Democracy and Political Theory - Claude Lefort

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The Question of Democracy

My purpose here is to encourage and to contribute to a revival of political philosophy. I am not alone in working to that end. Our numbers are, no doubt, small, but they have been increasing for some time, although it must be admitted that there is as yet little enthusiasm for the task. What surprises me is that most of those who ought to be best-equipped to undertake it because of their intellectual temperament, which inclines them to break with dogmatic beliefs, because of their philosophical culture, because of their desire to find some meaning behind the events, confused as they may be, that take place in our world, who might be expected to have become sufficiently disenchanted with the rival dominant ideologies to want to discern the preconditions for the development of freedom, or at last to shed some light on the obstacles that stand in its way, are and remain stubbornly blind to the political. 'Freedom', the simple word I have just used, is usually banished from scientific language or relegated to the vernacular, when, that is, it does not become a slogan for small groups of intellectuals who declare that they have taken sides and who are content with anti­ communism. They can be ignored. no matter how much noise they make, as we have seen their kind before. I am more concerned with those intellectuals and philosophers who claim to belong to the left or the far left. Although they live in an era in which a new form of society has emerged under the banner of fascism on the one hand and under that of socialism on the other, they refuse to contemplate or even perceive that momentous event. In order to do so, they would of course have to give new meaning to the idea of freedom. And yet they abandon it to the vagaries of public opinion, apparently on the grounds that everyone defines it in accordance with their own wishes or interests. By doing so. they cut themselves off, not from public opinion, but from political philosophy. even though they claim to be in search of rigorous knowledge. For the sole motivation behind political philosophy has always been a desire to escape the servitude of collective beliefs and to win the freedom to think about freedom in

On Modem Democracy

The Question of Democracy

society; it has always borne in mind the essential difference between the regime of freedom and despotism. or indeed tyranny. Yet now that we are faced with the rise of a new type of despotism (which differs, let it be noted, from ancient despotism as much as modern democracy differs from classical democracy). of a despotism which has, moreover. world-wide ambitions, despotism itself is becoming invisible. Whenever they hear the word 'totalitarianism', philosophers ask. 'What are you talking about? Is it a concept? How do you define it? Does not democracy mask the domination and exploitation of one class by another, the standardization of collective life and mass conformism? Even if we do agree that history has given birth to a monster. what caused the mutation? Was it an economic cause. a technological cause, or does it relate to the rise of state bureaucracy?' I am, as I said, surprised: how can they handle ontological differences with such subtlety, vie with one another in exploiting the combined resources of Heidegger, Lacan, Jakobson and Levi-Strauss, and then fall back upon such crass realism when the question of politics arises? Marxism, of course, has been through this stage too; it destroyed the old relationship that once existed between philosophy and naivety by teaching us that the establishment of a concentration-camp system. the extermination of millions of men and women, the suppression of freedom of association and freedom of expression, and the abolition of universal suffrage or its conversion into a farce which gives one party ninety­ nine per cent of the vote, tells us nothing about the nature of Soviet society. But the most remarkable thing of all is that the withering away of that ideology has done little to set thought free or to help it return to political philosophy. It may well be admitted that it is not socialism, or 'true' socialism as they quaintly say, that is being constructed in the USSR, in Eastern Europe. in China, Vietnam. Cambodia. or Cuba, but how many intellectuals are still haunted by the spectre of the correct theory, by the belief that it will reveal the laws that govern the development of societies and that it will enable them to deduce a

they regard as particular facts and as distinct from other particular social facts, such as the economic, the juridical. the aesthetic. the scientific or the purely social, 'social' being defined as designating modes of relatiOns between groups or classes. This approach implies a surreptitious reference to the space that is designated as society. It claims to be able to provide a detailed survey or reconstruction of that space by positing and articulating terms, by forging specific systems of relations, or even by combining them into an overall system, as though the observations and constructs did not themselves derive from the experience of social life, an experience which is at once primordial _ and umquely shaped by our insertion into a historically and politically det�rmined framework. One effect of this fiction is immediately obvwus: modern democratic societies are characterized by. among other things. the delimitation of a sphere of institutions, relations and activities which appears to be political, as distinct from other spheres

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formula for a rational practice? At best. we find expressions of sympathy for the dissidents persecuted by communist regimes or for popular uprisings. But such feelings have no lasting intellectual effect. They are unable to discern freedom in democracy, because democracy is defined as bourgeois. They are unable to discern servitude in totalitarianism. It would. however, be a mistake to restrict ourselves to a critique of Marxism. If we are to reinterpret the political. we must break with scientific points of view in general and with the point of view that has come to dominate what are known as the political sciences and political sociology in particular. Political sociologists and scientists. for their part. do not attempt to define politics as a superstructure whose base is to be found at the supposedly real level of relations of production. They obtain their object of knowledge by constructing or delineating political facts, which

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which appear to be economic, juridical. and so on. Political sociologists and scientists find the preconditions that define their object and their approach to knowledge in this mode of appearance of the political, without ever examining the form of society within which the division of reality into various sectors appears and is legitimated. The fact that something like politics should have been circumscribed within social life at a given time has in itself a political meaning, and a meaning which is not particular, but general. This even raises the question of the constitutiOn of the social space, of the form of society, of the essence of what was once termed the 'city'. The political is thus revealed, not in what we call political activity, but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured. It appears in (he sense that the process whereby society is ordered and unified across its divisions becomes visible. It is obscured in the sense that the locus of politics (the locus in which parties compete and in which a general agency of power takes shape and is reproduced) becomes defined as particular, while the principle which generates the overall configuration is concealed. This observation is in itself an invitation to return to the question that once inspired political philosophy: what is the nature of the difference between forms of society? Interpreting the political means breaking with the viewpoint of political science, because political science emerges from the suppression of this question. It emerges from a desire to objectify, and it forgets that no elements, no elementary structures, no entities (classes or segments of classes). no economic or technical determinations, and no dimensions of social space exist until they have been given a form. Giving them a form implies both giving them meaning (mise en sens) and staging them (mise en scene). They are given meaning in that the social space unfolds as a space of intelligibility articulated in accordance with a specific mode of distinguishing between the real and the imaginary, the true and the false, the just and the unjust, the permissible and the forbidden. the

On Modern Democracy

The Question of Democracy

normal and the pathological. They are staged in that this space contains within it a quasi-representation of itself as being aristocratic, monarchic, despotic, democratic or totalitarian. As we know, the corollary of the desire to objectify is the positioning of a subject capable of performing intellectual operations which owe nothing to its involvement in social life. Such a neutral subject is concerned only with detecting causal relations between phenomena and with discovering the laws that govern the organization and the workings of social systems or sub-systems. The fiction of this subject is vulnerable to more than the arguments of critical sociologists and Marxists who object to the distinction between factual judgements and value judgements, and who show that the analyst is working within a perspective forced upon him by the need to defend his economic or cultural interests. Well-founded as it may be, this argument itself comes up against limitations which will not be examined here. It fails to recognize that any system of thought that is bound up with any form of social life is grappling with a subject­ matter which contains within it its own interpretation, and whose meaning is a constituent element of its nature. By ascribing neutrality to the subject, it deprives the subject of the means to grasp an experience generated and ordered by an implicit conception of the relations between human beings and of their relations with the world. It prevents the subject from grasping the one thing that has been grasped in every human society, the one thing that gives it its status as human society: namely the difference between legitimacy and illegitimacy, between truth and lies, between authenticity and imposture. between the pursuit of power or of private interests and the pursuit of the common good. Leo Strauss's attacks on what might be termed the castration of political thought as a result of the rise of the social sciences and of Marxism are sufficiently eloquent for us not to dwell on the issue here; we have only to turn to the critique that opens Natural Right and History.' Let me say simply that if we ignore distinctions that are basic to the exercise of the intellect on the grounds that we cannot supply their criteria, and if we claim to be able to reduce knowledge to the limits of objective science, we break with the philosophical tradition. If we refuse to risk making judgements, we lose all sense of the difference between forms of society. We then fall back on value judgements, either hypocritically, beneath the cloak of a hierarchy in the determinants of what we take to be the real, or

does not result from a transformation of the mode of production. In the case of German or Italian fascisms. the point does not have to be stressed, as they adapted themselves to the maintenance of capitalist structures, whatever changes they may have undergone as a result of increased state intervention into the economy. But it is important at least to recall that the Soviet regime acquired its distinctive features before the era of the socialization of the means of production and of collectivization. Modern totalitarianism arises from a political mutation, from a mutation of a symbolic order, and the change in the status of power is its clearest expression. What in fact happens is that a party arises, claiming to be by its very nature different from traditional parties, to represent the aspirations of the whole people, and to possess a legitimacy which places it above the law. It takes power by destroying all opposition; the new power is accountable to no one and is beyond all legal control. But for our purposes, the course of events is of little import; we are concerned with the most characteristic features of the new form of society. A condensation takes place between the sphere of power, the sphere of law and the sphere of knowledge. Knowledge of the ultimate goals of society and of the norms which regulate social practices becomes the property of power, and at the same time power itself claims to be the organ of a discourse which articulates the real as such. Power is embodied in a group and, at its highest level, in a single individual, and it merges with a knowledge which is also embodied, in such a way that nothing can split it apart. The theory or if not the theory, the spirit of the movement. as in Nazism -may well turn everything to account as circumstances demand, but it can never be challenged by experience. State and civil society are assumed to have merged; this is brought about through the agency of the ubiquitous party which permeates everything with the dominant ideology and hands down power's orders, as circumstances demand, and through the formation of a multiplicity of microbodies (organizations of all kinds in which an artificial socialization and relations of power conforming to the general model are reproduced). A logic of identification is set in motion, and is governed by the representation of power as embodiment. The proletariat and the people are one; the party and the proletariat are one; the politbureau and, ultimately, the egocrat, and the party are one. Whilst there develops a representation of a homogeneous and self-transparent society, of a People-as-One, social division, in all its modes. is denied, and at the same time all signs of differences of opinion, belief or mores are condemned. We can use the term despotism to characterize this regime, but only if we specify that it is modern and differs from all the forms that precede it. Power makes no reference to anything beyond the social; it rules

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arbitrarily, in the crude statement of preferences. I would like now to draw attention to what reinterpreting the political means in our times. The rise of totalitarianism, both in its fascist variant (which has for the moment been destroyed, though we have no grounds to think that it might not reappear in the future) and in its communist variant (which is going from strength to strength) obliges us to re-examine democracy. The widespread view to the contrary notwithstanding, totalitarianism

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as though nothing existed outside the social, as though it had no limits (these are the limits established by the idea of a law or a truth that is valid in itself); it relates to a society beyond which there is nothing, which is assumed to be a society fulfilling its destiny as a society

On Modern Democracy

The Question of Democracy

produced by the people who live in it. The distinctively modern feature of totalitarianism is that it combines a radically artificialist ideal with a radically organicist ideal. The image of the body comes to be combined with the image of the machine. Society appears to he a community all of whose members are strictly interdependent; at the same time it is assumed to be constructing itself day by day, to be striving towards a goal - the creation of the new man - and to be living in a state of permanent mobilization. We can ignore other features, which I have described at length elsewhere, such as the phenomenon of the production-elimination of the enemy (the enemy within being defined as an agent of the enemy without, as a parasite on the body, or as an interference with the workings of the machine). Nor am I trying here to reveal the contradictions totalitarianism comes up against. Even this brief outline allows us to re-examine democracy. When seen against the background of totalitarianism, it acquires a new depth and cannot be reduced to a system of institutions. In its turn, democracy too is seen to he a form of society; and our task is to understand what constitutes its uniqueness, and what it is about it that leads to its overthrow and to the advent of totalitarianism. Anyone who undertakes such a project can learn a great deal from Tocqueville. The thing that marks him out from his contemporaries is in fact his realization that democracy is a form of society, and he arrives at that conclusion because, in his view. democracy stands out against a background: the society from which it emerges and which he calls aristocratic society- a term which it would not be appropriate to discuss here. Tocqueville helps us to decipher the experience of modern democracy by encouraging us to look back at what came before it and, at the same time, to look ahead to what is emerging, or may emerge, in its wake. His investigations are important to us in several respects. He posits the idea that a great historical mutation is taking place, even though its premisses had long been established, and he puts forward the idea of an irreversible dynamic. Although he attempts to locate the fundamental principle of democracy in a social state - equality of condition - he explores change in every direction, takes an interest in social bonds and political institutions, in the individual, in the mechanisms of public opinion, in forms of sensibility and forms of

contradiction that arises when the social order no longer has a basis seems to me to be much more important than his reputation. He traces this contradiction by examining the individual, who has been released from the old networks of personal dependency and granted the freedom to think and act in accordance with his own norms. but who is, on the other hand, isolated, impoverished and at the same time trapped by the image of his fellows, now that agglutination with them provides a means of escaping the threat of the dissolution of his identity. He then examines public opinion as it conquers the right to expression and communication and at the same time becomes a force in its own right, as it becomes detached from subjects, thinks and speaks for itself, and becomes an anonymous power standing over them. He examines law which, because it is drawn to the pole of the collective will, accepts the new demands that are born of changes in mentalities and practices, and which, as a result of equality of condition, is increasingly dedicated to the task of standardizing norms of behaviour and, finally, he examines power, which has been set free from the arbitrariness of

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knowledge, in religion, law, language, literature, history, etc. His explorations lead him to detect the ambiguities of the democratic revolution in every domain, to make, as it were, an exploratory incision into the flesh of the social. At every moment of his analysis, he looks at things from both sides, moves from one side of the phenomenon to the other, and reveals the underside of both the positive - new signs of freedom -and the negative - new signs of servitude. It is only recently that Tocqueville has become a fashionable thinker, that he has been defined as the pioneering theorist of modern political liberalism. But his intuitive vision of a society faced with the general

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personal rule, but which, precisely because it destroys all the individual instances of authority, appears to belong to no one, except to the people in the abstract, and which threatens to become unlimited, omnipotent, to acquire an ambition to take charge of every aspect of social life. I am not saying that Tocqueville's analysis of this contradiction, which is inherent in democracy, is irrefutable. but it does open up a very fruitful line of research which has not been pursued. Without wishing to discuss the difficulties into which he stumbles - I have given some indication of these elsewhere2 - let me simply observe that his explorations are usually restricted to what I have termed the underside of the phenomena he believes to be characteristic of the new society, and that he does not pursue his explorations by examining the underside of the underside. True, a century and a half have gone by since the publication of Democracy in America. We therefore enjoy the benefits of experience and have the capacity to decipher things that its author could only glimpse. But it is not simply his lack of experience which restricts his interpretation; there is also, I believe, an intellectual reluctance (which is bound up with a political prejudice) to confront the unknown element in democracy. As I cannot develop my criticisms here, I will merely state that in his attempt to bring out the ambiguous effects of equality of condition, Tocqueville usually tries to uncover an inversion of meaning: the new assertion of singularity fades in the face of the rule of anonymity; the assertion of difference (of belief, opinion or morals) fades in the face of the rule of uniformity; the spirit of innovation is sterilized by the immediate enjoyment of material goods and by the pulverization of historical time; the recognition that human beings are made in one another's likeness is destroyed by the rise of society as abstract entity, and so on. What he fails to see, and what we are in a position to observe, is that another influence or

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On Modem Democracy

The Question of Democracy

counter-influence is always at work and that it counteracts the petrification of social life. Its effects are revealed by the appearance of ways of thinking and modes of expressiOn that are won m the face of anonymity. of the stereotyped language of opmwn; by. the nse of demands and struggles for rights that place the . formal .vtewpomt of the law in check; by the irruption of a new meamng of history; by the unfolding of multiple perspectives o� historical kno":'ledge as a result of the dissolution of an almost orgamc sense of durauon that was once apprehended through customs and traditions; by. the increasing heterogeneity of social life that accompames the domman�e of so�Jety and state over individuals. We would of course also be mistaken If, m our turn we claimed to be able to limit our explorations to the undersid of the underside. On the contrary, we must recognize that, so long as the democratic adventure continues, so long. as the terms of the contradiction continue to be displaced, the meanmg of what IS coming into being remains in suspense. Democra.cy thus proves to be the historical society par excellence, a society which, m Its very form, welcomes and preserves indeterminacy and which provides a remarkable contrast with totalitarianism which, because it is constructed under the slogan of creating a new man, claims to understand the law of its organization and development, and which, m the modern world,

by levelling and unifying the social field and. simultaneously, by inscribing itself in that field, made possible the development of commodity relations and rationalized activities in a manner that paved the way for the rise of capitalism. Under the monarchy, power was embodied in the person of the prince. This does not mean that he held unlimited power. The regime was not despotic. The prince was a mediator between mortals and gods or, as political activity became secularized and laicized, between mortals and the transcendental agencies represented by a sovereign Justice and a sovereign Reason. Being at once subject to the law and placed above laws, he condensed within his body, which was at once mortal and immortal, the principle that generated the order of the kingdom. His power pointed towards an unconditional, other-worldly pole, while at the same time he was, in his own person, the guarantor and representative of the unity of the kingdom. The kingdom itself was represented as a body, as a substantial unity, in such a way that the hierarchy of its members, the distinction between ranks and orders appeared to rest upon an unconditional basis. Power was embodied in the prince, and it therefore gave society a body. And because of this·, a latent but effective knowledge of what one meant to the other existed throughout the social. This model reveals the revolutionary and unprecedented feature of democracy. The locus of power becomes an empty place. There is no need .to dwell on the details of the institutional apparatus. The important point is

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�

secretly designates itself as a society without history. . . We will, however, remain within the limits of a. descnptwn If we simply extend Tocqueville's analyses, as they themselves urge u� to identify those features which pomt to the formatiOn of a �ew despotism. The indeterminacy we were discussmg does not pertam to the or�er of empirical facts, to the order of economic or soc1al facts wh1ch, hke the gradual extension of equality of condition, can be seen to be born of other facts. Just as the birth of totalitarianism defies all explanations which attempt to reduce that event to the level of empirical history, so the birth of democracy signals a mutation of th� symbolic order, as .

is most clearly attested to by the new position of. power. . . I have tried on several occasions to draw attentiOn to th1s mutatiOn. Here, it will be enough to stress certain of its aspects. The singularity of democracy only becomes fully apparent if we recall the nature of the monarchical system of the Ancien Regime. This is not in fact a matter ofrecovering from a loss of memory but, rather, of recentenng our investigations on something that we failed to recognize because we lost all sense of the political. It is in effect within the framework of the monarchy, or that of a particular type of monarchy which, pnnce originally developed in a theologico-political matrix, gave the . sovereign power within the boundaries of a terntory and made him both a secular agency and a representative of God, that the features, of state and society were first outlined, and that the first separatiOn of state and civil society occurred. Far from being reducible to a superstructural institution whose function can be derived from the nature of a mode of production, the monarchy was the agency which,

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that this apparatus prevents governments from appropriating power for their own ends, from incorporating it into themselves. The exercise of power is subject to the procedures of periodical redistributions. It represents the outcome of a controlled contest with permanent rules. This phenomenon implies an institutionalization of conflict. The locus of power is an empty place, it cannot be occupied -it is such that no individual and no group can be consubstantial with it - and it cannot be represented. Only the mechanisms of the exercise of power are visible, or only the men, the mere mortals, who hold political authority. We would be wrong to conclude that power now resides in society on the grounds that it emanates from popular suffrage; it remains the agency by virtue of which society apprehends itself in its unity and relates to itself in time and space. But this agency is no longer referred to an unconditional pole; and in that sense, it marks a division between the inside and the outside of the social, institutes relations beween those dimensions, and is tacitly recognized as being purely symbolic. Such a transformation implies a series of other transformations. and they cannot be regarded merely as effects, as cause and effect relations have no pertinence in the order of the symbolic. On the one hand, the phenomenon of disincorporation. which we mentioned earlier. is accompanied by the disentangling of the sphere of power, the sphere of law and the sphere of knowledge. Once power ceases to manifest the principle which generates and organizes a social body. once it

On Modern Democracy

The Quesrion of Democracy

ceases to condense within it virtues deriving from transcendent reason and justice, law and knowledge assert themselves as separate from and irreducible to power. And just as the figure of power in its materiality and its substantiality disappears, just as the exercise of power proves to be bound up with the temporality of its reproduction and to be subordinated to the conflict of collective wills, so the autonomy of law is bound up with the impossibility of establishing its essence. The dimension of the development of right unfolds in its entirety, and it is always dependent upon a debate as to its foundations, and as to the legitimacy of what has been established and of what ought to be established. Similarly, recognition of the autonomy of knowledge goes

when popular sovereignty is assumed to manifest itself, when the people is assumed to actualize itself by expressing its will, that social Interdependence breaks down and that the citizen is abstracted from all the networks in which his social life develops and becomes a mere statistic. Number replaces substance. It is also significant that in the mneteenth century this institution was for a long time resisted not only by conservatives and bourgeois liberals, but also by socialists -and this resistance cannot simply be imputed to the defence of class interests. It was provoked by the idea of a society which had now to accept that which cannot be represented. In this brief sketch of democracy, I have been forced to ignore a major aspect of the empirical development of those societies which are organized in accordance with its principles - a development which justified socialist-inspired criticisms. I am certainly not forgetting that democratic institutions have constantly been used to restrict means of access to power, knowledge and the enjoyment of rights to a minority. Nor am I forgetting - and this would merit a lengthy analysis - that, as Tocqueville foresaw, the emergence of an anonymous power facilitated the expansion of state power (and, more generally, the power of bureaucracies). I have, on the other hand, chosen to

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hand in hand with a continual reshaping of the processes of acquiring knowledge and with an investigation into the foundations of truth. As power, law and knowledge become disentangled, a new relation to the real is established; to be more accurate, this relation is guaranteed within the limits of networks of socialization and of specific domains of activity. Economic, technical, scientific, pedagogic and medical facts, for example, tend to be asserted, to be defined under the aegis of knowledge and in accordance with norms that are specific to them. A dialectic which externalizes every sphere of activity is at work throughout the social. The young Marx saw this only too well, but he mistakenly reduced it to a dialectic of alienation. The fact that it operates within the density of class relations, which are relations of domination and exploitation, should not make us forget that it stems from a new symbolic constitution of the social. The relation established between the competition mobilized by the exercise of power and conflict in society is no less remarkable. The erection of a political stage on which competition can take place shows that division is, in a general way, constitutive of the very unity of society. Or to put it another way, the legitimation of purely political conflict contains within it the principle of a legitimation of social conflict in all its forms. If we bear in mind the monarchical model of the Ancien Regime, the

meaning of the transformation can be summarized as follows: democratic society is instituted as a society without a body, as a society which undermines the representation of an organic totality. I am not suggesting that it therefore has no unity or no definite identity; on the contrary, the disappearance of natural determination, which was once linked to the person of the prince or to the existence of a nobility, leads to the emergence of a purely social society in which the people, the nation and the state take on the status of universal entities, and in which any individual or group can be accorded the same status. But neither the state, the people nor the nation represent substantial entities. Their representation is itself. in its dependence upon a political discourse and upon a sociological and historical elaboration, always bound up

with ideological debate. Nothing, moreover, makes the paradox of democracy more palpable than the institution of universal suffrage. It is at the very moment

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concentrate upon a range of phenomena which are, it seems to me, usually misunderstood. In my view, the important point is that democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the .markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge, and as to the basis of relations betweel self and other, at every level of social life (at every level where division, and especially the division between those who held power and those who were subject to them, could once be articulated as a result of a belief in the nature of things or in a supernatural principle). It is this which leads me to take the

view that, without the actors being aware of it, a process of questioning is implicit in social practice, that no one has the answer to the questions that arise, and that the work of ideology, which is always dedicated to the task of restoring certainty, cannot put an end to this practice. And that in turn· leads me to at least identify, if not to explain, the conditions for the formation of totalitarianism. There is always a possibility that the logic of democracy will be disrupted in a society in which the foundations of the political order and the social order vanish, in which that which has been established never bears the seal of full legitimacy, in which differences of rank no longer go unchallenged, in which right proves to depend upon the discourse which articulates it, and in which the exercise of power depends upon conflict. When individuals are increasingly insecure as a result of an economic crisis or of the ravages of war, when conflict between classes and groups is exacerbated and can no longer be symbolically resolved within the political sphere, when power appears to have sunk to the level of reality and to be no more than an instrument for the promotion of

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On Modem Democracy

the interests and appetites of vulgar ambition and when, in a word, it appears in society, and when at the same time society appears to be fragmented, then we see the development of the fantasy of the People­ as-One, the beginnings of a quest for a substantial identity, for a social body which is welded to its head, for an embodying power, for a state free from division. It is sometimes said that democracy itself already makes room for totalitarian institutions, modes of organization and modes of representation. Whilst this is certainly true, it is also still true to say that a change in the economy of power is required if the totalitarian form of society is to arise. In conclusion, I return to my initial considerations. It seems strange to me that most of our contemporaries have no sense of how much philosophy owes to the democratic experience, that they do not explore its matrix or take it as a theme for their reflections, that they fail to recognize it as the matrix of their investigations. When one recalls how certain great philosophers were drawn to Nazism, at least in its early stages, and, to a much greater and lasting extent, to Stalinism, one begins to wonder whether, in modern philosophy, the ability to break with the illusions of both theology and eighteenth- and nineteenth­ century rationalism does not carry with it, in turn, quasi-religious faith, a nostalgia for the image of a society which is at one with itself and which has mastered its history, for the image of an organic community. But can we restrict discussion to the idea of a separation between philosophical thought and political belief? Can either remain unaffected, once they have come into contact? It appears to me that the question is worth asking, and that we might be able to shed some light on it by following the evolution of the thought of Merleau-Ponty. A similar necessity led him to move from the idea of the body to the idea of the flesh and dispelled the attractions of the Communist model by allowing him to rediscover the indeterminacy of history and of the being of the social.

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Human Rights and The Welfare State

As soon as we begin to ask ourselves about human rights, we find ourselves drawn into a labyrinth of questions. 1 We must first ask ourselves if we can in fact accept the formula without making reference to a human nature. Or, if we reject the notion of human nature, without surrendering to a teleological vision of history. For can we in fact say that human beings have embarked upon a voyage of self­ discovery, that they create themselves by discovering and instituting rights in the absence of any principle that might allow us to decide as to their true nature and as to whether their evolution does or does not conform to their essence? Even at this early stage, we cannot ignore the question. Even if we attempt to avoid it and simply examine the import of an event such as the proclamation at the end of the eighteenth century of the rights known as the rights of man, other difficulties lie in store. If we adopt the latter course, our investigations appear to be guided, if not by observation, at least by a reading and interpretation of the facts. We begin by asking ourselves about the

meaning of the mutation that occurred in the representation of the individual and of society. That question leads to another: can the effects of that mutation elucidate the course of history up to the present time? To be more specific: is it the case that human rights merely served to disguise relations established in bourgeois society, or did they make possible, or even give rise to, demands and struggles which contributed to the rise of democracy? Even this is too crude a statement of the terms of the alternative. Even if - and I believe that the organizers of this de bate would accept the hypothesis - we agree that the institution of human rights has come to support a dynamic of rights, do we not have to investigate the effects of that development? It is one thing to say that social, economic and cultural rights (notably those mentioned in the United Nations Charter) arise as an extension of those original rights. It is quite another to say that they derive from the same inspiration, and it is yet another to take the view that they promote freedom. The question takes us further still if we ask whether