http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/6067/full
EXCERPT: How the British Think would make a strange title for a book — at least that is what my friends in Britain tell me. But [...] an exploration of French thought is more justified. Thinking, it seems, is part of France’s history and one of the characteristics the French are famous for.
In his latest book, How the French Think, Sudhir Hazareesingh [...] shares his deep knowledge of the French passion for the intellectual quest. [...] The book is rich in information and anecdotes and easy to read, and it shows a love of France [...]
The French are rationalists, and like abstraction; they divide the world into right and wrong, and of course between Left and Right; they are fond of utopianism and believe — or believed — in progress and science.
[...] But today, according to Hazareesingh, because of the end of Communism, which was deeply rooted among French intellectuals, the fading of structuralism, and anxiety about France’s identity in a globalised world, the French have come to doubt themselves and their intellectual destiny. This can be seen in the decline of France’s intellectual life and in its fading intellectual influence in the world.
I think that the situation is even more depressing than that. [...] It is true that there are still great French writers and thinkers, and that newer disciplines like economics offer new kinds of talents. But as a cultural phenomenon, I don’t think that French thought has survived.
France was never such a thing as an entire nation of thinkers [...] But there was a deep respect among ordinary people for the cultivated elite [...] Now a large part of this elite pays no attention to culture any more, as is shown by the poverty of their language. One cannot help comparing the eloquence of, say, Charles de Gaulle, and the spiritual vacuum that someone like François Hollande represents. [...] Or open any recent fiction or non-fiction publication in French: the vocabulary range is shrinking, the sentences are three words long and the form is always fashionably deconstructed — but not à la Derrida.
If the present is embarrassing, is the past as glorious as one might suppose? Hazareesingh, describing the French intellectual pantheon, includes all the main strands of French thought — Descartes, positivism, Gaullism, Marxism, structuralism, liberalism — all inevitably placed on the same level. [...] Why all the praise for Sartre and Marxism? Or for the structuralists? French Marxism, a rather rigid kind of Leninism followed by a Latin Quarter Maoism, was either intellectual nonsense or an insult to real people struggling in the USSR and elsewhere. As for structuralism, apart from the great Lévi-Strauss and the sometimes interesting but strange Foucault, it is difficult to see much sense in, for example, Lacan’s one-minute sessions where he shouted at patients for a large fee.
I am left to wonder: did all countries have such strange intellectual moods? Were the French mad? Were they really thinking? It all depends on what you call thinking. I may be very un-French, but because something is grandiose or unintelligible doesn’t make it worthy of being called thinking. Support for revolution and destruction — of institutions or of the bourgeoisie, for example — doesn’t necessarily justify the description of thinking. I suspect that Hazareesingh would disagree with me....
EXCERPT: How the British Think would make a strange title for a book — at least that is what my friends in Britain tell me. But [...] an exploration of French thought is more justified. Thinking, it seems, is part of France’s history and one of the characteristics the French are famous for.
In his latest book, How the French Think, Sudhir Hazareesingh [...] shares his deep knowledge of the French passion for the intellectual quest. [...] The book is rich in information and anecdotes and easy to read, and it shows a love of France [...]
The French are rationalists, and like abstraction; they divide the world into right and wrong, and of course between Left and Right; they are fond of utopianism and believe — or believed — in progress and science.
[...] But today, according to Hazareesingh, because of the end of Communism, which was deeply rooted among French intellectuals, the fading of structuralism, and anxiety about France’s identity in a globalised world, the French have come to doubt themselves and their intellectual destiny. This can be seen in the decline of France’s intellectual life and in its fading intellectual influence in the world.
I think that the situation is even more depressing than that. [...] It is true that there are still great French writers and thinkers, and that newer disciplines like economics offer new kinds of talents. But as a cultural phenomenon, I don’t think that French thought has survived.
France was never such a thing as an entire nation of thinkers [...] But there was a deep respect among ordinary people for the cultivated elite [...] Now a large part of this elite pays no attention to culture any more, as is shown by the poverty of their language. One cannot help comparing the eloquence of, say, Charles de Gaulle, and the spiritual vacuum that someone like François Hollande represents. [...] Or open any recent fiction or non-fiction publication in French: the vocabulary range is shrinking, the sentences are three words long and the form is always fashionably deconstructed — but not à la Derrida.
If the present is embarrassing, is the past as glorious as one might suppose? Hazareesingh, describing the French intellectual pantheon, includes all the main strands of French thought — Descartes, positivism, Gaullism, Marxism, structuralism, liberalism — all inevitably placed on the same level. [...] Why all the praise for Sartre and Marxism? Or for the structuralists? French Marxism, a rather rigid kind of Leninism followed by a Latin Quarter Maoism, was either intellectual nonsense or an insult to real people struggling in the USSR and elsewhere. As for structuralism, apart from the great Lévi-Strauss and the sometimes interesting but strange Foucault, it is difficult to see much sense in, for example, Lacan’s one-minute sessions where he shouted at patients for a large fee.
I am left to wonder: did all countries have such strange intellectual moods? Were the French mad? Were they really thinking? It all depends on what you call thinking. I may be very un-French, but because something is grandiose or unintelligible doesn’t make it worthy of being called thinking. Support for revolution and destruction — of institutions or of the bourgeoisie, for example — doesn’t necessarily justify the description of thinking. I suspect that Hazareesingh would disagree with me....