 |
| Um baralho de cartas que remonta à Revolução Francesa, onde os reis foram substituídos por homens sábios (Solo, Platão, Catão e Brutus) e as rainhas por virtudes (justiça, união, prudência e força). Leo S. Olschki, La Bibliofilia, Florença: Giuseppe Boffito, 1906. |
François Furet, que faleceu há vinte anos este ano, foi uma figura central na vida intelectual do final do século XX. Historiador da Revolução Francesa, desafiou a interpretação social que apresentava o levante como expressão da luta de classes, sintoma da transição do feudalismo para o capitalismo. Em vez disso, a interpretação política de Furet retratou a revolução como o triunfo de uma ideologia maniqueísta que quase inevitavelmente levou à violência que se seguiu.
Furet avançou pela primeira vez esta perspectiva em Interpretação da Revolução Francesa (1978), que mobilizou a então ascendente crítica francesa do totalitarismo para pintar o evento como protototalitário e, assim, desacreditar a tradição revolucionária. No ano do bicentenário de 1989, ele elaborou esta versão dos acontecimentos em uma história narrativa e dicionário crítico. A sua interpretação prevaleceu amplamente na mídia francesa e entre o público, embora muitos historiadores continuassem críticos dela. Assombrado pelo seu envolvimento juvenil com a política revolucionária, o último grande projeto de Furet foi uma história quase autobiográfica da “ilusão” comunista, que procurava explicar o apelo da ideologia.
O fio condutor da obra de Furet nos seus últimos vinte anos foi o seu esforço para pôr fim à tradição revolucionária na França. Ele trabalhou para facilitar uma virada centrista e liberal na política e na vida intelectual francesa. Intelectualmente, ele defendeu a reabilitação dos pensadores liberais franceses do século XIX, mais notavelmente Alexis de Tocqueville, que, segundo ele, poderia iluminar o caminho a seguir.
Furet também avançou a agenda liberal ao construir instituições dedicadas a ela. Em 1982, ajudou a fundar a Fondation Saint-Simon, que reunia intelectuais centristas, líderes empresariais, políticos e funcionários públicos. Dois anos depois, ele criou o Institut Raymond Aron dentro da École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), onde reuniu intelectuais com ideias semelhantes, muitos dos quais haviam ingressado no corpo docente da EHESS enquanto Furet atuou como seu presidente entre 1977 e 1985.
À medida que a sua interpretação da Revolução Francesa ganhou força, Furet tornou-se um importante comentador político, com a imprensa solicitando regularmente as suas opiniões. Entre as suas contribuições marcantes para a vida política francesa está La République du centre: La fin de l’exception française (1988), em coautoria com Jacques Julliard e Pierre Rosanvallon. Este texto anunciava o fim da polarização esquerda-direita na política francesa e a chegada de um novo centrismo.
Citando o eclipse do Partido Comunista Francês (PCF) e a reconciliação da direita católica com a república, Furet argumentou que os eleitores franceses tinham concordado com um modelo de governação moderado que protegeria as liberdades essenciais, manteria a prosperidade em uma economia de mercado e cuidar dos menos afortunados através da redistribuição. Ele acolheu favoravelmente este desenvolvimento: tanto neste livro como em outros, o seu comentário foi tanto análise como defesa.
A vitória de um novo centro em 2017 nos convida a revisitar o pensamento de Furet. Preocupações específicas do final do século XX levaram-no às suas conclusões, mas também o cegaram para processos já em funcionamento durante a sua vida e que só se tornaram mais importantes hoje. Compreender as ideias de Furet e as suas deficiências esclarece os desafios que enfrentamos na crise atual.
Escrita no rescaldo da vitória presidencial de François Mitterrand em 1988, a contribuição de Furet para La République du centre procurou explicar porque é que o centrismo tinha se apoderado da política francesa.
On the Right, he cited the waning of Gaullism and the resolution of the conflict between church and state, which enabled Mitterrand’s first victory in 1981 when his Socialist Party (PS) captured a significant portion of the Catholic vote. On the Left, he noted that the PCF had declined as a result of the discrediting of the Soviet model and the crisis of Jacobin political culture.
Further, Furet believed that the trente glorieuses, France’s postwar economic boom, transformed the nation. He explained that France had experienced “the fastest collective embourgeoisement of its history” over those decades, making society “at the same time more individualistic and more uniform — or to put it negatively, less aristocratic and less revolutionary.”
In the Tocquevillian terms that underlay Furet’s analysis, France had passed from a revolutionary to a democratic social state. Voters wanted neither socialism nor neoliberalism; 75 percent — in other words, everyone except Communists and National Front supporters — agreed that the center should govern.
Furet argued that, when France voted for Mitterrand and the PS in 1981, they were not voting for the Left’s Common Program, whose radical measures were designed to spark the socialist transition. Indeed, Mitterrand and his party erred between 1981 and 1984 when they nationalized large sectors of the economy and tried to roll back Catholic schools. Likewise, after winning the 1986 legislative elections, the Right erred by flirting with Hayekian neoliberalism. Centrist France wanted neither full-blown socialism nor the reign of the market, Furet asserted.
Thus Furet believed French voters turned to the center in 1988 because socioeconomic development had made them more individualistic and more equal. While France had certainly moved in this egalitarian direction during the postwar boom, Furet paid little attention to the economic crisis that began in the latter half of the 1970s. Surprisingly, he identified the beginning of the center’s triumph at the very moment that its purported cause — prosperity — was no longer fully operative.
Though individualism had hardly disappeared, France was becoming less equal. Furet did not acknowledge that the first Mitterrand government had attempted to respond to this crisis. In fact, he only recognized the economy’s political importance in his discussion of the National Front’s rise, which he partially attributed to “insecurity.”
A more robust understanding of the period shows that the centrist turn in the late 1980s was as much a result of a specific politico-economic conjuncture as of the longer socioeconomic transformation Furet cited. Notably, the socialist government’s failure between 1981 and 1983 to implement “Keynesianism in one country” and Mitterrand’s subsequent turn to European integration played key roles in this process. After gaining power for the first time since the 1930s Popular Front, the Left had failed, allowing the new center to rise from the rubble.
O centro pode aguentar?
The recent victory of Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! might initially appear as the culmination of the centrist turn Furet identified three decades earlier.
One element of continuity is that the new center emerged from the collapse of the old center, namely Mitterrand’s center-left PS and the center-right Les Républicains (LR). As Perry Anderson argues, both center-right president Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12) and center-left president François Hollande (2012-17) failed to resolve the current crisis: they could neither fully embrace neoliberalism nor satisfy the elements of their constituencies opposed to it.
Both the PS and the LR were shellacked in this summer’s elections. Neither party’s presidential candidate made it to the second round, and both fared miserably in the legislative elections. Standing in their ruins, Macron promised disinterested, quasi-providential leadership that could finally lead France out of its economic doldrums. Rallying the upper middle class, from which his party’s deputies are overwhelmingly drawn, Macron gathered enough support to win, but his victory seems rather more precarious than that of the 1980s center.
For one, both the far right and the “Left of the Left” — as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called it — did well. Over 40 percent of the electorate voted for either Marine Le Pen or Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round. Le Pen made it to the second round with 21.5 percent of the vote; Mélenchon trailed her by less than two points, winning the largest share of any presidential candidate to the socialists’ left since Jacques Duclos’s 21.3 percent in 1969.
Le Pen’s and Mélenchon’s parties — the National Front and France Insoumise, respectively — did less well in the legislative elections, and the electoral cycle ended with the far right in crisis. Nevertheless, their relative success, not to mention the high rate of abstention and invalid ballots, indicates that French opinion remains divided: Macron has not won over the electorate.
If he fails, the center’s victory will likely be temporary. In that case, the most remarkable development of the 2017 elections will likely be Mélenchon’s breakthrough, which could launch a revival of the socialist project. In any case, the success of both the Left and the extreme right indicate that Furet’s triumph of the center was, at best, a medium-term phenomenon.
In his later years, Furet considered himself a Tocquevillian, explaining that the nineteenth-century liberal “gave me the principal inspiration of my research” and that “his idea of democracy as the inevitable condition of modern man offered me the best help I could find to understand our present.”
From Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Furet derived an understanding of democracy as a principle or norm that can never be fully realized. The inevitable gap between aspiration and social reality feeds a passion for equality that only grows stronger as the degree of actual parity increases. Unchecked, this egalitarian impulse threatens liberty and can result in revolution. Furet, haunted by his youthful flirtation with communism, believed that France must reject this tendency before it could fully embrace a centrist government.
Focused on the threat posed by the passion for equality, Furet played up its manifestations to better denounce them. One particular focus of Furet’s ire was American political correctness. Furet had been directly exposed to it beginning in the mid-1980s as a member of the University of Chicago’s faculty where he became friends with its premier American critic, Allan Bloom.
For Furet, political correctness represented a dangerous outbreak of revolutionary egalitarianism. He believed that behind it lay “the classic revolutionary idea that ‘all is political,’ that there are no natural inequalities but only social injustices.” Similarly, he argued that multiculturalism had become “the most important social movement of the last quarter century” and that the Clinton administration’s embrace of it led to the Democratic Party’s loss in the 1994 congressional elections.
This strange conclusion overlooked the campaign’s dominant issue: the failed universal health care initiative, which the Republican Party relentlessly attacked as “big government.” A more sober appraisal might have recognized that the bill’s failure and the subsequent conservative victory indicated that the United States was struggling to address rising inequality. But, because Furet focused less on actual equality in favor of the desire for equality, all of this escaped him.
Furet’s obsession with the egalitarian impulse also dominated his commentary on French politics. He supported the death of the revolutionary tradition he had analyzed in La République du centre, writing that, after the collapse of Soviet Communism, we are condemned “to live in the world as it is,” at least for the foreseeable future.
He welcomed political disengagement, seeing it as a product of the pursuit of well-being, and he agreed with political philosopher Pierre Manent “that one must live democratic modernity in moderation.” Communism’s collapse led him to believe that capitalism and democracy could not be separated and that “socialism can henceforth be thought about only within (and as a corrective to) the laws of the market.”
Though he explicitly rejected the neoliberal reduction of society to the market and supported redistributive policies to partially correct economic inequality, he presented the choices facing France as technical questions and found the public’s refusal to accept liberalizing reforms irresponsible.
The 1995 strikes in response to social security and pension reforms as well as the Left’s 1997 victory in the legislative elections angered Furet. In his analysis, the strikes were anachronistic because their goals were “incompatible with the demands of productivity in an open economy as well as with the age pyramid.” The 1997 election showed that French politics had been “overrun by demagogy” and a “narcissistic ignorance of the economy.”
The more society refused economic liberalization, the more pessimistic for democracy’s future Furet became. In a 1997 interview, he claimed that leftist economic critique came from “an egalitarian sentiment dangerous for liberties,” and, in a speech that same year, he explained:
Furet avançou pela primeira vez esta perspectiva em Interpretação da Revolução Francesa (1978), que mobilizou a então ascendente crítica francesa do totalitarismo para pintar o evento como protototalitário e, assim, desacreditar a tradição revolucionária. No ano do bicentenário de 1989, ele elaborou esta versão dos acontecimentos em uma história narrativa e dicionário crítico. A sua interpretação prevaleceu amplamente na mídia francesa e entre o público, embora muitos historiadores continuassem críticos dela. Assombrado pelo seu envolvimento juvenil com a política revolucionária, o último grande projeto de Furet foi uma história quase autobiográfica da “ilusão” comunista, que procurava explicar o apelo da ideologia.
O fio condutor da obra de Furet nos seus últimos vinte anos foi o seu esforço para pôr fim à tradição revolucionária na França. Ele trabalhou para facilitar uma virada centrista e liberal na política e na vida intelectual francesa. Intelectualmente, ele defendeu a reabilitação dos pensadores liberais franceses do século XIX, mais notavelmente Alexis de Tocqueville, que, segundo ele, poderia iluminar o caminho a seguir.
Furet também avançou a agenda liberal ao construir instituições dedicadas a ela. Em 1982, ajudou a fundar a Fondation Saint-Simon, que reunia intelectuais centristas, líderes empresariais, políticos e funcionários públicos. Dois anos depois, ele criou o Institut Raymond Aron dentro da École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), onde reuniu intelectuais com ideias semelhantes, muitos dos quais haviam ingressado no corpo docente da EHESS enquanto Furet atuou como seu presidente entre 1977 e 1985.
À medida que a sua interpretação da Revolução Francesa ganhou força, Furet tornou-se um importante comentador político, com a imprensa solicitando regularmente as suas opiniões. Entre as suas contribuições marcantes para a vida política francesa está La République du centre: La fin de l’exception française (1988), em coautoria com Jacques Julliard e Pierre Rosanvallon. Este texto anunciava o fim da polarização esquerda-direita na política francesa e a chegada de um novo centrismo.
Citando o eclipse do Partido Comunista Francês (PCF) e a reconciliação da direita católica com a república, Furet argumentou que os eleitores franceses tinham concordado com um modelo de governação moderado que protegeria as liberdades essenciais, manteria a prosperidade em uma economia de mercado e cuidar dos menos afortunados através da redistribuição. Ele acolheu favoravelmente este desenvolvimento: tanto neste livro como em outros, o seu comentário foi tanto análise como defesa.
A vitória de um novo centro em 2017 nos convida a revisitar o pensamento de Furet. Preocupações específicas do final do século XX levaram-no às suas conclusões, mas também o cegaram para processos já em funcionamento durante a sua vida e que só se tornaram mais importantes hoje. Compreender as ideias de Furet e as suas deficiências esclarece os desafios que enfrentamos na crise atual.
A república centrista
Escrita no rescaldo da vitória presidencial de François Mitterrand em 1988, a contribuição de Furet para La République du centre procurou explicar porque é que o centrismo tinha se apoderado da política francesa.
On the Right, he cited the waning of Gaullism and the resolution of the conflict between church and state, which enabled Mitterrand’s first victory in 1981 when his Socialist Party (PS) captured a significant portion of the Catholic vote. On the Left, he noted that the PCF had declined as a result of the discrediting of the Soviet model and the crisis of Jacobin political culture.
Further, Furet believed that the trente glorieuses, France’s postwar economic boom, transformed the nation. He explained that France had experienced “the fastest collective embourgeoisement of its history” over those decades, making society “at the same time more individualistic and more uniform — or to put it negatively, less aristocratic and less revolutionary.”
In the Tocquevillian terms that underlay Furet’s analysis, France had passed from a revolutionary to a democratic social state. Voters wanted neither socialism nor neoliberalism; 75 percent — in other words, everyone except Communists and National Front supporters — agreed that the center should govern.
Furet argued that, when France voted for Mitterrand and the PS in 1981, they were not voting for the Left’s Common Program, whose radical measures were designed to spark the socialist transition. Indeed, Mitterrand and his party erred between 1981 and 1984 when they nationalized large sectors of the economy and tried to roll back Catholic schools. Likewise, after winning the 1986 legislative elections, the Right erred by flirting with Hayekian neoliberalism. Centrist France wanted neither full-blown socialism nor the reign of the market, Furet asserted.
Thus Furet believed French voters turned to the center in 1988 because socioeconomic development had made them more individualistic and more equal. While France had certainly moved in this egalitarian direction during the postwar boom, Furet paid little attention to the economic crisis that began in the latter half of the 1970s. Surprisingly, he identified the beginning of the center’s triumph at the very moment that its purported cause — prosperity — was no longer fully operative.
Though individualism had hardly disappeared, France was becoming less equal. Furet did not acknowledge that the first Mitterrand government had attempted to respond to this crisis. In fact, he only recognized the economy’s political importance in his discussion of the National Front’s rise, which he partially attributed to “insecurity.”
A more robust understanding of the period shows that the centrist turn in the late 1980s was as much a result of a specific politico-economic conjuncture as of the longer socioeconomic transformation Furet cited. Notably, the socialist government’s failure between 1981 and 1983 to implement “Keynesianism in one country” and Mitterrand’s subsequent turn to European integration played key roles in this process. After gaining power for the first time since the 1930s Popular Front, the Left had failed, allowing the new center to rise from the rubble.
O centro pode aguentar?
The recent victory of Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! might initially appear as the culmination of the centrist turn Furet identified three decades earlier.
One element of continuity is that the new center emerged from the collapse of the old center, namely Mitterrand’s center-left PS and the center-right Les Républicains (LR). As Perry Anderson argues, both center-right president Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12) and center-left president François Hollande (2012-17) failed to resolve the current crisis: they could neither fully embrace neoliberalism nor satisfy the elements of their constituencies opposed to it.
Both the PS and the LR were shellacked in this summer’s elections. Neither party’s presidential candidate made it to the second round, and both fared miserably in the legislative elections. Standing in their ruins, Macron promised disinterested, quasi-providential leadership that could finally lead France out of its economic doldrums. Rallying the upper middle class, from which his party’s deputies are overwhelmingly drawn, Macron gathered enough support to win, but his victory seems rather more precarious than that of the 1980s center.
For one, both the far right and the “Left of the Left” — as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called it — did well. Over 40 percent of the electorate voted for either Marine Le Pen or Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round. Le Pen made it to the second round with 21.5 percent of the vote; Mélenchon trailed her by less than two points, winning the largest share of any presidential candidate to the socialists’ left since Jacques Duclos’s 21.3 percent in 1969.
Le Pen’s and Mélenchon’s parties — the National Front and France Insoumise, respectively — did less well in the legislative elections, and the electoral cycle ended with the far right in crisis. Nevertheless, their relative success, not to mention the high rate of abstention and invalid ballots, indicates that French opinion remains divided: Macron has not won over the electorate.
If he fails, the center’s victory will likely be temporary. In that case, the most remarkable development of the 2017 elections will likely be Mélenchon’s breakthrough, which could launch a revival of the socialist project. In any case, the success of both the Left and the extreme right indicate that Furet’s triumph of the center was, at best, a medium-term phenomenon.
Igualdade com moderação
In his later years, Furet considered himself a Tocquevillian, explaining that the nineteenth-century liberal “gave me the principal inspiration of my research” and that “his idea of democracy as the inevitable condition of modern man offered me the best help I could find to understand our present.”
From Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Furet derived an understanding of democracy as a principle or norm that can never be fully realized. The inevitable gap between aspiration and social reality feeds a passion for equality that only grows stronger as the degree of actual parity increases. Unchecked, this egalitarian impulse threatens liberty and can result in revolution. Furet, haunted by his youthful flirtation with communism, believed that France must reject this tendency before it could fully embrace a centrist government.
Focused on the threat posed by the passion for equality, Furet played up its manifestations to better denounce them. One particular focus of Furet’s ire was American political correctness. Furet had been directly exposed to it beginning in the mid-1980s as a member of the University of Chicago’s faculty where he became friends with its premier American critic, Allan Bloom.
For Furet, political correctness represented a dangerous outbreak of revolutionary egalitarianism. He believed that behind it lay “the classic revolutionary idea that ‘all is political,’ that there are no natural inequalities but only social injustices.” Similarly, he argued that multiculturalism had become “the most important social movement of the last quarter century” and that the Clinton administration’s embrace of it led to the Democratic Party’s loss in the 1994 congressional elections.
This strange conclusion overlooked the campaign’s dominant issue: the failed universal health care initiative, which the Republican Party relentlessly attacked as “big government.” A more sober appraisal might have recognized that the bill’s failure and the subsequent conservative victory indicated that the United States was struggling to address rising inequality. But, because Furet focused less on actual equality in favor of the desire for equality, all of this escaped him.
Furet’s obsession with the egalitarian impulse also dominated his commentary on French politics. He supported the death of the revolutionary tradition he had analyzed in La République du centre, writing that, after the collapse of Soviet Communism, we are condemned “to live in the world as it is,” at least for the foreseeable future.
He welcomed political disengagement, seeing it as a product of the pursuit of well-being, and he agreed with political philosopher Pierre Manent “that one must live democratic modernity in moderation.” Communism’s collapse led him to believe that capitalism and democracy could not be separated and that “socialism can henceforth be thought about only within (and as a corrective to) the laws of the market.”
Though he explicitly rejected the neoliberal reduction of society to the market and supported redistributive policies to partially correct economic inequality, he presented the choices facing France as technical questions and found the public’s refusal to accept liberalizing reforms irresponsible.
The 1995 strikes in response to social security and pension reforms as well as the Left’s 1997 victory in the legislative elections angered Furet. In his analysis, the strikes were anachronistic because their goals were “incompatible with the demands of productivity in an open economy as well as with the age pyramid.” The 1997 election showed that French politics had been “overrun by demagogy” and a “narcissistic ignorance of the economy.”
The more society refused economic liberalization, the more pessimistic for democracy’s future Furet became. In a 1997 interview, he claimed that leftist economic critique came from “an egalitarian sentiment dangerous for liberties,” and, in a speech that same year, he explained:
A sociedade democrática nunca é suficientemente democrática e os seus apoiadores são críticos da democracia mais numerosos e mais perigosos do que os seus adversários. As promessas de liberdade e igualdade da democracia são, de fato, ilimitadas. Em uma sociedade de indivíduos, é impossível fazer reinar a liberdade e a igualdade de forma duradoura.
Furet’s analysis depended entirely on his assertion that an egalitarian impulse drove democratic politics. However, partly because he believed this passion could never be satisfied, he offered little analysis of actual economic conditions: he asserted that reducing the gap between rich and poor only made the desire for complete equity stronger. Furet invoked concrete economic realities only in order to condemn the 1995 strikers for their selfishness, pitting the interests of unionized workers against the unemployed.
Class conflict hardly existed in Furet’s analysis. He believed France faced only technical questions, and the only relevant social conflicts existed between different sectors of the working class, such as the employed and the unemployed or young and old. In short, Furet demanded that the French submit to the demands of the neoliberal economy or enter “very quickly into a cycle of irreversible decadence,” as he prophesied in a 1996 interview.
He never examined his central premise that a passion for equality was primarily responsible for opposition to this agenda, and he swept the problem of real inequality under the rug. Indeed, Furet wanted nothing more than to prevent the return of the twentieth century’s revolutionary utopias that still haunted him.
Class conflict hardly existed in Furet’s analysis. He believed France faced only technical questions, and the only relevant social conflicts existed between different sectors of the working class, such as the employed and the unemployed or young and old. In short, Furet demanded that the French submit to the demands of the neoliberal economy or enter “very quickly into a cycle of irreversible decadence,” as he prophesied in a 1996 interview.
He never examined his central premise that a passion for equality was primarily responsible for opposition to this agenda, and he swept the problem of real inequality under the rug. Indeed, Furet wanted nothing more than to prevent the return of the twentieth century’s revolutionary utopias that still haunted him.
Uma visão mais clara
A análise tocqueviliana da igualdade de Furet sofria de um defeito fatal que tanto impediu o seu poder explicativo na altura como continua a confundir as questões hoje. Permitiu que Furet evitasse confrontar a transformação estrutural do capitalismo, que começou na década de 1970 e resultou no aumento da desigualdade econômica que se tornou a questão fundamental do nosso tempo. Quando incluímos esta mudança econômica nas nossas análises, o triunfo do centro no final da década de 1980 começa a parecer mais uma solução provisória que ruiu com a derrota do centro-esquerda e do centro-direita em 2017.
Da mesma forma, a virada de Furet para o conceito tocqueviliano de “paixão igualitária” na década de 1990 serviu efetivamente como um álibi para as políticas neoliberais porque lhe permitiu ignorar a crescente desigualdade. Ele argumentou que o verdadeiro desafio que a França enfrentava era o impulso igualitário, que localizou na fundação das sociedades democráticas e não nas crises econômicas concretas do seu tempo.
Poderíamos decidir que Furet pertence a outra época, obcecada pelo espectro do comunismo, mas o seu ataque aos opositores do neoliberalismo como “demagogos” parece demasiado familiar. Hoje, como ontem, esta retórica serve para inviabilizar discussões substanciais sobre a desigualdade e o papel que as políticas neoliberais desempenham na sua produção.
Adaptado de Lava.
Colaborador
Michael Scott Christofferson é professor de história na Universidade Adelphi. Atualmente está escrevendo um livro sobre François Furet.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário