Surveys elite and popular ideas in France since the revolution, in an effort to characterize predominant modes of Gallic thinking. The author begins with the rationalist, deductive thought of Rene Descartes, which spilled from science into the social sciences and the humanities: Cartesian thinking remains the feature of the French worldview. Other conceptual treatments include utopianism, left-right artefacts, and metropolitan-regional oppositions. The final third of the book focuses on postwar notables such as Camus and Sartre, the communist left, and the postmoderns — de Gaulle merits comparatively little notice. Surprisingly, the left-liberal author concludes postmodernism (and implicitly communism) has proven a dead end, and even blames the mindset for spurring contemporary pessimism. Well written and honest, if bien pensant.