SIX

Natural Law and Human Motives

As we have seen in various ways in our previous chapters, the innovations distinctive of modern politics, whether they concern the idea of human rights or the establishment of the modern state and of representative government, have profoundly changed our condition by changing the conditions of human action. These innovations are particularly ambitious and audacious artifices that subject human agency to unprecedented constraints. Let me try to summarize this great transformation.

Since the human world is a world of action, a practical world, it is naturally or essentially archic.¹ Divided into commanding and obeying—a person either obeys or commands—it is also held together and put in motion by an act that begins and commands. Now, by a reversal that is indeed supremely audacious and ambitious, the initiators of the modern movement posited that there was nothing natural in this archic character; that, on the contrary, what was natural was the an-archy of a condition without either command or obedience; and that it was only by starting from such a condition that it would be possible to construct a just form of commanding and of obeying. Still, whatever the authority of our forefathers or of those who inspired our constitutions, it would nevertheless be hard seriously to maintain that equality is humanity’s natural condition or that the command-obey polarity is artificial. As a matter of fact, the modern political order, our political order, has never ceased to be archic. Even today it continues to depend on the acts of those who command. If it were otherwise, we would not be so worried about the passions, reasons, and dispositions of President Donald Trump. Still—and here lies the transformation—the modern political project has introduced into the archic order what one might call certain an-archic planes—horizontal planes in a vertical order—which are ever more extensive and attract all public light to themselves and thus monopolize acceptable public reasons. Thus, even while we act and, as agents, as acting beings, enter necessarily into the countless modalities of the command-obey polarity, and necessarily engage in acts as commanded and illuminated by their rule, we seek to give more and more place to the plane of life that denies commanding or obeying by multiplying new rights, the declaration and recognition of which replaces the human life that we experience with a kind of “dream-life of the angels” in which we are supposed to put our faith. In chapters 3 and 4 I examined the weaknesses intrinsic in the very notion of human rights, emphasizing in particular how the increasing authority of this notion leads necessarily to a loss of the meaning and intelligibility of law. What concern me here are the consequences of these developments for our self-understanding. Under our present conditions, human association is more and more opaque to itself; it understands itself less and less, since, as the practical and archic operation is more and more obscured by an-archic conventions and frameworks, the bases of actions and of institutions and the sources of citizens’ own actions and institutions are less and less accessible to them. How can we close the chasm, which grows larger every day, between our social and moral experience, on the one hand, and, on the other, the language of unlimited rights, which has become the sole authorized discourse? That is, how can we escape the demoralizing division between actual experience and legitimate speech and again give to our social and moral experience the means of expression that are so clearly lacking today?

In the face of an-archic individualism, with its rights that have no meaning except openness to an unlimited authorization of actions or behaviors with no rule or purpose, it is tempting to posit somewhat defensively a communitarian and archic order based on a natural law that derives its authority from a certain idea of nature, an idea understood as the objective synthesis of all norms desirable for the good regulation of the human world. This approach is a response to a very legitimate need, in the face of the virulence of the principle of subjectivity, to formulate anew the principles of an objective order. But this defensive and reactive approach, by advancing theoretical and synthetic propositions concerning human nature or the nature of the human world, remains a prisoner of the theoretical view that it shares with the philosophy of rights. It does not enter into the practical operation itself, which it claims to rule without taking the trouble to analyze how it works. In order to enter into the practical operation, we must first consider the question of human motives.

The Question of Human Motives

I will start from the following proposition, leaving it to readers to evaluate its validity and relevance as it concerns each of them: every action properly so called requires a balancing of the three main human motives, that is, the pleasant, the useful and the honest.² To this last we might add the just and the noble, which are kindred notions. There is no human being who is not moved by the pleasant, the useful, and the honest (the just, the noble). The active presence in us of these three great motives is not up to us, even though the strength of each, their relative weight, and the way in which they affect our actions vary according to our nature, our education, and, precisely, the way we are in the habit of acting. Since they are objective components of human nature, we have them in common as human beings, and it is because we share these motives that we understand each other and that we are capable of judging one another, and moreover that we cannot avoid judging one another.

One might argue that these three categories of motives are not equally natural or objective, or not so in the same way. The pleasant and the useful are notable for their stability and objectivity. According to a famous remark of Aristotle’s, we cannot cause sexual intercourse to be unpleasant, nor a knife’s cut to be pleasant. As for the useful, we cannot make it the case that forgetting to declare our tax liabilities would not be quite useful, or that others’ failure to honor their debts to us would not be very disadvantageous. It is to the ideas of what is honest (just, noble) that we attribute a certain plasticity, to the point of refusing them a natural or objective status. It cannot be denied that these conceptions in fact vary considerably according to places and times. It is just these variations that have led to the elaboration of the human sciences—the sciences whose task it is to make intelligible the “infinite diversity of laws and customs” that humanity presents—and that the idea of an essentially constant “human nature” seems not to be able to account for. Nevertheless, as interesting as may be the epistemological or more generally philosophical questions posed by the scope of variations in the human phenomenon, these do not directly affect the practical human being, the human being in action, the agent. The question whether the idea of the just or the noble varies with one’s particular culture is without pertinence for the acting human being: as an agent, he must count a determinate idea of the just or the noble—most often, in effect, the idea held and nourished by his “culture” or city—and not at all the “infinite diversity” catalogued by the anthropologist, as necessarily among the principal motives of his actions. The variability of ideas of the just or of the noble, but also to a lesser degree of the useful, and even of the pleasant (since human beings can have very different ideas concerning what is “good to eat”)—this variability in no way changes the invariable fact that every human being, whatever the “culture” or city to which he belongs, is necessarily moved by these three categories of motives.

Of course this does not mean that the agent is the inert site of the activity of motives, of their play or of, as it were, the competition among them, or that the chosen action is determined mechanically by the strongest motive, or by the strongest combination of motives, however such strength might be evaluated. As I have just noted, the agent is an agent; he bears an active relation to his motives. Neither the pleasant nor the useful nor the noble (just, honest) is in his power, but the weight accorded to each and the way they are combined depend in the first instance on him, that is, on his disposition, on his nature as it is either perfected or degraded by his education and by the habits produced by his past actions. In brief, the agent’s motives are not up to him, as to either their presence or their nature; they belong to the human being as such, to human nature; but the way these human motives become his action is up to him. His dispositions with respect to the action, his virtues and his vices, are up to him.

This description of the relationship between the action and the motives of action is admittedly just an overview, but it has the merit of emphasizing—rightly, I think—the objective and sharable character of human motives. But does it make sense to oppose the practical certainty of the agent as belonging to his “culture” or his city with the perplexity of the theoretical man confronting human diversity, as I have done? Let us take a closer look at the problem.

Let us start with the case, which is not so rare and which is always interesting, of a person who effectively or sincerely sacrifices the pleasant, or the useful, or both to his or her idea of what is just or noble. If we share his idea of the just or of the noble, or if we at least include it in the category of what is authentically just or noble, then all is well, I might say, and we admire such an agent. This is a just man, or a noble woman, and perhaps even a hero! But what happens when his or her idea of the just seems to us unjust, or when his idea of the noble seems ignoble? Can we still say that he has in practice obeyed, as an agent, the motive of the just or of the noble such as he understands it, adding only that for our part we disapprove, reject, or condemn his idea of the just or of the noble? Might we look at the crimes of Islamist terrorists who justify their acts by the commandments of their religion in this way? How can we reasonably confront the chasm that suddenly opens up between the point of view of the agent—occupied in this case by a terrorist—and that of the spectator—occupied in this case by a citizen informed of the terrorist’s attack?

We cannot say that the terrorist’s act is a crime that bears no relation to the idea of the noble or the just that he has taken from his religion or from a certain interpretation of his religion. Nor can we say that he has simply obeyed an idea that is inscribed in his religion or his “culture,” an idea of the noble that we not only do not share but that horrifies us. Shall we say that he was led along and misled by a “false idea” of the noble? The truth is rather that his relation to the idea is gravely distorted. In such cases, we might imagine, the agent vividly experiences the passion awakened by a certain idea—a “sublime” idea—of the noble or of the just; he is carried away by this idea, but he lacks the adequate education or dispositions to lead his enthusiasm in the right direction and thus to purge it; he is looking, as it were, for a shortcut that promises to satisfy his passion immediately, in a way that is crude and cruel and that doubtless has little to do with the idea of the just or of the noble that originally motivated him or that was present more or less seriously at the beginning of the process. In the simplest case, which is not necessarily the rarest, this idea simply provided the pretext for satiating a criminal drive.

An analysis of this kind might help us to clarify the conduct of terrorists, but its merits are inseparable from its limitations. Its results are essentially negative; we avoid tempting errors without providing a satisfying positive explanation. The problem is not only that the “passage to the act” always retains something mysterious but also that we are dealing here with an aspect of the human soul that is especially opaque. It would not be wise to seek more clarity than belongs to the domain. The interesting inquiry concerns rather the general question of the place and the role of the “noble” in the architecture of the human soul—not only the soul of the terrorist or the jihadist but our soul, as peaceful citizens of our countries. The jihadist reactivates an archaic and crushing idea of the law in contact with a society that prides itself on having learned its lessons from the “war of the gods” and left behind it any commanding or demanding idea of the law. The terrorist and the good citizens are opposed as the criminal and the honest person, but they share the same perplexity or incompetence, or parallel perplexities or forms of incompetence, where it is a matter of relating judiciously to the law. What other explanation is there for the fact that, when they attack our “pleasant” in the name of their “noble,” we can answer them only with our pleasant in the place of our noble? In any case, it is futile to envision their conduct as the result of a “radicalization” to be treated by a “deradicalization,” as if terrorist criminality were an illness separable from the general dynamic of human motives, motives that we all share and whose good ordering demands above all a common education that is sufficiently attentive precisely to the diversity of human motives.

Thus, the point of view of the observer and the point of view of the agent cannot be entirely separated. Once again, the observer, whether a professional scholar or an ordinary citizen, cannot say simply: this agent judges a conduct to be intrinsically noble or just that I judge to be intrinsically ignoble or unjust. However strange may be the “culture” of the “other,” and however strange his idea of the noble or the just, I cannot judge an action without judging an agent, and I cannot judge the agent without judging myself. This requires effort. Thus Montesquieu, while emphasizing the “bizarreries” of the nobility’s “point of honor,” shows that the passion of the point of honor effectively sustains a vigorous disposition to liberty, since it introduces certain “necessary modifications in the obedience” due to a prince. Even if these “bizarreries” first strike us as incomprehensible and even seem to us absurd, the motive that informs them and that they in turn maintain then becomes quite comprehensible for us. The reference of human beings, whoever they may be, to an idea of the noble or of the just is always in principle comprehensible and sharable by all human beings, at least as a possible and meaningful perspective. If there are some forms of conduct toward which we cannot make this movement of understanding, whether these be “crimes of honor”³ or of terrorism, then we must conclude that these are forms of conduct that are just as criminal for their agents as they would be if we had adopted them ourselves.

Moreover, as I have said, the acting human being is not a prisoner of his or her motives. He is not the plaything of his idea of the just. He is so much less its plaything as this idea is never completely determinate. Despite its sometimes crushing authority, it retains an irreducibly problematic character, or at least always presents certain “difficulties”—there is always something that doesn’t quite add up. The agent moved by a high idea of the just, by a “thirst” for justice, may well come to correct and to rectify, or at least to inflect, the idea that he has received from his “culture” or his city. Thus those persons who are declared the most just have often been the “reformers” of their cities. In this sense the motive of the just or of the noble is “stronger” than the idea of the just or of the noble that specifies it here and now.

These remarks are intended only to suggest that the bases of practical life are much more stable and constant than we are inclined to admit, carried away as we are by the theoretical point of view of the social sciences, and more generally by the point of view of the observer or spectator. As spectators—and human beings love spectacles—we are naturally attracted and charmed by the spectacle of the diversity of human conduct that attracts our attention all the more when it is different from what is familiar to us, and that attracts it most especially if the particularity is spectacular, preferably spectacularly atrocious. This is not the best disposition for penetrating the springs of the acting animal. We must go against this tendency if we want to do justice to the point of view of action. All this matters for our approach to the question of natural law.

The Question of Natural Law

The very notion of natural law presupposes or implies that we have the ability to judge human conduct according to criteria that are clear, stable, and largely if not universally shared. It demands that the motley diversity of the human phenomenon, which is apparent to anyone, be reduced to a single set of characteristics common to all humanity and thus suitable to provide the foundation for rules of justice that are comprehensible and acceptable by all. I have suggested that the principal motives of human action—the pleasant, the useful, and the noble (just, honest)—constitute such characteristics. There is the question, however, how we can accord a decisive role to the motives of action—that is, to the factual bases of human acting—in an investigation into natural law, that is, into action’s norm. How can we locate a valid rule of action on the basis of a description, however correct and precise it might be, of the way the motives of human action operate and fit together?

Sometimes we make a mountain out of a molehill. A case in point concerns the modern philosophers who are eager to reproach their predecessors or some of their colleagues for confusing “is” with “ought,” or succumbing to the “naturalistic fallacy.” But in reality there is neither a leap nor a chasm nor an abyss between “is” and “ought,” but only a gentle slope along which we can walk with modest confidence. This, I say without vanity, is what I am now doing. To consider attentively the way in which human beings act, to grasp the reasons of their actions, and from this to discern the best way to judge and guide such actions—this not only involves no paralogism, it in fact constitutes the only way to proceed if we want to escape the alternative of deciding arbitrarily what rule, norm, or law we will declare valid or, on the other hand, renouncing its pursuit. This in any case is what I propose, and it is a modest proposition in all respects.

The principle of this proposition can be summed up roughly as follows: a society, a regime, or an institution that does not give sufficient place to the three great motives that we have enumerated, that does not open up sufficient space for them, cannot be considered in conformity with natural law, that is, with this order of practical life that is not made by human beings but within which they not only live better and more happily, in a way that is more in conformity with human nature and its vocation, but also find more complete and exact self-knowledge. I would like to show by a few examples that this proposition, though it may not provide for the elaboration of what the Greek philosophers called the “best regime,” gives us the means to arrive at appropriate judgments on the great practical and political questions. As I have said, this is a modest proposition; strictly understood it leaves much to be desired and thus calls for complements and refinements. But it does help us arrive at practical truths on questions in which we collectively have a stake and that it is very important for us to evaluate judiciously.

Let us take first the case of a political regime concerning whose nature and merits much has been said over the last three quarters of a century, that is, the communist regime. Some are especially focused on communist “ideals,” on the idea of justice that the regime claimed to put in practice, either in order to praise its radicality and completeness or to denounce its “utopian” character. Those who had granted the validity and the nobility of the ideal were then obliged to ask themselves whether this ideal was at least approximatively realized by the regime. There was thus an argument over about seventy years concerning ideal communism and “real socialism”—for how is it possible to judge whether the real corresponds to the ideal when one regards the real in the light of an idea of the ideal that is necessarily very uncertain, and when there is no way to know what a society effectively “in conformity with the ideal” of communism would really look like? Among the lessons to be learned from the terrible communist experience, let us retain this one: the surest way not to see what is right before one’s eyes and to commit the most serious errors of political and moral judgment is to look at the human world according to the polarity between the real and the ideal, “is” and “ought.” Once a person has subjected himself to the obligation to bring about the convergence of what he began by separating in the most rigorous manner, he is under a contradictory injunction that gravely prevents or falsifies any spontaneous or sincere perception of the human association under consideration, in this case, the communist regime. How can the sinister phenomenon—what we see as sinister and is sinister—be regarded as manifesting reality when it is supposed simultaneously to indicate the glorious ideal? How then can the sinister phenomenon even be seen? For that matter, how could one fail to see in the sinister phenomenon a manifestation of the realization of the glorious ideal that is all the more convincing in its paradoxical character? To be brief, called to see at once the real and the ideal, to see them as at once distinct and mixed up together, the observer loses the use of his senses and of his common sense.

Even so, it was a simple thing not to be duped, even without being seriously informed concerning the magnitude of the repression and cruelty of the regime. The most casual and least observant traveler, in seeing the sadness of housing and clothing, the stiffness and brutality of physiognomies, the difficulty of obtaining the most elementary services from one’s neighbor—even the most naïve and favorably disposed traveler, I say, was forced to notice that the communist regime granted only the most meager share to the useful and the pleasant and that it frustrated cruelly and incomprehensibly these two fundamental springs of human life. This defect was so obvious and so massive that, whatever one’s sympathies for the ideal proclaimed by the regime, and even if one were ignorant of the fact of its crimes, this defect was enough to declare it without hesitation to be contrary to natural law. A judgment based exclusively on the role of the useful and the pleasant in communist life would have been incomplete but also rigorously correct. This would have distinguished it from many other judgments, which were caught between the opposing tongs of the real and the ideal, the “is” and the “ought.”

In order to establish the pertinence of the criteria of the three motives, we might also have taken the example not of a political regime but of a fundamental social institution such as marriage. If man and woman are to find in marriage a framework and a rule of life that gives appropriate place to the three motives, then a lot of imagination is not needed to unfold the practical consequences of a natural law so conceived. Marriage will not be an association of mere consent or enjoyment, one that might be chosen, put aside, and resumed according to changing feelings, as it is regarded more and more today; nor will it be a mere arrangement of the utility of families, as it was traditionally; nor, finally, will it be a paradoxical exercise in chastity, as proposed in a certain Catholic interpretation of the natural law that is still quite widespread. It may seem that the result of applying our criteria is, if not trivial, at least disappointing, since it leaves us with a concrete but minimal characterization of the institution, without providing any explicit criterion of perfection or at least of improvement.

This objection seems to me groundless. The notion of natural law neither includes nor demands an exhaustive definition of all the institutions in which human beings seek human goods. It is supposed to help us apply a simple and concrete criterion for determining whether it is possible for human nature to find satisfactory fulfillment in a given institution, political regime, or framework of action in general. After this, nothing prevents us from pursuing the reflection on the engagement of each motive according to the institution under consideration, with the understanding that, in every human institution, but in different ways according to the nature of the institution, the motive of the noble or of the just opens up a field of possibilities to the desire for improvement that is incomparably more vast than does the motive of the pleasant or that of the useful. Natural law as I propose to view it here offers precisely this advantage: while providing explicit and concrete criteria that make it possible to appreciate the conformity of an institution or of a mode of conduct to the natural law, it leaves the agent as well as the evaluator great latitude for exploring paths of improvement, or rather encourages him to explore such paths of improvement. If we wish for the appeal to natural law to be able usefully to illuminate the complexities and refinements of practical life, it is important that, far from taking the form of a discourse that is theoretical and assertoric and that confuses the ordinary regime of action with the perfect regime, each one spoiling the other, the discourse of natural law maintain in a sense the potentiality and, I dare say, the reserve of practical principles that remain implicit insofar as they have not yet commanded a concrete action or institution, whose qualities can be assessed only after the action or the institution has been seen or experienced “in the act.” The indication of modest principles of the kind I have just suggested fully leaves room for the motivating or even enthusiastic description of excellent practical realities, whereas the positing of a perfect law cannot usefully guide ordinary practical life or provide a sincerely desirable idea of practical excellence or perfection.

The Explicit and the Implicit

Such an approach would make it possible, along with other advantages, to avoid what is hazardous and occasionally ridiculous in lists of human rights. It makes little sense, we can agree, to include “paid vacations” in a catalogue of rights to be translated into all the languages of the world, including those that have no word for vacation or for salary. On the other hand, paid vacations make perfect sense among the both pleasant and useful measures that one might reasonably claim and establish in a productive society characterized by salaried work. It might be said that paid vacations, or other such policies, fit no better in an account of the content of the natural law than in a catalogue of human rights. This is true, but precisely, a right understanding of natural law, a right understanding of its practical character, saves us from the tyranny of the explicit and the exhaustive that is the fate and the scourge of the philosophy of human rights. This philosophy, having abandoned the perspective of the agent, can guide actions only by absolute propositions that can in no way enter into practical deliberation since, once a human right has been declared, there is nothing left to deliberate, but only strictly to apply. But the very character of natural law excludes anything so dogmatically explicit, since it involves the “play” proper to practical life, since it always leaves room to deliberate and then to choose. That effectively makes it less explicit, and moreover less pretentious, but not less rigorous: it alone is in fact rigorous in practice because, unlike declared rights, it is meant to be part of an actual deliberation and not to replace one.

So conceived, natural law is not like Kantian moral law, in relation to which the agent must always necessarily fall short. Natural law guides action but does not determine it, and thus does not command it. Only the agent, enlightened by the natural law and alert to particular circumstances, is fit to make the reflective choice that leads to effective action and commands it. Where the natural law is concerned, humanity in its ordinary or current condition is not this mass of perdition that the law condemns, but so many actors who undertake much and often fall short, who are ceaselessly straying further from and coming closer to this law of nature that does not define an ideal, but rather helps us to find the point of equilibrium and the optimal rule for a happy life, that is to say a reasonably pleasant, useful, and noble life.

I have already mentioned the common and, as it were, official objection that is addressed to the very notion of natural law: nature cannot make laws; only man, only human reason and will, are capable of producing law, since law has meaning only in relation to a human being who produces and obeys it. What is curious is that the force of this objection has been felt and even become axiomatic at the same time as and to the degree that we were losing any sense of the seriousness of human law, over a long process that I have tried to describe in these chapters. At the same time and to the degree that these human rights were gaining all the authority that had until then been accorded to political law—that is, the law that commands in the human world—the human law thus emptied of its meaning obtained the monopoly of the idea of law at the expense of natural law. This double movement suggests that natural law and human and political law, far from being incompatible notions, are on the contrary in solidarity and mutually implicated. Natural law is the law or the practical principles that human beings do not make because those principles belong to their nature, but that motivate, illuminate, and guide man-made laws. If there were not an authority or a resource like natural law, there could not be a human law in the proper sense, since human beings would not have a way to evaluate what they choose to call law, or, in the first place, no way to know whether what they are talking about is in fact the practical measure called law. Thus, as we see today, as the law becomes more and more exclusively a guarantor of rights, an authorizing law, it is losing entirely what constituted its nature as law, that is to say its character as a rule of action. It is true enough that the law followed by human beings has meaning only in relation to the human beings that produce it, but the natural law is precisely the mediator of this relation: human law has meaning only in relation to the nature of human beings. We might add that this natural law contains nothing that might offend human pride, since it simply invites the agent to combine the three great human motives in the best way. What could be more satisfying to the acting human being than to have produced, in the given circumstances, the action that imparts what is due to the pleasant, the useful, and the noble? What could be more honorable than to have discerned and produced the just proportion?

By ruining the architecture of practical life, the dogmatism of rights has destroyed the intelligibility not only of natural law and of human-political law but also of political command, of which political law is a part and which always provides the key to the practical order. However we might try to give new life and color to the now discredited notion of natural law, its destiny is inseparable from those of political law and political commandment. These three great constituents of the architecture of practical life either work together or perish together.

The Primacy of Command

If we close our ears for a moment to the ceaselessly whispered suggestion of laissez-faire, laissez-passer, if we strive to be attentive to practical life as we can observe it in ourselves and outside ourselves, then we will perceive that all action is either commanding or commanded, at least implicitly or by tendency. This, moreover, is why human life, whether public, social, or private is always essentially in tension. This is neither a defect that we should correct nor a disease that we should heal. There is no need to attribute this tension to some particular feature of human nature—for example, to attribute it, as Hobbes does, to the desire ever to acquire power after power or, as Locke does, to the continual uneasiness of a life besieged by need. Almost everything that presses upon or oppresses us is contained in the fact of having to act, in the fact of the agendum. It is in the urgency and the uncertainty of the agendum that the command finds and hides its root. It is in the tension inseparable from the agendum that even the agent least greedy for power finds himself led to command and finally obliged to command. The urgency of what is to be done and the desire to do well initially hide the command contained in the action itself; this command, which is at least implicit, of course does not escape those who take part in the action with us and who thus see a command, our command, where the agent sees only the thing to be done. Once finally deployed, the action has produced one who commands and one who obeys, each one possibly against his will, but rather in the end willingly, since such is the logic of action.

Thus command has less to do with the acting person’s desire for power than with action itself; or let us say at least that the person covets the commanding stance only because it is internal to action itself. Authentic or complete action is naturally commanding. Command is action itself, its core and essence. As to one who neither commands nor obeys—who can say what he really does? In the movements of his body or of his soul, how can we discern the part played by habit, by reflexes, by automatic responses, by just going along, “doing nothing”? Command indicates immediately that one has broken with passivity, with the inertia of immanent life, that the present is not enough, that one cannot merely continue or prolong, that a future must be opened up and that an action begins. Aristotle emphasizes that only he who commands needs all the virtues of the acting person. (This is so at least of the person who means to command well, but then one who does not know how to command does not truly command.) He needs especially the virtue that orders and crowns practical life, the virtue of prudence, which is the virtue proper to him who commands, whereas he who obeys can be satisfied with what Aristotle calls right opinion, which tells him whom and how he should obey. In the good regime of the Greek city—that is, in the well-constituted democracy—every citizen commands and obeys in turn: either he commands, or he obeys—tertium non datur [there is no third option]. Among those who know what it means to command and to obey, no one would dream of claiming that he obeys himself or that he commands himself, a fetishistic formula and a paralogism dear to the adepts of “autonomy.” These reflexive and reversible propositions have no meaning in practical life, since they presuppose that it is possible to erase the qualitative difference between the commanding agent and the commanded agent, between the disposition of one who commands and the disposition of one who is commanded—in brief they presuppose that the same agent can contain simultaneously the two opposing dispositions of practical life, as I have tried to explain in the preceding chapters. In the real city, which is inhabited and animated by actors and not reflective thinkers, the citizen can be said to accomplish no action that is not commanded by a magistrate of the city, unless he himself is a magistrate, in which case he commands other citizens for the time and within the scope of his office.

This perspective, which is oriented by the question of command, does not derive from some particular value attached to the superiority or inequality implied in commanding, or from some special taste for this inequality or superiority, nor from any overall conception of the world, from a “hierarchical conception” of the natural and human world, as is often said lazily and repeated confidently in dealing, for example, with Aristotle. This perspective is tied directly to a way of understanding practical life and action. The practical good, which has no existence outside of the action that aims at it and produces it, is, as it were, at every moment on the verge of being lost or degraded or of being abandoned. And at every moment it is the proper and personal aim of whoever has received or claims particular responsibility for this good and breaks with the inertia into which human life naturally sinks or gets bogged down to command and to begin the action that preserves or improves, the “perfecting” action, with a view to this good.

This practical primacy of commanding has been lost to view in the conditions of modern society and freedom, in which the irresistible power of the state and its sovereignty impose the framework and the habit of equal rights and thus offer a life that ignores command as well as obedience, at least ostensibly or apparently, a life that we call “free,” a life in which everyone is busy day and night seeking the mirage of “autonomy.” Command has not entirely disappeared—far from it; it is even seen as legitimate within the limited framework of a function within a system of productive work. It is in the guise of necessities of production or of administration that command and obedience subsist and are hidden among us. This, however, is by no means a residual subsistence, but rather a power that is all the more oppressive for being underhanded, given that “work relations” are all doubtless rendered more difficult by the fact that the inequality that there prevails is contrary to the principles of common existence and to the tenor of the rest of social life, where egalitarian familiarity rules. Let me observe in passing that, to the degree that the command-obey polarity became, as it were, invisible in the sociopolitical landscape informed by the figure of the autonomous subject, something called “domination” became the focus of attention; this was understood to be a social and moral phenomenon that is in a way detached from the action of members of society, since the command of the one who commands is no longer concretely inscribed and visible in the public space, but instead a phenomenon that bears down on the mass of society in a way that is all the more oppressive and discouraging. This domination has taken many forms throughout the development of modernity, but from the beginning it has been at the root of the resistance and suspicion to which modern productive society has constantly given rise. Certainly one of the most serious weaknesses of “liberalism”⁴ is its incapacity to take the measure of this phenomenon, its readiness to see in this resistance and suspicion an “ideological” viewpoint fomented by those sectors of social or political opinion that refuse to see the “reality” or the “necessities” of “the modern economy.”

It is, on the other hand, in close-knit communities that are devoted to action in the full sense, and where special attention is given to the correctness of action, to the effective presence and to the life of the good or of the proper end of these communities, that the articulation between command and obedience is the most explicitly clear and thematized, as well as carried out with the most care. This was the case in particular of the ancient republics, and it is still the case of Christian religious communities.

As we have abandoned ourselves more and more completely, or more and more resolutely, to the inertia of laissez-faire, laissez-passer, we have lost sight of the central role of command in practical life, including especially the commanding role of the law as a rule of common action. We put our faith in the postulate that a certain inaction, or a certain abstention, is at the origin of the greatest goods. At the same time as the flux that carries away human beings along with products of their activities swells and accelerates, we take off the brakes and abstain from actions that would tend to moderate and to direct the movement of people and of things. We believe, moreover, that nothing is more pointless or sterile in general than the tension proper to the acting person, whether he is concerned with this world or with the other. “Avoid stress,” “stay cool,” “take it easy”—these are a few versions of the only commandment whose validity we recognize. The grammar of human life has been reduced for us to enjoyment or suffering. Between these two modes of passivity that claim all our attention and provide the matter of all our new rights, there is no longer any space for acting. At the beginning of the arc of the development of modernity, we deliberately abandoned that law that commands and gives the rule to action, in favor of the state that organizes the conditions of action, an action henceforth judged not by its rule but by its effects. Since this beginning the rule of action has been continually eroded, and action itself has been continually shrinking, while the effects of our actions, amplified by our abstentions, have become ever more crushing. The acting animal is now the prisoner of the very audacious and ingenious arrangement that he once devised to escape the urgency and to avoid the difficulty of the practical question. Caught in the realm of inaction, he seeks out, in a kind of terminal fever, the last corners of social existence that still escape the laissez-faire idea and where the very idea of the law might suffer its final defeat. Western, or at least European, humanity seems to want to rally itself all together, not in order to do some great new thing but in order to refuse unanimously and irrevocably to hear the question: “What is to be done?”

And yet this passivity in which we place our pride cannot last indefinitely. The more the effects of laissez-faire, laissez-passer grow, the more urgent grows the question what is to be done.