Historicising the 'French Liberal Revival'

My project explores the history of the ‘liberal revival’ that emerged in French political and economic thought during the 1970s. Previous scholarship on this phenomenon has tended to see it as the product of an anti-totalitarian turn in French intellectual life following the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in 1974. On this view, the ‘French liberal revival’ amounted to the recovery of a previously dormant tradition, twentieth-century French political culture having previously been radically anti-liberal in character. My starting point in historicising the ‘French liberal revival’ is to critique these claims. The ultimate aim of the project is to uncover how and why French intellectuals from across the political spectrum engaged with ideas and traditions of thought that they identified as liberal in the final third of the twentieth century. In doing so I hope to bring to light the complex heterogeneity of the liberal turn in late twentieth-century French thought and situate this phenomenon within its larger international context.