Rethinking the French Liberal Moment

Some Thoughts on the Heterogeneous Origins of Lefort and Gauchet’s Social Philosophy

Bibliographic Data

ID20044056
AuthorsNoah Rosenblum (corresponding author)
Year2016
Pages61-83
Publication date2016-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueIn Search of the Liberal Moment (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan US (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9781137581266_4
OpenAlexW2479972408
ISBN9781137581266
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited11

Recent scholarship has taken an interest in the renaissance of French liberal thought in the second half of the twentieth century. This “French liberal revival” has swept up scholars and commentators alike, and is often thought to include the important French philosophers Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet. But, as work in intellectual history has shown, the term sits uneasily on at least these two. On close examination, we see that some of their mature thought is only ambiguously committed to liberal goals and rests on complex philosophical premises that are incompatible with some traditional liberal arguments. Tracing aspects of their social thought back to its roots reveals how deeply opposed to liberalism some of their premises were and helps us see how they carried illiberal ideas forward into new contexts. This forces us to take a new perspective on at least this piece of the twentieth century’s French liberal moment, revising accepted stories of its origins and meaning. Recognizing the heterogeneous sources of their argument leads us to appreciate Lefort and Gauchet’s creative work of reconstruction and resist the urge to canalize their powerful social philosophy

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Classical liberalism · Epistemology · Liberalism · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Scholarship · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Sociology, Political Theory · Political Theory and Influence · Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research

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