Pierre-André Taguieff

Pierre-André Taguieff is a French philosopher who has specialised in the study of racism and antisemitism. He is the director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in an Institut d'études politiques de Paris laboratory, the Centre for Political Research . He is also a member of the Cercle de l'Oratoire think tank.

Taguieff is the author of a number of books and papers on racism and antisemitism, including The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and Its Doubles (2001) and Rising from the Muck: The New Antisemitism in Europe (2004). He is known in particular for his studies on the French National Front and populism.

Beliefs and works

On racism In La Force du préjugé – essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (1987), Taguieff analyzed several different types of racism: The first type of racism is against miscegenation, in favor of racial segregation, and wants to preserve differences between various alleged races. 19th century racialism theories, such as Arthur de Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–55), are an example of this type of racism, which pretends to be founded on science and on the existence of biological human races. In other words, this pseudo-scientific racism mistakes differences in the amount of melanin (which determines skin color) for racial differences. The second type is insidiously hosted by the Enlightenment philosophy of universalism: its dream of unity of mankind may bring it, in specific and extreme cases, to the will to annihilate all cultural differences, amounting to effective genocide or ethnocides. Taguieff's point is not in declaring that the Enlightenment philosophy is racist in itself, but extreme forms of this will of universality may lead, in practice, to the destruction of the plurality of cultures and to the rejection of even moderate forms of multiculturalism. The third and more recent type has integrated the cultural relativists' attacks against racism. This new form of racism has reversed the famous anti-racist arguments of ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. According to Lévi-Strauss, different cultures are incommensurable, and, because of this, each one thinks progress and superiority is on its side - Lévi-Strauss, in his 1952 essay for the UNESCO, used the famous metaphor of two trains crossing each other's path: each one thinks he is going the right way, while the other seems not to move or to move backward. Because of this, ethnocentrism is a necessary optical illusion, which in turn racist discourse uses to justify itself.

Taguieff was himself accused of racism on several occasions, for instance when he praised Oriana Fallaci's book The Rage and the Pride. He was also criticized for his contribution to the controversial website Dreuz.info, which French newspaper Le Monde described as "ultra-Zionist" and islamophobic.

Pierre-André Taguieff wrote Les Contre-réactionnaires in 2007, in which he opposed both antiracism and antifascism. He considers them as ideologies which are instrumentalized by far-left groups "aiming to regularize as many illegal immigrants as possible without any regulation".