The State They’re in: Bourdieu, Debray, and the Revival of Engagement

If there was one feature of the French cultural and political landscape over the past thirty or so years that had seemed until recently beyond dispute, it was the disappearance of the intellectuel engagé/committed intellectual. The revolutionary hopes of 1968 were to come nowhere near realization in the political domain, something that perhaps became clear as early as the Gaullist electoral landslide in June of that year. The immense energies unleashed by the May movement were to invest themselves above all in the spheres of textuality and culture–a development favored by the movement’s origins in the universities and the enthusiasm with which it was taken up by (most of) the intelligentsia. From the reconfiguring of education and broadcasting to the influence, often more widespread outside France than within, of Althusserian and Lacanian cultural theory, it was in the superstructure that radical change was most evident. Political change, meanwhile, took the more tranquil form of Mitterrand’s election in 1981 and the subsequent tailoring of socialist aspirations to the demands of a market economy, whose global hegemony since the break-up of the Eastern bloc has remained largely unchallenged.