WOID #XIII-2. Review: Beginning of the End for the End of the Beginning?

Perry Anderson, "Dégringolade." London Review of Books, September 2, 2004
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n17/ande01.html

Perry Anderson, "Union Sucrée." London Review of Books, September 23, 2004
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n18/ande01.html

Perry Anderson, La pensée tiède. Un regard critique sur la pensée française, with a response by Pierre Nora. Paris: Seuil, 2005
Symposium: "The End of French History? Perry Anderson Dissects ’Neo-Liberal’ France"
With Michael Christofferson, Eric Fassin, Patrick Fridenson, Arthur Goldhammer, Dick Howard, Joan Scott, Johanna Siméant and Perry Anderson
Friday, April 22 2005, 10:00-7:30
Institute of French Studies, NYU, New York City.

The not-so-great French historian Augustin Cochin once wrote that reading about the French Revolution was like watching a man shadow-dueling: you saw the man’s reactions but you never saw what he was reacting to. I got a similar impression from a day-long conference, April 22, at NYU, centered around the Marxist scholar Perry Anderson and his recent, two-part article about the role of intellectuals in neo-liberal France.

The irony (which Anderson exploits fully), is that the main architect of neo-liberal thought in the ’seventies and ’eighties, Francois Furet, built his arguments around Cochin’s. Furet started out as a Marxist historian of the French Revolution before turning professional pundit and writing a classic, brilliant attack on Marxist interpretations of the French Revolution which he parlayed into an attack on Marxism, on Revolution itself, then on the very concept that revolutionary change was possible, viable, or even probable. 

Anderson’s article describes how Furet, along with Pierre Nora, the editor of a hugely successful series on the "Places of Memory" in French History, set up the usual networks of friends and loyalists in the French press, the universities and the publishing houses, with an overwhelming message of class solidarity and cooperation - meaning, of course, co-optation. And if this sounds like a nefarious plot, well, what alternatives could a critic offer in response? That Furet, Nora, and all of their friends in power reflected the prevailing social dynamics, or perhaps (eek, eek!) the social tensions created within relations of production by the shifting forces of production? 

Neo-liberals (in Anderson’s telling) were hoist by their own pet theory; as to Anderson’s article, it’s gained a lot of traction in the past few weeks, as it became obvious that the French people are increasingly fed up with the neo-liberal, Social-Democratic, wish-wash-Green social pact imposed upon them - tired, that is, of the whole neo-liberal, parasitic, political class. How fed up they are we’ll soon find out, when the results of the referendum that was supposed to usher in a neo-liberal Europe come in, on May 29. Right now the new European Constitution, or rather, its French backers, seems to be facing an overwhelming vote of no-confidence. Anderson was not offering a new theory, he was more like a doctor prodding for pain, and getting plenty of it. 

There was pain to be shared at the NYU symposium, where a series of scholars, right and left, French and American, took turns at Anderson. But turns at what? It was so much shadow-boxing with a theory unmentioned until the last sentence of Anderson’s concluding remarks. The theory was Marxism and the elephant in the room was Class Conflict. Arthur Goldhammer, a translator out of Harvard, offered up a panglossian defense of that most panglossian of movements, French neo-liberalism, balancing existential pessimism about the evils of society with pink promises of class cohesion - it was a like watching Fritz Lang’s version of Metropolis. From the other side, Patrick Fridenson, a labor historian, inadvertently reminded us that French trade unions, too, were all too happy to play the game of class cohesion after 1968, in a speech laced with a good deal of workman’s-cap posturing. It was like watching Jack Lang’s version of Metropolis.

Aside from Fridenson’s sniping at Anderson’s facts, neither Goldhammer nor Fridenson addressed the question of the actual role of intellectuals like Furet and Nora in the neo-liberal hegemon, because both were invested in discrediting the idea of hegemony itself. That task fell to Michael Christofferson. Christofferson’s argument was tightly reasoned: he brought the question back to a conspiracy. To what extent, he asked, were left-wing intellectuals responsible for their own failure in the ’seventies? It was a fruitful question because it opened up the "conspiracy theory" to a wider, circumstantial reading of the role of Furet and others in French social and cultural life; more fruitful, though, if Christofferson’s point of departure had not been the politically charged characterization of French liberal thought as "anti-authoritarian," meaning "anti-Soviet," meaning "red-baiting." Anderson later pointed out that leftists did not merely question the Authoritarian State but the Authoritarian Corporation as well.

The Rodney King role went to Dick Howard, of Stony Brook, who tried to save the baby of teleology with the bathwater of liberalism (or is it the other way around?), proposing a utopian narrative of social progress but a "democratic" one and (presumably) not a violent one. From your lips to Marx’s ear, Professor, but that does not resolve the present problems cutting across all classes in French society: problems that are to all appearances insoluble without a reordering of class relations, which reordering has been known to lead to violence on occasion. And violence, as Lenin said, is not a sausage you can chose, hot or cold, at the deli-counter of History. 

Fruitful models for social change: Joan Scott (of Princeton) deadlocked with Anderson over the question of minorities and minority women, suggesting that the traditional Marxist approach to class left it powerless in front of demands by (or for) French Muslim women to cover their heads in the classroom. Anderson’s answer was predictable and unsatisfactory - though I believe there is an answer. 

What historians of the French Revolution have learned from Furet is that it’s the conception of class, not class itself, that needs to be rewritten. Class is a dynamic concept, constantly changing under pressures of culture and conflict. Gender and class analysis come together more and more as forms of alterity, and the study of alterity is the study of ongoing cultural formations, not essences, as Anderson and Scott seem to secretly still believe. And there is nothing, by the way, to say this particular approach is new to the French revolutionary tradition - hey, doesn’t the Jacobin Constitution of 1793 guarantee the right to cross-dress?

The symposium closed with an hour-long defense by Anderson, bringing the issue back to where it once belonged: not what the role was, but what the role of intellectuals like himself should be. And what is that? A few months back I had a long conversation with a very depressed French teenager - forgive the redundancy. We talked about the years leading up to ’68, about a constant, vicious repressiveness that no one dared to name. I was struck by the amount she understood about this - far more, I think, than most of the participants at the seminar in New York City. I told her (she had never heard) about the massacre of peaceful demonstrators at Métro Charonne in 1962, an event that marked my generation forever. Not all Places of Memory are in the books.

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