#whatireadovershabbat Bernard-Henri Lévy's Barbarism with a Human Face, trans. George Holoch (1977; Harper & Row, 1979)
Bernard-Henri Lévy, a celebrity intellectual known affectionately (and also not so affectionately) in his native France as BHL, has begun a tour for his new book, Israel Alone (Wicked Son, 2024). I’ll see him at his stop at Ohio State Hillel in a few weeks. To prepare, I picked up a few of his books.
In grad school, I only heard of Lévy as an intellectual lightweight, a neoliberal shill. After reading Barbarism with a Human Face, the book that launched him to stardom before he had turned 30, I understand how he earned this reputation, or rather, why it was foisted on him.
In Barbarism with a Human Face, Lévy offers a withering critique of the Marxist-socialist-progressive posturing now endemic in the academy, but which, at the time, extended to the ruling class of many Western countries. So withering is Lévy's critique that it makes sense why academics tend to dismiss him: it's far safer to turn your nose up at a book like this than to read and argue against it. Arguing against Lévy risks granting that he has a point. And if you grant him that, then you have somehow to face the insurmountable obstacle to faith in the ultimate goodness of Marxism, Communism, or socialism: their record of evil. It's disquieting to "do" Marxist criticism when you must remember that it aims at the gulags.
But Lévy goes beyond a critique of Marxism. Barbarism with a Human Face serves up a biting critique of all theories of the good society. Against the state-sponsored socialism of his day, Lévy argued that any abstract “good” hatched in the minds of intellectuals inevitably contains a seed of totalitarianism: such good will always be used to justify the evil that precedes it.
Where does that leave the intellectuals, who have, since Plato's day, dreamed of engineering a utopian world, planned according to their sense of right and reason? The best an intellectual can do, Lévy says, is to fight evil wherever it appears. A far cry, admittedly, from the desire to perfect the world which has animated so many. But within this pessimism there is a kind of optimism. It leaves it to us, to everyone, to work out the good, little by little, for ourselves. And we must believe that we can work it out, since to let someone impose the good upon us is the surest path to hell.
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