Realm of Lesser Evil: An Essay on Liberal Civilization 9780745646206, 9780745646213

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The Realm of Lesser Evil

The Realm of Lesser Evil An Essay on Liberal Civilization

Jean-Claude Michea Translated by David Fernbach

polity

First published in French as

L'empire du moindre mal ©Editions

Flammarion, 2007. T his English edition ©Polity Press, 2009

Liberti

•

Egalite

•

Fraternite

REPUBLIQ.UE FRANc;AISE This book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as part of the Burgess programme run by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in London. (www.frenchbooknews.com) Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4620-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4621-3 (paperback) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabon by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd, Hong Kong Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Limited, Bodmin, Cornwall T he publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website:

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To Linda Kizico Hudan. Without her humanity, her culture and her valuable encouragement, this little book would never have seen the light.

The starting-point for The Realm of Lesser Evil was a lecture given in January 2007, at the invitation of my friend Andre Perrin, in the context of a training course for philosophy teachers at the Montpellier academy. Though completely recast, this forms the framework of the first chapter. As with all theoretical work, this book requires a large number of notes. To facilitate the reader's task, I have arranged it so that the notes that follow each chapter, though in each case corresponding to a precise point in the text, can be read as 'scoliae', i.e. independent small precisions; and this is likewise true for the notes that accompany these scoliae. It should thus be possible, without any inconvenience, to read the work in a linear fashion.

Winston Churchill said of democracy that it was 'the worst form of government, except for all those other forms'. It would be hard to find a more appropriate formulation of the liberal spirit. Whilst this displays an unfailing optimism as to the capacity of human beings to make themselves 'masters and possessors of nature', it displays a profound pessimism when it comes to appreciating their moral capacity to build a decent world for themselves. As we shall see below, the roots of this pessimism lie in the idea, an eminently modern one, that it is precisely the temptation to establish, here on earth, the reign of Good and Virtue, that is the ultimate source of all the evils that have constantly beset humanity. This critique of the 'tyranny of the Good' naturally has its price. It forces a view of modern politics as a purely negative art: that of defining, in other words, the least bad society possible. It is in this sense that liberalism has to be understood, and understands itself, as the 'politics of lesser evil'.

Contents

1

The Unity of Liberalism

2

Questions of Method

3

The 'Open Society' and the

1 40

Politics of Necessity

48

4

Tractatus Juridico-Economicus

59

5

Egoism and Common Decency

88

6

The Unconscious of Modern Societies

7

112

From the Realm of Lesser Evil to the Best of Worlds

138

ix

1 The Unity of Liberalism

It is hard to doubt that if Adam Smith or Benjamin Constant were to return today - an event that might well raise the level of political debate considerably - they would find it very dif­ ficult to recognize the rose of their liberalism in the cross of the present.1 This indicates the reason for the remarkable intellectual confusion about the use of this term that is evident on all sides today. Many people, for example, like to distin­ guish between a 'good' political and cultural liberalism and a 'bad' economic liberalism; critique of the latter is then itself differentiated according to whether its target is 'true' liberal­ ism, 'neo-liberalism', or 'ultra-liberalism'. The thesis I shall defend here has at least the merit of simplifying the question. I maintain, in fact, that the histori1 Adam Smith's famous pin-maker employed only ten workers . The author of The Wealth of Nations clearly did not envisage for a moment a world ruled by pension funds and great transnational firms, not to mention shell companies and the mafia economy. Matthieu Amiech has given some very interesting details on this point in an essay devoted to 'Les Etats-Unis avant Ia grande indus­ trie', published in the December 2006 issue of Notes & Morceaux choisis. [The 'rose' and 'cross' here are from the mystical symbol of the Rosicrucians. Tr.] -

1

The Realm of Lesser Evil cal movement that has profoundly transformed modern soci­ eties must be fundamentally understood as the logical accomplishment (or the truth) of the liberal political project, as this has been gradually defined since the seventeenth century, and especially since the philosophy of the Enlighten­ ment. That amounts to saying that the soulless world of contemporary capitalism is the only historical form in which this original liberal doctrine could be realized in practice. It is, in other words, actually existing liberalism. And this is true, we shall see, as much in its economic version (which has traditionally been the preference of the 'right' ), as in its cultural and political version (whose defence has become the speciality of the contemporary 'left', and above all of that 'far-left' which is the nodal point of the modern Spectacle).2 To defend this thesis, which I suspect is far indeed from being unanimously accepted, two initial precisions are neces­ sary. To speak of a 'liberal logic' implies first of all that we carefully distinguish between the intentions of various clas­ sical writers and the political and civilizational effects that their system of thought has contributed to producing, in a manner that I see as inevitable. This is in fact an exercise that should not upset liberals overmuch, in so far as they generally accept, with Adam Ferguson, that the real movement of societies is above all 'the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design'.31t is at all events an exercise as old as philosophy itself, being after all the method used by Plato in his Gorgias to disclose the real issues involved in the arguments of the Sophists. We may recall how Plato's critique here proceeds in three stages. The first section of the dialogue introduces the axiomatics of Gorgias, who repre­ sents as it were the Adam Smith of rhetoric. This initial debate is followed by a critical examination of the positions

2 ['Spectacle' here is a particular reference to Guy Debord; see

below, chapter 4. A number of key concepts in the text are capital­ ized in this way. - Tr.] 3 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), section 2.

2

The Unity of Liberalism of Polus, a disciple of Gorgias who has managed to exploit some of the philosophical implications of the initial axiomat­ ics from which his teacher had generally recoiled for reasons of personal decency. This second moment corresponds to the 'actually existing rhetoric' of fourth-century Athens. The dia­ logue finally ends with the intervention of Callicles, a neces­ sarily imaginary character since he symbolizes for Plato everything that could develop from the Sophist programme, if - unhappily for the city - all its logical potentialities were followed through. The conclusion is then reached that if Gorgias should not be confused with Callides, he is none the less in a sense intellectually responsible for all the conse­ quences that a possible 'Callides' could draw from his postulates. But to speak of a 'liberal logic' also implies that, beyond the multiplicity of writers and the many differences between them on one or another point, it is possible to treat liberalism as a current whose principles not only can be philosophically unified, but in the last analysis must be. This is dearly a point that many readers will be reluctant to concede. For if this is indeed the case, it makes far more difficult the habitual pro­ cedure of those who, like a large section of the contemporary left and far-left, make a radical opposition between political and cultural liberalism on the one hand (defined as the unre­ stricted advance of rights and the ceaseless liberalization of mores), and economic liberalism on the other - the emancipa­ tory developments of the former being fundamentally independent of the damage caused by the latter. I am well aware of the risks involved in this kind of exer­ cise, j ust as whenever in the history of ideas an 'ism' of some kind has to be defined; and all the more so, of course, in that the current in question has a history of several centuries. The presentation of a philosophical logic always presupposes, by definition, a work of conceptual reconstruction, and conse­ quently certain simplifications, choices and interpretations that are anything but ideologically neutral . It goes without saying that I fully assume these positions. I only hope I shall not be criticized for having rashly increased in this way the

3

The Realm of Lesser Evil importance of the Callicleses of liberalism in relation to that of the Poluses and Gorgiases. One final difficulty, of a terminological nature, must still be cleared up. Carl Schmitt wrote in 1928 that 'there is no liberal politics sui generis, but only a liberal critique of poli­ tics'. If 'liberalism' is taken to mean a strictly defensive polit­ ical posture - for example, one that habitually supports the various struggles for basic democratic freedoms everywhere that these come under threat, are abused or abolished - then there is clearly nothing I can object to in a 'liberalism' of this kind. Orwell himself did not hesitate to refer to the heritage of the 'old liberals' of nineteenth-century England, taking the word in this very particular sense. But liberalism as it is understood today represents a far more precise political ideal, and one with a quite different philosophical scope. It refers in fact to the project of a radical transformation of the human order, which necessarily requires the support of particular government policies to put it into practice. It is certainly significant from this point of view that the very terms 'liberal ideas' and 'liberalism' only appeared - at least in the French situation - after Thermidor (notably in Des reactions poli­ tiques, a foundational work if indeed there is one, published by Benj amin Constant in 1797). And it was only after 1815 that these terms definitively entered the political vocabulary, where they were used for a long time to denote the parlia­ mentary opposition of the left to the forces of the right and reaction. The positive project of a liberal society (and conse­ quently that of a 'governmental liberalism') thus appears indissociable from the new ideological context defined in the same era by Auguste Comte: how was it possible, assuming that after the French Revolution there could be no return except in the imagination to the traditional societies of the Ancien Regime, to establish a modern social order, in con­ formity with the fundamental aspirations of a humanity that had finally become 'adult' ? In pointing this out I am certainly not forgetting that the first partial experiments in governmen­ tal liberalism had already taken place in France under the monarchy: the policies of deregulation of the grain trade

4

The Unity of Liberalism pursued by Laverdy and Maynon d'Invault from 1764 to 1770.4 Nor should we forget the initial phase of the Revolu­ tion itself, and especially the key role played by the Allard decree and the Le Chapelier law. 5 It remains none the less that it was above all as a post-revolutionary project, made possible by the definitive destruction of the foundations of the Ancien Regime, that philosophical liberalism was able to become historically active, until it constitutes, in our own day, the main (if not the only) active principle of government policies and transformations of civilization in the West - and thereby on the planet as a whole. It is in this sense alone that the term liberalism will be used here. Liberal doctrine did not appear in History as lightning from a clear sky. The logic governing its responses, in fact, only acquired its meaning once it was re-inscribed within the modern Western project and the questions that defined this. Liberalism, indeed, is not only inseparable from this project; it is actually its only coherent theoretical development, since, as distinct, for example, from the republican ideal which continues to grant a maj or place to ancient virtues, or from early socialism with its essential reference to ideas of moral­ ity and community, it does not seek to borrow any of its maj or formulations from earlier philosophical traditions. As against the absurd idea, particularly widespread on the left, that liberal policies are by nature 'conservative' or 'reaction­ ary' (classifications, moreover, that by an irony of History go back to Benj amin Constant), it is appropriate to see lib­ eralism as the modern ideology par excellence. It is indispens4Diderot's criticisms of these policies in his 'Apologie de !'Abbe Gal liani' are still very instructive. This text was republished in 1 998 with a remarkable introduction by Michel Barrillon, Diderot dans Ia premiere bataille du liberalisme economique (Marseille: Agone, 1 99 8 ) . 5 [The Allard decree o f 2 May 1 79 1 , followed b y the L e Chapelier law passed by the National Assembly on 14 June, banned workers' associati ons and the right to stri ke in the name of free enterprise. This law remained in force until 1 8 64 . - Tr. ]

5

The Realm of Lesser Evil able, therefore, if we wish to explain its logic, to return for a moment to the sources of the modern project itself. In order to understand the nature of this project, we must again guard against any retrospective or ethnocentric illusion - a methodological precaution that is generally neglected. The object will thus be to avoid, as far as is possible, explain­ ing the fundamental moments of the genesis of liberalism by drawing essentially on ideological schemas that appeared along with it, and were chiefly designed to permit it to justify itself. This implies, first of all, that the work of modernization carried out by European societies should no longer be con­ sidered a priori as simply a historically necessary step in the progress of Reason (or the 'development of the productive forces' ) , and, as a result, as a movement both inevitable and irreversible, which no other existing civilization has (or had ) either the right or the power to oppose. It is only when this naive mythology is de-activated (however essential it is to the self-definition of modernity) that it becomes possible to tackle the philosophical problem on its genuine foundations. At that point we can stop making an interminable list of the 'block­ ages' or 'obstacles' that for such a long time delayed various 'premodern' societies from the 'normal' development of Civilization. The question will be rather what 'chance con­ currence of strange causes' (in Rousseau's expression ) pre­ cipitated the advent of the Western exception, with a view to better understanding the historically unprecedented but not necessarily exemplary path which European societies chose to take from the seventeenth century on. In this complex combination of contingent causes (or pre­ conditions, it would be better to say), and without forgetting earlier historical specificities (such as, for example, the terms of the theologico-political problem bequeathed by the con­ flict between Empire and Church ),6 an essential place must be reserved for the invention of the experimental science of 6 Cf. Pierre Manent, Histoire intellectuelle du liberalisme (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1 98 7), ch. 1 .

6

The Unity of Liberalism nature, an invention which itself had a number of political and intellectual preconditions, and which constitutes one of the most singular features of the modern West/ The crucial importance of Galileo's Scienza nuova is above all due to the fact that it made philosophically conceivable the project the modern one par excellence - of making human beings 'masters and possessors of nature'. And yet, it is above all as the image of a new symbolic authority, the ideal of Science, an authority that could henceforth be opposed to that of the Church, that Galilean physics produced its two most impor­ tant ideological effects. On the one hand, it supplied a par­ ticularly solid metaphysical foundation for the notion of progress (a point that Pascal immediately noted) .8 And on the other hand, it promoted the belief - whose postulates Hobbes and Spinoza were among the first to define - that the extension of the Galilean method to the study of human nature would soon make it possible to construct a 'social physics', and by way of this create the conditions at last for a 'scientific' and 'impartial' treatment of the political problem.' The implications of this astonishing paradigm are 7 Some particu larly stim ulating philosophical ind ications on this subject are to be found in Olivier Rey, Itiueraire de l'egaremetzt (Paris: Seuil, 2003 ). 8 Hence his efforts, in the Preface au traite du vide, to draw a pre­ ventive demarcation line between 'subjects that fall u nder sense or reason ing', where the a uthority o f the M oderns wou ld now preva il, and the sum total of other 'matters' ( including, of co urse, theology), which cou ld not be conceived under categories of Progress. Pascal was thus one of the first philo sophers to be at the same time both modern and anti-modernist - or, if you like, one of the first modern critics of Modernity. 9 As Auguste Comte would later write, 'when politics has become a positive science, the public should grant publicists, and indeed will necessarily do so, the same confidence in politics as it presently grants astronomers for astronomy and doctors for medicine, etc.' (Separatiou geuerale eutre les opiuiotzs et les desirs, 1 8 1 9) . This is the metaphysical foundation for the contemporary a uthority o f omnipresent 'experts'.

7

The Real m of Lesser Evil

clearly unlimited. It is enough, for example, to combine this new representation of Reason in perpetual progress with the discovery of America (a further fortuitous precondition) to obtain a series of particularly remarkable effects. Whereas for Strabo or Herodotus the encounter with different civili­ zations was essentially conceived under the sign of geograph­ ical coexistence, it now became possible to apprehend this in the framework of a historical succession. It is also interesting to note that Adam Smith was one of the first thinkers to exploit this new model (as Christian Marouby has clearly established) and propose, on the basis of the anthropological findings available in his time, a systematic theory of 'stages' in the development of humanity, with economic growth being the foundation and motor of this. 1 0 If it is accepted that one can only speak of 'modernity' where people begin to represent to themselves the way in which they live as a mere historically determined moment of a universal evolu­ tion, 1 1 it is then undeniable that a large number of the philo­ sophical tools indispensable for the deployment of the 10 Cf. Christian M arou by, L'E co1tomie de Ia 1tature. Essai sur Adam Smith et l'atzthropologie de Ia croissa1tce (Paris: Seuil, 2004 ). It was by referring in particular to ethnographic material on the Iroquois and Hurons of the Five Nations confederacy that Smith was led to conceive of a ' necessary' movement lead ing all human societies from the ' hunting stage' to commercial society by way of the 'pas­ toral' and 'agricultural' stages. Maro u by shows in fine detail the countless distortions of empirical observation and logica l reasoning that Smith was forced into in order to maintain this hyp othesis, as well as the anthropological p ostulates on which The Wealth of Natio1ts is based (and which of course are still the basis of contem­ porary economic 'science' ) . 1 1 Cf. C. A. Bayly, La Naissance du monde modeme, 1780-1914 ( Paris: E ditions de l'Atelier, 2006 ), p. 2 1 : 'In the first place, we shall assume in this book the idea that a n essential dimension of moder­ n ity depends on the convictio n o f being modern. M odernity is an asp iration to be " in synch rony with one's time " . This has ta ken the form of a processus of emulation and borrowing. It seems hard to deny that, between 1 78 0 and 1 9 1 4, a growing number of people

8

The Unity of Liberal i s m

modern imaginary were developed and put into circulation at the time of the Galilean revolution. Though the ideal of Science thus played a fundamental role in the constitution of the modern imaginary, this was not in fact the real trigger of the dynamics of modernization. The model of the Galilean revolution could only have been so rapidly summoned to the service of resolving the political problem because this latter was posed, at the same time, in entirely unprecedented historical forms. In this 'concurrence of strange causes', it seems in fact that what contributed in the most determining fashion to catalysing the modern response to the crises of European society was, above all, the extraor­ dinary historical trauma provoked among all contemporaries by the amplitude and duration of the wars of this time. In the classical anthology that he devoted to the problem of war and peace from Machiavelli to Hobbes, Georges Livet stressed that 'all the writings of this period sigh after peace'. 12 It must be recognized, in fact, that the dramatic wars that defined the everyday horizon of human lives throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were characterized by two features which were deeply original from any point of view. On the one hand, the introduction of new weapons and the corresponding tactical or strategic innovations (such as the predominant importance from now on of the infantry) very rapidly made confrontations incomparably more mur­ derous and devastating than before. On the other hand, and above all, there was the generalization, in the second half of the sixteenth century, of an entirely new form of warfare, at decided that they were modern, or that they lived in a modern world, whether they liked this or not. [ . . . ] This was also the era o f modernity because the poor a n d subject peoples o f the whole world believed that they could improve their situation and their future prospects by adopting the external signs o f this mythical modernity, whether this meant the pocket-watch , the umbrella, or new sacred texts.' 12G. Livet, ed., Guerre et paix de Machiavel a Hobbes ( Paris: Armand Colin, 1 9 72), p. 5 0 .

9

The Real m of Lesser Evil

least at this degree of intensity,13 i.e. ideological civil war, its principal form at this time being war of religion. This cer­ tainly does not mean that the whole series of conflicts that disorganized Europe at this time can be reduced simply to religious civil war. But the latter formed the permanent background, with the result that even the seemingly more classic wars that were regularly waged between the political powers of the time - such as the terrible Thirty Years War in the first half of the seventeenth century - were always overdetermined, both in their origin and in their concrete peripeties, by the logic of this new form of conflict. It also affected the very nature of human relations in the most radical fashion, and it was certainly not by chance that Pascal, following Hobbes, considered it the greatest of evils - a formulation that is also found at the same point in time in Nicole's Essais de morale.14 This is actually due to the fact that, as distinct from traditional war, which could on occa­ sion renew the ties of a community, civil war tends by defini­ tion to introduce the most de-socializing divisions possible. Divisions which, by setting some people against others relatives, neighbours and friends - threaten at every moment to undo the cycle of traditional solidarities and allegiances, a cycle which we know constitutes the very essence of 'primary sociality' (as Alain Caille calls it) and the essential matrix of those everyday relations of trust without which

1 3 Plato already distingu ished between stasis (civil war) and polemos (war with fo reigners). 14 Pascal's form ulation is clearly an allusio n to that of Erasmus ('war is the greatest of evils', Institution du Prince chretie1z, 1 5 1 6 ). Erasmus' analysis already granted a central place to civil war: 'What name sho uld be given to the act of Christians who tear each other to pieces when so many ties unite them, who prolong mas­ sacre for years for no conceivable reason, out of personal animos­ ity or the foolish ambition of youth ?'

10

The Unity of Libe ral i s m

there can be no lasting historical community. 1 5 It is revealing, moreover, that Corneille, despite his work being a constant celebration of warlike and heroic virtues, does not hesitate, as soon as civil war is concerned, to define this as the 'reign of crime'. It is in all likelihood this haunting by civil war that explains, in the first place, why the philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and particularly those of Protestant origin or sensibility) almost always describe their 'state of nature' as a condition necessarily governed by the war of all against all (whether this is original or derivative) . From all evidence, this is first and foremost a philosophical transposi­ tion of the situations of civil war of their time, pushed by hypothesis - as in any thought experiment - to the imaginary limit at which individuals, supposedly free by nature from any allegiance towards one another, no longer have any other value to defend than the preservation of their own lives, in a world defined by the fear of death and generalized distrust. It is clear, then, that this hyperbolic manner of formulating the conditions of the political problem itself contains the principle of its solution. 1 6 As Rousseau put it, it is only when 15 0n the nature and scope of this primary sociality in sixteenth ­ century France, the standard work is that by the American historian Nathalie Zeman Davis, The G ift in Sixtee7zth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). 16 ln the same way that, in terms of metaphysics, Cartesian doubt had to take a hyperbolic form in order to fo und in advance the possibility of the cogito. We can note here that modern solutions have always to be deduced on the basis of philosop hical situations that are not only negative, or even desperate (absolute doubt, ab solute violence ), but also fictional (in Descartes the hypothesis of the dream and the evil spirit, in Hob bes the state of nature, in the economists the fab le of primitive barter). It is n ot the least paradox of a society that sees itself, for the first time in history, as entirely 'realistic' and proced ural - in other words b ased on the purely mechanical protocols of Law and Ma rket - that it should create its own foundation myths in this way.

11

The Real m of Lesser Evil

the obstacles generated by the endless unleashing of imitative rivalries 'show their power of resistance to be greater than the resources at the disposal of each individual for his maintenance in that state' that these individuals are able to understand that 'the human race would perish unless it changed its manner of existence' ( The Social Contract, Book 1, chapter 6 ) . Fear o f violent death, distrust towards those around, rej ec­ tion of all ideological fantasies and the desire for a life that would at last be quiet and peaceful - this then seems to be, in the last instance, the historical horizon of the new 'way of being' that the moderns would now incessantly demand. It is fundamentally one and the same thing, in their eyes, to establish a society in conformity with the progress of Reason, and to define the conditions that would finally enable human­ ity to emerge from war ('the conditions of society, that is, of human peace', as Hobbes soberly writes at the start of his De Cive). This configuration, indivisibly both political and psychological, illuminates, among other things, the abso­ lutely key role played in modern Western culture, both by the repression of everything that surrounds death, and by the deeply rooted sentiment of the horror and absurdity of all wars, from now on understood as the worst of evils. This kind of sentiment, which was essential in the genesis of lib­ eralism, was visibly forged, once and for all, through the prism of the most terrible of wars, ideological civil war, the memory of which was bound up with the unleashing of reli­ gious fanaticism, and - a little later - revolutionary Terror. This also offers an explanation of how the only 'war' that remains conceivable, in a philosophical construction of this kind, is the war of man against nature, waged with the weapons of science and technology; a substitute war, which the Moderns precisely expect to divert into work and indus­ try the greater part of those energies that had previously been devoted to the war of man against man. [A] Christopher Lasch, with his customary perspicacity, grasped this point perfectly well. The modern belief in Progress, he wrote, should not be interpreted as simply 'a secularized version of

12

The Unity of Liberal i s m

Christian millenarianism'. It is fundamentally the sign of a very prosaic aspiration to finally live in peace, far from the murderous agitations of History, and a legitimate desire on the part of individuals (at least according to Adam Smith) to now devote the essential part of their efforts to 'improving their condition' by peacefully seeing to their own affairs. 1 7 In this sense, the modern ideal of progress was originally anchored less in the attractions of some earthly paradise than in the desire to escape at all costs from the hell of ideological civil war, in other words the desire to finally emerge from the 'greatest of evils'. By placing the question of the ideological pacification of society in this way at the centre of the complex of problems, it becomes easier to conceive both the absolute originality that accompanies it and, above all, the profound unity of the two philosophical figures under which liberalism was to lead this project to its logical fulfilment. Let us take the original­ ity first of all. In a remarkable essay, Eric Desmons has shown very well how the ability to sacrifice one's life, when circum­ stances demand this, for the community to which one belongs, has always been the proclaimed virtue of all kinds of tradi­ tional societies, in other words societies that ascribe a privi­ leged place to face-to-face relations, and consequently to sentiments of shame and honour. [B] From the primitive warrior to the citizen of ancient Rome (and we may recall, after Skinner, that the republican ideal of Antiquity never completely coincides with the modern paradigm), from the martyr to the Christian faith through to the medieval knight, 17 Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven (New Yo rk: Norton, 1 9 9 1 ) . O n this lassitude and deep desire for peace, some curious lines were already written by Benj amin Constant in an abandoned draft preface to Adolphe: 'I wanted to depict in Adolphe one of the main moral sicknesses of our century, this fatigue, uncer­ tainty, absence of force, perpetual ana lysis, that places an ulterior motive alongside every sentiment, and in this way spoils these as soon as they are born.' Adolphe's moral sickness was visibly the l iberal syndrome itself.

13

The Real m of Lesser Evil

it was this permanent readiness for ultimate sacrifice that, for better or worse, provided a public basis for the self-esteem of individuals, and the guarantee of their possible eternal glory, whether such glory was sacred or profane. 1 8 In the image of Hegel's slave - who, at the decisive moment, trembles for his biological life and prefers this to the honour of a heroic death - Western modernity thus appears as the first civilization in history that has undertaken to make self-preservation the first (or even the only) concern of the rational individual, and the founding ideal of the society that he has to form along with his kind. As Benj amin Constant clearly emphasized, 'the aim of the moderns is security in private enj oyments; and they call freedom the guarantees that institutions grant to such enj oyments' . 1 9 There could be no better way of saying that the freedom that liberals would celebrate (as distinct from the bristly republican freedom) was above all simply another name for a quiet (and if pos­ sible agreeable ) life, and an aspiration to a historic rest that was well deserved ('the calm desire of wealth', as Hutcheson put it in 1755 ) . The new philosophical custom which developed, starting from Hobbes, of preceding political reflection with a suppos­ edly obj ective ( or 'materialist') description of human nature, can be explained to a large extent in the light of this pro­ gramme. Its first function seems indeed to have been to secure in advance the anthropological preconditions for the pacifica­ tion that was sought after, by inscribing these in the way that the political problem itself was posed. According to the dom­ inant interpretation of the time, however, the two main 1 8 Eric Desmons, Mourir pour Ia patrie? (Paris: PUF, 200 1 ). Desmons o ffers a passionate analysis of the dou ble movement that first of allied St Augustine to transfer to the City of God the love that the citizen of Antiquity was supposed to cherish for his own City, and in a second phase led the n ascent nations o f the late M iddle Ages to repatriate this Augustinian ideal of the martyr to the fa ith, to the benefit of their new patriotism. 1' De Ia liberte des Ancie1ZS comparee a celle des Modemes, 1 8 1 9 .

14

The Unity of Liberalis m

causes of the madness of war were, on the one hand, the desire for glory on the part of the Great, and, on the other, the pretensions of people to know the Truth about Goodness (the source of all civil wars), so that they could set themselves up as competent to judge the salvation of others. On this basis, it was easy to conjugate the system of modern responses to the question of civil peace. First of all, it was imperatively necessary to assume that the desire for glory and the cult of heroic virtues were, definitively, no more than a mask for amour-propre and private interest; this is where what Paul Benichou called the work of 'demolition of heroes' came in (something in which La Rochefoucauld and Port-RoyaP0 between them played a maj or role, as we well know). And secondly, it became indispensable to establish that our con­ victions concerning the True, the Good and the Beautiful were not universally communicable, and perhaps were even nothing more than a simple matter of habit or taste. In more contemporary terms, that is, the philosophy of suspicion (or deconstructionism) and cultural relativism (or multicultural­ ism), which still in our own day represent the two fundamen­ tal pillars of the postmodernist temple. We should not be deceived by the insistence of the moderns, since the seven­ teenth century, on the philosophical necessity of considering people, not as they should be, but as they are ( 'treating their vices and infirmities in the manner of geometers', as Spinoza put it) . D espite appearances, this is less a function of a hard­ won lucidity, under the future protection of new 'human sciences', than of a theoretical constraint internal to the modern programme itself. It is at bottom a matter of an anthropology of lassitude (one of the first figures, if you like, of 'never again') , bent on defining in its turn what individu­ als should be, so that the process of devalorization and neu­ tralization of their two main warlike passions - the claim to 20 [The Parisian convent of Port-Royal wa s the most important

stronghold of Jansenism , with its emphasis on d ivine grace and predestination. Blaise Pascal was among its leading champions. Tr.]

-

15

The Real m of Lesser Evil

know the True, and to embody heroism and Virtue - can finally be set in motion. It is clearly in this precise framework that the essence of Man starts to be read in a privileged fashion after the model of the 'bourgeois', the well-off busi­ nessman whom the entire era now agrees to define as prosaic, peaceful and inoffensive. From this point of view, one can say that modernity only really begins to deploy its maj or ideological effects from the moment that (in Marx's play on words), 'civil society' (die burgerliche Gesellschaft) comes to be conceived essentially as 'bourgeois society'. It is now possible to explain, in its constitutive logic, the parallel double movement that leads philosophical liberalism to propose the utopia of a rational society, placing the very foundation of its pacified existence in the simple dynamic of the impersonal structures of Market and Law. 21 Whatever the solution reached, the procedure is in fact the same. The question is to discover or imagine the mechanisms (in other words, the systems of weight and counterweight, conceived after the model of physical theories of equilibrium), [C] capable of generating by themselves the whole order and harmony that are politically necessary, without there being any longer any need to appeal to the virtue of the subj ects involved. This may well be a renunciation with no great psychological consequence, since, for a modern spirit, 'virtue' (whether it draws its official inspiration from religious faith, custom, morality, the civic ideal, or the spirit of giving) now constitutes simply a form of hypocrisy or lying to oneself, a constant source of ideological disputes and conflicts that threaten to unsettle, at any moment, this process without a subj ect that is the condition for any tranquil society.

21 [' D roit' as used by M ichea is more strictly translated as 'Right' , i.e. the principles underlying positive law. I have preferred 'Law' as avo id ing awkwardness in severa l places, but the distinction should be kept in mind. Tr.] -

16

The Unity of Liberalis m

It is certainly not necessary to deny, in advancing this thesis, the clear differences of philosophical emphasis that distinguish the solution championed by the liberalism of Law (or political liberalism) from that privileged by the liberalism of the Market. From the standpoint of the concrete history of ideas, it is indispensable to take this into account. But from a philosophical standpoint, it is no less indispensable to establish that these two parallel versions of liberalism are not only, for most of the time, associated in fact. There also exists a structural necessity that leads each of them to seek perma­ nently its theoretical supports in the other, with the object of escaping in this way their respective antinomies. It is precisely this necessity that Marx summed up in his famous formula: 'Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham'.22 If liberalism thus presents itself, from its very origin, as a philosophical double-entry table, there is a sense in which it is quite indifferent whether its principles are developed from the starting-point of its strictly political side or its economic side. From a pedagogic point of view, however, it seems more logical to start from political liberalism, in so far as this latter, as distinct from its economic counterpart, is forced by definition to confront the modern political problem in a direct fashion, by elaborating for this purpose a mechanics of power that is extremely precise, and which at its point of departure, we should note, does not necessarily assume a particular conception of the Market and its metaphysical role. The basic axiom of political liberalism is sufficiently well known. If the claim of certain individuals (or associations of individuals, such as the Church ) to have the true definition of Good is the fundamental cause that leads people into violent confrontation, then the members of a society will only be able to live in peace with one another if the Power charged with organizing their coexistence is philosophically neutral; 22 [K. Marx, Capital, Volume O tte (Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1 9 76 ), p. 2 8 0 . - Tr.]

17

The Real m of Lesser Evil

in other words if it abstains on principle from imposing on individuals any particular conception of the good life. In a liberal society, everyone is thus free to adopt the style of life that they deem most appropriate to their conception of duty (if they have one ) or happiness; on the sole and unique res­ ervation, of course, that their choices are compatible with the corresponding freedom of others. This last requirement assumes the presence - on top of individuals separately engaged in seeking the good life and happiness - of an instance charged with harmonizing freedoms that are initially in competition, and only j ustified in limiting the scope of these by defining a certain number of common rules. This instance is Law (with the State, in this perspective, having no further essential function than that of guaranteeing its effec­ tive application) . And the principles that are deemed to guide its exercise are, in liberal terminology, those of Justice. Here again, Benj amin Constant's formulations show an exemplary limpidity: 'Let us pray', he writes, 'that authority remains within its limits; that it confines itself to being j ust. We shall concern ourselves with being happy. ' But this liberal thesis of the primacy of the Just over the Good (as Anglo-Saxon philosophers designate it) 23 must be properly understood. If for political liberalism Law consti­ tutes the instance of supreme regulation that must be sub­ stituted for all others, this is naturally not in the sense of earlier normative mechanisms, judged to be arbitrary and stifling - whether again these are those of custom, morality, religion, or republican virtue. The 'theory of justice' on which the new authority of Law is based has in actual fact little in common with what traditional philosophy had pre­ viously conceived under this name. It is no longer concerned, in other words, to define Ideas or grasp Essences, i.e. to express itself in the name of some kind of 'Truth', whatever the metaphysical status of this latter may be. Rather than speaking of a 'theory of justice', it would be more appropri23 Cf. for example Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism atzd the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 9 82 ) .

18

The Unity of Liberalis m

ate to speak on this subj ect of a theory of adj usting or adj ustment. It essentially consists in setting up the most effective institutional combinations, and therefore calculat­ ing most exactly the system of weights and counterweights ( 'checks and balances' ) that makes it possible to maintain the equilibrium of rival freedoms while placing the minimum in the way of demands on them - guaranteeing them, if you prefer, the lowest possible rate of existential taxation. On principle, therefore, a liberal theory of justice does not have to engage in any particular philosophical reflection on what might be the best way of living. It is limited instead to defin­ ing the technical conditions of a simple modus vivendi - that which it is necessary to impose on a multitude of elementary particles in constant movement, with the object of reducing as far as possible the risk of shocks and collisions (which comes back, ultimately, to assigning the liberal Law a func­ tion comparable to that of the highway code) . As for what these particles consider to be their duty or their happiness, that consideration no longer falls within the field of political philosophy. In this sense, and parodying what Heidegger wrote about science, one could say that, for liberals, the most just State - the one that, on all levels, asks least of us - is the State that does not think. A State without ideas - or, as liberals put it, without ideology - and which, out of a kind of inverted Platonism, stakes its philosophical honour on no longer asking what is the best way of leading one's life or employing one's 'natural' freedom. At the limit, this State without ideas or values2 4 (which refrains, therefore, from judging any but technical questions) cannot even be understood any more as a 'government of people'. It is rather, in Saint-Simon's famous distinction, purely an 'admin­ istration of things', demanding not so much any genuine political convictions as simply an 'expert' competence, that

24 We know the extent to which , in the last thirty years, the liberal State has found a political personnel remarka bly adapted to its function.

19

The Real m of Lesser Evil

of the informed manager. No one better formulated this ideal of absolute axiological neutrality than Immanuel Kant, when he noted, in his Project for a Perpetual Peace, that in the hypothesis of a perfect legislative work, the mechanism of Law would in itself be sufficient to ensure the peaceful coexistence even of a people of demons. And yet this is where the problems of political liberalism begin. Certainly, with the exception of the Marquis de Sade (whom Lasch, Lacan and Pasolini have all seen, in their respective ways, as simply the shadow side of Enlightenment philosophy), 25 none of the early liberals would have cele­ brated as the logic end-term of liberty the advent of a 'people of demons'. The problem is that nothing in the logic of political liberalism protects it against such an eventuality. The authority of the liberal Law, as we have seen, is only legitimate because it confines itself to arbitrating the Brown­ ian motion of competing freedoms, without ever appealing to other criteria than the requirements of freedom itself which essentially reduce simply to the necessity of not harming another person. This last criterion, however, cru­ cially important for liberals, turns out when tested to be very difficult to use (as John Stuart Mill already showed in the mid nineteenth century). By what right, for example, can a liberal society prevent individuals from harming them­ selves ( and we know how many liberals, from the late lamented Milton Friedman through to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, have vigorously campaigned for the decriminalization of drugs) ? Or, on the terrain of relationships between indi­ viduals, on what basis can it be decided that the act of criticizing (or ridiculing) a religion does or does not harm 25

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (London: Sphere, 1 9 80); jacques Lacan, 'Ka nt avec Sade' ( E crits, Paris : Seuil, 1 96 6 ) a n d o f course Sa/0, o r the 120 D ays of Sodom, the insufferable ma sterpiece of Pier Paolo Pasolini - filmed in 1 9 75 - who depicts the conditions in which the Sadean universe (which was one of the major 'revo lutionary' reference points of the far-left of the tim e ) found its most disturbing fulfiment i n the death-throes of fa scism .

20

The Unity of Liberalis m

the well-understood exercise of freedom of its believers? To what extent, conversely, do the teachings of this or that religion as to the status of women or the nature of homo­ sexuality directly attack the 'rights of minorities' ? In the face of such questions, and they are legion, the liberal Law is unavoidably in great difficulty. If it must refrain on principle, in making its judgements, from drawing support from any particular metaphysical conceptions (for example, ideas of the salvation of the soul, of common decency or of human dignity), it is inevitable, given the perpetual evolution of mores (a process that the Moderns unanimously agree in deeming 'natural'), that it finds itself confronted with a growing number of 'social problems' that are manifestly impossible to resolve in a coherent fashion in the strictly technical framework it has given itself. The logical drift is then to steadily pursue the path of a massive regularization of all possible and imaginable behaviours. Consider, for example, the exemplary case of prostitution. If the only criterion on which it is possible to distinguish between permissible and impermissible acts26 is definitively the consent of the individuals involved, by what right can it be claimed that prostitution, as long as it is practised volun­ tarily, is not a trade like any other, probably destined to j oin the economically promising category of 'personal services' ? Once judgement can no longer be made on the basis of a critique of the commodification of the body (since this is a particular philosophy, and moreover an anti-capitalist one), it is hard not to follow the liberal j urist Daniel Borillo when he comes to the conclusion: 'It is not up to the State to promote a specific sexual morality, at the risk of itself becom­ ing immoral. Only adult persons themselves are capable of deciding what is appropriate for them [ . . . ]. By what right would the State forbid someone from having sexual relations in exchange for payment, and making this their habitual

26 Cf. Michaela Marzano, ]e co1zsetzs dotzc je suis ... E thique de l'autotzomie ( Paris : PUF, 2006 ).

21

The Real m of Lesser Evil

profession ? ' 27 This legal analysis, impeccable if one takes the founding dogmas of liberalism as sacred, thus offers a rein­ forced ideological foundation for the position of liberal 'feminists', when they proclaim, in the persons of Marcela lacub and Catherine Millet: 'As women and feminists, we oppose those who aspire to tell women what they should do with their own bodies and their sexuality. We oppose those who insist on repressing prostitute activity instead of seeking to de-stigmatize it, so that those who have chosen what they consider an authentic profession can exercise it in the best conditions possible. ' 2 8 [D] This minimalist mode of reason­ ing can naturally be extended to all conceivable demands, including those most contrary to good sense and common decency, and the example of the United States offers daily demonstrations of this. All that is needed is to be able to manipulate, even in a very rough and ready way, those tech­ niques of 'deconstruction' which their happy conceptual sim­ plicity now makes accessible to anybody ( even a Liberation reader), and which make it possible, without too much intel­ lectual effort, to transform all possible moral scruples into so many arbitrary and historically determined taboos. 27 Cited by M ichaela Marzano Ue co1zsens done je suis), p . 1 4 5 . We should note that Daniel Borillo, under the influence o f his very liberal distru st of all 'norms pronounced in common' (interview in Marianne, 10 February 2007 ), pushes po sitivist jurisprudence to the point of believing that, since differences between 'masculine' and ' feminine' are based after all only on scholarly metaphysical constructions, 'the law does not have to be concerned with this' (which immed iately shoots down, we shou ld note, the principle o f parity). I t is not s urprising, therefore, that Jack Lang rushed to write a preface for the last little work of this Milton Friedman o f Law. 28 [This open letter in Le Mo1zde, from Catherine M illet, editor o f Art Press a n d a uthor of a sexually explicit memoir, together with lawyer and a uthor Marcela Iacub, and writer Catherine Robbe­ Grillet, criticized Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior min ister, for h is plan to ban prostitutes from the streets, as well as those left-wing parties that proposed to penalize the clients of prostitutes. - Tr. ]

22

The Unity of Liberalis m

We can predict, however, that there will always be other individuals - or associations of individuals - who judge that each of these new 'advances of Law' encroaches on their own freedom, in so far as they see one or other of them as harming their own sensibility and 'self-esteem' (which constitute, in a now general opinion, an integral part of this freedom) . It is thus inevitable, at the end of the day, that this process of infinite extension of individual rights (or liberalization of mores) ends up triggering, under the effect of the old dialec­ tic of provocation and resistance, the appearance of a new war of all against all. A war waged this time before tribunals and by commissioned attorneys, 2 9 with upholders of the 'politically correct' becoming, as we can all see, professional soldiers. And since the proclaimed neutrality of the liberal Law does away in advance with any serious philosophical support for deciding between these contradictory claims, there is no other issue available to it, at the end of the day, than to passively record the continuing variation in the dif­ ferent relations of force that affect opinion and society. Today, therefore, the ban on tobacco; tomorrow, perhaps, the legalization of drugs; and probably, in the near future, both of these at the same time. Certainly, the strange climate that is now established in favour of an ever-greater number of legal crusades (the disturbing pleasures of informing, the generalized surveillance of some people by others, the ineluc­ table multiplication of censorships, controls and prohibi­ tions) seems the very opposite of the peaceful and tolerant world that the founders of liberalism dreamed of: what would Montesquieu, Constant or Tocqueville have thought of Act Up, Chiennes de Garde, or Les Indigenes de Ia Republique ? l0

29The attorney is, along with the entrepreneur, the emblematic figure of the liberal system, as any American TV series is there to remind us. 30 The 'axiological neutra lity' demanded by liberalism sometimes has curious consequences. Thus noth ing can logically pro hib it the use of even racism for pedagogical purposes, if there is good reason

23

The Real m of Lesser Evil

But of course, it is always in the name of their theory of Law and Freedom that this deranged need to legalize, exclude and prohibit is currently developing without limit. From the moment that the liberal State sees itself, in Pierre Manent's expression, as 'scepticism become institution', there is no coherent institutional firebreak to prevent the methodical dismantling of what Orwell called 'common decency'; nor likewise, it goes without saying, of simple good sense. Need we recall once again that it was precisely around this crucial question - the difference between a just society and a decent society31 - that the first elements of the socialist critique of liberalism were developed in the early nineteenth

to believe that this is an effective political means for atta mmg equality of rights (this is the principle o f all 'affirmative action' ). This is how Houria Bouteld ja, speaking for Les Indigenes de la Republique, could calmly declare (on a programme hosted by Frederic Taddei, broadcast on France 3 ), and without - need we say? - arousing the least political or media reaction, that the first preconditio n for 're-educating the rest of Western society' was to consider 'whites' as 'lower than dogs' (cf. Mariamze, 30 June 2007). A point of voca b u lary should be made clear here, though it is visibly ignored by the majority of professionals in the political and media world: i1zdige1ze, in French, does not mean 'savage' , 'primi­ tive' , or 'colonized', but rather 'originating here' - basically an exact synonym for 'native popu lation'. The antonym of this word is alloge1ze, meaning 'of fo reign origin'. Clea rly you need not have read Orwell to divine what a lways hides behind the political and media decision to impose on the public at large the use of a word in a sense opposite to what it actually has. [The militant gay orga­ nization Act Up, in France as in the US, focuses its action o n AIDS. Chiennes de Garde (the fem inine of ' watchdogs' ) campaigns against violence to women. Les Indigenes de la Republique was founded in 2005 to struggle against ' all discrimination of race, sex, religion or origin', in the wake of the 2 004 law banning the wearing of the veil and other rel igious symbols in school. - Tr.] 3 1 On this distinction, originating with Orwell, see Avishai Margalit, La Societe dece1zte (Pa ris: Champs-Flammarion, 2007 ).

24

The Unity of Liberal i s m

century ? The principle of this critique (rooted in the lived experience that the urban popular classes had of the early forms of dehumanization generated by the new industrial order, and the already limitless egoism of the new possessing classes) was that a society that in actual fact32 encouraged behaviour so indecent and so manifestly contrary to human dignity could not be morally acceptable, so that it made no sense to define it as 'j ust'. For the first socialists, therefore, it was indispensable that the collectivity should organize itself as such, in order to inscribe in reality (though their concrete proj ects varied to a considerable degree from one current to another) those conditions for a decent existence and a minimal solidarity without which the State of Law, whatever its evident advantages, would continue to lack any effective human content. It is particularly interesting, therefore, to analyse here the response given to this problem in 1848 by Frederic Bastiat. 33 There are two reasons why this individual holds a decisive place in the history of French liberalism. First of all, he was one of the first liberals to debate openly with this nascent socialist critique ('We have as our opponents', he wrote, 'the communists, the Fourierists, the Owenists, Cabet, Louis Blanc, Pierre Leroux and many others' ) . Secondly, and above all, he was (with his 'economist' friends), one of the very first ideologists of this movement to have accepted, without the

32 As we know, the critique of liberalism, for these representatives of early socia lism, always set out from the contra diction between the formal principles of Law and the reality of the facts (so that they distinguished for example between ' formal liberty' and 'real liberty' ) . This philosophical procedure ena bled them to open beyond strictly political problems - the space of the social question. In our d ay, on the contrary, left intellectuals are generally those for whom reality is no longer anything b ut the exception that confirms a theory (preferably a ' sociological' theory). 33 Frederic Bastiat, 'Justice et fraternitf' Uoumal des E cotzomistes, 1 5 June 1 84 8 ) .

25

The Real m of Lesser Evil

least compunction, 34 the dialectical unity of the two aspects. From this point of view, his response may be seen as an exemplary announcement of all the philosophical develop­ ments to come from this actually existing liberalism. What strikes the contemporary reader right away in this response of Bastiat's is the care that he takes to make clear from the start how, far from defending the calculating egoism denounced by the 'socialist schools', he personally shares his opponents' ideal of a supportive and decent community: And shall we be reduced to speak of ourselves? Very well, let o ur actions be examined. We shall certainly admit that these vario us publicists who, in o ur day, seek to stifle in the h uman heart the very sentiment of self-interest, who show themselves so pitiless towards what they call individ ualism, whose mouths are always filled with words such as devotion, sacri­ fice, fraternity - we shall accept that they excl usively o bey these sublime motives that they counsel to others [ . . . ], but in the end, we shall be allowed to say that in this respect we do n ot fear comparison.

What is at stake, in this inaugurating debate, is not in his eyes the question of whether it still makes sense to maintain that 'fraternal' behaviour or solidarity is more worthy than egoistical behaviour. On this point, Bastiat, contrary to the maj ority of liberals today/5 claims to experience no doubt, and declares that he is in total agreement with the socialists.

34 Th is was not the case, as we know, for Constant, Tocqueville, or even Adam Smith. 35 When today's libera ls ma inta in, for example, that any attempt to restrict the indecent profits of the great predators of the world o f b usiness would inevita bly lead these t o move themselves or their factories abroad, they take for granted their indifference in prin­ ciple to any civic responsibility, any morality, or even any h uman sentiment. As La urence Parisot proudly declares, ' a salary scale has n othing to do with morality' .

26

The Unity of Libe ral i s m

His critique of nascent socialism is far more subtle. It consists in developing the idea that fraternity cannot be practised 'to order' without straight away losing its meaning, and that a gesture is only truly generous if it is accomplished spontane­ ously and without expecting the least return.36 The socialists' error would thus lie, in these conditions, in making any real fraternity impossible, by calling for duties to be inscribed in legislation that only individuals have the power to impose on themselves: 'Hence', writes Bastiat: these attempts at the organ ization of labo ur; these declara­ tions that the State owes all its citizens subsistence, well­ being, education; that it must be genero us, charitable, attentive and devoted to all; that its mission is to suckle the infant, instruct the yo uth, assure work to the strong, provide pen­ sions for the weak - i n a word, that it has to directly intervene to rel ieve every kind of su ffering, [ . . . ] supply balm for all wounds, shelter to all the unfortunate, and even aid and French b lood for a l l the oppressed on the surface of the globe.

The desire to apply this generous programme 'by law and taxation', as Bastiat puts it, can only rebound against itself, and by establishing only a caricature of true fraternity, lead inevitably to a regime of terror and generalized poverty. The problem, however, remains unsolved. If it is admitted that fraternity only has any meaning as a private practice based on private choices, and if the just State must refrain on principle from intervention in these fields, how then is it still possible to hope to introduce into the everyday life of individuals the moral rigour and spirit of solidarity that

36 Bastiat's criticism is perfectly well founded, in so far as it concerns simply the everyday relationships that individuals form between themselves (i.e. everyth ing that comes under 'primary sociality' ). His mistake (or h is sophism) l ies in transposing, without the least d isc ussion, this basic anthropological truth on to the very different level of pub lic policy, or what Ala in Caille calls 'secondary sociality'.

27

The Real m of Lesser Evil

Bastiat claims to recognize as the condition of any genuinely human society? What, in the end, authorizes a political liberal to believe that people will make by themselves desirable choices, and will not rather prefer to adopt an egoistic behav­ iour, or even cynically decide to behave like 'demons' ? If Bastiat's response is still exemplary here, it is precisely because it marks particularly clearly the moment (both philosophical and historical) at which the unity in itself of liberal philoso­ phy finally becomes a unity for itself. In other words, the moment at which liberalism, in defending itself against the socialist critique, discovers that it has no longer any other coherent choice available but to subcontract to the mecha­ nisms of the Market its concern to resolve the constitutive aporias of Law. 'After mature consideration', Bastiat thus writes, 'we must recognize that God has done a good job, with the result that the best condition for progress is justice and liberty. ' This curious approach, seemingly far from modern, need in no way trouble the liberal reader. We learn very quickly, in fact, that this deus ex machina charged with the definitive regula­ tion of the moral question can have no other possible incar­ nation than Adam Smith's famous 'hidden hand'. The question is therefore to understand that it is the total libera­ tion of economic exchange (as well as the quasi-total aboli­ tion of taxation) ,37 which, by placing the just society under the protective tutelage of the laws of supply and demand, will itself be in a position, by a purely mechanical process, to generate this peaceful and supportive community which true liberals as well as socialists see as their ideal. Bastiat certainly does not ignore the massive objection of the

37 For Bastiat, this cond ition is a regular personal obsession . In this aspect, he was certa inly one of the first a uthors to interpret with such conviction the great complaint of present-d ay liberals: 'the rich are the real poor, as the State takes everything' . Hence h is extreme popularity on web sites that reflect the views o f big business .

28

The Unity of Libe ral i s m

socialists of his day, already a traditional one. As Victor Considerant, whom Bastiat himself cites at length, wrote: What could result from this industrial liberty on which so much h ope has been set, this famous p rinciple of free compe­ tition, that was held to be so strongly endowed with a char­ acter of democratic organization ? It could o nly produce general subj ugation, the collective enslavement of the masses deprived of capital, industrial tools and instruments of labour, as well as o f education, to the class that is ind ustrially pro ­ vided and well equipped. They say that the battlegro und is open , all in dividuals are called to the combat, and conditions for all are equal. Very well, b ut let us not forget one thing, that on this great battlefield, there are those who are schooled, hardened to war, armed to the teeth , and who have in their possession a great tra in of supplies, materia l, armaments and war machines, as well occupying all the positions, whereas the others, deprived, naked, ignorant and hungry, are obliged, in order to live from day to day and to provide for their wives and ch ildren, to implore their very a dversaries for work o f some kind a n d a meagre wage .

If Bastiat was scandalized that such a warlike vocabulary could be used apropos the fundamentally peaceful world of industry and gentle commerce (what was more unthinkable, in fact, than an economic war ?), he none the less recognizes Considerant's merit in having correctly located the issues at stake. 'The deep disagreement between socialists and econo­ mists', writes Bastiat, 'consists in this: the socialists believe in an essential antagonism of interests. The economists believe in natural harmony, or rather, the necessary and progressive harmonization of interests. This is the whole of the matter. ' I t is simply that o n this key question, Providence is not neutral, and already chose its camp a long time back. As Bastiat puts it: 'Providence is not deceived. It has arranged matters in such a way that particular interests, under the law of justice, naturally reach the most harmonic combinations'; and he adds triumphantly that 'it is this conclusion that is reached by political economy'.

29

The Real m of Lesser Evil

All the elements for this miraculous conclusion are thus now combined. It did indeed fall to Political Economy, inseparably both a new Newtonian science and a hermeneu­ tics of Providence, to proclaim the Gospel that had been so long awaited. It alone, in fact, possessed the power to reveal to people, supported by theorems, the magic linkages that make free and undistorted competition mechanically gener­ ate unlimited Growth, which in turn will permit, just as mechanically, 'lifting the suffering classes in two respects, first by supplying them with provisions at low price, and secondly by raising their level of wages'. Now, Bastiat con­ cludes, and this is the ultimate wellspring of his demonstra­ tion, 'it is not possible for the lot of the workers to be naturally and doubly improved in this way, without their moral condition being likewise lifted up and purified' - a person's moral capacities being directly proportional to the material goods he possesses, since these secure him, by def­ inition, against the two eternal sources of the penchant for ill that are envy and resentment. From now on, no more fear of a people of demons. It is the Economy, finally free to develop according to its own natural laws - and protected by the justice of the ideologically neutral State (any ideo­ logical intervention could only disturb the providential order of the Market) - that will itself undertake to morally edu­ cate people and progressively establish true fraternity in their hearts, under the benevolent eye of God. All this, be it understood, without there being any need to exert on them the least legal constraint, nor even to remind them of any kind of duty. In this sense, economic Growth is the solution to the riddle of History, [E] the secret - Bastiat again - of 'Progress' and 'a society that becomes steadily more perfect'. 38 For a completely coherent liberal, authority must certainly remain within due bounds and rest content

38 In his speech at Silver Spring on 14 February 2002, George W. Bush formulated most clearly the common assumption o f all liber­ als, o f both right or left: ' Growth is the solution, n ot the problem.'

30

The Unity of Libe ral i s m

with being just. But it is Economics that will make us happy, and in the wake of this, fraternal and good into the bargain. 39 We started with the antinomies of political liberalism, at grips with its Kantian demons, and have brutally ended up in the world of Adam Smith and Turgot. There should be nothing surprising about this constitutive oscillation between the two moments of liberalism. It reminds us in fact that the ideal of 'gende commerce' - the coping-stone of Enlighten­ ment philosophy and foundation of nascent Political Economy - was not formulated as the conclusion to schol­ arly reflections on the allocation of scarce resources or the optimal combination of factors of production. It was actu­ ally inscribed from the start in the proj ect of systematic pacification of society that was the genuine source of modern institutions. It is significant from this point of view that the first known project for universal peace, Emery de Lacroix ( Cruce)'s Le Nouveau Cynee, published in 162 3 , sought from the start to link this key question of peace with the

39 Bastiat does not seem to have noticed the contradictory character of the solution he proposed. If, under the effect of unlimited Growth, 'creator of jobs and wea lth ', people grad ually become more honest, generous, and m utually supportive (which is also, we may remark, the postulate of o fficial sociology when it explains transgressive and criminal cond uct p urely in terms of social depri­ vation ) , the bala nces that condition this Growth wo uld be rapidly compromised , since these rest by definition on the pursuit by each individ ual of his well-understood egoistic interest. The same paradox immed iately re-a ppears in Ma ndeville: a hive cannot be economically profita ble if it is assumed to be populated by h onest and virtuous bees ( Fable of the B ees, 1 7 1 4 ) The development o f egoism a n d 'private vices' remains in a l l circumstances, therefore, the sole possible cultural support for economic Growth. We can note in passing that B astiat's thesis (and that of sociologists of the liberal far-left) equally assumes that the rich are necessarily honest. Being by definition sheltered from need, they wou ld not dream of breaking the law ( by defra uding the tax a uthorities, for example, or exp loiting their emplo yees ) . .

31

The Real m of Lesser Evil

entirely new one of freedom of trade - as evidence its very subtitle: 'A discourse on the occasions and means of estab­ lishing a general peace and freedom of commerce throughout the world'. We find in this curious treatise, which proposes to harmonize 'the Turk and the Persian, the Frenchman and the Spaniard, the Chinese and the Tartar, the Christian and the Jew or Mohammedan' one of the very first rehabilita­ tions of the figure of the merchant, previously the object of universal contempt, a rehabilitation that seems particularly clear in the political issue at stake: 'There is no trade com­ parable in utility', writes Cruce, 'to that of the merchant who legitimately increases his means at the expense of his work, and many a time at the risk of his life, without harming or offending anyone: in which respect he is more to be praised than the soldier, whose advance only results from the robbery and ruin of others. '40 It was only necessary therefore for Boisguilbert to develop the concept of a natural economic order - by transposing into the sphere of commercial activity the model of Cartesian physics - for the conj unction of the two modern themes (pacifying role of commerce, self­ regulating mechanism of the market) to make philosophi­ cally conceivable the proj ect of Adam Smith: that of showing how the simple operation of the laws of the free market could generate by itself - without the State having to inter­ vene, and without appealing to the impossible virtue of indi­ viduals - a world that was at the same time peaceful, prosperous, and as happy as a world of egoists can be; a perfect mechanical imitation, therefore, of the effects that morality and religion formerly expected from collective goodness. If political liberalism always ends up finding its natural centre of gravity in economic liberalism, this is there­ fore above all because this last, in both its project and its principles, already constituted, right from the start, the par­ allel political response to the modern problem.

40 Th is text was rep ublished in 2 004 by Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

32

The Unity of Liberalis m

The dialectical movement that continuously reduces polit­ ical liberalism, whatever its initial intentions, to market liberalism thus owes nothing to chance. When properly understood, it is even the sole philosophically coherent means that remains available to this doctrine, each time that it seeks to escape its constitutive aporia - the combination of a 'j ust' authority and the demons at large - without abandoning its fundamental certitude, derived from the original trauma of the wars of religion and the Jacobin terror: the idea that a State that refrained from any judgement about morality and the good life was the only State which one could be sure would never seek to achieve the salvation or happiness of individuals without their will. Early socialism, however, was always able to obj ect that a society that demanded no more of its members than their reciprocal indifference would not be a genuine society, and that the motto 'live and let live' always ends up, where a minimum of common decency is lacking (i.e. a minimum in the way of shared values and effectively practised collective solidarity) , transformed in fact into 'live and let die'. If it wishes to remain faithful to itself - and not venture onto the terrain, too slippery in its view, of values and morality - then political liberalism has no other choice but to pass. This is when the visible hand of the just State, which initially was supposed simply to define the rules of the game, constantly discovers itself compelled to concede to the Market, and its invisible hand, the task of settling unresolved problems by organizing the whole of the game for its own account. It is at this very point, indeed, that the methodical scepticism of Law finds its ultimate truth in the arrogant dogmatism of Economics. It remains to be seen whether this really is a solution, and if it makes it genuinely possible to overcome the socialist objection. We have to fear, however, that this 'moral order', which so terrifies our brave political liberals, may have only been expelled through the door of the State to return in force through the window of the Market. For if Economics now has the vocation, in place of earlier theologies, of

33

The Real m of Lesser Evil

defining the path that humanity has to follow - that of unlimited Growth, this new 'balm for all wounds' - it is in actual fact because, beneath the intimidating mask of 'neces­ sity', it amounts to nothing more, right from the start, than an invisible ideology and an incarnate religion.41 Is it not in fact the Market that today monopolizes - through its immense entertainment industry and its omnipresent adver­ tising propaganda - the right to teach all human beings, starting with children, what they are allowed to know, what they must do, and what they are permitted to hope for? To preach to them, in other words, the way in which they should live, and the 'scientific' reasons why any other way of envisaging things is now quite senseless ? A just return, all things considered. For if the liberal State must remain forever a philosophically empty form, what else is there than the Market which can fill the pages it leaves blank, and in the end take on the task of pronouncing on morals ? The political liberalism of Benjamin Constant is not a one-way ticket. It always includes, whether you like it or not, the return to Adam Smith.

Notes [A] The idea that work and industry constitute, in a certain sense, a continuation of war by other means lies at the centre of Auguste Comte's positivism: 'There are only two possible purposes of activity for a society, which are violent action on the rest of the human species, or conquest, and action on nature to modify it to the benefit of man, or production [ . . . ] . The military purpose was that o f the old system, the indus­ trial purpose is that of the new one' (Plan des travaux scien-

41 See on this subject the magnificent ana lyses of Pierre Legendre in Dominium mu1tdi. L'Empire du ma1tageme1tt ( Paris: M ille et Une Nu its, 2007 ) .

34

The Unity of Libe ral i s m

tifiques necessaires pour reorganiser Ia societe, 1 822 ) . Nietzsche thus grasped perfectly the modern connection between the pacifist ideal and the war against nature when he wrote (Dawn, para. 1 73, trans. Kauffman) that 'a society in which there is continual hard work will have more secur­ ity: and security is now worshipped as the supreme divinity'. Such work 'is the best policeman'. We may note on this subj ect Polanyi 's very interesting analysis of the conditions of appearance of capitalist politics, at the start of the nine­ teenth century: The entirely new factor, we submit, wa s the emergence of an acute peace interest. Traditionally, such an interest was regarded as being o utside the scope of the system . Peace with its corollaries of crafts and arts ranked among the mere adornments of life. The Ch urch might pray for peace as for a bountiful harvest, but in the realm of State action it wo uld nevertheless advocate armed intervention; governments sub­ ordinated peace to secu rity and sovereignty, that is, to intents that could not be achieved otherwise than by recourse to the ultimate means. Few things were regarded as more detrimen­ tal to a community than the existence of an organ ized peace interest in its midst. As late as the second half of the eigh ­ teenth century, J. J. Rousseau arraigned tradespeople for their lack of patriotism beca use they were suspected of preferring peace to liberty. After 1 8 1 5 the change is sudden and com­ plete. The backwash of the French Revolution reinforced the rising tide o f the Ind ustrial Revolution in establ ishing peace­ ful business as a universal interest. Metternich proclaimed that what the people of Europe wanted was not liberty but peace. Gentz called patriots the new barbarians. Church and throne started o ut on the denationalization of Europe. Their arguments found support both in the ferocity of the recent popular forms of warfare and in the tremendously enhanced value of peace under the nascent eco nomies. 42

42 Karl Polanyi, The G reat Trans{ormatio1t [ 1 949] ( Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 ), p . 7.

35

The Real m of Lesser Evil

[B] One of the recurring problems of modern philosophy - from Hobbes to Constant - and one never truly resolved, is that of the defence of a pacified society against the aggression of foreign enemies. How is it possible, in effect, to count on the readiness for ultimate sacrifice on the part of citizens who are supposed only to mobilize for their community to the extent that this protects them in an absolute sense against death ? The least illogical solution evidendy consists in entrusting the defence of this community to a professional army, without questioning too much the metaphysical moti­ vations of those who compose this. This, as we know, is the sense of the reform decreed by Jacques Chirac in 1 9 97, with the almost unanimous applause of the le&. If this solu­ tion is rej ected, there remain only three philosophical pos­ sibilities: the apologia for desertion (which Hobbes acknowledges as perfecdy coherent) ; the solution of emigra­ tion, based on the idea - borrowed from economic calcula­ tion - that a citizen whose life is threatened must always prefer, to the risks of resistance, emigration to a more favourable destination (this is the thesis of 'total freedom of movement', preferred by the liberal far-le&) ; or, finally, the hope that the constant progress of technology will enable modern nations to wage war without deaths (at least on their side), the hypothesis of George Bush and the NATO strategists. This set of solutions defines what Eric Desmons amusingly calls, in homage to Celine, the Bardamu syndrome. 4 3

[C] In her remarkable thesis La Balance et l'Horloge: La genese de Ia pensee liberale en France au X VIIIe siecle (Montreuil: 43

[After the narrator of Lo uis-Ferdinand Celine's ]oumey to the Etzd of the Night. Tr.] -

36

The Unity of Liberalis m

Les Editions de Ia Passion, 1 9 89 ) , Simone Meyssonnier explained the key role played by Bernouilli's scientific work in the construction of the modern economic imaginary. In a general sense, it is necessary to underline that the model of self-regulating equilibrium (or the 'process without a subj ect', as Althusser put it) stands at the heart of all the philosophical constructions of liberalism. Celine Lafontaine, in a passionate work, shows how, at the end of the Second World War, the cybernetic programme was conceived by Norbert Wiener, with the backing of the US authorities, in the official hope of freeing humanity from the murderous grip of 'ideologies' and ensuring an era of universal peace based on a 'scientific' form of government (L'Empire cyber­ netique: des machines a penser a Ia pensee machine, Paris: Seuil, 2004 ) . She also reconstructs extremely convincingly the complex path that led - via a deliberate Congressional policy and think tanks - from this initial cybernetic pro­ gramme to its transformation into structuralism (thus con­ firming, at the historical level, all the intuitions that Henri Lefebvre and the Situationist International had in their day). This work casts an unsuspected light on the philosophical background that made possible the emergence of the new far-left in the 1 9 60s.

[D] It is well known how in Germany, where thanks to the left prostitution has already become 'a job like any other', certain women workers dismissed by Capital have been logically offered by their local labour office, in the way of retraining, employment as charm hostesses in new Eros Centres. But this way of resolving the question of youth unemployment, which is certainly on the rise, is only one side of the ques­ tion. If, as the followers of Borillo and Iacub would have it, prostitution is simply a job like any other, and if one of the functions of School is always to prepare young people for future professions, it is logically inevitable that the national

37

The Real m of Lesser Evil

education system should take charge, already in the class­ room, of the training of students desirous of orienting themselves towards this job of the future - the creation of diplomas, appropriate courses and options; the establish­ ment of programmes, theoretical and practical tests and exams designed to confirm the skills acquired; finally, the constitution of bodies of teachers and inspectors, indispens­ able for giving life to this eminently model project. We await impatiently Jack Lang's preface and enthusiastic editorials in

Liberation.

[E] A central question in liberal philosophy is that of the articu­ lation between determinism ( individuals must adapt to the laws of the market) and free will (it is up to us to find our way to be happy) . The solution offered by Benj amin Con­ stant does no more than register this problem: 'Everything is moral in individuals', he wrote, 'but in the masses everything is physical. [ . . . ] Each is individually free, because individually he has no other concern than himself, or forces equal to his own. But as soon as he enters into a group, he ceases to be free' (Litterature du XVIIIe siecle - cited by Tzvetan Todorov in his Benjamin Constant, Paris: Hachette, 1 99 7) . The liberal paradigm offers several ways of resolving this problem. The simplest consists in maintaining that, if individuals are effec­ tively determined to act from self-interest (which justifies the necessity of the Market as the sole form of socialization really appropriate to human nature), each none the less remains responsible for the personal use that he freely makes of his reason, in other words his faculty to understand where his true interest lies. That is why, in the Monopoly game that is liberal economic competition, individuals are led in the end to attribute the entire merit for their achievements to themselves (this is the foundation of the myth of the 'self­ made man' and all such 'success stories' ) . Conversely, they

38

The Unity of Libe ralis m

have only themselves to blame for all their unhappiness and defeats. This solution represents an inexpensive way of recy­ cling, considerably simplified, the Spinozist (and Stoic) idea according to which genuine freedom lies in the understanding of necessity. It is what the tele-evangelists of Capital habitu­ ally proclaim in their daily propaganda.

39

2 Q u esti o n s of M ethod

A s many readers will probably have noticed, the explanation for the origin of liberalism offered in the previous chapter does not fit the framework of 'historical materialism'. [A] I understand by this expression the conviction, very largely shared in our day, that the key which determines the ultimate sense of all historical processes must be sought, in the last instance, in the necessary movement of the Economy, itself conditioned by the inevitable tendency of Technology to advance according to its own laws. (As Marx put it, 'the windmill gives you the feudal lord, the steam mill the indus­ trial capitalist'. ) [B] If we adopt this way of seeing things, then 'liberal phrases', as Marx calls them, necessarily become simply an 'idealistic expression of the real interests of the bourgeoisie'. 1 And the historical ascendancy of the latter must itself be understood as an irresistible expansion deter­ mined by the steady progress of the 'productive forces', a development inexorably destined to break 'at a certain thresh­ old' the relations of feudal property that formed their tran­ sient political envelope. 1 Karl Marx, The Germa7t Ideology, in K. Marx and E Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1 9 75 ), p. 1 9 7 .

40

Questions of M ethod

Yet, beneath its radical appearance, this 'materialist' fashion of viewing things represents no more than a rigorous systemization of the essential postulates of the modern im­ aginary (already partly effected, moreover, by Adam Smith ) . 2 And it was certainly not by chance that the different dis­ courses that today celebrate capitalist globalization, held to be inevitable and eliminating all conceivable barriers to the sway of a unified world market, all rest on the idea that the future of humanity can only be read on the basis of the com­ pulsions of economic growth, itself dependent on the cease­ less advance of 'new technologies'.3 It has become difficult to ignore, however, following the pioneering work of Karl Polanyi, that this representation of the Economy as a separate and autonomous sphere of social existence is in fact a very recent historical construction, whose retrospective proj ection onto past societies is precisely what defines the modern illusion. [C] In point of fact, if the existence of extremely complex and developed commercial activity is attested well before the appearance of Western modernity, it is equally certain that this activity could never have given birth to any kind of capitalist system by its inter­ nal dynamic alone. In 'premodern' societies, this commercial 2 1n h is cele brated 1 9 1 3 article 'The Three Sources and Three Com­ ponent Parts o f Marxism', Lenin d id not hesitate to locate Marx in an intellectual contin uity with Smith and Ricardo. But this text simply repeats Kautsky's less well-known argument in a lecture given in 1 907 ('The Th ree So urces of Marxism'), which already made Marx the direct heir of 'English economic science' , i.e. of original liberalism. 3 ln our day, it is in the work of Toni Negri that the definitive coincidence of Marxist propositions with their liberal implications finds its clearest and most mechanical fulfilment. The inevita ble conclusio n is clear: every forward step of capitalism must be sup­ ported ( including, for example, the referendum on the European constitution), since this is the shortest ro ute to arrive at world com­ munism. This curious ideological construction undou btedly betrays the habitual collateral damage of an Althusserian (or Deleuzean ) philosophical formation .

41

The Real m of Lesser Evil

activity is always 'embedded' (in Polanyi's expression ) in a whole series of conditions which are indissolubly political, religious, and cultural, and which organize both its limits and its meaning. [D) It is true that, once the capitalist system is historically constituted, and has managed to endow itself with its own practical preconditions (for example, the gen­ eralized dissolution of the ties people have to the land and their instruments of labour), it becomes possible for it to develop on the basis of its own laws. The whole problem remains, however, of explaining by what combination of circumstances, in large part unpredictable, these different practical preconditions were able to come together at a par­ ticular moment in European history. The question is, as before, to explain the original historical configuration that made possible the emergence of a world effectively domi­ nated, at the present time, by the imaginary of economic growth (and thus by the series of phenomena that constitute the material form of existence of this imaginary), without for all that transforming, under the effect of a retrospective illu­ sion, this essential modern situation into an atemporal and abstract condition of human evolution, unfolding everywhere its invariable effects, from the first tribes of hunters of the Palaeolithic era. 4 To the extent that one of the fundamental mechanisms of this contingent historical configuration was the ideal of Science, we have here a key basis for explaining the role, singular in all respects, that ideology [E) has constantly 4Apa rt from Polanyi's work, we should mention here, among the most fruitful critics of liberal 'h istorical materialism' , the works of Pierre Cla stres, Marshall Sahlins and Cornelius Castoriadis. Without of course forgetting the monumental work accomplished by the researchers of MAUSS (the 'Mouvement Anti-Utilita ire dans les Sciences Sociales' ) for the last twenty-five years or more, nor the many gro ups that are today discussing 'decroissmzce' ( negative growth), nor aga in the heirs of the Situation ist International, such as Ja ime Semprun and the co ntrib utors to L'Ettcyclopedie des ttuisances.

42

Questions of M et h od

played, since the seventeenth century, in defining and estab­ lishing Western policies of modernization. As Pierre Manent has remarked, modern politics (as opposed to what was generally the case in earlier civilizations), 'was conceived and desired before being put into practice', with the result that 'the suspicion arises that there is something essentially deliberate and experimental in liberal politics, that it presup­ poses a conscious and constructed proj ect'. 5 If, despite all this, some people stubbornly persist in seeing this form of interpretation as 'idealist', by dint of the important role that it ascribes to intellectual logics in the instauration of the modern world, it is sufficient to reflect for a moment on the status of those strange 'Communist' societies that main­ tained their murderous hold over a considerable part of the world for decades. It would be absurd, of course, now that this terrible parenthesis is essentially closed, to see it as an historically inevitable effect of the development of the pro­ ductive forces, which generated appropriate political and police 'superstructures', from Russia to Cuba, and enabled humanity to take a great leap forward towards a 'higher' form of organization. In reality, as Orwell always insisted, it is clear that the concrete appearance and development of these various totalitarianisms (whatever the indisputable part played by local conditions and 'material' factors in the strict sense of the term) remains strictly incomprehensible as long as we refuse to recognize a central role for the typically modern ideological proj ect, borne by certain par­ ticular sectors of the contemporary intelligentsia, of organiz­ ing humanity scientifically. It goes without saying that this remark holds equally for the liberal ideology whose dogmas Western political elites have undertaken (certainly in very different forms, but still dependent on the same imaginary), for more than two centuries now, to materialize on a world­ wide scale.

5 Cf. Pierre M a nent, Histoire i1ztellectuelle du liberalisme ( Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1 9 8 7 ) .

43

The Real m of Lesser Evil

N otes [A] It is generally accepted that the term 'historical materialism' was never used by Marx himself (any more, indeed, than that of 'dialectical materialism', coined by Joseph Dietzgen in 1 8 8 6 ) . Likewise that there are many passages in Marx's work where he significantly qualifies his 'theory of stages'; the most well-known of these, dated 8 March 1 8 8 1 , being his draft reply to Vera Zasulich - one of the most interesting figures in Russian populism. The fact remains that Marx, as against several representatives of early socialism, never really managed to break with the main aspects of the modern myth of Growth. From this point of view, the 'Podolinksy affair' seems very relevant. This Ukrainian socialist ( 1 8 50-9 1 ) was in fact one of the very first scholars to demonstrate - basing himself among other things on the second law of thermody­ namics - the ecological limits that any proj ect of unlimited economic growth would inexorably come up against. (In this respect he was certainly one of the major precursors of Nicholas Georgescu-Rosen.) In 1 8 82, Podolinksy sought to draw the attention of Marx and Engels to this problem, undoubtedly crucial to the future of socialism, and in a more general fashion, to any modern society. But as Engels proved incapable of seeing Podolinksy's ideas as anything more than a new variant of Malthus (a particular bete noire), the cor­ respondence came to a rapid end. A brief allusion to this misunderstanding between Marx and ecology can be found in the most recent book by Serge Latouche (Le Pari de Ia decroissance, Paris: Fayard, 2006 ) .

[B] It is clear that the two examples Marx gave in The Poverty of Philosophy are particularly unfortunate. The water-mill, a clear improvement on the windmill, was actually invented

44

Questions of M et h od

in Asia Minor in the first century BC; and by the fourth century AD the Roman complex at Barbegal, near Aries, was already able to use hydraulic power to mill sufficient wheat to feed 80,000 people. As for the steam-mill, it is known to have been invented and perfected towards the start of the second century AD by Hero of Alexandria, under the name of the aeolipyle. These two inventions, however, never set ancient societies on the road to feudalism or cap­ italism. This confirms, contrary to the thesis maintained by Marx and the liberals, that a technical innovation - even the Internet or genetic engineering - can never develop of itself particular historical effects (economic or otherwise) if a certain set of very precise cultural and political precondi­ tions are not already at work. The idea of 'technological determinism', therefore, only has a certain sense within soci­ eties that have chosen the capitalist mode of development, and even here, only to the extent that individuals have resigned themselves en masse to internalizing the conse­ quences of this choice. It is useful to consult on this point the recent study by Aldo Schiavone (L'Histoire brisee. La Rome antique et /'Occident moderne, Paris: Belin, 2003 ), which establishes very clearly how, by the end of the second century AD, the main technological conditions for capitalist take-off were combined in the Roman Empire. What was lacking, however, were the political and cultural conditions.

[C] It is remarkable how Engels, seeking to maintain the illusion of a determination in the last instance by economics, even in 'primitive' communities, succeeds in the end only with the help of a rather poor play on words. The elementary struc­ tures of kinship, whose key role in this type of society he is obliged to admit, are thus transformed into 'economic rela­ tions of production', determining corresponding cultural 'superstructures', on the pretext that they constitute, a&er all, relations of reproduction (cf. The Origins of the Family,

45

The Real m of Lesser Evil

Private Property, and the State, 1 8 84). The effects of this retrospective illusion are of course inexhaustible. In the same way, Herve Defaivard was able to demonstrate that modern translations of Aristotle's Politics systematically tend to 'economize' the concepts used by the Greek philosopher (the fundamental notion of metadosis, for example, always being rendered by the term 'barter', though the sense it has for Aristotle is only grasped by reference to an anthropology of the gift) . Cf. his Essai sur le marche (Paris: Syros, 1 99 5 ) . [D] On the importance of commercial activity in antiquity, refer­ ence should be made to the fundamental work of Jean Baechler, Le Capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1 9 95; this new edition is considerably enriched in relation to that of 1 971 ) . To take only a single example, Baechler recalls that i n the fourth century BC, at Nippur and Babylon, there were already 'firms' that 'received monetary deposits, issued cheques, and made loans at interest', going so far as to sometimes invest 'in agricultural and industrial enterprises' (Le Capitalisme, vol. 1, p. 1 95 ) . For all that, it was clearly not in Mesopotamia that the capitalist system historically appeared. In analogous fashion, Jerome Bascht, in his thesis on medieval civilization, well brings out the role and scope of commercial activity within the feudal context. But, he adds, this activity only began to acquire the strictly economic sense that it has today at the end of the eighteenth century, 'with the proclamation by political economy of the free market, supposedly self­ regulated and tending to become homogeneous' (La Civilisa­ tion feodale de I'an mil a Ia colonisation de /'Amerique, Paris: Flammarion, 2006, p. 3 9 1 ) .

[E] Nothing of course forbids the use of the concept of ideology to denote the political ideas of Plato, or those in the letters

46

Questions of M et h od

of Confucius. But from the moment that the model of exper­ imental natural science was historically constituted, we can register the appearance of an entirely new type of discourse: one that claims to pronounce the truth on the good 'gover­ nance' of men, imitating the method of the natural sciences and the modalities of technical action that it validates (whether this discourse takes the form of 'economic science', 'racial ' biology, 'scientific socialism' or cybernetics) . It is in effect always in the name of a knowledge presented as 'sci­ entific' that modern ideologies justify themselves in deploying their effects. I propose therefore to reserve the term of ideol­ ogy, as far as possible, for this imitative discourse, unknown in earlier societies, and whose human representative is the now proliferating figure of the 'expert'.

47

3 The 'Ope n Society ' and the P o l itics of N ecess ity

Reduced to its basic principles, liberalism thus presents itself as the proj ect of a minimal society, with Law defining its form and the Economy its content. [A] This belief that a human community can function in a coherent and efficient fashion without drawing the least support (other than rhe­ torical) from shared moral and cultural values, is however so strange - in the light of what history and anthropology teach us - that the defenders of this doctrine have generally envis­ aged a more presentable fall-back position. There is thus an annexe clause that invites us to see the 'spirit of tolerance' and 'refusal to rej ect the other' as a kind of substitute ethics, which should be taken as a condition of the liberal system, or at least a happy consequence of its everyday operation. 1 This is indeed the ordinary significance of modern apologias

1 One of the first formulations of this idea is due to Spinoza . ' For in this most flo urishing state, and most splendid city', he wrote of Amsterdam, 'men of every nation and religion live together in the greatest harmony, and ask no questions before trusting their goods to a fellow-citizen, save whether he be rich or poor, and whether he generally acts honestly, or the reverse . His religion and sect is considered of no importance: for it has no effect before the judges

48

The 'O pen Society' and the Politics of N e cessity

for the 'open society' (or the 'multicultural' society as it's called today), in which many people have ended up finding the only sure sign of a moral progress of humanity, and consequently the only acceptable reference-point, for modern minds, of the frightening term 'morality'. The whole question clearly boils down to knowing what such an ambiguous concept as that of tolerance can mean. If it is a question of denoting the historically acquired capacity of generalizing to all human beings those attitudes of respect, benevolence, or even empathy, that each community starts off by reserving, in principle, for its closest members/ it is not hard to admit that this spirit of tolerance and openness towards others constitutes the highest degree of all moral perfection; or, if you prefer, the incessant work that people have to perform on themselves in order to maintain, and to develop as far as possible, the conditions of their own human­ ity. It is equally incontestable that this work of universaliza­ tion of the basic human virtues (i.e. the elementary structures of reciprocity) underwent some of its most remarkable advances in Renaissance Europe, in particular from the time

in gaining or losing a ca use . . .' A Theologico-Political Treatise, in Works of Spinoza (trans. Elwes), vol. 1 (New York: D over, 1 95 1 ), p . 263 . We should note in passing that this commercial anti-racism in no way guarantees that the new tolerance will also apply to the poor. 2 Levi-Stra uss thus remarks that 'for great parts of the human species and for tens of thousands of years [ ... ] the notion o f human­ ity stopped at the bo undaries of the tribe, the lingu istic gro up, sometimes even the village' (Race et Histoire, ch. 3 ). It should be added, however, that on the one hand the boundaries of the tribe do not a utomatically provide protection against failures of reci­ procity (the role that fratricide plays in religio us myths is well known ), and on the other, that the laws of hospitality (and the positive figure of the Stranger that they presuppose ) also constitute a centra l element of the operation of these traditional societies one that Levi-Stra uss sometimes tends to u nderestimate.

49

The Real m of Lesser Evil

of the discovery of America. 3 And yet it seems hard to inscribe the founding principles of the modern solution (and thus of liberalism) simply in a philosophical continuity of Renais­ sance Humanism and its constitutive references to the culture of Antiquity. The greater part of the arrangements of effective pacifica­ tion in modern Europe, in fact, have their real point of departure in the sixteenth century, with the action of intel­ lectuals and men of power (or women, such as Catherine de' Medici ), who were referred to at the time as 'Politiques'. This generally denoted all those who were convinced, as distinct from the classic Humanists, that the end of the wars of reli­ gion, and a new equilibrium between the European powers, could only be obtained and guaranteed in any lasting fashion by keeping to the strict rules of 'political realism'. This position, which constituted the actual point of departure of modernity, naturally had very radical implications. It assumed, for example, that all parties involved would now agree to abstract4 from their personal convictions as to the essence of true religion or the 'good life'. When, for example,

3 Without even mentio ning the Christian tradition and ancient Stoicism, the part played by Chinese culture (amo ng other th ings by Confucianism ) in this work of universalization should not be neglected . 4 This work o f abstraction is one of the major practical origins o f the historical movement th at made possible, for better or worse, the modern individ ualization of subjects. As Pierre Manent empha­ sizes, ' one of the principal " ideas " of liberalism is of co urse that o f the " individual", not as a being of flesh and blood, not as Peter as distinct from Pa ul, but rather as that being who, by virtue o f being h uman, i s naturally entitled t o certain " rights" that can be listed, rights attaching to them independently of their function or place in society, and that make them the equal of any other human' ( Histoire intellectuelle du liberalisme, Paris : Calmann-Levy, 1 9 87, preface ). We know conversely the role th at the critique of th is abstract individual has played in all the vario us challenges to modernity.

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the champions of the 'political solution' pressed the various powers to tolerate the practice of Reformed religion, this was not for any reasons of an ecumenical or humanist kind (such as can be found, for example, in Pico de Mirandola). If this 'political solution' seemed to them the last chance of salva­ tion, it was rather because experience had offered sufficient proof, to their eyes, that any other manner of proceeding would once again lead endlessly to exhausting civil wars and the 'miseries of this time' that were bound up with these. The demand for a generalized 'historic compromise' was thus in no way a triumphant resolution of these problems, something conforming to the grandeur of man, his dignity and the advances of Reason. To the minds of the 'Politiques', nothing more was involved than a strategy of lesser evil, imposed by the nature of things, and to which everyone should now learn to adjust themselves, given the wretched human condition ( 'incapable of truth and goodness', in the words of Pascal) and the destructive character of human passions. 5 It is only in the context of this disillusioned anthropology that it is possible to understand the constant recourse, from the sixteenth century onwards, to the metaphysical idea of 'necessity', an idea that would rapidly become the philo­ sophical cornerstone for all modern political constructions, including the now dominant form of the ideas of 'Growth' and 'Progress'. [B] As explained by Michel de L'Hospital, the most familiar representative of this historical current, if com­ promise and transaction were the only possible foundations 5 To defend the edict o f Ja nu ary 1 5 62 before the Pope, the French ambassador said that this solution ' is not the one that the king desires, but that which he deems feasible'. As a good humanist, La Boetie respo nded (in his Memoire sur /'E dit de ]atzvier) that the king 'has as his duty, not only to maintain h is subjects in peace and harmony, but also, and chiefly, to ensure that they walk on the right path, and do not stray from the path of salvatio n'. On this point, see Sergio Cardo so's article ' La Crise de Ia raison poli­ tique dans Ia France des guerres de Religion', in Les Ave1ttures de Ia raiso11 politique (Paris: Meta il ie, 2006 ) .

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of a realistic politics, it was 'because we must bend to the necessity before which no other reason prevails'. Recourse to the concept of necessity thus presupposes that there exist historical situations in which men have reached such a degree of mimetic violence that the question of their collective sur­ vival can no longer depend on their free will, or therefore on any kind of appeal to their moral and religious conscience. The sole problem to resolve, therefore, in this pessimistic approach, is that of the practical means to neutralize the action of the different moralities, philosophies and religions in which individuals have sought up to now their various reasons for living, as well as and above all their way of con­ fronting death. [C] We can note right away here the para­ doxical character of this politics of necessity which gradually became the principle of all institutional representations of modernity, and particularly liberal representations. It only manages in fact to present itself as the accomplished form of political wisdom (that whose 'realism' protects it from the utopian reveries of Humanism) at a moment when it chooses to dissolve itself into a purely technical management of 'necessity'. It should therefore be no surprise that the politi­ cal and diplomatic vocabulary of the time, as many com­ mentators have noted, becomes increasingly invested by 'the terms of a balance of forces, of equilibrium and counter­ weight', technological metaphors that substitute here for the rhetoric of Goodness and Salvation. 6 This revolution in words simply reflects the intellectual revolution which at this 6 G. Livet, ed., Guerre et paix de Machiavel a Hobbes (Paris: Armand Colin, 1 9 72 ), p. 7 8 . The politics of 'checks and balances' (which claims to resolve all problems encountered by the establish­ ment of mechanisms and 'processes without a subject' ) does not j ust bear on the q uestion of civil peace. It equally underlies all the reflections of the time on international relations; from this point of view, the debates that led to the treaty of Westphalia mark the definitive entry o f Europe into the modern age. We know, more­ over, that the co ncept of 'interest', which constitutes the corner­ stone of the liberal economic mechanism, was elaborated first o f

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time was transforming the old political philosophy (which still inquired into the nature of the best government, the ideal City, or the politics to be drawn from Scripture), into the art of managing all problems encountered in a purely instrumen­ tal fashion . There can be no doubt that this new vocabulary (soon refined by the ideal of Science) was one of the most immediate ideological sources of the liberal response to the modern political problem, both in its directly political version (reflection on the mechanisms of Law and the balance of powers) and in its economistic version (reflection on the mechanisms of the self-regulating Market) . The fine legend of the humanist sources of the West should not lead us to forget the genuine origin of the modern com­ promise. This was never founded on a politics of reciprocal recognition. None of the parties involved really sought to see, in the enemy that agreed to lay down his arms, a being inter­ esting for himself. It was only a question of adjusting to his existence in the purely technical context of a modus vivendi established for purely practical reasons, and bracketing off ideological differences (or, if you prefer, the privatization of moral and religious convictions) . It would be surprising, then, if the magnificent 'tolerance' on which the 'open society' is always supposed to be founded (and which gives its privi­ leged members their characteristic good conscience at a low cost) genuinely corresponded to what Erasmus or Montaigne would have understood by such terms. Nothing allows us to equate it with the long and complex work that each person has to effect on themselves in order to undo their egoism and learn to regard the world with the eyes of others. In actual fact, for most of the time it denotes no more than a minimal fashion of coexisting with one's contemporaries, such as all - from Frant;ois Guichardin to Henri de Rohan - in the context of considerations on raiso1Z d'etat and the European balance o f power. See o n this point Albert Hirschman, Les Passio1ZS e t les interets, Paris: PUF, 1 9 80 ), and Politiques de l'i1zteret, edited by Ch ristian Lazzeri and Dominique Reynie, Besant;on : Presses Universitaires Franc-Comto ises, 1 9 9 8 ) .

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The Real m of Lesser Evil

prevails, Adam Ferguson tells us, 'once affective ties have been broken'. Once again, it is precisely Milton Friedman who has described most precisely (or cynically) the real nature of this liberal tolerance, when he celebrates the Market as the magic mechanism enabling 'millions of individuals to come together on a daily basis without any need to love one another, or even to speak to one another'. And there is sadly every reason to fear that what the public Spectacle invites us constantly to applaud today, under the seductive term of 'multiculturalism', is simply another name for this merely j uridical and commercial unification of humanity. A world of total uniformity, in which the Other is seen far less as a possible partner in an always singular encounter, than as a pure object of tourist consumption and various kinds of instrumentalization. 7

Notes [A] In Le Figaro magazine of 6 January 2007, Alain-Gerard Slama wrote that 'the two cardinal values on which democ7 0n this idea that the etzcoutzter, very d ifferent in this respect from a mere exchange, is a way of access to the universal purged of all Eurocentrism, read the pa ssionate essay by Kenta Ohji and M ikhai"l Xifi, Eprouver l'utziversel, essai de geophilosophie (Paris: Kime, 1 9 9 9 ) . Apart from the major philosophical interest of a critique o f the assumptions of Western un iversalism i n the light of the Japa­ nese view of the question, particularly interesting here is the cri­ tique of the liberal theo ries of Habermas, which the authors show are still highly dependent on the excha nge paradigm. As for the actual psychological foundations of the 'anti-racism' constantly procl a imed by showbiz stars and media pro fessionals, Rousseau, in his E mile, already said it all: 'Be wary of those cosmopolitans who seek far off, in their boo ks, duties that they disda in to fulfil close at hand. Such philosophers love the Tartars in order to be dispensed from loving their neighbours.' Anyone who has h ad dea l­ ings with these people can have no doubt a b o ut this at all.

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racy rests are liberty and growth'. This is a perfect definition of liberalism. One in which, of course, what the author takes care to call 'democracy' is simply the liberal system, bending the word to the requirements defined by modern 'semantic workshops'. (This is the name in the United States for bodies charged with imposing on the public at large, by way of the control of the media, the use of words that best meets the needs of the ruling classes.) This now customary sleight of hand naturally authorizes a whole series of very useful dis­ crepancies. If the word 'democracy', for example, must now be used only to define liberalism, then a new term is needed to denote that 'government of the People, by the People, for the People' which was seen as the very essence of democracy not so long ago. The new term chosen by the semantic work­ shops is 'populism'. All that is needed, then, is to equate populism (in the face of any basic historical knowledge) with a perverse variant of classic fascism, [a] and the effects desired can be obtained with a disconcerting facility. If it occurs to you, for example, that people should be consulted on this or that problem that affects their future, or that the incomes of the business world's great predators are really indecent, something within you immediately warns that you're in danger of falling into the most disturbed 'populism', and consequently that the 'filthy Beast' is approaching you in great strides. As a well-brought-up citizen (well brought up by the media industry), you immediately know what you should really think and do. We clearly end up here with the likes of Charles Berling and Philippe Torreton.8 [a] Engels in fact considered the Russian populists of his time 'the only people who have so far done anything in Russia' (letter to Vera Zasulich, 23 April 1 8 8 5 ) ; and we know that Christopher Lasch viewed the Anglo-American populist tradition (from William Cobbett to Martin Luther King) as the most precious component of the radical demo­ cratic spirit. To measure the amplitude of disinformation 8 [Both popular film actors supported Segolene Royale's presidential campaign in 2007. Tr.]

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The Real m of Lesser Evil

imposed by the 'semantic workshops' and their 'political scientists', you can imagine what would happen if, from one day to the next, French museums decided to reserve the term 'Impressionism' simply for Soviet painting of the Stalin era, and only fix this label on the paintings of Alexander Guerasimov or Boris Kustodiev. One thing is certain: our brilliant media figures would see red soon enough.

[B] This idea of 'necessity', in the name of which liberals con­ tinue to justify their basic political choices (we need only note the contemporary discourse on 'necessary adaptation to the realities of the modern world'), has its actual place in a more complicated historical configuration, and cannot be reduced simply to its political and diplomatic origins. In its developed form, it is the crystallization point of several intellectual tra­ ditions, each elaborated relatively independently, and gener­ ally with no immediate relationship to the political problem of peace. It is possible here to distinguish three main currents, whose further combinations give Western liberalism its spe­ cific coloration. First among these is a religious critique, born out of the indulgences crisis, which gradually led Luther to forge the image of a human creature whose salvation did not depend on his works ( 'Free will is a fiction in things or a word without object. For no one is in a position to think or do whatever he chooses in the way of good or ill, but every­ thing obeys an absolute necessity', Assertio omnium articu­ lorum, 1 520) . Secondly, a philosophical movement that, in order to release men from the guilt-inducing hold of the established Churches, sought also, in the person of Spinoza, to deny their free will and inscribe their existence in an economy of natural necessity in which notions of Good and Evil were deprived of their meaning. And finally, of course, the appearance of experimental science, which, by coining the concept of 'determinism', immediately made it possible to apply this to the sphere of human affairs. It was at the point of convergence of these three great metaphysics of

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necessity that liberal theorists drew (consciously or other­ wise) the essential part of the tools required by their philo­ sophical enterprise. This is particularly clear in the case of the dominant school of present-day sociology (from Pierre Bourdieu to Laurent Mucchielli ), whose imaginary is clearly structured by a double fascination with the ideal of Science and a simplified Spinozism, and by an underground influence of Lutherist and Jansenist sensibilities (compare, for example, the way in which Bourdieu, in his analyses of the School, criticizes the notion of 'merit' ) . [a] Hence, of course, the facility with which the conclusions of this sociology (for example, on the nature of the education system or the sup­ posed causes of crime) are always such as to be acceptable to a large part of the media world, and effectively recycled to the profit of Capital and its perpetual modernization. [a] 'At the risk of shocking, I would say that the more familiar I am with the determinations of which my interlocu­ tor is the product, the more I comprehend them. The more information I gather on the genealogy, position and trajectory of an individual, the more their choices, preferences and asser­ tions become clear. This has a Spinozist air to it: when one manages to grasp the person whom one is dealing with as necessary, there is almost an aesthetic feeling, a sense of beauty' (Pierre Bourdieu, Liberation, 11 February 199 3 ) .

[C] One might draw on the theories of Rene Girard to describe the chain of historical decisions that led to the establishment of modern society. This would support the idea that Moder­ nity is the religious solution that Europe managed to install in order to dispel the extraordinary mimetic crisis of six­ teenth-century society ( 'the greatest crisis in the history of the nation', as Sergio Cardoso writes) . The founding sacrifice that allowed individuals (who in this way became 'modern') to re-establish civil peace was evidently the sacrifice of moral conscience (whether its cultural guise was religious or other-

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The Real m of Lesser Evil

wise). It is perfectly logical, then, that the self-regulated Market and abstract Law, i.e. the two institutions born from this sacrifice (and whose ritual operation must be located beyond good and evil) were in their turn rapidly promoted to the rank of idols and divinities, before which a reconciled humanity was called to prostrate itself. If it has since turned out that these new gods of Modernity prove incapable, for reasons bound up with the very nature of human societies, to keep their redemptive promises ( this was the basic conviction of the early socialists), this would imply, from Girard's point of view, that modern humanity has still not emerged from the age of wars, and that the forward flight of the liberal system (what other meaning is there to the idea of infinite growth ? ) could soon logically require a further sacrifice: that of nature and humanity themselves.

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4 Tractat u s J u rid ico - Eco n o m i c u s

As Hobbes clearly perceived, 1 the imaginary institution of modern societies proceeds, above all, from a radical distrust of the moral capacities of human beings, and consequently of their ability to live together without doing each other harm. From this point of view, the pious founding tales of the pro­ gressive myth are largely based on a retrospective illusion. The genesis of the modern proj ect (just as that of liberalism, which represents the most coherent version of this project) is hard to locate in the direct continuity of Renaissance Humanism, or of Florentine republicanism and its vivere civile libero.2 The different political, economic and cultural

1 'We must therefore resolve, that the Originall of all great, and lasting Societies, consisted not in the m utuall good will men had towards each other, b ut in the mutuall fear they had o f each other' (Hobbes, De Give, ch. I, 2 ) . This gives the measure of what strange philosophy (or else pure rhetoric, deliberate lie, or sheer stupidity) is at work in D ominique Strauss-Kahn's presenting his particular version of liberalism as one of a 'society of trust' (d. Le Monde, 3 November 2006 ) . 2 0 n the question of the political origins of modernity, see, besides the classic works of Quentin Skin ner, especially Liberty before

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The Real m of Lesser Evil

agencies that configure the effective reality of the contempor­ ary world, on the contrary, only seem fully intelligible in the light of their original anti-humanism. In fact, it is to the extent that they assume people to be 'incapable of truth and goodness' - and infinitely more harmful by their chimerical pretensions to virtue than by the tranquil exercise of their vices [A] - that the modernizing 'Politiques' (breaking on this point with the spirit of earlier civilizations) found themselves logically led to limit their philosophical ambitions to seeking the least bad society possible. 3 This programme initially was deliberately realistic and moderate, and resigned, as distinct from the enthusiasm that inspired the early utopians, to con-

Liberalism (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1 9 9 8 ) and 'Am brogio Lorenzetti and the Portrayal of Virtuous Government', in R enaissance Virtues (Cam bridge: Cambridge Un iversity Press, 2 002 ), the key work of Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to R easo1z of State (Cambridge: Camb ridge University Press, 1 9 92), which demonstrates the radical philosophical break with Ren aissance Human ism and the Florentine repub lic introduced by the ' Poli­ tiques' of the sixteenth century. It is remarka ble, moreover, that the report o f the Trilateral Commission devoted to the 'govern­ ability' of modern societies ( The Crisis of D emocracy, 1 9 75 ), a report that has come to constitute the ideological matrix of the 'new wo rld order', set up in its introductory chapter an opposition between 'value-oriented intellectuals' wh o decide on the basis of values, and whose critica l activity is consequently a da nger to the u nderlying equilibria of liberal society, and 'technocratic and pol­ icy-oriented intellectuals' who confine themselves to a purely tech ­ n ical and political approach to the problems of ' advanced industrial society', and whose number, the report is happy to say, is growing in parallel with this society itself. This distinction reprod uces in a certain respect, and in a different terminology, the fo und ing cleav­ age o f m odernity, between Humanists and 'Politiques' . 3 A society that presents itself as 'the least bad possible' logically tends to base the essential part of its propaga nda on the idea that it exists to protect us from infinitely worse ills. That is why, as Guy

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sidering men 'as they are', so that it could not only accommo­ date their vices but, above all, seek to convert these into usable energy for its own operation. The various modes in which the ideal of the liberal pacification of life gradually came to unfold the whole series of its civilizational implications thus only constitute, in the last instance, a dialectical development of this pessimistic anthropology in the face of the various unpre­ cedented situations that History continues to present. The concepts of 'checks and balances' and a self-regulating mechanism, which organize all the ideological constructions of liberalism, must be understood first of all as the philo­ sophical materialization of this original distrust of the moral capacities of humanity. If the desire to subject human conduct to an ethical ideal taken as universalizable is indeed the crime that contains all others, then it is in fact impossible to try and establish tranquillity and civil peace without first neutral­ izing all conceivable forms of moral temptation, whether these are religious or otherwise. In this sense, being 'modern' basically means being convinced that the new resources of Reason (of which Science offers the privileged model) are from now on capable of resolving this problem by indicating the lines of a double strategy. On the one hand, removing all traditional figures of political authority, and on the other, gradually placing the collective existence of individuals under the control of impersonal and ideologically 'neutral' mecha-

Deb ord remarks in his Comments otz the Society of the Spectacle, a liberal society generally arranges things so as to be 'j udged by its enemies rather th an by its results' (London: Verso, 1 9 90, p. 24 ). Consequently it is always an ideological drama for it when in the course of time this or that historical incarnation of abso lute Evil disappears (as with the fall of the Berlin Wall, for example ). And as the place of the worst cannot be allowed to remain open for long, liberal propaganda finds itself perpetually faced with the obligation to discover new incarnations - if need be, of course, manufactu ring them from scratch .

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The Real m of Lesser Evil

nisms whose free play will be able to produce automatically the entire political order that is desired, without ever having to appeal to these individuals in their guise of subjects. 4 As we know, for liberals there are just two mechanisms, and two alone, [B] that possess this providential property - the two parallel and complementary clockwork mechanisms of Market and Law. From the moment that this massive his­ torical transfer has been effected, modern freedom can thus be recognized in its constitutive double dimension, both juridical and economic. It can be defined, on the one hand, as the right to do anything that is not forbidden by positive law (as in Montesquieu's formula), and on the other, in a more discreet fashion, as the right to do anything that does not contravene the rules of the Market. This last point needs to be made rather more precise. In order for this society-machine to reach its optimum perfor­ mance - in other words for the apparatuses of Market and Law to be really in a position to generate by themselves all the equilibria that the theory expects of them - it is indispens­ able for the conditions of their free operation to be protected against any kind of arbitrary intervention that might disturb their logic. In its ideal form, therefore, the liberal State should permanently ensure that the exercise of political power is carefully separated from any moral or religious consider­ ation. [ C] In other words, to the extent that the latter are

4 The idea that the equ ilibria needed for the political salvation of a commu nity can only come from the actio n o f mechan isms indepen ­ dent of the will of individuals (and a fortiori independent of their merit ), clearly amounts to a transposition o f the theologies of grace elaborated by the vario us currents of mo dern Augustinianism . In the end, it is only by grace of the work ings of M arket and Law that men who by nature are 'only free for ill' (Luther, 95 Theses), finally manage to live in peace and prosperity, whereas, delivered to themselves, they could only incline to a war of all against all. We are visibly dealing here with one of those many utzcmzscious (yet still active ) religiou s schemas that prepared the modern mind to accept the simultaneous sacralization of Growth and Law.

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perceived as merely arbitrary ideological preferences (which in this capacity are acceptable only as private choices), the tendency to take them into account inevitably leads the liberal State to reintroduce into the modern administration of things all the sources of dispute bound up with the old government of people. This leads to a certain paradox for this would-be minimal State. If it follows its natural propensity, it must in fact arrogate itself the right to intervene in civil society when­ ever it is a question of defending the conditions of laissez­ faire, which in its eyes are those of liberty itself. Quite often, therefore, it finds itself having to break those cultural resis­ tances to 'change' that generally have their basis in the still dangerous 'archaisms' of tradition, or else in advantages unfairly acquired in the earlier (and no less archaic) struggles of the working class and its various allies. But this sovereign duty of 'making mentalities evolve' scarcely troubles liberals, since it is theoretically justified by the perpetual necessity of guaranteeing each person the effective possibility of peace­ fully enj oying their rights and their private independence. In this sense, a coherent liberal society - in other words, one whose members should have only a minimum of common activities can only persist in being if all the mechanical processes to which its members have decided to trust their political destiny genuinely are and remain processes without a subject. Given the constitutional distrust of liberals towards the eternal tendency of people to claim to be acting morally, this latter proposition must be understood in its most radical sense. It implies that the society of lesser evil is not simply one that, in order to function effectively, has no need to demand of its members any kind of work on themselves (to exhort them, for example, to conform to a definite ideal of moral or religious perfection) . In fact, and as Adam Smith (after Mandeville) never ceased to emphasize, it is a society whose cogs function all the better if each individual sponta­ neously renounces any such work (which, moreover, is inev­ itably suspect) , and prefers to this 'sacrificial' existence the more tranquil pursuit of his well-understood interests and the -

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realization of his particular desires. It is only on the basis of this preventive necessity of dissuading individuals from suc­ cumbing to the temptation of morality the source, as we know, of all utopias and evils - that it is possible to under­ stand, in their profound logic, the two parallel modern evo­ lutions of Law and Market. By borrowing the vocabulary of Spinoza, it is thus possible to formulate the following thesis: under a pure liberal system (in other words, one completely in conformity with its concept), the order and connection of Law are the same as the order and connection of the Market. These are certainly two different attributes, but each of them expresses, in its own order and fashion, the unitary substance of actual liberalism. For liberals, as we have seen, the first function of Law is to guarantee a 'j ust order', which means ensuring the peace­ ful coexistence of liberties that are inevitably rival, since by hypothesis each is bent on pursuing his or her own particular interest. Hence its fundamental axiological neutrality. Whereas the different traditional forms of Law always took care to articulate their normative work to a foundational moral reference-point (whether this was the word of God, devotion to the common good, popular custom or the natural order) , liberal Law sets out to formulate its decisions without ever drawing support from the least value judgement. If it claimed to pronounce what was 'good' or 'evil', i.e. if it claimed to judge in the old sense of the term,5 this Law would reintroduce into collective existence the ideological positions that always led individuals and groups into violent confron­ tation. The rationality that liberal Law vaunts is thus essen­ tially calculating and procedural. It has no other use than to maintain the conditions of civil peace ( 'public order') by -

5 'Pass no ju dgement, and you will not be j udged', as the Gospel already orda ined ( Luke 6, 3 7 ) . Th is is the sense in wh ich we should understand Chesterton's formula according to which 'the modern world is a world full of Ch ristian ideas gone mad'.

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bringing back into equilibrium the disorderly movement of opposing liberties, without ever having to question the metaphysical credentials of the demands being made. The strictly positivist character of such a programme is sufficient of itself to explain the ever-growing technicality of the modern legal industry, and the characteristic way in which it now tends to manufacture its norms. As Jacques Commaille asserts,6 contemporary Law is in constant transition from a 'dogmatic-finalist' model (that of traditional Law) to a 'pragmatic-managerial' model, with business management providing its most appropriate image. But the logic of liberalism simultaneously leads modern Law onto far steeper slopes. If its aim is above all to guar­ antee the effective operation of the social machine (what radicals rightly call the System), it is in fact indispensable to permanently ensure that the ideal of axiological neutrality, supposed to support the scholarly balancings of the techni­ cians of Law, really is protected from any ideological con­ tamination. Here, however, it does indeed seem that only the 'evolution of mores' - in other words the continual variation in the relation of cultural forces between competing freedoms - is in a position to provide the information necessary, by elucidating, at each stage of History, the presuppositions of the constituted Law that have up till now remained uncon­ scious. It is essentially in this manner that new motives for indignation can constantly appear and be formulated, pro­ viding an ipso facto basis for liberal exhortations towards new 'advances of Law'. To stick to a simple example, it is only in our epoch that we have come to understand how, more than two centuries after the French Revolution, we are still deprived, to the liberal lawyer Daniel Borillo's amaze­ ment, of the elementary right 'to whip our partner if he or she asks us, even if this provides us with pleasure', despite

6 Jacques Commaille, L'Esprit sociologique des lois (Paris: PUF, 1 9 94), p. 247.

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The Real m of Lesser Evil

this being a practice 'that does no harm to anyone and is not damaging to health'.7 How do we explain that such a denial of justice can still persist in the age of the Internet and the Global Market? As an experienced practitioner of 'French theory' - and a good disciple of Bentham - Borillo clearly has no trouble unmasking the hidden moralizing assumption that underlies this intolerable restraint on individual liberty. He stresses that, even though judges 'no longer appeal to a religious reference', 'we have yet to cast off transcendent values'. It is enough, in other words, to subject their practice to the well-oiled procedures of 'deconstruction', to immedi­ ately discover that these j udges sometimes still appeal to the strange 'notion of human dignity'. Which, on proper reflec­ tion, conveys 'a certain idea of the human', no less fantastic and arbitrary in this respect than any other ideological con­ struction. [D] In these conditions, to make into Law a notion that is so aberrant and with such a poor scientific foundation necessarily amounts to a 'paternalistic' initiative, which, it is not hard to imagine, could easily lead our fragile liberal societies step by step back, if we are not careful, to the darkest days of the precapitalist era. The problem, of course, is that this systematic practice of deconstruction (which, given its great simplicity, readily offers a basis for brilliant careers in the media, universities,

7 Phi/osophie magazi1ze, March 2007, p. 5 0 . However praiseworth y this openmindedness of Daniel Borillo ( not to mention h is mentor Jack Lang), it strikes me as still a bit limited, at least if we compare it with typical legal debates in some other European cou ntries. In Germany, for example, the champions of libera lism are already d iscussing the right of cannibalistic practices between consenting adults (the Bernd Jii rgen Bran des a ffair, spring 200 1 ); l ikewise that o f marriage between brother and sister (the liberal advocate Endrik Wilhelm has pleaded for the abolition of paragraph 1 73 o f the German penal code, wh ich punishes incest, on the pretext that this prohibition is no more than 'a folkloric historical survival' ). O ur French liberals still have some catch ing-up to do if they wa nt to be really competitive in the international ideas market.

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or at least pressure groups) , opens up, by definition, an infi­ nite philosophical abyss (as infinite as the development of commodities in the parallel order of the Economy). What limit, in fact, is it possible to assign it, other than an arbitrary one, i.e. one based in the last instance on moralizing prej u­ dice ? The programme of a liberal purging of Law (or, as liberals of the left and far-left prefer to put it, a 'struggle against all discriminations and exclusions') thus shows itself to be equally committed by nature to an unending movement. Its only logical end, indeed, can be official recognition of what Hobbes (a century before Sade) called the 'right of all over all'. It must be emphasized, however, that in forging this singular concept (which sums up very well the sensibility of the modern left), the author of Leviathan was only claiming to describe the degree zero of society, i.e. the maj or anthro­ pological condition of the war of all against all. The liberal constraint of absolute axiological neutrality naturally produces identical effects in the parallel order of the Market, the free development of which is called Growth. This is, for liberals, the only real foundation of the modern social tie, with Law, for its part, guaranteeing its indispensable formal conditions. In this perspective (which coincides with certain dogmas of orthodox Marxism), 8 the whole social mechanism thus rests, in the last instance, on such Growth. If the rate of growth declines or falls (phenomena whose specific cause, for the sect of 'economists', is always, whatever the circumstances, an insufficient degree of freedom for capital) , the pacification of the social bond will be threatened in its very foundations. 8 We can recall how, in the 1 9 3 0s, one o f the main criticisms that the various Trotskyist movements addressed to the capitalist system was that this led inexorably to the 'stagnation of the productive forces' . Hence the permanent invitation to relaunch Growth ('creator of jobs' and synonym for historic Progress), which remains - from Arlette to Olivier - the fundamental axis of the political programme of their heirs today. [Arlette Laguiller was the presi­ dential candidate of Lutte Ouvriere, and Olivier Besancenot of the Ligue Communiste Revolutiona ire, in the 2007 elections. Tr.]

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If Growth thus represents the alpha and omega of men's political salvation (only the Market, liberals insist, can permit individuals, supposedly moved simply by their egoistic inter­ est, to come to terms like thieves on a spree) , a certain number of conditions still have to be effectively combined. It is thus necessary, on the one hand, for competition to be 'free and undistorted', and on the other hand, for each agent operating in the ideal market (whether as producer or con­ sumer) to agree to play the game, i.e. behave 'rationally' by seeking in each situation to maximize their utility. This implies, to be sure, that in their everyday decisions these agents never allow themselves to be steered by dubious moral or 'ideological' considerations, such as, for example, those concerning the effect that their 'rational' decisions may have in the long term on the balances of nature or the humanity of the agents themselves.9 We know that, for the economists, these collateral effects of growth are no more than negative 'externalities', which their science teaches must be left without regret outside its field of study. First of all, because they seem hard to measure (and whatever cannot be mea­ sured has no existence in the 'science' of the Market) ; secondly, because, in any case, the greater part of these 'externalities' can only be appreciated as a function of cri­ teria that are essentially 'ideological'. How can we defend the idea, for example, that those sections of young people

9 We have a chemically pure example of the necessary 'axiological neutra lity' o f the liberal Market (whose only law is ' business is b usiness') in the recent creation, in Germany, of the company Erento.com whose object is to o ffer all political parties, tra de unions and pressure gro ups the services of professional demonstra­ tors, payable by the hour or day, and - if desired - equipped with megaphones or djembe drums (at extra cost, of course). As M onica , an employee of this new company, explained: 'For me it's j ust a job like any other. To demonstrate for organ izations that I don't myself support doesn't cause me any problem. '

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whom the entertainment industry and the manipulations of advertising have 'logotomized' with such great effect find themselves dispossessed, by this fact alone, of an important part of their humanity, if we follow Daniel Borillo in main­ taining that this notion of 'humanity' (and the sulphurous theory of alienation that accompanies it) is a mere flatus vocis, a word lacking in meaning? It is a consequence of this, and quite philosophically coher­ ent with it, that the various propagandists of the System actively work to exclude from their economic calculations anything that might be akin to a value judgement. For example, when they assess Gross Domestic Product, which in the eyes of the liberals is taken as a 'scientific' measure of Growth and hence the degree of obj ective cohesion of the society in question. This positivist methodology, in fact, is no more than the intellectual price to be paid for maintaining the fiction that Growth is indeed a process both necessary and axiologically neutral (which therefore can only be chal­ lenged from a partisan or utopian perspective), and satisfies in this way the transcendental condition of all liberal political equilibria. This leads, as has often been remarked, to the curious appearance of a Prevert-type inventory characteristic of the various official reports devoted to the measurement of GDP. In the statistical definition of liberal happiness, it is seen as perfectly sensible to take into account not only the production of the most useless and absurd commodities (whose consumption is imposed on a daily basis by advertis­ ing propaganda and its ever-changing definitions of 'prestige' and 'distinction'), but also some of the most ravaging effects of the capitalist mode of destruction of nature and humanity. The wisdom of these 'experts', therefore, includes without compunction in its surrealist calculations [E] not only the effects of industrial pollution and accidents on the road or at work, but also the propagation of epidemics and the rise in crime (along with the measures taken for protection from it), even the consequences of supposedly 'natural' disasters, or those more directly provoked by human intervention. (As

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everyone knows, there is nothing like a good war to boost an anaemic growth level. ) [F] This panglossian manner of considering a large part of the evils that beset humanity as the metaphysical instrument of a greater perfection (in this case, that of the rate of growth) may well appear indecent to those all over the globe who see the ecological, social and cultural prerequisites of their own dignity dismantled by capitalist logic. It was in this very sense that Thomas Carlyle did not hesitate, in 1 849, to define political economy, once and for all, as the 'dismal science'. It must be understood, however; that for liberals this meth­ odological exclusion of 'common decency' remains the sole rational condition that still permits the 'realm of lesser evil' to protect individuals against those infinitely worse ills that prowl eternally around a poor and naive humanity: those that the 'filthy Beast' has its sights on, crouching in each one of us and always ready to pounce. If the processes of Law and Market can thus develop in a perfect historical parallel, it is finally because the reasons that govern this double movement are in both cases structur­ ally identical. [G] The ever more radical ethical purge that each of these apparatuses is forced to conduct is no more than the practical counterpart of the renunciation of 'con­ ceiving human life in terms of its good or its purpose' 1 0 which philosophically organizes the entire liberal mecha­ nism. But this process, being avowedly without a subj ect, must equally be without a purpose. In the liberal configura­ tion of the world, therefore, and whatever may have been the original moderating intentions of its founders, the very notion of limit becomes ( for the first time in the history of civilizations) philosophically inconceivable. To legitimize its principle, in fact, it would be necessary to draw support

1 0 Pierre Manent, Histoire i1ztellectuelle du liberalisme ( Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1 9 8 7 ), p. 244 .

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from moral values, which means, according to the liberal ideology, from arbitrary normative constructions, designed to set men once more against one another, on the model of the wars of religion that are ever to be condemned. 1 1 Thus it is under the effect of its own logic, in the last analysis, that a liberal society finds itself compelled, as Marx perfectly well understood, to 'constantly revolutionize all social relations' and undermine all 'patriarchal, idyllic relations'. 1 2 'Constant revolutionizing of production', Marx continues, 'uninter­ rupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncer­ tainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.' This is the reason why the 'bourgeois epoch', i.e. the modern age, ontologically committed, once it has historically managed to reproduce itself on its own founda­ tions, to the idea that 'the final goal is nothing, movement is everything', 1 3 knows only one sole philosophical motto: the acceleration of all processes, a decisively modern reformula­ tion of the old principle of intendant Gournay, 1 4 'laissez

passer, laissez faire'. [H)

1 1 It would be interesting to study the fashion in which the history of the a rtistic avant-garde (especially in its constitutive relationship with the pro blem o f the lim it ) was itself constructed in parallel with this para llelism . That would mean exploring the decisive role played by the modern mythology of the 'artist' in the development of the liberal imaginary. 12 'Manifesto of the Communist Party' , K. M arx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1 9 76), p. 4 8 6 . 1 3 In the famous formula (the 'winged word', as Lenin p ut i t ) o f Eduard Bernstein ( 1 850-1 9 3 2 ), the first great figure of 'revisionism' (to use a word which denoted in its day what the entire modern left has now everywhere become ) in the history of the Marxist workers' movement. 14 U.-C.-M. Vincent de Gournay, a precursor of the Physiocrats, was intettdant of commerce from 1 75 1 to 1 75 8 .]

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N otes [A] Jean Rohou, in his very fine book Le XVIIe siecle, une revo­ lution dans Ia condition humaine (Paris: Seuil, 2002), shows with precision how the reversal of Jansenist anthropology into an apology for the liberal solution was effected in a privileged fashion in the work of Pierre Nicole (De Ia grandeur, 1 6 71 ) . 'Men', wrote Nicole, 'being devoid of charity out of the derailment of sin, remain none the less filled with needs and are dependent on one another in count­ less ways. Cupidity has thus taken the place of charity for meeting these needs, and it does so in a manner that cannot be sufficiently admired.' In 1 675 (De Ia charite et de l'amour­ propre), Nicole went so far as to maintain that in states where there was no real charity 'because true religion has been banished', it was still possible to 'live in as much peace, security and convenience as if in a republic of saints [ . . . ] . However corrupt this entire society might be internally and in the eyes of God, outwardly there was none better regu­ lated, more civil, more just, more peaceful, more honest and more generous; and what is all the more admirable is that, while being inspired and moved simply by self-love, and entirely devoid of charity, yet the form and characteristics of charity are visible on all sides.' With the result, concludes the Port-Royal philosopher, 'that in order to entirely reform the world, in other words to banish all vices and crude dis­ orders, and to render men happy in this life, all that is needed, in the absence of charity, would be to give all of them an enlightened self-love that was able to discern their true interests.' After stressing that 'in order to pass from these texts to a moral manifesto of liberal society, it was only necessary to suppress references to God', Rohou rightly notes how 'forty years aher the death of Louis XIV, an eminent Christian thus became the herald of liberalism, in terms that foreshadow those of Adam Smith, who was

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inspired by the analyses of a number of intermediaries, in particular Boisguilbert, a former student of Nicole at Port-Royal' ( Rohou, Le X VIIe siecle, p. 48 1 ) . One need only read the latest work of Frederic Lordon (L'Interet sou­ verain: essai d'anthropologie spinoziste, Paris: La Decou­ verte, 2006) to appreciate the degree to which the sociology inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu remains deeply in thrall to the anthropological debates of the seventeenth century, and in particular the ideological assumptions of La Rochefoucauld and the Jansenists of Port-Royal. In all like­ lihood, this provides one of the essential keys for under­ standing the constitutional ineptitude of the French far-leh today to develop a radical and unified critique of the liberal system.

[B] What is needed, from a liberal point of view, to construct a modern community? If we take the example of the European Community - though the same would apply to any other, including a national one - the response seems simple. On the one hand, of course, a common market, i.e. a space in which human monads can freely exchange goods and services, according to the rules of free and undistorted competition. And on the other hand, a set of legal regulations (a space of Law) that makes it possible, both to protect this competition, and to guarantee each monad (or each free association of monads) the right to live according to their private definition of the good life. Otherwise put, a coherent liberal society is defined as a peaceful aggregation of abstract individuals who, as long as they fully respect the laws, are deemed to have nothing in common (neither language, nor culture, nor history) except their desire to participate in Growth, as producers and/or consumers. Moreover, since these very minimal conditions of mem­ bership are now in the process of being globalized (by virtue of what Guy Debord called the 'world-spectacular [i .e.

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American] degradation of all culture'), 1 5 a developed liberal society must thus logically end up considering itself as simply a site of transition, implying no particular moral allegiance on the part of those who have provisionally chosen to reside there, and which everyone must be free to leave to the benefit of some other location, whenever their calculations suggest this is advantageous. An example (in the case of a calculation that bears on taxation) : is it more attractive for me to become a citizen of Belgium, Switzerland, or Monaco ? This is the principle of a total freedom of circulation across all points of the planet (and the complementary one of automatic reg­ ularization of all the transitional installations that follow), of which the left-wing champions of capitalism (who are the more coherent) refuse any philosophical critique, on the pretext that this could only lead to 'racist' or 'xenophobic' conclusions (remember the role played by the famous figure of the 'Polish plumber' in supposedly 'anti-racist' forms of legitimization of the liberal project of the European Consti­ tution). [a] [a] The web site of Bertrand Lemennicier (one of the four members of the liberal Mont-Pelerin sect whom Luc Ferry personally imposed, in 2003, on the jury for the economics agregation), offers this exemplary analysis from Gerard Bra­ mouille (a fellow-member of the same sect and jury ) : 'The illegal immigrant lowers both wage and non-wage costs of labour. He sharpens the competitiveness of the production apparatus and restrains the process of delocalization of enterprises, which find on their home ground what they might have to seek abroad. He facilitates the adaptations of

1 5 Guy Debord, 'Lettre a Mezioud O uldamer de decembre 1 9 85 sur Ia " question des immigres " ', Correspo1zda1zce, vol. 6 ( Paris: Libra irie Artheme Fayard, 2007 ), p. 3 6 3 . On this questio n of mem­ bership in a community, there are interesting remarks in the latest work by Pierre Manent, La Rais01z des natioTZs ( Paris : Gallimard, 2 006 ).

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employment to conjunctural variations, and increases the flexibility of the productive process.' It is politically indis­ pensable to make sure, therefore, we are told by this bosses' academic, that xenophobia does not make the illegal immi­ grant 'the easy scapegoat of a difficult problem'. This analy­ sis betrays the ultimate ideological foundation (whether conscious or not) of all the present battles of the liberal far­ left (those, for example, of the ' Education sans Frontieres' network that is very much in the media), to legitimize the abolition of all obstacles to the legal-commercial unification of humanity.

[C] If the liberal management of politics must abstract, by defini­ tion, from any moral or religious consideration (simply being charged with taking those decisions that 'necessity' imposes), [a] it still includes, like any management worthy of the name, a strategy of image and communication. And as the popular classes seem to remain exaggeratedly sensitive to the pre­ modern idea that politics should respect a certain set of values, liberal politicians regularly find themselves compelled to dress up the mathematical rationality of their programme in the dubious guise of old-style morality. Hence the unpleas­ ant spectacle (particularly on the occasion of electoral com­ edies) of these intransigent defenders of the Market being forced to pronounce, hand on heart, the most incongruous praise of the family tie, solidarity towards the most deprived, ecological responsibility and civic sense, whereas this Market whose empire they strive unceasingly to extend can only function effectively, as they know full well, by continually undermining all these dispositions. [b] No one who has read Machiavelli will be surprised by these necessary buffooneries. [a] From this point of view, a liberal political decision must always present itself as a decision with no 'plan B'.

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[b] We can particularly admire Sarkozy's charge against the 'heirs of May 68', in his 2007 election campaign, that they 'proclaimed that everything was permitted, that author­ ity was finished, that good manners were finished, that respect was finished, that there was no longer anything great, any­ thing sacred, anything admirable, any more rules, norms, or taboos'. Especially if we compare this with his own confid­ ings, though it is true that these were delivered in the more intimate setting of an interview with Michel Ofray: 'The interest of rules, limits, norms, is precisely that they permit transgression. Without rules, no transgression, and therefore no liberty. Liberty means transgressing' (Philosophie magazine, April 2007) .

[D) Behind the desire of a growing number of contemporary ideologists to question all the differences that still separate humans from animals, and even, for some of them, from cybernetic machines (to their minds, these are politically unacceptable discriminations) , there is evidently an ideologi­ cal issue that goes well beyond the actual scientific question. This can be seen very clearly in the works of Dominique Lestel (L'Animal singulier, Paris: Seuil, 2004), who, rej oicing that 'the age of mutants has arrived' (p. 1 3 3 ) , deduces from this that all critiques of the liberal deconstruction of the idea of humanity can only proceed from an ideological or onto­ logical 'spasm' (pp. 1 25-7) . 'All those', he writes, 'who com­ plain about the present age and newly emerging technologies say with one voice: modern man is inauthentic [ . . . ]. A whole section of Adorno's philosophy can be read as a catalogue, sometimes sad and sometimes hilarious, of the ways that human beings have found of being no longer authentic. But authenticity is to the human being what normality is to disease: a cultural fantasy' (p. 1 3 2 ) . Here we have excellent news for those workers across the whole world (especially those in Africa, Asia and Latin America) who, not having

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mastered 'French theory', still live with the illusory sentiment that the conditions in which they are exploited by the big international companies are 'abnormal' and 'inhuman', perhaps even 'alienating'. Thanks to bonobos, dolphins and cybernetic machines, they now know that the way in which they 'complain about the present age' is simply the ideologi­ cal effect of a 'cultural fantasy'.

[E] To get an idea of the mental universe that official economics inhabits, we can refer to the elementary example offered by Jean Gadrey and Florence Jany-Catrice in Les Nouveaux Indicateurs de richesse (Paris: La Decouverte, 2005, p. 2 1 ) : 'If a country paid 1 0 per cent of its people to destroy goods, make holes in the roads, damage vehicles, etc., and a further 10 per cent to repair them, mend the holes, etc., it would have the same GOP as a country in which this 20 per cent of the working population were employed in improving life expectancy and health, the level of education, and participa­ tion in cultural and leisure activities.' This example helps us to understand the great economic interest that there is, from the liberal point of view (as Mandeville was the first to point out, early in the eighteenth century) , in maintaining a high crime rate. Not only is the practice of crime in general highly productive (burning a few thousand cars a year, for example, only requires a very small material and human input, incom­ parable with the profits it brings the automobile manufactur­ ers). It also requires no particular investment in education (except, perhaps, in the case of computer crime) , with the result that the contribution of crime to growth in GOP is immediately profitable, even if it starts very young (in this case there is no legal limit on children's work) . Naturally, to the extent that this practice is very little appreciated by the popular classes, on the egoistic pretext that they are its first victims, it is indispensable to improve its image, setting up a whole industry of apology or even political legitimization.

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This work is usually entrusted to rappers, 'citizen' film­ makers and the useful idiots of state sociology. 1 6

[ F) On 1 8 March 1 96 8, a few weeks before his assassination, Robert Kennedy gave the following address at the University of Kansas: Our Gross National Product . . . cou nts air pollution and cig­ arette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways o f carnage. It counts special locks for o u r doors a n d the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl . It counts napalm and counts n uclear warheads and armored cars for the po lice to fight the riots in our cities. It co unts Wh itman's rifle and Speck's knife. And the television pro­ grams which glorify violence in order to sell toys to children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the hea lth of our children, the quality of their ed ucation or the joy o f their play. It does not include the bea uty of our poetry o r the strength of o ur m arriages, the intelligence of our pu blic debate or the integrity of our pu blic officials. It measures neither our wit not our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. ( www.jfk.library. org/Historical+R esources/Archives/ R eference+Desk/Speeches/RFKI R FKSpeech 6 8Mar1 8 UKatzsas.htm )

1 6 Th ose who appreciate this involuntary humour should read the Apologie du casseur by Serge Roure (Paris : M ichalon, 2006 ), a work of refreshing intellectual simplicity, apparently written by a partisan o f the L utheran 'bonded will' and the sociology of M ucchielli.

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Forty years later, it would certainly be extremely hard to find a representative of the left or far-left in France able to for­ mulate such a radical critique of the ideology of Growth.

[G] Liberal logic defines a double-entry table. In this table, the modern right (which after the Liberation decisively aban­ doned the re-establishment of throne and altar) represents the entrance-point privileged by the Market and its perpetual expansion. The modern left (which after the student move­ ment of May 1 9 68 decisively abandoned the historic com­ promise it made with the socialist workers' movement at the time of the Dreyfus affair) represents the entrance-point priv­ ileged by Law and its transgressive culture. 1 7 The former has its origins in Turgot and Adam Smith, the latter rather in Benj amin Constant and john Stuart Mill ( sometimes dressed up, it is true, in Trotsky's leather coat, for vague historical reasons that are still partly operative ) . This is why the right/ left cleavage, as it has come to function in our day, is the ultimate political key to the constant advances of the capital­ ist order. [a] In actual fact, it makes it possible to perma­ nently confront the popular classes with an impossible alternative. [b) Either they mainly aspire to be protected from the immediate economic and social effects of liberalism (redundancies, offshoring, pension reform, dismantling of public services, etc.), and they then have to resign themselves

17 0ne of the best studies devoted to the cultura l tran sformations that prepared the triumph of the liberal revolution in France (and thus the b irth of the new left) is that of Kristin Ross, R ouler plus vite. laver plus blanc. Modernisation de Ia France et decolonisation au toumant des amzees 60 (Paris : Flammarion, 2006 ). The a uthor emphasizes among other things the key role played in this histori­ cal process by the Mendes-France experience, by the development of advertising and a utomobiles, and by the appearance of a new press for women ( in particular Elle magazine ).

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to seeking temporary shelter behind the left or far-left, and validating all the cultural conditions of the system that gener­ ates these effects. Or, on the contrary, they rebel against this perpetual apology for transgression, but by taking refuge behind the right and far-right help to validate the systematic dismantling of their material conditions of existence, which this culture of unlimited transgression precisely makes possible. Whatever the political (or electoral) choice of the popular classes, they are offered no real means of opposing the system that methodically destroys their lives. Assuming that there is a particular interest in maintaining the fiction of a left anti-liberalism, we thus find ourselves inevitably led to the idea that modern society is the site of a strange and paradoxical dialectic. We have necessarily to accept, in fact, that the more the Market becomes autono­ mous and displays its inhuman consequences, the more abstract Law and the culture that accompanies it authorize, in the opposite sense, an unprecedented emancipation of the human race. Translated into the old language of Marxism, this new founding theorem of the modern left amounts to proclaiming that, in any modern liberal society, the legal and cultural 'superstructures' vary in the opposite direction to the inexorable movement of the economic 'infrastructure'. [c] This is the particular intellectual framework in which we should understand the work of Jacques Ranciere on the subj ect of the 'hatred of democracy', l 8 The great interest of his essay, in fact, is to confer on this singular reversal of historical materialism a particularly brilliant conceptual for­ mulation. From this point of view, his small book certainly amounts to the most intelligent philosophical manifesto that the modern left has produced with a view to legitimizing its new course. A brief comment on it is thus indispensable. The starting-point of this text is a radical questioning of the theses proposed by Jean-Claude Milner in his remarkable 1 8 Jacques Ranciere, The Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2006 ).

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essay Les Penchants criminels de /'Europe democratique (Paris: Verdier, 2003 ) . As against Milner's claim to display 'the theme of limitlessness' specific to modern society (p. 1 6 ), Ranciere obj ects that an analysis of this kind would mean transforming contemporary capitalist society into a 'homo­ geneous anthropological configuration'. 1 ' According to him, on the contrary, there are two figures of unlimitedness to distinguish, and it is impossible to superimpose one on the other, or deduce one from the other. We would thus be faced, on the one hand, with a 'bad infinity' - that of capitalist accumulation in the strict sense of the term - and on the other hand with a 'good infinity' - that of the evolution of mores and contemporary forms of consumption and entertainment. Behind the radical critique of the capitalist lifestyle and its narcissistic individualism (such as is found, Ranciere notes, in the analyses of Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch), we should rather hear a quite different discourse, that of the 'hatred of democracy'. To develop this dialectic with Proudhonist overtones (cap­ italism having its good and its bad sides), Ranciere uses just one essential argument. According to him, the fundamental features of a supposedly 'modern' denunciation of the con­ sumer society were in actual fact already completely present in the famous critique of Athenian democracy that Plato put forward in Book VIII of the Republic: 'Nothing is missing here ', writes Ranciere, 'from the census of evils that, at the dawn of the third millennium, the triumph of democratic equality has brought us: reign of the bazaar and its colourful goods, equality between the schoolmaster and the pupil, the resignation of authority, the cult of the young, of children and of animals. All that the long list of deplorable misdeeds of mass individualism in the era of supermarkets and mobile telephones does is add a few modern accessories to the Platonic fable of the untameable democratic ass' (ibid. , pp. 3 6-7) . [d] The conclusion seems to follow of itself. If, on

1 ' Ibid. , p. 2 9 .

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the one hand, capitalism did not yet exist in Athens (as we can all agree without difficulty), and if Plato was indeed a fierce opponent of democracy (which we can agree likewise) , how can w e not conclude, i n fact, that the critique o f 'super­ markets and mobile telephones' actually proceeds from a hatred of democracy, under cover of anti-capitalism ? Two remarks on this argument are needed. The first is purely formal, and concerns the limitations of the comparative use of ancient texts. By applying Ranciere's method, one could just as well demonstrate that the eco­ logical critique of automobile civilization (and the crazy townscape that follows from it) has strictly nothing in common with that of modern capitalism, since Juvenal already denounced in his Satires the insoluble problems of traffic in Rome. [ e] The second remark is philosophical, and bears on the interpretation of Plato's philosophy that Ranciere proposes. There are two important points, in fact, that this author omits. On the one hand, Plato's critique of the democratic polis only acquires its full sense in the context of his theory of the decadence of the ideal City, in which it simply represents one stage (after those of timocracy and oligarchy, and before that of tyranny). On the other hand, and this is far more important, the principle of this descend­ ing dialectic is precisely the growing role that commercial logic is steadily led to play in the cyclical history of the world, a logic whose essence Plato perfectly well understood. (In commodity exchange, he writes in Book II of the Republic, each person seeks above all to 'satisfy his interest'. ) The fact that capitalism - as the ideological proj ect of basing society on the generalization of commercial logic - was effectively inconceivable before the appearance of political economy in the eighteenth century (and the ideal of Newtonian science) , evidently does not mean that commodity relations were not present in earliest Antiquity, and neither, as a consequence, that it was impossible to grasp, already at that time, certain of the basic anthropological implications of this. In fact, it is above all in this critique of commodity exchange, and the connected desire for wealth, that we should seek the initial

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sources of this condemnation of pleonexia (the desire to possess ever more) that lies at the centre of Plato's political philosophy. [f] It was only in a second phase that the 'man with unlimited desires' was able to find in the democratic polis a form particularly appropriate to his essence; but we should remember that for Plato it is the tyrant, not the demos, that represents the ultimate figure of 'pleonectic man'. To put it another way: as opposed to Ranciere, Plato does not forget, in his political analyses, that the agora was not only the place where the popular assembly was held; as everyone knows, this was also the Athenians' marketplace. Certainly, Plato's critique of commercial democracy was above all that of an aristocrat hostile to the popular classes, who saw the demos as the privileged (but not exclusive) depository of commercial pleonexia. It would be completely absurd, from this point of view, to enrol Plato under the banner of any kind of socialism (though we know that attempts were made in this sense, particularly in the nine­ teenth century) . But it is not surprising, either, that this aristocratic critique of commercial logic enabled Plato to describe correctly certain human consequences that were already visible in his time - the unlimited desire to accumu­ late wealth and the pursuit of egoistic interest. (And the same is true, of course, for Aristotle's analysis of chresmatics, which Marx particularly admired. ) Failing in this way to understand (or deliberately misun­ derstanding) the complex nature of Plato's position (indis­ solubly anti-popular and anti-commerce), Ranciere finds it very hard to conceive liberalism in its actual dialectical unity. This is undoubtedly the reason why he is inevitably led to take up (if in a far more seductive form ) the old refrain of the modern liberals, according to which any radical criticism of the capitalist lifestyle (of 'hypermarkets and mobile phones') is secretly inspired by a deep hatred of democracy, and the aspiration to an elitist or even totalitarian world. The subsequent fate of his essay should thus be no surprise. It ended up becoming the official bible of Segolene Royal's 2007 presidential campaign, and the main ideological

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reference of all her election blogs. Given his past work, which is estimable in every way, that is a fate that Ranciere surely didn't deserve. [a] By virrue of the constirutive complementarity of these two philosophical moments of liberalism, their dialectical opposition always tends to attenuate in acrual government policies. The modern left, once in power, generally ends up rallying to the market economy, while the right, when it acrually has to deal with things, most commonly resigns itself to inscribing in legal marble the different stages in the 'evolution of mores' now deemed inexorable. Marx's German Ideology contains a prophetic description of this contempor­ ary division of labour between the left fractions of the ruling class (which control the 'culrural' spheres of Capital) and its right fractions (which control the economic spheres) : Inside this class one part appears as the thin kers of the class ( its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the formation of the ill usions of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others' attitude to these ideas and illu­ sions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas a bout themselves. Within th is class th is cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hos­ tility between the two parts, but whenever a practical collision occurs in which the class itself is endangered they automati­ cally vanish , in which case there also va nishes the appearance of the ruling ideas being not the ideas of the ruling class and having a power distinct from the power of this class. ( The Germa1Z Ideology, K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1 976, p. 6 0 )

[b] A s everyone can see for themselves, whereas totalitar­ ian societies hold to the simplistic principle, and one costly in human life, of the single party, contemporary capitalism has substiruted, with infinitely greater elegance (and efficiency), that of the single alternation.

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[c] The profit that official sociology never ceases to draw from this curious theorem of the new Leh is well known. On this subj ect, the most far-reaching study is still that of Baudelot and Establet (Le Niveau monte, Paris: Seuil, 1 9 8 9 ) . Its basic thesis i s easy to grasp, like all the theses o f the modern Leh: the more that capitalism transforms the School, simply as a function of economic considerations, the more the critical intelligence of students tends to rise (making them, for example, steadily more resistant to advertising propaganda, the entertainment industry and media manipulation). This a priori schema can naturally be applied to all domains, with no need to press empirical investigation very far. [d) As Ranciere knows perfectly well, the critique of liberal egoism and the atomization of society lay at the heart of the first socialist uprisings. To dispel this obstacle, in other words to stick to leh-wing positions, he is led therefore to present early socialism as simply one stage among others in counter­ revolutionary politics. The critique of liberal individualism - he writes - was 'initiated by the theoreticians of the counter-revolution in the wake of the French Revolution', and 'relayed by Utopian socialists in the first half of the nineteenth century' (p. 2 1 ) . A little further on, riding the winged horse of Nicolas Baverez, Ranciere goes so far as to recognize in this kind of critique 'a very French denunciation of the individualist revolution tearing apart the social body' (p. 22) . That is not very fair to Marx. [e] A particularly pleasing example of this old rhetorical procedure can be found in the most recent work of Lucien Jerphagnon (Laudator temporis acti: c'etait mieux avant, Paris: Taillandier, 2007) , a book designed to show the general public that deploring the present-day world is a constant of human psychology. It is appropriate to note here the aston­ ishing ideological schizophrenia of the spin-doctors of pro­ gressivism. On the one hand, in fact, they ceaselessly exhort the popular classes to adapt their 'archaic' mentalities to a world that is supposed to be in constant change (in which 'you cannot step twice into the same stream' ) . On the other

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hand, however, each time they have to deal with the least particular criticism of one aspect or other of capitalist devel­ opment (global warming, increasing egoism, rising crime, ever more invasive advertising, etc. ), they take up the posture of the traditional sage and reply with an indulgent smile that there is nothing new here under the sun, things have always been exactly the same and all these criticisms are unfounded, being as old as humanity itself. A good example of what Orwell called 'double-think' in his 1 984. [f] In Plato's work, the figure who embodies pleonexia in an emblematic way is Gyges, whose invisibility is precisely what makes him able to satisfy his unlimited desires. There is clearly nothing innocent about Plato's choice here, drawing on a myth of Herodotus. Gyges, in fact, was the supposed ancestor of that legendary king of Lydia whom the whole Greek tradition agreed in seeing as the inventor of money. This is a detail that does not fit very well with Ranciere's thesis according to which the Platonic denunciation of pleo­ nexia had its roots in the critique of democratic rules. I persist in believing, in fact, that the invention of money had more to do with economic exchange than with the power of the demos.

[H] 'But which is the revolutionary path ? Is there one ? - To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist "economic solution " ? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization ? For perhaps the flaws are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process", as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.' [a]

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These prophetic lines of Deleuze and Guattari (which legit­ imized in advance all the theoretical and practical reversals that the new left in power would shortly make), [b] undoubt­ edly constitute the most coherent philosophical formulation of the contemporary liberal programme (as can be seen by the practical use that someone like Toni Negri stubbornly continues to make of them); one that corresponds, in sum, to the historical moment at which, the major political and cultural obstacles to its unlimited development having been finally dispelled, liberalism can now turn on its own founda­ tions and as a function of its own logic, becoming in this way 'actually existing liberalism' . Foucault wrote that 'one day the century will be Deleuzean'. He did not realize what truth there was in these words. [a] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus ( London: Athlone Press, 1 9 84), p. 239. A Marxist of mechan­ ical bent might remark that the well-known success this work enj oyed coincided exactly with the Trilateral Commission beginning its reflections on the new problems of 'governabil­ ity' faced by contemporary capitalism. This is a point that Michel Clouscard already perceived, in his particular way, back in the 1 9 70s (Neo-fascisme et ideologie du desir, Paris: Denoel, 1 973 ) . On the question of the recuperation of Deleuzean ideology by the 'new spirit of capitalism', see also the decisive analyses of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello ( The New Spirit of Capitalism, London: Verso, 2005 ) . [b] We should note that this text also contains one o f the first examples of the contemporary use of the concept of 'fascism' to refer to the new socialist strategies of a break with the laws of the global Market. If Deleuze and Guattari did not use the term 'populism' (as is done by any left intellectual today), it is simply because at that time the word still belonged to the vocabulary of revolution. ( Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre's La Cause du Peuple, named in homage to George Sand's populist review of that name. )

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The liberal wager, as we saw, has a biblical simplicity. It rests on the conviction that it is possible at any time to spirit away the war of all against all, and give birth to a free, peaceful and prosperous society, even on the hypothesis that indi­ viduals act only as a function of their self-interest. All that is required is to channel the energy of 'private vices' to the benefit of the community, by delegating the harmonizing of individual behaviour to the neutral and impersonal mecha­ nisms of Law and Market. This solution implies, in exchange, that moral values - from which the various civilizations of the past have drawn part of their raison d'etre - are from now on expelled from the public space. As anyone can see, the majority of liberals of our day are perfectly at ease with this constitutive exclusion. Generally persuaded, along the lines of Lysander Spooner, of 'the impossibility of any one's - except each individual for himself - drawing any accurate line, or anything like any accurate line, between virtue and vice', [A] they have rather seen this foundational sacrifice as the ideal occasion to finally break with the 'books of the old moral philosophers' . 1 From this point of view (and if we except the economists in the strict sense, whose main activity 1 'For there is no such fi,zis ultimus, ultimate a im, nor summum bonum, greatest good, as is spoken of in the books o f the old moral philosop hers' (Hobbes, Leviatha,t, Book 1, ch. 1 1 ).

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consists precisely in mathematizing the egoistic hypothesis), Ayn Rand is probably the twentieth-century writer who best assumed the ultimate moral implications of the liberal para­ digm. 'A coherent capitalist ethics', she writes, 'proudly upholds and supports rational egoism. ' [B] The undaunted good conscience with which the princes of the modern economy exploit and dismiss their casual workers, rake in surrealistic profits, move their factories abroad, do business with dictatorships, ravage the environment, falsify their accounts, and - when their time is up - depart with their golden handshakes, surely finds its most valuable psycho­ logical support in this 'rational egoism'. It may appear unj ust, however, to reduce the moral phi­ losophy of liberalism to this glacial apology for individual egoism (even if its main intellectual preconditions are already to be found in Bentham's utilitarianism ) . 2 Was it not the initial concern of liberals to banish from political life, above all, any reference to a common conception of morality and the good life ? [C) In itself, a position of this kind only requires the privatization of moral, religious or philosophical values, not their abolition. In theory, everyone thus remains free ( as we have seen in the example of Bastiat) to prefer for their

2 Adam Smith's liberalism, for its part, is still hard to reduce entirely to the radical theories of rational egoism. Formed in the Hutcheson school, Smith made the effort, to the end of his life, to maintain a place for 'sympathy' in the fo rmation of social b onds and indi­ vidual morality. This is the well-known origin o f what German commentators have called the 'Adam Smith problem', i.e. the ques­ tion of the articulation between his Theory of Moral Se1Ztimetzts ( 1 75 9 ) and his l1tquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ( 1 776 ) . It should be noted, however, that this necessar­ ily unstable balance between the paradigm of egoism and that o f sympathy always ends by coming down on the side of the former. This is at least the thesis that Serge Laro uche argues in a very con­ vincing (to my mind, decisive ) fashion in L'ltzventiotz de l'economie (Paris: Albin M ichel, 2005 ), pp. 1 9 1-223 .

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own account a generous to an egoistic behaviour, in so far as this kind of distinction makes sense to their eyes. It has to be asked, however, to what extent this solution is genuinely coherent. From a liberal point of view, in fact, an altruistic individual, concerned for the common good, represents an exception to human nature. 3 A private choice of this kind, supposing that it is not simply a mask for self-interest or amour-propre, is thus already condemned to remain the privi­ lege (and a rather mysterious one) of a limited elite. But above all, it would be a choice lacking in consistency. If the pursuit by each person of their well-understood self-interest is the best way of serving the community to which they belong (which has been since Adam Smith the central credo of lib­ eralism), a liberal concerned for the common good should in all logic force himself to act as an egoist in order to give his moral convictions a real content. Liberals with a human face are thus condemned, at all events, to get back in line. 4

3 Translated into the terms of liberal economic analysis, one could say, a fter Kenneth Arrow, that ' altruistic motivation' is a 'scarce reso urce'. 4 Hence the seemingly insoluble p sychological contradictions of all those who, a long the lines of Constant or Tocqueville, resign them­ selves to the triumph o f commercial society while remaining deeply alien to its spirit. In the case of Benjamin Constant, literature wa s the privileged means for assuming these contrad ictions. A far more simple solution, of co urse, is to adopt the schizo phrenic posture o f the partisans of the traditio nal right who, in the words of the American critic Russell Jacoby, 'worship the market while bad­ mouthing the culture it generates' (and whose precise ideological pendant is this contemporary left who combat the logic o f the Market - tho ugh increasingly less so , it is true - only to prostrate themselves enthusiastically before the culture that it generates). We have all been fam iliar for decades with the political effects of this rigged alternative, and the interest there is from the standpo int o f the capitalist system in presenting i t as 'insuperable' and necessary to the 'cla rity of democratic debate'.

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These internal difficulties, however, are not the most dis­ turbing ones. The ideal of 'axiological neutrality' that philo­ sophically sustains the constructions of liberalism raises far more fundamental problems. If liberals, in fact, resign them­ selves so calmly to the idea of a definitive elimination of traditional values (liberalism always presenting itself as a war machine against various 'conservatives'), this is to the extent that they are persuaded that the balancing mechanisms of Market and modem Law are sufficient in themselves to gen­ erate all the cultural dispositions that are indispensable to the integration of individuals into the community. This inner conviction is based on two ideological postulates that are not always made clearly explicit (except, of course, in the work of the economists). It presupposes, on the one hand, that the necessary and sufficient condition to establish an efficacious human order lies in the aptitude of individuals to enter into the logics of Market and Law; in other words, essentially to conduct business and respect contracts. It presupposes, further, that this salutary aptitude is necessarily 'natural', since it seemingly demands no more than the faculty (itself taken as natural) to act according to well-understood inter­ est. Yet this axiomatic of interest, forged in the specific conditions of seventeenth-century Europe, is in no way self­ evident. It is astonishing even in its psychological naivety (and still more so, its ethnocentrism), if examined in the light of the fundamental findings of modern anthropology. The Market, Law and the State itself are necessarily in fact secondary forms of socialization. Not only in the sense that they appeared relatively late in the history of humanity. But above all, and in a deeper sense, because they can only operate and reproduce themselves on the basis of anthropological con­ ditions that are already given, being by themselves structurally incapable of offering the least modern equivalent. The practi­ cal possibility of establishing economic exchanges and legal contracts ( the two great modalities of the logic of 'give and take') thus already supposes, among individuals who decide to privilege these particular relationships, a certain degree of preliminary trust, and as a consequence, the minimal

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existence, in the parties in question, of psychological and cul­ tural dispositions to fidelity. Now, as amply confirmed by the vast literature on the 'prisoner's dilemma' [D] (and in actual fact, as we know, since Hobbes) , no rational calculation, in other words no calculation anchored solely in the logic of interest, can ever permit supposedly egoistic individuals to enter spontaneously the charmed circle of trust and thus agree on the solution that would be best for them (the famous 'win­ win' exchange) . As the economist Ian 0. Williamson therefore recognized, 'trust based on calculation is a contradiction in terms'. 5 Trust - which plays a key role in the life of traditional communities, as can be observed for example in the practice of oaths or the importance placed on giving one's word - actually finds its genuine conditions of psychological and cultural pos­ sibility in the infinitely complex and varied interactions of primary sociality ( in Alain Caille's expression), interactions that are based essentially, as everyone knows, on the threefold traditional 'obligation' (which is neither economic nor legal) to give, receive and assist. This logic of the gift, which Mauss was the first to establish at the heart of the sociological approach, is doubtless susceptible of a number of different interpretations (in some cases, mutually contradictory).6 But

5 Cited by Andre Orlean, 'Sur le role respectif de Ia confiance et de !' interet dans Ia constitution de l'ordre marchand', Revue du MA USS, 1 9 94. 6 The common kernel of all th ese interpretations is the idea that there can only be a gift where the return is never a legal or economic o bligation . The freedom to return or not (whatever its modalities and motivations) is thus at the heart of the cycle, which makes the structure inconceiva ble in purely deterministic terms . We may add that the 'spirit' in which something is given m ust also be taken into acco unt (wh ich forbids, for example, any mechanistic approach to the question), and that the gift can even exist in antagonistic forms ( from vendetta to potlatch, by way of prestige giving and the 'poi­ soned present' ) . See on this point Godbout and Ca ille's critique of the theories of Alain Testart, ambiguous to say the least, in the Revue du MA USS, second semester, 2002.

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in all cases it implies the primacy of the cycle or the relation­ ship over the individuals themselves (whether this primacy is conscious or not), thus making it necessary to inscribe at the heart of the human subj ect itself this dimension of symbolic indebtedness that forms one of the essential foundations of its constitutional incompleteness. [E] This cycle of the gift, which in a certain sense defines 'the founding moment of society', should of course not be con­ fused with an expression of morality in the strict sense of the term. But in a certain fashion, as jacques T. Godbout remarks, we should see it as 'the foundation of morality' .7 What George Orwell called 'common decency'8 thus only finds its true philosophical coherence when placed under this particu­ lar anthropological light. The many concrete examples he presents show very well, in fact, how this politically crucial notion never depends on any metaphysic (or theology) of

7 Ce qui circule entre 1ZOus (Paris: Seuil, 2007 ), p. 230. One o f the great merits of all the work of Jacques T. Godbout is that he always bases his critique of liberal egoism on precise investigations and experiments. Summing up the co untless experiments made on the subject of the prisoner's dilemma , Godbout thus notes that they massively contra dict the l iberal ideological postulate of Robert Axelrod, 'who sees generosity as very rare and almost always inducing exploitation. We perhaps to uch here on the true contra­ diction in this approach: starting from the assumptio n of egoistic interest in the name of realism, these experiments show how, in real ity, this postu late gives a poor acco unt of the behaviour o f social actors' (p. 270 ). Godbout's method i s also that of Joseph Heinrich, wh ose team had the good idea of subjecting a dozen or more h unter-gatherer societies to a series of tests comparable to the prisoner's dilemma . Their conclusion was clear: 'The axiom o f egoism i s not displayed b y a n y of the societies studied' (cited b y Godbo ut, Ce qui circule entre nous, p. 2 7 1 ) . 8 A n excellent summary o f this question can b e found i n Bruce Bego ut, 'Vie ordinaire et vie politique. George O rwell et Ia common decency', in the collective work L'O rdinaire et le politique (Paris: PUF, 2006 ), pp. 9 9-1 1 9 .

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Good; in other words, on one particular moral ideology among others. Orwell's permanent concern, using this delib­ erately vague and imprecise concept, is, on the contrary, to anchor the fundamentals of socialist practice in basic human virtues, the forgetting, rejecting or despising of which is always the distinctive sign of ideologists and men of power. These virtues, or psychological and cultural dispositions to generosity and fidelity (which basically sum up our personal capacity to give, receive, and assist) / naturally admit an unlimited number of particular translations, and vary accord­ ing to differences of civilization and historic context. But it is precisely this permanent translatability that is the ultimate foundation of their universalizable character, in opposition to simple ideologies of Good that can only extend their sin­ gular realm (let alone globalize it) in the privileged mode of crusade and conversion. Conversely, the negation of these elementary virtues is always expressed in an identical form: that of egoism and the calculating spirit, the historically unchanging conditions of the will to power, and all the betrayals that inexorably accompany this. [F]

9 What d ifferentiates moral behavio ur, in the strict sense, from traditional conduct founded on the sense o f honour or custom, is the internalization of the o bligations to give, receive, and assist - in other words, the acquisition of the cap acity to act ' in one's soul and conscience', and n ot j ust as a function of the regard of others and social reputation. In this sen se, the ethical disposition presup­ poses a certain degree o f historical development of the process of individu al ization and the 'care of self'. This individ ual reappro­ priation o f the spirit of the gift (which constitutes the essence of morality, in the present-d ay sense of the term ) fo unds in the a uton­ omous subject possibilities of resistance and revolt that are undoubt­ edly m uch greater than th ose available to individ uals in trad itional societies . Hence the l iberal necessity o f perma nently deconstructing all figures of the subject, in order to neutralize the effects of this 'moral con science' that is still a possible resource for the unwilling victims of modernity.

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It is not difficult, then, to foresee the kind of civilizational impasse into which any programme of complete moderniza­ tion of life will necessarily drive future humanity. By general­ izing to the totality of human behaviour the logic of 'give and take' (which to avoid the worst must always choose the lesser evil), this programme in fact can only invite the methodical dismantling of all those anthropological condi­ tions that, within certain very precise limits, permitted the mechanisms of Market and modern Law to function (at least partially) according to the expectations of liberal theory. It is this fact, moreover, that explains how the capitalist system has been able to function, until a relatively recent date, with a certain effectiveness, showing itself still capable, for example, of producing quality goods, sometimes even ones really useful for the human race. This is simply a function of the fact that, as Castoriadis writes: [I] t had inherited a series of anthropological types that it had not created and co uld not have created itself: incorruptible judges, ho nest and Weberia n officials, educators devoted to their calling, workers with a minimum of professional con­ scientiousness, etc. These types do not and cannot arise o f themselves, they were created i n former historical perio ds, with reference to val ues then held sacred and uncha llengeable : honesty, service t o the state, the tran smission o f knowledge, fine workmanship, etc. Now we live in societies in which these values, as is p ublicly known, have become derisory, in which all that counts is the amo unt of money you have pocketed, no matter how, or the num ber of times you have appeared on television . The only anthropological type created by capi­ ta lism, and which was initially indispensable for its establish ­ ment, was the Sch umpeterian entrepreneur: an ind ividual passionate to create that historica lly new institution, the b usi­ ness enterprise, and constantly expand it by the introduction of new technical complexes and new methods of market penetration . Now even this type has been destroyed by present-day development; as far as prod uction is concerned, the entrep reneur is replaced by a managerial burea ucracy; as far as money is concerned, speculation on the stock exchange, ta ke-overs, and financial arbitrage bring in far more than

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The Real m of Lesser Evil 'entrepreneurial' activity. At the same time therefore as we see the growing decay o f the public space, due to privatiza­ tion, we have the destruction of those anthropological types that conditioned the very existence of the system. 10

By continually exhorting people to become 'rational agents', whose every existential choice must find its model in the axi­ omatics of interest and strategic calculation [G] (since that is indeed, at the end of the day, the final meaning of all those incessant appeals for 'necessary adaptation to the develop­ ments of the modern world'), liberal logic does not just end up gradually destroying the conditions of all civility and all common decency. [H] It paradoxically leads to endangering the effective operation of its own underlying constructions, thus risking the reintroduction at all levels of social existence of that war of all against all (under the double form, initially, of economic and legal war) which it was in theory its initial raison d'etre to definitively leave behind. To the extent, however, that a society lacking any norma­ tive foundation remains - until proved otherwise - an anthro­ pological impossibility, the old 'god-making machine' is necessarily destined to get moving again. For there exists only one means compatible with liberal logic to re-establish a minimum in the way of common references, without under­ mining the axiological neutrality of Market and Law, or their leading role. This is the investment of these mechanisms themselves by the human demand for meaning and normative constructions. It is inevitable, therefore, in a developed liberal society, that Growth (the other name for global warming) should end up acceding to the status of the modern categor­ ical imperative ('Act always in such a manner that you can consume ever more with no limit, while working ever more'). At the same time, in a parallel fashion, the icy mechanisms of abstract Law necessarily tend to become the privileged basis of support of a new and particularly stifling moralism 1 0 Cornelius Castoriadis, La M01ztee de l'itzsignificance ( Paris: Seuil, 1 9 9 6 ), p . 6 8 .

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- that of the 'politically correct' individual or 'citizen' - in which the always singular figure of the Other is fated to give way to that of the 'man without qualities', a derisory meta­ physical residue of the struggle 'against all discriminations'. Can this double mystique, inexorably conjured up by the cold liberal mechanism, provide the soul supplement that is lacking, by definition, in a system whose negative ambition, since its very origin, has been simply the search for the lesser evil? There is every reason to doubt this. The conversion of Market and Law into cult obj ects can only generate theo­ logical commandments of a weak cultural interest ('Rival each other in consumption ! Worship in good conscience ! ' ) . This is all too evidently far too limited a n 'anthropological' basis to be able to entirely supplant the creative dialectics of primary sociality and the norms of humanity that are rooted in them. All the efforts made to maintain the repression of the latter can thus only have, in the long run, a single con­ sequence: the return of the anthropological repressed in the form of the permanent psychological suffering of individuals, a suffering destined to increase at the same pace as capitalist gl obalization. This specifically liberal figure of civilization's discontents should not be confused with the unprecedented new forms of social misery. But it surely constitutes, by its very scope, a new historical phenomenon, 1 1 from which the 1 1 On this po int we can refer to a nu mber o f works insp ired by psychoanalysis - for example, by Jean-Pierre Lebrun, Charles Melman and Dany-Robert D u four - which seek in various ways to discern the 'new psychic economy' engendered by the generalized liberal lifestyle. It is clear, in fact, that the repression of primary relatedness is bound to inscribe specific effects in the subject's unconscio us. We are fam iliar, for example, with the fact that people who, in the name of their precious difference, systematically refuse to bend to the lea st custom (i.e. any shared way of living) generally tend to develop, in return, a great many individual manias (these being simply private customs and ceremonies ), and a bove all, a great potential for hatred and (self-destructive ) anger. This is how, in La Perversiott ordhzaire. Vivre ettsemble satts autrui ( Paris:

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ruling classes and their pathetic 'celebrities' (modem ersatz for the courtiers of old ) are certainly the last who can hope to protect themselves - to judge by the human poverty of their lives. This is certainly the appropriate place to recall the socialist teaching of George Sand: there is no true happiness in egoism.

N otes [A] Lysander Spooner, Vices Are Not Crimes [ 1 8 75], section iv. According to Spooner, vices 'are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property', and crimes 'those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another'. A liberal society therefore should only punish the latter, and take no interest in the purely subj ective question of 'vices'. However, as the act of 'harming another' represents, as we

Denoel, 2007), Jean-Pierre Lebrun analyses in a striking fashion the case of Richard D urn, a n exemplary figure of this 'man without qualities' that liberal societies now manufacture on a large scale. A number of valua ble indications can also be found in Eva Illouz's essay Les Seutimeuts du capitalisme {Paris: Seuil, 2006 ), in which she sets out to describe the new emotional configuration ind uced by the genera lization of the liberal parad igm ; she examines, among other things, the new forms of relationship to others structurally imposed by the Internet. It wo uld be interesting in this perspective to study the way in which the repression of primary sociality { in which face-to-face relation ships predominate ) lea ds a growing number of individuals to search the compensatory possib ility of a 'second life' in a virtual universe, the price of this being the disap­ pearance of the real subject to the benefit of his or her avatar. On all these subjects, the major reference work rema ins, o f course, Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism.

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have seen, an extremely difficult criterion to handle (think, for example, of the right to strike in public services, where the viewpoints of the worker, the company and the user must all be taken into account), it is inevitable that the notion of 'crime' should end up, in Law, as applicable to any kind of proposition (whether in public or private) or any kind of behaviour whatsoever (to light a cigarette in the street, for example, or invite individuals to watch their dietary intake ) . [a] What Spooner clearly did not foresee is that a society freed of all moral 'prej udices' would by this token be con­ demned to see crimes everywhere. [a] In France, various pressure groups of obese people, for example, demand a halt to information campaigns on the need for a balanced diet, on the pretext that this deeply harms their image of themselves and their 'self-esteem'. On the other hand, activists of Veggie Pride denounce 'species-ism' (i.e. discrimination against animals, meat-eating amounting in their eyes to a particularly revolting and fascistic form of this), and demand that 'vegetophobia' be recognized as a crime in its own right.

[B] Ayn Rand ( 1 905-82 ) was a striking individual in every respect. Not only, to be sure, by the radicalism of her liberal views, [a] but also because this tireless Pasionaria of capital­ ism (still one of the most widely read authors in the United States) exercised a strange fascination over a section of the far-left, particularly by way of King Vidor's film adaptation of her bestseller, The Fountainhead. 12 This novel, published in 1 943 , manages to celebrate at the same time (and very

12 Ayn Rand herself wrote the script of this film, which is indeed

splendid in its way.

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coherently) both the virtues of capitalism and those of the rebel attitude. If we do not make the mistake (as most left intellectuals do) of identifying liberalism with a 'conservative' and 'patriarchal' ideology, it would be tempting to retain only the second element here. The French translation was published in instalments in Combat magazine, and had an important influence on Ivan Chtcheglov and his friends of the Letterist International, and thus indirectly on the initial positions of Guy Debord and the Situationist movement. 1 3 We should also note the important (and very revealing) phil­ osophical convergence points between the 'obj ectivist ethics' championed by Ayn Rand and the 'left Nietzscheanism' of Michel Onfray. [a] 'The proper method of judging when or whether one should help another person is by reference to one's own rational self-interest and one's own hierarchy of values: the time, money or effort one gives or the risk one takes should be proportionate to the value of the person in relation to one's own happiness. To illustrate this on the altruist's favourite example: the issue of saving a drowning person. If the person to be saved is a stranger, it is morally proper to save him only when the danger to one's own life is minimal; when the danger is great, it would be immoral to attempt it: only a lack of self-esteem could permit one to value one's life no higher than that of any random stranger. (And, con­ versely, if one is drowning, one cannot expect a stranger to risk his life for one's sake, remembering that one's life cannot be as valuable to him as his own . ) ' (Ayn Rand, The Objectiv­ ist Ethics, New York: Signet Books, 1 964, p. 45. ) Ayn Rand's philosophy would not enable us to understand the motiva­ tions of Jean Moulin; but at least we now know the bedside reading of Laurence Parisot.

1 3 0n Ivan Chtcheglov (Gilles lvain ) and the fascination that he long exercised over Guy Debord, see the book o n him by Jean-Marie Apostolides and Boris Donne, Ivan Chtcheglov, profit perdu ( Paris: Allia , 2006 ) .

1 00

Ego i s m and C o m m on D ecency

[C] The repulsion that liberals have for all 'norms laid down in common' (in Daniel Borillo's expression) goes well beyond norms of morality, philosophy or religion. [a] The simple requirement, for example, of a common orthography whose rules should be mastered by all is necessarily perceived by a 'liberal' educator as an arbitrary intervention by the State, incompatible with the spontaneous creative spirit of the pupils. [b] We can even go further. In the liberal perspective, the educational act itself becomes problematic. The preten­ sion to teach something to someone (apart from the laws of the Market, the rights of the individual, and strictly technical knowledge, the sole forms of the ideal of universality with an objective foundation) [c] is always suspect. It is easier in fact to see this as a disguised fashion of imposing on others what is simply a private opinion, and hence always decon­ structible. This is why the maj ority of liberal sociologists ( and in their wake, many parents in the FCPE) 1 4 have for a long time now agreed in presenting the School (or at least, what is left of it) as the privileged terrain of a 'symbolic violence' constantly practised on the child in the name of the 'elitist' pretension of certain adults to hold a knowledge, an experience or a culture whose transmission would be neces­ sary for their humanization. These remarks are evidently transposable, with still more reason, to education in the family itself. [d] [a] We know that the (very provisional) survival of collec­ tive customs and social rhythms represents, in the eyes of liberals, a grave danger to individual liberty. This is the case, for example, with the institution of Sunday rest. Marx already pointed this out in his chapter on the 'struggle for the normal working day' ( Capital, Vol. 1, chapter 1 0). 1 4 The FCPE, or Federation des Conseils de Parents d' E leves des Ecoles Publiques, traditionally close to the parties of the left, has for several decades been one o f the most active supporters of this process of the liberal transformation of the School.

1 01

The Real m of Lesser Evil

[b] On the political necessity of a correct mastery of the common language, it is useful to read the essay by Jacques Dewitte on the theories of George Orwell, Victor Klemperer, Aleksander Wat and Dolf Sternberger (Le Pouvoir de Ia

/an gage et Ia Liberte de I' esprit. Essai sur Ia resistance au langage totalitaire, Paris: Michalon, 2007). As for those who stubbornly claim that it is the complexity of orthography that today prevents its appropriation by children of the new popular classes (and who therefore dream of a 'newspeak' for the exclusive use of the poor, of which SMS language could probably form the basis), we can simply remark that it is far less difficult to understand the past participle than the rule of offside in football, a popular sport par excellence. The problem is thus necessarily elsewhere, the 'sciences' of education being well placed to hide it. [c] In a liberal state school (as long as education is not completely privatized ), the only subj ects that should gener­ ally be taught are those useful to homo economicus (i.e. the skills needed to integrate into the world of business and the Market), and those ideological reflexes indispensable to homo aequalis (i.e. the training of future consumers with a 'citizen' spirit) . The rest is just literature. [ d] In the liberal monadology, the family tie can only be conceived as a particular modality of contractual logic. 'The ultimate expression of this legal mobilization based on the contractual model is represented by the views of the libertar­ ian movement in the United States. This in fact strongly asserts the primacy of the rights of the individual, conceived as absolute and unchallengeable in the name of any holistic view of life based on a family in which the individual is only one element. The defence of the rights of the individual becomes the primary principle that it is up to the state to defend, even against the family' (Jacques Commaille, L'Esprit sociologique des lois, Paris: PUF, 1 9 94, p. 1 6 3 ) . This gives a better understanding of Christopher Lasch's profound remark that 'to envisage the modern world from the perspec­ tive of a parent amounts to doing so in the worst possible light'.

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Eg o i s m and C o m m on D ecency

[D] On the prisoner's dilemma, the key element in games theory (and thus in political economy), a detailed critique of the solution proposed by Robert Axelrod (which represents the most serious attempt from a liberal point of view to resolve the difficulties of the egoist axiomatic) is given in the latest book by Jacques T. Godbout, Ce qui circule entre nous, pp. 259-76 . We should emphasize that this dilemma, raised for the first time in 1 950 by Melvin Dresher and Merrill Flood, undoubtedly amounts to the best modelling of liberal logic. It makes it possible to establish, for example, that it is pre­ cisely in order to avoid the worst that egoist partners accept the 'sub-optimal' solution, i.e. that corresponding to a lesser evil when the wretched nature of humanity is taken into account. To obtain the optimal solution, all that is needed would be to reintroduce into the premises of the problem the possibility of a minimal degree of mutual trust and generos­ ity, but this is ruled out by the liberal hypothesis. 1 5

[E] 'The conceptions of the human being that occupy the philo­ sophical terrain in the European tradition do not locate the truth of self in a relationship, but either in the individual or in the transcendent order to which he or she is attached. ' 1 6 The ontological primacy o f the relationship over the

15 Axelrod, as a good liberal, wa s obliged to start from the idea that 'generosity is an invitation to be exploited'. O n all these questions, see the issue of the Revue du MA USS for the second semester of 1 9 94 (A qui se {ier? Confiance, interaction et theorie des ;eux) . 16 Fran�ois Flaha ult, 'B e yourself! ' Au-deliz de Ia co1zceptimz occi­ de1ztale de l'individu (Paris: M ille et Une Nuits, 200 6 ) , p. 1 04.

1 03

The Real m of Lesser Evil

individual subj ect (which suggests that the latter should be conceived no longer as a 'substance' but rather as a 'pole', whose identity, always complex, is above all 'narrative'), 1 7 remains in fact inconceivable so long as we keep within the essentially monadological framework of modern Western philosophy (what Marx called 'Robinsonades' ) . In this kind of problematic, the original indebtedness of the human subj ect (both biological, cultural, and psychological ) and the structural lack that is the complement of this, can in fact only be grasped in their 'morbid dimension', as the source of all 'diseases of guilt' and forms of dependence. 1 8 The nature of the problem changes, however, as soon as the origin of affects and values is considered on the basis of intersubj ectivity (the 'between ourselves' as Fran�ois Jullien calls it) , in other words, on the basis of those systems of relationships that precede (and make possible) any process of 'subjectivization'. The symbolic debt can then be understood, and experienced, in its positive dimension, which also permits the construction of genuinely human ties (such as love and friendship) - as has been very well shown by Jacques T. Godbout and Fran�ois Flahault. We may finally note that this primacy of the relationship over the individual is one of 'maj or assump­ tions of Chinese philosophy', 1 9 which makes it possible, for example, for it to conceive 'pity' (or sympathy) without

1 7 1 draw here on the ana lyses of Paul Ricoeur, developed in Temps et recit ( Paris: Se u il, 1 9 8 5 ) , as well as those of Judith B utler, Givitzg au Accoutzt of Yourself (New York: Fordham Un iversity Press, 2005 ). The common theme in these two stimulating works (which are each very different) is that the foundation of our ind ividual identity lies a bove all in our ab ility to construct an acco unt of our life (to tell ourselves or others) . This analysis is of co urse tra nsfer­ a ble to all forms of collective identity: man is ab ove all a being who tells ( herself) stories. 1 8 Nathalie Sarthou-La j us, L'E thique de Ia dette ( Paris: PUF, 1 9 9 7), p. 3 . 1 9 Fran�ois J ullien, Penser d'utt dehors (Ia Chitze} (Paris: Seuil, 2 000), p. 3 0 8 .

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Eg o i s m and C o m m on D ecency

falling into the difficulties characteristic of Rousseau or the­ orists of the 'moral sense' such as Shaftesbury or Hutcheson: 'Conceiving the process of things on the basis of a regime of interaction, which itself arises from a polarity (Heaven/Earth, Yin/Yang, etc.), the Chinese thus quite naturally conceive the reaction of insufferable - what we call "pity" - as simply a particular and flagrant case of this radical relationality between existences that we see life constantly weaving: a relationality from which I proceed, and which "plugs in" the living being that I am to all others. ' [a] In this 'relational' or 'intersubjective' way of seeing, the Other represents as much a positive horizon to my freedom as a negative limit on it, whereas the modern paradigm is only able by definition to integrate this latter dimension. [a] The difficulty in understanding the spirit of the gift does not lie only in the cultural obstacles that modern capitalism erects. An egoist psychology also opposes it. We know very well, in fact, that the drama of the egoist is that he can never conceive of himself as such. His pathetic inability to give, evident to the eyes of others, can only constitute in his own eyes a normal expression of human nature; leading him, in all good conscience, to see as naive (or hypocritical) the idea that there could really exist in the world generous behaviour and people different from himself. In this respect he is above all to be pitied.

[ F] 'Common decency' results from a continual work of human­ ity on itself in order to radicalize, internalize and universal­ ize these underlying human virtues expressed in the aptitudes to give, receive, and assist. 20 The first great developments of this work did not have to await modern times. Already in

20 1 refer here to the article by Alain Caille, 'Y a -t-il des valeurs naturelles?', in issue 1 9 of Revue du MA USS, 2002.

1 05

The Real m of Lesser Evil

ancient Egypt there existed, according to Jan Assmann, a very developed popular idea of j ustice, clearly anchored in cultural and psychological dispositions that had been pre­ pared by practices of gift. As Assmann puts it, we should distinguish between 'j ustice from above' and 'j ustice from below'. Justice from above is an organ of the State, estab­ lished to protect those who govern from rebellion, those who possess from robbery, and the established order from troubles of any kind. The Egyptian Maat, for its part, was a j ustice from below, a liberating justice that came to the aid of the poor and weak, those deprived and lacking rights, the widows and orphans. 'This j ustice was not established from above, but claimed from below. ' 2 1 Assmann goes still further. According to him, it is a mistake to believe, as did Nietzsche, that the origins of this popular idea of justice lie in monotheism, as justice had long been established in the world; without it, men would h ave been una ble to live together. In the Egyptian world, however, its origin lay with men and not with the gods. Men th irsted for right, while the gods thirsted for sac­ rifices . Justice was originally someth ing more pro fane and sec ular. Religion and ethics have different roots, and in the early rel igions they constitute two separate spheres, though communicating with o ne another in more than one man ner. It wa s only with monotheism that they came together into an indissoluble unity. 22

It is easy to understand from this starting-point how the most elaborate and universalist forms of morality could never be constructed in a complete break from this moral tradition. On the contrary, they only acquire their full sense to the extent that they seek to maintain the emancipating inspira­ tion of this 'justice from below', and draw from it the 2 1 Jan Assmann, Le Prix de monotheisme ( Paris: Au bier, 2007), p . 82. 22 lbid. , p. 84.

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Egois m and C o m m on D ecency

resources they need to be put into practice. [a] Cut off from this indispensable root, on the other hand, they are inevitably led to operate in a purely abstract fashion, in other words simply as moral ideologies, which can easily be turned round against the basic human virtues, while continuing to offer their many devotees this steely good conscience that has become one of the decisive marks of our time. It is easier to explain in these conditions the origin of the liberals' philo­ sophical error. To satisfy the dogmas of their utilitarian anthropology, and to spirit away the spectre of the wars of religion, liberalism was in fact structurally constrained to deny the existence of this common historical fund of univer­ salizable virtues, which for millennia had proved capable of inviting men to give the best of themselves. [b] In such condi­ tions, the concept of 'morality' could now have only a single meaning: that of an ideology of Good, in the name of which - we can grant liberals - all possible crimes can be righteously justified. [c] If all that is understood by the term 'Good' is this emi­ nently oppressive ideological construction, we can recognize without difficulty a genuine value in the liberal principle of the 'primacy of j ustice over goodness' - this being after all the sense of Orwell's battle against totalitarianism. But if what is envisaged under this term is the set of possible refer­ ences for the idea of decency and moral virtue (the idea, for example, that generosity and honesty are worth infinitely more than egoism and the calculating spirit), then it is indis­ pensable to reassert the socialist primacy of decency over j ustice, in other words the primacy of 'j ustice from below' (the matrix of all 'common decency') over this ideal of 'onto­ logical neutrality' which constitutes, at the end of the day, the ideal ideological cover for all 'justice from above'. [a] This dialectic of the universal and the particular partly corresponds to what Hegel sought to conceive under the concept of Sittlichkeit (or 'concrete morality'), in opposition to the abstract morality of the 'beautiful soul'. We may remember here the neat formula of the American philosopher Josiah Royce ( 1 855-1 9 1 6), who expressed the preliminary

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The Real m of Lesser Evil

condition for any theory of the concrete universal: 'Only those who have customs can understand the customs of others.' [b] The ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, for example, contains the following precepts: 'Do not denounce anyone to their superior, do not cause suffering, do not let people die of hunger, do not cause another's tears, do not torture animals, do not increase at the start of each day the amount of work demanded, do not swear or quarrel, do not wink, do not be angry or violent, do not get worked up or be deaf to the words of truth' (Jan Assmann, Le Prix de monothe­ isme, p. 9 1 ) . Apart perhaps from the question of winking, there is not much in this list that a decent spirit could disagree with today. [c] From this point of view, Trotsky's pamphlet Their Morals and Ours (written in 1 93 8 ) is one of the most terrible illustrations of contempt for ordinary people and their common decency - dispensed, in all good conscience, in the name of an ideology of the Good, but deaf to any talk of goodness (to take up Zygmunt Bauman's distinction between the effective practice of goodness and the ideological cult of the Good ) . Here we undoubtedly have one of the maj or cul­ tural sources of the pathetic inability of the French far-left to understand the moral demands of the popular classes (and, in particular, their traditional refusal to idealize criminality and transgressive behaviour) , ready to offer these on a platter to the cunning old foxes of the liberal right.

[G] Among the thousands of pages that contemporary liberal literature has devoted to the problem of rationalization of individual choices, I shall simply cite one text here, by Bertrand Lemennicier, which is particularly emblematic. The analyses of this liberal ideologist, in fact, so visibly aroused the enthusiasm of Luc Ferry (who undoubtedly saw in them his own real ideas about the family) that when he was

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Eg o i s m and C o m m on D ecency

minister of education he insisted on entrusting Lemennicier, together with other fellow-thinkers of his (such as Pascal Salin and Gerard Bramoulle ) with the effective direction of the agregation jury in economics, with a view to the ideal preparation of future generations for the rational new life that awaits them. Lemennicier wrote the following: Let us envisage the situation of an individual who hesitates between two women: one very educated, the other n ot. To enjoy the favours of the ed ucated woman, he has to redistrib ­ ute a sufficient share of the earnings of the couple to convince her to marry him , assuring her of a standard of living at least equal to that which she wo uld have if she rema ined single . With the less educated woman, on the other hand, the share he has to sacrifice will be very small. The opportunity cost o f a marriage t h u s depends on the salary that the woman can demand on the labour market. But it does not j ust depend on th is. The uneducated woman may be more pretty, sen suous and a ffectionate, or there is a h igher likelihood that she is so. Let us suppose however a n identity o f attrib utes apart from the level of education. The opportu nity cost of an educated woman is mea sured by her salary. This is higher than with the other woman, as he will have to pay more to obtain the same services. Certain services, such as the quality of children, are not independent of the level of education of the wife, and this qualifies the behaviour of a man who is desirous of quality domestic production. Aside from th is restriction, men should marry less educated women, or in any case, women less ed ucated than themselves.U

I spare the reader the translation of these new liberal adven­ tures of Romeo and Juliet into mathematical equations.

[H] One of the principles of the logic of gift is that the return, if there is one, must always be deferred (monetary payment

23 Le Marche du mariage et de Ia famille (Paris : PUF, 1 9 8 8 ), ch . 4: 'Le prix de Ia femme dans nos societes contemporaines' .

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The Real m of Lesser Evil

being precisely the economic invention that makes it possible to interrupt the gih cycle, by settling debts without delay) . Time thus appears as the first element in which genuine human relationships can be constructed. (And money, from this point of view, can be defined as a means of buying time that dispenses us from entering into a relationship with others.) Once the perpetual mobility of individuals becomes the first anthropological imperative of a society (what Bauman calls 'liquid life'), it is thus the very possibility of forming solid and lasting ties that disappears; in the same way, as Richard Sennett has ohen emphasized, as that of constructing coherent 'life accounts' (capable accordingly of offering indi­ viduals a satisfactory psychological foundation ) . We may finally note that Engels was one of the first to point out the human effects of this Brownian motion generated by the logic of liberalism, as far back as 1 845 : O ne realizes for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their h uman nature, to bring to pass all the marvels o f civilization which crowd their city; that a hundred p owers wh ich slu mbered with in them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully and multiply through union with those of others. The very turmoil of the streets has something rep ulsive, something against which h uman n ature re bels. The hundreds and thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same inter­ est in being happy? And have they n ot, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had noth ing in common, n othing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to h is own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no m a n to honour another with so m uch as a gla nce . The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private in terest, becomes the more repellent and offen ­ sive, t h e more these ind ividuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that

1 10

Ego i s m and C o m m on D ecency this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking, is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced , so self-conscio us as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme. Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared. Just as in Stirner's recent book, people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker underfo ot, and that the powerfu l few, the capital ists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains. 24

24 F. Engels, The Condition of the Work i1Zg-C/ass in England, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol . 4 (London: Lawrence and Wisha rt, 1 975 ), p. 3 2 9 .

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6 The Unconscious of Modern Societies

In a letter to Humphrey House of 1 1 April 1 940, George Orwell summed up his position on socialism in the following words: [T]he English intelligentsia [ . . . ] have become infected with the inherently mechanistic Marxist notion that if you make the necessary technical advance the moral advance will follow of itself. I have never accepted this. [ ... ] A year ago I was in the Atlas mountains, and looking at the Berber villagers there, it struck me that we were, perhaps, 1 ,000 years ahead of these people, but no better than they, perhaps on balance rather worse. We are physically inferior to them, for instance, and manifestly less happy. All we have done is advance to a point at which we could make a real improvement in human life, but we shan't do it without the recognition that common decency is necessary. My chief hope for the future is that the common people have never parted company with their moral code. 1

1 George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 1 : An Age Like This, 1 920-1 940 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1 970 ), p. 5 8 3 .

112

The Unconscious of Modern Societies The 'conservative' dimension of Orwell's socialism is imme­ diately dear here.2 Its essential principle is less the nostalgia for a vanished world than a determined opposition to the moral pessimism of the Moderns. It is this constant refusal to drown the 'common people' in the icy waters of egoistic calculation that enabled Orwell to criticize simultaneously both liberalism and totalitarianism. It has not been suffi­ ciently indicated, from this perspective, that these rival ide­ ologies both base themselves on the same negative view of man, forged as we have seen in the conditions of seventeenth­ century Europe. It is only by reference to this common starting-point that it is philosophically possible to grasp their actual differences. From the moment it is postulated that people are moved only by 'love of themselves and unconcern for others' ,3 there can only in fact be two coherent solutions to the modern political problem. Either one decides to accept men 'as they are', and must then resign oneself to playing to their egoism to construct the realm of lesser evil. Or else one maintains the project of a realm of good (in other words, the utopia of the perfect world), but its triumphant advent is

2 As is well known, Orwell sometimes presented himself as a 'Tory anarchist' in order to provoke the bashful left intelligentsia. The same attitude can be found in Paul Goodman, an important figure in the American anarchist movement, and one of the founders of the homosexual rights movement, when he defined himself as a 'neolithic conservative' . He also wrote: 'As a conservative anar­ chist, I believe that to seek for Power is otiose [ . . . ]; I am eager to sign off as soon as conditions are tolerable, so people can go back to the things that matter, their professions, sports, and friendships. Naturally, politics should not be for me': New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (New York: Vintage Books, 1 971 ), p. 202. Orwell would have subscribed to these lines without the least hesitation. 3 'We are not angered against men by seeing their hardness, ingratitude, inj ustice, pride, love of themselves and unconcern for others: they are made that way, it is their nature' (La Bruyere,

Les Caracteres, "De l'homme").

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necessarily subordinated to the fabrication of a new man. If the Orwellian idea of a decent society largely escapes these contradictions, it is because it is rooted, on the contrary, in a far more nuanced and clearly more realistic understanding of people. The work of self-institution [A] required by such a society implies, in fact, continuous support from moral possibilities that already exist, [B] possibilities that the first task is to radicalize, internalize and universalize, rather than eliminate in the name of a 'progressive' battle against all figures of tradition, held to be equally repressive. It is only on this 'conservative ' condition that the different inventions of the human mind (above all, the conquests of science and technology) can receive a human meaning, and possibly con­ tribute, within appropriate limits, to the real appropriation of collective existence. But this Orwellian definition of socialism also invites us to spell out the 'anarchist' dimension. Orwell in fact always considered the desire for power (i.e. the sentiment that an individual can only realize his essence through the hold he exerts over others) as the main psychological obstacle to the development of a decent society, and the ultimate source of all political perversions authorized by ideology.4 This key point deserves to be explained, as it enables us to shed light on certain fundamental aspects of the unconscious of modern societies. As we know, Stendhal held the work of Fourier in high esteem, describing him as a 'sublime dreamer who pronounced

4 'The growth of "realism " has been the great feature of the intel­ lectual history of our own age. Why th is should be so is a compli­ cated questio n . The interconnection between sadism, masochism, s uccess worship, power worship, nationalism and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate' (George Orwell, The Collected Essays, ]oumalism a1td Letters, Vol. 3: As I Please, 1943-1945, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1 970), p. 284.

1 14

The Unconscious of Modern Societies the great word: Association'. In his Memoirs of a Tourist, however, he attacks the idea of the phalanstery, a fundamen­ tal objection to it, according to him, being that is of such a nature as to compromise any attempts at 'association ' pro­ posed by the various nascent socialist currents of the time. Fourier - he writes - 'did not see how in every village, a lively rogue good with words (a Robert Macaire) would put himself at the head of the association and pervert all its fine results'. 5 This kind of critique, contrary to appearances, is very differ­ ent from that of the liberals. Stendhal did not maintain (at least not in this text ) that it was the very nature of men to make the project of a supportive and fraternal society impos­ sible. He simply points out that the socialists, doubtless out of an excess of optimism, systematically forgot that the will to power characteristic of certain individuals would always lead to the failure of the best-intentioned political undertak­ ings. If by anarchism we understand the project for a world in which it would be, if not inherently impossible, then at least a practical impossibility for 'Robert Macaires' to seize power and pursue their own ends, it would be quite accurate to say that the question Stendhal raises here is the anarchist question par excellence. It is true that the notion of 'desire for power' (or 'will to power' ) generally raises only a limited enthusiasm among modern critics of the liberal society. Those who have put forward a purely sociological approach to the facts (and they are in the maj ority) have generally tended to deny any value to this kind of explanation, which they are happy to relegate

Robert Macaire is the hero of I:Auberge des adrets, a successful play written in 1 8 23 by Benjamin Antier, in which the central character was played by one of the greatest actors of the day, Frederick Lemaitre. Popularized by Daumier's caricatures, the char­ acter of Robert Macaire symbolized throughout the nineteenth century the figure of the crooked and unscrupulous wheeler-dealer, the perfect embodiment - in the words of James Rousseau - 'of our positive, egoistic, miserly, lying and boastful age'. 5

115

The Realm of Lesser Evil to the basement of 'psychologism'.6 No doubt this criticism has an element of truth. We can agree without too much dif­ ficulty that the desire for power is always articulated to spe­ cific social and historical conditions. On this basis, it is tempting to consider it simply as a secondary psychological effect of the class relations and various institutional forms that protect the domination of man by man. Yet it is impos­ sible to dissolve the idea of the will to power entirely into these relations and forms. On the one hand, in fact, the ques­ tion of power (of the hold exercised over others ) runs through the whole field of human relationships, including those of everyday life and private connections. On the other hand, as Pierre Clastres has amply established/ the need to impose on one's fellows the laws of one's own ego (by treating them as

6 As Christopher Lasch writes, 'The left has too often served as a refuge from the terrors of the inner life. Another ex-radical, Paul Zweig, has said that he became a communist in the late fifties because communism "released him . . . from the failed rooms and broken vases of a merely private life. " As long as pol itical move­ ments exercise a fatal attraction for those who seek to drown the sense of personal failure in collective action - as if collective action somehow precluded rigorous attention to the quality of personal life - political movements will have little to say about the personal dimension of social crisis': The Culture of Narcissism (London: Sphere, 1 980), p. 1 5. This analysis certainly provides a good part of the real reasons for the need to seek at all costs a purely sociological explanation for the totality of human behaviour ( whether it is a question of criminality, relation to school or one's personal life). 7 Pierre Clastres has made a long study, especially with the example of the Indians of South America, of the political strategies used by 'primitive' societies to prevent the conversion into coercive power of the desire for prestige that from time to time inspires certain members of the tribe. It is generally enough for the latter to be transformed into symbolic chiefs with an unlimited obligation of generosity towards their community. 'In exchange for his generos­ ity, what does the " big man" obtain? Not the realization of his

116

The Unconsci o u s of M odern Soci eties

no more than means or mi"ors) can arise at any moment, even in the most egalitarian societies (and everyone knows with the exception, perhaps, of its activists themselves - that the world of parties, unions and associations is no better pro­ tected than any other, and perhaps less so, against power struggles and conflicts of ego). 8 It is better, then, on this point, to recognize the anarchists' fundamental philosophical lucid­ ity, and agree to reintroduce into the field of politics certain determining effects of the individual history of subj ects and their relationship to the unconscious.

desire for power, b ut the fragile satisfaction of his point of hono ur; not the ability to command, but the innocent enjoyment of a glory that he exhausts himself in cultivating. He works, in the true sense, for glory: society happily concedes this to him, occupied as it is in savo uring the fruits of its leader's efforts. Every flatterer lives at the expense of the o ne who listens to him ' : R echerches d'anthropologie politique ( Paris: Seuil, 1 9 9 0 ) p. 1 3 9 . On this fi ne lesso n in anar­ chism, see also Clastres' Society Against the State (Oxford: Blackwell, 1 977), as well as the collective volume devoted to Clastres' work (edited by M iguel Abensour), L'Esprit des lois sauvages ( Paris: Seuil, 1 9 87 ) . 8 This i s a point that Claude Alzon made very well back in 1 9 74, in analysing with his customary acidity the then flo urishing phe­ nomenon of comm unes. ' I know a good few of these l ittle bastards who swear by Marcuse and Deleuze without ever having read them. Experts in gu ilt-tripp ing the weakest, they are una ble to utter three words without brandishing the spectre of repression, a convenient argument that ena bles them, claim ing an encroachment on their freedom, to squeeze everyone around them like lemons. Not to spea k of a sexua l explo itatio n whose victims are the girls in the commune, and the criticisms they shower over other people, who supposedly are the only ones responsible for defeats that they are the first to provoke': La Mort de Pygmalion ( Paris: M aspero, 1 9 64), p . 1 5 4 . Thirty years later, we can all trace the path taken by these 'little bastards', many of whom have been a ble to find in the scintillating worlds of politics, b usiness or the media a far more rewarding satisfaction for their unchanged desire for power.

1 17

The Real m of Lesser Evil

The terms of the problem are simple enough to formulate. It involves jointly considering two seemingly contradictory facts. On the one hand, we know that nothing authorizes us to inscribe the desire for power (as a higher form of egoism and the negation of the other) in human nature itself, if we are not to fall back into the naive cynicism of the seventeenth­ century moralists. On the other hand, we have to accept that a desire of this kind does have a certain universality, since it can indeed be expressed in no matter what social and cultural context, including the most egalitarian (even if it is clear that some contexts are far more favourable to it than others) . In other words, if it is clear that the maj ority of human beings do not behave like Robert Macaire/ the fact remains, and this is where Stendhal was surely right, that where there are human beings, one must generally expect to meet Robert Macaires. I see only one way, both logical and empirically verifiable, to resolve this apparent contradiction. This is to distinguish philosophically between the egoism of the adult, which is always contingent, and that of the child, which seems on the contrary inevitable, not because it is 'natural', but rather, because it is initial. It is unnecessary to appeal here to the vast literature that psychoanalysis has devoted to this subject, particularly in its various approaches to narcissism. The slightest observation (if it is not blinded by the most possessive forms of parental love) sufficiently attests that the desire to be all-powerful is one of the first figures in the development of the individual mind.10 It ' As Hume wrote, 'It is, therefore, a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a kttave.' Hume's empiricism did however lead him right away to correct this libera l postulate: 'Though at the same time, it appears somewhat strange, that a maxim should be true in politics, which is false in fact' ('Of the Independency o f Parliament', 1 74 1 ). See on this point Didier Deleule, Hume e t Ia ttaissance du liberalisme economique ( Paris: Aubier, 1 9 7 9 ) . 1° Commenting on the work of Susan Isaacs, Levi-Stra uss observed that the initially possessive attitude of the child 'is felt not only for materia l objects, but also for immaterial rights, such as the hearing

1 18

The Unconsci o u s of M odern Societies

is this original desire, for example, that underlies what Christopher Lasch calls the 'boundless rage' that the child feels against those who fail to gratify its 'ravenous oral crav­ ings' .U If there is a sense to education, it is precisely that of offering the child the means to overcome this initial egocen­ trism and gradually acquire that sense of others that repre­ sents both the sign of and the condition for any genuine autonomy ( or, what amounts to the same thing, any psycho­ logical maturity). [C) It is only then that a human being becomes capable of holding his or her place in the human order, in other words of j oining in their turn the socializing chains of gift and reciprocity. And so if, for one reason or another, the inadequate performance of the 'paternal' and 'maternal' functions has not enabled the successful accom­ plishment of this work of autonomization (with all the neces­ sary renunciations that this implies by definition), such subj ects find themselves inexorably bound - unless released by subsequent emancipatory encounters - to the initial desire for omnipotence, and as a consequence, lacking the ability to 'grow up'. 1 2 They therefore remain egoistic monads, unable to

or singing o f a song. Furthermore, "taking turns" is one o f the hardest lessons for children under five years to learn' (Eleme1ztary Structures of Kimhip ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1 96 9 ), p . 8 5 . 1 1 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, p. 1 7 9 . 1 2 The idea lization of the child th at lies at the heart of modern liberal culture (this was not the case with Hobbes) is above all the sign of a fascinated admiration for its initial egocentrism . This is why the principle o f any liberal education is not to help the child grow up but to let it freely express its 'nature'. The most radica l critique of this illusion in fiction is undoubtedly William Golding's Lord of the Flies ( 1 95 4 ) . It is interesting to n ote how Peter Brooks, in h is remarkable film a daptation of 1 96 3 , saw fit to alter the final scene discreetly, with a view to suggesting that the initial egoism of the child was perhaps that of human nature itself. His le ft sensibility did not allow him to accept such a radical critique o f liberalism.

1 19

The Real m of Lesser Evil

give, receive or assist, except in a purely formal way (i.e. along the lines of those mere 'proprieties' that are indispensable to any social comedy, and whose acquisition requires only a training, and not an education in the strict sense of the term ) . I n this respect, the different pathologies o f the ego - from the will to power expressed as such, to such various derivative forms as, for example, the pathetic need to become 'rich' or 'famous' - must appear for what they are: the effect of an unresolved dependence on childhood situations, a depen­ dence that invariably leads to subjects seeing their own lives as the occasion for a personal revenge (a mutilating way of seeing, as it automatically transforms this life into a 'career' pathologically structured by the desire to succeed, or quite simply by the need to live perpetually in representation ) . 1 3 This is why the will to power always seems a sad passion. As Plato understood perfectly, there is no such thing as a happy tyrant, whatever the field or level at which the need to domi­ nate others is exercised. From an anarchist point of view, the ruling classes are to be pitied more than anything else. [D] The importance traditionally placed by anarchists on the problem of individual education ( in the family as well as at school), as well as their constant sensitivity to the moral and psychological dimensions of political activity, should in no way be surprising. And to the extent that the repression of these basic questions lies at the root of all the misadventures of the revolutionary movement, from the inevitable bureau­ cratization of its organizations through to its most predictable totalitarian propensities, anarchism appears less as one politi­ cal current among others, and more as a moral propaedeutic

1 3 The 'refusal to succeed' was one of the main slogans of the intel­ lectuals attracted to anarcho-syndicalism (such as Albert Thierry and Marcel Martinet) . Th is maxim followed logically from their natural attachment to common decency. Experience always con­ firms, in fact, that those who have devoted their whole 'life' to climbing the steps of a hierarchy (of any k in d ) have never done more than 'crawl vertically', as Georges Elgozy put it.

1 20

The Unconscious of Modern Societies for any possible revolution (of, if you like, a 'metapolitics' ) , at least if we understand by revolution, not the conquest of power by Robert Macaires who are always interchangeable, but rather the institution, by the classes that have up to now been dominated, of a free, egalitarian and decent society. 14 There is still one mystery that remains to be clarified. Since the immense merit of the anarchist tradition is that of having brought to the light of day the question of the individual roots of the desire for power (those that implicate a subject person­ ally in his or her actions, thus involving this subject's moral value), how can we explain that the valuable work of analysis undertaken in the context of this tradition has most of the time stopped halfway? Since the nineteenth century all 'patri­ archal' forms of domination have been copiously described and rejected, to the point of becoming a washed-out common­ place of social critique and 'gender studies'. Not nearly enough has been said, on the other hand, of those forms of subjection and manipulation of others that have their unconscious model in the maternal hold. This kind of 'forgetfulness' is particu­ larly strange. It was in fact at the very moment when the dynamic of modern societies began to undermine the cultural foundation of earlier patriarchal constructions15 - by 14 To stress the 'metapolitical' dimension of anarchism helps to resolve a number of philosophical difficulties. It is possible for example to recognize the presence of an 'anarchist' critique in third­ century China ( that of Pao King-yen or Hsi K'ang), even though that civilization, as Fran�ois Jullien has shown, had not developed a typology of political regimes comparable with that of ancient Greece. (And the same holds of course for the 'anarchism' of the South American Indians, as analysed by Pierre Clastres . ) Cf. Eloge de l'anarchie par deux excentriques chinois ( Paris: Editions de l'Encyclopedie des Nuisances, 2004 ). 15 In the Communist Manifesto, Marx recalls how 'everywhere that the bourgeoisie has conquered power' it has 'undermined all patri­ archal relations'. We may well wonder how certain 'Marxists' have been able to see 'patriarchy' as the condition for the regular func­ tioning of capitalist relations.

1 21

The Realm of Lesser Evil discrediting, to the profit of the mechanisms of Law and the Market, all references to a symbolic law - that the attention of social criticism came to focus in an almost exclusive fashion on this one modality of domination. 1 6 What makes this modern mystery still more murky is the evident denial that it implies. We can all verify daily how the dissolution of the symbolic Law never leads of itself to the triumph of a j oyous and conquering freedom. As Zizek rightly reminds us, 'the reflux of traditional patriarchal authority (the symbolic Law) is accompanied by its disturb­ ing double, the Superego'.17 This latter concept, which in Zizek's usage is closer to Lacan than Freud, is particularly interesting from our present perspective: 'the Superego', Zizek writes, 'must be strictly opposed to the symbolic Law. The latter, between the lines, is silently tolerant. It even incites doing what its explicit text forbids (as in the case of adultery), whereas the injunction of the Superego ordering j ouissance - because of the very clarity of this order prevents the subject from access to this far more surely than any prohibition. ' To illustrate this fundamental distinction, Zizek gives the following example: 'A parental figure that is simply "repressive" , in the mode of symbolic authority, will say to the child: " You must go to your grandmother's birth­ day and behave properly even if it bores you to death - I don't care if you want to or not, you just have to go. " Whereas the Superego figure says to the same child: "Even though you know very well how much your grandmother

16 Michel Schneider's courageous analyses should be commended here, even if his inadequate definition of liberalism curiously leads him to see the triumph of 'big mother' as the fulfilment of 'social­ ism', rather than of liberal modernity itself. Zizek, on the contrary, in his ferocious analysis of Bill Gates' liberalism, reminds us how 'the figure of domination that we are dealing with here is not that of the good old Oedipal patriarch': Le Spectre rode toujours (Paris: Nautilus, 2002 ), p. 20. 17 /bid. , p. 29.

1 22

The Unconsci o u s of M odern Societies

wants to see you, you shouldn't go unless you really want to - otherwise, you'd better stay at home. " ' The ruse of the Superego thus consists in making the subj ect believe in this false appearance of free choice, which, as every child knows, in reality is a forced choice that implies an even more power­ ful order: not only 'you have to visit your grandmother whatever your desire may be', but 'you must do it, and besides, you must be thrilled to do it!' The Superego orders that you enjoy doing what you have to do. Proof of this is what would happen if the poor child, believing that it is really supposed to choose freely, replies: 'No ! ' You can imagine in advance the response of the parents: 'But how can you refuse ? How can you be so nasty? What has your poor grandmother done that you don't love her? ' 1 8 It is somewhat surprising, then, after all these eloquent descriptions, that Zizek confines himself in this text to evoking a 'parental figure' in general, whereas the mode of operation of the 'superego figure' that he describes finds its privileged embodiment, in all evidence, in a far more precise figure: that of the 'bad mother', possessive and castrating. Where the 'patriarchal' variant of paternal authority essen­ tially orders the subj ect's obedience to the law that the tyran­ nical 'father' claims to embody, the 'matriarchal' desire for power presents itself in very different and far more stifling forms. It imposes as a duty the subj ect's unconditional love, and by this fact, functions above all by emotional guilt­ tripping and emotional blackmail, in modes of complaint, reproach and accusation that can be varied indefinitely. The first form of control establishes a mainly disciplinary order, commanding total submission of the subj ect in their outward behaviour. The second establishes a control that is far more radical, in so far as it cannot be assigned any kind of limit; it demands, in fact, that subj ects cede their desire and adhere with all their being to the submission demanded, on penalty of seeing themselves destroyed in the esteem that they have 18

Ibid., pp. 2 9-30.

1 23

The Real m of Lesser Evil

of themselves, since their refusal to accept this total hold over their own life can only signify a blameable inability to respond adequately to the 'sacrifices' undertaken for them. This dif­ ference is sufficient in itself to explain the immense difficulty that there always is in grasping a subj ection undergone for what it is, when this is exerted in a 'maternal' mode. Whereas the disciplinary order is, by definition, always frontal (which makes possible both an awareness of the oppression experi­ enced and a revolt against this order), the 'matriarchal' control exercised over a subj ect 'for their own good' and in the name of the 'love' that is professed towards them tends to operate in far more enveloping and insidious forms, with the result that such subjects are almost inevitably led to blame themselves for their own ingratitude and moral shab­ biness. [E] This has a fundamental political consequence for the analysis of modern societies. The mechanisms of 'pater­ nal' control (those that mimic the paternal authority in its function as the separating third person) can in general be perceived without difficulty by all the protagonists involved. The man or woman [F] who operates in 'patriarchal' mode knows perfectly well that they enjoy power. And those over whom this power is exercised are not duped either by the j ouissance that they have to confront. The forms of 'matri­ archal' control, on the other hand (in which men too have been past masters), are incomparable harder to perceive and name for what they are, both by those individuals of either sex who undergo them, and by those of either sex who exer­ cise them. As experience never ceases to show, it is psycho­ logically impossible for a possessive mother (or for any subj ect committed to operating in such modalities) to live her crazy will to power otherwise than as an exemplary form of love and sacrificial devotion. 1 9 It is inevitable therefore that 1 9 What modern political philosophy has generally fa iled to see, literature has as always been a ble to reveal with its particular weapons. There is probably no more exact (and disturbing) descrip ­ tion of the unconscious will to power o f a mother than the magis­ terial tale of Ludwig Lewisohn, The Case of Mr Crump which -

1 24

The Unconsci o u s of M odern Societies

the visible hand of patriarchal domination should end up leaving in shadow the invisible hand of matriarchal domina­ tion, so that all challenges to coercive power are directed at the former. [G] It is most likely in this maj or difference that we would need to seek the ultimate reasons for the immemor­ ial political repression of the realm of the mothers. 20 These brief remarks make it possible to raise a corner of the ideological veil that obscures the dark continent of modern societies. Liberal logic, in fact, obj ectively implies the dismant­ ling of all normative constructions built up with explicit reference to a symbolic law, to the benefit of just the mecha­ nisms of Market and Law, which are 'axiologically neutral'. By this fact, it is condemned to induce, in return, the wild development of new normative constructions whose priority anchorage is now in the subj ects' imaginary, in other words directly governed by the unconscious itself (and more par­ ticularly by what Zizek, following Melanie Klein and Christopher Lasch, calls 'fierce superego figures' ) . This is why the slow historical dismantling of disciplinary societies, which is the principal work of advanced modernity, never translates into the access by the majority to the fine autonomy that is promised. For lack of a full critique of the mechanisms of domination, a critique that liberal materialism forbids on principle, [H] this methodical dismantling leads, on the

Freud described as an 'incomparable masterpiece'. Written in the mid 1 920s, this shattering novel was immediately rejected by all publish ing houses in the US, and its author dragged through the mud on the grounds th at he undermined the family and national virtues. Finally published in France in 1 93 1 , with a preface by Thomas Mann, it was only a uthorized for American publication in 1 947 (and even then, in an exp urgated version ). The way in which this book was received at that time (and its relative lack of appreciation still today) clearly validates all possible clinical confirmations. 2° Cf. Fran�ois Vigouro ux, L'Empire des meres ( Paris: PUF, 1 9 9 8 ).

1 25

The Real m of Lesser Evil

contrary, to the gradual establishment of control societies, subject to the growing authority of 'experts' 21 and bathing in this strange climate of generalized self-censorship, repentance and guilt. All this corresponds, in the last analysis, to the war of all against all, when the new war of each against them­ selves is added to it. 22 This does indeed seem, in the last analysis, the unconscious anthropological foundation of this regressive civilization of 'Progress' that Christopher Lasch was one of the first to recognize as the 'culture of narcissism'.

N otes [A] If there is one point on which certain representatives of early socialism, starting with Fourier himself, can effectively be seen as utopian, it is in their claim to describe the organiza­ tion of the future society in the minutest detail. The concept of 'self-institution' (after Castoriadis) has the advantage of indicating a different philosophical direction, one more com­ patible with the democratic intervention of individuals. This clearly does not mean that a decent society can dispense with

21 '

" Adulthood " in the last generations has had very little to do with " a d ulthood" as that word would have been understood by adults in any previous generatio n . Rather, "ad ulthood " has been defined as "a position of co ntrol in the world of childhood " . Ambi­ tious America ns, sensing th is, have preferred to remain adolescents year after year': George Trow, Withi1t the Co1ttext of No Co1ttext (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1 9 8 1 ), p. 1 2 . This last remark casts light, among other things, on the fate of the liberal School and the co ntemporary proliferation of 'coaches' . 22 David Fincher's Fight Club is from this point of view one of the emblematic films of our liberal time, as has been shown very well by Slavoj Z izek, La Subjectivite a vetzir (Paris: Champs­ Flammarion, 2006 ) and Stanko Cerovic, Comme1tt maigrissetzt les ombres (Paris: Climats, 2003 ).

1 26

The Unconsci o u s of M odern Societies

direct and frontal political measures, nor consequently with the establishment of precise institutions and definite pro­ grammes (if only, for example, to put an end to the exercise of politics as a 'job', the control of information by the powers of money, and the possibility of acquiring and transmitting indecent incomes) . But as soon as support is sought in pre­ existing moral and cultural possibilities, the first ambition of a decent society cannot be the unlimited proliferation of laws and regulations (in the same inexorable logic that presides over the development of liberal societies) . [a] It must lie above all in the continuous creation of a political and cultural context capable of promoting and encouraging common decency; or, what comes to the same thing, of neutralizing and discouraging in practice (though without formally banning them) egoistic and predatory behaviour. Here again, the analyses of Jacques Godbout prove highly valuable from a political perspective. By closely studying the behaviour of individuals confronted in the real world with the situations described by Axelrod (on the model of the 'prisoner's dilemma'), the Canadian sociologist was led to maintain that the number of subj ects who, whatever the conditions, spon­ taneously chose to cooperate (instead of privileging egoistic calculation) rarely fell below 30 per cent. He also maintains (basing himself here in particular on the experiments of Fehr and Gachter) that cooperative behaviour is even displayed by 85 per cent of the cases, if 'exchange between the players is authorized, or another procedure enabling the sense of iden­ tification with the group to be increased'. Godbout logically concludes that 'in an egoistic setting, the individual tends to adopt an egoistic attitude, but in a generous setting, he will tend to adopt a generous attitude'.23 We may deduce from this that a decent society will have a far lesser need to pursue

2 3 jacques T. Godbo ut, Ce qui circule entre 1zous, pp. 26 8-72 . See also, by the same author in colla boration with Alain Caille, The World of the G ift (M ontreal : MeGill-Q ueen's Un iversity Press, 2000 ).

1 27

The Real m of Lesser Evil

forcible means, whether legal or otherwise (nothing is more foreign to a decent spirit than the murky and sinister world of the 'politically correct' ), as opposed to obliquely and indi­ recdy working to establish a human context that continu­ ously invites individuals to give the best of themselves, in other words to develop, as far as is possible, their psycho­ logical and cultural dispositions to mutual aid and friendship. We may note that the form of governmentality implied by a socialism of this kind is rather close, in many respects, to those Chinese cultural traditions that privilege indirect action on the conditions of a political process rather than the methodical forcing of the process itself. [b] But the need to take a certain distance from the Eurocentrism of modern ideologies should not present any real obstacle to the building of decent societies on a worldwide scale. [a] Socialism does not imply the abolition of abstract Law. It simply implies that the rules this establishes should not be confused with the principles on which a decent politics should be based. There is thus no contradiction, from a socialist point of view, in legally authorizing what one may still seek to combat morally or politically. The fact that a certain behaviour is legal does not thereby mean that it has to be considered morally desirable or politically just. As Lenin reminded us, defending the right to divorce does not mean this should be seen as an ideal or desirable solution, and given the status of a norm. In the liberal perspective, on the other hand, Law being by definition people's only common ideo­ logical reference (with morality at best a mere private matter) , such a distinction lacks any meaning and thus tends to become impracticable . This is why the natural penchant of liberal societies is not just to resort to Law for the setdement of every problem; it also implies, in one way or another, the gradual prohibition of everything that is supposed to 'harm others', according to standards defined by the balance of forces at the time. And since any political, religious or moral position adopted assumes, if at all coherent, a critique of opposing positions, there is always every right to suspect it of cherishing a 'phobia' towards these, whether conscious or

1 28

The Unconsci o u s of M odern Societies

otherwise. Liberal 'phobophobia' (i.e. the 'phobia' of all utterances capable of 'harming others' by daring to contra­ dict their point of view or criticize their ways of being) can thus only lead - via the proliferation of laws establishing 'crimes of opinion', and under the permanent threat of pros­ ecution for defamation - to the gradual disappearance of any serious political debate, and in due course, the extinction of freedom of expression itself, whatever the initial intention of the liberal authorities. [b] Confucian 'politics' places the figure of the gardener, attentive to the remotest preconditions for successful flower­ ing, far above that of the shepherd leading his flock or the pilot holding the ship's rudder (these last two figures being the traditional metaphors for the art of government in Western culture) . In a general fashion, modern Western phi­ losophy (in its dominant schools) can be viewed as an inter­ minable Cartesian 'discourse of method', according to which it is sufficient on every occasion to rationally apply the appro­ priate technical means, in order to directly attain the obj ec­ tive sought ( the idea that politics is a science being only a particular case of this procedure ) . This voluntarist and 'meth­ odological' spirit that takes its principles from the seven­ teenth-century ideal of science thus appears very remote from classical Chinese culture (or even from the Aristotelian concept of 'prudence' ) . Asian theories of 'not acting' (wu wei) suggest privileging in all fields of activity 'strategies' based on indirect action and the provisional 'forgetting' of the goal pursued (thus on the absence of strategy in the strict sense), ready for this end to valorize intuition and spontaneity at the expense of 'rational calculation' and reflexivity. See on this point Frant;ois Jullien's Le Detour et l'acces. Strategies du sens en Chine, en Grece (Paris: Grasset, 1 9 95 ) .

[B] As soon as we rej ect basing ourselves on virtues that are already (or still) present in the life of the popular classes, [a] it is not only the reasons for their revolts that become

1 29

The Real m of Lesser Evil

incomprehensible. It must also be accepted that the invitation to remain human has no meaning, that capitalism will be finally overcome only by people who do not yet exist, and that only a mysterious elite protected against the vices inher­ ent to human nature ( 'men of a different stuff', as Stalin said) can direct the industrial manufacture of the 'new man'. This is in the last instance the invariable mystic foundation of all theories that invite us to entrust the fate of peoples to the enlightened vanguard of the human race. 24 [a] In France, the film Dupont Lajoie (Yves Boisset, 1 974) illustrated in a simultaneously emblematic and caricature fashion the act of birth of a new left, whose contempt for the popular classes, until that point kept fairly well under control, could now be proclaimed without the least complex. It was in the wake of the bloody defeat of the Chilean people, a defeat with a traumatic effect at the time but which has now been quite forgotten, that this new left steadily resolved to abandon the cause of the people (now that everyone could clearly measure the physical risks its defence involved) in favour of an enthusiastic reconciliation with capitalist moder­ nity and its far more frequentative elites. It was only then that 'anti-racism' (already presented in Boisset's film as an ideal replacement solution) could be methodically substituted for the old class struggle, populism be deemed a thought crime, and the world of showbiz and the media become the privileged base of support for all the new political battles, in place of the old working class.

[C] 'Our best hope of emotional maturity', Christopher Lasch wrote, 'depends on our recognizing others not as proj ections

24 A more complete appreciation of this question is offered in the fine book by M ichel Terestchenko, u, si fragile vemis d'huma7Zite. B analite du mal, ba,alite du bie7Z ( Paris: La Decouverte-MAUSS, 2 005 ).

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The Unconsci o u s of M odern Societies

of our desires but as independent beings with desires of their own. More broadly, it depends on our acceptance of our limits. The world does not exist simply for the satisfaction of our desires; it is a world in which we can find pleasure and to which we can find a meaning once we have under­ stood that others have an equal right to this.' 2 5 This notion of psychological maturity (which is the traditional basis of all wisdom) thus assumes that it is possible, with time and experience, to overcome the initial egoism of youth, and, to quote Lasch again, 'to steadily identify with the happiness and success of others'. It is accordingly by its very definition incompatible with the philosophical postulates of liberal anthropology. This is why, since the foundational work of Georges Lapassade, [a] the critique of the idea of maturity has become the pons asinorum of the defenders of modern­ ism. The exceptional interest of Claude Alzon 26 is that he was already able in 1 974 to denounce this ideological enterprise and thus anticipate all the cultural transformations that have become so commonplace in our time. Its political and intellectual lucidity sufficiently explains why this maj or book has never been republished and has even disappeared from university reading lists. 27 [a] L'Entree dans Ia vie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1 9 63 ) . This book of touching naivety, which had its fifteen minutes of fame, displayed the whole series of ideological cliches that would enable capitalism, from the 1 9 70s on, to legitimize its cultural revolutions (particularly in the educational sphere) . A t that time, however, only the Situationists rightly judged

2 5 La Culture du 1larcissism (Paris: Champs-Flammarion, 2006), p. 299.

26 La Mort de Pygmalion. Essai sur l'immaturite de Ia jeunesse (Paris: M aspero , 1 9 74). 27 Th us Eric Deschavanne and Henri Tavoillot's book Philosophie des ages de Ia vie ( Paris : Grasset, 2007), wh ich has the great merit of tackling this question of maturity, does not contain a single reference to Alzon's fundamenta l essay.

13 1

The Real m of Lesser Evil

the intellectual worth of the book and its author (cf. 'M. Georges Lapassade est un con', Internationale situationniste, August 1 9 64, p. 2 9 ) . It seems that in recent years this eminent sociologist has chiefly devoted himself to the study of rap.

[D] From the moment that socialist struggle draws on the support of the common decency of 'ordinary people', it assumes, as Camus emphasized, the ability to love life (and thus the psychological maturity) without which no really generous action is possible. Whenever this psychological and moral basis is lacking, 'revolts' against the established order - no matter their apparent 'radicalism' - can only draw their motivations from anger, hatred, envy and resentment (and thus, in the last instance, from the most infantile forms of desire for power). [a] It is difficult then to escape the cruel criticisms that Nietzsche directed at the 'anarchist' who demands, with righteous indignation, 'his rights', 'ju stice', 'equal rights' [ . . . ]. His 'righteous ind ignation' itself already d oes him good; every poor devil finds pleasure in scolding - it gives him a little o f the intoxication of power. Even complain­ ing and wailing can give life a charm for the sake of which o ne endures it: there is a small dose of revenge in every com­ pla int, one reproaches those who are different for one's feeling vile, sometimes even with one's being vile, as if they had perpetrated an injustice or possessed an impermissible privilege. 'If I am canaille, yo u o ught to be so too' : on the basis of this logic one makes revol utions.28

If we are to avoid, unlike Nietzsche, lumping together those who really defend the cause of the people with the countless

28 The Twilight of the Idols (Harmo ndsworth: Penguin, 1 9 6 8 ), pp. 8 6-7 .

1 32

The Unconsci o u s of M odern Societies

Richard Durns 2 9 who constitute its narcissistic and desperate counterfeit (but one that the militant left visibly has the gih of attracting on a large scale) , it is thus philosophically indis­ pensable to distinguish between genuine revolt - which always assumes a preliminary adhesion to the affirmative values of common decency - and those 'rebel' poses, arrogant and haughty, whose actual psychological basis is always one of sadness, j ealousy, or Oedipal self-hatred. The Memoires of Rudolf Rocker, one of the most attractive figures in the anarchist movement, offer some valuable indications on this point. Rocker explains how, as a young anarchist activist, he was absolutely insistent on witnessing, out of morbid curios­ ity, the execution of Auguste Vaillant, author of the bomb attack on the Chambre des Deputes, in December 1 8 9 3 . Some years later, looking back a t that terrible moment, he wrote the following admirable lines: If I ask myself today why I attended that scene which my whole being fo und rep ugnant, I find only one explanation: all of us you ng people of that time were carried away by the cult of martyrdom which was in the a ir. Perhaps it is good to have experienced such an atmosphere; and yet I bel ieve that joyous acceptance of life is more propitious to the b lossoming of the human sp irit than the glow of glory that lies over tombs. M ovements of social struggle will a lways have their martyrs, b ut they should not be made into a cult. [b]

All evidence suggests that it is in the light of testimonies and analyses such as these that we should reflect on the two 29 Richard Durn was the gunman who attacked a Nanterre co uncil meeting on 27 March 2002. His act of ma dness cost the lives of eight council members, and a further fourteen were seriously injured. He killed himself the next day by jumping from a skylight in the Paris police station where he was under arrest. Durn had worked in humanitarian organizatio ns and taken p art in a nti­ globalization demonstrations; he was appointed treasurer of the Nanterre branch of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme at the end o f 200 1 .

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eternally antagonistic forms of revolt, and hence the two dif­ ferent sources of morality and revolution. [a] The imaginary that sustains the currents of mainstream rap music is particularly revealing from this point of view. Hence the key role that the entertainment industry assigns this new form of preaching in the process of the intellectual subjugation of modern youth. [b] Like any genuine anarchist, Rocker clearly did not share any of the illusions of the far-left (and official sociol­ ogy) of today as to the 'political' and 'rebel' character of criminal activity. 'In this agitated period', he wrote in his Memoires, 'when we firmly believed that the revolution was at hand, there were some petty malefactors who justified their actions in the name of libertarian ideas, whether to give themselves importance or for some other reason. This gave rise to the type of so-called "robber anarchists" , who attracted a good deal of attention. Their number however was in inverse proportion to the celebrity that they enj oyed. ' On Rudolf Rocker's major work, see the special issue devoted to him by A contretemps (no. 2 7, July 2007) , one of the most notable anarchist publications of today.

[E) It is clear that the political control exercised by totalitarian societies (as distinct from classical dictatorships) is funda­ mentally of the maternal type: hence the key role played by self-criticism and self-accusation, as well as the permanent obligation to love the supreme leader, described so well in Orwell's 1 984. It is important, however, to make clear that the two modes of domination can perfectly well coexist within a single system. The 'patriotism' of traditional patri­ archal societies was most commonly simply 'matriotism'. As Eric Desmons writes: The question of the sex of the city - the 'motherland' being the real common reference of the ideology o f pro patria mori

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The Unconsci o u s of M odern Societies - is not an idle one. Since dying for the city is presented as an act of love, it is quite reasonable that this should unite the maternal homeland - Ia patrie - with its children, rather than the state as the figure of the father. Psychoanalysis, to be sure, offers a useful key to interpretation here: the transfer to the maternal homeland of the responsibility for applying the paternal law (the law of the state ) actually effects the exclu­ sion of the father whose role is precisely to prohibit incest. With the 'state-paternalistic' obstacle thus removed by patri­ otic discou rse, it becomes possible to envisage death in battle as the accomplishment of an act of love between children and mother. There is thus establ ished a ma sochistic relationship - which excludes the father - between the homeland and its children, wh ich makes them desire, as proof of their love, heroic death and its share o f sufferings. 30

[ F) To avoid any misunderstanding, it is necessary to clarify two points here. In the first place, it is not as woman that the possessive mother dominates her human toys, but rather precisely as 'mother'. Secondly, her castrating realm is evi­ dently exercised over both sexes. We can deduce from this, both that in order to dominate others in the maternal mode it is in no way necessary to be a woman, and that the fact of being a woman in no way implies that one becomes a pos­ sessive mother. The point, then, is not to deny all those forms of 'male domination' that persist in our liberal societies (on this point, the feminist struggle continues to be quite legitimate) . And yet to reduce the dialectic of concrete rela­ tionships between modem men and women simply to this dimension (thus repressing the very idea that maternal domination is possible) amounts to far more than simply an intellectual error. Almost always, it is the unconscious per­ sonal avowal of a painful submission to one's own mother

30 E . Desmons, Mourir pour Ia patrie? (Paris: PUF, 2 00 1 ), p. 1 0 .

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(and, correlatively, the ineffectiveness of one's own father - if there was one - in the performance of his separating func­ tions). A very pertinent comment on this question can be found in Jean-Pierre Lebrun's article 'Richard Durn, les morts pour le dire' (in Psychologie clinique, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004), as well as in his already cited book La Perversion

ordinaire. [G] In a liberal society, the invisible hand of the Market is by definition always harder to perceive than the visible hand of the State, even though the power it exercises over the lives of individuals is far more developed. No particular intellec­ tual agility is required to note the existence of permanent police controls, which is thus quite within the capacity of a person of the left. But an infinitely more complicated opera­ tion is needed to recognize the power that Google exercises over modern individuals, above all over an individual who has always been subj ect to the techniques of maternal control. 'Is Google big brother? ' asks Olivier Andrieu, a specialist in search engines, who certainly suspects something of this kind: Google collects an unimaginable mass of data . They know me better than I know myself. In fact, if you use all their services, Google analyses not only your searches, but also the content of your ema ils ( G-mail ), the video s yo u watch (YouTube), the contents of yo ur computer (Google Desktop ), what you buy (via the price comparer Fro ogle ), etc. These d ata are used to help advertisers target their spots. Google even foresees in the future using the geographical location o f the surfer, a n d h a s recently registered a patent on a nascent techn ology to analyse the behaviour of on-line garners so as to insert advertisements corresponding to their psychological profiles into their video games Uoumal de D imanche, 27 May 2007).

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It is hard to imagine the modern left and far-leh (always ready to wax indignant at the slightest police check in a banlieue station) one day calling on the popular classes to rebel against this kind of control, or even simply against the omnipresent advertising propaganda without which the cap­ italist training of human beings would remain an empty word.

[H] There are two different ways of defining philosophical materi­ alism. Either this is seen, as by Engels, simply as a conception of nature 'without other addition', in which case it is no more than another name for atheism or rationalism. Or else it is seen, as by Auguste Comte, as a doctrine that sets out 'to explain the higher in terms of the lower'. It is clearly this latter definition that allows us to speak of a liberal material­ ism. The constituting programme of this materialism, in fact, starting with Hobbes and Helvetius, consists in reducing the ensemble of traditional 'values' to a simple mechanics of elementary forces (such as interest or self-love), of which they represent only the mask or effect. Materialism understood in this way thus clearly appears as a war machine designed to de-legitimize, in conformance with liberal logic, all reference to any kind of symbolic law. It is not too difficult, from this starting-point, to reduce in turn this desire for reduction to certain of its unconscious preconditions: all evidence suggests that modern materialism is ohen nothing more than a pure and simple mater-ialism. Many of the contemporary justifica­ tions of this doctrine, indeed, teach us more about the per­ sonal history of their authors than about the order of the world that they claim to explain.

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7 Fro m t h e Real m of Lesse r Evi l to t h e Best of Wo rl ds

How i s i t possible to escape the war o f all against all, i f virtue is simply a mask for self-love, if no one can be trusted and if one can only count on oneself? This is decidedly the inau­ gural question of modernity - this strange civilization that, for the first time in History, has set out to base its advances on methodical distrust, fear of death, and the conviction that loving and giving are impossible acts. The strength of the liberals is that they offer the only political solution compat­ ible with this desperate anthropology. They rely, in fact, on the only principle that cannot lie or deceive, the self-interest of individuals. 1 The 'natural' interest of man, which has been the crux of all modern philosophies since the moralists of the seventeenth century, thus becomes with

1 Cf. J. A. W. Gunn, 'Interest Never Lies. A Politica l Maxim of the Seventeenth Century' , in Politics and the Public btterest in the Seventeenth Century (London: Ro utledge, 1 9 6 9 ) . This maxim , insp ired by the writings of the D u e d e Rohan, w a s popularized in Europe by the work of his English disciple Merchamont Needham, luterest Will Not Lie, published in 1 6 5 9 . See on this point the analyses of Christian Laval in L'Homme ecouomique ( Paris: Gallimard, 2007 ).

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the triumph of liberalism the principle of all conceivable solutions. 2 The liberal initially set out to be the realistic man without illusions. He could certainly swing between the cynicism of Mandeville, the smiling scepticism of Hobbes, and the mel­ ancholy of Constant. But whatever his personal equation, he proudly proclaimed his empiricism and moderation. The rea­ sonable society that he sought to promote was in no way designed to arouse enthusiasm, which could only unleash new murderous passions. Equally distant from religious fanaticism and utopian reverie, neither City of God nor City of the Sun, it presented itself, on the contrary, as the least bad society possible; the only one, in any case, that could protect human­ ity from its ideological demons, by offering the incorrigible egoists that all men are the means to finally live in peace and pursue their prosaic occupations in tranquillity. Original liberalism was thus marked by a pessimism of the intellect. What then is the source of the manifestly very different climate into which contemporary liberalism has developed? For all evidence shows that the peaceful liberals of the Enlightenment ended up by arousing their own Schwiirmerei. 3 Indeed, judging by the present forms of the imaginary of modern societies (as can be read every day in advertising propaganda, the constant media celebrations of globalization

2 The critique of egoism and the liberal atomization of society lay at the heart of all political manifestos of early socialism . One wo uld be hard pressed today to fi nd the least trace of this in the pro­ grammes of the left and far-left (or even of any of the 'critiques of everyday life' that Henri Lefeb vre made in his time). See o n this particular point Philippe Chanial's presentatio n of the work of Benoit Malon - a key figure in French socialism - in La Morale sociale ( Paris: Le Bord de I'Eau, 2007 ) . 3 I n h i s critique of Swedenborg ( D reams o f a Visi01zary, 1 766), Kant introduces this philosophical concept to denote visionary enth usi­ asm and the frenzied imaginings of a Reason cut off fro m empirical real ity.

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and 'new technologies', and the incessant ideological cru­ sades in favour of transgressing the 'last taboos') , it has become hard to ignore the fact that something essential has changed. The realm of lesser evil, as its shadow has stretched over the entire planet, seems set on taking over, one by one, all the features of its oldest enemy. It now wants to be adored as the best of worlds. This final metamorphosis is far less surprising than it might appear, for at least two reasons. The first of these is that liberal pessimism always bore simply on the capacity of men to show themselves worthy of trust and act decently. It did not however bear on their aptitude to make themselves 'masters and possessors of nature', by their work and their technical ingenuity. To the extent that industry (in other words the rational and unbounded exploitation of nature) constituted, in all liberal philosophical constructions, the ideal form for warlike energy to be turned towards ends deemed useful to all, there thus existed, at the heart of liber­ alism, an original element of optimism and enthusiasm. This was naturally an element that made it possible to justify the religious cult of Growth and material Progress that is the underlying principle of modern civilization. The second reason is more complex. Liberal anthropology has, in fact, been marked from its origins by a curious con­ tradiction. On the one hand, it proclaims that men are by nature uniquely concerned with their self-interest and image. But on the other hand, experience never ceases to teach liberal governments that they have constantly to incite the same men to 'radically change their habits and mentalities', in order to adapt themselves to the world that their policies work tirelessly to establish. While the Market and abstract Law are supposedly the only historical mechanisms that conform to the real nature of men, the latter must be con­ stantly exhorted to abandon those ways of living that are closest to their heart, if they want to maintain the hellish rhythms imposed by the continual development of these two institutions. Every liberal politics thus appears governed by a metaphysically contradictory imperative: it must mobilize

1 40

F ro m the Real m of Lesse r Evi l to the B est of Worlds

reserves of energy to compel individuals to behave in every­ day life as they are already supposed to do by nature and spontaneously. 4 All that is needed to resolve this contradiction, of course, would be to abandon the dogmatics of egoism, and recognize that men are j ust as capable of giving and loving as of taking, accumulating and despoiling their fellows. But by very defini­ tion, nothing authorizes the integration of this fact of experi­ ence, commonplace as it is, into the liberal logic. It is inevitable therefore that this latter should end up reactivating in the form that corresponds to it (most o&en, it is true, in an unconscious fashion) the utopian proj ect par excellence, that of manufacturing the new man required for the optimal functioning of Market and Law - the worker ready to sacri­ fice his or her life and the lives of those dear to them to the competitive Enterprise, the consumer with boundless desire, the politically correct and pettifogging citizen closed to any real generosity, the absent or superseded parent - in order to transmit this set of virtues indispensable to the reproduction of the system in the best possible conditions.5

4 The strategies deployed by nascent liberalism to subject popula­ tions arriving from the countryside and the colonial empires to the rude discipline of wage-labour (and the new conception of time this implies) are widely understo od. The same is not true (we may wonder why) of the parallel efforts that Capital has had to make to compel individ uals to behave as docile consu mers and ' fash ion victims'. In American sociology, this form of ideological training is customa rily known as 'Sloan ism', in homage to the great cultural revol ution initiated in the 1 93 0 s by Alfred Sloan, president of Genera l Motors and Ford's great rival. 5 1t is worth emphasizing here that the liberal figure of the new man is itself deeply contradictory. What Daniel Bell called the 'institu ­ tionalization of envy' in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1 9 9 6, p. 22), indispensable in order to impose those habits of compu lsive and irrational consump­ tion witho ut which the accumulation of Capital (or Growth ) would immediately collapse, is opposed at all po ints, in fact, to the

1 41

The Real m of Lesser Evi l

We know since Hegel that a logic develops under the effect of its contradictions. When this logic corresponds to an effec­ tive reality, its contradictions generally tend to resolve in a positive manner, thus making possible, to use George Orwell's expression, 'a real improvement in human life'. When it rests on essentially ideological foundations (as is the case with the axiomatics of egoism) , the mode of resolution of these con­ tradictions is, on the contrary, one of forward flight, with its inevitable wake of human catastrophes and regressions. In the case of the logic of liberalism, the historical forms that this forward flight is destined to take are readily predictable. The permanent contradiction between the need to construct the new man adapted to the globalized operation of capital­ ism, and the troublesome obstinacy of ordinary people who want to remain human (what liberals, as good progressives, call their 'conservatism'), can in fact only be overcome by banking on the technological optimism that is the lyrical pendant of liberal moral pessimism. From the moment that people are persuaded that 'liberal democracy and the market economy are the only viable possibilities for our modern societies', 6 and that the definitive triumph of capitalism thus heralds the end of history, it seems impossible to escape Fukuyama's implacable conclusions: 'History will not be fin­ ished as long as the contemporary sciences of nature have

metaph ysics of effort and sacrifice that the obligation to 'work more to earn more' requires. Liberal societies thus constantly invite people to kill themselves with work , and at the same time to want 'everything, right away, and without doing anything', as the motto of the Ca nal+ TV station has it. Since the time available for con­ s umption is inversely proportio nal to that devoted to work, we have here a gen uine 'cultural contradiction of capitalism' . One o f the most classic solutions, t o attenuate this contradiction, is clearly to encroach o n the time needed for family life and the ed ucational work that it requ ires. Libera l ism ca n thus win out on all fronts. 6 Francis Fukuyama, 'La fin de l'Histoire dix ans apres' , Le Monde, 1 7 June 1 9 9 9 .

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F ro m the Real m of Lesse r Evi l to the B est of Worlds

not come to a halt. And we are on the eve of new scientific discoveries that, by their very essence, will abolish humanity as such.'7 This completely materialist fashion of resolving the liberal contradiction thus immediately transforms all the tra­ ditional terms of the problem. 8 The old frontier between the realm of lesser evil and the best of worlds previously drew its meaning from the philosophical opposition between men 'as they are' and men 'as they should be'. Once liberal ideol-

7 /bid. 8 The modern project of a 'rational' reconfiguration of human nature by means of new technologies can only be based philo­ sophically on a total materialism ( hence the famous struggles in the n ineteenth century between the Sorbonne, the longtime bastion o f humanism a n d idealism, a n d the College d e France, the privileged base of support for the militant materialism of the liberals). On this particular point, the ful lest work at present is that of Anson Rabin­ bach, Le Moteur humain. L'energie, Ia fatigue et les origi1zes de Ia modemite ( Paris: La Fabrique, 2004 ). 'The subject of this book', says Rabinbach, 'is the human engine, a metaphor of work and energy, wh ich provided the nineteenth-century theorists with a new scientific and cultural framework. By way of this metaphor, scien­ tists and reformers became a ble to express their fervent material­ ism, bringing nature, industry and human activity together into a single globalizing concept: that o f la bour-power' (p . 1 9 ) . 'The metaphor of the h uman engine', he adds, ' m ade credible the ideals of social liberalism, which it could show were consistent with the universal laws o f the conservation o f energy: increase in prod uctiv­ ity and social reforms being bound by the same natural laws. The dynamic language of energy also lay at the heart of many of the social and political utopias of the early twentieth century: Tay­ lorism, Bolshevism and Fascism . All these movements, despite their differences, considered the worker as a machine capable of u nlim­ ited increases in pro ductivity, and as a political instrument whose energy could be su bjected to scientific systems of organ ization.' This 'transcendental materialism of the ind ustrial revolution', as Rabinbach calls it, naturally provides the true metaphysical b asis of Fukuyama's programme. We should emphasize in passing that

1 43

The Real m of Lesser Evi l

ogy was compelled to assume in its turn the ideal of the new man (whose soul has to be entirely 'modernized' by the global Market), this frontier dearly loses its main reason for exist­ ing. A consistent liberal (that is, a liberal concerned to develop the initial axiomatics to its logical conclusion ) can thus no longer rest content, as previously, with ascribing the failure of totalitarian proj ects to the utopian nature of the ends pursued. What is now seen to have been the utopian aspect of these projects, explaining their inevitable collapse, is rather the inadequate nature of the means employed for the attainment of these ends. As Fukuyama puts it: The period opened up by the French Revol utio n saw the fl ourishing of a number of doctrines th at so ught to triumph o ver the limits of human nature by creating a new type of being who would not be subject to the prej udices and limita­ tions of the p ast. The failure of these experiments, at the end of the twentieth centu ry, has shown us the limits of social constructivism by confirming a C01Ztrario a liberal order, based on the Ma rket, and esta blished on manifest truths derived from 'Nature and the god of Nature' . But it may well be that the tools of the social constructionists of this century, from socialization at an early age, via psychoanalysis, through to agitprop and labour camps, were too crude to modify in depth the natural su bstratum of h uman nature.' -

-

This quaint backwardness of the means practised by totali­ tarian societies should not lead liberals to challenge the rationality of the 'constructivist' project itself. In the new perspective, the only question that arises is to know to what extent fully developed liberalism can itself take up this

the 'artistic a vant-garde' played the decisive role that it usually does in the social diffusion of the new progressive imaginary; cf. Eric M ichaud, Fabrique de l'homme 7JOUVeau: de Leger a M01zdria1Z ( Paris: Editions Carre, 1 9 97 ) . 9 Fukuyama, op. cit.

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F ro m the Real m of Lesse r Evi l to the B est of Worlds

historical proj ect on a more realistic and effective basis. On this point, Fukuyama's optimism is clearly total: The open character of the contemporary sciences of nature perm its us to suppose that, within the next two generations, biotechnology will provide us with the tools we need to accomplish what specialists in social engineering h ave not succeeded in doing. At that stage, we shall have fi nally put an end to human history, because we shall have abolished human beings as such. A new history beyo nd the human will then begin. 1 0

It is possible that this liberal haste to liquidate ordinary man will affront all those who are still tied to the old human­ ity by an irrational attachment. But if the anthropological mutation that Fukuyama calls for here is really inexorable and imminent (which it is, according to him, because 'it is science that leads the historic process', and 'we are on the eve of a new explosion of technological innovation in the sciences of life and biotechnology'), then we have to recog­ nize that liberalism is the solution to the riddle of History, and is now in a position to offer men (or at least their suc­ cessors) the conditions for an unexpected synthesis between the shining Future and the icy calculations of 'political realism'. It is at this precise point that History terminates and humanity has to get off. The logical development of the empire of lesser evil can only find its ultimate truth in the Brave New World of entertainment and 'news' that the advertising industry already sings with one voice. It is not hard to imagine the astonishment of Adam Smith or Benj amin Constant in the face of such a philosophical denouement. But this would not be very different, in the last analysis, from that which Gorgias experienced in the

10

Ibid.

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The Real m of Lesser Evi l

encounter with Callicles, his most talented spiritual son. 1 1 With the small difference, of course, that Callicles only owed his philosophical existence to the logical power of Plato, whereas Fukuyama and his thousands of ideological clones are today in control of the world in which we live. For anyone who has grasped the logic of liberalism, in the necessary development of its original unity - and thus beyond those secondary contradictions that enable its 'right' and its 'left' representatives to endow the spectacle of elections with a minimum of animation - it should now be clear that the necessity of establishing a decent society coincides with the defence of humanity itself. To the extent that basic human virtues are still largely widespread among ordinary people, it is equally clear that the practical conditions for such an undertaking still exist, at least potentially. (It is simply up to us, then, to help bring these indispensable virtues to life, starting by putting them into practice in our own daily behav­ iour. ) From this point of view, it is still possible to recognize, with the young Marx, that 'the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality' . 1 2 But Marx also understood that 'people who do not feel that they are human beings become the property of their masters like a breed of slaves or horses'. 13 It is necessary to point out here that the spec­ tacular expansion of contemporary liberalism has consider­ ably shifted the terms of this problem. The new human order that liberal elites are now determined to impose on a

1 1 This is the same astonishment as that of Professor Ru pert Cadell in the Hitchcock film R ope ( 1 9 4 8 ) , when he discovers, through the crime committed by his students, the ultimate sense of his own teaching. This ma sterpiece is certa inly o ne of the most effective introd uctions to the concept of ph ilosophical logic. 1 2 Letter to Ruge, September 1 843; K. Marx and F. Engels, Col­ lected Works, Vol. 3 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1 9 75 ), p. 1 44 . 1 3 Letter t o Ruge, M a y 1 8 43; ibid., p. 1 3 7.

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planetary scale requires, in fact, that people precisely cease to 'feel that they are human beings' and finally resign them­ selves to becoming poor egoistic monads, each struggling pitilessly against all others in the expectation of their hypo­ thetical 'fifteen minutes of fame'. Hannah Arendt was quite right to emphasize, therefore, in The Human Condition, that 'what is annoying about modern theories is not that they are false, but rather that they may come true'. If it remains correct that people are not egoistic by nature, it is no less correct that the training of humanity by Law and the Market is creating, day after day, the ideal cultural context that will permit egoism to become the habitual form of human behav­ iour. It would be a great mistake for the champions of humanity to underestimate this new reality, and it is impera­ tive for them to be aware, on the contrary, that the race is already under way, and in this race time is now working against them. There is certainly not yet anything inexorable about the universal triumph of capitalism, but it has become eminently plausible. This means, as a consequence, that the disappearance of humanity (in the sense that Fukuyama and his masters actively use the phrase), along with the parallel destruction of nature, now constitute genuine working hypotheses, and no longer just distracting scenarios of Hollywood-style science fiction. 14 Many readers will undoubtedly find i t deeply demobilizing to end a critique of liberalism with such forecasts of gloom

14Jared Diamon d's book Collapse (Londo n : Allen Lane, 2005 ) offers a passion ate approach to the problem raised by the suicidal development of certain civilizations. A number of interesting obser­ vations on the same problem can be found in the already classic study of S. N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires: The R ise and Fall of the Historical B ureaucratic Societies (New York: The Free Press, 1 9 6 9 ) . We need only add that the globalized liberal empire, for its part, has the means of making its own collapse coincide with that of the planet as a whole. This was not the case with earlier empires .

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The Real m of Lesser Evi l

and doom. We can begin by replying, in the words of Jean­ Pierre Dupuy, that 'when a catastrophe is announced in order to avoid it, this announcement does not have the status of a prediction in the strict sense of the term; it does not claim to say what the future will be, but simply what will happen if we do not guard against it'. 1 5 But if it happens, despite every­ thing, that humanity loses its last battle and is thus compelled to give way to post-human machines, in a world devastated by victorious liberalism, it would remain an ineffaceable truth. The greatest treasure for a human being - the key to his or her happiness - has always been harmony with oneself. This is a luxury that all those who devote their brief spell on earth to dominating and exploiting their kind will never know - even if the future should belong to them.

1 5 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Petite metaphysique des tsunamis (Paris: Seuil, 2005 ), p. 1 8 .

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