Should a critique disappear when its object is no longer present? Although politicians and journalists still use the concepts of fascism and communism rhetorically, perhaps taking the precaution of adding a “neo-” to cover their embarrassment, nearly no one any longer admits adhering to either, and neither does anyone seriously think that they will return any time soon. But of course no one thinks that the Roman Empire—or the Roman republic—will return soon, which doesn’t prevent learning from those experiences. And there are those, still a minority, who believe that the only way to interpret the U.S. Constitution is by reference to its authors’ supposed original intent. I use the terms “experience” and “intent” to stress that the study, and the critique, of totalitarianism does not belong to the domain of objective science based on neutral observation of nature or culture; it is philosophical—and therefore political, in a sense that I will define in the process of this analysis. Indeed, the critique of totalitarianism can serve as an introduction to modern political philosophy insofar as the immanent critique points beyond itself toward an understanding of the political problems confronting a democratic society that cannot take for granted its own foundations.
In the past—for example, with the emergence of Italian Fascism—totalitarianism (a term that the Fascists appropriated for themselves)1 presented itself as a political project worthy of replacing a corrupt and venal democracy that not only unleashed a foolish and self-destructive “total” war but privileged only those who were already established. For their part, Leninists explained that there can be no omelettes, or happy tomorrows, without breaking some eggs. Stalin would later explain that the only way to ensure that the state will wither away is to strengthen it to the maximum in order to reshape society in its image. But those times have gone; experience has made us more cautious, less rash or adventurous. Yet saying “those times have gone” only seems to express fatigue, a loss of tension that doesn’t explain anything. Moreover, what “experience” has made us more cautious, wiser? What could we in the West, who have always lived in democracies, have experienced of totalitarianism? What kind of wisdom have we learned from the experience of others? Can that new knowledge serve as the basis of a political thought or action, or is it simply a kind of resignation in the face of the massive fact—whose explanation is left to the political scientists—that democracy seems now to reign globally and without contest? But anyone could have seen well before 1989 that, if this victory was not preordained, certainly totalitarianism was a declining force, both politically and ideologically.
I am not worried that the capitalist democracy that stands alone on the global stage will somehow lose its footing (even if some of the new democracies may confront serious difficulties, stemming in part from their insufficient economic development, itself a product of political failures). My fear is rather that it will weaken gradually as a growing public apathy makes democracy a private personal experience rather than a site of public action, with the result that democracy will lose its signification and “capitalist” will stand alone, justified only by its (unequal) material results. In the post1989 world, interest has been reduced simply to economic interest—which is not the same as individual interest, which must be understood as the modern form of autonomy.2 Economic interest should of course not be ignored, nor is its pursuit dishonorable. Its place was suggested by Hannah Arendt who, in The Human Condition, the philosophical-political project that followed her still-provocative Origins of Totalitarianism, stressed the Aristotelian distinction between (economic) production, which is ruled by necessity, and (political) action, which is the domain of freedom. It is that domain of political freedom that is lost (or perhaps voluntarily abandoned, or exchanged for a kind of security that is taken to be a greater good) in totalitarian political regimes as well as regimes whose politics are determined by economic necessity. The result is what I call the antipolitics of capitalist democracy. This does not imply that capitalism is simply a different form of totalitarianism. It does, however, provide a starting point for a political and philosophical reflection on the actuality of the critique of totalitarianism after 1989.
It might be objected that public participation is itself typical of totalitarian societies, which are based on mass mobilization, the refusal to separate the private from the public, and the constant concentration of unified opinion. But that observation is static; it neglects to ask how the phenomena it describes came into being. The observer places himself outside the thing observed, neglecting to take into account the experience of the participant. If it is granted, as it must be, that totalitarianism is not imposed by force on unwilling participants,3 then the meaning of their experience must be explained. That is why Hannah Arendt recognized that the precondition for the totalitarian politicization of society, which must in turn be reproduced in order for the regime to remain in power, is the atomization and breakdown of social solidarity and its replacement by private anomie. It is not enough to describe the process by which totalitarianism is reproduced institutionally; the experience of its subjects must be explained as well.
An aphorism of Arendt’s friend, the critic Harold Rosenberg, casts light on the process that needs to be explained. The political activist, he suggests, is an intellectual who doesn’t need to think. Of course, the activist uses his intellect, argues, studies the facts closely, but this is only to justify the party line, which he or she does not determine. The party line is general; the task of the activist is to apply it to the particular issue at hand. The activist gains certainty and security in this exercise because he avoids the need to think the snovelty of the situation he confronts. This experience is not limited to the activist in totalitarian societies. Claude Lefort points to a similar observation by the nineteenth-century political thinker Edgar Quinet, who critically analyzed the process by which courageous affirmation of freedom in 1789 could be transformed, a decade later, into self-willed servitude to Bonaparte.4 The similarity of the two types of experience—which Lefort often describes by appropriating La Boétie’s expression “self-willed servitude”—suggests that the emergence of democracy and that of totalitarianism are related. But before jumping to conclusions, it should be noted that the activist as an intellectual who doesn’t think is not so different from the capitalist relentlessly pursuing economic self-interest, for whom intelligence is vital but stands in service to a goal that cannot be challenged. These analogies do not imply identity, but they do incite one to further thought.
My concern with political participation results from an attempt to understand the loss of the signification of the political in modern democratic society. The political, formulated as a substantive noun, refers to the process or structure through which everyday interactions among persons and interests acquire a sense or meaning that is not immediately apparent in their naked being. The priority of the experience of meaning and its connection to the specific forms taken by the political constitutes a guiding thread in the work of Claude Lefort. Starting from a Marxist critique of the Soviet bureaucratic deformation of political life, Lefort was led to pose the question of totalitarianism for its own sake and, more important, the question of the relation of totalitarianism to democracy. This path is also significant because it takes into account the need to adopt a critical stance toward both totalitarianism and the political domination of the logic of the capitalist economy. Lefort’s analysis of democracy does not treat it as what Marx called “the solution to the riddle of history.” Lefort is painfully aware of the antinomies of modern democracy, its fragility as well as its charm, and he is as painfully aware of the same characteristics on the side of totalitarianism. His most recent book, La complication (1999), was occasioned by his fear that a new complacency has emerged, one that sees totalitarianism as a mere accident, a temporary event on the broad canvas of historical progress of which democracy is the natural underpainting. The same worry is still evident in his most recent work, including the lecture in which he comments on Harold Rosenberg, noted above. His recognition of the need to try again and again to describe the uncanny logic that intertwines democracy and totalitarianism makes Lefort’s analysis of them both all the richer.5
WHY DID THE CRITIQUE FALL FROM FAVOR? QUESTIONS OF METHOD
The concept of totalitarianism gained popularity rapidly after World War II, but it lost its currency rather quickly. This was due only in part to the fact that it served both as an analytic category and as a (rhetorically) political one. This dual usage could be easily seen through, but other problems were more complicated, more philosophical. Was a new form imposed on social relations by the political seizure of power, such that the state was used to impose social changes; or were the social changes generated from within society, for example, by economic pressures; or were they a response to the stresses and strains of rapidly modernizing old European polities? Such was the question of the social scientist. Was the new, all-embracing society a reaction against the democratizing trends that had grown constantly if unsteadily since the Atlantic revolutions; or did it result from the inability of the old ruling classes and institutions to confront the challenges of the modern lifeworld? This was the challenge to the historian. Or did totalitarianism represent a new political form that differed from the classical models of despotism and tyranny familiar since the Greeks? This more philosophical question had radical implications; it implied not only the need to rethink the nature of political life itself but suggested also that the post-totalitarian world could not simply return to the old ways of doing things, as if the totalitarian interlude were simply an accident along the well-traveled highway of progress toward modernity. The advent of totalitarianism put into question not only the positivism of social science but the teleological representation of history that is its (unspoken) premise.
The first to use the concept of totalitarianism critically were anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi refugees who had remained part of the noncommunist left and sought to use the concept against both left- and right-wing forms of totalitarianism.6 In the case of the Frankfurt School’s Max Horkheimer, this leftist orientation had as its complement the insistence on the need to criticize capitalism as well. Although Horkheimer and Adorno, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, abandoned economic criticism for a broader, and historically universal, analysis of the constant presence of a darker side of Reason that accompanied each apparent step toward human emancipation, the turn to cultural criticism was a minority reaction to the analytic challenge of understanding fascism.7 The majority of left-oriented critics held on tightly to their critique of capitalism, as if the radical novelty of the two totalitarianisms threatened not only their political hopes but also their ability to situate themselves in their world. But this way of saving their sense of self came at the cost of misunderstanding the new political world that challenged them.
Many left-wing antitotalitarian anticapitalists hesitated to use the concept, fearing that it could only play into the hands of a right wing whose goal is to delegitimate any politics that attempts to achieve a real and substantive social equality they consider more important than a freedom that is in the last resort simply formal and abstract. After all, the concept of totalitarianism was defined—or at least consecrated in the academy—by the theses of Brzezinski and Friedrich in the early fifties, and this codification would then serve as the basis of the American anticommunist offensive in the hot period of the cold war.8 The CIA is said to have financed the Congress for Cultural Freedom in order to spread that critique of totalitarianism and thereby close off any temptation to seek a third way that would avoid the polarities of the cold war.9 Even the work of a philosopher as scrupulous as Hannah Arendt fell victim to this Manichaean interpretative framework. The reception of her Origins of Totalitarianism and then of her Essay on Revolution was muted in the fifties: the first work was criticized for placing Nazism and Stalinism in a common framework; the second because it analyzed what would later be called the egalitarian social “slippages” of the French Revolution while highlighting on the contrary the originary political creation produced by the American republic.10
The justification of the refusal to take seriously the critique of totalitarianism was the need to maintain a critical standpoint from which to criticize the present while making room for the possibility of a real justice in the future. And who could disagree with such a goal? But what is the present that is being criticized? What is the future that is promised? What is the justice that is to be achieved? How can one answer if one doesn’t accept the massive reality not only of totalitarianism but of the support—often unconscious or passive but nonetheless real—that the totalitarian temptation found in the heart of the Western democracies? Such, for example, was the politics of the anti-anticommunists. One cannot forget, after all, that the totalitarianism that was imposed over there, far away, knew quite well how to profit from the goodwill (and self-deception) of too many within the Western democracies. The promises that even many critics saw in “really existing socialism” do not offer a sufficiently critical definition of the present, the future, or the social justice to be won.
Others today go to the other extreme; they refuse the critique of totalitarianism on the grounds that it is no longer relevant. Not only does totalitarianism belong to the past, they insist; it was only an “illusion” (Furet) or a simple “ideology” (Malia). But, as the oft-quoted Santayana famously said, we must study the past in order not to be condemned to repeat it. Of course one doesn’t study that past with Ranke, to fulfill the positivist dream of finding out wie es eigentlich gewesen ist; rather, it is the constant reinterpretation of the past that shows its actuality in our thoughts and in our actions. Of itself, the past is passed, dead, without meaning; it comes alive only in contact with present history and those who are involved in its making. So it is also with totalitarianism and its critique.
The progressives who reject the critique of totalitarianism on the grounds that it would harm the good cause thus involuntarily bear witness to the actuality of that critique. They don’t deny that totalitarianism existed, but they pretend that it was only an accident, a detour on the road to the happy tomorrows. To resume the critique would be to reopen the wound, and it would also assume that evil doesn’t belong only to the past, that it is also part of the present. This attitude, interestingly, is not so far from the presuppositions of contemporary critics like Furet and Malia. That is why Claude Lefort recently returned to the critique of totalitarianism. His title, La complication, expresses his goal: complication has to erase the oversimplification that treats the present as if it were only a present, transparent to itself, univocal in its signification. It is too easy to preserve one’s good conscience, to pretend that we now know, finally, what needs to be avoided, to claim that the error was only subjective, that we will know in the future how to behave. The error, however, is not reducible simply to “stupidity” (Glucksmann); it is rooted in history, and that history endures in the present.
The situation could be described differently. Perhaps it is the illusion that is past, but the thing itself has not disappeared. To speak here of a “thing,” however, already expresses an erroneous understanding of the object of the critique of totalitarianism. It assumes that the reality of totalitarianism was a set of institutions, or behaviors, or other objective facts. But the reality is more difficult to grasp; to do so, one needs to adopt a phenomenological approach that avoids the one-sided standpoints of either the supposedly neutral outside observer or the participant in the process itself. What appears to the observer cannot encompass the sense the participants attribute to their actions, but the sense the participants intend to activate may not be congruent with the effects they produce. How can these two necessary standpoints be united?
The concept of illusion, like that of ideology, assumes that there is somewhere something that is real that one was led—why?—to mistake, to ignore, or to distort. Like the old-fashioned critique of ideology, the critique of totalitarianism would be a therapy, a learning to see what is truly real, whose goal is to correct the subject’s near- or farsightedness. This implies that the real remains what it always was: the object of a science or perhaps of a technique. The totalitarian error was subjective and in principle something temporary that can be corrected at little cost. (But why would people not once again fall into error?) More significant, this account denigrates human intelligence since the responsibility for error is put exclusively on the subject, while it implicitly treats the real as merely a passive substratum. Of course, people can err, we all have illusions and are tempted by ideologies. But history and politics are not so one-sided; they form a “flesh” (Merleau-Ponty) that acts as much as it is acted upon, that demands that we reflect on it at the same time—and because—we are part of it. After all, to do philosophy—and to do politics—implies that we put into question what only appears to be really real, that we interrogate it, and, if it seems necessary, that we correct it. And this implies that we give ourselves the right to be wrong. To think, after all, is to seek the truth while taking on the risk of being wrong, of erring.
This new totalitarian phenomenon that resists static definitions appears at the same time that the nature of the political is transformed by the birth of democracy. One aspect of democracy is the realization that human intervention can transform reality. It is important to take the terms literally: to transform reality is not simply to modify it, rearrange it, make it better, or correct it; those actions seek to adapt the real to an already given model, whether it be Platonic Ideas, natural Laws like those of science, or even the so-called laws of History. As opposed to such premodern projects, democratic politics becomes possible (and necessary) when there are no more preexisting models, when the individual has to take responsibility for his actions, to justify them by their own results, and to act such that the goal sought and the action undertaken are each their own origin. This indetermination of the democratic form of politics means that both the actor and the action, the subject and its object, the individual and society are thrown into doubt. That is why a democratic political philosophy calls on the method of phenomenology: the intentional act constitutes its object at the same time that, if it is not to be arbitrary, the same intentional act is also constituted (or called forth) by its object, from which it cannot be separated. This is an uncomfortable indetermination from which the individual seeks instinctively to free himself. This instinctive reaction to indetermination is not explained by the “bad faith” defined by Sartre’s existential phenomenology—whose subjectivism hides an implicit positivism; it has a deeper ontological ground, one that recalls the late Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of the interplay between the visible and the invisible.11
These preliminary methodological reflections should be completed by a brief reference to the final stages of the critique of totalitarianism as it became belatedly popular in France. It was taken up by a media-savvy group calling themselves the “new philosophers”—often ex-Maoists whose eyes had finally been opened by the (or, more precisely, their) discovery of the gulag—who drew radical consequences from their new certainty. They applied the label “totalitarian” to any political project, reasoning that by its very nature politics seeks to impose a conception of the future. The result of this reasoning was a sort of “angelicism” that argued that the only good politics is an antipolitics. The translation of this standpoint, by André Glucksmann, was an “Eleventh Commandment,” whose injunction is the Hippocratic imperative: Be sure to do no harm to anyone. Glucksmann’s personal manner of acting on this premise was often based on good political instincts, as early as his famous petition concerning the boat people, later in Vukovar, and today in Chechnya. But it is not always clear how his action and his theory relate to one another.12 Others who had been made sensitive to the new reality contributed to the widespread public sensitivity to the horrors taking place in the former Yugoslavia, succeeding in turning French diplomacy away from its traditional Serbophilia.13
All these recent criticisms of totalitarianism share an important methodological characteristic: the critic stands outside the criticized phenomena; he arrogates to himself a position that guarantees a kind of epistemological innocence from which to describe a world of sheer contrasts in which the grays of reality find no place. Such a picture opens to an understanding neither of the present nor of a possible future. In this context, a return to the old Marxist method of “immanent critique” makes explicit the interdependence of the subject with its object while seeking to understand not only the objective conditions of the possibility of critique but also the conscious mode of transforming the appearing reality. Even if it is no longer possible to be a Marxist, it is nonetheless the case that today one cannot avoid confronting Marx’s philosophical rigor in the attempt to rediscover political thought.
HOW TO TAKE UP MARX TODAY
What do we find when we return to Marx, who is so often blamed for the disasters of totalitarianism (and who is not innocent of them, even if the responsibility falls rather on those who didn’t know how to read him)? Lefort was a Marxist, in his own manner, and he has never abandoned that inspiration, to whose source he has returned several times in order to refresh his arguments and his own self-understanding—a fact that not only points to the seriousness of his engagement with these problems but also indicates that he recognizes and is provoked by the seriousness of Marx’s questioning itself. It is Marx, not Marxism, to whom he returns, but the exercise is not academic; it is lived experience, history and its novelty, that motivates the return.
As a serious Marxist, Lefort obviously could not avoid the encounter with Trotsky, already during the Occupation. This led him to an intense political activism in the Fourth International, followed by a rupture consummated in 1948 by the cofoundation (with Cornelius Castoriadis) of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie. A first summary of his engagement and break with Trotsky and Trotskyism was published that year in Les Temps Modernes, under the title “The Contradiction of Trotsky.” The contradiction that Lefort underlined was central to the Trotskyite political standpoint. The assumption that led to the founding of the Fourth International was that the proletariat was by its very nature revolutionary and that when it escaped from the ravages of Stalinism, it would need to find a “truly” revolutionary party to which it could turn for orientation. Lefort’s critique of this assumption already showed a characteristic typical of his analyses. He was not attacking a merely subjective error; he sought to show how Trotsky’s earlier participation in the creation of the Leninist-Stalinist party, and the justifications that he gave for this participation, could only blind him to the fatal role that this party incarnated without being aware of it. Trotsky’s “truly” revolutionary party would produce the same alienation as the Leninist party before it. The analysis, in other words, is already two-sided, or phenomenological, concerned with both the subject and its object. But Lefort’s assumptions are also Marxist, wagering still on the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat that, once it frees itself (or is freed) from the constraints imposed by the Stalinist leadership, will show itself to be in its very essence revolutionary—and able to organize itself without the mediation of a party.14
This first analysis was developed by Lefort in the following years through a continued critique of Soviet society as well as a critical analysis of Western societies. Lefort started from Castoriadis’s demonstration that the USSR represents a new social formation that cannot be identified either with “state capitalism” (where the party would play the role of the nonexistent Russian capitalist class) or with a superstructural deformation of a society whose socialist character is said to be guaranteed by the fact that private property no longer exists there (as the Trotskyists claimed). He then sought to evaluate the new forms of class division that emerged in the USSR and particularly the new dominant class incarnated by the party bureaucracy. At this stage, Lefort takes for granted the existence and dynamic role of classes and class struggle, as well as the idea of a proletariat that is naturally revolutionary and whose passivity could only be explained by the tactics—of which the purges represented only the most obvious manifestation—of the new dominant bureaucratic class. The implications of the claim that the USSR represented a new social formation had not yet been fully realized; the existence of a truly real infrastructure that needed to be brought to light was still presupposed. But that infrastructure was, in a sense, already double; it was composed, on the one hand, of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject and, on the other, of the reality of bureaucratic domination. Thus in 1956, with the publication of Khrushchev’s secret report to the Twentieth Party Congress, Lefort published in Socialisme ou Barbarie an article titled “Stalinism Without Stalin” that sought to demonstrate the continued existence and domination of the bureaucracy and the methods that permitted it to remain in power as the “leading party,” whose role in preserving the unity of Soviet society justified its position. In this way, Lefort was insisting on the reality of totalitarianism above and beyond the person of the “Little Father of the People”; the party itself was part of the reality of Soviet society. On the other hand, the outbreak of revolution in Hungary in the autumn of that year seemed to be a demonstration of the revolutionary reality of the proletariat and its ability to manage its own affairs; the creation of workers’ councils showed that the proletariat could get rid of—indeed, that it spontaneously distrusted—the party and its claims to leadership.
The key to the analyses of totalitarian society was therefore the power of the bureaucracy, an insight that seemed to be validated by the known facts. The temptation was therefore to apply the same analysis to capitalist society, while insisting there as well on the self-organizing capacity of the proletariat. Lefort had already laid the groundwork for this approach in the elegant phenomenological analysis of “proletarian experience” published in 1952 in Socialisme ou Barbarie. And of course the author of that magisterial analysis could only be shocked when, shortly thereafter, he read the encomium to the Communist Party (without which the class supposedly could not recognize itself for what it is) that Sartre presented in Les Temps Modernes under the telling title “The Communists and Peace.” Lefort’s reply, published in the same journal in 1953, went to the heart of Sartre’s argument while picking up a theme he had already alluded to in his analysis of Stalinism. Sartre’s premise was the idea of the unity of the working class rather than its everyday experience; as a result, his analysis insisted on the idea of that class as a “pure act” separated from the material and social conditions that produce it. Because of this separation, the working class depends on the presence of “its” party in order to exist as a being for itself. Sartre’s violent polemical reply to Lefort suggested that the criticism struck a nerve; it was met by another challenge from Lefort, whose title suggested his argument: “From the Answer to the Question.”
What question was Lefort referring to? A somewhat later essay, published in 1958 as a critique of “The Method of the Progressive Intellectuals,” shows that the question Lefort was driven to formulate depended on a deepening of the analysis of totalitarianism. Lefort sets himself again in opposition to the political-theoretical line of Les Temps Modernes that, in seeking to justify Gomulka’s return to power in Poland on the back of, and at the expense of, a working-class rebellion, put itself, so to speak, in the position of the press secretary of History. Lefort was challenging a vision of history and historical progress that supposes that the intellectual can have knowledge of the telos and goals that give that history its sense. This would put the intellectual in a position to judge and/or justify practical decisions taken in the midst of political uncertainty where the future remained open. Denouncing this intellectual pretension, Lefort was able to clarify his concept of totalitarianism as a new social formation, making clear that it could not be reduced to the results imposed by a power whose foundation is either bureaucratic domination (a reality that exists but has to be put into its proper context) or the division and diversion of a proletarian class that, once the cumbersome bureaucracy has been eliminated, would easily rediscover its real unity. Totalitarianism incarnated a new sense of the real and thereby a new reality. This new argument challenged the attempt to apply the critique of the totalitarian bureaucracy to capitalist society (as in convergence theories popular in political science at the time) because it is now clear that the two types of political system are not merely variants of a common material social formation. This conclusion was clarified in “What Is Bureaucracy,” which Lefort published in the journal Arguments (along with essays on the same theme by Alain Touraine and Michel Crozier) in 1960. The ground was prepared for a new stage in the analysis, one where the philosophical foundations of the sociological analysis would become more explicit.15
WITH MARX BEYOND MARXISM
The Marx to whom Lefort appealed during his first period was the revolutionary Marx, the voice of the proletariat and critic of social division. That Marx would soon give way to a Marx more concerned with the theory of history and, for that reason, more philosophical. This new style of questioning was influenced by the political experience that led to Lefort’s definitive break with the group Socialisme ou Barbarie. He came to recognize that, however creative its activity and however iconoclastic its theoretical work, its acceptance of the Leninist-Trotskyist role of the party inflected its analyses in a way that it could not eliminate.16 This small union of the faithful understood itself, in Lefort’s language, as the immortality of the “revolutionary body” that had been usurped by Stalinism. But in reality the group functioned like a microbureaucracy, with a division between the leaders and the followers, who only executed tasks that were given them, and with a manipulation of meetings, the separation of the different spheres of activity, the control of information concerning the functioning of the apparatus, and especially a stereotypical discourse that proved to be impermeable to events that put into question or challenged either its theory or its practice. What was remarkable in this manner of functioning, the height of its self-illusion, was that this microbureaucracy had no material foundation whatsoever. The power of its leaders depended on their control of information, their mastery of the proper language, and their ability to inscribe each and every fact, of whatever type, into a sort of mythic history. This bothered Lefort all the more, because he himself had a certain power in the organization for just these reasons. If things were this way inside Socialisme ou Barbarie, how could one claim to analyze bureaucratic domination in the Soviet Union according to a schema that only saw there a deformed version of class struggle? It was clearly necessary to take up again the reading of Marx while giving up the immediate hope for a proletarian revolution. But that sacrifice had to be justified philosophically—for one doesn’t change one’s analysis simply for conjunctural reasons.
A first step toward this new reading of Marx had been taken with the critique of the progressive intellectuals, who claimed to know the truth of history and who used that “truth” to justify a practice that at best adapted to the temporary situation or at worst became simply opportunist. But it was Marx himself who affirmed, in The Communist Manifesto, that the superiority of the Communist Party over all the other parties claiming to represent the proletariat consists in the fact that it knows the ends of history. It was therefore necessary to return to Marx to try to understand the roots of that claim, whose effects were felt also in the practice of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie, which because of this theoretical assumption proved to be blind to new facts that could have put into question its theory.17
How, then, can one discern the newness of the new? How can one avoid the return to repetition?18 How can theory open itself to temporality? These questions that Lefort has to confront as a result of his abandonment of the idea of an essentially revolutionary proletariat will continue to concern him. Later, in 1979, he adopted as the title of a collection of his essays L’invention démocratique. But before turning to the meaning of that title—is it democracy that is invented, or democracy that is itself inventive?—it is necessary to consider the results of Lefort’s rereading of Marx at the end of his first period. It should be noted as well that this was not his only rereading of Marx and that his reading is not simply pragmatic. For example, in a short essay on The Communist Manifesto published in 1986,19 Lefort stressed the eerie strangeness of Marx’s literary style: the presence of a voice that speaks from nowhere and claims to speak the truth, as if it were reality itself that was expressing itself. The author of this political thought disappears; he is only the path or the voice (la voie, ou la voix) through which truth makes itself “manifest.” But this fundamentally antipolitical view of history is not the only one that is presented by Lefort’s rereading of Marx.
Retrospectively, it is clear that Lefort had seen the need to challenge Marx’s understanding of the meaning of history for a long time without it having become the center of his concerns. His reflections finally crystallized in the lecture course he presented at the Sorbonne in 1965. These lectures were published first in mimeograph form by students attending the course; Lefort reworked them for publication only in 1978, when they appeared in the same collection—Les formes de l’histoire: Essais d’anthropologie politique—that contained his earlier essays putting into question (without mentioning it directly) the simple linear vision of history accepted by Marxist orthodoxy.20 The relation of these earlier essays to the rereading of Marx is clear from the title chosen by Lefort: “Marx: From One Vision of History to Another.”
The distinction between a representation of history as continuous or cumulative as opposed to a concept of history as marked by moments of discontinuity, rupture, or invention is clear in Lefort’s renewed consideration of Marx. The standard presentation of Marx that proposes an inevitable movement through which the forces of production develop and progress constantly in fact coexists with the idea of a radical historical rupture that explains the advent of modern capitalism. What is the source of such a rupture? Returning to Marx’s writings, Lefort is struck by the presence of both an interpretation of the world that seeks to discover its material foundation and a reading of that same world that underlines—starting from the famous analysis of the “commodity fetishism” in Capital—the power of the social imaginary. Lefort asks, how can we reconcile the Marx who appeals to Darwin with the Marx who swears by Shakespeare? The answer lies with Marx himself, says Lefort—who had just finished editing Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous The Visible and the Invisible, in which the philosopher proposes a phenomenological reading of history as a sort of “flesh” while insisting at the same time on the concept of “reversibility.” More precisely, it is not so much the answer that one finds with Marx but a reformulation of the question that would determine Lefort’s new reading of totalitarianism.
From this point, the terms of the analysis change. Lefort is no longer looking for the totalitarian deformation of an always possible revolution whose agent remains the proletariat, which has only to be freed from the weights and constraints that prevent its self-realization. That old image is based on the idea of a subject “in itself” that has to become “for itself” (i.e., self-conscious) in order for history to find its happy end(ing). That image postulates that totalitarianism is the other, the enemy from which one has to free oneself—as if totalitarianism had been imposed from outside, in spite of the efforts of the (good) subject or at least without its having contributed to its own self-abasement. (It should be noted in passing here that this vision of totalitarianism in fact reproduces the totalitarian structure that, as I will show in a moment, cannot do without the representation of external enemies in order to justify its grip on the social.) This dualistic interpretation is the product of a conception of history that is continuous and teleological. But such a conception contradicts itself: it postulates the end of that history whose contradictions are supposed to guarantee the revolutionary transcendence of its contradictory foundation. Its success would bring with it the seeds of its own (totalitarian) failure.
Rereading Marx draws attention to another dualism. On the one hand, there exist societies whose history appears immobile, repetitive, oriented to simple self-reproduction. These are all precapitalist societies. One of them presents a curious problem for the Marxist doxa: “Asiatic” despotism, in which economic relations clearly depend on the intervention of political power. This puts into question the notion that political superstructures depend on the economic infrastructure.21 Marx seems less concerned by this anomaly than by the phenomenon of the immobility of a historical society. He returns to it repeatedly, but he does not manage to explain it. The assumption that such societies must somehow be the theater of a hidden class struggle leaves him paralyzed. He turns with a certain relief to capitalist history, which, for its part, is structured by a progressive temporality that is constantly oriented to the production of the new. This permanent innovation that produces the mobility of capitalism constitutes what Lefort calls a “quasi-anthropological” revolution in human relations whose political translation is the advent of modern democratic society. The question that arises at this point is, what is the source of this mutation? It clearly defines the historical uniqueness of capitalism. And set against the description of the variety and permanence of immobile societies, it in turn poses the question of its own stability. Is capitalism, and the possibility of democratic social relations that accompany (while not being necessarily identical to) it, a historical aberration? Can the fall back into the repetitive vision of a society without history be avoided?
Lefort takes as the guiding thread of his renewed analysis of totalitarianism the question of the historicity of history, the relation of its mobility to its immobility, as it appears in the phenomenon of ideology. He begins by noting that Marx did not apply the concept of ideology to a pregiven capitalist reality. That would suppose that Marx knew already what was the essence of that reality and what was only its appearance. This first point makes it clear that ideology also differs from religion, for example, insofar as religion too explicitly postulates a beyond that is supposed to give meaning to the world. In doing this, religion shares with precapitalist societies a repetitive structure: both of them conjure away the threat of change, the uncertainty of history, the threat of novelty that defies tradition.22 Ideology comes to exist only within a capitalist society that cannot seek its legitimation by the repetition and reproduction of the Same; such a society is undermined by its immanent temporality; it is constrained to produce from within itself the representation of what it is supposed to be. Ideology is thus immanent to capitalism insofar as capitalism is a uniquely historical society; one could nearly define capitalism as incarnate ideology. But Lefort will show how the ideology immanent to capitalism is constantly put into question by its own immanent temporality.
The general structure of the ideology is rather simple, even though its forms are diverse (and deserve a more detailed presentation).23 Lefort first defines what he calls bourgeois ideology. Confronted by the constant changes that its capitalist industry introduces into society, the bourgeoisie seeks to eliminate the resulting uncertainty by proclaiming the eternal validity of values (such as the family, the nation, labor, etc.). These values are supposed to be immanent to society; their function is to give general meaning to their constantly changing particular manifestations. But the constant movement imposed by capitalist innovation on society ultimately challenges the fixity and permanence attributed to these values, which, as a result of the constant criticism, appear now as simple empirical claims. They lose their legitimating symbolic function such that, for example, the family appears simply as the reification of a specific form of family life imposed by a dominant class. The bourgeoisie may then attempt to save its claim by appealing to science. In this case, the value will be represented as a formal and universal rule that is possessed by a master—for example, the rules of grammar. But it is nonetheless necessary that the rule be proven valid in spite of the constant changes in society. The master will thus have to speak, to coin phrases, to use language to create meaning. But the rule is by definition abstract; its application will therefore produce either formulaic banalities, or, if it does produce meaning, a closer look will show that it had to infringe on the formality of the rule to do so. In either case, bourgeois ideology is again put into question. But it is not yet defeated. It can appeal to other values—for example, it will redefine the domain of applicability (claiming, for example, that the norms of the family do not apply only to heterosexual couples), or it will conjure up more precise and better defined rules (such as distinguishing the diverse grammars of the sciences and of cultural forms). Nonetheless, the instability that emerges in spite of all attempts to master instability and close off innovation finally puts into question the validity of bourgeois ideology. Its critics imagine and work toward overcoming the contradiction between a formal universality (of the value or rule) and its always particular realization by means of the invention of a new unity. With this, the temptation of totalitarian ideology appears on the horizon.
The totalitarian ideology whose historical genesis Lefort sketches is not identical with totalitarianism. Indeed, the failure of the totalitarian project does not put an end to the ideological form of totalitarianism. As a reality, totalitarianism shows itself to be always unstable, constantly forced to reaffirm itself by integrating otherness, whereas totalitarian ideology is a new way of seeking to put an end to the historicity of history, and thus of modern society, by showing its immanent meaning. As opposed to bourgeois ideology, which postulates values or rules that (like religious values) are explicitly different from the social reality they are supposed to legitimate, totalitarian ideology claims that its society carries within itself its own legitimacy.24 This legitimacy is obviously not that of capitalism as an economic system; the claim concerns rather the implicit and repressed historical truth that is carried by capitalism but whose effects transcend it. Lefort’s return to the analysis of the Marxist vision of history and its immanent telos was essential to the further development of his theory: Totalitarian ideology, and its agents, do not seek to bring totalitarianism into being—quite the contrary! They sincerely want to take into account objective necessity; they want to realize humanity, to overcome alienation and class contradictions, to reconcile society with itself—to put an end to what Marx called “pre-history” and its painful class struggles. Those who are tempted by such goals—and we all have been and will be again, at one time or another—will, hopefully, abandon them when confronted with their real consequences. Nonetheless, others, who are ready to break a few eggs in order to prepare the omelette of history, will make it a virtue not to hesitate when the stakes for humanity appear to be so high and the rewards so great and gratifying.
It is not necessary to carry the argument further here. Two lessons can be drawn from what has been said. On the one hand, capitalism and totalitarian ideology have a common source, they share a foundation: that dynamic, mobile history that carries the constant threat of the new. On the other hand, we do not yet understand why and how really existing totalitarianism comes into existence. We know that its seed (or ideological possibility) is born with modernity and the capitalist revolution, but we don’t know what revolution is needed for it in turn to overcome and eliminate capitalism. Indeed, it is necessary to underline the fact that this analysis of the shared substance of bourgeois and totalitarian ideology in no way claims that capitalism and totalitarianism are identical.
THE MEANING OF HISTORY
The analysis of the historicity of capitalism and the ideological attempts to conjure away its effects remains caught up in the premises of Marxism. Because the historicity that constantly produces the new is explained with reference to the structure of capital, the meaning of history is reduced to its material or economic foundation. That premise now has to be put into question. Lefort does so by returning once more to Marx himself, taking up the analysis of the Asiatic despotism that was one of the immobile forms of precapitalist modes of production. In effect, Marx recognizes that societies of this kind are given their material form by the political institutions whose power the society thereby reproduces. What is striking here is that Lefort’s description of totalitarian power in the USSR had presented a similar type of socioeconomic relations resulting from the imposition of political power. After the coup d’état—which is what it was—brought the Bolsheviks to power in 1917, the party became the absolute master of Russia. The new power then set about creating a society that reflected its own nature and thereby reproduced its power. It did so by eliminating competing parties, then through internal purges of the party itself, and then through the massive induction of new party members who owed their position and influence to the newly established system (this was the so-called Lenin Levy preceding the Thirteenth Congress, at which Stalin’s power was solidified). Now solidly in power, the process continued with the restructuring of the economy, the urbanization and industrialization of the country, and the gulags and the secret police. The new masters of course claimed to be orthodox Marxists and insisted that their actions were dictated by the priority of the economic sphere, but their practice belied their theory. The Russian Revolution was a political revolution whose effects were economic and social, not the inverse.
The analogy to Marx’s account of Asiatic despotism conceals as well as it reveals. It doesn’t explain either the contradictions that would undermine the new society from within before leading to its disappearance or the spectral actuality of the totalitarian phenomenon even after the disappearance of its material incarnation. The analogy is in fact only a reformulation (without the revolutionary hope) of what Lefort had shown already in his earlier analyses of Russian totalitarianism. That materialist analysis was not false—which is why Lefort uses it in La complication to criticize those idealists who interpret totalitarianism as either an “illusion” or a simple “ideology.” But it is incomplete. The Asiatic seizure of power was certainly a violent exercise of force, but if it were only that there would be no reason to fear a return of totalitarianism and nothing to learn from analyzing it. A further step is needed in order to eliminate a final remnant of Marxism: the idea of the determination “in the last instance” by the economic. The difference between precapitalist and capitalist social formations lies not only in their historical temporality but in the fact that the source of meaning in precapitalist societies is explicitly external to social relations, whereas capitalist society produces its significations from within itself. This poses the question of the meaning of the revolution—and the birth of capitalism was a revolution, not a coup like the Bolshevik revolution—that Marx reduced to the material and apparently natural emergence of capitalism. When this question is answered, it will be possible to understand why the concept of ideology is not simply applied to a reality that is assumed to be distinct from it and why ideology is not the result of the stupidity of the people who are duped by those who use ideology to rule the world. At the same time, it will be clear that science will never be able to replace philosophy for those who want to understand and intervene in contemporary political life.
The example most often used to illustrate Marx’s critique of ideology, and its relation to the birth of capitalism, is his analysis of the French revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in the essay “On the Jewish Question.” Marx describes French society as freeing itself from the yoke of a feudal monarchy only in order to impose on itself, unintentionally, the chains of capitalism. Capitalist relations are described as having grown up within the womb of the old feudal society; the revolution sets them free from hierarchical constraint and naively codifies them in the Declaration. This simple description of historical change needs to be looked at all the more closely because the metaphor of a revolution ripening within the “womb” of the old society is also applied by Marxists to the transition that will lead from capitalism to the radiant future—as if that future itself were simply another type of material economic relations. This metaphor also justifies the role of violence (“birth pangs”) and the intervention of the party (as “midwife” of history).
Lefort takes up Marx’s argument in the essay “Politics and Human Rights,” published in 1980 in the journal Libre.25 The Solidarnóse movement in Poland had come to represent a new kind of radical demand, one that appealed to human rights and did not seek state power as their presupposition. The influence of Marxism was still sufficiently strong that many French found it difficult to understand the radical implications of this different understanding of the political. Lefort begins by insisting that Marx’s analysis is not false, but it is incomplete because Marx misunderstands the political meaning of human rights. Indeed, Marx is not even true to his own method insofar as he criticizes these rights as if they existed only as ideals rather than as a practical reality lived by those who affirm these rights. From this practical perspective, for example, Marx is wrong to reduce liberty to the guarantee given to a monad separated from other men; nor is security just the protection of private property that justifies the power of the police. The lived reality of these rights, and their contrast to the rigid constraints of hierarchical society, shows that liberty is also the freedom of opinion and the liberty to express that opinion—an opinion, moreover, that is not a form of private property but rather exists only insofar as it has free access to a public sphere whose existence therefore must also be guaranteed. Similarly, security is experienced as a guarantee against arbitrariness, which is clearly expressed in the presumption of innocence and its protection granted by the law. Marx’s criticism doesn’t see the new possibilities of political action that these rights make possible; he sees instead only the reality of ideology.26
Marx’s blindness is explained by the economic reductionism that serves as both the foundation of his theory of history and its justification. But this theory is not only circular, presupposing what it needs to prove; it is also challenged by the very phenomenon that it seeks to explain: the political. Rather than focus attention on the supposed protocapitalism taking root within the ancien régime, Marx should have recognized and taken into account the absolutist character of that political regime. Absolutism was a regime in the classical philosophical sense of the term; it was not just an economic mode of production but encompassed the entirety of social life. A political regime is defined by a principle (or, with Montesquieu, a “spirit”) that determines the meaning of all levels of social life. Absolutism—which is not totalitarianism—was a type of regime in which the principles of power, of knowledge, and of the law are condensed in a single place; they are incarnated in the person of the King, who is himself the embodiment of the Nation.27 Because these three principles (without which no society can exist) are unified symbolically in the body of the King, they are explicitly recognized as external to the society to which they give meaning. Their monarchical incarnation was challenged by the revolutionary assertion of rights belonging to “man.”
The three principles (of power, knowledge, and law) are present in every society because every society must have a legitimate form of power (since decisions cannot be imposed by force or violence), society must produce knowledge defining its nature (because arbitrary action by members would potentially endanger social unity), and it must regulate relations among men and women by legal means (since there must always be a distinction between what is licit and illicit). The three principles need not be condensed in one representative. If they are, and their unity is then broken as their incarnation is denied, the nature of the regime changes: it undergoes a revolution. At that point, the demand for the rights of man emerges. The liberty that guarantees the free expression of opinion puts into question the idea of a monopoly of knowledge; henceforth, knowledge must be determined collectively, and its claims can be challenged. Legal protections and the presumption of innocence imply the rejection of arbitrary laws; the law henceforth must be the same for everyone. As for power, which is supposed to ensure the unity of society, it appears to return to the Nation, which must find a way to use it legitimately. But that legitimation will henceforth be put into question constantly by the other two principles, knowledge and the law, which have become autonomous and separate from one another as a result of the revolution that overturns absolutism.28
This revolution of the rights of man that makes possible the democratic project produces precisely the unmasterable temporality that haunted the historic vision of Marx. But this impossible mastery is no longer based on competition among capitalists; that competition, rather, is the result of this new temporality. The revolution that puts an end to absolute monarchy (and to its ultimately religious legitimation) disembodies the locus of power. The Nation does not have control of its own body; the determination of the embodiment of the Nation remains always an issue for the political. In other words, this revolution creates the conditions of the possibility of modern politics. From now on, political choices will acquire legitimacy by appealing to a Nation whose complete determination is never pregiven. The will of the Nation is constantly reproduced, and it is always open to challenge. As a result, the place of power is henceforth empty. This means that the principles of knowledge and those of the law, which remain separate from power and from one another, can in principle never be fixed. Power continues to exist, of course, but the struggle for its determination does not take place only at the level of the material state. Since knowledge and the law are in principle always open to debate, they too will continue to be the object of competition. The democratic adventure does not take place only at the level of power; knowledge claims are constantly challenged, and the law is applied to new domains where it must invent new norms defining the licit and the illicit. The multiplication of the types of legitimacy that Lefort found in bourgeois ideology no longer appears as the attempt to put an end to history; it now acquires a positive import insofar as it preserves the indeterminacy and indeterminability of democratic society.
But the immobile history that was incarnated in the absolutist regime is not thereby abolished; it remains present as the dream of a lost unity.29 Living with indeterminacy is a source of anxiety; democracy is inherently unstable, indeterminable. Attempts will be made to re-create unity, to find a worthy (symbolic) representative of it. These efforts result from the need to give meaning to the void that results from the disembodiment of power (and the competition for its determination), to understand the meaning of a unity that is always on the horizon but can never quite be domesticated. This is the meaning of the history of modernity—a modernity that is not so much capitalist as it is political and democratic. Because this meaning is nowhere fixed or incarnated, because it is revolutionary, the ideological structures that Lefort analyzed earlier will return, but this time they will be mobilized to understand the political process by which really existing totalitarianism both emerged (in its Communist form) and then collapsed with a rapidity that surprises the materialist but not the philosopher.
THE HISTORY OF MEANING
The reason that totalitarianism cannot be reduced to Asiatic despotism is that the power that is reflected in it is not based on force and even less on arbitrariness—although both of them are present in existing totalitarian society. Totalitarianism is revolutionary because it seeks to create and install a new meaning in the place of the historical indetermination that opened the path to the democratic revolution. This implies that, as revolutionary, totalitarianism doesn’t embody a fixed essence that can be determined once and for all. That is why political science cannot define it. The difficulty in understanding the Soviet Union once the “thaw” following the death of Stalin eliminated the canonical criteria of the Friedrich-Brzezinski model is well known, and I have already discussed Lefort’s earlier attempts to analyze these changes. What is now clear is that attempts at definitions fall short because each judges from a position external to the phenomenon it describes; they want to present a positive structure, to circumscribe its boundaries and its frameworks.30 But the phenomenon at issue concerns meaning, and its newness cannot help evading all these attempts to encompass it. Because meaning is disembodied and exists only as symbolic, and because it must always seek—always in vain—to embody itself somewhere, it is necessarily open to a history without end and without ends. The problem of embodiment, which found its unity in the absolute monarch, provides a guideline for Lefort’s analysis of the potentialities contained in totalitarianism.31 The deformation of the political imposed by totalitarianism results from its claim to realize the meaning of history by putting an end once and for all to the indeterminacy of democratic politics. The analysis of this paradoxical political engagement, which denies itself in order to realize itself, is in turn an interpretation of democracy that confronts democracy’s creative capacity but also the traps that it carries with it.
Totalitarianism does not lend itself to a positive sociological or economic analysis because the concept designates the meaning of a political regime, not its temporary institutional form. An analysis must try to understand the principle that gives totalitarianism its form and then explain the origin of that principle, as well as the work that it performs in really existing totalitarian society. This principle was implicit in the previous account; it is the principle of unity. More precisely, it is the idea of the embodiment of the people-as-One (peuple-Un) that represents a response to the disembodiment inaugurated by the democratic revolution. The argument avoids the temptation to treat that unity as abstract or as located outside the new society. That was the case in precapitalist societies, which were unified by a religious representation of their principle. The unity sought here is presented explicitly as immanent to the society, and it appears at several levels, which are not necessarily compatible with one another. On the one hand, the void left by the disappearance of the unifying representation of the body of the King must be filled by finding a way to embody the Nation. But, on the other hand, since the disembodiment of power has destroyed its unity with the principles of knowledge and of the law, the new unity must be achieved across a proliferating diversity that results from the multiplication, diversification, and competition of the domains of application of law and of knowledge. The Nation has to be represented at one and the same time as unitary and plural, a homogeneous association of citizens coexisting as a heterogeneous multiplicity of interests and individuals.32
Bourgeois ideology tried to compensate for the internal contradictions between the universality of its normative claims and the particularity of their realization by a sort of preemptive move beyond this immanent contradiction. As a result it enriched society not only materially but also and especially spiritually by multiplying kinds and domains of knowledge in order to find potential universal norms that could correspond to the particular claims that the old norms could not justify and by producing, for the same reason and by a similar process, new forms of law and new images of justice. Lefort’s analysis of the positive implications of the revolution of the rights of man can be seen as a testimony to the achievements of bourgeois society. But the same movement that produced these results shows that this society in quest of its lost unity suffered from alienation, just as the young Marx (who also thought bourgeois society, as capitalist, prepared a revolution by virtue of its positive achievements) predicted. The disembodiment of power frees civil society and the individuals who inhabit and produce it. These individuals are no longer attached, they become abstract, and it is not only Marx who criticizes the abstraction and formality of a democracy in which the will of the Nation is supposed to determine itself by the vote of atomized individuals, desocialized and separated from any community. It would appear that the overcoming of alienation defines the distinction between bourgeois and totalitarian society. But Lefort had shown the inadequacy of this Marxist understanding of the task of politics. His argument develops instead the implications of the symbolic dimension of the political.
When the principles of power, knowledge, and law were represented as if they were condensed in the body of the King, those principles were not assumed to exist in the reality of a particular king. The body of the King represented their symbolic unity. The cry “The King is dead, long live the King” expresses this idea that the mortal body of this or that monarch is not identical with the King, let alone with the Nation that the monarch symbolizes. A distinction is made between the visible and the invisible, a sort of doubling of the mortal and the immortal, a difference between what is instituted and that which institutes it. As opposed to the Marxist vision, there is a distinction between the head and the members of the body of society. As I noted earlier, the disembodiment of power by the bourgeois (or French) revolution destroys this symbolic function, and the task of bourgeois ideology is then to reinstitute or resymbolize unity and embodiment. But just as the master can only show the real effectiveness of the rule by giving a particular instance of its validity—whose particularity refutes the rule’s claim to universality—so too the exercise of power risks appearing as particular and thus as contingent or even arbitrary; indeed, it risks being identified simply with those who are exercising it today, losing its symbolic function as a result. When this happens, power is faced with what Machiavelli recognized as the greatest of all threats to its reign: hatred, ridicule, and disdain.
At this point, the actual revolutionary seizure of power appears on the horizon. Bourgeois ideology has shown itself to be more than just an ideology: it now appears as a mask for force and violence. Its symbolic effectiveness is destroyed, illusions are stripped away. But this does not mean that the old Marxists were right when they criticized bourgeois ideology by pretending to know its real, material foundation. The interplay between the symbolic and the real is more complex. The difficulty is not that reality loses its power to unify the society; rather, it is the symbolic that loses this power—and that is something quite different. This distinction becomes clear in the analysis of the principle that forms totalitarianism as a regime.
The foundation of totalitarianism is the representation of the people-as-One. This is the principle that gives meaning to the new social regime. The sociologist, the positivist Marxist, or the historian may see here the principle of the overcoming of class division. But the principle of totalitarianism makes a broader claim than the quest for a classless society; it wants to eliminate all forms of division—except, as was noted earlier, that between the people and its enemies, between the internal and the external. This later division is permitted precisely because it is necessary for the affirmation of unity. The representation of unity would not be effective without the idea of the enemy, which has not only to be constantly overcome but to be constantly reproduced—even if only in the form of those whose neutrality makes them merely lukewarm. This constant reaffirmation of unity is necessary because there is of course division in totalitarian society, if nothing else the distinction between the party that occupies the state apparatus and the society it governs. But that division must be hidden; better, it must be pushed to the outside such that all criticism, any hint of autonomy, appears as a threat to the unity that is the immanent principle of the new society. The symbolic dimensions of knowledge and of the law are integrated into this unity. The unified totalitarian society is represented as homogeneous and as transparent to itself; this latter characteristic means that it can know itself fully and thereby give itself its own law without having to have recourse to the Other (more precisely, to any sort of otherness, uncertainty, or doubt); the Other is the enemy who is, in principle, external and therefore need not be accommodated.
For all this insistence on unity, it is clear that, from its very origin, totalitarianism is undermined by contradiction and threatened by the division between the dominant party and the society. The threat is the greater because the very principle of this society makes this division unrecognizable to it.33 The society is represented as a body that maintains its identity—better, its health—by the feverish rejection of all otherness. As Solzhenitsyn noted in The Gulag Archipelago, it is no accident that Lenin designated the enemy as a parasite and political activity as a sort of social prophylaxis. Totalitarian society is characterized more generally by a contradiction between its being and its appearance, between the reality of division and the imaginary representation of unity. But this contradiction does not condemn it; societies can live, and indeed even prosper, despite this type of contradiction. That was the case for bourgeois society, whose constant effort to overcome such contradiction was the source of its richness. The reflection on totalitarianism has to be taken to a deeper level.
The unity that is constantly reproduced by the repression or denial of otherness appears as a process without a subject or agent that sets it into motion. It governs itself by means that it itself produces. Of course, the party is the principal actor in this process, and the people it dominates are not blind. But what the people see is determined by the principle of unity, which blinds them to division. The role of the party is not hidden; it is underlined, glorified, and inscribed in the constitution. The role and place of the party are justified by the interplay of the representation of the body and of embodiment. The party is identified with the people-as-One because it presents itself as the representative of the proletariat that in its turn represents the essence of the people. The party thus does not represent itself as a separate reality that would exist for itself, with its own interests, within a plural society; rather, it claims to represent the very identity of society. More than that, the party also presents itself as the guide and the conscience of the proletariat and, through the proletariat, of society itself. The result is apparently identical to the structure incarnated by the ancien régime: the party claims to be the head of which the society (the people-as-One) is the body.
Although the political principles of absolutism and totalitarianism insist on the principle of unity, there is a crucial difference between them. The absolutist regime is structured symbolically from the top down; the totalitarian regime builds itself from the bottom up. The representation of the party works by means of a series of identifications: the people and the proletariat, the proletariat and the party, the party and its leadership, the leadership and the leader, whom Lefort defines with Solzhenitsyn as the “Egocrat.”34 Each identification is based on the representation of an organism that is at once the totality and, insofar as it is separated from that totality, the agent that institutes it, gives it its identity, embodies its essence, knows its truth, and expresses its law. But, whereas the absolute monarchy could claim to unify power, knowledge, and law because it presented itself only as a symbolic power, this new series of identifications claims to legitimate the principle of the unity of power-knowledge-law in the reality of the party. This is why the unity that the party imprints on society cannot be challenged: that unity is taken to be the real reality of the society over which it exercises its power.35 The ancien régime was challenged when it lost its symbolic status and appeared simply as arbitrary, factual domination. Totalitarianism in principle unites the symbolic and the real, leaving nothing outside itself, but this strength turns out to be the source of its impressive weakness once the unity of the fortress is breached.
The principle that determines the identity of totalitarian society claims really to exist as immanent to it; its function is to set into motion the process without a subject that is said to be the self-management of a society that finds unity beyond its divisions. The result is that legislative or judicial activity is not understood to be the result of a choice among other possible choices. If it were a choice, it could be put into question, but that would destroy the unitary claim. Hence, government must be the very expression of reality. In the same way, knowledge can be understood only as the reflection of a reality, of which it, this particular bit of knowledge, incarnates the unitary essence, or the self-transparency of reality to itself. Self-management, transparency of reality, legislative and judicial actions that leave no room for individual judgment or arbitrary decisions: all these are only the articulation of a unity that is in principle already there. This picture explains why the representation of the totalitarian principle can be attractive.
This happy harmony is deceptive, however; its consequences are not what it intends. Because it cannot accept division, totalitarian society is closed to the new; it denies the unexpected and is unfriendly to creation. Its attempt to combine a realist discourse with the constant reaffirmation of unity leads it to misunderstand its own weaknesses (which of course are not all the result of an evil other). The claims made by unitary discourse to articulate the reality of the real can go too far, extending their pretensions to the point of absurdity (for example, Lysenko and the claims of socialist genetics), such that they appear as merely the discourse of power. Now, power becomes anything but symbolic; it is a particular power, open to mockery, to hatred—or to the politics of human rights of those dissidents who speak the reality that is concealed from those who hold power by their own unitary and identitary discourse. From this can arise a kind of solidarity that makes the fragility of the unitary materialism evident to all. The grounds of the failure of Gorbachev’s perestroika and more particularly of glasnost are easily understood; both policies can be seen as attempts to restore the unitary discourse by making it correspond to the real. Gorbachev’s reforms were not intended to eliminate the totalitarian system; his goal was to repair the ship while keeping it afloat.36
The totalitarian principle has many resources and can adopt different forms. The attempt to reform the Soviet Union drew on another possible strategy, articulated around one of the central elements in totalitarian antipolitics. The party is of course composed of activists who are convinced by its self-representation and its vision of the unitary society. The first chain of identifications that justify totalitarian logic was based on the representation of society as a body. The failure of this logic of embodiment makes room for another image, that of society as an organization: organized and organizable. Society is now analyzed by a scientific-technological method for which society appears as a multitude of individuals and groups organized by a division of social labor. As opposed to the disembodiment characteristic of bourgeois society that frees each sphere so that it can develop its own logic before the unity of the society is produced by the invisible hand of the market, totalitarian society claims to be thoroughly and completely organized. But organized by whom, and to what end? The answer determines the meaning of the question: because it is organized, society is in principle also organizable. The party activist will therefore have a double function: he must be at one and the same time an organization man, integrated into the party organs and dependent on them, and also an organizer, a social engineer constantly active, agitating, intervening in all aspects of society. How can the activist be at once integrated within the total society and yet the agent that makes the society what it is? When society was understood in terms of the image of the body, the activist did not face this problem. He was absorbed by a “we” that spoke through him; he identified with the party, which represents the body of the people at the same time that it provides a head that gives society its self-consciousness and identity. But that option has been challenged; the activist now faces a society that is in principle organized and yet in need of organization. The metaphor of a “transmission belt” conveying instructions from the center to the periphery is joined to the metaphor of an “engineer of souls” who decides how society will be produced. The implications of both metaphors are disastrous for the totalitarian-unitarian project. Both the party whose orders are being transmitted and the activist-engineer have placed themselves outside society. It now is clear that the power exercised on a society treats the society as passive matter that, like clay, is there to be organized. The party reveals at the same time its own feet of clay.
The triumph and the failure of totalitarianism can be understood, finally, as part of a history of the meaning of the political. That history proceeds from the symbolic embodiment of meaning incarnated by the absolute monarch, to its disembodiment within democratic society, and finally to the attempt to restore meaning through the totalitarian fantasy whose confusion of the symbolic with the real dooms it. This history is not a linear sequence whose logic is pregiven; it does not predict particular events and even less explain the invention of new meaning. It proposes only a critical interrogation that tries to make comprehensible the meaning of both the events and the invention. Nothing makes necessary the creation of totalitarianism—bourgeois ideology can continue to function37—and nothing ensures that totalitarianism will adopt the forms described in this reconstruction of its itinerary. Its principle could attempt to represent itself differently—for example, in nations whose newly acquired democracy emerged from the demise of communism and its empire or in those whose secularization process has taken a course different from the Western model’s. Just because the totalitarian principle was not necessary and its manifestations were malleable, its return cannot be excluded. Clearly, modern democracies unsure of their own legitimacy are structurally conducive to its ideological form. Empirical inducement is added by the presence of increased global economic inequality, social exclusion, and the shameless arbitrariness of the political establishment. Who would not wish that things change, and radically? But the revolutionary temptation must be resisted; democracy can be realized only democratically. But that realization is not an end in itself or a mere formality.
IN PRAISE OF DEMOCRATIC INDETERMINATION
Democracy inaugurates a history without end and without ends. Its advent makes possible the emergence of capitalism, but the two are not identical. The democratic revolution furnishes the framework within which capitalism can take hold; capitalism presupposes democracy, not the inverse. Capitalism’s emergence is one result of the process by which bourgeois ideology is forced to open new domains of value and to invent new rules to take account of particular phenomena that cannot be squeezed under the already given norms. The economic, with its own lawfulness and norms, comes into being just as do such domains as the law, the sciences, autonomous art, and the like. This process, whose basis is the disembodiment of absolutist society and the separation of the domains of power, knowledge, and law has remarkable similarities to the one Marx describes in The Communist Manifesto. What Marx came to suspect—that the capitalist economy had come to replace the political38—explains also the emergence of the totalitarian temptation (which Marx did not suspect).39 Totalitarianism represents an antipolitics in the same way that the unilateral domination of the economy does; both are antidemocratic in denying the differences among power, knowledge, and law. Antipolitics has been the omnipresent shadow across the political history of meaning; its principle of unity cannot tolerate the complexity, indetermination, and ambiguities that condemn the individual to judge and assume responsibility for such judgment. This indetermination, the negation of the totalitarian temptation, makes possible democracy.
The framework of meaning defined by the political is not itself the object of everyday politics. It defines only what can be called the symbolic or cultural parameters within which issues and institutions acquire political significance. The question posed at the outset—whether totalitarianism is to be understood as the politicization of all spheres of life, or whether it depends rather on the privatization and atomization of a mass society—can be analyzed from this perspective. If totalitarianism represents antipolitics, and if it is not forced on an unwilling society but is the expression of that society’s own self-image, it could only emerge when the disappearance of all external legitimation (be it traditional or religious, mythical or natural-scientific) has left society to fend for itself—that is, created a society that is through-and-through political. Such a society is political because it must itself produce the meanings that legitimate the existing forms of power, knowledge, and law. The politicization of society is in principle characteristic of democratic societies, not of their totalitarian enemy. In a democracy, it is in principle always possible for a domain of life that seemed immune to politics to lose its neutral status and become the object of political interrogation. Natural characteristics such as age, gender, or the family have undergone this process in recent years. The refusal to accept such democratic debate about aspects of social relations explains why totalitarian societies are and maintain themselves as privatized, atomized societies for which political judgment is a threat. It explains also why the critique of the totalitarian temptation remains actual in modern democracies whose conservative instincts rule out debate about issues that could become contagious. Conservatism is of course not totalitarian, but because it tends to be antipolitical, the analysis of the political history of meaning warns against it. But liberalism, with its stress on the unconditional and indiscriminate validity of human rights, could be accused of a similar conservatism. A return to the concept of human rights will make clear why the proposed democratic means to realize democracy, the resistance to the revolutionary temptation, is not an option for the status quo.
Faced with the indeterminacy of democracy, the quest for an ultimate foundation of social life becomes more than a philosophical speculation. But the actual discovery of such a foundation would eliminate the democracy that made necessary the search. The kind of foundation that would avoid such an antipolitics would have to be itself inherently democratic, proliferating even while it unifies. Lefort’s analysis of human rights fulfills this criterion. Lefort offers a phenomenological analysis that works from the perspective of the participants’ experience. The account underlines a triple paradox. First, a democratic society is composed of individuals who are free and equal in their rights. As such, this society is in principle one and homogeneous. But because it is individuals who are equal and free, this (political) unity exists only in principle; in reality, inequality or restricted freedoms may threaten social unity. Hence human rights cannot be defined in advance, as if they were fixed properties possessed by individuals. Nor can these rights be defined by those who hold power. They are in principle open to indefinite extension and modification. Second, while these rights belong to humans, the fact that no power grants them means that individuals, or their representatives, are responsible for defining them. The ability to articulate rights, however, is itself a right (as the history of struggles for suffrage suggests). This means that the act of claiming rights and the rights that are claimed are but two sides of a single action. It is that action by which, one can say without fear of paradox, rights proclaim themselves. Once again, this interdependence of the intention and the intended object means that there can be no preestablished limits on what will count as rights.
The third facet of this paradox draws the first two together. Although these rights seem to concern only the individual as a private person, when they are considered within the framework defined by the critique of totalitarianism, their impact is political in a way that a liberal would not recognize. The affirmation of the private sphere reaffirms a basic premise of democracy; it means that no power can claim to regulate society as a whole. To insist on the sanctity of the private does not entail anything more than this democratic claim; it does not define what will count as private in a given society. The sanctity of the private is the precondition of the public use of rights that maintains what Lefort calls “transversal” relations among individuals who are independent of external power. In this way, individuals establish their identity through social interactions that are autonomous (not monadic, as Marx thought). This is why the French declared the rights of man and those of the citizen. My right to free speech cannot exist without your right to listen to me, to read me, or to join with me in an association. As a result, the public space is enlarged. This triple paradox makes clear furthermore that the principle of the rights of man exists as symbolic; no concrete institution can exhaust that principle, and none can claim to represent it once and for all. It is a principle inherent in democratic politics, and it is manifest in each specific manifestation of a democracy at the same time that it guarantees that none of these manifestations can for that very reason ever claim to be a definitive definition of the institutions of democracy.
While human rights are an essential element of the indetermination of democracy, democratic politics is not defined by the actual struggle for rights as they are defined at one or another historical period. Of course, politics may seize upon the degree to which the norms asserted as human rights are less than adequately realized. It may also argue that certain material or institutional transformations are necessary for the realization of rights that are part of the constitutional consensus (or an empirically defined Rawlsian overlapping consensus). Political science and institutional sociology can make a contribution to this critique. But their contributions have meaning only insofar as they take into account the philosophical logic of the democratic structure of the political. If they ignore the need for this philosophical reflection, they risk becoming victims of the totalitarian temptation, whether they intend to or not. These empirical sciences may even, without reflecting explicitly on the meaning of their action, make human rights into an absolute.40 A positivist politics is from this perspective not different from a moralist politics: both are forms of antipolitics. The critique of totalitarianism warns against either, while pointing to their methodological error: both assume they can fly above reality, look down on it as if they were neutral observers who could describe its true structure, and dictate actions on that basis, regardless of the perspective of the actual participants.
The analysis of totalitarian reality becomes increasingly philosophical because the phenomenon described is not simply a historical accident. That is why the critique casts light also on problems faced by the post-totalitarian present. This claim should not be confused with the one criticized by Lefort at the end of his Marxist period, when he termed the progressive intellectuals activists whose teleological vision of history made it unnecessary for them to think. The error of these progressives was not only that they sought to justify present choices with reference to a future they assumed they knew; their political error had a philosophical source. Their supposed knowledge prevented them from recognizing the historical innovation that accompanies the invention of democracy. This philosophical blindness is shared with another type of progressive political attitude, that of the positivist, for whom it suffices to compare ideas with their actual realization in order to awaken the desire for action. Modeled on the Enlightenment criticism of religious mystification, this approach to political life forgets that the modern world is in principle secular; private religious practice is of course not forbidden in secular democracies, but their public life is not determined by religious principles. The problem with this position lies with its assumption that the observer can know the really real and compare it to its discursive representation. As with Marx’s Manifesto, the claim is that social reality is in itself determinant and open to univocal knowledge. The critique of totalitarianism should have laid to rest this philosophical presupposition as well.
Democratic indetermination and philosophical critique are two sides of the same political coin. Both have positive implications precisely because and insofar as they retain a sense of themselves, that is to say, of their limits. To overcome indetermination by the attainment of univocal unity or to attain the hard ground of philosophical certainty is, as the young Marx liked to say, a victory that is at the same time its own defeat. It is the indetermination of social conditions that ensures that whatever inequalities and limits on liberty may empirically exist will be challenged again and again from different points of view as different perspectives are invented. Similarly, philosophical critique is not just the result of a choice by an individual subject to challenge the certainties that no one else questions, an arbitrary measure by a private individual. Philosophical critique in turn arises because reality calls for this kind of individual engagement; if it were not for this material and social imperative, the critic would have no hope that the critique would be heard by others, shared, and eventually developed together with them. Democratic indetermination and philosophical critique show themselves to be the presupposition of the triple paradox of human rights that transforms them from the liberal property of a private homme into the political engagement of a public citoyen. The democratic project is not a solution to the miseries of humanity, another variant of the idea of revolutionary immanence embodied in the proletariat. The democratic project is, however, necessary for the indetermination that is in turn the precondition for the democratic project. This circle, rather than the progressive teleology of the Marxists, is virtuous because self-expanding.