11 - ‘Le retour des émigrés’? The study of the history of political ideas in contemporary France

Summary

Writing in the Revue de synthèse in 1988, Stefan Collini remarked that it was ‘the area of the history of political thought’ in English-speaking countries that marked ‘the point of greatest contrast with intellectual developments in France’. However, he went on, there were ‘signs that a re-alignment of the intellectual field . . . may give political thought greater prominence’. This possibility he attributed to ‘the recession of Marxism’ and to what he described as ‘a disenchantment with some of the major systematic theoretical constructions of recent decades’. Collini's suspicions have proved to be well founded. Since the beginning of the 1990s alone France has seen the creation of three reviews devoted, in different ways, to the study of the history of political thought: Philosophie politique, first published in 1992; La pensèe politique, in 1993; and the Revue française d'histoire des idées politiques, in 1995.

What has undoubtedly been the case, therefore, is that the muchvaunted ‘return to politics’ that had begun to take shape in the 1970s has now been bearing fruit. Indeed, it has had its own manifesto in the shape of René Rémond's edited volume Pour une histoire politique and its own institutional locations: the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques and the Université Paris X Nanterre as opposed to the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) of the Annales school. From 1984 onwards it has had its own review, Vingtième siècle, and its own subject, ‘le temps présent’, now recognised as a legitimate field of inquiry.