Although the title of this chapter poses a question, and its analysis will be descriptive, the conclusion is prescriptive. I will offer an argument that explains historically, sociologically, and philosophically the attraction of Marxism in France, the intellectual options that choice entails for those whom I broadly term “communist” (following Marx’s own description in The Communist Manifesto), and the strength and weaknesses of their position.1 Finally, I will point to some indices of the emergence of another intellectual style, one that I find more attractive and have labeled elsewhere a “politics of judgment,”2 to which I will return later in this volume. Although I begin with a comparison of the American and French intellectual, I am not concerned here with the American case, in part because the left/right split in the United States has been supplanted by debates between the center and the right and in part because the intellectual in American political life has been marginalized as a result of the cultural effects of the cold war. I present my arguments in the form of eleven theses—the parody on Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach is of course intended. Unintended but unavoidable is the technique so well applied by old-style Marxist intellectuals: the amalgam. I am painting a group portrait, not referring to specific cases, which nonetheless fit more or less well the big picture described here. My definition of that creature called “the intellectual” appears in the sixth thesis, with reference to Emile Durkheim’s interpretation of the Dreyfus affair.
1. French and Americans as intellectuals represent two styles: one moral, one political. In the United States, as in France, the intellectual is a specialist of the universal in a double sense: (a) concerned with everything; and (b) claiming universal validity for his or her arguments. But in the United States the intellectual tends to be a moralist (not a technocrat or pragmatist, as is sometimes claimed, for in either of those cases universal relevance is absent). Moreover, in the United States the intellectual not only tends to stand in opposition to the powers that be but also—and this is a uniquely American phenomenon—stands opposed to the public, from whom she or he does not expect immediate understanding or support. In this the intellectual may be taxed as being elitist and in fact may be—consciously or not. Yet at the same time the American intellectual tends also to be a populist, believing that people are basically moral and susceptible to appeals to their “better angels.” Such populism, however, is not a politics but a morality disguised as politics. As a result, even when intervening in so-called political matters, the American intellectual is not a political actor and contributes little or nothing to the understanding of everyday politics. (Of course, exceptions leap to mind, but aside from lawyers, whose role was noted already by Tocqueville, the only significant social category that is excluded is the social scientist, whose brief moment in the sun during the Great Society was perhaps irreparably harmed by excessive promises and inadequate delivery, for example, in the misnamed War on Poverty.)
In contrast, the French intellectual is a political animal, and even his moral interventions contribute to defining the political by directing the framework of debate. Further, the French intellectual can be on the right as well as on the left, whereas the American intellectual has tended to stand on the left wing of the political spectrum. (When American intellectuals appear on the right, as did the neoconservatives in the 1980s, this is said to be less the result of a change in their values than a reaction to the antics of the left, which is accused of betraying its values.) This political positioning is due to the relation of intellectuals to the revolutionary traditions that underlie the political cultures of the two countries. These traditions explain not only the moralism of American intellectuals but also the reasons they have been only rarely tempted by the Marxism that until recently was a looming presence in French politics. Americans are not inherently more moral than the French. They are the products of a different history (see, e.g., chap. 10, “Intersecting Trajectories of Republicanism in France and the United States”).
2. Historical changes may have made the French intellectual obsolete. After World War II, not only was antifascism de rigeur, but the inglorious demise of the Third Republic and the shameful Vichy regime discredited even more moderate political orientations, leaving only the left standing tall. The credibility of socialism and communism eroded over the years, but Marxism seemed untouched by this decline; as a theory, it could be exempted from the historical accidents that distorted its practical realization. But after the seemingly incomprehensible and certainly unexpected collapse of the East European sister states, followed by the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the reality of the failed experiment could no longer be denied. The question is, why had so many been blinded for so long? François Furet tried to suggest an answer in his suggestive study Le passé d’une illusion.3 But his allusion to Freud’s psychoanalytic account of the roots of religious belief does not take account of the reality of the illusion, which was not simply the product of arbitrary faith. And in any case the decline of Marxist beliefs had clearly affected the French intellectual community some fifteen years before the fall of communism, when Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago appeared. It was at this time that French political thinkers discovered liberalism, while the philosophers seized on the idea of human rights. The philosophers, always the leading group in France, sought to give their new conceptual orientation a political twist, demanding a moralization, particularly of international politics, that contrasted with their previous distrust of the motives of state actors. The political liberals also turned to ethics, but their contribution was apparently more modest, challenging the state’s administrative power in the name of citizen participation in controversial decisions.
These changes have led to a surprising number of translations of apparently quite technical American philosophical works, which are nonetheless read in a French political context. The quality of this reception varies (although the vitality and engagement of the recent work of Paul Ricoeur, who returned to France after many years teaching in the United States, should be noted). More significant is the persistence of a political interpretation of the new French concern with ethics. This can take the extreme form that some criticize as “rights-of-man-ism,” whose absolutism in its new cause may be simply a reformulation of the absolutism that refused to allow the “accidental” forms of totalitarianism to infect faith in Marxism. Such extremes, whether or not they are typical, can often point to analytically fruitful paths of inquiry.
3. The French intellectual is not Marxist; French culture is. Americans, particularly those who came of age during the heyday of the new left, tend to think of French intellectuals as functioning within and developing the legacy of Marx. In fact, however, it is hard to think of important French contributions to Marxism. Some would say this is due to the pressure for conformity exercised by the Communist Party, which drove, for example, Henri Lefèbvre from its ranks while taming a former surrealist like Louis Aragon. The one systematic attempt to develop the philosophical bases of Marxism, Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique, had little influence, and its promised second volume was published posthumously (as the engaged author toyed with Maoist activism).4 The other serious philosophical confrontation with Marx, in the pages of the then little known journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, led its leading figures, Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, to a severe critique of Marx’s premises and to the elaboration of their own political theories, whose principal concern was the radical nature of the democratic demands that Marx neglected. The most systematic study of Marx remains La pensée de Karl Marx, published first in 1957 by the Jesuit Jean-Yves Calvez, who was the leader in the Catholic-Communist dialogue of the times. Other confrontations with Marx, such as Derrida’s post-totalitarian Specters of Marx, reflect more the idiosyncrasies of their authors, although Michel Henry’s phenomenological rereading stands out, as does Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects (written before the author developed his unique persona). This is not simply a historical irony; it points to the way Marx is present among French intellectuals.
If Marxian theory is not a major contributor to French philosophical life, Marxism even today plays a central role in its intellectual culture. The American is often surprised by the almost casual allusions to concepts such as class struggle, bourgeois domination, or capitalist exploitation that remain background presuppositions apparently in no need of elaboration. The reason for this influence lies partially in French history (to which I return in chap. 9, “The Burden of French History”) and partially in the fact that Marx’s most accessible and most political writings concerned French history.5 This deeply political understanding of their own culture explains French mockery (and mock horror) of the invidious “political correctness” by which Americans tend to distinguish themselves: the French assume they have bigger fish to fry, their republican universalism standing in sharp contrast to American democratic particularism. The same overheated stress on the political may explain as well the relative social underdevelopment of French feminism (although the recent law insisting on parity of male and female candidates for office may introduce social change through political means). But there is a positive side to this political orientation: its presence throughout society explains the ability of French intellectuals to get a public hearing for their criticisms—since the general assumptions of Marxism, if not the theory of Marx, have seeped into the soil of French culture. As opposed to their American counterparts, French critics are not condemned to moral appeals from the wilderness.
4. The French intellectual illustrates Marx’s presuppositions. The metaphor of the “soil of French culture” alludes to a passage in which the young Marx, after discovering the revolutionary nature of the proletariat (in the 1843 “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction”), insists that the “the lightning of thought” must strike “this naive [proletarian] soil of the people” for human emancipation to be realized. This “lightning of thought” would be brought, Marx argues in The Communist Manifesto, by the communist armed with an understanding of the necessary course of world history. This communist, as Claude Lefort has argued, represents a new gestalt in political history, a figure who is paradoxically both within history and yet able to rise above it and account for its inevitable progress.6 The communist assumes that radical potential is constantly present, needing only the spark of consciousness to be awakened. American left-wing intellectuals since the 1960s have tried to operate on this assumption, first seeking to revive (or recover) a forgotten tradition of working-class struggle, then turning to ethnic histories to stake out a wider terrain, and finally broadening their reach to the field of “culture” in order to find within society the agent capable of transforming it. Alas, the results have been only the development of academic specialties (e.g., cultural studies) whose political translation is an identity politics that evokes little response in the wider public and whose results are only a disguised and cheapened form of interest politics.7 Some French intellectuals make similar presuppositions, a legacy of Marxism found in the positioning of sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu and those who join him in supporting what they take to be a “social movement” that is finally manifesting itself in spontaneous surges like the strikes of 1995.8 Most, however, do not. Yet their interventions resonate with the public in a way that makes the American jealous … and curious.
In this context, it is useful to recall the French intellectual who in the 1960s, while remaining a faithful member of the Communist Party, did introduce a philosophical reflection on Marx: Louis Althusser. Althusser’s basic intuition was expressed in his insistence that a so-called epistemological rupture (coupure épistémologique) separates the “humanism” of the young Marx, which finds its expression in the still idealist notion of “alienation,” from the “scientific” Marx of the mature economic work, which discovers a “new continent” on which to establish that communism of the future. Althusser’s contribution belonged to the general cultural movement through which the purported science of structuralism, the analysis of processes-without-a-subject, conquered French intellectual life by means of a paradoxical process of self-denial. The structuralist intellectual rejected the possibility of conscious political intervention to bring about social change while at the same time, and on the same basis, grossly inflating that same role, which was now seen as safe in the hands of the scientist. As in the case of Marx’s communist, the intellectual was thus placed at once inside and outside of history. The resulting position is apparently modest in its denial of so-called bourgeois subjectivity, but in fact it expresses the greatest hubris of all: the claim to knowledge of historical necessity.
There was something undeniably appealing about this stance; the ambitions of the teach-in, that political exercise invented by contemporary American intellectuals trying to face up to the Vietnam War, seemed modest in comparison with the certainties of structuralism. It is no accident—as the Marxists like to put it—that the structuralist intellectual was at home in the world of the communist. But it was also not surprising that after May 1968 many of Althusser’s young disciples adopted the voluntarism of Maoist politics: the step from a vision of processes without a subject to the primacy of radical will demanded only an inversion of values, not a political analysis.
5. The French intellectual tradition is broader than its communist deformation. The hubris of the communist entails a denial of personal responsibility (which explains the political dishonesty and lack of principle that have marked that tradition, which purports to take into account only objective necessity). But the French intellectual tradition—dating at least to Voltaire’s “écrasez l’infâme,” prolonged in the nineteenth century by Zola’s “J’accuse,” and continued in the twentieth century by Péguy, Simone Weil, and even at times Sartre and Beauvoir—did accept moral responsibility. The typical intellectual intervention was not the scientific analysis but the petition, the pamphlet, the open letter; it was literary (in the tradition of the moralistes) rather than technical or pragmatic. But this intellectual tradition had its own difficulty in linking moral critique to political responsibility. Tocqueville’s analysis of the French Revolution memorably criticized the philosophes for not understanding the practical imperatives that a government must face; their moralism made impossible the successful closure of the process begun in 1789. More recently, Reinhart Koselleck’s Kritik und Krise analyzed the intellectual’s role in the formation of public opinion before the French Revolution. He argued that the basis of the power of intellectual critique was the fact that its moralism expressed implicitly a political program that either dared not speak in its own name or was unaware of its own political premises. As a result, the old political order could not combat it, yet when it came to power it was unable to give itself stable institutional form. A similar point is made by François Furet’s analysis of the contribution of Augustin Cochin to understanding the political dynamics of the French Revolution.9 What is significant in the present context, however, is that despite the accuracy of this criticism the French intellectual’s moral intervention did find a public and political echo in a way that similar action by the American does not (or does only exceptionally). An intellectual tradition had come to exist in France, rooted in its “soil.” The question is: Why? What makes the French intellectual a public intellectual?
6. The French intellectual is a social creation. The intellectual emerges as a social type only when there exists a public receptive to his words. Emile Durkheim’s remarkable “Individualism and the Intellectuals” illustrates the point.10 The Dreyfusards were accused of questioning the authority on which the political unity of the nation depended; their insistence on the sole authority of reason was said to ignore the weight of traditional institutions (such as the army) that were needed to hold in check the forces of modern individualism. Durkheim’s reply stressed not only this attitude’s philosophical roots in Rousseau and Kant but also its foundation in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and in the moral catechism of the Third Republic. But he went further. Individualism is the religion of man “in the ritual sense of the word”; it is sacred; and it must be defended in the same way that a believer reacts to the profanation of an idol. Such individualism admittedly puts “la personne humaine” above the state and allows no compromise with its practical claims. But this does not mean that the rights of the collectivity are ignored, in theory or in practice. Kant’s defense of the autonomy of reason produced not only Fichte, who was already “quite impregnated with socialism,” but also Hegel, who produced Marx; and Rousseau’s individualism was complemented by a “authoritarian conception of society” that led to the French Revolution, which was “above all a great moment of national concentration.” In short, for the philosopher of the “social fact,” the moments of individualism and social solidarity are mutually reinforcing poles, and the analyst of the social division of labor warns that an attempt to restrain the development of individualism would only reintroduce conformism, which is no pillar of national strength.11 The intervention of the intellectuals in the Dreyfus affair cannot be explained simply by their sympathy for the victim, continues Durkheim; nor does it result from their fear that they might be treated in an equally unjust manner. Turning the tables on his traditionalist and nationalist opponents, Durkheim insists that the social basis of the “religion of the individual” means that if such affronts to the individual are unpunished, the very existence of the nation is threatened. Since what is shared by modern France is the religion of the rights of man, the violation of Dreyfus’s rights is a threat to the community, while their defense by the intellectuals reaffirms the glue that binds together a society founded on the ideas introduced to the world in 1789. On this, no compromise is possible.
Despite his stress on the social roots of modern individualism, Durkheim concludes on a note of political engagement whose similarity to that of Marx and the communist is striking. The individualism of the eighteenth century has to be brought up to date, he insists. At its origins, it was only negative, a liberation from external political bonds. This emancipation brought freedom to think, write, and vote, but such political freedom is a means, not an end; its value depends on how it is used. With the foundation of the Third Republic, says Durkheim, new barriers fell; but his generation did not know how to use its freedom, which it turned against its fellow citizens to reinforce social division. Durkheim is not advocating that the clash of interests be ignored; the sociological intellectual wants to use his new freedom to ameliorate a social machine that is “still so harsh on individuals,” while seeking to realize what Durkheim’s use of quotation marks clearly recognizes as Marx’s principle of “‘to each according to his labor.’” This would be the true realization of the individualism inaugurated in 1789, organizing economic life and introducing greater justice into contractual relations. This achievement is not preordained, as in Marx; it is the result of political intervention—which is made necessary by social conditions. The present crisis, Durkheim affirms, has “returned to us a taste for action.” Our enemies are strong only because we are weak, but they are only “men of letters seduced by an interesting theme” that is but an abstraction that will not permit them to hold back the masses “if we know how to act.” Although he does not go on to explain “how to act,” one can assume that Durkheim’s new social science would be the source of the needed advice. But that new science itself has not only social roots; its discovery that individualism is the principle that binds together modern society implies that the freedom that permits the intellectual to “act” has its own roots in a political phenomenon: the French Revolution.
7. The uniqueness of the French Revolution is its incompleteness. François Furet’s final reflections on the uniqueness of the French Revolution, published posthumously,12 underline the fact that this revolution had to confront a question that neither the Glorious Revolution in England nor its American successor had faced: the religious question. France had not had a Reformation; church and state were bound in a theologico-political unity that neither side could break. Unable to invent a satisfactory political solution, the French made politics itself into a religion. The explanation of this claim provides a pessimistic political complement to Durkheim’s sociological optimism founded in the modern religion of the individual. For Furet, the revolution presented an “a-religious character” because “the promise of a good society is no longer written in sacred texts, as in the English case, or in a harmony of the political and the religious, as in the American example, but depends only on the development of history.” The philosophes were not only individualists and intellectuals; they were the most radically antireligious participants in the European Enlightenment, and the revolution continued their work, despoiling that pillar of the ancien régime, the Catholic church. But it was then forced to confront “for the first time all of the dimensions of the dilemma of modern liberalism, which supposes that social and political life no longer entails any common belief shared by the citizenry since each citizen is the master of what are considered to be only his ‘opinions.’ No revolution prior to the French had to face this collective spiritual deficit, which would become the common destiny of modern societies.” Rather than follow the recommendations of the optimistic sociologist, the pessimistic critic of communism as an illusion (in Le passé d’une illusion) draws together his analysis of our century with his life work on the political nature and legacy of the French Revolution: “From this point of view, Voltairean deism, parliamentary Jansenism, the Savoyard vicar, the natural religion of the physiocrats, the esoterism of the Masons are all of a piece: they consecrate political expectations more than they form collective beliefs.” Indeed, Furet returns (implicitly) to his own past as a Communist who left the party after 1956 when he concludes by admitting the accuracy of Marx’s critique of the French “illusion du politique.” But the fact that the political goals sought by the revolution were illusory does not mean that they are not effective in producing real political action. Their illusory nature does, however, mean that the political action is condemned to fail—and condemned also to be taken up again, over and over.
8. Denial of the uniqueness of the French Revolution leads to the emergence of the communist as intellectual. Furet’s analysis shows that the revolution was condemned to failure. But this failure—and the repeated attempts to realize the revolution’s promise—are the basis of what is known as “French exceptionalism.” This unique history created the conditions for the emergence of the critical intellectual; it made him—and later her—part of the fabric of modern French history. In effect, if present conditions do not correspond to the universality of the revolutionary republican vision, criticism becomes a republican duty, and the critic does not stand outside society but claims only to express what is “in itself” or implicitly already present in the fabric of that historical society. This political claim has a similar structure to the social claim of the communist. The painful ethical decision faced by the American intellectual who must decide to stand up for right and rights even against the majority does not trouble the intellectual heirs to the French Revolution. (This is no doubt one reason why ethical theory—as opposed to the catechism of republican morality—was little developed in France.) What is more, the public to which the intellectual addresses his criticism was formed by the same self-critical tradition and is therefore receptive to the critique. The same historical structure explains why right-wing political intellectuals could also flourish in France; they stood at the other pole of the debate, putting religious or nationalist values where the republicans stood on their own promise of individual rights.
The failure to reflect ethically on the republican morality presupposed by the critical intellectual led to a denial of the uniqueness of French political culture, which explains the emergence of the communist, who claims to represent the necessary development of world history. There are both logical and historical grounds for this shift in orientation. Logically, the critic had to presuppose that the revolutionary project was realizable; otherwise, the critical mission made no sense, and there was no reason to expect that the message would be received by public opinion. Historically, a transference of the republican faith to the Russian Revolution of 1917 made that event appear—despite what some came to admit were its “deformations”—to be the continuation of the republican project. There is no need to rehearse here the historical basis on which this belief was edified, but precisely because it was edifying, because it satisfied the essentially religious nature of the French “politics of illusion,” it retained its power over the imagination of generations.13 During the interwar years, left and right could both criticize a so-called bourgeois republic that had bled France during the long war from 1914 to 1918 and then lacked the strength to rebuild it at its close. After 1945 intellectuals of the left supported the party of the working class, whose resistance to Fascism supported its claim to be the rightful heir of the republican revolution. Anticolonial agitation made the mental gymnastics more difficult during France’s Vietnam and then Algerian wars, but anti-imperialism could claim that the French Empire, like that of Bonaparte, was a betrayal of the revolutionary legacy (although others could claim the opposite and compare Napoleon’s failures to Stalin’s successful extension of the Soviet imperium). When the invasion of Hungary drove many from the Communist ranks in 1956 and the “fraternal” intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 drove out still more, most continued to consider themselves part of the original project, sometimes rebaptized as “Euro-Communism” or even the “Third Way.”
9. The “service public” is the expression of the uniqueness of the French Revolution. At the end of his essay, Furet argues that the Third Republic sought “an end to the revolution marked, or at least promised, by a new sacral power—but a secular [laïque] power—because the instructor had replaced the priest.” This shift signifies also that the nature of the intellectual has changed. How does the primary school teacher become a sort of intellectual? What kind of intellectual has emerged here? His—and only later her—task was to carry the civilizing mission of the republic to the countryside, realizing its universal message. Following Tocqueville, Furet stresses the religious element that animates this secular politics: “It is the universalism of ‘civilization,’ faith in progress, the emancipation of the human species.” Belief in this secular trinity endures today; it underlies worries about threats from the European Union and the Euro, and it explains the masses who went to the streets in December 1995 to protest the government’s attempt to reform an antiquated and indebted social security system. Paul Thibaud, the former editor-in-chief of Esprit, draws the implications of this secular trinity in an important essay:
The French public service is a sentiment, or even a belief, which unites three attitudes or orientations: the spirit of the Enlightenment that inspires technicians who seek to demonstrate progress and bring it to the people by innovative activities; the desire of politicians to have access to the means to intervene in society, particularly in projects of urban planning and modernization; and a quasi-liberal mode of working that is regulated by fixed procedures that are not dependent on the whims of petty bosses, an illustration of the value of autonomy that is treasured by the Homo republicanus who made public service a national ideal.
Thibaud’s replacement of the third term, the “emancipation of the human species,” by “a quasi-liberal mode of working” announces the transformation of the Homo republicanus into the modern liberal individualist. It is thus no surprise that Thibaud concludes that the republican synthesis has come to an end; that is why his essay is titled “Réapprendre à se gouverner” (The need to relearn self-government).14
10. The role of the intellectual as public servant has become problematic. The inherited notion of the service public was not incompatible with the self-conception of the communist as intellectual. The inherent goodness of the gift of civilization brought to those who have been deprived of it cannot be put into question; it participates in a necessary progress whose intellectual origin lies with the antireligious Enlightenment and whose political realization began in 1789. This intellectual project is a “public service” whose messengers stand, modestly, in the service of the public, which is expected to recognize in them its own needs. Denouncing its enemies, articulating its nascent but inchoate demands, refusing to compromise with injustice, this “public servant” has been derided as the “intellectuel pétitionnaire” who claims to lend voice to the voiceless. At its best, public service is a noble calling, an admirable vocation, a form of Weber’s ethics of conviction. This allusion to Weber suggests, however, an implicit criticism: the intellectual abandons the ethics of responsibility. But Weber (whom the French have only recently come to know, in large part thanks to Raymond Aron) knew that the ethics of responsibility is burdened with its own one-sidedness. The question of responsibility has to be formulated differently for this case. What is striking is that there is no connection between the intellectual’s work (oeuvre) and the work (travail) of the intellectual.15 The importance of this distinction becomes clear in the second interpretation of the intellectual as public servant. In this case, the universality signified by the collective category “public” is challenged; the dual nature of the intellectual (whom my first thesis defines as concerned with everything while claiming universality for his judgments) becomes truly ambiguous. The public servant has the task of serving the Republic, whose identity with the public has become problematic.
The critique of totalitarianism that belatedly seized French intellectual life with the translation of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (in 1974) led some to rediscover the importance of the ethical reflection that appeared unimportant to the republican political project (these were the so-called new philosophers, although one could doubt their newness as well as the naive simplicity of their philosophy); others were led to reexamine the problematic nature of modern democracy (as was the case for Esprit and the more liberal Commentaire, founded by Raymond Aron). Both styles of reflection of course could appeal to the French Revolution, whose Declaration of the Rights of Man had declared also the rights of the citizen without worrying about their compatibility. While the reexamination of the roots of democracy has been more important (since the new philosophers’ tended more toward moral exhortation than political analysis), its significance lies in the quest for a philosophical foundation for political analysis. Returning to the classic Greek tradition, democracy is interpreted as a regime, a set of individual and social relations united by the world of meaning that attaches to them.16 The idea that meanings are not inherent in things shatters the pretension of any positivism (including that of historical materialism) and opens to criticism all aspects of human life, public as well as private, suggesting the possibility (and necessity) of uniting the ethical, liberal, and republican dimensions of political life. The foundation of intellectual critique is no longer a public that is presumed to be waiting for the Word that enlightens and thereby liberates. Whereas Furet’s politics-as-secular-religion was condemned to illusion, democratic politics—which refuses traditional religious transcendence and presupposes a Reformation—is liberated by this supposed illusion, that is, by its own impossible but always renewed self-affirmation. In this way, the modern individual whom Thibaud rightly saw replacing the classical Homo republicanus acquires the role of the critical individual stressed by Durkheim’s sociology. If the intellectual is to serve that individual, he or she can only do so by strengthening individuality, not by acting in the place or name of this or that individual or category of individuals.
11. The intellectuals have tried to change the world; the point, however, is to interpret it. The old French intellectual whom I contrasted at the outset to his and now her American cousin will survive as long as the communist interpretation of the legacy of the French Revolution remains alive. Its paradoxical foundation is its modest (!) assumption that it is only giving voice or bringing to consciousness what is already dormant in the soil of history. This means that its professed goal of changing the world is self-contradictory, since it is in fact only making explicit what was implicit in existing society. Its politics is an antipolitics: a refusal of responsibility and the expression of an inability to live with that other legacy of the French Revolution—the indeterminacy of democratic politics, which must be constantly interpreted anew and can never be finally fixed or repaired. Responsibility is the axial category for the intellectual today; judgment rather than the expression of revealed truth is its manifestation. To interpret the world is first of all to put it into question, to doubt its fixedness and solidity, to go beyond its appearing forms. This implies acceptance of the possibility of error—more, the affirmation of the right to err and the need to confront others in public debate. This has not been the traditional stance of the French intellectual. But in the world of modern individualist democracy, it is the only practice open to the intellectual—that is, to the critical intellectual who is not content with the world as it is.
Whether globalization will make national boundaries and traditions irrelevant in the long run may be an empirical question. The process after all was analyzed more than a century ago by Marx, who saw it as the precondition for the (communist) realization of the French Revolution. That Marx’s French followers continue to hold on to their inherited national mission shows only that their Marxism lacks the imaginative courage and capacity for judgment that makes reading Marx still rewarding even while the work of his French adepts has been quietly left—like Marx’s own German Ideology—to “the gnawing criticism of the mice” (as Marx put it in the autobiographical sketch that he published in the 1859 preface to “Toward a Critique of Political Economy”). The certainty that the world needs to be changed has led to an inability to interpret it that condemns the self-declared revolutionary’s political project to vanity precisely because of its supposed modernity.