Western Difference
Let us return to the core themes of our argument – technology and value in the ‘global era’ – from a standpoint that complements the one expounded in the first chapter: the paradoxes of universalism. As I shall argue particularly in the final section of this chapter, this is a demanding choice that involves the adoption of an unusual perspective compared with what commonly (or from the ‘disciplinary’ standpoint) is understood by ‘political philosophy’. The theme of the paradoxes of universalism draws directly upon that symbolic and cultural dimension of the conflict of values that is generally repressed or considered secondary by the prescriptive models, namely neo-Utilitarianism and neo-Contractualism, which have dominated the ‘doctrinal’ field over recent years. Therefore, it is necessary to immediately specify that the expression the ‘paradoxes of universalism’ is adopted here in its most rigorous sense. It is not our intention to speak, generally, of contradictions, limits, perverse effects, counter-finalities, etc., but – literally – to speak of paradoxes. That is, of something that is in contrast with the dóxa, with current opinion and the commonsense view of ‘universalism’. We will attempt to underline the tacit implications or the ‘un-thought’ (as one used to say) of universalism. This is a difficult operation to be carried out through a series of incisive and radical critical steps. However, we will not aim to denounce or eliminate the foundation of the universalist platform. We shall advance the reasons (plural) of universalism and its (this time in the singular) originary cultural premise, no less than its initial promise of emancipation. That its verification is not only essential, but even a necessary preliminary step on the way to the correct framing of the question (of which Steven Lukes is so fond) ‘What is left?’ – in the dual sense – is so obvious that it is not worth dwelling on.1
On the rare occasions when political discourses transcend concern with single issues by considering what causes them or what they have in common, one encounters a curious phenomenon. The paradoxes of universalism gravitate obsessively around a single point. They tend to gravitate around the same slogan, which also aims to serve as a passe-partout: the ethnocentric character of the Western ‘universalist’ horizon. This is something entirely different from the ‘glaring disparity’ – of which Tzvetan Todorov speaks at the start of his Nous et les autres – ‘between what people in power said and the lives they led and allowed us to lead’.2 It is a much more profound phenomenon even than the way official doctrines ‘robbed the noblest terms of their meaning: “liberty”, “equality”, and “justice” became words that served to mask repression and favouritism, the flagrant disparities in the way individuals were treated’.3 The paradox, as explained above, indicates instead that the emancipatory universals of the Occident (from the idea of communicative reason to that of the freedom of the will) underlie ab originibus a closing monocultural axiom. In other words, they constitute a set of values and guiding principles valid for all people and for all climates. But they also find themselves wrapped in a one-dimensional envelope that is entirely typical of the specific cultural source that generated them, i.e., that literally ‘conceived’ them and brought them into the world. In turn, that source bears the precise and unmistakeable markings of the logic of identity and of identification. This is the dispositif of the Western logos, furrowed since birth by a profound and invisible wound: the abstraction from corporeity, from naturalness, from the originary bifurcation of the species. It is unnecessary to insist on the decisive importance of this theme. We shall merely note, in passing, that it would not only be a pointless delusion but also a woeful error to hope to exorcise it on the grounds of the indisputable (and sometimes frankly unbearable) mannerism with which the critique of so-called logocentrism – or better still, ‘logo-phono-centrism’ – is to this day presented by some of the ‘super-contemporary’ representatives of the French and Italian thought of différence. While bearing in mind the breadth of the problem, we will focus on the triptych that for the last two centuries has represented modern Western rationalism: liberty, equality and fraternity. To this day, and even more so since the ‘second ‘89’, these three great themes perform the role of legitimating resource of the political organisations and institutions of the Occident.
A first and crucial problem arises concerning the viability of these principles in the face of the challenge of a ‘global era’ that is characterised by the irruption of irreducible ethical and cultural differences. The question directly concerns the destiny of the democratic form as well as the historical and emancipatory content it encapsulates, because those principles, which describe the horizon of politically incisive universalism, are also – as Edgar Morin has correctly noted – the guiding terms of the left.4 These are gigantic words, the importance of which stretches across the entire political arena and which divide up the world not despite but because of the collapse of the old ideological walls. They are hyperdense words that appear to concentrate within themselves a maximum of meaning and truth. They are nuclei words forming centres around which our ideas gravitate as do our conflicts. They are cardinal words that indicate the zenith and the nadir, the old and the new, the north and south, the low and high, the left and right. They are, finally, strategic words forming fortresses for our beliefs.
It is my firm conviction that these words have now become proprietors of reality. They are hyperreal. For this reason I believe that behind their apparent self-evidence there hide the ramifications and enigmas that must be extracted through rigorous conceptual analysis as well as through an unbiased interpretation of real phenomena. If we want to be fully prepared to face the challenges of our time, we must have the courage to analytically adopt/assume and politically master two distinct but interrelated phenomena: a) the ‘Promethean disproportion’5 – as Günther Anders used to call it – between Man and the world produced by Man (that is, the instrumental and linguistic universe of technology); and b) the cultural gap produced by the conflict between values and their existential translation, between the principles of politically incisive universalism and their practical realisation in the framework of the ‘material constitution’.
Holding together these two aspects in a productive tension represents our only credible chance of relaunching contemporary democracy. We are tempted to close these opening comments by returning to the ancient but still valid exhortation Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
But we should not be so precipitous. What we have said so far is merely the tip of the iceberg.
The ‘Big Chill’
In order to approach the problem adequately and to not remain ensnared by the scenarios we have just outlined, we will have to carefully avoid two sterile and risky attitudes. On the one hand, we must ban from our discourse ‘Nobel Prize–style statements’. That is to say, we must avoid all generic formulas that the language of politics has perniciously transmitted even to ‘intellectuals’, who have been called to comment upon anything and everything. Such language has not moved on since the nineteenth century, notwithstanding the impact that the twentieth-century revolutions had upon expressive forms, from the arts to the sciences, and to the very way we look at experience. The archetype of such sententious phrases is best represented, naturally, by the extraordinary ‘discovery’ that the current situation of humanity is characterised by the alternative between great dangers and great possibilities. In other words, and more specifically, we must steer clear of the ‘dual’ perversity of the postmodern, the oscillation between the hermeneutics of euphoria (weak thought, theory of the simulacra et similia) and a heuristics of fear (the common attitude to the ‘dark’ aspect: from Arnold Gehlen’s posthistoire to Hans Jonas’ ‘principle of responsibility’). On the other hand, we must also avoid setting up our own ‘Western-Eastern Divan’ (the allusion is to Goethe’s West-östlicher Diwan) by rambling on about yet another (in truth antediluvian) ‘discovery’ concerning the relationship between the Orient and the Occident.
Let us try to grasp the bull by the horns while doing our best not to be gored. Today, the Occident is an exploded cultural sphere. The explosion, whose fragments we find ourselves trying to administer, occurred not despite but as a consequence of the apparent global victory of its model. So what characterises the ‘spiritual situation’ of our age? The imposition of homologating Western parameters under every sky and over all cultures? I do not think so; or, rather, I do so only in part. We must signal that we are faced with a crucial point. To do so we will go against the current of the discordia concors of all those ‘apocalyptic’ or ‘integrated’ intellectuals who, from within the Occident, either jubilantly salute the triumph of the Western model or babble in defeatist manner against the universal homologation supposedly introduced by such a model, without recognising that for some time now the stick has been bent in a diametrically opposed direction to that of universalism. The climate threatening to mark the passage to the new century is that of the politics of difference championed by different groups in their increasingly widespread and intense rebellion against the universalist Western model. I refer – for those who have not already understood – to the battle of the American Communitarians against the democratic pact. This is a far more subtle and insidious phenomenon than even the nationalistic and sub-nationalistic ‘tribalism’ that has rent the European continent since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Empire. The battle of the neo-Communitarians is more socio-cultural than political. For this reason, it risks taking root in ethnic groups and strata of the population that are traditionally indifferent to the course of the politique politicienne. For these veritable ‘indigenous’ fundamentalisms of the Occident, the institutions of universalism represent the realm of the ‘Big Chill’ because they are irredeemably typified by a physiological indifference towards the different ‘politics of recognition’ engaged in by the multiple ‘communities’, that is, towards the links of solidarity that can exist not between atomistically divided individuals (according to the schema of the ‘social contract’ from Hobbes onwards) but between concrete, culturally alike subjects. We begin to glimpse the outline of the unsettling neo-Communitarian challenge. From its perspective, not only is the instrumental and strategic dispositif of universalism ethnocentric (i.e., the technologies, the conventions, the formal rules of democracy), but so is its ‘communicative reason’, that is, the very idea of rational dialogue. Persuasion, in other words, is viewed as a more civilised model of the conversion of the ‘barbarian’ and the ‘infidel’. It is seen, therefore, as essentially a means to neutralise cultural ‘alterity’. Moreover, the emphasis on the concretion of the forms of life tends to draw the themes of solidarity and sharing of values back to the riverbed of cultural specificity.
In the face of the most extreme forms of communitarianism and ‘multiculturalism’ (the other key phrase of these years), there is a strong temptation to see in them ‘nothing new’, as if they were merely an anachronistic reaction to the victories of Western democracy and rationalism; but to do so would be merely to shut one’s eyes, entrenching oneself in a sterile and pathetic defence of our certainties. It would mean failing to ‘understand’ the reasons for a challenge that is drawing into its orbit not only substantial social groups but also combative and well-prepared intellectuals: from Robert Bellah to Alasdair MacIntyre, from Charles Taylor to Martha Nussbaum, from Michael Sandel to the late, lamented Christopher Lasch, right through to the brilliant ‘liberal-communitarian’ hybridisations of Walzer and Rorty. Moreover, are we so sure that the themes of solidarity and the bond of the community are adequately accounted for by the great equations of universalism? To answer this question it is necessary to rapidly analyse the components of the revolutionary-emancipatory ‘triptych’.
The Forgotten Dimension
As we have already suggested, behind their apparent self-evidence, the three principles of modern universalism conceal some enigmatic and paradoxical ramifications that still need unpacking. The paradoxes of universalism taken in the sense of politically incisive universalism (i.e., which is constitutive of the politics and freedom of modernity) are essentially of two types: A) the paradoxes inherent to the ideal/conceptual structure and B) the paradoxes inherent to the historical dynamic and experience. We shall examine each of these aspects.
As is well established, the age-old dispute among liberalism, socialism and democracy has almost exclusively concentrated on the two poles of liberty and equality. It has either posed itself the problem of distinguishing between the two dimensions or it has attempted to conjugate them in a superior, or simply more acceptable, synthesis. All of the political, economic and social doctrines that allied themselves to each of these great idealities (and attempted, more or less successfully, to bring them together in the forms of liberal democracy, social democracy or ‘liberal socialism’) engaged with this bipolar tension. Fraternité was the forgotten dimension – at least from the theoretical standpoint. It is rare to find a specific entry in political dictionaries for this term. For example, there is no sign of an entry for this term even in the revised Dizionario di politica (1983) edited by Norberto Bobbio, Nicola Matteucci and Gianfranco Pasquino. This is not an unimportant omission, given that it is one of the key principles of the triptych. There is, however, a profound reason for this absence. The problem of ‘fraternity’ represents a veritable thorn in the side for the triad of modern universalism, precisely because it poses the question of the link, the bond of solidarity and community that no logic of pure freedom or mere equality is able to grasp or resolve. The logic to which the values of freedom and equality answer is the – strictly modern – logic that underlies the historically and anthropologically cultural model of individual choice. In the final analysis this model rests on a foundation of individualism. Therefore, in the very conceptual and symbolic structure of universalism there is a latent conflict between the (general) logic of citizenship and the (specific) logic of belonging. Hence, it is inevitable that it is precisely those democratic movements and tendencies that aim to present themselves as the ‘party of rights’ which have to assume the centrality of this paradox in its entirety. From here stems the paramount question: how can one be the bearer of rights without opposing the logic of belonging? How is one to conjugate universalism and difference? Two historical examples will suffice to signal the difficulty of the problem.
Already in the revolutionary phase, fraternité sought and found a lasting referent in the idea of the nation. But it was precisely this idea that would trigger the retaliation of the ‘nationalization of the masses’.6 After the Napoleonic wars, the post-revolutionary European states adopted the national factor as the identifying element of recognition and belonging to contrast the French pretence of imposing, through universalist-revolutionary legitimation, its own nationalist and expansionist interests.
The other thorn in the side of the universalist model is represented by the logic of class. To the same extent but in a different manner from the question of nationality, it too posed the problem of belonging and of a symbolic identification that is not given by the terms of liberty and equality themselves. Both these claims of belonging acted as limit and break to the logic of rights, understood as the expansive dynamic of rules and formal dispositifs providing a universally valid insurance. To be schematic, we could say that class, in contrast to nation, involves two types of division. A horizontal one that forms the basis of its transnational (or internationalist, as one used to say) vocation, and a vertical one that sustains the ‘strong’ (and originally exclusive) character of its criteria of identity and belonging. However, even the historical projection of ‘class’ appears marked by a two-sidedness or – if you prefer – by an inextinguishable ambiguity. Consider, on the one hand, the polemic that for a long period the workers’ movement conducted, in the name of ‘cosmopolitan’ enlightenment, against the ‘nationalistic revivals’ of the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, think of the reiterated calls to ‘take up the flags’ that had been allowed to fall into the mud by the ineptitude of the ruling elites. As we know, the course of European social democracy has hardly been free from nationalistic (as well as statist) tendencies, even without going as far as the extreme solution represented by Leninism. In Leninism, class and state tend to be so tightly screwed together that they result in a model far from the one originally delineated by Marx and the First International (and, partly, even from that developed – in a much more complex climate and in a more enduring form – by the Second).
B) To grasp the paradoxes inherent to the dynamic and historical experience of the principles of universalism, we must take up again and deepen a theme that was clear to the disenchanted gazes of Tocqueville and Weber but also to the infernal and mercilessly demystifying eye of the old Marx. The process of capitalist modernity constitutes a unique, absolutely exceptional event in the context of human societies, precisely because it is realised through the revolutionising of values and a radical break with the bonds of the community that held together the traditional areas of life. Therefore, the affirmation of modern universalism coincides with the experience of universal uprooting. But this experience is nothing other than the effect of the unfolding of the cultural presupposition of universalism, that is, of its irreducibly individualist nucleus. It is the ‘individualist model’ and not (to adopt Louis Dumont’s oppositional couple) the ‘holistic model’ that forms the basis of the very principle of equality. And it is on this basis that one should look for the explanation for its unprecedented expansive force. Tocqueville said that once equality irrupts into history, it can no longer be driven out. Nevertheless, whereas the holistic model has always been differentiating par excellence (paradoxically, precisely because of its organic and hierarchical nature), the individualist model (conversely, for its intimately egalitarian vocation) has been homologating par excellence. This is a crucial paradox that Tocqueville, Marx and Weber – each in his own way – sharply bring into focus. But, having done so, they infuriatingly, each for different if not completely opposed reasons, leave the paradox unresolved. As disenchanted diagnosticians must, the first and last thinkers proposed an ethics to confront destiny, not a theory to make history. Marx, on the other hand, who wanted instead to make history and unquestionably made an impression on it, outlined a solution but – properly examined – did so in terms of a grand finale of individual realisation and collective fulfilment. Who can forget the ‘each’ as sender and receiver of ‘all’ in the propositions of the Manifesto or of the Critique of the Gotha Programme? Contrary to what is believed today, the proliferation of ‘false paths’ taken by the Marxist-inspired left have not depended on an excess but on a deficit of prescriptions in Marx’s work. It was precisely the absence of medium-term indications concerning ‘what is to be done’ – compared with the ‘irenic’ long-term projections and the many analyses of the present and the short term – that left the political organisations of the various Internationals with the challenges of the paradoxes of universal emancipation. On the one hand, the workers’ movement declared it was carrying forth the Enlightenment idea of emancipation by immersing it into the materiality of real struggles, while on the other hand, it brandished the logic of class as a weapon against the model individualist homologation. In other words, belonging to a class has always represented an alterity and an insoluble aporia of universalism, coagulating the social link against the fragmentation provoked by the principle of individualism.
Looking back at the dramatic history of the last century, one has the impression that the aporia has doubled, making way for two separate [divaricati] but interrelated phenomena. The first historic phenomenon is represented by the flowing of the latent determinism of the idea of ‘law of motion’ (an aspect that coexists and conspires with the radically individualist premises) into the fetishisation of the Collective. This route has led – with all the ‘orthodox’ alterations and legitimations of doctrine – to the tragic experience of ‘real communism’. The second phenomenon is constituted by the flowering of counter-tendencies and zones of resistance to universalism, which involve the championing of the irreducible autonomy of partial subjects, whether they be real or mythologically constituted: race, ethnicity, Volk. It would be extremely interesting to analyse the various manipulations that the concept of ‘the people’ underwent in the twentieth century. We would no doubt discover some unexpected and unsettling collusions between ‘right’ and ‘left’. But I believe that, once again, an anthropologist such as Louis Dumont is correct (in contrast to many political scientists) in affirming that contemporary totalitarianism is by no means an ‘aberration’ or an ‘exceptional event’ – that would confirm the rule of our ‘Splendid, and progressive, destiny’7 – but a creature born from the viscera of universalist individualism;8 despite the fact that it completely reverses its polarity, assigning to a collective Identity or Fetish the (individualist) prerogatives of the will to power and dominion over the world. It is certainly no accident that it is precisely through the analysis of the dynamic of the masses in the last century that emerges the need to excavate the ‘heart of darkness’ of the Occident, to bring its constitutive elements to light. But for the fact that – and I come now to the most subtle point of my argument – to confront the problem in these terms means inevitably running into the limits of a rationalistic and utilitarian-type approach to social phenomena.
Pluralism and Conflicts of Value
To highlight some of these limitations I will introduce a theme that, today, is decisive not only at the level of theory but also with respect to the socio-cultural challenge of the Communitarians: the theme of the conflict of values. Not only Western philosophy but Western politics as well has always – except in the case of some significant exceptions – tended to consider the conflict of values to be a pathological accident. This has not, however, only influenced/affected the utilitarian paradigm but the Kantian idea of Man as a moral agent as well. Following the dissolution of causal determinism and substantialism, we have in recent years witnessed the return of ethics on a grand scale. And yet, this return appears to be infected with an old prejudice: the doctrine of rational behaviour. According to this doctrine, whose most celebrated representative is Kant, every person is a transcendent ethical subject able to act in accordance with universal principles and independently from his existential situation and, specifically, from his historical and cultural roots. It is a case now of seeing whether such a doctrine can form an adequate platform to confront the challenges of our time, or whether this extremely noble idea might not contain instead the roots of the ethnocentric paradox of Western universalism, that is to say, of the paradox which allows it to be a vehicle of ‘colonisation’ of other cultures that is the more powerful the more subtle it is. We shall now verify/investigate in what sense the theme of the conflict of values explodes the two principal contemporary versions of the doctrine of rational behaviour.
In the course of this investigation, we shall consider positively, and then critically, two philosophers who develop a particularly mature and sophisticated level of ethical and political argument: Bernard Williams and Isaiah Berlin.9 They share the belief that the limit of neo-Utilitarianism lies in its pretence to reduce the conflict of values to a case of logical incoherence, and the limit of neo-Contractualism consists in the presupposition of a high level of cultural homogeneity between the subjects and groups that are located in the ‘original position’.10 From this standpoint, the critique that neo-Communitarians direct at Rawls seems to be anything but foundationless. The ‘veil of ignorance’ that forms the presupposition of the ‘original position’ of the contract is, in reality, too flimsy. If one wants to include subjects that are also unaware of the facts of the French Revolution or are, at least, unwilling to attribute universal significance to the values that flowed from it, it is necessary to increase the veil’s thickness. But this is precisely the problem with which democratic Occidental societies find themselves faced: that of confronting the demands for citizenship of culturally differentiated individuals and groups who, while they instrumentally demand recognition of their rights, are not prepared to acknowledge the universal legitimacy of the democratic formalism. For both Berlin and Williams (despite the difference of their language and theoretical framework), the Western philosophical tradition meets its limit precisely where it considers the conflict of values as a pathology, an obstacle to be removed, a nuisance against which one must defend oneself at the first opportunity. According to Berlin, the dominant philosophical and political tendency of the Occident rests upon three fundamental assertions. 1) For every authentic question there exists one correct answer that excludes all other responses as erroneous, as not-true. As long as it is formulated in a logically clear manner, there is no question of which one can provide two distinct answers both of which would be correct (and equally, there is no correct answer to an inauthentic question). 2) There exists one method to find logically valid answers. 3) All valid answers must be compatible amongst themselves. A tradition structured in this way is, in truth, able to ‘tolerate’ only the conflict of interest. Conversely, the conflict of values is registered – by this tradition – as a pathological outburst;11 i.e., literally separation from the chain of being, collapse of logical coherence, deficit of rationality. But the reality of the social context is one constituted by a plurality of values that can enter into conflict and that are not necessarily reducible one to the other. Therefore, this conflict can also be translated into a conflict of obligations, of mutually incompatible imperatives that can in no sense be treated as a case of logical incoherence, or only at the price of thinking in accordance with an ethnocentric and colonial model of Reason. In short, there is a dramatic typology of the cases that we could call ‘tragic’, in which we find ourselves faced with the Williams idea of the incommensurable exclusivity of a hierarchy of incompatible values. This is not only a confrontation between Western culture and other cultures, but of a conflict of values that traverses the very heart of the Cosmopolis, of the Occident’s metropolitan life as well.
From the diagnosis of these two philosophers, there emerges the clear awareness that – following the globalisation of the Western model – the problem of cultural alterity does not exist only as a clash with the outside, but as an aporia internal to the functioning of Western society itself. It is Berlin, however, who registers the centrality of the problem most acutely. His most recent reflections directly concern the decline of utopias. He indirectly poses the question: why is it that the failure of the idea of the ‘new man’ and the ‘perfect society’ does not end with the collapse of real communism but continues to reverberate strikingly from East to West? In attempting to answer this difficult question, he sets out from the link between Western utopia and the idea of a homogeneous and universal (ethical and rational) nature of man. All the variants of utopia, he argues, are anchored to the original universalist vocation of Western culture. The entire arch of their historical development – from colonial utopias to the so-called colonisation of the future – would receive the seal of universal fulfilment, that is, of static perfection, understood as the restoration of a shattered original unity.12 Isaiah Berlin’s suggestive historical and doctrinal fresco concludes with the proposal of pluralism as the one plausible solution to the symmetrical but inconvenient opposites of universalism and cultural relativism. But in what way and with what arguments is such a solution prospected?
Common Good and Self-Refuting Prophecy
The core of Berlin’s argument consists in opposing the universalist model to the other aspect of the Enlightenment (and, mutatis mutandis, Hegelian) philosophy of history: namely, the idea of the irreducible autonomy of cultures proposed [prospettata] by Herder (and before that, by Vico). In contrast to the utopia of history understood as the progressive (linear or dialectical) transition towards the transparency of Reason, there stands the ‘healthy’ opacity of cultural differences understood in their incommensurable individuality. No ethics or rationality of action is formed independently of the riverbed of tradition and language, i.e., in accordance with a specific symbolism. Every culture has its own parameters and its own hierarchy of values that is different from others. Therefore, to postulate a criterion of valuation that presupposes a single standard of measure for ‘rational behaviour’ is a proof of the blindness towards that which makes humans human: the capacity to differentiate themselves culturally. Berlin’s warning is extremely severe. Either democracy sheds its traditional prerogatives of cultural autochthony and abandons the universalist and monist fetish of the substantially homogeneous Subject, or it will find itself ensnared in the critical mass of its paradoxes. It risks being sucked back into the spiral of the self-refuting prophecy.
And yet Berlin’s solution to the question is as unsatisfactory as his framing of it is rigorous. Essentially, the inadequacy can be traced back to his way of understanding the democracy of ‘difference’, which he interprets in terms of pluralist democracy or democracy of differences. This is in no sense a ‘weak’ interpretation of the term. On the contrary, it turns conflict into a constitutive moment of the democratic process and the search for the ‘common good’ into the unstable equilibrium between the aspirations of various groups. But such a reading allows one a merely rhetorical escape from the horizon of ethical relativism of the type represented by Kelsen. At best, it allows one to correct it and integrate it via the anthropological notion of cultural pluralism (that is, in any case, not alien from Kelsen’s thinking). And this is so because Berlin leaves substantially unanswered two decisive questions that are of vital importance for democratic theory.
First, the question regarding the presupposition of the value of democracy: the inviolability of human rights in terms of individual rights and the inalienable rights of the individual. Kelsen’s ethical and philosophical relativism includes such an ultimate value in the rigorously conditional schema: ‘if … then …’. If you choose the principle of the right to life and liberty of each, then you can only opt for the democratic form. Conversely, a coherent escape from the swamp of relativism leads to the adoption of this value as an element of challenge and comparison with ‘other’ cultures that negate it or subordinate it to other values (the Collective, the State, the Nation, the People, etc.). But this compels one to overcome the axiom of the incommensurability of cultures that is part and parcel of a particular anthropology, as well as the adoption of a comparative perspective that is able to contemplate the moment of symbolic interaction between cultural contexts. In fact, assigning the symbolic dimension exclusively to the moment of differentiation indicates the inheritance of a burdensome ethnocentric prejudice that is widely present in anthropological studies. On closer examination, the highlighting of differences (that each, in their own domain, acts as though they were irreducible identities) is not at all an antithesis but the other side of the coin of homologating universalism.
Therefore, the abandonment of the universalist and substantialist idea of the ‘common good’ should not necessarily result in an embrace of the Herderian scenario of cultures that relate to one another as insular self-sufficiencies, or monads without doors or windows. The globalisation of the world that took effect with the collapse of the wall between East and West has suddenly projected us against a wall that is so vast that we are unable to see its contours. Those contours are of a problem that is so macroscopic as to pass unobserved: that a confrontation between the great cultures of the planet has not yet happened. At this time, when Western democracies are becoming heir to ever more active and conspicuous elements of other cultural contexts, this confrontation is on the point of imposing itself with an absolute urgency.
All this takes place in the presence of a critical threshold that we have only just begun silently, and almost imperceptibly, to traverse. The crossing of this critical threshold crucially implicates the very idea of ‘nature’ that we had become accustomed to and upon which we had constituted – since the modern era – our political order and social contracts. To this point, nature had essentially been conceived in two ways by Western culture. First, nature as ‘temple’, as ordered cosmos and impassable container of events that followed one another cyclically (in accordance with the classical account that spanned from Greek and Roman civilisation to the Middle Ages). Second, nature as ‘laboratory’: a partitioning of the universe for experimentation (according to the account that spanned the period from the 1600s throughout the industrial epoch). Now we see a new idea emerge, where the very boundaries between nature and artifice begin to fade: nature as code. This is an entirely new idea – postmodern, if you like – but extremely ancient as well. It evokes the traditional, hermetic or cabalistic theme of the cipher and deciphering. It is on this basis that we must rethink the very idea of contract, which originally postulated nature as a ‘state’, an unmodifiable presupposition upon which the artifice of the state – the ‘mortal god’, the ‘great and omnipotent’ Leviathan – would be erected. It is from this standpoint that the challenge of universalism must again be launched by considering a new range of possibilities for the destiny of the species on this planet.
Given this – to say the least – unsettling backdrop, what is the task for democracy? First, it must contend with the radical transformation that has affected some of the key problems against which it has measured itself historically, beginning with the problem of exploitation, which today tends increasingly to turn into that of marginalisation. But the very problem of marginalisation cannot be conceived in classical terms, since it now directly implicates the critical-cultural dimension. In his most recent work, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt – a sociologist who has come closer than most to a comparative approach to the cultural problems of ‘modernisation’ – has provided an illuminating interpretation of contemporary fundamentalisms. He has explained how it is not the exploited or poor classes that are fundamentalist, but rather those strata of the population who feel themselves to be marginalised by the ‘centre’ of society. This feeling of marginalisation from the centre constitutes an essential aspect not only for sociological analysis but for a radical redefinition of the concept of democracy itself. To assume it fully means going to the very root of this concept and initiating a confrontation between the two halves of the Occident. In addition, it involves an unprejudiced attempt to verify whether the ‘oceanic model’ of the common-law countries is more suited than the ‘Continental model’ of the civil-law countries to make the two poles of universalism and difference interact. But acknowledging this would mean – both for theory and practice – renouncing once and for all the idea of the state as the ‘lever’ of emancipation. It would mean … oublier Paris.
Therefore, the adoption of a comparative perspective on cultures is essential to the reconstruction of a political concept adequate to our times. It is of vital importance to establish the relationship between invariance and mutation in the forms of power on which are staked the destinies of the ‘third phase’13 of democracy, i.e., of that transnational democracy that is definitively able to leave behind the obsolete ‘referents’ of the preceding phases – from the demos to the nation states. But for democratic culture (in both its liberal-democratic and its social-democratic variants) to make/satisfy such demands it must measure itself against a series of unresolved conceptual problems. I will merely consider the principal ones, which – ideally – should be inserted into a whole series of others.
The first conceptual node to be resolved is that formed by the confrontation between the two paradigms underlying the different conceptions of order and conflict: the methodological-individualism of rational behaviour (or the voluntarist theory of action) – which sets out from the agent and his/her rationality, turning on the notions of ‘preference’, ‘intentionality’, ‘model of ends’, ‘project’ etc. – and the anti-utilitarian model of social normativity, according to which the individualist dimension of action is instead overdetermined by symbolic systems that are experienced and acted upon, above all, unconsciously. Are we certain that the theme of the relation between common and shared values – in Jon Elster’s words, by the ‘cement of society’14 – is entirely subsumable under the first paradigm? Are we sure that – schematically speaking – it is resolvable within Weber’s perspective, without having first attentively evaluated Durkheim’s or Mauss’ positions, and, last but not least, Freud’s?
The second unresolved conceptual theme is that of the ‘sacred’, which is the inescapable constant of power and of the social bond once one adopts the idea of society as a relational-symbolic whole; that is, as something more than, and other than, the simple sum of the individuals who compose it. Even to those who are reluctant to take up the radical notion of ‘sacred sociology’ that emerged in the 1930s from Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois’ Collège de Sociologie, it will be difficult not to agree with Clifford Geertz15 that a society that is entirely desacralised is one that has been completely depoliticised. If the motif of the sacred is identified with that of the persistence of iterative rituals and models that preside over the mechanisms of symbolic identification – a question the sociologist Alessandro Pizzorno has focused on keenly in relation to democratic theory – then another significant requirement follows: that of a radical revision of the concepts of ‘secularisation’ and ‘Western rationalism’ as they were elaborated in Max Weber’s great comparative investigation. In other words, secularisation does not connote a linear ‘desacralisation’, in the same way as the crisis of the so-called centralities (from the People-subject to the State-subject)16 does not necessarily result in an attenuation or weakening of the mechanisms of symbolic identification. A paradigmatic example of this is Marc Bloch’s analysis of the symbolic interchange between religious auctoritas and political potestas in Les Rois thaumaturges of 1924,17 which constitutes a veritable jewel of historical anthropology. As he argues there, the centuries-long conflict between the two powers does not bring to an end a linear process of differentiation. Rather, it draws to an end a mirror game in which the one tends to assume the prerogatives of the other. The Church takes on the characteristics of a state (assuming the qualities of centralisation and bureaucratic rationalisation) and the state adopts ecclesiastical ones (increasing its sacred features and ritualising its procedures).
The third conceptual node we need to consider is that of the mythical-ritualistic pattern of sovereignty. This theme emerged from Samuel Hooke’s ethnological investigations at the start of 1930s, which were collected together in Myth and Ritual and The Labyrinth. The significance of these investigations is not only that they bring to light (some decades before Michel Foucault) the persistence of a mythical-ritualistic complex independent from the existence – or otherwise – of a topologically identifiable and visible sovereign Centre. Their importance, instead, is in their shattering that ‘contempt of ritual’ that Mary Douglas saw as one of the negative attributes of contemporary social theory.18 By demonstrating the derivation of myth from ritualistic practice (and not vice-versa, as in the formula that goes back to the German cultural tradition and, in particular, to the phenomenologism of Frobenius’ school), those investigations showed the importance of power’s spatial framework. But in so doing they ended up rehabilitating the Latin function of ritus. It is no coincidence that there is no equivalent for this term in the Greek language. Ritual (in which that system of rules and procedures that we call ‘law’ is cultivated) is the ‘black box’ that links up the two key moments of the symbolism of power: augurium and regnum, auctoritas and regal/monarchical power. They both derive from the common root aug- (from which the verb augere stems); augurium and auctoritas include the meaning of ‘augmentation’ [aumento], of symbolic increment. In relation to these, regnum acts as normative operator and regulator. In other words, regal potestas translates the augmentum, the increment of sense (and the conferment of authority) implicit in the augural [augurale] function, in a dispositif of signs. As has been documented by Benveniste, the etymology of rex – from the root rex – relates back to the meaning of regere, ‘marking’, tracing a straight line and, hence, delimiting or marking the perimeter of a space.
Rex, which is attested only in Italic, Celtic, and Indic – that is at the Western and Eastern extremities of the Indo-European world, belongs to a very ancient group of terms relating to religion and law.
The connexion of Lat. Rego with Gr. Orégō ‘extend in a straight line’ (the o- being phonologically explicable), the examination of the old uses of reg- in Latin (e.g. in regere fines, e regione, rectus, rex sacrorum) suggests that the rex, properly more of a priest than a king in the modern sense, was the man who had authority to trace out the sites of towns and to determine the rules of law.19
Originally, the expression rex regit regiones means ‘the marker [segnatore] marks [segna] the marks [segni]’. Thus, the couple augurium/regnum – indicating a link but an unresolvable tension as well – forms the constant supporting the symbolism of power and of public space, even in its multiple variants and historical metamorphoses. The dynamics of power perennially pose the problem of an excess of meaning, a surplus of sense that must each time individually be translated into an intrinsically coherent system of signs. It is from the irreducible tension of this polarity that the secret logic presiding over all myths of foundation draws its origin: the mythology of a single and ‘sovereign’ source of power. Consequently, the crises of legitimacy of a political order or regime are always produced from the uncoupling of the two poles of the augurium/augmentum/auctoritas and the regnum/ regere of potestas. If it is true to say that, today, such a crisis affects the democratic form, as is attested to by the neo-Communitarian and neo-Populist rebellion against ‘procedural liberalism’, it follows that there is only one way to confront it: to once again raise the question of its ‘essence’ or ‘value’ (from which, in the final analysis, stem its ‘rules’ and ‘techniques’ as well), and to verify if it can be said to contain a symbolic reservoir, an ‘augural’ redundancy of meaning, that its currently codified signs are no longer able to transmit, and, if so, where this may be found. It is doubtful, however, that such a verification can be given without submitting the two poles of the ‘individual’ and the ‘community’ to a further investigation that would go well beyond the terms in which their relation had been thought of by the dominant paradigms of liberalism and socialism.
I will conclude by coming to the other – more specifically theoretical – point left out in Isaiah Berlin’s diagnosis. It concerns what we could call – following Robert Dahl – the ‘shadow concept’ of democracy. It consists not so much in ‘overcoming’ its meta-physical-substantialist status in a relativist or pluralist manner, so much as the activation of its metaphysical implication. If it is true to say that the vocation of democracy, inasmuch as it is the typical political-cultural institution of the Occident, is represented – as Tocqueville, Marx and Weber well knew – by the cipher of uprootedness, its most suitable definition will be that of the commonplace of uprootedness. Only on this basis – which is also an alternative rethinking of the potential of the tradition – is there a possibility of a confrontation with cultural ‘alterities’ that can escape the opposed and specular risks of hegemonic universalism and relativism. Only democracy can truly call itself a paradoxical community: the community of the without-community, not despite but precisely because of its formal rules that, limiting the taxis, the sphere of the exercise of power, guarantee the autonomous development of the spheres of life. Democracy is always ‘to-come’ [ad-venire], precisely because it does not sacrifice the opacity of friction and conflict to the utopia of absolute transparency. Democracy does not enjoy a temperate climate, nor does it benefit from a perpetual and uniform light. For it is nourished by that passion of disenchantment that holds together – in an unresolvable tension – the rigour of the form and the disposition to welcome ‘unexpected guests’.
For this reason, it knows that it would go to ruin were it to forget, even for a single instant, the only presupposition that keeps it alive: the totum is the totem.
1 Steven Lukes, ‘What Is Left?’.
2 Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity, p. vii.
3 Ibid.
4 Edgar Morin, Pour sortir du XXe siècle.
5 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen.
6 George Lachmann Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses.
7 Giacomo Leopardi, ‘Broom’, in Selected Poems, p. 105.
8 Louis Dumont, Homo aequalis.
9 See Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity; Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.
10 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice.
11 Translator’s note: In Italian, scatenamento means literally unchaining.
12 See Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions.
13 Robert Alan Dahl, Polyarchy.
14 Jon Elster, The Cement of Society.
15 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.
16 Translator’s note: this also includes debates around the centrality, or otherwise, of the working class, of ‘the Political’, etc. that was so important to the debates within – and without – the Italian Communist Party in the 1970s. See, for example, Giorgio Napolitano, A. Accornero, M. Cacciari, M. Tronti, operaismo e centralità operaia.
17 Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch.
18 Mary Douglas, ‘The Contempt of Ritual’.
19 Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, p. 307.