Ed. Some of you may have been familiar with Ravel. His “How Democracies Perish” is a good read as I recall (it’s been a few years…). He died last April, 2006.

Open Democracy Henri Astier May 4, 2006

France’s foremost political thinker was also her most misunderstood, says Henri Astier.

Jean-François Revel, who died on Sunday 30 April at the age of 82, was not just the grand old man of French political literature; he was a leading exponent of freedom in the tradition of Raymond Aron, Alexis de Tocqueville and Baron Montesquieu.

Revel, initially a philosopher, made his name in 1957 with a critique of the intellectual fashions of the time, Pourquoi les Philosophes? (Why Philosophers?). The book contended that philosophy, having spawned a host of disciplines – mathematics, physics, biology, history and the social sciences, as well as the scientific method itself – was itself no longer a creative force. Revel’s argument that since the late 18th century, philosophy had ceased to be responsible for intellectual breakthroughs provoked the disgust of both the Sorbonne establishment and the newfangled Nietzschean-Heideggerian school.

In the 1960s Revel continued to contribute to the history of ideas, with a book on Proust and a history of western philosophy. He ventured into politics at the end of the decade with his first international bestseller, Without Marx or Jesus (1970). The book, written after an eye-opening encounter with a United States in the midst of a cultural revolution, argued that today’s true progressive force was not Marxist collectivism but US-style individualism. “The 20th-century revolution will take place in the United States”, Revel wrote. “It can only unfold there, and it has started to do so. It will spread to the rest of the world only if it succeeds in North America.”

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