8 2008 (original) (raw)

Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu’s book Le Cancer américain (1931) is often mentioned in the literature, e.g. by Philippe Roger as “the most virulent of the anti-American essays of the interwar period” in France. It needs to be situated within its authors’ careers, on the cusp between years of hammering out their own critical theory and taking it to the fledgling Ordre Nouveau personalist movement as a Third-Way alternative to capitalism and communism and a federalist challenge to the modern nation-state. Thus, for them, America is not a territory so much as a state of mind they call a “social neurosis” as the systematic, unfettered application of “the most dismal mistake Europe has ever committed: the rationalist error”, specifically as industrial and financial rationalization and standardization, eliminating personal factors to reduce everything to the inhuman and abstract statistical laws of large numbers required for mass production. For in this productivist system, people are caught in a vicious circle closed by advertising and credit: buying on credit to consume and producing to pay the debts incurred buying diversions from the drudgery of this very process. This psychological addiction makes the “American cancer” of consumer society inoperable, except through some kind of inner, “spiritual revolution”, that they have yet to spell out in terms of “personalism”. A “holy war” of European culture against American materialism would be a self-deception if waged on the stage of power politics, requiring of states that they modernize following American methods in order to remain competitive, thus ironically furthering that same technological hegemony other cultures purport to question in resisting financial globalization and cultural homogenization. Beyond mere antimodernism or xenophobia, despite their vitriolic tone, Aron and Dandieu’s anti-American writings thus perceptively express some enduring motivations and dilemmas of “counter-cultural” currents both within and outside the United States.