Frank Adler

The Original Model of American Democracy and the Turn to Statism

There is no doubt the US has evolved into a statist system vastly different from its point of departure. Yet the proposition that the original American model was somehow replaced or subverted by its French counterpart seems historically false and theoretically misleading. Briefly and schematically, by the French or Jacobin model I understand a centralized, unitary state which on principle brooks no regional diversity, opposes subsystem autonomy, prevents or discourages communal or associational meditation between individual citizens and the state. This state, moreover, has rendered itself progressively autonomous with respect to the selection and training of its personnel, its administrative modus operandi, its culture or esprit de corps, and has displayed remarkable historical continuity regardless of social change or actual changes of regime (republics, empires, Vichy).

Left Vigilance in France

The “appeal to vigilance” against the resurgence of the far Right, launched by forty Left intellectuals last summer, generated one of the most bizarre ideological controversies France has witnessed since the threshold year of 1981, when the Left joyously came to power pledging to “change life.” Coming four months after the Lefts worst electoral debacle in recent memory, the Appeal may mark the end of a political era and signal the final demise of the engagé intellectual identified with Sartre. The message was that the rise in racism and the resurgence of the far Right were due essentially to the Lelts lack of vigilance against the growing legitimation of the tar Right, and that this had occurred because some Left intellectuals had deviated from orthodoxy in considering other explanations and had debated these issues with an intellectual of the New Right (Alain de Benoist).

Thalheimer, Bonapartism and Fascism

It is not at all surprising that August Thalheimers 1930 essay on fascism should have been so enthusiastically rediscovered, reprinted and widely discussed in left-wing European circles during the 1960s. Informed debate on fascism had reached a major theoretical impasse: factually, more was known than ever before, or, at any rate, enough to dismiss as “empirically inadequate” virtually all of the better known traditional interpretations; yet, conceptually, no new theoretical nets had been cast that might have better accounted for the full range of phenomena to be subsumed under the generic term fascism. Moreover, to the degree that extremely well-researched, specialized monographs had successfully challenged the old theoretical warhorses, few scholars were inclined to hazard new totalizing formulations lest their own heads in turn be severed on the merciless empirical block.

Politics, Intellectuals and the University

The current crisis facing intellectuals and the university certainly is multifaceted and not reducible either to pat structuralist explanations or those which would simply treat the crisis as a reflection of the spiritual morass of our age (post-modernist ennui, the eclipse of metanarratives, the collapse of meaning, etc.). This crisis must be seen as rooted in the fall of those lines of demarcation which separate intellectuals from other groups on the basis of their practical activity, and the university from the state and all other institutions of civil society. In other words, what might very well be at stake is nothing less than the privileged particularity of intellectuals (their special status as bearers of universal knowledge, their distinctive claims as seekers of truth and excellence) and the privileged particularity of the university.

Racism, Antiracism and the Decline of the French Left

The last two years have been difficult ones for Pierre-André Taguieff. Despite his undisputed status as one of Frances leading experts on racism and right-wing politics, he has progressively run afoul of what Jean-François Kahn has called “le système intello-médiatique” During the Summer of 1993, Taguieff was attacked in the “Appeal to Vigilance” controversy on grounds of having helped legitimate the far Right by confusing public opinion with his complex analyses of racism and his criticism of the growing ineffectiveness of fashionable antiracism. He responded first by writing a 440 page book on the New Right, then a 722 page book on antiracism, reviewed here.

New Racism vs. Old Anti-Racism in France

Throughout Western Europe public opinion polls indicate mounting frustration with the “immigrant problem” — an influx of impoverished, culturally-distinct, non-European migrants, driven by the relative economic-demographic disparities between the Third World and the West. Words such as “invasion,” “ghettos” and “insecurity” express a generalized fear of expanding urban concentrations of poor migrants whose eventual absorption (in the popular view) is highly problematic and whose cultural assimilation, for a constituency far beyond the Extreme Right, has become doubtful. Beyond the additional “threat” of significant migration from Eastern Europe should the transformational efforts in the former communist bloc fail, economic stagnation and rising unemployment in Western Europe will have created conditions wherein “normal” ethnocentrism has begun to transform itself into xenophobia, aggressive nationalism and even racism.

Norberto Bobbio at 80

On October 18, 1989 Norberto Bobbio celebrated his eightieth birthday, a milestone marked by extensive discussions regarding his life, his intellectual contributions in general, and particularly his celebrated reflections on the themes of socialism and democracy. Longevity is obviously not the sole factor making Bobbio so unique, though few scholars have remained productive for more than five decades (his first publications date back to 1934 and he remains intellectually active today). Rather, Bobbio is perhaps the vital link between an amazing generation of intellectuals which came of age in Italy during the 1920s (Gramsci, Gobetti, Rosselli) and contemporary discussions of pluralism, liberalism and the “new” social democracy.

1992 or Bust

La grande illusion became a best-seller in France the moment it came off the press. Its author, Alain Mine, became a celebrity overnight, appearing on such influential talk shows as “Apostrophes,” and being featured in journals like Le Monde and Le nouvel observateur, on the Left, and éléments, on the Right. Why should this polemic against “the myth of 1992” have caused such a stir? Why should Mine, me so-called europessimiste, have become a point of reference for all discussions relating to the European Community? Why, after public opinion polls had indicated overwhelming French support for the unified European market, was Mines shrill warning taken so seriously?

Telos, 1968 And Now

May 1968 serves as a benchmark for those who would nostalgically like to identify that one moment of the 1960s which qualitatively marked a break with the past. In Europe — France and Italy, in particular — one can immediately recall the songs and slogans. Even those on the other side of the barricades have chosen to remember the most positive, emancipatory impulses of this temps de vivre, while regretting the disruptions and personal inconveniences. Like the Spring of 1848, the Spring of 1968 was a moment of madness; just as a conservative critic of 1848, like Tocqueville could admit in its aftermath that everyone, in spite of everything, breathed more freely because of the folk.

Rizzi's Honor

In the famous opening sentence of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx notes that somewhere Hegel had written that great world-historical phenomena occur twice, neglecting to add, however, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Given what we now know of the heretofore hidden side of Bruno Rizzi, still another revision seems in order: sometimes such phenomena make yet a third appearance, this time as embarrassment, rank embarrassment. Indeed, Rizzis name surfaced in three such sequential contexts. The first was in the late 1930s when non-stalinist Marxists, primarily Trotskyists, were debating whether or not a “new class” had emerged in the Soviet Union.