If the present is embarrassing, is the past as glorious as one might suppose? Hazareesingh, describing the French intellectual pantheon, includes all the main strands of French thought — Descartes, positivism, Gaullism, Marxism, structuralism, liberalism — all inevitably placed on the same level. In that situation it is impossible not to compare various periods and people — and then, not to pause and wonder. Why all the praise for Sartre and Marxism? Or for the structuralists? French Marxism, a rather rigid kind of Leninism followed by a Latin Quarter Maoism, was either intellectual nonsense or an insult to real people struggling in the USSR and elsewhere. As for structuralism, apart from the great Lévi-Strauss and the sometimes interesting but strange Foucault, it is difficult to see much sense in, for example, Lacan’s one-minute sessions where he shouted at patients for a large fee.

I am left to wonder: did all countries have such strange intellectual moods? Were the French mad? Were they really thinking? It all depends on what you call thinking. I may be very un-French, but because something is grandiose or unintelligible doesn’t make it worthy of being called thinking. Support for revolution and destruction — of institutions or of the bourgeoisie, for example — doesn’t necessarily justify the description of thinking.

I suspect that Hazareesingh would disagree with me. There is a discreet ambiguity present in the book, which becomes stronger and stronger the further one gets through it. The first part remains very neutral, maybe because it is further away in time; nearer the present, one feels that Hazareesingh is more interested in the intellectuals of Saint-Germain-des-Prés than in, say, Raymond Aron. I don’t mind him having his preferences, but I have mine too. The book ends with a strong critique of Alain Finkielkraut, a writer famous for his passionate defence of French republicanism, laïcité and integration as against multiculturalism. Hazaree-singh sees Finkielkraut as “the ultimate embodiment of the closing of the French mind” and a supporter of “ethnic nationalism”. But Finkielkraut has never said or written such words: he is just a very clever cultural conservative. I find the contrast between Hazareesingh’s harsh treatment of him and his relative indulgence towards those nice gauchistes rather striking.

So we diverge: I think the French mind is closing partly because of the damage done by the gauchistes — they deconstructed so much that there is little left to deconstruct, and they forced all subsequent scholars to think in a very restricted way; Hazareesingh thinks it is because of conservatives like Finkielkraut. Or maybe we are both wrong, and the truth is to be found elsewhere.

How the French Think expresses a kind of fascination for the French way of thinking that I have often noticed among many scholars in France and elsewhere, and which has always surprised me. “French intellectual constructs are speculative in that they are generally the product of a form of thinking which is not necessarily grounded in empirical reality,” writes Hazareesingh. And it is true: Sartre’s theoretical work is unintelligible, his political thought dogmatic; Deleuze’s — see, for example, Mille Plateaux for a good laugh — approaches delirium; Bourdieu’s, even dealing with social “reproduction”, divided reality between right and wrong, the latter being forbidden because it was bourgeois. From a more political perspective, even when The Gulag Archipelago was published in 1973, many intellectuals didn’t want to accept the brutal truth and kept longing for the dictature du prolétariat. But shouldn’t intellectuals care about empirical reality, either as a starting point or as a result? If speculation is necessary, shouldn’t it be always linked to facts, because both challenge each other? Isn’t it possible that the French have gone too far in their worshipping of speculation? I tend to think so.