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PIERRE-ANDRA‰ TAGUIEFF is one of France's leading writers on the subject of racism and on the ideology of the contemporary extreme right. He has also written extensively on the theoretical and practical dimensions of the struggle against racism in France. Born in 1946 to Russian and Franco-Polish parents, he was educated in Paris. Having trained in philosophy, with an early interest in philosophy of language, he is currently a senior researcher at the CNRS. He also teaches at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques. His own political develop- ment has passed via various forms of ultra-leftism in the radical 1960s to remain broadly on the left since that time. Though highly critical of the Socialist Party's ideological vacuity, he gave Lionel Jospin his support in the 1995 presidential election. From the late 1970s onwards he began to publish scholarly essays on the discourse and ideology of the New Right think tanks, GRECE and the Club de l'Horloge. In due course, as different elements of the New Right evolved and diverged from each other, Taguieff maintained a par- ticular interest in the work of Alain de Benoist, the most fertile and original of the theorists. The summation of his research in this area is contained in Sur la Nouvelle Droite.I» Meanwhile, he pursued an over- lapping investigation into past and present expressions of antisemitism, including work on the mythology of Jewish world conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.2 He also examined the deterministic theories of cultural difference, collective identity and separate develop- ment which have been developed by intellectuals of the extreme right as substitutes for the old doctrines of biological racism, Aryanism and white supremacy. The most important of his works on the subject was La Force du prA©jugA©.3 In addition, Taguieff has devoted attention to the Front national (FN), to which many former luminaries of the New Right have in any case migrated. Here too his work has maintained a particular emphasis on the ideological and discursive aspects of the phenomenon.4 Over the course of time Taguieff has made the transition from aca- demic specialist to Parisian intellectual. He has become one of the promi- nent group of political and cultural communicators who regularly con- 68 |
