Savage and Modern Liberty
| Date | 01 April 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885105050449 |
| Published date | 01 April 2005 |
| Author | Samuel Moyn |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Savage and Modern Liberty
Marcel Gauchet and the Origins of
New French Thought
Samuel Moyn Columbia University
abstract: This article is a study of the trajectory of the contemporary French
liberal philosopher Marcel Gauchet from his early, ‘anarchist’ commitments through
the 1970s to his discovery and defense of liberalism, notably as expressed in his 1980
revival and interpretation of his 19th-century countryman Benjamin Constant’s post-
revolutionary liberalism. Discussed in the article are Gauchet’s devotion to and
revision of the portrait of primitive society he inherited from the French
anthropologist Pierre Clastres, how his early political and theoretical concerns are
transmuted in Gauchet’s reading of Constant, and the relevance of this trajectory for
comprehending even Gauchet’s most recent pronouncements about the nature and
future of liberal society.
key words: anarchism, Pierre Clastres, Benjamin Constant, Marcel Gauchet, Stephen
Holmes, liberalism, modernity, ‘new French thought’, primitive society, the state, Alexis de
Tocqueville
[E]ven if our finitude remorselessly destines us to misunderstanding and illusion, it does
not inevitably condemn us to place this destiny in the hands of others. (Marcel Gauchet,
The Disenchantment of the World )
Introduction: A Liberal Itinerary
What a difference a decade makes! An anarchist in 1970, the now prominent and
influential French political theorist and philosopher of history Marcel Gauchet
had by 1980 taken his position in the vanguard of the neo-liberal ideology that has
since gone so far in the historic reorientation of French political thought of
the last 25 years.1Intellectually, the first date signified little more than the dis-
concerting flux, born of the student and worker revolt two years earlier, and the
confusing panoply of enthusiasms and projects to which it gave rise. The second
date saw Gauchet helping found Le Débat, destined to be one of the most influen-
tial intellectual journals on the French scene, and reviving the political writings of
164
article
Contact address: Samuel Moyn, Assistant Professor of History, Columbia University,
616 Fayerweather Hall, MC2547, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Email: s.moyn@columbia.edu
EJPT
European Journal
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 4(2)164–187
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885105050449]
Benjamin Constant, one among many 19th-century thinkers who, like François
Guizot and Alexis de Tocqueville, had for so long been prophets of liberal
modernity without honor in their own land. How did this transformation occur?
The following offers a study of Gauchet’s political trajectory, focusing on his
passage from his youthful mania for the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres to
the initial statement of his mature neo-liberalism. For it is a crucial but little-
known fact that the thinker who did so much to revive the credibility of liberal
modernity in French thought began his career with an almost unbelievable enthu-
siasm for an anthropologist who rejected liberal modernity – indeed, all modern-
ity – root and branch. And this youthful passion did much both to prepare, and to
determine, the mature thought that flowed out of it. Though this article must
address other dimensions of his work, the focus is on how Gauchet’s early itiner-
ary casts light on the normative terms in which he came to defend liberalism. From
Clastres to Constant, then: strange in appearance, this itinerary is straighter than
one might initially suppose.
Pierre Clastres and Savage Anarchism
‘Clastres leaves behind a brief, dense and magnificent body of work, one whose
ability to renew thinking has not yet been fully gauged.’ So Gauchet wrote in a
necrology for Pierre Clastres a few months after the latter’s tragic and untimely
death in July 1977 in a car wreck. The piece capped a whole series of writings
Gauchet offered on his now disappeared teacher. When Clastres’s signature work,
La Société contre l’État (Society against the State), had been published a few years
before, Gauchet, still in his mid-twenties, had authored an immediate homage to
it, followed by several dense ‘think-pieces’ on the significance of Clastres’s dis-
coveries, climaxing finally in the newspaper obituary.2An ex-communist, and a
student of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clastres spent years in the 1960s in Paraguay
doing ethnographic fieldwork on tropical forest peoples; when he wrote up and
collected his findings, he became famous in the 1970s for his attribution of an
implicit politics to savages that resonated unexpectedly with libertarian currents
on the French left of the time.3Calling him in the necrology ‘a philosopher in the
ancient and rare meaning of the word, a man with the true questions, at once the
simplest and most decisive’, Gauchet credited Clastres with ‘push[ing] his reflec-
tions on the first societies far enough so that they revealed an unknown but crucial
dimension of every society’.4
Briefly, Clastres’s signal discovery had been the primacy of the political. Clastres
had seen, in an interpretation of the strange fact that primitive headmen and
chieftains exercise no political authority over their fellows, that the whole of their
societies seemed to be organized to avoid the fact of human domination. Indeed,
savage men, so Clastres wrote, enjoyed a ‘sense of democracy and taste for equal-
ity’.5So interpreted, the way of life of primitive men implied an intentional mode
of politics rather than an uninterrupted relation to nature. As Gauchet had put 165
Moyn: Savage and Modern Liberty
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