Jean Francois Revel

In honor of the man's passing, I order several of his books and am presently reading Without Marx or Jesus. Good book, although I think his premise has turned out differently than he first thought. Yes, there was a revolution, but it was in the direction of Reagan, not McGovern. However, he acurately conveys the inherent restlessness and vitality of the States. We are nothing if not an unctious lot.
I remember reading an article in Macleans (a Canadian publication) which profiled him (sorry, can't find it. Twas four years ago). It always blew me away because the article talked about how the French value and honor their philosophers in a way that the USA doesn't. I found the article tedious for two reasons. First, why was a Canadian publication comparing France to the US, not Canada. It's typical of the magazine I found. Anything positive in the world needs to be contrasted with the USA, for balance I suppose. The second salient fact that escaped the author was that JFR was a very pro-American author (at least philosophically, not always politically) and that his work appeared to have very little influence on French society as a whole. If he were so revered, why did he not make more converts?
This is not to mock JFR, for I find him to be a brilliant, insightful man who is not leaden with Foucoult or Satre's intentional opaqueness and obfiscution. It's a comment that societies easily make rock stars out of people and still can readily disregard what they think. All that being said, he will be sorely missed, a man unafraid of the truth, a man unafraid to speak his mind with the mental incisiveness to say it well. The only question remains, can France produce a successor?