Intellectuals and Philosophers in Postwar France and Germany

THE MAIN ARGUMENT of this essay relates to the ways in which French and German intellectuals in the postwar era have conceived of their own role and mode of activity in strikingly contrasting ways, particularly with regard to issues of communication and the public sphere. In very general terms, the most influential German model, theorized most lucidly and practiced most assiduously by Jürgen Habermas, has been that of the intellectual as a crucial and enabling stimulus to the construction of a public sphere in which citizens might develop an active and intersubjective discussion about political ends. In contrast, the most influential French model, less explicitly theorized as a way of acting, but implicit throughout the work of the generation of thinkers who came to prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s, has been that of the intellectual as a skeptical but ever-hopeful transmitter of ideas and concepts, sending out messages in a bottle or firing arrows in the hope that another “thinker” will find something useful in these messages.

This opposition can be articulated in several ways. Most obviously, it is a consequence of the different preoccupations of French and German intellectuals in the postwar era. That is to say, German intellectuals, certainly up to the point of unification, have been concerned with the legacy of the Third Reich. French intellectuals, on the other hand, have tended to work on a series of issues relating to apparently more general problems such as discourse, power, and desire.