Imagine that Karl Marx had sat down in 1847 and written, “A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of democracy.” Would The Communist Manifesto that he published in February 1848 read so very differently from the now classic text that has been said to have changed the world? Recall some of the ringing phrases from Marx’s description of the rise of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist world it created. He portrays the bourgeoisie as “revolutionary” because it has “put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.” It has “stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored,” and “torn away from the family its sentimental veil.” Its great productive force, surpassing the pyramids, aqueducts, and cathedrals, has shown “what man’s activity can bring about.” In a famous sentence, Marx sums up his praise for this capitalist revolution: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations … are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”1 Granted, this is not a description of democracy that can be found in political science textbooks; it is a tense portrait of social relations that must seek constantly a stability that will always exceed their grasp. It represents a historically unprecedented form of human coexistence no longer based on the principles of unity, stability, and community but instead accentuating a dynamics of difference, uncertainty, and individualism. Such are the social relations of democracy, a mode of living that is as much a threat to any established order as Marx’s communist revolution was supposed to have been.
The claim of this book is that, whatever his intentions, Marx did announce that the specter of democracy is haunting Europe. To justify that claim, I have to explain first of all why he—and those who later claimed his legacy—did not understand the radical implications of his work. That is why the first part of the book examines Marxism and the intellectuals. While it is true that Marx considered the working class to be the agent of the coming revolution, the theoretical basis of this assertion appealed to minds primed to receive it and eager to translate it immediately into their own practice. That is why it is tempting to identify the intellectual with Marxism, at least after fascism had discredited right-wing theorists (to the point that even Heidegger’s French disciples tended to assimilate his thought to a leftist critique of capitalism). While it is not false, such a generalization reaches too wide. The first part of the book illustrates both the attractiveness of Marxism to intellectuals and the ways in which some of them learned how to use Marx not only to criticize Marxism but to recognize the radical implications of democracy. Particularly in the French case,2 this could take place only after the historical uniqueness of another type of new social relations was recognized: the critique of totalitarianism (which is not just another tyranny) made clear the radical nature of democracy—which the emergence of totalitarianism shows to represent a challenge not only to the established order but to itself as well. Totalitarian ideology, after all, claims that it incarnates the true realization of democracy when in fact it is the attempt to overcome the creative instability characteristic of democratic social relations typical of modernity.
Why did Marx and his successors misunderstand his basic insight? The title of The Communist Manifesto suggests one reason. Marx’s goal was to make manifest a reality that was maturing in the womb of capitalism; the communists were to be the midwives of history. Communism would put an end to a savage history of class struggles that had divided humanity against itself. Because Marx was looking for a solution, he could not recognize that democracy posed to humankind new problems that could not be solved without putting an end to democracy itself. As if he intuited the threat posed by this new political form, Marx tried to anchor its reality in the economic relations of capitalism, which would produce its own proletarian “grave-diggers.” This project made some sense in the nineteenth century, when a growing urban working class challenged the justice of the new economic system. But the effects of twentieth-century totalitarianism make clear that the economy cannot be isolated and treated as if it were the determinant cause of social relations. The totalitarian seizure of power precedes its use of this power to impose its will on socioeconomic relations. This autonomous political intervention is not admitted by the totalitarian regime, which denies its own political nature by claiming to express only the necessities of a history whose interpretation it monopolizes. In this way, totalitarianism is the antithesis and negation of democracy, whose problematic achievements stand out more sharply in its light. As such, totalitarianism can be defined as an antipolitics.
This theoretical claim can be illustrated by two personal experiences.3 I went to Paris in 1966 to discover the radical political theory that I thought was missing in the United States. At my first Parisian demonstration against the Vietnam War, I was caught up in the speaker’s world historical perspective; immersed in the flow of his rhetoric, I was a moment late in registering my applause when I noticed that he too was applauding. This was no egoistic individual expressing mere opinion; his applause signified that his words came from elsewhere, from society or History even. The speaker (whose name I have long since forgotten) was making manifest a Rationality that, because it was shared by all humanity, could draw each individual out of alienated private life into a greater community. This meant that he did not have to take personal responsibility for a judgment that could be debated; he was deciphering History for an anonymous public that he did not need to convince rationally to accept its revelation. The speaker was not only a caricature of Hegel in the role of Secretary to the Absolute Spirit; such an attitude is what permits the totalitarian machine to function. The irony is that he thought he was refusing the arbitrary egoistic regime of the bourgeoisie when in fact he was delivering himself, powerless, to an even more powerful arbitrary rule, that of a totalitarian society that takes itself as the Last Judgment of History.
This anecdote suggests that totalitarianism is not imposed by force on an innocent, democracy-loving population. A second experience, not long after that Parisian demonstration, illustrates the necessity to choose actively democratic politics. I became friendly with some dissident students in Prague in 1967, before the attempt to create from the top down a “Socialism with a Human Face” was crushed by the 1968 invasion by the Warsaw Pact. These students explained that they had gotten into trouble because they had organized a demonstration against the Vietnam war. I didn’t understand: wasn’t their government opposed the war? Yes, but they had organized the demonstration, not the government. Independent activity was a threat, autonomy a danger, and self-organized groups a menace. That is why the invasion of August 1968 was probably unnecessary; the party-state knew already that it could not risk abandoning its control.4 But the same reasons explain why, despite the repression imposed after 1968, many Czechs (and other East Central Europeans) refused to accept the Gleichschaltung that sought to eliminate all independent organization. The resistance that culminated in the revolutions of 1989 was a manifestation of the clash of democratic self-organization with totalitarian power. The defense of civil society against the omnipresent state demonstrated again the radical challenge that democracy poses to any established order. Indeed, when the old order fell in 1989, the civil societies that had united in solidarity against it found that their own divisions, which were set aside in the struggle against the totalitarian state, emerged nearly as soon as their victory was confirmed.5 Democracy is a challenge even to itself.
If democracy is indeed the specter haunting Europe, it clearly does not represent the kind of real force that Marx saw incarnated in the rising working class that capitalism was creating in ever greater numbers and equipping with an ever more powerful machinery of production. If democracy does not have the same kind of world historical role that Marx postulated for communism, what is democracy? What is its historical place? In what sense is it truly new? And how can its novelty be understood?
Although he is not directly treated in this book, Tocqueville provides a useful insight. At the outset of Democracy in America, he insists that equality is the new principle that separates democracy from all preceding societies, which, in one or another manner, were based on a hierarchy assumed to be natural and immutable. Tocqueville calls this equality a “generative fact,” whose widely diverse effects he then follows in his still readable study. As opposed to Marx, Tocqueville does not treat equality simply as a material fact (or a goal to be realized). Its function can be called symbolic, and its results exist in the sphere of meaning.6 The idea of a symbolic institution of a society can be understood by comparison to attempts to describe the way political culture influences social relations. The symbolic is concerned with the philosophical creation of social meaning, whereas political culture is treated as a causal factor to be studied empirically in order to ensure that there exists a material or social foundation of meaning. The symbolic institution of meaning is the presupposition of political culture, which rearranges and adapts the symbolic to fit empirical conditions.7 This distinction permits an interpretation of the difference between traditional societies and modern democratic societies. Traditional societies are characterized by the fact that the symbolic institution that generates meaning (e.g., the gods) is assumed to be external to the society, which therefore cannot change it. They are societies without history, seeking only to reproduce themselves. Modern democratic societies have overcome such external sources of meaning, but this victory of enlightenment is ambiguous since it means they have to generate their own meanings from within themselves—and they can change these meanings or organize competition for such change. That is the task of democratic politics in a society that creates its own historical dynamic. It is also why “all that is solid melts into air.” But the quest for solid foundations in a modern society whose future must remain open is also the source of the antipolitical or totalitarian threat.
While the encounter of Marxism and the intellectuals in part 1 of this book concludes with the passage from the critique of totalitarianism to the politics of democracy, democracy is defined there only in the categories of political philosophy and illustrated by contrast to the varieties of antipolitics.8 Part 2 attempts to fill in the picture of democracy and to explain some of the difficulties in the practice of democratic politics. It develops the distinction between a democratic republic (toward which French politics has tended historically, at least until some recent developments) and a republican democracy (which represents the historical form adopted but never theorized at the time of the American Revolution). This conceptual framework is not identical with the familiar characterization of the French Revolution as oriented to social transformation while the American Revolution remained (self-)limited to the political sphere.9 The difference between the symbolic and the empirically real suggests the need to look for a unifying principle in the experiences of both political societies. The French had to legitimate the overthrow of a political society unified by its monarchical institutions; to do so, they had to oppose a new unitary principle to the old order. This meant they could leave no place for particular organizations such as political parties, and the same unitary principle militated against judicial autonomy.10 Yet it is just this judicial autonomy and the development of a system of political parties whose competition is accepted as legitimate that characterize the practical results of the American Revolution. The French democratic republic assumes that society only acquires its true unity by being integrated within the republican state, whereas the American constitutional republic guarantees the autonomous self-management of individual and social relations.
The two contrasting political histories that were inaugurated by revolutionary breaks with traditional societies make clear that democracy is not defined by fixed institutional structures (such as elections, checks and balances, or judicial autonomy) but depends rather on the meaning that individual actors attach to their social relations. But the institution of meaning is not a one-time affair that lasts forever; it must be constantly renewed and always runs the risk of temporary failure and even self-destruction. That is why the chapter that intervenes between my presentations of the historical paths of French and American democratic politics (chapter 10) points to the ways in which the two histories tend to overlap, interrelate, and intersect. It shows also how these histories cast new light on the tired contemporary quarrels between liberals and communitarians, both of whom prove liable to the reproach of antipolitics. Similarly, the reconstruction of the political dimension of American history is followed by an attempt (chapter 12) to explain the emergence of a kind of political-religious fundamentalism that is at once contrary to the American vision of democracy and yet contained within it as a latent possibility, just as the French democratic project came to be identified with the communism inaugurated in 1917. Once again, “all that is solid melts into air.” Democracy is not a solution (comparable to Marx’s communism); it poses problems not only to the established order but to itself. The French got it right with their quest for the unitary democratic republic (which is not quite identical with socialism), but so did the Americans with their discovery of the politics of republican democratic diversity (which is not quite identical with liberalism). The challenge is to hold on to the unity that animates the one without losing the diversity preserved by the other.
The return to Marx in part 3 is now prepared. It might seem that the demise in 1989 of so-called really existing socialism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union would permit a rediscovery of Marx as a political thinker unencumbered by the historical mistakes of those who claimed to be his heirs. If that were my intention, I could have gone directly to work, without the theoretical and historical preliminaries in the first two parts. But while there is much to criticize in present-day socioeconomic relations, I leave that criticism to others. My project instead is somewhat paradoxical—at least at first glance. Rather than directly recover a political Marx, I stress the importance of the philosophical Marx in order then to open the path to politics. The events of 1989 permit the rediscovery of a Marx who is first of all a philosopher. Although Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx seemed to return to the philosopher as well, his goal was more immediately practical: to undercut the self-certainties of the times. I want to show that Marx’s inability to recognize the democratic political implications of his own analysis was due to his own philosophical rigor. Marx tried mightily to radicalize Hegel by doing what I call (in chapter 13) philosophy by other means. Where Hegel appealed to reason, Marx appealed to the material world—but, like Hegel, he searched for the traces of reason incarnated in that world.11 That is why he could not recognize the democratic political implications of analyses like those in The Communist Manifesto. The economy, class struggle, the proletariat: these realities were what Marx thought would realize philosophy and put an end to history. Once again, it would be too easy to criticize Marx retrospectively; it is more important to reconstruct the rigor of his search, to watch him revise his analyses from one work to the next, to articulate the unity of a life’s work that didn’t either shy away from the political arena or hide behind facile rhetoric.
The presentation of Marx in chapter 13 has another ambition. Just as the specter of democracy showed its radical potential as well as its self-destructive possibilities only against the backdrop of totalitarianism, so the political problems posed by modern democratic society can appear as problems but also as appeals to creative intervention only against the backdrop of Marx’s systematic philosophical achievement.12 As with the encounter of Marxism and the intellectuals, this philosophical project has to be reconstructed in order for political theory to be freed from its sway. It is not any more legitimate or useful to imagine simply that Marx was wrong (or stupid, or worse) than it is to assume that totalitarianism is imposed on an unwilling people by a foreign conqueror. It is more fruitful—and more consonant with Marx’s own favorite method of immanent critique—to assume that there are reasons that Marx misunderstood himself and that these reasons must be understood before it becomes possible to right the errors. That is why the conclusion of the book returns to the beginning (to the question of Marx and philosophy) rather than proposing a new political project, as if humanity were only awaiting new marching orders to achieve its destiny. Democracy is not a natural condition of humankind; nor is it inscribed in the inevitable course of human history. Democracy cannot exist without democratic citizens, individuals conscious of the perils as well as the pleasures that it offers. In this sense—to paraphrase a slogan dear to Marxists13—there can be no democratic practice without democratic theory. An analysis of democracy that starts from a critical rereading of Marx not only transforms our understanding of Marx’s theory but also calls our attention to the difficult dual status of democratic theory, which opens toward both politics and antipolitics.
The adventure and the danger opened by modern democracy lead me to conclude with a promissory note. I do not want to leave the impression that the theoretical arguments presented here have no immediate political implications. During the time that I was writing this, I also wrote more directly political articles, contributed shorter political commentary, and was often interviewed about current political developments. To have added that material to this book would have made it more complicated than it needs to be; it is better to reduce my thesis here to a clear and concise theoretical presentation. However, modern technology provides a way to offer the reader access not only to these earlier political writings but also to my ongoing attempts to apply the understanding of democracy as radical and my critique of the various forms of antipolitics (including those that shocked the world on September 11, 2001)14 to current events. I will therefore post the earlier articles, as well as future contributions, on my Web site: ms.cc.sunysb.edu/rhoward.
It remains for me to thank all the usual people, who know what I owe them, but most of all Jennifer Crewe of Columbia University Press (and her two anonymous reviewers), who was convinced by the very rough and approximate set of materials that I presented as the first version of this project. She encouraged me (with a contract!) to continue, and, when I was in the midst of the far more vast rewriting than I had intended and was lost in my own systematic web, she unpacked the project, showed me the broad lines that were important, and made it possible to produce this work. The book would not exist without her help. Thanks also to Paul Berman for a final critical reading that got many things right.
It will be clear to the reader how much I owe to Claude Lefort and to the late Cornelius Castoriadis, whose absence I still feel. I also owe a debt to the people whom I have known in the context of the journal Esprit, above all to Olivier Mongin and Paul Thibaud. I regret that I cannot reprint here the chapter in Defining the Political in which I tried to explain (already in 1978!) the uniqueness of that journal, which had just begun its antitotalitarian, democratic turn. I should thank also Bernard Perret, who double-checked the reading of French economic theory that I propose in the appendix to chapter 9, “The Burden of French History.” And there are also my German partners, particularly Sigrid Meuschel and Hermann Schwengel. But this book emerges from an international dialogue and debate, whose participants are too numerous to be listed individually. I have been fortunate since the earliest experiences (some of which I have described in this introduction) to share in the experience of something like an international new left. I hope that this volume will contribute to our collective project.
Thanks also go to those who forced me to write earlier versions of some of these chapters, all of which have been revised, extensively in most cases, for this volume.
“Marxism in the Postcommunist World” was a lecture at the annual summer school of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences in June 1998. The theme was chosen by the students and faculty of the school. It was published in the Australian journal Critical Horizons 1, no. 1, in February 2000. A modified French version appeared in Transeuropéennes in the fall of 1999.
“Can French Intellectuals Escape Marxism?” was a talk organized by Lawrence D. Kritzman at Dartmouth College. A first version was published in French Politics and Society 16, no.1 (winter 1998). A revised German version appeared in Kommune 16., no. 6 (1998). A French version appeared in La Nouvelle Lettre internationale, no. 1 (fall 1999).
“The Frankfurt School and the Transformation of Critical Theory into Cultural Theory” was published in an early version in Cultural Horizons; a revised German translation appeared in Kommune 18, no. 8 (2000).
“Habermas’s Reorientation of Critical Theory Toward Democratic Theory” presents ideas that I developed first in “Law and Political Culture,” Cordozo Law Review 17, nos. 4–5 (March 1996), and then in a shorter review of Habermas in German Politics and Society 15, no. 1 (spring 1997).
“The Anticommunist Marxism of Socialisme ou Barbarie” began life as a short contribution to Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century Thought, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. It has been expanded and developed here.
“Claude Lefort’s Passage from Revolutionary Theory to Political Theory” combines an essay for The Columbia History with the laudatio for Claude Lefort on his receiving the Hannah Arendt Prize of the city of Bremen. It also adapts material from chapter 8.
“From Marx to Castoriadis, and from Castoriadis to Us” was presented in a French version at a conference organized in Paris in 1999 to commemorate Castoriadis’s death; it was reworked for a conference on Castoriadis organized by Andreas Kalyvas at Columbia University in December 2000. No version has been previously published.
“From the Critique of Totalitarianism to the Politics of Democracy” was part of a lecture given in Paris in June 1999 at the Institut des Hautes Etudes de la Magistrature to a group of French judges. It was rewritten for publication in La revue du Mauss, no. 16 (2000). The English translation here has been extensively revised.
“The Burden of French History” began life as a lecture in German to a group of French and German businessmen in February 2001 at the Frankreich-Zentrum of the University of Freiburg. I have radically revised it in the meantime. A shorter English version appears under the title “From Republican Political Culture to Republican Democracy: The Benefits and Burdens of History” in French Politics, Culture and Society 10, no. 3 (fall 2001).
“Intersecting Trajectories of Republicanism in France and the United States” develops arguments presented earlier under the title “From the Politics of Will to a Politics of Judgment: Republicanism in the U.S. and France,” in Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, no. 4 (2000).
“Reading U.S. History as Political” was a lecture at the Collège International de Philosophie in 1987, which was published in the Revue française de science politique 38, no. 2 (April 1988). It is reprinted in Pour une critique du jugement politique (Paris: Cerf, 1998). An English translation of it serves the afterword to The Birth of American Political Thought. It has been radically revised and expanded (and retranslated) for the present volume.
“Fundamentalism and the American Exception” was a talk at a meeting in Paris on problems of fundamentalism organized by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the Fondation Jean-Jaurès. A short version appeared in Fundamentalism and Social Democracy (Bonn: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1996); an expanded version was published in Etudes in November 1996. A German variant appeared in Kommune 14, no. 11 (1996). The present version started with a translation from the French by Julie Sadoff, which I have expanded and adapted for this volume.
“Philosophy by Other Means?” was written for this volume. It is based on a much longer essay published in Alain Renaut’s five-volume Histoire de la philosophie politique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999). With the help of Eric Cavallo, that article was reworked; a somewhat different version appears in Metaphilosophy 32, no. 5 (October 2001): 463–501.