Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France
MONSIEUR L’ADMINISTRATEUR,
MES CHERS COLLÈGUES,
I thank you for receiving me in your midst. At this inaugural moment today, I am first of all aware of the responsibility that falls on me as a result of your decision to open your courses of instruction to the most living of the problems of contemporary politics. But I am most conscious of the wonderful opportunity that you have accorded me. It is an opportunity, at a moment I hope to be the midpoint of my career, to invigorate my researches with a new energy, by relocating them in an intellectual milieu unique thanks to the radical freedom it provides—shielded, as one is at the Collège de France, from the pressures of any agenda, freed from any obligation to evaluate and train students, and liberated from the need to present one’s credentials in the face of the usual disciplinary barriers. This chance for a new departure therefore has nothing of the ambiguous and melancholy air of summation so inevitably associated with what are called “academic honors,” signaling—as they so frequently do—that a work is considered essentially complete. For this reason I can make my own the words of Roland Barthes: “My entry into the Collège de France is a joy more than an honor: an honor is sometimes undeserved, but a joy never is.”1 And it is unquestionably a joy for me to be able to speak with you today about a project at the moment of its continued elaboration, the joy of an activating obligation and a productive duty.
The expression of my acknowledgments must begin with Professor Marc Fumaroli, who presented you with the project of a chair in the modern and contemporary history of the political. It is first of all thanks to the breadth of his interests and the force of his eloquence that I am able to be in your midst this evening.
I must also, without further delay, let one share in these thanks who is no longer here to receive them this evening: François Furet. It was he who, by inviting me to join the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales at the beginning of the 1980s, helped me make the decisive leap at time when, as a young academic, I remained between two worlds, at the margins of the university system, in the rather precarious position of an intellectual maverick. He put me in a position to give a certain unity to my life and realize the dream of every man and woman: to make a profession of his passion. It was under his guidance and that of Claude Lefort, the one a historian and the other a philosopher, that I learned to work beyond academic routines and intellectual fashions. They were for me, both of them, masters and, indissociably, friends and colleagues. The other members of the Centre de Recherches Politiques Raymond Aron, together with whom we undertook to renovate the long decrepit study of the political, know well what I owe each one of them. It gladdens me that this small community of historians, sociologists, and philosophers are able to see the originality of its work recognized through my election. Finally, though the list of those to whom I ought to express my gratitude could be lengthened further, I will limit myself to thanking the great late medievalist Paul Vignaux. In fact it is probably because of the bonds of friendship that were forged at the very beginning of the 1970s with Vignaux, one of the founders of democratic trade-unionism in France, that as a young militant I could have slowly realized as I did, unlike an important part of the generation of 1968, that a life rigorously dedicated to the comprehension of the world fully participates in creating the conditions for its change: that there is a total complementarity between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa.
The modern and contemporary history of the political, then. The study of the political sometimes has taken place at the Collège de France, tangentially, under more oblique headings. I must, of course, make special mention of André Siegfried, author of Le Tableau politique de la France et de l’Ouest; holder of a chair in “economic and political geography,” he was one of the pioneers of electoral analysis in this country.2 The question of power and its genesis, more generally, has figured in the courses of professors who officially taught sociology or philosophy; one thinks simply of Raymond Aron or Michel Foucault, who each, if in quite different ways, meant so much for my generation. And the decisive role that Maurice Agulhon has played more recently in the study of political mentalities and political culture in nineteenth-century France is well known.
This new chair that I occupy today joins this tradition, even if these various antecedents do not constitute a true genealogy. But there are also certain curricula of the nineteenth century at the Collège de France that approach the spirit, if not the content, of the present chair. I think, especially, of Jules Michelet’s concern to illuminate the vicissitudes of the present by retracing the genesis of the French state and nation. And one must likewise make reference to Ernest Renan. While he held a highly specialized chair in Hebraic, Chaldaic, and Syriac languages, the great academic at the same time wanted to reflect on collective life in the long term, to enlighten his contemporaries and to challenge them for their blind spots and oversimplifications. The intent of my enterprise is not terribly different, in many respects, from that “philosophy of contemporary history” to which he aspired.
Edgar Quinet, lastly. He, too, entered the Collège de France in 1841 charged with a traditional study. But in his actual courses, that ardent republican moved very quickly onto more dangerous terrain, successively dealing with the Jesuits (together with Michelet), ultramontanism, and then the relationship between Christianity and the French Revolution. I can recognize myself quite well in one of the more famous expressions of this author of The Revolution: “French democracy has exhausted its storehouse of ideas, which has to be stocked up again.”3 I eagerly adopt Quinet’s program myself, and I feel myself close to his concern to help prepare for the future by rooting reflection on the present in the comprehension of the ordeals of the past. With one appreciable difference, however, which is that such a project can retain its meaning only through being placed in a much larger comparative framework.
This is not the first time, stricto sensu, that the word “political” figures in the title of a Collège de France chair. And yet, the object of modern and comporary politics is now taken explicitly as a subject matter and placed at the center of a teaching plan. Notwithstanding the continuities with the past I have just mentioned, the project of a history of “the political” is, for this reason alone, something original. Accordingly, it is best to start with a definition of the object of study.
As I understand it, “the political” is at once a field and a project. As a field, it designates the site where the multiple threads of the lives of men and women come together, what allows all of their activities and discourses to be understood in an overall framework. It exists in virtue of the fact that there exists a “society” acknowledged by its members as a whole that affords meaningfulness to its constituent parts. As a project, the political means the process whereby a human collectivity, which is never to be understood as a simple “population,” progressively takes on the face of an actual community. It is, rather, constituted by an always contentious process whereby the explicit or implicit rules of what they can share and accomplish in common—rules which give a form to the life of the polity—are elaborated.
One cannot make sense of the world without making room for the synthetic order of the political, except at the price of an exasperatingly reductive vision. The understanding of society, in fact, can never be limited to adding up and connecting together the various subsystems of action (economic, social, cultural, and so forth). These latter are, for their part, far from being easily intelligible by themselves, and only become so as part of a more general interpretive framework. Whatever the catalogue of cultural and social facts, economic variables, and institutional logics, it is impossible to decipher society at its most essential level without bringing to light the nerve center from which the very fact of its institution originates. An example or two will suffice to persuade of this fact.
To understand the specificity of a phenomenon like Nazism, it is easy to say that the dissection of the different tensions and the multiple stalemates of German society in the 1930s is not enough—unless one wants to limit oneself to a banal analysis of its origins as simply an exacerbated response to the crisis of the Weimar regime. The truth of Nazism as a pathological attempt to bring about a unified and homogenous people is understandable only if it is related to the conditions of the perverse resymbolization and recomposition of the global order of the political in which it took place. To take another example, closer to the present, the crisis that today is wracking a country like Argentina is not be interpreted simply according to economic and financial factors that immediately present themselves. It takes on meaning only when resituated in a long history of decline linked to the recurrent difficulty of forging a nation founded on the recognition of shared obligations.
At this level, therefore, which one could call “global,” is where matters have to be studied in order to usefully approach a good number of questions that haunt the contemporary world. Whether it is a matter of contemplating the possible future forms of Europe, analyzing the transformations of democracy in an age of globalization, guessing the destiny of the nation-state, evaluating the transformations of the welfare state, or discovering the conditions in which the long term in societies so often governed by the dictatorship of the present would be taken seriously, it is always to the key question of the political that the perplexities and disquietudes of today lead back.
In speaking of “the political” as a noun, I thus mean as much a modality of existence of life in common as a form of collective action that is implicitly distinct from the functioning of politics.4 To refer to “the political” rather than to “politics” is to speak of power and law, state and nation, equality and justice, identity and difference, citizenship and civility—in sum, of everything that constitutes political life beyond the immediate field of partisan competition for political power, everyday governmental action, and the ordinary function of institutions.
The question is thrown into the relief it deserves in democratic societies, that is to say, in those societies in which the conditions of life in common are not defined a priori, engraved in a tradition, or imposed by an authority. Democracy, in fact, constitutes the political in a field largely open to the very fact of the tensions and uncertainties that underlay it. If it has seemed for two centuries now to be the unsurpassable principle of organization of any modern political order, the imperative that spread this assured belief has always been both ardently felt and ambiguous in its implications. Since it is at bottom an experiment in freedom, democracy has never been other than a problematic solution for the institution of a polity of free beings. The dream of the good and the reality of indeterminacy have combined in it over the long term. This coexistence is specific to the extent that it is due principally to the fact that democracy is not simply a distant ideal on whose content everyone already agrees, with debate remaining simply as to the means for realizing it. The history of democracy is, for this reason, not simply one of a blocked experiment or a betrayed utopia.
Far from corresponding, then, to a simple practical uncertainty as to how to bring it about, democracy’s unmoored meaning is due quite fundamentally to its essence. It implies a type of regime that resists any attempt at unequivocal classification. The specificity of the malaise that has dogged its history stems from this fact too. The train of disappointments and the perpetual feelings of its betrayal that have always accompanied it have stung just as much as the debate over its definition has resisted closure. From democracy’s unmoored wandering has followed both a quest and a nagging absence of destination. One must begin with this fact in order to understand what democracy is: the history of a disenchantment and the history of an indeterminacy are bound up with one another.
The indeterminacy is rooted in a complex network of equivocations and tensions that have structured political modernity since its inception, as study of the English, American, and French revolutions shows. There is equivocation, first of all, about the very subject of this democracy, for the people do not exist except through approximate successive representations of itself. The people is a master at once imperious and impossible to find. “We the people” can take only debatable form. Its definition is at once a problem and a challenge. There is a tension, too, between number and reason, between opinion and expertise, for the modern regime instituted political equality through universal suffrage at the same time that it has often called for a rational authority to arise whose objectivity implies impersonality. There is an uncertainty, next, about the adequate forms of social power—popular sovereignty struggling to express itself through representative institutions that will not lead to its limitation in one way or another. There is a duality, finally, of the modern notion of emancipation that gives rise to a desire for individual autonomy (privileging law) at the same moment as it prompts participation in the exercise of social power (replacing authority with politics). The duality is one between liberty and power or, put differently, between liberalism and democracy.
Such a conception of the political makes a historical approach the condition of its thorough study. In fact, one cannot make sense of the political as I have just defined it except in recalling, in some tangible way, the breadth and density of the contradictions and ambiguities that run through it. It has been my ambition, therefore, to rethink democracy by following the thread of its history as it has been spun. But note that it is not simply a matter of saying that democracy has a history. More radically, one must see that democracy is a history. It has been a work irreducibly involving exploration and experimentation, in its attempt to understand and elaborate itself.
The goal is thus to retrace the long genealogy of contemporary political questions in order to make them more thoroughly intelligible. History enters the project not only out of the interest in recognizing the weight of tradition, in order to provide banal “enlightenment” of the present through the study of the past. Rather, the point is to make the succession of presents live again as trials of experience that can inform our own. It is a matter of reconstructing the manner in which individuals and groups forged their understanding of their situations, to make sense of the challenges and aspirations that led them to formulate their objectives, to retrace, in a sense, the manner in which their vision of the world organized and limited the field of their activity. The object of such a history, to put it yet another way, is to follow the thread of trial and error, of conflict and controversy, through which the polity sought to achieve legitimate form. It consists, in a metaphor, in the publication of the script of the play in which different acts of the attempt to live together have been performed. In attempting to take up this red thread, I have been led to return, in part, to follow in the footsteps of the publicists and historians of the nineteenth century—such as Quinet, François Guizot, or Alexis de Tocqueville—who wanted to enlighten their contemporaries in developing what they defined as a history of civilization. I share with them the selfsame preoccupation with writing what one could call a global history.
History conceived in this way is the active laboratory that created our present and not simply its background. Attention to the most burning and urgent of contemporary problems can therefore not be dissociated from the meticulous reconstruction of their origins. To start with a contemporary question, to trace its genealogy before facing it anew at the end of the inquiry, enriched by the lessons of the past, has to be the method developed to give indispensable depth to political analysis. It is thanks to such a permanent dialogue between present and past that the process whereby societies are instituted can become legible and from which a synthetic understanding of the world can emerge. The project is identical to envisioning a history that one might call comprehensive, so that intellection of the past and interrogation of the present participate in the same task through being placed in a common framework. It reveals the resonances between our experience of the political and that of the men and women who were our predecessors, giving Marc Bloch’s formula its strongest possible meaning: “Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past.”5 It makes structural partners of the passionate concern for relevance and a scrupulous attention to history. It is for this reason a history whose purpose is to recover problems more than to describe models. Its enterprise ends up, in this manner, intersecting that of political philosophy.
The history of the political as practiced in this spirit is distinct in the first place, and by its very object of study, from the history of politics. The latter, beyond the recovery of the chronological unfolding of events, analyzes the functioning of institutions, unravels the mechanisms of public decisionmaking, illuminates the reasoning of actors and the way they interacted, and describes the rites and symbols that punctuate life. The history of the political draws on such sources, to be sure. With all of the subaltern battles, personal rivalries, intellectual confusions, and short-term calculations that it involves, political activity stricto sensu is in fact what circumscribes the political and allows it to be carried out. It is inseparably both an impediment and a means. Rational deliberation and philosophical reflections are not dissociable from passions and interest. The majestic theater of the general will is also the permanent stage for scenes borrowed from the more daily comedies of power. So it is not through taking refuge in the supposedly tranquil sky of concepts that one could really claim to understand the sources and the difficulties of instituting the polity. Those cannot be grasped except through study of ordinary contingencies, always coated as they are by the veneer of events. This has to be acknowledged. But it is necessary to emphasize forcefully, all the same, that one cannot remain at that level to reach the enigma of the political. How could one understand the structural instability of a regime, for example, by contenting oneself with narrating the ministerial crises that take place in the visible foreground?6
In a more general way, one should take into account that the history of the political as I try to practice it likewise draws on the results of the different social sciences; and that it intends, moreover, to unify their variety, even if it is especially interested in a set of facts and problems that occupy their traditional blind spot. To make clear what I mean, and to avoid excessively abstract methodological considerations, it is more useful to proceed through several examples in order to suggest how my approach is distinguished from the disciplines of social history, political sociology, political theory, and finally intellectual history.
Social history, first. It places the accent on the interpretation of conflicts of power and oppositions of interest. It furnishes an explanatory grid that allows the link between positions and actions in the specifically political field—that of elections or partisan affiliations for instance—and the cultural, economic, or social variables that characterize different groups to be perceived. The problem, however, is that this approach takes only a portion of reality into account. Consider, in this regard, the example of the fight for universal suffrage. A social history could retrace the conflict between the “impatience” of the people and the “fear” of the elites and could describe the strategies of the forces in play. One can, in fact, analyze the movement for electoral reform that punctuated the July monarchy in this way. But such an interpretation would be partial. It makes little sense, in fact, of the position of the ultras, the legitimists, who presented themselves at the time as champions of universal suffrage. It also fails to explain the vacillation of a whole part of the republican camp, perceptible in the defense that some of its members made of mediated suffrage or even the hesitation of others even to use the term universal suffrage (the prominence of the alternative watchword of “electoral reform” implying an uncertainty about the immediate goal to be achieved, and not simply tactical prudence). History in such a case is thus not only marked by a conflict between high and low in society, but is also structured by an implicit tension about the very notion of political suffrage: a tension, namely, between suffrage as a symbol of social inclusion, the sacralization of equal citizenship (which, therefore, gives rise to the imperative of its universalization), and suffrage as an expression of social power, a form of social governance (which, in contrast, forces a confrontation with the relation between number and reason and between entitlement to vote and capacity to vote). This last history, which one could call “internal,” also has to be retraced.
Sociology, for its part, proposes to “disenchant” politics, to make manifest the real social mechanisms that structure its field, at some distance from whatever doctrines are proclaimed there and thus from the discourses of actors and the advertised functioning of institutions. At the beginning of the twentieth century, several pioneering works laid down the framework of the discipline. Roberto Michels, first, developed a meticulous theory of the conditions in which oligarchic power arises in democratic organizations. Moisei Ostrogorski, in another foundational work, showed how the rise and extension of political parties leads in practice to the transformation of the meaning of representative government from top to bottom.7 The work of Max Weber, among many others still, could be added to the list if it were a matter of charting the formation of the discipline. No one could dream of contesting its academic fecundity and its civic importance—the “public pessimists” (in Michels’s expression) whom I have just mentioned have been enormously useful teachers of lucidity. I myself helped make certain of their works available again in the 1970s.8
But something escapes this approach, too. Take, for example, the analysis of the real functioning of representative government that occupies the center of most of these works. Political sociology indeed “unmasks” the way power is arrogated and the forms of manipulation that develop in the shadow of the representative mechanism. But it does not interest itself in understanding what amounts in some sense to the heart of the problem of modern representation: the quandary of the representability of democracy. By sacralizing the will against the order of nature or that of history, modern politics entrusts power to the people at the very moment that the project of emancipation that it furthers leads in parallel to making the social more and more abstract. The development of juridical conventions and fictions is, in this way, driven by the concern to achieve an equality of treatment and to institute a common space among men and women who are very different from one another. Such abstraction is in this sense a condition of social integration in a world of individuals (whereas in traditional society concrete differences were a factor of insertion, the hierarchical order basing itself on the principle that differences were to interlock with and complement one another). Democracy is thus a regime of fictionality in a double sense. Sociologically, first, since it involves the symbolic creation of an artificial body of the people. But technically, too, for the development of a rule of law presupposes the “generalization of the social,” its abstraction as it were, in order to make it governable according to universal rules. If in democracy this formalism is thus a positive principle of social construction, it makes the constitution of a tangible people more uncertain at the same time. Accordingly, a contradiction arises between the political principle of democracy and its sociological principle: the political principle consecrates the power of the very collective subject that the sociological principle tends to make less coherent and whose visibility it tends to reduce. It is from the point of view of this other “internal contradiction” that the history of the political as I understand it frames the question of representative government. It also studies, for example, the history of electoral techniques as a succession of attempts to address this founding deficit of representability.
It bears noting too that the approach I am outlining offers the possibility of going beyond a certain structural contradiction to be found in political sociology and in the social sciences quite generally: the terms in which they make sense of social functioning in effect lead to thinking about it in its steady state—according to its regularities. But to understand change, one needs other concepts. The history of the political can combine the two dimensions, reconciling structure and history. (One might note in passing that it was this formal promise that for a long time was one of the principal reasons for Marxism’s analytical appeal.)
It is worth discussing next how my project differs from that of political theory, at least as it is usually understood today. The works of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas which, in the 1970s and 1980s, gave a new centrality to this approach can be cited as convenient examples of what I mean. Their basic trait is to be essentially normative. They explain what rational deliberation ought to look like, what popular sovereignty demands, what the universally recognized principles of justice are, or those on which any legitimate legal rules ought to be based. Everyone knows the salutary role that such works have played in restoring to their deserved relevance questions that the social sciences dismissed as useless. They have constituted the heart of an undeniable renovation of political thought, leading some for this reason to speak of the 1970s as the period of a “return of the political.” But these intellectual enterprises have, yet again, missed something; in this case it is the aporetic essence of the political that suffers the neglect. That their essentially procedural concerns generally led them to a close affiliation with legal or moral philosophy testifies to this fact. It is easy to see, in such authors, that the deployment of a rationalizing vision of the establishment of the social contract leads them to “formalize” reality. The person who, in Rawls’s theory, makes choices under the veil of ignorance adopts a more universal and rational view the more he sheds himself of information about the real world. Reason is available in this framework only on condition of abstraction, according to the extent distance is won from the sound and fury of the world.
Basing oneself on the complexity of reality and acknowledging its aporetic dimension, in contrast, leads to interest in the very heart of the political. For this reason, it is necessary to come to grips, first of all, with the problematic character of the modern political regime in order to understand its movement and not hope to dissipate its enigma through an imposition of normativity, as if a pure science of language or law could provide men with the reasonable solution to which they would have nothing to add but conformity. It is also, for similar reasons, to go astray to think that one can exorcise complexity in movement of the democratic adventure through any typological exercise. What is interesting is not the distinction of many different kinds of representative government from one another or the attempt to classify the positions of actors or the characteristics of institutions according to well-defined cases. The point, rather, is to take the permanently open and tension-filled character of the democratic experience as one’s object. The proposal is not simply to oppose, in the banal manner of the past, the universe of practices to that of norms. It is to take the constitutive antinomies of politics as the point of departure, antinomies that reveal their nature only in their historical development. If one takes social justice as an example, the goal would be to show through a history of the welfare state how perceptions of the extent of legitimate redistribution practically evolved, and then what the determinants of these perceptions were. In this way, the starting point would have to be the contradiction that set up the matrix of the problem: on one side, the principle of citizenship imposing the recognition of an “objective” social debt; on the other side, the principle of personal autonomy and responsibility leading to the appreciation of the importance of “subjective” individual behavior. Only this history, once again, could clarify the “concept” under study in the case. History is, for such reasons, both the subject matter and the necessary form of a total interpretation of the political. Political concepts (democracy, liberty, equality, and so forth) can be understood only through the historical work of their testing and the historical search for their clarification. I therefore feel close to the project of “empirical phenomenology” that Anne Fagot-Largeault evoked in her recent inaugural lecture.9
The history of the political is situated, fourth and finally, at a great distance from intellectual history. The two kinds of history, to be sure, are interested in the same kinds of touchstone works. But in the history of political, these works are no longer taken by themselves, as simple autonomous “theories,” the imposing wreckage of failed voyages since left on the shores of the past. They are analyzed as elements of a more global social imaginary. They are its remnants that now have to be placed back in a general framework of interpretation and exploration. Representations and “ideas” amount in this perspective to a structuring material of social experience. Far from being taken on their own, in narrow genealogies, placed in the closed circle of doctrinal proximity and distance, these representations are understood as real and powerful “infrastructures” in the life of societies. At a distance, then, from a disincarnated vision that would falsely liberate itself from taking into account the forces that shape the framework of human action, the goal is rather to enrich and complicate the notion of “determination.” It is a matter of taking hold of all of the “active” representations that orient action, impose on the field of possibilities the limits of the thinkable, and demarcate the ground on which contest and controversy can take place. “Like the Roman fētialēs,” Michel de Certeau once suggestively noted, “stories ‘go in a procession’ ahead of social practices in order to open a field for them.”10 I would like to make this formula my own. Narratives and representations have precisely this positive function of opening “a legitimate theater for practical actions.”11
In contrast to the history of ideas, then, the subject matter of the history of the political, which I would call “conceptual,” cannot be limited to the analysis of and commentary on great works, even if these can often justifiably be considered “moments” crystallizing the questions that an era poses and the responses that it attempts to these questions. The history of the political borrows, especially, from the history of mentalities the concern of incorporating the totality of the elements that compose that complex object that a political culture is: the way that great theoretical texts are read, the reception of literary works, the analysis of the press and movements of opinion, the life of pamphlets, the construction of transitory discourses, the presence of images, the significance of rites, and even the ephemeral trace of songs. Theorizing the political and doing a living history of representations of life in common combine in this approach. For it is at a “bastard” level that one must always come to the political, in the tangle of practices and representations.
Only under the conditions of its experiential testing can the political be deciphered. Its history for this reason demands first of all attention to its antinomies, analysis of its limits and tipping points, and examination of the disappointments and the disarray to which it can lead. The work I have done accordingly takes as its privileged object the lack of fulfillment—the fractures, the tensions, the limits, and the oppositions—that have been emblematic of democracy. The content of the political in fact is not possible to apprehend except in those moments and situations that make clear that democratic life is not one of distance from some preexisting ideal model but one of the exploration of a problem to be resolved.
I have already made brief mention of some of the structuring antinomies of which democracy is made and which I have had occasion to study. But there are many others that have to be taken into consideration. I think especially of those one could classify as “contradictions of form.” And they have hardly been explored up to now. Notably deserving of detailed examination is what I call the problem of the “organizing third.” I mean by this phrase the fact that collective expression is practically inconceivable without the intervention of a certain exteriority. There is, for example, no possibility of elections without the existence of candidates, who limit in advance the choice of the citizens even in allowing them to choose. The logical impossibility of direct or immediate democracy has been the subject of many discussions over the last two centuries, discussions whose history deserves to be reconstructed. It would lead to a better appreciation of the meaning to be attributed to the necessarily reflexive character of representative democracy, and it would permit a new appreciation of the foundations of democratic legitimacy.
But I would especially like to draw attention to another contradiction of form—one that has not, in my opinion, been adequately taken into account: I mean that of the relation of democracy and time. The study of the political has, in general, focused on the analysis of actors, procedures, and institutions, thereby taking temporality as a basically neutral element (as duration). But if democracy is a regime of the self-institution of society, it seems necessary to understand time as an active and constructive dimension. For politics is also the set-up of social time, marked simultaneously by memory and the impatience of the will; it combines rootedness and inventiveness. I would like, in this case as well, to try to understand democracy on the basis of an analysis of its aporias, taking as my point of departure a distinction between time understood as a resource and time understood as a constraint. In the late eighteenth century Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine posed this problem in an exemplary way in their great debate on the rights of man. Paine formulated the modern program of radical emancipation when he set Burke in his sights: “There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of man, or any generations of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the ‘end of time,’” he wrote. “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations that preceded it.”12
For the American or French revolutionaries, the affirmation of the general will presupposed a permanent capacity—or at least a generational one—to invent the future, with the result that what one generation freely chose cannot become an inexorable destiny for those that follow. Whence the debate, central on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, over the correct way to think about a constitutional text, so that it does not take the force of what would come close to a binding constraint. (The problem is still alive today, as the terms in which the question of the democratic pedigree of constitution control is often approached would seem to suggest.) All democracies have thus evinced the same worries as Karl Marx when he railed against “the tradition of all the dead generations [that] weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”13
The attraction for the short term that many deplore today does not stem simply from a kind of acceleration of history artificially sustained in a fickle media-driven world. It is rooted, rather, in a structural phenomenon. In order to confer tangible power on the general will, democracy is constantly tempted to award legitimacy to “the caprice of the moment” (in Renan’s phrase), an imperative that imposes itself as a destructive master. From another angle, law—considered by everyone as a necessary agent of protection—can take form only by introducing a longer temporality in common life. It is equally patent that we live in a world in which economic vitality depends on the capacity to consider public interventions over longer and longer periods of time and in which, too, taking environmental problems seriously commits one to thinking in temporal horizons that are incompatible with those of electoral cycles. Democratic time is thus susceptible to two kinds of temporal difficulties: excessive immediacy for the concerns of the long term and excessive duration for the urgencies of the moment. In both cases, the pertinence of the notion of the general will finds itself open to question.
Such tensions of temporality have nourished and deepened a whole set of perplexities and conflicts. Positions can easily oscillate between two equally troubling extremes. On the one hand, one finds a radically instantaneous interpretation of democracy—an interpretation that could fall prey to an executive power capable of freeing itself from ordinary constraints in the name of exceptional situations. On the other, there is the opposite position, which would empower experts—allegedly possessing unique insights into the issues at hand—who alone would be considered competent to “represent” social interests over the long term. The long history of such conflicts illuminates numerous contemporary alternatives of this kind. It also can open the way to a renovated understanding of democracy as a conjunction of temporalities. The subject of democracy, I would like to show, has to be understood as one indissociably juridical (the people as citizens and electors) and historical (with the nation linking memory to the promise of a shared future).
But the forms of democracy have their own connection to the plurality of temporalities. At some distance from any univocal approach, which might concentrate on the procedure of electoral legitimation alone, it is better to emphasize how the perspective of a more complex body of forms of sovereignty (from a simple decision to protest to the memorial institution of the general will in a constitution) works in tandem with the understanding and analysis of the multiplicity of temporalities that constitutes the human experience.
To add to all of these different aspects of democratic indeterminacy there is also the permanent crisis of political language. And it is, alas, all of the essential notions—equality, citizenship, sovereignty, the people, and so forth—whose definition is so problematic. Significantly enough, the drama of language’s breakdown already seemed to occur in the French revolutionary years. At the moment that he launched the Journal d’instruction sociale, together with the Abbé Joseph Sieyès, the Marquis de Condorcet stated, for example, that “the alteration of the meaning of words indicates the alteration of things.”14 One of the most perspicacious observers of the Terror could note of Maximilien Robespierre and his associates, too, that “they deprived all the words of the French language of their true meaning,”15 while Jacques-Pierre Brissot, for his part, violently attacked those he called “thieves of names.”16 It is for such reasons that Camille Desmoulins could make it his program in Le Vieux Cordelier to champion freedom of the press, with the possibility of challenge to words and things that it implies, as the touchstone of the democratic experience: “It is in the character of the Republic,” he put it at the time, “for men and things to be called by their name.”17 In contrast, ideology is the most nakedly perverse manifestation of a calculated or consensual divorce between words and things. It comes down in the end to the attempt to deny and dissimulate the contradictions of the world through the illusory coherence of doctrine. It breaks free of reality in staging a fantasmic order and in following a path in which clarity is forced.
The work of the historian is, there too, to bring to light these questions and endeavors in order to grasp the movement of democracy in its most problematic dimensions. To this extent, his way can intersect with those whose job it is to explore words and to tame an opaque reality with the tool of language. If literature and poetry have the function of opening us up to the presence of the world by the devices of language, there is reason for them to take on a more expansive purpose in the midst of the uncertainties of the democratic age. The novelist and the poet are, each after his own singular fashion, those who survey the ambiguity and clear the silence of language; they remain open to the contradictions of the world and never allow concepts to exhaust the density of the real. The history of the political joins in concert with literature in the interstices of the social sciences. They work together in a related movement of deciphering the world. I note the place that writing had among a number of nineteenth-century historians; Michelet, among all of them, knew best how through his language and style to say most sensitively what his documents sometimes had trouble expressing on their own.
A history of aporias, then, but also a history of limits and boundaries. For it is in fact at its moments of gestalt switch, at the points at which it turns back on itself, that the question of democracy is clarified each time anew in the most startling ways. From Hannah Arendt to Claude Lefort, a complete renovation of the conceptualization of the political took place between the 1950s and the 1970s, taking the recognition of totalitarianism as its point of departure. Against purely descriptive approaches, which saw only the aggravated resurgence of dictatorship or tyranny, the originality of these authors was to show that the regimes in question had to be understood as deviant forms of democratic modernity—as its negative fulfillment, in a sense. And one must understand the effective fantasy of a power that could fully absorb society—the key characteristic of totalitarianism—as corresponding to a utopian extension of the representative principle. It involved the desire to bring about, artificially and at the same time, a society perfectly legible in its unity and a power supposed to be completely identified with it, with the goal of reabsorbing in its very origin the gap between the social and the political. The motivating energy of the totalitarian enterprise derived from this pretension, which continued in the utopia of calling into existence a power wholly confounded with society and absolutely indissociable from it. Totalitarian power is, for this reason, commanded by an imperious logic of identification. In radicalizing the notion of the class party and in finally erecting it as an absolute, it hoped to surpass the founding aporias of representation and to institute a power that would provide “real representation” of society. It is the party that put in place that imaginary chain of identification that led to thinking of the political direction and even the first secretary—whom Alexander Solzhenitsyn called the “Egocrat”—as the perfect incarnation of the people. The party eventually went beyond the function of representation: it became the very substance of the people.
The discovery of the limits of the political has thus essentially consisted, at least up to the present, of an exploration of the stormy zones and savage domains into which democracy could lead. This exploration of its abysses remains a privileged way to understand democracy. Research in these directions, for this reason, still has to be pursued; contemporary events provide further encouragement to do so, and I plan to play my role in this endeavor. And yet it is now pressing to note that we are today truly confronted with the inverse problem, with the attrition and no longer the exacerbation of the political. We live through the ordeal of an apparent dissolution or erasure: the feeling of a decline of sovereignty, the perception of a dissolution of the will, along with a parallel rise in the power of the law and the market. The frontiers of government and administration, of management and politics, are similarly becoming more vague. The diagnosis will have to be improved, no doubt. But the key is to emphasize that it is now time to approach the political taking these gray zones as a point of departure, making sense of the weakened energies, the paralyzing drifts, and the silent fragmentations.
The turbulence of the contemporary world should not, however, incite anyone to reflect solely on the limit forms of the political. For it is also today the space of the political that finds itself in dire straits. The question has been studied for twenty years now, by numerous authors, based on the recognition of a growing dissociation and differentiation of the relations of power and territory once securely anchored in the figure of the sovereign state. The various works of political science or legal study on the dissolution of sovereignty externally and its dissemination elsewhere are well known. Not enough attention has been accorded, however, to the concomitant tendency through which nation-states have become more fragile internally, thanks to the weakening of the social contract and the narrowing of collective identities.
The acceleration of secessionist movements is the most remarkable clue to the trend. The number of states has grown at the same time as the source of such multiplication has changed. The numbers are eloquent. The 44 states of 1850 had only become 60 by the eve of World War II. The process of decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s and the breakup of the Soviet sphere, in the largest sense, after 1989 were the most important causes of the multiplication of states: they had reached 118 as of 1963, and 197 in 2000. The movement has continued, sharpened in many cases thanks to ethnic and religious conflict.
Specialists in international relations have looked into the phenomenon from the point of view of their discipline. But it is also useful to analyze it by connecting it to the process of ethnic segmentation and the reality of “social secession” that seems to play a growing role. A number of national splits, in fact, have occurred when, in the face of the need for redistribution to master differences, existing populations have simply refused to coexist any longer. These mechanisms of the retraction of the political correspond, in this way, to a test of the limits of the social contract whose dimensions it is now urgent to measure. The decisive phenomenon is not always clearly perceived. The genuine paradox is that the contemporary decline of the nation-state—as a social form—is occluded by the multiplication of nation-states as sovereign entities. The conflicts over distribution that normally are resolved through “internal” social compromise are transformed in certain cases into conflicts of identity that are “externalized” as a partition of nations. The older logic of winning and defending rights through aggregation has, in other words, often now become segregative. The blossoming of nationalism today testifies, correspondingly, to the retreat and not the spread of the historical form of the nation. For nations once considered as reduced universals is now substituted a new sense of nations restrictively conceived as enlarged particularities. This is a phenomenon that cries out for precise analysis, at least if one wants to combat its deleterious consequences. It is therefore pressing to articulate an “internal” analysis and an “external” analysis of the political, to open the approach in terms of international relations to research conducted from the perspective of the social contract’s content and the forms of collective identity and solidarity still felt to be pertinent.
Antinomies and limits, in sum, but also disappointments. For it seems to me necessary to proceed yet further and open up a third mode of inquiry into the political, involved in the exploration of democratic disappointment. A whole series of contemporary debates coalesce, in fact, around the diagnosis of a transition felt to be dangerous: the decline of the will, the unraveling of sovereignty, the disaggregations of forms of collectivity, and so forth. Such debates, it bears repeating, are by no means unprecedented, even if with each reappearance they are formulated in new ways. It is first of all thanks to the impossibility of dissociating the political from politics that a certain kind of disappointment with the modern regime comes about. For it is never simple to separate the noble from the vulgar, the great ambitions from the petty egotistical calculations, the trenchant language of truth from the sophistry of manipulation and seduction, the necessary attention to the long term from submission to the urgencies of the moment. If the frontier in each case has to be a subject of reflection and an object of discovery, it remains in movement and in fluctuation, determined as it is in part by the prism of interests, captive to differences of perspective.
There grows up around the political, as a result, a longing that in a certain sense is impossible to fulfill. It is often as if there were at the same time too much and too little of politics, a fact which combines an expectation and a rejection. The desire for politics flows from the aspiration for the collectivity to be its own master, and the hope of seeing a community take form in which a place is made for each person. At the same time, there is a rejection of sterile conflicts and the search for a simply private happiness. It is easy to feel at once what feels like an exasperation before an excess and a nostalgia before what feels like a decline. Politics often seems simultaneously like an irritating residue, to be eliminated if possible, and like a tragically lacking dimension of life, a cruelly absent grandeur.
I hope to devote myself to retracing the history of this disappointment as well as that of various attempts to surmount it: the search for rational politics on the one hand, and the exaltation of cultures of voluntarism on the other. The plan in this regard is to conceptualize democracy based on an analysis of the feeling that it is absent. From Pierre-Louis Roederer to Auguste Comte, from Auguste Jullien to the Count Henri Saint-Simon, one can follow the formulation in the first quarter of the nineteenth century of a social science, a science of order, or a positive politics that would allow the passage from the difficult government of men to the supposedly peaceable administration of things. Against the grain of such scientistic utopias of a radical deep freeze of the political, allowing its dissolution in a happy ending, there have also occurred the periodically expressed aspirations for its exaltation, in the form of a whole series of cults of the will. The history of these cycles remains to be taken up. This history undeniably possesses a dimension one could call “social.” Memories of the Terror often overdetermined the horizon of all those, after Thermidor, who aspired to an impersonal government of reason; conversely, it was the narrowness and irresolution of routine regimes that, a half-century later, nourished calls in 1848 for a creative voluntarism. But one cannot stop with this oversimplifying approach, if only because the same forces often led the simultaneous expression of both moods (in twentieth-century communism, for example, the praise of supposedly authoritative experts in management went together with the most exacerbated voluntarism). It is also necessary to show that disappointment is born from the difficulty of making the democratic ideal a living force in quotidian reality: democracy has been prey in turn to fear of conflict and to anxiety about its absence, torn between the aspiration to individual autonomy and the quest for participation in life together.
Contemporary debates about the disappearance of the political could not, therefore, be understood solely thanks to the analysis, admittedly sketched quite briefly, of the forms through which sovereignty has been disseminated and its ingredients resynthesized. They would have to be placed, in addition, in a continuous history of democratic disappointment which is only, perhaps, the other face of a history of the hatred of democracy, a hatred that sometimes masks itself in the claim that it solely objects to the dominance of its so-called “liberal” or “bourgeois” form. The project would involve, to put it differently, the composition of a negative history of democracy.
This task I have been outlining of a history of the political takes on all of its importance at this dawn of the third millennium, at a moment when everyone feels the growing disquietude of “history biting from behind,” in a famous [Trotskyist] line.18 It will suffice for my purposes now, in a rapid sketch, to recall the conditions in which economic globalization has modified the space of democracy and made the search for the general interest more difficult; to measure the emergence of a universe in which forms of “governance” have substituted more and more, in a burst throughout the world, for the legible and responsible exercise of sovereignty; to record the disturbances caused by the compression of media-driven time; to bear in mind the conflicts linked to the renaissance of national identity; and finally to evoke the problems suggested by the entry into a framework in which the weight of forces as ungraspable as they are menacing becomes more obvious each day. It is around pressing observations of this nature that numerous projects of research in the social sciences are organized today. The history of the political, in the way that I have attempted to sketch its contours today, offers a specific contribution, I think, to the clarification of these questions in restoring them to the longer and enlarged perspective that they deserve. It must also allow the widespread temptations of the day—to take refuge in the position of disabused retirement or to abandon the government of the world to the pretended sufficiency of market operations or the exclusive power of law—to be overcome.
“In scientific matters,” Marcel Mauss noted, “it is impossible to proceed too slowly; while in practical matters, one cannot wait.”19 I have taken care not to forget this essential distinction, which one could not transcend without consequences. The moment one intervenes in universally debated problems in the contemporary world, there is a great risk that the difference between patient labor and hasty commentary, between science and opinion, will dissolve before one’s eyes. But for the modern and contemporary history of the political, there is no way beyond this risk, no hope of discovering a zone of inquiry protected, thanks to some means of inaccessibility, from the movements of life. Its ambition, rather, is to descend in the civic arena to offer it a supplement of intelligibility and a dose of lucidity. It owes to itself the project of offering a calm and critical reading of the world where too often the clamor of passions, the flexibility of opinions, and the comfort of ideologies rule. The most rigorous academic work and the most patient acts of erudition can in this way participate directly in the activity of citizenship, born as they are from confrontation with events, and always remaining tethered to them. I hope to enroll myself to this extent, with modesty but with the firmest determination, in the line of all of the scholars who were the most indefatigable citizens, precisely through their works, incessantly joining together—in Romain Rolland’s phrase, one popularized by Antonio Gramsci, who served as a longtime guide for a whole sector of my generation—the pessimism of the intellect with the optimism of the will.
Reflecting on what made the courses that he gave within these walls special, Michelet noted: “It is not really teaching that occurs here, to be perfectly precise. It is the examination of high questions, in front of the public. One speaks, not to students, but to equals.”20 There is probably some part of illusion in such an approach to a public course, which is not equally possible from discipline to discipline. Yet it provides a healthy reminder of the experiential test to which the kinds of words risked in this forum are submitted. And it is, one might say, precisely in such a test that is to be found the source of the joy that I mentioned at the beginning of this lesson, without yet being able to define it. It is that of participating in a scholarly utopia, one that exists for the sake of the polity’s reinvigoration.