Two things threw my holiday season for a loop. One sad. One empowering.
Last week, I wrote about the not unexpected, but still unsettling, loss of Dick O’Neill who had been a part of my for over 70 years—and a defining part for the last 20.
Now, let me turn to the uplifting part, which I had already drafted when word of Dick’s death came in last Friday and had planned on posting it today when everyone got back from their own holidays.
Roland Cayrol
A brief episode on the Christmas Eve edition of the PBS NewsHour sent me on an intellectual journey that led me to put the political (and to a lesser degree career) choices I’ve made since the early 1970s. That included a return to issues that few people I work with today realize had been at the heart of what I did way back when.
I began my professional life as America’s leading expert on the new left in France. Not because I was so good at it, but because I was the only American expert on the new left in France.
What, I hear you ask, does this have to do with the holiday season in 2023??????
On Christmas Eve, the PBS NewsHour featured a story about Bernard-Henri Lévy and his new documentary on Ukraine. Lévy himself is not someone I’ve paid much attention to over the years, perhaps because he was too much of a philosopher and too Zionist. But he is one of my few contemporaries who remains politically engaged in a meaningful way and has always had thought provoking ideas, so I paid attention to what he was saying to Ali Rogan.
For some reason, that prompted me to check out what had become of my friend Roland Cayrol, who had been my mentor while doing my research on the PSU (Unified Socialist Party). I had already been thinking about him since the pandemic began a bit because I have found myself revisiting some of the issues he and I worked on then, including worker owned and managed companies, expanding what democracy meant, and the role of progressive Catholics and spirituality in general in political life.
After a quick Ecosia[1] search, I learned that he had just written a memoir which, of course, is only available in French—Mon voyage au coeur de la 5ème République—My Journey at the Heart of the Fifth Republic. Luckily, getting books in French is no longer a big deal. Amazon being Amazon and Kindles being Kindles, it was on my iPad/Kindle before the NewsHour was over and started reading it right away.
Given my renewed interest in economic justice and the work I’ve been doing with Rondine, I found it riveting (though you might not unless you both read French and find the ins and outs of political life their addictive), only putting it down for Christmas dinner with our grandchildren (and their parents). In part, that was because I’m still fascinated (and confused) by French politics. Mostly, however, it was because Roland and I have had to deal with some similar political challenges over the last half century.
It was particularly interesting because we reached different conclusions about most of them. Nonetheless, it was clear from reading his memoir that the strategic tensions surrounding those choices had ushered in remarkably creative periods in both of our lives and left us intellectually open, curious, and engaged long after most of our friends have retired. Most importantly for the purposes of this post, I spent the last ten days rethinking the decisions we’ve both made which led me to double down on some of them, especially those that my friend Dick O’Neill and I worked on together.
I doubt most readers will be interested in the work of a French political scientist, pollster, and public intellectual. But, knowing a bit about Roland might help put the questions I’ve been posing and their roots in the French left into some perspective.
We met in 1972 when I showed up at his office the day after I arrived in Paris to do my PhD thesis which also turned out to be my first book.[2] I had chosen the PSU (and would have included the Italian new left, too, had I gotten enough fellowship money to cover a second year of field research) because I thought that we in the American new left could learn a lot more from our European colleagues than from the likes Che Guevara or Mao Zedong. And the PSU was the best example I could find. It had been among the leaders of the student-worker uprising in May 1968 which I lapped up while simultaneously taking my first European politics course and leading Oberlin’s SDS chapter. The PSU also had working class support especially among Catholic workers and would go on to win almost five percent of the presidential vote the following year.
So, a couple of years later, my PhD adviser (who had also hired me to be his research assistant as a way of fulfilling my alternative service obligation as a conscientious objector) suggested that studying PSU activists would hone my political science skills while making a contribution to the left here at home. He had met Roland through the project on the politics of representation in France that I was working on, knew that he was a PSU leader under a pseudonym, and put the two of us in touch.
The first night, my then wife and I went to a meeting on the unity of the left which almost killed my thesis on the spot. The next morning, I showed up at Roland’s office at Science Po not knowing what was going to happen either with my research plans or my hoped-for political growth.
I was 24. He was 31. But the seven year difference felt like a lifetime. I was still trying to figure out what it meant to blend left-wing activism with what I hoped would be a high-end academic career. He seemed to have it figured out. He was already a major figure on the French left in general and in the PSU in particular, all while being a leader in a new wave of quantitative political scientists which is how I thought of myself professionally at the time.
At that first meeting, he convinced me that the PSU was not going to disappear and become a part of the center left because it found even the Communist Party to be too conservative. He also thought that my plans to study its grass roots activists made a lot of sense because it was so much broader than the support base of the new left anywhere else, including in Italy where he also worked.
We worked closely for the whole year I was in France. I became as close as a foreigner could get to being a PSU militant de base. I also realized that Roland’s world of public intellectuals wasn’t one I was particularly comfortable with or interested in, which meant that I missed out on most of the connections I could have developed through him with the likes of Lévy and other stars of the French intellectual world, including Jacques Delors who died while I was polishing this post. I do admit to having a bit of jealousy about missing that side of his life, since he has also written three mystery novels (two of which I’ve read) under a second pseudonym, Jean Duchateau. In the first one, he kills off then President François Mitterrand.[3]
After I returned to the States, finished the thesis, and took a full time teaching job, my interests turned away from the PSU and, then, France, but Roland and I remained friends, though we have not seen each other since I was in Paris last at the turn of the century.
But when I read his memoir, I realized how many of the issues he raised found echoes in my own life and work, some of which have returned to center stage in my own life in the 2020s. The work I’ve done with Zebras Unite and Rondine have brought economic justice and countries that speak Romance languages back on center stage in my own career development when I’m in my late seventies and Roland is in his early eighties. Just as he challenged me to grow politically, professionally, and personally in those olden days befor our hair color got challenged, I found he was doing it again now that neither of us has much hair color left.
Francophones can get a sense of his insights and his self-depricating sense of humor by watching.
[1] For those who don’t know it, I use Ecosia rather than Google. Its profits are used to plant trees to combat climate change. Over 150,000,000 trees at last count.
[2] To my horror, I just discovered that you can still get it on Amazon. Do not buy it. Its political message is buried in turgid prose and analyses based on complicated regression equations.
[3] Spoiler alert #1. Both mysteries have surprise endings that would make Agatha Christie proud. Spoiler alert #2, although the first two novels are still in print, like his memoir, they are only available in French. Spoiler alert #3, this is not Roland’s only pseudonym. This one is best translated as “Guy(s) of the Castle,” chateau being a slang term for the Elysée Palace where the French president lives and works.
Donc, merci Roland.
The Key Tensions
Political v. systemic change. This first one only came into focus while I was reading his memoir. We may both be political animals, but we ended up envisioning what that meant rather differently. Roland always situated himself as an explicitly political actor, whether as an academic, an activist, or a public commentator. I love that stuff, too. When my car radio still had presets, I only needed two—one for NPR and one for C-SPAN radio which is available over the air here in Washington. But I’ve always defined my interests more broadly, something I see now in the work I do with Zebras Unite, ProSocial, and even the startup world. I don’t know if either focus is better, but my more all-encompassing one has left me open to new initiatives, including those that have brought me back to issues I hadn’t worked on since my PSU days.
Radical v. reformist. We were probably both as radical as we ever were when we met in 1972. The PSU defined itself at the time as a revolutionary party. I was a product of one of the more radical wings of the American new left of the 1960s. But when I actually interviewed PSU members, I realized that they were not about to take up arms and tear down the system. Neither was I. They may not have committed themselves as fully to nonviolence as I had, but we all saw any pathway to radical change coming through what we Americans at the time called “working inside the system.” Although I didn’t quite see it at the time, my year in France was the first step toward the kinds of strategy which I support today and which I doubt Roland would buy given the nature of French civil society. Most notably, I’m more enamored of the possibilities that exist from working with progressive capitalists than he is. But we have both made our peace with a system that has allowed us to build successful careers while also being critical of the status quo. In the end, we’ve both become a lot more pragmatic, although I now work more on the fringes of power than he does and am comfortable doing so. I do get to spend a fair amount of time with people who hold or have held elected office or served as senior civil servants. While I’ve come to see the impact that they have had, their roles do not lend themselves to the kind of sweeping change I have chosen to focus on. At the same time, it has been gratifying to see ideas that were very much “fringe” issues when I got interested in them move into the cultural and political mainstream as has been the case with paradigm shift and systems thinking both of which were on our agendas when we first met. Indeed, I’m hoping to the same with the idea of bridging social capital, which is how I’ll end this post.
Protest v. constructive alternatives. One of the things that attracted me to the PSU was its commitment to constructive alternatives to the status quo. Sure, the activists I met were as willing as anyone to criticize the system. However, in those days, it proposed something it called autogestion or a decentralized form of socialism in which workers owned and managed their own enterprises. Perhaps because my own leftism had a base in the coop movement (and I would have included Italian coops if I had found the money to spend two years in the field), autogestion grabbed me. That interest got rekindled in the 1990s while I watched Yugoslavia implode—because it had experimented with autogestion. Then, my own economic model shifted as I began learning from some of the more progressive startup companies in Silicon Valley and, more recently, in my work with Zebras Unite which, itself, draws heavily on the experience of those European coops and the idea of self-organized, emergent networks. Roland seems less interested in large scale change beyond the explicitly political than I am, but I probably would never have put things other than political change on the front burner as much as I do now if I hadn’t ended up working with him. And, I can see a clear “through line” from the way the PSU tried to reach out to people who had not thought much about autogestion or gender or the environment and my own infatuation with Loretta Ross’s idea of calling in people we disagree with rather than canceling them or otherwise calling them out.
Activist v. academic. I went to grad school with the (perhaps delusional) belief that I could be both a radical activist and a committed teacher and scholar. That meant that Roland became almost an instant role model. I knew that I wouldn’t follow the career path he had which included spending a lot of time with and enjoying being in the presence of people at the highest levels of power in Paris—with all that entailed personally. Even had that lifestyle been appealing, it was not something I could hope to achieve with a PhD written about a minor (and soon to be dead) political party on the French left! Still, I never was able to strike a comfortable balance between my academic and activist selves. For the first decade of my career, I was a pretty conventional academic. I rediscovered activism in the 1980s and moved out of full time teaching in the early 1990s. I no longer have any significant ties to political science, and my connections to the peace and conflict studies academic world are limited. At the same time, I’m far more interested in concepts and theory and the like than most of my activist colleagues. I love mentoring the dozen or so students and young professionals I work with at any moment in time, but I’m glad to be out of the academic rat race. With the book I’m doing now, Peace as a Verb, I may finally be striking the balance between raising powerful conceptual issues but doing so through telling stories in a way that average readers could easily learn from.
Structural v. individual. My year with the PSU and my friendship with Roland opened the door to something that only seemed like a “this v. that” situation at first glance. I had already been interested in systemic understandings of political life and got a healthy new dose of a different “macro” approach because my work with the PSU required dealing with Marxism seriously for the first time in my life. I also got introduced to other “big picture” ways of looking at the world such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the noosphere which has also reappeared in my post-pandemic life. At the same time, I came to see the people I interviewed—most of whom I worked with on a daily basis and therefore got to know well—as whole human beings whose political views evolved along with everything else in their lives. Some, too, had an interest in spiritual issues given the PSU’s roots in the Catholic left. I had had some interest in personal growth and spirituality in my own journey toward peace activism and nonviolence, but it is safe to say that the time spent figuring out what made my PSU friends “tick” politically left me more open to digging more deeply into myself, something I’ve doing explicitly since my own activism got rekindled in the early 1980s.
My Other Not-That-Much-Older Mentor From the “Old Days”
There is also a neat chronological irony to my accidental discovery of Roland’s memoir. I’m working with a team of colleagues at the Alliance for Peacebuilding, Rotary, and beyond to use a new documentary on the work of Robert Putnam in our efforts to rebuild social capital in the United States. Putnam was also one of my professors, although he was not yet doing the research that would lead him to write Bowling Alone. He is only two years older than Roland or eight years older than I am. Although he was too conventional an academic to be the kind of role model that Roland became, Bob has dealt with a lot of the same “big questions” that I have even if his own personal journey did not include a deep engagement in the new left of the 1960s and 1970s.
Still, beginning with his book, Making Democracy Work which I read in the mid-1990s, his writing and our occasional conversations have also led me to work through most of those same big tensions in my political and professional life. When I saw him at the DC premier of the film a couple of months ago, I was struck, too, by how engaged he still is and how open he is to exploring his own version of these big questions.
Regular readers will hear a lot about how my thinking evolves along the lines he poses as the new year wears on,
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.
