Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

Credit goes to Judt for persuasively arguing his point of view on French intellectuals - Sartre above all - and their softness on communism and the Soviet Union in the post-World War II context. It is at once an interesting and clearly written book, and yet quite irritating in its tone, which tends towards the supercilious. Judt rarely has any doubts about his judgments about people or events, and a bit more modesty would do him greater credit as an historian. It would be all the more engaging if he allowed the possibility that there are other viewpoints which have merit. That type of concession is found in his much finer volume on Aron, Camus and Blum, but not here. His polemical style and tone are not endearing, but this book is still worth the read, and his viewpoint needs to be heard and considered, even if it is very one-sided. Judt is not the person to consult for a balanced, unbiased understanding of Sartre's politics, and he is, as usual, too much the apologist for Camus, whose position on the Algerian war for independence never receives the critical analysis from Judt that is required. But Judt is just the person to consult as a corrective for those unaware of some of the absurdities which, indeed, were part of Sartre's political engagements in the turbulence of the postwar world. Ironically, Judt somewhat resembles Sartre in his inability to listen to the opposite viewpoint! Still, no one in English has argued better than Judt this critique of French intellectuals' seduction by the ideology of communism following the war. Strongly recommended, but with major reservations.

This is a decent book, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I had expected: Tony Judt's writing is usually crisper and more analytic. Alas, in this case he may have set out to write a book, but what he delivered has more than a whiff of sermon: too many sonorous phrases and not enough clinical analysis. Interestingly, I had exactly the same problem with Furet's 'The Passing of an Illusion', though I thought at the time that that was just a case of Academicianitis. Something about this subject seems to provoke reasonable people to clamber onto a pulpit to deliver an argument that should really be a slam dunk. Sartre didn't just look like a wall-eyed toad, he was a wall-eyed toad all the way through, but Judt can't quite bring himself to say so. In fact he shows quite a bit of residual indulgence in the way, e.g., he describes Sartre's writing in the sixties as 'silly' when the proper word is 'disgusting'. (Deep in his heart, Judt seems to think his subjects should, in spite of everything, be granted more respect than the current generation and, in particular, more respect than Bernard-Henri Levy, but I don't see why - at least BHL has never endorsed the murder of people he doesn't like). Judt doesn't really in the end manage to explain to me why the little cacomorph and his friends were so indulged for so long. The best bit is the discussion of the French relationship to liberalism (or why there isn't one), which is unqualifiedly good, together with the remarks on the sociology of postwar Parisian intellectual culture - not surprising, since this is the stuff Judt really knows. On the other hand, the one page summaries, analyses, and dismissals of philosophical positions are slightly embarassing. Richard Wolin got whacked around the quad and assigned 500 pages of Habermas by Richard Rorty recently for this sort of thing. Being on the side of Wolin and Judt, not Rorty, I wish they wouldn't do it. (Slightly) ironically, toward the end, Judt remarks in passing - he could/should have said a lot more - on the intellectual laziness and slovenliness of his subjects: the way they substituted glibness for thought, and showed no qualms about holding forth on a subject, be it economics, sociology, foreign politics or bombinating cockatrices, without knowing, or even seemingly caring, whether they really had the slightest idea. Rabelais's assessment of the Sorbonne needs no revision, 25 generations later. This is part of a growing shelf of modern stuff to file beside Julien Benda: along with Judt, we have Furet, Wolin, Lilla, etc., but the definitive work on the pathology of French (and German) intellectual culture over the last hundred years has yet to appear. It will eventually: the subject is just too inviting.

After reading Tony Judt's relentless ripping apart of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and other post-war French intellectual fellow-travelers, one might be forgiven for wondering whether the author actually likes France. I am sure he does; it is just the unbelievable pig-headedness and irresponsibility of some of France's most acclaimed "thinkers" in the 1940s and 1950s that he cannot stand. The question that nags at the reader as he progresses through this book is: Just why did anyone take Sartre and co. seriously? Tony Judt not only has the answer, he issues a very pertinent warning about the current French fashion for deriding the intellectual perversions of the immediate post-war era. Putting it bluntly, a certain type of bone-headed universalism and a penchant for meaningless abstract riddles that seem peculiar to French intellectuals have by no means disappeared.