DMITRY SHLAPENTOKH
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was Tocqueville's contemporary and spent most of his life in exile in
France. Herzen shared Tocqueville's vision of America and added that
while in Imperial Russia the Secret Police (Third Section) watched over
you, in America, society itself took on the role of the Secret Police. Sev–
eral generations after Herzen, Carl G. Jung arrived in America.
Although celebrated as the guru from Switzerland who enlightened
Americans about "archetypes" and the "collective subconscious," lung,
upon his return to Europe, noted that he hardly found traces of the
much-celebra ted America n ind ivid ua Iism, and that Americans dissol ved
personalities
to
reflect the group they belonged to.
The idea that Americans were actually anti-individualistic and mem–
bers of an overly controlling society was not popular throughout most of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, twentieth-century Amer–
ica was seen as the embodiment of the West and of individuality. The
U.S. was often opposed to the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany, the
U.S.S.R., and China-where the state played the role of "Big Brother"
who controlled political and personal life. The notion that America was
a country of uninhibited individualism was not seriously challenged even
in the 1960s, when a new generation of French philosophers began to
question the belief that Illodern capitalism leads to a free society.
Michel Foucault, one of the most popular French philosophers in the
[960S, was often cited by those in favor of the sexual revolution. He
argued that the nature of a society and the relationships of people in it
were defined by what he called the "episteme," whose essential aspect
in modern Western society was restrictiveness. In fact, Foucault saw
Illodern Western civilization as a dictatorship. He located the essence of
freedom not in political life but in daily life, including the way one could
engage in sex: society legitimized only one form of sex-the procreative
activities of married couples. He noted that sex as an enjoyable activity
in its own right had disappeared altogether.
Despite his anti-capitalist barbs and his conclusion that the contem–
porary West was nothing but a circular prison where the inmates' daily
lives were watched and regulated, Foucault maintained some positive
views of the U.S. To be sure, he readily took American imperialism to
task, but he never railed at Americans. In fact, he and his fellow leftists
had an admiring public in the United States. As to sexual freedom, he
found America more relaxed than Europe. Here, he could enjoy his
homosexualitv without recrimination.
By the end of the Cold War, the European Left maintained that the
restrictiveness and controlling aspects of capitalism as a political and
economic system were not only attributes of capitalism, but also of the
