Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Left and Henri Bergson

  • Original Article
  • Published:
French Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

This article studies the polarizing role Henri Bergson played in twentieth-century political theory in France and beyond. A controversial and charismatic philosopher, Bergson’s thought traveled a notoriously convoluted itinerary. Though his critiques of scientific positivism before the First World War endeared him to Catholic intellectuals, sectors of the French left were his most committed interpreters, a fact that mystified and enraged his contemporaries. Tracing the assorted ways the left took up Bergson—from syndicalism to négritude—brings into focus the left’s historically bipolar relationship to scientific progress and its promise of emancipation. It also underscores something fundamental about the history of the twentieth-century left: It maintained an ideologically unpredictable yet indispensable concern for “lived experience.”

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Ansell-Pearson, K. 2002. Philosopher and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Antliff, M. 1993. Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Antliff, M. 2007. Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arendt, H. 1998 [1958]. The Human Condition, 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

  • Armus, S.D. 2001. The eternal enemy: Emmanuel Mounier’s Esprit and French anti-Americanism. French Historical Studies 24(2): 271–304.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arnold, A.J. 1981. Modernism and Négritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Azouvi, F. 2007. La gloire de Bergson. Essai sur le magistère philosophique. Paris: Gallimard.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baldwin, J. 1998. Nobody knows my name. In James Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. T. Morrison, 150–155. New York: Library of America.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baring, E. 2011. The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Benda, J. 1913. Une philosophie pathétique. Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine.

    Google Scholar 

  • Benjamin, W. 1999. Experience and poverty. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 2, 1931–1934, eds. Jennings, M., H. Eiland, and G. Smith (trans: Livingston, R., and others), 731–736. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

  • Benjamin, W. 2007 [1955]. On some motifs in Baudelaire. In Walter Benjamin: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Arendt, H (trans: Zohn, H.) 155–200. New York: Schocken Books.

  • Bergson, H. 1915. The Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict. London: Thomas Fisher Unwin, Limited.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bergson, H. 1946 [1934]. The Creative Mind (trans: Andison, Mabelle L.). New York: Philosophical Library.

  • Bergson, H. 2001 [1889]. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (trans: Pogson, F. L.). Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

  • Berman, M. 1982. All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon & Schuster.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bianco, G. 2015. Après Bergson. Portrait de groupe avec philosophe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

    Google Scholar 

  • Canales, J. 2015. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Césaire, A. 1956. Culture and colonization. Présence Africaine 8–10: 193–207.

    Google Scholar 

  • Césaire, A. 1978 [1941]. Charles Péguy. In Tropiques, Tome I. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, pp. 39–40.

  • Césaire, S. 1978 [1941]. Léo Frobenius et le problème des civilisations. In Tropiques, Tome I. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, pp. 27–36.

  • Césaire, S. 1978 [1942]. Malaise d’un civilisation. In Tropiques, Tome I. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, pp. 43–49.

  • Césaire, A. 1978 [1943]. Maintenir la poésie. In Tropiques, Tome II. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, pp. 7–8.

  • Césaire, S. 1978 [1943]. 1943: Le surréalisme et nous. In Tropiques, Tome II. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, pp. 14–18.

  • Césaire, A. 1978 [1945]. Poésie et Connaissance. In Tropiques, Tome II. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, pp. 157–170.

  • Césaire, A. 2001 [1950]. Discourse on Colonialism (trans: Pinkham, Joan). New York: Monthly Review Press.

  • Césaire, A. 2013 [1949]. Speech at the National Assembly, 11 July 1949. In Aimé Césaire: Écrits politiques. Discours à l’Assemblée nationale, 1945–1983. Paris: Nouvelles éditions Jean-Michel Place, pp. 61–66.

  • Césaire, A. 2017. Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal. In The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire (trans: Arnold, A. J., and C. Eshleman), 3–62. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

  • Ciepley, D. 2006. Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cohen, P. M. 2018 [1987]. Piety and Politics: Catholic Revival and the Generation of 1905–1914 in France. New York: Routledge.

  • Connolly, W. 2005. Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dardot, P., and C. Laval. 2014. Commun. Essai sur la revolution au XXIe siècle. Paris: Découverte.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dean, C.J. 1992. The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Deleuze, G. 1988. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Depestre, R. 2001 [1967]. An Interview with Aimé Césaire. In Discourse on Colonialism ed. A. Césaire (trans: Riofrancos, Maro), 81–94. New York: Monthly Review Press.

  • Diagne, S.B. 2011. Bergson postcolonial. L’élan vital dans la pensée de Léopold Sédar Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal. Paris: CRNS.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dilthey, W. 1988 [1923]. Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History (trans: Betanzos, Ramon J). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

  • Eros, J. 1955. The positivist generation of French republicanism. The Sociological Review 3(2): 255–277.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fanon, F. 1956. Racism and culture. Présence Africaine 8–10: 122–131.

    Google Scholar 

  • Forth, C.E. 2001. Zarathustra in Paris: The Nietzsche Vogue in France, 1891–1918. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • François, A., N.Y. Kisukidi, C. Riquier, et al. (eds.). 2014. Annales Bergsoniennes VII: Bergson, l’Allegmagne, la guerre de 1914. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

    Google Scholar 

  • Giordani, T. 2018. On Sorel and Bergson: The impact of Bergson’s ideas on Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. Lo Sguardo 26(1): 163–181.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grogin, R.C. 1974. Bergson and the French Catholic Revival: 1900–1914. Thought 49(3): 311–322.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grogin, R.C. 1988. The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914. Calgary: University of Calgary Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grosz, E. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grosz, E. 2010. Feminism, materialism, and freedom. In New Materialisms: Ontology; Agency, and Politics, ed. D. Coole and S. Frost, 139–157. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Guerlac, S. 2006. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gunter, P.A.Y. 1999. Bergson and the war against nature. In The New Bergson, ed. J. Mullarkey, 168–182. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hamilton, J.J. 1973. Georges Sorel and the inconsistencies of a Bergsonian Marxism. Political Theory 1(3): 329–340.

    Google Scholar 

  • Headley, C. 2019. Bergson, Senghor, and the philosophical foundations of négritude: Intellect, intuition, and knowledge. In Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism Through the Writings of Henri Bergson, ed. A.J. Pitts and M.W. Westmoreland, 79–120. Albany: SUNY Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Horkheimer, M., and T. Adorno, 2002 [1947]. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (trans: Jephcott, Edmund). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  • Hughes, S.H. 1958. Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930. New York: Knopf.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hymans, J.L. 1966. French influences on Leopold Senghor’s theory of négritude, 1928–1948. Race 7(4): 365–370.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jankélévitch, V. 2015 [1959/1930]. Henri Bergson (trans: Schott, N. F.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Jay, M. 2005. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jaurès, J. 1914. Discours de Jaurès. L’Humanité, 23 January, pp. 1–2.

  • Jennings, J. 2011. Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France Since the Eighteenth-Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jones, D. 2010. The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kesteloot, L. 1991. Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude (trans: Kennedy, Ellen Conroy). Washington, DC: Howard University Press.

  • Kimball, R. 1992. The treason of the intellectuals & ‘the undoing of thought.’ The New Criterion, December 1992.

  • Koselleck, R. 2000 [1959]. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

  • Lagardelle, H. 1902. Socialisme ou Democratie? Le Mouvement socialiste 7: 625–32, 673–87, 774–81, 889–97, 1009–16, 1081–88.

  • Le Mouvement socialiste. 1899. Déclaration. 1: 1–5.

  • Lefebvre, A., and M. White (eds.). 2012. Bergson, Politics, and Religion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lukes, S. 1975. Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work. Middlesex: Penguin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maritain, J. 1914. La philosophie bergsonienne. Paris: Marcel Rivière.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maritain, R. 1941. Les grandes amities, souvenirs. New York: Éditions de la Maison Française.

    Google Scholar 

  • Massis, H., and A. de Tarde. 1911. L’Esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne. Paris: Mercure de France.

    Google Scholar 

  • McGrath, L. 2013. Bergson comes to America. Journal of the History of Ideas 74(4): 599–620.

    Google Scholar 

  • McGrath, L.S. 2020. Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moyn, S. 2005. Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mullarkey, J. (ed.). 1999. The New Bergson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Müller, J.W. 2006. Julien Benda’s anti-passionate Europe. European Journal of Political Theory 5(2): 125–137.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nesbitt, N. 2003. Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Péguy, C. 1914. Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne. Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine.

    Google Scholar 

  • Péguy, C. 1943. Basic Verities: Prose and Poetry (trans: Anne and Julian Green). New York: Pantheon.

  • Péguy, C. 1958 [1932]. Temporal and Eternal (trans: Dru, Alexander). New York: Harper and Brothers.

  • Popper, K. 2013 [1945]. The Open Society & Its Enemies. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

  • Prochasson, C., and A. Rasmussen. 1996. Au nom de la patrie: Les intellectuels et la Première Guerre mondiale, 1910–1919. Paris: Découverte.

    Google Scholar 

  • Quirk, T. 1990. Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rabinbach, A. 1992. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ray, L. 2011. Anti-Americanism and left-right ideology in France. French Politics 9: 201–221.

    Google Scholar 

  • Renan, E. 1891. The Future of Science. Boston: Roberts Bros.

    Google Scholar 

  • Robcis, C. 2020. Frantz Fanon, institutional psychotherapy, and the decolonization of psychiatry. The Journal of the History of Ideas 81(2): 303–325.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roe, G.H. 2014. The Passion of Charles Péguy: Literature, Modernity, and the Crisis of Historicism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roth, J.J. 1967. The roots of Italian fascism: Sorel and Sorelismo. The Journal of Modern History 39(1): 30–45.

    Google Scholar 

  • Russell, B. 1912. The philosophy of Bergson. The Monist 22(3): 321–347.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sayre, R., and M. Löwy. 1984. Figures of romantic anti-capitalism. New German Critique 32: 42–92.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scott, J.W. 1991. The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry 17(4): 773–797.

    Google Scholar 

  • Senghor, L. S. 1945. Défense de l’Afrique noire. Esprit (July): 237–248.

  • Senghor, L. S. 1946 Speech at the National Constituent Assembly (11 April 1946). In Annales de l’Assemblée Nationale Constituante. Débats IV: du 1er au 17 Avril 1946. Paris: Imprimerie des Journaux Officiels, pp. 1714–1715.

  • Senghor, L.S. 1956. The spirit of civilization or the laws of African Negro culture. Présence Africaine 8–10: 51–64.

    Google Scholar 

  • Senghor, L.S. 1977. Liberté III. Négrtitude et civilisation de l’universel. Paris: Editions Seuil.

    Google Scholar 

  • Senghor, L.S. 1993. Liberté V. Le dialogue des cultures. Paris: Editions Seuil.

    Google Scholar 

  • Severac, J.B. 1911. Influence de la philosophie de M. Bergson. Le Mouvement socialiste 29: 182–193.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sharpley-Whiting, T.D. 2002. Negritude Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shklar, J. 1958. Bergson and the politics of intuition. The Review of Politics 20(4): 634–656.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sinclair, M. 2011. Embodiment: Conceptions of the lived body from Maine de Biran to Bergson. In The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. A. Stone, 187–203. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sinclair, M. 2016. Bergson’s philosophy of will and the war of 1914–1918. Journal of the History of Ideas 77(3): 467–487.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sinclair, M. 2020. Bergson. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sorel, Georges. 1999 [1908]. Reflections on Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Soulez, P. 1989. Bergson politique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

    Google Scholar 

  • Soulez, P., and F. Worms. 2002. Bergson. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sternhell, Z. 1996 [1983]. Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (trans: Maisel, David). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  • Stock, P.H. 1971. Students versus the university in pre-World War Paris. French Historical Studies 8(1): 93–110.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sutton, M. 2002. Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics 1890–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Swift, S. 2013. Hannah Arendt, violence and vitality. European Journal of Social Theory 16(3): 357–376.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vout, M., and L. Wilde. 1987. Socialism and myth: The case of Bergson and Sorel. Radical Philosophy 46(Summer): 2–7.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weber, E. 1962. Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weber, E. 1968. The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilder, G. 2015. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zaretsky, E. 2015. Political Freud: A History. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

For their help, I thank Eric Brandom, Judith Grant, and Michelle Weitzel. Thanks also to Jen Fredette for her editorial advice and to Adriana Alfaro Altamirano, who later revealed herself as a reviewer. This article is dedicated to the memory of Isaac Kramnick.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics, University of Virginia, Gibson Hall S453, Charlottesville, VA, 22903, USA

    Kevin Duong

Authors
  1. Kevin Duong
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kevin Duong.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Duong, K. The Left and Henri Bergson. Fr Polit 18, 359–379 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-020-00130-w

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-020-00130-w

Keywords

Search

Navigation