ABOUT THIS BOOK

In this important volume, Herman Lebovics, a preeminent cultural historian of France, develops a historical argument with striking contemporary relevance: empire abroad inevitably undermines democracy at home. These essays, which Lebovics wrote over the past decade, demonstrate the impressive intellectual range of his work. Focusing primarily on France and to a lesser extent on the United Kingdom, he shows how empire and its repercussions have pervaded—and corroded—Western cultural, intellectual, and social life from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

Some essays explore why modern Western democratic societies needed colonialism. Among these is an examination of the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke’s prescient conclusion that liberalism could only control democratic forces with the promise of greater wealth enabled by empire. In other essays Lebovics considers the relation between overseas rule and domestic life. Discussing George Orwell’s tale “Shooting an Elephant” and the careers of two colonial officers (one British and one French), he contemplates the ruinous authoritarianism that develops among the administrators of empire. Lebovics considers Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking about how colonialism affected metropolitan French life, and he reflects on the split between sociology and ethnology, which was partly based on a desire among intellectuals to think one way about metropolitan populations and another about colonial subjects. Turning to the arts, Lebovics traces how modernists used the colonial “exotic” to escape the politicized and contested modernity of the urban West. Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies is a compelling case for cultural history as a key tool for understanding the injurious effects of imperialism and its present-day manifestations within globalization.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Herman Lebovics is Professor of History at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age, also published by Duke University Press; Mona Lisa’s Escort: André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture; and True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945.

REVIEWS

“Herman Lebovics is one of the leading American cultural historians of France and a rare native of our shores whose work has been translated into French. People on both sides of the Atlantic will want to read these extremely interesting essays.”—Edward Berenson, Director of the Institute of French Studies, New York University

“[T]his volume is an important collection from a prominent historian that contributes to the critical history of imperialism. . . . [I]t is a useful and significant book. Lebovics provides several sophisticated ways in which we can see the inter-related history of the colonies and the metropole. His approach is wide ranging, linking cultural developments to specific political moments and economic processes.”

-- Michael G. Vann Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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