My purpose here is to encourage and to contribute to a revival of
political philosophy. I am not alone in working to that end. Our
numbers are, no doubt, small, but they have been increasing for some
time, although it must be admitted that there is as yet little enthusiasm
for the task. What surprises me is that most of those who ought to be
best-equipped to undertake it because of their intellectual temperament,
which inclines them to break with dogmatic beliefs, because of their
philosophical culture, because of their desire to find some meaning
behind the events, confused as they may be, that take place in our
world, who might be expected to have become sufficiently disenchanted
with the rival dominant ideologies to want to discern the preconditions
for the development of freedom, or at last to shed some light on the
obstacles that stand in its way, are and remain stubbornly blind to the
political. 'Freedom', the simple word I have just used, is usually
banished from scientific language or relegated to the vernacular, when,
that is, it does not become a slogan for small groups of intellectuals
who declare that they have taken sides and who are content with anticommunism.
They can be ignored. no matter how much noise they
make, as we have seen their kind before. I am more concerned with
those intellectuals and philosophers who claim to belong to the left or
the far left. Although they live in an era in which a new form of
society has emerged under the banner of fascism on the one hand and
under that of socialism on the other, they refuse to contemplate or
even perceive that momentous event. In order to do so, they would
of course have to give new meaning to the idea of freedom. And yet
they abandon it to the vagaries of public opinion, apparently on the
grounds that everyone defines it in accordance with their own wishes
or interests. By doing so. they cut themselves off, not from public
opinion, but from political philosophy. even though they claim to be
in search of rigorous knowledge. For the sole motivation behind
political philosophy has always been a desire to escape the servitude
of collective beliefs and to win the freedom to think about freedom in