Tocqueville, America, and Us. Avant-propos

A partial English translation of this article appears under the title “Tocqueville” in a 1995 volume of essays on political philosophy edited by Mark Lilla for the series New French Thought.¹ The stated aim of this volume was to introduce English-speaking readers to a new generation of French thinkers who had rediscovered political philosophy in a country that had for decades cast it aside. The prestige of such intellectual trends as existentialism, Marxism, structuralism, and post-structuralism, each in their own way, distracted generations of French thinkers from properly political questions. It was the generation of thinkers whose intellectual development was shaped by the failed revolution of 1968 and the revelations of the true extent of the atrocities of Communist regimes that brought politics, and liberal politics in particular, back to the center of their writings.² The New French Thought volume, with this narrative in mind, sought primarily to showcase essays by members of this intellectual generation—which includes Marcel Gauchet along with Pierre Manent, Luc Ferry, and Gilles Lipovetsky—that focus on great thinkers of the liberal canon, new understandings of the history and key concepts of modern politics, or critiques of the illiberal aspects of contemporary French intellectual life.

Translating and reprinting the entirety of Gauchet’s essay today in 2016 is—in a sense—a far less ambitious undertaking. The first English publication of “Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous” sought to present the revival of liberal political thought (or, rather, thought about liberal politics) as a contemporary intellectual phenomenon. In other words, its aim was to diagnose a shift in the overwhelming philosophical trends of its own day, a break between the vanguard of today’s thinkers and those of previous decades. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was good reason to regard the present moment as the result of a long process of ideologisation and de-ideologisation. But almost thirty years since the essay’s original publication in Libre, however, there are equally good reasons to reconsider this narrative. This is not to say that such a redemptive tale of French intellectuals’ return to liberalism and the critique of totalitarianism is entirely false or historically outdated. Far from it. Reading “Tocqueville, America, and Us,” one finds a characterization of totalitarian extremism, for example, that remains contemporary. My only suggestion is that we are better served today by a more ambivalent analysis of the status and success liberalism in French thought of the last several decades. It is therefore my hope that a complete English translation of this essay will not only help introduce Anglophone readers to Gauchet’s work (which has been too little translated), but also aid in understanding the historical specificity of the so-called liberal moment in France.

Gauchet’s essay is a particularly good example of what can be gained by today’s English-speaking reader. One finds in “Tocqueville, America, and Us” not only an early version of the analysis Gauchet expands some years later in Le désenchantement du monde, but also an engagement—though mostly implicit—with many of the most prominent voices of twentieth century French intellectual life. In this early essay, Gauchet remains close to the teaching of his erstwhile mentor Claude Lefort, who characterized democracy as essentially a site of confrontation and conflict. His discussion of the notion of alterity in society draws on both the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas and the work of French anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres.³ And it is hard to read Gauchet’s polemical engagement with what he takes as the prevailing academic orthodoxy without noticing a thinly veiled jab at the work of Michel Foucault, anticipating his later criticism of Foucault’s history of madness. All of these engagements, furthermore, take place through a reading of Tocqueville, whose “revival” in the 1970s—largely thanks to Raymond Aron—is itself a major turning point in French intellectual history. To read this early work in Gauchet’s career is therefore to place oneself at a major crossroads of twentieth century French thought. [End Page 160...