Michael C Behrent. French Politics, Culture, and Society. Volume 35, Issue 3, Winter 2017.

Their words, their concerns, their denunciations sound distinctly contemporary. One speaker evokes a “neoliberal current, which has global power,” while another describes “neo-liberal or neoconservative ideologies” as the new “axes of consent.” Still another characterizes “neoliberalism” as a discourse that, “under the pretext of liberating the individual from state interference, in fact constitutes a direct attack on the welfare state.” This critical appraisal of “neoliberalism” is paired with an equally apprehensive attitude towards “globalization” (or mondialisation). “Are we not witnessing,” a speaker asks, “an evolution that is perhaps inevitable, which some would deem desirable, towards globalization?”

These remarks seem integral to the critique of “neoliberal globalization” that has gained traction since the 1990s and is associated closely with the anti- and alter-globalization movement, the anti-neoliberal Left, and intellectuals such as Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Naomi Klein (to name but a few). Yet these words were uttered nearly two decades earlier, in March 1979, at a conference held at the storied “experimental university of Vincennes,” located in a forest east of Paris. The conference, devoted to le nouvel ordre intérieur (or new internal order), was organized by two young professors of English, Pierre Dommergues and Bernard Cassen, and featured a host of prominent intellectuals, academics, and politicians, including Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, François Châtelet, Nicos Poulantzas, and Jean-Pierre Chevènement.

The Vincennes conference occurred at what, in retrospect, appears as a crucial turning point in France’s intellectual, political, and economic history. On the one hand, as a number of recent historians have chronicled, the Marxist outlook that had dominated much of French intellectual life since May ’68 found suddenly itself on the defensive, as it parried blows from the nouveaux philosophes, the anti-totalitarian campaign, and a more diffuse attitude of cultural libertarianism that was gradually emancipating itself from radical politics. On the other hand, scholars increasingly recognize the 1970s as the moment when the ideology known as neoliberalism was invoked to justify the dismantling of the postwar Keynesian welfare state, ushering in a radically new economic era. The 1979 Vincennes conference helps us to rethink both developments. First, the conference reminds us that the critique of Marxism and revolutionary politics in no way extended to every corner of French intellectual life. If anything, it provoked a significant counter-attack, as the 1979 conference attests. Second, the conference suggests that at least one reason why some sixties leftists remained committed to their core values was their assessment that, in the wake of the economic slump triggered by the 1973 oil crisis, capitalism had assumed a new and potentially more insidious form. In this way, the Vincennes conference testifies to the inception of an emergent critical consciousness regarding “neoliberalism” and “globalization,” terms that were only beginning to acquire their current meanings. They would not become fully mainstream in European (and indeed global) political discourse until the 1990s. At present, these ideas are central to the new, post-communist Left, as embodied by the Occupy movement, the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise in France, and a host of other movements that have vehemently attacked the international economic system in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, the Eurozone crisis, and mounting global inequality.

What is perhaps most striking about the Vincennes conference is the lucidity with which its participants conceptualized neoliberalism’s onset. Organizers and other participants advanced the thesis that a “new internal order” was emerging in industrialized countries, in which the dismantling of the welfare state and the postwar economy through market-oriented policies was matched by an apparent retreat of the state’s coercive powers. In other words, under the “new internal order,” the state and other forms of social authority pursued what the organizers called a “soft way,” creating a veneer of freedom which, they maintained, ultimately bolstered the ideological hegemony of capitalist elites. While the conference had little immediate impact, the participants, its context, and the concepts that it explored constitute an instructive moment in the development of a public consciousness and a critical discourse about neoliberalism.

The Organizers

The initiative to organize the conference on le nouvel ordre intérieur was launched by Pierre Dommergues and Bernard Cassen, who not only taught at the University of Paris-8-Vincennes, but had also played critical roles in founding that unique institution. The “experimental university,” as it was known, was the brainchild of Charles de Gaulle’s education minister, Edgar Faure, who, in the aftermath of the May 1968 protests, sought to reform the country’s sclerotic university system. In the summer of 1968, to ensure that the new university would open by January, the education ministry tapped three young academics to implement the project: Dommergues, Cassen, and the literary scholar and soon-to-be feminist Hélène Cixous. Set up in a somewhat improvised fashion on a plot of land owned by the city of Paris in Vincennes Forest, the new campus offered a pioneering vision of a post-’68 university, premised on unconventional pedagogies, interdisciplinary teaching, and unusually progressive policies: students, for instance, could register without having earned the baccalauréat, which opened higher education to non-traditional students and workers. Vincennes also became a magnet for academic radicals: its earliest faculty members included Michel Foucault (before he moved to the Collège de France in 1970), Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, François Châtelet, Alain Badiou, and Nicos Poulantzas, as well as a large contingent of revolutionary student groupuscules. Though some worried that Faure’s plan amounted to a deliberate attempt to round up all the academic leftists at Vincennes, siphoning them off from the rest of the university system, the experimental university would, in the eyes of many, come to embody the enduring spirit of May ’68.

Both Dommergues and Cassen taught in the English department at Vincennes, which later became the department of Anglophone Studies. Their shared interest in the English language played a significant role in shaping their political beliefs. Dommergues, a scholar of contemporary American literature, was fascinated by the ambivalence riddling the culture he studied: in one book, he noted that the Declaration of Independence had triggered “the first modern war of liberation against colonialism,” while ratifying an ideology based on “possession, the cult of production, and consumption.” By the late seventies, in a series of articles written for Le Monde diplomatique, Dommergues maintained that a number of political developments had rendered the latent totalitarianism in American society explicit. While Dommergues found the resurgence of a racist and populist right deeply troubling, he identified the rise of neoconservatism as the most disturbing trend in American politics. In a May 1978 article he discussed Nathan Glazer’s critique of affirmative action, as well as the work of such neoconservatives as Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol. Dommergues was, Cassen maintains, one of the first French intellectuals to address these issues. Neoconservatism’s program, described by Dommergues as “soft fascism,” amounted to the establishment of an authoritarian order in which the apparent liberalization of social and cultural life masked the reassertion of social hierarchies and economic domination. “In the America of the seventies,” Dommergues wrote, “one … finds traces of proto-fascism. Its most troubling [signs] are not tied to the extreme right’s resurgence … but to the insidious development of fundamentally antidemocratic tendencies that are presented as the necessary conditions for a new rationality, new kinds of interdependence, and a new humanism.”

Cassen followed a somewhat different path to radical politics. Born in 1937, he completed an agrégation in English and taught at a lycée and at the Sorbonne before Vincennes. He also worked as a journalist, writing about British society as well as Latin America, which he reported on for both Le Monde and Le Monde diplomatique. This cross-section of interests ultimately led Cassen to address the problem of “cultural imperialism”—specifically, the global ideological and cultural hegemony of American corporations. In an essay from 1979, Cassen explained that he had initially chosen his profession because “with English, one always gets by.” Yet it eventually dawned on him that this hackneyed conviction reflected a disturbing political reality. “The fact,” he explained, “that 85 percent of children—or rather parents—choose English as their first language in middle or high school is only a symptom of the United States’ political, economic, technological, and cultural hegemony over the western world since the Second World War.” This linguistic imperialism, he believed, constituted an extension of the power that American multinational corporations wielded in the global economy. Through the spread of English, American values had come to permeate French society: English language skills determined corporate promotions; French companies adopted American database systems, written in English; and jeans and tee-shirts bearing the names of American universities were all the rage among French youth. This ideology, he maintained, had become even more pervasive following the 1974 election of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who endorsed the “American” values of consensus and liberalism. “How many times,” Cassen asked, “have we heard nostalgic references to ‘good’ American unions, whereas France’s two large unions, the CGT and the CFDT, are seen as ‘revolutionary’ and as perturbing social relations that, without them, would be harmonious?” The year the conference was held, Cassen offered a course at Vincennes entitled “Cultural Imperialism: Case Studies.”

Though Dommergues and Cassen served as the conference’s principal organizers, journalist Claude Julien also played a notable role. Born in 1925, Julien worked for some twenty years as a foreign correspondent for Le Monde and, ultimately, as the head of its foreign news desk. While living in the United States, he developed a deep knowledge of American society, even as he grew increasingly alarmed by the country’s imperialistic ambitions, which he described in a 1968 essay entitled L’Empire américain. In 1973, Le Monde’s editor, Jacques Fauvet, made Julien the editor-in-chief of the newspaper’s monthly supplement on international affairs, Le Monde diplomatique. Under Julien, Le diplo, as it was known, gradually emancipated itself from the daily newspaper, becoming a quasi-independent publication reputed for its highquality journalism and an editorial line steeped in tiers-mondisme. Dommergues and Cassen, as we have seen, wrote for Julien’s paper at the very moment it embarked on this new course. There was thus considerable crossover between Le diplo and Vincennes’ Department of Anglophone Studies, and both organizations proved crucial to planning the 1979 conference. It is unclear which of these three figures first coined the expression the “new internal order,” but it seems most likely that the concept emerged synergistically from the concerns that Dommergues, Cassen, and Julien shared through their involvement in these overlapping radical outposts during the 1970s. It was their growing sense that France, the United States, and the world as a whole was being organized along new economic and political principles that informed their decision to organize the 1979 conference.

The Economic Crisis and the Neoliberal Response

The 1979 conference on the nouvel ordre intérieur was shaped by several contexts, ranging from the global to the parochial. In the first place, the conference reflected a growing consciousness that the 1973 crisis had fundamentally altered the economic system prevailing in western societies since the Second World War and provided political and economic elites with a chance to place their rule on a new footing. To understand these trends, Vincennes’ Anglophone Studies department organized a theoretical seminar in the 1978–79 academic year entitled “Analysis of the Crisis of the Seventies,” whose participants included Dommergues, Cassen, Noam Chomsky, and Henri Lefebvre. This initiative testifies to the growing consciousness among intellectuals that the crisis marked a new phase in capitalism’s history: a shift from postwar Keynesianism to an aggressively free-market orientation. In a March 1979 article published in Le Monde diplomatique, written in preparation for the conference, two economists, Michel Beaud (a Vincennes professor who had briefly been the university’s president) and Daniel Biron, argued that corporations were, in the wake of the crisis, seeking new ways to make capital profitable by unloading loss-making investments, expanding into Third World markets, and clamping down on labor. Since 1973, the policies pursued by industrialized nations to combat the crisis had fallen into two main categories: the “hard,” neoliberal, and (from a capitalist perspective) largely successful model pioneered by West Germany, and the “light,” neo-Keynesian, and ultimately failed approach pursued by France, the United Kingdom (pre-1979), and Italy. West Germany’s “success,” Beaud and Biron explained, could be attributed to the Social Democratic government’s quick response and success in building societal consensus (notably among trade unions) around anti-inflationary and deficit-cutting policies, including slower salary growth, aggressive industrial specialization (primarily in high tech industries) aimed at the export market, and the appreciation of the Deutsche Mark.

France, however, had initially responded to the crisis with far more conventional measures, such as stimulus spending (with little regard for the ballooning public debt). Yet the results of these policies—unprecedented inflation, unmanageable debt, and massive balance of payments deficits—soon proved unsustainable. Consequently, France turned to Germany for a solution. The sudden shift occurred in 1976, when Giscard d’Estaing’s new prime minister, the economist Raymond Barre, adopted an anti-inflationary plan based on the liberal principles favored by West German Social Democrats. Absolute priority now went to restoring France’s balance of payments equilibrium; salary increases were abruptly curbed, and unemployment was used to pressure workers to moderate their demands. As a result, unemployment hit record levels, allowing French employers to sideswipe labor organizations by hiring nonunionized workers (especially immigrants) and resorting increasingly to subcontracting. In short, for Beaud and Biron, 1973 was not only the first major crisis of the postwar period; it also provided businesses and governments with a unique opportunity to reconfigure capitalism along neoliberal lines.

A somewhat different solution to the economic crisis was being explored in the United States. To many commentators, the modèle allemand and the modèle américain represented the fundamental alternatives for navigating through the crisis. Both were seen as embodying forms of “neoliberalism.” Dommergues analyzed the modèle américain in the March 1979 issue of Le Monde diplomatique. Though its New Deal had inspired the post-World War II European welfare state, the United States, as it entered a cycle of “declining growth, unemployment, inflation, underproduction, and underinvestment,” now offered a new model—in fact, two, interrelated models. The first, which he called “liberal-conservatism,” favored an unapologetic return to the free market system, in which “the keyword is competition” and the “enemy [is] state intervention.” Renouncing Keynesianism, this ideology was “supported by small and middle-sized companies and the segment of the middle classes that sees itself as the victim of the social transfers of the 1960s.” Dommergues referred to the other model as “liberal-modernism.” More pro-business than free-market per se, this ideology embraced a kind of “right Keynesianism,” favoring additional government support for the private sector and public support for internationally competitive high tech industries. Both models, Dommergues asserted, were “neoliberal”: “these two currents of neoliberalism are connected in their will to impose a new distribution of wealth, discipline the labor force, and establish a new consensus.” Emblematic of these policies, Dommergues argued, was the Democratic administration of President Jimmy Carter, which had pursued deregulation and austerity, dragged its feet on raising the minimum wage, encouraged non-union and immigrant labor, and promoted “workfare.” The belief that an aggressive form of “neoliberal” capitalism had exploited the 1973 crisis to push its agenda in West Germany, France, and the United States informed the decision to organize the Vincennes conference.

The Trilateral Commission and Democratic Rollback

The fear that business and political elites would take advantage of the economic downturn to reestablish the authority they had lost in the social conflicts of the sixties haunted the conference organizers. The focal point of this concern was a report issued by the Trilateral Commission. Founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller, this commission consisted of politicians, business leaders, and foreign policy scholars from the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. In the late seventies, the Trilateral Commission seemed particularly influential—appearing to many a conspiracy theorist as a kind of shadow world government—due to its strong connections to the Carter Administration. Its 1975 report, entitled The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies, was coauthored by the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, the French sociologist Michel Crozier, and the Japanese sociologist Joji Watanuki. The report maintained that the collapse of the postwar economy in the early seventies was mirrored, at a political level, by a breakdown of democratic institutions. This insight prompted its authors to ask: “Is political democracy, as it exists today, a viable form of government for the industrialized countries of Europe, North America, and Asia?” The question was pressing, given, as the report put it, anxieties concerning “the disintegration of civil order, the breakdown of social discipline, the debility of leaders, and the alienation of citizens.” In the section devoted to the United States, Huntington suggested that the proliferation of democratic politics since the 1960s constituted the primary reason for democracy’s predicament. Without disavowing democracy as such, the report claimed that political institutions in advanced societies could be salvaged only by acknowledging democracy’s limits. In practice, this meant a pushback against what Huntington called the previous decade’s “democratic surge” and a reassertion of social authority, leadership, and expertise. Democracy could be saved, in short, only if industrial societies agreed to live with less of it.

The Trilateral Commission report became something of an obsession with the mid-seventies Left, and the organizers of the 1979 conference were no exception. The idea that political liberties would be scaled back to give corporations free rein proved crucial to conceptualizing the nouvel ordre intérieur. In an article from the March 1976 issue of Le Monde diplomatique, Julien mocked the Trilateral Commission’s report, claiming that it represented a return to the “prestigious tradition of the partisans of a strong state, of ‘law and order,’ who care rather little about the flourishing of democracy.” Others feared that the report presaged an attack on critically minded intellectuals, whom it had in part blamed for contemporary society’s lack of “governability.” A review of Penser la Révolution française, François Furet’s polemic against the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution, that appeared in Le Monde diplomatique in March 1979 wondered whether the historian’s theses were “that different from those of the Trilateral Commission”: both wanted to “reduce political democracy’s immediate scope of action,… reduce appeals to the principles of equality and liberty,” and promote “more reliable forms of management.”

One of the most striking and problematic features of this emerging analysis was the characterization of this new authoritarianism as “fascist.” The intellectuals who made this claim cited Western support for dictatorships promoting free-market policies in Chile, South Korea, and Brazil. Yet Julien, Dommergues, and others also feared that the West was headed in the same direction. This “new” fascism, they believed, had learned from its “older” iteration’s mistakes. In making this argument, Dommergues drew on American political scientist Bertram Gross’s book Friendly Fascism: Logic of a More Perfect Capitalism. Gross defined “friendly fascism” as “the more concentrated, unscrupulous, repressive, and militaristic control by a Big Business-Big Government partnership that … squelches the rights and liberties of other people both at home and abroad.” This fascism was “friendly” in that it relied less on outright coercion than on consent, “positive reinforcement,” and “carefully distributed payoffs.” In describing this new political system as “soft fascism,” the conference participants juggled three interrelated claims: that the current historical situation in the western world (economic crisis, anxieties about democracy, and conservative resurgence) strongly resembled Europe in the 1930s; that the likelihood of a mass, authoritarian party seizing power nonetheless remained, for the time being, virtually nil; yet that even so, an entirely different conception of power—highly authoritarian in some respects, distinctly libertarian in others—was on the rise. The reference to “fascism” served, in short, both to define and differentiate the emergent world order.

The Left vs. the Nouveaux Philosophes

The conference’s third context relates to the French Left’s evolution over the course of the seventies. After a fever pitch of gauchiste activism in the years immediately following May ’68, a number of former student radicals dramatically foreswore the Marxism they once embraced. Seizing on the opportunity presented by the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the so-called nouveaux philosophes André Glucksmann and BernardHenri Lévy wrote pamphlets characterizing Marxism as inherently totalitarian. Meanwhile, the current within French socialism associated with Michel Rocard, known as the “second Left,” took advantage of this controversy to launch a preemptive attack on French Communists (as well as Marxist Socialists). Yet by the late seventies, this critique of Marxism was itself subject to scrutiny. Not only were the nouveaux philosophes reproached for the poverty of their philosophy and obsession with media exposure; they were also accused of complicity with Giscard d’Estaing’s and Barre’s liberal agenda. Indeed, at the same moment that the nouveaux philosophes and the second Left were denouncing Marxism, France’s new president made a public pitch for liberalism in his 1976 essay Démocratie française. Some intellectuals bemoaned the fact that little remained of May ’68 besides a spirit of cultural libertarianism compatible with the economic liberalism reasserting itself in the wake of the 1973 crisis. In 1978, Régis Debray lamented that the esprit de mai had given way to “neo-liberalism,” and that the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola” (as Jean-Luc Godard famously dubbed the sixties generation) had become “the legitimate offspring of hashish and Raymond Aron.”

This critique of “liberal-libertarianism,” as it became known, spilled over into Socialist Party politics. In 1977, Michel Rocard delivered a famous speech describing the French Left as a house divided between “two cultures”: a statist tradition favoring top-down social change versus an anti-statist current seeking the empowerment of civil society. Soon thereafter, the rival Socialist faction associated with Jean-Pierre Chevènement and the CERES (the Centre d’études, de recherches, et d’éducation socialiste) launched a counter-attack, accusing Rocard’s current of being, as one scholar puts it, “born-again liberals, both economically and politically.” In 1978, Chevènement upped the ante in a series of articles, dubbing the Rocardians “the American left.” This claim was central to the CERES’ ideological position, which maintained that capitalism had entered a new imperialistic phase in which the United States exercised global hegemony through multinational corporations. The nation-state, Chevènement maintained, constituted the only rampart against this threat. To charge that the Rocardians and other liberal leftists were “American” was, in short, to accuse them of complicity with Yankee imperialism. In 1978, Chevènement asserted that the function of the “‘American’ left … is to hasten the Americanization of French society and to prevent any revolutionary solutions to the crisis of late capitalism.” The “American left,” he added, espoused a “frantic anti-Marxism” and a “professed hatred of the (national) state, which allowed it to throw itself into the arms of (multinational) capital.” CERES’s two leading figures, Chevènement and Didier Motchane, did not merely participate in the 1979 conference; their ideas harmonized with those of other participants, notably Cassen’s critique of American cultural imperialism. Cassen spoke approvingly of Chevènement’s criticism of the “American Left” in his summary of the conference panel on “The Americanization of Cultural Life.” The sense that an entire sector of the Left had fallen under liberalism’s sway was often expressed at the conference and was constitutive of the idea of a “new internal order.”

Saving Vincennes

Finally, a fourth and more parochial context in which the 1979 conference occurred was the battle for Vincennes University’s very survival. Though the university experienced rising enrollment and claimed to have achieved its goals, it was routinely presented in the media as a redoubt for drug-dealers and sexually depraved leftists. The immediate chain of events that threatened Vincennes’s existence, however, was triggered by a 1975 law that gave the city of Paris unprecedented political autonomy. In 1977, the city’s newly empowered municipal government announced that it would not renew the university’s lease on the land the state had borrowed from the city in 1968. Consequently, the university would have to move by 1979. After three-way negotiations between the university, Paris’s town hall, and the government, the higher education minister, Alice Saunier-Seïté, informed the university that it would be relocated to the northern suburb of Saint-Denis, the site of a small technical university.

The proposed “transfer” of Paris-8 to Saint-Denis triggered organized resistance within the university community. The faculty and administration published a forceful defense of the achievements of Vincennes in a book entitled Vincennes ou le désir d’apprendre. Meanwhile, a “Defend Vincennes” evening was organized at the Palais de la Mutualité. A long list of prominent intellectuals and artists, including Chomsky, Jacques Lacan, Herbert Marcuse, JeanPaul Sartre, Ariane Mnouchkine, and Foucault, signed a petition “to save Vincennes.” When the conference opened, the campus was still actively mobilized around the “defend Vincennes” slogan. At the opening session, Dommergues stated that one purpose of the event was to offer “another image” of Vincennes, contradicting the negative media stories. Throughout the conference, session chairs encouraged the audience to make a ten franc contribution to the Association for the Defense of Vincennes University.

Yet the issue of the “transfer” was not merely a backstage controversy. An examination of literature protesting the initiative kept in the university’s archives suggests that many students and faculty saw the assault on the university as arising from the very neoliberal policies that the conference sought to highlight. Specifically, these leaflets asserted that Giscard d’Estaing’s and Barre’s “advanced liberalism” combined pro-market, anti-worker economic policies with a shift towards authoritarianism. A flyer distributed by the university’s Socialist Party section entitled “Defend Vincennes … And Much More” declared that the threatened “dismantling” of the university was part and parcel of the government’s effort to control intellectual and cultural institutions: “The current government has endeavored to regain control of information and education (the dismantling of the ORTF, the affair of the Parisien libéré, the Hersant Group’s takeover of the Figaro, France Soir, and the provincial press).” It further noted that the “disciplining of the universities, the Haby reform, the pressuring and repression of faculty, the liquidation of Vincennes and departments that were considered subversive or troublesome are but different components of an overarching policy.” A tract distributed by the Vincennes Communist Party committee began by describing the attack on the university as an element of the conservative government’s broader political strategy, which consisted of “making workers pay for the effects of a crisis that itself was produced by monopoly domination.” The Communists, too, maintained that this economic paradigm had important educational repercussions: “In the realm of culture and higher education, this policy naturally leads to the financial stifling of any kind of activism that is judged insufficiently profitable in the short term (in other words, culture in general) and, above all, the methodical destruction of the public service of the university, the role of which will be reduced to that of a service shaped by the demands of capitalist profit.”

Moreover, in naming its handout “The Barre Plan Comes to the University,” the Communist Party committee specifically linked the dismantling of Vincennes with the Barre government’s austerity policies, aimed at fighting inflation and unemployment through salary and price freezes, tax increases, and promoting France’s competitiveness abroad. At Vincennes, it declared, “we are dealing with a reorganization of the same kind that the Barre Plan is imposing on entire branches of industry.” Similarly, the Socialists compared the war against Vincennes to the “disciplining of workers organized by Barre.” Another Communist Party leaflet linked the situation at Vincennes to the government’s takeover of the failing Lorraine steel industry, which resulted in the layoff of tens of thousands of workers. The handout asked: “Is Vincennes that far from Lorraine? Are blast furnaces that far from the pedagogical experiences? The policy of ‘turning the light off’ [i.e., plant closings] assiduously pursued by the government of monsieur Barre has struck both sectors in a single movement.” In short, the connection made in these leaflets between the ordeal at Vincennes and the market-based austerity policies of the Barre-Giscard government suggests that, by the late seventies, students and faculty had not only grasped that a new economic order was emerging, but also developed a critical discourse about neoliberalism that could be used to explain their institution’s predicament.

In these ways, four intertwined contexts shaped the 1979 conference: the economic crisis of the seventies and the economic paradigm shift it triggered; a fear that market liberalization would be accompanied by a rollback of democratic rights; a reassertion of the Marxist (and nationalist) Left against its “antitotalitarian” critics; and the controversy surrounding the French government’s attempt to uproot the University of Vincennes. These contexts not only contributed to the view, shared by some intellectuals, that capitalism was entering a new phase, but also to the belief that the new economic order operated through a cunning mix of social permissiveness and political authoritarianism.

Conceptualizing the “New Internal Order”

The Vincennes conference opened on Thursday, 22 March 1979. The concept of an emerging “new internal order” provided the organizing logic for the program: day one was dedicated to “Restructuring Policies,” the second day to “New Forms of Social Control,” and the final day to a consideration of alternatives.” The proceedings of the conference were recorded (and in some cases filmed) and subsequently published.

Though it took place in 1979, the conference’s ambiance felt in many ways more like 1969. Question-and-answer sessions at the end of the panels became opportunities for long political harangues, which panel chairs attempted, more or less successfully, to cut short. Rowdy behavior and catcalls from the audience interrupted plenary sessions, challenging the organizers’ efforts to stay on schedule without appearing dictatorial. Students whooped their approval of popular speakers. The leonine sociologist Henri Lefebvre was met with particularly boisterous acclaim, eliciting cries of “Vas-y Henri, encore!” Nor were students reluctant to express disapproval of academic mandarins: after Chomsky delivered a long speech in English, pausing periodically while an interpreter translated his remarks, one student complained that the great linguist had inflicted a kind of “death” on the auditorium—words that unleashed a new round of hoots and boos. Meanwhile, session chairs politely requested that audience members refrain from smoking—a plea repeated often enough to suggest that it was usually ignored. Though it would clearly be a mistake to suggest the two dozen or so participants (not to mention the members of the audience) shared a single political position or analytical framework, a set of interrelated concerns appeared in panel after panel.

Perhaps the central intuition informing the notion of a “new internal order” was the idea that Western countries were entering an age of “soft power”—that is, a system that demanded far less ideological conformity and social discipline then had the postwar system, even embracing a considerable loosening of social mores—so long, that is, as major economic interests and the class structure remained unthreatened. While this notion bore some resemblance to the contention of postwar social theorists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Foucault that liberal-capitalist societies were latently hegemonic and authoritarian, what distinguished it was the claim that freedom was directly constitutive of this new paradigm: not only was liberty celebrated by neoliberal ideologues, it was also central to neoliberalism’s economic policies (deregulation, the dismantling of the welfare state, etc.), social practices (the cult of personal fulfillment, liberated sexuality, etc.), and political programs (including the leftist obsession with “self-management”). In its preparatory issue for the conference, Le Monde diplomatique dubbed this new form of power “the soft way.” As Dommergues put it, “[t]oday’s order is characterized by an increased margin of tolerance for individual and civic behavior, on the condition that relations of force remain unchanged. Participation—and why not self-management?—is tolerated, even encouraged, as long as the essential is not called into question.” The new order, Julien noted, broke with the “old” bourgeois belief that, to protect its economic interests, it had to uphold a conservative “moral order.” Yet the private and personal liberties that the “soft way” authorized went hand-in-hand with, and even necessitated, a powerful security apparatus—both to ensure that the dominant economic forces were never threatened and to repress any force obstructing this purely individual pursuit of freedom. Through the “soft way,” neoliberalism could be made consistent with significant degrees of individual liberty, while denouncing its highly restrictive conception of acceptable political demands.

The “soft way,” in the minds of many conference participants, was also central to the “ideological restructuring” underway over the previous decade. Commenting on the United States, Dommergues explained how neoliberals and neoconservatives had criticized the expansion of welfare benefits, asserted that inequality was “natural” rather than social, and attacked “big government”—ideas that had trickled into mainstream discourse. Yet the most insidious aspect of this ideology, Dommergues suggested, was that it perpetuated the conflation between “individual flourishing (who can be against it?) and the anarchic development (who can be for it?) of a self [that is] cut off from the world.” In the United States, the cultivation of “personal growth” and the infatuation with the private sphere of intimacy had undermined the appeal of genuinely emancipatory movements. In its obsession with “personality and narcissism,” contemporary culture had become the unwitting accomplice of capitalist individualism and neoliberal anti-statism.

In a panel on the “Americanization of Cultural Life,” Jean-Pierre Chevènement returned to his critique of the “American Left.” The liberal character of American society, he argued, had fostered the illusion that leftist politics should focus primarily on securing more freedom and democracy in daily life. Yet the problem with environmentalism and feminism, as their fate in the United States suggested, was that such movements could exist without fundamentally altering society’s power structure: the “little desiring machines” thrived comfortably under the shadow of the “great bureaucratic machines” that were the Pentagon, Coca-Cola, or the Ford Foundation. This attack was primarily directed against the second Left, which espoused a similar conception of grassroots politics and participatory democracy: the powers that be, Chevènement maintained, were thrilled by the idea of leftists getting bogged down in the management of local economies. Ultimately, the message of the “American Left” amounted to the following: if you want to change society, “you primarily have to do it at the grassroots level, without preoccupying yourself with the main power centers.” In this way, the “American Left,” according to Chevènement’s definition, shared the same ideological assumptions as the practices of “personal self-fulfillment” analyzed by Dommergues: a quest for individual freedom and communal autonomy that posed no fundamental threat to society’s basic power arrangement.

In addition to restructuring the dominant ideology, the “new internal order,” its participants maintained, also, gave birth to a new kind of state. While there was no agreement on what to call it, the general consensus held that the postwar welfare state was on the way out and that its successor was a different beast altogether. First, the emergent state was adapting to the pressures of globalization. The philosopher Jean-Marie Vincent explained: “The national state is … torn between the necessity to master its own national space strictly defined, which is essential from the standpoint of class equilibrium, and the need to maintain and support an international economic, financial, monetary, and commercial network, which is essential from the standpoint of economic power and prosperity.” One implication of the “globalization” of the state was a “tightening of the political game,” as the state increasingly limited itself “to internalizing [or] transmitting to the national level manifestations of the crisis that are a result of international chaos.” As a result, political theorist Nicos Poulantzas argued that the scope of democratic politics was being severely circumscribed. With the global market narrowing the options available to elected national leaders, the state’s legitimacy depended increasingly on technocrats. Thus while the state’s power dwindled at the international level, it increased—at democracy’s expense—at the national level, as politics was confined to a “bureaucratic and dominant mass party” network. Along similar lines, the political sociologist Pierre Birnbaum argued that Giscard d’Estaing’s call for a “return to liberalism” entailed an abandonment of the state’s normative commitment to a “general interest” transcending particular interests: “civil society,” he concluded, “[was] invading the state,” as increasing collusion between the state and big business attested. Thus the contours of the neoliberal state were slowly coming into focus: its capacity for action was severely limited by a competitive global marketplace; it had replaced party rule with state administration; and it collaborated with large corporations rather than rising above civil society’s particularistic interests.

A further consequence of this transformation of the state was the decline of law at the expense of regulation. The philosopher François Châtelet argued this point with particular vigor. Traditionally, he contended, the state’s authority derived from law. Yet this model of the state had, over the previous fifty years, been gradually replaced by one in which authority was exercised not through law, but rather through “regulation.” As the welfare state expanded its reach into every aspect of social life, it ceased to be guided by legal universalism, preferring to issue regulations based on scientific and technical expertise. The archipelago of state and para-state institutions wielding this regulatory authority had fractured the homogeneous space of the law, reintroducing “a disparity of commands worthy of those attributed to ‘feudal’ regimes, save for the difference that all are potentially subject to them.” Thus while the neoliberal state might appear a good deal less disciplinary than earlier systems—even appealing to post-’68 libertarianism—it had, in fact, imposed a dense grid of state and semi-state regulatory authorities upon the social space.

A final trait of the “new internal order” was the insidious link between economic freedom and security. As Julien observed: “The new internal order … has at its disposal a powerful ally: the taste for security.” For him, this obsession with security was a direct consequence of conceiving of individuals as consumers rather than citizens. The latter accept the risks inherent in self-governance. Security, however, “calls for the abdication of all autonomy in the name of reassuring order.” A significant factor in the emergence of an increasingly sophisticated security apparatus (which participants discussed at length) was computer technology. French consciousness of the imminent “computer revolution” was notably shaped by the publication in late 1977 of a report entitled L’Informatisation de la société, written by two civil servants, Alain Minc and Simon Nora. As evidence of modern society’s anti-democratic drift, the “Minc-Nora report” came second only to the Trilateral Commission in the eyes of many participants. The main authority on these trends at the conference was Louis Joinet, a prominent magistrate. Joinet argued that states were rapidly developing programs for using computers to rationalize their security apparatuses. He mentioned, notably, the GAMIN program (Gestion automatisée de médecine infantile), a computerized system created in the early seventies for supervising childhood illness across the Hexagon. Such technology offered the state staggering possibilities for expanding surveillance: Joinet mentioned the creation of computerized personnel files, electronic eavesdropping, and the development of social profiling programs. While this technology’s often invisible character was consistent with the principle of the “soft way,” it nonetheless represented, Joinet argued, so many “liberty-killing traps.”

While much of the intellectual work of the conference went into defining the emerging system itself, the question of alternatives—and thus resistance— was very much the order of the day. Participants did not rally around a consensus solution, but most agreed on one point: social democracy was not the answer, since social democrats were little more than neoliberalism’s willing executioners. According to the philosopher Jean-Marie Heinrich, a likely outcome of the economic crisis was neither an authoritarian solution nor a revolutionary one, but rather the development of a French form of social democracy. Yet such a system would simply be neoliberalism in sheep’s clothing, so much so that this “neo-social democracy” might be more accurately described as “self-managed capitalism.” Under this arrangement, the capitalist powers, working through organizations like the OECD or the Trilateral Commission, would control the international market and national political machines. They would, however, subcontract power at the local level to intellectuals and the petty bourgeoisie. In this way, “self-management” theorists like Pierre Rosanvallon and Patrick Viveret would see their ideas realized, albeit within very restricted boundaries. Meanwhile, through industrialization, the working class’s power would be decimated. Heinrich dubbed this system “Giscardo-Socialism.” The implication, in short, was that social democracy, far from representing an alternative, constituted a form of collaboration with the emerging neoliberal order.

Tensions: The Nation, the State, and Human Rights

Despite the broad coherence of the theoretical position staked out by conference participants on the emerging neoliberal order, a number of tensions within this shared outlook soon became apparent. The first pertained to the role of the nation in resisting neoliberal globalization. In many respects, the conference marks a significant moment in the rehabilitation of a left-republican conception of the nation that would flourish in the 1980s. For Cassen and Chevènement, only a resurgent nation-state could challenge the American-led effort to create an international market for US-based multinational corporations by dissolving national borders. As Cassen asserted, “Indeed, everything is being globalized. Economies, social policies, and ideologies. And this new concept of globalization makes it possible to throw away that of internationalism, which has become inconvenient, since it still implies the existence of nations.” In his essay summarizing the panel on nationalism and internationalism, Daniel Auffray observed: “The slogan of national independence can be advanced against an internal order that is nothing more than the reflection of the external order imposed by the two great powers, the United States and the German Federal Republic….” The nation was instrumental to preserving local languages and culture against the threat of Americanization and maintaining sovereignty in the face of the European Economic Community and the European Monetary System, both regarded as neoliberalism’s Trojan horses.

Yet this appeal to a kind of progressive nationalism in the name of resisting neoliberalism left some uneasy. Some intellectuals, Cassen acknowledged, were reluctant to speak of “Americanization,” as it smacked of French nationalism. Furthermore, pitting the nation against imperialism could cut several ways. After the panel on cultural Americanization, an audience member of African origin pointed out that the speakers presented themselves as victims of “American acculturation,” when in fact the French were “oppressors” of the Third World as well as national minorities within France. Another African audience member reminded the panel that at school he once had to sing the French nationalist anthem, “Nos ancêtres les gaulois.” Chevènement responded that under the current system of American economic hegemony, there was little difference between an African singing a French song and his own son watching Goldorak (a popular Japanese television series broadcast in France at the time). Traditional tiers-mondistes, however, proved more reluctant to accept such equivalencies: Julien thus remarked that the West’s “liberty and prosperity,” however threatened, was only “one side of the [global] coin”; the other side was “dictatorship and stark misery in the Third World.”

The closely related question of the state also divided participants. In a sense, this debate mirrored the ambiguous picture of the neoliberal state that emerged from their discussions: the state seemed both diminished, due to slashed budgets, deregulation, and globalization, and unusually mighty, as its class character and security apparatus were accentuated. Unsurprisingly, many gauchistes remained deeply suspicious of the state. Lefebvre warned of the emergence of a “new state” that would “recuper[ate]… decentralization, debureaucratization, and even self-management,” allowing it to “withdraw from some of the obligations it had inherited from previous forms.” Yet others believed that, like the nation, the state could prove a powerful weapon against multinational corporations. Auffray observed: “As the heir to the revolutionaries of 1789, and thus profoundly popular in its origins, [the nation] remains the best framework for waging the class struggle. The State must be revitalized through the Nation, so that, like Antaeus, it finds new forces to oppose to that which seeks to take its place.”

A third subject of controversy concerned Western countries’ support for human rights. In his keynote speech, Chomsky argued (as he had in several contemporaneous publications) that President Carter’s human rights initiative constituted a transparently ideological effort to achieve the United States’ longstanding foreign policy goals. This “crusade for human rights” was in fact a “crusade against independent development,” as most of the countries that the United States condemned for human rights abuses fell outside of its sphere of influence (Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, etc.). Meanwhile, American foreign policy officials had praised military takeovers in Brazil in 1964 and Indonesia in 1966- 1967, as well as the Shah’s regime in Iran, as epitomizing enlightened leadership. Chomsky added that, if anything, American involvement and the deterioration of human rights were directly correlated. However, Maria Antonietta Macchiocchi, an Italian writer and Communist politician who taught sociology at Vincennes, publicly disagreed with her “American friend” that human rights were simply an extension of US imperialism. This view, she argued, represented a dangerous return to an “archeo-Marxist current,” ultimately rooted in an “inability to formulate the liberty of the subject in new terms.” As this exchange indicates, the stakes of this disagreement not only amounted to the proper assessment of Carter’s foreign policy, but also whether a shot of liberalism was needed to revive the Left.

The Ambiguous Role of Michel Foucault

A final disagreement that took place at the conference must be mentioned, though the claim that it occurred at all remains speculative. One of the most prominent figures to address the conference was the philosopher Michel Foucault. Yet he was also the only major participant whose remarks were not incorporated into the conference volume. Given Foucault’s willingness to allow his remarks to appear in even the most obscure journals, this omission is surprising. It seems possible that Foucault may have disagreed with the positions expressed at the conference and sought to distance himself from them. Though this hypothesis cannot be irrefutably proven, the evidence is nonetheless compelling.

On the surface, Foucault’s analysis of the political implications of the economic crisis hewed remarkably close to the views expressed by other participants. Indeed, the whole idea of a “soft way” to governance recalled the intuitions about modern power forms that Foucault had explored in his books. In his March 23 presentation, Foucault stated that the most likely effect of the crisis would be a dismantling of the welfare state, since, he observed, the state “can no longer, in the current economic situation, be a welfare state.” Two options remained open. The first Foucault called “the fascist possibility,” discussed frequently at the conference. Yet Foucault explained that fascism means a system in which the state depends on a mass party to dominate society. Consequently, Foucault concluded, “I do not think for the moment that in a country like France it is this possibility, of the coupling of an impotent state with an omnipotent party, that threatens us.” The second possibility, he suggested, was more plausible: the state would withdraw from realms it had previously controlled, acknowledging that it could “no longer afford the luxury, politically and economically, of wielding an omnipresent, meticulous, and costly power.” Instead, it would retreat to a few core activities: ensuring security; enforcing police action within narrowly-defined “margins of intolerance” (while increasing “margins of tolerance”); establishing a “general system of information,” notably through computer technology; and orchestrating consensus through the media.

While the substance of Foucault’s position did not diverge dramatically from other participants’ analyses, its tone and emphasis differed significantly. He was far more reticent to characterize the emerging order as incipiently fascistic, however “soft.” Less than three weeks earlier, on March 7, Foucault had, in his weekly lecture at the Collège de France, expressed frustration with what he called “state phobia” and efforts to discredit the state by likening it to “fascism,” its least acceptable form. Foucault had thus already taken exception to the view, widespread at the conference, that neoliberalism could be equated with “proto-fascism” or the “Brazilianization” of industrialized countries.

Furthermore, Foucault’s conception of the neoliberal state as one that strategically retreats from certain realms in order to redeploy to others (a feature of the liberal state that he had recently developed when examining German Ordoliberalism), while hardly Pollyannaish, was distinctly more subdued than other participants’ accounts. Finally, the prominence of the Chevènement faction at the conference, as well as the repeated attacks on the Rocardian current, was unlikely to have made Foucault feel politically at home. Not only did his own sympathies lie with the second Left, but Chevènement had publicly accused Foucault of being one of the “American Left’s” chief theorists.74 The event’s association with a sector of French socialism that he found insupportable may have been another reason he chose to dissociate himself from it. This omission does, however, add ballast to the claim that the presence at the conference of the French Left’s least social-democratic elements partially explains its participants’ ability to identify neoliberalism as a problem and to mount an intellectual riposte to its earliest manifestations.

Conclusion

The 1979 Vincennes conference gathered an impressive array of speakers to grapple with an issue that French intellectuals had yet, for the most part, to address in any comprehensive manner: the political, economic, and cultural consequences of the 1973 economic crisis. At the same time, its organizers proposed a remarkably coherent concept—a “new internal order” based on the “soft way”—that sought to account for how a complete restructuring of the capitalist system could go hand-in-hand with cultural liberalization and democratic rollback.

Despite these accomplishments, the conference had little immediate impact. Neither the concepts of the “new internal order” or the “soft way” caught on; even the terms “neoliberalism” and “globalization” had to wait until the nineties to become common currency. When this did happen, of course, one of the conference’s main organizers, Bernard Cassen, emerged as a major figure in the rising alter-globalization movement. In 1996, he was named the director-general of Le Monde diplomatique; in 1998, he helped to found ATTAC, eventually becoming its honorary president; and, in 2001, he was instrumental in launching the World Social Forums at Porto Alegre. The conference, moreover, constitutes an important context for understanding the views on neoliberalism that Michel Foucault developed in his Collège de France lectures, which were delivered almost simultaneously. At a time when many are scrutinizing these lectures in search of conceptual tools to critique neoliberalism, a consideration of the positions expressed at the 1979 conference reminds us that Foucault’s assessment of neoliberalism, while hardly uncritical, was far less damning than some of his contemporaries’ (notably on the issue of neoliberalism’s authoritarian or “fascistic” potential). Yet despite its importance for these and other developments, the Vincennes conference is rarely cited, either by historians or activists, as a significant moment in the nascent intellectual awareness of the new economic order.

What the Vincennes conference teaches us is that the basic components of a critique of neoliberalism had been developed within a few years of an economic crisis that had compelled Western capitalist interests to organize themselves along radically new lines. Looking back at the conference, Cassen observed: “It shows one thing, which is that configurations are created that make it possible for projects to crystallize. Here, we had what one might call the logistical configuration and the means to publish and make [ideas] known, and there were ideas in the air and they crystallized [at the conference]. And most likely they later spread.” These ideas include a recognition of how neoliberal economic policies systematically dismantled the postwar economy and the welfare state, an appreciation of the new capitalist order’s global scope, an analysis of the distinctive form of ideological hegemony that accompanied it (notably its cooption of the libertarian spirit of the sixties), and, perhaps, most importantly, the insight that neoliberal economics were, in practice, politically illiberal. Indeed, many of the problems that would subsequently mobilize the alter-globalization movement—the post-Maastricht European Union, the World Trade Organization, the financial crises of the late 1990s—and many of its signature proposals—such as the taxation of financial transactions and the mobilization of international civil society through social forums—were years away from being conceptualized.

Yet the Vincennes conference makes it clear that the consciousness and initial analytical insights necessary for thoroughgoing critique of neoliberalism were in place at an early stage. Moreover, it allows us to reconsider the tendency to see liberalism, democracy, and an uncritical embrace of human rights as the unchallenged “victors” of the ideological battles that occurred in France in the 1970s. While the intellectuals on the left who bucked these trends were increasingly marginalized and perhaps even chastened during these years, they nonetheless proposed a perceptive analysis of contemporary trends and carved out a space on the left between traditional Marxism and social-democratic reformism. While this niche remained largely unoccupied in the decade or so following 1979, its powers of attraction increased considerably when, in the 1990s, anxieties about globalized neoliberalism—and many of the concerns presciently articulated at Vincennes—became our age’s unsurpassable horizon.