Tony Judt and Tim Snyder on the twentieth century

Timothy Snyder helped Tony Judt to create a "spoken book" during Judt's final months of illness through a truly unique series of conversations about biography and history. The book is well worth reading. Snyder is the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, and the spoken book he created with Judt is Thinking the Twentieth Century. This work deserves recognition both as a contribution to the philosophy of history as well as to the task of making sense of Europe's often horrible complexity and darkness throughout much of the twentieth century. The book is a mix of Judt's reflections about his own intellectual and personal development (biography), and the complicated back-and-forth that the twentieth century embodied between thinking and history -- between ideologies and philosophies of society, and the large schemes of social and political systems that dominated the twentieth century -- fascism, totalitarianism, liberal democracy, conservative democracy, capitalism, and communism. Each system had its theorists, from Marx to Lloyd George to Keynes to Pareto to von Mises to Stalin; and the theories had important effects on the evolution of the systems and the movements of resistance that sometimes arose within them. So "thinking the twentieth century" is meant very literally: Judt believes that the large movements and shifts that occurred during the century were importantly influenced by ideologies and philosophies, often in pernicious ways. And, of course, both he and Snyder have spent their careers as historians "thinking the twentieth century" through their efforts to make sense of its enormous tides, storms, and seismic realignments.

There is a deep reason why it makes sense to pay attention both the the supra-individual events of the century as well as the theories that were debated in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Budapest, and Warsaw. This conjunction emphasizes the intimate relationships that exist between thinking, doing, and historical change. As Marx observed, "men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing." By giving emphasis to the ideas and theories that occupied activists, philosophers, economists, and revolutionaries, Judt and Snyder offer their own affirmations of agency in history. For better, and often for worse, the great events of the century flowed fairly directly from theories and ideas.

Snyder and Judt spend a good deal of time on several large historical features of the twentieth century: the trajectory of Marxist thinking -- both communist and non-communist -- in western and central Europe; the complexities and contradictions of liberalism, in both western and eastern Europe; the rise of Soviet domination of eastern and central Europe; the critics of Communism whose voices became audible in the decades following World War II (Kolakowski, Koestler, Orwell, Havel, Kundera, Raymond Aron, Sidney Hook, ...), the internal national dynamics of Soviet-installed regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and other central European countries from 1946 to 1989, the Cold War, and the vicissitudes of liberal democracy. It is not exactly intellectual history; rather, it is a history that is sensitive to the ways in which intellectuals -- theorists, philosophers, poets -- influenced events in very profound ways.

The Marxist left often regarded the intellectuals who renounced their loyalty to the Communist movement as turncoats and reactionaries. Judt and Snyder make it clear that this frequently is not the case. Many critics of Communism in the 1950s retained their progressive beliefs and values, but saw clearly the oppression and tyranny that Soviet Communism had come to embody.

It’s best to think of the Cold War liberals [Raymond Aron, Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler] as the heirs to American Progressivism and the New Deal. That’s their formation, in the French sense of the word, that’s how they were molded, that’s what shaped them intellectually. They saw the welfare state and the social cohesion it could generate as a way to avoid the extremist politics of the 1930s. That is what fueled and informed their anti-communism: the latter was also driven by a background many of them shared in anti-fascist activities before 1939. The anti-fascist organizations, the fronts, the movements, the journals, the meetings, the speeches of the thirties have their counterpart in the anti-communist liberalism of the fifties. (228)

The “aggressively socialist” is crucial. There’s nothing reactionary about Sidney Hook. There’s nothing politically right-wing about him, though he was conservative in some of his cultural tastes—like many socialists. Like Raymond Aron, he was on the opposite side of the barrier from the sixties students. He left New York University disgusted with the university’s failure to stand up to the sit-ins and occupations—that was a very Cold War liberal kind of stance. But his politics were always left of center domestically and a direct inheritance from the nineteenth-century socialist tradition. (227)

And here is a very good statement by Judt of what these "Cold War liberals" defended:

What made the West a better place, in short, were its forms of government, law, deliberation, regulation and education. Taken together, over time, these formed an implicit pact between society and the state. The former would concede to the state a certain level of intervention, constrained by law and habit; the state, in turn, would allow society a large measure of autonomy bounded by respect for the institutions of the state. (229)

One of the themes that Snyder pursues is how Judt's identity as the child of working class immigrant Eastern European Jewish parents affected -- or did not affect -- the development of his interests as a historian. This is all the more important in consideration of the facts of the Holocaust and the central role that Nazi extermination had in virtually all of the historical developments of the period.

Like my mother, my father came from a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe. In his case, though, the family made two stopovers between the Russian Empire and Britain: Belgium and Ireland. My paternal grandmother, Ida Avigail, came from Pilviskiai, a Lithuanian village just southwest of Kaunas: now in Lithuania, then in the Russian Empire. Following the early death of her father, a carter, she worked in the family bakery. Sometime in the first decade of the century, the Avigails decided to make their way west to the diamond industry in Antwerp, where they had contacts. There in Belgium Ida met my paternal grandfather. Other Avigails settled in Brussels; one started a dry-goods store in Texas. (2)

And his ordinary sensibilities as a boy and adolescent:

Even the very car in which we drove suggests a certain non-Jewish Jewishness on my father’s part. He was a big fan of the Citroën car company, though I don’t believe he ever once mentioned to me that it had been established by a Jewish family. My father would never have driven a Renault, probably because Louis Renault was a notorious wartime collaborator whose firm had been nationalized at the Liberation as punishment for his Vichyite sympathies. Peugeots, on the other hand, got a favorable pass in family discussions. After all, they were of Protestant extraction and thus somehow not implicated in the Catholic anti-Semitism of Vichy-era France. No one ever said a word about the background to all this, and yet it was all somehow quite plain to me. (7)

Judt was named "Tony" in remembrance of his father's cousin Antonia in Brussels, who was known as "Toni" and was murdered in about 1943 along with her sister at Auschwitz. It is also interesting to learn that Judt spent the better part of two years as a teenager on a kibbutz in Israel before returning to Britain to attend Cambridge University. The Holocaust was a direct and living reality for the young Tony Judt in England -- "I cannot recall a time when I did not know about what was not yet called the Holocaust" (6).

The world of my youth was thus the world that was bequeathed us by Hitler. To be sure, twentieth-century intellectual history (and the history of twentieth-century intellectuals) has a shape of its own: the shape that intellectuals of right or left would assign to it if they were recounting it in conventional narrative form or as part of an ideological world picture. But it should be clear by now that there is another story, another narrative that insistently intervenes and intrudes upon any account of twentieth-century thought and thinkers: the catastrophe of the European Jews. A striking number of the dramatis personae of an intellectual history of our times are also present in that story, especially from the 1930s forwards. (11)

And yet Judt did not become a historian of the Holocaust. He did not focus his studies, as so many young intellectuals did, on the question of how the Holocaust could have occurred.

If I have any special insight into the history of the historiography of the Holocaust, it is because it tracks my life quite closely. As I mentioned earlier, I was unusually well-informed on this subject for a ten-year-old child. And yet, as a student at Cambridge University in the 1960s, I have to confess that I was remarkably uninterested in the subject—not only the Holocaust, but Jewish history in general. Moreover, I don’t believe that I was in the least taken aback when we studied, e.g., the history of occupied France without any reference to the expulsion of the Jews. (31)

The more one looks back on the twentieth century, the bleaker it becomes. Mass killings, tyrannical states, deliberate starvation of millions of peasants in Ukraine, war without end; and following the end of the Second World War, a protracted Cold War, more state-sanctioned mass starvation in China, colonial wars in Indochina, and the murderous, genocidal breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Where in this story does one find grounds for hope for the future? Both of Tim Snyder's books -- Bloodlands and Black Earth -- are awesome and admirable demonstrations of honest, unblinking historical research into unspeakable human catastrophe. Consider just a paragraph from Bloodlands:

The twenty-second of June 1941 is one of the most significant days in the history of Europe. The German invasion of the Soviet Union that began that day under the cryptonym Operation Barbarossa was much more than a surprise attack, a shift of alliances, or a new stage in a war. It was the beginning of a calamity that defies description. The engagement of the Wehrmacht (and its allies) with the Red Army killed more than ten million soldiers, not to speak of the comparable number of civilians who died in flight, under bombs, or of hunger and disease as a result of the war on the eastern front. During this eastern war, the Germans also deliberately murdered some ten million people, including more than five million Jews and more than three million prisoners of war. (155)

It was, indeed, the "beginning of a calamity that defies description." And it is a history that all of us need to confront more honestly than we ever have, if we are to create a better world.

Where today is a practical vision of a world that is just, humane, and peaceful? Where are the leaders who can help steer a global world of dozens of armed powers to a stable, peaceful future? Where are the institutions that can help navigate through the challenges our century will face? What in fact have we learned from the horrors of the twentieth century that will help us navigate to a world that permits the full and free development of all human beings?

It is not quite true to say that we altogether lack a set of ideas that might constitute the core of such a vision: nations that embody secure institutions and values of liberal democracy, full equality of opportunity, ample provision of social services, and a reasonable range of economic inequalities; and international institutions that ensure equitable economic relations among states, robust conflict-resolution mechanisms, and effective ability to solve problems of the global commons, including especially global climate change. It is a liberal, social democratic, and internationalist worldview that depends on a simple theory: a just and equitable world is a peaceful world. If our mood today is gloomy, it is because so many features of this vision for the future are under attack by the extreme right, including the frenetic lurches of the current president. Liberal democracy, social welfare policies, economic equality, and international institutions are all under attack from some of the same forces of hate that led to such destruction in the previous century. The platforms of hate and division seem more powerful than ever, amplified by seemingly ubiquitous social media. And our leaders of all stripes seem to have only myopic vision when it comes to the problem of navigating through the turbulent waters we now find ourselves in. We want a world that is more free, more just, more peaceful, and more sustainable than the one we find today.  Is this too much to ask?

*****

Here is an excellent lecture by Tim Snyder on Bloodlands.

Literature and memory

As a way of finding some interesting distraction in the social isolation of Covid-19 I have been reading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. The book primarily treats the way that literate English soldiers, educated in a certain way and immersed in a particular public school culture, found words and phrases to capture part of their horrendous experiences in trench warfare over the months or years that extended between the moment of enlistment and death. Pilgrim's Progress plays a central role in many depictions, and some of Britain's most striking poetry of the twentieth century comes from this time.

Fussell is primarily interested in exploring the ways that British poets who served during World War I chose to express their experience of war and the violence, fear, and chaos of the trenches. He captures the bitterness, irony, and cynicism created in this generation by the war in authors and poets like Robert Graves (Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography), Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man), Edmund Blunden (Undertones of War), and Wilfred Owen ("The Parable of the Old Man and the Young").

The book is interesting in part because of the particular moment that we are all enmeshed in right now, from Mumbai to Milan to Manchester to Detroit. The world of Covid-19 feels a bit apocalyptic -- even if there are no heavy artillery pieces thundering away in the distance. It seems certain that we will all have memories of this period that will be clear and sharp, and colored by the illness and deaths of so many people around the world and the country. Also similar is the pervasive sense of the utter incompetence and arrogance of the national government (in the United States, at least), in its lack of preparation and foresight and its continuing efforts to minimize the crisis. Just as the officers and soldiers of 1916 despaired at the complacent idiocy of the general staff, so we have come to despair at the moral and scientific buffoonery that emanates from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Reading Fussell led me to reread Robert Graves in his autobiography, Good-Bye to All That. Graves himself was seriously wounded by artillery fire during the battle of the Somme, at the age of twenty. His colonel mistakenly wrote a letter of condolence to his mother, saying "I very much regret to have to write and tell you your son has died of wounds. He was very gallant, and was doing so well and is a great loss" (Graves, 274). That turned out to be premature; Graves survived the war. But a pleasure he took with him throughout his life came from the words that were said about him when it was believed in London that he was dead: "The people with whom I had been on the worst terms during my life wrote the most enthusiastic condolences to my parents: my housemaster, for instance" (281). But there was a disadvantage in being dead: "The only inconvenience that my death caused me was that Cox's Bank stopped my pay and I had difficulty in persuading it to honour my cheques." An advantage was also possible, though; he was able to make changes to his own obituary. During recovery in Wales with his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he writes, "We made a number of changes in each other's verses; I remember that I proposed amendments which he accepted in his obituary poem 'To His Dead Body' -- written for me when he thought me dead." And he and Sassoon agreed about the idiocy of the war: "We no longer saw it as a war between trade-rivals; its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder."

The items that Graves took back with him to the front following his recovery are quite interesting -- the list makes one think of Tim O'Brien's Vietnam book, The Things They Carried.

I went back as an old soldier; my kit and baggage proved it. I had reduced the Christmas tree that I first brought out to a pocket-torch with a fourteen-day battery in it, and a pair of insulated wire-cutters strong enough to cut German wire (the ordinary British army issue would only cut British wire). Instead of a haversack I had a pack like the ones the men carried, but lighter and waterproof. I had lost my revolver when I was wounded and had not bought another; rifle and bayonet could always be got from the battalion. (Not carrying rifle and bayonet made officers conspicuous in an attack; in most divisions now they carried them, and also wore trousers rolled down over their puttees like the men, because the Germans had been taught to recognize them by their thin knees.) Instead of the heavy blankets that I had brought out before I now had an eiderdown sleeping-bag in an oiled silk cover. I also had Shakespeare and a Bible, both printed on india-paper, a Catullus and a Lucretius in Latin, and two light weight, folding, canvas arm-chairs, one as a present for Yates the quartermaster, the other for myself. I was wearing a very thick whipcord tunic with a neat patch above the second button and another between the shoulders; it was my only salvage from the last time out except the pair of ski-ing boots which I was wearing again, reasonably waterproof -- my breeches had been cut off me in hospital (293-294)

The whipcord tunic was the same clothing he wore when wounded by shrapnel at the Somme -- hence the neat patches in two places front and back.

What is particularly interesting about The Great War and Modern Memory is the creative selectivity that it illustrates. Fussell chooses particular poets, particular poetic devices, and particular features of a subaltern's war experience to tell his story. But there is a limitless range of choice in all these features. Fussell could have told many different stories, using boundlessly different sources and perspectives. There is no final and comprehensive story for building out the title "The Great War and Modern Memory". Fussell's genius is his synthetic ability to take a handful of details from multiple sources and fuse them into a powerful, unified story. His development of the theme of euphemism in war is a brilliant example. But of course it is just one such story. And there are limitless materials that would add insight to the story but that have never been studied -- including countless military records of specific engagements, unpublished but archived memoirs and diaries of soldiers who served at the Somme or nameless corners in the trench system, or home-side newspaper accounts of life and war in France. Fussell makes use of materials like these, but his examples are only a small fraction of those available. 

Jay Winter's introduction to the book captures Fussell's perspective on his material very precisely: angry, disgusted at hypocrisy, and entirely cynical about the top officers. Part of what Fussell brought to this book in his own duffle bag of equipment was his own service in the US Army during the Battle of the Bulge, an experience he describes in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. And of course he wrote this book during the final years of the war in Vietnam -- a war with similar futility, irony, and waste. Winter writes:

Fussell was a great historian, one who found a way to turn his deep, visceral knowledge of the horrors and stupidities of war into a vision of how to write about war. ... How did he do it? By using his emotion and his anger to frame his understanding of memory, and his insight into the way language frames memory, especially memories of war. War, he knew, is simply too frightful, too chaotic, too arbitrary, too bizarre, too uncanny a set of events and images to grasp directly. We need blinkers, spectacles, shades to glimpse war even indirectly.... The indelible imprint Paul Fussell left on our understanding of war was on how language frames what he termed "modern memory". (kl 102)

Paul Fussell was both an angry and a witty man. He was drawn to the poets and novelists of the Great War in Britain in part because they were, like him, truth-tellers about war. But his earlier work on Augustan poets of the eighteenth century predisposed him to the delights of irony and the savagery of words usefully applied to the cruel masters of the world. (kl 122)

This is sense-making -- both by the poets like Graves and Sassoon whom Fussell analyzes, and by Fussell himself, in trying to work out the relationships that exist between experience, language, and poetry in our efforts to make sense of the Yossarian-like things we are often subject to in the crises of modern life.

Academic social media

The means through which academics engage in communication and discussion of their ideas have changed significantly in the past decade through the rapid growth of the importance of social media in the dissemination of new ideas. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress have become important media for communication in a range of fields, from celebrity gossip to news flashes to the dissemination of new breakthroughs in particle physics. Blogging platforms such as Blogger, Medium, and Wordpress in particular have become a highly accessible place for the expression of ideas, opinions, and social commentary. An idea posted on WordPress is instantly visible in most countries in the world (not including China). And because of the amazing coverage of search engines, that idea can be located by the academic researcher in Mumbai, Helsinki, Buenos Aires, or Des Moines within minutes of posting.

The challenge of social media as a channel for serious ideas and engaged debate is the fact that there are few of the badges of reliability provided by conventional media and academic journals associated with social media. So the hard question is whether social media channels can serve a serious intellectual purpose in terms of the dissemination of knowledge.

The appearance of a second edition of Mark Carrigan's Social Media for Academics is therefore timely. Both young academics -- well versed in the mechanics of social media -- and more senior scholars will find the book interesting and provocative, and many will find useful new ways of presenting and discussing their work using the resources created by social media platforms. I've long been convinced of the value of blogging as a platform for developing and disseminating my work in philosophy and sociology, and I celebrate Mark's efforts to help all of us figure out constructive, intellectually valuable ways of using the various media available to us.

It is interesting to reflect a bit on what an academic -- a professor, a professional political scientist or literary critic or physicist -- wants to accomplish with his or her writing, and whether social media can help with those goals. There are a number of possible goals that come to mind:

1. to explore new ideas and get useful feedback from others about those ideas
2. to achieve solid, well argued results on a topic that will be a permanent part of the corpus in one's field
3. To contribute to important contemporary debates through better insights into current problems (global climate change, war in the Middle East, the threat of rising nationalist-populism)
4. to elevate one's position in the status-hierarchy of the profession
5. to create a "celebrity" reputation in a field that leads to invitations as commentator on public television or CNN

The first motivation is well suited to social media. If one can gather a small network of people with similar interests and a willingness to interact, a blog can be a very good mechanism for testing and improving one's ideas. The second motivation can also be served by social media, in the sense that exposure of one's ideas through social media can help to deepen and refine one's thinking. In order for these ideas to become part of the permanent corpus of one's field of study, it seems likely enough that the ideas and theories will need to find more traditional forms of academic expression -- book chapters, peer-reviewed articles, and books. But these two goals are entirely consistent with being an authentic scholar and academic; they have to do with the pursuit of truth and insight. And they fall in the category of the "new collegiality" that Carrigan discusses (232).

The third goal is a respectable academic goal as well. It is entirely legitimate and appropriate for academics to bring their voices to bear on the issues of the day. Certainly some of the Twitter feeds I appreciate the most come from academics like Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann), Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan), Juan Cole (@jricole), and Dan Nexon (@dhnexon). And what I appreciate about their tweets is the honesty and relevance their ideas (and links) have in addressing topics like climate change, global inequalities, and issues of war and peace.

The final pair of goals -- status, reputation, and well-paid television gigs -- seem a bit antagonistic to the most important academic values. I suppose that Aristotle and Kant both would find these goals obnoxious because they are narrowly self-interested and unrelated to the virtues or duties of an academic -- pursuit of truth and the advancement of knowledge. But, sad to say, it is clear enough how social media can support these goals as well, as Carrigan discusses in several places (136).

I am very glad that Mark has brought a discussion of the "dark side" of social media into the discussion in the second edition. Like all things digital, the hate-based Internet has moved rapidly since the first edition of this book, and it is now a very important part of the rise of right-wing populism in many countries. Likewise, the use of social media to bully and harass people in the most abhorrent ways is a plague that we haven't learned how to control. And the weaponization of social media that has occurred since the first edition of the book is a genuine threat to democratic institutions.

Mark Carrigan is an astute and well-informed follower of the topic of the rising role of social media in the academic world, and the book is well worth a close reading. And it raises an interesting question: what would Socrates' Twitter stream have looked like?

Grand Hotel Abyss

Georg Lukács in 1962 used the colorful image of a fictional "Grand Hotel Abyss" to express his disappointment in the theorists of the Frankfurt School. Here is a passage in which the idea is described in "Preface to the Theory of the Novel" (link):

A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.’ (The fact that Ernst Bloch continued undeterred to cling to his synthesis of ‘left’ ethics and ‘right’ epistemology (e.g. cf. Frankfurt 1961) does honour to his strength of character but cannot modify the outdated nature of his theoretical position. To the extent that an authentic, fruitful and progressive opposition is really stirring in the Western world (including the Federal Republic), this opposition no longer has anything to do with the coupling of ‘left’ ethics with ‘right’ epistemology.)

The thinkers of the Frankfurt School -- Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, Benjamin, Wellmer, Marcuse -- were for Lukács too much devoted to theorizing capitalism and barbarism and too little about changing it. They were like imagined world-weary residents in the Grand Hotel Abyss, observing the unfolding catastrophe but doing nothing to intervene to stop it. They were about theory, not praxis.

Stuart Jeffries uses this trope as the organizing theme of his group biography of these figures in Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, and, in a word, he finds that Lukács's critique is unfounded.

Jeffries emphasizes the common social origins of these boundary-breaking critics of capitalism. The book is detailed and insightful. Jeffries emphasizes the common social and cultural origins of almost all these men -- German, Jewish, bourgeois, affluent -- and the common threads of their criticism of the capitalism and consumerism that surrounded them in the early and middle twentieth century. The central question of how it came to pass that ordinary people in cultured, philosophically rich Germany came to support the Nazi rise to power was of vital concern to all of them. But consumerism, authoritarianism, and the suffering both created by and hidden by capitalism are also in the center stage.

The book is primarily about ideas and debates, not the particulars of personal biography. Jeffries does an impressive job of walking readers through the debates that swirled within and across the Frankfurt School -- is capitalism doomed? Are workers inherently revolutionary? Is art part of the support system for capitalism? Is Marxism scientific or dialectical? Jeffries does an exceptional and fascinating job of telling this complex story of intellectual history and social criticism.

A particularly important innovation within the intellectual tradition of critical theory was the pointed critique these theorists offered of mass culture. Unlike orthodox Marxists who gave primary emphasis to the workings of the forces and relations of production -- economics -- the critical theorists took very seriously the powerful role played within advanced capitalism by mass culture, film, media, and television. (The publication in 1927 of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 appears to have been an important impetus to much of the theorizing of the Frankfurt School.) Here is one example of the social criticism of Hollywood offered by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment:

Consider, for instance, Donald Duck. Once, such cartoon characters were ‘exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism’, wrote Adorno and Horkheimer. Now they had become instruments of social domination. ‘They hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.’ (225)

So what is a more progressive role for works of art and culture to play in a society embodying serious social exploitation and domination? One work that was an important point of consideration for several theorists was the Brecht and Weill opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany. Adorno and others regarded this work as one that gave appropriate and unblinking attention to the suffering of the modern social order.

Brecht’s libretto, too, sought to make it clear that the bourgeois world was absurd and anarchic. ‘In order to represent this convincingly’, wrote Adorno of the dramatisation of the bourgeois world as absurd and anarchic, ‘it is necessary to transcend the closed world of bourgeois consciousness which considers bourgeois social reality to be immutable. Outside of this framework, however, there is no position to take – at least for the German consciousness, there is no site which is non-capitalist.’ This was to become one great theme of critical theory: there is no outside, not in today’s utterly rationalised, totally reified, commodity-fetishising world. When Marx wrote Capital in the mid nineteenth century, the more primitive capitalist system he was diagnosing made commodity fetishism merely episodic; now it was everywhere, poisoning everything. ‘Paradoxically, therefore’, Adorno added, ‘transcendence must take place within the framework of that which is.’ Brecht’s assault on capitalist society in Mahoganny was then paradoxically both from within and from without at the same time, both immanent and transcendent. (132)

Jeffries also provides a fascinating and extended discussion of the deep interactions that occurred between Thomas Mann and Adorno in Los Angeles as Mann worked at completing Doctor Faustus. Mann wanted Adorno's expert advice about modern music, and Adorno obliged. Jeffries argues that Adorno had a substantive effect on the novel:

Arguably, the finished novel reflects Adorno’s melancholic philosophy more profoundly than Mann’s. This is not to suggest plagiarism: as Adorno wrote in 1957, the insinuation that Mann made illegitimate use of his ‘intellectual property’ is absurd. The underlying aesthetic philosophy of the novel goes beyond the binary opposition between the Apollonian and Dionysian, between the orderly and the ecstatic, that Nietzsche set out in The Birth of Tragedy and to which Mann repeatedly appealed in his fiction... During the collaboration with Adorno, however, Mann set aside his original, Dionysian conception of the composer and as a result Leverkühn became something much more interesting –a figure who dramatised something of the Frankfurt School’s, and in particular Adorno’s, distinctive contribution to the philosophy of art. (243)

And what about fascism? This was a central thrust of Frankfurt School research, and opinion was divided about the causes of the rise of Nazism in Germany among the Frankfurt School theorists. But here is an interpretation that seems particularly relevant in 2016 in the United States, given the pageantry of political rallies and the slogans about making America great again:

Fascism was, as a result, a paradox, being both ancient and modern: more precisely it was a system that used a tradition hostile to capitalism for the preservation of capitalism. For Bloch, as for Walter Benjamin, fascism was a cultural synthesis that contained both anti-capitalist and utopian aspects. The Frankfurt School failed to emphasise in its analysis of fascism what Benjamin called the ‘aestheticisation of politics’. It fell to Benjamin, Bloch and Siegfried Kracauer to reflect on the Nazi deployment of myths, symbols, parades and demonstrations to command support. (250)

The chapter on Habermas is also very good and can be read separately as an introduction to Habermas's leading ideas (chapter 17). It is significant that this final voice of the Frankfurt School should be one that provides a basis for greater optimism about the prospects for modern democracy than what emerges from the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

The perspectives of the Frankfurt School were developed in the context of crises of capitalism, fascism, and anti-semitism in the 1930s. But these theories are once again deeply relevant in the context of the politics of 2016. A xenophobic, divisive candidate and party have assumed the reins of power in a populous democracy. The issues of propaganda and unapologetic political lies are before us once again. The politics of hate and intolerance have taken center stage. And the role of culture, media, and now the internet needs to be examined carefully for its dependence upon the corporate order as well as its possible potency as a mechanism of resistance. The Frankfurt School thinkers had important insights into virtually all these questions. Jeffries' very interesting intellectual history of the movement is timely.

Jeffries quotes from a letter from Adorno to Mann on the aftermath of Nazism in Germany with observations that may be relevant to us today as well:

The inarticulate character of apolitical conviction, the readiness to submit to every manifestation of actual powers, the instant accommodation to whatever new situation emerges, all this is merely an aspect of the same regression. If it is true that the manipulative control of the masses always brings about a regressive formation of humanity, and if Hitler’s drive for power essentially involved the relationship of this development ‘at a single stroke’, we can only say that he, and the collapse that followed, has succeeded in producing the required infantilisation. (273)

These are words that may be important in the coming years, if the incoming government succeeds in carrying out many of its hateful promises. And how will the institutions of media and culture respond? Let us not be infantilized in the years to come when it comes to the fundamental values of democracy.

The French Left since 1945

Bertolt Brecht

Ferdinand Lasalle

John Maclean

Jean Jaures

Rene Marx Dormoy

Salvador Allende

In an earlier post I suggested rethinking some of Lucien Goldmann's contributions to Marxist theory.

In order to put Goldmann's ideas into context it is worthwhile turning to Tony Judt's excellent book, Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830-1981. Judt addresses the relevant time period in chapter 4, “French Marxism 1945-1975.” The chief thinkers to whom he refers in this chapter include Althusser, Merleau-Ponty, Castriadis, Lefebvre, Goldmann, and Gorz. It is clear that this was an important part of French intellectual life and politics during this period, whether we are thinking of the electoral strength of the French Communist Party or the whirlwind of activism in the streets in 1968. Were there elements of French Marxist theory in those years that can make an important contribution to contemporary issues?

Judt is an absorbing observer of intellectual and political currents. One aspect of his insight derives from his attention to context:

They [Sartre and Althusser] are users of a certain sort of political language at a certain moment in a very particular society, and our concern must be to learn just what that language meant at the moment of its appearance, for user and hearer alike. My contention in this essay will be that the theory and practices of marxism in France were unusually bound up with the political struggles and allegiances of the protagonists, and more generally with the terms of political argument in modern France. (kl 2957)

So it isn't enough to identify big ideas and themes within the Left generally; rather, we need to pay close attention to the nuances of language and reference that were current at specific points in time in the French culture sphere.

Here is how Judt summarizes the primary issues of French post-war Marxism:

The concerns of marxist intellectuals in France since 1945, while varying in emphasis, have been concentrated steadily upon five discrete areas of ideological and political interest. These are the theory of a proletariat, the role of a revolutionary party, the interpretation of Stalinism, the status of the individual in marxist thought, and marxism itself as an object of study. The shifts in emphasis within and between these themes have never amounted to an unconcern with any one of them, but the varying degrees of interest have undoubtedly reflected changing circumstances. The order in which I have listed these themes, then, is consonant with the chronology just presented, and it therefore does little violence to the material, and reflects a certain historical symmetry, to take them in turn. (kl 3445)

Judt devotes the rest of the chapter to these issues and the ways in which they developed through the polemics of the 1960s.

A key intellectual factor that Judt emphasizes in this period is the injection of Hegel into French intellectual life. Kojeve in particular introduced a reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit) that had large impact in France, and the writings of the early Marx (most influenced by Hegel) came to have a substantial appeal to some French intellectuals.

The essence of marxism was now its theory of human alienation, the conditions of that alienation and the necessity of overcoming this condition. All else, being secondary, could therefore be taken on trust. (kl 3152)

Judt points out an important paradoxical consequence of this Hegelian turn in French post-war marxism: an increasingly wide separation between theory (the views of the philosophers) and practice (the rigid economic and political doctrines of the French Communist Party, the PCF). And the latter in turn was increasingly entwined with the crimes of Stalinism and the USSR:

Stalinism made it difficult to be ‘with’ the PCF, but history made it impossible to be against it. Above everything, intellectuals in these years strove to define themselves with reference to the Communists, to share their myths and move on their terrain. (kl 3191)

Althusser made part of his reputation by insisting on a fundamental break between the early Marx and the “mature” Marx of Capital. Judt understands this intellectual swerve on Althusser’s part in political terms — as a way of separating Marxism from the crimes of Stalinism. By denigrating the “humanist” Marx and favoring the impersonal “structuralist” Marx, Althusser appeared to leave little room for moral criticism of Stalinism and the behavior of the Communist Party of the USSR or other countries.

The Althusserian approach rejected all interest in the ‘humanist’ Marx at about the time when humanism had run its course as an intellectual fashion in Paris. By focusing on structures, both in society and in the argument itself, Althusser diverted attention from human acts (and thus human errors) and thereby swept away ten years of guilt over the ‘mistakes’ and ‘deviations’ of Stalin. (kl 3337)

Regrettably, reading Judt on this period makes me less inclined to think that this is a good place to turn if we are interested in re-discovering insights in the Marxist tradition that may be pertinent to the issues we face today. The debates over the role of the proletariat that he rehearses seem arcane today, and Althusser's philosophical arguments about structure and theory seem even less relevant to today's issues.

Maybe the reason for this lack of relevance derives from an old Marxian trope -- the relation of theory to praxis. The problems we face today are not chiefly problems of theory. These are problems of substantial, enduring, and entrenched inequalities of power, opportunity, and wealth. And the challenge in front of attacking these inequalities is not a deficiency of theory, it is the pervasiveness of those inequalities themselves. Was Althusser grappling with the real and pressing social problems of post-war France? Or was he grappling in a typically philosophical way with conceptual problems raised by a particularly dense body of texts? The latter seems to be closer to the mark -- a point Judt seems to endorse:

With Althusser we are seeing the belated revenge of the French idealist heritage, asserting its primacy in the very act of justifying the most materialist of marxisms. (kl 4049)

And Judt offers a small theory based on historical circumstances to account for this turn to philosophy within Marxism:

The years 1945–75 do seem to confirm Karl Korsch’s insight, to the effect that Marx the philosopher surfaces in moments of revolutionary optimism, but that in what Merleau-Ponty was to call ‘des périodes d’affaissement’ subject and object disassociate and flexible relations become, for marxist observers, immutable structures. (kl 4102)

So if not Althusser and Goldmann, then to whom might we turn for some fresh thinking and new insights about contemporary society from a Marxian point of view? Still on the horizon are Lukács, Horkheimer, and Adorno -- the subjects of several posts in the past as well as some upcoming entries.

(Above I've assembled a stamp album of leaders of the international Left. Anyone have a Gramsci?)

Historians of Past & Present

image: "Historians of Past and Present," National Portrait Gallery, London

A recent article on J. H. Elliott in the New York Review of Books includes a very striking portrait of the founders of the British history journal, Past and Present. The painting includes Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Lawrence Stone, and Keith Thomas (standing); and Christopher Hill, J. H. Elliott, and Joan Thirst (seated). The journal has been an incredibly important platform for some of the best social history being written from its founding in 1952 through the present, and it is very striking to see these pathbreaking historians all depicted together.

The journal was founded post-war by a group of historians who were Marxist and often members of the British Communist Party; but the journal itself maintained an intellectual independence from doctrine and party that allowed it to cultivate genuinely important historical research. As Hill, Hilton, and Hobsbawm put the point in the 1983 essay mentioned below, "In our dealings with Party or Group we were quite explicit in establishing that the journal was independent, and would accept no policy instructions" (5).

There is one element of this piece of intellectual history that I continue to find particularly intriguing. This has to do with the relationship between intellectual honesty and political conviction.  How is an historian's work (or the work of a social scientist or philosopher) affected by his or her political convictions? Intellectual honesty seems like a straightforward thing: we want scholars to pursue their findings as the facts and inferences guide them. We want them to help us understand how the world works, based on their best reading of the evidence. We don't want them to "spin" events or processes into alignment with their political ideologies or commitments. So how did this work for the historians of Past and Present and for Communist historians who were not part of the journal like E. P. Thompson? 

One part of the answer seems clear: these historians chose their topics for research based on their intuitions about the drivers of history, and these intuitions were certainly bound up in their political commitments and passions. So when Hobsbawm focuses on "Machine Breakers" (1952) or Soboul on "Robespierre and the Popular Movement of 1793-4" (1954) or Rodney Hilton on "Freedom and Villeinage in England" (1965) or E. P. Thompson on "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd" (1971), the topics they study have an obvious relevance to their political passions. But what about their findings? Are they able to see the aspects of their stories that are unexpected from a classical Marxist point of view? Is history "gnarly" and unpredictable for them? And are they honest in laying out the facts as they found them? Having read each of Hobsbawm, Soboul, Hilton, and Thompson with a certain degree of care over the years, my belief is that they meet this test. Certainly this is true for Thompson; the originality of his classic book, The Making of the English Working Class, is precisely to be found in the fact that it is not a cookie-cutter theory of class. Instead, Thompson goes into great detail, based on a rich variety of primary sources, about the sources of identity that working people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created for themselves. These historians are not doctrinaire in their findings, and they honestly confront the historical realities that they find.

One way of getting a feeling for the journal is to look at its contents. The topics included in the first ten years of publication of Past and Present cover a broad range of historical subjects. Here are some exemplars from the first decade:

• Hill, Christopher. 1952. "Puritans and the Poor." Past & Present (2):32-50. doi: 10.2307/650123. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650123
• Hilton, R. H. 1952. "Capitalism--What's in a Name?" Past & Present (1):32-43. doi: 10.2307/649987. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649987
• Hobsbawm, E. J. 1952. "The Machine Breakers." Past & Present (1):57-70. doi: 10.2307/649989. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649989
• Homans, George Caspar. 1953. "The Rural Sociology of Medieval England." Past & Present (4):32-43. doi: 10.2307/649895. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649895
• Kiernan, V., and Christopher Hill. 1953. "Puritanism and the Poor." Past & Present (3):45-54. doi: 10.2307/650035. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650035
• Hobsbawm, E. J. 1954. "The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century." Past & Present (5):33-53. doi: 10.2307/649822. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649822
• Mondolfo, Rodolfo, and D. S. Duncan. 1954. "The Greek Attitude to Manual Labour." Past & Present (6):1-5. doi: 10.2307/649811. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649811
• Soboul, A. 1954. "Robespierre and the Popular Movement of 1793-4." Past & Present (5):54-70. doi: 10.2307/649823. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649823
• Childe, V. G. 1955. "The Sociology of the Mycenaean Tablets." Past & Present (7):76-77. doi: 10.2307/650174. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650174
• Kosminsky, E. A. 1955. "The Evolution of Feudal Rent in England from the XIth to the XVth Centuries." Past & Present (7):12-36. doi: 10.2307/650170. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650170
• Rudé, George E. 1955. "The Outbreak of the French Revolution." Past & Present (8):28-42. doi: 10.2307/649776. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649776
• Aston, T. H. 1956. "The English Manor." Past & Present (10):6-14. doi: 10.2307/650142. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650142
• Goubert, Pierre. 1956. "The French Peasantry of the Seventeenth Century: A Regional Example." Past & Present (10):55-77. doi: 10.2307/650145. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650145
• Soboul, A. 1956. "The French Rural Community in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries." Past & Present (10):78-95. doi: 10.2307/650146. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650146
• Connell, K. H. 1957. "Peasant Marriage in Ireland after the Great Famine." Past & Present (12):76-91. doi: 10.2307/650016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650016
• Klíma, A. 1957. "Industrial Development in Bohemia 1648-1781." Past & Present (11):87-99. doi: 10.2307/649742. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649742
• Ludloff, R. 1957. "Industrial Development in 16th-17th Century Germany." Past & Present (12):58-75. doi: 10.2307/650015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650015
• Jones, A. H. M. 1958. "The Roman Colonate." Past & Present (13):1-13. doi: 10.2307/649865. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649865
• Małowist, M. 1958. "Poland, Russia and Western Trade in the 15th and 16th Centuries." Past & Present (13):26-41. doi: 10.2307/649867. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649867
• Cobb, R. 1959. "The People in the French Revolution." Past & Present (15):60-72. doi: 10.2307/649832. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649832
• Trevor-Roper, H. R. 1959. "The General Crisis of the 17th Century." Past & Present (16):31-64. doi: 10.2307/650152. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650152
• Briggs, Asa. 1961. "Cholera and Society in the Nineteenth Century." Past & Present (19):76-96. doi: 10.2307/649981. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649981
• Soboul, Albert, and Georges Lefebvre. 1961. "Urban Society in the Orléanais in the Late Eighteenth Century." Past & Present (19):46-75. doi: 10.2307/649980. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649980
• Dore, R. P. 1962. "Talent and the Social Order in Tokugawa Japan." Past & Present (21):60-72. doi: 10.2307/649996. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649996
• Finley, M. I. 1962. "Athenian Demagogues." Past & Present (21):3-24. doi: 10.2307/649993. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649993

Out of this list a number of themes recur: for example, underclass life, revolution, class, and economic history. These topics reflect the theoretical and political interests of the founders and the editors of the journal, and they served to encourage a substantial volume of additional research along these lines in the years that followed. Many of these essays have proven to be a classics in their genres.

Two interesting articles were published in the journal in 1983 about its own history (link). The first was by three of the founding editors of the journal, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, and Eric Hobsbawm. And the other was by Jacques Le Goff, the then-editor of the equally important French history journal, Annales.  These two essays offer very interesting snapshots into the role that the journal played in British history through the mid 1980s.

Hill, Hilton, and Hobsbawm emphasize the intellectual independence of the journal from its inception. This independence derived from the commitment of the board of editors: "It has been the collegiality of the Board which enabled us to know each other, to formulate a consensus about the sort of history we wanted to encourage -- irrespective of ideological or other divergences within the Board -- to establish policies and perspectives for the journal, however tacitly and empirically, and to establish a flexible continuity of policy" (12).

Jacques Le Goff also addresses the Marxist orientation of the journal in his 1983 contribution in these terms:

Never having had any prejudice against Marxism, provided it was open and undogmatic, I was totally able to accept a publication in which there was certainly an element of Marxism but which gave no impression of being subject to a dogma, still less to a party. (14)

Le Goff emphasizes the importance of the intellectual impetus that Past and Present created for historians everywhere. He draws attention to the annual conferences that the Past and Present Society organized, and the importance of many of these discussions for further developments in historical research.

Past and Present has been a leading forum for a particularly dynamic field of historiography in its six decades of publication. Its pages have highlighted the importance of social and economic history; the concrete history of social classes; the dynamics of revolution; the role that technology played in ordinary life in medieval and modern times; the key roles that agriculture and rural life played in early modern history; and underclass social life. These are themes that have a great deal of salience for a Marxist interpretation of history.  But what is displayed in its pages, from beginning to the present, is rigorous, critical history -- not Marxist dogmas about the working class, the peasantry, or the inevitability of social revolution.

(Here is a rational discussion of Hobsbawm's political affiliations in the Guardian; link. And here is a diatribe against Hobsbawm's insufficient commitment to Marxism in the International Marxist Tendency; link. This lengthy piece presents an alternative interpretation of Hobsbawm's life and work. Harvey Kaye provides extensive discussion of these figures in The British Marxist Historians. Also interesting is Michael Scott Christofferson's French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Anti-totalitarian Moment of the 1970s.)

Intellectual history as history?

How do fields like the history of art or the history of philosophy relate to history simpliciter? Are there similar problems and methods in the history of ideas to those facing social or economic historians? Or is the idea of examining a series of events possessing temporal order the only thing these fields have in common?

Take the history of philosophy as an example. When philosophers analyze and present the history of their discipline for undergraduates, there is a fairly standard narrative in Anglo-American philosophy. The narrative begins with the pre-Socratics, with a set of questions about the nature of reality and some examples of how to reason about such questions. It moves then to classical ancient philosophy and considers the questions, theories, and methods of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Here a broader range of questions come into play, including the nature of knowledge, the nature of reality, and the nature of virtue and justice. The medieval philosophers come next, including Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and perhaps Maimonides. Theological questions are center stage. Sometimes the Islamic world is given credit for maintaining knowledge of the ancients, especially Aristotle, through the upheavals of the post-Roman Empire dark ages. Then we come to "modern" philosophy, including the empiricists (English-speaking) and the rationalists (Continental).  Kant generally gets a page of his own, seeking to reconcile these two traditions, and then we hurtle into Hegel and the nineteenth century philosophers.

This narrative is largely structured around topics, theories, and methods, and the named philosophers are characterized in terms of their distinctive contributions to these items. When the historian of philosophy invokes change or dynamics, it is founded on the dialectic of the ideas and theories. Empiricism developed through as series of intellectual problems and inadequacies in earlier treatments. So in a typical history of philosophy, the narrative takes an internalist perspective -- an argument about how one set of theories and methods led logically or dialectically to another. The biography and historical setting of the philosopher is considered to be irrelevant, with occasional exceptions. (The setting of civil war is sometimes considered relevant to the development of Hobbes's theory of the state.)

An externalist approach to the history of philosophy would take a different tack.  The historian of philosophies might look at philosophy as a grounded intellectual practice, thoroughly embedded in a certain set of social and political activities. The philosopher's system of ideas would not be viewed as a purely autonomous intellectual activity, but rather a set of formulations that are responsive both to earlier arguments and social and political realities and assumptions. The circumstances and settings of particular philosophers would be highly relevant for the historian on this approach. This approach might look at the systems of thought created by philosophers as ideologies -- idealized expressions of more widespread systems of social ideas that serve the interests of various powerful groups. This is roughly speaking the approach taken by CB McPherson in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (link). And it would be a variation of the approach taken by current work within the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) (link).

The internalist approach to the history of philosophy doesn't really seem to have much to do with history in any genuine way. And perhaps this applies to internalist approaches to other fields as well -- literature, painting, cuisine. And yet ideas do play important roles in history -- they have consequences and they ate influenced by social and material conditions. The challenge for the historian is how to make these connections through careful investigation while at the same time giving systems of thought and creativity the degree of autonomy they also possess.

Here are a few threads that are relevant to these questions. First, in the history of ideas we can always ask questions about the social conditions or influences on ideas. We might argue, as TJ Clark does in The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, that social conditions in the 1830s in rural France made the realism of Courbet possible.  This brings social and intellectual history onto the same canvas.

Second, we can use tools of sociological analysis to provide a framework for thinking about art and philosophy. Bourdieu's concept and theory of field are relevant: an art tradition develops within a field of artists and a set of cultural institutions (The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field). This too provides a social and material context for the history of ideas.

Third, it is both legitimate and necessary for social historians to take the development and currency of ideas seriously. Certain instances of popular politics, for example, may not make sense unless we explicate the religious or cultural ideas of the population.

So a truly insightful history of ideas and thought shouldn't be either purely internalist or purely externalist. Rather, the historian needs to be able to both respect the discipline while at the same time tracing the material processes through which it develops. An in fact, we do have examples of scholars who have managed to do both; a good example is Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change.

Public intellectuals in France and the US

What is the role of the intellectual in France in 2010?  And has that role declined in the past several decades?  Have the media and the internet profoundly eroded or devalued the voice of the intellectual in public space?  The Nouvel Observateur takes up these questions in a recent issue devoted to "Le pouvoir intellectuel" (link).

The line of thought is a complicated one.  Jacques Julliard frames the question by proposing that the public imagination of the intellectual involves a narrative of precipitous decline since the active engagements of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus.  There was a conception of the engaged intellectual who brought his/her ideas and convictions into opposition when state and society were going wrong -- Algeria, Vietnam, capitalism.  And, Julliard suggests, the common view is that the current generation of intellectuals have not succeeded -- perhaps have not even attempted -- at bringing theory, critique, and value into the public sphere.  Jean Daniel captures the idea in his editorial: "Faut-il rire des 'intellos'?"

But -- here is the complexity -- Julliard refutes this idea.  The tradition of the public intellectual is not attenuated or corrupted in France; rather, the current generation of intellectuals are in fact engaged and involved.  It is nostalgia for a golden age -- the age of Liberation, Communism, and Existentialism -- that foreshortens the reputation of the intellectual today.  But the golden age is a myth.

Tout cela est faux, archifaux, et prouve seulement que Saint-Sulpice n'est séparé de Saint-Germain que par quelques enjambées et par la piété du souvenir. Et revenons aux faits. [All this is false, badly false, and only proves that Saint-Sulpice is only separated from Saint-Germain by a few steps and the piety of memory.  Let us return to the facts.]

Julliard points out five salient facts. First, we sometimes confuse the intellectual and the literary artist.  The artist is valued for the aesthetic quality of his/her works, whereas the intellectual is valued for the significance of the impact of his/her ideas.  Second, the impact of Sartre and Camus on France's wars in Algeria or Vietnam was minimal, and later generations of French intellectuals have actually exercised greater influence.  In fact, Julliard argues that Lévy, Glucksmann, and Finkielkraut were more effective in their own interventions about policy in Bosnia than Sartre or Camus on the colonial wars.  Third, Julliard argues that modern media, including the blogosphere, have provided the contemporary intellectual with a much more powerful platform for disseminating ideas and values than was available to Zola, Sartre, or Camus.  He cites debates on the Israel-Palestine conflict, global warming, immigration, European governance, and even philosophy and literature, as locations of debate where modern media have amplified the voices of intellectuals.  Fourth, there is the question of designation: who decides who the "intellectuals" are?  The media select their talking heads; what confidence can the public have that these are the best voices available?  Julliard even suggests that there has been an inversion of quality; the telegenic pundit acquires reputation as a savant, rather than the savant being sought out as a pundit.  And fifth, there was a tendency of the "engaged" philosophers of the generation of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Camus, to be engaged in service to a cause -- Communism, most commonly.  So the positions offered by these intellectuals were often enough not "intellectual" at all; they did not follow from the principles, ideas, and methods of the thinker, but rather derived from the position of a party or camp.  Today's intellectuals, Julliard suggests, are interested in ideas rather than ideologies.  And with this commitment they have returned to the real vocation of the intellectual:

En rompant avec l'idéologie abstraite au profit de l'universel concret, les intellectuels, du moins les plus novateurs d'entre eux, sont revenus à leur fonction essentielle : la critique sociale, et d'abord la critique de leur propre pratique. [Dispensing with abstract ideology, today's intellectuals have returned to their essential function: social criticism, and especially criticism of their own practice.]

So Julliard's telling of the story expresses several key points: France needs public intellectuals; there are several overlapping generations of thinkers who are filling this role (and more to come); and in fact, the decline of ideology and the rise of media and the Internet makes the voices of intellectuals more effective rather than less.  In his editorial in this issue Jean Daniel reaches a similar conclusion: "En un mot: depuis que nous n'avons plus confinace dans des idéologies, nous avons un frénétique besoin des idées. C'est-a-dire des intellectuels." [In a word: since we no longer have confidence in ideologies, we have urgent need of ideas; which is to say, intellectuals.]

In continuing the theme, Nouvel Obs returns to the debate of 1980 by talking again with several of the young intellectuals it consulted in that year.  Pascal Bruckner, Luc Ferry, and Gilles Lipovetsky offer their perspectives on the role of ideas and intellectuals in French society from the vantage point of 2010 (link).  And there is a challenging interview-discussion with Alain Badiou and Alain Finkielkraut on communism (link).  So Nouvel Obs is doing its part -- it is helping to bring to the fore debates and thinkers who can help France navigate into the twenty-first century.

There is one form of practical proof of the importance of intellectuals in contemporary France that is not so visible from the United States: the depth and pervasiveness of the presence of deeply thoughtful scholars and writers on French radio and television.  For a taste of the breadth and depth of the voices of intellectuals in French society today, consult the list of podcasts made available from radio programming at France Culture (link).  Particularly rich are Les nouveaux chemins de la connaissance (link) and Repliques (link). These programs exemplify serious voices, serious debates, and nuanced and extensive discussions.

In the United States it seems that the whole issue of the public intellectual plays out differently than in France.  To begin -- the great majority of the "public" have virtually no interest in or respect for academic discussions of issues.  Fox News, talk radio, and blistering political blogs fill that space.

Second, however, there is a subset of the American public that does have an appetite for more detailed and nuanced treatment of the issues that face us.  Slate.com has between 5 and 8 million unique readers a month; the Huffington Post logged about 10 million visitors in December, 2009; and NationalReview.com logs about 4.5 million readers a month.  The Facebook page for "Give me some serious discussion and debate about crucial issues!" could be huge.

Looking at the question from another angle -- the academic world in the United States is itself a meaningful segment of the workforce.  There are about 1.5 million post-secondary teachers (professors and lecturers) in the United States, and the majority of these have doctoral degrees.  Of these, a smaller number fall into traditional "intellectual" disciplines: English literature (74,800), Foreign literature (32,100), History (26,000), Philosophy and Religion (25,100), and Sociology (20,300), for a total of 178,300.  In engineering, mathematics, and the sciences there are another 262,600 post-secondary teachers.  (These data come from a Bureau of Labor Statistics snapshot for 2008 (link).)  So a small but meaningful proportion of the US population have advanced degrees and intellectual credentials.  They are a core segment of the audience for public intellectuals. And, of course, you don't have to be an academic to be an intellectual.

Further, there are a host of specialists and experts on specific crises -- environment, finance, globalization, war -- who are called upon to comment on specific issues, and there are specialized "think tanks" that promote and disseminate research on critical public issues.  Moreover, voices like that of Bill Moyers have offered critical and nuanced perspectives on public television (link) (regrettably, now off the air).  And the United States has a number of prominent academics who speak to a broad public -- Henry Louis Gates, Jeffrey Sachs, Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West, Michael Walzer, and James Gustave Speth, to name a few.  So there is a domain of intellectual discourse that succeeds in escaping the confines of the academic world and the limiting echo-chamber of cable television; this domain helps to create and feed an intellectual public.

Overall, it seems fair to say that public intellectuals have little influence on public opinion and public policy in the US today.  Perhaps Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) still has a lot of validity.  But maybe, just maybe, it is also possible that the Internet is beginning to offer a bigger footprint for serious analysis and criticism for the American public and American policy makers.  Perhaps there is a broadening opportunity for intellectuals to help define the future for the United States and its role in the world.  And perhaps we can be more like France in this important dimension.