Maxime Rodinson Looks Back
▻http://www.merip.org/mer/mer269/maxime-rodinson-looks-back
Joan Mandell and Joe Stork spoke with him in April 1986, when he came to Washington for the celebration of MERIP’s fifteenth anniversary. We publish the interview here for the first time.
What was your first view of the people and culture in Lebanon?
I had some colonial ideas left in my mind, here and there, reinforced by study of anthropology. I remember a time I asked a Syrian man, “Did you have people gifted in mathematics, too?” He was angry, of course.
(...)
A big question at this time is that in 1954, the beginning of the Algerian revolution, the Party did not take a strong stand.
I did not have much knowledge of the events in North Africa at that time.
Did this become a big debate for you?
Yes, because I was beginning to have doubts about the politics of the Party at that time, and with others we managed to ask the Party to take a stand more in favor of independence of Algeria. But we were all disciplined in the Party at that time. We got angry about the position of the Party, and more prone to associate with non-Party people — the independent left — which is taken very badly by the Party, of course. But the Party had taken great pains to demobilize. So in 1956 there were elections in France. The socialists came into power and the Party had great expectations, especially with relations to Moscow and the idea of the great alliance of the socialist parties and the Soviet Union. All this could not be endangered by secondary things like Algeria. When the new assembly [Chambre de Députes] met, the Party voted special powers for Guy Mollet in Algeria. This was the first time I dared to contradict the position of the Party. Not all the way, of course. I wanted to speak out against these special powers. They decided that they had to make that move and sacrifice a part for the whole. I began to have doubts, theoretically. I began the slow evolution toward a critique of the Party. I left two years later, in 1958.