Philosophy in France

In fact, only one book on or around Marxism has been received for survey during the year that is past, though there are perhaps few British philosophers who would see anything for surprise or regret in that. Among the books not received, however, are two of very considerable interest and intelligence, which it would be wrong not to mention for the sake of anyone who may be unaware of their existence; Merleau Ponty's Les aventures de la dialectique and Raymond Aron's L’opium des intellectuels. Both books appeared at roughly the same time as a British critic was rash enough publicly to lament that political philosophy was dead in France. Quite apart from anything else, this seems an odd complaint of a country in which Marxism, be it for better or for worse, is very much a live intellectual influence. Classical Marxism may indeed be what Professor Acton calls “a philosophical farrago,” but it would be a bad mistake to treat it as no more than a dead doctrinal body, to be dissected and preserved, if at all, as simply an historical curiosity. What the intellectuals of the world’s next generation or two will be saying may be anybody's guess; but that a very large proportion of them will be saying it in Marxist or Marxist–derived terminology seems a safe prediction. When for any reason a certain vocabulary is placed beyond the bounds of critical questioning, all development must take the form of interpretation and application. But to say this is very different from saying that all development is brought to a halt.