01 Introduction 049121 (JB/D) 4/1/05 1:35 pm Page 5

INTRODUCTION

Peter Murphy

Collective creation remains one of the most compelling and difficult

issues in political philosophy. The two great theories of it – the Greco-Roman
Republic and the social contract – remain unsurpassed. Indeed, so much so
that state systems erected on the basis of later – 19th and 20th-century –
ideologies have not weathered well at all. Nationalist and socialist, liberal
and totalitarian states – right across the political spectrum – have pretty much
all failed to generate convincing collective identities in the long run. In some
cases the failures have been appalling; in other cases, just lack-lustre.
One of the things that made Cornelius Castoriadis a great thinker is that
he didn’t dodge the question of collective creation. At a certain point in his
life, sometime in the early 1960s, he stopped thinking that ‘socialism’ or
‘Marxism’, or any of the other ‘isms’ that the 20th century so liked, had much
of any significance to contribute to the construction of great societies. He
turned his attention instead to the Greco-Western idea of collective self-
creation. Two versions of this idea echoed in his work. One was the ancient
citizen city; the other was social self-creation through the social contract cul-
minating in Rousseau’s ‘modern Sparta’. Both models rejected the idea of
representation. Castoriadis stuck firmly by this rejection. Representation
equalled alienation of the power of collective creation.
In this issue of Thesis Eleven, Jean Cohen offers a sympathetic critique
of Castoriadis. She defends the idea of representation, while insisting on the
importance of Castoriadis’ notion that societies are capable of knowing
self-institution – and that marvellous things, not least robust collective
identities, flow from collective acts of creation. Cohen makes a strong case
for the proposition that moderns can create and innovate in deep and con-
sequential ways through representative institutions. Indeed, well-formed
representative institutions can protect against the inverted absolutism of
Rousseau-style popular sovereignty and romantic direct democracy.
Cohen’s critique ‘translates’ Castoriadis into an American context.
Cohen brings Castoriadis’ theory face-to-face with the presuppositions of the

Thesis Eleven, Number 80, February 2005: 5–8

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd
DOI: 10.1177/0725513605049121
01 Introduction 049121 (JB/D) 4/1/05 1:35 pm Page 6

6 Thesis Eleven (Number 80 2005)

truly great modern experiment in Greco-Roman type social self-creation.

Because America was founded on a revolution, its political philosophers are
more or less obliged to give an account of the act of foundation. Part of
the American genius was to unfold creation through representation. The
American innovation in the mode of social creation was to multiply the
number and ways of representation: through courts, legislatures, presidential
candidates, states, the federal union, and so on.
Peter Wagner takes up the theory of collective determination from the
standpoint of Europe. In the case of Europe, foundation is not a fact of
history but something that Europeans are still groping towards. Europe is an
idea that remains to be born. Wagner surveys the prehistory of the Europe
to come. He assays its multi-pronged narratives, as well as its dead ends of
apolitical individualism, linguistic-cultural chauvinism, deadly totalitarianism
and, finally, anti-totalitarian criticism ranging from Adorno to Lyotard via
Berlin and Talmon. By the 1990s the long march of the Europeans-to-be
through romanticism, nationalism and totalitarianism ended in the philo-
sophical cul-de-sac of anti-politics. As Wagner points out, and as Castoriadis
was to concede (despite his hopes to the contrary), the political movements
of ‘1968’ turned from the aspiration of collective determination to the anti-
politics of protest – or else to a more cautious anti-totalitarian liberalism
sceptical of grand political ambitions. On the level of state institutions,
periodically revised technocratic compromises between nationalism,
socialism and liberalism provided the basis for state management across the
European continent.
Through all of this, though, it has never been certain that a coherent
political Europe with a strong collective identity would create itself. Most
recently, anti-Americanism has provided fuel for a collective European self-
understanding. But all such negative dialectics continue the cycle of anti-
politics. Despite this, Wagner is not pessimistic about the future. In his
estimate, post-World War II technocratic state compromises of nationalism,
socialism and liberalism provide a foot up for European self-creation so long
as nationalism can be replaced by a supra-nationalism based on a self-critical
hermeneutical relationship to Europe’s troubled history.
What is clear from Wagner’s magisterial survey of Europe’s effort at
self-creation is just how difficult such movements really are. What Trevor
Hogan’s reconnoitre of Christian Socialism indicates is that 19th-century
‘isms’ didn’t in the end convincingly answer the question of social self-
creation. Hogan charts Christian Socialism’s inward movement from social-
ism to liberalism – a movement that mirrors the larger historic shift from
politics to anti-politics. At the same time, when most ideologies turned
chaste and individualistic, the ‘Christian’ qualifier of ‘Christian Socialism’
managed in some quarters to remain intellectually robust precisely because
it continued to address meta-questions about the collective determination
of humankind. Hogan discusses the important work of John Milbank, and
01 Introduction 049121 (JB/D) 4/1/05 1:35 pm Page 7

Murphy: Introduction 7

his neo-Augustinian vision of the city of grace, music, festivity and free
association. One cannot help thinking that the update of the late Roman
vision of a ‘pilgrim’s progress’ that enriches space through the balancing
order of grace and the mutual pacts of strangers along the way might be
more informative of the present age than the messianic temporality of high-
pitched ideologies or their apolitical residues.
As Vassilis Lambropoulos points out, what came along with such
messianic fervour at the turn of the 20th century – the high point of the
age of ideology – was a horror of form and representation. In social
theoretical terms, life was elevated above form. But this notion was not
universally adored. The young Georg Lukács resisted the idea, figuring that
he could save a version of tragic ethics for modern Central Europe. He
intuited, against the current, that the capacity of forms to represent what
was essential in life was paramount to the good shaping of the human soul
and human society. That Lukács also dropped the veil of tragedy for a much
longer-lasting messianic vision is well known. Perhaps this endgame was
already implicit in his version of tragedy. As Lambropoulos suggests, the
modern habit of transforming tragedy into ‘the tragic’ sets modern tragedy
strangely at odds with ancient dramaturgical and political ethics. But,
nonetheless, the spellbinding passages in Lukács’ early essays arguing for
form against impressionistic life, and for representative essence against
unique identity, remain compelling.
This is especially so when the course of collective self-creation has so
often come to such a sorry end-point when measured against the anticipa-
tions of the last century or so. Remember the expectations that people once
had for the Soviet Union, or for the newly independent countries of the ‘third
world’? Many critics now even approach the promises of European self-
institution with undisguised scepticism, and it is hardly reassuring when
celebrity theorists, like Slavoj Žižek, equate politics with the authentic acts
of great (read: ruthless) leaders. Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey dissect
such deluded nonsense with appropriate slashing vigour in this issue. Žižek
may be taken as a metaphor for where the practice of collective institution
has ended up: in the psychoanalytic waste-bin.
It is for this reason that Jean Cohen’s conclusions in her article are
important to take note of. She sketches there a model of politics that
operates through multiple, overlapping, and sometimes antagonistic
representations. One of the most crucial debates in modern life has been
about the nature of creativity. Is it mimetic (does it re-present something)
or is it authentic? Cohen points out how American institutional design,
through much iteration, has relied faithfully on representation rather than
authenticity. Many voices speak and act for the sovereign people, yet at the
same time a balancing order makes something roughly coherent out of this
complex mimesis. Perhaps just as the day for the messianic temporal acts
of authentic identities has exhausted itself, the art of imagining that comes
01 Introduction 049121 (JB/D) 4/1/05 1:35 pm Page 8

8 Thesis Eleven (Number 80 2005)

when we represent something is due for a dusting off. It is the art of

mimetic imagining that binds the legislators of Cohen’s Arendt-style America
with the actors in Lambropoulos’ tragic drama, Hogan’s Augustinian
pilgrims, and Wagner’s absent agents of collective determination. All of
these characters act not for themselves but for something else and someone
else.