H.
J.
KAPLAN
373
pressed in your letter.
By facts on the ground I mean politics, the abrasive daily give and take
of government and opposition in a democratic society; and the most readily
observable fact about politics here is that the subject of your inquiry is not an
issue at all. Nor does anyone on either side, both consisting of quite
heterogeneous elements, seem to have any expectation or hope of making it
one. On the face of it this might seem surprising, in view of the fact that Mit–
terrand fil"st came to power through an alliance with the Communist Party,
then already in decline but more important numerically and intellectually than
it is today. The opposition, however, at least since Mitterrand retreated from
the nationalizations of the first years and from the inflationary social policies
and the old-fashioned "archeo-socialist" rhetoric that went with them, seems
for the most part to have resisted any temptation it might have had to recall
the common Marxist roots of communism and socialism in France , or to
suggest that projects and ideas still cherished by the non-Communist lett in
this country were in any measure responsible for the economic and social
disaster that has been visited upon the peoples of Eastern Europe. The
principal reason for this, it seems to me, is that the projects and ideas in
question - all involving some increment of governmental assistance to groups
and individuals in trouble - are still seen as electorally popular here, whereas
free market ideas continue to be regarded with a great deal of ambivalence,
and not least by certain elements of the
patnmat,
that is, management, itself.
To be sure, all political parties (except the dwindling Communist Party)
now officially defend the principle of the market economy - up to the stake,
exclusively, as Rabelais put it. In practice everyone expects them to be more
or less
dirigiste,
which means to pursue some form of industrial policy. Philo–
sophicalliberalism
a
la Milton Friedman raised its head a few years ago, and
produced some books with provocative titles, like
Demain Ie Capitalisrne
(F01waTd to Capitalism),
but this line of thinking has yet to root itself deeply
here, although it constitutes one of the oldest sub-plots in the history of
French social thinking. In its new incarnation, in any case, its chief target was
not Marxism as such or Communism (because that would have been tanta–
mount to beating a dead horse) but rather the statism
cum
mercantilism,
reminiscent of Colbert and the
ancien Tigime,
which seems
to
coopt the most
determined French
libimux
once they are in power. ... Which is not to say
that philosophical liberalism has left no traces and has no future among the
intelligentsia; on the contrary, there is a recrudescence of interest in the En–
glish classical economists, in Mill, in Burke (a new translation of the
Collected
WOTks
is being prepared by Georges Liebert of Laffont), and of course in
such French ancestors as Tocqueville and Jean-Baptiste Say. All this cannot
be unrelated to the spectacular bankruptcy of socialism in Eastern Europe. I
