Utopian Pluralism in Twentieth-Century France

Deepening democracy through pluralism has been a recurring demand in French social thought during the twentieth century. Curiously, though, despite growing historical research that has uncovered vibrant forms of pluralism within France’s post-revolutionary past — political, social and cultural — contemporary considerations of the prospects for pluralism in the French Hexagon over the last two decades have remained, overwhelmingly, ahistorical in their orientation.2 Rather than nourished by critical reflections upon the opportunities latent within indigenous traditions and experiences, much recent French writing on pluralism has unfolded in a kind of presentist vacuum. Although often and understandably absorbed with the specifically French problems of accommodating post-colonial cultural politics and religious and ethnic difference within a long-standing, secular, universalistic republican political culture, contemporary writings have also been deeply marked by Anglo-American debates about diversity, particularly those associated with multiculturalism.3 Presented in such terms, it should thus come as little surprise that efforts to defend pluralist democracy in France have repeatedly become the objects of republican suspicion and scorn, as a kind of backdoor attempt at ‘Americanizing’ French political or social life, imposing ‘Anglo-Saxon’ modes of ‘politically correct’ thought upon the French mind and communitarianism on French culture.4