Abstract
The reader of this volume may wonder why some thinkers were included while others are absent. The answer lies in the concept of a legacy and in the politics of its inheritance. The wordplay is important. Designating the legacy as Marxian suggests that Marx and those Marxists who claim to be his heirs have no monopoly on the theoretical definition or practical realization of radical politics. By refusing to accord Marx the sole paternity of the political search for what classical philosophers called ‘the Good Life in the City’, it becomes possible to rethink political theory and the light that it casts on contemporary political choices. My principles of inclusion and exclusion can be explained by this broader goal. As for Marx himself, to whose work I have returned several times during the years since the first edition of The Marxian Legacy, he is also best understood within the context constituted by his legacy, which has practical as well as theoretical, as the title of this chapter suggests.
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Notes
- 1.
Rorty makes this suggestion at the conclusion of a comparison of ‘Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity’, reprinted in Habermas and Modernity, edited by Richard J. Bernstein (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 174. He consoles himself, earlier in the essay, with the comment that ‘it is not clear that these efforts have done the modern age much good (or, for that matter, harm)’ (p. 168). Although his ‘Deweyian’ pragmatism claims to ground a progressive democratic politics, his theory points to the ambiguous situation of the critique of Marxism, as will be apparent in the discussion of neo-conservatism and post-modernism in section II.
- 2.
The first of these presented a general discussion of ‘The Theory and Practice of Dialectical Theory’ which insisted on the relatedness but also on the difference of theory and practice. It is not reproduced because I have, I hope, elaborated its arguments more convincingly, and certainly in more detail, in From Marx to Kant (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985). The second introductory chapter tried to understand the political movement known as the ‘New Left’ within whose cresting wave this book was written. In its wake, this Afterword tries to understand what has happened. Both chapters have been reprinted in a collection of my political essays, Defining the Political (1989).
- 3.
I will not try to reconstruct historically what the ‘New Left’ was; nor of course, does the concept as it is used here stand or fall on the basis of empirical facts. I am generalizing from an experience that I conceptualize as the ‘Marxian legacy’.
- 4.
In the book, and in this Afterword, I avoid the thickets of erudition as much as possible. There exist many studies of Marx and Marxism, undertaken from differing points of view, and with greater or lesser pretention to exhaustiveness. My goal is different. I want to restore the question that underlies ‘the Marxian legacy’.
- 5.
An example of such ulterior motives can be found in Althusser, whose Stalinist dogmatism is dissected by Claude Lefort in his analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s three volumes on the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ in Un homme en trop, pp. 79ff.
- 6.
Habermas suggests that when the Institute for Social Research, in emigration in New York, was isolated from dialogue with other intellectual traditions, it lost the critical impulse that kept it alive. As an empirical indication of his argument, Habermas notes the importance of the Book Review section of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , which composed roughly one-third of each issue, reviewing with some 350 books each year, totaling nearly 3500 during its nine-year life (Jürgen Habermas, ‘The inimitable Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung: How Horkheimer took Advantage of a Historically Oppressive Hour’, in Telos, No. 45, Fall, 1980).
- 7.
C.f., Habermas’ comments on just this aspect of the Zeitschrift. Habermas himself is a prime example of the attempt to arrange marriages among the disciplines, albeit from his own synthetic point of view. The place of his project within the ‘legacy’ will be discussed below.
- 8.
This gives rise to the familiar technique for defending ‘really existing socialism’, which is not the product of political opportunism or cynicism; it has theoretical roots as well. This type of politics of theory is not restricted to Trotskyists, although the stubborn purity in which this sect has persisted makes it archetypal. Lefort generalizes from his own experience as a Trotskyist in his essay on ‘L’image du corps et le totalitarisme’ (in L’invention démocratique. Les limites de la domination totalitaire (1981)). He shows that the leadership positions within the Trotskyist ‘micro-bureaucracy’ are based on a certain kind of knowledge, exercised by the verb and capable of fitting facts into a mythical history. This knowledge defines what is and is not real for group members; its basis is a mythologized vision of what happened in the past. As a result, this self-proclaimed knowledge is invulnerable to criticism; it produces a closed world in which party members share by becoming one of ‘us’, the collective carriers of the theory. As a result, individual members lose their identity and their sense of the outside world.
- 9.
Lefort’s essay, ‘Relecture du Manifeste communiste’, is printed in his Essais sur le politique. XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1986). The citation is from page 188. The original publication was found in the Dictionnaire des oeuvres politiques (Paris: PUF, 1986).
- 10.
Post-war Eastern Europe is, in a sense, the double heir of the legacy, as Soviet, but also as European. There is a theoretical story to be written about this double legacy; a first step is found in Jacques Rupnik’s ‘Le totalitarisme vu de l’Est’, in Hassner and Rupnik, eds., Totalitarismes (Paris: Económica, 1984).
- 11.
The historian, François Furet, has illustrated the theoretical dilemma in Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), as Claude Lefort demonstrates in his critical review reprinted in his Essais sur le politique.
The impossibility of situating revolution in a temporal or a sociological ‘before’ or ‘after’ implies that revolution is essentially utopian! This intuition animated the work of Ernst Bloch within the legacy, as well as pointing to two other thinkers who adopt motifs from the legacy without therefore becoming full participants, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. I will explain below why they were not treated in The Marxian Legacy, despite their awareness of revolution and utopia.
- 12.
See my article (with Brigitte Howard), ‘Une mort nécessaire?’, in the monthly journal Front (Paris: September, 1969, pp. 28–29). The problem of political ‘agency’ is central to any modern theory of politics, as I have tried to show in my writing since the first edition of this book, some of which are collected in Defining the Political and in The Politics of Critique (1988, 1989).
- 13.
The best study in English remains the first, Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Men who are Changing American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). Steinfels’ work retains the freshness and surprise of discovery. Habermas has written a critical essay distinguishing the American from the German variety of neo-conservatism: ‘Neoconservative Culture Criticism in the United States and West Germany: An Intellectual Movement in Two Political Cultures’, reprinted in Richard J. Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity, op. cit.
- 14.
On the distinction between the Foucadian and Frankfurt orientation, see Axel Honneth, Kritik der Macht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985). In English, see Martin Jay’s careful attempt to distinguish Adorno from typical Marxist views of reification, in Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), especially pp. 67–68.
- 15.
These worries are not recent, nor is Habermas focused only on dangers coming from the Right. Already in the 1960s, he criticized the German student movement for a susceptibility to what he called ‘left-wing fascism’. That debate was documented in the collective volume, Die Linke antwortet Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968). That collection presents a debate within the left, beginning from Habermas’ own statement, published under the title ‘Die Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder’.
- 16.
Habermas’ Legitimation Crises never reached a satisfactory explanation of ‘late’ capitalism. He returned to the question in his Theory of Communicative Action (1981). The processes of modern rationalization take root first in the sphere of the economy, then in the increasing rationalization of law and administration, and finally in the affectively defined domain of personal life. ‘Late’ capitalism is characterized by the attempted rationalization of this third element of social life. The resistance to this ‘colonization of the life-world’ may take the forms described as ‘post-modern’. C.f., the collection of interviews with Habermas edited by Peter Dews, Habermas. Autonomy & Solidarity (London: Verso, 1986). The work of André Gorz, discussed below, offers a more rewarding political analysis.
It should be noted as well that Habermas’ criticism of French post-modernism’s political implications was first presented (in English) in 1985 as a series of 12 invited lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris. Its German version appeared as Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Zwölf Vorlesungen, in 1985.
- 17.
He makes this claim in an interview with Aesthetik und Kommunikation, reprinted in his collection, Die neue Unübersichtbarkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), pp. 180–81. The two volumes, well more than a thousand pages, are of course the development of theoretical concerns as well. Habermas offers other political reasons as well. At the conclusion to his comparative criticism of American and German neo-conservatives, he observes that ‘If modernity had nothing to offer beside the praises of neoconservative apologetics, one could understand why parts of today’s intellectual youth are returning (via Derrida and Heidegger) to Nietzsche, searching for salvation in the portentous moods of the cultic rejuvenation of a young conservatism not yet distorted by compromise’ (in Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity, pp. 93–4). He adds to this negative argument a positive ground for develo** his new theory in his interview with the New Left Review. After denying that he is a ‘transcendental philosopher’, he explains that ‘I would not speak of “communicative rationalization” if in the last two hundred years of European and American history, in the last forty years of the national liberation movements, and despite all the catastrophes, a piece of “existing reason”, as Hegel would have put it, were not nevertheless also recognizable-in the bourgeois emancipation movements, no less than in the workers’ movement, today in feminism, in cultural revolts, in ecological and pacifist forms of resistance, etc.’ (p. 102). The ‘piece of “existing reason”’ refers to the Marxist concept of a ‘real abstraction’ that was discussed earlier in The Marxian Legacy and to which I will return in the next paragraph.
- 18.
I use the common word ‘social’ here to designate what Hegel called ‘civil society’, which is defined by relations among individuals structured by the goal of maintaining their own particularity. Hegel’s notion of the political is distinguished radically from this civil society (Cf., Philosophy of Right, paragraphs 258 and 260). Habermas knows that the political must be able to claim universality, but his social premises permit its universalization only in the sphere of individual morality.
Explaining the goals of his theory in his ‘Reply to My Critics’ in the New Left Review interview, Habermas insists that ‘Nothing makes me more nervous than the imputation that because the theory of communicative action focuses attention on the social facticity of recognized validity-claims, it proposes, or at least, suggests, a rationalistic utopian society. I do not regard the fully transparent—let me add in this context: or indeed a homogenized and unified—society as an ideal, nor do I wish to suggest any other ideal—Marx was not the only one frightened by the vestiges of utopian socialism’ (NLR, p. 94). Earlier in the interview, Habermas speaks of his ‘somewhat restricted understanding of the task of philosophical ethics’, namely, that ‘the philosopher ought to explain the moral point of view, and—as far as possible—justify the claim to universality of this explanation, showing why it does not merely reflect the moral intuitions of the average, male, middle-class member of a modern Western society. Anything further than that is a matter for moral discourse among participants’ (p. 84, my italics). I underline the notion of ‘moral discourse’ here because, in the present context, what is at issue is the place of the political within the Marxian legacy. When Habermas does talk about the place of politics in modern societies, he reduces politics functionally to a ‘steering mechanism’ that has been made autonomous by modern processes of rationalization. This conflates government administration with the political.
- 19.
Cf. ‘Bewusstmachende oder rettende Kritik-Die Aktualität Walter Benjamins’, in Politische-Philosophische Profile (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981). A propos of the utopian element on Benjamin and Adorno, it should be recalled that the young Habermas had praised Bloch as ‘a Marxist Schelling’ in an early essay published in his Theorie und Praxis (1963).
- 20.
NLR, p. 82.
- 21.
As I read them, the ‘new philosophers’ are neither new nor philosophical. They borrow without acknowledge political arguments developed years previously in Socialisme ou Barbarie; their philosophy is rhetorical, based ultimately on the ‘morality’ that they put in place of the political. A destructive critique is found in Castoriadis’ aptly titled article on Bernard-Henri Lévy, ‘L’industrie du vide’, in Domains de l’homme. Les carrefours du labyrinthe (Paris: Seuil, 1986). It is no surprise that this product of media attention has dispersed, finding itself at different points in the spectrum, with André Glucksmann remaining, morally at least, on the left.
- 22.
I have misplaced my copy of this book. The citation here is found in Pierre Grémion, Paris/Prague. La gauche face au renouveau et á la régression tchécoslovaques, 1968–1978 (Paris: Juilliard, 1985), p. 313 n 3.
- 23.
I have tried to show in some detail how, and why, this is the case in From Marx to Kant . That account was especially indebted to Lefort’s earlier theory. Lefort’s recent work on the French Revolution itself, and on its interpreters, goes still further, as will be seen below. My debt to Castoriadis will also be apparent in the following discussion.
- 24.
This reconstruction of the legacy around the concepts of revolution and democracy was not present in the first edition. Its chief concern was the definition of ‘the political’, for which Marxism had no clear theoretical role. The Preface to that first edition admitted that the substantive formulation, ‘the political’, might appear at first as a philosopher’s mystification of everyday politics. I tried to give a better conceptual clarification in From Marx to Kant . The discussions in this new Afterword of the newer work of Lefort and Castoriadis explain why I am replacing it here with the concept of democracy—or better, with the question of democracy. As noted earlier, the concept of utopia could also serve as a guide-line for a different attempt to reconstruct a (non-identical) legacy.
I have added also a discussion of the recent work of André Gorz, which draws from Sartre’s ‘existential phenomenological’ orientation political and theoretical implications that the author of the Critique of Dialectical Reason might well have seen as contributing to what would have been the promised second volume of that work. As will be seen, Gorz can also be read as contributing to the third, critical, moment of the legacy in the work that he began to publish in the 1980s, starting with the Adieux au prolétariat.
- 25.
Among the earlier rediscovery, the contribution of Paul Breines to The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism, co-edited by Andrew Arato and Paul Breines (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), should be mentioned. Arato’s reconstruction of the crucial dialectic of History and Class Consciousness remains the best presentation of the theoretical contribution.
- 26.
This legacy would not include Karl Korsch, who independently developed insights in some ways similar to Lukács’ in Marxism and Philosophy, also published in 1923. The differences between the two are apparent in Korsch’s 1929 essay on ‘The Present State of the Problem “Marxism and Philosophy”’ published in the new edition of his earlier volume. Korsch’s further evolution took an original path, intellectually and politically, on which cf. Breines, op. cit., and especially Michael Buckmiller’s ‘Marxismus als Realität. Zur Rekonstruktion der theoretischen und politischen Entwicklung Karl Korschs’, along with a complete bibliography of Korsch’s works, in Über Karl Korsch, Jahrbuch: Arbeiterbewegung, Theorie und Geschichte, Claudio Pozzoli, ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1973). Volume 2 of Jahrbuch contains a selection of nearly 150 pages of Korsch’s letters from the 1930s.
- 27.
The relation of the so-called Budapest School, some of whose members were constrained to exile in the 1970s, and to Lukács’ and to Marx’s legacy would demand a separate study. In their own ways, Agnes Heller, Ferenc Feher, Gyorgy Markus, and Mihaly Vajda have attempted to go beyond Lukács’ classicism in aesthetics, his linear theory of history, and ethics of duty; they have tried to replace the primacy of labor and the paradigm of production with attention to values, symbols, and communication.
- 28.
I have had to exclude Antonio Gramsci from The Marxian Legacy due to my inability to work with the Italian sources. Paul Piccone’s reconstruction of his arguments in Italian Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) shows remarkable parallels in the intellectual, and even political, developments of Gramsci and Marx, particularly as concerns their attraction to and rejection of Hegel. Piccone goes on to argue that the attempts to revitalize a Gramscian politics undertaken by diverse Italian leftist groups—not to speak of his canonization by Togliatti’s Communist Party—are doomed to failure because of the culturally and socially specific roots of Gramsci’s theoretical and practical proposals.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe reintroduce Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). They reconstruct the history of Marxist Socialist practice and theory in order to show how that concept avoids the antinomies produced by the attempt to integrate a political theory of class unity and an economic theory of crisis. Gramsci is said to abandon the vision of politics as conjunctural intervention in a field of pre-given, economically defined interests. Class unity is treated on an ‘intellectual and moral’ plane, seeking to create a ‘collective will’ which becomes the cement of an ‘historical bloc’. This explains Gramsci’s insistence on the material nature of this ‘historical bloc’ which reflects Gramsci’s conception of the material foundations of common world-views. These elements acquire their unity only from this new commonality into which their previous identity is dissolved. Hence, for Gramsci, the class does not take state power; it becomes the state. Socialism emerges from the progressive disintegration of one civilization while another is constructed within it around the new class core.
Laclau and Mouffe recognize that Gramsci is still burdened by economic orthodoxy. They develop the implications of his concept of hegemony by applying the methods of French deconstructionism. That is a procedure which falls outside the constraints of the legacy, despite Laclau and Mouffe’s obvious debt to Lefort. The deconstructionist premises of their project are illustrated suggestively in their reconstruction of the history of the failures of Marxism as a political movement; but the link between politics and theory is only suggested, not justified. Their proposal of a radical, pluralist democratic politics as the basis for realizing what Marxism could not express is formulated in a conceptual universe that is foreign to the experience that is the Marxian legacy. The place of a democratic politics is better explained in the recent work of Lefort and Castoriadis—and even in a reinterpretation of Habermas. For a critical interpretation of Laclau and Mouffe’s work, c.f., ‘Another Resurrection of Marxism’ reprinted in my Defining the Political.
- 29.
The analogies to the French Revolution are suggestive. Each turning point, and each defeated leader, in the constant process of radicalization that was stopped only by Thermidor’s destruction of what Marx called ‘the illusion of politics’ finds partisans who insist that it represents the ‘truth’ of the Revolution. Much of Lefort’s work during the past few years has turned around questions posed by the French Revolution and the attempts by nineteenth-century politicians and historians (such as Guizot, to whom Marx owed so much, as well as Tocqueville, Michelet, and Quinet, and the Machiavellian ‘dandy’ Ferrari) to understand its jerky process of radicalization that seemed incapable of finding an institutional stability. Lefort’s publications on the period are found in his Essais sur le politique, op. cit., to which I will return.
- 30.
In Ernst Blochs Wirkung. Ein Arbeitsbuch zum 90. Geburtstag (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975).
- 31.
This explains why Burghardt Schmidt, who assisted Bloch in editing the 20-volume edition of his Werke, has been able to write a penetrating account of the post-modernism debates from an unabashedly Blochian perspective. His Postmoderne-Strategien des Vergessens (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1986) applies the logic of non-contemporaneity to the problem of the omnipresence of myth in the imagination of the post-modernists. With Bloch, Schmidt sees positive implications without being forced to accept the entire package, because he recalls that myths can be archaic or revolutionary myths, stabilizing or rebellious in their effects. Concerning the post-modernist critique of the Enlightenment, Schmidt rejects what he calls a ‘hypochondriac anxiety of being touched’ by the other that he finds in Habermas. The Enlightenment presents a utopia insofar as the presence of ‘what has not disappeared because it has never fully become’ remains as a subversive element pointing beyond the ‘cynical antics’ of the post-moderns in the present.
- 32.
In our correspondence, André Gorz asked me several times what I mean by ‘a question’, especially when I affirm that the political is a question which society poses to itself about itself. Is this not, he asks, to hypostatize society into a kind of meta-subject? He is correct on one level when he insists that only individuals can pose questions. They can question their relation to society, and they can ask what is usually called the political question: what is the Good Society? But how, when, and why do individuals ask such questions? Gorz himself suggests an answer when he points out that a question is solicited by the absence of sense, adding that such an absence is itself a kind of presence: ‘it exists but it is elsewhere, we don’t know where’. By extension, the existence of society—as opposed to the accidental coagulation of atoms that Sartre conceptualizes as ‘seriality’—supposes a kind of implicit sense of the unity and specificity that makes it this society. That sense is never fully formalized in customs, rituals, or laws; and in modern societies, the forces of dispersion tend to become even greater. Because society’s sense of itself can never be fully present (even as an absence), the political as a constant questioning by individuals of the sense of social existence that can never be absent. The political question can be submerged as the process of modernization disperses and reifies individual existence to the point that (as Habermas recognizes) the sense of society seems ultimately to disappear. In such conditions, the attention of the critical analyst turns to the processes which are destroying the society’s sense of itself; and the action called politics tends to become a defense of society against disintegrating forces (such as the capitalist mode of production, bureaucratic administration, or ‘instrumental reason’). As opposed to such a defensive politics, ‘the political’, in the mode of interrogation, is a positive movement to give to society a new sense of itself. It cannot neglect the disintegrative forces, but its broader questioning casts these in a different light. This is the sense in which the critique of Marxism goes beyond the adaptive use made of Marx within the legacy.
- 33.
Helmut Dubiel’s Wissenschaftsorganisation und politische Erfahrung: Studien zur frühen Kritischen Theory (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978) adopts this approach. Each of his three chapters treats first the ‘Historical and Political Experience’, then the ‘Theory of the Theory-Praxis Relation’, and finally offers a concluding description of the ‘Theoretical Position’. For example, in the first period, the Marxist project of a planned society is seen as a realizable goal; in the second period, historical possibility plays a lesser role in the constitution of the theoretical position; in the third, the concrete social project social philosophy is replaced by a universal philosophy of history.
An approach closer to my own is found in Andrew Arato’s Introductions in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). He suggests that the School had the chance to make a new contribution to Marxism because a politics based on the self-organization of the proletariat had, by 1923, entered a ‘crisis of revolutionary subjectivity’. The Frankfurt theory of culture could be coupled with a political sociology in order to escape the dilemmas of classical Marxism because the struggle against domination in a reified, commodity-society no longer called for an immanent critique incarnated in the individuality of the proletariat; political mediation was necessary to break the ‘technological veil’ of ‘instrumental reason’. In this context, Arato restores the originality and the rigor of three lesser-known members of the Institute: Otto Kirchheimer, Frederick Pollock, and Franz Neumann. He also explains the context that gave rise to debate about the persistence of ‘crisis tendencies’ in capitalism, with which Horkheimer’s ‘Authoritarian State’ marked a rupture. This opened the possibility of a political crisis theory, which found its place in the earlier work of Habermas.
- 34.
Marcuse’s philosophical background should be mentioned here. Marcuse’s first publication, in 1928, ‘Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism’, appeared in an issue of the Philosophische Hefte devoted to Heidegger’s Being and Time (English translation in Telos, No. 4, Fall 1969). When Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts were first published, he laid the groundwork for a sort of ‘Heideggerian Marxism’ in his review, ‘The Foundation of Historical Materialism’. His debt to Lukács was made clear in his essay ‘On the Problem of the Dialectic’ (English translation in Telos, No. 27, Spring 1976). These developments are brought together in the essay ‘On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics’ (English translation in Telos, No. 16, Summer 1973). The reworking of these preliminary works in the book as a Habilitation and in the Band in the book Hegel’s Ontology and the Foundation of a Theory of Historicity was rejected as a Habilitationsschrift by Heidegger.
Habermas recalls his first meeting with Marcuse, in 1956, as the encounter with ‘an embodiment and vivid expression of the political spirit of the old Frankfurt School’. He notes that at the beginning of his association with the Institute, Marcuse was more conservative than the others, but he ended his life an unyielding and even romantic radical. Habermas’ essay, ‘Psychic Thermidor and the Rebirth of Rebellious Subjectivity’, traces the roots of this evolution, stressing that Eros and Civilization is ‘among Marcuse’s books the most Marcusian one’, but admitting the validity of Adorno’s criticism of its inability to ground its optimism. Marcuse continued to search for grounds, but continued also his refusal to yield to pessimism, telling Habermas from his hospital bed that ‘all basic value judgments are based on compassion, our sense for the suffering of others’ (in Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity, citations from pp. 68, 74, 77).
- 35.
Wolfgang Bonss edited the materials gathered from Fromm’s empirical study of the German working class in 1929; the English translation is available as Erich Fromm, The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). In addition to Bonss’ introduction, see also his more general study, setting the Frankfurt empirical research in context: Die Einübung des Tatsachenblicks. Zur Struktur und Veränderung empirischer Sozialforschung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982).
- 36.
A critic might say that I underplay the importance of the ‘critique of instrumental reason’ in the inheritance of the Frankfurt School. I will make clear its importance in a moment when I turn to Habermas’ more recent work.
- 37.
The new theory is intended also to correct errors within his own earlier work, particularly the over-extension of the philosophical distinction between technical and communicative action to the plane of sociology, which he proposed first in ‘Science and Technique as “Ideology”’. Although Habermas says that he tried to correct this error Legitimation in Legitimation Crises of Late Capitalism by the introduction of systems theory, he does not add that this self-critique puts into question the epistemological sociology developed in Knowledge and Human Interests. Cf. Habermas’ ‘Entgegnung’, in Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, eds., Kommunikatives Handeln. Beiträge zu Jürgen Habermas’ ‘Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), pp. 379, 383.
- 38.
The New Left also laid claim to the heritage of the Frankfurt School. This worried the later Horkheimer, who finally consented to the republication of his Zeitschrift articles only after they were already available in pirate editions. He felt obliged to insist in his Prefaces that their social-critical edge not be taken seriously by the younger generation, affirming that ‘despite all its failures, the questionable democracy is nonetheless better than the dictatorship which its overthrow would bring about’.
One of the critical New Leftists, Hans-Jürgen Krahl, had worked closely with Adorno. After his death in a car accident, a collection of his writings was published under the title Konstitution und Klassenkampf (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1971).
- 39.
Op. cit. p. 121.
- 40.
This is another reason for not including Adorno within the legacy, despite the attempt by Habermas—who had been Adorno’s assistant in Frankfurt student—to show his place in the chapter ‘From Lukács to Adorno’ in his Theory of Communicative Action. Albrecht Wellmer offers the most persuasive arguments for the inclusion of Adorno in this legacy in Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne: Vernunftkritik nach Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), especially in the essay ‘Wahrheit, Schein, Versöhnung. Adornos ästhetische Rettung der Modernität’ first presented at the Adorno-Congress in 1983.
- 41.
Neither the original Frankfurt School nor Habermas attempted seriously to apply the critical theory to ‘really existing’ socialist societies. Although Frederick Pollock did on occasion address the question, he tended to be concerned with the comparison to Fascism or the emerging Western welfare state. This is a significant omission; the phenomenon of totalitarianism is an important element within the legacy that affects the theoretical form it adopts. The most significant work from the point of view of critical theory has been that of Andrew Arato, which is presented in his contribution to Habermas-Critical Debates, edited by J. B. Thompson and D. Held (London: 1982). Johann Arnason has tried to integrate this question into a general critique of Habermas’ theory of communicative action. Habermas’ reply showed him even less willing to engage Arnason than he was ready to consider the issues raised by Arato. Arnason’s essay and Habermas’ evasion are found in Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, eds., Kommunikatives Handeln. Beiträge zu Jürgen Habermas’ ‘Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986).
- 42.
The concluding sentence of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which can be read as an application of the ‘critique of instrumental reason’ to contemporary Western society, cites Benjamin: ‘Only to the hopeless is hope given’.
- 43.
The psychoanalytic variant of such an orientation is developed in Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. Joel Whitebook has presented a striking critique of Marcuse, making creative use of recent psychoanalytic work on narcissism to develop a perspective for a socially relevant critical theory. See ‘Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Social Theory’ (unpublished paper, February, 1986).
- 44.
The previously mentioned concluding discussion of volume I of the Theory of Communicative Action refers to this problem, under the title ‘From Lukács to Adorno: Rationalization as Reification’. That first volume begins with a 200-page demonstration that modern social science cannot avoid posing the fundamental problem of rationality, followed by a 150-page discussion of Weber’s theory of rationalization, confirming the importance of the Weberian mediation in order to find a way out of the circle of the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
- 45.
Interestingly, Habermas does not propose a reorientation of the basic questions of philosophy, applying his new approach to the inherited tradition.
- 46.
For example, he asserts that ‘[h]owever opposed the intentions of their philosophies of history, nonetheless the culmination of Adorno’s thinking is similar to that of Heidegger in their attitudes to the theoretical claim of objectifying thought and reflection: Mindfulness of nature (Eingedenken der Natur) in Adorno comes shockingly close to Heidegger’s remembrance of Being (Andenken des Seins)’. Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, I, p. 516. Wellmer’s above-mentioned book tries to reintegrate Adorno within the communicative paradigm, suggesting that something like the mimetic moment is necessary if Habermas’ theory is to avoid the abstract formality for which it is often criticized. The question of happiness, so important in the earlier critical theory, is largely absent from Habermas’ work, as will be seen.
- 47.
An outline of volume II will have to suffice to give a sense of the path to these conclusions. The construction is nearly parallel to the first volume. Mead and Durkheim are introduced in order to make plausible the transition from a subject-centered, goal-oriented rationality to the primacy of communicative action. The results are thematized through a historical reconstruction of the processes of modernization as they develop from the unity of ‘system and life-world’ in primitive societies to their double differentiation in modern society. The increasing complexity of the system denotes its distinct form of modernization while the increasing rationality of the life-world corresponds to its modernization. In the process, these two necessary moments of any society are separated one from the other. Talcott Parsons is introduced to suggest the attempt to explain their functional unity, paralleling the treatment of Weber in the first volume. Parsons’ description of the means by which the social totality is ordered does not succeed in integrating the ‘critique of instrumental reason’ that was the center of Weber’s analysis of modern societies because his functionalism does not stress the typically modern situation in which sub-systems, such as the economy or the administrative state, function as autonomous systems within the society itself. Habermas returns to Weber’s theory of modernization, which he reinterprets by appeal to Marx as an ‘inner colonization of the life-world’. In this way, he is able to propose the tasks for a critical theory of contemporary modern society.
- 48.
The passage continues by noting that ‘No path leads from it [i.e. reconstruction] back to a theory of history which does not a fortiori distinguish between problems in the logic of development and those of the dynamics of development’ (citations in Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, II, pp. 561–62). I will return to the implications of this problem below.
- 49.
Habermas is not always clear about the relation among the aspects of his own develo** theories. For example, Martin Jay’s essay in Habermas and Modernity suggests that although the parallel between the emancipatory interest and the criterion of ‘subjective truthfulness’ might be the back-door through which the philosophy of consciousness could reappear; another possibility would be that the ‘subjective truthfulness’ of the actor introduces that material content, or happiness, that Adorno sought to preserve for critical theory. Habermas’ reply admits laconically that this could be a serious problem but offers no correction.
- 50.
Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), to which I will refer as PDM. Future references to the Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns will be indicated in the text by TdkH.
- 51.
The historical character of this process of modernization should be stressed at the outset to avoid a misunderstanding of the political implications of Habermas’ theoretical argument. The life-world is not a domain of primal innocence into which the imperatives of the ‘system’ intrude; and the political goal is not to restore its lost purity. Habermas insists that his model is analogous to Marx’s reconstruction of the transition from concrete to abstract labor as the foundation of capitalist social reproduction. He adds that his systems theoretical approach can take into account, for example, the phenomena of ‘micro-power’ analyzed by Foucault. In the same essay in which he defends himself against the interpretation that portrays a benign, conflict-free life-world, he adds that ‘[o]ne can thus define the life-world negatively as the totality of the domains of action that do not fit into a description of them as subsystems steered by media’ (in ‘Entgegnung’, op. cit. p. 387. The first two points are made at pages 395 and 375ff ).
Jean Cohen has developed the implications of this historically situated analysis with reference to the phenomenon of ‘new social movements’. She insists on the fact the rationalization of the life-world in the ‘autonomous cultural spheres of science, art, morality and law organized around their own internal values’ contains ‘the potential for increased reflexivity regarding all dimensions of action and world relations’. This makes possible a ‘further modernization of the life-world … involving the replacement of gemeinschaftliche coordination of social life by potentially self-reflexive forms’. Capitalist class society can block this further development; but the new social movements can be seen as carriers of its positive potential. See ‘Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements’, in Social Research, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), esp. pp. 708–716.
- 52.
Johann Arnason develops a critical counterproposal to Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action. Habermas clearly has in mind the conditions within Western welfare state societies. Although Habermas’ self-limitation is in itself legitimate, a theory which sweeps as widely as his should not avoid critical debate. Habermas replies to Arnason ‘That [i.e., what Arnason has proposed] is an alternative starting point for explanation which sets other phenomena in the center … That discussion would go beyond the bounds of an already long reply. Let us wait for the book which will certainly soon ripen from Arnason’s fruitful thoughts’ (in ibid., p. 395). This is not the only example of Habermas’ tendency to insist that he define the terms of debate. I had the same experience years later when I presented a long, critical comment on his legal theory, Faktizität und Geltung in a special issue of the Cordozo Law Review (Volume 17, Numbers 4–5, March 1996).
- 53.
Another motif from the communicative theory of action enters at this point: the criterion of universalizability, which Habermas had begun to elaborate at the end of the 1970s. The relation among the concepts of universalizability, autonomy, and democracy is not always clear. The autonomous sub-systems of law, science, and art seem to obey different logics of universalizability; and it is not clear that the concept of democracy applies in the same manner to each. Jean Cohen’s interpretation of the new social movements, in op. cit., suggests that there is a confusion in Habermas between the functional rationality of the media-steered sub-systems and the discussion of society as a ‘system’. She sees the media-steered sub-systems as operating in terms of system-rationality, while the sub-systems anchored in the life-world operate in terms of communicative rationality. This argument is made plausible by a comparison with Habermas’ earlier attempts to understand social movements as simply ferments for a democratic learning process—a position whose ‘institutional deficit’ Cohen criticizes well in ‘Why More Political Theory’, Telos, No. 40, Summer, 1979.
- 54.
This neglect is perhaps due to its similarity to that neo-conservative argument against which Habermas continually polemicizes. The argument recalls Paul Piccone’s theory of ‘artificial negativity’ that was developed over the years in the journal Telos by Piccone and his pseudonymous double Moshe Gonzales, who polemicized frequently against Habermas.
- 55.
Habermas makes explicit use of the Marxist notion of a ‘real abstraction’ when discussing his political theory as such (e.g., in a crucial passage (TdkH, II, p. 593) that I will cite in a moment). In reply to his critics, he writes that although ‘Nothing was further from my mind than Marx-exegesis, I was only interested in comparing the transition from concrete to abstract labor with the transition from communicative action to media-directed interaction in such a way that my analysis of social pathologies would become understandable as an investigation of “real abstractions”’ (‘Entgegnung’, op. cit., p. 395; cf. also p. 389).
- 56.
Cohen makes a similar point in op. cit., p. 710. She attributes this to Habermas’ ‘revival of the classical breakdown thesis’. Her own positive interpretation of Habermas depends on the assumption that this Marxist element can be separated from Habermas’ argument. His use of the ‘real abstraction’ and his constant references to the Marxist model make me less confident.
- 57.
Habermas’ description can lead to confusions because he talks sometimes about an opposition of system and life-world in general, while stressing at other times the role of the functional media through which the system reproduces itself. In the latter case, for which Cohen and Arato’s Civil Society and Political Theory (1992) argues, colonization of the life-world means the spread of monetized and bureaucratic (or power) relations throughout the life-world, destroying the autonomy of communicative rationality that permits its reproduction without pathological distortions. This is the ‘empirical question’ that Habermas posed a moment ago. The difficulty is that, even if the empirical research does detect pathologies, this framework says nothing about how to confront them. Since the distinction and opposition of system and life-world is constitutive of modernity, whose project of Enlightenment Habermas wants to complete, it must be assumed that his theory would seek to propose other media that are characterized by something like what Ivan Illich called ‘conviviality’. The difficulty, however, remains: How does the threat posed by the old media become the basis for conscious ‘reflexive’ action? What is the political means for the invention of the new media? What is the theoretical status of a politics which does not limit itself to reconstruction? The theories of André Gorz will be seen in a moment to deal more adequately with this problem.
- 58.
Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), pp. 161, 162, 145. Other examples might be cited. The article ‘Does Philosophy Still Have a Purpose?’ had insisted that ‘great philosophy’ has come to an end; philosophy is ‘merely a branch of research among others’ (NLR, p. 85). Or, again, ‘The thinker as a form of life, as vision, as expressive self-presentation is no longer possible. I am no producer of Weltanschauungen; I would in fact like to produce a few small truths, not the one great truth’ (Aesthetik und Kommunikation, in NU, p. 207). Or, finally, in the NLR cited earlier, he explains his ‘somewhat restricted understanding of the task of philosophical ethics’ by asserting that ‘the philosopher ought to explain the moral point of view, and—as far as possible—justify the claim to universality of this explanation, showing why it does not merely reflect the moral intuitions of the average, male, middle-class member of a modern Western society. Anything further than that is a matter for moral discourse between participants’ (p. 84).
- 59.
In Bernstein, Habermas and Modernity, op. cit. Habermas does not really treat adequately some interesting questions posed by Jay concerning the theory of art and by Whitebook concerning psychoanalysis; he limits himself once again to explaining his own position.
- 60.
This is, of course, my reading of Habermas, from within the legacy. His own interpretation of the ‘challenge’ remains within the frame of his communication theory. ‘Now the change from one form of argument to another is often motivated internally, through bottlenecks in the course of the argument; but often such a transition needs external motivations (Anstösse)—namely, through problems that confront us (auf uns zukommen). How a transition takes place in each case is governed by the logic of argument; whether and when we must make a transition depends on that faculty of judgment that is embedded in communicative action. For this there is no meta-discourse’ (‘Entgegnung’, op. cit., p. 343).
When Habermas repeats this argument two pages later, the necessity for a theory of the political becomes clearer. ‘The pragmatic doubt concerning the Cartesian doubt is based on the experience that real problems emerge—and are not created by mere will. But we must pose such problems, which confront us (auf uns zukommen)—that is not a problem for the faculty of judgment. It is certainly true that often the transition to arguments is not the ‘most rational’ answer to a problematic situation. But that can be known only historically—and it is again not an affair for personal judgment. For example, it is only in the hypothetical look backwards that we are driven to the assumption that, after the defeat of the Nazis, a spontaneous reckoning that comes with a purifying revolt would not have been the better alternative to a decades long smoldering examination of conscience’ (ibid., p. 345). Habermas may have had in mind the experience of the 1918 Revolution in Germany that cast a shadow over the Weimar Republic. It seems less plausible for the period 1945–1949, when there were oppositional and trade union alternatives that were undermined by the policies of the occupying powers, as illustrated, for example, in Eberhard Schmidt’s Die verhinderte Neuordnung, 1945–1952 (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1970).
- 61.
‘Entgegnung’, op. cit. p. 393. Cf. the more detailed arguments in the title essay of Die neue Unübersichbarkeit, op. cit. Habermas does stress, as will Gorz, who studied carefully his work, that ‘In all events, for empirical reasons, I do not any longer believe that there is much hope for the democratic transformation from within of a differentiated economic system according to the simple recipes of workers self-management-that is, to want to transform entirely its steering from money and organizational power to participation’ (ibid., p. 392). This would imply that the Marxist notion of revolution, and a utopian Arbeitsgesellschaft, has to be replaced by a different set of political goals. This makes the restriction of democracy to a defensive reaction all the more disturbing.
- 62.
As will be seen, Lefort shows that the inability of Marxism to understand the political implications of human rights is due to Marx’s schematic view of history which portrays the replacement of the feudal ‘democracy of unfreedom’ by the economic structures of capitalist exploitation. Marx neglects the crucial fact that between feudalism and capitalism there existed the Absolute State, one of whose legitimizing claims was its nature as a Rechtsstaat .
- 63.
‘Entgegnung’, op. cit. p. 391.
- 64.
Sartre made the point explicitly in an interview with Michel Contat, ‘Autoportrait à 70 ans’, in Le Nouvel Observateur, juillet, 1975.
- 65.
The incomplete manuscript of the Critique de la Raison dialectique, tome II, subtitled ‘l’intelligibilité de l’Histoire’, has been published by Arlette Elkaim-Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1985) along with a revised version of the first volume, subtitled ‘Theorie des ensembles pratiques’. The revisions in the first volume mostly concern style, printer’s errors, as well as the insertion of subtitles to clarify the development of the argument. Elkaim-Sartre notes that during the 1958–1960 period when he wrote the Critique , Sartre was also working on his Flaubert, writing his autobiographical Les Mots, and develo** a movie scenario for the life of Freud while finishing the play The Condemned of Altona. Because of this hectic schedule he paid little attention to such editorial details in the Critique , explains Elkaim-Sartre.
- 66.
On that evolution, see the essay by the pseudonymous Antoine Liniers, in Terrorisme et démocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1985), and the study of the quite different evolutions of the Italian and German ultra-lefts by Philippe Reynaud in the same volume.
- 67.
I did not treat Gorz in the first edition of The Marxian Legacy, in part because this filiation was not apparent to me in his work at the time but also because his major philosophical work Les fondements pour une morale had not been published. For an evaluation of his early development prior to the Adieux, see my essay ‘New Situation, New Strategy: Serge Mallet and André Gorz’, in The Unknown Dimension: Post-Leninist Marxism, edited by myself and Karl E. Klare (New York: Basic Books, 1972). The reason for my re-evaluation of his place is explained by Gorz himself in an interview titled ‘Der Mensch ist ein Wesen, das sich zu dem zu machen hat, was es ist!’ in Soziale Bewegungen, Jahrhuch 2 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1985). Gorz stresses there his philosophical ambition to elaborate an existential ontology, of which one volume that was completed between 1946 and 1955 was published two decades later as Fondements pour une morale (Paris: Galilée, 1977). In 1958 and 1959, he published two more accessible, but still theoretical, essays, Le traître and La morale de l’histoire (both Paris: Editions du Seuil), to the first of which Sartre wrote a long Preface. When Sartre modified his philo-communist politics, moving toward the belief that anti-colonial rebellions, and especially the Algerian struggle for independence that culminated in 1962, now replaced the proletariat as the subject of world revolution, Gorz—who was a journalist for the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, as well as an editor of Les Temps Modernes—went his own way. His Strategy for Labor and Neo-Capitalism (1964) was his first answer to Sartre’s political inconsistencies. The answer must have been convincing, because by the time he published Le socialisme difficile (1967), the orientation of Les Temps modernes (of which Sartre remained the chief editor) had clearly followed his proposals. This was the political theory that had I treated in The Unknown Dimension. Gorz sees a theoretical continuity between his earlier essays from the 1950s, this second period in the 1970s, and the arguments proposed in his recent works, Adieux au prolétariat and Les chemins du Paradis (both Paris: Galilée, 1980,1983). Common to them all is the concern which animated Sartre: morality, its philosophical foundation, and its political translation. Discussion of the relation between the two periods, and his later work, is found in the more than 35 years’ correspondance between the two of us, now in the DH archives at Stony Brook University.
- 68.
Adieux au prolétariat (Paris: Galilée, 1980), pp. 13 and 91. Future references to this book will be indicated simply by the page number.
- 69.
Les chemins du Paradis (Paris: Galilée, 1983), p. 15. The Marxist intent of the book is apparent in its subtitle, ‘L’agonie du Capital’, which recalls the theoretical presuppositions of Marx’s own intended contribution to revolution. This is the reason that I will not deal with this book directly in the text and why I call it ‘more sociological’. As indicated below, Gorz insists that the difference of the two does not concern their theoretical foundations but the public to whom they are addressed. The ‘left’ public, he thought, could not ‘hear’ the arguments of the Adieux because it did not understand its language.
- 70.
This is a familiar difficulty for any moral philosophy. Gorz describes well the many reasons that explain why the leap is not taken in contemporary society. The most important are anchored in the developmental logic of the capitalist economy in its post-industrial phase which produces a dispersion and fragmentation that presents the illusion of individualization in consumer society that is conducive to ‘bad faith’. Because Gorz insists that capitalism no longer contains within itself any liberating potential, his positive politics has to explain how authentic ‘good faith’ can find a social anchor. His diagnosis of the end of capitalism’s liberating potential leaves only existential ontological freedom as the foundation of a future politics.
- 71.
In each illustration of the spheres of increased freedom, Gorz insists not only on the place but also on the limits of systemic necessity. The ‘tools of conviviality’ may be better, and socially less costly, if they are industrially produced. Insofar as Marx recognized that freedom exists only outside the workplace, Gorz criticizes the Marxist-feminist idea that housework should be treated as wage-labor. He considers this to be a form of alienation insofar as it treats individual freedom as if it were itself a commodity, placing it voluntarily within the sphere of necessity. Gorz insists on the implications of what he calls a ‘totalitarian pan-economism’ that considers society as a macro-subject while atomizing individual relations by treating them only from the utilitarian and functionalist point of view imposed by the necessities of capitalist reproduction. He uses the concept of ‘totalitarian’ to criticize the idea that the integration of the individual into the social community implies that personal and private-domestic life are nolens volens contributing to the reproduction of society and therefore should be remunerated by that community (e.g., with a guaranteed annual income). This political demand treats the personal and private-domestic spheres as commodities, accepting in this way the logic of capital. Similarly, the Marxist-feminist criticism of the way capitalism treats women, children, and the family tacitly accepts the logic of capitalism while restricting the domain of freedom. Against such politics, Gorz cites Marcuse’s essay on ‘Socialism and Feminism’ to argue that ‘post-industrial socialism will be féminine, or it will not exist at all’ (p. 120).
- 72.
Such a separation and autonomization of moments within the totality of a dialectical theory had already been criticized by Luxemburg; the (Hegelian) grounds for the interrelatedness of the whole were worked out by Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness. A similar point has been made vividly by Castoriadis. Separating Marx’s arguments from their revolutionary claim in order to ‘apply’ them to a different and new reality denies the originality of Marx’s theoretical and political claims. I will return to Castoriadis’ arguments in a moment.
- 73.
These assertions come in the answer to a question in the above-cited interview in Soziale Bewegung, pp. 121–122.
- 74.
Interview, Ibid., p. 146.
- 75.
Although Gorz rejected the Hegelian-Marxist theory of the proletariat as the agent and subject of history, his ‘non-class’ as a ‘non-proletariat’ is nonetheless its functional replacement. This is why he still has recourse to History, despite his rejection of the Marxist variants of its theory.
I should underline here that Gorz disagrees with this interpretation. He suggests that what I call ‘practice’ is ‘in fact a visible technical-economic change whose disintegrating effects on society we are witnessing or suffering’. Its most general characterization is the serial-individualization which destroys all sources of social cohesion; the imperatives of capitalism and the technological mutations that go with it guarantee that this process will continue. The result is that ‘the development of capitalism no longer holds any emancipatory potential. The question is how to bring this development under control, how to get a movement under way that will channel it towards human goals and put its own rationality in the place of a blind process’. Gorz therefore insists that it is neither modesty nor trust in the ‘movement of history’ that prevents him from proposing solutions, but rather ‘the fact that, at the present time, no such proposition could be credible and avoid being wishful thinking’.
The practical political conclusions that Gorz has been advocating on the basis of this analysis get their positive thrust not from a logic of history but from his ontological premises. His insistence on the primacy of individual freedom as self-determined action taking place within a sphere of necessity whose limits can be rolled back implies the need to give priority to a cultural politics. Gorz explains this orientation in an interview with Peter Glotz, ‘Kapitalistisches Konsummodell und Emanzipation’, in Die neue Gesellschaft, the semi-official monthly of the German Social Democratic Party (No. 5, May, 1986). The left, including the trade unions, must fight on the cultural plane for worker control over flexible time; it must replace the old struggle for equality with the goal of increasing the space of individual freedom. It must, in Glotz’s paraphrase, create a ‘left individualism’. Given the tendencies of contemporary capitalism, this is a feasible short-term goal; it is built on the ‘(re)creation of micro-social bonds, of a network of societal relations that cannot as yet be knitted into a societal totality and (as far as I am concerned) never should be … The most urgent task of unions and parties is to help micro-societies to emerge, to help the aggregation and solidarity and mutual aid of the individuals emerging from social disintegration’. (Non-attributed citations here are from a personal letter that is part of a 35-year correspondence with Gorz, much of which is found with his papers at the archives of the IMEC in France and now also in the DH archives at Stony Brook University.)
Within the context of the Marxian legacy, these at first plausible arguments still seem to me still to fall short. The theorist continues to be absent; ontology replaces History; and the question of the political that briefly emerged is submerged. Gorz objects to my tendency to underemphasize the economic. But the meaning of the economic, and the kind of necessity it imposes, depends on the political question that gives it meaning. The contemporary economic developments that Gorz describes could, as he admits, give rise to a one-dimensional society dominated by its culture industry. The liberation of the economic, and hence the ability to understand its function in a given society, depends on the question of its political place, as Gorz himself suggested in the Adieux. The movement that I say Gorz assumes as existing ‘out there’ is produced by the economic mutations that he describes; we both agree that if it does not learn to identify itself and find plausible goals, it will never realize human goals and a humane society. The existence of that ‘absent presence’ identified by Habermas, which Gorz calls the political, keeps open the room for that development, which of course depends finally on individual (and collective) action for its realization.
- 76.
Although he would vehemently deny it, what I called Habermas’ reactive theory of democracy reflects also involuntarily such ‘existentialist’ traits.
- 77.
I will not attempt to compare the contributions of Lefort and Castoriadis, as if the ‘correctness’ of one analysis meant automatically the ‘error’ of the other. There are of course differences between them, as concerns the analysis of totalitarianism and with regard to the politics of democracy, as will be apparent. What is important in the present context is the way that Lefort and Castoriadis demonstrate why and how the legacy must become self-critical without losing its thrust as radical interrogation. Also worth mentioning again here is the fact (discussed in the new introduction to this third edition of The Marxian Legacy) that insofar as the New Left identified itself as ‘leftist’ because of its anti-capitalism, it had difficulty accepting the critique of totalitarianism, pointing out that during the Cold War the supporters of that critique were defenders of capitalism; and for the same ideological reasons the New Left tended to ignore the relation of that critique of totalitarianism to the politics of democracy.
- 78.
Lefort also published two collections of his earlier writings, to which I referred frequently in The Marxian Legacy on the basis of offprints or manuscripts that he had given me. The earlier volumes are Les formes de l’histoire. Essais d’anthroplogie politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) and Sur une colonne absente. Ecrits autour de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Gallimard, 1978).
The three new volumes are Un homme en trop. Réflexions sur L’Archipel du Goulag (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976, second edition 1986), L’invention démocratique. Les limites de la domination totalitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1981), and Essais sur le politique. XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986). I will refer to these works in the text as UH, ID, and EP, following citations with a page number.
After the demise of the journal Libre, of which Lefort and Castoriadis were among the editors, Lefort founded a new journal, Passé-Présent, of which four volumes appeared before its demise.
- 79.
Lefort draws some of the implications of this position in his essay commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. Despite the massive departures from the Communist Party after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, French intellectuals did not really understand the meaning of that revolution. Their critique of totalitarianism found a more accommodating platform in the Prague Spring of 1968 because—adopting the position Lefort described as “progressive intellectuals”, they continued to think about politics from the point of view of political power, as if that were the place where the fate of socialism is decided. Reform, their politics implies, is what the East needs; real revolution can take place only in conditions of capitalism.
The originality of the Hungarian Revolution as Lefort portrays it 20 years later is not limited to the formation of the workers’ councils, their mode of election of delegates, and use of the imperative mandate. Lefort considers the debate of the Budapest council whether to decree itself a national council, to which the provincial delegates could adhere later if they so decided it was more significant. The option for efficiency in the face of danger was rejected in favor of the democratic movement from below because the workers knew from experience the limits of a top-down governmental structure (even if it were in the ‘good’ hands of Nagy and his ministers). They knew too the difference of economic and political power, which is why they insisted that even in a democratic government, unions must have the right to strike, and that the factory councils retained the right to propose changes. In a word, they rejected the idea of a wholly unified society because they had experienced the totalitarian relations that accompany it. Their goal was to prevent power from solidifying, to separate law from interest, and knowledge from ideology. This option for democracy rather than efficiency was not the ‘finally discovered solution’ that Marx thought he had seen in the Paris Commune. It was the way to pose the question of democracy, of power and the limits of even their own power. (See ‘Une autre révolution’, as well as Lefort’s essay on the Polish Solidarnosʹcʹ, ‘Reculer les frontières du possible’, in ID.)
- 80.
Of course the Egocrat may die, and he need not be replaced by another Egocrat; Stalin’s successors enjoyed a different status than their singular master. Lefort’s point is that the advent of totalitarianism—not only in Russia, but elsewhere: in China, Cuba, or Ethiopia, among others—demands his existence in order to constitute the logic of unification of state and society in the form of the united people which preserves the image of its unity in the act of eliminating particularity. This point is stressed in ‘Staline et le stalinisme’, in ID, where Lefort recalls the difficulties of Trotsky in the face of Stalinism. Trotsky could explain Stalin by historical events (such as the decimation of the politicized working class in the struggles following 1917); or he could explain Stalinism as the result of bureaucratic distortions (due to the entry of opportunistic and mediocre cadres into the Party once Stalin was in power). He could not explain the new political logic of totalitarianism. The attempt to say that Stalin’s excesses were necessary in order to justify the sacrifices necessary to create the material infrastructure of socialism supposes that socialism is simply the end of social relations based on private property; and it implies that such excesses are merely the political form necessary to accomplish this transformation. That makes Stalinism a political necessity, at least in the short-run. Trotsky did come to see, toward the end of his life, one fundamental characteristic of Stalinism. Where the absolute monarch might say, ‘L’état, c’est moi’, Stalin could affirm, ‘La société, c’est moi’. This insight is, for Lefort, crucial.
- 81.
Lefort points out that these rationalizations parallel those that serve Western intellectuals who still defend the truth of Marxism. Typical rationalizations include the following: Marx didn’t say that; your source or informant is a false one; the texts cited show the remnants of bourgeois tradition; they are the texts of youth, circumstantial or accidental; only the logic of the system as a whole counts; this is simply another reason to separate true Marxism from its empirical deformations; and so on.
- 82.
This is the reason that Lefort’s concept of totalitarianism cannot be equated with the empirical social-science formulations of that concept used especially in the context of Cold War ideology since it was first formulated by Brzezinski and Friedrich. When Lefort—or Castoriadis—insists on the radical difference between totalitarianism and classical forms of despotism or authoritarianism, the claim should not be confused with the distinction by Jean Kirkpatrick that was adopted by the Reagan administration. Lefort and Castoriadis are not claiming that the Soviet Union is totalitarian and therefore unchangeable for all eternity. The critique of totalitarianism exists also within totalitarianism itself, as Volume III of the Gulag Archipelago shows.
- 83.
The term is in fact misleading here if it is identified with Sartre’s philosophy or his politics. Lefort’s interweaving of the ‘existential’ into the political is most clearly presented in his essay on La Boétie, ‘Le nom d’Un’, published as a Postface to the re-edition of Le Discours de la servitude volontaire (Paris: Payot, 1976). La Boétie’s interrogation of the ‘voluntary’ nature of political submission is not concerned simply to explain the ‘desire’ of the empirical individuals; he shows ‘the plurality covered over by the fiction of the singular, a fiction whose irresistible effect is to lead us to conceptualize the people as we do Man in general and to erase the social relations under the supposition of a human nature’ (p. 267). In a movement partially analogous to the symbolic logic that presides over the birth of the Egocrat, Lefort asserts that ‘attached to the visible body of the tyrant, who is only one among others, is the image of a body without equivalent or model, at once entirely separated from those who see it (and, in this separation, entirely self-related) and which, entirely visible and entirely active, leaves nothing existing outside itself. It is the image of a separated power above the mass of the powerless, the master of the existence of each and of all; but also the image of the society as wholly self-related and having a single and unique organic identity. Or, to put it more strongly, the same image condenses division [of the monarch from society] and the absence of division [in society itself]’ (ibid.). From the side of the subject, Lefort describes a ‘self-love’ and ‘social narcissism’ whose effect is a willed submission that is similar to the self-conception of the Bien-pensant in the Gulag. ‘With submission, the charm of the name of One destroyed the articulation of political language. The people wants to be named; but the name in which the difference between individuals is abolished along with the enigma of social division, and the test of unending social recognition is the name of the tyrant’ (p. 274). The difference of La Boétie’s tyrant from the Egocrat is that the monarch remains separate from the society he unifies. This monarchical tyrant cannot say, with Stalin, ‘La société, c’est moi’.
Turning to the practical implications of the argument, Lefort notes that La Boétie stresses ‘the desire of the dominated; the strength of the tyrant, the efficacity of his lies, are shown to depend on their demand to be deceived. This leads us to think that reflection on the political is bound up with a political project [to free us from illusion]’ (p. 296). Lefort then goes on to show that the political critique entails a social analysis that is based on the distinction between the dominated and the dominators that is itself instituted by the institution of political forms. He asserts that ‘the secret and wellspring of domination depends on the desire in each, at whatever level of the hierarchy, to identify with the tyrant by making himself the master of another. The chain of identification is such that the lowest of the slaves wants [nonetheless] to think he is a god ... the enslavement of all is bound up with the desire of each to be carriers of the name of One in the face of the others. The phantasm of the One is not only that of a people united and named; it is simultaneously that of each man as a little tyrant within society’ (p. 301). This is the political situation that also makes possible the constitution of bourgeois society under the domination of the institution of absolute monarchy, within whose political forms both the bourgeoisie and the democratic project are born. As will be seen in a moment, Lefort’s insistence on the political role played by the absolute monarchy adds a space left out of the Marxist theory of History.
- 84.
Lefort’s essay on the ‘Permanence du théologico-politique?’, in EP, presents a sustained critique of the positivism of political science and shows the relation of its implicit theoretical presuppositions to the logic of totalitarianism. By showing that the theological has a justifiable claim to found symbolically the political institutions of pre-democratic societies, Lefort refutes the vision of history as a series of events taking place in a social space. As elsewhere, Lefort scorns the ‘little professors of atheism’ whose unthinking positivism denies the religious along with the question to which it tries to present an answer.
- 85.
This argument was important in France, where the belated discovery of Soviet totalitarianism by the left, along with the failures of the Socialist government elected in 1981, turned many ‘progressive intellectuals’ toward the supposed virtues of economic liberalism. The validity of the critique of liberal-capitalist society , and of its specific bureaucratic forms of domination, is not lessened by the critique of totalitarianism. See, for example, ‘L’impensée de l’Union de la gauche’ in ID, as well as ‘La question de la démocratie’ and ‘Les droits de l’homme et l’Etat-providence’, in EP.
- 86.
In this context, Lefort criticizes Furet’s innovative interpretation of the French Revolution (in Penser la Révolution française) as founded on the ‘illusion of the political’. Lefort titles his appreciatively critical essay, ‘Penser la révolution dans la Révolution française’ (in EP; cf. also, the study ‘Edgar Quinet: La Révolution manquée’). Furet tends to restrict the political to what is done in and by actors involved in empirical politics. He sees that the French Revolution brought democracy to France; but he treats its dynamic at the level of ideology, which is only a partial description of the effects of the destruction of the visible element of power of the Ancien Régime. The excess of the Revolution beyond its ideological form points to the fact that the emergence of democracy is based on a gap between the symbolic and the real, which in turn expresses a division within the being of the social. The failure of the Revolution to culminate in a representative democracy was not due to its ideology, as Furet’s account suggests. As Edgar Quinet saw, the Revolution’s ideology was unable to recognize its own political radicality; heir to the monarchy, it attempted to replace that incarnation of society by that of le peuple rather than admit that the impossibility of bringing such an unified political figure into reality meant the opening of that infinite debate on the foundations of legitimacy, which is another way of defining democracy.
- 87.
Lefort developed the notion of incorporation, with its reference to the need to fix representation in a body (le corps), in a lecture presented to a group of psychoanalysts, ‘L’image du corps et le totalitarisme’, in ID, pp. 159ff. The influence of psychoanalysis on Lefort’s thought, mentioned in Chap. 8, cannot be explored further here. The liberals’ notion of incorporation represents the positivist alternative to a theory of history as ‘flesh’. Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of totalitarianism made frequent use of images of incorporation, speaking of the bureaucracy, for example, as the ‘organs’ which have ‘tentacles’, develop ‘muscles’, and attempt to make society into one great ‘Organ’ (UH, pp. 29, 119).
- 88.
This essay was discussed earlier, in Chap. 8.
- 89.
Lefort’s fundamental reference here is Kantorowicz’s monumental study of The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). His most detailed discussion of these arguments is found in ‘Permanence du théologico-politique?’ in EP. Kantorowicz distinguishes four formations through which the transition from monarchy to the modern state passes: a Christo-centric power is replaced by a juridico-centric, then a politico-centric, and finally a humano-centric formation. In each case, the monarch makes visible in his person the union and the division of the natural and the supernatural, the finite and the infinite. The power of this symbolic representation of the political carries over into the secular state; Bracton, for example, speaks of the king as the vicar of the treasury; as such, the monarch is the public body of the state. At this point, the relation of the invisible and the invisible is transformed; monarchical power in the state claims universality, yet the territorial body of the kingdom, nation, or people is a particular reality that by nature is limited. Universal authority without limits is joined to limited authority; universal values are claimed to be present in a specific territory. The democratic revolution will consummate a rupture with this instable ‘theologico-political formation’.
- 90.
Lefort illustrates the role of the symbolic in the electoral process of contemporary politics. The idea of elections appeared scandalous to nineteenth-century liberals and conservatives (as well as to Marxists). It is a neutral procedure by which the plurality of constituents in a divided and conflicting empirical society are represented by a simple addition of votes by citizens each of whom is considered as abstractly equal. This procedure not only legitimates the divisions in the empirical society; it also symbolizes the dissolution of the pre-modern corporate body of society while affirming the legitimacy of the popular sovereignty that is expressed in the form of an interrogation. The symbolic dissolution of pre-existing social interests, influences, and personalities reaffirms that the place of power is in principle empty; those who claim the right to occupy it can always be challenged and their legitimacy questioned. This procedure confirms a new relation between society and the political form that makes its identity visible in the form of a question (ID, p. 148f; cf. ID, p. 176, and EP, p. 28f ).
- 91.
Castoriadis will insist on the real threat of Soviet expansion on the basis of a different analysis of the Soviet Union. Both agree that the inability of democracy to realize its own specificity constitutes a major weapon in the Soviet arsenal. They disagree on the reasons that could lead the Russians to use it, and the manner of its potential use.
- 92.
C.f., the two essays, ‘Droits de l’homme et politique’, in ID, and ‘Les droits de l’homme et l’Etat-providence’, in EP. I will concentrate on the first, to which the second adds a discussion of the ‘neo-liberal’ (and conservative) criticism of his position by Pierre Manent. That criticism suggests that the increase in rights produces necessarily an increased role for the state. Lefort admits this as an empirical possibility, but points out that it does not affect the symbolic articulation of political relations by a politics of the rights of man. Manent’s position tends to conflate too easily the welfare-state with the totalitarian state. For his part, Lefort insists on the way that the recognition of the rights of man is based on ‘the right to have a right’ as a symbolic mutation of what he earlier called the ‘mise en sens’ of the political, which opens the endless democratic adventure. Rights are declared by men; their only guarantee is the public action by other men who recognize the legitimacy of the idea of rights. Included in this guarantee is the right to question those specific rights proclaimed by the state on the basis of ‘the legitimacy of a debate on the legitimate and the illegitimate’ (EP, p. 53). Lefort argues strongly against those for whom the rights of man are a ‘luxury’ that poorer nations cannot afford, condemning the ‘disdain’ involved in refusing to others the right to have a right without which they are reduced symbolically to the status of animals (EP, p. 54).
- 93.
Lefort points out that Marx’s critique of ‘abstract man’ is shared by conservatives like Burke and de Maistre and by bourgeois liberals like Guizot. The foundation of the rights of this ‘man’ is not found in nature or in reason; their foundation expresses the new structure of the political brought by the logic of democracy (EP, p. 51). Lefort’s critique of Marx’s materialist interpretation of ideology shows that he neglects to look at the real possibilities opened up by the symbolic mutation of the political.
- 94.
This misunderstanding results from the fact that rights are declared by men, who in that action declare their humanity and their co-existence as equal individuals, at the same time that these rights claim to be more than simply a human artifice. The crucial element defining the universality of rights is their presence in a public space. Lefort insists (in EP, p. 53ff ) that although the majority may support rights with which others disagree, the degradation of human rights does not result from errors by the majority but from the deformation or elimination of that public space. He admits that the increased function of the state can be interpreted as shrinking this public space; but he criticizes the neo-liberals for not seeing that increased mass participation in that space has also arisen as new rights are demanded and injustices denounced. ‘There is no institution that, by its very nature, can guarantee the existence of a public space in which the questioning of right is propagated. But, reciprocally, that space supposes that distinct institutions articulate the image of their own legitimacy, and that the actors within those institutions exercise their political responsibility’ (EP, p. 57). Lefort employs the classical political term ‘corruption’ to denounce the parties, press, and legal institutions that deny their public responsibility by virtue of their self-interested behavior. His argument concludes with a triumphant comparison of the claim by the conservative Gaullist French Justice Minister, Alain Peyrefitte, that ‘public opinion’ was not ready to accept the abolition of the death penalty with his Socialist successor (after 1981), Badinter, who spoke the language of justice, succeeded in prohibiting the death penalty because he understood that ‘opinion’ is not constituted by fears, hatreds and the desire for vengeance.
- 95.
Since the first edition of The Marxian Legacy, Castoriadis has continued the republication of his earlier essays in the collection 10/18 and published two volumes of newer theoretical and political essays under the title Les carrefours du labyrinthe (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978, 1986). He also published the first volume of Devant la guerre (Paris: Fayard, 1981) which develops his analysis of the Soviet Union to a new stage. His ontology, whose first phase is presented in L’institution imaginaire de la société, discussed in the Legacy, has been refined in the Carrefours volumes, as well as two volumes in preparation, titled tentatively l’Element imaginaire and la Création humaine. Citations in the text below refer to the second volume of Carrefours, titled Domaines de l’homme, as DdH, and to DlG, followed by a page number. I will not return to the materials treated in the first edition, which are now collected in the first volume of Les carrefours.
- 96.
This could be taken as a critique of Lefort’s analysis of totalitarianism, although Lefort insists that he is describing a symbolic political logic, not a social reality. Conversely, Lefort could be criticizing Castoriadis’ arguments in Devant la guerre when he asserts that ‘one hears that the Soviet Union is a formidable power against which the armies of the West are of little weight, that their only chance is to hide under the nuclear umbrella ... But then one must explain that this formidable power is subject to no less formidable contradictions; that the bureaucratic State shows itself to be undermined by corruption; that in the USSR itself ideology has weakened; that if Russian nationalism can still assure resistance to the enemy, as it did during the last war, nothing justifies the belief that a society where oppression and penury are the rule is capable of furnishing a faith in conquering communism! ... One must stop giving credibility to the image of a Russian colossus which could suddenly turn on Western Europe, eat and digest it in a few weeks, unless it is stopped by the arm of deterrence’ (ID, pp. 37–8). For his part, Castoriadis asserts explicitly that although the Soviet Union is ‘no doubt still pregnant with a revolution’, he abstracts from that possibility in the present analysis (DLG, p. 217; cf. CL, p. 186). Since the second promised volume of Devant la guerre has not been published, no more can be said about this matter.
I will not follow the sni** attacks of Castoriadis on Lefort, or vice-versa; neither names the other as the object of his attacks. My concern is not the opposition between Lefort and Castoriadis but their respective contributions to the Marxian legacy. The basic difference between the two men that led to Lefort’s departure from Socialisme ou Barbarie concerned the nature of the ‘revolutionary organization’ and the possibility of a realized revolution. That difference remains; it is apparent in the attitude of each to the nature of a democratic society. The new refinements each has added to the critique of Marxism permitted their elaboration of different means to grasp the legacy still manifest the basic difference—Lefort develo** a theory of political history, Castoriadis a philosophical ontology. With regard to the nature of totalitarianism, their paths diverge radically. It was the publication of the first part of Devant la guerre in the Libre (No. 8) that led to a final break and to the journal’s disappearance.
- 97.
This formulation is my way of accounting for an apparent inconsistency in Castoriadis’ account. He explains the radically new Soviet regime as a development from the earlier ‘total bureaucratic capitalism’ while at the same time insisting on its radical novelty. He writes, for example, that ‘just as when the imaginary of the unlimited expansion of “rational” mastery takes hold of the western world, it finds—rather, it creates—a privileged sector of social life where it at first incarnates itself. This sector is production, taking the form of organization called the firm, and finding a first human “natural” and “organic” carrier which is the capitalist class. In the same way, at the end of its path—and after having exhausted the “politico-ideological” field by means of the total domination of the Party/State—this unlimited expansion of mastery becomes the simple reign of brute force wrapped in nationalist imperialism; it finds its natural field in violence, its form of organization in the industrialized modern Army, and its appropriate human carrier in what I have called military society’ (DLG, p. 260).
This argument seems to suggest that the new Soviet form, like capitalism, is simply a variant within the ‘imaginary institution’ that began in the fourteenth century. More strongly, it suggests that the Soviet Union has brought this imaginary to its ‘logical’ conclusion and its self-negation. In that case, however, it would not be a new creation. My formulation tries to avoid this ‘Hegelian-Marxism’ which projects a logic of historical necessity by suggesting that there is an ontological underpinning explaining how the new can be instituted without radically negating what preceded it. This would explain why, just as totalitarianism need not arise only where its ‘material conditions’ are prepared, so too the new Soviet model can be seen—bastardized—in some Third World dictatorships.
- 98.
It is not important in the present context to decide whether Castoriadis’ thesis is empirically valid—indeed, although he provides extensive documentation, his argument is conducted essentially on the level of political theory and its ontological foundations. Its relation to Castoriadis’ understanding of democracy, and particularly the ontological distinction between heteronomy and autonomy, will be developed in a moment.
- 99.
Castoriadis explains the theoretical preconditions for this process in ‘L’imaginaire: la création dans le domaine social-historique’, in DdH, pp. 219–237. He uses the concept of the ‘imaginary’ to refer to social significations in order to indicate that these neither correspond to nor are exhausted by references to the rational or the real; they are an ontological creation. Significations cannot be explained on the basis of non-significations, nor can they be reduced to a single, univocal element. This imaginary creation produces a world that can be understood by ‘identitary-ensemblist’ logic. This logic in effect forms a code that filters the world; it has no signification in itself; its own sense is instituted. Sense is the product of the imaginary; it is not determined, and the relations it establishes are not causal. Sense can only be ‘elucidated’, not explained. As Castoriadis argues in greater detail elsewhere, all social systems contain these two moments of creation and identitary-ensemblist code, as does all language, which cannot explain why the word dog is a ‘dog’ and the number three relates to god. Brute Force is the limit case of this relation, whereas the ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ of mathematics, despite its apparent abstraction, demonstrates the power of the imaginary in Castoriadis’ scheme (Cf. CL, pp. 448ff ).
- 100.
The 1986 Preface to the Polish edition of Devant la guerre stresses the failure of Reagan’s politics, at home, and with regard to rearmament. Leaving aside cost-overruns like $200 hammers and $800 toilet seats, the question that concerns Castoriadis is what strategic good has been done by this program? He points out that there is a difference between having political tactics and deciding to pay for them, which he attributes to the Americans, as contrasted with what he sees as Soviet spending with no political or strategic goals. The imaginary logic of liberal capitalism assumes that all problems can be solved and that money will buy or produce the technology needed to solve these problems. The twin questions that remain to be resolved from this perspective are: will anti-bureaucratic political movements arise in the West when Reaganism and Thatcherism dissolve? And second, has Russian society has become so atomized that it remains caught up in Great-Russian chauvinism with the result that nothing positive can be expected from it? In the meanwhile, Castoriadis adds significantly, the Polish resistance to the government of general Jaruzelski shows that the struggle for freedom remains alive still in the lands of communism and that its realization demands not just a desire but a struggle (in DdH, pp. 122f and 126f ).
- 101.
Castoriadis’ comparison of his notion of autonomous social institution to the biological account of Varela suggests the difference between his manner of accepting the dialectic of enlightenment and that of another heir of Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas. Both society and the organism have a form of organizational, informational, and cognitive closure. Both create their own world, in which they include themselves. They distinguish what is information, noise, and nothing at all; as systems, they have a programed response to any given facts once they identify them. As opposed to Habermas, Castoriadis insists that societies do not ‘contain’ a system that is distinct from their life-world; they are this system. As opposed to Varela’s biological concept of autonomy which is defined by its closure, Castoriadis insists that the institution of society cannot be closed; if it were, the result would be either paranoia or ‘the end of history’. Society is not organized functionally by its ends; it can constantly renew itself because it is essentially open to self-interrogation. Its finality is not its own reproduction; it posits values, which it seeks to preserve. The ‘circle of creation’ means that there is no external observer who, like the biologist or the critical systems-theorist, can explain these values. At most, societies like the Greek and its European legatees may institute a type of self-reference (DdH, pp. 226–228, 236–7).
- 102.
As a contemporary illustration, Castoriadis’ essay on the death of Brezhnev, ‘The Russian Regime will succeed Itself’, points out that those who expect that conflict will eventually break out within the Soviet Union are projecting a schema onto Russian history ‘that has proven true nowhere outside of “European” history’ (CL, p. 73). There is no reason to think that the cynical society instituted by and for Brute Force belongs to that tradition. Cf. the discussion of ‘Development’ and ‘Rationality’, in DdH, esp. pp. 165ff, and the essay in the same volume, ‘Third World, Third-Worldism, Democracy’, esp. p. 109.
- 103.
Castoriadis stresses the fact that the Greek organization of public life was founded on a notion of logos as the circulation of words. Each individual must have an equal right to speak frankly (isegoria), and each must speak frankly concerning public affairs (parrhesia). Historiography was invented by the Greeks in order to keep before the public its own temporality. Political experts never emerged because it was clear that a good judge of a product can only be its user. The remarkable institution of the graphe paranomon was invented to permit the people to question its own laws; it instituted the possibility to challenge a regularly voted law before by a jury chosen at random, listening again to the arguments that at first seemed convincing, and if necessary correcting decisions made under the influence of popular passion. Finally, the Greeks invented tragedy to represent the chaos of Being, the lack of order in the world, and the absence of correspondence between intention, action, and results (Cf. DdH, pp. 286–306). (It need not be stressed that the theoretical implication of the ‘oath’ in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory has literally nothing in common with the Sartrean version of the same concept, which depends on a self-willed alienation of each participant creating a heteronomous structure of domination.)
- 104.
Castoriadis replies to Lefort (again without naming him) in this context. The rejection of the possibility of a totally transparent society is based on an ‘(already debatable) empirical observation dressed as an ontological tautology’ (DdH, p. 381). Societies may hide the radical creativity by which they institute themselves from themselves; that is the function played especially but not exclusively by religion. That does not mean, insists Castoriadis, that they must always deny their own self-institution. Autonomy does not mean self-transparency any more than it means the absence of rules. Autonomy refers to the relation that a society institutes to its rules just as, in the case of psychoanalysis, autonomy does not mean the replacement of the unconscious by self-transparent rationality. Castoriadis concludes that Freud’s famous aphorism ‘Where it was I must be’ should be completed by the adage ‘Where I am, it must emerge’ (CL, p. 102).
- 105.
This lack of any defined or definable limit only apparently links capitalism and democracy. Autonomous democracy is aware of the need to limit itself even though it recognizes also that an external limit cannot be determined without introducing heteronomy. The rationality of capitalism, on the other hand, is based on the principle of unlimited expansion. This is why the ‘crisis of development’ in the Third World is a threat to capitalism (DdH, pp. 138–143). Similarly, capitalism is threatened from within because its logic of infinite development may prove to be an abstract formalism incapable of producing that sense of meaning, without which social life loses its direction (DdH, pp. 416ff ).
- 106.
The relation between the internal and the external threat to European democracy remains to be elaborated in the second volume of Devant la guerre. The internal threat is lodged first of all in the ‘dual institution’ of contemporary Western societies that can tilt toward capitalist values of unlimited expansion if the specificity of the limits of their democratic political institutions is not recognized. The role that Castoriadis attributes to the transformation in the conditions of women and youth suggests that the failure to recognize the political potential of these social transformations (which Castoriadis does not identify as such with the ‘new social movements’) is also an internal threat. Castoriadis develops the implications of this suggestion in a debate with Daniel Cohn-Bendit published as De l’ecologie à l’autonomie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981). He distinguishes between a system of political authority and a scheme of needs, which together constitute the institution of society. Ecology has put into question the latter while recognizing that solutions cannot wait until after ‘the Revolution’. The relation between the new needs and the global society that imposes limits on what the free individual can without telling him what he must will remain an open question. This paradoxical structure that integrates freedom with a recognition of its own limits both preserves and threatens democracy.
- 107.
Claus Offe, who tries to combine the impetus of the New Left with the critical theory of Habermas in an empirical political sociology, makes this point in the Introduction to an English collection of his essays, Disorganized Capitalism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986). His work has ‘attempted to think of the modern state as a highly complex agency that performs a variety of different historically and systemically interrelated functions which can neither be reduced to a mere reflection of the matrix of social power not considered as part of an unlimited multitude of potential state functions’ (p. 4). Offe analyzes the way the implantation of democracy affects the processes by which political authority is legitimated. His notion of ‘disorganized capitalism’ suggests a ‘heuristic’ approach to the inability of modern democratic societies to conceive of themselves from within themselves; it serves, in other words, as a critique of the positivism of political sociology. Offe does not make fully explicit the implications of his approach because, like Habermas, he still thinks of politics as a response to social problems rather than as questioning of society by itself through the mediation of the political. Offe remains, in his own terms, a political sociologist.
- 108.
The ambiguity of the new social movements on this regard is most obvious in the ‘peace movements’, as Castoriadis in particular has argued. The various points of view concerning the ambivalent potential of this phenomenon are well-represented in Telos, No. 51, Spring, 1982.
- 109.
The suggestion appears in their numerous essays over the past years in Telos, and in Cohen’s Introductory essay to a special edition of Social Research devoted to the new social movements from which I cited her comments concerning Habermas. Although Arato and Cohen use Habermasian concepts to articulate their theory, its implications go beyond the limits of Habermas’ conception of democracy.
- 110.
Cf. Andrew Arato, ‘Civil Society Against the State: Poland 1980–81’, in Telos, No. 47, Spring, 1981, pp. 23–47, and Andrew Arato, ‘Empire vs. Civil Society: Poland 1981–82’, in Telos, No. 50, Winter, 1981–82, pp. 19–48. Arato notes, for example, that ‘Instead of claiming to represent society, the workers’ organization played a major role in hel** organize other strata such as peasants and students’ (p. 24). ‘Society’ is not the replacement for Marx’s proletariat as the subject-object of History; society becomes civil society in the action of the new social movements.
- 111.
Pierre Hassner traces the changing meanings of the notion of totalitarianism from its theoretical-philosophical formulation by Hannah Arendt to its social-science and cold-war interpretation by Brzezinski and Friedrich, which then dominated the discussion among political scientists. Hassner concludes his well-documented survey with the observation that ‘[w]e began from the idea of introducing a political science perspective into the French approach to totalitarianism which seemed to us—and still seems to us—too ideological. We conclude with the idea that the concept of totalitarianism is not a concept of political science’. The basis for this assertion is formulated on the same page: ‘No doubt the political scientist can only recognize different forms of authoritarianism; and the notion of totalitarianism takes on its sense, as Lefort suggests, only with respect to a theory of democracy and of the rights of man—and, one should add, a theory of the relations between language and society, or between philosophy and politics’. C.f., ‘Le totalitarisme vu de l’Ouest’, in Totalitarismes, op. cit., p. 36.
- 112.
It is not surprising that most of the neo-conservatives and many of the post-modernists are former Marxists. The adventures of the radical Trotskyists around the Partisan Review whose quest to preserve the radicality of their revolutionary position took the form of a determined defense of modernist art and an equally determined attack on totalitarianism stand as a signpost and warning. Their anti-totalitarian politics was transformed gradually into a defense of 1950s America at the same time that its aesthetic partners succeeded, in Serge Guilbaut’s phrase, in ‘stealing modern art from Paris’. It does not follow from this, as Guilbaut’s reductionist account implies, that some sort of Marxism would have been a better option. The cautionary tale is rather that the radical critics transformed a political question into a sociological solution. From this point of view, the ‘slippery slope’ of the Partisan Review and those who once shared its radical goals did not manifest itself in the magazine’s famous 1952 debate in which they ‘chose America’. The roots of their descent are found in their option for a really existing, if socially critical, aesthetics as an answer to an essentially political question.
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Howard, D. (2019). Actualizing the Legacy—New Social Movements in the West and Civil Society against the State in the East. In: The Marxian Legacy. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4_10
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