THREE

The Order of the State without Right or Law

We must return to an affect, a passion, with which we have already been much concerned, that is, fear. It has disappeared from the intellectual framework that helps us to conceive the collective order and to organize common life. Someone establishing an index of the main notions of political liberalism and of representative government or of modern democracy could omit the entry “fear” without any risk of scandal. In fact its absence would not be noticed; it is rather the presence of this notion that would surprise or even shock. Such an off-putting, indeed chilling affect as fear would cast a sinister shadow over the architecture of the positive and even cheerful notions that organize modern politics. More profoundly, whereas the usual notions are resolutely abstract, whether it is a question of “human rights,” of “representation,” of “material and moral interests,” or further of “separation of powers,” fear is something concrete, painfully concrete one might say, something that concretely designates a primordial component of human nature that can be observed or experienced by each of us. In fact, however much we may want to be the sovereign authors of the human order and to depend on nothing but our freedom, the construction of modern politics would never have been able to take hold without deriving support from our nature, and more precisely from the passivity of our nature, as it imposes itself on us especially in the affect of fear. It is this decisive role of our nature in its passivity under the aspect of fear that the reading of Machiavelli and Hobbes puts before our eyes.

At the same time, it is true that it is hard for us to conceive that such a complex and refined edifice as the modern political order could be based on something so simple—so vulgar, one is tempted to say—as fear. Not only is our vanity offended, but our good sense pushes back. One person frightens someone; another is frightened; and maybe the second responds by frightening the first. How can a principle of order be derived from this tangle of passions? It is in fact hazardous, as I have emphasized, to make conjectures concerning Machiavelli’s political intentions or projects; it is even impossible to “derive a political teaching” from this supposedly “realist” work. And yet Thomas Hobbes found the way to render Machiavelli’s perspective—I was going to say Machiavelli’s reformation—at once moral and practicable, without in any way backing off from the primacy of fear, indeed while making the use of fear thematic and systematic. He could not have based a rigorous approach on fear, he could not have based an institution on a radically new type of fear, an institution destined to give modern life its form—that is, the state—if he had not succeeded at the same time in moralizing fear, in giving it a moral function and so to speak a moral mission. Hobbes accomplished this task by removing fear from all dependency in relation to natural law, however this law might be conceived. Far from leaving the affect of fear under a rule that would guide the way in which this affect must be mastered and that might require, for example, that the city inculcate virtues such as courage in its citizens, he puts fear in the position of a cause, of a moral or rather moralizing cause: it is the affect itself—the passion of fear, that is—that is the spring or the pivot of what Hobbes again calls the natural law, a “natural law” that is not properly a law but rather, as Hobbes readily admits, a “conclusion” or a “theorem” derived from the human fear of death.1

How then does he proceed? As I said, he gives fear a moral function and even a moral mission; he brings out the moralizing potential of this affect. Not only is fear the most constant, the most powerful, and thus the most trustworthy human motive, but it has the singular virtue of repressing the most toxic affect of the human species as well as of the individuals that compose it, the affect Hobbes designates by the term “pride,” which prevents “every man [from acknowledging the] other for his Equall by Nature.”² By this he means the irresistible tendency of the human heart that causes human beings ceaselessly to recount dangerously seductive stories about themselves, each person with his particular stories as well as the stories of the human race in general. By repressing vainglory and pride, fear not only promises and produces peace among members of society and thus guarantees external order; it also resists the dominance of error and falsity internal to every person, that is, the ambitious and pretentious imagination of those who believe and those who believe in themselves (and these are often the same)—that is, the imagination of those who believe that the gods look upon them with particular benevolence and who therefore are ready to make themselves the spokespersons of divinity and the imagination of those who think themselves superior to others in some way and for whom this superiority entitles them to command others or to put themselves above them.

It is impossible to mistake not only the moral component of Hobbes’s approach but also the intensity of his moral tone. But it is harder precisely to discern the status and, as it were, the site of this morality. The moral order is born for Hobbes from the encounter between the person who frightens and the one who is afraid, that is, between two figures devoid of morality, understanding the term “morality” here as the orientation that is at least claimed according to a rule posited or received in advance. One who fears, or whom it is important to frighten, is not only without morality but is driven by the most ruleless human passion, that is, pride. We know nothing of the motive or intention of the one who frightens, the sovereign or the state; our knowledge is limited to the happy effect of that person’s action, that is, peace. Thus the morality that Hobbes is so careful to bring about and that the modern state really produces is an effect of morality—the moral effect of the encounter or the dynamic between two figures who are themselves devoid of morality.

Man Is the Being with Rights

This dynamic devoid of intrinsic morality, from which results and which produces the new institution, is rooted in the natural human condition, which is itself devoid of intrinsic morality. It is well known that the state of nature, or of the war of all against all, which is the war of each individual against every other individual, is a lawless state, a condition devoid of any law whatsoever.³ But why, then, given that there is no law, would there be right or rights? What in particular is the meaning of the right proper to the state of nature, the right of every individual to everything, including others’ bodies⁴—the jus in omnia—especially given that all are bearers of this right? What in effect can be the meaning of a right that, rather than distinguishing and distributing things and persons, expresses and confirms a confusion devoid of the least seed of order? When it is said that all have a right to everything, does this not mean finally that no one has a right to anything? One might answer that this is indeed the case and that it is precisely for this reason that it is necessary to leave the state of nature. Granted, but if it is only outside the state of nature that individuals have an effective right to certain things, that means it is pointless to speak of “rights” in the state of nature, especially a right to all things. How can one have a right when the affirmation of a right or of rights neither implies nor allows any determination, even the most approximative, either from the side of the person or of the thing? The main difficulty is not that right in the Hobbesian state of nature has no reality or effectiveness; it is that it has no meaning:⁵ there is no way to put it in words, except in words that have no meaning, such as the phrase jus in omnia.

These objections do not apply only to the teachings of modern natural right, which could not have been elaborated without the “hypothesis” of a “state of nature.” Since these teachings provided the axioms of our public philosophy, this philosophy is vulnerable to the same objections, objections that do not spare the sacred sentence contained in the first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: “Human beings are born and remain free and equal in rights.” To be sure, there is no mention here of a right of all to everything, but the familiarity and the authority of the proposition cannot hide its vertiginous indeterminacy, or rather its determination-defying character. Indefinite rights are here attached to indefinite individuals—to each and to all. Now, one might say that this indetermination is inseparable from the universality of the principle. This is true, but so is the reverse: the universality proper to the doctrine of human rights is inseparable from this indetermination, this active power of producing indetermination. Whatever the concrete arrangements put in place by human beings, these are exposed in advance to contestation and to claims that have no limit either on the side of the subject of rights or on that of the matter of rights. Since every social arrangement holds together and unites, under some determinate form, certain determinate persons and determinate goods, services, or activities, all social arrangements are vulnerable to a contestation, and finally to a partial or total negation that can always claim to be legitimate and just since it is derived from human rights. The same principle that today grounds this claim of rights will sooner or later justify a more radical claim of more extensive rights. This extension is never just an extension, that is, an augmentation of the number of rights bearers; it necessarily involves a qualitative change of institution or of association, a change that can be immensely positive⁶ but can also prove damaging when the increasingly exclusive preoccupation with rights in the end obscures the purpose of the institution and undermines its effectiveness.

This ambivalence in the extension of human rights is most often ignored. We suppose that the extension of rights in itself means progress, improvement, the attainment of a higher quality of human association. This is to underestimate the complexity of social, political, and moral life. The extension of rights, the openness to “new rights,” can never constitute more than half of our task. We are in effect bound beforehand to order the common world by rules or by laws that determine such order and that must be derived from sources other than human rights. The declaration and promotion of human rights in effect presupposes the prior existence of a human world already ordered according to rules and purposes that cannot be derived simply from human rights. If we wish, for example, to extend rights of access to the university in a judicious way, it is important first to have a somewhat clear idea of the meaning of the university as an institution. If “new rights” are going to mean effective social and moral progress, then they must not obscure or damage the meaning of the institution to which we wish to give wider access. Human rights by themselves provide no positive determination of the contents, or of the “goods,” of human life; they may concern indiscriminately actions, functions, status, qualifications, goods, services, or any yet unnamed object to which a claim that is unforeseeable today might wish tomorrow to attach a right, a “new right.” Once established in its exclusive legitimacy, the idea of rights tends to become an empty form in search of its matter, and everything, literally everything, can become matter for this form. Any and all aspects of human life, from the most evident to the most secret, are henceforth open to a legitimate claim. The infinitely complex and differentiated architecture of life is given over to a right of access indifferent to this complexity. To declare human rights in a way that is perfectly indeterminate and actively resistant to determination is to grant to just anyone the formal authorization to claim whatever thing in the human world he judges or feels he has a right to. And why would not everyone demand his right to all things, since all things have been declared a matter of human rights? Thus the jus in omnia that could find no meaning in the state of nature where everything was still indeterminate, finds a particularly ample and troubling meaning in our regime of rights, since what is delivered over to a jus omnium in omnia are all the determinations, all the qualities, all the aspects of an actually existing world. All concretely human forms, whether it is a question of the nation, the family, the university, or of any institution that shelters and produces a determinate human good, are delivered up to a claim that is not concerned to have rhyme or reason because it has been given an unlimited authorization in advance.

In order to give some minimal plausibility to this hypothesis or postulate of a condition characterized by rights without law, or of man defined as the being with rights, theoreticians of modern natural right have had to make much of certain traits of the state of nature understood as a war of everyone against everyone. In effect, in such a situation it would be quite difficult in practice to incriminate someone for some action he had committed and thus to contest his “right” to act in this way, since he could always more or less plausibly claim the excuse of legitimate self-defense. One can grant the argument, even though the conditions of the state of war do not eliminate all distinctions among actions, as Hobbes himself recognized with his noted honesty. But even if, in certain violent situations, all actions tend to resemble each other in their violence, it takes a lawyer’s trick to assimilate the act of one who kills in self-defense to the act of one who attacks in order to kill. Moreover, “legitimate self-defense” itself does not properly define a “right,” or only in a very restricted or technical sense. The situation called legitimate self-defense cancels the punishable character of an act contrary to the law that forbids murder or battery. To say that one has “the right of self-defense” does not mean that one has precisely the “right to kill” in defending oneself. It means rather that one is immune from penalty, or acquitted, if one has killed or wounded one’s attacker while defending against him. The infraction is determined without being punishable. The acquittal demanded by the lawyer is conditional on a very meticulous and even mistrustful examination of the circumstances, with particular attention given to the “proportionality” of the self-defense in relation to the attack.

We see, then, that the recognition of a situation of legitimate self-defense by no means reveals a “right” somehow prior to all law, but rather a properly exceptional suspension of the application of the law that forbids murder and determines the punishment of the murderer—a law that does not cease to be valid even though its application is suspended, exceptionally or extraordinarily. How, moreover, could this “right,” supposing it is valid, constitute the source or provide the type of rights that are pertinent in social and political life, which requires the application of principles that are much more complex and refined than the right to persevere in being or to preserve oneself—which, if we had to name the rights bearer, is less a right of a human being than the right of a conatus? In any case, the abusive interpretation of the “legitimate right of self-defense,” extended to the whole of human rights, has greatly contributed to obscuring our vision of social and political life. What is lost from view in particular is the determining and specific role of the law as a rule of action, since right, now understood as prior to and independent from law, presents itself to us as a sufficient principle of action, a function that it can in no way fulfill.

Let us dwell a moment on the proposition in which so much passion is invested today: man is the being who possesses rights. It resonates as our self-definition and our perspective on humanity, one that we take to have fortunately replaced other definitions and perspectives, such as that man is God’s creature or that man is a political animal. This definition certainly has assumed the authority from which other definitions used to benefit. It is not, however, of the same type. Not only is its content of course different, but it is also different as a definition, or in its form of definition. I think this will become clear if we compare it to the definition proposed by Aristotle: man is a political animal.

Aristotle’s definition seems just as general, just as “abstract,” as ours, but in fact it is of a very different type. Albeit indeed abstract, it “contains,” as it were, all the concrete modalities of the most significant human competence, the one most proper to man, which it designates as the “political” competence. Positing that human beings organize their practical life in the best way by governing themselves in associations of a certain kind called “cities,” it leaves it up to them, one might say, to put this capacity to work according to certain concrete modalities with their corresponding preferences, modalities that political science distinguishes and describes, thus developing and justifying this definition. As soon as we formulate this definition, as we still do readily today, our mind is filled with concrete images that evoke more or less clearly the political life of human beings, or their life in cities. Whatever may be the city, or even some other kind of human association, it is implicitly contained in this definition.

The elusive enigma of the definition that we are trying to grasp is something else entirely. As we have said, human rights, however we may render them explicit, presuppose a human world already ordered not by rights but by laws—political and moral laws, but also customary rules, such, for example, as those that guide the expression of sexual desire. They presuppose that the city and its diverse laws are already there. As we formulate our definition, what comes to mind are not concrete images of a human world defined by rights, but concrete images of “the struggle for rights,” that is, of social movements or changes that, however important or desirable one judges them to be, intervene in an already constituted human world, such that our definition, unlike Aristotle’s, is deliberately partial and biased. Moreover, in order for the form of our definition to be adequate to the idea or to the representation that it evokes, it would have to be modified as follows: human beings always and everywhere have the right to claim or to demand human rights. The only concrete or practical determination of these abstract rights is in effect that they are always and everywhere liable to be claimed by the subjects of these rights—that is, human beings—which distinguishes them radically from what today are called “animal rights.” Even with this modification, this definition leaves the positive features of the human world, the world in which the human being has the right to claim human rights, in complete indeterminacy. There is no way to know, in particular, whether “the being with rights” is or is not a “political animal.” Thus, whether we define the human being as “the being with rights” or as “having always and everywhere the right to claim human rights,” we say nothing concerning what constitutes or gives form to human life.

The truth is that nothingness haunts this definition. We would not doubt this if we took seriously the approach of the founders of modern natural right. We take pleasure in comparing their various versions of the state of nature or of the social contract, and we question the status of their “hypothesis”; we evaluate, along with the coherence of their doctrines, their political or social relevance, or we go further and study the “context” of the elaboration of these teachings. All that is very well, but if we stop there, there is a decisive element that escapes us, the very element that Thomas Hobbes puts before our eyes when he proposes to consider society or the city tanquam dissoluta—as if it had been dissolved or reduced to its elements—in order then to recompose it in a more rational manner. What is at stake here is more than a “question of method.” We suppose that it is possible to reduce the human world to a kind of “degree zero,” to nothing or almost nothing, to dismember it entirely in order then to reconstruct or recompose it entirely. We suppose that a human being can operate beginning with nothing, precisely with the nothing of humanity. I am by no means exaggerating, since, in speaking of man in the state of nature, Rousseau declares without qualification: “Limited to physical instinct alone, he is nothing, he is an animal.”⁷ To propose to think the human world by beginning with a human being from which the human has been “methodically” removed, in order finally to organize the world with justice and humanity, is an ambition or an enterprise that is at once exorbitant and affected by an “original vice.”

One might reply that all that is “a thought experiment,” that it is proposed “theoretically,” or as a “hypothesis.” To be sure—but this is a thought, theory, or hypothesis that is aimed at and orients or guides future action. In any case, what does it mean to think about such a matter? Perhaps to think our humanity does not fit so well with certain magical tricks: with what virtuosity our authors make “man” disappear and then reappear! One would have to admit that thought is capable of focusing on what does not exist or on what is losing its being and its form—more precisely, on a human world that is decomposing to the point of losing its human features, to the point of becoming a lawless condition in which human life, deprived of rules, no longer has anything human about it. The idea that the human mind could fix its attention on a condition in which all human traits are absent, or rather from which it must implacably remove all human traits while continuing to recognize the humanity of this condition, is a “hypothesis” that cannot be seriously considered, one that—with all due respect to the great minds who have wished to follow this path—involves an unpardonable element of frivolousness.

Of course it is possible to think “wound” without bleeding and to think “to kill” without being a murderer, but it is treating the effort of human thought lightly to imagine that we might effectively conceive and carry out a kind of “de-creation-re-creation” of humanity without experiencing a mortal upheaval. It is a fact that the thinker who went the furthest in this enterprise, who committed himself to it with the most depth and sincerity, was only able to follow through on it by according to himself the status and the prerogatives of the standard of the natural man, or of man according to nature. Rousseau was able to go so far in the deconstruction-reconstruction of man’s humanity only because he believed he had found in himself the human being molded by nature itself and that this self-knowledge made possible the most precise knowledge of human nature as such. However, since we have contemptuously dismissed the very idea of a human nature, what is left that could possibly give life and being to this individual entitled to rights, that could give human form to this conatus, this unknown, this x? For us there remains nothing.

Let us go further. By conceiving, or claiming to conceive, a dissolution of the human city prior to its recomposition according to the best principles, we postulate a “power to think” or a “power to understand” that is essentially indifferent to and thus essentially superior to what it claims to think or to understand. It is as if the human intellect, the faculty of understanding, were comparable to a beam of light, a flashlight that can be pointed indifferently at a house in ruins or at a resplendent palace. This supposition may be pertinent or defensible where the understanding of nonhuman nature is concerned, since this nature obeys, at least largely, an observable and verifiable causality; but it is essentially unsuitable for understanding the human world, which is first of all a practical world, a certain organization of action, a certain operation. It cannot be approached judiciously without first drawing from this very world, from the human world such as it appears, the relevant information on the way action is organized within it, that is, without first being attentive to the way in which it understands itself. One may then, if there are good reasons for it, build a “better regime” in speech or in thought, but this is something very different from claiming to build the just city or the good society starting from this degree zero of humanity that is the state of nature or the civitas dissoluta—from separated individuals who are supposedly entitled to their rights.

This is why Socratic political science, the political science that Aristotle presents as the specific science of the human world, proceeds from a description of the way human cities define themselves in their own eyes, that is, first, the way they understand themselves and speak of themselves, thus starting with the opinions of citizens concerning their city. If we do not take seriously the diverse and sometimes opposing ideas of the just held by citizens, we disqualify ourselves from really understanding what goes on in the city, and thus from possibly elaborating a better city. I just evoked the way human cities define themselves in their own eyes. I would like in fact to emphasize that the object of practical science is active, that it takes a form in which the mind has its part, that it is inscribed in being in a way that excludes the knowing intellect’s power to use it as it will, for example by subjecting it to a resolutive-compositive method that treats it like an object as devoid of speech as it is of thought. The truth is that, in order to achieve an adequate understanding of human cities, these must be considered as realities that speak and that think, and that might cry out. On the other hand, if one chooses to work with the formless inhabitant of the state of nature, whose poverty Rousseau recounted to us, then one is a maker who meets little resistance on the part of his matter—his prime matter—to use Hobbes’s very terms. It follows that the work that is thought and projected is far from being a better city; it is not even a city, but a new institution that is not properly political, what the moderns call the state. Modern natural right does not properly found a political philosophy, but a doctrine of the state.

The Christian Question

The question then arises why such a way of thinking and such an institution developed in a Europe steeped in classical thought, a Europe that was, moreover, rich in diverse principles of action, including of course the Christian religion with its unheard-of propositions and the particularly strict demands it addressed to human beings. I will consider the question of Christianity, or of Christianity as a political question, only from the epistemological angle that interests us here, that of social knowledge and political science. The Christian religion presents a singularly resistant obstacle to Socratic political philosophy or to Aristotelian political science. The human condition announced and illuminated by Christianity, the condition of the creature, is still more rigorously determinate than the political condition experienced by the Greek city and analyzed by Greek political science. The creaturely condition is experienced and presents itself to the understanding as “enslavement to sin.” All other components of the human world are subordinated to this fact, a fact that is controlling in an unprecedented sense. All powers of the human being are affected by this disorder in one way or another. It is thus a question of an enslavement that is insurmountable by man reduced to his own strength. Only Christ’s grace can deliver him, the first step of liberation consisting in his becoming aware of the slavery of sin. The experience of sin and of grace is eminently decisive as well as strictly invisible: it operates in foro interno, in such a way that there is an essential difference—as it were, an essential incommunicability, between political experience and Christian experience. The citizen is visible and active in the midst of his fellow citizens, while the Christian takes his bearings by the invisible action of an invisible being infinitely different from himself, even though the Christian normally belongs to a visible ecclesial institution that guides his relation to God in a more or less detailed and rigorous way.

Therefore (limiting ourselves here to the problem of the knowledge of the human world) anyone who wishes to describe life in a Christian community under the regime of Christianity in the manner of Aristotle—that is, by starting with citizens’ opinions on the just city or justice in the city—is confronted with a difficulty that will prove to be insurmountable. Shall he consider the dispositions and opinions of the citizen, or the dispositions and the faith of the Christian? The ambitions of the agent, or the reflections of the penitent? He cannot look in the same way at the visible citizen and the invisible Christian, nor can he ask them to submit to the same kind of attention. What words will he trust: those that most faithfully manifest the city’s opinions, those of the citizen who is always so sure of the justice of his claims, or those of the Christian, who is preoccupied first of all with his own injustice? This does not mean, moreover, that Christians inhabit only the regions of interiority. It is obvious that religions in general are the source of convictions and of passions that intervene visibly in the public space no less than political opinions and passions. Still, in the case of Christianity, however public, potentially influential, or even tyrannical the manifestations of the ecclesial institution may be, and however visible and audible may be the convictions of certain sectors at least of the Christian public, the center of gravity of Christianity resides in an interiority that no visible reality can reach and that no visible expression can express in a non-equivocal manner, given that the effect and the interior meaning of even the most public sacraments are inaccessible to the observer. It follows that behind the fabric of society an immense domain extends of which the invisible part is incomparably more significant and “real” than the visible part, thus a domain that cannot be mapped by any human instrument, by empirical observation or social science. In brief, under a Christian regime, the social phenomenon is at once overburdened and elusive. One might say that the intelligible surface of Christianity is impossible to “fix” because of the overabundance and equivocal character of its signs.

Over a long history many more or less judicious and durable accommodations have been made, and many mediations have been introduced between the political operation and the Christian operation,⁸ the first of these being the Catholic Church itself. No one needs to be reminded that at a certain moment in our history this mediation came to appear unjustifiable or untenable to a “critical mass” of Europeans. What interests us here is not the practical and political failure of this mediation but what it means for social knowledge. When human life is divided between two operations of great power and depth, operations that are essentially independent of each other, it does not produce itself in the form of a synthetic phenomenon that can be taken into view to form the basis of an adequate political science. As damaging as it was, the disdain of the dogmatists of modern natural right for the social and political phenomenon can be said to have been inevitable, since it resulted from the overdetermination, or simply from the division or confusion, of the phenomenon itself. This division required an entirely new approach that was entirely detached from concern for the phenomenon, whether in its political or in its Christian version.

To get around this overdetermination or confusion of the human phenomenon, some resigned themselves or resolved to imagine and to produce a new basis of possible human determinations, or an indeterminate basis of humanity, whose law of construction demanded that it be emptied of political as well as of Christian determination—a basis of humanity on which to build a human world that would bring to light neither the political nor the Christian phenomenon, and thus one in which the political operation as well as the Christian operation would be in principle impossible, at least in their complete forms. Not being a citizen, this indeterminate basis of human rights would not be an agent in the proper sense; he would situate himself in the human world without knowing any rule of action; he would decide to ignore the fact that there cannot be action without a rule of action. Not being a Christian, he would not be reflective in the proper sense; he would situate himself in the human world without encountering a condemning law, able to see himself only as an innocent. The effort of modern natural right and of the state that it has inspired and informed was to bring to light this being defined by a right to be and to do that would be limited or ordered neither by the law of the city nor by the law of conscience.

The Meaning of the State

If the arguments I have just developed have some validity, then this means that the doctrines of modern natural right are based on mental constructions—the state of nature, human rights—that, far from being especially pertinent for guiding action and ordering the political body, tend rather to throw the rule of action into indeterminacy and to obscure more and more the sources of common life. To these arguments that target the intrinsic validity or logical consistency of a human right supposed to be prior to all law, the reader of Hobbes, or the observer of the modern state, or simply the practical person will oppose a counterargument that is not without force. I would sum up this argument as follows: Whatever the defects or obscurities of the notions or the mental constructions of modern natural right, the political meaning of the approach that they underlie is clear enough and in itself of great practical relevance. The point for members of society, for the subjects of sovereignty, in brief for all those who obey, is that they grant the sovereign, the one who commands, the quantity of power that that person needs in order to fulfill his function such as his subjects conceive it, that is, to protect them by repressing the ambitious or the factious who wish to dominate or exploit them. It is not hard to see in the theoretician’s approach the outline, very vigorously drawn, of the construction of a political apparatus strong enough to repress the desire for superiority and to establish subjects or citizens on an equal plane, of which this apparatus is the protector and the guarantor. Whatever may be the philosophical weaknesses of the contractualist argument, the practical basis of the process envisioned is clear enough: it is the common interest—common up to a certain point—between the powerless many and the one who holds power.

This objection has a point. It rightly reminds us that the modern state was built against the enemy common to the many and the one, that is, the “few” in its many versions, not only the “nobles” or the “aristocrats” but also all intermediate bodies or mediators, including particularly the singular mediator that is the Catholic Church. This argument nevertheless leaves aside a practical question of great importance, that of the motives of action or the purposes proper to the bearer of sovereignty as an agent—a question that Hobbes omits entirely, since in his system, the sovereign, the holder of the greatest power humanly conceivable, has no motive of his own to exercise this sovereignty, receiving it as he does simply through its being abandoned or transferred from the jus in omnia of the subjects. The objective of the sovereign cannot be reduced to the domestication of the few, whatever importance this objective has taken on in the development of the modern state. Nor is it sufficient to object, as did Locke, that the subjects instructed by Hobbes imprudently nourish a lion or a tiger in order to protect themselves from foxes. The forgotten question is that of the motives proper to this lion or tiger, the motives proper to the one who commands, that is, who acts in the most complete sense or who alone carries out a complete action. The implicit argument that the one who commands “has an interest” in repressing those who would command is not sufficient. For if those who would command are moved by pride, how is it that the one who commands would not also be so moved, or moved even more by pride? Or how could the one who superlatively frightens others himself entirely escape fear? Hobbes’s indifference to the motives of the one or the ones who command is justified only if the functioning of the political apparatus is essentially independent of the motives of those who control it—if the state produces its salutary effects independent of the government.

Moreover, while Hobbes takes account only of the motives of those who obey, he attributes to them only those that fit: since those who obey are constrained and dominated by fear, their motives are reduced to the desire to persevere in being in the most comfortable way possible. Machiavelli was more generous; he granted people a specific desire not to be oppressed, a motive that involves a certain intrinsic decency.⁹ As I have already pointed out, from the point of view of the builder of the state, the human world does not find the basis of its ordered movement in the question What is to be done? This world is supposed to find its limits and be held together by the polarity between those who obey because they cannot, so to speak, do anything and those who command because they can, so to speak, do anything. But one who can do nothing does not act, does not even obey in the proper sense. Neither does one who can do anything act or even command in the proper sense. Since, in the new collective order, no one acts in the proper sense, then there is no point being concerned with the internal rule of action.

The Practical Question

How can the builder of the state forget or dodge so completely the practical question that subdivides into two distinct but inseparable questions, the question of commanding and the question of the internal rule of action? He forgets or dodges it as we have subsequently forgotten or dodged it, by granting to the proposition according to which all human beings are born and remain free and equal in rights the value of a founding axiom. If human beings are naturally free and equal, that means that obedience is essentially repugnant to them, that they are essentially recalcitrant. If obedience is essentially repugnant to them, if they are essentially recalcitrant, then the question of obedience becomes primary; it becomes the main political question—as it were, the only political question: the new and true political science, Hobbes insists, is a science of obedience.¹⁰ How then are we to make people obey who are essentially recalcitrant, people who find in themselves no reason to obey? This is to ask at the same time how to produce the power capable of making them obey and how to make this obedience just or legitimate, that is, equal.

Leo Strauss maintained the thesis that modern political philosophy lowered the criteria of justice in order to make their application more certain and, so to speak, irresistible. It was from a starting point in his profound study of Hobbes’s political philosophy that Strauss formulated this axial theme in his interpretation of modern political philosophy and, more generally, of the modern project or movement.¹¹ This thesis is at once suggestive and penetrating, but I will nevertheless criticize it as follows: it tends to obscure the immense indeterminacy that affects the instrument—that is, the sovereign state—by which the thus lowered criteria of justice are supposed to be applied. Criteria and application, justice and power—there we can agree. The state is in fact charged with bringing together power and justice, irresistible power and equal justice, but what remains indeterminate is the morality proper to the state, that is, the intention or the disposition by which it beats down the pride or represses the disobedience of subjects or of citizens. If we are condemned to ignorance concerning this intention, if it remains necessarily indeterminate, this is because the state draws its motivation, or rather its raison d’être and its basis, from the perspective of those who obey, not those who command. Those for whom obedience is essentially repugnant conceive and produce the instrument that will force them irresistibly to obey—the instrument that makes them obey in order then to obey them. Thus this immense apparatus, this martellus infinitus, does not know whether it is obeying or commanding, and the people who make use of it do not know either. This indeterminacy that combines opacity and duplicity indicates, more than any other characteristic, the vice of the modern state, the weakness that is intrinsic to its construction and the underside of its immense power.

In the moral penumbra of the state, the citizen unlearns what it is to obey and even more what it is to command. He unlearns together the two modalities of human action, particularly the main modality, that of commanding. The dominance of the state is the cause of an ongoing withering of human action and, at the same time, inseparably, of the growing obscurity of our understanding of action.

It is tempting to try to imagine the end point of the process of subjecting the political and social order to the state, the ultimate effect of this enigmatic institution that, wanting to be at once absolute sovereign and docile instrument, neither really commands nor obeys. The state commands with no specific reason all those who would like to command for any reason whatsoever. The state represses or contains those who would claim to command without itself pretending positively to command, even while officially declining to command itself, since it leaves free and equal citizens with their freedom. The immense machine of the state is busy emptying the social world of all commandment, busy producing a world without commandment, or with no other commandment than that of the state, which does not command in the proper sense—busy producing a human world in which no one either commands or obeys, in which each person is, as it were, reduced to the condition prior to action, a condition in which there is no rule available for guiding or concretizing action, such a rule being the condition of the distinction between one who commands and one who obeys. Commanding in fact has meaning in the human world only because he who commands or who claims to command discerns more clearly or takes his bearings more resolutely by the rule of action than those who are then led to obey are capable of doing. It is ultimately this rule of action that the great machine ceaselessly brings down, humiliates, and finally effaces as far as it is possible to do.

Thus, under the pressure of the state, the human being is reduced to the condition prior to action, or, as we have said using a word whose vacuity designates exactly the empty form that is thus produced, the condition of the “individual.” The individual is defined abstractly as the being with rights and experiences himself concretely in the self’s body as suffering or enjoying, in the passivity of the self’s body as suffering or enjoying. Thus the modern state rests on a natural right that is posited and produced by the state, a right to which “modern” or “democratic society” conforms more and more in proportion to the deployment of the state. At the end of its course the modern state produces a social state that asymptotically approaches the state of nature as presupposed in its construction. The human being that will be called “modern” or “democratic” posits and produces himself according to a norm that has the authority of nature—human beings are born and remain free and equal in rights—but a nature posited and produced by the most powerful artifice ever conceived and constructed by human beings.