The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century

National Interest, The, Summer, 1999 by Daniel J. Mahoney

Tony Judt, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 196 pp., $17.50.

The intellectual is a distinctive product of the modern Enlightenment and his virtue is assuredly not "responsibility." As traced by the principal commentators on this new social type, he is marked first and foremost by an ungrounded confidence in "progress", in the forward march of history, and by a desire to eliminate all obstacles to its realization. He dreams of a "symmetrical" or uniform world where the messiness and contingency of ordinary political life is overcome. He is prone to a "literary" view of politics that ignores the constraints facing the acting citizen and statesman.

Benjamin Constant famously emphasized that the modern intellectual is tempted to identify with arbitrary power, as long as it is carried out in the name of the sovereignty of the people. The modern landscape is strewn with examples of intellectuals justifying "popular" or revolutionary despotism. Edmund Burke provided the first full-fledged sociology of modern revolution, locating some of the fanaticism of the French Revolution in the liberation from traditional restraints characteristic of both the litterateurs and their allies, the new, ascendant monied interests in France.

Tocqueville, too, saw the literary spirit as a contributing cause of the Revolution as well as a continuing hallmark of French and modern intellectual culture. In Recollections, his remarkable memoir of the revolution of 1848, Tocqueville provides his most lucid discussion of the literary spirit in politics. He was deeply disturbed by the enthusiasm that the French intellectuals displayed for the overthrow of the corrupt and plutocratic, yet tolerably decent, liberal Orleanist monarchy in 1848. Tocqueville was dismayed by the blind faith that many intellectuals placed in the efficacy of revolutionary action. In a memorable passage in Recollections, he describes an encounter with his friend Ampere who, to his surprise, did not share Tocqueville's own "grief" over the outbreak of an unnecessary revolution that would further undermine the prospects for ordered liberty in France. Tocqueville commented that the "good nature[d]" Ampere

was too much inclined to carry the spirit of a salon over into literature and that of literature into politics. What I call the literary spirit in politics consists in looking for what is ingenious and new rather than for what is true, being fonder of what makes an interesting picture than what serves a purpose, being very appreciative of good acting and fine speaking without reference to the play's results, and finally, judging by impressions rather than reasons.(1)

But the literary spirit is not, Tocqueville suggests, "confined to Academicians. To tell the truth, the whole nation shares it a little, and the French public as a whole often takes a literary man's view of politics."(2) What an imposing image: an entire nation addicted to literary politics and political irresponsibility! At some level, this has always been the lament of the "English party" (the constitutionalists who oppose both revolutionary excesses and reactionary nostalgia) in French politics. It is a complaint renewed in the scholarship of Tony Judt.

In his controversial Past Imperfect (1992), Judt levied a thoroughgoing indictment against the illiberalism and "fellow-traveling" of the pro-Stalinist French intelligentsia in the period between 1944 and 1956. His book stressed the rare moral courage of those figures such as Francois Mauriac, Raymond Aron and Albert Camus who refused to succumb to the totalitarian temptation. Judt's indictment sometimes lacked nuance, underestimated the pro-communist or progressivist sentiments of intellectuals outside France, and to some French readers read like a scolding apology for the superiority of Anglo-American civic culture over a hopelessly misguided French one.(3) But the book remains one of the best accounts of the terrible irresponsibility inherent in historicism as such - the suspension of ordinary political judgment and of common sense standards of good and evil inevitably leads to servile apologies for inhuman dictatorships as long as they call themselves "progressive." Whatever its rhetorical excesses, Past Imperfect is at its best an intelligent renewal of the Tocquevillian critique of literary politics. One reviewer, John Sturrock, in the New York Times Book Review no less, went so far as to question the idea that responsibility is something that should be demanded of intellectuals. Sartre, he suggested, had the right to all of his opinions and "to have been as irresponsible as he liked."

In his new book, The Burden of Responsibility, Judt questions the presumption that lies behind that reviewer's defense of Sartre, namely, the assertion of the value of commitment as an end in itself. Modern intellectuals too often speak a "decisionist" language defending a course of action based upon an actor's (or thinker's) "good intentions" or "sincerity" or simply his histrionic "commitment" to a cause. They transform irresponsibility into a virtue, into what Max Weber called in his 1919 essay on "Politics as Vocation" the "ethics of conviction", with its preoccupation with "ultimate ends." Weber famously put forward an alternative "ethics of responsibility", in which the political thinker or actor takes responsibility for the consequences of his actions. What most defenders of Weber's famous distinction ignore is that for Weber the choice for responsibility itself is the result of an arbitrary decision. In his new book, Judt surely defends a more responsible version of responsibility, one closer to Tocqueville's guiding purpose of "seeing not differently but further than the parties."