Maurice Samuels. The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews.

Abstract

This book hits home—if by “home” we mean the core of our actual debates on multiculturalism and identity politics, on equality and justice in a globalizing world. And the first surprise it entails for the reader is the proof that these debates are hardly as new as many columnists would like to have it, and that its combat lines have never been as clear-cut as their contemporary interpretations seem to imply. Very conscious about this highly politicized context, Maurice Samuels in The Right to Difference provides a superb example of how engaged historical writing can indeed look for answers to twenty-first-century problems—not by using history as an ideological stone pit, however, but rather by carefully contextualizing sources and thus discovering submerged alternatives, some of which became actually potent for a time, while others did not prevail for long. Given his areas of specialization, it comes as no surprise that Samuels has chosen the case of France in order to intervene in the ongoing general discussion between those scholars who indict the idea of universal individual rights as generally hostile to collective difference (or even worse, as an ideology for camouflaging colonial exploitation) and those who see the fundamental values of the West endangered by an exaggerated attention to minority rights. You do not have to be an expert in French history in order to follow the argument that he develops in five well-selected case studies that cover almost 250 years: Samuels reconstructs the ways in which French thinkers have been conceptualizing the relationship between the universal and the particular while discussing the position of Jews in France, from the Revolution to the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Explicitly rejecting the aforementioned rigid confrontation, he carefully places his examples on an imagined continuum, with the demand for radical assimilation on one end, and a rather pluralist version of universalism on the other.