InfoTrac Web: Gen'l Reference Ctr (Magazine Index).

                                                                              
   Source:  The New Republic, June 27, 1994 v210 n26 p39(3).
                                                                              
    Title:  The Lives of Michel Foucault._(book reviews)
   Author:  Paul Berman
                                                                              
 Subjects:  Books - Reviews
   People:  Macey, David
            Foucault, Michel - Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Rev Grade:  A
                                                                              
  Magazine Collection:  74D0192
Electronic Collection:  A15524056
                   RN:  A15524056
                                                                              

Full Text COPYRIGHT The New Republic Inc. 1994

Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France by Sunil Khilnani
(Yale University Press, 264 pp., $30)

The Lives of Michel Foucault by David Macey (Pantheon, 599 pp., $30)

Is there One Big Explanation, or only 1,000 small explanations, for the
enormous influence that French intellectuals have exercised around the world
for so many generations? In his very lucid and useful book, Sunil Khilnani, a
lecturer in politics at Birkbeck College, London, devotes himself to
describing the ins and outs of modern French political philosophy, and he
never does get around to laying out the One Big or the many small explanations
that might account for the global importance of his own topic. But the
stimulating quality of his book is such that, as I turned his pages, One Big
Explanation lumbered upward from his narrative even so. It was Hannah Arendt's
from thirty years ago, still applicable, more persuasive today than ever
before.

The worldwide influence of the French intellectuals, in her account, descends
from an oddly complementary relation between America's 1776 and France's 1789.
The American Revolution was a political success, which showed the world that
feudal systems could be overthrown and proper foundations for freedom, in her
phrase, could be laid, if the Founders went about their task in the right
spirit. But intellectually the American Revolution was less impressive. The
vast sagacity and learning of the American founders generated a legal and
constitutional literature. But it did not generate the sort of wide-ranging
literature of revolution and democratic society and the meaning of these
things for a worried world that could be easily studied in other countries or
even in this one. The Founders led a fine revolution, but the result was much
action, little dialogue, like a chase movie.

The French Revolution went in the other direction. Politically it was mostly a
failure. But precisely because of the calamities and heartbreaks that
resulted, the French writers pored obsessively over the arts and science of
revolution, and kept asking what a revolution is supposed to be, and what is a
proper revolutionary aim and how can things go better next time. This made the
French Revolution a gigantic intellectual success. Readers around the world
who were contemplating a leap by their own feudal and oppressed societies into
a better future had good reason to turn to the French authors for a discussion
of every relevant issue.

What the readers found in those French writings was, of course, sometimes very
peculiar, and got more so as the years went on. Khilnani reminds us that
French thinking on the subject of revolution was powerfully twisted by the
third of the world's great revolutions: Lenin's in Russia. French writers who
were dedicated to praising the achievements of their own revolution now
interpreted Jacobinism as a precursor to Bolshevism, which distorted the
meaning of the 1790s but did seem to testify to the universal significance and
ultimate success of the French events. Khilnani's history of these discussions
begins after the Second World War, at a time when the French Communist Party,
in the full blush of Stalinism, controlled 35 percent of the national vote in
France and dominated the intellectuals, who should have known better, and did
know better, in cankered corners of their left-wing hearts.

But as Khilnani shows, communism's appeal followed logically (more or less)
from the Bolshevik interpretation of the French Revolution. Soviet greatness
seemed to prove France's. To feel, as Sartre once said, that "the worker has
two countries, his own, and the Republic of Soviet Russia," was almost
patriotic on the part of the French. The distinguished role played by the
French Communists in the wartime resistance (once the Soviet Union had entered
the war) only bolstered the historical identification of Jacobins and
Bolsheviks. And so the discussion of revolution and modernity that radiated
outward to the world with such powerful influence from the postwar French
writers took on a fateful tint of ardent sympathy, sometimes nuanced,
sometimes not, for the Soviet project.

Khilnani's description of the postwar left-wing intellectuals focuses mainly
on Sartre and Louis Althusser, who divided between them the chief French
versions of the Marxist tradition. Sartre's brand was Olympian, humanist,
Hegelian, drawn to the Young Marx, fitfully pro-Communist but
anti-institutional. Althusser's brand was scientific, anti-humanist, Leninist
instead of Hegelian, drawn to the Old Marx, institutionally committed to Party
membership and academic affiliation. How stimulating and profound, how hugely
important those differences once seemed! But that was always an error. For
it's hard to see in retrospect what possible interest might lie in exploring
the alternative emphases on the Young Marx versus the Old Marx or any of those
other once-crucial-seeming distinctions, if the differing interpretations in
the hands of these philosophers turned out, as they did, to be 95 percent deaf
(Althusser) or 90 percent deaf (Sartre) to the meaning of Marxism in power.

The purpose of reading Sartre or Althusser on Marxism today is only to
discover the ways that brilliance can deceive itself. Khilnani, it must be
said, is not the first historian to lower the boom on the postwar French
leftists. Last year Tony Judt published a book with a similar argument called
Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956, and his book was fiercer and
more vivid. But Khilnani's achievement is to drive onward through the '50s and
'60s into the era that began in 1968, when the pro-Communist understanding of
revolution finally came under general assault in France.

This, for American readers, is the most interesting part of the story. Yet it
has not previously been told, at least not in detail. There had always been
conservative and liberal criticisms of communism in France, but the assault
that now proved to be effective came instead from the far left, along four
lines of attack. You might even say that one of the great achievements of the
French intellectual left was to undermine, in the name of left- wing values,
the Communist orientation that was itself a product of the left.

The first of these attacks, the most classically left-wing, came from the
ex-Trotskyists Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort in the journal
Socialisme ou barbarie, beginning in the late 1940s. The Socialisme ou
barbarie group was the French equivalent of the tiny currents of opinion that
emerged out of Max Shachtman's wing of Trotskyism in the United States. There
was even a bit of trans- Atlantic mutual influence between the French and
American tendencies, though this is a theme that Khilnani leaves untouched.
During the '50s and into the early '60s, Castoriadis's group seemed to have no
influence at all in France, but the student uprising of 1968 was a festival of
the avant-garde, and in the world of Marxism nothing was more avant-garde than
Socialisme ou barbarie, and Castoriadis's combination of libertarian
revolution and vehement anti-communism turned out to be immensely influential
among the student revolutionaries. That was one reason why the '68 uprisings,
which seemed to outside observers to be a great forward step for communism,
turned out instead to be crucial in breaking communism's power in France.

A second criticism came from the younger writers who had begun as Maoists, and
in some cases as Althusser's students, but who ended up, after Solzhenitsyn's
The Gulag Archipelago was published in 1974, as anti-Communists pure and
simple. These were the New Philosophers, whose newness came mostly from
drawing together inspirations that were fairly old. The New Philosophers
combined the moral fury of Solzhenitsyn, the anti-totalitarian analyses of
Castoriadis and Lefort, the anti-Hegelianism of Karl Popper, a few
inspirations from religion, and a good deal of ex-Maoist, chest- beating
remorse in the style that Khilnani calls "penitential." Khilnani is not
especially impressed with the insights or profundity of the New Philosophers,
with the exception of Andre Glucksmann, the brightest of the group. But the
New Philosophers had a talent for television talk-show appearances and self-
promotion, which led to influence. Castoriadis and Lefort were interesting
thinkers, but the New Philosophers were good popularizers.

A third influence that turned the French against communism came from Michel
Foucault--which is yet another story that has not, until now, been properly
told. Here it is useful to supplement Khilnani's account with the new
biography of Foucault by the British intellectual historian, David Macey.
Macey's book is a cautious and conventional account of Foucault's doings,
written with admirable expertise and a keen spirit of defensiveness, as might
be expected from a biography that has been duly "authorized" by the subject's
surviving companion, Daniel Defert. Foucault, too, was the subject of a book
last year: James Miller's The Passion of Michel Foucault, a very fine
biography that offered a more convincing portrait of Foucault the man and the
thinker. But Macey's attention to day-to-day events yields a vivid picture of
Foucault the political activist, especially in the early 1970s, when the great
philosopher plunged into a radical campaign for prison reform. This was a
courageous and admirable campaign. There was an aspect of it, much downplayed
by Macey, that was deluded, too, due to Foucault's participation in the
extreme-left political hysterias of the time and his alliance with the
Maoists.

Still, when those same Maoists veered into anti-communism, Foucault veered as
well, without any of the attention-getting scenes of chest-beating penitential
agony. Foucault's greatest philosophical and historical insights always came
from the sympathy he intuitively felt for the totally oppressed, for the
victims of mass incarceration and of abusive psychiatrists. Sympathy of that
kind was the motive behind his prison reform activism in the early '70s, too.
And since Solzhenitsyn's Gulag was nothing if not the greatest protest against
prison systems and mass incarceration ever written, it was natural for
Foucault, as a theorist of total oppression, to keep on following Glucksmann
and the Maoists in their new enthusiasm for Russian zeks and the other victims
of communism.

Foucault's contribution to the anti-Communist mood was practical, as well. He
was one of the intellectuals in France who noisily defended Polish Solidarity
during the period when the Socialist government held back from doing so in
order not to antagonize its allies among the French Communists. At the moment
of his death, he was planning to join a boat in the South Seas to go rescue
Vietnamese refugees. And since Foucault was widely seen as the most brilliant
and prestigious French thinker since Sartre, the meaning of these protests for
intellectual opinion was very great.

In Khilnani's judgment, the deepest and most important of the French arguments
against communism was made, however, by Fran*ois Furet, the historian of the
French Revolution. It might seem odd for an academic historian to play a
bigger role than any of the critics of contemporary politics, except that, in
Khilnani's analysis, the interpretation of the French Revolution always held
the key to French attitudes toward communism. In his early work Furet
criticized the Communist interpretation of the French Revolution for being
inadequately faithful to the genius of Marx, which is to say that Furet, too,
initiated his anti-communism from a position left of the Communists
themselves.

But finally he took the old equation between Jacobins and Bolsheviks and
simply stood it on its head. If the Bolsheviks were totalitarians, so were the
Jacobins. If the Bolshevik Revolution was a disaster, so was the Jacobin
aspect of the French Revolution. The successful part of the French Revolution
was, instead, its constitutional commitment to representative democracy--its
"republican" component. And the effect of this argument by Furet, coming as it
did on the heels of the anti-totalitarian leftists, the New Philosophers and
Foucault's analysis of total oppression, was a sweeping revision in the way
intellectual opinion in France has come to look on its own founding revolution
and on the nature of political democracy.

"The French Revolution ringingly described itself as the bearer of democratic
rights and liberties," Khilnani writes:

But the revolution--and the left it created--proved to be the best enemy of
these values. Democracy in its constitutional representative form--the only
form in which inhabitants of the modern political world are ever likely to be
durably acquainted with it--remained in quite fundamental respects
unpracticed, untheorized and unloved in France. To the intellectual left,
constitutional representative democracy, "bourgeois" or "formal" democracy,
was a contemptible and mystifying illusion; only beginning in the late 1970s
did it gradually come to be accepted as a political form in its own right, and
not merely an illicit simulation of "true," direct or revolutionary democracy.

Whether the new, post-Communist judgments of the French intellectuals are to
be admired is another question. At the end of last year's Past Imperfect, Judt
shook his head in disapproval at the newly fashionable liberalism among the
younger French intellectuals, whose understanding of liberalism seemed to him
to be fatally compromised by Jacobin holdovers. Khilnani offers the same
opinion. In his view the French intellectuals, for all the merit in their
recent revisions, have still not managed to understand what the Jacobins, too,
could never understand, which was the mechanisms of democratic representation.

To show how badly the French understand these things, he points to the fiasco
of European unification, in which a great deal of power was going to be
invested in Brussels and still other powers in the Bundesbank. I can't say if
Khilnani is right about the current discussion, but let us suppose that he is.
It would mean that, even after 200 years, no one has been able to combine the
spectacular theoretical virtues of French intellectual discussion with the
humble practical virtues of Anglo-American liberal understanding. Maybe a
little more time is needed?
                                                                              
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