The Travail of French Intellectuals

Though Francophilia remains common among American intellectuals, few are at ease with the intricacies of French intellectual life. We enjoy the clarity, logic, and verve of contemporary writing in France, but much of it remains obscure to us because we are not pricked by many of the nettles that so persistently plague the French intelligentsia. We applaud where they speak to our own condition or in a language common to men of ideas everywhere, but much of what they say is a puzzle—or is taken for what it is not.

The Obstructed Path ought to relieve this situation. It is a quite remarkable book, in form a history of the development of ideas, yet not systematic in its exposition either of a history or of the ideas themse...