Few intellectual histories of France by non-French authors in recent years have produced the bitter polemic that Tony Judt's Past Imperfect: French intellectuals (1944–1956) elicited. Published in French at the same time as the English edition in 1992, the book was held to account for its questionable historiographical legitimacy, alleged inaccuracy in the treatment of sources, and not-so-hidden partisanship, even if it also received some positive reviews from authoritative specialists in the field in important national newspapers. Nevertheless, the general tone and content of the French academic reviews were largely negative, and in many ways this response was unsurprising: how could a study arguing that a certain dominant (and still alive) Jacobin philosophical tradition was characterized by a “marked absence of a concern with public ethics or political morality” be read otherwise? Further, in an often caustic style, Judt accused the postwar French intellectuals of being seduced by totalitarian tendencies. Such charge, not surprisingly, provoked a pointed defence of the intellectual and historiographical national sensibility, which was not above resorting to Continental stereotypes against the “Anglo-Saxon” cultural model. Nor was the negative reception surprising to Judt, who positioned himself explicitly in the text as an outsider, belonging to a different intellectual tradition. It is useful to remember this uproar today as one considers new books by Gisèle Sapiro and François Dosse, as it illustrates three important issues in a lively academic register: the continuity of a French approach to intellectual history, its difference from Anglo-American traditions, and a possible—although mediated—angle for understanding the nature of this French particularism, through the discussion of the historiographic projection of the idea of intellectual status.

近年来，很少有非法国作家撰写的法国知识史引起了托尼·朱特（Tony Judt）的《过去的不完美：法国知识分子》（1944-1956）的激烈争论引发。该书于 1992 年与英文版同时以法文出版，尽管它也获得了一些积极的评价，但它被认为是为了解释其值得怀疑的史学合法性、据称在处理资料方面的不准确以及不那么隐藏的党派偏见来自全国重要报纸的领域权威专家。然而，法国学术评论的总体基调和内容在很大程度上是负面的，而且在许多方面，这种反应并不令人惊讶：一项研究如何认为某种占主导地位（并且仍然存在）的雅各宾哲学传统的特征是“明显缺乏对公共道德或政治道德的关注”是另一种解读？此外，朱特经常以刻薄的方式指责战后的法国知识分子受到极权主义倾向的诱惑。毫不奇怪，这样的指控激起了对知识分子和史学民族敏感性的尖锐辩护，这并不排除诉诸大陆对“盎格鲁-撒克逊”文化模式的刻板印象。Judt 对负面的接受也不感到意外，他在文本中明确地将自己定位为一个局外人，属于不同的知识传统。今天，当人们考虑 Gisèle Sapiro 和 François Dosse 的新书时，记住这种骚动是很有用的，因为它在生动的学术记录中说明了三个重要问题：法国思想史方法的连续性，它与英美传统的区别，以及一个可能的——虽然是中介的——角度来理解这种法国特殊主义的本质，