(Old) New French Thinkers and American Catholics

I have begun to read an edited collection titled New French Thought: Political Philosophy, edited by Mark Lilla. Published in 1994, it is a diverse collection of translated essays which introduces to an Anglo-American audience a conversation in French intellectual life that, up to that point in time, had been from the American engagement with the continental traditions. Up to that time, the French imports which dominated American philosophical discourse were thinkers critical of liberal modernity and proponents of a antihumanist and historicist philosophical project. Unfortunately for the American landscape, by the time of the publication of this volume, those thinkers and philosophical projects which preoccupied the American academe had been overtaken by a group of thinkers who rejected the antihumanism and historicism (some in part others completely) and were more less critical of liberalism than the more famous and influential prior generation.

In his introduction, Lilla lightly traces the contours of the history of French philosophy. It is a story in which liberal modernity plays a prominent role, alongside history and "modernity" in the form of the residue of the French Revolution. The French encounter with liberalism differs markedly from the British and American experiences. Whereas the British and American encounters with liberalism have been endogenous or immanent, the French have experienced liberalism at a distance; theirs has been a critical and often repudiatory encounter with this sociopolitical system. This has produced a rich and variegated corpus, constituted by a diversity of approaches represented by numerous thinkers which may strike the American reader as overwhelming in its quantity, diversity and, perhaps most fundamentally, its generally critical stance toward liberalism. Whereas the American experience has been being both of and in liberal modernity, the French experience has often sat outside of a similar milieu.

The generation of philosophers introduced in the Lilla volume share a formative set of experiences in the France after the May 1968 events. These events brought about a social and political culture which was much more malleable to a liberal order. The thinkers collected in the volume are more comfortable with exploring and accepting the legitimacy liberalism than were the members of the previous generation (e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre or Michel Foucault), who were more familiar to an American philosophical audience.

I think that the Catholic can appreciate this generation of French philosophers' response to liberalism. The Catholic engagement with liberalism has been similarly contested. As it has been noted on this blog, there has been an ongoing debate by Catholics in America over the relationship between Catholicism and liberal modernity. While one group of Catholics has taken a view of the relationship between Catholicism and liberal modernity which has been positive, the other group has held a critical view of the relationship between Catholicism and modern liberal democracy.

This is not old news, however I think that the volume can act as a vehicle by which to understand the American Catholic experience. American Catholics have a closer relationship to liberalism than do these French thinkers -- not only were they born into a liberal culture but the "foundations" of their government are modern liberal. But, the American Catholic critics share with these thinkers a critical distance to liberal modernity. The Catholic critic of American liberalism can find an ally in the French thinkers for the simple reason that they both hold the modern sociopolitical order at an arm's-length.

I think that the American Catholic critic of liberalism fails because s/he is perhaps too critical of the liberal order. To the extent that the liberal order is an organic or internally-traceable historicosocial development of a political space, then I don't think that the Catholic critic has much to stand on by way of sustainable critique. Yes, he can point to the Church and the Truth that the Church protects; the critique would have to be intelligible to an American who hears it. I don't see that happening; the critical reactions seem to be too philosophically dense, and frankly too "impractical" for the American ethos.

I suspect many Catholics have read the work(s) of Pierre Manent, and other figures. The American Catholic can perform a service fr himself by being more sympathetic or open to the liberal tradition which constitues who it is that he is.