MARK LILLA
259
gan to seem intellectually and, yes, morally suspect after these reve–
lations . (Why it took them this long - after having rejected the
testimony of Arthur Koestler, Gustav Herling, and countless
others - is a question the French have yet to confront.)
As we in the United States are well aware, the crumbling of
Marxist orthodoxy need not necessarily regenerate intellectual ener–
gies. But in France it did. Over the past ten years Paris has wel–
comed a number of new magazines and thinkers, all antitotalitarian
and anticommunist (the two finally being equated), but otherwise
quite fresh and various. We simply cannot compare our magazines
of the same political tendencies to the breadth and seriousness to be
encountered in
Le Dibat, Commentaire,
La
Liberti
de
l'Esprit,
and the
renovated
Esprit.
And if no giants dominate the scene as Aron and
Sartre once did, the new atmosphere has allowed other, less engaged
thinkers to stand out. The most important French historian today,
for example, is not Fernand Braudel but
Fran~ois
Furet, whose revi–
sionist history of the Revolution and its aftermath has made all
French intellectuals in this history-drunk land confront their own
troubled liberal tradition . Political and moral philosophy once again
seem possible, now that intellectuals have crept out from Marx's
shadow; for them, a respectable ethics and politics must be based on
a defense of human rights, and whether they lean slightly left or
right their inspiration today is that other German, Immanuel Kant.
(French Kantians-think of it!) The works of Luc Ferry and Alain
Renault are the best in this line, but again, like Furet's books, they
have yet to find an American audience.!
Do I exaggerate? After all, many members of the old and new
left still control the highest positions in the French academy, and
some are still card-carrying Party members . These positions, in such
a centralized country, in turn mean tremendous patronage powers,
which are ruthlessly employed. Yet one finds, as has often been the
case in France before, that the real center of intellectual life is not to
be found at the apex of the institutional pyramid. The intellectual
"avant-garde," one might say, has moved on. What makes this latest
movement perhaps difficult for many Americans to understand and
to accept is that, for the very first time, the avant-garde is not radical
but liberal.
1. A translation of
La pensie
'68 by Luc Ferry and Alain Renault
will
be published
this fall by the University of Massachusetts Press .
