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FRENCH LIBERALISM’S “INDIAN DETOUR”: LOUIS DUMONT, THE INDIVIDUAL, AND LIBERAL POLITICAL THOUGHT IN POST-1968 FRANCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2014

JACOB COLLINS
JACOB COLLINS*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

Liberalism in France has typically been concerned with political, rather than economic, issues. Its classic texts—those of Constant, Guizot, and Tocqueville—were written in the aftermath of the Revolution, and reflected on the historical and political problems that grew out of it: the nature of the modern state, the rights and duties of the individual, and the nexus of institutions that mediated their relationship. These writings defined the contours of modern French liberalism, and became a key resource for thinkers in the late 1970s, notably Pierre Rosanvallon and Marcel Gauchet, who were looking for ways to revitalize the liberal-democratic project. In his 1985 study of Guizot, Rosanvallon could regret that “the question of liberalism in French political culture of the nineteenth century is ‘missing’ in contemporary thought.”1 If the task of political theory was to recover this intellectual tradition, what were the terms of the recovery? Which ideas were missing from the conceptual landscape of the 1970s to inspire it?

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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , November 2015 , pp. 685 - 710
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Rosanvallon, Pierre, “François Guizot and the Sovereignty of Reason,” in Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, ed. Moyn, Samuel (New York, 2006), 117–26, at 119Google Scholar.

2 This essay does not wish to downplay the influence of Lefort's work on both Gauchet and Rosanvallon, which was fundamental in every sense. It will, however, forego a reconstruction of his complicated political theory. Interested readers should consult Weymans, Wim, “Freedom through Political Representation: Lefort, Gauchet and Rosanvallon on the Relationship between State and Society,” European Journal of Political Theory, 4/3 (2005), 263–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Breckman, Warren, Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy (New York, 2013), 139–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gauchet made a formal break with Lefort around the time of his engagement with Dumont's work, and it is conceivable that these two phenomena were related, as Moyn, Samuel has argued in “The Politics of Individual Rights: Marcel Gauchet and Claude Lefort,” in Geenens, Raf and Rosenblatt, Helena, eds., French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day, eds. (Cambridge and New York, 2012), 291–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Rosanvallon, “François Guizot and the Sovereignty of Reason,” 119–20.

4 Little is known about these early years, but Dumont seems to have associated with the Grande-Jeu group of poets, and been on close terms with surrealist anthropologists like Roger Caillois. He also claimed to be an “orthodox communist” in the 1930s, and a member of the Association of Writers and Revolutionary Artists. See Lardinois, Roland, L’Invention de l’Inde: Entre ésotérisme et science (Paris, 2007), 269CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Galey, Jean-Claude, “A Conversation with Louis Dumont,” in Khare, R. S., ed., Caste, Hierarchy, and Individualism: Indian Critiques of Louis Dumont's Contributions (Oxford, 2006), 240–6Google Scholar.

6 Dumont, Louis, “Pour une sociologie de l’Inde,” in Dumont, La civilisation indienne et nous (Paris, 1964), 89–113, at 91Google Scholar. Dumont was almost fanatical about Mauss's influence on his own work. He once wrote, “Faithfulness to Mauss's profound inspiration seems increasingly to be a condition of success in our studies. If I seem to depart from him, a closer look should be taken: for if I really do so, this will be through my own inadequacy and not a deliberate departure.” Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: An Essay on the Caste System, trans. Mark Sainsbury (Chicago, 1970), xviGoogle Scholar.

7 Bouglé, Célestin, Essays on the Caste System, trans. Pocock, D. F. (Cambridge, 1971), 5Google Scholar. Bouglé's earlier work has recently been republished with an introduction by Serge Audier. Bouglé, Célestin, Les idées égalitaires (Paris, 2007)Google Scholar.

8 Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 44.

9 Dumont, “Pour une sociologie de l’Inde,” 95, original emphasis.

10 Dumont argued that in Bouglé's work it often seemed that the main components of Indian society were “independent features.” See Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 276 n. 24c; and also Dumont, , “Commented Summary of the First Part of Bouglé's Essais,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2 (1958), 31–44Google Scholar.

11 See Parkin, Robert, Louis Dumont and Hierarchical Opposition (New York, 2003), 42–8Google Scholar.

12 Dumont, Louis, “On Value, Modern and Nonmodern,” in Dumont, , Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago, 1983), 234–68, at 262Google Scholar.

13 In a later work, Dumont wrote, “modern man, closed in upon himself and perhaps misled by his sense of superiority, has some difficulty in grasping his own problems.” Dumont, Louis, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago, 1977), 10Google Scholar.

14 Dumont, Louis, “World Renunciation in Indian Religions,” in Dumont, , Religion/Politics and History in India: Collected Papers in Indian Sociology (Paris and The Hague, 1970), 33–60, at 45Google Scholar. This influential paper was delivered as the Frazer Lecture at Oxford in October of 1958.

15 Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 236.

16 Ibid., 11–19.

17 Dumont, Louis, Homo Aequalis, vol. 1, Genèse et épanouissement de l’idéologie économique (Paris, 1977)Google Scholar. I will be citing from the English edition, titled From Mandeville to Marx, cited above at n. 13.

18 Louis Dumont, “Genesis, II: The Political Category and the State from the Thirteenth Century Onward,” in Dumont, Essays on Individualism, 60–113, at 62, original emphasis.

19 Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, 4–5.

20 The 1965 essay “The Modern Conception of the Individual: Notes on Its Genesis and That of Concomitant Institutions,” appeared first in Contributions to Indian Sociology, 8 (1965), 13–61, then in French as “La conception moderne de l’individu, note sur sa genèse, en relation avec les conceptions de la politique et de l’État à partir du XIIIe siècle,” Esprit, Feb. 1978, 18–54. It was modified, as “Genesis, II” for Dumont, Essays on Individualism. A later essay, which forms a kind of prequel to the earlier one, is here called “Genesis, I: The Christian Beginnings: From the Outworldly Individual to the Individual-in-the-World,” in ibid., 23–59.

21 Dumont, “Genesis, I,” 31.

22 Dumont, “Genesis, II,” 66.

23 Ibid., 71.

24 Indeed, he seldom wrote of India after Homo Aequalis, and by the 1990s claimed to no longer be interested in it.

25 Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, 53.

26 Ibid., 53, 81, 85.

27 Ibid., 113. A more positive version of this thesis can be found in Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London and New York, 1983)Google Scholar.

28 Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, 166.

29 Ibid., 11, translation slightly modified.

30 Ibid., 12, italics in the original. While the two regimes had very different characters for Dumont, they were connected, according to a later essay, through an important “homology”: “Hitler did for race what Marx did for class: subordinated the State to it.” This contention sits uneasily with case presented in Homo Aequalis. First, it asserted exactly what the earlier work rejected, that totalitarianism was “derived in the first instance from the permanence or ‘survival’ of premodern or more or less general elements.” It also invoked Marx as a precursor to totalitarianism—something he tried to avoid in Homo Aequalis. Louis Dumont, “The Totalitarian Disease,” in Essays on Individualism, 149–79, at 165.

31 Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, 12.

32 Dumont, Louis, “Totalité et hiérarchie dans l’esthétique de Karl Philipp Moritz,” Revue de musicologie, 68/1–2 (1982), 64–76, at 71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Once Dumont abandoned India for the West, he came to focus on the national “subcultures” of Europe, taking a special interest in the conflict between French and German value systems. Whereas the French person thought of him or herself as essentially an individual—i.e. the egalitarian mentality—the German was “immediately conscious of his collective identity as a German,” and thus embodied the holist mentality. See Dumont's, “L’Allemagne répond à la France: Le peuple et la nation chez Herder et Fichte,” which appeared in the journal Gauchet co-edited, Libre, 6 (1979), 233–50Google Scholar; and Dumont, “Left versus Right in French Political Ideology: A Comparative Approach,” in Hall, John A. and Jarvie, I. C., eds., Transition to Modernity: Essays on Power, Wealth and Belief (Cambridge, 1992), 259–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 238; Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, 9.

34 Dumont was not unaware that his depiction of India as a static unity would attract criticism. He attempted to head off these objections by arguing that not all societies valued history, and that to imply otherwise was to assume the universality of European ideas. See Dumont, La civilisation indienne et nous, 31–54.

35 See Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, 2001), 54–9Google Scholar. French, Indian, and English critiques of Dumont's work are abundant. The Indian commentaries have been usefully collected in Khare, Caste, Hierarchy, and Individualism, with Partha Chatterjee and Andre Beteille providing very critical remarks on Dumont's work. In England, Macfarlane, Alan's “Louis Dumont and the Origins of Individualism,” Cambridge Anthropology, 16/1 (1992–3)Google Scholar, 1–28, is particularly sharp. French scholarship is somewhat below these standards. For one response see Meillassoux, Claude, “Y a-t-il des castes aux Indes?” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 54 (Jan.–Jun. 1973), 5–29Google Scholar.

36 Paul Thibaud, “À quoi bon aller en Inde,” Esprit, Feb. 1978, 3–4. See below.

37 See Lardinois, L’invention de l’inde, 285–7; and Sedgwick, Mark, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2004), 193–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, 9.

39 Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 105.

40 Dumont, “On Value,” 246, original emphasis.

41 Dumont's defenders have always insisted on his sympathy for liberal democracy. See Vibert, Stéphane, Louis Dumont: Holisme et modernité (Paris, 2004), 76Google Scholar; and Henri Stern, “L’occident vu d’en face,” Esprit, Feb. 1978, 15–17.

42 Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 237. Tocqueville had figured as a central reference for Dumont from the time of Homo Hierarchicus, as both a methodological predecessor—someone who tried to understand one's own society in light of another—and as a “sociologist” of democracy. Some twenty years later he acknowledged deeper affinities with Tocqueville, their common attachment to Normandy, “ma petite patrie,” for example. His treatment of Tocqueville's politics was hesitant and ambiguous, and entirely indicative of his own ambivalences: “It is often said that Tocqueville resigned himself with sadness to the success of equality and democracy. I don't know. What's certain is that he knew how to recognize the coming of a new era, and give in—humbly I would say—to the new values that historical development—perhaps the will of providence—had imposed.” Louis Dumont, “Tocqueville et le respect de l’autre,” Esprit, Aug.–Sept. 1987, 1–5, at 4.

43 Dumont, “Introduction,” Essays on Individualism, 1–19, 18.

44 For a comparison of the public image of both anthropologists in France see Casajus, Dominique, “Claude Lévi-Strauss et Louis Dumont: Portraits médiatiques,” Gradhiva, 14 (1993), 87–93Google Scholar. It is heavily slanted in favor of Dumont.

45 Thibaud, “À quoi bon aller en Inde,” 3–7.

46 Stern, “L’occident vu d’en face.”

47 Rosanvallon, Pierre, La démocratie inachevée (Paris, 2000), 410Google Scholar.

48 Rosanvallon, Pierre, Le capitalisme utopique: Critique de l’idéologie économique (Paris, 1979), 11, original emphasisGoogle Scholar.

49 Ibid., 12.

50 Ibid., 15. The terminology belongs to Lefort and refers to the way that democracies represent social divisions.

51 Ibid., 41.

52 Ibid., 159–60, original emphasis.

53 Here I make use of an English translation of the Marx chapter in Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, 160–86, at 168 (188 in French edition).

54 The phrase is from Andrew Jainchill and Samuel Moyn, “French Democracy between Totalitarianism and Solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and Revisionist Historiography,” Journal of Modern History, 76/1 (March 2004), 107–54, at 123.

55 Rosanvallon, Le capitalisme utopique, 230.

56 The importance of Dumont for Gauchet's work has been noted in Natalie Doyle, Democracy as Socio-cultural Project of Individual and Collective Sovereignty: Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet and the French Debate on Modern Autonomy,” Thesis Eleven, 75/1 (2003), 69–95, at 70, 82; and Lilla, Mark, “The Legitimacy of the Liberal Age,” in Lilla, , ed, The New French Thought: Political Philosophy (Princeton, 1994), 3–34, at 20–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Gauchet, Marcel, “De l’avènement de l’individu à la découverte de la société,” Annales ESC, 34/3 (May–June 1979)Google Scholar, 451–63, repr. in Gauchet, La condition politique (Paris, 2005), 405–31, at 409, 419, 407.

58 Ibid., 420, 411, 423.

59 I thank Samuel Moyn for making available to me his unpublished book chapter “The Society of Individuals,” which makes this point in a very clear way.

60 An excellent account of Dumont's individualist reading of Tocqueville may be found in Audier, Serge, Tocqueville retrouvé: Genèse et enjeux du renouveau tocquevillien français (Paris, 2004), 221–81Google Scholar.

61 Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 17, 16, 20.

62 Marcel Gauchet, “Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous,” in Gauchet, La condition politique, at 370. For more on this transformation in Gauchet's work see Moyn, Samuel, “Savage and Modern Liberty: Marcel Gauchet and the Origins of New French Thought,” European Journal of Political Theory, 4/2 (2005), 164–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Gauchet, “Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous,” 370, 368.

64 This rivalry was rekindled in Gauchet's well-known account of secularization, The Disenchantment of the World (1985). The work was greatly indebted to Dumont's theses about the historico-philosophical trajectory of Christianity, but nevertheless disagreed with them on a number of key points. See Gauchet, Marcel, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, 1997), 206, 207Google Scholar.

65 Ibid., 370.

66 Ibid., 375.

67 Dumont, “On Value,” 267.

68 Gauchet, “Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous,” 380–81.

69 Dumont, in a later essay, attempted to refute Gauchet's reading of Tocqueville, this time without citing it. He argued that Tocqueville acknowledged conflict in his work, but “did not regard it as the dominant value or last resort of society. On the contrary, conflict is subordinate, or encompassed, in his work.” Dumont, “Tocqueville et le respect de l’autre,” 4.

70 See Audier, Tocqueville retrouvé, 250.

71 Gauchet, Marcel and Swain, Gladys, La pratique de l’esprit humain: L’institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique (Paris, 1980)Google Scholar. Here cited is the abridged English translation, Madness and Democracy: The Modern Psychiatric Universe, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton, 1999), 179. For two considerations of this text see Moyn, Samuel, “The Assumption by Man of His Original Fracturing: Marcel Gauchet, Gladys Swain, and the History of the Self,” Modern Intellectual History, 6/2 (2009), 315–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Weymans, Wim, “Revising Foucault's Model of Modernity and Exclusion: Gauchet and Swain on Madness and Democracy,” Thesis Eleven, 98/33 (2009), 33–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Gauchet and Swain, Madness and Democracy, 179–80.

73 Rosanvallon, Pierre, “Le sacre de l’individu,” Revue européenne des sciences sociales, 22/68 (1984), 149–51, at 151Google Scholar. The essay was first published in Libération, 17 Nov. 1983.

74 Rosanvallon had commenced his attack on Keynesianism in La crise de l’État-providence (Paris, 1981). There he declared, citing Dumont, of course, “The heart of the [political] system resides, in my view, on the representation that is made of the individual and society” (at 98). See also Lipietz, Alain, “Crise de l’État-providence: Idéologies, réalités et enjeux dans la France des années 1980,” Crise économique, transformation politique et changements idéologiques, Montréal, Cahiers de l’ACFAS, 16 (1983), 49–86, 66–9Google Scholar.

75 In this milieu, Dumont's work found many uses. See e.g. Todorov, Tzvetan, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 398Google Scholar, which decried excessive individualism in Dumontian terms; Renaut, Alain, The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of the Subject, trans. M. B. DeBevoise and Franklin Philip (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 30, 38Google Scholar, which used Dumont's work as a foundation for a philosophy of the individual; and Ozouf, Mona, Women's Words: Essay on French Singularity, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar. Ozouf makes ingenious use of Dumont's “hierarchical opposition” by showing that the basis of French feminism's exceptionalism lay in unconsciously privileging the universal over the particular. For example, “Women's demands have often combined universalism and particularism, and Hubertine Auclert argued each by turns. But the arguments were not of equal weight, and Hubertine did not lose sight of the hierarchy of her two arguments” (at 273).

76 Lipovetsky, Gilles, L’ère du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain (Paris, 1983), 105Google Scholar.

77 Ibid., 151.

78 Gauchet, Marcel, “Avant-propos,” in La démocratie contre elle-même (Paris, 2002), i–xxix, at ixGoogle Scholar.

79 Marcel Gauchet, “Pacification démocratique, désertion civique,” in ibid., 176–98, at 176–7.

80 Rosanvallon, Pierre, Le sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris, 1992), 14, 107Google Scholar.