I MIGHT AS WELL say it straightaway: this book forms part of an inquiry that will not end with its final period. Proceeding, by way of Marx’s suspended revolution, from the Platonic philosopher-king to what reigns today as the sociological conception of the world, I will try to indicate here some of the milestones and retrace some of the paths I pursued in asking two or three questions that are, at once, very simple and very complicated. How are we to conceive of the relation between the order of thought and the social order—as harmony or as rupture? How do individuals get some idea in their heads that makes them either satisfied with their position or indignant about it? How are representations of self and other—which sustain hierarchy, consensus, or conflict—formed and transformed? For twenty years I have had occasion to pursue these questions in various sites and circumstances: a seminar on Capital called to an unexpected notoriety; a thesis on Feuerbach interrupted by the din of the street; some time spent circulating between university halls and factory doors; ten years of research in worker archives.
That certainly makes for a number of detours. And several times word got back to me that intentions so pure in principle and labors so laudable in their execution should be, nevertheless, in a bit more of a hurry to display the straight lines of their method and the terra firma of their results.
I must acknowledge that with respect to the questions I posed, I have been fortunate to encounter teachers of the highest repute, some rightly so. Unfortunately, a certain irresoluteness of character, fed by an excessive attention to minute discrepancies in detail, always kept me from finding the most promising theories confirmed in the examples that life or study offered me. To which undoubtedly was added a certain Christian sentimentality that made me judge as a bit simplistic and rather disdainful the way in which learned discourses assumed that the common run of mortals forged their vision of the world. To say nothing of the naïveté with which the defenders and historiographers of the people praise the sober simplicity of the ideas they ascribe to them.
And so I had to set out without a guide—without a thread, one master of the art said to me—on the territory of the historian. There the study of a single case, it seemed to me, would help to advance my research: the years 1830 to 1850 witnessed the flowering of utopian socialism and, at the same time, a wide range of working-class expression from ethereal poetry to combative pamphlets and doctrinal newspapers. I tried to learn if these two developments met up with each other, whether we could know what proletarian intellectuals gathered from this utopian flowering, what they were able to oppose to it from their own reserves, and what in this whole process affected thinking in such a way as to modify the order of things.1 In the course of this research, my interest shifted. Behind the “positivist” question—what could a person think at such a moment in the history of discourses and in such a position within the order of society?—I had to recognize the more fundamental question: how can those whose business is not thinking assume the authority to think and thereby constitute themselves as thinking subjects? The tableau that offered itself to me in response was exemplary in this respect, for when proletarians, in granting themselves permission to think, invaded the territory of the literati, the literati answered evasively by celebrating work as the true culture of the poor and the future of the world, and by warning the representatives of that world of the dangers of developing a split personality.
That scene was to remind me of some earlier readings as well as more recent experiences. I had read previously without particular interest the texts in which Plato borrowed from artisans the paradigms of philosophy, and those in which he ordered these same artisans not to think about anything beyond their jobs. I was born in a century when homage to labor, proletarian consciousness, and the spirit of the people brought to unheard-of perfection the forms of authority and the discourses of servitude. Where I lived, to be sure, the former were more civil and the latter more modest. But I was familiar enough with such efforts to restore to a class its consciousness, and to the people its culture, to sense in them also the trope that can be counted among the master logics of modernity: exclusion by homage. (As I indicated, I had personal reasons for being sensitive to the issue.) Finally, Bourdieu’s Distinction struck me with its insistence on opposing proletarian amor fati to bourgeois culture games—on opposing, if you will, the undershirts that cling tightly to the bodies of workers to the too-large ideas on which workers drift away when answering the questions of the experts [des savants].2 And that book’s criticism of philosophers as “deniers” of the social seemed to be in curious continuity with the exclusions of the philosophical tradition.
Between the ancient ruses of philosophy and the modern ruses of anti-philosophy, it appeared possible for me to trace a straight line. I would start from the logic used by Plato to make the philosopher a weaver, the better to consign shoemakers to the hell of non-philosophy, and I would arrive eventually at the reverence for popular virtues and the denunciation of ideological vanities that sustain equivocally the modern discourse of experts and leaders. Along the way, I would have to show only how Marx, in destroying the Platonic realm of the Ideas, may perhaps have prolonged what he said he was overturning, giving proletarians truth so as to exclude them more surely from the learned science reserved for experts. The task did not seem to be beyond my abilities.
I forgot that I had never known how to draw a straight line. And both Plato and Marx had more than one trick in store to ensure my failure once again. Plato forced me to notice that the sorry fate he reserved for artisans was also, precisely, the price to be paid for pursuing insistently a question that still has some importance for us: how can justice be established beyond all questions of technique and the hygiene of individual and social preservation? From the opposite angle, Marx’s brutality toward the old moons of the philosophical firmament was purchased at the price of ever-recurring lacerations and paradoxes. I had to ask myself why Marx laid the blame not on Don Quixote the chimerical lover of justice, but on Sancho the realist; why his proletariat was so inconsistent and his bourgeoisie so quick to swoon; and whether his work had been made interminable simply by reasons of his own health or by a more fundamental question regarding the distance between revolutionary justice and social health.
A few added twists and turns, then, so that what began as a rather dispassionate inquiry into the image of the worker in scholarly discourse came to transform itself as it reopened all the venerable conflicts between philosophy and rhetoric, justice and health. The contemporary blindness of policies that take one of these for the other, and that identify sociology’s framing of the question (and responses to it) with the advance of democracy, undoubtedly contributed to that change. The final section of this book may well have ended up, as a result, more lively than I had anticipated. But I realized that if we show too much respect for others’ arguments, we do them the worst injury, which is to make them insipid.
A closely related thought accounts for two presuppositions of my reading. I have never been able to subscribe fully to the golden rule that prevailed during the era of my schooling, which is not to ask an author any questions except for those that he had asked himself. I have always suspected a little presumption in that modesty. And experience seemed to teach me that the power of a mode of thinking has to do above all with its capacity to be displaced, just as the power of a piece of music may derive from its capacity to be played on different instruments. I need hardly point out that to argue the contrary has some relation to the doctrine urging everyone to mind his or her own business.
For similar reasons I have not bowed to the propriety that distinguishes between the recognized and disavowed works of a given author, or makes allowances for such circumstances as youth and maturity. Precautions and retractions may attest to an author’s courage or prudence. The fact remains that any mode of thinking that is the least bit singular reveals itself in always saying basically the same thing, which it cannot but hazard every time in the colorful prism of circumstances. Contrary to what interested parties may say, only imbeciles ever truly change, since they alone are free enough regarding all thought to feel at home in any particular mode of thinking. I personally have always tried to follow a simple rule of morality: not to take for imbeciles those about whom I was talking, whether they happen to be floor layers or university professors.3