Here’s a tidbit from before Sarkozy was President that gives a certain sense of how his administration was likely to regard philosophy, and the humanities in general:<\/p>\n
\u00ab Nicolas n’est pas quelqu’un qui se compla\u00eet dans l’intellect, assure le pr\u00e9fet Claude Gu\u00e9ant, directeur de cabinet place Beauvau, puis \u00e0 Bercy. J’ai beaucoup c\u00f4toy\u00e9 Jean-Pierre Chev\u00e8nement. Il lisait de la philosophie jusqu’\u00e0 2 heures du matin, c’\u00e9tait toute sa vie, les id\u00e9es prenant parfois le pas sur l’action. Nicolas, lui, est d’abord un homme d’action. Quand il bavarde avec Lance Armstrong ou avec un jeune de banlieue, il a vraiment le sentiment d’en tirer quelque chose. D\u00e8s qu’il monte en voiture, la radio se met en marche. Il aime les choses simples, les vari\u00e9t\u00e9s, la t\u00e9l\u00e9vision. En cela, il exprime une certaine modernit\u00e9. Les Fran\u00e7ais ne passent pas leur temps \u00e0 lire de la philosophie… \u00bb<\/em><\/p>\n
“Nicolas isn’t someone who revels in the intellect,” asserted the prefect Claude Gu\u00e9ant, chief of staff at the Ministry of the Interior and then at the Ministry of Finance. “I’ve spent a lot of time with [the Socialist politician] Jean-Pierre Chev\u00e8nement. He read philosophy until two in the morning, all his life, ideas sometimes took precedence over action. Nicolas, on the other hand, is primarily a man of action. When he chats with Lance Armstrong or with a kid from the slums, he really feels like he’s getting something out of it. As soon as he gets in a car, the radio’s on. He loves simple things, variety, TV. In that, he expresses a certain modernity. The French don’t spend their time reading philosophy…”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A certain modernity is the opposite of time wasted on philosophy books…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here’s a tidbit from before Sarkozy was President that gives a certain sense of how his administration was likely to regard philosophy, and the humanities in general: \u00ab Nicolas n’est pas quelqu’un qui se compla\u00eet dans l’intellect, assure le pr\u00e9fet Claude Gu\u00e9ant, directeur de cabinet place Beauvau, puis \u00e0 Bercy. J’ai beaucoup c\u00f4toy\u00e9 Jean-Pierre Chev\u00e8nement. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[488,753,496],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2051"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2420,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051\/revisions\/2420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}