1. In 2004 a young French woman alleged she had been brutalized by a group of youths of North African origin on a Parisian train. The story was aired on France’s evening television news bulletins and became a national cause célèbre until it became clear that she had only made up the story to get on television. Translator’s note.
2. In early 2001, the director of the École de-s Science-s Politiques, Richard Descoings, amid much controversy, set up an alternative access scheme for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Translator’s note.
3. The Economist, 5 March, 2005.
4. Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, New York University Press, 1975. Set up in 1973, the Trilateral Commission is a sort of club of reflection gathering together State officials, experts and businessmen from the United States, western Europe and Japan. It is often credited with having elaborated the ideas of the future ‘New World Order’.
5. Aristotle, the Constitution of Athens, ch. XVI.
6. A student of Louis Althusser’s at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1960s, Jean-Claude Milner was part of the Lacanian Cahiers pour l’analyse, which he co-founded in 1966. He is also a well-known linguist, the author of many books, and a former director of the College International de Philosophie in Paris. Translator’s note.
7. For this the reader should consult Jean-Claude Milner’s major work Les Noms indistincts, Seuil, 1983.
8. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon and Schuster, 1996.
9. Cf. Claude Lefort, The Democratic Invention: the Limits of Totalitarian Domination, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000 [1981].
10. Augustin Cochin, Les Sociétés de pensée et la démocratie moderne, Copernic, 1978. Augustin Cochin (1876–1916) was the son of baron Denys Cochin, who was a royalist deputy and minister during the First World War. As an avowed monarchist, Augustin Cochin collaborated on Action française’s journal Revue grise. He died in battle in 1916. Translator’s note.
11. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, 1998, and J. Ranciere, ‘Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103, 2/3, Spring/Summer, 2004.
12. Dominique Schnapper, Providential Democracy: an Essay on Contemporary Equality, trans. John Taylor, Transaction, 2006 [2002], p. 124.
13. Ibid
14. On the various and sometimes contorted paths leading to contemporary neo-Tocquevillism, and notably on the conversion of the traditionalist, Catholic interpretation of Tocqueville into a postmodern sociology of ‘consumer society’, see Serge Audier, Tocqueville Retrouve: genèse et enjeux du renouveau tocquevillien français, Vrin, 2004.
15. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Harper Collins, 1976. It must be noted that Daniel Bell’s account still articulated a call for a return to puritanical values together with a concern for social justice, something which has completely disappeared with those who have revived his problematic in France.
16. Gilles Lipovetsky, L’Ère du vide: essais sur l’individualisme contemporain, Gallimard, 1983, pp. 145–146.
17. Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, trans. Chris Turner, Sage, 1998 [1970], p. 50.
18. The movement of 1995 was a response to government plans to introduce a series of measures designed to bring France in line with international finance and move it toward an American-style system of pensions. In reaction to this popular movement, the editors of the journal Esprit published a petition in Le Monde, (9 December, 1995) supporting the government’s ‘audacious’ plans and condemning the ‘corporatist interests’ of the workers. Translator’s note.
19. Jules Ferry (1832–1893) became the French Minister of Education (ministre d’Instruction publique) in 1879. His aim was to build a secular and republican France on the basis of the school. Translator’s note.
20. Renan’s thesis is summed up in La Réforme intellectuelle et morale, oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, Calmann-Lévy, 1947, pp. 325–546. That in Renan’s work this thesis goes hand-in-hand with a palpable nostalgia for the medieval Catholic people, putting its work and its faith at the service of the great cathedral works, is not a contradiction. Simply, the elites are ‘Protestant’, that is, enlightened and individualist, and the people ‘Catholic’, that is monolithic, and more believing than knowing. From Guizot to Taine and Renan, this is the kernelof the thinking of the elites in the nineteenth century.
21. Jean-Louis Thiriet, ‘L’École malade de l’égalité’, Le Débat, no. 92, Nov/Dec, 1996.
22. For the development of these themes, the interested reader can consult the complete works of Alain Finkielkraut, notably L’Imparfait du présent, Gallimard, 2002, or, more economically, the interview of the same author by Marcel Gauchet, ‘Malaise dans la democratie: L’école, la culture, l’individualisme’, Le Débat, no. 51, Sept/Oct, 1988. For a trendier version in a neo-Catholic punk style see the complete works of Maurice Dantec. Alain Finkielkraut teaches at the École Polytechnique in Paris. He is among France’s cohort of public intellectuals who appear regularly on talk shows. Intellectually, he claims affiliation to the thought of Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Lévinas. He has gained a certain notoriety for his controversial views concerning, for example, the riots in the Parisian banlieues and throughout France in 2005, which he attributed not to sociopolitical causes but to racial-ethnic ones, i.e. to the presence of Islamists. Maurice Dantec is a bestselling French cyberpunk fiction writer. Fleeing the ‘Islamisation of France’, he moved to Montreal, Canada, where, amongst other things, he collaborates with a conservative Francophone journal called Égards. Avowedly pro-Israel and pro-NATO, he endorses a ‘Christian-Futurist’ vision, which he pursues in his war against the contemporary nihilism he alleges is embodied in French leftism, the conservative right of Jacques Chirac, and of course the Islamists. Translator’s note.
23. Finkielkraut, L’Imparfait du présent, p. 164.
24. Ibid., p. 200.
25. Jean-Jacques Delfour, ‘Loft Story: une machine totalitaire’, Le Monde, 19 May, 2001. On the same theme – and in the same tone – see Damien Le Guay, L’Empire de la télé-réalité: ou comment accroître le ‘temps de cerveau humain disponsible’, Presses de la Renaissance, 2005. Loft Story is the French equivalent of the British Big Brother reality show. Translator’s note.
26. Lucien Karpik, ‘Being a victim; that means finding someone to blame’, accounts collected by Cecile Prieur, Le Monde, 22–23 August, 2004. We know how important denouncing democratic tyranny is for the prevailing opinion. On this matter see notably Gilles William Goldnadel, Les Martyrocrates: dérives et impostures de l’idéologie victimaire, Plon, 2004.
27. In 1815, the Bourbon Restoration restricted the franchise to those able to afford a cens (fee) of 300 francs. Un censitaire is used in the sense of an elector able to pay the cens. Translator’s note.
28. From this point of view one would benefit from reading Le Salaire de l’idéal: la théorie des classes et de la culture au xxe siècle (Seuil, 1997), in which the same Jean-Claude Milner analyzes, in the Marxist terms of the unfortunate destiny of ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ become irrelevant to capitalist expansion, the processes attributed here to the fatal development of democratic limitlessness.
29. Jean-Claude Milner, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, Verdier, 2003, p. 32. I thank Milner for his responses to the comments I addressed to him about the theses presented in this book.
30. Benny Lévy, Le Meurtre du pasteur: critique de la vision politique du monde, Grasset Verdier, 2002. Benny Lévy (1945–2003), former secretary to Jean-Paul Sartre and head of the Gauche prolétarienne, was a former student of Louis Althusser. In 1978 he discovered Lévinas and soon became a fervent Talmudist. In 2002 he co-founded the Lévinas Institute in Jerusalem with Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. Translator’s note.
31. Lévy, Le Meurtre du pasteur, p. 313.
32. Republic, VIII, 562d–563d.
33. Laws, III, 690a–690c.
34. This was demonstrated when, under one of the Socialist Party governments, it was proposed that the members of the university selection committees be drawn by lot. No practical argument could be opposed to this measure. The situation consisted in a limited population composed by definition of individuals of equal scientific capacity. A single capability was thereby undermined: the inegalitarian competence, the skill of manoeuvring in the service of pressure groups; in other words, the attempt was doomed.
35. On this point see Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge University Press, 1997 [1996].
36. Milner, Les Penchants criminels, p. 81.
37. Cf. J. Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose, Minnesota University Press, 1999 [1995].
38. Cited by Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen: histoire du suffrage universel en France, Gallimard, 1992, p. 281.
39. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Viking, 1963, pp. 270–271.
40. On this point, see Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen, and Manin, Principles of Representative Government.
41. Democracy, said John Adams, signifies nothing other than ‘the notion of a people that has no government at all’ cited in Bertlinde Laniel, Le Mot Democracy aux Etats-Unis de 1780 à 1856, Presses Universitaires de Saint-Étienne, 1995, p. 65.
42. The regime censitaire spanned the years 1815 to 1848. Translator’s note.
43. On the racial legislation of the Southern States, the reader can consult Pauli Murray, ed., States’ Laws on Race and Color, Georgia University Press, 1997 [1951]. To those who constantly raise the spectre of ‘communitarianism’, this reading will give a somewhat more precise idea as to what protecting a communitarian identity can really mean.
44. See Paul Robiquet, ed., Discours et opinions de Jules Ferry, A. Colin, 18931898, volumes III and IV of which are devoted to the education laws. In his intervention at La Cérémonie de la Sorbonne en l’honneur de Jules Ferry du 20 décembre 1905, Ferdinand Buisson underscores the pedagogical radicalism of the moderate Ferry in citing notably his address to the Congrès pédagogique on 19 April, 1881: ‘Henceforth between secondary and primary education there shall no longer be any insurmountable abyss neither when it comes to methods nor when it comes to personnel.’ However, one will note that the ‘republican’ campaign of the 1980s, without deigning to examine their competences, denounced the infiltration in colleges by primary teachers, those ‘teachers of general education’, and deplored the ‘primarization’ of secondary school teaching.
45. Cf. Alfred Fouillée, Les Études classiques et la démocratie, A. Colin, 1898. To gauge the importance of a figure like Fouillée at the time, it must be remembered that his wife was the author of a bestseller of republican pedagogical literature, Le Tour de France de deux enfants.
46. Fouillée, La Démocratie politique et sociale en France, F. Alcan, 1910, pp. 131–132.
47. Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism, trans. Valence Ionescu, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968, p. 83.
48. The Ecole nationale d’administration, ENA, is one of the Grandes Écoles, the collective name for the leading tertiary education institutions in France outside of the university system. Graduates of the Grandes Écoles provide most ministers for governments of all persuasions and represent a large proportion of the upper echelons of the public service. Translator’s note.
49. The referendum in France to ratify the proposed European Constitutional Treaty was held on 29 May, 2005. Voter turnout was 69%, of which 55% voted ‘no’. Translator’s note.
50. The word ‘liberalism’ lends itself today to all sorts of confusions. The European left use it in order to avoid the taboo word of capitalism. The European right use it to designate a vision of the world where the free market and democracy go hand-in-hand. The American evangelist right, for whom a liberal is a leftist destroyer of religion, family and society, remind us opportunely that these two things are quite different. The weight of a ‘communist’ China in the free market and in the financing of American debt, advantageously combining as it does the advantages of liberty and those of its absence, testifies to this in another manner. [The French term libéralisme can refer both to political liberalism and to economic neoliberalism. Translator’s note.]
51. Cf. Linda Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State: Governing the Economy in a Global Era, Polity, 1978.
52. On the emergence of this figure and its novelty with respect to the traditional figure of the intellectual spokesperson of the universal and the oppressed see D. and J. Ranciere, ‘La Legende des intellectuels’, in J. Ranciere, Les Scènes du peuple, Horlieu, 2003.
53. Maurice Dantec, Le Théâtre des opérations: journal métaphysique et polémique 1999 and Laboratoire de catastrophe générale. journal métaphysique et polémique 2000–2001, Gallimard, 2003, p. 195.
54. For a good anthology of these themes see Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, Vie et opinions de Frédéric Thomas Graindorge, Hachette, 1867. On ‘democracy in literature’, see the critique of Madame Bovary by Armand de Pontmartin in Nouvelles Causeries du samedi, Michel Very, 1860.
55. Cf. Ulrich Beck, Democracy Without Enemies, trans. Mark Ritter, Polity, 1998, and Pascal Bruckner, La Mélancolie démocratique: comment vivre sans ennemis?, Seuil, 1992.
56. Cf. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, 2001, and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin, 2005.