French intellectuals against the left : the antitotalitarian moment of the 1970's

In the latter half of the 1970s, the French intellectual Left denounced communism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics through a critique of left-wing totalitarianism that paved the way for today's postmodern, liberal, and moderate republican political options. Contrary to the dominant understanding of the critique of totalitarianism as an abrupt rupture induced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's __The Gulag Archipelago__, Christofferson argues that French anti-totalitarianism was the culmination of direct-democratic critiques of communism and revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. The author's focus on the direct-democratic politics of French intellectuals offers an important alternative to recent histories that seek to explain the course of French intellectual politics by France's apparent lack of a liberal tradition. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ABBREVIATIONS INTRODUCTION French Antitotalitarianism in Comparative Perspective Chapter 1 FROM FELLOW-TRAVELING TO REVISIONISM The Fate of the Revolutionary Project, 1944-1974 Chapter 2 THE GULAG AS A METAPHOR The Politics of Reactions to Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago Chapter 3 INTELLECTUALS AND THE POLITICS OF THE UNION OF THE LEFT The Birth of Antitotalitarianism Chapter 4 DISSIDENCE CELEBRATED Intellectuals and Repression in Eastern Europe Chapter 5 ANTITOTALITARIANISM TRIUMPHANT The New Philosophers and Their Interlocutors Chapter 6 ANTITOTALITARIANISM AGAINST THE REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION François Furet’s Revisionist History of the French Revolution EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SECONDARY SOURCES INDEX