Do the French Think Too Much?

New York Times journalist Elaine Sciolino just published an article in which she explains that the Sarkozy presidency believes that the French should think less and do more. Sarkozy ran his campaign with the slogan “Work more to earn more;” apparently, it should have been “Work more to think less”:

France is the country that produced the Enlightenment, Descartes’s one-liner, “I think, therefore I am,” and the solemn pontifications of Jean-Paul Sartre and other celebrity philosophers.

But in the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy, thinking has lost its cachet.

In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their “old national habit.”

“France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”

Outraged reactions did not take long:

“How absurd to say we should think less!” said Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher, writer, professor and radio show host. “If you have the chance to consecrate your life to thinking, you work all the time, even in your sleep. Thinking requires setbacks, suffering, a lot of sweat.”

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the much more splashy philosopher-journalist who wrote a book retracing Tocqueville’s 19th-century travels throughout the United States, is similarly appalled by Ms. Lagarde’s comments.

“This is the sort of thing you can hear in cafe conversations from morons who drink too much,” said Mr. Lévy.

What is interesting is that both sides of the controversy seem to believe that there’s a zero-sum relation between work and thinking: More work allegedly entails less thinking and vice-versa. Perhaps this logic applies to some heavy manual tasks but certainly not to people in office and leading France. Or at least, I hope not…