A Report on the French Left: From Marxism to "Structuralism"
Furet, François
The "end of the ideologies," diagnosed by Raymond Aron, among others, refers generally to the developed societies of America and Western Europe. 2 It connects prosperity, economic growth, and...
...its universal values...
...Perhaps that golden age of the historical conscience has already passed...
...What prevails is not a liberal and empirical criticism of Marxism, but a hyper-intellectual, systematic way of thinking, aiming at a general theory of man...
...Superficially and for a brief moment, it seemed to lend a new lease of life to great universal visions of social transformation, but in reality it served to discredit lastingly and in depth the philosophies of history of the nineteenth century...
...The Western intellectual looked overseas for his (mythical) tie with the oppressed and the agents of world revolution, in the ranks of an enemy who was assumed by definition to be socialist and internationalist...
...But he transforms it profoundly by drawing up a veritable theory of superstructures...
...But perhaps on another plane this ambiguity itself is significant of the development of some Communist intellectuals who have remained in the Party since the de-Stalinization crisis, and of younger ones who have since joined it in a climate that has become much more tolerant and much more critical than that of the fifties...
...But Voltaire was the most acclaimed hero of the eighteenth century, the Revolution put Rousseau into the Pantheon, and Victor Hugo's coffin was followed by an enormous crowd...
...The disconcerting outcome in Algeria and the very victories of the colonial peoples have slowed down left-wing intellectual investment in the Third World, for the difficulties in the way of economic "take-off" are often too technical in nature to nourish passion, and the love affair between FLN's French wartime friends and the Algeria of Colonel Boumedienne has ended in disappointment...
...To Sartre a man can always draw logical conclusions...
...Neither the Dreyfus case, nor the Popular Front, nor the postwar spread of Communism are intelligible if the part played by the intellectuals and their ideological elaboration is left out of account...
...But during those very years a new universalist mirage, an ersatz Messianism, presented itself to the revolutionary intellectuals, namely, the struggle for the independence of the Third World or, in the French context, support for the FLN in the Algerian war...
...One of the plainest symptoms of the end of the ideological age among French intellectuals is, incidentally, this passion for the study of superstructures, as if they desire to track down, unveil, and understand the intellectual products of men and groups from their most hidden motivations...
...Is this scruple to be regarded as a real rupture with history...
...It is significant that a whole trend of Communist thought implicitly relies on structuralism, not to break with Marxism, but to renovate it...
...I do not wish to relapse into over-facile identifications, unduly confusing books and authors, but from the point of view of this analysis it is permissible to compare the work of Barthes and Foucault with that of Levi-Strauss...
...Above all, a profound overnight change has taken place in the French intellectual's idea of the world and the part played in it by his country...
...It is true, as he often repeats, that he has never ventured beyond, though, as always happens whenever a book becomes fashionable, imprudent or over-zealous disciples tend to extend his method toward building up a general theory of societies...
...In his last years Freud was greatly attracted by the interpretation of anthropological data (which he lad not completely mastered...
...This led to a new diaspora of Communist and progressive intellectuals...
...II It is without doubt this situation which explains the great impact of the kind of thinking of which Levi-Strauss is both a model and a representative...
...But this is also the weakest point in Marx's analysis...
...But does the end of ideologies mean the end of ideologues...
...De-Stalinization, the Sino-Soviet schism, the crisis of the Third World— and French and European prosperity—have punctured the progressivism of the fifties that was so characteristic of the ideological age...
...The left-wing periodicals bear witness to this...
...This makes Sartre the last "nineteenth-century philosopher"—which cannot be pleasing to him...
...We are still "focused" on the French Revolution...
...4 E. Leach, "Genesis as Myth," Discovery, May 1962...
...Moreover, structural anthropology at long last promises an advance of the human sciences to a methodology as rigorous as that of the exact sciences...
...There turned out to be other enemies besides the bourgeoisie, and it came to be seen that the Soviet Union was not always necessarily and inherently in the advance guard of human history...
...It can look at the world with eyes no longer veiled by its own example and civilizing obsession...
...Not that such research and the accumulation of factual information is not growing in France...
...From this there emerges a Marxism purged of its Hegelian paternity and of all contamination by bourgeois humanism, and differing from Marx's own teaching, since the latter is redefined by the bringing to light of its fundamental conceptual structures...
...But it facilitated this, it did not create it...
...he accepts the idea of a global society in which determining factors will in the last resort be the relations between men and nature...
...The former hails the triumph of the bourgeoisie and the second the advent of the proletariat, but both, even if this is denied, as it is by Marx, imply a moral view of politics, distinction between good and evil, and commitment to the side of the good...
...That is the last trick played on him by Words...
...Revue internationale des sciences sociales, 1964...
...Thus the recent disappointments of the French intellectuals and the general political situation combine to cast doubt on history—for so long a tyrannical mistress before she became an unfaithful one...
...Stated simply, the structural description of man as object has taken the place of the historical advent of the man-god...
...The phenomenon could be crudely summed up by saying that the place occupied by Marxism twenty years ago in French intellectual life, which is so sensitive to fashions, has been taken by structuralism...
...Thus the assurance of a retrogressive movement of truth vanishes under the anthropologist's eye, and the philosophy of history becomes a myth, the necessity of which only empha sizes its lack of substance...
...The term hardly has meaning to a man who believes that in their state of babbling infancy the human sciences to which he has devoted his life and outside which he wishes to say nothing have for the time being nothing serious, still less useful, to offer to the polis and its struggles—except a relapse into ideology...
...But, if what Foucault says is indeed true, and if structuralism confines Marx to a nineteenth-century tyrannized over by history, it is very curious and sociologically extremely interesting that structuralism should have developed in France so systematically and so late, and in the same left-wing intellectual circles that (in the broad sense of the term) had been Marxist since the liberation...
...Is not this entomologist of human behavior, capable of the feat of emerging from his own cultural world, the reverse of Sartrian man, on whom engulfment in history and the emergence of a revolutionary practice imposes his celebrated commitment...
...the primacy of infrastructures is like a hand dealt at cards...
...Why, then, the privileged position enjoyed today by the ideology of the Left and by the left-wing intellectual...
...If it is true that present-day France tends in its social depths to be dozing off into a society of abundance and social integration, is the diagnosis true also of the groups and the men whose profession is thinking and writing...
...Is it the meaning of history created by Sartre's dialectical reason...
...Levi-Strauss is constantly aware both of the kinship and of the gap still to be filled in...
...hence the originality of his work, and no doubt also its wide range, which contrasts with the deliberately restricted nature of ethnological description...
...The left-wing intellectual had invested his liquid revolutionary capital in religious nationalism...
...It is born neither of fraternity of political opinion—for Levi-Strauss is the opposite of a "committed" man—nor of philosophical kinship—which is highly problematical if it exists at all, and is in any case a matter of indifference to Levi-Strauss—but from an inverse relationship in which nostalgia for Marxism has been able to insert itself...
...For decolonization revealed to all the secrets of the anthropologists, those pioneers of anti-colonialism: namely, that cultures are multiple, are all equally worthy of respect, and manifest themselves in terms of permanence rather than of change...
...The role of the anthropologist is thus to classify cultural systems, to undertake for each of them an objective analysis of their systems of symbols and their articulation...
...It is the historical symbol of an age, that is, the ideological age...
...For in one sense the work of anthropological analysis resembles a laboratory experiment...
...Thus it is probable that the end of the ideological age among the French intellectuals embraces two distinct phenomena differing in nature...
...The Frenchman of the Right, armed with BarrPs v. Zola, Maurras v. Romain Rolland, and Drieu de la Rochelle v. Aragon, also has his cultural pedigree whose assumptions and political hypocrisy the Left has frequently denounced...
...Up to that moment historical certainty and moral judgment had combined and reinforced each other...
...intellectual change does not itself call for sociological explanation...
...they are intended to bring to the surface the subconscious structure of social beliefs, the code underlying man's thinking, which finally determines what he does think of himself and of others...
...The genius of this professional philosopher resides, paradoxically perhaps, in the secret of his sensibility and art rather than in the clarity of his thought...
...and finally, the hostility of the French Communist party deprives it of a great deal of influence...
...There can be no greater historical oversimplification than deifying the intelligentsia's purely protesting role...
...The objectives of the psychoanalysts are implicitly transferred from the individual to the collective, from clinical analysis to the "decoding" of a social language like the myth...
...the present intellectual revolution consists in his view in the breach with historicism and the end of humanist anthropocentrism...
...Structural analysis, which is an attempt to extend the methods of natural science to the "human sciences," is thus subtly diverted in the direction of Marxist dogmatism, which is assumed as a self-evident premise—for the Marxist model is assimilated from the outset to the scientific model...
...Intellectual and sociological contradiction mutually explain and reinforce each other...
...The Legitimacy of Solomon, Archives Europeennes de sociologic, 1966...
...To that extent, perhaps, the case of the French intellectuals deserves to become a classic...
...The study of structures has a double advantage, chronological and logical: chronological because the description of structures provides it with a startingpoint, and this gives complete autonomy to the work of the structuralists, while the opposite is not true...
...In vain he refuses to be what he has become, for he is caught up in the pitiless history of literature...
...One may legitimately ask the exact and natural sciences what they are...
...From other passages less materialist and less Marxist interpretations can be drawn, for one can never be sure whether the logical structure brought to light by the analysis is of the same nature as the material produced by it or whether it informs reality...
...Instead of being concerned, like Sartre, with reconciling an epistemology with progressive ideas, their object is to marry structuralist method and Marxist theory...
...He merely offers us, as the so-called developed societies do, a multiplicity of cultural solutions of the eternal conflict between man and nature...
...Althusser simultaneously offers structuralism and Marxism, critical study and doctrinaire intransigence, loyalty to the French Communist party and reservations about it...
...the car, the refrigerator, and television are said to have killed the revolution...
...Nevertheless, the economic setbacks that have taken place in most of the recently decolonized countries have in a way restored to honor the idea of a Leninist—or Maoist—dictatorship...
...The answer is that the last great battle of right-wing ideology was fought by fascism—and lost...
...he does not even provide us with one adequate image among others...
...What for lack of a better term is called the Parisian "fashion" for structuralism, that is, its social success and its timing, would thus be explained by its deep relationship, both contradictory and homogeneous, to Marxism...
...Everything is happening as if the crisis of Marxism had cleared the ground for a methodology of another kind but at the same level, heir to the same ambition for global, systematic understanding...
...It is this that forced him in his last philosophical book to substitute his dialectics of individual liberty for Marxist dialectical materialism while quoting as "evidence" and approving without the slightest critical analysis the sum total of the propositions put forward in Das Kapital, that is to say, the essentials of the Marxist philosophy of history...
...This leaves us with the task of trying to describe and understand this paradoxical phenomenon, as well as the curious and, I think, specifically French mutual contamination that has taken place between Marxism and structuralism...
...this takes into account the concomitant multiplicity of societies and cultures...
...Hence the passion inseparable from it, the proselytism, the condemnation of the enemy and even of the indifferent, the identification of personal morality with historical necessity...
...It is true that Levi-Strauss has also emphasized his debt to Marxism...
...in seeking the Bolshevik party of 1917 it found Islam, and instead of Lenin it found Boumedienne...
...but if we had lived earlier we might have been focused on the Fronde...
...Their fields of work are very different, but the methodological inspiration is the same...
...Levi-Strauss rejects the methodological confusion implied in this illicit anthropology-psychoanalysis relationship, based on the old idea that the savage reveals man in his infancy, which assumes that the individual and the social are of the same nature...
...the end of the ideological age has found its doctrinaires...
...And what is the history to which he refers...
...That is the meaning of the work of Althusser and his friends, who are trying to restore the theoretical value of the work of Marx and Lenin by rigorous analysis of their operative concepts in order to free it of the banally humanist ideology in which Garaudy diluted it...
...they have also rediscovered in it their ambition for an all-embracing science of man and their old all-embracing dream, freed from the naivetes of commitment and of the meaning of history...
...But in this instance the fascination exercised by Levi-Strauss over many Marxist or ex-Marxist intellectuals seems to me to require a more specific explanation...
...This additional experiment in ideological extremism was the more characteristic of left-wing intellectual circles in that it was experienced in social isolation, disclaimed by the Communist party, and not understood by the working class...
...There are many reasons to suppose that a sociological study of his present audience would disclose these factors, which are so characteristic of the present and the recent past of Communist intellectuals...
...But Levi-Strauss continually denies it, and pays explicit tribute to history, allowing it even to "reserve its rights" (Inaugural lecture...
...now both factors in the apogee of the ideological age were simultaneously punctured by developments in the contemporary world...
...III Having settled accounts with this pseudo-science, however, the fact remains that societies change and that there are histories—if not a single history—that are entitled to their observers...
...But, unlike Marx, he sees no historical remedy for this false consciousness, no reconciliation of man and his true history...
...The French intellectual, heir to a prestige less fragile than power and unconsciously used to a universal radiation of his culture, is not yet reduced to the sad state of the Belgian: but he is increasingly aware of being a citizen of a country that, in spite of Gaullist rhetoric, no longer has the sense of making human history...
...He has turned into a patriarchal figure, a big brother aging in glory, a Nobel prize winner in spite of himself, but a Nobel prize winner all the same...
...To Levi-Strauss, who made himself plain on the subject in Pensee sauvage, 3 'Esprit, November, 1963...
...3 By this subterfuge he reconciles his philosophic conscience with his political progressiveness, but at the same time illustrates the profound duality of his work and uneven quality of his intellectual rigor...
...Foucault, imitating the use of the anthropologist's cultural telescope and reversing it, tries to gain more light from it that way...
...But now even this dream is fading...
...Valery admirably foresaw this phenomenon after the First World War in his Regards sur le monde actuel...
...At a first level of analysis, it is evident that if Marxism continues to lie at the heart of the French intellectual debate it is less as a theory than as an ideal, less as an intellectual tool than as a political heritage...
...The "end of the ideologies," diagnosed by Raymond Aron, among others, refers generally to the developed societies of America and Western Europe...
...The irruption into history of the nations of the Third World, instead of promoting a "Chinese" version of Marxism, has in fact contributed to hastening the end of ideologies in contemporary French culture...
...The fact that he belongs to the same generation as Sartre and has lived through practically the same history and is also considered to belong to the "Left" is thus immaterial...
...As soon as it is granted that he has conceived very varied societies and uses a logic as profound—or simple—as that of modern science, he no longer exists as such, or as a "primitive...
...Nevertheless, he can perhaps be considered more faithful than Sartre to Marx's philosophic premises and materialist determinism...
...To enumerate its great themes and aspirations is not to evade the significance of the intellectual movement which reflects the scope of its influence, since that is precisely what has to be understood...
...Levi-Strauss mingles the Jivaro world with his European outlook, while Foucault sets out to consider European culture from a Jivaro angle in order to turn it into a scientific object and make it examinable...
...2 It connects prosperity, economic growth, and social integration on the one hand with the progressive decline of political extremisms on the other...
...a whole world collapsed, as I well remember, because I was part of it...
...The respectful and distant doffing of his hat to Das Kapital does not derive from the same level of analysis...
...This division of labor is equal only in appearance, however...
...In both cases the object under observation is treated as a natural object, is laid out in space, is amenable to any amount of experimentation, and there is awareness of the distance between the observer and the observed...
...It will perhaps be objected that this question implies a certain modification of our initial proposition, for the relations of intellectuals to ideologies differ in nature from those of the general public, or are at any rate more complicated (even if they are apparently simple or deliberately simplified...
...French colonization (which it must not be forgotten, was often "Left" in origin) claimed to place them in Western "time," putting them through European stages of progress whether they liked it or not...
...to him these things belong to the domain of opinion and not to that of science...
...What interests him is the establishment of new existential foundations for human history and the revision of what he considers the mark of "scientism" in Marx...
...But from the point of view of the social character of his audience, that matters little...
...His books, written with a rather precious rigor, are a pitiless commentary on man's nothingness, marking a probably fundamental epistemological breach with the "ideo logical age...
...This type of analysis has already inspired endless comment on neo-capitalism, the Gaullist regime, and the kind of political torpor that has characterized France since the end of the Algerian war...
...Like that of the myth, the realm of ideologies is the realm of a false consciousness of reality, which must be explained at another level...
...the few interviews that—obviously without pleasure— he has given the press betray more than prudence—a professional desire to keep his distance from his own cultural world and the chaotic history that introduces its disorders into it...
...A few years ago, it was chiefly the romantic and antibureaucratic character of the Cuban revolution (which contrasted so sharply with socialism of the Soviet type) that roused enthusiasm, but the Chinese model now seems to be restoring priority to economic rationality, and this classic slant may again enable it to be used in the defense of totalitarianism...
...what societies do with the hand imposed upon them depends on men's cultural inventiveness...
...Moreover, he has always refused all extrapolation of his analytic procedures to mythologies, beliefs, or "historical" societies...
...to Levi-Strauss he can only think that he does so...
...The intellectual Left has rarely governed the France of its time, but it has supplied i Reprinted, with permission, from the British magaiine Survey...
...It is, on the other hand, significant that a work as specific and as technical as his should have had so widespread an impact on men of letters, art critics, and philosophers...
...This is systematized in Foucault's latest book...
...But all this lies within the same determinist ambition and derives from the same desire to decipher what underlies the apparent or merely conscious meaning of human behavior...
...Ideology is born of the feeling that a great historical problem can and must be solved by individual commitment...
...he did so explicitly in reply to Edmund Leach, the British anthropologist, who suggested a Levi-Straussian "decoding" of the Book of Genesis—and the contrast between the theoretical ambition implicit in his ideas and the thinness of their field of application rouses the mistrust of many of his colleagues in the English-speaking world, who remain attached to the empirical accumulation of facts .4 In France, however, it is this ambition, or rather its special contribution to South American anthropology, which has roused the enthusiasm of intellectuals and led rapidly to discussions at the most general level—existentialism, Marxism, and structuralism...
...This explains the curious path taken by Althusser...
...But everything is more than ever subordinated, even more than it was yesterday, to the search for a general theory...
...Thus structural anthropologists are needed to study order, and historians to study disorder...
...Evidently not, for, except at the price of unscrupulous falsification, looking back cannot demonstrate in the present the necessary outcome of the past...
...Trying as he is to "de-ideologize" Marxism, he nevertheless uses it both as an object of study and as his sole point of scientific reference...
...Now, it is impossible to grasp everything at once...
...The class struggle has different aims according to Guizot or Marx...
...Levi-Strauss writes of a world in which the eagle, the bear, and meadow-sage still exist, but he believes no more than Rousseau, who is one of his favorite authors, in a return to a primitive happiness that has disappeared forever...
...No matter that they are contradictory...
...But it also betrayed the survival of the Jacobin tradition, nostalgia for the France of 1793, a patriotism temporarily frustrated but nevertheless still optimistic...
...A stubborn illusion grants the present the rather foolish privilege without seeing that it itself introduces into successive events a connecting link drawn from its own depths...
...And in what way does he belong to the "Left...
...Pensee sauvage...
...the analysts of man's "dissolution" have succeeded the prophets of his advent...
...But an unlimited number of variables are not open to this inventiveness...
...The national masochism of the Petainist bourgeoisie or fifteen years later the nationalist enthusiasm for l'Algerie francaise, refer back to the same system of intellectual and moral arguments, only its terms vary with the event...
...2 Raymond Aron, Trois essais sur l'dge industriel...
...Thus the ''primitive" does not provide us with an image of man's childhood, as was believed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in accordance with a naively European model of human history...
...From this point of view, which is perhaps the most significant for our argument, Marx and Sartre are on the same side of the barricade, that of history, while Levi-Strauss is on the other, that of structure...
...History, like Le Verrier's planet, thus becomes a perpetual "disturbing factor" introducing structural disequilibriums...
...It is probably no chance, nor is it the mere result of an incidentally only too obvious cultural chauvinism, that structuralism, which has dominated European linguistic research since the first postwar period, was popularized in France not by linguistics but by the progress of anthropology...
...C. Levi-Strauss, "Anthropologic et philosophic," New Left Review, 1966...
...Now, however, there is perhaps a trace of expiatory masochism in the revaluation of these extra-European worlds...
...On the contrary, it betrays structures and logical systems whose appearance and mutations, far from being necessary and inevitable as so many stages in an identical human evolution, depend on a calculation of probabilities...
...Twenty years have now passed since Sartre tried to reconcile the existentialist self with Marxist determinism, that is, his theory of personal liberty with his progressive opinions...
...But the problems and choices of French intellectuals, because of the authority they have enjoyed since the period of the Enlightenment, have often been indicative of those of society as a whole...
...Having deliberately abstained from postwar political struggles, shut in his student's and scholar's ivory tower, he has felt no need to state his position in relation to Communism or anti-Communism...
...Hence the epistemological contradiction and political ambiguity of the works of Althusser and his friends, who are devoted to restoring life to Marx by rigorous analysis but are blocked by bigoted adherence to a conceptual apparatus which, brilliant though it may have been, dates from another age and another world...
...He tries to describe, not individual patterns, which would result in a study of opinions, but the conceptual structures which in each period make those opinions possible...
...synchronism and diachronism cannot be taken in at the same glance...
...Not only has the Soviet flame gone out and the Third World disconcerted or disappointed its friends of the heroic age, but France itself is no longer France...
...The outcome is familiar...
...And logical because after the structures have been analyzed, the normal in the event has been pulverized and history can hardly be rationalized, and perhaps cannot be rationalized at all...
...De-Stalinization raised the issue of justice and truth in the Communist world...
...Since the end of the war ideological elaboration ha consequently been a quasi-monopoly of the Left...
...anthropology and the anthropological approach appeared at the right moment to meet a historical situation, fulfill a social expectation...
...Foucault's methodological aggressiveness, which is probably one of the clues to the success of his book, has the interest of trying to systematize the general significance of structuralism in European culture of the present day...
...Not only have Marxists or ex-Marxists been able to invest their past in this without repudiating it...
...Hence, there was a readiness of intellectual opinion, a kind of expectation— rather as a century ago the inglorious check to the romantics of 1848 preceded and facilitated the formation of the realist and positivist generation...
...France would one day again pick up the torch of revolutionary history...
...At the present time the political disappointments suffered by progressivism have weakened the influence of Marxism among the Left intellectuals, but it is LeviStrauss and not Raymond Aron who reigns in the void thus created...
...as if one of the functions of Gaullist nationalism were now to counterbalance an objective process of French "Americanization...
...The heir to Boaz and Mauss knows that there is no such thing as a state of nature, but that there are many communities and cultures, which are so many ways of facing nature, and that there is no positive way of establishing any hierarchy between them...
...It is on this condition alone, in Althusser's view, that Marxism can again become what it really is—this having been masked by the huge amount of social and historical sedimentation that has taken place—that is to say, the theory, the science par excellence as opposed to the ideologies...
...How the celebrated Hegelian tribunal, which had become the "opium of the intellectuals," was wildly misused by the victorious Left after it had been "proved right" by history was described by Raymond Aron even before the politico-moral tribunal of Stalinism broke down with the death of Stalin...
...it signifies merely his allegiance to the left-wing intelligentsia, the resistance of yesterday and the present-day struggles against imperialism...
...IV But there is yet another and still more surprising aspect of the relationship between the Marxists and the structuralists...
...the anthropologist has been consecrated a philosopher rather in spite of himself...
...For lack of suitable soil for experimentation of this type at home, some Western intellectuals proclaim its necessity in the underdeveloped countries as the only way of demolishing the obstacles in the path of the mobilization of labor and national saving for capital formation...
...A great deal of egocentricity and naivete is required if one is to believe that the whole of man has taken refuge in a single one of his historical or geographical modes of being, while the truth about man lies in the system of their differences and common properties" (Pensee sauvage, p. 329...
...on the contrary, for nearly two hundred years the conflict between Right and Left has been the warp on which ideologies have been woven...
...Levi-Strauss, criticizing the fabrication of historical meaning by Sartre's dialectical reason, wrote this significant passage on the history of the French Revolution: Those described as men of the Left still cling to a period of contemporary history that granted them the privilege of consistency between practical imperatives and patterns of interpretation...
...it is to try to obtain an anthropological view of contemporary societies and cultures...
...Having been expelled from history, the France in which he lives consents the more willingly to expel history...
...But frivolous or perhaps illusory though this anticipation may be, it underlines the methodological influence of his work...
...claiming a long line of great but damned ancestors is a cheap way of entering into an exceptional heritage...
...he never extrapolates into his own field the procedures of psychoanalysis...
...the work of the historian is dependent, ornamental, or at all events relegated to a distant future...
...In fact their chance of one day deserving their name specifically depends on their keeping silent...
...If this analysis is as a whole correct, if there is indeed a link between a general phenomenon like the end of ideologies and the attractiveness of structuralism in the special environment of the French intellectuals, it will strike one as surprising that the disintegration of ideological certainties and of the "meaning" of history has not led to a return to favor of empirical research and the gathering of factual information on the pattern of the English-speaking world...
...The Muslim fellah celebrated by Fanon had become the latest ally of revolutionary defeatism of the Leninist type...
...However abstract it may be, the effect of his work is to revive something like the great Rousseauist paradox that split the eighteenth century...
...The transference of his revolutionary hopes to the Soviet Union and then to the Third World was in itself an implicit confession of impotence concerning the possibilities in his own country...
...Sartre speaks and will always speak as the big brother to all those who lived profoundly through the times of fascism and Communism...
...If these are required of them, or if on political grounds it is considered clever to pretend to do so, it will not be surprising if all one gets is phony balance-sheets...
...on the contrary, there as elsewhere sociological investigations, public opinion polls, massive searches of documents are multiplying...
...Working with a few societies into which history has not introduced its chaos and in which reduction to a few variables is relatively easy, he has been able to satisfy his concern for scientific rigor and his obsession with the linguistic "model" in the best possible conditions...
...The natural-sciences model has displaced the history model, man as object has taken the place of man as subject, structure has taken the place of process, concept that of practice...
...it is precisely because they are contradictory that a structuralist interpretation of Marx is able to offer them a temporary home...
...Like Hegel and Marx, Sartre still describes an advent, a history to be fulfilled by man, while Levi-Strauss reduces multiple man to common mechanisms, dissolves him in a universal determinism, in the last resort displays him like a natural object...
...In fact the problem whether it is materialist or Kantian (a Kantianism without transcendental subject, Paul Ricoeur has said) is of little interest to Levi-Strauss, who seems to accept both hypotheses...
...But his emphasis is different...
...But the social and human sciences are not yet in a state to render accounts...
...That is why ideology is far from consisting exclusively of a theory of history, though in the France of yesterday Marxism-Leninism was the most widespread and extreme form it took...
...with eyes now skeptical about the "lessons" and "meaning" of history...
...Increasing one's knowledge in one field proportionally diminishes one's chances of acquiring it in another...
...Thus the industrial society of Europe or America loses the privileged position to which it believes itself entitled in relation to tribes buried in the forests of the Amazon...
...One feels it to be suffused by love of nature, the countryside and flowers, a fondness for "primitive" man that inevitably stimulates nostalgia for a happiness lost by industrial societies...
...He has inherited from Marx the scientific ambition to interpret in intelligible terms the ideas that men form about the natural and social worlds by another system underlying them...
...Warsaw, Budapest, the Chinese schism have only accentuated the process, providing the last rites for a Marxism-Leninism that had been both incarnate and universal...
...In another sense, however, the methodological quarrels of the anthropologists threaten the assimilation of anthropology to the exact sciences...
...Perhaps this should be regarded, as certain English-speaking anthropologists regard it, as a special feature of the French national tradition...
...It would be highly significant for our argument if it were so...
...that is to say, he takes little interest in his philosophical relations with Marxism...
...Thus the French Left has no monopoly of ideology...
...the structuralist "de-ideologizing" of Marxism undoubtedly offers a way of living through the end of the ideologies inside the Communist world...
...On this Levi-Strauss agrees with Marx and Freud...
...But his ideas about myths extend to the collective, the objectives of individual psychoanalytic treatment...
...But until when...
...But it is too obviously inapplicable to European conditions, its culture being too "exotic" and its antecedents too well known, and so it is unlikely to rally a great deal of support...
...and the fact that one can at least imagine the possibility shows that this was merely a fortuitous situation, resembling the chance "focusing" on a heavenly body of an optical instrument with which it happened to be in a state of relative motion...
...It is, however, uncertain, even unlikely, that Levi-Strauss, who has a passion for accuracy, would accept this vague and general attribution of paternity affixed to him under the label of "structuralism...
Vol. 14 • March 1967 • No. 2
