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.”Footnote 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?
My contention here will be that “the individual” was the crucial missing category of French thought in the late 1970s. Marxism and structuralism, which dominated French thought after the Second World War, were concerned more with group dynamics than with individual ones. Both philosophical movements were beginning to crumble in the 1970s, Marxism for its alleged complicity in Stalin's crimes; structuralism for its agnosticism toward politics, which was untenable for France's youth after the 1968 revolts. Rosanvallon and Gauchet had, since their student days in the late 1960s, been intellectually active on the non-communist left, and were among those who rallied to the theory of “radical democracy” in the aftermath of 1968. This committed them to an egalitarian, democratic politics that was critical of both Anglo-style liberalism—with its passion for free markets—and Marxist theory. Along with their teacher, Claude Lefort,Footnote 2 an ex-Trotskyist philosopher, Rosanvallon and Gauchet attacked both doctrines for giving too much prominence to economic theory, and ignoring the necessarily political character of social activity. Therefore, if liberal-democratic theory was to escape this impasse and develop an identity of its own, it would have to deepen its understanding of modern political and social dynamics. It was this search for an alternative language of politics and society that sent Gauchet and Rosanvallon looking for new intellectual foundations.
Their ideas about individuality were mediated by a figure who has been overlooked in the history of recent French thought, the seminal anthropologist of India, Louis Dumont. In the mid-1970s, Dumont was a professor of anthropology at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, where Rosanvallon and Gauchet were likely to have met him. At this point in his career Dumont had essentially abandoned Indology for the study of European political theory, and it was this aspect of his work that inspired Rosanvallon and Gauchet to take a greater interest in the historical development of individualism in Europe. From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, their work shared this common purpose: to recenter the liberal-democratic project around the individual. In this, Dumont was the single most important influence on their work, even if they sometimes took his analyses in new and unforeseen directions. That Dumont would come to play this role in the history of French liberalism was ironic since he himself tended to be cool toward individualist–egalitarian values.
In particular, what Dumont helped them to see was that the society of individuals had a historically specific mode of appearance in Europe, as both the gradual dissolution of hierarchy, and the development of a new psychological sense of independence. Liberal-democratic theory, according to Rosanvallon and Gauchet, had to think more carefully about the sociocultural structures of individualism—how the individual became inserted into and articulated within a pluralist society (in which individuals could be expected to have multiple affiliations and commitments). Relying heavily on the anthropological work of Dumont, this revised liberalism refused to consider the individual as a being apart from society, with his/her own special set of rights, and insisted that he/she be approached as a being torn between self-standing autonomy and communal identification. In this respect, a new liberalism would have to respect the contingent, fluctuating nature of its analytical objects, and treat the individual as both a personal and a social entity. As Rosanvallon signaled, “isms” could be misleading: “In all cases, the implicit assumption is that the term ‘liberalism’ refers to a collection of coherent and historically stable political or economic meanings.” But this assumption was mistaken, and in fact it was impossible “to speak of a modern liberal philosophy either in general or as a single doctrine.”Footnote 3 Rather, liberal theory had to be made consistent with the sociocultural conditions of the late twentieth century, for which Dumont's anthropology provided an invaluable resource.
LOUIS DUMONT
Dumont was born in 1911 and became interested in studying anthropology upon hearing the lectures of Marcel Mauss in the 1930s. Like many of the young figures devoted to Mauss, Dumont trafficked in communist politics, surrealism, and even mysticism. He was drawn in particular to the work of Indologist René Guénon, whose writings indulged in esoterism and traditionalist politics, and probably motivated Dumont, at least in part, to specialize in India.Footnote 4 His doctoral studies were interrupted by the war, for the entirety of which he was interned in Hamburg as a prisoner of war. He spent the early postwar years abroad, first in southern India, where he completed his dissertation research, then at Oxford, as lecturer in Indian sociology at the then Institute for Social Anthropology. Dumont settled back in France in 1955 upon taking a job at the Ecole pratique des hautes études.Footnote 5 His inaugural address, “For a Sociology of India,” laid out a research program that was heavily indebted to the “sociological” method of Durkheim and especially of Mauss.Footnote 6 Much like the latter, Dumont maintained that true insight into the mental life of other peoples required both direct observation—that is, exhaustive description of social life—and a general theoretical overview of that culture. The monograph he published from his thesis, A South Indian Subcaste (1957), was more in the way of a traditional ethnography, providing a thorough inventory of the social customs and rites of the Pramalai Kallar of Southern India. It was in his next major work, Homo Hierarchicus (1967), that Dumont deployed the sociological program outlined in his address.
In Homo Hierarchicus (1967), Dumont developed a comparative paradigm that would occupy him for the remainder of his career. There, he contended that the forms of social life in traditional/Eastern and modern/Western societies rested on two distinct principles of social organization, the one holist, the other individualist. A thorough comparison of these two types, he thought, could bring us closer to the understanding of a universal human nature. In Homo Hierarchicus, Dumont focused on one holist society, India, and attempted to explain how the caste system provided a thoroughgoing and coherent model of social relations. His key intellectual debt in this summa was to the pioneering work of Célestin Bouglé, a sociologist in Durkheim's circle. Bouglé had constructed the same typological contrast between East and West in the early 1900s, publishing his doctoral thesis, Les idées égalitaires (1901), at the same moment he began his ethnological work on India, the society “that was the most contrary to that which egalitarian ideas are establishing in the West.”Footnote 7 Where earlier interpretations of caste society had focused on the interests of different social actors, Bouglé had produced—using Durkheimian sociology—a structural account of sociocultural relations. Caste, he argued, was a function of a distinctly religious way of organizing society, whose fundamental axis was the opposition of the pure and the impure. Hinduism, in other words, was the key to understanding its laws of motion.
Like his predecessor, Dumont held that it was the logic of the sacred that structured every aspect of Indian society, and made it appear “consistent and rational to those who lived in it.”Footnote 8 As Dumont signaled in his 1955 address, “one must never forget that India is one.”Footnote 9 And like Bouglé, Dumont held that politics and economics in India had never been completely detached from religion—each of them holding a subordinate status. Where he added to Bouglé's analysis was in capturing the complexity of the hierarchical mentality in Indian culture, the ways it functioned as a lived principle.Footnote 10 Caste was “segmented,” according to Dumont, meaning that contingent situations and events determined the form caste would take at different moments. In one situation, group A would be opposed to group B; in another, A split into two subgroups, A1 and A2, which stood opposed. Caste was thus not a simple vertical ranking system, Brahman down to Untouchable, but a kind of structure in motion, in which groups learned to internalize the flow of rank in diverse circumstances.
However, the social stratification of caste society did not exhaust the meaning of “hierarchy” for Dumont. More broadly, hierarchy referred to the way the fundamental value system of a society was articulated.Footnote 11 In non-modern, “traditional” societies, there was no separation of value and fact. Their way of representing reality implied a certain relationship between knowledge and action: “ideas are in conformity with the nature and order of the world, and the subject can do no better than consciously insert himself in this order.”Footnote 12 For modern European societies, however, facts did not imply values: equality, for example, was seen to be a given feature of the natural world, and thus a fact. Ideas and practices were of a different quality in being variable and constructed, and thus constituted values. These two different forms of judgment—fact and value—were therefore not to be conflated. However, according to Dumont, the moderns were deceiving themselves by thinking in this way, since they refused to see their egalitarianism as the result of an implicit choice, which ranked one value most highly. What many have found confusing about this aspect of Dumont's work is that egalitarian societies were also, on this conception, hierarchical, since they elected to place one value—equality—above all others. As a result of this self-deception, their world view was always more illusory and ideological than their hierarchical counterparts.Footnote 13
Another key difference between egalitarian and hierarchical societies was the way in which they conceived the individual. The latter were “holist” when it came to the value they placed on individuals, and tended not to recognize persons as autonomous subjects. Of course, people were biologically individuated, but their existence took on meaning only in the context of the social whole. In practice, this holism was unlikely to be absolute. Just as egalitarian societies had some degree of hierarchy in the West, so too did holist societies have some degree of individuality. Dumont found, for example, a crucial exception to the holist principle in the figure of the Hindu sanyasi, the holy man who “leaves the world behind in order to devote himself to his own liberation.”Footnote 14 The case of the sanyasi showed that societies could be both hierarchical and individualist, and that their separation was never absolute. Holism was the mother value in places like India, but individualism could be found at the subordinate level of practice. What of the reverse case?
HOMO AEQUALIS
The final pages of Homo Hierarchicus foreshadowed the next stage of Dumont's comparison: “The completion of our present task only sketches for us a new task: to reverse the perspective and throw light on egalitarian society by comparison with hierarchical society of the pure type, in a work which could be called Homo Aequalis.”Footnote 15 “To reverse the perspective” implied that the same methods and procedures of analysis would be used in both cases. But the continuity was imperfect.Footnote 16 In the introduction to Homo Aequalis, for example, one reads
In Tocqueville's phrase, I would turn back the mirror—the Indian mirror in this case—on ourselves, in order to look from a new angle at the fundamental conceptions of our modern mind. The historical dimension being indispensable, it would be a literary inquiry, a study of texts.”Footnote 17
Here, then, was the essence of Dumont's approach to homo aequalis: instead of social structures—the guiding paradigm of homo hierarchicus—there was now “history” and “the fundamental conceptions of our modern mind”; instead of anthropology, there was now to be “a study of texts.” Dumont had in effect moved from structural anthropology to intellectual history.
In Homo Aequalis (published simultaneously in English as From Mandeville to Marx), Dumont developed his earlier idea of the individual, defined as the “independent, autonomous, and thus (essentially) non-social moral being, as found primarily in our modern ideology of man and society.”Footnote 18 “Modern” was a synonym of “European” and “Western,” and an antonym of “traditional societies,” whose holist and hence non-individualistic system of organization activated a different set of values: “the relations between men are more important, more highly valued, than the relations between men and things. This primacy is reversed in the modern type of society.”Footnote 19 With a more horizontal society came a corresponding shallowness in interpersonal relationships and a crass materialism. If the world of holism found it difficult to “think” the individual, the world of equality had trouble recognizing the social.
How did the West come to value individualism over hierarchy? Dumont gave two answers to this question. The first centered on the “revolution of values” introduced by Christianity—a case that was made through a series of articles, the first and most important of which appeared in 1965, the last in 1983.Footnote 20 In this narrative, the structural logic of Christianity gradually overthrew the hierarchical arrangements of the Greco-Roman world, where individuality had no value: what could never be comprehended there “and which was given from the start in Christianity is the brotherhood of love in and through Christ, and the consequent equality of all.”Footnote 21 In this respect, Dumont was consistent in seeing religion as the foundation of cultural value systems: just as Hinduism provided the foundation for India's caste society, Christianity produced a historically dynamic society of individuals in the West. This tendency was embedded in its way of relating to the world. Those familiar with Gauchet's now classic formulation about Christianity—that of “a religion for the exit from religion”—will at once recognize this argument. How was it, according to Dumont, that Christian ideas of equality and individuality came to undermine the hierarchical and corporative nature of the ancient and medieval worlds?
For Dumont, it was the nominalism of William of Ockham, the Franciscan scholar of the fourteenth century, that helped effect a transition from a feudal, corporative order to a modern, individualist one. The formulation of nominalism gave new weight to individual substances over general ones, and thereby laid the groundwork for a novel way of thinking about the political community: as an aggregate of individual units (societas), instead of a pre-given whole (universitas). Dumont wrote
If Ockham does not deal at length with politics he does presage the notion of popular sovereignty and the political contract. In general, on the social level proper, it is clear that the [Christian] commonwealth has evaporated, the vacuum having been filled with the freedom of the individual.Footnote 22
The individualist revolution, explained Dumont, coincided with an epoch in European history—the late Middle Ages—in which the state emerged victorious in its long battle against the papacy. Thus “the global society was henceforth to be the individual State, while the core of religion became enshrined in the conscience of each and every individual Christian.”Footnote 23 The individual and the state, in other words, were historically linked as two moments in a unitary process of modernization.
The second answer, from Homo Aequalis (1977), argued that a more recent revolution of values had taken place from roughly 1650 to 1750 in Europe, with the result that the economy came to be seen as an autonomous, self-governing domain—conceptually de-linked, that is, from politics. Here we find Dumont falling comfortably into his role as a scholar of the West, and giving greater attention to theories of democracy and totalitarianism, which had by 1977 become a fixture of French intellectual discourse.Footnote 24 In his view, the individualist revolution was significantly advanced by the British political tradition, beginning with Locke and Mandeville. Locke laid the philosophical foundation for natural equality in the Second Treatise, but what interested Dumont in particular was Locke's broad conception of property and how it authorized the reconstruction of political society from the relationship a man has with his possessions (the point of the compact being the preservation of personal goods). For Dumont, “property here is not an economic category, pure and simple, but an economic category in statu nascendi, before the umbilical cord has been cut.”Footnote 25 Locke had put the individual at the center of economic relations, where he or she was to remain for the rest of modernity. But Locke was far from articulating a doctrine of homo oeconomicus, in which individual egoism was given free rein. This was a task for Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees shocked contemporary readers with its immortal slogan “private vice, public benefits.” In giving full license to economic self-interest, previously discouraged as asocial behavior, Mandeville “disjoined hedonism from morality as he separated morals from religion,” and thus, at last, cleared economics of its remaining political–moral ballast. With Adam Smith, the evolution was complete, as he did away with use value, grounded wealth in the exchange value created by labor, and found therein the basis for the economy's self-sufficiency.Footnote 26 Self-interest prevailed in its absolute form.
The remainder of Dumont's book—nearly half—was dedicated to a survey of Marx's work, and argued, very much against the grain, that the communistic aspects of Marx were only an appearance, and in fact “Marx is essentially individualist.”Footnote 27 For what Marx never could accept—unlike Hegel, say—was that the individual could find redemption in and through the state: freedom for him, rather, was liberation from the state. In this respect, Marx, in giving primacy to economics and relying on the highly individualistic notion of the division of labor, was much closer to the English liberals. And while Marx often flirted with holist, communitarian ideas, the individual was the true subject of his thought: “Marx's aim remains the emancipation of man through the proletarian revolution, and this aim is predicated on the assumption of man as an individual—as he thinks of himself, on Marx's own admission, only in the bourgeois era.”Footnote 28 Indeed, the transformations wrought by the individualist revolution were so thoroughgoing as to extinguish the possibility of thinking in authentically collectivist terms. Here was Marx after all, the great enemy of bourgeois individualism, unable to conceive any alternative to it.
Among his French contemporaries, Dumont was unique for having treated Marx not as a totalitarian thinker, but as a kind of utopian liberal. Totalitarianism, which “still awaited, thirty years after the Hitlerian apocalypse, to be mastered in thought,”Footnote 29 could not simply be understood as the translation of philosophy into practice for Dumont. Its sources were much deeper, and had to do with the inherent limitations of the egalitarian paradigm. A constant refrain of his work was the idea that egalitarianism represented an unstable principle of social organization, and as such generated more conflict and violence than its holist counterparts. Totalitarianism developed precisely in the West as the desperate search for some form of unity or consensus. In this sense, totalitarianism could often appear as a kind of anti-individualist holism. But this was an illusion, according to Dumont, and in fact what occurred was “the attempt, in a society where individualism is deeply rooted and predominant, to subordinate it to the primacy of the society as a whole. It combines, unknowingly, conflicting values.”Footnote 30 The result was a sharp dislocation of subjectivity, forcing individuals to submit to an artificial community organized by the perverse demiurges of Hitler and Stalin. The weakness and isolation of the individual in modernity, and the normalization of conflict in these societies, created a powerful totalitarian temptation. For Dumont, this offered a clear lesson for egalitarian societies: “ideology has the power to transform social reality only between certain limits and . . . when we ignore those limits we produce the contrary of what we desired.”Footnote 31 Equality might very well lead to a more just society, but it could just as easily lead to one in which endemic conflict produced the desire for stability and order, and thus laid the groundwork for totalitarianism.
Dumont's work on Marx and totalitarianism led to a more profound interest in Romantic German philosophy, to which he devoted the remainder of his scholarly career. He claimed to no longer be interested in India, but ironically seemed to find some image of India in the German Romantics, with their hymns to nature and mystical ordinances. In their writings, he perhaps saw a way to fuse the individual with some higher principle, writing, for example, that “man must transcend himself in the work of art, this being the redemption of the real and of the individual.”Footnote 32 With sentiments like these, we do well to remember his early apprenticeship with the surrealists and the lifelong admiration he had for the Indologist and mystic René Guénon. Democracy and individualism, though permanent features of the contemporary world, were not to Dumont's taste.
“CHINESE ETIQUETTE”
What are the larger conclusions to be drawn from Dumont's intellectual project? The obvious thing to note is the dualist nature of his career trajectory, the first half devoted to the anthropology of India and informed by a structuralist, holist method; the second half devoted to a study of egalitarian societies and informed by a looser, textually based anthropology (which looks more like intellectual history). Dumont never failed to note that the two phases were intimately linked, such that “Homo hierarchicus can help Homo aequalis to complete the consciousness he has of himself,” and “an anthropological view of our own society [would make] the understanding of other societies much easier.”Footnote 33 As many of Dumont's Anglo-American and Indian critics pointed out, this desired effect was an optical illusion, resting on an orientalist conception of the extra-European world. The West was permitted to have a complex history whereas India remained basically static—a more or less timeless essence, sociologically united through Hinduism.Footnote 34 The suppression of Indian history also led Dumont to overlook the role of non-Hindu influences in Indian society—namely Muslim and Buddhist—and to marginalize the history of British colonial rule.Footnote 35 Dumont's French audience, on the whole, had no such reservations about his work on India, and even celebrated it for its “modesty” and “lack of romanticism.”Footnote 36 By the time Rosanvallon, Gauchet, and others welcomed Dumont's work as an invitation to rethink liberalism, it had already been subject to devastating criticism—discredited even—in the anglosphere.
Dumont was often said to have inherited the “intellectualism” of French sociology, which, in the vein of Durkheim, Mauss, and Bouglé, tended to privilege the idealist—as opposed to materialist—bases of social unity. For Dumont, this method enabled one not only to describe a given culture's intellectual specificities, but also, more critically, to explain which ideologies were and were not suited to it. For example, socialism could not work in the individualist societies of the West, nor could equality work in the holist societies of the East. Their collective dispositions and habits would make for an awkward synthesis, respectively. In the case of India, Dumont's position left him vulnerable to the objection that he was apologizing for the caste system: the Brahmins sit at the top, and nothing can be done to change this.Footnote 37 It could also be said of the sociological method that, if practiced without rigor, it might easily collapse into crude psychologism—Germans think one way, Italians another, etc. Certainly Dumont began to court this risk as his anthropological project reached hemispheric proportions. In Homo Aequalis, he remarked, “There is no doubt that traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Indian ideologies are holistic while ours is individualistic.”Footnote 38 As these grand categories, like “holism,” were made to accommodate more and more cultural phenomena, their plausibility could only be enfeebled.
Politically, Dumont's position was difficult to read. There was a powerful antimodernist constant that underlay his work—a romantic affinity for the “primitive” and “traditional” over “the “modern” and atomized. Modernity was materialistic, love of things, not people; equality was bland homogeneity, with no respect for originality or difference; and technology was the repudiation of nature and organic life. Dumont's work conveyed a thinly veiled moral critique of European civilization, arguing, “the caste system should be seen as less ‘exploitative’ than democratic society. If modern man does not see it this way, it is because he no longer conceives justice other than as equality.”Footnote 39 He extended his attack on equality in a later essay, “On Value” (1979), even assuming a normative attitude:
There may well be, indeed there actually is, a need for reintroducing some measure of holism into our individualistic societies, but it can be done only . . . at the price of introducing a highly complex hierarchical articulation, which can be imagined, mutatis mutandis, as a parallel to the highly elaborate Chinese etiquette.Footnote 40
Egalitarian societies, it seems, were regarded by Dumont as being illusory, conflictual, and alienating by virtue of the stress they placed on atomic individualism. Holist societies, by contrast, tended to be more solidaristic and consensual, and hence less prone to violence.
Thus, while there is much to suggest a conservatism in Dumont's work, it is more likely that he saw himself as a liberal in the Tocquevillian vein; that is, as a kind of nostalgic liberal. He was resigned to the ultimate irreversibility of the democratic–egalitarian revolution,Footnote 41 but still held that “hierarchy is a universal necessity that will become manifest in some way.” Therefore, he explained, “we have fallen in with Tocqueville's view that individualistic democracy is only viable if it is encompassed in a more extensive ideology of a traditional sort—of a religious, or perhaps other, type.”Footnote 42 If this prescription remains vague, it does indicate a willingness to make peace with the society of individuals, to admit that some balance was at least possible between “individualistic value-ideas and their opposites.”Footnote 43 Dumont's French admirers were not exercised greatly by this ambivalence. As with Tocqueville, they saw Dumont as a lucid analyst of modern democracy, whose work offered important object lessons for a reconstructed theory of liberalism.
FIRST READINGS
The reception of Dumont's work by political theorists proceeded in stages. The first wave came in 1978—that is, shortly after the appearance of Homo Aequalis—when the journal Esprit devoted part of an issue to Dumont's work. At this point, Dumont was still known worldwide as a leading scholar of India, and one of France's great living anthropologists (second only to Lévi-Strauss)—but not as an ideologue.Footnote 44Esprit in the mid-1970s was at the forefront of the antitotalitarian movement, publishing some of the first theoretical articles on the issue. Its special number on Dumont included a translation of his 1965 essay “The Modern Conception of the Individual: Notes on Its Genesis and that of Concomitant Institutions” (which had appeared originally in Contributions to Indian Sociology in English), and two short appreciations by the then editor, philosopher of religion Paul Thibaud, and art historian Henri Stern. These were paean, meant to stir up enthusiasm for Dumont's work, and bring it line with Esprit's intellectual battle against totalitarianism. The authors tended to read Dumont as a libertarian pushing for greater individual liberty against the impositions of the state—a distortion if anything, given Dumont's coolness toward the modern individual. But this was the continuing irony of the liberal appropriation of Dumont: individualists looking toward a resolute anti-individualist for answers.
Thibaud presented Dumont as one of modernity's most astute critics, a successor of Emmanuel Mounier, the founding spirit of Esprit:
Dumont's reflections on the crisis of modernity, to which one could tie the entire history of this journal, is inseparable from the awareness of a past that must be retrieved, of a bifurcation that must be identified, not to erase it (for this has no meaning), but to interrogate and understand it.
Dumont was also an anticolonialist, a forerunner of the “already classic” work being done by Marcel Gauchet and others on the theory of totalitarianism, and a moralizing thinker, who helped the West to see its “own egocentrism.” If Dumont, intellectually, was a prophet of modernity, what political lessons did his work impart? For Thibaud, Dumont's work rebuffed facile discussions of equality on the left, reminding that “not all ideas are realizable under any conditions.” Political-economic equality, in the socialistic sense, was one of these ideas: “the affirmation of the equality of persons is an illegitimate ideal that cannot be realized unless,” and here Thibaud supplies the corrective, “it is counterbalanced by another modern value: personal liberty.” Dumont's work could be used to drive a wedge between socialism and an alternative philosophy of individual liberty.Footnote 45
Henri Stern's essay was far more combative, brusquely waving off any criticisms that might be made of Dumont's work. “There is absolutely no nostalgia for hierarchical societies in the work of Louis Dumont, no fatalisms about the end of the world either.” Dumont's reading of Marx “brought fresh blood to Marxist studies, immobilized for years by quibbles,” and his work in general opened new ground for political reflection. One way was by
laying bare the conditions for the survival of democracy by showing what other societies can teach us about the general condition of life in society. This project allies the radicalism of critical thought with a great deal of prudence concerning suggestions about “what is to be done.”
Prudence aside, what was, after all, to be done in Stern's compte rendu of Dumont? His “healthy approach” offered lessons for libertarians: “The efforts to renew a libertarian philosophy, whether autogestionnaire or ecological, could usefully profit from a confrontation with Dumont's radical critique of individualism,” since the former tended to be naive about its own cultural-historical conception of individuality. Here too Dumont was made into a libertarian critic of socialism.Footnote 46
ROSANVALLON: “CLEARING GROUND”
It was soon after this reception at Esprit that Rosanvallon and Gauchet began to incorporate Dumont into their work. Rosanvallon was active in the post-1968 democratic self-management (autogestion) movement as a militant of the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT)—a noncommunist, reformist trade union with roots in Catholic syndicalism. In the early 1970s, the CFDT aligned itself with workers’ self-management, which pressed for the expansion of civil society against and beyond the state—a kind of “grassroots democracy,” as Rosanvallon would later call it.Footnote 47 The CFDT was a key player in this increasingly popular movement, and Rosanvallon one of its principal theoreticians. He cowrote Michel Rocard's speech at the Parti socialiste's Nantes Congress in 1977, which announced a split in the culture of the party, statism on one side, self-management on the other. The statist camp, headed by François Mitterrand, won the bid for leadership of the party, and it was around this time that Rosanvallon quit militancy and turned his attention to academic pursuits.
Rosanvallon's first historical work, Le capitalisme utopique: Critique de l’idéologie économique (1979), presented a bold rereading of the liberal intellectual tradition, and even suggested new directions for a theory of politics. The book, originally a thesis at the Ecole des hautes études, for which Dumont sat on the jury, opened with an homage to the anthropologist, and clearly endorsed his account of modernity:
With the emancipation of the political [i.e. democracy] comes the affirmation of the central figure of the individual, marking the passage from a holist society (universitas) to a society of individuals (societas). At the same time that politics frees itself, the subject distinguishes itself from the social body.Footnote 48
Ockham's revolution, in other words, had reached its completion in modernity, with the aggregative model of politics taking over from the holist one of Christianity. Individualism, for Rosanvallon as for Dumont, constituted the unsurpassable horizon of modernity: “It is therefore from the individual and his nature that one must think and resolve the problem of the institution of the social. To think in terms of natural law is to adopt a natural anthropology.”Footnote 49 Rosanvallon hereby accepted Dumont's later use of anthropology—not the structuralist one of India, but the one of Europe, which prescribed a self-reflexive investigation of one's own cultural forms. This “study of texts,” in Dumont's phrase, could reveal much about the sociocultural structures that continued to inform modern forms of association.
According to Rosanvallon, the challenge for political theorists from the seventeenth century on was to “institute the social”;Footnote 50 that is, to devise a system of government that could anchor the free-floating individual within a social order. Hobbes invented a political solution to the problem, conceptualizing a society that was grounded in natural law—not divine grace—and based on the consent of all members. This novel approach influenced a whole tradition of political thinking, extending through Pufendorf and Locke to Rousseau in the mid-eighteenth century. The Scottish philosophers gave a different solution to the problem of instituting the social, with Smith's The Wealth of Nations providing the definitive answer: “the economy is presented as the resolved mystery of all constitutions.” For Rosanvallon, this marked the true turning point of modernity, confirming what his predecessor had argued: “It is at the heart, not the periphery, of modern thought that what Louis Dumont calls the economic ideology is born.” There was nothing particularly new in Rosanvallon's recapitulation of Smith's work. Like most commentators, he underscored the role of the “invisible hand” as a mechanism that coordinated seemingly divergent and anarchic self-interest, and created a “society without a center.”Footnote 51 If the market could be counted on to harmonize interests, the work of political theory and politics itself from Hobbes onward—to consider the duties and obligations specific to society—was no longer necessary.
The conclusions that Rosanvallon drew from Smith's work and the economic ideology in general were far less commonplace. He argued, in fact, that Smithian liberalism was so individualistic and autoregulative that it became utopian, attempting to “realize a market society that represents the happiness of mankind in its full maturity.” This “democratic anarchism” was not to be trusted: “It is from this utopian liberalism, which seems to me so dangerous, that one must understand the possible return of totalitarianism developing within democracy.” Rosanvallon accused Smithian liberalism of wanting to do away with the political, and of seeking to create a transparent society by eliminating all intermediary institutions. With these values, “everything is in place for the political seizure of this ideology, leading to a totalitarian society.”Footnote 52
If Smith was deemed a dangerous utopian, what did Rosanvallon think of Marx? On this question, Le capitalisme utopique took a firm Dumontian line, for what Rosanvallon wished to stress was Marx's deep continuities with Smith. “I agree with Louis Dumont,” wrote Rosanvallon:
All of Marx's philosophy can in fact be understood as an attempt to deepen modern individualism. His critique of capitalism and bourgeois society takes on all of its meaning only when placed in this perspective. He shows in Capital, in fact at length, how capitalism's specificity is in making society, considered globally and abstractly, progress even as it makes men regress individually.Footnote 53
Why had Rosanvallon endorsed this heterodox reading of Marx? It allowed him, as only Dumont's work could, to bracket Smithian liberalism and Marxism as two perversions of the same tendency in Western political theory. These were two faces of a modern utopia, which, in seeing society as a kind of pure market (one of goods, the other of men), treated politics as extraneous and therefore disposable. In dissolving or ignoring the political, they always risked sliding into totalitarianism.
We might see Le capitalisme utopique as a way of “clearing ground” for a political alternative to liberalism and socialism.Footnote 54 The attack on Smith and Marx was very much to this effect, aiming to assemble and then undermine a whole tradition of political-economic thought. But it would be wrong to assume that Rosanvallon was therefore hostile to liberalism tout court. His prescription, to “free oneself of utopian liberalism,” was a way of rescuing liberalism from its worst tendencies, of cutting off the rotten parts. Liberalism, if anything, had to be repackaged, even if Rosanvallon, at this early stage, had little sense of what this would entail. He wrote vaguely that liberalism needed to embrace a “positive” program, and think more concretely about the relationship of the individual to the state.Footnote 55 At the very least, the terms of the analysis were clearer thanks to Dumont's work.
GAUCHET’S INDIVIDUALISM
Dumont figured as a key reference in Gauchet's work from the late 1970s through the publication of his landmark The Disenchantment of the World in 1985. Gauchet's engagement with the anthropologist's work was more adversarial than Rosanvallon’s, but productively so, since it framed a debate on individualism that would be highly influential for French liberal thought in the 1980s. His text on Dumont, “De l’avènement de l’individu à la découverte de la société,” appeared in Annales in 1979, and turned out to be a prelude to an important turn in Gauchet's thought. Since his time as a student at the University of Caen in the late 1960s, Gauchet had collaborated closely with his teacher, Claude Lefort. Together, they had written pioneering articles on the philosophy of the political in the early 1970s, coedited two theoretical journals, and become leading thinkers of antitotalitarianism. Toward the end of the decade, Gauchet began drifting away from Lefort, and developing a distinct set of philosophical positions. The work of Dumont, which brought a special focus to the category of “individualism,” was to play a central role in Gauchet's turn away from Lefort toward a politics of liberalism.Footnote 56
In effect, what Dumont had done, according to Gauchet, was to register a shift in the sociocultural foundations of modernity, away from “the fundamentally hierarchical” character of premodern social arrangements, toward a world in which individualism was a permanent, unsurpassable horizon. Likewise had Dumont correctly identified the key role of the “economic ideology” in modernity: it had come to “mask the primacy of the social and allow the human atom to be emancipated from his or her explicit subordination to the collective order.” Gauchet went on to praise “the rare acuity” of Dumont's reading of Marx, the “striking clarity” of his theory of totalitarianism, and his talent for “going straight to the essence of things.”Footnote 57
While Gauchet appears to have accepted the broad features of Dumont's analysis, namely the cultural–social transition from hierarchical to egalitarian society, he found some of his explanations wanting. In particular, Dumont posed too sharp a break between the hierarchical past and the individualist present, and thus overstated the horizontality of modern social relations. “Is there really,” Gauchet asked, “a degradation of the ontological dignity of the social” in modernity? Was individualism completely illusory, as Dumont thought? What seemed to concern Gauchet was the starkness of Dumont's sketch of egalitarian society: either it lied to itself about how and what it valued, or it drifted toward totalitarianism in seeking to rekindle principles of order and hierarchy. “It's this alternative,” remarked Gauchet, “that we should interrogate,” for what if it turned out that the individualist break had activated new conceptions of the social, and unleashed new collective dynamics in general? What if it were “impossible to dissociate the ideological construction of the individual as a supposedly primary concept . . . from the primordial cohesion of the social, which is anterior to all consciousness”?Footnote 58 Dumont failed to consider that individualist participation—even if illusory—had actually set off something new in society, and hence missed a crucial sociocultural moment in the development of modernity.Footnote 59
Gauchet's essay on Dumont set the stage for his turn to liberalism in 1980, a year in which he became editor of Le débat, co-authored a book on psychiatric philosophy with his partner Gladys Swain, and produced a landmark essay on human rights and two long commentaries on Constant and Tocqueville. In these texts, Gauchet began to formulate an alternative to Dumont's bleak option for the West—deceptive atomism or totalitarianism—without losing sight of his essential insight, that the individualist mentalité was the bedrock of democratic societies. One way of correcting Dumont was to revisit the original theorist of the hierarchy-to-individualism dynamic, Alexis de Tocqueville, a key intellectual source for Dumont himself.Footnote 60 In the introduction to Homo Hierarchicus, Dumont had recognized a predecessor in Tocqueville, as one “who saw the characteristics of the new society clearly, in contrast with those of the preceding one,” and whose “fusion of equality and identity has become established at the level of common sense.” The problem with Tocqueville's work, according to Dumont, was that he conceded too much to the individualist–egalitarian revolution, and had missed its illusory, ideological character. “The ideal of equality,” reminded Dumont, “even if it is thought superior, is artificial.”Footnote 61 European societies chose, at a deep cultural level, to privilege equality over any other value, but then refused to acknowledge the elective quality of its beliefs. Ironically, the nostalgic aristocrat had been too thoroughly imbued with the democratic ethos to recognize the necessity of an ordering principle in society.
Gauchet's text, “Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous,” likewise placed the dissolution of hierarchy and the rise of the individual at the center of Tocqueville's project. In reviewing the latter, Gauchet reached a momentous conclusion, which led him to break with the more libertarian views he had originally held: namely, pace Tocqueville, the state had created the means for the individualist revolution; “it was the mirror in which the individual could recognize his independence.”Footnote 62 Libertarian political theory had been naive to cast the individual against the state, since these were in fact complementary entities whose development was tightly linked. As Gauchet put it baldly, “more individualism means more state. The one cannot decrease without the other also doing so.” Crucially, Gauchet credited this breakthrough to Dumont, whose early essay on individualism “had put in place the essentials of the problem.”Footnote 63
But he was not to follow Dumont to the letter, since Gauchet was trying to derive a superior account of modernity.Footnote 64 What needed to be seen was the way democratic societies internalized France's old hierarchical divisions with the advent of popular sovereignty. According to Gauchet, “the state ceased appearing as the essence of an order that pre-existed human intention”—as a great metaphysical Other.Footnote 65 The rank-ordering principles that had legitimized the Old Regime were now absorbed within democratic society, and thus no longer projected onto an external agency. What happened to these divisions—of estates, ranks, and so on—once they were internalized? Individuals and groups, now seen to occupy the same playing field, were set against one another (without necessarily seeing it this way). What thus certified Gauchet's disagreement with Dumont was the former's reading of this scenario: it was a necessary and stabilizing feature of democratic society. So long as this incessant play of interests was controlled—via parties, classes, and other institutions—democratic society could resist the temptation of reactivating hierarchical, totalitarian movements. The innovation of Tocqueville's work, thought Gauchet, was to have shown how “collective conflict is, in spite of appearances, a powerful integrating force”—a counterintuitive pacifying mechanism.Footnote 66 The dissolution of hierarchy was not inconsistent with social solidarities for Gauchet—proof, in other words, that collective identity and individualism could be reconciled in practice.
Dumont hit back in his “On Value” essay of 1980. The “Chinese etiquette” comment, cited as a positive instance of hierarchy, had a sequel in that essay, with Dumont arguing,
There are two ways of somehow recognizing alter: hierarchy and conflict. Now, that conflict is inevitable and perhaps necessary is one thing, and to posit it as an ideal, or as an “operational value,” is quite another. . . . Conflict has the merit of simplicity while hierarchy entails a complication similar to that of Chinese etiquette. The more so, as it would here have to be encompassed within the paramount value of individualism and equality. Yet I must confess my irenic preference for the latter [i.e. Chinese etiquette].
If there were any doubts as to Dumont's interlocutor, a footnote pointed to Gauchet's essay—“a thoughtful reappraisal of Tocqueville”—as the intended target.Footnote 67 The passage captures the extent to which Gauchet and Dumont were developing their ideas of the individualist revolution in dialogue. After all, they agreed on a great many points: the individual as protagonist of modernity, the crucial role of the state in making him/her so, and the illusory character of individualism, which sowed social discord. Their only disagreement, expressed above by Dumont, was over the valuation of this illusory sense of individualism: Dumont thought the situation ought to be clarified, the hierarchical nature of all societies made plain to the citizens of modernity, whereas Gauchet thought that the conflict of individualist societies could be beneficial, being “in its own way highly productive of integration and cohesion.” For Dumont, individualist egalitarianism was an effect, a symptom; for Gauchet, it was causal, producing something else. He argued, “If social conflict violently opposed one person or group to another, disuniting them in appearance, it also had the effect of affirming a community of belonging between them that was more profound than the differences that separated them.”Footnote 68 In the sense that dissensus unified society, and acted as an “essential factor of socialization,” it could be seen to preserve, not endanger, the individualist–egalitarian project.Footnote 69
For Gauchet, Tocqueville and Dumont had correctly understood the character of modernity as the dissolution of hierarchy into a society of individuals, but had also crucially missed how this individualism functioned within the framework of democratic self-government. Both thinkers—whose attachment to liberalism, it might be noted, was tempered by nostalgia for traditional values—had been too quick to dismiss the advent of individualism: for Dumont, this individualism was caught up in self-delusion, while for Tocqueville individualism led to forms of civic association, and posed no real problem as such.Footnote 70 This left an opening for Gauchet to measure the full implications of the individualist revolution (as a truly novel development). His work on psychiatric philosophy considered one aspect of the issue: how the disaggregation of hierarchy affected the psyche in modernity. Pratique de l’esprit humain, cowritten with his partner Gladys Swain, asked how the self could be expected to cope in a society that was divided against itself. They described this as an unprecedented moment in human history, in which
the confrontation between individuals finds itself emancipated from any prior framework that is presumed to include and inform it. Individuals will henceforth meet under the sign of the alea, characterized by an absence of norms and by uncertainty as to whether coexistence is possible; in addition, a bundle of profoundly personal possibilities opens up every time.Footnote 71
There was, in other words, an existential component to the individualist revolution: interpersonal relationships were open and random, and offered a spectrum of possibilities (from self-realization to alienation). Conflict—of the Hegelian kind—could be expected with the dissolution of social bonds, and thus “coexistence became a dramatic confrontation between two subjectivities that are at once mutually dependent on each other and mutually independent. Each is equally obliged to impose itself on the other in order to win recognition.”Footnote 72
For Gauchet, individualism was not an ideology or an illusion as it was for Dumont, but an ontological feature of democratic society. The individual was a free-willing subject who acted in his or her own self-interest, and often conflicted with others. This conflict was not of a material nature, but of a psychological one, and hence it was incumbent on democratic societies to entrust the flourishing of individuals not to markets or constitutional principles, but to education, which could prepare citizens for the psychological demands of modernity. This was to be approached cautiously, since one might encourage individuals to submit their identities too much to collective entities on the one hand, or foster a reckless sense of independence on the other. Marxists and hard-line republicans tended to favor the former, while libertarians—much in the vein of Thibaud and Stern—favored the latter. And, indeed, Gauchet worried that either of these perversions might befall democratic society at any time, the one leading to totalitarianism, the other to postmodernism nihilism. But in the end, there were compelling reasons to believe that individuals could prosper in democracies without tearing apart the social fabric. The tension between the individual and the collective that underlay democratic society could actually be productive. Tocqueville and Dumont had stopped short of recognizing this as a possibility.
DUMONTIAN SEQUELS: THE MITTERRAND YEARS
Clearly Louis Dumont's historical-anthropological theses had begun to resonate with a younger set of thinkers, many of whom seemed interested in finding new ways to understand—and defend—the individual's place in society. Dumont's next work, Essays on Individualism, arrived in 1983, well timed to meet the increasing demand for his work. Rosanvallon reviewed this book in Libération, and used the occasion to pay homage to his mentor, whom he honored as one of the greatest anthropologists of the twentieth century, indeed, “as important as Lévi-Strauss.” Rosanvallon also foregrounded Dumont's key role in reconceptualizing the individual:
The framework outlined by Dumont offers the possibility of moving beyond vague and contradictory discourses on contemporary individualism. It allows us to understand why the exacerbation of individual autonomy, as a supreme social value, goes together with a recurrent nostalgia for a more communitarian order . . . If individualism and statism are tightly linked, how do we think about the development of modern societies? If a society cannot do without hierarchy, if no man is an island, how do we redefine in a meaningful way our ideas of justice and equality? Finally, can we exit the holism/individualism alternative? Dumont's proposals go to the heart of our difficulty in leaving behind Keynesianism, and more broadly, in reorienting modernity. This Indian detour and history of ideas brings us back in the final analysis to our most current and pressing problems.Footnote 73
For Rosanvallon, as for Gauchet, Dumont was to be commended not only for having recognized the centrality of the individual to modernity, but also for having approached it in a unique way—as a historical-anthropological process. Particularly valuable was Dumont's idea that individualism and the social (administered from “above”) were two aspects of the same historical development, and thus had to be thought together. Here we find Rosanvallon making this point in a negative way: excesses of individualism were linked to the crisis of social democracy, a product of its inability to connect with the people. In other words, the Keynesianism to which Rosanvallon referred was like totalitarianism in Dumont's theory: a clumsy and “nostalgic” attempt to reinstate a collective ethos in a society where individualism was the mother value. Therefore too much individualism—i.e. “the exacerbation of individual autonomy”—could easily lead to antiquated conceptions of the social at state level.Footnote 74 Hence political theory needed to find a way to “exit the holism/individualism alternative” and reconcile the individual with a non-static conception of the social. Certainly, Rosanvallon, like Gauchet, rejected—at least implicitly—the libertarian reading of Dumont, which set the individual against the state. The point was not only to recognize the individual as the metaphysical protagonist of modern society, but also to see his/her existence as socially mediated, inscribed in a world of group and institutional affiliations. The individual was in, not against, society.
It was at this juncture—thanks in large part to the spadework of Gauchet and Rosanvallon—that individualism became a key site of philosophical debate in 1980s Paris, and Dumont's name indissociable from it. The issue of defining individualism was particularly urgent for those on the center left, many of whom did not support Mitterrand's Socialist government, but at the same time rejected the rhetoric of triumphant individualism that Thatcher and Reagan represented.Footnote 75 It was to combat the latter that the philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky powerfully conveyed the dangers of ceding too much to the individual in his 1983 L’ère du vide—a text very much indebted to the analyses of Dumont, Rosanvallon, and Gauchet. While Dumont was correct to regard the individual as “sacred” to modernity, Lipovetsky argued, consumerism and mass media had inflamed the sense of individuality to a degree that was socially destructive.Footnote 76 The result was postmodern nihilism: drug use, violence, dropping out, etc. For Lipovetsky, as for Rosanvallon in his review of Dumont, the crisis of the individual was a sign that social democracy was failing its citizens, providing them with no meaningful collectivist option, and leaving them more atomized than ever. A renewed sense of social solidarity was therefore needed to offset this narcissism, but one that respected the postmodern condition: “the way is open for the State to enter into the era of personalization, to fall in synch with the open and mobile society, [and] to refuse bureaucratic rigidity.”Footnote 77
Ironically, given their skepticism of Mitterrand's Socialist government, Rosanvallon and Gauchet were somewhat unsettled by the liberal turn taken by Mitterrand in the mid-1980s. They increasingly tended to share Lipovetsky's concern that French society had become too individualized—a marked change from their writings of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which had warned of the totalitarian threat posed by marxisant philosophies. While it is true that Gauchet had registered his objections to the ascendancy of human rights as a social paradigm in 1980, he acknowledged that it had become a reality ten years later, “the society of individuals having found its politics.”Footnote 78 Indeed, by the 1990s, “civic desertion” was more to be feared than collectivist phantoms, and Gauchet could even regret the uncontested hegemony of democracy: conflict was, after all, an essential and productive aspect of democratic politics.Footnote 79 Rosanvallon took a similar route after the end of the Cold War, looking to reignite a French democracy that risked becoming complacent. The first of three volumes on the political history of French democracy, Le sacre du citoyen (recall that his essay on Dumont was called “Le sacre de l’individu”), placed the individual at the center of the French political project, and traced his/her struggle to win the right to suffrage. For Rosanvallon, “Political equality is conceivable only through the perspective of radical individualism,” and in “modern society, the individual is first.”Footnote 80 Of course, Dumont was appropriately cited as a key inspiration behind the work. Thus, more than a decade after their first encounters with Dumont, Gauchet and Rosanvallon continued to use his historical-anthropological insights as the foundation for an egalitarian political project, of which Dumont himself had always been skeptical.
