Unless otherwise specified, all translations are mine.
INTRODUCTION
1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, with an introduction by A. J. P. Taylor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 82–83.
2. The role of the French intellectuals is important for my argument because, as is seen in part 2, French history illustrates one of the two basic types of democratic politics. When I turn to the work of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, it is to suggest one way in which a critical theory that starts from Marxist premises can lose sight of its original political goal (and become identified with a kind of cultural theory that, in the United States, is often identified as French). On the other hand, the recent work of Jürgen Habermas, representing the second generation, shows how those same concerns can develop toward a unique vision of what a chapter in his newest book (which I received too late to address in this text) calls a “democratic Rechtsstaat.” See Jürgen Habermas, Zeit der Übergänge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001).
3. Consistent with the theoretical goals of this book, I have eliminated most material that is either anecdotal or dated historically. The two experiences described here, as well as some brief introductory remarks to chapter 7’s discussion of Castoriadis, are the exceptions that, I hope, justify the rule.
4. Of course, the real reason for the invasion had nothing to do with defending true socialism against a heretical Third Way; the invasion was an expression of the so-called Brezhnev doctrine, which insisted that no state could leave the Soviet bloc—recognizing that if one were permitted to deviate from Moscow’s line, others would soon follow—as indeed they did in 1989.
5. See, for example, Marc Morjé Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
6. The concept of the symbolic institution of society is developed particularly by Claude Lefort. It is explained in detail in chap. 8, “From the Critique of Totalitarianism to the Politics of Democracy.” It should be noted that the distinction between symbolic and cultural meaning implies a distinction between the goals of political science and those of political theory. The political scientist assumes that he can stand above a given world and describe from without its structures and relations, as if meanings were always the same, never open to change. In this, the political scientist is making assumptions typical of a traditional rather than a modern democratic society.
7. Another way to explain this point is to distinguish between the political and politics. The political refers to the symbolic institution of meaning within which different issues gain (or lose) salience for practical politics. Transformations of the political make possible political change. How else can one understand the importance, for example, of feminism or the rights of various minorities (or indeed of rights themselves)? Issues that were not the concern of practical politics suddenly become fair game because of such changes.
8. I should stress that the category of antipolitics is not restricted to totalitarianism and that neither are the two identical. I have described elsewhere the history of what I call “two hundred years of error” that came to an end with the downfall of communism. The French Revolution of 1789 overthrew the old hierarchical and traditional society, liberating the individual and making possible democratic politics. But it produced as well conditions in which democracy became a threat to itself: individualism and the reign of private interest along with political instability and social inequality. For two centuries, appeals to an invisible hand, to a social plan—or to some variant of the two—competed in the anti-political quest for an end to democratic instability. See Dick Howard, “Rediscovering the Left,” Praxis International 10, nos. 3–4 (October 1990–January 1991): 193–204.
9. This is the picture painted most memorably by Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963).
10. Chapter 9 suggests some reasons why, in contemporary conditions, these characteristics may be changing.
11. Many examples, from all periods of Marx’s work, are offered in chapter 13. From his doctoral dissertation, when he called on “philosophy [to become] worldly as the world [becomes] philosophical,” to the eloquent insistence that “reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form,” published in a letter to Ruge in the issue of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in which he announced the proletariat as the agent of revolution, down to the very project of Capital as an immanent critique of political economy, Marx’s materialist rationalism is the red thread crossing through his work.
12. Need I stress that it is an achievement? This philosophical project is what separates Marx from even the most philosophical of his disciples—such as Lukács, whose History and Class Consciousness is no doubt the pinnacle of Marxist theorizing. The disciples had to reconstruct what they assumed to be a systematic philosophical project; Marx had to invent that project, through many false starts and misleading way stations, with no certainty that he would come to the end of the road.
13. See chapter 7 for Castoriadis’s development of the implications of the Marxist imperative: no revolutionary practice without revolutionary theory.
14. See Dick Howard, “Quand l’Amérique rejoint tragiquement le monde,” Esprit (October 2001): 8–14, published in German translation as “Krieg oder Politik?” Kommune 19, no. 10/01 (October 2001): 6–9.
1. MARXISM IN THE POSTCOMMUNIST WORLD
1. For example, the belabored and ultimately inconsistent schemata that Marx uses to explain the circulation of capital in volume 2 of Capital seem to have dictated the choice of massive investment in heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods. Of course, there were nonideological reasons for the Soviet choices, but most of these too imitated earlier capitalist models of economic development. Rosa Luxemburg had warned of this difficulty before the Bolshevik seizure of power. In her Accumulation of Capital (1913) and more strongly in her posthumous reply to her critics in the Antikritik (1921), she insists that Marx’s categories are not transhistorical; they apply only to the historically specific mode of production called capitalism.
2. The first sentence of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics explains that philosophy remains radical in a reified capitalist society precisely because it is theory, while Marcuse’s vision of a totally administered capitalist society leaves no place for any positive political agency that could be discovered by immanent critique; all that remains is the Great Refusal popularized in the 1960s in the old Frankfurt School adage: Nicht mitmachen! See chapter 3 for a further discussion of the Frankfurt School.
3. See John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) for a summary of recently available materials from former Soviet archives.
4. See the article-petition published under the ironic title “Le spectre du trotskisme,” in Le Monde, June 21, 2001. The authors stress, “We were Trotskyists, some of us are still Trotskyists, and others could become Trotskyists.” The occasion for this intervention was the admission by French prime minister Lionel Jospin that he had remained a Trotskyist not only after he joined the Socialist Party but after he became its first secretary and indeed a minister in the government of François Mitterrand. He apparently left the “Lambertist” branch of the Fourth International only in 1987. For details, Le Monde, June 6, 2001, which headlines “The Political Secret of Lionel Jospin,” as well as see Le Monde, June 7, 2001, and the analysis of the varieties of French Trotskyism in Le Monde, June 13, 2001.
5. Trotsky’s ability to understand the dynamics of revolutionary action is clear in his accounts of both the 1905 and the 1917 revolutions, in which he was a leading actor. This is what I refer to as his phenomenology. On the other hand, his structural dogmatism resulted in an inability to put into question the role of the Bolshevik party in supposedly making the revolution. As a result, as Claude Lefort shows, he could never understand Stalinism as other than the product of Stalin’s petty personality. See Claude Lefort, “The Contradiction of Trotsky,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986). On Lefort, see chaps. 5, 6, and 8, below.
6. Rosa Luxemburg, Selected Political Writings, ed. and trans. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 369. It was the recognition of Luxemburg’s contradictions after I had edited and translated this work that led me to the critical account that I presented in The Marxian Legacy (1977; 2d ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), whose first chapter deals with both the continued attractiveness of Luxemburg and these internal contradictions.
7. In Die nachholende Revolution (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990). Habermas’s arguments are discussed in chapter 4, below. The idea that the West, or western democracies, have nothing to learn from Eastern European and Soviet experience implies that more than seventy years of history in that part of the world can be written off as simply an unfortunate accident. It implies as well that there is no relation between Western democracy and the development of totalitarianism. I will return to this point below—indeed it is a theme that runs throughout this book.
8. There are other grounds for the turn to cultural studies, as I suggest in chapter 3.
9. I develop this argument in more detail in chap. 13, “Philosophy by Other Means?”
10. It is a sign of the consistency of Marx’s philosophical concerns that he made a similar point more than thirty years later, in The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), this time with regard to the difference between equal rights under capitalist conditions and the future equality that would be brought by communism. But, as will be seen in chapter 13, his self-understanding had matured in these thirty years.
11. In this sense, Marx is proposing what I will call in the final part of this chapter a political theory. It is an account of how individuals relate to one another and to their society as a whole. This is not always, however, Marx’s own self-understanding; it was emphatically not that of Engels, who edited the second and third volumes of Capital, which may not follow the logic that Marx would finally have found. On the other hand, the passages from the Grundrisse (the unpublished thousand-page manuscript written in 1857) that I cite can be interpreted in a more political light; they do reflect Marx’s own systematic conception.
12. The passages to which I am referring are from notebook 8 of the Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), esp. pp. 699–712. More detail is presented in chapter 13, below.
13. In Karl Marx, The First International and After (London: Penguin, 1992).
14. See Dick Howard, “Rediscovering the Left,” Praxis International 10, nos. 3–4 (October 1990–January 1991): 193–204.
15. The ideas of responsibility and judgment as well as the previous suggestion that when theory claims to pierce beneath appearances it assumes a risk point to a significant political problem for democracies: the right to be wrong is the precondition of democratic choice. There are of course different types of error and different ways to assert this right. Further discussion of this matter recurs throughout this book, as well as in my two studies of political judgment: Political Judgments (Lanham, Md.: Row-man and Littlefield, 1996), and Pour une critique du jugement politique (Paris: Cerf, 1998).
16. Many have criticized Arendt for her faith in the emergence of revolutionary moments, particularly in On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965). I will return to her analyses in the comparative discussion of the American and French Revolutions, and the democracies they created, in chapter 10.
17. This paradoxical circularity also means that democracy is necessarily incomplete. The attempt to realize democracy was the step that misled Marx and became one of the justifications of his totalitarian successors. The idea that the proletariat had only “its chains” to lose connects Marx to a pre-democratic political (or romantic) ethos.
18. One cannot even appeal to a weaker form of historical logic, such as the social-democratic progression sketched by T. H. Marshall as the progress from civil rights to political rights and finally to social rights. See the recent reprint of Marshall’s Citizenship and Social Class (London: Pluto, 1992).
19. As did Georg Lukács, and the Frankfurt School after him. But in both cases the philosophical quest led them to misunderstand its political implications.
20. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; reprint, Boston: Beacon, 1957). As previously indicated, I am talking about politics in the classical sense, as the determination of the principles that govern a social order, that give meaning to the relations existing within it (for example, those of men and women, parents and children, the living and the dead), and that define in this way what the Greeks called a “political regime.” Politics in this sense institutes a domain of symbolic meaning. Thus one might ask why the Greeks considered the oikos (household, or sphere of production) to be insignificant, leaving it to women and slaves, whereas modern capitalism privileges the economy as a domain of freedom (at least for some)?
21. Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1969), p. 243. Translation modified.
22. In this sense, as Castoriadis points out, political theory can be said to be “materialist” because it defines “what matters” (ce qui matière) in a given society at a particular moment. Castoriadis’s wordplay is found in “La question de l’histoire du mouvement ouvrier,” in L’expérience du mouvement ouvrier (Paris: UGE, 1974), 1:63. On Castoriadis, see chapter 7.
23. Recall the earlier citation from The Critique of the Gotha Program, which can be considered to be Marx’s other or more mature Manifesto. Marx criticized Lassalle’s economism by pointing to the slave who criticizes slavery because wages will never exceed a fixed minimum. That is economism, implies Marx; the issue is freedom, which is political.
2. CAN FRENCH INTELLECTUALS ESCAPE MARXISM?
1. When I label people “Communist,” I am not referring to their programmatic or policy choices but rather to a more general political attitude that colors the way they give meaning to their world. Readers too often neglect the third section of the Manifesto, which describes “Socialist and Communist Literature” in a dialectical progression whose culmination is of course Marx’s own position. This then leads to the short final section that describes the “Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties.” Communists are said not only to support “the attainment of the immediate aims … of the working class,” but, more important, to “represent the future of that movement.” Therefore they “support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things,” including “the democratic parties of all countries,” who are seen as participating in “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” Just as communism will overcome all opposition within society, so the Communists and their theory represent the truth that unifies all oppositional standpoints. An analysis of the historical reasons that made Marxism so influential in France is found in chap. 9, “The Burden of French History.”
2. See Dick Howard, Pour une critique du jugement politique (Paris: Cerf, 1998); and idem, Political Judgments (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Little-field, 1996).
3. François Furet, Le passé d’une illusion (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995).
4. One should, however, note the attempt of the pseudonymous Épistémon [Didier Anzieu] to show, in Ces idées qui ébranlèrent la France (Paris: Fayard, 1968), that May ’68 was its translation into action. See my discussion of Sartre’s contribution in The Marxian Legacy, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
5. I refer of course to his essay on the Revolution of 1848, Class Struggles in France; his analysis of the seizure of power by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, The 18th Brumaire; and his glorification of the struggle of the Paris Commune in The Civil War in France.
6. Lefort’s essay “Rereading The Communist Manifesto” was originally published in François Chatelet, Evelyne Pisier, and Olivier Duhamel, eds., Dictionnaire des oeuvres politiques (Paris: PUF, 1986). The English translation is found in Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
7. The results of this interest politics are cheapened because the rewards offered are generally more symbolic than materially real. (It should be noted that the use of the term “symbolic” here refers to something that is real and is won but whose value is only symbolic, acquiring its meaning from the political way in which meanings are instituted in a given society. This political function of giving meaning is referred to often in the following chapters as “the symbolic.”)
8. See my essay “The French Strikes of 1995 and Their Political Aftermath,” Government and Opposition 33, no. 2 (spring 1998): 199–220. An earlier version appeared in “The French Strikes of 1995,” Constellations 3, no. 2 (October 1996): 248–260. The essay explains the different positions taken by the groups associated with Bourdieu, on the one hand, and the journal Esprit, on the other.
9. See Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973); and François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). Further discussion of this point is found in my essay “The Origin of Revolution,” in Dick Howard, The Politics of Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
10. The English translation of this essay, which was first published in the Revue bleue in 1889, can be found in Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, ed. Robert N. Bellah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 43–57. All quotations in the text are from this translation.
11. The argument sketched here is developed by means of a contrast to the “methodological individualism” of Max Weber in Dick Howard, “Individu et société,” in Christian Delacampagne and Robert Maggieri, eds. Philosopher 2 (Paris: Fayard, 2000), pp. 419–432.
12. See “L’idée française de la révolution,” Le Débat, September–October 1997. I quote passages from pp. 25, 28, 28, 29, and 30, respectively in this discussion. The citations from Furet at the beginning of thesis 9 are from pp. 30 and 29.
13. Furet’s critique of the “edifying” discourse concerning the French Revolution is formulated in his critique of the Marxist interpretations in the first chapter of Penser la révolution française. See my discussion in Howard, “The Origin of Revolution.”
14. The essay was published in the August–September 1997 issue of Esprit, on pp. 131–151. The citation is from p. 146.
15. This distinction also alludes to the subtitle of Claude Lefort’s remarkable analysis of Machiavelli, Le travail de l’oeuvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
16. Since most French intellectuals had been schooled in the theories of critical doubt begun by Marx, pursued by Nietzsche, and brought to a peak with Freud—and Jacques Lacan, the Parisian master awaiting his Thomas Mann—there is a strong tendency to speak the language of Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its distinction of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. The symbolic in this context expresses what classical political philosophy designates by the idea of a political regime. It marks the moment when the individual subject separates from the immediacy of the infant’s relation to the world and learns how meaning is attributed to things and relations.
3. THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CRITICAL THEORY INTO CULTURAL THEORY
1. Published in 1937, in the exiled Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, these essays became available in Germany in the 1960s only in pirate editions easily found in radical bookstores. They were soon translated into English. See Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” as well as “Postscript” in Critical Theory (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972); and Herbert Marcuse, “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon, 1968). Marcuse was not shy about his past work; Horkheimer was. It was only the existence of the pirate editions that led him to republish (some) of his early work.
2. This is from the first sentence of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 65. The italics are mine.
3. This sentence appears in the introduction, under the heading “The Possibility of Philosophy,” in T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), p. 3.
4. The dislikes in question concern particularly American jazz. I should stress that I am not claiming that there is a direct line of filiation linking the Frankfurt School to the kinds of literary and cultural theory that are identified in the university today as critical theory. My concern here is with the suggestive similarities of the two—and their inability to deal with politics. The fact that many of today’s cultural critical theorists appeal to Adorno (but not to Horkheimer or to the Frankfurt School) seems to me to be merely coincidental. Moreover, the other member of the Frankfurt School who wrote extensively on aesthetics, Herbert Marcuse, is more nuanced (or less consistent) politically than Adorno. Although he sometimes wanted art to take to the street and lose its aesthetic form, Marcuse titled his final work Die Permanenz der Kunst (“The Permanence of Art,” though its title in English translation is The Aesthetic Dimension). For a discussion and analysis of Marcuse’s oscillating aesthetic theory and its political implications, see Dick Howard, “Out of the Silent 50’s,” Defining the Political (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 21–30.
5. A full-scale reconsideration of the vogue enjoyed by the politics of theory would have to take into account its French variants (which often build on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony), starting no doubt with Louis Althusser’s employment of the term in his February 1968 lecture “Lenin and Philosophy,” published as Louis Althusser, Lénine et la philosophie (Paris: Maspero, 1969). See chap. 2, “Can French Intellectuals Escape Marxism?” The final thesis, which suggests they have tried too hard to change the world, whereas the point rather is to understand it, is congruent with the critique of a politics of theory here.
6. I suggested this point in the first edition of The Marxian Legacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), and amplified it in the second (1988). See in particular the chapter dealing with Horkheimer, as well as the afterword to the second edition.
7. Rolf Wiggershaus’s meticulous social history was published in German in 1986; its English translation appeared in 1993, at a time when another “post” led to a more critical approach to the old theory: the challenge of postcommunism. See The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).
8. Cited from Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, p. 127. The parallel to the above citation from Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, published more than thirty years later, in 1966, is a sign of a continuity that some would deny.
9. One of Horkheimer’s most famous remarks was the lapidary observation that “the pill” killed love. Here, one is tempted to see the romantic heritage of critical theory. But before condemning new reactionaries, it should be noted that the rebellious offspring of critical theory were not innocent of all charges; even Jürgen Habermas was driven at one point to attack what he called their tendency toward a “left-wing fascism.” See n. 18, below.
10. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, pp. 536, 537. Translation slightly modified.
12. The issues raised here, and their theoretical roots, are nicely dealt with in William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).
13. Wiggershaus, op. cit., p. 320.
14. This essay is discussed at some length in the chapter treating Horkheimer (without Adorno) in The Marxian Legacy. It marks the high point, and a turning point, in Horkheimer’s work far more than does the better-known collaborative essay he wrote with Adorno during his California exile, The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The critique of the two totalitarianisms leaves unquestioned the place of capitalism in Horkheimer’s analysis; it seems to disqualify the sphere of politics rather than, as it might have, calling into question the relation between the socioeconomic infrastructure and the cultural or ideological superstructure that is said to depend on it.
15. The concept of a politics of critique is rendered ambiguous by the genitive, which could suggest that it is the critique that is political (or replaces the political, as I am claiming here) or that there is a critical politics that has its own specific structures and imperatives (as I try to suggest in my book of the same title). This is not the place for a discussion of the latter usage.
16. Helmut Dubiel, Wissenschaftsorganisation und politische Erfahrung: Studien zur frühen Kritischen Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978). The English translation, by Benjamin Gregg, was published as Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).
17. Wiggershaus’s account of the kind of research undertaken by the Institute for Social Research after its return to Germany is surprising to Frankfurt hero-worshipers. This bread-and-butter work was at first carried out in connection with the trade union movement but soon lost even this political justification. Questions of theory disappeared from the Frankfurters’ concern—with the exception of several doctoral dissertations (including those of Oskar Negt, Rolf Tiedemann, and Alfred Schmidt) published in the short-lived book series that the Institute edited. In its place came practical field research that Wiggershaus describes under the title “Farewell to independence: research in Mannesmann factories.” In effect, the research seems unambiguously to have taken the side of management. Although Adorno continued the theoretical work of negativity, Wiggershaus recounts the now well known story that all the old copies of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung were kept locked away in the basement of the institute’s Frankfurt offices, as if to lock away the political concerns that underlay the radical theoretical stance of the founders. This explains why the new left first encountered most of these texts in pirate editions, including the eight volumes of the entire life of the Zeitschrift, whose last year’s issues appeared in English.
18. Habermas, even then, was hardly a hard-line leftist. He attacked the illusions of the student left at a congress of the SDS in 1968, publishing his theses under the heading “Die Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder,” which provoked an immediate counterattack in him in the book Die Linke antwortet Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968). That Habermas would later develop his own version of a critical theory that has culminated in the formulation of a radical theory of democracy could of course not have been treated in Wiggershaus’s 1986 book. See chapter 4, below, for a discussion of Habermas’s more recent work.
19. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1934; Reprint, New York: Seabury, 1974, p. vi.
20. Marx makes this point in the “Exchange of Letters” with Ruge, Bakunin, and Feuerbach, originally published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher and reprinted in Karl Marx, Frühe Schriften I, ed. H-J Lieber and Peter Furth (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1962), p. 448.
21. See Marx, Frühe Schriften I, p. 104.
4. HABERMAS’S REORIENTATION OF CRITICAL THEORY TOWARD DEMOCRATIC THEORY
1. Published in Cambridge, Mass., by the MIT Press in 1989.
2. The work published under this title by the Beacon Press in Boston in 1973 is an abridged version of the German original. It excludes particularly the more philosophical discussion of Marxism.
3. “Zur philosophischen Diskussion um Marx und den Marxismus,” Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Studien (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963), pp. 261–335.
4. The controversy is documented in Die Linke antwortet Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968). There is no editor of this volume; “the left” that is answering Habermas takes itself as a collective subject—as Habermas no doubt feared.
5. Published in Boston by the Beacon Press in 1971.
6. Published by the Beacon Press in 1975.
7. Published in two volumes by the Beacon Press in 1984 and 1987.
8. Published by the MIT Press in 1996.
9. Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little Brown, 1973), which was the first to treat the school as a whole, did discuss both Neumann and Kirchheimer. His study, however, considers only the period 1923–1950. It was not until 1994 that a full-length theoretical analysis of their contribution was proposed by William E. Scheuerman, in Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). See also the collection of their works edited by Scheuerman, The Rule of Law Under Siege (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
10. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990.
11. This second appendix, titled “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure,” was originally a lecture published in a volume titled Die Ideen von 1789 in der deutschen Rezeption, ed. Forum für Philosophie Bad Homburg (n.p., 1989).
12. The interview was published in Die Zeit, no. 53 (1993). It is cited in a recent article by Dany Cohn-Bendit, who plays on the famous phrase of Horkheimer in his title, “Wer vom Totalitarismus schweigt, sollte auch nicht über die Freiheit reden,” Kommune 19, no. 3/01 (March 2001): 6–10. (Horkheimer’s phrase, written at the outset of the war, was “He who refuses to speak of capitalism, should say nothing of Fascism.” It appeared in “Die Juden und Europe,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 8 [1939–1940]: 115.)
13. This suggestion is most clear in chap. 9, “The Burdens of French History,” which traces the difficult emergence of the autonomy of the law and its impact on the practice of democracy in contemporary France.
14. In the French way of dealing with such issues, these norms would be called symbolic: they institute the meanings that we collectively attach to the sounds that we utter, and they socialize us to recognize that the world is not composed simply of neutral and self-identical or objective facts that present themselves to a neutral or disincarnated consciousness.
15. The “proceduralist paradigm” may confuse the Anglo-Saxon reader, for whom proceduralism refers to a strictly neutral, value-free jurisprudence. As Kenneth Baynes has pointed out, Habermas makes explicit on his concluding page what is clear to the careful reader throughout: for him, autonomy is the value underlying his proceduralism. See Kenneth Baynes, Democracy and the Rechtsstaat, in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen White (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 201–231.
16. See the preceding note, concerning Habermas’s notion of proceduralism, the problem of neutrality, and the value assumption that Habermas makes concerning autonomy. He would of course claim that autonomy is necessary in order for the democratic processes he is describing in Between Facts and Norms to function fully.
17. Habermas indicates his debt to Ingeborg Maus, whose acute critique of Carl Schmitt (and his left-wing admirers) is also developed in her brilliant reading of Kant as a theorist of radical democracy in Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992). I have discussed Maus’s contribution in the article “Just Democracy,” Constellations 2, no. 3 (January 1996): 333–353.
18. “Reply to Symposium Participants,” Cardozo Law Review 17, nos. 4–5 (March 1996): 1545.
19. The only Frenchman truly to engage Habermas at this level has been André Gorz (an Austrian by birth). I should thank him here for years of critical correspondence on these matters, which are sedimented in this chapter as elsewhere. As he once dedicated an essay on these matters to me, I should like to do the same with this chapter.
5. THE ANTICOMMUNIST MARXISM OF Socialisme ou Barbarie
1. Lefort and Castoriadis are discussed elsewhere in this book (see chaps. 6 and 7). Lyotard joined the group in the mid-1950s; his experience teaching in North Africa led to his assuming responsibility for much of the journal’s analysis of France’s long colonial war against Algerian independence. The journal supported the independence movement, without, however, giving in to the apocalyptic hopes of many French leftists that an Algerian victory would bring socialism to the former colony and even inaugurate a revolutionary process in France. Castoriadis claims that it was Lyotard who was most resistant to the need to break with Marxism in order to remain on the side of revolution (as presented in Castoriadis’s long article series in the last issues of the journal, under the title “Marxisme et théorie révolutionnaire,” which is reprinted as the first part of The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey [London: Polity, 1987]). If that is the case, Lyotard’s development in the ensuing years demonstrated his capacity to learn from experience.
Daniel Mothé (a pseudonym) was the “worker” among the journal’s contributors; he was employed at the Renault factory at Billancourt (the famous center of communist militancy) until he was forced to retire because of an on-the-job injury in the 1970s. During the May ’68 uprising, he tried to bring together young workers with students occupying the university (including a visit to an “Action Committee” of young Americans of which I was a founder). The work that he published in the journal gave rise to two books: Journal d’un ouvrier (1958) and Militant chez Renault (1965). While following a new career as a sociological researcher, he has continued to publish political analyses under the name Mothé, particularly in Esprit, while publishing his sociological work under his given name, Jacques Gautrat.
2. The theory of bureaucratic state capitalism started from the premise that the Bolshevik Party had to do in Russia what the indigenous capitalist class had been unable to do: industrialize the country and bring it into modernity. This would in turn prepare the conditions for proletarian revolution (and create a proletariat in a largely agricultural and backward land). There are many difficulties with this theory, as the journal’s authors came to recognize over time. Among the most important are that capitalism supposes the existence of a market society and free laborers whose juridical and personal freedom is the only good they have to sell in it. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” created neither a free market nor free laborers.
3. This is exactly the way Marx reasoned in both his analyses of Bonaparte’s seizure of power after the failed 1848 revolution in France. See note 4 in chapter 6 and especially chapter 13, below.
5. Published in Esprit, February 1998.
6. CLAUDE LEFORT’S PASSAGE FROM REVOLUTIONARY THEORY TO POLITICAL THEORY
1. The text of the laudatio can be found in Festschrift zur Verleihung des Hannah-Arendt-Preises für politisches Denken, 1998 (Bremen: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 1999). Unfortunately I never saw the page proofs of the text, and the printed version has numerous unfortunate errors.
2. I should stress that to say democracy poses problems is not to say that it doesn’t also solve others and it is emphatically not to oppose to it some better or more stable form of political life.
3. See “La résurrection de Trotsky?” reprinted in Claude Lefort, Eléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie (Geneva: Droz, 1971).
4. This is of course the same argument that Marx suggested in The 18th Brumaire. The confiscation of the revolutionary activity by a bourgeois government is a negation of workers self-activity that results from their lack of self-conscious initiative; when they recognize and in turn negate that negation, their activity then becomes self-consciously revolutionary. Cf. chapter 13.
5. See chapter 5 for a discussion of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
6. Claude Lefort, “Organisation et parti,” Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 26 (1958).
7. Claude Lefort, “Qu’est-ce que la bureaucratie?” in Eléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie (Geneva: Droz, 1971).
8. Lefort is a remarkable reader of philosophers and philosophy, for reasons that I will suggest in a moment. It is worth noting here that he returns frequently also to Machiavelli, Michelet, Tocqueville, and Guizot.
9. Claude Lefort, Les formes de l’histoire: Essais d’anthropologie politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1978).
10. I discuss Lefort’s concept of ideology in more detail in chap. 8, “From the Critique of Totalitarianism to the Politics of Democracy.”
11. Claude Lefort, Le travail de l’oeuvre: Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 776.
12. Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort, and Jean-Marc Coudray (a.k.a. Cornelius Castoriadis), Mai 1968: La brèche. Premières réflexions sur les événements (Paris: Fayard, 1968).
13. Lefort’s article began with an expression of relief: “We are a small number who have been waiting for such a book for a long time, a book telling what it is like in the Soviet prisons and labor camps, telling of the terror that not only in times of danger but continuously accompanied and reinforced the edification of the bureaucratic regime in the USSR.” His next paragraph then asked “Why were we waiting for it?” And although he recalls his earlier critique of totalitarianism, Un homme en trop further develops that critique by integrating it into the democratic political theory that would remain his central concern. In this sense, Lefort was “waiting” for an occasion to develop further his own theory.
14. Lefort was also involved in the debates within and around the diverse psychoanalytic groups that, in the wake of Lacan’s break with Freudian orthodoxy and the schisms among Lacan’s followers, were particularly rich during this period. Some of his important essays, such as “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” were originally lectures to these groups before being published in their journals.
15. This terminology is of course also indebted to Lacanian psychoanalysis, which distinguishes among the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real.
16. It should be noted that Habermas refers to this transcendent symbolic institution of society as metaphysical thought that must be overcome by postmetaphysical theory. See the brief discussion of this point in chapter 4.
17. This implies that religion is not a form of ideology. One should recall that when the young Marx criticizes religious alienation, especially in “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” he sees that religion is also a struggle against demeaning social relations. Cf. chapter 13.
18. In Claude Lefort, L’invention démocratique (Paris: Fayard, 1981). Lefort is referring to the 1978 alliance between the Socialist and Communist Parties, which were to run in the parliamentary elections on the basis of the Common Program. When it became clear to the Communists that this would not work to their advantage (despite the high figures that the polls were registering), the party raised absurd demands that were clearly aimed at breaking the alliance. Of course, the 1981 victory of François Mitterrand that reactivated that alliance (and much of its program) showed that the Communists were right to worry. However, one should not blame the subsequent loss of Communist influence on this alliance with the Socialists; its causes run deeper, as I suggest in my discussion of French political culture, especially in chap. 9, “The Burden of French History.”
19. Such a claim would itself be ideological, naturalizing the indeterminacy typical of democracy. This remark is important for understanding the present situation in the former Soviet bloc.
20. Lefort has returned once again to the question of totalitarianism in La complication: Retour sur le communisme (Paris: Fayard, 1999). I discuss this volume briefly in chap. 8, “From the Critique of Totalitarianism to the Politics of Democracy.” Its title suggests another formulation of the structure of democratic indetermination: it proposes that the reduction of totalitarianism to an “illusion” (Furet) or an “idéocratie” (Malia) oversimplifies; the philosophical analysis of the political institution of society to which Lefort was led by his critique of totalitarianism cannot neglect the actual power politics that are also involved. That may be why Lefort’s subtitle refers to communism rather than to totalitarianism.
21. Volume 2, for example, points out that the original condition of the Americans was not only that of material equality but characterized by the fact that the original settlers had fled the old world in a quest for religious liberty—such that the desire for liberty can be said to be generative also.
22. This lecture was part of the program organized in 1982–1983 by the Center for the Philosophical Study of the Political, directed by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; it is published in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Le retrait du politique (Paris: Galilée, 1983), pp. 71–88. On this center, see my discussion “The Origin and Limits of Philosophical Politics,” in Dick Howard, The Politics of Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
23. Alain Montefiore, ed., Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
24. Both essays are reprinted in Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique: XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1986); the first was originally published in Libre in 1978, the second in Passé-Présent in 1982. Lefort does not explain why he placed the second before the first in Essais.
7. FROM MARX TO CASTORIADIS, AND FROM CASTORIADIS TO US
1. I purchased my first copies of Marx’s Capital, as well as the three volumes of Lenin’s Selected Works, in the edition of Progress Publishers, Moscow, in 1965; they were not yet easily available in U.S. editions. I found them not in bookstores but in the trunk of the car of the San Antonio Communist Party member who came weekly to peddle his wares on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. This is of course not an endorsement of the Communist Party’s openness; the manuscripts of the young Marx that explore such “bourgeois” themes as alienation were translated late and reluctantly by the party (in the German edition, they appeared as supplementary volumes to the forty-volume edition of the Complete Works). Louis Althusser’s immensely popular philosophical claim that there was an “epistemological rupture” between the humanist theory of the young Marx and the scientific discoveries made by the mature Marx were published at the same time. See Louis Althusser, Pour Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1965); and Louis Althusser, Jacques Rancière, and Pierre Machery, Lire le Capital, 2 vols. (Paris, Maspero, 1965).
2. Published in New York by Basic Books in 1972.
3. Neither of them had time to write the chapter, and the person they asked to do so did not deliver. Lefort was finishing his massive study Le travail de l’oeuvre: Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972) and preparing the publication of a first collection of his essays, Eléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie (Geneva: Droz, 1971); Castoriadis was completing the second part of L’institution imaginaire de la société (Paris: Seuil, 1975) and preparing the publication of his collected essays, which would begin to appear in 1974.
4. Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, published in 1964, had already made suggestive references to Husserl; Marcuse had studied with Husserl’s successor, Heidegger, whose abstract theorizing he rejected in favor of the more concrete Marxist concept of alienated labor. Marcuse’s personal influence on the editors of Telos was important, and many of his earlier essays from his Frankfurt School days were translated in the journal, providing philosophical substance to his growing public image as a guru for the new political left.
5. They were published with my introductions (which had been subjected to what the journal’s chief editor called “constitutive editing”), which later were republished in modified form in The Marxian Legacy, most of whose chapters had their origin in work done for Telos.
6. Originally published in Textures, nos. 12–13 (1975).
7. It is really a turn to the Greeks, who had not played a significant role during Castoriadis’s earlier development but would become increasingly important for him. There is not room in this chapter to do more than call attention to these later essays that look increasingly to Greek democracy as a model of the autonomy central to his concerns. That the Greeks invented simultaneously not just philosophy and democracy but also tragedy (whose role—for example, in Antigone—is to warn against the hubris that threatens autonomy) is not only a historical demonstration of Castoriadis’s theses (recalling Marx’s wager on history) but also a sign that history follows no linear or progressive path (rejecting the metaphysics that underlies Marx’s wager).
8. The details of this claim, and the notions of a phenomenological and logical moment to the analysis, are elaborated in the discussion of Marx’s theory in the final chapter of this book.
9. Castoriadis, L’institution imaginaire de la société, p. 157.
8. FROM THE CRITIQUE OF TOTALITARIANISM TO THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY
1. The term appears to have been used already in 1923 by anti-Fascists; Mussolini laid claim to it in 1925, when he ascribed to his new regime a “fierce totalitarian will” and then, a few months later, defined his goal in a famous aphorism: “Everything in the State, nothing outside of the State, nothing against the State.” For details, see Enzo Traverso’s useful introduction to the well-selected anthology Le totalitarisme: Le XXe siècle en débat (Paris: Seuil, 2001), pp. 19–20. Traverso suggests that the first appearances of the concept were during World War I, which was seen as the first “total war.”
2. I argue this point from a different perspective in chap. 9, “The Burden of French History,” where the new independence of the judiciary is seen as legitimating the idea of a plurality of interests, which in turn challenges the unitary French vision of their political republic. In the present context, the modern legitimacy of interest derives from its contrast to premodern societies in which the individual is subordinated to the community.
3. There are of course cases where totalitarianism has been imposed by force, for example, in postwar Eastern Europe. But even in those cases, if the regime is to be established, it must find some witting collaborators, or it quickly becomes simply a dictatorship. The normative claim and the political reality have to have an overlapping structure from the standpoint of the participant.
4. Rosenberg’s aphorism is cited by Claude Lefort in a lecture that he, as a prior recipient of the Hannah Arendt Prize of the City-State of Bremen, gave in honor of Helena Bonner, the winner of the prize in 2000. Lefort’s lecture (in German translation) was published as “Die Weigerung, den Totalitarismus zu denken,” Kommune 19, no. 5/01 (May 2001): viii–xiv.
5. I will not present Lefort’s philosophical development as if it were somehow part of a necessary or logical path or as if it somehow resulted from a sudden lucidity that, finally, permitted him to gain a knowledge of the truth. Rather, I use Lefort in order to explain why the critique of totalitarianism remains necessary for anyone who wants to be involved with political theory today. Thus I do not propose a complete reading of Lefort’s work here; I rather use him for my own goals. I do hope, however, that the reader will want to return to Lefort’s work, whose philosophical and political implications do not cease to intrigue me each time I review them anew. I should note that I have reconstructed the earlier evolution of Lefort’s work in The Marxian Legacy, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
6. See William David Jones, The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
7. See chapter 3, which discusses the transformation of Marxist critical theory into critical cultural (or literary) theory. A sad legacy of Horkheimer and Adorno’s totalizing “dialectic of enlightenment” was the remark of Roland Barthes (in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France) that all language is totalitarian. On the other hand, Michel Foucault never expressed publicly his obvious debt to the same source.
8. See Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956). It is true that this definition is static and structural, and it was seriously challenged empirically by the beginning of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union. But the process of de-Stalinization could also give rise to the impression that the communist system would “converge” with the political life of the Western democracies, giving rise to a world composed of similar “industrial societies.” This latter thesis, like the totalitarianism thesis of the social scientists, ignores the dynamics of political experience. As a result, not only is the understanding of totalitarianism oversimplified; so too is the understanding of democratic politics, as I shall show.
9. On the Congress for Cultural Freedom, see my essay, written while writing the first draft of the present book, “L’anti-totalitarisme hier, aujourd’hui et demain,” Critique, no. 647 (April 2001): 259–278. An enlarged English version appears in Government and Opposition, summer 2002.
10. The term “slippages” (dérapages) was used in the pathbreaking work of François Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution française (Paris: Hachette, 1965), which marked the first serious break with what Furet was to denounce later as “the [Marxist] revolutionary catechism” in what became the first chapter of his Penser la révolution française. “Slippages” was of course a lame way of expressing the fact that the political course of the revolution could not be determined simply by its material infrastructural necessities. In a sense, the rich work of Furet in the succeeding years, down to his Le passé d’une illusion, was an attempt to understand more precisely the status of these political “slippages.”
11. It should be recalled that Lefort was Merleau-Ponty’s student and his posthumous editor; he has returned constantly to that of Merleau-Ponty’s work, as one sees in his collection Sur une colonne absente: Ecrits autour de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). Lefort saw quite early the difference between the existential phenomenology of Sartre and that of Merleau-Ponty; his polemic’s with Sartre in the early 1950s in Les Temps Modernes turned around the difference between his analysis of the “experience” of the proletariat, which stood richly in contrast to Sartre’s paradoxical insistence on the “idea” of the proletariat, and its incarnation in the Communist Party. For details, and the critique of Sartre’s positivism, see Howard, The Marxian Legacy.
12. One cannot always rely on good instincts. The other popular antitotalitarian critique from the 1970s was that of Michel Foucault. Trying to elaborate a new conception of the intellectual, Foucault’s activity with regard to prison reform set one parameter, while his more general critique of repressive society took a very different form, one that lent itself to the transformation of critical theory to cultural theory. And of course Foucault’s instincts could mislead him, as with his early support not just for the movement against the shah of Iran but specifically for the ayatollahs of Khomeini.
13. This thumbnail sketch, whose methodological implication I will draw in a moment, leaves out the role of those associated with the monthly journal Esprit. That is in part because Esprit was one of the places where Lefort published and developed his analysis. Nonetheless, any larger historical picture of French antitotalitarian criticism should not ignore Esprit. I discussed its history and general orientation in chapter 8 (pp. 135–149) of Defining the Political (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
14. It should be noted that this faith in the proletariat will reappear as the more general phenomenological question of the body. Here, the proletariat represents the positivity of revolution, whereas it will later be taken up in a sort of dialectical movement between incorporation and disincorporation that is constitutive of democracy and its possible slippages. I will return to this question later in this chapter, in the section entitled “The History of Meaning.”
15. “What Is Bureaucracy” starts from a confrontation of Marx with Weber, who apparently is able to understand this modern phenomenon better. However, the formalism that permits Weber’s ideal typical account to encompass the variety of modern social structures comes at the price of inadequate differentiation within the bureaucracy. More precisely, Weber cannot distinguish between technically necessary functions and those that are the result of the need for the bureaucracy to reproduce itself in order to legitimate its presence (as Lefort had shown for the Soviet bureaucracy). The political role of the totalitarian-Stalinist bureaucracy then proves to be a key to understanding the ambiguities of industrial capitalist social bureaucracies. Lefort is also still concerned with the critique of capitalism. What appeared to Weber to be the most efficient and rational mode of modern social relations is seen to depend on the existence of a quantitatively leveled—Tocqueville would say egalitarian—form of social relations. Although Lefort does not refer to Tocqueville at this time, he already suggests that democracy is not a solution but a problem: it can lead to self-management (auto-gestion), or it can present the conditions that make possible its own totalitarian elimination by a bureaucracy that claims to act in order to realize the very equality that is its own premise.
16. Indeed, it is telling that Lefort had seen this problem when he wrote “The Contradiction of Trotsky,” but he did not recognize that the same critique applied to Socialisme ou Barbarie.
17. As suggested in chapter 5, concerning Socialisme ou Barbarie, its ability to recognize the new and its attempts to thematize the importance of historical novelty were nonetheless among its strong points.
18. Lefort asks these questions explicitly in the concluding essay to Elements d’une critique de la bureaucratie (Geneva: Droz, 1971), titled “Le nouveau et l’attrait de la répétition.” This is significant, since Eléments republishes his most important essays from the first period of his work. The English translation is found as chapter 4, “Novelty and the Appeal of Repetition,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986).
19. This was published in François Chatelet, Evelyne Pisier, and Olivier Duhamel, eds., Dictionnaire des oeuvres politiques (Paris: PUF, 1986), pp. 671–682.
20. The first of these significant essays, which repay reading today, was “L’échange et la lutte des hommes” (1951), which takes its starting point from Marcel Mauss’s essay on The Gift and challenges Lévi-Strauss’s reading of his anthropological predecessor; the second (1952) takes up the question of “sociétés ‘sans histoire’ et historicité”; while the third, also published in 1952, is entitled “Capitalisme et religion au XVIe siècle: Le problème de Weber.” For a discussion of these precocious works, see Howard, The Marxian Legacy.
21. I will return to this point below, in the section titled “The Meaning of History.”
22. There is nonetheless an important difference between the two: Religion is articulated around the question of meaning; it represents explicitly the symbolic element that gives reality its identity while making clear the difference between the secular and the religious. Precapitalist society, on the other hand, is interpreted by Marx as if it were a real reality that presents itself as such, with no need for a symbolic mediation. Since the meaning of the precapitalist or premodern world is given once and for all by an origin that is external to that world, such a society cannot be put into question or become self-critical; that is why it is closed to the new.
23. See Claude Lefort, “Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society. The essay was originally published in the Encyclopedia Universalis and reprinted as “Esquisse d’une genèse de l’idéologie dans les sociétés modernes,” in Claude Lefort, Les formes de l’histoire: Essais d’anthropologie politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), pp. 278–329.
24. The claims made in these two sentences appear to contradict one another. How can totalitarianism integrate otherness while totalitarian ideology claims that society carries its own legitimation within itself? The contradiction is overcome, as will be seen in a moment, by the activity of the totalitarian party—the same party that was responsible for “the contradiction of Trotsky” analyzed in Lefort’s still-Marxist first phase. The difference between totalitarian ideology and really existing totalitarianism is crucial.
25. The English translation appears in The Political Forms of Modern Society; the French was reprinted in L’invention démocratique: Les limites de la domination totalitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1981).
26. I will return to the politics of the rights of man in the last part of this discussion. It is worth noting here Lefort’s insistence on the presumption of innocence, which he calls an “irreversible gain for political thought.” (The Political Forms of Modern Society, p. 71).
27. The capital letters indicate that here “King” and “Nation” do not refer to particular incarnations of empirical realities; the claim concerns the symbolic meaning of the terms, as will be seen in a moment. Absolutism as a form of regime is the opposite of the arbitrary domination of an empirically existing power holder.
28. One sees here the return of the structure called bourgeois ideology, which is now explained by a non-Marxist theory of history. Whereas its first description, above, situated it within a world that is dominated and determined by capitalism, now that ideology is determined by its relation to what Lefort will call “the democratic invention” (or the imperative to invent democracy).
29. This is where Shakespeare becomes more relevant to the argumentative strategy than Darwin—although of course Marx seems to appeal indiscriminately to both of them.
30. This temptation toward what Merleau-Ponty called a “pensée du survol” is illustrated in Lefort’s massive study Le travail de l’oeuvre: Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), which presents first an 80-page demonstration of the historical inability to come to a common understanding of the label “Machiavellian” and then a 160-page survey of eight types of interpretation of Machiavelli’s works, each of which is in itself convincing but ultimately assumes for itself a position outside the work that claims somehow to observe it in its neutral totality. In other words, the problem of political science’s positivism is philosophical.
31. The crucial analysis is found in “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” which is translated in The Political Forms of Modern Society; originally published in Confrontation (1979), it is reprinted in L’invention démocratique. In the following discussion I will allude to other essays of Lefort, sometimes without citing them directly.
32. This problem is of course at the roots of modern social contract theory. I suggest a historical-political solution to it in chapter 10 by distinguishing a republican democracy from a democratic republic.
33. This is why in 1989 the older, still-believing Communists could not understand what was happening to them, as was typified by the plaintive cry of the old East German head of the secret police, Erick Mielke: “Wir lieben euch doch!” (But we really love you).
34. The contribution of Lefort’s essay on The Gulag Archipelago, whose character as a “literary investigation” he underlines, should be stressed, particularly in the context of the sudden French “discovery” of totalitarianism. Also worth noting is Lefort’s concern with the philosophical and political status of works of literature. His most striking statement in this regard is found in the attack on those who claim to defend Rushdie’s right to publish a work like the Satanic Verses on the grounds that it is only a novel—as if it was not necessary to take seriously the way in which a novel creates a symbolic world.
35. One might imagine that, for a time, this structure can succeed in presenting itself in the symbolic mode and thus exercising a symbolic power. That would explain why totalitarian power is, obviously, not simply imposed by force. But, as I will demonstrate in a moment, this symbolic power falls to the level of reality once the active party member has really to exercise his power. That is why the image of society as a body will be doubled by the image of society as an organization—both organized and organizable.
36. One recalls here the arguments of Lefort’s 1956 article, “Stalinism Without Stalin,” Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 20 (1956–1957).
37. In fact, Lefort distinguishes a contemporary form of ideology that marks a transcendence of bourgeois ideology; he calls this new form the “invisible ideology” and describes it as the reign of the trivial, of the anything-goes, a relativism where everything is equivalent to everything else and nothing has a particular or critical value. Since this idea, presented in the “Outline of the Genesis of Ideology,” has not been developed further by Lefort, who has in the meanwhile spent much time writing on Tocqueville (among others) and the question of the rights of man, I only allude to it in this footnote. The similarity of this “invisible ideology” to what has come to be called postmodernism suggests that it would be worth returning to this matter since at least some postmodernists claim to be heirs to a radical political project that avoids the snares of ideology.
38. The justification of this interpretation of Marx as theorist of the political (and critic of the domination of the economic) is suggested in the discussion of Marx in chapter 7 and developed in chapter 13’s rereading of Marx.
39. It is necessary to underline again what I said previously: ideology and the democratic revolution go together; ideology is made necessary by the revolution it seeks to legitimate at the same time that the fixity of the legitimation it proposes is constantly put into question by the dynamic inherent in the new democratic society. Thus ideology is both produced by the democratic revolution and thrown into doubt by it. But ideology is not by itself totalitarianism: the latter is an existing reality. That is why I speak here of a “totalitarian temptation” that attracts many people who, if they were faced with the reality of totalitarianism, would reject it with horror.
40. My favorite example of this tendency is the clause written into one of the Brazilian constitutions (I do not remember which one) produced at the end of their long dictatorship that decreed “real inflation shall not exceed 8 percent.” Surely a laudable goal, and one that could be defended politically, but does it belong in a constitution?
9. THE BURDEN OF FRENCH HISTORY
1. The French are captivated by their own history, seemingly unable to look at the present in its own terms and for that reason always in danger of repeating the old rather than facing the new. Mark Twain underlined this tendency in an amusing portrait of a French political speech in Innocents Abroad. A more scholarly argument making the same point is Robert Gildea’s The Past in French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
2. In fact, quarrels over legitimacy existed ever before 1789, in the form of religious conflict (as when Henri IV famously decided that “Paris is worth a mass” and converted), conflict between the aristocracy and the monarchy (the Fronde), or shortly before the Revolution, with Boulainvilliers and the claim of the Frankish origin of French nobility. These quarrels antedated the emergence of modern politics.
3. The phenomenon denotes first of all the increased numbers of unemployed, but its connotation extends to the broader problem of maintaining the social solidarity envisioned by the republican project. Traditional unemployment was temporary; the individual’s social self-conception as a worker remained. Exclusion eliminates such social ties, creating a climate of dependence that compounds isolation. Welfare payments and other social benefits permit survival but not integration. The result is what Jean-Paul Fitoussi and Pierre Rosanvallon call the “corruption” of the republic, a term to which I will return later. See their Le nouvel âge des inégalités (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 197.
4. The most famous case is the affair of contaminated blood transfusions, which cost former prime minister Laurent Fabius his chance to achieve the highest political office. His public affirmation that he was “responsible but not guilty” could only further discredit the authority of the republican state. At the same time, Denis Salas points out that the number of court cases in general had risen from 6 million in 1962 to 10.5 million in 1972 and then to 14 million in 1993. Whether the two phenomena are connected demands further investigation. See Denis Salas, Le tiers pouvoir (Paris: Hachette, 1998), p. 275 n. 2.
5. I have included a separate appendix at the end of this chapter in which I sketch some of the orientations in contemporary French economic theory. The reader will see that the historical and political structures analyzed here are present there as well.
6. It was this culture whose deracinated triumph was denounced and whose necessary demise was predicted by Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation. The abstraction and formalism achieved in France permitted at first great advances, but its separation from the soil of the nation would ultimately weaken it. The subtlety of Fichte’s account is often missed by hasty dismissals of his “nationalism.” For an account, see the introduction to the second edition of my From Marx to Kant (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), pp. 25–30.
7. See Bronislaw Baczko, Comment sortir de la Terreur: Thérmidor et la Révolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Baczko points to accusations that Robespierre sought to install himself as the head of a new monarchy—an accusation that makes sense in light of the conflict between the will of the monarch and that of the Revolution. Marcel Gauchet speaks of “the enigma of Thérmidor” that consists in the inability of its agents, who were clearly marking an end to the revolutionary order, to break with the underlying unitary logic of the revolution. See his La Révolution des pouvoirs: La souveraineté, le peuple et la représentation, 1789–1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), pp. 154–155.
8. The Commune united republican claims at the national level (refusing to accept defeat by the Prussians) and the social level (in its working-class composition and demands).
9. See especially François Furet, La révolution, 1770–1880 (Paris: Hachette, 1989).
10. See François Furet, La gauche et la révolution au milieu du XIXe siècle: Edgar Quinet et la question du Jacobinisme, 1865–1870 (Paris: Hachette, 1986), which also reprints the essential documents. Furet of course knew that his own publication also had contemporary echoes: did support for the goals sought by socialist revolution mean that one had to support—however “critically”—the USSR?
11. The celebration of the bicentenary of the Revolution was marked by a series of clashes between the followers of the actual holder of the chair, Michel Vovelle, and François Furet. The often comic but quite serious competition is chronicled in Stephen Kaplan, Adieu 1789 (Paris: Fayard, 1993).
12. Robert Gildea’s The Past in French History has an excellent chapter on this ambiguous legacy. The standard French history of the right remains René Rémond, La droite en France de 1815 à nos jours: Continuité et diversité d’une tradition politique (Paris: Aubier, 1954), which distinguishes between ultras, Orleanists, and nationalists.
13. That is why the Constituent Assembly voted the Le Chapelier law forbidding the formation of trade unions. Indeed, the Le Chapelier law forbade even petitions from organized groups of any kind Although I will return to this issue below, it is perhaps worth noting here that even the constitution of the Fifth Republic (article 4) subordinates political parties to “the principles of national sovereignty and democracy.” Guy Carcasonne’s commentary notes that this means that parties “have no true status, nor are they bound by obligations that can be validated, as opposed to the situation in Germany” (La Constitution, 3d ed. [Paris: Seuil, 1999], p. 49).
14. This also explains why most political parties in France refer to themselves as movements, or unions, or reunions, rather than identifying themselves with particular causes. Thus one finds today on the right side of the political spectrum the Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) and the Union des Démocrats Français (UDF)—as well the the far-right Front National (FN); on the left are the Socialists, who, in the recent past, were called the Section Française de l’International Ouvrier (SFIO), and a “republican” splinter group, the Mouvement des Citoyens (MDF). The shifts on the left are explained below.
15. The priority placed on the rights of man results from the same revolutionary need to replace the unity of the absolute monarchy with the nation by an equally powerful synthesis. Marcel Gauchet suggests that the revolutionaries were not, at the outset, seeking to overthrow the monarchy; they appealed to natural law and the doctrine of rights in order to establish their own claim to legitimacy. As the contest with the monarchy advanced, the transformation of the former Estates-General from a national assembly to a constituant assembly would eventually force them to recognize that the implicit logic of their own claim implied the need to reconstitute a regime of a very different type. See Marcel Gauchet, La révolution des droits de l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
16. This attitude may explain why much of the French left saw 1917 as the realization of the project of 1789 and 1793, ignoring the antidemocratic practices of the Bolsheviks while believing their promises concerning their (professed) results. See chap. 10, “Intersecting Trajectories of Republicanism in France and the United States,” for a comparison of the French republican and American democratic variants of these themes. It should be noted here that one variant of the French republican vision would be the creation of a formal or procedural state whose universality is the guarantee of individual rights. In this, the republic realizes the Rousseauian vision of the law—but not the substantial vision animating the Genevan’s republican political idea of the general will.
17. The idea of realizing the republic by means of educational reform had been part of the original project of the French Revolution. The present-day bastion of the intellectual elite, the Ecole normale supérieure, was created in 1794 to train teachers. The presence of the revolutionary project in Ferry’s reforms is evident. He had been a participant in the political debates begun by Quinet’s refusal to accept the inevitability of a repetition of all phases of the originary revolution. His name remains associated not only with educational reform but with the colonial mission civilisatrice, which could be justified by appeal to the Declaration of Rights, arguing the need to extend these rights to non-French as well. The best discussion of the actuality of this republican theory remains Claude Nicolet’s L’idée républicaine en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), which stresses the recurrence of the republican motto: “The [political] form will produce the [social] basis” (La forme tirera le fond).
18. The concept of a republican elite should be underlined. The republican goal is not a leveling down but rather the raising of all. This no doubt explains another phenomenon that is peculiar to French political culture: the role of the petition, signed by intellectuals acting not in the name of their specific science but rather as the conscience of the nation that is concerned with the best interests of that nation.
19. See François Furet, Jacques Julliard, and Pierre Rosanvallon, La république du centre: La fin de l’exception française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1988).
20. The attempt to eliminate the Catholic schools led to massive demonstrations recalling the revolutionary journées, this time on the right, with over a million people in the streets of Paris in June 1984, and to the replacement of the minister of education, Alain Savary (who had cofounded with Mitterrand the new Socialist Party) by the very republican Jean-Pierre Chevènement. Quilès’s exhortation is cited from the useful compilation by the staff of the journal Le débat, Les idées en France, 1945–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), p. 377.
21. Indeed, the present Socialist Party was created only at the Epinay Congress of 1971. Its ancestor was the SFIO, an organization whose name—the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière—reflects the unitary and universal goals of republicanism. François Mitterrand, who had never been a socialist, needed to give himself ideological credibility by means of the new label.
22. This is no doubt another origin of the practice of using petitions signed by intellectuals and appealing to the good sense of public opinion. While this aspect of French political life could be traced back to the activity of Voltaire, his “écrasez l’infame” was considered a founding slogan, and its author an honorary ancestor, of the revolutionary republican tradition.
23. This is at least the principle repeated on all sides. The post-1945 control of the Communists over their affiliated union, the CGT, is clear to most observers, particularly after the CIA managed to join with a faction of Trotskyists to split that union in April 1948, creating the rival organization Force Ouvrière (FO). This obeissance was ideological as well as political. For example, when the Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez insisted in May 1955, despite all evidence, that “absolute pauperization” characterized the situation of the working class, the CGT Congress meeting in June adopted the identical thesis. See Les idées en France, pp. 132, 134.
24. This is of course a modern political appearance, not to be identified with the older category “reactionary” that come from the antirepublican struggles. The modern far right appears in the context of democracy. As Furet points out in Le passé d’une illusion (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995), the idea of a revolutionary right emerges only in the wake of World War I. See chap. 8, “From the Critique of Totalitarianism to the Politics of Democracy.”
25. There was another, realpolitik reason for the alliance. As Mitterrand explained in Ma part de verité (Paris: Fayard, 1969), he considered that social change was making his party into the “sociological” majority; the new alliance would weaken the communists and make the socialists then also the “political” majority.
26. The success of this strategy would have depended on a similar choice by the German Social Democrats, as I suggested at the time. See “France, Germany and the Problem of Europe,” reprinted in Defining the Political (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
27. Some see Gaullism as a return to a form of Bonapartism because of its plebiscitary character. Yet François Furet remarks perceptively (in La république du centre, p. 18ff) that whereas de Gaulle left behind a relatively firm set of institutions, Bonaparte left only a name.
28. Yves Mény, La corruption de la république (Paris: Fayard, 1992). Paul Jankowski points out that worry about this kind of corruption dates at least to the Cahiers de doléance of 1789, which complained of the confusion of public and private interest involved in the sale of offices by the king. See Paul Jankowski, “Méry de Paris,” French Politics and Society 19, no. 1 (spring 2001: 61–69.
29. Other possibilities for corruption were provided by the policy of nationalizations and denationalizations that followed the initial measures of 1981. It is only fair to note that a first law governing party finance was passed in 1988, after the scandals had become too evident to ignore. It had to be revised again in 1990 and 1993. The absence of legal regulation was not the result of political scheming; its origin lies in the fact that the unitary representation of the republic implies that there is in principle no place for particular interest and hence no one thinks of the need to regulate it.
30. The recent revelations concerning these types of practices by the former mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, make clear this mutual complicity: although Chirac’s RPR party got a larger part of the loot, parts of it went to all the parties. Politicians say that as long as money is not taken for personal reasons but for the good of the party, this is acceptable. And they are surprised when the public is outraged by their voting themselves an amnesty law for this reason. This is another aspect of the corruption of the republic. See Mény, La corruption de la république, pp. 282–292. Even the New York Times recognized finally that something new was afoot in France; see Suzanne Daley’s “In France, the Wink at Corruption Gives Way to Scrutiny” (January 11, 2001, p. A3).
31. The most optimistic argument is presented by Denis Salas, who subtitles Le tiers pouvoir, Vers une autre justice.
32. Consistently republican, French laws represent the general will in its generality and universality, as opposed to American laws, which, although also claiming universality, take into account particular conditions—for example, a tax bill will exclude “all” corporations incorporated on such and such a date in this or that state when the tax favor is in fact being offered to only the one corporation that happens to fit that description. The décrets d’application are needed for a law that has been duly voted to become effective, giving the state bureaucracy significant autonomous power.
33. Mény explains this practice in chapter 3 of La corruption de la république, “Pantouflages: Le compromis historique de l’administration française.” According to Le Monde, March 5/6, 2000, for the first time more than 50 percent of graduates of the Inspection des finances would prefer a career in private industry. An illustration of the dangers of this system is seen in the (temporary) downfall of former finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was in charge of privatization of industries from 1991 to 1993, went into private business, and then returned as finance minister when the Socialists came back to power in 1996, only to fall victim to an accusation of corruption. What some call a functional synthesis, others see with a different eye. Yet Le Monde’s Thierry Bréhier (March 24, 2000) still applies the logic of the synthèse to find Strauss-Kahn’s activity quite justifiable.
34. See my analysis in “The French Strikes of 1995 and Their Political Aftermath,” Government and Opposition 33, no. 2 (spring 1998): 199–220.
35. Claude Lefort’s Un homme en trop stressed the political arguments that many readers of Solzhenitsyn missed because they were concerned only with its sensational revelations. Lefort also stressed the threat that the book posed to the cultural power of the Communists. The importance of the theoretical argument is suggested by the fact that its publisher, Les Editions du Seuil, republished Lefort’s book in a paperback edition in 1986, a decade after its first edition, when there was no shock value—only theoretical interest—to justify this project.
36. This project, which François Mitterrand tried to appropriate for his own purposes by calling for an “administrative provisional government,” is still debated. See “Mendès-France voulait-il prendre le pouvoir en mai 68,” Le Monde, June 29, 2001, which reports on a conference organized at the National Assembly to discuss this theme.
37. This is the argument suggested by François Furet, Antoine Liniers (a.k.a. Olivier Rolin), and Philippe Reynaud in Terrorisme et démocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1985). Liniers-Rolin’s participant account of the one attempt at terrorism (a kidnapping) is fascinating. One might note, however, that Italy and Germany had also previously had popular fascist governments, which could partially explain their more violent options. See also Paul Berman, “The Passion of Joschka Fischer,” New Republic, nos. 4519 and 4520 (August 27 and September 3, 2001): 36–59.
38. Did ethics replace politics? Did it destroy it? Or was the demise of the political the precondition of the emergence of ethics? The verdict is not yet rendered, but the argument here favors the last alternative. The student strikes of the 1980s seemed to argue for the priority of ethics. However, see my essay “Ethics and Politics,” reprinted in Defining the Political 294–304, where I take issue with this thesis concerning the massive strikes of 1986. On the other hand, it should be noted that the sense of political action of course changed. The idea of a historical vanguard was no longer plausible. This transformation in turn had effects in another sphere—the aesthetic—as Marcel Gauchet has noted. Experimental literature and poetry, even the cinema, which had been so important for the generation who still had an experience of the vanguard political temptation played little role for the new generation that came to maturity in the eighties. See Marcel Gauchet, “Totalitarisme, libéralisme, individualisme,” in Les idées en France, pp. 513–515.
39. The other solution, borrowing from Tocqueville on America, would make democracy into a social condition and suggest that France could live without its political culture. But then France would be America!
40. This argument is developed at length in Claude Lefort’s discussion of Michelet’s argument against the killing of the king in “Permanence du théologico-politique?” in Essais sur le politique: XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1986). The notion of the symbolic as employed here comes from Lefort, whose use of this concept to understand the nature and limits of the totalitarian project is discussed in chaps. 6 and 8.
41. The disappearance of the parlements is not so strange when one takes into account the difference between lawyers who are members of the barreau and whose essential function is defense against the interventions of the state and those lawyers who are state employees and are known as magistrats. The latter, because they are dependent on the state and presumably work to fulfill its goals (and are under its administrative control) are given great powers. In the passages that follow, however, I am following the ideas proposed by Salas, Le tiers pouvoir, in proposing that present-day developments suggest these magistrates can free themselves from the control of the state and play a crucial role in democratization. On the other hand, the same globalization and democratization that favor the magistrates can be seen as a threat to the barreau. Concerning the latter, see Lucien Karpik, Les Avocats: Entre l’Etat, le public et le marché, XIII–XX siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).
42. Cited in Les idées en France, p. 418.
43. The judiciary increasingly protects the rights of individuals or groups against the weight of societal demands. In so doing, it does not so much solve problems as pose new ones. The recognized rights still have to be integrated into the web of differences that make up a modern society.
44. Published in Esprit, June 2000, pp. 207–222. Esprit has devoted a number of special sections to the problems raised by the new economy. In an afterword to a new edition of his study of the past twenty-five years of French intellectual life, Face au scepticisme (Paris: Hachette, 1998), Esprit’s director, Olivier Mongin, tries to explain why he sees political economy acquiring a centrality on the intellectual agenda that had previously escaped its more technical-administrative orientation. In a series of developments culminating with the massive strike wave of 1995, it became clear that the old compromise between labor and capital—consecrated by the mutualization or sharing of risks through a form of social and generational solidarity based on the logic of insurance policies—could no longer hold. Structural and long-term unemployment made it impossible to ensure social integration through work, and especially through lifetime work in one firm. Then, as the consequences of the end of the cold war (which had permitted clear delimitation of the so-called enemy) came together with globalization, those who sought to renew the old compromise were clearly defeated. The shape of a new compromise remains to be seen.
45. A more complete discussion of Durkheim can be found in my article on him that will appear in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).
46. Bernard Perret and Guy Roustang, L’économie contre la société (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
47. See, for example, André Orléan, “L’individu, l’opinion et le capitalisme financier,” Esprit, November 2000; and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Le détour et le sacrifice: Ivan Illich et René Girard,” Esprit, May 2001.
48. Laville and Levesque, “Penser ensemble l’économie et la société,” Esprit, p. 214.
49. Viviane Forrestier, L’horreur économique (Paris: Fayard, 1996). For a brief critical summary, see Pierre Rosanvallon, “France: The New Anti-Capitalism,” Correspondence, no. 7 (winter 2000/2001): 34–35. See also Vincent Tournier, “L’apocalypse économique selon Viviane Forrestier,” Esprit, March–April 1997, pp. 231–235. The Forrestier phenomenon is a part of the reaction of old French political logic to the new world of global economics. Along with Le Monde diplomatique, the acolytes of Pierre Bourdieu who call themselves “the left of the left,” and an undeniably present and justified worldwide protest against the results of economic globalization, the plea in favor of the victim will—and should—always find support. Whether this support can be translated into a political project is another, and more important, question. And still another is whether such support in the last resort is harmful to forming just the political project that it would need to realize its own goals. A brief but incisive presentation of the Forrestier affaire and its implications can be found in Pierre Rosanvallon’s ironically titled essay, “France: The New Anti-Capitalism.”
50. Laville and Levesque, “Penser ensemble l’économie et la société,” p. 214.
51. Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). See G. Roustang, J.-L. Laville, B. Eme, D. Mothé, and B. Perret, Vers un nouveau contrat social (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1997).
52. See “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques,” in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1950).
53. Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free, 1995).
54. André Gorz, Misères du présent: Richesse du possible (Paris: Galilée, 1997). For a discussion of Gorz’s earlier work that led him to these position, see my essay on the new workign class in Dick Howard and Karl Klare, eds., The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism Since Lenin (New York: Basic, 1972), as well as the afterword to Dick Howard, The Marxian Legacy, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
10. INTERSECTING TRAJECTORIES OF REPUBLICANISM IN FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES
1. Of course the excluded don’t represent a threat to overthrow the system, as did the working class, but the republican’s working class was never seen as the kind of social-revolutionary threat that was represented by Marx’s proletariat. I will examine the ground of this difference below, when I consider the French notion of solidarisme and its Durkheimian roots.
2. See Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
3. As will be apparent, one of the roots of the paradoxical trajectories of the concept is that the French and the Americans have a different understanding of what counts as political.
4. Indeed, Tocqueville points out that “of all countries in the world, America is the one in which the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed” (chapter 1, “Concerning the Philosophical Approach of the Americans,” Democracy in America, 2:429; emphasis added).
5. See V. I. Lenin, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” (1904), in Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), 1:443. Note that Lenin speaks here of the “organization” of the proletariat, not the proletariat itself.
6. See the article “Fraternité,” in Dictionnaire critique de la révolution française, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), pp. 731–741.
7. In “Fraternité,” Mona Ozouf recalls Jean-Paul Sartre’s attempt to reconcile his existential philosophy with his Marxist ideology by inventing the concept of “Fraternité-Terreur.” She doesn’t mention that Sartre’s concept has further implications, in effect justifying Stalinism. I have tried to show why the existentialist lover of freedom could find himself going to this extreme in The Marxian Legacy, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
8. The Great Seal of the United States, printed on the back of every U.S. dollar, features on one side the revolutionary motto “Novus Ordo Seclorum” and on the other the unitary imperative “E Pluribus Unum.”
9. Although this conflict between private interests or private rights and the public good has become increasingly evident, it is worth noting that its first appearance can be traced to the earliest stages of the American Revolution, when John Adams expressed his alarm at the democratic implications of Tom Paine’s Common Sense in his explicitly republican Thoughts on Government. Similarly, as a president faced with the democratic opposition of the Jeffersonians, Adams would justify for the same reason the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.
10. Rawls was translated into French only in 1987. Another reason for the French lack of concern with these issues is suggested in “Toward a Republican Democracy?” in chap. 9, “The Burden of French History.” The French tradition of administrative law is republican and unitary, with no place for the kind of legitimate conflict of competing rights’ claims that Rawls’s theory seeks to legitimate.
11. A useful examination of this French history is found in Jacques Donzelot, L’invention du social: Essai sur le déclin des passions politiques (Paris: Fayard, 1984).
12. Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
13. Sylvie Mesure and Alain Renaut, Alter ego: Les paradoxes de l’identité démocratique (Paris: Aubier, 1999). It should be noted that among Renaut’s work are studies and translations of Kant and Fichte as well as polemical debates with what he and Luc Ferry denounced as “’68 Thought.” He also recently edited a five-volume history of political philosophy. Renaut and Mesure also published together the excellent study La guerre des dieux: Essai sur la querelle des valeurs (Paris: Grasset, 1996), while Mesure is the author of a study of Raymond Aron.
14. See, e.g., ibid., pp. 255–256.
15. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic, 1983).
16. See especially the discussion under the heading “Property/Power,” in ibid., p. 292.
17. Since the index of Barber’s Strong Democracy contains no references to republicanism, however resonant his account may be with some of the categories under consideration here, I leave aside any discussion of its detailed proposals. I have discussed Barber’s more recent work in “Le déficit démocratique: Débats américains, questions européennes,” Transeuropéenes, nos. 6–7 (winter 1995–1996): 7–14.
18. This interpretation does, however, fall back on the old Hegelian-Marxist model of immanent critique by assuming that there exists—but in alienated form—a solution to the dichotomies and antinomies that render bourgeois thought so unstable. I doubt that Mesure and Renaut had this version of immanent critique in mind, but the presence of this Denkfigur is worth noting.
19. Christian Ruby, La solidarité (Paris: Ellipses, 1997).
20. Donzelot, in L’invention du social, stresses its Rousseauian presuppositions that identify the state of nature with Reason and leave no room for political deliberation—that is, for error—on the part of democratic individuals.
21. This is not strictly true in the American case, as John Patrick Diggens has noted frequently and eloquently, most recently in On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Lincoln’s opposition to slavery was not simply moral; it expressed also a political philosophy that was rooted in the republican tradition but integrated the role of free labor. A discussion of this strand in American history is unfortunately not possible here. For the French case, the influence of Proudhon as well as that of the utopian socialists starting from Saint-Simon would also constitute an exception.
22. Challenged from his left in his own party and by his Communist Party coalition partners, Jospin tried to have his cake and eat it too in his September 26, 2000, speech to the Socialist deputies of the European Parliament meeting in Strassburg: “The market economy does not spontaneously work in harmony. It needs ground rules to function effectively.” In our context, Jospin’s claim would be to combine procedural liberalism with socialism while ignoring the question of social solidarity and inclusion that is, however, the true challenge to modern republican politics.
23. Something that is imaginary is not therefore either stripped of any real effects or an unnecessary illusion or fiction. It is necessary to appeal to the concept of sovereignty when analyzing modern democratic politics. Sovereignty represents the symbolic unity of society. If one or another social group or political institution could actually incarnate this symbolic sovereignty, the democratic basis of society would be lost. See the discussion in “Republican Politics: Anomie and Judgment,” later in this chapter.
24. In the following paragraphs, I am summarizing some implications of my book The Birth of American Political Thought, which I also discuss in chap. 11, “Reading U.S. History as Political.”
25. The citation is found, significantly, in the chapter entitled “The Activity Present in All Parts of the Political Body in the United States: The Influence that It Exercises on Society,” which stresses the influence of the political republic on the social activity of the individual. The citation is found in De la démocratie en Amérique, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 1:254.
26. Indeed, one recalls that for many of the early modern political theorists, the judicial branch did not represent an independent representative power, and its independence is still questioned in many modern nations (such as contemporary France!). One might also recall that, in the Second Treatise of Civil Government (1689), Locke suggests that the so-called Federative Power “which deals with foreign policy” should be considered to represent an autonomous function of government. But there is of course no reason to look only to the past. The important point that needs to be developed further is that this imperative pertains to political institutions. If, as will be seen in a moment, one wants to treat trade unions as political, this means that their job is not simply (as Prime Minister Jospin suggested) to represent real (i.e., corporate) interests.
27. Still another example is offered by the development of international law, as suggested in the provocative study by Agnès Lejbowicz, Philosophie du droit international: L’impossible capture de l’humanité (Paris: PUF, 1999).
28. The excluded are excluded from something, after all. For example, French observers point out that the second generation of immigrants from the Maghreb differ from their parents in that they reject discrimination not simply because of its harmful and degrading personal effects but because they consider themselves to be first of all French.
29. This metaphor of “being heard” is used effectively in Jürgen Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), which also uses the interesting metaphor of society “laying siege” on the state to which I am also alluding here. See chap. 4, “Habermas’s Reorientation of Critical Theory Toward Democratic Theory.”
30. Of course, this is not Kant’s terminology. Moreover, it should be noted that Kant is talking about laws of the natural world rather than conventional laws, physei rather than nomoi. Nonetheless, in the political world of democratic republicans, there is a constantly present temptation to think of the sovereign will as if it also existed physei, as a natural given. In this context, it might be noted that the justification of the politics of will recalls the Greek notion of the oikos, the household world of production that is restricted to women and slaves and governed by laws of necessity, as opposed to the polis, which is the public domain in which freedom can be realized.
31. I cannot develop the technical arguments for this structural analogy further here. See Dick Howard, Political Judgments (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), as well as the systematic philosophical treatment in idem, From Marx to Kant, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993).
32. Who would have thought, in the 1970s, that European societies could live with 12 percent rates of unemployment? At what point does racial discrimination become exclusionary? When and under what conditions do the poorly housed represent an instance of exclusion? These are not questions for an objective social science; there are no pregiven laws under which they can be subsumed and in terms of which their weight can be measured. They are political questions.
11. READING U.S. HISTORY AS POLITICAL
1. It is worth noting that most progressive movements in U.S. history have appealed to the values of the Declaration rather than to the constitutional mechanisms and procedures that are supposed to ensure democratic political action. This could be one explanation for the absence of organized progressive political movements—and for the repeated recurrence of populist politics that is often tinted with reactionary overtones. I will try to suggest here why the Constitution does in fact offer progressives political possibilities for making social change. As for the reactionary overtones, see chap. 12, “Fundamentalism and the American Exception.”
2. That is why the definition of rights that are held to be self-evident is followed by a sentence that begins: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.”
3. On this reading, it took the incorporation of the post–Civil War amendments, particularly the fourteenth, in order to nationalize the rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Of course, the incorporation of those amendments took another hundred years with regard to race relations, and it continues in other aspects of American life.
4. I indicate the original substantive form of the French wording to stress that I am referring here not to actual historical events but to their symbolic meaning. I am summarizing briefly here the method I used in The Birth of American Political Thought, trans. David Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), which was originally written in French.
5. This is true mainly for the New England colonies, whose dissenting traditions and habits of ecclesiastical self-government made their churches more like what Weber designates as sects. Tocqueville stresses this habit of religious freedom particularly in the second volume of Democracy in America, where it seems to form a potential counterweight to the “tyranny of the majority” that he feared in the first volume and whose basis was the social fact of equality whose implications preoccupy him in that volume. Claude Lefort has stressed this latter point in several of his essays on Tocqueville, to which I am indebted. See also chap. 12, “Fundamentalism and the American Exception.”
6. I have inverted the Hegelian structure in which the concept integrates the moments of the immediate (being) and its reflexive mediation (essence) because Hegel’s system is not capable of thinking the autonomy of the political, as I tried to show in From Marx to Kant, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993). For Hegel, social problems make necessary political institutions, whereas the case of the American Revolution suggests that it is the political that gives meaning to the social.
There is a Hegelian aspect to the philosophical method for reading that I use in The Birth of American Political Thought (but not in the present discussion). In that book, a fourth section tries to interpret the various historical interpretations of the phenomena analyzed in order to demonstrate the validity of my arguments. This confirms the basic theoretical analysis in the same way as did Hegel’s nonsystematic works, such as his History of Philosophy; or, History of Religion. (It might be noted that Marx proposed the same method in Capital, whose three volumes relate as a triad, moving from the immediacy of a single capitalism to the mediation through the circulation of capital, and culminating in the analysis of the many capitals, to which a fourth volume, Theories of Surplus Value, was added in a similar attempt to confirm the basic argument.) See the discussion of Marx in chapter 13, below.
7. It is worth noting that it is the king rather than Parliament, against which previous protest had been addressed, who is declared to be the author of the “long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object [that] evinces a design to reduce them [the colonists] under absolute Despotism,” which gives the colonists “a right” [and a] duty, to throw off such Government.” The colonists hoped to reason with (or appeal to the interests of) members of Parliament, perhaps even achieving something more than mere “virtual representation”; attacking the king meant that the question of sovereignty was now the only issue to be addressed.
8. This does not contradict the earlier assertion that the constitutions of the states intended to represent society. The explicitly political form of representation incorporated in these state constitutions was assumed to be necessary in order to guarantee that the essence of society, its common good, would be correctly recognized. In this sense, the constitution of Pennsylvania and those of the other states do not differ; each assumes that there exists something called the common good, although they differ about the political institutions necessary for its discovery. I shall show that the federal constitution of 1787 works in terms of a different, properly political, logic.
9. No doubt an economic interpretation can be offered here. Lack of unity in the laws prevented interstate commerce from developing, while the overly democratic constitutions (not only in Pennsylvania) along with frequent renewal of the legislatures made for constantly changing laws that also worked against commercial growth. My point is not to deny the role of interest; it is to understand its place and its limits. Given their experience with English tyranny, the Americans’ concern was above all political.
10. To avoid misunderstanding, rights are not a thing that an individual has, the way one possess an object; rights exist in and as social relations. To say that the object of democratic politics is rights does not mean that the increase (or loss) of rights is the content of politics; it means only that, whatever issues are addressed, the results will also affect the rights of those concerned. An increase in the minimum wage is not only an economic gain.
11. Readers will recall having learned in high school Washington’s condemnation, in his farewell address, of “the baneful effects of the spirit of party,” as well as Jefferson’s first inaugural address, which insisted that “we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” The interpretation of the emergence of parties as a system was developed most convincingly by Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Hofstadter of course belongs to the literal school of consensus historians. His argument is nonetheless fundamental.
12. This argument is illustrated by Martin Van Buren, the first professional politician to reach the presidency, in his Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States (1867; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967). Although a fully pragmatic politician for whom party loyalty was the most important of all political principles, in his Inquiry Van Buren appeals to a contrast of good and evil that is typical of premodern politics.
13. The appeal to virtue can be seen not only in the cultural politics of the new left of the 1960s; it is also present in the cultural revolt that was symbolized in the antiestablishment cultural politics that made Barry Goldwater, the “conscience of a conservative,” into the Republican Party presidential candidate in 1964 before it eventually brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency. See This point has recently been made again in Sam Tanenhaus, “The GOP; or, Goldwater’s Old Party,” New Republic, June 11, 2001, which reviews among others Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right.
14. The anti-Federalists who opposed the new constitution did not think of themselves as a political party (indeed, they were opposed to parties as a threat to social unity). Nor did the relation of anti-Federalists to Federalists constitute a party system, as was the case later.
15. The argument for the priority of rights in American politics can be applied to the example of the New Deal and the role of political parties as well. Bruce Ackerman’s provocative suggestion, in We, the People, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), that the politics of the New Deal illustrates a second way in which the Constitution can be amended opens the way for such an interpretation—which is admittedly controversial and would demand a more historical analysis than can be offered here.
16. NIMBY is an acronym for “Not in My Back Yard.”
12. FUNDAMENTALISM AND THE AMERICAN EXCEPTION
1. The New York Times of November 10, 2001, notes that all biology texts in the state of Alabama will include a warning that evolution is a “controversial theory.” It is perhaps encouraging that the Times adds that Alabama has the “distinction” of being the only state to take such measures.
2. Cited in Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1962), p. 129. Hofstadter’s discussion of Bryan is found in chapter 5, “The Revolt Against Modernity.” His entire book remains a valuable warning for those who unthinkingly identify democracy with enlightenment and modernity.
3. Hofstadter points out later that Debs too had his anti-intellectual side. See the examples in ibid., p. 291.
4. Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1986), 1:204.
5. Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1995).
7. This fundamentalism is not new, nor is its relation to the politics of the far right. It was analyzed by liberal intellectuals worried about the rise of Goldwaterism in the 1960s, for example, in Daniel Bell’s study “The Dispossessed,” in The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell (1963).
8. It is difficult to accept Cox’s claim that the birth of Pentecostalism can be compared to the Protestant Reformation (p. 118–119). Richard Hofstadter already observed a distinction similar to the one described by Cox at the time of the Great Awakening in the nineteenth century. But for Hofstadter, this opposition is at the root of a strong antiintellectual current in American history. See his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
9. Once again, this does not seem to be a new historical invention. Richard Hofstadter’s attempt to explain McCarthyism and the rise of a new right-wing politics around Barry Goldwater and the John Birch society led him to analyze the recurrence of what he called a “paranoid style” of politics in American history. See Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1964).
10. Cox, Fire from Heaven, p. 297.
11. See Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1992), for the reasons that this view of welfare is wrong—and why it nonetheless remains popular.
12. It is worth noting that the other manifestations of Pentecostalism described by Cox do not manifest this shift from pre- to postmillinarianism. Nor does Cox explain its appearance in the United States. I will try to do so below, by looking at what historians call the “exceptional” character of the United States.
13. Describing his visit to the new university, Cox tries to put the best face on it—but doesn’t really convince. See Harvey Cox, “The Warring Visions of the Religious Right,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1995, pp. 59–69.
14. Cited by Cox, Fire from Heaven, p. 291.
15. Another, more liberal, interpretation of the idea of regency is proposed by Seymour Martin Lipset, who uses the term “stewardship” to explain the exceptional role of philanthropy in America: everything that exists in the world belongs truly to God, and we are only the temporary stewards and thus have an obligation to aid those in need (American Exceptionalism. A Double-Edged Sword [New York: Norton, 1996], p. 68).
16. Richard Hofstadter notes that the Puritan clergy was “as close to being an intellectual ruling class—or, more properly, a class of intellectuals intimately associated with a ruling power—as America has ever had” (Anti-Intellectualism, p. 59). But he also notes that it was guilty of the error that is typical of intellectuals, imagining that it “might be able to commit an entire civil society to the realization of transcendent moral and religious standards, and that they could maintain within this society a unified and commanding creed” (p. 62). On the other hand, Tocqueville notes that these Puritans had also been dissenters at home, seeking liberty more than economic equality. This may be one reason that, as I will suggest, they could initiate a kind of civil democratic tolerance and republican pluralism.
17. They may not leave on their own, but they will be liable to follow charismatic leaders who will find the room to emerge as the experienced unity of the believers becomes formal and bureaucratic as its liturgy is rationalized.
18. The sects that become churches often justify their transformation by pointing out that a poorly educated clergy typical of the sect is unable to face up to the challenges of modern life (including its secularism). The sects reply that experience of the spirit is more important than knowledge of the letter; worse, the educated man risks falling victim to the sin of pride.
19. Of course, there were other Protestant nations before the creation of the United States, but they were converts. America was born Protestant, so to speak.
20. From this perspective, the Constitution of 1787 (and Supreme Court judgments based on it) marks the transformation of the sect into a church. Radical movements, of the left and of the right, have appealed historically to the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address begins “Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers founded… .” Lincoln’s reference point is 1776, not 1787.
21. Lipset, American Exceptionalism, p. 31. In an article written in December 2001, reflecting on the impact of September 11, 2001, I suggested that American forms of anti-Americanism are particularly significant. (Cf. Esprit, janvier 2002.) The United States is founded on values, which of course can serve to put into question any given political claim to instantiate those values. While no one would talk about un-French attitudes, Hitler and his cronies did talk about Un-Deutsch behavior. But Germanity here referred to something essential, or substantial. The American values are of a different coin. I suggest that they have four distinct roots, all published in English language texts in 1776. The Declaration of Independence, of course, but also Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Bentham’s Fragment on Government, and especially Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The article is also available on the Web site indicated in the introduction; a German translation is in Kommune, January, 2002.
22. Lipset even argues that Lyndon Johnson’s error during the Vietnam War was his refusal to make it a moral crusade (because he feared that this would give rise to a renewed McCarthyism). The result was that the antiwar movement had the monopoly of morality (ibid., p. 66).
23. The best illustration of these developments was written before the peak of incomprehension; see E. J. Dionne Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).
24. The reconciliation of Weber and Durkheim around the problem of democracy is suggested in my essay “Individu et société,” in Philosopher 2 (Paris: Fayard, 2000).
13. PHILOSOPHY BY OTHER MEANS?
1. It should be noted that Sartre made this claim in the essay “Marxism and Existentialism,” which appeared as a hundred-page introduction to the incomplete but still fascinating Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), in which he attempted to offer a philosophical foundation to Marxist theory (p. 29). The remark follows a denunciation of the stagnation of Marxist theory, which Sartre hoped to renew. A discussion of Sartre’s theory appears in Dick Howard, The Marxian Legacy (1977; rev. ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
2. “Das philosophisch-werden der Welt als weltlich-werden der Philosophie,” in Frühe Schriften I (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1962), p. 70.
3. Citations from Joseph O’Malley’s edition of Marx’s Early Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) are given in parenthesis as OM, followed by a page number, here OM, 62. I have occasionally modified the translation but have always given the English source in OM.
4. The 1843 “Exchange of Letters” among Marx, Ruge, Bakunin, and Feuerbach is cited here from the Frühe Schriften I, p. 448. Two other passages from the exchange should be noted. “We do not,” writes Marx, “face the world in a doctrinaire fashion, declaring, ‘Here is the truth, kneel here.’ We merely show the world why it actually struggles; and consciousness is something the world must acquire even if it does not want to.” And, at the end of the letter, Marx notes that “mankind does not begin any new work but completes its old work consciously” (449, 450).
5. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts are quoted in my translation from the Cotta edition cited in n. 3, above; parentheses indicate the page numbers, here 645.
6. The critique directed here at Proudhon was a constant concern for Marx, whose goal was not simply to better the material conditions of “wage slaves.” The political implications of this critique emerge in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, which I discuss under “The Capitalist Economy as Political Subject,” below.
7. Citations from “Wage Labor and Capital” are from David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), indicated by DM and a page number, here DM, 256.
8. Citations from this text are translated from the German, published in volume 3 of the Marx-Engels-Werke (East Berlin: Dietz, 1962), and are indicated in the text by GI followed by a page number, here GI, 35.
9. Frühe Schriften I, p. 449.
10. Marx-Engels-Werke, 3:6.
11. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, with an introduction by A. J. P. Taylor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 82–83.
13. Citations from the English translation in Political Writings, vol. 2 (New York: Penguin, 1992), are indicated in the text as CSF, followed by the page, in this case 47.
14. Ironically, the concept of Bonapartism was adopted by the Fourth International (the Trotskyists) to offer a “materialist” explanation of Stalin’s rise to power.
15. Citations from the English translation in Political Writings, vol. 2, are indicated in the text by 18th followed by the page, in this case 150.
16. Capital as a whole was subtitled A Critique of Political Economy. Each volume had its own subtitle in Marx’s overarching conception. Encouraged by the economic crisis of 1857, Marx wrote a draft of his entire theory in 1857; this manuscript, which became widely available only in 1953, under the title Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, supports the interpretation of Marx’s economic theory as a whole that will be offered here. The failure of the crisis of 1857 to lead to revolutionary action may explain why the preface to the 1859 publication of Toward a Critique of Political Economy returns to the more determinist and reductionist theory that Marx and Engels had developed in The German Ideology.
17. Citations from the Penguin edition (London, 1967) are indicated in the text by volume and page number, here 1:280.
18. One need not treat that theory as the metaphysical claim that there is a kind of substance called labor that enters into the composition of each commodity; the theory can be understood instead as a critical theory of social relations. For a critique of the labor theory of value, see chapter 7’s discussion of Cornelius Castoriadis, above.
19. It is only in volume 3 that Marx tries to show that a “law of the tendency of the rate of surplus-value to fall” interferes with capitalism’s smooth reproduction process. This is because it is only in that volume that he introduces the competition among the capitalists that blinds them to the need to maintain the social formation on which their profits are based. That is when the “artificial” domination by the economic takes on a different connotation, that of being historically specific and thus transitory.
20. The phrase is found in a letter of February 22, 1858 (“Es ist zugleich eine Darstellung des Systems und durch die Darstellung eine Kritik desselben”). I first encountered it in Roman Rosdolsky’s pathbreaking study of the Grundrisse, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen “Kapital” (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968), p. 18n. On Marx’s relation to Lassalle, see the discussion of The Critique of the Gotha Program in the section “Politics and Class Struggle,” later in this chapter.
21. This systematic intent is evident in the amount of space Marx devotes to explaining not just that but how and why the economists were led to err. The fourth volume of Capital, Theories of Surplus-Value, is essential to Marx’s project: his systematic demonstration is complete only if he can show the necessity of these illusions.
22. Citations from the Vintage edition (New York, 1973) are indicated as Gr, followed by a page number, here, Gr, 463. The reader will recall the earlier critique of Proudhon’s politics as simply making for better-paid slaves. The same notion returns below in the critique of Lassalle in The Critique of the Gotha Program.
23. This latter point is subject to debate. Sometimes Marx seems to think that truly human relations lie outside the sphere of production, as in the Greek understanding of democratic citizenship; sometimes he is tempted by the romantic German model of self-fulfillment through the labor process. I will return below to his vision of human fulfillment as it is presented in the Grundrisse.
24. The manuscript of this chapter was first published in Russian and German in Moscow in 1933; it became accessible in the West in the late 1960s. Citations are from the English translation, printed as an appendix to the first volume of Capital, indicated as R followed by a page number, here R, 990.
25. This thesis, stated in the first part of chapter 15’s discussion of the “internal contradictions” of the law, is not consistently maintained. The other claim is that relations of production determine relations of distribution. In fact, both theses can be maintained if care is taken to distinguish capitalist relations of production based on exchange-value from social relations based on human or use-values.
26. Frühe Schriften I, 598.
27. Citations from the English translation in the Penguin edition, Political Writings, vol. 3, are given in the text as CWF followed by a page number, here CWF, 200.
28. Engels’s phrase is cited by Lenin in “State and Revolution,” in Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1960), 2:314.
29. Citations from the English translation in Political Writings, vol. 3, are indicated as Gotha followed by a page number, here Gotha, 346–347.
30. See the arguments developed particularly in chapter 9, above. This reconstruction of Marx’s project helps explain also the attraction-repulsion of critical intellectuals to Marxism that was illustrated throughout the first part of this book.