Tocqueville, America, and Us. Preface written in 2016

The following article originally appeared in 1980. It is typical of a certain intellectual moment in France, one that fits into a much larger ideological moment—a global one, really—that one might call the “liberal turn” in our recent history.

Two dates come to mind: May 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the British elections, and November 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States. In France at that time, the liberal turn had none of the same political effects. Quite the opposite: in May 1981, it was François Mitterrand’s left-wing government that came to power, after spending 23 years in opposition. In the intellectual sphere, however, the subsequent move towards liberalism was profoundly felt, perhaps more so in France than elsewhere, because it marked a real rupture with the country’s tradition. After all, for the British and the Americans, a turn towards liberalism merely involved a return to what had been the dominant inspiration of their history. But for the French, this called into question the double heritage that their political culture was based on, both a revolutionary and statist past.

The most striking illustration of this impact is the series of lectures that Michel Foucault devoted to the subject between January and April 1979, now famous since its publication in 2004 under the misleading title, The Birth of Biopolitics. “The problem of liberalism presents itself to us, in effect, in its immediate and concrete reality,” Foucault says in order to justify this break from his initial program.¹ But I would cite two other important titles that perhaps offer a better idea of the tremors taking place at the time. François Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution, published in 1978, was a thunderclap in what had seemed to be the clear skies of the Marxist orthodoxy that read the bourgeois revolution of 1789 in light of the social revolution to come.² Furet’s insistence that “the French Revolution is over” had the effect of revealing that the emperor—“Revolution,” that is—had no clothes. In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition expanded on this analysis by extending it to all “grand narratives” of progress or emancipation.³ If the “immediate and concrete reality” of the liberal question, both in France and elsewhere (even in China!), was most apparent in the discussion of the role of the state in the economy, there was an additional discussion to be had concerning the decisive event in our national history that was the Revolution and, in a broader sense, the clashing visions of history caught up in the interpretation of this event. This was the array of questions that served as the background for the reflections I developed in “Tocqueville, America, and Us.” Even independently of my own case, however, this moment nourished an entire intellectual generation, lending its particular color to the reevaluation and reappropriation of the liberal tradition that became this generation’s task.

Among the major thinkers contributing to the renewal of the problem of liberalism, one also cannot fail to mention the impact of Louis Dumont’s Homo æqualis, which appeared in 1977. Dumont tackled the subject formidably, bringing to light the link between the development of the notion of economy and the affirmation of individualism from Mandeville to Marx. Pierre Rosanvallon took on a similar exploration in his 1979 Le capitalisme utopique.⁴ As for my own approach, I attacked the problem from a more political angle. The guiding thread throughout my work was the manner in which liberal thought emerged in France out of both the heritage of the Revolution, and the tradition that directly challenged this heritage.

In this sense, my study of Tocqueville was inseparable from my work editing the political writings of Benjamin Constant, which I took on at the same time and which also appeared in 1980 with a long preface entitled “The Lucid Illusion of Liberalism.”⁵ My thesis was, in short, that liberalism is blind to what makes it possible, which is at the same time the...