Heresy, Common Decency, and Post-liberalism: Notes on Jean-Claude Michéa’s Towards a Conservative Left

This is a first draft of an article that will appear in revised form in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Illiberalism Studies.

When Patrick Deneen published his now-infamous Why Liberalism Failed in 2018, it was a provocation.[1] The combination of the verb to fail, and its presentation in the past tense (suggesting that the event had already occurred) seemed to overstate the case, to be premature, or else simply to have been wielded in service of a partisan, ideological attack. Today, the title seems much less provocative. For all with eyes to see, liberalism has, if not outright failed, at least been in the throes of a crisis which it seems unable to weather. It is no longer hegemonic and as such, at a minimum, it can no longer be taken as “ideological assumption,” as “common sense,” or the “default normative system of our societies.”[2] In the play of Western politics, “liberalism is no longer the stage.”[3] Emerging in its place is a new ecosystem, wherein myriad political imaginaries are blossoming, going by names as encompassing as post-liberalism, illiberalism, and anti-liberalism, and as specific as National Conservatism, Catholic integralism, Neoreaction, and many others besides.

What has largely remained an open question for those studying and working in this space is why the left has been relatively absent from this ecosystem. Most of the emergent philosophies just named seem to be pegged to the political right. With the exception of some British post-liberals,[4] the most influential propagators of each came out of the European and North American rights, and often see themselves as the true, or deep, right. A new essay collection by the French thinker Jean-Claude Michéa, entitled Towards a Conservative Left, is a fitting occasion for thinking through these dilemmas. It picks up and plays with (almost mockingly) the inadequacies of traditional binaries for the contemporary moment, as the smushing together of “conservative” and “left” suggests, and asks us to think soberly and philosophically about liberalism itself and the possibility of an alternative. In so doing, it lends itself, perhaps begrudgingly or disinterestedly, to a growing canon of post-liberal works. Thus, while his work could arguably be viewed from several vantage points, it is my contention that Michéa’s theory is distinctly post-liberal. And not only so, but in fact a kind of prefiguration or premonition of what we today call post-liberalism. Michéa’s work, as I will briefly demonstrate, has myriad problems. But it is also of great value when read symptomatically. It can be seen as both prescient and crucial to producing new knowledges concerning post-liberalism and the future of Western politics. The article takes the publication of Towards a Conservative Left as a point of departure and as such reviews it in some depth. But it also does two other things: it critiques the foundations of Michéa’s theory, and it situates his work within a larger story, asking what it tells us about the structural conditions of modern politics. To do these things, the article fleshes out its themes by chronicling a series of what I call Michéa’s heresies, using them to situate him in his own context and ours.

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As an entry point, it is worth noting that Towards a Conservative Left is marked by a biographical streak. This is helpful on its own terms, as Michéa is more than likely being introduced to an English-speaking audience for the first time in these pages. But it lends itself to theoretical significance, too. We are told by Michael Behrent, Michéa’s translator and the editor of this volume, that Michéa “was literally born communist” in 1950.[5] His parents met in the resistance to Nazism, and later came to be devoted members of, and employed by, the Parti communiste français. As he himself says in chapter five of this volume, “For better or worse, communism was my political mother tongue” (78).

Michéa’s experience here is emblematic of an entire generation of French men and women, many of whom would go on to become writers and thinkers (though many more, of course, would not). The shared experience of the Resistance, especially for the working classes, was kept alive in spirit as much by the dinner table behavior of families—as Annie Ernaux has beautifully written about in The Years—as by culture and politics, and lent itself to a softly communist ethic that sometimes did and other times did not solidify in the institutions and dogma of the PCF. In Ernaux’s words, “From a common ground of hunger and fear,” everything in those years that constituted her own and Michéa’s childhood, “was told in the ‘we’ voice and with impersonal pronouns.”[6] Despite growing up “in a family in which communism mattered,” the young Michéa did not follow in his parents’ footsteps and become a lifelong communist. He left the PCF in 1976, in the middle of his twenties (3). His reason for doing so was quite common, the product of disillusionment with actually existing socialism, and the toll was common, too. As he says, “Leaving the Party…was not just an intellectual break-up. It meant ending friendships, which was hard, morally and psychologically” (79).

What we can rescue, theoretically speaking, from this brief foray into Michéa’s early years goes well beyond personal history. It, in fact, captures the spirit of his entire corpus: the spirit of heresy. Jean-Claude Michéa is a heretic. As we have just seen, he was first a heretic in the context of his own family, breaking from his Communist upbringing as a young man. But Michéa’s familial heresy gives way to several deeper heresies over the course of these pages: first, a national heresy against French intellectual culture (at least as it developed in the years after the War); second, a heresy against liberalism, whose hegemony and logics were imbibed by many a former radical, but not Michéa.

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Michéa’s rebuke of France’s intellectual culture takes two forms: one that concerns his intellectual influences, and one that concerns his professional trajectory. To deal with the latter very quickly, we shall say only that, despite being socialized in Paris’ elite institutions and trained in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Michéa forwent a career in academic philosophy at a time when “French Theory’s” prestige was peaking—preferring something much humbler instead. In lieu of pursuing a position at one of France’s prestigious universities, he became a high school teacher in Montpellier. An anarchist-tinged personal ethos drove him to do this: the refusal to succeed (80). This refusal to succeed, this refusal to populate the institutions which were and are so valorized in the country, is nothing short of a rebuke of the animating drives of France’s post-war settlement and intellectual life.

Now the question of influences. We must say that in the course of this heresy, Michéa does something that is almost unspeakable, especially in light of France’s proud and nationally vibrant intellectual culture: he valorizes the English. In particular, one Englishman called George Orwell. What he takes especially from Orwell is a deep concern for “common decency.” This common decency has an interpersonal dimension, of course, which can manifest in one’s relations with neighbors and friends and acquaintances. But more importantly for Michéa, it has a political dimension that can be channeled into opposition to the status quo. The politics of common decency are of a very particular type, and it is here that we see the traces of what I have called Michéa’s first heresy pulsating throughout his second, too. The politics of common decency are, for both Orwell and Michéa, socialist politics. But they are not scientific socialist—that is, Marxist—politics, but rather moral and practical politics. They are politics that view socialism as “an opportunity for working-class action and not as a historical necessity entrusted to theoretical experts” (32). If one senses a subtle critique of historical materialism here, it is made explicit later (83). What all this amounts to, in the words of Behrent, is that Michéa’s work is “less philosophical than moral. He asks us not to be more critical or insightful, but wiser” (13).

Thus, what Michéa calls “working-class socialism”—that is, common decency socialism—is driven not by a desire for power, but for justice. It can therefore be distinguished from a professionalized kind of socialism which has been “taken over” by a déclassé intelligentsia intent on “expropriating” socialism from its roots in the working class. This latter form of socialism is profoundly ideological, operating “in complete indifference to lived experience and objective reality,” and therefore prone to “totalitarian perversion” (22-23, 26, 174, 206). Michéa’s Orwell-inflected socialism, on the other hand, is less a materialist philosophy than a form of moral and ostensibly realist politics that wants to meet the mass of people where they are. His conservative sensibility is clearly on display here.

This realism is rooted in certain assumptions and makes certain claims about the working class: that they are “simple people” with (favorably citing Orwell) “sensitive minds”; that they tend to “express themselves primarily through feelings”; that, by virtue of their contact with physical reality (that is, by virtue of laboring), they are less predisposed to ideology (26-28, 49). From these assumptions and claims follows a series of other claims. For one thing, any revolt worth its name is the product of a ‘generous anger’ motivated by a “spontaneous rejection of injustices…directly suffered or witnessed.” The subjects of these revolts—what Michéa variously calls ‘common man,’ ‘ordinary people,’ or simply the working class—are conceptualized as “those who are indifferent to power and have no need to dominate their peers to feel that they exist” (43). The intellectuals’ revolts, according to Michéa, are informed by a very different source: “envy, hatred, and resentment” (39-41). One can see in this analysis a well-thought-out kind of populism in Michéa’s work, where anti-elitism is not merely guttural but actually theorized.

The spirit of Orwell’s influence leads Michéa down a path that culminates not only in populism and anti-elitism but also in outright anti-intellectualism. Intellectual activity is, in a way, ontologically suspect, preordained not just to be mystificatory and deceptive but prone to the Nietzschean will to power and therefore to totalitarian impulses.[7] I am skeptical of this rehabilitation of Orwell, and do not find this kind of “realism” convincing. In fact, I find it rather essentializing and fetishistic, not to mention prone to reformism (whatever radical sheen Michéa wants to gloss his thought with). It is not only that it is morally questionable and analytically dubious to treat proletarians as noble savages. Philosophically, one is left with a problem: if moral clarity, good character, and noble social behavior are derived from conditions of want, suffering, and physical labor, why would a leftist want the working classes to leave these conditions behind? As Michéa said in an interview, “When your income is too low…you cannot in fact hope to confront the many ups and downs of daily life unless you can count on help from your family or solidarity from your village or neighborhood”[8] (see also 190-191). If it is poverty that breeds the commendable virtues of solidarity and mutual aid, then one should worry if material spoils become too readily available. This is precisely antithetical to Marx’s famous dictum: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.[9] In this Marxist imaginary, the link between want and virtue is severed, and solidarity reigns without relying on material suffering as its scaffolding. To put my cards on the table, I can only say that, unlike Michéa, some of us still dream of the classless society of Marx’s The German Ideology, with material bounty and otium galore.[10] I do not think we would all be worse people in that society than in our own. Rather than pursuing a bit of “justice” for workers in a capitalist system, the left’s goal should be universal human freedom. And in that, to paraphrase Adorno, proletarians have absolutely no advantage over anyone else except insofar as they are structurally situated to bring such a condition to fruition.[11]

What is most striking is that, while Michéa thinks that he is abandoning the potential for totalitarianism when he rejects Marxism in favor of, ironically, bourgeois morality and liberal notions of class and character, he is in fact sacrificing something much more precious—genuine universalism—and in so doing reifying capitalist social relations at precisely the moment he tries to critique them. And it is not as if one cannot see a little totalitarianism in Michéa’s theory either: if intellectual types are ontologically suspect and dangerous, one does wonder what exactly a better society than our own is supposed to do with them.[12] If Orwell is the model, then we cannot help but illustrate this point with reference to that shadowy episode which comes to mind when one hears murmurs of “the list.” That is, the episode wherein Orwell provided a list of names of 135 communists to Britain’s clandestine services.[13] If totalitarianism is latent in intellectual labor, it is probably there too in informing on your fellow citizens.

Finally, even if we are being generous, there is a paradox at the heart of Michéa’s rehabilitation of Orwell and his attendant moralism. That paradox can be gleaned when one tries to square Michéa’s strident anti-liberalism (more on that in the section below) with the fact that Orwell’s work has been consistently and rather easily appropriated by liberalism. A very basic historicization of Orwell makes it obvious why: when he died in January 1950, the Cold War (a term he popularized, as it happens) was already several years old and set to become “hot” six months later in Korea.[14] With both fascism and communism flattened by Orwell into a single thing called totalitarianism, it is no wonder that liberal democratic capitalism could assimilate him to its camp during the Cold War, even if Orwell himself was not a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. And not only during this period: Orwell, even the radical Orwell, was once again appropriated during the War on Terror to justify the worst excesses of liberal adventurism and cruelty during its fight against first Arab and Islamic countries, and then others besides.[15] Of course, one can never (at least not entirely) blame an author for how they have been interpreted, especially after their death, but one does have to ask serious questions about what left their work open to such interpretations in the first place. In this case, I would argue that it is precisely Orwell’s moralism that has done so. This is why Michéa’s imbibing it produces a paradox in his work. It is also why we hear next to nothing from him about why 1984 and Animal Farm are so commonly used by liberals to discipline their ideological competitors (or to stamp any contrarianism in children that may lead to radicalism) and not against liberalism itself.[16] With totalitarianism lurking in every revolutionary movement, liberalism always becomes “the lesser evil” and demands support, which Orwell was quick to provide—a snare that Michéa steps into alongside his hero.[17]

With reference to that other theme we are tracing here, we can say that on all these points we see some affinities between Michéa’s work and post-liberalism. The invocation of common decency, specifically “common decency at a political level” as Michéa calls it, of course, lends itself to what Stefan Borg and others contend is the core of post-liberalism: the desire to return to a politics of the “common good.”[18] This desire for a common good is explicitly expressed throughout the titles and pages of post-liberal works and observed in the best secondary literature on the topic.[19] But the marriage is not entirely a happy one. Michéa comes into conflict with post-liberalism not so much as it pertains to ends, but to means. The post-liberals’ increasing affinity for, and propensity to use, state power in pursuit of the common good is something Michéa cannot abide, suspicious as he is of power as such. With that said, there is a strain of post-liberalism (particularly evident in its British manifestation) that is similarly tepid toward the state, seeing it as they do as an unfortunate consequence of modernity. And Michéa himself is not immune to the temptation of anti-modernism either, as the work of Amaury Giraud has shown and to which we will briefly return to below.[20] However, one more difference must be drawn out before we move on. Post-liberals’ increasingly explicit advocacy of an elite-driven politics does not sit naturally with Michéa’s anti-intellectual populism, for reasons that should be obvious by now. Michéa does not just find the current elite or intelligentsia to be unfortunately (and contingently) corrupt: he finds the existence of these stations and their constitutive characteristics to be immoral and dangerous. So, while Patrick Deneen has tried to reconcile populism and elitism in his “aristopopulism” formulation, it remains clunky at best and undertheorized and highly questionable at worst, and not something Michéa could reconcile himself with even if it were better theorized.

Now, I admit that I am being a bit playful here with this notion of national heresy. Michéa, of course, remains deeply French. He has never taken teaching positions abroad. He, for the most part, does not concern himself with the domestic politics of any country beyond France. And he even speaks beautifully, even poetically, about his connection to the French soil, to Landes, and the small village where he now makes his home as a “countryside philosopher.”[21] But intellectually speaking, he is the first to admit that he rejects both the institutions that propagate France’s distinct intellectual ecosystem and all those fashionable philosophical movements which left Paris and garnered global acclaim in the postwar era—what we Americans vulgarly call “French Theory.”[22] The fact that he identifies much more closely with Orwell’s “Tory anarchism” than existentialism, structuralism, or post-structuralism tells us something. If this is a kind of heresy as I have suggested, it is one that is useful for our purposes here, insofar as it allows us to see that in rejecting the fashions of his national context, Michéa went looking for inspiration elsewhere. This elsewhere was not only England, but America: the sheer amount of references to the American theorist Christopher Lasch in his corpus is staggering, as is the fact that Michéa was almost singularly responsible for popularizing Lasch’s work in France.[23] As Behrent says, “Besides Orwell, no other writer has influenced Michéa as much” (11). So, to the extent that Michéa found what he was looking for outside French intellectual culture, he was able to cultivate a new and distinct kind of theory that both prefigures and aligns with what today we increasingly call post-liberalism. Let us turn more forthrightly to that theme.

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Now, finally, we arrive at one last heresy: the heresy against liberalism.

Here we find Michéa’s most theoretically important contribution, in my view, which comes by way of his “The Unity of Liberalism” essay.[24] The core claims and concepts of this essay, written in 2007—a full decade before post-liberalism really came into its own, I might add—constitute the animating drive of what we now call post-liberalism. These are variously philosophical, anthropological, and historical.

The first thing to say is that Michéa’s account is inevitablist—our present is the “logical realization (indeed, the truth) of the liberal philosophical project” (94). Michéa traces the genealogy of that project exclusively to the birth of Western modernity. While it is rather uncontroversial to suggest that liberalism is a modern philosophy, Michéa’s absolutism is more controversial, insofar as he claims that “liberalism does not borrow any of its major claims from earlier philosophical traditions.” Liberalism is, then, “the modern ideology par excellence”; it is “in truth…[the] only coherent theoretical elaboration” of modernity (97). But what is modernity in this telling? The modern condition is the sum product of the scientific revolution and Europe’s civil (religious) wars. Liberalism anthropologizes these historical developments: the historical experience of civil war and de-socialization becomes constitutive of the human condition itself. The human condition is now characterized by the state of nature, by the war of all against all, and by the autonomous but vulnerable individual. According to Michéa, liberal philosophy is built upon this “absurd” false anthropology,[25] upon this “philosophical transposition of the contemporary condition of civil war” (101). Here, we can also say that if Michéa has an anti-modern streak, as I hinted at above, it is because of his anti-liberalism, and the complete coincidence of liberalism and modernity in his thought. In this way, his work is in a sense more honest than other post-liberals’ because, as Matt Sleat has suggested, the object of the post-liberal critique is very often not liberalism, but modernity in toto (even if post-liberals obscure that fact).[26] Most post-liberals refuse to admit as much—Michéa more or less does (even if by way of a conflation).

In any case, what follows from this “anthropology of weariness,” which describes what humans fundamentally are, is a philosophy for the ideological pacification of society, which must “devalue and neutralize the two most bellicose passions: the claim to possess the truth and the claim to embody virtue” (103-104). Virtue as such comes to be seen as ideological for liberalism. Truth claims as such come to be seen as dangerous.[27] In their stead, we get the neutral liberal state and the impersonal institutions of law and market. Here, superficially, we get the “two” liberalisms: political liberalism, grounded in the law and the individual rights protected thereby, and economic liberalism, grounded in the market and equal exchange.

But Michéa insists that these two liberalisms are one, unified by a common purpose if not a common mechanism: it both cases, the drive is toward “engendering political order and harmony, without ever appealing to individual virtue.” Thus, while it may be possible to “distinguish” between the two, philosophically speaking, they are united. Moreover, “to escape their respective contradictions, each is driven by a structural necessity to seek theoretical support from the other” (105). By avoiding the thorny question of virtue and by sacralizing neutrality, liberalism empties itself of any concept of justice and comes only to be a theory of “adjudication”: the state adjudicates between competing liberties, ensuring that one’s liberty is never used to harm another. Liberal justice, for Michéa, is therefore akin to “traffic laws” (107). Because liberalism can adjudicate claims using the criterion of liberty alone—appealing to some other criteria would bring metaphysics back in, truth claims back in, et cetera— “liberalism’s logical tendency is thus to move gradually towards mass acceptance of every possible behavior imaginable” (108).

Though he obviously would not have been able to address it in 2007, it is evident that such a theory has been unknowingly popularized in contemporary debates, especially as they relate to gender and sexuality and “wokeness,” or what Michéa prefers to call “cultural neoliberalism.”[28] The rise and acceptance of new identities, pronouns, gender affirming care procedures, et cetera, have come to be explained in more or less Michéist terms, part of that “every possible behavior imaginable” formulation authorized by liberalism. The viciousness of the “woke versus anti-woke” culture wars points to a central irony that Michéa identifies: despite liberalism’s invention to quell them, “the infinite extension of liberal rights (or the liberalization of behavior) inevitably winds up unleashing a new war of all against all, driven by a dialectic in which provocation produces stubbornness” (110). The result is a fractured, anti-social society devoid of solidarity, reciprocity, and a shared culture. And further, the need to enforce compliance with, or acceptance of, these newfound rights produces an illiberal liberalism which surveils, censors, cancels, fines or jails those who do not adhere. For this reason, what begins as a “methodical dismantling” of repressive traditions “leads to the gradual establishment of control societies” (129). Michéa, drawing on Orwell as he is wont to do, suggests that this generalized affliction may be “just” according to liberal tenets, but it is not decent (111).

There is something else to be said about the void at the center of liberalism. If this void is characterized by the absence of public virtue, then any conception of virtue will by necessity be privatized. For this reason, “The dialectical movement that inevitably reduces political liberalism, whatever its initial intentions, to free-market liberalism owes nothing to chance” (117). In other words, the “good” comes to be understood and pursued via the market mechanism. The good life is subjugated to the laws of supply and demand. And the reason why is quite simple: the contradictions that pervade political liberalism, discussed above as competing rights claims, cannot be resolved through political liberalism itself. And so, as Michéa rhetorically asks, “If the liberal state is destined to be philosophically empty, what other force than the market can fill in its blank pages by teaching humans how to live?” (118). Through commodification, advertising, and marketing, liberalism trusts the invisible hand to teach us all how to live a virtuous life. For this reason, Michéa argues that “contemporary capitalism constitutes the only historical form in which liberalism’s original doctrine could, in practice, realize itself. Put differently, contemporary capitalism is actually existing liberalism” (94). While some post-liberals might talk about “woke capitalism,”[29] Michéa better understands that taming or de-wokifying capitalism is at best addressing a symptom.

Oddly, “The Unity of Liberalism” is rarely cited by the mostly English-speaking cohort of post-liberals (though Michéa has been favorably cited by John Milbank and Adrian Pabst).[30] But even when uncited, its themes clearly animate, or at a minimum are in accordance with, the work of prominent post-liberals. The inevitablism I discussed above, as is well known, is a nearly ubiquitous post-liberal claim.[31] Critiques of liberalism’s false anthropology course throughout the pages of post-liberal works, too.[32] And the unity of political and economic liberalism is largely taken for granted by post-liberals. Take Patrick Deneen, who suggests in his Regime Change that “The two sides of liberalism—economic and social libertarianism—are revealed to be identical, monolithic, and eager to deploy power in the name of enforcing individual expressivism.”[33] Similar suggestions are characteristic of post-liberal works from across the spectrum. The invocation of liberal enforcement in the previous quote aligns with Michéa’s suggestion that liberal tolerance bleeds into oppressive control—a claim widely adopted by post-liberals, too.[34] And while they speak in different terms than Michéa about liberalism’s move toward accepting “every possible behavior imaginable,” all post-liberals largely agree that liberalism is, in Kevin Vallier’s words, “always hungry. Hungry for liberation.”[35]

This is not to say that there is a pure coincidence between Michéa’s theory and the post-liberal problematic. On the question of capitalism, especially, Michéa is more clear-eyed and has a more radically materialist understanding of the problem than post-liberals do. The most radical alternative to contemporary capitalism that post-liberals seem capable of imagining is merely a redux of postwar corporatism,[36] and their understanding of class is mostly culturalist or adjacent, concerned more with where someone lives, what their ostensible values are, and their consumer habits than whether that person sells their labor as a commodity for a wage.[37] To his credit, Michéa knows these positions are misguided and insufficient. And he has retained enough of his Marxist upbringing to know that the necessity of selling one’s labor-power is a better metric for determining class position than whether one eats at corporate chains or local haunts, or whether one lives in urban centers, exurbs, or rural areas.

Here, it is worth offering another line of critique before proceeding to the closing sections of the article. While others will certainly disagree, especially those more intent on rescuing liberalism than I am, I find Michéa’s argument about the unity of liberalism compelling, and there is much in it to agree with. But it is largely a descriptive analysis; when Michéa wades into prescription, he becomes less convincing. Without recapitulating criticisms levelled in the previous section, the idea that liberal capitalism can be replaced by a society built on Orwellian “common decency” seems to me to start from false, reified, unsustainable premises. Moreover, the strategy sold by Michéa is no more convincing. The fetish for the periphery, and especially the preference for anarchist-tinged spontaneity, diffuse organization, and direct action—in a word, populism—has produced just as much failure (if not more) on the left than its organized, institutionalized, and hierarchical predecessors in the trade unions and mass parties did, as recent work by Vincent Bevins and others has shown.[38] The truth is that Michéa, staunch a critic of liberalism as he is, proffers a mode of politics that is only viable in the wake of liberalism’s presiding hegemony and destruction: his are a politics fit for an age without mass politics, without imagination, and without genuine sociality. They may superficially signal an end to the End of History, but they are a politics more fit for an interregnum than a renewal. This is not to fault Michéa; it is only to point to the sharpest irony in his work.

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As I hope the preceding sections have shown, Michéa’s project was certainly ahead of its time. And today, the character of Western politics is increasingly Michéist insofar as it is increasingly post-liberal. In this sense, Michéa’s work is of great value—but only when approached in a certain way. My contention is that we can read everything in this volume—from the personal biography down to the mature theory—symptomatically, and in fact that we must. Michéa’s trajectory can be symptomatically read as a product of several structural moments. The first being the boom and concomitant elite overproduction of Les Trente Glorieuses, from which Michéa was formed and from which he benefited.[39] His subsequent abandonment of institutional left politics and his move toward a kind of conservatism is symptomatic of a far broader trend, too—and in fact, Michéa’s trajectory is at the softer edge of this trend. Many former communists and socialists moved not away from these and into “conservative leftism,” but rather gave themselves up to the cold embrace of the National Front (or else left politics behind altogether). The statistics of this realignment are well-documented in the academic literature. Its phenomenology, on the other hand, is documented by many a memoirist, such as the aforementioned Annie Ernaux, and more poignantly by Didier Eribon, who writes in his Returning to Reims about his family moving away from the Communist Party and toward the National Front, and the complex emotions and justifications that characterized this transformation.[40]

More than just the intellectual expression of a structural transformation in French society, Michéa’s philosophy can be read symptomatically as an expression of the repeated failure of the twentieth-century left, within the borders of France and without. None of this is to deny Michéa’s agency in all of this, but it is to situate it in a wider context so that it has some relevance outside the thoughts inside one man’s head. If post-liberalism or a “conservative left” appeal today, it is in large part because of the structural malaise that has gripped the Western world over the past half-century or more, characterized by an attendant loss not only of material stability and the comforts of rooted traditions and identities, but of a horizon of genuine possibility for politics. If Michéa’s philosophy is a symptom of this malaise, it is one that was aware of its circumstance relatively early on, and which provides a diagnostic examination of the contours of that malaise and where to lay the blame for it.

One of the epistemological values of Michéa's work, then, is that it can be situated both globally and locally, and advance knowledge in either context. Globally, the structural malaise I just spoke about is evident across the West, and so what appears at first as a distinctly French story becomes applicable in many places outside its borders. But locally, Michéa’s work is crucial for understanding the French context specifically, insofar as it is representative of a hidden, native and organic, genealogy of post-liberalism in a place where such a tradition has superficially not yet existed. It is often commented upon, and true enough as far as it goes, that post-liberalism is an Anglo-American phenomenon.[41] In fact, it is only very recently, perhaps with the 2025 publication of Adrian Pabst’s Penser l’ère post-libérale, that post-liberalism has really been given its due in France.[42] But Michéa complicates this story by advancing a theory that is post-liberal in all but name. In so doing, reading his work on its own terms and symptomatically opens the possibility for a new research agenda that will explore and explicate the distinctly French roots of what is increasingly a global trend. These roots are growing into a formidable ecosystem in France, with Michéa acting as chief pedagogue. That is to say that his “subterranean influence on a new generation” of radicals in France is increasingly bearing fruit and, as I have argued throughout this article, I think we can think of this ecosystem as a node in the global network of post-liberalism.[43] Michéa thus gives us the opportunity to de-parochialize (that is, de-Anglicize) post-liberalism in the same way that some scholars have tried to de-Anglicize liberalism itself by turning to the French context.[44] The local and the global epistemological implications of Michéa’s theory thus work in tandem.

Relatedly, if readers will indulge me one final symptomatic reading, I must note that Towards a Conservative Left exists in the world only because it has been published by Vauban Books, a small publisher whose tagline is “dissidence in translation.”[45] In addition to Michéa’s book, the press has only published six other titles: three books from Renaud Camus, Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, a book from 19^th-century Orientalist Ernest Renan, and a revisionist history of French colonization by Driss Ghali. Those in the know will understand that these books are not for the faint of heart. I bring this up not to libel Michéa with charges of guilt by association—which I categorically reject in every instance—but because it helps to illuminate some of the questions with which I began, concerning the rightward bent of actually existing post-liberalism and, implicitly, the question of whether a left-wing post-liberalism is possible at all. If it can be said that Michéa is genuinely on the left—and I think that he is—it must nonetheless be noted that his theories find little reception there. As much as this tells us anything about Michéa, it tells us much more about the state of the contemporary left, which is so deeply and unthinkingly wedded to liberalism that critics thereof are instead assimilated to the hard right. In abandoning its historic mission, the left has all but ceded the ground of critique to its enemies alone, at least as it concerns liberalism. Quel dommage.

*

When all is accounted for, Michéa’s Towards a Conservative Left has significant value insofar as it allows us to return to a source that is, perhaps unbeknownst to itself and its progeny, both an analysis of and an origin for our politics today. It allows us, therefore, to gain new insights into how we got here, and to more accurately date the demise of hegemonic liberalism. More than just insights into the origins of our contemporary politics, it helps us to understand their contents and contours in new ways, both in their grievances and their prescriptions. While the volume can be critiqued along myriad lines, as I hope I have shown, a symptomatic reading alone is sufficient cause to recommend its distribution far and wide.

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[1] Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press (2018).

[2] Marlene Laruelle, “Is Liberalism as an Ideological Assumption Over?” Brown Journal of World Affairs 31, no. 2 (2025): 23-32. See especially 23-24, 29.

[3] Kevin Vallier, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism. Oxford University Press (2023), 273.

[4] I am thinking specifically here of John Milbank, Adrian Pabst, and Maurice Glasman.

[5] Michael C. Behrent, “Why Michéa Matters.” In Jean-Claude Michéa and Michael C. Behrent (ed.), Towards a Conservative Left: Selected Writings of Jean-Claude Michéa. Vauban Books (2025): 1-19, 3.

[6] Annie Ernaux, The Years. Seven Stories Press (2017), 19.

[7] “The lignification of language—its tendency to become ‘wooden’—thus appears well before totalitarianism, even if the latter completes the process. But the origins of these processes are analogous.” Jean-Claude Michéa and Michael C. Behrent (ed.), Towards a Conservative Left: Selected Writings of Jean-Claude Michéa, 28. Marx, for his part, saw the division between intellectual and physical labor not as ontological and dangerous, but as the contingent product of the capitalist division of labor. In a communist society, “the antithesis between mental and physical labour” would “vanish.” All the better in my view, but it is unclear to me whether Michéa agrees. See Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program. International Publishers (2021), 10.

[8] Michael C. Behrent, “An Interview with Jean-Claude Michéa.” Dissent. June 7, 2019. https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/an-interview-with-jean-claude-michea/.

[9] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, 10.

[10] “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology. International Publishers (1947). Michéa may think that this passage sounds like a version of Club Med, like a bourgeois bohemian’s dream of an all-inclusive resort, but I do not, and I find such a suggestion borderline offensive. See page 209 of this volume for this reference.

[11] “In my estimation, this would involve nothing less than the complete liquidation of the Brechtian motifs which have already undergone an extensive transformation in your study - above all, the liquidation of any appeal to the immediacy of interconnected aesthetic effects, however fashioned, and to the actual consciousness of actual workers who have absolutely no advantage over the bourgeois except their interest in the revolution, but otherwise bear all the marks of mutilation of the typical bourgeois character.” Theodor Adorno, “18 March, 1936 Letter to Walter Benjamin.” In Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics. Verso (1980): 120-126, 124-125.

[12] It should be said that I am being polemical here, as I hope my tone makes clear. Given Michéa’s uncharitable readings, I think it is somewhat appropriate to counter with our own. In reality, and with all seriousness, I reject the concept of “totalitarianism” outright, finding it to be a highly dubious and ideological construct which obscures more than it illuminates.

[13] Christipher Hitchens tries to make light of, or excuse, this episode in his glowing portrait of Orwell, but I find it unconvincing. See chapter seven, “The List,” in Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters. Basic Books (2002), 155-171.

[14] See George Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb.” Tribune. October 19, 1945. Accessed via the The Orwell Foundation. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/you-and-the-atom-bomb/

[15] Christopher Hitchens is again instructive here, given that he consciously tried to model himself after Orwell and became one of the most fervent proponents of the War on Terror. Drawing the two together, he once said, “If you visit North Korea, which I have done, or Iraq under Saddam Hussein, which I have also done…it is not possible to write about it or describe any aspect of it without saying it’s 1984.” Christopher Hitchens, “Why Orwell Matters.” Remarks delivered at the Commonwealth Club (2005). https://christophererichitchens.com/why-orwell-matters-the-commonwealth-club-2005/

[16] On the point about children’s education, John Reed has dealt with the issue succinctly in his review of Christopher Hitchens’ book on Orwell: “Hitchens fails to engage the central issue—the millions of classroom copies of Animal Farm and 1984, and the impact that has had, does have, and will have, on any child who wishes to exhibit a healthy contrarian point of view. To exhibit a revolutionary impulse, in American public schools, is to be met with brays of, ‘Four legs good, two legs bad.’” John Reed, “The Anti-Matter of George Orwell.” The Brooklyn Rail. April/May 2003. https://brooklynrail.org/2003/04/books/the-anti-matter-of-george-orwell/

[17] Michéa approvingly cites Orwell as saying, “I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil.” Surely this is uncontroversial vis-à-vis Nazism and Imperial Japan (though the idea that the crimes of the latter were orders of magnitude worse than their British counterpart seems questionable to me), but as the recent “fascism debate” makes clear, things are today not so clear. The temptation to squeeze Trump, or Le Pen, or Orbán into the fascist box was always as much about disciplining the left into submission as it was about defeating the allegedly authoritarian right. To willingly walk into this trap has been, and continues to be, a mistake for the left. When I say Michéa is reformist, this is one of the reasons why, and it is downstream from his philosophy and influences. For the Orwell quote and Michéa’s approving citation of it, see Michael C. Behrent, “An Interview with Jean-Claude Michéa.” For an introduction to the fascism debate in the United States, see Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (ed.), Did it Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America. W.W. Norton and Company (2024).

[18] See Stefan Borg, The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right. Routledge (2026), 6-7 and passim. Laura K. Field, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. Princeton University Press (2025), 5. Paul Kelly, “The post-liberal movement.” In Duncan Ivison (ed.), Research Handbook on Liberalism. Edward Elgar Publishing (2024): 276-292. Matt Sleat, Post-Liberalism. Polity (2026), 10, 178 and passim.

[19] It is right there in the title of Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism and Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good and in the pages of many more books besides.

[20] See Amaury Giraud, “The Second Birth of Christopher Lasch in France: Roots and Mechanisms of a Postmortem Success.” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 4, no. 2 (2024): 21-31. See also Amaury Giraud, “Penser le conservatisme à gauche : genèse, passé, actualité et continuités paradigmatiques d’une philosophie politique singulière.” PhD dissertation. University of Montpellier, 2021. https://hal.science/tel-04958768/

[21] Antoine-Frédéric Bernhard, “Jean-Claude Michéa, un philosophe établi à la campagne.” Le Regard Libre. January 12, 2024. https://leregardlibre.com/philosophie/jean-claude-michea-un-philosophe-etabli-a-la-campagne/

[22] Fredric Jameson wonderfully traces the history of this period of French thought in Fredric Jameson, The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present. Verso (2024).

[23] Amaury Giraud, “The Second Birth of Christopher Lasch in France: Roots and Mechanisms of a Postmortem Success.” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 4, no. 2 (2024): 21-31. See especially 27-31.

[24] Chapter six of this volume.

[25] Michael C. Behrent, “An Interview with Jean-Claude Michéa.”

[26] Matt Sleat, Post-Liberalism, 117-141.

[27] Two quotes are instructive here. “For the modern mind, ‘virtue’ (whether it draws its official inspiration from religious faith, custom, morality, the civic ideal, or the spirit of giving) is now seen as little more than hypocrisy or self-deception, a constant source of ideological dispute and conflict that constantly threatens to deregulate the subjectless process needed to establish a peaceful society.” And, “The fundamental axiom of political liberalism is well known. If the main reason for human violence is the conviction of some individuals (or associations of individuals, like a church) that they alone possess the truth about the good life, then members of a society cannot live in peace unless the authority responsible for organizing their coexistence is philosophically neutral…” Otherwise, presumably, we would all start killing each other. Jean-Claude Michéa and Michael C. Behrent (ed.), Towards a Conservative Left: Selected Writings of Jean-Claude Michéa, 105-106.

[28] Michéa formulates this concept in Jean-Claude Michéa, Extension du domain du capital—Notes sur le néolibéralisme culturel et les infortunes de la gauche. Éditions Albin Michel (2023). For commentary, see André Larané, “John-Claude Michéa: “Le Wokisme est un néolibéralisme culturel.” Herodote. February 5, 2026. https://www.herodote.net/_Le_wokisme_est_un_neoliberalisme_culturel_-article-3103.php

[29] The most effective propagator of the “woke capital” line has been the activist Christopher Rufo. See e.g., Christopher F. Rufo, “Walmart vs. Whiteness.” City Journal. October 14, 2021. https://www.city-journal.org/article/walmart-vs-whiteness; Christopher F. Rufo, “Unmasking Woke Capital.” Christopher F. Rufo Substack. November 21, 2021.

Unmasking Woke Capital

; Adrian Wooldridge, “An Anti-Woke Warrior Has US Companies Running Scared.” Bloomberg. October 25, 2022. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-10-25/anti-woke-activist-christopher-rufo-has-companies-like-disney-running-scared?embedded-checkout=true

[30] Michéa is cited several times throughout Milbank and Pabst’s co-authored book. See John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future. Rowman & Littlefield (2016). See also, John Milbank, “The Politics of the Soul.” Revista de Filosofía Open Insight 6, no. 9 (2015): 91-108. https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=421639456006, 102-103. It is also important to note that Sohrab Ahmari, a preeminent post-liberal, did blurb this volume. Ahmari’s praise can be found on the volume’s back cover and reads “Jean-Claude Michéa has elucidated perhaps the only political and intellectual framework that might yet save the West. If this seems obvious in retrospect, it is only thanks to his yeoman labor.” The emphasis on retrospect is my own and I have done so because it suggests exactly what I have been arguing throughout this review: that Michéa’s work is a genuine prefiguration of what would later become post-liberalism.

[31] See e.g., Patrick Deneen, “The Tragedy of Liberalism.” The Hedgehog Review (Fall 2017): 38-51, 41, 50; Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 179; Patrick Deneen, “After Liberalism: Can we Imagine a Humane, Post-Liberal Future?” ABC Religion & Ethics (2014). https://www.abc.net.au/religion/after-liberalism-can-we-imagine-a-humane-post-liberal-future/10098770; Patrick J. Deneen, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Sentinel (2023), 3-5, 47, 237; Adrian Pabst, Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal. Polity Press (2021), 18. For commentary on this theme, see Stefan Borg, The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right, 49.

[32] Patrick Deneen, e.g., has said that liberalism ideologically remade the world “in the image of a false anthropology” and later that “Liberalism’s break with the past was founded on a false anthropology.” Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 19, 185.

[33] Later in the same book, Deneen suggests that these “two sides” of liberalism in fact constitute “a single party,” as they “work in tandem to destroy the very institutional forms and traditional bases that supported the working class.” Patrick J. Deneen, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Sentinel (2023), p. 54, 141-142.

[34] For an emblematic example, see Nathan Pinkoski, “Actually Existing Postliberalism.” First Things. October 22, 2024. https://firstthings.com/actually-existing-postliberalism/

[35] Vallier is referring to Adrian Vermeule’s diagnosis specifically, but it is true for all post-liberals. Kevin Vallier, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism, 126.

[36] Sohrab Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc. and Michael Lind’s The New Class War are the most thorough explications of this position, though both suffer from myriad deficiencies.

[37] The emblematic example here is Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite. Penguin Random House (2020).

[38] Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. Public Affairs (2023). See also Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession. Verso (2023). See also my review of these books at Aaron Irion, “Say Goodbye, Wave Hello to Left Populism?” Sublation Magazine. March 29, 2024. https://sublationmedia.com/say-goodbye-wave-hello-to-left-populism/

[39] I am grateful to my friend and comrade Daniel Tutt for raising this point with me.

[40] Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims. Semiotext(e) (2013). See especially pages 125-155.

[41] “Postliberalism, as understood in this book, has two distinct origins: one British and one American.” Stefan Borg, The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right, p. 8. See also pages 14 and 22-44 of the same. See also, Julian G. Waller, “Postliberalism and the 2024 Election.” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 5, no. 2 (2025): 1-19.

[42] Adrian Pabst and Clotilde Brossollet, Penser l’ère post-libérale: Une ‘troisième voie’ pour sortir de la crise démocratique. Éditions Desclée de Brouwer (2025). I am grateful to Stefan Borg for bringing this to my attention in his The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right, 5.

[43] Michael C. Behrent, “France’s Anti-Liberal Left.” Dissent. Spring 2019. https://dissentmagazine.org/article/frances-anti-liberal-left/. See also Behrent’s interview with one of the members of this new generation at Michael C. Behrent, “Irreconcilable Lefts: An Interview with Kévin Boucaud-Victoire.” Dissent. June 7, 2019. https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/irreconcilable-lefts-an-interview-with-kevin-boucaud-victoire/

[44] This is, for instance, a core component of Helena Rosenblatt’s argument insofar as she tries to demonstrate the “centrality of France to the history of liberalism.” Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press (2018), p. 3 and passim.

[45] Homepage: Vauban Books. https://vaubanbooks.com/