Again, a really fine essay. And in particular, you capture nicely our present circumstances--"The reality is that people are now on their own, with neither the collective ideologies nor the personal philosophies like existentialism...where will we find the moral strength to go on and what happens if we don't?" These are the $64,000 questions!
I find Wesley Yang's writing quite confusing and his choice of the name "Successor Ideology" is baffling. I don't think his point is that the Successors have a coherent ideology but that the Successors think they do or it is good enough. In any case they have enough policy in place (derived from social justice activism) to be able to create job openings (i.e. get people fired). It works fairly well.
I think Yang's model for how and why what he calls "Successor Ideology" has taken over so many important choke points in culture and society is persuasive and the best explanation out there. Unfortunately his writing style is weird (for me). I have found his interviews more useful but they take time.
I agree. I don't think the "successor ideology" is a useful term at all, and don't use it. But I do think that this rag-tag bundle of ideas can, nonetheless, be said to fulfil some of the *functions* of an ideology in terms of maintaining internal discipline, the more so precisely because it is fluid and ever-changing, and requires constant vigilance if you are not to violate it. Indeed, in its current incarnation, the ideology can be used to destroy anyone who says, does, or does not say or do, anything that might be deemed potentially offensive to any designated group. So here in France, the National Secretary of the Green party has been forced to resign after anonymous accusations that he had engaged in behaviour "likely to damage the mental health of women." Apparently, a secret enquiry of some kind is under way.
In part 1 you mentioned how in Orwell's 1984 the Party line was completely fluid and, for the purpose of social control, was all the more powerful for it.
I have a hunch that he thinks of a "successor ideology" (just one side mostly) because he is really a partisan in the fight: he hates what passes as "the left" in US. The problem is that all sides of politics, left, right, and even those who claim to be neither, is looking to organize their politics on a program of doing things. Everything is symbolic peddling of victimology: "you" (whoever their supposed audience is) ought to be great but you are not because "they" (whoever they are) hate your "essence" (whatever that is). Once they are in position of power, they don't really try to cut deals and get things done, and to be fair, their entire politics is based on not cutting deals--I've won the office (by whatever means) because I screamed loud about my "essence," and that can't be compromised. And who would these politicians seek support from anyways? Politicians of yesteryear went around asking local chambers of commerce, union halls, and farmers' organizations where there were people who could articulate what practical problems that they can address in Washington--and these could be used as chips for cutting deals and building coalitions. Now, politicians are courting either comfortable middle class people who have no obvious problems confronting them that require workable solutions or distressed, angry, but atomistic people who only know that they are being wronged but are incapable of articulating their problems in practical terms. (Again, I don't know how universal this is outside US). You can't win much loyalty from them, but they can win them over cheaply--just symbolic words. So there is a sort of tribalism, but not a genuine kind that builds bonds among persons--just would-be-leaders pandering to the audiences' presumed "essences.". Since they are not built on genuine personal bonds, they don't carry much weight in times of actual distress.
Yang gets a lot of these, but seems a bit too eager to push them to the factions he dislikes rather than see the problem as a fundamental social challenge.
Yang's motives aren't my main concerns. Maybe he's a writer and needs an audience and, like Greenwald, who found ever more readers and subs giving him ever more praise the more he unloads on s***libs. Substack is a set of silos, each with echo-chamber potential. But I am trying engage with ideas more and to judge the people offering them less.
I think Yang has described the system of incentives, ideas and institutional policies that produces the authoritarianism in woke better than anyone else. My problem is I find his language hard to follow and I bet that's not just me.
I think that is reasonable, although it is not clear to me if his characterization about the "woke" being more prone to authoritarian tendencies is accurate. Rather, it seems to me that pretty much every major political movement today is susceptible to thus tendency and that it's attributable, I think, to their "faith-based" nature: they command allegiance on the basis of collective belief that they are morally right just because they believe they are right This is incompatible with politics based on works, ie what have you done in material terms that would deserve my loyalty
In other words, wokism is a fundamentalist religious sect and it's developing analogous characteristics.
Sure. And that makes me think of another amusing equivalence. In the Part 1 essay there was a particularly jarring sentence that I commented on. It's the second one here.
> "Thus, in his famous words, we are “condemned to be free,” whether we like it or not, and we are responsible for our choices and actions. In our current age, when nobody is free, and nobody is responsible for their actions, this cold, austere, philosophy inevitably has much less appeal than it once did."
There's nothing else like that sentence in the essay and nothing like it in Part 2 at all. It stands out because of the sudden context switch, the obvious hyperbole, and its bitter, aggrieved tone. That's understandable but it often comes across to me as another story of victimhood.
I guess what's going on is the usual generational thing. The revolutionaries out in the street hurling half-bricks, insults and demands for reform at the establishment are really just impatient about getting their turn in the establishment with all its privileges and power.
The way you contrast Sartre as decisive and sticking to positions and Camus as less so seems to suggest that existentialism demands or when properly lived by will produce the stubbornness of Sartre. But I don't really see why.
You have one especially concise and powerful paragraph, with which I have no argument and have shared with friends:
> The point, I think, is that Existentialism is inherently hard. It’s not all apricot cocktails. To accept that the world has only the sense you give it, that you are free whether you like it or not, that only you can take decisions and you are then responsible for them, is just too much for many people. “We’re on our own” said Sartre. “There are no excuses.” How much more agreeable to believe that there are excuses, that you are weak and powerless, and thus that you are not responsible for anything.
Life and the world are complex and highly dynamic. My understanding of it is very small and struggles to keep up with the firehouse of new information. So I need to be ready to be wrong and to say that I don't know when I don't. That being the case I'm not sure the rigidity of Sartre that you described is for me.
No, and I think it's all the more difficult because, as I pointed out, it's hard to separate Existentialism in its mature form from the lives and personalities of its originators. I suppose the answer that Sartre would give is that any real existential choice has to be profound and committed and thorough-going. So if you decide you are going to support, say, the Soviet Union rather than the US, the only valid "choice" is to support them no matter what. I do think, though, that we shouldn't confuse choice with opinions about facts. Sartre seems to have felt that, irrespective of the facts, he had a responsibility to follow the political line established by Moscow, since he had made his choice. The alternative, I suppose he would have argued, is being pushed this way and that way, and in the end refusing to make a choice at all, because you don't have all the facts. I'm not sure I fully agree with this, but I do think it's probably what Sartre believed.
Thanks for the extra info. I suppose this ties in with the Really Terrible Times aspect. If the choice isn't hard then you don't need a philosophy and your commitment to your own freedom/responsibility is evident only when tested. On the one hand, I get it, sorta, theoretically. On the other, it sounds like the kind of thing that, in sufficiently charismatic form, could lead to tragedy.
There is an interesting paradix here, at least in US politics: as recently as 1990, the usual (and largely correct, in a sense) description of American politics was that "all politics were local," that is it rested on many politicians with local roots delivering tangible results to diverse locally important groups of supporters. "Ideology" was not important in the sense that cooperation often extended between presumed ideological opposites and many politicians did not bother pursuing "coherent" or "consistent" ideologies. The reason was simple: if you stuck closely to just one side, you couldn't cut deals, and without deals, you couldn't deliver as many "results" to your home people.
Fast forward a couple if decades, things are dramatically different: politicians (and activists) strive hard for "consistent" and "coherent" ideology--they try hard to be in the right side of all issues given which groups they align with. (Although one might note that this consistency is not exactly based on substance and first orinciples either. The consistency is with which side you are on.) But where are the "results"? Retail politicians of yesteryear at least delivered bridges and post offices and they were unafraid to own "ideological waffling" that it took to get them. Retail politicians of today expect that saying the right magic words and standing next to the right symbols (people or otherwise) is enough to get them elected and, well, to be honest, they are not wrong.
I suppose this exists on a different dimension from the transition in philosophy, but there is a striking parallel here. Older politicians did things and did not consider their environment to be an insuperable obstacle. Today's politicians consider themselves creatures of their environment. They cannot challenge it by doing things, even taking advantage of the environment as necessary. They can only stand on the "right" side. They can only take the environment they operate in as given and surrender to it.
I suppose this description of American politics will sound very foreign to many readers here, not only Europeans, but even Americans younger than I. But I am constantly struck by Aurelien's musings about intellectual and social trends echoing what i've been noticing about how American pilitics has been changing.
I find it striking that while Existentialism is so often thought of as part of left wing thought, when expressed bluntly in its rawest form (as you do) it comes across as old style right wing 'bootstrap' thinking or occasionally the worst forms of libertarianism. I guess this is both a source of its original appeal and its weakness. As you so elegantly express it, it is so much easier to think of oneself as a victim of circumstances or society. In a sense, people are searching for community by allying themselves with arbitrarily defined oppressed groups.
If I understood right (big if), existentialism is not a political theory and an existentialist could support all manner of politics. It says that god and other theories of teleology (including bunk stories about technological/social evolution like agriculture > settlement > state > injustice) provide no way out. Because these external truths don't exist, we are responsible for our judgements about what is true about the world and life and therefore about our moral choices. We are also responsible for our moral code. This responsibility is a function of our freedom.
In a sense it confronts head on all the arguments from authority about morality by telling us that our conscience matters even (especially) when it is in frightening conflict with prevailing thought.
One might revise your sentence to "arbitrarily defining" oppressed groups. One particularly annoying feature of modern "multiculturalism," at least in US, is that, through this, (some) elites apparently feel that they can dictate what presumed oppressed groups (that they are not part of) should think about themselves and are deludes enough to be surprised and indignant when they are pushed back.
Excellent and rings true, and much to think about. Thank you! What a rare treat to be led on a sweeping flight over the most prominent features of our collective and individual mental terrain of the last several decades!
Each time I read one of your essays, I am left awash in ideas. I believe there is much we share in our world view and how we seek to find the connections that explains it. Where we differ is that you are making concrete in symbol those connections. Please keep it up.
I really enjoyed reading the two essays on Sartre, it made it clear to me how much of an existentialist I have always been. (I actually did get around to reading the book in my teens.)
One thing though: “be reasonable, demand the impossible!” is not a slogan of spoiled brat radicalism, it’s from the cuban revolution, and took for granted that you would be willing to die for that impossible dream, side by side with your comrades, gun in hand.
I find the suggestion that Sartre has been forgotten or marginalized in favor of other thinkers from that era rather odd.
Most of my friends (millennial generation) know who Sartre is in such a way that he's come up in conversation. Him and Beauvoir are the archetypical "cool power couple" of continental philosophy. However, none of my friends have mentioned Althusser, and I'd say that Foucault has come up about as often as Sartre.
Well, I was writing in a specifically French context. But I should perhaps have distinguished (more words! more words!) between people and ideas. Educated French people still know about Sartre and de Beauvoir much more than, say Barthes or Deluze, as people. That's because they had interesting lives and lived at an interesting time. And Camus is very well known here. But people are not the same as ideas, and the ideas that dominate intellectual life at the moment, certainly in France, and elsewhere by my observation, are those of the past-1968 era, even if few of those who hold them could say exactly where they came from.
That makes a lot of sense--Sartre is certainly a "personality" in a way the others aren't, and you're right to say that his ideas do not reign in the same manner as the ideas of the other philosophers you mention.
But I would also add, in terms of Sartre's ideas, that a few have penetrated rather deeply. For example, I've heard in conversation certain turns of phrase that echo Sartre--usually it comes out like this: "Meaning is not something that is given to you, it's something that you make on your own. You must decide to have meaning."
After rereading your essay again I want to raise an additional issue.
I believe you have nicely captured the key economic/political reality of that historical period with your statement "This cocktail (existentialism, critical theory, liberalism etc) is, in essence, the drink of a stable society, where wars, revolutions and repressions are things of the past"--with a generation of middle-class intellectuals largely brought up in such economic security and consequently having the luxury to re-integrate themselves back into such a society after their "radical" protests, usually with little cost to their future professional careers.
Flash forward to 2022 and you now have quite persuasive arguments like those of Branko Milanovic in "Capitalism Alone" who maintains that the neglected history of the Third world involved communism (in China) as the social system that enabled backward and colonized societies to abolish feudalism, regain economic and political independence and build indigenous capitalism, with Communism serving as the functional equivalent of the rise of the bourgeoise in the West.
An additional question for the future may then well be-- can their ever be instituted a more equitable capitalism (a type of people's capitalism) or is our current trajectory to be a seemingly inevitable march towards war, revolution and repression( as the ultimate system "stabilizers")?
"it’s clear that our present political culture contains nothing at all which might help us to collectively meet the challenges and potential disasters of tomorrow. . . . Liberalism, with its tendency towards narcissistic individualism, is inherently incapable of providing a framework for society to act together in the face of common threats."
OK, what is a linguistic, conceptual galaxy which turns that lemon into lemonade? I have proposed abandoning mechanical, economic, political, and messianic metaphors for our self-awareness as individuals and groups in favor of botanical ones, such as:
"We Americans are a garden of gardens, and we communicate with other nations by taking them also as gardens of gardens, valuable all, different all, but not enemies."
I like you essays, but it seems to me a) that it is still framed in binary thinking..., and, sadly, the use of ad hominem does not help: “neither Althusser’s murder of his wife in 1980, and subsequent internment, nor Foucault’s much-publicised paedophilic holidays in Morocco in the 1970s, seem to have affected their popularity or their influence very much”. BTW, the second claim is far from “true”. It is a pity, because it is an interesting take on our times.
I didn't mean to be ad hominem, and in fact I wasn't criticising either figure as such. What I was drawing attention to is rather the curiously different way in which posterity has remembered them, compared to Sartre. Foucault is a particular case (since it's not disputed that Althusser killed his wife). Stories about Foucault's sexual preferences have a long history and, whilst I'm not in a position to know, they are widely believed to be true. As far as I'm concerned, that doesn't and shouldn't affect the value of his work (which I think is considerable): what puzzles me is the apparently random, or at least highly idiosyncratic, way on which our society decides who should be censored for their (alleged) behaviour and who not. After all, Sartre was not forgotten (as it were) for his literary and philosophical works, but for his political sympathies.
The only French philosopher I've read is Montaigne. But I have read quite a few economists, from Smith up to Mitchell (MMT) and economics, to me, is all about philosophy. With that background, I believe the world has many tools that can make a better world. And avoid the wars and abuses that have plagued us for what--10,000 years? William Jennings Bryan, in my opinion, summed it up quite succinctly. "There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it. "
William Jennings Bryan, Democratic National Convention, Chicago, 1896.
Again, a really fine essay. And in particular, you capture nicely our present circumstances--"The reality is that people are now on their own, with neither the collective ideologies nor the personal philosophies like existentialism...where will we find the moral strength to go on and what happens if we don't?" These are the $64,000 questions!
I find Wesley Yang's writing quite confusing and his choice of the name "Successor Ideology" is baffling. I don't think his point is that the Successors have a coherent ideology but that the Successors think they do or it is good enough. In any case they have enough policy in place (derived from social justice activism) to be able to create job openings (i.e. get people fired). It works fairly well.
I think Yang's model for how and why what he calls "Successor Ideology" has taken over so many important choke points in culture and society is persuasive and the best explanation out there. Unfortunately his writing style is weird (for me). I have found his interviews more useful but they take time.
I agree. I don't think the "successor ideology" is a useful term at all, and don't use it. But I do think that this rag-tag bundle of ideas can, nonetheless, be said to fulfil some of the *functions* of an ideology in terms of maintaining internal discipline, the more so precisely because it is fluid and ever-changing, and requires constant vigilance if you are not to violate it. Indeed, in its current incarnation, the ideology can be used to destroy anyone who says, does, or does not say or do, anything that might be deemed potentially offensive to any designated group. So here in France, the National Secretary of the Green party has been forced to resign after anonymous accusations that he had engaged in behaviour "likely to damage the mental health of women." Apparently, a secret enquiry of some kind is under way.
In part 1 you mentioned how in Orwell's 1984 the Party line was completely fluid and, for the purpose of social control, was all the more powerful for it.
I have a hunch that he thinks of a "successor ideology" (just one side mostly) because he is really a partisan in the fight: he hates what passes as "the left" in US. The problem is that all sides of politics, left, right, and even those who claim to be neither, is looking to organize their politics on a program of doing things. Everything is symbolic peddling of victimology: "you" (whoever their supposed audience is) ought to be great but you are not because "they" (whoever they are) hate your "essence" (whatever that is). Once they are in position of power, they don't really try to cut deals and get things done, and to be fair, their entire politics is based on not cutting deals--I've won the office (by whatever means) because I screamed loud about my "essence," and that can't be compromised. And who would these politicians seek support from anyways? Politicians of yesteryear went around asking local chambers of commerce, union halls, and farmers' organizations where there were people who could articulate what practical problems that they can address in Washington--and these could be used as chips for cutting deals and building coalitions. Now, politicians are courting either comfortable middle class people who have no obvious problems confronting them that require workable solutions or distressed, angry, but atomistic people who only know that they are being wronged but are incapable of articulating their problems in practical terms. (Again, I don't know how universal this is outside US). You can't win much loyalty from them, but they can win them over cheaply--just symbolic words. So there is a sort of tribalism, but not a genuine kind that builds bonds among persons--just would-be-leaders pandering to the audiences' presumed "essences.". Since they are not built on genuine personal bonds, they don't carry much weight in times of actual distress.
Yang gets a lot of these, but seems a bit too eager to push them to the factions he dislikes rather than see the problem as a fundamental social challenge.
Yang's motives aren't my main concerns. Maybe he's a writer and needs an audience and, like Greenwald, who found ever more readers and subs giving him ever more praise the more he unloads on s***libs. Substack is a set of silos, each with echo-chamber potential. But I am trying engage with ideas more and to judge the people offering them less.
I think Yang has described the system of incentives, ideas and institutional policies that produces the authoritarianism in woke better than anyone else. My problem is I find his language hard to follow and I bet that's not just me.
I think that is reasonable, although it is not clear to me if his characterization about the "woke" being more prone to authoritarian tendencies is accurate. Rather, it seems to me that pretty much every major political movement today is susceptible to thus tendency and that it's attributable, I think, to their "faith-based" nature: they command allegiance on the basis of collective belief that they are morally right just because they believe they are right This is incompatible with politics based on works, ie what have you done in material terms that would deserve my loyalty
In other words, wokism is a fundamentalist religious sect and it's developing analogous characteristics.
Sure. And that makes me think of another amusing equivalence. In the Part 1 essay there was a particularly jarring sentence that I commented on. It's the second one here.
> "Thus, in his famous words, we are “condemned to be free,” whether we like it or not, and we are responsible for our choices and actions. In our current age, when nobody is free, and nobody is responsible for their actions, this cold, austere, philosophy inevitably has much less appeal than it once did."
There's nothing else like that sentence in the essay and nothing like it in Part 2 at all. It stands out because of the sudden context switch, the obvious hyperbole, and its bitter, aggrieved tone. That's understandable but it often comes across to me as another story of victimhood.
I guess what's going on is the usual generational thing. The revolutionaries out in the street hurling half-bricks, insults and demands for reform at the establishment are really just impatient about getting their turn in the establishment with all its privileges and power.
The way you contrast Sartre as decisive and sticking to positions and Camus as less so seems to suggest that existentialism demands or when properly lived by will produce the stubbornness of Sartre. But I don't really see why.
You have one especially concise and powerful paragraph, with which I have no argument and have shared with friends:
> The point, I think, is that Existentialism is inherently hard. It’s not all apricot cocktails. To accept that the world has only the sense you give it, that you are free whether you like it or not, that only you can take decisions and you are then responsible for them, is just too much for many people. “We’re on our own” said Sartre. “There are no excuses.” How much more agreeable to believe that there are excuses, that you are weak and powerless, and thus that you are not responsible for anything.
Life and the world are complex and highly dynamic. My understanding of it is very small and struggles to keep up with the firehouse of new information. So I need to be ready to be wrong and to say that I don't know when I don't. That being the case I'm not sure the rigidity of Sartre that you described is for me.
No, and I think it's all the more difficult because, as I pointed out, it's hard to separate Existentialism in its mature form from the lives and personalities of its originators. I suppose the answer that Sartre would give is that any real existential choice has to be profound and committed and thorough-going. So if you decide you are going to support, say, the Soviet Union rather than the US, the only valid "choice" is to support them no matter what. I do think, though, that we shouldn't confuse choice with opinions about facts. Sartre seems to have felt that, irrespective of the facts, he had a responsibility to follow the political line established by Moscow, since he had made his choice. The alternative, I suppose he would have argued, is being pushed this way and that way, and in the end refusing to make a choice at all, because you don't have all the facts. I'm not sure I fully agree with this, but I do think it's probably what Sartre believed.
Thanks for the extra info. I suppose this ties in with the Really Terrible Times aspect. If the choice isn't hard then you don't need a philosophy and your commitment to your own freedom/responsibility is evident only when tested. On the one hand, I get it, sorta, theoretically. On the other, it sounds like the kind of thing that, in sufficiently charismatic form, could lead to tragedy.
There is an interesting paradix here, at least in US politics: as recently as 1990, the usual (and largely correct, in a sense) description of American politics was that "all politics were local," that is it rested on many politicians with local roots delivering tangible results to diverse locally important groups of supporters. "Ideology" was not important in the sense that cooperation often extended between presumed ideological opposites and many politicians did not bother pursuing "coherent" or "consistent" ideologies. The reason was simple: if you stuck closely to just one side, you couldn't cut deals, and without deals, you couldn't deliver as many "results" to your home people.
Fast forward a couple if decades, things are dramatically different: politicians (and activists) strive hard for "consistent" and "coherent" ideology--they try hard to be in the right side of all issues given which groups they align with. (Although one might note that this consistency is not exactly based on substance and first orinciples either. The consistency is with which side you are on.) But where are the "results"? Retail politicians of yesteryear at least delivered bridges and post offices and they were unafraid to own "ideological waffling" that it took to get them. Retail politicians of today expect that saying the right magic words and standing next to the right symbols (people or otherwise) is enough to get them elected and, well, to be honest, they are not wrong.
I suppose this exists on a different dimension from the transition in philosophy, but there is a striking parallel here. Older politicians did things and did not consider their environment to be an insuperable obstacle. Today's politicians consider themselves creatures of their environment. They cannot challenge it by doing things, even taking advantage of the environment as necessary. They can only stand on the "right" side. They can only take the environment they operate in as given and surrender to it.
I suppose this description of American politics will sound very foreign to many readers here, not only Europeans, but even Americans younger than I. But I am constantly struck by Aurelien's musings about intellectual and social trends echoing what i've been noticing about how American pilitics has been changing.
I find it striking that while Existentialism is so often thought of as part of left wing thought, when expressed bluntly in its rawest form (as you do) it comes across as old style right wing 'bootstrap' thinking or occasionally the worst forms of libertarianism. I guess this is both a source of its original appeal and its weakness. As you so elegantly express it, it is so much easier to think of oneself as a victim of circumstances or society. In a sense, people are searching for community by allying themselves with arbitrarily defined oppressed groups.
If I understood right (big if), existentialism is not a political theory and an existentialist could support all manner of politics. It says that god and other theories of teleology (including bunk stories about technological/social evolution like agriculture > settlement > state > injustice) provide no way out. Because these external truths don't exist, we are responsible for our judgements about what is true about the world and life and therefore about our moral choices. We are also responsible for our moral code. This responsibility is a function of our freedom.
In a sense it confronts head on all the arguments from authority about morality by telling us that our conscience matters even (especially) when it is in frightening conflict with prevailing thought.
One might revise your sentence to "arbitrarily defining" oppressed groups. One particularly annoying feature of modern "multiculturalism," at least in US, is that, through this, (some) elites apparently feel that they can dictate what presumed oppressed groups (that they are not part of) should think about themselves and are deludes enough to be surprised and indignant when they are pushed back.
Excellent and rings true, and much to think about. Thank you! What a rare treat to be led on a sweeping flight over the most prominent features of our collective and individual mental terrain of the last several decades!
Each time I read one of your essays, I am left awash in ideas. I believe there is much we share in our world view and how we seek to find the connections that explains it. Where we differ is that you are making concrete in symbol those connections. Please keep it up.
I really enjoyed reading the two essays on Sartre, it made it clear to me how much of an existentialist I have always been. (I actually did get around to reading the book in my teens.)
One thing though: “be reasonable, demand the impossible!” is not a slogan of spoiled brat radicalism, it’s from the cuban revolution, and took for granted that you would be willing to die for that impossible dream, side by side with your comrades, gun in hand.
I find the suggestion that Sartre has been forgotten or marginalized in favor of other thinkers from that era rather odd.
Most of my friends (millennial generation) know who Sartre is in such a way that he's come up in conversation. Him and Beauvoir are the archetypical "cool power couple" of continental philosophy. However, none of my friends have mentioned Althusser, and I'd say that Foucault has come up about as often as Sartre.
I can't recall Camus ever being mentioned.
Well, I was writing in a specifically French context. But I should perhaps have distinguished (more words! more words!) between people and ideas. Educated French people still know about Sartre and de Beauvoir much more than, say Barthes or Deluze, as people. That's because they had interesting lives and lived at an interesting time. And Camus is very well known here. But people are not the same as ideas, and the ideas that dominate intellectual life at the moment, certainly in France, and elsewhere by my observation, are those of the past-1968 era, even if few of those who hold them could say exactly where they came from.
That makes a lot of sense--Sartre is certainly a "personality" in a way the others aren't, and you're right to say that his ideas do not reign in the same manner as the ideas of the other philosophers you mention.
But I would also add, in terms of Sartre's ideas, that a few have penetrated rather deeply. For example, I've heard in conversation certain turns of phrase that echo Sartre--usually it comes out like this: "Meaning is not something that is given to you, it's something that you make on your own. You must decide to have meaning."
After rereading your essay again I want to raise an additional issue.
I believe you have nicely captured the key economic/political reality of that historical period with your statement "This cocktail (existentialism, critical theory, liberalism etc) is, in essence, the drink of a stable society, where wars, revolutions and repressions are things of the past"--with a generation of middle-class intellectuals largely brought up in such economic security and consequently having the luxury to re-integrate themselves back into such a society after their "radical" protests, usually with little cost to their future professional careers.
Flash forward to 2022 and you now have quite persuasive arguments like those of Branko Milanovic in "Capitalism Alone" who maintains that the neglected history of the Third world involved communism (in China) as the social system that enabled backward and colonized societies to abolish feudalism, regain economic and political independence and build indigenous capitalism, with Communism serving as the functional equivalent of the rise of the bourgeoise in the West.
An additional question for the future may then well be-- can their ever be instituted a more equitable capitalism (a type of people's capitalism) or is our current trajectory to be a seemingly inevitable march towards war, revolution and repression( as the ultimate system "stabilizers")?
"it’s clear that our present political culture contains nothing at all which might help us to collectively meet the challenges and potential disasters of tomorrow. . . . Liberalism, with its tendency towards narcissistic individualism, is inherently incapable of providing a framework for society to act together in the face of common threats."
OK, what is a linguistic, conceptual galaxy which turns that lemon into lemonade? I have proposed abandoning mechanical, economic, political, and messianic metaphors for our self-awareness as individuals and groups in favor of botanical ones, such as:
"We Americans are a garden of gardens, and we communicate with other nations by taking them also as gardens of gardens, valuable all, different all, but not enemies."
I like you essays, but it seems to me a) that it is still framed in binary thinking..., and, sadly, the use of ad hominem does not help: “neither Althusser’s murder of his wife in 1980, and subsequent internment, nor Foucault’s much-publicised paedophilic holidays in Morocco in the 1970s, seem to have affected their popularity or their influence very much”. BTW, the second claim is far from “true”. It is a pity, because it is an interesting take on our times.
I didn't mean to be ad hominem, and in fact I wasn't criticising either figure as such. What I was drawing attention to is rather the curiously different way in which posterity has remembered them, compared to Sartre. Foucault is a particular case (since it's not disputed that Althusser killed his wife). Stories about Foucault's sexual preferences have a long history and, whilst I'm not in a position to know, they are widely believed to be true. As far as I'm concerned, that doesn't and shouldn't affect the value of his work (which I think is considerable): what puzzles me is the apparently random, or at least highly idiosyncratic, way on which our society decides who should be censored for their (alleged) behaviour and who not. After all, Sartre was not forgotten (as it were) for his literary and philosophical works, but for his political sympathies.
The only French philosopher I've read is Montaigne. But I have read quite a few economists, from Smith up to Mitchell (MMT) and economics, to me, is all about philosophy. With that background, I believe the world has many tools that can make a better world. And avoid the wars and abuses that have plagued us for what--10,000 years? William Jennings Bryan, in my opinion, summed it up quite succinctly. "There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it. "
William Jennings Bryan, Democratic National Convention, Chicago, 1896.