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Intellectuals, Culture and Public Policy in France: Approaches from the Left

The classic view of the French intellectual, since the Second War at least, has been as a stalwart opponent of the bourgeois state. Sartre’s leftist existentialism, Althusser’s structuralist Marxism, Foucault’s trenchant analyses of bio-power, for all their differences, were grounded in a hostility to the Jacobin state which has been a leitmotif of the French intellectual left at least since the foundation of the Fifth Republic. Ahearne’s painstakingly and thoroughly documented survey may thus come as something of a surprise, for to the view of the intellectual ‘speaking truth and justice to power’ (p. 1) he counter-poses the less glamorous, but perhaps quite as influential, figure of the intellectual deeply involved in the sphere of public policy, primarily in relation to culture. If the most contestatory intellectual names, notably Sartre and Badiou, have by and large given the Paris corridors of power a wide berth, there is an impressive array of other figures identified with the left and frequently critical of the Socialist Party who have nevertheless ‘become involved in the policy process despite the general censure that has often been attached to such moves’ (p. 26). For a UK readership the notion of the public-policy intellectual tends to evoke such names as Anthony Giddens or even Philip Blond, so it may come as something of a relief to find a rather more elite corps in Ahearne’s pages. After a general overview, he moves on to a consideration of conceptual approaches, thorough to be sure but often couched in an Anglo-American organizational sociologese where ‘the policy primeval soup’ (p. 35) sits a touch insalubriously alongside ‘successive policy garbage cans’ (p. 37). The style becomes less laboured when Ahearne moves on to his specific case studies, focusing successively on that Republican diehard ‘laicity’, cultural policy, curriculum reform, cultural democracy and the role of television. Earlier thinkers, Condorcet, Quinet and Buisson in particular, are given due weight in the chapter on laicity, which also focuses on the 2002 Debray report on the study of religions in school and the 2003 Stasi commission, seen as ‘a relatively pure example of cultural policy in display mode’ (p. 79)—itself a back-handed tribute to the importance of high-level intellectual endorsement in French political culture. The chapter on cultural policy manages the almost lipogrammatic feat of making only one reference to Jack Lang—presumably regarded for Ahearne’s purposes as a politician rather than an intellectual. Malraux, on the other hand, is extensively treated, by way of a discerning analysis of his staging of ‘the encounter between an archetypal public intellectual’s expressive disposition and that world [sc. of policy-making]’ (p. 105). Malraux’s ‘significant other’ here is not Lang—or even Giscard’s underrated Culture Minister Michel Guy—but Pierre Bourdieu, whose 1960s work on culture and education, commissioned by Malraux’s ministry, here receives overdue attention. Bourdieu recurs in the chapter on curriculum reform, sandwiched between the Langevin-Wallon report (1944–1947), by two members of the Communist Party, and Edgar Morin’s 1998 document prepared at the behest of the controversial Claude Allègre, ‘an apologia for the importance of general problem-solving capacities’ (p. 154) and thus a plea for transdisciplinarity rather than the hyperspecialization often characteristic of the French system. Bourdieu co-prepared two reports on the curriculum, in 1985 and 1989—thus,