SFHS 2015. Part Two of Two.

Here is the promised second post on the SFHS. I’ve delayed long enough that these papers aren’t really fresh in my mind any longer, but I want to get this off my plate. Apologies for any misrepresentations! I’ll say only that these papers deserve a more thoroughgoing treatment than I’m able to give them here.   

Saturday morning, at a little after 8:30, the panel “Beyond Determinism: Rethinking the Philosophy of History and Political Economy in Postwar France” got underway. Presenters included, in order, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Alexander Arnold, and Aner Barzilay, with comment from Michael Behrent. All three papers were excellent and, at least for me, educational. Behrent’s comment was exemplary—at least what I heard of it. Since I had to leave part way through I won’t have anything to say about it here.   

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (hereafter: DSJ) delivered a paper on Raymond Aron entitled (I think) “Liberal Dictatorship, Aron’s Critique of Hayek’s Concept of Liberty,” drawn from his dissertation in progress on Aron. DSJ framed his project broadly as rescuing Aron from the historiographical box of ‘lonely liberal critic of Marxism.’ Aron was more than just a critic of Marxism, and engaged in a fruitful way with many different intellectuals (as it happens I posted some notes on one of DSJ’s earlier papers about Aron and Schmitt here). In particular, Aron leveled his critical fire at various forms of ideology that found material support in the United States—development theory, realist IR, etc—that made universalizing claims something like Marxism. DSJ’s goal in this particular paper is to argue against the understanding of Aron as a neo-liberal, as someone who walked the now-famous road to Mont Pelerin, who was influenced by Hayek especially after a wartime stay in London. It isn’t so, DSJ says.

DSJ develops his critique of the neo-liberal Aron first by criticizing or “mitigating” the moment of sociability, the networks, that have been pointed to in linking Aron to neo-liberalism. The heart of the paper, though, is an archival record of a talk Aron gave in 1955 at a conference in Milan (sponsored by the CCF, and in their archive). The context of this talk was Aron’s new prominence as the author of The Opium of the Intellectuals and especially the “end of ideology” thesis found in its last chapter. This is great material, and  DSJ contextualizes the debate in an exemplary way—this, really, is the paper. The point for DSJ’s larger argument is that Aron describes Hayekian liberalism as ideological in the same way as Marxism—indeed he apparently said there that “at the end of the day, what the liberalism of Hayek constitutes is inverted Marxism.” Economic inevitability ruled both vision of the future, although they pointed in different directions. Hayek would require, as in the title of the talk, a “liberal dictator” to get his system off the ground. Well, Rousseau needed his legislator, so perhaps this isn’t so unreasonable. I’d be interested, in light of this discussion, to go back and re-read Aron’s “États democratiques et états totalitaires” (June 1939).

As is sometimes the case with this sort of argument, by the end I wondered how anyone could possibly have ever thought of Aron as a neoliberal. Perhaps this was clarified in the Q&A. My guess would be that this label is as much an artifact of the polemical theater of French intellectual politics as anything else. DSJ did not spend very much time establishing the definition of neoliberalism according to which Aron would be one, and it seems to me that in fact Aron was a liberal, not a neoliberal. DSJ makes the case (I think convincingly) that a key difference between him and Hayek was that the latter never really accepted the legitimacy of democracy, while Aron did. Having spent some time reading Élie Halévy, Aron now sounds to me more and more like his student, or, conversely, as though Halévy really was Aron’s maître-penseur. The talk mentioned above was, after all, delivered on the heels of an extremely pessimistic survey of the field by Halévy. Perhaps we can say that Aron’s liberalism was, at first, anti-totalitarian, but that he learned to shed this fear as Hayek did not? In any case, a great presentation from DSJ.

Next up was Alexander Arnold, whose dissertation concerns postwar (up to 80s) French political economy, and who spoke about Rosanvallon and economic determinism. This paper was also great, the product of lots of reading of Rosanvallon. I myself make use of Rosanvallon’s work, but I read him first as a historian (the book on Guizot, for instance)—so this paper was particularly interesting for me. Essentially, Arnold reconstructs Rosanvallon’s political economy as he developed it over the course of the 1970s, in his writings as an autogestionnaire. An important climax is the critique of Marx offered in Le capitalisme utopique. I’m not certain that I’m reconstructing Arnold’s reading correctly here, but the idea seems to be that Rosanvallon believes we should read classical political economy as philosophy, not really as a description of economic reality. At its base is an utopique description of the subject, for instance. Nonetheless, Adam Smith—and here, can this really be what Rosanvallon thinks? It’s been some time since I looked at that book—allows us for the first time to philosophically grasp both the institution and the continuity of society. But this is not a description of the world. Marx, however, took the writings of liberal political economy for such a description, and his critique is principally a critique of that economic (in fact philosophical) writing, not of the real economy. “There is enormous distance between concrete society and the discourse of political economy.” Capitalism, in reality, should be understood in a minimal way, which allows for the construction of democratic—autogestionnaire—alternatives, or really reforms.  

This account of political economy, Arnold argues, or really this inattention to it, left Rosanvallon and the deuxième gauche more generally unprepared to meet the challenges of austerity that emerged in the Mitterand years. My central question here is not so much about the reconstruction of Rosanvallon—although I would be interested to see this story extended into his much deeper engagement with the French liberal tradition as the 80s wore on—but about this ‘response.’ Who has been able to meet these challenges? As far as I can tell no one really offers a really compelling account of what is to be done (at least no one who isn’t on the side of austerity). The best Marxisant analyses I’ve seen are rather grim. So what does Arnold want Rosanvallon to have done? To have occupied a more intransigent oppositional position? I’m not sure. In any case, to have avoided advocating “d’apprentissage collectif d’austérité...”

I’m leaving out here a number of things: especially Arnold’s nuanced discussion of the merits of Rosanvallon’s self-description of autogestion as ‘realist,’ and Daniel Lindberg’s criticisms of this; and then the larger framing of the paper in the history of liberalism, and adjudication between the political and the economic aspects of this. I look forward to reading more.

Finally, there was Aner Barzilay, whose talk was “Foucault and Deleuze’s Hidden Debate about Nietzsche” [paraphrase!], and whose dissertation is on Foucault’s Nietzsche. The larger project is to emphasize the continuities on the level of philosophy in Foucault’s oeuvre. This is in reaction to an over-emphasis on the late lectures and on Foucault as a theorist of something called ‘neoliberalism.’ The larger context is above all the question of the transcendental and the subject—trying to keep the two apart. Nietzsche is the most important reference for Foucault, the actuator of the whole project. Barsilay’s talk here is a reconstruction of a (largely implied) dialogue between Foucault and Deleuze, and it is built around Barzilay’s archival discovery of a 1977 note from Deleuze to Foucault discussing just these issues. The exchange and the moment are fascinating. This period, and the political break between the two philosophers, has now received a certain amount of attention. So it is remarkable and much to be appreciated that Barzilay can still bring something new to that table.

I cannot do justice to Barzilay’s talk, so I won’t try to report its details. Delicate questions regarding the nature of the transcendental, the plaisir/desire distinction, and power as Kantian schematization of the subject, were all dissected. Neither Deleuze nor Foucault is to be taken lightly, and Barzilay approaches at a level of textual involvement but also abstraction that makes summary difficult. Again, I’d like to read. 

I agree broadly that we should take Foucault’s earlier work more seriously when thinking about the later lectures. The problem of the subject—historical, transcendental, prison, etc—is indeed clearly a central one for Foucault (and the career-long circling around Kant is unsurprising). I’m less convinced by the centrality of Nietzsche for Foucault generally, but I think this is mostly because I’m skeptical that there’s much of a ‘there’—what did Nietzsche mean, really? To what extent did Foucault take what he needed to take from this corpus? The reference seems constantly to be to the Genealogy, which isn’t the same thing as Nietzsche. But, after all, the point of the larger project is presumably to argue this point. My larger concern with the paper is, I’m sure, not really justified, but here it goes. This paper is, almost, saying: ‘hey, I know you think that the late Foucault is about investigating the actual conditions in which living human beings are made to suffer, but no, in fact it’s about the far more important question of avoiding the transcendental subject!’ I suppose what I want from Barzilay is an account of how the political thought of this newly continuous philosopher-Foucault looks different, or should be appreciated differently, from the less-continuous version of Foucault against which Barzilay is arguing.

I think this is a legitimate question (despite everything) because all three of these papers were about attempts to grapple with the nature of the State. [I'd have liked, also, to hear more explicitly about the question of determinism--although perhaps the originally-planned fourth paper would have helped with this focus]. This common problem was of course clear. Barzilay mentioned, at the end of his talk—and I’ve lost track of in precisely what register, and would like to know—that to refer to the state is to bring a knife to the gunfight of modern politics. There is also Foucault’s famous remark from the lectures about cutting off the head of the State, as well as that of the King. But at issue between Aron and Hayek was interpretation of the nature of the State; and Rosanvallon’s political economy seems also to have turned on the capacity of a subject—a State? A syndicat?—to intervene in the economy. Now, this was self-consciously a panel of intellectual historians, so it is a little pedantic to call on them to be more contextual. And probably Michael Behrent did (some version of) that in his comment. Certainly his work on Foucault and the Foucaultians makes me think him likely to have done so. But how to create this context? Here the panel turns back on itself—intellectual history often does—because, I think, the central question is how we, here today, understand the changing nature of state power in the face of economic imperatives in the postwar world. This is after all the problem all the subjects discussed by the panel were interested in.

That closing is not too coherent, and not too clear, but perhaps I’ll manage to follow it up with an eventual post on essays from the no-longer-so-new Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (2014).

SFHS 2015. Part One of Two.

This past weekend was the meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies at Colorado College. I saw a number of excellent papers and some quite cohesive panels. I’m going to do brief write-ups of only two of these panels. The first, here, is a panel titled “Education, Religion, and Laïcité in Republican France,” with papers by Linda Clark, Eleanor Rivera, and Rachel Hutchins.

Linda Clark—“Women Educators and the Politics of Laïcité: Normal School Directrices, 1879-1889”—spoke about the directrices of écoles normales for women in the first decade after the institution of generalized secondary education for women. In this period, there were approximately 180 such directrices (Clark has the exact number, but I missed it). A few écoles normales already existed, of course, but a large number of new women were needed to run the new schools that would be created under the law. Eventually, although not at first, these women would be trained at the new ENS at Fontenay-aux-Rose. Clark opened her talk with a letter sent by an archbishop to Jules Ferry in 1880. Did Ferry know, the archbishop asked, that one of his directrices was a Protestant? Ferry replied that he did, but that her religion was not important, only her professional capacity. Clark is broadly interested in this question: how laïque were these early teachers? Who were they? Clark’s paper was rich with valuable detail about this all-important group. After all, if the schools were the heart of the republican project, and the republic could survive only if it ‘won the battle’ for women, then this group—those who would run the schools to teach the teachers—was of great importance.

Clark divides her subjects into three groups. There were 17 normal schools for women in France when the new law went into effect in 1879. 10 had laïque directrices, and all these were retained as new schools were opened. This is the first group. Second are the 33 directrices appointed to newly-created schools mostly in the first year (79-80), who did not pass through Fontenay-aux-Rose. Third is the remaining majority, women who passed through the ENS at Fontenay and thus received the laique training that was, ideally, supposed to prepare them for their task.

Clark’s paper showed that, at first, Ferry and co. had to rely on more Catholic teachers, and allowed much greater latitude for the expression of Catholic doctrine on the part of these directrices. In fact, especially in the early years, Catholic directrices sometimes met with more success in effective laicization than did non-Catholics. There was great turnover in the first few years. This depended in part on regional differences, with more turnover in more Catholic areas. Vendé saw four different directrices in four years. Mostly these women were not married. The directrice had to live in the school, so some people thought they should not be married, or perhaps that it wasn’t a good idea to have husbands in the “couvent laïque.” On the other hand there are several examples of married women as directrice causing no particular difficulty or scandal.  Republicans were in principle committed to tolerance, so they noticed but accepted Catholic directrices as long as this didn’t disrupt or obstruct laicization. Religious practices on the part of directrices could be cause for dismissal—often were, although sheer incompetence was as well—but there are also cases of directrices being accused, and then defended successfully. Perhaps surprisingly, complaints came both against too radically laïque directrices and against those who were not laïque enough. By the late 1880s, there was less tolerance for Catholics. Once the ENS at Fontenay is running, dismissals because of excessive Catholicism drop off sharply. Only 1 of the 81 who went through was, ultimately, dismissed for catholic practices. 

My central take-away here was that, indeed, these directrices were an effectively laïque bunch. Compromises were made, especially at first, but the larger picture is of a surprisingly effective construction of a corps of elite teachers.

Eleanor Rivera’s paper, “Neutral Space: Laïcité and Early Third Republic Classrooms,” also examined the contested edges, we might say, of Ferry-era laicization efforts, but in a quite different mode. She uses the optic of space to inquire about how laicization worked at the level of the primary school, focusing on the Seine-inférieure. In fact what this means is a close look at very local conflicts over the signs and symbols of religion mostly within classrooms—especially crucifixes. I wonder, then, if Rivera’s framing might be different: perhaps it is not so much space as material or visual traces of religion that interests her? Or perhaps I’m over-remembering the spatial framing of her paper?

However that may be, the paper itself was a fascinating and detailed recounting of several such conflicts. Although at a different level of the French educational systems than Clark, Rivera’s paper also demonstrated the great variations according to local response that characterized efforts at laicization—and, concomitantly, the flexibility in many cases of the higher administration. Even after it became illegal to have crucifixes up in classrooms, many remained when local conditions made it difficult for the administration to have them removed without great conflict. Guidelines existed, Rivera tells us, for when and how local teachers might best take these symbols down (over a long break, quietly, quickly, and decisively). Conflicts nonetheless arose. Rivera recounted in some detail one particular sequence in which a local mayor declared his complete legitimacy—given by universal suffrage—in attempting to re-install a crucifix removed from a classroom in his town. This is interesting partly because the election of mayors was an innovation on the part of the Third Republic, and so we see here a nice dialectic of democratic legitimacy being accepted by opponents of republican policies. The broader point of Rivera’s research (at least this part of it) was that especially in primary education, teachers and administrators were willing to retain a substantial amount of Catholic paraphernalia in and around the classroom if it meant they could get the children into the school, and they could still control the curriculum.

Rachel Hutchins’ paper took us out of the early Third Republic and into the (late?!) Fifth Republic. She is interested in the uses of the term “laïcité” since 1980 in French primary school curriculum and textbooks (which are importantly different). Hutchins’ paper, too, was rich with detail and impressed upon me how little I know about recent French pedagogical debates. For instance, in the early 1980s official policy removed ‘histoire’ from the curriculum, replacing it, on the basis of reasoning drawn from Piaget and Annales historians, with direct interaction with artifacts and historical documents, but without significant framing? If this is even partly right, I’d be interested to know more. 

In any case, Hutchins’ central argument is that, especially in the textbooks that schoolchildren actually use, laïcité has undergone a process of idealization. It has been transformed, in Hutchins’ excellent phrase, “from value to myth.” She shows the differences between the official position taken in the preambles to various curricular documents and the actual content of the textbooks, which are not legally required to fit in any particular way with official curricula. An important turning-point, she argues, came as around 1985 national history returned to primary school curricula. At first, in textbooks from the late 1980s, laïcité is mentioned only briefly, if at all. By 2008, however, the main textbook for primary use on civil education gives exactly as much space to laïcité as to liberté, égalité, fraternité. Despite space also given to explicitly anti-racist messages, this way of presenting the 1905 law in fact re-enforces, and this last is a paraphrase of Hutchins, traditional nationalism in the guise of republican universalism. Hutchins even shows that Islam is handled in history textbooks so as to emphasize its warlike, conquest-oriented aspects. The crusades appear as a ‘reconquest’ on the part of Christian rulers. Muslims were commercial and scientific in the past, but not, these textbooks suggest, in the present. This part of Hutchins’ paper was very interesting, but I would have liked to see it treated in a broader way—not something, of course, there was time for in the paper.

A number of useful questions emerged from the audience. (There was a very substantial comment from Barry Bergin, but for some reason my notes from it are missing, so I won’t try to reconstruct it—suffice it to say that he raised several of the below points as well). Hutchins, for instance, who had framed the curricular changes she describes largely in terms of xenophobic or anti-immigrant discourse and the rise of the FN, was asked about other possible relevant changes. These are indeed numerous and not to be discounted in post 1968 France. Jean Pedersen asked two (related!) questions of the panel as a whole, which I shall mangle in paraphrasing. First, what is really the continuity or the difference between laïcité in 1880 and the same term today? Second, the form taken by laïcité in all these papers is subtractive (my word), that is it removed symbols or practices in order to achieve ‘neutrality.’ What about an (American) positive or inclusive model of neutrality? This last, for any number of reasons, was indeed never on the table in France. In fact, Rivera told in response a nice anecdote about a newspaper column in which this very specter was raised—a crucifix with a cross, a start of David, a ‘head of Mohammad’ (!), the mason’s level, all together—as a possible outcome of botched laicization. This appeared as an abomination in the 1880s. (And today it is left to Slavoj Zizek to become outraged (or at least worked-up) about the “coexist” bumper-stickers made out of these symbols.) Pedersen did not really get an answer to her first question—indeed it is a difficult one.

Of course, laïcité even over the long-term has been the object of an enormous amount of excellent scholarship in France. Jacqueline Lalouette leaps to mind here. It seems to me that we would be well-served to analytically separate republican anticlericalism, which has roots well before the Revolution and which played such an important role in it, from laïcité, which I would understand as a 19^th century synthesis of free-thinking and Protestant approaches to deconnecting organized or institutionalized religion from morality. It seems pretty clear that in the late 19^th century, in the run-up to 1905, Protestants played a key role in laicization, and that, at least on its face, there was nothing atheist (we might say) about laïcité. The default understanding—the rhetorical frame in the present—seems to be that laicization worked in the Third Republic, but isn’t working now, should be made to work with the same moral energy and clarity that it had in the 1880s. Certainly the papers in this panel suggest that Ferry’s project (not that it was only his) was a remarkable one. But it seems clear that to really understand the laïque schools of the 1880s, we need at least to begin with the educational policies and politics of the Second Empire. We need to think about the significance of the Paris Commune in shaping political possibilities (and fears) in the first decades of what would become the Third Republic. Republicans were not simply Enlighteners fighting obscurantist Catholics. They were also (even the more staunchly democratic among them) property-owners fighting socialists. And then if we want a bilan of the Republican school system, we’d better think very hard about the 1930s and Vichy, in particular the extent to which the latter had “Republican origins.” Hutchins’ characterization of laïcité in recent years as a “myth” rather than a “value” of the republic seems, at least from my perspective, dead on. The place that the concept—the administrative strategy—of laïcité had in the political conjuncture of the early Third Republic made it a functional part of the Republic and gave it, it seems to me, a completely different meaning than it has today. Laïcité may have been a genuine myth in the late 19th century, and today merely rhetorical cover. 

All of which is a long-winded response to three great papers, Bergin’s comment, and questions from the audience—as well, I should say, as conversation after the panel. Having just written substantially more about this than I meant to do, I’ll commit to doing the same (although at less length) tomorrow with another, quite different panel: “Beyond Determinism: Rethinking the Philosophy of History and Political Economy in Postwar France.”