DOMINIQUE SCHNAPPER
229
William Phillips:
What about
Fran~ois
Revel?
Dominique Schnapper:
He is not a neoconservative, he's a liberal in our
terms!
Diana Trilling:
We would call him a neoconservative.
Dominique Schnapper:
You would call him a neoconservative?
William Phillips:
How would you characterize the magazine
Commen–
taire?
Dominique Schnapper: Commentaire
is considered Barriste , center-right,
what we call liberal , Tocquevillian . What would you call it, if not
liberal? How else would you characterize the Tocquevillian tradi–
tion?
Harold Kaplan:
On this point, remember Koestler and his progeny.
The closest thing to what we call neoconservative comes through
that.
Commentaire,
Revel, Casanova,
Besan~on,
even though he is
libn-al.
Dominique Schnapper:
Well, Revel, Casanova, and
Besan~on
are dif–
ferent cases.
Harold Kaplan:
Every neoconservative is different from every other
one. There is a family recognized there .
It
is no accident, as the
Marxists like to say. These people often meet with our neoconser–
vatives . You'll have from here people such as Irving Kristol and
Norman Podhoretz. So there is a sort of elective affinity, even
though the phenomena are not exactly alike.
Dominique Schnapper:
I would say that Kristol and Podhoretz have
something in common with the right wing of
Commentaire,
but not at
all with the left wing.
Diana Trilling:
How would you define that difference between the
right wing and the other wing of
Commentaire?
Dominique Schnapper:
They all are antigovernment. They all are an–
tineutralist in international relations . Most of them are not anti–
Third World . They are against the position that the Third World is
the responsibility only of the Europeans . Their position is that it
should be some kind of a common responsibility . Some of them, I'm
sure, would have been pro-Dreyfus right from the beginning. Some
others, not.
Leonard Kriegel:
I'm curious about how you define a trend that goes
from a pro-Soviet stance roughly from 1945 to 1970, and then
gradually becomes anti-Soviet, and now is firmly anti-Soviet. Has
glasnost
affected this at all? How do French intellectuals look upon
glasnost?
And how does that affect their view of America?
Dominique Schnapper:
Every time something happens in the Soviet
