Samuel Moyn

French Democracy between Totalitarianism and Solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and Revisionist Historiography

No book has affected the study of modern French history in the last twenty-five years more than Francois Furet’s Penser la Revolution francaise (translated as Interpreting the French Revolution).1 Furet’s interpretation of the French Revolution and French history more generally, and the revisionism it inspired, are by now well known. This essay interprets the intellectual career of Pierre Rosanvallon— one of Furet’s most interesting students, recently honored by election to the College de France, his nation’s most prestigious academic institution—as an attempt to test the flexibility of Furet’s paradigm for understanding French history and its amenability to new ends. Rosanvallon’s work responds to the most obvious limitation of Furet’s project, both interpretive and political: its ambivalence about the democratic project itself. The question Rosanvallon’s exercise prompts, however, is just how fundamental a break with Furet’s model is required to write a history of democracy that corrects for what seems to be an uncertainty about the viability of democracy, especially about its extension. This essay argues that Rosanvallon’s very attempt to operate within Furet’s framework in the name of a more democratic vision unwittingly demonstrates some of the interpretive limitations of the premises

Savage and Modern Liberty: Marcel Gauchet and the Origins of New French Thought

This article is a study of the trajectory of the contemporary French liberal philosopher Marcel Gauchet from his early, ‘anarchist’ commitments through the 1970s to his discovery and defense of liberalism, notably as expressed in his 1980 revival and interpretation of his 19th-century countryman Benjamin Constant’s post-revolutionary liberalism. Discussed in the article are Gauchet’s devotion to and revision of the portrait of primitive society he inherited from the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres, how his early political and theoretical concerns are transmuted in Gauchet’s reading of Constant, and the relevance of this trajectory for comprehending even Gauchet’s most recent pronouncements about the nature and future of liberal society.

OF SAVAGERY AND CIVIL SOCIETY: PIERRE CLASTRES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF FRENCH POLITICAL THOUGHT

This essay examines the thought of the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1938–1977). It situates his once-famous depiction of savage politics as a premonitory rejection of the state at the crossroads of several traditions, long- and short-term. First, Clastress thought resonates with the primitivistic appeal by French “moralists” since the early modern period to the lifestyle of prehistoric societies; second, it casts light on the history of French anthropology in the crisis years of structuralism; and third, it reflects the revival of Friedrich Nietzsche in French thought of the era. Above all, however, the essay explains Clastress thought as an attempt to resist and to overcome the well-known communist allegiances of postwar French intellectuals. Early in rejecting communism, Clastres owed his prominence to the 1970s popularization of the critique of “totalitarianism.” The so-called “passing of an illusion” of communism, one version of which Clastres pioneered, is often interpreted as the replacement of confusion with truth. It is more interesting, the essay suggests, to situate it in its time, as a complex achievement as defective as it was creative, if Clastress thought is taken as an example. In closing, the essay suggests some legacies, often unintentional, Clastres left behind in French political thought of the years since his death.

THE ASSUMPTION BY MAN OF HIS ORIGINAL FRACTURING: MARCEL GAUCHET, GLADYS SWAIN, AND THE HISTORY OF THE SELF

This essay reconstructs conceptually and situates historically contemporary French philosopher Marcel Gauchets theory of the origins and development of modern selfhood. It argues that his history of the self as the interiorization of constitutive alienation, and of the history of self-consciousness as the progressive recognition of this alienation, originated out of a unique combination of historical factors—the radical politics of May 1968, the rise of the antipsychiatry movement, and (perhaps most surprisingly) the new psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. The essay considers Gauchets study, together with his partner Gladys Swain, of the foundations of psychiatry, and investigates the connections of their narrative of origins to Michel Foucaults work. The essay concludes by turning to Gauchets more recent contributions and considering the implications of his history of the self for Anglo-American scholarship.

Fantasies of Federalism

In several essays written in the midst of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt advocated federalism as a replacement for nationalism, which she believed had been rendered obsolete. Adolf Hitler had demonstrated the limits of ethnic homogeneity as a basis for political organization. The idea of “the nation” that had set the world on fire had definitively revealed its shortcomings: it failed to hold up when mapped onto territory shared by different peoples and so often ruled by a permanent majority. “Nowhere in Europe today,” Arendt remarked in 1945, “do we find a nationally homogeneous population.” Furthermore, political federalism of some sort had worked for Americans for a century and a half. Why not Europe? Why let nation-states remain the rule?

From experience to law: Leo Strauss and the Weimar crisis of the philosophy of religion

This paper is a study of the origins of Leo Strausss thought, arguing that its early development must be understood in the context of the philosophy of religion of late Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. More specifically, it shows that Strausss early works were written against the background of Kantian philosophy and post-Kantian accounts of religious experience, and that his turn towards medieval law as a topic and ideal was precipitated by the critique of those accounts by radical Protestant theologians writing in the post-World War I era of crisis. Ironically, then, Strausss investment in premodern Judaism—and his related rejection of modern philosophy—had important Christian origins.

Antisemitism, philosemitism and the rise of Holocaust memory

ABSTRACT Moyns article is primarily a theoretical consideration of whether philosemitism can and should be studied as a ‘cultural code’ in precise historical contexts, just as antisemitism has been. To illustrate, it takes up controversies around works by Roger Peyrefitte and Jean-François Steiner in France in the mid-1960s, arguing that their books, including their reception, mobilized a temporary cultural code based on flirting with antisemitism in the putative service of philosemitism. Moyn also argues that this time-bound dynamic contributed to the rise of Holocaust memory at a crucial moment. Some analysis of content and reception is provided in the cases of both works at issue, but the dominant purpose is to complicate recent assertions of continuity in the history of antisemitism: ideological content can matter less than function, with continuity at one level masking discontinuity at another.

Tradition and Beyond: Christian Human Rights in Debate

It is a great honour to have Christian Human Rights read and criticised by these three premier scholars, and I am grateful to them for giving my book their attention. Since I am in sympathy with so many of their remarks, I will focus in my brief response mainly on their more serious reservations. John Finnis and Thomas Pink give accounts that are based on a fundamentally internal perspective—from within Christian tradition and thought—where my point of view is secular and external. While external perspectives on traditions can risk insufficient empathy and glaring ignorance, internal vantage points court their own difficulties, and tend almost inevitably in the direction of apologetics in the original sense of that term. Worse, they routinely mistake what have been generated as internal rationales for changes after the fact for actual causes of and reasons for externally driven transformations. I do not disagree and indeed would insist that no tradition changes if its partisans do not offer justifications of revision that make sense to them from an internal point of view. And traditions are defined as much by such change as by stasis, always argued out from within, and with enduring internal principles justifying departures. But it is another matter to credit such internal sources as the causes of and reasons for the change in the first place. Most frequently, they are more like rationalisations. To external observers, this fact is generally very plain. In his fair-minded response to Christian Human Rights, Pink reasonably says that, in the otherwise shocking commitment of Catholic authorities and philosophers to universal personal entitlements at the middle of the twentieth century, there must have been some antecedents. And of course that is the case: ex nihilo nihil fit. Further, even for believable pretexts to be found for ‘opportunistic’ change within a tradition, there has to be some basis on which to claim the novelty is possible to reconcile with what came before, and Pink surveys some of the traditional sources, both in medieval philosophy and in modern papal teaching, that made it allowable to integrate human rights. Similarly, it was clearly possible from the start for the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ in my country’s Declaration of Independence to be later understood to include black men. This does not, however, mean that the commitment caused its own eventual

Christian Human Rights: An Introduction

Christmas Day, 1942. The outcome of World War II was undecided. A month before, the tide at Stalingrad had turned against the Germans; just two days before, General Erich von Manstein had abandoned his efforts to relieve the Wehrmacht’s doomed Sixth Army. Still, there was no telling that the extraordinary German strength in the war on display so far would now ebb quickly. Nonetheless, the Roman Catholic pope, Pius XII, had something new to say. The Americans had formally entered the war a year before, but the Allies would not reach mainland Italy for another nine months, or make it to Rome for a year and a half. The pope felt himself in dire straits. His relationship with Benito Mussolini had long since soured, and he was a prisoner in his own tiny Roman domain. As for the Jews, the worst victims of the conflict, millions were dead already; the victims at Babi Yar had lain in their ravine for more than a year; Treblinka, the most infernal death camp, had begun killing operations six months before and much of its grim work was already complete. Officially, of course, the papacy and its leader were neutral in the war, and did not play politics. Many of Pius’s flock, however, were to be found on all sides of the war. To the extent recent observers have revisited Pius’s Christmas message, it has been to argue about whether he could or should have said more about the Holocaust than he did. But the real interest in the message is what the pontiff was for, not what he was against. In this fight, Christianity stood for values, and in the perspective of world history, Pius XII had some new ones. On that day, the appeal to reaffirm faith in the dignity of the human person, and in the rights that follow from that dignity, reached unprecedented heights of public visibility. The very first of the five peace points that Pius XII offered that day ran as follows:

The Relativist Stratagem

thetic’ – citizenry, which is not deeply divided along ideological lines and in which politics is merely a profession like any other (more or less similarly to Schumpeter’s view). Is that enough for democracy to sustain itself? Invernizzi Accetti insists that the definition of relativism he endorses should be distinguished ‘both from a form of moral nihilism and from a form of moral absolutism’. ‘It is different from moral nihilism’, he writes,