The Ivankiad by Vladimir Voinovich

French Intellectuals Against the Left by Michael Scott Christofferson

I'm going to claim this one despite reading only four of six chapters.

Notes on five & six:

Chapter 5: The New Philosophers and their Interlocutors

• “New philosophy” was a late 1970s philosophical moment - rather than a movement - that was always more about politics than philosophy. It’s most closely associated with two French intellectuals, Andre Glucksmann and Bernard Henri-Levy, though a number of other authors together formed a very loose affiliation. If I had to summarize their ideas in a single sentence, it would be a pessimistic doubt that any structured political project - either revolutionary or not - can avoid descending into large-scale totalitarian violence like Auschwitz or the gulag, which they saw as emerging from the same rationalist & statist tradition as the governments of Western Europe and the U.S. Revolutionary projects are perhaps slightly more suspect because they tend to lead to an intensification of state violence owing to the Manichean, millenarian dynamics inherent to revolution. This led to an intense skepticism and distrust of any form of state power, which ultimately seems vaguely anarchist or, you could argue, libertarian. Because of this fundamental distrust, the only acceptable politics are modest, moral, and rights-based. But what’s interesting about them isn’t their ideas so much as their embodiment of what Christofferson calls “the coming of age of French antitotalitarianism.”
• New philosophy got its start as a marketing campaign by a publisher to sell books and only acquired a hint of coherence once it gathered attention as a critique of the Union of the Left. Christofferson again and again emphasizes the extent to which domestic political pressures drove, if not the genesis of these ideas, at least their prominence in French intellectual life.
• The impresario of new philosophy was Bernard Henri-Levy, who seemed to possess an intuitive gift for identifying intellectual trends and marketing himself to them. He found work at the publishing house Grasset, where he arranged contracts for many of his friends and marketed them as “new philosophers” regardless of how disparate their ideas were. So, once again, new philosophy started out as an essentially meaningless marketing term and only later became associated with an antitotalitarian critique of the French Left.
• Their notoriety was a product of a unique and brief historical moment: after the 1977 municipal elections, which the Union of the Left won by a landslide, and before the dissolution of the Union of the Left and subsequent electoral defeat in the 1978 parliamentary elections.
• At the time, there was considerable anxiety among the non-Communist left about the PCF gaining state power, and - as with Solzhenitsyn and other Eastern European dissidents - the new philosophers served as a cudgel with which to beat the PCF. Again, their fame originated in their political relevance much more so than the actual content of their ideas.
• A large element of that political relevance lay in the identity of the writers themselves as former Marxists - or at least claiming to be former Marxists. Glucksmann grew up in communist youth organizations and was a member of the PCF before breaking with it during the 1950s in reaction to the Hungarian invasion and PCF policy on the Algerian war. Henri-Levy claimed to have been at the barracks during the events of 1968, though Christofferson writes that this was untrue. In any case, both he and Glucksmann were of the left, which made their critique of Marxism all the more damning -- because it was an attack from the left.
• Moreover, new philosophy was a mass media phenomenon as well as a philosophical movement. Both Henri-Levy and Glucksmann were not at all averse to speaking in dramatic and simplistic formulas that played well on French TV. Throughout the summer of 1977, they appeared on TV shows debating different prominent intellectuals. One of their common rhetorical techniques was to claim that their critics were engaged in the same absolutist, discriminatory thinking that led to totalitarianism and the gulag. This made them undebatable, since they would just discredit the principles of logical debate itself. All this combined to sell a large number of books.
• They cast themselves as dissidents-to-be under a feared tyrannical government by the Union of the Left. In this way, they claimed for themselves some of the moral authority that Eastern European dissidents had come to enjoy in late 1970s France without actually facing any political repression.
• The two key texts of new philosophy were Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers & Henri-Levy’s Barbarism with a Human Face.
• The Master Thinkers argued that many of the big names of continental philosophy - Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc. - had provided the intellectual basis for the modern state’s project of domination. They had “put together the mental apparatus indispensable to the launching of the great final solutions of the twentieth century.” The state, by definition, seeks to control the organic and chaotic energies of the pleb, with whom Glucksmann is allied precisely because the pleb is not an organized - and therefore coercive - political force. In this way, Glucksmann’s book is populist, anti-intellectual, and anarchistic. 
• While Glucksmann does see hope in the plebs and their resistance to state coercion, Henri-Levy’s Barbarism with a Human Face is even more pessimistic, arguing that the only acceptable form of political action is a defensive assertion of moralism and rights in the face of exploitative state authority. His book sees in religion a bulwark against totalitarianism because religion imagines an otherworldly sovereign, which Henri-Levy thinks discourages transformative earthly politics. Without religion, the state takes itself to be sovereign and embarks on millenarian social projects, which inevitably end in tyranny.
• In its suspicion of the state and all political action, you could make the case that new philosophy is weirdly conservative.
• New philosophy benefitted from the support and endorsement of well established French intellectuals. For instance, Foucault praised and promoted Glucksmann, even though Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers had appropriated and simplified many of Foucault’s ideas. Likewise, an established intellectual journal called Tel quel praised Henri-Levy and opened its pages to him. In general, Christofferson sees this support as a savvy political move: Foucault and Tel quel had accurately gauged the contemporary political mood and hitched their names to the new philosophers as a way to promote their own brands.
• I would note that Christofferson conceives his subjects as primarily self-interested and politically sensitive. He always looks for a political motive behind these intellectuals’ decisions.
• The irony of the new philosophers was that they often posed as would-be dissidents, soon to be thrown in the gulag by an ascendent PCF, at exactly the same time that the PCF was moderating its position, disavowing the dictatorship of the proletariat, and criticizing the USSR. There was also no sustained, hardcore opposition to the new philosophers in French intellectual life. They played dissidents while benefitting from what was the hegemonic ideology of their time - antitotalitarianism. And while fear of a PCF-led government drove much of the anti-Left critique, the Left lost the 1978 election, and the PCF never recovered thereafter. 

Chapter 6: A Revisionist History of the French Revolution

• Christofferson argues that the work of Francois Furet was, in essence, an antitotalitarian polemic directed at the French Left disguised as a revisionist history of the French Revolution.
• Furet was a committed Marxist and member of the PCF until the late 1950s, though he would later claim that he had grown disillusioned with the party in the early 1950s.
• In the late 70s, it was a mark of farsighted prestige to have spotted the essential totalitarian nature of communism ahead of the curve, and the earlier the better. Therefore, Furet tried to locate his rejection of the party as early as possible, but his published work shows that he was a member of a reformist communist group in the late 50s and remained a Marxist into the 1960s. 
• After failing to complete his state doctorate, he turned to journalism, only returning to history when, according to Christofferson, he saw a way to advance his public profile through history writing.
• The book that marked the full development of the position that made him famous was called Interpreting the French Revolution. It appeared in 1978, again at the high water mark of this antitotalitarian moment. 
• The book argues that the Terror was an inevitable outgrowth of the Manichean dynamics of revolution, and that conversely Jacobinism as a revolutionary ideology was sufficient to explain the development of the revolution. Ideology and only ideology dictated their actions. Revolutionary ideology led inevitably to repression because the revolution declares everything prior to itself to be obsolete and deserving of extinction, while at the same time denying that there can be any objective obstacles to the its revolutionary program. Therefore, if the revolution does encounter obstacles, they can only be the work of enemies, which must be destroyed.
• Moreover, Furet suggested that the repressive illiberalism of the Revolution still lay at the heart of French political culture, which explained why so many intellectuals, including his younger self, were blind to communism’s true nature. His thesis provided an excuse for all the ex-communists seeking to defend themselves from the antitotalitarian critique. 
• Ultimately, Furet was smearing the French Revolution with the now-disgraced reputation of the Soviet Union, suggesting that they belonged to the same tainted revolutionary tradition. 
• As with the new philosophers, Furet read the political winds correctly and enjoyed considerable success for his antitotalitarian interpretation of the French Revolution
• I dislike theories of totalitarianism because they tend to steamroll flat - often for politically questionable motives - diverse political and historical phenomena, ideas, trends, etc. It’s a process of clumsy equivalencies. Revolution becomes Marxism becomes the Soviet Union becomes Stalin becomes the gulag. 1937 becomes 1977. Stalin and Hitler might as well be the same thing because, hey, they both put people in camps. One immediate giveaway is that totalitarianism only exists for antitotalitarians, and so it is only defined in opposition, as a collection of undesirable tendencies. And since totalitarianism is always cast as the ultimate bad, it serves mainly as a political slur for all the things you’ve usefully grouped together. It’s just a shitty rhetorical technique, a reductio ad hitlerum.