There is little need to retell the tale of the rise of neoliberalism, though the intellectual history of its French variation may be less familiar to the reader. Unsurprisingly, the latter is the subject of more commentary in France itself where many believe that the end of Les Trente Glorieuses plunged the country into an interminable malaise. Only a decade before, an outpouring of new forms of thought from philosophy to film had lofted the country’s international cultural standing to a height it had not attained since the Age of Enlightenment. But the de-radicalization that began in the 1970s would soon transform the country into one of the many ideological provinces of an increasingly American-centered world. Even commentators who were determined opponents of the Left at the time would later acknowledge that the success of their campaign might have contributed to this dispiriting outcome by uprooting the nation from both its revolutionary and traditional past. What was the deeper significance of the collapse of the revolutionary idea in the land that had given birth to it amid the fading away of Catholicism, its historic adversary?

I 

The scholarship on the post-1968 period has been dominated by two different versions of a triumphant liberalism, both recounting the toppling of Marxist hegemony in philosophy and political theory. The most well-known proponent of the first, the late Tony Judt, held that under the aegis of Sartre and other apologists for Stalinism French thought in the 1940s and 1950s was a morally bankrupt and intellectually feeble affair, and this verdict was extended to the 1960s and early 1970s when new varieties of left-wing illiberalism supposedly ran amok. The second variant comes from a younger cohort of American historians who have tempered the polemic and told a more uplifting story of the rise of a neo-humanist liberalism from the 1970s. A few Marxists go over the same developments while portraying what liberal historians have seen as a heroic liberation from totalitarian follies as instead a great betrayal that paved the way for a neo-liberal counter-revolution: “ex-Communists sold out, 68ers became yuppies, second-rate liberal intellectuals co-opted the media, and ethical paradigms offered a bland, consensual substitute for sharp political and social analysis.”¹ 

The Anthropological Turn reframes the picture by focusing on the formation of a small politico-intellectual counter-current of what its author occasionally calls “collectivist thought.” While the left-wing Régis Debray and the right-wing Alain de Benoist may be familiar names, Marcel Gauchet and Emmanuel Todd are less likely to be. Jacob Collins summarizes the highlights of their four careers, occasionally expanding on the significance of their metapolitical approaches to the multiple crises gripping French society from the 1970s. The premise of the study is that the post-1968 era in France did not result in the imposition of a seamless unity of establishment liberal ideology, but rather, in the minds of the four intellectuals under consideration, “unlocked a shared set of tropes and biases that could be reconfigured as a powerful critical philosophy.” The latter took the form of theorizations of supposedly quasi-natural symbolic forms of political order that in the view of all four continued to shape the destinies of post-modern peoples even in their declining state. Burgeoning inequality, post-political apathy, all-American plebianization, an acceleration in the decline of Christianity, an ongoing anti-immigrant backlas—taken together, these seemed to pose fundamental questions about the anthropological foundations of human society. 

The disintegration of social bonds in the 1970s seemed to call for a cultural analysis of the present by political theorists, and likewise a return to anthropologists and sociologists who privileged this dynamic in their work—Durkheim especially.

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim analyzed its titular theme in light of the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane as most clearly exemplified by the totemic religions of Australia. Religious thought divided the world into two genera: “Sacred things are things protected and isolated by prohibitions; profane things are those things to which the prohibitions are applied and that must keep at a distance from what is sacred.” Collins claims that Durkheim’s comparative theorization of the modern and primitive inspired all four despite the unevenness of references to his work in theirs. 

Nevertheless, the array of concepts invented by Durkheim—”collective consciousness,” “social anomie,” “collective representations,” not to mention his dichotomies of sacred-profane and social-individual—could be made to serve variable political ends. 

One suspects that the founder of French sociology was perhaps too wide an influence to qualify as a distinguishing intellectual inspiration of the four figures under consideration. The intellectual-historical constellation Collins sketches can sometimes be hard to make out as the more general thematic questions with which he attempts to define its problematic also seem too open-ended to specify the shared concerns of the four.

The questions they asked tended to be of a basic order: What is politics, and what are its elementary features? What constitutes a true political community? How is the individualized self to be understood in modern society? What is the French republic and what does it mean to be one of its citizens?

These bland queries thankfully do not frame the study, but the operative premise of The Anthropological Turn seems to be that a roundabout, associative approach to formative influences will unveil salient family resemblances.

The sequence of four short intellectual bios begins with Alain de Benoist, leading theorist of the post-fascist New Right, followed by Marcel Gauchet, sociologist of a trans-epochal dynamic of secularization culminating in liberal-democracy, moving on to Emmanuel Todd, comparative historian of the value orientations of the different forms of the family, and concluding with Régis Debray, young strategist and companion-in-arms to Che Guevara, later social philosopher of the life and death of nations. What advantages does arranging the careers of these public intellectuals across a Right to Left spectrum offer?  

While the scholarship described above has enriched our understanding of particular French traditions, discourses, and political issues, it has not always honored the spirit of political divisions in France, and it sometimes minimized them. 

The failure of these studies to honor the national spirit of division reveals a persistent bias: in depth in their treatment of the Center and Center-Left, they pass over much of what has been happening on the Right even as the latter has steadily advanced, at least electorally speaking. 

This array of what Collins calls political anthropologies seems to have crystallized over three phases. In the first phase, the four confronted the prospect of a Socialist-Communist government in the 1970s. At the time, Benoist, Gauchet and Todd joined the anti-totalitarian chorus of the well-funded nouveaux philosophes and their allies, in contrast to Debray, a vocal proponent of the Common Program who joined the new government after it came to power in 1981 as an advisor on foreign policy relating to Third World causes. The second began with the Socialist president François Mitterand’s embrace of austerity with the third, final shape coming on the heels of the collapse of Communism and the victory of the American-led West. It was only over this last, third period that three of the four under consideration began to distinguish themselves for the first time as critics of the now dominant ideology of the West; Debray’s “anthropological turn” began earlier. What they opposed was not so much the valorization of the market—all four tended to avoid economic subjects—but rather its new globalizing mission of human rights promotion. Notably, it is in this last phase that Collin’s narrative trails off—it’s not clear when this story ends—with significant implications for his argument as we shall see.

There are two, wholly distinct conceptions of anthropology Collins employs in bringing together Debray, Gauchet, Todd and Benoist. The first is German and philosophical—one might think of Feuerbach here but Collins has in mind the later, less well-known interwar philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen that the reader might know something about from the references to it in Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political where it is maintained that all the great political theories presupposed man to be by nature either good or evil. Here evil is understood neither theologically nor morally but rather in an anthropological sense as Mängelwesen—beings lacking instinctual foundations and thus exposed to the openness of meaning. The terrors of this destabilizing openness are neutralized by membership in sharply-bounded collectivities. Anthropology in this German and philosophical sense arose in response to the predicaments of modern as opposed to primitive forms of collective existence. Since all four wrote on modern politics, they might pass, then, as anthropological thinkers, though it was only Benoist who seems to have had any cognizance of this body of work. 

The other, more familiar connotation of the term stems from the French tradition of the academic discipline devoted to the study of primitive society, and Collins more consistently uses the term this way. But so understood, it fails to apply to Todd, who wrote on kinship but from outside the national anthropological tradition, and only barely does to Benoist, who looked back to a lost world of Indo-European herders and not to the still living remnants of hunter-gatherer peoples. In this second sense, anthropology, according to Collins, concerns not so much nature but rather the sacred. Although Collins suggests that the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss inspired the anthropological turn of the four, it should be noted that the latter saw himself as a theorist of the distinctive rationality of the savage mind and explicitly rejected the emphasis on the sacred. His assumption seems to be that Lévi-Strauss, like Durkheim before him, loomed so imposingly on the intellectual landscape of the period that he opened up the very possibility of these new anthropological styles of thinking about modern politics. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s recollection of his own intellectual formation in the 1950s is cited to convey his impact: 

For the first time, a social science imposed itself as a respectable, indeed dominant discipline. Lévi-Strauss, who baptized his science anthropology, instead of ethnology…ennobled the human science that was thus established, by drawing on Saussure [the early twentieth-century Swiss semiotician] and linguistics, and turned it into a royal science. 

Departing from the conventional practice of intellectual historians, Collins casually applies the term “structuralism” to these four writers in reference to their proclivity to explain the present in terms of universal or epochal cultural patterns though not a single one of them aligned himself to this school of thought. Collins seems to opt for the term mainly in order to emphasize the more national cast of their intellectual formation for, as Peter Dews has noted, structuralism in France marked a turning away from German influences toward native ones. Fixating on the French reception of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Collins maintains, has tended to obscure the post-war vitality of the country’s own, earlier intellectual traditions. In an earlier essay prefiguring the argument of his book, Collins identified the main native models for the subjects of his study.

The presiding figure in Benoist’s reimagining of European society was Georges Dumézil, the prolific French linguist-anthropologist and doyen of Indo-European studies. For Gauchet, the debt was two-fold: Tocqueville, on the one hand, who modeled a lucid and stereoscopic analysis of democracy, and the anthropologist Pierre Clastres on the other, who furnished Gauchet with his idiosyncratic account of the relationship between the state and society. Todd’s deployment of demographic criteria for the study of ideology was borrowed from the nineteenth-century social scientist Frédéric Le Play, author of a deeply conservative study of European kinship relations. Debray’s plundering offered rich re-readings of Auguste Comte and an anthropologist of primitive society, André Leroi-Gourhan, yielding a highly original account of the relationship between religion and technology in modernity.

What is Collins’s overall evaluation of the intellectual contribution of his subjects? In both his introduction and conclusion, he offers a critical perspective on this so-called anthropological turn, faulting it for its indifference to the role of the socio-material factor in politics. 

With the erosion of political solidarity over these decades came a new emphasis on culture in the thought world of neoliberalism; that is, more attention was given to questions of “identity,” “community” and religion.”

This formulation seems to suggest that, with respect to these questions, political anthropology remained within neo-liberalism’s intellectual orbit or at least failed to break from it despite its critical aspirations. As an idealist discourse on superstructures, political anthropology supposedly could not grapple with the material contradictions of capitalism that resurfaced with the financial crisis of 2008 and have continued to shape political developments in France and the wider world thereafter. The author’s vantage point of critique is a particular sort of anti-capitalism— “democratic socialism”—whose premises will be addressed in the conclusion.

II

The order in which Collins unfolds his small intellectual portraits of the four is reversed here and goes from Left to Right in accordance with the convention. Further, Gauchet is situated next to Debray on the Left of the spectrum and Todd placed next to Benoist on the Right to facilitate more continuity in the presentation of themes but also because Gauchet came out of a left formation, while the younger Todd came out of a more right-wing one, and so with greater historical conformity to the spectrum motif of the study. 

1. Régis Debray

Régis Debray was once a legendary figure: scion of an haute bourgeois Gaullist family, an Althusser student at the ENS, a young guerrilla fighter and strategist in Latin America, then a political prisoner in Bolivia, and later confidant to the ill-fated Salvador Allende. The culminating episode of this storied career of militancy was his time as a foreign policy advisor to Mitterand. After this last episode, Debray abandoned direct political engagement and began a second career as social philosopher in the Comtean line of theoretical system builders but would attain more recognition as a prolific critic of his country’s submission to American political and cultural hegemony. 

Life as a globe-trotting partisan began with a fateful encounter with Fidel Castro that would soon put his newly developed theory to the harsh test of practice. 

In 1967, at Castro’s prompting, Debray wrote the book that made him world famous, The Revolution in the Revolution? In it, Debray argued that it was a mistake for civilian populations in developing countries to arm themselves for the purposes of waging revolutionary combat…What was needed, therefore, was a cadre of professional fighters who could operate independently of civilian populations and whose sole task was the military defeat of the bourgeoisie. 

This strategy was discredited with its spectacular failure in Bolivia in 1967 when Guevara was captured and executed and where Debray, who had recently joined the unit, was arrested and interned until 1970. In his cell, he read Gramsci’s prison writings, giving him a new, longer-term vision of revolutionary struggle hinging on the previously under-theorized anthropological depths of the national question. In a 1976 interview with Michael Löwy, Debray proposed his own anthropological concept of the nation: 

It is created from a natural organization proper to homo sapiens, one through which life itself is rendered untouchable, or sacred. This sacred character constitutes the real national question.²

As an adviser to Mitterand on Third World affairs he developed a left-wing nationalist perspective on France’s potential vocation as a former Great Power in a world largely divided into East and West blocs. A once more sovereign France could lead Western Europe out from under US hegemony and into an era of partnership with the Third World. Debray’s anthropological turn began as a reflection on the experience of multiple defeats capped off by Mitterand’s abandonment of any ambition to break with capitalism and the American-led Western alliance. Thereafter he opposed France’s support for the US-led Gulf War coalition as well as its ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1991. During the Balkan Wars, he spoke out against the NATO bombardments of Serbia and refuted its humanitarian rationales. Though Gauchet certainly would have rejected its anti-imperialist aspect, Collins’s summary of Debray’s view of the new ideology of human rights largely applies to the others as well.

Human rights was thus the imperialism of the postmodern age—depoliticized, ahistorical, and aligned with capitalist interests.

In De Gaulle: Futurist of the Nation, Debray recalled that the General quite improbably had conjured up the classical spirit of statesmanship in a post-war Europe lacking honor and will to power. Most honorably, de Gaulle was “the last West European statesman to take the power of the mind seriously.”³ The world of the intelligentsia was a recurring theme of his writings from the 1980s that denounced the new liberal vogue in the spirit of Julien Benda. The polemic was attenuated by a probing self-criticism of the voluntaristic illusions of political reason, unable to grasp the transience of the great controversies of one’s own time. 

From critique, he moved on to the positive and systemic theorization of his ambitious multi-volume Mediology project. In it, Debray offered a general theory of the ritual organization of communities of belief anchored in figures of transcendence from prehistoric to postmodern times with each mode of organization conceived as a fortress against individual mortality and the entropy of collective meaning. The contemporary focus of this theoretical enterprise was the decline and fall of a workers’ movement whose ideational motor had been the sacral Marxist text spawning a multi-branch family tree of leader-interpreters. “Socialism was thus an ideology of print culture: More than just a set of ideas, it was also a means of communication. Naturally, it would have difficulty surviving the postindustrial video age, when image triumphed over the word.” 

The collapse of the Communist bloc was an episode in a wider epochal shift in the organized epicenters of spiritual production moving in lock step with the remorseless global advance of American civilization. Debray looked back coldly on the liberationism of 1968, seeing in it little more than a prefiguration of the imperial ideology of human rights that came after. “[T]he student protests of 1968 traded the collective for the individual, the past for the present, a politics of commitment for one of flux, movement, and speed…By way of 1968, France had entered the depoliticized, anti-historical age of what became known as the postmodern.” The glib Western consumer could now double as an ethical spectator of media-spotlighted scenes of horror if privileged enough to care and potential claimant of victim status if a member of some disadvantaged minority.

Over much of the third, post-Cold War period of Collins’s narrative, Debray looked on the new post-modern landscape of the West with the kind of equanimity that a profound pessimism of the intellect can afford. Like victory, defeat was transient: movements, states, peoples and whole civilizations will rise and fall until the extinction of the species. Debray gave an up-to-date, cybernetic expression to this classical, quasi-cyclical vision of man in the cosmos. 

The history of mankind was written in a double-entry ledger. Whenever its equilibrium is disturbed by technical progress, ethnic factors intervene to re-establish it.

Massive erasures of the quasi-sacral collective fabric of society would eventually provoke a ricorso, re-sacralization, a return to the origin. Modernity’s dissolution of social bonds stirred dormant archaic layers of the collective mind, a dialectic he saw at work in the rise of both Christian and Islamic fundamentalism. But the specific problem which his reference to “the ethnic factor” addressed was, of course, immigration. From the 1970s, the mounting hostility of the native French—often the descendants of immigrants themselves—to later Muslim arrivals from the Maghreb put into question the nation’s long-standing civic republican identity. Debray had long maintained that the essential condition of the human was closure—borders that protected a collective way of life from an entropic external environment. 

Indeed, for France to become “open”—welcoming of others and internationalist in its politics—it needed first to close around itself and secure a republican mode of belonging. Only the nation was truly internationalist.

And yet how could one now reconcile this existential necessity of closure with self-transcending drives to remain open—to history, novelty, the other—at a time when the last vestiges of an older universalism of the workers’ movement were going out with the tide? In his later writings, a note of resignation inflects the metaphysical pessimism that had infused his anthropological turn from its beginnings. The verdict was in: the restoration of French and European autonomy in its wider civilizational significance was no longer in the cards–America had won. In a Swiftian satire, Debray compared Atlantic Europe to the Greek world under Rome and has a fictional “Xavier de C” urging Washington to give its subjects imperial citizenship, as the emperor Caracalla did in A.D. 212. The analogy of Greece and Rome, to Europe and America—what does it imply? Oswald Spengler saw the decline of the culture of the West as a consequence of the inexorable imperialist expansion of its technological civilization. For Debray, the continent’s venerable monuments and traditions—including the modernist artifacts of its last and catastrophic century of greatness—will be safeguarded by its elites. Its historic cities perhaps might even be inspired by the example of Greco-Roman Alexandria. The edifice of European Heritage will remain perched safely above the global pop-culture of mixed multitudes of natives and immigrants. The militant of yesteryear suggests that the European intellectual of tomorrow might have to learn to live with this arrangement in the hope that decline will afford a modicum of dignity to men of letters and the arts. Too gloomy? One might find reassurance in the thought that as long as the great dialectic of entropic death and rebirth is still in play the prospect of some great comeback can never be ruled out.

2. Marcel Gauchet

In the 1980s, Gauchet was at the forefront of a liberal revolt against socialism. By the 1990s he had moved close to the right wing of the Socialist Party but now as a critic of neoliberalism, holding it responsible for France’s deepening “social fractures” —a term which he was reputed to have coined. While the criticism has been occasionally sharp, it has also been limited in its focus on egregious inequality and insecurity and made less offensive to the country’s intellectual and political establishment by its benign preoccupation with civic mindedness.

It was not always so. From a lower middle-class, Catholic and Gaullist family from Normandy, Gauchet was an early convert to the Left though hostile to France’s then mighty Communist Party. After completing his degree at the regional university at Caen, he began to write for a small Belgian journal of philosophy, Textures, whose editorial committee soon came to include Claude Lefort and the Greek-born philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. Both belonged to the ultra-left council communist tradition which held that capitalism had to be overthrown from below by workers taking direct control of the factories. They soon became Gauchet’s mentors. What did he learn from them? After the heady atmosphere of May 1968 dissipated, Lefort began working on an anthropological theory of politics that took the form of a fiendishly opaque commentary on Machiavelli. Boiled down, its thesis is that all social wholes being intrinsically incomplete are divided into antagonistic parts that require unifying self-representations to sustain their uncertain collective existence and powers of agency. “Machiavelli’s prince figured as a model in this operation, functioning as a distorting mirror and thus enabling the people to imagine themselves in a fictional way.” 

Lefort had concluded that his earlier vision of a pure and transparent self-determination of society was a utopic fantasy, for the political was a necessarily heteronymous and intrinsically unstable symbolic mediation of the parts to the whole of society. By contrast, Castoriadis remained more faithful to their councilist origins and proposed an alternate anthropology: heteronomy was the subjection of society to hypostasized orders of its own making while autonomy was its ability to “recognize in its institution its own self-creation.” All this might seem reminiscent of Feuerbach and Marx’s sympathetic criticism of him in his Paris Manuscripts of 1844 though, strangely, Collins never mentions the post-war French reception of Marx’s early humanist anthropology of species being and alienated labor. Gauchet adopted the leitmotifs of both Lefort and Castoriadis—one seeing heteronomy as an inescapable condition of symbolically unifying politics, the other conceiving of autonomy as the politics of exiting from the heteronomous state of submission to transcendent powers.

Gauchet’s first article in Textures, “Figures of Sovereignty,” was a gloss on an entry from Émile Benveniste’s Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Institutions on the etymologies of the word “king”—rex in Latinand raja in Sanskrit. “The adjective rectus can be interpreted: straight as this line which one draws.” Kings were the founders and supreme judges of political communities by virtue of ritualized deeds that circumscribed their boundaries. After its foundation, the identity of a collective depended upon civic-religious reenactments of these constitutive delimitations casting whoever after became ruler into an already constituted symbolic role. Such myths of the founders of peoples established the difference between the sacral role of the ruler and the contingent occupant of that role. It was this abstraction of the office from its holder that allowed for the emergence of a representative conception of power. From this beginning, the historical pathway leading to modern liberalism opened up with the implication that the ghosts of the vanished whole would continue to haunt it.

Another direct influence on Gauchet was Pierre Clastres who looked to the decentralizing strategies of primitive people to provide a new, non-Marxist account of the problem of the origins of the state from an anarchist perspective. Collins summarizes it as follows.

By instituting power in the form of an impotent chief, these cultures had indeed immunized themselves against the threat of tyrannical authority and the division of society into masters and subjects. In doing so, however, they also cut themselves off from the world beyond.

Gauchet appropriated Clastres’s framework—a modification of Lévi-Strauss’s opposition of hot to cold societies—but came to a conclusion diametrically opposed to his. Societies that braved the passage to statehood were seen as having opened themselves up to a dynamic of endless, uncertain change. Out of the destruction of egalitarian but benighted Golden Age communities, groups emerged that could hope to master the world around them by shaking off the primal fear of being in the openness of the world. From the auratic wonder before a now partly pacified environment a spiral of greater self-awareness emerged. In La Condition Politique, Gauchet describes his theory as a “transcendental anthropo-sociology” laying bare the historical process by which humanity acquired a consciousness of itself as a subject. “The state was the true path toward liberation.” This is not far from Hegel though the debt seems not to have been acknowledged. 

Gauchet held that the politico-theological order erected by pre-modern class states opened the path to what degree of autonomy human beings are capable of by repressing the animist witchcraft of the primitive world, freeing up the space for disenchanted spheres of ordinary life. But under these old regimes, a dehumanized multitude alienated the products of this rude stage of the domestication of nature over to their more-than-human rulers in a fog of religious mystification, and so what modest advances of practical secularization there were from below appeared in the guise of its opposite, as good fortune bestowed from above. It is only with modern democracy that the self-determining potential of hot societies comes to the fore. “Democracy is the political form assumed by the autonomous form of collective existence once it is ‘taken out of religion.’” The process of departure from religion hinges on the separation of what was once united within the traditional religious framework—politics, law and belief—thereafter posing the problem of their meaningful reconnection. Gauchet’s historical metanarrative was meant to cast light on the twentieth century experience of the God that failed. “I consider that the totalitarian regimes represented an ultimate attempt to restore the former unity.” While Debray held that the culturally entropic forces of technological modernity would trigger a ricorso of the sacred, Gauchet could counter that secularization was irreversible and any resurgence of the sacred (whether as religious fundamentalism or some new collectivism comparable to what communism had been) was to be seen as no more than an episodic reaction—potentially dangerous but incapable of changing the course.

Collins’s main criticism of Gauchet is that he ignored pressing socio-economic issues and was overly invested in his country’s culture wars. He points to some scathing remarks the latter made in opposition to the public strike wave that hit France in 1995. “‘I do not share,’ he continued, ‘this faith in the creative effervescence of the margins,’ and, in breaking with Lefort, ‘I “turned to the right” by rallying à la politique normale.’” Collins makes short work of Gauchet’s brand of liberal hypocrisy that praises the open clash of ideas provided nothing unfamiliar and disturbing emerges from below. 

What kind of conflict is to be desired for Gauchet—presumably something more than mere parliamentary political disagreement? Moreover, Gauchet claims to endorse forms of collective solidarity, but when they come from the Left—and conjure “class” and “revolution”—they are regarded as perversions of historical development and incompatible with the “symbolic” dynamics he has so persistently emphasized.

Gauchet was the sole member of the quartet to approve of France’s post-Gaullist embrace of the Western alliance. Unlike the others, he was hostile to France’s nationalist tradition and professed allegiance to a West that for the time being was going to be led by America, while they would opt for a pan-European alliance with Russia against America. Gauchet became more critical of western democracies after their defeat of totalitarianism and directed his fire at their blinkered adherence to the creed of market fundamentalism: 

even when it supported free trade, classical liberalism presupposed that this sphere of private rights would remain contained within the political structure of the nation-state. Neo-liberalism completely pulls this sphere out of the political frameworks based on the state and nation. In its most extreme form, it promotes their disappearance. This means that it deprives collective action of what, to this day, has constituted its main lever.⁴

The failures of a succession of French governments of the Center-Left and Center-Right to halt the dispiriting fall out of globalization prompted Gauchet to move somewhat further to the Left. Collins tracks his passage from Left to Right but chooses not to dwell on this later leftward curve with the narrative losing steam as it approaches the present. The result is that a picture of centrist Gauchet from this earlier period is made to epitomize the blindness of this anthropological discourse to the harsh socio-economic realities of contemporary capitalism but his later political evolution no longer seems to fit this characterization. After all, the sentiment expressed in the above passage on neo-liberalism does not seem to be all that different from Collins’s own “democratic-socialist” point of view.  

3. Emmanuel Todd

In contrast to the other three, Emmanuel Todd was a social-scientist but one with a penchant for large-scale theorizing and even bold historical forecasting. After completing a degree at the Institut d’études politiques, he began his graduate studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he soon joined the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. He eventually wrote a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Peter Laslett and Alan Macfarlane who held, in opposition to the prevalent Marxist view, that England’s individualistic family system had taken root long before the onset of capitalism. Todd’s work on kinship might be said to fit in with Collins’s conception of some shared filiation of his four subjects to the themes of Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, but his Cambridge formation placed him well outside the French tradition of anthropology. Collins attempts to link Todd to the latter—in accordance with his thesis that the anthropological turn was a turning towards French influences—by underscoring his debts to the early nineteenth century comparative research of the Catholic Frederic Le Play on the forms of the European working-class family from France to Russia.

While still finishing his thesis, Todd returned to France and wrote a book on the USSR, The Final Fall,that cannily predicted the imminent collapse of the Soviet empire based on then emerging evidence of demographic decline. With this book Todd became a rising star of the liberal, anti-totalitarian Left. In 1983, he took a position at the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) and published another study that laid out his anthropological system. Its basic thesis was that modern worldviews express premodern family arrangements. 

“The ideological system is everywhere the intellectual embodiment of family structure, a transposition into social relations of the fundamental values which govern elementary human relations: liberty or equality, and their opposites, are examples. One ideological category and only one, corresponds to each family type.”…For Todd, ideology could be graphed as intersecting axes of liberty and equality, making a Cartesian-style grid. The vertical axis represented liberty and measured the authority of the father over the son. The horizontal axis represented equality and measured the relationship between siblings. Each quadrant of the grid, bounded by these two axes, defined the ideology of a given family structure. 

What follows focuses on his ideologically illustrative European cases but Todd had each quadrant include many more countries from all over the word.

The type that balanced equality and liberty Todd called the “nuclear egalitarian family” with France as its main case. In the quadrant where liberty paired with inequality, there was what he called the “absolute nuclear family” exemplified by the primogeniture of the recently euthanized English landed class. In the quadrant where authority and inequality met one had the “authoritarian family” native to Germany with all that implied. Finally, in the fourth quadrant, where authority intersected with equality, there was the exogamous “community family”—the heart and soul of old Russia where the Dostoevskian spirit of patricide reigned. Though France was only one case and therefore tended to one ideology that finely balanced liberty and equality, when surveying its diverse regions it could also be seen to embrace them all and thus contain within its breast all four ideological spirits.  

Todd applied his comparative taxonomy of family forms to France’s electoral landscape where he could show a regional ideological pattern in place since the founding of the Third Republic a century earlier. What could explain this persistence? Class analysis was unable to answer the question as peasants from different regions voted differently, and indeed any attempt to explain it in terms of material interests proved of limited use “for understanding this unconscious and enduring logic.” Todd concluded from his theoretical framework that the anti-immigrant National Front party with its roots in collaboration and the bitter legacies of French Algeria was a merely transitional phenomenon despite the inroads it was making into regions where the Communist Party had recently dominated. Cutting across the older pattern, the National Front had performed well in regions—the Paris basin, the East, and Provence—where different forms of family prevailed. It followed that “the FN has no future, because it does not really exist, or not in the same way as the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the UDF or the RPR.” His schema had grounded the country’s political divisions in a nineteenth century historical configuration that was now passing away, and the failure of its predictive powers soon became apparent. How did he end up responding?

Todd performed the greatest volte-face of the group, beginning as an anti-Soviet crusader, writing enthusiastically of France’s assimilation into the European Union. By the millennium, he was a committed national-republican, disparaging both free-market policies and US imperialism, while also composing impassioned apologia for state-run protectionism. 

But the political passion that motivated his earlier ill-fated prediction put him on a more distinctive path. Though Collins does not go over his political evolution over the post-Cold War period, he considers the more recent past in somewhat greater detail when discussing Todd than he does in his chapters on the others. This focus on the contemporary in Todd’s case brings the decades-long rise of the party of Le Pen and reactions to still remembered acts of terrorism more clearly into the frame of the anthropological turn. The historical anthropologist of the family became an increasingly outspoken defender of France’s Muslim communities, seeing them as a culturally restorative force, the nation’s only hope for a future.

France, however, often maligned for its culture of intolerance toward peoples of different races, had much higher rates of intermarriage and showed itself to be far more tolerant and welcoming than the more segregated societies of the Anglo-American world. Again, this was a gift of its extraordinary cultural heritage.

More unpredictably, around the time of the Gulf War he became a vocal critic of Europe’s submission to American power, making his case in a book entitled After the Empire. While the US had been a benevolent force during the Cold War, after the collapse of the Soviet Union Europe no longer needed its protection. But instead of withdrawing, a massively indebted America sought to forestall decline by strongarming and mobilizing clients into coalitions against its enemies. Todd even came to see Russia as a bulwark against America, a natural ally of Europe on grounds of history and geography. Enraged, the American historian Tony Judt denounced him as “a mad scientist.” Todd would take on other, more eminent luminaries of the American establishment. In his 2008 polemic, After Democracy Todd denounced Samuel Huntington’s view that Islam and the West were civilizational enemies. 

We are the aggressors. One need only count the number of dead in the United States, in Europe, and in the Muslim world to verify this. Our Islamophobia is largely endogenous, the effect of our own religious trouble.

The religious crisis was the simultaneous decline of Catholicism and its historic secular adversaries, the republican tradition as represented by France’s center-left and center-right. Historic dividing lines had lost their raison d’être as all of the now indistinguishable, zombified parties of White France embraced a shrill, identitarian hostility to Islam: “when the French state turns an image of Muhammad depicted as a prick into a sacred image, this constitutes a historic turning point.” Yet for all his occasional gloominess, the future of the country still looked bright for Todd and occasioned yet another prediction more defiant than social-scientific: “France existed before the Industrial Revolution and the 1789 Revolution. She will survive the disappearance of the working class and the terminal crisis of Catholicism.” 

4. Alain de Benoist

Born in 1943, from a conservative bourgeois family of the Loire Valley, Alain de Benoist entered as a teenager into the ranks of former German collaborators, aging royalist reactionaries and student supporters of die-hard terrorists for the lost cause of French Algeria. The collapse of the last great outposts of the French Empire in the 1950s, culminating in de Gaulle’s betrayal of their cause, triggered a crisis in the ranks of the extreme Right. Benoist began as a young protégé of the notorious Dominique Venner, founder of the far-right Europe-Action, who had concluded from this experience of defeat that French nationalism was a spent force.

In 1963, Venner launched a new journal to help carry out this program, Europe Action. Benoist came on board almost immediately, as did a number of sympathetic young radicals who had been part of the FEN network. Ideologically, Europe Action broke with the “traditionalism” that had distinguished both the interwar and postwar Right. Charles Maurras’s strategy for Action française was to rally around the army, the Church, and the aristocracy.

In the aftermath of de Gaulle’s betrayal of French Algeria, Venner fought to replace the vestiges of Maurrassian traditionalism with a militant youth politics of pan-European white supremacy. Once the mainstay of the national counter-revolutionary tradition going back to De Maistre, Catholicism was now out, and in the name of a nebulous ancestral paganism Judeo-Christianity would be denounced as the “Bolshevism of antiquity.”

Europe-Action would be a flash in the pan, but Benoist and others were determined to carry on and organized a discussion to this end in the autumn of 1967. The decision was made to found a new review, named after Georges Sorel’s syndicalist Nouvelle école. The first issue appeared in the winter of 1968, just a few months before the student protests broke out in Paris, and shortly before the formation of GRECE–Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (Research and Study Group for European Civilization), a group that proclaimed a coming renaissance of Europe’s Aryan Urvolk.

Benoist’s record through the 1970s is a grim tale: an outspoken supporter of apartheid South Africa, Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and Portuguese colonialism, he held fast to crumbling outposts of the White Race in the same spirit of last-ditch romanticism that had motivated German collaborators to go to the bitter end. By contrast, Benoist went only half way and then turned back. Like with Debray, his anthropological turn was a response to multiple experiences of defeat. Collins describes the new strategy as Gramscian in its orientation towards a longer-term transformation of the hegemonic order of values.

 

The allusion to Gramsci figured in a larger strategy of co-opting the critical and revolutionary legacy of the Marxist tradition. Benoist often made passing references in his writings to Althusser and other Marxists, and even claimed that he imagined the New Right to be a kind of latter-day Frankfurt School.

The early to mid-1970s was the best of times for this new formation as Benoist was fêted by backers who looked at the possibility of a victorious alliance of the Communist and Socialist Parties with great trepidation. In the 1974 presidential election, GRECE supported the liberal Valéry Giscard d’Estaing against François Mitterrand, joint candidate of the Socialist and Communist Party. In 1974, the leading members of GRECE founded the Club de l’Horloge (Clock Club) conceived in the image of an American think tank with the idea of recruiting students from the elite Institut d’Études Politiques destined for careers in politics.

At this point, the club was under the patronage of Michel Poniatowski, minister of the interior and an adviser to Giscard. Benoist is widely acknowledged to have ghost-written his book, L’Avenir n’est écrit nulle part (Nowhere Is the Future Written), in which there was much talk of Europe’s Indo-European values and the cosmic evolution of man.

Though Collins underscores the formative French intellectual influences on the four, German thinkers of the Right loomed equally large for Benoist. Though his political awakening began in a milieu crawling with collaborators, it seems that he was only introduced to right-wing political thought from inter-war Germany in the early 1980s when he came across Armin Mohler’s 1950 study, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932, an encyclopedic overview of the diverse currents of the non-Nazi radical Right that its author classified under the rubric “Conservative Revolutionary.” His interest in the latter may have deepened after 1980 when he wrote a prefatory essay to Oswald Spengler’s recently translated Hour of Decision. The opening line of the latter went as follows. 

Is there today a man among the White races who has eyes to see what is going on around him on the face of the globe? 

With the Communist International in mind, Spengler prophesied that the European proletariat was veering towards an alliance with the colored populations of the colonial world to overthrow the European ruling classes.

While Benoist would continue to express views in line with his post-1968 militant right-wing direction, electoral realignments would soon put him on a more unusual path. When the parties of the conservative Right won a narrow majority in the Assembly, fears of a Socialist-Communist take-over temporarily receded. The temporary rift between the parties of the Left that then broke out seemed to raise hopes that they might be kept out of government indefinitely. Continued cooperation with right-wing radicals now looked like a liability. With Bernard-Henri Lévy leading the charge, the media suddenly turned against GRECE, denouncing it as the right-wing of the great totalitarian dragon. 

This experience seems to have had a sobering impact on Benoist who concluded that France’s liberal-conservative establishment was a more insidious enemy than what remained of the anti-systemic Left. But he also steadfastly refused to see the National Front—rooted in traditions that he had rejected long ago—as an authentic anti-systemic Right. He responded to the 1984 electoral breakthrough of Le Pen’s party with an indifference bordering on contempt, and went so far as to declare in the lead-up to European parliamentary elections of the same year that he would cast his vote for a sinking Communist Party because it remained the most anti-capitalist, anti-liberal and anti-American force in French politics. A year before the Berlin Wall came down Benoist launched a new journal, Krisis, featuring favorable coverage and occasional interviews with Baudrillard and Debray with the intention of opening a dialogue with the Left.

As a critic of the United States, Benoist was perhaps the most implacable and vicious among the quartet, lashing out not only against the empire, but also against the “American way of life”—its puritan origins, its noxious egalitarianism. In its imperial form, according to Benoist, the US was a consumerist behemoth imposing liberal-materialist values across the world, trampling on native cultural formations wherever its feet came down. Strangely enough, for someone of Benoist’s political sensibilities, Europe now found itself allied with the Third World, as both were sandwiched between the great superpowers, struggling for cultural autonomy. In Europe, Tiers monde, même combat, Benoist argued that if Europe is to come into its own, it must engage in dialogue along the North–South axis, and break the East–West dialectic. The theoretical inspiration for Benoist’s counter-geometry of world politics was Régis Debray, a leading thinker of North–South cooperation.

With the end of the Cold War, Europe was faced with a decision to either decline or rise up and become a self-determining civilization by entering into an historic alliance with Russia whose cultural traditions might be mobilized for a continent-wide tryst with destiny. In what briefly seemed like a historical situation open to such a momentous choice he looked to the conservative revolutionary Ernst Niekisch who had once dreamt in vain of a Russo-German alliance against Western capitalism. For Collins, this is a position that lacks all credibility.

Benoist has become a leading apologist for Putin’s Russia in France and has maintained a long friendship with the Russian neo-Fascist Alexander Dugin.

Over the post-Cold War era which this study fitfully covers, Benoist has spoken out against what he sees as a geo-politically servile and neo-liberal European Union. With little interest in the economic side of things (though now a passionate ecologist and advocate of décroissance) he criticized the Maastricht Treaty for its bureaucratic neglect of cultural matters—a glancing blow compared to what others have said but Benoist’s commitment to the pan-European ideal perhaps kept him from going deeper. Of the four figures Collins treats, Benoist arguably has the least claim to the status of original or systematic thinker and none of the others ever sunk to the level of his New Age pagan enthusiasms of the 1970s. But less entrenched in a system he has perhaps remained more open to a wider range of intellectual traditions than they and continues to be a lively interlocutor with figures from across the spectrum. Collins concludes the chapter by noting that things are looking good for the once intransigent white militant who now, like the others, seems to be ending his intellectual career as an eco-friendly critic of neo-liberalism.

Since the 1980s, it looked as though Benoist might forever remain on those margins, but this changed very rapidly as the neoliberal center has crumbled in the West. Benoist’s books now appear on display in Paris’s major bookstores, and Benoist is frequently invited to speak at the country’s most respected institutions. Le Monde has referred to this period as Benoist’s “second youth.”

What ideas drive him now after so many lost causes have been left behind? 

The main impetus of Benoist’s formation will be unfamiliar to the reader and so warrants some further elaboration. For all his Teutonic dalliances, his greatest intellectual inspiration arguably remained Georges Dumézil, the world’s preeminent scholar of Indo-European studies who on a foundation of peerless erudition is said to have single-handedly reestablished the study of the religious myths and heroic epics of a cultural world stretching from the Ireland of The Cattle Raid of Cooley to the India of the Mahābhārata. Modern linguistics could be said to have emerged as the comparative study of Indo-European languages and one of its early intellectual landmarks was the identification ofphonological laws of sound change that made possible the reconstruction of a significant portion of the core vocabulary of “Proto Indo-European,” a ghost language that had not been spoken for several thousand years and of which there was no literary trace. 

With his ingenious etymologies, Dumézil, like his contemporary Émile Benveniste, hypothesized some of the institutions, poetic forms and beliefs of the descendants of horse-drawn wagoners that spoke this lost tongue on the Pontic-Caspian steppe more than five thousand years ago. Over the course of the last century it became apparent to scholars that from there these war-like people began to pour out at different times in different directions, sweeping through Europe, Iran, and India, and even making inroads into Western China. In 1938 Dumézil advanced his now renowned tri-functional thesis.⁵ [5] It held that even long after this Urvolk had broken up into distinct ethno-linguistic descendent populations—Indic, Italic, Celtic, Slavic, Germanic and Greek—their tales would continue to uphold an ideal of a hierarchical social order divided into three parts with each fulfilling a specific cosmic function. Tending to the domain of the sacred were sovereign priest-judges charged with performing correct sacrifices to primal ancestors and gods; second came the sphere of violence whose exercise was the responsibility of warriors with a tendency to veer off the path of heroism into spiritually polluting, berserk outrages; last was the sphere of life and sustenance in the hands of tillers and herdsman. 

What was the contemporary significance of this remote ideal of the heroic age, the object of as many projections and fantastic longings as the even more distant Golden Age that was said to have preceded it? Benoist was succinct.

One can see the depth of changes in social structure—and mental structure—that have taken place of late in modern Europe, where, under the influence of egalitarian doctrines, the distinction between the three “orders” or “functions” has essentially been erased. But also, the traditional hierarchy has been completely inverted, such that now it’s the economic function, i.e. the production of material goods, which occupies first place, and thereby shapes mentalités and determines needs and values.

The trifunctional ideal is both a controversial hypothesis for the comparative study of the Iron Age mythologies of Indo-European speakers and also itself a myth that arose in response to the downfall of the Old Regime over the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. The wide appeal of this invented tradition of racial origins depended not just on the scientific prestige of historical linguistics but also on some real socio-political continuities. For until its destruction in the world wars of the last century Europe had preserved vestiges of this tripartite division far more so than had India with its more multifarious caste and varna system. Indo-Europeanism was a potent ideology of race, nation and civilization at a time when Judeo-Christianity was suspected of having instigated a slave revolt in morality that put the class struggles of the nineteenth century into an even more ominous light. On the Right, it was often said that the supplanting of the spiritual and martial by the industrial and financial ruling classes would open up the floodgate to revolution and leveling in all its forms. This dire prophecy could be made to rhyme with a Vedic account of the present as a Dark Age. Unlike any other civilization, Europe seemed destined to uproot itself from its own ethno-religious origins. A young Hegel put his finger on a problem that enthusiasts of the Indo-European vogue would hope to address.  

Christianity has emptied Valhalla, felled the sacred groves, extirpated the national imagery as a shameless superstition, as a devilish poison, and given us instead the imagery of a nation whose climate, laws, culture, and interests are strange to us and whose history has no connection whatever with our own. A David or Solomon lives in our popular imagination, but our country’s own heroes slumber in learned history books.⁶

For the early Hegel, this hybridization had left a vacuum at the heart of Germany and Europe more generally. Later, he would come to see this vacuum as the absent cause of a violent spiritual turmoil whose history unfolds in radically discontinuous episodes, across different peoples with no continuity of memory or anthropological substratum. 

Though Collins acknowledges that Benoist had little use for the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, he points to the one text of his that Benoist had no doubt read closely: “Race and Culture” from 1952 whose conclusion that he does not cite reads as follows.

Now we cannot close our eyes to the fact that, despite its urgent practical necessity and the high moral goals it has set for itself, the struggle against all forms of discrimination is part of the same movement that is carrying humanity towards a global civilization—a civilization that is the destroyer of those old particularisms, which had the honor of creating the aesthetic and spiritual values that make life worthwhile and that we carefully safeguard in libraries and museums because we feel ever less capable of producing them ourselves.⁷

Familiar sentiments perhaps, but the passage arguably captures the essence of the intelligent conservative position on nature and culture.

The explosive growth of the new science of ancient DNA has shed much light on the demographic history of the Indo-European expansion that has confirmed older ideas of the long-term impact of the conquests of steppe peoples that had not long ago seem discredited as ideologically suspect. The advances of historical linguistics once gave sustenance to the Indo-European ideology, and it is likely that the discoveries of ancient genetic lineages will give it a new lease on life. In the study of man, science and ideology, indeed science and pseudo-science will remain dialectically interdependent. Nonetheless, it may be safe to assume that the belief in European racial superiority is in interminable decline, and as of now no return to a mythical original can be foreseen. What beliefs will the men and women of the twenty-first century Right put in the place of race, religion, nation and sex?

III

Collins used the term anthropology to refer to a foundational approach to the political, where the foundation is understood to be an ancestral racial origin (Benoist), the human need for reconciling collective representations of inherently antagonistic social relations (Gauchet), the longue durée of kinship forms (Todd), and finally, the modes of symbolic organization in which individuals hope to transcend their dismal finitude (Debray).

Political anthropology, as I have defined it, was formed in the 1970s as France transitioned away from a postwar solidaristic society toward a fractured and neoliberal one. Its intellectual affinities were shaped by the postwar ascendancy of the social sciences, anthropology in particular. 

He shows how the anthropological discourse immunized these thinkers from the rhetoric of human rights and “forestalled any easy rapprochement with the ascendant liberalism.” But given the enormous variety of their formations, it is hard to see in what sense they partook in a shared discourse. Was “political anthropology” a wider discourse, or did it comprise only them?  Collins does not mention the criteria by which they were selected and others excluded—Alain Supiot, for example, who seems to more clearly conform to the thematic rubric of the study, if not exactly its chronological parameters.  

How did their respective theorizations relate to the positions each took in contemporary controversies? The intellectual careers Collins considers did not simply vary in their political tendency but apparently in many of the topics they chose to respond to—though one feels that being public intellectuals there must have been more uniformity in this regard than is conveyed by his juxtaposition of their lives. It would have clarified the position of each within the constellation he seeks to identify if the study had framed a more systematic comparison of their views on topics of contemporary controversy—Americanization, the EU, populism, ecology, inequality, feminism, immigration and anti-Semitism come to mind—and if the four were in some way responding to one another we do not hear of it. 

Some readers may recall that the configuration of political space as a spectrum from Left to Right was put into question in the aftermath of the collapse of European Communism, and more recently as populist movements claimed to cross-cut this opposition with one pitting the people against a globalist elite. And it does seem that the political evolution of his four subjects testifies to some disordering of this once canonical staging of modern politics. Around the end of the story Collins tells the reader that the initially varying political outlooks of the writers under consideration seem to have begun to converge onto a shared anti-neoliberal outlook, one that appears pretty left-wing from an American perspective and is probably not far from the author’s own point of view. Not only does the narrative trail off in the very period when their respective criticisms of neo-liberalism all came to assume a theoretically systematic and politically trenchant form, this way of wrapping up the story pushes out of view an ideological convergence of arguably some anthropological significance. 

Collins identifies the pivotal historical change that he sees all four of his subjects responding to. 

All four writers sensed a seismic shift in the underlying social structure of France, namely the vanishing of the proletariat as a significant historical actor. The displacement of the factory in the larger scheme of capitalist production…undermined the collective power of the proletariat, which was supposed to have strengthened as capitalism’s crises worsened.

Compared to the broader, more diffuse concerns with which Collins weaves together the subjects of his study, this insight might have provided a more integrating critical perspective. For while all four situated the ideological regressions of neo-liberalism in longer-term histories of civilization, they partook of a wider experience of disillusionment with European Communism and movements of national liberation that began before the collapse of these anti-systemic forces and has continued to shape the ideological environment for long after.

Is there any possibility of the emergence of a politics that would occupy the vacuum left behind by this collapse? Collins compares the four to the Young Hegelians around Bruno Bauer by calling them the Holy Family, referencing Marx’s denunciation of this circle for their continued adherence to philosophical idealism. 

In activating France’s dormant anthropological tradition, these thinkers have concealed and obfuscated the materialist bases for social and political relations. Their attention to idealist constructions—the nation-state (Debray), imaginary kinship relations (Todd), “social-historical” autonomy (Gauchet) and the ancestral cultural unit (Benoist)—can only obscure the character of the relations of production, and foster an idealist conception of political community.

Collins suggests that because post-war economic affluence temporarily neutralized capitalism’s socio-economic contradictions, all four thinkers hypostasized the cultural and political and subsequently responded to the rise of neoliberalism in these partly mystifying terms. Such is his main criticism of the formation, but we do not know for sure because the narrative trails off in the 1990s. All four—even Gauchet—eventually became sharp critics of neoliberalism as the line dividing them into Left and Right attenuated.

Once the Great Recession hit in 2008, it seemed as though, for the first time, capitalism’s end would arrive through internal contradictions and not through external challenges. 

We now find ourselves in a new era of war. Will the threat of extinction provoke a return of archaisms and a new drive toward community? 

There is also something comforting about the idea of a return of the archaic, as though Giambattista Vico’s ricorsi were in effect, and human history could be reset. No one has captured this better than Lévi-Strauss in the closing pages of Tristes tropiques: “If human beings have always been concerned with only one task—how to create a society fit to live in—the forces which inspired our distant ancestors are also present in us. Nothing is settled; everything can still be altered. What was done, but turned out wrong, can be done again. ‘The Golden Age,’ which blind superstition had placed behind [or ahead of] us, is in us.”

It might be said that Vico’s ricorso sits uneasily with how we tend to think of the Golden Age: 

But the most striking recurrence of human things in this connection was the resumption in these divine times of the first asylums of the ancient world, within which, as we learned from Livy, all the first cities were founded. For everywhere violence, rapine and murder were rampant, because of the extreme ferocity and savagery of these most barbarous centuries. Nor, as we said in the Axioms, was there any efficacious way of restraining men who had shaken off all human laws save by divine laws dictated by religion.⁸

Collins avoids discussing war though that may seem odd since it is during war that an individual’s membership in a collective most strikingly comes to the fore. In their world wars, modern European nations now subject to the forces of cultural entropy (Debray), disenchantment (Gauchet), zombification (Todd) and decadence (Benoist) once imagined themselves as communities of fate entitled to call on otherwise atomized individuals to make the ultimate sacrifice in defiance of any calculation of self-interest. Collins has none of his subjects address the phenomenon that one might think would be decisive for an anthropological discourse on politics, nor does he himself have much to say about it. Currently the neoliberalism around which his narrative turns is being dismantled piecemeal, not due to any popular upsurge but rather as a consequence of intensifying geo-political strife. Perhaps this is a context in which collectivist forms of political thought will get a sympathetic hearing in the West. Max Weber made the connection clear.

The individual is expected ultimately to face death in the group interest. This gives to the political community its particular pathos and raises its enduring emotional foundations.⁹

If this expectation returns on a large enough and lasting scale, we will not have heard the last of political anthropology. 

1. Jacob Collins, The Anthropological Turn: French Political Thought After 1968 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2020). ↩︎
2. Régis Debray, “Marxism and the National Question,” New Left Review, 105 (September–October 1977). ↩︎
3. Régis Debray, De Gaulle: Futurist of the Nation, trans. Johnn Howe (London: Verso, 1994), 28. ↩︎
4. Natalie J. Doyle and Marcel Gauchet, “Neo-liberal ideology and the New World: An Interview with Marcel Gauchet,” International Journal of Social Imaginaries 1, 2 (2022): 307. ↩︎
5. Georges Dumézil, Mythes et dieux des Germains: Essai d’interpretation comparative (Paris: Leroux, 1939). ↩︎
6. G.W.F. Hegel, “The Positivity of the Christian Religion,” in Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox and Richard Kroner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2011), 146. ↩︎
7. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Race and Culture,” in A View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 23. ↩︎
8. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, 3rd ed., trans. By Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1948), 359. ↩︎
9. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California, 1978), 903. ↩︎