"Without Marx or Jesus: the New American Revolution has begun" by Jean-François Revel
The Spearhead Culture
During the Cold War, France had only two liberals: Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel. Revel was a contrarian not only due to his defense of liberal ideas in a country where praise for Stalin was far more common than admiration for Adam Smith. He challenged one of the dominant features of the Cold War France: anti-Americanism. With Without Marx or Jesus: the New American Revolution has begun, published in 1970, he sparked great controversy by proclaiming that America is not only more revolutionary than the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, but that the U.S. was capable of something that Europe was not: creating political and cultural “prototypes”.
Revel was a French cosmopolitan. He said of himself that if he doesn’t read two newspapers in English, Italian and Spanish every day, he feels like he’s in exile. After earning his degree in philosophy, he embarked on a teaching career, starting in Algeria, before moving on to Mexico and then Florence. He continued teaching until 1963, when he made the decision to focus solely on writing.
The author of the only biography of Revel, Philippe Boulanger, states that “with his profile of a 19th century publicist, Revel was perhaps the last great French liberal of the 20th century.” While later he supported Reagan and was receptive to Hayek’s ideas, his liberalism was not purely Anglo-Saxon, but also embedded in the French tradition. He combined two strands of French liberalism, which Annelien de Dijn (in French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville) refers to as laissez-faire liberalism and aristocratic liberalism. In the spirit of the former, he considered the market to be a fundamental sphere of human relations and creativity. In the vein of the latter, he valued protection from arbitrary government actions. In one of his articles, Revel gave the following definition of liberalism: “Perhaps liberalism is only the confused set of resistances of humanity to the persistent idées fixes that attempt to purify it by enslaving it.”
For Revel, liberalism should be inseparable from democracy, the most pragmatic of all regimes, as it uses the method of trial and error, exercising constant self-correction. He wrote that democracy was so mercilessly attacked by intellectuals, precisely because it was the only regime where they had the right to speak freely.
Revel warned against intellectuals who willingly choose fanaticism over careful observation and empirical restraint. He gave the example of Frederic Joliot-Curie, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, who argued that the Communist Party, equipped with the Marxist method, must inevitably hold the key to political wisdom. “Man’s capacity to construct in his mind almost any theory, to “prove” it to himself and to believe it, is unlimited. It is only equalled by his capacity to resist what refutes it,” he wrote in La Connaissance inutile.
He criticized de Gaulle and the new regime he built in 1958, the Fifth Republic. Like Tocqueville, he compared the American system with the French one. In the latter, the president is much more powerful, his authority does not meet such barriers as in America, leading to “presidential hypertrophy” and “ineffective absolutism”. Within the Fifth Republic, there are few checks on presidential authority beyond public protest. This last observation is particularly pertinent in light of recent events, including the gilets jaunes demonstrations and more recent protests against pension reforms.
For Revel, however, the U.S. was not just a backdrop against which the flaws of the French system came to the surface. In his eyes, America is a civilization that, in contrast with Europe, has “the ability to formulate cultural prototypes and prototypes of political societies.”
Revel wrote in 2000 that if the French left and right were stripped of their anti-Americanism, there would be nothing left of their political ideas. This assessment may be considered too harsh, but every political formation and intellectual involved in politics in France had to grapple with their stance towards the United States as a global superpower. These issues boiled down to two questions, which Richard F. Kuisel formulated as follows in The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power: “How can we avoid American hegemony and remain independent? How can we be modern and yet remain French?”
At the time Without Marx or Jesus is published, the two traditional poles of anti-Americanism – and the two frameworks structuring collective imagination in France – Gaullism and the Communist Party, have been undergoing a crisis. The first had been weakened by the departure of de Gaulle after a failed referendum. The Communist Party faltered due to a combination of challenges. May 68’ was a rebellion of the youth that drew upon leftist traditions opposing those represented by the party (which spoke out against the student revolt). Another factor undermining its authority was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, was published soon after. In the 1970s, anti-Americanism was waning.
In the 1980s, with the coming to power of the Socialists, a shift took place. On the one hand, President Mitterand was on friendly terms with Washington, first with Reagan and then with Bush. On the other hand, the cultural policy of his government was based on anti-American resentment. The key figure here was the Minister of Culture in 1981-86 and in 1988-93, Jack Lang, who launched a campaign of “cultural protectionism” against the United States. According to Kuisel, the widespread anti-Americanism observed in France during this period was primarily limited to the elite class. At the time, the majority of the French, especially young, expressed a desire to live in the United States when asked where they would like to reside if not in their home country.
Lang began with a public gesture – he refused to attend the American film festival in Deauville. Then, at a UNESCO conference in Mexico City, he made a speech against American “cultural imperialism”. Soon after, he sought to organize global resistance to the “pan-Atlantic” cultural invasion. His declarations and policies were met with criticism among the so-called noveaux philosophes, intellectuals who, initially fascinated by Marxism, revised their views. André Glucksmann described Lang’s attitude as archaic, as indeed was the entire program of the Socialists. The anti-Americanism of the Socialists was summed up by historian of ideas Jacques Julliard as an revenge of inferior writers and intellectuals, an ideal that serves as a rallying point for the far right and the communists.
The Socialists tried to push their agenda of “cultural protectionism” at the European Union level as well. Jacques Delors, finance minister in the Mitterand government and later president of the European Commission, demanded the safeguarding of national cultures, which he believed were under threat from Hollywood. This anxiety was fueled by the growing number of films from across the Atlantic in French cinemas. According to Kuisel, between 1980 and 1993 their box office share rose from 34% to 53%. The increasing position of U.S. releases was also noticeable on television, due in large part to the fact that it was cheaper to buy U.S. programs than to produce your own content.
Over time, the apprehensions of a subset of the French elite regarding Americanization have found fewer supporters in the wider society. According to sociologist Jerôme Fourquet’s book, L’Archipel français, the average French person today does not display any significant resistance to Americanization. For instance, since the 1990s, around 8% of children have been given Anglo-Saxon names each year. This trend is even observed in the nationalist Rassemblement National (formerly Front National) party, where important figures such as Steeve Briois, Davy Rodriguez, and its president, Jordan Bardella, have Anglo-Saxon names. Notably, as Kuisel reminds us, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the party, held Ronald Reagan as his role model.
Fourquet notes that French lifestyles have become Americanized: the vast majority aspire to own a house with a pool in the suburbs, the lower classes listen to and dance to country music (the sociologist cites a figure of 9% of the population over the age of 18, or nearly 4 million people), and the upper classes dream of going to the States (Fourquet reports that among the upper classes, one in two people have already made the “obligatory pilgrimage” overseas). The author observes that – with the breakdown of the Catholic cultural mold and the decline of the mass Communist and Gaullist parties – one of the last shared experiences for society has become a visit to Disneyland. According to a 2017 Ifop survey, 60% of French people have visited Disneyland near Paris, including 2/3 of those in the 35-50 age bracket and 75% of those under 35. “Disneyland is now part of our heritage,” writes Fourquet.
Jacques Chirac’s opposition to intervention in Iraq can be seen as the last manifestation of political anti-Americanism. In 2003, his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, articulated the French stance at the UN. Some of his warnings proved valid, as when he said that “the option of war may seem at first sight to be the quickest. But let us not forget that after winning the war, we must build peace. And let’s face it: it will be long and difficult.”[1] In 2009, French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s decision to rejoin NATO’s military command marked a significant departure from the policy of opposition to the United States. Macron’s recurring slogans about “strategic autonomy” do not represent any significant change in this matter.
Régis Debray, a leftist intellectual, a former comrade of Che Guevara and later a supporter of Mitterand, signaled the exhaustion of anti-Americanism in his 2017 book Civilization. How we all became Americans. Debray has never supported Atlanticism, and as recently as 2013 was calling for France to leave NATO. In his book, however, he concludes: while in the early 20th century America was a variant of European civilization, in the 21st century Europe is just a variant of the American one.
As I mentioned, the 1960s marked the peak of French anti-Americanism. That was when Jacques Servan-Schreiber, author of the famous book The American Challenge, brought together in the daily “L’Express” writers and intellectuals who did not share the then widespread aversion to America. Among them, Jean-François Revel stood out.
In Without Marx or Jesus, Revel intended to avoid both the pitfalls of pro-Americanism and anti-Americanism, labeling them as “irrational attitudes”. Following his time in the United States, the French writer concludes that America – like Italy, France and England in the past – represents now a “society-laboratory”. It is there, he believes, that the revolution of the 20th century can take place and nowhere else.
The first reason why the revolution can only happen in America is that the U.S. “enjoys continuing economic prosperity and rate of growth, without which no revolutionary project can succeed.” Second, it is where the frontier of innovation is constantly being pushed. Third, it is a country that is oriented toward the future, not mesmerized by the past. Fourth, it’s a country of rebellion against authoritarian control – Revel writes this having in mind the student revolts of the 1960s – where different lifestyles and ways of life proliferate. The American revolution is supposed to be the first modern revolution in which differences over values are more important than differences over means of existence.
The revolution that is to take place in America is destined to be an absolutely novel event in history, claims the writer. It must not be an imitation, but rather a burst of innovations and new economic solutions, without which it would not be able to keep its promises. It is these factors that ensure that the revolution “is not a settling of accounts with the past, but with the future.” Here Revel invokes the economists of the 18th century, for whom the feudal system of the ancien régime was not only unjust, but also unproductive. A true revolution means increasing productivity and efficiency relative to the regime it overcomes.
The American revolution is supposed to have nothing in common with the revolutions of the 19th century, “or rather, with the revolutions dreamed of in the nineteenth century.” Thus, it will not come, contrary to the expectations of the European left at the time, either from the Soviets or from Maoist China. Revel notes that this is a hard truth to swallow for the left, which is ready to consider any eventuality, except that the U.S. – the country of exploitation, imperialism and Joe McCarthy – could be the source of an upheaval. They see America rather as the target of a revolt or its greatest obstacle, and not as the place where revolution will be ignited.
Soviet Russia is no longer a source of revolutionary impulses, China, too, remarks Revel, offers no new radical vision for the world. Mao’s aphorisms from the Little Red Book have little to do with conditions in the industrialized countries of the West. They represent “emotional abstractions,” not visions capable of transforming the First World.
The Western left in the 1960s and 1970s argued that the revolution could come from yet another direction – the Third World. According to Revel, this belief is a manifestation of nostalgia for the pre-industrial world. He adds that there is no more counter-revolutionary combination than synthesis found in the Third World, namely that “of socialism with the past. Taken together, they have the effect of perpetuating economic stagnation while justifying political dictatorships.”
Nor is there any chance that the revolution will start in Europe, where the prevailing mood is that nothing can happen and where every effort toward innovation is immediately suppressed. Before the Second World War, French essayist and poet Paul Valéry noted that Europe entered its Ptolemaic era: it had become a civilization of quotations and compilations, fixated on the past and devoid of creativity. Revel writes in a similar tone about the continent – everyone feels the need to return to the past, even if they intend to do something new, slave to the compulsion of invoking Bakunin or Marx, the 1789 Revolution, the Paris Commune or the Bolshevik Revolution, Mao, Castro, God or pre-industrial society. In May 1968, students wrote the famous slogan on the university walls: “imagination has come to power.” It meant nothing, writes Revel, as their imagination is reduced to old doctrines and past events. Its essence is repetition. For them the revolution becomes “a pale imitation of an earlier fiasco. And, since there is a multitude of historic failures from which to choose, it should come as no surprise that there are a correspondingly large number of ‘revolutionary’ movements.”
One may ask whether nostalgia is always counter-revolutionary? After all, the revolutionaries of 1789 were largely inspired by the Roman Republicans, and the Bolsheviks imagined they were reenacting the feats of Robespierre and his companions. Today in America, many of the most future-oriented thinkers feel nostalgic for the technological optimism of the 1950s.
Not only is Europe not future-oriented, but it also lacks the technological and economic preconditions to set a new course for the world. According to Without Marx or Jesus among European countries only the UK can sustain the technological initiative. This observation remains accurate to this day: DeepMind, for instance, was developed in the UK, not in France or Italy. In certain areas of the industry – such as machine tools or advanced optics – an exception should also be made for Germany. In any case, Revel’s remark that Europe’s prosperity is based on research and technological breakthroughs made on the other side of the Atlantic remains relevant to this day.
Debray writes in Civilization that Europe has indeed fallen into decadence, but this should not be a reason to despair. He argues that decadence can be full of creative impulses, and cites the declining Austro-Hungarian Empire as an example. It was this period that saw a remarkable creative flourishing. In painting it was Kokoschka, Schiele and Klimt, in music Schoenberg, Webern, Mahler, in literature Musil, Zweig and Broch, in the domain of ideas Wittgenstein, Schumpeter, Freud. Hollywood would be different without Fritz Lang, von Sternberg or von Stroheim. It was Austro-Hungarian decadence that contributed to the development of positivism, expressionism, Zionism and Marxism.
It is hard to deny the intellectual and artistic fecundity displayed by the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire. Revel, however, would not be convinced by this argument. He asks the question: in the absence of technological and economic dynamism, will Europe be able to innovate in the field of culture and sensibility? His answer is negative. As the reason, he cites the reign of a particular kind of intellectuals who are not only concentrated on the past, constantly rehashing old paradigms, but further show an antipathy toward scientific thinking, and use the manipulation of ideas as a way to gain status and separate themselves from the rest of the mankind. The greatest ambition they can muster is to create their own local variant of what will emerge elsewhere. “Certainly, western Europe will undergo changes in mentality,” writes Revel, “but these changes will be dictated not from within, but from abroad.” Europe has ceased to be a spearhead culture.
According to Revel, Europeans cannot forgive America for making them aware of their cultural failure. Humiliated, they have no choice other than to imitate her. This entails a biased criticism of every phenomenon from across the Atlantic: when automation increases productivity, Europeans call Americans “slaves of technology,” when they succeed in reducing poverty, the old continent scorns their “consumer society”, and so on. Anti-Americanism, both on the left and the right, essentially boils down to a fear of change. This is particularly evident on the left, which cannot bear to think that a revolution – a brand new one, emancipated from old schemes – can be born on the other side of the ocean, and that it is there that solutions to the problems of the modern world will be invented.
It is worth considering the question of whether French right-wing anti-Americanism was entirely unjustified. Revel criticizes de Gaulle’s anti-American resentment, explaining it by the fact that the general could not forgive the Anglo-Saxons for how much he owed them. This psychological interpretation, however, does not exhaust the subject. Eric Branca in L’Ami américain. Washington contre de Gaulle 1940-1969, provides a different perspective. He attempts to show relations between the U.S. and France in a new light, not of friendship, but of the vassalization of Paris toward Washington that de Gaulle feared. Jean Monnet, later considered one of the fathers of the EU, according to Branca, advised Henry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s aide, to “destroy de Gaulle.” Moreover, Branca mentions that in Harry Truman’s eyes, France should have relinquished its security to the United States, similar to how Germany had done after the war. L’Ami américain argues that Washington remained hostile to de Gaulle, intolerant of his desire for independence, but at the same time reveals that the general was by no means an enemy, but one of the U.S.’s staunchest allies. When the Russians raised the Berlin Wall in 1961, he was the first European head of state to assure Kennedy of his support in the event of a confrontation with the Soviets, and similarly reassured him when Moscow placed missiles in Cuba. The French leader once said that “America’s best allies are not those who bow down to them, but those who can say no to them.” Branca points out that it was Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger – perhaps the sharpest minds that guided American foreign policy in the second half of the 20th century – who respected de Gaulle the most.
Without Marx or Jesus makes the claim that “it is highly significant that the movement of dissent - the only original contribution to the technique of sedition to appear in the past decade, and perhaps since World War II - has originated in the United States.” Revel has in mind the student protest movements from Berkeley and other places. He insists that information is the most important factor sustaining democracy, and that the only way to resist manipulation by state institutions and the media is to make as much information available to the public as possible. The revolutionary dynamic was awakened precisely by information abundance. It led to an event unique in history: that opposition to the foreign war arose in the country that led the war. Never before, claims Revel, had anything like this happened, never had the public rebelled against military expeditions or interventions that were intended to advance the national interest. At the same time, the French thinker notes that broad access to information has not always had the desired consequences, leading to “widespread and strong feelings of guilt, and a passion for self-accusation which, on occasion, tends to go to almost unbearable extremes.”
Revel admits that the function of information is disturbance. At the same time, he argues that the combination of social revolution and the pursuit of democratic freedoms can only happen through an abundance of information. This is a thesis that Martin Gurri seems to contradict in his Revolt of the Public. Indeed, information overabundance has led to an erosion of the legitimacy of up until now recognized institutions and to a shift in the balance of power toward outsiders. However, this has not brought a constructive change, but rather a “paralysis of distrust”, where the old structures are fiercely criticized, while those who contest them are unable to craft any alternative.
Another question is whether this particular type of rebellion – which Revel calls “dissent” – undermines the technological base, which itself forms a precondition for revolution. Research indicates that the Baby Boom generation demonstrated staunch resistance to innovation. Bruce Gibney notes in The Generation of Sociopaths that “Studies in 1972 and 1974 by the National Science Board showed that of all age groups, those under thirty (at the time, a survey group composed entirely of Boomers) held the most negative views about science and technology, including that S&T changed the world too quickly and produced outcomes that tended toward the worse.” He goes on to say that Boomers at best failed to sustain the pace of technological development prior to the 1970s, and at worst simply stunted it. Gibney accuses them of pulling away from an empirical mentality to one based on feelings, which seems to be confirmed by an examination of language. Since the 1970s – as hippie/dissent culture goes mainstream – the vocabulary associated with expressing emotions has supplanted the language of cool, empirical description[2].
Revel lists three more aspects of the American revolution that distinguish it from revolutions of the past. The first is the American aesthetic imagination, which is more vivid, in his opinion, than anywhere else in the world. It is easier to assimilate than European culture, pretentious and wrapped in an aristocratic mythology. Another distinguishing feature is that it leads to “cultural polycentrism”. “Technological plenty, in fact, opens the door to the formation of unexpected cultural minorities,” Revel argues, and there is supposed to be no end to the process of discovering new cultural variants. In the past, cultures created individuals; today, individuals will create cultures, increasingly liberated from national traditions and customs. Looking back, these remarks seem particularly pertinent. In the age of the Internet, more and more people are choosing the culture they want to live in, breaking away from the one they were born into, fashioning a world where everyone has a “niche of our own, on respectful (if uncomprehending) terms with all the other subcultures.”[3]
Revel maintains that the new American revolution will bring yet another great change: the end of national sovereignty, in which the Frenchman sees the main source of all the problems of the modern world. In later years he would abandon this view, but in Without Marx or Jesus he contends that for the revolution to really happen, it must sweep the globe. In The Totalitarian Temptation, published a few years later, this conviction is still present, as he sees nation-states as the greatest hindrance to achieving a dream state of global order, in which the economy will be governed by some overarching political authority and individuals will be free to make their own choices within a framework of “cultural polymorphism”. He calls for the abolition of foreign policy and the establishment of international, global structures.
This is certainly the weakest facet of Revel’s book. This shortcoming has already been singled out by French reviewers, as they pointed out that he pays too little attention to foreign relations, treating them in a manner that is not only reductionist, but simply utopian. If the revolution is to be global, or there will be no revolution at all, as Revel maintains, then there will be no revolution at all, one reviewer wrote. Another weakness is the insufficient and superficial handling of the religious aspect, which the title itself announces. The Frenchman mentions the vaguely religious nature of the dissent on the one hand, argues that the appeal to God means clinging to the past, while the new revolution has to be completely detached from the old systems of beliefs. However, he does not sufficiently elaborate on these themes; his reflection on the subject is reduced to remarks scattered throughout the book.
While not all of Without Marx or Jesus’ assertions are still pertinent, Revel has addressed a number of issues in a new tone, previously rarely heard in Europe. The relevance of his insights is confirmed by two important books on the U.S., namely America by Jean Baudrillard and History Has Begun: Birth of a New America by Bruno Maçaes.
Both develop Revel’s thesis that America is a society-laboratory that creates prototypes of cultural and political forms. Baudrillard writes that the U.S. represents the original modernity, while Europe is the “dubbed or subtitled version,” condemned to imitate whatever appears on the other side of the Atlantic. America is no longer under the influence of Europe, there is not even a question of an exchange of impulses between the two civilizations, as Maçaes emphasizes when he argues that a new kind of culture, never before known to the West, is being born in the States. He insists that Tocqueville’s thesis of continuity between the old continent and the U.S. has turned out to be wrong, and what is unfolding overseas is not the culmination of the European experience, but a genuine transformation and rupture with the old world.
When the Portuguese diplomat claims that America could abandon its political or civilizational form in order to save its international position and thus appear in some entirely new shape, unknown to the West – here he seems to be moving towards Revel’s vision, where America represents a laboratory of new possibilities. Baudrillard, too, recognizes its distinguishing feature in the “unprecedented materialization of models.” Both, however, unlike Revel, seem to identify America’s distinct path with the creation of stories, fictions, with an “orgy of images” as Baudrillard puts it, or with what Maçaes calls virtualism.
In his article on History Has Begun, John Gray highlights that Maçaes’ analysis “focuses on shifts in human consciousness, but it is changes in the material world that will be decisive in shaping the next stage in history.”[4] In a world that has so clearly recognized – first during the pandemic, then after the Russian invasion of Ukraine – how important the world of atoms is, the thesis of the future reign of virtualism seems to rest on dubious foundations. In today’s context of “resource nationalism,” where there is a renewed focus on industrial policy and on pushing forward the technological frontier, it is crucial to contemplate whether America’s transformation into what Maçaes describes as a “society of stories” could be seen as decadent.
Ross Douthat concludes that virtualism, which Maçaes considers as the essence of the new American civilization and a manifestation of its vitality, is merely a transitional period[5]. Other thinkers reflecting on contemporary America, such as Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel and others – for example the progress studies movement – also regard this stage of American civilization as an era of crisis, the symptoms of which they group under the common denominator of the Great Stagnation.
On this particular point, there is a key difference between Maçaes’ thinking and the reflections from Without Marx or Jesus. For Revel, economic growth and technological development constitute necessary conditions for America’s revolutionary dynamism. Without them, the problems plaguing modern America cannot be solved, and without the ability to solve them – America, in Revel’s interpretation, will cease to be itself, that is, a society-laboratory. History has Begun convinces us that this period of technological slowdown, deceleration of productivity and flight towards what Maçaes describes as “artificiality” – and what the Chinese perceive as “spiritual opium” – is the beginning of America’s “highest period”. The proliferation of fictions that fascinates the Portuguese thinker, inextricably linked to a world where social media and virtuality are considered the pinnacle of technological progress, means for the U.S., to quote Cowen’s The Complacent Class, “essentially a low-innovation mode of existence.” It would be hard to argue that the internet platforms that make it possible to fabricate these “plots” “are doing the most important work pushing forward our technologically-accelerating civilization.”[6]
For all its diversity and mind-boggling variety, virtualism represents the force of stasis. It is difficult to consider it as anything other than the exhaustion of the revolutionary dynamism that made America, according to Revel, a society capable of creating cultural and political prototypes. Maçaes is correct in suggesting that the intoxication with virtualism may be a feature particular to the U.S. However, it cannot be denied that it could lead the country down the path of decline, especially if its geopolitical rivals reject it. For China, as Dan Wang notes, “hard tech is more valuable than products that take us more deeply into the digital world.”[7]
After the publication of Revel's book, The Anti-American Obsession, the renowned Belgian sinologist Simon Leys wrote a letter to the author. He confessed that although his arguments convince him, he cannot get rid of some doubts: “How not to be afraid of America, he asks, and above all not to be afraid for America?” While many are afraid that America slides deeper into decadence during this period of transition, others worry what shape it will take when it comes out of it. Of the many questions that the 21st century will answer, it is one of the most fascinating.