The Anthropological Turn: French Political Thought After 1968

By Jacob Collins

A close look at post-1968 French thinkers Régis Debray, Emmanuel Todd, Marcel Gauchet, and Alain de Benoist

In The Anthropological Turn, Jacob Collins traces the development of what he calls a tradition of "political anthropology" in France over the course of the 1970s. After the social revolution of the 1960s brought new attention to identities and groups that had previously been marginal in French society, the country entered a period of stagnation: the economy slowed, the political system deadlocked, and the ideologies of communism and Catholicism lost their appeal. In this time of political, cultural, and economic indeterminacy, political anthropology, as Collins defines it, offered social theorists grand narratives that could give greater definition to "the social" by anchoring its laws and histories in the deep and sometimes archaic past.

Political anthropologists sought to answer the most basic of questions: what is politics and what constitutes a political community? Collins focuses on four influential, yet typically overlooked, French thinkers—Régis Debray, Emmanuel Todd, Marcel Gauchet, and Alain de Benoist —who, from Left to far Right, represent different political leanings in France. Through a close and comprehensive reading of their work, he explores how key issues of religion, identity, citizenship, and the state have been conceptualized and debated across a wide spectrum of opinion in contemporary France.

Collins argues that the stakes have not changed since the 1970s and rival conceptions of the republic continue to vie for dominance. Political and cultural issues of the moment—the burkini, for example—become magnified and take on the character of an anthropological threat. In this respect, he shows how the anthropological turn, as it figures in the work of Debray, Todd, Gauchet, and Benoist, is a useful lens for viewing the political and social controversies that have shaped French history for the last forty years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812297027

Book preview

The Anthropological Turn

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

OF THE MODERN AGE

Series Editors

Angus Burgin

Peter E. Gordon

Joel Isaac

Karuna Mantena

Samuel Moyn

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Camille Robcis

Sophia Rosenfeld

The Anthropological Turn

French Political Thought After 1968

Jacob Collins

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used

for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this

book may be reproduced in any form by any means without

written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Collins, Jacob, author.

Title: The anthropological turn : French political thought after 1968 / Jacob Collins.

Other titles: Intellectual history of the modern age.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: Intellectual history of the modern age | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019032104 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5216-3 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Benoist, Alain de—Political and social views. | Gauchet, Marcel—Political and social views. | Todd, Emmanuel, 1951– —Political and social views. | Debray, Régis—Political and social views. | Political science—France—History—20th century. | Political anthropology—France. | France—Politics and government—1958– | France—Intellectual life—20th century.

Classification: LCC JA84.F8 C64 2020 | DDC 320.01—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032104

For Naomi

CONTENTS

Introduction:France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology

Chapter 1.Toward a White Nationalist Europe: The Archaic Fantasies of Alain de Benoist

Chapter 2.Marcel Gauchet and the Anthropology of the State

Chapter 3.Family Ties: The Anthropology of Emmanuel Todd and the Identity of France

Chapter 4.Tracking the Sacred: The Political Anthropology of Régis Debray

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

France in the 1970s and the Making of Political Anthropology

The 1970s in France were years of malaise. The 1960s had been monumental by comparison: The economy was growing at an extraordinary rate; Charles de Gaulle, a kind of living myth, was president; young radicals were protesting Western imperialism in North Africa and Southeast Asia; and a social revolution nearly toppled the government in 1968. The cinema of the New Wave, the philosophy of Louis Althusser, the fashion of Yves Saint Laurent—to name only a few—were the high cultural achievements of this decade. The 1970s, in contrast, were marked by economic recession, political fragmentation, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the uninspiring liberal presidency of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. This change of mood had underlying structural causes: The oil shock of 1973 signaled the end of a thirty-year period of unprecedented economic growth, and production began shifting away from manufacturing toward a service-oriented economy. Politically, the many radical groups and movements that were created in the late 1960s were, by the mid-1970s, disbanded, their members either dropping out or cleaning up their act to join more established political parties. Their hope of building new kinds of political community after 1968—more popular and egalitarian—were crushed in this atmosphere.

There was, nevertheless, one promising development: In 1972, Socialists and Communists agreed to put aside their differences and run on a joint platform, striking a pact that became known as the Union of the Left. Shortly before the 1978 elections, however, the Communists abruptly withdrew and the coalition fell apart. The right-wing vote had already been split between followers of de Gaulle, and President Giscard’s liberal coalition. And now with the left-wing vote forked too, the electorate was divided almost evenly four ways, leading to a political deadlock. Thus, with the slowdown of capitalist growth and the splintering of politics, the sense of optimism that animated the 1960s’ spirit of protest evaporated and indeed left a void in the heart of French politics. The philosopher Jean Baudrillard offered an appropriate epitaph: The loss of meaning, the end of history, the agony of politics, the transparency and indeterminacy of the social itself, the power of simulation, the omnipresence and obscenity of the media.¹

While many things were dying out in this decade, new things were taking shape too.² In political discourse, attention shifted toward groups that had been previously marginal to mainstream politics: women, gays, immigrants, and prisoners. This was largely a product of 1960s radicalism. By the early 1970s, a wide array of feminist and gay-rights groups brought new visibility to issues of gender discrimination and sexuality. In 1972, Michel Foucault and others, outraged by the existence of a mass carceral system, launched the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), which aimed to expose the wretched conditions of the prisons in capitalist societies: We propose to make known what the prison is: who goes there, how and why they go there, what happens there, and what the life of the prisoners is, and that, equally, of the surveillance personnel; what the buildings, the food, and hygiene are like, and so on.³ Finally, the most marginal of all, immigrants, succeeded in making their voices heard in France in this decade. As the historian Daniel Gordon has pointedly argued, the ex-colonial immigrant was not only a key player in the 1968 revolts but also, for twenty years following the end of empire, the subject of sharp political controversy (around, for example, housing, labor, and immigration quotas).⁴ The Communist philosopher Étienne Balibar quit the party in 1980 not because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan but because a Communist municipality in the Parisian banlieues bulldozed a hostel being built for Malian workers.⁵

By the following decade, the indeterminacies of the 1970s began to harden, and it became clear to many that a new France was in the making. After a period marked by high unemployment, stagnant wages, and high inflation, French people were ready for a change. In May 1981, they elected for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic a Socialist president, François Mitterrand. After the bitter infighting of 1977 and 1978, this victory brought a momentary surge of excitement to the Left. Mitterrand promised a sweeping redistributive agenda that would transform society and break with capitalism. His demand-side economic policies, however, quickly exacerbated existing problems: Deficits soared as unemployment and inflation continued to rise. After less than two years in office, Mitterrand reversed course—the famous U-turn—and implemented a number of anti-inflationary austerity measures. Wages were frozen and transfer payments were no longer increased, contrary to Mitterrand’s promises. Even if social spending remained high by the standards of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the French had very little to show for it by the 1990s. During Mitterrand’s first seven-year term, productivity declined, unemployment continued to rise, and social conflict was aggravated rather than pacified. In addition, membership in the mass parties of the Left, not to mention unions, had already been falling off precipitously since the late 1970s.⁶ After the U-turn, these numbers tanked. The French Communist Party (PCF), once the largest party of the Left, had been reduced to a shell of its former self by the decade’s end. Between 1982 and 1987 alone it lost 100,000 members.⁷

Moreover, these years were characterized by a recurrent failure by the major parties to find a stable ruling coalition. The 1986 legislative elections delivered sweeping victories for the Right, forcing Mitterrand to name the conservative Jacques Chirac as prime minister. This was the first time a cohabitation scenario had arisen in the Fifth Republic, leaving one party in control of the executive office and another in charge of the legislature. In 1988, the parliamentary majority shifted back to the Left, and then again to the Right in 1993. The formation of solid ruling blocs has proved fleeting ever since.⁸

Political discourse likewise took on a more divisive, embittered tone. For the first time, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s race-baiting party of the extreme Right, the Front national (FN), began to achieve high returns in local, national, and European elections in the mid-1980s. With the simultaneous formation of anti-racist groups like SOS Racisme, the language of race, citizenship, gender, and immigration took on new importance in French public debate. On the one hand, the centrality of these issues to French discourse had been made possible by the social revolution of the 1960s, which rendered visible all the ways that the apparent consensus of the postwar miracle years had excluded women, gays, immigrants, people of color, and the incarcerated. In doing so, it demanded that new logics of the social be considered, ones that were more inclusive and egalitarian. On the other hand, the effects of this revolution were being felt at the moment when economies were slowing and budgetary pressures increasing. Once austerity measures took hold in 1983, public debate quickly assumed that some groups were entitled—at the expense of others—to a diminishing stock of welfare provisions. This was the context in which Le Pen’s movement of the Far Right gained a national foothold, pitting ethnic groups against one another and arguing that immigrants ought to be the first group excluded from these benefits. The response of Mitterrand and the Socialist Party (PS) was to push for tolerance. They defended the right to difference for various subgroups, and they called for initiatives supporting regional and ethnic diversity.⁹ Thus it happened that economic and cultural pressures—the recession and the end of empire—converged to form a new framework for talking about identity and race in the early 1980s.

By the mid-1980s, it was obvious to many French commentators that the country was moving in a certain direction: toward a neoliberal society with fragmented politics, high unemployment, and declining social solidarity. As might be expected, judgments about the 1980s—both contemporary and retrospective—were categorical and typically negative. The philosopher Félix Guattari referred to them as winter years, and for Alain Badiou they could be characterized as a counter-revolution.¹⁰ France’s leading historian of the decade subtitled his book: the great nightmare.¹¹ The 1970s were, on the contrary, indeterminate and defamiliarizing. Thus, this period can be seen as a decade in transit, one in which an old order was disappearing and a new one was emerging.¹² The great ideologies that had once anchored French political identities—namely, Catholicism, communism, and Gaullism—were giving way to a new set of political logics and identities. The question I have asked myself in writing this book is, how did French thinkers write political theory within this context of defamiliarization? More specifically, how did they respond to what Baudrillard called the indeterminacy of the social—the sense that the social, economic, and cultural bearings of France were shifting, and some new world was being made?

I argue that across the political spectrum, French thinkers felt as though they were at a point zero, as though political ideas had to be invented from scratch and given new life. Thus, they turned to writing what I have called, in a loose sense, political anthropology.¹³ These were grand narratives that sought to give greater definition to the social by anchoring its laws and histories in the deep and sometimes archaic past. The questions they asked tended to be of a basic order: What is politics, and what are its elementary features? What constitutes a true political community? How is the individualized self to be understood in modern society? What is the French republic and what does it mean to be one of its citizens? In responding to these questions, the emphasis was always on the long unfolding of political and social concepts, and often on origins themselves. I see this as an attempt to fix meaning where it was fleeting and unstable and to overcome what must have seemed like a troubling destabilization of social and political signifiers. Ideologically, this intellectual configuration took shape as a critique of both the PCF’s communism, now seen to be hopelessly decrepit, and the neoliberal policies implemented first by Giscard and more fully by Mitterrand.

I refer to this kind of theory, first, as anthropological not because it was undertaken by actual anthropologists or grounded in ethnographic fieldwork but because it borrowed concepts and methodologies from the discipline of anthropology and it often purported to make universal claims about human nature—a term used unapologetically by some of the figures covered in this book.¹⁴ Thus, while influenced by the work of anthropologists, these thinkers were assuredly outsiders to the field, and their ideas were not likely to be accepted as legitimate by real practitioners of the discipline. Second, I refer to this type of theory as political not only because it focused on questions of a political nature but also because its conclusions were intended expressly as political interventions. In this way did these theories engage with a broader reading public and attempt to impact national debate and discussion.

To illustrate this mode of thought, I have focused on four thinkers, each belonging to a different political-intellectual tradition in France: on the extreme Right, the philosopher of the New Right, Alain de Benoist; representing the political center, the political theorist Marcel Gauchet and the demographer-historian Emmanuel Todd; and, on the socialist Left, the philosopher and critic Régis Debray.¹⁵ In response to the political and social impasses of the 1970s, these four thinkers developed, by the early 1980s, an elaborate political-anthropological system, and each attempted to bring greater clarity to the social and define the ideal political community. Coming from diverse political backgrounds, their visions of this political order differed wildly, but the means by which they arrived at their conclusions, and the questions they asked, were remarkably similar. In what follows, I will provide a brief overview of their lives and ideas and will show how political anthropology has come to impact political culture in France for the last forty years.

Thinkers

Alain de Benoist, born in 1943, came from a conservative, petit-bourgeois family in the Loire Valley. As a teenager, he found his way into the ranks of the extreme Right, then dominated by ex-Vichy collaborators and members of prewar groups like Action française and the Parti Populaire Française (PPF). At the moment of Benoist’s entry, the extreme Right was fighting to preserve the French empire in Algeria—a struggle that led a few years later to the creation of a paramilitary terrorist group, the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS). Benoist was not a member of this group but joined a student organization that had close ties with it. He spent much of the early and mid-1960s writing for the far right-wing press, especially journals like Cahiers universitaires and Europe Action, both proudly ultra-nationalist and racist.

In 1967, he decided to abandon his nationalist-militant agenda for an intellectualized politics—a Gramscianism of the Right he would later call it. Pulling together friends and sympathizers, Benoist co-founded the ultra-right think tank, GRECE, and launched the first issue of its flagship journal, Nouvelle école, in 1968. The movement committed itself to a philosophy of neo-paganism, anti-egalitarianism, and cultural essentialism. The group achieved notoriety in France in the late 1970s, and Benoist, through his hundreds of books and deep links to right-wing movements throughout Europe, became one of the most well-known and influential thinkers of the Far Right. By the middle of the 2010s, he was one of France’s most translated authors and a key reference for the alt-right movement. His work and that of his associates have contributed to debates around cultural identity and belonging in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century France.

Like Benoist, Marcel Gauchet’s origins were provincial and conservative. Born in 1946, he grew up in a small coastal town in Normandy. His parents were manual laborers, and Gauchet was a choirboy in the local parish. He had initially intended to earn his degree as a teacher, but, after being radicalized by university protests against the Algerian War, he decided to enroll at the University of Caen. There he studied sociology, history, and philosophy, but he also began a long intellectual collaboration with his teacher Claude Lefort. Lefort brought him into a circle of non- and ex-Marxist radicals, who theorized the self-management movement of the early 1970s, and celebrated the democratic ethos of May 1968. Gauchet later broke ranks with this group and decided to join the political establishment. He became in 1980 a co-founding editor, with Pierre Nora, of the centrist review, Le Débat, soon to be one of the most prestigious intellectual publications in France.

Gauchet has written several commanding works of political philosophy, including The Disenchantment of the World (1985), a theory of secularization that many, like Charles Taylor, have taken to be a definitive re-theorization of the concept. From the late 1980s, Gauchet taught political theory at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and is now recognized as one of France’s premier thinkers. From 2007, his major undertaking was a philosophical history of democracy from the sixteenth century to the present, which occupied four volumes and some two thousand pages. In 2014, he was invited to give the keynote lecture at France’s annual history conference, that year devoted to the theme of rebels in history. Two young journalists at the left-wing newspaper Libération called for a boycott of the conference on the grounds that Gauchet was too reactionary to speak on such a topic. The same year, he debated his views with the most famous living communist philosopher in France, Alain Badiou.¹⁶

Emmanuel Todd, born in 1951, is the youngest of the group, and the only non-Catholic. He is the son of the journalist and biographer Olivier Todd—himself of Austro-Hungarian Jewish and Anglo ancestry—and the grandson (maternally) of the French Communist writer Paul Nizan. Drawn toward communism in the 1960s, Todd joined the Jeunes communistes at age sixteen and then the Communist Party itself. A visit to socialist Hungary in 1968 changed his views, however, and he became, in his own words, a spectacular anti-communist.¹⁷ His next move was to Cambridge, where, under the tutelage of Peter Laslett and Alan Macfarlane, Todd developed a deeper interest in the history and sociology of the family, inspiring him to write a doctoral thesis on pre-industrial peasant families in Europe.

Todd returned to France in the mid-1970s and moved principally in liberal, anti-Communist circles. In 1976, at just twenty-five years old, Todd published La Chute finale (The Final Fall), which predicted, using bits and pieces of demographic data, the collapse of the Soviet Union. The book made waves among liberals and anti-communists, and Todd was hailed by major intellectuals—principally historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and political scientist Jean-François Revel—as a brilliant and promising young intellectual. He was soon given a weekly column in Le Monde, where he reviewed major publications in the social sciences. In the early 1980s, Todd found steady employment as a researcher at the Institut national d’études démographiques (INED), and his work quickly changed focus. He now looked to establish, on the basis of demographic maps and charts, a planetary atlas of kinship patterns, and to show how those patterns were correlated with political and social ideologies. The texts he wrote in this period formed the theoretical basis for all his subsequent work, including a controversial book on immigration, Le Destin des immigrés (1994); a best-selling critique of the American empire, Après l’empire (2002); and a provocative breakdown of the Je suis Charlie movement, Qui est Charlie? (2015), a book that made the already well-known Todd into a national celebrity. Todd abandoned his youthful liberalism after 1989 and devoted his energies to defending protectionist and pro-immigrant positions. He has been a leading voice in France on both issues.

Régis Debray was from a high bourgeois Parisian family with conservative politics. His parents were both top lawyers, and his mother was elected to municipal office in the late 1940s on the Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) party list. Debray rebelled and joined, like Todd, the Jeunes communistes, though a full decade earlier, as Debray was born in 1940. He was a brilliant philosophy student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1960s but was more interested in Third World politics than in the pursuit of scholarship. On the basis of an article he wrote on the Cuban Revolution in Les Temps modernes (the journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre), Debray was summoned to Havana by Fidel Castro himself in 1965. The next decade he spent as a political militant in Latin America, where he wrote his world-famous pamphlet of revolutionary struggle, The Revolution in the Revolution?, and later joined Che Guevara’s ill-fated Bolivian campaign of 1967. There, Debray was captured, tried, and given a thirty-year sentence, though he served only three. Returning to France in 1973, he rallied to the presidential candidacy of François Mitterrand and became not only a key figure in the radicalization of the PS in the 1970s but also a staunch advocate of the Union of the Left. After serving as an adviser to Mitterrand during the latter’s first term, Debray resigned and helped start a neo-republican movement in France, the principal aims of which were to oppose the single currency and French support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and to defend an egalitarian and secular vision of the French republic.

Debray occupies a unique position within French intelligentsia: On the one hand, he is a consummate insider with close ties to powerful figures; on the other, however, an independent-minded thinker whose positions have sometimes left him politically isolated. At turns a communist, Third World revolutionary, socialist, republican, and Gaullist, Debray has also assembled a diverse catalog of writings, which has included plays, novels, memoirs, histories of religion and art, literary criticism, political theory, sociologies of intellectuals, and satirical essays. His main theoretical text was 1981’s Critique of Political Reason, an original if often overlooked work that reevaluated, from an anthropological point of view, the religious and irrational foundations of politics. It has since guided Debray in his protean thinking about French national and cultural identity.

The four thinkers studied here are not elite thinkers on the order of Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, or Badiou. Their international reception has been, for the most part, limited. Only two of Gauchet’s works, for example, have been translated into English. Nevertheless, their impact on French political culture has been considerable. As political operators occupying key positions within the national cultural apparatus, each has found a broad readership in France. Gauchet is day-to-day editor of the French equivalent of the New York Review of Books; Todd is a best-selling author and a frequent guest on France’s political talk shows; Debray has been an important opinion maker on the Left since the 1970s, sitting on influential committees, writing controversial op-eds, and appearing constantly on French radio (especially France Culture); and Benoist has likewise been instrumental in making the Far Right’s voice heard in public debates, as, for instance, in the same-sex marriage controversies of 2012–13. Their ideas and views are considered newsworthy by the French media, and their works are typically reviewed in the leading papers and cultural magazines. If one wishes to understand the relationship between ideas and politics in France, these are the kinds of thinkers that need to be studied.

Methods of Political Anthropology

The political anthropologies adopted by these thinkers shared a number of features in common, one being their common use of the grand narrative format of writing. The concepts, social systems, and ideologies tracked in these writers’ texts were shown to have developed over a long period of time, on the order of centuries and millennia. In Gauchet’s writing, for instance, the notion of autonomy was inscribed in a history that stretched back to primeval, pre-Christian societies. Likewise, in Todd’s work, political ideologies could be traced back to kinship relations in premodern peasant communities. These grand narratives supposed that history was, in some basic way, meaningful; that it was not simply one damned thing after another but a series of interconnected events and structures that unfolded according to a certain logic. If these codes and meanings were interpreted correctly, history could be made to show the inner logic of the social and political.

Famously, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard saw incredulity toward metanarratives as one of the key features of what he called the postmodern condition. Writing in 1979 and simultaneous with the construction of these political anthropologies, Lyotard argued that the status of knowledge had undergone major shifts since the dawn of modernity. Belief had been shattered in that age, making way for the rise of the sciences, which in turn introduced to Western culture new styles of argumentation and new standards of proof. Regarding the latter, Lyotard declared that postmodern societies measured knowledge in pragmatic terms, by how effective it was in optimizing the system’s performance.¹⁸ Truth procedures thus became relative to every different scientific community and were no longer subject to universal validation. Each community participated in its own language game and constructed little narratives about what qualified as knowledge. The direction of postmodern society, as anticipated by prewar Viennese thinkers like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Robert Musil, was toward a pragmatic, anti-metaphysical outlook. Under these conditions, grand narratives could only appear as curiosities, as so many fables, myths, and legends that survived from the age of belief.¹⁹

While many insights are to be found in Lyotard’s short book, his main contention was overly hasty. Certainly, among French thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s, there was a movement away from grand narrative toward more experimental forms of writing. One thinks immediately of Foucault’s archaeologies, Derrida’s deconstructions, and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes. All of these challenged the idea that society could be comprehended by way of a single master code or structure. Likewise, anti-metaphysical philosophers—but principally Wittgenstein and Friedrich Nietzsche—were common currency among French thinkers of this era. At the same time, however, it could not be denied that grand narrative was pervasive in French social and political theory and not only among the thinkers under discussion here. Lyotard for the most part ignored politics in The Postmodern Condition, but this was the domain in which grand narrative mattered most.²⁰ Liberals, Marxists, radicals, and conservatives alike typically remained beholden to a style of writing that aimed to convince a wide audience of the truth of their views. They wrote to persuade beyond their immediate milieu. Even Foucault, as he came to be more politically active in the 1970s, abandoned his earlier archaeologies, and began to write what were obviously meta-narratives (of, for instance, power, sexuality, and governmentality).²¹ Many similar examples could be cited: the political theorist Pierre Rosanvallon’s two trilogies on the history of democracy were of broad and cumulative sweep, as was the republican philosopher Blandine Kriegel’s multivolume history of the state.

A similar point could be made about structure in this context. This term was out of fashion among France’s elite thinkers by the late 1970s, such that thinkers like Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Foucault came to be called, with much looseness, post-structuralists. Structuralism, broadly speaking, was a formalist and an objectivist way of thinking that related superficial appearances to underlying conceptual patterns.²² In structuralism’s most famous formulation, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, social institutions and customs—for example, marriage relations and myths—were linked to formal possibilities that existed in the human mind. This mode of thinking gained wide traction in French universities for much of the 1950s and 1960s, especially within the social sciences. For the post-structuralists, however, structures were like grand narratives in that they were loaded with metaphysical assumptions and implied a sense of stability and permanence in human affairs where perhaps they were lacking. Post-structuralists thus took it upon themselves to interrogate these structures, and they typically argued that desire, power, sexuality, identity, and so on, were more convincingly seen as contingent and unstable signifiers, and hence were irreducible to pre-given structures. Derrida’s 1967 Of Grammatology is often held to be the first major post-structuralist text, having explicitly deconstructed the work of France’s two leading structural anthropologists: Lévi-Strauss and André Leroi-Gourhan.²³ In a similar vein, Deleuze and Guattari wrote their anti-psychiatric theory as a refutation of Freud’s Oedipal structures; and Foucault, his theory of power against Marxist theories of history and social structure.²⁴ Thus, it was a commonly held assumption among scholars that structuralism had been superseded and abandoned.

Such announcements of structuralism’s death were premature however. Political and social theorists inspired by structuralism continued to search for laws and underlying patterns of thought in the 1970s and 1980s (including those post-structuralists who had allegedly killed it). Debray’s theory of human nature in the Critique of Political Reason was undeniably structuralist in supposing that all human groups everywhere were bound by the same basic rules and procedures.²⁵ The book was critical of Lévi-Strauss but without calling into question the utility of structures: Lévi-Strauss had posited the wrong laws; Debray was going to give us the correct ones. Todd’s work was likewise structuralist: All political and social ideologies were rooted in anterior kinship relations. Gauchet’s insights about the state were directly influenced by Lévi-Strauss’s distinction between hot and cold societies (the former having both history and the state, the latter having neither).²⁶ And Benoist’s fantasies of a rejuvenated, white Europe were traced back to pre-Christian Indo-European social structures.

What the post-structuralists disliked about structuralism—its rigidity and pretensions to objectivity—was precisely what attracted political anthropologists to it. Systems, structures, laws, and axioms were useful insofar as they could help ground political judgments in clearly delineated frameworks. In this respect, one could think of political anthropology as structuralism politicized. This procedure, to be sure, involved a degree of modification and even distortion. Lévi-Strauss, for instance, had developed his own version of structural analysis through sophisticated linguistic and mathematical models. Myths and kinship relations were broken down into signs and recombined to unlock pre-given social laws of behavior.²⁷ The structuralism of political anthropologists, by contrast, tended to be a cruder affair: They picked and chose from its canons without worrying too much about consistency or correct usage. The historian Camille Robcis has made a similar point with regard to how psychoanalysts and policy makers in postwar France appropriated structuralist language to redefine familial and gender codes: Insofar as the concepts of Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan served their ends, they used them.²⁸ Thus, one could say that there was a selective use of structural ideas after the 1960s but not a decisive break.

Intellectually, as Peter Dews has noted, structuralism in France marked a turning away from German philosophical models toward native ones: Behind Lévi-Strauss there lay Émile Durkheim and the entire tradition of early twentieth-century sociological positivism, which had taken shape in opposition to what many regarded as the unscientific and literary character of the nineteenth-century humanities.²⁹ This was likewise true of political anthropology: Whereas the elite thinkers looked to German philosophers—especially Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Edmund Husserl—to support their post-structural interrogations, the writers discussed here looked primarily to French anthropologists and sociologists.³⁰ Benoist’s template for Indo-European values was derived from Georges Dumézil, the linguistic anthropologist trained in Durkheim’s milieu in the early twentieth century. Gauchet, in collaboration with his colleagues Claude Lefort and Pierre Clastres, was steeped in the literature of French anthropology and developed his work in dialogue with Louis Dumont, Lévi-Strauss, Durkheim, and Durkheim’s nephew, Marcel Mauss. Todd’s work was overflowing with references to native traditions in the social sciences. His classification of marriage systems was borrowed and reworked from the nineteenth-century sociologist Frédéric Le Play, who conducted a continent-wide survey of working families in his 1855 Les Ouvriers européens. Todd likewise incorporated the methods of Durkheim, the Annales School of history, and Alfred Sauvy, the demographer and founder of INED, into his work. Finally, Debray was a Marxist in his early career, but by the late 1970s he was influenced more by figures like Auguste Comte, the nineteenth-century sociologist, and André Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologist and prehistorian trained by Mauss.

Here, again, the preference for native thinkers reflected a politicized outlook: The search for a science of politics was at the same time a search for a French political identity. It thus made sense for these political anthropologists to cite precedents within their own intellectual tradition and build on preexisting frameworks. For instance, as the liberal tradition in France attempted to reinvent itself in the late 1970s, it established contact with its nineteenth-century ancestors: Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Constant, François Guizot, and Edgar Quinet.³¹

In the methods of political anthropology, there was, in sum, an emphasis on grand narrative, structure, and native social-scientific frameworks. One more could be added to this list: political anthropology’s holist approach to the study of society. Holism supposed that human collectives and their social arrangements formed a complex ensemble of wholes—interlocking systems were never reducible to their parts. Societies, thus, existed not as an aggregation of elementary particles but as a pre-given organic unity. This too was a legacy of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social sciences, and its leading practitioners tended to see ideas, beliefs, and practices not as a product of individual wills but as collective representations that acted on and shaped the individual. Culture and meaning were forged at the social level before becoming individual.

This methodological preference disposed our thinkers toward a certain kind of analysis. For one, they tended to privilege the nonrational sources of human motivation in their political and social theory. Crucial to the work of Debray, Todd, Gauchet, Benoist, and many other thinkers in France at the time, was the idea that a political unconscious was at work, that outlooks and beliefs were formed and passed down beyond the express intention of the actors involved. For Todd, political and religious worldviews were determined within the crucible of the family. In societies where the father was domineering, political and social ideologies were likely to be authoritarian and hierarchical. Where children inherited equally, one could expect a value system that reflected egalitarian preferences. For Gauchet, social life was profoundly holist and symbolic: The key element for any group was the relationship it maintained between the here and now—the world of immanence—and the world beyond. Around this primordial division there developed a whole ensemble of political and social institutions that would incarnate and represent the sacred other.³² Only in late modernity did these symbolic structures begin to decay and lead to