Commenting on the history of philosophy, Bertrand Russell wrote that it is a disappointing fact that after initiating modern philosophy with Descartes, and continuing with Malbranche, philosophy in France became content to imitate what had been begun elsewhere. The philosophical development in France before the Revolution, he claimed, was an outcome of Locke and Newton and afterwards was premised on idealism imported from Germany.¹ Following this trend, post "68 French philosophy leant heavily on German. philosophy and tended to identify the philosophical concept of the subject with a concept of the subject found in (rationalist) German philosophy, specifically Enlightenment philosophy. The Kantian concepts of subjectivity and justified belief were considered to underpin philosophically a more general discourse that was linked to the social or political processes of liberal modernity. Thus through a number of quite complicated philosophical moves humanism, defined in terms of the Cartesian-Kantian conception of subjectivity, was cleaved to modernity.