There are no solutions, only problems, and our duty is to ensure that we are not deceived. The Reason of the Jacobins is also an illusion, and the only advice that the gauchiste is disposed, in the end, to offer, is the advice given by Genet and Sartre: be true to nothing, so as to be true to yourself. He no longer believes that the process of ‘discovery’ – whereby the ploys of unreason are exposed – will present the opportunity for some new and ‘rational’ alternative. But he is distinguished by a boundless cynicism. The modern gauchiste shares the rationalist’s suspicion of human institutions, and his contempt for superstition. But far more important in the thinking of the left has been the Enlightenment rationalism, which seeks to penetrate through human subterfuge, and to display the hidden core of unreason that lies within our acts. No doubt this desire for system, and for universalist answers, shares some of the character of Roman Catholicism.
It has taken up the socialist challenge to present a rival system, a rival intellectual machine, with which to generate answers to all the problems of modern man. And every movement away from the left – Ultramontanism, Action Franacise, Nouvelle Droite – has felt called upon to match the theoretical absolutism of its opponents. Even the exceptions – Chateaubriand, de Maistre, de Tocqueville, Maurras – have focused their attention on the standard of revolution, hoping to glimpse some strategy that would fortify their restorationist designs. Whatever power has reigned in the skies of politics, French intellectual life has tended to adopt the ways and manners of the Jacobins. Nowhere has the outlook of the left entered more firmly into the national culture than in France, the motherland of revolution.
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