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Rethinking the French Liberal Moment: Some Thoughts on the Heterogeneous Origins of Lefort and Gauchet's Social Philosophy

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Rethinking the French Liberal Moment: Some Thoughts on the Heterogeneous Origins of Lefort and Gauchet's Social Philosophy CHAPTER 3 Rethinking the French Liberal Moment: Some Thoughts on the Heterogeneous Origins of Lefort and Gauchet’s Social Philosophy Noah Rosenblum ecent scholarship has taken an interest in the renaissance of French liberal thought in the second half of the twentieth century. This R“French liberal revival” has swept up scholars and commentators alike, and is often thought to include the important French philosophers Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet. But, as work in intellectual history has shown,1 the term sits uneasily on at least these two. On close examination, we see that some of their mature thought is only ambiguously committed to liberal goals and rests on complex philosophical premises that are incompatible with some traditional liberal arguments. Tracing aspects of their social thought back to its roots reveals how deeply opposed to liberalism some of their premises were and helps us see how they carried illiberal ideas forward into new contexts. This forces us to take a new perspective on at least this piece of the twentieth century’s French liberal moment, revising accepted stories of its origins and meaning. Recognizing the heterogeneous sources of their argument leads us to appreciate Lefort and Gauchet’s creative work of reconstruction and resist the urge to canalize their powerful social philosophy. Conceptualizing the “French Liberal Revival” In a purely analytic sense, we can understand the idea of a “French liberal revival” in two different ways. The phrase describes, first, a new or renewed interest in traditional liberal themes by thinkers writing in French. We can S. W. Sawyer et al. (eds.), In Search of the Liberal Moment © The Editor(s) 2016 62 ● Noah Rosenblum recall, here, the nouveaux philosophes with their interest in the value of individual liberty and the problem of state coercion. The twentieth century’s French liberal moment, from this perspective, is synonymous with a turn by recent French philosophers to liberal topics. We can also take the idea of a “French liberal revival” in a second, more historical sense: a renewed attention to canonical French liberal thinkers by writers of whatever stripe, in whatever language. On this count, we might recall the interest in the French liberal Benjamin Constant by Anglophone thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin and John Plamenatz.2 We could even identify a number of different French liberal revivals, such as a British French liberal revival of the 1960s, or an American French liberal revival, which is still ongoing today.3 As a conceptual matter, these two different senses of “French liberal revival” are distinct. Contemporary French writers could cultivate an interest in liberal themes without a care for historic liberal thinkers, French or other- wise. And writing on canonical French liberals—whether in France, the United Kingdom, or the United States—need not be a way of engaging with traditional liberal concerns. We may, however, wish to take account of elective affinities. An interest in liberalism might drive someone to study canonical liberal thinkers. Similarly, a study of canonical liberal thinkers, undertaken for its own sake, might kindle an interest in liberal themes. Such elective affinities would seem espe- cially strong within a given linguistic, historical, or national tradition. Contemporary French liberals, with their particular training and familiari- ties, might be more likely to take an interest in French liberals than canonical liberal thinkers from other traditions. For the same reason, if French histori- cal liberals were to be revived by anyone, it stands to reason the revivalists would more likely be contemporary French liberals than anyone else. We can identify, then, a third referent for the phrase “French liberal revival” at the intersection of its two more proper meanings. It is a specific instance of the other two: the recovery of canonical French liberal thinkers by recent French thinkers with an interest in traditional liberal themes. Importantly, there is nothing logically necessary or inevitable about this intel- lectual composite. It is a product of construction, a category held together by choice and chance. It is an imagined event whose conceptual complexity and ontological contingency are masked by the double work done by its charac- teristic adjectives, “French” and “liberal.” We say them once, but mean them twice, and so make what is accidental appear essential. If there was a “French liberal revival,” it is, in fact, in this third, doubled sense that we usually mean it. And Claude Lefort and his student Marcel Gauchet must surely have been a part of it. Both thinkers are French—both born and educated in France, and both eventually becoming part of the Rethinking the French Liberal Moment ● 63 French intellectual establishment. Both concerned themselves, at least in part, with traditional liberal themes. And both took a deep interest in canoni- cal French liberal thinkers. We see this quite explicitly in Lefort’s brief 1994 essay “Libéralisme et démocratie.” Invited to reflect on “the historic victory of liberalism” after the fall of communism, Lefort used the opportunity to give a short, virtuoso performance in French liberal revivalism.4 Yes, he acknowledged, it was timely to consider the problem of liberalism at that particular moment, in the shadow of the collapse of the Soviet empire. But, he went on, his were no mere occasional thoughts. Liberalism “has been a subject of growing interest over the last twenty years or so,” that is, since the 1970s.5 And that interest, he went on, should not be reduced merely to attempts to reckon with Soviet totalitarianism. Liberalism’s significance—and others’ interest in it—should be traced back to its origins in the seventeenth century as the first serious “critique of religious authority and . of a political authority without checks.”6 That critique, Lefort explained, was still relevant for phi- losophers, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, as it offered the resources for understanding aspects of the deep structure of the modern world.7 In the concluding sections of his remarks, Lefort fleshed out this insight by work- ing through the thought of French liberals Benjamin Constant, François Guizot, and Alexis de Tocqueville. The essay is an encapsulation of the (doubled) French liberal revival. Lefort explores traditional liberal themes and questions, such as the nature of social division, the problem of the market, and the idea of individual liberty. He elaborates his point through a discussion of canonical French liberal thinkers. And, of course, he does it all in French. The Liberalism of Revivalism If we take a more careful look at Lefort’s work, though, and the kind of French liberal revivalism he engaged in, we see the fault lines of the doubled construct reemerge, and the composite come undone. The contingency of the connection between an interest in liberal themes and the historical liberal tradition forces a question: what is the relationship between the philosophies of left-leaning liberal revivalists such as Lefort and the French liberal thinkers they so often cited? How did their (doubled) French liberal revivalism come to fuse its two parts together? The question is all the more muddied since even “Libéralisme et démocra- tie,” an embodiment of Lefort’s French liberal moment, is not obviously a liberal piece. It initially sets out not to recover liberalism, but to critique it. Noting that contemporary liberals were also democrats, Lefort begins his 64 ● Noah Rosenblum essay with their failure to explain the connection: “why is it that the attach- ment of liberals to democracy . cannot be undone, and why do they have little or nothing to say about it?”8 His answer is not exactly to their credit. Most liberals, he explains, have systematically misunderstood the relationship between civil liberty and democratic government. Taking liberty as the foun- dation and touchstone of a well-ordered society, they have sought to erect a government on the basis of putatively prepolitical social institutions embodying liberty, namely, the self-organizing free market. But, Lefort explains, if the fall of the Soviet Union teaches us anything, it is that this relationship should be reversed. “When the market establishes itself in the absence of democratic institutions and of a State capable of ensuring respect for the law, the havoc it wreaks is obvious.”9 The inability of market mecha- nisms to protect liberty, absent a certain kind of state and society, points us toward what Lefort believes to be a confusion in liberalism. Democracy should come before civil rights, even for those committed to the primacy of individual liberty. To reverse the relationship between the political and the civil is, however, to demolish the grounds of a certain kind of liberal theory. As Lefort recog- nizes, “it is one thing to admit that political liberties are linked to freedom of enterprise and commerce; quite another to find the source of the former in the latter. Similarly it is one thing to admit that market, industrial, capitalist society . implies the independence of the individual . .; quite another to conceive of society as resulting ultimately from multiple networks of relations between individuals, posited as first terms.”10 Lefort wants to defend some liberal insights—the connection between civil and political liberty, the rela- tive autonomy of the individual. But he rejects their accompanying philo- sophical justification, predicated as it is on the primacy and distinctness of each self-sovereign person.11 Whether Lefort believes that this rejection constitutes a wholesale break with liberalism is difficult to say. French liberalism, he explains, has always been more sensitive to the political foundations of freedom and less enam- ored of the market. Lefort sees in Constant, Guizot, and Tocqueville different attempts to build a political theory that would protect individual liberty without treating it as prepolitical, self-sustaining, or spontaneously emergent.
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