Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

Rating:
Summary: A Fine Example
Review: A fine example of polemical quidnuncery. Despite ostensibly, or nominally, being a history of post war French intellectuals, this tract shows precious little evidence of having read, let alone understood, the seminal works of the period (a period which, in retrospect represent an immense intellectual and political adventure). So, for example, there is not a jot of evidence that the author has engaged with Sartre's immense omnium gatherum, the "Critique of Dialectical Reason" or the flawed masterpiece on Flaubert. Instead, Mr Judt prefers, modestly, to confine his argument to what seems to be easier for him to understand, vis: cowardice, treachery small-mindedness and political tergiversations, all of which are sedolously catalogued.Thus, the private lives and political promiscuities of such obvious geniuses as Sartre are used as a proboscis or ferule (or tripwire) with which to berate the thinker in question for daring to deviate from bourgeois orthodoxies. While such diversionary peccadilos may be of interest to the quidnunc, they are no substitute for philosophical reflection - something in which this screed is sadly lacking.

Rating:
Summary: Ruthless dissection of French intellectual scene
Review: After reading Tony Judt's relentless ripping apart of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and other post-war French intellectual fellow-travelers, one might be forgiven for wondering whether the author actually likes France. I am sure he does; it is just the unbelievable pig-headedness and irresponsibility of some of France's most acclaimed "thinkers" in the 1940s and 1950s that he cannot stand. The question that nags at the reader as he progresses through this book is: Just why did anyone take Sartre and co. seriously? Tony Judt not only has the answer, he issues a very pertinent warning about the current French fashion for deriding the intellectual perversions of the immediate post-war era. Putting it bluntly, a certain type of bone-headed universalism and a penchant for meaningless abstract riddles that seem peculiar to French intellectuals have by no means disappeared.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not as good as I had hoped
Review: This is a decent book, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I had expected: Tony Judt's writing is usually crisper and more analytic. Alas, in this case he may have set out to write a book, but what he delivered has more than a whiff of sermon: too many sonorous phrases and not enough clinical analysis. Interestingly, I had exactly the same problem with Furet's 'The Passing of an Illusion', though I thought at the time that that was just a case of Academicianitis. Something about this subject seems to provoke reasonable people to clamber onto a pulpit to deliver an argument that should really be a slam dunk.

Sartre didn't just look like a wall-eyed toad, he was a wall-eyed toad all the way through, but Judt can't quite bring himself to say so. In fact he shows quite a bit of residual indulgence in the way, e.g., he describes Sartre's writing in the sixties as 'silly' when the proper word is 'disgusting'. (Deep in his heart, Judt seems to think his subjects should, in spite of everything, be granted more respect than the current generation and, in particular, more respect than Bernard-Henri Levy, but I don't see why - at least BHL has never endorsed the murder of people he doesn't like). Judt doesn't really in the end manage to explain to me why the little cacomorph and his friends were so indulged for so long.

The best bit is the discussion of the French relationship to liberalism (or why there isn't one), which is unqualifiedly good, together with the remarks on the sociology of postwar Parisian intellectual culture - not surprising, since this is the stuff Judt really knows. On the other hand, the one page summaries, analyses, and dismissals of philosophical positions are slightly embarassing. Richard Wolin got whacked around the quad and assigned 500 pages of Habermass by Richard Rorty recently for this sort of thing. Being on the side of Wolin and Judt, not Rorty, I wish they wouldn't do it. (Slightly) ironically, toward the end, Judt remarks in passing - he could/should have said a lot more - on the intellectual laziness and slovenliness of his subjects: the way they substituted glibness for thought, and showed no qualms about holding forth on a subject, be it economics, sociology, foreign politics or bombinating cockatrices, without knowing, or even seemingly caring, whether they really had the slightest idea. Rablais's assessment of the Sorbonne needs no revision, 25 generations later.

This is part of a growing shelf of modern stuff to file beside Julien Benda: along with Judt, we have Furet, Wolin, Lilla, etc., but the definitive work on the pathology of French (and German) intellectual culture over the last hundred years has yet to appear. It will eventually: the subject is just too inviting.