French intellectual provincialism

In her first column, American economist Deirdre McCloskey criticizes the rigidity of French intellectuals, who are statist and too inward-looking.

We English-speakers all admire French culture. In Switzerland, we know the great liberal thinker Benjamin Constant, from Lausanne, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from Geneva, that important figure in socialist thought. Along with Tocqueville, Bastiat and even Aron, Constant is one of my heroes. Unfortunately, they are all out of fashion in their native countries.

And wherever French is spoken, the food is of course better than that of our German-speaking neighbors. If I hadn't recently developed a wheat allergy, I could eat French bread exclusively, accompanied by French wine, chocolate and cheese. Come to think of it, I can still eat all that except the bread, even if the hundreds of different wines and cheeses are much better with a Parisian baguette.

But there's one aspect of this culture that I don't like, especially in France. French intellectuals today often have a surprising provincialism, a shocking lack of diversity of opinion and a frightening rigidity of thought. They are inward-looking. The French-speaking Swiss and Belgians aren't really like that, and I admire them for it. So are the Italians. So are the Poles. Provincialism can be measured by the percentage of books translated into French from, say, English. But that applies to all non-French people. I have a Dutch friend who was the director and founder of Amsterdam University Press. A publisher from Paris came to Amsterdam every year and made fun of Saskia's art books. Just imagine: making fun of the golden century of Dutch art (1584-1702). My goodness!

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Perhaps this inward-looking attitude stems from the fact that the French are becoming annoyed at the fact that English, not French, is now the dominant language. lingua franca – ha, ha – and that, unlike the Swiss or Franco-Canadians, the French don't know English very well. As a shamefully monolingual woman, I can hardly resent the fact that people don't know English very well.

However, for their own sake, whether in business, rock music, IT or science, young French people should get on with it, hard. In Sweden, or even in modest Belgium, it's hard to find anyone who isn't bilingual or trilingual. In Switzerland, it's almost impossible. Over 90% of the Dutch are fluent in English. Not so in France, where only four out of ten people claim to be able to hold a normal conversation in Shakespeare's language.

Faced with this reality, the French intellectual develops defense techniques. He calls something ’Anglo-Saxon«, then goes off in a huff. Take economics, for example. Most French economists outside Toulouse, like Thomas Piketty, don't understand economics very well. They do the math, but they don't know that price is and must be determined by human supply and demand, not by the state. They conceive of economics as lawyers do, thinking that laws must be made. One of my students told me that he had taken an elementary economics course at the Sorbonne, where the teacher asked the class what should be done in the event of inflation. The answer, apparently, was that the state should forbid price rises.

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I experienced the same thing some time ago, when I spoke about liberalism to a Belgian audience made up mainly of French-speaking economics teachers. Unfortunately, the country of Voltaire and Tocqueville is rather statist. Its inhabitants think that to be modern, you have to be illiberal. My speech praised the «primitive» liberalism of July 1776 and August 1789. It was greeted with polite applause from the various nationals present. But not, I noticed, from the two French economists. The heart of liberalism is the medieval motto Audite et alteram partemListen to the other side too. From the English Channel.

Every month, carte blanche to Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. Professor Emerita of Economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she holds the Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute, Washington D.C.

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