Eric Fassin

Eric Fassin teaches at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

In lieu of Sartre and Raymond Aron, future historians of French intellectuals in the Eighties and Nineties may well be condemned to structuring their narratives around the post-Marx brothers of French intellectual life, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. This is not a case simply of contemporary thinkers being dwarfed by the giants of the past – the familiar lament about the decline of French intellectuals is rather unfair. The problem is that Lévy and Finkielkraut play the venerable role of intellectual to perfection – that they imitate their noble ancestors to a fault.

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