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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.
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.
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