French Intellectuals Against the Left

by Christofferson, Michael Scott; Hansen, Per H.; Society for European Business History

• ISBN13: 9781571814272
• ISBN10: 1571814272
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-07-01
• Publisher: Berghahn Books

Summary

In the latter half of the 1970s, the French intellectual Left denounced communism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics through a critique of left-wing totalitarianism that paved the way for today's postmodern, liberal, and moderate republican political options. Contrary to the dominant understanding of the critique of totalitarianism as an abrupt rupture induced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Christofferson argues that French anti-totalitarianism was the culmination of direct- democratic critiques of communism and revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. The author's focus on the direct-democratic politics of French intellectuals offers an important alternative to recent histories that seek to explain the course of French intellectual politics by France's apparent lack of a liberal tradition.

Author Biography

Martin Dean is an applied research scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC Wilfried Feldenkirchen holds the chair of Economic, Social and Business History at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg Gerald D. Feldman teaches history at the University of California in Berkeley Neil Forbes is Senior Lecturer in history in the School of International Studies and Law at Coventry University Per H. Hansen is Professor of Business History at Copenhagen Business School Peter Hayes is Professor of History and German, and Theodore Zev Weiss Professor of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University, Illinois Lars Heide is an Associate Professor of Business History at Copenhagen Business School Kurt Jacobsen is an Associate professor of Business History at Copenhagen Business School Christopher Kobrak is a Certified Public Accountant with ten years of practical business experience Christopher Kopper is currently teaching history at the University of Pittsburgh Eduard Kubu is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Charles University Jiri Novotny holds a Ph.D. and is the leading archivist of the Czech National Bank Luciano Segreto is the Chairman of the History department of the University of Florence Jiri Sousa is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Department of Auxiliary Historical Sciences and Archival Studies, Charles University Mira Wilkins is Professor of Economics and Business History at Florida International University Jana Wustenhagen is a lecturer in the department of history at the Martin-Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Abbreviations	ix
Introduction	1	(26)
From Fellow-Traveling to Revisionism: The Fate of the Revolutionary Project, 1944-1974	27	(62)
The Gulag as a Metaphor: The Politics of Reactions to Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago	89	(24)
Intellectuals and the Politics of the Union of the Left: The Birth of Antitotalitarianism	113	(43)
Dissidence Celebrated: Intellectuals and Repression in Eastern Europe	156	(28)
Antitotalitarianism Triumphant: The New Philosophers and Their Interlocutors	184	(45)
Antitotalitarianism Against the Revolutionary Tradition: Francois Furet's Revisionist History of the French Revolution	229	(38)
Epilogue and Conclusion	267	(10)
Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources	277	(6)
Index	283