The political battle lines have been drawn in Europe too, with Iraq again a litmus test. There, however, the loudest arguments are on the left side of the spectrum. In England, it was public intellectuals such as Guardian columnists David Aaronovitch, Andrew Anthony, and Nick Cohen; Times writer Oliver Kamm; and former New Left Review Editor Norman Geras who accused their own side of being more interested in Bush bashing than in overthrowing a hideous dictator. In France the philosopher André Glucksmann and Doctors Without Borders founder (and current foreign minister) Bernard Kouchner did the same. In Germany, it was the singer, poet, and former dissident Wolf Biermann. A similar debate took place in America a few years ago, with liberal pundits such as Jacob Weisberg, Thomas Friedman, George Packer, and Peter Beinart taking the pro-war position. But the stateside battle has receded in recent years, with most liberal hawks abandoning their previous enthusiasm for the Iraq project.

None of the continental left-wing interventionists consider themselves converts to a new ideology. They’re orphans, they say: The left has left me, they argue, not the other way around. They almost uniformly reject the label neoconservative as a term designed more to insult than to illuminate, though many acknowledge trundling down a path very similar to that of the American liberal who has been “mugged by reality.”

Standing near them, but not exactly among them, is Bernard-Henri Lévy. In 1976 Lévy, a telegenic ex-Maoist famous for his unbuttoned shirts, declared himself a “new philosopher,” becoming, Time noted at the time, an “overnight celebrity” plastered on magazine covers (including reason’s) and on TV talk shows. The following year Lévy would publish Barbarism With a Human Face, his stinging attack on the Sovietophilia of his fellow intellectuals. “No socialism without camps,” he declared. “No classless society without its terrorist truth.”

The left, he still insists, remains “his family,” but it is a clan that continues to disappoint. In Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, Lévy eagerly rejoins the family feud, fiercely criticizing the current state of the European left, an intellectual movement that has been “led astray.” But while many of his diagnoses overlap with those of his hawkish liberal friends, there are plenty of issues, he reminds readers, on which he differs with them. Unlike the hawks, he opposed the invasion of Iraq. But he agrees with them that the European left has traded its principles of human rights for a cheap anti-Americanism and an inconsistent, often incoherent anti-imperialism.

Lévy appears to take great joy in cataloging his countless apostasies from the left. “Socialism is totalitarianism,” he told reason in 1978. “As long as you are a Marxist, you will justify no matter what horror and no matter what evil in the name of historical providence.” But he was, and still is, a reliable social democrat, grumbling in Left in Dark Times about “the ultraconservative enemies of the welfare state” and offering digressions about the massacre at Virginia Tech—in a state, he frets, where “it is every citizen’s inalienable right to possess assault rifles.” As the 40th anniversary of France’s 1968 student rebellion approached in May, French media outlets were filled with misty-eyed remembrances, and Lévy didn’t deviate from that nostalgia. L’esprit soixante-huitard, he repeatedly writes, was “anti-authoritarian,” “anti-totalitarian,” “pro-human rights,” “anti-Stalinist,” even “libertarian.”

Today’s European left, by contrast, is a “creaky ruin” and a “corpse.” It is obsessed with “anti-Americanism,” and it tolerates a remarkable amount of anti-Semitism in the name of anti-Zionism. It embraces illiberal leaders like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela but scorns the “neo-liberalism” of Western Europe and America. For the American reader who pays little attention to the machinations and shifting orthodoxies of European intellectuals, such complaints may seem odd. But our left is different from their left. For Americans, wars among socialist sects are primarily of interest to academics and octogenarian readers of The Nation. We needn’t worry that a coalition government will have to appease a rump Communist Party, nor do any major newspapers, television networks, or high-circulation journals of opinion plump for green, socialist, or syndicalist candidates.

Before unloading on those he accuses of perverting the French left, Lévy engages in an odd spasm of moral accounting, a tabulation of who got what right and when. There’s a certain excessive self-regard here, a bit like the Chris Rock riff in which a father boasts that “I take care of my kids,” hoping for validation, not realizing that for most people this is a normal instinct. Lévy praises a now-defunct newspaper with which he was involved, bragging that “we defended Vaclav Havel, poet and politician!” He pats himself on the back because he “preach[ed] against [the] terror” of the Red Brigades, an Italian terrorist group of the 1970s.

The publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 1973, he writes, “shook our generation to its core.” Well, it shouldn’t have. Reliable information had long existed outlining the brutality and barbarism of both Leninism and Stalinism. (The God That Failed was published in 1949, for instance, and reliable information about the Great Purge of the 1930s had long been available.) The Khmer Rouge’s genocide in Cambodia, which began in 1975, is also presented as a turning point. “Cambodia is when everything unravels,” Lévy writes, “and the age finally realizes what’s what.” And while “not everyone believes it at first”—because they simply have no desire to believe—“the news is verified and spread, it comes as a shock.” Again, one wonders why, this late in the game, mass killings by dictatorships of the proletariat would provoke any surprise.

Lévy denounces left-wing activists such as the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who advised Westerners to support the insurgency in Iraq, as members of “the fake left”—because, he argues, the real left would never excuse barbarism. The conspiratorial view of Western governments’ foreign policy motives, the warnings of impending fascism, and the insistence on viewing all world events through the lens of anti-imperialism, Lévy argues, are handcuffing the anti-totalitarian left. He is doubtless right that shoehorning most every geopolitical dispute into a reductionist argument about the appetites of the Empire (and to his opponents, there is only one empire) “is no longer analysis but magic.” Anti-imperialism, a cause he clearly associates himself with, risks descending into “conspiracy-mongering.” For Lévy, it is difficult to divine imperialist intent in NATO’s intervention in Serbia (which many on the European left opposed, to his irritation) or to view Israel’s war with Lebanon as a quest for territorial expansion, without even a mention of its theocratic enemies.

In his 2007 book What’s Left, a cri de coeur against what he sees as the left’s abandonment of human rights, former Guardian columnist Nick Cohen asked a question clearly on Lévy’s mind, an issue that they both brush against time and again: Why, in so many European capitals, do activists of the left carry signs proclaiming that “we are all Hezbollah now”? It is clearly alarming for Jewish intellectuals such as Cohen and Lévy to see so many old comrades comingling with religious extremists. In Germany, France, and Scandinavia, the parties of the far right are vigorous in their denunciations of American capitalism and American imperialism, and they naturally profess a deep distaste for Israel. The two radical poles are not the same, of course, but in recent years they have frequently overlapped; this in an era when Horst Mahler, the former far-left lawyer-activist and Baader-Meinhof coconspirator, can become counsel and chief ideologue for Germany’s neo-Nazi NPD party. For Lévy, it is time to worry about Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, and potential “‘Red-Brown’ syntheses” of those who view liberalism as a common enemy.

Such concerns are overblown. The radical right has made serious electoral inroads in only a few European countries, its parties are generally excluded from the larger media debate, and there is a mutual skepticism, if not hostility, between it and the left. But Lévy is correct to observe the merging of fringe left and right anti-capitalism, and their common cause in extreme anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism.

Lévy devotes a good deal of attention to the threat of radical Islam, which is the focus of much more debate these days in Western Europe than in the United States. (France is home to roughly 4 million Muslims.) To Lévy, an outspoken atheist, the “most effective tool against Islamism is not the concept of tolerance,” which he rightly sees as an amorphous, vague, and ultimately indulgent strategy, “but the concept of a secular society.” He forcefully denounces the sickening displays of acquiescence seen in “tolerant” countries like Sweden, which seized the Web servers of a right-wing website that republished the now-infamous Mohammad cartoons, a total surrender to those who demand that religion not be mocked.

While much of Left in Dark Times is intellectual score settling, Lévy is also interested in promoting the politics of virtue: He wants to stanch the bloodshed in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Saddam’s Iraq, and Chechnya, and to punish the politics of anti-imperialism for focusing its attention exclusively on the foreign policy of the United States. He is right that those who deny the massacres at Srebrenica, claim that a free press exists in Russia, or disbelieved the accounts of genocide in Cambodia are not reliable allies. But he does not explain how to achieve a “moral” foreign policy, short of engaging the French military in every world hot spot.

This omission is the main difficulty with Left in Dark Times. Lévy predictably suffers from the solipsism and insularity of the public intellectual. As he joined splinter parties, presided over schisms, and denounced heresies, the world barreled forward, globalized, and oversaw the dissolution of the Soviet empire. He is right to criticize his friend Nicolas Sarkozy for his overly cordial relationships with such sinister leaders as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. But he is wrong to presume that the strict morality of a philosopher applies to the everyday business of world affairs. This is the separation between the open-shirted intellectual—who, with a well-worded essay denouncing totalitarianism or imperialism, can easily position himself on the right side of history—and the statesman, who is often forced to engage in realpolitik with unsavory characters. In the end, Lévy tells us what to do (stop genocide, stop denying genocide) but neglects to inform us just how this is to be achieved.

These are doubtlessly admirable goals, but without any coherent suggestions of just how to purge the illiberal elements of the social democratic left, the reader can only assume that Lévy is channeling his inner Marxist: It is the public intellectual—and his moral outrage—that will be the vanguard of the counter-revolution.

Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, by Bernard-Henri Lévy, New York: Random House, 214 pages, $25

BHL, as he is known in France, would be easy to dismiss if he weren’t so damn smart and interesting. Even when he is preening and self-serving, this is a writer who is adept at raising important issues and treating them with intelligence and verve.

“Left in Dark Times” is a much-abridged translation of a book published last year in France, the original title of which can be roughly translated as “This Big Corpse Flat on Its Back.” Lévy sees the left as a corpse, or as a ruin, but rather than writing an account of a drift to conservatism, Lévy offers a polemic explaining why he remains faithful to the core principles of the democratic left.

The book begins with an account of a conversation between the author and conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, who wanted his support as he campaigned for the presidency. Why was it impossible for Lévy to vote for a candidate from the right, even when he is a friend? Interest in this section of the book depends on knowing the contemporary French political scene, but as we are currently wondering whether some of Hillary Clinton’s supporters will bring themselves to vote for a Republican, American analogies do come to mind.

When Lévy turns his attention to core principles, he realizes that he remains an homme de gauche. When Clinton’s supporters see their core principles at odds with the McCain-Palin ticket, will they, too, recognize that democracy must go beyond personality?

What are Lévy’s core principles? He describes four events as pillars of his beliefs: Vichy, Algeria, 1968, and the Dreyfus Affair. These events cemented for Lévy a strong revulsion against fascism and colonialism, and a commitment to fight on behalf of those persecuted by the powerful. Lévy and his intellectual cohort also became vigilant against the ways in which self-described revolutionary movements create their own trajectory toward totalitarianism.

Radicals find scapegoats, and they often adopt a politics of purification that imitates the very fascist structures they had wanted to destroy. This was Lévy’s theme when he rose to prominence as one of the “New Philosophers” in the 1970s, and it remains his core concern today.

The New Philosophers were building on the work of the anti-Marxist left that rejected the anti-democratic dimensions of communism without accepting the radical inequality and injustice produced by modern industrial societies. Lévy rejected the ideology of progress and its capacity to dismiss oppression and suffering as necessary steps in history’s long march. For him, being on the left means “always taking the side of the victims, of the oppressed.”

The incoherence and outright betrayals of the left have grown like weeds among the ruins of totalitarianism, and Lévy devotes much of the book to attacking them. He is sharply critical of the idea of progress embedded in a critique of liberalism that has become fashionable among self-styled radical thinkers in Europe and the United States. Lévy excoriates the intellectual gurus who dig deep to find global systems of empire instead of focusing on the everyday political work of extending human rights, combatting genocide and fighting poverty.

He is particularly effective in diagnosing how anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism have acquired increased ideological legitimacy on the left. For those thinkers (Lévy cites Noam Chomsky) who have already concluded that all evil in the world emanates from the United States, there is no room for victims of merely local wars – even when these amount to genocide: “You can’t be a murderer and be an enemy of the US – so Milosevic was innocent.”

Lévy exposes and dismantles this imbecilic “logic.” What would he put in its place? With the “double crown of equality and freedom” as his guide, he argues that we should replace our embrace of mere tolerance with a more confident promotion of a secular society. Universals can no longer be grounded in the old metaphysical absolutes, but human rights can be extended through secular, universalizable concepts. Without fear of being taken for colonialists, the left should consistently advocate for protecting the oppressed. “European or not,” he writes, “the idea that an adulterous woman shouldn’t be stoned to death or burned alive is an idea worth universalizing.”

A pragmatic, liberal politics of solidarity can generate the political and intellectual energy for a left devoted to freedom and equality. It’s the left we very much need in these dark times.

Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University and the author of “The Ironist’s Cage: Memory, Trauma and the Construction of History.”

The flamboyant French litterateur Bernard-Henri Lévy, widely known in Paris as BHL, acknowledges the problem. In his new book, he writes that “the famous split between Left and Right that has structured French politics . . . has become harder and harder to believe in.” That is because, to his dismay, much of the Left, cuckolded by history, no longer believes in progress or modernity. He describes the contemporary Left, with its signature scowl of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-liberalism, as “that great backward falling corpse which the worms have already started to chew.”

Despite his disdain for much of the current Left, and despite the fact that many of those closest to his point of view in France endorsed the presidential candidacy of the “right-wing” flag bearer Nicholas Sarkozy, a personal friend, Lévy refused to abandon the Socialist ticket. His dilemma, he told Sarkozy, was that no matter how much he liked, respected, and even agreed with the French president, he couldn’t support him because “the Left is my family.” Lévy’s new book is an effort—part memoir, part essay, part polemic—to explain the nature of those family ties.

“And does my insistence, on sticking with the Left that has done everything to empty itself of its substance mean I’m clinging to yesterday . . . to nostalgia? . . . Yes, maybe,” Lévy writes. “But not only.” Lévy’s “not only” refers to the images he treasures of his father in the uniform of the Spanish Republicans who fought Franco; of the great resistance hero Jean Moulin; of the brave socialist Prime Minister of the 1930s, Leon Blum. He acknowledges that “images are not enough” and describes the events that shaped his loyalties and those of his parents. These include the Dreyfus Affair, Vichy France, and the Algerian War, as well as being a young man during the uprisings of May 1968. He wonders if he is worthy of his illustrious ancestors, such as the “young left-wing captains in Portugal 1975 bringing down the Salazar dictatorship.” But here again, he backtracks and adds, “It is true that none of these events can completely justify the clear division of Right and Left.” He recognizes that some on the Right supported Dreyfus and the events of May ’68, while “many socialists . . . pacifists and sometimes Communists” took part in Vichy’s crimes. “These events,” he concludes, “are split by the same dividing line that they purport to draw.”

Some American readers will find themselves exasperated by Lévy’s very French form of discursive, emotional writing, which lacks the concision and specificity of the best English-language essays. BHL criticizes Sarkozy for supposedly writing off the Arab and Islamic rioters of the banlieues who need to be incorporated into France, for example. But his moralizing leaves no room to discuss the rigid terms of France’s statist economy, which makes it almost impossible to create jobs for the unemployed beurs, who have plenty of time to fester on welfare. And some of his concerns are far more salient in a European context than in an American one. Most Americans don’t realize that much of Tony Blair’s cabinet in England consisted of former far-leftists; or that Massimo D’Alema, Italy’s prime minister at the end of the 1990s, was formerly a communist; or that Lionel Jospin, French Prime Minister from 1997 to 2002, had earlier been a Trotskyist for two decades.

But, argues BHL, whatever the considerable failings of those older iterations of Leftism, until the fall of the Soviet Union the Left still had something like a positive agenda. Since then, Leftists—reduced to “the joint ownership of resentment”—have increasingly turned against their parentage, the Enlightenment. The Left now defines itself so closely by its hatred of America and Israel that anti-globalization activists even draw on counter-Enlightenment figures—such as the philo-Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt—to create what BHL calls “a right-wing left.”

The Left’s once proud universalism has devolved into an ethnic particularism, of the sort that once found its home in the fever swamps of the far Right. “We are in a world in which, on the one hand, we have the United States, its English poodle, its Israeli lackey—a three-headed gorgon that commits all the sins in the world—and, on the other side, all those who, no matter what their crimes, their ideology, their treatment of their own minorities, their internal policies, their anti-Semitism and their racism, their disdain for women and homosexuals, their lack of press freedom and of any freedom whatsoever, are challenging the former” and are thus to be defended, Lévy laments. Here he refers, among other examples, to the case of British Leftist playwright Harold Pinter who became, during the Bosnian slaughter of the 1990s, an ardent defender of Slobodan Miloševi?.

Lévy has fought the good fight. His courageous book Who Killed Danny Pearl, based on his extensive travels in Pakistan, unflinchingly described the radical evil of our time. But under the spell of a hopelessly confused nomenclature, BHL, sticking to his anti-Sarkozy guns, concludes with a call for what he terms “melancholy liberalism.” The phrase may sound odd to American ears, but its content is quite familiar. It’s another name for the disillusioned liberalism of 1950s America, with its strong sense of nuance, irony, and complexity. It’s a chastened liberalism worthy of admiration. But after following BHL’s stylish twists and turns in describing the creation of a “right-wing left,” the reader is bound to ask at least two questions. First, when is it time to leave a dysfunctional family? And second, is it not time to free ourselves, as much as possible, from a hopelessly outdated and unavoidably misleading set of political categories?

Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal and a professor of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (Random House, 256 pp., $25)

For all his flash and media savvy, the years have proven BHL to be a steady and serious thinker since he emerged as one of the famous “nouvelle philosophes” in the wake of May 68.

When many of his compatriots toyed in the romantic playground of Maoist fantasy or Marxist revolution, BHL remained a loyal steward of the Enlightenment and staunch defender of liberal civilization. He has kept his eye on the ball of human freedom even as the issues and their context changed, from the Gulag Archipelago to ethnic cleansing to female circumcision, championing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Alija Izetbegovic and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In the same long breath he has condemned Soviet prison camps, genocide against Muslims and the oppression of Muslim women immigrants in Europe in the name of mulitcultural tolerance.

When Daniel Pearl was decapitated by what BHL calls “fascislamists” in a shuttered room on the grimy outskirts of Karachi, he saw more than the murder of a Jew, but a striking out at the impure cosmopolitanism of the American-led liberal order. Though critical of the war in Iraq, BHL nonetheless insists on being “anti-anti-American” because he understands that anti-Americanism is the thread that has linked the three totalitarianisms of our time — fascism, Communism and Islamism. Like Paul Berman in his book “Terror and Liberalism,” BHL sees that that the yearning for purity — whether based in class, race or religion — is what lay at the root of all crimes against humanity. It is the impetus of obscurantism, of the impulse to close off instead of open up, to exclude instead of embrace.

Much of Left in Dark Times is a breathless account of the outright silliness of the French left and the political battles waged over the past few decades as a result of BHL’s public stances. The rest defines the battles ahead for anyone from within the left committed to liberal values.

The stunning central thesis of the book is that “tolerance could be the cemetery of democracies, while secular concepts are their crucible.” For BHL tolerance “is the idea that every belief has every right;’ tolerance “grants all power to communities.” In secular society, human rights come first. In effect, secularism shields the free individual from belief and community. A topical case in point is that of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, targeted by fascislamists and African tribalists for her defense of women against the multicultural relativism that enables “honor killings” or other crimes by Muslim immigrants on European soil.

His concerns ring somewhat less true in the United States. To be sure, every eruption of religious awakening in America has sought, with limited success, to curb civic freedoms. But the powerful assimilationist impulse which converts ethnic communities, especially of immigrants, into individual citizens has been the forte of this fading superpower. Barack Obama is exhibit number one.

I agree with BHL that “the temptation to differentialism,” by which he means relativism that claims the same rights don’t belong to all, is the greatest threat to the universality of reason. But since his gaze is fixed on Europe and the Middle East, he barely mentions China in this book. Yet, surely, the return of the neo-Confucian Middle Kingdom as an influential global power while the West limps toward hegemonic demise is something that ought to engage his attention when he returns pen to page. “Non-universalism” is, after all, a central tenet of China’s resurgent Confucianism.

Even more provocatively for a religious society like America, BHL argues that “atheism is the price of democracy” because it will rescue free people from “the devil and his legion of murderous angels.” By “atheism” he means the rejection of any system of belief rooted in another realm — not just traditional religion but the materialist faiths of Communism and History — that would destroy free individuals in the name of their salvation.

“No other heaven, ever again,” is the slogan BHL proposes in order to avoid the holocausts, genocides, prison camps and blockbuster acts of terrorism in the times to come.

With this slogan, BHL and his atheist fellow travelers such as Christopher Hitchens or the Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka (who has condemned the “psychopaths of faith” trying to muzzle “the Muse of Irreverence”) seek to equate the excommunication of God with the freedom of man and peace, or at least less suffering, in the earthly kingdom.

Others don’t see it that way at all. Jurgen Habermas, the leftist German sociologist, worries that modern, faithless Europe is unable to generate its own values as it heads into the future. Instead, it must fall back on notions of human rights and dignity of the individual that spring from the Judeo-Christian heritage that sanctifies the person because he is made in God’s image. To that end Habermas calls not for atheism, but for a “post-secular ” society that admits religious belief is not inconsistent with modernity.

In his political afterlife, Tony Blair has converted to Catholicism and established a Faith Foundation to spread “religious literacy,” arguing that religion is a force for the good. Even in BHL’s own front yard, French President Nicholas Sarkozy recently hosted the Pope and called for a “dialogue with religion” and a “secularism that respects and includes, not excludes.”

So, must the left be atheist or post-secular? That is the coming debate. And BHL should engage it.

Left in Dark Times is a book of profound insights, even if it is sometimes tough going for the American reader not always so attuned to the tussles of European politics. BHL makes a compelling case against those on the deluded left and elsewhere who would extinguish the Enlightenment. The left, he pleads, should come down to earth and forget its “lyrical” dreams of perfecting mankind through appeals to the beyond that always end up as nightmares. Rather, it should remember the humility of Albert Camus and embrace his “melancholy” humanism. He might also have mentioned, which he doesn’t, good old American pragmatism which lay, granted, sometimes buried beneath our periodic outbursts of messianism.

BHL is right, of course, to warn — “from within the family” — that only by exposing the illusions of the left can it avoid abetting more dark times in the future. He is underlining once again what Immanuel Kant knew and Isaiah Berlin echoed: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” Even, or especially, BHL might add, if God is on your side.

In the following dialogue, I raise some of these issues with BHL:

MY TALK WITH BERNARD-HENRI LEVY: THE EMPTY HEAVEN OF DEMOCRACY (Translated from the French by Bill Weber).

Bernard-Henri Levy, France’s most well-known philosopher, talks with Global Viewpoint editor Nathan Gardels about the controversial ideas in a recent book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand
Against the New Barbarism.

Nathan Gardels: “Tolerance could be the cemetery of democracies, while secular concepts are their crucible,” you write in your book, Left in Dark Times. Wow. That is quite a provocative thesis. Do you really mean that?

Bernard-Henri Levy: Of course, in saying this I mean an extreme form of tolerance, one that prompts us to accept the notion that all opinions, absolutely all, without any distinction or limits, deserve our respect. Where does that leave the opinion of the racist, the fascist, the rapist or that of anyone who, in the name of some ideology or other, calls for mass murder or the assassination of those who offend them?

In the minds of the fanatics of tolerance all these opinions deserve respect; and in their eyes the fanatics themselves expect to be treated equally and with dignity.

This leads to crazy situations like those we observe in England, in the Netherlands and in the rest of Europe, where the discourse of the assassins of Theo Van Gogh in the local mosque, as well as that of the killers who were earlier sent out to track my friend Salman Rushdie, become acceptable.

True tolerance begins only after the prior and adamant decision to exclude any form of discourse proffering hatred, discrimination and murder as acceptable speech. Tolerance is not synonymous with an absolute principle of freedom of expression, which, etymologically speaking, would be “unlinked” from any and all transcendental mandate. To accepts such an unlinked principle would render us speechless, for example, when confronted with the assassins who are in pursuit of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Gardels: You say that “secularism is the crucible of democracy.” How does that apply across the West when Europe is largely a post-religious society but America is quite religious?

BHL: When I talk about secularism, I have in mind a threefold principle. Firstly, political authorities should have absolutely nothing to say about what our spiritual needs should be. Secondly, the task of the state is not to deal with churches, mosques or religious organizations, but rather with each citizen individually, as pure subjects of the law. Thirdly, in the event that the state should deal with religious institutions, it should do so from the outside, in a neutral manner so to speak, on a purely material level, and with the sole objective of creating a public space where those who are religious, atheist or agnostic can all have an equal chance to meet with their followers and provide them with a message of their choosing. This is true secularism in its exact meaning. It also makes the distinction between the United States and Europe less clear cut than the usual cliché suggests.

With respect to France, we are witnessing an attempt to reintroduce religion into the public sphere. It manifests itself in the Muslim organizations who, during the affair of the Mohammed cartoons in Denmark, attempted to force public opinion, as well as judges and even the legislature, to take religious law into account in the drafting of Civil Law. It became apparent during the riots in the outskirts of Paris in November of 2005 when some proposed sending the imams to restore order where the police of the Republic could not. Lastly, it also manifests itself when President Nicolas Sarkozy incessantly invokes what he calls an “open secularism,” thereby intimating that secularism can be “closed” or “negative”, or that it could even ruin the social fabric.

I must underline, however, that on the American side, things are less simple than caricature suggests. When Thomas Jefferson talked about “building a wall” between the political order and the great religious dogmas, he actually recommended nothing else than “Rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and Rendering unto God that which is God’s”. In other words, he issued the most basic secular recommendation.

Where is the evidence that Jefferson’s modern successors, those who incessantly invoke God in their speeches, are really that unfaithful to his principle? When President Bush invokes God is he really doing anything more than affirming a space where all religions are able to express themselves on an equal footing? That is a pretty good definition of secularism.

America has really always steadfastly upheld this principle. Each time you have had a debate about prayer in schools, the decision favored a secular solution. Each time the so-called “creationist” question came up, you have had some quite idiotic positions, some sterile and absurd debates, but the actual dividing wall was never dismantled.

Let’s hope this never changes, which is why this year’s presidential elections are so important. In Sarah Palin you have somebody, who, for the first time ever, seems set on chipping away at this wall if she enters the the White House…

Gardels: In this regard, how is your book being received in America, compared to France?

BHL: It has been received well by those who understood the fundamental principle – that the state has the obligation to provide all religions with the legal, institutional and even material framework within which they can flourish; that it shall not preach, recommend, or favor any religion over any other; and, above all, that it shall not favor those who are religiously inclined over the agnostics or atheists who, in the public space, are entitled to the same place and the same dignity as the believers.

This principle, of course, suits the atheists, but there is no reason why it should not also suit religious minds. If I were an American evangelical Christian, for example, I could not ask for more. I would defend, with all my being, my right to organize, to build beautiful churches, and to do it, above all, on an equal footing with older and already established churches. I would not request, nor would it be in my interest, for the state be the mouthpiece for my message, thereby meddling with my affairs. In other words, defending secularism would not bother me in the least.

I just finished a long book tour which lead me to those cities where the evangelical are numerous, well organized and powerful. And frankly, I found them with this mindset, but I found nobody among them who would bemoan the existence of a wall of separation, which, in reality, protects them.

Gardels: Because of the disasters related to religious intolerance, from the Crusades to “fascislamism” to totalitarian oppression associated with the Communist faith, you argue that atheism is the “price of democracy” – the alternative to which is “the devil and his legion of murderous angels.” So, atheism must go hand in hand with democracy?

BHL: I have nothing against private and personal faith. I am even willing to grant that faith elevates the soul, gives meaning to life, anything you want. Not only will I concede this but I have often said that the whole concept of human rights is inconceivable without the great wagers of Jews and Christians alike around the notion that the human being is inviolable because he was made in the image of the Creator.

However, I do not wish the Prince, or, if you prefer, the state, to invoke any faith in order to accomplish its tasks of governance. I want a state, which is, strictu sensu, atheist or indifferent towards God. I want a state which acts as if Heaven was empty. What is, in the final analysis, the common trait of all the situations and tragedies which you mentioned? They were brought about by people who wanted to bring Heaven to Eart. They are the doings of madmen, who thought that they were able to build the City of Men in the image of the City of God.

Democracy is just the opposite. Democracy runs counter to the illusion, which was shared by the Crusaders as well as the inventors of totalitarian religions and is presently shared by the supporters of Muslim fundamentalism. Democracy is against the idea that it would be not only desirable but also possible to copy a social order from some sort of divine design. Atheism, in this sense, is the politics of democracy.

Gardels: As you come to this conclusion, Tony Blair has converted to Catholicism in his political afterlife and started a Faith Foundation for religious literacy because “you can’t understand the modern world if you don’t understand religion.” His political experience has taught him that religion can be a force for the good.

BHL: I agree with the idea that “you can’t understand the modern world if you don’t understand religion.” My only problem with this concept is its transfer into the realm of politics.

If Blair had made the same statement when he was in power, and if he had drawn consequences from it for his government, that would have been a problem. What consequences could he have drawn?

First, he could have said that “society should espouse and emulate this religious link, whose grandeur I, Blair, have just discovered.” It is very unlikely that Blair, even touched by Grace, would have gone that far, as this would have opened an expressway to pure and simple totalitarianism.

Secondly, he could have drawn the conclusion that the best contract with the subjects of society is one that deals with the churches or mosques en bloc, almost as a flock, looking for us at the church doors by seeking out the bishops or imams who are supposed to speak on our behalf. This opens the door not to totalitarianism, but to “communitarism”, which, in my opinion, is hardly better. Blair, however, did not do this, as far as I know. Instead, he recruited Tariq Ramadan and relied on him for his reflections on political Islam, which, granted, was not particularly brilliant. However, he never fell into the anti-secular trap.

Gardels: You mentioned Sarkozy. Let me return to that point. Nicolas Sarkozy argued, during the Pope’s visit, that “rejecting a dialogue with religion would be a cultural and intellectual error.” He called “for a positive secularism that debates, respects and includes, not a secularism that rejects.” What is your view on this intervention?

BHL: It was not up to Sarkozy to say this. In doing so, he exceeded his prerogatives and his role as president of an authentically democratic Republic. Once again, what is democracy? It is the uncertainty about the ultimate purposes. It is the continuous elusiveness of truth. Once again, it is the empty Heaven. In other words, it is not up to the President of the Republic to comment on what religions tell us about the ultimate purpose of our actions. He is free to believe whatever he wishes, but he should not tell us about it. This is none of our business.

Gardels: Jurgen Habermas, the German social theorist, has suggested of late that what we
need is not atheism but a “post-secular” society in which the religious and secular mentalities
are no longer segregated under some outmoded idea of modernity. Believers and non-believers alike must learn from each other in order to establish a “shared citizenship.” Isn’t this completely the opposite of what you are arguing?

BHL: Well, yes and no. Yes, we must reflect on religions. Yes, they are part of our heritage, both spiritual and moral. But no, this must not interfere with questions related to citizenship.

Gardels: Habermas has come to this conclusion because he doubts that secular modernity is capable of constituting its own values and must rely, as you yourself suggested earlier, on the Judeo-Christian heritage which sancitifed the person as made in the image of God, and thus gave birth to the notions of human rights and dignity.

BHL: Yes, indeed. I said the same thing, long before Habermas, in a book entitled “Le Testament de Dieu”, published in 1979. (It also appeared in the US, published by Harper & Row). Simply put, to say that human dignity is unthinkable outside the Judeo-Christian heritage is one thing. To include this heritage in the social contract, however, is quite another. That is what Pope John Paul II wanted to do in the European Constitution. This is the slippage, the confusion and the misunderstanding that must be avoided at all cost.

In the post-secular society that Habermas conceives, it is vital not to confuse things. To profess that a social contract ought to be reached between individuals who are what they are only as a result of the Judeo-Christian heritage, whose heirs they are consciously or unconsciously, is one thing. I agree with this premise. But to say that the terms of the contract must be based, ever so lightly, on the arsenal of dogmas, rules and articles of faith of the very same Judeo-Christianity, is something else entirely and would constitute a grave error.

Gardels: In your book, a whole chapter is devoted to rejecting “the temptation to differentialism,” arguing for the universality of rights. I have just returned from China where it is clear that a neo-Confucian sensibility is beginning to define a kind of non-Western modernity there. One of the basic principles of Confucianism is a disbelief in abstract universal ideas; the belief that all truths are rooted in concrete local realities- thus the principle of “non-universalism.”

BHL: So be it. This is a different model of development, based on another mentality. I never believed in Fukuyama’s theory of the “End of History” in which the all the world’s conflicts resolve into one model. What you are saying gives me one more reason to feel comfortable with my choice.

Gardels: This non-universalism, Chinese intellectuals will tell you, allows China to avoid both “a clash of civilizations” between universalisms (Islamim or Confucianism vs. the West) and the West’s universalist triumphalism “at the end of history.”

BHL: Yes, that is possible, but in that case these Chinese intellectuals must explain to me how they can, from this starting point, this desire to avoid “the West’s universalist triumphalism”, create something that is similar to human rights. The “West’s universalism” is a meaningless concept. As the term indicates, universalism is universal. It is based on principles which are valid, and fortunately so, regardless of their geographical origin. Let us stop this stupidity! We must abandon this idea according to which all ideas are like plants, firmly implanted in their original soil.

Gardels: Rather than geopolitics, the Chinese talk about a “geo-civilizational” paradigm of the kind, for example, that allowed Buddhism and Daoism to coexist for millennia.

BHL: Granted, but it is not that easy to escape from geopolitics. Look at the great geopolitical choices of China in the last ten years. Look at its position with respect to the question of Darfur, or Iran, or the development of neopopulism à la Chavez. Geopolitics is a form of metaphysics. We are faced with geopolitical choices, which are always linked to the primordial wagers of metaphysics.

Gardels: Though atheistic, isn’t your universalism really a function of the Western idea of modernity, rooted after all, in monotheism? Perhaps non-universality is the future in a post-American world?

BHL: Of course, my universalism is rooted in monotheism. But where I disagree is when we are told that this universalism is an invention linked to that specific tribe, which is the Western tribe. Since when is monotheism an invention of the West? Since when are Jerusalem, Nazareth, or the Sinai Desert in Europe? Come on! Let us abandon these childish views! Alright, human rights first appeared in Europe, and more particularly in England. But this proves nothing of their destiny, their desirable area of influence, or the good they will do in non European countries, which may decide to adopt them. Great ideas transcend borders.

Gardels: Maybe the Chinese are the proof of what Habermas doubts: that the Confucian “ethics of reciprocity” -do unto others as you would have them do unto you — is a non-religious, humanistic ethos, universally shared, but differentially employed?
BHL: Perhaps indeed.

IT IS impossible to imagine any country but France that could produce Bernard-Henri Levy.

BHL, as he is usually known in his native land, manages to bestride the worlds of philosophy, politics, human rights activism and high fashion with equal aplomb, a slender, handsome, swept-haired figure in designer suits and shirts open nearly to the navel. He is married to a fan-magazine beautiful actress and is heir to a vast fortune. He writes weekly columns, appears regularly on television, publishes books and champions the cause of humanitarian intervention with a passion and moral consistency few can match.

He also is regularly assailed as egomaniacal, self-promoting, opportunistic and fundamentally unserious. He is, in other words, a French intellectual celebrity. Levy first came to prominence in the 1970s when — alongside Alain Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann — he helped found the “new philosophers,” who were persuaded to abandon the orthodox Marxist nostrums of the old left by the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” and the witness of East European literary intellectuals, such as Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel and Czeslaw Milosz.

Since then, Levy has championed the cause of military intervention in the Balkans and Darfur, become a firm defender of Israel, investigated the murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl, become an implacable foe of militant Islam. More recently, he retraced De Tocqueville’s journey through America and published a memoir of his experience.

It was no wonder, therefore, that during the recent French presidential election, Levy’s friend Nicolas Sarkozy telephoned and asked the philosopher to do what his old comrade Glucksmann had done: write and publish an article announcing his support for the Gaullist candidate. When Levy declined, citing his membership in the “family” of the left, Sarkozy cited their many practical political alliances and demanded to know why Levy persisted in holding with a movement whose members, at every turn, seemed to reject him and his thought? “Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism” is the author’s reply, arranged in a sequence more closely resembling linked lectures — he is, after all, still a professor of philosophy — than it does chapters.

It’s an apologia based first on shared images, ideals and experience — an aesthetic of loyalty, if you will — and then on a series of critiques of the left’s shortcomings, followed by concrete suggestions for their remedy. (The subtitle is borrowed from his initial anti-Marxist manifesto — “Barbarism With a Human Face” — which was itself a gloss of the Prague Spring’s motto: “Socialism With a Human Face.”)

American readers likely will find two of these chapters/lectures of particular interest. One has to do with the pervasiveness, persistence and perniciousness of anti-Americanism as an ideology. You can get a flavor of how the author deals with that by the fact that he terms “anti-Americanism” the “socialism of imbeciles.” (There’s really no put-down like a French put-down.) Levy’s discussion of contemporary anti-Semitism is sophisticated, detailed and convincing. In his analysis, a new left-wing critique centers on Israel and accuses Jews of first, monopolizing the world’s compassion by insisting on remembering the Holocaust; of creating an industry, Zionism, around that memory; and of using both to establish and maintain a racist, fascist and criminal state, Israel.

Levy is particularly good on showing how this new “progressive” critique of Jewish conduct has merged with traditional prejudices against Jews in commerce and professions to create a new, socially acceptable anti-Semitism in England and continental Europe. (It’s worth recalling in this context that Levy always has supported Israel as a liberal democracy rather than a “Jewish state” and has simultaneously argued for the creation of a Palestinian nation alongside, which is today’s conventional diplomatic wisdom.)

Levy offers as fine a description as you’re likely to find anywhere of what the conventional international left — political and journalistic — has adopted as its worldview: “We are in a world in which, on the one hand, we have the United States, its English poodle, its Israeli lackey — a three-headed gorgon that commits all the sins in the world — and, on the other side, all those who, no matter what their crimes, their ideology, their treatment of their own minorities, their internal policies, their anti-Semitism and their racism, their disdain for women and homosexuals, their lack of press freedom and of any freedom whatsoever, are challenging the former.”

The author is not only a committed secularist in the best French republican tradition, but also an atheist by principle and not simply through skeptical default. Yet he links religious insight with the “tragic wisdom” he proposes as the familial left’s salvation — albeit in that inimitable flow of rhetorical quicksilver that is the BHL signature. He begins with William of Orange’s famed martial dictum: “One need not hope in order to undertake, nor succeed in order to persevere.”

At the Hebrew bible’s heart, according to Levy, is a similar insistence on the necessity for a “laborious, tireless, efficient morality”:

“And that’s the beautiful and strange invention of those Polish rabbis from the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century who — in reaction to Hasidism and its excessive reenchantment of the world . . . — proposed . . . the theory of a God who, of course, created the world; who wanted to do so and who therefore created it, but who after having done so, his need satisfied, then ‘concealed his transcendence’ and ‘withdrew’ — leaving his creatures the responsibility to retain or not the pieces of this universe that he left to them. If men failed to take up the task, the world would fall to pieces.”

On the other hand, “if they took care to keep the world from falling apart — then they would manage to prevent that decreation. . . .

“That is how, in any event, it seems to me that politics ought to be thought of in the democratic age.”

Levy proposes that the contemporary left take from the Dutch warrior prince and the learned rabbis three lessons: One, it’s philosophical and psychological “heaven” that must be emptied, the old idols of transcendence, material perfection and the creation of new men and women smashed with “the good Nietzschean hammer.” Second, there must be a mourning period for lost ideals (illusions?), but without that “nostalgia” that engenders “a hope of return.” Finally, the left must adopt an activism “all the more burning because shorn of the pretense of transcendence.”

“This,” Levy writes, “is the melancholy left of Camus . . . the great Camus, pessimistic and joyous, a skeptic but still a fighter — the Camus who affirms with the same energy that neither the kingdom of Grace nor that of Justice is or will be in the world — but the soft upheaval of whose urgency we can still hear, if we pay attention.”

In Levy’s view, the “choice, after all, is clear”: “the melancholy Left versus the lyrical Left.” The former can move forward committed — or, to borrow the French formulation, “engaged” — to democracy, human rights and solidarity. The latter can drift from one self-delusion, the old messianism (the construction of new men and women), to a new demonology — the Anglo-American alliance and Israel. Meanwhile, a force that would devour both if it were able — Islamo-fascism — lurks in the outer darkness, the new totalitarian threat.

At the end of the day, it won’t be too great a surprise if those who choose Levy’s melancholy left end up in a place that looks very much like the liberal, tolerant, pluralistic civil society proposed in the philosophies of Berlin and Popper. Too bad they’re not read alongside Heidegger, Lacan and Derrida in those continental universities.

L.A. WEEKLY: Your book was inspired by a peculiarly French dilemma — whether or not to vote for a dynamic, reformist, right-wing presidential candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, a friend of yours, who actively sought your support, and if not, why not? You chose to vote for his left-wing rival, Ségolène Royal, and this book is in part a defense of that decision. Explain its relevance to a reader on the American left.

Bernard-Henri Lévy: The situations in the two countries are not the same. But there are comparable elements. I don’t believe in saviors on horseback coming in to heal societies in crisis. There is a Sarkozian brutality, which is, in many respects, the equivalent of what a McCain administration would be like. But I also want to tell you that one reason I voted for the left is that the left is ill. Maybe mortally so. And this kind of illness can only be treated from within. Thus, I want to embrace the left, so as to be in a better position to criticize it. To live in it in order to reform it. It’s a principle that works for France, and also for the United States.

One of the many reasons you chose not to vote for Sarkozy had to do with the question of character — a certain “feverish” quality you detected in him and which you thought unsuitable to the office. I thought of this over the summer, when he welcomed Barack Obama to Paris as if he were already the American president, which struck me as a recklessly unstatesmanlike act. Britain’s Gordon Brown and Germany’s Angela Merkel were careful not to do it, and, after all, John McCain may become president. But this also suggests something about the character of Obama — for he could surely have told Sarkozy that he did not want presidential treatment before he had even officially attained the nomination of his party. You are an Obama supporter. Have you seen anything in his character, or behavior, to shake your faith?

No, I wouldn’t say that. That Obama fell into a snare set by Sarkozy is one thing — and he’s not the first. That he wanted to have any part of it is another — which I don’t believe. In any case, the stakes in this election are too enormous to get hung up on such vicissitudes In my mind, the election of Obama would be a chance for America to end the strife between communities. To cool the mad onrush of competing victimizations. To reconcile blacks and Jews, for example. In brief, to reconcile America herself to her own dream.

Comparing America to a country like France, or to the EU in general, many Americans would say that there is barely a left wing in the U.S. at all — just two shades of conservatism, Democrat and Republican, as Gore Vidal has claimed. Do you agree?

No. I think that [the Gore Vidal line you cited] is one of those typically ultraleftist ideas that I criticize in the book. What is the left according to the dreams of Vidal? Castro? Chavez? The morons who find excuses or reasons for the assassins of 9/11? Come on! You do have an American left. On subjects like health care, the role of government, abortion, civil liberties, there are genuine differences. Between McCain and Obama the differences are enormous. And it’s good that it’s that way.

Toward the end of the book, you construct a heavily veiled argument that could easily be read as support for the decision to invade Iraq. For example, “I’m pleading to detach human rights from their original soil; to replant them in the soils of civilizations that might not necessarily have thought of them … [as] a first step toward a real dialogue between cultures.” This sounds to me like an argument that George Bush, whom you refer to as a “fool,” would make, and in fact has made. Isn’t this a book that purports to be a defense of the left, and an impassioned call for the left to reinvigorate itself, but is likely to be praised more by the right than by the left it hopes to inspire?

If Bush says, at midday, that it’s daytime, I’m not going to force myself to claim that it’s the middle of the night! As to the war in Iraq, it’s very simple. It’s always a good thing that a dictator should be put out of business, and there is no society in the world that ought to be off-limits to human rights and democracy. The idea of accompanying Iraq along this road to democracy, the notion of a “duty to intervene,” applied to Iraq, obviously had nothing wrong with it. The problem is the way in which one acted. An idiotic strategy, the lack of an alliance on the ground to provide cover, and then, above all, the ideological error which is engraved in the genetic code of the neocons: To construct a democracy, you need diplomacy, the state — a very strong intervention by the state — but these men who, in their domestic politics, profess not to believe either in the state or in politics, can’t then claim to believe in them abroad.

Conditions in Iraq look a lot better now than a year ago. Is there a single good word you can say for President Bush?

Yes, of course. He’s not autistic. He’s listened to the criticisms. And he has, finally, at the end of two long years, decided to dedicate himself to the kind of nation-building I mentioned earlier.

As well as the travels across the country you undertook for your last book, American Vertigo, you have spent a lot of time in New York and elsewhere in America. If you had to choose a single characteristic that differentiates the Americans and the French, what would it be?

Movement. Which is to say, the sense of space and also of time.

In a brilliant passage, you describe how French or European ideas about America can be highly contradictory, even nonsensical. The idea that we are still a “Puritan” society is one of them. I suspect you agree with this, however, and would be interested to hear why. Or to put it another way, what is the difference between French and American approaches to sexuality?

In effect, Puritanism! Although it seems to me there is a difference here between men and women. Among the former, I see Puritanical strains that are not fading. But I have the feeling that American women are much less Puritanical than they’re reputed to be. Or, more exactly, that Puritanism is often just an element in their arsenal of seduction. It’s an opinion.

Has Sarkozy said anything to you about your book since its publication earlier this year in France?

No.

LEFT IN DARK TIMES: A STAND AGAINST THE NEW BARBARISM | By BERNARD-HENRI LEVY | Random House | 256 pages | $25 hardcover

He described the left here as suffering from a sublime desolation. We were trapped in “a desert of sorts, a deafening silence, a cosmic ideological void.” But this was a wasteland of our own making, it seemed. We did not call for abolition of the death penalty, or speak out against creationism, or Guantánamo Bay. Nor was there any passion in the opposition to George Bush, who was denounced “mechanically” and “ritualistically.” Worse still–and Lévy was really very shocked by this–American progressives had somehow overlooked “the sheer scale of the outrageous poverty blighting American cities.” Evidently it went unnoticed by the left until Hurricane Katrina.

The essay offered much to chew on, once you picked your jaw up off the floor. It raised important questions. Subtle questions. Questions verging on the metaphysical. Did Bernard-Henri Lévy comprehend that “the American left” and “the Charlie Rose television program” are, in fact, distinct entities? Might there be aspects of social and political life that do not impinge upon the consciousness of Sharon Stone or Warren Beatty (who, to judge by American Vertigo, are among the American left’s most important figures)? Can a thing be, and yet not be, well publicized?

I frame these questions with all due seriousness, for they touch on something one must always keep in mind while reading Lévy’s work–his new book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (Random House, $25), most emphatically included. For BHL (as he is known in France and, increasingly, the United States) is not simply another pundit. He brings to current affairs a certain philosophical method, which he succinctly unpacked not many years ago in his book War, Evil, and the End of History. There Lévy explained that he found it impossible to recognize as valid any political movement “about which I could not have the feeling, even if illusory, that it began, ended, and found its reasoning in me alone.” And so while “the American left” may or may not exist, what Charlie Rose so lovingly calls “this table” certainly does–for BHL has sat at it. Hence certain rigorous deductions are possible.

The interest of Lévy’s latest book comes from watching him apply his version of phenomenology to something grander than our provincial struggle between being and nothingness. Published in France following the election of Nicolas Sarkozy last year, the book opens with BHL receiving a phone call from the candidate. We eavesdrop on Sarko angling for an endorsement and are given a quick tour of the grounds for abundant mutual admiration between philosopher and politician. But, hélas, Lévy must withhold his support, for, as he says, “the Left is my family”–a remark that surprises, not to say unhinges, Sarko.

The naïve reader, too, and perhaps even an American one, may find this claim of leftist affiliation coming out of nowhere. Thirty years ago, Lévy was the coordinator and chief publicist for the New Philosophy–a school of thought, largely staffed by ex-Maoists, that argued that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had not been such a boon to humanity (in all, a reasonable thesis) and so any radical critique of capitalism would lead to the Gulag Archipelago (a judgment that does not seem beyond all argument).

BHL and his cronies never had much influence in the United States, where their work seemed like braised chunks of Karl Popper served in heavy sauce. And serious thinkers of the anti-Stalinist left in France tended to regard the whole episode as an embarrassment, with Cornelius Castoriadis wryly describing New Philosophy as a rare example of double antiphrasis. Still, the movement had its effects on public life–quite like American neoconservativism, for which Lévy has expressed such profound ambivalence. Among the most poignant episodes in American Vertigo is the meeting with William Kristol, whom Lévy finds to be rather less than a serious intellectual and even something of a partisan hack. BHL’s sad astonishment at this realization is itself rather sad and astonishing.

Lévy still regards himself, despite everything, as a man of the left, yet the left is not consubstantial with his ego–an intriguing paradox that demands thorough exploration. The title of Lévy’s book in French refers to the left as “This Big Corpse on Its Back,” which may imply some polemical intent. That is subordinate, however, to the main task of developing an ideology that begins, ends and finds its raison d’être in BHL alone. The author poses himself long rhetorical questions (and often repeats them for clarification, sometimes more than once). He pauses to itemize all the things he is not thinking about, or must ignore–then goes ahead and tells you what he might have to say if he decided to think about them.

We witness a historical re-enactment of the New Philosophical argument that Pol Pot’s regime was the logical culmination of the Marxist revolutionary vision at its purest. Here, the benighted American leftist reader may want to interrupt–to ask if, say, the destabilization of Cambodia by years of carpet bombing during the Vietnam War might be just as germane to understanding the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power as even the most nuanced appreciation of Louis Althusser’s structuralism. (Ideas have consequences, but so do B-52s.)

Such an objection would not be welcome, for one of the two very worst forces in the world, by Lévy’s account, is anti-Americanism. The other is anti-Semitism, which, it seems to BHL, is well on the way to becoming the ideological core of a new, global totalitarian movement. Sooner or later all those kids with Che T-shirts and Noam Chomsky lectures on their iPods are going to discover the Protocols of Zion–and then what happens? Nothing good.

To swim against this sinister tide, it is necessary to insist upon “the correct notion of Islamofascism, or, better, of Fascislamism” (why the latter should be preferable is not clear) and revitalize old leftist commitments to secular society. The good, true, BHLian left will be generously cosmopolitan. “You won’t find me denying that non-European civilizations have produced wonders, and whole worlds, that it would be disastrous to ignore, and even more disastrous to crush beneath the wheel of a lazy, brutal, eradicating Universal,” proclaims Lévy.

That last part is a relief, to be sure. But it places us right back in front of certain problems that are not so readily solved–not in theory and certainly not in practice. For there is a long history of particular societies coming to regard themselves as “concrete Universals” (to borrow from a certain idiom apropos here)–in short, as the fullest possible manifestation of the proper essence of humanity, given the world’s conditions. People in other societies tend not to take this well, at least not when it becomes a foreign policy enforced by B-52s. It makes them resentful, and worse than resentful, and being patted on the head for their colorful history and folkways may not soothe them. Meanwhile, coining expressions that connote a profound link between their civilization and fascism will not promote concord, no matter how carefully you explain the nuances intended. Signifiers can impose their own logic.

Alas, declaring oneself cosmopolitan and open and nonbrutal may not prove helpful, either, however heartfelt the claim. Too often, being “on the left” means being merely well-meaning (particularly so in the United States, where we remain all too uncorrupted by power); but there must be more to it than that, beginning with, as Marx put it, “the ruthless critique of everything existing.” Lévy wants to lay claim to the legacy of antitotalitarian radicalism. He treats it almost like a family heirloom. But he avoids embracing that tradition’s hostility to capitalism–the fundamental sense that there is something deranged and profoundly intolerable about a system in which grain is dumped into the ocean to sustain high prices on the international market while people around the world are rioting for food or finding themselves obliged to eat cakes made of mud.

Lévy sees the future menaced by the prospect of barbarism. He is right to worry. But amid his soliloquies, he makes gestures of warning in the wrong direction. A few years ago, Terry Eagleton wrote that it would take a transformation of the political economy of the entire planet just to make sure everyone on it had access to clean drinking water. I dare say that insight, or something like it (as opposed to, say, an irresistible hankering to go on the road to Cambodia Year Zero), is what drives most people on the left. At least some of us in the United States think that way, when not contemplating the abyss.

Above all, Lévy offers a powerful new vision for progressives everywhere, one based neither on the failed idealisms of the past neither nor on their current misguided, bigoted, and dangerously sentimental attachments but on an absolute commitment to combat evil in all its guises. The “new barbarism” Levy compellingly diagnoses is real and must be confronted. At a time of ideological and political transition in America, Left in Dark Times is a polemical, incendiary articulation of the threats we all face–in many cases without our even being aware of it–and a riveting, cogent stand against those threats. Surprising and sure to be controversial, wise and free of cynicism, it is one of the most important books yet written by one of the crucial voices of our time.

See the fourth cover

BHL made the point, in reference to a scenario sketched out by Fukuyama, that in any conflict between a Muslim woman confronting her family over a love match with a man of whom her family may disapprove, it is the obligation of progressives and the West to side with the individual over the community. This romantic notion, of love conquering all, is anathema to traditional Islamist thought–and takes a strong stand for individual freedom. When BHL made the statement, it was greeted by silence–punctuated by the sound of one person clapping. I turned around and saw a middle-aged Asian woman applauding–surrounded by dumb, silent, and disapproving students and Washingtonians.

I thought to myself: BHL may have a hard sell with this one…

So, I’m going to request an interview with BHL from his Random House publicist (his editor was there, and I did shake BHL’s hand, since practically no one else was around him after the talk). I hope I’ll have a chance to ask him some questions about his book while he’s in the nation’s capital. In the meantime, I did at least get a few photos with my cell phone of the French nouvelle philosophe.

NY Sun review here. You can read an excerpt here. On Kojo Nnamdi’s WAMU-FM radio show, here.

Mr. Lévy will deliver this message and propose a solution — a recommitment to universal values and human rights — in two appearances in New York this week. On Tuesday, he will face off at the New York Public Library with another leftist intellectual celebrity, the Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek. On Thursday, at the 92nd Street Y, he will be interviewed by the editor of the New York Times Book Review, Samuel Tanenhaus, about his latest book, “Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism.”

Mr. Lévy said in an interview that he makes his criticisms as a member of the left himself, who is deeply disturbed by the trends he describes. The three themes of his talk on Thursday, he said, will be the left’s relativism, its anti-Americanism, and its anti-Semitism.

In many leftist circles, he said, “You have this idea that universal criteria should not be applied to every people, to every community,” and “criminal practices are legitimized because they are consistent with a certain cultural framework.” He mentioned as an example Muslim women’s wearing of the veil, which he described as a means of humiliating women.

“I am fed up with the argument that human rights are the privilege of the Western world, and that proposing human rights to the rest of the world is an act of imperialism,” Mr. Lévy said. “Even if human rights are a European invention,” he continued, “why should an idea that was born here or there not migrate elsewhere? Christianity was born in the Middle East, and today it is dominant in America. So why should an idea born in England not be exported to Pakistan or Afghanistan?”

Despite his enthusiasm for exporting human rights, Mr. Lévy did not support the American invasion of Iraq, which he called “morally right, but politically wrong.” As he explained: “It was of course right to overthrow a despot, but it was done by politically illiterate people, who had not the slightest idea of what it means to build a democracy.”

While Mr. Lévy said that some of the strains of intolerance he describes are less potent among the left in America than in Europe, he believes that anti-Semitism is equally rampant and virulent here. As an example, he mentioned the book “The Israel Lobby…,” by the American political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, which argues that pro-Israel organizations exert an inordinate influence on American foreign policy. “It was a true anti-Semitic book, which intended to put the fire in the minds of a lot of people,” he said. This is the new “progressive anti-Semitism: It is not a racist anti-Semitism. It is not a Christian anti-Semitism. It is anti-Semitism in the name of foreign policy,” Mr. Lévy said.

For moral philosophers, dark times offer bright opportunities. When political leaders commit atrocities, intellectuals remind the world of right and wrong. Ever since Emile Zola accused the French military of railroading a conviction in the case of Alfred Dreyfus in 1898, Parisian thinkers have been especially adept at this task. In “Left in Dark Times,” Bernard-Henri Levy, perhaps the most prominent intellectual in France today, seeks to revive this tradition of speaking truth to power.

This time, however, those who stand accused are on the left rather than the right. Levy sees major threats to freedom and individual self-development from genocidal regimes and religious fanatics tempted by terror. All too often, he argues, the left, hating the United States and prepared in the name of anti-imperialism to justify Third World tyrants, looks the other way. Levy hopes to remind liberals of the historic attachment to liberty and human rights that grew out of the French and American revolutions.

The result is a moving and inspiring book. Levy is prominent for a reason. His prose, even when translated into English, never descends into academic jargon. He likes telling stories, even if all too many of them seem to have little purpose other than name-dropping. Most of all, though, Levy is remarkably clear-sighted. He is right not to succumb to the easy anti-Americanism so common in France. His sarcastic dismissal of postmodernist thinkers for their flirtation with fascist ideologues is spot on. For all his criticism of the left, he never succumbs to the right; compared with the neoconservatives in his country and ours, Levy retains his faith in equality as well as liberty.

The opposite of liberty is totalitarianism. As Levy explains it, totalitarians believe that there is an absolute good revealed through history in dialectical fashion and that the world’s problems are the result not of human evil but of a sickness for which only they have the cure. Against such a vision of the world, liberals must insist on a pluralism of ends, an insistence on proper procedures, and the need to respond without qualification to evil in the world whenever it appears. Levy’s big fear is that although the left was eventually victorious over the previous forms of totalitarianism represented by fascism and communism, it has lost its way in dealing with such contemporary issues as genocide and terrorism.

So far, so good; I consider myself a member, hopefully in good standing, of the anti-totalitarian liberalism Levy wants to bring back to life. Yet something nonetheless troubles me about “Left in Dark Times.” This does not involve what Levy has to say about genocide and ethnic cleansing; the world was too slow to respond to the barbarities in Bosnia and Rwanda, and too many innocent people died as a result. My problem lies with the way Levy explains the threat to liberty posed by terrorism, especially those forms inspired by radical Islam. Here he comes much too close to the kind of apologetics he all too rightly accuses the left of engaging in.

It is frequently said that we ought to tolerate religious differences; whatever we might think of Islam, we should respect the rights of adherents to believe what they want. No, Levy responds, what the Muslim world needs is not tolerance but secularism. It is not freedom of opinion that we ought to seek but freedom of thought. Only by applying to Islamic societies the same standards of free inquiry that we apply to our own do we treat Muslims as our equals. If Muslims say that cartoons caricaturing their prophet are offensive and should not be published, we should ignore their calls for sympathy and in the name of freedom of thought be willing to stand charged with blasphemy.

The problem with this way of thinking is not just that secularism taken to such an extreme is itself illiberal; knowing what is right, it tramples on the sensitivities of others with little regard for how they may understand the world. A bigger issue lies elsewhere. Levy is convinced that one reason we do not respond forcefully to Islamofascism– a term he is perfectly willing to use–is because the world is rife with anti-Semitism. Most people, even if not especially on the left, have always hated Jews, he insists, and see no reason to come to the defense of Israel in its own struggle against its terroristically inclined neighbors.

But Israel is not a secular society; it is a Jewish state. If we are to tell Muslims that they ought to open up their societies to outside influences, shouldn’t we be putting pressure on Israel to reform its incredibly strict marriage laws? If we decline to stop the publication of cartoons offending Muslims, shouldn’t we permit people to say anti-Semitic things? Levy ends his book with a ringing call for universalism: “And why can’t something that works in one place not work in another?” he plaintively asks. It is a good question. Answering it, alas, would require a liberalism willing to treat Israel the same way we treat every other country, something that Levy never does.

Levy is right to insist that liberalism embodies enduring universal values as pertinent to our own times as ever. It also requires a deeper willingness to see the flaws of one’s own side than he offers in this book.

Alan Wolfe is professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism
By Bernard-Henri Levy
Translated, from the French, by Benjamin Moser
Random House, 233 pp., $25

So it was satisfying for Mr Lévy to get a begging call from Nicolas Sarkozy last year when he was running for the French presidency. The two men knew each other from Mr Sarkozy’s former constituency, Neuilly, on the edge of Paris, where Mr Lévy lives and votes. As France’s star intello de gauche, could Mr Lévy write “a nice article” endorsing him? No, he couldn’t, Mr Lévy told him. The left was his family. “Your family?” Mr Sarkozy retorted, “These people who’ve spent 30 years telling you to go fuck yourself?” Mr Lévy held firm. Despite everything, he still belonged on the left.

On hanging up, he asked himself why. “Left in Dark Times” is his answer, a mixture of political autobiography, polemic and plea. Four 20th-century episodes fixed Mr Lévy’s general outlook: the Dreyfus affair, France’s wartime Vichy government, the Algerian war and les évènements of May 1968. Those are markers for the “isms” he learned to detest: populism, fascism, colonialism and authoritarianism. He has proud memories of the left. His father fought fascism in Spain in the 1930s. He himself saw left-wing soldiers end Portugal’s dictatorship in 1975.

Other memories make him ashamed of the left: encounters with Indian Maoists who had just shot dead several landowners, or with Mexican and Italian nihilists threatening to shoot him for apostasy. His most shaming memory is Bosnia, whose war he filmed and which he thinks the West, particularly the Western left, betrayed.

In his polemic he attacks the six principal claims of the influential anti-global left. Liberalism is not, Mr Lévy counters, just the free market: human rights and democracy matter too. Europe is not, or not only, a capitalistic machine. The United States is not a semi-fascist country. Humanitarian intervention is not an imperialist ploy. Israel is not to blame for anti-Semitism, which is serious and growing. Militant Islamism is not the West’s fault but a homegrown scourge that threatens the West much as fascism did.

He ends with a plea for the “universal values” of human rights and democracy. He is less for multicultural tolerance than for secularism. By that he means keeping moral and religious demands, where possible, out of politics. The left he would like to belong to is not dreamy about the world. It knows how bad things can get. It accepts that there is evil. He wants a “melancholic” not a “lyrical” left.

Mr Lévy’s essay deserves attention despite notable faults. He writes in bloggese, the underedited, all-in-one-breath style of webchat. For the business-school mind, it is too much about ideas, not policy management. Nor will it detain party politicians, keener to win power than to take stands. But ideas and taking stands matter too. Politics needs intellectuals. In modern times the brainy left provided most of the mental opposition up to the 1960s or so. The right’s eggheads then took over. It is the left’s turn again in Mr Lévy’s view. First, though, its intellectuals need to grow up.

In his new volume, “Left in Dark Times” (Random House, 256 pages, $25), the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy gives a convincing and very troubling answer to that question. Gone, he writes, are the left’s inspiring and necessary ideals: its universalism, its love of justice, its sympathy with the oppressed, its commitment to truth-telling. In their place is a toxic brew of hatreds: of America, conceived as the imperial culprit behind all the world’s crimes; of Israel and the Jews, who now occupy the same place in the left’s demonology that they once held for the nationalist right; even of liberalism itself. Mr. Lévy compares the left — especially, but not exclusively, the French left — to a decomposing body, whose process of decay is releasing noxious pathogens. “Some weak notions,” he writes, “derive a potent energy from their very weakness; some are like bad cells in a body that phagocyte the good ones, killing them but taking nourishment from them.”

Mr. Lévy’s critique is all the more credible because he is himself a man of the left, and proud of the fact. He opens “Left in Dark Times” with a vignette of his telephone conversation with President Sarkozy, during the latter’s 2007 election campaign. Mr. Lévy was a friend and admirer of Mr. Sarkozy’s, yet he could not bring himself to vote for the conservative candidate. “Why didn’t I vote for Sarkozy?” he asks at the beginning of the book. “Why was I so profoundly convinced, then, that it was literally impossible for me to vote for that man?” The reason, he explains, is that his heart and his identity belong irretrievably to the left, to the Socialist Party. “No matter how much I like and respect you,” he told Mr. Sarkozy, “the Left is my family.”

Mr. Lévy’s decision to start the book with this story tells us a great deal about the man. He brags of his closeness to power, the way he can get the president of France on the phone, and also of his celebrity, which makes him such a valuable asset to a political campaign. (In the end, he worked actively for Mr. Sarkozy’s defeated rival, Ségolène Royal.) Later in the book, he will write with serene immodesty about his exploits in Portugal, where he witnessed the overthrow of the Salazar dictatorship, and Bangladesh, where he covered the war between India and Pakistan. In short, he is always conscious that he is not just an intellectual but a brand — BHL, with his good looks and open shirts and actress wife and inherited fortune.

Mr. Lévy’s prose, too, seems to wear an open shirt. In “Left in Dark Times,” he writes very casually, with a rhetorical heat and rhythm better suited to the platform than the page. The book is full of one-sentence paragraphs, run-on sentences, and repetitions. Nor does he shy away from garishness and grandiosity. “Still later, in Italy,” runs one nostalgic passage, “the university amphitheaters filled to overflowing, overheated, wherever I came … Bologna. Milan. Shouts. Raised fists. Terrible, exalted condemnations. Embittered fervor.” Glory days!

This is not how intellectuals write, or act, in America, and it gives “Left in Dark Times” an odor of frivolity. Yet Mr. Lévy is far from a frivolous thinker. He came to prominence in the 1970s as part of the so-called new philosophy movement, whose newness was precisely its rejection of the old communist verities. One of his most famous books described Marxism as “barbarism with a human face.” In his new book, he writes scathingly of “the totalitarian temptation” of which the left was guilty: “the notion that revolution isn’t a fancy-dress party and that because it’s a revolution it’s worth a few mass graves beneath the sun of Good, for the sake of the New Man; the fascination of the clean slate and the white page, which until my generation drove so many projects and desires; the profane millenarianism that was, until so recently, the religion of progressive humanity and whose principal article of faith could be summed up, in its popular version, in the famous saying ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.’”

Yet as he goes on to write, “all of that, as everyone knows, isn’t exactly the problem today.” The left has neither the ideological fervor nor the political strength to make a revolution anywhere in the West. Mr. Lévy’s key point, however, is that this weakness does not equal harmlessness. The left may be “hanging between two worlds, smoke without fire … words without meaning, leaving the twentieth century without quite entering the twenty-first.” But its powerlessness has made it a prey to nihilism and despair, to the point that some of the most inhumane and undemocratic forces on the intellectual scene now march under the banner of the left.

The heart of Mr. Lévy’s book is his strong denunciation of those forces. There is, first of all, the left’s hatred of liberalism — the idea and the very word, which is anathema in French politics. This looks paradoxical to Americans, who are used to associating the word “liberal” with the left wing of the Democratic Party. But in Europe, liberal still carries its original 19th-century meaning as the philosophy of individual freedom; and this freedom, to the French left, is nothing but the Trojan horse of an all-devouring capitalism.

The left’s willingness to abandon the name and tradition of liberalism, to Mr. Lévy, is an ominous sign. “These morons,” as he calls them, forget that “the beautiful word liberty” was the original inspiration for the French Revolution, and for all truly emancipatory politics. Hating liberalism, he argues, means hating the Enlightenment. That is why the left, which once looked up to Lafayette, Locke, and Voltaire, can now flock to politicians such as the dictator Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and even admire the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt.

Such a “Red-Brown” synthesis, Mr. Lévy writes, is only possible because the driving passion of today’s left is no longer liberty or even equality, but hatred. It is locked in a conspiratorial mind-set, which holds that since American capitalism is the root of all evil, all opponents of America or capitalism are ipso facto virtuous. That is why people who call themselves leftists have been found, over the last decade, supporting the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milosevic; and sympathizing with the fascist dictatorship of Saddam Hussein; and turning the 2001 Durban Conference against racism into a festival of anti-Semitic hatred; and deliberately ignoring the genocide in Darfur, because it doesn’t fit neatly into the anti-American worldview.

Mr. Lévy offers the best summary I have seen of that worldview, which can be glimpsed in the works of many influential left-wing philosophers and journalists. “We are in a world in which, on the one hand, we have the United States, its English poodle, its Israeli lackey — a three-headed gorgon that commits all the sins in the world — and, on the other side, all those who, no matter what their crimes, their ideology, their treatment of their own minorities, their internal policies, their anti-Semitism and their racism, their disdain for women and homosexuals, their lack of press freedom and of any freedom whatsoever, are challenging the former.” After reading “Left in Dark Times,” it is impossible to deny that the left, whatever its past glories — and Mr. Lévy remembers them all, from the Dreyfus affair to the events of 1968 — is now a danger to truly liberal values. A danger, despite its decrepitude: for as Mr. Lévy says, “even when they’re not in charge of anything, ideas are what, for better or worse, drive, and allow us to change, the world.”