In the latter half of the 1970s, the French intellectual Left denounced communism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics through a critique of leftwing totalitarianism that paved the way for today's postmodern, liberal, and moderate republican political options. Contrary to the dominant understanding of the critique of totalitarianism as an abrupt rupture induced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Christofferson argues that French antitotalitarianism was the culmination of directdemocratic critiques of communism and revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. The author's focus on the directdemocratic politics of French intellectuals offers an important alternative to recent histories that seek to explain the course of French intellectual politics by France's apparent lack of a liberal tradition.
In the latter half of the 1970s, the French intellectual Left denounced communism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics through a critique of leftwing totalitarianism that paved the way for today's postmodern, liberal, and moderate republican political options. Contrary to the dominant understanding of the critique of totalitarianism as an abrupt rupture induced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Christofferson argues that French antitotalitarianism was the culmination of directdemocratic critiques of communism and revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. The author's focus on the directdemocratic politics of French intellectuals offers an important alternative to recent histories that seek to explain the course of French intellectual politics by France's apparent lack of a liberal tradition.
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