Jean Touchard

Jean Touchard (13 November 1918 – 1 July 1971) was a French political scientist and historian.

Biography

Jean Touchard was born at the 9th arrondissement of Paris. A former student of the École normale supérieure and a professor of literature (1943), he joined General de Gaulle's cabinet after the war.

Touchard was then appointed cultural attaché to the French embassy in Argentina (and later returned to France with a "Que sais-je?" on the subject), before being appointed, in 1954, secretary general of the National Political Science Foundation, of which he made a center of higher education and research of international renown.

In parallel with his teaching at the Institute of Political Sciences of Paris on "The movement of political ideas in contemporary France", which he taught alternately with René Rémond and Raoul Girardet, he led postgraduate seminars and directed research.

Jean Touchard died in Boulogne-Billancourt.

Research

His book The Left in France since 1900, taken directly from his course at Sciences Po, is a classic in the study of political movements in France in which he examines the evolution of the French left, seeking to answer the question "What is the left?"

In his book History of Political Ideas, he made a very thorough study of all the great political thoughts that have crossed time. His classification of the different liberal currents, according to the social circles concerned, is noteworthy:

XVIII century

• French aristocratic liberalism
• English aristocratic liberalism
• French political utilitarianism
• English political utilitarianism

XIX century (in the broad sense: 1789–1914)

• Liberal revolutionary thought
• French bourgeois liberalism
• English bourgeois liberalism or Manchesterian liberalism
• Liberal nationalism
• French imperialist liberalism
• English imperialist liberalism
• American imperialist liberalism

XX century

• Neo-liberalism
• Keynesian liberalism (what Anglo-Saxons call Liberal today)
• Liberal neo-conservatism or Chicago School

He was also the author of an original doctoral thesis on The Glory of Béranger, with a complementary thesis on his ancestor Louis Rousseau. He was the author of an essential article on "The Spirit of the 30's". With Louis Bodin, he wrote a book in the "kiosk" collection: Popular Front. 1936.

Works

• La République Argentine (1949)
• Histoire des idées politiques (1959; 2 volumes)
• Front populaire, 1936 (1961)
• La Gloire de Béranger (1968)
• Aux Origines du Catholicisme Social, Louis Rousseau (1968)
• La Gauche en France depuis 1900 (1977)
• Le Gaullisme, 1940-1969 (1978)

External links

• Works by Jean Touchard at Gallica
• Works by Jean Touchard at Persée
• Works by Jean Touchard at Dialnet
• Works by Jean Touchard at Open Library