power of negative thinking, The

Spectator, The, Jun 25, 2005 by Scruton, Roger

Of course, there have been dissenters. Novelists like Louis Pauwels, philosophers like Alain Besançon and Luc Ferry, essayists like Alain Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann, have done their best to speak up for the French inheritance against its institutionalised detractors. Interestingly, however, it is the Sartrean legacy that is exported. The message that British and American academics wish to hear from France is not that of Louis Pauwels who, in Les orphelins, tells the inner story of 1968 and its moral bankruptcy, but that of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Bourdieu - Sartreans in everything that matters, who have continued the master's work of hunting down meanings and spearing them with their finely honed negation signs.

However, man cannot live by negation alone. Notwithstanding his heroic attempt to live in recoil from the world of others, Sartre envisaged an ideal community - a Kingdom of Ends in which he would be finally united with les ouvriers, and of which he was already in some mystical way a part. In his later writings, therefore, he comforted himself with the invocation of a new form of society whose only foundation would be authentic choice. In this groupe en fusion the intellectual and the proletarian would be united, without the mediating structures of custom, authority and law. Thus would the intellectual be redeemed, without paying the normal and intolerable price of redemption, which is obedience.

If you look at Sartre's philosophy in that way, you will see through it to its ultimate origins in Rousseau. Moreover, Sartre's invocation of the workers recalls Rousseau's invocation of le peuple, to whom the intellectual is supposedly bound by a compassionate zeal. And just as Robespierre used Rousseau's philosophy to justify the greatest attack on the people that the modern world had witnessed, so did Sartre use his philosophy to justify the totalitarian regimes that had done most to ruin the hopes of the working class. Whether Sartre was as great a writer or as ingenious a thinker as Rousseau I do not know. But he was certainly as pernicious an influence.