94
PARTISAN REVIEW
Europe is entering the margins of the present world economy, which
has just shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific in Braudelian terms .
Like Venice in the seventeenth century, France has been overtaken
by the Antwerp and London of the new Pacific countries . There is
nothing which can be done to fight against this inexorable trend but
to accept it and to look increasingly for
social
solutions to economic
problems . Minc joins Albert in stressing that with the end of postwar
growth, economics as a reference value and as an intellectual
discipline has failed, sinking in front of the double problem of infla–
tion and unemployment in a world of "crazy subsystems." Both
authors point out that even at the height of its postwar economic
boom, the French economy created at most 200,000 jobs annually.
In a far more negative international context, there is no economic
solution with which to absorb two million unemployed.
Rather than looking pragmatically for other economic solutions
or tinkering with available tools, these French thinkers have aban–
doned the purely economic sphere altogether in what can be con–
strued as a return to a classic, French posture which always con–
sidered economics as "base." Indeed it is significant that all three
authors stress the degree to which France never had an economic
humus,
and that Frenchmen fail to think as
homo economicus
in a
culture which always eschewed political and economic liberalism,
and feared the notion of the marketplace while favoring grandiose
economic projects destined to bolster the political visions of Louis
XIV's descendents. In Closets's, Albert's , and Minc's work the old
arguments linked to France's archaic economic mentality are
resurfacing after a decade of being considered outdated. In a similar
vein, France's distance from the United States is once more
measured in terms of a growing abyss. Albert stresses the extent to
which America has all the necessary elements with which to solve
her economic crisis in economic terms (energy resources, the dollar
as international currency, a self-sufficient market); Minc points out
that the United States remains at the center of the new world
economy by simply shifting coasts from the Atlantic to the Pacific in
an internal pivoting measure. France instead appears as both the
victim of geography and of a fierce economic setting in which she has
no control over the key variables .
The economic pessimism of these thinkers stands in marked
opposition to the political and economic voluntarism of the Socialists
in power, even if they too have lowered their sights in the past year.
