Courtney McGrailHow the French think: an affectionate portrait of an intellectual people
by Sudhir Hazareesingh
(Allen Lane, £20)
Felix M. Larkin
The French are self-consciously an ‘intellectual’ nation, taking their cue from Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.” They revere their public intellectuals and in France public intellectuals are engaged in political and cultural life to an extent greater than in other countries.
For the French, with their espousal since the 1870s of laïcité (or secularisation) as a core civic value, alongside liberté, égalité and fraternité, their public intellectuals are a type of godless priesthood – articulating and elaborating on abstract propositions, which inform a wider national discourse. The French commitment to rationality takes the place of religion in former times.
The focus of this fine book is, however, on how the French think, not what they think. It suggests that it is their way of thinking, rather than the substance of their thought, that defines their intellectual endeavour.
The author, Sudhir Hazareesingh, points to the sharp distinction between Anglo-Saxon and French modes of thinking. He writes: “The idea of knowledge as continuous and cumulative, which is the central premise of Anglo-Saxon epistemology, is alien to the French way of thinking… French intellectual constructs are speculative in that they are generally the product of a form of thinking not necessarily grounded in empirical reality.”
That speculative quality is, Hazareesingh argues, what unites French thinking from Descartes to Derrida.
Observation
Another unifying factor is the French sense of their superior capacity for thought, illustrated by Pascal’s observation, cited by Hazareesingh, about his compatriots: “I do not speak of fools; I speak of the wisest men.”
This leads to what Hazareesingh characterises as “the inescapably messianic dimension shared by all the great modern French political doctrines, from the revolutionaries’ aspiration to regenerate humankind through Napoleon’s celebration of the grand nation to Charles de Gaulle’s ‘certain idea of France’ as a country destined for grandeur”.
As he also notes, the French believe that “they have a duty to think not just for themselves but also for the rest of the world”. To the rest of the world, these notions may seem arrogant – even ridiculous; yet it is impossible to underestimate the extent of the influence of French thought on all our thinking.
Within the humanities in recent years, for example, the increasingly dominant leitmotif has been so-called ‘French theory’ – in particular, Foucault’s writings about power, knowledge and sexuality and Derrida’s work on deconstruction. These and other similar thinkers have empowered younger academics to transform their disciplines by providing them with, again to quote Hazareesingh, “the conceptual instruments needed to unsettle the conservative traditions dominating the humanities and social sciences”.
Hazareesingh adds a word of caution, however, about the “ultimate hollowness” of much of this theorising: he says, fairly in my view, that its “overriding characteristic was opaqueness … an attempt to cover its analytical limitations by creating a feeling that something extraordinary and unusual was going on”.
Hazareesingh concludes his study by referring to what is generally perceived as a decline in French influence – “France’s diminishing cultural imprint” – in recent years, as France and the rest of the world succumb increasingly to what he terms “Anglo-American mercantilism”. The resulting loss of confidence within France has been exacerbated by domestic tensions such as those that erupted in the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January this year.
Nevertheless, he sees in the response to the Charlie Hebdo incident, both in France and worldwide, a positive reaffirmation of French republican values and evidence of France’s continuing ascendancy in the intellectual sphere. Je suis Charlie equates to Je suis français.
This a deeply scholarly book, written by a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford – a native of Mauritius who, as he tells us, has been observing French public life since his adolescence in the 1970s. Its thesis, to summarise perhaps too simplistically, is that the French way of thinking represents a triumph of style over substance, but this is not to deny the unique French contribution to shaping how we comprehend the world in which we live.