UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Anthropological Turn in French Thought: The 1970s to the Present Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3p75q9p5 Author Collins, Jacob Joseph Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Anthropological Turn in French Thought: The 1970s to the Present A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Jacob Joseph Collins 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Anthropological Turn in French Thought: The 1970s to the Present by Jacob Joseph Collins Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Lynn Hunt, Chair This dissertation focuses on post-1968 French thought and looks at how French thinkers responded to a new set of challenges that emerged in the 1970s and 80s: the economy had begun to falter, the revolts of 68 failed to produce an alternative to capitalism, and the “great ideologies” that had once sustained cultural life in France – Catholicism, communism, and Gaullism – no longer mobilized people in the same way. I argue that philosophers and social theorists met these challenges by reconceiving the language of politics, using concepts and methodologies associated with anthropology to do so. They wanted to rediscover the roots of political sentiments and social bonds as a way of understanding how they had gone so astray in the twentieth century. Much of their writing was focused on the legacy of totalitarianism, the role of religion in contemporary life – which they all took to be of first importance – the fragmentation of political identities with the advent of globalization, and the persistent social inequalities that attend modern democracy. The thinkers I examine cover the entire ideological spectrum: on the far left, Régis Debray, a revolutionary in the 1960s turned militant republican in iii the 70s; on the center-left Emmanuel Todd, demographer, political liberal, and sharp-eyed critic of neo-liberalism; on the center-right, Marcel Gauchet, former left-libertarian turned theorist of democracy; and on the far right, Alain de Benoist, architect of the “New Right” movement, cultural essentialist, and implacable critic of egalitarianism. I show how each thinker constructed a meta-narrative of modernity, and how, in spite of their political differences, they came to see fundamental issues in similar ways. iv The dissertation of Jacob Joseph Collins is approved. Kirstie McClure Perry Anderson Lynn Hunt, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 v Contents Acknowledgements vii Vita viii Introduction 1 Chapter One – The Anthropological Turn in French Thought 11 Chapter Two – Alain de Benoist: A Restorationist Anthropology 50 Chapter Three – Marcel Gauchet: Anthropologies of the Liberal State 103 Chapter Four – Family Trees: Emmanuel Todd and the Roots of a Gallic Liberalism 172 Chapter Five – Tracking the Sacred: The Political Anthropology of Régis Debray 233 Chapter Six – Legacies of the Sacred: The Political Anthropology of Régis Debray 305 Concluding Remarks 368 Bibliography 383 vi Acknowledgements In writing this dissertation, I have benefited greatly from the advice and friendship of many people. I would like to thank Lynn Hunt for being an extraordinary adviser. I have profited enormously from her generous feedback throughout the writing process, and from her peerless example as an historian. I thank Perry Anderson for the many ways he encouraged me during the writing of this dissertation, and for the untiring attention he gave to it. I would like to thank Robert Brenner, Saul Friedländer, Margaret Jacob, Kirstie McClure, Ted Porter, and Teo Ruiz for their continuing support. I owe many debts to fellow graduate students at UCLA, who contributed in various ways to the making of this dissertation: my good friends, Aaron Benanav, Susan Mokhberi, and Alexander Zevin; fellow French historians, Elizabeth Everton, Sung Choi, Lauren Janes, Deb Bauer, and Alexia Yates. In France, Laure Fernandez and Quentin Dève were outstanding hosts and roommates. I want to thank Susan Watkins and Tony Wood at New Left Review for their insightful comments on my work. Special thanks go out to my family for their love and support, and of course, to Naomi, for everything. vii VITA Education M.A. with distinction, European History, UCLA, 2006 B.A., cum laude in History, major in Philosophy, Cornell University, 2003 Publications “States of Security”, New Left Review 81 (forthcoming, May-June 2013) “An Anthropological Turn: The Unseen Paradigm in Modern French Thought”, New Left Review 78 (November-December 2012), pp. 31-61 “A Metaphysics of Democracy”, New Left Review 74 (March-April 2012), pp. 145-155 “Link Arms!”, New Left Review 64 (July-August 2010), pp. 131-139 “Days of the Commune”, The Evergreen Review 118 (June 2009) Conferences October 2009, Western Society for French History, “The Political Anthropology of Régis Debray and the Return of the Nation-State” October 2012, UCLA French Graduate Conference, “Disappearing Selves: Autobiography and Counter-Autobiography in the French Tradition” viii Introduction This dissertation identifies and unfolds the making of a new paradigm in post-1968 French thought, the “anthropological turn.” It follows the work of four thinkers, Régis Debray, Emmanuel Todd, Marcel Gauchet, and Alain de Benoist, all non-anthropologists who nevertheless attempted to reconstruct the foundations of political theory with reference to anthropological concepts and methodologies in the 1970s. The questions they wanted to answer – what is politics?, what constitutes a true political community?, what is the role of human agency in the context of the group? – were given renewed urgency in the aftermath of 1968. Anthropology was an obvious place to look for thinkers who wanted to breathe new life into their field of study, both for its prestige in post-war France, and for its attention to origins. We thus find each author giving an anthropological interpretation of politics, in many cases identifying politics as a reified entity – “the political”, analogous to the “social” or the “economic” – and tracing it back to “primitive” society. For Emmanuel Todd, to use one example, anthropological politics was rooted in pre-modern family structures, which continue, in spite of their antiquity, to shape social relations and ideological formations in modernity. The itineraries of these four thinkers were very different, as were their particular fusions of the political and the anthropological, but the fact that they all considered, at the very same moment, this fusion necessary signals the existence of an important current of thought that has yet to be explored. The dissertation before you is a work of intellectual history, and, in keeping with its methods, tries to interpret and contextualize the published writings of some of France’s leading thinkers. I have given a stronger contextual reading than is customary for intellectual history, relating developments in philosophy and political theory very closely with events, crises, and 1 discourses in the period between May 68 and the election of Mitterrand in 1981 – the “entre- deux-Mai” as it is sometimes called. If I have insisted on such a strong link between political events and theory, it is because the world-historical singularity of the post-war French intellectual moment,1 the enormous diffusion and popular resonance of its ideas from 1945 to 1980, invites us to look beyond the text for its meanings. The first chapter deals at length with the intellectual scaffolding of the anthropological turn, its core themes and methodologies, as well as its contribution to the field of political philosophy in France. Here I would say only that the anthropological turn represents a way of thinking about political questions that deviates from what many of us expect to find in post-68 French thought. It reinstates the mode of “grand-narrative” that Lyotard famously claimed post- modern philosophy to have surpassed. The respective work of these four thinkers feature great syntheses of events and ideas that stretch back to the origins of human society, with specific views on the forms politics will take in the present and future. In this regard, it marks a return to the “savage” political theory of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot, but within a distinctive late-capitalist, post-structuralist context. The latter component is essential for appreciating how the anthropological turn attempted to negotiate an urgent theoretical problem of its time, namely the confrontation of structuralism (and its attention to impersonal social mechanisms), with new demands for “agency” and “practice” within the ambit of the human sciences. The anthropological turn suggests its own way of balancing history, practice, and structure to yield a theory of politics.2 1 This view is expressed forcefully by Alain Badiou in “The Adventure of French Philosophy,” New Left Review 35 (Sept.-Oct. 2005): 67-77. With classical Greece and enlightenment Germany, Badiou names post-war France as one of the three greatest “moments” of intense philosophical production. 2 The work of both Pierre Bourdieu and Marshall Sahlins in the 1970s and 80s were benchmarks in terms of resolving this impasse. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford 2 All four thinkers considered here were part of the same post-war generation. The eldest, Debray (b. 1940), is eleven years the senior of Todd (b. 1951), the youngest of the group, while Benoist (b. 1943) and Gauchet (b. 1946) fall roughly in the middle. The left-wing figures, Debray and Todd, were born and raised in Paris, though with different kinds of middle-class backgrounds. Todd descends from an illustrious literary-bohemian line, his grandfather the great communist writer of the interwar period, Paul Nizan, his father the well-known author and journalist, Olivier Todd. The family had strong ties to England, as Nizan’s wife was English, and both Olivier and Emmanuel were sent to Cambridge for university.