Towards a Conservative Left offers the first comprehensive English-language introduction to the thought of Jean-Claude Michéa. Over the past three decades, Michéa has staked out a place for himself as France's foremost "left populist." A fierce critic of the illusions of progress and champion of the "common decency" that should (but no longer does) inform left politics, Michéa shows how the left's focus on cultural liberalism has become a crucial element in today's neoliberal economic order. At a time when the old divisions between "left" and "right" have never seemed less self-evident, Michéa invites us all to rethink our positions and imagine politics afresh.

The book opens with an introduction by its editor, the intellectual historian Michael C. Behrent, who situates the development of Michéa's thought in the context of contemporary French political life and shows how its guiding preoccupations, far from being limited to that context, speak directly to our own political moment.

Jean-Claude Michéa is a French essayist, philosopher, and the author of numerous books. Born in 1950 to Communist parents who met in the anti-German resistance movement, Michéa studied philosophy at the Sorbonne before pursuing a career as a high school philosophy teacher in the southern French city of Montpellier. He currently lives in the Landes, in southeastern France.

"Jean-Claude Michéa has elucidated perhaps the only political and intellectual framework that might yet save the West. If this seems obvious in retrospect, it is only thanks to his yeoman labor." — Sohrab Ahmari, US Editor, UnHerd

"Americans tend to think French intellectual life is all Foucault and postmodernism. By introducing Jean-Claude Michéa, this volume helps us see how much more vibrant contemporary French thought is. Even when one firmly disagrees with Michéa, one cannot but see him as a thinker of extraordinary relevance to our period of ideological realignment." — Gregory Conti, Associate Professor of Politics, Princeton University

"Michéa’s savage assault on the new left’s progressive cultural liberalism and its delirious theology of unlimited human rights is both compelling and exhilarating." - Alistair Miller, The Salisbury Review