1

The Question of Democracy

My purpose here is to encourage and to contribute to a revival of

political philosophy. I am not alone in working to that end. Our
numbers are, no doubt, small, but they have been increasing for some
time, although it must be admitted that there is as yet little enthusiasm
for the task. What surprises me is that most of those who ought to be
best-equipped to undertake it because of their intellectual temperament,
which inclines them to break with dogmatic beliefs, because of their
philosophical culture, because of their desire to find some meaning
behind the events, confused as they may be, that take place in our
world, who might be expected to have become sufficiently disenchanted
with the rival dominant ideologies to want to discern the preconditions
for the development of freedom, or at last to shed some light on the
obstacles that stand in its way, are and remain stubbornly blind to the
political. 'Freedom', the simple word I have just used, is usually
banished from scientific language or relegated to the vernacular, when,
that is, it does not become a slogan for small groups of intellectuals
who declare that they have taken sides and who are content with anti
communism. They can be ignored. no matter how much noise they
make, as we have seen their kind before. I am more concerned with
those intellectuals and philosophers who claim to belong to the left or
the far left. Although they live in an era in which a new form of
society has emerged under the banner of fascism on the one hand and
under that of socialism on the other, they refuse to contemplate or
even perceive that momentous event. In order to do so, they would
of course have to give new meaning to the idea of freedom. And yet
they abandon it to the vagaries of public opinion, apparently on the
grounds that everyone defines it in accordance with their own wishes
or interests. By doing so. they cut themselves off, not from public
opinion, but from political philosophy. even though they claim to be
in search of rigorous knowledge. For the sole motivation behind
political philosophy has always been a desire to escape the servitude
of collective beliefs and to win the freedom to think about freedom in
10 On Modem Democracy
society; it has always borne in mind the essential difference between
the regime of freedom and despotism. or indeed tyranny. Yet now
that we are faced with the rise of a new type of despotism (which
differs, let it be noted, from ancient despotism as much as modern
democracy differs from classical democracy). of a despotism which has,
moreover. world-wide ambitions, despotism itself is becoming invisible.
Whenever they hear the word 'totalitarianism', philosophers ask. 'What
are you talking about? Is it a concept? How do you define it? Does
not democracy mask the domination and exploitation of one class by
another, the standardization of collective life and mass conformism?
Even if we do agree that history has given birth to a monster. what
caused the mutation? Was it an economic cause. a technological cause,
or does it relate to the rise of state bureaucracy?' I am, as I said,
surprised: how can they handle ontological differences with such
subtlety, vie with one another in exploiting the combined resources of
Heidegger, Lacan, Jakobson and Levi-Strauss, and then fall back upon
such crass realism when the question of politics arises? Marxism, of
course, has been through this stage too; it destroyed the old relationship
that once existed between philosophy and naivety by teaching us that
the establishment of a concentration-camp system. the extermination
of millions of men and women, the suppression of freedom of
association and freedom of expression, and the abolition of universal
suffrage or its conversion into a farce which gives one party ninety
nine per cent of the vote, tells us nothing about the nature of Soviet
society. But the most remarkable thing of all is that the withering away
of that ideology has done little to set thought free or to help it return
to political philosophy. It may well be admitted that it is not socialism,
or 'true' socialism as they quaintly say, that is being constructed in the
USSR, in Eastern Europe. in China, Vietnam. Cambodia. or Cuba,
but how many intellectuals are still haunted by the spectre of the
correct theory, by the belief that it will reveal the laws that govern
the development of societies and that it will enable them to deduce a
formula for a rational practice? At best. we find expressions of
sympathy for the dissidents persecuted by communist regimes or for
popular uprisings. But such feelings have no lasting intellectual effect.
They are unable to discern freedom in democracy, because democracy
is defined as bourgeois. They are unable to discern servitude in
totalitarianism.
It would. however, be a mistake to restrict ourselves to a critique
of Marxism. If we are to reinterpret the political. we must break with
scientific points of view in general and with the point of view that has
come to dominate what are known as the political sciences and political
sociology in particular.
Political sociologists and scientists. for their part. do not attempt to
define politics as a superstructure whose base is to be found at the
supposedly real level of relations of production. They obtain their
object of knowledge by constructing or delineating political facts, which
The Question of Democracy II
they regard as particular facts and as distinct from other particular
social facts, such as the economic, the juridical. the aesthetic. the
scientific or the purely social, 'social' being defined as designating
modes of relatiOns between groups or classes. This approach implies
a surreptitious reference to the space that is designated as society. It
claims to be able to provide a detailed survey or reconstruction of that
space by positing and articulating terms, by forging specific systems of
relations, or even by combining them into an overall system, as though
the observations and constructs did not themselves derive from the
experience of social life, an experience which is at once primordial
_
and umquely shaped by our insertion into a historically and politically
detrmined framework. One effect of this fiction is immediately
obvwus: modern democratic societies are characterized by. among
other things. the delimitation of a sphere of institutions, relations and
activities which appears to be political, as distinct from other spheres
which appear to be economic, juridical. and so on. Political sociologists
and scientists find the preconditions that define their object and their
approach to knowledge in this mode of appearance of the political,
without ever examining the form of society within which the division
of reality into various sectors appears and is legitimated. The fact that
something like politics should have been circumscribed within social
life at a given time has in itself a political meaning, and a meaning
which is not particular, but general. This even raises the question of
the constitutiOn of the social space, of the form of society, of the
essence of what was once termed the 'city'. The political is thus
revealed, not in what we call political activity, but in the double
movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is
obscured. It appears in (he sense that the process whereby society is
ordered and unified across its divisions becomes visible. It is obscured
in the sense that the locus of politics (the locus in which parties
compete and in which a general agency of power takes shape and is
reproduced) becomes defined as particular, while the principle which
generates the overall configuration is concealed.
This observation is in itself an invitation to return to the question
that once inspired political philosophy: what is the nature of the
difference between forms of society? Interpreting the political means
breaking with the viewpoint of political science, because political
science emerges from the suppression of this question. It emerges from
a desire to objectify, and it forgets that no elements, no elementary
structures, no entities (classes or segments of classes). no economic or
technical determinations, and no dimensions of social space exist until
they have been given a form. Giving them a form implies both giving
them meaning (mise en sens) and staging them (mise en scene). They
are given meaning in that the social space unfolds as a space of
intelligibility articulated in accordance with a specific mode of
distinguishing between the real and the imaginary, the true and the
false, the just and the unjust, the permissible and the forbidden. the
12 On Modern Democracy
normal and the pathological. They are staged in that this space contains
within it a quasi-representation of itself as being aristocratic, monarchic,
despotic, democratic or totalitarian. As we know, the corollary of the
desire to objectify is the positioning of a subject capable of performing
intellectual operations which owe nothing to its involvement in social
life. Such a neutral subject is concerned only with detecting causal
relations between phenomena and with discovering the laws that govern
the organization and the workings of social systems or sub-systems.
The fiction of this subject is vulnerable to more than the arguments
of critical sociologists and Marxists who object to the distinction
between factual judgements and value judgements, and who show that
the analyst is working within a perspective forced upon him by the
need to defend his economic or cultural interests. Well-founded as it
may be, this argument itself comes up against limitations which will
not be examined here. It fails to recognize that any system of thought
that is bound up with any form of social life is grappling with a subject
matter which contains within it its own interpretation, and whose
meaning is a constituent element of its nature. By ascribing neutrality
to the subject, it deprives the subject of the means to grasp an
experience generated and ordered by an implicit conception of the
relations between human beings and of their relations with the world.
It prevents the subject from grasping the one thing that has been
grasped in every human society, the one thing that gives it its status
as human society: namely the difference between legitimacy and
illegitimacy, between truth and lies, between authenticity and imposture.
between the pursuit of power or of private interests and the pursuit
of the common good. Leo Strauss's attacks on what might be termed
the castration of political thought as a result of the rise of the social
sciences and of Marxism are sufficiently eloquent for us not to dwell
on the issue here; we have only to turn to the critique that opens
Natural Right and History.' Let me say simply that if we ignore
distinctions that are basic to the exercise of the intellect on the grounds
that we cannot supply their criteria, and if we claim to be able to
reduce knowledge to the limits of objective science, we break with the
philosophical tradition. If we refuse to risk making judgements, we
lose all sense of the difference between forms of society. We then fall
back on value judgements, either hypocritically, beneath the cloak of
a hierarchy in the determinants of what we take to be the real, or
arbitrarily, in the crude statement of preferences.
I would like now to draw attention to what reinterpreting the political
means in our times.
The rise of totalitarianism, both in its fascist variant (which has for
the moment been destroyed, though we have no grounds to think that
it might not reappear in the future) and in its communist variant (which
is going from strength to strength) obliges us to re-examine democracy.
The widespread view to the contrary notwithstanding, totalitarianism
The Question of Democracy 13
does not result from a transformation of the mode of production. In
the case of German or Italian fascisms. the point does not have to be
stressed, as they adapted themselves to the maintenance of capitalist
structures, whatever changes they may have undergone as a result of
increased state intervention into the economy. But it is important at
least to recall that the Soviet regime acquired its distinctive features
before the era of the socialization of the means of production and of
collectivization. Modern totalitarianism arises from a political mutation,
from a mutation of a symbolic order, and the change in the status of
power is its clearest expression. What in fact happens is that a party
arises, claiming to be by its very nature different from traditional
parties, to represent the aspirations of the whole people, and to possess
a legitimacy which places it above the law. It takes power by destroying
all opposition; the new power is accountable to no one and is beyond
all legal control. But for our purposes, the course of events is of little
import; we are concerned with the most characteristic features of the
new form of society. A condensation takes place between the sphere
of power, the sphere of law and the sphere of knowledge. Knowledge
of the ultimate goals of society and of the norms which regulate social
practices becomes the property of power, and at the same time power
itself claims to be the organ of a discourse which articulates the real
as such. Power is embodied in a group and, at its highest level, in a
single individual, and it merges with a knowledge which is also
embodied, in such a way that nothing can split it apart. The theory -
or if not the theory, the spirit of the movement. as in Nazism -may
well turn everything to account as circumstances demand, but it can
never be challenged by experience. State and civil society are assumed
to have merged; this is brought about through the agency of the
ubiquitous party which permeates everything with the dominant
ideology and hands down power's orders, as circumstances demand,
and through the formation of a multiplicity of microbodies (organizations
of all kinds in which an artificial socialization and relations of power
conforming to the general model are reproduced). A logic of
identification is set in motion, and is governed by the representation
of power as embodiment. The proletariat and the people are one; the
party and the proletariat are one; the politbureau and, ultimately, the
egocrat, and the party are one. Whilst there develops a representation
of a homogeneous and self-transparent society, of a People-as-One,
social division, in all its modes. is denied, and at the same time all
signs of differences of opinion, belief or mores are condemned. We
can use the term despotism to characterize this regime, but only if we
specify that it is modern and differs from all the forms that precede
it. Power makes no reference to anything beyond the social; it rules
as though nothing existed outside the social, as though it had no limits
(these are the limits established by the idea of a law or a truth that is
valid in itself); it relates to a society beyond which there is nothing,
which is assumed to be a society fulfilling its destiny as a society
14 On Modern Democracy
produced by the people who live in it. The distinctively modern feature
of totalitarianism is that it combines a radically artificialist ideal with
a radically organicist ideal. The image of the body comes to be
combined with the image of the machine. Society appears to he a
community all of whose members are strictly interdependent; at the
same time it is assumed to be constructing itself day by day, to be
striving towards a goal - the creation of the new man - and to be
living in a state of permanent mobilization.
We can ignore other features, which I have described at length
elsewhere, such as the phenomenon of the production-elimination of
the enemy (the enemy within being defined as an agent of the enemy
without, as a parasite on the body, or as an interference with the
workings of the machine). Nor am I trying here to reveal the
contradictions totalitarianism comes up against. Even this brief outline
allows us to re-examine democracy. When seen against the background
of totalitarianism, it acquires a new depth and cannot be reduced to
a system of institutions. In its turn, democracy too is seen to he a
form of society; and our task is to understand what constitutes its
uniqueness, and what it is about it that leads to its overthrow and to
the advent of totalitarianism.
Anyone who undertakes such a project can learn a great deal from
Tocqueville. The thing that marks him out from his contemporaries is
in fact his realization that democracy is a form of society, and he
arrives at that conclusion because, in his view. democracy stands out
against a background: the society from which it emerges and which he
calls aristocratic society- a term which it would not be appropriate to
discuss here. Tocqueville helps us to decipher the experience of modern
democracy by encouraging us to look back at what came before it and,
at the same time, to look ahead to what is emerging, or may emerge,
in its wake. His investigations are important to us in several respects.
He posits the idea that a great historical mutation is taking place, even
though its premisses had long been established, and he puts forward
the idea of an irreversible dynamic. Although he attempts to locate
the fundamental principle of democracy in a social state - equality of
condition - he explores change in every direction, takes an interest in
social bonds and political institutions, in the individual, in the
mechanisms of public opinion, in forms of sensibility and forms of
knowledge, in religion, law, language, literature, history, etc. His
explorations lead him to detect the ambiguities of the democratic
revolution in every domain, to make, as it were, an exploratory incision
into the flesh of the social. At every moment of his analysis, he looks
at things from both sides, moves from one side of the phenomenon to
the other, and reveals the underside of both the positive - new signs
of freedom -and the negative - new signs of servitude.
It is only recently that Tocqueville has become a fashionable thinker,
that he has been defined as the pioneering theorist of modern political
liberalism. But his intuitive vision of a society faced with the general
The Question of Democracy 15
contradiction that arises when the social order no longer has a basis
seems to me to be much more important than his reputation. He traces
this contradiction by examining the individual, who has been released
from the old networks of personal dependency and granted the freedom
to think and act in accordance with his own norms. but who is, on the
other hand, isolated, impoverished and at the same time trapped by
the image of his fellows, now that agglutination with them provides a
'
means of escaping the threat of the dissolution of his identity. He then
examines public opinion as it conquers the right to expression and
communication and at the same time becomes a force in its own right,
as it becomes detached from subjects, thinks and speaks for itself, and
becomes an anonymous power standing over them. He examines law
which, because it is drawn to the pole of the collective will, accepts
the new demands that are born of changes in mentalities and practices,
and which, as a result of equality of condition, is increasingly dedicated
to the task of standardizing norms of behaviour and, finally, he
examines power, which has been set free from the arbitrariness of
personal rule, but which, precisely because it destroys all the individual
instances of authority, appears to belong to no one, except to the
people in the abstract, and which threatens to become unlimited,
omnipotent, to acquire an ambition to take charge of every aspect of
social life.
I am not saying that Tocqueville's analysis of this contradiction,
which is inherent in democracy, is irrefutable. but it does open up a
very fruitful line of research which has not been pursued. Without
wishing to discuss the difficulties into which he stumbles - I have given
some indication of these elsewhere2 - let me simply observe that his
explorations are usually restricted to what I have termed the underside
of the phenomena he believes to be characteristic of the new society,
and that he does not pursue his explorations by examining the underside
of the underside. True, a century and a half have gone by since the
publication of Democracy in America. We therefore enjoy the benefits
of experience and have the capacity to decipher things that its author
could only glimpse. But it is not simply his lack of experience which
restricts his interpretation; there is also, I believe, an intellectual
reluctance (which is bound up with a political prejudice) to confront
the unknown element in democracy. As I cannot develop my criticisms
here, I will merely state that in his attempt to bring out the ambiguous
effects of equality of condition, Tocqueville usually tries to uncover
an inversion of meaning: the new assertion of singularity fades in the
face of the rule of anonymity; the assertion of difference (of belief,
opinion or morals) fades in the face of the rule of uniformity; the spirit
of innovation is sterilized by the immediate enjoyment of material
goods and by the pulverization of historical time; the recognition that
human beings are made in one another's likeness is destroyed by the
rise of society as abstract entity, and so on. What he fails to see, and
what we are in a position to observe, is that another influence or
16 On Modem Democracy
counter-influence is always at work and that it counteracts the
petrification of social life. Its effects are revealed by the appearance
of ways of thinking and modes of expressiOn that are won m the face
of anonymity. of the stereotyped language of opmwn; by. the nse of
demands and struggles for rights that place the . formal .vtewpomt of
the law in check; by the irruption of a new meamng of history; by the
unfolding of multiple perspectives o historical kno":'ledge as a result
of the dissolution of an almost orgamc sense of durauon that was once
apprehended through customs and traditions; by. the increasing
heterogeneity of social life that accompames the dommane of soJety
and state over individuals. We would of course also be mistaken If, m
our turn we claimed to be able to limit our explorations to the
undersid of the underside. On the contrary, we must recognize that,
so long as the democratic adventure continues, so long. as the terms
of the contradiction continue to be displaced, the meanmg of what IS
coming into being remains in suspense. Democra.cy thus proves to be
the historical society par excellence, a society which, m Its very form,
welcomes and preserves indeterminacy and which provides a remarkable
contrast with totalitarianism which, because it is constructed under the
slogan of creating a new man, claims to understand the law of its
organization and development, and which, m the modern world,
secretly designates itself as a society without history. .
.
. reveals the revolutionary and unprecedented feature of democracy.
We will, however, remain within the limits of a. descnptwn If we
simply extend Tocqueville's analyses, as they themselves urge u to
identify those features which pomt to the formatiOn of a ew despotism.
The indeterminacy we were discussmg does not pertam to the orer
of empirical facts, to the order of economic or soc1al facts wh1ch, hke
the gradual extension of equality of condition, can be seen to be born
of other facts. Just as the birth of totalitarianism defies all explanations
which attempt to reduce that event to the level of empirical history,
so the birth of democracy signals a mutation of th symbolic order, as
is most clearly attested to by the new position of. power. . . be represented. Only the mechanisms of the exercise of power are
I have tried on several occasions to draw attentiOn to th1s mutatiOn.
Here, it will be enough to stress certain of its aspects. The singularity
of democracy only becomes fully apparent if we recall the nature of
the monarchical system of the Ancien Regime. This is not in fact a
matter ofrecovering from a loss of memory but, rather, of recentenng
our investigations on something that we failed to recognize because
we lost all sense of the political. It is in effect within the framework
of the monarchy, or that of a particular type of monarchy which,
pnnce
originally developed in a theologico-political matrix, gave the . Such a transformation implies a series of other transformations. and
sovereign power within the boundaries of a terntory and made him
both a secular agency and a representative of God, that the features,
of state and society were first outlined, and that the first separatiOn
of state and civil society occurred. Far from being reducible to a
superstructural institution whose function can be derived from the
nature of a mode of production, the monarchy was the agency which,
The Question of Democracy 17
by levelling and unifying the social field and. simultaneously, by
inscribing itself in that field, made possible the development of
commodity relations and rationalized activities in a manner that paved
the way for the rise of capitalism.
Under the monarchy, power was embodied in the person of the
prince. This does not mean that he held unlimited power. The regime
was not despotic. The prince was a mediator between mortals and
gods or, as political activity became secularized and laicized, between
mortals and the transcendental agencies represented by a sovereign
Justice and a sovereign Reason. Being at once subject to the law and
placed above laws, he condensed within his body, which was at once
mortal and immortal, the principle that generated the order of the
kingdom. His power pointed towards an unconditional, other-worldly
pole, while at the same time he was, in his own person, the guarantor
and representative of the unity of the kingdom. The kingdom itself
was represented as a body, as a substantial unity, in such a way that
the hierarchy of its members, the distinction between ranks and orders
appeared to rest upon an unconditional basis.
Power was embodied in the prince, and it therefore gave society a
body. And because of this, a latent but effective knowledge of what
one meant to the other existed throughout the social. This model
The locus of power becomes an empty place. There is no need .to dwell
on the details of the institutional apparatus. The important point is
that this apparatus prevents governments from appropriating power
for their own ends, from incorporating it into themselves. The exercise
of power is subject to the procedures of periodical redistributions. It
represents the outcome of a controlled contest with permanent rules.
This phenomenon implies an institutionalization of conflict. The locus
of power is an empty place, it cannot be occupied -it is such that no
individual and no group can be consubstantial with it - and it cannot
visible, or only the men, the mere mortals, who hold political authority.
We would be wrong to conclude that power now resides in society on
the grounds that it emanates from popular suffrage; it remains the
agency by virtue of which society apprehends itself in its unity and
relates to itself in time and space. But this agency is no longer referred
to an unconditional pole; and in that sense, it marks a division between
the inside and the outside of the social, institutes relations beween
those dimensions, and is tacitly recognized as being purely symbolic.
they cannot be regarded merely as effects, as cause and effect relations
have no pertinence in the order of the symbolic. On the one hand,
the phenomenon of disincorporation. which we mentioned earlier. is
accompanied by the disentangling of the sphere of power, the sphere
of law and the sphere of knowledge. Once power ceases to manifest
the principle which generates and organizes a social body. once it
18 On Modern Democracy
ceases to condense within it virtues deriving from transcendent reason
and justice, law and knowledge assert themselves as separate from and
irreducible to power. And just as the figure of power in its materiality
and its substantiality disappears, just as the exercise of power proves
to be bound up with the temporality of its reproduction and to be
subordinated to the conflict of collective wills, so the autonomy of law
is bound up with the impossibility of establishing its essence. The
dimension of the development of right unfolds in its entirety, and it is
always dependent upon a debate as to its foundations, and as to the
legitimacy of what has been established and of what ought to be
established. Similarly, recognition of the autonomy of knowledge goes
hand in hand with a continual reshaping of the processes of acquiring
knowledge and with an investigation into the foundations of truth. As
power, law and knowledge become disentangled, a new relation to the
real is established; to be more accurate, this relation is guaranteed
within the limits of networks of socialization and of specific domains
of activity. Economic, technical, scientific, pedagogic and medical facts,
for example, tend to be asserted, to be defined under the aegis of
knowledge and in accordance with norms that are specific to them. A
dialectic which externalizes every sphere of activity is at work
throughout the social. The young Marx saw this only too well, but he
mistakenly reduced it to a dialectic of alienation. The fact that it
operates within the density of class relations, which are relations of
domination and exploitation, should not make us forget that it stems
from a new symbolic constitution of the social. The relation established
between the competition mobilized by the exercise of power and
conflict in society is no less remarkable. The erection of a political
stage on which competition can take place shows that division is, in a
general way, constitutive of the very unity of society. Or to put it
another way, the legitimation of purely political conflict contains within
it the principle of a legitimation of social conflict in all its forms. If
we bear in mind the monarchical model of the Ancien Regime, the
meaning of the transformation can be summarized as follows: democratic
society is instituted as a society without a body, as a society which
undermines the representation of an organic totality. I am not suggesting
that it therefore has no unity or no definite identity; on the contrary,
the disappearance of natural determination, which was once linked to
the person of the prince or to the existence of a nobility, leads to the
emergence of a purely social society in which the people, the nation
and the state take on the status of universal entities, and in which any
individual or group can be accorded the same status. But neither the
state, the people nor the nation represent substantial entities. Their
representation is itself. in its dependence upon a political discourse
and upon a sociological and historical elaboration, always bound up
with ideological debate.
Nothing, moreover, makes the paradox of democracy more palpable
than the institution of universal suffrage. It is at the very moment
The Quesrion of Democracy 19
when popular sovereignty is assumed to manifest itself, when the
people is assumed to actualize itself by expressing its will, that social
Interdependence breaks down and that the citizen is abstracted from
all the networks in which his social life develops and becomes a mere
statistic. Number replaces substance. It is also significant that in the
mneteenth century this institution was for a long time resisted not only
by conservatives and bourgeois liberals, but also by socialists -and
this resistance cannot simply be imputed to the defence of class
interests. It was provoked by the idea of a society which had now to
accept that which cannot be represented.
In this brief sketch of democracy, I have been forced to ignore a
major aspect of the empirical development of those societies which are
organized in accordance with its principles - a development which
justified socialist-inspired criticisms. I am certainly not forgetting that
democratic institutions have constantly been used to restrict means of
access to power, knowledge and the enjoyment of rights to a minority.
Nor am I forgetting - and this would merit a lengthy analysis - that,
as Tocqueville foresaw, the emergence of an anonymous power
facilitated the expansion of state power (and, more generally, the
power of bureaucracies). I have, on the other hand, chosen to
concentrate upon a range of phenomena which are, it seems to me,
usually misunderstood. In my view, the important point is that
democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the .markers
of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a
fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge,
and as to the basis of relations betweel self and other, at every level
of social life (at every level where division, and especially the division
between those who held power and those who were subject to them,
could once be articulated as a result of a belief in the nature of things
or in a supernatural principle). It is this which leads me to take the
view that, without the actors being aware of it, a process of questioning
is implicit in social practice, that no one has the answer to the questions
that arise, and that the work of ideology, which is always dedicated
to the task of restoring certainty, cannot put an end to this practice.
And that in turn leads me to at least identify, if not to explain, the
conditions for the formation of totalitarianism. There is always a
possibility that the logic of democracy will be disrupted in a society in
which the foundations of the political order and the social order vanish,
in which that which has been established never bears the seal of full
legitimacy, in which differences of rank no longer go unchallenged, in
which right proves to depend upon the discourse which articulates it,
and in which the exercise of power depends upon conflict. When
individuals are increasingly insecure as a result of an economic crisis
or of the ravages of war, when conflict between classes and groups is
exacerbated and can no longer be symbolically resolved within the
political sphere, when power appears to have sunk to the level of
reality and to be no more than an instrument for the promotion of
20 On Modem Democracy
the interests and appetites of vulgar ambition and when, in a word, it
appears in society, and when at the same time society appears to be
fragmented, then we see the development of the fantasy of the People
as-One, the beginnings of a quest for a substantial identity, for a social
body which is welded to its head, for an embodying power, for a
state free from division.
It is sometimes said that democracy itself already makes room
for totalitarian institutions, modes of organization and modes of
representation. Whilst this is certainly true, it is also still true to say
that a change in the economy of power is required if the totalitarian
form of society is to arise.
In conclusion, I return to my initial considerations. It seems strange
to me that most of our contemporaries have no sense of how much
philosophy owes to the democratic experience, that they do not explore
its matrix or take it as a theme for their reflections, that they fail to
recognize it as the matrix of their investigations. When one recalls how
certain great philosophers were drawn to Nazism, at least in its early
stages, and, to a much greater and lasting extent, to Stalinism, one
begins to wonder whether, in modern philosophy, the ability to break
with the illusions of both theology and eighteenth- and nineteenth
century rationalism does not carry with it, in turn, quasi-religious faith,
a nostalgia for the image of a society which is at one with itself and
which has mastered its history, for the image of an organic community.
But can we restrict discussion to the idea of a separation between
philosophical thought and political belief? Can either remain unaffected,
once they have come into contact? It appears to me that the question
is worth asking, and that we might be able to shed some light on it
by following the evolution of the thought of Merleau-Ponty. A similar
necessity led him to move from the idea of the body to the idea of
the flesh and dispelled the attractions of the Communist model by
allowing him to rediscover the indeterminacy of history and of the
being of the social.
2
Human Rights and The Welfare
State
As soon as we begin to ask ourselves about human rights, we find
ourselves drawn into a labyrinth of questions. 1 We must first ask
ourselves if we can in fact accept the formula without making reference
to a human nature. Or, if we reject the notion of human nature,
without surrendering to a teleological vision of history. For can we in
fact say that human beings have embarked upon a voyage of self
discovery, that they create themselves by discovering and instituting
rights in the absence of any principle that might allow us to decide as
to their true nature and as to whether their evolution does or does
not conform to their essence? Even at this early stage, we cannot
ignore the question. Even if we attempt to avoid it and simply examine
the import of an event such as the proclamation at the end of the
eighteenth century of the rights known as the rights of man, other
difficulties lie in store. If we adopt the latter course, our investigations
appear to be guided, if not by observation, at least by a reading and
interpretation of the facts. We begin by asking ourselves about the
meaning of the mutation that occurred in the representation of the
individual and of society. That question leads to another: can the
effects of that mutation elucidate the course of history up to the present
time? To be more specific: is it the case that human rights merely
served to disguise relations established in bourgeois society, or did
they make possible, or even give rise to, demands and struggles which
contributed to the rise of democracy? Even this is too crude a statement
of the terms of the alternative. Even if - and I believe that the
organizers of this de bate would accept the hypothesis - we agree that
the institution of human rights has come to support a dynamic of
rights, do we not have to investigate the effects of that development?
It is one thing to say that social, economic and cultural rights (notably
those mentioned in the United Nations Charter) arise as an extension
of those original rights. It is quite another to say that they derive from
the same inspiration, and it is yet another to take the view that they
promote freedom. The question takes us further still if we ask whether