Abstract
For much of its life, liberalism has had more enemies than friends. With the exception of brief moments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, liberals have rarely dominated the political scene. And even when they have, they have been bitterly attacked by a whole range of opponents—from socialists and communists, to fascists and conservatives. Among the many criticisms leveled at liberalism, there is one that has proved particularly powerful—namely, the idea that liberalism and capitalism have progressed hand in hand. Even if liberals themselves have often been divided in their attitude toward the rise of capitalism, the link between liberalism and some form of market-based free trade is one that has repeatedly drawn the attention of antiliberals. Most recently, the advent of “neoliberalism” in the United States and the United Kingdom in the late 1970s laid the foundations for an aggressive form of free-market capitalism that was accompanied by a renewed interest in liberal ideas.2 For antiliberals everywhere, the intimate relationship between the radical market ideas of the “Chicago Boys” and the radical liberal ideas of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan was both necessary and unsurprising. The collapse of communism in the late 1980s, the generalization of economic policies such as “shock therapy” and “structural adjustment” in the 1990s, and the ideological triumph of “liberal democracy” merely reinforced the sense among antiliberals that, after a long period in the mid-twentieth century when liberals had tried to tame the excesses of capitalism, they were once again showing their true colors.3
This piece would never have been written were it not for the “New Perspectives on the French Liberal Renaissance” workshop that was held on December 7, 2013, at the University of London in Paris. The organizers, Iain Stewart and Stephen Sawyer, offered an exciting environment in which to discuss my ideas and I am very grateful to all those involved for their feedback. Many of the arguments I present here have been developed in conversation with Michael C. Behrent and David Priestland; I thank them for their dedication to the cause. Akhila Yechury knows that she offers me precious intellectual and emotional support, but I must nevertheless express my immense gratitude to her for what she does. This piece is dedicated to my father’s memory; I know he would have enjoyed reading it.
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Notes
For different perspectives on the rise of neoliberalism globally, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Serge Audier, Néolibéralismes: une archéologie intellectuelle (Paris: Grasset, 2012).
A discussion of the European context for these changes can be found in Hagen Schulz-Forberg and Niklas Olsen (eds.), Re-inventing Western Civilisation: Transnational Reconstructions of Liberalism in Europe in the Twentieth Century (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014).
These survey results are discussed in Pascal Perrineau, “The Great Upheaval: Left and Right in Contemporary French Politics,” in France since the 1970s: History, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty ed. Emile Chabal (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 25–40.
On this, see Emile Chabal, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt (eds.), French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Mark Lilla (ed.), New French Thought: Political Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Jeremy Jennings, Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Iain Stewart, “Raymond Aron and the Roots of the French Liberal Renaissance” (PhD Diss., University of Manchester, 2011); and the second part of Chabal, A Divided Republic.
One of the few attempts to do this is William Gallois, “Against Capitalism? French Theory and the Economy since 1945,” in After the Deluge? New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France, ed. Julian Bourg (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004).
A good account is Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (London: Yale University Press, 1993).
I have been influenced here by the discussion of the fragmentation of ideas of power in American intellectual life in Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (London: Harvard University Press, 2011), chap. 3 (“The Search for Power”).
For different appraisals of Gorz’s work, see Finn Bowring, André Gorz and the Sartrean Legacy: Arguments for a Person-Centred Social Theory (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) and Christophe Fourel (ed.), André Gorz: un penseur pour le XXIè siècle (Paris: La Découverte, 2012).
For instance, André Gorz, Stratégie ouvrière et néocapitalisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964).
On this period, see Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Anti-totalitarian Moment of the 1970s (Oxford: Berghahn, 2004).
André Gorz, Adieux aux prolétariat: au-delà du socialisme (Paris: Galilée, 1980), 214 (“Annexe IIb: vivre sans travaillerh”). This annex was originally published as Michel Bosquet, “Quand les chômeurs seront heureux …,” Le Nouvel Observateur, December 4, 1978.
Conrad Lodziak and Jeremy Tatman, André Gorz: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 111.
Timothy B. Smith, France in Crisis: Welfare, Inequality and Globalization since 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
On this, see, for instance, Françoise Gollain, “André Gorz était-il un écologiste?” Ecologie & politique 1(44) (2012): 77–91.
James Shields, The Extreme-Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (London: Routledge, 2007); Pascal Perrineau, La France au front: essai sur l’avenir du Front National (Paris: Fayard, 2014).
See, for example, some of the essays in André Gorz, Ecologica (Paris: Galilée, 2008). These were essays from throughout his career which Gorz selected himself shortly before he died. The book was published posthumously.
A good example is Pierre Rosanvallon, L’âge de l’autogestion, ou, La politique au poste de commandement (Paris: Seuil, 1976).
Debray’s essay was first published in November 1989 in Le Nouvel Observateur. The version I refer to here is “République ou démocratie” in Régis Debray, Contretemps: éloges des idéaux perdus (Paris: Folio, 1992), 15–54.
There is now a vast literature on the affaire du foulard. For a selection, see Alain Renaut and Alain Touraine, Un débat sur la laïcité (Paris: Stock, 2005); Jean Baubérot, Alain Houziaux, Dounia Bouzar, and Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, Le voile, que cache-t-il? (Paris: Les Éditions Ouvrières, 2004); Michel Wieviorka (ed.), Une société fragmentée: le multiculturalisme en débat (Paris: La Découverte, 1996); Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); John Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and the Public Space (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
After “République ou democratie,” he wrote two further books on the subject: Régis Debray, Que vive la République (Paris: Odeil Jacob, 1989) and Régis Debray, La République expliquée à ma fille (Paris: Seuil, 1998).
There is a searing critique of Debray’s approach in Serge Audier, La pensée anti-68 (Paris: La Découverte, 2010), 290–300.
Among many others, see the criticisms in Pierre Mounier and Hugues Jallon, Les enragés de la République (Paris: La Découverte, 1999) and Daniel Lindenberg, Le rappel à l’ordre: enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Paris: Seuil, 2002).
Alain Finkielkraut, La défaite de la pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1987); Blandine Kriegel, Philosophie de la République (Paris: Plon, 1998).
On this, see especially Emile Chabal, “Just Say non? France, Britain and the European Union since the 1980s,” in National Identities in France, ed. Brian J. Sudlow (London: Transaction Press, 2011), 163–186.
Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 2011 [1999]).
For a theoretical elaboration of this idea of “justification,” see Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
For a summary of some of these, see Paul du Gay and Glenn Morgan (eds.), New Spirits of Capitalism? Crises Justifications, and Dynamics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For an attempt to apply some of Boltanski and Chiapello’s insights to postwar history, see the final chapters of David Priestland, Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power (London: Penguin, 2013).
This view was most clearly expressed in the well-known set of essays in François Furet, Pierre Rosanvallon and Jacques Julliard, La République du centre: la fin de l’exception française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1988).
Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde: essai sur la société néolibérale (Paris: La Découverte, 2009).
Michael C. Behrent, “Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976–1979,” Modern Intellectual History 6(3) (2009): 539–568.
Christian Laval, Jeremy Bentham: le pouvoir des fictions (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994).
Christian Laval, L’école n’est pas une entreprise: le néo-libéralisme à l’assaut de l’enseignement public (Paris: La Découverte, 2004).
Their latest book proposes a platform for democratic and revolutionary change. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Commun: Essai sur la révolution au XXIe siècle (Paris: La Découverte, 2014).
On this, see Emile Chabal, “The Rise of the Anglo-Saxon: French Perceptions of the Anglo-American World in the Long Twentieth Century,” French Politics, Culture and Society 31(1) (2013): 24–46 and Jeremy Jennings, “France and the Anglo-Saxon Model: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives,” European Review 14(4) (2006): 537–554.
Alain Touraine et al., Le grand refus: réflexions sur la grève de décembre 1995 (Paris: Fayard, 1996).
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Chabal, E. (2016). Capitalism and Its Critics: Antiliberalism in Contemporary French Politics. In: Sawyer, S.W., Stewart, I. (eds) In Search of the Liberal Moment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137581266_7
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