In looking back over my account of French philosophy during the twentieth century, I have been struck by the centrality of discussions of individual freedom. Of course, this focus may have been the unconscious result of my own predilections, and there surely are other themes (perhaps consciousness or science) that would nicely unify the story. But it is hard to deny that French philosophers of the last hundred years have produced a remarkably broad and deep body of work on freedom, and, by way of conclusion, I offer some brief reflections on the general significance of this theme and on the way it has developed over the century.

The concern with individual freedom as a concrete, lived reality has, more than anything else, maintained the distinctiveness of French philosophy throughout the century. It lay behind the French resistance to German idealism, which was always read as tending to swamp individual freedom in the flood of the absolute. The focus on freedom also explains the insulation of French philosophers from epistemological foundationalism, whether that of Husserl's phenomenological “philosophy as a rigorous science” or that of logical empiricism.