French Intellectuals Against the Left

In the latter half of the 1970s, the French intellectual Left denounced communism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics through a critique of left-wing totalitarianism that paved the way for today''s postmodern, liberal, and moderate republican political options. Contrary to the dominant understanding of the critique of totalitarianism as an abrupt rupture induced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn''s The Gulag Archipelago, Christofferson argues that French anti-totalitarianism was the culmination of direct-democratic critiques of communism and revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. The author''s focus on the direct-democratic politics of French intellectuals offers an important alternative to recent histories that seek to explain the course of French intellectual politics by France''s apparent lack of a liberal tradition.

In the latter half of the 1970s, the French intellectual Left denounced communism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics through a critique of left-wing totalitarianism that paved the way for today's postmodern, liberal, and moderate republican political options. Contrary to the dominant understanding of the critique of totalitarianism as an abrupt rupture induced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Christofferson argues that French anti-totalitarianism was the culmination of direct-democratic critiques of communism and revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. The author's focus on the direct-democratic politics of French intellectuals offers an important alternative to recent histories that seek to explain the course of French intellectual politics by France's apparent lack of a liberal tradition.

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1. From Fellow-Traveling to Revisionism: The Fate of the Revolutionary Project, 1944-1974
Chapter 2. The Gulag as a Metaphor: The Politics of Reactions to Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago
Chapter 3. Intellectuals and the Politics of the Union of the Left: The Birth of Antitotalitarianism
Chapter 4. Dissidence Celebrated: Intellectuals and Repression in Eastern Europe
Chapter 5. Antitotalitarianism Triumphant: The New Philosophers and Their Interlocutors
Chapter 6. Antitotalitarianism Against the Revolutionary Tradition: François Furet’s Revisionist History of the French Revolution

Epilogue and Conclusion

Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources
Index