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Confessions of a Sceptical Francophile

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2012

Roger Scruton*
Affiliation:
Visiting Research Professor St Andrews Fellow of Blackfriars Hall Oxford

Abstract

In post-war France we have witnessed an upsurge in philosophical and quasi-philosophical literature, much of it nonsense and all of it radically politicised. What is the explanation of this? I advance the thesis that the post-1968 literary scene expresses a bid for a new kind of social membership, and that it is the hunger for membership that explains not only the intellectual structure of this literature but also its world-wide influence. I also suggest that there survives in this literature both an intellectual agenda and a historical memory, in which the war-time experience of France is all-important. In the course of my argument I try to explain the radical difference between analytical philosophy, which permits its practitioners to have unorthodox (i.e. non-left-wing) political views, and a particular post-war French intellectual tradition, which has until recently allowed no such deviation from its tacit norms.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2012

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References

1 Nor is this tradition dead. See for a particularly lucid adaptation of it to modern problems, Williamson, Timothy, The Philosophy of Philosophy (Oxford, Blackwell, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

2 Of course, it would be a gross insult to Marxism in general, and Marx in particular, to suppose that this is the only available form that Marxism in our time can take. See the impeccably Marxist dismissal of Althusser by Jerry Cohen (Cohen, G.A., Karl Marx's Theory of History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979Google Scholar, Preface), and also that by Thompson, E.P. in The Poverty of Theory (London, Verso, 1978)Google Scholar.

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10 Kojève has been posthumously identified by the French intelligence service as a Soviet agent. However, he was a close friend of the influential conservative political theorist Leo Strauss (influential in America, that is). He was also the propagator, through his Hegel lectures, of the ‘end of history’ idea that Francis Fukuyama later delivered in a form that could be easily swallowed by American liberal conservatives. It seems that Kojève wore a Mephistophelian mask that nobody has ever deciphered, and the fact that he was one of the architects of the European Union and fully party to the mendacities by which it was invented and imposed upon the continent is entirely consonant with his inscrutable character.

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13 Richard Dawkins's theory of the meme (The Selfish Gene) is inadequate for many reasons, not least because it does not distinguish between sense and nonsense; likewise Sperber, Dan, Explaining Culture, a Naturalistic Approach (Oxford, Blackwell, 1996)Google Scholar.

14 See Grant, Robert, ‘Ideology and Deconstruction’, in O'Hear, Anthony, ed., Verstehen and Human Understanding (London, Royal Institute of Philosophy, 1998)Google Scholar.

15 See FrumForum, March 27th 2011. It is difficult for an English reader to believe BHL when, in his recently published exchange of letters with Michel Houellebecq, he characterises himself as a persecuted outsider, and victim of the mob. See Levy, Bernard-Henri and Houellebecq, Michel, Public Enemies (London and New York, Random House, 2011)Google Scholar.

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18 See again Robert Grant, op. cit.