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The essential question remains: why did this political dimension disappear from the writings of Lévi-Strauss after 1950? More to the point, when he selected the articles that were to form Structural Anthropology, why did he retain only those in which this aspect does not appear? And when he incorporated these reflections of the 1940s into other later works, especially Tristes Tropiques, why did he “edit” out the more political passages?

There is no simple, unequivocal answer to these questions. There is, of course, the contingent and quickly obsolete dimension of some of his references, but Lévi-Strauss’s political reflections were general enough that they could have survived the narrow circumstances of their production. It is important to remember, as he himself often pointed out, that the early 1950s were a period of crisis for him – at the theoretical, personal and professional levels.²⁹ By his own account, his two consecutive failures at the Collège de France, in 1949 and 1950, were at the root of it: “After this double disaster, I was convinced that I would never have a real career. I broke with my past, rebuilt my private life.”³⁰ To this series of ruptures must be added the sale at auction in 1951 of the collection of Amerindian art he had built in New York, a dispersion which must have been traumatic, not only because it represented a loss but also because, for Lévi-Strauss, “the passionate impulse to collect” was intimately linked to the construction of identity,³¹ and this breaking up of the collection symbolized the fragmentation of the personal and psychological unity he had rebuilt in exile. “I live in a grave,” he told Monique Roman, who was to become his third wife.³² In any case, his texts of the 1950s convey a change of mood as well as of tone: the optimistic planning of the political articles of the 1940s (which may be interpreted as a vestige of the reformist Marxism of his younger years)³³ was no longer appropriate. At the end of his life, when he was asked about the disappearance of politics from his intellectual horizon, Lévi-Strauss agreed, upon his interviewer’s insistence, to date it not from the early 1930s but from the war, conceding that he had taken part in a few Gaullist meetings in the early 1940s, yet always playing down his diplomatic work as a cultural attaché in New York from 1945 to 1947 and then his activities as a member of UNESCO’s International Social Science Council, over which he presided from 1952 to 1961. No need to suspect him of bad faith – such a reconstruction shows, rather, how profound his change of course truly was, its self-evidence retrospectively shaping the past, especially for someone like Lévi-Strauss who frequently narrated his own life experience and whose autobiographical accounts eventually sedimented. In the early 2000s, in the margins of a letter he had written to his parents in September 1942 that declares his intention to write a book unrelated to anthropology which would hark back to his “former conversations with Arthur” (i.e. Arthur Wauters, the Belgian Marxist activist who had initiated him into politics) – a book intended to “clarify a number of ideas,” made necessary in his view by the confusion that marred the political discussions of the time – Lévi-Strauss laconically scribbled: “No recollection.”³⁴

But whatever the date settled on for his break from politics, Lévi-Strauss’s explanation remained the same. He consistently evoked his disillusionment following the realization that his political analyses always turned out to be inadequate and his predictions systematically belied by events. He did not have the political “nose” that enabled some to sense new social tendencies and allow their thinking to be shaped accordingly, permitting some scholars also to act sometimes as decision-makers and political players. Hence, at the very apex of his professional recognition and intellectual celebrity, he decidedly and even deliberately withdrew from the concerns of public life and the ideological battles of his day. An anthropologist specializing in vanished pre-Columbian civilizations, he was to dedicate himself to his teaching at the Collège de France and spend summers at his country refuge at Lignerolles, where he “binged on myths” and wrote the four volumes and two thousand pages of the Mythologiques, removed from the unrest of the 1960s. It was at this time that he sketched the features of what was to become his public persona from the 1980s until his death.

The hypothesis of a fundamental and belatedly discovered mismatch between his personal temperament and the demands of political action should not be entirely dismissed, but it cannot account for the early 1950s about-face. We should note, first of all, that the disillusionment occurred at a specific time and place, namely France of the Fourth Republic. The anthropologist who had dreamt of renewal and tabula rasa was back in his home country thirteen years after his first trip to Brazil in early 1935; in the intervening years he had been back only for short periods, spending a total of ten of the previous thirteen years abroad. During this period, his status and identity had undergone major changes: an ambassador of French thought in Brazil (a university professor while he was not yet thirty years old), then a young and rising anthropologist upon his return to France, he is drafted in 1939 and experiences the “disorderly retreat” of the French army over several months, “from one billet to another” and from “cattle-trucks” to “sheep-folds”;³⁵ his Jewish identity, which he thought he could discount, was thrown back in his face by the law of October 13, 1940, and he became “potential fodder for the concentration camp,”³⁶ forced to flee into exile; having reached New York after a gruelling crossing, he gradually made his way in the world of American anthropology and forged local intellectual networks; he played an active role within the École Libre des Hautes Études and was appointed cultural attaché immediately after the war. But, upon his return, he found a country that did not want to see itself as having been defeated and that proved more interested in rewriting its history. Former institutional and intellectual divisions resurfaced (he experienced his own failures at the Collège de France as a victory of the “ancients” over the “moderns”), as did the same characters. It was the physical anthropologist Henri Vallois, a specialist in racial taxonomy appointed by the Vichy government in 1943 to replace Paul Rivet at the helm of the Musée de l’Homme, who was elected director of the institution in 1950, over Jacques Soustelle, a renowned anthropologist and a figure of Free France. As a result, Lévi-Strauss resigned from the position as assistant director of the museum which he had held since his return from the United States. This diffuse yet profound unease with regard to France is revealed in many passages of the early chapters of Tristes Tropiques – “confessions” he wrote over the course of a few months, in a state of “rage” and “irritation” that he would “never have dared publish if [he] had been competing for a university position.”³⁷

The narrow-mindedness condemned by Lévi-Strauss was perfectly illustrated in the French refusal to open the national community “on the basis of equal rights” to the “twenty five million Muslim citizens” from the colonies, a timorous isolationism that contrasted with the audacity of the United States a century earlier, when it opened its doors to mass immigration by poor and uneducated Europeans – a successful gamble “which saved America from remaining an insignificant province of the Anglo-Saxon world.”³⁸ This comparison between the two national destinies figures in the very last chapter of Tristes Tropiques, written in early 1955, as the Union Française – the political organization of the French colonial empire from 1946 on – was falling apart and the Algerian war was just beginning. For Lévi-Strauss, this debacle was due to the hypocrisy of the system of representation within the Union Française, the so-called double college which, despite a theoretically egalitarian Constitution (since “indigenous” status had been abolished and all Union members had the status of citizens), established a highly unequal system of representation between metropolitan French and colonial populations. This is the only allusion in Tristes Tropiques to an issue that was both at the center of French current events and the essential dynamic of the international context at the time of its writing – i.e. decolonization – which has been singled out as conspicuously absent from Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology. Thus, neither at the international nor at the national scale had the post-war period kept its promise of a new deal.

At the end of “The Theory of Power in a Primitive Society,” Lévi-Strauss cited the very important memo of November 8, 1941, on the “new indigenous policy in French equatorial Africa” by Governor-General Félix Éboué, which he had read in English translation. In it, Éboué recommended a policy of gradual and realistic association which took existing social structures into account, respected traditions and relied on traditional leaders – and it was with regard to the latter point that Lévi-Strauss mentioned it. This memo was to serve as the starting point of the Brazzaville Conference (January 30 to February 8, 1944), which led to the creation of the Union Française. The latter was widely inspired, at least at the level of principle, by the federalist ideal that Lévi-Strauss supported, having seen nationalism as a scourge ever since his early socialist years. In February 1943, writing for a few interlocutors at the US State Department, he argued: “The disintegration of national sovereignty must start from within through a process of federalism, on the one hand, and the creation of economic bodies, on the other, that will undermine the differences between national groups.”³⁹ But by the mid-1950s that ideal was already anachronistic. “Federalism” had become an accusation leveled by the nationalist right and the colonial camp, in particular against Pierre Mendès-France (whom Lévi-Strauss held in high esteem and with whom he met as he was writing Tristes Tropiques), and even against Jacques Soustelle, himself an anthropologist by training and a socialist in his youth, who had been appointed Governor General of Algeria in 1955. Independentist leaders, for their part, saw federalism as nothing but an empty catchword, as demonstrated by the hypocrisies of the Union Française – nothing but a way of surreptitiously perpetuating French rule. The principle of nationhood thus resurfaced everywhere, and Lévi-Strauss understood that he had to accept defeat in the face of what he later termed the “powerful engine” against which “no dominating state, not even a federating state, can stand up to for long.” However, as he would immediately add, this was “nothing to celebrate” – “national sovereignty is not a good in itself; it all depends on what use is made of it.”⁴⁰ In this respect, the early 1950s was indeed a moment of disillusionment for Lévi-Strauss, and, when he incorporated the text of “The Theory of Power” into Tristes Tropiques, he removed the reference to Félix Eboué and his comments on the necessity of dialogue between anthropologists and colonial administrators.

In his eyes, the history of the world was now determined, and in some sense overwhelmed, by the expansion of Western modernity. No force, no regulatory mechanism could oppose it any longer. “We have placed the colonized people” in a “tragic position”: they are “forced to choose between ourselves or nothing.”⁴¹ This accounts for the absence of the colonial question from the work of Lévi-Strauss, since this return of the nation-state forced him to make a distinction between, on the one hand, “small traditional societies, protected by their own isolation from the ravages of civilization, with no other ambition than to live apart” from capitalist modernity and, on the other hand, peoples who wanted to “take part on an equal footing in international life and to become full members of industrial society, in relation to which they can only feel like latecomers.”⁴² The two do not belong to the same history or call for the same approach. In this respect, the turning point was probably “The Foreign Policy of a Primitive Society” (chapter X) which articulated for the first time the idea on which Race and History was to conclude in 1952, and which was to become the central thesis, albeit in a much more pessimistic mode, of Race et Culture – namely the relative incommensurability of cultures and the need to maintain differences between groups. Making the “notion of humanity … coextensive with all human beings peopling the surface of the earth” was progress, but the foreign policy of the Nambikwara reminds us of the need for each group to continue to “think of itself as a group, in relation to and in opposition with other groups,” for this balance is the only way out of the alternative between “total war,” from which we had only just emerged in 1949, and “the utopian ideal of total peace” (p. 147).

The early 1950s was thus marked less by a withdrawal from politics as by a change of scale in thinking, as well as, it must be said, a rise in pessimism. For it was then that the “unilateral system” of Western civilization as a whole, and the fetishism of progress, became the targets of Lévi-Strauss’s critique. It was also then that he began to apply the thermodynamic metaphor of entropy to global history, in the rich sense the term entropy had recently acquired from information sciences and cybernetic theory – i.e. the multiplication of exchanges between human groups flattens and equalizes an enclosed world – and condemns it to disorganization.⁴³ This did not prevent him from continuing for a few more years to act as an expert within the newly founded UNESCO, whose headquarters were in Paris, not far from the Musée de l’Homme. He was on the panel of scholars the organization formed in December of 1949 to reflect on what was to become UNESCO’s first Declaration on Race;⁴⁴ in August 1950, he went on a four-month mission to India and Pakistan to investigate “the state of the teaching of the social sciences in Pakistan”; and, at the behest of Alfred Métraux – who directed a collection of publications entitled “Race and Racism” – he wrote Race and History, which was published in 1952, at the same time as he became head of the UNESCO International Social Science Council. As Wiktor Stoczkowski has noted (and as opposed to Lévi-Strauss’s own later account), he was very actively involved, at least during the first few years, even if his interventions betrayed a certain scepticism regarding the principles governing the organization.⁴⁵ It was within this framework that his thinking on a “generalized humanism”⁴⁶ developed from his critique of traditional humanism, which was in his view poisoned from the start by the “self-love” that had led man to isolate himself from his environment and from the rest of the living world. It was then that he became convinced – sounding incongruous at the time and resonating with disturbing relevance today – that “these recognized rights of humanity as a species will encounter their natural limits in the rights of other species.”⁴⁷