Scholars need to tell their stories: if I simply dump a bunch of predictable labels on Peterson or his enemies, and teach you nothing about the relevant intellectual history, then I’ve clearly failed you. Hold me to telling this history generously and truthfully — and let us hold Peterson to the same standard. For he writes, “above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.” To this end, I’ll provide you with as many primary and secondary sources as I can. Right now, YouTube culture rewards — rather than punishes — people for making the most sweeping, inflammatory claims possible about swaths of philosophy, culture, history, and art. This trend can be fought by patiently returning to essays and books — not necessarily academic ones, but to texts that demand we slow and calm down. I am writing this as a genuine nobody, so my argument rests on the quality of my sources more than my reputation or camera appeal.

I am not here to attack or defend specific philosophical positions within French intellectualism, but I utterly oppose the inane punditry, hyper-generalizations, and irresponsible ignorance swirling around a history that can be readily sketched out: French intellectuals may be notoriously hard to understand, but their historians aren’t. A number of excellent historians and biographers precisely capture the French political and intellectual milieu that Peterson deems so reprehensible (eg. Dosse, Eribon, Sirinelli). The best ones for my purposes are all French. North Americans tend to distort French ideas because we are so keen on applying them to our own literary, political, and cultural concerns. The extreme disparities between French inception and later American application unfolds in French Theory by François Cusset, the best (but imperfect) work on the trans-Atlantic journey and divergences. Cusset argues, among other things, that a tendency towards identity politics is not inherent in the original French works, which is something that Peterson routinely suggests. The pre-Peterson confusion of French thinkers with their American reception creates quite a mess that I begin to sort out here.

The End of the Humanities?

On many occasions, Peterson traces back what he believes to be the nearly total corruption of the social sciences and humanities to various French intellectuals imported to North America, and to a lesser extent, to the Frankfurt school: this is his historical argument par excellence. Despite being a psychologist, his primary narratives against campus politics, social justice, the academic left, and sundry villains fall under the purview of intellectual history. Peterson remains extremely serious in his belief that postmodern (neo)marxists from Europe have tainted the majority of the social sciences and humanities beyond redemption. Indeed 1960s France, according to Peterson, has “probably produced the most reprehensible coterie of public intellectuals that any country has ever managed.” Facing extensive criticism, he retracted the illiberal idea of the postmodern course detector or blacklist system that he proposed, and now wants to promote those old-school courses with a “classical” humanities curriculum.

The humanities today discourage both the classical and “theory” types; the dividing lines are often illusory. Our precarious states remain a vital question with complex multiple causes. Peterson inadvertently identifies one of these causes in a statement I agree with: “the incremental remake of university administrations into analogues of private corporations is a mistake.” However, consulting his many tweets and polemics, we discover that Peterson thinks the humanities are primarily afflicted by useless, undercited scholarship, full of “ideology” tracing back to the continent.

Uselessness and ideology: the topics diverge. The “passion of uselessness,” as George Steiner lovingly put it, drives the humanities. We must ultimately realize, as an erudite introduction to the question argues, that “There Is No Case For the Humanities.” But to grasp the postmodern (neo)marxist “ideology” in question, French intellectualism itself should be investigated, which is where I hope I can be of help. Attempting the ridiculous and impossible task of distilling postmodernism down to a single everyday word, let us call it skepticism — but a skepticism applied to a bunch of unusual categories outside of everyday incredulity. Yet we will get much further by investigating the two specific “bloody postmodernists” in question, Derrida and Foucault, who Peterson takes as mortal enemies.

Despite the fame of Derrida and Foucault in North America, we must never allow this perplexing, somewhat antithetical pair to personify 20th century French intellectualism, which would mean slipping into a cheap Francophobia that would omit a Bergson or Durkheim at the edge of the 19th century, or a Cassin or Descola entering the 21st. The “top ten French stars” approach can be an irritating impediment to those who map the broader lines of thought woven through dozens and dozens of thinkers. For me, personally, the most interesting French thinkers are those who were influential but only barely or belatedly recognized in North America, such as the brilliant linguist Émile Benveniste.

If intellectual history is a game where we fault the originators of certain concepts for their subsequent usage, evolution, and (mis)interpretation, Peterson should be attacking linguists such as Benveniste and especially Ferdinand de Saussure, without whom the history of structuralism (Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, etc.) would not be possible (or Derrida’s spectacular American debut of 1966). This linguistic framework would reach its peak in the extremes of American postmodernism. If we play blame-the-inventor, then Peterson should vilify the classic How To Do Things with Words by British philosopher of language J. L. Austin: the idea of performatives, as applied by Judith Butler, helped distance the world of (biological) sex from (cultural and linguistic) gender, and it was Peterson’s reaction against this distancing via pronouns that originally put him in the spotlight. Our everyday political attention to language today surely has something to do with the linguistic turn (or turns) of the 20th century. But Peterson does not blame linguists and philosophers of language. Their concepts, even when amplified through the wildest genetic fallacies, produce a tiny rhetorical ripple when compared to Peterson’s favorite move. Why bother with language when you can invoke Karl Marx?

Peterson’s Method: Marx as the Measure of All Things

Let us first tackle the Marx half, the more important half, of the epithet postmodern (neo)marxist. Peterson’s dominant rhetorical strategy is to measure various thinkers’ proximity to Marx — via their thought or personal politics — and thereby indict them in proportion to how (neo)marxist they were, never failing to estimate of number of deaths attributable to the horrors of Stalin and Mao. Here are two excerpts that perfectly represent this strategy, in which Peterson declines to define postmodernism (an extremely tricky and multifaceted term to be sure) but immediately identifies the relevant thinkers as “avowed Marxists”:

I want to talk about postmodernism a little bit. That’s Michel Foucault in the middle [of the PowerPoint screen] and a more reprehensible individual you could hardly ever discover or even dream up no matter how twisted your imagination. Foucault and Derrida I would say — there’s more — but I would say they’re the two architects of the postmodernist movement. In brief, I think what they did was in the late 60s and early 70s they were avowed Marxists way, way after anyone with any shred of ethical decency had stopped being a Marxist. …[various ad homs] … Foucault in particular, who never fit in anywhere and who was an outcast in many ways and a bitter one and a suicidal one his entire life, did everything he possibly could with his staggering IQ to figure out every treacherous way possible to undermine the structure that wouldn’t accept him in all his peculiarity. And it’s no wonder, because there would be no way of making a structure that could possibly function if it was composed of people as peculiar, bitter, and resentful as Michel Foucault. … He did put his brain to work trying to figure out A) how to resurrect Marxism under a new guise, let’s say, and B) how to justify the fact that it wasn’t his problem that he was an outsider [and] it was actually everyone else’s problem.

This performance at UWisconsin represents classic Peterson invective oratory, but he or his editors at Penguin toned things down for 12 Rules:

More important in recent years has been the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, leader of the postmodernists, who came into vogue in the late 1970s. Derrida described his own ideas as a radicalized form of Marxism. Marx attempted to reduce history and society to economics, considering culture the oppression of the poor by the rich. When Marxism was put into practice in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere, economic resources were brutally redistributed. Private property was eliminated, and rural people forcibly collectivized. The result? Tens of millions of people died.

When we consult the relevant biographies and historical sources on the life and work of Derrida and Foucault, these statements would be fairly termed “egregious misrepresentations” — or in Peterson’s vocabulary, “lies” (“leading to Hell”)— for readers disposed to historical accuracy, neutral presentation, and other scholarly values.

On Derrida

In Derrida’s biography by Benoît Peeters, we find Derrida criticized by his peers for not being a Marxist. As Derrida wrote to historian Pierre Nora, “It is perhaps the whole of Marxist dogma about colonization, economic imperialism (and the phases of capitalism) that needs to be revised.” Derrida indeed resisted joining the Parti communiste français (PCF), a powerful force in French intellectualism; very approximately, we could say that Derrida was a cosmopolitan social democrat in his own beliefs, working on causes such as apartheid and his native colonized Algeria.

More troubling than misrepresenting Derrida’s personal politics, though, is Peterson’s utter neglect of the thinkers and topics the philosopher actually considered. Derrida published more than twenty books before Spectres de Marx (1993), covering an enormous range of thinkers such as Husserl, Hegel, Heidegger, Saussure, Nietzsche, Rousseau, and Plato. A quasi-sincere attempt to understand him on his actual topics — ranging from education, ethics, and justice to Judaism, animality, and the theory of the gift — is far more likely to produce a frustration with his style than the sort of seething moral outrage that grips Peterson when he discusses the “bloody” Derrida at a sub-Wikipedia level of abstraction. Though Derrida’s deconstruction went through an easily-ridiculed process of domestication in North America — applied, as a fad, to far too many pop culture targets — we must never forget that deconstruction originally concerns itself with a very particular tradition of philosophy. If Derrida’s mission was to blow up Western civilization, he botched the job. Teaching Derrida’s texts demands teaching the resoundingly European texts that obsess him, thus popularizing Plato, philosophical patriarch #1, for North American students who have never experienced the classicism of the French lycée.

Peterson seized a quote from Spectres de Marx to profoundly misconstrue Derrida as a dogmatic Marxist, rather than as a philosopher who, three decades into his career, wanted to investigate the “spirit” of Marxism set against the backdrop of the “totalitarian terror in all the Eastern countries, all the socio-economic disasters of Soviet bureaucracy, the Stalinism of the past and the neo-Stalinism in process” that was formative for Derrida. The mature Derrida wrote this in 1993, long after the nouveaux philosophes such as Bernard-Henri Lévy used the French translation of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1974) to shame the French far left after the failures of the 1968 protests. A monolithic French left does not exist. Rhetorically, however, it would be most convenient if it did.

What about Peterson’s sources? The Derrida quote that identifies deconstruction with a “certain spirit of Marxism” — elsewhere, he identifies it with America — is to be found at the start of Stephen Hick’s Explaining Postmodernism, suggesting that Peterson never read Spectres de Marx directly. Explaining Postmodernism is indeed the only synoptic work on the relevant intellectual history that Peterson ever cites in 12 Rules. The rest of Peterson’s take on Derrida in 12 Rules improves, ever so slightly, in its honesty, but conflates the hierarchies Derrida was actually interested in interrogating — metaphysical ones from the history of philosophy — with Peterson’s famed dominance hierarchies, and appears to be derived from a summary of a summary of a summary of Derrida’s late 1960s or early 1970s work. Given that scholars on the left, center, and right have attacked Derrida much more successfully on substantive grounds, it would seem remarkably embarrassing that Peterson attempts this guilt-by-association attack on Derrida based on demonstrably false political affiliations and ignores the countless opportunities for criticizing Derrida afforded by actually reading a few of his books — or books by the epigones who instrumentalized his thought, originally for the purpose of literary criticism.

Let us imagine what would happen if we introduced a certain thinker — let’s say the mysterious author of “Why Socialism?” — by describing the murderous possibilities of socialism, then later mentioning that this thinker’s primary interest was physics (I am speaking of Albert Einstein). Yet this is precisely what Peterson does with Derrida: there is a total distortion (or ignorance?) of what Derrida actually spent his life doing, which was, more or less, writing and teaching about many canonical philosophers, literary figures and a grab-bag of other thinkers. Though Derrida might be extremely difficult and often irritating to read, I would invite anyone to flip through his books and confirm the spirit and themes of what Derrida discusses — a prominent one being a resistance, not an embrace, of totalizing systems of thought. Arguing that Derrida is a bad philosopher methodologically would be infinitely easier than arguing he is a evil person morally. One cannot leave his Politics of Friendship with the sense that Derrida (or his friends) hated humanity, love, virtue, kindness, or the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero that he cites so profusely.

On Foucault

Michel Foucault, unlike Derrida, joined the PCF in 1950, and then vehemently rejected communism and dogmatic Marxism. The rigid doctrines of the PCF and its condemnation of homosexuality was a terrible fit for the gay and idiosyncratic Foucault: a heterodox thinker who, on different accounts, has potential sympathies towards the end of his career with libertarianism, neoliberalism, and anarchism; a thinker who claimed “we must insist on the specificity of the Gulag question” against every sort of reductionism. In his personal politics and lifestyle, he was more radical than Derrida; in their thought, it is a toss-up.

Whatever Foucault was (or will turn out to be), he was far from dogmatic Marxism, and though he is loved by the academic left, he cannot be understood as a sensitive “progressive” in the sense that North Americans understand it. When Peterson says that “in late 60s and early 70s [Foucault and Derrida] were avowed Marxists way, way after anyone with any shred of ethical decency had stopped being a Marxist,” we are left with the profound impression that, in the most charitable case, he is effectively unstudied in their biographical and intellectual arcs, and, at worse, has simply lied to his audience with an extremely sensational delivery, spicing things up with an extended ad hominem based on Foucault’s perilous mental health (Peterson did read Foucault’s work on madness). Foucault was radical, certainly, but will not fit the rigid archetype — Peterson loves archetypes — that Peterson requires to dismiss him.

A Continental Peterson?

Owing to Peterson’s powerful desire to quarantine various French thinkers supposedly infected by Marx — creating an intellectual tribalism which he is against politically — he has yet to realize that various critical theorists, continental philosophers, and literary critics offer certain positions in proximity to his own (“Rule 9: Assume That the Person You Are Listening to Might Know Something You Don’t”). For someone who wants young atheists to seriously study the stories of the Bible, he should be reading John Caputo — Derrida’s student — author of What Would Jesus Deconstruct: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church and The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Certainly, he should try out Emmanuel Levinas, Jewish philosopher and Derrida interlocutor, known for “ethics as first philosophy” — or why not Martin Buber, whose I and Thou relation Peterson might appreciate? How about the French Jesuit scholar Michel de Certeau, who ranges from his famous studies of everyday life to psychoanalysis and Christianity? Perhaps more theologians would be in order. It would not take long in a Jesuit college or a Benedictine seminary to realize that Peterson purges Christian doctrine of its communal messages, creating a strange Nietzschean prosperity gospel of individualism. And if his interest in dialogue and fighting polarization is sincere, the work of Russian philosopher and critic Mikhail Bakhtin (a great reader of the Peterson hero Dostoevsky) would be immensely illuminating. Yet Peterson is an absolutist on Marx. His moral condemnation of intellectuals who were merely shaped by Marxist milieus — readers of Marx, certainly, but opposed to rigid prescriptions, doctrines, and obviously, to totalitarianism — seemingly imbues him with an immense postwar Francophobia so strong that he fails to engage many potential allies such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, provocateur-philosopher extraordinaire, whose recklessness and media hunger were renowned (until Peterson came along—even Lévy would turn down Rebel Media).

The preconceived blanket association of mid-to-late 20th century French intellectualism with Stalinism or Maoism — or less explicitly political and extremely retroactive categories like postmodernism — smothers any attempt to learn about French ideas in good faith. Such problems predate Peterson. Certainly, there was a pronounced left lean — and a pacifist lean — in the École Normale Supérieure and its preparatory classes; French Stalinists and Maoists took far too long to get off the wagon. But exceptions abound to the “rule” of the French intellectual left. We cannot ignore the profoundly influential political theorist Raymond Aron (who called Marx “the opium of the intellectuals”), the rightward-drifting historian of the French Revolution François Furet, and the (more inwardly) conservative philologist Georges Dumézil (an influence on Foucault). And we will never properly position the French left until we reveal the wartime cast of collaborationist, fascist, and anti-Semitic intellectuals — barely recognized by North American academics — such as Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline (whose name is popping up because some of his most disgusting tracts may soon be republished). I sincerely invite Peterson to apply his theory of fascism — “if men are pushed too hard to feminize, they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology” — to either historic French fascism or to the modern French far right (surely, someone on the internet is already working on the puzzle of how to blame fascism on feminism). As always with Peterson, there can be no economic explanations for disturbing political phenomena, only cultural ones.

Peterson, Socialist

From Maps of Meaning, through his videos, and all the way to 12 Rules, Peterson seems torn up by his youthful socialist beliefs and doubtful as to economic policy. One of the most unappreciated statements in 12 Rules is this seemingly innocuous aside: “I have some beliefs that might be regarded as left-leaning. I think, for example, that the tendency for valuable goods to distribute themselves with pronounced inequality constitutes an ever-present threat to the stability of society.” Yet Peterson’s belief in this tendency appears absolutely remarkable when we consider his (1) non-engagement with the classic sociological tradition that studies inequality (2) non-engagement with Thomas Piketty — another “bloody” Frenchman — and other economists who study inequality (and who propose solutions, which Peterson suggests are illusory) (3) attacks on modern left or liberal academics who want to address a multiple package of extreme inequalities including, but not limited to, inequalities of wealth and income.

Ever the historian, Peterson regards the “overwhelming horrors of privation and necessity” as the real problem of history (why not study economics, then?). Of course this is and was a major problem — but shall we simply shut down the departments of academics who want to study other major problems? Accusing “soft,” “irrational,” Continental-inspired scholars of various psychopathologies ensures Peterson will never have to tackle the vast empirical literature on those inequalities that reach demonstrably oppressive proportions. Analytic feminism? Feminist empiricists? Feminist scientists, feminist historians? Thinkers with plenty of methodological rigor and no affections of style calmly making their cases? Such people do not exist for Peterson, who historically bonds social justice with the non-analytic postmodernism in order to dismiss them together.

Peterson’s associative logic thwarts him from actually studying the inequality he claims is dangerous: people who study inequality today may also read Marx to critically revise his critiques of capitalism, and this, for Peterson’s Cold War mindset, is seemingly intolerable. As a psychologist, he must realize one of the hallmarks of conspiratorial thinking is the belief that everything is connected, that each emergent fact is linked to other facts that all become interpretable with respect to the conspiracy. If it is true that French intellectuals such as Foucault went too far with a conspiratorial study of power as a singular, transcendent, and reductive category, slipping into what Eve Sedgwick called paranoid reading, then we should also accept that Marx cannot be the measure of all things, which is indeed the primary rubric, a paranoid rubric, that Peterson applies to French intellectualism and its delayed afterlife in North America. Somewhat like American liberals who interpret each bumbling decree of the Trump administration as an inexorable tumble on a slippery slope to fascism, the genetic fallacy incessantly beckons Peterson back to Marx, barely allowing a crack of moral daylight between anti-totalitarian readers of Marx and the gulag itself.

Beyond Economics

What were French intellectuals up to, aside from politics? Phenomenology (eg. Merleau-Ponty), existentialism (eg. Sartre), structuralism (eg. Levi-Strauss), and the Annales School (eg. Braudel) represent tremendously important movements or milieus in the 20th century; Nietzsche cast a long shadow into France from 19th century Germany. Peterson, to my knowledge, has never seriously engaged so-called French Nietzscheanism. If and when Peterson reads Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies” — an anthology favorite — he may have to give up Nietzsche as a treasured thinker, for there is no better example of vulgar postmodernism than this text, which proclaims the illusory linguistic-rhetorical quality of truth. If he is to be consistent, Peterson’s associative moral logic necessitates dumping the whole of Nietzsche’s thought. For most scholars, there is some kind of Good Nietzsche and Bad Nietzsche (in fluctuating, debatable proportions). The Bad Nietzsche is more than his appropriation by the Nazis and the domestic French fascists; there is something — perhaps small, but really dangerous — lurking within. Peterson typically consumes his thinkers whole to prevent these sorts of situations that require nuanced thinking. “Philosophizing with a hammer”: this is Peterson’s favorite Nietzschean expression. Historicizing with a bulldozer: this is Peterson’s actual method.

The category postmodern (neo)marxist puzzles historians in the same way that married bachelors might trouble logicians. Dogmatic Marxists believe too strongly in deterministic understandings of history to be considered properly postmodern. Indeed, in Lyotard’s famous definition, postmodernism is “incredulity towards metanarratives,” specifically the kind of historical metanarrative that Marx offers. On the other hand, the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson wrote a famous critical account of postmodernism, attacking it as the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” marked by an emptying of historical knowledge, a lack of depth, and sleazy forms of pastiche in art. Nonetheless, there is a proximity of time and place between those actual Marxists (eg. Althusser) and other thinkers who would eventually be lumped together— across the Atlantic but not in France — as postmodernists.

Long before Peterson, Anglophone scholars made mistakes in labeling Derrida and other French intellectuals as postmodernists in the first place; Peterson recently dubbed this pair the “architects of postmodernism” as if they had some sort of blueprint (an anachronistic vision, to be sure). Across the political spectrum, scholars attached the terms postmodernist and poststructuralist to thinkers who explicitly rejected or never recognized these labels. To grasp the relevant French history, free of North American buzzwords, I recommend reading François Dosse alongside Why There Is No Poststructuralism In France.

If we use the term “postmodernism,” it becomes rather easy to group French intellectuals with vehement disagreements into a unified school and hence dismiss them — or, as used to be the case, to publish books on postmodernists as though they were as tidily a clustered group as the impressionists. Whether we are talking about movements in art, music, literature, or thought, grouping related figures together under key terms is academically profitable and easily publishable. Decades later, however, the most brittle terms fall apart. Postmodernism — as a (deeply Americanized) grouping of ideas, as a historical moment, and as a term — was declining before Peterson’s rise, roughly in sync with this Google Ngram chart: