ABSTRACT
The ideological earthquake among the youthful elite of the ‘progressive’ Parisian intelligentsia has temporarily, at least, brought to a halt the double-talk and facile self-deceptions that characterized the French Left since 1945. The most sophisticated of all the former contestataires who re-read their Marx in the cold light of Gulag is the ex-Maoist Andre Glucksmann. The original sin of totalitarianism was traced back to Karl Marx himself, and beyond him to the metaphysical tradition of western philosopy beginning with Plato. Le mangeur d’hommes was the omnipotent, cannibalistic state that Lenin had wished to destroy and replace by the ‘administration of things’ which even a simple cook could run. Glucksmann’s interpretation of German antisemitism focuses exclusively on the cult of the state which rejects the right to existence of any minorities in its midst. The original sin of the German ideology, according to Glucksmann, is that from the outset it became the accomplice of a secret, totalistic will-to-power.
