Democracy in an Era of Distrust
The erosion of the trust of citizens in their leaders and in democratic institutions has been one of the most heavily studied phenomena in political science over the last twenty years. A series of famous works, in a national or comparative framework, have clearly established a diagnosis for the malady, and they are sufficiently well known to make it unnecessary to revisit them. It is simply useful to emphasize that eroding trust does not necessarily imply civic apathy, at least as precisely as one might be led to believe by those who consider the growth of electoral abstention the privileged indicator of the changing relationship of civil society to the political system. For the phenomenon of abstention in fact reflects a transformation of public life and not simply a decline of interest in it. One could even claim that the decline in electoral participation has often gone along with a more general development of civic activity. But how to understand such a turn of events? The brief answer is that we are moving bit by bit from a “polarized” political democracy to more disseminated forms of “civil democracy.”
Voting is the most visible and institutionalized form of citizenship. It is the act that long has both crystallized and symbolized the concepts of political participation and civic equality. But this notion of participation is complex. For it blends three dimensions of interaction between the people and the political sphere: expression, implication, and intervention. Expressive democracy involves society’s voice when it passes judgment on politicians and their actions or when it engages in more serious protest. Implicative democracy concerns the totality of the means by which citizens act in concert and join with one another in order to produce a common world. Finally, interventionist democracy implies all the forms of collective action on which the people might rely to achieve a desired result. Together, these three kinds of political activity make up democratic life.
What makes the vote special is that it allows these different modalities of civic existence (which correspond to different “moments” of public life) to factually coincide. Elections amount to the most condensed and potent form of civic engagement—and the most incontestable because they have been the most organized and visible. The history of democracy, for this reason, has for a long time simply been identified as a process of concentrating the political field of which the long struggle for universal suffrage has been both the means and the symbol. It is in this perspective that one must understand the contemporary transformations of democracy: if electoral democracy has undeniably eroded, the expressive, implicative, and interventionist aspects of democracy have been gaining strength. A number of clues confirm the suggestion. The scale of participation in associational activities and the massive support for a welter of advocacy groups contradict the idea of an individualist withdrawal from civic life. The notion of the advent of a new civic passivity, so often accepted unreflectively, therefore has to be revised.
With this important specification of what has been called “democracy’s discontent” in mind, the difficulty of contemporary democratic disenchantment can be faced anew. The moral stigmatization of political leaders—the frequent denunciation of their lack of “political will” and of their excessive indifference toward the general interest—has been frequently invoked as the major cause of the resentment of citizens toward their representatives, with the notion of a “decline of the political” sometimes called upon to explain the results. In this way, a deficit of contemporary democracy, as it were, is often targeted, as if the moment simply called for denouncing an inability to live up to a given model or deploring a betrayed promise.
Instead, I would like to explore another approach to illuminate the difficulty. I propose that it is the very structure of the contemporary democracies that is at issue, rather than simply the malfunction of a workable model. More precisely, what has nourished the distrust of the citizens is paradoxically the consequences of diverse responses that have failed for more than a century to correct the insufficiencies and solve the problems of representative government. To put my thesis schematically, distrust is a constitutive rather than a recent feature of democratic life. It is almost coeval with the birth of universal suffrage. At the turn of the twentieth century, if not before, anxiety and disillusion about actually existing democracy made their rude appearance. The French and American cases are especially revealing, with populist antiparliamentarism and the Progressive movement both expressing the same sense of expectation and the same politics of refusal.
But how to analyze the phenomenon comprehensively? It seems to me that the best way to think about it is to stress that it has occurred thanks to the dissociation from each other of two traits that were confounded before, both in history and in the theory of representative and democratic governments: legitimacy and trust. Elections, it was thought, would combine the two—and this is the one of the main reasons why elections by vote were preferred to elections by lot. Elections do not simply allow for the division of labor and the discrimination of abilities between voters and leaders: the form of choice that they put into motion allows linking a procedure of selection with a qualitative relation (while lot allows the one without the other).
These two political traits once believed to coincide in the electoral result—legitimacy and trust—are not of the same nature, however. Legitimacy is a juridical quality, of a strictly procedural order; it is created perfectly and completely by elections. But trust is different and far more complex. It amounts to a kind of “invisible institution,” in Kenneth Arrow’s famous phrase. It fulfills at least three purposes. First, it enlarges the quality of legitimacy, in adding to the latter’s strictly procedural character a moral dimension (integrity in the general sense) as well as a substantive dimension (interest in the common good). Trust also plays a temporalizing role: it allows for the presupposition of the continuity in time of this enlarged legitimacy after the electoral moment. Finally, it is an institutional shortcut, “internalizing” as a working premise a whole series of mechanisms of verification and ratification.
Indirect Democracy
It is the dissociation of legitimacy and trust, then, that has been the central problem of the history of democracy. This dissociation ought to be familiar, for it is the rule and not the exception. Hence, there is even a phrase—in French, l’état de grâce, and in English, political honeymoon—to express the reality that there is after each election a short and exceptional period during which the two qualities are not separated.
Responses to this situation have developed in two directions. First, proposals and experiments for reinforcing the basis of procedural legitimacy have abounded—whether by making recourse to the ballot box more frequent, developing the mechanisms of direct democracy, or even reinforcing the dependence of the representatives on voters (as with procedures for recall in certain American states). In all of these cases, the amelioration of electoral democracy has been the goal. But, in parallel, there has also been a whole congeries of efforts—through informal social movements but institutions too—intended to compensate for the erosion of trust by institutionalizing distrust. This trend has progressively defined the contours of what I propose calling indirect democracy. This indirect democracy amounts, together with the institutions of electoral democracy, to a whole. And yet it has never been understood as a political form in its own right. The different elements that compose it have, of course, been noticed, or even meticulously examined. But they have never been placed within an overall framework that makes sense of their deepest characteristics in a serious and coherent way.
Having devoted a whole series of works to the extended history of the first half of the democratic equation, the dynamics of electoral democracy on the basis of the French case, the new focus of my research is to come to grips with this other and indirect democracy. Indeed, it is thanks to the understanding of the difficulties posed by this indirect democracy that I believe it will become possible to propose a new interpretation of the democratic disenchantment of historical and contemporary life.
Three ensembles comprise the mechanisms of distrust characterizing indirect democracy: the exercise of mechanisms of oversight, the creation of independent institutions, and the formation of powers of rejection. It is worth hazarding a very brief evocation of each.
The mechanisms of oversight, first. They continue to play a growing role in the life of contemporary societies. By this expression, I mean the forms of constraint and the weight of pressure that civil society can bring to bear on political society (and not the reverse as in Michel Foucault’s classic perspective, though this other dimension is always also there). These forms of testing the leaders are of two kinds: acts of denunciation and revelations of fact on the one hand and airing of evaluations, information, and counter-expertise, on the other. The muckrakers vividly illustrated the first function in the United States at the start of the twentieth century, but one must also mention, of course, the famous “committees of surveillance” during the French Revolution. The politics of suspicion or transparency have thus always allowed civil society to extend and complete its self-expression only begun at the ballot box. The worker’s movement, for its part, memorably exemplified the exercise of the function of evaluation and counter-expertise when it developed in the middle of the nineteenth century important practices of social inquiry, amounting in a sense to a civil reappropriation of procedures previously restricted to parliamentary action.
These different mechanisms of denunciation or evaluation have a number of points in common. First, their effect is to test the reputation of a power. Reputation is a kind of “invisible institution” constituting one of the structuring elements of trust. This process of testing has four characteristics: it is permanent (while electoral democracy is intermittent); it is open to individuals, and not simply organizations, to enact; it enlarges and opens the field of intervention to society (already John Stuart Mill noted that while it is not possible to undertake everything, it is possible to check up on everything); and it allows a specific kind of intervention, forging a third way distinct at once from the regime of exit and from that of voice. One could add that this “democracy of oversight” is today in full expansion. The “new social movements,” like the advocacy groups, are less and less organs of negotiation or even of representation; they devote themselves more and more to activities of oversight. For this reason, new modes of protest take place more and more often through the media.
Mistrust of government has also occurred along a second axis—the erection of independent institutions, ones shielded from the direct authority of executive power. One of the first historical examples of this kind of institution is the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in the United States, which dates from 1887. It was the advertised goal of the legislative power in that case to exempt the regulation of the railroads from the authority of an executive suspected of close ties to business interests. This commission, it was frequently emphasized, aimed to keep the regulation of the given economic sector “out of politics.” It also answered to a declared intent to promote the general interest and to protect the consumer, functioning in this regard as a sort of protective judge (“acting as the poor man’s court,” in the formula used at the time). Guaranteed true independence thanks to its bipartisan composition, the ICC thus brought the superiority of substantive legitimacy (one due to impartiality) to bear on the procedural and electoral legitimacy of the president.
The support of public opinion eventually led more or less everywhere in the world to the development of this kind of institution. Forms of the regulatory state have thus been erected to counteract a political sphere believed to be too influenced by interest groups. In the French case, it is the figure of a state “above parties” that arose to express mistrust of politicians. The path leading to the conferral of a status on the public function followed this course, ending in the notion that the “corporatism of the universal” that functionaries were supposed to incarnate would have more legitimacy than the “corrupted universalism” of the elected representatives. In this manner, citizens often chose in favor of their bureaucrats and against those victorious at their own ballot boxes.
This approach to the general interest, opposing what several authors have called an “output democracy” (judged by its consequences) to an “input democracy” (following from procedures), has played a trailblazing role to make independence a major criterion in politics. While electoral democracy maintains the dependence of politicians on voters, indirect democracy pursues the project of developing the independence of implemented policies from partisan logics. Without entering into the details of the question, one may nevertheless suggest that the same terms of thinking suit a number of other institutions like constitutional judiciaries or central banks. To evoke an image to anticipate the full presentation, one might cite an American author of the 1830s, John Rowan, who wrote: “The independence of the judiciary has been greatly misconceived. The true independence of the Judges consists in their dependence upon, and responsibility to, the people.”1 No doubt, to make sense of this “democracy of limitation” one would have to turn to the body of literature on the comparative legitimacy of different kinds of institutions, or even works of sociology or social psychology establishing a hierarchy of types of legitimacy.
The multiplication of the powers of sanction and rejection is the third form of structuring mistrust of indirect democracy. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu emphasized the distinction, central in his opinion, between the ability to act or judge and the ability to reject. He placed the accent on an asymmetry whose importance has continued to grow as citizens increasingly experienced the limitations of electoral democracy in achieving their objectives and their hopes. Realizing that they were little capable of constraining their governments from undertaking certain actions or making certain decisions, citizens turned to the path of multiplying the sanctions on power. And so there slowly grew up, in the shadow of a positive but uncertain democracy, what one might call a “negative democracy.”
There is first of all a “technical” reason that explains this development. Acts of rejection produce results that are genuinely tangible and visible. To repeal legislation fully realizes the intention of the actor, while the measure of success of a campaign to bring about a specific policy is in all cases more subject to controversy and partiality. The will is always fulfilled completely in an act of rejection because it is driven in such a case to a univocal and clear decision that exhausts a given intention. The simple mandate or authorization, in contrast, possesses none of these qualities: the question of the fulfillment of the will remains open in this framework, since the future is uncertain in what it will bring and the actions of the empowered agent are undetermined. The tension at the heart of the democracy of mandate, in other words, is suppressed in the framework of negative democracy.
From a sociological point of view, it is obvious that negative coalitions are easier to organize than positive majorities. One might say that a growing difference is emerging between electoral and social majorities. Political majorities are in their essence aggregative; they are constituted by an arithmetical addition of votes. Each person can be the vehicle of a particular intention or a specific meaning. The voters deliberate as they please, often without ever attaining a precise conception of their rationale, the combination of adhesion, sanction, or prevention in their choice. The ballots mechanically reduce these complex expressions to simple and cumulative data. Their only tangible meaning is that they can be counted and added up. But what one could call social majorities are different. While political majorities produce overall legitimacy and exist over a legal timeframe, social majorities play the role of making specific actions possible. It is unthinkable, for example, to reform social security without a corresponding social majority. But most often, social majorities manifest themselves negatively, in the form of passive consent. And they are always in movement, constantly shifting, evolving in tandem with the issues.
These reactive social majorities are, generally speaking, quite heterogeneous. And it is for this reason that they are easily formed. They do not need to be coherent to play their role. They have a power all the more considerable, since in their field of conflict the intensity of their reactions often plays an essential role. In the street, in media outlets, or through symbolic expression, it is not simply a question of arithmetic. But true social majorities are difficult to create. They presuppose by nature either a passive consensus or a positive and deliberated agreement. They cannot, like electoral majorities or reactive coalitions, take root in equivocacy and ambiguity. They are therefore more fragile and volatile. Experience, in any case, proves that it is much easier for a politician to lose support thanks to clumsy statements than to gain it thanks to taking original stands.
For all these reasons, the veto has become the dominant form of political intervention in contemporary society.
The Mixed Regime of the Moderns
This sketch of the three modes of civic mistrust suggests that the indirect democracy that they constitute is indeed an original political form: they are not simply a matter of curious exceptions or aberrant developments. But it is surprising to observe that the diverse theories of representative government or of the democratic regime have remained confined for all intents and purposes to electoral and institutional democracy. I am therefore proposing an enlargement of the understanding of the political functioning of contemporary societies in offering this analysis of democracy’s indirect modalities. The insight seems to me all the more important since it allows one to incorporate the most living and habitual phenomena of the life of democracies; it gets at the heart of what practically and emotionally links today’s citizens to public life. This indirect democracy presents four great characteristics, which I outline below. They lay out a future program of research and the working hypotheses of a project (they can by no means, therefore, anticipate its finished results).
1. Indirect democracy is distinguished by its attraction to a judicial model of politics. Of course, this attraction takes place on different levels. One could first speak of a “functional” judicialization of politics thanks to the impulse to construct a more impartial state. The pole around which this movement organizes itself technically and legitimates itself socially is a juridical notion of judgment (impartiality) rather than a notion of will (the majority issuing from universal suffrage). But one could also think of the “moral” judicialization of politics. The forms of oversight and stigmatization that society enacts in indirect democracy lead the role of procedures for checking actors to be minimized and a markedly personal and penal responsibility to be deployed around political leaders more and more each day. “Scandals” play a central role, therefore. Finally, one might argue for a “political” judicialization, meaning that the function of opposition is framed more and more often in terms of indictment (on the model of the great English political trials of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), eclipsing a vision of politics as the rivalry among different programs. To summarize this triple judicialization of politics, one could say that the figure of the citizen as voter is today more and more overtaken by the image of the citizen as juror.
2. Indirect democracy can also be understood as the socialization and dissemination of legislative power. For it is striking to note that it is many of the principal original attributes of legislative control of the executive that are now, in part, directly exercised by civil society. The power of inquiry, to restrict myself to this example, has thus been largely captured by the media and associations. But one might say the same of impeachment: alongside legislative procedures, informal actions of impeachment are constantly brought. Here again, the “descent towards society” of such mechanisms as censure and veto has to be evoked. This transformation is probably impossible to understand except on condition of taking into account the fact that the key modern power has become the executive, while classical political theory always insisted on the plurality of powers, and ranked the legislative power first among them.
3. In certain ways, the forms of indirect democracy, moreover, lead beyond the opposition between liberalism and democracy. For they arise neither from Madisonian representative government nor from the alternative of direct democracy. In a way, they do lead to a growth of “liberalism,” with all the limitations on power that the term implies. But this movement proceeds, remarkably, in the guise of democratic pressure rather than out of fear of the tyrannical potential of the majority. They make up, therefore, a new “economy of distrust” and of the balance of powers. It is in this sense that I propose to speak of the mixed regime of the moderns. Indirect democracy calls into being a wholly unprecedented division of powers, redesigning at the same time the network of checks and balances. Its innovations also suggest that the two great liberal mechanisms of the rule of law and the balance of power are reaching the point of fusing. Further still, it is possible to see beyond the distinction between input and output democracy.
4. Finally, it is worth adding the striking fact that indirect democracy has brought back to the modern world numerous political characteristics of the predemocratic universe. One might suggest as much by exploring a series of privileged indicators. It seems to return, for example, to the ancient definition of the judge as overseer and guardian, just as it revivifies the substantive and moral understanding of power and the common good of medieval doctrine (along with its relative indifference to procedural concerns). And it also reanimates the premodern vision of consent as noninterference with power. The hypothesis of the reintegration of the old in the new, in which the old is of course reinterpreted to suit the new, would logically have to be accompanied by a reevaluation of the putative rupture between the two moments. It might even lead to a new interpretation of the totality of the history of democracy. The idea would be to understand how the modern democratic regimes were led, in their first phase, to a certain institutional and conceptual polarization of political forms, with the development of indirect democracy progressively departing from this original requirement.
The examination of these four different characteristics of indirect democracy might then lead to a further inquiry in which its “principles” would have to be formulated. But this theoretical vision, grounded in the study of a number of historical cases, would also allow for understanding the indeterminacies and contradictions that structure democracy’s indirect form. And it would also provide the basis for interpreting its pathologies. Populism, to briefly turn to that example, might well be possible to reinterpret as a perverted form of indirect democracy, in the same sense that totalitarianism has been analyzed as a perversion of incarnated democracy.
This dynamic fashion of telling the history of indirect democracy, on the whole, would complement the conceptual history of electoral and institutional democracy that I have proposed in my prior works and of which this volume provides an overview. But this new research, since I plan to conduct it in a global and comparative framework, will in all probability lead to more synthetic results than those obtained in the prior studies of the French laboratory alone (even if I always understood my trilogy as a point of entry into the general problematic of democracy rather than as a treatment of a nation as an end in itself).
An Unpolitical Democracy
But does indirect democracy deserve the name? One can hardly doubt it. There are certainly “democratic effects” caused by these diverse and growing forms of the oversight and supervision of leaders. So it certainly is a model of democratic social power, more and more developed each day, even if it is a one that works indirectly. The extent of its corrective effects to the insufficiencies or abuses of the representative system could, of course, be extensively debated; but the global significance of the phenomenon is unmistakable.
And yet the unpolitical character of this kind of democracy is both obvious and troubling. It is apparent in a double sense. The diverse mechanisms or behaviors at issue have first of all the effect of dissolving the expressions of a generality. In essence negative and reactive, they cannot serve to structure or to bear a collective project. Some have, in any case, argued of these independent authorities that it is a matter of creating a “politics without politicking.” But it is actually a matter, very simply, of unpolitics. It is in fact more of “regulation” that one should speak in trying to describe the nature of the exercised activity. To put it briefly, this indirect and unpolitical democracy is characterized by blending democratic effects and unpolitical activity. And it is for this reason, too, that it is an original form escaping the traditional oppositions between liberalism and democracy and between representative government and direct democracy.
The spreading forms of indirect democracy tend, as a second consequence, to diminish visibility and blur legibility. But these have been two constitutive characteristics of the very essence of the political. There is no politics, indeed, if actions cannot be gathered together in a single narrative and represented on a single stage before the public. The development of indirect democracy thus has indissociably complex and problematic implications. They are complex because the growth of social power occurs alongside populist and reactive tendencies. They are problematic, too, because the evolution toward a “civil democracy” in the offing promotes forms of fragmentation and differentiation where a coherent order and the imperative of totality have to be sought.
The unpolitical character of indirect democracy explains the contradictory fears that it inspires. Citizens cherish independent authorities for their action at the same time that they deplore the fact that they are unelected. It is from this tension, it seems to me, that the disenchantment marking contemporary democracy is flowing in its depths. It is not caused by a disappointment possible simply to overcome (by improving the procedures organizing the representative system, for example), but is instead structured by the aporia formed by the combination of the democratic with the unpolitical.
It is important to stress that this aporia is strengthened by the trend toward the functionalization of participatory democracy likewise underway. This phenomenon has shown itself in two ways. There is first the development of what one might call a “managerial democracy,” by which I mean the fact that the opinions of actors of all kinds must henceforth be integrated more and more into the function of complex systems in order for them to run correctly. Even the appeal to an expressive democracy has, indeed, become a constitutive element of “good” management. In businesses as in government, the same call has sounded (in the French case, a whole series of legislative texts have organized the inclusion of associations in public programs in domains like health or the environment). But one must add, in the second place, that as different and decentralized organizations (both NGOs and domestic associations) have assumed regulatory functions, forms of “civil democracy” have also multiplied.
This presentation suggests that the enormous literature produced in recent years on the problem of governance has dealt with only a very small part of the problem I have been sketching. If it has taken up the new faces of “managerial democracy” or “civil democracy,” it has nevertheless left unexplored the vast continent of indirect democracy. Similarly, the large literature critical of neoliberalism, attacking the invasion of the forces of the market in the diverse areas of social life and deploring the decline of political will, sees only a particular type of evidence of “unpolitics” today. The understanding of the sources and forms of indirect democracy, therefore, can secure powerful new arms for the critique of society, renewing and regrounding it at the same time.
Repoliticizing Democracy
The sketch I have offered of indirect democracy suggests, in the very terms of its exposition, what might be the next steps in this unprecedented stage of the progress of democracy. Far from conceiving of democracy as already realized, an already saved up capital now simply there to conserve, my approach forces the stress to fall on the paradox that the growth of social power, in essentially negative modes, has come linked to forms of the hollowing of the political. The response to undertake, on the basis of the foregoing understanding, has two components: the institutionalization and rationalization of the forms of indirect democracy on the one hand and its politicization on the other.
The first is easiest to grasp. It would involve the more methodical organization of the diverse kinds of oversight or rejection that exist today essentially in the form of informal social powers. To give only one possible example, citizen rating agencies could regularly evaluate the actions of certain public organisms. Indeed, there are many projects to imagine in this sphere. The second component of democratic progress to put in action, the politicization of indirect democracy, is the most important and the most difficult. For the challenge is to create what one might call democratic projects, to conceive political activity as the continuous action of society on itself and not simply as a series of episodic interventions.
In this framework, there is a whole range of practical works of resymbolization, of the production of generality, of translation, and of the interpretation of reality that has to be undertaken. Against exceptionalist conceptions of the political, the return of the political would have to be understood as proceeding from an ensemble of actions and discourses for producing commonality and making the system of social interactions both more legible and more visible. Giving meaning back to politics, then, cannot take place in the first instance through the elaboration of a doctrine or overall project. It is above all a matter of publicly reconstituting and exposing, in order to pave the way for their evaluation and modification, the effective modes by which the social system is produced. There is a work to be shouldered of writing and publication that in this regard amounts to the very foundation of the political. It would aim to give a vocabulary to social experience and to outline for it the framework in which it takes on meaning—and thus allow for it to reform itself. The enterprise of the politicization of indirect democracy thus calls for an authentic rediscovery of ordinary politics, conceived in terms that are at once simple, radical, and profound.
These perspectives, which can barely be glimpsed in this presentation of a work to be carried out, could allow for the political horizon of the left to be restored in three ways. First, they would give new tasks to the democratic ideal, saving them from the flat and restorationist nostalgia of a golden age of civic life. The point would be not so much to denounce the accretions on a system believed to be workable in itself or to wish to be free of its ponderous complexity (and therefore simply to call for the erection of stronger, more participatory, or more deliberative institutions). Rather, the hope would be to find practical engagements in a democracy conceived as a social activity. Democracy, to put it in the terms of some of the Greeks reread by Michel Foucault at the end of his life, is more a matter of a permanent dietetic care than of anatomic and orthopedic curiosity. This approach might lead, in the second place, to a communion of the ideals of democracy with those of socialism. Historically, the first have above all been defined in procedural terms, while the second have been thought about in a substantive fashion. If politics is conceived, however, as the work of society on itself, then the experimentation with differences that makes it up is also its heart. Substance and procedure blend, in the end, to make democratic progress connect with the deepening of the exigency for social justice.
The perspective of a repoliticization of democratic life allows, third and finally, for the relations between national democracy and cosmopolitan democratic forms to be imagined in a new and different way. The usual understanding of this relationship consists in thinking in terms of a transfer, that is to say of a reproduction at a higher level of forms of regulation first achieved in the national forum. The notion of indirect democracy, however, suggests a mode of political regulation that is neither that of institutional government, nor that of the governance associated with the function of the market and the extension of the rule of law. It is in terms of the constitution of an indirect democracy at the international level that one might therefore define a final operational program. It is an indirect democracy still taking its first steps, and that has to be both developed as a collection of social powers (through the action of NGOs and diverse international organizations) and institutionalized in order that powers of oversight, control, or rejection might see the light of day. The objective will have to be, in this spirit, to develop “democratic projects” of the community of nations to keep ever present the force of justice and law.
In sum, the goal is to pursue simultaneously, on different scales, democratic progress and the construction of a cosmopolitan order. But while such convergence has often been conceived in the weak sense of a generalized dissemination of power, of a multiplication of forms of governance without government (whether in the dreamlike manner of a globalization of good feeling or in the more exalted mode of an epiphany of revolt), the task is to discover how to pursue it as the expression of an exigency that is strong and realist at once.