Volume 28, Number 21 & 22 · January 21, 1982
Guide Rouge
By Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France
by Régis Debray, translated by David Macey
Schocken Books, 251 pp., Verso Editions, $9.95 (paper)
Régis Debray, author of Revolution in the Revolution? and now, at forty, one of President Mitterand's official advisers, shares with most of his coevals a quality that can no longer be taken for granted in younger generations: he knows, more or less, how to handle numbers, how to handle dates, facts, characters, and footnotes. These four or five skills give him an advantage over some of the French literary and intellectual figures whom he attacks in the book under review. 'New philosophers' especially, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, seem to have parted company with what a Soviet colleague calls 'vulgar factologism,' the modest but indispensable groundwork on which even the loftiest intellectual constructions must be built.
Review, 4404 words
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