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the Rights of Man. This poses certain thorny problems, not least
of coherence. For how can the notion of the rights of man, born
in an intellectual and philosophical context in which man was
considered a subject responsible for his actions, be reconciled
with Heidegger's view that, from now on, "it is no longer man
as such who matters" and that one must think "against subjectiv–
ity"? This is a serious question that should be posed and devel–
oped rigorously, rather than cultivating a patchwork philosophy
in typically French style. By taking this question seriously, one
is inevitably driven back to a critical rereading of the philosophy
of the 1960s.
This sort of critical rereading has recently begun in France,
both by sociologists and philosophers. For example, Gilles
Lipovetsky, inspired by the work of American sociologists, has
written a brilliant essay titled
L'ere du vide
(Gallimard, 1983),
which examines the relation between the intellectual move–
ments of the 1960s and the changes in Western societies over the
past twenty years. In this light, is there really anything
"revolutionary" or "deconstructive" about the philosophy of the
"sixties"? Was it really the rupture with existent thought and
reality that it pretended to be? Or was it not rather accompanied
by social changes already at work, changes marked by the rise
of liberal individualism and of a consumer society that the
"School of '68" seemed to denounce absolutely? In the West today
it might seem that the decade of the 1980s, with its ethos of private
self-fulfillment, is completely opposed to the collective values
concerning the family, business, and work that grew out of the
"reevaluation of values" begun in 1968. But one wonders: was this
rupture just a surface phenomenon? Lipovetsky's hypothesis,
borrowed from Daniel Bell, is that this confrontation with liberal
individualism did nothing more than give birth to a
hyperindividualism perfectly reconcilable with existing social
life. All that remains in order to support this hypothesis is to un–
cover the logic of what has, until now, just been presented as a
provocative paradox. We have attempted this in our essay, '68-'86:
Itineraires
de
l 'individu
(
Gallimard, 1987).
It is sufficient here to sketch out this logic on the intellectual
plane by considering the cultural effects of this radical critique
that was repeated,
ad nauseum,
in the different philosophical cur–
rents of the 1960s. Consider, for example, the manner in which
