Intellectuals, Culture and Public Policy in France: Approaches from the Left

摘要

The classic view of the French intellectual, since the Second War at least, has been as a stalwart opponent of the bourgeois state. Sartre's leftist existentialism, Althusser's structuralist Marxism, Foucault's trenchant analyses of bio-power, for all their differences, were grounded in a hostility to the Jacobin state which has been a leitmotif of the French intellectual left at least since the foundation of the Fifth Republic. Ahearne's painstakingly and thoroughly documented survey may thus come as something of a surprise, for to the view of the intellectual 'speaking truth and justice to power' (p. 1) he counter-poses the less glamorous, but perhaps quite as influential, figure of the intellectual deeply involved in the sphere of public policy, primarily in relation to culture. If the most contestatory intellectual names, notably Sartre and Badiou, have by and large given the Paris corridors of power a wide berth, there is an impressive array of other figures identified with the left and frequently critical of the Socialist Party who have nevertheless 'become involved in the policy process despite the general censure that has often been attached to such moves' (p. 26).