacks of neoliberalism—inequality, crumbling infrastructure, high unemployment, and declining social solidarity—were routine features of life in France. Once the Great Recession hit in 2008, it seemed as though, for the first time, capitalism’s end would arrive through internal contradictions and not through external challenges. Political theory in the twenty-­first century was thus bound to reflect the socioeconomic effects of

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decades of neoliberal policies. Indeed, it was in this context that Thomas Piketty’s pathbreaking Capital in the Twenty-­First Century—a massive study of long-­term wealth inequalities—found a mass global readership and opened new inquiries into the economic and social laws of capitalism.12 In the case of Lordon, political theory has increasingly been written in dialogue with anti-­systemic social movements. Assuming political anthropology can be remade by Lordon and others in such a fashion, how will it fare in the twenty-­first century? As the climate warms and the earth’s surface becomes more and more uninhabitable, it seems likely that human communities will be facing new privations and stresses, and will, like their distant forebears, be tasked with radically remaking social bonds. Will the threat of extinction provoke a return of archaisms and a new drive toward community? Was André Malraux correct when he was alleged to have predicted that the twenty-­first century will be spiritual, or it will not be? Political anthropology touches on something fundamental about modernity and the constant threat of social dissolution it brings, and this may give the paradigm longevity in the century to come. There is also something comforting about the idea of a return of the archaic, as though Giambattista Vico’s ricorsi were in effect, and human history could be reset. No one has captured this better than Lévi-­ Strauss in the closing pages of Tristes tropiques: “If human beings have always been concerned with only one task—how to create a society fit to live in—the forces which inspired our distant ancestors are also present in us. Nothing is settled; everything can still be altered. What was done, but turned out wrong, can be done again. ‘The Golden Age,’ which blind superstition had placed behind [or ahead of] us, is in us.”13

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Notes

Introduction 1. Jean Baudrillard, La Gauche divine: Chronique des années 1977‒1984 (Paris: Grasset, 1985). In English translation: The Divine Left: A Chronicle of the Years 1977‒1984, trans. David L. Sweet (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014), 83. 2. For essays on the 1970s in France, see Emile Chabal, ed., France Since the 1970s: History, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 3. Michel Foucault, “Manifesto of the Groupe d’Information sur les prisons (1971),” Viewpoint Magazine, online, www​.viewpointmag​.com​/2016​/02​/16​/manifesto​-­­of​-­­the​-­­groupe​ -­­dinformation​-­­sur​-­­les​-­­prisons​-­­1971/. Accessed 16 August 2018. 4. See Daniel Gordon, Immigrants and Intellectuals: May ’68 and the Rise of Anti-­Racism in France (London: Merlin Press, 2012); and Daniel Gordon, “French and British Anti-­Racists Since the 1960s: A Rendez-­Vous Manqué?” Journal of Contemporary History 50, 3 (2015): 606‒31. 5. See Étienne Balibar, “De Charonne à Vitry,” in Les Frontières de la démocratie (Paris: La Découverte, 1992), 19‒34. 6. For an excellent political-­economic analysis of this period, see Timothy B. Smith, France in Crisis: Welfare, Inequality and Globalization Since 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). No less valuable are Vivien Ann Schmidt, From State to Market? The Transformation of French Business and Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Jonah D. Levy, Tocqueville’s Revenge: State, Society, and Economy in Contemporary France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 7. Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectuals and the French Communist Party: Disillusion and Decline (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 143. 8. On this point, see Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini, L’Illusion du bloc bourgeois: Alliances sociales et avenir du modèle français (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2017). 9. See Judith E. Vichniac, “French Socialists and Droit à la différence: A Changing Dynamic,” French Politics and Society 9, 1 (Winter 1991): 40‒56. 10. See Félix Guattari, Les Années d’hiver: 1980‒1985 (Paris: Barrault, 1986); and Alain Badiou, Le Siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2005). 11. François Cusset, La Décennie: Le Grand cauchemar des années 1980 (Paris: La Découverte, 2006). 12. Along these lines, the historian Pascal Ory has referred to these years as the “l’entre-­ deux-­mai” (between-­the-­two-­Mays), the first referring to May 1968 and the second to Mitterrand’s election in May 1981: L’Entre-­deux-­Mai: Histoire culturelle de la France, Mai 1968‒Mai 1981 (Paris: Seuil, 1983).

228 Notes to Pages 4–11 13. I would like to distinguish my usage of this phrase from that of the prominent French anthropologist Georges Balandier. In his 1967 book of the same title, he adopted “political anthropology” as a critique of social anthropology’s racist assumption that non-­Western societies did not have politics or history because they lacked a state. For Balandier, it was necessary to recognize that “all human societies produce politics and that they are all subject to the vicissitudes of history.” Political anthropology, he added, “tends therefore to the establishment of a science of politics, regarding man as homo politicus and seeking properties common to all political organizations in all their historical and geographical diversity.” This conception of politics as a universal dimension of human social life is a key feature of the paradigm I am here calling “political anthropology.” Where I differ from Balandier is in seeing a broader application for this term, beyond the disciplinary confines of anthropology and into the mainstream of French political and intellectual life. See Georges Balandier, Political Anthropology, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Pelican Books, 1970), viii, 1. 14. Debray, for example, spoke of “primary invariables belonging to human nature—a term which has had a very bad press.” Régis Debray, “Marxism and the National Question,” New Left Review I/105 (September‒October 1977): 25‒41, 28. 15. I do not pretend that the political spectrum identified here is exhaustive or rigid. There are moments—during the 1990s, for instance—when the Far Left appears to many commentators quite conservative. The classifications here are based on the political traditions in and through which these thinkers developed their ideas (and not necessarily on the political positions they have taken throughout their lifetimes). 16. Alain Badiou and Marcel Gauchet, What Is to Be Done? A Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism, and the Future of Democracy, trans. Susan Spitzer (London: Polity, 2016). 17. Emmanuel Todd, “Contre la monnaie unique, le choix de la nation et du bon sens économique,” Les Cahiers du communisme 1‒2 (1997), 170. 18. Jean-­François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Minuit 1979); in English translation, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv. 19. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 27. 20. For more on Lyotard’s inattention to politics, see Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 2005), 24‒36. 21. See, especially, Foucault’s recently published lectures from the Collège de France, in particular Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979‒1980, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2016); and Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977‒1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2007). 22. There is a vast literature on structuralism. I have found useful the following texts: François Dosse, The History of Structuralism, vol. I: The Rising Sign, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); John Sturrock, Structuralism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003); and Peter Caws, Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988). 23. The first chapter of Derrida’s breakthrough work first appeared in the journal Critique as a review of three books, one of which was André Leroi-­Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole, vol. I: Techniques et langage (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964), and Le Geste et la parole, vol. II: La Mémoire et les rhythmes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1965). See Jacques Derrida, “De la grammatologie,” Critique 223 (December 1965): 1016‒42; and “De la grammatologie (II),” Critique 224 (January 1966):

Notes to Pages 11–16

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23‒53. In English translation: Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 24. See Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2007). 25. Régis Debray, Critique de la raison politique, ou l’inconscient religieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). In English translation: Critique of Political Reason, trans. David Macey (London: New Left Books, 1983). 26. For this distinction, see Claude Lévi-­Strauss and Georges Charbonnier, Conversations with Claude Lévi-­Strauss (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969). 27. See Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson (New York: Basic Books, 1963). 28. Camille Robcis, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 104. 29. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-­Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 2005), 3. 30. There has been a very strong tendency to read postwar French philosophy as the importation of German thinkers. See, most prominently, Vincent Descombes, Même et l’autre: Quarante-­cinq ans de philosophie française (1933‒1978) (Paris: Minuit, 1979). In English translation: Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-­Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 31. For these reconstructions, see François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); and Marcel Gauchet, “Benjamin Constant: L’Illusion lucide du libéralisme,” in Benjamin Constant, Écrits politiques, ed. Marcel Gauchet (Paris: Gallimard, 1997): 11‒110; and Marcel Gauchet, “Constant: Le Libéralisme entre le droit et l’histoire,” La Condition politique: 277‒305. 32. These ideas were developed across a series of long and theoretically dense essays that appeared in relatively obscure journals of the non-­Communist Left. They have been republished in Marcel Gauchet, La Condition politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). 33. Alain de Benoist, Les Idées à l’endroit (Paris: Hallier, 1979), 87. 34. See Gauchet’s four-­volume history of democracy, L’Avènement de la démocratie. The idea is introduced in the first volume, La Revolution moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 10; and then described in detail in the second two volumes: La Crise du libéralisme, 1880‒1914 (Paris: Gallimard, 2007) and À l’épreuve des totalitarismes, 1914‒1974 (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). 35. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 166‒75. 36. See Eleanor Davey, Idealism Beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism 1954‒1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-­Paul Sartre (London: Verso, 2010). 37. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 54. 38. For excellent and very different histories of nineteenth-­century political theory, see Claude Nicolet, L’Idée républicaine en France (1789‒1924): Essai d’histoire critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1982); and Lucien Sève, La Philosophie française et sa genèse de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1962).

230 Notes to Pages 17–21 39. For a lucid genealogy of “turn” language, see Judith Surkis, “When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy,” American Historical Review 117, 2 (June 2012): 700‒22. 40. Emmanuel Todd, L’Invention de l’Europe (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 94, 193. 41. Alain de Benoist, Comment peut-­on être païen? (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981). 42. The two thinkers once debated their views in the pages of Le Débat. See Régis Debray and Marcel Gauchet, “Du Religieux: De sa permanence et de la possibilité d’en sortir,” Le Débat 127 (November‒December 2003): 3‒17. For comment on this exchange, see Michael C. Behrent, “Religion, Republicanism, and Depoliticization: Two Intellectual Itineraries—Régis Debray and Marcel Gauchet,” in After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France, ed. Julian Bourg (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). 43. Debray, Critique of Political Reason, 169-­78. 44. Marcel Gauchet, Le Désenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). In English translation: The Disenchantment of the World, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 4. 45. Emmanuel Todd, Who Is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 20. 46. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 283, 288. 47. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1980); and Blandine Kriegel, The State and the Rule of Law, trans. Marc A. LePain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 48. The group was Socialisme ou Barbarie (a phrase coined by Rosa Luxemburg), and it published a journal by the same name. For a history of the group, see Philippe Gottraux, “Socialisme ou Barbarie”: Un Engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de l’après-­guerre (Paris: Payot, 1997). 49. See Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, and Edgar Morin, Mai 68: La Brèche: Premières réflexions sur les événements (Paris: Fayard, 1968). 50. See Donald Reid, Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968‒1981 (New York: Verso, 2018). 51. This discourse has been carefully tracked and assessed by Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004). See also Dominique Lecourt, The Mediocracy: French Philosophy Since 1968, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2001). 52. The main New Philosophers were Bernard-­Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann. Their key works from the period were Bernard-­Henri Lévy, Barbarie à visage humain (Paris: Grasset, 1977); and André Glucksmann, La Cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes: Essai sur les rapports entre l’État, le marxisme et les camps de concentration (Paris: Seuil, 1975) 53. Emmanuel Todd, Le Fou et le prolétaire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1979). 54. Alain de Benoist, Les Idées à l’endroit (Paris: Éditions Libres-­Hallier, 1979). 55. There is a vast and interesting literature around this transformation. See, notably, André Gorz, Métamorphoses du travail, quête du sens: Critique de la raison économique (Paris: Galilée, 1988); Robert Castel, Les Métamorphoses de la question sociale: Une Chronique du salariat (Paris: Fayard, 1995); and Luc Boltanski, Les Cadres: La Formation d’un groupe social (Paris: Minuit, 1982). 56. For a résumé of this literature, see Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). In English translation: The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2005), 296‒314.

Notes to Pages 21–28

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57. See Emile Chabal, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 58. Alec G. Hargreaves, Multi-­Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society (New York: Routledge, 2002), 13‒24. See also, Sung-­eun Choi, Decolonization and the French of Algeria: Bringing the Settler Colony Home (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 59. Marcel Gauchet, “Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous,” in La Condition politique, 305‒403, 378. 60. Todd, Who Is Charlie?, 3‒4. 61. See, among others, Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress, trans. Jeremy Carden (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 62. See Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières: Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius, Diderot (Paris: Maspero, 1971); and Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 63. Francis Schiller, Paul Broca: Founder of French Anthropology, Explorer of the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 64. See, notably, Alexis de Tocqueville’s early essays on Algeria in Writings on Empire and Slavery, trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); and Marcel Mauss, Manual of Ethnography, trans. Dominique Lussier (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). For scholarship, see George R. Trumbull IV, An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge, and Islam in Algeria, 1870‒1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 65. For a history of Paris’s ethnological museums, the work of reference is now Alice L. Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 66. On the primitive in twentieth-­century French culture, see Daniel J. Sherman, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945‒1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 67. Picasso is quoted in Patricia Leighten, “The White Peril and L’Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism,” Art Bulletin 72, 4 (December 1990): 609‒30, 625. 68. On colonial and exotic motifs in French art and design, see Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-­de-­siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 69. Victor Karady, “The Durkheimians in Academe: A Reconsideration,” in The Sociological Domain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology, ed. Philippe Besnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 71‒90, 73. 70. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 38. 71. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton), 1967. 72. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Tristes tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1974). On the literary importance of Tristes tropiques, see Vincent Debaene, L’Adieu au voyage: L’Ethnologie française entre science et littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). For Lévi-­ Strauss’s reflections on Mauss, see Claude Lévi-­Strauss, “Introduction à l’oeuvre de M. Mauss,” in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1950): ix‒lii.

232 Notes to Pages 28–33 73. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. II, trans. Monique Layton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 4, 9, 11, 12, 24. 74. See Claude Lévi-­Strauss, “Panorama of Ethnology 1950‒1952,” Diogenes 1, 2 (1953): 69‒92; and Claude Lévi-­Strauss, “Les Trois humanismes,” Demain 35 (1956): 16. On this theme in Lévi-­Strauss: Susan Sontag, “The Anthropologist as Hero,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 2001): 69‒82. 75. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 6. 76. Régis Debray, Par amour de l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 22‒23. 77. Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence, trans. Jeanine Herman (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010), 224. 78. See Maurice Godelier, Horizon, trajets marxistes en anthropologie, 2 vols. (Paris: Maspero, 1973). For scholarship on Godelier, see Laurent Dousset and Serge Tcherkézoff, eds., The Scope of Anthropology: Maurice Godelier’s Work in Context (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012). 79. See Emmanuel Terray’s Le Marxisme devant les sociétés primitives: Deux études (Paris: F. Maspero, 1969). One of these studies is of Claude Meillassoux’s classic, Anthropologie économique des Gouro de Côte d’Ivoire: De l’économie de subsistance à l’agriculture commerciale (Paris: Mouton, 1964). For commentary, see John Clammer, Anthropology and Political Economy: Theoretical and Asian Perspectives (London: Macmillan, 1985). 80. Mark Lilla, “The Legitimacy of the Liberal Age,” in New French Thought: Political Philosophy, ed. Mark Lilla (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 6‒7, 17. 81. In a review of Geroulanos’s book, Chabal has suggested that many of these historians, given that they were “trained on the US East Coast” and are “fascinated by late twentieth-­ century thought,” belong to what he calls an “East Coast School” of French intellectual history. Specifically, he places Bourg, Christofferson, Geroulanos, Robcis, Samuel Moyn, and a historian specializing in Foucault, Michael Behrent, under this heading. I have elected not to use this designation, however, since the term “school” implies something deeper than mere “fascination” with the same field: at the very least, it implies a common set of positions or approaches. Likewise, “East Coast” seems inexact, since two of the historians named here (Moyn and Bourg) completed their graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley (i.e., on the West Coast). See Émile Chabal, “Review of Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present, by Stefanos Geroulanos, H-­France Forum 13, 4/2 (2018), www​.h​-­­france​.net​/forum​/forumvol13​ /Chabal​.pdf. 82. Stefanos Geroulanos, Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). 83. Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 182. 84. Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 343, 6. 85. Robcis, The Law of Kinship, 236. 86. François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 151. 87. Hoffmann’s term was “stalemate society.” See Stanley Hoffmann, “Paradoxes of the French Political Community,” in In Search of France: The Economy, Society, and Political System in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley Hoffmann et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963): 1‒117. 88. Chabal, A Divided Republic, 212‒14.

Notes to Pages 34–41

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89. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 10‒11. I want to be clear that I am not using Kuhn’s concept strictly and do not mean to imply that there was nothing “thinkable” in France beyond the bounds of political anthropology. 90. Bourg and Ross in their histories of 1968 naturally give more attention to the Far Left than do these other studies. 91. Chabal, A Divided Republic, 246. 92. Cusset, French Theory, 330. 93. Chabal, A Divided Republic, 2; Geroulanos, Transparency, 20. 94. The literature on French neoliberalism is developing rapidly. For the analysis of policy, see Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, La Grande bifurcation: En finir avec le néolibéralisme (Paris: La Découverte, 2015); Chris Howell, “Regulating Class in the Neoliberal Era: The Role of the State in the Restructuring of Work and Employment Relations,” Work, Employment and Society 30, 4 (2016): 573‒89; and Bruno Amable, “The Political Economy of the Neoliberal Transformation of French Industrial Relations,” ILR Review 69, 3 (May 2016): 523‒50. For intellectual histories of neoliberalism, see François Denord, Néo-­libéralisme, version française: Histoire d’une idéologie politique (Paris: Demopolis, 2007); Michael C. Behrent, “Liberalism Without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-­Market Creed,” Modern Intellectual History 6, 3 (November 2009), 539‒68; Serge Audier, Néo-­libéralisme(s): Une Archéologie intellectuelle (Paris: Grasset, 2012); and Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2014). 95. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 20. 96. Geroulanos, Transparency, 21; Cusset, French Theory, 5; Ross, May ’68, 17.

Chapter 1 1. For an overview of these, see François Duprat, Les Mouvements d’extrême-­droite en France depuis 1944 (Paris: Éditions Albatros, 1972); and Joseph Algazy, L’Extrême-­droite en France de 1965 à 1984 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989). 2. My interpretation is here influenced by Arno Mayer, Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870‒1956: An Analytic Framework (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); and Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 3. These include Franc-­maçonnerie, voilà l’ennemie (Paris: Nouvelle éditions nationales, 1935), and La Finance juive et les trusts . . . (Paris: Jean Renard, 1942). 4. Alain de Benoist, Mémoire vive: Entretiens avec François Bousquet (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2012), 71. 5. Ibid., 67. 6. On Venner, see Frédéric Charpier, Génération Occident: De l’extrême droite à la droite (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 23‒40. 7. Dominique Venner, Pour une critique positive, available online at http://​1000tempetes​ .free​.fr​/venner​_critique​_positive​.pdf. Accessed 30 August 2018. 8. Ibid. 9. Unsigned editorial, “Les Européens,” Europe Action 1 (January 1963), 7. 10. Fabrice Laroche [pseud. Alain de Benoist], “Qu’est-­ce qu’un militant?” Europe Action 8 (August 1943): 42-­48, 44, 45.

234 Notes to Pages 41–46 11. Ibid., 48. 12. Fabrice Laroche [pseud. Alain de Benoist] and François D’Orcival, Le Courage est leur patrie (Paris: Éditions Saint-­Just, 1965). The title is in fact a play on Malraux’s line in L’Espoir, “le courage est une patrie.” 13. On this, see Todd Shepard, Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962‒1979 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 19‒42. 14. Gilles Fournier and Fabrice Laroche [pseud. Alain de Benoist], Vérité pour l’Afrique du Sud (Paris: Saint-­Just, 1965); and François D’Orcival and Fabric Laroche, Rhodésie: Pays de lion fidèles (Paris: Table Ronde, 1966). Tamir Bar-­On has pointed out that Benoist never includes the former book in his bibliography, which means that he is trying to achieve some distance from it. See Tamir Bar-­On, Rethinking the New Right: Alternatives to Modernity (London: Routledge, 2013), 237. 15. There is a vast and rich secondary literature on this theme. See, among others, Sandrine Sanos, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-­Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 16. Jean-­Claude Valla, Engagements pour la civilisation européenne: Souvenirs (Billère: Alexipharmaque), 50, 32. 17. Editorial, “Les Européens,” 8. 18. Unsigned editorial, “Leurs dieux sont morts,” Europe action 2 (February 1963), 10. 19. Benoist, Mémoire vive, 77. 20. This is from Benoist’s obituary, “Dominique Venner,” La Spectacle du monde (May 2009). The text can be found on Benoist’s website, at https://​s3​-­­eu​-­­west1​.amazonaws​.com /alaindebenoist/pdf/venner.pdf. 21. On the day of Venner’s death, Marine Le Pen tweeted a warm salute on behalf of the Front national: “All of our respect to Dominique Venner whose last eminently political gesture was to try to awaken the people of France.” “Le FN ‘respecte’ le suicide de l’extrême droite de Notre Dame,” Libération (26 May 2013). 22. Benoist, Mémoire vive, 112. 23. Michel Wayoff, “Pourquoi un ‘gramscisme de droite,’ ” in GRECE, Pour un “gramscisme de droite,” XVIe colloque national (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1982), 7. For Benoist’s own use of this concept, see Alain de Benoist, “Le Pouvoir culturel,” in Les Idées à l’endroit (Paris: Hallier, 1979), 250‒62. 24. Valla, Engagements, 78. 25. Benoist, Mémoire vive, 103. 26. Valla, Engagements, 78, 79‒80. 27. Ibid., 116‒17. 28. The best source on the early history and personnel of the New Right is Anne-­Marie Duranton-­Crabol, Visages de la nouvelle droite: Le GRECE et son histoire (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1988). 29. Ibid., 114. 30. Valla, Engagements, 151. 31. Benoist, Mémoire vive, 115. 32. Ibid., 106. 33. Valla, Engagements, 144‒45; Benoist, Mémoire vive, 121.

Notes to Pages 46–55

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34. Jean-­Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-­Right Politics in Europe, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2017), 148. 35. Valla, Engagements, 104. Valeurs actuelles was firmly anchored on the extreme Right. Its founding editor, Raymond Bourgine, was a supporter of Algérie française and of Jean-­Louis Tixier-­Vignancour’s presidential run in 1965. Loustau, longtime an editor there, was given a death sentence at the end of the war and was then amnestied in 1954. See Richard Landwehr, French Volunteers of the Waffen-­SS (Brookings, OR.: Siegrunen Publications, 2006), 139. 36. On the club, see Tom McCulloch, “The Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s and 1990s: Ideology and Entryism, the Relationship with the Front National,” French Politics 4 (2006): 158‒78. See also Pierre-­André Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle droite: Jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris: Descartes et Cie, 1994), and, for a GRECE take, Valla, Engagements, 129. 37. Valla, Engagements, 148. 38. See Marc Blachere, “La Mort du magnat du presse Robert Hersant,” L’Humanité (22 April 1996). 39. Valla, Engagements, 164. 40. Many of these responses have been collected in Julien Brunn, ed., La Nouvelle droite: Le Dossier du “procès” (Paris: Oswald, 1979). 41. Robert de Herte [pseud. Alain de Benoist], “Et voici la ‘nouvelle droite,’ ” Éléments 31 (1979), 2. 42. Valla, Engagements, 170. 43. In the 1980s and 1990s, the journal translated and published a number of Benoist’s articles. A special double issue in the early 1990s was devoted entirely to the French New Right. See Telos 98‒99 (Winter 1993‒Fall 1994). 44. Ibid., 179‒81. 45. Alain de Benoist, “Fondements nominalistes d’une attitude devant la vie,” Les Idées à l’endroit, 34. Emphasis in original. 46. Benoist, “Fondements nominalistes,” 31. 47. Ibid., 39. 48. Alain de Benoist and Thomas Molnar, L’Éclipse du sacré (Paris: Table Ronde, 1986), 133. 49. Alain de Benoist, “Le ‘Bolchévisme de l’Antiquité,’ ” Les Idées à l’endroit, 167‒84; Alain de Benoist and Jean-­Luc Marion, Avec ou sans Dieu? (Paris: Beauchesne, 1970), 66. 50. Alain de Benoist, On Being a Pagan, trans. Jon Graham (Atlanta, GA: ULTRA, 2004), 166. The text was published first as Comment peut-­on être païen? (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981). 51. Ibid., 80. 52. Ibid., 11. As here, all emphasis is in the original unless otherwise noted. 53. Benoist, “Fondements nominalistes,” 46, 38. 54. Benoist and Molnar, L’Éclipse du sacré, 113. 55. Benoist, On Being a Pagan, 32. 56. Ibid., 13. 57. Alain de Benoist, “Vingt-­cinq principes de ‘morale,’ ” in Les Idées à l’endroit, 49‒54, 50. 58. Malcolm Bull, “Where Is the Anti-­Nietzsche?” New Left Review 3 (May‒June 2000): 121‒45, 128. 59. Benoist and Molnar, L’Éclipse du sacré, 203, 204. 60. Ibid., 202. 61. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 267. The concept has been

236 Notes to Pages 55–59 revived in the work of the German historical sociologist Wolfgang Streeck. See his How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (New York: Verso, 2016), 35‒46, and “The Return of the Repressed,” New Left Review 104 (March‒April 2017), 5‒18. It has also been invoked by the French anti-­racist Left: Houria Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love, trans. Rachel Valinsky (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2016), 31‒32. 62. Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918‒1932: Ein Handbuch (1949; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 16‒17. 63. Ibid., 15. 64. Roger Griffin, “Between Metapolitics and Apoliteia: The Nouvelle Droite’s Strategy for Conserving the Fascist Vision in the ‘Interregnum,’ ” Modern & Contemporary France 8, 1 (2000): 35‒53. 65. Benoist, Mémoire vive, 213. See also, Alain de Benoist, “Armin Mohler: Un Regard,” in Ulrich Fröschle, Markus Josef Klein, and Michael Paulwitz, eds., Der andere Mohler: Lesebuch für einen Selbstdenker: Armin Mohler zum 75. Geburtstag (Limburg: San Casciano Verlag, 1995), 25‒30. 66. Ibid., 215, 216. 67. See, with an updated bibliography, Armin Mohler, La Révolution Conservatrice en Allemagne 1918‒1932 (Puiseaux: Pardès, 1993). 68. For Benoist’s personal interactions with Jünger, including an incident where Benoist was attacked by anti-­fascist protesters in Berlin in 1993, see Alain de Benoist, “Ernst Jünger et la ‘nouvelle droite,’ ” Sezession (February 2008). The text can be found on Benoist’s website, at https://​s3​-­­eu​-­­west​-­­1​.amazonaws​.com​/alaindebenoist​/pdf​/junger​_et​_la​_nd​.pdf. 69. J. P. Stern, Ernst Jünger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 17. 70. Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). This is the first English translation. The text was originally published in German in 1932 as Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft under Gestalt and can be found in Ernst Jünger, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 8: Essays II (Stuttgart: Klett-­Cotta, 1981). 71. Alain de Benoist, “Ernst Jünger: La Figure du travailleur entre les dieux et les titans,” Nouvelle école 40 (Fall 1983), 11‒61, 21. 72. See Elliot Neaman, “Between Collaboration and Resistance: Ernst Jünger in Paris, 1941‒44,” in Rhine Crossings: France and Germany in Love and War, ed. Aminia M. Brueggemann and Peter Schulman (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 229‒48 73. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957). 74. For a critical portrait of Spengler, see H. Stuart Hughes, Spengler: A Critical Estimate (New York: Scribner, 1952), and for his review of the English translation of Hour, see “Spengler,” New York Review of Books (June 1963). Spengler preferred Mussolini to the Führer. 75. Alain de Benoist, “Préface,” in Oswald Spengler, Années décisives (Paris: Copernic, 1980), 23. 76. Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision: Part One: Germany and World-­Historical Evolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), 3, 89. The central chapter of the book is called “The White World-­Revolution.” 77. Benoist, “Préface,” 18. 78. Theodor W. Adorno, “Spengler After the Decline,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 66. In a stinging summation of the Decline, Adorno wrote, “If one were to characterize Spengler himself in the terminology of the civilization he denounces and name him in his own style, one would have to compare the Decline of the West

Notes to Pages 59–63

237

to a department store where the intellectual agent sells the dried literary scraps he purchased at half-­price at the close-­out sale of culture.” 79. A sizable literature exists on “philosophical anthropology.” I have found useful the essays of Karl-­Siegbert Rehberg; in particular, “Philosophical Anthropology from the End of World War I to the 1940s and in a Current Perspective,” Iris 1, 1 (April 2009): 131‒52. The work of reference is the 700-­page tome by Joachim Fischer, Philosophische Anthropologie: Eine Denkrichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg im Breisgau: Alber, 2009). 80. See Rehberg, “Philosophical Anthropology,” 142; and Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 1831‒1933, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 81. Martin Buber, “The Philosophical Anthropology of Max Scheler,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 6, 2 (December 1945), 307‒321, 307. 82. See, for instance, Jürgen Habermas, “Symbolic Expression and Ritual Behavior: Ernst Cassirer and Arnold Gehlen Revisited,” in Time of Transitions, trans. Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 53‒70; and “Anthropologie,” in A. Diemer and I. Frenzel eds., Fischer-­Lexikon Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1958), 18‒35. Habermas was a student of a leading thinker of philosophical anthropology, Erich Rothacker. See also Wolf Lepenies, “Handlung und Reflexion: Aspekte der Anthropologie Arnold Gehlens,” Soziale Welt 18, 1 (June 1967): 44‒66. 83. Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Natural Place in the World, trans. Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 29. 84. Habermas, “Symbolic Expression,” 60. 85. For some of these, see Lutz Niethammer’s excellent Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1992). 86. F. Seifert, “Zum Verständnis der anthropologischen Wende in der Philosophie,” Blätter für deutsche Philosophie 8 (1934‒35): 393‒410. 87. Alain de Benoist, “Une nouvelle anthropologie,” in Les Idées à l’endroit, 93‒100, 96. 88. See Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle droite. 89. Alain de Benoist, Vu de droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines (Paris: Copernic, 1977), 324. 90. Alain de Benoist, Des Animaux et des hommes: La Place de l’homme dans la nature (Billère: Alexipharmaque, 2010), 51, 63, 65, 87. 91. Benoist, Mémoire vive, 177. 92. Benoist, On Being a Pagan, 41. 93. Alain de Benoist, “L’Idéologie du genre,” in Les Démons du bien (Paris: Pierre-­Guillaume de Roux, 2013), 130. This text expanded on an earlier pamphlet, Alain de Benoist, Non à la théorie du genre (No to the Theory of Gender) (Paris: Éditions Mordicus, 2014). The title borrowed one of the slogans adopted by the anti‒gay-­marriage Manif pour tous (Demonstration for all) movement. 94. Alain de Benoist, Famille et société: Origines, histoire, actualité (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1996), ch. 1. 95. Benoist, Mémoire vive, 172. 96. Benoist, On Being a Pagan, 4, 201, 3. 97. Benoist, “Préface,” 28. 98. Alain de Benoist, Orientations pour les années décisives (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1982), 32. 99. Ibid., 12, 60, 31, 32. See also Alain de Benoist, Europe, tiers monde, même combat (Europe, Third World: Same Struggle) (Paris: Laffont, 1986).

238 Notes to Pages 64–70 100. Benoist, Orientations, 27. 101. Ibid., 61, 9. 102. Alain de Benoist, Bibliographie générale des droites française, 4 vols. (Paris: Dualpha, 2004‒5). See also, among others, Alain de Benoist, Bibliographie internationale de l’oeuvre de Louis-­Ferdinand Céline (Paris: Pierre Guillaume de Roux, 2015); and Alain de Benoist, Charles Maurras et l’Action française (Lyon: Niherne, 2002). 103. Maurice Olender, “Georges Dumézil: The Political Use of the Indo-­European Pre-­ History,” in Roger-­Pol Droit, ed., Greeks and Romans in the Modern World (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1998), 191‒209, 191. 104. Georges Dumézil, “Entretien,” Nouvelle école 10 (October 1969), 44. 105. Carlo Ginzburg, “German Mythology and Nazism: Thoughts on an Old Book by Dumézil,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 130; and Arnaldo Momigliano, “Georges Dumézil and the Trifunctional Approach to Roman Civilization,” History and Theory 23, 3 (October 1984). 106. See Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 121‒22. 107. Dumézil defended himself in an extended published interview with the Foucault scholar, Didier Eribon. See Georges Dumézil, Entretiens avec Didier Eribon (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). Eribon was Dumézil’s leading apologist and wrote the exculpatory, Faut-­il brûler Dumézil? Mythologie, science et politique (Paris: Flammarion, 1992). 108. Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 137. 109. Benoist, Mémoire vive, 166. 110. Benoist, “L’ordre,” Les Idées à l’endroit, 104. 111. For scholarship on the New Right’s use of Indo-­European ideas, see Stéphane François, “La Nouvelle Droite et les Indo-­Européens: Une anthropologie d’extrême droite,” Terrain: Anthropologie & sciences humaines 56 (2011): 136‒51; and Tamir Bar-­On, Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 138‒61. 112. Alain de Benoist, “L’Europe retrouvée,” in Maiastra (pseudonymous collection of authors), Renaissance de l’Occident? (Paris: Plon, 1979), 308. 113. Alain de Benoist, Dictionnaire des prénoms: D’hier et d’aujourd’hui, d’ici et d’ailleurs (Paris: Les Éditions des Monts Arrée, 2009), 11. The text was first published as Le Guide pratique des prénoms (Paris: Publications Groupe-­Média, 1979). 114. Alain de Benoist, Les Traditions d’Europe (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1982), G/T 13, p. 2 (the book does not follow normal pagination). 115. Benoist, Famille et société, 60. 116. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 2‒3. 117. Quoted in Alan Macfarlane, “Louis Dumont and the Origins of Individualism,” Cambridge Anthropology (1992): 1‒28, 3. 118. I have examined this relationship in Jacob Collins, “French Liberalism’s ‘Indian Detour’: Louis Dumont, the Individual, and Liberal Political Thought in Post-­68 France,” Modern Intellectual History 12, 3 (2015): 685‒710. 119. Benoist, Orientations, 36. For Benoist’s remarks on the importance of Dumont to his thought, see Benoist, Mémoire vive, 225‒26. 120. Pierre Bérard, “Louis Dumont: Anthropologie et modernité,” Nouvelle école 39 (November 1982): 95‒115, 99‒100.

Notes to Pages 70–76

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121. Scholars have rightly attacked the double-­handedness of this catchphrase. But has anyone challenged it on philosophical grounds? On what basis can this thinker who is hostile to the natural law tradition proclaim difference to be a “right”? What guarantees it? Who enforces it? 122. Benoist, Mémoire vive, 173. Benoist also relied heavily on Lévi-­Strauss in his book on the family and gender. See Benoist, Famille et société, 32‒33, 40‒43. 123. On Lévi-­Strauss’s politics, see, among others, Wiktor Stoczkowski, Anthropologies rédemptrices: Le Monde selon Lévi-­Strauss (Paris: Hermann, 2008), and Jean-­Loup Amselle, Affirmative Exclusion: Cultural Pluralism and the Rule of Custom in France, trans. Jean-­Marie Todd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 124. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), 45, 10. For a more conservative expression of these ideas, see Lévi-­Strauss’s follow-­up essay, “Race and Culture,” in The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 3‒24. 125. See Bar-­On, Rethinking the French New Right, 125. 126. For a full menu and definition of these, see the classic work, Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973), 1‒38. 127. For the social theory of nineteenth-­century legitimists, see Steven Kale, Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society, 1852‒1883 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); and Sudhir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 128. Benoist and Molnar, L’Éclipse du sacré, 102. Here I use Karen E. Fields’s English translation: Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1995), 230. 129. Benoist, Mémoire vive, 192. 130. Alain de Benoist, Au-­delà des Droits de l’homme: Pour défendre les libertés (Paris: Krisis, 2004). The text was republished in 2016 by the press Pierre-­Guillaume de Roux. 131. Alain de Benoist, “Dissolution du lien social et retour des communautés,” in Ligne de mire: Discours aux citoyens européens, II: 1988‒1995 (Arpajon: Le Labyrinthe, 1996), 189‒217. 132. For a comparison of the New Right and the FN, see Michalina Vaughan, “The Extreme Right in France: ‘Lepénisme’ or the Politics of Fear,” in The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe, ed. Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson, and Michalina Vaughan (London: Longman, 1995): 215‒33. 133. Alain de Benoist, “Entretien sur le Front national de Marine Le Pen,” Flash (January 2011). https://​s3​-­­eu​-­­west​-­­1​.amazonaws​.com​/alaindebenoist​/pdf​/entretien​_sur​_le​_front​ _national​.pdf. Accessed 30 August 2018. 134. During the early 1980s, Faye was one of the most active and visible members of the New Right. The book pronouncing his racist views was Guillaume Faye, Colonisation de l’Europe: Discours vrai sur l’immigration et l’Islam (Paris: L’Æncre, 2000). 135. Griffin, “Between Metapolitics and Apoliteia,” 50‒51. 136. See Alain de Benoist, Démocratie: Le Problème (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985). 137. Camus and Lebourg, Far-­Right Politics, 130‒31. 138. Alain de Benoist, “ ‘Souverainistes’ et souveraineté,” in Critiques—Théoriques (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 2002), 482. See also Benoist’s “Johannes Althusius,” in Critiques—Théoriques, 283‒313. 139. Alain de Benoist, “L’Idée de l’empire,” in Critiques—Théoriques, 460. 140. Alain de Benoist, “Maastricht et la mémoire de l’avenir,” in La Ligne de mire II, 107‒133, 112. See also Charles Champetier, “Maastricht: Non,” Éléments 75 (September 1992), 3‒4.

240 Notes to Pages 76–84 141. Alain de Benoist, “Russie: L’Histoire ouverte,” Éléments 74 (Spring 1992), 36. Benoist here includes a photo with Alexander Dugin standing in Moscow’s Red Square. 142. Alain de Benoist, Carl Schmitt actuel: “Guerre juste,” terrorisme, l’état d’urgence, “nomos de la terre” (Paris: Krisis, 2007), more recently appearing in English as Carl Schmitt Today: Terrorism, “Just” War, and the State of Emergency, trans. Alexander Jacob (London: Arktos, 2013). See also Benoist’s preface to Carl Schmitt, Du Politique: “Légalité et légitimité” et autres essais (Puiseaux: Pardès, 1990); and Alain de Benoist, Carl Schmitt: Internationale Bibliographie der Primär-­und Sekundärliteratur (Graz: ARES, 2010). 143. Alain de Benoist, preface to Ernst Niekisch, Hitler—Une fatalité allemande et autres écrits nationaux-­bolcheviks (Puiseaux: Pardès, 1991). 144. Michael O’Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-­Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (London: Arktos, 2013), 243. O’Meara is a neo-­rightist sympathizer. The book first appeared in 2004 but was later republished by the neo-­rightist media outlet Arktos. There are so many misspellings of French words in the bibliography as to call into question the author’s command of the language. 145. See Razmig Keucheyan, “Alain de Benoist, du néofascisme à l’extrême-­droite ‘respectable,’ ” Revue crieur 6 (February 2017), 129‒43, 133. 146. Benoist presented a paper, “The Identity Question,” at the Alt-­Right’s National Policy Insitute in Washington in 2013. The theme of the conference was “After the Fall: The Future of Identity.” Video available at https://​arktos​.com​/people​/alain​-­­de​-­­benoist/. Benoist has since distanced himself from the group. See J. Lester Feder and Pierre Buet, “The Man Who Gave White Nationalism a New Life,” BuzzFeed News (27 December 2017), www​.buzzfeed​.com​/lesterfeder​ /the​-­­man​-­­who​-­­gave​-­­white​-­­nationalism​-­­a​-­­new​-­­life​?utm​_term​=​.mg2EXXm2Xq​#​.rjbo004V0L. 147. Ariane Chemin, “Alain de Benoist, intellectuel d’extrême droite, accueilli à bras ouverts à Sciences Po,” Le Monde (21 April 2016). 148. Ariane Chemin, “La Seconde Jeunesse d’Alain de Benoist,” Le Monde (10 January 2017).

Chapter 2 1. Marcel Gauchet, La Condition politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 13. 2. Alain Badiou and Marcel Gauchet, What Is to Be Done? A Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism, and the Future of Democracy, trans. Susan Spitzer (London: Polity, 2016), 3‒4. 3. Marcel Gauchet, La Condition historique: Entretiens avec François Azouvi et Sylvain Piron (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 20. 4. Ibid., 29. 5. Unsigned editorial, Textures 2‒3 (1971), 4. 6. Gauchet, Condition historique, 61‒62. 7. Claude Lefort, “An Interview with Claude Lefort,” Telos 30 (Winter 1976‒77), 173‒92, 173. The text originally appeared in the journal Anti-­mythes 14 (1975): 1‒30. 8. Claude Lefort, “Philosophie et non-­philosophie,” L’Esprit 66, 6 (June 1982), 102. 9. Philippe Gottraux, “Socialisme ou Barbarie”: Un engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de l’après guerre (Paris: Payot, 1997), 21. 10. See Castoriadis’s most fully developed Socialist text, “On the Content of Socialism, I,” in Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings I, 290‒309, esp. 298‒303. The text originally appeared as “Sur le contenu du socialisme,” Socialisme ou Barbarie 17 (July 1955), 67‒102. It was followed by two later installments, “On the Content of Socialism, II,” and “III.”

Notes to Pages 84–89

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11. Claude Lefort, “What Is Bureaucracy?” in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 106. The text appeared originally as “Qu’est-­ce que la bureaucratie?” Arguments 17 (1960): 64‒81. 12. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Recommencing the Revolution,” in Political and Social Writings, vol. III: 1961‒1979, trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 37. The text originally appeared as “Récommencer la révolution,” Socialisme ou Barbarie 35 (January 1964): 1‒36. 13. Castoriadis, “Recommencing the Revolution,” 29. 14. Cornelius Castoriadis, “For a New Orientation,” in Political and Social Writings III, 7‒17. The text was first published in Cornelius Castoriadis, L’Expérience du mouvement ouvrier, 1: Comment lutter (Paris: 10/18, 1974). This technique could be seen at work in the cinematic masterpiece of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, Chronique d’un été, from 1961. It also became a key element of the autonomia movement in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. On this, see Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2017), ch. 2; and Andrea Cavazzini, Enquête ouvrière et théorie critique: Enjeux et figures de la centralité ouvrière dans l’Italie des années 1960 (Liège: Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2013). 15. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Anticipated Revolution,” in Political and Social Writings III, 152. The text originally appeared in Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort, Jean Marc Coudray [pseud. Cornelius Castoriadis], Mai 68: La Brèche (Paris: Fayard, 1968), 91‒142. 16. Castoriadis, “For a New Orientation,” 16‒17. 17. For scholarship dealing with Lefort’s early engagement with anthropology, see Natalie J. Doyle, “Democracy as Socio-­Cultural Project of Individual and Collective Sovereignty: Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet and the French Debate on Modern Autonomy,” Thesis Eleven 75 (2003): 69‒95, esp. 72‒74; Samuel Moyn, “Savage and Modern Liberty: Marcel Gauchet and the Origins of New French Thought,” European Journal of Political Theory 4, 2 (2005): 164‒87; and Warren Breckman, “Lefort and the Symbolic Dimension,” Constellations 19, 1 (2012): 30‒36. 18. Claude Lefort, “L’Oeuvre de Clastres,” in L’Esprit des lois sauvages: Pierre Clastres ou une nouvelle anthropologie politique, ed. Miguel Abensour (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 186‒87. This text was reprinted as “Dialogue avec Pierre Clastres,” in Claude Lefort, Écrire: À l’épreuve du politique (Paris: Calmann Lévy), 303‒35. For the English translation, see Claude Lefort, Writing the Political Test, trans. David Ames Curtis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 207‒35. 19. Claude Lefort, “Société ‘sans histoire’ et historicité,” Les Formes de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 39. This text appeared originally in Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 12 (1952): 91‒114. 20. Claude Lefort, “L’Échange et la lutte des hommes,” Les Formes de l’histoire, 27. This text originally appeared in Les Temps modernes 64 (1951): 1401‒17. 21. Castoriadis, “The Anticipated Revolution,” 125‒26. 22. Claude Lefort, “Le Désordre nouveau,” in Mai 68: La Brèche, 49. 23. Lefort, “An Interview with,” 187. For more on the differences in their analyses of 1968, see Antoine Chollet, “Claude Lefort et Cornelius Castoriadis: Regards croisés sur Mai 68,” Politique et sociétés 34, 1 (2015), 37‒60. 24. Lefort, “Le Désordre nouveau,” 39. 25. Claude Lefort, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society, 304; and Claude Lefort, Le Travail de l’oeuvre: Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 433.

242 Notes to Pages 89–96 26. Lefort, “Image of the Body,” 303, translation modified. 27. Ibid., 298‒99. 28. Ibid., 303. 29. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (London: Polity Press, 1987), 146. For the French, see L’Institution imaginaire de la société (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 30. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, 214. 31. Even though the foundations of Castoriadis’s work were in deep tension with Marx’s thought by the mid-­1970s, he never renounced Marxism or his belief in the imminence of revolutionary change. For Castoriadis’s later comments on Marx, see, for example, “Marx aujourd’hui: Entretien avec des militants libertaires,” Lutter 5 (May‒August 1983): 7‒15. For a Marxist consideration of Castoriadis’s position, see Daniel Bensaïd, “Politiques de Castoriadis: Castoriadis corrige Marx?,” Contretemps 21 (2008): 131‒42. 32. Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet, “Sur la démocratie: Le Politique et l’institution du social,” Textures 2‒3 (1971): 7‒78, 16. 33. Ibid., 9. 34. Marcel Gauchet, “Figures de la souveraineté,” Textures 2‒3 (1971): 131‒57, 143. 35. Ibid., 150, 153. 36. Philippe Gottraux, “Socialisme ou Barbarie”: Un engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de l’après-­guerre (Paris: Payot, 1997), 205. 37. Samuel Moyn, “Claude Lefort, Political Anthropology, and Symbolic Division,” Constellations 19, 1 (2012): 37‒50, 38. 38. Pierre Clastres, “Copernicus and the Savages,” in Society Against the State, trans. Robert Hurley in collaboration with Abe Stein (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), 17, 14, 17. 39. Pierre Clastres, “Marxists and Their Anthropology,” in Archeologies of Violence, trans. Jeanine Herman (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010), 224. The essay was first published in Libre 3 (1977): 135‒49, and was written a few days before Clastres’s death. 40. Ibid., 222. 41. Ibid., 224‒25. 42. Pierre Clastres, “Exchange and Power: Philosophy of the Indian Chieftainship,” in Society Against the State, 28. The essay originally appeared as “Échange et pouvoir: philosophie de la chefferie indienne,” L’Homme 2, 1 (1962): 51‒65. Remarkably, this essay was published before Clastres did his fieldwork in South America. 43. Ibid., 32. 44. Ibid., 35. 45. Pierre Clastres, “Power in Primitive Societies,” in Archeologies of Violence, 169. The essay was first published in Interrogations 7 (June 1976): 3‒8. 46. See Emmanuel Terray, “Une nouvelle anthropologie politique?,” L’Homme 29, 110 (April‒June, 1989): 5‒29, 21. See also the critical essays of Jean-­Loup Amselle, ed., Sauvage à la mode (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1979). 47. References to these can be found, respectively, in Clastres, Archeologies of Violence, 169, 198, and 168. 48. Clastres, “Exchange and Power,” 34‒35. 49. Clastres, “Society Against the State,” in Society Against the State, 163. 50. Pierre Clastres, “Archeology of Violence: War in Primitive Societies,” in Archeologies of Violence, 274. This text was first published in Libre 1 (1977): 137‒73.

Notes to Pages 96–105

243

51. Lefort, “Dialogue avec Pierre Clastres,” 116. 52. Gauchet, Condition historique, 64. 53. Marcel Gauchet, “Politique et société: La Leçon des sauvages,” Cahiers de l’ISEA: Économies et sociétés, Series S, Études de Marxologie 17 (October 1974): 1563‒69, 1564, 1569. 54. Ibid., 1568. 55. Marcel Gauchet, “Politique et société: La Leçon des sauvages,” in La Condition politique, 91‒180, 107. This text was originally published in two parts, the first in Textures 10‒11 (1975): 57‒86, and the second in Textures 12‒13 (1976): 67‒105. 56. Gauchet, Condition historique, 73. 57. Ibid., 71. 58. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 236; in French, La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962), 312‒13. 59. Gauchet, Condition historique, 73. 60. Gauchet, “Politique et société” (1975/76) 112. 61. Ibid., 132. 62. Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 6. For the PCF’s handling of this controversy, see Philippe Robrieux, Histoire intérieure du parti communiste, vol. III: 1972‒1982 (Paris: Fayard, 1982), 173‒80. 63. Gauchet, Condition historique, 158. 64. Pierre Clastres, “Entretien avec L’Anti-­mythes,” in Pierre Clastres, ed. Anne Kupiec and Miguel Abensour (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2011), 36. 65. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Revolutionary Exigency,” in Political and Social Writings III, 237, 245, 238. This text is an interview with Olivier Mongin, Paul Thibaud, and Pierre Rosanvallon that originally appeared in L’Esprit (February 1977): 201‒30. 66. Marcel Gauchet, “L’Expérience totalitaire et la pensée de la politique,” in Condition politique, 458. 67. Olivier Mongin, “Penser le politique contre la domination (sur quelques travaux de Lefort et Gauchet),” Esprit (October 1975), 516. 68. Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left, 141. 69. Miguel Abensour and Marcel Gauchet, “Les Leçons de la servitude et leur destin,” in Étienne de la Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire (Paris: Payot, 1976), xiv, viii. 70. Ibid., xxvi‒xxvii. 71. Pierre Clastres, “Freedom, Misfortune, the Unnameable,” in Archeologies of Violence, 173. This article originally appeared as “La Boétie et la question du politique,” in La Boétie, Discours, 229‒46. 72. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3, 429. 73. Ibid., 360, 428, 451. 74. Ibid., 423, 386. For commentary on these passages, I have found useful Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (London: Routledge, 2000), esp. chs. 5 and 6. 75. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977‒1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 109. 76. For Foucault’s politics in the late 1970s, see Michael C. Behrent, “Liberalism Without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-­Market Creed, 1976‒1979,” Modern Intellectual History 6, 3 (2009): 539‒68. Deleuze and the Libre circle were much more critical of the New

244 Notes to Pages 105–114 Philosophers than was Foucault. See Gilles Deleuze, “Les Nouveaux philosophes,” Minuit 24, suppl. (May 1977); and Cornelius Castoriadis, “Les Divertisseurs,” Nouvel observateur 658 (June 20‒26, 1977), 50‒51; translated as “The Diversionists,” in Political and Social Writings III, 272‒80. 77. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 286. 78. Ibid., 110, 165, 175, 182‒83, 148. 79. Ibid., 201, 364‒65, 357. 80. Marcel Gauchet, “La Dette du sens et les racines de l’État—Politique de la religion primitive,” Libre 2 (1977): 5‒43, here cited in La Condition politique, 66. 81. Ibid., 88‒89. 82. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 21. The text first appeared as Le Désenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). 83. Ibid., 41‒42. 84. Ibid., 49, 108. 85. Ibid., 50. 86. Ibid., 205, 77, 118, 124, 77. 87. Ibid., 76. 88. Ibid., 135, 163, 206. 89. Ibid., 9. 90. Emmanuel Terray, “Sur Le Désenchantement du monde de Marcel Gauchet,” Le Genre humain 23 (Spring 1991), 109‒28. 91. Marcel Gauchet, “On n’échappe pas à la philosophie de l’histoire,” in La Condition politique, 181‒203, 184, 201. The article appeared in the same issue of Le Genre humain as Terray’s essay. 92. Ibid., 174. 93. Ibid., 181. 94. See Cornelius Castoriadis, Devant la guerre: Les Réalités (Paris: Fayard, 1981), the first of two planned volumes, the second of which never arrived. For a point by point refutation of this book, see Jacques Sapir, The Soviet Military System, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 95. On the relationship between Lefort and Gauchet on human rights, see Samuel Moyn, “The Politics of Individual Rights: Marcel Gauchet and Claude Lefort,” in French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day, ed. Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 291‒310. 96. Claude Lefort, “Politics and Human Rights,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 272. The article was first published as “Droits de l’homme et politique,” Libre 7 (1980): 45‒83, and reprinted in Claude Lefort, L’Invention démocratique: Les Limites de domination totalitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1981), 159‒76. 97. Marcel Gauchet, “Les Droits de l’homme ne sont pas une politique,” Le Débat 3 (July‒ August 1980): 3‒21. It was republished, with new footnotes, in Marcel Gauchet, La Démocratie contre elle-­même (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 1‒26, 17. 98. For an excellent discussion of rights in Gauchet’s work, see Geneviève Souillac, Human Rights in Crisis: The Sacred and the Secular in Contemporary French Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005). 99. Gauchet, Disenchantment, 47.

Notes to Pages 115–120

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100. Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, Madness and Democracy: The Modern Psychiatric Universe, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 255. This is only a partial translation of the original, La Pratique de l’esprit humain: L’Institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). The book was written as an alternative to the anti-­psychiatric philosophy of Foucault, whom the book greatly angered. On the relationship of Gauchet to Foucault, see Wim Weymans. “Revising Foucault’s Model of Modernity and Exclusion: Gauchet and Swain on Madness and Democracy,” Thesis Eleven 98, 1 (2009): 33‒51; and Michel Feher, “Les Interrègnes de Michel Foucault,” Pensée avec Michel Foucault, Théories critiques et pratiques politiques (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2005), 251‒99. 101. Particularly influential for Gauchet’s framing of this problem was the anthropology of Louis Dumont, made clear in Marcel Gauchet, “De l’avènement de l’individu à la découverte de la société,” in La Condition politique, 405‒31. For comments on this relationship, see Jacob Collins, “French Liberalism’s ‘Indian Detour’: Louis Dumont, the Individual, and Liberal Political Thought in Post-­68 France,” Modern Intellectual History 12, 3 (2015): 685‒710. 102. Marcel Gauchet, “Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous,” in La Condition politique, 304–403, 357‒58. The text originally appeared in Libre 7 (1980): 43‒120. 103. Badiou and Gauchet, What Is to Be Done?, 139. 104. Marcel Gauchet, “Benjamin Constant: L’Illusion lucide du libéralisme,” preface to Benjamin Constant, Écrits politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 87. 105. Ibid., 97. 106. Gauchet, La Condition historique, 160‒61. 107. Quoted from Dominique Lecourt, The Mediocracy: French Philosophy Since 1968, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2001), 74. 108. Marcel Gauchet, La Révolution des pouvoirs: La Souveraineté, le peuple et la représentation, 1789‒1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 7; Gauchet, “Constant: L’Illusion lucide,” 91‒92. 109. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 11‒12. The best work on Furet is Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left, 229‒66. 110. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 77, 12, 78. 111. Claude Lefort, “Penser la révolution dans la Révolution française,” Annales ESC 35, 2 (March ‒April 1980), 334‒352, 352. 112. Marcel Gauchet, La Révolution des droits de l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 19‒35. 113. For commentary, see Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty: Political Essays, trans. James Ingram (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 40. The book was originally published as La Proposition de l’égaliberté (Paris: PUF, 2010). 114. Marcel Gauchet, “La Droite et gauche,” Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 3, part 1, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 419. 115. Gauchet, “Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous,” 381. 116. On Foucault’s neoliberal affinities, see Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent, eds. Foucault and Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016). 117. Marcel Gauchet, “Essai de psychologie contemporaine, I,” in La Démocratie contre elle-­ même, 229‒62, 237. The essay appeared in Le Débat 99 (March‒April 1998): 164‒81. 118. Gauchet, “Constant: L’Illusion lucide,” 94‒95. 119. Marcel Gauchet, Éric Conan, and François Azouvi, Comprendre le malheur français (Paris: Stock, 2016), 18. 120. Ibid., 122‒23 (emphasis in original).

246 Notes to Pages 120–129 121. Marcel Gauchet, “L’École à l’école d’elle-­même,” in Gauchet, La Démocratie contre elle-­ même, 109‒69, 120, 121. The essay was first published in Le Débat 37 (November ‒December 1985): 55‒86. 122. See Natalie J. Doyle, Marcel Gauchet and the Loss of Common Purpose: Imaginary Islam and the Crisis of Modern European Democracy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017). 123. Gauchet, Disenchantment, 4. 124. Marcel Gauchet, “Les Ressorts du fondamentalisme islamique,” Le Débat 185 (May‒ August 2015), 63‒81, 77. 125. Gauchet, “Essai de psychologie contemporaine,” 239, 241. 126. For comments on Gauchet’s politics of gender, see Camille Robcis, “Republicanism and the Critique of Human Rights,” in France Since the 1970s: History, Memory, and Politics in an Age of Uncertainty, ed. Emile Chabal (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 225‒43. 127. The state figures as a theme in Gauchet’s tetralogy of modern democracy, L’Avenèment de la démocratie. There is not sufficient space here to cover these developments. My thoughts on these issues, however, can be found in a review of the third volume: Jacob Collins, “A Metaphysics of Democracy,” New Left Review 74 (March‒April 2012): 145‒54. 128. Marcel Gauchet, “Pacification démocratique, désertion civique,” Le Débat 60 (May‒ August 1990), reprinted in La Démocratie contre elle-­même, 176‒198. 129. Badiou and Gauchet, What Is to Be Done?, 80. 130. The phrase comes from Natalie J. Doyle’s excellent book, Marcel Gauchet and the Loss of Common Purpose. 131. Marcel Gauchet, “Le Tournant de 1995 ou les voies secrètes de la société libérale,” in La Démocratie contre elle-­même, 296‒325, 325, 314‒15. 132. Unsigned editorial, “Arguments pour une réforme,” Le Débat 89 (March‒April 1996): 4‒18, 11. 133. Gauchet, “Tocqueville,” 380. 134. Badiou and Gauchet, What Is to Be Done?, 68‒72.

Chapter 3 1. Emmanuel Todd, Allah n’y est pour rien! Sur les révolutions arabes et quelques autres (Paris: Le Publieur, 2011), 40. 2. Emmanuel Todd, “Contre la monnaie unique, le choix de la nation et du bon sens économique,” Les Cahiers du communisme 1‒2 (1997), 170. 3. Emmanuel Todd, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems, trans. David Garrioch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 17. The original text appeared as Emmanuel Todd, La Troisième Planète: Structures familiales et systèmes idéologiques (Paris: Seuil, 1983). 4. Todd, Explanation of Ideology, 108‒32. 5. Ibid., 99‒108. 6. Ibid., 103. 7. Ibid., 55‒98. 8. Ibid., 33‒34. 9. Ibid., 146. 10. Ibid., 155‒95. 11. Ibid., 33. 12. Andrew Glyn et al., “The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age,” in The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience, ed. Stephen A. Marglin, and Juliet B. Schor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 39‒125, 112‒13.

Notes to Pages 129–135

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13. Emmanuel Todd, The Causes of Progress: Culture, Authority and Change, trans. Richard Boulind (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1987), 1. The text was originally published as Emmanuel Todd, L’Enfance du monde: Structures familiales et développement (Paris: Seuil, 1984). 14. Todd, Causes of Progress, 136, 2. 15. Ibid., xiii. 16. Ibid., 16, 21. 17. Ibid., 137, 157. 18. Ibid., 169‒75. 19. Ibid., 183. 20. Ibid., 8‒9. 21. Emmanuel Todd, La Diversité du monde: Structures familiales et modernité (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 8. This book combined both La Troisième planète and L’Enfance du monde into one volume, with a new preface by Todd. 22. There has been little commentary in France on these works. The exceptions are Claudette Savonnet-­Guyot, “La Force du destin: Anthropologie et politique,” Revue française de science politique 33, 4 (1983): 721‒36; Hugues Lagrange and Sebastian Roche, “Types familiaux et géographie en France,” Revue française de science politique 38, 6 (1988): 941‒64; and Henri Mendras, “Untitled Review,” Revue française de sociologie 25, 3 (July‒September 1984): 484‒89. Mendras, one of France’s leading demographers, is considerably warmer toward Todd’s theories in his classic La Seconde révolution française, 1965‒1984 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). 23. Theodore M. Porter, “Reforming Vision: The Engineer Le Play Learns to Observe Society Sagely,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 281‒302, 283. 24. Catherine Bodard Silver, preface to Frédéric Le Play, On Family, Work, and Social Change, ed. Catherine Bodard Silver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3‒134, 17‒19. 25. Frédéric Le Play, “Les Origines de la méthode,” in Les Ouvriers européens: Études sur les travaux, la vie domestique et la condition morale des populations ouvrières de l’Europe, et leur relations avec les autres classes, précédé d’un exposé de la méthode d’observation, vol. I (Tours: Mame, 1879). 26. See Frédéric Le Play, Descriptions des procédés métallurgiques employés dans le pays de Galles pour la fabrication du cuivre et recherches sur l’état actuel et sur l’avenir probable de la production et du commerce de ce métal (Paris: Carilian-­Goeury, 1848), 20. 27. Le Play, “Les Origines de la méthode,” 24, 18. 28. Frédéric Le Play, “Observations sur le mouvement commercial des principales substances minérales, entre la France et les puissances étrangères,” Annales des mines 3, 2 (1832): 501‒46, 501. On Le Play as engineer-­social scientist, see Françoise Arnault, Frédéric Le Play: De la métallurgie à la science sociale (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993); Antoine Savoye and Frédéric Audren, Naissance de l’ingénieur social: Les Ingénieurs des mines et la sciences sociale au XIXe siècle (Paris: Presses des Mines). 29. Frédéric Le Play, Vues générales sur la statistique: Suivies d’un aperçu d’une statistique (Paris: Bourgogne and Martinet, 1840), 4, 9. 30. Michael Z. Brooke, Le Play: Engineer and Social Scientist (London: Longman, 1970), 50. 31. Porter, “Reforming Vision,” 288. 32. Silver, Preface, 66. 33. For notes on the organization of Ouvriers and Le Play’s contributions to quantitative sociology, see Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Notes on the History of Quantification: Trends, Sources, Problems,” Isis 52, 2 (June 1961): 277‒333, 311‒15.

248 Notes to Pages 135–140 34. Le Play, “Paysans à corvée des steppes d’Orenbourg,” Les Ouvriers, vol. II, 47‒98, 52. 35. Brooke, Le Play, 56. 36. Le Play, “La Constitution des races de l’Orient,” Les Ouvriers, vol. II, ix‒xxxiv, xxx. 37. Le Play, “La Constitution sociale des races du nord,” Les Ouvriers, vol. III, ix‒xlii, xxix. 38. Le Play, “La Constitution sociale des races ébranlées de l’Occident,” Les Ouvriers, vol. V, ix‒l, x. 39. Le Play, “Le Paysan-­savonnier de la basse Provence,” Les Ouvriers, vol. IV, 390‒444, 441. 40. Le Play, “Éléments divers de la constitution sociale,” Les Ouvriers, vol. V, 358‒74, 367. 41. Karl Marx, “A Workers’ Inquiry,” La Revue socialiste (20 April 1880). The text can be found online at www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/marx​/works​/1880​/04​/20​.htm. 42. Frédéric Le Play, La Réforme sociale en France, déduite de l’observation comparée des peuples européens, vol. I (Tours: Mame, 1864), 12. See also, Maguelone Nouvel, Frédéric Le Play: Une réforme sociale sous le Second Empire (Paris: Economica, 2009). 43. Le Play, La Réforme sociale, vol. I, 310. 44. Frédéric Le Play, L’Organisation de la famille, selon le vrai modèle signalé par l’histoire de toutes les races et de tous le temps (Tours: Mame, 1871), xvi. 45. Le Comte H. Aymer de la Chevalerie, M. Le Play: Son système réformiste; ses ouvrages, l’Union de la paix sociale (Paris: E. Dentu, 1877), 31. 46. On Le Play’s legacy, see Bernard Kalaora and Antoine Savoye, Les Inventeurs oubliés: Le Play et ses continuateurs aux origines des sciences sociales (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1989). On the natalist and familial debates, see Camille Robcis, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 25‒38. 47. Silver, Preface, 6. 48. Lazarsfeld noted that Le Play’s ideas were known to be “fascistic.” Lazarsfeld, “Notes on the History of Quantification,” 317. 49. Peter Laslett, “The Gentry of Kent in 1640,” Cambridge Historical Journal 9, 2 (1948): 148‒64, 148. 50. Ibid., 149, 150. 51. This biographical overview of Laslett draws from Richard Whatmore, “Introduction to the Princeton Classics Edition” of J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), vii‒xxii, xiii‒xv. 52. Peter Laslett, Patriarcha: Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1949). 53. See J. G. A. Pocock, “Present at the Creation: With Laslett to the Lost Worlds,” International Journal of Public Affairs 2 (2006): 7‒17. 54. Peter Laslett, ed., Philosophy, Politics, and Society: A Collection (New York: Macmillan, 1956). 55. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost—Further Explored (London: Routledge, 1983), 18, 21. The latter passage came in for caustic treatment in E. P. Thompson, “The Patricians and the Plebs,” in Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993), 19. 56. Peter Laslett, “Introduction: The History of the Family,” in Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 16. The assertions made here had already been put forward in “Size and Structure of the Household in England over Three Centuries,” Population Studies 23, 2 (1969): 199‒223; and “The

Notes to Pages 141–145

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Comparative History of Household and Family,” Journal of Social History 4, 1 (Autumn 1970): 75‒87. They were subsequently refined in Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Peter Laslett et al., eds., Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 57. Laslett, “Introduction,” 18, 73. Laslett later regretted the boldness of his assertion and qualified it on many occasions. For one, see Peter Laslett, “The Character of Familial History, Its Limitations, and the Conditions of Its Proper Pursuit,” Journal of Family History 12, 1‒2 (1987): 263‒84. 58. Laslett’s claims provoked a wave of backlash from social scientists in the 1970s. For a sample of these, see the essays in Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson, eds. Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200‒1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 59. Laslett, “Introduction,” 24, 49, 46, 10. 60. Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, A Seventeenth-­Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 159. 61. In a memorial “pen-­portrait” of Laslett, his close personal friend Macfarlane reported, “The developing findings of Peter and the Cambridge Group always influenced my writings.” Alan Macfarlane, “People Who Have Influenced Me the Most: Peter Laslett” (2002), which can be found on his website, at www​.alanmacfarlane​.com​/TEXTS​/PeterLaslett​.pdf. 62. Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and the Social Transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). For critical comments on this text, see Perry Anderson, “A Culture in Contraflow, II,” New Left Review I/182 (July‒August 1990), 85‒137, 125. 63. The influence of English social history in French thought has been neglected in the French historiography. For two notable exceptions, see Paul-­André Rosental, “Les Liens familiaux, forme historique?,” Annales de démographie historique 2 (2000): 49‒81; and Vincent Gourdon and François-­Joseph Ruggiu, “Richard Wall en France: Retour vers le futur?” Revista de Demografía Histórica 33, 2 (2015): 65‒86. Todd’s work is mentioned only in passing in the second of these, and not at all in the first. 64. Emmanuel Todd, “Seven Peasant Communities in Pre-­Industrial Europe: A Comparative Study of French, Italian, and Swedish Rural Parishes” (Ph.D. thesis, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, 1976), 197. 65. Ibid., 86. 66. Ibid., 99. 67. Emmanuel Todd, The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere, trans. John Waggoner (New York: Karz Publishers, 1979), 6‒7. 68. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc, two vols. (Paris: Mouton, 1966). In abridged English translation: The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974). 69. Todd, Final Fall, 7. 70. Ibid., 26. On Orwell, it has been argued that 1984 was more about Britain than it was the USSR. See Isaac Deutscher, “ ‘1984’—The Mysticism of Cruelty,” in Marxism, Wars and Revolutions: Essays from Four Decades (London: Verso, 1984), 60‒72. 71. “And the young historian Emmanuel Todd, in his challenging essay on the Soviet Union, has successfully approached current Communist society with certain techniques of enquiry that had been previously employed by Pierre Goubert, in his study of the Beauvaisis in the

250 Notes to Pages 145–152 seventeenth century.” Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and R. Sieburth, “Recent Historical ‘Discoveries,’ ” Daedalus 106, 4 (Fall 1977): 141‒55, 149. 72. See Le Roy Ladurie’s memoir, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-­Montpellier: P.C.-­P.S.U. 1945‒1963 (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). 73. Emmanuel Todd, “Deux manières d’écrire le passé: Au Ras des pâquerettes,” Le Monde (21 April 1978). 74. André Burguière, “Les Historiens de la France saisis par l’anthropologie,” Ethnologie française 37/HS (2007): 99‒102, 101. 75. Emmanuel Todd, “Un tableau noir de la capitale,” Le Monde (29 December 1978). 76. Todd, “Deux manières.” 77. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “La Crise et l’histoirien,” Communications 25 (1976): 19‒33. 78. Todd, Allah, 38‒39. 79. Emmanuel Todd, Le Fou et le prolétaire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1979), 40, 22. 80. Ibid., 117, 111. 81. Ibid., 239, 249. 82. Ibid., 9‒10, 257‒58. 83. Ibid., 19. 84. Hervé Le Bras and Emmanuel Todd, L’Invention de la France: Atlas anthropologique et politique (Paris: Pluriel, 1981), 32, 30. 85. Ibid., 22, 23. 86. Ibid., 8. 87. Ibid., 9. 88. Ibid., 14, 107, 22. 89. Ibid., 212. 90. The scholarship on Siegfried is large. For a useful overview, see Loïc Blondiaux and Philippe Veitl, “La Carrière symbolique d’un père fondateur: André Siegfried et la science politique française après 1945,” Genèses 37 (1999): 4‒26. 91. See André Siegfried, Tableau politique de la France de l’Ouest sous la troisième république (Paris: A. Colin, 1913). The continuity and stability of political attitudes was a premise of the book: “In establishing these electoral maps as a continuous pattern, I have tried above all to mark out, in the geographical distribution of opinions, those which have a character of stability.” 92. This point is also made in Burguière, “Les Historiens de la France saisis.” He claims there is another referent of L’Invention de la France, the work of statistician Adolphe d’Angeville, who was active in the July Monarchy and supposed the existence of two Frances with two different mental and physical characteristics. The line was drawn from Saint-­Malo in Brittany to Geneva on the Franco-­Swiss border. Certainly the idea was crucial for Le Bras’s later work but never for Todd. For the former, see Hervé Le Bras, Les Trois France (Paris: O. Jacob, 1995). 93. Le Bras and Todd, L’Invention de la France, 8. 94. Ibid., 10. 95. On the revival of Le Play, see Jean-­René Tréanton, “Faut-­il exhumer Le Play? Ou les héritiers abusifs,” Revue française de sociologie 25, 3 (1984): 458‒83. 96. Le Bras and Todd, L’Invention de la France, 7. 97. Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, vol. II, People and Production, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper Collins, 1988), 70‒71, 539. 98. Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, trans. Geoffroy de Laforcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 40.

Notes to Pages 153–161

251

99. Pierre Nora, “From Lieux de mémoire to Realms of Memory” (preface to the English-­ language edition), in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. I, Conflicts and Divisions, ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xvii. For a critical take on Nora’s volumes, see Perry Anderson, The New Old World (New York: Verso, 2009), 159‒63. For a softer view, see Emile Chabal, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 18‒25. 100. The Fondation’s mission statement, quoted in Robcis, The Law of Kinship, 50. 101. For a detailed history of INED, see Paul-­André Rosental, L’Intelligence démographique: Sciences et politiques des populations en France (1930‒1960) (Paris: O. Jacob, 2003). 102. See Alfred Sauvy, “Trois mondes, une planète,” L’Observateur 118 (14 August 1952), 5. For commentary, see Christoph Kalter, Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c. 1950‒1976, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 42‒46; and Jacques Véron, “L’INED et le tiers monde,” Population 50, 6 (November 1995): 1565‒77. 103. Alfred Sauvy, La Vie en plus: Souvenirs (Paris: Calmann-­Lévy, 1981), 207. 104. See, notably, in Population’s first issue, Alfred Sauvy, “Évaluations des besoins de l’immigration française,” Population 1 (January‒March 1946): 15‒22. 105. Alfred Sauvy, Fertility and Survival: Population Problems from Malthus to Mao Tse-­ Tung (New York: Criterion Books, 1961), 82. 106. Alfred Sauvy, “Le ‘Faux problème de la population mondiale,” Population 4, 3 (July‒ September 1949): 447‒62, 448. 107. Pierre Chaunu, Au coeur religieux de l’histoire (Paris: Libr. Académique Perrin, 1986), 506. 108. Emmanuel Todd, The Making of Modern France: Politics, Ideology and Culture, trans. Anthony and Betty Forster (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 1, 3. The text originally appeared as Emmanuel Todd, La Nouvelle France (Paris: Seuil, 1988). 109. Ibid., 2. 110. Ibid., 83, 190, 91. 111. Ibid., 198, 203. 112. Ibid., 3. 113. Emmanuel Todd, L’Invention de l’Europe (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 500. 114. Virginie Mamadouh, “A Political-­Cultural Map of Europe: Family Structures and the Origins of Differences Between National Political Cultures in the European Union,” GeoJournal 47 (1999): 477‒86, 481. 115. Todd, L’Invention de l’Europe, 498. 116. Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 30. 117. Quoted in Eric Aeschimann, “Les Républicains, zélotes de la nation,” Libération (16 March 1999). 118. Emmanuel Todd, L’Invention de l’Europe, 2nd ed. (Paris: Seuil, 1996). 119. Todd, “Contre la monnaie unique,” 175‒76. 120. Emmanuel Todd, L’Illusion économique: Essai sur la stagnation des sociétés développées (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 13‒31. 121. The centrist journal edited by Gauchet, Le Débat, hosted a forum on L’Illusion économique, where Todd was attacked from a number of different angles and was accused of exaggerating the mutilations of contemporary capitalism. See, among others, Élie Cohen, “Une

252 Notes to Pages 161–170 Nouvelle pensée,” Le Débat 101 (September‒October 1998), 103‒8; and Jean-­Luc Gréau, “L’Économie n’est pas une illusion,” Le Débat 101 (September‒October 1998), 109‒17. 122. Todd, L’Illusion, 31. 123. Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, trans. C. Jon Delogu (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 79‒99, 142‒43. The original French was Emmanuel Todd, Après l’empire: Essai sur la décomposition du système américain (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). 124. Todd, After the Empire, 28, 10‒11. 125. Ibid., 147. 126. Tony Judt, “A New Master Narrative? Reflections on Contemporary Anti-­Americanism,” in Tony Judt and Denis Lacorne, eds., With Us or Against Us: Studies in Global Anti-­Americanism (London: Palgrave, 2005), 11‒33, 24, 11. For a more balanced judgment, see Tom Nairn, “Out of the Cage,” London Review of Books 26, 12 (June 2004): 11‒14. 127. Emmanuel Todd, Le Destin des immigrés: Assimilation et ségrégation dans les démocraties occidentales (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 12. 128. Emmanuel Todd, Après la démocratie (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 38. 129. Ibid., 39. 130. Emmanuel Todd, “Rien ne sépare les enfants d’immigrés du reste de la société,” Le Monde (29 November 2005). This was not a particularly radical position. Others have argued forcefully that the revolts were a response to police brutality and therefore should not be seen as a desire to assimilate. See Cathy Lisa Schneider, “Police Power and Race Riots in Paris,” Politics & Society 36, 1 (March 2008): 133‒59. 131. Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd, The Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies Across the World, trans. George Holoch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 38. The text first appeared as Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd, Le Rendez-­vous des civilisations (Paris: Seuil, 2007). 132. This is, in fact, the title of the small book that appeared shortly after the Arab revolts of 2011. Emmanuel Todd, Allah n’y est pour rien! Sur les révolutions arabes et quelques autres. 133. Emmanuel Todd, Who Is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 3‒4. The text first appeared as Emmanuel Todd, Qui est Charlie? Sociologie d’une crise religieuse (Paris: Seuil, 2015). 134. Hervé Le Bras and Emmanuel Todd, Le Mystère français (Paris: Seuil, 2013). 135. Todd, Who Is Charlie?, 39‒40. 136. Ibid., 48. 137. Ibid., 189, 175. For an excellent consideration of Who Is Charlie?, see Jeremy Harding, “I Am French,” London Review of Books 38, 2 (January 2016): 21‒24. 138. Finkielkraut made this remark on radio, a guest on “Le Grand oral des GG.” It can be found online at www​.dailymotion​.com​/video​/x2qybe8. For the second comment, see Béatrice Giblin, “Qui est Charlie? ‘L’Imposture’ Emmanuel Todd,” Le Point (22 May 2015), online, www​ .lepoint​.fr​/societe​/qui​-­­est​-­­charlie​-­­l​-­­imposture​-­­emmanuel​-­­todd​-­­22​-­­05​-­­2015​-­­1930369​_23​.php. 139. Savonnet-­Guyot, “La Force du destin,” 730. 140. A point made in Nairn, “Out of the Cage.”

Chapter 4 1. Régis Debray, Bilan de faillite (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), 48. 2. Régis Debray, Les Masques (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 168‒69.

Notes to Pages 170–174

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3. The passages on Lévi-­Strauss come from the third volume of Debray’s autobiographies, Régis Debray, Par amour de l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 22‒23. 4. Olivier Todd, “Fusilleront-­ils Régis Debray?” Nouvel observateur 132 (24‒30 May 1967). 5. Régis Debray, Loués soient nos seigneurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Unless noted otherwise, I will be citing from the English translation, Praised Be Our Lords, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2007), 11‒14. 6. Régis Debray, “Le Castrisme: La Longue marche de l’Amérique latine,” Les Temps modernes 224 (January 1965): 1172‒237. It was reprinted in Régis Debray, Essais sur l’Amérique latine (Paris: Maspero, 1967), 47‒128; and it was translated and edited in English as “Latin America: The Long March,” New Left Review I/33 (September‒October 1965): 17‒58. 7. Debray, Praised Be Our Lords, 38, 55. 8. Régis Debray, Révolution dans la Révolution? Lutte armée et lutte politique en Amérique latine (Paris: Maspero, 1967). I quote here from the English translation, Revolution in the Revolution?: Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America, trans. Bobbye Ortiz (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), 41. 9. Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 36. 10. Debray’s early work drew many responses from the Anglophone Left in the 1960s and 1970s. See Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, Régis Debray and the Latin American Revolution (New York: MR Press, 1968); and Robin Blackburn’s introduction to the English translation of Essais sur l’Amérique latine, Strategy for Revolution (New York: MR Press, 1970). For later surveys of Debray’s work, see Keith Reader, Régis Debray: The Writing of Commitment (London: Pluto Press, 1995); and Donald Reid, “Régis Debray: Republican in a Democratic Age,” in The Human Tradition in Modern France, ed. K. Steven Vincent and Alison Klairmont-­Lingo (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2000): 163‒84. 11. It had a first print run of 300,000 and was read aloud nightly on national radio. 12. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text 9/10 (Spring‒Summer, 1984): 178‒209, 202. 13. A firsthand account of Debray’s imprisonment can be found in Tariq Ali, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the 60s (New York: Verso, 2018), 204‒36. 14. Debray’s speech, as well as the official sentence quoted here, can be found in Régis Debray, Le Procès Régis Debray (Paris: Maspero, 1968), 128. 15. Much of this account is based on James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia, 1952‒1982 (London: Verso, 1984), 136‒47, 182‒83. 16. Debray, Praised Be Our Lords, 111; Loués soient nos seigneurs, 248. 17. Régis Debray, Journal d’un petit-­bourgeois entre deux feux et quatre murs (Paris: Seuil, 1976), 47. 18. Régis Debray, “Time and Politics,” in Prison Writings, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Random House, 1973), 87‒160, 134. The translation here is modified. The text first appeared as “Notes de prison—Temps et politique,” Les Temps modernes 287 (June 1970): 1937‒2001. 19. Debray, “Time and Politics,” 95. 20. A short text, “Schema for a Study of Gramsci,” appeared in the Prison Writings volume. The piece first appeared as Régis Debray, “Notes on Gramsci,” New Left Review I/59 (January‒ February 1970): 48‒52. 21. Hobsbawm quoted in Tom Nairn’s two-­part assessment of Gramsci, “Euro-­Gramscism,” London Review of Books 2, 13 and 14 (1980): 13‒15 and 12‒14. Hobsbawm’s remarks were made at the 1977 Congress of Gramsci Studies in Florence.

254 Notes to Pages 174–180 22. See Debray, “Notes on Gramsci.” 23. Debray, Praised Be Our Lords, 119. 24. Régis Debray, Entretiens avec Allende sur la situation au Chili (Paris: Maspero, 1971), 134. 25. Régis Debray, “Introduction,” in ibid., 58. 26. François Mitterrand, “Discours d’Epinay,” available at http://​ miroirs​ .ironie​ .org​ /socialisme/www​.psinfo​.net​/entretiens​/mitterrand​/epinay​.html. 27. Claude Estier, “Mitterrand et Allende,” La Lettre de l’Institut François Mitterrand 45 (8 October 2013), http://​www​.mitterrand​.org​/Mitterrand​-­­et​-­­Allende​.html. Accessed 10 July 2019. Mitterrand’s own account of the meeting—essentially the same—can be found in François Mitterrand, Lettres à Anne, 1962‒1995 (Paris: Gallimard, 2016), 911. 28. Judith Bonnin, “François Mitterrand à la découverte de l’Amérique latine (1971‒1981),” Le Genre humain 58, 1 (2017): 29‒53. 29. Estier, “Mitterrand et Allende.” 30. François Mitterrand, “Salvador Allende,” L’Unité 76 (14‒20 September 1973). 31. Debray, Praised Be Our Lords, 225. 32. Ibid., 124. 33. Ibid., 167‒68. 34. Debray eulogized Allende in the pages of Nouvel observateur: “Salvador Allende did not lose. He died as he had wanted to: fighting.” Régis Debray, “Il est mort dans sa loi,” Nouvel observateur 462 (17‒23 September 1973): 35‒37, 35. 35. Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850‒2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 408‒17. 36. Berlinguer outlined this strategy in a three-­part essay published in the party’s newspaper after Pinochet’s coup. Enrico Berlinguer, “Riflessioni sull’Italia dopo i fatti del Cile,” Rinascita (28 September 1973); “Via democratica e violenza reazionaria,” Rinascita (5 October 1973); and “Alleanze sociali e schieramenti politici,” Rinascita (12 October 1973). 37. Eley, Forging Democracy, 413. 38. Santiago Carrillo Demain l’Espagne: Entretiens avec Régis Debray et Max Gallo (Paris: Seuil, 1974). See also Carrillo’s classic, Eurocommunism and the State (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1978). 39. Régis Debray, Lettre aux communistes français et à quelques autres (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 15. 40. Régis Debray, “N’attendons pas la révolution pour renverser le régime des bedaines,” Nouvel observateur 449 (18‒25 June 1973), 20‒21, 21. 41. He wrote in 1974, “Let’s not be afraid of truisms: politics is the class struggle competing for the State. It is, in Lenin’s words, a ‘concentrated expression of the economy.’ ” Régis Debray, La Critique des armes (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 188. 42. Régis Debray, “Le crible chilien,” L’Unité (18 January 1974), 19‒22, 20, 22. 43. For a broader discussion of Cuba’s place in the French Left’s imaginary, see Eleanor Davey, Idealism Beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 94‒111. 44. Quoted in Bonnin, “Mitterrand à la découverte de l’Amérique latine,” 41. 45. Debray, Loués soient nos seigneurs, 276. 46. Quoted in Bonnin, “Mitterrand à la découverte de l’Amérique latine,” 42. 47. A woolly defense of these deployments can be found in Charles Hargrove, “Valéry Giscard d’Estaing,” Politique étrangère 51, 1 (1986): 115‒28. For more critical discussions, see Nelly Mouric, “La Politique tchadienne de la France sous Valéry Giscard d’Estaing,” Politique africaine

Notes to Pages 180–186

255

16 (1984) 86‒101; and Daniel Bach, “Dynamique et contradictions dans la politique africaine de la France,” Politique africaine 5 (1982): 47‒73. 48. Régis Debray, La Guérilla du Che (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 62. 49. Régis Debray, La Critique des armes (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 86. 50. Régis Debray, “Lettre d’amour,” L’Espérance au purgatoire, 43. This was Debray’s official text rallying to Mitterrand, published first in L’Unité. 51. Régis Debray, “Marxism and the National Question,” New Left Review I/105 (September‒October 1977), 25‒41, 26, emphasis in the original. The text first appeared as Régis Debray, “Marxisme et question national,” Critique communiste 10 (1976), 121‒46. This journal, perhaps the preeminent Marxist review of its day in France, was founded by members of the Trotskyist Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR). 52. Ibid., 27, 30. 53. Régis Debray, Les Rendez-­vous manqués: Pour Pierre Goldman (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 39. For comments on this work and Goldman’s, see Jacques Pelletier, “À la dérive de Debray et de Goldman: Notes pour un auto-­portrait politique d’un intellectuel petit-­bourgeois des années 60,” Liberté 18, 2 (1976): 68‒79. 54. Debray, Les Rendez-­vous manqués, 38, 70, 39. 55. Debray, Les Rendez-­vous manqués, 140. 56. This account of Mélusine relies heavily on Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy (London: Macmillan, 1985), 13‒15. See also, Catherine Clément, Mémoire (Paris: Stock, 2008), ch. 14. 57. Peter Dews, “The ‘Nouvelle Philosophie’ and Foucault,” Economy and Society 8, 2 (1979): 127‒71. 58. Dominique Lecourt, The Mediocracy: French Philosophy Since the Mid-­1970s, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2001), x. 59. Régis Debray, Lettre aux communistes français et à quelques autres (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 12. 60. Ibid., 120, 103. 61. Régis Debray, Modeste contribution aux discours et cérémonies officiels du dixième anniversaire (Paris: Maspero, 1978). I will be quoting the 2008 republication of the pamphlet, which bears the blander title, Mai 68: Une Contre-­révolution réussie (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2008), and, where noted, the partial English translation of the text, Régis Debray, “A Modest Contribution to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary,” New Left Review I/115 (May‒June 1979), 45‒65. Here I am quoting from the latter, 60. 62. Debray, Mai 68: Une Contre-­révolution réussie, 22. 63. Debray “A Modest Contribution,” 48. 64. Debray, Mai 68, 62. 65. Ibid., 79. 66. Ibid., 47. 67. For a contemporary evaluation, see Philippe Le Goff, “Capitalism, Crisis and Critique: Reassessing Régis Debray’s ‘Modest Contribution’ to Understanding May 1968 in Light of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme,” Modern and Contemporary France 22, 2 (2014): 231‒51. 68. Gauchiste narratives tended to blame the PCF for blocking a genuine revolutionary opportunity in May. However, from another perspective, the strength of the student Left in France and Italy had been reinforced by the existence of a mass Communist Party and trade-­ union movement. As Pierre Vidal-­Naquet and Alain Schnapp argued in their comprehensive

256 Notes to Pages 186–191 summation of May, this enabled the groupuscules to imagine they were the university wing of the Left. This was in contrast with Germany, where a much smaller Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) had to imagine itself as an avant-­garde Leninist force. See Alain Schnapp and Pierre Vidal Naquet, Journal de la commune étudiante: Textes et documents, novembre 1967‒juin 1968 (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 20. 69. For a contemporaneous rejoinder, see Henri Weber, “Reply to Debray,” New Left Review I/59 (May‒June 1979): 66‒71. For a more historicized critique of Debray’s theses, see Kristin Ross’s excellent May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 70. Jacques Julliard, “Le Tiers monde et la gauche,” Nouvel observateur 708 (5 June 1978), 39. 71. Ibid., 39, emphasis in original. 72. Responses were collected in a volume, Le Tiers monde et la gauche, ed. Jean Daniel and André Burguière (Paris: Seuil, 1979). Contributors included Debray, Jean Lacouture, Thomico Sisowath, Gérard Chailand, Maxime Rodinson, and Claude Bourdet. For scholarship on this exchange, see Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-­ Paul Sartre (London: Verso, 2010), 190‒92; and Eleanor Davey, Idealism Beyond Borders, 132‒41. 73. Régis Debray, “Il faut des esclaves aux hommes libres,” in Daniel and Burguière, eds., Le Tiers monde, 89, 93. This text originally appeared in Le Monde diplomatique in October 1978 and later in a collection of Debray’s journalistic writings, L’Espérance au purgatoire, 64‒71. 74. Ibid., 95. 75. Debray, Les Rendez-­vous manqués, 89. 76. Debray, Praised Be Our Lords, 66, and Loués soient nos seigneurs, 150. Translation modified. 77. Ibid., Praised Be Our Lords, 135 78. Régis Debray, “Nicaragua: ‘modération’ radicale,” Le Monde diplomatique (September 1979), 10. I am quoting here from the English translation: Régis Debray, “Nicaragua: Radical ‘Moderation,’ ” Contemporary Marxism 1 (Spring 1980): 10‒18, 10. 79. Ibid., 13. 80. Debray referred to Bernard Pivot, host of the popular television talk show, “Apostrophes,” as a “dictator,” and this sent intellectuals into an uproar. For a positive assessment of Debray’s book, see Didier Motchane’s review in Le Monde diplomatique (June 1979). 81. Régis Debray, Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1979). I will be quoting here from the English translation, Régis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France, trans. David Macey (London: New Left Books, 1981), 169. The English edition comes with an excellent prefatory essay by the literary critic, Francis Mulhern. 82. Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities, 32. 83. Ibid., 197. 84. See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,” The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 42. Closest to Pouvoir intellectuel was Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus (Paris: Minuit, 1984). 85. Debray acknowledged the similarities of their views, writing, “The problematic of this text [Bourdieu’s “Champ intellectuel et projet créateur,” 1966], which I discovered only recently, is so close to my own that I have gone over certain of my formulations and clarified them as a result of reading it.” Debray, Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France, 119n. 86. Debray, Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France, 172.

Notes to Pages 191–199

257

87. Ibid., 73. 88. Ibid., 81. 89. For comments on these historical points, see the introductory essay by Francis Mulhern in Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities. 90. Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 244. 91. Régis Debray, “Le Rôle de l’intellectuel,” Essais sur l’Amérique latine (Paris: Maspero, 1967), 185. 92. Régis Debray, Le Scribe: Genèse du politique (Paris: Grasset, 1980), 11. 93. Ibid., 66‒67. 94. Ibid., 68. 95. Ibid., 65. 96. Ibid., 73. 97. Ibid., 198, 207. 98. Ibid., 200 99. Blandine Kriegel, “R.D. educateur,” Cahiers de médiologie 1 (2001): 63‒69, 66. 100. See Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 268‒71. 101. Ibid., 166. 102. Ibid., 173, 204. 103. Ibid., 204. 104. Régis Debray, Critique de la raison politique, ou l’inconscient religieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). I will be quoting from the English translation, Critique of Political Reason, trans. David Macey (London: New Left Books, 1983), 12. 105. Ibid., 14. 106. Ibid., 53. 107. The clearest and most rigorous explication of the “axiom”—upgraded from “theorem”— appeared in the published text of his dissertation defense at the Sorbonne: Régis Debray, “L’Incomplétude, logique du religieux?” Bulletin de la Société française de la Philosophie (January 1996): 1‒35. He now claimed that this axiom was an extension of Austrian logician Kurt Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorem, which argued that no logical system could be complete to itself. Debray was challenged on this point by the philosopher Jacques Bouveresse in Prodiges et vertiges de l’analogie: De l’abus des belles-­lettres dans la pensée (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 1999). 108. See Jean-­Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-­Smith (New York: Verso, 2004). 109. Debray once again was criticized by Bouveresse for characterizing belief as a requirement. See Jacques Bouveresse, Peut-­on ne pas croire? Sur la vérité, la croyance et la foi (Paris: Agone, 2007). For comments on this discussion, see Jacob Collins “Thinking Otherwise: Jacques Bouveresse and the French Tradition,” New Left Review 108 (November‒December 2017): 47‒72. 110. Ibid., 215, 192, 212. 111. Ibid., 187. 112. Ibid., 136. 113. Ibid., 267‒68. 114. Ibid., 277. 115. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127‒86, 133.

258 Notes to Pages 199–206 116. Debray, Critique of Political Reason, 162. 117. Ibid., 280. 118. Ibid., 142. 119. Ibid., 276. 120. Ibid., 309‒10. 121. Ibid., 289, 290, 293. 122. On cybernetics, see Claude Lévi-­Strauss and Georges Charbonnier, Conversations with Claude Lévi-­Strauss (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 40‒42; and André Leroi-­Gourhan, Évolution et technique, vol. I: L’Homme et la matière (Paris: Albin Michel, 1943), 19. 123. Debray, Critique of Political Reason, 323‒24. 124. Ibid., 332‒33. 125. Ibid., 345. 126. The Critique was not as widely reviewed as Pouvoir intellectuel or Le Scribe. The most comprehensive review came from the pen of Alain de Benoist. See “Régis Debray et la ‘raison politique,’ ” Nouvelle école 37 (Spring 1982): 109‒37. 127. In particular, see Tom Nairn, “The Modern Janus,” New Left Review I/94 (November‒December 1975): 3‒29; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), which cites Debray a number of times. 128. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 129. Debray, Critique of Political Reason, 9‒10, 26. 130. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 7, 49. 131. Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); and Gianni Vattimo, “The Age of Interpretation,” in Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, The Future of Religion, ed. Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 132. In the second volume of his autobiographical trilogy, Debray regretted that he was always introduced as a comrade of Guevara and not as a disciple of Comte, as he now wished. See Debray, Par amour de l’art, 216‒17. 133. Jean Baudrillard, The Divine Left: A Chronicle of the Years 1977‒1984, trans. David L. Sweet (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014), 50. 134. Ibid., 75, 55. 135. Jean-­François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 12, 15. 136. For a particularly pointed, if hyperbolic, attack on this front, see Guy Hocquenghem, Lettre ouverte à ceux qui sont passés du col Mao au Rotary (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986). 137. Régis Debray, Les Empires contre l’Europe (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 200. 138. Ibid., 150. 139. Régis Debray, La Puissance et les rêves (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 165, 39. 140. Ibid., 99, 283. 141. Ibid., 282, 291. 142. Debray wrote a third book on military strategy in this period, which dealt with questions of national defense and nuclear politics in greater detail. See Régis Debray, Tous azimuts: L’Europe stratégique (Paris: O. Jacob, 1989).

Notes to Pages 207–212

259

143. Régis Debray, “Lettre d’un voyageur au président de la République,” Le Monde (13 May 1999). The text was translated as “Open Letter from a Traveller to the President of the Republic,” in Masters of the Universe? NATO’s Balkan Crusade, ed. Tariq Ali (London: Verso, 2000. 144. Bernard-­Henri Lévy, “Adieu Régis Debray,” Le Monde (14 May 1999). The exchange became an “affair,” with every news outlet in the country taking a position (typically, against Debray). Debray and Lévy had previously traded blows over the Balkan Wars in the pages of Le Monde. See Régis Debray, “L’Europe et le sort de la Bosnie: Les Frères ennemis,” Le Monde (25 May 1994); and Bernard-­Henri Lévy, “Huit réponses à Régis Debray,” Le Monde (26 May 1994). For scholarly comment, see Richard J. Golsan, French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and 1990s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 123‒42. 145. Edwy Plenel, L’Épreuve (Paris: Stock), 48–49. 146. Régis Debray, Häiti et la France: Rapport à Dominique de Villepin (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2004), 23. 147. For an excellent account of this affair, see Peter Hallward, “Option Zero in Haiti,” New Left Review 27 (May‒June 2004): 23‒47. 148. See Régis Debray, Éloges des frontières (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), and Du Bon usage des catastrophes (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). 149. Debray, Praised Be Our Lords, 230. 150. Ibid., 231. 151. Ibid., 126. 152. Ibid., 13, 55, 110 (emphasis in original). 153. Régis Debray, “Êtes-­ vous démocrate ou républicain?,” Nouvel observateur (30 November‒6 December 1989). 154. For a rundown of this and later affairs involving the headscarf, see John R. Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 155. Ibid., 116. 156. Mona Ozouf, Composition française: Retour sur une enfance bretonne (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 239. 157. For more on the Stasi Commission and its vote, see Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves, and Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). The lone holdout in the vote was France’s leading scholar of laïcité, Jean Bauberot. 158. Régis Debray, Ce que nous voile le voile: La République et le sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 15. 159. Régis Debray, À demain de Gaulle (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). I quote here from the English translation, Régis Debray, Charles de Gaulle: Futurist of the Nation, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1994), 52. 160. Ibid., 13. 161. Ibid., 95. 162. Debray was not the only left-­wing Gaullist to emerge in the 1990s. There were also Serge July and Max Gallo. For comments on this phenomenon, see Sudhir Hazareesingh, In the Shadow of the General: Modern France and the Myth of de Gaulle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 163. Debray, Charles de Gaulle, 28‒29. 164. Ibid., 106.

260 Notes to Pages 213–220 165. Ibid., 96, 110. 166. Régis Debray, Dieu, un itinéraire: Matériaux pour l’histoire de l’éternel en Occident (Paris: O. Jacob, 2001). Here I quote from the English translation, Régis Debray, God: An Itinerary, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Verso, 2004), 2. 167. For definitions, see Régis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms (London: Verso, 1996). 168. These are, in chronological order: Régis Debray, Cours de médiologie générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1991); Vie et mort de l’image: Une histoire du regard en Occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Manifestes médiologiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Transmettre (Paris: O. Jacob, 1997); Croire, voir, faire: Traverses (Paris: O. Jacob, 1999); Introduction à la médiologie (Paris: PUF, 2000). 169. See Régis Debray, L’État séducteur: Les Révolutions médiologiques du pouvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1993); L’Oeil naïf (Paris: Seuil, 1994). 170. Régis Debray, Cours de médiologie générale, 258‒59. 171. Ibid., 264. 172. Debray, God, 2‒3. 173. André Leroi-­Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole, vol. I: Technique et langage (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964), and Le Geste et la parole, vol. II: La Mémoire et les rythmes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1965). In English translation: Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). References to Leroi-­Gourhan can be found throughout Debray’s work, though especially in Critique of Political Reason; Transmitting Culture; and Régis Debray, Supplique aux nouveaux progressistes du XXIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). For a direct engagement with Leroi-­Gourhan’s ideas, see Régis Debray, “Histoire des quatre M,” Les Cahiers de médiologie 2 (1998): 7‒25. 174. Debray, God, 7. 175. Ibid., 43. 176. Ibid., 30, 31. 177. Ibid., 217. 178. Ibid., 177, 126. 179. Ibid., 180‒81. 180. Régis Debray, Transmettre (Paris: O. Jacob, 1997). I am quoting here from the English translation, Transmitting Culture, trans. Eric Rauth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 3. 181. Ibid., 3, 6. 182. Régis Debray, Les Communions humaines: Pour en finir avec “la religion” (Paris: Fayard, 2005); and Régis Debray, Le Moment fraternité (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). 183. Debray, Bilan de faillite, 73, 60.

Conclusion 1. Alain Badiou and Marcel Gauchet, What Is to Be Done? A Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism, and the Future of Democracy, trans. Susan Spitzer (London: Polity, 2016), 86. 2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, or, Critique of Critical Critique (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), 201 (emphasis in original). 3. For an earlier treatment of these questions, see Régis Debray, Éloge des frontières (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). 4. One important to attempt to think through Marx’s notion of “critique” is Jacques Rancière’s “Le Concept de critique et la critique de l’économie politique dans les ‘Manuscrits de

Notes to Pages 220–225

261

1844,’ ” in Lire le Capital, vol. 1, ed. Louis Althusser (Paris: Maspero, 1965): 93–210. For Rancière, Marx’s idea of criticism combined anthropological with political-­economic analysis. For example, under capitalism, “pauperization”—a product of economic developments—becomes alieantion, a new anthropological structure. 5. For a participant’s view of Nuit Debout, see Stathis Kouvelakis, “Overturning a World: An Interview with Frédéric Lordon,” Jacobin (4 May 2016), www​.jacobinmag​.com​/2016​/05​/nuit​ -­­debout​-­­france​-­­el​-­­khomri​-­­labor​-­­law/. 6. Debray published a short book on Macron after the 2017 election: Régis Debray, Le Nouveau Pouvoir (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2017). He wrote about environmental disaster in Régis Debray, Du Bon Usage des catastrophes (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). And a forthcoming book will examine the notion of the popular in the work of Victor Hugo. Both Benoist and Gauchet have written on the insurgent populist movements of the 2010s: see Alain de Benoist, Le Moment populiste: Droite-­gauche, c’est fini! (Paris: Pierre-­Guillaume de Roux, 2017); and Marcel Gauchet, “Populism as Symptom,” Social Imaginaries 3, 1 (2017): 207‒18. Gauchet touched on this theme too in his book on Robespierre: Marcel Gauchet, Robespierre: L’Homme qui nous divise le plus (Paris: Gallimard, 2018). Todd, in his latest book, takes up Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the United States: Emmanuel Todd, Où sommes-­nous? Une esquisse de l’histoire humaine (Paris: Le Seuil, 2017). 7. I have borrowed this metaphor from Alberto Toscano’s lucid survey of Lordon’s work: “A Structuralism of Feeling?” New Left Review 97 (January‒February 2016): 73‒93. 8. Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, trans. Gabriel Ash (London: Verso, 2014), xi‒xiii. 9. Frédéric Lordon, L’Intérêt souverain: Essai d’anthropologie économique spinoziste (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 56‒58. 10. Frédéric Lordon, Imperium: Structures et affectes des corps politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2015), 19‒20. 11. Ibid., 331, 327. 12. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-­First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). 13. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Tristes tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 393. Italics in original, translation modified slightly.

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Abellio, Raymond, 47 Abensour, Miguel, 102–103 Académie française, 47, 66 Académie Goncourt, 169 Action française, 5, 39, 41–43, 66 Adorno, Theodor, 59, 236n78 Alexandre-­Debray, Janine, 170 Algeria, 6, 15, 80, 84, 154, 170, 171, 178 Ali, Tariq, 253n13 Allende, Salvador, 174–179, 208, 254n34 alt-­right, 77 Alternativ für Deutschland, 77 Althusius, Johannes, 76 Althusser, Louis, 1, 14, 44, 170, 183, 193, 198–199 Amable, Bruno, 227n8, 233n94 Anderson, Benedict, 202 Anderson, Perry, 228n20, 249n62, 251n99 Angeville, Adophe d’, 250n92 Annales School, 143–146, 148, 151, 152, 154, 157 anomie, 27, 79, 121, 123, 158, 167 anthropological turn, 4–5, 17, 221 antifascism, 178 anti-­totalitarianism, 20–21, 100–101, 117, 124, 183, 187–188, 194 archaism, 54, 68, 69, 77, 106, 111, 148, 179, 213, 225 Aristide, Jean-­Bertrand, 207 Aron, Raymond, 14, 31, 50, 88, 100, 189, 195 Arthur, Paige, 229n36 Attali, Jacques, 160 Badiou, Alain, 4, 7, 9, 170, 202 Balandier, Georges, 228n13 Balibar, Étienne, 2, 170, 245n113 Balkan Wars, 207 Bardèche, Maurice, 43

Barrès, Maurice, 41, 42, 70 Barrientos, René, 172 Bauberot, Jean, 259n157 Baudrillard, Jean, 2, 4, 74, 182, 203 Beauvoir, Simone de, 125 Behrent, Michael C., 230n42, 232n81, 233n94 Benda, Julien, 189, 194 Benjamin, Walter, 213 Benoist, Alain de, 34, 37–78, 124, 193, 220; and alt–right, 77–78; and the anthropological turn, 5–6, 9; on Christianity, 17, 24, 41, 51–55, 62, 69; and the Conservative Revolution, 55, 56, 59, 70; on Dumont, 68–70, 75; and Dumézil, 11–12, 47, 64–67, 70, 72, 75; on Durkheim, 71–73, 75; on empire, 76–77; and Europe Action, 40–46; on the family, 62, 68; and fascism, 38; on federalism, 74–76; on Gehlen, 59–62; and GRECE, 6, 37, 44–50, 57, 67–68, 70–75; on Heidegger, 51, 53, 59–61, 63; on identity, 38, 41, 43–44, 52, 54, 59, 75; and Indo-­European culture, 11–12, 24, 48, 61, 64–70, 72, 74, 76, 153; and the “interregnum,” 55, 63, 74; on Lévi–Strauss, 70–71, 75; political anthropology of, 13–18, 21–24; in the postwar extreme Right, 39–45; paganism of, 51–53; on race, 11, 42, 61–62, 71; upbringing of, 38–39 Bensaïd, Daniel, 242n31 Benveniste, Émile, 91 Bérard, Pierre, 45, 70 Berlinguer, Enrico, 177–178, 183–184, 254n36 Bicentenary of the French Revolution, 118, 208–210 Blackburn, Robin, 253n10

264 Index Blanc, Louis, 134 Blanca, Antoine, 179 Blot, Yvan, 47 Bodin, Jean, 75–76 Boétie, Étienne de la, 102–103, 107, 109 Bolivia, 172–173, 176, 202 Boltanski, Luc, 230n55–56 Bonald, Louis de, 38, 137 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 211 Bouglé, Célestin, 27 Bourdieu, Pierre, 28, 256n84–85 Bourg, Julian, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 232n81, 233n90 Bouteldja, Houria, 235–236n61 Bouveresse, Jacques, 170, 257n107, 257n109 Bowen, John R., 259n154, 259n157 Boyer, Robert, 223 Brasillach, Robert, 42, 43, 212 Braudel, Fernand, 144, 152–154 Breckman, Warren, 241n17 Broca, Paul, 25, 27, 145, 151 Brown, Wendy, 35 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 206 Buber, Martin, 59, 61 Buci-­Glucksmann, Christine, 182 Buddhism, 110 Bukharin, Nikolai, 171 Bull, Malcolm, 54 Burguière, André, 250n92 Cahiers universitaire, 6 Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, 125, 140 Cambridge School, 139 Camus, Albert, 125 Camus, Jean-­Yves, 75 Carrillo, Santiago, 178, 183 Carter, Jimmy, 180, 188 Castel, Robert, 230n55 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 19, 81, 83–91, 93, 96, 99–103, 112–113, 117, 240n10, 242n31; and anthropology, 84–85; and anti-­ totalitarianism, 100–101; career of, 82–83; and Devant la guerre, 113; and Gauchet, 93, 96, 99–103, 112–113, 117; and Lévi-­ Strauss, 90; and Libre, 112–113, 118; and Marxism, 82–84, 90, 242n31; and May 1968, 86–87; and Socialisme ou barbarie, 83–84, 100; and the social-­historical, 90, 102, 112; and the symbolic, 90

Castro, Fidel, 8, 170–171, 179, 207, 208, 214 Caws, Peter, 228n22 Céline, Louis-­Férdinand, 42, 56 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 172, 176 Centre d’Études, de Recherches, et d’Éducation Socialiste (CERES), 182 Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron, 117 Chabal, Emile, 30, 33–36, 232n81 Champetier, Charles, 45 Charcot, Jean-­Martin, 145 Charles-­Roux, Edmonde, 179 Charonne Metro Massacre, 80 Chaunu, Pierre, 155 Chevènement, Jean-­Pierre, 160, 175, 206–207 Chiapello, Ève, 230n56 Chile, 174–179, 202 Chirac, Jacques, 3, 21, 50, 73, 123, 183, 207, 211, 217 Choi, Sung-­eun, 231n58 Christen, Yves, 48 Christianity; and Benoist, 17, 24, 41, 51–55, 62, 68–69; and Debray, 17–18, 181, 198–203, 206, 215–217; and Foucault, 106, 109–111; and Gauchet, 17–18, 120, 122; and Le Play, 135; and liberalism, 19; and political anthropology, 220; and Todd, 124, 158, 163–166 Christofferson, Michael Scott, 30, 31, 36, 101, 232n81, 245n109, 257n100 citizenship, 3, 21–23, 76, 158 Clastres, Pierre, 12, 29, 92–105, 107–108, 111, 113, 193, 224 Clavel, Maurice, 31 Clément, Catherine, 182, 255n56 Club de l’Horloge, 47, 49–50, 73 Cohen, Élie, 251n121 Collège de France, 105, 108 Comité des intellectuels pour la liberté (CIEL), 194–195 Commentaire, 195 Commission du Gouvernement pour les Travailleurs, 133 Common Program of Government, 99, 103, 176, 178 communism, 4, 5, 7, 20, 42, 47, 101, 128, 156, 161 Comte, Auguste, 13, 131, 137, 193, 203, 258n132

Index 265 Condorcet, Marquis de, 131 Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), 87, 187 Confédération générale du travail (CGT), 20 Conklin, Alice L., 231n65 consensus, 3, 31–32, 34, 123, 160, 163, 166, 208–211 Conservative Revolution, 55, 56, 59, 70 Constant, Benjamin, 13, 116 Constantine, 200 Coston, Henry, 38 Courbage, Youssef, 164 Critique communiste, 181 Crozier, Michel, 33 Cuba, 15, 170–172, 176, 179, 180 Cuban Revolution, 8, 170–172, 177, 187 Cusset, François, 30, 32, 35, 36 cybernetics, 189, 201, 258n122 Dagognet, François, 213 Daniel, Jean, 31 Dardot, Pierre, 233n94 Davey, Eleanor, 229n36, 254n43, 256n72 De Gaulle, Charles, 1, 39, 154, 170, 175, 180, 211–213, 259n162 Debaene, Vincent, 231n72 Débat, Le, 6, 9, 15, 79, 113, 116–117, 119–121 Debord, Guy, 14, 49, 182 Debray, Régis, 49, 72, 74, 160, 169–218; and anthropological turn, 5–6, 34; in Bolivia, 172; in Chile, 174–176; Critique of Political Reason, 8, 11, 18, 22, 169, 196–205, 212; in Cuba, 171; on de Gaulle, 180, 211–213; on democracy versus republics, 208–213; and “dissensus,” 209–210; on foreign policy, 204–208; on fraternity, 181–182, 199–200, 209, 218; on French Revolution, 208–210; on “headscarf affair,” 210–211; on human rights, 187–188; on ideology, 198–199; on identity, 191, 197–198; and incompleteness theorem, 193; on intellectuals, 189–197; and Marxism, 174, 181, 183, 190, 195–199, 202–204; on May 1968, 175, 178–179, 181, 184–186, 191; mediology of, 213–217; and Mélusine group, 182–183; and Mitterrand, 8, 19, 169, 177, 179–181, 196, 204–211; in Mitterrand administration, 19, 204–208; on nationalism, 22, 170, 174, 200–202; on New

Philosophers, 192; political anthropology of, 11–15, 20–24, 193–204, 219–220, 224; in prison, 172–173; and religion, 17–18, 193, 197–203, 213–218; Revolution in the Revolution? 171–172; and the sacred, 181, 193, 197, 201–202, 204, 209–212, 214–215, 219, 221; and socialism, 19, 170, 172, 175–179, 195–196, 202, 205, 213–214, 217; on the state, 172, 179, 183, 187–190, 195–196, 198–201, 204–213; trial of, 172; on the Union of the Left, 184; upbringing of, 170–171 Defferre, Gaston, 175, 179 Deleuze, Gilles, 9–11, 20, 31, 32, 103–105 Delors, Jacques, 160 Demidov, Count Anatoly, 133 democracy, 7, 10, 15, 57, 74, 79, 80–82, 89, 91, 101, 110–122, 127, 130–131, 208–213 Denord, François, 233n94 Derrida, Jacques, 9–11, 32, 193, 194, 228n23 Descombes, Vincent, 229n30 Deutscher, Isaac, 249n70 Dews, Peter, 12, 255n57 Dickens, Charles, 134 Diderot, Denis, 25, 170 Dong, Pham Van, 214 Doriot, Jacques, 40 Dosse, François, 228n22 Doyle, Natalie J., 241n17, 246n122 Dreyfus Affair, 189, 191, 194 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 66, 207 Drumont, Édouard, 42 Duchet, Michèle, 231n62 Dugin, Alexander, 77 Dumézil, Georges, 12, 33, 47, 64–67, 70, 72, 193, 238n107 Dumont, Louis, 12, 68–70, 75 Dunkerley, James, 253n15 Durkheim, Émile, 12, 13, 19, 26–28, 33, 219, 224; and Benoist, 71–72, 75; and Debray, 193, 200; and Dumont, 69; and Le Play, 138; and Lévi-­Strauss, 28; and political anthropology, 73; and Todd, 146, 148, 158, 167 École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), 6, 79, 117, 223 École des Mines, 132 École Normale Supérieure (ENS), 8, 64, 170, 173

266 Index École Polytechnique, 132 École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), 65 El Khomri Bill, 221 empire, 135; American, 7, 161–162, 205, 217; Benoist on, 76–77; Debray on, 205, 208, 210–211, 216, 217; French, 2, 6, 22, 25–27, 39, 42; Roman, 110, 200; Soviet, 125, 162, 205; Todd on, 161–162 Engels, Friedrich, 137, 220 Enlightenment, 25 Epinay Congress, 175 Eribon, Didier, 238n107 L’Esprit, 101, 191 Estier, Claude, 176 Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadero, 25, 28 Eurocommunism, 177, 183–184, 202 Europe Action, 6, 40–46, 61, 65 European Economic Community (EEC), 158, 180 European Monetary Union (EMU), 76, 159–160, 210 Eysenck, Hans, 47 family, 121, 126–143, 149–167; absolute nuclear family, 126; “African systems” of family, 128; authoritarian family, 127, 130; communitarian, 150; community endogamous family, 128; community family, 127; nuclear egalitarian family, 126, 164; nuclear family, 141, 149–150, 156; patriarchal family, 135; stem family, 135–136, 138, 140, 156; Western (“unstable”) family, 136, 149 Fanon, Frantz, 172 fascism, 49, 55, 76, 89, 101, 127, 145, 158 Faye, Guillaume, 74, 239n134 federalism, 74–77 Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (FEN), 39–40, 46 Feher, Michel, 245n100 Feltrinelli, Giangiacomo, 172 Ferry, Jules, 16 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 203 Figaro, Le, 49 Figaro magazine, Le, 48–49 Filmer, Sir Robert, 139 Finkielkraut, Alain, 167, 252n138 Fondation Alexis Carrel, 154

Fondation Marc-­Bloch/Fondation du 2 Mars, 160 Fondation Saint-­Simon, 117 Foucault, Michel, 10, 11, 20, 31, 113, 182, 193, 213, 227n3, 232n81, 245n100; and GIP, 2, 32; and the state, 103, 105–108, 119 France insoumise, 222 Frankfurt School, 44 French Revolution, 16, 38, 117–119, 131, 157, 180, 208–210 Freud, Sigmund, 114, 145, 146, 148 Friberg, Daniel, 77 Front National (FN), 3, 24, 37, 50, 71, 73, 156, 157, 158, 166, 218, 222, 234n21, 239n132 Fukuyama, Francis, 161 Furet, François, 74, 113, 117–118, 208–209, 229n31, 245n109 Gallimard, 117, 191 Gallo, Max, 259n162 Gauchet, Marcel, 34, 69, 79–82, 91–92, 96–103, 107–124, 153, 163–164, 193, 219– 220, 224, 246n127; and Algerian War, 80; and the anthropological turn, 5–7; on La Boétie, 102–103; and Castoriadis, 93, 96, 99–103, 112–113, 117; on Christianity, 106, 109–111, 120, 122; and Clastres, 96–102, 107–108, 111, 113; and Le Débat, 113, 116–117, 119, 120, 121; and democracy, 80–82, 101, 110, 112–122; The Disenchantment of the World, 6, 79, 108–112; and Durkheim, 72–73; education of, 79–82; and the French Revolution, 113– 119; and Furet, 74, 117–118; on human rights, 103, 113–115; on identity, 107, 116, 120, 122; on Islam, 110, 120–121; and Lefort, 80–81, 92, 99–103, 116–117; on Lévi-­Strauss, 82, 85–86, 90, 92–93, 98–99, 104, 108, 111, 121; and liberalism, 23, 74, 79, 100, 116–117, 119, 122; and May 1968, 80–81, 101; political anthropology of, 9, 11–24, 96–103; La Pratique de l’esprit humain, 114–115; on “primitive” religion, 96–101; and psychoanalysis, 114; and republicanism, 117–120; on sovereignty, 91–92; on the state, 107–116; on the state and the subject, 112–116; on totalitarianism, 100–103; upbringing of, 79–80

Index 267 gauchisme, 112, 179, 185–186, 189, 195, 204 Gaullism, 4, 80 Gehlen, Arnold, 59–62 Geroulanos, Stefanos, 30, 31, 35, 232n81 gilets jaunes, 35, 222 Ginzburg, Carlo, 66 Girard, René, 214 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 1, 20, 22, 48, 99, 103, 177, 180, 183, 188 Glucksmann, André, 103, 183, 186, 230n52 Glyn, Andrew, 246n12 Gobineau, Arthur de, 151 Godard, Jean-­Luc, 28 Gödel, Kurt, 257n107 Godelier, Maurice, 29, 232n78 Goldman, Pierre, 181 Gordon, Daniel, 2, 227n4 Gorz, André, 230n55 Gramsci, Antonio, 55, 160, 174, 214 grand narrative, 9, 203, 213 Grasset, 191 Great Recession of 2008, 38, 123, 219, 221, 224 Gréau, Jean-­Luc, 252n121 Griaule, Marcel, 104 Griffin, Roger, 56, 74 Griotteray, Alain, 48 Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), 2, 32 Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE), 6, 37, 44–50, 57, 67–68, 70–75 Guattari, Félix, 4, 10, 20, 103–105 Guayaki Indians, 93 Guénon, René, 69 guerrilla struggle, 171–174, 181 Guesde, Jules, 214 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 8, 171, 179, 207, 208, 214, 258n132 Guizot, François, 13 Gulf War, 159–160, 206 Habermas, Jürgen, 60 Haïti, 207 Harding, Jeremy, 252n137 Hargreaves, Alec G., 231n58 Haudry, Jean, 66 Hazareesingh, Sudhir, 159, 227n7, 239n127, 257n90, 259n162 “headscarf affair,” 210–211

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 85, 131, 167, 185, 191, 220 Heidegger, Martin, 12, 51, 53, 59–61, 63 Herr, Lucien, 214 Hersant, Robert, 48 Hertz, Robert, 27 Hitler, Adolf, 58 Hobbes, Thomas, 25, 96, 112, 197 Hobsbawm, Eric, 174, 253n21 Hocquenghem, Guy, 32, 49, 258n136 Hoffmann, Stanley, 33, 232n87 holism, 13–15, 69, 182, 223–224 Hollande, François, 165, 217, 221, 222 Howell, Chris, 233n94 Huberman, Leo, 253n10 Hubert, Henri, 27 human rights, 15, 69, 103, 113–115, 183, 187, 206, 208 humanitarianism, 15, 187–188, 207 Hunt, Lynn, 16, 229n37 Huntington, Samuel, 163–164 Husserl, Edmund, 12 identity, 4, 24, 34, 35, 219, 221; collective, 89–92, 94, 107, 116, 120, 122, 191, 197–198; cultural, 6, 8, 14, 75; and Debray, 191, 197–198; of France, 152–153; and Gauchet, 107, 116, 120, 122; and the New Right, 38, 41, 43–44, 52, 54, 59, 75; political, 13, 21, 23. See also race identity politics, 71 immigration, 2, 21–24, 74, 120, 125, 152, 154, 156, 158–159, 162–167 Indignados, 221 Indo-­Europeans, 11–12, 24, 48, 61, 64–70, 72, 74, 76, 153 industrialization, 19, 134, 136–137, 140–143, 158, 167, 201 Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po), 47, 125 Institut National d’Études démographiques (INED), 7, 13, 125, 153–155 intellectuals, 116–117, 157, 163, 181–184, 187–196 International Brigades, 181 Islam, 110, 120, 135, 163–167, 199, 210, 216 Jacobins, 75–76 Jameson, Fredric, 172, 202 Jaurès, Jean, 214

268 Index “Je suis Charlie,” 7, 23, 165 Jeanneney, Jean-­Noël, 208 Jessup, Bob, 255n56 Jesus Christ, 109–110, 200, 203, 216 Jeune nation, 39 Jeunes communistes, 7, 8, 92, 170 Joxe, Alain, 182 Judaism, 109, 215–216 Judt, Tony, 162 Julliard, Jacques, 187 July, Serge, 259n162 Jünger, Ernst, 42, 50, 56–58, 63 Kahn, Jean-­François, 207 Kalter, Christoph, 251n102 Kant, Immanuel, 196 Kaplan, Alice, 234n13 Keynes, John Maynard, 219 kinship, 7, 9, 11, 12, 17, 30, 93, 121, 126, 140, 142, 143, 149, 150, 167–168, 219–221 Kissinger, Henry, 206 Kriegel, Annie, 49 Kriegel, Blandine, 10, 19, 182, 194, 230n47 Kristeva, Julia, 195 Kuhn, Thomas, 34, 233n89 Kun, Béla, 171 Lacan, Jacques, 30, 32, 114 laïcité, 120–121, 163, 211, 259n157 Laplace, Pierre-­Simon, 206 Laslett, Peter, 7, 125, 139–142, 149, 157, 249n61 Laval, Christian, 233n94 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 247n33, 248n48 Le Bras, Hervé, 148–153, 162, 165, 250n92 Le Gallou, Jean-­Yves, 47 Le Pen, Jean-­Marie, 3, 37, 38, 71, 73, 156, 157 Le Pen, Marine, 78, 222, 234n21 Le Play, Frédéric, 12, 19, 33, 124, 132–142, 167; career of, 132–134, 137–138; and Durkheim, 138; and industrialization, 136; legacy of, 138; and religion, 135, 137–138; sociology of the family, 134–138; Réforme sociale en France, Le, 137–138; Todd on, 142, 143, 149, 150, 152, 157 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 7, 143–146, 157, 250n72 Lebourg, Nicolas, 75

Lecourt, Dominique, 182–183, 230n51 Lefebvre, Raymond, 171 Lefort, Claude, 6, 19, 20, 80–103, 113, 116–118, 123, 193; and anthropology, 84–87; and anti-­totalitarianism, 20, 100–101, 117; and La Boétie, 102–103; education of, 82–83; and Gauchet, 80–81, 92, 99–103, 116–117; and Lévi-­Strauss, 85–86; and Marxism, 82–84; and May 1968, 86–88; and Merleau-­Ponty, 82–83; Socialisme ou barbarie, 81, 83–84, 91, 100; theory of politics, 88–89 Lenin, V. I., 40, 83, 179, 180, 199, 214 Leroi-­Gourhan, André, 11, 13, 17, 104, 201, 215, 228n23, 258n122 Lesquens, Henry, 47 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 17, 33, 47, 82, 104, 224, 225, 258n122; and Benoist, 70–71, 75; and Castoriadis, 90; and Clastres, 93–94; and Debray, 11, 170, 173, 193, 194, 198, 201; and Gauchet, 11, 82, 98–99, 108, 111; and kinship, 32, 121; and Lefort, 85–86; and the state, 108, 111; structural anthropology of, 11, 12, 27–29, 32, 149; and Todd, 125, 145 Lévy, Bernard-­Henri, 31, 50, 103, 183, 207, 230n52, 259n144 Lévy, Jonah D., 227n6 Lévy-­Bruhl, Lucien, 149 Leys, Simon, 218 liberalism, 10, 194–195; and Benoist, 42, 48, 51, 56, 59, 60, 68, 73, 74; and Debray, 186, 188, 194, 205–210; and Gauchet, 23, 74, 79, 100, 116–117, 119, 122; of Giscard, 1, 4, 48, 99, 177, 180; nineteenth-­century, 13–15, 116–117; political anthropology and, 30, 35; and Rocard, 103, 186; and Todd, 7–8, 20, 124–126, 131–133, 141, 143, 147–148, 157–162, 167. See also neoliberalism Libre, 103–105, 107, 113, 116 Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), 182, 255n51 Lilla, Mark, 30 Lincoln, Bruce, 66 Lindenberg, Daniel, 182 Locchi, Giorgio, 45 Locke, John, 25, 139, 141 Lordon, Frédéric, 222–225 Loustau, Jean, 47

Index 269 Löwy, Michel, 181 Lupasco, Stéphane, 47 Lycée Janson de Sailly, 170 Lyotard, Jean-­François, 9, 11, 203, 228n18 Maastricht Treaty, 23, 75, 76, 159–160, 167, 206 Mabire, Jean, 68 Macfarlane, Alan, 7, 125, 142–143, 149, 249n61 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 88–89, 91, 196 Macron, Emmanuel, 217, 222 Maistre, Joseph de, 16, 38, 44, 51–52, 137 Malraux, André, 125, 225, 234n12 Malthus, Thomas, 131, 145, 154 Mann, Thomas, 55 Mao Tse-Tung, 214 Marchais, Georges, 182 Marion, Jean-­Luc, 235n49 Marmin, Michel, 47, 48 “marriage for all,” 62, 237n93 Marx, Karl, 40, 80, 85, 137, 145, 167, 195, 214, 220, 223 Marxism, 105, 202–204, 213, 220, 242n31; Benoist on, 56; and Castoriadis, 82–84, 90, 242n31; and Clastres, 93; and Debray, 174, 181, 183, 190, 195–199, 202–204; decline of, 30; and Gauchet, 82, 111; and Lefort, 82–84, 88; and Lordon, 223; and political anthropology, 14–15; and Todd, 140, 146. See also socialism Mascolo, Dionys, 31 Maspero, François, 81, 172, 175 Mattick, Paul, 83 Maulnier, Thierry, 43, 47 Mauroy, Pierre, 175 Maurras, Charles, 40, 41, 46 Mauss, Marcel, 12, 27, 85–86, 231n64 May 1968, 19, 37, 74, 94, 96, 99, 189, 191, 221, 222, 224; Bourg on, 30–32; and Castoriadis, 86–87; and Debray, 175, 178–179, 181, 184–186, 191; and Gauchet, 80–81, 101; and immigrants, 2; and Lefort, 86–88; and political anthropology, 1; and PSU, 178; Ross on, 30–31; and self-­ management, 6, 20, 103; and Todd, 148 Mayer, Arno, 233n2 Mayhew, Henry, 137 Mead, Margaret, 85 Médecins sans frontières, 187

Médiapart, 207 mediology, 213–217 Meillassoux, Claude, 232n78 Meillet, Antoine, 65 Mélenchon, Jean-­Luc, 222 Mélusine group, 182–183, 192 Mendras, Henri, 247n22 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 81–83 Michelet, Jules, 209 Milosevic, Slobodan, 207 Mitterrand, François, 49, 99, 210, 211; Benoist’s critique of, 63–64; and Debray, 8, 19, 169, 175–181, 196, 204–208; and Latin America, 176–179, 205; presidency of, 63, 74, 79, 105, 155, 159, 195–196, 204; presidential campaign of, 8, 48, 159; policies of, 2–3, 5, 119, 221; “right to difference,” 4; as secretary of the PS, 175–176 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 55 Mohler, Armin, 55, 56 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 66 Monde, Le, 7, 49, 50, 77, 117, 145, 207 Monde diplomatique, Le, 187, 188, 222 Monnerot, Jules, 47 Montaigne, Michel de, 25, 102 More, Thomas, 25 Morin, Edgar, 121, 241n14 Motchane, Didier, 74, 179, 182, 256n80 Moyn, Samuel, 229n35, 232n81, 241n17, 244n95 Mulhern, Francis, 256n81, 257n89 Museum of Man, 28 Musil, Robert, 10 Mussolini, Benito, 138 myth, 10–12, 51–52, 64, 66–67, 82, 93, 97–98, 170, 204–205, 208–212, 217, 220 Nairn, Tom, 202, 252n126, 252n140, 253n21 Napoleon III, 137 nationalism, 15, 18, 22; and Benoist, 42, 45, 76; and Debray, 170, 174, 200–202; and Far Right, 41–42, 56, 73; and Todd, 159 Nazi Party, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 99–100 neocolonialism, 180, 188 neoliberalism, 4–5, 22–23, 35, 47, 79, 121, 160, 185, 210, 219–224. See also liberalism neo-­republicanism, 8, 166, 206 New Philosophers, 20, 103, 105, 183, 188, 192 New Right. See Alain de Benoist; GRECE Newton, Isaac, 206

270 Index Nicolet, Claude, 229n38 Niekisch, Ernst, 76 Nietzsche, Friedrich 10, 12, 17, 42, 52, 53 Nizan, Henriette, 125 Nizan, Paul, 7, 125, 170, 189 Noiriel, Gérard, 152, 162 Nora, Pierre, 6, 113, 116, 153 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 8, 180, 205–207 Nouvelle action française, 46 Nouvelle école, 6, 44, 45, 47, 48, 61, 66, 70, 74 Nouvel observateur, 31, 48–49, 210 Nouvelle revue française, 191 Nuit Debout, 221, 222 Occupy Wall Street, 221 oil shock, 1, 22 Organisation de l’armée sécrète (OAS), 6, 39–41, 43, 80 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 129 Orwell, George, 145 Ory, Pascal, 227n12 Ozouf, Mona, 49, 210 Pacte civil de solidarité (PACS), 32, 34, 121 Paganism, 52–53, 62 Palombarini, Stefano, 227n8 Pannekoek, Anton, 83 Paris Commune, 26, 138 Parti Communiste Français (PCF), 1–3, 34, 40, 107, 143, 182, 192, 203; and anti-­ colonialism, 15; and Clastres, 93; and Debray, 184, 186, 203; decline of, 3; and the elections of 1978, 48–50; and Gauchet, 80; and Lefort, 83; and May 1968, 87, 255n68; and the Union of the Left, 1, 48, 99, 103, 144, 176–177; and Todd, 7, 21, 125, 144, 147–148, 157, 160, 166. See also communism Parti Communiste Internationaliste (ICP), 83 Parti Ouvrière Internationaliste, 83 Parti Populaire Française (PPF), 5, 40 Parti Socialiste (PS), 3, 4, 79, 107, 159, 160; and Benoist, 63, 71; and Debray, 15, 19, 175–184, 188, 192, 203, 208–211; direction under Mitterrand, 175–180; and the elections of 1978, 49–50, 183; foreign

policy of, 178–180; founding of, 175–176; and Gauchet, 79, 107; and neoliberalism, 3, 221; radicalization of, 8, 159; and Rocard, 186; and Todd, 156, 157, 165; and the Union of the Left, 48, 99, 178–180. See also socialism Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), 87, 178, 182, 187 Partido Comunista de España (PCE), 178, 183 Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), 177, 183 Pascal, Blaise, 184 Pauwels, Louis, 48 Pearson, Roger, 66 pensée unique, 160 Pfister, Thierry, 49 Phares et balises, 160, 206 Philippot, Florian, 78 philosophical anthropology, 59–61 Picasso, Pablo, 26 Piketty, Thomas, 224 Pinel, Philippe, 114 Pinochet, Augusto, 176, 177, 179 Pivot, Bernard, 256n80 Plenel, Edwy, 207 Pocock, J. G. A., 139, 248n53 Podhoretz, Nicholas, 50 political anthropology, 4–5, 25, 29, 93, 92–103, 196–202, 219–223, 228n13; methods of, 11–16; themes of, 16–24 Pomian, Krzysztof, 113 Poniatowski, Michel, 48 Popper, Karl, 140 Popular Front, 174, 180 Popular Unity coalition (Chile), 174–175, 177, 179 Porter, Theodore M., 247n23 positivism, 16 postindustrial society, 148, 152, 214 postmodernism, 10, 186, 188, 203, 211 post-­structuralism, 11, 193 Poulantzas, Nicos, 19, 182–183, 230n47 “primitive” societies, 18, 80, 85, 86, 94–99, 101, 104, 107–109, 112, 119, 198 primitivism, 26–29, 60, 80, 231n66 Prix Fémina, 169 proletariat; and Debray, 172, 185; dictatorship of the, 177; disappearance of the, 23, 152; and the Far Right, 58; and Todd, 125, 147, 152 Proust, Marcel, 110

Index 271 psychoanalysis, 14, 59, 91, 114, 145–146, 149 Putin, Vladimir, 77, 161 Quinet, Edgar, 13 race, 3, 4, 25, 27, 28; and Benoist, 38, 41, 42, 58, 61–62, 70–71, 74; and Lévi-­Strauss, 70–71; and Todd, 126, 151, 162–163, 166–167 Radek, Karl, 171 Rancière, Jacques, 170 Rassemblement européen de la liberté, 43 Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF), 170 Rassemblement pour la République (RPR), 8, 50, 183 Reader, Keith, 253n10 Reagan, Ronald, 3 Rebatet, Lucien, 43 Reed, John, 171 Reid, Donald, 230n50, 253n10 religion, 17–19, 52–53, 65–67, 91–92, 97–99, 108–112, 135, 158, 163–164, 193, 197– 203, 213–217, 220. See also Christianity; Islam; the sacred; primitive religion Renan, Ernest, 14 Républicains, Les, 222 republicanism, 16, 19, 22, 30, 32, 34–35, 73–74, 117–120, 159–162, 180, 192, 204–211 Revel, Jean-­François, 7 Reynaud, Jean, 132 Reynaud, Paul, 154 Rhodesia, 42 Ricardo, David, 131, 144, 145, 154 riots of 2005, 163–164, 166 Rivière, Jean-­Claude, 45 Robcis, Camille, 12, 30, 32–34, 232n81, 246n126, 248n46 Robin, Corey, 233n2 Rocard, Michel, 33, 87, 178–179, 186 Rollet, Maurice, 45 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 10, 229n31 Rosmer, Alfred, 171 Ross, Kristin, 30, 31, 36, 233n90, 256n69 Rouch, Jean, 31, 241n14 Rougier, Louis, 47 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 25, 28, 194, 196, 198 Roy, Manabendra Nath, 171 Rue Copernic bombing, 49, 152

sacred, 17–18, 220; Benoist and the, 62, 67, 71–73; Debray and the, 181, 193, 197, 201–202, 204, 209–212, 214–215, 219, 221; Dumézil and the, 65; Durkheim and the, 27, 71–72, 138; Gauchet and the, 98, 122; Todd and the, 165. See also religion Saint Francis, 197 Saint Laurent, Yves, 1, 26 Saint Paul, 199, 203 Saint-­Simon, Henri de, 16, 132, 137 Sandinistas, 188, 205 Sanos, Sandrine, 234n15 Sapir, Jacques, 244n94 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 164, 217, 221 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 8, 14, 117, 125, 170, 171, 189, 197, 204 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 28 Sauvy, Alfred, 13, 154 Savary, Alain, 175–176 Scheler, Max, 59–60 Schmitt, Carl, 55, 56, 70, 76 Schnapp, Alain, 256n68 Schneider, Cathy Lisa, 252n130 Scott, Joan, 259n157 “Second Left,” 87, 103 Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), 175, 178 secularization, 17, 18, 110–111, 118, 120–121, 163 self-­management (autogestion), 6, 20, 86–87, 90–91, 96, 101, 103, 178–179 Servan-­Schreiber, Jean-­Jacques, 33 Sève, Lucien, 229n38 Shepard, Todd, 234n13 Sherman, Daniel J., 231n66 Siegfried, André, 151, 156, 157, 250n90–91 Simiand, François, 27 Smith, Adam, 131, 145 Smith, Timothy B., 227n6 Sneevliet, Henk, 171 socialism, 14–15, 20, 86, 99; of Allende, 175–177; and anti-­totalitarianism, 100, 187; Benoist on, 63, 73; Debray and, 19, 170, 172, 175–179, 195–196, 202, 205, 213–214, 217; of Eurocommunists, 177–179, 183–184; of Lefort and Castoriadis, 83–84, 86, 91; of Mitterrand, 176–177; nineteenth-­century, 16; Todd on, 125, 128, 150. See also Marxism; Parti Socialiste

272 Index Socialism ou barbarie, 81, 83–84, 91, 100, 230n48. See also Lefort; Castoriadis Society of Anthropology (Paris), 25 Solidarity (Poland), 195 Sollers, Philippe, 195 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 20, 100 Somoza, Anastasio, 188 Sontag, Susan, 232n74 Sorel, Georges, 44, 56 SOS Racisme, 3 Souillac, Geneviève, 244n98 South Africa, 42 Soviet Union, 7, 75, 76, 83, 100, 113, 125, 143–144, 159, 176, 178, 183 Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), 256n68 Spanish Civil War, 181 Spengler, Oswald, 55, 57–59, 63, 236n78 Spinoza, Baruch, 223 Stalin, Joseph, 83, 177, 202 Stasi Commission, 211 state, 19–20, 94–95, 100–102, 104–116, 119, 183, 190, 212 Streeck, Wolfgang, 235–236n61 structuralism, 32–33; in anthropology, 17, 27–30, 51, 64, 70, 82, 93, 111, 143, 145, 182, 193, 201; and Benoist, 64, 70; and Castoriadis, 90; Clastres on, 29, 93; and Debray, 182, 193, 201, 215; and Dumézil, 193; and Gauchet, 82; and Leroi-­ Gourhan, 201; of Lévi-­Strauss, 27–30, 32, 70, 82, 90, 93, 145, 193, 201; and Lordon, 223–224; and political anthropology, 9–14, 219–220; and Todd, 143, 145 Sturrock, John, 228n22 Surkis, Judith, 230n39 Swain, Gladys, 114 Sweezy, Paul M., 253n10 symbolic, 13–17, 32, 70, 88–92, 96, 121–123, 193, 200–201, 223 Taguieff, Pierre-­André, 235n36 Taylor, Charles, 6 Tel Quel, 195 Temps modernes, Les, 8, 171, 191 Terray, Emmanuel, 111, 232n79 Textures, 81–82, 91, 97, 100–101, 104–105 Thatcher, Margaret, 3 Third World, 8, 15, 22, 63, 129–130, 147, 154–155, 170, 179–180, 187–188, 196, 204

Thompson, E. P., 248n55, 249n58 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 13, 14, 18, 123, 230n46, 231n64 Todd, Emmanuel, 9, 73, 124–132, 139, 142– 168, 206, 210, 220, 250n92; on American empire, 159–163; and the Annales School, 143–146; and the anthropological turn, 5, 7–8; and anti-­totalitarianism, 146–148; on democracy, 127, 130–131; on diversity, 150–153, 157, 162; and English social history, 139–143; family structures of, 125–131; on the Front national, 156–158, 166; and identity, 152–153; on immigration, 152, 154, 156, 158–159, 162–167; and INED, 153–155; on Islam, 135, 163–167; on “Je suis Charlie,” 164–166; and Le Play, 142, 143, 149, 150, 152, 157; and liberalism, 7–8, 20, 124–126, 131–133, 141, 143, 147–148, 157–162, 167; on literacy, 127–131; and May 1968, 148; on neoliberalism, 160–162; on PCF, 125, 146–148, 157, 160, 166; political anthropology of, 11–18, 20–24; on race, 162–163; on religion, 135, 158, 163–164; on riots of 2005, 163–164, 166; on Soviet Union, 125, 143–145, 148; on tolerance, 144, 148, 152, 163; upbringing of, 124–125 Todd, Olivier, 7, 125 Todorov, Tzvetan, 231n62 tolerance, 4, 76, 120, 144, 148, 152, 163 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 45 Torres, Juan José, 172 totalitarianism, 89, 99, 107, 113, 115, 126, 144, 146, 148, 187, 208 Tricontinental Conference, 170 Trocadero Museum (see Ethnographic Museum), 25, 28 Trotsky, Leon, 83, 171, 214 U-­turn of Mitterrand, 3, 208, 221 Union of the Left, 1, 8, 19, 20, 103, 143, 167, 176, 177, 182–184, 192, 202, 203 Union pour la Démocratie Française (UDF), 48, 50, 63, 157, 183 Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-­léninistes (UJC(ml)), 182 Union de la paix sociale, 138 L’Unité, 176 United Nations (UN), 205–206

Index 273 United States of America, 16, 32, 50, 63, 144, 154, 159–163, 176, 179, 180, 182, 205–207 University of Havana, 171 Valeurs actuelles, 47 Valla, Jean-­Claude, 42, 44–49 Vattimo, Gianni, 203 veil. See “headscarf affair” Venner, Dominique, 39–43, 45, 234n21 Vial, Pierre, 45, 68 Vichy government, 42–43, 154, 166, 210 Vico, Giambattista, 225 Vidal-­Naquet, Pierre, 256n68 Villepin, Dominique de, 207 Vincent, Jean-­Marie, 182

Waffen-­SS, 47, 56 Warsaw Pact, 206 Weber, Henri, 182, 256n69 Weber, Max, 109 Weymans, Wim, 245n100 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 10, 140 workers’ inquiry, 86, 137 Wright, Steve, 241n14 Wrigley, E. A., 140 Zinoviev, Grigory, 171 Zizek, Slavoj, 203 “Zombie Catholics,” 165–166 “Zombie Muslims,” 167

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Acknowledgments

This book is the labor of many years and has benefited from the support of several people. For reading these chapters and helping me think through this project in general, I thank my professors at UCLA, Lynn Hunt and Perry Anderson, and my dear friends Susan Mokhberi, Naomi Taback, and Alexander Zevin. In the early stages, I received invaluable guidance from Robert Brenner, Saul Friedländer, and Kirstie McClure, and I am grateful to them for it. I would like to thank my friends with whom I discussed these and related ideas during the writing of this book: Grey Anderson, Aaron Benanav, Sung-­ eun Choi, Matthew Crow, Elizabeth Everton, Laure Fernandez, Lauren Janes, Emud Mokhberi, Maxim Pozdorovkin, Diana Raesner, Joshua Rahtz, Matthew Strohl, and my colleagues in the history department at the College of Staten Island. I can never be thankful enough for the love and support of my in-­laws and family, particularly my parents. Parts of the introduction first appeared in New Left Review 78 (November‒December 2012): 31–61. I thank Susan Watkins and Tony Wood at New Left Review for their insightful comments on my work. I am grateful to have received a grant from the Research Foundation of the City University of New York (CUNY) for the completion of this book. I was also fortunate to have been chosen to participate in CUNY’s Faculty Fellowship Publication Program in 2018. I thank my group and our mentor, Moustafa Bayoumi, for their comments on Chapter 2. At the University of Pennsylvania Press, I thank Damon Linker for his editorial wisdom, and I thank the production team for the hard work it put into this book. Finally, I am grateful to the two anonymous readers who reviewed and ultimately improved the manuscript.