---
title: "A History of Philosophy, Vol. IX: Modern Philosophy — From the French Revolution to Sartre, Camus, and Lévi-Strauss"
author: "Frederick Copleston"
year: 1974
shelf: "ancient-roots"
purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Copleston+History+of+Philosophy+French+Revolution+Sartre+Camus+Levi-Strauss"
in_stock: false
related: ["copleston-history-philosophy-8", "copleston-history-philosophy-7", "merleau-ponty-phenomenology-perception", "heidegger-being-time", "yalom-existential-psychotherapy"]
collections: []
content_type: "book-commentary"
key_takeaways:
  - "The ninth volume completes Copleston's history by turning to French thought from the Revolution onward, and it openly revises its own charter: originally meant to cover French philosophy between the Revolution and the death of Bergson, it extends well into the twentieth century to treat Sartre at length, to outline some of Merleau-Ponty's ideas, and to add remarks on the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. The cost of that reach, Copleston records in the preface, is that nineteenth-century thought in Italy, Spain and Russia falls away, and the book confines itself to French philosophers rather than to philosophy in France as a geographical area."
  - "Its architecture runs in three parts. Part I moves from the Revolution to Auguste Comte — the traditionalist reaction in De Maistre and De Bonald, the ideologists and Maine de Biran, the eclecticism of Cousin, the social philosophy of Fourier, Saint-Simon and Proudhon, and Comte's law of the three stages and religion of humanity. Part II runs from Comte to Bergson, gathering positivism in France, neo-criticism and idealism, the spiritualist movement, and two chapters on Bergson's duration, memory, and the two sources of morality and religion."
  - "Part III carries the account from Bergson to Sartre and beyond: Christian apologetics and Thomism in France, philosophy of science, philosophies of value and personalism, the religious thought of Teilhard de Chardin and Marcel, two chapters on Sartre's existentialism and his later turn toward Marxism, and a closing chapter that sets Camus's philosophy of revolt and Merleau-Ponty's body-subject beside Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, which Copleston reads as a new naturalism distinct from both existentialism and Marxism."
references:
  - "Copleston, F. (1974). A History of Philosophy, Vol. IX: Modern Philosophy — From the French Revolution to Sartre, Camus, and Lévi-Strauss. Image Books/Doubleday."
  - "Copleston, F. (1966). A History of Philosophy, Vol. VIII: Modern Philosophy — Empiricism, Idealism, and Pragmatism in Britain and America. Image Books/Doubleday."
  - "Copleston, F. (1963). A History of Philosophy, Vol. VII: Modern Philosophy — From the Post-Kantian Idealists to Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Image Books/Doubleday."
glossary_terms:
  - "the traditionalist reaction to the Revolution"
  - "the law of the three stages"
  - "the spiritualist movement"
  - "closed and open morality"
  - "being-for-itself"
  - "the synchronic and the diachronic"
scholar_prompts:
  - "Copleston devotes two chapters to Bergson, following duration and freedom, the relation of memory and perception between spirit and matter, and finally the contrast between a closed morality that defends the group and an open morality bound to dynamic religion and mysticism. For a library that treats the psyche as real and lawful, what does Bergson's insistence on lived time and on a mobility that intelligence spatializes recover about the inner life, and where might his division of morality into the closed and the open oversimplify how the soul actually holds obligation and aspiration together?"
  - "The volume gives Sartre extended treatment — pre-reflective and reflexive consciousness, being-in-itself and being-for-itself, the absolute freedom of the for-itself, and the later reintegration of that freedom into the Marxist dialectic of the Critique. Read against depth psychology's claim that much of the psyche is not chosen but given, what does Sartre's proclamation of radical freedom clarify about responsibility, and what does it refuse to see about the conditioning, the inheritance, and the unconscious ground from which a life is actually lived?"
  - "The final chapter sets Lévi-Strauss against Sartre: a conditioning of thought and activity by formal structures that underlie consciousness, opposed to the freedom proclaimed in Being and Nothingness, and offered — in Copleston's reading — as a new naturalism that reintegrates man into Nature. Where does a practice attentive to pattern beneath awareness find kinship with the structuralist search for invariant forms, and where must it insist that the structures which shape a psyche are not merely synchronic laws but a living, historical dialectic between a person and a world?"
seo_title: "Copleston's History of Philosophy, Vol. IX: France and Existentialism | Seba"
seo_description: "On Copleston's ninth and final volume — French thought from the traditionalist reaction and Comte's positivism through Bergson's duration to the existentialism of Sartre, the revolt of Camus, and the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss."
---

**A Charter Revised: France after the Revolution**

The ninth volume completes the history by narrowing to a single national tradition and then, in the same motion, spilling past its own stated limits. Copleston records in the preface that the earlier volumes had been drifting beyond the nineteenth century — the eighth had already treated Moore, Russell, and Dewey, men born in the nineteenth century but active well into the twentieth — and that the present volume carries the tendency further still. It was first intended to cover French philosophy between the Revolution and the death of Bergson; in fact it includes a fairly extensive treatment of Sartre, a briefer outline of Merleau-Ponty, and some remarks on the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. The price of that extension is stated plainly: the plan to include nineteenth-century thought in Italy, Spain, and Russia has had to be abandoned. Copleston is careful, too, about what "French" means here. He has treated of French philosophers rather than of philosophy in France as a geographical area, declining to annex Russian exiles such as Berdyaev who lived and wrote on French soil but belong to another tradition. The volume is thus not a geography but the tracing of a line of thought, held to one country across nearly two centuries.

**Part I — From the Revolution to Auguste Comte**

The first part follows French thought as it reacts to the Revolution and then builds a science of society upon its ruins. It opens with the traditionalist reaction — De Maistre and De Bonald, Chateaubriand and Lamennais — for whom the Revolution's appeal to abstract reason had to be answered by authority, tradition, and the Church. From there Copleston turns to the ideologists and to Maine de Biran, whose philosophical development moves inward from sensationalist psychology toward the levels of human life and the felt sense of effort and will. Eclecticism follows in Royer-Collard and above all Cousin, whose position in the academic life of his country made him impossible to omit. The part then gathers the early social philosophies — the utopianism of Fourier, Saint-Simon on the development of society, Proudhon's anarchism and syndicalism, with a note on Marx's judgment of the French socialists — before arriving at Auguste Comte, whose law of the three stages, classification of the sciences, and eventual religion of humanity with its Great Being give the positivist impulse its first full system.

**Part II — From Comte to Bergson**

The second part traces what became of that impulse and what rose against it. Positivism in France is followed through Littré's criticism of Comte, Claude Bernard on experimental method, Renan on positivism and religion, Taine on the possibility of metaphysics, and Durkheim's founding of sociology, with Lévy-Bruhl on morals. Against this current Copleston sets the counter-movements: the neo-criticism and personalism of Renouvier, Cournot's inquiry into basic concepts, and the idealist metaphysics of Hamelin and Brunschvicg; then the spiritualist movement, in which Ravaisson, Lachelier on the bases of induction, Boutroux on contingency, Fouillée on idées-forces, and Guyau restore an inner and dynamic principle to a nature the positivists had flattened. The part culminates in two chapters on Bergson — his idea of philosophy, duration and freedom, the relation of memory and perception between spirit and matter, the interplay of instinct, intelligence, and intuition, and finally the two sources of morality and religion, the closed and the open, static defense and dynamic mysticism.

**Part III — From Bergson to Sartre, Camus, and Lévi-Strauss**

The third part carries the account into the twentieth century and its dominant existential and structuralist currents. It begins with the religious and scholastic responses — Blondel's way of immanence and the question of modernism, the Thomist revival in Maritain, Gilson, and Maréchal — and with the philosophy of science in Poincaré, Duhem, Meyerson, and Bachelard, and the philosophies of value and personalism in Le Senne, Lavelle, and Mounier. Two religious thinkers, Teilhard de Chardin and Marcel, are set against each other before the volume gives Sartre its most sustained attention: pre-reflective and reflexive consciousness, being-in-itself and being-for-itself, the freedom of the for-itself and the problem of other minds, and then the later Sartre of the Critique, who reintegrates that freedom into an individual praxis caught in the practico-inert and the dialectic of the group. The closing chapter sets Camus's absurd and philosophy of revolt beside Merleau-Ponty's body-subject and his quarrel with Marxism, and ends on Lévi-Strauss, whose structuralism — with its emphasis on synchronic form beneath conscious life — Copleston reads not as a system but as a current of thought, a new naturalism opposing Sartre's absolute freedom with structures that condition it.

For this library the volume closes a long arc and marks a threshold. It records the tradition in which the modern language of freedom, the absurd, lived time, and the unconscious structure was forged — experience turned inward in Maine de Biran and Bergson, freedom raised to an absolute in Sartre and then bent back under history, and, at the end, the claim that man is patterned by forms he does not choose. These are the terms in which one philosophical culture tried to say what a person is and how far a life is its own.