Louis Althusser |
|
'Montesquieu: Politics and History' first published |
|
|
Part One | |
MONTESQUIEU: POLITICS AND
HISTORY | |
Foreword 13 | |
1. |
A Revolution in Method 17 |
2. |
A New Theory of Law 31 |
3. |
The Dialectic of History 43 |
4. |
'There are Three Governments . . .' 61 |
5. |
The Myth of the Separation of Powers 87 |
6. |
Montesquieu's Parti Pris 96 |
|
Conclusion 107 |
Bibliography 108 | |
Part Two | |
ROUSSEAU: THE SOCIAL
CONTRACT | |
Foreword 113 | |
1. |
Posing the Problem 116 |
2. |
The Solution of the Problem: Discrepancy
I 125 |
3. |
The Contract and Alienation 135 |
4. |
Total Alienation and Exchange: Discrepancy
II 140 |
5. |
Particular Interest and General Interest, |
6. |
Flight Forward in Ideology or |
|
Part Three |
MARX'S RELATION TO HEGEL 161 | |
Index 187 |
page 6
page 9
Part
One page 11
Montesquieu made us see . . . Mme De Staël
France had lost her claims to nobility; Montesquieu page 13 to him so that the whole followed. The whole did follow. At other times he
felt himself lost in this gigantic universe of minute data as if in a
boundless sea. He wanted this sea to have shores, he wanted to give it them
and reach them. He reached them. No one went before him in this adventure. It
is as if this man, who was enough in love with ships to discuss the design of
their hulls, the height of their masts and their speeds; who devoted enough
interest to the first peripli to follow the Carthaginians down the
coasts of Africa and the Spaniards to India, felt some affinity with all
sea-rovers. Not in vain does he invoke the sea when he finds himself in the
wide open spaces of his subject: the last sentence of his book celebrates the
longed-for approach to land. It is true that he set out for the unknown. But
for this navigator, too, the unknown was simply a new land. interest or party. Did he not himself say that he was a historian precisely
because he was detached from every faction, shielded from power and all its
temptations, free of everything by a miraculous chance? Capable precisely of
understanding because free of everything? Let us do him the duty, which is the
duty of every historian, of taking him not at his word, but at his work. It
has seemed to me that this image is a myth, and I hope to show it. But in
showing it I should not like anyone to believe that Montesquieu's enthusiastic
parti pris in the political struggles of his time ever reduced his work
to a mere commentary on his wishes.
page 17 opposition between the sciences of nature and the sciences of man was not
yet in season. The most metaphysical exiled into God this science of politics
or history, which seemed to be the conjunction of the chances of fortune and
the decrees of human freedom: Leibniz, for example. But all that is ever
handed over to God is the errors of man - and Leibniz entrusted to God the
human idea of a science of man. As for the positives, the moralists, the
philosophers of law, the politicals, and Spinoza himself, they did not doubt
for a moment that it was possible to treat human relations like physical
relations. Hobbes only saw one difference between mathematics and the social
sciences: the former unites men, the latter divide them. But that is only
because in the former the truth and men's interests are not opposed,
whereas in the latter whenever reason goes against man, man is
opposed to reason. Spinoza, too, intended that human relations should be
treated in the same way as natural things, and by the same routes. For
example, take the pages that introduce the Political Treatise: Spinoza
denounces the pure philosophers who, as the Aristotelians do with nature,
project into politics the imaginary of their concepts or ideals, and he
proposes to replace their dreams with the real science of history. How then
can we claim that Montesquieu opened routes which we find completely mapped
out well before him? their coffers spices and gold, and in their memories the tale of customs
and institutions which overthrew all the received truths. But this scandal
would have had the impact of a mere curiosity had it not been for the fact
that in the very heart of the countries which were thus sending forth their
ships for the conquest of the new lands, other events, too, were shaking the
foundations of these convictions. Civil wars, the religious revolution of the
Reformation, wars of religion, the transformation of the traditional structure
of the State, the rise of the commoners, the humbling of the great - these
upheavals, whose echo can be heard in all the works of the period, gave the
material of the scandalous tales brought back from across the seas the
contagious dignity of facts real and full of meaning. What had previously been
themes for compilation, extravaganzas to appease the passions of the erudite,
became a kind of mirror for the contemporary unease and the fantastic echo of
this world in crisis. This is the basis for the political exoticism
(known history itself, Greece and Rome, becoming the other world in
which the present world seeks its own image) which has dominated thought since
the sixteenth century. Theologico-Political Treatise), or on society in general
(Hobbes in De Cive and Leviathan, Spinoza himself in the
Political Treatise). They do not produce a theory of real history, but
a theory of the essence of society. They do not explain any particular
society, nor any concrete historical period, nor a fortiori all
societies and all history. They analyse the essence of society and provide an
ideal and abstract model of it. We might say that their science is as far from
Montesquieu's as the speculative physics of a Descartes is from the
experimental physics of a Newton. The one directly attains in simple natures
or essences the a priori truth of all possible physical facts, the
other starts from the facts, observing their variations in order to disengage
their laws. This difference in objects then governs a revolution in
method. If Montesquieu was not the first to conceive of the idea of a social
physics, he was the first to attempt to give it the spirit of the new physics,
to set out not from essences but from facts, and from these facts to disengage
their laws. infinite disorder: man's very unreason. It is necessary to say, 'I have
first of all considered mankind; and the result of my thoughts has been, that,
amidst such an infinite diversity of laws and manners, they were not solely
conducted by the caprice of fancy' (SL, Preface), but by a deeper reason,
which, if not always reasonable, is at least always rational; by a necessity
whose empire is so strict that it embraces not only bizarre institutions which
last, but even the accident that produces victory or defeat in a battle and is
contained in a momentary encounter.[2] This
rational necessity rejects, along with the scepticism which is its pretext,
all the temptations of Pascal's apologetics, espying in human unreason the
admission of a divine reason; and all recourse to principles which surpass man
in man, like religion, or assign him ends, like morality. In order to begin to
be scientific, the necessity which governs history must stop borrowing its
reasons from any order transcending history. It must therefore clear from the
way of science the pretensions of a theology and a morality
which would like to dictate it their own laws. celibacy, polygamy and usury can be decided on theologically, he would
agree. But all these facts derive also and first from an order foreign to
theology, from an autonomous order which has its own principles. Let them
therefore leave him in peace. He does not forbid anyone to judge as a
theologian. Let them therefore grant him in exchange the right to judge as
a politician. And let them not go seek theology in his politics. There
is no more theology in his politics than there is a steeple in the telescope
through which the curate was shown the moon.[3]
But the cause is not yet understood. For it is not enough to
distinguish the sciences and their orders: in life the orders overlap one
another. True religion, true morality, supposing that they are excluded from
the political order as explanatory principles, do nonetheless belong to that
order by the conduct and scruples they inspire! Here the conflict becomes an
acute one. For it is easy to render morality unto morality and to judge only
as a pure politician. That is all right when one is writing about the
horrifying morality of the Japanese or the terrifying religion of the Turks.
All the theologians in the world will leave them to you. But when by chance
one encounters the true morality! And the true religion! Can one treat them,
too, 'humanely', as purely human things? Show that the Christian
religion and morality, like those of the pagans, can be explained by the
political regime, two degrees of latitude, an over harsh sky, the manners and
morals of merchants and fishermen? Is it permissible to print that it is the
difference in climate that has preserved Catholicism in the South of Europe
and spread Protestantism in the North? Can one thus authorize a political
sociology of religion and morality? The contagion of this evil imposes a
return to its source, and the theologians are seen to be the victims of the
fate accorded to Mahomet or the Chinese. For it is all right for false
religions to be no more than human, and to fall beneath the profane empire of
a science, but how can this empire be prevented from gaining the true
religion? Hence the theologian who quickly scents the heresy in an over human
theory of false religions. And Montesquieu who struggles and defends himself
in the terrible narrow margin separating his convictions as a believer (or his
dishonest precautions) from his exigencies as a scientist. For there is no
doubt but that, on many occasions, Montesquieu expounds in his examples the
complete argument of a true sociological theory of religious and moral
beliefs: Religion and morality, which he correctly refuses the right to
judge history, are no more than elements internal to given societies which
govern their forms and their nature. The same principle that explains a given
society also explains its beliefs. What, then, is left of the distinction of
orders? The distinction, if it is to be maintained, and it has to be,
traverses, then, the order of religion and morality itself. Religion can be
said to be understood in its human meaning and role (which can fall within a
sociology) or in its religious meaning (which falls outside any sociology).
That is how Montesquieu retreats, in order to avoid jumping. same way. Montesquieu is unique precisely in taking the opposite position
to these theoreticians, although he was their heir, and opposing on one
decisive point the theories of natural law of which they were for the
most part the proponents. relations. Paradoxically, this state, ignorant of all society, contains
and illustrates in advance the ideal of a society to be created. It is the
end of history that is inscribed in its origin. Thus the 'freedom' of the
individual in Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke. Similarly, the equality and
independence of man in Rousseau. But all these writers have in common the same
concept and the same problem: the state of nature is no more than the origin
of a society whose genesis they want to describe. the doctrine of natural sociability or of the instinct of sociability
designates a theory of feudal inspiration, and the doctrine of the
social contract a theory of 'bourgeois' inspiration, even when it is in
the service of absolute monarchy (in Hobbes for example). Indeed, the idea
that men are the authors of their society in a primordial pact, which is
sometimes duplicated into a pact of (civil) association and a pact of
(political) domination, is thus a revolutionary idea, echoing in pure theory
the social and political conflicts of a world in genesis. This idea is both a
protest against the old order and the programme for a new order. It deprives
the established social order and all the political problems then in dispute of
any recourse to 'nature' (at least to that inegalitarian 'nature'), denounces
a fraud in it and bases the institutions its authors defend, including
absolute monarchy in struggle against the feudal lords, on human
convention. It thus gives men the power to reject the old institutions, to
set up new ones and if need be to revoke or reform them by a new convention.
In this theory of the state of nature and of the social contract, apparently
pure speculation, we can see a social and political order that is falling, and
men founding on ingenious principles the new order they hope to defend or
erect. import. They did not have the idea of explaining the institutions of all
the peoples of the world, but of combating an already established order or of
justifying an order which was nascent or about to be born. They did not want
to understand all the facts but to found, i.e. to propose and
justify, a new order. That is why it would be aberrant to look in
Hobbes or Spinoza for a real history of the fall of Rome or of the emergence
of feudal law. They were not concerned with the facts. Rousseau was to
say openly that it is essential to start by 'laying facts aside'.[7]
They were only concerned with right, i.e. with what ought to be.
The facts were for them only the matter for the exercise of this right, and in
some sense the mere occasion and reflection of its existence. But here they
remained in what must really be called a polemical and ideological
posture. They made the side they took the very reason of history. And their
principles, which they presented as science, were no more than values
committed in the struggles of their time - values which they had
chosen. thing. A condemnation of the problem of origins as absurd. Society always
precedes itself. The only problem, if there must be one, though it is one
never encountered, would be why there were some men without society. No
contract. To explain society, a man and his son are all that is required. It
is thus hardly surprising to find, in the rapid review of the state of nature
in Book I, that a certain fourth law stands in for this absent contract: the
instinct of sociability. Here is a first indication pointing the way to
a judgement of Montesquieu as an opponent of the theory of natural law for
reasons related to a parti pris of the feudal type. All the political
theory of the Spirit of Laws will reinforce this conviction. actual government is forced to combine the two; he must know what ought to
be in order to judge what is.'[8] order and wills to obey. A legislator and subjects. The law possessed
thereby the structure of conscious human action: it had an end, it
designated a target, at the same time as it required its attainment. For the
subjects who lived within the law it offered the ambiguity of
constraint and ideal. It is this meaning and its resonances that can be seen
exclusively to dominate medieval thought, from Saint Augustine to Saint
Thomas. Law having only one structure, divine law, natural laws and positive
(human) laws could be discussed in the same sense. Every case exhibited
the same form of commandment and end. Divine law dominated all laws. God had
given his orders to nature as a whole and to man, and by doing so had fixed
their ends. The other laws were no more than the echo of this
primordial commandment, repeated more and more faintly throughout the
universe, the communion of angels, human societies, nature. As we know, it is
a fault of those who give orders, at least in certain institutions, to like
them to be repeated. moving in their orbits, could be turned into a universal model. The old
sense of law, which is an order and an end pronounced by a master, maintained
its original position: the domain of divine law, the domain of moral (or
natural) law, the domain of human laws. And one can even note something at
first sight paradoxical but rational enough: that the theoreticians of natural
law whom I have discussed made their concepts a contribution to the old
definition of law. Doubtless they, too, had 'secularized' 'natural law', the
God who pronounced it or, having made his decision, mounted guard over it,
being as useless as Descartes's God: no more than a night-watchman against
thieves. But they had retained from the old version its teleological
structure, its character as an ideal masked by the immediate appearances of
nature. For them natural law was as much a norm (devoir) as a
necessity. All their demands found refuge and support in a definition of law
which was still foreign to the new one. his wisdom and power'. Once God has been dealt with, the rest follows. The
best way to reduce one's opponent is to bring him over to one's own side. He
watched over the old domains. They have now been opened up to Montesquieu, and
first of all the entire world of the existence of men in their cities and in
their history. He is at last to be able to impose on them his own law.
tion itself: that there is no play on the word law. This dangerous
confusion is inherent in the fact that Montesquieu, who with all objects of
knowledge disengages their laws from the facts, is here seeking to know
a particular object, the positive laws of human societies. But the laws
found in Greece in the fifth century B.C. or in the Kingdom of the First
Frankish Line, are obviously not laws in the first sense - scientific laws.
They are juridical institutions, for which Montesquieu wants to state the
(scientific) law of their distribution and evolution. He says this quite
plainly when he distinguishes between laws and their spirit: 'I
do not pretend to treat of laws, but of their spirit, and . . . this spirit
consists in the various relations which the laws may have to different
objects' (SL, 1, 3). Thus Montesquieu does not confuse the laws of his object
(the spirit of laws) with his object itself (laws). I believe
that this simple distinction is indispensable if a certain misunderstanding is
to be avoided. Still in Book I, having shown that all the beings of the
universe and even God are subject to laws as relations, Montesquieu envisages
the differences in their modalities. In this way, he distinguishes
between the laws that govern inanimate matter, and which brook not the
slightest deviation, and the laws that govern beasts and men. As one rises in
the scale of being, laws lose their fixity and at any rate their observation
its precision. 'The intelligent world is far from being so well governed as
the physical' (SL, I, 1). Thus man, who has over other beings the privilege of
knowledge, is prone to error and the passions. Hence his disobedience:
'As an intelligent being, he incessantly transgresses the laws established by
God, and changes those of his own institution' (SL, I, 1). Worse still, he
does not even observe those he has given himself! But it is precisely this
errant being, in its history, that is the object of Montesquieu's
investigations: a being whose conduct does not always obey the laws it is
given, and in addition can have special laws it has made: positive laws,
without for all that respecting them any more than the others. those of a theoretician who is here confronting a profound ambiguity.
Indeed, two different interpretations can be given of this distinction
between the modalities of laws, two interpretations which represent two
tendencies in Montesquieu himself. laws (the natural laws of morality) and from positive laws.
Everything goes to show that Montesquieu did not intend to state the 'spirit'
of laws, i.e. the law of laws, without also stating the bad human side of the
spirit of laws: the law of their violation, in one and the same principle.
make and know. It is indeed an appeal to the legislator, but an appeal for
him, aware of the illusions of ordinary consciousness and critical of that
blind consciousness, to model himself on the enlightened consciousness of the
scientist, i.e. on science, and to make the conscious laws he gives men
conform as far as possible to the unconscious laws that govern them. Hence it
is not a question of an abstract ideal, of an infinite task which concerns men
because they are impotent and errant beings. It is a question of a
correction of errant consciousness by well-founded science, of the
unconscious consciousness by the scientific consciousness. Hence it is a
question of transferring the acquisitions of science into political practice
itself, correcting the errors and unconsciousness of that practice. beings may have laws of their own making; but they have some likewise which
they never made. Before there were intelligent beings, they were possible;
they had therefore possible relations, and consequently possible laws. Before
laws were made, there were relations of possible justice. To say that there is
nothing just or unjust, but what is commanded or forbidden by positive laws,
is the same as saying that, before the describing of a circle, all the radii
were not equal. We must therefore acknowledge relations of justice antecedent
to the positive law by which they are established' (SL, I, 1). And these
'primitive' laws are related to God. These laws of an always pre-existent
justice, independent of all the concrete conditions of history, amount to the
old type of commandment-law, normative law. It matters little whether they are
called divine and are exercised by the ministrations of natural religion; or
moral and are exercised by the education of fathers and teachers or by the
voice of nature which Montesquieu, before Rousseau, called 'the sweetest of
all sounds' (SL, XXVI, 4); or political. It is no longer a question of the
positive human laws engaged in concrete conditions of existence from which the
scientist has to disengage precisely their law. It is a question of a
norm established for man by nature or God, which amounts to the same thing.
And this characteristic contains, of course, a confusion of orders: scientific
law disappears behind commandment-law. This temptation can be detected very
distinctly at the end of the first chapter of Book I. The quotations I have
used to support the first interpretation then tend in a completely new
direction. It is just as if, now, human error, that integral part of men's
conduct, was no longer an object of the science, but the profound argument
justifying the existence of laws, i.e. of norms. It would be amusing to
imagine that the reason why bodies do not have (positive) laws is because they
do not have the wit to disobey their laws! For the reason men do have such
laws is less because of their imperfection (who would not give all the stones
in the world for a man?) than because of their capacity for insubordination.
Man: 'He is left to his private direction, though a limited being, and
subject, like all finite intelligences, to
ignorance and error: even his imperfect knowledge he loseth; and, as a
sensible creature, he is hurried away by a thousand impetuous passions. Such a
being might every instant forget his Creator; God has therefore reminded him
of his duty by the laws of religion. Such a being is liable every moment to
forget himself; philosophy has provided against this by the laws of morality.
Formed to live in society, he might forget his fellow-creatures; legislators
have, therefore, by political and civil laws, confined him to his duty' (SL,
I, 1). This time we have really fallen back, no question. These laws are
orders. They are laws against forgetfulness, laws of recall which
restore to man his memory, i.e. his duty or norms, range him with the end he
has to pursue, whether he will or no, if he wants to fulfil his destiny as a
man. These laws no longer concern the relation between man and his conditions
of existence, but rather human nature. The normative margin in these
laws no longer, as above, concerns the distance between the human
unconsciousness and the consciousness of its laws, it concerns the human
condition. Human nature, human condition, here we are right back in a
world we thought we had broken with. In a world of values fixed in heaven in
order to draw to them the gaze of men. marriage combinations, or the conjugation of the two sexes in abominable
encounters); that despotism and torture conflict with human nature always, and
slavery often. In short, a number of liberal demands, some more political
ones, and many platitudes in support of well-established customs. Nothing
remotely resembling the generous attitudes that other no less prudish, but
more resolute or naïve theorists attributed or were to attribute to 'human
nature': liberty, equality, fraternity. We really are in another world.
terrain of nature, a terrain, however, that one has chosen before
him, and with the appropriate weapons. Everything is prepared for the defence
of a different cause from nature's: that of a shaken world one would like to
re-establish on its foundations. 'a complete master-piece within an incomplete master-piece' (J. J.
Chevallier). After Book XIII we seem to enter another world. Everything should
have been said about the governments, their types being known, but here we
have the climate (Books XIV, XV, XVI, XVII), then the quality of the soil
(Book XVIII), then manners and morals (Book XIX), and commerce (Books XX,
XXI), and money (Book XXII), and population (Book XXIII) and finally religion
(Books XXIV, XXV), which each in turn determine the laws whose secret has
apparently already been provided. And to cap the confusion, four Books of
history, one discussing the development of the Roman laws of succession (Book
XXVII), three expounding the origins of feudal laws (Books XXVIII, XXX, XXXI),
and between them one Book on the 'manner of composing laws' (Book XXIX).
Principles which claim to provide order for history ought at least to put some
of it in the treatise which expounds them. atemporal structures and a historical genesis, etc. Which is a way of
saying that if he did make certain discoveries, they are only linked by
the disorder of his book, which proves against him that he did not make the
particular discovery he thought he had made. what condition can there be a government which gives power to the people
and makes it exercise that power by the laws? - On the condition that the
citizens are virtuous, i.e. sacrifice themselves to the public good,
and, in all circumstances, prefer the fatherland to their own passions. The
same for monarchy and despotism. If the principle of the government is
its spring, that which makes it act, that is because it is, as
the life of the government, quite simply its condition of existence. The
republic will only 'go', to coin a phrase, on virtue, just as some motors will
only go on petrol. Without virtue the republic will fall, as will monarchy
without honour, despotism without fear. totality of the nature and the principle of a government, Montesquieu is in
fact proposing a new theoretical category, one which gives him the key to an
infinity of riddles. Before him political theorists had certainly tried to
explain the multiplicity and diversity of the laws of a given government. But
they had done little more than outline a logic of the nature of
governments, even when they were not, as in most cases, satisfied by a mere
description of elements without any inner unity. The immense majority
of laws, such as those that determine education, division of lands, degree of
property, techniques of justice, punishments and rewards, luxury, the
condition of women, the conduct of war, etc. (SL, IV-VII), were excluded from
this logic, because their necessity was not understood. Montesquieu here
majestically closes this old debate, by discovering and verifying in the
facts the hypothesis that the State is a real totality and that all the
particulars of its legislation, of its institutions and its customs are
merely the effect and expression of its inner unity. He submits these
laws, which seem fortuitous and irrational, to a profound logic, and relates
them to a single centre. I do not claim that Montesquieu was the first to
think that the State should of itself constitute a totality. This idea
is already lurking in Plato's reflection and we find it again at work in the
thought of the theoreticians of natural law, at any rate in Hobbes. But before
Montesquieu this idea only entered into the constitution of an ideal
State, without lowering itself to the point of making concrete history
intelligible. With Montesquieu, the totality, which was an idea,
becomes a scientific hypothesis, intended to explain the facts.
It becomes the fundamental category which makes it possible to think, no
longer the reality of an ideal state, but the concrete and hitherto
unintelligible diversity of the institutions of human history. History is no
longer that infinite space in which are haphazardly scattered the innumerable
works of caprice and accident, to the discouragement of the understanding,
whose only possible conclusion is the insignificance of man and the greatness
of God. This space has a structure. It possesses concrete centres to which
are related a whole local horizon of facts and institutions: the States. And
at the core of these totalities,
which are like living individuals, there is an inner reason,
an inner unity, a fundamental primordial centre: the unity of nature
and principle. Hegel, who gave the category of the totality enormous scope
well knew his own teacher when he expressed his gratitude for this discovery
to Montesquieu's genius. Even in the history of Rome, which is for him truly the most perfect
experimental subject, a kind of 'pure substance' of historical
experimentation, the ideal purity only had one moment, at the beginning, for
all the rest of the time Rome lived in political impurity. It would surely be
incredible if Montesquieu were unaware of such a contradiction. It must be
that he does not think he is contradicting his principles, but that he is
giving them a more profound meaning than they are attributed. I believe in
fact that the category of the totality (and the nature-principle
unity which is its core) is indeed a universal category, one which does not
concern just the perfect adequacies: republic-virtue, monarchy-honour,
despotism-fear. Manifestly, Montesquieu considers that in any State,
whether it is pure or impure, the law of this totality and its unity
is supreme. If the State is pure, the unity will be an adequate
one. But if it is impure, it will be a contradictory one. All the
impure majority of Montesquieu's historical examples are so many examples of
this contradictory unity. Thus Rome, once the first period is over, and the
first great conquests have occurred, lives in the State of a republic which
will lose, loses and then has lost its principle: virtue. To say that
therefore the nature-principle unity always survives but has become a
contradiction is quite simply to state that it is the relationship existing
between the political form of a government and the passion then providing it
with a content which governs the fate of that State, its life, its
survival, its future, and hence its historical essence. If this relationship
is a non-contradictory one, i.e. if the republican form finds virtue in
the men it governs, the republic will survive. But if this republican form is
now only imposed on men who have abdicated all virtue and relapsed into
private interests and passions, etc., then the relation will be a
contradictory one. But it is precisely this contradiction in the
relation, i.e. the existing contradictory relation, that decides
the fate of the republic: it will perish. All this can be inferred from
Montesquieu's historical studies, and in particular from Considerations on
the Causes of the Grandeur and Declension of the Roman Empire, but it is
also clearly stated in Book VIII of the Spirit of Laws, which deals
with the corruption
of governments. To say, as Montesquieu does, that a government which loses
its principle is a lost government means quite clearly that the
nature-principle unity is also supreme in the impure cases. If it were
not, it would be impossible to understand how this broken unity could break
its government. two terms are in contradiction (Republican Rome and Romans who have
abandoned virtue), crisis breaks out. The principle is then no longer what is
wanted by the nature of the government. Whence a chain reaction: the
form of the government tries blindly to reduce the contradiction, it changes,
and its change drags the principle along with it, until, with the help of
circumstances, a new harmony emerges (imperial-despotic Rome and Romans living
in fear), or a catastrophe which is the end of this breathless chase
(barbarian conquest). The dialectic of this process is quite clear: its
extreme moments are, either peace between the two terms of the opposition, or
their conflict; in their conflict, the interaction of the terms is clear, as
is how each modification of one inevitably induces a modification of the
other. Thus it is clear that nature and principle are absolutely
interdependent in the mobile but pregnant totality of the State. But it is
not clear where the first change comes from, nor the last one either in the
order of time, or in that of causes. It is not clear
which of these two terms linked together in the fate of the totality
is the preponderant one. form of government. That is why every particular form produces in
its principle its own conditions of existence, and always forestalls itself,
although at the same time it is the principle which is expressed in that form.
We would seem here to be in a real circular expressive totality in
which each part is like the whole: pars totalis. And the movement of
this sphere which we think is moved by a cause is no more than its
displacement onto itself. With a rolling ball, each point on its sphere can
move from top to bottom and return from there to the top, go back down again,
and so on to infinity. But all its points do the same. There is neither top
nor bottom in a sphere, entirely contained as it is in each of its points.
which is, in the last resort, the cause of the development of forms and
their meanings. To the point that the classic image of form and content (form
being what informs, effectivity itself) has to be inverted. It is the
principle that is, in this sense, the true form of that apparent form, the
nature of the government. 'There are very few laws which are not good, while
the State retains its principles. Here I may apply what Epicurus said of
riches: "It is not the liquor, but the vessel, that is corrupted" ' (SL, VIII,
11). it represents new principles, and heteroclite ones, which clash with the
unity I have just demonstrated? from himself by forcing this disorder to appear as an order. But I should
like to suggest briefly that in this disorder we can often glimpse something
approaching an order which is not foreign to what has so far been established.
makes the Christian religion accord so well with moderate government: 'We
owe to Christianity, in government, a certain political law; and in war, a
certain law of nations' (SL, XXIV, 3). Thus just when they are acting on the
government and determining certain of its essential laws, all these causes,
apparently so radically disparate, converge on a common point: the
customs, morals and manners of being, feeling and acting that they confer on
the men who live within their empire. was a ship held by two anchors, religion and manners, in the midst of a
furious tempest' (SL, VIII, 13). Finally, look at modern States: 'Most of the
European nations are still governed by manners and morals' (SL, VIII, 8),
which is what saves them from despotism, partly already master of their laws.
How can it be doubted that the manners and morals, vaster and more extensive
than the principle, are nonetheless its real foundation and seat, when the
same dialectic can be seen outlined between the manners and morals and the
laws as between the principles and the nature of a government? 'Laws are
established, manners are inspired; these proceed from a general spirit, those
from a particular institution: now, it is as dangerous, nay, more so, to
subvert the general spirit as to change a particular institution' (SL, XIX,
12), It is hard to see why it would be more dangerous to change the
manners and morals than the laws if the manners and morals did not have the
same advantage over the laws as the principle has over the nature: that of
determining them in the last resort.[1] Hence the
idea that recurs so frequently of a sort of primitive virtue of manners and
morals. If 'a people always knows, loves and defends its manners more than its
laws' (SL, X, 11), that is because these manners are more profound and
primordial. Thus, among the earliest Romans, 'their manners were sufficient to
secure the fidelity of their slaves; so that there was no necessity for laws'
(SL, XV, 16). Later, 'as they then wanted manners and morals, they had need of
laws'. And among primitive peoples themselves, if manners precede laws and
stand in for them (SL, XVIII, 13), that is because in some sense they derive
their 'origin from nature'. The form and style of conduct which are
expressed politically in the principle can be reduced to this ultimate
basis. This ultimate basis whose essential components Montesquieu lists as the
climate, the soil, the religion, etc.
It seems to me that this substantial analogy between the
manners and morals and the principle also explains the strange circular
causality of these factors, which seem at first sight completely
mechanical. It is true that the climate and the soil, etc., determine certain
laws. But they can be counteracted by them, and all the art of the enlightened
legislator consists of playing on this necessity in order to beat it. If this
recourse is possible it is because this determination is not direct but
indirect, and that it is completely gathered together and concentrated in
the manners and spirit of a nation, entering via the principle, which
is the political abstraction and expression of the manners and morals, into
the totality of the State. But since within this totality there is a certain
possible action of the nature on the principle, and hence of the laws on the
manners and morals and consequently on their components and causes, it is
not surprising that climate may give way to the laws. the surface in the principle. But it is hard to see the transition
from the manners and morals to the principle, from the real conditions to the
political exigencies of the form of a government, which come together in the
principle. The very terms I used, such as the manners being
expressed in the principles, betray this difficulty - for this
expression is in some sense torn between its origin (the manners and
morals) and the exigencies of its end (the form of the government). All
Montesquieu's ambiguity is linked to this tension. He did feel that the
necessity of history could only be thought in the unity of its forms and their
conditions of existence, and in the dialectic of that unity. But he grouped
all these conditions, on the one hand in the manners and morals, which
are indeed produced by real conditions, but whose concept remains vague (the
synthesis of all these conditions in the manners and morals is no more than
cumulative); and on the other hand in the principle, which, divided
between its real origins and the exigencies of the political form it has to
animate, leans too often towards these exigencies alone. precisely the pre-eminence of the forms over their principles, and wanted
there to be three kinds of government, in order that, protected by the
necessities of climate, manners and morals, and religion, it could make its
choice between them.
I hope to be very brief on the republic. Faguet may have said that
Montesquieu is a republican. Montesquieu does not believe in the republic, and
for a simple reason: the age of republics is past. Republics only last
in small States. Our era is that of medium and large empires. Republics can
only be sustained by virtue and frugality, general mediocrity in its original
sense, i.e. that everybody is content with nothing. Our age is one of luxury
and commerce. Virtue has become such a burden that its effects would be
disastrous if they could not be attenuated by milder laws. For all these
reasons, the republic retreats into the distant past: Greece, Rome. No doubt
that is why it is so beautiful. Montesquieu, who is quite prepared to call
Richelieu crazy for his claim to want an angel for king, so rare is virtue,
accepts that in Greece and Rome there were, at certain periods, enough angels
to make up whole cities. 'everything' are nonetheless not at the mercy of their own caprice. The
citizens are not so many despots. Their omnipotence subordinates them to a
political order and a political structure which they recognize and which
transcend them as individual men: the order of the laws, whether
fundamental, i.e. constitutive of the regime, or occasional, i.e.
decreed in response to events. But this order itself, which makes them
citizens, is not an order received from without, as for example is the
feudal order, the 'natural' inequality of the estates in a monarchy. In
democracy, the citizens possess the unique privilege of themselves consciously
and voluntarily producing in legislation the very order which governs them.
Children of the laws, they are also their fathers. They are subjects only as
sovereigns. They are masters subject to their own power. It is clear that this
synthesis of subject and sovereign in the citizen, which haunted Rousseau,
demands of man that he be more than man, and that without being quite an
angel, he be a citizen, which is the true angel of public life. law, that is because all of a man's private life consists of being a public
man - the laws being the perpetual 'reminder' of this exigency. This circle of
democracy, which is simply the eternal education of democracy, this remarkable
circle of a regime which thus accepts its existence as a perpetual task,
realizes the specific duty of the citizens, who, in order to be all as
they are in the State, must, in their very persons, become 'all' of the State.
sentatives is on its death-bed. Montesquieu, on the contrary, holds that a
democracy without representatives is an imminent popular despotism. This is
because he has a very special idea of the people, confirmed by those ancient
democracies in which the freedom of the 'free men' was to the forefront,
leaving the multitude of artisans and slaves in the shade. Montesquieu does
not want this 'common people' (bas-peuple) to have power.[2]
This is indeed his most deep-lying concern, and it illuminates all the
precautions of Book II (Chapter 2). Abandoned to itself, the people (the
common people) is nothing but passion. It is incapable of foresight, thought
and judgement. How could passion judge, since it is the very absence of
reason? Let the people therefore be deprived of all direct power, but let them
choose representatives. They are extremely well-qualified for choosing,
for they see men in action at close quarters, and discern the good and the
mediocre instantly. They know how to choose the good general, the good rich
man and the good judge; they see the first in his wars, the second in his
banquets and the third in his judgements. They have a 'natural capacity, in
respect to the discernment of merit', and as proof that merit stares them in
the face, 'though the people of Rome assumed to themselves the right of
raising plebeians to public offices, yet they would never exert this power;
and though, at Athens, the magistrates were allowed, by the law of Aristides,
to be elected from all the different classes of inhabitants, there never was a
case, says Xenophon, that the common people petitioned for employments which
could endanger either their security or their glory' (SL, II, 2)! What a
wonderful natural gift of the people, forcing them to admit their own
inability even to be their own masters, and to take for lords precisely those
who have the advantages of rank and fortune over them. Ancient democracy
itself thus already witnesses in favour of all the notables of history.
force this judicious inclination and, if all else fails, what is required
to admonish it and establish it in its vocation. In particular, there are laws
which divide the people into classes, with enough discrimination to deprive
the commoners of their votes. 'It is in the manner of making this division
that great legislators have signalized themselves.' Servius Tullius, for
example, had the wit to 'lodge the right of suffrage in the hands of the
principal citizens', so that 'it was property rather than numbers that decided
the elections'. Or the Roman legislators who realized that the public vote
'should be considered as a fundamental law of democracy', for, 'the lower
classes ought to be directed by those of higher rank, and restrained within
bounds by the gravity of eminent personages' (SL, II, 2). Voting
secretly is a privilege of the aristocratic seigneury, for the reason
that they are themselves their own great men! No doubt but that the surest
means of maintaining such a natural disposition is to produce it.
With monarchy and despotism, which is in some sense its inverse and pole of
attraction, we are in the present. Montesquieu thinks that modern times
belong to feudal monarchy, and the feudal monarchy belongs to modern times.
Antiquity knew no real monarchies (in Rome, as we know, the republic was what
was hidden in its trappings) for two reasons, which their conjunction will
illuminate: because it was ignorant of the true distribution of powers and
knew nothing of government by the nobility. which have the privilege of being fxed and established? What is the
meaning of this fixity and establishment? Here Montesquieu has in mind what
jurists had for three centuries called the fundamental laws of the
kingdom. The expression fundamental law often appears in the
Spirit of Laws. Every government has its fundamental laws. Thus the
republic has, among others, the electoral law. Thus despotism has the
nomination of a vizir by the despot. We even learn in passing that the
colonial pact is the fundamental law of Europe vis-à-vis its overseas
colonial possessions (SL, XXI, 21). Thus Montesquieu uses the expression in a
very broad way, assigning to it the designation of those laws in a government
that define and found its 'nature' (in modern terms: its constitution), as
distinct from the laws by which the government governs. But it is obvious that
in the case of a monarchy this expression contains the echoes of past
disputes. The object of these disputes was the definition of the powers of the
absolute monarch. The notion of the fundamental laws of the kingdom
intervened to limit the pretensions of the king. It demonstrated to him that
he was king, by the grace of God no doubt, but also as an effect of laws older
than him which he accepted tacitly by mounting the throne: the virtue of these
laws seating him there even unbeknownst to him. The jurists usually cited the
law of blood succession, but also a whole series of dispositions whose object
was the recognition of the existing orders: nobility, clergy, parliament, etc.
The fundamental laws which set the king on his throne demanded in return that
the king respect them. It is to this meaning that Montesquieu is reverting
under cover of a more general sense, when he talks of monarchy. the dissipation of power, not only on the death, but also during the life
of a prince. This law really is a law. He also invokes the necessity of a
'depository of the laws' independent of the royal authority, and this really
is a matter of a 'law' establishing a political institution. But the
nobility and the clergy! We were thinking of political institutions,
and here we have the intervention of social orders. In fact the word
law here only designates the privileged bodies in order to signify that
the king is only the king through the existence of the nobility and the
clergy, and that in return he must recognize them and defend their privileges.
the legal field. But it is also the existence of privileged orders.
Now we are in the social field. It follows from this reasoning that these
orders are identical with the fixity and constancy. The reason for this
remarkable identity is that a monarch without a nobility and without orders is
not inconceivable, but he would be despotic. The performance of the
mechanics of power (the channels) serves the cause of the orders and
combats that of the despot which any prince is if he dispenses with the
nobility. Hence we can conclude that in essentials, these fixed and
established laws are no more than the fixity of the establishment of the
nobility and the clergy. extent, the 'channels' which he has to grant the loan of it, all impose on
him a necessary slowness which is the very duration of his power. In fact the
nature of monarchical government presupposes a real space and duration. The
space: the king does not fill it by himself, in it he meets a social structure
which is extended because it is differentiated, composed of orders and
estates, each having its place. The space which is the measure of the
extent of the royal power is thus the limit of his authority. The space is an
obstacle. The infinite plain of despotism is a kind of narrow horizon before
the despot, precisely because it contains none of those accidents
constituted by the inequalities of men: it has been levelled. It is the
following obstacles: the nobility, the clergy, that give the space its
political depth, just as the following obstacles: hedges, roofs and steeples
give it its visual depth. And the time of the royal power is merely
this space experienced. As a man endowed with the supreme power, the
king is a prey to haste, everything seeming to be a matter of decree. He will
learn the slowness of the very world he governs, of the privileged orders, and
of that body entirely devoted to teaching it him in a good monarchy: the
depository of the laws. This slowness will be a kind of enforced education
of the sovereign's political reason by the real and full distance which
separates him from his subjects. It is from this distance that he will acquire
reason. This prince, who is certainly no angel, will become reasonable by the
very necessity of his power: its space and duration will be the practical
reason of a king, forced to become wise by experience, if he is not so by
birth. In a democracy the notables, by their rank and fortune, stand in for
reason for the people; in the same way, in a monarchy, the nobility stands in
for wisdom for the king. different in a monarchy. The nobility that stands in for wisdom for the
king is not forced to be wise. On the contrary, it is its nature to be
unreasonable. It is incapable of reflection, so much so that it has to look to
lawyers to remember the laws it does not want to forget! Whence then does
monarchy, in which nothing is reasonable, derive this reason? From the
nobility, which does not have any, but produces it without wishing it
or realizing it, without even having anything to do with it. It is thus just
as if monarchy produced political reason as the result of its private
unreasons. This reason, which features under none of the rubrics, is there
nonetheless in the whole. It is surely the most profound law of monarchy that
it produces its end despite itself in this way. If its fundamental laws need
to be complemented by one last one, which is really the first, it would be to
state that the original law of monarchy is this ruse of reason.
and codes. Politeness and generosity, greatness of soul? These are indeed
obligatory duties for all men towards their kind if they are to live together
in peace. But in honour 'politeness, generally speaking, does not derive its
original from so pure a source: it rises from a desire of distinguishing
ourselves. It is pride that renders us polite, we are flattered with being
taken notice of for a behaviour that shews we are not of a mean condition, and
that we have not been bred up with those who in all ages are considered as the
scum of the people' (SL, IV, 2). Generosity itself, which seems to flow from
goodness, is merely the proof that a well-born soul wants to present itself as
greater than its fortune, by giving it away, and above its rank, by forgetting
it; as if it could deny the advantage of rank that is required to have the
pleasure of denying it. All the appearances of virtue have thus been turned
upside down. For honour is not so much the subject of virtue as its
subjugator. 'To this whimsical honour it is owing that the virtues are only
just what it pleases: it adds rules of its own invention to every thing
prescribed to us: it extends or limits our duties according to its own fancy,
whether they proceed from religion, politics, or morality' (SL, IV, 2).
Hegel was to see the origin of the master and the slave, and of
self-consciousness. In Montesquieu, the masters and slaves always pre-exist
honour; its triumph never celebrates a real triumph. The race was run before
the starter's flag. In honour, if we must still speak of a race, some have
twenty years start, as Pascal puts it, and all the race is in the procedure.
This is because in fact if honour does demand 'honours and distinctions', it
presupposes their sanctioned existence and their regular attribution - in
other words, it presupposes a State in which 'pre-eminences and ranks' prevail
(SL, III, 7). Honour is the point of honour not of a merit attained in the
struggle, but of a superiority obtained by birth. Honour is thus the
passion of a social class. If it seems to be its father, since it was
constituted in the distant origin of barbarous laws, when the Franks defeated
the Gauls, its father, since it maintains it in the conviction of its
superiority, honour is rather the child of the nobility, since outside
the existence of the nobility it would be inconceivable. And all its falsity
consists in the fact that it gives the appearance of morality or merit to
reasons which pertain to the vanity of a class. and prejudice? Their effect is the same, and without the super-human effort
required of virtue in the same cause. Honour is the economy of virtue. It
dispenses with it and gives the same effects at a lower cost.
Such is monarchy. A prince protected from his own excesses by
privileged orders. Orders protected from the prince by their honour. A prince
protected from the people and a people protected from the prince by these same
orders. Everything depending on the nobility. A power moderated less by its
pure essence or its attribution than by the fixed and established social
conditions in which it is exercized, and which, as obstacle and means, give it
the slowness and conciliation which are its entire rationale. Each individual
pulling for himself, having his own absolute in his head, and the equilibrium
emerging, as if unbeknownst to all, from these very contradictory excesses.
The reason of monarchy may well be described as a contrariety of follies. And
as it is clear that this order is the one Montesquieu prefers, its structure
may cast light on certain of his choices. And especially the ideas he has of
men and reason. For if he does possess a true enthusiasm for intelligent
reason, he has no passion for ideal reason. Montesquieu occasionally says that
the reasonable is not all of reason, and that to do well is not to do good. If
he holds republican virtue so high, it is because he believes that it is
always more or less angelic and out of human reach. If he prefers to it the
conciliation of monarchy and honour, it is indeed because honour, in its
round-about way, is the short-cut to virtue, but above all because this
short-cut is made via passions born from the nature of a condition and not by
the asceticism of a conversion. This reason he dreams of making supreme in the
State is far rather the reason which acts behind men's backs and on them than
the reason that lives in their consciousness, and by which they live. It is
clear how monarchy naturally enters into that great law of history, already
discovered, that it is not the consciousness of men that makes history. But it
is also clear how such a general idea can serve such a particular cause. For
of all the political unconsciousnesses, it is no mystery to say that
Montesquieu knew how to choose the right one: monarchy.
3. D E S P O T I S M
In the order of Montesquieu's definitions, despotism is the last of the
governments. I hope to show that it is the first in his mind. not according to
his preference, which obviously goes to monarchy, but, what comes to the same
thing, in his aversion. And that his object is to provide new arguments not
only for choosing monarchy, but also for re-establishing it on its true
foundations, by counterposing to it the spectacle of its downfall and bugbear.
Despotism is certainly a political idea, the idea of
absolute evil, the idea of the very limits of politics as such. subjects. Not even the arbitrary decree of the despot, which can be reduced
to nothing by a palace revolution, a harem conspiracy or a popular rising. Nor
does it know political laws other than the one that governs the strange
transmission of power, always absolute, which descends from the prince to the
last family head in the land, via the first vizir, the governors, the bashaws,
repeating imperturbably from one end of the kingdom to the other the logic of
passion: laziness on the one hand, delight in domination on the other. Nor
does it know any judiciary laws. The only code of the cadi is his
humour, the only procedure, his impatience. Hardly has he lent his ear to the
parties than he decides, and distributes bastinados or chops off heads on the
spot. Lastly, this strange regime does not even bother with that minimum of
police that might regulate exchange and commerce. The 'society of needs' is
not even governed by the unconscious laws which constitute a market, an
economic order transcending the practical life of men: no, the logic of the
economy is the economy of logic, it reduces itself to the pure passions of
men. The merchant himself lives from one day to the next for fear of
losing tomorrow whatever surplus he might amass today, in his own way like the
American savage cited by Rousseau who in the morning sells the bed he has just
left, not thinking that there will be another night this evening. . . .
Without political or legal transcendence, i.e. without past or future,
despotism is the regime of the moment. tyrant cannot suffer the continuity of 'families' that time enriches and
the succession and effort of generations elevate in human society. Better, he
cannot tolerate any of the greatnesses of establishment that he himself
confers on certain of his subjects. For ultimately a vizir, governors, bashaws
and cadis are needed! But this greatness is only occasional, taken back the
moment it is conceded, almost evanescent. It is nothing the moment it has
arrived. Every clerk may thus hold all the power of the despot, but his life
is a postponed disgrace or assassination: that is all his freedom, that is all
his security! It is as easy, says Montesquieu, to make of a prince a scullion,
and of a scullion a prince (SL, V, 19). The social distinctions that emerge
from this egalitarian desert are no more than the appearance of a universal
distinction. But even that body, so necessary to order or terror, the army,
has no place in this regime: it would constitute too stable a body, and be too
dangerous to the general instability. At most all that is needed is a guard of
janissaries attached to the person of the prince, and which he sends out in
lightning raids on someone's head, before locking it back up again in the
night of the palace. Nothing that distinguishes between men, nothing that
resembles in the slightest the outline of a social hierarchy or a social
career, the organization of a social world, in which, in advance of and for
all the time of the existence and for the growth of the generations, avenues
open into the future - in which one may be sure of being noble for life if one
is so by birth, of becoming bourgeois in life if one has deserved it by one's
industry. No more than it knows any political and legal structure and
transcendence, does despotism know any social structure. destroy them. They reign only over empty uniformity, over the void
constituted by the uncertainty of tomorrow, abandoned lands and a commerce
that expires at its birth: over deserts. And it is the desert itself
that despotism establishes at its frontiers, burning lands, even its own, to
isolate itself from the world, to protect itself from the contagions and
invasions from which nothing else can save it (SL, IX, 4 & 6). In fact,
nothing that resists in the void: let a foreign army penetrate into the empire
and nothing will stop it, neither strongpoint nor force, since there are none;
it is thus necessary to weaken it before it ever reaches the frontier by
opposing it with a first desert in which it will perish. The space of
despotism is no more than the void: thinking he is governing an empire, the
despot reigns only over a desert. speak beneath the political and the social, restricted to the step
below their generality and constancy, does at least live the lower life of
this step. And this life is solely the life of immediate passion.
passion which only ever repeats itself. Among the political passions it is
the only one which is not political, but 'psychological, because immediate.
Nonetheless, this is the passion that constitutes the life of this strange
regime.
It is only too clear that what Montesquieu has been trying to
represent in this picture of despotism is something quite different from the
State in oriental regimes: it is the abdication of politics itself.
This value judgement explains its paradoxical character. In fact, despotism is
always on the brink of being considered as a regime which does not
exist but is the temptation and peril of the other regimes when corrupted;
and yet as a regime which does exist, and can even be corrupted;
although corrupt in essence, it can never fall into anything but corruption
itself. No doubt that is the fate of all reprobate extremes: it is convenient
to represent them as real in order to inspire disgust. It takes many pictures
of the devil to uphold virtue. But it is also important to give the extremity
all the features of the impossible and of negativity; to show that it is not
what it claims; and to destroy in it even the appearances of the good that
would be lost if one lapsed into it. That is why the image of despotism is
justified by the example of the regimes of the East, at a time when the latter
impressed itself and was refuted as an idea. Let us therefore leave the
Turks and the Chinese in peace, and focus on the positive image for which this
danger is the bugbear. Montesquieu made his hero.[7] It is to
this party that we owe the most famous of the doléances against the
excesses of Louis XIV's reign. The poverty of the peasantry, the horrors of
war, the intrigues and usurpations of courtesans, these are the themes of its
denunciations. All these famous texts acquired 'liberal' overtones by their
oppositional character, and I am afraid that they often feature in anthologies
of 'la liberté ' alongside those of Montesquieu himself, and not
without a well-established appearance of correctness, for this opposition took
a unique part in the struggle against the feudal power really, and whatever
they may have said, embodied by the absolute monarchy; but the purposes which
inspired them had about as much relation to liberty as the ultras' clamour
against capitalist society under the Restoration and the July Monarchy had
with socialism. In denouncing 'despotism', Montesquieu is not defending
against the politics of absolutism so much liberty in general as the
particular liberties of the feudal class, its individual security, the
conditions of its lasting survival and its pretensions to return in new organs
of power to the place which had been robbed from it by history. favour. And even in the all-powerful governors dispatched to the provinces,
can we fail to recognize the grotesque masks of the intendants charged with
the King's omnipotence in their domains? How could we fail to suspect in the
regime of caprice a forced caricature of the regime of 'bon plaisir ',
in the tyrant who is 'tout l'état ' without saying it, a distorted echo
of the Prince who had already said it, even if it was not yet completely true.
But a cause has to be judged by its effects. Once we see the respective
situations of the great and the people in despotism, we will
realize the dangers against which it was meant to be a forewarning.
Protected. But also just as threatening in their own way. For
despotism presents a second privilege: that it is the regime of popular
revolution.[10] No other government leaves the people
to their passions alone, and God knows, the people are subject to them! These
popular passions need the bridle of reflection: the notables elected in a
republic; the intermediary bodies found in a monarchy. But in a despotism, in
which passion reigns supreme, how are the people's instincts to be chained, in
the absence of any order, legal or social, which they will accept? When
passions dominate, the people, who are passion, always win in the end. Even if
only for a day. But this day is enough to destroy everything. Enough at any
rate to overthrow the tyrant in the shocks of a revolution. All this is plain
to read in Book V, Chapter 11 of the Spirit of Laws.[11] And it is hard to avoid drawing a second lesson,
this time not addressed to the great, but to the tyrants, or by
extension to those modern monarchs tempted by despotism. This second
lesson clearly signifies: despotism is the sure road to popular revolutions.
Princes, avoid despotism if you would save your thrones from the
people's violence!
These two lessons together constitute a third: if the
prince ruthlessly fights the great, the great will thereby lose their
conditions of existence. But in doing so, the prince will have cleared the way
for the people, who will turn against him, and nothing now protects him from
their blows: he will thereby lose his crown and his life. Hence let the
prince understand that he needs the rampart provided by the great to defend
his crown and his life against the people! That is the basis for a fine
and completely reasonable alliance based on mutual advantage. All he has to do
to secure his throne is to recognize the nobility. the monarchical order, to justify parliaments, and even for the convocation
of the Estates General? Did not the American Constitution of the end of the
century and the French Constitution of 1791 itself, not to speak of those of
1795 and 1848, consecrate Montesquieu's desired principles of the separation
of powers in their arguments and dispositions? These two themes: the
separation of powers, the balance of powers, are they not still current
themes, still taken up and disputed in the very words established by
Montesquieu? vene in the legislature by proposing laws or in the judiciary by pressure,
etc., not only can no minister be responsible to the legislature, but also no
member of the legislature can, in his personal capacity, assume executive and
judicial functions, i.e. become a minister or a magistrate, etc. I leave aside
the details of this logic, which is still alive in some people's minds.
It is hard to see how such important interferences of powers
as these can be reconciled with the claimed purity of their separation.
puissances are the king, the upper chamber and the lower chamber,
i.e. the king, the nobility and the 'people'. Here Eisenmann shows very
convincingly that Montesquieu's true object is precisely the
combination, the liaison of these three puissances.[12] That what
is involved is above all a political problem of relations of forces,
not a juridical problem concerning the definition of legality and its
spheres. were satisfied at having revealed beneath the mythical exterior of the
separation of powers the real operation of a division of power between
different political forces, we would risk encouraging the illusion of a
natural division, one that occurs of itself and answers to an obvious
equity. We have moved from powers to puissances. The terms have
changed? The problem remains the same: it is never more than a question of
balance and division. This is the last myth I hope to be able to expose.
subverted, and the dependent intermediate powers annihilated' (SL, VI, 5),
and the example he cites in the following pages is that of Louis XIII, who
wanted to judge a gentleman himself (ibid.). If we compare this exclusion and
the arguments for it (that if the king judges, the intermediate bodies are
annihilated) on the one hand with the arrangement that only calls noblemen
before a tribunal of their peers, and on the other with the misfortunes the
despot reserves primarily for the great, we can see that this
special clause depriving the king of judiciary power is important above all
for the protection of the nobility against the political and legal
arbitration of the prince, and that once again the despotism Montesquieu
threatens us with designates a policy directed quite precisely against the
nobility first of all. the lesson of despotism, the king will realize that his future is well
worth a nobility.
Thus the analysis of the English Constitution leads
essentially to the same point as the examination of monarchy and despotism; to
the same point as certain of the reasons behind the theoretical principles of
the opponent of the theorists of the social contract: to Montesquieu's
political choice. the categories in which the men of the eighteenth century thought the
history they were living answer to the historical reality? In particular
is the clear distinction between the three puissances a well-founded
one? Is the king really a puissance in the same sense as the nobility
and the bourgeoisie? Is the king an autonomous puissance of his own,
sufficiently distinct from the others not in person or powers, but in role
and function, that he can really be put in the balance with the others, be
circumvented and compacted with? The 'bourgeoisie' itself, those notables of
profession (la robe), trade and finance, is it to that extent and in
that epoch the opponent of the nobility and its opposite already
detectable in the lower chamber Montesquieu concedes it, its first theoretical
victory in a campaign which was to triumph in the Revolution? To ask these
questions is to call back into doubt the very convictions of the men of the
eighteenth century and to raise the difficult problem of the nature of
absolute monarchy on the one hand, of the bourgeoisie on the
other, in the historical period in which Montesquieu lived and which he
thinks. absolute: a king fighting with and sacrificing the great to take his
clerks and his allies from the commoners.[2] On the
other hand the absolutist party, bourgeois in inspiration, the
Romanists (the Abbé Dubos, that author of a 'conspiracy . . . against
the nobility' - SL, XXX, 10 - and target of the last Books of the Spirit of
Laws), and the Encyclopedists, celebrate either in Louis XIV or in the
enlightened despot the ideal of a prince who is wise enough to prefer
the merits and titles of the hard-working bourgeoisie to the outdated
pretensions of the feudal lords. These partis pris are incompatible,
but the argument is the same. But we are justified in asking whether this
basic conflict opposing the king to the nobility and this supposed alliance
between absolute monarchy and the bourgeoisie against the feudal lords does
not mask the true relation of forces. to have one's eyes open to the world to perceive immediately forms,
objects, groups and movements: this obviousness, which does without knowledge,
can nonetheless lay claim to it and think that it understands what it
only perceives. But the elements at least of a science are
really needed to understand the deeper nature of these obviousnesses, to
distinguish between the profound structures and conflicts on the one hand and
the superficial ones on the other, and between the real motions and the
apparent motions. Without a critique of the immediate concepts in which
every epoch thinks the history it lives, we shall remain on the threshold of a
true knowledge of history and a prisoner of the illusions it produces in the
men who live it. mercantile economy then acted we see that it was a fairly well intergrated
part of the feudal system itself: mercantilism is precisely the politics and
theory of this integration. All the economic activity which then seemed to
constitute the vanguard (commerce, manufactures) was indeed concentrated on
the State apparatus, subordinate to its profits and to its needs.[3]
Manufactures were founded above all to provide the court with luxury goods,
the troops with arms and the royal commerce with materials for exports, the
profits from which returned to the treasury. The great navigation companies
were created first and foremost to bring into the country, and always more or
less to the advantage of the royal administration, spices and precious metals
from overseas. In its structure the economic cycle of this period is thus
orientated towards the State apparatus as its goal. And the counterpart to
this orientation is the fact that the 'bourgeois' who at one moment or another
give life to these economic operations have no other economic or individual
horizon than the feudal order that this State apparatus serves: on
becoming rich, the merchant does not, with a few rare exceptions,
invest his gains in private production, but in lands, which he buys for
their title and for an entry into the nobility; in offices that are
functions of the administration, which he buys so as to enjoy their revenue as
a kind of rent; and in State loans, which guarantee him large profits.
The aim of the 'bourgeois' enriched by trade thus consists of directly
entering the society of the nobility, by the purchase of lands or the
refurbishing of a family whose daughter he marries, or of directly entering
the State apparatus by the gown and offices, or of sharing in the
profits of the State apparatus via rents. This is what gives this upstart
'bourgeoisie' such a peculiar situation in the feudal State: it takes its
place inside the nobility more than it fights it, and with these pretensions
to enter the order it seems to be fighting, it supports it as much as it
undermines it: the whole cycle of its economic activity and of the careers of
its members
thus remains inscribed in the limits and structures of the feudal
State. (feudal) and left-wing (bourgeois) combatants related not to dominant and
shared illusions, but to the reality of an absolute monarch who, thanks to an
irresoluble balance of forces, has become the real arbiter between the two
opposed classes. But this interpretation has the weakness that it lapses into
an idea of the bourgeoisie which, as I believe I have indicated, does not
correspond to the reality. itself. And the political regime of absolute monarchy is merely the new
political form required to maintain feudal domination and exploitation in a
period of the development of the mercantile economy. same forms. Between the king, the nobility and the bourgeoisie all
was decided by a constant conflict of a political and
ideological kind. Between the masses of the exploited, peasants subject
to feudal rights, small craftsmen, shopkeepers, minor professions in the
towns, on the one hand, and the feudal order and its political power on the
other, it was hardly a question of theoretical disputes but rather a matter of
silence or violence. It was a struggle between power and poverty, most often
settled by submission and for brief periods by riots and arms. Now these
starvation rebellions were very frequent in town and country throughout the
seventeenth century in France, which had not only the peasants' wars and
jacqueries of sixteenth-century Germany, but also urban riots; these risings
were ruthlessly suppressed. Now we can see what the king, the absolute
power, and the State apparatus were for, and what side the
famous 'puissances ' which occupied the forestage were on; until
certain 'journées révolutionnaires ' of the Revolution, the first that
achieved a victory - and brought a certain disorder both to theories and
powers. forces invoked by Montesquieu: the king, the nobility, the 'bourgeoisie'
and the 'common people', some light will be cast on our general interpretation
of his political choice and influence. Montesquieu's posterity. For this right-wing opponent served all the
left-wing opponents for the rest of the century, before providing weapons in
future history for all reactionaries. Of course, in the most acute period of
the Revolution, Montesquieu disappeared. Robespierre speaks very harshly of
the division of powers: we can hear the disciple of Rousseau confronting a
situation in which theories could be judged. But it remains the case that the
whole pre-revolutionary period was acted out very largely in terms of
Montesquieu's themes, and this feudal enemy of despotism became the hero
of all the opponents of the established order. By a unique historical
volte-face, a man who looked towards the past seemed to open the door
to the future. I believe that this paradox pertains above all to the
anachronistic character of Montesquieu's position. It is because he
pleaded the cause of an outdated order that he set himself up as an
opponent of a political order which others were to make outdated. With
due allowance, his thought is like the revolt of the nobility which preceded
the Revolution, and which Mathiez argues precipitated it. Montesquieu himself
merely wanted to re-establish a threatened nobility in its outdated rights.
But he thought the threat came from the king. In fact, taking sides against
the king's absolute power, he lent his hand to the undermining of the State
apparatus which was the nobility's only rampart. His contemporaries made no
mistake about this when, like Helvétius, they reckoned him 'too feudal',[7] and yet they conscripted him in their battles. What does it
matter where the blows come from so long as they strike the same point? And if
it is true that this 'revolutionary' posterity of Montesquieu's is a
misunderstanding, that misunderstanding must nonetheless be given its due: it
was merely the truth of an earlier misunderstanding: the
misunderstanding that had projected Montesquieu into right-wing opposition at
a time when it no longer had any meaning.
Oeuvres Complètes, 2 vols, ed. Roger Caillois, Pléiade edn,
Paris, Individual Authors
Henri Barckhausen, Montesquieu: ses idées at ses oeuvres d'après
les Dino Del Bo, Montesquieu, le dottrine politiche e giuridiche
(Milan, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, special number of October 1939
on
page 111
Part Two page 113 of the political 'problem' by the 'social contract' is only possible
because of the theoretical 'play' of this Discrepancy. However, the 'Social
Contract' has the immediate function of masking the play of the Discrepancy
which alone enables it to function. To mask means to denegate and reject. In
fact, the functioning of the Social Contract in Discrepancy I is only possible
because this Discrepancy I is carried over and transposed in the form of a
Discrepancy II, which alone enables the corresponding solution to function
theoretically. Discrepancy II then leads by the same mechanism to a
Discrepancy III, which, on the same principle still, leads to a Discrepancy
IV. We thus find that we are confronted by the observation of a chain of
theoretical discrepancies, each new discrepancy being charged to make the
corresponding solution, itself an effect of an earlier solution, 'function'.
In the chain of 'solutions' (Social Contract, alienation-exchange, general
will-particular will, etc.) we thus discern the presence of another chain, one
which makes the first theoretically possible: the chain of pertinent
Discrepancies which at each stage enable the corresponding solutions to
'function' theoretically. A comparison of these two chains, of the 'logic'
peculiar to each, and of the very special logic of their relationship (the
theoretical repression of the Discrepancy) direct us towards an understanding
of the theoretical function of the philosophical system in which Rousseau
proposed to think politics. theoretical effects of that problematic (including the apparently technical
arrangements for the organization of power, the distinction between its
organs, its working procedures). Book I Chapter IV sustains the whole of the Social Contract, since
it poses and resolves the problem which constitutes the fundamental question
(that 'theoretical abyss') of political life. The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect
with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in
which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and
remain as free as before. This is the fundamental problem of which the Social
Contract provides the solution (SC I, VI, p. 90).1 But Chapter VI, which formulates the question in this way,
has five chapters preceding it. . . . the social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other
rights. Nevertheless, this right does not come from nature, and must therefore
be founded on conventions. Before coming to that, I have to prove what I have
just asserted (SC, I, pp. 3-4). Rousseau proves it in Chapters II-V: a refusal to found
society in nature, or in illegitimate conventions. always go back to a first convention', first in principle with respect to
all possible conventions, in particular with respect to that convention called
the 'contract of subjugation' which, according to Grotius, a people might
conclude with the king to whom it submits.
It would be better, before examining the act by which a people gives itself
to a king, to examine that by which a people is a people; for this act, being
necessarily prior to the other, is the true foundation of society (SC I, V, p.
11). And, in the final paragraph of this same Chapter V, Rousseau
rejects one last objection concerning the majority principle:
The law of majority voting is itself something established by convention,
and presupposes unanimity, on one occasion at least (SC I, V, p. 11). With this last thesis Rousseau is rejecting the Lockean
theory of the 'natural' character ('natural' in the physical sense of the
word) of the law of the majority. The majority does not belong to the social
body as weight does to the physical body. It presupposes an act of convention
prior in principle to its stipulation: it therefore presupposes a unanimous
act of convention which adopts it as a law. Chapter VI can then pose the problem in all its rigour. This posing
contains three moments: (a) the conditions for posing the problem; (b) the
absolute limits to posing the problem; and (c) the posing of the problem
properly speaking.
(a) The conditions for posing the problem
They are expressed in the first paragraph of Chapter VI.
I suppose men to have reached the point at which the obstacles in the way
of their preservation in the state of nature show their power of resistance to
be greater than the forces at the disposal of each individual for his
maintenance in that state. That primitive condition can then subsist no
longer; and the human race would perish unless it changed its manner of
existence (SC I, VI, p. 11). Let us examine the important terms in these two sentences,
which define the objective conditions for posing the problem. (i) The 'obstacles'
They are not external obstacles. They do not come from nature
(catastrophes, cataclysms, 'natural difficulties -- climate, resources -- in
the production of sustenance, etc.). We know that Nature has been tamed, she
is no longer at war with herself, once men have cultivated her: the only
catastrophes left are human ones. Nor do the 'obstacles' come from other human
groups. are peaceful. This state defines their very condition: they are subject and
condemned to it, unable either to find any shelter in the world to protect
them from its implacable effects or to hope for any respite from the evils
afflicting them. (ii) The 'forces'
These 'resistant' 'obstacles' are opposed by the 'forces' at the disposal
of 'each individual' for his maintenance in the state of nature. the goods he possesses' (SC I, IX, p. 16). He has 'acquired' these goods
during the development of his social existence, which induced the development
of his intellectual and 'moral' faculties. with a particular interest. Remembering the exclusive seizure of lands
(taken away from the 'supernumeraries') which induces the state of war in the
universal sense of a state, and all its subsequent effects: rich and poor,
strong and weak, masters and slaves, it is clear what meaning is concealed by
the apparently anodyne inclusion of 'goods' in the list of the elements
constituting the 'forces' of the individuals when they have reached the state
of war. (iii) The fatal contradiction: obstacles/forces
If the obstacles are purely human and internal, if they are the effects of
that state of war, it is clear that the forces of each individual cannot carry
him through: for individuals would have to be stronger than the very forces to
which they are subject and which make them what they are, each 'stronger' on
his own account than the implacable (universal and perpetual) relations in
which they are trapped, those of the state of war. What indeed are these universal relations constituting the state of war?
These relations in which the individuals are trapped are nothing but the
product of their own activities. Hence the relations are not external to the
individuals and the individuals cannot change them from the outside. They are
co-substantial with the individuals. Indeed, the whole development of human
history has been produced by a dialectic such that the effects of the first,
involuntary socialization developed but also simultaneously alienated the
individual: such that in response this first alienation developed existing
social relations while alienating them more and more. So long as 'there was
still some forest left', men could partially escape the tyranny of social
relations and the alienating effects of their constraint. When the 'end of the
forest' came and the whole earth came under cultivation and was seized by its
first occupiers or the strong men who supplanted them, then there was no
longer any refuge for human liberty. Men were forced into the state of war,
i.e. into alienation. That is how they were trapped in the very relations that
their activity had produced: they became the men of those relations,
alienated like them, dominated by their particular interests, powerless
against those relations and their effects, exposed at every moment to the
fatal contradiction of the state of war. Fatal in the threat it held over
their lives and their liberty, henceforth inseparable from the particular
interest in which that liberty no longer found anything but its alienated
expression. A contradiction in the strict sense of the term, since the state
of war is liberty and human activity turned against themselves, threatening
and destroying themselves; in the form of their own effects. A contradiction
not only between the individuals and their forces on the one hand, and the
human 'obstacles' of universal competition on the other, but also (as a
function of the nature of this state of universal alienation) between each
individual and himself, between self-respect and particular interest, between
liberty and death. (b) The absolute limits to posing the problem
These are the conditions (the state of war on the one hand; the forces of
each individual on the other) which define the absolute limits to posing the
problem. They are gathered together in the second paragraph of Chapter VI:
'But, as men cannot engender new forces, but only unite and direct existing
ones . . . ' (c) Posing the problem
What is the existing individual, considered as a subject of definite
forces? We can summarize the set: life + physical forces + intellectual and
moral forces + goods + liberty, in the form: forces + liberty. As the force and liberty of each man are the chief instruments of his
self-preservation, how can he pledge them without harming his own interests,
and neglecting the care he owes to himself? This difficulty, in its bearing on
my present subject, may be stated in the following terms: The solution lies in a particular 'form of association' which
guarantees the 'unity' of the 'forces' of the individuals without harming the
instruments of their self-preservation: their forces (including their goods)
and their liberty. page 125
The solution to the problem posed lies in the nature of the act by which a
people is a people: this act is a contract. 'The nature of the social pact is private and peculiar to itself.'[1] In fact,
the 'nature of the act' of this contract is such that the structure of the
Social Contract in Rousseau is profoundly modified in comparison with its
strictly juridical model. Behind the juridical concept of the contract
we are dealing with an exceptional contract with a paradoxical structure.
If an individual, says Grotius, can alienate his liberty and make himself
the slave of a master, why could not a whole people do the same and make
itself subject to a king? There are in this passage plenty of ambiguous words
which would need explaining; but let us confine ourselves to the word
alienate. To alienate is to give or to sell. Now, a man who becomes the
slave of another does not give himself; he sells himself, at least for his
sustenance: but for what does a people sell itself? What emerges from this definition of alienation is the
distinction between 'give itself' (as a gratuitous act without exchange) and
'sell itself ' (as a non-gratuitous act, containing the counterpart of
an exchange). Hence:
To say that a man gives himself gratuitously, is to say what is absurd and
inconceivable; such an act is null and illegitimate, from the mere fact that
he who does it is out of his mind [or mad. But] madness creates no right (SC
I, IV, p.7). Strictly speaking the slave sells himself, since he
negotiates his submission at least for his sustenance. Strictly speaking: for
this concession of Rousseau's is no more than a demonstrative device, to
bring out the fact that even accepting its underlying principle, the thesis of
the contract of slavery cannot be extended to the contract of (political)
submission. Indeed, a people cannot sell itself: it does not get in exchange
for its submission, even from the king, the sustenance that the slave at least
receives from his master. A people that thinks it is selling itself (i.e. in
an advantageous contract of exchange) is really giving itself for nothing,
completely for nothing, including its liberty. To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of
humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is
possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all
liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts (SC I, IV, p.
8). The formal conclusion of Chapter IV on alienation: total
alienation is illegitimate and inconceivable because a contradiction in terms:
'incompatible with man's nature'. 'manner of existence', the sole solution offered to men, 'play' on a single
concept: alienation. The Two Recipient Parties and their Discrepancy
Indeed, so far we have only examined one aspect of the Social Contract:
what happens between the two Recipient Parties (RPs) in the form of total
alienation. But who are these RPs? on the other, the 'community'. Hence RP1 = the
individual, and RP2 = the 'community'.
R P 1 (individual) R P 2 (community) (total alienation)
> <
( ? )
(exchange) individuals do appear in the two RPs. But it is not a 'minor' difference:
it is the very solution of the contract inscribed in one of its
conditions: the RP2. The nature of the social pact is private and peculiar to itself, in that
the people only contracts with itself (op. cit., p. 425). Precisely: the people can only be said to 'contract with
itself' by a play on words, on this occasion on the word that
designates the RP1 as the 'people', a term only strictly
applicable to the RP2, the community (the object of the
contract being to think the act by which 'a people is a people'). This formula shows us that the act of association comprises a mutual
understanding between the public and the individuals, and that each
individual, in making a contract, so to speak, with
himself, is bound in a double capacity; as a member of the Sovereign he is
bound to the individuals, and as a member of the State to the Sovereign (SC I,
VII, pp. 13-14). Here the difference of 'form' which distinguishes between the
RP1 and the RP2, in other words, the
difference between the individual in the form of isolation and the individual
in the form of the community, which defines the RP2, is
thought in the category of individuality. The Discrepancy is admitted and at
the same time negated in the 'so to speak ' of 'each individual in
making a contract, so to speak, with himself . . . '.
Thus we can observe in Rousseau's own discourse a Discrepancy
within the elements of the contract: between the theoretical statuses of the
RP1 and the RP2. effects does Rousseau 'expect' from this falsified recourse. Or rather, to
avoid the language of subjectivity, what effects necessarily call forth this
recourse? These questions put us on the trail of the function fulfilled by
that singular philosophical object, the Social Contract. This
Discrepancy between the contract (borrowed from existing Law) and the
artificial philosophical object of the Social Contract is not a difference in
theoretical content pure and simple: every Discrepancy is also the index of an
articulation in the dis-articulation constituted by the
Discrepancy. In particular, an articulation of Rousseau's philosophy with
existing Law by the intermediary of one of its real concepts (sanctioning a
real practice), the contract, and with existing juridical ideology. The nature
of the function fulfilled by Rousseau's philosophical thought can no doubt be
elucidated by the study af the articulations which link it to the
realities of Law, Politics, etc . . . , in the dis-articulations which,
in the form of theoretical Discrepancies, constitute it as a
philosophy, as the philosophy it is. reveals its basic determinations on a number of occasions (the historical
conditions of possibility of the contract, the theory of manners and morals,
of religion, etc.). In both cases the philosophical object Social Contract is
relieved of its primordial function. Neither Kantian Morality nor the Hegelian
Nation are constituted by a 'contract'. Besides, is it not enough to
read Rousseau closely to see that his Contract is not a contract?
concept never being anything in Rousseau but the denegation of its fait
accompli), but the act of constitution of Rousseau's philosophy itself, of
its theoretical object and logic. page 135
This theory of total alienation enables Rousseau to settle
theoretically the 'terrifying' problem posed by the 'devil' Hobbes to all
political philosophy (and to all philosophy as such). Hobbes's genius was to
have posed the political problem with a merciless rigour in his theory of the
state of war as a state, and to have claimed that the contract founding civil
society was not a give-and-take contract of exchange between two Recipient
Parties. Hobbes's contract, too, depends on a total alienation which the
individuals agree among themselves to the advantage of a Third Party who is a
Recipient in that he takes everything (absolute power), but is not a
Recipient Party to the Contract since he is external to it and gives
nothing in it. This Third Recipient Party, too, is constituted by the
Contract, but as an effect external to the contract and its Recipient Parties
(all the individuals contracting with one another to give everything to the
Prince: it has been called a contract of donation, thinking of modern
life-insurance contracts, i.e. to use a term which carries real weight with
Hobbes, contracts of insurance against death). A total alienation in
externality, to an external Third Party constituted by the Contract as an
absolute Prince, this is Hobbes. Naturally, there are gaps in this 'system':
what 'guarantee' is there against the despotism of a Prince who is not even
bound by the exchange of a promise? How can one entrust oneself to his
'interests'? How is one to represent to him (and think) his 'duties'?
dence of the Prince's externality to the contract. Rousseau is alone in
remaining in immanence, without any recourse to a Third Party, even if it is a
man. He accepts the law immanent in Hobbes's state of war: he only changes its
modality. which is merely to transfer the problem into the individuality of
the Prince (his interest, his conscience, his duty). Rousseau's master-stroke
is to see that a problem cannot be resolved simply by its suppression in a
mere factual transfer, but only by really making it superfluous.
tract, i.e. to make this Second Recipient Party, which is in fact the
solution itself, appear to be one of its conditions. The 'true' problems are
elsewhere: they must be pursued, for the effect of Discrepancy I is to 'chase'
them constantly ahead of their supposed solution. Up to the point where it
will be clear that the problems, which anyone might think at their beginnings,
are really at an end, because their 'solution' was installed from the
beginning, even before they appeared. Discrepancy is also inversion of sense.
Discrepancy II The peculiar fact about this alienation is that, in taking over the goods
of individuals, the community, so far from despoiling them, only assures them
legitimate possession, and changes usurpation into a true right and enjoyment
into proprietorship. Thus the possessors . . . have . . . acquired, so to
speak, all that they gave up (SC I, IX, p. 18). I have started with the most astonishing, the most 'concrete'
text, since it concerns the 'goods', the 'properties' of individuals. Note in
passing a second 'so to speak ' (an index of the denegation of the
Discrepancy, as in the previous case). This 'everything' that they give
includes their goods. They give them, but to get them back as they gave them
(except for the subtraction of taxes).
As they gave them? No: wearing the new 'form' of property, replacing mere
possession. A particularly precise case of the change in 'manner of existence'
produced by the Contract. Each man alienates, I admit, by the social compact, only such part of his
powers, goods, and liberty as it is important for the community to control;
but it must also be granted that the Sovereign is sole judge of what is
important (SC II, IV, p. 24). On this occasion the deduction is made within total
alienation itself, i.e. the result of the exchange of alienation is shifted
back onto it and then immediately removed from it. Hence: total alienation
only applies to a part of that whole. How better express: it must be total so
as not to be total. Discrepancy II. Let us draw up the whole account in terms easily commensurable. What man
loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to
everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil
liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses. If we are to avoid mistake
in weighing one against the other, we must clearly distinguish natural
liberty, which is bounded only by the forces of the individual, from civil
liberty, which is limited by the general will; and possession, which is merely
the effect of force or the right of the first occupier, from property, which
can be founded only on a positive title. 'Account', 'commensurable', 'loss', 'gain'. The language of
accounts. The language of exchange. Result: the exchange is advantageous.
limitation of alienation, produced first on alienation itself by its total
character. This mechanism is identical with the 'clauses' of the contract. If
they have to be scrupulously respected without changing them one iota, this is
in order to ensure the effect of the self-regulation and self-limitation of
alienation itself. The undertakings which bind us to the social body are obligatory only
because they are mutual; and their nature is such that in fulfilling them we
cannot work for others without working for ourselves. Why is it that the
general will is always in the right, and that all continually will the
happiness of each one, unless it is because there is not a man who does not
think of 'each' as meaning him, and consider himself in voting for all? This
proves that equality of rights and the idea of justice which such
equality creates originate in the preference each man gives to himself, and
accordingly in the very nature of man. It proves that the general will, to be
really such, must be general in its object as well as its essence; that it
must both come from all and apply to all. . . . (SC II, IV pp. 24-5).
The matter is clear: behind rights, behind reciprocity, it is
only ever a question of 'the preference each man gives to himself', of
individuals who only 'think' of themselves, of 'working for themselves'. The
mechanism of total alienation imposes on 'the preference for oneself', on the
particular interest, a transformation whose end-result is, in one and the same
movement, the production of the general interest (or general will) and the
self-limitation of total alienation in partial alienation, or rather in
advantageous exchange.
Rousseau expounds the logic of this mechanism in the
paragraphs of Chapter VI which immediately follow the exposition of the clause
of total alienation. The last one sums them up:
Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and
as there is no associate over which he does not acquire the same right as he
yields over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an
increase of force for the preservation of what he has (SC I, VI, p. 12).
This contract which is not an exchange thus paradoxically has
an exchange as its effect. We now see why this total alienation can be both
'incompatible with man's nature' (SC I, IV, p. 8), and not contrary to it. In
the Social Contract, man does not give himself completely for nothing. He gets
back what he gives and more besides, for the reason that he only gives himself
to himself. This must be understood in the strongest sense: he only gives
himself to his own liberty. exchange on the other. This unthought 'problem' is 'chased away' and
'thrust aside'. The solution is itself a problem: the problem that Rousseau is
to pose in the.terms of particular interest and general interest (or
particular will and general will). But already we suspect that this 'problem'
itself can only be 'posed' on the condition of a new Discrepancy III.
Discrepancy III essence? To be general: both in its form and in its content, as a decision
of the general will, relating to a general object.
. . . when the whole people decrees for the whole people, it is considering
only itself; and if a relation is then formed, it is between two aspects of
the entire object, without there being any division of the whole. In that case
the matter about which the decree is made is, like the decreeing will,
general. This act is what I call a law (SC II, VI, p. 30). And Rousseau adds: 'When I say that the object of laws is
always general, I mean that law considers subjects as a body and actions in
the abstract, and never a particular person or action.' I should have wished to be born in a country in which the interest of the
Sovereign and that of the people must be single and identical. . . . This
could not be the case unless the Sovereign and the people were one and the
same person ('Dedication' to the Discourse on Inequality).[1] This dream is realized by the Social Contract, which gives
Sovereignty to the assembled people. The act of legislation is indeed never
anything but the Social Contract combined, repeated, and reactivated at each
'moment'. The primordial 'moment' which 'has made a people a people' is not a
historical 'moment', it is the always contemporary primordial 'moment' which
relives in each of the acts of the Sovereign, in each of his legislative
decisions, the expression of the general will. But the general will only
exists because its object exists: the general interest.
If the opposition of particular interests made the establishment of
societies necessary, the agreement of these very interests made it possible.
The common element in these different interests is what forms the social tie;
and were there no point of agreement between them all, no society could exist.
It is solely on the basis of this common interest that every society should be
governed (SC II, I, p. 20). We are now confronted with the problem of the relations
between particular interest and general interest. But we have seen particular
interest intervene in the very mechanism of the self-regulation of total
alienation:
Why is it that . . . all constantly will the happiness of each one, unless
it is because there is not a man who does not think of 'each' as meaning him,
and consider himself in voting for all? This proves that equality of rights
and the idea of justice which such equality creates originate in the
preference each man gives to himself, and accordingly in the very
nature of man (SC II, IV, pp. 24-5), As a passage from the Geneva Manuscript (an early draft of
the Social Contract) specifies, this preference is no more than
another name for particular interest:
As the will tends towards the well-being of the wisher and the particular
will always has as its object the private interest, the general will, the
common interest, it follows that the last is or should be the only true motive
force of the social body . . . , for the particular interest tends always to
preferences and the public interest to equality.[2]
The paradox that springs from a comparison of these passages
is the fact that the particular interest is presented both as the
foundation of the general interest and as its opposite. To 'resolve' this
contradiction, let us see how Rousseau treats it practically
vis-à-vis the theoretical problem posed by the conditions of validity
of voting. The general will is always right and tends to the public advantage; but it
does not follow that the deliberations of the people are always equally
correct (SC II, III, p. 22). In principle, the general will is the resultant of the
particular wills:
. . . take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel
one another, and the general will remains as the sum of the differences. . . .
the grand total of the small differences would always give the
general will (SC II, III, p. 23).
If such is the principle of the mechanism for the declaration
of the general will, how can the deliberations of the people be incorrect and
therefore fail to declare the general will? For the mechanism to carry out its
function properly, two supplementary conditions are needed:
If, when the people, being furnished with adequate information, held its
deliberations, the citizens had no communication one with another, the grand
total of the small differences would always give the general will, and the
decision would always be good (SC II, III, p. 23). Hence the people must have 'adequate information', i.e. there
must be 'enlightenment', which poses the problem of its political education.
It is therefore essential, if the general will is to be able to express
itself, that there should be no partial society within the State, and that
each citizen should think only his own thoughts SC II, III, p. 23). An absolute condition for Rousseau: that the general
will really is interrogated in its seat, in each isolated individual, and not
in some or other group of men united by interests which they have in common,
but which are still particular with respect to the general interest. If
the general will is to declare itself, it is thus essential to silence
(suppress) all groups, orders, classes,
parties, etc. Once groups form in the State, the general will
begins to grow silent and eventually becomes completely mute.
But when the social bond begins to be relaxed and the State to grow weak,
when particular interests begin to make themselves felt and the smaller
societies to exercise an influence over the larger, the common interest
changes. . . . (SC IV, I, p. 85).
Note: the general will survives nonetheless, unalterable and
correct: 'It is always constant, unalterable and pure; but it is subordinated
to other wills which encroach upon its sphere.' The proof: in the most corrupt
individual the general will is never destroyed, but only eluded. being the object of a denegation inscribed in the ordinary use of the
concept of particular interest. This denegation is inscribed in so many
words in his declaration of impotence: human groups must not exist in the
State. A declaration of impotence, for if they must not exist, that is
because they do exist. An absolute point of resistance which is not a
fact of Reason but a simple, irreducible fact: the first encounter with a real
problem after this long 'chase'. in demarcation from its real double, the 'general interests' which Rousseau
calls 'particular' because they belong to human groups (orders, classes, etc.)
-- so the 'pure' particular interest of the isolated individual (what he
obtains from the constitutive origins of the state of nature) is a myth, whose
nature is visible once it is seen that it has a real 'double' in the general
interests of human groups that Rousseau calls 'particular' because they
dominate the State, or struggle for the conquest of its power. As in the
previous cases, we can spot this Discrepancy, but only beneath the verbal
denegation of a play on words: here the juggling with particular and general,
concepts which properly belong exclusively to the individual and the
Sovereign, but which serve theoretically to reduce the Discrepancy introduced
into Rousseau's conceptual system by the emergence of the following
irreducible phenomenon: the existence of the interests of social groups. The
interest of these social groups is sometimes called particular, sometimes
general, for the good of the Cause, the cause of the ideological mirror couple
particular interest/general interest, which reflects the ideology of a class
domination that presents its class interests to particular individuals
as their (general) interest. philosophy of politics by distancing itself through this Discrepancy III
which constitutes it. By this procedure it could be demonstrated that the
classical difference of and opposition between the external and internal
criticism of a philosophical theory are mythical. page 125
The solution to the existing 'theoretical difficulties' is entrusted to
practice. It is a question of managing to suppress, in the reality which can
no longer be avoided, the social groups and their effects: the existence of
orders, of social classes, of political and ideological parties and of their
effects. The essential moments are to be found in the theory of manners and morals
(moeurs), education and civil religion. In its principle this attempt
has the aim of setting up the practical arrangements for a permanent moral
reform intended to cancel out the effects of the social interest groups which
are constantly arising and active in society. It is a question of ceaselessly
defending and restoring the 'purity' of the individual conscience (i.e. of the
particular interest which is in itself the general interest) in a society
where it is threatened by the pernicious effects of 'particular' groups.
Along with these three kinds of law goes a fourth, most important of all,
which is not graven on tablets of marble or brass, but on the hearts of the
citizens. This forms the real constitution of the State, takes on every day
new powers, when other laws decay or die out, restores them or takes their
place (les supplée), keeps a people in the ways in which it was meant
to go, and insensibly replaces authority by the force of habit. I am speaking
of morality (moeurs), of custom, above all of public opinion; a power
unknown to political thinkers, on which none the less success in everything
else depends. With this the Great Legislator concerns himself in secret,
though he seems to confine himself to particular regulations; for these are
only the arc of the arch, while manners and morals (moeurs), slower to
arise, form in the end its immovable keystone (SC II, XII, pp. 44-5). The cause in these unwritten key laws is the action on the
'particular will' which is embodied in the 'manners and morals'. 'Now, the
less relation the particular wills have to the general will, that is, morals
and manners to laws . . .' (SC III, I, p. 48). But the 'manners and morals'
are no more than the penultimate link in the chain of a causality that can be
depicted as follows:
Laws->public opinion->manners and morals->particular will
For their part, the social groups can be relied on to act
automatically, by their mere existence as well as by their undertakings and
influence, on each of the moments of this process. Hence it is indispensable
that a counter-action be exercised on each of the intermediate causes. The
Legislator acts par excellence on the laws. Education, festivals, civil
religion, etc., on public opinion. The censors on mannas and morals. But the
Legislator only intervenes at the beginning of the historical existence of the
social body, and the censors can only preserve good manners and morals, not
reform bad ones. It is thus at the level of public
opinion that action can and must be constant and effective. Hence the
importance of the education of the citizens by public means (festivals) or
private means (Émile): but education cannot be enough without recourse
to religion, i.e. to religious ideology, but conceived as civil religion, i.e.
in its function as a moral and political ideology. That is why it is necessary to return to earth and to attack those
dangerous human 'groups' in their very principles. And, remembering the main
theses of the Discourse on Inequality, to speak of reality, i.e. of
'goods', of property, of wealth and of poverty. In clear terms: the State must
be maintained in the strict limits of a definite economic structure.
. . . the end of every system of legislation . . . reduces itself to two
main objects, liberty and equality -- liberty, because all
particular dependence means so much force taken from the body of the State,
and equality, because liberty cannot exist without it. . . . By equality, we
should understand, not that the degrees of power and riches are to be
absolutely identical for everybody; but that power shall never be great enough
for violence, and shall always be exercised by virtue of rank and law; and
that, in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy
another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself: which implies, on
the part of the great, moderation in goods and position, and, on the side of
the common sort, moderation in avarice and covetousness (SC II, XI, p. 42).
Here Rousseau adds a note:
If the object is to give the State consistency, bring the two extremes as
near to each other as possible; allow neither rich men nor beggars. These two
estates, which are naturally inseparable, are equally fatal to the common
good; from the one come the friends of tyranny, and from the other
tyrants (SC II, XI, p. 42n).
The central formulations of this passage repeat, but
vis-à-vis their political effects, certain even of the terms of the
Discourse on Inequality: 'From the moment one man began to stand in
need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any
one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared.'[1] This
possibility marks, with the beginning of the division of labour, the
beginnings of dependence, which becomes universal when, all the land being
cultivated and occupied, 'the supernumeraries . . . are obliged to receive
their subsistence, or steal it, from the rich,'[2] and the
rich are able to buy or constrain the poor. It is this reality which haunts
the second practical solution of the Social Contract. Such equality, we are told, is a speculative chimera which cannot exist in
practice. But if its abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we should not at
least make regulations concerning it? It is precisely because the force of
circumstances tends continually to destroy equality that the force of
legislation should always tend to its maintenance (SC II, XI, p. 42). Clearly, it can only be a matter of regulating an inevitable
abuse, an effect of the force of circumstances. When Rousseau
speaks of 'bringing the two extremes as near to each other as possible', it
is a question of the following impossible condition: to go against the force
of circumstances, to propose as a practical measure a solution 'which cannot
exist in practice'. It is hardly necessary to note that the two 'extremes'
have all that is required to constitute themselves as human groups defending
their 'interests' without caring a jot about the categories of generality or
particularity. different kind: a transfer, this time, the transfer of the impossible
theoretical solution into the alternative to theory, literature. The admirable
'fictional triumph' of an unprecedented writing (écriture): La
Nouvelle Heloïse, Émile, the Confessions. That they are
unprecedented may be not unconnected with the admirable 'failure' of an
unprecedented theory: the Social Contract.
page 161
Part Three
page 163
From what I know of it, these were not, believe me, in that very special
period, ordinary commentaries. What M. Hyppolite said then helped several of
his students to orientate themselves 'in thought', as Kant put it, i.e. also
in politics. M. Hyppolite has certainly forgotten the words he then uttered:
but not everyone has forgotten them. I am here to bear witness. Against what
common sense, the common sense of financiers and lawyers, tells us, there are
many writings that blow away, but a few words that remain. No doubt because
they have been inscribed in life and history.
Thesis 1 (a statement of fact). The union, or fusion
of the Workers' Movement and Marxist theory is the greatest event in the
history
of class societies, i.e. practically in all human history. Beside it, the
celebrated great scientific-technical 'mutation' constantly resounding in our
ears (the atomic, electronic, computer era, the space-age, etc.) is, despite
its great importance, no more than a scientific and technical fact: these
events are not of the same order of magnitude, they only bear in their effects
on certain aspects of the productive forces, and not on what is decisive, the
relations of production. Thesis 2 (a statement of fact). Marxist theory includes a
science and a philosophy. Thesis 3. Marx founded a new science: the science of the
history of social formations, or the science of history. Thesis 4. Every great scientific discovery induces a great
transformation in philosophy. The scientific discoveries which open up the
great scientific continents constitute the major dates in the
periodization of the history of philosophy: Marx, almost everyone in the human or social sciences says he is more or
less a Marxist. But who has taken the trouble to read Marx closely, to
understand his novelty and take the theoretical consequences? Without
exception, the specialists of the human sciences one hundred years after Marx
work with outdated ideological notions like Aristotelean physicists carrying
on with Aristotelean physics fifty years after Galileo. Where are the
philosophers who do not take Engels and Lenin for philosophical nonentities? I
believe they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Not all Communist
philosophers even, far from it, think well of Engels and Lenin as
'philosophers'. Where are the philosophers who have studied the history of the
workers' movement, the history of the 1917 Revolution and the Chinese
Revolution? Marx and Lenin have the great honour to share the fate of
intellectual pariah with Freud and to be travestied when they are discussed as
he is travestied. This scandal is not a scandal: the relations that reign
between philosophical ideas are what are called relations of forces,
ideological, and therefore political relations of forces. But it is bourgeois
philosophical ideas that are in power. The question of power is the number-one
question in philosophy, too. Philosophy is indeed in the last instance
political.
Thesis 5. How is Marx's scientific discovery to be
explained? will be taken only for what it is: the index of a problem, and the
indication of the schematic conditions for it to be posed.
Which means very schematically that Marx (Capital) is
the product of the work of Hegel (German Philosophy) on English Political
Economy + French Socialism, in other words, the Hegelian dialectic on:
Labour theory of value (R) + the class struggle (FS). between Marx and Reading Capital, etc. Experience has very quickly
shown that it is impossible to hold to this internal circle: the only
way to advance is via the experience of the class struggle.] of "Das Kapital", it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant,
mediocre epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat
Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing's time treated
Spinoza, i.e. as a "dead dog". I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of
that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the
theory of value, coquetted (kokettieren) with the modes
of expression peculiar to him. . . .'
3. This something from Hegel is thus something quite
different from the inversion of the idealist tendency into the
materialist tendency. It is something which concerns the dialectic.
Here the metaphor of the inversion ceases to serve any useful purpose: it is
replaced by a different metaphor. To invert the Hegelian dialectic = to
demystify it = to separate the rational kernel from the irrational
shell. This separation is not a mere sorting out: (take some and leave some).
It can only be a transformation. Marx's dialectic can only be the Hegelian
dialectic worked-transformed. sophy -- not only a new conception -- but a new modality of existence, I
shall say a new practice of philosophy: a philosophical discourse that
speaks from somewhere else than classical philosophical discourse did.
To make this comprehensible, let me invoke the analogy of psychoanalysis.
Germany, because it seemed to transfigure the existing state of things
(das Bestehende). In its rational shape (Gestalt) it is a
scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because
it includes in the positive comprehension of the existing state of things at
the same time also the comprehension of the negation of that state, of its
inevitable breaking up; because it regards every developed form as in fluid
movement and thus takes into account its transient nature, lets nothing impose
upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.'[4] Two
notions stand out in this passage:
Acknowledgments : We are grateful to
J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd for their kind permission to use extracts from
The Social Contract and Discourses, translated by G. D. H. Cole, and
from Émile, translated by Barbara Foxley, both published in Everyman's
Library.
page 7
Translator's note : Quotations from
the works of Montesquieu in Part One of this book have in general been taken
from the four-volume translation by Thomas Nugent entitled The Works of
Monsieur de Montesquieu, published in London in 1777. References to the
Spirit of Laws give the Book number in Roman and the chapter number in
Arabic numerals: thus, SL, VIII, 9 means The Spirit of Laws, Book VIII,
Chapter 9. Quotations from Rousseau in Parts One and Two have been taken
either from The Social Contract and Discourses, translated by G. D. H.
Cole, in the Everyman's Library edition of 1966, or from Émile,
translated by Barbara Foxley, in the Everyman's Library edition of 1957. Page
references are to these editions. However, the translator has taken the
liberty of altering these translations whenever questions of consistency of
terminology, or facilitating the reader's understanding of Althusser's
commentary, have arisen. Quotations from Marx, Engels and Lenin in Part Three
have been taken from the standard English translations of their works,
published in England by Lawrence and Wishart.
page 8 [blank]
Montesquieu:
Politics and
History
page 10 [blank]
To apply the ideas of the present time to distant ages,
is the
most fruitful source of error. To those
people who want to modernize all
the ancient ages,
I shall say what the Egyptian priests said to
Solon,
'O Athenians, you are mere children.'
The Spirit of Laws, XXX, 14.
gave her them back.
Voltaire
page 12 [blank]
Foreword
I make no claim to say anything new about
Montesquieu. Anything that seems to be new is no more than a reflection on a
well-known text or on a pre-existing reflection.
I simply
hope that I have given a more living portrait of a figure familiar to us in
marble or bronze. I am not thinking so much of the inner life of the Seigneur
de la Brède, which was so secret that it is still debated whether he was ever
a believer, whether he loved his wife as she loved him, whether past the age
of thirty-five he experienced the passions of a twenty-year-old. Nor so much
the everyday life of the Président de Parlement tired of parliament, of the
lord absorbed by his lands, of the vineyardist attentive to his wines and his
sales. Others have written of this, and they should be read. I am thinking of
a different life, one which time has cloaked in its shadow, and commentaries
with their lustre.
This life is, first, that of a thinker
whose enthusiasm in legal and political matters never waned to the end, and
who spoilt his sight by too much reading, hurrying to win the only race with
death that really concerned him, his completed work. But let there be no
misunderstanding: it is not the curiosity of his object, but his
intelligence, which is all Montesquieu. His only wish was to
understand. We have several images of him which betray this effort and
his pride in it. He only delved into the infinite mass of documents and texts,
the immense heritage of histories, chronicles miscellanies and compilations,
in order to grasp their logic and disengage their grounds. He wanted to seize
the 'thread' of this skein which centuries had tangled, to seize this thread
and pull it
page 14
That is why Montesquieu reveals something of the profound joy of a man who
discovers. He knows it. He knows he is bringing new ideas, that he is
offering a work without precedent, and if his last words are a salute to the
land finally conquered, his first is to warn that he set out alone and had no
teachers; nor did his thought have a mother. He notes that he really must use
a new language because he is speaking new truths. Even his turns of phrase
betray the pride of an author who illuminates the ordinary words he has
inherited with the new meanings he has discovered. In that moment when he is
almost surprised to see its birth and is seized by it, and in the thirty years
of labour which constituted his career, he is well aware that his thought
opens up a new world. We have got used to this discovery. And when we
celebrate its greatness, we cannot but let Montesquieu be already fixed in the
necessity of our culture, as a star is in the sky, perceiving only with
difficulty the audacity and enthusiasm he must have had to open to us this sky
in which we have inscribed him.
But I am also thinking of
another life. Of the life too often masked by the very same discoveries that
we owe to him. Of his preferences, his aversions, in short, of Montesquieu's
parti pris in the struggles of his age. A too soothing tradition would
like Montesquieu to have cast on the world the gaze of a man without
page 15
Others before him set
out for the East -- and discovered Indies for us in the West.
page 16 [blank]
Chapter One
A Revolution in
Method
It is a received truth that Montesquieu is the founder
of political science. Auguste Comte said it, Durkheim repeated it and no
one has seriously disputed their judgement. But perhaps we should step back a
little in order to distinguish him from his ancestors, and to see clearly into
what it is that thus distinguishes him.
For even Plato
stated that politics is the object of a science, and we have his
Republic, Politics and Laws to prove it. All of the
thought of antiquity lived in the conviction, not that a science of politics
was possible, which is a critical conviction, but that one could go ahead with
it straight away. And the moderns themselves took up this thesis, as is clear
from Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza and Grotius. Of course, the Ancients should be
criticized not for the claim to reflect on the political, but for their
illusory belief that they had produced a science of it. For their idea
of science was borrowed from their own knowledges. And as the latter, with the
exception of certain areas of mathematics, not unified before Euclid, were no
more than immediate glimpses or their philosophy projected into things, they
were complete strangers to our idea of science, having no examples of it. But
the Moderns! How could the mind of a Bodin, of a Machiavelli, of a Hobbes or
of a Spinoza, the contemporaries of the already rigorous disciplines
triumphing in mathematics and physics, have remained blind to the model of
scientific knowledge that we have inherited?
And in fact
from the sixteenth century on we can see the birth and growth in a joint
movement of a first, mathematical physics, and of the demand for a second,
soon to be called moral or political physics, which aimed for
the rigour of the first. For the
page 18
In fact, if he seems to follow known
routes, he is not going to the same objects. Helvétius says of
Montesquieu that he has Montaigne's 'cast of mind'. He has the same curiosity
and takes the same matter for reflection. Like Montaigne and all his
disciples, collectors of examples and facts hunted out from every place and
time, he takes as his object the entire history of all the men who have
ever lived. And this idea did not come to him altogether by chance. We
must imagine the double revolution that shook the world at the turn of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A revolution in its space. A revolution in
its structure. It is the age of the discovery of the Earth, of the great
explorations opening up to Europe the knowledge and the exploitation of the
Indies East and West and of Africa. Travellers brought back in
page 19
Such is Montesquieu's object, too. As
he says, 'The objects of this work are the Laws, the various customs, and
manners, of all the nations on earth. It may be said, that the subject is of
prodigious extent, as it comprehends all the institutions received among
mankind.'[1] It is precisely this object that
distinguishes him from all the writers who, before him, had hoped to make
politics a science. For never before him had anyone had the daring to reflect
on all the customs and laws of all the nations of the world. Bossuet's
history does claim to be universal: but all its universality consists of is
the statement that the Bible says everything, all of history being in it, as
an oak is in its acorn. As for theoreticians like Hobbes, Spinoza or Grotius,
they propose the idea of a science of history rather than working it
out. They reflect not on the totality of concrete facts but either on some
of them (Spinoza on the Jewish State and its ideology in the
1. A Defence of the Spirit of
Laws, Part II: The General Idea.
page 20
Hence it is clear both what unites Montesquieu
with the theoreticians who preceded him and what distinguishes him from them.
He has in common with them the same project: to erect a political
science. But he does not have the same object, proposing to produce the
science not of society in general but of all the concrete societies in
history. And for this reason he does not have the same method, aiming
not to grasp essences, but to discover laws. This unity in project and
difference in object and method make Montesquieu both the man who gave his
predecessors' scientifc exigencies the most rigorous form - and the
most determined opponent of their abstraction.
The
project of constituting a science of politics and history presupposes first of
all that politics and history can be the object of a science, i.e. that they
contain a necessity which the science can hope to discover. It is
therefore necessary to overthrow the sceptical idea that the history of
humanity is no more than the history of its errors and divagations; that a
single principle can unite the prodigious and daunting diversity of manners
and morals: man's weakness; that a single reason can illuminate that
page 21
It is not for
theology to pronounce on the truth of the facts of politics. An old
argument. But it is hard to imagine today the weight of ecclesiastical decree
on history. It is enough to read Bossuet's campaign against Spinoza, guilty of
having outlined a history of the Jewish nation and the Bible, or against
Richard Simon, who had the same project inside the Church itself, to see the
conflict between theology and history, and its violence. This conflict
occupies the whole of the Defence of the Spirit of Laws. Montesquieu
was accused of atheism, of deism; of not having mentioned original sin; of
having condoned polygamy, etc.; in short, of having reduced laws to purely
human causes. Montesquieu replies: to introduce theology into history is to
confuse orders and mix up sciences, which is the surest way to keep them in
their childhood. No, his aim is not to play the theologian; he is not a
theologian but a jurist and a politician. That all the objects of political
science may have a religious meaning, too, that
2. SL, X, 13 (the battle of Pultova);
Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur and Declension of the Roman
Empire, Ch. XVIII.
page 22
Thus religion cannot stand in for science in history. Nor can
morality. Montesquieu takes the utmost care at the outset to warn
against understanding morality when he says politics. The same
for virtue. 'It is not a moral, nor a Christian, but a political
virtue' (SL, Advertisement). And if he returns a dozen times to this warning,
it is because here he runs up against the commonest prejudice: 'in all
countries morality is requisite' (ibid.). Hobbes and Spinoza said the same
thing: all the duties in the world do not constitute the beginning of a single
knowledge ; in his morality, which wants to make the man he is the man
he is not, man only too obviously admits that the laws that govern him are not
moral. Hence a determination to reject morality is essential if these laws are
to be penetrated. Human and Christian virtues are held up against Montesquieu
when he attempts to understand the scandalous usages of the Chinese and the
Turks! 'It is not usual to crowd these questions into books of natural
philosophy, politics and civil law.'[4] Here, too,
distinct orders must be distinguished: 'All political are not moral vices; and
all . . . moral are not political vices' (SL, XIX, II). Each order having its
own laws, it only lays claim to laws of its own. He replies to the theologians
and moralists that he only wants to speak humanely of the human order
of things, and politically of the political order. He defends his most
profound conviction: that a science of politics can never be founded except on
its own object, on the radical autonomy of the political as such.
3. A Defence of the SL, Part I,
II, Answer to the 9th Objection.
4. A Defence of the
SL, Part II: On Climate.
page 23
page 24
Hence the accusation of atheism, and the weakness of his defence. For if he
gave his answers vigour, he could not give his arguments power. Someone tries
to convict him of atheism. His only argument: would an atheist write that this
world, which goes on its way and follows its laws alone, was created by an
intelligence? Someone argues that his position amounts to Spinozism and
natural religion. His only reply: natural religion is not atheism, and anyway,
I do not profess natural religion. All these defensive stands could not
deceive his opponents or allies. Besides, the best defence he presents of
religion, the encomium he openly makes to it in the Second Part of the
Spirit of Laws, is as much that of a cynic as that of a believer. Take
the polemic against Bayle (SL, XXIV, 2 & 6). Bayle argued that religion is
contrary to society (that is the meaning of the paradox about the atheists).
Montesquieu counters that it is indispensable and profitable to society. But
by doing so he remains within Bayle's principle: the social function, the
social and political utility of religion. All his admiration amounts to is to
show that the Christian religion, which lays claim only to heaven, is very
well-suited to the earth. But all the 'politicals' used this language, and
Machiavelli first of all. In this completely 'human' language, faith does not
find its birth-right. Quite different arguments are required to win over a
theologian!
However, these two principles preliminary to any
political science: that it is impermissible to judge history by religious or
moral criteria, that on the contrary it is essential to rank religion and
morality among the facts of history and subordinate them to the same science,
do not radically distinguish Montesquieu from his predecessors. When all is
said and done, Hobbes and Spinoza spoke the same language, and were treated as
atheists in the
page 25
Let me specify this point. In his
book on political theory, Vaughan shows that all the political theorists of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, with the exception of Vico
and Montesquieu, theoreticians of the social contract.[5]
What does this exception mean? In order to decide, we must make a rapid survey
of the theory of natural law and of the social contract.
What unites the philosophers of natural law and of the social contract is the
fact that they pose the same problem: what is the origin of society?,
and solve it by the same means: the state of nature and the social
contract. It may seem very strange today to pose such a problem of origins
and to wonder how men, whose physical existence, even, always presupposes a
minimum of social existence, could have moved from a zero state of
society to organized social relations, and how they crossed this primordial
and radical threshold. And yet it was the dominant problem of political
reflection of the period, and if its form is strange, its logic is profound.
To show the radical origin of society (we are reminded of Leibniz, wanting to
pierce the 'radical origin of things'), men must be taken before society: in
the emergent state. Rising from the earth like pumpkins, said Hobbes. Naked,
said Rousseau. Stripped not only of all the instruments of art, but above all
of all human bonds. And they must be grasped in a state which is a negation
of society. This emergent state is the state of nature. Certainly,
the various writers give this primordial state different characteristics.
Hobbes and Spinoza see in it the reign of the state of war, the strong
triumphant over the weak. Locke claims that the men there live in peace.
Rousseau, in an absolute solitude. The different features of the state of
nature sometimes suggest the reasons why men will have to leave it, at others
the springs of the future social state and the ideal of human
5. C. E. Vaughan, Studies in the
History of Political Philosophy (Manchester, 1939), vol. II, pp. 253ff.
page 26
It is the
social contract that ensures the transition from the negation of
society to the existing society. Here again it may seem strange to imagine the
establishment of a society as the effect of a general convention, as if every
convention did not already presuppose an established society. But we must
accept this problematic since it was held to be a necessary one, and only ask
what this contract means, this contract which is not a mere legal
artifice but the expression of a very profound rationale. To say that the
society of men emerges from a contract is indeed to declare truly human and
artificial the origin of all human institutions. It is to say that society
is the effect neither of a divine institution nor of a natural order.
It is therefore above all to reject an old idea of the foundation of the
social order and to propose a new one. It is clear what opponents are implied
by the theory of the contract. Not only the theoreticians of the divine origin
of all society, who may serve many causes though most often that of the
established order, but particularly the proponents of the 'natural' (and not
artificial) character of society: those who believe human relations to be
planned in advance in a nature which is no more than the projection of
the existing social order, in a nature in which men are inscribed in advance
in orders and estates. To say what is at stake in a word, the theory of
the social contract in general overthrows the conviction peculiar to the
feudal order, the belief in the 'natural' inequality of men, in the
necessity of orders and estates. It substitutes a contract between
equals, a work of human art, for what feudal theoreticians attributed
to 'nature' and to man's natural sociability. It is therefore
generally a fairly sure index of discrimination between tendencies to consider
that
page 27
But these features of polemic and petition so
characteristic of the theory of natural law explain precisely its
abstraction and idealism. I said above that these theoreticians were
restricted to the model of a Cartesian physics which knew only ideal
essences. And those who would like to judge Montesquieu by comparing him
with Descartes, as has been done,[6] or Newton, reduce
him to an immediate but abstract appearance. This model of physics is only an
epistemological model here: its true arguments are partly external to it. If
the theoreticians I am discussing do not take Montesquieu's object: to
understand the infinite diversity of human institutions in all times and
places, it is not simply because of the mere aberration of a method inspired
by the Cartesian model of science, but also for motives of quite another
6. Gustave Lanson, 'L'influence de la
philosophie cartésienne sur la littérature française', Review de
métaphysique et de morale, Année 4, 1896, pp. 517-50, especially pp.
540-6.
page 28
I do not say that all was in vain in this
gigantic undertaking: its effects can be demonstrated, and they are
considerable. But it is clear how far Montesquieu's proposals distance him
from these perspectives, and in this distance his arguments are more clearly
distinguishable. They are twofold, political and methodological, both tightly
linked. Let us reflect, then, on the absence of any social contract in
Montesquieu. There is indeed a state of nature of which Book I of the
Spirit of Laws gives us a very rapid glimpse, but no social contract.
On the contrary, 'I have never heard anybody talk of the law of nations', says
Montesquieu in the 94th Persian Letter, 'but he carefully begun with inquiring
into the origin of society; which appears ridiculous to me. If men did not
form themselves into societies, if they avoided and fled from each other, it
would be right to ask the reason, and to inquire why they kept themselves
separate: but they are born united to one another, a son is born near his
father, and there he continues; here is society and the cause of it.' This
says every-
7. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality among Men, in The Social Contract and Discourses,
translated by G. D. H. Cole (London, 1966), p. 161.
page 29
But this conscious rejection of the problem and of the concepts of the
theory of natural law leads to a second indication, no longer of politics, but
of method. Here undoubtedly stands revealed Montesquieu's radical
novelty. Rejecting the theory of natural law and the contract, Montesquieu at
the same time rejects the philosophical implications of its
problematic: above all the idealism of its procedures. He is, at
least in his deliberate consciousness, poles apart from judging the fact by
the right and proposing in the guise of an ideal genesis an end for
human societies. He only knows facts. If he refuses to judge what
is by what ought to be, it is because he does not draw his
principles from his 'prejudices, but from the nature of things' (SL, Preface).
Prejudices: the idea that religion and morality can judge history. This
prejudice was in principle in harmony with certain of the proponents of
natural law. But also a prejudice: the idea that the abstraction of a
political ideal, even dressed up in the principles of science, can stand in
for history. In this Montesquieu broke absolutely with the theoreticians of
natural law. Rousseau made no mistake about it: 'The science of politics is
and probably always will be unknown. . . . In modern times the only man who
could have created this vast and useless science was the illustrious
Montesquieu. But he was not concerned with the principles of political law; he
was content to deal with the positive laws of settled governments; and nothing
could be more different than these two branches of study. Yet he who would
judge wisely in matters of
page 30
The Montesquieu who refuses precisely to judge what is by what ought to
be, who only wants to give the real necessity of history the form of its law,
by drawing this law from the diversity of the facts and their variations, this
man is indeed alone in facing his task.
8. Émile, translated by B.
Foxley (London, 1957), V, pp. 421-2.
page 31
Chapter Two
A New Theory of
Law
A refusal to subordinate the material of political facts to
religious and moral principles, a refusal to subordinate it to the abstract
concepts of the theory of natural law, which are nothing but disguised value
judgements, that is what clears away the prejudices and opens the royal road
of science. That is what introduces Montesquieu's great theoretical
revolutions.
The most famous of these is contained in two
lines defining laws: 'Laws . . . are the necessary relations arising
from the nature of things' (SL, I, 1). The theologian of the Defence,
who is not so naïve as Montesquieu would have us think, cannot believe his
eyes. 'The laws relations - what can he mean by this? The author has not
however deviated from the ordinary definition of Laws without design.'[1] He was right. Montesquieu's intention, whatever he may have
said, was certainly to change something in the received definition.
The long history of the concept of law is well-known. Its modern
meaning (the sense of scientific law) only emerged in the works of the
physicists and philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And
even then it still carried with it the traits of its past. Before taking the
new sense of a constant relation between phenomenal variables, i.e. before
relating to the practice of the modern experimental sciences, law belonged to
the world of religion, morality and politics. It was, in its meaning, steeped
in exigencies arising from human relations. Law thus presupposed human beings,
or beings in the image of man, even if they surpassed it. The law was a
commandment. It thus needed a will to
1. A Defence of the SL, Part I,
1, Objection I.
page 32
It was a long time before the idea that
nature might have laws which were not orders could rid itself of this
heritage. It is visible in Descartes, who still tried to reduce to a divine
decree the laws he had discovered only in bodies: conservation of motion,
fall, collision. With Spinoza came the awareness of a first difference: 'But
the application of the word "law" to natural things seems to be metaphorical,'
for the 'ordinary meaning of law is simply a command.'[2]
In the seventeenth century, this long effort succeeded in disengaging a
special domain for this new meaning of law: the domain of nature, of
physics. Sheltered by the divine decree which still protected from on
high the old form of law, saving the appearances, a new form of law was
developing which, little by little, through Descartes and Newton, took the
form stated by Montesquieu: 'a fixed and invariable relation' between variable
terms, such that 'each diversity is uniformity; each change is constancy' (SL,
I, 1). But it was hard to see how what is valid for falling or colliding
bodies, and for the planets
2. Theologico-Political
Treatise, IV, in Benedict de Spinoza, The Political Works, edited
and translated by A. G. Wernham (Oxford, 1958), p. 69.
page 33
But in these two
lines, Montesquieu proposes quite simply to expel the old version of the word
law from the domains which it still held. And to consecrate the reign of the
modern definition - law as a relation - over the whole extent of beings, from
God to stones. 'In this sense, all beings have their laws; the Deity his laws,
the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the
beasts their laws, man his laws' (SL, I, 1). Everything is in this sentence.
At last an end has been put to all forbidden reserves. The scandal can well be
imagined. No doubt God is still there to give the initial push, if not to
mislead. He created the world. But he is no more than one of the terms of the
relations. He is the 'primitive reason', but the laws put him on the same
footing as beings: 'Laws are the relations subsisting between it (primitive
reason, i.e. God) and different beings, and the relations of these to one
another' (SL, I, 1). Add to this the fact that God himself, the instituter of
these laws, in creating beings sees his own primordial decree subordinated to
a necessity of the same nature, and even God falls inwardly victim to the
universal contagion of the law! If he did make these laws that govern the
world, the ultimate reason is that 'they are relative to
page 34
We must face up to the implications of this theoretical
revolution. It presupposes that it is possible to apply a Newtonian category
of law to matters of politics and history. It presupposes that it is possible
to draw from human institutions themselves the wherewithal to think their
diversity in a uniformity and their changes in a constancy: the law of their
diversification and the law of their development. This law will no longer be
an ideal order but instead a relation immanent to the phenomena.[3] It will not be given in the intuition of essences, but
drawn from the facts themselves, without preconceived ideas, by investigation
and comparison, by trial and error. At the moment of its discovery, it will be
no more than a hypothesis, and will only become a principle once it has
been verified by the utmost diversity of phenomena: 'I have followed my object
without any fixed plan; I have known neither rules nor exceptions; I have
found the truth only to lose it again. But, when I had once discovered my
first principles, every thing I fought for appeared' (SL, Preface). 'I have
laid down the first principles, and have found that the particular cases apply
naturally to them; that the histories of all nations are only consequences of
them' (ibid.). This is indeed the cycle of an empirical science in search of
the law of its object, almost to the point of direct experimentation.
But this theoretical revolution also presupposes that the
object of scientific observation (here the civil and political laws of human
societies) is not confused with the results of the investiga-
3. A clear Newtonian resonance in
Montesquieu's formulations: the author, he says of himself, 'is not treating
of causes, nor does he compare causes: but he treats of effects, and compares
effects' (A Defence of the SL, Part I, 1, The Answer to Objection III).
Cf. also the following note on polygamy: 'It is not an affair of calculation,
when we reason on its nature; it may be an affair of calculation, when we
combine its effects' (ibid., Part II, Of Polygamy).
page 35
These reflections may seem in Montesquieu's case those of a moralist
deploring man's weakness. I believe rather that they are
page 36
In the first, one
could say: sticking firmly to the methodological principle that the laws of
relation and variation that can be disengaged from human laws are distinct
from those laws themselves, men's errors and deviations with respect to those
laws raise no problems. The sociologist, unlike the physicist, is not dealing
with an object (a body) which is obedient to a simple determinism and follows
a line from which it does not deviate - but with a very special type of
object: men who deviate even from the laws they give themselves. What then has
to be said about men and their relation to their laws? That they change them,
get round them or violate them. But none of this affects the idea that it is
possible to disengage from their obedient or rebellious conduct a law that
they follow without knowing it, and from their very errors, the truth
of this law. To be discouraged in the search for the laws of men's conduct one
must be so simple as to take the laws they give themselves for the necessity
governing them! In truth, their error, the aberrations of their humour, their
violation and changing of their laws, are quite simply part of their
conduct. All that is required is to disengage the laws of the violation
of laws, or of their changing. And this is indeed what Montesquieu does in
almost every chapter of the Spirit of Laws. Open a book on history (the
Roman succession, justice in the early period of feudalism, etc.): it is clear
that its object consists precisely of human divagation and variation. This
attitude already presupposes a very fruitful methodological principle, the
refusal to take the motives of human action for its dynamic, the ends and
arguments men consciously propose to themselves for the real, most often
unconscious causes which make them act. Montesquieu thus appeals constantly to
causes of which men are ignorant: climate, soil, manners and morals,
the inner logic of a set of institutions, etc., precisely so as to explain
human laws and the deviation which separates men's conduct both from
'primitive'
page 37
This interpretation allows us to give a perhaps more apt
sense to a theme which constantly recurs in Montesquieu, and which seems to
concern the norms (devoirs) governing laws. Indeed, when discussing
human laws, we very often find Montesquieu appealing from existing laws to
better ones. A strange paradox for a man who refuses to judge what is by what
ought to be (doit être) - and yet falls into the trap that he himself
has denounced! Montesquieu says for example (and this clashes with all the
laws deprived of that reason he describes in his book) that 'law in general is
human reason, in as much as it governs all the peoples of the earth' (SL, I,
3). He also says that laws ought to be adapted to the people, that they
ought to be relative to the nature and principle of the government,
that they ought to be relative to the physical constitution of the
country, etc. The list of these 'oughts' or norms is endless. And just when
one thinks one has properly grasped the essence of his definition of the
nature and principle of a government, one is astonished to read that this
'does not imply, that, in a particular republic, they actually are, but that
they ought to be, virtuous . . . otherwise the government is imperfect' (SL,
III, 11). Despotism itself, to be 'perfect', God knows by what sort of
perfection, has itself some norms to respect! The general conclusion from
these texts seems to be: the theoretician of the ideal, or the legislator, has
taken the place of the scientist. The latter only wanted facts; the former
proposes ends. But here again the misunderstanding depends in part on a
word-play on the two laws: the laws really ordering the actions of men
(the laws the scientist is investigating) and the laws ordained by men. When
Montesquieu proposes norms for the laws, this is only for the laws that men
provide themselves. These 'norms' are quite simply a demand for men to narrow
the distance between the laws that govern men unbeknownst to them and the laws
they
page 38
Such is the first of the two possible interpretations, and it
illuminates the immense majority of Montesquieu's examples. Thus understood,
Montesquieu is indeed the conscious precursor of all modern political science,
which will have none of any but a critical science, which only disengages the
real laws of the conduct of men from the apparent laws they provide for
themselves in order to criticize those apparent laws and modify them, thus
returning to history the results obtained in the knowledge of history. This
scientific distance with respect to history and this conscious return to
history can, of course, if the object of the science is taken for the science
itself, provide a pretext for the accusation of political idealism (cf.
Poincaré: science is in the indicative; action in the imperative)! But once it
is clear that the distance described as ideal between the existing
state and the project of its reform is in this case simply the distance of
a science from its object and from ordinary consciousness, every objection
of this kind falls. In the apparent ideal that science proposes for its
object, it is merely restoring to it what it had taken from it: its own
distance, which is knowledge itself.
But I have to admit
that there is another possible interpretation of the texts I have been
discussing, and one that can be sustained in Montesquieu himself. Here indeed
is the way he introduces human laws into the concert of general laws:
'Particular intelligent
page 39
page 40
Here Montesquieu
returns like a good boy to the most insipid of traditions. Eternal values do
exist. Read the statement of this in Book I: the laws must be obeyed; one's
benefactor must be recognized; one's Creator must be obeyed; evil deeds will
be punished. A remarkable list! A second one complements it: Book I, Chapter
2, teaching that 'nature' gives us the idea of a Creator and inclines us
towards him; that it intends that we should live in peace; that we should eat;
that we should be inclined towards the other sex; and be desirous of living in
society. The rest is added bit by bit, scattered as it is in more remote
passages: that a father owes his offspring nourishment, but not necessarily
inheritance; that a son supports his father if he is in trouble; that women
must give way to men in the home; and above all that behaviour relating to
modesty is all important in human purposes (whether it is a question of women
in most of their actions, in
page 41
I believe that this side of Montesquieu is not a matter of
indifference. It does not amount only to one isolated concession in a
set of rigorous exigencies, the tribute paid to satisfy the world's
prejudices, in order to have peace. Montesquieu needed this recourse and
refuge. As he needed the ambiguity of his conception of law to combat his
most ferocious opponents. Re-read his reply to the watchful theologian. These
laws which precede themselves, these equal radii equal for all eternity,
before anyone, God or man, had ever drawn a circle anywhere, these relations
of equity predating all possible positive laws, provide him with an argument
against the Hobbesian threat. 'The Author was attempting to overthrow Hobbes's
system; a system the most terrible, in that by making all the virtues and
vices depend on the establishment of laws men make for themselves . . . he,
like Spinoza, overthrows both all religion and all morality.'[4] So much for religion and morality. But something quite
different is at stake. No longer the laws controlling religion and morality,
but the laws governing politics, decisive laws for Montesquieu himself.
It is the foundation of these laws that is at stake for Hobbes in the
contract. These eternal laws of Montesquieu's, laws pre-existing all human
laws, are thus really the refuge in which he protects himself from his
opponent. That there were laws before laws makes it clear that there is no
longer a contract, nor any of the political perils to which the very idea
of a contract commits men and governments. In the shelter of the eternal laws
of a nature without egalitarian structure, one can fight the opponent from
afar. He can be awaited on the
4. A Defence of the SL, Part I,
1, Objection I.
page 42
It is certainly not the
least of Montesquieu's paradoxes that he thus served old causes with ideas the
strongest of which were completely new. But it is time to follow him into his
most familiar thoughts, which are also his most secret ones.
page 43
Chapter Three
The Dialectic of
History
Everything I have said so far concerns only Montesquieu's
method, its presuppositions and meaning. This method applied to his object is
indisputably novel. But a method, even a novel one, may be in vain if it
fails to produce anything new. What then are Montesquieu's positive
discoveries?
'I have first of all considered mankind; and
the result of my thoughts has been, that, amidst such an infinite diversity of
laws and manners, they were not solely conducted by the caprice of fancy. I
have laid down the first principles, and have found that the particular cases
apply naturally to them; that the histories of all nations are only
consequences of them; and that every particular law is connected with another
law, or depends on some other of a more general extent' (SL, Preface). Such is
Montesquieu's discovery: not particular ingenuities but universal first
principles making intelligible the whole of human history and all its
particulars: 'When once I had discovered my first principles, everything I
sought for appeared' (ibid.).
What then are the principles
which make history intelligible in this way? Once posed, this question raises
a number of difficulties which directly involve the make-up of the
Spirit of Laws. Montesquieu's great work, which opens with the pages I
have just been discussing, does not indeed have the expected arrangement.
First of all, from Book I to Book XIII, it contains a theory of governments
and of the different laws that depend either on their natures or on their
principles: in other words, a typology, which appears very abstract,
although it is crammed with historical examples, and seems to constitute a
whole isolated from the rest,
page 44
Where indeed are
they to be found? The Spirit of Laws seems to be made up of three parts
added on to one another, like ideas which have come up and that one does not
want to lose. Where is the clear unity we expected? Should we seek
Montesquieu's 'principles' in the first thirteen Books, and thus owe him the
idea of a pure typology of the forms of government, the description of
their peculiar dynamic, the deduction of laws as a function of their nature
and principle? Suppose we agree. But then all the material about climate and
the various factors, then the history, seem interesting certainly, but
additional. Are the true principles on the contrary in the second part,
in the idea that the laws are determined by different factors, some material
(climate, soil, population, economy), others moral (manners and morals,
religion)? But then what is the concealed argument linking these determinant
principles with the first ideal principles and the final historical studies?
Any attempt to maintain the whole in an impossible unity, the ideality of the
types, the determinism of the material or moral environment, and the history,
falls into irresoluble contradictions. Montesquieu could be said to be torn
between a mechanistic materialism and a moral idealism, between
page 45
I should
like to try to combat this impression and reveal between the different
'truths' of the Spirit of Laws the chain that links them to other
truths discussed in the Preface.
The first expression of
Montesquieu's new principles is to be found in the few lines which distinguish
between the nature and the principle of a government. Each
government (republic, monarchy, despotism) has its nature and its
principle. Its nature is 'that by which it is constituted', its
principle the passion 'by which it is made to act' (SL, III, 1).
What is to be understood by the nature of a
government? The nature of the government answers the question: who holds
power? how does the holder of power exercise that power? Thus, the
nature of republican government implies that the body of the nation (or
a part of the nation) has sovereign authority. The nature of
monarchical government, that one alone governs, but by fixed and established
laws. The nature of despotism, that one alone governs, but with neither
laws nor rules. The retention and mode of exercise of power - all this remains
purely legal, and when all is said and done, formal.
The principle takes us into life. For a government is not a pure form.
It is the concrete form of existence of a society of men. For the men subject
to a particular type of government to be precisely and lastingly subject to
it, the mere imposition of a political form (nature) is not enough,
they must also have a disposition to that form, a certain way of acting and
reacting which will underpin that form. As Montesquieu puts it, there has to
be a specific passion. Each form of government necessarily desires its
own passion. The republic wants virtue, monarchy honour, and despotism fear.
The principle of a government is drawn from its form, for it is a 'natural'
derivation of it. But this consequence is less its effect than its
precondition. Take the example of the republic. The principle of
the republic, virtue, answers the question: on
page 46
Montesquieu has been
accused of formalism because of his way of defining a government by its
nature, which does indeed consist of a few words of pure constitutional
law. But it is forgotten that the nature of a government is formal for
Montesquieu himself so long as it is separated from its principle. One
should say: in a government a nature without a principle is inconceivable and
non-existent. Only the nature-principle totality is conceivable,
because it is real. And this totality is no longer formal, for it no longer
designates a purely juridical form, but a political form engaged in its own
life, in its own conditions of existence and survival. Although defined in one
word, virtue, honour, fear, these conditions are highly concrete. Like passion
in general, the passions may seem abstract, but as principles they express
politically the whole real life of the citizens. The virtue of the citizen
is his entire life devoted to the public good: this passion, dominant in the
State, is, in one man, all his passions dominated. With the principle it is
the concrete life of men, public and even private, that enters into the
government. The principle is thus the intersection of the nature
of the government (its political form) with the real life of men. It is thus
the point and aspect in which the real life of men has to be resumed in
order to be inserted into the form of a government. The principle is the
concrete of that abstract, the nature. It is their unity, it is their
totality, that is real. Where is the formalism?
This point
will be conceded. But it is decisive if we are to grasp the full extent of
Montesquieu's discovery. In this idea of the
page 47
page 48
Here, however, formalism is still
lying in wait for us. For it may well be that this category of the totality
constituted the unity of the first Books of the Spirit of Laws. But it
may be said that it is restricted to them, and that it is marked by the error
of these first Books: that it concerns pure models, a truly republican
republic, a truly monarchical monarchy and a truly despotic despotism only. In
'Reflections on the Preceding Chapters' (SL, III, 11), Montesquieu says: 'Such
are the principles of the three sorts of government: which does not imply,
that, in a particular republic, they actually are, but that they ought to be,
virtuous: nor does it prove, that, in a particular monarchy, they are actuated
by honour; or, in a particular despotic government, by fear; but that they
ought to be directed by these principles, otherwise the government is
imperfect.' Is this not to prove that an idea which is only valid for pure
models and perfect political forms has been taken for a category
applicable to all existing governments? Is it not to relapse into a theory of
essences and into the ideal trap which was precisely what was to be avoided?
Whereas one must, as a historian, necessarily explain a certain
very imperfect republic or monarchy, not a pure republic or monarchy?
If the totality is only valid for the purity, what use is the totality in
history, which is impurity itself? Or, and this is the same aporia, how can
one ever think history in a category attached in essence to pure atemporal
models? We have come back to the difficulty of the disparity of the Spirit
of Laws: how to unite the beginning and the end, the pure typology and the
history?
I believe we should be careful not to judge
Montesquieu by one sentence, but, as he forewarns us, take his work as a
whole, without separating what he says in it from what he does. It is indeed
very remarkable that this theoretician of pure models never (or hardly ever)
in his work gives any but impure examples.
page 49
page 50
Hence it is a strange mistake to doubt that
Montesquieu has a sense of history, or to suspect that his typology diverted
him from a theory of history, that he wrote books on history through a
distraction which led him away from his principles. This mistake is no doubt
rooted primarily in the fact that Montesquieu did not share the already
widespread and soon to be dominant ideology, the belief that history has an
end, is in pursuit of the realm of reason, liberty and 'enlightenment'.
Montesquieu was probably the first person before Marx who undertook to
think history without attributing to it an end, i.e. without projecting
the consciousness of men and their hopes onto the time of history. This
criticism is thus entirely to his credit. He was the first to propose a
positive principle of universal explanation for history; a principle which
is not just static: the totality explaining the diversity of the laws
and institutions of a given government; but also dynamic: the law of
the unity of nature and principle, a law making it possible to think the
development of institutions and their transformations in real history, too. In
the depth of the countless laws which come and go, he thus discovered a
constant connection uniting the nature of a government to its
principle; and at the core of this constant connection, he stated the inner
variation of the relation, which, by the transitions of the unity from
adequacy to inadequacy, from identity to contradiction, makes intelligible the
changes and revolutions in the concrete totalities of history.
But Montesquieu was also the first to give an answer to a question
which has become classic, the question of the motor of history. Let us
look again at the law of historical development. It is completely governed by
the relation existing between the nature and the principle in their
very unity. If these two terms are in harmony (Republican Rome and virtuous
Romans), the totality of the State is peaceful, men live in a history without
crises. If the
page 51
In his work on the
Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Ernst Cassirer praises Montesquieu for
having thus founded a quite modern 'comprehensive' theory of history, i.e. for
having thought history within the category of the totality, and the
elements of this totality in a specific unity, while precisely renouncing
the idea that one element might be more important than the others, i.e.
that there might be a motor of history. History is simply a moving
totality, whose unity can be understood and the meaning of whose
inner movements can be grasped, but which can never be explained, i.e.
its interactional movements can never be related to a determinant element. And
in fact this view seems to accord with the letter of many passages from
Montesquieu, who constantly turns from the form of the government to its
principle, and from its principle to its form. It is the republican laws that
produce the very virtue that enables them to be republican; the monarchical
institutions that engender the honour that underpins them. As honour is for
nobility, the principle is both father and child of the
page 52
However, I believe that this slightly over-modern intuition
does not express Montesquieu's most profound thought. For he intends there to
be in the last instance a determinant term: the principle.
'The force of the principles draws everything to it.' Such is the grand
lesson of Book VIII, which opens with the sentence, 'The Corruption of each
government generally begins with that of the principles.' Corruption (and thus
the impure state I have been discussing) constitutes a sort of experimental
situation which makes it possible to penetrate the indivisible
nature-principle unity and decide which is the decisive element of the
opposition. The result is that it is definitely the principle that governs
the nature and gives it its meaning. 'When once the principles of government
are corrupted, the very best laws become bad, and turn against the state: but,
when the principles are sound, even bad laws have the same effect as good'
(SL, VIII, 11). 'A State may alter two different ways; either by the
amendment, or by the corruption, of the constitution. If it has preserved its
principles, and the constitution changes, this is owing to its amendment; if,
upon changing the constitution, its principles are lost, this means that it
has been corrupted' (SL, XI, 13). This clearly shows the transition from the
case of the experimental situation of corruption to the general case of any
modification (to the good as well as to the bad) in the nature of the State.
Thus it really is the principle
page 53
Of course, this does not exclude the effectivity of
the nature on the principle, but within certain limits. Otherwise it would
be difficult to understand how Montesquieu could have imagined laws intended
to preserve or reinforce the principle. The urgency of these laws is simply a
confession of their subordinate character: they are only active in a
domain which may escape them not only for a thousand accidental and external
reasons, but also and above all for the fundamental reason that it reigns over
them and decides even what they mean. There are thus limit situations in which
laws that are intended to provide manners and morals are powerless
against manners and morals themselves, and rebound against the end they were
supposed to serve - the manners and morals rejecting laws opposed to their own
goals. However hazardous a comparison it may be, and one that I put forward
with all possible precautions, the type of this determination in the last
instance by the principle, determination which nevertheless farms out a
whole zone of subordinate effectivity to the nature of the government,
can be compared with the type of determination which Marx attributes in the
last instance to the economy, a determination which nevertheless farms out
a zone of subordinate effectivity to politics. In both cases it is a
matter of a unity which may be harmonious or contradictory; in both cases this
determination does nonetheless cede to the determined element a whole region
of effectivity, but subordinate effectivity.
Hence this
interpretation reveals a real unity between the first and last parts of the
Spirit of Laws, between the typology and the history. But there remains
one difficulty: the so varied second part, which introduces climate, soil,
commerce, religion - surely
page 54
Let us first run through the
new determinant factors suggested to us. Before climate (Book XIV), there is
another important element, referred to on several occasions, and particularly
in Book VIII: the dimensions of the State. The nature of a government
depends on the geographical extent of its empire. A minute State will be
republican, a moderate State monarchic and an immense State despotic. Here is
a determination that seems to overthrow the laws of history, since geography
decides its forms directly. Climate reinforces this argument, since
this time it is the temperature of the air that distributes the empires,
despotisms beneath violent skies, moderate governments beneath tender ones,
and decides in advance which men will be free and which slaves. We learn that
'The empire of the climate is the first, the most powerful of all empires'
(SL, XIX, 14), but at the same time that this empire can be conquered by
well-conceived laws leaning on its excesses to protect men from its effects. A
new cause then appears: the nature of the soil occupied by a nation.
According to whether it is fertile or arid, the government there will be a
government of one man or of many; according to whether it is mountainous or a
plain, a continent or an island, liberty or slavery will be found to triumph
there. But here again the causality invoked can be counteracted: 'Countries
are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but to their liberty'
(SL, XVIII, 3). But here are the manners and morals (moeurs) or
general spirit of a nation, which add their effectivities to the others; then
commerce and money, and finally religion. It is hard to avoid an impression of
disorder, as if Montesquieu wanted to exhaust a series of principles he has
discovered separately and then heaped together for want of any better order.
'Mankind are influenced by various causes; by the climate, by the religion, by
the laws, by the maxims of government, by precedents, morals, and customs'
(SL, XIX, 4). The unity of a profound law has turned into a plurality of
causes. The totality is lost in a list.
I do not want to
make it look as if I hoped to save Montesquieu
page 55
What is indeed remarkable in the majority of these factors,
which either determine the very nature of the government (e.g. geographical
extent, climate, soil) or a certain number of its laws, is the fact that they
only act on their object indirectly. Take the example of the climate.
The torrid climate does not produce the despot just like that, nor does the
temperate the monarch. The climate only acts on the temperament of men,
by way of a nice physiology which dilates or contracts the extremities and
thereby affects the global sensitivity of the individual, imprinting on him
peculiar needs and leanings, down to his style of conduct. It is the men
thus constituted and conditioned who are apt for particular laws and
governments. 'It is the variety of wants, in different climates, that first
occasioned a difference in the manner of living, and thus gave rise to a
variety of laws' (SL, XIV, 10). The laws produced by the climate are
thus the last effect in a whole chain, whose penultimate link,
the product of the climate and the cause of the laws, is the 'customary
life' (manière de vivre) which is the outside of the 'manners and
morals' (moeurs) (SL, XIX, 16). Look at the soil: if fertile
lands are good for the government of one man alone, that is because the
peasant there is too busy and too well-paid by his efforts to raise his nose
from the ground and his pence. Commerce: it does not act directly on
the laws but via the intermediary of the manners: 'Wherever there is commerce,
there we meet with agreeable manners' (SL, XX, 1) - hence the peaceful spirit
of commerce, its suitability to certain governments, its repugnance for
others. As for religion itself, it seems to be part of another world
than these completely material factors, but it acts nonetheless in the same
way: by giving a nation ways of living the law and practising morality; it
only concerns government through the behaviour of citizens and subjects. It is
its mastery of fear that makes the Mahometan religion so apt for despotism: it
provides it with slaves, ripe for slavery. It is its mastery of morality that
page 56
From their conjunction
arises what Montesquieu calls the spirit of a nation. He does write:
'Mankind are influenced by various causes; by the climate, by the religion,
etc.,' but only so as to conclude: 'from whence is formed a general spirit of
the nation' (SL, XIX, 4).
Hence it is the result: the
manners and morals, the general spirit of a nation, which determines either
the form of the government or a certain number of its laws. The question then
arises, is this not an already familiar determination? Indeed, remember
what I have said of the principle of a government and of the depths of
the concrete life of men it expresses. Considered not from the viewpoint of
the form of the government, i.e. of its political exigencies, but from
the viewpoint of its content, i.e. of its origins, the principle is
really the political expression of the concrete behaviour of men, i.e. of
their manners and morals, and spirit. Of course, Montesquieu does not say in
so many words that the manners and morals or spirit of a nation constitute the
very essence of the principle of its government. But he does set out
from principles as the pure forms of the government: their truth appears in
their corruption. When the principle is lost, it is clear that
manners and morals effectively take the place of principle: that they
are its loss or salvation. Take the republic, abandoned by virtue: there is no
longer any respect for magistrates there, nor for old age, nor even for . . .
husbands. 'No longer will there be any such things as manners, order, or
virtue' (SL, VIII, 2). It would be hard to say more clearly that the
principle (virtue) is simply the expression of the manners. Look
at Rome: in its trials and reverses, with events shaking all the forms, it
held fast: 'Rome
page 57
1. 'In all societies, which are simply
a union of minds, a common character is formed. This universal soul adopts a
way of thinking which is the effect of a chain of infinite causes which
multiply and combine century by century. Once the tone has been given and
received, it alone governs, and everything that sovereigns, magistrates and
peoples may do or imagine, whether it seems to conflict with the tone or to
follow it, always relates to it, and it dominates even the total destruction
[of the society]' (Mes Pensées).
page 58
I
know that counter-quotations will be used against me and that I shall be
accused of giving Montesquieu the benefit of the doubt. However, it seems to
me that all the reservations one might express turn on no more than a single
point: the ambiguity of the concepts of principle and manners and
morals. But I believe that this ambiguity is real in Montesquieu
himself. I should say that it expresses simultaneously his wish to introduce
the utmost clarity and necessity into history, but also in some sense his
inability - not to speak of his choice. For if the region of the
nature of a government is always perfectly sharply defined, if the
dialectic of the nature-principle unity and contradiction, and the thesis of
the primacy of principle, both emerge clearly from his examples, the concept
of principle and the concept of manners and morals remain vague.
I said that the principle expresses the condition of existence of a
government, and has the real life of men as its concrete background. The
parallel causalities of the second part of the Spirit of Laws reveal to
us the components of this real life, i.e. the real material and moral
conditions of the existence of a government - and summarize them in the
manners and morals which come to
page 59
It will be said that this contradiction and this ambiguity are
inevitable in a man who thinks in the concepts of his period and cannot
transcend the limits of the then established knowledges, simply interrelating
what he knows, and unable to seek in the conditions he is describing a deeper
unity, which would presuppose a complete political economy.[2] That is true. And it is already remarkable that Montesquieu
should have defined and designated in advance in a brilliant conception of
history an as yet obscure zone barely illuminated by a vague concept: the zone
of manners and morals (moeurs), and behind it the zone of the
concrete behaviour of men in their relations with nature and with their
past.
But within him another man than the scientist took
advantage of this ambiguity. The man of a political party which needed
2. See Voltaire already: 'Montesquieu
had no knowledge of the political principles relating to wealth, manufactures,
finances and commerce. These principles had not yet been discovered. . . . It
would have been as impossible for him to make [The Spirit of Laws]
Smith's treatise on wealth as Newton's mathematical principles.'
page 60
page 61
Chapter Four
'There are Three
Governments . . .'
There are thus three species of government. The republic,
monarchy and despotism. These totalities should be closely examined.
1. T H E R E P U B L I C
This political angelicism makes
democracy (for here I shall ignore aristocracy, which is an unstable mixture
of democracy and monarchy) an exceptional regime, a kind of synthesis of all
the exigencies of politics. First, it is truly a political regime, by
which I mean a regime which attains the true sphere of politics: that
of stability and universality. In democracy, the men who are
page 62
This category of the citizen realizes the synthesis of the State
in man himself: the citizen is the State in the private man. That is why
education has such an important place in the economy of this regime
(SL, IV, 5), for Montesquieu as well as for Rousseau. Montesquieu shows that
democracy cannot tolerate the division of education characteristic of
monarchic regimes. In fact modern man is torn between two educations: that of
his fathers and teachers on the one hand, and that of the world on the other.
The one preaches him morality and religion. The other never to forget himself.
And what Hegel was to call the law of the world, which governs real
human relations, triumphs over the law of the heart, whose refuge is the
hearth and the Church (SL, IV, 4 & 5). None of this in a democratic
regime: family, school and life speak the same language. The whole of life is
simply an endless education. For, in its very essence, democracy presupposes,
behind this endless discipline and edification which is in some sense its
temporal form, a true conversion of the private man into the public
man. If in democracy all private vices are public crimes, which is the
justification for the censors, if civil law is identical with political
page 63
A moral conversion? That is what Montesquieu proposes when
he depicts virtue, although it is entirely political, as the preference of the
public good over private good (SL, III, 5; SL, IV, 5), as self-forgetfulness,
as the triumph of reason over passion. But this moral conversion is not that
of an isolated conscience, it is that of a State totally steeped in this duty,
translated into laws. With its laws, the republic, which wants
citizens, takes care to force them into virtue. At what cost can this
virtue be thus forced? At the cost of an archaic economy maintained in its
past, at the cost of manners and morals carefully guarded by the laws, the
aged and the censors; lastly, and above all, at the cost of judicious
political measures, which only aim to edify the people in order to maintain it
within the power of its notables.
Indeed what is
striking in the entirely retrospective apologia for the people's government
constituted by democracy (aristocracy is much less exemplary, because,
dare I say it, it is founded from the outset on the division of the people),
is the care taken to distinguish two peoples within the people. When
Montesquieu's republic is compared with Rousseau's, and the virtue of the one
with the virtue of the other, it must not be forgotten that the former is in
the past and the latter in the future; the latter a people's republic, the
former a republic of notables. Hence the importance of the problem of
popular representation. Rousseau has no intention that the people
should legislate through its representatives: 'Sovereignty, for the
same reason as makes it inalienable, cannot be represented; it lies
essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation'
(The Social Contract, Book III, Ch. 15).[1] A
democracy which adopts repre-
1. Rousseau, The Social Contract
and Discourses, op cit., p. 78.
page 64
Thus in democracy there is available what is required to
rein-
2. 'There is nothing in the world more
insolent than republics. . . . The common people is the most insolent tyrant
there can be', Voyages (Pléiade edition, 2 vols, ed. Roger Caillois,
Paris, 1949-51, vol. 1, p. 863).
page 65
Carefully confined to the past by the enlargement of modern
States and the turn of events which has made virtue inhuman, democracy
therefore only relates to the present by the lessons of experience that
descend from it: 'Even in a popular government, the power ought not to fall
into the hands of the common people' (SL, XV, 18).
2. M O N A R C H Y
What is
monarchy? By its nature it is the government of a single person who
directs the State 'by fixed and established laws'. By its principle, it
is the reign of honour.
A single person who governs:
the king. But what are these laws
page 66
Read carefully Book II Chapter 4. You will find that the first sentence
identifies the nature of monarchical government, government 'by
fundamental laws', and the 'intermediate, subordinate, and dependent powers'.
The intermediary powers are two in number: the nobility and the clergy, the
nobility being the 'most natural' of the two. Thus 'intermediary bodies' are
to be laws! Elsewhere Montesquieu cites as a fundamental law of monarchy the
law of succession to the throne, which prevents intrigue and
page 67
This is all admitted straightaway: 'The most natural
intermediate and subordinate power is that of the nobility. This, in some
measure, seems to be essential to a monarchy, whose fundamental maxim is "No
monarch, no nobility; no nobility, no monarch" ' (SL, II, 4). I think that we
can learn a great deal here from the abstract character of at least a part of
Montesquieu's political typology. There is no longer any reason to wait for
the principle to discover the concrete life of the State: the whole
political and social order emerges already in its nature.
'These fundamental laws necessarily suppose the intermediate channels
through which the power flows' (SL, II, 4). These 'channels' are precisely the
nobility and the clergy. But by a linguistic trick we are again facing a
purely legal problem. The 'necessarily' ('these laws necessarily appear
. . .') is thus really worth its weight in gold. For until now the
necessity for the nobility and the clergy has not been at all obvious!
It is by no means a primordial necessity. It is a necessity in the sense in
which we speak of the necessity one is in to accept a certain means
supposing one wants a particular end. This necessity consists in the fact that
in the absence of intermediate orders there is nothing to prevent the king
being a despot. For, 'in monarchies, the prince is the source of all
power, political and civil'; but 'if there be only the momentary and
capricious will of a single person to govern the State, nothing can be fixed,
and of course there is no fundamental law' (SL, II, 4). Everything is in these
four lines. The fundamental law is the fixity and constancy of a regime. All
right. We are in
page 68
Given this, the juridical
argument returns to the fore. And Montesquieu is pleased to describe the
dynamic peculiar to this regime of intermediary bodies as if it were a matter
of a pure form of the political distribution of power.
It is
very remarkable that the metaphor that haunts despotism is taken from
colliding bodies - while the one that haunts monarchy derives from a flowing
spring. Water which flows from an elevated spring, passes into channels which
moderate its speed and guide its course - and at the bottom reaches the lands
which owe it their verdure. The image of colliding balls implies immediacy in
time and space, and the 'force' entirely transmitted by the impact. That is
why in despotism power is either exercised or handed over. The image of the
irrigating spring implies, on the contrary, space and duration.
Its temporality being its course, time is needed for the water to flow. And it
never all flows away: a spring does not empty like a basin, it always contains
more than it gives away. And contrary to the ball which may be ejected in the
opposite direction to the one with which it collided, their instantaneous
impact sharply separating them, flowing water never breaks with itself. It is
the same uninterrupted stream, from the spring to the most distant lands.
Such is the power of the prince. He never abdicates it, as
the despot does, entirely into the hands of a third party. However much power
he gives to ministers, governors and captains, he always retains more. And the
world in which he exercizes it, its
page 69
But there is one essential
difference between democracy and monarchy. In a democracy it is absolutely
necessary that there be virtue and reason somewhere, and that
some men be reasonable of themselves who could not hope to be so
despite themselves. It is impossible for a republic to be democratic if its
notables are not virtuous. The fate of reason is thus handed over to men
themselves, even if it is only delegated to a few of them. It is quite
page 70
This is what constitutes the very essence of honour,
the principle of monarchy. Indeed, the truth of honour lies in the fact that
it is false. 'Philosophically speaking, it is a false honour,' says
Montesquieu (SL, III, 7). This falsity has to be understood in two senses.
First, that the truth of honour has nothing to do with the truth. Second, that
this lie produces a truth in its own despite.
Honour has
nothing to do with truth, nor with morality. This seems to clash with all the
appearances of honour itself, since honour means frankness, obedience,
politeness and generosity. Frankness? For honour, 'truth . . . in
conversation, is here a necessary point. But is it for the sake of truth? By
no means' (SL, IV, 2). Such a love of 'truth and simplicity' is to be found in
the people, who have no part in honour, but not in honour, which is only
interested in truth 'because a person habituated to veracity has an air of
boldness and freedom'. Obedience? Honour does not accept it for obedience's
sake, but for honour's sake, not for the goodness or virtue of submission, but
for the grandeur restored to it by the choice it makes to submit. The proof is
that this entirely submissive honour subjects the status of the commands it
receives to its own judgement: disobeying all those it reckons dishonourable,
all those that conflict with its own laws
page 71
Does honour then have some relation with a different truth
that is no longer theoretical or moral, but quite practical and profane? It
looks like it when we find Montesquieu seeking in the barbarous laws, which
subordinated the judge's decision to trial by combat, for the origin of
honour in the point of honour. This recalls Hobbes and his
extraordinary image of the destiny of men in struggle. In the endless race
which constitutes our whole life, we are on a kind of track in which we all
started together. Until death, which is to abandon the race, we continue to
struggle, endlessly trying to pass one another. Honour is then to turn
round and see that there are people behind us. That is Hobbes's honour,
which expresses both the human wish to take advantage of man and the real and
conscious merit of having improved on men. But it is not Montesquieu's honour.
For him, honour is not the spring of the human condition, the universal
passion which arouses the universal struggle for prestige and recognition in
which
page 72
But honour
is false, not only because of its ruse with truth. It is false because this
lie produces a truth. This strange passion, in fact so regulated that its
whimsicalities have their laws and a whole code which seems to invert the
social order by its contempt for order and society, serves the reason of the
State by its very unreason. For honour, with its ruse of truth and morality,
is itself the dupe of its own ruse. It thinks it knows no other duty than the
duty one recognizes for oneself: the duty to distinguish oneself, to
perpetuate one's own grandeur, to care for a certain self-image that raises
one above one's own life, and the orders one receives. In fact, 'each
individual advances the public good, while he only thinks of promoting his own
interest' (SL, III, 7). In fact 'this false honour is as useful to the public
as a true honour could possibly be to private people' (ibid.). The virtues,
false in their cause, are true in their effects: obedience, frankness,
politeness and generosity. What does it matter to the prince whether he
obtains them from morality and truth, or from vanity
page 73
But there is a quite different merit, one which is of concern precisely
to the prince who keeps the accounts and takes the profits: it will not let
itself be beaten by anything, not even by the prestige of the supreme power.
That it is above any laws, not just religious and moral ones, but also
political ones, means that honour is the rock against the king's fancies. If
the power of honour is 'limited by its very spring' (SL, III, 10), if the
great only ever have honour on their minds, this sufficiency suffices them.
They have no other ambition at heart, whether of fortunes to be won or of
power to be conquered; if honour is this blinding of the great to the real
interests of the world, if its folly thus protects the prince from their
audacity as the great, this folly also protects the prince against his own
temptations as a man. For he can never hope that these great ones will ever
enter into his plans for other reasons than their own, for motives foreign to
this strange honour. He may lay claim to their complete service, but never
their entire soul. And if he tries to go beyond reason and throw himself into
enterprises which exceed the legitimate power, he will be held back by the
honour of his nobles, which will oppose his laws to his orders and make the
latter rebels. That is how reason will reign in the State, as the
powerlessness of two follies, and truth, as two contradictory falsities. We
can tell from this trait whether honour does not as the principle in
this government play the same part as the nobility and the intermediary
bodies do as the nature. And whether honour, far from being a
general passion, as virtue must be in a republic, is not the passion of an
estate, which may be contagious, as examples always are, but cannot be
shared. Hidden away in a chapter on penal law we can read a short sentence to
the effect that 'the peasant . . . has no honour to lose' (SL, VI, 10). Which
makes him worthy to suffer bodily the punishments for his crimes. A great man
is tortured in his honour, which is his soul. Shame thus taking the place of
the wheel.
page 74
page 75
What is despotism? Unlike the republic and like monarchy, it
is an existing government. It is the government of the Turks, of the
Persians, of Japan, of China and of most Asian countries. The government of
immense countries with a voracious climate. The location of the despotic
regimes already suggests their excess. Despotism is the government of extreme
lands, of extreme extents beneath the most ardent skies. It is the limit
government, and already the limit of government. It is easy to guess that the
example of real countries is only providing Montesquieu with a pretext.
Apparently, at the time of the 1948 conference, Turkish listeners, on mention
of the famous statement that despotism is the government of the Turks, uttered
'the most lively and most justifiable of protestations'.[3] M. Prélot has gravely related this incident. But without
being a Turk, one can suspect the political exoticism of a man who never went
beyond Venice and the frontiers of Austria, and only knew the Orient by
accounts among which he knew precisely the ones to choose. By 1778, in an
admirable work on Législation orientale, Anquetil-Duperron was already
opposing the real East to Montesquieu's oriental myth. But once the
geographical myth of despotism has been denounced, there remains an idea of
despotism that no Turkish protestation can refute. If the Persian does not
exist, where does a French gentilhomme, born under Louis XIV, get the
idea of him?
3. M. Prélot, 'Montesquieu et la
formes de gouvernement', in Receuil Sirey du bicentenaire de l'Esprit des
Lois, p. 127.
page 76
It is in fact insufficient to define despotism as the government 'in
which a single person, with neither rules nor laws, directs everything by his
own will and caprice'. For this definition remains a superficial one so long
as the concrete life of such a regime has not been represented. How
indeed could a single person really direct by his own caprice the
immense empire of lands and peoples subject to his decree? This is the paradox
that must be illuminated to discover the meaning of the idea.
The first feature of despotism is the fact that it is a political
regime which has so to speak no structure. Neither legal-political nor
social. Montesquieu repeats several times that despotism has no laws,
and by that we should understand first of all no fundamental laws. I
know that Montesquieu cites one when he argues that the tyrant delegates all
his power to the grand vizir (SL, II, 5), but this only has the appearance of
a political law. In fact it is simply a law of passion, a psychological
law which betrays the bestiality of the tyrant and the divine surprise which
reveals to him, in the depths of his laziness, like the Pope Montesquieu cites
who resigned the administration of his States to his nephew (ibid.), that the
government of men is the art of a child: it is enough to let a third party
govern them! In its pretension, this false law, which illegitimately converts
passion into politics, suggests that in despotism all politics can always
be reduced entirely to passion. We still have no structure. I know that
there is nonetheless in despotism a substitute for a fundamental law:
religion. It is indeed the only authority which is above authority, and can,
in some circumstances, moderate the excesses of the prince's cruelty and the
subjects' fear. But its essence, too, is passionate, since in despotism
religion is itself despotic: 'it is fear added to fear' (SL, V, 14).
Hence neither in the vizirate nor in religion is there
anything like an order of political and legal conditions transcending human
passions. And in fact despotism knows no laws of succession. Nothing that
designates tomorrow's despot to yesterday's
page 77
This precariousness
is, if I may say so, ensured by the disappearance of any social
structure. In a democracy, the magistrates have a statute, and property
and even relative wealth are guaranteed by the law. In a monarchy, the
nobility and the clergy are protected by the recognition of their privileges.
In a despotism, nothing distinguishes between men: it is the realm of
extreme equality which lowers all subjects to the same
uniformity (SL, V, 14). Here, says Montesquieu, all men are equal, not
because they are everything, as in a democracy, but 'because they are nothing'
(SL, VI, 2). It is the suppression of orders by a general levelling down. No
hereditary order, no nobility: this sanguinary regime cannot tolerate
greatness in blood. Nor greatness in goods: the
page 78
This disposition gives a strange pace to the life of this regime. This
government which reigns over vast spaces in some sense lacks any social
space. This regime, which has lasted millennia in the Chinese example, is
somehow stripped of all duration. Its social space and its political
time are neutral and uniform. Space without places, time without duration.
Kings, says Montesquieu, know the differences there are between
provinces, and respect them. Despots not only do not know such differences,
they
page 79
As for the time of
despotism, it is the opposite of duration: the moment. Not only does despotism
know no institutions, no orders and no families that last, but also its
very own acts spurt out in a moment. The entire people is made in the
image of the despot. The despot decides in a moment. Without reflecting,
without comparing reasons, without weighing arguments, without 'mediums' or
'limitations' (SL, III, 10). For it takes time to reflect, and a certain idea
of the future. But the despot has no more idea of the future than the merchant
who profits in order to eat and that is all. All his reflection comes down to
deciding, and the legion of his precarious administrators repeat the
same blind gesture to the end of the most remote province. What could they
decide anyway? They are like judges without codes. They do not know the
tyrant's reasons; he has none anyway. They have to decide! Hence they will
follow his 'subitaneous manner of willing' (SL, V, 16). As 'subitaneously' as
they will be disgraced or butchered. Sharing in every respect the condition of
their master, who would only learn of his future from his death, if he were
not dying.
This logic of abstract immediacy, which contains
extraordinary inklings of some of Hegel's critical themes, does nonetheless
have a certain truth and content. For this regime that survives so to
page 80
Perhaps it has not been sufficiently realized that the
famous passions that constitute the principles of the different
governments are not all of the same essence. Honour, for example, is not a
simple passion, or, if you prefer, is not a 'psychological' passion. Honour is
capricious like all passions, but its caprices are regulated: it has
its laws and its code. It would not require much pressure to make Montesquieu
admit that the essence of monarchy is a disobedience, but a regulated
disobedience. Honour is thus a reflected passion, even in its own
intransigence. However 'psychological', however immediate, honour is a passion
highly educated by society, a cultivated passion, and, if the term can be
suggested, a cultural and social passion.
The same is
true of the passion of the republic. It, too, is a strange passion, one which
has nothing immediate about it but sacrifices in man his own wishes to give
him the general good as his object. Virtue is defined as the passion for the
general. And Montesquieu obligingly shows us certain monks shifting to the
generality of their order all the ardour of the particular passions they
repress in themselves. Like honour, virtue thus has its code and its laws. Or
rather it has its law, a single law: love of the fatherland. This
passion for universality demands a universal education: the school of all life
itself Montesquieu answered the old Socratic question - can virtue educate
itself? - by saying, it must, and the whole destiny of virtue is precisely to
be taught.
The passion that sustains despotism knows not
this duty. Fear,[4] since it must be called by its name,
needs no education, and the latter is, in despotism, 'in some measure,
needless' (SL, IV, 3). It is not a compound or educated passion, nor a social
passion. It knows neither codes nor laws. It is a passion without a career
before it, and with no title behind it: a passion in statu nascendi
which nothing will ever divert from its birth. A momentary
4. It is very remarkable that
Montesquieu reserves fear, which Hobbes, the theorist of absolutism, found at
the heart of all societies, to despotism alone.
page 81
If the tyrant resigns the exercise of government out
of laziness and boredom, that is because he refuses to be a public man. It is
because he does not want to pretend to that order of considered impersonality
which constitutes a statesman. By a movement of private whim or lassitude,
which dresses up in the trappings of solemnity, he divests himself of the
public personage and hands it over to a third party, as a king hands his cloak
to a valet, in order to abandon himself to the delights of private passions.
The despot is no more than his desires. Hence the harem. This abdication of
the despot is the general form of the regime that renounces the order of the
political in order to give itself up to the destiny of the passions alone.
It is hardly surprising therefore to see the same pattern repeated
indefinitely in all the men making up the empire. The lowliest subject is a
despot, at least over his wives, but also their prisoner: the prisoner of his
passions. When he leaves his house, it is his desires that move him once more.
This shows that in a despotism, the only desire that survives is a desire for
the 'conveniences of life'.[5] But this is not a desire
followed through: it does not have the time to compose itself a future. Thus
the passions of despotism overturn into one another. The spring of despotism
could be said to be desire as much as fear. For they are for themselves their
own inverses, without any future, like two men tied back to back with no space
between them, riveted to the spot by their chains. And it is this model of
passion that gives despotism its style. That absence of duration, those
sudden, irretrievable movements are precisely the attributes of these
momentary and immediate passions which fall back on themselves like stones
children hope to throw to heaven. If it is true, as Marx said in a youthful
image, that politics is the heaven of private men, despotism can be described
as a world without a heaven.
5. SL, V, 17 & 18; VII, 4 Cf. IX,
6: Despotism is the reign of 'private interest'.
page 82
We have a sufficient number of texts
and sufficiently categorical ones by Montesquieu and his contemporaries to
suggest that despotism is only a geographical illusion because it is a
historical allusion. It is absolute monarchy that is Montesquieu's
target, or if not absolute monarchy in person, then at least the temptations
to which it is prone.[6] As is well known, Montesquieu
belonged by conviction to that right-wing oppositional party of feudal
extraction which did not accept the political decline of its class and
attacked the new political forms inaugurated since the fourteenth century for
having supplanted the older ones. Fénelon, Boulainvilliers and Saint-Simon
were of this party, which, until his death, set all its hopes on the Duc de
Bourgogne, whom
6. Cf. the 37th Persian letter: A
Portrait of Louis XIV. Usbech: 'He hath often been heard to say, that of all
the governments in the world, that of the Turks, or of our august Sultan,
pleased him best; so highly does he esteem the politics of the East.'
page 83
No doubt 'despotism' is a caricature. But its object is to terrify and
to edify by its very horribleness. Here is a regime in which a single
individual governs, in a palace he never leaves, prey to feminine passions and
the intrigues of courtesans. A caricature of Versailles and the Court. Here is
a tyrant who governs through his grand vizir. A caricature of the
minister[8] whom nothing, above all not his birth,
entitles to that post save the prince's
7. 'The death of the last dauphin was
a dreadful wound for the kingdom. . . . Although all the diverse plans for his
government were unknown, it is still certain that he had the grandest ideas in
the world. It is certain that there was nothing in the world he hated so much
as despotism He wanted to restore all the various provinces of the kingdom
their Estates, like Breton and Languedoc. He proposed that there should be
councils and that State secretaries should only be the secretaries of these
councils. He proposed to reduce the costs of office (charges de la
robe) to the necessary level. He proposed that the King have a kind of
civil list as in England, for the up-keep of his house and court, and that in
time of war this civil list should be taxed like other funds, for, he said, it
is unjust that all the subjects should suffer from the war without the prince
suffering too. He proposed that his court should have some morals'
(Spicilège, p. 767, Pléiade edition, op cit, vol II, pp.
1429-30).
8. 'The two worst citizens France has known:
Richelieu and Louvois' (Mes Pensées, Pléiade edition, op cit, vol 1, p.
1120).
page 84
The paradox of despotism is to make such an effective attack on the
great, whatever their extraction (and how could we fail to think of the
nobility, the least revocable of the great?),[9] that the
people are in some sense spared. The despot has so much to do to defeat the
great and destroy the threat of the rebirth of their condition, that the
people, who know nothing of such things, are sheltered from this struggle
unleashed over their heads. In a certain sense, despotism is the great brought
down and the people tranquil in their passions and affairs. Sometimes, says
Montesquieu, one sees torrents swollen by storms descend the mountain,
ravaging all in their paths. But all around there are only green fields and
grazing flocks. In the same way, despots sweep away the great, while the
people, though poverty-stricken, know a kind of peace. I admit that this is
only a 'tranquillity' and indeed the tranquillity that reigns in a besieged
town, since it is in these terms that Montesquieu criticizes it (SL, V, 14),
but who would not prefer it to the terror of the great, who live in the
'pallor' of expected blows, if not death? When we come upon these passages,
which Montesquieu almost seems to let slip (SL, XIII, 12, 15 & 19; III,
9), it is clear that inadvertance has nothing to do with it. It is in fact a
warning which has also the meaning of a reminder. The lesson is clear:
the great have everything to fear from despotism, from terror to
destruction. The people, however miserable they may be, are protected.
9. 'As the instability of the great is
natural to a despotic government, so their security is interwoven with the
nature of monarchy' (SL, VI, 21).
page 85
10. SL, V, 11; cf. VII, 2: In a
despotism 'everything leads to sudden and unforseen revolutions'.
11. SL, V, 11: 'Monarchy has a great advantage over a despotic
government. As it naturally requires there should be several orders or ranks
of subjects, the State is more permanent, the constitution more steady, and
the person of him who governs more secure.
'Cicero is of the
opinion that the establishing of the tribunes preserved the republic "And,
indeed (says he), the violence of a heedless people is more terrible. A chief,
or head, is sensible that the affair depends upon himself, and therefore he
thinks; but the people, in their impetuosity, are ignorant of the danger into
which they hurry themselves." This reflection may be applied to a despotic
government, which is a people without tribunes, and to a monarchy, where the
people have some sort of tribunes.
'Accordingly, it is
observable, that, in the commotions of a despotic government, the people,
hurried away by their passions, are apt to push things as far as they can go.
The disorders they commit are all extreme; whereas, in monarchies, matters are
seldom carried to excess. The chiefs are apprehensive on their own account;
they are afraid of being abandoned; and the intermediate dependent powers do
not choose that the populace should have too much the upper hand. . . .
'Thus all our histories are full of civil wars without
revolutions, while the histories of despotic governments abound with
revolutions without civil wars. . . .
'Monarchs, who live
under the fundamental laws of their country, are far happier than despotic
princes, who have nothing to regulate either their own passions or those of
their subjects.'
page 86
Such is
despotism. An existing regime, certainly, but also and above all an
existing threat which hangs over the other regime of the present day,
monarchy. An existing regime, certainly, but also and above all a political
lesson, a clear warning to a king tempted by absolute power. It is clear that
despite its apparent detachment, the original list conceals a secret choice.
Maybe there are three species of government. But one, the republic,
does not exist except in historical memory. We are left with monarchy and
despotism. But despotism is no more than abusive, perverted monarchy. We are
thus left with monarchy alone, a monarchy to be protected from its perils. So
much for the present period.
But, it will be said,
what of the future? And what about the English Constitution
which Montesquieu presents as an ideal in the famous sixth chapter of Book XI?
Is it not a new model, superseding all the earlier lessons? I hope to prove
that it is nothing of the kind, and that the logic of the theory of monarchy
and despotism constitutes if not all the meanings, at least one important one,
of the famous debate about the separation of powers.
page 87
Chapter Five
The Myth of
the
Separation of Powers
This is a famous text. Who is not familiar with the theory
according to which every good government rigorously distinguishes between the
legislature, the executive and the judiciary? That it
guarantees the independence of each of these powers in order to obtain
from this separation the advantages of moderation,
security and liberty? Such, according to this theory, is in fact
the secret of Book XI, conceived later than the first ten, and inspired in
Montesquieu by the revelation of England, where, during a stay in 1729-30, he
discovered a radically new regime with no other object than liberty.
Before Book XI, Montesquieu presented a classical theory,
distinguishing different political forms, describing their peculiar economies
and dynamics. He then threw off the mask of the dispassionate historian, and
even, if it is to be believed, that of the partisan gentilhomme, to
give the public the ideal of a nation with two chambers, an assembly of the
third estate, and elected judges. Thereby, for some, Montesquieu at last
reached the sphere of the political as such, and demonstrated his genius in a
theory of the balance of the powers, so well arranged that power is itself the
limit of power, thus resolving once and for all the political problem,
which is entirely a matter of the use and abuse of power; for
others, the political problems of the future,[1]
which are less those of monarchy in general than those of representative and
parliamentary government. The temporal succession is in some sense the
guarantee of this interpretation. Did not the age as a whole look to
Montesquieu for arguments to weaken
1. Prélot, op. cit., pp. 123, 129ff.
page 88
I hope to be able to argue that this is almost
completely a historical illusion, and give reasons for it. In this vein, I
should first like to make explicit all I owe the articles of the jurist
Charles Eisenmann.[2] I should
like to repeat the essential points of these articles here before extending
their conclusions.
Eisenmann's thesis is that Montesquieu's
theory, and in particular the famous chapter on the Constitution of England,
has produced a real myth: the myth of the separation of powers.
A whole school of jurists arose, particularly at the end of the nineteenth and
the beginning of the twentieth century, which took advantage of a number of
isolated formulations of Montesquieu's in order to impose on him a purely
imaginary theoretical model. According to this model, Montesquieu's
political ideal coincides with a regime in which this separation of
powers is rigorously guaranteed. There should be three powers: the
executive (the king, his ministers), the legislature (the lower and upper
chambers) and the judiciary (the body of magistrates). Each power corresponds
precisely to its own sphere, i.e. its own function, without any interference.
Each power in each sphere is provided for by an organ rigorously distinct from
the other organs. Not only can there be no encroachment of the executive onto
the legislature or judiciary, or any reciprocal encroachment of the same kind;
but also none of the parts constituting an organ can belong to any other
organ. For example, not only can the executive not inter-
2. See in particular: Eisenmann,
'L'Esprit des Lois et la separation des pouvoirs', Mélanges Carré de
Malberg, Paris 1933, pp. 163-92; 'La pensée constitutionnelle de
Montesquieu,' Recueil Sirey, op. cit., pp. 133-60.
page 89
Eisenmann's first audacity was to show that this famous
theory quite simply does not exist in Montesquieu. A careful reading of
his texts shows, in fact:
1. That the executive encroaches
on the legislature, since the king has the power of veto.[3]
2. That the legislature can to a certain
extent exercize a right of inspection over the executive, since it checks on
the application of the laws it has voted, and, without there being any
question of 'ministerial responsibility' to parliament, can ask for accounts
from the ministers.[4]
3. That the
legislature encroaches seriously on the judiciary, since, in three special
circumstances, it sets itself up as a tribunal: in all matters, the nobles,
whose dignity must be preserved from any contact with the prejudices of
popular magistrates, will be judged by their peers in the upper chamber;[5] in questions of amnesty;[6] and in
questions of political trials, which are brought before the tribunal of the
upper chamber on the impeachment of the lower chamber.[7]
3. 'The executive power has no other
part in the legislative than the power of rejecting' (SL, XI, 6).
4. The legislative power 'has a right, and ought to have the
means, of examining in what manner its laws have been executed'; the ministers
must give an 'account of their administration' (SL, XI, 6).
5. 'The great are always obnoxious to popular envy: and, were they to be
judged by the people, they might be in danger from their judges, and would
moreover be deprived of the privilege, which the meanest subject is possessed
of in a free State, of being tried by his peers. The nobility, for this
reason, ought not to be cited before the ordinary courts of the judicature,
but before that part of the legislature which is compounded of their own body'
(SL, XI, 6).
6. 'It is possible that the law . . .
might, in some cases, be too severe. . . . That part . . . of the legislative
body, which we have just now observed to be a necessary tribunal on another
occasion, is also a necessary tribunal in this: it belongs to its supreme
authority to moderate the law in favour of the law itself' (SL, XI,
6).
7. 'It might also happen, that a subject, intrusted
with the administration of [cont. onto p. 90. --
DJR] public affairs, may infringe the rights of the people. . . .
In general, the legislative power cannot try causes; and much less can it try
this particular case, where it represents the party aggrieved, which is the
people. It can only, therefore, impeach. But before what court shall it bring
its impeachment? Must it go and demean itself before the ordinary tribunals,
which are its inferiors, and, being composed moreover of men who are chosen
from the people as well as itself, will naturally be swayed by the authority
of so powerful an accuser? No: in order to preserve the dignity of the people
and the security of the subject, the legislative part which represents the
people must bring in its charge before the legislative part which represents
the nobility, who have neither the same interests nor the same passions' (SL,
XI, 6).
page 90
Eisenmann's second audacity was to show that in fact
Montesquieu is not concerned about the separation, but about the
combination, fusion and liaison of these powers.[8] The essential point of this proof consists first of being
clear that the judicial power is not a power in the true sense of the word.
This power is 'in some measure, next to nothing', says Montesquieu.[9] And in fact, for him the judge is only a sight and a voice.
It is a man whose only function is to read and speak the law.[10] This interpretation is disputable, but it must at least be
admitted that in matters where the judge threatened to be more than an
animated code, Montesquieu was careful to enact guarantees which are no longer
legal but political: for example, look who judges the crimes and delictions of
the nobles and political cases! Once taken, these precautions which transfer
any political effects the judiciary may have to more strictly political organs
ensure that the rest of the judiciary really is 'next to nothing'. We then
confront two powers: the executive and the legislature. Two
pouvoirs but three puissances, to use Montesquieu's own
words.[11] These three
8. 'The legislative body being
composed of two parts, they check one another. . . . They are both restrained
by the executive power, as the executive is by the legislative' (SL, XI, 6).
'The three powers are . . . distributed and founded' (SL, XI, 7).
9. 'Of the three powers above-mentioned, the judiciary is, in some
sense, next to nothing' (SL, XI, 6).
10. 'The national
judges are no more than the mouth that pronounces the words of the law, mere
passive beings, incapable of moderating either its force or rigour' (SL, XI,
6).
11. Cf. the passage on Venice in SL, XI, 6: 'Thus at
Venice, the legislative power (pouvoir) is in the council, the
executive in the pregadi, and the judiciary in the quarantia.
But the mischief is, that these different tribunals are composed of magis-
[cont. onto p. 91. -- DJR] trates all
belonging to the same body; which constitutes almost one and the same power
(puissance).'
page 91
This casts light on the famous problem of
moderate government. True moderation is neither the strict separation
of powers (pouvoirs) nor a juridical concern and respect for
legality. At Venice, for example, there are indeed three powers and three
distinct organs: but the 'mischief' is that these three organs 'are composed
of magistrates all belonging to the same body; which constitutes almost one
and the same puissance ' (SL, XI, 6). Thus it is all very well to say
that despotism is the regime in which a single person governs alone, without
rules or laws, or that the despot appears in every prince or minister who goes
beyond the law and abuses his power. At bottom, this is not what is at issue,
for we are familiar with regimes in which despotism reigns even under the
appearance of laws, and, says, Montesquieu, that is the worst of
tyrannies.[13] Moderation is something quite
different: it is not mere respect for legality, it is the balance of powers,
i.e. the division of the pouvoirs among the puissances, and the
limitation or moderation of the pretensions of one puissance by the
pouvoir of the others. The famous separation of powers is thus
no more than the calculated division of pouvoir between determinate
puissances: the king, the nobility and the 'people'.
I think that my remarks on despotism make it possible to go beyond these
pertinent conclusions. For this illumination itself poses a question: to
whose advantage is the division made? If we
12. Eisenmann, 'La penseée
constitutionnelle de Montesquieu,' op. cit., pp. 154ff.
13. 'No tyranny can have a severer effect than that which is exercised
under the appearance of laws, and with the plausible colours of justice'
(Considerations . . . , Ch. XIV).
page 92
We can illuminate the meaning of this division and its
ulterior motives, given of course that Montesquieu is concerned with the
combination of puissances and not with the separation of powers,
by examining all the possible encroachments of one power on another and an
the possible combinations of one power with another, in order to find
which encroachments and combinations are absolutely excluded. I have found
two, which are of prime importance.
The first excluded
combination is for the legislature to usurp the powers of the executive:
which would immediately consummate the collapse of monarchy into popular
despotism.[14] But the inverse is not the case.
Montesquieu accepts that monarchy may survive and even retain its
moderation, if the king controls not only the executive, but also the
legislative power.[15] But let the people become the
prince and all will be lost.
The second excluded
combination is more famous, but to my mind it has been treated as too
obvious and for that reason not fully examined. It concerns the investment of
the judiciary in the executive, the king. Montesquieu is strict: this
arrangement is enough to bring about a collapse of monarchy into
despotism. If the king himself judged, 'the constitution by such means
would be
14. 'Should the legislative power
(puissance) usurp a share of the executive, the latter would be . . .
undone' (SL, XI, 6).
'If there were no monarch, and the
executive power (puissance) should be committed to a certain number of
persons, selected from the legislative body, there would be an end of liberty'
(ibid.).
15. 'In modern monarchies, the prince is
invested with the executive and legislative powers (puissances), or, at
least, with a part of the legislative, but does not act in a judiciary
capacity' (SL, XI, 11).
'Most kingdoms in Europe enjoy a
moderate government, because the prince, who is invested with the two first
powers (pouvoirs), leaves the third to his subjects' (SL, XI, 6).
page 93
If we now return to the famous
balance of the puissances, we can, I think, propose an answer to the
question: to whose advantage does the division work? If we stop considering
the forces invoked in Montesquieu's combination and look at the really
existing forces of his day, we have to state that the nobility gains two
considerable advantages from his project: as a class, it becomes directly a
political force recognized in the upper chamber; also, by the clause which
excludes royal power from the exercise of judgement and also by that other
clause which reserves this power to the upper chamber, where the nobility is
concerned, it becomes a class whose members' prospects, social position,
privileges and distinctions are guaranteed against the undertakings of
either the king or the people. As a result, in their lives, their families
and their wealth, the nobility are safe both from the king and from the
people. How better to guarantee the conditions for the permanent survival of a
decadent class, whose ancient prerogatives are being torn from it and disputed
by history?
The counterpart to these assurances is another
assurance, but this time one for the king's benefit. The assurance that
the monarch will be protected by the social and political rampart of the
nobility against popular revolutions. The assurance that he will not find
himself in the situation of the despot, abandoned and alone face to face with
his people and his passions. If he is prepared to learn
page 94
Not only will this nobility serve as a
counter-weight to the 'people', since, with a representation out of proportion
to the numbers and interests of the masses, it will balance the representation
of the people in the legislature, but also by its existence, its privileges,
its lustre and its luxury, even by its generosity, this nobility will teach
the people in concrete daily life that greatness is respect-worthy, that there
is a structure to the State, that it is far from the passion for power, that
in the moderate space of a monarchy the distance of social conditions and the
duration of political action are long-winded: in short, the wherewithal to
discourage for ever any idea of subversion.
I see nothing in
any of this which distances it from the basic aspirations of the theoretician
of monarchy and despotism. The 'regime of the future'[16] is,
indeed, in many ways different from the monarchies of the Europe of the time.
The latter still have the feel of their origins and their rudimentary
constitutions are still primitive: they are poorly armed to fight the danger
of despotism which threatens them and to resolve the complex problems of the
modern world. But they can be said to contain in them, in their political and
social structure, everything needed to satisfy this exigency. The
representation of the people itself which seems to contradict all his
past positions, and has led some people to believe that Montesquieu was a
republican at heart and on the side of the third estate, is in the spirit of
monarchy. Read Chapter 8 of Book XI, whose sixth chapter was precisely the one
with the discussion of the English Constitution, and it will be clear that the
principle pf the representatives of a nation in a monarchy, a principle
entirely foreign to antiquity, belongs to the very origins of Gothic
government, 'the best species of constitution that could possibly be imagined
by man' (SL, XI, 8). That is why Montesquieu can say of the government which
seems to look forward to the future, that the English found it 'in the woods'
of their past (SL, XI, 6).
16. Prélot, op. cit., p. I23.
page 95
This political choice may be masked
for two reasons. First, Montesquieu's mode of reflection, the juridical purity
and abstraction of his political analyses. I think that my more careful
examination has shown that Montesquieu's juridicalism itself in its own way
expresses his parti pris. But this choice may also be concealed by
history: by the history that separates us from Montesquieu; and the history
that Montesquieu himself lived. To understand this choice properly, it must be
grasped in itself and in the history Montesquieu lived: in the history which
he thought he was living, whereas it too was also acting on him behind his
back.
page 96
Chapter Six
Montesquieu's
Parti Pris
We have now certainly made some progress. From the
separation of powers to the equilibrium of the puissances dividing up
the power. And from this apparent equilibrium to the scheme to re-establish
and consecrate one among these puissances: the nobility. But we are
still within Montesquieu.
In this examination we have
managed to move from the fore-stage to backstage, from our author's apparent
reasons to his real reasons. But in doing so we have adopted his reasons and
accepted the division of roles he proposed for us without adapting them in any
way. Take Eisenmann, for example: he has a notion that the problem is not
juridical, but political and social. But when it comes to listing the social
forces present he rediscovers Montesquieu's own three forces: king, nobility,
bourgeoisie, and goes no further. Moreover, this tripartition is not
Montesquieu's alone, it is the tripartition of the whole epoch, of Voltaire,
Helvétius, Diderot and Condorcet, and of a long tradition lasting well into
the nineteenth century and perhaps still not quite dead even today. This
conviction is so manifest, this obviousness so general, that none of the
parties in the eighteenth century, even up to the beginning of the Revolution,
ever thought of revoking it. Should we therefore accept it absolutely? Can we
go so straightforwardly into the categories of Montesquieu and his age and
decide without argument that he very accurately distinguished the
puissances, not in their combination, but in their definition, and
separated them according to their 'natural articulations'?
What I mean is that we should pose ourselves a very simple question, but one
which may turn everything upside down: do
page 97
Now we have to admit that one idea dominated
all the political literature of the eighteenth century: the idea that absolute
monarchy was set up against the nobility, and that the king relied on
the commoners to balance the power of his feudal opponents and reduce
them to his mercy. The great dispute between the Romanists and the
Germanists about the origins of feudalism and absolute monarchy
unfolded against the background of this general conviction. Its echo can be
found in many passages in the Spirit of Laws ;[1]
and in its last three Books, which are hardly ever read but are devoted
entirely to it, and should be read to see on which side Montesquieu really
ranged himself. On the one hand the Germanists (Saint-Simon,
Boulainvilliers and Montesquieu, the last better informed and more nuanced,
but just as firm) nostalgically evoke the age of primitive monarchy: a
king elected by the nobles and a peer among his peers, as it was originally in
the 'forests' of Germany, counterposing it to monarchy become
1. SL, VI, 18; X, 3; XI, 7 & 9;
XIV, 14; XVII, 5; XVIII, 22; etc.
page 98
We should not
conceal from ourselves the fact that contemporaries of the time lived
their history while thinking it, and that their thought, still groping
for scientific criteria, lacked that necessary distance which enables thought
to become the critique of life. Thinking a history whose deeper springs
escaped them, it was easy for them to limit their thought to the immediate
categories of their historical life, most often taking political
intentions for reality itself, and superficial conflicts for the basis of
things. History and the perceived world are not so very different. Everyone
can immediately and obviously 'see' in history 'forms', 'structures', groups
of men, tendencies and conflicts. It is to this obviousness that Montesquieu
appeals in his famous statement: 'There are three species of government; . . .
in order to discover their nature, it is sufficient to recollect the idea of
them had by the least educated of men' (SL, II, 1). It is this kind of
obviousness which makes visible the omnipotence of a king, nobles slaves to a
court or reduced to a minimal political portion on their lands, omnipotent and
mischievous intendants, upstart commoners. It is enough to have one's eyes
open to see these facts, as it is enough
2. Cf. SL, XXXI, 21: Louis the
Debonnaire, 'As he had no longer any confidence in the nobility, he promoted
mean people, turning the nobles out of their employments at court to make room
for strangers and upstarts.'
page 99
I believe that in order to cast light on
the ideological problems of this period, it is helpful precisely to draw on
the recent achievements of historical research, and to re-examine the received
notions of absolute monarchy, of its 'alliance with the bourgeoisie' and of
the nature of that bourgeoisie itself.
I must content myself
with very brief indications. However, I do want to say that it seems more or
less certain today that the gravest danger confronting the historian of the
seventeenth and even of the eighteenth century, at least of its first half, is
to project onto the 'bourgeoisie' of this period the image of the later
bourgeoisie which made the Revolution, and of the bourgeoisie which emerged
from the Revolution. The true modern bourgeoisie, which transformed the
previous economic and social order from top to bottom, is the
industrial bourgeoisie, with its mass-production economy, concentrating
entirely on profit subsequently reinvested in production. But in its
generality this bourgeoisie was unknown to the eighteenth century; the
bourgeoisie of that period was quite different: in its most advanced elements
it was essentially dependent on the mercantile economy. The fact that
the industrial economy emerged at a given moment from an accumulation in which
the mercantile economy constituted a moment, too often gives rise to the
conclusion that the mercantile economy was foreign to feudal society in
principle. Nothing is more doubtful. Once we know in what sense this
page 100
3. 'The laws' in a monarchy 'ought to
favour all kinds of commerce consistent with the constitution, to the end that
the subjects may, without ruining themselves, be able to satisfy the continual
cravings of the prince and his court' (SL, V, 9).
page 101
Once established, this point obviously overthrows
both the classical schema of the alliance between the absolute monarchy and
the bourgeoisie, and the received notion of absolute monarchy. It is
therefore necessary to ask what is the nature and function of absolute
monarchy, even in the conflicts which at this time oppose it to the
nobility.
Up to the present, two answers have been given to
this question. Both abandon the idea of the king, in the grotesque caricature
of the despot, as the sworn enemy of the feudal lords, replacing it by the
idea that the fundamental conflict of this period did not oppose the king to
the feudal lords, but the feudal lords to the rising 'bourgeoisie', to the
people. But the agreement goes no further.
For the first
interpretation sees in this conflict the origin and opportunity of absolute
monarchy. The confrontation and involuntary equilibrium of two antagonistic
classes, each powerless to triumph over the other, and the peril in which
their struggle put the entire society, gave the king the opportunity to raise
himself above them as the arbiter in their rivalry, and to draw all his
strength from each of their powers opposed or threatened by the power of the
other.[4] It is this exceptional situation which explains
how the king could play one class off against the other and sustain the hopes
of each at the very moment he was playing the other's game. This explains why
all parties in the eighteenth century fought over the king, both those
who wanted to see him turn back towards the origin of his institutions, and
restore the nobility to its rights, and those who expected his
enlightenment would give the victory to bourgeois reason against
privilege and arbitrariness. The fund of ideas common to both right-wing
4. See even in Marx (The German
Ideology, London, 1965, pp. 60-1) a passage on Montesquieu which still (in
1845) inclines towards this interpretation: 'For instance in an age and in a
country where royal power, aristocracy and bourgeoisie are contending for
mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the
separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an
"eternal law".'
page 102
Much more illuminating is the
second answer, which has acquired additional authority from Porshnev's recent
studies on the Fronde and Popular Revolts in France in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[5] In this
view, the thesis of the king as arbiter between two equally strong and equally
powerless opposed classes is based both on an anachronism and on a mythical
notion of the nature of the State. The anachronism, as I have shown, is to
lend the bourgeoisie of absolute monarchy the traits of the later
bourgeoisie, in order to think it even in this epoch as a class radically
antagonistic to the feudal class. We know all about this. The mythical
notion of the nature of the State is to imagine that a political power can be
established and exercised outside classes and over them, even in the general
interests of society. This dual critique leads to the following perspective:
absolute monarchy is not the end, nor is its aim the end, of the regime of
feudal exploitation. On the contrary, in the period under consideration it is
its indispensable political apparatus. What changes with the appearance
of absolute monarchy is not the regime of feudal exploitation, it is the
form of its political domination. The primitive monarchy celebrated by the
Germanists, the personal political privileges of feudal lords enjoying
an independence that made them the king's peers, has merely given way
to a centralized, dominant and absolute monarchy. This political
transformation was a response to changes in the conditions of economic
activity which occurred inside the feudal regime itself, and in particular to
the development of the mercantile economy, the first appearance of a national
market, etc. In the period under consideration, these modifications do not
make any inroads into feudal exploitation
5. See bibliography.
page 103
It is
hardly surprising that the advent of absolute monarchy, centralization and its
epiphenomena (and even that gilded political internment camp, Versailles) had
the appearances of a usurpation, an injustice and a violence directed at their
class in the eyes of the individual feudal lords, stripped, even by force, of
their ancient personal political prerogatives. But it is impossible not to
reckon this precisely a fixed idea of theirs which masked the real from
them, and a true historical misunderstanding which made them confuse these
ancient personal political prerogatives with the general interests of their
class. For it is only too clear that the king of absolute monarchy
represented the general interests of the feudal class up to and including
against the protestations of the individual feudal lords with their
old-fashioned nostalgia and blindness. And if the king was an arbiter,
he was not the arbiter in the conflict between the nobility and the
bourgeoisie, but in conflicts within the feudal class, which he
resolved in its interest. When he decided, it was, in general, never for
anything but to guarantee the future of that class and of its domination, even
against some of its members.
But here another
puissance intervenes, one which Montesquieu does not introduce into the
division of power, another puissance than those that won the honours of
political theory: the 'puissance ' of the masses of the people who were
precisely the victims of the feudal exploitation which it was the function of
the State apparatus and absolute monarchy to maintain and perpetuate. Porshnev
has partly restated and partly discovered this aspect of the problem, showing
that the fundamental antagonism at that time did not counterpose the
absolute monarchy to the feudal lords, nor the nobility to a bourgeoisie which
was for the most part integrated into the regime of feudal exploitation and
profited by it, but the feudal regime itself to the masses subject to
its exploitation. This fundamental conflict does not stand out like the
secondary conflicts, nor does it have their theoreticians. And it does not
take the
page 104
The privilege of this fourth 'puissance ',
which so concerned the thoughts of the other three, was to be, so to speak,
not represented in the political literature of the period. Not until the
appearance of a poor priest from Champagne, like Meslier, whose Testament
Voltaire carefully purged of all its political sting, and then Rousseau, did
this 'people', this 'common people' (bas-peuple) enter as a
puissance, first into pamphlets, and finally into the concepts of
political theory. Before this it had only an allusive existence theoretically:
as it does in Montesquieu himself, who is so careful strictly to distinguish
the notables from it. As it does for Voltaire and most of the Encyclopedists.
But this fourth puissance, this subject of non-knowledge, passion and
violence, nevertheless haunts the alliances of the other three as a memory
does its loss: by its censorship. The reason why this puissance is
absent from the contracts that concern it is that the reason for these
contracts was to make it absent - or, what is the same thing, to consecrate
its slavery.
It seems to me that If we bear in mind this
real nature of the
page 105
This real analysis
enables us to evade the appearances of retrospective history. And in
particular the illusion of believing Montesquieu to be the herald,
even the disguised herald, of the cause of the bourgeoisie which was to
triumph under the Revolution. It is clear what the famous lower chamber,
already so well framed in the project of an English style constitution,[6]
represents: the share offered to a bourgeoisie which was seeking its place in
the feudal order and, finding it there, hardly dreamt of threatening that
order any further. This perspective also enables us to judge at their real
historical value the liberal 'reforms' for which Montesquieu set himself up as
spokesman: the reform of penal legislation, the critique of war, etc. They
were so little related to the future triumphs of the bourgeoisie that the very
same Montesquieu who reckoned torture inhuman intended that the nobles should
have their own class tribunal in every matter: the upper chamber. What has
made it look as if Montesquieu belonged to the party of the 'bourgeoisie'
seems to me rather to have been conceived by him partly as common-sense
proposals in which he had the public courage of his convictions, partly as a
rather skilful way precisely of bringing the 'bourgeoisie' round to his cause
and swelling the feudal opposition with the contribution of the discontents of
this 'bourgeoisie'. Which presupposes, if not a clear vision, at least a
fairly real sense of the objectives of this bourgeoisie.
But
this analysis also enables us to understand the paradox of
6. 'England is at present the freest
country there is in the world . . . but if the lower house gains the upper
hand, its power would be unlimited and dangerous; instead, at present
unlimited power is invested in the King and parliament, and the executive
power (puissance) in the King, whose power is limited' (Notes on
England, Pléiade edition, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 884). Cf. also the instructive
example of primitive monarchies: 'The people there were the legislative
puissance ' (SL, XI, 11). But 'as soon as the people got the
legislative power into their hands, they might, as they everywhere did, upon
the very least caprice, subvert the regal authority' (ibid.). That is because,
in these monarchies of heroic Greece, there was not yet any 'body of nobles'
(SL, XI, 8). The representation of the people, even by notables, was thus not
balanced within the legislature by the representation of the nobility.
page 106
7. Réflexions Morales, CXLVII.
Cf. also his letters to Montesquieu and Saurin.
page 107
Conclusion
And if I should close by returning to my first
words, let me say of this man who set out alone and truly discovered the new
lands of history, that nevertheless his own notion was always to return home.
The conquered land he salutes on his last page, as I pretended to forget, was
the land of return. Such a long route to come back home. To old-fashioned
ideas after so many new ideas. To the past after so much future. As if this
traveller, having set out for distant lands, and spent many years in the
unknown, believed on returning home that time had stood still.
But he had broken the trail.
page 108
Bibliography
W O R K S B
Y M O N T E S Q U I E U I N F R E N C
H A N D E N G L I S H
1949-51.
De l'esprit des lois, ed. G. Truc,
Classiques Garnier, Paris, 1964.
The Spirit of Laws, translated by
Thomas Nugent, revised by J. V.
Pritchard, Encyclopaedia
Britannica, Chicago, 1952.
Lettres Persanes, ed. Jacques Roger,
Garnier-Flammarion, Paris, 1964.
Persian Letters, translated by C.
J. Betts, Penguin Classics, Harmonds-
worth,
1973.
Considérations sur les Causes de la Grandeur des Romains et de
leur
Décadence, ed. Ehrard, Garnier-Flammarion, Paris,
1969.
Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and
their
Decline, translated with notes and introduction by
David Lowenthal,
Collier-Macmillan, New York and London, 1965.
W O R K S O N M O N T E S Q U I E U
papiers de La Brède (Paris, 1907).
Pierre François
Barrière, Un Grand provincial: Charles-Louis
de
Secondat, baron de la Brède at de Montesquieu
(Bordeaux, 1946).
Ély Carcassonne, Montesquieu et le problème de la
Constitution française
au XVIIIe siècle (Paris,
1927).
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment,
translated by
Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove
(Princeton N. J., 1951).
Sergio Cotta, Montesquieu e la scienza della
società (Turin, 1953).
Joseph Dedieu, Montesquieu et la tradition
politique anglaise en France.
Les sources anglaises de l'Esprit
des Lois (Paris, 1909).
page 109
1943).
Émile Durkheim, Montesquieu and
Rousseau, Forerunners of Sociology,
translated by R.
Manheim (Ann Arbor, 1960).
Charles Eisenmann, 'L'Esprit des Lois et la
separation des pouvoirs,'
Mélanges R. Carré de Malberg
(Paris, 1933), pp. 163-92.
Bernhard Groethuysen, Montesquieu,
Introduction to a selection of
texts in the collection 'Les
classiques de la liberté' (Geneva, 1947).
Paul Hazard, European Thought
in the Eighteenth Century, translated
by J. Lewis May
(Harmondsworth 1965).
Maxime Leroy, Histoire des idées sociales en
France: I. De Montesquieu
à Robespierre (Paris,
1946).
Boris Fedorovich Porshnev, Jean Meslier et les sources populaires
de
ses idées (Address to the Rome Congress, 1955; French
edition by
the Academy of the Sciences of the USSR).
Boris
Fedorovich Porshnev, Les soulèvements populaires en France
de
1623 à 1648, translated by Ranieta, revised Robert
Mandrou,
École Pratique des Hautes Études, Centre de Recherches
Historiques
Oeuvres étrangères, no. 4 (Paris 1963). On
Porshnev, see La Pensée
nos. 32, 40 & 41.
Charles
Seignobos, 'La séparation des pouvoirs,' in Études de
politique
et d'histoire, ed. J. Letaconnoux (Paris,
1934).
Jean Starobinski, Montesquieu par lui-même (Paris,
1953).
Charles Edward Vaughan, Studies in the History of Political
Philosophy
before and after Rousseau, ed. A. G. Little
(Manchester, 1925), vol. I.
Enrico Vidal, Saggio sul Montesquieu,
con particolare riguardo alla sua
concezione dell'uomo, del
diritto e della politica (Milan, 1950).
Collective
Works
Montesquieu.
'Montesquieu: sa pensée politique et
constitutionnelle,' Recueil Sirey
du bi-centenaire de
l'Esprit des Lois (Paris, 1952).
Bulletin de droit
tchécoslovaque, Bicentenary of Montesquieu's Death,
in
French (Prague, 1955).
Actes du Congrès Montesquieu (Bordeaux,
1956).
page 110 [blank]
Rousseau: The Social
Contract
(The
Discrepancies)
page 112 [blank]
Foreword
In interrogating the philosophy we have
inherited, we can start from one simple observation: each great doctrine
itself thinks itself in a specifically philosophical object and in its
theoretical effects. For example: the Platonic Idea, Aristotelean Action, the
Cartesian Cogito, the Kantian Transcendental Subject, etc. These objects have
no theoretical existence outside the domain of philosophy proper. Within
Rousseau's doctrine, the Social Contract is a theoretical object of the
same kind: elaborated and constructed by a philosophical reflection which
draws from it certain definite theoretical effects.[1]
I should like to suggest vis-à-vis Rousseau's
philosophical object, the 'Social Contract', that an examination of the mode
of theoretical functioning of the fundamental philosophical object of a theory
may enlighten us as to the objective function of that philosophical theory: to
be quite precise, as to the problems it eludes in the very 'problems' it
elects.
Indeed, a schematic analysis of the theoretical
functioning of the object Social Contract confronts us with the
following fact: this functioning is only possible because of the 'play' of an
internal theoretical discrepancy (Discrepancy I).[2] The
'solution'
1. The material which has gone into
the following pages is taken from a course of lectures given at the École
Normale Supérieure, Paris, in 1965-6.
2. Translator's
note: Décalage. In Reading Capital and
Lenin and Philosophy
and Other Essays, I translated this word as 'dislocation'. Its literal
meaning is something like the state of being 'staggered' or 'out of step'. I
have shifted from a more mechanical to a more mental metaphor in my
translation here because it makes the sense of the term in this essay emerge
much more clearly, but also because the standard English translations of Lenin
use 'discrepancy' to translate the Russian nesootvetstvie, where Lenin
is clearly using the word for the concept embodied by all Althusser's [cont. onto p. 114. -- DJR] uses of 'décalage
', e.g.: 'We, the Russian proletariat, are in advance of any
Britain or any Germany as regards our political order, as regards the strength
of the workers' political power, but we are behind the most backward
West-European country in organizing a good state capitalism, as regards our
level of culture and the degree of material and productive preparedness for
the "introduction" of socialism. . . . It would be a fatal mistake to declare
that since there is a discrepancy between our economic "forces" and our
political forces, it "follows" that we should not have seized power. Such an
argument can be advanced only by "a man in a muffler" who forgets that there
will always be such a "discrepancy", and that it always exists in the
development of nature as well as in the developments of society' ('"Left-wing" Childishness and
Petty-Bourgeois Mentality', in Collected Works, vol. 27, London
1965, pp. 346-7).
page 114
If this type of analysis proved
well-founded, it would also have the following dual interest:
1. It would make intelligible Rousseau's problematic and the
page 115
2. It would make
intelligible the possibility of a number of 'readings' of Rousseau's Social
Contract, and the subsequent interpretations (Kantian, Hegelian, etc.).
These interpretations will no longer seem to us to be merely arbitrary or
tendentious, but as founded in their possibility in Rousseau's text itself: to
be quite precise, in the 'play' allowed by the 'space' of the theoretical
Discrepancies constitutive of Rousseau's theory. In their turn, the
interpretations may provide us with an index and proof of the necessary
existence of those Discrepancies.
My analysis will
essentially concern Book 1, Chapter VI of the Social Contract.
page 116
Chapter One
Posing the
Problem
A. R E S U L T O F C H A P T E R
S I-V
This
fundamental question is posed in the following terms:
Chapter I only promises the
solution:
In
Chapter II, Rousseau shows that society cannot have the family as its origin.
In Chapter III, that it cannot be founded on the 'right of the strongest'. In
Chapter IV, that it cannot depend on 'conventions' sanctioning the effects of
violence (the submission of the slave to his master, of a nation to its
conqueror).
In Chapter V, Rousseau draws the conclusion:
'That we must
1. Page references are to Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, The Social Contrat and Discourses, translated by G. D. H.
Cole, London, 1966.
page 117
Having set aside
every hypothetical natural foundation for the social body and rejected the
classical recourse to false contracts derived from force, Chapter V thus leads
to two results:
1. It is necessary to elucidate the question
of the primordial contract, prior in principle to every contract: the contract
concluded in 'the act by which a people is a people '.
2. Since the law of the majority can only act on the basis of a first
unanimous convention which adopts and establishes it, the contract by which 'a
people is a people' implies unanimity.
B. P O S I N G T H E P R O B L E M
page 118
The first condition is that 'men' have 'reached' a 'point' which is
nothing but a limit-point, a critical point in their existence: the point
dividing the life of the human race from its death. This fatal critical
'point' for the human race takes us back to the Discourse on
Inequality: it is the fully developed state of war.
This point is critical and fatal because it is the site of an
insurmountable contradiction in that state between on the one hand the
'obstacles' in the way of the life of the human race, and on the other the
'forces' that individuals can oppose to them. What are these 'obstacles
'? What are these 'forces '?
They are purely internal to existing human
relations. They have a name: they are the effects of the generalized state of
war, of universal competition and, even in the breathing-space of a precarious
'peace', the constant threat which everyone feels hanging over his goods, his
liberty and his life. State of war must be understood in the strong sense, as
Hobbes was the first to define it: this state is a constant and universal
relation existing between men, i.e. it is independent of individuals, even if
they
page 119
These 'obstacles' stand 'in the way of' the
'preservation' of men 'in the state of nature'. What the state of war
threatens is what constitutes the ultimate essence of man: his free life, his
life as such, the instinct that 'preserves' him alive, what Rousseau calls
'self-respect' (amour de soi) in the Discourse on Inequality.
I shall take the liberty of calling this state of perpetual
and universal war the state of human alienation. This is a theoretical
'anticipation'. Although Rousseau does speak and make use of the concept of
alienation, he does not do so to designate the effects of that state of war. I
shall give reasons for the liberty I am thus taking.
These forces are constituted by the attributes of the natural man,
having arrived at the state of war. Without this last specification, the
problem of the Social Contract is incomprehensible.
When, in the Social Contract, Rousseau mentions these 'forces' it is
clear that he is not mentioning the 'forces' of man in the 'first state of
nature' in which we find no more than a free animal with zero 'intellectual
and moral faculties'. We are concerned with an animal which the double impact
of the Natural Catastrophes and the Great Discovery (metallurgy) has made a
social being with developed and alienated faculties. The animal of the first
state of nature has as its 'forces': its body (life) + its liberty. The man of
the generalized state of war has quite different forces. He still has his body
(though his physical powers have declined), but he has intellectual forces and
also 'goods ', too. 'Each member of the community gives himself to it,
at the moment of its foundation, just as he is, with all the forces at his
command, including
page 120
The 'forces' of
the individual in the state of war can thus be resumed as follows: physical
forces (life) + intellectual and 'moral' forces + goods + liberty. Liberty
still features alongside 'force': 'The force and liberty of each man are the
chief instruments of his self-preservation' (SC I, VI, p. 12).
I have not made this comparison for the fun of noting distinctions, but
because their registration is the index of a development -- the
alienation of man even within the state of nature, as a result of the
historical process which culminates in the state of war.
We
can grasp this transformation in the presence of 'goods' among the 'forces' of
the individual, and in the appearance of a new category of human existence:
the category of interest. 'If the opposition of particular interests
made the establishments of societies necessary . . . ' (SC II, I, p. 20). It
is enough to put this definition of the condition of the Contract (the
opposition of particular interests) alongside the effects of the generalized
state of war to see that while the process of the socialization of men
transformed their faculties, it simultaneously transformed their
'self-respect' into particular interest. When particular interest is reflected
by the individual, it takes the abstract (and subjective) form of egoism
(amour propre), the alienation of self-respect (amour de soi).
But the objective content of particular interest links it directly with the
nature of the state of war. The category of particular interest immediately
betrays its universal basis. One particular interest can only exist as a
function of the other particular interests in rivalry, in universal
competition. This is revealed by the sentence of Rousseau's I have just
quoted: 'The opposition of particular interests . . . ' means that particular
interest is constituted by the universal opposition which is the essence of
the state of war. There are not first individuals each with his own particular
interest: opposition intervening subsequently as an accident. The opposition
is primary: it is the opposition that constitutes the individual as a
particular individual
page 121
It is important to mark the category of particular
interest as specific to the state of social ties existing in the state of war
Literally speaking, the human animal of the first state of nature has no
particular interest because nothing can oppose him to other men -- the
condition of all opposition, i.e. of necessary ties, being then still absent.
Only developed-alienated man acquires little by little, as a result of the
ties in which he is engaged by the dialectic of involuntary socialization, the
advantage (if such it can be called) of the category of particular interest,
the form taken by egoism in nascent society. Particular interest only ever
truly becomes particular interest in its radicality in the state of war.
Particular interest features in so many words in the conditions of the
establishment of society: 'If the opposition of particular interests made the
establishment of societies necessary, the agreement of these very interests
made it possible' (SC II, I, p. 20). Let us bear this text in mind.
Individuals are trapped in a very special way. These 'obstacles' are not
external ones. To specify: there is a close bond between the 'forces' of the
individuals and these obstacles, which justifies my speaking of the state of
war as a universal state of alienation.
page 122
Such is the ultimate argument for this
critical 'point' at which the 'primitive condition' can 'subsist no longer':
'the human race would perish unless it changed its manner of existence.'
page 123
What is interesting about this text is that it
defines in a rigorous manner the theoretical field of the problem and suggests
the impossibility of any solution which introduces an element external
to that field itself. There is thus no transcendental solution, no recourse to
a third party, be it God or Chance. The solution cannot be found outside the
existing givens, a ruthless enumeration of which has just been established.
The only solution possible inside the theoretical field constituted by men and
the alienated relations whose authors and victims they are is for them to
change their 'manner of existence '. Rousseau 'takes men as they are'
(SC I, Preface, p. 3). He takes their forces as they are. Men only have these
forces at their disposal. No solution in the world can change either the
nature of these forces or the nature of the 'obstacles' they collide with. The
only way out is to play on the 'manner of existence' of men, or the
arrangement of these forces. '. . . As men cannot engender new forces, but
only unite and direct existing ones, they have no other means of
preserving themselves than the formation, by aggregation, of a sum of forces
great enough to overcome the resistance. These they have to bring into play by
means of a single motive power, and cause to act in concert' (SC I, VI, pp.
11-12).
The whole of the Social Contract is defined
by the absolute limits of the theoretical field in which the problem is posed.
It is a question of creating a force capable of surmounting the 'obstacles'
which block the forces of each individual, of creating this force by
inaugurating new relations between the existing forces (union instead of
opposition): 'changing the manner of existence' of men. This clearly means
posing the problem of the contract as a function of the individuals and of
their forces.
page 124
And here is the problem definitively posed:
The problem is
to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole
common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while
uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as
before (SC I, VI, p. 12).
Let us not lose sight of the fact that
forces (including goods) + liberty = particular interest. Re-read the
second sentence of the Social Contract: 'In this inquiry I shall
endeavour always to unite what right sanctions with what is prescribed by
interest, in order that justice and utility may in no case be divided' (p. 3).
Chapter Two
The Solution to the
Problem:
Discrepancy
I
Apparently Rousseau is here returning to the traditional solution of the
school of Natural Law, which thinks the origin of civil society and of the
State in the juridical concept of the contract.
What
does a contract consist of? What are its constitutive elements? Reduced to a
schematic expression, a contract is a convention agreed between two Recipient
Parties (which I shall call Recipient Party number one or RP1, and Recipient Party number two or RP2)
in order to proceed to an exchange: give and take. For example, in the classic
contract of submission between the People and the Prince, the RP1 is the People, the RP2 the Prince. The
exchange involves the following 'terms': the People promises obedience to the
Prince; the Prince promises to guarantee the good of the People (above all by
his respect for the Fundamental Laws). With the sole exception of Hobbes,
whose contract has a quite different and quite unprecedented structure, the
jurisconsults and philosophers of Natural Law generally respected the
juridical structure of the contract (give and take exchange between two RPs)
in the use made of the concept of the contract to 'resolve' the problem of the
'origin' of civil and political society.
Rousseau, too,
adopts the juridical concept, but immediately warns that 'the clauses of this
contract are so determined by the nature of the act that the slightest
modification would make them vain and ineffective' (SC I, VI, p. 12). In
Émile he is more explicit:
page 126
The paradox of this peculiar contract lies completely in its
central clause.
Its 'clauses, properly understood, may be
reduced to one -- the total alienation of each associate, together with
all his rights, to the whole community' (SC I, VI, p. 12).
The mystery of the Social Contract lies in these few words, to be precise, in
the concept of total alienation. This time it is Rousseau himself who speaks
of alienation.
What is alienation? Rousseau has already
defined the term in Book I Chapter IV (p. 7):
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Émile, translated by B. Foxley, London, 1957, p. 425.
page 127
Liberty: it
is out, the great word that takes us past the fictions accepted up to this
point for the purposes of refuting Grotius. Sell whatever you like (give and
take), you cannot sell your liberty.
And yet: it is this total
alienation itself that constitutes the single clause of the Social Contract:
'the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the
whole community.'
There can be no ambiguity: liberty
is certainly included in 'all the rights' of each associate.
Let us stop a moment at this paradox. I can say: the total alienation of the
Social Contract is the solution to the problem posed by the state of universal
alienation that defines the state of war, culminating in the crisis resolved
by the Social Contract. Total alienation is the solution to the state of
total alienation.
Obviously, as I have already noted,
Rousseau does not use the term alienation to designate the mechanism and
effects of the state of war. Nevertheless I have shown that I am justified in
using this anachronistic term to designate what Rousseau thinks of the nature
of the state of war. The advantage of this substitution of terms is to make
this conversion of sense, this change in the
page 128
Before the Contract, we are in the
'element' (in the Hegelian sense) of alienation without any external
recourse.'This alienation is the work of the very men who suffer it. The
slavery of the state of war is a real alienation of man, forced to give his
liberty for nothing in exchange for a pure illusion, that of believing himself
to be free. We are certainly in the element of alienation: but it is
unconscious and involuntary.
There is no solution to this
total alienation except total alienation itself, but conscious and voluntary
total alienation.
If this is indeed the case, we return in
the solution itself to what I called the absolute limits to any possible
solution. The solution cannot come from outside, and even within the world of
alienation it cannot come from outside the single law governing that world.
The solution is only possible on condition of 'playing' on the 'manner of
existence' of this implacable law. It can only consist of returning in its
origin to that law itself, total alienation, while 'changing its manner of
existence', its modality. This is what Rousseau very consciously states
elsewhere when he says that the remedy of the evil must be sought in its very
excess. In a word, a forced total alienation must be turned into a free
total alienation.
But the scandalous thing is as follows:
how can a total alienation really be free, since we know from
Chapter IV that this association of terms (alienation, liberty) is
incompatible, an absolute contradiction? Hardly has it been glimpsed than the
solution retreats into impossibility. The solution itself needs a solution.
This solution of the solution is contained in the
Discrepancy between the Recipient Parties to the contract (Discrepancy I).
On the one hand they are
the individuals taken one by one, and
page 129
The contract is an act of exchange between the RP1 and
the RP2. We know what the RP1 gives
in this act of exchange: everything (total alienation). But we do not
yet know what is given by the RP2.
If we ask, what will the RP2 give? we run up
against a 'minor' difficulty which we have ignored up till now: who is the
RP 2? The 'community'. But what is the community? The
union, the association of the individuals and their 'forces'. Is that not
clear and adequate? And yet the whole mystery of the mechanism of the contract
lies in the unique nature of this RP2.
In a word, here is the difficulty: in every contract the two Recipient Parties
exist prior to and externally to the act of the contract. In Rousseau's Social
Contract, only the RP1 conforms to these conditions. The
RP2 on the contrary, escapes them. It does not exist
before the contract for a very good reason: it is itself the product of
the contract. Hence the paradox of the Social Contract is to bring together
two RPs, one of which exists both prior to and externally to the contract,
while the other does not, since it is the product of the contract itself, or
better: its object, its end. It is in this difference in theoretical status
between the two Recipient Parties to the contract that we inscribe:
Discrepancy I.
What is the community? Of whom is it
composed? Of the same individuals who appear as individuals in the
RP1, i.e. at the other pole of the exchange. In the
RP2 they appear, too, but no longer as individuals, but
all in their 'corporate capacity', i.e. in a different form, in a different
'manner of existence', precisely the form of a 'whole', of a 'union', and this
is the community. This difference of 'form' is just a difference of form: the
same
page 130
Rousseau
knows it, but it is symptomatic that he is content to reflect this singularity
of the structure of the Social Contract by masking and denegating it in
the very terms by which he signals it. Here are two examples.
In Émile:
And in the Social Contract itself:
To sum
up:
The 'peculiarity' of the Social Contract is that it is
an exchange agreement concluded between two RPs (like any other contract), but
one in which the second RP does not pre-exist the contract since it is its
product. The 'solution' represented by the contract is thus pre-inscribed in
one of the very conditions of the contract, the RP2,
since this RP2 is not pre-existent to the contract.
page 131
We also observe that Rousseau, aware of this Discrepancy, cannot but
mask it with the very terms he uses when he has to note it: in fact he
negates this Discrepancy, either by designating the RP1
by the name of the RP2 (the people), or the RP2 by the name of the RP1 (the individual).
Rousseau is lucid, but he can do no other. He cannot renounce this
Discrepancy, which is the very solution, in the shape of the procedure which
inscribes this Discrepancy, not in the solution but in the conditions of the
solution. That is why when Rousseau directly encounters this Discrepancy, he
deals with it by denegation: by calling the RP1 by the
name of the RP2 and the RP2 by the
name of the RP1. Denegation is repression.
Thus this Discrepancy can be recognized between the content of the
juridical concept of the contract, which Rousseau imports into his problematic
to give it a cover, and the actual content of his contract. If we take as our
point of reference the contract in its juridical concept, and if we argue that
Rousseau takes it for the concept of the content which he gives us, we can
say: Rousseau's contract does not correspond to its concept. In fact, his
Social Contract is not a contract but an act of constitution of the Second RP
for a possible contract, which is thus no longer the primordial contract. The
Discrepancy between the Social Contract and its concept has the same content
as the Discrepancy I have just defined. If the terms of the juridical contract
in its concept are superimposed on the terms of Rousseau's Social Contract, a
pertinent difference, a Discrepancy, emerges. It concerns the RP2.
One first conclusion can be drawn from
these schematic remarks: it concerns the singular type of relation that there
is between the juridical concept of the contract and the concept of the Social
Contract. Why is Rousseau forced to think what he says in a concept which is
not the concept of what he says? Why this recourse? Why this necessarily
falsified recourse? What
page 132
Another
conclusion: if we consider this Discrepancy I, it is clear that, for perfectly
objective reasons inscribed in the theoretical space of the 'play' it opens,
it authorizes different 'readings' of Rousseau.
The 'plays'
on words by which Rousseau himself negates the 'play' of the
theoretical space opened by the Discrepancy, authorize, in the strong sense,
the Kantian and Hegelian readings of the Social Contract. The 'play' on words
which calls the RP2 by the name of the RP1 (the individual 'making a contract, so to speak, with
himself') directly authorizes a Kantian reading of the Social Contract (cf.
Cassirer). The 'play' on words which calls the RP1 by the
name of the RP2 ('the people only contracts with itself')
directly authorizes a Hegelian reading. In the first case, the contract is an
anticipation of a theory of Morality, whose voice can be heard in certain
already Kantian formulations (liberty as obedience to the law one has given
oneself, etc.). In the second case, the contract is an anticipation of a
theory of the Nation as a totality, a moment of the Objective Spirit which
page 133
And since I am dealing with the possible 'readings' of
Rousseau -- I do not know if it has already been attempted, but if it has not,
it can certainly be foreseen -- the Discrepancy allows a remarkable
phenomenological (Husserlian) reading of the Contract, as a primordial act
of constitution of the RP2, i.e. of the juridical
community, in other words, as a primordial act of constitution of juridical
ideality on the 'foundation' of the 'passive syntheses' of which the
Discourse on Inequality gives us admirable descriptions, which only
await their commentators.
Of course, the Discrepancy which
thus makes objectively possible Kantian, Hegelian or Husserlian 'readings' of
Rousseau also, thank God, makes possible a 'Rousseauist' reading of Rousseau.
Better: without bringing to light and rigorously defining this Discrepancy, a
'Rousseauist' reading of Rousseau is impossible. For in order to read Rousseau
in Rousseau, three things have to be taken into account: (1) the objective
existence of this Discrepancy in Rousseau; (2) the denegation of this
Discrepancy by Rousseau; and (3) the equally necessary character of the
existence both of this Discrepancy and of its denegation, which do not arise
as accidents in Rousseau's thought but constitute and determine
it. To take into account this Discrepancy and its denegation is to take into
account a theoretical fact, and its theoretical effects, which govern the
whole logic of Rousseau's thought, i.e. both its possibility and its
impossibilities, which are part of one and the same logic: that of a
Discrepancy constitutive even in its denegation. If the Social Contract is not
a contract but the (fictional) act of constitution of the Second Recipient
Party (i.e. the coup de force of the 'solution'), in the same way it
can be said that the Discrepancy is not what Rousseau says about it (its
page 134
From here on it is clear
that this logic can only be a double one: the logical chain of the
problems thought being constantly inhabited by a second chain, the logical
chain of the Discrepancies which follow them like their shadows, i.e. precede
them as their arbitrary 'truth'.
Chapter Three
The Contract and
Alienation
We can now return to total alienation. It was the solution, but an
impossible because unthinkable one. Discrepancy I has made it possible,
because thinkable.
If total alienation is possible, despite
the contradiction of its concept, it is because of the nature of the Second
Recipient Party: which features the same men as the RP1.
It is possible because it is purely internal to the liberty of the
individuals: it is possible because men give themselves totally, but to
themselves.
To think Rousseau's novelty we must return to
the classical contracts. In them, the two Recipient Parties are prior to the
contract and different from one another: e.g. the People and the Prince. It
follows that it is always a matter of a juridical contract of exchange: give
and take. Not only is the contract an exchange, but if we try to apply the
category of alienation to it, it turns out to be a partial alienation.
The individual only cedes a part of his rights in exchange for his security
(there is one exception: Hobbes, whom I shall discuss later). In Rousseau what
is striking is the fact that the individual has to give everything, to give
himself entirely, without any reserve, in order to receive something 'in
exchange', even when exchange has no more meaning. Or rather: in order that
the possibility of an exchange acquire a meaning, it is necessary that there
be this initial total gift, which can be the object of no exchange. Hence
Rousseau poses as the a priori condition of any possible exchange
this total alienation which no exchange will compensate. The constitution
of the Second Recipient Party, i.e. the community, is thus not an exchange but
the constitution of the a priori condition of possibility of any (real
or empirical) exchange. I shall return to this conclusion in a moment.
page 136
Rousseau's theoretical greatness is to have taken up the
most frightening aspects of Hobbes: the state of war as a universal and
perpetual state, the rejection of any transcendental solution and the
'contract' of total alienation, generator of absolute power as the essence of
any power. But Rousseau's defence against Hobbes is to transform total
alienation in externality into total alienation in internality: the Third
Recipient Party then becomes the Second, the Prince becomes the Sovereign,
which is the community itself, to which free individuals totally alienate
themselves without losing their liberty, since the Sovereign is simply the
community of these same individuals. Finally, the rejection of any
transcendence took, in Hobbes, the form of the factual transcen-
page 137
Rousseau's advantage here is to be more
'Hobbesian' than Hobbes himself, and to retain the theoretical gains of
Hobbes's thought. Rousseau's social body does indeed have all the categories
of Hobbes's Prince. The community has all the attributes of a natural
individual, but transposed into the 'element' of union: it is not a question
here of a real individual (some man or some assembly which is the Prince) but
of a moral totality, of the moral person constituted by the alienation of all
the individuals. That power is in essence absolute, that it is inalienable,
that it is indivisible, that it cannot 'err', all these scandalous theses of
Hobbes's are repeated word for word by Rousseau, but converted to the new
meaning conferred on them by the internality of alienation.
Let us consider only one of these theses: the essentially
absolute character of any sovereign power (a 'philosopheme' which
contains, in its order, the very principle of the Kantian conception of a
priori conditions of possibility). The tiny but decisive difference
separating Rousseau from Hobbes stares us in the face when Rousseau, who
thinks in Hobbes, simultaneously thinks what he needs to protect himself from
Hobbes's 'difficulties', in particular from the 'crux' of the 'guarantees' of
the contract of alienation, which, in classical philosophy, inevitably takes
the form of the problem of the Third Man. Indeed, if a conflict arises
who will arbitrate between the People and the Prince? Hobbes's solution is to
suppress the problem, but by suppressing the right to a guarantee. Hence
obvious 'factual' difficulties. Rousseau confronts the problem without
faltering. He too will suppress it, but without suppressing the right to a
guarantee: by realizing it, which makes it superfluous. Hobbes certainly
'felt' that in order to suppress this problem, the contract would have to be
no ordinary contract, the violation of which always requires the intervention
of a third man, an arbiter -- hence his contract of total alienation, but in
externality
page 138
To suppose that a third man is required to arbitrate in a
conflict between two RPs to a contract is in fact to suppose that a third man
outside the civil society of the contractors is required for that society to
exist, and it is thus to suppose that civil society does not exist, since it
leaves outside itself the very condition of its own existence: that third man.
Hence it is to suppose that without saying so one is still in the element
prior to the Social Contract, that principle is being settled by fact, the
a priori conditions of all exchange by the empirical conditions of
exchange, etc. The problem of the third man then becomes the index and proof
that the political problem has been badly posed: the radical reduction which
lays bare the a priori constitutive essence of the juridico-political
has not been attained. In other words, to invoke the necessity for the third
man is to admit that one is still in the element of violence and that one is
still thinking the problems of civil society in the categories of the state of
nature and the state of war.
In Rousseau's theory of total
alienation this 'difficulty' disappears: there is no longer any need for an
arbiter, i.e. for a third man, because, if I dare use the expression, there
is no Second Man, because the Second Recipient Party is identical with the
First, because for him individuals only ever contract with themselves, because
the total alienation is for him purely internal. Between the individuals
(subjects) and the Sovereign, there is no need for an arbiter, since the
Sovereign is nothing but the union of the individuals themselves, existing as
members of the Sovereign, in the 'form' of union.
Of what
use is this new philosophical object, the Social Contract? For the
'resolution' of all these 'problems'. But the solution to these problems is
never anything but the effectivity of Discrepancy I, which permits a
non-contract to function as a con-
page 139
page 140
Chapter Four
Total
Alienation
and Exchange:
I was perhaps a little hasty in saying that the Social Contract was
not a 'true' contract because it contained no exchange: total alienation
excluding all possible exchange as a function precisely of its total
character. And yet the Social Contract also functions as a juridical contract
between two Recipient Parties: give and take. The individual gives everything
-- and receives nothing in exchange. The paradox of total alienation which
appeared to us as this non-exchange, the condition of possibility of all
exchange, does nevertheless produce an exchange. This is where I shall
inscribe Discrepancy II.
Just as Rousseau noted
Discrepancy I in remarking that the Social Contract was a contract of a
'private and peculiar' (particulier) type, he connotes Discrepancy II
in the same way by saying that total alienation produces a 'peculiar'
(singulier) effect:
page 141
Another text is even more
categorical:
We are really in the
accountability of an exchange. Listen to Rousseau in SC I, VIII, p. 16. It is
an accountable balance:
Thus we have both ends of the chain. On the one hand total
alienation, on the other a real advantage. How can a total alienation be
transmuted into an advantageous exchange? How can a total alienation, which
could not receive anything in exchange that would be its equivalent, which
appeared to us as the condition of possibility of all exchange, immediately
and in itself take the form of an exchange, and even an advantageous one? What
mechanism produces this astonishing effect?
This mechanism
is a mechanism for the self-regulation, self-
page 142
'The clauses of this contract are so
determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would make
them vain and ineffective' (SC I, VI, p. 12). What clauses? One formal clause:
equality in total alienation. But also something which is not a clause, but a
cause: interest.
Equality. Each gives
all he is and has, whatever he has. All men are equal in alienation,
since it is total for each of them. This is a formal clause, for men have
unequal possessions, and we know that the exchange is advantageous to the one
who possesses the most, for it is he who risks the greatest loss in the state
of war.
Interest. This is what opens up the 'play' in
the formal clause of equality, which allows interest to come into
'play'. 'The conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no one has
any interest in making them burdensome to others.' Why? Whoever wanted to make
them 'burdensome to others' would make them burdensome to himself,
automatically, as a function of the formal equality implied by total
alienation. Hence it is certainly equality which plays the part of limitatory
regulator even within total alienation. But this formal equality would be a
dead letter were it not made active at each moment by the interest of each
individual. The reciprocity of the contract lies in the formal equality
produced by the total alienation. But this reciprocity would be empty and vain
if the individual interest caught up in it did not really bring it into
'play'.
page 143
This is one of the points in
Rousseau's theory which makes any Kantian 'reading' in terms of a morality
thoroughly impossible. Strictly speaking, 'total alienation' might be taken
for an expression designating the transcendence of the order of morality with
respect to any interest. But total alienation produces its effects precisely
only because it presupposes within it the determinant effectivity of interest.
For Rousseau, interest (which is the form of self-respect in the system of
social relations, state of war or contractual society) can never be 'put into
parentheses' or 'transcended', except by itself. Without the effectivity of
interest, there would be no self-regulation, no self-limitation of total
alienation, nor its conversion into 'advantageous exchange'. It is because the
interest of each individual is active in total alienation that each individual
receives back what he gives and more besides. He will want for others what he
wants for himself, as a function of the equality imposed by the clause of
total alienation. But he would not want anything for others if he did not
first want it for himself. The general interest is not the product of a moral
conversion that tears the individual away from his interest: it is merely the
individual interest forced into the generality of equality, limited by it but
simultaneously limiting in its effects the total alienation which is the basis
for this general equality.
page 144
We can now specify the nature of
Discrepancy II. Discrepancy I lay in the difference in theoretical
status of the two Recipient Parties, and in the fact that the Social Contract
was not a contract of exchange, but the act of constitution of the Second
Recipient Party.
What was 'chased away' at the first moment
as a result of Discrepancy I reappears at the second moment in the form of
Discrepancy II: the false contract functions as a true contract nonetheless,
for it produces an exchange, and even more, an advantageous exchange.
What had been 'chased away' at the first moment has now been 'caught up with'
and thought at the second moment. But at the cost of Discrepancy II:
between total alienation and the exchange it produces, between total
alienation and the interest which ensures its self-limitation,
self-regulation, by realizing this total alienation as an exchange.
But then we can go further: in the mechanism which inscribes the
effectivity of the interest of each individual in the necessity of the
universal (and hence egalitarian) form of total alienation, there is a
Discrepancy of theoretical status, unthought, unassumed. In other words, it is
not the same interest that produces the total alienation on the one hand and
acts in it to realize it as an
page 145
To sum up: Discrepancy I concerns the difference between the
RP1 and the RP2. Discrepancy II
concerns the difference between total alienation and advantageous exchange.
Discrepancy III is about to appear in the 'problem' of the general interest or
general will, or, what amounts to the same thing, in the problem of the law.
page 116
Chapter Five
Particular Interest
and
General Interest,
Particular Will and
General
Will:
All the remarks that follow presuppose a knowledge of the arrangement
and nature of the Institutions that emerge from the Social Contract: the
Sovereign (or legislature), the Government (or executive), the nature of the
acts of the Sovereign (laws) and of the Government (decrees), and the
subordinate relation of the Government to the Sovereign, for which it is no
more than the 'official' or 'clerk'.
This arrangement
reveals two orders of reality:
1. A basic, essential
reality: it is on the side of the Social Contract and the Sovereign, on the
side of the legislative power and law. There is the 'life' and 'soul' of the
social body.
2. A secondary reality, whose whole essence it
is to be delegation and execution, mission and commission: the Government and
its decrees.
As a first approximation, the difference
between these two orders of reality can be expressed in the statement that the
essence of the former is generality and the essence of the latter
particularity. Two categories which, in their distinction, dominate the
whole 'nature', i.e. in fact all the theoretical 'problems', of the Social
Contract. Let us look at this slightly more closely, examining the object
par excellence which realizes the essence of the Sovereign: the law.
What is a law? The act proper to a Sovereign. What is its
page 147
Let
us consider this double generality of the law.
1. The
generality of the law is the generality of its form: 'when the whole
people decrees for the whole people'. The whole people = the entire people
assembled together, decreeing for itself as a 'body', abstracting from
the particular wills. The will of this body is the general will. Hence we can
write: generality of the law = general will.
2. The
generality of the law is the generality of its object: 'when the whole
people decrees for the whole people '. The object of the law is the
'whole people', as a 'body' and considering only 'itself', abstracting from
all particularity (action, individual). We can write: generality of the object
of the law = general interest.
The unity of the law can then
be written: general will = general interest.
This
couple can only be explained by its opposite: particular will = particular
interest. I think we know what particular will and particular interest are
(cf. the Discourse on Inequality). The whole difficulty lies in
understanding the generality of the will and of the interest as the same
generality.
Rousseau's dream:
1. The Social Contract and
Discourses, op. cit., p. 145.
page 148
2. Book I Chapter IV. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), vol. III, p.
295. The last sentence is paraphrased in SC II, I, p. 20.
page 149
In the people as a whole, in fact, voting
has as its object the promulgation of laws, i.e. the declaration of the
general will. How is one to proceed in order to know the general will? The
principle is posed in SC IV, I, p. 86: '. . . the law of public order in
assemblies is not so much to maintain in them the general will as to secure
that the question be always put to it, and the answer always given by it.'
This passage means:
1. that the general
will always exists, since it is, as the title of this chapter states,
'indestructible';
2. but that three conditions have to be
brought into play for it to be able to declare itself.
It
must first be asked a pertinent question, one which essentially relates to it:
concerning not a particular object but a general object.
This question must be asked it in a pertinent form, one which really
interrogates the general will itself and not the particular wills.
Lastly the general will must answer this question, i.e. existent as it
is, it must not be 'mute', as happens when 'in every heart the social bond is
broken'.
Supposing that a general question has been asked
it, and that the general will is not mute, it must be interrogated in the
forms required by its very nature if it is really to answer the question
asked. This is the whole problem of voting rules:
page 150
But above all (and this is the decisive point) there must be
no 'factions' or 'partial associations' in the State, above all no dominant
partial association, for then what is 'declared' will no longer be the general
will but a partial will, if not quite simply a particular will: that of the
dominant group.
page 151
The individual: 'Even in selling his vote for money, he does not
extinguish in himself the general will, but only eludes it. The fault he
commits is that of changing the state of the question, and answering something
different from what he is asked. Instead of saying, by his vote, "It is to the
advantage of the State," he says, "It is of advantage to this or that man or
party that this or that view should prevail"' (SC IV, I, p. 86).
We are now in a position to specify the nature and theoretical function
of Discrepancy III.
I said: I think we know what
particular interest is but we do not know what the general interest is. But
Rousseau says that the general interest is the common ground of the particular
interests. Each particular interest contains in it the general interest, each
particular will the general will. This thesis is reflected in the proposition:
that the general will is indestructible, inalienable and always correct. Which
clearly means: the general interest always exists, the general will always
exists, whether or no it is declared or eluded.
What
separates the general interest from itself, the general will from itself?
Particular interest. We have a total contradiction: particular interest is the
essence of the general interest, but it is also the obstacle to it; now, the
whole secret of this contradiction lies in a 'play ' on words in which
Rousseau calls the particular interest of each individual in isolation
and the particular interest of social groups by the same name.
This second interest, which is a group, class or party interest, not the
interest of each individual, is only called particular with respect to the
general interest. It is a 'play' on words to call it particular in the way the
interest of the isolated individual is called particular. This 'play' on words
is once again the index of a Discrepancy: a difference in theoretical status
of the isolated individual and social groups -- this difference
page 152
But precisely the
theoretical denegation, by the ambiguous use of one and the same concept
('particular interest'), of this 'resistant' fact allows the theory to develop
without resistance, in the commentary on the mirror couple: particular
interest/general interest. However, on closer inspection, we can see the
Discrepancy at work even in this couple.
The general
interest: its existence has as its sole content the declaration of its
existence. Rousseau does not doubt for a moment the existence of a general
interest as the foundation for every society. That the ideology of the general
interest is indispensable to the real societies which served as references for
Rousseau is certainly true. But in the Social Contract, Rousseau never
treats the general interest as an ideology or myth. Its real existence is so
little in doubt for him that he affirms its unalterable and imperturbable
existence, even when the general will which declares it has become mute. Here
the theoretical Discrepancy begins to reveal a quite different Discrepancy:
the Discrepancy which installs this philosophy in the Discrepancy between it
and the real which its birth required from the beginning.
The same is true, in mirror form, for the particular interest. For, the
general interest is no more than the mirror reflection of the particular
interest. The particular interest, too, is the object of an absolute
declaration of existence. The two declarations echo one another since
they concern the same content and fulfill the same function. And they are
discrepant with respect to the same reality: the interests of social groups,
the object of a denegation indispensable for the maintenance in working order
of the mirror categories of particular interest and general interest. Just as
the general interest is a myth, whose nature is visible once it is seen
page 153
The
Discrepancy now appears to us in all its breadth, and in a new form. It no
longer concerns some or other point internal to the theory. It is no longer a
question of the status of the Second Recipient Party (Discrepancy I) or of the
status of the exchange in total alienation (Discrepancy II). This time it is a
question of the very Discrepancy of the theory with respect to the real; for
the first time the theory has encountered social groups in existence. Having
reached this point, I can make one suggestion and one comment.
The suggestion. It would undoubtedly be very interesting to go back
along the path we have just completed, but this time starting from Discrepancy
III as the reason for all the earlier 'problems' and Discrepancies. That would
be to start from the dis-articulation of Rousseau's philosophy, i.e. from the
point at which it is articulated onto the juridical ideology of the society in
which Rousseau lived, constituting itself as an ideological
page 154
The
comment. It is that in the object involved in the denegation of Discrepancy
III (social groups, orders, classes, etc.), Rousseau has finally reached what
he began with as a problem: the result of the Discourse on Inequality.
And this comparison would no doubt give pertinent results for the ideological
concepts underpinning all the theoretical space of the Social Contract:
liberty, self-respect, equality, etc. The famous liberty in particular,
solemnly attributed to the man of the first state of nature, the reserve and
sacred depository for one-never-knows-how-long, i.e. for the Future of
Morality and Religion (and for the General Will, i.e. for the General
Interest) -- it would become clear that the natural man has no need or use for
it: that the whole of the Discourse on Inequality can quite well do
without it. And it would also be seen what the social groups are all about: is
it not the body of the 'rich' who take the initiative in the Social Contract,
whose arguments are there denounced: the very 'deliberate' undertaking of the
greatest imposture in the history of the human race? The true Social Contract,
now a 'legitimate' one, thus finds at the end of the displacement of its
concepts the very same realities whose existence and implacable logic had been
described in the Discourse on Inequality.
One last
comment. If Discrepancy III now concerns the Discrepancy of the theory with
respect to the real, it can no longer be a question of a mere
theoretical denegation. The denegation can only be a
practical one: to denegate the existence of human groups (orders,
classes) is to suppress their existence practically. Here I inscribe
Discrepancy IV.
Chapter Six
Flight Forward in
Ideology or
Regression in the
Economy:
Discrepancy
IV
Recall the conditions for the 'sound' functioning
of the consultation of the general will. The people must be enlightened, and
no intermediary human groups must be imposed between it and the general will.
Rousseau will conduct the two tasks abreast, in one and the same operation,
which takes two forms, the second being an avowal of the failure of the first,
and vice versa. Flight forward in ideology and (or) regression in reality.
Discrepancy IV, which is perfectly 'practical' (but naturally implies
theoretical effects) 'separates' the two forms of this alternating attempt.
Here I can only give a few brief indications.
1. T H E F L I G H T F O R W A R
D I N I D E O L O G Y
page 156
Listing the various sorts of laws, Rousseau distinguishes
political laws, civil laws and criminal laws. But the essential remains
unspoken:
page 157
Flight
forward into ideology, as the sole means of protecting the particular will
from the contagion of those so-called 'particular', i.e. social, 'interests'
of the famous 'intermediary' groups. A flight forward: for it has no end. The
ideological solution, that 'keystone' which holds up to heaven the whole
political arc, needs heaven. Nothing is as fragile as Heaven.
2. R E G R E S S I O N I N ( E C O N O
M I C ) R E A L I T Y
page 158
In the economic reforms he proposes, Rousseau aims to proscribe the effects of
the established economic inequality, and especially the grouping of men into
those two 'naturally inseparable' 'estates', 'rich men' and 'beggars'. The
criterion he retains is that 'no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy
another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself'. He expresses out
loud, but without thinking its practical preconditions, the old dream of
economic independence, of 'independent commerce' (Discourse on
Inequality), i.e. of (urban or agrarian) petty artisanal production.
'Flight backwards' this time, in economic reality:
regression.
That it is a dream, a pious wish, is well known
to Rousseau:
1. The Social Contract and
Discourses, op. cit., p. 199.
2. ibid., p. 203.
page 159
In a word: Rousseau invokes as a practical
solution to his problem (how to suppress the existence of social classes) an
economic regression towards one of the phenomena of the dissolution of
the feudal mode of production: the independent petty producer, the urban or
rural artisanate, what the Discourse on Inequality describes in the
concept of 'independent commerce' (universal economic independence permitting
a 'free' commerce, i.e. free relations between individuals). But to what saint
should one entrust oneself for the realization of this impossible regressive
economic reform? There is nothing left but moral preaching, i.e. ideological
action. We are in a circle.
Flight forward in ideology,
regression in the economy, flight forward in ideology, etc. This time the
Discrepancy is inscribed in the practice proposed by Rousseau. This practice
concerns not concepts, but realities (moral and religious ideology which
exists, economic property which exists). The discrepancy really
is in so many words the Discrepancy of theory with respect to the real in its
effect: a discrepancy between two equally impossible practices. As we are now
in reality, and can only turn round and round in it
(ideology-economy-ideology, etc.), there is no further flight possible in
reality itself. End of the Discrepancy.
If there is no possibility of further Discrepancies -- since they would
no longer be of any use in the theoretical order which has done nothing but
live on these Discrepancies, chasing before it its problems and their
solutions to the point where it reaches the real, insoluble problem, there is
still one recourse, but one of a
page 160
Marx's Relation to
Hegel
page 162 [blank]
I should like to thank Monsieur Jean Hyppolite
for the great honour he has done me in inviting me to his Seminar. I am
greatly indebted to M. Hyppolite. Among many other achievements, he will go
down in the history of French philosophy as the man who has had the courage to
translate Hegel and sponsor the publication of Husserl. He has pulled French
philosophy away from the reactionary tradition which has dominated, I say
dominated (for fortunately there have been other elements beneath this
domination), its whole history since the French Revolution, a reactionary
tradition reinforced by the academic reigns of Lachelier, Bergson and
Brunschvicg. In this tradition French chauvinism took the form of the simplest
kind of stupidity: ignorance. M. Hyppolite has had the courage to fight
against this ignorance. We owe to him our knowledge of Hegel, and through
Hegel, the beginnings of an understanding of, among other things, the distance
separating Marx from Hegel. Let us not speak of the fate French philosophy has
reserved for Marx. Brunschvicg, who thought Hegel mentally retarded, regarded
Marx and Lenin as philosophical nonentities. M. Hyppolite has also had the
courage to speak of Marx, and of Freud, those great damnés de la terre
for academic bourgeois philosophy.
Everyone more or less
knows this now. But it is worth saying.
Let me add that I
have a debt to M. Hyppolite that he will not suspect. If I have been able to
glimpse the revolutionary theoretical scope of Marx's work in philosophy, it
is thanks to a very dear friend, Jacques Martin, who died five years ago. Now
Jacques Martin was privileged, under the Occupation in Paris, to hear M.
Hyppolite, then a professeur de khâgne (teacher in Letters in the
preparatory class for the École Normale Supérieure), comment on certain
passages from the Phenomenology of Mind.
page 164
I should like to put forward a few schematic themes about Marx's
relation to Hegel.
I renounce rhetoric and maieutics,
whether Socratic or phenomenological. In philosophy, the true beginning is the
end. I shall begin at the end. I shall lay my cards on the table so everyone
can see them. These cards are what they are: they carry the stamp of
Marxism-Leninism. Exposed in this way, they will naturally have the
form of a conclusion without premisses.
Let me start with a
fact. The Marx-Hegel relationship is a currently decisive theoretical and
political question. A theoretical question: it governs the future of
the number-one strategic science of Modern Times: the science of history, and
the future of the philosophy linked to that science: dialectical materialism.
A political question: it derives from these premisses. It is inscribed
in the class struggle at a certain level, in the past as in the present.
To understand the contemporary importance of this fact of
the Marx-Hegel relationship, it must be understood as a symptom, and explained
as the symptom of the following realities. In order to situate the symptom, I
shall state these realities in the form of Theses.
page 165
We are living in the
necessary effects of this fusion, of this union. Its first results: the
socialist revolutions (USSR, China, etc., revolutionary movements in Asia,
Vietnam, Latin America, Communist Parties, etc.).
(a) This
union realizes the 'union of theory and practice'.
(b) This
union is not an established fact but an endless struggle, with its victories
and defeats. A struggle in the union itself. With the 1914 War: the crisis of
the Second International. At present: the crisis in the International
Communist Movement.
The union brings together: the Workers'
Movement and Marxist theory. Here I shall only discuss Marxist theory. What is
Marxist theory?
In the great classical tradition
of the Workers' Movement, from Marx to Lenin, Stalin and Mao, Marxist theory
has been defined as containing two distinct theoretical disciplines: a science
(designated by its general theory: historical materialism) and a philosophy
(designated by the term dialectical materialism). There are very special
relations between these two disciplines. I shall not examine them in this
paper. I shall suggest the following: of these two disciplines, science and
philosophy, it is the science that has the place of determination (in the
sense defined in Reading Capital and
closely specified by Badiou in Critique, May 1967).[1] Everything depends on this science.
1. 'Le (Re)-commencement du
matérialisme dialectique', Critique, no. 240, May 1967.
page 166
The foundation of the science of history by Marx is the most important
theoretical event of contemporary history.
Let me use an
image.
There are a certain number of sciences. They can be
said to occupy a certain site in what can be called a theoretical space. Site,
space. Metaphorical notions. But they convey certain facts: the proximity of
certain sciences; relations between neighbouring sciences; domination of
certain sciences over other sciences; but simultaneously sciences without
neighbours, insular sciences (isolated positions in a void: e.g.
psychoanalysis, etc.).
From this standpoint it is possible
to consider that the history of the sciences reveals the existence, in this
problematical theoretical space, of great scientific continents.
1. The continent of Mathematics (opened up by the Greeks).
2. The continent of Physics (opened up by Galileo).
3. Marx has opened up the third great continent: the
continent of History.
A continent, in the sense of this
metaphor, is never empty: it is always already 'occupied' by many and varied
more or less ideological disciplines which do not know that they belong to
that 'continent'. For example, before Marx, the History continent was occupied
by the philosophies of history, by political economy, etc. The opening-up of a
continent by a continental science not only disputes the rights and claims of
the former occupants, it also completely restructures the old configuration of
the 'continent'. A metaphor cannot be spun out indefinitely -- otherwise I
should here say that the opening-up of a new continent to scientific knowledge
presupposes a change of terrain or an epistemological 'rupture',
etc. I leave you the trouble of the temporary needlework required to bring all
these metaphors into agreement. But one day we shall have to drop all this
sewing and patching for something quite different: to make a theory of the
history of the production of knowledges.
page 167
1st
continent (Mathematics): birth of philosophy. Plato.
2nd
continent (Physics): profound transformation of philosophy. Descartes.
3rd great continent (History, Marx): revolution in
philosophy, announced in the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach. End of classical
philosophy, no longer an interpretation of the world, but a 'transformation'
of the world.
'Transformation of the world': an enigmatic
word, prophetic but enigmatic. How can philosophy be a transformation of the
world? of which world?
Whatever the case, it is possible to
say, with Hegel: philosophy always arrives post festum. It is always
late. It is always postponed (différée).
This
thesis is very important to me: in a certain respect (its theoretical
elaboration), Marxist philosophy or dialectical materialism cannot but be
behind the science of history. Time is needed for a philosophy to form and
then develop after the great scientific discovery which has silently induced
its birth.
All the more so in that, in Marx's case, the
scientificity of his discovery has been fiercely denied, fought and condemned
by all the self-styled specialists of that continent. The so-called Human
Sciences still occupy the old continent. They are now armed with the latest
ultra-modern techniques of mathematics, etc., but they are still based
theoretically on the same outworn ideological notions as they were in the
past, ingeniously rethought and retouched. With a few remarkable exceptions,
the prodigious development of the so-called human sciences, above all the
development of the social sciences, is no more than the aggiornamento
of old techniques of social adaptation and social readaptation: of
ideological techniques. This is the great scandal of the whole of
contemporary intellectual history: everyone talks about
page 168
If we take seriously what Marx tells us
about the real dialectic of history, it is not 'men' who make history,
although its dialectic is realized in them and in their practice, but the
masses in the relations of the class struggle. This is true for political
history, general history. For the history of the sciences, making due
allowances, the same is true. It is not individuals who make the history of
the sciences, although its dialectic is realized in them, and in their
practice. The empirical individuals known for making such and such a discovery
realize in their practice relations and a conjunction wider than
themselves.
This is where we can pose the problem of the
relations between Marx and Hegel.
I shall give an
extraordinarily schematic figuration. I hope it
page 169
To pose it thus in outline, I shall start once again from an indication
of Engels's, taken up and developed by Lenin and known by the name of the
Three Sources of Marxism. Sources is an outdated ideological notion,
but what matters to us is the fact that Engels and Lenin do not pose the
problem in terms of an individual history, but in terms of a history of
theories. They establish a pattern involving three theoretical
'characters': Classical German Philosophy, English Political Economy and
French Socialism. Say: Hegel, Ricardo and Babeuf-Fourier, Saint-Simon, etc. To
simplify and for expositional clarity, I shall partially set aside French
Socialism and consider only Ricardo and Hegel, as symbolic representatives of
English political economy and German philosophy respectively.
I shall then return to the extremely general diagram of
'theoretical practice' which I proposed five years ago in an article on the
Materialist
Dialectic.
Diagram I
page 170
R + FS = raw material, object of Marx's theoretical practice
H = instruments of theoretical production, the
product of the work of the Hegelian dialectic on Ricardo is then
Capital = M.
[What we tried to do in Reading
Capital can be represented, in thoroughly indicative fashion, by the
following diagram:
Diagram II
We took as our raw material the Marx-Hegel
relationship (G'1). We set to 'work' on this raw material means of theoretical
production G'2 (Marx himself + certain other categories) to produce a result
G'3: whatever Reading Capital contains that is not aberrant. This
labour is provisional -- for us above all. The theoretical labour process
must be pursued in a new cycle in which G'2 might be represented by the
(+ or - erroneous) relation
page 171
Let us return to Diagram I. Capital is the product of the work of the
Hegelian dialectic on Ricardo, etc.
This is a perfectly
classical thesis, and one which can, of course, equally well support
orthodox-Marxist as anti-Marxist interpretations, since in its schematic
formulation, this thesis can give weight to the idea that Marx's relation to
Ricardo is reducible to a relation of the application of Hegel to
Ricardo.
However, this thesis is always stated in the
classical tradition along with another equally, if not more, insistent one:
the thesis of the inversion. It is not Hegel that is applied to Ricardo
but Hegel inverted. An enigmatic expression. What does inversion mean?
The first index of a problem.
A second index. Very many
examples can be found in the classics of Marxism. I shall only take one:
Lenin's paradoxical and apparently contradictory declarations on the
Marx-Hegel relationship.
In What the 'Friends of the
People' are, Lenin says that Marx has nothing to do with Hegelian triads
and that Capital is not their application to Ricardo.
But in his Reading Notes (known as the Philosophical Notebooks),
Lenin writes: 'Aphorism: it is impossible completely to understand
Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having
thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic.
Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood
Marx !!'.[2]
However, a page
earlier in the same notes, Lenin writes: 'Hegel's analysis of syllogisms .
. . recalls Marx's imitation of Hegel in Chapter One.'[3]
An expression notably recalling a famous
and enigmatic expression of Marx, who, in the Afterword to the second German
edition of Capital, says: 'Just as I was working at the first volume
2. Lenin, Collected Works, vol.
38 (London and Moscow, 1961), p. 180.
3. ibid., p. 178.
page 172
A strange
application of Hegel to Ricardo. Let me sum up:
1. Not
Hegel: but Hegel inverted. Inversion = rational kernel extracted from
its mystical shell.
2. Further: 'coquetting' with Hegelian
modes of expression (says Marx); an 'imitation' (says Lenin).
3. Leaving aside the imitation and coquettry, there remains the strange
inversion. It is the inversion of idealism into materialism: matter in place
of the idea. But to say this is to be much too general with respect to what is
in question. For Feuerbach had already said and done just this, in
ideology. Now, our inversion does not only concern the general world
outlook but one very precise point: the dialectic. Marx 'inverts' it,
for his dialectic is the 'direct opposite' of the Hegelian dialectic. What is
the opposite of the Hegelian dialectic? A mystery. We must go further: to the
rational kernel, i.e. to a content with a scientific theoretical value.
Then it is no longer a matter of inversion but one of critical
extraction, of a 'demystification' of the dialectic. What is a
demystification? There is no longer any question of an application.
I have brought these indices together and, with considerable difficulty
and at the cost of much clumsiness, have advanced the following hypothesis:
1. Marx did not 'apply' Hegel to Ricardo. He made something
from Hegel work on Ricardo.
2. This something from
Hegel is first Hegel inverted. The inversion of Hegel only concerns his
world outlook = the inversion of idealism into materialism. World
outlook = tendency. Nothing more: the tendency of a World Outlook does
not ipso facto provide any scientific concepts.
page 173
4. Thus Marx makes Hegel work
on Ricardo: he makes a transformation of the Hegelian dialectic work on
Ricardo.
It is indeed necessary to say that the Hegelian
dialectic has been transformed in the theoretical work it has carried
out on Ricardo. The theoretical instrument of labour which transforms the
theoretical raw material is itself transformed by its work of transformation.
The result is the dialectic at work in Capital: it is no
longer the Hegelian dialectic but a quite different dialectic.
We took this difference for the raw material of our work, as I have
suggested in Diagram II.
Hence the results that
appear in For Marx and Reading Capital.
Essentially we found in Marx:
-- A non-Hegelian conception of
history.
-- A non-Hegelian conception of the social
structure (a structured whole in dominance).
-- A non-Hegelian
conception of the dialectic.
Hence, if these theses
are well-founded, they have crucial consequences for philosophy: above all,
the rejection of the basic system of classical philosophical categories.
This system can be written:
(Origin = ((Subject =
Object) = Truth) = End = Foundation)
This system is
circular, because the Foundation is the fact that the adequation of subject
and object is the teleological origin of all truth. I cannot justify this
circular sequence here.
There follows from this rejection a
new conception of philo-
page 174
1. The point is to carry out a displacement = to make
something move over (bouger) in the internal disposition of the
philosophical categories.
2. Such that philosophical
discourse changes its modality -- speaks otherwise (autrement),
which creates the difference between interpreting the world and changing it.
3. Without philosophy disappearing nonetheless.
Apparently it is the most conscious discourse there is. In
fact it is the discourse of an unconscious. The point is no more to
suppress philosophy than it would be to suppress the unconscious in Freud.
What is required is, by working on the phantasms of philosophy (which underly
its categories), to make something move over in the disposition of the
instances of the philosophical Unconscious, so that the unconscious discourse
of philosophy finds its site -- and speaks at the top of its voice
about the very site assigned to it by the instances which produce it.
I shall leave these crucial questions here.
One point remains. Everything we have published on Hegel in fact leaves
out the positive heritage Marx, by his own confession, owed to Hegel. Marx
transformed the Hegelian dialectic, but he owed Hegel a crucial gift: the
idea of the dialectic. We have not discussed this. I should like to say a
little about it.
In the Afterword to the second German
edition of Capital, Marx discusses the dialectic in the following
terms: '. . . The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands,
by no means prevents him from being the first to present (darstellen)
its general form of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him
it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you
would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
'In its mystified form, the dialectic became the fashion in
page 175
1. The dialectic is
critical and revolutionary.
Now, the ambiguity of the
dialectic is clear. It can be
(a) either a transfiguration of the
existing state of things, the 'fait accompli ' (das Bestehende),
the existing order. The dialectic: benediction of the existing order (social,
scientific).
(b) or critical and revolutionary: it implies the
relativity of every established order, social and theoretical, of
societies and of systems, of institutions and of concepts.
The dialectic: a critique of the absolute by historical relativism.
This theme is very clear in Engels: the dialectic sets concepts in
motion. A direct adoption of the Hegelian theme: Reason as a critique
of the Intellect. Reason sets the concepts of the Intellect in motion.
The classical opposition in Marxism between
metaphysical materialism |
|
= |
metaphysical/dialectical |
dialectical materialism |
opposition |
4. Capital, vol. I (Moscow,
1961), p. 20.
page 178
2. But there is something else of much greater importance:
does the Hegelian dialectic contain a rational kernel -- and if
so, what is it?
To see this, a long detour is
required. It is necessary to go back through Marx's theoretical history. The
decisive moment in this history is the rupture with Feuerbach. This
rupture is announced in the lightning flash of the Theses on Feuerbach. The
Theses on Feuerbach were written in haste after a crucial theoretical event:
the introduction of Hegel into Feuerbach (it took place in the 1844
Manuscripts). The Manuscripts are an explosive text. Hegel,
re-introduced by force into Feuerbach, induces a prodigious acting out
of the Young Marx's theoretical contradiction, in which is achieved the
rupture with Theoretical Humanism.
To speak of Marx's
rupture with Theoretical Humanism is a very precise thesis: if Marx broke with
this ideology, that means he had espoused it; if he had espoused it (and it
was no unconsummated marriage) that means it existed. The Theoretical Humanism
Marx espoused was that of Feuerbach.
Marx 'discovered'
Feuerbach, like all the Young Hegelians, in very special conditions, which I
have said something about, following Auguste Cornu. For a time Feuerbach
'saved' the young Hegelian radicals theoretically from the insoluble
contradictions induced in their liberal-rationalist 'philosophical conscience'
by the obstinacy of the damned Prussian State, which, being 'in itself' Reason
and Freedom, persisted in misrecognizing its own 'essence', persevering beyond
all propriety in the Unreason of Despotism. Feuerbach 'saved' them
theoretically by providing them with the reason for the Reason-Unreason
contradiction: by a theory of the alienation of Man.
Obviously it would be impossible, on whatever basis, even a Marxist one, to
think that the matter of Feuerbach can be settled by a confessional note of
the kind: a few quotations from him, or from Marx and Engels, who had
read him. Nor is it settled by that adjective of convenience and ignorance
which nonetheless resounds in so many disputes: a speculative
anthropology. As though it were enough to remove the speculation from the
anthro-
page 177
pology for the anthropology (assuming one knows what that word designates)
to stand up: cut the head off a duck and it won't go far. As though it were
also enough to pronounce these magic words to call Feuerbach by his name
(philosophers, even if they are not watch-dogs, are like you and me: for them
to come, they must at least be called by their names). Let me therefore
try to call Feuerbach by his name, even if need be by an abbreviation of his
name.
Of course, I shall only discuss the Feuerbach of the
years 1839-45, i.e. the author of The Essence of Christianity and the
Principles of the Philosophy of the Future -- and not the post-1848
Feuerbach, who, against his own earlier precepts, put a lot of 'water in his
wine' for fear of the (1848) Revolution.
The Feuerbach of
The Essence of Christianity occupies a quite extraordinary position in
the history of philosophy. Indeed, he brings off the tour de force of
putting an 'end to classical German philosophy', of overthrowing (to be quite
precise: of 'inverting') Hegel, the Last of the Philosophers, in whom all its
history is summed up, by a philosophy that was theoretically
retrogressive with respect to the great German idealist philosophy.
Retrogressive must be understood in a precise sense. If
Feuerbach's philosophy carried in it traces of German idealism, its
theoretical foundations date from before German idealism. With
Feuerbach we return from 1810 to 1750, from the nineteenth to the eighteenth
century. Paradoxically, for reasons that should make a good 'dialectic'
derived from Hegel giddy, it was by its retrogressive character in
theory that Feuerbach's philosophy had fortunate progressive effects in the
ideology, and even in the political history, of its partisans. But enough on
this.
A philosophy which carries traces of German
idealism but which settles accounts with German idealism, and its supreme
representative, Hegel, by a theoretically retrogressive system, what
are we to make of that?
The traces of German
idealism: Feuerbach takes up the philosophical problems posed by German
idealism. Above all the problems of Pure Reason and Practical Reason, the
problems of Nature and Freedom, the problems of Knowledge (what can I
page 178
know?), of Morality (what ought I to do?) and of Religion (what can I hope
for?). Hence Kant's fundamental problems, but 'returned to' via Hegel's
critique and solutions (broadly the critique of Kantian distinctions as
abstractions, which for Hegel derive from a misrecognition of Reason reduced
to the role of the Intellect). Feuerbach poses the problems of German idealism
with the intention of giving them a Hegelian type of solution: indeed, he
tries to pose the unity of the Kantian distinctions or
abstractions in something resembling the Hegelian Idea. This
'something' resembling the Hegelian Idea, while being its radical inversion,
is Man, or Nature, or Sinnlichkeit (simultaneously sensuous
materiality, receptivity and sensuous intersubjectivity).
To
hold all this together, I mean to think as a single unit these three
notions: Man, Nature and Sinnlichkeit, is a dumbfounding theoretical
gamble, which makes Feuerbach's 'philosophy' a philosophical velleity, i.e. an
actual theoretical inconsistency invested in a 'wish' for an impossible
philosophical consistency. A moving 'wish', certainly, even a pathetic one,
since it expresses and proclaims in great solemn cries the desperate will to
escape from a philosophical ideology against which it remains definitively a
rebel, i.e. its prisoner. The fact is that this impossible unity gave rise to
a work which has played a part in history and produced disconcerting effects,
some immediate (on Marx and his friends), others postponed (on Nietzsche, on
Phenomenology, on a certain modern theology, and even on the recent
'hermeneutic' philosophy which derives from it).
It was an
impossible unity (Man-Nature-Sinnlichkeit) which enabled Feuerbach to
'resolve' the great philosophical problems of German idealism, 'transcending'
Kant and 'inverting' Hegel. For example, the Kantian problems of the
distinction between Pure Reason and Practical Reason, between Nature and
Freedom, etc., find a solution with Feuerbach in a unique principle:
Man and his attributes. For example, the Kantian problem of scientific
objectivity, and the Hegelian problem of religion find a solution with
Feuerbach in an extraordinary theory of mirror objectivity ('the object
of a being is the objectification of its Essence': the
page 179
object -- the objects -- of Man are the objectification of the Human
Essence). For example, the Kantian problem of the Idea and History,
transcended by Hegel in the theory of the Spirit as the ultimate moment of the
Idea, finds a solution with Feuerbach in an extraordinary theory of the
intersubjectivity constitutive of the human species. As the principal term in
all these solutions, we always find Man, his attributes, and his 'essential'
objects (mirror 'reflections' of his Essence).
Thus, with
Feuerbach, Man is the unique, primordial and fundamental concept, the
factotum, which stands in for Kant's Transcendental Subject, Noumenal
Subject, Empirical Subject and Idea, which also stands in for Hegel's Idea.
The 'end of classical German philosophy' is then quite simply a verbal
suppression of its solutions which respects its problems. It is a replacement
of its solutions by heteroclite philosophical notions gathered from here and
there in the philosophy of the eighteenth century (sensualism, empiricism, the
materialism of Sinnlichkeit borrowed from the tradition of Condillac; a
pseudo-biologism vaguely inspired by Diderot; an idealism of Man and the
'heart' drawn from Rousseau), and unified by a play on theoretical
words within the concept of Man.
Hence the extraordinary
position and the effects Feuerbach could draw from his inconsistency:
declaring himself in turn and all at once (and he saw no malice or
inconsistency in it himself) a materialist, an idealist, a rationalist, a
sensualist, an empiricist, a realist, an atheist and a humanist. Hence his
declamations against Hegel's speculation, reduced to abstraction. Hence
his appeals to the concrete, to the 'thing itself', to the real, to the
sensuous, to matter, against all the forms of alienation, whose ultimate
essence is for him constituted by abstraction. Hence the sense of his
inversion of Hegel, which Marx long espoused as the real critique of Hegel,
whereas it is still entirely trapped in the empiricism of which Hegel is no
more than the sublimated theory: to invert the attribute into the subject, to
invert the Idea into the sensuous real, into matter, to invert the Abstract
into the Concrete etc. All that within the category of Man, who is the
Real, the
page 180
Sensuous, and the Concrete. An old tune whose worn-out variations are still
served up for us today.
There you have the Theoretical
Humanism which Marx had to deal with. I say theoretical, for Man is
not just for Feuerbach an Idea in the Kantian sense, but the theoretical
foundation for all his 'philosophy', as the Cogito was for Descartes,
the Transcendental Subject for Kant and the Idea for Hegel. It is this
Theoretical Humanism that we find in so many words in the 1844
Manuscripts.
But before turning to Marx, one more word
on the consequences of this paradoxical philosophical position which claims
radically to abolish German idealism but which respects its problems and hopes
to resolve them by the intervention of a heap of eighteenth century concepts,
gathered together within the theoretical injunction of Man, which stands in
for their 'philosophical' unity and consistency.
For it is
not possible to 'return' with impunity to a position behind a
philosophy while retaining the problems it has brought to light.
The fundamental consequence of this theoretical retrogression
accompanied by a retention of current problems is to induce an enormous
contraction of the existing philosophical problematic, behind the
appearances of its 'inversion', which is no more than the impossible 'wish' to
invert it.
Engels and Lenin were perfectly well aware of
this 'contraction' with respect to Hegel. 'Feuerbach is small in comparison
with Hegel.' Let us go straight to the essential: what Feuerbach unforgiveably
sacrificed of Hegel is History and the Dialectic, or rather, since it is one
and the same thing for Hegel, History or the Dialectic. Here too, Marx,
Engels and Lenin made no mistake: Feuerbach is a materialist in the sciences,
but . . . he is an idealist in History. Feuerbach speaks of Nature but . . .
he does not speak of History -- Nature standing in for it. Feuerbach is not
dialectical. Etc.
Having obtained this perspective, let us
specify these established judgements.
page 181
Of course, history certainly is discussed by Feuerbach, who
hopes to distinguish between the 'Hindu', the 'Judaic', the 'Roman', etc.,
'human natures'. But there is no theory of history in his work. And
above all there is no trace of the theory of history we owe to Hegel as a
dialectical process of production of forms (figures).
Of course, as we can now begin to say, what irremediably disfigures the
Hegelian conception of History as a dialectical process is its
teleological conception of the dialectic, inscribed in the very
structures of the Hegelian dialectic at an extremely precise point: the
Aufhebung (transcendence-preserving-the-
transcended-as-the-internalized-transcended), directly expressed in the
Hegelian category of the negation of the negation (or negativity).
To criticize the Hegelian philosophy of History because it
is teleological, because from its origins it is in pursuit of a goal
(the realization of Absolute Knowledge), hence to reject the teleology in the
philosophy of history, but to return to the Hegelian dialectic as such at the
same time, is to fall into a strange contradiction: for the Hegelian
dialectic, too, is teleological in its structures, since the key
structures of the Hegelian dialectic is the negation of the negation,
which is the teleology itself, within the dialectic.
That is why the question of the structures of the dialectic is the key
question dominating the whole problem of a materialist dialectic. That is why
Stalin can be taken for a perceptive Marxist philosopher, at least on this
point, since he struck the negation of the negation from the 'laws' of the
dialectic. But to the extent, I say to the extent, that it is possible to
abstract from the teleology in the Hegelian conception of history and the
dialectic, it is still true that we owe Hegel something which Feuerbach,
blinded by his obsession with Man and the Concrete, was absolutely incapable
of understanding: the conception of History as a process. Indisputably,
for it passed into his works, and Capital is the evidence, Marx owes
Hegel this decisive philosophical category, process.
page 182
He owes him even more, which Feuerbach was again unable even
to suspect. He owes him the concept of a process without a subject. It
is fashionable in philosophical conversations, which are sometimes turned into
books, to say that in Hegel, History is the 'History of the alienation of
man'. Whatever the intention behind the pronunciation of such a formulation,
it states a philosophical proposition which has an implacable meaning,
one which is locatable in its offspring, if not discernible in their mother.
It is to state: History is a process of alienation which has a subject,
and that subject is man.
Now, as M. Hyppolite has very well
noted, nothing is more foreign to Hegel's thought than this
anthropological conception of History. For Hegel, History is certainly
a process of alienation, but this process does not have Man as its subject.
First, in the Hegelian History it is not a matter of Man, but of the Spirit,
and if one must at all costs (which in respect of a 'subject' is false
anyway) have a 'subject' in History, it is the 'nations' that should be
discussed, or more accurately (and we are approaching the truth) it is the
moments of the development of the Idea become Spirit. What does this
mean? Something very simple, but if it must be 'interpreted', something
important from the theoretical point of view: History is not the alienation of
Man, but the alienation of the Spirit, i.e. the ultimate moment of the
alienation of the Idea. For Hegel, the process of alienation does not 'begin'
with (human) History, since History is itself no more than the alienation of
Nature, itself the alienation of Logic. Alienation, which is the dialectic (in
its final principle the negation of the negation or Aufhebung), or to
speak more precisely, the process of alienation, is not, as a whole
current of modern philosophy which 'corrects' and 'contracts' Hegel would have
it, peculiar to Human History.
From the point of view of
Human History the process of alienation has always already begun. That
means, if these terms are taken seriously, that, in Hegel, History is thought
as a process of alienation without a subject, or a dialectical
process without a subject. Once one is prepared to consider just for a
moment that the whole Hegelian teleology is contained in the expressions I
page 183
have just stated, in the categories of alienation, or in what constitutes
the master structure of the category of the dialectic (the negation of the
negation), and once one accepts, if that is possible, to abstract from
what represents the teleology in these expressions, then there remains the
formulation: history is a process without a subject. I think I can
affirm: this category of a process without a subject, which must of
course be torn from the grip of the Hegelian teleology, undoubtedly represents
the greatest theoretical debt linking Marx to Hegel.
I well
know that, finally, there is in Hegel a subject for this process of
alienation without a subject. But it is a very strange subject, one on which
many important comments would have to be made: this subject is the very
teleology of the process, it is the Idea, in the process
of self-alienation which constitutes it as the Idea.
This is
not an esoteric thesis on Hegel: it can be verified at each instant, i.e. at
each 'moment' of the Hegelian process. To say that there is no subject
to the process of alienation whether in History, in Nature or in Logic, is
quite simply to say that one cannot at any 'moment' assign as a subject to the
process of alienation any 'subject' whatsoever: neither some being (not even
man) nor some nation, nor some 'moment' of the process, neither History, nor
Nature, nor Logic.
The only subject of the process of
alienation is the process itself in its teleology. The subject of the
process is not even the End of the process itself (a mistake is possible here:
does not Hegel say that the Spirit is 'Substance becoming Subject'?), it is
the process of alienation as in pursuit of its End, and hence the process of
alienation itself as teleological.
Nor is teleological a
determination which is added to the process of alienation without a subject
from the outside. The teleology of the process of alienation is
inscribed in black and white in its definition: in the concept of
alienation, which is the teleology itself in the process.
Now perhaps it is here that the strange status of
Logic in Hegel begins to be clearer. For what is Logic? The science of
the Idea,
page 184
i.e. the exposition of its concept, the concept of the process of
alienation without a subject, in other words, the concept of the process
of self-alienation which, considered in its totality, is nothing but the Idea.
Thus conceived, Logic, or the concept of the Idea, is the dialectic, the
'path' of the process as a process, the 'absolute method'. If Logic is nothing
but the concept of the Idea (of the process of alienation without a subject),
it is then the concept of this strange subject we are looking for. But the
fact that this subject is only the concept of the process of alienation
itself, in other words, this subject is the dialectic, i.e. the very
movement of the negation of the negation, reveals the extraordinary paradox of
Hegel. The process of alienation without a subject (or the dialectic) is the
only subject recognized by Hegel. There is no subject to the process: it is
the process itself which is a subject in so far as it does not have a
subject.
If we want to find what, finally, stands in for
'Subject' in Hegel, it is in the teleological nature of this process, in the
teleological nature of the dialectic, that it must be sought: the End
is already there in the Origin. That is also why there is in Hegel no
origin, nor (which is never anything but its phenomenon) any beginning.
The origin, indispensable to the teleological nature of the process (since it
is only the reflection of its End), has to be denied from the moment it
is affirmed for the process of alienation to be a process without a
subject. It would take too long to justify this proposition, which I propose
simply in order to anticipate later developments: this implacable exigency (to
affirm and in the same moment to deny the origin) was consciously
assumed by Hegel in his theory of the beginning of Logic: Being is immediately
non-Being. The beginning of the Logic is the theory of the
non-primordial nature of the origin. Hegel's Logic is the Origin
affirmed-denied: the first form of a concept that Derrida has introduced into
philosophical reflection, erasure (rature).
But the Hegelian 'erasure' constituted by the Logic from its first words, is
the negation of the negation, dialectical and hence teleological. It is in
teleology that there lies the true Hegelian Subject. Take away the teleology,
there remains the philosophical
page 185
category that Marx inherited: the category of a process without a
subject. The word 'procès' (process) which expresses a development considered in
the totality of its real conditions has long been a part of scientific
language throughout Europe. In France it was first introduced slightly
shamefacedly in its Latin form -- processus. Then, stripped of this
pedantic disguise, it slipped into books on chemistry, physics, physiology,
etc., and into a few works of metaphysics. In the end it will obtain a
certificate of complete naturalization. Let us note in passing that in
ordinary speech the Germans, like the French use the word Prozess
(procès, process) in the legal sense [i.e., trial].[5]
That is Marx's principal positive debt
to Hegel: the concept of a process without a subject.
It underpins Capital from beginning to end. Marx was perfectly aware of
it. Witness this note added by Marx to the French edition of Capital.
Marx: Le Capital, tome I (a note found only in the
French edition!):
In passing, let me draw attention to the fact that the
concept of a process without a subject also underpins the whole of Freud's
work.
But to speak of a process without a subject implies
that the notion of a subject is an ideological notion.
If the following double thesis is taken seriously:
1.
the concept process is scientific,
2. the notion subject is
ideological, then two consequences follow:
1. a revolution
in the sciences: the science of history becomes formally possible,
2. a revolution in philosophy: for all classical philosophy depends on
the categories of subject and object (object = a mirror reflection of
subject).
But this positive heritage is still
formal. The question posed then is as follows: What are the
conditions of the process of history?
Here Marx no
longer owes anything to Hegel: on the decisive point he contributes something
without any precedent, i.e.:
5. Karl Marx, Le Capital, t. I
(Éditions Sociales, Paris, 1948), p. 181n.
page 186
There is no such thing as a process except in relations (sous des rapports): the relations of production (to which Capital is restricted) and other (political, ideological) relations.
Our meditations on this scientific discovery and its philosophical
consequences are not yet over: we are only beginning to suspect them and
assess their extent. It hardly need be said that it is not by dabbling in
structuralist ideology that we can obtain the means to explore the immense
space of the continent that Marx has opened for us (Marx's Verbindungen
do not amount to a 'combinatory'!).
The continent was opened
up a hundred years ago. The only people who have ventured into it are
militants of the revolutionary class struggle. To our shame, intellectuals do
not even suspect the existence of this continent, except to annex and exploit
it as a common colony.
We must recognize and explore this
continent, to liberate it of its occupiers. To reach it it is enough to follow
those who went before us a hundred years ago: the revolutionary militants of
the class struggle. We must learn with them what they already know. On this
condition we too shall be able to make discoveries in it, of the kind
announced by Marx in 1845: discoveries which help not to 'interpret' the
world, but to change it. To change the world is not to explore the moon. It is
to make the revolution and build socialism without regressing back to
capitalism.
The rest, including the moon, will be given to
us in addition.
23 January 1968
page 187
| |
abstraction, 20, 27, 29, 31, 38,
43, |
|
| |
decrees, 146-7 |
error, 20, 35-6, 38-40, 48 |
| |
73, 98; principle of, 37,
44-53, |
120-2, 124, 143-5,
147-8, |
| |
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 17, 24 |
64n; Notes on England, 105n;
Mes |
| |
Communist, 165 |
petty artisanal, 158-9; relations
of, |
| |
Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy duc
de, |
subjects (of a State), 31, 55, 62,
69, |