Jean-Claude Michéa through the Orwell Compass: Escaping Orthodox Marxism without Renouncing Socialism

Jean-Claude Michéa through the Orwell Compass: Escaping Orthodox Marxism without Renouncing Socialism

Amaury Giraud

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Keywords: Jean-Claude Michéa, George Orwell, conservative left, anti-modern socialism, anti-liberalism, intellectual populism

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An anti-capitalist struggle that is incapable of clearly integrating its conservative dimension has strictly no chance of developing itself and, consequently, of striking effective blows against its designated enemy. One of the primary philosophical concerns of those who claim to oppose the despotism of the economy must therefore always be to question, on principle, all the speeches that celebrate “progress” and “movement” without any other precision.

Jean-Claude Michéa[1]

Until 1995 and the publication of his first essay[2] at the age of 45, the life of Jean-Claude Michéa (born 1950) was quite simple, undisturbed, and sweet: it was divided between his philosophy classes at the Lycée (high school) Joffre of Montpellier (southern France), the beaches of the Mediterranean Sea, and the soccer games in his neighborhood. Since then, however, he became “an author by accident,”[3] even if he still does not consider himself as a real writer (“just because you have helped a friend to move three times does not make of you a mover”)[4] and his life took a “totally different turn,” which he is not “always sure that it was the right one.”[5] It must be said that, in the minds of some, Michéa has progressively become a kind of prophetic philosopher (to such an extent that, 10 years ago, in 2016, the journalist Alexandre Devecchio—from the right-wing media outlet Le Figaro—spoke of a true “Michéa generation”[6] in France when, three years before, another French journalist, Jean-Laurent Cassely, had ironically considered young anti-modern intellectuals like himself as a proper group of “jeanclaudemichéists”).[7] For Kévin Boucaud-Victoire, journalist at the left-wing sovereigntist journal Marianne and biographer of Michéa,[8] criticizing modern capitalism by “leaning on tradition”—as the philosopher has done it—permitted to him to feel like he had “reconciled with [him]self.”[9] Past authors and intellectuals, like the anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), the essayist George Orwell (1903–1950), and the historian Christopher Lasch (1932–1994), have been (re)discovered and (re)introduced in the French public debate partly by dint of the successive books of Michéa and their more and more growing popularity.[10] Even if the Montpellier philosophy professor (retired in 2010) has long rejected the term of “left-conservative” (to which he prefers the George Orwell’s “Tory anarchist”), already in 2007, Le Figaro presented him as “a conservative from the left”;[11] in 2011, the France Culture radio considered him as the defender of a “conservative socialism”;[12] and later, in 2013, Marianne described him as a “cult author” and “the figure of a left-conservatism that has become rare in the French mental universe.”[13] Nowadays, author of nearly 20 philosophical essays (all devoted to a heterodox Marxist and anti-modern critique of capitalist liberalism, since he officially claims to “dig a furrow” and to write always “the same book but enriched”),[14] Michéa can see his atypical political ideas—a mixture of sentimental populism, rooted democratic socialism, and contestation of the progressive elites’ lack of morals in modern market democracies—crossing the Atlantic Ocean: in September 2025, an anthology of his writings, selected by the American academic historian Michael C. Behrent, has been translated and published in the US for the first time ever.[15] If the American readership has thus recently discovered the political philosophy of the anti-liberal intellectual, in France the success of his manifold essays has also given rise to virulent criticism (notably from a portion of the academic field).[16]

The biographical particularity of Michéa that could enlighten some of his most—in appearance—contradictory political beliefs (socialism without automatic progressivism, cultural liberalism as an inseparable counterpart of the economic liberalism that both threaten the solidarity habits of the lower classes, needed popular conservatism in order to better ensure the protection of the working classes’ anthropological cultures and ways of life, etc.) is that the philosopher grew up in a 1950s French family that was “traditionally” Communist (and this element seems to be highly momentous in his personal intellectual journey): “This family came from families who had always been red since ever. So, I did not become a revolutionary out of rebellion against the father, but out of conservatism: to preserve the family tradition. And I know that this gives you a completely different mentality. … I very naturally enrolled myself in a family affiliation that went back to the 1871 Paris Commune.”[17] Michéa’s parents, who met during the Second World War in the French Resistance, were both members and employees of the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français: PCF): his father, Abel Michéa (1920–1986), was a sports journalist for the official PCF newspaper L’Humanité (specialized in cycling),[18] and his mother, Noëlle Michéa, was a stenographer at the French Information Union (Union française de l’information: UFI), the news agency of the PCF.[19] If Abel Michéa was a Communist, he was also, as his son described him many times, “deeply allergic to any ideological discipline (‘he is a zero in politics,’ said of him Maurice Thorez [General Secretary of the PCF from 1930 to 1954]),”[20] and was moreover a close friend of the writer Antoine Blondin (1922–1991), often defined as a “right-wing anarchist.”[21] Following his father’s example, Jean-Claude Michéa thus claims to not be that kind of “ideologist” who could not be friend with a non-Communist person because, in his eyes, “friendship has always transcended political cleavages.”[22]

The anti-liberal philosopher was born in Paris’ 12th Arrondissement, his youth was logically a Parisian one, and he studied philosophy at Sorbonne University between 1967 and 1972,[23] so was he a student during the May 68 events. If, at the beginning of the May 68 “Revolution,” he supported on the whole this movement (he was, at that time, a “Guevarist” and a “leftist”[24] opposed to the PCF’s conceptions,[25] that is to say to those of his own parents), he progressively distanced himself from “leftism” and its “theoreticism” when he understood that most of the Maoist students came from bourgeois backgrounds and looked down on students from working-class backgrounds like him: “Among these Maoist students, there were not many people interested in football or in Tour de France. … When you have been raised in a working-class environment, you can easily smell the bourgeoisie’s class hatred coming from a hundred meters away. … [Gradually], the leftist groups—most often constituted by great bourgeois individuals—began to treat the young [PCF] Communist students, officially as political enemies but, in fact, as a bourgeois treats his servants.”[26] Thereby, increasingly disgusted by the authoritarian turn of May 68 due to the “leftists” hegemony over the movement—precisely between the end of the year 1968 and the commencement of the year 1969—Michéa decided to finally join the PCF rapidly: “I joined the party in 1969. Much more, beside, in response to the witch-hunt atmosphere that was beginning to develop itself into the faculties run by leftists than because of a genuine approval of the party line.”[27] In 1972, Michéa obtained his philosophy “agrégation” and next was appointed as philosophy teacher at the Lycée (high school) Joffre of Montpellier (a city located in the South of France—far away from Paris where he spent his childhood—which he discovered at that time and then assuredly loved, to the point of defining himself, from then on, as a “meridional” who was “ashamed to have been born in Paris” ).[28] But after manifold stays in Communist countries, such as Cuba or USSR (even at a young age, he spoke Russian fluently), and on account of “international policy issues,”[29] he decided to leave the PCF in 1976 (nevertheless, he recognizes that he broke off “politically” with the party, but “not affectively” with a lot of its members).[30]

No longer an orthodox Communist or Marxist in 1976—even if he had not been really that type of intellectual for a long period of time before—Michéa would not, however, completely renounce to numerous aspects of Marxist, socialist, anarchist, and populist traditions, especially those coming from 19th-century thinkers such as Pierre Leroux (1797–1871), Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), Nikolay Mikhaylovsky (1842–1904), Paul Lafargue (1842–1911), Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), etc. Furthermore, it is mainly by relying on 20th-century atypical and unorthodox Marxist philosophers—such as Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), Simone Weil (1909–1943), Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975), Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997), Guy Debord (1931–1994), etc.—that Michéa would conceptualize his own critical perception of the modern capitalist liberalism and its dangers (in particular by dint of his discovery of the Orwell’s essays in which the British author theorized his primordial concepts of “common decency” and “Tory anarchism,” the very ones that have had presumably a substantial influence on the Montpellier philosophy professor). What did Michéa—a Communist-born philosopher raised in a “traditional” Communist family and a former member of the PCF—find in the writings of atypical Marxist or socialist intellectuals (and, among them, George Orwell) that allowed him to patiently build his own critical views on the capitalist modern world? Why can “conservatism,” in his eyes, be partially used to fight against the permanent revolution conducted by modern capitalism and its continuous innovations that constantly transform, still according to him, human beings, families, cultures, nations, societies, etc.? Why not be, still from Michéa’s point of view, a “Tory anarchist” (or a “left-conservative”) if, actually, “the bourgeoisie, historically, has played an essentially revolutionary role”[31] and has made that “all that was solid and steady is shaken, all that was holy is profaned”?[32] At last, why has the retired philosophy teacher of Montpellier become, nowadays, one of the most famous representative intellectuals of the “conservative left” (a label he rejects by the way)? To satisfactorily answer to these questions, first one must study the structural and basic relation that links Michéa’s works to Orwell’s.

In the Footsteps of Orwell: The Still Existing “Common Decency” of the Working Classes and the Increasing Indecency of Modern Capitalism

Like many other far-left intellectuals, philosophers, and thinkers during the 1970s, Jean-Claude Michéa decided to quit institutional Communism, in 1976, by virtue of a realization about the totalitarian or authoritarian nature of most of the Communist regimes all over the world. In France, already by the end of the 1940s, Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) and Claude Lefort (1924–2010), through their movement “Socialism or Barbarism,” were among the first ones, at least coming from the far left, to denounce Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism as corrupt, dictatorial, and bureaucratic versions of original Marxism. For instance, Lefort strongly supported, during a trial in France, the Soviet dissident Victor Kravchenko (1905–1966) when the latter published his book, I Chose Freedom, in 1947—which asserted the existence of the gulag system—and was attacked by French Communist journalists, who accused him of being a so-called US disinformation agent. But in terms of proofs and awareness of state Communism’s monstrosity, the 1970s seem, however, absolutely pivotal from this point of view. Indeed, in 1971, the Belgian Sinologist Simon Leys (1935–2014)[33] published his critical essay, Les habits neufs du président Mao (The Chairman’s New Clothes),[34] about Maoism and the crimes of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). In 1974, the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) documented the fierceness and horror of the Soviet concentration camps in The Gulag Archipelago.[35]And, last but not least, in 1975 the French-Chinese writer Jean Pasqualini (1926–1997) revealed likewise the violence of the láogǎi (劳改) system in Communist China in his autobiographic work, Prisonnier de Mao.[36] For Jean-Claude Michéa, all of these testimonies combined with his own experiences of factually existing Communism in Cuba, in Eastern Europe, and the USSR, convinced him that something had gone bad and mad in official Marxism, or at least with the state-run manifestations of it (whether they take the face of Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Castrism, etc.): “Because I spoke fluent Russian, I gradually developed the habit of venturing off the beaten path and of going into places … that were at that time strictly off limits to Western travelers. While I never naturally stumbled upon a concentration camp, these unexpected encounters with ordinary workers allowed me to discover what their real life was like, and consequently the true class nature of Soviet power.”[37] This revelation, documented by many authors whom Michéa read as if they were mirroring what he saw by himself, led him to think that only fanatic ideologues could still deny the existence of this inhumane, liberty-killing, and perverted Communism: “Unless one is being willfully blind, that is to say unless one is a true believer, there always comes a time when you finally open your eyes.”[38] Nonetheless, if the young Jean-Claude Michéa criticized and gave up on institutional socialism from that precise moment of the mid-1970s, he did not choose to abandon for all that the “socialist tradition” and to, like many other former “sixty-eighters,” (“soixante-huitards”), accept the market economy, the modern consumer society, and the liberal capitalist system as they are: “When the totalitarian system collapsed, I adopted all the critiques of totalitarianism, but I could not say ‘bye bye Lenin’ like I was going along with most of the herd, namely by repudiating the whole socialist tradition. … The problem now is new: how can I continue to criticize this world in which I live and that seems to me an unfair, alienating, and self-destructing world, without, however, reactivating, in the manner of [Alain] Badiou, the belief in the old ideas of a Leninist revolution from above? And at that moment, Orwell became obvious. … In Orwell’s work, the critique of totalitarianism (present in Animal Farm and 1984) is inseparable from the critique of the capitalist world (present in the essays). … So it was through the reading of Orwell’s essays that I found my way.”[39]

In Michéa’s perception, the socialism of Orwell is an instinctive, non-ideological, and free one that allows him to remain socialist (but in a strictly working-class orientation) without the disadvantages of orthodoxy, sectarianism, dogmatism, party discipline, etc. (the French philosopher loves to often quote a Simon Leys sentence that compared Orwell to “these iconoclastic and inspired monks who, to warm the convent on a cold winter night, do not hesitate to take an axe and to make kindling out of the holy statues.”)[40] Far from the intellectual Marxism and champagne socialism that he deeply disapproved all his life, Orwell conceptualized his “common decency” theory by sharing the living conditions of the workers he depicted in The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937. And this is likewise the questioning of Orwell about the reasons why “socialism is losing ground exactly where it ought to be gaining it”[41] (that is to say among the lower classes)—and the responses he gave back to this questioning (“orthodox communist” bourgeois intellectuals trying to overpower the simple “ordinary working man” for whom “socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about,”[42] left-wing parties full of “a rootless town-bred section of the middle class,”[43] progressive modern socialism that promises “a sort of glittering Wells-world that sensitive minds recoil” from in the name of a legitimate “temperamental conservatism,”[44] etc.)—that persuaded the philosophy professor of the accuracy of Orwell’s political analysis. Hence, at the crossroads of the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the simultaneous perusals of the George Orwell’s essays, but also of Guy Debord’s (notably The Society of the Spectacle,[45] published in 1967, and his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, published in 1988, in which Debord denounced “the society modernized up to the stage of the integrated spectacular”),[46] and Marcel Mauss’ (in particular the essay on The Gift the latter wrote in 1925 about the anthropologically natural aspect of the “giving, receiving, reciprocating”[47] principle, an “archaic” principle to which he urged humanity to “return”),[48] would permit to Jean-Claude Michéa to build his own reasoning method by including a “conservative dimension” in his intellectual fight against a capitalist liberalism he considers as a fundamentally modern (even “supermodern”) phenomenon which, logically, could never be “conservative” at all (contrary to what most left-wing and far-left-wing forces usually think) because, as Marx[49] and Engels wrote it precisely in their 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, this phenomenon led by bourgeoisie has always played an “essentially revolutionary role” that has made that “all that was solid and steady is shaken, all that was holy is profaned.”

As early as 1983, Jean-Claude Michéa wrote a first article about George Orwell that was refused by every intellectual reviews to which it was proposed in France as well as in the rest of Europe (and this, despite the valuable help of the famous Spanish author Jorge Semprún [1923–2011], a close friend of Michéa and the brother-in-law of his future publisher Alain Martin [born 1941]).[50] But 10 years later, Alain Martin—funder of the Montpellier-based publishing company Climats—suggested to Jean-Claude Michéa to make an entire book starting from his yet unpublished article. With Orwell Anarchiste Tory, his inaugural essay published in 1995, Michéa voluntarily decided, therefore, to promote and defend a popular, democratic, heterodox, and atypical socialism directly inspired by George Orwell’s thought: “It is always necessary to remember that [the] intuitive solidarity with the values of the popular culture is the true center of gravity of Orwell’s socialism. … For Orwell, the socialist struggle is, before everything, an effort to internalize these popular values and to disseminate their effects into the whole society.”[51] From Michéa’s point of view, the elites of the modern capitalist liberalism are immoral while, within the working-classes, the “common decency” is still operative: “If consequently the modern intelligentsia has, in its entirety, broken off with the realism of the ordinary man, that is fundamentally because it has ceased to be moral.”[52] Moreover, Michéa estimates that he experienced the “common decency” theory long before having even read Orwell’s books, during his 1950s and 1960s youth in the Communist solidarity atmosphere where he grew up: “This notion of common decency—far from being a metaphysical concept that I would have discovered during my philosophy studies—therefore corresponded first and foremost to the sociological reality that I had, most of the time, before my eyes.”[53] The “Tory anarchism” of Orwell is, still according to Michéa, the best way to oppose capitalism which is, intrinsically, a modern, revolutionary, and constantly transformative dynamic: “By refusing, even if only as a game, to make of the word ‘conservative’ the absolute insult, Orwell struck the capitalist system at the heart of all its intellectual devices.”[54] In Michéa’s opinion, Orwell is simultaneously a “defender of freedom,” a “radical socialist,” and “a conservative”: “What this era does not accept is that someone could be, at the same time, a declared enemy of the totalitarian oppression, a man who wants to change the life without, however, making of the past a tabula rasa, and above all a loyal friend of the workers and the humble.”[55] In the end of his first essay, Michéa someway outlines what will be the content of all of his future books during the next three decades: “What is sure is that, in a world which so craftily arranges itself to produce its apparent unintelligibility and our real powerlessness, we desperately need Tory anarchists of George Orwell’s caliber.”[56] In 2003, Michéa published his fifth essay, entitled Orwell éducateur (“Orwell as Educator,” in reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Schopenhauer as Educator), in which he insisted, not only on the anti-totalitarian convictions of Orwell, but also on his anti-capitalist ones without which he considers that “the real complexity of his work, both novelistic and philosophical, remains singularly incomprehensible.”[57] Once again, he claims that the “common decency” is a crucial element of a true and popular socialism that the modern left-wing progressivism could not even understand (so liberal it has become, still according to Michéa): “The central place that Orwell gives to ‘common decency’ in the formation and the remaining of the socialist spirit can surprise only a modern left-wing man, that is to say one trained by essence to quickly forget everything that contradicts the prevailing Spectacle.”[58] Thus, the Orwell compass somehow enabled Jean-Claude Michéa of remaining a socialist without still being an orthodox Marxist (he henceforth prefers the project of a “decent society,” even if it supposes to move away from the official left-wing doctrine; in a way, Orwell acted on him like an indispensable provider of critical freedom): “Orwell is right against all the positivist traditions of the left: socialism will be decent or will not be.”[59] 

Remaining Socialist While No Longer Belonging to the “Left”: The “Unity of Liberalism” and the Rejection of All Possible Forms of Modern Capitalism

As we saw previously, the patient manufacturing of Michéa’s critical view of capitalist modernity required the use of cardinal authors and thinkers’ concepts that the Montpellier philosophy teacher has employed for the purposes of elaborating his own original thought process: whether it be Marcel Mauss (“giving, receiving, reciprocating” as natural moral values of human beings, unlike capitalism), Guy Debord (the “Spectacle” as a structural element of the “modern society”), George Orwell (“common decency,” “Tory anarchism,” “free, egalitarian, and decent society,” etc.), but also Christopher Lasch (“culture of narcissism,”[60] “revolt of the elites,”[61] populism as “the authentic voice of democracy,”[62] etc.), all these intellectuals helped him, on the one hand, to conceptualize his singular anti-modern vision of the contemporary world and, on the other hand, to escape from Communist rigorism while remaining, however, a “socialist” (yet in the tightly Orwellian sense of the adjective). Nowadays, when a debate is devoted to Orwell or Lasch, it has become rare for Michéa not to be mentioned (modest, the latter even confesses that he feels “very uncomfortable that some are tracing these ideas’ origins back to [him]”).[63] If undoubtedly, the anti-modern essayist has become renowned, over the last 30 years, partly because of his relevant and strategic reuse of the works of Mauss, Orwell, Debord, and Lasch (not to mention evenly the importance, in Michéa’s philosophy, of the ideas of Simone Weil, Charles Péguy [1873–1914], Pier Paolo Pasolini, etc.), withal he did propose himself also new concepts and original theories within the French intellectual landscape. Among these “michéist” theories, the “unity of liberalism” notion seems to be the one which mostly runs through all Jean-Claude Michéa’s books since 1995 (and the one which, assuredly, constitutes the leading anchor point of all his both anti-modern and anti-capitalist philosophical system). Thereby, in the vision of Michéa, economic liberalism (defended by the right) and cultural liberalism (defended by the left) belong to the same political and metaphysical thought: that of liberalism as a whole. According to this “unity of liberalism” concept, the rules of the right-wing liberalism (globalization, deregulation, individualistic consumerism, etc.) conduce consequently to the effects of the left-wing liberalism (no borders, hedonistic progressivism, individualistic societalism, etc.). In this manner, left-wing and far-left-wing parties and thinkers are mistaken, still from Michéa’s perspective, when they pretend to fight a capitalism they consider as a “conservative” mechanism and, alike, right-wing and far-right-wing parties and thinkers are mistaken when they claim to stand up for a “conservative” society while defending, otherwise, a capitalism that is basically a revolutionary, modern, continuously innovating, and transforming economic model[64] (as Marx and Engels had already understood it as early as 1848 in their Manifesto of the Communist Party).

In Jean-Claude Michéa’s mind, the May 68 motto “it is forbidden to forbid” applies equally to the right-wing economic liberalism (which seeks market deregulation) and to the left-wing cultural liberalism (which seeks societal deregulation): “By piously accepting to submit themselves to the most sacred commandment of the modern Tablets of Stone—it is forbidden to forbid—the youths of the new middle classes … discovered, indeed, a freedom finally on their scale: that which consists of radically breaking … with all the obligations implied by filiation, belonging and generally speaking, a linguistic, moral or cultural heritage.”[65] Thus, still according to Michéa, if both left and right are wrong (the first one because it believes that capitalism is “conservative,” and the second one because it believes in its own supposed “conservatism”), then to which political side does he belong to? In Michéa’s opinion, socialism must be distinguished from the left (and obviously from the right) due to the fact that he defines the left as “the party of the Enlightenment philosophy and of the ‘progress forces,’ standing up against all the figures of the old regime”[66] (aristocracy, army, and church) when, on its side, socialism would be “the philosophical expression of the 19th- century workers revolts against the inegalitarian and dehumanizing effects of the liberal modernization”[67] (two distinct definitions which explain why Michéa henceforth considers himself specifically as a “socialist,” or even as a “Tory anarchist” or as an anti-capitalist “populist,” but no longer as a left-wing philosopher—besides, he deems that “neither Marx nor Engels … never thought of defining themselves as ‘left-wing men’ ”).[68] In his conception, the struggle against capitalist liberalism must go through the acceptance of the eminently modern dimension of this “designated enemy” (assuming, therefore, that a certain degree of conservatism can be opposed to it): “Contrary to the absurd idea, but particularly widespread on the left, that liberal policies would be ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary’ by nature … , liberalism should be seen as the modern ideology par excellence.”[69] However, most of the contemporary Western lefts are politically and culturally liberal, which makes the hypothetical end of capitalism and its anthropological immorality impossible: “Indeed, there is no fundamental contradiction between the struggle of economic liberals for trade globalization and for the abolition of all borders, and the struggle waged by political and cultural liberals against all the arbitrary ‘taboos’ of morality and against ‘all forms of discrimination.’ The Cannes Film Festival is not the majestic negation of the Davos Forum. It is, on the contrary, its fulfilled philosophical truth.”[70] Without even realizing it, still from Michéa’s critical point of view, cultural leftism shares mimetic adorations with economic rightism (in a certain way, the left recites in verse what the right intones in prose): “The lumpenproletariat (or riffraff) is nothing other than the financial aristocracy of the dregs of liberal society or, if one prefers, the hooded version of Wall Street traders. Beneath their apparent opposition, it is therefore the same type of human behavior that right-wing economists and left-wing sociologists, each in their own way, celebrate. That is what I call the ‘unity of liberalism.’ ”[71] That is the reason why Michéa even adds that “the beautiful souls of cultural liberalism” often serve as “the useful idiots of economic liberalism,” sometimes going so far as to “do the dirty work of capitalism in place of capitalism.”[72] Michéa’s analysis rejects the domination of the simplistic left and right political partition and agrees with the first slogan of the Spanish left-wing populist party Podemos, the one that was in use chiefly between 2014 and 2019: “We are neither right nor left, we are those at the bottom against those at the top”[73] (he even sees it as “the return, beyond left/right divide, to the anti-capitalist cleavages that were the ones of original socialism, anarchism, and populism”).[74] For the anti-modern philosopher, liberalism can be compared to the two-faced Roman god Janus (“liberal Janus”),[75] with a left-wing visage and a right-wing one: “Cultural liberalism and economic liberalism are merely two sides of the same historical project (otherwise, how can it be explained that beyond a certain threshold of development of the capitalist system they almost always progress at the same pace?)”[76] A “true dialectical complementarity”[77] links these two types of liberalism together to form then, eventually, just a single one: that of modernity or “supermodernity”, societally and economically progressive but, above all, destructive of some morally positive traditions, cultures, and solidarities inherited from the past and that should be preserved both from the “creative destruction” of right-wing liberalism and the “cancel culture” of left-wing liberalism.

Conclusion

How can capitalism be seen, in the eyes of those who are supposed to challenge it, as a fundamentally conservative system, when never in the history of humanity a social regime had made, like it had, of the radical and perpetual upheaval of all existing conditions the sole fundament of its legitimacy? … It is obviously in the world of advertising and showbiz (and not, of course, in the sermons of John Paul II) that we can read, in all its purity, the imaginary of contemporary capitalism.

Jean-Claude Michéa[78]

Now 75 years old, the retired philosophy professor is someway living the life he has dreamt of for a long time. In accordance with his degrowth doctrine and with his ecological anti-capitalist convictions, he decided, in 2016, to leave Montpellier and to move to the southwest of France in order to cultivate there a vegetable garden using self-sufficient farming methods (under the supervision of his wife Linda, a “daughter of Vietnamese market gardeners”[79] with an encyclopedic agricultural knowledge). He continues to write, even though he still does not appreciate it, but most of his time is henceforth devoted to land working, collective life of his small village, and the friendship of the peasants and the hunters of his neighborhood. In Michéa’s mind, this new rural life perfectly corresponds to his yearning for sharing the living conditions of the deep-rooted working classes who, despite the violence of the modern capitalist liberalism, manage to survive thanks to local solidarity, regional culture, village traditions, mutual aid, and camaraderie spirit (an atmosphere that somehow reminds him of the ambience of generosity of his Communist childhood into a “popular counter-society” very far removed from “the Stalinism of the [PCF] leaders”[80] at that time). Between 1995 and 2025, he published 15 essays, some of which have been translated into Spanish, in Italian, in German, or even in English languages. Recently, two German sociologists, Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey,[81] proposed to build a “post-liberal antifascism”[82] (“postliberalen Antifaschismus”) based on the philosophical analyses of Jean-Claude Michéa and, furthermore, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung portrayed Michéa as the French intellectual who succeeded in demonstrating that “liberalism is obsolete.”[83] From his discovery of Orwell’s books, at the intersection of the late 1970s and the early 1980s, to the publishing of his last essay in 2025, Jean-Claude Michéa never ceased to orientate himself along the paths of philosophical thought by using the Orwell compass (the one through which, as he admits it, he “found [his] way.”)[84] If, by stating that economic liberalism and cultural liberalism are the two sides of the same coin (that of modern, progressive, and innovative capitalist liberalism), the anti-liberal philosopher faithfully followed in the footsteps of the “Tory anarchist” British writer, he also never forgot that the main moral goal of Orwell (and therefore his own) was the erection of “a ‘free, egalitarian, and decent’ socialist society”[85] (a kind of yet “revolutionary” goal which, even at his advanced age, he has not given up on at all).

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[1] Jean-Claude Michéa, L’enseignement de l’ignorance et ses conditions modernes (Castelnau-le-Lez: Éditions Climats, 1999), p. 131–132.

[2] Jean-Claude Michéa, Orwell Anarchiste Tory (Castelnau-le-Lez: Éditions Climats, 1995).

[3] Jean-Claude Michéa, “À voix nue: Épisode 4/5, Devenir un auteur par accident,” interview by Guillaume Erner, France Culture Radio, January 10, 2019, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/a-voix-nue/devenir-un-auteur-par-accident-8483356.

[4] Jean-Claude Michéa, “À voix nue: Épisode 3/5, Qui n’a pas connu Montpellier dans les années 1980,” interview by Guillaume Erner, France Culture Radio, January 9, 2019, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/a-voix-nue/qui-n-a-pas-connu-montpellier-dans-les-annees-80-2063476.

[5] Michéa, “À voix nue: Épisode 3/5.”

[6] Alexandre Devecchio, Les nouveaux enfants du siècle (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2016), p. 213.

[7] Jean-Laurent Cassely, “Moi, adorateur de Jean-Claude Michéa, infiltré à Slate,” Slate, April 6, 2013, https://www.slate.fr/story/70017/adorateurs-jean-claude-michea.

[8] Kévin Boucaud-Victoire, Mystère Michéa: Portrait d’un anarchiste conservateur (Paris: Éditions de l’Escargot, 2019).

[9] Quoted in Ariane Chemin, “Des jeunes gens antimodernes,” Le Monde, January 11, 2017, https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2017/01/10/a-la-rencontre-des-jeunes-conservateurs-sans-complexe_5060240_3232.html?srsltid=AfmBOooaiKPxIinukX9SSW1kET4Ryvv5kojCkTm_f6OUyv2jB35E0gis.

[10] Amaury Giraud, “The Second Birth of Christoper Lasch in France: Roots and Mechanisms of a Postmortem Success,” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 4, no. 2 (2024): p. 21–31, https://www.illiberalism.org/the-second-birth-of-christopher-lasch-in-france-roots-and-mechanisms-of-a-postmortem-success/.

[11] Jean-Marc Bastière, “Un conservateur de gauche,” Le Figaro, October 14, 2007, https://www.lefigaro.fr/lefigaromagazine/2007/09/14/01006-20070914ARTMAG90595-un_conservateur_de_gauche.php.

[12] Brice Couturier, “Jean-Claude Michéa, George Orwell et le socialisme conservateur,” France Culture Radio, October 6, 2011, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/les-idees-claires/jean-claude-michea-george-orwell-et-le-socialisme-conservateur-5365909.

[13] Aude Lancelin, “Tempête sur Michéa,” Marianne, August 31, 2013, https://www.marianne.net/societe/tempete-sur-michea.

[14] Jean-Claude Michéa, “À voix nue: Épisode 5/5, Décroissance dans les Landes,” interview by Guillaume Erner, France Culture Radio, January 11, 2019, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/a-voix-nue/decroissance-dans-les-landes-9415876.

[15] Michael C. Behrent and Jean-Claude Michéa, Towards a Conservative Left: Selected Writings of Jean-Claude Michéa (Blowing Rock: Vauban Books, 2025).

[16] It predominately began with a violent article published by the French sociologist Luc Boltanski (born 1940), “Michéa, c’est tout bête,” Le Monde, October 6, 2011, in which Boltanski accused the philosophy professor from Montpellier of being an “anti-liberal pamphleteer” who would have “captured” Orwell’s legacy and compared him to 1930s intellectuals who ultimately supported Marshall Pétain’s Vichy regime during the Second World War. Two years later, the economist and philosopher Frédéric Lordon (born 1962) in turn wrote an article entitled “Impasse Michéa,” La Revue des Livres, no. 12, July 9, 2013, in which he considered the Orwell’s “common decency” theory as a “spontaneous sociology” (he even speaks of the “misery of common decency”) and estimated that, through his use of this concept, Michéa resorts to an “essentialization of the people.” At last, one of Michéa’s most ardent opponents in France is the political scientist Philippe Corcuff (born 1960), who chose, in two of his essays, to accuse the anti-liberal philosopher of being a dangerous “confusionist” author. Philippe Corcuff, Les années 30 reviennent et la gauche est dans le brouillard (Paris: Éditions Textuel, 2014); Philippe Corcuff, La grande confusion (Paris: Éditions Textuel, 2021).

[17] Jean-Claude Michéa, “À voix nue: Épisode 1/5, La chance d’avoir des parents communistes,” interview by Guillaume Erner, France Culture Radio, January 7, 2019, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/a-voix-nue/la-chance-d-avoir-des-parents-communistes-2870124.

[18] Émile Besson and Abel Michéa, 100 ans de cyclisme (Paris: Éditions Benjamin Arthaud, 1969).

[19] Jean-Claude Michéa, La double pensée: Retour sur la question libérale (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, Coll. Champs, 2008), p. 68.

[20] Michéa, La double pensée, p. 71.

[21] Pierre Carrey, “Antoine Blondin: Des hommages en boucle pas anodins,” Libération, July 18, 2016, https://www.liberation.fr/sports/2016/07/18/antoine-blondin-des-hommages-en-boucle-pas-anodins_1467018/.

[22] Michéa, “À voix nue: Épisode 3/5.”

[23] Michéa, La double pensée, p. 67.

[24] Jean-Claude Michéa,“À voix nue: Épisode 2/5, Paris avant les bobos,” interview by Guillaume Erner, France Culture Radio, January 8, 2019, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/a-voix-nue/paris-avant-les-bobos-2167521.

[25] During the May 68 events, Georges Marchais (1920–1997), the future General Secretary of the PCF (1972–1994), supported the strike of the workers but not the Latin Quarter students’ one and wrote, in the columns of L’Humanité, that these last were “false revolutionaries” and “sons of bourgeois” who “quickly, will put on standby their ‘revolutionary flame’ to go running daddy’s company and exploit the workers there in accordance with the best traditions of capitalism.” Georges Marchais, “De faux révolutionnaires à démasquer,” L’Humanité, May 3, 1968.

[26] Michéa, “À voix nue: Épisode 2/5.”

[27] Michéa, La double pensée, p. 68–69.

[28] Michéa, “À voix nue: Épisode 2/5.”

[29] Michéa, La double pensée, p. 69.

[30] Michéa, “À voix nue: Épisode 2/5.”

[31] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifeste du parti communiste (Paris: Éditions Mille et unes nuits, [1848] 1994), p. 16.

[32] Marx and Engels, Manifeste du parti communiste, p. 18.

[33] Furthermore, the resounding book of Simon Leys, Les habits neufs du président Mao, has been published, in 1971, by the publishing house Champ libre, founded in 1969 by the film producer Gérard Lebovici (1932–1984), who was joined two years later in this publishing adventure by the situationist philosopher and atypical Marxist intellectual Guy Debord (the author, in 1967, of The Society of the Spectacle). It should be noted that, in Michéa’s intellectual pantheon, both Simon Leys and Guy Debord are very highly ranked, notably because the formirst oner wrote a major tribute essay to George Orwell in 1984 (Simon Leys, Orwell ou l’Horreur de la politique [Paris: Éditions Hermann, 1984]) and, equally, because the second onelatter published, as a kind of “manager” of Champ libre, numerous essays of the British writer translated into French language during the 1980s, such as Homage to Catalonia (Paris: Éditions Champ libre, 1981) and The Road to Wigan Pier (Paris: Éditions Champ libre, 1982).

[34] Simon Leys, Les habits neufs du président Mao: Chronique de la Révolution culturelle (Paris: Éditions Champ Libre, 1971); Simon Leys, The Chairman’s New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (London: Allison & Busby, 1977).

[35] Alexandre Soljenitsyne, L’Archipel du goulag (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974); Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Haper & Row, 1974).

[36] Bao Ruo-Wang (Jean Pasqualini), Prisoner of Mao (New York: Paul Reynolds, 1973); Jean Pasqualini, Prisonnier de Mao: Sept ans dans un camp de travail en Chine (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1975).

[37] Michéa, La double pensée, p. 69–70.

[38] Michéa, p. 70.

[39] Michéa, “À voix nue: Épisode 4/5.”

[40] Leys, Orwell ou l’Horreur de la politique, p. 23.

[41] George Orwell, Le quai de Wigan (Paris: Éditions Ivrea, [1937] 2010), p. 194.

[42] Orwell, Le quai de Wigan, p. 199.

[43] Orwell, p. 205.

[44] Orwell, p. 213.

[45] Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Éditions Buchet-Chastel, 1967).

[46] Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, Coll. Folio, [1988] 2014), p. 25.

[47] Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [1925] 2012), p. 142.

[48] Mauss, Essai sur le don, p. 219.

[49] Michéa often remembers that, in the preface to Das Kapital in 1867, Karl Marx explicitly asserted that his goal was to “reveal the economic law of motion of modern society” (quoted inJean-Claude Michéa, Notre ennemi le capital: Notes sur la fin des jours tranquilles [Paris: Éditions Flammarion, Coll. Climats, 2017], p. 11). Later, in 1894, Marx’s sentence would be considered by Lenin himself as “problematic” in his essay against Russian populists, What the “Friends of the People” Are (Russian populists—such as Nikolay Mikhaylovsky [1842–1904], for instance—who, on the contrary, fully agreed with this kind of anti-modern aim of Marx).

[50] Jean-Claude Michéa, Orwell Anarchiste Tory (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, Coll. Climats, [1995] 2020), p. 183.

[51] Michéa, Orwell Anarchiste Tory, p. 97.

[52] Michéa, p. 33.

[53] Jean-Claude Michéa, “Entretien avec Michael C. Behrent à l’usage de la presse américaine” (Unpublished: Personal Archives of Jean-Claude Michéa, May 2025), p. 6.

[54] Michéa, Orwell Anarchiste Tory, p. 115.

[55] Michéa, p. 146.

[56] Michéa, p. 147.

[57] Jean-Claude Michéa, Orwell éducateur (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, Coll. Climats, [2003] 2009), p. 29–30.

[58] Michéa, Orwell éducateur, p. 97.

[59] Michéa, p. 123.

[60] Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979).

[61] Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995).

[62] Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, p. 106.

[63] Michéa, “À voix nue: Épisode 3/5.”

[64] Moreover, Jean-Claude Michéa regularly quotes a sentence of the American historian Russell Jacoby (born 1945), which argues that right-wing and far-right-wing political actors—who relentlessly act in favor of capitalist liberalism, while publicly presenting themselves as “conservative”—are totally incoherent since they paradoxically “worship the market while cursing the culture it engenders.” Quoted in Jean-Claude Michéa, L’empire du moindre mal: Essai sur la civilisation libérale (Paris:  Éditions Flammarion, Coll. Climats, [2007] 2010), p. 130.

[65] Jean-Claude Michéa, L’enseignement de l’ignorance et ses conditions modernes (Castelnau-le-Lez: Éditions Climats, 1999), p. 40–41.

[66] Jean-Claude Michéa, Impasse Adam Smith: Brèves remarques sur l’impossibilité de dépasser le capitalisme sur sa gauche (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, Coll. Champs, [2002] 2006), p. 80.

[67] Michéa, Impasse Adam Smith, p. 80.

[68] Jean-Claude Michéa, Les Mystères de la gauche: De l’idéal des Lumières au triomphe du capitalisme absolu (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, Coll. Climats, 2013), p. 18.

[69] Michéa, L’empire du moindre mal, p.17.

[70] Michéa, La double pensée, p. 15.

[71] Jean-Claude Michéa, Le complexe d’Orphée: La gauche, les gens ordinaires et la religion du progrès (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, Coll. Climats, 2011), p. 126.

[72] Michéa, Les mystères de la gauche, p. 130–131.

[73] Íñigo Errejón, “ ‘Macron est un caudillo néo-libéral’—Entretien avec Íñigo Errejón,” interview by Léo Rossell, Vincent Dain and Lenny Benbara, Le vent se lève, August 16, 2017, https://lvsl.fr/macron-est-un-caudillo-neoliberal-entretien-avec-inigo-errejon/.

[74] Michéa, Notre Ennemi le Capital, p. 81–82.

[75] Michéa, Les Mystères de la Gauche, p. 119.

[76] Jean-Claude Michéa, Le loup dans la bergerie: Droit, libéralisme et vie commune (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, Coll. Climats, 2018), p. 39.

[77] Jean-Claude Michéa, Extension du domaine du capital: Notes sur le néolibéralisme culturel et les infortunes de la gauche (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2023), p. 95.

[78] Michéa, Orwell Anarchiste Tory, p. 122–132.

[79] Michéa, “À voix nue: Épisode 5/5.”

[80] “Entretien avec Jean-Claude Michéa”, interview by Jean Cornil, Centre Laïque de l’audiovisuel (CLAV), YouTube, January 28, 2013, https://youtube.com/watch?v=5r-tlZfGPW0&ra=m.

[81] Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey, Zerstörungslust: Elemente des demokratischen Faschismus (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2025).

[82] Quoted inSimon Grothe, “Gibt es einen ‘demokratischen Faschismus’?” Jacobin, December 13, 2025.

[83] Julian Nicolai Hofmann, “Philosoph Jean-Claude Michéa: Der Liberalismus hat ausgedient,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 5, 2026.

[84] Michéa, “À voix nue: Épisode 4/5.”

[85] Jean-Claude Michéa, Conservations américaines: Entretiens avec Michael C. Behrent (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2025), p. 81.