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72 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY A MARXIST VIEW OF FRENCH PHILOSOPHY From Montaigne to Diderot and Rousseau, French thought is in the van of international philosophical activity. After 1789 it weakens and fades. Textbooks on the subject pass from the eighteenth century almost directly to the end of the nineteenth, from the philosophers of reaction at one end to the philosophers of dismay at the other, with a glance at Auguste Comte on the way. Art histories, too, ignore Couture, Detaille and Meisonnier, to hasten from Delacroix to Impressionism without even a glance for Rosa Bonheur and all the academicians who set the tone and drew the fees and favors of their time. Each age writes the history it wants, and dismisses what seems irrelevant to its point of view; but if we are to see history as other than eschatological, then we need to pay more attention to what past periods thought important in themselves, not only to the features which we do. For his own ends, this is the task Lucien S&e (La Philosophie franfaise contemporaine et sa gen~se de 1789 a nos jours [Paris: Editions sociales, 1962], 351 pp., index. Ft. 14,50) attempts; and, though he no more hides his Marxist bias than St. Augustine did his Christian one, the history he writes is novel and suggestive. Blank spaces in the intellectual history of the nineteenth century are filled with scenes of great activity, blind spots in method are replaced with working indications of an historical approach which we might try more often; and while his scenes are more sketchy than he allows and his methods less comprehensive than he would admit, the lucid writing, accessible to every kind of reader, harks back to the encyclopedists and to the great age of a philosophy still comprehensible to cultivated men. Mr. S~ve's book should be required reading for all historians of ideas, as well as for students of the Marxist approach, provided their blood pressure is normal. This is an uneven book, and the best of it lies in the methodological introduction and in the two opening sections which bring the story down to 1914. Since Marxism argues that a philosophy cannot be understood outside its political and social context, S6ve seeks "the objective social roots of contemporary French philosophy," and finds them in the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the anachronistic survivals of the order it replaced, and the struggle of a rising proletariat against the dominant bourgeois social order. In one way or another all philosophy must be social, all philosophy must be moral. Ever since Plato's Republic, the role of philosophy in the education of social leaders has been well understood, and S6ve shows how deliberately the various regimes of nineteenth-century France used it to formulate and teach doctrines which would defend and justify the existing social order. He draws attention to the fact that "la philosophie en France... est avant NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 73 tout, ou du moins ~tait jusqu'~t ces derniers d6cennies, celle des professeurs," and that to understand the conditions in which it was elaborated we must understand the conditions in which it was taught, the conditions which the dominant regime and class set out to create. He gives us a picture of the centralized educational system, so crucial to the formation of educated opinion, so long a reflection of political orientation; a system where one of Napoleon III's ministers explained that "the different regiments of the Universitary army need to be led by a single hand"; where Victor Cousin's Justice et Charitd, written in 1848 to fill the needs of General Cavaignac, becomes part of the philosophy curriculum; where Victor Duruy considers "the philosophical studies of our lycdes the best remedy for materialism," and Jules Ferry insists that moral philosophy, like politics, is the domain of the State. It is against this background, where under the July Monarchy the minister of education requires teachers to give their students "proofs of the existence of God, of the spirituality and the immortality of the soul," where under the Second Republic the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences affirms that "it is insufficient to reestablish material order . . . if...

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