Books reviewed:

- Régis Debray, L’Emprise, Gallimard, 146p, FF75, ISBN 2-07-075861-3
- Régis Debray, I.F. suite et fin, Gallimard, 190p, FF85, ISBN 2-07-076069-3
- Tzvetan Todorov, Mémoire du mal, Tentation du bien, Enquête sur le siècle, Robert Laffont, 356p, FF149, ISBN 2-221-09079-9
- Jean-François Revel, Les Plats de saison, Seuil, 442p., FF135, ISBN 2-02-037137-5

Non-French people can be forgiven for wondering how the French intellectual sees the world these days. He was last seen planning the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in a Paris café in 1972, and apart from gnomic utterances about post-modern society little has been heard from him since then. What happened was that by the 1980s the French intellectual had lost his trademark faith in Marxism and become a believer in democracy, civil liberties, the rights of minorities, and relief for the wretched of the earth. In short he was just like other western intellectuals; he had ceased to be an object of study or curiosity. In many ways this was good news. Humanitarianism is a nice sort of doctrine; you can’t get things spectacularly wrong by preaching it. Surely it is better for young idealists to dream of building clinics in Africa than blowing up their parents’ home. So have French intellectuals put their support for collectivist monstrosities behind them? Has the rise of humanitarianism led to a new age of responsibility and maturity in France’s public debate? The authors of the books under review beg to differ.

Régis Debray, a 1960s radical turned champion of the nation-state, formally broke with humanitarianism during the Kosovo conflict. He made himself thoroughly unpopular by travelling to Serbia, dodging the bombs, and writing on his return that the NATO campaign was doing more harm than good. The humanitarian Left rounded on Debray, lambasting him as naïve at best and a closet supporter of Milosevic at worst. The debate raged briefly in Le Monde in May 1999, and ended with Debray’s discomfiture. France’s smart opinion, like the public at large, applauded the bombing of Yugoslavia.

After a spell away from public view, Debray responded by publishing two short books. His aim was not to revive old disputes over Kosovo, but to expose what he viewed as the biases of his critics. The first book, L’Emprise takes on journalists. This is not a new departure for Debray, who has elevated the art of deconstructing newspeak into a new academic discipline, “médiologie”. L’Emprise (”The Hold”) compares the French press of today to the Roman Catholic church of old. The new religion, Debray contends, has its articles of faith (human rights), its charitable orders (French doctors and the like), and its crusading knights (NATO). The role of the media, as the new clergy, is to uphold the faith and keep people to the straight and narrow. “Major excommunication used to be fulminated ex cathedra by bishops in dark churches,” Debray writes. Now dissenters like himself are confronted by new inquisitors: “Heavyweight commentators (…) , foes of totalitarianism entrenched in all the weeklies, channels, and dailies without exception.”

The second book, I.F. suite et fin, takes on intellectuals. Again, Debray is on familiar territory: in 1979 he published a broadside against Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: the Intellectuals of Modern France (Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France) His latest book contends that the intellectuel français, the “I.F.” of the title, is a pale imitation of the 1900 model (the noun “intellectual” originated during the Dreyfus affair). Émile Zola was an international celebrity, unlike his parochial heirs. The original “I.F.” was an advocate for unpopular causes; today’s is a prosecutor bent on bringing evil-doers to book. Above all, he is a moralist: his mind is programmed to tell Right from Wrong, rather than truth from error. As Debray remarks, the opposite was true of Dreyfus’s defenders. The question they asked was: “Is he guilty or innocent?”, and not: “Is it better to be for or against the accused captain?” Debray argues that because French intellectuals are more interested in moral correctness than in factual accuracy, they are condemned to irrelevance. The “I.F.”, he says, is on the verge of extinction.

Debray’s main merit is that he does not go for easy targets. Human rights groups and relief agencies are so obviously well meaning that we readily take them at their own estimation of selfless keepers of the public interest. But as Debray reminds us, good people are vulnerable to self-righteousness: their very goodness leads them to regard opponents as morally tainted, rather than intellectually wrong, and public debate is stifled as a result. Ultimately self-righteousness does not work: there may be excellent arguments for cancelling Third World debt or ending child labour, just as there might have been good reasons to bomb Serbia — a point Debray concedes. But only through reasoned discussion can a point of view lastingly prevail.

But to hit hard target you need to focus your sights. Debray does not, and wastes much ammunition as a result. He is reluctant to quote, or even name, his opponents, and prefers to inveigh against the intellectual media-hounds in general. Debray’s bugbears seem to be Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann, but one gets the impression that he cannot bring himself to confront them head on. Unfortunately for Debray, a biting irony and a zest for metaphorical pyrotechnics are no substitutes for clarity and attention to detail.

When he does give specifics, he is sloppy with his examples. While making a point about the tendency of those who support armed intervention to exaggerate atrocities, Debray dismissively mentions estimates of 100,000 dead in Kosovo and one million in Rwanda, suggesting that both figures were plucked out of the air to stir up international outrage. This may have been true regarding Kosovo: in the end, the number of ethnic Albanian pronounced dead or missing after the war was just over 6,300 — a terrible crime, but hardly a case of genocide. In the case of Rwanda the one-million figure is close to the truth, the word “genocide” was justified and the rest of the world let it happen. One can argue that the international community disgraced itself in both Kosovo and Rwanda, but not in the same way.

Even in his basic contentions, Debray gets carried away. He offers no evidence that French intellectuals are a dying breed. And has their quality really declined in recent decades? It’s all a matter of taste, of course, but few in France lament the passing of Marxoid structuralism as a model for social sciences (although the old deconstructionist flame is being kept alive in American universities). No French intellectual today would affirm a duty to lie for a good cause, as Sartre did, or sing the praises of Iran’s Ayatollahs, as Foucault did, and that must be an improvement. Of course, the fact that intellectuals have embraced human rights, arguably a worthier cause than the class struggle, does not entitle them to feel smug. Anyone claiming superior wisdom in the name of modernity is bound to be judged harshly by future generations. Ideologies may change, but basic attitudes remain: the combination of naïveté and arrogance that has characterised France’s intellectual life for centuries shows no sign of disappearing. That charge is damning enough. Debray would have made his job easier by concentrating on documenting it, rather than stating a dubious law of intellectual decline.

Tzvetan Todorov in Mémoire du Mal, Tentation du Bien offers much more thorough and effective critique of political Manicheism than Debray does. A Bulgarian-born linguist and guru of 1970s structuralism, Todorov turned to the history of ideas late in his career. His latest book is an intellectual survey of the Twentieth century that draws many of its illustrations from his country of adoption, France. Todorov argues that the most fateful innovation of the past hundred years — the “mal du siècle”, as he puts it — has been the introduction of moralism into the heart of politics. As morality ceased to place strict demands on private conduct, public life became shot through with it.

The transformation of politics into a struggle between good and evil was carried out to its deadliest extremes by totalitarian regimes. What characterised Nazism or Communism was the mass murder of large sections of the population for the good of mankind. Tororov makes clear that both variants of totalitarianism can, and should, be understood rationally, a point controversially made about the Nazis by the German historian Ernst Nolte in his 1986 book The European Civil War (whose French translation last year triggered a local version of Germany’s “historians’ debate” of the 1980s). The word “rational”, as used by both Todorov and Nolte, is not meant as justification, but suggests that both systems have their internal logic. Stalin or Hitler did not kill millions out of sheer bloodlust. Kulaks had to be exterminated because private property was the root of all evil; for the Nazis, a healthy nation had to be rid of Jews and other parasites. “The Chekist or SS who kills ‘enemies’,” Todorov writes, “believes he is working for the benefit of others and acting rationally.”

This idea is hardly new — “Who does not view his own cause as just?” Erasmus asked — but it seems to have been neglected in the twentieth century. The Nazis and their racist ideology are justly condemned as evil; but many westerners find it difficult to judge communists as harshly because their ideals of peace and brotherhood are generous. Todorov is not for a moment suggesting that we should judge regimes either on their own terms or not at all. Some are clearly wicked, he says, but we must not pass judgment on the basis of self-proclaimed intentions. Almost by definition, these are admirable. What makes distinguishes good from evil systems is the means they are ready to use to reach their ideals.

Todorov’s central point is that totalitarian regimes do not have a monopoly on oppressive self-righteousness. “Totalitarianism may sometimes be seen, with justification, as the evil empire,” he writes, “but it does not follow that democracy embodies, in all places and at all times, the kingdom of virtue.” Like Debray, Todorov considers the war over Kosovo as a raw affirmation of western power: NATO was spoiling for a fight with an enemy conveniently cast as a new Hitler. One does not need to agree with him on this to accept his wider point: by presenting the war as a combat against pure evil waged on behalf of pure victims, the allies justified a ruthless use of their firepower.

Similarly, one does not need to share Todorov’s dim view of the United Nations International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a poodle of the Security Council to express concern about the Tribunal’s independence. The indictment of Slobodan Milosevic on charges of crimes against humanity at the height of the Kosovo conflict is disturbing: one may support NATO and the Tribunal, but any suggestion that they may be working hand in hand undermines the authority of both. The most worrying thing in all this is the position of those who, in France and elsewhere, traditionally stand for impartial justice. The press, human rights advocates, and intellectuals are squarely behind the Chief Prosecutor in The Hague and assume that defendants are guilty. The prevailing attitude among them seems to be: “We are the good guys, so we cannot be suspected of abuse of power.”

If current conflicts can be staged as morality plays, so can past ones. Slaying the beast once the danger has passed is a safe way of being right, and one that is particularly prevalent in France. Todorov notes that the French are obsessed by the German occupation: they go over the same ground, not to analyse events dispassionately but to pass judgement. In the late 1980s and 1990s a proclaimed devoir de mémoire (”duty to remember”) was exercised through the trials of dying men called upon to answer for the crimes of the Gestapo and the Vichy regime. As Todorov observes, trials are based on the clash of sharply opposing points of view, and are therefore not the best way to shed light on a complex past. Anyone wishing to have an idea of the moral maze experienced by collaborationists and resistance fighters will learn more from reading, say, the novels of Patrick Modiano than the transcripts of any trial.

Mémoire du Mal, Tentation du Bien contains a number of short essays on writers, such as Primo Levi and Vasily Grossman, who rejected moral posturing despite their first-hand experience of the century’s worst systems. What is striking in Todorov’s selection is how obscure the French authors are: who, in France or elsewhere, remembers David Rousset or Germaine Tillon? Even in their time these Nazi camp survivors who became critics of the totalitarian system that survived the war had no intellectual influence. Despite Todorov’s best efforts, they will remain footnotes in what Bernard-Henri Lévy has called “le Siècle de Sartre”. Culturally, France is stuck in the darkest twentieth century.

This is also the conclusion reached by Jean-François Revel in Les Plats de Saison. This book is not a full-blown political essay, but a diary for the year 2000 where Revel, a philosopher, and best-selling political writer, jots down his daily gripes and reflections on everything from tasteless radishes to France’s awkward constitution. Anyone who enjoys Revel’s acerbic style and lucid thought will feast on such a diverse menu (the title, meaning “seasonal dishes”, reflects both this variety and the author’s gastronomic interests).

Despite the necessarily broken structure of the book, bit-by-bit Revel paints a vivid picture of France’s intellectual landscape. In his previous book, La Grande parade, he had shown how, perversely, the death of the Soviet Union had led to a revival of anti-capitalism in the West. It was now possible to dream of an alternative to economic liberalism without being made to face the fact of life under “real socialism”. As capitalism became universally practised it was increasingly reviled. But while in most western countries this condemnation merely brought together vocal minorities — the hard Left, the far Right, and trade unions– in France it is the majority view.

Les Plats de saison provides many weird and wonderful illustrations of this. At a leaving party thrown last year for the outgoing Employment Minister, Martine Aubry, her staff broke into the Internationale, the original Soviet anthem – a song, Revel notes, that is as relevant to modern France as Maréchal, nous voilà, the hymn to the leader of Vichy France, Marshall Pétain. This incident is more than a drunken outburst by pseudo-revolutionaries: it is indicative of a deep hostility to market forces shared by French people of all persuasions. President Chirac, a conservative, said last year that globalisation was a cause of world poverty. Prime Minister Jospin, a socialist, has been fighting a rearguard battle with his European counterparts against the Blairite Third Way.

The most popular public figure in France last year was undoubtedly José Bové, peasant leader, globaphobe extraordinaire, and enemy of junk food. The nation was shocked when a court gave him a light prison sentence for trashing a McDonald’s restaurant. Union leaders and politicians rushed to condemn the verdict, explaining that farmers, truck-drivers and other groups often express their grievances through “direct action” without getting punished for it — so why should Bové? As Revel observes, those leaders make no distinction between legal and illegal protest: destroying property and blocking roads are regarded as legitimate forms of political action in France. Violent protest can even be encouraged: when anti-capitalists in December demanded free train rides to Nice, where they were planning to disrupt a European summit, the Transport Minister met them half-way and offered a 50% reduction. “It’s the Revolution subsidised by those against whom it is directed,” Revel comments.

Intellectuals on the whole reflect rather than combat popular feelings against to “ultra-liberalism”, as faith in markets is known in France. This is partly because in the twentieth century, the intellectual has defined himself as an opponent to the “system”, and nowadays the only system to oppose is a capitalist one. To be sure, there is no shortage of books analysing the ills of France’s bloated and unrestructured public sector or making the case for globalisation — but they are mostly written by sociologists and economists who have no meaningful impact. The intellectuals who matter, the talk-show commentators and leader writers, expand on the ravages of global capitalism as if no-one had ever make a serious case for free trade. As a result public discussion is divorced from facts and knowledge available to any first-year economics student.

Revel concludes that democratic capitalism may have triumphed over communist totalitarianism in the real world –something to be thankful for — but not in the minds of many people, and not in the minds of the French people. The idea that totalitarianism is not just a system of government but also a mindset that can flourish under a democracy has underpinned Revel’s whole work. Mental habits inherited from totalitarianism can therefore survive its destruction as a geo-political entity. “The victory of democracy will not be complete as long as lying continues to appear natural in the world of politics as in that of thought,” he writes. “As long as betraying truth, denying elementary facts (…) and attempting to destroy rather that refute those who contradict you continue to prevail in public debate, we cannot claim, whatever the calendar says, that we have left the twentieth century and entered the third millennium.”

Henri Astier

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Books reviewed:

- Bernard Lacroix, Jacques Lagroye, eds, Le président de la République, usages et genèses d’une institution, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 416p., 180F, ISBN 2 7246-0613-2.

- Jean-François Revel, L’Absolutisme inefficace, ou contre le présidentialisme à la française, Paris: Plon, 190p., 95F, ISBN 2-259-02478-5.

If, as the philosopher Alain wrote, “power deeply transforms those who wield it”, it is no wonder François Mitterrand seems to have changed so much in his dozen years as France’s president. The socialist who in the 1960s denounced de Gaulle’s “permanent coup d’État”, and whose 1981 victory over a king-like Giscard was hailed as a repeat of Bastille Day, has, according to critics, turned into an absolute monarch himself. His image now tarnished by a spate of scandals, Mitterrand is as unpopular as any French Head of State since Louis XVI. As the right is expected to win the legislative elections in March, which means that a conservative prime minister will be in for another bout of “cohabitation” with a hostile chief executive, no serious political discussion in France is complete without a debate on the president’s powers.

The two books under review cover the main points at issue. They agree on the symptoms (presidential hypertrophy) but disagree on the nature of the disease and on the implied cure. Le président de la République, usages et genèses d’une institution, a collection of essays by various constitutional experts, argues that the presidency was not shaped once for all in 1958 but over time by the political actors of the day. The institution, one of the editors writes, “should not be seen as a reality which exists independently from those who hold it”.

True, the 1958 constitution was designed to put an end to the “régime des partis” — the parliamentary root of all political evils according to de Gaulle. A strong president nominates the prime minister and has the power to dissolve the Assembly. The presidency, however, did not fully eclipse Parliament until the 1960s, with the direct election of the president and the repeated use of referendums.

The taming of the prime minister illustrates this evolution. The constitution gives the “Chef du gouvernement”, whose authority rests on Parliament, a central role in the executive. It does not give the president the right to dismiss him/her at will. But de Gaulle and Pompidou demanded undated resignation letters before nominating their prime ministers. Today, there is so little doubt about the president’s right to sack them (except during cohabitation), that no such stratagems are needed.

Public-speaking is a key aspect of the modern French presidency. Presidents are under no obligation to explain their policies: they choose the time, the place, and the format of their addresses; when they wish to be interviewed they handpick the journalists. Thanks to this complete control over communication, they have developed a tendency to speak in bombastic generalities and sidestep hard questions.

The contributor, however, does not address the substance of presidential pronouncements. It would be interesting to study, say, ritual references to the world’s freedom-lovers turning their gazes towards Paris, waiting for a ray of hope to shine. Their anxious expectation is usually rewarded after the advent of a new president: “Le monde enfin désire… nous voir jouer un rôle qui nous revient, parce qu’il sent que sera à l’avantage de tous les hommes” (De Gaulle, 13 June 1958); “Des centaines de millions d’hommes sur la terre sauront ce soir que la France est prête à leur parler le langage qu’ils ont appris à aimer d’elle” (Mitterrand, 11 May 1981), etc.

One contributor helpfully uses Weber’s notion of charisma — the leader’s access to “essential truths that are inaccessible to common men.” While charisma is initially an individual quality, it can become the attribute of an institution. Since Pompidou succeeded de Gaulle in 1969, whoever was president has dealt with eternal verities while ordinary politicians have been mired in the world of day-to-day contingencies. This “routinization of charisma” has enabled the Elys‚e to take on new powers: de Gaulle’s once controversial “domaine r‚serv‚” doctrine (foreign policy as a presidential preserve) is now widely accepted.

But despite many sharp analyses, the book doesn’t convince. Forget about the often atrocious jargon — the writers are after all legal scholars. The central emphasis on an ever-evolving practice suggests that the written constitution doesn’t matter — a peculiar idea for a Roman law country. And to argue, as a one expert does, that “law is fact that has imposed itself” simply means that France has no constitution, customary or otherwise.

Far more convincing is Jean-François Revel’s idea that French “présidentocratie” was “written in the genetic code” of the Fifth Republic. In L’Absolutisme inefficace, an enormously entertaining book which should be required reading for anyone interested in French politics, Revel argues that the main flaw is not in men but in the system. “The misuse of some tools derives so obviously from the instruction manual that it is criminal to put them into the hands of even a saint.”

Revel starts with the fact that the 1958 constitution sets no meaningful check to presidential powers. The main control — an election every seven years — comes too rarely to be effective. With the president free to dissolve an Assembly which cannot vote him out, Parliament was bound to turn into the rubber-stamp body it has become. The judiciary, kept on a short leash since the Revolution, has never been under tighter political control. The president heads and nominates all nine members of the council that promotes judges. “In the logic of the régime”, Revel writes, “the great interests of the nation are only discussed at the Elysée palace among a narrow circle of unelected advisers and ultimately within the presidential brain itself.”

Nothing is more alien to the Fifth Republic than Montesquieu’s theory of checks and balances. Separation of powers was explicitly rejected by de Gaulle in a famous 1964 press conference: “the indivisible authority of the State is wholly conferred on the president by the people. All others, whether ministerial, civilian, military or judicial, are delegated and maintained by him.”

According to Revel the result of this imbalance is not action, but paralysis. Like any omnipotent institution, the French presidency “does not work and prevents everything else from working”. Given the lack of public debate, the main way for people to make their displeasure felt is to take to the street. This invariably leads the government to cave in to special interests. Last summer’s disastrous showdown with lorry drivers is only the latest illustration of France’s ineffective absolutism.

The other main feature of the 1958 constitution is the two-headed executive. The Head of State is flanked by a prime minister whose authority nominally derives from Parliament but who predictably became the president’s creature. This was obvious in 1972, when president Pompidou sacked Chaban-Delmas, who had just won a massive vote of confidence in the Assembly. Chirac’s resignation in 1976 illustrates the same point: when French prime ministers leave before their terms run out, this is not due, as in Britain, to a disagreement with their Parliamentary base, but to a clash with the president.

Not only does the president pick the prime minister, but also the cabinet. Pierre Mauroy, Mitterrand’s first prime minister, complained that he had chosen only one member of his government. But this does not make France’s executive similar to America’s. The White House, of course, must deal with a powerful Congress and judicial busybodies. More importantly, the US president — like the British PM — is clearly accountable for his actions, while in France the fiction of an independent government shields the president in times of trouble. The division of labour in the French executive is simple: the president takes the decisions and the prime minister takes the blame.

Immunity from scandal is a striking fact of French political life in the past decade. Revel points out that Mitterrand never had to answer for illegal arm-sales to Iran (”Luchaire”), the embezzlement of foreign aid by cabinet officials (”Carrefour du d‚veloppement”), attempts to block a corruption inquiry (”Urba”), or for the use of blood known to be AIDS-contaminated, leading to the infection of more than a thousand haemophiliacs.

Revel notes that immunity extends downwards to a crowd of minions who owe their careers to the protection of an unimpeachable president. Scandals that elsewhere would have triggered top-level investigations resulted in the prosecution of mere underlings, and at worst in the resignation of a minister (after the bombing of a Greenpeace ship in 1985). “In France”, concludes Revel, “the person responsible is not the one who gives orders, but the one who receives them.”

Not only is French presidentialism troublesome but it spreads its trouble wide. Across the political spectrum, men waste their talents pursuing the only job that matters. Paralysis extends to the whole body politic as the potential candidate “joins others in a special waiting room, a VIP lounge, where one had better tend to one’s image rather than public affairs, while of course pretending not to care about the former and think only of the latter”. Again and agains, Revel traces France’s problems — fear of reform, lack of discussion, waste of public funds, nepotism, mob rule, corruption, etc. — to a presidential institution which combines omnipotence and inaction.

There is more to the debate on the presidency than an argument about the impact of the 1958 constitution. Those who say that the system changes as the balance of political power shifts will stress that the Assembly recovers its prerogatives in times of “cohabitation”, when the cabinet’s parliamentary basis is made obvious. The constitution clearly works, and the government should take this opportunity to chip away at the presidency. France has known too many constitutional upheavals: it now needs small reforms, like the shortening of the presidential term.

The others will deny that cohabitation works. “It is silly to think that a country can be governed by two mutually hostile leaders”, Revel writes. He points out that the 1986-88 period, when the president was both in power and in the opposition, only paved the way for Mitterrand’s re-election. Tinkering with the system will achieve little, Revel argues, as long as no choice is made between US-style presidentialism and British-style parliamentarianism. In either case, there must be limits to what the executive can do and accountability for what it has done.

What are the chances of reform? Some see the very seriousness of the situation as an encouraging sign. As Revel is fond of saying (quoting Proust): “the disease is the best doctor — it forces the patient to cure himself.”

Henri Astier

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Half-a-dozen essays written in the 1970s and 1980s established Jean-François Revel, a philosopher/journalist with a zest for anti-Gaullist pamphleteering, as France’s leading anti-communist intellectual. In best-sellers with dire titles like The Totalitarian Temptation or How Democracies Perish, Revel noted that capitalist democracy, which carried with it an unprecedented degree of wealth and freedom, was widely seen as repressive, while communism, a demonstrably failed system, was considered even by Westerners as progressive. He concluded that the West was hopeless at exploiting its own strengths, and often more bent on rushing to its enemy’s rescue than on self-preservation. In the end, he speculated, the law of political evolution might be the survival of the least fit. Now that the Soviet empire has collapsed and capitalism is acclaimed from Managua to Ulan Bator, Revel’s ideas look even more unfashionable and irrelevant than they did a decade ago. In Le Regain Démocratique, he proves that they are as thought-provoking as ever.

The first half of the book deals with the end of the “cold war”. Revel stresses that he never argued democracies were doomed — there is a big difference between warning and predicting. In his previous books he merely described what might happen if democracies kept looking the other way while the Soviets pursued aggressive policies. As it happened, the Soviet ran out of ammunition. The victory of the West, Revel says, had little to do with a principled determination to stand up for its own interest and ideals.

Indeed, he points out that between 1985 and 90, democracies were at their appeasing best. In June 1990, for example, as the Soviet Union was about to collapse and the West had never looked so strong, Mikhail Gorbachev negotiated in Washington from a position of strength to obtain financial and political support from Westerners, who ignored the desperate appeals of independence-seeking Balts. The prevailing idea at the time was: “We must help Gorbachev in order to encourage reform.” The lessons of détente — that to reform communism you must start by ditching it and that aid only delays the process — had not been learnt. The West, Revel concludes, “never believed in its own superiority” and “was rescued almost against its will, not because it defended itself but because the forces which sought to destroy it unexpectedly disintegrated.”

Revel gives three reasons for this disintegration. First, from 1980 to 1985 democracies did show a rare readiness to support attempts to reverse Soviet conquests (notably in Poland and Afghanistan). Second, Communism became ideologically bankrupt — by the 1980s, Soviet leaders had stopped viewing themselves as saviours of mankind and had lost their political will to survive. Third, Gorbachev played a crucial role by seeking to replace the old apparatus with a new breed of officials who he thought would purge communism of Stalinist oppression and lead it into the next century. As could be expected, ordinary Soviets used their new-found freedom to relegate Marxism-Leninism, not just Stalinism, to the dustbin of history.

This analysis leads Revel to adopt an original position in the “end-of-history” debate. He shares Francis Fukuyama’s faith that capitalist democracy, as the best form of social system ever invented, will ultimately replace the others. But in the short term at least, he points out that history is made of men’s actions — it is up to them to move ahead or backwards. “A political analyst might, with solid arguments, say to a condemned man on whose neck the guillotine is about to fall: ‘Don’t worry, this execution belongs to an obsolete moment in history’. But in doing so he only confirms that nine tenths of what happens to us is made of the dregs of an earlier era.” The Chinese students might well one day be free, but not the ones who were crushed in Tiananmen Square. “Of course in the long run, it is probable that China will take a liberal course. But in politics I care about the short run, because life is short.”

The second half of the book analyses current challenges to the democratic resurgence. Despite growing awareness in developing countries that political and economic freedoms are vital pre-conditions, not by-products, of development, it will take a cultural revolution for those freedoms to take root in the Third World. As long as most Muslims reject the separation of Church and State, for instance, Arab countries will remain in the grip of tyranny and poverty. In the Eastern bloc, dealing with the psychological after-shocks of communism will be an especially daunting task. Even in the developed world, the growth of corruption and apathy threatens to undermine the moral foundation of free societies.

Democracy and human rights, Revel concludes, will prevail only if people believe in them and take actions to defend them. He stresses in particular the moral duty of international intervention: dictators should not be allowed a free reign of terror within their own borders.

Le Regain démocratique is a major political essay written in the razor-sharp style of a born pamphleteer. As was the case with Revel’s previous works, the aficionados will relish the clarity, the trenchant metaphors and the crushing wit; the others, after gritting their teeth through the first few chapters, will probably throw away the book and conclude that the author is a hopeless conservative.

Revel, in fact, is an uncompromising liberal — in the old European sense of the word and in the American “cold-war liberal” tradition. The American columnist George Will once elegantly defined the conservative as “a pessimist who goes though life hoping to be proven wrong.” Only by that standard could Revel be called a conservative.

Henri Astier

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This one-volume edition of Jean-Francois Revel’s two-part Histoire de la philosophie occidentale (first published in the late 1960s) covers thinkers from the pre-Socratics to Kant. It is a jargon-free narrative intended for general readers, not a treatise for philosophy students — “Histoire” is meant as “story” rather than “history”. But neither is it a bland “Western-civ-for-infants” manual — Revel has a serious point, which he makes with both gusto and erudition: philosophy is dead.

In a nutshell, philosophy arose from men’s desire to make sense of the world around them without resorting to religion. Early Ionian thinkers (notably Thales and Herodotus) had a passion for observing nature and founded philosophy on the rejection of myth. But the search for hidden truths, and the discarding of outward phenomena, made a comeback with Plato. For the next two mellenia, philosophers oscillated between two conceptions of knowledge, one emphasizing concrete observation and the other general theories of a deeper reality.

This, Revel argues, changed with the birth of modern science as a separate branch of inquiry. Philosophers faced a difficult choice: they could either focus on their core metaphysical activities and drift towards brainy triviality (Descartes), or embrace empiricism, which meant winding up the business (Kant). The irrelevance of modern philosophy is not argued with any hostility — the author used to teach the subject. Incidentally, the book marked the end of philosophy for Revel, who focused on politics after the success of Without Marx or Jesus in 1970. His central message, however, remained the same: men achieve knowledge by trying hard to look at reality as it is, not as they would like it to be.

Henri Astier

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Pierre Boncenne, Pour Jean-François Revel: Un esprit libre
Plon, 343 pages, 21 euros, ISBN 2-259-19920-8

Pierre Boncenne has written the first book ever about Jean-François Revel. The fact that it was published after his death goes a long way towards proving its main point – the greatest French thinker of his age was also the most misunderstood.

Others – such as Michel Foucault, Claude Lévy-Strauss, Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu, Philippe Sollers – were the subjects of countless studies during their lifetimes. Roland Barthes even wrote a tribute to himself as part of Le Seuil’s prestigious “Écrivains de toujours” series of monographs. Jacques Derrida, perhaps the greatest French intellectual star since Sartre, was celebrated in a feature film and his death in 2005 was front-page news all over the world.

Not so Revel. There was little fuss when he died in April. French papers carried a few (mostly lukewarm) tributes, but other media ignored the event. France-Culture, the thinking Frenchman’s radio of choice, did not mention it on its website and did not broadcast a discussion of Revel’s work until eight months later. As one commentator remarked: “Revel is treated like people with a readership of one.”

And yet he was hardly obscure. All his books since Without Marx or Jesus (1970) have been worldwide successes. A one-time leading newspaper editor, Revel had extensive connections. Political leaders at home and abroad consulted him; he was a close friend of Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Saul Bellow. His stature grew with age: during his final decade he joined the Académie Française, published five hugely successful books, and was a regular guest on TV and radio.

How can such an influential insider be treated like a marginal figure? Why did he pioneer a new genre he called “the reviled best-seller”? These questions lie at the heart of Pierre Boncenne’s outstanding book. Pour Jean François Revel is not just the intellectual portrait of a man, but also an account of France’s cultural life in the past half-century and its peculiar workings. Boncenne draws on interviews from many writers, foremost among whom is the sinologist Simon Leys, a fellow friend and admirer of Revel. Leys has had his share of problems with the Paris establishment but is now held in considerable respect, and Boncenne’s frequent references to him serve to reinforce his contention that Revel too deserves to be regarded as a major author.

The case against Revel centres on his militant anti-communism. Alone among France’s top journalists, he openly challenged Communist leader George Marchais, with damning revelations about his wartime past and party funding by Moscow. Marchais called him “a scoundrel”. Some of Revel’s sharpest barbs were directed at democrats, particularly his fellow left-wingers, who bowed to Marxist intimidation. He saw the alliance between France’s socialists and communists from the early 1970s as a betrayal. In The Totalitarian Temptation (1976) and How Democracies Perish (1983) Revel analysed with passionate intensity the 1001 ways in which self-styled progressives engaged in doublethink and connived at Soviet aggressiveness.

What put Revel beyond the pale was not anti-communism per se: the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 1973 had a deep impact in France and criticism of the Soviet Union was occasionally voiced on the left. The French “antitotalitarians” revived a political trend that had died out in America in the 1960s: cold-war liberalism. But to the extent that the French tolerated anti-communism, they liked it sugar-coated. Any condemnation of Moscow and its far-flung clients had to be balanced by denunciations of right-wing dictatorships, to show that the critic was not a fascist sympathiser. Revel called this requirement the “great taboo” of his time – and he cheerfully broke it.

Communism and fascism may have been each other’s enemies, but both were above all enemies of freedom. Revel felt it should be possible to censure one without appearing to condone the other, from a strictly democratic standpoint. Having risked his life fighting Nazi occupation of his country, he did not see the need to scatter his shots by engaging in ritual anti-fascism, and focused on what he identified as the main threat to democratic civilization after 1945: communism.

This single-mindedness earned him the scorn of smart opinion. For 20 years after The Totalitarian Temptation, Le Monde never mentioned a single book by Revel. He was shunned by reference books until the late 1990s – when his admission to the Académie Française automatically qualified him for entry in the Larousse dictionary. By then many lesser figures had been there for years.

His name continues to smack of heresy to this day, notes Boncenne, who suggests a neat “Revel test”. Mention him in polite company and watch the shocked reaction: “Don’t tell me you like this right-wing pig!” All Revel aficionados have experienced this. The enduring “Revel-is-a-reactionary” meme explains the deafening silence that followed his death.

The widespread view that he was an obsessive cold-warrior is rooted in a misconception that Revel himself identified three decades ago: anti-communism is not seen as deriving from observation or reflection, but from irrational hostility. When Soviet dissidents told the world about the persecution they endured, the reaction among many in the West was not so much to consider the crimes, but to question the motives of those who were swayed by them. Revel lampooned this attitude thus:

“The facts revealed by Solzhenitsyn should not lead the unbiased observer to form a negative opinion of communism. On the contrary, it was the prior contamination of their souls by anti-communism that made them susceptible to such rumours and induced them to… spread them, thus abetting the plot which (the most incriminating clue of all) was being orchestrated at precisely that time!”

An encyclopaedic mind with many interests, Revel did not confine himself to politics. He wrote a History of Western Philosophy – which rivals Bertrand Russell’s – as well as books about art, poetry, cuisine, and literature. This probably counted against him in a country where heavyweights tend to claim exclusive rights over specific fields.

Revel broke the French intellectual mould in the style as much as the substance of his writings. He had a gift for crystal-clear prose, and for compressing complex ideas into arresting formulas. On the immunity from scandal a top-heavy constitution confers on the president, he wrote: “In France the person held responsible is not the one who gives orders, but the one who receives them.” He argued against cultural protectionism and government attempts to curb imports from Hollywood thus: “Nothing would please me more, as a viewer, than to bathe every night in an invigorating flow of Albanian, Tanzanian or Burmese filmography – on one condition: that the choice should be mine.”

Revel’s biting irony often makes you laugh out loud, and this too counted against him: a great author is not supposed to amuse you. As Boncenne notes, Revel had more than wit – he had humour, the power to turn his irony against himself. This is most obvious in his 1997 autobiography, but early in his career he had emphasized the need for both individuals and groups not to take themselves too seriously. “One can assess the degree of civilization of a society by its capacity to make itself an object of ridicule or contempt,” he wrote in 1958. Thus France’s propensity to pose as an example drew one of his sharpest barbs: “French culture has radiated for so long that it’s a wonder mankind hasn’t died from sunstroke.”

Revel’s pugnacious style led many to dismiss him as a “pamphleteer”. He did not object the label – pamphlets have a long tradition in France, going back at least to Pascal’s Provinciales – but he rejected the implication that it is an inferior genre. “There is no effective polemic without solid content, without underlying truthfulness,” he wrote. Equating vigorous prose with lack of substance is the mark of superficial minds that confuse obscurity with profundity.

Revel sought to reach out to the layman rather than impress the literati. He avoided high-flown language, lengthy footnotes, and other trappings of “seriousness”. Boncenne notes that his decision in the mid-1960s to work for Robert Laffont, a subsidiary of Time-Life regarded as low brow, rather than a prestigious publisher such as Gallimard or Le Seuil, reflects a lifelong preference for a wider audience over the elite. Reactions to his books reflected this choice: the public lapped them up, critics and academics shrugged them off.

Revel did not belong to a coterie – a drawback in a culture that prizes neat intellectual labels. During his time he saw trendy schools come and go: phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, deconstructionism, postmodernism. Revel punctured the pretensions of these cliques and never created one himself. The only French school he can be associated with is “libéralisme”, in the old-fashioned sense that stresses individual liberty and small government. He is the latest in a line that includes Montesquieu, Tocqueville and Raymond Aron.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, the figure he is closest to is another intellectual loner: George Orwell. Boncenne points out the deep similarities between the two: the obsession with clear writing, the view of communism as a deadly threat to socialism, and – above all – the exposure of man’s resistance to facts and vulnerability to ideology.

Boncenne rightly regards The Flight from Truth (La Connaissance inutile, 1988) as Revel’s most profound essay. It is also his most Orwellian. The book explores in detail the human ability to ignore data that do no fit pre-conceived ideas. Like Orwell, Revel saw our preference for mental comfort over information as fateful for democracy. Both rejected the widespread view that “there is no objective truth”. The great weakness of totalitarian systems is that there is a real world they cannot change: remove any possible confrontation with facts and you lose the main weapon against powers that are relying on propaganda to get inside your head.

This reviewer has no doubt that Jean-François Revel will one day achieve the recognition he deserves. And Boncenne’s book will be seen as groundbreaking – the first comprehensive tribute to one of the most eloquent champions of liberty in the 20th century.

Henri Astier

See also some other details on the book in french here.

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Au sommaire (voir PDF), de nombreux articles très variés:

- Souvenir d’un jeune inconnu (version retouchée d’In Memoriam)
Par Henri Astier

- L’esthète, le combattant et le philosophe (voir cet article)
Par Nicolas Baverez

- Un philosophe franc-tireur
Par Marie-Hélène Belin-Capon

- C’était à Washington, au bar d’un grand hôtel
Par Alain Besançon

- En mai 1968
Par Enzo Bettiza

- L’aventure du Ciné-Club de Mexico
Par Philippe Boulanger

- Florence et l’histoire de l’art
Par Françoise Cachin

- Adieu
Par Jean-Claude Casanova

- Un entretien avec de gaulle
Par Jean-François Deniau

- Avec le sceptre de l’esprit
Par Max Gallo

- Une présence forte et lumineuse
Par Simon Leys

- Un homme pour toutes saisons
Par Philippe Meyer

- Le courage du bon sens
Par Pierre Nora

- À l’Institut d’histoire sociale
Par Pierre Rigoulot

- Le mémorialiste
Par Laurent Theis

- Compagnon de barricade
Par Mario Vargas Llosa

La revue est disponible dans toutes les bonnes librairies, et également sur le site de la revue.

On en parle:

- Par Hoplite
- Par François-Xavier Brunet

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J’ai rencontré Jean-François Revel pour la première fois il y a près de 14 ans. Je lui avais envoyé la recension que j’avais faite du Regain démocratique dans le Times Literary Supplement. Elle avait eu l’heur de lui plaire, et il m’avait invité à déjeuner lors de mon prochain passage à Paris.

J’avais rêvé d’une telle rencontre depuis près de 10 ans. Au début des années 1980, étudiant, j’avais été foudroyé par la lecture de Comment les démocraties finissent. Toute ma colère contre le totalitarisme, qui perdurait avec le soutien des “progressistes” occidentaux, était exprimée avec une éloquence polémique et une érudition qui me comblaient. Au cours des années suivantes j’avais avalé toute son œuvre comme on dévore un festin.

En cet automne de 1992, je me préparais à un gueuleton bien réel avec l’écrivain, qui m’avait convié dans une brasserie de Montparnasse. “C’est pour voir Monsieur Revel,” murmurai-je en entrant, comme on pénètre dans un lieu saint. Le serveur m’amena à la table où je trouvai mon hôte en train de deviser avec le patron. Il m’accueillit avec un air ravi qui me mit tout de suite à l’aise, comme s’il m’avait attendu avec autant d’impatience que moi!

Durant cette rencontre, et la demi-douzaine qui suivirent au fil des années, je fus frappé par la simplicité et la gentillesse de Revel: jamais le moindre signe de prétention, la moindre pose de maître à penser. En même temps, j’avais toujours la conscience d’être en présence d’un esprit supérieur. C’était comme si, dans ce décor familier de bistro parisien, je déjeunais avec Montesquieu ou Tocqueville. J’avais à coté de moi un carnet où je prenais des notes discrètement.

J’ai par la suite appris à aborder les questions importantes au début. Il était généreux avec le vin et au bout de plusieurs verres de Nuits-Saint-Georges mes notations devenaient confuses – et peut-être ses réponses s’émoussaient-elles également.

Ce qui m’a tout de suite frappé, c’est la correspondance totale entre l’écrivain et l’homme. Il me répondait avec ce bon sens dévastateur, ce goût de la formule, ce savoir encyclopédique qui caractérisent son oeuvre. Un exemple: je commençai par noter que les critiques de son dernier livre, mêmes positives comme celle de d’Ormesson dans Le Point, semblaient ne pas aller au cœur de son propos. C’était comme si on évitait de parler de ses thèses.

Revel opina vigoureusement: “Vous savez, ça demande du temps et des efforts de lire correctement un livre, alors la plupart des journalistes se contentent de feuilleter. Je m’en suis aperçu très tôt, après Pourquoi les philosophes. On me reprochait des arguments que je n’avais jamais tenus. On ne retenait que les quelques pages où je parlais des universitaires français. Or la thèse du livre était beaucoup plus générale: j’expliquais que la philosophie avait servi son rôle. Elle avait enfanté l’esprit scientifique, les maths, la chimie, la biologie, la physique, l’histoire, les sciences sociales… Mais en gros depuis Kant, les grandes découvertes se faisaient en dehors d’elle. Cette thèse n’était pas un rejet radical de la philosophie. J’ai été professeur jusqu’en 1963 et j’ai toujours estimé que l’enseignement de la l’histoire de la philosophie était essentiel. Je dis simplement qu’il ne s’agit plus d’une forme créatrice de pensée. J’ai beaucoup d’estime pour mon ami Michel Serres, mais ce n’est pas de la pensée sérieuse.

Ce qui s’est donc passé avec Pourquoi les Philosophes est une préfiguration de l’accueil qui sera réservé à tous mes livres: grand succès de librairie, encouragements et félicitations qui affluent du monde entier, mais les critiques et les journalistes me tombent dessus pour de mauvaises raisons.”

Je profitai de l’engloutissement d’une huître par mon hôte pour lui glisser une copie de la critique négative qu’avait faite en son temps le Time Literary Supplement de Comment les Démocraties finissent. À 8 ans de distance, Revel se souvenait parfaitement de l’article.

“Oui, le TLS m’avait classé, avec Casanova, dans la Nouvelle Droite. C’était ne rien comprendre au libéralisme, qui se situe dans la tradition de Aron, Tocqueville, etc. En plus, le TLS avait dit que le livre était une attaque contre les pacifistes. Ce n’est pas vrai. J’ai écrit ce livre en 81-82, l’ai remis à l’éditeur en décembre 1982. Les grands rassemblements pacifistes datent de 1983, juste avant le déploiement des euromissiles. Le discours de Mitterrand au Bundestag (en faveur des euromissiles) date de janvier 1983. J’ai dû ajouter une note après l’impression des épreuves, parce qu’il fallait bien reconnaître que Mitterrand avait eu raison. Le sujet du livre n’est pas le pacifisme. Vous comprenez: si vous écrivez un livre sur la pêche à la ligne et qu’on vous dit que le manuel de chasse à courre que vous venez d’écrire n’est pas bon, vous êtes en droit d’être surpris.”

Revel fut sans doute le plus grand défenseur des libertés qu’a connu le 20e siècle. Il le fut non seulement en raison de son intellect exceptionnel, mais aussi en raison de son imperméabilité aux pieuses dévotions contemporaines. Nous sommes tout influencés par l’esprit du temps, par ce que nous entendons autour de nous, au point de ne plus être surpris ou indignés par ce qui passe pour normal. Revel, lui, ne s’est jamais départi d’une morale politique inaltérable: c’est elle avant tout qui lui a conféré sa lucidité et son génie.

Revel restera comme LE grand écrivain antitotalitaire. Il fut plus conséquent qu’Orwell (qui défendit la liberté politique avec un brio exceptionnel, mais resta un antilibéral en économie), plus courageux que Camus (qui n’abandonna jamais totalement une bonne conscience de gauche), plus influent que Hannah Arendt et plus accessible que des universitaires comme Isaiah Berlin ou Raymond Aron.

La liberté à perdu un irremplaçable champion.

Henri Astier

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Jean François Revel, La grande parade, Essai sur la survie de l’utopie socialiste. Paris: Plon, 346p., F129 (€19,66) 2-259-19056-1

Reviewed by: Henri Astier

Before the collapse of communism many people on the left in the west took a bleak view of the world. Capitalism, which puts profits before people and fosters inequality, was bad; in communist countries bureaucrats had hijacked the revolution, and that was bad too. After the Berlin Wall fell, however, few radicals celebrated. Their worldview, if anything, is now bleaker than before. The peoples of the world don’t even have two evils to choose from; capitalism reigns unchecked, making the world safe for corporate plunder. Why does an increasing body of opinion believe this? What assumptions are these ideas based on? How influential are they?

Jean-François Revel, a long-time critic of the left’s fascination with Marxism, tackles these questions in La grande parade – the French word here primarily means “parry”, as in boxing. What progressives have successfully dodged, he argues, is the reality check that the end of communism should have brought about. At the time, most observers drew two main lessons. One was that communism was beyond redemption. The other was that liberal capitalism – markets underpinned by the rule of law — was the only way forward. But by the mid-1990s the left had launched a counter-offensive on both fronts. Liberalism was again denounced as fundamentally iniquitous, and the hope for a good, non-capitalist order was revived. Revel contends that the end of communism actually galvanised the radicals: “Now they were free,” he writes, “to idolize unreservedly a socialism restored to its pristine condition – utopia.”

A prime example of this flight from reality, according to Revel, is the battle over the Black Book of Communism. When it was published in France in 1997, the book was condemned by many on the left as an attempt to exculpate the Nazis and legitimise right-wing extremism. Le Monde noted that the publication coincided with a meeting of the far-right National Front. But Revel’s interpretation of the Black Book controversy turns the tables: politically motivated progressives, he says, were engaged in a posthumous defence of communism, designed to gloss over its crimes.

One might object that the Black Book’s critics were not defending communists: they were only denying that you could equate them with Nazis. Regardless of the undisputed crimes committed in its name, communism meant well. But such an objection only bolsters Revel’s basic claim: the “ultraleft”, as he calls it, is intent on rescuing communist ideals from the Soviet wreckage. Revel notes wrily that this is inconsistent with praxis – reality, as Marx insisted, should never be confused with the professed intentions of social actors. Since communism, everywhere and at all times, has resulted in political repression, the argument that it was at heart a good idea must be based on a complete retreat from observable reality. A Black Book-style body count, Revel persuasively concludes, is abhorrent to those who refuse to judge communism on the evidence only.

Revel also shows that reluctance to take stock of communism is not confined to the “ultraleft”. In 1997 Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, a moderate socialist, jumped into the fray over the Black Book by praising the French Communist Party as a force for progress. President Jacques Chirac, in a 1999 speech commemorating the killing of villagers by Nazis at Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944, condemned “all” atrocities down the ages – from the massacres of Huguenots to the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. In his otherwise comprehensive overview of man’s inhumanity, Chirac did not mention a single communist crime.

Revel identifies a “most favoured totalitarianism” clause: remembering the Nazis is rightly considered a duty, but those trying to keep the memory of communist crimes alive are dismissed as reactionary holdovers from the Cold War. Denying the Holocaust is a crime in many countries, known as “negationism” in France. “Pronazi negationists are only a handful,” Revel notes. “Procommunist negationists are legion.”
Deying the criminal nature of communism is just phase one of “opération grande parade”; phase two consists in affirming the criminal nature of capitalism. Economic liberalism, Revel writes, is “universally” reviled. “Hold on!” one might say. “Governments all over the world are falling over themselves to open their markets!” True, Revel replies, but few preach what they practice. In France, a reluctant convert to market discipline, politicians of all stripes avoid the L-word like the plague. “Non, nous ne sommes pas libéraux!” protested Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former socialist minister. Alain Juppé, a former conservative prime minister, once described liberalism as a “jungle”.

Liberalism, Revel goes on, is now routinely blamed for many social ills – from the adjustment problems of former communist economies, to child labour in developing countries and environmental damage everywhere. The eco-warriors, street-reclaimers and sundry anti-capitalists who recently demonstrated in Seattle, Washington and London are not the only, or even the most eloquent, exponents of such views. In a famous 1997 article for the Atlantic Monthly the financier George Soros argued that the spread of market values endangered democracy and fostered inequality. The British public apparently agrees. In May 2000 Channel 4 television aired a programme entitled “New Labour on Trial”, in which Tony Blair’s government was being prosecuted from an Old Labour, anti-liberal perspective; by a margin of almost two to one, a jury of 250 people, said to be representative of the population, pronounced the Prime Minister guilty of being a control freak and turning his back on the poor.

Revel points out that critics attribute to capitalism the characteristics of totalitarianism. John Gray, in his 1998 book False Dawn, described “liberal ideology” as a utopia. Economic liberalism is also often said to be a dictatorship: governments are no longer accountable to people but to corporations. France’s leading anti-capitalist author, Vivianne Forrester, whose new book is entitled Une étrange dictature, told a recent television show that “we are experiencing a form of totalitarianism”.

The widespread idea that behind capitalism’s benign surface lurks a monster is rarely challenged – even in market-friendly Britain. A recent remark by the left-wing politician Ken Livingstone that “every year the international financial system kills more people than Hitler” drew mostly mild rebuke. Britain’s leading liberal publication, The Economist, commented that Mr Livingstone “still allows his wild mouth to get the better of him.” Londoners took the remark even less seriously and elected him mayor of a city that contains Europe’s main financial centre. Compare this with the international furore over the Black Book’s (much better documented) contention that communism killed more people than Hitler.

Revel observes that the debate between liberals and their critics is warped by a basic misunderstanding. Capitalism is often viewed as an ideology, a socialism in reverse. Markets, it’s often said, are not the answer to everything – as if anyone had ever made such a silly claim. “Since socialism was conceived in the delusion that it could resolve all problems,” Revel writes, “its supporters attribute the same conceit to their contradictors.” But unlike socialism, capitalism was never a blueprint for an ideal society: it evolved by trial and error down the centuries. Capitalism is not so much a doctrine as it is a process by which new arrangements are being tested. Anti-capitalism, Revel concludes, boils down to a hatred of progress.

La grande parade is not just a passionate defence of classical liberalism and an attempt to puncture the enduring appeal of the socialist utopia. Like all of Revel’s earlier work, it’s above all a reflection on people’s capacity for dismissing the evidence before them. Mario Vargas-Llosa once compared Revel to another great anti-totalitarian thinker, George Orwell. This powerfully sensible book could indeed have been prefaced with a sentence from Orwell’s 1946 article, In Front of your Nose: “The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proven wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.”

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First time published in the Times Literary Supplement on the 18th of March, 2005

Version augmentée par rapport à celle publiée dans le TLS.

Books reviewed:

• Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization, New York, Oxford University Press, 308p, $28, £19.99, ISBN 0-19-517025-3
• Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 398p, £19.99, ISBN 0-300-10252-6
• Jean-François Bayart, Le gouvernement du monde. Une critique politique de la globalisation, Paris, Fayard , 448p., €24, ISBN 2-213-61653-1
• Daniel Cohen, La mondialisation et ses ennemis, Paris, Grasset, 264p., €18, ISBN 2-246-66401-2

The debate over globalization in most countries is reminiscent of the debate over Darwinism in America. In both cases there is a yawning gap between basic knowledge and public discussion. That life is billions of years old and has evolved though natural selection is among the best-established facts in science. It is supported by rigorous theory and overwhelming evidence. Biologists disagree on many things, but they agree on this. Yet in US politics evolution is hugely controversial. American newspapers routinely describe the Darwinian orthodoxy as an idea under fire.

The storm over globalization also has a baffling dynamic of its own. That trade brings wealth and that a country hurts itself by blocking imports is among the best-established ideas in the social sciences. It is supported by rigorous theory and overwhelming evidence. Yet all over the world this idea is regarded as hugely controversial. Rich countries view cheap foreign goods as a threat to jobs and living-standards. The growing tendency of Western companies to move production and administrative tasks overseas — “outsourcing” — is seen as doubly destructive: capital is being sucked out of decent domestic industries, to help set up sweatshops in poor countries.

The media describe the free-trade orthodoxy as an idea under fire. But the bedrock of this idea, David Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage (which shows why it makes sense even for countries with no natural advantage to specialise and exchange), has never been credibly challenged. You would not suspect this from reading newspapers, which tend to misrepresent academic debates on trade. Sceptics like Nobel laureates Paul Samuelson and Joseph Stiglitz are routinely billed as representatives of a surging anti-globalization movement among economists. But the argument is over the size of the benefits from trade, not their existence. Neither Samuelson nor Stiglitz has set out to refute Ricardo; both condemn protectionism.

What we have is a case of “wasted knowledge”, as the French philosopher Jean-François Revel called the failure of known facts to inform public debate (1). Faced with this muddle, what should economists do? Most let the world rant and focus on serious campus work, in the hope that some students will remember the basics beyond graduation. But for thick-skinned academics, joining the fray has its attractions. Those who rubbish trade have such weak arguments are so weak that intellectual supremacy is assured. This is not enough to win in the public sphere, of course, but an economist who writes with wit can help set the record straight and become famous in the process, as Paul Krugman did in the mid-1990s (2).

Krugman, now a celebrity columnist, has spawned a new genre: books by economically-literate writers refuting misconceptions about globalization. Three of the books under review fall into that category. The fourth, a brave attempt to challenge the critics without resorting to economics, raises interesting issues of its own.

At this point, some clarification is needed. The word “globalization” means many things — from the freer flow of goods, to falling communication costs, increasing ease of travel and cultural cross-pollination. “Anti-globalists” have nothing against many of these. They thrive on communication technology and laudably embrace other cultures. Moreover, their creed is rooted in Marxism, an internationalist doctrine. What they oppose is market-driven, or liberal, globalization. A world united under benevolent guardians apportioning resources would suit them fine. French activists call themselves altermondialistes, signalling not their opposition to globalization, but their wish for a different kind. English equivalents, such as “anti-globalist”, should be used with this proviso in mind.

Jagdish Bhagwati, a top-notch economist who teaches at New York’s Columbia University, has long sought to enlighten the public debate. He writes regularly for newspaper to explain the benefits of globalization. His latest book pulls together the various aspects of the case in a compact volume aimed at the general reader. The point of In Defense of Globalization is two-fold: to uphold the orthodoxy on trade and to warn against dangerous new trends in global policy.

The orthodoxy on trade is based on a simple idea. We would be much poorer if we tried to grow our own food, build our own homes, and generally produce all the things we consume. It makes more sense to focus on specific jobs and buy what we need from other specialists. The same wealth-maximising logic applies to groups. “If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry,” Adam Smith wrote.

This is as true now as it was in the eighteenth century. Bhagwati reviews a wealth of studies showing that economies sheltered by high tariffs – which remain the norm in Africa — have paid the expected costs in efficiency. East Asian countries, by contrast, opened up and grew spectacularly from the 1960s. The same has been happening more recently to Bhagwati’s native India.

Growth, crucially, helps the poor. The widespread myth of rising inequality is an update on Marx’s prediction that capitalism would bring wealth to the few and misery to the many. As it happened, growth swelled the ranks of the middle-class and dramatically reduced poverty across the West. Asia’s developing countries are rapidly travelling down the same route. In the early 1970s 11% of the world’s poor lived in Africa and 76% in Asia. Those figures are now almost reversed. The most glaring cases of the privileged growing fat while masses starve are found in such militant non-globalizers as North Korea and Zimbabwe.

Bhagwati’s survey of the gains from globalization is eloquent but hardly groundbreaking. He is, after all, reminding us of Economics 101. But his warnings against new trends in policy are more original. Trade talks, he notes, are increasingly concerned with non-trade issues. Child labour is a case in point. It is a serious problem but one that has nothing to do with globalization – 95% of working children produce goods that are not for export.

Globalization is in fact part of the cure, as it helps remove the real cause, poverty. This is why trade restrictions are dangerous. In the early 1990s many Bangladeshi garment factories closed down when the US threatened sanctions over child labour. The children laid off did not stop working: they ended up in illegal sweatshops and in brothels. Rich countries can help relieve child labour – through, say, building schools — but trade action is worse than useless.

The same applies to the environment. Some export activities are dirty, but so are many protectionist policies, such as Europe’s notorious farming system. Environmental concerns, Bhagwati argues, should be tackled in their own right. In general, he argues, mixing trade with other issues – as is increasingly the norm – is never a good idea, and provides an excuse for special interests in rich countries to keep foreign goods out.

Bhagwati is often accused of “market-fundamentalism” – a handy charge levelled at anyone who questions any type of state intervention. It is particularly unfair in the case of Bhagwati, who made his name by warning against some harmful effects of trade. His latest book has a chapter on globalization’s downsides, notably increased volatility, and ways to cope with them. If anything, Bhagwati is too inclined to give anti-globalists the benefit of the doubt. He distinguishes between thuggish zealots and NGOs that “are susceptible to, and indeed invite, reasoned argument”. Sadly, he provides no evidence of such open-mindedness.

For a systematic, no-holds-barred demolition of anti-globalism, turn to Martin Wolf, a British economist-turned-journalist. In Why Globalization Works, he covers much of the same ground as Bhagwati. But where the latter – who is perhaps eager not to intimidate the reader with his science – gives us the big picture, Wolf piles on the evidence, tracking down every fallacy, every deceit, every half-truth that confuse the public debate.

Take the inequality question. Anti-globalists are fond of saying that the income gap between the richest and poorest countries is growing. And so it is: Spain was quite a lot richer than Kenya 50 years ago, and is immensely more so now. Does it mean that global equality is growing? Not at all. Looking at the extremes is deceiving. The Taiwanese were as poor as Kenyans in the 1950s, and are now as rich as Spaniards. More significantly, billions in China and India have been lifted out of poverty.

People, not countries, are what matters. The proportion of extremely poor people (living on one dollar a day or less) has been falling for decades – from half the world population in 1950 to a fifth now. Absolute numbers began declining in 1980. Every other indicator of well-being – health, life-expectancy, child mortality, education, food consumption – shows a narrowing, not a widening, of the gap between North and South.

This, however, can be concealed though various statistical sleights of hand exposed by Wolf. One of involves measuring dollar incomes at official exchange rates – as if what mattered most to Malians was what they could buy while on holiday in New York rather than on the Bamako market. True assessments of living standards, based on Purchasing Power Parity, show a dramatic reduction in global inequality.

Another trick consists in measuring gaps in absolute, rather than relative terms. Consider a hypothetical case: incomes in rich country A double every twenty years, and rise five-fold in developing country B. Thus incomes in A have gone from $20,000 to $40,000 since 1985, and from $1,000 to $5,000 in B (a fair approximation of Asian growth). People in B will say, correctly: “We used to earn 5% of incomes in A and now we are earning 12%: at this rate we will be level with A by mid-century!” But Western doomsters will say, speciously: “The wage differential between A and B is rising all the time: it has grown from $19,000 to $35,000 in just two decades!” QED: globalization is not working.

We swallow this not just because we are bad at maths, but we do not understand the very point of trade. Imports are seen as bad, and exports good. Economists have long shown that this mercantilist view is false: the benefits of trade are the things foreigners bring, and our exports help pay for them. This is where the notion of terms of trade comes in – the relative prices of a country’s imports and exports. People usually grasp this notion in relation to developing countries. If the price of cocoa falls, Ivorians can afford fewer Finnish phones. They are worse off. When oil goes up, Arab rulers can buy more jets. They are better off.

But we lose sight of this in relation to developed countries. When Koreans sell us cheap cars we do not thank our good fortune, or the Koreans; we view them as unfair competitors. But as Wolf notes, they have made us more competitive by improving our terms of trade: “The paradox of the popular debate is that improvements in competitiveness, thus defined, are generally seen as a deterioration instead… The reason for that is that, as usual, people are confusing the fate of the particular import-export sectors with that of the economy as a whole.”

Does trade depress wages in the North? Do multinationals exploit workers in the South? Does globalization restrict policy choices? Are unfettered financial flows dangerous? Are rich countries not being outrageously protectionist? Wolf provides careful answers to every question raised by globalization (the answers to the above are: no, no, no, up to a point, yes). No complaint is too far-fetched for him to consider. He even bothers to consider Naomi Klein’s “tyranny of brands”, and George Monbiot’s fears of a subverted democracy.

Wolf does more than answer complaints: he goes to the heart of ideological anti-globalism, which he identifies as a resurgence of the collectivist utopia. If only the profit motive was removed, we would all be so happy! Today’s protesters have the same mental reflexes as collectivists of old. All the problems found in capitalist societies, from pollution to inane TV programmes, disqualifies capitalism itself, which is compared to a perfect system that does not exist.

The book has one shortcoming: Wolf devotes the first 130 pages to a disquisition on the efficiency and virtue of markets. This is logically correct, as trade is the international dimension of markets, but tactically unhelpful. Pro-trade views are rarely derived from first principles. Many of the leaders who have opened up their countries in the past twenty years have not been right-wing doctrinaires, as is commonly claimed, but pragmatic left-of-centre polititians such as New Zealand’s David Lange or Brazil’s Fernando Enrique Cardoso (not to mention Chinese or Vietnamese leaders). The US economist Ronald Coase, one of the past century’s great advocates for trade, insisted the case should be made the case on utilitarian grounds only. Wolf does precisely that in the body of his book, which is why he might have cut down on the (admittedly brilliant) liberal manifesto.

This quibble aside, this is a terrific book. If the anti-globalist chatter you hear on television or at dinner parties irritates you, buy Why Globalization Works. You will get enough ammunition to refute the most opinionated ignoramus (although you may get fewer dinner party invitations).

While Bhagwati and Wolf go back to economic basics, Jean-François Bayart, the French sociologist who wrote Le gouvernement du monde, (”World Government”) undertakes to study globalization from his vantage point exclusively. Economists will be “infuriated by my ignorance”, he boasts. To see things properly, “it is necessary – urgent? — to return to the foundation of social sciences”.

Bayart, it must be stressed, is no friend of the anti-globalists: his aim is to counter their claims that economic forces are undermining the state and threatening the fabric of society. He rightly ridicules the idea that consuming Coca-Cola, or the products of any multinational, amounts to a relinquishment of cultural identity.

Bayart may be a pro-globalization – or at least anti-anti-globalization – sociologist but he remains a sociologist above all. His heavy use of jargon makes him hard to take seriously. When he writes that international hotels have “extended to the nodal points of the globalization process a homogenization of the material framework for certain bodily functions” (meaning you can be fairly sure you’ll get a clean bathroom at the Kuala Lumpur Sheraton), you wonder if he is not being funny.

Another occupational hazard for sociologists is guru worship. Bayart’s hero is Michel Foucault. You might have thought that a philosopher who expounded on the repressive nature of Western society makes an unlikely critic of modern anti-globalism. But Bayart rises to the challenge, showing that the free flow of goods has gone hand in hand with a gigantic Foucaldian locking-up of people – whether in airport transit halls or refugee centres. We are all being penned in, to the extent that the US prison at Guantanamo Bay prison is a “microcosm of globalization”, writes Bayart – who throughout the book regales us with anecdotes from his travels around the world.

Sociology may or may not be able to shed light on globalization. But what this book brilliantly demonstrates is that discussing an economic fact without referring to economics is futile. It is like trying to analyse the evolution of life by relying on metaphysics rather than science (as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin did). Again, you do not need a PhD to make a meaningful contribution to the globalization debate. Many brilliant writers on trade have been only amateur economists – such as Frédéric Bastiat or his talented modern heir, the Swedish author Johan Norberg (3).

Daniel Cohen, unlike his countryman Bayart, has a firm grasp of his subject. He is an economics professor and clearly accepts the orthodoxy on trade. However his book, La mondialisation et ses ennemis (”Globalization and its Enemies”) chooses not to dwell on economic basics – as though it was not polite to do so.

Cohen has no time for the theory that globalization leads to exploitation of poor countries: “If anything, they are suffering from not being exploited enough,” he writes. He shows why a Vietnamese worker being paid $2.75 to make a Nike shoe that sells for $70 in the West is not a case of gouging – we must not forget about the huge non-labour costs, the iron link between wages and productivity, and the fact that Nike is not particularly profitable.

But no sooner has Cohen made the orthodox case than he reassures us that the world is unfair after all: powerful forces are preventing the poorest countries from joining the wealth-creating process of globalization.

To make this point, Cohen seeks theoretical support outside economics. He draws, for instance, on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, a groundbreaking study of the influence of geography on the development of societies. This book is a model of enlightening social science. It explains how agriculture arose in Eurasia, why explorers from Europe came to America rather than the other way around, and why that contact was so devastating for native Americans. But, pace Cohen, Diamond tells us nothing about contacts between modern nations. Pizza Hut opening an outlet in Lima is not the modern equivalent of Pizarro descending on the Incas.

The evidence used by Cohen to support his claim that trade will widen the gap between rich and poor countries is as shaky as his theory. He makes much of the fact that the colonial relationship between Britain and India failed to enrich the latter. But far from being an example of “the purest free trade”, as Cohen claims, the Raj was a textbook example of managed trade. India was barred from exploiting its comparative advantage by selling textiles to Britain.

Nineteenth-century imperialism was indeed a form of globalization, but certainly not a liberal one. Free traders have always defended liberty, and condemned empire as an extension of protectionism. Bastiat called colonialism “reciprocal monopoly”.

Cohen has the cause and effect backwards: developed countries do not trade because they are rich, they are rich because they trade. Eighteenth-century Europe was poorer than most of Africa is today. Not so long ago hunger stalked Asia. There is no reason why Africa, given the right policies, should not also escape poverty and hunger.

Cohen is an interesting case of “wasted knowledge”, an intelligent analyst who neglects his own expertise. He is like a doctor who knows that a medicine works but is reluctant to prescribe it to the worst-affected patients, having convinced himself that it will do little good to them.

One reason for Cohen’s ambivalence could be the politics of his audience. Cohen himself is close to the modernising Left – a trend that combines market-friendliness with distrust of “unbridled capitalism” and takes a cautiously positive view of globalization (4). While modernisers are dominant among European socialists, they are very much in the minority in France.

Since the French Right and Left are equally hostile to markets, Cohen’s tepid endorsement is as strong a defence of globalization as you can mount in France without being branded a “neo-liberal” crackpot. The subtext of his book seems to be: the case for trade is difficult to make as it is, it would be counterproductive to antagonise people more than I have to.

Such an attitude amounts to an admission of semi-impotence. It accepts that knowledge can be of only limited use in the politics of trade. But the effectiveness of the orthodox case must not be underestimated. Free traders have scored decisive victories, from the repeal of Britain’s Corn Laws to the establishment of the post-war liberal order a century later. Public opinion is not doomed to remain in the dark, and the bright light shone by Wolf and Bhagwati is more likely to help than Cohen’s dimmed beam.

Henri Astier

Notes:

(1) Jean-François Revel, La Connaissance inutile, Grasset, 1988.
(2) Paul Krugman, Pop Internationalism, MIT Press, 1996.
(3) Norberg wrote In Defence of Global Capitalism, Timbro, 2001.
(4)A British representative of this trend is Charles Leadbeater, author of a sensible book on globalization Up The Down Escalator, Viking, 2002.

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