A Perfect Past: Tony Judt and the Historian’s Burden of Responsibility Ethan Kleinberg

 A Perfect Past: Tony Judt and the Historian’s Burden of Responsibility

Ethan Kleinberg

Hasn’t the time come to draw a veil over the past, to forget a time when Frenchmen disliked one another, attacked one another, and even killed one another?

Georges Pompidou, September 21, 1972

Tony Judt did not suffer those he considered fools lightly. Nor did he hold back in his critical assessment of scholarship or current events. In one of his final interviews he put it this way: “In fairness, all my life I’ve been rather up front with my opinions and never hidden them on grounds of conformity or (I fear) politesse.”1 The brute force of his critical analysis is of course evident throughout Past Imperfect, but I write this knowing full well that my own methodological and research interests would likely have put me on Judt’s “ship of fools” as well. That being said, I also know that Judt appreciated sound argument and forceful debate and this he considered to be a two- way street. Thus it is with deference and respect that I hope to be equally up front with my opinions without regard for conformism or politesse.

 I did not know Judt well, and our exchanges were limited to several phone calls and a series of e- mails. But the influence and impact of his scholarship on me has been a constant since I first encountered Past Imperfect as a graduate student at UCLA in Robert Wohl’s seminar on European intellectual and cultural history. The Marxist students decried it as the work of a “Reagan democrat,” while others dismissed it as overly bound to its historical moment in relation to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then there 

Ethan Kleinberg is professor of history and letters at Wesleyan University. He is an editor for, and in 2012 becomes executive editor of, the journal History and Theory. He is currently completing a book on Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic lectures in Paris.

 The author would like to thank Peter Gordon, Berel Lang, Laurie Nussdorfer, Samuel Moyn, and Michael Roth for their critical comments and suggestions. He would also like to thank Zvi Ben- Dor Benite, Katherine Fleming, and Lewis Kornhauser for their inspiring conversation. 1 Evan R. Goldstein, “The Trials of Tony Judt,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 12, 2011.

French Historical Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Winter 2012) DOI 10.1215/00161071-1424965

Copyright 2012 by Society for French Historical Studies

were those who were completely convinced by Judt’s rhetorical force and command of European history. Fortunately, Wohl was a sure guide through this terrain, keeping our engagement on track and leading us through some of the thornier issues that arose concerning philocommunism, the intellectual tradition in France, and the relation between these French intellectuals and their counterparts in Eastern Europe. I still believe that Wohl’s review of Past Imperfect for the Journal of Modern 

History is one of the best commentaries on that work.2

 But I was particularly bedeviled by Judt’s book. I came to the history department at UCLA with a focus on modern German philosophy (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, the Frankfurt School) and a proclivity for “postmodern” thought. I had a deep interest in Jean- Paul Sartre and his cohort, but I felt I had no stake in defending their political choices and assumed that this would be one of those informative though inessential books one encounters in graduate school. But Past Imperfect provoked in me what I can only call a visceral response. I was passionately conflicted about the book. There were moments when I felt in total agreement with Judt, and others when I was sure that he was off the target. I combed through the chapters, trying to understand his moves and the historical logic behind his choices. No matter how many times I read the book, I could not bring myself to wholly agree or disagree. The book was right and wrong. Beyond this, it piqued my interest in the historical moment and figures he explored, and this coincided with my own increasing interest in French intellectual culture. I can’t say that my encounter with Judt’s Past Imperfect led to my decision to pursue research in French intellectual history rather than in German, eventually culminating in my book, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–61, but the two occurred at the same time, and thus Past Imperfect holds a weight for me perhaps disproportionate to seemingly more relevant and equally important books that guided me along my intellectual path.

 In the years since graduate school my infatuation with Past Imperfect, and then later with The Burden of Responsibility, has not waned. I regularly teach Past Imperfect in my “Treason of the Intellectuals” seminar at Wesleyan University, and it never fails to provoke argument and discussion. These are also two books that I routinely assign to my senior honor’s thesis students who are working on topics in intellectual history. Both books have stood the test of time well, and Past Imperfect still provokes a visceral reaction in me. Every time I read it, I am compelled to grapple with the assertions, to try to unpack the argument, to rethink 

2 Robert Wohl, review of Past Imperfect, by Tony Judt, Journal of Modern History 67, no. 3 (1995): 737–38.

the movements between the chapters. I have done this many times, and to this day I still find myself arguing against and agreeing with Judt.  In short, Past Imperfect is a very good book. It is a book that makes one think hard and productively, but—and here I lack all politesse— it is not a good historical book. To be sure, there is a lot of good history in it but the primary argument is moral not historical. The argument is predicated not on the historical “facts” but on the judgment of the historian whose moral hindsight becomes the basis for an implicit counterfactual history that demonstrates how the historical figures should have acted and this is based on Judt’s particular point of view.3 In this regard, Past Imperfect is driven by Judt’s longing for a different past, a perfect past that could have been achieved given the moral fortitude of responsible individuals. This became clear to me with the publication of Judt’s work on Léon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron in which the antagonists of Past Imperfect are placed in stark contrast to the protagonists of The Burden of Responsibility.

 In Past Imperfect, Judt can be seen as akin to a prosecutor who has built an incredibly strong case but who, in his zeal to demonstrate the irresponsibility and moral failings of the accused, overstates it to the extent that certain arguments contradict others. In this case it is a series of historical arguments each of which has merit on its own but undercuts the others when they are presented in concert. Because the goal of the book is to show the moral irresponsibility of these intellectuals who should have known better, the elaborate historical justifications employed to substantiate this point lead to conflicting historical assertions. Thus while Past Imperfect is eminently clear in articulating the moral failures of figures such as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau- Ponty, and Emmanuel Mounier, it strains to provide an explanatory framework as to why they acted as they did.

 But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Judt’s intellectual endeavor is that he seemed to be aware of the methodological conundrum he encountered. Thus Judt can provide us with the eminently historical statement that his Past Imperfect “is a study of the behavior of French intellectuals in a very specific historical moment” that “also tries to draw on a larger understanding of France’s recent past (and that of others too) in order to explain that behavior” before conceding that the book “is not a history of French intellectuals” but rather an “essay on intellectual irresponsibility, a study of the moral condition of the intelligentsia in postwar France.”4 The burden of proof is different 

3 See Simon T. Kaye, “Challenging Uncertainty: The Utility and History of Conterfactual-ism,” History and Theory 49, no. 1 (2010): 38–57.

4 Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley, CA, 1992), 8, 11.

for each of these statements, and I think that it is this discrepancy that makes the work so convincing on one level and so vexing on another. But it is also the source of one of the most enduring legacies of both of these books, as subsequent scholars have been forced to grapple with the ethical force of his moral argument and the at times conflicting nature of his historical one. To steal a line from Martin Jay, Past Imperfect is like the irritant that has stimulated the production of many pearls. In what follows I hope to make clear some of the methodological and argumentative historical problems inherent in Past Imperfect and The Burden of Responsibility by examining some of the questions that Judt poses in relation to the figures he investigates and then turning to his responses to these questions. In demonstrating Judt’s quest for a “perfect past,” I also hope to demonstrate the gap between Judt’s moral and historical case by offering alternative historical methods. My goal is not to dismiss these important works but to articulate the role they played in determining my own methodological choices and the impact they have had on some other scholars in French intellectual history as well.

Insufferable Foolishness

“How in the face of all this literary evidence, not to mention the testimony of their own eyes, could intelligent people willfully defend communism as the hope of the future and Stalin as the solution to the riddle of History?”5 This is a question that Judt poses at the beginning of Past Imperfect but is unable or unwilling to answer despite several reiterations throughout this book and in The Burden of Responsibility. In one instance, Judt chastises previous authors on the topic because “they don’t explain why former cultural heroes held such silly opinions, nor do they help us appreciate just why, holding the views they did, they became and remained so prominent and respected.”6 But the answer to this question is far less important to Judt’s argument than the way that it is rephrased to emphasize the silliness and absurdity of the fact that these intellectuals held such views. It was their foolishness that made them insufferable and is itself evidence of their moral irresponsibility. To maintain this moral argument, however, Judt is forced to emphasize only those historical explanations that can account for the silliness of their choices and positions while discounting or ignoring others that might be equally damning in terms of the historical repercussions of their choices but more accommodating in an attempt to actually understand those choices.

Thus Judt relies on two justificatory scaffolds. The first presents 

5 Ibid., 3.

6 Ibid., 4.

the particular moral failings of the individual actors (Beauvoir, Sartre, Merleau- Ponty, Mounier):

The very importance and international prominence of French thinkers in the postwar world has placed on them a special burden, perfectly consistent with the claims made by Sartre and his peers regarding the responsibility of the writer for his words and their effect. It is the contrast between those claims and the actual response of a generation of French intellectuals when presented with practical situations and moral choices that is remarkable and requires explanation.7

This moral failing is given added weight when Judt informs us that “the failure of French intellectuals to fulfill the hopes invested in them by their admirers in Eastern Europe in particular, together with the influence exerted by the French on intellectual life in other Western countries, had a decisive impact on the history of postwar European life.”8 Thus Judt presents us with the diagnosis that these intellectuals held a particular burden of responsibility but each failed miserably when making practical moral choices. Placed in relation to the argument offered in The Burden of Responsibility that lauds the choices of Blum, Camus, and Aron, it becomes apparent that other choices were available and could have been made, but in the cases of Beauvoir, Sartre, Merleau- Ponty, Mounier, and others they were not.

 But how does one explain such foolishness? Judt’s second and more historical scaffold also conserves the assertion that these intellectuals were undeniably silly, though it does so by pointing to the structural and sociological conditions of the intellectual in France that fostered such foolishness by such intelligent people:

At the heart of the engagement of the 1940s and 1950s there lay an unwillingness to think seriously about public ethics, an unwillingness amounting to an incapacity. An important source of this shortcoming in the French intelligentsia was the widely held belief that morally binding judgments of a normative sort were undermined by their historical and logical association with the politics and economics of liberalism.9

On this reading, the malady that incapacitated the French intellectuals of the Left and impaired their moral judgment was a structural one inherited from the French Revolution wherein liberalism and the respect for justice and the rights of the individual that Judt asserts is inherent to the liberal tradition were excluded from French thought.

  I will return later to the ways that Judt’s larger argument about 

7 Ibid., 8.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., 229.

how “the absence in postwar France, of any consensus about justice—its meaning, its forms, its application—contributed to the confused and inadequate response of French intellectuals to the evidence of injustice elsewhere, in Communist systems especially” is in conflict with his more particular argument about the specific moral failings of individual intellectuals.10 For the moment I would like to emphasize instead how each of these scaffolds highlights the moral failings either of figures like Beauvoir, Sartre, Merleau- Ponty, and Mounier in particular or of the culture of the French intelligentsia as a whole. Each of these scaffolds eschews engagement with any plausible historical explanation that might enhance our understanding of these figures and their choices by rendering them less or not at all absurd. I would like to pursue two such possibilities.

Philosophy as Historical Explanation

In his pursuit of a moral indictment of these intellectuals, Judt turns a blind eye to a key factor in their educational and social development. They, unlike Judt in Past Imperfect, took their philosophy seriously. To my mind, Judt’s aversion to addressing philosophy in the service of historical explanation is a glaring omission in Past Imperfect as a work of intellectual history. Judt could certainly have argued in his book that these figures took their philosophy too seriously and that this was in fact an error in judgment, but this is not the tack he chose, because to do so would have been to concede that there is a way to view these figures wherein their actions and choices make a certain amount of sense. Judt’s desire to indict rather than explain leads him to reach certain conclusions without first addressing other plausible accounts. To return to his question: “How in the face of all this literary evidence, not to mention the testimony of their own eyes, could intelligent people willfully defend communism as the hope of the future and Stalin as the solution to the riddle of History?” A deep engagement with the philosophy of Hegel and the reception of Hegel in France could provide a richer and more satisfactory answer that actually explains the choices of these figures in the context of their time. For Beauvoir, Sartre, Merleau- Ponty, and Aron as well, Hegel’s teleological philosophy of history could account not only for the inevitable progress of humankind assumed by their neo- Kantian, positivist, and spiritualist teachers but also for the seemingly negative impact of conflict, war, and turmoil that they each experienced as the legacy of World War I.11 What 

10 Ibid., 75.

11 See my Generation Existential (Ithaca, NY, 2005); Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge, 1980); Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History (Ithaca, NY, 1988); Judith Butler, 

is more, Alexandre Kojève’s presentation of Hegel in proximity to Heidegger and Marx allowed this generation of intellectuals to apply the lessons of this troubled dialectical teleology in the service of an existential Marxism whose ultimate end was foreordained but whose route was obscured by contingency and conflict. Given their deep and abiding commitment to the philosophical endeavor, it becomes less difficult (though no less troubling) to understand how these thinkers could “willfully defend communism as the hope of the future and Stalin as the solution to the riddle of History.”

 I take issue with Judt’s assertion that “Sartre’s special contribution” was that “revolution was a categorical imperative” and with his later statement that “for both Sartre and de Beauvoir, the Kantian reign of ends was only conceivable as the outcome not of morally informed choices but of revolution.”12 It is true that the juxtaposition of the Kantian moral imperative and the radically contingent and thus amoral event of revolution makes these thinkers look especially bad, but here too the philosophical pronouncements are far more decipherable in relation to the Hegelian legacy in France. In this light, Judt’s substantiating statement that “revolution would not only alter the world, it constituted the act of permanent re- creation of our collective situation as the subjects of our own lives” makes much more sense as an articulation of the necessarily coupled existential and historical manifestation of the master-slave dialectic as the motor of history (derived from Kojève’s Hegel) than it does as solely a Kantian reign of ends.13 If the historian allows the possibility that these intellectuals and practicing philosophers actually believed in the power, worth, and accuracy of philosophy (an assertion that Judt at times holds in Past Imperfect and maintains throughout The Burden of Responsibility), then one can understand their reasoning and explain it in its context even if one does not agree with it.

 The utility of employing philosophy in the service of historical explanation can also be demonstrated when engaging Judt’s reading of Merleau- Ponty’s troubling work Humanisme et terreur (1947). Judt characterizes this work as Merleau-P onty’s “bet on history,” which in one way it is:

Let us suppose, he [Merleau-P onty] wrote, that history has a meaning. Let us further suppose that this meaning is vouchsafed through change and struggle. Let us also accept that the proletariat is the force for revolution in our era. Finally, let us credit the Commu-

 

Subjects of Desire (New York, 1987); and Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton, NJ, 1977).

12 Judt, Past Imperfect, 40, 83.

13 Ibid., 40.

nists with their claim to embody the consciousness and interests of the proletariat. If these premises are correct, then the purges of the show trials of the thirties in Moscow are shown to have been not only tactically and strategically wise but historically just.14

In Judt’s paraphrase the assertion does sound absurd, callous, and morally irresponsible, especially as Judt presents his exegesis of Merleau- Ponty’s work immediately following his chapters on “show trials” in Eastern Europe and the absence of political justice in postwar France. But here, too, a deep engagement with the way that a Kojève- inspired Hegelian historical logic is embedded in Merleau-P onty’s Marxism and his strident, discomforting defense of Stalin would allow the intellectual historian to understand why and how Merleau- Ponty could make this bet on History and why, to Merleau- Ponty’s mind, “we have no choice but to act as though it will be positive, because to renounce Marxism . . . would be to dig the grave of Reason in history, after which there would be left only ‘dreams and adventures.’”15 Perhaps in the end it was, as Judt says, a matter of faith for Merleau- Ponty, but it was not faith in Moscow and Stalin per se, as Judt leads us to believe. It was faith in the Hegelian telos of history. Here it is a question not of agreeing with Merleau- Ponty, or even conceding that specific philosophical works or traditions should be afforded such weight and importance in discussions of political affairs, but of acknowledging that at this particular historical moment these particular historical actors did.

 Judt is not averse to such a pronouncement in principle, because in The Burden of Responsibility he engages with the intellectual production of Blum and Camus and especially with the philosophy of Aron to make his point. Furthermore, he concludes that in the end Aron was first and foremost a philosopher who chose to follow a political path, though this restricted his philosophical production.16 Thus I can only conclude that Judt’s exclusion of philosophy in the service of historical explanation in Past Imperfect is in the rhetorical service of his larger moral argument. But his historical argument would have been stronger had he accounted for the philosophical evidence. What is more, his larger moral point would still have held. The possibility that Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-P onty actually articulated a coherent and logical argument does not absolve them of moral responsibility or culpability and in some ways renders the verdict Judt longs for even more damn-

14 Ibid., 120.15 Ibid.

16 Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1998). On Aron, Judt writes, “Even at the end of his career Aron saw himself as what he had been at the outset—a philosopher” (171).

ing. Judt’s assertion that the special failing of these French intellectuals is “not only the idea that something called communism exists separate from and independent of the historical epiphenomenon itself; but also the astonishing belief that the defense of this ideal of communism (or Marxism) and the threats to its credibility transcend in importance all other lesser issues” could be explained and rendered less astonishing when articulated in terms of the ways that these particular intellectuals came to understand Marx infused with a latent Hegelian idealism that allowed for such a pernicious mutation.17 Moreover, these French intellectuals’ obsession with ends regardless of means provides further and distinct evidence as to the origins of the “permissive attitude towards extremist positions of all sorts . . . especially those that absolved individuals of any private moral responsibility for the era in which history had placed them.”18 This is a criticism of the French Left proffered by Emmanuel Levinas, albeit in 1960, where Levinas asserts that the Hegelian emphasis on the “end of history” allows one to ignore moral transgressions in the present.19

 Of course, it is nothing new to suggest that intellectual historians take the intellectual production and formation of their subjects seriously. But the force of Judt’s moral argument placed a disproportionate emphasis on the role and place of ethics in such a historical investigation and compelled intellectual historians to ask themselves whether their use of philosophy as historical explanation was in the service of explaining or of explaining away the questionable choices of the figures they worked on. This emphasis on the relation between ethics and philosophy is evident in works of French intellectual history by Julian Bourg, Jonathan Judaken, and Samuel Moyn, among others. It is present in my work on the reception of Heidegger in France, where I found myself following Judt’s lead in attempting to place the ethical questions front and center while challenging his methodology by trying to understand the philosophical logic and legacy that underpinned the choices of these historical actors. It remains a central concern in my current work on Levinas’s Talmudic lectures, where I take issue with Levinas’s self- fashioning as a Talmudic authority but also take seriously his theological and philosophical commitment to transcendence. In both works I have been goaded by Judt to try to understand the errors of judgment committed by the historical actors by relating them to errors of perception, and this brings me to my second point.

17 Judt, Past Imperfect, 131.

18 Ibid., 255.

19 See Emmanuel Levinas, “Messianic Texts,” in Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore, MD, 1990), 59–96; see also Samuel Moyn, “Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Readings: 

Between Tradition and Invention,” Prooftexts 23, no. 3 (2003): 338–64.

Perception History

In Past Imperfect, the title of Judt’s eighth chapter, “The Sacrifices of the Russian People: A Phenomenology of Intellectual Russophilia,” provocatively suggests the use of phenomenology in his historical investigation. As it turns out, he is less interested in phenomenology per se than in articulating his assessment of the belief system of postwar French intellectuals. Thus his goal in the chapter is to demonstrate the ways that the French intellectual commitment to communism was not a matter of “understanding, the cognitive activity usually associated with intellectuals, but faith.”20 The discussion of “phenomenology” comes soon after in Judt’s response to a comment by Jean Beaufret. Judt tells us that according to Claude Roy, in 1949 Beaufret refused to “pronounce” on the USSR because “we still lack a phenomenology of the Soviet Union.” But, Judt also tells us:

Beaufret was wrong. He and his friends had indeed constructed a “phenomenology of the Soviet Revolution,” but it rested on an unusual premise: that of the self- annihilation of the observer. Before one could construct a case for the Communists, one had to first undermine one’s own intellectual authority. The evidence, of camps, deportations, trials, and the like, had to be set aside, or placed in a sort of ethical parenthesis. As Mounier expressed it, “I want these stories to be untrue.” This is humiliating for an intellectual, and it explains the palpable sense of relief that overcame such people when they finally abandoned the effort.21

Thus in Judt’s telling, it was the French intellectuals’ overwhelming faith in the “civic religion” of communism that led them to support the Soviet Union even in the face of evidence that should have led them to reject this cause. For Judt, this can only be explained by the possibility that these intellectuals had sacrificed their most important possession, their own intellectual authority, in the service of this cause and in so doing carved out an ethical parenthesis or epoché, to use phenomenological language. It is as though they willingly created a blind spot that kept them from seeing what was so apparent to others. Judt’s argument again makes these intellectuals look very bad, more humiliated than silly, by arguing that the choice between right and wrong was so clear that it was only by an act of intellectual self- annihilation that they had come to hold the positions they articulated.

 But Judt’s emphasis on the role of faith and choice creates a blind spot of sorts in his work as well, especially in terms of phenomenological method. Rather than assume that Mounier, Beauvoir, Sartre, and 

20 Judt, Past Imperfect, 153.

21 Ibid., 156–57.

Merleau- Ponty were blinded by faith, a supposition that does not actually require a phenomenological investigation and that itself must be taken on faith, given the lack of substantiating evidence, a more profitable and satisfying historical explanation could be ascertained by following Husserl’s assessment of perception and judgment articulated in works such as Ideas (1919) and Experience and Judgment (1939).22 In these works and others, Husserl attempted to demonstrate that from a first- person point of view, one can never detect whether one’s perception is an accurate perception until proved wrong after the fact. Husserl starts with simple judgments based on perception, such as “the ball is round and red,” which the first- person observer takes to be true until he or she later finds that one half of the ball that had been hidden from sight is in fact green and dented.23 One believes the ball to be red and round until one later finds and thus believes that half the ball is green and dented. This is to say that from a first-p erson point of view there is no difference between “true” and “false” perception. Christian Beyer presents it well by stating that one cannot fall victim to and detect a perceptual error at the same time.24 This is why for Husserl, the phenomenological reduction, the parenthesis or bracketing of the observer, must necessarily be a suspension of judgment if one is to understand the nature of the perception being observed. What is more, in terms of perception an object perceived may undergo a change, such as a cherry tree losing its blossoms, but the first- person perception and judgment may remain the same, the cherry tree resplendent with blossoms.25  But how does this tie back to Judt, Past Imperfect, and The Burden of Responsibility? Judgments are based on perception, and in Past Imperfect Judt works hard to organize his book and argument so as to ensure that his readers make the “right” one. He gives us a detailed and exact account of the “show trials” in Eastern Europe between 1947 and 1953 as well as his diagnosis of the structural maladies of the French intellectuals, including the “lessons” of defeat and occupation, before he presents us with his “phenomenology of Russophilia.” Thus Judt’s emphasis is on the perceptions of the reader who is privy to a wealth of information about, and analysis of, Eastern Europe and the épuration (purges) beyond anything available to the French intellectuals at that time. This tactic makes things much more clear to the reader than 

22 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. Fred Kersten (Norwell, MA, 1998); and Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. Spencer Churchill (Evanston, IL, 1997).

23 Husserl, Ideas, 220.

24 Christian Beyer, “Bolzono and Husserl on Singular Existential Statements,” in Phenomenology and Analysis: Essays on Central European Philosophy, ed. Arkadiusz Chrudzimksi and Wolfgang Hueur (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), 76–77.

25 Husserl, Ideas, 217.

to the historical actors and again returns one to the leading question: given all of this historical evidence, how could these intellectuals possibly have made the choices they did? This, then, puts Judt in a position to provide his answers phrased as a “will to ignorance,” an “unwillingness to think seriously about public ethics,” an “ethical parenthesis” or sheer silliness.26 Focusing on the perceptions of the reader allows Judt to be successful in advancing his moral argument and persuading the reader that his judgment is correct but again at the expense of historical explanation. When viewed through the optic of the historical actor’s perceptions and the observation that one cannot fall victim to and detect a perceptual error at the same time, however, much of Judt’s evidence in support of his claim can be read in a different and more historically satisfying way, especially when coupled with the philosophical evidence discussed earlier.

 Cases in point are Judt’s examples of what he labels the World War II myths of “Communist Resistance” and the “battle of Stalingrad.” In each case he presents powerful evidence as to the circumstances and powers that shaped the French intellectual’s perception of communism and the Soviet Union. Judt tells us that the myth of the Communist Resistance “was not only a myth, of course—Communists and the French Communist party really did play an important part in the anti- Nazi Resistance from 1941 on.”27 This gave the French communists and the French Communist Party (PCF) a sort of moral high ground in the postwar years in the minds of philosophically sympathetic intellectuals that was exploited by the PCF to maintain their sympathy. Furthermore, the defeat of the Nazis at the battle of Stalingrad validated the Hegelian philosophical arguments that underpinned the French intellectuals’ perception of the Soviet project in relation to the march of History. Stalingrad

was proof not only that communism was successful in Merleau- Ponty’s sense, and which thus cast a seal of approval on the purges of the thirties, but that it was genuinely popular. How could one now doubt the broad proletarian base on which the regime in Moscow rested—if it had been the bureaucratic dictatorship depicted by its enemies, how could it have mobilized a continent, defeated the Nazis, and saved Europe from Fascism?28

Judt frames the issue in terms of the way it “cast a seal of approval on the purges of the thirties,” but, given the perception of the victory as validating Hegelian- Marxist philosophy, one might better characterize 

26 Judt, Past Imperfect, 4, 157, 158, 229.

27 Ibid., 159.

28 Ibid., 161.

these particular intellectuals as accepting the “historical necessity” of the purges without necessarily approving of them. Their perception of the Communist Resistance and the battle of Stalingrad, like Husserl’s perception of the red ball, led them to make certain judgments about the phenomena that lacked crucial pieces of information at the time. But this perception of the significance of the battle is what allowed “Simone de Beauvoir and others [to] argue that the Russians fought well because of the logic of their cause—they knew what they were fighting for.”29 Here Beauvoir and the other French intellectuals projected their own perception that a philosophical logic was guiding the events of History onto the actions of the Russian people and Soviet regime and came to the conclusion that their judgment was correct. This casts a different meaning on Judt’s assessment that “the Soviet state, both in its reality and in the penumbra of half- truths that surrounded its image in the West, was the fulfillment of the dream of nineteenth- century thought.”30

 What is more, Judt’s evidence suggests that both the PCF and the Soviet Union played an active role in reinforcing these perceptions through the support of artists such as Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger but also through the organization of international “peace” conferences staged in Eastern European countries.31 Demonstrating the calculated nature of this tactic, Judt states that “as the guests of the peace organizations, French journalists and artists visited East European countries and wrote enthusiastically about their experiences, seemingly unaware that they were regarded, by their hosts and hosts’ victims alike, as ‘pigeons,’ the happy successors to the ‘useful idiots’ of the thirties.”32 Judt even says that to this end, the Communists proved “more adept at such exploitation than the Fascist journalists of the late thirties.”33 Judt does not consider the way that these complex networks of dissemination played into the perceptions of the intellectuals under investigation and instead offers the belittling remarks that “in the context of the period, one can see how otherwise intelligent and sophisticated people came to such positions” or that these intellectuals “would believe anything.”34 Thus he again focuses on the insufferable foolishness of the French intellectuals that led to such moral failure. But to return to the “peace organizations” that Judt offers as explanation and condemnation, his discussion of the support for these organi-

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 165.

31 Ibid., 216–18, 224–25.

32 Ibid., 225.33 Ibid., 223. 34 Ibid., 225.

zations points to the supporters’ perception that the fight for “peace” was a fight against fascism and the moral urgency that they felt underlay this cause. This is a historical explanation that Judt disallows in Past Imperfect, even though he employs it in The Burden of Responsibility. In the later book, Judt argues that despite Blum’s contribution to the “partisan myopia” of the French Socialist movement and the role he played in the downfall of the Third Republic, he should still be considered a paragon of responsibility, because the choices he made were consistently based on what he considered moral.35 This creates something of a double standard for Judt.

 Judt is correct to speak of an ethical parenthesis or bracketing, though I find his usage to be misapplied. The figures he investigates may well have needed to find a means to bracket their ethical choices, but to understand those choices in their historical milieu, we must first attempt to understand these intellectuals’ perceptions of the Soviet Union and communism. Thus it is the historian and not Judt’s intellectuals who must employ a suspension of judgment, an ethical bracketing, that allows the historian to assess as precisely as possible the nature of the actors’ perceptions in relation to their actions. This is the strategy I aim to employ in a cultural and intellectual history of French perceptions of the Soviet Union up to 1968 that I have tentatively titled Seeing Red: French Perceptions of the Soviet Union.36 This project, which is clearly influenced by the work of Judt and focuses on many of the issues discussed in this forum, will explore the impact of specific Soviet cultural exports in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, and film (such as the films of Sergei Eisenstein and the Bolshoi Ballet) as well as more convoluted routes of cultural influence (such as the PCF’s and thus Soviet Union’s tacit approval of artists like Picasso, Léger, and Edouard Pignon; Picasso provides an interesting example of an artist whose work was condemned in the Soviet Union but who was seen as a defender and ambassador of the Soviet experiment in France). In the end I hope to analyze the relationship of perceptions and judgments to illusions and reality and to explore such perceptions and judgments in relation to ever- growing truth claims to the contrary. Employing this strategy, the historian can certainly pass judgment but not in advance of the phenomenological investigation into perception history.

35 Judt, Burden of Responsibility, 82–85. The difference that Judt detects between Blum and the other French intellectuals is that Blum was willing to reevaluate his choices and positions. Most notably in 1948 he admitted that the French Socialists should have been more critical of the Communists and more supportive of Eastern European Socialists (60). But this, too, could be productively explained in the framework of a perception history because of how current perceptions can invalidate and devalue previous perceptions (see Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 89, 90).

36 The title makes reference to the USSR and the PCF but also to the red ball that Husserl references in his discussion of perception and judgment.

A Perfect Past

There are multiple times in Past Imperfect when Judt points to the danger of current thinkers “drawing a veil” over the postwar years and the choices made by the French intellectuals or the ways that these thinkers attempted to veil the repercussions of their choices themselves.37 Indeed, the great virtue of the heroes of The Burden of Responsibility seems to be their ability to see through or lift the veil (self- imposed or otherwise) that obscured and distorted the vision of their contemporaries. The driving force of Judt’s argument in The Burden of Responsibility concerns their ability “to take a stand not against their political or intellectual opponents—everyone did that, all too often—but against their ‘own’ side” by challenging the “propensity in various spheres of public life to neglect or abandon intellectual, moral, or political responsibility.” But the act that unifies these three figures was, for Judt, their ability to recognize the Soviet regime and thus the Communists as immoral.38 That they could recognize immorality and make these choices is crucial to the argument in Past Imperfect, because it substantiates Judt’s statement that, no matter what the historical situation or context, “moral conditions, unlike economic ones, are always elective.”39

 In Judt’s account, Beauvoir, Merleau-P onty, Mounier, Sartre, and the others should have been able to make these choices too, but they did not. They should have been able to see what was happening in Eastern Europe. “What seemed unforgivable and inexplicable was the failure of the French to see what they—Poles, Czechs, and others—now saw.”40 It is certainly unclear whether Blum, Camus, or Aron could actually see what the Eastern Europeans saw, nor does it seem fair to expect the other French intellectuals to be able to. But Judt’s larger point is that, based on information available at the time, Blum, Camus, and Aron could make what Judt considers the morally responsible choice, while Beauvoir, Merleau- Ponty, Mounier, Sartre, and others could not. The difference between the two groups, Judt tells us in both works, is that in this era of French moral irresponsibility Blum, Camus, and Aron were all outsiders. Judt defines Blum as “a man who was never quite French in the sense that his contemporaries insisted on defining 

Frenchness.”41 Camus, “in this France, for all his concern with the mod-

37 E.g., Judt, Past Imperfect, 5, 7, 102. Judt was certainly aware of Georges Pompidou’s use of this term in reference to the case of Paul Touvier, who was the first Frenchman charged with “crimes against humanity” for his actions during the Vichy regime. It would be an interesting exercise to explore his use of this term in relation to the lack of engagement with the issue of the Holocaust in Past Imperfect. Judt brings up the issue in The Burden of Responsibility when he discusses how Aron avoided the same issue in a tone that sounds eerily confessional.

38 Judt, Burden of Responsibility, 20; see also 21–25, 61, 63–65, 96, 116, 158, 179. 39 Judt, Past Imperfect, 226.

40 Ibid., 279.

41 Judt, Burden of Responsibility, 85.

ern condition and the illusions of History, was an alien.”42 And Aron’s cosmopolitan interests, specifically his commitment to liberal thought, distinguished him from his French contemporaries “in every sense and in a variety of keys.”43

 This is where it becomes clear that Judt’s argument is moral and not historical. In Past Imperfect, Judt sets up the French intellectuals to fail by presenting a history of the structural maladies (some going back as far as the French Revolution) that led to a confused sense of justice and a “vacuum at the heart of public ethics in France,” then indicting these intellectuals for their inability to make a moral choice.44 The heroes of The Burden of Responsibility provide the evidence to substantiate Judt’s moral argument about individual choice but only by being excluded from the French structural malady by virtue of their “outsider” status. Thus Judt’s historical “agency” argument about the French intellectuals’ morally irresponsible choices is undercut by his argument about the larger historical “structure” that conditioned these same choices.  But Judt’s use of the figures of Aron, Blum, and Camus also introduces a Manichaean divide between a perfect past that could have been and the past imperfect that was. The argument succeeds at the moral level by making the ethical ramifications of these choices crystal clear but only by rendering these choices historically obvious and figures like Beauvoir, Merleau- Ponty, and Sartre decidedly foolish. Such a tactic has rhetorical force but leaves Judt caught in the “insoluble contradiction between wanting to argue that the ideas of postwar French intellectuals have been vacuous noise while at the same time having to acknowledge that this airy nonsense has had a pernicious and widespread influence on the thinking of other intellectuals all over the world.”45 In his quest for a perfect past and a morally responsible world, Judt himself draws a veil over the many imperfect perceptions and judgments that led these historical actors to make the choices they did in an atmosphere that was decidedly less clear than he allows. Perhaps the emphasis on clarity in the past demonstrates Judt’s desire for greater clarity in the present, as Past Imperfect has been described as the “hinge” between Judt’s life as a historian of France and a public intellectual.46 But the past is always imperfect as is our present, and it is the historian’s burden of responsibility to uncover the past’s imperfections, not to veil them.

42 Ibid., 135.

43 Ibid., 144.

44 Ibid., 73–74.

45 Wohl, review of Past Imperfect, 738.

46 See Timothy Snyder, “Tony Judt: An Intellectual Journey,” New York Review of Books blog, www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/aug/31/tony- judt- intellectual-j ourney.