Books: This Year's Pundit

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WITHOUT MARX OR JESUS by Jean-François Revel. 269 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

Jean-François Revel has been described by Mary McCarthy as having a "bullish" aspect, a "broad-browed, head-lowered promise of some intransigent charge into the arena." With critical hoofs stamping and literary horns waggling, what Revel gores is myths. After teaching in Florence, for instance, he wrote a book suggesting, among other heresies, that Italian men are far less virile than popular legend has it.

In France as a columnist for the weekly L'Express, Revel cast his beady eye upon a more solid target, sacred, large, fixed as a monument: Charles de Gaulle himself. Then Revel had a splendid idea. As a Frenchman in search of the ultimate heresy, why not—sacre bleu! —write a book in praise of the United States?

Without Marx or Jesus is the result. Already a bestseller in France, it promises to be one of those literary causes celebres that Americans like to discuss without necessarily reading. Revel operates from two unprovable premises with a passion for abstract generalization that seems extreme even for a Frenchman. Premise 1: "If mankind is to survive," Revel thunders, the world must have a revolution. Premise 2: Such a revolution can start only in the U.S.

But just what is the "absolutely necessary" and rather total transformation Revel calls for? Little short of Utopia. All Revel seems to expect is an end to "the notion of national sovereignty," some sort of "worldwide economic and educational equality," the "abolition of war," an "elimination of the possibility of internal dictatorship," and worldwide birth control.

His prescribed change, Revel asserts, is already taking place in these United States. As he goes through the motions of proving it, Revel spends a good deal of time trying to destroy myths that cynical Europeans and guilt-ridden natives share about the New World:

Myth No. 1: "Conformity" and "uniformity" are now the chief characteristics of American society. "The truth," Revel writes, "is that American society is torn by too many tensions not to become more and more diversified." He sees the U.S. as a healthy bundle of contradictions, "a diversity of mutually complementary, of alternative subcultures."

Myth No. 2: Americans are slaves to "gadgets." Revel's solemn counterclaim: "The truth is that there is no country in the world where automobiles, for example, are treated more like ordinary tools—or where people drive less like maniacs." Furthermore, making an assertion that will particularly outrage Europeans, he insists that "aesthetic" imagination is "more pronounced in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world."

Opinion v. Opinion. Myth No. 3: America is "the citadel of reaction." Revel's reply: Nothing quite as unreactionary as Ralph Nader or the mass opposition to Viet Nam has ever happened in Europe.