Abstract:
This paper seeks to complexify the comprehension of the so-called “French antitotalitarian moment” of the 1970s, marked by the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and by the intellectual prominence reached by the critique of totalitarianism. The question I raise is how this critique of totalitarianism shapes the interpretations of classical liberalism formulated by authors such as Pierre Rosanvallon and Marcel Gauchet. The hypothesis is that those interpretations are characterized by an ambiguity: in the first instance, both liberalism and totalitarianism are accused of tending towards the suppression of the autonomy of “the political” - an aspect that leads Rosanvallon and Gauchet to revisit the Schmittian critique of liberal depoliticization. Nevertheless, a certain liberal tradition appears as fruitful for exploring the primacy of “the political” in the institution of the social.
Keywords:
liberalism; totalitarianism; Pierre Rosanvallon; Marcel Gauchet; contemporary French political theory; democracy