Mick Hartley

From the introduction to Samuel Fitoussi’s book Why Intellectuals Fail – in French, Pourquoi les intellectuels se trompent.

Sartre, Foucault, De Beauvoir, and the failure of 20th century intellectuals.

What if culture, intelligence and education did not make us wiser, but made us more prone to error? In the USSR, university graduates were two to three times more likely to support the Communist Party than those who only finished secondary school. White collar professionals held far more favourable views of communist ideology than agricultural labourers and semi-skilled workers. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, responsible for the murder of nearly two million of their fellow citizens, were led by eight French-speaking intellectuals: five teachers, a university professor, a civil servant, and an economist. All had studied in France in the 1950s, several of them at the Sorbonne, where they absorbed Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas on political engagement and on the necessity of revolutionary violence. In the West, many leading intellectuals became fellow travellers of the Soviet regime, from Sartre himself (”A revolutionary regime must rid itself of a certain number of individuals who threaten it, and I see no other means than death. One can always get out of a prison“) to Bertolt Brecht (who said of those executed during the Moscow trials: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot“) or Bernard Shaw (“We are duping and doping ourselves by reckless abuse of Stalin just as we used to in the cases of Voltaire and Washington”). The list goes on: Althusser, Aragon, André Glucksmann, Edgar Morin, Noam Chomsky…

Upon his return from the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell could not persuade a single influential journal to publish his account of the purges, tortures, and executions committed by the Spanish Communist Party – because of the British intelligentsia’s tacit sympathy for communism. For the same reasons, he later struggled to find a publisher for his anti-totalitarian satire Animal Farm (T. S. Eliot, then a director at a major publishing house, rejected the manuscript, complaining that Orwell had not presented the “Trotskyist point of view” sympathetically enough). “The English intelligentsia, wrote Orwell in the book’s preface, has developed a nationalist loyalty towards the USSR, and in their hearts, they feel that to cast any doubt on the wisdom of Stalin is a kind of blasphemy.”…

In the second half of the twentieth century, political lucidity remained a scarce commodity among the French intelligentsia. Fidel Castro received visits from Agnès Varda (who directed a propaganda film comparing him to Gary Cooper), from Sartre (who wrote sixteen laudatory articles about him for France-Soir), or from Simone de Beauvoir (who described the Cuban dictator as a gifted and benevolent philanthropist). This was not, incidentally, her first flirtation with totalitarianism. A few years earlier, she had travelled to China, only to publish, upon her return, a five-hundred-page book glorifying Maoism. “The policies implemented by the regime, she analysed, are those that any modern and enlightened government, intent on advancing its country, should adopt.” “Freedom, she wrote, was a very concrete reality” in China, while in the West it had become an illusion, worn away by “conformism” and “individualism”. She dismissed as a bourgeois fabrication the idea that China was a dictatorship….

Two decades later, Sartre hailed the Iranian Islamic Revolution, as did Michel Foucault, who described with a certain naïveté the progressive policy he believed the mullahs’ regime would pursue:

“By ‘Islamic government,’ no one in Iran means a political regime in which the clergy would play a leading or supervisory role. […] One can find in the Quran general guidelines: Islam values work; no one can be deprived of the fruits of their labour; what must belong to all (water, the subsoil) shall not be appropriated by anyone. Freedoms will be respected insofar as their exercise does not harm others; minorities will be protected and free to live as they please on condition that they do not injure the majority; between man and woman, there will be no inequality of rights, but difference, since there is a difference in nature. In politics, decisions will be taken by majority rule; leaders will be accountable to the people; and everyone, as provided for in the Quran, will be able to stand up and demand an account of those who govern.”

And so it goes, still. Where did gender ideology originate? Queer Theory/Judith Butler. The lauding of Palestinianism? “Settler-colonialist” academics joining hands with the Islamists…