Jean-Francois Revel
Written by The Resista Tuesday, 02 May 2006 22:25
As a rule, Europe has not been well-served by its public intellectuals. German philosopher Martin Heidegger was a Nazi apologist; French writer Jean-Paul Sartre was famously soft on Stalin; German novelist Günter Grass opposed German reunification; Portuguese novelist José Saramago supported an aborted Communist coup d'etat, and . . . well, it's a long list.
But an exception was Jean-Francois Revel, the French political theorist and commentator who died last week at the age of 82.
In books such as "The Totalitarian Temptation," "How Democracies Perish," "Democracy Against Itself" and "Anti-Americanism," Revel dissected the psychological weaknesses of liberal-democratic culture that made it dangerously prone to self-destruction. "The totalitarian phenomenon," he wrote in National Review in 2000, "is not to be understood without making allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or -- much more mysteriously -- to submit to it. Democracy will therefore always remain at risk."
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