The Communist Temptation: Rolland, Gide, Malraux, and Their Times traces the evolution of the committed left-wing public intellectual in the interwar period, specifically in the 1930s, and focuses on leading left-wing intellectuals, such as Romain Rolland, Andre Gide, and Andre Malraux, and their relationships with communism and the broader anti-fascist movement. In that turbulent decade, Paris also welcomed a growing number of Russian, Austrian, Italian, Dutch, Belgian, German, and German-speaking Central European refugees-activists, writers, and agents, among them Willi Munzenberg, Mikhail Koltsov, Eugen Fried, Ilya Ehrenburg, Manes Sperber, and Arthur Koestler-and Paris once again became a hotbed of international political activism. Events, however, signaled a decline in the high ethical standards set by Emile Zola and the Dreyfusards earlier in the twentieth century, as many pro-communist intellectuals acted in bad faith to support an ideology that they in all likelihood knew to be morally bankrupt. Among them, only Gide rebelled against Moscow, which caused ideological lines to harden to the point where there was little room for critical reason to assert itself.

French Intellectuals at a Crossroads examines a broad array of interrelated subjects: the effect of World War I on France's intellectual community, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of international communism, calls for pacifism, the creation of an "Intellectuals' International of the Mind," the debate over the myth of the disengaged intellectual, the apolitical group of "intellectuels non-conformistes," and, finally, the challenges of surrealism. Together, these developments reflected the diversity of intellectual commitment in France in the uncertain and troubled 1920s and 1930s. The interwar period also witnessed France's relative decline, as expressed in a move from a mood of immense relief coupled with a feeling of debilitating fatigue to an inward-looking, pessimistic, and defeatist outlook that presaged World War II and national collapse.

The Emergence of the French Public Intellectual provides a working definition of "public intellectuals" in order to clarify who they are and what they do. It then follows their varied itineraries from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the nineteenth century. Public intellectuals became a fixture in French society during the Dreyfus Affair but have a long history in France, as the contributions of Christine de Pizan, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo, among many others, illustrate. The French novelist Emile Zola launched the Dreyfus Affair when he published "J'Accuse," an open letter to French President Felix Faure denouncing a conspiracy by the government and army against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish and had been wrongly convicted of treason three years earlier. The consequent emergence of a publicly-engaged intellectual created a new, modern space in intellectual life as France and the world confronted the challenges of the twentieth century.

This volume is a peer-reviewed collection of essays submitted by participants of two joint conferences on the theme of globalization. The essays collected in this volume deal with a wide variety of subjects related to globalization, ranging from the social sciences to the humanities. Globalization Redux contributes to a better understanding of globalization and its ramifications in a host of domains.

By now the basic facts of the Dreyfus Affair are known and beyond dispute. This book condenses a century or more of scholarship but adds significant new knowledge about some of the main figures in the Affair, as well as Dreyfus's heroic struggle for freedom and rehabilitation. It also studies how intellectuals contributed to the Affair and largely defined it and themselves, creating a new class of committed intellectuals who, from time to time, would descend from their Ivory Tower to become involved in something that ""strictly speaking was none of their business"" (Sartre). This book follows the careers of both Dreyfusard (Lazare, Zola, Peguy) and anti-Dreyfusard (Drumont, Barres) intellectuals, as well as the itineraries of several up-coming-intellectuals such as Gide and Rolland, who, for a variety of reasons, chose not to become involved. Moreover, the Affair is still ""radioactive"" because the issues it raises remain as relevant as ever not only in France but also around the world. As one prominent key player, Charles Peguy, stated several years after Dreyfus had been rehabilitated: ""the longer this affair has been over, the more evident it becomes that it will never be over."" adly, there is no shortage of cases of the justice system breaking down and even running amuck. Past and present abuses in the name of the ""war on terror"" are still waiting for the Emile Zola, not only to denounce them to the nation and to the world but also to create a true debate about our core values as a democracy. Which public intellectual will step up to pen the ""J'Accuse"" of our times? Zola's passionate defence of Dreyfus is legendary and constitutes the moral high point of intellectual commitment in France but also, paradoxically, the beginning of their demise as arbiters of a higher or nobler, that is to say, a more idealistic public ethics. The rehabilitation of Dreyfus constituted a victory for justice, but it also signaled a decline in the moral stature of the committed intellectual. Less than a decade after the rehabilitation of Dreyfus, French intellectuals no longer would command the moral high ground. During World War I, those on both the Left and Right rushed to embrace the war effort without questioning it (the only internationally well-known French intellectual to oppose the war was Rolland). By the 1930s, French intellectuals were more likely to take their cues from Moscow or Berlin and to immediately situate any issue in a much larger ideological and international context.