Intellectuals and the French Communist Party

Intellectuals and the French Communist Party

Author: Sudhir Hazareesingh

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9780198278702

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This work examines the emergence and subsequent demise of intellectual identification with the French Communist Party, arguing that after 1978, political conflicts between the Communist leadership and party intellectuals led to an erosion of support.


The Wind From the East

The Wind From the East

Author: Richard Wolin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-11-14

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0691178232

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How Maoism captured the imagination of French intellectuals during the 1960s Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who’s who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China’s Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless exposé of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful story of this legendary period in France. Richard Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of the Cultural Revolution, and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life. Wolin’s riveting narrative reveals that Maoism’s allure among France’s best and brightest actually had little to do with a real understanding of Chinese politics. Instead, it paradoxically served as a vehicle for an emancipatory transformation of French society. Recounting the cultural and political odyssey of French students and intellectuals in the 1960s, The Wind from the East illustrates how the Maoist phenomenon unexpectedly sparked a democratic political sea change in France.


Past Imperfect

Past Imperfect

Author: Tony Judt

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0814743927

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Swept up in the vortex of communism, French postwar intellectuals developed a blind spot to Stalinist tyranny. Albert Camus, who had been an authentic moral voice of the Resistance, pretended not to know about the crimes and terrors of the Soviet Union. Jean-Paul Sartre perverted logic to make an apologia for the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Simone de Beauvoir called for social change to be brought about in a single convulsion, or else not at all. Foolish French thinkers, suffering self-imposed moral anesthesia, defended the credibility of the show trials in Stalinized Eastern Europe. In a devastating study, Judt, a professor of European studies at New York University, argues that the belief system of postwar intellectuals, propped up by faith in communism, reflected fatal weaknesses in French culture such as the fragility of the liberal tradition and the penchant for grand theory. He also strips away the postwar myth that the small, fighting French Resistance was assisted by the mass of the nation.


French Intellectuals Against the Left

French Intellectuals Against the Left

Author: Michael Scott Christofferson

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9781571814272

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Christofferson argues that French anti-totalitarianism was the culmination of direct-democratic critiques of communism & revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. He offers an alternative interpretation for the denunciation of communism & Marxism by the French intellectual left in the late 1970s.


French Intellectuals and Politics from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation

French Intellectuals and Politics from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation

Author: D. Drake

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2005-04-05

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0230006094

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A companion volume to Drake's Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (2002), French Intellectuals from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation traces the political positions adopted by French writers and artists from the end of the 19th century to the Liberation. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it offers a clear and accessible analysis of the intellectuals' engagement with nationalism, pacifism, communism, anti-communism, surrealism, fascism and anti-fascism, which is located within the evolving national and international context of the period.


Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France

Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France

Author: D. Drake

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2001-11-11

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0230509630

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What did French intellectuals have to say about Gaullism, the Cold War colonialism, the women's movement, and the events of May '68? David Drake examines the political commitment of intellectuals in France from Sartre and Camus to Bernard-Henri Lévy and Bourdieu. In this accessible study, he explores why there was a radical reassessment of the intellectual's role in the mid 1970s-80s and how a new generation engaged with Islam, racism, the Balkan Wars and the strikes of 1995.


Intellectuals and the Left in France Since 1968

Intellectuals and the Left in France Since 1968

Author: Keith A. Reader

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1987-03-02

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1349185817

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Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Foucault - the currency of these names in the world of modern thought is widespread. But all too often in the English-speaking world their work and ideas are considered without reference to the context in which they were produced, and this is the gap that this new study sets out to fill. The major revaluation of what constituted the 'political', set in train by the 1968 events is a key theme here, and the work of the best-known French intellectual figures of the time both illuminates and is illuminated by it. But it is not just a new reading of already familiar figures that the reader will find in this work. Writers little-known in the English-speaking world, or hitherto not extensively treated in English, receive similar contextualising attention, so that the recent upsurge in sociology or the impact of a dissident Marxist such as Henri Lefebvre take their place alongside better-known figures in the first book-length English-language survey of one of the most exciting, and often bewildering, periods in European intellectual history.