The New Philosophers

A coterie of young writers attacks Marxism as evil

It is probably the liveliest intellectual hubbub to hit Paris since the early 1950s, when Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre startled other leftist intellectuals by defending Stalin's ironfisted regime, in spite of its excesses. This time the furor revolves around a group of young intellectuals, most of them lapsed Marxists, who are now attacking Marxism as an evil, obsolete ideology that leads inevitably to totalitarianism. The "New Philosophers," as they are known, have become overnight celebrities--featured on magazine covers and on TV talk shows. The New Philosophers have no wide popular following and are unlikely to have much impact on next March's elections, when France's Socialist-Communist coalition hopes to win power. Nonetheless, Socialist Party Chief Franc,ois Mitterrand has promised to write a rebuttal to their views, which he says are "too important" for off-hand comment.

Most of the eight or nine New Philosophers, who range in age from 28 to 40, were marked by the student riots of May 1968, which collapsed under pressure of a cynical collaboration between the Communists and De Gaulle's government. Since 1975, they have churned out 14 books, two of which are now on French bestseller lists. Although they insist that there are important differences in their views and bridle at being lumped together, they nonetheless share a common argument: Marxism is not only dead but dangerous in an era in which all the sweeping philosophical systems of the 19th century are out of date.

The group's most publicized--and most pessimistic--member is Bernard-Henri Levy, 28, a long-tressed editor at the Paris publishing house of Grasset who coined the term New Philosophers. In his hot-selling polemic, Barbarism with a Human Face, Levy attacks the promises of Marxism as empty. "Revolution is a myth," he says, pointing to the Soviet Union; instead of "withering away," as Marx predicted, the state has grown into a monstrous "reactionary machine." Levy blames the persistence of Marxist ideas in France on the thinkers of the French Enlightenment, who paved the way for Communist dogmatism by spreading a naive faith in the historical inevitability of human progress. "The harsh truth," in Levy's view, is that "the world is in a bad state. We are realizing that the 20th century's great invention may prove to be the concentration camp, which is generalized murder for reasons of state."

The group's oldest member (at 40), as well as its best-regarded thinker, is Andre Glucksmann, an ex-Communist. He first gained prominence in 1975 with The Cook and the Man-Eater, a book inspired by Alexander Solzhenitsyn's disclosures of the horrors of Stalin's Gulag. Glucksmann describes his colleagues' revolt against Marx as "a refusal to be swept along the rails of a system that was issued 150 years ago by an illustrious long-beard." In his current bestseller, The Master Thinkers, he explores the philosophy of order developed by Fichte, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche in Germany in the 19th century. Glucksmann argues that their concept of a "human science" by which modern governments exercise control over their populations, combined with their theory of an "ultimate revolution" that would transform society, helped create a climate in which the strong totalitarian state could emerge.

The New Philosophers are not, of course, the first intellectuals of the left to discover that Marx is a false god. Andre Gide and Arthur Koestler, among many others, abandoned Communism in bitter disillusionment over Stalin's purges and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Glucksmann argues that most such ex-Marxists believed that "the doctrine and hopes of Marxism were good but the [Soviet] interpretation was wrong." By contrast, the New Philosophers maintain that the ideology itself is inherently evil. As proof, they cite Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. "The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism," says Levy. "The Soviet prison camp is Marxist, as Marxist as Auschwitz was Nazi." Solzhenitsyn, he adds, is "the Shakespeare of our time, the only one who knows how to point out the monsters."

The New Philosophers argue that old ideological superstructures--Marxism, capitalism, Christianity--are not flexible enough for the modern world because politics today does not revolve around different visions of Utopia but specific, mundane issues. Glucksmann contends that intellectuals today must avoid joining ideological "caravans" of any kind and should turn their attention to "precise matters--to colonial crimes, life in prisons, the drug problem, the threat of nuclear plants."

The politics of the future, says Jean-Marie Benoist, 35, another New Philosopher and author of Marx Is Dead, will be fluid--a world of "small cells" of people coalescing on issues that affect them, and not on grand political ideologies. Like most of his colleagues, Benoist sees signs of hope for mankind in the emergence of such ad hoc, problem-oriented groups spawned by the women's liberation and human rights movements. Although many, if not most, of these pioneering developments first took place in the U.S., the New Philosophers do not consider capitalism as an alternative to socialism. Indeed, they barely bother attacking it since the leftists they are addressing are already anticapitalists. Nonetheless, notes Levy, "between the barbarity of capitalism, which censures itself much of the time, and the barbarity of socialism, which does not, I guess I would choose capitalism."

Glucksmann and his colleagues have pasted a totalitarian label on Marxism at a time when Communist parties in Italy and Spain, as well as in France, are talking up their notion of a "Eurocommunism" that is independent of Moscow and ready to accept democratic forms, including elections. Not surprisingly, the French left's reaction has been sharp. The usually left-leaning daily Le Monde has gamely praised the "passionate challenge" raised by the New Philosophers. But the socialist Le Matin has flatly condemned their thinking as "elegant despair" and "a banal form of dandyism." A commentator in the pro-Socialist Nouvel Observateur blasted the New Philosophers as mere "disc jockeys of ideas."

But many thoughtful Frenchmen applaud the New Philosophers' message. The French left, notes Author Jean-Franc,ois Revel (Without Marx or Jesus), has suffered serious losses of faith in Marxism before--notably with the Hungarian tragedy in the 1950s and the Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. "Nonetheless," Revel adds, "the French left has to hear it played again on another instrument. They had it last time on the piano, now they are getting it on the tuba." In the current context of French politics, the leitmotiv of the New Philosophers may well be the theme that many are yearning to hear.

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