Raymond Tallis: In Defence of Realism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

 

For two generations and counting, literary studies in the universities of the West have been ruled by professors who have embraced ‘postmodernist’ doctrines intended to ‘subvert’ commonsense understanding of reality in the name of social and political egalitarianism. That there is no non-arbitrary limit to such subversion, that social and political egalitarianism can as easily be ‘deconstructed’ as social and political hierarchy, does not occur to many of these adepts of ‘Literary Theory’ although, among the more clear-eyed, it does not matter, since they have seen that Nietzsche’s will to power might best be satisfied by making a grand show of ‘social justice,’ even as its advocates enjoy the quasi-aristocratic privileges of tenure-based prosperity. And like the titled aristocrats of old, the new aristoi respond to their impudent critics either with serene shows of indifference, ignoring them altogether, or with a contemptuous back of the hand. 

A professor of geriatric medicine, thankfully independent of the bad opinions of the academics he (how do you say?) critiques, Raymond Tallis wisely selects a surveyable portion of this barren landscape: the ‘theorists’ rejection of realist fiction. Against their literary lordships, he ventures to claim that, “understood as an attempt to do justice to, to express or to preserve, a piece of reality, realism is not the dead hand of the past but the challenge of the present and the future,” despite “the inextricable mixture of half-truths and whole falsehoods” on which the case against them has been argued or, perhaps more accurately, asserted. Although he acknowledges the malign social and political intentions of the literary academics—many of them leftover New Leftists who never smartened up—he is primarily concerned that these “current trends in literary criticism represent a real threat to the development of fiction”: “The republic of letters cannot be a more healthy place for being wrapped in a fog of bad philosophy and worse linguistics and such a fog can only slow the appreciation of true worth.”

Lit-crit professors begin at turns by denying that “we” no longer have a “common sense of reality” but are restricted by “all kinds of relativistic structures of consciousness.” But they further claim that they, somehow, see these structures for what they are, namely, excrescences of “contemporary capitalist reality,” whose “essence is unreality.” Modern reality is “more horrible than any that has gone before,” “more vast and complex,” “pre-digested” by imagery put up by commercial advertisers and political propagandists, dominated not by nature but by the human artifacts designed to conquer nature. “Can any thinking artist trust his own perceptions?” Evidently, thinking critics can (and is not Das Kapital subtitled, “A Critique of Political Economy”?). Mere novelists had better get in line. 

Tallis demurs. “Revolting cruelty is not a twentieth-century invention; nor is the application of technical advances to bestial ends.” The American Civil War saw more American deaths than the wars of the twentieth century caused later Americans to suffer, and as for Tallis’s fellow Europeans, the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars devastated the old continent as thoroughly as any war in the twentieth century.  “It is, therefore, no more a sign of moral or intellectual insensitivity to try to write a realistic novel in the 1980s than it was in 1922 or 1857.” The real change has been the change of expectations in the West: the more “recent horrors” “seem less excusable because we like to believe that the world is—or should be—more civilized than it was.” Should technological progress not be accompanied by moral and political progress? If, manifestly, it is not, don’t blame realism, Tallis writes; blame the unrealism of progressivism. This some ‘postmodernists’ have proceeded to do, but without abandoning their progressivist sentiments. Nature, according to postmodernist sensibilities, is a benign and generous Mother. Tallis, who treats the chronically decaying elderly, rather doubts this. And, in a supremely ‘insensitive’ moment, he suggests that persons who claim that X is unreal must believe that something else is. That being the case, the attack on realism loses its cogency, unless the ‘theorists’ can show why they are the superior realists. Which they deny anyone can do, even as they act as if they’re doing it. 

Anti-realists often deny that the real world has an order or, more modestly, that the order seen in realist fiction “is alien to reality itself.” But how alien? Obviously, a story about a real event, and even more, a story about a made-up event that really could have happened, is not identical to the reality outside the ‘text.’ That doesn’t mean “that there is an especially pernicious distortion at work in the construction of realistic narratives.” Memories of events are not the events but that doesn’t mean “that all memory is false,” that “re-lived experience is a falsification of lived experience.” “Experience cannot of itself be true or false since truth values can be assigned to experience only when it is reflected upon and articulated into propositional form and made the basis of an assertion—as when, that is, it is recalled at a later date.” To say, ‘There is a dog in this room’ is not the experience of perceiving the dog in the room but it is a true (or false) statement, nonetheless. You can select a fact (choose to point out that there’s a dog in the room) but that doesn’t mean you made it up. Anti-realists confuse “the role of the subject as one who articulates reality into facts on the one hand and the truth-conditions of factual statements on the other; between what motivates the formulation of reality into statements and the reality that determines whether or not they are true…. Failure to observe this distinction will lead to a kind of idealism that holds that reality itself is created out of values—in short, to magic thinking.”

There is still another confusion, the assumption “that discourse can be genuinely ‘about’ something only if it is structured like it.” Just because language doesn’t have the same structure as (for example) nature doesn’t mean that language is a system closed off from nature. The reverse is also true: “an identity of form guarantees nothing,” inasmuch as Object A “does not count as a description of Object B just because it looks like it.” Thus, “isomorphism is…neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition either for expression or for truthful reference.” Just the opposite: “Only when there is a distance between what is said and the reality that is spoken of can a narrative, or any description, be ‘about’ anything.” Physical reality is, which means that “is not itself true or false.” Only a statement about reality can be true, in line with but not identical to the reality it describes or makes note of. “Truth and falsehood emerge as fully explicit categories only in relation to statements that formulate reality in order to present it as facts.” Yes, “telling transforms reality,” but “if telling were not different from living, it would be redundant.” 

“When these muddles are cleared up, little of the case against realistic facts remains.” And when that case evaporates, “the radical arguments against realistic fiction that we have examined here” do, too. 

What if the anti-realist were to concede these ‘epistemological’ points, but instead claim that realistic novels have been superseded by a more accurate medium, cinema? Are images not more accurate depictions of reality than words, precisely because they are depictions, pictures, especially moving pictures that track real-world activity? Indeed, no one could deny that a camera better “replicate[s] the visible surfaces of parts of the world” than a writer can do. But does reality “consist essentially of visible surfaces”? If not, then not. “At best, the camera renders sensibilia, not experiences or perceptions.” They cannot “depict the sense of visible things, in which experience and knowledge are dovetailed.” This is why people talk and write about movies when they try to understand them. Once again, “physical reality is in itself neither true nor false; neither are its representation.” One sees this whenever one notices “the usually dismal and sometimes downright embarrassing results of attempts to film great realistic novels,” when meaning gets squeezed out and only the spectacle remains.

More radically, and returning to epistemology, anti-realists may claim that “we get reality wrong not only when we report and remember it but even as we experience it.” In the neo-Marxist thought of Louis Althusser, for example, we are told that capitalist social structures and beliefs so distort reality, that the world as we now experience it is already so thoroughly artificial, that the realistic novel merely reports these distorted socially constructed experiences. “What counts as real” to the novelist is only “what is acknowledged by the group to which the individual belongs at a given moment or the group consciousness that is operating through him”—an “ideology” that has been “intersubjectively constructed.” The ideology claims to justify the rule of the ruling class in that society. The claim resembles the image of the Cave in Plato’s Republic, with the shadows of idols on its walls, except that in Marxism the idols’ movements are ultimately driven not by the rulers, and what contrasts with the artifacts, the idols, is not nature. It is instead the ‘dialectic of history’ that determines the conduct of the rulers. Historicism replaces naturalism. For Marxists, “what counts as ‘reality,’ then, is a privileged version of what is out there and is at least in part an outcome— of a struggle [the ‘dialectic’] between rival experiences of the world, related to competing needs and conflicting interests.” The ruling class uses its ideology to “naturalize social phenomena,” to make them seem real, “to confer upon them the objectivity of [the] material world, to make that which has been constructed by human beings seem to confront them as naturally given. “This is an illusion, sometimes deliberately conjured, sometimes shared by the rulers themselves.” (There can be little doubt that American slaveholders of the nineteenth century often believed the result of ‘race science’ or, to be unkind to, albeit honest with Althusser, that Marxists who have boosted themselves into positions of rule have often believed the claims of ‘scientific socialism.) According to him, “all ideology expresses a class position” while simultaneously concealing the reality of that position from its dupes. “Ideology,” Althusser claims, “is so potent and inescapable because it is invisible; because it does not consist of a set of ideas that can be debated, tested, opposed but is implicit in practices.” Realistic novels seem realistic only “because they do not question what is customarily taken for granted,” taking the side of the ruling-class ideology that prevails in their time and place. Proponents of ‘Literary Theory’ “imagine themselves as the somehow awakened”—Tallis writes decades before the term ‘woke’ replaced clunky, academic-sounding ‘consciousness’—persons “able to speak to readers who are still lost in the collective ideological dream.” Exactly how they achieve this heightened state of mind is often somewhat obscure, and the discrediting of Marxian ‘science’ might seem to have foreclosed that pathway to epistemological privilege. But so they have done, they insist.

Althusser does so by distinguishing himself, and his fellow neo-Marxists, from everyone else. All “subjects,” including neo-Marxist subjects, are “socially and historically constructed,” as “the self is merely a set of social relations” existing in space, in time, in thought and in action. The self (and here Althusser departs from the Marxism of Marx) is constituted by language. The problem, Tallis observes, is that subjects seem to “pre-exist the system, however much they are bound up or shaped by it.” Althusser denies this, dismissing it as “a symptom of the false consciousness that is the work of ideology.” The supposedly “unitary, pre-social ‘metaphysical’ subject is in fact a social construct.” “In fact,” Althusser proclaims, “the State and its Apparatuses only have meaning from the point of view of the class struggle, as an apparatus of the class struggle ensuring class oppression and guaranteeing the conditions, of exploitation and its reproduction,” since “man is an ideological animal by nature.” But “in fact”? “By nature”? How does Althusser know what facts and nature are, if his ‘self’ is socially constructed? How does he know that his socially constructed ‘self’ sees deeper into the nature of things, perceives facts more clearly, than the benighted many? How does he know that his self is socially constructed, if it is socially constructed? To do so, he needs to exempt himself from his own strictures. 

Nor does realist fiction necessarily endorse the existence of an unchanging self, unaffected by ‘History.’ Tallis remarks that on the contrary, “realistic fiction has done more than any other literary form to undermine the quasi-religious conception of the self as pre-formed, unfolding from within, kissed awake by crucial experiences”; realist authors “have been in the forefront of those who have discredited the essentialist conception of the self.” What Stendhal did with his persons caught up in the Battle of Waterloo, what Tolstoy did “to de-center history in perhaps the greatest nineteenth-century realist novel,” bear little resemblance to the caricatures of realism held up by the anti-realists. A realist novelist “does not have to subscribe to the beliefs implicit in liberal humanism,” beliefs from which Stendhal, and especially Tolstoy, are really quite remote. Are such men really incapable of ‘thinking critically’ about the world, or are they in fact guilty of failing to think Marxically? 

If, as Marxists and many other thinkers ancient and modern contend, there is no such Person as God to provide a comprehensive perspective against which merely human perspectives must be measured, then the otherwise “inexplicable coincidence or dovetailing of literally millions of different viewpoints” in the establishment of, well, science among other things, requires one “to postulate that there are ‘social forces’ ordering the developing consciousness so that it may participate in, understand and operate within, the intelligible order that has been agreed upon by the collective.” Yet this does not mean that “the forces combing consciousness to self-intelligibility and socializing its world picture can be expressed entirely in narrow political terms or summarized so easily as Althusser seems to imagine.” His “critique” makes “ideology inescapable and his own critique impossible,” an instance of the paradox of the Cretan Liar. This is particularly “awkward” for “those who would condemn realism on political grounds,” grounds that the contemnor must somehow know, if he is to sustain his claim to rule those who do not know. And if “all discourse, inasmuch as it is intelligible, is steeped in ideology,” what then? How can Althusserians distinguish the regimes they endorse—the ‘peoples’ republics’—from the ‘bourgeois democracies” and, if they manage to do so, how can they claim one is superior to the other? 

Moreover, “even if the ideas of the radical critics of realism were actually true, they would still not justify the welcome that is given to most of the existing brands of anti-realism.” By demolishing the criteria by which a literary work may be judged good or bad, they make literary work, including literary criticism itself, pointless. One is left with whimsicality authored by “whimlings.” “There is a highly advertised abdication of authorial control”—the celebrated ‘death of the author’—the claim that “chance or the unconscious dictates the work.” If so, who knows and why care? Tallis is so bold as to suggest that a main purpose of the whimling is to call attention to himself, like “a brilliant child dancing in the spotlight of an admiring gaze.” In the face of the alleged absurdity of bourgeois existence, play is the only serious thing left to do, especially if it can be presented as subversive of bourgeois existence.

Much of this was anticipated by the French surrealists—André Breton, Louis Aragon being the most prominent—who flourished in the aftermath of the First World War. The original surrealists “combined art with ‘direct action,’ writing with scandal in an anarchistic attempt to “undermine and possibly abolish bourgeois reality.”  “There was a dream of transforming the world,” of a vast liberation of desires in the wake of destroying “logic and everything based on it” or in any way partaking of it, such as religion, morality, and the family. It wasn’t long before they were outdone by “madmen greater than themselves and a collective madness greater than anything than they could aspire to,” the fascist and Communist tyrants who “set about destroying religion, morality and family, with a degree of success greater than [the surrealists] had ever imagined.” Aragon distinguished himself by seeing this and going right along with it, embracing Stalinism. “The last prominent French literary figure to wake up out of the Stalinist dream,” he may be said to have anticipated the aging New Leftists and their students who now celebrate the genocidal intentions of mullahs. “The history of surrealism is not that of an undifferentiated, nameless Id but of certain large posturing Egos.”

What happens when you ‘destroy’—i.e., abandon—logic is that you end up saying nothing, rather as I do when I tell you I have in my possession a square circle. You don’t know what I mean, and neither do I. And so: the anti-realist text must be “free of all the usual trappings of realism” but at the same time somehow “reflect the unreal nature of contemporary reality”; it should “criticize, not collude in, the prevailing ideology” yet “reflect the dehumanized face of contemporary reality” all while resolutely opposing ‘humanism’; it should be “self-reflexive to the point of infinite regression,” since an aversion to infinite regression only worries a logical mind, and it should be “non-referential,” never ‘about’ anything, “‘writable’ but not ‘readable.'” Somehow, this farrago of incommensurables will change the world for the better, although no one can say (or everyone equally can say) what ‘better’ would be. Ultimately, “a text that ceased to be a communication emanating from a writer and received by a reader would simply cease to be a text.” Which, in many of these cases, wouldn’t be such a bad thing, were it literally the case.

Meanwhile, what one ‘literary theorist’ has called “the golden age of criticism” chugs along, thanks to the institutional inertia of the universities; “it would be only a small exaggeration to say that the syllabus, rather than the open market of the book trade, was the economic space of postmodernism.” That the New Left continues to control academic institutions has given the movement a lifespan far exceeding its intellectual deserts, as the ideologues run the show. That show addresses literature only peripherally; “critics still take sides—but the objects of their most explicit advocacy tend to be critical theories rather than works of literature,” very much at the expense of “literary or aesthetic judgment.” Nor is the show especially difficult to put on; given the prevalent egalitarianism, lit-crits need not work too hard, once they’ve mastered the jargon. One “does not prefer ‘good’ works over ‘bad,’ the canon of ‘literature’ over the rest: literature is merely ‘what gets taught’ and is therefore defined not in terms of its intrinsic properties but on the basis of the purely extrinsic accident that it serves someone’s (ideological) purpose to have it valued and therefore taught.” As usual, in practice this means that the egalitarians have ensconced themselves in a hierarchy, with ‘stars’ pulling down substantial sums of money in exchange for their none-too-burdensome labors. Non-referentiality seems not to interfere with successful careerism in the rotten bourgeois society. This leads to some amusing paradoxes, as when the plays of the avant-garde Marxist Bertolt Brecht become what even one admirer calls “classics of the bourgeois theater.” (“Their revolutionary impact,” Tallis remarks, “may be judged by the almost total absence of the proletariat from their audiences in the free world and the Arts Council funding necessary to mount them.”) And so, “behind ‘theory’ is a dream of unmasking literature and society at large and in this way contributing to the revolution that will lead to a better future. Exactly how this is going to come about is a little unclear.” It is likely to remain so. This more or less must be so, since “if language, for example, were essentially non-referential, then all fiction—not merely realistic fiction—would be impossible; and so too would all literary criticism.” 

“All of this is so obvious, the reader may wonder why critics have managed to maneuver themselves into such absurd positions.” It helps not have had any serious “experience of continuous, logical or critical thought,” to have avoided the task of “advocating ideas that are put to the test of logic or of experience.” Institutional insulation provided by the universities enables the literature professors to concentrate their attention on the politics of academia itself, where rhetorical gestures and petition-signing suffice when it comes to consideration of politics beyond the university walls. The fact that “experimental art and progressive politics” do not necessarily “go together” in the lives of artists outside academic confines may be safely ignored.

Against all this, Tallis asserts that “realistic fiction remains the great unfinished aesthetic adventure.” As the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn demonstrates, a realist need not attempt to write like Tolstoy (or Flaubert or Dickens). The Red Wheel experiments with a variety of literary techniques: “the task of letting reality into fiction will always demand a questioning attitude to the language and assumptions of one’s own life and of the world one knows and will require the author to be as experimental as any of the more obtrusively experimental anti-realists.” Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Russian and Communist revolutions invites “a response to an invitation to draw part of what we now; or to use what we know to imagine into what we don’t.” Since “man is the only form of matter that is astonished at its own existence and capable of conceptualizing its own mutability in the terrifying idea of death,” realistic fiction “is, potentially, the highest achievement of man,” and can serve as a rebuke to tyrannies political and intellectual, alike. As for anti-realism, it would be a mistake to try to get rid of it, were that possible. “The anti-realist critique, keeping realism on its toes by continually questioning the received version of the nature of reality and mocking the fictional conventions by which reality is captured for the printed page, is an essential goad, an irritant driving the realistic novelist towards a more self-critical and conscious confrontation with reality, a greater willingness continually to compare what he writes with the world he is experiencing outside of his moments of writing. It forces realism to notice itself.” But for that to happen, “realism, however, remains central.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nathan Orlando: Raymond Aron and His Dialogues in an Age of Ideologies. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2023.

This review was originally published in Perspectives on Political Science, Volume 52, Number 4, October 2023.

 

A fully ‘credentialed’ graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, a longtime professor of sociology at the Sorbonne, Raymond Aron (1905-1983) nonetheless wrote about politics for scholarly and general reader in exactly the same way: free of jargon, full of common sense. He wrote that way because he thought of politics that way—politically. Aristotle defines politics as the relation of reciprocal ruling and being ruled. Whether addressing his fellow scholars or those who read his newspaper articles, he always spoke as one citizen to another.

In thinking this way, Aron avoided the technicist temptation, with its futile attempt to reduce political science to a set of mathematical equations and graphs, and the even more futile and demonstratively dangerous temptation to reduce political theory to ideology. As Nathan Orlando puts it in this impressive, book, “political scientists of both mindsets dream of a formula such that political action could become simply a matter of inputting the relevant variables into the transhistorical, immaculate equation”—whether expressed in numbers or in formulaic words—and “thereby obviating the need for fallible human judgment.” Political thought needs political theory, which can provide a framework for making political choices, so long as the theorist denies himself the hubristic pleasure of supposing that his ideas solve political problems. With Aristotle, Aron knew that “it is not always ignorance but sometimes the very nature of the subject matter that determines the nature of a theory”; since politics isn’t chemistry or physics, subject to strictly controlled experimentation upon substances that don’t ‘talk back,’ no political theory can ‘print out’ and answer to such questions as war or peace, republic or principality. Insofar as one can discern a theory in Aron’s political thought, it is in large measure “a theory about the limits of theory.” he offers “not a set of ready-made solutions to all the problems of political life but a path to find solutions to a given dilemma.”

Accordingly, in considering the political conditions of mid-twentieth century Europe, Aron engaged not in monologues but dialogues, in some cases engaging political thinkers and statesmen who were reluctant to dialogue with him. He became accustomed to such dialogues early on, having rejected the neo-Kantian philosophy of his university professors in the 1920s, the more sinister philosophic determinism (‘Left’ and ‘Right) he encountered in Germany in the early 1930s, and the economically sound but insufficiently political political economy of Hayek in the 1940s. Although an admirer of the great republican monologist, Charles de Gaulle, he remained independent of Gaullism; in his dialogue with the General, he received few direct responses to his criticisms but knew that his silent interlocutor regarded him as un homme sérieux, the only contemporary political writer worth reading. In his Socratic role, “buzzing like a gadfly,” Aron targeted “comprehensive doctrines, secular religions, demagogues, and all simple, indiscriminate theories that promise miraculous solutions to the problems of human life,” preferring the sobriety of Tocqueville to the systematic rationalism of the ‘high moderns’ and the no less dogmatic irrationalism of the ‘postmoderns.’ 

Many of what would become called the postmodernist themes were sounded by Jean-Paul Sartre, Aron’s classmate at the École. After graduation from university and completion of his military service, Aron accepted academic appointments in Germany, first in Cologne and then in Berlin. Sartre, who had failed his examinations, remained in France but continued his study of philosophy. Both began as idealist, neo-Kantian ‘men of the Left.’ Aron studied Marx, Weber, Husserl, and Heidegger at the same time Hitler undertook his meteoric ascent to supreme power. On the theoretical as well as the practical level, German erased Aron’s naivete. Upon his return to France, it was Aron who brought Husserl to the attention of Sartre; “if Sartre is the father of modem existentialism, Aron played the matchmaker.” That the “human eye cannot see itself,” requiring “a perspective outside of itself by which to see itself,” is the “essential insight of existentialism.” Aron and Sartre discovered themselves in this initial dialogue with one another. But they discovered radically different persons. Aron took from the Germans both a sense of the importance of dialogue to the uncovering of reality and a powerful understanding what happens in politics when politicians abandon dialogue for dictatorship, in both the political and the literal sense of the word. The result of that abandonment is tyranny. Modern tyranny seizes upon the claim that history, conceived as the course of events, is going somewhere, its course determined by historical laws, themselves conceived as ‘dialectical.’ But this dialectic involves not only the clash of opinions, as seen in Socrates’ dialogues, but the clash of actions; according to historicists, the course of events consists of thoughts and actions that unfold in a predictable and inevitable sequence, giving absolute authority to those who understand the laws of history over those who must consent to follow the commands of this vanguard. Aron saw that the two most powerful parties in Germany, the Nazis and the Communists, made the same kind of claim to rule, one basing the historical dialectic on ‘class consciousness,’ the other on ‘race consciousness.’ The weakest German party was animated by the same sort of neo-Kantian idealism Aron had seen in France; its regime, the Weimar Republic, could not stand up to the parties of tyranny.

Aron recoiled from all three parties, all three ideologies. For him, the attempt to replace an impotent idealism with a fusion of idealism and realism was no grand philosophic ‘synthesis’ but merely a chimera. Instead, while remaining mindful of such an ideal or “universal” principle as justice, one must consider political actions primarily in the light of practical rather than theoretical reasoning. Moralism in politics “demands perfection”; it commands us to follow the absolute truth and let the world fall. Practical politics “accepts compromise as inevitable in political life,” given the reciprocity of ruling and being ruled as the core of political life. “The moral critic sleeps well. But he is useless to anyone but himself.” The practical critic and the practical politician reach out to others in dialogue and friendship, seeking reasonable if not abstractly rational settlements of concrete political problems. Aron wrote in that spirit, seeking to engage and persuade, not to announce and demand, much less command. At the same time, the partisan conflicts he witnessed in Germany alerted him to the crucial importance of regime politics, politics consisting of disputes over a nation’s purposes and its way of life, a politics the mild parliamentarians of interwar Europe had hoped they had removed from the landscape.

With Husserl and Marx now in hand, Sartre, by contrast, spent the 1930s and 1940s engaged in a “quixotic attempt to wed existentialism to Marxism.” He never really studied either politics or economics and, while abandoning neo-Kantianism he retained the tone of a strict, even fervent, moralist. Dismissing Kant’s ideals or transcendent principles as illusory, he became even “less tolerant of moral shortcomings rather than more.” He began with Nietzschean assumption that god is dead—not only the God of the Bible but the ‘god’ of transcendentalist philosophy, the categorical imperative. If God is dead, everything is permissible. There is no duty, whether Christian or Kantian. Nor is there any human nature that can serve as a moral standard. But this radical freedom implies radical responsibility. “In living, we each craft our own essence”; existentialist “authenticity” is “to embrace this freedom.” “For Sartre, all the world is a series of evocative paintings that means something particular to each observer, with no impression closer to the truth than any other.” On the one hand, this requires constant self-assertion, constant self-invention, a sort of permanent revolution (to borrow a phrase from Trotsky, later enacted by Mao); on the other hand, since we only understand ourselves by seeing ourselves in the eyes of others, this also requires the recognition of those others while denying that others’ existence is any more stable than one’s own. In Sartre’s view, political struggle was entirely ad hominem, a matter of conflicts among persons, and a succession of Manichean” or uncompromising conflicts at that, since any compromise must be inauthentic, a poor-spirited concession to someone who has espoused some view other than one’s own. This accounts for Sartre’s detestation of “the bourgeois West,” with its commercial-republican inclination to split differences, to come to reasonable accommodations among citizens. Sartre thus wavers from endorsing anti anti-Western political actor, very much including sanguinary tyrants, to the anarchism of the French students during their rebellion of May 1968. 

Thus, “for the first time in the history of philosophy, Sartre takes as a model for dialectic not the dialogue but individual or even solitary consciousness,” whereby each “self” thinks and defines its own existence. “The role of the interlocutor is to conform rather than to contribute.” As a result, Sartre’s writings became more and more impenetrable, whereas Aron’s writings remained clear and eminently readable throughout his career. Goodwill between the two men “became a casualty of ideology.” The friendship ended when Aron (briefly) dared to collaborate with the Gaullists, who defended republicanism against both fascism and communism.

Although Sartre called Marxism “the unsurpassable philosophy of our time,” his attempt to, well, surpass it by wedding existentialism to it ran into an irresolvable contradiction. “The existentialist prizes the radical, inalienable freedom of the self, realized in dialectic.” “But dialectical materialism,” the core of Marxism, “holds that the subject—bourgeois and proletarian alike—is determined by the relations of productive forces out of his control.” There can be no ‘responsibility’ in the Sartrian sense; consistent with his determinism, Marx refrains from blaming the capitalist for thinking and acting as he does. In his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre vainly attempts to square the circle, transferring the dialectic from socioeconomic classes to individuals. So relocated, the struggle becomes the individual’s fight to rest the pull of what Sartre calls “the practico-inert,” the “everyday comfort and complacency” which chains us “within the banality of bourgeois routine and its trappings.” Human freedom id dialectical, the practico-inert anti-dialectical. According to Sartre, human life has always been a struggle against the scarcity of resources. Yet, even as human beings move from scarcity to some degree of prosperity, unfreedom persists. The individual by himself cannot effectively resist this dead weight of the practico-inert, but when he freely joins a “fused group” of fellow reels, “as the French did during the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the Revolution that followed,” then “each member [voluntarily] thinks and acts as any other,” and freedom triumphs. This is the link between Sartrian individual freedom and Sartrian socialism. The initial, unifying surge of revolutionary fervor can, moreover, be sustained: “The totality of the group is guaranteed, in the final account, by terror”—the guillotine being the weapon of choice in the 1790s. But that, too, is freedom since the individual has freely pledged, Sartre writes, to “instill terror within” himself by telling his fellow revolutionaries, “You must kill me if I secede.” Although he seems not to recognize it, Sartre has radicalized the ‘bourgeois’ social contract of Thomas Hobbes, whereby the sovereign monarch wields death, the king of terrors, over his subjects.

The Kremlin was not amused. Sartre had no more studied Marx’s Capital than Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and it was on the economic determinism of Marx that the Politburo hung its collective (and collectivist) hat. Sartre consoled himself by railing against the “deliberate moral heinousness” of the West, preferring to judge the West by its defects, its supposed “moral perversity,” while judging the Communist regimes “on their lofty aspirations which their shortcomings ought not,” in his view, “overshadow.” After all, Communist crimes aim at building socialism. But even this could not reconcile real, existing Communism to existentialism, as Sartre himself began to see. Even terrorizing purges couldn’t last forever. Just as the revolutionary fervor of the Bolsheviks ossified into the rule of a new ruling class of Party bureaucrats, so Sartre’s oath-bound “fused group” will, Aron predicted “ossify over time as struggle gives way to routine,” causing the group to fall back into “the very practico-inert against which the struggle began.” For Sartre, then, the permanent revolution really must be permanent, endlessly renewed. ‘History’ will have no end; it is a cycle. But if so, why “did any of these choices or those making them actually matter?” Were the choices really free, at all? Was the free self-immolation of the individual into the group not meaningless?

Aron was not more impressed by Sartre’s intellectual legerdemain than the Communists. He considered “the major fact of our age” to be “neither socialism, nor capitalism, nor the intervention of the state, nor free enterprise,” but “the monstrous development of technology and industry,” seen in all political regimes and economic systems. The commercial-republican West and the socialist-tyrannical East both pursued “the same ends: the maximization of consumer, commercial, and military goods and services.” In this struggle, by the 1970s the victory of the West was obvious, as Aron argued in his ironically titled 1977 book, In Defense of Decadent Europe. Marx’s pseudo-scientific claims of the inevitable collapse of ‘capitalism’ having been falsified, Sartre was trying to marry a corpse. And both versions of Marxism led to rule by terror, by mass-murder, although Sartre’s version skipped the revolutionary stage and went right to the farce—May ’68. The problem was not only a matter of unutterably bad practical judgment; it involved, preeminently, a theoretical error. “The freedom of the individual requires that future history remain both unknown and unknowable, at least in full.” Neither personal freedom nor political liberty can be fully tethered to determinism. At the same time, those who seek such freedom and such liberty need to take heed of the realities in front of them rather than the dream they imagine to be ahead of them.” “To defer blame for political acts until the arrival of the kingdom to come is to abdicate political judgment in favor of faith and to sacrifice present political goods”—to say nothing of living human beings—to “hypothetical ones.” “Liberal democracy has not completely removed tragedy from the human condition, but things are not nearly bad enough to justify gambling away every juridical and logical barrier to unlimited despotism in the hope of making things marginally better.” Secular religion of the totalitarian stripe teaches that you must break an egg in order to make an omelet, but the omelet is spoiled by the violence of the breaking. Non-secular religions usually incline to take care that means fit ends, praising the prudence of serpents along with the innocence of doves and leaving the severer punishments to the superior judgment of God. 

With Friedrich Hayek, Aron found himself in dialogue with a fellow liberal, if not a fellow liberal democrat, a firm ally not only in the struggle against Marxism but against the statist dirigisme of John Maynard Keyes. Keynes and his school defined freedom as the overcoming of necessity—obviously drawing from Bacon’s “conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate”—a conquest centering on the accumulation of power in the form of wealth. That is, power defined ‘econonomistically’ betokens true human freedom. Hayek re-centers the meaning of freedom on its classical foundation: scope for reasoned action, “independence of the arbitrary will of another.” Aron shares this orientation, writing and speaking in order to lead his fellow citizens “down the path of political wisdom” by bringing them to think with him, not to obey rhetorical appeals to ‘the right side of History.’ The two men “shared a common understanding of human agency in history”; in the course of events, thoughtful actions can make a difference. We are not awash in ‘process.’

At the same time, reasoning must not overreach its powers, becoming rationalism. Hayek distinguishes the Scottish from the French Enlightenment. The latter “posits the unlimited potential of human reason to overcome all obstacles and accidents, to incorporate all into its order,” as indeed the Keynesians inclined to do. The Scottish Enlightenment, seen preeminently in the writings of Adam Smith, understands reason not as systematic but as the more limited pursuit of prosperity based on conditions readily seen, not supposedly foreseen—this, further limited by the precepts of conscience, as described in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. A shared “humbling recognition of the limits of human reason led Hayek and Aron to the same conclusion about the nature of governments, both socialist and pluralistic: they are not and cannot be omnipotent in governing human affairs.” This rationally discernible understanding of reason’s limits and the humility it encourages contrasts with the hubris of ideology.

Paradoxically, it was the success of liberal economics and politics that was undermining liberalism in the years following the Second World War. Aron noticed two closely related maladies: first (in an insight borrowed from Tocqueville), “the better things get, the more frustrated individuals become with the imperfections that remain, that conditions are not better still”; second (in an insight borrowed from Joseph Schumpeter, but seen as far back as the Bible), the virtues that build prosperity—thrift, public spiritedness—decline as prosperity increases. In the postwar years, to point out the dangers of ‘the affluent society’ was to go against the grain of prevailing sentiment in the democracies Aron saw “a certain kinship” with Hayek, “this man who chooses to defy the demos for the sake of the demos.”

Hayek understands freedom’s opposite, coercion, as a narrowing of the individual’s choices back by the threat of harm. “For Hayek, coercion is the great evil to be avoided not simply as an intrinsic or independent iniquity but because it disrupts the ability for man to make use of his rationality,” the characteristic that makes him a human being. On the contrary, “the possibilities for the individual should remained as unrestricted and open to the unforeseen as possible.” To achieve this, Hayek proposes the rule of law, which differs from coercion because it is promulgated not hidden, and it is impersonal. Law provides the individual with information about the conditions under which the individual can act, giving him foreknowledge of what will or will not happen if he does what he plans to do. Law gives him “the predictability upon which to base future conduct.” Therefore, a democratic regime may compromise the rule of law, since democracy is a procedure, a mode of governing, and as such animated by the arbitrary will of the majority, which is unpredictable.

Aron takes Hayek’s point, but demurs. “Non-coercion appears to Aron to be an insufficient standard by which to measure freedom.” It does not take into account the moral and political complexities of affluent, industrial societies, which constrain citizens in ways that mere equality under the law cannot address. In modern states, political liberty, participation in the framing of the laws that govern us, has become indispensable to the maintenance of individual freedom. Moreover, modern political economies can constrain the freedom of action of industrial workers; Marx was right about that, if about little else. Marx wrongly dismisses “formal freedoms”—political liberty—in favor of “real” freedoms—protection against unemployment and other ills of the business cycle and of factory-worker “wage slavery.” “Formal freedoms” will not suffice “when the ability to exercise them is lacking.” Both kinds of freedom must be respected; “the two types of freedom exist in dialogue” among citizens who stand ready to fit one with the other. For Aron, the United States of his time, the American way of life, had achieved a decent reconciliation, to the degree possible, of these “various desires for freedom.”

Behind laws, one always finds a regime, and a regime consists not only of a way of life but of persons, rulers, the institutions by which they rule, and the purposes they pursue by ruling. A government of laws is strictly impossible, only a government in accordance with laws. Only persons can govern, and they are governing other persons. In applying laws, even ‘strict constructionist’ judges need to exercise equity, prudential judgment of particular individuals whose circumstances differ from case to case; individuals need equal protection under the laws, not sameness of application of the laws. “Even were it possible to expunge the human element of political life, politics without men becomes an automated system, a machine focused upon efficiency that more than likely sublimates all other priorities to economic progress”—understandably enough in Hayek, “an economist by training” who “attempt[s] to fit his political philosophy into his economic categories.” But as Aron insists, “Politics is never reducible to economics,” whether Marxist or liberal. “The soldier who throws himself onto a grenade, the voter who agrees to higher taxes, the jury that convicts a gang member who promises vengeance, these do not pass muster for economic rationality.” Surprisingly, Hayek’s denigration of politics, his attempt to replace it with the rule of law, parallels the anti-political character of the administrative state he detests, replacing the government of persons with the administration of things. On the contrary, Aron argues, “Politics as usual constitutes the primary recourse against the administrative state.”

“Aron makes the radical suggestion that deriving law from the dialogue of men is not only not a tragedy of the human condition but the only way to approach some issues,” the only way to acknowledge that politics addresses the persistence of human imperfection. “The search for the transcendent, perfect code will leave us wanting.” And Tocqueville is right (in this, neither man is more French): Political liberty opens the individual human soul to a joie de vivre unattainable under the anti-political regimes of modern tyranny or the impersonal “rule of law.” This can “only be doubted by minds captive to fanaticism or prejudice.” In Aron’s words, “democracy is morally superior to despotism not because, say, its economic system is better”—though it is—or “because it is more creative and generally productive”—but “because it comes up with better human beings” under the conditions of modern statism. Within the framework of the modern state, government of and by the people, ruling one another reciprocally, politically, is now the best way to achieve government for the people.

In Charles de Gaulle, Aron addressed no theorist devoid of any sense of practical politics. As Aron saw it, de Gaulle’s mistakes owed to his inadequate political theory, which skewed his excellent political judgment. De Gaulle, the ardent French nationalist, at times took his nationalism too far.”

Aron cautioned his readers not to mistake Gaullist nationalism as either a form of biological pseudo-science (as seen in Hitler) or as a species of misguided metaphysics (as propounded by Hegel). For de Gaulle, a nationality does consist of the “spirit” of a people, but not in the unfolding of some supposed ‘Absolute Spirit.’ Nationality results instead from ruling institutions, moeurs or ways of life, and the historical experience of a people, along with its purpose or purposes—in the case of France, famously, la grandeur. That is, nationality closely resembles what Aristotle calls a regime, with “spirit” meaning what Aristotle means by ethos. This question of the French regime had wracked French politics for a century and a half, with partisans of Legitimist monarchism (absolutists and constitutionalists), Bonapartist despotism, republicanism (military or commercial), socialism (democratic or communist), and oligarchy (‘authoritarian’ or fascist), vying for rule. Implicated in the ‘Who rules?’ question was the ‘way of life’ questions, since “France was the last country in Western Europe to cease eulogizing the yeoman farmer, to accept the city as a benign rather than devouring monster and, in short, the last to modernize.” More precisely, however, France was the last to modernize its civil society but among the first to modernize its state, which it did under the Bourbons in the seventeenth century. Added to these dilemmas of regime and the relation between modern state and civil society was France’s geopolitical circumstance. Locate squarely on the Great European Plain stretching from “the Atlantic to the Urals,” as de Gaulle put it, more than once, a militarily powerful Franc might succumb to the lure of imperialism, while a weak France might succumb to the imperial ambitions of others. The Russians were far away, with imperial ambitions that did not read so far west, but once Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns had unified the many German states, France was outnumbered and outgunned by its next-door neighbor.

Call it patriotism, nationality, or nationalism, de Gaulle saw the way forward for the French in the proud, spirited invocation of Frenchness, backed institutionally by a strong executive elected by the people, not the weak parliamentarism that had failed Franc and Germany. Hence the Fifth Republic, for which he acted as the founder. “Nationalism, he hoped could provide [the] cohesion necessary for France, battered by waves of military and social upheaval in the first half of the twentieth century”—and indeed for a hundred twenty years before that—to “regain control of her destiny”—her self-government—in “the second half.”

Aron saw, understood, and concurred in most of this. Throughout the 1930s, both men had warned against French failure to take German ambitions seriously. During their exile in London, Aron worked on La France Libre, the Gaullist newspaper, which had built up more subscribers than any other monthly publication in Britain by the end of the war. De Gaulle wasn’t entirely happy with Aron’s journalistic touch, which he regarded as too analytical, insufficiently ardent for the times. But the break came in 1943, when Aron published an article titled. “L’Ombre de Bonaparte,” in which he suggested that “the growing personality cult” surrounding the Free French leader might result in the ruin of French republicanism, after the war. He was especially troubled by de Gaulle’s claim to symbolize or embody France itself; he had already overridden the rule of law by dismissing the Vichy regime the parliamentarians had surrendered to, in the wake of the Nazi conquest. Having asserted his own claim to rule, having become “the arbiter of what was and what was not ‘eternal France,'” de Gaulle, at least in the minds of some member of his entourage in exile, began to resemble Louis Napoleon—or even Louis XIV, with his worrisome claim, “L’État, c’est moi.” “Human nature being what it is, it would have been difficult not to conflate the nation with its guardian, guarantor, promulgator, and chief of government himself.”

Aron’s suspicions heightened after the Nazis took over southern France beginning in November 1942, where the Vichy regime had ruled (under Nazi supervision) for the previous two years. The London Gaullists worried that the Vichyites might take their regime to Algeria and set up their gown government in exile in competition with Free France. As Orlando summarizes the matter, “during this pivotal reconfiguration of forces, General de Gaulle chose self-interest over national interest,” fearing that the doddering Marshal Pétain, figurehead leader of the Vichyites, might “find his backbone and do the right thing.” “Where the roads between self-interest and national interest diverged, the General failed to make the necessary distinction and chose himself over France.”

But did he? De Gaulle viewed the insinuation with indignation, and rightly so. De Gaulle was no monarchist, Bonapartist or otherwise, and the Vichyites were no republicans. What is more, and worse, the charge of Bonapartism was precisely the accusation leveled against de Gaulle by President Roosevelt and his State Department throughout the war. De Gaulle suspected the Americans of wanting France to return to a weak, parliamentary form of republicanism that Washington could readily influence. (One might add that Roosevelt himself hardly favored a legislature-centered regime in his own country.) In de Gaulle’s eyes, Aron’s article added another bucket of water to the American grist mill. The problem was that in 1943, Aron knew de Gaulle too little to know that. His concern was understandable; it might have been allayed precisely by an Aron-style dialogue between the two men—this one in person, not in print—but that never happened.

When de Gaulle voluntarily left the government in the year after the end of the war, Aron was reassured of the General’s republican bona fides. His fears renewed in 1958, however, when the crisis of French rule in Algeria threatened the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle lost no time in swooping in, shouldering aside the hapless parliamentarians threatened by a military coup orchestrated by Algeria-based military officers. Admittedly, as Aron wrote, de Gaulle “has the soul of a paternal monarch or of a prince-president, not of a tyrant.” Still, in a role analogous to that of the dictator-savior-legislators of the Roman republic, de Gaulle founded a republic Aron judged to grant too much power to the president, over-correcting the parliamentary republicanism that had failed the country every time it had been put to a serious geopolitical test. As he frequently did, Aron preferred the American system of mutually checking, balanced powers, however much that had been compromised by the likes of Roosevelt. Aron thus continued to uphold dialogue, not executive monologue, as the sine qua non of the republican regime and indeed of genuine politics.

To emphasize the need for a strong executive in the new republic, de Gaulle attempted to stake out an independent stance, the vindication of French sovereignty or self-government and the assertion of French grandeur in his foreign policy. This involved moves designed to inspire national sentiments not only in France but throughout the world, undermining (as he hoped) the rival Cold War hegemons, the United States and the Soviet Union. That is, de Gaulle, who understood very well that France could no longer be grand in the manner of Louis XIV or Napoleon I, could still act greatly by bringing every nation to take on the moral and political responsibility of self-government, against imperialism. At the same time, he hoped to build Europe into a federation, not an empire of sovereign nations, “l’Europe des patries.” Ultimately, this would include Russia itself; at one point, he startled Premier Alexei Kosygin with the abrupt invitation, “Come, let us build Europe together.” (The firm Communist Party ideologue demurred.) De Gaulle took this to be an achievable project, if only in the long run, because he saw that nations outlive their rulers and ruling institutions of the moment. Sooner or later, he believed, the nations will prevail. France would reach for a new type of greatness, the greatness that comes from leading the nations to a new order of geopolitics beyond both Realpolitik and imperialism.

While that last claim is empirically true, if French nationality consists of a regime in the profound Aristotelian sense of the word, not simply in politicians and institutions that evanesce, would regime conflicts not persist among self-governing nations? De Gaulle knew that they would, which is why he saw to it that (to take the most striking example) France built a nuclear arsenal that could be aimed in all directions. Aron considered these long-range strategies and tactics a threat to France in the present. To destabilize the Atlantic Alliance in the name of French self-government and greatness might well make de Gaulle’s farsighted policy impossible, causing it to stumble long before it could be realized.

In response to these criticisms particularly a 1961 article quite prematurely titled, “Adieu to Gaullism,” de Gaulle took the trouble to write to Aron in 1963. “At bottom,” he said, “everything: ‘Europe,’ the ‘Atlantic Community,’ ‘NATO,’ ‘armaments,’ and so on, comes down to a single question, should France be France?” Yes, Aron, replied, but all of those things that confine France now also indispensably protect her, here and now. Given not only the power of the Soviet Union and the nature of its regime, France needs her mighty ally, however its dominance may chafe. And the fact that de Gaulle had entwined grandeur with himself—to be sure, as an element of a republican founding—only gave Aron further pause. “Aron, given l=to less lofty visions and more moderate expectations, recognized that France could be France without greatness. and that, both prudentially and practically, she must be.” That is, Aron associated French greatness with great power, which it obviously no longer had, nuclear arms notwithstanding. De Gaulle, however, never supposed that France would fully recover the power wielded in previous centuries; for him, greatness could now be achieved by policy, enunciated more in words than in action, policy foreign and domestic, both in the service of spirited self-government, in France and in all countries.

Given the largely rhetorical character of de Gaulle’s enterprise, at least in his foreign policy, Aron objected to the rhetoric itself. “By his maverick pronouncements, he gave the Soviet bloc every reason to overestimate its support in the West.” De Gaulle also encouraged the growing movement of left-wing ‘Third Worldism,’ which set France on a course bizarrely in tune with the contemporary fulminations of the neo-Marxist Frantz Fanon. “And perhaps most of all,” de Gaulle’s rhetoric, Aron wrote, “did not shake the Soviet bloc, but he did trouble the Western bloc, which was by nature more stable,” being ruled by democratically elected politicians, not Kremlin oligarchs. True, de Gaulle’s actions in the intermittent Cold War crises spoke louder, at those moments, than his words—President Johnson never forgot de Gaulle’s backing during the Cuban missile showdown, when he was Kennedy’s vice president—de Gaulle’s rhetorical “oversimplications, so oft repeated an so vociferously expressed, endangered the Western allies unnecessarily and courted unacceptable risks”; “by attempting to carve out a role in global politics separate from but equal to that of the two Super Powers, de Gaulle’s politics of grandeur screened France from reality, to the peril of all,” not because de Gaulle didn’t know the score but by riding on an implausible pretense, by becoming an implausible mythmaker. As Orlando writes, “De Gaulle had a fine, prudential line to walk between timorous acceptance of the given”—the sort of poor-spiritedness he had excoriated as far back as the 1930s—and “pernicious audacity toward his romantic vision.” In Aron’s judgment, de Gaulle stepped over that line too often. In Orlando’s judgment, “Aron’s firm grip on the actual counterbalanced de Gaulle’s vivid imagination,” opposing his prose to the General’s poetry. True, de Gaulle never soared off into the clouds with ideologues like Sartre, or even into the poetry-at-the-service-of-the-prosaic seen in Hayek. But he went a little too far in that direction. “The prosaic and the fantastic must go hand in hand in the realm of politics, neither fully capturing the human adventure.”

Orlando takes de Gaulle’s break with Israel over its initiation of the Six-Day War in 1967 as the most illustrative instance of the Gaullist “civil religion” of nationalism “put to the test.” The incident posed an “underlying question: can one be both a Jew and a Frenchman?”

In the aftermath of Israel’s spectacular victory against Arab armies massed on its borders, de Gaulle, hitherto a firm supporter of the Jewish state held a press conference in which he complained that its government had ignored his warning that whichever side truck first would be regarded by franc as the aggressor. “France’s voice was unheeded,” he intoned, adding that since Israel’s founding the presence of such an “elite people, self-assured and dominating” in the Middle East might well cause more trouble in an already unstable region. He called for the Great Powers, very much including France, to impose a peace settlement including internationally recognized borders, but only after the United States removed its troops from Vietnam—a seemingly irrelevant condition that perplexed more than a few observers.

Orlando provides a careful analysis of de Gaulle’s rationale and of Aron’s critique. In the 1950s, de Gaulle had decried Israel’s founding as “a historical necessity,” going so far as to say that the main problem with it was that the country was too small to be readily defended, that it needed ready access to the Red Sea, and that it should enjoy some degree of control over Jerusalem. These were the results of the 1967 war: Why did de Gaulle reverse himself? Orlando sees that in the 1950s France and Israel were closely aligned, France having supported Israel during the 1956 Suez Canal War, unlike the United States or the Soviet Union, then competing for Egyptian favor. That is, Israel then “constituted one point in the constellation of the Gaullist vision for potential foreign policy.” Not so, by 1967. This time, the Americans were backing Israel and alliance with the Arab states had become more attractive to France, which had relinquished its imperial holding in every Muslim country it had occupied. Aron saw that de Gaulle was simply pursuing France’s “new national interest,” part of his “broader campaign of appealing to nationalism, worldwide. It was another demonstration of French independence from the Americans, a demonstration with no material cost either to France or to Israel, since the Israeli victory was a fait accompli. This also explains de Gaulle’s demand for American withdrawal from Vietnam; he promoted national self-determination for the Vietnamese, even at the risk of a communist regime there, while again charting an independent course from Washington.

Aron understood all this but dissented. Given the worldwide rivalry of the Great Powers, there could be no coherent and lasting settlement of Arab-Israeli borders brokered by them. Since France wasn’t really a Great Power, far from being a go-between at some future peace conference, it would be ignored, if not excluded altogether. Further, if the assertion of national interest amounts to an imperative for any government, was Israel not acting in its own national interest by launching a preemptive strike against the far more numerous Arab armies? And was this not doubly true, given the fact that any Israeli loss would have meant the erasure of Israel, whereas Arab defeats in the past, present, and future left the Arab countries intact? Finally, did the Israelis not plainly see that it “could not rely on any other state” to defend it in a timely way? As a Jew, Aron well knew that Jews in Europe had often been tolerated in their host countries, but often persecuted. Why would Gentile nations leap to their defense now that they had a state of their own?

The history of European anti-Semitism also brought Aron to object to de Gaulle’s remark about the elite and dominating people, although not in any facile way. Aron understood that in de Gaulle’s mid “elite, self-assured, and dominating” was a compliment, albeit a double-edged one in this context. Just as he had dismissed charges that de Gaulle was a fascist, so he dismissed charges that he personally was anti-Semitic, while deploring the comfort such a remark would give to those who were—very much including certain elements among the French and substantial portions of the Arab populations. As Aron remarked, the word dominateur has a negative connotation, and had been deployed against Jews by elements of the French Right in the 1930s. De Gaulle had no animus against Jews, but he did resent “the outpouring of support among French Jews for Israel’s actions.” Whose side were they on: France, as embodied by de Gaulle, or a foreign state, even if that state consisted of their fellow Jews, many of whom had left Europe in the wake of the Holocaust.

In this “we see the ultimate expression of de Gaulle’s nationalism,” an all-or-nothing concept that precluded any sympathy for any people that defied French policy. In Aron’s understanding of Gaullist nationalism, “the unswerving love of France and France alone can and should fill the horizon of one’s imagination and identity.” Himself a thoroughly ‘secularized’ Jew, who declared “I am French…before I am Jewish,” and indeed an anti-Zionist in the 1930s and ’40s, Aron viewed de Gaulle’s assumption with profound unease. “In suggesting that the Jewishness of the Jew inherently sets him at odds with the state, that Jewishness creates the necessary and sufficient condition for disloyalty and, by implication, therefore ought to be severed from his being as a French citizen, the General transgressed the limits of what a nation can and should ask of its citizens.” Important as patriotism is, it surely must not constitute the fullest expression of a human being’s soul.

Therefore, “a liberal state must accept that each person can have both a nation-state and a religion simultaneously.” It is one thing to demand loyalty, to stand ready to punish treason. Dissent from national policy usually does not qualify as treason, as it surely did not in this case; nor does sympathy for a foreign nation. De Gaulle also should have been more careful at directing such a criticism at Jews, a little more than a decade after Jewish survivors had been released from German concentration camps, which gave a rather more harsh example of “domineering.” “Taken to the extreme, nationalism can obscure all else—especially prudence—from consideration, just as communism had done for Sartre.” (De Gaulle is said to have remarked, “Sartre, too, is France,” but for the down-to-earth Aron, that was precisely the problem.) So, yes, “de Gaulle suggests an important dictum with which Aron concurs; dual political identities ought to be forbidden because they deny a fundamental premise of political life.” De Gaulle rightly reprimanded “Israelis of the diaspora,” but he wrongly reprimanded Jews who were French citizens. Israel, a secular and democratic state, is not the same as the Jewish people as a religious or, more broadly, ‘cultural’ identity.

“What then is nationalism, ideally?” Aron acknowledged what de Gaulle accomplished while evoking his version of it: a new and better constitution for France; divestment of the last important and highly troublesome imperial territories; construction of a nuclear deterrent force; modernization of the economy; restoration of some of France’s lost international prestige; facing down no fewer than four threats of civil war. The major powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, held themselves together at least in part with shared (in the case of the Soviet, imposed) ideas; France had no such resource, as many of its factions cashed over rival ideas. De Gaulle “rallie[d] his people to a flag—with himself as its bearer—rather than a creed”; “because a state in the world lives more precariously than a transcendent idea, de Gaulle’s (lack of) margin for error forces him to walk a narrower line,” and so did his kind of nationalism. “By uniting a sharply factionalized nation behind his very person, General de Gaulle risk[ed] disaster with each and every decision. But neither could he avoid indecision.” Indecision was what had brought down several of France’s parliamentary republics. In Aron’s last analysis, “de Gaulle did more with less than any Frenchman could have dared hope.”

Raymond Aron’s political science was intentionally embedded in concrete political circumstances, as those circumstances arose. It resisted easily summarized grand generalizations. But, as Orlando writes, “The West did not need a Marx to outline a new philosophy of history. The West did not need to demand of its thinkers a philosophical uniformity. In order to stymie the Soviet Union, the West needed only to be.” That is, it needed the power not of refutation of example, and example that endured. This had been so, from George Washington to Charles de Gaulle when it comes to statesmen (would you rather be ruled by Napoleon or Lenin?), and even more so in the prosperity of its civil societies and, indeed, their joie de vivre. (Even de Gaulle, no boulevardier, faulted the Soviet Union for its lugubrious atmosphere.)

Aron rightly insisted that the dialogic character of Western civil societies made the West stronger than the Soviet Union, which, as he wrote, “paralyze[d] knowledge even while claiming to ‘totalize’ it.” The West’s “confidence in the governed” triumphed over the Communists” “refusal of dialogue” even as its adepts droned on about ‘the dialectic.’ He continued: “A philosopher is first of all responsible to philosophy”; “he would cease to deserve the name of philosopher only on the day that he came to share the fanaticism or skepticism of ideologues, the day he subscribed to inquisition by theologian-judges.” It is the philosopher’s “civic duty, his duty to society,” to pursue dialogue, first of all with himself, then with others. That is why philosophy must and can be political philosophy, ruling and being ruled by the better arguments, as tested in dialogue. the Socratic gadfly practices such political philosophy.

Political philosophy is also ‘politic’ philosophy. as Orlando finely describes him, “Aron stood for political prudence. As a result, he regularly stood alone. But he was never content to remain so” He “endeavored to dissuade his friends from their excesses,” and if he did not convince his friends he may well have dissuaded many of his fellow citizens from going along with those excesses. “He showed the broader citizenry how to do politics in an age of ideologies, how to return to the public realm,” how to recover citizen liberty from those who claimed to rule on the basis of one or another species of historical determinism. He rested his hope not in “the process of history but…in the rational capacity of man and in a regime that allows him to exercise it.” In so doing he “impar[ed] to posterity a paradigm that shows us how we might confront our own dilemmas and interlocutors in our own time.”

With his first book Nathan Orlando brings himself forward as a political thinker in the line of Aron. Long may he continue in it.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Chapter 3: “Beyond the Positivity of the Social: Antagonisms and Hegemony”; Chapter 4: “Hegemony and Radical Democracy.” London: Verso, 2014 (second edition).

 

In their first two chapters, Laclau and Mouffe traced the course of the “Crisis of Marxism,” the embarrassing failure of ‘scientific socialism’ to deliver on its prediction, namely, the proletarian revolution. Increasingly, Marxian thinkers saw the need to make political strategy and choice, even free will, central to socialist politics, to give politics its independence back, refusing to claim that political life merely ‘reflects’ underlying social and economic forces. This led Antonio Gramsci to hold up “hegemony” or ruling as indispensable to socialist politics, just as it has been to political life from the beginning. 

“We now have to construct theoretically the concept of hegemony.” The authors thus follow in the line of modern epistemology, which inclines to make knowledge a matter not so much of perceiving as of making. Leo Strauss (a thinker the authors do not consult) remarks that Machiavelli shoulders aside the metaphor of knowledge as seeing (offered by Plato and the other philosophers of classical antiquity) and the metaphor of knowledge as hearing (as prophecy, hearkening to the voice of God) in favor of the metaphor of knowledge as touching, ‘grasping.’ Unlike seeing and hearing, touching perceives by means of direct contact with the object perceived; simultaneously, it affects that object, lays it open to grasping, shaping, making. Modern theory is no longer ‘merely theoretical.’ Modern, Machiavellian, philosophy thinks of thinking as intervention, construing—not quite the creatio ex nihilo of the Biblical God, who fully knows what he has fully brought into being, but somewhat in the imitation of, and sometimes as a rival to, Him.

As historicists, the authors understand their effort not as a dialectical ascent from the ‘cave’ of convention, lit by fires ‘built’ by its rulers, to sunlit nature, but as a “strategic movement requiring negotiation among mutually contradictory discursive surfaces” (emphasis added). This isn’t quite Socrates’ political philosophy, which does indeed require dialogue, strategically inflected, with fellow citizens inside the political ‘cave,’ because Socrates aims at an ascent to a nature that the authors deprecate. They would stay within the cave, while rearranging and indeed reconstructing the fires and idols within it. The objects within the cave are the only things there are, at least for political purposes. Political life requires speech or articulation, implying “some form of separate presence of the elements which that practice articulates or recomposes.” Those elements, they maintain, “were originally specified as fragments of a lost structural or organic totality.” By “originally,” they mean in the thought of the late eighteenth century, the thought of German Romanticism. The Enlightenment thinkers of the generations immediately preceding them had dismantled, at least to their own satisfaction, the cosmos of Christendom and of the classical philosophers who preceded it, ‘disenchanting’ the world. The Romantics undertook “an eager search” for “a new synthesis,” a reintegration of body and soul, reason and feeling, thought and the senses. Politically, they sought a modern equivalent of the ancient polis in the face of the modern state, with its complex civil societies of many ‘classes,’ increasingly bound together by impersonal, scientistic bureaucracies—a disenchantment, indeed. But any synthesis must be, well, synthetic—artificial, therefore unlike “the natural organic unity peculiar to Greek culture,” as they conceived it. [1] 

As the poet-philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin explained it, Romanticism upheld “two ideals”: reducing human needs to their “natural simplicity” while aspiring to “the highest cultivation” through “the organization which we are able to give ourselves.” Laclau calls the first ideal “articulation,” the second, “mediation.” They describe the distinction as “a nebulous area of ambiguities,” not nearly so clear as the Romantics wanted it to be. Enter Hegel, whose work “is at once the highest moment of German Romanticism” and the first fully post-Enlightenment “reflection on society.” Hegel takes the fragments of the modern world and reunites them in a grand synthesis by means of his historical dialectic—history conceived as the rationally understandable unfolding of the Absolute Spirit. The “cunning of reason…leads separation back to unity,” in “the highest movement of rationalism,” “the moment when it attempts to embrace within the field of reason, without dualisms, the totality of the universe of differences.” Unfortunately, “this synthesis contains all the seeds of its dissolution” because “the rationality of history can be affirmed only at the price of introducing contradiction into the field of reason.” By this, the authors evidently mean that the principle of contradiction, first articulated by Plato’s Socrates in the Republic, states simply that the same thing will not do, or suffer having done to it, opposites, in the same part, at the same time, in relation to the same thing. (So, for example, to say that a child’s top both stands still and moves isn’t a contradiction, since it stays still with respect to its axis while moving with respect to its circumference.) Socrates leaves it at that; if two opinions contradict one another, one or both must be false, insofar as they are contradictory. Hegel would like to treat opinions and indeed everything else as if they were paints of opposite colors; when mixed together, they form a new color. This is “introducing contradiction into the field of reason,” thereby undermining the principle of reasoning itself. [2] In making Hegelian dialectic a supposed science explaining the dialectical unfolding of economic-material relations in society, Marx and his followers imported such “ambiguities and imprecisions” into socialist theory.

Thus, “this area of ambiguity constituted by the discursive uses of ‘dialectics’ is the first that has to be dissolved.” The authors undertake to do so by denying that ‘society’ is a coherent totality, rationally understandable because governed by laws of dialectical development, its elements ultimately to be harmonized as if it were a Hegelian syllogism, the grand concluding synthesis of a set of theses and antitheses. The elements of ‘society’ are “diverse” and “precarious,” contingent on one another, ever-shifting—more Heraclitean than Hegelian. “The social itself has no essence.” Human beings determine the ‘nature’ of these contingent relations. More, they determine the identities of the elements themselves—nowadays, for example, as ‘L,’ ‘G,’ ‘B,’ ‘T,’ ‘Q,’ and on, perhaps, to infinity.  That is, social relations and identities are not “merely ‘cognitive’ or ‘contemplative’ but instead defined by “an articulatory practice which constitutes and organizes social relations.” Today’s complex “industrial societies” see “a growing proliferation” of such relations and identities. Analyzing “articulation” will “give us our starting point for the elaboration of the concept of hegemony.” This requires establishing “the possibility of specifying the elements which enter into the articulatory relation” and then determining the relations among them. 

Before doing so, they offer a critique of some “theoretical discourses” which move in the direction they seek but remain “inhibited by the basic categories of an essentialist discourse”—essentialism being the claim they are most eager to refute because they regard it as limiting egalitarianism, and thereby preventing a radical democratic politics. They begin with the then-famous French Algerian Marxist, Louis Althusser. Althusser rejected both Stalinism and the fashionable ‘Marxist humanism,” which described Marxism as a benign extension of Enlightenment thought. His own “structural Marxism”—holding, against Lenin, that the modern state is not the instrument of the bourgeois class but a framework ensuring the viability of capitalist enterprise—diverged from the current line of the erratic French Communist Party leader, Roger Garaudy, who was promoting ‘socialism with a human face,’ at the moment. For the authors, Althusser’s analysis exhibited an unrealized potential. Althusser demystified the modern state by denying Hegelian immanence; the state isn’t really the instantiation of ‘God,’ that is, the Absolute Spirit. Such concepts as state and society have symbolic meaning but they are not to be taken literally as coherent causes, as drivers of ‘History.’ “Society and social agents lack any essence, and their regularities merely consist of the relative and precarious forms of fixation which accompany the establishment of a certain order.” But Althusser failed to take this idea far enough. He retained an ‘essentialist’ notion of economic life, thereby “laps[ing] into the very defect he criticizes.” He sees that the state, society, and even individuals are not essences, but he takes the economy as “an abstract universal object…which produces concrete effects,” determining the character of society. What Althusser implied but did not realize was a “critique of every type of fixity, through an affirmation of the incomplete, open and politically negotiable character of every identity.” The presence of other identities prevents the “suturing” of my own identity. That is why the working class has not been and can never be what Marx said it would be: the unified and decisive driver of the last stage of history. 

Having established that point, the authors can now offer four definitions of the terms that serves as touchstones for their theory. They define “articulation” as “any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identify is modified as a result of the articulatory practice.” A “discourse” is “the structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice.” A “moment” is a position differentiated by an articulation with a discourse. An “element” is “any difference that is not discursively articulated.” That is, talking about something or someone changes the thing or person talked about. If I say I’m an angel and you say I’m a rotter, both of those claims alter what and who I was before the claims were made. It is not merely an exaggeration to regard this as a theory which gives some credence to the belief that saying something make it so—although only some credence, as the authors will soon explain.

Given these definitions, one must pay careful attention to “the characteristic coherence of the discursive formation” one is examining, the “dimensions and extensions of the discursive,” and the “openness or closure exhibited by” that discursive formation. The coherence one perceives in a discursive formation owes its existence not to “the expression of any underlying principle external to itself,” such as a law of history. ‘Values’ are relative to each other. They “depend closely upon one another.” They can be seen to cohere only in the sense that they coalesce, for a time, a “moment,” in a regular “system of structural positions.”

One must also reject “the distinctive between discursive and non-discursive practices” because “every object is constituted as an object of discourse.” The dichotomy between “the linguistic and behavioral aspects of a social practice” is a false dichotomy. For example, while it is true that an earthquake “is an event that certainly exists,” independently from what anyone wills, the question of whether we think of the earthquake as a natural phenomenon or an act of God “depends on the structuring of a discursive field.” It is in that sense that saying something about an event ‘makes it so.’ Discursive structures, furthermore, are not mental but material structures; speech is an act. Articulation is “a discursive practice [emphasis added] which does not have a plane of constitution prior to, or outside, the dispersion of the articulated elements,” whether that plane is mental or material. “The main consequence of a break with the discursive/extra-discursive dichotomy is the abandonment of the thought/ reality opposition, and hence a major enlargement of the field of those categories which can account for social relations.” Metaphor, for example, no longer takes second place “to a primary, constitutive literality of social relations.” Laclau and Mouffe to this extent may be said to ‘poeticize’ political thought.

They are careful not to take such “moments” too far. They are limited, if not ‘essentially’ defined by exterior factors. Positing something doesn’t entirely make it so. “The transition from the ‘elements,'” the differences not discursively articulated, “to the ‘moments'” in which they are, “is never fully realized”; “there is no identity that can be fully constituted.” “Here we arrive at a decisive point in our argument”: ‘society’ is not “a sutured and self-defined totality.” It has “no single underlying principle fixing—and hence constituting—the whole field of differences.” Identities are never fully fixed within it. “Neither absolute fixity nor absolute nonfixity is possible.” In this, they partake of the ‘postmodernism’ of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida, with their insistence “on the impossibility of fixing ultimate meanings.” There are, however, “partial fixations”; if there were not, “the very flow of differences would be impossible,” and a night in which all cows are black would descend upon us. The authors call these (temporarily) “privileged discursive points of this partial fixation” “nodal points.” Identities float, but they are identities. “The practice,” the act, “of articulation, therefore, consists in the construction of nodal points which partially fix meaning; and the partial character of this fixation proceeds from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity.”

Where does this leave the human individual, the “subject”? Laclau and Mouffe stand with Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger in denying the accounts of both rationalism and empiricism, which view the subject “as an agent both rational and transparent to itself,” unified and homogeneous, and as the “origin and basis of social relations,” as in social contract theory. They regard the critique of rationalism as definitive, although of course, given their own anti-essentialism, this amounts to a tacit admission that the critiques themselves might be redefined. To the authors, subjects are really “subject positions,’ identities that exist in relation to other identities, in many ways unfixed. This is why they reject ‘humanist’ Marxism. “What is important is to try to show how ‘Man’ has been produced in modern times, how the ‘human’ subject—that is, the bearer of a human identity without distinctions—appears in certain religious discourse’s, is embodied in juridical practices and is diversely constructed in other spheres.” ‘Man,’ as produced or constructed, is indeed “a fundamental nodal point from which it has been possible to proceed, since the eighteenth century, to the ‘humanization’ of a number of social practices,” but today it must be understood as only a nodal point, lest a presumption of fixity interfere with the project of radical democracy. The same goes for feminism. It, too, must avoid a rigid dichotomy of feminine and masculine, both ‘essentialized’ and thus distorted. And, obviously, the familiar Marxist dichotomy of capitalists and proletarians brings distortions in its wake, which is why Marx’s supposedly scientific predictions never came true. Nodal positions are established politically, not by the immanent nature or historicity of subjects. “Neither the political identity nor the economic identity of the agents crystallizes as differential moment of unified discourse, and…the relation between them is the precarious unity of a tension.” Human subjects do not give meaning to themselves or anything else, since “the subjectivity of the agent is penetrated by the same precariousness and absence of suture apparent at any other point of the discursive totality of which it is part.” Articulation is hegemonic, a political act of agents interacting with one another. 

Social antagonisms are not the same as physical collisions, although they can lead to physical collisions. And social antagonisms are not, strictly speaking, contradictions, which in logic amount to the juxtaposition of two entirely opposite ideas, as in the impossibility, ‘blackwhite.’ A social antagonism arises when “the presence of the ‘Other’ prevents me from being totally myself.” For example, “it is because a peasant cannot be a peasant that an antagonism exists with the landowner expelling him from his land.” This renders the peasant’s ‘being a peasant’ precarious, partial, so long as the landowner can kick him out. Thus, “antagonism, far from being an objective relation,” like a physical collision or a logical contradiction, “is a relation where in the limits of every objectivity are shown.” The landowner may be able to dispossess the peasant, and indeed the peasant, or more likely a group of peasants, might be able to dispossess the landowner. “The limit of the social must be given within the social itself as something subverting it, destroying its ambition to constitute a full presence.” The social is no more fully constituted than the persons who interact within it. At the same time, antagonism also has its limits in the continued existence of the antagonists. The dispossessed peasant or landlord need not be destroyed; new social relations may coalesce. 

Considered politically, antagonism takes place not so much among individuals as among social groups. The authors give the example of the antagonism between peasant culture and urban culture. As “not one but two societies” within a political community, a “millenarian rebellion” may occur—a “fierce, total and indiscriminate” assault on the city. “The only alternative is massive emigration towards another region in order to set up the City of God, totally isolated from the corruption of the world.” On the more mundane level, Benjamin Disrael considered the “two nations” in England, the poor and the wealthy; another example is the Continental antagonism between the old, throne-and-altar monarchies and the regimes of popular sovereignty. As a statesman, Disraeli sought to unite the two nations into one, avoiding revolution, by extending voting rights to the working classes and meeting some of the social demands of the workers. Laclau and Mouffe call this policy of expanding and ‘complexifying’ the political sphere the “logic of difference.” As complexity increases, the demands of one group antagonistic to the existing regime might not collaborate with another group just as antagonistic, but on different grounds. For example, feminists might not collaborate with racial minorities. Such struggles are democratic but they are not “popular” in the sense that they consist of ‘the people, united.’ 

How, then, to achieve democratic “hegemony” or rule? The Marxist claim that a socioeconomic class could be the agent to achieve this has failed, thanks to “the generalized crisis of social identities” that democratic social complexity itself has caused. But if “nodal points” are possible to establish, then Gramsci’s notion of social antagonism as a “war of position” becomes salient, if imperfect. He is right to think that a popular identity needs to be constructed, cannot be assumed to exist as a precondition of antagonism. He is wrong to think that there is one main antagonism, the working class against the capitalists. “We will therefore speak of democratic struggles,” not the grand “popular” one, a plurality of struggles. As the authors put it in their somewhat tiresome jargon, “The hegemonic dimension of politics only expands as the open, non-sutured character of the social increases.” In a complex, modern society, “there can be a variety of hegemonic nodal points,” not just one (e.g., ‘capitalism’). “Insofar as the social is an infinitude not reducible to any underlying unitary principle, the mere idea of a center of the social has no meaning at all.” This plurality must become “the starting point” of social-democratic analysis. This disposes of ‘totalitarian’ forms of Marxism. The Soviet or Chinese Communist attempts to harmonize the entirety of a modern society into one coherent thing is impossible. Instead, the various social groups, understanding their own precariousness in relation to all the others, will need at times to cooperate and resist all the others, with no supreme Leader or Party to ‘guide’ them. “No hegemonic logic can account for the totality of the social and constitute its center, for in that case a new suture would have been produced and the very concept of hegemony would have eliminated itself.” To rule means to rule over someone or some thing, but ‘totalitarianism’ absorbs all into one, an impossibility. However, “it would be equally wrong to propose as an alternative, either pluralism or the total diffusion of power within the social, as this would blind the analysis to the presence of nodal points and to the partial concentrations of power existing in every concrete social formation.” No one “logic” can account for such complexity. This means that “a ‘scientific’ approach attempting to determine the ‘essence’ of the social would, in actual fact, be the height of utopianism.” Marx and his followers have decried the folly of ‘utopian socialism,’ but they have fallen into it from another angle.

Democracy arose in the first half of the nineteenth century, socialism in the second half. As a result, a unified popular pole, “far from becoming more simple” to obtain, as Marx predicted, “grew increasingly difficult” to obtain “as the growing complexity and institutionalization of capitalist society” led to “the corporatization and separation of those sectors which should ideally have been united as ‘the people.'” Politics saw “the very identity of the forces in struggle” subjected to “constant shifts,” calling for “an incessant process of redefinition.” Mere economic-class antagonism “is incapable of dividing the totality of the social body into two antagonistic camps, of reproducing itself automatically as a line of demarcation in the political sphere.” For “radical democracy” to form, a “radically libertarian and more ambitious” politics will be needed. 

Even granting this, why is radical democracy good? In search of an answer, one must turn to the authors’ discussion of “the democratic revolution.”

On the grounds (as it were) from their rejection of anti-essentialism, they rule out not only history but nature as a source of right. Admittedly, with “the anthropological assumption of a ‘human nature’ and of a unified subject,” one can reject at least some forms of subordination, namely, those that stunt human nature itself. In rejecting “this essentialist perspective,” they need another approach. They begin by distinguishing subordination from oppression, and both of these from domination. A relation of subordination is one in which one “agent is subjected to the decisions of another”—an employee to an employer, a child to a parent. A relation of oppression is one in which subordination has sparked antagonism. A relation of domination is one in which subordination is “considered as illegitimate from the perspective, or in the judgment, of a social agent external to” the subordinate and his subordinator. So, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft vindicated the rights of women by transferring the more generally accepted principle of “political equality between citizens”—a social agent external to men and women as such—to “the field of equality between the sexes.” Citing Tocqueville, Laclau and Mouffe take his democratic revolution, “the end of a society of a hierarchic and inegalitarians type, ruled by a theological-political logic in which the social order had its foundation in divine will,” society’s replacement of that with the “affirmation of the absolute power of its people,” as morally dispositive. The argument of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, an argument from natural right, derives its authority not from the substance of its claims but from its “establishment of a new legitimacy,” the “invention of democratic culture,” by means of “provid[ing] the discursive conditions which made it possible to propose the different forms of inequality as illegitimate and anti-natural, and thus mak[ing] them equivalent as forms of oppression” (emphasis added). That is, saying it made it so, once French society assented. 

This democratizing tendency in modern societies, beginning in the political realm, argued in the realm of male-female relations by Wollstonecraft, eventually influenced discourses on economic inequality, with socialists “putting in question” the “forms of subordination” seen in the workplace and “demanding new rights” for the workers. This is as Tocqueville predicted, when he wrote, “It is impossible to believe that equality will not finally penetrate as much into the political world as into other domains. It is not possible to conceive of men as eternally unequal among themselves on one point, and equal on others; at a certain moment, they will come to be equal on all points.” Tocqueville worried about that, not because he sought to defend the privileges of the titled ‘aristocracy’ to which he belonged but because the effort to achieve thoroughgoing equality in all spheres of human life might well put an end to liberty, the precondition of moral conduct, either under a Napoleonic despotism or under a softer, bureaucratic despotism. To their credit, Laclau and Mouffe share some of his caution, humanity having seen tyrannies far worse than anything Napoleon attempted, and bureaucracies at least as stultifying as those Tocqueville envisioned. Nevertheless, as socialists, they remain fixated on ‘capitalist’ oppression. Indeed, “a good proportion of the new political subjects have been constituted through their antagonistic relationship to recent forms of subordination, derived from the implanting and expansion of capitalist relations of production and the growing intervention of the State.” These include “the waste of natural resources, the pollution and destruction of the environment,” the ills of urbanization, and even the attempts to meliorate social equality by means of “the Keynesian Welfare State,” which “has been accompanied by a growing bureaucratization” of State practices, which is “one of the fundamental sources of inequalities and conflicts.” Indeed, “expansion of capitalist relations of production and of the new bureaucratic-state forms” have proven “mutually reinforcing” in many instances. “Given the bureaucratic character of State intervention, this creation of ‘public spaces’ is carried out not in the form of a true democratization, but through the imposition of new forms of subordination,” resulting in “numerous struggles…against bureaucratic forms of State power.” By this (and again consistent with their socialism) the authors mean not the resistance of small businesses against public and corporate bureaucracies but rather such phenomena as the “Welfare Rights Movement” in the United States, whereby clients of the Welfare State demand more benefits, more transfers of wealth from the upper and middle classes to themselves, in the name of social equality. Once again, “the categories of ‘justice,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘equality’ have been redefined and liberal-democratic discourse has been profoundly modified by this broadening of the sphere of rights.” 

On the level of ‘culture,’ the “new mass culture” has “profoundly shake[en] traditional identities,” as it “contains powerful elements for the subversion of inequalities.” In particular, the young “constitute a new axis for the emergence of antagonisms,” since the they are simultaneously advertised to, treated as consumers, and thereby enticed to spend money they don’t have, “stimulat[ing] them to seek a financial autonomy that society is in no condition to give them.” This generates antagonism, antagonism further exacerbated by the erosion of family bonds, and especially parental authority, which grates against egalitarian sentiment. Liberty, now reconceived as ‘diversity,’ not only disoriented parents and the bourgeoisie but the left, especially the ‘Old Left’ of Marxism, ill-disposed to an emerging “radical and plural democracy.” “Pluralism is radical only to the extent that each term of this plurality of identities finds within itself the principle of its own validity, without this having to be sought in a transcendent of underlying positive ground for the hierarchy of meaning of them all and the source and guarantee of their legitimacy.” Radical pluralism is democratic insofar as its self-constituting, self-validating character has been universalized; everyone gets to do it. At the same time, radical democracy, precisely because it has no foundation below it, no essence within it, and no standard above it, teeters on precarity, even more than previous societies have done.

The authors identify the main threat to a democratic outcome as “neo-liberalism,” initiated by Friedrich von Hayek’s “violent attack on the interventionist State and the various forms of economic planning that were being implemented” in the mid-1940s, when he published The Road to Serfdom. Although Hayek argues that the Welfare State will cause “the power of the law” to decline, the power of bureaucracy to increase, Laclau and Mouffe are having none of that. “In reality”—that is to say, in terms of their own agenda within agon of the Left in the precarious democratic world—the issue “is the very articulation between liberalism and democracy which was performed during the course of the nineteenth century,” the extension of asserted democratic rights from the political to the economic sphere. Hayek’s “central political objective,” individual liberty, ought to outweigh egalitarianism. “All State intervention” in the name of “social or redistributive justice,” “except in connection with matters that cannot be regulated through the market, is considered as an attack on individual liberty.” Oddly, they associate Hayek with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who aimed to “remove public decisions more and more from political control and to make them the exclusive responsibility of experts”—a bureaucratizing move Hayek would have detested. Hayek criticized democratic political control of the economy, but had no objection to political engagement in any decent regime, so long as it permitted individual liberty, very much including property ownership. This (very likely deliberate) confusion enables the authors to claim that neoliberals propose “a new definition of democracy which in fact would serve to legitimize a regime in which political participation might be virtually non-existent.”

They are surely right to contend that “the form in which liberty, equality, democracy and justice are defined at the level of political philosophy may have important consequences at a variety of other levels of discourse, and contribute decisively to shaping the common sense of the masses” in “the constitution of a hegemonic left alternative” to neo-liberalism. At this point, they admit that the plausibility of neo-liberal ideas in contemporary politics owes much “to the growing bureaucratization of social relations.” To refute it, one must challenge “possessive individualism,” the claim that “the rights of individuals,” including property rights, exist “before society, and often in opposition to it.” However, to defend pre-social, pre-political individual rights, neo-liberals understand what Locke, the American Founders, and many other earlier thinkers and statesmen now called ‘liberals’ understood: that government is necessary to secure those rights. Since they reject scientistic-bureaucratic government, the authors argue, neo-liberals recur to “a set of themes from conservative philosophy,” particularly conservatism’s “profoundly anti-egalitarian cultural and social traditionalism.” This is the real agenda; neo-liberals fly “under the cover” of liberty, but in fact only intend to “legitimate inequalities and restore the hierarchical relations which the struggles of previous decades had destroyed.” They offer no proof of this charge; given the intended audience of their book, they don’t need one.

In face of this threat, acknowledging the precarity of all hegemonic arrangements in democracies, Laclau and Mouffe declare that “the task of the Left therefore cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology,” as Marxists do, “but on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction of a radical and plural democracy.” As they have previously (and indeed repeatedly) remarked, there are no natural rights inherent in individuals because “the meaning of the liberal discourse on individual rights is not definitely fixed.” “The radical changes which are necessary in the political imaginary of the Left, if it wishes to succeed in [ahem!] founding a political practice fully located in the field of the democratic revolution and conscious of the depth and variety of the hegemonic articulations which the present conjuncture requires” must begin with overcoming “the fundamental obstacle” to that revolution, namely, any “essentialist apriorism” that “sutures” the social. From there, the Left will need to reject its own inclination to establish “privileged points”; for Marxism, this was the claim that socioeconomic classes drive ‘history.’ This error has led to the political ruinous claim that “the expansion of the role of the State is the panacea for all problems,” and that a technocratic economism will serve as the basis for State action against capitalist inequality. More, the “classic concept of ‘revolution'” as propounded and practiced by the Jacobins, animated by essentialist apriorism and instantiated in statism, must also be abandoned. This concept “implied the foundational character of the revolutionary act,” but this perspective “is incompatible with the plurality and the opening which a radical democracy requires.” Revolution should be reconceived as process. The Left should encourage more autonomous “spheres of struggle and the multiplication of political spaces,” against the “concentration of power and knowledge that classic Jacobinism and its different social variants imply.” In this effort, socialism will become not the but “one of the components of a project for radical democracy.” Socialism is indeed “necessary to put an end to capitalist relations of production, which are at the root of numerous relations of subordination,” but it is no more than that. Socialists need to understand that, accept it, and act accordingly.

To say this, however, raises “a whole set of new problems.” Where and in what form shall Leftists determine the antagonisms they wish to foster in the ever-shifting terrain of social and political activity? To what extent can pluralism comport with the commonalities of “equivalences” among the many social actors? Can this neo-Heraclitean conception of human life really lend itself to “define a hegemonic project,” or is it a mere recipe for anarchism?

In terms of “equivalences,” Leftists should regard them as “family resemblances” (a phrase borrowed from Wittgenstein), not entities lending themselves to systematic unity. For example, feminists should think of the State as “an important means for effecting an advance, frequently against civil society in legislation which combats sexism”—the supposed ‘patriarchy’ of the family, pay differentials, and so on. Fortunately, the vast modern State itself “is not a homogeneous medium…but an uneven set of branches and functions,” whose internal conflicts may be turned toward egalitarianism in civil society. “Neither the State nor civil society is the surface of emergence of democratic antagonisms.” The same goes for political parties and (although they do not yet see it) business corporations, which can also be induced to deploy power in the service of egalitarian claims. “What we are witnessing is a politicization far more radical than any we have known in the past, because it tends to dissolve the distinction between the public and the private, not in terms of the encroachment on the private by a unified public space, but in terms of a proliferation of radically new and different political spaces.” This thoroughgoing politicization will, the authors hope, prevent anarchy, since disputes will center on ruling, albeit in the fluid manner they envision, not on not-ruling.

This is where Laclau and Mouffe define the newest ‘New Left’ project, which is in some respects a reprise of the Popular Front strategy of the 1930s, without the ‘essentialist’ Marxist assumptions that made the Communist Party such an untrustworthy partner in that movement. The Left must expand the “chains of equivalence” to include “anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-capitalism.” Notice that these will indeed be “chains” of equivalence, “symbols of a unique and indivisible struggle.” Yet, somehow, “each of these struggles retains its differential specificity with respect to the others.” There is no contradiction, they claim, so long as no one group on the Left seeks preeminence over the others—the working class over feminists and civil rights advocates, as seen in the past. No one group serves as the foundation of the struggle; instead, each mixes its efforts with the others, limiting the others while strengthening the Left as a whole against the Right. “From this we can deduce a basic precondition for a radically libertarian conception of politics: the refusal to dominate—intellectually or politically—every presumed ‘ultimate foundation’ of the social.” If the Left fails in this, the familiar “Rousseauian paradox”—that “men should be obliged to be free”—must triumph, and they are back to some new version of Bolshevism. Here, a Marxian phrase actually helps: “The free development of each should be the condition for the free development of all.” Marx is referring not to socialism but to the end of history, to communism. Laclau and Mouffe want communism without state socialism, without the dictatorship of the proletariat or of anyone else.

Admittedly, “this total equivalence never exists,” given the precariousness and “unevenness” of the social. Equivalence, “the demand for equality,” ought always to be “balanced by the demand for liberty”—a “radical and plural democracy.” This tension need not descend into contradiction because reality, including human individuals, is fluid. The appropriate defense against bureaucratic excesses on the Left is not “to return purely and simply to the defense of ‘bourgeois’ individualism,” as neo-liberals want to do. Rather, we need “the production of another individual, an individual who is no longer constructed out of the matrix of possessive individualism” along the lines of “‘natural’ rights prior to society.” Such natural rights conduce to claims of private rights. Instead, individual rights ought to be defined “only in the context of social relations which determine subject positions,” rights “which involve other subjects who participate in the same social elation,” rights which “can only be exercised collectively,” in accordance with a “social theory [that] defends the right of the social agent to equality and to participation as a producer and not only as a citizen.”

But what about the chain of democratic equivalences”? The authors recognize a threat in it. “Paradoxically,” this “very logic of openness and of the democratic subversion of differences” brings with it “the possibility of a closure far more radical than in the past.” Once all “traditional systems” are broken, now that “indeterminacy and ambiguity turn more elements of society into ‘floating signifiers,’ the possibility arises of attempting to institute a center which radically eliminates the logic of autonomy and reconstitutes around itself the totality of the social body.” That is, if there are no standards exterior to society to which citizens can appeal—no divine or natural laws, not even the supposed laws of history—then “the logic of totalitarianism” might recur, “an attempt to re-establish the unity which democracy has shattered between the loci of power, law and knowledge.” To avoid this, and to avoid the opposite pole of anarchy, “an implosion of the social and an absence of any common point of reference,” the “experience of democracy should consist of the recognition of the multiplicity of social logics along with the necessity of their articulation,” an articulation “constantly recreated and renegotiated,” with “no final point at which a balance will be definitively achieved.” Partial social stability can prevail by undertaking “the search for a point of equilibrium between a maximum advance for the democratic revolution in a broad range of spheres, and the capacity for the hegemonic direction and positive reconstruction of these spheres on the part of subordinated groups.” Leftist utopianism remains where it should be, in the quite different minds of those who seek the elimination of their own subordinate positions in society, but at the same time think seriously about what the conditions of the equality they aspire to should be. These many utopias should never be allowed to coalesce into one, as that would result in a reprise of totalitarianism. This limited utopianism will avoid the other danger, the mere pragmatism of “reformers without a project.”

Thus, for the newest New Left, “the epistemological niche from which ‘universal’ classes and subjects spoke has been eradicated, and it has been replaced by a polyphony of voices, each of which constructs its own irreducible discursive identity.” An egalitarian Heracliteanism reigns over all, preventing any one ruler from destroying either equality or liberty. Latterly, their attempt has been encapsulated in the slogan, ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’—a reformulation of the now somewhat long-in-the-tooth New Left ambition to maximize incommensurables. In abandoning the modernist epistemology of ‘grasping,’ they recur to the Biblical epistemology of hearing—their “polyphony of voices”—replacing the God of the Bible with the lesser god of Vox Populi.

 

Notes

1. That Greek philosophers themselves did not understand the polis to be simply natural or “organic” may be seen in the Platonic-Socratic metaphor of the cave and throughout Aristotle’s Politics.
2. The authors identify the philosopher who formulated this critique of Hegel as the German Aristotelian, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg in his 1840 book, Logische Untersuchungen. It is fair to say that they do not follow Trendelenburg into Aristotelian ethics or politics.