ABSTRACT
Throughout his long life, French political theorist and commentator Jean-François Revel was seldom a stranger to controversy. He opined on, among other things, the beauty of Italian women (overrated), the glories of France (very overrated), and even his own vocation, philosophy (in his view, no longer a serious subject). But most of all, Revel was an ardent anti-communist who despised communist regimes and fulminated against their historical record of criminality and poverty. And while his closest colleagues were often hardcore Marxists and visceral America-bashers, Revel—who was himself a self-professed man of the left—relished in his defense of the free market, liberal democracy, and even the United States. From his 1970 Without Marx or Jesus to his final book Anti-Americanism, Revel championed America’s status as a superpower and assailed his anti-American compatriots, many of whom, from the comfort of their French villas, fabricated knee-jerk critiques of every American action at home and abroad.
