“There is nothing elitist about listening to wise men,” the director of the New School’s Wolfson Center for National Affairs, Sondra Farganis, said in welcoming the audience Monday to an interview of French philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Levy by New York Times critic at large Edward Rothstein. Since last spring Mr. Levy has followed in Alexis de Tocqueville’s footsteps, traversing America and reporting his experiences in a multi-part article in the Atlantic, which co-sponsored the evening.

Mr. Rothstein asked Mr. Levy if there was an American impulse to know who we are. Mr. Levy said this narcissistic question was posed again and again at every step of his journey. At a bookshop in an Atlanta airport, he said he looked at the best sellers on a central table. Half of them, he said, were devoted to this question of “who we are”: obesity in this country, cancer in this country, junk food in this country, and so on.

Mr. Levy said it was a very strange question, linked to the building of identity. Compared to Europe, America was built all of a sudden, he said. European nations have had centuries-old dynasties. People felt they belonged to an old tradition. Americans have a strong feeling of being latecomers to history.

Mr. Rothstein brought up William Randolph Hearst’s castle, San Simeon, which Mr. Levy had described in print as making him wish “to laugh, to vomit, and yet at times to applaud.” Mr. Levy said Hearst’s castle is a good summary of the strange and neurotic relationship of America to Europe, its “father and mother.” Hearst sent emissaries to “buy, bring, and rebuild” the beauty and greatness of Europe on the soil.

Mr. Levy spoke about the rampant American tendency to turn everything into a museum. “One of the things that strikes you is the multiplication of museums,” he said. “You cannot go through one tiny city, one big or little road, without finding museums of the founder of the city, pharmacy, lobster, prehistoric animals which were found there, museum of the cheese, museum of any single thing big and little, as if this country were a factory of producing the past.” He mentioned the Mormons, who store billions of names of people who have lived in the past.

He described being in Des Moines at the beginning of his journey last July. “I arrived at my hotel in that city, a Radisson or something like that, and I was welcomed by the director, who told me he had a great surprise for me. He had chosen a very special room – the room where Senator Kerry was going to be next week. In the room was a muse um piece behind glass in an old-looking wooden frame wooden frame: a list from one of his aides of items that Kerry would want to have in his minibar. “This was an anticipated museum of what Senator John Kerry was about to have in his minibar.” He said America – a “factory of the past” – has museums even about events that have not yet happened. This was strange and peculiar, he said.

“When I was in the north, I was absolutely depressed.” Love of the city, he said, is the very definition of civilization. He said he saw parts of Detroit looking as though they were Dresden or Sarajevo, abandoned by its own inhabitants. What was the force of destruction that inhabits this country? “But I was in quite another part of the country, Savannah, Ga., where I saw exactly the contrary.”

You cannot travel without being impressed, sometimes shocked by the omnipresence of religion in all aspects of life, he said. Religion was not just a weapon and argument for reactionary views, but also crucial to the Civil Rights movement, where religion and freedom traveled at the same speed. America had “a revolution that succeeded” while many revolutions are unsuccessful or end in nightmare.

One person in the audience, Jerry Spivack, asking about conservatism in America, asked whether America was headed toward fascism. Mr. Levy said there were no simple answers: Part of the country goes in one direction, the other heads the opposite way. He said he was against the war in Iraq and thought it was a big mistake. But when he met with neoconservatives, he felt the topic was not so simple: One could not just say that they were bringing America in a bad direction.

“I had a strange feeling, when they told me their own personal history, that it was mine,” he said. They came of political consciousness during the Cold War and were upset at the cowardice of the Western world; they were skeptical of multilateral organizations that did not do anything in Bosnia or Rwanda; they opposed fascism in Kosovo; when they said democracy was linked to natural rights and universal values, Mr. Levy said, how could he disagree? “On the other hand, when they told me their conclusions” I felt “in complete disagreement.”

Mr. Levy took a last audience question. “Where and what was your best meal in the United States?” He said he had a lot of good meals and America was not all junk food and obesity, as sometimes Europeans believe.