Political Philosophy and Public Purpose

Series Editor

Michael J. Thompson

William Paterson University, New York, NY, USA

This series offers books that seek to explore new perspectives in social and political criticism. Seeing contemporary academic political theory and philosophy as largely dominated by hyper-academic and overly-technical debates, the books in this series seek to connect the politically engaged traditions of philosophical thought with contemporary social and political life. The idea of philosophy emphasized here is not as an aloof enterprise, but rather a publicly-oriented activity that emphasizes rational reflection as well as informed praxis.

More information about this series at http://​www.​palgrave.​com/​gp/​series/​14542

Dick Howard

The Marxian LegacyThe Search for the New Left3rd ed. 2019

Dick Howard

Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, New York, NY, USA

ISSN 2524-714Xe-ISSN 2524-7158

Political Philosophy and Public Purpose

ISBN 978-3-030-04410-7e-ISBN 978-3-030-04411-4

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4

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In Memory of

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997)

And

Claude Lefort (1924–2010)

Series Editor’s Foreword

As a new era of populism dawns, there is a kind of nostalgia that sets in when thinking about how the New Left of the late 1960s and 1970s unfolded. It is all too easy to forget the seriousness of the ways that this generation was rethinking society, culture, politics, the family, and the self. It is all too easy for its intellectual and political impulses to be obscured by the way it has been framed in popular memory and consciousness mediated by the conservative 1980s: as a movement bloated by hyper-idealism, reckless social criticism , evincing what Samuel Huntington referred to in the 1970s as an ‘excess of democracy’ . What all of this hides from view, however, is the ways that many of this generation—both in the West and the Soviet East—were rethinking democracy and, more centrally, the ideas of Marx. In this sense, Dick Howard’s seminal book, The Marxian Legacy , is at once both a document of that period’s attempt to rethink and recreate Marxian critique and a document marking a crucial evolutionary stage in Marxian theory itself.

I first encountered the first edition of this book in the 1990s when, as a graduate student , I was engaged in my own project of reconstructing the shattered pieces of Western Marxism into a more coherent, critical form of theory. Amid the debris left in the wake of postmodern political theory and philosophy , it was a tonic—for it framed Marxism as a reservoir of ideas and principles that could help shape a new critical consciousness . Howard’s exploration of the ideas of Ernst Bloch , Rosa Luxemburg , Max Horkheimer, and Jean-Paul Sartre , among others, retains its ability to reward those who see the need for a form of critique that can retain both its power to give insight into the realist-materialist structures of power and the humanistic-democratic ideas that must serve to displace and transform them. For this reason, Howard sees Marx’s ideas as currently in evolution and development by successive generations of radical thinkers. Just as the writings of the Young Marx were once used to critique the orthodox scientism of rigid orthodoxy, so today can we see in the Marxian legacy a capacity of a renewal of more robust democratic and humanist principles that underwrite the Marxian project of critique.

Such a project is in need now just as urgently as in the past. New forms of authoritarianism are gaining legitimacy, populism has taken a decidedly right-wing turn, democratic movements and associations have withered. We are in the midst also of a long counter-revolution against the cultural and institutional progress made during the middle of the twentieth century. A more rapacious form of capitalism has been untethered from social-democratic institutional constraints, the legitimacy of the business community and its culture of consumption and entrepreneurship has colonized the culture, oligarchic inequality reigns supreme, and the degradation of society and the natural environment both threaten to undermine society. The early decades of this century have therefore shown that Marx’s relevance persists even as a new generation now seems less aware of the deeper political and philosophical debates that formed the ideas of earlier radical thinkers. As populist ressentiment has increased and democratic aspirations and values have ebbed, Howard’s book can help us focus once again on the kind of political ideas we must keep in view. To imagine a more compelling form of democracy , to elicit a radical imagination for troubled times, we can indeed look to Howard’s important study of the Marxian legacy to plumb the depths of a new political sensibility.

Michael J. Thompson

Fall 2018

Preface to the Third Edition

Why Return to The Marxian Legacy Today?

The Marxian Legacy is a book about theory and theorists ; and it is more than that. These thinkers were engaged with their times, facing their present with an eye toward a future whose advent for many had long been symbolized by the name of Marx. This confrontation of the present with the future is the axis of radical critical thought. Critics look to a horizon of potential that sometimes advances brightly before receding as former visionaries find themselves alone with their melancholy. The first two editions of this book were the product of moments when a promised future seemed near. The author was convinced—as were the thinkers whom he chose to study as witnesses to the Marxian legacy —that theory is even more necessary in such times when the rising tide seems to bear effortlessly the future with it. The critical spirit hesitated, recalling the watchword: ‘No practice without theory’. Social conditions in the present cannot alone give birth on their own to a new future; critical and political thought are also necessary. Without it, the tide will ebb, the horizon drifts and fades, while those who have ridden the waves of social discontent that they hoped would make possible overcoming the miseries of the present run aground on granite rocks of resistance or drift exhausted onto the sands of conformity. ‘No social change without political vision’ is the corollary.

This third edition is published at a time when the frustrating rise in the forms of inequality has led increasing numbers of young people to protest the injustice of a system of which they feel themselves to be victims. It is one thing to challenge the legitimacy of a socio-economic system; it is another to imagine the possibility of a shared political future. The idea of ‘ socialism’ has recovered an unexpected popularity, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world where it never had much of a foothold. The term remains undefined; those who adopt it are more certain of what they oppose than of the future they envision. One example, among many, is found in a July 2016 survey: 51% of those between ages 18 and 29 were opposed to ‘capitalism’, and 33% of them favored ‘ socialism’ . The poll was a reflection of the popularity of the self-declared socialist, Bernie Sanders, among Democratic Party primary voters that year. After their party’s electoral loss, these numbers have increased; but the representation of the goal has not become clearer. Sanders’ definition of socialism (to which he adds the qualification ‘democratic’) appeals to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s electoral promise of 1944 to create a ‘Second Bill of Rights’ adding socio-economic freedoms to those of liberal-capitalism . This promise of a better social present comes at the cost of imagining a new political future.

More than a quarter century after the demise of the former Soviet Union put a final nail in the coffin of communism, Marx, Marxism, and the Marxian legacy are an unknown continent for the new generation. The youth of the 1960s who sought to create what they called a New Left suffered from the same chronological forgetting. Some sought to rediscover Marx as a critical theorist ; others found their identities in existing variants of Marxism; a few tried to build a vision of the future on the basis of the Marxian legacy . The appearance of analogous forms of the same process of self-discovery today, nearly 50 years later, is the primary reason for this new edition of The Marxian Legacy . The structure of the book and the story of its earlier existence are presented briefly in this Preface. An account of the birth of an international New Left is found in the Introduction. The attempt a decade later to actualize that movement, which led to publication of a second edition of the book, is presented in the revised Afterword that reflects on the emergence of new social movements in the West and the struggle of civil society against the state in the East. The author’s own evolution in the quarter century that led to the present third edition is sketched at the end of this brief Preface.

* * *

The first edition of The Marxian Legacy was published in 1977; versions of its chapters had been published in the early 1970s in journals identified with the New Left . By the time they were reworked for the book, the promise of that early movement had faded; what remained was tarnished beyond recognition, consigned to a career in the academy or—in Irving Howe’s famous retort to a radical student from Columbia University—had ‘become a dentist in Westchester County’. The New Left called itself a ‘movement’; it was a spontaneous, unmediated coalescence of minds and bodies, instinct and desire, intuition and reason. Critics from what it denounced as the old left fastened on this self-identification to criticize traits that reminded them the fascist insistence that its leaders were the reflection of such a popular movement. The members of the new movement knew little about history; for most of the participants, their self-identification as leftists meant simply that they were opposed to a status quo that had been described by Paul Goodman, one of their elder supporters, as ‘Growing Up Absurd’. Their movement was ‘new’ and alone; the remnants of the radical organizations that had grown up during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war had been absorbed into that same status quo. This was only somewhat less true in Western Europe than the United States.

The positive unity of the New Left was defined symbolically by the figure of Marx. The fact that his work was little known only added to its attractiveness. Marxism had been excluded from organized political life by the anti-communist forces of the times; for inversely identical reasons, it had no presence in the universities because it had been confiscated by the Soviet Union under the name of ‘Marxism-Leninism’. That caricatural orthodoxy maintained itself by imposing its rigid interpretations on the work of Marx (which was not innocent of the reproaches addressed to the rigid logic of ‘dialectical materialism’). At the time that the more radical philosophical works of the young Marx began to be published in German in the 1930s, the anti-fascist struggle did not offer propitious conditions for critical reflection; the unity of the Leninist party maintained by its Stalinist offspring was maintained during the anti-fascist war. It is understandable that among New Leftists it was assumed that there must exist an ‘unknown dimension’ of critical Marx ian thought that could provide at once and immediately insights, methods for criticizing, and means for realizing their criticism of their post-war capitalist system. This quest for what I call the ‘Marxian legacy’ is described in the Introduction to this edition on the basis of my own experiences at the time in the United States, France, and West Germany. A half century after those experiences, it seems to me that one reason for the political failure of the New Left was that they did not realize that it itself was an important part of the legacy of Marx. That self-misunderstanding helps to explain why it was caught between hyper-radicalism and dogmatic doctrines that reduced novelty to stale formulas.

The Marxian Legacy tells the story of a critical journey through the work of significant figures who attempted to inherit that legacy . The first two chapters—on Rosa Luxemburg and Ernst Bloch —illustrate the difficulty that radical political thinkers faced when they sought to find a place within the corpus of Marx ism . The constraints imposed by this choice led their successors to try to develop a critique of Marxism that used the philosophical young Marx to criticize the rigidity of Marxist political orthodoxy. In this way, they rediscovered the concept of immanent critique that can be found in Marx’s youthful writings and be deciphered beneath the apparently mechanical economic analysis of Capital and contemporary capitalism . This second group of thinkers recognized that Marxism can be used to develop a broader critical perspective than the mechanical materialist version of dialectics . Georg Lukács was the transitional figure between these two moments; after his 1923 breakthrough study of History and Class Consciousness was condemned by the Bolshevik -dominated Communist International, he spent much of his long life trying to remain within Marx ism even while using it as a critical and dialectical method. As a result, his work is discussed in two different sections of The Marxian Legacy rather than serve as the basis of an independent chapter.

The attempts to use Marxism are at once fruitful and frustrating; the roots of the difficulties encountered by the project lay in the antinomic formulation of the project. The idea that one can use Marxism separates the philosophical bases of Marx’s theory from its use as social and political criticism. This neglects the process by which the young Marx criticized the idealism of Hegel while proposing a materialist theory through which ‘philosophy becomes worldly’ and engages the task of ‘making the world philosophical’ . Max Horkheimer, the founder of the Frankfurt School of critical theory , recognized this difficulty in his early formulation of the tasks of a critical theory of society . As his exile grew longer, Horkheimer’s theoretical pessimism intensified; when he returned to post-war Germany, he denounced the radicalism of his students who he felt had misunderstood what the moderate virtues of democracy are. For many years, he refused permission to republish his early writings. Curiously, his slightly younger colleague, Herbert Marcuse, who in the same journal with Horkheimer had insisted more strongly on the philosophical aspect of Marxism, would become a guiding spirit of the early New Left . Its project could be interpreted as the attempt to unify Horkheimer’s critical social theory with Marcuse’s philosophical insights. It was not an accident that the German New Leftists published pirate editions of the Frankfurt School’s early work and that young Americans joined them.

Jürgen Habermas , an early ally of the New Left and the successor to Horkheimer’s chair in Frankfurt, later became critical of what he considered its radical excesses, which could be said to have resulted from the failure to understand the necessary transition from a critical theory of society to a multi-dimensional political theory. Habermas’ attempt to replace Marxist economic theory of capitalist crises with the study of the kinds of crisis typical of late- capitalist forms of legitimation was richer than the earlier critical theory ; but it met a similar fate to the other users . As Habermas came to see in his later work, the antinomical combination of political philosophy and social criticism failed to provide a satisfactory philosophical basis for uniting these two distinct tasks. Habermas proposed that basis in his theory of communicative action (addressed in Chap. 10 , this volume).

An inverse form of this antinomic dilemma appears in a third attempt to use Marxism found in Jean-Paul Sartre’s attempt to reformulate the philosophical bases of Marx’s materialist dialectics. Whereas Habermas began his project from the side of social and political analysis before turning to philosophical foundations, the French existentialist’s reconstruction of Marx ism proved to be unable to escape from Marx’s categorical construction buttressed by historical examples to find the social world; his promised practical second volume was never completed. The fact that Sartre’s original insights were brought to political fruition in the 1980s by his disciple, André Gorz, points to the need to overcome the antinomies of using Marxism. Gorz’s reformulation of the critical project comes to recognize the need to criticize Marxism, as he declares decisively in titling his 1980 breakthrough book, Adieux au prolétariat (which is discussed in Chap. 10 , this volume).

The symmetrical failures of the project using Marx ism are not accidental; it becomes necessary finally to criticize Marxism in order to save the legacy . The first appearance of this new relation to the Marxian legacy was found in the political essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the 1940s and 1950s. Because the debates of the times were quickly dated and the work of the philosophy professor attracted increasing attention prior to his premature death in 1961, the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s political thought were neglected; his properly political writings were translated too late to influence the New Left . It remained for his student and friend, Claude Lefort , the editor of his posthumous work, to draw out the political potential of Merleau-Ponty’s critical thought. Lefort was more than a disciple; he had been the co-founder with Cornelius Castoriadis of the radical journal Socialisme ou Barbarie (whose title refers to the choice posed by Rosa Luxemburg that New Leftists found attractive 50 years after her death). The reason that these two critics of Marxism from the left , to whom this new edition of The Marxian Legacy is dedicated, need to be read and understood can be illustrated here by a brief autobiographical excursus that describes my evolution in the decade between the first edition of this book and the decision to publish an expanded second edition a decade later. Their critical work is fundamental for understanding how the critique of Marxism is necessary in order to preserve Marx’s legacy .

* * *

After the fallow years when radical politics seemed to move from the left to the right as the symbolic figures of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan appeared, social conditions similar to those that had nourished the earlier New Left began to appear as what observers called ‘ new social movements’ made their presence felt in the west at the same time that the first stirrings of the ideas that would become the basis of the movement of civil society against the state that appeared in some Eastern European countries. Although their animating vision was often global, as in the case of the ecological Green movements, the occasion for their mobilization was local, reflecting the demand for participation in decisions concerning one’s own life, as the Port Huron statement defining the goals of American student movement (SDS) had put it in the 1960s. This grass roots orientation expressed the rejection of social-democratic and Keynesian forms of politics as bureaucratic and paternalist measures proposed by those-who-know for the benefit of those-who-need-our-help. Whatever momentary material improvement they could bring, such politics resulted in increased dependency rather than greater social autonomy. A further aspect of these new social movements can be seen in the way they sought to draw out the universal implications of their particular claims by formulating demands that were at some times material, at others symbolic , and often identitary. Their protests and proposals originated from local conditions, while their resolution demanded global change. The salient point about these movements was their difference from the Marx ist vision of politics proposing universal remedies without consideration of their application to particular conditions. As opposed to the Marx ist theory based on a lawfulness according to which the inherently self-contradictory nature of capitalism is illustrated (but not proven) by particular examples, the new movements followed the inverse path that leads from the struggle against specific forms of injustice to the recognition of the more general, systemic conditions that need to be transformed in order to insure social autonomy.

These new forms of social action seemed to confirm some of the philosophical implications that I had drawn from the project of criticizing Marxism developed in the chapters on Lefort and Castoriadis during the period of latency between the fading, splintered New Left of the 1970s and the emergence of the new social movements . I reread closely the work of Kant , Hegel , and Marx from the perspective of their potential contribution to an understanding of democracy that would permit a new type of critical theory . The result, published under the title From Marx to Kant (1985), was intended to provoke potential New Left readers who continued to treat Marxism as sacred text beyond criticism ‘in the last instance’. My interpretation was textual; knowing that none of the three had been concerned with democracy , I made few attempts to sound out the scholarship of political scientists in secondary sources. Bearing in mind the relation of the critique of totalitarianism to the affirmation of a modern political democracy , I tried to show Kant’s distinction between a determinative form of judgment that begins from a pre-given, scientific, or universal lawfulness under which it seeks to subsume particular facts and a reflexive judgment of the type found in affirmations of aesthetic taste in which a particular instance or object is judged to have universal validity insofar as it can win the assent of the participants in public debate. It seemed to me that the experience of the new social movements confirmed the democratic potential of Kant’s insight as it was developed in his Critique of Judgment . I tested these philosophical claims in two other collections of my essays written in the succeeding years under the titles of The Politics of Critique (1988) and Defining the Political (1989).

A third factor that led to the decision to publish a second edition of The Marxian Legacy was the way that the critique of totalitarianism challenged the generally accepted leftist vision of politics based on the story of the French Revolution presented as progressing toward increasing richness as it passed from the overthrow of absolutism in 1789 to the declaration of a republic in 1791, before culminating in a vision of a wholly social republic in 1793. That vision supposedly had been consecrated by the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, whose totalitarian potential I now recognized. Looking for an alternative to the canonical model of a progressive path to social revolution , I spent a number of years during the 1980s studying the American Revolution, whose reactionary or ‘ bourgeois’ character had been a matter of faith for an early New Leftist. My concern to compare and contrast these two modern revolutions attracted me to the debate among American historians supporting a ‘republican interpretation’ of the political goals of the revolutionaries as opposed to the standard liberal interpretation that appeals to a natural law theory of individualism that is supposed to be inherently democratic as well as allergic to the state and politically isolationist. Based on Roman history known intimately by the American leaders and pamphleteers, the republican interpretation permitted me to move beyond a vision of a politics dependent on social conditions. This step was crucial to overcoming the antinomies that had plagued the users of Marx ism . The republican interpretation also satisfied the anti-establishmentarian penchant of the New Leftist; it could be seen as well as a critique of capitalist , individualistic, and alienated forms of social life. It confirmed the importance of maintaining the distinction drawn by the critics of Marxism between the political and the social.

This political and intellectual context led me to think that a new edition of The Marxian Legacy , which was published in 1988, would be useful. I omitted the two chapters from the first edition that had addressed the specific conditions of the New Left during the earlier period; in its place I added a lengthy Afterword that reflected on the new political possibilities that were implicit in the new social movements , East and West. This lengthy Afterword, which appears here as Chap. 10 , tries to take stock of the further new works by Habermas, Lefort, and Castoriadis (as well as critical reinterpretation of development of the Sartrian approach in the work of André Gorz). Most important, it confirmed my understanding that the critique of totalitarianism led necessarily to recognition that democracy is fundamental to the realization of the Marx ian legacy. It is worth noting that, writing in late 1986, I did not see that the type of new social movements emerging in Eastern Europe developing the positive and democratic role of civil society —a crucial concept that the young Marx had adapted from Hegel —would become capable in 1989 of beginning the overthrow of communist domination. What was clear at the time was that ‘ democracy’ is not simply the inverse opposite of totalitarianism and that its relation to capitalism needed to be examined more critically. It would turn out that democracy is not the solution to the problem of totalitarian domination; it is also a problem for those who seek to realize it.

* * *

The need for a more critical understanding of democracy became clear in the years that followed immediately the collapse of communist rule. I had experienced with Czech friends the conditions that gave birth to the reform efforts of the Prague Spring in 1968; but I did not speak the language or travel in the countryside, and the Soviet invasion that put an end to that short-lived hope only convinced me of the totalitarian nature of communism. Two decades later, before and especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I spent a good bit of time in the former German Democratic Republic, whose language I did speak. One experience was crucial to my understanding of the relation of the Marxian legacy to democracy . After I had given a lecture on the model of the American Revolution at the University of Greifswald, I noticed that my listeners were hardly as enthusiastic as I was about my theories of American democracy . After later discussions, it became clear that they were bothered by my praise for the virtues of what I had called, unwittingly, while speaking informally in German, a ‘democratic republic’. They reacted negatively because they had just freed themselves from a regime that called itself by the name of the German Democratic Republic. On further reflection, the importance of the distinction between a democratic republic and a republican democracy became increasingly clear. A democratic republic is built according to the progressive model of communist story-telling describing the way the successive phases of the French Revolution became ever more radical and egalitarian until the political state and the society over which it had ruled become identical. Leftist supporters of a democratic republican model forget that the ‘withering away of the state’ that is said to go together with the realization of its egalitarian goals entails also the absorption of the political  freedoms insured by the republican political sphere. As opposed to that first model, a republican democracy of the type developed in the American Revolution recognizes the distinction between the political sphere that is insured by the constitution and the democratic society whose active and autonomous individualism it preserves. Still a leftist, I also realized that the economic manifestation of the individualism insured by a republican democracy can put into question the republican institutional framework, producing results that are antipolitical.

For the next decade, I worked within the twin frameworks of the Marxian legacy and the danger of what I came to call ‘antipolitics’. The results were collected in The Specter of Democracy (2002), a title that alluded to Marx’s claim that ‘a specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism’. The first section of the book, called ‘Marxism and the Intellectuals’, concluded with a discussion of the passage from the critique of totalitarianism to the politics of democracy . Along the way, the reader of this new edition of The Marxian Legacy will find three chapters that are a continuation of the earlier discussion. The first explains how Habermas’ recent work moves toward a reorientation of critical theory toward an interpretation of democratic theory that is consonant with the idea of a republican democracy ; the second re-examines the way in which Lefort was led from revolutionary theory to concentrate more sharply on political theory; the third shows how Castoriadis’ critique of Marx bears on actual political considerations facing the left while ignoring the false track opened by his interpretation of the USSR as a stratocracy. The second section of The Specter of Democracy was then given over to comparisons of the French and American models as they were worked out in practice. Finally, the reader who thinks that once the decision to criticize Marxism has been made Marx’s thought can be forgotten will find another attempt to understand the power of Marx’s own critical theory based on a short book published in French (2001).

Once again, the concerns indicated by my titles indicate the need to recognize that the demise of the totalitarian vision of politics does not induce an automatic democratic reflex. The ideal of democracy needs greater thickness if it is to avoid rhetorical simplifications; democracy can itself become a source of antipolitics, for example, when its republican constitution loses its legitimacy and, as in imperial Rome, corruption destroys the individual virtue on which the republic depends. This concern became pressing in the wake of the American reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, which were perceived as threatening the self-understanding of republican democracy . Trying to find the proper angle for reflection, I published two new books in French. Aux origines de la révolution américaine (2004) reprises my interpretation of the American Revolution as a tightly interwoven series of events and debates that began in 1763 and reached a conclusion in 1803 when the election of Jefferson as the candidate of the opposition was accepted at the same time that the priority of the constitution over any temporary political majority was affirmed. When I then accepted my editor’s challenge to write a weekly series of essays on the state of American democracy during a one-year period, published as La démocratie à l’épreuve (2006), I was not only testing my own theoretical arguments in real time; I was also trying to show the need for attention to be given to what Merleau-Ponty called ‘the flesh’ of republican democracy , insuring that it does not remain an abstraction whose significance is forgotten in the unwitting tendency to speak of a democratic republic.

I adopt a somewhat different framework in the more recent essays collected in Between Politics and Antipolitics: Thinking About Politics After 9/11 (2016). The claim that ‘thinking’ occurs in a space and time situated ‘between’ politics and antipolitics points to the fact that there can no more exist a purely political republican democracy than a strictly social democratic republic. The concept of thinking, borrowed from Hannah Arendt, suggests that political thought that cannot be restricted to the Marxist framework, remaining unaware of its paradoxical and antinomic goal aims at the overcoming of politics. I had already tried to illustrate the way that antipolitics has functioned throughout the history of political theory in The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the French and American Revolutions (2010). The more contemporary essays that try to make sense of the political world after the rupture that followed the shock of 9/11 test the theoretical claim of that book. Among them are an essay on reading Arendt after the fall of the Berlin wall and a speech delivered in that city at the request of my East German friends on the 20th anniversary of that epochal event in which I question more broadly the meaning of a political revolution. Another chapter returns to the Marxist question—how to do ‘philosophy by other means’—on the basis of a reconstruction of the paths of the two fathers of sociology, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Habermas, Gorz, and Lefort return as well in this volume. In this context, the shattering experience of the First World War provided a backdrop against which to think about the aftershocks of 9/11, and the meaning of a New Left is examined in a separate essay to which is added an interview with the author that retraces the experience of searching for a New Left.

I need to add a final consideration here before completing this new edition. At the outset of this preface, I expressed the optimistic hope that perhaps the social environment today might lend itself to a reappearance of a political New Left . I have to conclude it by admitting that the election of Donald Trump and his first 18 months in office are not signs of hope. Commenting on that election live on French radio, I expressed the compensatory hope that the republican democratic framework would be strained but maintained. Seeking a proper angle of reflection, I once again opted for a French perspective and tried to take a long-term view of American political life. The story I tell in Les ombres de l’Amérique. De Kennedy à Trump (2018) finds me once again standing ‘between’ politics and antipolitics, unable to tell only the progressive story of an American republican democracy had progressed ‘from King to Obama’. The ‘shadows’ of America in my narrative are cast by the constant temptation of antipolitics. The story of the New Left is not free of its own shadows; indeed the New Left no more exists in reality than does the political or the social; it stands today at the same symbolic level as did the name of Marx; it is in effect his legacy.

Dick Howard

Paris, France

September 28, 2018

A Note to the Reader

This new edition of The Marxian Legacy has been entirely revised. Although the chapter titles from the first edition of 1977 remain the same, the arguments are clarified, modified as necessary and rewritten with an eye to the present. The first section of the book begins “within Marxism” understood as a radical theory that describes a self-sufficient totality that claims to be the negation of the capitalist system. The second section analyzes three different ways of “using Marxism” as it became clear that the increasing complexity of modern society cannot be understood only on the basis of its economic foundation. The third section then tries to understand why “criticizing Marxism” became necessary for those who wanted to inherit the Marxian legacy. That is only the beginning of the story.

A fourth section of this new edition of The Marxian Legacy turns to the task of “realizing the legacy” once the need for an immanent critique of Marx ism that concluded the first edition had been understood. This fourth section, which was first presented as an “Afterword” to the second edition in 1988, returns to the earlier attempts to inherit the legacy from the perspective of the search for a New Left as they were reflected in the emergence of “New Social Movements in the West and Civil Society against the State in the East” (Chap. 10 ¹ ). These new movements made clear that the realization of the Marx ian legacy is not identical with the “revolution” that was promised by nineteenth century Marx ism let alone with its prewar dogmatic successors or their post-war or post-modernist ultra-left critics. This recognition is not a sign of resignation; in no way does it entail the abandonment of the challenge posed by the legacy.

From this perspective, the outlines of a fifth section, pointing to possibilities for the renewal of the search for the legacy are implicit in the Preface written for this volume. The twin focus on the New Left and on the critical debates and their practical consequences of the past century is not an exercise in leftist melancholy or my own fond remembrance of times past. The Preface explains why this new edition is needed. The chapters that composed the first edition were a product of the early New Left, whose energies had been exhausted by the time of their first publication as a single volume in 1977. The challenge did not disappear; the emergence of new political movements and the challenge of understanding them critically led me to publish a second edition of 1988 accompanied by an afterword that constituted an independent essay. But, as with the first and then with the second editions, history moved more quickly than theory; the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the critical theory needed to understand a New Left for a moment appeared without an anchor. ²

This new edition tries to put the social and political developments that make it actual into historical perspective; the Preface also presents very briefly my own attempts to understand the rapidly changing times I was living during the quarter century between the second edition and this new one. I have continued to try to inherit what I called the “Marxian legacy,” underlining the political dimension that Marx underplayed and unraveling the paradoxical dialectical relation between the falsely naive options of (reformist) politics and of what I call (revolutionary) antipolitics. I have aimed for clarity in rewriting the manuscript while preserving without melancholy the excitement of discovery that I felt when I began to discover the Marxian legacy nearly half a century ago!

This book is scholarly but it is not the result of academic scholarship. It offers elements of an intellectual history of the Marxian legacy but it is not a work of intellectual history. It is based on personal experience but it is not autobiographical. It tells a political story that should also be read as philosophical. It tries to keep alive the spirit of what I continue to call a New Left.

Contents

1 The New Left and the Marxian Legacy:​ Early Encounters in the United States, France, and Germany 1

1.​1 Innocent Beginnings 2

1.​2 The French Connection 6

1.​3 The German Path:​ From Phenomenology to Critical Theory 10

Part I Within Marxism21

2 Theory, the Theorist, and Revolutionary Practice:​ Rosa Luxemburg 23

2.​1 Revolutionary Practice and Its Theory 26

2.​2 The Theorist and Her Practice 36

2.​3 Revolutionary Theory 43

3 Marxism and Concrete Philosophy:​ Ernst Bloch 49

3.​1 Bases of Bloch’s Dialectics:​ Actuality and Utopia 52

3.​2 Confrontation with Fascism and Development of the Dialectic 56

3.​3 Bloch Versus Frankfurt:​ Dialectics of Labor and the Principle of Hope 61

3.​4 The Problem of Our Heritage 66

Part II Using Marxism73

4 Toward a Critical Theory:​ Max Horkheimer 75

4.​1 The Agenda 77

4.​2 A New Type of Theory 82

4.​3 Excursus:​ Herbert Marcuse on the Philosophical Genesis of Critical Theory 87

4.​4 Political Implications 90

4.​5 The Independence of Critical Theory 95

5 From Critical Theory Toward Political Theory:​ Jürgen Habermas 101

5.​1 What Is Late Capitalism?​ 103

5.​2 Critical Theory and Marxism 109

5.​3 Historical Materialism and Theory of Evolution 116

5.​4 The Tasks of Philosophy and the Question of the Political 121

5.​5 The Political:​ Action or Institution?​ 125

6 The Rationality of the Dialectic:​ Jean-Paul Sartre 135

6.1 The Necessity of a Critique of Dialectical Reason 139

6.​2 The Foundations of the Dialectic 143

6.​3 The Dialectic of the Social World 148

6.​4 The Problem of Revolution 155

6.​5 Concretization and Critique 157

Part III Criticizing Marxism169

7 From Marxism to Ontology:​ Maurice Merleau-Ponty 171

7.​1 Why Reread Merleau-Ponty?​ 172

7.​2 Marxism and Its Politics 176

7.​3 Toward a Reformulation 183

7.​4 The New Left, Marx, and Philosophy 187

7.​5 And Now?​ 197

8 Bureaucratic Society and Traditional Rationality:​ Claude Lefort 201

8.​1 Developing Theory and Developing Society 207

8.​1.​1 Politics and the Social 207

8.​1.​2 The Origin of the Social 208

8.​1.​3 Societies Without History and the Origin of History 211

8.​1.​4 Alienation, Ideology, and the Real:​ The Structure of Capitalism 215

8.​2 The Political and the Philosophical 219

8.​2.​1 The Proletariat and the Problem of the Real and the True 219

8.​2.​2 Political Realism as Interrogation 224

8.​2.​3 The Logic of the Political 228

8.​2.​4 Politics and Ideology 232

8.​3 Philosophy Again 236

9 Ontology and the Political Project:​ Cornelius Castoriadis 243

9.​1 The Political Critique of the Economic and the Economic Critique of the Political 246

9.​2 Organization:​ The False but Necessary Debate 250

9.​3 Marxism:​ The Problem of Metaphysics 255

9.​4 Ontology:​ The Status of Theory and the Political Project 263

9.​5 What Is Revolution?​ 275

10 Actualizing the Legacy—New Social Movements in the West and Civil Society against the State in the East 285

10.​1 The Politics of Theory 287

10.​2 The Theory of Politics 291

10.​3 Why the Legacy?​ 298

10.​4 Why Question Marx?​ 302

10.​4.​1 The Frankfurt School:​ Inclusions and Exclusions 305

10.​4.​2 Jürgen Habermas:​ Philosophical Foundations, Political Questions 308

10.​4.​3 Sartre to Gorz:​ Political Questions, Philosophical Proposals 319

10.​5 Criticism and the Question of History 325

10.​5.​1 Claude Lefort:​ History as Political 328

10.​5.​2 Cornelius Castoriadis:​ Ontology as Political 342

10.​6 The Legacy as Present History 356

Index 395

Footnotes

1

Chapter 10 , which was first published simply as an “Afterword,” should be read as an independent essay that tries to understand attempts to “realize the legacy”.

2

For this reason, although we remained friends and correspondents, I did not return to the later work of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997), André Gorz (1923–2007), Claude Lefort (1924–2010), or Jürgen Habermas (1929–). As mentioned in the Preface, I have written about them elsewhere. C.f., for example, Political Judgments (1997), The Specter of Democracy (2002), and Between Politics and Antipolitics. Thinking about Politics after 9/11 (2016).

© The Author(s) 2019

Dick HowardThe Marxian LegacyPolitical Philosophy and Public Purposehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4_1

1. The New Left and the Marxian Legacy: Early Encounters in the United States, France, and Germany

Dick Howard1  

(1)

Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, New York, NY, USA

Dick Howard

In the mid-1960s, as the Cold War seemed frozen into place after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the stalemate that defused the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the spirit of a ‘New Left’ began to emerge in the West. Although encouraged by events in the Third World, its common denominator was the idea that the misunderstood (or misused) work of Karl Marx must have offered a theory that both explained the discontent with the present among a new generation of youth and could also offer them guidelines for future action. At once personal and social, critical and political, this expectation was encouraged by publications of the writings of the young Marx as well as the discovery of non-orthodox theorists and political activists whose critical work had been ignored or suppressed by Soviet-dominated communist parties. These theories represented an ‘unknown dimension’¹ that became the object of vigorous debate in the 1960s and early 1970s. The searching candle burned bright for a decade before it flamed out.

Meanwhile, the revolutionary spirit that Marx liked to call the ‘old mole’ had grubbed its way underneath the Iron Curtain; the multi-faceted movement of civil society against the repressive states anchored to the Soviet bloc brought finally the fall of communism. But the critical spirit was too weak, economic need weighed too heavy, and the spirit of utopia waxed. It seemed as if there was nothing to inherit from the past. As in the 1960s, the critical spirit of the young Marx, the critical philosopher searching for his path, can suggest a reason to persevere. In a ‘Preliminary Note’ to his doctoral dissertation, Marx justified his refusal to compromise with existing conditions by invoking the example of Themistocles who, ‘when Athens was threatened with devastation, convinced the Athenians to take to the sea in order to found a new Athens on another element’.² This was not yet an anticipation of Marx’s turn away from philosophy to political economy. Like the New Left, Marx was trying to articulate the grounds of a critique of a present that he considered ‘beneath contempt’ in order to hold open the political future.

I will use this idea of a New Left to conceptualize the underlying unity of diverse political experiences during the past half century. Although Marx is not the direct object of my reconstruction, his specter is a recurring presence at those ‘nodal points’ where the imperative to move to ‘another element’ becomes apparent. These are moments when the spirit that has animated a movement can advance no further; it is faced with new obstacles, which may be self-created. I will analyze from a participant’s perspective the development of the New Left in the United States, France, and West Germany as it tried to articulate what I call the ‘unknown dimension’ of Marx’s theoretical project.

1.1 Innocent Beginnings

As the Civil Rights movement spread, and more rapidly as it merged with protests against the Vietnam War, it was necessary to propose a political theory to explain both the conditions against which protest was raised, and the future projects and goals of the movement. This two-sided imperative, analyzing critically the present while opening a future horizon, could not be realized by a single academic discipline such as sociology or economics; critical analysis of the present coupled with a normative reflection on the positive possibilities latent within it has always been the domain of political philosophy. The dominant mode of analytic philosophy in most major Anglo-Saxon philosophy departments dismissed concern with history or politics as speculative.³ It was (barely) legitimate to appeal to the existentialist voluntarism of Jean-Paul Sartre; but the French philosopher’s demonstration that Marxism is ‘the unsurpassable horizon of our times’, elaborated in the 800-plus pages of his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), was not translated until 1976. It was (barely) more acceptable to turn to Husserl’s or Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of the life-world (and the recognition of lived-experience as a ‘horizon’), although the latter had been discredited politically and only the first volume of Husserl’s Ideas had been translated. However interested, most Americans did not have the linguistic competence to pursue this path.

Marxism in the adulterated forms of dialectical materialism was not a serious philosophical or political alternative. After the ravages of McCarthyism, there was no political (or commercial editorial) market for it. I bought my first copies of Capital in the summer of 1965 from an old communist who would drive from San Antonio to the University of Texas in Austin with a trunk full of literature from Progress Publishers in Moscow. Party control of Marx’s writings was maintained so far as possible by its American affiliate, International Publishers. I experience their desire for control when they interviewed me on Christmas Eve of 1970 about a possible translation of the young Marx. The meeting came to a rapid end when I suggested that I would of course add explanatory notes to explain difficult passages.⁴ The only option seemed to be to create a new mode of publication. The first step in that direction was taken when the New Left recognized that it was not the first New Left and that America had not always been a status quo society. This insight gave rise to the development of ‘history from below’, which was pursued in the mimeographed pages of the student-run journal, Radical America. Although the initiative came from historians (led by Paul Buhle), the pages of this journal were open to philosophical and critical theory as well. The young Marx found a place here, as did contemporary French theory, as did I.⁵

Of the politically engaged theoretical journals that emerged in the late 1960s, Telos was the most provocative. After two issues as the ‘official bi-yearly publication of the Graduate Philosophy Association’ at Buffalo, the journal defined itself as ‘definitely outside the mainstream’ in issues 3 to 5 (Spring 1969–Spring 1970); a year later, it called itself more modestly an ‘international interdisciplinary quarterly’, but its radical editors defined themselves as ‘revolutionary’ rather than simply ‘radical’ in numbers 10 and 12 (Winter 1971 and Summer 1972). The labels are unimportant; the fact that the journal remained resolutely international influenced more strongly its future. Its history was marked by disagreement, dissent, and ruptures, each justified by appeal to the practical implications of theoretical choices.⁶ Intellectual, political, and personal issues both bound together and separated the editors.

Speaking for myself, I joined the editorial board in the Fall of 1970 with issue 6 (a 360-page summum that contained among contributions by the editors, as well as essays and translations by Tran Duc Thao on the ‘Hegelian dialectic’, Maurice Merleau-Ponty on ‘Western Marxism’, Georg Lukács on the ‘Dialectics of Labor’, and Agnes Heller on ‘The Marxist Theory of Revolution’⁷). The editors of Telos were fully embarked on a voyage of initiation that continued with two issues consecrated to the repressed works of Georg Lukács (numbers 10 and 11, 1971–1972). Looking back today at the old volumes, I am a bit astonished by the breadth and depth of their themes. They present a juxtaposition of the stages of rediscovery of critical Marxism with a concern for French political debate (André Gorz and Serge Mallet, as well as the challenge of structuralism to the Hegel-inspired critical theories), as well as critical readings of Eastern European attempts to save what was critical in classical Marxism (in the theories of the Budapest School or the work of the Czech philosopher Karel Kosik, as well as the banned Yugoslav Praxis philosophers). Hard-to-place figures like Karl Korsch, Ernst Bloch, or the Dutch astronomer and founding spirit of the Council Communists, Anton Pannekoek, found themselves alive again in the pages of Telos. The diversity of the contributions reflects the avid curiosity of the authors. But this eager openness and free-floating critical spirit did not last.

I left Telos officially with issue 36 (Summer, 1978), after a series of critical exchanges among the editors that began already in 1974. The intellectual climate had changed with the political normalization. During the first years of Telos, the Vietnam War continued, as did opposition to its senseless pursuit. The rapid self-initiation into the varieties of Marxist theory and the nuances of its practice seemed all the more urgent; working with texts in French and German, providing translations and commentaries on them, the editors had remained, as they promised, ‘definitely outside the mainstream’. In the uncertain political conditions created by imperial war, colonial adventure, and the fight against racial discrimination at home, the serious work of theory was felt to be a kind of praxis. But a problem arose from the identification of Marx’s theory as the banner of resistance and the key needed to open the door to a revolution that seemed ever more imperative as repression at home increased. Repression had to be met with resistance, on all fronts, including that of theory.⁸ But resistance could become stubborn and dogmatic, pledging allegiance to the flag of Marxism at the cost of creating a climate that discouraged critical thinking.

An expression of this uncritical Marxist dogmatism led me to finally leave Telos. The editors were unwilling to publish the essays by Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis that I had proposed for translation. It was apparent that their explicit critiques of Marx were too much to accept in a journal that felt the pressured to hold high the partisan banner; to criticize Marx could seem to provide ammunition to the enemy (as if we critical theorists were perceived at all by that enemy). I prevailed ultimately, writing introductions to their essays published in successive issues in the winter 1974 and spring 1975 issues (numbers 22 and 23).⁹ The experience left a bitter residue; my concern was not to defend the Marxist faith but to recover the spirit of the New Left. From this perspective Telos had become what I called a ‘meta’ forum, publishing analyses or revised interpretations of second-generation representatives of that ‘unknown dimension’ whose aura had drawn the original editors to the project. Commentary on commentaries gave me the feeling that the journal was no longer ‘definitively outside’ of the establishment. I managed to arrange publication of some contributions, mainly on French themes, but the editorial trains were on different tracks; careers could be made, although it would be unfair to confuse fidelity to dogma with opportunism. In spite of the journal’s cosmopolitanism and the diversity of its contributions—some resuscitating forgotten Marxian radicals such as Karl Korsch (e.g., issue 26, Winter 1975), others joining theoretical analysis with contemporary politics (e.g., issue 16 which brought together Marcuse’s 1930 essay on the concept of labor with André Gorz’s analysis of the division of labor in the modern factory)—the reheated dinner no longer satisfied my imagination.¹⁰

My story had not ended. The motivation that had brought me to Telos led me to return to the journal as ‘Notes’ editor with issue 58 (1983). I wanted to take account of new phenomena that were appearing, particularly but not only in East-Central Europe. It seemed necessary to stress their novelty, rather than to insert them into an already valid theoretical framework. The journal had begun to publish original essays and translations from Eastern Europe where the challenge of Polish Solidarność trade union to the totalitarian state was relayed by oppositional intellectuals in Hungary and elsewhere. Telos benefitted from the presence in New York of two Hungarian students of Lukács, Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher, as well as the editorial input of Andrew Arato, a native Hungarian educated in the United States. There was excitement in the West as well, as the idea of the autonomy of civil society began to take hold. This seemed to confirm much of what Lefort and Castoriadis had asserted in their essays published earlier, as well as in their articles reprinted by Telos on the 20th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution (issue 29, Fall 1976). I took responsibility for the ‘Notes’ section of the journal because the times did not seem right for a new grand theory. A politics based on the autonomy of civil society had to remain alert to signs of the new truths rather than rely on old truths.¹¹

As it happened, I soon found myself in the modest minority of editors; the proponents of grand theory came increasingly to the fore. I left the journal once again with issue 71, in 1987. I was not surprised to find that issue 72 was devoted to the work of Carl Schmitt; I should have seen it coming. My misperception resulted in part from the fact that I, along with Lefort and Castoriadis, distinguish between ‘the political’ which defines the framework within which the legitimate struggle for power can take place and political action itself. Already in 1974 I had titled an article on Habermas ‘A Politics in Search of the Political’, and a decade later, in the context of the East European emergence of civil society, I analyzed what I saw as ‘The Return of the Political’ which I suggested could make possible ‘A Political Theory for Marxism’.¹² My conception of the ‘political’ differed radically from Schmitt’s conservative-decisionist theory, which came to dominate the journal. Telos has continued to publish, apparently remaining on the conservative path accompanied by traditionalist overtones that I am unable to understand.

1.2 The French Connection

Another option open to a would-be New Leftist in the 1960s could be found in France. As a country where the Communist Party had won a quarter of the vote in the post-war years, France seemed to prove the cultural legitimacy of Marxist theory. What is more, it was also the home of critics of Marx who considered themselves to be leftists, many of whom were philosophers. The most famous was the ‘existentialist’, Jean-Paul Sartre (whose gesture in refusing the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 because it implied acceptance of ‘bourgeois’ values pleased many a young iconoclast).¹³ An American had a further reason to choose France: its revolutionary tradition appealed to equality, whereas the American tradition of 1776 stressed individual liberty. Indeed, the Civil Rights Movement was demanding protection above all for individual rights rather than seek a cross-racial class struggle. That choice was not a tactical error; but it had to be understood as only the first stage toward revolutionary change.

France between 1966 and 1968 provided both an initiation to Marx and a critique of Marxism. At the Communist Party’s annual Fête de l’Humanité, I was refused free entry although I explained that I was a comrade getting by on scholarship. Later, at a demonstration against the Vietnam War, a speaker from the Party demonstrated the justice of the anti-war cause while showing its place in a long historical chain; at the end of his discourse, as the public applauded, he joined them, suggesting that he was not expressing his opinion but spoke the truth of historical necessity. A similar Marxist conviction animated the Trotskyist opponents of the communists. Those who attended their (smaller, semi-public) meetings had to sign-in under a pseudonym, increasing the thrill and sense of the exclusivity of participation.¹⁴ The theoretical justification of this practice was that the revolution could come at any time and that without an organized and knowledgeable leadership to give direction to the working class could fail or be stolen and deformed (as was said to have been the case in the Soviet Union). The point seemed well taken; theory was necessary. I moved into the dormitory at Nanterre where I spent a good part of the day reading Marx’s Capital while watching a nasty yellow smoke rise from the tin shacks of the neighboring bidonville.

There are experiences offering lessons that could not be drawn from books. The principal theoretical challenge that occupied me was to identify the working class that was assumed to be the agent of revolution.¹⁵ Had the capitalist economy brought into being a ‘new working class’, as several theorists whom I came to identify with the New Left claimed? Among them were Serge Mallet, whose analysis of La nouvelle classe ouvrière appeared in 1963; André Gorz published Stratégie ouvrière et néo-capitalism in 1964; and Daniel Mothé published Militant chez Renault in 1965.¹⁶ All three would become friends. Mallet had been a functionary of the Communist Party; after he quit the party when it proved incapable of understanding or resisting the new Gaullist regime that came to power in 1958, his research was funded in part by a grant from Jean-Paul Sartre. At the time, Gorz was a journalist at the weekly magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, author of the existentialist analysis of alienation in Le Traître, and a member of the editorial committee of Sartre’s journal, Les Temps Modernes.¹⁷ Mothé, whom I came to know at the journal Esprit, had been a line-worker at the huge Renault automobile plant at Billancourt while a member of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie , insisted on the capacity for self-organization on the part of workers without the need for a political party to show them the way. What the three political thinkers shared was a welcoming eye for the new. Needless to say, all three were eager participants in the ‘events’ of May 1968.

I followed here the French usage in talking about May 1968 as ‘events’. What crystallized in the ‘March 22nd Movement’ at Nanterre before spreading and spiraling across France (and abroad) had little to do with Marx. In retrospect, the losers on the left were what I call the Marxists: the Maoists, who insisted that real revolution could not be led by students; logically consistent, their followers ignored the campuses and went instead to the working-class suburbs, where they found no echo; and the Communist Party (and its trade unions) who did their best to restrain the unexpected movement that they could not master. For my part, at Nanterre, I had the feeling during the pre-May meetings on campus that I was back at a New Left gathering in the States. It was as if the over-politicized students who, in earlier meetings I had attended, had harangued one another about the need to support the ‘peasants and workers of X’ rather than the ‘workers and peasants of X’ were now speaking English.¹⁸ The price I paid for this comfort was in a way paradoxical; I had come to France to find a theory that could make political sense of my New Left experience not to confirm it, now in a new language.

A first reflection after the experience of May 1968 led me back to Marx. What was the relation between the philosophical explorations of the young Hegelian whose analysis of capitalism explored the diverse ramifications of alienation (as both Entfremdung and as Entäusserung) and the author of Capital whose three thick tomes demonstrating the internal contradictions and necessary breakdown of capitalism I had been studying in that dormitory at Nanterre? The ebbing of the spirit of May seemed to lend weight to the structuralist arguments of Louis Althusser, who drew a sharp line between Marx’s ‘scientific’ work and his youthful philosophical explorations. The simultaneous publication in 1965 of his Pour Marx and the two collaborative volumes of Lire le Capital seemed to offer a material foundation for the New Left experience that I had come to France to find. The political price to be paid, however, was not realized by most at the time.¹⁹ The all-encompassing denunciation of ideology in the name of ‘science’ left no room for subjectivity characteristic of the new left or the May movement; the result eliminated the pole of negativity characteristic of the dialectic. I tried to avoid this dead end in my revised doctoral dissertation that proposed an analysis of The Development of the Marxian Dialectic.²⁰ The qualifier ‘Marxian’ (rather than the substantive ‘Marxist’) was meant to show that his turn to political economy was based on the dialectical elaboration of Marx’s youthful philosophical insights.

Other questions raised by the experience of May 1968 led me back to the existential Marxism of Sartre. At the ‘First International Telos Conference’ in October 1970, I proposed an analysis of ‘Existentialism and Marxism’.²¹ I was led to this theme by a slim volume titled Ces idées qui ont ébranlé la France, Nanterre Novembre 1967-juin 1968.²² The author uses categories developed in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason to reconstruct the tumultuous emergence on one campus of a revolt that ‘shook the French nation’. The author concludes on a note of what can be called pessimistic optimism. Sartre had tried to explain the transformation what he called serial and external relations among alienated individuals through a movement that transforms them into a ‘group-in-fusion’ through which passive participants become for a moment fused as active members of a collective subject. Sartre recognizes that by its very existential nature the fused group is unstable; it has to seek means to conserve its unity. The only possible solution to this political problem seems to demand that the existentialist cedes his subjectivity to objective knowledge of the Party. Sartre is more subtle in the Critique than he had been earlier; appealing to the history of the French revolution, he introduces first the idea of an ‘oath’ by which the fused group binds itself. The words appear to be powerless in the face of the hard, existential reality of ‘scarcity’ that Sartre calls the ‘practico-inert’. The oath must then be enforced, ultimately by Terror, itself enforced by a leader who functions as an external ‘totalizing Third’ whose description at times recalls Stalin, or the Communist Party. This troubling political implication of this attempt to join existentialism and Marxism may be one reason that Sartre never completed the promised second volume of his Critique.

One last French encounter deserves mention here. As is well-known, French intellectuals of a leftist bent often express their allegiances, or their protests, by signing petitions that are reproduced in journals read by a wider public. In the late winter of 1968, I attended the presentation of a petition against the war in Vietnam by a group that included among others, Sartre. Afterward, I wrote a short paper for the journal Esprit reflecting on ‘Les intellectuels français et nous’.²³ My point was that words are cheap; there are actions to be undertaken. I didn’t mention the fact that I had been working with a network formerly active against the French war in Algeria that was now involved in helping American deserters. One of the other participants at the press conference was Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who contacted his friends at Esprit to find out who I was. We met; I arranged for him to meet with some of the Americans; we became friends. A few years later, when I wanted to have a chapter on Socialisme ou Barbarie for The Unknown Dimension, Vidal-Naquet, an engaged intellectual who never joined a political party, arranged for me to meet Lefort, which in turn led to my meeting Castoriadis. Reflecting on the experience, I have concluded that my activist resentment of the intellectual who signs was based on a misunderstanding of the solidarity of critical individuals who think for themselves.

1.3 The German Path: From Phenomenology to Critical Theory

The Contributions to a New Marxism published by Telos included Paul Piccone’s proposal for the elaboration of a ‘Phenomenological Marxism’. The editor in chief was summarizing his vision of the path followed by the early Telos. Enzo Paci, the radical Italian phenomenologist, had developed a critique of the pretension to scientific objectivity on Husserl’s posthumously published The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.²⁴ Paci tries to demonstrate that the foundation of this vision is an alienation from the lived-world whose effect is the further reproduction of alienated relations that make the human quest for meaningful experience impossible. It took only a short step for Piccone and the early editors to recognize that the implacable logic of capitalism is a manifestation of a similar alienation. This interrelation became clear when Telos published in the same issue translations of Herbert Marcuse’s 1928 ‘Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism’ along with Husserl’s account of ‘Universal Teleology’.²⁵ Capping that issue was Piccone’s essay on ‘Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness Half a Century Later’ which made the integration of phenomenology and Marxism explicit. Despite its sad political fate, Piccone was certain that Lukács’ book had still the potential to reclaim its explosive impact.

Although I was not yet involved with Telos, two brief ‘Notes’ that appeared in the same issue dealt with events in which I had participated, making me more receptive to the journal. One note affirmed Telos’ outsider perspective through a biting report on the American Philosophical Association’s winter meeting (at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel!). Intellectually irrelevant, the big name figures of the academic world were denounced for having mobilized their fellows against a condemnation of the Vietnam War, while their job-seeking graduate students were consigned to a Kafkaesque maze on the 18th floor where they competed for interviews. The other Note, also critical, commented on an international phenomenological colloquium in Schwäbisch Hall, West Germany, which was said to have placed insufficient emphasis on the importance of the life-world. The exception was said to be the synthetic conclusion presented by Paul Ricoeur.²⁶

The political difference between a phenomenological foundation for radical politics and Althusser’s ‘Marxist’ structuralism is striking. The French Marxist was criticizing a bourgeois subjectivism that supposedly led to a philosophical idealism that separated theory from its practical implications. The task of structural logic, as Althusser thought he had found it in Capital, was to demonstrate the material condition of possibility of radical change by overcoming the separation of theory and praxis. The difficulty is that structuralism (like dogmatic materialism) leaves no place for the intersubjectivity that constitutes meaning in the life-world. By contrast, the phenomenological insistence on the primacy of the life-world led to the recognition that lived-experience is inseparably the foundation of the world of the subject and the condition of its possible objectification in positive science. Neither can exist nor be understood apart from the other. Phenomenology avoids the either/or of materialism and idealism; in this way it overcomes what Lukács called ‘reification’ and the young Marx denounced as ‘alienation’. While this reading of phenomenology can veer toward a Hegelian-Marxist theory, the ideas of a life-world and the lived-experience within it were in fact fundamental for the emerging New Left.²⁷

The similar political reflexes among New Leftists did not obviate the differences in their cultural and historical background. The German New Left experience was at first affected by the fact that the Social Democratic Party (SPD)—the lineal heir of the party of Marx and Engels!—had decided at its Bad Godesberg Conference in 1959 to abandon its self-understanding as a class-based party of revolution. Because it had opted to become a reformist ‘peoples’ party’, the SPD no longer referred to Marxism as its guiding philosophy. In the following years, as its youth organization, the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (SDS), began to radicalize in ways that resembled the experience of their American counterparts in the other SDS,²⁸ its leaders were tempted to return to the Marxism and class theory that the reformists had rejected. One important difference between the two movements was that the Germans had access to the original texts of Marx.²⁹ This was a temptation that could lead to scholastic debates about text interpretation or to dogmatic claims to know better than the simple participants. In both cases, it turned attention away from the creativity of practical interventions by the young militants that were rapidly changing the inherited mandarin culture.

The German New Left was generally more bookish than most of its American cousins. Its members were also more concerned with the past, which the reconstructed Western nation did its best to forget. In the case of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer and Adorno no longer identified themselves with Marxism as Critical Theory; Horkheimer refused to republish the yearly volumes of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung that were published from exile between 1932 and 1941. Horkheimer played an administrative academic role while still teaching at Frankfurt, while Adorno was widely known for his cultural interventions on the radio. But their reputations had preceded them. Radical students began to publish pirate editions photocopied from the original texts, glued together on cheap paper, bound with thin red cover pages, as a sort of Samizdat! Among those that I purchased at the Karl Marx Buchhandlung in Frankfurt between 1968 and 1970 are the complete edition of the Zeitschrift and three volumes of Horkheimer’s essays titled Kritische Theorie der Gesellschaft, Dialektik der Aufklärung, and Authorität und Familie. Two other small volumes by Horkheimer also remain on my shelves: the Anfänge der bürgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie and three essays from his most radical period, 1939–1941, published under the title Autoritärer Staat.³⁰

Whether their books concerned Marx or the Frankfurt School, the German New Left was a generation of readers. In a way, that was true of all of the New Lefts. One cultural trait that marked the Germans was the idea of a life-world that must be protected against instrumentalization. The refusal to treat what should be an end in itself as a means to something else, be it capitalist domination or a science acquired at the cost of one’s humanity, is a tradition that goes back to the German Enlightenment and to Kant. At their most pessimistic moments, Adorno and Horkheimer constructed a historical-ontological ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ that arises when reason turns on itself leaving the way clear for domination by unreason, as it had after 1933. Horkheimer had allowed himself a somewhat less fatalistic, more political interpretation of the historical moment in the Eclipse of Reason (1947). Significantly, its German edition 20 years later, published as Zur kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft, was more than twice its size. Its final essay, which dates from 1965, reaffirms the goals of Critical Theory—the critique of the existing order—with the caveat that the ‘threats to freedom’ that were the subject of his original essay have changed.

The new German radicals wanted not only to criticize the existing world; they wanted to change it. Seeking their way, they tried to return to the origins of critical theory. They read Horkheimer’s path-breaking essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ and—having read Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man—they eagerly read the exchange between Horkheimer and Marcuse titled ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’.³¹ Then they went back still further, to Marx, especially the young Marx. What they found gave them a deeper sense to critical theory.

Those who did their reading of the young Marx could not fail to be struck in particular by two passages. The first, in the ‘Exchange of Letters’ (among Marx, Ruge, and Feuerbach) that introduced the Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher, insists that ‘We do not face the world in doctrinaire fashion, declaring “Here is the truth, kneel here!”…We do not tell the world, “Cease your struggles, they are stupid; we want to give you the true watchword of the struggle.” We merely show the world why it actually struggles; and consciousness is something that the world must acquire even if it does not want to’. This is a straightforward formulation of the idea of immanent critique. It did not, however, suffice on its own. As they read on, they saw that Marx went on to apply this critical theory in his ‘Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’. ‘Man’, he begins there, ‘is not an abstract essence existing outside the world. Man is the world of men, state, society’. The task of the immanent critique is ‘to make these reified relations dance by singing to them their own melody’. As his analysis becomes more concrete, step by immanent step, the ‘man’ from whom Marx began becomes the ‘proletariat’. In this incarnation, the ‘world of men’ is an object that is produced by a certain type of self-reflective society; yet it remains always a subject capable of praxis and understanding—of making a revolution!

The problem for the New Left was that this proletariat conceptualized by Marx no longer existed. That seemed to leave two options for a revolutionary theory of immanent critique. The first would pursue the project on the terrain of culture that had been staked out by Adorno and by the increasingly popular Walter Benjamin. Elements of this option have been described recently by Philipp Felsch’s study, Der lange Sommer der Theorie. Geschichte einer Revolte, 1960–1990, which reconstructs the integration of French deconstruction theory into Germany by the efforts of the publishers of the Merve Verlag.³² Most of the story that Felsch recounts takes place outside of the framework of the present account. However, one factoid that he cites at the outset points toward the second option for a radical left.

At the time of his death while in prison, the founder of the terrorist Red Brigades, Andreas Baader, had become a voracious consumer of the works of Marx, Marcuse, and Reich; nearly 400 volumes were found in his cell. Baader represented an extreme version of the other option for the New Left: an actionism, which claimed to be a praxis that did in its way what Marx had advocated for critical theory. Although the activists have thought they could ‘make the reified relations dance by singing before them their own melody’, the song that they sung opposed their own violence to that of an unjust society. It is true 1968 was a year that had seen the French May events, followed by the police violence at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, the pursuit of the war in Vietnam, and the crushing of Prague Spring by Soviet and allied tanks. The ‘praxis faction’ argued that by provoking state-violence their actions would force the ruling class to reveal the iron fist within its velvet glove. This superficial and antipolitical option was rightly denounced as ‘left wing fascism’ by the heir to the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, assembly of 2000 activists on June 2, 1968. Although he later admitted that this was no doubt a bad choice of words, Habermas’ point was telling.³³

With the turn to violence, what I called at the outset of this discussion the New Left’s age of innocence came to an end. The search for an ‘unknown dimension’ continued, although Marx was no longer considered to be its origin. In France in the mid-1970s, as if to atone for past orthodoxies, anti-totalitarianism became an inspiration for a number of former New Left intellectuals. In Eastern Europe, anti-totalitarianism became a practical reality; in 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, and in 1991 the Soviet Union disappeared. As was the case for many participants in Telos during the 1980s, it seemed to many that a new New Left could take shape within the spaces of a ‘civil society’ that conserved its autonomy. This conceptual hope expressed a familiar concept for the heirs to the earlier New Left who had read the young Marx. Those who adopted it unfortunately did not pay sufficient attention to the origin of the concept with Hegel, who saw civil society as only a particular mediation between the immediacy of family life and the universality of the political state. An autonomous civil society cannot stand alone. The political renewal of the mediations that Hegel called the family and the state stands today as the ‘unknown dimension’ that could animate a new New Left. Marx may well continue to offer his help in the search for what he had called at the beginning of his own quest to found a ‘new Athens on another element’.

Footnotes

1

C.f., the collection of essays that Karl E. Klare and I co-edited, The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism since Lenin (New York: Basic Books, 1972). The subtitle makes clear our political intention.

2

My translation from the note in the ‘Vorarbeiten’ titled by its editors ‘Nodal Points in the Development of Philosophy’ as published in Karl Marx. Frühe Schriften, H-J Lieber and Peter Furth, editors (Stuttgart: Cotta Verlag, 1962), p. 104.

3

John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, published only in 1971, plays no role in the story I am telling. As for the British, the existence of a still vibrant trade union tradition helps to explain the persistence of a more-or-less orthodox Marxist orientation among leftists.

4

The climate changed rapidly; commercial publishers saw a market. Not known for critical perspicacity, one of the commercial editors, Doubleday, pushed their luck with the publication of a 450-page compilation of The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings, 1905–1952, edited by Stanford University professor, Bruce Franklin. C.f., the ironic critical review by Paul Breines in Telos No. 15 (Spring 1973).

5

C.f., ‘French New Working Class Theory’ (Vol. III, No. 2, May 1969) and ‘Genetic Economics vs. Dialectical Materialism’ (Vol. III, No. 4, August 1969). My edition of the Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971) was designated ‘A Radical America Book’.

6

Robert Zwarg has recently published a lucid, richly detailed, and critically argued study of Die Kritische Theorie in Amerika. Das Nachleben einer Tradition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017). Zwarg uses the development of Telos and New German Critique to trace the afterlife of the Frankfurt tradition of critical theory. In the course of his presentation, he also offers a generous account of Radical America as well.

7

The issue also included my essay ‘On Marx’s Critical Theory’ which used the recently discovered manuscript of Marx’s Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses to demonstrate a continuity between the social analysis of the young Marx and the work of the mature political economist. As Rosa Luxemburg (whose work I was editing at the time) intuited, capitalism and its contradictions can only be understood as a system of social reproduction.

8

I had an early experience of the weight of Marxist orthodoxy at a conference on Rosa Luxemburg in Italy in 1973. My presentation asked how Rosa Luxemburg could beat once the most innovative of Marxist activists and yet the most dogmatic defender of Marx’s texts (e.g., against Bernstein’s revisionism). As it happens, the following day saw the coup d’état in Chile against the Socialist government of Salvador Allende. I instantly became persona non grata! A revised version of that paper was published in Telos, issue 18, ‘Rethinking Rosa Luxemburg’ (and reprinted in the first edition of The Marxian Legacy). Another example of this kind of pressure is seen in Trent Schroyer’s article in issue 12 of Telos, ‘The Dialectical Foundations of Critical Theory’, the author feels compelled to begin his discussion of Habermas with an apology: ‘Despite the vilification of the left, and to the dismay of the academy, Jürgen Habermas remains a Marxist’.

9

My introductory essays situated historically the two co-founders of the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie in the context of French leftist politics and political theory. They became the basis of the chapters on Lefort and Castoriadis published in The Marxian Legacy.

10

The last article that I published, ‘Enlightened Despotism and Democracy’ (in issue 33, Fall 1977), built from a historical reconstruction to pose a question that led me to turn from the model of the French Revolution to reconsider the history of the American Revolution. The article touched as well on themes that became basic to the critique of totalitarianism.

11

A far-reaching synthesis that I found convincing was published in 1992 by two editors whose contribution to Telos had been significant; c.f., Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, in Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). Both Cohen and Arato, as well as Heller and Feher, finally left Telos by the early 1990s, when they were unable to overcome the influence of the right-wing Schmittian grand theorists.

12

C.f., ‘A Politics in Search of the Political’, Theory and Society, 1, 1974, pp. 271–306; ‘The Return of the Political’, Thesis Eleven, Nr. 8, 1984, pp. 77–91; and ‘A Political Theory for Marxism’, New Political Science, Nr. 13, Winter 1984, pp. 5–26.

13

C.f., his declaration of refusal, reprinted in http://​www.​nybooks.​com/​articles/​1964/​12/​17/​sartre-on-the-nobel-prize/​

14

I later used my pseudonym when I published an article on Czech student dissidents that relied on information that could have harmed friends there. C.f., ‘Czech-Mating Stalinism’ in Commonweal, May 17, 1968. I refer below to my debt to the dissidents whom I knew in the 1960s. It should be noted that although both Communists and Trotskyists claimed the legacy of Marx, they both were far more justified when they presented themselves as heirs to Lenin!

15

I knew already from reading one of the few books on Marx that was widely available in the United States, C. Wright Mills’ The Marxists (New York: Penguin Books, 1962), that the crucial problem for a contemporary Marxist would be to define what the ‘working class’ could mean in contemporary societies.

16

All three of these books were published by the Éditions du Seuil. I discuss the theories of Mallet and Gorz in The Unknown Dimension, op. cit. I return to Gorz’s later work in the ‘Afterword’ to the second edition of The Marxian Legacy, reprinted in this edition, and reconsider his philosophical path in Chap. 7 of Between Politics and Antipolitics.

17

Gorz’s idea of a ‘New Left’ differed from my own vague understanding; his was strongly influenced by the Italian trade union theorists around the CGIL. After we had become friends, he once told me that he was the editor who had refused to publish my essay on the American New Left in Les Temps Modernes, even though it had been accepted in an official letter to me by his colleague, Claude Lanzmann. I have been unable to find a copy of my manuscript.

18

The former, I came to learn, identified with Maoism, the latter with one of the two Trotskyist factions. At the time, neither my knowledge of French nor my understanding of Marxist scholastics was sufficient to grasp the distinction. I did write, in early June, an account of the May events on the basis of my experience. A copy was sent by courier (the post office was closed) to the journal Viet Report. I do not know whether it arrived. Meanwhile, a friend in London who borrowed by carbon copy never returned it!

19

I was part of the overflow crowd at Althusser’s lecture, ‘Lénine et la philosophie’, at the Société Française de Philosophie on February 24, 1968. Althusser, who remained a party member, could appeal to the science of structures to criticize forms of ‘ideology’ that didn’t fit the prevailing party views.

20

(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972).

21

Published in Towards a New Marxism (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1973). This publication was no doubt a sign of Telos’ self-confidence rather than of the result of its rejection by commercial publishers. I would similarly publish my first work with small leftist publications ‘outside the mainstream’. Another reason for these publications was the intense desire to communicate, immediately, with others caught up in the same ‘movement’. C.f., the chapter on Sartre in The Marxian Legacy.

22

The volume was published under the pseudonym of Epistémon (Paris: Fayard, 1968). Its author was Didier Anzieu, a psychoanalyst and professor of psychology at Nanterre; and his title is of course a wordplay on John Reed’s well-known account of the Russian Revolution as ‘Seven Days That Shook the World’.

23

C.f., Esprit, mars 1968, pp. 506–508.

24

The German edition was first published in 1936. The English translation by David Carr appeared in 1970. Telos published some fragments of Husserl’s text without authorization (in Number 4, Fall 1969). Affirming its political principles, the editorial page insisted that ‘Since ideas should neither be sold nor bought, none of the included material is copyrighted and can be used for any purpose whatsoever by anyone’. It did the same with chapters from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s as yet untranslated Adventures of the Dialectic in Numbers 6 and 7. The English translation by Joseph Bien appeared only in 1973.

25

C.f., volume 4, Fall 1969.

26

I had been there and agreed. It had been Ricoeur’s support that brought me to Paris, in part on the basis of an exchange of letters in which I tried to show how I thought phenomenology could provide the basis for rethinking New Left and anti-war politics. See Ricoeur’s letters of May 15, 1965, and November 5, 1965, and my letter of February 6, 1966, in DH Archive at Stony Brook University.

I should add, however, that David Carr, the English translator of Husserl’s Krisis, who was also at the conference, pointed out to me that his impression was that there was perhaps too much, but too vague, a discussion of the life-world. He himself had presented a paper on that theme. C.f., his ‘Diskussionsbeitrag’, to the publication of the papers presented: Vérité et vérification/Wahrheit und Verifikation (Actes du 4ème Collques internationale de Phénoménologie), ed. H. L. Van Breda (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1974), pp. 95–96.

27

I leave aside the very different interpretation of the life-world and lived-experience by Heidegger. It did not play a significant role among readers of Telos, although most did read the (difficult if not unreadable) translation into English and some were fascinated by its still influential French variant.

28

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had been the youth organization of the Social Democratic League for Industrial Democracy. It declared its autonomy from its parent in 1960.

29

In fact, the generally available and inexpensive East German edition (the Marx Engels Werke, familiarly called ‘die blauen Bänder’) did not include many of the early philosophical works of the young Marx. These could be found in the more expensive edition of the Frühe Schriften published by the Cotta Verlag only in 1962, which I took care to cite in my writings about the young Marx.

30

Perhaps in the Enlightenment tradition, when Amsterdam was a center of pirate editions, the last-named book had a publisher (Amsterdam: Verlag de Munter, 1967), the others were usually done by anonymous collectives and were undated. There were other pirate editions, for example, of Karl Korsch and of Wilhelm Reich’s 1934 journal called Sex-Pol (as well as a pocket-sized, illustrated version of Der sexuelle Kampf der Jugend). One found also editions of authors who had abandoned their former political theories, such as Karl August Wittfogel, Franz Borkenau, and Richard Löwenthal (under the pseudonym Paul Sering). Another large volume, retyped by anonymous collaborators (like the Samizdat publications that helped bring down the Soviet Union), previously published texts from academic journals under the title Kritik und Interpretation der Kritischen Theorie: über Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin, Habermas.

31

All three essays appeared in volume 6 of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (1937), which was copyrighted in Paris by the Librairie Félix Alcan in 1938.

32

(München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2015).

33

C.f., the reconstruction of Habermas’ philosophical development in the first edition of The Marxian Legacy. I keep this theoretical development separate from his political writings in Chap. 5 of this edition, which are the subject of that chapter, ‘Citizen Habermas’, republished in Between Politics and Antipolitics: Thinking About Politics After 9/11 (New York & London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). At the time, international connections were strong, as reflected in, for example, Alfred Schmidt’s contribution to The Unknown Dimension. I knew many of the SDS leaders from Frankfurt criticized by Habermas, including the charismatic Hans-Jürgen Krahl, whose necrology, as noted above, was published in Telos. Others, such as Rainer Zoll, a life-long friend, who had left the university to work for the IG Metall (but returned to a post in Bremen somewhat later), helped put the excesses in perspective.

Part IWithin Marxism

© The Author(s) 2019

Dick HowardThe Marxian LegacyPolitical Philosophy and Public Purposehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4_2

2. Theory, the Theorist, and Revolutionary Practice: Rosa Luxemburg

Dick Howard1  

(1)

Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, New York, NY, USA

Dick Howard

No coarser insult, no baser defamation, can be thrown against the workers than the remark ‘Theoretical controversies are only for intellectuals. (Social Reform or Revolution?)

The question to be addressed here is not that of the adequacy of this or that particular theory in accounting for, or acting on, a given context of social relations. I am not concerned whether, for example, the theory expressed in The Accumulation of Capital is adequate to account either for the conditions of the period in which it was formulated or for our present conditions; nor, a fortiori, am I concerned with whether that theory conforms to the edifice of Marx’s Capital. To judge a theory in terms of its adequacy to supposedly real conditions implies a latent conservatism and positivism; theory is then treated as an analysis of ‘facts’ about a world that itself is taken as pre-given and fixed. Such an approach implies a dualism—on the one side, the theory; on the other side, the ‘facts’ which it is to reflect—that makes it fundamentally undialectical. Moreover, the point, after all, is not to understand a given positive world, but to change it! And this intention implies a very different notion of theory.

Moreover, my question goes beyond the person and activity of Rosa Luxemburg. Through her person and activity, I want to look at a problem that affects our understanding of Marxism, and our own self-perception as theorists who are also revolutionaries: namely, the relation of theory and practice. For Rosa Luxemburg this was no problem even in the darkest hour: ‘Marxist theory gave to the working class of the whole world a compass by which to fix its tactics from hour to hour in its journey toward the one unchanging goal’ (p. 325, The Junius Pamphlet).¹ Today, after the (however temporary) setbacks of the working class in the West, after the excesses, stupidities, and crimes committed in the name of Marxism, after the so-called successes of revolution where Marxism least expected them, we can no longer be so sanguine as Rosa Luxemburg. And as theorists, we know too that Marxism itself contains profound ambiguities: we know that there is a latent positivism in the thought of Marx himself; we know how Engels tended to ‘naturalize’ the dialectic, how the Second International assimilated an evolutionary Darwinian element into its doctrine, how the Third International was able to continually change its line to fit national need and convenience while always justifying itself in terms of Marx citations, and so on. We have seen Marxism lose its critical thrust and become what Oskar Negt calls a ‘science of legitimation’. And, on the other hand, we have seen those who have attempted to maintain the razor-edge of dialectical criticism fall victim to bourgeois pop-culture, practical despair, or insular theorizing.

We are living after a crisis of Marxism, and a crisis of Marxists! The effects of this crisis on our theory and our practice have been disastrous—whether in the form of an exacerbated Third Worldism culminating in phenomena like the Weatherpeople and Baader-Meinhof terrorists, or in the neo-populist return to the factories in search of a somehow redeeming contact with the ‘real’ working class, or in the form of theoretical doubt, sterility, and/or eclecticism. With the bonds of theory and practice burst asunder, theory becomes dogma and practice becomes blind activism.

In this context it is opportune to re-examine the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg. Not as a precious heirloom, placed on the mantelpiece to be admired but not touched; not as a political, or theoretical, ‘third way’ between alternatives that, for whatever reasons, we don’t like—for Rosa Luxemburg is neither a spectacle to be observed nor the mouthpiece of a new dogma that will give us that dull certitude of which we feel in need. It is not a question of Luxemburg or Lenin, spontaneity or organization, mass or party; nor is it a question of ‘competing’ theories of imperialism, the national question, the peasantry, or the role of formal democracy; and it is certainly not our task to judge the ‘authenticity’ of her—or any other—‘Marxism’. We cannot approach the question in terms of ‘if only her advice on this or that had been taken’, for such an attitude is of interest at most for parlor discussion and bad novels. Our concern is with our present and the tasks it poses; we turn to history not to salvage some ‘pure’ thinker or some unblemished ‘truth’ ignored or misunderstood by its contemporaries, but rather with the understanding that, in however distorted a form, it too is part of our present, that we must reflect on it in order to understand better what is to be done.

The appeal today of Rosa Luxemburg to a heteroclite group of left-inclined activists and theorists in opposition to the dominant tendencies within the official international Communist movement is understandable, and yet there is something quite paradoxical about it. There is of course her critique of revisionism and opportunism in theory and in practice, her stress on spontaneity and self-formation of consciousness, her early recognition of Kautskyian dogmatism and of the increasing bureaucratization of the SPD, her shrill outcry against the Social Chauvinism of the national parties, and her recognition of the role of imperialist capitalism as forcing an internationalist and anti-war strategy on the world proletariat, her avid defense of the councils form as the crucial element in the coming revolution; and, to be sure, there is her critique of Lenin’s views on the party. All of these, interpreted in one or another manner, give more than enough grounds for adopting the name of Rosa Luxemburg. And yet, there is another side which should be less pleasant for those who latch on to a label in their rush to be more radical than Thou. Luxemburg was a dogmatist (in a sense to which we shall return). For example, she is satisfied that she has refuted Bernstein when she ‘shows that, in its essence, in its bases, opportunist practice is irreconcilable with Marxism’ (p. 130, Social Reform or Revolution?). She accepts Marxism as ‘the specific mode of thought of the rising class conscious proletariat’ (p. 127, Social Reform or Revolution?) and never doubts its truth despite the series of defeats which she, and the proletariat, suffered. Or, to give another example, she was a ‘legalist’ when it came to construing Party or International decisions, advocating expulsions, justifying her position on the mass strike in terms of ‘the true essence of the Jena resolution’, and, on the International scene, proposing the reconstruction of an International which would have a control over the national parties not essentially different from what came to pass with the construction of the Third International. Or, concerning her position with regard to Leninism, one must recall not only the ‘non-democratic’ manner in which she functioned in the Polish Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) but also, within her critique of Lenin, her defense of a control from the top within the German party, to whom the Lenin-critique was actually addressed.

In Sects. 2.1 and 2.2 of the following, I want to look at the two sides of Luxemburg’s activity in order to delineate and explicate their logic. In Sect. 2.1, ‘Revolutionary Practice and Its Theory’, my concern is to bring out Luxemburg’s attitude, as theorist, to the ongoing struggles of the class and the different forms that they took. To make her position clear, it will be necessary to make reference to the theoretical work of Marx. In Sect. 2.2, ‘The Theorist and Her Practice’, I will look at the implications of Luxemburg’s practice as theoretician and revolutionary, in order to show the problems and paradoxes which the theoretician-as-revolutionary must confront. In Sect. 2.3, ‘Revolutionary Theory’, the attempt will be made to draw some conclusions with reference to theory itself. What is it about a theory that makes it revolutionary?

2.1 Revolutionary Practice and Its Theory

Only the working class, through its own activity, can make the word flesh. (Was will der Spartakusbund?)

Marxian theory has always had a somewhat ambiguous (or, charitably interpreted, a dialectical) relation to revolutionary practice. Marxism claims to be the theory of the working class. This notion, however, can be interpreted in two senses, whose consequences are radically different. On the one hand, it can mean that Marxism is the working class’ theory; that it is the theory which the working class adopts, accepts, and uses as a guide to its action. On the other hand, it can mean that Marxism is the theoretical expression of the actual practice of the working class, which means that its practice implicitly contains its own theory, which is expressed in Marxism in such a way that the class can recognize itself in the theory, understand what it in fact is doing as a class, and draw the implications of that activity. The distinction, in other words, is that between a theory for practice and a theory of practice.

The distinction between the two interpretations is often blurred. Gramsci, who tends to be a representative of the latter tendency, nonetheless speaks of the need for Marxism as an ideology to help the proletariat maintain its faith in the struggle at those times when the revolutionary tide is out. Lenin, who tends to be a representative of the former tendency, achieves his greatest moments precisely when he breaks with the received doctrine and opens new paths based on his empathetic understanding of the masses and their capacities at a given moment. Indeed, there is an ambiguity in the work of Marx himself. Capital is an attempt to integrate a rigorously scientific or deductive economic model with a theory of the class struggle as the basis of the various forms taken by the capitalist production process. We see the first of these moments, for example, in Marx’s discussion of the move from cooperation, division of labor, and manufacturing to machinery and modern industry, or in the ‘law’ of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. But in both cases, the second moment immediately intervenes, in the first case, when Marx’s discussion points to the role of capitalist reaction to working-class struggle as leading to the introduction of new methods for the production of relative surplus-value and, in the second, when the chapter on countervailing tendencies points to the level of the class struggle as a central variable of the rate of profit. The same ambiguity runs through many of Marx’s conjunctural political analyses. For example, the Paris Commune is first condemned on theoretical grounds by Marx, then enthusiastically accepted and integrated into the theoretical conception of the nature of proletarian revolution, and then, on further reflection, once again brutally criticized, on theoretical grounds, in some of Marx’s later letters.

This Marxian ambiguity appears in Rosa Luxemburg’s practice as a revolutionary theoretician. Mention has already been made of her belief that revisionism could be refuted once its incompatibility with Marxian theory had been shown. She could of course claim efficacity for this approach insofar as, within the dualistic confines of the Erfurt Program, her opponents insisted that their position was compatible with Marxism. But the notion of a theory for practice enters at a second, theoretically more interesting, level in her discussion of the dialectic leading to the ‘final goal’. This needs to be looked at in some detail, before going on to see how the element of the theory of practice figures in her work.

In Social Reform or Revolution?, we read statements like these: ‘It is the final goal alone that constitutes the spirit arid content of our socialist struggle which turns it into a class struggle’ (p. 39). ‘The final goal of socialism is the only decisive factor distinguishing the Social Democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and bourgeois radicalism, the only factor transforming the entire labor movement from a vain attempt to repair the capitalist order into a class struggle against this order’ (p. 53). On a first level, these are of course replies to Eduard Bernstein’s revisionist assertion that ‘the movement is everything, the final goal is nothing’. A further, somewhat lengthy, assertion in the same text goes further, however:

The secret of Marx’s theory of value, of his analysis of money, his theory of capital, his theory of the rate of profit, and consequently of the whole existing economic system is—the transitory nature of the capitalist economy, its collapse, thus—and this is only another aspect of the same phenomenon—the final goal, socialism. And precisely because, a priori, Marx looked at capitalism from the socialist’s viewpoint … he was enabled to decipher the hieroglyphics of capitalist economy. (p. 101)

What worries Rosa Luxemburg, as revolutionary theorist, in Bernstein’s revisionist politics—and still more in its translation in the pragmatic horse-trading of the opportunist politicians, for example, in Schippel’s military policy—is its empiricism. In effect, for the empiricist the facts are precisely what is out there, before my eyes, in all its gross ugly reality. The empiricist with a heart—that is, the humanist—confronted with this reality desires to smooth the rough edges, efface the ugliness, make peace. The empiricist standpoint is that of the ‘vulgar economist’, the Benthamite continually attacked by Marx as having the mentality of the small shopkeeper who can only see things from the individual point of view, never the totalizing view of the working class. The essential connectedness of the spheres of life is lost to the empiricist, for whom all relatedness is accidental or external. The political result of empiricism is that workers’ strikes, electoral action, demonstrations, and other actions are not in themselves revolutionary; they are either a moral reaction to evil or a defensive reaction to oppression, which the ‘socialist’ politician can use as means or pawns in the political game. But if there is no essential connection among the various activities undertaken by the working class, then a fundamental insight of Marx is lost—namely, that capital and labor form a conflictual pair such that each affects and depends on the other. Luxemburg’s point here, as Lukács correctly perceived, is that there is no such thing as a ‘fact’. The ‘facts’ only make sense in their interrelatedness, in their totality—in this case, in the context of the inherently contradictory and doomed capitalist system—hence, in the context of the ongoing revolution.

While agreeing with Luxemburg’s political and epistemological critique of empiricism and its consequences, we should note a problem here. One is somewhat taken aback by her use of the term a priori when referring to Marx’s theoretical standpoint in Capital. Is it really an a priori? If so, the argument takes on an ideological character, posing the technological question: ‘What signification must I give to the “facts” in order that they fit into the theoretical and practical structures that I want to develop?’ The theory becomes a theory for practice, no longer a theory of it. If, as Luxemburg suggests, what differentiates socialism from bourgeois democracy and bourgeois radicalism is nothing but this a priori belief in the final goal, then one is at a loss to explain the patient and detailed research of Marx writing Capital; Capital becomes a construction! If Marxism starts from the assumption of the necessity of revolution, then it is a viciously circular theory, not totally unlike Christian doctrines of ‘original sin’.

Rosa Luxemburg has unintentionally pointed to an ambiguity in Marx himself. In the Marxian philosophy of history, there often appears a latent neo-enlightenment or Hegelian belief in the progressive logic of history as it moves toward a final reconciliation. Whether latent or actual, this tendency was theorized—ideologized is a better term—by the Second International. To a degree, this argument makes sense. If we recognize the vanity of a hyper-empiricism, we ask ourselves how we are to make sense of the present. Certainly, the present is historical; but that simply implies variation. Something more is necessary: a directionality, a positive goal, an end to (pre-)history. If, then, history has a direction, all those stages which have not yet reached the ‘end’ are imbued with a kind of negative valence; a dialectic ensues between the present-as-not-yet-future and the future-toward-which-the-present-tends. In a present pregnant with the future, we can avoid the symmetrical errors of opportunism-revisionism and ethical utopianism.

It can be argued that this tendency—which reifies history into a mechanistic process unrolling with predetermined necessity—is in fact overcome in the works of Marx and Luxemburg. For the present purpose, it suffices to note its presence, even if only latent. Without the qualifications to which I will refer below, it would be a mystification of the actual process of revolution, and would have as a logical consequence a kind of technology of revolution, a means-ends doctrine deducing from the putative inevitability of the revolution a series of techniques to hasten the ‘birth-pains’. Its upshot would be the equation of socialism with nationalization and planning, and the neglect of the human relations that are central to socialism’s content.

Luxemburg’s practical experience of the day-to-day political struggles served to insulate her against the abstractions of theory. Luxemburg refers to ‘two reefs’ between which the proletariat must chart its course: ‘abandonment of the mass character or abandonment of the final goal; the fall back to sectarianism or the fall into bourgeois reformism; anarchism or opportunism’ (p. 142, Militia and Militarism; c.f., also p. 304, Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy). The same approach occurs repeatedly in her work; the theorist as revolutionary seems to have the task, as theorist, of maintaining at all times the tension between the present and the possible future, avoiding the temptations of the immediate as well as the dreams of a Beyond, leaning now to one side then to the other in order to maintain that difference which is the space within which the movement can develop. Here, one only need to refer to the brilliant critiques of the Blanquist temptation—in In Memory of the Proletariat Party, in the Mass Strike essay, or in Our Program and the Political Situation—and her concomitant stress on the nature and role of the transitional program to see how she avoids the temptation of reifying the historical process. In her analysis of the Polish Proletariat Party—a model of Marxian historical analysis—she writes that what ‘separates the Social Democratic position from those of other movements is … its conception of the relationship between the immediate tasks of socialism and its final goals’ (p. 179). She then presents a detailed analysis of the programmatic statements of the Party, comparing them with the Blanquist attitude of the Narodnaya Volya and with the programmatic sections of the Communist Manifesto. Her conclusion is that ‘The ABC’s of socialism teach that the socialist order is not some sort of poetic ideal society, thought out in advance, which may be reached by various paths in various more or less imaginative ways. Rather, socialism is simply the historical tendency of the class struggle of the proletariat in the capitalist society against the class rule of the bourgeoisie’ (p. 201).² It is the developing struggle and the tension created by the opposition of classes, not a poetic, ethical, or technological necessity, that makes socialism appear as the sense of the actual class activity of the proletariat.

History is the history of the class struggle; and certainly before August 4, 1914, Luxemburg never doubted that that class struggle would end as Marx had predicted. But the immediate tasks of practical politics had to be dealt with, and Luxemburg’s manner of dealing with them is innovative and rich with lessons. Faithful to Marx, she asserts:

Man does not make history of his own volition. But he makes it nonetheless. In its action the proletariat is dependent upon the given degree of ripeness of social development. But social development does not take place apart from the proletariat. The proletariat is its driving force and its cause as well as its product and its effect. The action of the proletariat is itself a co-determining part of history. (p. 333, The Junius Pamphlet)

The upshot of this is fundamental not only for the theory of history—which must lose any character of predetermined necessity, lose its external and mechanistic character, and become that experience of choice and creation that we live daily—but also for political practice. It means that class consciousness becomes the central focus and locus of revolutionary activity.

Luxemburg notes a fundamental paradox constitutive of the class struggle. She sees that ‘the proletarian army is first recruited in the struggle itself’, yet that ‘only in the struggle does it become aware of the objectives of the struggle’ (p. 289, Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy). This ‘dialectical contradiction’ (ibid.) cannot be resolved via the Leninist-Kautskyian understanding of class consciousness as the immediate result of the outside influence of the party and its ideology. That is a technology; it supposes a knowledge of a predetermined historical necessity to be taught by the knowledgeable to the unknowing and preserves the relations of subordination. Luxemburg insists that ‘the masses can only form this [revolutionary] will in a constant struggle against the existing order, only within its framework’ (p. 131, Social Reform or Revolution?). Concretely, this means that

the solution to this apparent paradox lies in the dialectical process of the class struggle of the proletariat fighting for democratic conditions in the state and at the same time organizing itself and gaining class consciousness. Because it gains this class consciousness and organizes itself in the course of the struggle, it achieves a democratization of the bourgeois state and, in the measure that it itself ripens, makes the bourgeois state ripe for a socialist revolution. (pp. 180–1, In Memory of the Proletariat Party)

It must be stressed that this is not simply a psychological process, a kind of additive learning by the accumulation of bits of experience; Luxemburg’s argument only makes sense when we recognize that the conditions in which the proletariat begins the struggle are conditions of which it is the co-creator, and each new phase of the struggle forces new conditions which modify the proletariat objectively as well as subjectively. Thus, despite all her work in economics and her rigid insistence on the centrality of Marx’s structural breakdown theory, when it comes to practical politics and its theory, Luxemburg insists—vehemently in her Antikritik, for example³—that economics alone will not bring socialism. History is richer, more complex, and more human than that.

As a theorist of the class struggle, for whom the development of revolutionary class consciousness becomes the central variable, Luxemburg implicitly throws into question any dogmatism of the ‘final goal’ and with it any linear view of the evolution from capitalism to socialism. This could be richly illustrated from any of her works, particularly the Mass Strike.

Each new rising and new victory of the political struggle simultaneously changes itself into a powerful impetus for the economic struggle by expanding the external possibilities of the latter, increasing the inner drive of the workers to better their situation and increasing their desire to struggle. After every foaming wave of political action a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle shoot forth. And vice versa. The ceaseless state of economic war of the workers with capital keeps alive the fighting energy at every political pause. It forms, so to speak, the ever fresh reservoir of the strength of the proletarian class, out of which the political struggle continually renews its strength. And, at the same time, it at all times leads the untiring economic boring action of the proletariat, now here, now there, to individual sharp conflicts out of which, unexpectedly, political conflicts on a large scale explode.

In a word: the economic struggle is that which leads the political struggle from one nodal point to another; the political struggle is that which periodically fertilizes the soil for the economic struggle. Cause and effect here continually change places … And their unity is precisely the mass strike. (p. 241, Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions)

The mass strike, which is a collective class action taking place over time, alters the very conditions which engendered it, at the same time that the new conditions which it creates bring it forth again, now in a different form. The economic continues and develops the political, the political does the same for the economic; and both affect and are affected by the drives and desires of the proletariat. It is interesting that nowhere in the Mass Strike essay does Rosa Luxemburg present an ‘economic’ analysis in the strict sense of the term; nowhere does she talk, for example, of the role of French capital, of the unequal regional development, or of the class composition of the Russian state. In effect, she shows the inner connection of a series of economic and political struggles over a period of nearly a decade; yet she gives no ‘cause’ and shows no external ‘necessity’ for this development and repeatedly insists that ‘the mass strike cannot be propagated’. Indeed, if ‘Marxism’ is taken to be a theory which explains capitalist society on the basis of its contradictory economic infrastructure which necessarily engenders crisis and revolution—and this is, at least in part, the interpretation Luxemburg gives in Social Reform or Revolution?—then it is questionable how ‘Marxist’ Luxemburg’s mass strike theory is.

The mass strike theory is the theorization of proletarian practice. The interplay of the economic and political struggles that Luxemburg theorizes makes sense only when we realize that both aspects of the struggle are the results of proletarian practice. In effect, the proletariat has seized the role of social subjectivity; and the Other that it confronts is not some eternally fixed form—‘capital’, the ‘bourgeoisie’, or the ‘state’, for example—but rather it is nothing but the result and realization of its own previous action. Luxemburg’s insistence that the mass strike represents the ‘unity’ of the political and economic struggles is based on her dynamic understanding of capitalism as produced in and by the practice of the active class subject. The mass strike is the sense of the movement of differentiation between the political and the economic spheres of action. Capitalism will not break down for economic reasons; its overcoming depends on the action of the proletariat.

Luxemburg’s activity during the 1918–1919 revolution in Germany reinforces this interpretation while pointing to the question that will be addressed in the next phase of our interpretation, namely, the role of the theorist within the revolutionary process. Her position—which was outvoted at the founding Congress of the KPD (Spartakus)—was based on the recognition that abstract theorization based on normative models of what ought to be is useless and that the theorist must confront the actual practice of the movement, theorizing it in order to show its strengths and weaknesses, possibilities and limits. The positions of the ultra-left, which carried the Congress, made her nuanced analysis of the next tasks of the revolution appear moderate and unappreciative of the tempo inaugurated by 1917; indeed, her speech was greeted, as the stenographic minutes report, by ‘weak applause’.

The opposition to Luxemburg’s analysis was based partly on the impact of the Russian success and the lessons that the German revolutionaries thought they could draw from what they knew of Leninism. Luxemburg had already replied to this sort of criticism, pointing out that the Leninist view of the party will not bring socialism because ‘it is not based on the immediate class consciousness of the working masses’ (p. 288, Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy). Rather, it transforms even the members of the revolutionary group ‘into pure implements of a predetermined will lying outside their own field of activity—into tools of a central committee’ (p. 289, ibid.). It makes the ‘mass of comrades’ into ‘a mass incapable of judging, whose essential virtue becomes “discipline,” that is obedience to duty’ (p. 264, ibid.). While these criticisms of Leninism are certainly valid in the abstract, it is important to recognize that Luxemburg’s argument is based in her specific conception of socialism as a process whose nuances were traced above and that each specific situation demands a concrete analysis whose task is to reveal its possibilities and its limits.

In ‘Our Program and the Political Situation’, Luxemburg stresses the difference between bourgeois and socialist revolutions: in the former, ‘it sufficed to overthrow that official power at the center and to replace a dozen or so persons in authority’, whereas in the latter, ‘we have to work from beneath, and this corresponds to the mass character of our revolution’ (p. 407, Our Program and the Political Situation). What had taken place in Germany on November 9 was, in this sense, a bourgeois revolution, despite its formal incarnation in the workers’ and soldiers’ Councils.

It was characteristic of the first period of the revolution … that the revolution remained exclusively political. We must be fully conscious of this. This explains the uncertain character, the inadequacy, the half-heartedness, the aimlessness of this revolution. The struggle for socialism has to be fought out by the masses, by the masses alone, breast to breast against capitalism, in every factory, by every proletarian against his employer. Only then will it be a socialist revolution. (396, ibid.)

The limits of the situation were clearly the unripeness of the masses; the possibilities were those created by the very action of the masses, action which had changed the meaning and reality of their situation, and changed them as well. The dialectic of praxis and its sedimentations that she had pointed to in analyzing the mass strike would have to play its role here. She proposed participation in the vote for a National Assembly, agreeing with Paul Levi’s speech which asserted this as a prime task while admitting that of course it would not itself ‘make’ the revolution. Against the activism of the ultra-left—typified by Gelwitzki’s ‘Ten men on the street are worth more than a thousand votes’—she spoke of a ‘long revolution’, of the proletariat’s maturation process through a series of struggles, and she criticized the gross alternative of ‘guns or parliament’, demanding a ‘more refined, dialectical choice’.

Luxemburg’s position did not carry the Congress; and two weeks later, she and Liebknecht were dead, in the ruins of the revolution. Her last article, ‘Order Reigns in Berlin’, proposes again a theorization of the struggle; it offers no recipes for future success, but describes only the possibilities and limits of the moment. The limits were partly conjunctural—the need to combat the Ebert-Scheidemann-Noske Social-Democratic regime—but mainly concerned the limited development of proletarian class consciousness. The possibilities were shown by the spontaneous creativity of the Berlin masses, ‘the people’s instinctive recognition that … the counter-revolution would not rest with the defeat it had suffered, but rather would be bent on a general test of strength’ (p. 412, Order Reigns in Berlin). She insists on the fact ‘that from the very beginning the moral victory was on the side of the “street”’ (ibid.). The stress on the moral character of the struggle, on the possibility that the people recognize that they themselves must take charge of their own liberation, and on the historical character of that struggle as creating meaning and opening possibilities in the present is a strain that runs throughout Luxemburg’s life. Socialism remained for her an objective necessity; yet in the crucial theoretical moments, in the theorization of revolutionary practice, it was the conscious, subjective, moral element that came to the fore. Reflecting on the defeat of 1919, she wrote:

The leadership failed. But the leadership can and must be created anew by the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the crucial factor; they are the rock on which the ultimate victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were up to the task. They fashioned this ‘defeat’ into a part of those historical defeats which constitute the pride and power of international socialism. And that is why this ‘defeat’ is the seed of the future triumph. (p. 415, ibid.)

Here, as throughout, the theorist gives no recipes and offers no tactics; she strives to understand, to express, and to crystallize the sense of the actual struggles. Yet she is the same theorist who taught economics at the Party School, and who wrote The Accumulation of Capital, the same person who on countless occasions analyzed the international politico-economic conjuncture in a variety of widely read party newspapers and journals; and she is the self-professed orthodox Marxist, defender of Theory against internal critiques as well as against bourgeois attempts to weaken it through expropriation. How do both sides of this picture hold together?

We began this part of the discussion with the motto ‘only the working class, through its own activity, can make the word flesh’. That formulation is typical. On the one hand, there is the ethical phraseology coupled with the stress on autonomous self-activity of the proletariat. On the other hand, there is that enigmatic ‘word’, which seems to be pre-given and foreordained. If the Word is already immanent and awaiting only History for its realization, there is present here the danger of the theory for practice and the seeds of a dogmatism. If, however, we understand with Luxemburg the revolution as a process, as the totality and sense of the struggle signified by the mass strike and based ultimately on the dialectic of class consciousness and its objective sedimentations, then the Word takes on the sense of an open self-creation. Then we can avoid the danger of technological recipes for revolution and describe our task with Rosa Luxemburg:

The essence of socialist society consists in the fact that the great laboring mass ceases to be a dominated mass, but rather, makes the entire political and economic life its own life and gives that life a conscious, free and autonomous direction. (p. 368, What Does the Spartakus League Want?)

The Word is not that of the theorist, but that of practice. What then is the role and task of the theorist?

2.2 The Theorist and Her Practice

The element of spontaneity plays such a prominent role in the mass strikes in Russia not because the Russian proletariat is ‘unschooled’ but because revolutions allow no one to play school-master to them. (p. 245, Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions)

Rosa Luxemburg was a party-person. Her loyalty can be seen, for example, in her angry letter to Henriette Roland-Holst concerning the decision of the left-wing of the Dutch Social Democracy to split from the turgidly opportunistic Center and form a new, truly left, party. Even if they were theoretically correct, she argued, separation from the ‘party of the working class’, however corrupted it may be, is suicide. A split would entail a separation from the life-blood of socialism; it would privilege purity at the cost of participation in the inevitable revolution. A morally Beautiful Soul, entrenched in its purity at the cost of being unable to put that purity into practice, is not Marxist in her eyes. More important than any question of efficacity—though the fate of the Dutch Left, and countless other such pure doctrines, is certainly instructive—is the basic notion of revolutionary theory as a theory of practice, which implies that if one separates oneself from the masses, then theory will become an ideology, sterile, and unable to evolve with the development of the mass struggle itself. In however corrupted a form, the Party represents that focus in which the forms of struggle find their expression, their reflection, and from which they are reflected back to the masses who can thus become conscious of the wealth of possibilities implied in their own actions.

There is an ambiguity in this view of the party which, as we shall see, corresponds to an ambiguity in the role of theory itself as well as to an ambiguity in the theorist’s own social insertion. On a factual level, we know that Rosa Luxemburg’s activity within the Polish SDKPiL did not correspond to her view of the function of the German Party; and we know that, after serious doubts and hesitations, she left the SPD to join the newly formed Communist Party of Germany (Spartakus). We can offer conjunctural explanations for both of these choices, and that is sufficient for the present purposes. What is more striking is that she insists that the Party is necessary, but not as a tactical tool for the seizure of power! This is clear in her critique of the Leninist technology of revolution and in her analysis of the German revolution of 1918–1919. In the latter, she points to the political onset of the revolution, shows its insufficiency, and insists that the next stage must be the economic combat in which, ‘breast to breast’, each proletarian becomes aware of his task, becomes conscious of the situation and its demands. Decrees, the seizure of central power, programmatic statements are not enough. ‘The masses must learn to use power by using power’ (p. 406, Our Program and the Political Situation). It seems, in effect, that the Party’s task is precisely to avoid the temptation of seizing power, the political temptation; it must, as she puts it in the Mass Strike essay,

give the slogans, the direction of the struggle; … organize the tactics of the political struggle in such a way that in every phase and in every moment of the struggle the whole sum of the available and already released active power of the proletariat will be realized and find expression in the battle-stance of the party; … see that the resoluteness and acuteness of the tactics of Social Democracy never fall below the level of the actual relation of forces but rather rise above it. (p. 247, Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions)

The Party, in other words, depends on the level of struggle of the masses for the formulation of tactics; and at the same time, the Party must ‘rise above’ the actual level of struggle. How can it do both? This is the question of Theory and the challenge for the radical theorist.

The same problem is posed somewhat differently in the final section of the Mass Strike essay. Discussing the relation Party-Trade Unions, Luxemburg insists that it is the Party which is responsible for the growth of the Unions insofar as the Party, by spreading the ‘ideology’ of Social Democracy, sensibilizes the masses to their situation. She rejects the Trade Unionists’ argument that their numerical strength indicates that they and their policy of compromise should dominate the movement. The movement is more than its organizational forms, and the Party, as the ‘spirit’ of the movement, transcends its organized mass, and is more than just its organized kernel centered in offices and official functions. But, if this is the case, one has to ask why Rosa Luxemburg put so much stress on the ‘legislative’ function of the Party Congress, as if she expected this yearly ‘assembly of Buddhists and bonzes’ to create correct tactics that all must follow. The only explanation seems to be that she saw the Party and its decisions as not simply representing (i.e., theorizing) ongoing practice but also as guiding it, as pushing it forward, giving it a sense of mission and totality. This, however, is an ideological function and supposes a certain—linear—theory of History.

This ambiguous attitude is present throughout the activity of Rosa Luxemburg. One sees it in her apparently contradictory arguments on nearly every major issue: on the one hand, she insists that parliamentary and trade union struggles are not the way to socialist revolution, showing that their one-sided defensive character is rooted within the game-rules of the capitalist system; on the other hand, she argues that without parliamentary democracy and without free trade unions and their struggles, a socialist revolution would not be possible because there would be no political room for the proletariat to develop its consciousness and no economic space to free itself from the immediate pressure of the struggle for existence within a society based on wage slavery. She argues that bourgeois democracy is an empty hull, a formality which veils the class domination of the bourgeoisie, but she insists that without this formality there would be no possibility for the proletariat to organize and recognize itself as a class; and moreover, she attempts to demonstrate that in the age of imperialism the only party which for objective reasons must support democracy is the party of the proletariat. She insists repeatedly and vigorously that without the economic necessity of the breakdown of capitalism there are no objective grounds for the socialist revolution, but she argues just as emphatically that it is only the class conscious proletariat which, by its own efforts and through its own self-educative experience, can make the system tumble. In her last political struggle, she opposed a hyper-activist politics in favor of a ‘long revolution’ based on electoral as well as economic struggles; yet she supported the majority decision for armed rebellion, laying down her life in the abortive actions that followed, and justifying this not as a ‘mistake’ but as a necessary step in the historical development of the proletariat.

In each of these decisions—and one should point to others, for this theorist of proletarian spontaneity was also probably the only Marxist of her time to understand the importance of a transitional program, to whose necessity she returned time and again; this convinced internationalist did not hesitate to oppose ‘Marx’ on the national question; this ‘bloody Rosa’ did not hesitate to criticize what she saw as excesses in the Russian Revolution—the first pole of the opposition seems to represent a theoretical position based on the ideology of Marxism and valid for capitalism in general, while the counter-position, which she actually adopted in the fire of action, is a modification of that theory based on what is in fact its basis: the action of the proletariat as inflecting the social-political configuration of capitalism. The orthodox Marxist that she was is responsible for both poles: the ideology itself must be defended against the opportunistic incursions of those too short-sighted to see the basic necessities to which the fundamental contradiction capital/labor points; and at the same time, the revolutionary kernel of the theory—that class consciousness, achieved in the struggle within the existing order, is the sine qua non of its elimination—must be kept open. The revolutionary Marxist theorist, in other words, is both a conservative and a visionary. Both must be maintained, for the theory without vision becomes a dead weight on the practice of which it was once the expression—that is, becomes an ideology; and vision without analytic content becomes a utopian and baseless wish, a groundless existential activism—that is, also an ideology.

The practice of Rosa Luxemburg as theorist is a remarkable attempt to maintain both poles of this dialectic of revolutionary theory. For example, in the debate with Bernstein, her defense of economic orthodoxy suddenly gives way when confronted with Bernstein’s challenge: what if, suddenly, the power fell into the hands of the proletariat? Her reply is that ‘the idea of a “premature” conquest of political power … [is] a political absurdity, derived from a mechanical conception of social development, and positing for the victory of the class struggle a time fixed outside and independent of the class struggle’ (p. 123, Social Reform or Revolution?). Bernstein’s question is based on an ideological view of a History unrolling independently of precisely the forces that constitute it; it supposes that the theorist is in a position external to the class struggle, and is able to see the totality of history and its necessities from outside.

Yet, immediately following this defense of a theoretical position situated within and partaking of the class struggle, she returns to the defense of economic orthodoxy, maintaining the necessity of the breakdown theory in purely economic (i.e., external) terms. The implication is that the two go together, that neither alone is sufficient and that each influences the other. One could demonstrate in detail—in her Polish work, in her analyses of the situation in France, or her practical and theoretical attempts to prove the necessity and to prevent the onset of the World War—this two-sidedness of Luxemburg’s practical and her theoretical work. If one looks at her speech, Our Program and the Political Situation, one is first of all struck by the fact that she felt the need to introduce a resolution against the counter-revolutionary activities of the SPD government with regard to the Russian situation, and the care with which she documents these interventions. This care for socialist legalism is transferred to the plane of actual considerations with the return to the old Erfurt Program of the SPD, which she attempts to interpret in the spirit of the ongoing revolutionary activity with the manifest aim of linking the activities of the new Spartakus Party to the tradition of Marxism. At the same time, however, one sees the visionary side in her stress on, and recognition of, the creative form taken on by the mass activity: the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Both poles are there, as always.

Yet, what is striking in the practical activity of this revolutionary theorist is that she was a failure. On every central issue—from the revisionist-opportunist debates, through the mass strike, the question of militarism and imperialism, the attitude to adopt toward the war, the tactics to be followed by the KPD in 1918–1919—she was refuted. She was refuted on other issues as well—the parliamentary tactic to be followed, the nature and function of the Party, the role of the trade unions, the status of the International. What is important in these refutations is that she was never beaten by other theoretical arguments, but rather she was refuted by the facts, the events—refuted by History. For a Marxist, this is of course the most damning refutation of all!

There is a further peculiarity in Rosa Luxemburg’s practice as a theorist. She was a dogmatist, in the sense already alluded to. She never put Marxism into question, never doubted its teachings for a moment. We know that hers was a creative Marxism, following the spirit and not the letter, open to new developments, as a theory of practice must be. Yet the result of this was only that she was a dogmatist eternally in opposition. This is paradoxical; for if I am correct in asserting that she captured the spirit of the movement in her theorization, then the practice of the revolutionary theorist, and the revolutionary theory itself, is cast into doubt by Luxemburg’s fate.

Several explanations of this paradoxical politics could be advanced. We might say, as with Fidel Castro’s famous 1953 speech, that ‘history will absolve her’. That, however, implies a linear view of history, seen from a divine or transcendental viewpoint, where progress takes place continually until such time as it eventually reaches its—that is, our—imputed goal. But to say that a Marxist is ‘ahead of her time’ is to say implicitly that she was in fact incorrect in her analyses; for what distinguishes Marxism from the run-of-the-mill utopians is that it claims to discover the future within the present. The linear view of history, on the other hand, separates History from the class struggle which constitutes it; it is ideological.

We might say that her analyses, her perceptions of the ongoing and innovative reality, were incorrect either because of a too dogmatic adherence to the Theory or because of an overly optimistic interpretation of the reality. We might say that she chose the wrong points of intervention, that, for example, she should have broken with the SPD as early as 1907–1908, or that she should have tried to build a stronger oppositional base within the party, instead of confining herself to journalism, the Party School, and agitational speech-making. We might say that she gave too great credence to the spontaneity of the masses and consequently did not take care to prevent them from falling victim to the illusions of the leadership, that she should have followed Lenin’s tactics and used organizational measures to maintain the purity of the Party. We might advance a variant of Michels’ oligarchy thesis to explain why a theory that is the reflection of the practice of a vanguard cannot become the reigning position within a mass democratic Party. We could heap up details concerning the manipulation by the party leadership, with which Michels’ analyses of the SPD is rich. (Indeed, Luxemburg seems to see something similar to Michels’ analysis in the sociological remarks in the last section of her Mass Strike essay.) We might go further to suggest, with Artur Rosenberg, that she ought to have known, as did Lenin in July 1917, when to beat a tactical retreat in order then to choose the right moment for a comeback; or we could refer to Hannah Arendt’s interpretation that she was ultimately a romantic and a moralist, not a Marxist at all.

There are many possible explanations of Luxemburg’s practice as a theorist, and its destiny. None is in itself convincing, for each is obliged to introduce external and contingent factors. At best, one says that if Luxemburg was defeated, and if there were contradictions in her position, the source of this lies in the historical terrain on which she stood. The contradictions in her work would thus be due to the immaturity of capitalism and the consequent immaturity of the proletarian movement; her ‘defeats’ would be seen as only temporary, and the advance of the capitalist contradictions will show the long-term fruitfulness of her position. In other words, one asserts that Luxemburg had the correct theory, but that when she applied this theory to the reality of her times, a distortion emerged because of an inadequacy in the reality itself. But this interpretation fails too. It assumes that if one had a proper understanding of the world, it would be possible to find a proper method to change it. This suggestion neglects a fundamental point, common to the dialectics of Marx and Hegel: that dialectical theory (or method) cannot be separated from its content. Their separation leads to an external, linear view of History, dividing what Marxism sought to unite: theory and practice. We have, therefore, to ask, why a true Marxist—and the above arguments have implied that Luxemburg was faithful to the best elements in Marx himself—was powerless to relate as a revolutionary to the actual practice of her time? And, if the Marxist theory, as theorization of proletarian practice, is unable to command the allegiance of the masses and to effect social change, then perhaps there is something wrong with the theory itself?

It might be suggested that the assertion of Luxemburg’s ‘failure’ is a kind of pragmatic judgment itself situated outside of the history in which her work was forged. It would seem that the verdict ‘failure’ was arrived at by superimposing her theory and her practice on an ever-flowing History which was the material base on which her work functioned. This would give her theory and her practice a closed, positive, and ultimately ideological character, instead of presenting it as an open, interrogative theory of practice. Indeed, the motto with which we began this section—that no one can play school-master to the revolutionary proletariat—suggests that our criticism has violated one of her own central precepts. In order to clarify this problem, we will have to look at the ambiguities of revolutionary theory itself by returning to a question that was posed but not yet answered: how is it possible for the theory to be a theory of the actual practice of the proletariat and at the same time to rise above that practice?

2.3 Revolutionary Theory

Far more important, however, than what is written in a program is the way in which it is interpreted in action. (Our Program and the Political Situation)

The essential variable in the theoretical and practical work of Rosa Luxemburg is class consciousness. It is no doubt for this reason that at a time when capitalism has revealed itself as a total system seemingly capable of absorbing its economic, social, and political contradictions, we can find her work a congenial source of reflection on our own problems. In a way, this is ironic, for she was too orthodox, too dogmatic, and too much an optimist to have sensed the problems posed by the advent of a scientized, bureaucratic capitalism. She is not concerned with the mechanisms of individual or mass psychology, with problems like reification, alienation, or false consciousness. Yet she has been, and is, a source of fruitful reflection on just these problems.

In asserting that class consciousness is the essential component, the sine qua non of any revolutionary movement, Luxemburg is certainly no different from many other Marxists. What is distinctive is her analysis of it—or better, the fact that she never makes it into the object of her theorizing, but rather shows its actual appearance as the reflection and critical self-reflection of the open possibilities that proletarian action has created. This central ‘ingredient’ is never thematized, is always present on the margins, emerging and taking form only to be carried onward and to reappear in a different guise; it is not a thing but the sense and meaning, the unity and totality of the class struggle. It is not external, the product of a theory or the property of the Party; it is both the condition of the possibility of the struggle and the product of that same struggle. We can fix the elements that play a role in determining the present status of class consciousness, talking about the material conditions which determine the forms of consciousness. But this cannot be understood as a cause-and-effect relation, empirically determined. We know, for example, that the same conditions can give rise to very different forms of consciousness and activity; we know, for example, that the economic conditions in which we actually live are given a different human, lived-significance from what appears in the cold official statistics. What is crucial is that the material conditions can only affect the class precisely insofar as the class itself is willing to be affected, that is, attributes a significance to these conditions.

As we read Luxemburg’s analyses of the events of her time, and as we vicariously follow her courses on political economy at the Party School, what gives her work a character that is more than just good analysis and ‘correct’ interpretation is her ability continually to put her finger on the dynamic, the possibilities, the sense and radical signification, the openness of the situation she is describing. Of course, much of what she ‘predicted’ did not come to pass. But once again this ‘failure’ cannot be judged from the transcendent standpoint of a History that has now closed off the possibilities and shown in retrospect her judgment to have erred. Her task was not to present ‘the’ necessary path to follow, to ‘prove’ the correctness of her view inductively and/or deductively; it was rather to reveal the sense of a situation, to point to its central feature: the fact of its openness. When we judge her a ‘failure’, we treat her practical political work as a closed thing with only one possible signification; and therewith we fall back into a view of a linear and mechanically unrolling history. History as lived is precisely the openness of interrogation; and Luxemburg’s task as practical theoretician was to focus on this openness, on the possible class consciousness with which the situation is rich.

It would be an oversimplification to assert that since class consciousness is the central variable of the revolutionary process, the task of the theorist is to act always in such a way as to raise the level of that consciousness. For that supposes that we know what class consciousness is; it implies that class consciousness is a thing and that it grows, somehow, by the addition of little bits of information received from outside itself; and it makes theory into a kind of tool or weapon, preparing the ground for the famous practice of ‘substitutionism’ whereby the Party as the possessor of the theory substitutes itself for the masses, whose ‘correct’ consciousness it claims to be. Of course, class consciousness is not indeterminate either. But Luxemburg also avoids the trap of presupposing an external, linear conception of history, which would contain a fixed view of the nature of socialist consciousness. Thus, we find her speaking with confidence and sanguinity of the need for the proletariat to accede to power several times, each time losing it, before it finally learns to establish its new society (p. 123, Social Reform or Revolution?). And we are struck by her continual return to the historical ‘failures’ of the movement—lost strikes and revolts, 1848, 1891, the history of May Day, and so on—as being a necessary component in the growth of class consciousness. She does not present a pseudo-materialist explanation of these ‘failures’, but rather, refusing to explain them away, she gives them a positive significance precisely because of the new dimensions that they open.

Yet, we are still confronted with the problem of theory’s being at once a theory of the actual movement and at the same time ‘rising above’ it. In effect, this turns out to be a false problem once we escape from the external, linear view of History and recognize that our theory is part and parcel of history itself. Theory cannot be simply a static reflection of the present nor an external construct that serves as guide. The reason for this is that the central variable determining the historical process is not fixed but indeterminant, open, changing and creating new significations. Theory is not and cannot be a system—at least not if it is revolutionary theory. And indeed, in what sense can we say that Rosa Luxemburg ‘had’ a theory? Certainly, she accepted Marxism and even attempted to present a theoretical correction of it in The Accumulation of Capital, and more strongly still in her Antikritik. But in her practice, and in the relation of her theory to practice, she never attempted to elaborate a series of positive and determined formulae that could be followed. For example, is the Mass Strike essay the presentation of a theory? Certainly not in the traditional sense; yet as engaged Marxists we talk about it as such. Why?

If we look again at the theory of the mass strike, what is central is the shifting forms taken by class consciousness, expressing itself now politically, now economically, now in minor movements or even in quiescence, now in major flare-ups whose cause seems minor in comparison with the enormity of the class’ oppression. Moreover, the Mass Strike movement that culminated in the Russian Revolution of 1905 is seen to have its roots in activity in different geographical regions over a period of nearly a decade. The ‘Mass Strike’ itself, Luxemburg explicitly notes, is a concept, a totalization, the unity of a variety of actions. The historical actors did not consciously sense themselves to be a part of this movement whose unity the theorist presents; they did not follow directives in moving their struggle from one plane to another, one region or issue to another. Yet the Mass Strike is there. It is the historical sense of proletarian struggle of the moment, not consciously appended to the individual actions but their latent signification and meaning. The theory gives an empirical accounting of the events and thus is a theory of the activity; and at the same time, it ‘rises above’ insofar as it unifies and designates the possibility that has been opened.

What is the process of revolution, and on what does it depend? Ultimately, it needs a free space, a sort of vacuum that is created and felt in the power relations that have hitherto held the proletariat in bonds. The opening of this space is not the result of theory or the product of class consciousness in the sense that they would function like a kind of Archimedean point from which to move the world. Obviously, there are real events and material conditions which play a role. But when we begin to analyze these events and material conditions, we find that they could play their role only because of their lived, human significance. And it is through this notion of significance that theory finds its role as rising above. It rises above insofar as it is the integrated sense and possibility of the present whose theory it is. It is this not simply as theory, but as lived experience, insists Rosa Luxemburg, noting that ‘in the storm of the revolutionary period, the proletarian is transformed from a provident family man demanding support into a “revolutionary romantic” for whom the highest good, namely life—not to speak of material well-being—has little value in comparison with the ideals of the struggle’ (pp. 246–7, Mass Strike). The sense and possibility, inherent in the movement and theorized by the revolutionary, are the difference which makes all the difference in revolutionary action.

The notion of the ‘two reefs’ between which revolutionary practice must continually navigate can be extended to the paradoxes of revolutionary theory. As a theory of practice within capitalist society, it must remain affixed to its material base; yet at the same time, it must ‘rise above’ and dwell in the realm of sense, of the difference, of the possible. It must hold together the poles: alone, the first makes history into a mythology, and itself becomes either a shameless empiricism or a technology which treats humans as objects, while the second alone runs the danger of falling into moral utopias, vague hopes, or empty ethical demands. The implication of the motto with which we began this Section is that the stress should not be placed on the mystifying adjectives ‘proletarian’ or ‘revolutionary’, but rather, when we are concerned with theory, these concepts should be applied to specify the particular kind of theory for which we aim—binding rigor with openness, critique with self-critique, and necessity which points to possibility. The duality to which I have pointed in the theoretical and practical activity of Rosa Luxemburg is not something that the famous dialectical Aufhebung can take care of in some magical manner. Rather, it is constitutive of the project itself. It must be understood, and it cannot be changed by simplification of whatever sort.

Footnotes

1

Pages in parenthesis, followed by the title of an article or pamphlet, refer to the English translation of Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, edited by Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). Although the following analysis refers explicitly to some of her central theoretical essays, my selections for this first English language anthology of her work tried to let her present herself and her political vision in a way that would seem familiar to a young New Leftist.

2

Comparison with Hegel, and with Marx, is interesting here. Hegel insists that ‘the subject matter is not exhausted in its goal, but in its being carried out; nor is the result the actual whole, but rather the result along with its becoming’ (Preface to Phänomenologie des Geistes, Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952, p. 11). Marx’s political translation of this, in the Communist Manifesto, is that ‘in the various phases of evolution through which the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie passes’, the communists must ‘always advocate the interests of the movement as a whole’. This ‘translation’ by Marx is more ‘idealist’ than the Hegelian position, for it implies that the Party can know the whole even before the carrying out brings it to fruition.

3

See especially pp. 36–7 and 117 of the original edition of the Antikritik.

© The Author(s) 2019

Dick HowardThe Marxian LegacyPolitical Philosophy and Public Purposehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4_3

3. Marxism and Concrete Philosophy: Ernst Bloch

Dick Howard1  

(1)

Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, New York, NY, USA

Dick Howard

Banality too is counter-revolution against Marxism itself.

(Das Prinzip Hoffnung, p. 322)

In order to situate Bloch and his Marxism , it is necessary to move beyond the history of ideas to enter into the concerns and choices of a real movement aiming at changing the world. This orientation presents a double difficulty that arises from trying to understand a thinker who has been an actor in this movement for the past 70 years and at the same time trying to cast some light on this movement itself. The difficulty is multiplied by the fact that Bloch considers himself not simply a philosopher but a Marxist philosopher for whom Marx’s Aufhebung of philosophy proposes the elimination of the bad, contemplative philosophy of the past, but not the destruction of philosophy itself. As a result, the facts of history and the choices made by Bloch cannot explain the movement of his action or thought; it is necessary to philosophize with the philosopher-Marxist in order to illuminate his contribution as it was at the time and as it remains.

Bloch’s thought is both too orthodox and too heterodox to enter into standard categories: too engaged in the struggles and the intellectual life of his time and too much a systematic and rigorous philosopher . Faithful supporter, even champion, of the communism of the Third International , he nonetheless remained critical in his theoretical writing when it seemed necessary to him. This earned him criticism from the right as well as from the left.¹ Particularly grating in retrospect are his defense of and deference to Stalin, his unabashed defense of the Moscow Trials, as well as his naïveté toward East Germany (which he left after the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. In spite of the difference between his radically critical theory and his conformist orthodox practice, the rhythm of what he called his ‘experimental’ thought pursued doggedly (if sometimes dogmatically) through his reconstruction of the manifestations of humanity, from the smallest and nearly banal events to the most monumental of the classics, cannot fail to attract critical readers.

Bloch was one of those young intellectuals seeking their rebellious way during the fin de siècle during which the preparations of the World War were becoming painfully evident. Friend of the Expressionists, participant in the Salon of Max Weber, admirer of the polyvalent philosopher-sociologist Georg Simmel (at whose home he first met a young Hungarian, Georg Lukács, whose inseparable collaborator he was to remain for more than a decade), Bloch was a pacifist who chose exile in Switzerland rather than resistance in a Germany at war. Like so many others, he was thrown into a turmoil by the Revolution of 1917—the ‘Novum’, as he would call it in his later systematic language. Returning to Germany after the abdication of the Emperor, his theoretical work reflected the revolutionary struggles that continued until 1923. During this agitated period, he wrote the Spirit of Utopia (1918, revised edition, 1923) and Thomas Münzer as Theologian of the Revolution (1921) and published a collection of essays, Through the Desert (1923). That year marked the end of an intellectual epoch: Soviet Russia lived, but in isolation; the revolutionary wave had been stopped before the gates of Warsaw and its counterpart in Germany was soon to be replaced by the Brown Plague, as the Weimar Republic became the symbol of a new order cursed by the sins of its birth.

The question of the role of the communist intellectual was posed most immediately and acutely in that same year, 1923, which saw the publication—and the condemnation—of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy. The irony of this double condemnation was redoubled by the fact the anathema came from both the right-wing Social Democrats and their communist critics in Moscow. The parallel but opposed choices of these two great innovators in the tradition of Hegelian-Marxism expressed a dilemma for the politically engaged intellectual such as Bloch: to conform to the party in hopes of maintaining some influence on its future or to remain faithful to critical theory from the hope that reason will finally have its way. Lukács renounced certain of his key ideas in order to remain faithful to the party and ‘thus’ to the Revolution, whereas Korsch remained faithful to his position, becoming rapidly isolated and without influence on his times.

The third great ‘Hegelian-Marxist’ of the post-war period was Ernst Bloch, who never joined the Party and whose less directly political style and concerns at least partially spared him the attacks and polemics of the new orthodoxy. While I am not convinced that Bloch’s choices offer an adequate model, I have come to think that the question itself is ill-posed. What Bloch does offer, and what becomes a central category in his work, is the notion of an active inheritance. The critical intellectual would do well to assume that heritage.

The first step is to try to understand the spectrum of thought associated with Marxism. That was the challenge of the Hegelian-Marxists in 1923. Bloch’s review of History and Class Consciousness illuminates the specificity of his own position. He sees that Lukács’ theory of the proletariat as the subject/object of history—a product of capitalism that has the potential to become the agent of its transformation—lends itself to a Leninist vision of the party as acting in the name and ultimately in the place of the proletariat. Bloch has to show that a different path is possible. Its necessity became clear to him already in 1924 with the appearance of popular fascism. Bloch recognized that the threat could not be analyzed by appeal to traditional economic categories or a simplified notion of class consciousness . The old philosophical categories, and the contemplative stance outside the fray, were not sufficient. In exile, when fascism came to power, Bloch wrote his three-volume The Principle of Hope, a master-work that could never be expected to find a direct party-political translation. He himself became more obedient politically to the Moscow orientation during the war; at its end, he assumed a professorship—his first—in Leipzig, East Germany. He remained a loyal, although critical, citizen after the 1953 workers’ uprising, and after suppression of the 1956 revolution in Hungry, moving to the West only in 1961, after the erection of the Wall. Before criticizing these political choices, it will be useful at the end of these reflections to consider the path chosen by another critical Hegelian-Marxist, the founder of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Max Horkheimer, who chose the West after his return from American exile (whose work will be considered in more detail in the next chapter).

3.1 Bases of Bloch’s Dialectics: Actuality and Utopia

Bloch’s long, lyrical review of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness carried the telling title ‘Actuality and Utopia’, as if to underline both his agreement and his criticism of similarities to his close friend. After criticizing Lukács’ thesis, Bloch writes, in italics, that ‘The foundational metaphysical theme of History is discovered in another manner, but substantially in agreement, as in [Bloch’s] Spirit of Utopia’.² In the pre-war atmosphere charged with despair, passion, and revolt, where the German Social Democratic Party was incapable of imagining the future while a revolt of the imagination raged in the various forms of expressionism and irrationalism, Bloch and Lukács shared the culture of German Idealism enriched by the desire to do something to change the world . Their shared values appear in the at once enthusiastic but sober introductory pages of Bloch’s review, which evoke a world unable to understand itself caught up in a frenetic activism. Bloch then reconstructs the essential contributions of Lukács’ book: its use of the concepts of reification and ‘second nature’ to analyze the crisis, the absence of a conception of the totality that could unite the strands of revolt, and Lukács’ attempt to conceptualize the material crisis by returning to the (Kantian) problem of the Thing-in-itself by means of a reinterpretation of Marx’s theory of capitalism. In effect, Bloch joins Lukács in showing how the quantification and reification of social relations that results from economic specialization and the division of labor hides the qualitative sense of experience that binds together the spheres of life. The lack of a vision of totality explains the radical nature contemporary forms of art and morality; to regain the lost unity, the Bloch agrees with Lukács, a return to Hegel and Marx is necessary in order to understand the potential creativity of history as the mediation of individual self-consciousness and everyday experience.

Bloch reproduces the path of History and Class Consciousness in his own manner, his own language, and articulated around his own preoccupations. Lukács’ theory of the primacy of the Party does not seem to bother him, although obedience to its dictates would soon lead Lukács to abandon much of what Bloch found important in his work. Bloch was not blind to political reality, predicting difficulties with the ‘Russians for example, who act philosophically but think like uncultured dogs’.³ Although they ‘are infinitely different from the Revisionists, … they are nonetheless in nearly the same manner separated from the philosophical heritage , and many of them will say that Marx did not stand Hegel on his feet in order that Lukács once again stand Marx on his head’.⁴ The bourgeoisie too will misunderstand the reasons Lukács insists on returning to the fundamental problem of German Idealism —the subject/object problem—just as they have always done with their own best thinkers.

In Bloch’s reading, the key to Lukács’ theory is that ‘[t]he instant [Augenblick], which for all others is a conceptual embarrassment, is here raised to the moment of decision, the penetration [Durchblick] into the totality ’.⁵ Bloch reinterprets Lukács’ analysis of the fetishism of commodities and its relation to the idea that, as a commodity for sale in the marketplace, the proletariat is an object whose self-knowledge would constitute a critique of bourgeois society in its totality . In Bloch’s reading, this self-knowledge arises from a dialectically open conception of the Now [Jetzt] which permits the actor to be ‘finally capable of grasping the Now in which we stand’.⁶ This Now is not identical to what Hegel called a ‘moment’ [Moment] that stands impoverished and abstract before the consciousness of the individual who is about to undertake the educational journey into the Absolute. For Bloch, the Now is intersubjective and actively mediated by a we-subject. Read in this light, Lukács’ analyses of the structure of capitalism as well as of the paradoxes of German Idealism open toward a concrete task: revolution as the repossession of man and nature through the elimination of alienation . Theory implies praxis: ‘As soon as the accompanying concept, itself dialectical , is capable of grasping the present, recognizing in it those tendencies from whose opposition it can create the future, then the present is its present, the moment of deepest and most amplified mediation, the moment of decision, the birth of the new’.⁷ Bloch’s argument can be understood as a theory of constitution; the Now is mediated or constituted by the we-subject which can only seize itself precisely in its act of constitution and as its act of constitution. The fixed, reified static presence is exploded; the Now is the new, the utopia which is actual to which Bloch’s title referred.

Although Bloch does not deal directly with Lukács’ politics, the political implications of his critique are weighty. He draws attention to the author’s ‘sociological homogenization’ which reduces history to a single dimension and a linear structure . But no more than the Now, history is not reducible to a total social formation closed on to itself, having a singular meaning that is waiting to be seized by the perceiving consciousness . History is a ‘polyrhythmic formation’⁸ which includes the artistic , the religious, the metaphysical , and the social-economic. Lukács’ reduction loses the dianoetic element that is essential to thought. The implications of this reduction appear especially in Lukács’ treatment of nature . Bloch’s insistence that a ‘subject that could create the surpassing of Nature as its own reality, has not yet come … is not yet discovered’ is an implicit criticism of Lukács’ theory of the proletariat as revolutionary subject.⁹ His claim is that ‘a social adequation [of subject and object] can be achieved more easily economically than legally or morally, whereas the spiritual [das Geistige] can follow another, more devious force, or can take its path more slowly’.¹⁰ Lukács’ social reduction was motivated by his desire to avoid both bourgeois positivism and the moralistic dualism that is its presupposition. But his solution carries the drawback that the leap, the constitution of the actuality of utopia in the present, is replaced by a conceptual mythology based on the subject/object identical incarnated in the Party.

The further implications of the corrective proposed by Bloch appear in his later analysis of fascism. Lukács moves to closure too quickly; the quest for solutions masks problems demanding analysis, choice, and action. Bloch suggests the need for ‘the weighing down of the totality through the concept of the sphere’.¹¹ This vision opens room for the mediated and multi-leveled conception of the Now. ‘The sphere’, he writes, is ‘the expression of different subject/object levels posited in the process itself, … which expresses and disseminates itself temporally … and also spatially in the positing of the sphere’.¹² This conceptual shift could have made it possible for Lukács not only to seize the Now as a process but also to avoid the reduction which impedes the leap into the new. ‘Only one level higher in the Now’, exhorts Bloch, ‘and beside, above the proletariat appears the obscure mystery of the lived instant [Dunkel des gelebten Augenblick], the actuality hidden in it that is victorious against the abstraction which is removed from the subject’.¹³ Had he carried through such an analysis, Lukács would have been led to the ‘unconstructible question [unkonstruierbare Frage] … Respect for the secret of the We which in reality is undiscovered not only for us but thus also for itself; the secret which is the secret of the world’.¹⁴ Posed in this manner, actuality and utopia would appear finally together; they would be co-constitutive of each other. This, perhaps, is what Marx meant when he suggested that until now the world has merely possessed in a dream what it needs to consciously demand in reality.

Bloch’s interpretation of Lukács suggests the two senses or tendencies contained in History and Class Consciousness; his criticism points to the chasm between the conception of theory by the two self-proclaimed Marxists which would become most clearly evident in the Hegel interpretations they each published after the Second World War. In Der junge Hegel (1948), Lukács attempts to paint a nearly Marxist thinker, limited only by the socio-economic and political conditions of the Germany of his time, whereas Bloch’s goal in Subjekt-Objekt (1951) is to illuminate the heritage of Hegel through a sustained reflection on the tensions which are uneasily maintained within the system of the German Idealist . Where Lukács attempts to justify Hegel’s theory from within a doctrine he anticipated but could not realize, Bloch could never accept the idea of a complete and finished doctrine which would unlock the meaning of positive reality by applying a proper method. That is why Bloch demonstrates the wealth of the Hegelian reflection through an analysis of the systematic and mature works, while Lukács concentrates on Hegel’s early critique of the positivity of institutions , concentrating on his study of political economy that is said to culminate in Phenomenology of Spirit. Where Lukács’ analysis is continuous, systematic, and well-rounded, Bloch’s disconcerts, leaps, doubles back on itself only to stride forward toward that Now, the spheric totality opening onto a we-subject . Lukács’ analysis is useful to the reader wanting to know why Hegel could have been so important to Marx; Bloch’s intention is to situate Hegel in the world , guided by what he calls that ‘one-sidedness … which makes one point sharply at the goal’.¹⁵ Teaching in the newly communist German Democratic Republic, Bloch appears to identify this goal with Marxism. He specifies however the need for ‘attention to instances in the sense that no detail is a priori designated as inessential is unavoidable for concrete philosophizing’.¹⁶ For Bloch, ‘[a]ctuality is nominalism, not conceptual realism; but a nominalism all of whose moments and details are held together by the unity of the objective real-intention, founded by the utopian unity of the goal’.¹⁷ The contrast with Lukács appears again in a short essay in which Bloch stresses Walter Benjamin’s ‘sense for the incidental’ as ‘that which so unbelievably lacked in Lukács’.¹⁸

The contrast of Bloch and Lukács points to the ambiguity of the legacy of Hegelian-Marxism. In contrast to Korsch , Bloch and Lukács remained true to the party of the proletariat, refusing what they saw as the isolated purity and abstract moralism of a truth with no objective referent. Both also justified their fidelity with reference to the threat of fascism. Although he claimed that much of his work was ‘Aesopian’, Lukács strained to recover the latent utopian passion that Bloch discovered in History and Class Consciousness. For his part, Bloch remained faithful to his utopian vision of the Now, the spherical totality , and the unconstructible question; but he could not ignore historical challenge of rising fascism. His analysis published in Heritage of Our Times (1935) attempts, not always successfully to avoid the temptation—to which Lukács succumbed—to conflate the theoretical analysis with the concrete reality. That is the trap for Hegelian-Marxists who pursue theory as if it were itself a form of praxis and fall victim to the apparent practical necessity imposed by political realism.

3.2 Confrontation with Fascism and Development of the Dialectic

The 1923 was not only the date of the appearance of Hegelian-Marxism in the books of Lukács and Korsch ; it was also the year of the final failure of Marxist revolution in Germany, and it was also the year of Hitler’s failed putsch in Munich. Never accepted by the radical Left and Right , the republic established at Weimar appeared to be a merely formal democracy which was daily contradicted by the social conditions. Bloch despised the timid republican bourgeoisie , be it Centrist or Social Democratic; and he supported the Communists , but without joining them. He would say ironically, after Hitler’s ascension, that everything they did was correct—simply that they neglected the essential. With a small group of friends—among them Benjamin , Adorno , Kracauer, Weill, and Brecht —he attempted to illuminate that polyrhythmic and spherical Now where the totality in its futurity opened itself. While chapters in the Heritage concern the arts, culture, philosophy, and quotidian life, the philosophical-political thesis of the book is drawn in a short essay, ‘Noncontemporaneity and the Obligation to its Dialectics’.

Bloch’s analysis begins from apparently orthodox economic premises:

As opposed to the proletariat, the middle class does not in general participate directly in production but enters it only with intermediary activities, with such a distance from social causality that the formation of an alogical space can occur without obstacles, a space in which wishes and romanticisms, primal drives and mythicisms come onto the stage.¹⁹

What holds for these middle classes holds, mutatis mutandis, for the peasantry. That ‘alogical space’ is not nothing; its contents must be analyzed. The concrete articulations of that ‘polyrhythmic formation’ which is the present face of lived-history must be studied. The economic analysis is only a beginning; it creates only the possibility for the emergence of novelty beyond the sphere of material necessity.

Bloch begins from a political fact. ‘Were misery to affect only contemporaneous men, even if they were from different social positions, backgrounds and consciousnesses , it could not drive them to march in such different directions, especially not so far backwards’.²⁰ Proletarianization, impoverishment, and the heavy cloud of uncertainty for their future might be expected to drive the middle strata and even the peasantry to the Communists or at least to the Social Democrats. If this did not occur, argues Bloch, it is a sign that although they tend to become commodities like everything else in the reified world of capital, there remain real remnants of a past which is still present to which they can actively relate their situation. What drives these people is not simply a false consciousness or the effects of capitalist or fascist propaganda. Particularly in Germany, where the bourgeois revolution remained unrealized until 1918, and where therefore capitalism was overdetermined by modes of production and consciousness that never underwent the leveling effects of the world of commodity capitalism, these remnants could play a role. Driven, hounded, threatened, these remnants can be mobilized to seek anchorage at the port closest to what they perceive as home.

In Marx’s analysis of the contradictions of capitalism, the antagonism between the forces and the relations of production is the key to revolutionary upheaval. The revolutionary project of the proletariat is inscribed in the conditions of capitalism. Its activity is determined by its everyday experience of the limits, artificiality, and irrationality imposed on its free activity. What it seeks is a future already present but yet dependent for its actualization on its own conscious revolutionary activity. The contradiction described in this (Hegelian-Marxist) manner is what Bloch calls a contemporary contradiction. Bloch contrasts this Marxist vision to other contradictions which make themselves felt within the social totality ; these are non-contemporary contradictions. They are part of the polyrhythmic Now, structures of the sphere which presents the actuality of utopias , not all of which are progressive. Marx himself recognized the existence of such non-contemporary contradictions, for example, in the Introduction to Marx’s study of The German Ideology when he stresses the existence of other modes of production alongside the dominant one; similarly in the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx subtly analyzes the behavior of the peasantry in terms of their remembrance of the French Revolution and their role in the Napoleonic empire. Bloch’s task is to thematize these contradictions in terms of the Now, as mediated by a we -subject.

Strata such as the peasantry, the petite-bourgeoisie, or their petty-bureaucrat descendants live their present in the mode of the past and envision their future through the distorting mirror of capitalism with its exploitation and rationalization of human relations. They feel that something is wrong but they don’t know what it is; their lives seem to go on with no exit or future. Their ideals—duty, honor, Bildung—are no longer accepted; their idols—the house, land, the people, or nation—have been crushed under the leaden foot of capitalism or dissipated in senseless consumerism. They live a diffuse ressentiment which is unable to give itself a name, to crystallize a sense of self, or to understand its place in the world . Bloch calls this ressentiment a ‘dammed-up rage’ [gestaute Wut]; it is a subjectively non-contemporary contradiction. This frustrated energy is not a form of ‘false consciousness’ whose basis is economic ; it reflects ‘the objective non-contemporary contradiction which results from the continued effectiveness of older relations and forms of production, no matter how thwarted, as well as older superstructures. The objective non-contemporary reality is far from and foreign to the present; it includes the declining remnants as well as, above all, the unutilized past which has not yet been “aufgehoben” into the realities of commodity capitalism’.²¹ Such objectively non-contemporary contradictions are not solely due to the specific circumstances of German capitalism; they point to an incompleteness inherent in the structure of capitalism itself. In Bloch’s political ontology , their existence plays a crucial structural role permitting the possibility of a critical-utopian philosophy.

The two forms of non-contemporary contradictions can be used by capital to turn the rebellion, ressentiment, and discontent of the concerned strata toward other goals and activities. This must be taken into consideration by the strategy and tactics of the revolutionary proletariat. Bloch suggests the need to take seriously and articulates the futurity contained in every form of contradiction . In the case of the contemporary contradiction , a future is already present but repressed by the capitalist relations. This present-future is the mediation that makes necessary the politics of revolution. In the case of the non-contemporary contradictions, the ‘unutilized past’ that was not eliminated becomes crucial precisely because it was never realized in its own time.

They are thus ab ovo contradictions of unfulfilled intentions, divisions within the past itself: not simply in the present, as the divisions of the contemporary contradictions, but equally running throughout the entirety of history; so that here hidden contradictions, namely the still unutilized contents of intention, can in this case themselves join in the rebellion.²²

The Now is thus full with a utopian present-future and with a future that is always-already present. Their unification in a revolutionary movement would be the justification of Marx’s well-known assertion that the proletarian revolution will be the final revolution, the repossession in reality of what humanity has until now possessed only in a dream.

This philosophical analysis implies choices for practical politics. Bloch insists that it is only the contemporary contradiction, the proletarian struggle against the domination of capital, which can animate the non-contemporary contradictions. In other words, the struggle of the proletariat with capital remains primary.

Even the possible full ripening of the specifically unutilized elements of the past can never on its own leap forward to a quality which we do not already know from the past. The most useful help for such a leap will be an alliance that frees the still possible future from the past by positing the co-existence of both in the present.²³

The proletarian struggle in turn animates the non-contemporary contradictions positively and negatively; it awakens ressentiment among some, and at the same time it has the potential to join with the proletariat in a common struggle. In order to correctly understand the multiple antagonisms tearing at the social fiber, Bloch insists that even the contemporary contradictions are, at least in part, driven and activated by the same content as the non-contemporary ones. What is lacking from the point of view of non-contemporaneity is, at least in part, the same relations that the proletariat has been seeking in the present. The positive desire in the struggle of the proletariat that points to the future is precisely what has never yet been realized in the past: full human being , non-alienated labor —in utopian parlance: paradise on earth. ‘In the revolt of the reified negativity of the proletariat there exists, in the last analysis, the always non-contemporary material presence of a contradiction which rebels against the wholly non-released “productive forces”’.²⁴ The principal contradiction in the present of course remains the (Marxist vision of the) clash between the forces and relations of production, the opposition of the proletariat and the capitalist . That is why Bloch assumes without further ado that the struggle must be conducted under the hegemony of the proletariat. But at the same time, in that Now where the we-subject breaks into a spherical, polyrhythmic history, the dialectic of the struggle must include all of the contradictions which comprehend and compose the totality . To have neglected this was the root of the Communist Party’s inability to mount a coherent counter-movement to Hitler’s fascist brown-shirts.

The analysis of the contemporary and non-contemporary forms of contradiction is found in a collection of essays, Heritage of This Time, published in 1935. The reader is struck by the fact that it is not only from the past and in the ideological sphere that Bloch finds his inheritance . Bloch also attempts to reap this harvest through the appropriation of the modern—in the forms of Kracauer’s analysis of the newly developing stratum of employees in offices, the philosophy of Bergson , in modern physics, or in Brecht’s theater. He once again separates his philosophical outlook from that of Lukács , for whom the heritage would only be the attempt to take over the conquests of the radical bourgeoisie in order to put them, immediately, at the service of the proletariat.²⁵ Bloch’s utopian counter-suggestion is that ‘[t]he foundation of the non-contemporary contradiction is the unfulfilled fairy tale of the good old times, the unresolved myth of the mysterious old being or of nature ; one finds here and there not simply a past which, from the standpoint of the class, still lives, but also a past which has not been materially realized’.²⁶ This suggests that, for Bloch, to inherit is not to receive from the past; it is rather to pay the debts of the past in order to receive the present. As long as the past remains as a debt, the present will never be free.

The question how to inherit a legacy faces those who claim to be the heirs of Marx. Bloch is perhaps more chary than he need be. When the expressionist poet Gottfried Benn expressed his allegiance to the Nazi regime, the modernist sensibility with which he had been associated came under attack. From his Moscow exile, Lukács replied with a defense of classical bourgeois realism, setting off the Expressionismusdebatte in which Bloch took part. His contribution was a scintillating refutation of the platitudes of narrow, insensitive Marxist orthodoxy. While he criticized mordantly the ‘all too great progress from utopia to science’ and suggests the need to add to what he calls Marxism’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ a ‘Critique of Practical Reason’, he does not, however, take the further step that would ask for a ‘Critique of Judgment’. That would have demanded reflection on what, in his own terms, would be a sort of subjective non-contemporaneity that would reveal a ‘negative’ legacy of Marx.

Although it is the task of specialists to evaluate Bloch’s influence during his years in Leipzig, his teaching in Tübingen, where he continued to lecture in his 80s, arriving at his lectures in an old Citroen ‘deux-chevaux’ driven by one of his students , brought him to the attention of the New Left. Representing what he called the ‘warm stream’ within Marxism, Bloch’s influence rivaled with the ‘critical theorists’ of the Frankfurt School. Positioned as heirs of Marx who refused a self-imposed tutelage to orthodoxy (which Bloch called the ‘cold stream’), Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno had returned soberly to West Germany after completing their Dialectic of Enlightenment whose pessimistic conclusions led Horkheimer to integrate his work in the establishment of the new order while turning to Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism in the place of his previous critical stance. As with Bloch, so for Horkheimer, circumstances played a role in his choices (which were not those of his partner, Adorno ). As philosophers , both had set out to develop a critical theory in the tradition inaugurated by Marx. Their own legacies bear contrast.

3.3 Bloch Versus Frankfurt: Dialectics of Labor and the Principle of Hope

As the continual use of the term ‘critique’ in his titles or subtitles indicates, Marx’s theory was above all critical. It was neither contemplative philosophy nor positive presentation of the world as it is. What then was its relation to science, whose progress during the second half of the nineteenth century seemed to promise a new and better world? Engels and many of the Social Democratic followers of Marx felt the temptation; so too did Marx, who was flattered by a Russian review of Capital, which treated Marx’s opus as a shining illustration of the scientific method. Engels’ Anti-Dühring, written at Marx’s request, became canonical, particularly when its chapter titled ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’ was published as a separate pamphlet in 1880. The science emphasized by the founders was said to be critical because it was ‘materialist’ as well as ‘historical’. The difficulty with this vision became evident in the years leading to the outbreak of world war; as Rosa Luxemburg had seen, there was no place for political action in a world of material necessity ! The praxis-oriented critical dialectics gives way to a theory of science which reintroduces a dualism that separates the subject from its object; theory is the recognition of necessity rather than its critique.

The early Frankfurt School revolted against this materialist devolution of Marxist dialectics. Although he was the close friend of some of the most original collaborators among the participants, Bloch never shared the style or the goals of the School’s director, Max Horkheimer. It is tempting to hone in on shared themes, such as Theodor W. Adorno’s idea of ‘exact phantasy’, ‘non-intentional truth’, or his use of ‘historical images’ such as the ‘bourgeois interior’ as a key to understanding the radical implication of Kierkegaard. Such themes could be underlined in Walter Benjamin’s use of ‘dialectical images’ in his unfinished study of the Paris of the nineteenth century, but these incursions into the intellectual history of ideas distract from the concern to read Bloch in the light of the need to understand the political potential of Marx’s vision of theory as critique. The early work of Max Horkheimer provides a more useful point for contrast and comparison.

The challenge is to restore to Marxism its nature as a critical theory capable of analyzing the present as at once a part of a multivalent material world and as an actor always already in the process of changing it. What Horkheimer calls ‘traditional theory’ is produced by the theorist separated from the object who either contemplates the world passively or attempts to manipulate it to realize goals that are external to the object itself. For its part, a ‘critical theory’ overcomes that separation by finding in its object itself an intentionality that opens to a future, and in that way offers a meaningfulness to the alienated world. This is what Marx aimed to produce in Capital: an analysis of capitalism which points beyond its object to the socialist future. The critical theorist accounts for the direction and the structure of theory on the basis of a study of its material object. The traditional philosophical goal of realizing the autonomy of thought is replaced by the recognition of thought as imbricated in its object.

The elaboration of the mediations between the material world and the historical subject was the project to which the Frankfurt School devoted many of the pages of its journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , which are rich with theoretical-cultural analyses of such phenomena as the family, mass culture, bourgeois culture, literature, and the arts with their implications and tensions, as well as with reconsiderations of the critical potential of ‘traditional theory’. While often fascinating as cultural and intellectual history, revealing the tensions between a thinker and his epoch as well as strains within an individual biography, these analyses are disappointing in one fundamental aspect: it is never clear who is doing the analysis, how the author came to pose these questions, and how the subject is practically implicated in the object analyzed. Horkheimer shows himself often to be aware of this problem. Yet the best he can offer are vague references to the ‘imagination’ of the critical theorist , an animating ‘phantasy’, or even an ‘engagement’. He insists that the truth of the analyses can only be demonstrated after the revolution which they call for and seek. While this is consistent with his program, it is no more satisfying than the historical-materialist position that argued that the growth of capitalism which socializes the world of production permits the theorist to comprehend the direction of history even though that process is realized by the objective logic of capitalism which works behind the back of the active subjects.

Bloch’s approach to the dialectical relation of subject and object is most clearly presented in his interpretation of Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ in The Principle of Hope. He insists that Marx surpasses traditional contemplative philosophy by demonstrating that concrete labor is the basis for understanding of the world . He points out that the ruling class in capitalism seeks to legitimate its domination by emphasizing the role of labor, producing not only an ethical vision of labor but also logos of practical labor as central to the self-understanding of the human species. Of course, the entrepreneur and his ideology portray labor in a form which is ideological , passive, and contemplative. Nonetheless, a rupture is introduced, from which the tensions and progress of German Idealism emerged. This is what makes Marxian materialism radically different from that of Democritus whose contemplative approach is closer to a Plato . For Marx practical labor is conceived as a real relation between subject and object. As a result, the idea that the empirical world exists independently of the subject is impossible; the material world is always mediated by, and results from, human labor. The priority of being over consciousness can only be understood insofar as working on an object does not in any way eliminate that object, but rather marks it, opens it, mediates it. This explains the ontological source of what Bloch had called the always present non-contemporary contradictions.

This kind of understanding of labor is lacking in Horkheimer. Horkheimer does insist that Nature is independent and irreducible to thought. But his theory of ‘mimesis’ does not pose the mediations, even the psychological ones, that would be needed for concretization.²⁷ Lacking a theory of labor, Horkheimer’s philosophical anthropology—like that of Feuerbach before him—is incapable of understanding and working out its relation to the philosophical heritage . In the case of Feuerbach, a ‘true humanism’ is elaborated through the critique of that heritage which permits the emergence of the ‘true’ by denouncing the ‘false’. For his part Horkheimer presents at first a brilliant series of antinomical analyses of past and present tendencies in theory before lapsing into a pessimism which gives way to a reactionary politics and a skeptical theory. Thus, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (written with Adorno ) as well as his study of the Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer develops his critical analysis with reference to the concept of Reason which, for traditional philosophy—for example, in Kant’s philosophy of history—, constituted the hope for the humanization of the world before it went astray and become a rationalization used in the service of domination. The problem is not that Horkheimer neglects the socio-economic base of this degeneration, nor that his analyses are superficial or uninteresting; the root of his difficulties lies in his critical program in which the engagement and the praxis of theory are replaced first by an apocalyptic vision of history (expressed in his 1942 essay on the ‘Authoritarian State’) and then by a flat and cold rational pessimism . The active heritage to whose need Bloch pointed is neglected. At best, Horkheimer draws from his pessimism a lingering regret for the conquests of bourgeois individualism which, he suggests but doesn’t adequately explain, was capable of saving itself from the reification of both Reason and social relations.

In order to inherit from the tradition, including those aspects of it that have been suppressed for socio-political reasons,²⁸ thought must be conceptualized according to the model of the mediation of the subject/object by labor within precisely that polyrhythmic formation which is history. Horkheimer’s attempt to inherit from the ‘critical theory’ of Marx tries to take seriously the degeneration of Marxism at the hands of its epigones; that is its virtue. Horkheimer’s attempt at critique from within the Marxian movement falls flat and ultimately inverts itself because his conception of reason is either based on the traditional Enlightenment view or appeals only to the engagement of the imagination and phantasy of the critical theorist . He has missed the fundamental point: correlative to the sociological leveling that Bloch criticized in Lukács , Horkheimer can be said to engage a leveling either in terms of a flattened-out Reason or a flight from those implications toward a phantasy which, ungrounded in concrete activity, tires after a while and seeks a secure niche from which criticism (but not action) can be undertaken. Because he never gets to what Bloch presents as the core of Marxism—the theory of labor—Horkheimer’s account of the degeneration of the heritage is external and flawed.

Comparison of Bloch’s sketches from the history of philosophy with those of Horkheimer shows that Bloch’s theory is activated by different concerns. Both consider the role of the social-historical conditions in the formation of thought, and both characterize that thought in terms of its internal contradictions and tensions. Bloch’s presentation is structured in terms of a futurity which is activated by the non-contemporaneity of thought. This is not a vision of the future for which the theorist wishes or fantasizes about. Bloch’s point is that it is internal to the chain of thought under consideration. There has been too much change in the world , he argues, from the conquest of Rome to Genghis Kahn to the modern fascist barbarians. ‘But salutary change, not to speak of achieving the Kingdom of Freedom, comes about only through salutary knowledge, accompanied by ever more precisely controlled necessity ’.²⁹ This knowledge is no more a technical theory for practice than it is a contemplative philosophy. Bloch’s interpretation of the famous 11th ‘Thesis on Feuerbach’ insists on the task which it poses to philosophy: ‘The final perspective of changing the world which Marx sought to formulate is illuminated here. Its idea—the knowledge-conscience of every praxis in which is reflected the Totum which is still afar—doubtless demands just as much innovation in philosophy as it creates the resurrection of nature’.³⁰ This ‘innovation’ and ‘resurrection’ are both structured by the arguments that have been developed here: through the polyrhythmic Now, manifesting the remnants of a not-yet resolved task, and mediated by the concrete labor of the plurality of social beings. Although they are present, these elements are only active insofar as subjects are capable of taking them into their possession.

Horkheimer’s phantasy remains external to its object, unmediated by it, and at best grounded by that search for individual autonomy which was the goal of the classical German idealists . Bloch, on the other hand, insists on taking a position. In his major work, The Principle of Hope, he does not spare the reader, citing various polemics of Marx against the so-called true socialists whose self-satisfaction given by a vague sentiment of love for humanity is pilloried as impractical, useless, and even harmful. For Bloch, their modern equivalents cannot even refer to this kind of sentimentalism: their ‘love’ is seen as only a mask for an anti-communism which dares not reveal its true face. Bloch insists on his position. ‘Without choosing a party in love, without a very concrete pole of hatred, there can be no true love; without the party standpoint in the revolutionary class struggle, there is only an idealism turned backwards instead of praxis aiming forward’.³¹ This affirmation is shocking to a reader who has engaged with Bloch’s thought while being himself engaged politically. His position repeats the arguments he used at the time of the Moscow Trials. One such reader rooted in the New Left was Oskar Negt³² who favored Bloch’s engagement over the purity of the Frankfurt School which condemned both the communists and the fascists only to find themselves isolated, adopting an apolitical politics coupled with an often uncritical acceptance of the methods of American social science. This reality is not of itself a justification of Bloch. It simply points out that it is not sufficient to criticize his politics as if his choices could be understood in isolation from their time. It is not sufficient to suggest that a theory that justifies bad politics is not worth examining in greater depth.

3.4 The Problem of Our Heritage

What can be said today about the concrete philosopher who was so aware of the nuances of the Now who finds himself opting for a political practice which fails to recognize what seem today patent injustices. Bloch’s goal is the unification of reason and hope, the human and the natural, the dream and reality. His project is complicated by the fact that each pole is itself double and incomplete. Reason, humanity, and the dream are each determined by what they have been, but each has been what it was only by virtue of a ‘not-yet’ (Noch-Nicht) which drags it, pulls it, works on it. And, by the mediation of concrete phantasy whose model is labor , the same is true of hope, nature , and reality, which are also doubly dynamic and incomplete. To seek their unification is not to return to the quest for that philosophy of identity which was the summit of German Idealism . The point is that it is only through this unification that each element can become fully what it potentially is already. Bloch’s interpretation of the 11th Feuerbach Thesis spoke of the ‘resurrection of nature’. The point is not that nature will become identical with humanity, nor that humanity will explain itself and its destiny when it understands nature . There is an ‘intentionality’ which is specific to the object itself (which was recognized, before Benjamin and Adorno , by those philosophers who are treated by Bloch as the ‘Left Aristoteleans’). The violation of this objective intentionality is precisely the foundation of all alienation.

From this point of view, Bloch’s theory is related to a long mystical tradition whose influence on Hegel and German Idealism was considerable. This point is argued in Jürgen Habermas’ essay, ‘A Marxist Schelling’, in which Bloch’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ serves as the fulcrum for the exposition and critique . Nature for Bloch is not something which has always been; its essence is not something in the past (ein Gewesenes) to which one could return, but is rather out there, on the horizon, as a Not -Yet. The utopian dimension is anchored in nature itself which, mediated by thought in the form of labor , gives a presentiment of the new that has not yet been. To bring out the specificity of Bloch’s approach, Habermas compares utopian thought with speculative thought in order to suggest that Bloch opens a third alternative. Utopian thought considers its analyses as refutable, but does not expect that reality will offer their definitive proof because praxis always goes further than the theory that anticipates it. Speculation, on the other hand, wants to continue its philosophical quest, looking to reality only for its proof, never for its refutation. Bloch’s position would be the unification of the two attitudes: ‘The guarantee of salvation falls away, but the anticipation of salvation preserves certainty for itself, saying: it will work thusly or not at all, all or nothing will be achieved, the finally fulfilled hope according to the anticipated images of fulfilment—or chaos’.³³ This is the teleology of the Not-Yet. It depends for its validity ultimately on an ontology , but one which is consistent with Marx’s project (although not necessarily that of the Marxists).

Habermas’ approach to nature and its potentialities, which is central to the Blochian position, leads to a critique of technology as we know it. Whereas Marx tended to view technology as a neutral factor, Bloch sees clearly—as does the Frankfurt School, although from a different theoretical base—that modern civilization is based on a domination of nature which cannot help but turn back against it, deflecting its aims, needs, and hopes. The ‘resurrection of nature’ for which Bloch calls and which would be achieved by socialism would permit a ‘co-productivity’ of man and nature . Similarly, in the sphere of art, as opposed to Adorno , for example, who saw the truth of art revealing itself in its intrinsic contradiction which illuminates the real itself, Bloch insists on the utopian dimension which must be actively inherited. This leads him neither to despair nor to expect the return to a paradise once possessed but somehow lost. Bloch’s concern is with the completion of what throughout human and natural history has been seeking its expression and realization without having the power or mediations that would permit such a completion. This realization is the New; it is always active as a force, even though it has never existed as such. The critical philosopher permits it to name itself, to recognize itself for what it is; he is the Socratic midwife that traditional philosophers invoked but could not conceive because their attention was turned backward, to what was rather than toward what has not yet been. Bloch’s message is that the philosophical concern with essences, das Gewesene, ‘what has become’, must be transformed from within.

Despite the often brilliant results to which this standpoint leads, its political translation poses problems. Habermas suggests that ‘[a] utopia which understands the dialectic of its own realisation in a utopian manner is in fact not so concrete as it pretends to be’.³⁴ He adds elsewhere that it is striking that Bloch concentrates on deciphering theories of law rather than actual legal structures , theories of the state rather than the state itself.³⁵ His point is that a theory concentrating on the Not -Yet, the utopian in the present, remains still a prisoner of that reality which it seeks to surpass. The problem was posed already by Hegel . Bloch’s attempt to protect Marxism against vulgar utilitarianism or pragmatism goes too far in its insistence on the need for philosophy; it neglects the other, objective side of the critical intention that guided Marx. Based on the idea that the transition to socialism is not the result of a linear material progress but rather of a qualitative leap, and stressing the importance of the historical, ‘spherical’ Now at the same time that he seeks to ground philosophically its understanding, Bloch loses the historical-empirical side of Marxism. In seeking to inherit the New actively, in the here and now, Bloch’s theory has the paradoxical result of losing the everyday in which it is to be based. Thus, concludes Habermas, however concrete it may seem, Bloch’s theory remains in the last analysis abstract and speculative.

Habermas’ critique neglects a fundamental point which underlies the entire Blochian edifice. Bloch offers a double account of the origins of that critical phantasy which inhabits not only the few who are its theorists , but which is in fact possible and often actual in the many. The analysis of the temporality of contradiction which is the manifest source of radical phantasy is itself grounded in the temporality of the Now; and this latter is ontologically structured by the concept of the Not-Yet. Bloch’s stress on the ‘obscure mystery of the lived instant’, on the ‘sphericality’ of the Now, and on what he calls the ‘unconstructible question’ is not poetry or speculative mysticism. It is a claim about what theory can do; it tries to understand the tasks and insertion of theory in the world. His paradoxical task is the formulation of an open system, an Experimentum Mundi, as the title of his 1975 systematic summation calls it. This apparently contradictory task is the only one possible in a world that is not clear and translucent and whose significance is not available to the casual glance. What can be resurrected is not what was but rather only that which existed in the form of a Not- Yet. Critique is not negation but anticipation.

What can be inherited from Bloch is no more than what he too sought to inherit. Reading him helps learn to see the tradition through his eyes, and watching him function in his own present opens again the desire to inherit, to pay the debt of the past, and redeem it. Bloch’s work and his legacy suggest the reason that critical thinkers are driven from politics to philosophy and then back again. That oscillation will go on; neither pole can be abandoned, for in a sense neither is possible without the other. Bloch’s utopia is not abstract, nor is it the project of the political thinker separated from or guiding the proletariat. In a sense, Bloch’s political choices are an accidental result of his political thought. The paradox is only apparent for, in the last analysis, Bloch’s philosophy is his politics; the philosophy of the Not -Yet, of the polyrhythmic and spherical Now, itself designates a politics, demands the practice of inheritance , and offers guidelines for practical analysis. Bloch’s heirs can recognize the very motives which drive them to praxis and to theory in this conception of the unity of philosophy and politics. As in the many unforgettable vignettes in his own work, Bloch too is brought into present by those who continue to read him.

Footnotes

1

See, for example, Hellmuth G. Bütow, Philosophie und Gesellschaft im Denken Ernst Blochs (Berlin: Ost-Europa Institut, 1963), which offers an unsympathetic account written from the standpoint of the Communist Party orthodoxy shortly after Bloch had chosen to remain in the West after the construction of the Berlin Wall. From a standpoint reflective of the New Left, see Festschrift published for Bloch’s 90th birthday, Ernst Blochs Wirkung, which contains a useful historical documentation as well as helpful commentaries. An earlier version of the present chapter appeared in that volume.

2

‘Aktualitaet und Utopie. Zu Lukäcs’ “Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein”’, in Ernst Bloch, Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), p. 619. Bloch told me in conversation that his Spirit of Utopia was as indebted to Lukács’ collaboration as was History and Class Consciousness to his own thought. He also mentioned that Lukács’ heirs had recently discovered over a hundred letters which Bloch wrote to him during that period (but added that he did not have his side of the correspondence). A collection of Lukács’ pre-war correspondence was published some years after that conversation in G. Lukács, Briefwechsel, 1902–1917 (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1979).

3

Ibid., p. 601.

4

Ibid.

5

Ibid., p. 600.

6

Ibid., p. 614.

7

Ibid.

8

Ibid., p. 618.

9

Ibid., p. 619.

10

Ibid., p. 618. Lukács’ interpretation of nature entails a rejection of Engels’ theory of the ‘dialectics of nature’ which was adopted by Marxist orthodoxy. This was one of the grounds for the condemnation of History and Class Consciousness. When the book was finally republished (in 1968), it included both Lukács’ early political writings and his more apologetic later texts, beginning with his 1924 study of Lenin. The new introduction, written in 1967, tries to explain away his rejection of Engels’ theory. When I visited him in the summer of that year, he explained that he was working on his ‘ontology’ whose foundation was an understanding of the constitutive primacy of labor.

11

Ibid., p. 619 (Bloch’s stress).

12

Ibid.

13

Ibid., p. 620.

14

Ibid., p. 621.

15

Ernst Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt. Erlaeuterungen zu Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, erweiterte Edition, 1962), p. 503.

16

Ibid., p. 502. Bloch does not recall here his earlier suggestion to Lukács that he understand the actuality of the moment as spherical.

17

Ibid., p. 508.

18

Ernst Bloch, ‘Erinnerungen’, in Ueber Walter Benjamin (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968), p. 17. Bloch tells the story that once when he and Benjamin joined Lukács in Capri at the beginning of the 1930s, they began to discuss the impression that a fairy tale makes on the young listener. After a long conversation during which Lukács remained silent, Bloch asked for his thoughts, only to receive a stereotypical reply: it depends on the social conditions of the hearer, the author, and so on. The old friends did not meet again!

19

Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), p. 110. I have kept the title of the English translation, although the term ‘Erbschaft’ could be rendered as ‘legacy’.

20

Ibid., p. 112.

21

Ibid., pp. 116–17. One might overhear in these analyses an echo of Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism in The Accumulation of Capital and especially in the Antikritik. To my knowledge, Bloch does not cite her work (although Lukács does).

22

Ibid., p. 117.

23

Ibid., p. 119.

24

Ibid., p. 121.

25

Ernst Bloch, ‘Bemerkungen zur “Erbschaft dieser Zeit”’, in Vom Hasard zur Katastrophe. Politische Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1934–1939 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), p. 49. (The article dates from June 1936.)

26

Erbschaft dieser Zeit, op. cit., p. 122.

27

Bloch analyzes this problem in Subjekt-Objekt under the title ‘Hegel und die Anamnesis. Contra Bann des Anamnesis’. He first stresses the two senses of temporality in Hegel as well as the role of formation (Gestaltung) and re-membrance (Er-innerung) in order to conclude that without this basis the future becomes an abstraction with no foundation. For this reason an anamnesis of a very specific type is necessary: ‘Precisely without an anamnesis of an archaic or historically stationary type; for in their essence the work-formations (Werk-Gestalten ) of the process border not on the return but rather a utopia of the Not-Yet’ (Op. cit., p. 488).

28

Throughout Bloch’s works one finds beautifully articulated and important studies of nearly forgotten thinkers from every field of endeavor. This aspect of his work is more than simply an exercise or a demonstration, as should be clear from the above.

29

Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1959), p. 326. (This book was written between 1938 and 1947 in the United States, and was revised in 1953 when it was first published, and again in 1959. The first edition appeared in the GDR in three volumes in 1954, 1955, and 1956.)

30

Ibid., p. 327.

31

Ibid., p. 318.

32

Oskar Negt, ‘Ernst Bloch—der deutsche Philosoph der Oktoberrevolution’, published as the Postface to Vom Hasard zur Katastrophe, op. cit.

33

Jürgen Habermas, Theorie und Praxis (Neuwied: Luchterhand Verlag, 1963), p. 350.

34

Jürgen Habermas, Theorie und Praxis (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971, fourth revised edition), p. 349.

35

Ibid., p. 268.

Part IIUsing Marxism

© The Author(s) 2019

Dick HowardThe Marxian LegacyPolitical Philosophy and Public Purposehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4_4

4. Toward a Critical Theory: Max Horkheimer

Dick Howard1  

(1)

Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, New York, NY, USA

Dick Howard

In the previous chapter I contrasted briefly Ernst Bloch’s concrete philosophical attempt to appropriate Marx creatively through the notions of concrete phantasy, labor, and the futurity of the present with the Critical Theory of Max Horkheimer. Since my concern there was with Bloch, for purposes of exposition I did not treat the nuances in Horkheimer’s text. I now want to show that Horkheimer’s writings as well as the influence exercised through his self-declared ‘dictatorship of the director’ of the Frankfurt School are more probing than they first appeared; the result is a concept of Critical Theory that is a research program with practical implications.¹ Looking first at Horkheimer’s own explicit program, I will make clear that he fits clearly into the search for the Marxian legacy. However, as his project deepened philosophically, its socio-political concerns widened in the dark days of exile and war; the reflections that Horkheimer published in 1942 under the laconic title ‘Authoritarian State’ mark a turning point in his debate attempt to appropriate Marx for Critical Theory. The path toward pessimism opened; the vision of revolutionary politics dimmed before it disappeared.²

I was tempted to begin this discussion with a laconic question: ‘Marxism as Critical Theory and/or Critical Theory as Marxism?’ In Horkheimer’s early writing, it often becomes apparent that ‘Critical Theory’ is used simply as a code word for Marxism. This may have resulted from his desire to legitimate his discourse within the academic establishment. Whatever his motivation, it gave him a double freedom: the liberty to redefine and go beyond the narrow, ‘economistic’ reading of Marxism that neglected the social relations at the root of the economy, and the political freedom to stand against the orthodoxy of the Communist party. The adoption of Critical Theory as a trademark carried the further advantage that it replaced the familiar doctrines and practice of Marxism with a still-to-be-elaborated theory; as a result the intellectual acquired a autonomy permitting independent analysis and decision while also demanding that new domains and methods of research be opened. In a word, without Marx’s contribution, Critical Theory would not have been possible; but Horkheimer’s hope seems to have been that the child becomes the father of the man. In this light, his Critical Theory remains contemporary.

In another mood, the chapter might have been entitled ‘Leaving Critical Theory’. The goal would be to understand how Horkheimer was led not simply to reject Marxism but to the adoption of positions which, however formally consistent with Critical Theory, had practical implications that were reactionary. The crucial text would be his 1970 lecture, ‘Critical Theory Yesterday and Today’. After criticizing Marx for erroneous economic predictions, Horkheimer suggests that Marxists do not understand the connection between equality and justice and that while the former may be achieved, its acquisition comes at the cost of justice and freedom. As a result, the task of his ‘new’ Critical Theory is not to make revolution but to oppose the ‘new terrorism’ that has emerged on the left, while its positive function is to support those elements of Western liberalism which protect the autonomy of the individual and human culture. This ‘new’ Critical Theory goes on to stress two lessons from theology: first, the doctrine of original sin, which implies the impossibility of complete happiness in the present while still recognizing that today’s culture is itself the result of a miserable and cruel past, and second, the Old Testament prohibition on the portrayal of God, which Horkheimer translates as the fact that humans cannot know the True and the Good, leaving only Stalin and Hitler vainglorious enough to make such a claim. The pessimistic former ‘dictator’ knows that existing evil must still be combatted; but he insists that ‘Hunger is not in the least the worst [evil]; worse is the fear of force. And it is certainly one of the tasks of Critical Theory to speak this out’.³ Coming finally to actual politics, Horkheimer attacks the German students’ demonstration against the visit of the Shah of Iran to Berlin in 1867, arguing that Germans can do nothing about Iranian conditions and should instead direct their attention against, for example, what goes on in German prisons. Yet it was precisely this demonstration, and the police violence against it, which contributed to the birth of a New Left which, to Horkheimer’s regret, took many of its critical tools from the ‘old’ Critical Theory.

In the end, this chapter is called ‘Toward a Critical Theory’ because the New Left students criticized by Horkheimer had built their movement on a set of ideas that drew on theories that had been advanced by the Critical Theory of the 1930s. They sought to unveil the hidden force and subtle violence that quietly glues together bureaucratic society. The New Leftists denounced the ‘affirmative culture’ that left no place for critique while justifying (as ‘individual freedom’) the atomization of society and the resulting privatized passivity imposed by bureaucratic society. Their critique of domination, their refusal to repress the life of the senses, and their dismantling of the authoritarian familial socialization process must have seemed eerily familiar to Horkheimer—all the more since the rebellious students adopted his former associate, Herbert Marcuse, the author of the best-selling One-Dimensional Man (1964), as one of them! Horkheimer’s path from Marx to Critical Theory needs to be examined as another attempt to inherit the Marxian legacy.

4.1 The Agenda

Although Horkheimer did not shy away from stating the revolutionary goals of Critical Theory, the immediate tasks he assigned it were defined by the double crisis of Marxian and bourgeois theory. While he appeared more concerned with the crisis of bourgeois science, in practice the work undertaken by the Institute and the perspectives from which it emerged were Marxist. Science was defined and limited by its role in the capitalist division of labor which restricts it to empirical fact gathering and prevents it from putting itself in the service of human needs. This is not the result of individual choices; it emerged when the once progressive function empirical science changed. Concentration on the empirical had served the rising bourgeoisie well; but it tended to be both a-historical and unconcerned with the totality of its effects, such that the empirical researcher is unable to distinguish the essential from the merely accidental.

A method oriented towards being and rather than towards becoming corresponds to the view of the given social form as a mechanism of self-repeating processes which, of course, can be disturbed for a shorter or longer period, but which in no way demands any other scientific attitude than, for example, the explanation of a complicated machine.⁴

The result of this attitude and of its social insertion is that scientists and even philosophers are aware of the crisis, but are unable to discover its causes. They are blinded because, as part of society, science is involved in a double contradiction: in theory, each step of research has epistemological grounds, but yet the way the problem is posed cannot account for itself; moreover, even if it recognizes its social insertion and dependence, this science is unable to develop a theory of society in its contradictions and therefore its becoming. Thus, concludes Horkheimer, the crisis of science and the crisis of society are part of one problem. A theory of present-day society is necessary if science to advance beyond the limits expressed in its form and content, its methods and materials, and even the individual details of its work.

Horkheimer’s revolutionary goals are stated quite explicitly in his early essay ‘On the Problem of Prediction in the Social Sciences’ (1933). Science needs to be able to predict; the element of futurity is essential to it. But for the social sciences, prediction clearly depends on the social conditions about which the prediction is offered, and not on the cleverness or subtlety of the theorist. Horkheimer refers to Duprat’s distinction between prévision and prédiction, according to which prevision is expressed as an abstract law or tendency which is different from the prediction of actual facts or events. He objects that a law is expressed in the form ‘if x then y’, which means that if it can be shown, for example, that market economies necessarily develop both monopolistic and crisis-inducing results, and if it can be established that we live in a market society, then we can predict the impossibility of bettering these conditions. This, however, is still not sufficient; historical prediction is a risky business precisely because, despite Vico’s famous aphorism, men still do not make their own history, or at least they do not make it as they would choose consciously. Such uncertain conditions need not last; planning is indeed possible, and the more planning is introduced, the more accurate will be prediction. Thus, concludes Horkheimer, prediction will become fully possible only in a free society: ‘For the true human freedom is neither that of being unconditioned nor that of mere caprice, but it is identical with the mastery of nature within and without us through rational decisions’.⁵ Therefore, the task of science and that of politics come together: ‘the effort of the sociologists to come to accurate prediction is translated into the political effort towards the realization of a rational society’.⁶ The next step is to formulate this coincidence of politics and knowledge into a research program that has political results.

Horkheimer’s Inaugural lecture, delivered on his assuming the directorship of the Institute, sets out the perspectives in which he intends to direct his research group under the title ‘The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research’. The project of a social philosophy emerged first in the development of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel. The Kantian project grounded the forms of social existence—state, law, religion, economy—in the individual as constitutive agent. Even though Kant did not confuse the constitutive individual consciousness with the empirical individual, he was unable to move beyond an analysis based on the still abstract opposition of autonomy and heteronomy. Fichte then developed the analysis of the split between the individual and the social, but the full resolution of the problem had to await Hegel’s attention to the ‘labor of history’ for an answer.

With Hegel idealism thus becomes social philosophy in its essential parts: the philosophical understanding of the collective whole in which we live and which gives the basis for the creations of absolute culture is at the same time now knowledge of the sense of our own being in its true value and content.⁷

Horkheimer stresses that while Hegel’s idealism argues in terms of a logic of Spirit, it also takes account of the role of individual interests, drives, and passions. This is most clear in the Philosophy of Right with its detailed economic analyses and account of the role of civil society and in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History with its telling image of history as the ‘slaughter bench’. Yet Spirit triumphs, transfiguring the individual and its particularity while achieving reconciliation. The death of this Hegelian reconciliation was, however, not long in coming; the progress of science, technology, and industry made it clear that the need for philosophical mediation such as Hegel had offered was no longer felt⁸; the effects of social action now appeared directly, achieving the desired results immediately.

Once again, history moved on. The earlier success began to appear as naked exploitation; Hegel’s archenemy Schopenhauer celebrated the triumph of his pessimism as the senselessness of society became too evident. With this, however, the need for social philosophy was born anew as the contradiction between the individual and the social totality could not be bridged. Passing through the efforts of Cohen, Scheler, Hartmann, Reinach, and Heidegger, Horkheimer’s conclusion is that

[i]f speaking in slogans is permitted, one could assert that today social philosophy encounters the longing for a new sense (Sinngebung) of a life which is restricted in its individual search for happiness. Social philosophy appears as a part of the philosophical and religious efforts to reinsert the hopeless individual existence into the womb or, to speak with Sombart, into the ‘golden ground’ of meaningful totalities.⁹

This ‘new sense’ cannot be given, nor can the conditions which engender the longing be analyzed, by irrationalist approaches which leave the empirical world entirely in seeking unities like the Soul or the Volk. Nor can the Kantian individualism be renewed. Theory has thus come full circle; but in its travails, it has acquired criteria of validity and methods of research; and it knows that even at its most empirical, the Hegelian project is not adequate to the task posed today.

Horkheimer stresses the need for empirical research but insists that the lesson of the critique of positivism is not that science must be freed from philosophy; rather it must learn consciously to integrate an adequate conception of philosophy into its research. He proposes for the Institute that

on the basis of actually present philosophical questions, investigations are to be organized in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians and psychologists come together in a lasting work community and do together what in other regions of study is done by a single person in a laboratory, what all true researchers have always done: namely, following through their philosophical questions which aim at the greatest knowledge with the most precise scientific methods; reformulating and making more precise their questions in the course of the work; inventing new methods; and yet not losing sight of the universal. No yes-or-no answers to the philosophical questions emerge in this manner, but rather these questions themselves are dialectically brought into the empirical scientific process; that is, their answer lies in the progress of factual knowledge which affects their form itself.¹⁰

Horkheimer insists once again that philosophy cannot be separated from concrete research, as if philosophy took care of the big problems, giving meaning to the empirical materials and integrating them into a totality. That would leave research caught in the chaos of specialization where the projects chosen and the methods applied are arbitrary (or socially pre-formed); and the materials delivered by such fragmented research would be unsatisfactory because, after all, the research itself forms the facts and implicitly gives them a meaning, whether it is aware of this or not. At the same time, were the separation instituted, philosophy itself would lose its relevance, remaining apart from the world and caught up in its own ‘universal’ problems, unable to deal with the specificity of the particular.

Horkheimer gives an example of the type of problem with which he wants the Institute to deal, and the methods he proposes to apply.

[T]he question of the interrelations between the economic life of society, the psychological development of the individual and the changes in the cultural sphere in the narrower sense, to which not only the so-called spiritual contents of science, art and religion belong, but also law, customs, modes, public opinion, sport, forms of leisure and life style, etc. The intention of investigating the relations among these three processes is nothing but a formulation in a manner adequate to the methods at our disposal and the status of our understanding of the old question of the interrelation of particular existence and universal reason, of reality and idea, life and spirit, now posed in terms of the new constellation of the problem.¹¹

The research is to be centered at first around a study of the qualified or professional workers and employees in Germany; it is then to be expanded to other countries as well. Horkheimer lists seven methodological tools that are to be applied. Published statistics, reports of organizations, and political groups are to be evaluated. This is to be done in the context of a continual examination of the total economic situation. A psychological and sociological study of the press and belletristic literature is to be undertaken, evaluating not only the contents but their effects on the members of the group. Questionnaire techniques are to be used, not as an end in themselves, but to keep close contact with the life situations of those studied and also to check assertions and ideas developed through the use of other tools. Critical reports by experts (Sachverständigengutachten), especially from persons with practical knowledge of the group or situation, are to be used. Non-book documents are to be gathered and evaluated, especially through the Institute’s branch office in Geneva where the Archives of the International Labour Bureau are located. All of this is to be the subject of continual evaluation, comparison with new and old publications on the subject, and further revision.

Horkheimer does not deal explicitly with Marxism in the Inaugural Lecture; in fact, in the praise of his predecessor, Carl Grünberg, he suggests that whereas in the latter’s Inaugural statement stress had been laid on the fact that no research is unaccompanied by a Weltanschauung (in Grünberg’s case, by Marxism), the new direction is to follow ‘the unchangeable will to serve truth without any hesitation’.¹² Yet, the definition of this first research project was clearly based on perceived inadequacies in the Marxist theory. In the Foreword to the first volume of the Institute’s new journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , Horkheimer makes this motivation even more clear. He proposes that a crucial problem for social research and theory is the development of a social psychology which would be adequate to the needs of history. This task, which Erich Fromm was to assume in the Institute’s first years, and which found an empirical and theoretical expression in the Studies on Authority and the Family (1936), was one which circumstances forced upon Marxism. The practical concern of this theoretical project was that it be adequate to the needs of the present historical moment. This concern with the present-as-history means, continues Horkheimer, that the studies presented in the journal will often have a ‘hypothetical character’. He admits that ‘[m]uch will show itself to have been false, but the expectation of future correction cannot prevent the research from applying the means of the different sciences to the problems of present society and its contradictions in order to conceptualize those processes which are important for both the functioning and the transformation of social life in a way that is adequate to present knowledge’.¹³ Horkheimer speaks out explicitly for social change. Yet, he insists that ‘[t]he obligations to scientific criteria divide social research methodologically from politics’.¹⁴ He admits that science is historically conditioned, that knowledge is not free from the existing attitudes of the knower, and that it is not an end in itself or without practical consequences. Nonetheless, Horkheimer insists on the theoretical criteria. This insistence suggests that he intends to elaborate a specific kind of theory, one which will have a precise social function. It was only in 1937, in the article ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, and in its Afterword—as well as in Herbert Marcuse’s ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’ which appeared in the same issue with Horkheimer’s Afterword—that this new theory was spelled out.

4.2 A New Type of Theory

Horkheimer suggested a further goal of the integration of empirical research into a social philosophy in the Foreword to the Zeitschrift, invoking ‘the presupposition that under the chaotic surface of events a structure of active forces can be recognized which is accessible to concepts’.¹⁵ This presupposition, to whose rationale Horkheimer frequently returns, protects against the disciplinary fragmentation that results from the capitalist division of labor, which affects the sciences as well. His suggestion is that social theory must be concerned with the totality of society. It tries to articulate the way that this totality structures the ‘chaotic’ world of appearances. But the totality can never be fully rational in the world of appearances. The task of the theorist is to make explicit the incomplete or latent rationality of the existing social relations. That means that theory cannot be simply receptive, cataloging and ordering the ‘facts’; theory must be active, intervening in the determination of the nature of a rational society. By focusing on the totality of social relations, Horkheimer’s critical theory goes beyond the traditional philosophical distinction of appearance and its rational essence to seek to overcome it.

The critical project implies that the traditional separation between the knowing subject and the object of investigation cannot be maintained. The idea that science formulates hypotheses which it seeks to confirm by testing whether the particular facts can be subsumed under the hypothetical lawfulness is challenged by the recognition that the ‘facts’ are part of an active, but not completely realized totality. The contribution of the theorist who looks beyond the immediate givenness transforms the concept of necessity and theory of causality used by traditional science. The incomplete realization of the ‘structure of active forces’ that constitutes the totality means that the objects with which theory deals are not only incomplete; it implies also that they are changing and hence historical.¹⁶ The overcoming of the traditional dualisms of subject/object, knowledge/known, universal/particular eliminates the hypostatization of theory and that of the ‘fact’; it is also a rejection of the dream of a complete and self-contained theory. This historical opening of the domain of theory entails the need to examine more closely the contribution of the theorist.

Horkheimer’s account builds from Lukács’ reconstruction of the history of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel and Marx in History and Class Consciousness. In the era of the rising bourgeoisie, the task of the theorist could be accomplished by empirical and positive theorizing. Social reality at the time was in advance of its own theory, which functioned as a regressive ideology; the theorist had merely to call things by their name and to argue for an adequation of institutions to reality. But as the negative social consequences of capitalist reality began to show themselves, the function of theory changed; it became necessary for theory to articulate the perspective of the totality of social relations by overcoming the traditional dualist presupposition. Although Kant recognized the dilemma, his conception of the individual subject as constitutive of the world of appearances limited his vision. He could realize the synthesis of subject and object only by recourse to the transcendental schematism, defined in the first Critique as an ‘art hidden in the depths of the human soul’, or by appealing in the third Critique to the intuition of the artistic ‘genius’. Fichte’s development of the Kant’s idea of practical reason in the second Critique and Schelling’s attempt to construct a philosophy of nature building on the third Critique culminated in Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit, which Marx’s materialism claimed to realize.

The first conclusion drawn by Horkheimer from this historical reconstruction of German Idealism is reflected in his critical social theory. The Hegelian resolution of Kant’s dualism, and its Marxian translation, suggests the idea of a double preformation of the subject by the object and of the object by the active intervention of the subject. The activity of the knowing subject in the social world leads to the acquisition of a set of categories that permit understanding that world. Reciprocally, the active participation of the subject contributes to the historical formation and transformation of that world. This action of the subject on the object and the effect that the object produces in the experience of the subject are reflected in both the history of philosophy and in the history of the formation of capitalism. Horkheimer avoids the temptation (to which Lukács seemed to succumb) of a harmonistic vision of the unity of the two processes in a wholly rational world.

A critical theory needs to adopt a standpoint that transcends the empirical world without separating itself from it in order to understand the totality of social relations that underlies their ‘chaotic’ appearance. Horkheimer reinterprets the Marxist insistence on the priority of the economic in this context. No doubt recalling the aphorism of the young Marx who claimed that ‘[r]eason has always existed, but not always in a rational form’, he claims that production always contains a planned component, a social reason, and a rational method, however limited and narrow historical limits make it. The ‘double preformation’ of both the social world and the active subject explains why production can never be completely rational, and why it cannot always satisfy all human needs. The most that can be achieved is a critical understanding that takes into account these limits while remaining open to future progress. As compared to a traditional theory determined by the imperatives of the division of labor, a critical theory can use its results in its interpretation of present needs. As opposed to the traditional theory that seeks to make the machine run more smoothly, critical theory recognizes that because the machine is always incompletely rational, it needs instead to be repaired and replaced. This is the point at which Critical Theory encounters politics.

On the basis of his assumption that human beings are ‘the producers of their entire historical form of life’,¹⁷ Horkheimer proposes to analyze the significance of the transformation of entrepreneurial capitalism in his own times as it is reflected in the juridical, political, and ideological spheres. Juridical owners no longer direct their factories, even though the laws of property have not changed; their hired managers begin to extend their control beyond the firm to the political sphere. The entrepreneurial capitalists lose also their dominant cultural role and with it their moral authority in society. Ideological faith in ‘great men’ is accompanied by the distinction between parasitical and productive capitalists. This now makes possible a challenge to the laws of property, since the productive actors ought to be rewarded. With the elimination of the material substance of the legal forms of property as economic concentration is completed by the authoritarian state, the old ideology disappears. The result of this historical analysis of the economy explains what Horkheimer designates as the possibility of fascism. In the old liberal capitalism, positive mediations existed to lessen the power of the capitalist class. Good character, critical individual judgment, and a general cultivation were economic necessities; but they also became part of individual behavior, preserving independence. This relative independence has disappeared in the new conditions; mass belief patterns are directly inculcated, people are atomized and are thus more dependent on the economic than ever before because the previous mediating agencies are absent. Thus, while the economic analysis retains its validity, the political task of Critical Theory changes, for it is now the only mediator on the scene.

Horkheimer recognizes that ‘it would be mechanical, not dialectical to judge also the forms of the future only in economic terms’.¹⁸ Critical Theory has to articulate the implicit but unrealized reason at work in the historical process of social reproduction. It appeals to a specific kind of judgment that arises historically. In feudal conditions, judgments were ‘categorical’; they claimed that ‘this is the case, it cannot be changed’. In the day of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, judgments were ‘hypothetical’ or ‘disjunctive’; they asserted ‘if x then y’ or ‘either this or that’. At present, Critical Theory has to appeal to ‘judgments’ whose validity can be established only when the future is made present by praxis that is based on them.¹⁹ This appeal to an existentially based praxis can be understood in terms of the ‘double preformation’ of the economic totality. Critical Theory is co-constitutive of the change which its existential judgments claim to be necessary. Horkheimer generalizes his argument beyond the sphere of production to speak of an ‘interest in freedom’ that is co-constitutive of its object insofar as it co-determines the ‘facts’ of social experience which the theory integrates.²⁰ The ‘double preformation’ implies further that the theorist is involved in and affected by the work of theory; as Horkheimer reformulates his thesis, the difference between traditional and critical theory is ‘not so much a difference of objects as a difference of subjects’.²¹ The existential interest is not the discovery of an ultimate transcendental position from which the social world can be judged; it is the necessary starting point, which is modified by the act of choice itself. That is why Critical Theory is essentially historical.

It is clear that Critical Theory is not a set of affirmations or hypotheses; it is a form of praxis. If it is separated from the world from which it emerges, becoming a doctrine, it falls back into the traditional philosophical attitude. That is why Horkheimer is consistent when he refuses to allow Critical Theory to be put directly into the service of the proletariat. He points out that if that class were in immediate possession of the truth, theory would be useless; it would become the empirical registering of facts floundering in chaos.

The intellectual who only announces with open-mouthed awe the creativity of the proletariat, and finds his satisfaction in adapting to it while transfiguring it, does not see that any deviation of theoretical effort which he allows through the passivity of his own thought, as well as any avoidance of the temporary opposition to which his own thought could bring him, only makes these masses blinder and weaker than they need be.²²

Once again, the ‘double preformation’ makes it clear for the intellectual that ‘his own thought belongs in this development as a critical, forward-driving element’.²³ Any excessive optimism only prevents a critical understanding of temporary defeats in the long struggle. Horkheimer insists that even the massive and needy existence of the proletariat is no guarantee of the eventual success of Critical Theory’s goals:

There are no universal criteria for Critical Theory as a whole … Just as little does there exist a social class on whose support one could base oneself … Critical Theory … has no specific instance standing for it save the interest which is connected with it in the elimination of social injustice.²⁴

Curiously, in the ‘Afterword’ to ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ that he published in the next issue of the Zeitschrift, this sober vision does seem to give rise to a certain defiant optimism:

But if its concepts which emerge from the social movement ring futile because not much more stands behind them than their persecutors, the truth will nonetheless come forth; for the goal of a rational society which, granted, today appears present only in phantasy, is truly inherent in every man.²⁵

This faith in the necessary emergence of truth does not mean that struggle is unnecessary, nor that its result will be victory, wiping away the tears and sweat of the past. The passage cited above that denies the centrality of the proletariat continues: ‘Bringing this negative formulation to an abstract expression: it is but the material content of the idealistic concept of Reason’. This slight change of accent in the new essay could have been influenced by the treatment of the idea of Critical Theory by Herbert Marcuse which was published alongside of Horkheimer’s ‘Afterword’.²⁶

4.3 Excursus: Herbert Marcuse on the Philosophical Genesis of Critical Theory

Announced under the joint authorship of Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’ was published in the next issue of the Zeitschrift. In the text itself, the two contributions were distinguished by the name of their author. Horkheimer’s ‘Afterword’ developed his arguments for Critical Theory by stressing the tasks of the social sciences, using Marx without explicit reference to his work. For his part, Marcuse articulated his critical perspective from within the history of philosophy, trying to show how and why the theories of Marx as well as the new project called Critical Theory are properly understood from within that history. Marcuse, who had studied with Husserl, and written his Habilitation thesis (under the supervision of Heidegger) on Hegel’s Ontology adds philosophical nuance to Horkheimer’s exposition of the tasks of critical social theory.

Marxism emerged from the historical conditions of Germany in the 1830s when the claims of philosophy were more progressive than the contemporary social conditions which, in Marx’s phrase, were ‘beneath the level of history’. When his philosophical critique discovered the economic foundation of these social conditions, philosophy lost its explanatory power; humanity’s ultimate questions and the nature of its pressing needs had to be reformulated in economic terms. ‘Economic’ did not imply simply concern with production, any more than materialism meant simply the primacy of matter. In Marcuse’s analysis, materialism implies first of all that the concern for human happiness motivates the analysis and, second, that this happiness can only be achieved through a change of the existing social conditions. In this way, the materialist vision correlates the philosophical analysis with the economic concepts which are articulated with reference to the social totality structured by the still unfulfilled demand for happiness. Economic materialism thus took over the traditional claims of philosophy which, ‘to the extent that it is more than a specialty within the given division of labour, has always lived from this: that reason was not yet reality’.²⁷ Marcuse explains what he means by ‘reason’ with reference to the task of classical philosophy.

Philosophy wanted to investigate the ultimate and most universal grounds of Being. Under the name Reason it understood the idea of a specific being in which all the decisive oppositions (between subject and object, essence and appearance, thought and Being) are unified. Coupled with this idea was the conviction that beings are not immediately rational, but must first be brought to reason. Reason must present the highest possibility of man and of beings. Both belong together.²⁸

From this perspective, classical philosophy is always idealist, subsuming being under thought; but at the same time, insists Marcuse, philosophy is also critical of the gap between appearance and its rational essence. Whatever does not satisfy the demands of Reason must be criticized. This critical task was internalized by bourgeois philosophy and, to a degree, by bourgeois society, insofar as they both identified reason with freedom. The problem with this bourgeois standpoint is that critical reason became identified with mere subjective freedom, most explicitly in Kant’s ethics, where only the intention motivating action, not its practical effect grounds its moral validity. Marcuse does not denounce this orientation as merely ideological. He insists that although its idealism had no practical effect in the world, it nonetheless preserved a space for freedom, opposition, and protest.²⁹ Marcuse’s argument now takes a different tack from the historical materialist perspective of Marxism. Philosophical idealism came to an end with this internalization of reason by the bourgeois subject whose freedom began to be manifested in its social relations. At this point, it becomes apparent that external social conditions limit the free exercise of reason; bourgeois philosophy must turn to social theory in order to act in a manner consistent with its own rational freedom.

This philosophical reconstruction explains the emergence of nineteenth-century social movements, including the recently discovered Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, to which Marcuse had consecrated a detailed philosophical analysis in 1932, before joining the Frankfurt Institute. Critical Theory emerges when the failures of these movements lead to a return to the traditional concerns of philosophy, which it seeks now to reformulate critically. Critical Theory maintains the philosophical goals of freedom and reason which it seeks to reconstruct outside of the narrow framework of economics. It is supported in this project by the fact that real struggles for freedom continually take place, treating the demand for the happiness and reason as a concrete political mediation rather than simply an abstract utopia.

In this process, philosophy is part of the struggle precisely insofar as it remains philosophical, preserving its rigor and maintaining its rational demands. This is where Marcuse sees the importance of the contributions to the Zeitschrift which had dealt with topics like truth and verification; rationalism and irrationalism; the role of logic, metaphysics, and positivism; and the concept of essence. From his point of view, more than social science is needed in the formulation of Critical Theory. The task is to find in philosophical reflection a content that goes beyond the social limitations that led to its formation by uncovering the tensions and limits that are constitutive of the problem being studied. Marcuse restates his philosophical perspective concisely in ‘The Concept of Essence’, insisting that since so much of ‘men’s real struggles and desires went into the metaphysical quest for an ultimate unity, truth and universality of Being’, the critical theoretical analysis will have social implications.³⁰ Putting the point somewhat paradoxically, he asserts that philosophical truth ‘is only truth insofar as it is not the truth about the actual society. Precisely because it is not this truth, because it transcends this actuality, it can become a concern of critical theory’.³¹ A sociological analysis that would only criticize philosophy from the perspective of social science would neglect the truth inherent in past struggles and constitutive of past philosophies.

As with Horkheimer, Marcuse attributes to the critical theorist a ‘phantasy’ which is necessary for the critical project. However, he insists that this phantasy had always already been present in philosophy, for example, in Aristotle or Kant. Marcuse does not explain its origins, but he insists that it is related to reason rather than the product of caprice insofar as it is part of a social process whose limits it continually challenges. More important, what the presence of phantasy shows is more central than any collection of facts insofar as selection of the facts makes sense only in terms of the meaningful goal which structures them. By holding out this philosophical goal, Marcuse’s analysis permits and demands a continual process of self-criticism. The implications that he draws from this position in his writings of this period (and later) have to be left aside in the present context.

Marcuse concludes his essay with the claim that present-day conditions seem to return to the dilemmas confronted by Marx in the 1830s: theoretical reason has developed far beyond the social conditions of the time, which are ‘beneath the level of history’. Critical Theory must bring to consciousness the possibilities contained in the philosophical acquisitions of struggle; it must show the presence of the unfulfilled tasks. Marcuse makes no proposal for Critical Theory analogous to Marx’s move to the economic as a new foundation and formulation of those unfinished works which it preserves. His project also differs silently from Horkheimer’s Critical Theory, which implied the need for a new stance for philosophy as a critique within experience itself. The difficulty faced by both of these early Critical Theorists may stem from the fact that they seem to take for granted the continued validity of Marxian economics, working at its interstices, correcting its excesses, and filling in its incompleteness. Before asking whether Marx’s economic theory provides an adequate framework for defining the tasks of a Critical Theory, Horkheimer’s ‘Authoritarian State’ (1942) needs to be examined.

4.4 Political Implications

Writing from his American exile, after the Zeitschrift had finally begun to publish in English before closing shop altogether, Horkheimer drew together the political strands of Critical Theory in a passionate essay first published in a privately printed volume dedicated to the memory of his friend and colleague, Walter Benjamin, who had chosen suicide when he found himself unable to find refuge from the fascist plague. Familiar motifs return, rendered more acute by the political framework into which they are thrown: fascism in power and the outbreak of Hitler’s world war. Horkheimer poses the painful problem of Critical Theory’s political place, role, and justification and contribution; he asks also the theoretical question of the source of its existential judgments, interest in the future, and critical phantasy.

‘Authoritarian State’ is one of those peaks to which a thinker sometimes ascends, combining anger and hope with sober lucidity in an essay whose tensile strength is fascinating. After such a peak, the tension cannot be maintained, the fragile structure splinters, and for the remainder of his life the theorist picks up the pieces with a greater or lesser constancy and creativity. The optimism based on reason, truth, and freedom which marked the initial formulations of Critical Theory is combined in Horkheimer’s essay with a pessimism so total and unremitting that hope can be clothed only in an apocalyptic vision. In this unification of opposites whose tension pervades every paragraph, Critical Theory as a radical political theory with practical intent reaches its culmination. Horkheimer’s work from this point onward would be increasingly dominated by his pessimistic meliorism; the initial tension weakens at each successive formulation, until the writings of the last years which are but a pale shadow, a formalized Critical Theory establishing itself as a tradition.

‘Authoritarian State’ begins ironically: Marxist predictions have come true insofar as machines have made work superfluous, but the worker remains necessary. Meanwhile the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie is decimated and dependent. ‘The Eldorado of bourgeois existence, the sphere of circulation, is liquidated’, while the state has become the Total Capitalist reinforcing socio-economic exploitation.³² In the Marxist theory, the result of such transformation would produce conditions for the breakdown and revolution of capitalism. In reality, the authoritarian state has eliminated the market, which gave the capitalists breathing space; in its place, the planned economy wins loyalty by nourishing the masses better than did the free market. As a result, the revolutionary workers’ organizations have been integrated into the state.

When he looks to the Soviet Union for hope, Horkheimer finds instead further reasons for pessimism. ‘The most fully developed kind of authoritarian state, which has freed itself from any dependence on private capital, is integral étatism or state socialism’.³³ He admits grudgingly that the Soviet system is preferable to the ‘mixed form’ of authoritarianism in fascism. ‘But the producers, to whom capital legally belongs, remain wage laborers, proletarians no matter how much is done for them’.³⁴ Stepping back to take historical distance, Horkheimer asserts that the roots of this authoritarianism are found at the beginning of the bourgeois era: Robespierre’s France initiated what became welfare state centralism in which parliament was maintained simply to register laws decreed by the Jacobins while the spirits of the masses were heated by ‘brotherhood and denunciation’.³⁵ Jacobin limitations on the power of the Church were not imposed for their own sake but because the state wanted to control the Church: ‘The “sans-culotte Jesus”, concludes Horkheimer, announces the Nordic Christ’.³⁶ Thermidor brought only a temporary halt to centralizing authoritarianism.

The most disturbing aspect of the present situation is not only the decline of the revolutionary workers’ movement but its own contribution to the erection of the authoritarian state. Horkheimer offers two accounts of this absence of revolutionary opposition. He explains the bureaucratization of the social-democratic party by pointing to the pressures on the movement as it became a mass organization; the need to maintain its unity leads to caution, the quest for rewards such as increased wages that do not threaten the system, and the increased expertise of the leaders makes them necessary while decreasing the need for individual participation. These pressures create conditions for the collusion between the capital and trade union leaders, while the pervasive influence of capitalist productivist rationality spreads among the passive working class. If opposition to the leaders’ betrayal were to succeed, continues the pessimistic critical theorist, it will be forced to maintain itself by the same means. Although Horkheimer’s instinctive Marxism leads him to assert that these conditions are the result³⁷ of a change in the mode of capitalist production, he knows full well that the Soviet model of socialism offers no real hope. Even critical recourse to phantasy is of no avail. ‘If phantasy freed itself at all from the soil of factuality, it put in the place of the present state apparatus the bureaucracy of the party and unions and replaced the profit principle with the planning by bureaucrats. Even utopia was filled with disciplinary rules’.³⁸ People here are treated as objects; in the best of cases, their own objects. ‘So far as the proletarian opposition in the Weimar Republic did not die as a sect, it fell to the spirit of administration’.³⁹ Although it matters to the individual whether Bolshevism, Reformism, or Fascism is in power, they are species of a common genus whose bureaucratic domination, must be overthrown.

Horkheimer does not give up easily his Marxist presuppositions. He asserts that ‘[t]he revolutionary movement was the negative reflection of the conditions that it attacked’.⁴⁰ But the authoritarian state has changed those conditions, with the result that because ‘the rationality of domination [was] already weakening when the authoritarian state takes over’,⁴¹ revolution may still be possible. The new state is inefficient; the legitimacy of bureaucratic domination becomes weaker. After all, ‘obedience … is not productive’,⁴² bureaucracy encourages petty struggles among the bureaucrats, and the anarchy of the world markets complicates their planning. The authoritarian state is forced to resort to police methods, permanent mobilization, use of racial prejudice, and to the generalization of propaganda. Internationally, the competition of the two authoritarians states will produce ‘[t]wo friend-enemy blocs of states with changing composition [which] will dominate the world, offering along with the fascist symbols better rations to their followers on the backs of the half-colonial and colonial masses, and finding new grounds for an arms race in their reciprocal threat to each other’.⁴³ Each regime remains in power now only because the masses fear the results of a victory by the others. Horkheimer recalls the way that forms of workers’ self-organization emerged spontaneously in France in 1871 and Russia in 1905, without stressing that both experiences took place in a context marked by war and defeat. The workers’ councils (Räte) are an example of the innovation of which the masses are capable when they will it. ‘The possibility today is no less than the doubt’.⁴⁴ This is an example of what Horkheimer had earlier called an ‘existential judgment’. It is not based on structural or rational guarantees; it is a concrete utopia that can only be willed.

The affirmation of revolutionary possibility presupposes a critique of Marxism, which is now seen to be one source of the bureaucratic mentality that was realized in the authoritarian state. Marxism plays now the role of a traditional theory. ‘Truth which is experienced as property changes into its opposite; it opens itself to the relativism whose critical thrust is based on the same ideal of security as the absolute philosophy’.⁴⁵ For Critical Theory truth has a different status.⁴⁶ Horkheimer illustrates his argument with a telling historical example. ‘Although the later course of history has confirmed political position of the Girondins against the Montagnards, Luther against Münzer, humanity was not betrayed by the premature undertakings of the revolutionaries, but through the mature wisdom of the realists’.⁴⁷ On the contrary, Horkheimer insists, ‘for the revolutionary, the world has always been ripe enough’.⁴⁸ Those leaders of the workers’ organizations whose realism had made them complicit in the creation of the authoritarian state had, like Marx, imagined progress as a logical sequence of historical stages. As a result, ‘revolution is brought down to the level of mere progress’⁴⁹ in which realism and relativism have identical political effects insofar as the decisions of the actors depend on the supposed objective conditions external to them.

Returning to the critique of domination in the authoritarian state, its leaders asked themselves the practical question how to exercise the power won by the revolution. They did not see that the question itself assumes that domination will continue, whereas the goal of revolution is precisely to overcome all forms of domination. ‘The forms of free association do not close themselves off into a system’.⁵⁰ The desire for closure is a mark of traditional theory; it is an expression of a need for security in the face of an undeterminable future freedom. ‘Without the feeling of being part of a large party, an all-honored leader, world history, or at least an unerring theory, their socialism doesn’t function’.⁵¹ If ‘dialectic is not identical with development’, it can only depend on a ‘leap’ that can never be rationally deduced any more than security can ever really be won. ‘It is for this reason that the Marxian science consists in the critique of bourgeois economics and not the projection of a socialist one: Marx left that to [the German Social-Democrat, August] Bebel’.⁵² The socialist heirs of Marx could only guarantee the economic necessity of revolution at the price of losing the will whose action is constitutive of the conditions it attacks. Revolution has no material or logical necessity; nor can it avenge the wrong that has been done by establishing itself as a new ruling class.

Horkheimer recognizes that a Marxist could say that his vision of Critical Theory is utopian, but he insists that in the changed conditions he has described, this is the only choice. The atomization of society means that each atom is like all the others, and the destruction of the traditional mediations means that the Word carries more weight; it becomes a utopian mediation. What the word speaks is ‘what everyone knows and yet forbids himself from knowing’.⁵³ The Word speaks through thought; the task of Critical Theory is to restore the sense of the past struggles and hopes for those who turn toward the future. The atomization of society and the demystification of tradition have banished even the thought of freedom and with it the hope carried by utopia; that is the way in which all forms of authoritarianism ensure their continued domination. Yet precisely this abuse renders the Word more powerful. ‘The powerless expression in a totalitarian state is more threatening than the most impressive demonstration by a party under [the government of] Wilhelm II’.⁵⁴ It is not for nothing that the authoritarian state bans its philosophers; nor was it for nothing that Horkheimer insisted that the Zeitschrift continue to publish from its American exile in German.

Human phantasy, and the desire for freedom, must be rekindled through Critical Theory. ‘Thought itself is already a sign of resistance, the effort not to let oneself be deceived. Thought is not simply against orders and obedience, but rather puts them in relation to the actualization of freedom. This relation is endangered. Sociological and psychological concepts are too superficial to express what has happened to the revolutionaries in the last decades; the goal (Intention) of freedom is damaged, and without it neither knowledge nor solidarity, nor a correct relation between group and leaders is possible’.⁵⁵ Horkheimer at this time still expected that the rekindling of the spirit of freedom and the desire for utopia would be coupled, finally, with the rebirth of a revolutionary movement that would find the ‘correct relation between group and leaders’. He rejects the option to work within the system, but says no more than that. His final word in this brilliant and despairing essay is that ‘[a]s long as world history goes in its logical path, it does not fulfil its human calling (Bestimmung)’.⁵⁶

4.5 The Independence of Critical Theory

The path traced by Critical Theory moves away from an empirical research program aimed at filling the gaps left in Marxian theory toward the elaboration of a radically new type of theory. But the path was not traveled to the end; the traces of Marxism remained present both in the theoretical assumptions and in the political consequences. The inability ultimately to articulate and maintain a specific stance for Critical Theory was responsible for the deception and ultimately the pessimism which marked the next three decades of Horkheimer’s life.⁵⁷ Recalling comparison with Ernst Bloch in the preceding chapter, Bloch’s claim that Horkheimer was unable to ground his critical categories because he never took seriously Marx’s theory of labor as the ground of that phantasy and choice which found and direct the interest in freedom in its concrete manifestations can be maintained only with qualifications. Horkheimer does indeed stress the planned, rational element in the produced human world which makes it accessible to, and demands the use of, reason. He does not, however, develop this theory further; and from the stance of ‘Authoritarian State’, he would certainly have to say that the ‘reason’ and ‘planning’ manifest in the productive system are still forms of rationality as domination. The hope for scientific prediction expressed in 1932 appears retrospectively to be the expression of a traditional attitude toward theory. That is why the excursus on Herbert Marcuse’s effort to ground Critical Theory in the history of philosophy was significant. But despite the essential theoretical difference between Horkheimer and the Marcusian position,⁵⁸ beneath their later political stances lies a common conception of the nature, tasks, and possibilities of theory.

Radicalizing Marx’s project and criticizing those elements in it that result from Marx’s rationalist presuppositions, Horkheimer elaborates a Critical Theory which is in constant contact with the social structures that it seeks not only to understand but to change. Critical Theory is set apart from its traditional counterpart specifically by its historical nature which means that because it is its own object, it can never fixate itself, never become a theory standing apart from, flying above or contemplating its object. It is this character—and not, as so often claimed, the assertion that Nature will always remain Other—which is responsible for the Frankfurt School’s rejection of the identity theory of philosophical rationalism. This understanding of history and the limits of rationalism are the grounds for the ‘critical’ nature of the Critical Theory, as well as the source of its politics. Its phantasy, futurity, and existential judgment are grounded in this structure of the theory itself. Because Horkheimer never drew these conclusions, he found himself appealing to an always-inherent sense of freedom which he supposed present in all individuals. This idea of ‘freedom’ is loaded with metaphysical overtones that must be deciphered. It would be better to elaborate the notion of freedom from the structure of Critical Theory insofar as its practice is in the last resort the elaboration of the notion of human praxis.⁵⁹

Because Critical Theory is a praxis, it always threatens to be transformed against its will into traditional theory, becoming a hypothesis, a slogan, or even a political program. This is not the betrayal by the theorist. Critical Theory is conscious of this threat because it is always critical of itself precisely because it is its own object. Praxis has the same structure, although not always the same degree of reflexivity as Critical Theory. Individual action becomes immediately an object, affecting the world as production and also taken up by the praxis of others in the social world which transform the original intention of the actor. More precisely, action or praxis is not a discrete intervention, undertaken with a clearly delimited intention (although the actor may think that to be the case). Praxis emerges within the world, and it comes to understand itself only in ‘the thick’ of the world where it has continually to be begun anew. When Horkheimer’s essays are read from this point of view, the apparent meanderings, doubling back on and reformulating the nature of the problem and its political implications,⁶⁰ take on their full sense. In the world of bureaucratic domination described in ‘Authoritarian State’, a Critical Theory must be a mediator of a specific type. It incites to the empirical research that was so important to the Institute for Social Research, but it can never assume the role that was played by traditional theory. For that reason, Critical Theory cannot be taught or formulated; it can only be done!

Footnotes

1

The literature examining the legacy of the Institute for Social Research has expanded greatly since Martin Jay’s early, well-documented book, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1973). In the present context, I want to add to the list the recent study by Robert Zwarg, Die Kritische Theorie in Amerika. Das Nachleben einer Tradition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017). Zwarg focuses on the appropriation of the Frankfurt School particularly by participants in the New Left who wrote extensively in the journals Telos and New German Critique. I was one of them; and I have learned a great deal from reading Zwarg’s work.

2

I will concentrate on Horkheimer’s earlier writings, putting them in the context of a programmatic statement by Herbert Marcuse written during the time when he was the most creative exponent of Horkheimer’s views. Although the Institute for Social Research was not a one-man show, focus on Horkheimer to the exclusion of Adorno, who also returned to Frankfurt after the war, is justified by my concern here with the legacy of Marx (in contrast to Robert Zwarg’s stress on the American ‘afterlife’ of Critical Theory).

3

‘Kritische Theorie gestern und heute’, in Gesellschaft im Uebergang (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1972). p. 168.

4

‘Bemerkungen über Wissenschaft und Krise’, in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Band 1, 1932, p. 3. (Future references to this journal will be indicated with the sign ZfS.)

5

‘Zum Problem der Voraussage in den Sozialwissenschaften’, in ZfS, Band 2, 1933, p. 412.

6

Ibid.

7

‘Die gegenwaertige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozialforschung’, originally in Frankfurter Uniuersi-taetsreden, Heft xxxvii, 1931, pages 3–16; reprinted in Max Horkheimer, Sozialphilosophische Studien (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1972), p. 34.

8

See the discussion below of the role of mediation in Critical Theory’s own self-understanding.

9

‘Die gegenwaertige Lage’, op. cit., p. 38.

10

Ibid., p. 41.

11

Ibid., p. 43.

12

Ibid., p. 46.

13

‘Vorwort’, in ZfS, Band 1, 1932, pp. 2–3.

14

Ibid., p. 3.

15

Ibid., p. 1.

16

It should be parenthetically noted that Horkheimer is aware that this assertion does not hold for nature, which will always exist and will always demand a traditional approach, though modified still, as the results of quantum mechanics indicate. I cannot deal here with Horkheimer’s notion of inner and outer nature and his theory of mimesis, which are fully developed only in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

17

ZfS, Band 6, 1937, p. 625.

18

Ibid., p. 629.

19

Ibid., p. 279.

20

This notion of an interest in emancipation guiding Critical Theory is not mentioned explicitly in Jürgen Habermas’ Knowledge and Human Interests, which will be discussed in Chap. 5. The influence of Horkheimer and of the distinction between traditional and critical theory certainly affected Habermas’ work.

21

ZfS, Band 6, 1937, p. 263.

22

Ibid., p. 268.

23

Ibid.

24

Ibid., pp. 291–2.

25

Ibid., p. 630.

26

Ibid., p. 292.

27

Marcuse, Ibid., p. 632.

28

Ibid.

29

Marcuse developed this argument critically in the same issue of the Zeitschrift in his essay ‘On the Affirmative Character of Culture’.

30

Herbert Marcuse, ‘Zum Begriff des Wesens’, in ZfS, Band 5, 1936, p. î.

31

ZfS, Band 6, 1937, p. 643.

32

‘Authoritärer Staat’, in Max Horkheimer, Gesellschaft im Übergang, op. cit., 13.

33

Ibid., p. 19.

34

Ibid.

35

Ibid., p. 18.

36

Ibid.

37

Not the cause! Horkheimer is still working with traditional Marxian categories here, despite the critique of Marxism developed later in his essay. This fidelity to the Marxian theory as describing of the essential laws of capital regardless of its changed structure has already been noted. It is one of the reasons that, by the end of the War, Horkheimer would give up entirely on Marxism and the possibility of revolution. I will discuss this fidelity to Marxian economics which also affects earliest reformulations of Critical Theory by the ‘second generation’ of Critical Theory in the early work of Jürgen Habermas in the next chapter.

38

‘Authoritärer Staat’, op. cit., p. 15.

39

Ibid.

40

Ibid., p. 17.

41

Ibid., p. 20.

42

Ibid., p. 27.

43

Ibid., p. 22.

44

Ibid., p. 28.

45

This is argued in detail in Horkheimer’s critique of Mannheim, ‘Ein neuer Ideologiebegriff’, reprinted in Sozialphilosophische Studien, op. cit.

46

‘Authoritaerer Staat’, op. cit., p. 23.

47

Ibid., p. 23.

48

Ibid.

49

Ibid., p. 24.

50

Ibid., p. 22.

51

Ibid., p. 20.

52

Ibid., p. 25.

53

Ibid., p. 30.

54

Ibid.

55

Ibid., p. 34.

56

Ibid.

57

This theoretical argument needs to be stressed against those who would date the decline of the Critical Theory from their stay in America, the adoption of ‘American’ empirical research methods, or even from Horkheimer’s own ‘bourgeois’ character which showed itself to be susceptible to the rewards and honors heaped upon him on his return to Germany after the war.

58

Marcuse’s case is somewhat more complex if one recalls, for example, his early, Heidegger-influenced essay on ‘The Philosophical Foundations of the Concept of Labor in Economics’ (1933), as well as the previously mentioned essay on Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts which appeared in Die Gesellschaft in 1931.

59

See the discussion of Sartre in Chap. 6 below and especially the critical analysis of The Adventures of the Dialectic by Merleau-Ponty that is presented in Chap. 7.

60

I have of course ‘linearized’ Horkheimer’s exposition here. Much of his work, because of his self-critical rigor, can appear uncertain of its political implications, although this chapter has hopefully better defined the kind of practical theory Horkheimer was seeking.

© The Author(s) 2019

Dick HowardThe Marxian LegacyPolitical Philosophy and Public Purposehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4_5

5. From Critical Theory Toward Political Theory: Jürgen Habermas

Dick Howard1  

(1)

Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, New York, NY, USA

Dick Howard

The goals Max Horkheimer had set out for the Institute for Social Research were passed on to Jürgen Habermas in the 1960s when he was named professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Frankfurt. Faithful to the attitude of Critical Theory, Habermas’ evolving work has been driven between two seemingly opposed, but in fact mutually dependent, poles: the concretization of Critical Theory as a research program and the political concerns bound up with the Marxian heritage of Critical Theory. By actively inheriting the tension between these two poles, Habermas has been able to rethink many of the questions that blocked the development of Marxism. He has also been attacked politically by others who also claim to be heirs of Marx. This is not the place to adjudicate that case. At the end of the 1970s, Habermas was still in his 40s; his philosophical thought began to develop the idea of a ‘communicative reason’ that could overcome reified rationality. While waiting for the promised new study, a reflection on the path traveled by Critical Theory under his leadership offers a useful pause.

Habermas had been a supporter of the early student movement, but he became critical of its actionist tendencies which were based on a curious combination of anti-intellectualism justified by a political dogmatism vaguely based on Marxism. His theoretical work during this period built on the insights of his Frankfurt predecessors concerning the changed role of science in contemporary capitalism as well as the pessimistic analysis of reason in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. His first results, published in 1967, studied the irrational ways that the ‘logic of the social sciences’ was applied in making social and political policy; during the same period, he analyzed the philosophical presuppositions which made possible this travesty of reason in the service of social domination. The synthesis of these social-philosophical reflections in Knowledge and Human Interests, published in 1968, included a re-examination of the theoretical foundations of Marxism. Crucial to reclaiming the Marxian project was the distinction between the logic of labor (understood as the purposively rational action of the individual subject) and interaction (understood as the process of dialogical interaction of humans who make claims about the truth of their choice of action). On this basis, Habermas seemed to avoid the difficulties confronted earlier critical Marxists such as Bloch and Horkheimer. This philosophical advance had political implications which Habermas addressed in his first major publication after leaving Frankfurt to become co-director of the Max Planck Institute for the Life Sciences in Starnberg.¹ Legitimation Crises of Late Capitalism, published in 1973, an analytic study that can be read as a synthesis of the first stages of Habermas’ attempt to inherit actively from his predecessors.

Legitimation Crises is composed of three parts. The notion of a crisis is elaborated descriptively using a methodology appropriated from systems theory. Habermas notes the difference between an organism, which can be immediately distinguished from its environment and whose crisis is one of physical life or death, and a society whose crisis is based on a reflexive self-understanding. Without such a distinction, it is not possible to know whether social change is simply a form of system adaptation to a changing environment rather than the result of a cognitive learning process. To clarify this distinction, Habermas outlines the principles of a theory of social evolution based on the differentiation of forms of human sociality. This theory of social evolution is based ultimately on the idea of the political as the process by which a given social formation asserts its own identity.² The second part of the book then confronts and clarifies the implications of different plausible analyses of late capitalist crisis. Its goal is to make plausible Habermas’ contention that the need for legitimation is the central systematic problem that late capitalism can only overcome by changing its class structure or by a radical transformation of its traditional cultural needs and motivations. The third section of the book goes on to question whether capitalism can in fact effectuate this latter sort of change (since, by definition, it cannot change from a class to a classless society while remaining capitalist). Habermas applies what he calls a ‘praxeology’ or ‘universal pragmatics’ to try to show why this change has not taken place. The only remaining option is to develop a radical ‘politics of Enlightenment’.

5.1 What Is Late Capitalism?

Habermas recognized and began to analyze aspects of modern society that clash the predictions of Marxist analysis as early as 1957; he developed his interpretation in 1960 under the title ‘Between Philosophy and Science: Marxism as Critique’. Both of these texts were published in Theorie und Praxis in 1963. Habermas had previously published more political analyses of changing modern society in a co-authored volume, Student und Politik in 1961, as well as in his social-historical analysis Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, which appeared in 1962. Together with the essays published in Theorie und Praxis, these earliest studies by Habermas propose the notion of a radical politics whose success is not dependent on objective economic crisis. The next stage of his work confronted positivist theory and the ideology on which it is founded. This brought his attention back to problems of social structure and the need for a methodology capable of articulating the kind of critical theory sought by Marx.

Habermas is always thorough. He first analyzed the question of method with regard to the social sciences, publishing in 1967 Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften; he then turned in 1968 to its philosophical foundations in Knowledge and Human Interests; a temporary synthesis that stressed the role of science policy and state intervention in contemporary capitalism was published in 1968 under the title Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’. As he indicated by the title selected for his 1971 volume of debates with the systems theoretical sociology of Niklas Luhmann, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie, Habermas’ concern throughout was the formulation of a specifically social theory. His Introduction to new edition of Theorie und Praxis, also in 1971, makes this clear in the claim that ‘[a]ll of these studies of the empirical relation of science, politics and public opinion in late capitalist societies must remain unsatisfactory as long as the serious starting points for a theory of late capitalism are hardly worked out’.³ The concern with ‘late capitalism’ in Legitimation Crises is thus the culmination of 15 years of experience and reflection.

The term ‘late capitalism’ can be misleading.⁴ Descriptively, it points to the increased degree of organization in social relations that results from growing intervention of the state in all spheres of life. This in turn results from the higher degree of capitalist concentration, multinational corporate activity, and an ever more controlled and manipulated market. The increasingly restricted sphere of private autonomy and the minimization of the market in determining social distribution reflect a change in class stratification which creates a variety of new forms of social behavior. The increased application of science and technology changes the work process and affects the profit and investment choices of the larger corporations, as well as the options for government spending. Mechanized farming and greater urbanization create new social problems whose political expression takes place outside of the traditional framework of party democracy . From their side, mass media and the theoretically equal chance of all for education affect the socialization process and role conceptions of larger sections of the population. At least in the developed capitalist countries, scarcity is no longer immediately physical; the new forms of scarcity concern nature itself, as well as the very meaning of social existence. Habermas recognizes the need to find a theoretical framework beyond the empirical description of these changes in order to differentiate and to make sense of these complex phenomena.

Recalling that a ‘crisis’ can either endanger the sick body or mark the moment at which the fever breaks before health is restored, Habermas proposes a systems theoretical interpretation the types of crisis of late capitalism. He distinguishes three potential areas for its outbreak: the economic, the political, and the socio-cultural. Crises can become manifest in four forms: as system crises of the economic or of administrative rationality and as identity or social crises that result in the failure of social legitimation or individual motivation. These abstract generalizations are applicable to any social system. To differentiate among systems, it is necessary to discover a principle of ‘social organization’ whose function is analogous to the Marxist concept of a ‘social formation’ (p. 18)⁵ that defines the principles that assure the system’s identity. Such principles ‘determine the learning capacity and thus the level of development of a society first with regard to the forces of production and then their system of interpretation which insures identity, and thus also limits the possible growth of steering capacity’ (p. 30). This will make possible the formulation of an empirically based evolutionary theory that will do away with contingency in the choice of a theoretical standpoint.

Systems theory is too general to provide the basis for such a theory. In Habermas’ formulation, ‘[w]ithout a theory of social evolution on which I could base myself, the organizational principles cannot even be grasped abstractly; their definition will be at best indicatively illustrated and explained with reference to the institutional domain which has functional primacy for each level of development (system of kinship, political system, economic system)’ (pp. 31–32). Although a fully developed theory of evolution would give more precise indications than those presented by Habermas in this small volume, what Habermas has offered here suffices to indicate how the choice of standpoint from which the analyst determines the kind of crisis that is life-threatening escapes from contingency; it explains why crises of identity are the ones that shed light on the central components of a social system. Correlatively, this means that the systems crises in the economic and administrative spheres cannot be seen as the motivating force for the collapse of a society, unless that society’s form of self-identity is assured by these systems, as was the case, respectively, for the periods of liberal market capitalism and feudalism.

Habermas’ analysis of late capitalism develops sequentially four possible forms of crisis. He assumes the validity of Marx’s conception that the fundamental economic contradiction is constituted by the ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’.⁶ Once this ‘law’ is given, the problems that emerge from the economic sphere can only be solved by administrative interventions of the state. Historically, such state activity seems to have been successful at least temporarily. The relative infrequency of economic crises can be explained by the state’s adoption of political measures compensating for limits imposed by laws of the economic marketplace. Alternatively, the state can be still more interventionist, acting as the planning agent for ‘united monopoly capital’. Habermas argues that neither strategy is empirically satisfactory because the state has only limited functional freedom. Insofar as its intervention changes the rules of the economic game, it cannot apply the same remedies a second time since the economic actors’ expectations were changed by the first intervention. Under these conditions, what Habermas calls a rationality crisis emerges either because of the conflict between opposed capitalist interests that limits the state’s freedom or because the performance of its economic function forces the state to create autonomous sub-systems—such as transportation, housing, education, business subventions of various sorts—that are not functional for the system as a whole. In either case, a new type of demand is imposed on the state, which must now legitimate its activity. It can deal with this obligation either by attempting to buy off potential protest (building hospitals, schools, and the like) or by creating its own ideology to insure popular support. In the former instance, problems of a fiscal nature emerge; the result is the politicization in areas of social life previously understood as a-political. In the latter case, problems of motivation emerge, posing the question of the degree to which the state can create an ideology that compensates for the transformation of traditional forms of social-political life.

The definition of late capitalism that emerges from this systems theoretical description has two central features. The adjective ‘late’ can be used insofar as the system has used each of the four types of crisis-prevention available to it. Habermas’ position here is taken from Claus Offe, who explains that ‘[t]here is no recognizable dimension in which new mechanisms for the self-perpetuation of the capitalist system (which are at the same time compatible with its continued existence…) can be found and applied. What remains is the variation and refinement of the triad of usual self-adaptive mechanisms which at least to some degree have been applied in all developed capitalist systems; and on the other hand, in the case that they are not sufficient, either the historically unproductive or the productive-revolutionary breakdown of the basic structure of capitalism’.⁷ The second justification for this usage is the demonstration of the inability of the system to function alone insofar as its self-regulation depends on the resolution of the legitimation and motivational crises that threaten the identity of capitalism.⁸

Generally speaking, all social systems have had crises of legitimation, which they have resolved in different ways. Primitive societies are organized either by a system of kinship or of religion whose permanence preserves the social order and provides a truth-referent for practical questions. Pre-capitalist Western societies gradually developed a politico-religious legitimation process in which the forms of social and personal interactions were infused with a sense that was meaningful to the participants. In turn, liberal market capitalism found its principle of legitimacy in the equal opportunity offered by the marketplace and in some cases also by political democracy. Habermas suggests that these forms of legitimation have lost their attractiveness. Perhaps this is only an appearance, but it may be also the result of systemic failure. To clarify the problem, Habermas proposes to examine the notion of legitimation as it is manifested in the socio-political functions of the contemporary social system and in its socio-cultural function in the creation of individual identity.

The necessity of state intervention in late capitalism gives rise to political crisis of legitimation. The state has two resources to confront them: value and sense (p. 104). Insofar as the state intervenes in the market, its legitimacy depends on the economic value it produces; the democratic form of its action assures the sense of its action for the members of society. In this way, even those who do not benefit from the economic intervention feel that they have a voice in their destiny. ‘Because the activity of the state follows the declared goal of directing the system by avoiding crises, and thus the class relation has lost its apolitical form, the class structure must be affirmed in struggles for the administratively mediated division of the social productive growth’ (p. 76). For example, although the state can buy allegiance through fiscal generosity, when a crisis appears, as unemployment and inflation begin to rise, state action needs the support of the citizens to increase taxes or impose wage-and-price controls. The impending crisis will lead to decreased confidence in the state, reducing its ability to act. What it can no longer buy with value, it must purchase with sense.

The difficulty that now arises stems from the fact that the legitimation of the previous state interventions was economic; its concern was the maintenance of the capitalist system. At first, it intervenes as a market-substitute in order to keep demand and profit high. Its reach grows; it sees the need for infrastructural improvements; it becomes involved in the educational system, begins to fund scientific research and its translation into new technologies; it is mobilized to compensate for the ecological reformist trade unions. All of these functions are ultimately oriented to the production of use-value; they produce winners and losers. State intervention cannot be hidden in a cloak of systemic neutrality. In order to insure the legitimacy of its action in a class-based society, the state must develop means to insure the allegiance of society. To be legitimate from the perspective of members of society, its action must be perceived not only as efficacious but as meaningful—ultimately, as democratic.

The problems of political legitimation that cannot be produced by economic intervention depend ultimately on the ability of the state to provide a meaningful basis for the activities of the individual. What Habermas calls a ‘motivational crisis’ appears ‘when the socio-cultural system changes so that its output is dysfunctional for the state and for the system of social labor’ (p. 106). It is at times unclear whether the motivation crisis arises because of a change in this socio-cultural system, as in the above passage, or whether it occurs when change in the economic and political systems makes the inherited motivational structure dysfunctional. Motivation is not the same as legitimation; it is based on a logic of normative structures and images of the world which, Habermas insists, have their own logic whose meaningfulness is independent of the political and the economic systems.⁹ The empirical questions are whether they have changed, or become dysfunctional, and what that means.

Habermas analyzes four elements of motivational structure: (1) the impossibility of regenerating a tradition, (2) the way social structures have undermined the principle of individual effort, (3) the fact that normative structures present in post-autonomous art and articulated by communicative morality destroy the motivational patterns of private life, and (4) the fact that, in spite of these difficulties, tradition is nonetheless necessary. The results of Habermas’ analysis appear to present an antinomy that will have to be unraveled step by step.

The analysis of the first and third problems shows that motivations are mutable; they are affected by social change. As work becomes increasingly rationalized and service industries transform previously interpersonal services into marketable commodities, culture becomes commercialized, child-rearing appeals to psychological expertise, and citizens expect their problems to be solved by state administration. The enlarged role of rationalized science destroys the traditional images of life as a meaningful totality, replacing them with scientific and religious fads based rumor or partial evidence. For its part, modern art no longer holds out the promise of happiness; its value is that of just another commodity whose apparent independence is protected by its obscurity in the eyes of the broader public. From this perspective, it appears that traditional norms not only are surpassed but have become useless in the new social system.

Contrary to the previous account, the second and fourth questions point to the non-manipulability of norms. Their articulation will depend on Habermas’ development of the theory of social evolution by appeal to what he calls a ‘universal pragmatics’. It appears now that the modern replacement of the traditional idea that effort will be rewarded by gratification through the mediation of the equality of market-chances has been replaced by an educational system producing over-qualified individuals prepared to do unrewarding work at meaningless jobs while they have no idea what to do with the increased free time produced by the new system of social relations. The traditional normative quest for meaning is retained but repressed and unrealized. Habermas leans on the work of his Starnberg colleagues. He points to the analysis of adolescent crisis by Döbert and Nunner-Winkler as illustrating the difficulty of assimilating new norms of late capitalism.¹⁰ The classic analyses of young radicals and alienated youth by Kenneth Keniston are also said to illustrate the results of a social system that does not permit the normal communicative assimilation of social roles. The inherited normative needs that find their expression in cultural tradition make themselves felt only by their absence.

The motivation crises are neither the final cause nor basis for the other types of crisis; that assumption would make the analyses of the other three forms irrelevant by basing them all on psychology. The logic proper to motivation must be studied on the basis of a theory of social evolution which is concerned with norms that are universal. Their universality is manifested in the fact that they are not the product of individual action but, rather, generate the possible types of action available to the individual. The particular individuality of a social subject is only acquired within a pre-given system of institutions and norms. A social system seeking to reproduce itself must produce individuals whose motivations generate actions that are functional. This explains why the crucial problem to be addressed by a crisis theory of late capitalism concerns legitimation. Legitimation is determined both by the need to analyze the way that the economic and the political contribute to the empirical integration of the system and by the institutional structure that institutes normative forms of motivation. This dual structure explains in turn why legitimation crises become the object of a critical theory of society.

5.2 Critical Theory and Marxism

Crises in late capitalism differ fundamentally from those of the liberal capitalism described by Marx; the same is true for their critical analyses.¹¹ Habermas proposes a reformulation of ‘historical materialism’ whose validity would not be limited to liberal capitalist market society whose singularity is seen in the fact that crises in its economic system were also crises of social identity. In that social formation, the free market was not only the foundation of economic production; its free market for labor and the dual nature of commodities governed also the social and institutional distribution of power. That is why Marx’s Capital was a critical theory of capitalist society whose political implication was revolutionary. Building on this model, Habermas proposes that ‘[h]istorical materialism seeks a comprehensive explanation of social evolution that explains not only the process by which the theory itself develops but also the context in which it is applied. The theory presents the conditions under which a self-reflection of the history of the species has become objectively possible; and at the same time it names the addressee who, with the help of the theory, can bring it to awareness of itself and its potentially emancipatory role in the process of history’.¹² As long as the liberal capitalist economy functioned smoothly, it legitimated the social inequality which resulted from free exchange on the capitalist market. Crises are its ‘practical ideology critique’ (p. 47) insofar as they affect not only the integration of the system but put into question social integration as well. The interdependence of system and social integration means that economic analysis is immediately translatable into social terms; that is why Marx ‘is the author of the 18th Brumaire as well as Capital’ (p. 49).

The central role of legitimation as an independent manifestation of crisis in Habermas’ analysis of late capitalism can be understood as a further development of his earlier critical theory.¹³ Habermas began his confrontation with Marxism in the wake of the Frankfurt School’s recognition that the modern form of a Marxist critique of political economy had to be based on a critique of instrumental reason . As Habermas’ colleague Albrecht Wellmer pointed out,¹⁴ the Frankfurters’ critique still depended on the basic logic of Marx in one crucial sense. The historical pessimism expressed in the culminating theoretical work of Horkheimer and Adorno’s most radical stage, The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, was based on a paradoxical and ultimately self-defeating concept of human labor. As the productive conquest of outer nature increases, it increases the dependence of laboring humanity on an artificial world that it has itself produced. The natural world is reified as the human world is alienated. The result must be either economic catastrophe (as Lukács theorized) or an uncertain apocalypse which could as well be barbarism as socialism (as Luxemburg feared). Habermas at first tried to circumvent the difficulty by reconsidering Marx’s concept of productive labor.

Habermas rejects Marx’s claim in the 1844 Manuscripts that what is positive in Hegel’s Phenomenology is that Hegel ‘grasps the nature of labor, and conceives objective man (true, because real man) as the result of his own labor’. Not only does he criticize the idealist implications of this assertion drawn by Hegel¹⁵; Habermas insists that Marx’s interpretation conflates two distinct conceptual phenomena which express different forms of rationality. The forces of production depend on labor, whereas the relations of production express forms of social interaction. The rationality of productive labor is monological; it is purposive, goal-oriented activity that is indifferent to its content. The logic of production can never transcend itself to formulate goals that are liberating. The rationality of social interaction is dialogical; it expresses symbolically mediated human relations between subjects who retain their own subjectivity. The dialogical rationality at work in social relations is communicative and capable of becoming emancipatory.¹⁶ In present context, the former is responsible for the maintenance of the productive system, the latter takes charge of assuring social integration.

The difference between the rationality of labor as instrumental and that of communicative institutional action provides a guiding thread for Habermas. Communicative institutional activity institutes the normative social structures in which men live with and speak to others. Habermas tries to explain how these norms come into being in his debate with the proponent of a strictly objective systems theory, Niklas Luhmann.¹⁷ For Luhmann norms are directly empirical, even arbitrary; they are based on reciprocal expectations of persons occupying pre-given social roles; as such they have no cognitive basis claim to truth. Habermas proposes instead that norms are presupposed in the structure of speech itself; the participants in any speech situation must make the counter-factual assumption that the other participants are capable of understanding and communicating. In this way, speech supposes a universality concerning both what is spoken about and the social conditions of the speaker himself. Although this universal is norm that is ‘counterfactual’, it is activated by the first speech act exchanged with another because without presupposing it, there would be no possibility of communication, however distorted.¹⁸

This only apparently abstract philosophical argument permits Habermas to propose a redefinition of Critical Theory. The critical theorist makes a counter-factual assumption about the ideal speech situation and then asks: what would each member of a society think if they were completely aware of their situation, fully free and able to express the occluded aspects of social life, and could ask whether their empirical interests were universalizable to all members of society or whether they are suffering from one or another form of exclusion, discrimination, or exploitation? From this counter-factual question, it becomes possible to show both the functional necessity for the system to legitimate itself ideologically and, at the same time, to indicate the possible forms of critique of that ideology.¹⁹

Habermas does not explicitly claim that this reformulation of a philosophical theory of critique is compatible with Marxism. Its basic structure is consistent with the Marxist theory of proletarian revolution, whose logical premise is that the particular interests of the proletarian class coincide with the universal interest of a classless society. It differs insofar as the communicative theory seeks speech to explain how modern individuals can act together rationally; that was the reason that Habermas’ crisis theory was based on rational social legitimation rather than the particular psychological motivations of individual subjects. Rational normative universality cannot be achieved by isolated, monological subjects; the validity of any form of binding social unity depends on the implicit existence of a concept of contractual obligation. This premise is put into question in a later chapter of Legitimation Crises which suggests that the bourgeois individual and with him the notion of social obligation have disappeared from late capitalism.²⁰ This challenges the idea that there could still exist a universal social class. It implies that in late capitalist society particular individual interests co-exist with an abstract, undifferentiated universality. Insofar as Habermas’ communicative theory is such an abstract undifferentiated universal claim, his argument needs to be concretized.²¹

It is not surprising to find that a similar difficulty faced the young Marx, whose path to a solution should be recalled in a brief excursus. In his 1843 ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State’, Marx attempted to resolve it by insisting on the need for universal democratic voting rights. Each individual citizen, he asserts, would participate ‘individually-as-all’; the legislator would be my representative in the same way that the shoemaker represents my needs. Marx quickly rejected this solution as ‘merely political’, recognizing the primacy of civil society in his ‘On the Jewish Question’ and citing Rousseau’s insistence that a new political state can be built only if the nature of its citizens is transformed. The failure of the French Revolution, insists Marx, was due to the fact that it changed the political superstructure while leaving intact the egoistic and competitive civil society at its base. This insight led Marx from philosophy to political economy. He came to see that the correct relation of the state to civil society—of the universal and the particular—can be established only when the particular self-interest of economic subjects is replaced by social relations whose legitimacy comes from their universality. When that transformation is achieved, the state can, in Engels’ pithy phrase, ‘wither away’.

Marx’s philosophical theory is abstract; its political implications are dangerous. He asserts that increasingly rational relations of production based on the evermore developed capitalist division of labor create a system of socio-economic interdependence whose universal potential is concealed from the working class by the self-interested behavior that is the foundation of the system of capitalist domination. When the working class becomes conscious of the great potential of developed capitalism, production that had been appropriated by a particular ruling class will become production for universal needs according to a plan established by all for the good of all. Marx’s claim assumes that someone—the philosopher, or the planner—can somehow stand outside of the constantly changing historical process in order to bring it to self-awareness. That is a form of the same abstract idealism that the young Marx had criticized in Hegel. The political consequence of this idealism is that the social universality concealed by the capitalist division of labor becomes incarnate in a particular body, the philosopher-king or the master-planners… or the Leninist party. While it is abstractly true that the state can wither away in such conditions, there is no necessity that it must do so.

The dictatorship of the proletariat may become the rule over the working class by a self-selected party who claim to speak in its name (as Horkheimer recognized in his ‘Authoritarian State’). Ironically, the two possible ways to avoid this consequence are both implicit in Lenin’s The State and Revolution, which was written in August 1917 with the explicit aim of justifying the coming Bolshevik seizure of power rather than wait for the supposed ‘withering’ to take place on its own. The first potential means to avoid party rule is found in the idea of self-governing workers’ councils, the soviets. Discussing the lessons of the Paris Commune, Lenin argues—without mentioning Rousseau—that the process of revolution will effect a change in human nature of the sort that no amount of theoretical study or participation under conditions of capitalist domination could effect. The famous aphorism that is attributed (wrongly) to Lenin—that ‘every cook will be able to govern’—is based on the assertion that the praxis of the revolution will have taught the ‘cooks’ the need to transcend their narrow particular interests in order to act for the universal good of all. Lenin’s rhetorical support for workers’ councils (or soviets) was taken over and developed by the left-wing opposition, which could also appeal to the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg. Although Habermas does not make the direct connect, his distinction between learning as adaptation to systemic necessity and an evolutionary leap to a new stage of social evolution suggests that the expectation of a revolutionary leap from particular existential experience to universal social norms is, if not romantic, certainly problematic.

The apparently objective means to avoid party domination over the working class is also found in the analysis of the Paris Commune in The State and Revolution. Lenin points to the way that ‘large scale production, factories, railways, the postal service’ provide models of the way that complex tasks can be reduced to ‘simple operations of registration, filing, and checking … that can be easily performed by every literate person’. The socialist state can adopt freely the same processes; state administrators will be paid a worker’s wage while being stripped of ‘every shadow of privilege, of every semblance of “official grandeur”’. Building on this model, Lenin recalls Engels’ argument that the withering of the state takes place when ‘the government over men is replaced by the administration of things’. The reduction of political rule to administrative mechanisms produces a depoliticized public which is fit only to be ruled. Politics is left to the party, whose ideology claims to express objective scientific truth and a vision of the future freed from the illusions of the past. The result is in fact the triumph of the logic of capitalism rather than an evolution toward the new socialist society promised by the party.

The point of this excursus is that Habermas correctly sees the constitutive and unavoidable nature of the problem of the relation of critical philosophy and Marxist critique. Marxists cannot ignore the philosophical foundations of the political, presupposing that civil society and interpersonal relations is its ‘real’ base. Habermas’ stress on the role of the universal—in the form of the norms without which individuation would not occur, and in the form of the truth-claims without which practical activity would be a sort of meaningless, anomic activity—addresses the central political problem. He thus helps his reader avoid the reductionism that follows from an overly simplified and instrumental reading of Marx. He does so by restoring the integral role of the political in Marxian and in revolutionary theory. The adequacy of his solution is another question, to which I will return.

Habermas’ theory of the political does leave room for politics. He understands that not all interests are universalizable and proposes a model for justifiable compromise, which is said to be legitimate when (a) the two sides are equal and (b) the interest in question is itself not universalizable (p. 154). But this suggestion is quickly abandoned; the general demand for universalization dominates the theoretical argument. Indeed, in an essay written after Legitimation Crises,²² Habermas writes that ‘[c]ompromises are the results of clever acting and negotiation, not of discourses’. But how then can the demand for universalization be maintained? Habermas analyzes a variety of ultimately unsatisfactory possibilities.²³ Anthropological assumptions about the nature of the species are unconvincing because no one knows what human needs in fact are. A universal, objectivist philosophy of history like that of Marx presupposes a teleology and makes assumptions about the class divisions in order to clinch its argument. Reference to the immanent norms of the system supposes knowledge of what distinguishes accidental from systemic claims. The same difficulty faces the assumption of the existence of a difference between the normative claims and the systemic reality: the difference only accidental. Examination of the legal codes to show who is excluded from social participation forgets no system organizes itself totally by written laws. Habermas proposes that the critical political thinker adopt an ‘advocatory model’ (p. 161). ‘The advocatory role of critical social theory would rather consist in a substitute [stellvertretende] simulated discourse between the groups that are divided by an articulated or at least virtual opposition of interests in order to find universalizable and at the same time repressed interests’ (p. 161). These interests would then be the object of empirical research.²⁴

Habermas develops the basis for his advocatory model in the final two chapters of Legitimation Crises. He continues his debate with Luhmann, whose replacement of the individual subject by the imperatives of the system implies that democratic decision-making uselessly increases the complexity of the system whose concern should be simply its own self-regulation and preservation. Habermas proposes a quasi-empirical critique of Luhmann’s position, showing that democratic planning is at least as good as the administrative non-participative alternative while contributing at the same time to the development of practical social rationality that is superior to the purposive-rational form of administrative planning (p. 189). Habermas admits that the advocacy model of critical theory can fail in a society that has altered the role of the individual and the function of rationality to such a degree that only self-regulating systems and sub-systems exist. Ultimately, he insists, the possibility of critical failure is better than prejudging reality (as does Luhmann when he replaces the democratic individual by the administrative system).

The defense of the advocatory model is passionate, but its individualist foundation of social theory leaves indeterminate the emergence of universal norms. Habermas vacillates, before returning to the problem in his concluding chapter, which announces his ‘Partiality for Reason’ (Parteilichkeit für Vernunft). The title is paradoxical: it is logically impossible to ask people to ‘be reasonable’; reason must already exist if it is possible to make a rational argument for being reasonable. If there is a choice as to who is to be reasonable, the state (Luhmann ) or the people (Habermas), the question presupposes that rationality is the property of one particular group; but that denies the universality of reason. Habermas sees only the possibility of returning to the ‘old European idea of human worth’, which can provide a basis for social action even in a social system that is increasingly taking its own autonomous course. That legacy of the Enlightenment, affirms Habermas proudly, remains the only possibility for political modernity.

In spite of his critique of Luhmann, Habermas does not simply reject the contribution of systems theory. His claim is that it is wrong to treat society as constituted by a non-social, external subject. Society (as system) is constituted by social action (by individuals); individuals are always already social beings who cannot ignore systemic constraints. This paradoxical interdependence permits a reformulation of the problem of the relation of the universal and the particular as that of the relation of the social and the individual.²⁵ However, as Ulrich Rödel points out, the point of view of the system corresponds politically to that of the capitalist. It neglects the fact that the function of intervention by the state is not arbitrary; it is the result of class struggle.²⁶ The result for Marxists, as expressed by Claus Offe, is that systems theoretical analysis is useful for analyzing the problems of the capitalist state, but from its point of view. This leads to a practical dilemma insofar as ‘[r]evolutionary theory can thus always be constructed only as the self-explanation of a practical movement that is already in process’.²⁷ Habermas rejects this conclusion from his close collaborators, insisting that if praxis can only be justified after the fact, nothing differentiates one praxis from any other, including that of the fascists. For this reason, Habermas goes beyond the issues posed by the legitimation crises to develop further his theory of social evolution.

5.3 Historical Materialism and Theory of Evolution

Habermas claims that Luhmann’s systems theoretical strategy provides a ‘paradigm’²⁸ for the analysis of one dimension of the problem of social evolution, while the two other dimensions of the self-reproduction of the species need to be treated independently. The organizational principles of human society are articulated in three dimensions. The productive forces continually extend the boundaries of the available world through science and technology; organizational forms of human societal interaction govern the self-maintenance of the given society; and emancipatory learning is developed through the critique of ideologies and the demand for rational legitimation. Habermas claims that the systems theoretical approach gives priority to the second dimension, organization. It claims that a system maintains itself by increasing its internal complexity—its ‘steering capacity’—while decreasing the complexity of its environment. The most efficient form of increased internal complexity is the differentiation of sub-systems which can take over burdens on society. Social evolution is seen in the degree to which the administrative system is differentiated from, and able to control, the society. Systems theory, as a method of administration, is thus a theory which is also a practice! This claim is one reason for Habermas intense debate with Luhmann. Aside from the theoretical problems proper to systems theory,²⁹ Habermas’ major criticism of Luhmann is that his idea of ‘legitimation through procedure’ (as he titles one of his books) is ultimately based on a decisionism whose only possible legitimation is its success, which can never be guaranteed over time.

As opposed to Luhmann’s systemic functionalism which reduces social relations to one level, the differentiated model of Historical Materialism presents three distinct types of activity—instrumental, social, and emancipatory—each of which makes specific truth claims. If they are reduced to one type of action, the possibility of human individuation and praxis are lost as the social cement cracks. In his earlier work, Habermas saw History as the horizon which constitutes the boundary within which praxis moves. In Baier’s summary,

History is not a theme for dialectical sociology for its own sake, but as a condition of praxis, to be understood as a hermeneutic philosophy of History from a practical standpoint … in order to formulate a theory of how praxis is made possible by the mediation of History.³⁰

Already in his 1968 Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas had connected the three forms of truth-oriented activity to three cognitive interests and attempted to show epistemologically the need for and limits of each. The thrust of that book was to show that because these cognitive interests are socially embedded, social theory provides the ultimate foundation for epistemology. This insight was then concretized by the mediation of History (whose capitalization indicates its indefinite conceptual referent) and rendered critical by the suggestion that the grounds of theory must be at once its truth-reference and a social theory. The result points to the need for a theory of social evolution which will enable the theory to avoid the contingency of brute factuality. To avoid the relativism and dependence on accidental social conditions (which could change at any time), and in order to avoid the temptation to appeal to an ahistorical notion of truth outside the sphere of human relations, Habermas had to move beyond the position of Knowledge and Human Interests to justify the status of social norms.³¹

The development of a theory of evolution is not a substitute for a theory of History, let alone for a concrete historical analysis. A first reading of Habermas’ preliminary sketch of social evolution in Legitimation Crises³² can give rise to the impression that Habermas has left the terrain of history for that of ontology. Looked at more closely, he sees the need for a theory of social evolution in order to make possible a human social praxis which is not contingent but remains truth-oriented and open to discursive critical questioning. If there were no such theory, human history could not be written or theorized; it would only be random events with no claim to truth or normativity and no place for the actors to recognize themselves and to criticize their traditions in a dialogue that demands reasoned responses. That explains the fact that a critical theory of social evolution oriented toward the questions of normativity and truth has to be itself understood as a conquest of human evolution. ‘Indeed!’, exclaims Habermas; it would be the theoretical equivalent of Engels’ revolutionary ‘leap from necessity to freedom’. At the same time, he warns, it would be wrong to confuse particular knowledge achieved at a given moment with the conditions of its universalization, to conflate individual freedom with its social realization, or to think that the liberating process of psychoanalytic analysis can be transferred directly to the social plane.³³ The problem of the relation of universal and the particular remains.

Albrecht Wellmer’s suggests that the theory Habermas needs would be ‘the phantastic demand to develop a materialist version of [Hegel’s ] “Phenomenology of Mind”’.³⁴ This claim is potentially misleading. Hegel’s Phenomenology deals with appearing knowledge and is to the last contingent. What is demanded would be more like the Logic, which the author’s Foreword to the Second Edition describes concisely. ‘In that it deals with the thought determinations which overall penetrate our mind in an instinctive and unconscious manner, and themselves remain unattended because they enter into language as well, the science of logic will be the reconstruction of those determinations which are separated out by reflection and fixed by it as subjective external forms in their matter and content’.³⁵ Hegel is reacting here to a position which is limited because it is concerned ‘only with the correctness of knowledge, not with its truth’³⁶—which is a good description of his own Phenomenology, which was written well-before the Logic. This distinction is essential to understanding why Habermas insists on truth as fundamental to, and erroneously neglected by, social theory.

In recent re-evaluations of Theorie und Praxis and Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas has attempted to indicate the place of the theory of evolution. He establishes a categorial distinction between several closely related conceptual pairs: constitution and validity, categorial meaning and discursive verification, life-related communication and discourse, and praxis and theory. In each pair of categories, the first refers to the tasks of a critical theory, while the second belongs to the domain of a theory of social evolution. The first refers to the constitution of a life-world; it makes up the categorial meanings which provide the content of a statement. The second refers to the truth claim constituted by the intersubjective element in the performative aspect of the speech act. That something is the case and that something is true are two different types of claim. The first can be immediately verified once an objective frame of reference or measurement (the cognitive interests which constitute the domain of something given) is established; the second demands an intersubjective and mediated verification achieved through the discourse of all potential participants—that is, it must be universalizable in the sense previously discussed. The first claim, that such-and-such is the case, is not. The first type of claim is particular and is bound to a monological context of action; the second concerns the reconstruction of universal and anonymous systems of rules within the context of a discourse removed from immediate practical imperatives. Each of these represents a form of self-reflection, but the first is modeled on the (a-symmetrical) relation of analyst/patient, which is particular, whereas the second is the reconstruction of the ‘know how’, the intuitive rules that all must follow. The self-reflection achieved by the former will therefore have practical consequences, whereas the universality of the latter promises only the transcendental foundation of species-activity. This reconstruction will become the basis of a theory of evolution that is grounded on Habermas’ communication theoretical theory of a ‘Universal Pragmatics’.

This new stage of his theoretical work leads Habermas to redefine his notion of cognitive interests. Critical theory is concerned with the particular, whereas reconstructive (evolution theory or universal pragmatics) accounts for the universal. The notion of interest is described as their ‘latent nexus’.³⁷ The cognitive interests are neither ideology-critical nor based in psychology or the sociology of knowledge: ‘they are invariant’.³⁸ If they could be deduced directly from the imperatives of life-praxis, they would only be contingent.³⁹ Instead, they must be ‘deeply rooted anthropological’ forms, although Habermas insists that this does not imply a turn to naturalism as some critics have argued.⁴⁰ Habermas does admit that he is unclear as to whether these interests are ‘transcendental’ in a strict sense or ‘empirical’ although not contingent insofar as they refer to properties shared by the species as a whole (as in the claims of ethology).⁴¹ Returning to the issue two years later, in the Postscript to Erkenntnis und Interesse, Habermas concludes that ‘[a]s long as cognitive interests can be identified and analyzed by reflection on the logic of inquiry in the natural and cultural sciences, they can legitimately claim a transcendental status. They assume an “empirical” status as soon as they are analyzed as the result of natural history—analyzed, that is, in terms of a cognitive anthropology. I put “empirical” in quotation marks, because a theory of evolution which is expected to explain historically the emergent characteristics of a socio-cultural form of life (in other words, the constituent elements of social systems) cannot itself be developed within the transcendental framework of objectivizing science’.⁴²

The ability to analyze the ‘empirical’ is crucial to Habermas’ reconstruction of Historical Materialism. The theory of evolution will be able to do so only if its reconstruction of the universal and anonymous rule systems can articulate that ‘latent nexus’ that binds it to an action-oriented critical theory. Habermas sees the key element in this process in the fact that the roots of the cognitive interests ‘result from the imperatives of the sociocultural life form bound up with work and language’.⁴³ This assertion does not contradict his insistence that the interests are not derived from the imperatives of life praxis; his claim coincides with the ‘anthropological’ and ‘species’ character that he is stressing insofar as homo sapiens is at once a working and a speaking animal. The reformulated Historical Materialism is thus based on cognitive interests which are at the same time what is to be reconstructed in its evolutionary universality and what in its particularity makes possible the situated critical theory that is ultimately grounded in them. The theory is thus doubly reflexive in the sense demanded; the open problem at this point is the identification of the ‘addressees’ capable of realizing this theory.

The parallel of Habermas’ project with Hegel’s Logic does not mean that both have the same conception of truth. Habermas’ discursive theory is rooted in the consensus concerning validity that arises in a situation of undistorted and equal speaking, making the paradoxical claim that the truth both exists as a universal (hence, it is not constituted but constitutive) and yet that it depends on the particular individual subjects for its factual validity. For this claim to be valid, Habermas’ theory of evolution must be projective or historical in a way that includes an ‘empirical’ referent. His claims are often unclear. Stressing the importance of reflexive theory as reconstructive, he asserts that ‘therefore the claim to be acting dialectically with insight is senseless. It rests on a category mistake’.⁴⁴ But in the very next paragraph, he suggests that it is possible to act in terms of a counter-factual assumption, as was the claim of critical theory in Legitimation Crises. On the other hand, for the reconstructive theory of evolution, it appears that ‘[t]he entirety of past history is the history of distorted communication’.⁴⁵ In this case, as Albrecht Wellmer points out ‘it would follow that undistorted communication in each of the evolutionary spheres is the universal which founds the evolution of the species, and that it is the task of the particulars to achieve what they must always already posit in the forms of their practical life’. Or, as Habermas puts it in the new Introduction to Theorie und Praxis, ‘in a process of enlightenment there are only participants’.⁴⁶

5.4 The Tasks of Philosophy and the Question of the Political

The philosophical ground of Habermas’ theory is the notion of truth or validity whose translation into a critical theory fills the twin functions of social legitimation. Both truth and validity depend on language, whose articulation presupposes a counter-factually assumed situation of undistorted communication. To avoid misunderstanding, it must be stressed that language here will be analyzed in the context of the ‘empirical’ theory of evolution. As opposed to Luhmann’s systems theoretical account, which made the political steering system the primary causal factor, Habermas insists on the importance of the demand for truth in all three evolutionary domains. In the domain of the productive forces, truth results in the reduction of the complexity of external nature; in the domain of social interaction, the increasing differentiation of specific sub-systems guarantees greater individual freedom and a larger palette of social possibilities; in the domain of emancipatory learning, the idea of truth leads to a critique of ideology that makes possible a continual learning process which maintains flexibility in the other two domains. Insofar as Habermas’ notion of truth is articulated as the form of social discourse, emancipatory learning cannot be defined (as does Luhmann) by increased systemic complexity; it is better understood as a function of ideology-critique and self-reflexive activity.⁴⁷ In this way, it defines the goal of present political tasks and locates the actual weaknesses of the system of late. This final step to the argument justifies the structure of the entire theory, making clear the non-contingent grounds that Habermas needed in order to escape the problems posed to empirical research into the structures of late capitalism.

Habermas needs to justify his claim to inherit the philosophical-anthropological notion of truth that he modernizes in his model of undistorted communication. At the same time, he has to face the ‘Marxist’ question of the validity of the heritage of the ‘bourgeois’ Enlightenment. The first elements of a response are found in a presentation in August 1973 at the annual meetings of the Yugoslav journal Praxis titled ‘The Role of Philosophy in Marxism’. Habermas presents his arguments in an easily outlined logical progression. First, there are three modern societal transformations that affect philosophy: (1) the changed nature and role of bourgeois culture in late capitalism, (2) the domination of scientistic assumptions and the reactions to this cultural hegemony, and (3) the positive tasks of philosophy in the new context. The first transformation affects the motivational kernel of culture, which becomes dysfunctional, producing revolts particularly by youth. Those who do not join the revolt adopt the cynicism of scientism, perhaps mitigated by forms of ‘analytic philosophy’. The paths open to philosophy that refuses the two polar opposites can then take three forms. The first is a relativism that accepts the domination of science but insists that there are domains of life that remain outside of it. Habermas calls this a Komplementärphilosophie which, from Jaspers to Kołakowski, reduces philosophy to a Weltanschauung, denying its philosophy’s vital claim to truth and universality. The opposite pole is a renewal of a Heideggerian ontology that ignores the dead-end to which its critique of modern technology leads. Between the two poles is found the renewal diamat in the Russian sense, claiming to know society as a totality and to orient action to this truth. Its fatal—idealistic—assumption that it has this truth is in fact the signal that for it philosophy has come to an end.

Rejecting these alternatives, Habermas poses three tasks for a Marxist philosophy. It must develop a theory that uses the advances of the social and natural sciences without falling into their positivist tendency. It must defend reason as the demand for truth both in science and in the practical questions of life. And it must demystify the appearance of objectivity claimed by the institutions of late capitalism by showing their connectedness with the human project of seeking and creating the truth of the good life. Habermas admits that this project does not announce a revolutionary break with the past. ‘Whoever would eliminate philosophy sets aside an element of the bourgeois world whose heritage we cannot ignore without harming science itself’. He then turns once again, in his concluding remarks, to the problem of the universal and the particular. As the unity of theoretical and practical reason, philosophy must be the medium or universal in terms of which the identity of society and of its members are formed without at the same time the risk of falling into particularistic identities. Philosophy, in a word, must be adequate to the tasks of reconstructive as well as critical social theory.

Social theory based on (discursive) truth standards proposes first of all a reconstruction, a self-reflection which has no practical consequences other than enlightenment or clarity concerning what individuals already are and do. This can in turn become the foundation of a critical self-reflection on the particular forms of life and action. Mediated by the cognitive interests, it becomes the basis of a critical theory. In its most immediate form, the universal character of its claims serves as a critique of all particular structures.⁴⁸ A more differentiated formulation can be derived from a communicative reconstruction of psychoanalysis in which the metapsychological theory of Freud is used to set in motion an asymmetrical communication between the theorist-as-already-knowing and the individuals whose communicative capacities are blocked by the existing social system. As with psychoanalysis, the acknowledgment of the validity of the theory by the participants would take place in the context of open discussion by those whose life situation it attempts to explain.⁴⁹ Habermas suggests that a richer critical theory can in this way develop what the young Marx called the task of ‘all as individuals’ by means of the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of the species that demonstrates its dependence on the individual members of that species for its realization.

The reader cannot fail to be struck by the triadic logic of Habermas’ theoretical arguments and the constant reappearance of the problem of the universal and the particular. His solution to the question of ‘universalizable’ interests seems at times return to a Humean concept of the universal that is not compatible with the cognitive interests that ground the theory insofar it is a philosophical reconstruction separated from the lived experience of the members. It is no surprise that Habermas came under criticism from the Marxist left. His reply to his former assistant, Oskar Negt, recognizes the premise of the criticism but argues by a sort of via negativa that his position is the only possible way forward.⁵⁰

Habermas subsumes the Marxist criticisms of his position within his enfolding theoretical reconstruction. Claiming the heritage of the Enlightenment, which he reformulates in communicative categories, he asserts that the first challenge to political practice is to create an organization that can unite individuals in a continual process of critical self- and social-reflection. In a second step, he argues that the development of the Communist party type of organization marks a new step in the ‘history of the species’ insofar it brings naturally emerging discursive methods of problem-solving methods to a self-reflective formulation. ‘With this type of organization something very remarkable is institutionalized: outwards, against the class enemy, strategic activity and political struggle; inwards, in relation to the mass of wage laborers, organization of enlightenment, discursive initiation of processes of self-reflection. The vanguard of the proletariat must master both: the critique of the weapons and the weapon of the critique’.⁵¹ When the Party has come to power, it is supposed to function as the mediator between the self-reflection of the proletariat and the practical political struggle. Habermas does not explain this third moment by recourse to the structure of the proletariat that makes it capable of such self-reflection. To the contrary, he asserts that those who have seized power in fact try to keep it by acting strategically rather than discursively; they are guided by their own particular interests rather than universalizable claims. The result is distorted communication which makes criticism illicit and blinds the capacity for self-understanding.

Habermas’ reconstruction offers grounds for his critique. Another triad points out that in principle the revolutionary organization has three distinct tasks: the development of theories, the organization of enlightenment in which the theories are tested for their ability to spark a process of reflection in particular groups, and the choice of strategy and tactics in the political struggle. By attributing these distinct roles to a single institution, the Party has blurred the necessary distinctions among them. The usual justification of this choice is that the Party has to act as the consciousness of a proletariat ‘in itself’ that is unaware of its radical potential to become conscious ‘for itself’. Habermas maintains instead his communicative interpretation. ‘The only advantage of which Marx could legitimately have assured a proletariat acting in solidarity would have been this: that only a class which constitutes itself as such with the aid of a true critique is in a position to clarify in practical discourses how one should act rationally in the political sphere’.⁵² Only on this basis, he suggests, can the subordination of both the proletariat and critical theory to the Party be justified while, avoiding a politics in which the Party, as the independent bearer of truth, initiates actions for the masses who are supposed to learn post hoc that their interests coincide with those of the enlightened elite. A strategy ‘freed’ from the need for self-reflection on the part of the participants culminates in a Stalinism for which theory becomes, in Negt’s apt phrase cited earlier, a ‘science of legitimation’.⁵³

The critique of the Leninist theory of the revolutionary political organization has a curious echo in Habermas’ criticisms of the ‘actionism’ of the German student movement at the time to which I referred at the outset of this reconstruction of Habermas’ development. Its idea that radical provocations, of ‘exemplary action’ and even violence that would serve to reveal the hidden repression beneath the smooth surface of the status quo, shared, no doubt unintentionally, the idea that the actions of those who know are necessary for the repressed masses to break their chains. Habermas criticized this politics for using people without giving them the chance to build a discursive opinion about their situation.⁵⁴ He recognized the need to institutionalize forms of discursive confrontation because he did ‘not want to hold that a sufficient realization of the demands that we must place on discourse is a priori impossible . The limitations which we have considered can either be compensated through institutional arrangements or at least neutralized in their effects on the declared goal through an equal division of the chance of exercising speech acts.⁵⁵ Despite his earlier criticism of the New Left, he now admits as well that there are situations in which we must act. The challenge is to define what counts as political activity for his type of social theory.

5.5 The Political: Action or Institution?

The expanded role of the state in late capitalism politicizes areas of life which liberal capitalism had left to the private sphere. State action eliminates the appearance of naturalness from decisions concerning wages, child-rearing, health care, and urban policy. This can encourage demands for participation by those affected by these policies. Habermas builds on Claus Offe’s combination of Marxist political intentions with a systems theoretical analysis of the state. Offe defines his goal as the demonstration of the class nature of the contemporary state. His analysis moves through three stages. First, he will ‘conceptualize the domination organized by the state as a selective, event-producing system of rules, as a “process of sorting out”’. Second, he proposes to ‘deduce the kind of selectivity that would demonstrate the class character of the domination by the state: which specific selections must a state apparatus perform in order to function as a capitalist state?’ The final step is to analyze ‘the methodological problems that appear in the empirical determination of selectivity’ that can show ‘a structural complementarity between state activity and the dominant class interests’.⁵⁶ The state functions in this theory as a ‘sub-system’ of society, performing specific functions that reduce social complexity. For that reason, Offe insists that it must be called the ‘state apparatus’ in order to avoid the implication that it could function as an independent subject.⁵⁷ This is consistent with the idea of a state in capitalist society stressed by the British socialist Ralph Miliband. On this view the political becomes whatever ‘is made into an object of administrative activity’.⁵⁸

While Offe’s version of systems theory seeks to present a political analysis, like all systems theories it tends to reduce all phenomena to manifestations of the social. A different systemic theory, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, suggests a differentiated categorical structure that underlines the autonomy of the political. Hegel devotes a long explanation of the functions to what he calls ‘The Police and the Corporations’ in his reconstruction of the logic of ‘civil society’.⁵⁹ Neither term should be understood in its contemporary meaning; conceived as institutions of civil society, they provide the functional equivalent of the contemporary welfare state. In Hegel’s account, they serve as the mediation that prepares the overcoming of social relations based on atomistic particularity which leads to the political state. Although Marx criticized Hegel’s hypostatization of the state as a ‘concrete universal’ that reconciles particularity and universality, in his historical analyses such as the Eighteenth Brumaire he found it necessary to recognize the existence of a political sphere that was not identical to the ‘state apparatus’. Similarly, Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune in The Civil War in France makes clear that it is the administrative function state apparatus (rather than ‘the political’ unity of society) that is destined to disappear after the revolution. Marx’s political analysis recognizes that politics is based on something more and other than economics or the systemic control of state administration. Marx does not, however, develop the theoretical foundations of his historical insight. Habermas’ notion of universalizable interests can be interpreted as a reformulation of the Hegelian notion of the political as a concrete universal that is capable of expressing conceptually Marx’s insight. In Hegel’s case, the political state reconciles the sphere of individuality with that of social particularity. Habermas’ focus on legitimation as the axial point for his analysis of late capitalism reformulates this insight in modern terms. The structure of this argument rests on the possibility of establishing a theory of evolution that can fulfill the logical function needed for Habermas to complete his reconstructive theory. That theory would have to find a place for both individual action and for its institutionalization in political forms that avoid reification.⁶⁰ Habermas had offered historical sketches that suggest the kind of argument that he wanted to develop. It would have to show how action can acquire a paradoxical kind of institutionalization that is at the same time self-critical. For example, in Theorie und Praxis, he offers what he calls some ‘very rough examples that are only illustrations’ of this process, referring first to ‘the institutionalization of discourses whose validity claim is based on mythological or religious interpretations of the world’, which are ‘systematically put into question and validated: we understand this as the beginning of philosophy in classical Athens’. A second example points to ‘the institutionalization of discourses whose validity claims on the basis of professionally inherited, technically useful secular knowledge’ that are ‘systematically put into question and validated: we understand this as the beginning of the modern empirical sciences’. A final illustration is the institutionalization of discourses whose ‘validity claims depend on practical and political decisions that should be continually put into question and checked: this takes place in eighteenth-century England, then on the continent and in the USA’. These developments led to the birth of a bourgeois public and the demand for representative forms of government, culminating in ‘bourgeois democracy’.⁶¹

Habermas’ interpretation of bourgeois democracy as the institutionalization of self-critical individual action may surprise the Marxist. The young Marx had criticized this political form as a ‘democracy of unfreedom’; in his eyes, it only universalized the particular opinions and needs of a single class. The analysis of the ‘End of the Individual’ in Legitimation Crises suggested the need to go beyond that one-sided understanding of the bourgeoisie as participating in a process of universalization. Although critics have noticed that the discourse theory of truth apparently imitates the market principle at the foundation of bourgeois society, Habermas is always careful to insist that its foundation is universal. The problem is to distinguish the empirical social relations from their normative legitimation. The paradigm of language is perhaps too universal, or not sufficiently differentiated, to concretize the universality of the positive institution of the political. The specific difference that constitutes the political is lost in a process of enlightenment that has no end. This is perhaps also a reason that Habermas lays so much stress on the need for an empirically demonstrable theory.⁶²

Habermas’ theory is ultimately unsatisfactory for the paradoxical reason that he does not consistently develop those theoretical insights that first impelled him to elaborate his theory. He has seen the crucial problem of the universal and the particular as central to a political theory and articulated it theoretically and empirically in his demonstration of the centrality of the legitimation problem. He recognized the need for a politics that goes beyond middle-class monotony as well as self-proclaimed left-wing monological practice. Most importantly, he has demonstrated that questions of truth and validity cannot be excluded from social and political theory. This theorizing of political praxis as enlightenment is a necessary component, but only a component, of the response to the structures of late capitalism. Unless the undifferentiated universal of an ideal speech situation can be concretized through the application of a theory of evolution, Habermas’ work will remain only as a challenge. That theory of evolution would have to incorporate a reconsideration of the ontological premises inherited from Critical Theory if it is to account for the concrete relations of individual and institution. That would demand a reconsideration of Hegel, rather than the turn back to Kant in order to formulate a ‘universal pragmatics’ in the stead of the promised reconstructive theory of evolution.

Footnotes

1

I make use of insights from manuscripts or published papers from other members of the Institute (where I was a Humboldt Fellow in 1982). I refer also (n. 14) to an essay by a former member, Albrecht Wellmer, first presented at Stony Brook University.

2

Habermas does not use the specific concept of ‘the political’, which I have adopted from Claude Lefort. His theory is particularly indebted to three younger colleagues at Starnberg: Rainer Döbert, Klaus Eder, and Gertrud Nunner-Winkler. References to their work are found in the earlier editions of this volume. In a sense, Legitimation Crises can be seen as a report summing up and drawing temporary conclusions from the first phase of the work of the Starnberg institute.

3

Jürgen Habermas, Theorie und Praxis, ‘Einleitung zur Neuausgabe’ (Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1971), p. 14. (Note that all references to Theorie und Praxis, unless otherwise specified, refer to the Introduction to this 1971 edition.)

4

The most influential use of the term at this time was Ernest Mandel’s in Der Spätkapitalismus. That Trotskyist theorist insists that the concept does not claim to reveal a ‘new essence’ of capitalism that transcends Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s Imperialism. Just as Lenin built on Marx, today’s capitalism is merely the enrichment of yesterday’s. As a result, Mandel’s concept is chronological rather than synthetic; he prefers it to neo-capitalism in order to stress that there is no discontinuity between the two. Habermas’ interpretation is discussed in part II. I had criticized Mandel’s theoretical premises already in ‘Genetic Economics vs. Dialectical Materialism’, Radical America, Vol. III, No. 4, August 1969, pp. 21–31.

5

Pages in parenthesis refer to the original German, Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1973). The English translation by Jeremy J. Shapiro is titled Legitimation Crises (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).

6

Habermas’ appeal to this ‘law’ is curious. He had criticized its formulation in Theory und Praxis, pointing to historical factors such as the way science leads to the increase of surplus-value, contradicting the Marxist theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. (Cf., the original 1963 German edition, pp. 192–4.) A further problem is seen in Legitimation Crises where the role of the state, the increasing size of monopolies, and the end of the free market are said to lead to the political determination of wages. C.f., also the Starnberg working paper by Ulrich Rödel, ‘Zusammenfassung kritischer Argumente zum Status der Werttheorie und zur Möglichkeit einer werttheoretisch formulierten Krisentheorie’ (1973).

The problem of an economically imposed crisis theory is present throughout the Marxian legacy, creating both theoretical and practical antinomies. It is faced frontally by Cornelius Castoriadis, as will be seen in Chap. 9.

7

Claus Offe, Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates (Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1972), particularly the discussion of ‘Spätkapitalismus—Versuch einer Begriffsbestimmung’, p. 24.

8

Faithful to the ethos of the Institute for Social Research, Habermas presents empirical analyses of each type of crisis and describes the difficulties faced by attempted solutions. It is not necessary to follow these detailed accounts in the present context.

9

Cf. Legitimationsprobleme, pp. 19, 99, 117, 123, and so on. Recourse to an autonomous permits Habermas to avoid reducing the legitimation crisis to contingent factors, as will be seen.

10

Cf. Döbert-Nunner, ‘Konflikt und Riickzugspotential im spätkapitalistischen Gesellschaften’, working paper of Max Planck Institute, Starnberg.

11

Cf. J. Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologic’ (Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1968), esp. pp. 75ff.

12

Theorie und Praxis, op. cit., p. 9.

13

Habermas redefines the Marxist concept of an economically determined ‘social formation’ by the systems theoretical idea of a ‘social organizational principle’. Under late capitalist conditions, this leads him reinterpret Max Weber’s sociological interpretation of the historically distinct forms of social organization in terms of their different forms of legitimation. He goes further than Weber insofar as the sociologist interpreted ‘legitimation’ as produced either by empirical psychological reasons or as the result of ‘value choices’ that are ultimately inexplicable or irrational. That is why Habermas seeks to formulate a philosophical theory of social evolution.

14

Cf., Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Communication and Emancipation. Reflections on the Linguistic Turn in Critical Theory’, in Stony Brook Studies in Philosophy, ed. P. Byrne, C. Evans and D. Howard (Stony Brook, New York, 1974), 1.

15

Cf. Habermas’ essay ‘Arbeit und Interaktion. Bemerkungen zu Hegels Jenenser “Philosophic des Geistes”’, in Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologic, op. cit.

16

There has been much debate about this distinction. In the Appendix to the English translation of Knowledge and Human Interests (which was not published in German originally), Habermas explains that ‘I do not mind at all calling both phenomena praxis. Nor do I deny that normally instrumental action is embedded in communicative action (productive activity is socially organized, in general). But I see no reason why we should not adequately analyze a complex, i.e., dissect it into its parts’.

17

Cf. Jürgen Habermas/Niklas Luhmann, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1971), especially pp. 114–22 and 202–20. (Hereafter referred to as ‘Habermas/Luhmann’.)

18

Cf. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Wahrheitstheorien’, published in Festschrift für Walter Schultz (Neske Verlag, 1973), cited here, and later reprinted in Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Habermas explains that ‘The ideal speech situation is neither an empirical phenomenon nor a mere construct but rather an unavoidable assumption that is reciprocally presupposed in all discourses. Though this assumption can be counterfactual it need not be; but even when it is made counterfactually it is an operatively effective function in the communication procedure. I thus speak preferably of an anticipation, a premise for an ideal speech situation’ (p. 258). Always careful, Habermas adds that the ideal speech situation is not a regulative principle in Kant’s sense; it is a factual anticipation necessary for the very act of speaking; nor is it a concrete concept in Hegel’s sense since there is no historical social form which perfectly corresponds to it (p. 259).

19

On this, cf. Legitimationsprobleme, op. cit., pp. 155–8, and Habermas/Luhmann, op. cit., p. 281.

20

C.f., Habermas’ analysis of ‘The End of the Individual’ in Legitimationsprobleme, op. cit., pp. 162–78.

21

The difficulty is apparent in Legitimationsprobleme when Habermas explains that in late capitalism, ‘God becomes the name for a communicative structure which forces men under the penalty of the loss of their humanity to go beyond their accidental empirical nature by encountering one another mediately, namely through the mediation of an Objective Thing which they themselves are not’ (op. cit., p. 167).

22

‘Wahrheitstheorien’, op. cit., p. 251.

23

C.f., Offe, Strukturprobleme, op. cit., pp. 85ff.

24

The question whether interests, by definition, are particular returns below in the discussion of Habermas’ theory of ‘cognitive interests’.

25

Cf., for example, Theorie und Praxis, op. cit., p. 25, for a clear illustration.

26

Rödel, ‘Zusammenfassung’, op. cit., p. 10.

27

Offe, Strukturprobleme, op. cit., p. 90.

28

Habermas/Luhmann, op. cit., p. 281.

29

On this, besides the Habermas/Luhmann debate, and the book by R. Döbert already mentioned, cf. the two Theorie-Diskussion volumes published by Suhrkamp after the Habermas/Luhmann debate. See also R. Bubner, ‘Wissenschaftstheorie und Systembegriff’, in R. Bubner, Dialektik und Wissenschaft, and the provocative, Hegelian-inspired essay by Klaus Hartmann, ‘Systemtheoretische Soziologie und kategoriale Sozialphilosophie’, in Philosophische Perspektiven, Band 5, 1973.

30

Cf. H. Baier, ‘Soziologie und Geschichte’, in Archiv, für Rechtsund Sozialphilosophie, 1966, LII, 1, pp. 67–89; reprinted in Kritik und Interpretation der kritischen Theorie (The Hague, 1971). The citation is from p. 377 of the latter, whose political bias toward a more orthodox Marxism should be noted.

31

This does not mean, as M. Theunissen suggests, that Habermas must give up the principle that epistemology is based on social theory; it means only that he recognizes the need to provide grounds for that assertion. C.f., ‘Die Gefährdung des Staates durch die Kultur’, a review of Legitimationsprobleme, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 9, 1973.

32

Similarly, c.f., Döbert, op. cit., as well as Döbert-Nunner-Winkler on child development. See also Habermas’ ‘Moral Development and Ego Identity’ and my note on its presentation in Telos, No. 27, 1976.

33

Theorie und Praxis, op. cit., pp. 22–3. The point is made again below in the discussion of the difference between a critical and a reconstructive theory.

34

Wellmer, op. cit., p. 97.

35

Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik (Meiner: Hamburg, 1963), p. 19.

36

Ibid., p. 18.

37

‘Postscript’, op. cit., p. 175.

38

Theorie und Praxis, op. cit., p. 16.

39

Ibid., p. 26.

40

Ibid., p. 27.

41

Ibid., note 31.

42

‘Postscript’, op. cit., p. 181.

43

Theorie und Praxis, op. cit., p. 16. C.f., also his ‘Postscript’, op. cit., p. 177, where Habermas writes: ‘The universality of cognitive interests implies that the constitution of object domains is determined by conditions governing the reproduction of the species, i.e., by the socio-cultural form of life as such’.

44

Ibid., p. 44.

45

Wellmer, op. cit., p. 92.

46

Theorie und Praxis, op. cit., p. 45.

47

Cf. Legitimationsprobleme, pp. 27–30, especially p. 28 on the role of learning mechanisms.

48

This logical claim can become the first step on a slippery slope, as is the case for some elements of the Frankfurt School. Of course, a theory of ‘the social’ or the idea that institutions form individuals and social relations can be accused of reification insofar as it denies the particular and/or hypostatizes the social. The stress on particularity can come at the cost of an inability to say anything meaningful about them or even to distinguish them one from another. The challenge for social and political theory is to formulate conditions of mediation permitting the articulation of the universal in the particular and the affirmative relations of the particular to the universal.

49

Habermas recognizes that the strict analogy does not hold; it at best makes sense in the case of the traditional view of the relation of the party to the masses. Cf. Theorie und Praxis, op. cit., pp. 35–7, and ‘Der Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik’, in Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1971), as well as the critiques of Geigel and Gadamer in that volume.

50

Negt’s work has taken a less orthodox turn. Cf. his collaboration with the cineaste Alexander Kluge, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung. Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit (Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1972).

51

Theorie und Praxis, op. cit., p. 33. On the problem of institutions, see the discussion below, as well as the chapters on Merleau-Ponty, Lefort, and Castoriadis.

52

Ibid., p. 39.

53

Cf. the excellent Introduction by Oskar Negt to N. Bukharin, A. Deborin, Kontroversen über dialektischen und mechanistischen Materialismus (Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1969), where this term is defined in detail.

54

Habermas adds here the peculiar argument that ‘Such attempts are precisely also tests; they test the limits of the changeability of human nature, above all of the historically variable structure of motivations or drives. (Antriebsstruktur)—limits about which we do not have, and in my opinion for fundamental reasons of principle cannot have theoretical knowledge’ (Theorie und Praxis, op. cit., p. 42). This is perhaps an anticipation of what would become his theory of evolutionary stages. I take the liberty here of adding a reference to my essay ‘Citizen Habermas’, reprinted in Between Politics and Antipolitics, which discusses in more detail Habermas’ uneasy relations with the New Left.

55

‘Wahrheitstheorien’, op. cit., p. 257.

56

Offe, Strukturprobleme, op. cit., p. 74.

57

Ibid., p. 173.

58

Ibid., p. 130. C.f., Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969).

59

Paragraphs 230–56.

60

C.f., the criticisms by the conservative political theorist, Bernard Willms, Kritik und Politik. Jürgen Habermas oder das politische Defizit der ‘Kritischen Theorie’ (Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1973).

61

Theorie und Praxis, op. cit., pp. 31–2.

62

Habermas’ failure to develop a theory of the political offers a partial explanation for the absence of a theory of revolution in even his Marx-inspired early writings. For example, in Theorie und Praxis (p. 37), he asserts that ‘Against many sectarian efforts, it should be pointed out today that in late capitalism the change of the structures of the general educational system is possibly more important for the organization of enlightenment that fruitless cadre schooling or the building of powerless parties. I mean by this only that: these are empirical questions which should not be prejudged’.

© The Author(s) 2019

Dick HowardThe Marxian LegacyPolitical Philosophy and Public Purposehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4_6

6. The Rationality of the Dialectic: Jean-Paul Sartre

Dick Howard1  

(1)

Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, New York, NY, USA

Dick Howard

The sharp rupture that appeared in May 1968 threw into question not only the functional machine of modernizing French capitalism; the spontaneous creativity it revealed was also so much sand in the smoothly oiled machinery of orthodox Communist practice and Marxist theory. Neither the Gaullist victory at the polls in June nor the promise of the electoral Common Program of the socialist and communist parties deceived anyone: the specter of May had replaced the ‘specter of communism’ announced in The Communist Manifesto. The New Left specter has not achieved an institutional identity, and this makes it all the more dangerous to the established order while at the same time preserving its explosive force. The discovery and self-discovery symbolized by May was in fact a rediscovery of that unfinished work and elemental hope that Ernst Bloch showed to be not just the driving force but as well the arché and logos of revolution. More prosaically, it could be suggested that the nineteenth-century bourgeois revolutions, followed by bitter proletarian struggles, achieved only one of the three emblems that adorned the banners of 1789—equality—and that May 1968 represented the forms of liberty and fraternity that remain to be realized. This was expressed most emphatically in Cohn-Bendit’s iconoclastic insistence that ‘Tu fais la révolution pour toi’; the insistence on the role of pleasure and desire in the festive atmosphere of fraternization and communality turned the revolt into a positive affirmation. Underground, surfacing only in occasional and punctual actions, the specter of May, like that ‘old mole’ whose image captured the imagination of poets and philosophers alike, is digging away and undermining the structure of bureaucratized capitalist daily life.

The relation of the new specter and the inherited model remains to be established. Jean-Paul Sartre’s attempt to articulate the relation of his existentialism to Marxist theory and Communist practice provides a starting point. On the one hand, the pseudonymous Epistemon’s Ces idées qui ont ébranlé la France is certainly correct in pointing out that Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique provides an abstract, but accurate, account of the pattern of action that emerged during May. On the other hand, Sartre himself has insisted that it was only after May that he was able to see clearly how those ideas of freedom and morality expressed in his early work could find their political articulation.¹ Despite the eclipse of Sartre’s influence in France (where, e.g., the Critique is hardly discussed, and the three large volumes on Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille, seem to have found few readers), his existential phenomenology and his gifted pen make him the representative of a temptation that demands analysis. His quixotic personality adds to his appeal. He knows that his name, not his person, is an institution which can be used; and he lends it (perhaps too) freely—signing appeals, writing prefaces, presiding over the Russell Tribunal, taking the official direction of the then forbidden Maoist newspaper (Libération) or demanding to visit the Red Brigades leader, Andreas Baader, in his West German prison.

The Sartrean example offers a particular kind of temptation for the intellectual. There is a certain self-deprecation and even anti-intellectualism in Sartre’s highly conceptual analyses which reflect the frustrations of the thinker who ardently desires to see his ideas translated into action. At first, Sartre’s unstinting support for the Good Cause seems admirable.

But if I consider the entirety of the conditions that are necessary for man to exist, I tell myself that the only thing to do is to underline, to show the value of and to support with all my power that which, in particular social and political situations, can bring about a society of free men. If one does not do that, one accepts that man is nothing but shit.²

But this depreciation of the task of the intellectual contradicts what Sartre claims to have learned from May: the need to replace the ‘old intellectual’ style, which consisted in opposing the universal claims of Man to the injustice of particular situations. The ‘new intellectual’ in whom Sartre says he recognizes the demands of his earlier philosophy is part and parcel of the ongoing political movement; engagement in the movement fulfills what Sartre proposed in Being and Nothingness : ‘there is only the point of view of engaged knowledge. That is to say that knowledge and action are only two abstract moments of an original and concrete relation’.³ No more than the earlier existentialist, the ‘new intellectual’ should not be limited to following the ongoing movement, ratifying the projects already begun. The pathos of Sartre’s self-understanding, and the reality of his political practice—not simply his facile lending of his name, but his political support for the Communist Party in the 1950s—put into question the foundations of his philosophy.

Although the moral theory that he promised as the complement to the existential ontology of Being and Nothingness was never published, the emergence of a New Left encouraged him to return to that project in a more militant mode. He argues that the revolt expressed, for example, when a worker refuses to accept the racist remarks of his foreman—is the expression of freedom because ‘there is no particular situation which by itself would suffice to determine a revolt’.⁴ The revolt breaks the chain of everyday passivity (the worker has surely been treated in a racist manner before); it expresses a freedom that makes possible the invention of true values; it is a moral affirmation of human dignity. Pointing to other revolts—students against authority, workers against bureaucracy—Sartre concludes that

[t]he philosopher who would express in words the nature of that freedom would permit them to become more profoundly conscious of their situation. From such a position, the Maoists [who, for Sartre at this time, represented his New Left] have come to pose anew the question of morality; or rather, no, they haven’t posed it, they undertake practical actions which always have a relation to morality. It will be the task of the philosopher of the Maoist society to define morality in terms of freedom.⁵

This assertion refers to two different subjects, the philosopher who expresses in words what people are doing and the activists whose practice creates the situation in which the philosopher can recognize the free, moral task. Sartre’s interlocutor, the Maoist leader known as Pierre Victor (a.k.a. Benny Lévi), sees the implication of this dualism. ‘What still bothers me in your position, Sartre, is that freedom is the same at the beginning and at the end’.⁶ Sartre’s weak reply is left lying, only to be picked up again later when Victor insists that, in practice, there must be a development and articulation of the forms of freedom. Yet, Sartre’s reply only confirms the earlier objection: ‘one is free or one is not free’.⁷ Sartre’s freedom ultimately has no depth, is rooted in no tradition, and is unable to reflect on itself and to learn from experience.

The appeal of Sartre’s theory is that it seems to give each individual a responsibility that can be realized immediately by that individual, whose action is said to further the revolution. He interprets revolution ‘not as a movement for the overthrow of one power by another’ but rather as ‘a long movement of liberation from power’.⁸ He has realized that the Communist Party is an institution that stifles revolution.

An institution is a demand addressed to abstract and atomized individuals whereas a true praxis can only exist in concrete assemblies. If a revolutionary party must exist today, it should have the least possible resemblance to an institution, and it should contest all institutionalism – outside itself, but above all within itself. What must be developed in people is not the respect for a supposed revolutionary order, but rather the spirit of revolt against all order.⁹

The result would be a society consisting only of fully human and open encounters. But whereas the ontology presented in Being and Nothingness in 1943 could only imagine such a society as based on ‘authenticity’, he now thinks in the wake of 1968 that he sees the path to its concrete realization.

In order that a true social concord be established, a man must exist entirely for his neighbor, who must exist entirely for him. This is not realizable today, but I think that it will be realizable when the change in economic, cultural and affective relations between men will have been accomplished, first of all by the suppression of material scarcity which is, in my opinion – as I showed in the Critique de la raison dialectique – the basis of all the past and present antagonisms between men.¹⁰

The reference to ‘scarcity’ introduces a different type of problem. Its existence entails a limitation on the pristine freedom from which Sartre’s argument began. Freedom is now ‘situated’; it is limited and hence dependent. The political exercise of freedom can consist only in supporting the Good Cause that is supposed to overcome scarcity and thereby realize absolute freedom. The definition of that project appears to depend on an understanding of the origin of the alienation of freedom that accounts for the passive reproduction of conditions of scarcity.¹¹ In that way, the moral theory of freedom could be combined with a social theory that can give direction to political action.

6.1 The Necessity of a Critique of Dialectical Reason

The title of Sartre’s systematic social theory suggests its multiple goals and points to the kind of theory he proposes. He begins from a determined criticism of the ‘Marxist-Leninist’ tradition. The negative ground for criticism concerns the over-extension the domain of validity of dialectical Reason. Its positive formulation depends on the demonstration of the ontological conditions of the possibility of dialectical Reason itself. The parallel of Sartre’s proposal with Kant’s definition of the critical task,¹² as Sartre suggests by referring to his theory as a ‘Prolegomenon to any future Anthropology’ (p. 153) is evident.¹³ It leads Sartre to return to the ‘existentialist’ problematic of Being and Nothingness , recognizing its limits as only an ‘ideology’ within Marxism, which he affirms boldly is ‘the philosophy of our time’ (p. 29). As long as capitalism remains, he insists, without pausing to explain how his philosophy of freedom is compatible with an economic determinism according to which thought depends on being, Marxism cannot be surpassed.

Sartre’s previous encounters with Marxism were marked by skirmishes, friendly reunions, misunderstandings, and verbal violence. Some markers on his path deserve mention. He moved from his 1946 polemic, ‘Materialism and Revolution’, to the co-founding of a political movement (the RDR) as a Third Force in post-war politics, going on to an amicable reunion during the Korean War and moving on to the series of articles on ‘The Communists and the Peace’ (which cost him the friendship of his philosophical comrade, Maurice Merleau-Ponty), then breaking with these erstwhile allies over the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and the evaluation of Polish liberalization in 1956, and then finding himself finally in support of violent opposition to France’s colonial war in Algeria. It is easy to understand why the philosopher wanted to settle accounts with the Marxist theory that was supposed to explain what is to be done in such conditions of choice.

For all his political inconsistencies, Sartre was nonetheless remarkably persistent in the philosophical pursuit that led him to the Critique. Three problems from Being and Nothingness plagued him:

(1)

the problem of the ‘we-subject’. In the 1943 book, Sartre can deal with the ‘we-object’—that is, several discrete individuals who are recognized by an Other as a unity even though they are not acting in concert consciously; but he could not explain the harmonious coexistence of a plurality of social subjects because each pour-soi (subject) can only objectify (and thereby negate) the being of every other pour-soi; each remains caught in a world of its own reifications.

(2)

The problem of matter. The unforgettable literary descriptions of Nausea as well as the vivid analyses in Being and Nothingness describe matter as something ‘opaque’ or ‘massive’ that interferes with the self-transparency of the pour-soi. Matter is sheer facticity to be manipulated and used by the negating activity of the pour-soi. It plays no positive role as a mediator between the subjectivities which inhabit the social world. As a result, Sartre risks falling back to a kind of Cartesian dualism of ‘thinking’ and ‘extended’ substances.

(3)

Correlative to these two problems is Sartre’s inability to cope with the concrete historical experience central to the Marxist problematic. The philosopher could stress the historicity of the projects of existential subjects, but Being and Nothingness was unable to articulate the mediation between this general level and its particular manifestations.

Sartre’s confrontation with Marxism was enriched from the outset by his recognition of the theoretical flaws of the orthodox version of the doctrine which were flayed mercilessly in the 1946 ‘Materialism and Revolution’, and analyzed more sympathetically in the 1957 essay on ‘Questions of Method’, which is printed as the first part of the Critique.¹⁴ His criticism of the so-called dialectics of nature and his attack on the analytical and reductionist epistemology of crude materialism were particularly important for the development of his theory.

Sartre’s concern in the Critique is ontology. As a result, his reaction to the pretensions of ‘scientific’ Marxism is to criticize its epistemological foundations. Insofar as his ontology is anthropological, Sartre wants to analyze the human project and the human responsibility that underlie the structure of the social world. To deal with a phenomenon like colonialism, for example, it is necessary to do more than identify and label a certain sociological process. Labeling not only reveals but above all conceals the specificity of the experience that is conceptualized by the understanding. The ‘thing’ is not just out there; it is a result, the product of a specific praxis¹⁵ of specific individuals.

The lifeless movement of appearances that economic Reason can study is only intelligible in relation to the anti-dialectical system of super-exploitation. But this latter in its turn is not intelligible if one does not first see in it the product of human labor which forged it and does not cease to control it. (p. 683)

The objectivist fallacy which separates the subject from the observed object, purging radically the latter of any trace of human subjectivity and human projects, must be avoided.

Epistemological materialism sacrifices its own intelligibility at the quantitative altar of positive science. For its part, dialectical intelligibility is based on the homogeneity that arises from the self-recognition of the interaction of subject and object. When positive science eliminates the human factor from its analyses, it finds itself incapable of understanding the intelligibility of its world. At best, quantitative science permits the exterior presentation of a totalization frozen into a lifeless totality. Sartre rejects such a materialist reductionism.

if one had to reduce the relations of practical multiplicities to simple contradictory determinations that are produced, simultaneously or not, by the development of a process; if one had, for example, to consider that the proletariat is the future destroyer of the bourgeoisie by virtue of the simple fact that the progressive decrease of variable capital and the increase of fixed capital, by increasing the productivity of the worker and reducing the buying power of the working class as a whole, will produce, passing from crisis to crisis, the economic catastrophe from which the bourgeoisie will not escape, then one ultimately reduces man to the pure anti-dialectical moment of the practico-inert. (p. 731)

The material and cultural world that Sartre calls the ‘practico-inert’ is not sheer inert facticity having no depth and only one meaning. For dialectical thought, it ‘is only intelligible because we produce it ourselves.… In a word, if in human history the mode of production is the infrastructure of every society, this is the case because work is the infrastructure of the practico-inert (and of the mode of production)’ (p. 671).

The problem posed here by Sartre is illustrated in the attempt by the young Marx and Engels to account for the origins of alienation in The German Ideology. Their account begins with the primitive division of labor and proceeds to explain the succeeding developments as permutations and combinations of this original ‘historical’ circumstance. Their choice of this genetic and materialist account followed Marx’s failure to deduce the emergence of private property from alienated labor and of alienated labor from private property in the 1844 Manuscripts. Sartre criticizes the genetic materialism of The German Ideology as a pseudo-history that makes the fate of humanity depend on a natural and mechanical necessity. The reduction of praxis to a mechanical reaction poses also a theoretical problem. If the division of labor is natural, and if its extension will extend its negative effects to the point where the negation will be negated, then the origin of negativity must be explained.¹⁶ The dialectic needs negativity, without which there is no movement, no project, not even a human world. The genetic account has no place for the human actor, reducing socialism to an inert reorganization of the relation among things, as the mature Engels put it in his 1880 pamphlet, ‘Socialism: Utopian or Scientific’.

Engels’ theory of the ‘dialectics of nature’ makes an analogous mistake, occluding and naturalizing the source of negativity. As a result, he reintroduces a dualism of subject and object: the scientific investigator is represented as a neutral observer contemplating the activity of a world of objects to which he does not belong. The supposedly neutral observations are then tested in experiments whose chief epistemological characteristic is that isolating the elements to be studied recreates the atomistic world presupposed by the subject-object dichotomy. All subjectivity is stripped from the supposedly self-moving dialectical nature, which is fitted to a pre-formed mold defined by what Engels calls the trinity of ‘dialectical laws’. ‘But’, objects Sartre, ‘in the historical and social world … there is truly a dialectical reason; by transporting this law into the ‘natural’ world, engraving it there by force, Engels takes its rationality from it; it is no longer a question of a dialectic that man makes in making himself, and which, reciprocally, makes man; it has become a contingent law whose only justification is: this is how it is, and not otherwise’ (p. 126). Sartre concludes that the ‘dialectics of nature’ is irrational because it cannot justify itself and must borrow a schema from another domain.

Sartre’s own theory is resolutely dialectical; the orthodoxies criticized as irrational are not simply abandoned as if they were forgettable misperceptions. They themselves must be understood, dialectically, as the product of a certain kind of human activity. The reasoning of the positivist addicted to numbers, the economistic Marxist who wants to reduce all thought to things, or the bourgeois sociologist who studies the positive functions of institutions are not simply the wrongheaded; their understandings of the world are partial (in both senses of the term); their claims must be integrated into the totality of experience which is, Sartre insists, a totalization that can never be reduced to a totality in which all elements are fixed and finished, people are dead objects isolated from one another as well as separated from the observer contemplating them.

6.2 The Foundations of the Dialectic

Dialectical rationality is not simply reflective or contemplative; it is reflexive. It depends on the homogeneity and reciprocity of Self and Other, Subject and Object—although strictly speaking this polarity is based on the premises of analytical thought. Sartre describes his dialectical project in an active voice.

In a certain sense … man undergoes the dialectic as though it were a foreign power; in another sense, he makes it. And if dialectical Reason is to be the Reason of History, then that contradiction must itself be lived dialectically. This means that man undergoes the dialectic in as much as he makes it, and that he makes it in as much as he undergoes it. Moreover, it is necessary to understand that Man does not exist: there are only persons, who define themselves entirely by the society to which they belong and the historical movement which carries them. If we do not want the dialectic to again become a divine law, a metaphysical fate, then the dialectic must come from individuals and not from who-knows-which super-individual ensembles. In other words, we encounter this new contradiction: the dialectic is a law of totalization which makes for the existence of collectives, societies, history – that is, realities which impose themselves on individuals; but at the same time the dialectic must be the product of millions of individual acts. Thus, we will have to show how it can be at once a result (without being a passive means) and a totalizing force (without being a transcendent fate); how it can at each instant realize the unity of the dispersive pulsing movement and that of integration. (p. 131)

The dialectic is intelligible only insofar as the individuals who constitute it are themselves dialectically constituted; conversely, individuals in their social and historical milieu are dialectically constituted only insofar as this milieu is itself dialectical. Neither pole can be taken alone; each is the condition of the intelligibility of the other: this is the structure of reflexivity.

The shared structures of a historical society cannot be understood without reference to the constitutive acts of the many individuals which, in turn, cannot be understood outside of their societal context. In order for this dialectical circularity to avoid relativism, the formal, a priori, structures that govern the relationship between the individual constitutive acts and the plural social structures they constitute and which in turn reconstitute them must be discovered. This leads Sartre to formulate what he calls a ‘dialectical nominalism’ which asserts that ‘if it exists, the dialectic can only be the totalization of the concrete totalizations produced by a multiplicity of totalizing singularities’ (p. 132). He neglects to add that the ‘totalizing singularities’ are themselves totalized for reasons that are not specified. He explains that the first volume of the Critique will move from the most simple and abstract¹⁷ structures through the stages of totalization and re-totalization, explaining finally the historically given society in all its complexity and richness as the result of a continual ascent of intelligibility in which each later, more complex structure is comprehended as grounded by previously established principles. Once this formal, a priori task is completed, the second volume¹⁸ would have to show that these structures permit an intelligible understanding of history.

In this way, Sartre’s project is to present a transcendental social philosophy; it can also be seen as an attempt to found and complete Marx’s 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State. Marx’s critique, it will be recalled, attacked the inversion of subject and object which permits Hegel to treat social categories as subjects of which the actual individuals are the determined predicates. For Marx this is a mystification which is unintelligible because the dialectical circularity is broken and Spirit (not active individuals) determines the social categories. Sartre’s task is to reconstruct, beginning from the individual, the increasingly concrete determinations of human society and its history.

Sartre’s project is transcendental in that it attempts to articulate a categorial structure based on a principle of which each successive development can be seen as a principiatum; each moment must have its intelligibility in a ground of which it is the grounded realization. The dialectical circularity, with its comprehension of the interpenetration of the terms as totalizations rather than fixed totalities, permits the ascent to ever-more complex structures without falling back into an ‘atomism of the second degree’ (p. 152) insofar as the principle itself is modified and enriched at each stage of development because of the reciprocal mediation of principle and principiatum.¹⁹ As a result, from a methodological point of view, Sartre’s transcendental edifice is a philosophical departure; his insistence on the presence of the human being as a real ground that interacts with and is modified by experience while remaining ontologically what it always in principle was avoids the static analysis of traditional philosophy while at the same time modifying the (analytic) notion of a fixed and unchanging Truth known by a contemplative neutral subject in favor of a dialectical philosophy of intelligibility. This permits the formulation of a theory that is (in Habermas’ sense of the terms) both reconstructive and critical.

Sartre’s transcendental-yet-real ground is the immediate, ‘abstract’ human individual and its praxis:

The critical experiment will begin from the immediate, that is, from the individual in his abstract praxis, in order to rediscover through more and more profound conditionings the totality of his practical relations with others, and by the same means, the structures of the diverse practical multiplicities, and, through the contradictions and struggles of these multiplicities, to come to the absolutely concrete: historical man. (p. 143)

For the dialectical movement to begin, this individual and the still undifferentiated and inhuman world in which the individual finds itself must interact. This interaction, as ontological, defines the starting point. Because it does not pretend to be a ‘natural history’ of humankind but rather a self-consciously ontological ground, and because his nominalism is in fact a relation, Sartre’s position avoids the problem that vitiates The German Ideology . The initial position is an ontological relation in which praxis and the world, as yet undifferentiated, give each other meaning via a totalizing interaction in which each mediates the other.

The first totalizing structure is based on need, which ‘is the negation of the negation in so far as it reveals itself as a lack in the interior of the organism; it is positivity in so far as by means of it the organic totality tends to conserve itself as it is’ (p. 166). That is, the organic being, man, depends on the inorganic world which is external to it and which it must internalize in order to survive. In this process of internalization, the organic must externalize itself in order to appropriate inorganic nature. The organic thus gives unity and sense to the brute factuality of the inorganic world, which becomes a thing-to-be-consumed. Simultaneously, the organic being opens itself to the world and its risks: ‘The organism makes itself inert (man weighs on the lever, etc.) in order to transform the surrounding inertia’ (p. 174). The process is at once circular and dialectical: ‘Man is “mediated” by things in exactly the same measure as things are “mediated” by man’ (p. 165). Man externalizes his internal relation to the external world and in so doing negates its exteriority; man becomes a being-in-the-world, and the world becomes a being-for-man.

There is, however, a ‘contingent and ineluctable’ fact about the external world, which is crucial to the development of the theory: scarcity (p. 168). The internal relation to the world in terms of need works on the world by externalizing itself in order to act on the world. This action cannot alter the brute fact of scarcity (or, at least, it has not yet done so; with the end of scarcity would come the end of what Marx called ‘pre-history’, and at that stage the dialectical theory would no longer be applicable).²⁰ Due to the dialectical reciprocity, the factual existence of scarcity is internalized (as scarcity of food or raw materials; at a higher level, scarcity of time, clients, or even fresh air: scarcity itself is dialectical, modified by the complexity of the societal totalization process). The internalization of scarcity introduces negativity (le néant) into the notion of the human subject in a dialectically intelligible manner, as opposed to the more phenomenological-descriptive approach adopted in Being and Nothingness ; it permits Sartre to develop the notion of praxis-as-project and to explain how the future acts as a negativity which affects the present as a facticity-to-be-totalized.

The dialectic of material scarcity appears to permit Sartre to go beyond the negative understanding of matter as brute Otherness (the en-soi as portrayed in Being and Nothingness ) to a positive appreciation of its role in the development of historical society. Matter becomes the condition or mediation which creates the possibility of social relations. ‘In effect, scarcity, as the univocal relation of each and of all to matter, finally becomes the objective and social structure of the material environment, and thus, in return, designates with its inert finger each individual as a factor and victim of scarcity’ (p. 207). The social relations thus established are antagonistic. ‘In pure reciprocity, the Other-than-me is also the same as me. In reciprocity modified by scarcity, the same appears to us as the anti-man inasmuch as this same man appears as radically Other (that is, as carrying the threat of death for us)’ (pp. 207–8). This threatening Other—which I may become at any time for any Other—is the ‘Excess Third’. In that each can become the Excess Third, negativity and conflict enter human affairs not, as in The German Ideology , because of the division of labor, class divisions, and the like; Sartre’s account has ontological precedence over sociological descriptions caught up in an infinite and non-dialectical (historical) regress.

In the social world, each individual as individual works on the material world attempts to appropriate it (to negate it and form it) in terms of an individual project which gives sense to the world. Though their projects may be different or similar, they are inscribed in one and the same material world, which accepts them as the wax does the seal: passively. But though the material world is the ‘inert memory of all’ (p. 200), containing the inscription of a shared history, it also mediates individual projects in precisely the measure that these projects mediate it. Consequently, the material world is not passive but actively passive. Every ‘material’ advance of civilization has its effect on the daily lives of people. The TV, the private automobile, the paperback book, the McDonald’s hamburger affect them in ways unintended by their personal projects because of this active passivity.

The active passivity of the material world is paradoxical; its actions seem to be the result of the praxis of everyone and no one. Each of the individual projects is absorbed into its materiality and then reflected back as through a kaleidoscope. Matter becomes a ‘counter-finality’, an ‘anti-praxis’, a ‘praxis without an author’ (p. 235). Sartre gives two examples (the first borrowed from Engels, the second from Adam Smith and Marx). Chinese farmers eking out a bare living on a small plot of land each decide individually that they can grow more food if they cut down the trees on their plots in order to have a greater arable surface. The result of this praxis, however, turns against them all, though it was willed by no one, in the form of giant floods which occur on the treeless land. Or, if we look at the influx of gold into seventeenth-century Spain, we see each individual forming the project of personal enrichment, importing gold from the colonies, with the result: inflation, lowered domestic productivity, outflow of gold to foreign middlemen, and finally the decline and impoverishment of the entire nation—willed by no one, yet produced by all.

Sartre defines the material world as the practico-inert in order to underline its paradoxical nature and lack of univocal signification. It is the product of plural individual praxis that no longer possesses the transparency characteristic of free praxis. The active passivity of the practico-inert is at the root of alienation. Insofar as the productions of individuals escape from the project for which they were intended, they dominate their makers, who are caught in a machinery they did not will but cannot escape. Each of becomes Other: each is determined by the project of the Other, just as each determines unintentionally the project of the Other. ‘In a word’, writes Sartre, ‘otherness comes to things from men and returns from things to men in the form of atomization’ (p. 246). This means that the practico-inert is not just a thing: it is a frozen praxis-as-Other produced by the particular project of each individual (as Other of each Other) while reinforcing the otherness of each as an Other individual. The practico-inert is not an ‘object’ for positivist science; it should be understood as a materialist form of what Hegel called ‘objective Spirit’.

The dual structure of the practico-inert is a dialectical translation of the ontological principle of man-as-praxis. Its intelligibility has its source in the interaction of men and matter in a world of scarcity. Sartre counts among the manifold forms of the practico-inert, which include not only tools and machinery as well as other products of collective individual praxis (including cultural artifacts whose prototype may be language), men themselves. Insofar as human being is defined, at least partially, by the non-human, individuals are not identical with the free praxis which was the ontological principle on which dialectical intelligibility was built. The weight of the inhuman Other on the definition of the human does not entail the loss of the project of the self-reclamation of free praxis. On the contrary, it marks an important progress.²¹ The analysis will become more complex as it now becomes more concrete; and the task remains the one stressed at the end of ‘Search for a Method’: ‘Anthropology will not merit its name unless it substitutes for the study of human objects the study of the different processes of becoming an object’ (p. 107).

6.3 The Dialectic of the Social World

In the world of the practico-inert, the social collectivity exists in a condition that Sartre defines as ‘seriality’. Parallel to the active passivity of the practico-inert, the serial individual experiences life as a passive activity, determined by the object (the Other) which totalizes the series by defining the ends that unite the series. In an elevator, for example, or waiting for a bus, a plurality of persons is (passively) defined as a kind of unity by its object (riding-the-elevator, waiting-for-the-bus). Each is there as the result of an individual project (going to work, seeing a client or friend); yet their unity comes not from their individual projects but from the external object. From the point of view of each, each Other (on the elevator, in the bus) is interchangeable; no internal, interpersonal community is established among them; each recognizes itself as defined by Otherness (the coming-of-the-bus, the riding-in-the-elevator) which totalizes their experience. The result is a situation of powerlessness: the object which defines the members of the series is absolutely Other; the persons forming a serial unity are interchangeable, faceless Others; each individual feels depersonalized and dehumanized by the knowledge that for each of the other Others he is just another Other, replaceable by any other of them: ‘each is identical to the Other inasmuch as he is made, by the Others, an Other acting on the Others. The formal and universal structure of otherness (alterité) is the rationality of the series’ (p. 314).

Sartre adopts the descriptive, first person voice of phenomenology. In the serial relation, I can affect the Other only insofar as I treat myself as Other (just as, in order to affect the material world, individual praxis must externalize itself and thereby expose itself). Since each of us is replaceable by the Other, I act as I would want the Other to act, I do what I think the ideal Other would do. I fear becoming the ‘Excess Third’ and refuse to take risks, keep my own counsel, fear the Others, and fear myself as Other. Sartre illustrates the functioning of serial rationality with the example of the marketplace (pp. 328ff.), public opinion (pp. 338ff.), and racism (pp. 345ff.). He could have added to his list the failures of political practice that couches itself in radical rhetoric but ultimately acts ‘rationally’ by thinking what the serial Others have been thought to think. Serial rationality cannot transcend the existent serial relations. As serial, I size up the ‘objective situation’ (i.e., the practico-inert that determines the unity of the serial collective), and I gauge my actions in terms of its demands. My projects become its projects; they become projects of the Other, of the Thing, and therewith all are determined by the Otherness of that thing called the System.²² Our mutual Otherness determines us as belonging to the serial unity determined by an external Thing; but the totality that we form is a collectivity that is always Other, a dead totality and not a living totalization.

Sartre’s conceptual argument can be illustrated by the example of a classroom. All enter at the appointed time, sit in identical seats riveted to the floor to prevent any but a linear arrangement with all heads facing the teacher. Students take this class because ‘one’ should take it: it is either interesting, or useful, or required. We pay attention, take detailed notes (alongside our doodles), and look alert: to the teacher we are all Other, mutually interchangeable; and we compete for high grades, which are scarce goods (controlled by the teacher). When one of us is questioned in class, or when we have to produce written work, rather than join together to help one another, we compete: each is afraid of becoming an Excess Third (receiving a low grade); and we know that this is how students are supposed to behave. We ask few questions, hazard few original ideas, since ‘one’ is supposed to fit in, to receive rather than give ideas, to acquire an Education, like everyone else.

The serial unity among members of the class is a lateral relation of Other to Other. It is important to understand that each individual is acting freely when, for example, exteriority is internalized in the (successful) attempt to make good grades. Although the result of that choice is a reaffirmation of the alienated system, it remains a free choice even when its results work against the possibility of societal liberation. The task of Sartre’s dialectical critique is not to compare what is with what ought to be—that is the idealist or utopian stance—but rather to explain consistently the structures of what is the case in the here-and-now. If a person who obeyed the dictates of the Thing were irrevocably alienated, the possibilities of human liberation would be eliminated. By showing the dialectical rationality of such alienated serial behavior, Sartre at the same time preserves the conditions of possibility of social liberation.

The transition from the all-pervasive, lateral seriality to the self-defined group has the same dialectical intelligibility as the previous moments. The group is unified by its project and by the constant movement of integration that attempts to purify its praxis by eliminating the forms of inertia it contains. The group differs from the series, which was defined by relations of Otherness, whereas the group is founded on Sameness. The group is the active attempt to escape from determination by the Other (thing or person) and to create a self-determining social plurality that Sartre calls a we-subject. Sartre calls it a ‘group-in-fusion’ because it is an active self-foundation, a totalization-in-progress that will replace the serial ‘we-object’ by a collective ‘we-subject’. Although he does not insist on it, Sartre is proposing a solution to what I called one of the unresolved problems of Being and Nothingness.

Sartre proposes a phenomenological account of events of the French Revolution in order to illustrate the transition from seriality to the group. The Paris population prior to the symbolic event of the seizure of the Bastille was a mélange united by geographical location and the facts of poverty and discontent. As conditions worsened, rumors flew (transmitted from Other to Other, reflecting a fear of the power of the state as Other); demonstrations took place and people armed themselves (still in a serial context: each reacting to the menace of the Other, each seeing in the neighbor’s actions the determination of what one should do). These serial actions had an unintended consequence; they created the possibility of the unification of a self-determining active group. That fusion depended first on the perception of a threat that affected each individual precisely because in their serial relations each was identical to the other and any or all of them could become an ‘excess Third’; and second, a ‘totalizing Third’ had to set the process in motion.²³ The external menace was symbolized by the Bastille, which was not only a prison but a military fortress threatening the population. As Sartre puts it metaphorically, the temperature in the crowd rose as it fed on itself. At some point, suddenly, someone—anyone!—galvanizes the population, crying out: ‘A la Bastille!’ The heterogeneous crowd fuses into a group, acting together for a common cause. Its organization is still determined by the perceived need to overcome the threat posed by this external force (the-Bastille-as-a-menace-to-each-and-all). Action has now replaced passivity; ‘It is not that I am myself in the Other … in praxis there is no Other, there are only me’s’ (p. 420). Social otherness is replaced by a fusion of the Same; now anyone can become the totalizing Third, while each action in turn mediates the group and the individual as Third.²⁴ Because belonging to the group defines all as the Same and frees them from determination by external heterogeneity, action within the group is no longer the ‘active passivity’ of the serial individuals. The Bastille is taken!

This is only the first episode. The group was defined as a means toward an external goal, the negation of the threat that weighed over the group-in-fusion. The mode of existence of the group changes once the menace is overcome, the activity consummated and the group fused. The action is no longer a fusion; it has passed, has become a past, and as passive it threatens to recreate relations of seriality. To maintain the group, a new fear, an external threat, and a new totalizing Third are needed. This may take place if, for example, a rumor²⁵ that the royalists are coming from Versailles spreads, and the group decides that the threat to all is a threat to each (as the Same), taking measures to maintain its organization and awareness. But the mobilization will only last so long: fear becomes a habit, pain is dulled, and seriality again threatens. To maintain itself the group needs a ‘practical invention’: the Oath (pp. 439–40). Each individual as the Same swears on his life and person that the group and the we-subject it constitutes take precedence over all else. The Oath represents a form of negation or ‘alienation’ of freedom, but it is a freely and consciously willed self-alienation insofar as the individual chooses to become a group-object. I define my true existence as the being the Same; I limit my freedom to the freedom of the group so that, because we all act this way, each can count on the Other, and all can be certain that this ‘practical invention’ has (artificially) created the fear-reaction needed for the preservation of the group. The group now takes itself not simply as a means toward the negation (destruction) of an external threat to each Other-as-the-Same; the group now takes itself reflexively as an end in itself, worthy of preservation for its own sake (pour-soi). Written in the blood of each, the Oath permits the preservation of the group and the further differentiation of functions within it (so that, e.g., bound by the discipline of the oath, the group can send spies and infiltrators, form a fifth column, or deploy its reserves in such a way that the enemy will not become aware of its strength).

The Oath institutes what Sartre calls the ‘Fraternity-Terror’, which becomes the basis for his understanding of social institutions that apparently violate the imperatives of his existential nominalism. He recognizes that an oath is only a spiritual force which by itself cannot maintain the coherence and unity of the group. ‘The oath is a free attempt to substitute the fear of all for the fear of oneself and of the Other in and by each inasmuch as it suddenly again actualizes violence as an intelligible way to overcome individual alienation by shared liberty’ (p. 450). If, after swearing the Oath, you let the Other (the Enemy) appeal to you as Other-than-us, the group to whom you swore to remain the Same—and for whatever reasons you do so: fear for the ultimate victory of our group, a desire to gain material wealth and comfort, or fear for your family—then it is our duty, to you and to ourselves as a group, to eliminate you. And this violence that we do to you is ‘a practical relation of love among the executioners’ (p. 455). The oath affirms to you that, to the very last, we still consider you as one of us; and at the same time it proves to us, reflexively, that we still exist as a coherent group. In a word, purges are necessary to maintain the group.²⁶

This paradoxical institutionalization of the group is a necessity whose structure results from the ontological foundation of the group. The action of the group is the action of a constituted dialectic whose foundation is the nominalist constitutive dialectic of individual praxis. The constituted dialectic is not, Sartre insists again and again, some kind of hyper organism or the expression of a collective unconscious which would function like the praxis of a super-individual.²⁷ As a result, the group is a functional but inherently instable unity that is

born to dissolve the series in the living synthesis of a community, [but] it is blocked in its spatio-temporal development by the unsurpassable status of the organic individual, and finds its being outside itself in the passive determinations of the inorganic exteriority that it tried to suppress in itself. It formed against alienation, which substitutes the field of the practico-inert for the free practical field of the individual. But no more than does the individual, it does not escape from the practico-inert, and through it, falls back into serial passivity. (pp. 635–6)

The group, ‘the practical organism[,] is the unifying unity of the unification’ operated by the constitutive individuals (p. 431). The constitutive individuals are the rock-bottom foundation of Sartre’s ‘dialectical nominalism’ and their existential freedom can never be totalized from without.

The group does not exist in the world like an object (an sich); it is not, but is constituted as a perpetual becoming or fusion by the multiplicity of individual totalizations, each of which seeks a goal common to each and freely chosen by all. As a constituted dialectic, however, the group produces an action and tends to internalize this external effect as its definition. Returning to his illustration, Sartre notes that the inhabitants of the Bastille area did not originally exist and act as a group; it was the product of their action that presented itself to each individual as the product of a common praxis, and conversely, it appears as the definition of that same common or group praxis. Internalizing this result, each member regards himself as a group-individual. But the problem that arises as a result

is precisely the fact that the group does not and cannot have the ontological status that it claims in its praxis; and it is, inversely, the fact that each and everyone produces himself and defines himself in terms of that non-existent totality. There is a kind of interior void, an impassable and undetermined distance, a malaise in each community, large and small. This malaise incites a reinforcement of integrative practices, and grows in the measure that the group is more integrated. (p. 568)

The group that destroyed the Bastille was produced by a fusion in the historical heat of the moment; it defined itself in and by its action. When the moment has passed, only the result of the group-praxis remains. Each individual as individual identifies with the result, which has become something shared that constitutes the individuals as the Same. The group thus depends on a dead totality, rather than the living totalization that it formerly was. This is the foundation of the Fraternity-Terror which is, for Sartre, the archetype of the general process of group-socialization and the internalization of norms. Because the fusion cannot be maintained naturally over a long historical time, the group must either institutionalize itself or disappear.

The institutionalized group represents ‘a beginning of circular massification whose origin is the non-substantial existence of the community. The being of the institution … is the non-being of the group producing itself as the relation between its members’ (p. 583). In Sartre’s example, after the seizure of the Bastille, the group tends to disperse, returning to the everyday. A new danger, the revenge of the Royalists, may come today, tomorrow, or next week. The group must prepare to defend itself: it sends out patrols to stand watch, it begins to think about organizing the defense of the neighborhood, it assigns responsibilities—in short, it begins to differentiate itself into sub-groups, each of which is determined by its belonging to the larger group. Each of these differentiated groups is defined by a task that the group assigns it. As long as each individual has internalized the demands of the group, there is no danger of betrayal. Indeed, with the institution of the Oath and the Fraternity-Terror, a first defensive means has been defined by the group to prevent a betrayal that is always possible because once the fusing group cools down and the institution begins to emerge, the relation of each individual to the group again becomes serial, determined by Otherness. When the individual is determined by belonging rather than by doing, belonging has become passive, dependent on the Other. To avoid this fall back to seriality, the institution has the paradoxical task of preserving the being of a non-being (the group).

This paradoxical situation explains the origin of bureaucracy for Sartre. With the increasing differentiation of sub-groups, the group must ‘consume a part of its strength … in order to maintain itself in a state of relative fluidity’ (p. 539).

What constitutes the specificity of organized praxis is the pyramid of inertias that constitutes organized praxis … and the fact that for any apparatus its object (its subgroups which must be united) appears as an internal-external inertia which as such must be maneuvered, whereas the same apparatus, in its relations with other organs of the group, is itself manipulated as an inertia by the apparatus above it. (p. 537)

When the group, which originally constituted itself through a fusion that was a means to an end, takes itself as an end-in-itself and devotes its energies to its own self-preservation, each member acquires a dual status in the eyes of each other member: each is the Same, since each has internalized the same end-goal; yet each is an Other whose loyalty and efforts must be coordinated and structured. When the group becomes an end, its members become means; and, as the immediate goal for which the group was formed recedes in time, it becomes necessary to rule either by bureaucratic means or continually to invent new external dangers (e.g., world imperialism, traitors in our midst, and communists)—or both. In a word, the group-subject now takes itself as group-object, treats itself as a thing, with the result that its praxis becomes a ‘praxis-process’ (p. 549). Yet, though bureaucratized, the group retains a totalizing function which it acquires through the constitutive actions of individual praxis; hence, it would be wrong to study it from the outside, as only an object. The notion of the group as praxis-process points to the necessity of maintaining both functions, and their interaction, continually present in the analysis because, even as bureaucratized, the group is constituted by the constitutive dialectic of totalizing individuals.

6.4 The Problem of Revolution

As political, Sartre’s theory is marked by an ambiguity resulting from the difference between the ontological analysis of the forms of (social) praxis and the historical analogies used to illustrate these structures. Although the analogies are rich and the descriptions provocative, the reader knows—as Sartre must know but does not say—that history does not simply reflect the philosopher’s ontological categories. It is possible to illustrate the categories by historical analogy; it is quite another matter to explain the deeply complex interweaving of actual history. None of Sartre’s categorial moments exist for itself in its isolated purity. None can be translated immediately into political practice. Sartre’s use of historical analogies plays the same illustrative role as the Remarks and Additions in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which were added to the posthumous publication on the basis of student lecture notes. In his critique of Hegel’s theory, the young Marx treated the categorial theory and the historical illustrations as belonging to a unique theory, whereas their function for Hegel was to stimulate philosophical thought rather than to explain history itself.²⁸ The resulting ambiguity gave rise to a problem for Marxism whose philosophical status as the ‘unsurpassable horizon of our time’ was supposed to be justified by the ontological theory of the Critique of Dialectical Reason.

The Marxist theory of the proletariat as redefined by Sartre falls within the sphere of the practico-inert; it is a collective of serialities interspersed with particularistic groups, which it may form or, reciprocally, which form it. Periodically, and under given conditions, the temperature rises and a fusion occurs. In the fusion, leaders arise, first as regulative Thirds. ‘Thus, the leader is produced at the same time as the group itself, while he, in turn, produces the self-consciousness of the group that produced him. A problem can arise already in this elementary moment of the experience insofar as the leader is “anyone”, (p. 586). As the group begins to disintegrate back into seriality, the leader becomes the ‘authority’ whose function is to integrate ‘the multiplicity of institutional relations and to give them the synthetic unity of a real praxis’ (p. 587). The position of the leader shifts as a result of Sartre’s nominalism; the group-as-institutionalized has no fixed structure that defines its end. Whereas at first the leader was simply the expression of the group-as-all-of-us, the members of the group now become the expression of the leader. As a result, the leader has become something more, a ‘sovereign’. It is of course possible that the sovereign-leader may seek to preserve the collective identity of the subjects as a group who continue to define their collective end as freely chosen; but it is equally possible that the sovereign-leader seeks to insure his own self-preservation as sovereign, as the end that unifies the group. It is not difficult to imagine that original ‘leader’ occupies the historical role played by the Leninist party that—after some conflict within the party once it has become ‘sovereign’—ultimately became the Stalinist dictatorial ruler of the Soviet Union. Sartre himself defines Stalin ontologically as the constituted dialectic that must direct the constitutive dialectic of the masses in order to unify it around a common goal (p. 630).

The existence of the Party-State is a reflection of the serially structured working class; like its role any group in relation to the series whose members are other-directed, the Party is one of Others, competing for attention.²⁹ Under these circumstances, the Party may even win votes, compete in elections, and share in the formation of public opinion. It may recruit new members who choose to recognize themselves in it and its goals, justifying their self-subordination by the way that members are no longer simply Others-in-sympathy-with-the-cause; they have made themselves the Same as the other militants. Each militant identifies with the Party; in discussions with non-Party people (Others), each member will identify the Party as the Truth and goal of the class. This active adhesion to the Party is paradoxical; it is based on the social seriality that the Revolution claims to eliminate. Under such these conditions, support for the Party is obedience to the Other, regardless of whether that Other is or is not truly representative of the group. Consistency with his own theory leads Sartre to admit that the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat ‘is itself absurd’ (p. 630).

It is not surprising that Sartre criticizes party dictatorships in his political essays by appeal to the concepts developed in the Critique. In his Preface to the writings of Patrice Lumumba, he writes that:

The government atomizes the colonialized people and unifies them from the exterior as subjects of the King. Independence will be only a word if for that cohesion from the outside a totalization from the interior is not replaced.³⁰

Similarly, his influential Preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is based on the argument that revolt is necessary in order to substitute internal cohesion for the colonial yoke that dehumanizes the colonized by treating them as Other. In the Critique itself, Sartre recognizes that in any historical conditions of fusion, the Party’s directives will be followed only if they are in fact the expression of the activity of the fusing group. He suggests that when an actual fusion does occur, the old cadre group will find itself outside the process and will be forced to dissolve and reconstitute itself out of the movement. This argument developed in the Critique was confirmed, Sartre came to think, in the events of the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968.

Sartre finds himself in a paradoxical political situation because of his insistence on ontological categories. The group is not a hyper-organism; in order to preserve itself, it must institutionalize and bureaucratize itself. As a result, Sartre admits that ‘the transformation of the [working ] class into an actualized group has never occurred anywhere, even in revolutionary periods’ (p. 644). This empirical historical admission is philosophically intelligible as a result of the rules of ontological necessity that govern the formation of groups. Yet that same ontology defines revolution as the praxis which creates a we-subject. Does this paradox rule out revolution, empirically or ontologically? Does it mean that revolution is a misnomer for a series of material reforms (nationalizations, income redistribution, etc.) that are achieved by a temporary social fusion and consolidated in the following phase of institutionalization? That empirical claim flies in the phase face of Sartre’s repeated ontological justifications of the role of the party, asserting, for example, that there is ‘no doubt that the entire class is present in the organized group [i.e., the party] which has constituted itself within it’ (p. 644).

6.5 Concretization and Critique

In his Preface to Les Maos en France,³¹ Sartre recalibrates his social ontology to elaborate the three themes that he sees as fundamental to French Maoism: violence, spontaneity, and morality. He illustrates his theses with the recent example of a factory in northeastern France (Contrexéville) where, although working conditions were so bad that the workers called the factory ‘Buchenwald’, there had been no strikes during the 12 years of its operation.

The atomizing forces acted constantly on the workers, serializing them. An ensemble is said to be serial when each of its members, even though the neighbor of all the others, remains alone and defines himself in accord with the opinion of his neighbor insofar as that neighbor thinks like the others. That is, each is other than himself and behaves like an other who, himself, is other than himself. The workers spoke and affirmed the serial thought as if it were their own thought, but it was in fact the opinion of the ruling class imposed from outside.

These conditions pose a problem for an activist who goes to work in that factory with the intent of organizing resistance. What in fact occurred in this case, Sartre continues, was that ‘once an external change in the process of production showed, in one specific point, what actual conditions were, and drew from the workers a particular, concrete and temporally specific refusal, the series will give way to the group whose behavior expresses – even though often without formulating it – the radical refusal of exploitation’. Once this external change had intervened, the militant could make himself heard. In fact, continues Sartre, the fused workers on their own gave up the racism, misogyny, and passivity that had divided them. The implication of this example seems to be that the fused group no longer needs the militant, who is necessary only in serialized conditions. In that case, Sartre goes on, the militant has the double task of supporting the most ‘left’ tendency however modest its actions. The militant may propose specific tasks; if these are accepted, then he must know how to listen to the masses, accompanying but not guiding them. Further, replying to the implicit question, why a party? Sartre suggests that its necessity is explained precisely by the inevitable return to seriality: the party is ‘in a certain manner, first of all the memory of the masses. It must shorten the gap between the periods of fusion’.

As I have suggested, Sartre’s political application of his ontology poses several problems. The militant in fact finds himself in the position of the traditional intellectual, supporting ongoing actions once they have taken place. The theory of seriality explains the impossibility of actually intervening until the fusion has begun; and the fusion itself is said to depend on an external event. Moreover, not every external event catalyzes the alienated freedom present amidst the atomized seriality. Sartre offers the suggestion that the militant may intervene through violent actions (such as sequestration of managers, or use of force against bullying foremen) whose symbolic effect is to unveil the realities of exploitation and alienation, as well as showing the possibility to fight back. These actions will not always work; they are like the external events, which may or may not activate the workers’ freedom. In effect, while the virtue of Sartre’s politics is its insistence on self-development, it cannot offer a certain way for the militant to act politically to insure the rupture of seriality and the beginning of the self-developmental process. The militant, like the philosopher, either intervenes after the fact or acts according to an abstract universal demand.

Sartre presents this general problem at one point in On a raison de se révolter, when he asks his Maoist interlocutor what the working class in fact is during those periods when it is not acting. His reply is that the class is never completely passive. He suggests that Sartre’s distinction between the seriality and the group is too abstractly pure to be applicable; it presupposes the possibility of an absolute rupture which in fact cannot exist.³² Sartre had seen this danger in the Critique. At one point, he takes up the dispute between those who hold that the proletariat can only be organized as a class through the external action of the Party and those who argue in favor of mass spontaneity (p. 518). He concludes that the problem is ‘political’, since both solutions have the same ontological structure. If the group is truly a group, it is based on the Sameness of all, which implies that the Party will succeed in effecting the fusion of the group only if it is the Same as the group, not external or Other in relation to it. The fusion of a group is not the same as the agreement which might exist between a worker and her boss, for example, that the laws of physics are true. Agreement about a scientific principle is an accord about an Other; it does not affect the existence of either the worker or the boss, whose relation to the world of nature as Other is unchanged. When a group forms, and when its tactical or strategic unity is felt, the debate engaged is a life-or-death matter, not only for the existence of the group but also for each individual who composes its Sameness. Within the group, the implication is that the imposition of a solution would entail the death of the group as such. This ontological argument implies that an individual or faction that imposes its views on the group has won a pyrrhic victory by destroying the structure of the group. At this theoretical level, Sartre is consistent. Once he enters the thickets of actual history, the neat theoretical structures manifest their ambiguity.

While Sartre is aware of the political dangers, he is unable to avoid conclusions which contradict the New Left goals that he desires. The ontological foundation of his system prohibits a priori the stabilization of the group-in-fusion, condemning it to dispersion or to institutional petrification. The historical group must relate to other groups and series; that relation will itself be serial, producing structures of domination of which the bourgeois state is the illustration. These relations demand that the group-as-institutionalized take severe measures to preserve itself against the threats of inertia or dissolution. As a common member of a historical group, each must restrain himself, mold himself to the will of the institutionalized group. Since this group is threatened from the outside world in which it nonetheless operates, each must take care that despite their subjective goals, words and actions are not deflected by the dialectic of seriality, turning back against the group. ‘The model of the institutional-group’, says Sartre, ‘will be the forged tool’ (p. 585). In the same context, he speaks of the ‘systematic self-domestication of man by man’ (ibid.). Thus, political purges are justified by the paradoxical task of maintaining the being of a non-being, the group.

Sartre’s ontology leads him to conclusions that appear to violate his existentialist premises. He explains, in On a raison de se révolter,³³ that he is a revolutionary because the thought of the group is more true than that of the series, because each member of the group knows the truth and takes it as his own, whereas the atomized series is a structure of separation and impotence. Pressed on this point, Sartre finally replies that he prefers such group-thought because ‘That’s how I am’. He continues by affirming that ‘I think that an individual in the group, even if he is a little bit terrorized, is still better than an individual alone and thinking separation. I don’t think that an individual alone can do anything’. The existentialist now affirms that full freedom and individuality exist in the group, even if membership implies a certain constraint, a ‘little bit’ of terror. The ontological philosopher presumably justifies this subordination the continued existence of scarcity. As was already the case in Being and Nothingness , existential subjectivity gives way to the precise delimitation of the structures of the objective world. Sartre presents magnificent phenomenological descriptions of its ‘threatening and sumptuous opacity’³⁴ where, ‘[w]ith a certain distance, novels become completely similar to natural phenomena: one forgets that they have an author, one accepts them like stones or trees’. The paradox that becomes clear in the Critique is that the concept of the practico-inert overreacts: material necessity overwhelms and delimits the projects of praxis. That is why Sartre’s existentialism can only support or criticize; it is incapable of initiating action.

Sartre’s transcendental social theory attempts to show how each social formation must be understood as instituted by a more basic principle of which it is the concretion. This guarantees its dialectical intelligibility. The principle of the system is individual praxis, which is the constitutive ground of the constituted dialectic. Sartre recognizes that if the social world ‘is praxis through and through, the entire human universe disappears in an idealism of the Hegelian type’ (p. 688). A new paradox arises: theory must explain the opacity of the material world. That is why Sartre introduces the concept of the practico-inert as well as the correlative notions of active passivity and passive activity. He wants to account for the weight of the world, explaining the forms of alienation without violating the primacy of freedom. He criticizes Marxism for failing to recognize the ultimate implications of the rejection of idealism.

Marxism presents historical development as if, since father Adam, the same individuals made History, whereas in reality it is different individuals born from one another. In each generation, the young appear in a society which has its ruling class, its exploited, its institutions, its conflicts; but since they are not responsible for these, they must deal with them in an other manner. Consequently, in fact, History is not at all like the Marxists see it.³⁵

This implies that Sartre’s ontology corrects the inability of Marxism to understand the formation of class consciousness by demonstrating at once the integration of the subject in the objective world and that of the objective world in the formation of subjectivity. This is what Sartre’s variant of dialectical materialism understands by the concept of praxis.

One of Sartre’s definitions of praxis is particularly telling insofar as it identifies the role of the free subject in the transformation of the objective world.

In effect, praxis is a passing from the objective to the objective by means of an interiorization. The project, as a subjective move from objectivity to objectivity stretched between the objective conditions of the milieu and the objective structures of the field of possibilities, represents in itself the moving unity of subjectivity and objectivity…. The subjective thus appears as a necessary moment of the objective process. (p. 66)

The motivation of this subjective intervention is unclear. At one point in On a raison, Sartre asserts that morality ‘exists at the level of production itself’.³⁶ That would make moral action depend on conditions external to it. At another moment in the dialogue, another participant suggests that pleasure and freedom determine the decision to act. Sartre is unable to give a convincing reply, asserting that only commonly defined projects against a class enemy, not pleasure, can be a motive force.³⁷ Praxis is now defined by its subjectivity; it is a project. This was the difficulty that the author of Being and Nothingness had sought to overcome in his Critique of Dialectical Reason! After nearly 700 pages, the earlier distinction between the pure freedom of the pour-soi and the hard objectivity of the en-soi has been modified by the notion of the practico-inert, which can itself be found at times more on the side of the material necessities of social life, at other times oriented more toward the possibilities of praxis.

The Critique does mark an advance over the earlier formulation of Sartre’s existential theory. Book One analyzes the possible social forms available to individual praxis; these basic ontological principles articulate conditions of the intelligibility of increasingly concrete social relations among individuals in a world where the fact of scarcity shapes the practico-inert. Book Two promises to proceed ‘from the group to history’ by building on the ontological principles to elaborate a ‘concrete dialectic’ that ‘is revealed through the common praxis of a group’. It might be assumed that Sartre intended to conclude with a synthetic analysis that would bring together the two parts in an analysis of actual historical developments, as promised in the title of Book Two. Such an approach might have been similar to Habermas’ idea of a theory that is at once reconstructive and critical. But the free use that Sartre makes throughout of historical examples puts that possibility into question. He admits the limits of his project that result from the fact that ‘the fundamental condition of historical rationality is the impossibility of going beyond … action as the strictly individual model; that is, the constituted dialectical Reason … must be related to its always present but always masked foundation, the constitutive rationality [of the individual]’ (p. 643). Theory and practice take place in the real world; yet their principle and telos is sought in the philosophical sphere of ontology, where individual praxis remains (like ‘old Adam’) always equal to itself, becoming actual only in those ‘privileged moments’ when it transcends the material conditions of scarcity in an inexplicable act of revolt.

These limits of the Sartrean theory are not only imposed by his existential nominalism; they result also from his acceptance of Marxism. The ‘concrete dialectic’ analyzed in the second part of the Critique can be understood as the expression of civil society. Hegel had defined civil society as the sphere of ‘social atomism’ whose principle is the particularized individual engaged in an economic war of all against all that produces social tensions that must be surpassed at the level of the political state. For his part, Marx argued that the necessary overcoming of social conflict could only occur from within civil society as the result of a proletarian revolution. Although he was able to describe the material conditions that made this revolution possible, Marx was reduced to metaphors in describing the way material conditions were internalized by the subjects of revolution. In the essay in which he first defined the revolutionary proletariat, he spoke of the ‘lightning of thought’ that must strike ‘the naïve soil of the people’ before liberation could occur. The metaphorical appeal to ‘thought’ and the image of a ‘naïve soil’ suggest that Marx was trying to formulate an idea of revolution that was more than just a spontaneous revolt.

The canonical interpretation of the path toward revolution among Marx’s followers became identified with the Leninist political party whose role is to bring class consciousness from the outside; a radical minority continued to appeal to the spontaneity of revolutionary politics. Sartre seems at times to accept the Leninist view, for example, when he analyzes the constraints that lead the group to maintain its unity within civil society. At other times, he insists that social relations in civil society form a sort of impure ‘soil’ in which free subjectivity is embedded and alienated, waiting for ‘lightning’ to liberate its potential spontaneously. In his dialogue with the Maoists, he asserts that ‘It is absurd to think that one can define man uniquely according to his class. There is something more; the various alienations point directly to freedom, for only a freedom can be alienated; one cannot alienate a man who is not free’.³⁸ But a moment later, he joins the French communist party’s criticism of Solzhenitsyn asserting that the Soviet dissident’s ideas are harmful, archaic, and unfit for contemporary society!

Sartre’s political vacillation places his work squarely within the tradition of the western Left, unable to criticize the inherited vision of revolutionary politics. As if he recognized the dilemma, toward the end of the Critique, Sartre asserts that ‘at a certain level of abstraction, the class struggle is expressed as a conflict of rationalities’ (p. 742). Although he is referring to the distinction between analytical and dialectical reason as he has presented it, his own ‘dialectics’ is hobbled by the persistence of an analytical dualism that is expressed repeatedly in his basic operational social-historical category: the practico-inert. As a result, there is no place for politics in Sartre’s critical theory; if it were put into practice, it would produce an antipolitics. As if he were aware of this precipice, he left the second volume of the Critique unfinished, turning his attention to the completion of his Flaubert where, he hoped, the superiority of dialectical reason over its analytical rival would be finally demonstrated. It would remain for other French thinkers, who had been his contemporaries, to complete the task of formulating the critique of the claims of dialectical reason, overcoming the dualism of its presuppositions (Merleau-Ponty) and putting in question its Marxist-Leninist and finally its dependence on its Marxist heritage (Lefort and Castoriadis).

Footnotes

1

Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Victor, Philippe Gavi, On a raison de se révolter (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), p. 17. C.f., also Epistemon [Didier Anzieu], Ces idées qui ont ébranlé la France (Paris: Fayard, 1968).

2

Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations X (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). Citation from the interview with Michel Contat, ‘Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans’, p. 217 (hereafter, ‘Interview’).

3

Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Etre et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 370.

4

On a raison, p. 139.

5

Ibid., p. 101.

6

Ibid., p. 142.

7

Ibid., p. 344.

8

‘Interview’, p. 216.

9

On a raison, pp. 47–8.

10

‘Interview’, p. 144.

11

Replying to Michel Contat’s question whether his theory of freedom is too abstract, Sartre admits: ‘I think that in effect a theory of freedom that does not explain at the same time what are alienations, to what degree freedom can let itself be manipulated, deviated, turned against itself, can very cruelly disappoint someone who doesn’t understand what it implies, and who thinks that freedom is everywhere’ (‘Interview’, p. 223).

12

The ontological reading of Kant as opposed to treating his epistemology as central to his project is open to disagreement. This is not the place to argue about Kant. Suffice it that, for the Sartrean project, ontology is the condition of the possibility of epistemology.

13

All citations, unless otherwise noted, are from Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Gallimard, 1960). This volume includes a preliminary essay, ‘Question de méthode’, which is translated into English as ‘Search for a Method’. As throughout this book, all translations are my own.

14

‘Question de méthode’ is not integral to the ontological theory of the Critique. It was in fact drafted in 1957 in reaction to the liberalization of Polish communism. It is not the methodological ‘key’ to Sartre’s theory, as George Lichtheim argues in his typically urbane, and chatty manner (in ‘Sartre, Marxism and History’, in The Concept of Ideology, p. 294). The Critique stands quite well as an ambitious attempt to understand the ontological foundation to Marxism.

15

I will follow Sartre’s usage throughout, italicizing the term praxis to emphasize its ontological usage in the Critique.

16

Cf. Critique, pp. 214–24. The problem of the origin of negativity is present in Marx’s Capital as well. The final section of Volume I, the ‘So-Called Primitive Accumulation’, was tacked on in order to meet this problem by rounding out the first volume. Marx’s previously unpublished manuscript explaining the philosophical grounds for this transition was published in 1969 as the Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses (Frankfurt, Neue Kritik Verlag, 1969). Marx intended to explain the transition from production to consumption in his analysis of the difficulties of the circulation of commodities. As I have tried to show elsewhere, this 120-page manuscript demonstrates that Marx did not need the historical account of Primitive Accumulation to round out his theory.

17

‘Abstract’ is used in the sense of Hegel, meaning the least complex, most immediate moments which are false in isolation but constitutive as moments of the totality. ‘Abstract’ here means the same thing as ‘immediate’, as opposed to mediated structures which are, for Sartre and Hegel, the most concrete.

18

In interview with M. Contat and M. Rybalka (Le Monde, May 14, 1971), Sartre indicates that the promised second volume will not appear. This is not, he insists, for theoretical reasons but simply because he ‘will not have time … before [his] death’. Contat and Rybalka’s monumental Les écrits de Sartre (Gallimard, 1970) notes that Sartre had written two chapters for volume II, one on boxing, the other on Stalin (p. 340).

19

In fact, Sartre does not follow through on this claim, as will be seen. As opposed to the Hegelian dialectic of Spirit, which is present only in an incomplete form in each category, and whose incompleteness motivates the ascent to higher concretions, Sartre’s nominalism insists that the individual is fully present at every stage.

20

Self-proclaimed Marxists have not always seen this important notion, as witnesses the East German Introduction to Rosa Luxemburg’s Ausgewählte Schriften (1953) whose catalogue of her errors, denounces this as one of them. Sartre’s theory makes this point clearly but does not give a satisfactory definition of scarcity. He cannot explain the overcoming of scarcity because its elimination would imply that human praxis has come to an end. That is surely one reason that, in the late 1960s, under the influence of André Gorz, Sartre recognized new forms of scarcity, such as unpolluted air, free time, and the like.

21

This interpretation of ‘alienation’ as the product of free praxis implies that what some call ‘false consciousness’ that prevents people from acting in their own (collective) best interests is an aberration that can be overcome. It can be understood as Sartre’s way of formulating the Marxist idea of ‘immanent critique’.

22

C.f. Sartre’s Preface to Antonin Liehm’s Trois Générations (Gallimard, 1969) which analyzes the frozen culture of Czechoslovak communism through the application of this categorial framework. This essay is no doubt Sartre’s best political analysis, perhaps because its object is a culture whose yearning for freedom betrayed itself.

23

The role of the Third was prepared in Sartre’s earlier account of individual praxis. He explained that

[i]t is not possible to conceive of a temporal process which would begin with the dyad and conclude with the triad. The binary formation as an immediate relation of man to man is the necessary foundation for any ternary relation; but inversely, the ternary relation as the mediation of man between men is the foundation on whose basis reciprocity recognizes itself as reciprocal bonding. If the idealistic dialectic made an abusive usage of the triad, it is first of all because the real relation of men among themselves is necessarily ternary. But that trinity is not an ideal signification or characteristic of human relations: it is inscribed in being, that is, in the materiality of individuals. In this sense, reciprocity is not the thesis, nor is the trinity the synthesis (or inversely); it is a question of lived relations whose content is determined in an already existing society, which are conditioned by the materiality, and which one can only modify by action. (p. 189)

The parallel between the two levels of categorial analysis again illustrates the way that the basis of dialectical intelligibility is reflexive. The role of the Third will return in a moment.

24

Whereas for the individual praxis the Third was a menace threatening to make it an Excess Third, in the group-in-fusion each is made Other (hence, by analogy, excess) by the menace of an Other outside the group; and hence each is the Same.

25

The rumor need not be true. This is the technique used by states, for example, which maintain their ideological cohesion by installing a permanent fear of an outside threat and (eventually) an internal menace.

26

I will return to the implications of this crucial implication in due course.

27

Cf. pp. 417, 431, 507, 667, and so on.

28

I am indebted to my former teacher, Klaus Hartmann, for this point (among others), although the implications I draw from it are my own. C.f., Sartre’s Sozialphilosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966). Not surprisingly, Hartmann finds the same problem in Marx’s Capital; cf. Die Marxsche Theorie, De Gruyter, Berlin, 1970. (I add here that I tried to reconcile my views with Hartmann’s shortly before his early death in my contribution to a Festschrift for Hartmann, ‘Revolution as the Foundation of Political Philosophy’, in Hegel Reconsidered. Beyond Metaphysics and the Authoritarian State, edited by H. T. Engelhardt Jr. and Terry Pinkard [Dordrecht: Kluwer Verlag, 1994], pp. 187–209.)

29

Sartre seems to be aware that his theoretical framework has led him to political positions that he disapproves. As a result, he moves, in mid-paragraph, from the historical illustration of Stalinism to a demonstration of the way in which the ‘Hearst press’ manipulates public opinion (pp. 605–6).

30

In Situations V (Gallimard, 1964), p. 213.

31

Reprinted in Situations X, op. cit.; the following citations are from pp. 42f.

32

On a raison, op. cit., p. 166.

33

Ibid., p. 171.

34

C.f., Jean-Paul Sartre, in Situations II, p. 254 and p. 7, cited by Simone de Beauvoir in ‘Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-Sartrisme’ (Les Temps Modernes, 10, II, 1955), pp. 2075, 2082. Beauvoir’s reply to Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre in Les aventures de la dialectique is based on her misunderstanding of the point of Merleau-Ponty’s essay, as will be apparent in the following chapter.

35

On a raison, op. cit., p. 126.

36

Ibid., p. 45.

37

Ibid., pp. 144–5. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes a similar point (AD, p. 275) when he insists that intersubjective action is impossible for Sartre because his transcendental freedom has no history, springing forth a new and full blown in every moment.

38

Ibid., p. 342.

Part IIICriticizing Marxism

© The Author(s) 2019

Dick HowardThe Marxian LegacyPolitical Philosophy and Public Purposehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4_7

7. From Marxism to Ontology: Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Dick Howard1  

(1)

Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, New York, NY, USA

Dick Howard

The name of Maurice Merleau-Ponty conjures a multitude of images, refracting against one another in ways that continually surprise. There is first of all the phenomenologist. Under his pen, phenomenology becomes less than a method to be applied and more than an attitude: the phenomenological analyses emerge on their own from the materials in which they were embedded, those of science, of culture, and of the everyday. His studies of expression in art and literature are of a piece with the sure hand that guides his interpretations of the so-called hard sciences. The philosopher was part of a generation that lived through war, occupation, and the unanswered challenges of creating a post-war. The same manner of cleaving to the world is present in his political choices and critical analyses. He seemed to accept the reality of Cold War political dualism (in Humanism and Terror) before challenging its apparent common sense in a denunciation of what he called ‘Sartre’s Ultra-Bolshevism’ in his study of the Adventures of the Dialectic. The speculative moment of his phenomenology reappears in the unfinished ontology in The Visible and the Invisible where the reader has a sense that a poetic layer of mystery overlain with Heideggerian echoes weighs down the articulation of his philosophical lucidity. Each rereading, particularly in light of the fact that his work was cut short prematurely, offers new possibilities of interpretation, poses new questions, even at times suggests new practical political-historical understandings.¹

7.1 Why Reread Merleau-Ponty?

I return to Merleau-Ponty for two, seemingly incidental reasons, whose importance will become clear in due course. The first stemmed from the way that French theorists in the decades after his disappearance seemed to have forgotten him, treating his work as if it were a stepping stone that is no longer necessary now that the journey has advanced to firmer grounds. Although Sartre titled his tribute to his former friend and colleague ‘Merleau-Ponty vivant’, what came to be called ‘French Theory’ spared him little time.² It seemed that the diverse theorists regrouped under the headings of structuralism and deconstruction wanted to forget the nearby origins of their interrogations and to imagine the eternal validity of their thoughts and methods; it seemed as if they wanted to the possibility of a history, of change, and of the new without realizing, as a result, their thought tended to become obsessive, repetitive, even delusional. The second incitation to reread Merleau-Ponty came from the claim by the editor responsible for many of the English translations of the philosopher, James Edie, who decided that Humanism and Terror and The Adventures of the Dialectic are ‘two works of political polemic which, because of their dated and topical character, will probably never be published in English in their entirety’.³ This assertion, since disproven, expresses not only a lack of political sensitivity but also a philosophical blindness that afflicted Anglo-Saxon ‘good sense’. What could be learned from a philosopher who took seriously the work of Hegel, the philosopher ‘who started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason’ (SNS, p. 109)? What could it mean ‘to restore the world as the sense of Being, Being as absolutely different from what is “represented”, that is, as vertical Being which none of the “representations” exhausts but which they all attain: savage Being’ (VI, p. 306)? It seems as if the American reading and the French forgetting had a common result: a purification of philosophy that wants to separate it from the texture of history.

I return to Merleau-Ponty after a decade of political experience as part of the political movement of the New Left which seemed to satisfy the criterion described by the philosopher in 1945, at the beginning of the post-war years. Drawing together the threads of The Phenomenology of Perception, he asserted that ‘[i]f a revolution is truly in the sense of history, it can be thought at the same time that it is experienced’ (PhP, p. 416). While still a participant in the movement, I wrote an essay⁴ that tried to use his philosophical analyses of the lived world, the body, perception, and language to found a politics based on the reshaping of civil society and ultimately of everyday life. It appears now that I had ‘solved’ the problems of revolutionary thought by a reduction of the political to daily life, of philosophy to praxis, of the thickness and multivocity of the ‘flesh’ of history to the transparency of what is immediately real. That reduction robbed each of its specificity and thus prohibited an understanding of their relation. A theory of embodiment or idea of the lived world can become a disguised positivism that eliminates conceptual thought in favor of the observable givens, however sinuous, ambiguous, or polyvalent their linguistic description by the observing subject. Such an interpretation maintains unintentionally the notion of a constitutive subject for whom the world exists as ultimately understandable, potentially transparent, ready to be freely manipulated, forgetting the injunction in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception that ‘true philosophy is relearning to see the world’ (PhP, p. xvi).

I am rereading Merleau-Ponty here not only as a philosopher but above all in order to further my own reflections on how and why it seemed that the New Left was carried along on a wave on which novelty led to success and success to novelty, as if it was touching at the grain and the tensions of history armed with no preordained schema defining the target or choosing the weapon. In words borrowed from Merleau-Ponty, ‘the revolutionary movement, like the work of the artist, is an intention which itself creates its instruments and its means of expression’ (PhP, p. 508). A decade later, taking stock, it does no good to place the responsibility for its results on external factors; what blocked the development of the new movement was not only material necessity nor simply the result of bad political choices. We encountered the indeterminacy of historical life; attempts to ‘explain’ the failures of the movement can only negate the ‘existential’ conditions that made possible the New Left decade, making less likely its reappearance in new clothing.

It would be of course also be wrong to ignore the external conditions that encouraged the rise of the New Left, among them the American war in Vietnam. Merleau-Ponty, for his part, had condemned the tortures and moral bankruptcy of the French colonial war in Algeria; but he insisted that such criticism is ‘only moral: no politics follows [necessarily] from it’ (S, p. 408f.). But he had learned also from the post-war debates about Marxism that ‘[one] does not become a revolutionary through theory but through indignation’ (HT, p. 13). He had learned from Marxism, as we tried later to learn, that indignation must be theorized if it is to refresh itself. It cannot rest on either philosophy or morality alone, but must open out toward politics. Because the philosopher alone cannot create a politics, Humanism and Terror came to accept the need to ally with the Communist party after recognizing that ‘[t]he problems of communism are our problems’ (HT, p. 159). The fact that the alliance was based on shared problems explains why this alliance did not imply the subordination of the philosopher to the Party. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Note sur Machiavel’ presented the next year in Rome insists on the independence of both politics and philosophy.

If by humanism one means a philosophy of the essential man in isolation, who in principle finds no difficulty in his relations with others, no opacity in the social functioning, and replaces political culture by moral exhortation, then Machiavelli is not a humanist. But if by humanism one means a philosophy that confronts the relation of man with man, and the constitution between men of a situation and a history which are common to them as a problem, then one must say that Machiavelli formulated some of the conditions of any serious humanism. (Eloge, pp. 375–6)

Already in 1945, the ‘serious humanism’ that attracted the philosopher attraction to Marxism depended on its claim to be more than simply a philosophy; he called for a ‘Marxism without illusions, completely experimental and voluntary’. This was to be a Marxism that showed that ‘[t]he weakness of democratic thinking is that it is less political than moral, since it poses no social structural problems and considers the conditions for the exercise of justice to be given with humanity’ (‘Concerning Marxism’, SNS, pp. 219, 180). At that time, the demonstration of the ‘weakness of democratic thinking’ seemed to incline the philosopher to one side of the Cold War. But he was aware that this was at best a moral choice. That is why he criticized the existential-Marxism of Sartre, his co-editor at Les Temps modernes, pointing out that when his political morality is applied to reality it can only approve or condemn, but never propose or create. Marxism, with its theory of the proletariat as the creator of history, offered richer, more promising horizons for political thought.

Merleau-Ponty’s political leanings were clearly to the left side of the spectrum, but he recognized that these were moral choices. He condemned the tortures by the army, and denounced the bankruptcy of the colonial project, but he admitted that he had no political solution to offer (S, p. 408f). Already in 1951, during the French colonial war in Vietnam, he had asserted ‘[w]hat is serious is that all of the western doctrines are too narrow to confront the problem of the valorization of Asia’ (S, p. 302). When one of the most creative critical French social critics, Serge Mallet, tried to explain the conditions that had led to war by the notion of a ‘structural imperialism’, Merleau-Ponty appreciated the idea but questioned its validity as a politics in the absence of an ongoing oppositional movement (S, pp. 19–20). The political promise of Marxism remained an unrealized horizon, perhaps an illusory one.

During these years when he searched for a politics that could articulate a ‘serious humanism’, Merleau-Ponty was led also to question the possibility of a philosophy that could do justice to his appreciation of the richness of what he increasingly referred to as pre-reflexive experience, an ontological foundation that is never exhausted in the intentional consciousness of the individual will. That distinction was suggested by the title of the manuscript left incomplete on his desk: The Visible and the Invisible. His former student and friend, Claude Lefort, who edited the text for publication pointed to the relation of this ontological vision of philosophy and the Marxism that had engaged him for so long. ‘In a certain way’, writes Lefort, ‘Marxism taught him what he was seeking, what his work on the body and perception had already led him to ponder: a relation with being which attests to our participation in being, in this case a philosophy of history which reveals our historicity’.⁵ In Merleau-Ponty’s own words, ‘if consciousness were ever absolutely cut off from the true—no thought, not even Marxism, would be able to lay a claim to truth…. Marxism needs a theory of consciousness that accounts for its mystification without denying its participation in the truth’ (AD, pp. 57–8). The attempt to do philosophy had to go together with the translation of speculation into demands that are not only subjective nor merely objective. Beyond and yet also beneath the visible lies the historical. That was a dimension of daily life that the New Left had been unable to understand; it came back to haunt us.

Merleau-Ponty offered historical examples to illustrate and enrich his thinking. His interpretation of Max Weber’s demonstration of the elective affinities of Calvinism and capitalism makes the significant suggestion that the interpreter is led astray if either of these emerging expressions of social relations are seen as providing answers to pre-existing questions (either within church doctrine or in the secular economic conditions). The doctrinal questions emerge only after the actions are under way and while the actors are engaged in their web; they constitute a history that is made by the self-interrogation of acting individuals. As a result, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the movement of history ‘is of the same type as that of the Word or of Thought, and finally of the explosion of the sensible world between us: there is sense or meaning all over, dimensions and figures beyond what each “consciousness” could have produced; and yet nonetheless it is men who speak, think and see. We find ourselves in the field of history as we do in the field of language or of being’ (S, p. 28). It is best to try to understand the novelty of the new questions rather than to formulate too hasty answers to old, outgrown heritages with no legacy from the future.

7.2 Marxism and Its Politics

Merleau-Ponty’s preoccupation with Marxism, as a philosophical theory and as a politics, develops across three central axes: during the period of Humanism and Terror, he recognizes that the problems of organized communism are ‘our own’ (HT, p. 159) and he is concerned with Marxism as a manner or method of elucidating praxis within a historical context; in the period marked by the publication of The Adventures of the Dialectic and its political option for an ‘a-communism’ (AD, p. 248), he stresses the incoherence of Cold War Manichaeism and puts into question the centrality of the proletariat and the theory that the party is its representative; finally, after the 1956 Hungarian revolution and as decolonization showed the inadequacy of established thought, he returns to the project of Marx itself as a kind of philosophy that would be the ‘realization’ of philosophy as a ‘non-philosophy’ adequate to the problems of political choice within the ontological ‘flesh’ (chair) of history, recognizing the need for a new ontology and with it a new conception of the political. Each of these moments articulates the sinuous dialectic between the philosophical and the political, each demanding the other as its completion as well as offering its sense, yet each inevitably betraying the other. Deceived hopes each time renew the quest: in the end, the object of the quest will appear to be nothing but the question itself, sure of itself and continually reposed.

The first return and rethinking of Marx sought to transform a theory that had become an ideology and a mask. This appeared all the easier insofar as Marxism, even in its most distorted form, retained the elements of a humanist goal, the creation of a society where humans would relate to one another as persons and not as objects. The orthodox might ridicule as an abstraction Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that ‘[p]olitical problems have their source in the fact that we are all subjects and that, nonetheless, we see and treat the other as object’ (HT, p. 115). Whatever critics of communist practice may say, Merleau-Ponty insists that Marxism’s criticism of the hypocrisy of liberal society remains valid.⁶ The transformation of Marxism by returning to its theoretical base would seem to be facilitated by the fact that Marxism considers itself to be based on a philosophy. For that reason, uncovering the truth of Marxian theory should have impact on the practice of the Marxists.

The critical discovery process begins with critique of Marxism as an ‘ideology’, as illustrated by the fact that the ‘frequently celebrated relationship between ideology and economics remains mystical, prelogical and unthinkable as long as ideology remains “subjective” while the economy is conceived as an objective process, and the two are not made to communicate in the total historical existence and in the human objects which express it’ (SNS, pp. 232–3). The interdependence of the two domains could be established through an ‘existential’ notion of praxis; but that demands that praxis be situated within a history whose structuration Marxism must begin to define. ‘Marxism’, asserts Merleau-Ponty, ‘is not a philosophy of the subject, but it is just as far from a philosophy of the object: it is a philosophy of history’ (SNS, p. 231). Lefort’s observation is confirmed here; the elucidation of Marxism rejoins Merleau-Ponty’s own study of perception, where he had already written that ‘[o]ne would be tempted to say that it [Marxism] does not base history and the modes of thinking on production and the modes of working, but more generally on the mode of existence and co-existence, on interhuman relations’ (PhP, p. 200). Similarly, in his political arguments a few years later, Merleau-Ponty asserts that Marx ‘wanted to provide a perception of history which at each moment would make the lines of force and the vectors of the present appear’ (HT, p. 105). Similarly, in a later formulation, he asserts that

There is history if there is a logic in contingency, a reason in unreason; if there is an historical perception which, like perception in general, leaves in the background what cannot enter the foreground, seizes the lines of force at their birth and actively leads their traces to a conclusion.... all symbolic systems – perception, language, history – only become what they were, though in order to do so they must be taken up in a human initiative. (Résumés, p. 46)

The implication of these claims is that ‘[h]istory is not an external god, a hidden reason whose conclusions we would only have to record’ (AD, p. 32). Human history is ‘contingent and the date of the revolution is written on no wall, nor in any metaphysical heaven’ (SNS, p. 141). History perhaps provides a bridge or describes the context from which a text emerges. But the definitions offered still call for further theoretical and practical definition.

Political practice is situated in a historical milieu which forces it to action and to choice. As a theory of history, Marxism attempts to trace its logic in order to open the historical to conscious human initiative. ‘Essentially, Marxism is the idea that history has a sense … that it is moving towards the power of the proletariat which is capable, as an essential factor of production, of surpassing the contractions of capitalism and organizing the human appropriation of nature; and, as a ‘universal class’, of surpassing the social and national antagonisms as well as the conflict of man with man’ (HT, p. 139). But with this assertion of a sense of history, Marxism runs into a practical problem. The description of the Stalinist purge trials of 1937 in Humanism and Terror implies that Bukharin and his co-accused were led to confess precisely for ‘Marxist’ reasons. ‘To be a revolutionary’, writes Merleau-Ponty, ‘is to judge what is in the name of what is not yet, taking it for more real than the real’, because ‘revolutionary justice takes the future as its standard’ (HT, p. 30). What has happened in this interpretation is that, in political action, the sense of history has been transformed, praxis has become practice, and revolution a technique; history as ‘perceptual’ has become a metaphysical object, stripped of its contingency. Practice forces the issue, fixes its object in order to get a better hold on it and aim at it.

In this paradoxical structure, history calls for praxis, yet praxis transforms history; by negating the openness that called it forth, praxis seems to inevitably lead to its own elimination and to its reformulation as (technological) practice. Merleau-Ponty had reinterpreted Marx’s notion of praxis as

that sense which takes form spontaneously at the junction of the actions by which man organizes his relations with nature and with others. It is not directed from the beginning by an idea of universal or total history. We recall that Marx insists on the impossibility of thinking the future. (Eloge, p. 59)

The exigencies of political practice put this philosophical formulation into question. Conscious action seems to demand that the acting subject know fully the nature of the objective milieu into which the actions will be inscribed. The relativization of subject and object thus falls by the wayside; history becomes an object which can be known. Bukharin and his judges agree that at any moment there exists only one correct political choice which must be enacted; Bukharin’s ‘crime’ is to have been wrong. But, notes Merleau-Ponty:

[w]hen one asks for a solution, one supposes that the world and human co-existence are comparable to some problem in geometry where there is certainly an unknown but not indetermination; what one seeks is a regulated relation with what is given and with the ensemble of the givens which are equally possible. But the question of our times is precisely to know whether humanity is only a problem of that type. (HT, p. 203)⁷

The political practice of Communist parties demonstrates the result of the transformation of history from a question to an answer. In a 1948 discussion, Merleau-Ponty illustrates the results of this transformation already by his title, ‘Paranoiac Politics’. He stresses the irony that ‘[t]he thought which wanted to be the most historical and the most objective, leaving aside in the last analysis all the felt and lived differences in the experience of the actors in the drama, finds itself delivered over to phantasies; it is at the height of subjectivity’ (S, p. 316). Marked by a ‘neurosis of the future’ (S, p. 89; also Prose, p. 118), party Marxism becomes a ‘voluntarism based on absolute knowledge’ (AD, p. 117).⁸ After all, if one knows the course of History, one’s choice of actions will always appear to correspond to that sense, while those of one’s opponents fall into the realm of mere appearance, the invitation to error.

The Marxist theory of history which seemed so convincing and rational is transformed by the concrete demands of practice into what Marx called a point d’honneur. The unification of philosophy and politics has forced philosophy to separate itself from the real; as separate, philosophy becomes subjective, devolves into an ideology. Merleau-Ponty had been willing to work with, although independently from, the communists in 1948. After reworking the bases of the Marxist theory, the practical question that arises is whether it is the theory or the practice that has led to the deformations found in communism. The Adventures of the Dialectic takes up this challenge, beginning with a renewed investigation of the actual history whose practical transformation from sense to ‘reality’ was responsible for the failed marriage.

If the exigencies of practice have transformed philosophy, a renewed investigation of the specificity of the philosophical task is necessary. Merleau-Ponty began this rethinking in the incomplete manuscript posthumously published as the Prose of the World, as well as in his courses at the Collège de France. His inaugural lecture at the Collège, In Praise of Philosophy, implicitly takes up the roots of the deviation undergone by Marxism. ‘History has no sense if its sense is understood as that of a river which flows under the action of all-powerful causes towards an ocean where it disappears. All recourse to universal history cuts out the sense of the event, renders insignificant actual history, and is a masque for nihilism’ (Eloge, p. 61). Moving to a different key, but sounding the same theme, he criticizes the image adopted by André Malraux to portray a musée imaginaire in which the history of painting is unrolled as a linear progress accompanied along its path by a sort of Super Painter or Spirit. There is no need for the philosopher to mention politics in his lectures; it is present in filigree throughout. ‘There is no history if the path of things is a series of episodes without relation, or if it is a combat already won in the heaven of ideas’, he insists in summarizing one series of lectures (Résumés, p. 46). In the transitional manuscript between the earlier phenomenological studies and the later ontology, the Prose of the World makes the apparently paradoxical assertion that

[h]istory is judge. Not History as the Power of a moment or a century. History as that place where, beyond the limits of the centuries and the countries all that we have said and done which is most true and most valid, given the situations in which we had to say it, is reunited, inscribed and accumulated. (Prose, p. 121)

Historical logic affirms rather than denies the contingency of the history in which the philosophical subject is always already a participant.

Merleau-Ponty finds himself looking for new grounds. Part of his reconstruction of the tasks of philosophy passes through his version of the ‘linguistic turn’ (although, as a very French philosopher he seems to have had next to no connection to the Anglo-Saxon philosophical milieu). He reads closely Saussure’s General Theory of Linguistics, as well as the work of Émile Benveniste, asserting in his Inaugural Lecture that

[t]he theory of the sign as linguistics elaborates it implies perhaps an historical theory of meaning which goes beyond the alternative of things and consciousness. Living language is that concretion of spirit and of the thing which poses the problem…. The presence of the individual to the institution and of the institution to the individual is clear in the case of linguistic change … and Saussure may well have sketched a new philosophy of history. (Eloge, pp. 63, 64)

The significant advance suggested in this passage takes Merleau-Ponty beyond the dualism of subject and object toward the sphere constituted by their interdependence and interaction. Continuing his investigation in his courses, he summarizes his tentative conclusion that ‘History realizes an exchange of all orders of activity, none of which can be given the dignity of exclusive cause; and the question is, rather, to know whether that solidarity of the problems announces their simultaneous resolution or whether there is only concordance and reciprocal implication in the interrogation’ (Resumés, p. 44). To untangle this integument will be the task of the promised ontology.

At this stage of Merleau-Ponty’s reflections, Marxism is caught in the tenuous and tense position that maintains that it is a part of the very history of which it claims to express the sense. Everywhere and nowhere, it accepts the dual challenge of philosophy and of politics. Merleau-Ponty had already studied the historical-sociology of Max Weber in his attempt to free himself from the presupposed questions of Marxist history. He turns next to Georg Lukács, who tried to combine the lessons of Marx and Weber by means of ‘the recognition without restriction of history as the single milieu of our errors and our verifications [will] lead us to recover an absolute in the relative’ (AD, p. 44). But the immersion in this flux demands the establishment of a vantage-point from which to judge.

This immanent sense of inter-human events: where indeed can we place it? It is not, or not always, in men, in consciousness. But, outside of them, it appears that there are only blind events since we have renounced the idea of situating an absolute knowledge behind the things. Where then is the historical process, and what mode of existence can we accept for historical forms such as feudalism, capitalism, the proletariat, of which we speak as if they were persons who know and who wish, who are hidden behind the multiplicity of events. We do not see clearly what such a prosopopoeia represent. (Eloge, p. 62)

The search for a vantage-point or standpoint corresponds exactly to the shift that transformed the Marxist theory of history by treating the sense of history in practice as the reality of history. Lukács’ theory of the proletariat as the subject-object of history whose self-knowledge is identical to the transformation of the capitalist totality points to the centrality of the proletariat, but it entails also a theory of the party whose ‘absolute authority … is [identical with] the purity of the transcendental subject incorporated by force into the world’ (AD, p. 192). Lukács’ justification of Leninism and his subsequent political choices appear to be inscribed in the exigencies of a theory which accepts its historical insertion and strives to become praxis.

Inserted into the tissue of history, revolution becomes what traditional philosophy always sought. What Merleau-Ponty calls ‘Western Marxism’ treats revolution as ‘that sublime point at which the real and values, the subject and the object, judgment and discipline, the individual and the totality, the present and the future, instead of entering into collision gradually entered into complicity’ (AD, p. 12). The class consciousness that is essential to this transformative process ‘is a praxis, that is less than a subject and more than an object, a pulverized existence, a possibility that appears in the situation of the proletarian, at the joints of the things and its life, in a word – Lukács takes over Weber’s term here – an “objective possibility”’ (AD, p. 66). The paradoxical existence of a possibility that is nonetheless ‘objective’ provides a framework for the philosophical interpretation of praxis as the creation of ‘an order which is not that of knowledge but that of communication, exchange, frequentation. There is a proletarian praxis which operates in a way that unifies the class before it knows itself as such’ (AD, p. 70). The brute objective existence of the working class must be raised to the level of consciousness; this is where the party enters. ‘In philosophical terms: the party goes beyond the revolt of the proletariat; it realizes the revolt by destroying it as an immediate revolt [based on ‘indignation’, DH]; it is the negation of that negation, or in other words it is the mediation; its action has the effect that the class which refuses becomes the class that initiates and, finally, a society without classes’ (S, p. 350). The theory of the party fits into this philosophical framework.

The party doesn’t know everything, doesn’t see everything; and yet its authority is absolute because, if spontaneous history has a chance to become manifest history, it can only be in it…. In the absence of any metaphysics of history, the dialectic of the proletariat and the party unites in itself and carries with it all the others: Marxist philosophy has as its final condition not what the proletarians think, nor what the party thinks that they should think, but the recognition by the proletariat of its own action in the politics that the party present to it.… The party is at once everything and nothing: it is nothing but the mirror in which the forces of the proletariat, dispersed throughout the world, concentrate themselves; it is everything because without it the truth ‘in itself’ would never become manifest, would never complete itself as truth. (AD, pp. 106–7)

‘Everything and nothing’: Merleau-Ponty had insisted in a lengthy introduction to history of ‘Les philosophes célèbres’ reprinted in Signes that the place of philosophy was ‘everywhere and nowhere’. The crucial difference in the case of Marxism is that this place is now situated in a real history. ‘The party is thus like a mystery of reason: it is that place in history where the sense that exists understands itself, where the concept becomes life’ (AD, p. 71).

History does not come to an end; the story continues to be told and new versions invented. An ironic reversal assures that the union of philosophy and history in the party does not achieve the final reconciliation. The Party is transformed into precisely an impotent, self-deluding philosopher whose only hold on reality appeals only to force. The result is a paranoiac politics by which the party, pretending to be armed with the authority of Reason, substitutes itself for a proletariat whose ‘objective possibility’ is now incarnate in the Party itself. Should the Party seek to avoid this ironic reversal by taking as its guide the actual struggles of the exploited and alienated, this is not only a violation of the logic of Leninism; it also manifests the other side of the ironic paradox of history, suggesting that there is no need for philosophy because the idea of its unity with reality no longer is necessary. Those who had read the young Marx would recognize in Merleau-Ponty’s formulation the dead-end confrontation of what he called the ‘practical’ and ‘philosophical’ parties.

7.3 Toward a Reformulation

That goal of Marxism that Merleau-Ponty had made his own—the unification but not the conflation of philosophy and politics—failed. In the Preface to Signes, he returns to the dilemma facing the ex-communists trying to understand their new political coordinates. He repeats again that politics is a ‘modern tragedy’ insofar as all participants expected it to find the solution (S, p. 11). Marxism’s contribution had been to make history, like Hegel’s morning newspaper, a metaphysically charged experience. Even outside the party, the tendency of many was to maintain this attitude, to expect that, in some future, the proletariat (in some new clothing) will reappear on the stage of history. But, granting Marxism ‘its pretension not to be a philosophy, to be the expression of a single grand historical fact’, nonetheless ‘since one also admits that there is not at present a proletarian movement on a world scale, one puts Marxism into a position of inactivity and one defines oneself as an honorary Marxist’ (S, p. 14). A rethinking of the fundamental philosophical options of Marxism is clearly necessary.

Rather than debate the truth or falsity of Marxism, Merleau-Ponty asks whether the category of a ‘truth that missed its chance (vérité manquée)’ is not more conducive to understanding (S, p. 16).

There is an internal relation of the positive and the negative, and this is what Marx envisioned, even if he was wrong to restrain it to the dichotomy of subject/object. This internal relation operates in entire sections of his work, and it opens new dimensions to his historical analysis and changes the status of these analyses in a way that they can cease to be conclusive in the sense that Marx intended without ceasing to be the sources of sense and reinterpretable. The theses of Marx can remain true in the way that the Pythagorean theorem is true, no longer in the sense that it was for the inventor – as an identical truth and property of space itself – but as the property of a certain model of space among other possible spaces. (ibid.)

From this perspective, those who have broken with the Party are affirming that there are other possibilities, other ‘spaces’ and theaters of history which refract differently the sense that Marx first brought to light. ‘They have rejected a certain idea of Being as object, as well as of identity and difference. They have adopted the idea of a Being which is coherent in many foci or many dimensions. And, [adds Merleau-Ponty ironically], they say that they are not philosophers?’ (S, p. 18). Marxism, he continues, wanted to be the expression of the operation of history itself. ‘But that was precisely the height of philosophical arrogance’ (ibid.). In this way, the critique of Marxism leads to the reformulation of the philosophical task itself.

What emerges from this second go-around with Marxism is a conception of history that, in its surface contours, appears to return to his original insight. For example, in the Preface to Signes, he asks

what good is it to ask whether history is made by men or by things, since evidence shows that human initiatives do not annul the weight of things, and the ‘force des choses’ always operates through men? It is precisely this failure, when the analysis seeks to interpret everything in terms of a single dimension, that reveals the true milieu of history. There is no analysis that is final because there is a flesh of history; in it, as in our body, everything carries weight, everything counts – both the infrastructure and the idea which we have of it, and especially the perceptual exchanges between the one and the other where the weight of things becomes also a sign, things become forces, the accounting becomes an event. (S, p. 28)

This formulation differs from the earlier account which was based on a ‘philosophy of consciousness’ that produced the subject/object dualism. From that philosophical stance, the problem of constitution through a form of interaction was the center of concern: the proletariat was the embodied subject of history, whose traces philosophy follows through a world which proletarian action directly and indirectly constitutes. Marxism opened a new understanding of history; but the substitution of the party for the actual proletariat made it incapable of realizing its promise.

The renewed understanding of history uncovered in the wake of the political failure of Marxism demands a new ontology to interpret a history that is neither purely rational nor wholly recalcitrant to thought. The Marxism that interpreted history as the product of proletarian praxis neglected the density of the historical milieu that Merleau-Ponty called its ‘flesh’. In that environment, the effect of actions is never what the rational actor may have intended, although it is not therefore only accidental or arbitrary.

To understand at once the logic of history and its detours, its sense and what in it is resistant to sense, the Marxist would have had to conceptualize the sphere proper to history, the institution, which does not develop according to causal laws, like another nature, but always in dependence on what it signifies, not according to eternal ideas, but rather by bringing more or less under its laws events which, as far as it is concerned, are fortuitous, and by letting itself be changed by their suggestions. (AD, p. 88)

The implications of this passage move toward horizons to which Merleau-Ponty’s earlier work had gestured but left aside for the moment. The phenomenologist had cast wide his net during his years of teaching and writing. Pursuing his reinterpretation of what history must mean for a Marxist, he describes it as an ‘order of “things”’ that understands that it is bound to the order of nature by virtue of ‘relationships between persons,’ that are sensitive to all the heavy conditions of interdependence while remaining open to all that personal life can invent. This is, ‘in modern language, the sphere of symbolism, and Marx’s thought was to find its outlet here’ (ibid). Merleau-Ponty had referred to this ‘sphere of symbolism’ in his theory of linguistic the sign; it is present as well in his writings on artistic expression.

The more political implications of this new departure are found in Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of what he calls the institution, which belongs to what he called the ‘sphere proper to history’. In his lectures at the Collège de France on ‘The “institution” in Personal and Public History’, Merleau-Ponty stressed that ‘[w]e are looking here for a remedy to the difficulties of the philosophy of consciousness in the notion of the institution’ (Résumés, p. 59). This notion leads to a ‘revision of Hegelianism’ (ibid., p. 65), whose implications he sketches briefly.

We thus understood here by institution those events in an experience that give it durable dimensions, making it an experience in relation to which a whole series of other experiences acquire meaning, forming an understandable succession or a history. Put differently, the institution is an event or events that leave with a sense that is not a survival or residue but the appeal to a succession [of other events], and thus it is the demand for a future. (ibid., p. 61)

This lapidary assertion can be understood as a philosophical reformulation of his polemical reply to Sartre. The question, he wrote in The Adventures of the Dialectic, ‘is to know whether, as Sartre says, there exist only men and things, or whether there also exists that inter-world called history, symbolism, truth-to-be-realized [vérité à faire]’ (AD, p. 269). The philosophy of the cogito, whose sophistry and violence Merleau-Ponty unravels at length in his polemic with Sartre, is incapable of recognizing the flesh that is history.

Obsessed with this ‘thickness’ of the world, unwilling to abandon the imperatives of philosophy, Merleau-Ponty’s thinking focused on the problems that emerge from his recognition that philosophy had to embrace what he called ‘non-philosophy’. This concept did not refer to what he had earlier called Hegel’s concern with ‘the irrational’. Its signification appeared in his efforts to reinterpret the traditional idea of ‘nature’ as irreducible to the status of an object independent of and opposed to a conscious subject. His summary of his lecture course of 1956–1957 on ‘The Concept of Nature’ insists on this distinction.

Pure object, being in itself in which everything that exists is contained, and which nonetheless is not to be found in human experience because, from the outset, experience works on [façonne] and transforms it: nature exists for experience everywhere and nowhere, like an obsession. In seeking to elucidate this problem, one is thus not so far from history. (Résumés, p. 93)

Once again, the philosopher returns to the problem of history in all its opacity. In the same breath, he describes nature with the phrase which reoccurs repeatedly in his thought: everywhere and nowhere, nature like philosophy and history is at once an obsession, but also an appeal. The earlier analysis of the ‘problem of passivity’ in the lecture course of 1954–1955 had shown the limits of a phenomenological approach to these questions.

These descriptions, that phenomenology, always have something disappointing because they limit themselves to uncovering the negative in the positive and the positive in the negative. Reflection seems to demand supplementary explanations. The description will not have its full philosophical weight until the foundation of that demand itself is interrogated, until the principled reasons for which the relations of the negative and the positive present themselves are given: this is nothing but the posing of the bases of a dialectical philosophy. (ibid., pp. 72–3)

Merleau-Ponty devoted two lecture courses in 1955–1956 to the problems of a dialectical philosophy and—after two years devoted to the concept of nature—studied Husserl and the limits of phenomenology in his course of 1959–1960. No fully developed conceptual theory emerged from these preliminary studies. The nearly finished posthumous manuscript of The Visible and the Invisible, edited by Claude Lefort, was published in 1964.

7.4 The New Left, Marx, and Philosophy

Rereading Merleau-Ponty from the standpoint of the experience of the New Left has been rich but frustrating. The temptation for the would-be political actor is to stop the rereading, to leave philosophy to the philosophers, and to refuse to leave politics to the politicians. Along the way, Marx could be defended against the philosopher’s criticisms, perhaps turning phenomenologist’s descriptive discoveries to good use.⁹ The persistence of his concern to understand the relation of politics and philosophy, his combination of rigorous exposition and creative interpretation in his reading of Marx, and the insightful Preface to Signes published shortly before his death made a good fit with the experience of the New Left. It would be a betrayal of that experience which permitted and forced us to think for ourselves outside the routine of the political rituals to abandon Merleau-Ponty simply because he offers no ready-made solutions. The only honest continuation of our own project today seems to demand that we think it through to the end; that is just another way of conserving the legacy of our origins.

In ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, an essay dedicated to Sartre in 1952 that was published in the journal of which they were co-editors, Les Temps modernes, Merleau-Ponty criticized a ‘neurosis of the future’ that expresses what he called a ‘non-philosophy that is a deliberate refusal to know what one believes in’. The search for solutions for the future makes it impossible to understand present history; it creates the illusion that history could teach lessons. The reply of Marxists such as Henri Lefebvre, at the time a faithful party member, countered that the refusal to define the future ‘justifies [the present] situation instead of denouncing it’.¹⁰ On a first reading, Humanism and Terror could appear to defend a similar point of view.

Efficacious or not, [the role of philosophy] is to clarify the ideological situation, to underline beyond the paradoxes and the contingencies of present history the true terms of the human problem, to recall to the Marxists their humanist inspiration, to recall to the democracies their fundamental hypocrisy, and to maintain intact, against all propaganda, the chances that history might once again become clear. (HT, p. 196)

Only a few years later, reflecting in his Inaugural lecture, on the political claims of Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty clarified the philosophical foundation of his argument. ‘Philosophy explains that, dialectically, in given conditions, an opponent becomes the equivalent of a traitor. Such language is precisely the contrary of that of the ruling power; those in power cut short the premises and say more succinctly: there are only criminals in that group’ (Eloge, p. 69). By making these premises explicit, the philosopher restores the dimension of uncertainty, of choice, and the work of history in the making; he is not an external moral consciousness. In a philosophical text dating from the same period, this position is stated explicitly.

Perhaps the reader will say here that we leave him without an answer, and that we limit ourselves to a ‘So it is’ which explains nothing.… But when it is a question of speaking [la parole] or of the body or of history, unless one wants to destroy what one seeks to understand … one can only show the paradox of the expression. (Prose, p. 160)

Philosophy must deliberately restrain itself, becoming ‘phenomenology’ in the sense of Hegel, the presentation of the logic of the forms of appearance. Such a self-limitation must, however, be philosophically grounded.

The phenomenological project led the philosopher to the ontological question of the mode of existence of history as the mediation and medium of social life. Subject and object were relativized, and the philosophy of consciousness, as well as a theory of real constitution and the Sinngebung by an intentional subject, had to be rejected. Merleau-Ponty had defined his task already in an article of 1947 that insisted that

Metaphysical consciousness has no other objects than those of everyday experience: this world, other people, human history, truth, culture. But instead of taking them all as settled, as consequences with no premises, as if they were self-evident, it rediscovers their fundamental strangeness to me and the miracle of their appearing. (SNS, p. 165)

More than a decade later, he restated the philosophical task in significantly modified terms:

Philosophy has as its charge not to decompose our relation with the world into real elements, or even into ideal elements which would make an ideal object of the world, but to find the articulations in it, to awaken regulated relations of pre-possession, of recapitulation, of encroachment, which are asleep in our ontological landscape, which remain there only in the form of traces, and which, nonetheless, continue to function in it, to institute novelty into it. (VI, p. 137)

In the first citation, the world is still ‘out-there’ waiting to be rediscovered by the subject using its analytic capacities. By the time of the second suggestion, the role of the subject has become almost dependent on the instituting activity of that ‘ontological landscape’, which itself can be approached only obliquely. A further assertion in the second passage leads the argument further. Philosophy must neither decompose the world into real elements nor constitute it from purely ideal moments because the stuff of the world, the Being at which ontology aims, falls into neither of these preordained slots.

Presaged in his earlier phenomenological work, Merleau-Ponty’s development of a ‘new ontology’ was encouraged by another aspect of his confrontation with Marxism. At the outset of his first course at the Collège de France in 1952–1953, ‘The Sensible World and the World of Expression’, he insisted that ‘[p]erceptive consciousness is thus indirect or even inverted in relation to an ideal of adequation that it presupposes but does not look at face to face’ (Résumés, p. 12). The dream of truth as an adequation of thought and thing is an impossibility; the expression can never coincide with what it seeks to express. The collapse these poles into a single unity would eliminate both: the coincidence of thought and thing, expression and expressed, is the dream of positivism, or of the technocrat; it makes human action, history, or even consciousness impossible. The study of perception revealed a paradox whose understanding demands a rethinking of the notion of the Being which it is to perceive or express. In the Visible and the Invisible, this problem of representation continually recurs. ‘What I want to do’, he writes in a working note, ‘is to restore the world as the sense of Being absolutely different from the “represented”, that is, as the vertical Being which none of the “representations” exhausts but which they all “attain” – savage Being’ (VI, p. 306). Such ‘savage Being’ is not equated with a kind of pristine nature; it is not without the effect and affect of human action, nor is it somehow a-logical or inaccessible in its brute being. The lecture course on ‘The Problems of Passivity: Sleep, Unconscious and Memory’ (1954–1955) attempted to work through one aspect of the assertion, insisting that the analyses of these phenomena show precisely the ambiguous structure at which the philosopher is grasping. He invokes Freud, for example, to demonstrate that

[t]he essential contribution of Freudianism is not to have shown that there is an entirely different reality underneath the appearances, but that the analysis of behavior finds several layers of signification, that each of these has its truth, that the plurality of possible interpretations is the discursive expression of a mixed life where each choice always has several senses without our being able to say that one of them alone is true. (Résumés, p. 71)

The importance of Freud, and what Mereleau-Ponty’s earlier phenomenological descriptions illustrate, is that the most strict attention to the facts, to experience and to individual praxis, discloses the ambiguity of a multi-layered structure that cannot be made univocal without losing the originary experience it expresses. What is needed is a philosophy that is simultaneously a non-philosophy, a way to preserve the chiasm that unites paradoxically experience and its sense.

This philosophical project recalls the task undertaken by the young Marx in his confrontation with the systemic claim of Hegel to demonstrate at once the rationality of the real and the reality of the rational. This was the theme of the course that Merleau-Ponty was teaching in 1961 at the time of his sudden death. Although its title did not refer to Marx, Merleau-Ponty’s lecture notes for ‘Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel’ contain a sympathetic rereading of Marx that may surprise the reader who remembers the sharp refutation offered in The Adventures of the Dialectic. What is more, the citations from Hegel’s text, on which he comments paragraph-by-paragraph are taken from the German edition of Heidegger’s essay on Hegel’s Concept of Experience. In addition, the fact that the lecture notes were published in the little-known journal Textures, among whose editors were Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis is significant because they were the co-founders of the path-breaking journal Socialisme ou Barbarie which engaged its own critical debate with Marxism.

Hegel describes the way that consciousness learns that the truth (the Essence, or the Concept, in Hegel’s terms) that it assumed was found in its object can only be understood as through the experience of the ‘subject’. For Merleau-Ponty, this instable movement from the object to the subject in the process of experience implies that the standard of truth lies in experience itself.

It appears that dialectics is neither a fact of consciousness in the sense of a spiritual motor – for then it would be unsere Zutat [our addition] to the experience – nor is it (for the same reason) an objective movement. It is the movement of the contents, of experience, of this new ontological milieu which is the Erscheinung [appearance] that cannot exist without a relation to someone who has the experience of it. It is not a property of consciousness; it is rather consciousness which is a property of the dialectic. We can say that dialectics has consciousness (and seems impossible without the consciousness through which it makes itself the production of the new object) – but it is an opaque consciousness: experience. (PNP, p. 116)

Although the ‘new ontological milieu’ is opaque, it would be wrong to think that it should be wrenched loose from its experiential axis and posited as a univocal and transparently knowable truth.

The ambiguity is not a lack of univocity. It is ‘good.’ There is no problem if the Zweideutigkeit [dual signification] is present as such; if the absolute is the light of truth that appears in the thickness of the experience and embraces the relativized subject and object. But if one formulates this relation in terms of consciousness, one has an equivocation. (PNP, p. 127)

The traditional philosophical rejection of ambiguity is based on an implicit philosophy of consciousness that posits the dualism of subject and object, appearance and essence, being and truth. As a result, it rejects the idea that philosophy can flourish on the soil of experience. ‘The problem of a philosophy which is non-philosophy remains entire’, writes Merleau-Ponty, ‘as long as one thinks Consciousness or Gegenstand [object]’ (PNP, p. 118). Rejecting the tradition, the philosopher must assure himself that his new grounds are solid (although not stable). The reference to the absolute here is not accidental or insignificant, any more than is Merleau-Ponty’s return to Hegel, whose attempt to integrate the ‘irrational’ into philosophy he had praised 15 years earlier.

The difficulty that must be faced in the attempt to show how experience moves toward truth results from the fact that, as defined, experience differs from the lived experience because it has lost its immediacy. Merleau-Ponty had discussed this difficulty already in his long commentary on Malraux’s notion of a déformation cohérente in the phenomenon of artistic expression. Here, after the commentary on Hegel, he analyzes it in the context of Marxism.

To put the dialectic back on its feet (and one forgets that it is Hegel who said explicitly that the dialectic is a world on its head) would be to destroy it. Philosophy, that is, the access to the absolute, seems to be essentially experience, that is, entry into the phenomena, taking part in their maturation, in experience. It is this because it is only in the relation of experiri, by existing the things, that one can be present at the advent of knowledge. (PNP, p. 104)

Philosophy must be experiential, but it cannot be conflated with the things of experience. Experience is a relation; neither subject nor object, it is what makes both of these possible, while it itself cannot be accounted for simply by their combination. The dualism tends, however, to re-emerge in the confrontation of two orders: the idea of experience acting from outside the experience as a control on that experience itself. This, he adds in a marginal note, is like the idea of the proletariat in the form of the party becoming a controlling director over the proletariat. The result, he concludes a few pages later, is that ‘either the experience is truly taken into account, in which case it is a wandering, skeptical one; or it is understood, transformed into its truth, but then it is transcended. The pretension that one has reached this second order by experience is the most complete dogmatism, for it is a dogmatism disguised as the movement of things’ (PNP, pp. 121–2). Such a ‘dogmatism’, Merleau-Ponty suggests, is present in Marx as well as in Hegel.

The young Marx seems to have recognized and confronted the antinomic task of a philosophy which, in refusing to transform or transcend experience, would be a non-philosophy.

Marx critiques the pretension of philosophical Denken [thinking] to remain itself in [knowing] what is other than itself, to contain in itself and possess its contradictory – to go beyond it from within or to understand it from outside, without experience. The problem is to reconceive the philosophical proximity and distance, the nowhere and everywhere of philosophy, under the condition that one not give to consciousness – and especially not to ‘self-consciousness’ – the power of carrying in itself its contrary, of being within itself in what is the inverse of it. Not to construct under the name of Wissen [knowledge] an illusory power of being everything, a negativity that is so total that it digests and founds everything and nothing. (PNP, p. 164)

When the young Marx sought to make philosophy worldly while making the world philosophical, he recognized that this did not mean collapsing the one into the other. Philosophy, he insisted, was both true and false; it was not to be corrected either by the ‘philosophical party’, which wished to apply it to the world, or by the ‘practical party’, which wanted to change the world without the aid of philosophy. ‘Philosophy and non-philosophy, the philosophical and the practical, are non-dialectical insofar as both suggest implicitly that the world of experience and its philosophical understanding are separated one from the other. But as separated, each is false. Under the influence of Feuerbach, the young Marx moved on to seek a “philosophy” which is not a philosophy of consciousness but of sensuous man’ (PNP, p. 159). As such, Marxism could be the ‘non-philosophy’ whose task is to remain true to experience in witnessing the advent of its truth.

Merleau-Ponty had argued in The Adventures of the Dialectic that the philosophical project of the young Marx had been abandoned by 1850 in favor of ‘scientific socialism’ (AD, p. 85). Returning to Marxism now by analyzing the nature and possibility of a non-philosophy, his analysis is richer and more nuanced.

It is not the passage from philosophy to science; it is the passage from ‘direct’ philosophy (man , nature, Feuerbach) to another conception of philosophy (man, nature attained through the experience of capitalism; that experience understood and brought to its concept uncovers the proletarian class that is the historical formation in which the understanding of capital is realized; the identification of the theorist who thinks [or interprets] the functioning of capital with that historical formation itself: the latter, thus, reveals that the corresponding point to absolute Knowledge, is Erscheinende Wissen [appearing knowledge]. Capital rejoins the intuition of the proletariat just as the Logic of Hegel rejoins the Phenomenology). (PNP, p. 147)

Marx’s discovery of the proletariat as the subject/object of history that solves what he had called the ‘riddle of history’ appears at first to follow the parameters of a non-philosophy that remains faithful to the phenomenological task. Much of the analysis in the 1844 Manuscripts can be understood from this optic. But just as Hegel was unable to remain with experience, finally subordinating the Phenomenology to the encyclopedic system of his Logic, so too Marx was driven by his philosophical presuppositions to subordinate the proletariat to the logical imperatives of the reproduction of Capital.

Here one goes from reality (capital) to the appearance (the proletariat): the ‘becoming of the truth’ is substituted for the ‘becoming of consciousness’ just as with Hegel’s Logic. But this is still philosophy and still Hegel – under the appearance of abandoning philosophy, it is the most audacious philosophy: the philosophy which hides itself in the ‘things’, which is masked by an apparent positivism – philosophy precisely in the sense that it doesn’t want to be philosophy. And, conversely, the explicit philosophy of 1844 is not far from the concrete. (PNP, p. 160)

Merleau-Ponty’s argument is that just as the proletariat is the truth of the experience of capitalism, even while itself remaining an experiential praxis, it itself needs to be brought to its truth, which is the science of Capital. Moreover, as Marx insists repeatedly, the reality of capitalism is itself an ‘inverted world’; it relates to the concrete proletariat as philosophy does to experience. From here it is but a short step to the assertion that Capital is nothing but the experience of the proletariat brought to its truth or concept. Insofar as the relation of philosophy and experience is implicitly maintained, Merleau-Ponty correctly indicates that the mature Marx presents a disguised philosophy hidden in the movement of the things themselves. At the same time, moreover, the experience of the proletariat is transformed into the logical truth of capitalism. The result is the kind of ‘mystery of reason’ to which Merleau-Ponty had referred in The Adventures. The expression of the truth of History demands rethinking the relation of philosophy to non-philosophy in order to avoid such ‘mysteries’ that claim to show that the idea of experience dominates over the experience itself, making way for a dogmatism that justifies itself as being the movement of the concrete itself.

The contribution of the new ontology sought by Merleau-Ponty begins to make itself felt in this confrontation of Marx and Hegel. Both remained caught in a philosophy of consciousness, accepting its corollary, a philosophy of the object. The tension could not be maintained; the absolute was imported to bridge the gap: from the side of the Reason for Hegel, from the side of the material world for Marx.¹¹ As opposed to this, Merleau-Ponty had argued earlier, in his course on ‘Dialectical Philosophy’, that

[t]here is thus a dialectical absolute, which is there only in order to hold the multiple in its place and against its relief, to oppose the absolutization of these relations. It is ‘fluidified’ in them, it is immanent to experience. This is by definition an unstable position (Résumés, p. 82)

If the instability cannot be maintained, the possibility of philosophy itself as the analysis of the advent of knowledge in experience is put into question. This question was dealt with in the course of 1958–1959 by means of an investigation of Hegel’s legacy as refracted through Husserl and Heidegger. Concerning the latter, Merleau-Ponty insists that

[t]he term Being is not, like other terms, a sign to which one could find a corresponding ‘representation’ or an object: its sense is not distinct from its operation; by it we have Being which speaks in us rather than we speaking of Being. (ibid., p. 155)

Heidegger’s philosophy fails because he seeks a direct expression of Being, even while knowing that such an expression is impossible. Merleau-Ponty’s option, which is to approach the problem of Being through the beings of Nature, finds a congenial resonance in its reading of the young Marx. The philosophy elaborated in 1844, he says, seeks

a single Being where negativity is at work. Thus: nature will not be defined as a pure object, exteriority, but as ‘sensible’, sensual, nature as we see it. Natural beings have a preordered internal relation to one another. Man will not be defined either as pure subject or as a fragment of nature, but by a sort of coupling of subject/object with two faces: relation to an object, or an active object and thus as essentially relation to other men, generic being [Gattungswesen], to society – this relation being a transformation and result of the natural relation of a living being to external beings. History being in this sense the flesh itself of man. (PNP, p. 168)

Both the unstable dialectical absolute and the Being whose sense is expressed in itself are, like nature, facets of what Merleau-Ponty calls the flesh of history. ‘The task of philosophy would be … to elaborate a concept of Being that permits the contradictions – neither accepted nor “surpassed” – to find their place in it’ (Résumés, p. 128). Such a philosophy would express a different ontology than the one built on the perceptual metaphor of a subject perceiving an object distinct from itself; it would point toward a different conception of truth than the classical notion of adequation or expression. History would not be a future conceived spatially and linearly—as judge of the past, open horizon toward a beyond or materially predetermined by present conditions. Nor could the goal be what Merleau-Ponty had previously called a vérité à faire. History would participate in the present as a task always to be begun anew, whose accomplishment would be the mark of its end.

Merleau-Ponty has in effect returned to Marx’s own starting point, explaining now the ontological presuppositions that led him astray. When Marx describes what is ‘positive’ in Hegel, he thought that it would permit him to solve the ‘riddle of history’ by means of the negation of the negation. ‘Marx’, writes Merleau-Ponty, is a ‘positivist for a far-off future, beyond communism’ (PNP, p. 168). In effect, he wants to replace alienated objects by their non-alienated form. This is a form of positivism that—as in Hegel—claims that the essential structures of the given world deliver their reality to a disincarnated consciousness which receives them passively. ‘Positivism, in a sense – ironically – produces the same result as the absolute negation or the negative absolute of Hegel: i.e., the hidden sense of history, combat of the gods. Stalinism and Hegelianism. One could even say that Hegel maintains more clearly the sense of negativity, of tension’ (PNP, p. 173). It is this ‘sense of negativity’ that would be expressed in the new ontology which does not demand either the overcoming of philosophy or the elimination of the opacity of the flesh of historical experience.

7.5 And Now?

I explained at the outset that I wanted to reread Merleau-Ponty in order to gain a self-understanding; more precisely, I wanted to appreciate the meaning of critical reflection on one’s own past. I was attracted not only to his philosophical project but as well to his political sensibility. In his preface to a collection of his essays written over more than a decade that he published in late 1960 under the title Signes, the philosopher explains the difference between the two types of writing.

At first glance, what a difference, what a disparity, between the philosophical essays and the circumstantial remarks, nearly all of them political, which compose this volume. In philosophy, the path can be difficult, but one is certain that each step makes others possible. In politics, one has the oppressive impression of a breach that must always be repeated. (Signes, p. 7)

This distinction needs further explication, which I take the liberty of presenting in outline through the construction a series of citations that suggest the way in which the goal pursued by Merleau-Ponty contributes to a self-interrogation of the New Left.

The Adventures devoted more than a hundred pages to the critique of Sartre’s politicization of philosophy, which is contrasted to Marx’s manner of presenting their relation. In a telling contrast, Merleau-Ponty points out that whereas for the Marxists consciousness can be mystified, for Sartre, it is simply an example of bad faith. Similarly, for the Marxist, there are fools (sots); for Sartre there are scoundrels (canailles) (AD, p. 213). The ontological source of this distinction, as explained 50 pages later, introduces a new step in the argument.

If [as opposed to Sartre] one agrees that no action assumes as its own everything that takes place … and that all action, even a war, is always symbolic and counts as much on the effect that it will have as a signifying gesture and the trace of an intention as it does on the immediate results; if, in other words, one gives up ‘pure action’ which is a myth (a myth of the spectator consciousness), it is perhaps then that one has the most chance of changing the world. (AD, p. 270)

Merleau-Ponty illustrates his claim with another conditional formulation. ‘If all action is in fact symbolic, then books in their manner are actions and they are worth writing according to the rules of the trade, without abandoning the obligation to unmask’ (ibid.).

Pursuing this line of argument in one of the chapters of Signes, the philosopher explains Marx’s admiration for Balzac in spite of his reactionary political views in a way that illuminates his insistence on the dual task of the author (which is, implicitly, also that of the actor).

Marx wanted to say that a certain manner of making visible the world of money and the conflicts of modern society was more important than Balzac’s ideas, even his political ones, and that once that vision was acquired it would bring with it its consequences, with or without the consent of Balzac. (S, p. 96; also Prose, pp. 125–6)

Balzac’s novels make present the weight and thickness of the world as the individual strives to understand himself in action and through action. Balzac writes the world in the same way that Marx tried to think it, which does not entail the elaboration of the kind of step-by-step development that characterized the work of philosophy for Merleau-Ponty; it is more like the breach that must be constantly repeated. A passage from the introductory presentation of the Eye and the Mind, written during summer while the philosopher was preparing also his lectures on ‘philosophy and non-philosophy’, evokes the uniqueness of the work of art and its relation to its creator.

But art, and especially painting, draw from that pool of brute sense of which activism wants to know nothing. They alone do it in all innocence. One seeks counsel or advice from the author or the philosopher; one does not permit them to hold the world in suspense; one wants them to take a position, they cannot decline the responsibilities of speaking man.… [As opposed to that,] [n]o one attacks Cézanne for having lived in hiding at L’Estaque during the war of 1870. (OE, pp. 13–15)

This passage concludes with heavy irony that ‘everyone cites with respect [Cézanne’s affirmation that] ‘life is frightful’, when the least advanced student, since Nietzsche, would roundly repudiate philosophy if it was said that philosophy did not teach us to be great beings’ (ibid.). The reference to Nietzsche can be interpreted also as an allusion to the temptations of Marxism—or at least of Marxism-Leninism, where everyone wants to be a ‘little Lenin’, giving advice for the realization of history.

I suggested that Merleau-Ponty’s description of the dual task of the author applied to the actor as well. If that is true, it would seem possible to rethink the adventure of the New Left in the same light. One effect of such an interpretation would be to explain critically the misleading influence of classical Marxism on its self-understanding. Although this was not, of course, the philosopher’s concern, his repeated returns to Marx point in a similar direction. He recognizes in The Adventures that

it is correct to say that there is not much sense in beginning Bolshevism anew at the very moment when its revolutionary failure is evident. But there is not much sense either in beginning Marx anew if his philosophy is put into question by that failure; no sense in acting as if that philosophy emerged intact from the affair, as if it were in fact the end of the interrogation and self-critique of humanity. (AD, p. 124)

The allusion to the idea that the ‘revolutionary failure’ put Marx’s philosophy as a whole in question is in fact a reference to the claims of Cornelius Castoriadis to whom Merleau-Ponty had been introduced by Claude Lefort, to whom I now turn for further development of these reflections.¹²

Footnotes

1

In the text, all citations from Merleau-Ponty are indicated with a reference-sign and page number in parenthesis. All citations are from the French editions and are rendered in my own translation. The sources cited are Phénomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), indicated as PhP; Humanisme et terreur (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), indicated as HT; Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 6th ed., 1966), indicated as SNS; Eloge de la philosophie et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1953, 1960), indicated as Eloge; Les aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), indicated as AD; Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), indicated as S; L’oeil et l’Esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), indicated as OE; Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), indicated as VI; Résumés de cours (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), indicated as Résumés; and La prose du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), indicated as Prose.

2

The point was in fact made in Sartre’s ‘Merleau-Ponty vivant’, in Les Temps Modernes, Oct 1961 (reprinted in Sartre, Situations IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 243), but with reference to Merleau-Ponty’s influence in an earlier period.

3

James Edie, ‘Introduction’, in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 111, 1964), p. xiv. Since this statement was made, both volumes have been translated, though Humanism and Terror was not admitted to the philosophically consecrated series directed by Mr. Edie. I suppose that, in the end, we have to thank the ‘blind forces of the market’ for doing what the philosopher could not!

4

Dick Howard, ‘Ambiguous Radicalism: Merleau-Ponty’s Interrogation of Political Thought’, in Garth Gillan, ed., The Horizons of the Flesh (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973).

5

Claude Lefort, ‘La politique et la pensée de la politique’, in Lettres Nouvelles, lie année, nouvelle série, no. 32, p. 58.

6

Compare the statement in HT: ‘The decline of proletarian humanism is not a critical experiment which would annul Marxism entirely. As a critique of the existing world and of the other humanisms, it remains valid. At least in this sense, it cannot be surpassed’ (p. 165), with the statement printed over a decade later (but written in 1955, at the time of AD): ‘The decadence of Russian communism does not mean that the class struggle is a myth, that “free enterprise” is either possible or desirable, nor in general that the Marxist critique is void’ (S, p. 338).

7

In an earlier formulation (PhP, p. 456), Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘To say with Marx that man poses only those problems that he can resolve is to renew the theological optimism and to postulate the explosion of the world’.

8

Compare the following passage on Trotsky: ‘On the plane of the individual, this type of person is sublime. But we must ask whether they are the type who make history. They believe so strongly in the rationality of history that, if for a time history ceases to be rational, they throw themselves toward the wished-for future rather than pass any compromises with the incoherent present’ (HT, p. 85).

9

As I did in op. cit.

10

Mésaventures de l’anti-Marxisme, Les Malheurs de M. Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1956), p. 102. This collective volume published by the political-theoretical ‘heavies’ of and in the orbit of the French Communist Party shows how threatening Merleau-Ponty’s critique was felt to be the dominant intellectual tradition of the left at the time. The volume is interesting as an antiquity; from the point of view of theory, it is strictly and simply empty and vain verbiage.

11

Insofar as the theory of the proletariat is interpreted as an account of the praxis of a plural subject, the dilemma posed is replaced by its inverse opposite: the proletariat is treated as an absolute subject constituting the world. The transcendental subjectivity rejected by Marx is now situated in an object within the world. The result is a justification of the voluntarism of the Party, or a mystical view of praxis as the achieved unity of subject and object. Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre in AD showed clearly that these are two sides of the same coin.

12

As previously mentioned, Lefort had been a student of Merleau-Ponty and was the editor of his posthumous manuscripts; he was also the co-founder with Castoriadis of Socialisme ou Barbarie. Some indications of Castoriadis’ encounter with Merleau-Ponty are given in Chap. 9, note 10, along with a reference to his contribution to a special issue of l’Arc edited by Lefort.

© The Author(s) 2019

Dick HowardThe Marxian LegacyPolitical Philosophy and Public Purposehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4_8

8. Bureaucratic Society and Traditional Rationality: Claude Lefort

Dick Howard1  

(1)

Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, New York, NY, USA

Dick Howard

The work of Claude Lefort highlights one of the paradoxes of the Marxist tradition. Despite its claim to be the theory of the revolutionary proletariat, developing dialectically with the advances of the working class, a specifically Marxist approach to sociology and political theory was never developed. This might be the result of the ‘traditional’ structure of these disciplines, whose aim is prediction and manipulation of human objects. While the Institute for Social Research set itself the task of filling this lack (including in every issue extensive book reviews of contemporary empirical research), the political theory that would have been necessary to fuse its philosophical self-understanding with its empirical concerns was never developed, cut short by the development of what its leaders called the ‘authoritarian state’, fascism.¹ What remained was the assumption that classical Marxism provides a theory of the inherently contradictory and exploitative nature of the societal infrastructure, leaving the contemporary theorist with the task of elaborating the more or less independent tensions in the superstructure.

The relative weight accorded to these cultural and political variables reflects the search for a potential catalyst that could ignite already existing but still latent infrastructural contradictions. This is curious since any reader of Marx’s historical writing knows that Marx did not make this kind of distinction between ideas and the supposedly real. Yet, with the occasional exception in the work of Rosa Luxemburg, the poles of theoretical reflection, empirical social analysis, and political practice that Marx wanted to unite remain separated from one another. The theorist reconstructs what he takes to be the Marxist break with philosophy as implying the priority of the economy; the social analyst works with an often unstated model of this breakthrough, adapting the empirical materials to it or working out new permutations of the historical development; and then the political actor makes choices and tries to understand and justify their logic in terms of the theory and the sociological corollaries. Lefort’s critical appropriation of Marxism asserts first that this separation of what was united by Marx accounts for the underdevelopment of the practical side of Marxism and that, correlatively, this is not an accident but a flattening of Marx’s theory itself.

Lefort can be seen as carrying out the philosophical program of Merleau-Ponty, his high-school teacher who once suggested to his young student that he read Trotsky.  Lefort followed this advice to its logical conclusion, which led to his early political engagement. When he left the Trotskyist Fourth International to join in founding of the group ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’,² Lefort also joined Merleau-Ponty at Les Temps Modernes, taking part in the editorial discussions and writing for the journal. His collaboration ended—as did that of Merleau-Ponty³—with Sartre’s move toward the Communist Party in his essay on ‘The Communists and Peace’. Lefort’s critique of Sartre and his reply to Sartre’s rebuttal are masterful applications of that unity of theory, social analysis, and political judgment found in Marx at his best. Lefort’s answer to Sartre is a step toward the realization of Merleau-Ponty’s penetrating critique of Sartre in The Adventures of the Dialectic (which remained theoretical, whereas the axis of Lefort’s essay lies with his social analysis and its political implications). More generally, the movement of Lefort’s thought begins with Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the rationalist illusion that theory can grant absolute knowledge of a social totality which is the ‘really real’; but it moves from this starting point to the social and historical experience by which a society reproduces itself and its members, rejoining in this way the work of Marx’s own investigations.

Lefort’s development is complicated by his insistence on working with Marx and against the consequences of Marxism. From the break with the Fourth International through his second split with ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ (in 1958) and the foundation of the group ILO (Informations et Liaisons Ouvrières, later ICO, Informations et Correspondances Ouvrières), the struggle against the form of bureaucratic domination was foremost in Lefort’s political concerns. Beyond the critique of the Soviet Union and the orthodox Communist (and Trotskyist) organizational forms, Lefort was attempting to elaborate the conditions of the possibility of the self-organization of revolutionary struggle. While he agreed with the economic critique of Marx that Castoriadis was developing in Socialisme ou Barbarie , Lefort found that it did not go far enough. Following an argument from Merleau-Ponty, Lefort insists:

I wanted to show that the concept of Leadership [Direction] was tied to that of Revolution in the sense that we inherited it from Marx. The root of the illusion was the belief in a point of radical rupture between the past and the future, in an absolute moment (even if it is stretched out temporally) in which the sense of history is given.⁴

As he worked with the Marxian concepts of alienation and ideology, examining the phenomenon of history and the conditions under which a society reproduces and also interrogates its self-identity, Lefort articulated a reinterpretation of Marx helps to explain the devolution and flattening of the Marxian project. With Marx, and against Marx, he elaborates a theory of the mode of thought, sociality, and politics of revolution in its historical specificity. It is no coincidence that the central theoretical articles in which Lefort lays out this approach were not published in Socialisme ou Barbarie . In that journal, under the pseudonym Claude Montal, he published practical texts, on organization, on specific conjunctural events, and on the tasks of the militant. Since he felt bound to Marxism in some form, it takes a careful reading to see the originality of his approach as compared with such anti-Leninist variants as the Dutch Council Communists. Nonetheless, his analysis of the 20th Congress’ revelations about Stalinism, his critique of the ‘progressive intellectuals’, and his lucid analysis of the ‘proletarian experience’ show the direction in which he was moving. The political critique of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union as well as its role in the Marxist parties and sects opened toward a general interrogation of the interpenetration of the social and the political.

Lefort’s fundamental insight is the need for a critical theory that is a general critique of the pretensions of all theory; it must offer an analysis of the social that lays bare the structuring principles of the dependence of society on unarticulated premises; its political translation must destroy the idea that political solutions can put an end to political questions. This critical attitude neither makes for a skepticism nor excludes political engagement. Lefort explains himself in a long passage.

In short, I had to denounce as illusory it is the belief in a solution, in a general formula for the organisation of society by showing that the power of the bureaucracy had built and builds itself on that illusion, and by showing that breaking with it (or attempting to break, for this is a break which must continually be begun anew) is the fundamental condition of a struggle on all terrains against the actual or potential forms of domination.

It is a struggle against the strata that monopolize the decisions that affect the fate of the collectivity in each sector of activity; a struggle against the monopolisation of the means of production and of knowledge; a struggle that prevents the petrification of the social due to the effect of a coercive power that is necessarily driven to grow, to close in on itself, to imagine itself as the origin of the institution of the social; a struggle, therefore, that does not have to determine itself in terms of the alternative reform or revolution, global or partial objectives, but that has its own internal justification by virtue of the fact that its effects are felt at a distance from the place where it develops, that its specific efficacity is at the same time a symbolic one, that is, that it threatens the established model of social relations which heretofore was taken as natural.⁵

The theory that pretends to give knowledge of the real, like a sociology describing preformed facts or a politics that would resolve all social contradictions, falls into the rationalist dualism which must either give all power to the ‘facts’ or to a transcendental principle floating above the real. In both cases, thought or praxis is alienated, separated, and particularized; in both cases, the result will be ideological, taking part of the whole, imposing univocity on the multivalent.

At this point in his development, Lefort’s rejection of Marxism, although based on Marx’s own analyses, becomes controversial. As his former comrade, Castoriadis, asserted, Lefort appears to be forced to give up the idea of revolution itself! Lefort denied this implication for a long while. The difference of the two positions became clear when the two united in a book publication analyzing, in the heat of the moment, the possibilities opened by May 1968. As opposed to the immediate practical steps that Castoriadis proposes, Lefort sees in May the realization of the beginning of a revolution of a new type whose advent his critical confrontation with Marxism had demanded. Lefort had insisted on the need to abandon the traditional, philosophically rooted, notion of revolution as the completion of a rational system—what the young Marx had called the making philosophical of the world and making worldly of philosophy—because that demand is what leads to totalitarianism. Revolutionaries must give up the idea of the Good Society where all contradictions are resolved, the world made transparent to itself, and human praxis stripped of its contingency and ambiguity. The Good Society is not a state to be realized, an end to (pre-)history, or Engels’ famous replacement of the government over people by the administration of things. Lefort argues that the myth of revolution, anchored in that traditional philosophy, expresses in fact the world and world-view that the revolutionaries must combat; this myth is responsible for the degeneration of revolution. If one can speak of a ‘convergence’ between East and West, its roots in Lefort’s view are not in shared industrial techniques, but a shared logos based on traditional philosophy.

Lefort adopted the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, attempting to lay bare the structure of the experience of theory, sociality, and politics. The very style of his analyses recalls the manner of presentation adopted by Merleau-Ponty: rejecting the transcendental, non-situated, or constitutive subject, starting from one argument, showing its seeming necessity, only to drive it to the limit where it inverts and opens a new path. This experience, what Lefort calls the work of interpretation, is in fact the object being analyzed. Truth is not adequation of thought and (external) thing; it is a process that includes the situated thinker/actor. Through an analysis of the historical representations of Machiavellianism, and a confrontation of the lacunae of the classical interpretations which pretend to establish the meaning of the Florentine’s work, Lefort prevents the reader of his monumental Machiavel from imagining that Machiavelli’s thought could be reduced to a univocal message. He follows the path of the work, confronting its ambiguities, lapsus, and contradictions. Sociological and historical materials are introduced, not as a criterion of falsification but to illuminate the sense of Machiavelli’s chosen deformations (an allusion to Merleau-Ponty’s ‘deformations cohérentes’). The 776 pages of this volume could no more be condensed than the equally admirable application of Lefort’s interpretative technique to La Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire: a sinuous thought, doubling back on itself, opening and closing, restoring finally the indetermination of the text whose movement or work is its sense. Lefort describes the process concisely:

I therefore said that the question of interpretation already implies the question of the political. Through the discovery of the illusion of a disembodied thought taking an overview [pensée de survol] which gives the interpreter his power, I am led to understand what Machiavelli said from the point of view of the Prince who, blinded by his position of power, hides from himself the fact that this position is engendered in the division of the social, that the Prince himself is caught in that division.⁶

What makes a work live and become an object for the thought of successive generations is not its unique ‘message’ but the interrogation which it itself is and to which it gives rise. The author does not impose a view but guides the reader’s questioning. The situation of the Prince, or La Boétie’s apparently naive questioning of our submission to the Name, and thus to the power, of the One, interrogates the experience of the political. Similarly, what makes Marx a source of continual discovery is not the results which emerge from his analyses but rather the work of interrogation which bares the tensions and contradictions of the experience of capitalism, making Marx’s work precisely a theory of the proletariat.

The danger for theory is structurally identical to the risk that drives politics to become a form of domination rather than the sphere where a community debates and articulates the forms of its communality. In politics, the danger of the One, the Prince or the Party who becomes the unification and incarnation of the Good Society, separate from it and dominant over it is either the entryway to totalitarianism, or the moment that crystallizes a revolt from a society whose unity is no longer expressed by the One. For revolutionary theory, Lefort continues, the danger is also that the One, the idea of a unique Truth or Being that is the ‘really real’ that determines the nature of the appearances has either been lost among those appearances or has forced their neglect due to the position of overview that it claims for itself. This does not mean that a phenomenologically based metaphysics becomes the last rampart against invading totalitarianism whose theoretical justification would be the theory for a revolution that would, at last, be adequate to its human goals. The quest is more complicated.

Lefort’s Marxian heritage served him in good stead; the logical structure opened by phenomenology needed to be articulated as a social theory . Marx moved from the critique of the political state to a theory of the social, but remained at the level of civil society. Lefort rejects this reduction because it claims to have found the positive, ‘really real’ base on which all else is seated; it becomes a traditional theory. Lefort’s phenomenological stance demands the interrogation of the experience of the social, not of its ultimate reality. This claim needs to be explained in order to see how Lefort’s contribution to that active inheritance from Marxism fits into the framework that permits understanding a New Left.

8.1 Developing Theory and Developing Society

8.1.1 Politics and the Social

In his polemical reply to the ‘ultra-Bolshevist’ panegyric, ‘The Communists and Peace’ that marked Sartre’s political conversion (as he described it in his memorial essay on Merleau-Ponty), Lefort attacks Sartre’s atomistic and voluntaristic conception of the proletariat. Following the stress of his earlier essays on the notion of the proletariat as its accumulating experience,⁷ and presenting a subtle interpretation of Marx’s analysis of the modern industrial process, Lefort points out that Sartre begins from the idea of the unity of the class rather than the everyday experience of the class itself; and that Sartre concludes with the idea of the class as a pure act, without material conditions, by which the individual transcends himself to partake of social universality and therewith of freedom. Lefort stresses that this ideal omits the social ⁸

in its premises, because it mentions only the individuals; in its conclusions, because it ends with a collectivity united by the same will, identifying itself in action, perfectly present to itself and clear to itself. But this is only apparently what is designated by a collectivity; in reality, it is nothing but an individual, or better, a consciousness.⁹

Two central themes of Lefort’s theoretical approach already emerge here: the notion that the self-transparence of the social is impossible—such self-transparence being the classical rationalist dream of a perfect, god’s-eye view, or the modern dream of the bureaucracy—and, second, the attempt to pinpoint the specificity of the social, its relation to the individuals who institute it, and who are instituted by it.

The political misunderstanding of this specificity of social experience is manifested in Sartre’s acceptance of the communist party as incarnating the class from the standpoint of historical necessity. Sartre’s attitude is typical of left-leaning intellectuals; Lefort castigates their assumptions as ‘[t]he method of the progressive intellectuals’. Their position is rooted in a philosophical dualism that separates the particular (as individual, brute factuality) from the Historical; the latter is said to represent the truth of the particular; its universality dominates the particular individual, whose action and errors appear as only accidents in the linear course of History. On this basis, the ‘progressive intellectual’ interprets the choices posed by concrete historical situations.¹⁰ The upshot is that the experience of the class is neglected, with the result that there is no way to understand the possibility of autonomous activity. Instead, pure reason, or its inverse correlate, pure will, governs the historical process. Summarizing his argument in the counter-polemic to Sartre’s, Lefort goes on the attack.

I accused you of confusing the party and the class, and I saw at the source of that error your incapacity to define the class as an economic, social and historical reality. I tied that incapacity to your narrow rationalism which locked you into the oppositions of activity and passivity, subjective and objective, unity and division; I thought that this rationalism prohibited you from understanding the idea of praxis, which you understood in fact as the pure act of a pure organism, and which, in my opinion, supposes an interweaving of all the economic, social and political determinations.¹¹

Lefort’s polemical exchange with Sartre mobilized political implications of the theoretical work that he had undertaken in the early 1950s when he tried to understand how a specific type of rationality and the nature of the social mutually implicate one another, for example, in ethnographical studies, cultural anthropology, or in the historical example of sixteenth-century capitalism as interpreted by Max Weber. This work, as with his Machiavel, is important for understanding how Lefort’s critique of Marxism becomes essential to understanding the Marxian legacy.

8.1.2 The Origin of the Social

Lefort took the occasion offered by Lévi-Strauss’ publication of a new introduction to the works of Marcel Mauss to clarify his own notions of reason and of the social in an essay titled ‘L’échange et la lutte des hommes’.¹² Mauss, says Lefort,

proves to be one of the most representative authors of our times, who have undertaken the project of defining a new rationalism in the sense of Hegel, Marx and Husserl. His constant preoccupation is not to explain a social phenomenon in terms of another which is judged to be its cause, but to tie together all the economic, juridical, religious and artistic traits of a given society, and to understand how they work together in the same sense. (op. cit., p. 1400)

Mauss’ ‘Essai sur le don’ studies nothing less than the foundations of society itself. Exchange is seen to be a ‘total social fact’; its sense is not only economic but juridical, moral, religious, and aesthetic. Exchange relations exist prior to the ‘economic’ forms of reciprocity known as barter. The potlatch is the most famous example of an exchange relation that cannot be explained in terms of economics alone; Mauss’ essay draws together a manifold of other societies that have been studied by anthropologists. To explain these social forms, the analysis must go beneath the empirical. ‘Overall’, writes Lefort, ‘the greatest error is to want to treat exchange as a fact’ (ibid., p. 1406). Yet Lévi-Strauss’ Introduction to Mauss interprets his importance precisely in his handling of this manifold of facts, which corresponds to Lévi-Strauss’ own early efforts at mathematization by reducing social phenomena to their symbolic nature. He concludes that Mauss’ importance lies in seeing that what is crucial is the fact of exchange itself, not the operations that are its manifestation. As a result, it is necessary to analyze exchange itself before turning to its operational variations. This can lead to the postulation of a kind of Kantian transcendental consciousness that is interpreted as the seat of the categories which make possible the operational world of experience. Lefort disagrees:

The unconscious, Lévi-Strauss tells us, would be the mediating term between me and the other person, because it gives us ‘forms of activity which are at once ours and those of the other, conditions of all the mental lives of all men and of all times’. But this is to forget that from the perspective of such a collective consciousness, the notion of the other person—and, in fact, that of myself—no longer makes sense. (ibid., p. 1408)

Put differently, Lévi-Strauss’ position is based on a rationalism which dissolves the specificity of the particular in the universal.

The problem is that, to use Mauss’ terms, Lévi-Strauss interprets society as based on ‘rules’ rather than ‘behaviors’; that he assumes artificially a total rationality in terms of which groups and men are reduced to an abstract function instead of basing that function in the concrete relations that people establish among themselves. (ibid., p. 1409)

What is crucial to understanding is not its symbolic function within a given framework but the way that its behavior is itself signifying; analysis must focus on the immanent intention in action and not a logical order assumed to underlie concrete appearances.

The potlatch offers the most paradoxical form of exchange relation: in it the individual demonstrates reciprocity with others and with nature through the destruction of the gift offering. For Lefort, ‘not only is this an act, but the act par excellence, through which man conquers his subjectivity’ (ibid., p. 1413). Mauss proposed as a first explanation of the reciprocity involved in the potlatch the idea that destruction of the goods was conceived as a kind of exchange with the gods. The problem with this assumption is that the potlatch experience is also a form of competition: whoever destroys the most goods becomes chief, receiving recognition or honors. Mauss thus adds a second suggestion: in destroying the goods, the giver is in effect putting the other under an obligation which cannot be repaid, establishing a relation of domination. If that were the intention, it would destroy the reciprocity that the gift relation in general is based on. The analysis then goes further, recognizing that the destruction of the goods implies that the giver is independent of those goods, independent of external things in general and, ultimately, of nature itself. The domination that is established by the potlatch appears to be based solely and simply on the persons themselves, not on any external signs of power; in Hegelian terms, the confrontation with the other is effected through the mediation of the confrontation with nature. The goal is not simply the submission of the other, but wrenching free from nature itself. The resulting establishment of persons as independent is also the establishment of a specific sociality as distinct from nature.

We thus see that our analysis leads to a more profound reality than that of individual relations: to social reality itself. Exchange by gifts appears at first to offer the double character of an opposition between men and an opposition of men to nature. In a first sense, it is the act by which man reveals himself for man and by man. To give is just as much to put the other person in your dependence as to put yourself in his dependence by accepting the idea that he will return the gift. But that operation, that initiative in giving, presupposes a primordial experience in which implicitly each knows himself to be tied to the other; the idea that the gift must be returned presupposes that the other person is an other-than-myself who must act like me; his act in return must confirm to me the truth of my own act, that is, of my subjectivity. The gift is thus at once the establishment of difference and the discovery of sameness. (ibid., pp. 1414–15)

The opposition and difference without which the gift relation could not exist only becomes real when the other returns the gift, an action that overcomes that opposition. This ‘reality’ is not seen from without, by an observer; it is instituted in and by the social relation. ‘One does not give in order to receive’, writes Lefort in italics, ‘one gives in order that the other give’ (ibid., p. 1415).

Behind the struggle of men for mutual ‘recognition’ there appears the movement of a collectivity which attempts to behave like a collective subject. But far from abolishing the plurality of subjects, this ‘we’ only exists insofar as each affirms his own subjectivity by the gift. The behavior of the empirical subjects cannot be deduced from a transcendental consciousness; such a consciousness, on the contrary, is constituted only in experience. (ibid.)

The obligation to return the gift is not simply a contract between two private persons; it is a ‘social’ obligation which, if broken, would threaten society itself, which is a human reality that has ripped itself free from nature and constituted itself as a society. The social is more than the sum of individual actions, and yet less than the self-transparence of a pure subject that was implicit in Lévi-Strauss’ quasi-Kantian interpretation.

At the conclusion of his essay on the exchange relation, Lefort indicates a direction for further reflection.

These remarks, which are meant as a prolongation of Mauss’ analysis, should permit a confrontation of the social and the historical. It is striking that the exchange by gifts in its generalized form, and the institution of the potlatch, predominate and maintain themselves in societies that are incapable of developing a history. (ibid., p. 1416, my stress)

The social relations instituted by the potlatch regulate the rivalry between men and others as well as their relations with nature. The society which they institute still contains competition among its members. But the competition remains at a level of immediacy, never threatening the basic social relations that have been instituted. ‘Change’ exists only if the analyst claims to look down on society without being a part of it. For its part, history that is based an accumulation of experience that transcends immediate relations allows no such transcendental perspective.

8.1.3 Societies Without History and the Origin of History

Lefort takes up the challenge he has formulated in an essay on ‘Sociétés sans histoire et Historicité’ in which he analyzes what he calls a problem for ‘all rationalist theories of human history’.¹³ Be it the idealism of a Hegel or Husserl, or the materialism of a Marx, the origin of historical society remains opaque. Once a historical course is engaged, the rationalist does fine. But there exist societies that never enter onto the path of history or at least do not do so of their own will and logic. By what human decision, through what bestowal of sense, does history emerge as structuring the interrelations of humans among themselves? The response need not postulate a ‘first town meeting’ at which a collective decision is made. What is important to understand how individual behavior finds itself determined by a collectively assumed decision which wrenches society from its naturalness and structures its behavior.

Societies without history known by anthropologists are not free from conflictual behavior: jokes hide hostility, counter-magic is used against the spells of the other, paternal love for the son may conflict with duty to the nephew in matrilineal societies. In spite of conflict, the society continues and reproduces itself daily. Lefort reformulates the question.

[S]ocial reality is never totally given in the present; the synchronic order always encloses a discordance between its elements; and the harmonious configuration itself does not reveal an essence but presents itself rather as a solution that has come into being [solution advenue], as an ensemble of concordant replies given to past situations even though the sense of these situations escapes actors in the present (an encounter with another people, discovery of a new mode of production, for example), and hence one does not know in what sense this is a reply to the unexpected. (ibid., p. 98)

Lefort reformulates his question, starting from the recognition that the lack of a past is not nothing; ‘its absence calls it to our attention, suggests a style of becoming that can at least be described’ (ibid., p. 99). The question of the origin of society, which poses the philosophical question of the institution of institutions, has more than an antiquarian interest.

The particular mode of becoming of societies without history underlines the need to reconceptualize the concept of history itself.

What is specific to an historical society appears to be that it envelops the event, and has the power to convert it into a moment of an experience, such that it appears as an element in a debate which men pursue among themselves. In historical society, change is not essentially the passing from a state to another, but the progress of an intention which anticipates the future by tying it to the past. (ibid., p. 102)

History is ‘a style of collective behavior’ that makes sense of the world while defining social relations (ibid.). For this reason, historical memory becomes crucial:

If a society preoccupies itself with interpreting its past and with situating itself with relation to that past, if it explicitly formulates the principles of its organization, if it relates its factual activity and everything new that happens to it [lui advient] to its consciousness of its role and its values—such a society presupposes a particular type of becoming. (ibid., p. 103)

This lapidary definition suffices for the moment; it permits Lefort to reformulate his question by asking how societies without history could live a collective past. These societies must have made the decision to avoid the path of history. That choice would point to the importance of the representation of the past (or future) through which a society becomes conscious of its own identity.

Lefort uses Gregory Bateson’s analysis of Bali as a ‘schismogenetic’ society to illustrate the way that the conflict-ridden Balinese society established a variety of mechanisms to preserve itself from upheaval. Crucial in this account is the way that the Balinese society depends on a rigid set of orientations in time, space, and status. Outside these coordinates, the individual is lost, quite literally becoming neurotic. This cannot be explained, as Bateson suggests, by psychoanalytic concepts.¹⁴ In such a society there are no neutral situations; all behavior is governed by the social relations that cement together the society and constitute the individual as what he is. The past and future too must be brought into the structure of the presence of the present; otherwise the experience of indetermination would destroy the capacity of the socialized individual to function. Non-historical social relations thus serve as a way of avoiding the outbreak of social conflict, legitimating the particular forms of domination that give the society its particular character.

It would be misleading to think of a ‘passage’ from one type of society to another. Societies without history are structured as if the only goal for the individual is to relate to others in order to create together a ‘we’ that is distinct from nature and continually reproduces itself through the network of immediate relations to others. All activity is multi-valued, joining together economic, moral, religious, and aesthetic values such that none is taken to exist as its own domain; each is simply as an expression, open to many interpretations, but never neutral or valueless.

On the other hand, it is when activity becomes labor that its signification is fixed, that it acquires objectivity by showing the adequation of an intention and an object, that it turns men from their debate among themselves to draw them into a finality which was not given with their simple co-existence. (ibid. p. 113)

There is nothing necessary in this development; nothing in the non-historical society prefigures the transformation to a new social form based on a new temporality. There is no reason why the significance of the previous experience of social division should change its sense or challenge its legitimacy. The process is not a natural, gradual evolution. Whereas production was subordinated to the confrontation and integration of people into the collectivity in the non-historical society, ‘it is by a revolution in historicity that men transform production into productivity, disengage themselves from the investment in the other person that characterized their primitive situation, and inaugurate a history’ (ibid.). The paradox is not the one that puzzles the rationalist—that there exist non-historical societies; the surprise results from what appears as an ‘adventure’ in human relations surging forth without necessity. The search for a causal explanation of this novelty would lose sight of the specificity of the social, whose understanding Lefort seeks here.¹⁵

For Lefort history and society are institutions (in the transitive sense) that emerge from human co-existence without material or moral preconditions. In a later, unpublished, reflection on this stage of his work, Lefort suggests that a further question concerned him.

What ethnologist, I ask, has questioned the conditions which give him access to an experience of the world incommensurable with his own? Who examines the unavoidable fact that we are anchored in this time, in this space, that there is the possibility, perhaps one should say necessity, of knowing the meaning of other human societies, whereas within the frontiers of these latter societies, at least for savage societies, there is not a view on the foreign world.¹⁶

Lefort’s analysis is not based on a cultural relativism; his concern is with the place of memory and of representation in a historical society. This far-ranging analysis is reinforced in another article written during this period, ‘Capitalisme et religion au XVIe sièclè’¹⁷ that contrasts the economic determinist views of Robertson with the more open interpretation by Tawney of the origins of another form of historical society, capitalism. Going beyond Max Weber’s insistence on the role of Protestantism in this development, Lefort stresses the ‘revolutionary’ character of this historical invention.

A revolution supposes … a vision of the past and an apprehension of the future as the negation of the past, a heterogeneity of time or of temporality; it sees an act in which men join together in opposing, as ‘we’, other men whom they dispossess of their sense of the world. (ibid., p. 1897)

While it is possible, retrospectively, to point to the existence of ‘capitalist’ behaviors and institutions as early as the thirteenth century, and while at least the Jesuits attempted to adapt Catholicism to these new conditions, neither the economy nor ideology alone can be said to univocally determine the emergence of capitalism. What is more, he continues, the Reformation had a revolutionary signification insofar as, by introducing a new attitude to the world, it marks a rupture with the established mode of representation. A ‘capitalist’ existing in the world of universal Catholicism could not intend to create capitalism as such; only through the opening of a new signification could the capitalist come to know himself as a self-conscious subject. This institution of a form of sociality is central to Lefort’s more directly political concerns, as he explains in his next major essay, ‘L’aliénation comme concept sociologique’ where the particularity of historical society is developed more fully.

8.1.4 Alienation, Ideology, and the Real: The Structure of Capitalism

Lefort’s intervention in the debates occasioned by the publication of the young Marx’s philosophical writings, particularly the 1844 Manuscripts, makes use of his anthropological and historical studies. He summarizes Evans-Pritchard’s description of Nuer society—a society which, at first glance, appears to be reified, alienated, and mystified by one commodity which, although important, was not its life source: cattle. All social relations are expressed in bovine terms: lineage, marriage, exchange, aesthetics, and religion. Indeed, the language of the Nuers seems to have a manifold of nuances when it comes to cows, even while it is impoverished elsewhere. Although Nuer material life is not solely dominated by cattle, its world of representation, down to its metaphors and proper names, is; the society seems to express a type of cattle-fetishism. It does not matter that the Nuer’s use of cattle is not ‘economically rational’; the image of the cow, its fetish, is crucial to understanding social relations. Wars, quarrels, personal relations are all hidden behind bovine mystifications. Indeed, even the Nuer dream content seems to indicate a latent hostility to the cow, as do its myths and rites. From the outside, it would seem that the society is fragile; from within, it functions harmoniously. This contrast encourages Lefort to offer a closer analysis of Marx himself.

At its most general level, Marx’s notion of alienation is derived from the difference between a historically specific reality and its unreal self-representation: the socialized nature of productive labor is a reality in capitalism; but the commodity form in which it appears is an unreality, an appearance which hides and deforms the reality. Alienation is this unity in difference. A ‘natural’ form of labor is not deformed or exploited under capitalism, causing the appearance of alienation. Marx’s insistence on the historical specificity of the capitalist form shows that the socialization of labor is an achievement of capitalism; the same is true for the formal equality among human labors (in the notion of abstract, socially necessary labor) which did not exist before capitalism. A critique based on ‘natural’ human qualities would return alienation to the domain of traditional philosophy. Marx’s achievement was based on the social and historical specificity of capitalism. Moreover, Marx points out that the alienated fetishized forms are nonetheless real, actual conditions. When he criticizes a society in which the movement of things dominates people’s activity and self-understanding, Marx notes that it is not things but people acting through the things who create these conditions of domination. What is more, as Lefort’s anthropological studies showed, domination has existed in manifold forms and societies; only in capitalism has it had the double structure of alienation: a negativity with positive implications.

Concentration on the notion of alienation makes it clear that capitalism is not simply an economic form in which money is invested, returning a profit, which is reinvested in production of greater and more efficient results (the process that Capital describes simply as ‘M-C-M’—money buys commodities, including labor power, which produce a surplus value). Lefort’s concern is to understand the model of sociality that is implicit in this process. He turns to Capital’s discussion of the phases of economic development that culminate in what Marx calls ‘Machinery and Modern Industry’. Whereas the earlier stages (called manufacturing) subordinated the worker to capital, he remained still an individual, with particular personal skills applied to work in specific branches. In the further development, these personal skills are surpassed; the individual becomes simply a cog, part of the ‘collective worker’ whose work is ever more decomposed into its component parts. As a result, the worker has no idea of the meaning of his work, which becomes only a job, a function that depends on conditions he cannot understand. At the same time, however, the interdependence of each and all is increased. Modern industry thus presents a Janus face:

It appears, in effect, that the specific movement of industry by which the unity of all the productive acts is established—a universal society —is at the same time the movement by which separate spheres of activity are constituted¹⁸

The social (and socialized) character of production is patent in the activity of work itself at the same time that the division of labor into separate spheres, its constant decomposition into partial processes, separates the individual from others within the productive unity. Whereas in earlier forms of manufacture the labor that produced value in the product was the work of individual craftspeople, in modern industry value is the product of ‘average socially necessary labor’. In manufacture the measure of value was the theorist’s reconstruction of the market-function; in modern industry it is the structure of the experience of reality itself: the unity of labor exists effectively in the multiple tasks which compose the industrial process; but each task is only a fragmentary moment of that unity. The technological form of a given productive task gives that production a (historically specific) universality; while the division of capital and labor , mental and manual, makes each activity particular. In this sense, the actual process of assembly line production, for example, incorporates a contradiction: each gesture is at once radically particular (turning this bolt, welding this joint) and effectively universal (as part of the total social process). But this terminology, borrowed from philosophy, should not mislead.

The contradiction is not that between universalization and particularization, but rather consists in the fact that the experience of the particular criticizes itself because it presents itself as privation of the universal, because the experience of the universal degenerates into the particular. (ibid., p. 51)

Lefort’s point, once again, is not that individual work is robbed of its essence, deformed, and distorted.

From this perspective, one cannot speak of a society alienated in technology, in money or whatever; or of an alienated man, as if it were possible for the being of the society or the man to become Other. Alienation is not a state; it is the process in which activity is cut up into a manifold of independent spheres at the same time that each of these divided activities is subordinated to a single productive schema. (ibid., p. 52)

The individual is destined at once to have a ‘profession’, a concrete form of activity which objectifies and socializes him; and at the same time, such stable activity loses its sense and becomes a particular fragment within a social process that is continually changing but always riven by the contradiction between the socialization that renders it universal and the particularization of the activities of the individuals.

This specification of alienation within the structure of capitalism itself implies both a development and a critique of Marxism. The notion of ideology can be grounded sociologically. Ideology is defined by Marx as an inversion of the real that is not the fault of consciousness but is built into the social structure itself. In theoretical terms, ideology is the transformation of the particular into the universal, taking part of the whole. The necessity of this transformation can be seen in the description of the fragmentation and atomization of the worker in the act of production in modern industry whose defining characteristic is the socialization (i.e., universalization) of society. Each particular domain, from the menial to the mental, from production to juridical or artistic activity, is effectively particular, and yet within the socialized totality, it is historically universal. Each particular facet of the division of labor tends, therefore, to attempt to realize the universal in its activity, to generalize from what it does to what the social totality as a whole is. The result, of course, is self-deception and the impossibility of having a totality view on the society, because each sphere, as particular, is closed in on itself, cut off from communication from within to without; and yet each does effectively, structurally, communicate in spite of itself. Ideology is thus not just a form of consciousness within a given social formation; ideology is the structure of capitalism itself. It is misleading to identify ideology with religion (or ‘fetishism’) or to interpret it as a function left-over from a pre-capitalist social formation. Those pre-capitalist forms are based on reference to an external or transcendent universal, whereas in modern capitalism’s socialized society, the universal is immanent in the activity of the particulars.

This analysis not only makes more precise Marx’s intent in formulating the concept of alienation; its implications led Lefort in the 1960s toward a more political interpretation that culminated in his Machiavel: le travail de l’oeuvre (1972). The processes of alienation, and of ideology, pose the problem of reality and of truth. What is most real and immediate appears in fact to be what is least real. The occultation of reality is built into the structure of capitalist social relations. Marx thought that his analysis uncovered the really real basis of capitalist reality itself. In fact, according to the logic of the structures it uncovers, Marxism is itself part of those structures: it is thought in alienation thinking alienation, ideology thinking the structure of ideology. As a result, the demand for totality that is built into, but denied by, the social structure leads to the demand for a kind of truth or rationality which is systematically and structurally unattainable. This paradox demands a redefinition of the task of theory. Theory becomes society’s self-interrogation; philosophy is not the unveiling of an always present truth that had been distorted; it is the continual process of interrogation, destined to ambiguity, prohibited from absolutizing its results. With this development, the kinship between the Merleau-Ponty’s ‘philosophy of ambiguity’ and Lefort’s own political development re-emerges. Lefort concludes his essay on alienation:

If the idea of alienation in the last analysis calls forth that of truth, it is on the condition that we find its properly sociological content. (ibid., p. 54)

This will be the grounds for a double operation: critique of the presuppositions of social and political analysis and action, and at the same time a return to and re-evaluation of philosophy. Traditional Marxism and its definition of theory, praxis, and of revolution are called into question in the same process.

8.2 The Political and the Philosophical

8.2.1 The Proletariat and the Problem of the Real and the True

In his homage to Merleau-Ponty written shortly after the latter’s death, ‘La politique et la pensée de la politique’, Lefort tries to understand the inability of the French Left to deal with the Algerian revolution and its implications in France. During the revolution, the Left united in its support of the Algerian FLN (the National Liberation Front); with the victory, the FLN itself showed its divisions, and the transferred enthusiasm of the Left was shattered in the face of the realistic decisions imposed on the Front. In France, the war’s end did not bring an upsurge in political action and consciousness, but a depression and decompression. What bothered Lefort in the attitude of the Left was that

politics increasingly bases itself on a moral perception of the world in terms of which one must chose at each instant between two principles which exclude one another; and since these principles express themselves in men and structures, one must give one’s unreserved adhesion to the party of revolution whose very existence is its justification.¹⁹

This moral politics differed from traditional Marxist politics based on a rational image of society produced by joining together revolutionary consciousness and structural necessity to produce a socialist future. The new ‘revolutionary’ morality replaces Marxism’s rational interpretation of history. Sartre stood for this moralist position; counter-position was that of Merleau-Ponty.

For Merleau-Ponty, the question of revolution and that of reality and of truth were inseparable.

In a sense, Marxism taught him what he was looking for, what his work on the body and perception had already opened to reflection: a relation with being which testifies to our participation in being, specifically, a philosophy of history that uncovers our historicity. The proletariat is precisely that singular being where we find the genesis of history, where the past lives on in its signification, where the truth of what is not yet announces itself. (ibid., p. 58)

Lefort’s detailed analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s attitude toward Marxism, in Sense and Nonsense, then in Humanism and Terror, shows how the ‘singular being’ of the proletariat becomes the central axis on which Marxism turns. Attempting to remain within the opening that he found in Marxism, Merleau-Ponty confronted it with its empirical correlates, bringing together the theoretical proletariat and its actual incarnation. The crucial moment for Marxism was its claim to join in one subject the empirical and the true, of praxis and theory. Yet this unique opening, the passionate analysis of which makes Humanism and Terror appear at times like a defense of Stalin’s purges, is precisely the grounds for the degeneration that Merleau-Ponty would trace a few years later in The Adventures of the Dialectic. If the proletariat is taken as the Truth which coincides with the Real, and if its project is defined outside its control, then the empirical proletariat and its activities no longer enter into the dialectical interaction. Correlatively, if the empirical proletariat is analyzed in itself, the truth claim essential to the revolutionary project can no longer be maintained. If one sticks to the Marxist premise, the result is the idea of the Party-as-Truth, as Moral Absolute, or as Revolutionary Will, as it appears in Lukács, Trotsky, and Sartre.

The result of Merleau-Ponty’s series of confrontations with Marxism is a reformulation of the dialectic of being and truth, history and historicity. Marx’s error is that he attempted to find a place in history which would be the incarnation of his theory. He thinks of history in terms of totality, in terms of the principle of the constitution of that totality. This, however, falls back into representational thought and the idea that the concept and the object are separate; it denies both truth and historicity:

Society cannot become an object of representation, or a materiality that we would have to transform, because we are rooted in it; we discover in the particular form of our ‘sociality’ the sense of our projects and our tasks. (ibid., p. 67)

The task of political theory is not to explain and express the individual’s attachment to a society and a history which determine it from the outside; what must be restored is the fundamental indetermination of our historical situation. The path to this restoration is the process of interrogation of the real.²⁰ This task presupposes the rejection of the goal ‘of instituting a regime freed from the exploitation of man by man, which translates into the program of a party which would demand Power’ (ibid., p. 68). This does not mean that for Lefort the class struggle no longer exists; to the contrary, modern capitalism makes resistance all the more necessary.

The idea of a thought committed to indetermination and of a politics committed to contestation is not foreign to the spirit of Marxism … We can recognize in Marx’s image of the proletariat the symbol of a rupture of the social unity, and of a questioning, within the movement of history itself, of the relation of man to being. (ibid., p. 69)

This aspect of Marx’s theory of the proletariat and its praxis had been neglected not simply by the weak-willed epigone or by the changing structure of capitalism. Lefort’s 1964–1965 Sorbonne lecture series, ‘Réalité sociale et histoire’, shows why this loss has occurred.

Marx’s claim in his early writings was that the critique of theory in specific social conditions is a critique of reality itself. This can be understood on the basis of the analysis of capitalist social relations as a process of alienation that gives rise necessarily to the forms of consciousness known as fetishism and ideology. The socialization of society accompanied by the continual and increasing division of labor means that from within the society knowledge of the social totality—the self-knowledge or transparence of the social—is not possible. As the impossible attempt to know society from within, bourgeois theory manifests bourgeois reality in its contradictoriness. It is ideological in the previously defined sense. Marx himself would fall under the same strictures—unless he could claim that his theory is itself the praxis of a class of society, a social reality, which is not subject to the distortions of the alienation process. This is why Marx was driven to find anchorage in a place that is both within society, a participant undergoing its alienating processes while also escaping the final fate of society. This praxis, this place, is of course the proletariat. Lefort explains why Marx can make this claim, looking first at the nature of the proletariat as a commodity, then its actual functions in the work process, and finally its political role. As the commodity called labor-power, the proletarian is a formally free contractual partner; in selling his labor-power, the proletarian lives the contradiction of being a commodity and being a proprietor. Moreover, the particular commodity labor-power has no fixed value; its value is determined through the process of the class struggle itself. The proletarian enters the labor process at first as a private individual; but the hours at work are lived as part of a collective, followed by a return to private life. This movement from individual to collective and back to individual again does not take place in the sphere of circulation but in a specific kind of production, modern industry, where the veils are lifted and the worker experiences the material social reproduction (as opposed to the still artisanal manufacturing process).

Modern industrial production must obey a double demand: that the worker do what he is told and yet that he participate, want to produce, and confront the unexpected quickly and creatively. The proletarian experiences rationalization at the same time that, not tied to one branch or job, and especially not tied to the commands of profit, he also experiences the perversions of that rationalization. When the proletarian emerges to find a political role, this is not simply a defensive move; it reflects also a struggle for social control. In this expression of its goals, the proletariat does not need to conceal from itself its intentions, whereas the bourgeoisie must hide from itself and its supporters the structure of domination which its rule perpetuates.

These structural conditions explain the possibility of true social knowledge for the proletariat. An infinite dialectic is established in which the proletariat, while still a part of bourgeois society, continually engages in its own self-critique. The argument is not circular. Marx presents a description of the proletarian situation and then claims that the description grounds the revolutionary implications (or the ‘truth’) of that description. Theory is subordinated to praxis—but from the point of view of theory. Marx supposes a dialectic of theory and praxis that ultimately refuses to make the one depend on the other. But once the validity of the option for the proletariat is assumed, the impossibility of falsifying the theory arises. Some social tendencies seem to confirm the analysis, others deny it. These latter are the problem. To reduce them to mere accidents would be similar to the ‘method of the progressive intellectuals’. Lefort suggests that it is necessary to stop trying to formulate indefinite corollaries to Marxism; it is time to ask about its premises.

Can thought ever postulate that there exists an empirical place where history and society unveil themselves in their totality, where all equivocation is dissipated, where institutions, collective behaviors and symbols become transparent, where all the significations of the event are recuperated in the same truth?²¹

The question goes to the heart of Marxism. One could reply that Marx does not treat the proletariat as already universal, fully conscious, free from contradictions and that he doesn’t suppose that society can be fully known but, on the contrary, stresses its contradictory character. What is more, Marx insists that history need not lead inevitably or logically to socialism: barbarism is also a real possibility. The question nonetheless reemerges.

How can there be a correct relation with history, an exchange between social theory and social praxis, open investigation and true interrogation, if we have only the choice between the continual affirmation of an absolute sense and the negation of this sense which becomes the negation of all sense? (ibid., p. 69)

If the task of History is the achievement of socialism, if particular historical events and social configurations are to be interpreted as functions of the movement toward this goal, if those phenomena that stand in the way of this movement are either integrated into the process or ignored in the press toward action, and if, in other words, the contradictory reality is taken up only in its positive aspects, then the dialectic is eliminated, experience cannot do more than modify a presupposed truth, and theory becomes raw empiricism.

The result is thus paradoxical. Pretending to discover within history, at the level of the phenomena, an absolute foundation, the theorist rejoins the position of the philosopher who flies above history and subsumes empirical reality under the idea of a transcendental becoming of truth. But this paradox should not surprise us, for if the two procedures coincide, this is because in both cases thought postulates an adequation of sense and being (of the being of society and the being of history). (ibid., p. 70)

The result is the temptation to have recourse to the myth of possessing the entirety of the phenomenon, which is precisely what the analysis of the alienated structures of capitalist society warned against. The theory becomes ideological. It is a totality separated from the real that it claims to represent.

Marxism opens the question of the reality and truth of the social; but it closes off hastily the interrogation that could give access. Its error can be said to result from the equation of the signifier (the working class) and the signified (the revolution), reflecting the failure to go beyond representational and rationalist thought. Lefort’s lectures show that Marx did not always fall into this error. The analysis of the Asiatic societies, for example, or the discussion of the peasantry in the Eighteenth Brumaire demonstrates the role of the symbolic in social constitution. Rather than following Lefort through the analyses of Marx, his development of the insights that he has won from his careful reading of Marx into a theory that interweaves theory and political practice bears consideration on its own. A link between this new stage and his previous work is provided in his ‘Réflexions sociologiques sur Machiavel et Marx: La politique et le réel’, which takes its starting point from the attempt by the Italian philosopher and communist party leader, Antonio Gramsci to reconcile Marx and Machiavelli.

8.2.2 Political Realism as Interrogation

Gramsci suggests that beyond their obvious differences, Marx and Machiavelli share in a common political realism which opens up a new experience of the world, a new conception of society and truth.

What constitutes the common originality of their work is that both begin from the certainty that the real is what it is, and that in a certain manner there is nothing to be changed in it; and yet both induce from this a practical task.²²

From this perspective, Marx’s famous 11th Feuerbach Thesis (opposing the contemplative stance of the philosopher to the activist imperative to ‘change’ the world) is not the simple demand for engagement, moral choice, or spontaneous activism. It is the assertion that the real is through and through praxis and that recognition of the contradictions of the present already points beyond the present moment. Similarly in the case of Machiavelli, Gramsci finds an anticipation of the ‘philosophy of praxis’.

Knowledge of the past teaches what men are; the reading of empirical history is a reading of human nature. Realism consists in acting in such a way that, bringing the present back into the historical conditions of the past, it becomes possible to either apply the adequate remedies previously conceived, or to imagine other ones because we are aware of the errors that have been committed. In all events, our power of intervention is based on the consistency of both human passions and of the struggle that opposes everywhere a privileged class and the people. That opposition is the origin of all the difficulties as well as all the solutions. (ibid., pp. 117–18)

Gramsci notes that although they were apparently addressing different classes—Marx for a revolutionary proletariat, Machiavelli for the Prince—in both cases the relation of the work to its public was similar. True, the Prince was in appearance written for the ruler; but the ruler has to justify his domination, which means, in reality, to hide it. Machiavelli’s recipes may be correct; but a Prince could never publish them! Machiavelli did publish them, because he was writing for someone else: the rising, yet still timid, bourgeoisie.

Machiavelli is said to be a political realist insofar as he recognizes the historical task that the new bourgeoisie, blinded by tradition, has not yet understood.

If he draws our attention to the nature of power and shows that it is a human creation arising from the permanent conditions of social struggle, it is because he is speaking to those who are blinded by Power, who haven’t yet understood that it is within their grasp if only they prove to be the stronger. And he shows the price of its conquest. (ibid., p. 120)

In this way, The Prince appears to have the same demystifying function as the ‘philosophy of praxis’, as Gramsci calls Marxism. The idea of a historical task that the Prince recognizes must be made accessible to the consciousness of the people. In this critical translation, Machiavelli’s Prince becomes the ‘Modern Prince’, the Leninist party. The Prince/Party has the task of understanding what is historically necessary and seeing in it the actuality of the people’s will, however mystified its momentary form. The Prince/Party is the mediator. ‘In such an interpretation, Marxism permits us to rediscover the sense of Machiavellianism; but Machiavellianism rejoins, and defines in its place, the Marxist intention’ (ibid., p. 123). Overthrowing the traditional authorities and mystifications permits the establishment of a new authority, which is the task to which all other considerations are subordinated.

The political implications of this realism are the distinction of the meaning of class struggle from the daily life of the class. The sphere of politics is circumscribed and separated.

Precisely because of the opacity that it maintains with regard to the masses, it calls for the elaboration of a particular strategy whose objective is to obtain and to maintain their consensus, to convince them of the legitimacy of their leaders and the utility of their own sacrifices. (ibid., p. 124)

This lends assurance to the leaders, giving them the certainty that they are the agents of History and that they are correct in subordinating all else to the achievement of their task. The writings of the political realist are functional; they are judged by the success or failure of their appeal. A problem emerges here. Since the appeal is to the universal, no particular case can disprove it; either the position of the realist is effective, or he must remain silent. Lefort offers an illustration. The bourgeoisie exists as an economic class, but it needs political representatives because the basis of its economic unity is competition; the proletariat, however, cannot operate through political representatives because it is itself only when it actually struggles. This distinction refutes the claim of the Prince/Party to represent the universal because its real foundation in the particulars of class struggle is denied. The origin of its legitimacy in proletarian praxis lies outside of the Prince/Party; its claim to universality is simply ideological.

Pursuing his notions of indetermination and interrogation, Lefort challenges Gramsci’s insistence on realism by describing more closely at Machiavelli’s originality.

That originality does not consist in certain propositions which would support an essential thesis. It consists in an approach which makes the writer pass from a position to another, which permits him to outline successively this or that thesis and then to destroy them as theses; to conserve certain markers [repères] in this movement, to multiply them, and thanks to them, to circumscribe an order of phenomena whose unity had never been previously perceived. (ibid., pp. 126–7)

This movement from thesis to thesis, a multi-level unity in difference, is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical interrogations. Lefort takes care to insure that he is not imposing a thesis on Machiavelli. The nature of the reality he is analyzing can only be seen through this process because it is a historical reality; it is not a series of circumscribed events in objective space and time, nor is it an idealized image of the progress of humanity to self-knowledge.

History in the life of a people is the repetition of the project which constitutes society: the assembling of men who understand that they depend on the same public thing, acquire a collective identity, inscribe their respective positions in a common natural space, their institutions in a common cultural space, and determine themselves as a specific community vis-à-vis foreign people. They find a certain equilibrium in the relation of forces (even if they constantly put it into question), and are led by the will of the Master, that of the most powerful or that of the majority among them, to find the means for their security and their development. (ibid., p. 129)

Historical reality is in one sense a repetition; but the repetition itself is itself historical, taking place in a specific milieu, in structures and institutions that offer a finite number of choices. Machiavelli’s multi-signifying illustrations from Roman history in his Discourses manifest the social divisions out of which an equilibrium has emerged; how it is threatened by ignorance, rapacity, and fear; and how the equilibrium is maintained by the singular combination of the Republic and its imperial ventures. Similarly, he recognizes that the people is virtuous, but can be misled, and that although the Republic may choose the best leaders, their position is challenged by the fact that one stratum cannot dominate the theater of civil strife. No regime can incarnate the one good regime; politics must recognize that reality is historical, indeterminate, and constantly changing.

Machiavelli’s ‘realism’ is based on the denial of any system of fixed representations. It is the ‘realism’ of the phenomenologist. The same is true, Lefort argues, of Marx.²³

If Machiavelli’s thought has come down to us, it is because it forces us to embrace simultaneously these diverse perspectives. We make his realism our own when we observe that the conquest of the real is realized in the critique of each image at which we would be tempted to stop. (ibid., p. 132)

The upshot of Lefort’s analysis of Machiavelli is the project of defining an interrogation of the logic of the political.²⁴ ‘Doesn’t realism consist precisely in defining the terms of a situation, in ordering them in the form of a question?’ (ibid., p. 131) The question is more fundamental than the classical problem of political philosophy, which imagines that there can be one unique and stable Good Life in the City. The political question must ground the realist analysis of the social. It poses the questions of rationality, truth, and the nature and goals of theory. The emergence of the social to itself which preoccupied Lefort in his earlier writings reappears here as fundamental to a redefinition of the political.

8.2.3 The Logic of the Political

Lefort’s logic of the political is not the traditional, static onto-logic: it is historical and social in the sense that these terms have been redefined here. The political as such is constituted along with, and inseparately from, the social as such. It institutes a specific mode of experiencing the historical. The earlier analysis of Mauss’s interpretation of the gift relation made clear that the social is a wrenching free of interpersonal and communitarian relations from their natural insertion that defines at once the individual and the social community. With this institution of the social, the political necessarily emerges. It may not be recognized as such due to a concerted effort to avoid the decisions and divisions that it opens up. The ‘society without history’ appears to be such a society without the political. Lefort refers here to Pierre Clastres’ ethnographical demonstration that although retrospectively division is seen to be present in primitive societies, they are organized around its denial; in some cases, they deny that the difference that makes a difference (e.g., justifying what might look like social division as resulting from a transcendent, external source), or they may refuse to distinguish what appear to modern eyes as separate spheres of life (the economic, political, religious functions remain immediately interwoven). Although the political cannot be separated from the social, the two spheres do not exist on the same level, as determined by, or as determining, the social. It is not possible a priori to affirm that these phenomena are political, those are cultural, the others economic, as if history had come to an end and the analyst is able to stand outside and above it. The political is co-institutional with the social. It is a society’s self-reflection, the image that it gives to itself of what makes it a ‘self’. In this way, the political attempts to diffuse awareness of the problem of social division. Because the political is representational and symbolic, it cannot exist separately from or independently of the social that it at once represents and brings to self-awareness. Were it to be separated, it would lose its grounds, its origin, and become ideological. Nor can the political be separated from power.

It is necessary to begin from the general division [of the social and the political] to understand where power acquires a form, how it is effectively circumscribed, how it is represented, how it represents itself to others—[as well as] how the collective representation invests power in the social body and what simultaneously happens to the determination of nature and the gods. This will show how power separates itself and is perceived as Other, at a distance and ‘above’ society; and how the position of the separated power is modified.²⁵

This is the general task that the political in any society must fulfill, even when it is not articulated self-consciously as the political relations different from other forms of experience. A logic of the political can thus be established. It will be the logic of a unity in difference whose differentiations are not aufgehoben in a more complete unity but remain open to the contingencies of historical creation. The system is unstable, riven by conflict; change is always possible, never necessary.

The implications of Lefort’s approach can be seen by a reflection on the advent of democracy in Athens. With democracy came new forms of sociality; the space and time of life acquired a different sense, the relation to nature and to other humans was modified, and discourse took on a new meaning, becoming philosophical interrogation. Simultaneously, the political and the image of power changed: as politics and power moved to the center of the city, they were not perceived as forms of domination, but as open to the interrogation by society of its own nature and goals. In this way, as Lefort argues, society is attempting to incorporate in itself the law of its own origin, accounting for its own institution rather than accept a transcendent justification. Societal units and their articulations are in constant communication; their interrelations are openly readable in the social space. In a word, the society seeks its self-transparence. This self-understanding is specific to democracy.

[It is an] attempt that culminates in, and is rooted in the idea of a power which is de jure inoccupiable, inappropriable, at an equal distance from all those who are bound to it; it is no one’s power, neutral, and as such, instituting the social; it is at once the instigator and guarantor of the Law under which each finds his name, his place, and his limit. (ibid., p. 2)

Politics does not become a separate sphere of discourse; it is interwoven throughout the society and the socialization of the citizens. It is important to see that politics is not the whole that gives meaning to the parts; that would be metaphysics.

[Rather, the] interrogation of the political is born in a society where, as an effect of an identical historical rupture, both power and knowledge are put into question. Power is questioned in the relation it maintains with the social division in all its forms; and at the same time the knowledge is translated into a multiplicity of social discourses. Through these discourses knowledge of the markers [repères] of the real and of the law is opened to question. (ibid., pp. 2–3)

The linkage of the political and knowledge occurs through the medium of a discourse that carries both of them, in which they represent themselves as they are instituted in and institute the process of socialization. Lefort’s analysis of the political and that of knowledge once again manifest a similar structure. The logic of the political is not only referred to the social, but to the search for knowledge; the questions of reality and truth are linked in this way to the political.

Lefort spells out his logic of the political in a long article, ‘Sur la démocratie: le politique et l’institution de social’, written with his former student, Marcel Gauchet, on the basis of Lefort’s lectures at the Université de Caen, as well as in his dissertation: Le travail de l’œuvre Machiavel.²⁶ The logic of his argument can be seen by looking at the position of the Prince, as democratic, tyrannical, or even self-proclaimed socialist. The Prince must incarnate the unity of society. He is the symbol of the Law; he has no proper function because the political, as symbolic, has no independent existence. That means that the society itself has no real delimitation; it cannot properly be called a society. Insofar as there is no Other different from the collective that incarnates its self-representation, socialization cannot take place, and collective consciousness and historical memory are not possible. The Law must be greater than and different from the individuals in order for them to find their place in it. As a result, the Prince must now assert the separation of the political from society as well as the independence of the Law. This, in turn, poses legitimation problems.

Either the Prince must attempt to rejoin society—but this defeats his purpose by making him dependent on society and destroying the symbolic incarnation of the Law. The other option available is to impose the law, running the risk that the citizens will revolt. The dilemma of the Prince is that he is at once the incarnation of the social yet distant and distinct from it. This dilemma does not result from the subjective choice by the Prince; it is a problem that arises when society rips itself free and constitutes itself through its political self-representation. Navigating between these two poles, a variety of mediations can be established by different forms of government; none escapes the dilemma. The courts are to instantiate the Law, yet they must be open to the new; legislators are to be representatives who establish the Law for everyone; pressure groups and political parties act from their specific positions in society in the name of the entire society. The dual claim to be within and yet without, particular and universal, opens the danger ideology if experience is reduced to one or the other pole. On the other hand, these same conditions open political discourse to the questions of interrogatory philosophy: reality and truth.

The interdependence and interrelation of the phenomena of ideology and the political are implicated in the self-assertion and self-maintenance of the social and its discursive character which is lost when the difference of political experiences collapsed. Aware that his use of the term ‘political’ may appear too vague, Lefort tries to explain himself more precisely.

If we nonetheless call political the ‘form’ in which the symbolic dimension of the social reveals itself, this is not intended to privilege the relations of power among all other social relations, but to make it clear that the power is not ‘something’ empirically determined but is indissociable from its representation, and that the test of it is simultaneously a test of knowledge and of the mode of articulation of the social discourse that is constitutive of the social identity.²⁷

Perhaps the most striking illustration of his thesis is found in Marx’s discussion of Asiatic Despotism. The concept itself indicates that this ‘mode of production’ is articulated in terms of something other than the productive base itself. What struck Marx in this social formation is its permanence through all types of material and social change, which is due to the absolute separation of political power from the rural community it governs. This absolute separation gives this form of rule its transcendent legitimation, diffusing the potential for revolt arising from the existing divisions inherent in the society. The efficacity of this power reflects what Lefort calls l’imaginaire, a Freudian term that conceptualizes the representational dimension of psychic functioning, expressing the self-image that humans need in order to function as a social being. This self-image can be articulated in the Oedipal drama where the Father represents the Law, indicating to the male child what is socially forbidden, teaching the child his place in the society. Analogously, the social imaginaire would represent the Law of society’s structuring, telling it what is and is not legitimate, what can and cannot be changed, and ultimately defining and limiting its self-identity. The imaginaire, symbolically articulated, structures the scientific, religious, and aesthetic discourse through which a society comes to know itself. Its function is to neutralize the conflictual origins of the social, to create the illusion of permanence and necessity which characterized the ‘society without history’. This task must ever begin anew and engender the logic of the political; to imagine that the political (or ideology) could succeed in conjuring away the menace is to believe in a society without origins, a thought without its situatedness, a self-transparency of the real—in short, a positivism!

8.2.4 Politics and Ideology

The interdependence of the political and the ideological is articulated through the discourse on, and in the knowledge of, the social. To be, the political must enunciate the Law. In this process, the logic of its function leads it to neglect its origins in the social. It is the articulation of the law that insures that social division becomes real. Once again, Lefort explains his argument by reference to Marx, who is said to sometimes conflate the discourse on the real (or social) with the discourse emerging from the real itself. This is another variant of the distinction of a theory of and a theory for practice. Although Marx interprets the ‘mode of production’ in a way that includes not only material production but social reproduction (including the spheres of language, consciousness, and community), he describes this social self-production in the naturalist space of a linearly progressing humanity. Marx seems at times to realize the difficulty. When he asks about the origins of social divisions, he falls back on empirical data, appealing ultimately to the division of ‘labor’ in the sexual act. ‘Here’, writes Lefort, ‘Marx’s positivism is unequivocally unveiled’.²⁸ The idea that some brute fact, whose origin cannot be further explained, could come to give meaning to self- and social representations offers no bridge between a supposed natural state and the meaning attributed to it. Lefort’s goal is to interrogate such political presuppositions that affect what he called a ‘realist politics’.

The next step in Lefort’s argument again begins with a critical reading of Marx’s theory of ideology. The first point to be made is that Marx discovered the phenomenon; he did not apply reductively a criticism of ideas in order to discover a ‘reality’ beneath them; that reduction makes sense only if the critic knows already what is truly real. Marx himself took a different path from his orthodox followers.

From the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State’ to Capital, one principle of interpretation is maintained, which invites us to discover in the social structure the process of representation, first of all circumscribed within the limits of the philosophical, religious or political discourse. And it does not seem exaggerated to say that if Marx became disinterested in Hegel, it was because he discovered in the capitalist system as such the identification of the real and the rational that he had criticized [in philosophy]. It appeared to structure the form [mise en forme] of the relations of production where the logic of operations exhibits itself thanks to the obliteration of the conditions of their appearance. But such is the virtue of the deplacement effectuated in Capital that ideology shows itself there not only rooted in but pre-formed by the mode of production; that capitalism shows itself to be, in a sense, the original ideological discourse—a discourse, it will be recalled, that the author designates explicitly as such several times by making the protagonists speak.²⁹

The argument that ideology and alienation are expressed in the very structure of capitalism opened the career of ideology which adopted different forms as social complexity increased. Lefort distinguishes what he calls bourgeois ideology, totalitarian ideology, and the contemporary manifestation of an ‘invisible ideology’. These figures are expressions of the imaginaire in the given social and historical situation.

Ideology is articulated in the attempt to re-create the society without history. Its characteristics include the neglect of origins, the denial of the division, and the pretense of rendering social space self-transparent. Bourgeois ideology is specified by its continual reference to Ideals (Humanity, Justice, Democracy, Progress, etc.), its belief in Rules guiding action, and the multiplicity of accepted discourses it legitimates. Each of these discourses presents clearly the distinction between the Ideal and the Real, the Rule and its Application, Power and the Social. It is admitted that the Ideals are not (yet) realized; the existence of the Rule is assumed, yet believed only when its effects become manifest; and the multiplicity of discourses bears witness to the ongoing attempt to bring together the poles of the ideal and the real. A ‘logic’ similar to that of the political manifests itself in the framework of this form of ideology. In articulating itself, the social pretends to self-transparency, yet as articulated, it separates itself from itself; as separate it is open to question, challenge, revision; finally, a new articulation or discourse emerges. Bourgeois ideology is vulnerable for this reason; yet from within its own logic, any challenge simply becomes grist for its mill (as in the expression that ‘the exception proves the rule’). Challenges appear as appeals to progress, confirming the twin projects of the advance of Enlightenment and History.

The traditional Marxist critique of bourgeois ideology correctly points to its mystifying nature; the puzzle arises for the Marxist when the overthrow (or ‘transcendence’) of bourgeois ideology takes the form of totalitarianism. Lefort’s ‘meta-sociological’ suggestion is that the bourgeois logic of indefinite repetition is ‘haunted by tautology’.³⁰ Totalitarianism tries to achieve in reality the ‘reconciliation’ of the poles that bourgeois ideology holds apart. That separation is to be eliminated in a new type of sociality with no barriers between the spheres of life. Totalitarian ideology attempts to incarnate a mastery of social reality from within society itself; it is a politics which denies its separateness from civil society. It does not speak of the real, but attempts to incarnate itself in it, particularly through the vehicle of the mass party. Typical of the totalitarian ideology is the appearance of a ‘new social agent’, the militant, who pretends to incarnate the universal, speaking in the name of society itself.³¹ The militant is both in the social and of it; and yet he claims also to know its reality and its immanent goals. The question of subjectivity is covered over, as is the problem of interpersonal relations. A new functionality becomes operational; the artificial nature of the party becomes a virtue, representing a smooth logic claiming to function in terms of the image of the totality.

The functioning of totalitarianism closes the society in on itself; there is no external source of identity, legitimation, or socialization. This change in the nature of the social itself explains how totalitarianism differs from previous despotisms which were always marked by the separation and autonomy of the Prince. It explains also its instability, and the concomitant function of the Terror, which is not accidental or arbitrary. The goal of the totalitarian is to abolish the difference between the political and the social, the ideal and the real, signifier and signified. At the same time, it must show what it has done, in order to identify itself as absolute Power. Where the bourgeois ideology spoke of the social without claiming to be fully incarnate in it, the totalitarian has no distance. If the organization goes awry, the Plan fails or the bureaucrat misuses power, the whole edifice is put into question. Terror is not only necessary for this reason; it also makes each individual contingent and particular; all are alike in that the Terror may strike anyone. The result is that the desired fusion and elimination of the division within the social is realized; although viable, the edifice is fragile. It need not fall on its own.³² Its grotesque forms—in Nazi Germany or in Russia, for example—suggest that perhaps another means for conjuring the division which marked bourgeois ideology is possible and that our modern Western societies may be taking another path.³³

Lefort calls the western alternative to totalitarian practice (similar to what Habermas called ‘late capitalisim’) ‘the invisible ideology’. Reacting to both bourgeois and totalitarian ideologies, the attempt, again, is to close over the distance between the representation and the real which threatened bourgeois ideology while at the same time renouncing the completion of the representation within the real by means of its totalization, as is the case with totalitarianism. Analogously, the invisible ideology stresses the role of the group as both an expression of and the goal of social communication. What is communicated is not important; what counts is bringing everyone together in a homogeneous here-and-now, conveying the impression of a mastery over the social that is felt by each member. Personal presence is stressed, even though the person and the message are dissolved in the ritual of communication itself. Nothing is taboo: ‘in no epoch has one talked so much’ (ibid., p. 45). There are no Masters, no Rules or Ideals, and no image of the Historical Totality (as in bourgeois ideology); there is only the information that is experienced as being the social itself shared by all.

The result cloaks social divisions. Although talk about class, social contradictions, inequalities is permitted, these simply become part of the socialization process. Everything is communicable, sayable, intelligible; nothing is sacred, but everything is equal, equally real, and equally unreal. Science too changes: no longer acting on the real or a theory of it, science is the real itself. Organization is not acting on the real but obeying its dictates. There are no longer bosses and employees, workers and machines; all are part of a functioning whole, organized by a rationality independent of individual desire and human choice. Science spreads further insofar as everything is in principle equally intelligible; Nature, Psyche, and Society are united through the artificialism of method, be it formalism, operationalism, or systems theory. A further facet of this machinery is the modern (‘structuralist’) attempt to eliminate the subject in favor of the text. Pedagogy plays also a role, using its measurement techniques and ultimately the notion of self-evaluation to eliminate the (bourgeois) role of the Master. As a result, knowledge is no longer related to the Truth or the Law but only to the supposedly real itself. This reality is transmitted through information, which all must possess on every conceivable subject in order to join the others in the group. On the other hand, this knowledge is not a closed system; everything can and must be said; the quest for perpetual novelty illuminates a present that never becomes a lived past nor opens onto a future.

Lefort’s description of the forms of ideology, written in the 1970s, implicitly recognizes but does not develop an idea of convergence; it is based on structural analogies that are governed by the logic of the political. Lefort’s analysis is descriptive, not predictive, letting ‘the real’ speak for itself. That characteristic opens it up toward future evolutions. In his text, he considers as well the ideology of consumption, the transformation of nature into environment, the role of psychology, changing fashions, and more. What is at issue is (1) the attempt to destroy or deny the historical dimension of society through the ‘novelty’ of a perpetual present; (2) the closing of the question of the origins of the social by instantaneously and continually re-creating the group personality; (3) the denial of the division that institutes the social and creates the illusion that through the plethora of information and communication the social itself is speaking; (4) the homogenization of the real so that it no longer poses a threat through its divisions and difference; and (5) the socialization of the individual in such a manner as to limit the possible expressions of desire to a sphere defined in advance as the real.

8.3 Philosophy Again

In his conclusions to a long review of Lefort’s Machiavel, Marcel Gauchet writes that ‘he restores for us the possibility of thinking about society in a manner which is philosophy and knows that it can only be philosophy’.³⁴ From the time that he broke with the Fourth International, Lefort had rejected the theory of the Leninist party as leader of the proletarian revolution. He split twice with Socialisme ou Barbarie over the implications of this issue and has analyzed it extensively in his essay on May 1968, written in the heat of events and published in La Brèche. Lefort’s insistence that the proletariat alone can make its own revolution through its own experience earned him epithets from Sartre for being a ‘pure consciousness’ above the fray. While he has abandoned the theory of the proletariat in its classical form, Lefort’s attitude toward social change has remained constant. A theory of the social which knows that it can only be philosophy is all that the intellectual—or anyone else, for that matter—can claim. To think that you are doing more is not only self-deluding but dangerous. At best, such a theory which ignores its own limits can be an honestly bourgeois ideological stance; at worse, ignoring its own origins and claiming knowledge of the totality, it falls over to the totalitarian side. But this limitation of theory does not imply an ‘existentialism’ of some vague sort: that would be to enter ‘the invisible ideology’.

In his essay on Merleau-Ponty after the sudden death of the philosopher, ‘La politique et la pensée de la politique’, Lefort stressed that a reflection consistent with the philosopher’s thinking would support proletarian goals insofar as ‘we can recognize in them the symbol of a rupture of the social unity, and of a questioning, in the movement of history itself, of the relation of man to being’.³⁵ That rupture is not only due to the action of the proletariat. Within the context of the totalitarian and the invisible forms of ideology, such a rupture is open and inevitable, although inarticulate and unaware of its own nature. The political imperative, however, is not to play the modern Prince. Each participates from his own place: each must analyze, write, and speak for himself. No more can be done. This is not the position of a pure spirit watching the contradictory particulars fight it out, although it certainly is not Lenin in the Zurich library reading Hegel’s Logic. It is the place of lucidity guided by theory; the place of theory and the place which the individual cannot but occupy within a social written in the double register of the Law and the Real. To want to be the leader, or to think of oneself as the Marxist militant, is to be open to contradiction in one’s own attitudes and from the social reality itself.

This does not mean that there will not be social change, that all horizons are blocked, and that exploitation and domination will continue. Lefort’s position does not imply a quietism; he expects struggle to continue in all domains. But social change will not follow a linear logic any more than it follows mechanical laws. It surges forth unexpectedly. Not every action that calls itself ‘revolutionary’ is in fact conducive to political change. Lefort’s contribution appears to some critics limited to nay-saying, calling for an always awake attentiveness to the dangers of bureaucratization and renewed forms of domination. There is more to be said. In the domain of theory—as philosophy and as an approach to a radical sociology and political theory—Lefort elaborates insights which, from its own point of view and through its own praxis, the New Left has gropingly sought. His attempt to renew that unity of the theoretical, the social, and the political inaugurated by Marx and interrogated repeatedly by Lefort suggests the need to remain in touch with the origins of that New Left experience .

Footnotes

1

As was shown in Chap. 5, the earlier work of Jürgen Habermas tried to avoid this reproach. I will return to the further development of his version of critical theory in the ‘Afterword’ to this volume. I take the liberty of adding to this note a reference to a recent article that I wrote on Habermas as himself an engaged political thinker under the title ‘Citizen Habermas’, in Constellations, November 2015. https://​onlinelibrary.​wiley.​com/​doi/​pdf/​10.​1111/​1467-8675.​12190

2

On the group ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, see also the discussion in Chap. 9 of Cornelius Castoriadis. It would demand a separate monograph to trace the nuances of the group’s history or to try to separate the contributions of the individual members. By treating Lefort and Castoriadis separately, I hope to make clear both what unites them and at least the basis, if not the substantial details, of their differences. (The third member of the group to become a well-known critical philosopher in the 1970s was Jean-François Lyotard, a friend to whom I am also indebted, whose later work on the post-modern and the end of ‘grand narratives’ falls outside the scope of this present work.)

3

On the quarrel, cf. Sartre’s ‘Merleau-Ponty’, published in the commemorative issue of Les Temps Modernes and reprinted in Situations IV (especially pp. 257ff.). It is hard to avoid adding in reference to this article that Sartre seems never to have understood the radical novelty of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. His continual categorization of Merleau-Ponty as expressing a longing for the primal happiness he lived in his youth may be interesting psychology, but it explains little about Merleau-Ponty’s work, although perhaps much about Sartre!

4

‘Entretien avec C. Lefort’, in l’Anti-Mythes, No. 14, p. 10. (The interview dates from April 19, 1975, and is now translated in Telos No. 30, Winter, 1977. The l’Anti-Mythes has also published interviews with P. Clastres, Henri Simon, and C. Castoriadis, the latter having been translated in Telos No. 23, Spring 1975.) The animating spirit of the l’Anti-Mythes seems to have Lefort’s student, Marcel Gauchet, who later broke violently with his teacher. Gauchet became the co-editor of the journal Le Débat, a central organ of the French intellectual center-left.

5

Ibid., pp. 12–13.

6

Ibid., p. 27.

7

This argument is developed particularly in ‘Le prolétariat et sa direction’ and ‘L’expérience prolétarienne’, both of which are reprinted in Eléments d’une Theorie de la bureaucratie (Droz, 1971). In the latter article, Lefort develops a methodology for the sociological analysis of what the experience, and hence the consciousness, of the proletariat in fact is, how it changes, and why it can be so volatile.

8

The term will be defined more precisely below. It might be noted that this definition of the specificity of the social against Sartre’s idealism points to the importance of recognizing that the properly sociological deals with ‘2 plus n persons’ (as opposed to Sartre’s existential individualism).

9

In Eléments d’une Theorie de la bureaucratie (hereafter Eléments), op. cit., p. 65.

10

For example, Les Temps Modernes’ support for Gomulka as the only choice in the post-1956 situation in Poland, even though he clearly was not helping to extend—quite the contrary, he sought to normalize—the movement that brought him to power. At least by saving the party, and acting cautiously to prevent another Russian invasion, he appeared to the ‘progressive intellectuals’ to be giving History another chance. Similarly, Lefort shows that the application of this same ‘method’ transforms Sartre’s apparently critical ‘The Ghost of Stalin’ into a superficial critique that denounces and sees a series of errors and contingencies at the root of Russian political behavior rather than analyzes the foundations of Stalinism.

11

Aside from some nasty polemical remarks, Sartre’s major criticism of Lefort is that he denies mediation, seeing the proletariat in a crypto-Hegelian fashion. Sartre sees Lefort’s notion of the accumulation of proletarian experience as built on the representation of an evolution from seed to flower to fruit. Lefort’s proletariat is said to be modeled on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister or Marivaux’s Marianne: it earns its education through adversity. Sartre portrays Lefort’s attitude as one of the pure intellectual consciousness standing outside the fray because he insists that the Stalinism must be accounted for through an analysis of the actual experience of the class. Sartre’s criticism points to a real problem in Lefort’s position, although he neglects its nuances for his polemical purposes. Lefort has seen the problems with his understanding of the proletariat, although not by making apologies to Sartre. On the other hand, Lefort’s attack on Sartre remains valid despite the modifications that Sartre’s politics have undergone since then. Lefort is correct in pointing out that, although it stresses ambiguity, the Sartrean ambiguity is always for consciousness, subjective; as a result, it can be cleared up once one chooses the path of History. For Lefort, Sartre thus leaves behind Hegel, returning back to Kant: ‘Where the best of Hegel is in his attempt to describe the becoming of Spirit, to show how activity develops within passivity itself, you [i.e., Sartre] reintroduce the abstraction of moral consciousness—not the least sure of itself, certainly, nor clear to itself, but transcendent in relation to all its determinations, pure activity permitting neither deliberation nor critique inasmuch as it coincides with its project of revolution’ (in Éléments, p. 92). And, continues Lefort: ‘That the proletariat is already a class at the level of the production process, but not in the least a completed synthesis, that there is a dialectic but not a finalism, that the activity of the vanguard organizations must be put within the dynamic of the whole [ensemble] while this does not in the least mean that there is an undifferentiated totality nor a miraculous spontaneity—it is clear that all this, which upsets the relation subject-object is for you a “magical thought”’ (ibid., p. 100). In effect, for Lefort, Sartre’s position is nothing but a ‘social’ exemplification of the dialectic of Self and Other; forgetting that already Being and Nothingness showed that such a dialectic, even in the example of love, turns out to be antagonistic.

12

‘L’échange et la lutte des hommes’, p. 1400. I am citing from an offprint of this article given me by Lefort; unfortunately, I cannot find the exact date of publication. The article was written in 1951. All citations from this article in this part of the text are given as ‘ibid.’, followed by a page number. As indicated in the text, these essays were published together in Les forms de l’histoire. Essais d’anthropologie politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). The present essay is found at pages 7–14.

13

‘Sociétés sans historie et Historicité’, p. 92. Again, I am citing from an offprint and have not found the original text. The article was written in 1952. Citations in the text follow the form indicated in n. 12. The present essay is now at ibid, pages 15–29.

14

Lefort also appeals critically to the notion of a ‘basic personality’ presented by the cultural psychoanalysis of Abram Kardiner. C.f., his ‘Notes critiques sur les méthodes de Kardiner’, in Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, No. 10, 1951, and the ‘Introduction à l’oeuvre d’Abram Kardiner’, in the French translation of L’individu dans sa société (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). (The essay is reprinted in op. cit., pp. 80–111.)

I will return later to Lefort’s use of Freud, mediated in part by Jacques Lacan, when I discuss his notion of the imaginaire of a society. Lefort does not believe that concepts can be carried over from one domain of explanation to another, nor does he believe in an applied psychoanalysis. However, the experience confronted in the psychoanalytic cure and its meta-psychological reflection show parallels to the problematic Lefort is confronting. In the previously cited Interview with the l’Anti-Mythes, he notes that ‘whether it is a question of the critique of the myth of revolution, of the myth of the ‘good society’, of the critique of the contradictions of power, the idea of social division as the original division and hence of the permanence of conflict, of the idea that societies order themselves as a function of the demand for and the impossibility of thinking their origins, or again of the idea that the discourse which a society maintains about itself is constitutive of its institution, or of the relation that I attempt to establish between the figures of knowledge and power—in all these cases, the borrowing from Freud is felt’ (op. cit., p. 27).

15

Later, Lefort will identify the emergence of History with that of a Power, the political, separated from the society and claiming to incarnate its unity. He will return to this question from the point of view of the anthropological work of Pierre Clastres, La société contre l’état (Paris: Minuit, 1974).

16

‘Rapport de Recherches’, p. 16. This essay was submitted to the CNRS, Lefort’s employer, as part of the dossier for his yearly evaluation. It has not been published.

17

‘Capitalisme et religion au XVIe Siècle’, in Les Temps Modernes, 78 (1952). I am again citing from an offprint, following the above procedure; this time, however, the publication data were on the offprint! (now reprinted in op. cit., pp. 112–126).

18

‘L’aliénation comme concept sociologique’, p. 50. Again, I am citing from an offprint and have not got the publication data. The article dates from 1956. Citations in the text follow the above pattern (now reprinted in op. cit., pp. 49–68).

19

‘La politique et la pensée de la politique’, in Letters Nouvelles, lie année, nouvelle série, no. 32, p. 30. Again, citation is from an offprint; date of the article is 1961 or 1962; citations follow the above practice.

20

Lefort will later call this procedure interpretation in order to indicate that the interrogation follows a logic and method that arise from the imbrication and participation of the subject in the subject-matter.

21

Citation is from ‘Réalité sociale et histoire’, p. 68. This is the mimeographed version of the student notes, usually reread and corrected by the professor, and for sale in a bookstore near the Sorbonne. Lefort was asked to give these lectures by Raymond Aron, who was on leave. Lefort was planning to revise these lectures for eventual book publication; instead, the essential thrust of the course is found in ‘Marx: d’une vision de l’histoire à l’autre’, op. cit., pp. 195–233.

22

‘Notes sociologiques sur Machiavel et Marx: La politique et le réel’, p. 116. Once again, I cite from an offprint—but found the data: Cahiers internationaux de sociologié. Vol. 28, nouvelle série, 7e année, janvier-juin, 1960. References in the text follow the usual format (now reprinted in op. cit., pp. 169–194).

23

Lefort points out in ‘La naissance de l’idéologie et l’humanisme, Introduction’ (Textures, 73/6–7, pp. 27–68), that Marx and his followers tended to neglect this fundamental insight when they reduce ideology to a simple masking of the real. Such an argument supposes that it is possible to know the real in itself—for example, that the real basis of Roman society was its system of production (now reprinted in op. cit., pp. 234–277).

A propos of the ‘realism of the phenomenologist’, c.f. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Note sur Machiavel’ in Signes, pp. 267ff. The text is based on a lecture given in Rome in 1949.

24

The term is taken from the title of a review of Lefort’s Machiavel by Marcel Gauchet (in Critique, No. 329, Oct 1974). The suggestion of such a logic, however, is already contained in the article we are discussing.

25

‘Rapport de Recherches’, op. cit., p. 12.

26

In Textures, 71/2–3, pp. 7–79, and Machiavel: Le travail de Toeuvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).

27

‘Esquisse d’une genèse de l’idéologie dans les sociétés modernes’, in Textures, 74/8–9, pp. 3–54. A slightly revised version appears in the Encyclopedia Universalis (Organon) under the title ‘L’ère de l’idéologie’ (now reprinted in op. cit., pp. 278–329). A further elaboration of these themes is found in Lefort’s ‘Le nom de l’Un’, in E. de la Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire (Paris: Payot, 1976).

28

L’ère de l’idéologie, op. cit., p. 78.

29

‘La naissance’, op. cit., p. 48.

30

‘Esquisse’, op. cit., p. 31.

31

Ibid., p. 36.

32

Lefort’s recent study of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Un homme en trop (Paris: Seuil, 1976) elaborates this theory brilliantly.

33

‘Rapport de Recherches’, op. cit., p. 12.

34

Gauchet, in Critique, op. cit., p. 926.

35

‘La politique et la pensée de la politique’, op. cit., p. 69.

© The Author(s) 2019

Dick HowardThe Marxian LegacyPolitical Philosophy and Public Purposehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4_9

9. Ontology and the Political Project: Cornelius Castoriadis

Dick Howard1  

(1)

Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, New York, NY, USA

Dick Howard

For those who emerged from the political upheavals of the ‘New Left’ in the early 1970s, it has become at once more difficult and easier to be a Marxist. The difficulties are evident: numerical decline of the industrial working class as well as its depoliticization and domination by labor bureaucrats; the impossibility of deluding oneself about the heirs of 1917 and the kind of society they have instituted in the Soviet Union and its satellite states; and the seeming displacement of the axis of contradiction to the Third World, leaving only a vague cultural malaise at home that can be easily co-opted and ephemeral. The paradox is that precisely these difficulties make Marxism more attractive. Blocked in practical politics, Marxism offers a theory of the ‘essential’ course and agency of history. It defines the nature of revolution, condemning all reformism. The absence of an industrial proletariat leaves the political intellectual both a theoretical and a practical task: the empirical appearances must be interpreted critically in order to discover their essential structure; at the same time, these foundational structures must be translated into practical propositions whose aim is not simply reforms for their own sake but projects whose realization points to human possibilities beyond the immediate good they can bring.

Marxism remains a theory that needs a practical mediation: an organizational form. The concept of ‘theoretical practice’ popularized by the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser cannot fill this gap. Others have returned for inspiration to the history of leftist-political debates, starting from those that opposed Marx, Bakunin, and Proudhon in the nineteenth century, moving on to those sparked by Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky or latching on to Gramsci’s concept of the ‘organic intellectual’ or to the militant anarcho-communism of Karl Korsch or the Dutch Council Communists. For some, crystallization in a party (or ‘pre-party party’) is the essential task; for others, local activities on different levels can replace it until the temperature for fusion is reached. For all, implicitly or explicitly, the theory continues to serve as a rallying point. However interpreted, the theory is the source of meaning, the glue holding together fragmented activities and lives. Even if this or that aspect is questioned, there remains the idea that ‘the theory’ must exist. It is a Holy Grail that motivates the eternal quest.

The development of the group ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ and its spiritus rector, Cornelius Castoriadis, offers a critical mirror that puts this quest into a different, more radical, context. Although the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie was no longer published, its reputation was almost mythical among critical French leftists who might find old copies in a used bookstore on the rue Cujas in the Latin Quarter, the journal never published more than a thousand copies; members of the group numbered roughly 100. Castoriadis himself, a Greek refugee, published pseudonymously under the names Pierre Chaulieu and Paul Cardan. In the wake of the 1968 revolts, his work began to be republished in popular editions; and his major philosophical work, L’institution imaginaire de la société, appeared in 1975. Although it should not be forgotten that his work developed within an activist political group, Castoriadis’ evolution is significant for those who are still motivated by the search for a Marxism that can fulfill the promise that the founder invested in it.

A member of the Greek Communist Youth Party under the Metaxas dictatorship, Castoriadis, recognized during the Occupation that Stalinist politics was radically opposed to the project of proletarian self-liberation. Joining the Trotskyists of the IVth International was the logical step, which meant spending the years of anti-fascist resistance dodging not only the fascists but Stalin’s thugs as well. Moving to France after the war (to study philosophy), Castoriadis quickly found himself in opposition to the dominant tendency of the IVth International, not simply with regard to conjectural questions, but concerning basic issues such as the nature of the Russian regime, the structure of capitalism and the kind of crisis that would affect it, as well the role and function of a revolutionary political party. With Claude Lefort (under the pseudonym C. Montal), he took the lead in forming an oppositional tendency within the IVth International. The final rupture came in 1948 and led to the founding of the political group and journal, Socialisme ou Barbarie .¹

As ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ strove to relate theoretically and practically to the political and social changes of contemporary capitalism, its approach was colored by an increasingly critical attitude toward the ambiguities in Marx’s work itself. The basis of the critique was the insistence on taking Marx seriously—Marx as revolutionary, not Marx as a theorist of politics. In the last five issues of the journal (numbers 36–40, April–June 1964 to June–August 1965), Castoriadis published a lengthy article, ‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’, that argues for the basic incompatibility of the two. He and the group opted for the latter. Shortly thereafter, a letter was sent to the journal’s subscribers announcing the cessation of publication. The editors stressed the correctness of the journal’s analyses, adding optimistically that its audience was growing. Nonetheless, the audience remained only consumers of theory, while the theory itself did not indicate any political Archimedean point on which political action could build. ‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’ had concluded with the promise of a further article, under the title ‘On the Status of a Revolutionary Theory’. In the letter, Castoriadis indicates that the theoretical retooling he was calling for could not be accomplished while attempting to maintain the journal as part of a political project. Hence, both the journal and the group were dissolved.

The analyses that had appeared in Socialisme ou Barbarie appeared to many to have come to their first fruition in May 1968. Personally, despite their different ages and backgrounds, its ex-members found themselves at home in that movement which, as Castoriadis wrote, was not just the demand for but the affirmation of revolution.² Along with Edgar Morin and Claude Lefort, Castoriadis published (under the pseudonym Jean-Marc Coudray) a short volume of essays in early June 1968, attempting to contribute some analysis to the events in process. Yet the group did not reunite. After May 1968, Castoriadis left his job as a professional economist at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED) (acquiring French citizenship, which permitted him to publish under his own name) and devoted himself mainly to theoretical tasks. He began the publication of his writings, became a practicing psychoanalyst, and completed the promised essay on the status of revolutionary theory, which was published as l’institution imaginaire de la société and which laid the groundwork of a systematic ontology.³ He began teaching a course on political economy at Nanterre and with Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet was a member of the editorial board of the journal Textures. After a recent split (1977) in the editorial board of Textures, a new journal, Libre, began publication with Castoriadis and Lefort as leading members.⁴

9.1 The Political Critique of the Economic and the Economic Critique of the Political

In a conversation about the evolution of ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, Castoriadis once remarked that the group had ‘pulled the right string’—that of bureaucratization—and had simply and ruthlessly kept pulling. For militants emerging from Trotskyism, this starting point is not surprising. A demystification of the results of 1917 was an essential political task. The tools chosen by Castoriadis were at first those of orthodox Marxism. Yet the implicit logic of his political approach contained, in germinal form, an essential element of his later critique of Marxism that should be mentioned from the outset. The working class will continue to revolt against its immediate conditions, showing its willingness to struggle now for a better life. Yet so long as that better life is imagined in Stalinist tonalities, the political translation of this immediate struggle can only be provided by the Communist Party. What is important here is not simply that this strengthens the manipulative capacity of the Communist Party. This suggests implicitly that the stunting of the creative imagination of individuals, due to the existence of a socially legitimated collective representation—an imaginaire social, as Castoriadis refers to it later—must be analyzed for its own sake. The imaginary social representations are, in effect, a material force in their own right. To come to such an ‘idealist’ conclusion, Castoriadis took a strictly ‘materialist’ path.

The position of Trotsky was a pole of attraction for those who refused to recognize in Russia the true realization of their struggles and hopes. Yet a moment’s (Marxist) reflection shows the inadequacy of Trotsky’s notion of Russia as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’. If, in spite of accidents that could appear temporary aberrations, Russia were still essentially a ‘workers’ state’, the implication would be that the elimination of private ownership and the replacement of the anarchy of capitalist production by the Plan are the essence of socialism. The ‘degeneration’ would concern only the form, not the essence, of the Russian social formation. But this claim confuses the juridical forms of property with the actual relations of production. For Marx, it is precisely these relations of production that determine the forms of distribution and their (deformed) reflection in the superstructure. The vacillations in Trotsky’s own analyses—for example, on the question of ‘Thermidor’ or on the tactics to be followed by the Opposition—stem from this identification of form and essence.

Castoriadis’ analysis of, ‘The Relations of Production in Russia’ (1949),⁵ takes up this empirical problem which Trotsky had not dealt with. His virtuoso Marxist analysis serves as an illustration of what consistent Marxism can propose to empirical study. It had political implications as well. By 1934, Trotsky had been led to recognize that the working class was effectively excluded from control in the Stalinist state and that a new revolutionary party was necessary. Castoriadis’ critique of the priority given to the juridical representation leads him to an examination of the social relations that underlie it. His conclusion is that ‘[t]he dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be simply a political dictatorship; it must be above all the economic dictatorship of the proletariat, for otherwise it will only be a mask for the dictatorship of the bureaucracy’.⁶ This conclusion is not only interesting from a historical perspective; more important is the way it is established by following the example of the young Marx’s demystification of the juridical superstructure before examining its relations of the socio-economic infrastructure.

A further consequence of the analysis in ‘The Relations of Production in Russia’ is the demonstration of the central, and independent, role played by the bureaucracy. The critique of the Trotskyist position could have led to the theory of ‘state capitalism’.⁷ It would assert that the state (or the party) plays the same historical role in developing the forces of production that the capitalist class played in the West. The implication is that what exists in Russia is still a form—the most advanced, and therefore presumably the most contradictory form—of capitalism. It follows that the laws formulated by Marx in Capital are still valid in Russia, and that a proletarian revolution can be expected there. Castoriadis’ analysis of actual conditions in Russian industry (and agriculture, to which he devoted a separate article) showed in fact that the role of the bureaucratic state is to set these laws out of play. A political intervention has occurred, making it impossible to claim that the state is a collective capitalist and demanding recognition that Russia presents a historically new social formation based on a new form of domination: the bureaucracy.⁸

This recognition of the political role played by the state implies a specific reading of the Marxian notion of political economy that has implications for the idea of revolution itself. Marxism is not understood as a (technical) economic theory, nor as a closed system in the classical rationalist sense. Marxism is in fact a theory of social relations. The critique of the Soviet Union and the demystification of the juridical mask that uncovers the human relations that permit the continuance of the bureaucratic form which structures these relations can be extended to formulate a critique of capitalist society as well. Bureaucracy is not simply a political category. With the appreciation of the bureaucratic ‘string’ comes, necessarily, a re-evaluation of the content of socialism. This further break with Trotskyist essentialist formalism was confirmed and furthered by the events in East Germany (in 1953) and Poland and Hungary (in 1956). The idea of self-management that had been central for the group since 1948/49 was transformed and developed into a concrete and elaborated demand for the restructuring of daily life in the 1955 essay, ‘On the Content of Socialism’, whose second and third parts were completed in 1957–1958.⁹

The political critique of bureaucratic society demanded a re-examination of the economic base of Marxian theory. The political critique had been based on that economic theory. The tensions and antinomies it laid bare in the sphere of the political now rebound, putting itself into question. The theoretical lesson is there is no privileged position from which to observe the goings-on in the world, no detached observer, and no mythical proletarian subject-object of history.¹⁰ Neither economics nor politics has a God’s-eye-view of a once-and-for-all existing world structure. Just like the original economic thrust into the political, the political rebound into the economic turns out to destroy its own foundations. In one of the young Marx’s favorite Hegelian phrases, ‘Its victory is at the same time its own loss’. It loses its sense of itself as critical.

The economic critique of the political points to the central role of the relations of production, which are determined by the relation of capital to labor. Command over the means of production assures the command over the central commodity, labor-power. Once capitalism as a system of production and of social reproduction becomes dominant, capital tends to accumulate at the expense of labor, new and more ‘scientific’ modes of exploitation are devised; there ensues either an absolute or a relative pauperization of the working class. Marx does point to countervailing forces, most importantly the class struggle which increases its intensity with the growth of trade union power. Later analysts nuanced this picture, pointing, for example, to the relative privilege of the working class in the advanced countries due to imperial or colonial domination. The crucial point for Castoriadis is that Marx thought of his system as deciphering economic laws. To do this, he had to assume a fixed level of wages (even though he admitted that it was determined by ‘historical and moral factors’). Castoriadis points out that there is nothing in Marx’s theory that permits this level to be established; nothing explains why the trade union movement cannot succeed in decreasing—rather than increasing, as Marx’s theory supposes—the rate of exploitation. As a result, the creative activity embodied in the social relations of production is destroyed in its economic translation into a Marxist ‘law’ of increasing exploitation and pauperization. If the ‘law’ did hold, the proletariat could only exist as an object caught up in the reified forms in alienated production. Castoriadis insists on the political dilemma that results. Either the proletariat is passive objective material doomed to continued exploitation and impoverishment at all levels of life, in which case it is difficult to see the positive content, or even possibility, of socialist revolution and its difference from the desperate revolts of the downtrodden which have colored history; or it is a creative human force seeking self-assertion and struggling continually for its freedom in socio-historical conditions that can change as a result of its own action, in which case the law of value and its scientific certainty of capitalist collapse falls, and with it falls the edifice of Capital.¹¹

A further aspect of this political problem that had appeared already in Castoriadis’ analysis of the relations of production in Russia reappears in his analysis of bureaucratic capitalism. If the law of value were to be maintained, not simply as determining wages but across the board, that would demand the existence of competition and a free market situation. The competitive free market permits the determination of the value of a commodity (in Vol. 1 of Capital) as measured by the amount of socially necessary labor time it contains; and (in Vol. 3) it explains the difference of value and market-price as determined by the equalization of the rates of profit. What occurs under the bureaucratic domination is the interference of the political factor into the play of these supposedly free forces. The implication of this political state action is that the sphere of validity of economics as science is limited. For the Marxist used to looking to the determination by the material base, the result is a fundamental indetermination of the process of revolution.

The political critique of the economic, like the economic critique of the political, sends Castoriadis back to basic theoretical questions. He knows that both spheres have deeper roots. He admits that even to talk about a ‘content’ of socialism is misleading insofar as it implies something fixed and external that can be possessed. In fact, writes Castoriadis, ‘the absurdity of all inherited political thought consists precisely in wanting to resolve men’s problems for them, whereas the only political problem in fact is this: how can people become capable of resolving their problems for themselves?’¹² The ‘content’ of socialism can only be the process of self-management, which Castoriadis later reformulates as the self-institution of society. Indeed, as his political reflection was driven toward an increasingly virulent critique of Marxism as itself instituting a hindrance to revolutionary activity, Castoriadis went beyond the conception of self-management as an economic notion to assert that revolutionary self-management must be total if it is to cope with the problems created by the socially inculcated tendency toward privatization, isolation, and consumptive mystification typical of bureaucratic societies. A revolutionized society would be one in which the relation of the individual to all institutional forms is involved in a continual process of self-criticism. The problematic of the institution, as both instituted and instituting, becomes central once the antinomies of the economic and the political are worked through by a consistent Marxism.

9.2 Organization: The False but Necessary Debate

Certain of the orthodoxy of their Marxism, and sure that self-management was the only adequate form for a revolutionary society, the group ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ was confronted with the question of its own identity. Many members were strongly ouvrièriste in their attitude; this conviction convinced them that more than the replacement of the Communist party by a Trotskyist organization was needed. They remained convinced by the Marxist theory of the existence of an essentially revolutionary class and sought to find a vehicle for relating to that class without claiming to impose on them a theoretical consciousness external to their own experience. The experience in the Fourth International had also taught the group that the organizers of the revolution risked becoming a ruling bureaucracy rather than incarnating a microcosm of the future self-managed society. The splits led by Lefort and his constant criticisms were an important counter-balance, although they offered no positive solution. As the debate continued, the combination of the economic critique of the political and the political critique of the economic led to a stress on the less traditional, more innovative aspects of the class struggle that had not been imagined in the nineteenth century by Marx. Ultimately, over the years, self-criticism led to the elimination of its postulated centrality as the mythical and mystified image of revolution was rejected.

‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ itself functioned according to principles consistent with the Marxist theory they adopted. Members paid a steeply proportional percentage of their income as dues and accepted the tasks that the majority of the organization assigned them. There were general assemblies on a regular basis, while special groups with specific tasks, responsible to and revocable by the group as a whole, were established for particular conditions. There was a constant attempt at the development and self-education of each of the members, both in theoretical analysis and awareness of ongoing struggles. The journal they published was the organ in which both forms of this self-education were expressed. On the other hand, the stress on the self-education of the proletariat which must take its own fate into its hands meant that the group did not attempt to ‘parachute’ outsiders into their ongoing struggles. They organized where they worked and published their views in the journal and in leaflets (after 1959, they published in the small newspaper Pouvoir Ouvrier). Outside of their group, they held public meetings and attempted to recruit new members who shared their views. Some members were active in an industrial milieu, some in white-collar arenas; later there were some student members. International contacts were also established. In short, there was nothing unusual about the activities of this self-defined radical political organization.

Further pulling the ‘bureaucratic string’ created a series of tensions around the question of organization. In the first place, Castoriadis posed a simple question ‘What is important?’ From a traditional Marxist standpoint, the proletariat alone can seize power, and to do so it must conquer and destroy the bourgeois state. The implication was that attention was to be centered on the workplace with its attendant struggles that should eventually lead to political unification at a national level. But ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ was not traditionalist. It had recognized that bureaucratization is a social phenomenon that could be avoided by a concentration on the everyday where their task was to convince people that their concerns are not private but manifest socially important grievances that are worth struggling over. The goal was to convince people that capitalist control is maintained by convincing people that only the concerns of the experts really matter. This turn to the everyday not only broke with the traditional conception of revolutionary politics; it demanded that the organization itself transform its mode of action. Some members insisted that there should be a newspaper, or a part of the journal, given over to the readers. The first difficulty of this proposition was that too many non-intellectuals do not think that what they have to say is ‘important’. A second and inverse problem would emerge if readers began massively to contribute, which would force the organization to choices among contributions that were inconsistent with the goal of self-management. A similar difficulty existed when it came to the selection of factual reporting to appear in the journal, where editorial choice was necessary, and general criteria for selection had to be invented. To make a choice without explaining its reasons would render a disservice to readers.

The acute awareness of the dangers of bureaucracy posed an even more central question for the organization: that of its own existence. The problem that emerges here is not that political organizations tend to adopt bureaucratic forms insofar as they separate themselves from the ongoing struggles and concerns. From a Marxist perspective, each case must be explained historically and materially. The existential problem for ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ was made acute by the implications of the analysis of the ‘Relations of Production in Russia’ which insisted that there is no privileged position from which to survey and judge objectively ongoing struggles. Lefort drew the conclusion that the group’s very existence postulates that it itself possesses the keys to that heavenly perspective! Without that assumption, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ would be only another particular group expressing its own particular desires. Its interventions into ongoing struggles in the name of a theory, with the goal of aiding a practice, presupposes that it possesses knowledge that is not available to the participants. This implicit assumption is the foundation of an eventual bureaucratic domination over the class. The group takes itself as the General Staff of the Revolution; its activities become rigid and formal; it passes resolutions and debates as if the eyes of History were constantly upon it.¹³ Castoriadis’ reply to this criticism by Lefort and his supporters points out that opposition to organization is self-contradictory insofar as it separates theory from practice, insisting on theory at the expense of experience. His stinging, rhetoric is direct and brutal: ‘Am I to govern my whole life on the supposition that I might one day return to infancy?’¹⁴ This was hardly a response; the question remained open, but the cloture of further argument.

The organizational question had further implications. At least until Castoriadis’ break with Marxism in the article series of 1961–1963 (which led Lyotard, Souryi, and Maille to quit the group because of their unwillingness to abandon Marxism as such), the politics of ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ was ouvrièriste. The presupposition that the proletariat must be the agent of its own self-liberation meant that the group was necessarily separated from the working class whose consciousness it sought to raise. In classical nineteenth-century Marxism, this distinction of the party and the class led to a distinction between reformist trade union activity and the revolutionary party. The resulting dualism is overcome only conceptually by distinguishing the immediate activity of the class from the historical sense implicit in its struggles (as Rosa Luxemburg had done when she rejected Bernstein’s revisionist slogan that the movement is what counts, not the postulated ends that it seeks). This historical distinction apparently defines ‘what is important’ for Castoriadis. In practice, this attitude suggests that the organization must keep its distance from the everyday struggles which is a learning process through which the class comes to self-knowledge as a result of its defeats as well as its victories. In effect, the revolutionary organization presupposes the existence of a concrete and real goal that can be known; from this perspective, its role is simply that of a tolerant pedagogue. That self-understanding forgets that Rosa Luxemburg also insisted (in the Mass Strike) that ‘revolutions allow no one to play schoolmaster to them’.

Pushed by the irresoluble organizational question, Castoriadis is led ultimately to challenge the foundational Marxist assumption of an inherently revolutionary proletariat.

One sees … the profound duplicity of all Marxists: that revolutionary class, to which superhuman tasks are attributed, is at the same time profoundly irresponsible: one cannot impute to its own action what happens to it, nor even the actions that it undertakes; it is innocent in the two senses of the term. The proletariat is the constitutional monarch of history. Responsibility belongs to its ministers: to the old leaderships that erred or betrayed – and to us, who once again, against all opposition, are going to construct the new leadership.¹⁵

For Marxists, the proletariat is defined and created by its relation to the means of production; its revolutionary activity, which transforms it from a class in itself to a class for itself, is the result of its social-economic insertion in the process of production. This implies that the class is defined by its being and not by its praxis. Never immune to history’s ironies, Castoriadis points out that for Marx the bourgeoisie was the creative class whose actions changed the world. His account of the origins of capitalism shows that its necessity cannot be explained by material conditions; the process that Marx is called ‘Primitive Accumulation’ in Capital shows how the bourgeoisie created its own world by introducing the ideas of technological change, ever-expanding reproduction, and rationalization as the dominant significations and goals of social life. The proletariat, for its part, is defined for Marx by the economic-technological conditions through which it reproduces itself and society at large. This explains claims by Marx that have influenced his heirs, such as the famous assertion that ‘what counts is not what this or that proletarian does or thinks; what counts is what the class is and must do’. If the class does not appear to be following the lines decreed by history, the Marxist no longer defines it by its being; instead it makes the class into an essence, whose temporary manifestations are only accidents on the way to its self-realization as laid out by the rationality of Historical Materialism. Castoriadis’ claim that the Marxist proletariat is ‘innocent’ and that it is the ‘constitutional monarch of history’ draws attention to these consequences.

In spite of his criticism of Marx, Castoriadis insists that the class is its praxis, and that the praxis of the class in turn defines the social conditions in which it finds itself.¹⁶ That praxis is not a free creation apart from the social conditions in which it finds itself. These conditions change continually as a result also of the praxis of the class. While in their practice Marxists have often tried to take account of the praxis of the proletariat, their theory proves a hindrance. ‘What is important’ is always defined by reference to the class-as-essence. The essentialist view of the proletariat induces a blindness to struggles that do not fit the expected pattern. It also introduces a set of blinkers that hide a basic aspect of capitalism. Reading Capital from the point of view of proletarian praxis rather than an essentialist philosophy of history, Castoriadis demonstrates that the proletariat is not so innocent as it seems. Looking at Marx’s account of the transition from the production of absolute to relative surplus-value production, he shows how the introduction of economic rationalization by management and the use of machinery to replace human labor are made necessary as responses to the threat posed by proletarian demands. The implication is that capitalism as it has come to exist is the result class struggle. Technical development, the internal expansion of the market and creation of consumer society, and the ideology that accompanies them are necessary to capitalism’s continuation. Developing this analysis further, it is possible to suggest that the struggle that began within the material conditions of production will have moved beyond that sphere, making it necessary to find another agent who can carry forward the struggle against alienation and exploitation.

Spurred on by the continued existence of struggles against capitalist domination, within, around, and outside of production, Castoriadis’ interrogation ultimately put into question the foundations of Marxism itself. He could not ‘solve’ the organizational problem because the question was based on historical conditions that no longer existed. That did not imply that the quest for autonomy was abandoned. Over and again, he returned to the problem of organization, insisting on the need to cast off the blinkers in order to recognize the new and to interrogate its political sense. Writing in June 1968, Castoriadis insisted again on the need for organization, pointing out that the struggle was not intended to win a night of love but a life of love. The organization he calls for in the heat of the May revolt would not claim to assume the direction of the ongoing struggles; its task would be theoretical, thematic, and praxical, intervening only in the sphere in which its members were involved. The necessity of an organization, he insists, springs from the practical needs of its members who recognize that there are many others who would share the kind of political analysis he is suggesting; the role of the organization would be to create the space for them to come together, to talk, learn, and act. What more such an organization would do can only be defined in the concrete situation in which it exists, he insists. Yet Castoriadis admits that this is not a ‘solution’. He himself has in the meanwhile left the field of practice to develop the theoretical implications of the critique of Marxism that he had carried out.

9.3 Marxism: The Problem of Metaphysics

Using Marx to critique Marx leaves unanswered question: what is Marxism? The strongest case for Marxism—which neither Marxists nor Castoriadis always make—would insist that it goes beyond what Horkheimer called a traditional conception of theory, offering neither knowledge to be used for power nor theory to guide practice. Marx wanted to overcome the contemplative dualism that separated theory from the world about which it was supposed to produce knowledge. Marx’s theory was to be a theory of: of history, of revolution, and of the praxis of the proletariat. It was a theory of history because its own conditions of possibility were historical: prior to the socialization of society by capitalism, no theory of this type was possible. Insofar as the capitalism that had given rise to this new type of totality was itself founded on constant innovation and change, the theory had to be mobile, open to the changing course of social relations, and, most importantly, revolutionary. The revolutionary nature of the theory springs from its being the theory of the proletariat: of that class which is nothing, which suffers no specific wrong but general alienation, is created by and constantly reproduces capitalism; Marx’s proletariat is the concrete negation of capitalism, and the theory which expresses its actual position and struggles is for that reason at once historical and revolutionary. That theory is itself a part of the revolutionary praxis of the proletariat which is historically rooted and must, with the aid of that theory, come to an awareness of the task history has made possible: the overthrow of the social conditions of which it is the negative product.

The specific character of Marxism as a theory means that it must analyze and describe social relations of which it is itself a part; and at the same time it must be involved in and continually changing those very conditions, thus eliminating its own conditions of possibility. In order to justify this claim, Marx presupposes a view of history as based on class struggle. This concept of history affects the concrete tasks assigned to Marxist theory, permitting it to decipher the ideological nature of concurrent theories and to learn from the ongoing struggles of the proletariat. The process of its continual transformation through self-critique and its learning from proletarian praxis is built into the theory. The basis of this learning process is what the historically engaged theory tells it is ‘important’. It can do this because, at the same time that it is historical, it is also the expression of a self-critical theory that recognizes the role of praxis in the formation of the social world.

If today’s Marxism does not live up to Marx’s project, it should be possible for a critical theory to explain how such a devolution was possible. A powerful attempt to salvage Marx’s theory was proposed in Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness. His discussion of ‘The Changed Function of Historical Materialism’ asserts that Marxism is true as a method. As a result, he makes the paradoxical claim that even if all the empirical results of Marx’s research were proven wrong, his method could be applied anew to produce results that are revolutionary. Lukács seems to forget that a method is only valid for specific contents; if these are not present, the method cannot do what is claimed for it. He could reply that it is possible to know what these conditions are only through the application of the method itself, reminding his critics that in a society that is essentially capitalist, appearances are deceptive. The critic could reply by pointing out that the distinction of essence and appearance characterizes traditional contemplative philosophy for which the concept of essence is ahistorical, unchanging and self-evident. The Marxist insists on the praxis of the proletariat, which is constantly changing its world. As historical, Marxism works with a combination of efficient and final causes; as the theory of the revolutionary proletariat, it is a paradoxical theory of social change whose result will be the elimination of the conditions in which the theory was formerly valid. In this sense, Marxism is responsible for its destiny.

Pursuing the problem further, what can be said of Marx’s concrete analyses? Some aspects of it have maintained signs of life, others seem frozen, rigid, and formal. A popular interpretation suggests the need to distinguish two Marxes. The undeniably positivist and scientistic aspects of Marx’s work are said to reflect a problem facing any discoverer of a ‘new continent’ (Althusser ) who is forced to describe the voyage in the language left over from the past. This syncretism does not take seriously Marx’s claim that his theory was capable of explaining the course of history, including the conditions of its own possibility. The ‘two-Marxes’ theory treats Marx as if he was just another philosopher from whom partial or pragmatic insights can be gleaned; it does not treat him as a Marxist. To deny his own intention is to seek to inherit the past rather than to look forward toward social change. It is a confusing, or scholastic, attempt to preserve a ‘true’ Marx untouched by time and history.

Marx described his theory as the expression of proletarian praxis; examples abound in his work. His early analysis on the revolt of the Silesian weavers (1844) draws on the implications of a collectively undertaken praxis; he himself visited and took part in meetings of revolutionary workers in Paris in 1844; later, in analyses from Capital that were cited earlier, he shows how the actions of the proletariat induce changes in socio-economic conditions. Among contemporary Marxist historians, E. P. Thompson’s The Making of The English Working Class demonstrates that many of Marx’s ideas were already in the minds and on the tongues of English workers before Marx had ever crossed the Channel. However, it is also true that Marx’s ideas did not penetrate the broader socialist movement, which was more influenced by Proudhon, and later by Lassalle, and even Bakunin. When Marxism finally made its organized appearance, despite Marx’s own misgivings, it had become a catechism popularized by the nineteenth-century appeal of science and progress, as well as by the growing acceptance Darwin’s theory of evolution (for which Marx, and especially Engels, expressed their admiration).

Castoriadis is not concerned to salvage a ‘good’ Marx. Whatever the validity of the various attempts at Marxist reconstruction, these remain theoretical efforts. Castoriadis’ crucial point is that it is necessary to admit the fate of Marxism in order to be faithfully inherit his legacy. Analysis of Marxism from this revolutionary standpoint has implications for the understanding of present society.

Marxism can from now on serve effectively only as an ideology, in the strong sense of the term: an invocation of fictive entities, pseudo-rational constructions and abstract principles that, concretely, justify and hide a social-historical practice whose true signification lies elsewhere. One must really be a Marxist to ignore, or to consider as anecdotal, or to rationalize as accidental the fact that this practice is that of a bureaucracy that imposes its exploitation and totalitarian domination over a third of the world’s population.¹⁷

Castoriadis argues that this understanding of Marx-as-ideologue is unintentionally the purveyor of key elements of capitalist ideology: the primacy of production, the inevitability of capitalist technological forms, the justification of unequal wages, scientism, rationalism, blindness to the question of bureaucracy, and the adoration of capitalist modes of organization and efficiency. How could Marxism become, in his words, ‘the flesh of the world we combat’?¹⁸

The paradoxical assertion that Marxism has become a theory of capitalist society needs further elucidation. It is only in capitalist society that the economic sphere achieves its full independence and reveals its essential, productivist, and profit-seeking social function. This essence was manifested only indirectly, through manifold appearances in pre-capitalist societies, but that it is said to be nonetheless dominant there as well. Yet, for Marx himself, the specificity of capitalism is that it is not simply production of commodities, but that it represents the continually expanded drive for the augmentation of social reproduction (M-C-M, in Marx’s formula). Under capitalist social relations, the economy dominates all the other spheres of society; and its model of organization, which demands increasing rationalization in all spheres of society, spreads its corrosive influence over custom and tradition, creating a proletariat whose praxis is the condition of the possibility of an all-encompassing, rational theory of history. In spite of the difference between the place of the economy in capitalist societies and its function in pre-capitalist societies, Marxism asserts that history and historical transformations can be understood as a function of the development of the economic base. Although Marx is of course right to assert, polemically, that men cannot eat religion, the law, or even democracy and philosophy, it is necessary to ask what kind of theory could make this kind of reductionist materialist claim? And what does this reductionism say about Marx’s implicit notion of ‘human nature’?

A theory of human history must be able to account for the social change that overturns a prevailing mode of social relations. For Marx, the motor of history is of course class struggle. He offers two explanations of the origins of class society. The first is functional and rationalist in suggesting that history be read as a series of adaptations to the productive base. To the windmill corresponds feudal society, to the steam engine corresponds capitalism (to which socialism added Lenin’s aphoristic definition: ‘soviets plus electrification’!). A counterpoint is offered by ethnography, which looks at the other side of enlightenment rationalism to find hundreds of examples of societies whose productive and technological bases are identical while their social structures are radically different. Marx’s second claim suggests a reply to the first, reductionist version. In a given society, there arises a surplus which permits certain social strata to live from the work of others. They go on to arrange political institutions that preserve their power and life-style. This is an explanation, but it still does not go far enough; the ethnologists have shown the existence of many societies that produce a surplus without creating an exploiting class. The deeper question is why there could occur a shift in social attitudes permitting this division of the society. The existence of a surplus only explains the origins of class society if the nineteenth-century model of homo economicus is presupposed by the analysis. The difference between capitalism as expanded reproduction for profit and pre-capitalist economic formations warns us against this anarchronism.¹⁹

It could be objected that Marx’s theory of ideology does not conceive of human being in such a simplified, capital-centric perspective insofar as he develops from this material factor a more complex and articulated perspective in which production is only one determinant, alongside of social interaction, language, and species possibilities. The difficulty is that the dependence of the superstructural forms on their infrastructural base makes sense only if the two structures can communicate in some manner or another. Expressed as the action of the forces of production on the relations of production, the assertion is at least logically consistent since the relata are both forms of production. In this formulation, the dominance of production over all other modes of social activity is assumed. This will be seen to be ultimately an ontological assertion. For the moment, Marx’s argument appears to be the result of a sociological functionalism. Insofar as the system is oriented to its economic reproduction, all of its elements have an economic signification, and hence the dominance of the economic is assured. But the economic premise is not self-evident; it is a presupposition (about human nature), whereas Marx’s goal was to demonstrate its validity. There is no reason to assume that philosophy and democracy, let alone Dionysian cults or matrilineal kinship systems, have solely or even primarily economic signification.²⁰

It could be objected that Marx does not reduce everything to economics and that his understanding of the economic sphere does not refer solely to production but includes also the relations of production as well as the forms of social intercourse in a given society. Castoriadis agrees; but he concludes from this claim that there are times when Marx at his best appears to think just like the capitalist at his worst, treating the whole social world as simply parts of a system of material production for profit. It may be true that ‘this is how capitalism is’, and that Marx is simply describing its contradictory nature. Rather than occupy a revolutionary function the proletariat becomes from this point of view an integral part of capitalism. That was the reason that Castoriadis criticized the theory of the proletariat as the unique revolutionary subject. In the present context, he criticizes Marx’s theory qua theory, going beyond the critique of its reductionism or its functionalism to challenge Marx’s rationalism. That step leads him to reexamine the revolutionary project as such.

‘It is completely indifferent’, Castoriadis insists, ‘whether we say [with Hegel] that nature is a movement of the logos, or [with historical materialism] that the logos arises at a given stage of the evolution of nature, because from the outset both entities are posited as being of the same—i.e., of a rational—nature’.²¹ For the dialectic of ‘the negation of the negation’ to be effective, there must be supposed a rational system that provides for the homogeneity of the objects which relate to one another. This homogeneity could be established on the basis of an assumption about the universality of homo oeconomicus. In a more critical formulation, the claim would be that critical Marxism has the task of extracting the rational kernel of reality, its essence, from the appearing world. The important point is that in each case the argument depends on an ontological equation: rational = real = essential. The reader familiar with Marx’s work will recall aphorisms such as ‘the rational has always existed but not always in a rational form’, or his continually recurring organic womb-and-birth metaphors, as well as the accompanying assertion that theory exists to lessen the birth-pangs of the new society. In each case, the assumption is that history and its milieu are ultimately rational, ultimately progressing toward a goal which is already ‘essentially’ prefigured in the present. The telos that is presupposed by these claims only seems different from the Hegelian Spirit because it is dressed in historical garb, but its rational essence is ultimately the same: fully realized humanity, species being.

Two political positions that share identical premises emerge from this ontological stance. If the material present is ripe with a potentiality that makes it unstable and opens it to the possibility of change, what prevents its transformation? The answer must lie in what Marxists call the superstructures, for example, in the contradictory role of present-day educational structures, the family, or patriarchal dominance in society. Critical analysis can show that their system-preservative function is not perfectly fulfilled and that this lack of full functional fit creates the space for political practice. The goal of this critical analysis will be to create ultimately a new functionality that is not prey to internal contradiction. This has the unintended consequence of transforming the space of politics into a field for sociological intervention that seeks to impose harmony and unification from without. As a result, a bureaucracy is implicitly seated in the place of power. The grounds are cleared for Leninism and its consequent development in the soviet form of bureaucratic society. If there is a rationality to the world, and if history has ultimately a progressive direction, then those who can apply the theory to find the ‘really real’ beneath the appearances must become guides for those still lost in the shadow world. In this sense, ‘what is important’ is not what individuals may think but what the class ‘really’ is; the law-like activity of the infrastructure tells the naked truth of the future. Theory becomes social science, and the party with its specialists easily becomes the stand-in for the class. Substitutionism is justified; socialism becomes identical with the Plan. And, concludes Castoriadis, ‘humans no more make their history than the planets “make” their revolutions; they are “made” by it’.²² Politics becomes technology; praxis becomes rational-bureaucratic.

The root of the error here is that the systemic standpoint that follows from the rationalist premise which is assumed to be realized (or at least in principle realizable) in reality. Once that assumption is made, it becomes necessary to find the practical means for incarnating its reality. The theorist moves from analysis to intervention in reality; and with that, the critical theorist is replaced by the political party. The theoretical problem is that such a realized systemic totality would be a contradiction in terms. Were it to exist, it could not be known because it would be impossible to stand outside of it in order to see it as an object of knowledge. Put differently, if such a systemic totality existed, individuals would not exist as such; everything would dissolve into the rational system, difference would disappear. What is more, if such a totality existed, no praxis would be possible; pure rationality is nothing but pure contemplation, absolute obedience, another form of positivism. ‘The idea of a complete and definitive theory’, insists Castoriadis, ‘is nothing but a phantasm of the bureaucracy’, serving all the better to manipulate the masses.²³ In spite of these paralyzing consequences, Castoriadis claims that it is precisely this sort of theory that Marx needs in order to justify his claim that the revolutionary process is necessary as well as to insist that his theory is a ‘scientific socialism’. The move from philosophy to science in Marx is ultimately based on a traditional assumption about what theory must be, despite Marx’s attempt to open a new, critical type of theory.²⁴,²⁵

The reason that Marx falls back into this paradigm of contemplative theory is that he has not succeeded in radically historicizing his own historical theory. His claim is that proletarian revolutionary theory is the product of history; but he does not consider the possibility that history, for historical reasons, could make itself antiquated. The root of the difficulty lies in Marx’s linear conception of history. History is assumed to be the working out, through trials and tribulations, conjectures and refutations, of what already was already latent with the birth of humanity. Indeed, when Marx asks himself what is the specificity of human being, he has recourse to the famous distinction between the architect and the bee: the bee creates instinctively, whereas the architect works from a mentally created plan. This appealing image ignores the further question of the origins of the architect’s plan. Why this plan and not another? Why this invention, at this time and place? To assert that the specific content of the plan depends on the material circumstances in which it is formulated is to return to sociological functionalism and the idea that the knowing subject could fly above and gaze down on the ‘really real’ material world. If that were possible, revolution in Marx’s sense would be impossible. It does not matter whether the architect’s plan is presumed to exist potentially from the beginnings of humanity, emerging through stages and struggles; or whether it is a functional or rationalist reaction given social conditions. In the first case, history is only an illusion, a chimera with no real meaning (or a ‘slaughter-bench’, as Hegel observes lucidly); in the latter case, history is reduced to natural history, which in turn is conceived as either essentially rational (in which case it is no different from the first illustration), or it is a jumble of accidents (in which case there is no reason to suppose that revolution is inevitable).

In a word, for Castoriadis, Marxism is a metaphysics whose structure, premises, and elaboration are simply an adaptation of the conditions in a specific historical moment to the recalibrated demands of traditional rationalist theorizing. Marxism claims to be a revolutionary truth insofar as it is the bearer of the solution to ‘the riddle of history’. It justifies this claim by means of its own theory of history, which is itself based upon the primacy of the proletariat whose praxis is said to be expressed by Marxist theory. What appeared to be a radically new type of theory emerges as a tautology. It claims that Marxism is true because it is the theory of the proletariat; the proletariat, in turn, is said to be the truth of history because Marxism has shown it to be naturally necessary; hence Marxism is true. Twist and turn as its theorists may, Marxism turns out to be based precisely on premises that make the realization of its self-defined revolutionary goal impossible. A new conception of theory is necessary if the revolutionary project is to be maintained.

9.4 Ontology: The Status of Theory and the Political Project

The political tensions to which Castoriadis’ radical critique of Marxism led ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ were confronted directly in ‘Recommencer la révolution’ (1964). Summarizing again his rejection of classical Marxism, Castoriadis stressed the everyday struggle of the working class against the hierarchic, bureaucratic organization of labor. Because of this struggle, ‘labor-power’ differs from the other inputs into production; the capitalist knows precisely how many calories of heat will be produced by a ton of coal, but not how much labor is actually purchased by the wages paid. The everyday form of the opposition of capital and labor can be understood as the struggle between those who command and those who (are supposed to) execute. Industrial sociology proposes techniques to combat worker resistance; its most progressive proponents recognize that the most effective techniques must enlist the participation of workers. This combination of the workers’ activity and passivity in the formal and informal workplace spreads to all the institutions of society, from the consumer to the student, patriarch to patriot. Castoriadis had analyzed similar structural features in the bureaucratic forms of Soviet society. The only logical way to overcome the contradictory imperatives of command and execution is through self-management. Referring implicitly to Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, Castoriadis insists once again that his goal ‘is not to deduce the revolution but to make it’.²⁶

Castoriadis had confronted previously the practical difficulty to which he returned in ‘Recommencer la révolution’. In his three-part article published between 1955 and 1958, ‘Sur le contenu du socialisme’, he attempted to concretize the implications of his vision of industrial workers’ councils.²⁷ He returned to the difficulties that remained unresolved in another three-part article published in 1960–1961 that proposed to analyze ‘Le mouvement révolutionnaire sous le capitalisme moderne’. These essays made a new claim (that would lead to a split in the group in 1963); the irresolvable contradictions in the vision of a socialist society governed by workers’ councils led Castoriadis to abandon finally the classical Marxist theory of the proletariat. The challenge now was to offer a new theory that could take the place of critical Marxism, offering at once a critique of the present and reasons to struggle for the realization of a positive future. This was the task taken up in the five-part article published in 1964–1965, ‘Marxisme et théorie révolutionnaire’. Those essays were then published as the first part of his major work, L’institution imaginaire de la société, which was published in 1975.

Castoriadis now argues that the historical agent of revolutionary change, the proletariat, must be seen as the appearance of a deeper ontological structure of history. Although he was still working within the parameters of Marxism, he was attempting to overcome their limits. Marx tended, often for partisan reasons, to reduce the creative ambiguity of choice in history, subsuming it in a linear-progressive fashion and subjecting it to a philosophical rationalism. The past was seen as absorbed into the present, then becoming pregnant with a future which would, ultimately, eliminate irrationality and scarcity, putting an end to (pre-)History. But the end of History is a myth. Looking at actual history, it is clear that ‘the living being is more than the simple mechanism because it can give new responses to new situations. But historical being is more than the mere living organism because it can give new responses to the “same” situations, or create new situations’.²⁸ The idea of the creative ability of human praxis to produce a radical alterity, and thus historical change, is fundamental to the Castoriadis’ new ontology.

The new responses and new situations are not simply the result of rational-critical working through of what is already there; nor are they the product of a (materialist) Cunning of Reason. The projects which animate human praxis, and the rationality attributed to it, are themselves historical products. It is not possible to suggest that a material situation or a new technology of themselves call for social praxis; nor can it be claimed that an essential rationality was always implicitly present as a guide. ‘After the fact’, writes Castoriadis, ‘we can always say of any phenomenon that it was ideally possible. That is an empty tautology, which teaches nothing to no one’.²⁹ Rather, he suggests,

[a]cting or doing something [le faire] implies that the real is not thoroughly rational; it also implies that it is not chaos, that it contains … lines of force … which delimit the possible, the attainable, and indicate the probable, permitting action to find support in the given.³⁰

Understanding this ambiguity, which is constitutive of praxis, is necessary to avoid the phantasm of true theory, of total knowledge or disembodied thought. Neither engendered by material conditions alone (and therefore, ahistorical) nor the result of pure knowledge applied to brute matter (a technological denial of history), the activity of everyday life itself is praxis. The educator, artist, or the doctor does not ‘know’ the final result he seeks; nor does he simply follow material lines of force, as if these could be somehow read directly from the given, as if the significance of the given were immediately and univocally present. There is an indeterminateness in every praxis: the project is changed as it encounters the materiality of the world; and the visage of the world is altered once the project enters into contact with it.

The problem is to account for the creativity that is history. Castoriadis’ debt to Merleau-Ponty and to Lefort is evident. Praxis is not simply individual; as embodied, the individual is always-already-social; the pure thinker and knower, just like the pure actor or univocal action, is a fiction based on abstraction.³¹ Embodiment entails impurity, which is also the condition of the possibility of thought or praxis. The individual can never have exhaustive knowledge of himself; in psychoanalytic terms, the ‘I’ can never replace the ‘It’. The unconscious, the multivalency of representation, or desire cannot be eliminated; they are crucial to the creativity of the social-historical process itself. Rather than strive like the rationalist for their elimination, the concrete challenge is to understand the relation to them. The individual can relate to them, act on them and through them, only because they are Other, something that is always-already-present and also continually changing. They are the horizon that gives sense to thought and action and thus the condition of the possibility of creation. Their constantly changing nature poses a problem for contemplative rationalist theory which considers Being and beings to be defined and known by the fixed determinations which, ultimately, are said to make them what they are. This explains the need for a reformulation of the traditional notions of theory; reconsideration of the ontological nature of Being in turn affects the status of political theory and the nature of political practice.

Embodiment implies sociality not simply because it insures a physical co-presence with others, but also insofar as it entails the historical sharing of an intersubjective world of symbolically mediated discourse. The body opens out to the discourse of the Other just as it does to the unconscious. In this way, the temptation of what Castoriadis calls the ‘philosophical narcissism’ of the rationalist is avoided. ‘Autonomy is … not the elucidation without residue and the total elimination of the discourse of the unknown Other. It is the institution of an other relation between the discourse of the Other and to that of the subject’.³² Elimination of the social Other would imply the end of history, just as elimination of the body entails the end of praxis. The social Other and individual embodiment are constitutive of the historical nature of the present and the possibility of a project. In this sense, the individual always-already has a theory, plan, or project that is his; he does not act as the result of the discovery of some objective ‘gaps’ or contradictions in the supposedly objective world because the real does not present its meaning immediately. The steam engine does not immediately imply capitalism; humans do not act solely from physical need. The world which is confronted by individuals alongside others is instituted; as such it is active, instituting forms of individual and collective praxis in its turn. Such a social institution is not transparent, univocal or purely rational; nor is it the wholly opaque product of accidental interactions. ‘The social’, writes Castoriadis, ‘is that which is everyone and that which is no one, that which is never absent and nearly never present as such, a non-being more real than any being, that in which we are wholly immersed but which we can never apprehend “in person”’.³³ This ontological theory implies a radical reformulation of the Marxist political project. Its formulation here recalls also the project of Merleau-Ponty.

Politically, the theme of alienated praxis now acquires a more specific meaning. The problem to which it points is not simply that the individual is determined by an Other; Otherness is now seen to be the condition of the possibility of praxis or creation. Were alienation defined as domination by the Other, speech or communication would by definition be alienated. What constitutes alienation is that the Other to whom the individual relates disappears into an anonymous collectivity (the law, the market, the plan, or the bureaucracy). Of course alienation is not just a subjective phenomenon: it is backed by the force of those who stand to benefit from it. As opposed to exploitation, alienation is concerned fundamentally with the relation of the society itself to its own institutions. Revolutionary politics, concludes Castoriadis, must concern ‘henceforth a struggle for the transformation of the relation of society to its institutions’.³⁴ When the ‘string’ of bureaucratic society from which ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ began is now stretched further, its contemporary figure appears when ‘the phantasm of the organization as a well-oiled machine cedes its place to the phantasm of the organization as a self-reforming and self-expanding machine’.³⁵ The kinds of struggle appearing in contemporary society, from the family to the military, from the ecological to the ethnic, as well as in the changing workplace, are expressions of a revolt against the way that bureaucratic society perpetuates itself by means of this phantasm. As such, they can be seen as attempts to reinstitute a praxical relation to the social institution.

Castoriadis offers a series of historical examples to illustrate his argument that no ‘rationalist’ or ‘materialist’ explanation can comprehend such epochal social-historical transformations as the invention of democracy and philosophy in Greece, that of monotheism by a small Semitic people, or the revolution in political thought in fifteenth-century Florence. These inventions are historical leaps; they are revolutions. History is discontinuous; it brings about the introduction of alterity and creates the space for the originary creation that institutes temporality. History in this sense manifests the effects of what Castoriadis calls the ‘imaginaire radical’.

Its mode of operation is implicit, it is not specifically intended by anyone, it realizes itself through the pursuit of an indeterminate number of particular goals … which show in their effects that they have been over-determined by that central signification [the imaginaire radical] that was in the process of instituting itself. That central signification can thus be seized after the fact, as the non-real condition of the real coexistence of the social phenomena: a non-real but eminently effective [wirklich] because effectuating [wirkend] condition.³⁶

The imaginaire radical appears at first to be a type of Kantian transcendental ‘condition of the possibility’ of the existence of the historical. This is not exactly what Castoriadis intended. If it were a super-individual subject constituting the individual and its historical world, Castoriadis would have presented at best kind of Hegelianism. The new ontology as reformulated in L’institution imaginaire de la société makes clear Castoriadis’ explanation of the possibility of the new, and thus of the historical, without falling into the reductive pattern of transcendental philosophy. It will become the ontological basis for a theory of revolution that avoids the dilemmas of Marxist theory and practice.

History is marked by alterity, the emergence of the radically new that did not exist prior to its advent. This history concerns society, whose existence presupposes the institution of a world of common significations: all members of a given society must be able to identify this thing as a cow, this other as a law, and that third as male or female. The cow may also be a god, the law a heritage from ancestral struggles, the male or female an uncle or mother; whatever they are, all members of the society must recognize them in order to speak of them. The first social institution is this shared universe of discourse; it is based on the rules of what Castoriadis calls an ‘identitary-ensemblist logic’. A thing must be identified as this thing; and at the same time, these identifiable things must be capable of being collected in an ensemble that is different from those things themselves. What this thing signifies, and what those things are, differs in different social formations according to the imaginaire of each of them. Castoriadis calls the institution of a ‘logic’ and of a ‘technology’ correlative to this central imaginaire by the Greek names of Legein and Teukhein; they provide the means through which this central institution becomes manifest. The result is the social world which, for any given society, is the ‘real’ world in which it functions. The forms in which the world, individuals, and technology are instituted can vary indefinitely; the only constant is that there must be a commonality established that permits society to exist and to have an identity. Naturally given features like climate and geography play only a minimal role in these institutions; nature does not decree how any social-historical institution takes it into account, only that it must be considered. Borrowing a concept from Freud, Castoriadis suggests that nature serves as the anaclitic foundation for the institution.³⁷ As anaclitic, nature cannot explain the advent of its institution. The institution, however, can explain nature (as ‘this’ nature); it can explain the individual, the social, the technological, and all the rest of what Castoriadis calls secondary institutions and secondary forms of the imaginaire social. What it cannot explain, however, is its own advent. To do that, it would have had to be present before its own institution, which is impossible.

The first institution, the one that wrenches humanity from nature and makes it at once historical and social, is the institution of the institution. This is only apparently paradoxical or tautological. When Castoriadis points out that ‘the first law is that there is law’, his point is that before legal codes can be established, society must institute the signification ‘law’ as a shared meaning for the members. Only when ‘law’ is instituted will the society recognize that its material social conditions need legal codification or alteration. This institution changes the world. Previously existing relations form the anaclitic basis for the institution of the legal system; but they are effectively altered by the institution of ‘law’ which opens new possibilities for social relations. There is no Theseus who institutes the laws; no material conditions send Moses to the mount. If posterity attaches a name to the law-givers that is a result of the fact that it lives in the wake of the institution, within the significations it instituted and their material results. The institution itself is an anonymous collective product.

It is doubtful that one can directly grasp this fundamental phantasm; at best it can be reconstructed from its manifestations because, in effect, it appears as the foundation of the possibility and the unity of everything that makes up the singularity of the life of the subject³⁸

Once it is instituted, the institution can go on to institute a manifold of reorganizations, redeterminations, reformations of the already-present social significations. For example, the institution of capitalism’s domination by the economic could build on and reorganize a variety of already-present tendencies and structures in order to affirm itself. Those already existent forms—banks, a centralized government with financial needs and standing army, the influx of Spanish gold, technological advances—did not cause the institution of capitalism; but once capitalism was instituted, their nature became capitalist while also bringing new variations into being. Castoriadis recognizes that his argument had been anticipated by Marx’s aphorism that a machine is a machine that becomes capital only in certain social conditions. He goes beyond Marx for whom these social conditions are treated seen as ‘real’ material existences; their changed signification is said to result from a ‘dialectic’ through which quantity becomes quality.

To exist and to reproduce itself, any society needs the two fundamental institutions that are reciprocally dependent on one another; their designation by the Greek terms Legein and Teukhein points to their ontological signification, which is more significant than their immediate translation as logic and technology. Castoriadis translates the Legein as the multivalent actions ‘distinguish-choose-pose-assemble-count-speak’; it is that institution by which a ‘thing’ is recognized as self-identical and distinct from other things. The Legein does not define what the thing is, only that it is; it says that it is a this, that it is self-identical and different from other things. Nature obviously lends itself anaclitically to this operation, which can be viewed as the imposition of a code; but the institution of the Legein is not the result of the observation of empirical constancy in nature. The Legein not only institutes the self-identity of the thing, as well as that of the sign itself; it institutes as well the relation of the sign and the thing that it signifies. In this way, it makes possible language as a code that organizes and fixes significations, making possible social discourse. The institution of this relation has ontological consequences that explain both the conditions of possibility of Western metaphysics and its limits.³⁹ As he does frequently, Castoriadis stresses the originality of this institution of the Legein with a simple example. ‘One cannot reflect too much on this simple fact: the word dog and the dog belong together in a manner totally different than the paws and the head of the dog belong together’.⁴⁰ The institution not only institutes a whole gamut of relations, but simultaneously institutes itself as the condition of the possibility of these relations. This is inherent in the nature of the institution as originary; its consequence is that the code of significations it established consists in an indefinite series of relations to others, while at the same time the relation of signification itself can never be exhausted. In this way, the institution institutes a necessary stability of society while at the same time never ceasing to institute new forms compatible with it. It also retains the possibility of restoring the alterity at its foundation.

Castoriadis’ translation of the second facet of his originary ontology, the Teukhein, also combines plural significations. Rendering it as ‘assemble-adjust-fabricate-construct’ shows that it is both dependent on but also constitutive of the Legein. The activity of the Teukhein depends on the prior institution by the Legein of a code establishing the identity of the thing and the sign, as well as the relation of signification between them. As the structuring of social activity, the Teukhein is itself an originary social institution. It adds the notion of a goal (or end) of the action undertaken to the functions of the traditional identitary-ensemblist logic. This goal is itself necessarily structured by the instituted logic of the Legein, as Castoriadis illustrates with the example of the law. The code and the signifying relations that permit an event to acquire the signification ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ must be first of all instituted. Beyond (and co-originary with the institution of the legal logic) the institutions of legal activity must be instituted because a legal logic makes sense only insofar as it insures the enabling actions. In other words, if a society is to reproduce itself as society, it must not only institute the Legein but also the Teukhein that specifies the conditions from which action begins, the ways in which legitimate action occurs as well as the possible aims of those actions; these are all aspects of the Teukhein that depend on the specific social institution of the central imaginaire of a given society. The institution of the Teukhein only appears to depend on technology. Hominoids may use a branch or a stone in a way that appears retrospectively to function as a rudimentary technology. In fact, argues Castoriadis, the reason that the branch or stone is ‘distinguished-separated-sought-after, in order to make …, in a manner appropriate to …, and with the aim of’ depends on an originary Teukhein that is socially instituted within the horizon of some sort of finality.⁴¹

The primary concern of Castoriadis’ ontological theory is to account for the possibility of historical creation by showing how society is instituted in a manner that makes its apparent stability and self-identity possible . His goal, like Marx’s, is critical; he wants to show how instituted society comes to ignore its own nature as also instituting, thereby becoming alienated from itself. His thesis can be illustrated by a tripartite vision of History. In a first stage, society’s instituting character is denied; its origin is explained by reference to an external source (Ancestors, Spirits, or Gods). A second stage imputes its instituting character to nature and/or rationality (the development of the capitalist imaginaire, culminating in the bureaucratic mentality). Finally, a third stage would bring the explicit overcoming of alienation (although not of History) by recognizing explicitly and self-consciously the instituting character of society. Castoriadis insists that there is no necessity for this development. Its possibility depends on the ability of Castoriadis’ ontology to explain the constitution of the individual. In effect, according to the social-historical account given to this point, the individual appears to be instituted in the same manner as a cow or a tool. While the individual is indeed socially instituted, its existence entails a significant ‘more’ which makes its action creative.

Castoriadis’ reinterpretation of Freud proposes a theory of individuation that elucidates further his social-historical ontology. The unconscious presents itself as, not through, a flux of representations. These representations are over-determined, interwoven, and continually fleeing determination: dreams, whose manifest content appears in a (more or less) identitary-ensemblist form, show themselves in analysis to be a multi-layered set of signifying relations. The stubbornness of the unconscious—which knows neither time nor contradiction, that condenses and distorts, uses jokes, rebuses, and wordplays—makes the socialization of the individual appear almost miraculous. What Castoriadis calls the ‘miracle’ of socialization—that feudal society produces persons adapted to the roles of Lord and Serf, that capitalism produces the capitalist and the worker—cannot be explained by the constraints of external reality; the existence of psychosis proves that external force can be resisted and that the unconscious may call for ‘liberty or death’. Freud apparently appeals to the idea that unconscious representations derive from a ‘lack’ created by the withdrawal of the first satisfaction, the breast. The individual seeking to recover what is lost identifies it with the meaningful social world where outward conformity guarantees individual fulfillment. This at first appears to explain the internalization of societal norms.

Castoriadis argues that this interpretation of Freud commits the same double error that vitiated Marx’s work: it takes the real as somehow pre-given and knowable by an outside observer; and it begins from a supposed division of subject and object (the infans and the breast) rather than explaining the origin of this division. For the subject to feel a need or lack, and to act as a result, that need or lack must make sense for it, must be meaningful. Freud’s basic insight was that the originary satisfaction was itself representational; the phantasy of the breast, indeed phantasy-life in general, can provide satisfaction. Castoriadis’ interpretation of dreams does not see them as wish-fulfillments but as fulfilled wishes. The unconscious in its originary state is always-already-satisfied; it is all-powerful, forming the unity he calls ‘Ich bin die Brust’. ‘The great enigma here, as throughout [concludes Castoriadis], and which will always remain an enigma, is the emergence of separation’.⁴² Closing in this way the ontological circle, it now appears that the individual ‘enigma of separation’ cannot be resolved because it expresses at the level of the individual the logical structure that institutes the social-historical.

An individual imagination radicale corresponds to the social-historical imaginaire radical. Equally irreducible in their radicality, the two are not identical; their material manifestations can never exhaust their sense because they open space for different types of creativity. In the ontogenesis of the individual, the first stage is dominated by the all-powerful phantasy of the infans; everything and anything has significance for it as the realization of the phantasized fulfillment. This is not the manifestation of a natural primal desire or the reply to a perceived absence; desire supposes that the desired or its absence be invested with a sense that makes it meaningful. At different stages of individual development, and in different social-historical societies, different objects are invested with meaning. There is no ‘real’ basis for the investment of specific objects. It is true that mouth-breast and penis-vagina must be treated as meaningful if society is to reproduce itself, but there is no such necessity for the psychic investment of the third apparently natural relation, that of anus-feces. The imagination radicale is a ‘matrix of sense’ that cannot be represented as such; it shapes a world of fulfilled sense for the infans. The ontogenesis of the individual depends on a rupture of this unity that opens the psyche toward a potentially meaningful external world.

In this way, the phantasy of omnipotence is replaced by the projection of omnipotence onto the parent(s). This second omnipotence can only be overcome through its own self-destitution. This is the ‘Oedipal’ moment which Castoriadis interprets as the point at which the parent is recognized as only a ‘parent-among-others’ occupying a socially instituted role. Only then can the individual emerge as a person for himself in a social world.

Only the institution of society, proceeding from the imaginaire social, can limit the imagination radicale of the psyche and create a reality for it by creating a society. Only the institution of society can permit the psyche to emerge from its originary monadic madness⁴³

This is where the ontology of the individual and that of the social-historical function in unison; the imaginaire radical encounters the imagination radicale.

Castoriadis rejects the claim that society imposes itself on the individual; what is instituted in the social-historical presents the individual with a sense that satisfies the criterion of meaningfulness established by the nature of the originary unity that is the imagination radicale. The result of ontogenesis is a return to the originary unity, the always-already-fulfilled phantasm that is the matrix of sense. The presence of this same structure in the instituted world of social significations explains why an idea, a word, or a sign can provide a meaningful satisfaction for a mature individual. This is the paradox that psychoanalysis calls ‘sublimation’. Commenting on Freud, Castoriadis explains that

To say that sublimation has been imposed on the drives by civilization when it is evident that ‘civilization’ – that is, no matter what form of instituted society, even language – can only exist if and only if there is sublimation shows the irreducibility of the social-historical to the psychic and at the same time shows the inverse irreducibility.⁴⁴

He adds a concrete illustration a moment later.

[T]he ‘sublimation of homosexuality’ in social relations between individuals does not mean only or especially that one renounces the sexual satisfaction which the others could offer, but that these others are not simply sexual ‘objects’ but social individuals.⁴⁵

Society presents the individual with significations that the imagination of the psyche alone could never pose. Although their modes of being are radically different, each individual needs the other. The congruence of social roles that exist in every form of societal organization cannot be explained by privileging either the social-historical or the individual. In order to explain their congruence, a different ontological premise and a different type of theory are necessary.

The irreducibility of the originary is common to the social-historical and the individual. The imaginaire radical and the imagination radicale exist in their manifestations, but they are never explained or exhausted by them. Castoriadis introduces a new direction with his notion of a magma that is intended to express the unity-in-difference of the two types of radicalism. ‘An indefinite number of ensemblist organisations can be extracted from a magma, but it can never be reconstituted (ideally) by an ensemblist composition (finite or infinite) of these organizations’.⁴⁶ The magma serves to replace the traditional ontological concept of Being.

We assert that everything that can be effectively given – representations, nature, signification – exists in the mode of a magma; that the social-historical institution of the world, of things and individuals, insofar as it is the institution of the Legein and the Teukhein, is always also the institution of identitary logic and thus the imposition of an ensemblist organization on a first stratum of givenness which lends itself interminably to this operation. But also, that it is never and can never be only that – that it is also always and necessarily the institution of a magma of imaginary social significations. And finally, that the relation between the Legein and the Teukhein and the magma of imaginary social significations is not thinkable within the identitary-ensemblist frame of reference – no more than are the relations between Legein and representation, Legein and nature, or between representation and signification, representation and world, or ‘consciousness’ and ‘unconscious’.⁴⁷

From this perspective, the contribution of Freud to a radical critique is not his demystifying of traditional morality, but rather the demonstration of the multivalency of representation and the function of phantasy which throw into question the ontological basis of the classical tradition. The ‘fetishism of reality’ is shown to be the product of a specific social-historical institution.⁴⁸ With this, the perceptual metaphor must fall: ‘A subject which would have only perception would have no perception; it would be totally caught up in the “things,” flattened into them, crushed against the world, incapable of turning away from it, and thus incapable of fixating on it’.⁴⁹ The standpoint of the outside observer, for whom there exists relations of subject/object, signifier/signified, thought/being, is destroyed. ‘All expression’, writes Castoriadis, ‘is essentially a trope’.⁵⁰ There is never a single, cardinal referent, existing separately and singularly, waiting to be taken up by thought. The ontology of the magma shows that while the identitary-ensemblist understanding of Being as determined is necessary for the functioning of a society, it does not exhaust and cannot exhaust the significations that are society as magma. The originary and radical nature of the magma is what accounts for the possibility of historical creation, just as it explains the creativity of the individual.

9.5 What Is Revolution?

Castoriadis’ radical ontology draws out the political implications of his critique of Marxism’s imbrication within traditional rationalist philosophy.

What escapes [the traditional view] is nothing less than the enigma of the world that remains behind the shared social world. This enigma is [not a substance but] that which can become [à-être], the inexhaustible provision of alterity; and it is the irreducible challenge to all established signification. What escapes the traditional view is the very being of society as instituting society, that is, finally, its source and the origin of alterity, or its perpetual self-alteration.⁵¹

Instituted society is only apparently an alienated and dead product, a set of fixed matrices described by identitary-ensemblist thought; in fact, as magma, it is inherently historical. The theoretical project and the practical one come together; the structure of both is axed around the awakening of the instituting nature of society through the theoretical and practical critique of its reified self-understanding. This perspective was already implicit in Castoriadis’ redefinition of alienation in institutional terms. He makes its ‘revolutionary’ implications explicit in a series of questions that lead him to redefine the notion of revolution.

In what measure and by what means can individuals accept themselves as mortal without any imaginary instituted compensation; in what measure can thought hold together the demands of the identitary logic which are rooted in the Legein and the demands of what is, which is surely not identitary, without becoming for that reason incoherent; in what measure, finally and especially, can society truly recognize in its institution its own self-creation, recognize itself as instituting, institute itself explicitly, and overcome the self-perpetuation of the instituted by showing itself capable of taking it up and transforming it according to its own needs and demands and not according to the inertia of the instituted, in order to recognize itself as the source of its own alterity? These are the questions, the question of revolution, which not only go beyond the frontier of the theorisable but situate themselves right away on another terrain … the terrain of the creativity of history.⁵²

Castoriadis admits that theory can offer no reason to expect that this revolution will occur and that no material or logical grounds can be produced to argue for it. Rather, on the final page of The Imaginary Institution of Society, he justifies his revolutionary claim.

[W]e aim at it because we want it and because we know that other people want it – not because these are the laws of history, the interest of the proletariat, or the destiny of being. The instauration of a history where society not only knows itself but makes itself by instituting itself explicitly implies a radical destruction of all known forms of the institution of society.⁵³

‘Tu fais la révolution pour toi’ was one of the themes of May 1968; ‘participation in the decisions which concern our lives’ was the slogan of the American New Left. Castoriadis’ thought is of a piece with the times even while it brushes a philosophical tableau that reaches beyond them.

Castoriadis offers no recipe for revolution; he has shown that the Marxist idea of ‘revolution’ is built on a philosophical impossibility. At the same time that he shows how traditional theory is built on the occlusion of the social-historical, he explains why that form of alienation was necessary and how it remains always a threat. The ontology of the magma does not mean that the identitary-ensemblist organization of the world can be avoided. The Legein and the Teukhein must exist in all societies that remain stable. The differences among them depend on the central imaginaires of each of these societies, which manifest themselves in the different social significations they institute. Castoriadis’ aim is to encourage a changed relation of society to its institution, rendering conscious and open to discussion what had been occluded or repressed. Because he admits the necessity of the institutions of the Legein and Teukhein, Castoriadis continues to insist that a revolutionary organization is necessary because his changed vision of the meaning of revolution implies that the inherent danger of bureaucratization in the organization can and must always be fought. The task of the organization would not be to take the lead in action but (as Castoriadis had argued in 1968 in La brèche) to initiate reflection on the nature and limits of imaginary institution of society itself. Any specific set of demands should not be understood as a governmental program; their efficacy would depend on their ability to further interrogation and debate by the participants. For example, the demand that the revolution establish immediately equal pay for all members of society would not be based on considerations of justice or morality and certainly not on the ‘labor theory of value’. Its justification would be that such equality puts into question one of the central forms of the capitalist imaginaire and its productivist logic. Similar considerations would affect other points in an organization’s program, such as the elimination of hierarchy.

Castoriadis’ new ontology explains more fully his rejection of Marxism as ‘the flesh of the world we combat’. The distance traveled can be seen in a familiar example. When Marx describes the relations of production as the relation of persons by the mediation of things, he appears to treat the persons and things as existing independently before they are combined into specific relations. Castoriadis had criticized this perspective as early as his early essay on ‘The Relations of Production in Russia’. He adds now a further remark to specify his point.

Society does not, in a ‘first moment’, pose goals and significations in terms of which it could deliberate on the most appropriate technology to serve and to incarnate them. Goals and significations are posed from the outset in and by the technology and the Teukhein—just as the significations are posed in and by the Legein. In a sense, the tools and instruments are significations; they are in the ‘materialization’ in the identitary and functional dimension of the imaginary significations of a given society. A production line is (and can only exist as) a ‘materialization’ of a manifold of central imaginary significations of capitalism.⁵⁴

Marx of course knew, and repeated, that a machine is not ‘capital’ because of its real properties, any more than gold is automatically money. He tended nonetheless to treat ‘things’ as if their significations were neutral. In that sense, it is Marx who was the ‘philosopher’ while Castoriadis recognizes the full richness of social possibilities.

Castoriadis’ ontology of the magma is still not fully elaborated; he has promised a second volume tentatively titled L’élément imaginaire; and he continues to intervene actively in political and intellectual debates. Overcoming the traditional ontological prejudice that imposed the separation of theory from practice, Castoriadis opens a vista of research and reflection. Despite his differences with his former comrade, Claude Lefort, each of them combines philosophical reflection and political thought in ways that open the domain of ‘the political’. The structure and presuppositions of this project, in politics as in philosophy need to be understood if the radical project is to advance.

Footnotes

1

Biographical material cited throughout is adopted from ‘Introduction générale’, in La société bureaucratique, 1 (Paris: UGE, 1973), the 1974 Interview with Castoriadis by the Agence Presse Libération de Caen (translated into English in Telos, no. 23, 1975), and the Interview with Claude Lefort by the Anti-Mythes (Paris and Caen) in 1975. I have also relied on long discussions with Castoriadis and Lefort, as well as with former members of the group, such as D. Mothé, and J-F Lyotard. Where there are several versions of an event—such as the splits in the group—I have tried to present a balanced argument of the alternatives presented.

2

Jean-Marc Coudray (C. Castoriadis), in Mai 1968: la Brèche (Paris: Fayard, 1968), p. 92. The programmatic part of this essay was distributed as a mimeographed leaflet during May by some of the ex-members; a further discussion was added for the book’s publication.

3

This was published, along with the first five installments, as L’institution imaginaire de la société (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975).

4

On Trotsky, cf. Claude Lefort, ‘La contradiction de Trotsky’, originally in Les Temps Modernes, no. 39, déc–jan 1948–9, now in Lefort, Elements d’une critique de la bureaucratie (Genève-Paris: Librairie Droz, 1971). In the Interview with the Anti-Mythes, Lefort stresses his debt to Castoriadis for the economic part of his analysis.

5

‘Les rapports de production en Russie’, reprinted in La société bureaucratique, 1.

6

Ibid., p. 179.

7

An American splinter from the IVth International, in many ways similar to ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, did take this direction. The ‘Forrest-Johnson’ (Dunayevskaya-James) tendency was in close relation with ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, which translated some of their articles into French. This is not the place to enter into the differences between them, or the split of James with Dunayevskaya; it suffices to note that by the mid-1950s, the distance had become radical.

8

Cf. Lefort’s ‘What Is Bureaucracy?’ Telos 22 (Winter 1974–1975). In ‘Le totalitarisme sans Staline’, Lefort insists that the transformation effected cannot be called ‘primitive socialist accumulation’, as Isaac Deutscher suggests, because primitive accumulation in Marx’s sense brings about the establishment of relations of domination of Capital over Labor—not socialism. Lefort uses the term ‘state capitalism’ because he still believed that the existence of the proletariat means that Marx’s vision of socialism remains possible. Lefort goes on to suggest that the relations between state and civil society in bureaucratic Russia differ from those in bourgeois society, where competition maintains the separation between civil society and the state. ‘Totalitarianism’, he writes, ‘is not a dictatorial regime, as it appears when we speak summarily of it as a type of absolute domination in which the separation of powers is abolished. More precisely, it is not a political regime: it is a type of society, a formation in which all activities are immediately tied to each other, deliberately presented as modalities of a single universe in which a system of values predominates absolutely, such that all individual and collective activities must necessarily find in that system their coefficient of reality; in which, finally, the dominant model exercises a total constraint at once physical and spiritual on the behavior of the particular individuals. In this sense, totalitarianism makes the pretense of negating the separation characteristic of bourgeois capitalism among the various domains of social life, the political, the economic, the juridical, the ideological, etc. It effectuates a permanent identification of them all. Thus it is not so much a monstrous growth of the political power within society as a metamorphosis of society itself by which the political ceases to exist as a separate sphere’ (Eléments, p. 156).

The role of the party is crucial for this argument; it ‘is the agent of a complete penetration of civil society by the state. More precisely, it is the milieu in which the state changes itself into society, or the society into the state’ (Ibid., p. 157). Individual action is transformed, given a collective meaning. The party claims to be a mediator; but since the society remains divided, in reality the party is just another particular among the particular interest groups, although it pretends that its decisions have universal social validity. Lefort’s interpretation of the 20th Congress of the Russian Bolshevik party in February 1956 argues that it is not a loosening of the grip of the party but its self-affirmation. During the heroic period after 1917, the bureaucracy, like the bourgeoisie of the French Revolution, had to hide its real purpose from itself, draping itself in mythical robes. A quarter of a century later, with the industrialization of Russia, a calming of the passions, ending the violence, became possible. Where the rising bureaucracy needed the Terror and the myth of socialism to forge its own unity, once its base was established, it had to find forms to legitimate its control. This was all the more necessary as, during the same quarter of a century, a working class had also arisen, forged from the ex-peasantry, and laboring in conditions of modern industry. Its needs too had to be addressed, at least partially. The limits of what the bureaucracy can do in this context are—in Lefort’s interpretation at the time—those of the proletariat’s need for self-management, as well as the fact that, to maintain itself, the bureaucracy establishes wage and work hierarchies whose effect appears in the impossibility of making the Plan work, since in such conditions it is not possible to calculate the cost of socially necessary labor power. The inefficiency of the Plan and the new social needs of an industrial proletariat force the bureaucracy to assert its hold through new measures of ‘liberalization’ (as at the 20th Congress), aimed at increasing participation in production and thus raising productivity.

9

The analyses of the events of 1953 and 1956 in Eastern Europe which were published in Socialisme ou Barbarie remained refreshingly actual long after the events. Their implications for the revised view of capitalism were drawn later, as the ‘bureaucratic string’ was pulled even further. See also ‘Sur le contenu du socialisme’, in Socialisme ou Barbarie (hereinafter SB), nos. 17, 22, 23. Both Castoriadis and Lefort have recently published new essays on the 1956 Revolution in Hungary, in Telos, No. 29, Fall, 1976.

10

The relation between Merleau-Ponty and the ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ group would bear further study, as the essays on Lefort and Merleau-Ponty in this volume also suggest. There are circumstantial overlaps, among them: Merleau-Ponty’s use of Benno Sarel’s manuscript study of East Germany, his indebtedness to Lefort particularly as concerns the discussion of Trotsky, or the (unacknowledged) citation from Castoriadis in Les aventures (pp. 312–13) or Castoriadis’ own citation of Merleau-Ponty’s definition of praxis (SB, no. 38, p. 62) and his use of Merleau-Ponty’s adaptation of Malraux’s ‘deformation coherente’ to describe the imaginaire radical (ibid., no. 40, p. 45), or the return to the ontological problematic of the institution. There is also a more substantial philosophical debt. Worth mentioning here is the edition of the journal, L’Arc (no. 46, 1971), directed by Lefort, to which most of the editors of Textures, including Castoriadis, contributed.

11

This problem is elaborated concretely in ‘Sur la dynamique du capitalism’ (SB, 12–13, 1953–4) and in ‘Le mouvement révolutionnaire sous le capitalisme moderne’ (SB, no. 31, 32, 33, 1960–1). Castoriadis developed further his critique of Marx’s naturalistic presupposition in ‘Justice, valeur et égalité: d’Aristote à Marx et de Marx à nous’ in Textures, 1976. In this essay, Castoriadis’ political argument looks to the ontological presuppositions that deform Marx’s account of human laboring activity which appears to be both ahistorical and naturalist. Marx’s image of human being as based on labor is shown to reflect the imaginaire of capitalism.

12

Introduction générale, op. cit., p. 38.

13

SB, no. 38, p. 85; now in L’institution imaginaire de la société (henceforth L’institution) p. 129.

14

This analysis is developed clearly in ‘La question de l’histoire du mouvement ouvrier’, which is the Introduction to the first collection of his earlier essays, L’expérience du mouvement ouvrier, 1 (Paris: UGE, 1974) (henceforth ‘La question’). The debates, and quarrels, between Lefort and Castoriadis from the early 1950s, and again from the 1950s, have been reprinted in collections of their work, and each has returned to the problem in the interviews with the Anti-mythes. The crucial point in the present context is that both Castoriadis and Lefort recognize that insofar as their positions were still determined by the problematic of the proletarian revolution, the debate was deformed.

15

‘La question’, op. cit., p. 78.

16

Castoriadis makes use of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class to stress this point. Where Thompson avoids drawing the theoretical conclusions from his own work, Castoriadis brings them to the fore. In effect, Thompson recognizes the creative role of the working class in shaping itself as revolutionary subject, but he refuses to draw the implications as concerns the Marxism to which he doggedly held. Thompson combines the most acute historiographical methods with an ultimately dogmatic and unthinking maintenance of what he takes to be (humanist) Marxism.

17

‘La question’, op. cit., p. 113.

18

Ibid., p. 112.

19

It is obvious that human need is a factor in history; a starving society can establish no social formation. As will be seen in Section IV, Castoriadis deals with this problem under the heading of an always present ‘natural stratum’. For the moment, it suffices to add here the observation that the same supposedly natural needs have given rise to a dizzying multiplicity of forms of satisfaction, implying that their explanation in terms of need is either trivial or practically useless.

20

Thus, the Communist Manifesto’s beginning sections read like a hymn of praise to capitalism. Lefort presents similar criticisms.

21

SB, no. 37, p. 45; L’institution, p. 75.

22

SB, no. 38, p. 50; L’institution, p. 90.

23

SB, no. 35, p. 10 (article ‘Recommencer la révolution’).

24

‘Introduction générale’, op. cit., p. 14.

25

Ibid., p. 32.

26

SB, no. 35, p. 25 (article, ‘Recommencer la révolution’).

27

Claude Lefort’s comments on this attempt are worth citing here. ‘It is already a fiction to suppose that men could decide “en connaissance de cause” the general objectives of production if only they were put in the position of being able to evaluate (thanks to the Plan-producing factory) the comparative costs of investments in all sectors, of being able to appreciate the consequences of their choices and to hierarchize those choices. The implication is, in effect, that once it is freed from the false representations and artificial constraints engendered by capitalism, “desire” relates directly to the real and modulates itself with the aid of a slide-rule’ (Interview with the Anti-mythes, p. 13). Castoriadis’ developed ontology does not make the assumption that in socialism (or anywhere else for that matter) an individual could relate directly to a ‘really-real’ object.

28

SB, no. 37, p. 32; L’institution, p. 61.

29

SB, no. 39, p. 63n; L’institution, p. 187n.

30

SB, no. 38, p. 67; L’institution, p. 109.

31

In Les Aventures, Merleau-Ponty works through the implications of these identical assertions in his lengthy critique of Sartre.

32

SB, no. 39, p. 28; L’institution, p. 143.

33

SB, no. 39, p. 37; L’institution, pp. 153–4.

34

‘Introduction générale’, op. cit., p. 54. In comparison with Lefort’s ‘logic of the political’, it becomes clear that what for him is constitutive of the experience of the political is interpreted ontologically by Castoriadis.

35

SB, no. 40, p. 63; L’institution, p. 222. Similarities to Lefort’s analysis of the ‘invisible ideology’ are no doubt due to the fact that the two of them were again working together during this period, although not always in full harmony.

36

L’institution, p. 486.

37

In this way Castoriadis avoids the reproach of ‘existentialism’. A cow can be instituted as all sorts of things, from totem to tool; but it can never write a poem or invent the windmill. ‘On ne peut pas dire n’importe quoi’, repeats Castoriadis again and again. He put later his interpretation of psychoanalysis to the practical test as a clinician.

38

SB, no. 40, p. 44; L’institution, p. 200.

39

Castoriadis illustrates this point in detail with examples from mathematics and philosophy. The relation instituted by the Legein establishes a set of significations in terms of which the world is presented. To that end it constitutes what Castoriadis calls an ‘identitary-ensemblist logic’. The operators of the Legein—which include relations of separation/identification, distinctions such as with regard to/insofar as, and comparisons of validity as/validity for—can be iterated and combined indefinitely. The Legein brings with it the relation of finality or instrumentality insofar as it refers to what is not yet but could be—is added, the tradition of practical philosophy can be derived as well.

40

L’institution, p. 341.

41

The result here suggests a reformulation of Marx’s insights. Every society has a different finality that is instituted by its Teukhein and its imaginaire central. Revolution properly speaking would be the institution of a new social finality. In fact the revolution that Castoriadis calls for would go further; it does not simply introduce a change in the finality of production, although it includes that. The call for a change in the productivist finality of capitalism remains within the instituted thought of the Legein and the Teukhein. While recognizing the impossibility of doing without these, Castoriadis wants to change society’s relation to them. Reform would be a change in social finality; revolution implies a change in social relations. C.f., the concluding section, below, which examines Castoriadis’ redefinition of revolution.

42

L’institution, p. 406.

43

Ibid., p. 417.

44

Ibid., p. 420.

45

Ibid., p. 422.

46

Ibid., p. 461.

47

Ibid., pp. 462–3.

48

Ibid., p. 446.

49

Ibid., pp. 450–1.

50

Ibid., p. 476.

51

Ibid., p. 495.

52

Ibid., pp. 295–6. Lefort’s criticism on this point should be noted here because it avoids one possible misinterpretation and clarifies what was said about his theses in Chap. 8. He insists that ‘[t]he idea of auto-institution partakes of the most profound illusion of modern societies, i.e. of those societies in which (as Marx observed) little by little the relations of man to the earth, and relations of personal dependence are dissolved; of those societies in which there is no longer the possibility of inscribing the human order, the established hierarchies, in a natural or supernatural order—or better, the two at once—because the visible disequilibria there always pointed to an invisible order … [M]odern societies (and I am obviously not thinking only of the work of theorists, but of the discourse implied in social practice) are busy seeking in themselves the foundation of their institution’ (Interview with Anti-mythes, p. 18). Lefort sees Castoriadis giving in to the illusion of a total theory, in spite of his awareness of the danger. Castoriadis’ reply would no doubt be to point out that Lefort’s phenomenological ontology of experience leaves no room for a political project and hence that he denies the possibility of revolution. Castoriadis would further point out, as noted above (n. 27) with reference to Lefort’s critique of his analysis of the content of socialism, that while Lefort’s description of modern societies is accurate, their search for their own foundation continues to take the form of a traditional ontology based on a rationalism. His own notion of auto-institution does not follow the common-sense image of the consumer consciously choosing guns or butter, nor is it a version of the theme that ‘knowledge is power’. Despite their differences, the two positions seem to me closer to one another than either would admit.

53

L’institution, p. 498.

54

Ibid., p. 483.

© The Author(s) 2019

Dick HowardThe Marxian LegacyPolitical Philosophy and Public Purposehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4_10

10. Actualizing the Legacy—New Social Movements in the West and Civil Society against the State in the East

Dick Howard1  

(1)

Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, New York, NY, USA

Dick Howard

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.

The first two sections of this chapter, published in 1988 as an Afterword to the book’s second edition, treat the general question of the relation of theory and practice. I examine first what I call ‘The Politics of Theory’ and then turn to ‘The Theory of Politics’. The play on words is again intended to make a theoretical point that has practical consequences. I contend that the ‘New Left’ politics within whose horizon the first edition was written retains its radical potential. The symmetrical difficulties encountered by those who insist on the priority of theory for understanding political practice, as well as those for whom practical choices constitute the dynamic foundation for any radical political theory, permit me to explain why the book is divided into three distinct parts: ‘Within Marxism’, ‘Using Marxism’, and ‘Criticizing Marxism’. The young Marx had encountered similar difficulties when he tried to distinguish his own approach from both those contemporaries whom he called ‘the practical party’ and those he designated as ‘the theoretical party’. These difficulties also suggest the reason why the critique of Marxism remains essential to the Marxian legacy, which is not a unitary product that can be passed on without alteration regardless of historical changes that have intervened in the meanwhile. A legacy is not a birthright or patrimony, still less a gift or a bequest; it has to be earned in order to be truly possessed.

The third and fourth sections of this Afterword turn next to the questions ‘Why the Legacy?’ and ‘Why Question Marx?’ in order to explain first the principles that governed the inclusion and exclusion of such candidates as Georg Lukács, or the work of other members of the Frankfurt School. I go on to introduce some more recent critical accounts of Marx’s contribution to his own legacy. This third section recognizes also that the triadic structure that moves from ‘within’ to ‘using’ before ‘criticizing’ Marxism could be read as constituting a dialectical progress. However, as the fourth section indicates, that assumption would be misleading insofar as it leaves no room for further development, from the side of theory or from that of practice. That is why this fourth section discusses some works written after the first edition of The Marxian Legacy was written. I discuss here the ambitious theoretical project of Jürgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (1981) which forms an insightful addition to his earlier work that was discussed in the first edition. Similarly, from the perspective of Sartre’s ‘existential Marxism’, André Gorz’s Adieux au prolétariat (1980) seeks to recapture the legacy by rethinking the philosophical and practical premises leading him to subtitle his book provocatively as ‘Beyond Socialism’. Although they interpret the terms differently, both Habermas and Gorz recognize the broader question of ‘the political’; both seek solutions by reinterpreting the politics of democracy.

Returning to the criticism of Marxism by Merleau-Ponty, Lefort, and Castoriadis that was discussed in the first edition, it is clear that it was articulated from the standpoint of a critique of the ‘politics of theory’. The fifth section of this Afterword, ‘Criticism and the Question of History’, shows how Lefort and Castoriadis moved beyond their earlier critique toward a positive theory of democracy during the past decade. Although their conceptions differed, Lefort and Castoriadis shared an understanding of totalitarianism as the deformation of the socialist project. That critique has opened out to a positive perspective on democracy over the recent years The Marxist temptation to replace the formal institutions of ‘bourgeois’ democracy by a ‘real’ or ‘social’ democracy suggests that, in essence, totalitarianism is above all an immanent potential of democracy. As a result, democratic politics can be understood as posing a question to which, each in its own way, capitalism and totalitarianism try to formulate an answer. Both ‘answers’ fail because they eliminate the very question that animates radical politics. Hence, the final section of this Afterword, ‘The Legacy as Present History’, tries to draw different practical, and theoretical, consequences from the Marxian legacy by reframing that question in different terms.

10.1 The Politics of Theory

Despite Hegel’s downgrading political theory to the role of ‘the owl of Minerva’ who flies only after the fact, Marxist intellectuals stress the vital importance of theory. Struggling to come up with a ‘correct’ understanding, they naturally assume that their work is more than that ‘idiosyncratic need’ to which currently modish deconstructionists such as Richard Rorty want to reduce their labors.¹ The young Marx’s move from philosophy to political economy was based on a left-Hegelian reinterpretation of the theory-praxis problem. Marx argued that Hegel’s systematic demonstration of the rationality of the real could not be true as long as the real world’s imperfections were so painfully obvious. Theory had to be wrenched from its splendid isolation and turned to the world. Praxis was made necessary by the theoretical imperative to complete the system by changing the world, negating the negation. At least for the young Marx, theory justified and called for praxis. Theory was not, as is often assumed, the result of a praxis to which it merely gives a rational form. This is why the Communist Manifesto rejected other forms of socialist practice; their theories were inadequate to the task they proposed.

The priority of theory for radical politics is not absolute. Political intellectuals would not be the people they are if they were insensitive to the world around them. That was surely my own case during the years when I first wrote this book, and so it remains. The first edition contained two introductory chapters, which are not reproduced here.² Although the remaining chapters of the book treat the same thinkers as in the first edition, they have been rewritten in 2018 because this book is not simply document testifying to another epoch. This claim demands some explanation, since I clearly situated, and situate, myself within that earlier ‘New Left’ which may appear in retrospect as the reflection of blue-eyed generosity by a lucky generation produced by an ephemeral post-war prosperity whose welfare-state bounties began to wither away as the Vietnam War wound down and the civil rights movement diminished. That ‘New Left’ seems to have been condemned, with the old Left, by the history that Hegel called ‘The Court of Last Judgment’ and on whose progressive path Marx had relied. What is to be said in the face of changes in Portugal, Cambodia, or China, let alone Ethiopia, Iran, Afghanistan, Poland, or even Nicaragua? Or, to stay within the territory of what is called ‘Western Marxism’, does the German Social Democrats’ attempt to update their Bad Godesberg program under pressure from the movement called the Greens offset the lack of imagination displayed by the French Socialists when they finally came to power in 1981? Is the problem simply one of theory?³

The Marxian Legacy is critical of Marxism and of Marx. When the publisher of the first edition proposed a photograph of a demonstration from May 1968 as its cover, I had it replaced by a reproduction of Bruegel’s painting, The Blind Leading the Blind. In the Preface, I cited Castoriadis’ assertion that Marxism has become ‘the flesh of the world we combat’ but added immediately that ‘whatever we may think of Marxist orthodoxy, we cannot think without Marx’. I did not mean that qualification as a political apology; thinking with Marx is precisely his legacy, as the third part of this book shows. The problem is not so much Marx himself as it is understanding what political thinking in fact is. Theory has its politics, as politics has its theory. The point can be illustrated from contemporary Marxist theory; it can also be seen in Marx himself.⁴

Two types of theoretical politics try to use Marx and his legacy to save Marxism. This rescue-mission is necessary because, without a theory, praxis seems adrift, without a compass, meaningless. Worse, without a correct interpretation of its meaning, the sense of what praxis has in fact wrought may be misunderstood, stolen by opponents, or distorted for its addressees. One contemporary variant calling itself Marxist simply returns to the work of the Master, in order to demonstrate that competing views have misunderstood its sense. This is easy enough; the works of any great thinker, engaged with his times, provide grist for many mills, as the examples of Althusser, Della Volpe, or Colletti, and a host of less global reinterpretations, have demonstrated. Often invented for ulterior political purposes, such Marxism is not part of the legacy.⁵ Nor are the other contemporary attempts which adduce syncretically new theories in order to enrich the original, broadening it to treat questions that had not arisen in the nineteenth century. Freud is the most frequent mate for such mixed marriages, but he is hardly alone among the potential candidates, as the pages of the Frankfurt School’s Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung illustrated abundantly.⁶ The resulting union is no more fecund than the return to the original texts. Applications of Marxism to disparate domains are not part of the legacy. There is no need today to continue to read the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung because of its book reviews.⁷ The rescuers misunderstand the political nature of the theory because they implicitly equate it with the praxis it is supposed to determine. In doing so, they in fact separate the two spheres, excluding reciprocal influences that enrich both of them by their dialogue.

The dilemma for Marx’s rescuers is apparent in the twin goals that they pursue: to explain or to explain away. Some try to give sense to phenomena that escape the inherited texts. They practice the mixed marriage technique, and while their work is not devoid of sociological interest, it threatens to reach too far, explaining away the novelty of the phenomena it confronts. The paradigm illustration of this temptation is found in Marx himself when he tries to reduce cultural superstructures to socio-economic infrastructures. If this temptation is the exception in Marx’s thinking, his successors made it the rule. Trotsky’s insistence on the ‘socialist’ nature of the Soviet Union’s economic basis (because it had done away with private property) made him an appealingly tragic figure for many intellectuals, then as now. Lefort and Castoriadis developed their critical theories because they saw through the politics of this theory both in its justification of so-called really existing socialism and in the analysis of the changing nature of capitalist society. The danger is that theory claims to define a truth against which reality is to be measured. The Marx who is salvaged in this way is separated from the world with which his theory claimed to be inextricably bound. The theorist saves self-certainty by his illusory political engagement. The quest for a coherent understanding of the sense of social practice that animated the rescue-operation is forced to conclude that the real world is made up of constituted by accidents, external circumstances, or failures of leadership. Its result is the opposite of its intention.⁸

My goal is not to save Marx, not even from himself. Marx’s thought is relevant because of his questions, not his answers or even his mistakes. Lefort’s recent rereading of the Communist Manifesto illustrates the difficulty. Marx announces that a ‘spectre is haunting Europe’. This implies that communism is already a power and that the Manifesto is simply the statement of what already is the case. The politics of theory becomes the theory of politics. The resulting proclamation is not Marx’s claim; he speaks in the name of a London meeting that authorized him to proclaim internationally this message. The reader is not an individual questioning the world; the Manifesto is addressed to the world to which it explains its very own movement toward a necessary end. Although they are a political party, the communists do not speak as a particular, partisan group; they take no positions of their own but speak in the name of the world. The source of their knowledge is none other than the facts themselves, whose interpretation is evident to the observing Reason of the theorist. By contrast, when the bourgeoisie comes to speak, Marx shows that its assertions have the ironic result that its own principles turn against it; the abolition of the family, private property, and ‘all that is holy’ are part of a naturally unfolding history over which no one has control. The bourgeoisie must lie to itself and the world because its material position blinds it to the truth. On the other hand, if the communist speaks the truth, it is the voice of all previous history, a history that culminates in the proletariat whose essential nature is expressed by the Manifesto.

In this way, the Marx of the Manifesto is neither political nor a theorist. History is the theorist. Politics disappears because the proletariat is a curious sort of hero; it has no personality, no illusions in the present, no conflictual social bonds, and its only option for action is revolution. Its power comes not from what it does but from the very ‘nothing’ that it is, which makes it the executioner of history’s final judgment. This is not the proletarian analyzed in Capital whose productive learning that makes it a revolutionary subject is analyzed at length (e.g., in the long chapter on the struggles to limit the working day). The paradoxical a political politics of the Manifesto reappears in its refusal to think about the future that it wills. This is again paradoxical; ‘the history of humanity which takes place entirely before the eyes of the communists gives rise to a society without ideas, a society that is self-identical to the point that it abolishes any possibility of judgement. This is why Marx refuses to imagine the character of the future; society is for him self-sufficient; it excludes any representation of itself; it cannot name itself nor even explain why it claims to be free and just’. How, then, can Marx speak of oppressors and oppressed, or describe a struggle for emancipation? The secret of this antipolitics is the position adopted by the theorist, who is not an individual or a party but the voice of History itself, speaking the truth that which has finally become fully visible in the reality of the proletariat. The Manifesto marches forward, with the force of a rushing river or the monotonous movement of a machine. Retreat is ruled out since all other theories have been shown illusory, while Marx’s own text is not ‘theory’ but history made fully visible to itself.⁹

The paradoxical assertion that Marx is not the author of the Communist Manifesto coincides with the implicit reconceptualization of the politics of theory that transforms it into a theory of politics. If the theorists are correct in claiming the importance of their work, that is because of the peculiar nature of the Marxian theory rather than the result of the politics that it encourages and legitimates. Marx never made the distinction between the two spheres explicit. The implication of the Manifesto is that interpretation of his theory depends on its practice. This had important implications in Eastern Europe in the 1980s when, after the failures of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the crushing of the reform communism in Czechoslovakia in 1968 an oppositional movement of a new type emerged in the 1980s. Thinkers especially in Poland (Kuron´ and Modzelewski, Michnik) and Hungary (Konrad and Szelenyi, Kis) recognized that ‘theory’ in the form of wooden slogans that serve to rationalize bureaucratic domination has been discredited.¹⁰ The opposition that has emerged finds itself in the inverse identical position of the young Marx. Praxis that is expressed in new forms of resistance and creative forms of social solidarity in civil society, outside of the state, make theory necessary just as it had been theory that founded the young Marx’s turn away from philosophy to political practice. The new resistance that characterized the emancipatory movements in East Europe shows that politics need not depend on pre-given theory; it may produce its own self-critical understanding, which proves not to be foreign to the concerns animating the Marxian legacy, even when (as it had earlier in western Europe) it takes the form that I call in Part III, ‘Criticizing Marxism’. The Marxist theory of politics that results from those reflections will, in turn, have to overcome its own paradoxes in order to inherit the Marxian legacy.

10.2 The Theory of Politics

The opposition between a theory demanding practice and a practice that calls for theory is based on an oversimplification of both theory and politics. Wherever priority is placed, one pole is treated as a question, the other as supplying the answer. A ‘revolutionary’ theory or practice claims implicitly that there is a hiatus between the two poles; the revolution is conceived as a rupture that is neither an ‘after’ which reveals the truth of the old order nor a ‘before’ that explains the necessity of the new regime.¹¹ Although revolution can be conceived as the ‘truth’ of both politics and theory, it is not identical with either of them. This is what so fascinated Merleau-Ponty. Revolution is the moment in which theory and practice are united but distinct, each passing into the other, fructifying and transforming, questioning and challenging. The richness of Marx, and of his legacy, lies in the persistent attempt to think together these two poles which, for ‘common sense’, remain apart. Separated, theory and practice seek one another, need one another, and yet distort one another in their necessarily fruitless quest for identity. United, they destroy one another, as Lefort’s reading of the Manifesto demonstrates, and the practice of totalitarianism witnesses. While this does not mean that revolution is impossible, it points to the need to rethink the politics of revolution and the theory that explains its necessity.

That ‘New Left’ that I claimed as a participant in the Marxian legacy illustrates the difficulty. It was a cultural phenomenon, a mode, and life-style; and it was the sociological correlate of a specific political-economic conjuncture. But it was more than that; it was a movement for justice and a quest for happiness, freedom, and equality; and it was a democratic movement that continued to question itself. For just these reasons, its demise was predictable once it began to take itself for something it could not be: the agent of revolution.¹² Its practice became afflicted by theory; it sought to become what the theory demanded: a ‘revolutionary subject’. It travestied itself, searching for a sociological reality in which it could nest its desired subjectivity, from which it could define its identity, divesting itself from its own real conditions. It passed from the quest for unity with the labor and black movements, to seek unity with the Third World before tasting the ‘cultural revolution’ and finally splintering among the plurality of possibilities defined by its naive sociology. It could not recognize its own originality as a new politics because there was no place for the new in the Marxist theory that it found itself adopting. It could not formulate the theory of its own practice. It did not recognize that political theory is neither the description of a relation of forces nor the utopian projection of a final state of realized happiness or justice. Political theory can neither remain in the ‘before’ nor flee to the ‘after’. The New Left confused theory with practice and came up short on both ends.

Although the New Left has disappeared as an actor, it remained an absent participant in the debate initiated by the rise of a neo-conservative politics at the same time that post-modern theory began to make known its presence in the university in the 1980s. Both of these phenomena were in a sense anticipated by the New Left; together, they illustrate the critical nature of the Marxian legacy. In the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany, a neo-conservative politics challenges the extension of democratic participation that appears to threaten the foundations of the liberal Rechtsstaat .¹³ Habermas has pointed out that this interpretation treats a cultural effect as if it were a socio-political cause, ignoring conveniently the capitalist economy in which the new popular participatory demands are anchored. But that criticism is only a beginning. It is not enough to distinguish real from false causes of political problems; the problems persist. The neo-conservatives have raised significant questions about the limits, and therefore the nature , of political intervention. Their critique of the so-called new class that has accompanied the extension of the Welfare State ignores the reality of the needs to which that intervention answers, although the reality of the needs does not mean that the only solution comes from state action. The question of the limits of the political sphere cannot be avoided, especially by a tradition that tends to reduce the state to its economic function. The ‘New Left’ argument that ‘the personal is the political’ is in itself not the answer to the need to redefine politics.

The neo-conservative attack on the modern welfare state is not limited to the narrowly defined sphere of politics. The formulation of similar criticisms under the heading ‘post-modernism’ suggests that neo-conservatism is not necessarily a politics of the ‘right’. Much of contemporary French philosophy, under the influence of Heidegger, has turned vigorously against the rational (or ‘rationalizing’) principles of the Enlightenment, of which Marx was said to be a prime example. The origin of the rationalist error is said to begin with Descartes’ project, which takes the ego as the ‘master and possessor’ of all it surveys. This ‘philosophy of the subject’, whose project of mastery has negative ecological correlates, is blamed for the project of unlimited domination of which capitalism is only one manifestation. This mentality produces the modern myth of a progressive philosophy of history articulated in the nineteenth century by the German ‘Master Thinkers’ culminating in Hegel and Marx. Their ‘mad project’ can be resisted by ‘decentering’ the subject through what Foucault called ‘micro-strategies’ for the defense of daily life. These ‘post-modernist’ French themes had a familiar ring to German ears already attuned to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.¹⁴ Habermas heard in the post-modernist jargon a reformulation of neo-conservatism’s demand for limits. He feared that the French influence was leading to new elitism incarnated by those who can afford the individualism of micro-strategies; and he worried that they were encouraging unintentionally the renewal of an anti-rationalism that haunted German politics since the times of first Romantic movement.¹⁵ These observations are suggestive; it remains to formulate a political theory that situates the novelty of the present moment.

Habermas’ equation of neo-conservatism in politics with the French post-modernism in theory is revealing. His political attack on the neo-conservatives is the expression of a classical Social-Democratic political stance. When he comes to the French, his analysis is more complicated. Like the Frankfurt School, Habermas knows that the Enlightenment tradition and Marxism are not unambiguous heritages. Indeed, Habermas admits that what he considers as the excesses of post-modernism are part and parcel of the development of late-capitalism.¹⁶ But when he tries to understand systematically the place of post-modernism as philosophy, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), he returns to the young Hegel’s struggle to integrate the imperatives of the Enlightenment with his image of the ethical community in order to understand the refusal of the young Hegelians (including Marx) to accept Hegel’s systematic equation of the rational with the real. In this way, Habermas transforms the political problem raised by the neo-conservatives into a theoretical dilemma. He eliminates the specificity of the political question; theory replaces politics. The political question, whether posed by the New Left, the neo-conservatives, or the French post-moderns, is dissolved in theory before being transformed into a general analysis of modernity (whose ‘philosophical discourse’ for Habermas begins with Hegel, not with Marx). Analogous to the ways the Manifesto made theory depend on politics, Habermas tends to make politics depend on theory.

Habermas’ theoretical politics is elaborated in his two-volume Theory of Communicative Action which he began in response to the rise of a neo-conservative political reaction in Germany toward the end of 1977.¹⁷ The first volume concludes with a long chapter describing the movement ‘From Lukács to Adorno: Rationalization as Reification’; the second concludes with another intellectual voyage that passes ‘From Parsons Through Weber to Marx’. The first volume presents an immanent critique of the tradition inaugurated by Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and culminating in the aporias of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. The second reformulates the Frankfurt School critique of instrumental reason as the ‘colonization of the life-world’, which Habermas contends is a modern version of Marx’s own theory. The ‘tasks of a critical theory’ follow from the analogy to the notion of a ‘real abstraction’ which Marx took over from Hegel for his own purposes. Marx’s thesis was that the revolutionary critique of political economy became possible only at a specific historical moment, when the ‘abstract’ concept of labor power actually governs the behavior of capitalists such that the ‘concept’ of labor power becomes a real problem in the experience of a working class exploited by the capitalist mode of production and struggling for better conditions and a shorter working day. In these conditions, the particular wrongs suffered by the workers become general wrongs imposed by the entire system, which must itself be overthrown; the practical rebellion of the workers and the critical theory of capitalism are united by the reality of the theoretical ‘abstraction’. By extension, Habermas suggests that modern societies create autonomous individuals capable of free and rational communication at the same time that continued modernization demands the reduction of this autonomy in the name of the systemic rationality imposed on the life-world by the demands of late-capitalist social reproduction. The result parallels the situation described by Marx as a real abstraction; the modern life-world is threatened by colonization and as individuals we cannot not be struggling to overcome it. Practice and theory are joined by the fact that ‘communicative action’ is the foundation of both.

Habermas’ reformulated Marxist model of the relation of politics to theory repeats, in inverse form, the relation of theory to politics criticized in Lefort’s reading of the Communist Manifesto. Action is reaction, negation is affirmation, and Habermas can claim that it is ‘political’ because the threat to which it responds has a universal potential. Practice is made theoretical in the same way that the Manifesto made theory practical: by denying its particularity. Habermas wants to produce a Marxism that is also modern; and he wants to do justice to the ‘new social movements’ which continue, in their manner, the New Left. He does not, however, ask whether the transformations of modern society call for a different understanding of politics. The ‘politics’ that Habermas tries to theorize are social. This is no doubt the reason that, when it comes to philosophy, Habermas’ concern is morality before it is politics.¹⁸ That is why he criticizes the post-moderns, even while accepting the utopian vision of Adorno—and even of Benjamin, in what is surely his most brilliant piece of writing¹⁹—while refusing the sometimes strikingly similar post-moderns. ‘Adorno does not merely bale out of the counter-discourse which had inhabited modernity ever since the beginning; rather, in his desperate adherence to the procedure of determinant negation, he remains true to the idea that there is no cure for the wounds of the Enlightenment other than the radicalized Enlightenment itself’.²⁰ Habermas’ attempt to inherit both the Enlightenment and Marxism through a theory of ‘communicative action’ seeks to add the universalization of practice to the universalization presupposed by Marx’s theory of History. The question whether this combination of a philosophical theory of communicative action with a sociological analysis based on a reformulated Marxism can provide the basis for a modern politics will return; for the moment, the political implications of the post-modernist argument against which Habermas directs his polemical energies points to the fact that his theory of politics rejoins the idea of a politics of theory, whose implications remain to be analyzed.

In some of their most egregious oversimplifications, French post-modernists have identified the Enlightenment as the intellectual foundation of the Soviet Gulags. Often expressed by the ‘new philosophers’, who became popular in the latter half of the 1970s, this point can be left as an anecdote here.²¹ Pierre Rosanvallon’s contemporary attempt to explain the emergence of a ‘second left’ that had become for a moment a real political option in France in his Pour une nouvelle culture politique (1977) is more significant. Rosanvallon sees no exaggeration in the assertion that ‘We experience the gulag today similarly to the way German philosophy experienced the French Revolution: as a radical questioning which marks a decisive turning-point’.²² The assertion that parallel questions are posed by the revolution and by the experience of totalitarianism demands explanation. It suggests that totalitarianism, like revolution, reveals the ‘truth’ of politics. The ‘before’ and the ‘after’ only appear to differ; on analysis, they prove to be identical. Before totalitarianism, there was democracy; after totalitarianism, there shall be democracy. What is the totalitarian interlude? What is it about democracy that makes it turn against itself?

In the background of these questions lies the experience of the New Left and its practice of participatory democracy, as well as its naïve and ultimately self-destructive attempt to identify the personal with the political. I was attracted by the French preoccupation with the critique of totalitarianism and its relation to democracy at the same time that Habermas’ radicalization of the first generation of the Frankfurt School was an attractive option. Whereas Habermas ultimately came to defend the formal institutions of democratic procedure, the French understanding of the relation of totalitarianism and democracy pointed to a more radical possibility: the idea of a new form of politics. The critique of the Marxian legacy proposed by Lefort and Castoriadis offers a positive theory of the political that avoids the formalization of democracy at the same time that it opens the idea of a political theory of modernity.

The paradoxes that have emerged in these first discussions of the practice of theory and the theory of practice cast light on the new politics that The Marxian Legacy attempts to theorize. These paradoxes also explain the structure of the book. The emergence of ‘democracy’ in the practice of the New Left and in the theories of post-modernism pose more questions than they answer. The French Revolution demonstrated the inability of direct democracy to give itself institutional (representative) forms. Democracy is not a state of affairs. What I call Marx’s ‘phenomenologies’ of French history witness his dynamic understanding at the same time that they demonstrate that his own theory could not be ‘applied’ to guide practice.²³ This is no surprise; revolutions present the political moment in its pure form. They call for theory precisely because they manifest the new, which cannot be predicted nor discerned in the past. This ‘revolutionary’ nature of revolutions calls for a specific type of theory. Revolutions pass through three phases: they exist first as lived experience, which comes to recognize that it is neither presaged by the old nor marks a complete escape from its grasp; they must remain a constant process of self-affirmation; a first conceptualization then tries to fix the lived experience in an institutional form whose fundamental feature is determined by the fact that, knowing it is a rupture that is not yet complete, it remains open to further modification even as it attempts to anchor itself in society; finally, the reflective and critical result of the conflictual interplay between the new and the old may succeed in anchoring the revolution by preserving the ambiguities of democracy, or it may destroy democracy in order to preserve ‘the’ revolution.

Insofar as the Marxian legacy is revolutionary, the three sections which compose this book can be understood to follow the path of the democratic revolution. ‘Within Marxism’ describes the experience of Marxists whose rigor as theorists and probity as political actors poses the question of democracy under the conceptual mantle of revolution. ‘Using Marxism’ conceptualizes the experience and confronts its contradictions, although it is still unable to name the political question that implicitly drives its conceptual thought. Finally, ‘Criticizing Marxism’ captures the political question whose democratic openness preserves the legacy rather than embalming it a theoretical Kremlin Wall. There is a fourth moment to revolutions if they are successful: they live on. This Afterword, including its claim to preserve the ‘truth’ of the New Left experience, expresses that fourth moment, attempting to explain why my particular reconstruction is adequate to its object. Before bringing that argument to its conclusion, the first three phases of the legacy need to be specified theoretically. That will permit me, a decade later, to specify further principles of inclusion and exclusion and to bring the argument up to date by integrating the new work of Habermas, Lefort, and Castoriadis.²⁴

10.3 Why the Legacy?

Although he did not use the term, the notion of a legacy that is not simply handed down as whole cloth to the legal successors was conceptualized implicitly in Merleau-Ponty’s Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). On the surface, the phenomenologist appears to be retracing the intentions guiding an intellectual movement that is ultimately betrayed by Sartre’s ‘ultra-Bolshevism’. His own Humanism and Terror (1947) had earlier brought him too close to a communist orthodoxy from whose conceptual underpinnings he sought to free himself. Merleau-Ponty did not reject only the practical consequences (‘Stalinism’) of Sartre’s political theory; if his goal had been to criticism a politics of theory, he could have criticized Lukács for any number of political compromises rather than interpreting him as initiating the tradition of ‘Western Marxism’. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical intention is suggested also by the fact that he begins with a phenomenological interpretation of Max Weber’s method for bringing together the objectivity of the scientist with the passion of the politician. Weber’s ‘historical imagination’ is situated in the present while claiming to understand the past and to act politically toward a future that he knows cannot be known. This paradoxical mixture of theory and politics points to a conception of history that is foreign to Marxism but compatible with the Marxian legacy. The question posed by the concept of ‘Western Marxism’ is theoretical before it is political.

Claude Lefort’s Introduction to the 1980 re-edition of Humanism and Terror suggests the path through which the immanent critique of communist politics pointed the philosopher toward the theoretical reorientation. In the immediate post-war climate, Merleau-Ponty’s book had a double goal. He defended Marxism’s critique of the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed goals of bourgeois humanism that are contradicted by their material realization in capitalism. To do so, he had to rescue the originality of Marxism as a specific type of political theory. Merleau-Ponty juxtaposes the fictionalized portrait of Nicolas Bukharin in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon to the records of the actual Moscow Trials in order to develop a properly philosophical argument. He criticizes Koestler’s gross alternative between an impersonal logic of history and the integrity of existential intention that reduces political praxis to the choice between that impersonal logic and an abstract morality. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the Moscow Trials assumed the veracity of the revolutionary ideals proclaimed by the regime rather than challenge their material realization. As a result, the debate that he plays out between the supposedly revolutionary prosecution and the presumed still revolutionary Bolshevik is intended to preserve the openness that he thought characterized Marxism as a theory of proletarian praxis. As a theory of praxis, Marxism could pretend to certainty; its task is only to elucidate the necessity—not the content—of engagement with the world. This assumption permitted Merleau-Ponty to imagine that Bukharin would confess to error because, as a revolutionary who accepts the uncertainty of history, its judgment has condemned his concrete choices but not his revolutionary intentions.

Once Merleau-Ponty establishes his argument, the usually neglected third part of Humanism and Terror reopens the debate concerning the validity of Marxism. The victor appears to be a Marxism that is not the theory of the proletarian praxis Merleau-Ponty defended against Koestler. Marxism is now interpreted as the theoretical foundation for a critique of bourgeois humanism; it becomes a logic of history necessary to guide practice. The theory of practice is replaced by a consideration of the practice of theory. The result of the new stance is that the temporary absence of the revolutionary proletariat in contemporary Western societies suggests adopting a tactic of ‘revolutionary waiting’ for its reappearance. When he turns to the political role of intellectuals, Merleau-Ponty seems aware of the implicit change in the nature of the theory. He attacks the notion that political theory can treat historical problems as if they were parts of a kind of geometry problem to which a logical solution needs to be found. If there were such definitive solutions in history, there would be no place for the ‘existentialist’ ambiguity of proletarian praxis that his rebuttal of Koestler had shown to be essential to Marxism. In that case, it was not clear what the revolutionary was supposed to wait for. The question of the legacy is posed by just this absence of a solution to the problems of politics.

Nearly a decade later, The Adventures of the Dialectic elaborates the question that concludes Humanism and Terror while abandoning the tactic of political waiting. Merleau-Ponty returns to Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness whose condemnation by the communist party and renunciation by its author had not destroyed its influence as an underground classic.²⁵ There is no need to reconstruct here Lukács’ synthesis of Hegel and Weber to reinterpret Marx. No Marxist today can avoid confronting Lukács’ philosophical effort to understand at once the revolution and its failure. In a way, Lukács’ explanation of the failure by means of his reconstruction of Marxism testifies to the eventual success of his project. That is just the difficulty; his theory accomplishes too much. His explanation of reification explains the lack of proletarian class consciousness while at the same time assuring the conditions of its possible re-mergence. The question is when, and how, possibility becomes necessity. Lukács’ answer, like that of the Communist Manifesto, replaces philosophy by history. The ‘ascribed class consciousness’ attributed to the proletariat on the basis of historical necessity was in reality transferred to the communist party in the absence of real proletarian practice. The politics that result from this theory destroy the autonomy of the political question. The tactic of ‘revolutionary waiting’ becomes the unwilling accomplice of a Bolshevized Soviet Union whose traits Merleau-Ponty had tacitly recognized in Humanism and Terror .

Merleau-Ponty’s reconstruction of The Adventures of the Dialectic concludes with a devastating critique of the philosophical premises and practical consequences of the ‘ultra-Bolshevism’ of Sartre. Merleau-Ponty is part of the Marxian legacy because he restores to Lukács’ theory its philosophical character. One of the threads composing History and Class Consciousness is the critique of the scientistic positivism of Engels who could claim to be Marx’s legitimate heir. Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Lukács shows that Marx’s legacy is built around the questions that he posed rather than the answers he proposed. Lukács’ Hegelian reconstruction of the political-economic theory proposed in Capital , his specification of the dialectical method rather than any specific practical goal is the foundation of Marx’s work, and his integration of Weber’s theory of rationalization with Marx’s account of the fetishism of commodities are remarkable theoretical insights. Their fruitfulness could perhaps be described as a ‘legacy’ built on questions that he tried too quickly to answer.²⁶ The critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School would be among the legatees. Lukács himself moved too quickly toward synthesis; his Marx became a materialized Hegel, his later Aesthetic Theory and Ontology can be seen as paradoxical attempts to reclaim his own testament, which is not part of the Marxian legacy.²⁷ The fact that the young Lukács, student of Max Weber and close friend of Ernst Bloch, could reconstruct Marx’s answers more clearly than had Marx himself suggests that Marx’s genius lay in his ability to pose new questions for which neither his own theory nor the world that he knew had answers ready-to-hand.

Lukács devoted two of the essays in History and Class Consciousness to Rosa Luxemburg. He demonstrates her dialectical understanding of the need to interpret politics from the perspective of totality; and he defends her Accumulation of Capital, and its explanation of the relation between economic theory and proletarian practice. His acrobatic attempt in the second essay to refute her critique of the anti-democratic political practice by Lenin during the early months of the Russian Revolution without denying the virtues ascribed to her in the first essay rings false. His attempt should be noted here also because Luxemburg is said to present a non-Leninist alternative to the political stagnation that followed the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Russia and domination of the International.²⁸ That assertion cannot be proven (or disproven). It poses a question in the guise of an assertion. The notion of revolution inherited with the Marxian legacy implies that the founding experience will always have the character of ambiguity that permits its partisans to say, in retrospect, ‘if only we had stopped here, following this or that advice, avoided this or that contingency’.²⁹ That foundational experience, rather than its conceptual formulation as a ‘dialectical method’ that defines orthodoxy as Lukács argued, determines Luxemburg’s place in the Marxian legacy.

Rosa Luxemburg illustrates, but does not ask explicitly, the questions Marx left unanswered. She represents the lived experience of Marxism before it had been clouded by war and the failure of revolution to spread beyond Russia. What appear in retrospect as ‘contradictions’ emerge in their fullness because life itself, which for the Marxian politician includes theoretical life, draws them along in its unity. The difficulties are apparent only after the fact, when its life has ended, and its reconstruction undertaken. At that point the deeper unity of the life becomes an ‘ism’; it cannot serve the new generation, who face new problems, a new heritage. It is not possible to ‘use’ Luxemburg for a conceptual reconstruction of the legacy. She was the purest of Marxists, as Lukács, himself an ‘owl of Minerva’, had the insight to see. All that remains today are the contours of her experience; her answers have lost their relevance, her questions have to be reconstructed anew. Her defiant testament, from the ruins of the Spartakus rising, proclaims that ‘Revolution is the only kind of war in which the final victory can be built only on a series of defeats’. The chapter on Luxemburg in The Marxian Legacy is only a preliminary. It is not surprising that her critique of the Bolshevik Revolution turned around the problems of democracy; she could only pose it as a question, not as a model for those who follow her.

Because her experience is the legacy of Marxism, Luxemburg does not pose the question of that legacy. To illustrate the problem of the legacy from within Marxism, I turn to Ernst Bloch’s contribution, particularly his critical debate with Lukács, and his attempt to understand the newness of fascism. I titled an essay that I wrote for the Festschrift for his 90th birthday ‘Ernst Bloch–Our Contemporary’.³⁰ The title was not fortuitous. Bloch’s long life is larger, more textured, and contradictory than a single chapter could possibly portray; to have known him late in life was also to imagine the diverse facettes of his experience. In its unity the experience is striking; the ability of Bloch’s ‘warm stream’ within Marxism to remain contemporary suggests that, like Luxemburg, he too is part of the lived experience of the Marxian legacy. Considering Bloch within the ‘legacy’ suggests that, more than the ‘principle of hope’ with which he is usually identified, the question of how to inherit the legacy characterizes Bloch’s life. This may explain some of his political choices that retrospect judges harshly, as well as others, including his support for the New Left, which appear more favorable. The utopian element in Bloch was anchored always in the present, whose newness he sought constantly to measure.³¹ What distinguishes Bloch from Luxemburg, in the present context, is that he was aware of the problems posed by the legacy which he lived. What joins them together, however, remains an experience which no theory can exhaust, and that fact challenges any theoretical attempt to define it. As neither practice nor theory, this experience exists for those who seek to inherit it in the form of a question.

10.4 Why Question Marx?

The experience that founds the legacy remains affirmative; as a result, it excludes political reflection in the way that is suggested by the legacy: reflection as question. Of course, the experience of Marxism included tactical and even strategic thinking; and of course, alternatives were weighed, positions debated, texts interpreted. It could even be said that the Marxism of the Second International was overly concerned with political theory, at least as concerns interpreting what counts as orthodoxy. But the Second International was working with an inheritance, a solid basis which it sought to fructify for coming generations. Luxemburg and Bloch at times showed a similar attitude, which accounts for their occasional dogmatism when theory is invoked to justify a given practice. But a political theory that proposes specific actions separates theory and practice which, as Merleau-Ponty saw, the legacy attempts to hold together in the form of an interrogation. That is not the kind of theoretical politics that distinguished Luxemburg from her ally Karl Kautsky in the ‘revisionism debate’ or from another temporary ally, Eduard Bernstein, in opposition to the Social Democratic war policy in 1914; nor is it what characterized Bloch’s attempt to understand the novelty of fascism when faced with the dumb orthodoxy of Dimitrov and the leaders of the Third International. But Luxemburg did not conceptualize her political experience, and Bloch’s repeated attempts to describe the ‘unconstructible questioning’ that emerges in the ‘darkness of the lived moment’ only restate the dilemma by identifying revolution with a utopian moment. The question emerges explicitly only when experience is conceptualized in the attempt to use it.

Those within the legacy who ‘use’ Marx do not apply the kind of political theory that was inherited by the Second International. Their project was not to bring Marx’s theory in line with the new phenomena revealed by a developing capitalism as it was confronted by a ‘really existing’—if only in one country—socialism. Nor is the challenge to account for the failure of the revolution to spread after the Russians had broken the ‘weak link’ in the capitalist chain in 1917. Such issues were of course present; the legacy is not a mystical grail accessible only to the pure and purified. The three illustrations of the ‘use’ of Marxism presented in this section offer portraits of thinkers who continued to be involved in the problems posed to an inherited Marxist theory. They are included precisely because of their attempt to bring Marxism to bear on the new problems they faced. Conversely, creative contributions like as those of Adorno or Benjamin are excluded because of their imaginative transcendence of these more mundane problems of Marxism. This discussion of ‘using Marxism’ tries to show how the apparently practical application of Marxism poses questions that its rigorous theorists cannot help airing. The difficulty for their interpretation is not the absence of answers; the failure arises from the inability to identify the necessity of the question itself. It is not easy for a radical political theory, faced with a world whose change it desires, to remain in the interrogative mode.

The attempt to ‘use’ Marxism arises when the experience within the legacy is no longer directly accessible. Historical events do not explain this transitional moment. Different theorists are driven to realize the novelty of their situation by different historical conjunctures. The failure of world revolution, the rise of fascism, the nature of the Soviet Union (recognized at different moments by different theorists for different reasons), the persistence and apparent stability of capitalism after the Second World War, and the process of decolonization are still accidental occasions for a new attitude to politics and its theory. A more conceptual account of the transition to the ‘use’ of Marx by the legacy itself is necessary. It is important to explain why there occurred a renewal of Marxism at the very moments when its inability to explain or to guide action becomes manifest. The analysis of ‘the politics of theory’ has already suggested the theoretical weaknesses of such attempts. Whatever the rhetorical claims by the ‘users’ of the legacy—for whom practical considerations like getting a public hearing or the personal desire to remain ‘of the left’ may have justified a claim to orthodoxy—the results of their appropriation go beyond the immediacy of the experienced legacy to articulate the novelty of the question it contained. Their failure to formulate this question will be shown to result from the fact that they remain still within the conceptual universe of Marxism—which seeks positive solutions to social problems—even while the rigor with which they pursue their engagement forbids them from assuming that they have found such answers.³²

Users of the legacy are theorists, self-defined and self-limited. But their theory remains a ‘theory of politics’ whose limitations make it necessary to pose anew the question of the legacy. The paradox was not apparent to them. Marx had warned against the ‘idealism’ that believes that theory can guide practice. It would be useful to recall his youthful epigram proposing ‘to make these petrified relations dance by singing before them their own tune’. Reflection on the question why the mature theory of socialist revolution was presented by a study called Capital was called for. Users of the legacy tended to abandon the Marxist economic reductionism but not the appeal of the materialist infrastructure constituted by capitalism’s ‘petrified relations’. Theirs would be a theory that, they thought, would not be separate from the object theorized. Finding that ‘object’ which could replace the revolutionary proletariat hypothesized by Lukács and Marx proved to be difficult.

As the varieties of experience drove one or another engaged political thinker to recognize the need to ‘use’ the legacy, they seemed to differ in their designation of the missing revolutionary ‘object’ for reasons that depended on circumstance or personality. This apparent ground for their differences proves to be inadequate; its limits explain another set of exclusions from The Marxian Legacy. However insightful one finds Frankfurt School collaborators such as Frederick Pollock, Otto Kirchheimer, or even Franz Neumann on the autonomy of politics, or however fruitful the ‘genetic structuralism’ of Lucien Goldmann or the ‘critique of everyday life’ of Henri Lefebvre may appear, they do not belong within the question posed by the legacy. This is because the ‘object’ which in fact concerned the users of the legacy was the experience of the legacy, not a specific political conjuncture or the longer-term transformation of capitalism. This is the theoretical ground for the transition to the explicit ‘use’; it explains the strengths, and the limits, of their project’s orientation to the use-value of Marxism. The Marx who is in question in the legacy is both the father of Marxism and the thinker for whom history existed only in the interrogative mode.

10.4.1 The Frankfurt School: Inclusions and Exclusions

The conceptual ‘use’ of the legacy explains why I concluded the chapter on Max Horkheimer at the point where he had become, despairingly, aware of his relation to that legacy. I do not present him in the context of the Frankfurt School as an evolving intellectual project attempting to come to grips with its times, driven from a first phase characterized by ‘materialism’ to a second stance defined by the distinction between ‘traditional and critical theory’.³³ I do not analyze its debt to Lukács and discussed the work of Herbert Marcuse only with regard to his specific elaboration of ‘critical’ as opposed to ‘traditional’ theory.³⁴ The impact of psychoanalysis, mediated by Erich Fromm, is absent from the account, as is discussion of the actual research undertaken by the Institute for Social Research.³⁵ Perhaps surprisingly, I conclude my analysis at the point where, in Dubiel’s reconstruction, a shift to a third phase that concentrates on the ‘critique of instrumental reason’ occurs. As a result, I present an ‘existentialist’ Horkheimer, who marks a transition to Sartre as well as to the early Habermas because the basis from which his thinking drew was incapable of conceptualizing the political question that underlies the twin fascist and soviet ‘authoritarian states’ that were about to go to war.³⁶ In the intervening years, Habermas has elaborated a new theoretical orientation that breaks consciously with the ‘subject philosophy’ which, he argues, vitiated the Frankfurt School theory.³⁷ The new theory of ‘communicative action’ claims to be able to reformulate those goals which animated both Marx and his Frankfurt heirs.

Habermas is of course not the only claimant to this legacy,³⁸ nor is he an uncritical heir. Among the reasons for the cessation of publication of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , he explains, was

[p]erhaps … the fact that even those who have given Marxism the pseudonym of critical theory still did not proceed in a sufficiently unorthodox manner. Because they understood what Marx had called the “productive forces” too traditionally, they soon had to discover that the growth of the forces of cognitive–instrumental rationality do not of themselves guarantee forms of life worthy of men. For perhaps the real productive forces, their rational potentials, are based more on a state of communication than on working conditions.³⁹

The critical interpretation of the first-generation Frankfurt School need not depend on the validity of Habermas’ own position. He suggests another reason for the ambivalence of the founders after their return to the new Federal Republic of Germany in an ‘Afterword’ to a re-edition of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (whose republication Horkheimer had steadfastly refused until 1969, despite requests, including those of his co-author, Adorno). That book represented for Horkheimer a rupture with the project of the Zeitschrift, which he had nurtured and directed for a decade; after its completion, Horkheimer’s productivity was never the same; his projected speculative philosophy was never completed and his social pessimism continued to grow. Marx was increasingly replaced by Nietzsche as an immanent condemnation of the Enlightenment. No such wrenching shift was required for Adorno; motifs from his early work, which had not stressed the relation to Marxism, enter directly into the Dialectic of Enlightenment. The eschatological pessimism that Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason (1946) had been present throughout Adorno’s collaboration with the Frankfurt School.⁴⁰ Habermas, ever the dialectician of the present, concludes that if the earlier Marx-inspired Frankfurt School appealed one-sidedly to the student radicals of the 1960s, it would be equally one-sided for the present generation to adopt only the Nietzsche-inspired ‘post-modern’ variant which condemns the Enlightenment as ‘totalitarian’.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment presented a totalizing philosophy of history whose pessimistic conclusion was that reason’s progressive development is purchased at the cost of the oppression of outer nature and the repression of inner nature. There is no room for freedom, creative social relations or human dignity within this ever more tightly interwoven edifice whose human producers are also inevitably its deformed products. A seamless web runs from clever Odysseus through calculating Sade and on to the ad-men and the anti-Semites who treat others as means to their own ends. The optimism of Marx is condemned; its success could only bring about the failure that Horkheimer had denounced in the ‘authoritarian state’. The theoretical political project of Marx is impossible; there are no grounds from which the critique can build practically, and none from which it can legitimate rationally its project. The eschatological pessimism of Benjamin’s famous ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ expressed radically the mood of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. There is no artifact of culture that is not also a monument to barbarism. Salvation is possible only through a mystical theology which the work of art can perhaps prefigure; the philosophical logos in its modern garb stands utterly condemned. Capitalism and socialism are caught in the same nightmarish dream of material progress and false happiness that produced Auschwitz.⁴¹ Horkheimer and Adorno’s vision radicalizes Weber’s ‘iron cage’, which is no longer restricted to modernity alone. Political thinking is helpless and hopeless.⁴²

The Weberian overtones in the Dialectic of Enlightenment suggest to Habermas the direction for a more positive interpretation. The repressive costs of enlightened progress can be separated analytically from the gains they purchase. Weber’s notion of the perverse consequences of societal rationalization need not be generalized to the entirety of reason as logos: the latter then can equally be imagined as the immanent opponent of its repressive consequences.⁴³ This would permit the articulation of an immanent ‘critique of instrumental reason’ which provides guidelines for rethinking human history, as well as a research program for contemporary social investigation, and perhaps even a platform for political engagement. This immanent critique would provide a deeper foundation for Marx’s intuition of the potential for immanent critique of the capitalist mode of production. The authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment had already insisted that their condemnation of ‘the culture industry’ did not imply a rejection of ‘mass culture’ as such; their analyses sometimes sounded elitist but they remained in principle open to democracy. This is the point where a second correction of Weber is necessary. The sociologist had argued that no legitimate rational standard can guide political action within the instrumental parameters of a desacralized modern world; his political ‘ethics of responsibility’ is based, ultimately, on an existential decision that cannot be founded in any external standard. This irrationalism could become the basis for a right-wing political theory and practice (as in the case of Carl Schmitt) or it can justify the kind of post-modern antics that so disturb Habermas. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is a powerful argument because it takes seriously the demands of reason; to escape from its consequences by abandoning reason is a petition of principle unworthy of, and unthinkable for, those who want to save that very rationality whose self-condemnation they refuse to accept. Under these conditions, Habermas has to produce nothing less than a new theory of rationality itself!

10.4.2 Jürgen Habermas: Philosophical Foundations, Political Questions

A rationally grounded ‘critique of instrumental reason’, which Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment could not provide, would have the positive effect of restoring the Marxist notion that revolution is the immanent self-critique of capitalism. The self-division of reason into an instrumental and a human, social, and emancipatory reason is the obvious path. Habermas’ attempt to develop this proposal in Knowledge and Human Interests did not distinguish the social effects of the different forms of rationality (which can be described empirically by an outside observer) from the immanent grounds of this rationality (which make it necessary for reason to divide itself into distinct types). Habermas’ assertion of a ‘quasi-transcendental’ status for the specific knowledge-constitutive interests can be seen as an implicit admission of the difficulty. That is perhaps the reason that this philosophical framework is absent in the analyses of Legitimation Crises . That theoretical politics was developed within the paradigm of an immanent, sociologically reformulated self-critique that would lead to the crisis, and the eventual transformation, of the capitalist system. Comparison of the two approaches suggests that the difficulties in the attempt by Knowledge and Human Interests to show that philosophy is social theory led to an apparent abandonment of philosophy in favor of social theory. The inability of Legitimation Crises to think the political question within this framework is one reason that Habermas returned to the philosophical foundations of social theory, completing the project that the Dialectic of Enlightenment had left its heirs.⁴⁴

Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action proposes a radical reorientation toward the basic concepts⁴⁵ of traditional philosophy. When it avoided recourse to a mystical theology, the later Frankfurt School, and especially Adorno, developed the notion of a mimetic, non-(or pre-)conceptual relation to the world as the antidote to the paralyzing dialectic of enlightenment. This approach was especially suggestive with relation to art in which paradoxes such as the highly formalized and abstractly rational forms of modern music since Schoenberg could be adduced as ‘proof’ of the presence of the resistant ‘other’ from which revolt, and humanity, could be hoped. Habermas criticizes this attempt for its political implications,⁴⁶ but more importantly he puts into question the philosophical premises that make it possible. His goal is to return to the old project of a critique of instrumental reason by adopting a changed paradigm, the communication theory of action, and thereby to renew critical theory. The old theory was based on a ‘philosophy of consciousness’ that pictures a separate and self-sufficient observing subject standing over against an equally separate and autonomous objective world. The new theory goes beyond Hegel’s critique of Kant’s use of this model (as elaborated in Knowledge and Human Interests). The ‘decentering’ that stresses the primacy of intersubjective communicative action over the experience of the consciousness of the individual subject in the three domains of knowledge, social interaction, and expressive behavior provides the basis for Habermas’ renewal of the interdisciplinary project of the Frankfurt School. At the same time, the unsullied experiential basis of the revolt provided by the ‘mimetic’ moment can be given a rational foundation in the notion of a communicatively structured life-world.⁴⁷

The novelty of Habermas’ program can be illustrated by comparison with the problems unresolved by Knowledge and Human Interests. The ‘quasi-transcendental’ foundation of the critical ‘emancipatory interest’ has to be reformulated. It cannot be attributed simply to the achievement of self-reflection, as in psychoanalysis, since the subject-centered philosophy of consciousness has proven inadequate to escape from the dialectic of enlightenment. The intersubjective notion of communicative action suggests that rational understanding is based on the ability to explain the conditions in which any action can be accepted as valid by another individual. Such formal validity conditions concern three domains: the truth about objects, the appropriateness or rightfulness of the social relations in which that assertion is made, and the subjective truthfulness of the other actor(s). Standards must be developed to show that this understanding is not merely subjective. The method that determines these standards is called ‘reconstruction’, which Habermas sees illustrated in the work of Piaget and Kohlberg. Reconstruction avoids the problems of the constitutive orientation proposed by the dualistic philosophy of consciousness. For example, Alfred Schütz’s attempt to formulate a social phenomenology fails because the totality of the life-world can never present itself to a single gaze because that gaze, itself, is a part of that world. This is the same difficulty that vitiated the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Reconstruction, on the other hand, ‘can be certain of the rational content of anthropologically deep rooted structures through an at first reconstructive analysis, i.e., one that begins a-historically. It describes the structures of action and of understanding that can be deciphered in the intuitive knowledge of competent members of modern societies’. By underlining ‘at first’, Habermas suggests that reconstruction will not suffice by itself to explain the necessity of emancipation.⁴⁸ This was already clear from the fact that among the three conditions evaluated in communicative understanding, the earlier concern with an emancipatory interest is replaced by the ‘subjective truthfulness’ of the actor.⁴⁹ This self-limitation of theory to the ‘reconstruction’ of already existing practice will have important consequences on Habermas’ claim to inherit creatively the project of the Frankfurt School.

Habermas integrates the goals of critical theory into his new theory of communicative action by defining his project as the realization of the Enlightenment. This seems to exclude the moment of revolutionary or utopian rupture fundamental to the more clearly Marxist project in which the ‘emancipatory’ interest was rooted. Habermas’ understanding of the Enlightenment project is not so directly political. The relation of his interpretation to his new theoretical framework is made explicit in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.⁵⁰ When modernity is equated with the Enlightenment, the economic interpretation of social action which Marxism adopted because of its subject-centered theory of knowledge and action is placed into a broader context that Habermas defines as the ‘life-world’, which has primacy over the actions performed in it. ‘The life-world is the resource from which the participants in an interaction draw the arguments about which they seek consensus; it is the equivalent of what the philosophy of the subject attributed to the synthetic action of consciousness in general’ (PDM, p. 379). The critique of Schütz suggested that this life-world can be known only through the reconstruction of its formal pragmatic structures. Habermas does not, however, remain at the level of formal reconstruction. He applies the conceptual arsenal of systems theory. The social differentiation that comes with modernization ‘uncouples’ the life-world from the systemic conditions of its formal reproduction. System and life-world follow different logics in the process of modernization. Modernization of the social system increases its complexity, permitting it to confront new problems rationally; modernization of the life-world increases the rationality of its specific structures by freeing them from the traditional forms of heteronomy that deny freedom of communicative interaction.⁵¹ The co-existence of these different logical imperatives suggests a potential conflict which, Habermas insists, cannot be avoided because the separation of the spheres was the precondition for the breakthrough that inaugurated modernity. The conflict reintegrates the emancipatory goal that the theory of communicative action showed to be anchored in the life-world. Yet Habermas is not simply affirming a ‘politics of the life-world’. Because the Enlightenment project only emerges historically in a modern society characterized by the co-presence of the two logics, the concrete form in which it could be ‘completed’ remains to be specified. The development of an autonomous systems-logic was the prerequisite for the autonomy of the life-world; modern politics has to take into account their mutual dependence.

Habermas’ argument can be reformulated in terms that recall the Dialectic of Enlightenment. The system can only increase its complexity if the individuals in the life-world behave autonomously and rationally. Individuals in society confront two kinds of imperatives. The material system reproduces itself in the formal-bureaucratic mode described by Weber and refined by Parsons’ theory of the impersonal media—money (the market) and power (the political-administrative system)—that assure the appearance of neutral rationality. But these media-directed sub-systems, which become autonomous in modern societies, function effectively only when individual behavior obeys a goal-oriented, functional rationality that conflicts with the communicative rationality that is the basis of autonomous rational interaction in the life-world. The basic conflict in any modern society is defined by the attempt of the sub-systems to ‘colonize’ the life-world.⁵² Habermas sees this conflict as a reformulation of Marx’s basic distinctions between work and abstract labor or use-value and exchange-value. But Habermas does not expect a revolution which would eliminate the abstract sub-systems and their rationality; that kind of naive ‘politics of the life-world’ would only bring about a return to a pre-modern situation. Nor does that vision of political change make Marx’s error of confusing ‘bourgeois’ universal legal forms with the capitalist mode of production that is to be eliminated. The increasing complexity of modern society is not simply a threat to the life-world; increasing complexity means the creation and spin-off of other distinct sub-systems, such as the law, science, and art. The independence of these sub-systems, whose logic is rooted in the life-world, is guaranteed by the autonomy with which they set their own standards, appealing to nothing external or handed down by tradition. This autonomy is founded by the universalizability of their claims.⁵³ It permits Habermas’ version of the dialectic of enlightenment to have a potentially positive outcome.

The completion of the Enlightenment is not its overcoming, nor its end. The dialectic between system and life-world must continue if modern society is not to implode or explode. Although his model is Marx, Habermas does not expect a simple Marxist overcoming of the contradictions his theory describes. The realization of the threat of ‘colonization’ would destroy the autonomy of the life-world; that is why it is a danger also to the system itself. A thoroughly colonized life-world would no longer provide resources permitting the system to continue to increase its own complexity in order to face new threats to its advanced reproduction. This contradictory relation of dependence and independence defines the parameters of Habermas’ Enlightenment politics.

Habermas reformulates his position in contemporary terms. ‘In short, the result of this awareness is a new state of consciousness in which the welfare state project becomes, in a sense, reflective; it orients itself to the taming not only of the capitalist economy but also of the state itself’ (PDM, p. 421). But he does not develop this implicitly political argument politically⁵⁴; nor can he apply his reconstructive theory of communicative action to explain how this new, ‘reflexive’ consciousness comes into being. He turns to Marx, who ‘explains the process of real abstraction through the reification (Versachlichung) of socially integrated contexts of action which comes about when interactions are no longer coordinated by norms and values, or by a process of understanding, but are coordinated through the medium of exchange value’ (TdkH, II, p. 494). But Habermas does not expect transformation to follow a logic of necessity.⁵⁵ He stresses the ‘empirical question of when the growth of the monetary-bureaucratic complex will touch domains of action that cannot be reformulated as system integrative mechanisms without pathological side effects’. The analysis of Parsons’ theory of media, he continues, ‘has led me to the assumption that this limit is reached when systemic imperatives intervene in the region of cultural reproduction, social integration, and the socialization of the individual’ (TdkH, II, p. 548). This satisfies Habermas’ desire to formulate a research program for critical theory; but its relation to the political form assumed by the interminable process of the Enlightenment is not clear.

Habermas’ use of the notion of democracy suggests the source of the political ambiguity of his Enlightenment project. Increasing democratization is one, unintended, result of the process of social modernization that he describes. As the sub-systems within the life-world become autonomous, they are freed from the bands of tradition; each is self-governed, independent, and obedient only to the force of the better argument. Habermas describes this process as a democratization that accompanies modernization; he devotes many pages to tracing its expansion into ever-wider spheres of the life-world. This ‘democratization’ produces a social decentering of the life-world parallel to the theoretical structure defined by communicative action. This decentering invalidates any social theory that, similar to the one Lukács constructed for Marxism, is formulated from the point of view of a radical subject and claims to speak in the name of the totality. Similarly, Weber’s inability to see the specificity of the autonomous and communicatively founded structures that emerge within the life-world explains why modernity appeared to him as only the increasing power of the system over the isolated and defenseless individual. The same blindness helps to understand Marx’s misunderstanding of the achievements of bourgeois law and morality, for example, in his 1843 essay ‘On the Jewish Question’. Despite Habermas’ stress on its importance, and despite its analogies with the theory of communicative action, democratization of the sub-systems within the life-world is always described as a result; there is never an explicit movement for democracy as a goal and good for itself.⁵⁶ The reasons for Habermas’ simultaneous recognition of democracy as the positive output of the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, and yet his inability to thematize this process, can be found in the structure of his theoretical framework.

The paradox of democracy is that it exists in the life-world, but it is the product of systemic imperatives which could crush it if there does not emerge that ‘new state of consciousness’ that sees the need to ‘tame’ not only capitalism but the welfare state. Habermas describes the structural conditions for the reproduction of the life-world—which performs the active ‘synthetic’ function that was attributed to the philosophical subject (be it Hegel’s Spirit or Marx’s proletariat)—in the spare synchronic terms of his reconstructive approach. ‘The life-world reproduces itself insofar as these three functions, which go beyond the perspective of the actor, are fulfilled: the cultural tradition must be continued, norms and values must serve to integrate groups, and new generations must be socialized’ (PDM, p. 349). Under these conditions, ‘which go beyond the perspective of the actor’, there is no reason to expect a positive movement for democracy unless the life-world is threatened. Yet the premise of Habermas’ structural argument is that the modern life-world is always at once both threatened and maintained by the imperative of the reproduction of the system. This means that the ‘new social movements’ of which Habermas speaks positively are only a defensive reaction. He supports them not because they are creating democracy as a positive end, but because they are protecting the life-world (and therewith, of course, the system). The dichotomous structural framework of his reconstruction does not permit a political differentiation between movements whose reactive protection of the life-world is politically reactionary and those which will increase the space of democracy. Habermas is aware of the difficulty, but his description of the ‘pathological side-effects’ that constitute this threat leaves the matter as an ‘empirical question’ (TdkH, II, p. 548). To say more than this would demand going beyond the limits of reconstruction.⁵⁷

Habermas’ theoretical self-limitation can be justified, and also criticized, from within the framework that he himself elaborates. When he introduced the notion of reconstruction, he suggested that it was ‘at first’ an analysis which ‘begins a-historically’. Although that might have suggested that ‘something else’ would follow, Habermas insisted that there is a distinction between a logic of development and the ‘dynamics of development’. Reconstruction is limited to the logical; it is aware that normative claims ‘lead to error insofar as they suggest a concrete form of life’. This error characterized Marxism. Habermas explains that he wants to avoid ‘the confusion of a highly developed communicative infrastructure of possible life forms with a specific singular totality which claims to incarnate this good life—namely, the specific utopia which, in the past, crystallized around the potential of productive society (Arbeitsgesellschaft)’.⁵⁸ This Marxist representation of the Good Society absolutized the position of the proletariat, which it treated as a collective subject in whose name political philosophy was to speak. Alfred Schütz’s phenomenology again serves to illustrate the difficulty of such a philosophy of the subject: Schütz searched in vain for a correct position from which to describe the life-world, not realizing that he himself is a part of it and that it decides on his place, not vice versa. This situatedness of philosophy means that it is merely the guardian of the standards of rationality, as Habermas concludes in another reply to critics.⁵⁹ But this anodyne and apparently modest assertion forgets the ‘Copernican revolution’ that accompanies the shift from a philosophy of the subject to the theory of communicative action. If the life-world precedes and pre-determines the philosopher, the ‘standards of rationality’ must be affected by that same life-world. Within the process of modernization and enlightenment of the contemporary life-world, the ‘new social movements’ whose action Habermas wants to support can be said to be putting into question those standards.

Despite his insistence on the limits of his project, Habermas does suggest at times that political questions must be given their place. He recognizes the consequences of his rejection of the Marxist model of revolution based on the self-transformation of a productive society: ‘Once we give up the praxis–philosophical understanding of society as a self-referential macro-subject that is introjected into the individual subjects, then the corresponding models for the diagnosis and the overcoming of the crisis – division and revolution – are no longer useful’ (PDM, pp. 402–3). This negative conclusion concerning the anti-capitalist struggle is supplemented later, when Habermas speaks of the need for the self-limitation of the welfare state in order to avoid the pathological effects of ‘colonization’. But this time his argument is not couched in terms of the theory of communicative action and the Marxist critique based on the notion of the ‘real abstraction’.

Habermas employs here, in ‘scare-quotes’, the substantive formulation, das ‘Politische’ to designate a political function that cannot be reduced simply to the media-directed administrative ‘steering’ the social system (PDM, p. 420). He does not propose alternative steering media, as the Theory of Communicative Action might have suggested. He explains ‘the political’ in terms that ring differently from the description of democracy as a reactive result of the sociological process of modernization. ‘Self-organized publics must develop the astute combinations of power and intelligent self-limitation that are necessary in order to sensitize the self-steering mechanisms of the state and economy when confronted with the goal-oriented results of radical democratic will formation’ (PDM, p. 423). The unasked question here is why these publics would be inclined to pursue such results? This is yet another formulation of the earlier unanswered question of the ‘emancipatory interest’ that remains central, although latent, in the politics of Habermas’ new system. The key must lie in the structure of the life-world, which was described as performing the synthetic functions attributed to the subject by the ‘philosophy of consciousness’ that Habermas has now rejected. This is suggested when he asserts, in a subjunctive clause, that the life-world presents itself ‘when an objective provocation (Herausforderung) appears that makes the life world as a whole problematic’ (TdkH, II, p. 590). A ‘challenge’ that makes the whole ‘problematic’ is a question: it is the political question.⁶⁰

The question of the political cannot be reconstructed here by recourse to the Marxist notion of the ‘real abstraction’. Yet the conclusion to the Theory of Communicative Action appears to stress that option.

The theory of modernity that I have sketched in its broad lines permits us to assert at least the following. In modern societies, the room for contingency in the interactions that have been freed from their normative context expands so far that the proper nature (Eigensinn) of communicative action is ‘practically true’ both in the de-institutionalized forms of behavior in the familial private sphere and in the public sphere that is determined by the mass media. At the same time the imperatives of the autonomous subsystems penetrate the life-world and use the paths of monetizing and bureaucratizing to force communicative action to approximate formally organized activity even where the action-coordinating mechanism of understanding is functionally necessary. Perhaps this provocative threat, this challenge (Herausforderung) which puts into question the symbolic structures of the life world as a whole makes plausible the reasons for which that life-world has become accessible for us. (TdkH, II p. 593)

The ‘challenge’ to the life-world is said here to come from the systematic imperatives of modernizing late capitalism. But the same modernization is treated in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity as posing a question. The challenge in that case comes from the very decentering that ‘communicative action’ sought to theorize. Habermas points out that ‘in their communicative everyday action, modern, quite decentered societies maintain a virtual center of self-understanding … Granted, this center is also a projection, but it is an effective one’ (PDM, p. 417). In this context, the process of democratization is portrayed as actively related to this ‘virtual center’, which recalls also the question of ‘das Politische’ invoked in the same pages. ‘All partial public spheres point to a global public sphere, in which the society as a whole forms a knowledge of itself’ (PDM, p. 418). This knowledge is ‘in fact temporary. But this reflective knowledge of the society as a whole does exist’ (ibid.). Its existence does not take the affirmative mode of the Marxist ‘real abstraction’; it exists, rather, in the mode of the question of the Marxian legacy. It is the presence of an absence which cannot be ignored even though it can never become fully present in the form of an answer or closure.

The necessary self-limitation of the state (or ‘steering mechanism’), for which Habermas’ system could not account, finds its locus in the political question. Habermas described the ‘welfare state’ as steering society through the media employed particularly in taxation (he refers to the state in this context as the Steuerstaat, playing on the terms for steering and taxation). He did not distinguish here this state from the Rechtsstaat , which might be said to be the typically modern form of the enlightened state. While law, justice, and morality are independent sub-systems within the life-world of the administrative welfare state, their relation to the Rechtsstaat captures more adequately their ambivalent position in Habermas’ description. Recht, after all, can refer to each of these conceptual domains, which can potentially be either ‘colonized’ media through which the system reproduces itself or forms that increase the (communicative) rationality of the life-world. They become pathological forms within the life-world when they are reduced to mere media. Their democratization is not the automatic result of a dialectic between the imperatives of system and life-world. Nor can their democratization be reduced to the defensive reaction of a threatened life-world. Habermas’ systemic theory of democratization as the result of modernization results from his perhaps unconscious desire to remain within the Marxist camp, theorizing a social practice to which he attributes political efficacy. When he tries to explain the attempt by the new social movements to limit the pathologies introduced into the life-world by imposing limits on administrative and economic restriction of autonomy, Habermas admits that this is ‘a defensively formulated task, but this defensive redirection of the steering process will not be able to succeed without a radical and broadly based democratization’.⁶¹ But this radical democratization is not predictable or explicable on the basis of Marxist sociology.⁶²

The political question that Habermas’ system covers over in his attempt to remain still within Marxism is nonetheless brought out by his practical political recognition of the importance of the democratic project. His implicit Marxism explains Habermas’ insistence on the limits of theory. Yet his own paradigm shift to a decentered theory of communicative action broke with that type of Marxism. Had he concentrated his analysis on the Rechtsstaat instead of the sociological Steuerstaat, not only would he have been able better to analyze the ambiguous nature of the modern process of social differentiation, but he would have been able to explain the systemic necessity of the radical democracy crucial to his politics. The completion of the Enlightenment, the realization of modernity, and the refusal of the ‘post-modern’ option are all based on the utopia of an unending because unendable process. ‘The probabilities of conflict free reproduction processes’, he insists, ‘do not in the least grow with the degree of rationalization of a life-world—what happens is that the level on which conflicts appear simply shifts’ (PDM, p. 403). This shift is spelled out a moment later in an uncharacteristically mysterious formulation. ‘From the dark and polyphonic projections of totalities, there is also formed in modern societies a diffuse common consciousness’ (PDM, p. 417). This common consciousness is nothing other than that absent presence that Habermas calls in the same pages ‘the political’. Its concrete historical form is the ambiguous Rechtsstaat , conceived in its three dimensions of law, justice, and morality. The interpenetration and difference of these three autonomous sub-systems could be analyzed within the counter-factual discourse that Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action develops into a new system. The result would be a theory that can understand ambiguous phenomena like the new social movements from the standpoint of the political, instead of groping at political engagement on the basis of a social analysis.

Habermas does not develop this political theory (although his recent research [published only in 1992] has turned toward questions of law). The presence of the political question within his new system, as in his earlier efforts, suggests that, typical of the ‘users’ of Marxism, he sits astride a two-sided project that is still drawn toward both the original Marxian experience and toward the application of Marxism to the resulting problems. There are hints of what can only be called a ‘democratic utopia’ in Habermas’ stubborn insistence that the project of the Enlightenment must be realized with the means of the Enlightenment. His break with the philosophy of consciousness and the consequent rejection of the imagined Arbeitsgesellschaft of self-reproducing producers could not but point him in a new direction. Yet his decentered social theory is still haunted by a vision of social transformation based on a Marxist critique founded by the ‘real abstraction’. This orientation is reinforced by Habermas’ attempt to join together the theory of modernity with the strategy of contemporary analytical and post-Kantian philosophy that leads to the equation of universalizability with democracy in a way that destroys the political question posed by the democratic project.

The result is a sometimes hesitant defense of the radicalism of the ‘new social movements’ on the modest grounds of empirical social analysis. ‘A social theory that has given up on the self-certainty guaranteed by a theory of history without abandoning its critical claims’, concludes Habermas, ‘can only see its political role in using its more or less sensitive diagnoses of the present to sharpen attention to the essential ambivalences of the contemporary situation’.⁶³ If this is all that the radical new theory can offer, it is hard to see how it fulfills better the radical goals of critical theory than did the pessimistic perspectives of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. The further path through the legacy has to be developed instead by drawing out the explicit theorization of practice which Habermas broaches but refuses because his theory of practice gives way, ultimately, to the imperatives of the reconstructive project of a general theory of communicative action. Habermas remains still, despite his temptations, within the politics of theory. The primacy of democracy that he nonetheless recognizes can be thematized on the basis of the ideas of political engagement proposed by Sartre and elaborated more recently by André Gorz.

10.4.3 Sartre to Gorz: Political Questions, Philosophical Proposals

Sartre did not begin his theoretical investigations as a Marxist, nor did the famous assertion at the beginning of the Critique of Dialectical Reason—that ‘Marxism is the unsurpassable horizon of our time’—prove justifiable even in his own eyes.⁶⁴ This may have become apparent to Sartre in his three-volume study of Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille. It may have been clear to him even earlier, when he began work on the second volume of the Critique .⁶⁵ That continuation of his project proposed to analyze two major examples of societies that were more or less integrated, the post-revolutionary Russian case of a ‘directorial society’ as well as the categorical structure of a ‘disunited’ society illustrated by bourgeois democracy. Much of the study of Russia seems to have been completed, but Sartre left only general notes concerning ‘bourgeois democracy’. His hesitation to take up the problem of democracy is perhaps not surprising in light of the difficulties immanent to the framework of the Critique , to which the first edition of The Marxian Legacy pointed. Sartre returned to this text only after 1962. His two analytical examples were then elaborated separately, but the account of the relation of the relation of democracy and totalitarianism could not be carried out, in part because of Sartre’s prudish application of the vague notion of ‘directorial society’ to the Soviet Union. At a more personal level, Sartre may have turned away from Marxism as a result of his encounter after May 1968 with the ultra-leftist militants of the Gauche Prolétarienne, whose ‘Maoist’ insistence on the priority of ‘popular power’ led them to reject the terrorist option adopted by frustrated radical groups in Germany and Italy. These French Maoists opted for a verbal (and verbose) revolutionary politics whose foundation was ultimately the kind of ethical moralism that Sartre had outlined in Being and Nothingness .⁶⁶ But the personal evolution of a theorist neither validates nor invalidates the work he has left nor his engagement with his times; that is all the more true for Sartre’s Critique , which is part of the Marxian legacy.

The living presence of Sartre in the legacy is apparent today in the work of André Gorz,⁶⁷ whose politically explicit formulation of a theory of practice makes clear the ultimate presuppositions of that philosophical choice while demonstrating the political need to criticize Marx in order to be faithful to his legacy. Gorz’s Adieux au prolétariat begins with the statement that ‘Marxism is in crisis because there is a crisis of the working class movement’. Analysis of that movement, from the point of view of Marx himself, justifies the title: saying ‘good-bye’ (adieu) is not the same thing as bidding ‘au revoir’, which proposes to ‘see you again soon’. The contemporary Marxist, Gorz insists, must take final leave of the proletariat. Searching for its replacement, under the heading ‘Death and resurrection of the historical subject: the non-class of post-industrial proletarian’, Gorz returns immediately to the stance of a theory of practice in his first sentence. ‘The crisis of socialism is first of all the crisis of the proletariat’.⁶⁸ This crisis of the proletarian working-class movement is interpreted in the Adieux from the point of view of the actors. The socio-economic foundation for its arguments is presented in more Marxist terms three years later in Les chemins du Paradis. This essay seeks ‘to imagine, anticipate, begin the fundamental transformations whose possibility is inscribed in the mutations taking place’.⁶⁹ The ‘practice’ theorized in this second account is sought in transformations in both the social ‘forces of production’ and in the ‘relations of production’, which Marx had always included among the productive ‘forces’ of a society. From the standpoint of the legacy, the question whether this analytic stance, which Sartre suggested in his theory of the ‘practico-inert’, neglects the autonomy of the political question in favor of social analysis needs to be examined. Unlike Sartre, Gorz explicitly avoids that temptation in the Adieux au prolétariat.

Like Sartre, Gorz accepts the fundamental fact of scarcity as the premise from which social analysis must begin. Like Habermas, he stresses the systemic imperatives that any society must obey in order to maintain itself. These imperatives are analyzed functionally as the production of a ‘power without a subject’ that reinforces the form of bureaucratic domination (p. 78). Gorz does not remain with the abstract criticism of power; power need not be alienating, as can be seen, for example, in the authority exercised by the skilled worker over the apprentice, which is not the same as the impersonal domination of one individual over another based on their respective positions within a bureaucratic hierarchy. Domination (like alienation) is a two-sided coin. It denies the individuality of the dominated; but it also denies that of the dominator, who abandons his individual freedom when justifying his position by referring to necessities imposed by the system. The dominated may react to the anonymity of those who exercise this systemic necessity which perpetuates oppression by seeking to take power themselves; but that is a dead-end insofar as it replaces one functionary by another without increasing the freedom of anyone, since the system’s anonymous laws continue to dictate behavior. The other option for the dominated is either fascism or Stalinism, each of which seeks to replace ‘the system’ by a person who can at least stand up as a free individual in the face of the machine. Gorz’s existentialist premise is apparent in this analysis; he supposes that humans seek freedom come what may. Mass support for such totalitarian movements is assumed to result from a form of ‘bad faith’ that seeks an ersatz for the freedom that the appeal to systemic necessity denies. In spite of this stress on the role of consciousness in political choices, Gorz also underlines the unavoidability of the system and its imperatives. Rather than see a contradiction in these opposed choices—systemic necessity and consciousness of freedom—Gorz recognizes that it is precisely their clash that creates and maintains the space for politics.

Gorz’s ‘non-class’ replacement for the proletariat cannot be a supra-individual agent standing independently in opposition to the system as an alternative to its constraints; at the same time, however, he recognizes that it must be shown to be the immanent product of the system. Borrowing Alain Touraine’s notion of ‘post-industrial society’, Gorz analyzes the crisis of capitalism as a productive system from the point of view of the lived experience of the producers. Capitalism produces the material conditions necessary for labor, not for the kinds of work in which individual self-affirmation is possible. Gorz does not romanticize the idea of production; he rejects Marx’s idea of non-alienated labor as a political project defining the individual either in present conditions or as a future goal. Even if the romantic vision of creative labor were true, he points out that the kind of labor performed in post-industrial society is a routinized, indifferent activity accomplished by people who function as cogs in a system whose individuality makes no difference. Gorz calls such employees a ‘neo-proletariat’ who are ‘a non-worker[s] employed at an indifferent job’ and who incarnate only the negativity that Marx situated in the proletariat (pp. 97, 94). In that case, they are defined by their subjectivity, not by what their work makes of the world and themselves. Their subjectivity, existing within the concrete relations of modern capitalism, cannot find a substitute identity in a supposedly inevitable development of History like the one envisioned by Marxism. The existentialist conclusion follows easily from these analyses of post-industrial society. The non-class, or neo-proletariat, finds itself at the threshold of a liberation by the ‘foundational act of freedom which, proclaiming itself as absolute, takes itself as the supreme goal in each individual’ (p. 102). The question that remains to be answered is what would drive the non-class individuals over the threshold?⁷⁰

The affirmation of individual freedom does not abolish the necessities of the system; to the contrary, society remains an external constraint on each subjective freedom. Gorz rejects the idea that a planned society, however democratic, could organize the necessities needed for the reproduction of the system in a way permitting each individual to recognize his personal freedom within these systemic necessities. That kind of planning works only in monastic communities, which are not only set off from the world, but which are by their nature alienated because the necessity they accept is justified by the commandments of a God or a Leader to whom they sacrifice their freedom. Such communities are heteronomous. For the vast majority of individuals, systemic necessity continues to exist at the same time that, paradoxically, freedom is to be affirmed. The revolt affirming their freedom has to be based on a liberation of the individual as far as is possible, first by increasing free time, then, as the example of feminism shows, by affirming the values of intimacy, and finally by the development of what Ivan Illich calls ‘tools of conviviality’.⁷¹

The freedom that Gorz understands to be the result of a ‘cultural mutation’ does not abolish scarcity; what Sartre had called the practico-inert remains a problem (pp. 114, 127). Gorz avoids the political difficulties to which this problem drove Sartre, opening him to the lures and allure of the communist party and the need for its leadership. Gorz instead proposes a ‘dualist society’ that distinguishes between technical and moral imperatives as expressing respectively forms of heteronomy and autonomy. He rejects a system that has ‘rules without morality’ while refusing also to accept a politics based on ‘morality without rules’ (p. 130). The system must be organized in a way that limits to a maximum the domain of necessity without opening the door to the arbitrary decisions of power; that is the dual function of rules. The imposition of such limits is possible only when freedom can recognize the necessity of both itself and the system. The simple formula of workers’ self-management is not the solution; freedom can act only within the constraints of recognized necessity.

Gorz defines politics as the action of freedom on necessity. He distinguishes sharply what is necessary for production from what is necessary simply to maintain society itself. In post-industrial society, labor in the service sector increases as a result of the disruptive effects of the increasingly complex demands of the production process within the broader society whose reproduction is increasingly dependent on factors external to it. A reversal of this tendency would bring about a change in the mode of production defining contemporary society. Such a change cannot be introduced simply by withdrawing from a society that has become too complex. Gorz criticizes the counter-cultural ideology that wants to return to the simplicity and immediacy of the ‘loving-community’. His argument has implications that go beyond the narrow case of the counter-cultural reduction of the political that he sees as vitiating the effectiveness of the new social movements. ‘Any society or micro-society that abolishes the state–or, if one prefers, the apparatus of the law–as a specific place, distinct from itself where the necessities for its functioning and its reproduction are objectivized in the form of external laws and obligations, eliminates by this act any possibility of struggling against the material necessity involved in its functioning’ (p. 157). The possibility of freedom, the political existentialist now insists, depends on the existence of a state and laws distinct from the immediate relations among the members of society. Without such a distinction, ‘morality has no necessity, and necessity has no morality’ (p. 159). This interdependence implies concretely the need for social planification, which only the state can accomplish; but Gorz hastens to add that he is not advocating a return to the traditional socialist belief in the planned society that is to be the result of the conquest of power by the representatives of the working class. That would simply reinstall the domination of necessity over freedom in a new form, just as the simple revolt against bureaucratic domination was seen earlier ultimately to seek to replace one set of exploiters by another.

Gorz’s political analysis is based on his recognition of the specificity of the political. ‘The political is the specific place where society becomes conscious of its production as a process involving everyone, where it seeks to master its results and to control its constraints’ (p. 166). The plan is not the end that politics seeks to realize; it is merely a means used by politics to deal rationally with the sphere of necessity. Because politics is not reduced to planning, the agent who elaborates the plan can be confronted by the multiplicity of demands from the plurality of different individuals and groups seeking the means to realize their freedom. These movements pose to the state the question of the political. ‘The essential end of the political is thus not the exercise of power. Its function, on the contrary, is to delimit, to orient and to codify the actions of power, to define its means and its goals, and to make sure that it does not go beyond the framework of its mission. The confusion of the political and power, or the failure to distinguish between political struggle and the struggle for power (that is, for the right to run the State) signifies the end of the political’ (p. 167). Summing up his argument, Gorz adds a postscript that returns to his insistence on the distinction of the spheres of freedom and necessity while explicitly rejecting the famous argument by Marx, at the conclusion to volume III of Capital , which claims that in the post-revolutionary society these two distinct spheres will become identical within a transparent totality, an ultimate unity, one. The final line this postscript warns that ‘[w]ith the death of the political is announced the birth of the total State’ (p. 179). This laconic affirmation is crucial.

Gorz’s success in formulating the political question that Sartre could never articulate poses to the heirs of the Marxian legacy the question: why try to use Marx? The simple answer—that Marx provides useful tools for analysis of capitalism as a systemic totality, even though it leaves no room for political intervention—implies that these ‘tools’ are somehow separate or separable from the context in which they were elaborated and the function they were created to fulfill.⁷² Gorz does assert that ‘[t]here is no other theory for understanding the capitalist economy than the Marxist’. He also accepts Marx’s ‘philosophical anthropology’, as interpreted through the primacy of the phenomenon of alienation. On the other hand, he rejects Marx’s theory of history.⁷³ He admits as well that political change cannot ignore the history in which it must occur, which is no doubt one reason that his formulation of the political question recognizes explicitly the potential totalitarian results of its neglect. Gorz’s clear articulation of the place of the political is paired with an ‘existentialist’ insistence on the primacy of morality. The conclusion to the Adieux insists that ‘[t]he political is not moral nor is morality political. The political is the place where moral demands confront external necessities. That confrontation must continue for as long as, in Hegel’s words, consciousness does not meet the world ‘as a garden planted for it’. Only the permanence and the openness of that confrontation will be able to diminish to a maximum the sphere of necessity while maximizing the sphere of autonomy’ (p. 169). History, in other words, is constituted by and through this confrontation of freedom and necessity. This generalization, which would not shock a Marxist, still omits one element that needs to be explained: the choice of the theorist who tries to use the Marxist theory.

The reason for seeking to use the legacy appears to be built into the contradictory structure of a theory of practice. That theory is apparently modest. Gorz shares Habermas’ self-limitation of its reach. He describes his aim in the Adieux as ‘not to put a coherent theory in the place of the traditional ones … I wanted to show what happens when one puts oneself into political thought as an actual and complex subject. The book was supposed to lead the reader to perform a similar experiment’. This is consistent with Gorz’s description of history as the confrontation of freedom and necessity. It is not possible to tell others what to think, nor to think in their place. But, continues Gorz, because of the ‘literary’ quality of the Adieux, his argument was often misunderstood. As a result, he reworked the implications of his thesis in Les chemins du Paradis without that personal element of literary experiment. As a result, he concludes that ‘I consider the Adieux in its intentional incompleteness as the better, and the Chemins as the more useful book’.⁷⁴ This self-understanding is typical of the theory of practice. It assumes that there is a movement ‘out there’ which needs to learn to identify itself, to understand its own nature and limits, and to posit goals that are not self-defeating. The theory of practice does not seek to use Marx because it wants to tell people what they should do; it wants ‘only’ to enlighten them about the broader context in which they are in fact already acting. The Marxian legacy that is used in this context is implicitly identical to that theory of History which Gorz identified as Marx’s objectionable heritage.⁷⁵ The criticism of Marx will break with this last premise, making possible the concept of a ‘new Left’.

10.5 Criticism and the Question of History

The contrast between the Frankfurt School, Habermas and the French existentialist political use of the Marxian legacy depends on their different understandings of the realities of history, even while they share an underlying attitude toward History. The earlier Frankfurt concern for immanent critique gave way to Habermas’ reflection on the structure of the enlightenment project of which Marxism was a part. The motif of immanent critique remained, but its inadequacies were too apparent for it to be more than a regulative principle guiding the formulation of the theory; this was clear in the implicit and explicit use of the notion of a ‘real abstraction’ in both phases. Adherence to this regulative principle prevented Habermas from articulating explicitly the political question to which his theory pointed. From this perspective, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason appears to be a radical attempt to formulate immanently, on the basis of an existential ontology, the theory of immanent critique. The attempt failed because its existential subjectivity excluded in principle the consideration of the autonomy of the political.

Although Gorz’s political elaboration of Sartre’s existential premises recognized the autonomy of the political, he did not formulate a political theory of democracy ; he insisted instead on the moral freedom of the individual acting within the economic framework of a social history accessible to, but not identical with, the Marxian legacy. The reason that he failed to take this further step is suggested by his failure to formulate a political theory of totalitarianism. He recognized that the ‘total state’ can come into being as a result of the denial of the distinction between political power and the question of the political. His failure to elaborate the conditions in which this denial occurs is due to the fact that rather than focusing on the particularities of real history, his account of the political was Historical in a Marxist sense. It was the description of a general, structural condition whose content depended on the sociological analysis that he elaborated in the ‘more useful’ Les chemins du Paradis. A theory of history, with a small ‘h’, cannot simply assume that the capitalist mode of production defines the present or determines the outlines of the future.

The distinction between History and history that I am introducing here is implicit in the attempt to use the legacy; it becomes explicit in its critique . That critique is also a self-critique. Gorz’s conceptualization of the political concretizes what Habermas referred to as a ‘challenge’ and ‘virtual center of self-understanding’ that is present as a ‘diffuse common consciousness’ in the ‘dark and polyphonic projections of totalities’. But Gorz does not make this question the principle from which further critical reflection is developed. Using the method of immanent critique, Gorz shows that what he calls the ‘non-class’ subject is produced by the system; but he asserts that it is unable to identify with any goals implicit in that system. As a result, the individual is left to his morality, while the sense of the totality escapes into History’s series of changing modes of production where the Marxist can feel at home. The unending process of the Enlightenment, which Gorz also identifies as premise of the political, is not concretized in the processes of democratic institutions. Gorz is content to remain with the formal separation of politics and the political, which can but need not lead to democratic politics. The idea that there exists, at least in principle, a logic of History leads him to deny the political formation of history; democracy becomes simply an attribute or a modality of the development of History.

The political theories of Horkheimer, Habermas, and Gorz each reflect the presence of a question that they are unable to bring to self-reflection. The History that gives sense to the theory of practice is not present in history so much as it is the history that the Marxian legacy seeks to understand. That History is the question of the Marxian legacy; it is not its solution or a tool to use for understanding history. This becomes explicit when Marxist visions of History are replaced by the question of the political. The result marks the transition to the reflective critique of Marxism. Its necessity is implicit in the paradoxes that emerge in the attempt to use the legacy, whose self-reflection in the implicit political question posed by Horkheimer, Habermas, and Gorz can now become explicit. The use of the legacy has been described the lived experience that leads to the transition. To complete it, an objective moment must be added to that subjective experience.

The replacement of History by history as the Marxian legacy has a doubly objective foundation; it is ontological and political. The first is constituted by the history of the Marxian legacy as both a lived experience and as its conceptual use. The false starts and dead ends that have been analyzed in the preceding reconstruction that illustrated the experience of the legacy and its use were temporarily occluded when the legacy remained external to a historical project; the progress of History seemed to give hope and meaning to a projected future. This self-blinding, an expression of a sort of Marxist filial piety, reflected the inability of critical theory to recognize that it is an interrogation. Merleau-Ponty’s presentation of the adventures of ‘Western Marxism’ cast light on this blind spot. Beginning from an attempt to use Marxism (e.g., in Humanism and Terror), the philosopher was driven to rethink the “adventurous” search for the philosophical foundations that made that theory plausible. As a result, he was led to elaborate an ontology capable of explaining why theory was led freely and logically to mistake itself. This self-critical interrogation is the first foundation for the assertion that history is the Marxian legacy.

The second foundation for the assertion depends on the political as a specific form of interrogation. The question of the legacy has to manifest itself in the ‘flesh’ of history. This concept, evoked by Merleau-Ponty, is elaborated by Claude Lefort, his former student and the editor of his posthumous works. Lefort’s own works provide the concrete demonstration that when history is thought with reference to itself, it poses the question that the Marxian legacy was unable to articulate either in the form of a theory of practice or as a practical theory. The root of the difficulty was the tendency to think of politics in a functionalist or positivist framework. A first challenge to this misconception arose when politics took the form of a question—implicitly for Habermas and explicitly for Gorz. A deeper foundation for that question had to be sought in the specific history whose flesh only becomes visible when the Marxist mediation by History is abandoned. This transforms the positivist interpretation of the Marxian legacy into the self-reflection of history itself. This implies that history is the critique of any attempt to fix the nature of that legacy. Specifically, in the cases of Merleau-Ponty, Lefort, and Castoriadis, their critical positions were developed only insofar as they had first attempted to remain, critically, within the legacy at the same time that they refused to abandon the attempt to decipher the new in history, in the historical past, and in history as they lived it. The only legitimate critique of Marxism depends on this double position, which is both ontological and political. This was, in fact, also the attitude of none other than Marx himself. The critique of Marxism forms part of the Marxian legacy. Marx’s legacy is not his thought but his thinking.

The critique of Marxism from within the legacy has to satisfy two, apparently contradictory, imperatives. It has to remain true to the ontological demand for a theory which can explain its own foundations; and it must take into account the practical necessity that the new be given its singular place in the form of what can only be called ‘the’ political question. The earlier discussion of Lefort’s reading of the Communist Manifesto showed why and how Marxism sacrifices the latter imperative in order to present a theory which includes its Other—as practice, or as the world—in its self-referential structure. The ‘existential’ conclusions of Horkheimer, Sartre, and Gorz illustrated the inability of users of Marxism to articulate a politics on the basis of a singularity that is not subsumed by the totalization by theory. The necessary condition of a revolutionary politics is the experience of the new—as suggested by Habermas’ recognition of the ‘challenge’⁷⁶—but its sufficient condition is a theory which explains why this singularity, which Bloch called a novum, is not an accidental appearance that can be explained away by a totalizing theory of History. These philosophical poles find their political translation in the work of Castoriadis and Lefort. The demand for a self-referential foundational theory corresponds to the experience of totalitarianism; the irreducible singularity of the new expresses the positive politics of democracy. As was the case for the two poles of the critique of Marxism within the legacy, these two political options cannot be thought separately from each other without finally leaving the revolutionary question that was posed, but was not resolved or resolvable, by Marx.⁷⁷

10.5.1 Claude Lefort: History as Political

The interdependence of the ontological and the political structures in the self-critique of the legacy elaborated by Lefort’s earlier work is developed further in the three volumes he has published during the decade 1976–1986.⁷⁸ The phenomenon of totalitarianism acquires theoretical depth when it is interpreted from the critical standpoint of the Marxian legacy. Although Lefort was not surprised by the facts detailed in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago , he was struck by the author’s elaboration of their roots by means of a ‘literary investigation’ conducted from the standpoint of the experience of the zek, the ‘surplus man’ sent to the camps. Lefort read the work of the Russian with the same eyes that had guided his study of the Florentine, Machiavelli. Lefort explains his project in language that recalls Merleau-Ponty and invokes Marx.

It is necessary to rid oneself … of the point of view of each particular group, to assume the position of the actor who is ‘everywhere and nowhere’, the position of the infantryman who is omnipresent in the theater of war and who, as a mere pawn, is simultaneously excluded from it. Knowledge of the bureaucracy is not neutral for Solzhenitsyn; it excludes the illusion of a possible flight above the social world; it does not assume the standpoint of God …; it emerges from the experience of the dominated, and only thus is it raised to the level of the universal.

Does this language not recall something to those who claim the heritage of Marx? (UH, p. 37)

The ‘literary investigation’ of the Gulag tries to do what Merleau-Ponty had proposed as the necessary task of a Marxian analysis of the Soviet Union: it analyzes the anonymous process by which totalitarianism is installed and maintains itself. What is more, its third volume turns from the solitary moral truth to describe the birth of a new collective solidarity whose basis is not a spiritual truth but physical need, as well as new loyalties and collective decisions. Solzhenitsyn illustrates the origins of revolts that, in their form of struggle, have to be called revolutionary. They are ‘fissures’ in the ‘ideology of granite’ that do not result only from the protests of intellectuals or the weight of ideas; they spring from a demand for right and for justice that is the content of the democratic revolution.⁷⁹

The totalitarianism that Lefort analyzes in the pages of Solzhenitsyn’s ‘literary investigation’ is not an ideology, still less a theory; it reflects the anonymous, material practice that is the theoretical reflection of the interrogation of the ‘surplus man’. The analysis does not deliver a ready-made theory; nor does it propose a political practice. The Gulag presents a certain type of society as a microcosm. There are no ‘political’ prisoners in the camps; even the infamous public purges of the later 1930s took place only when their victims were no longer a real political threat. No distinctions are made among the relative skills of those forced to labor in the camps; nor does their work have a direct economic value to the regime, which chews up the human raw materials of its ‘penitentiary industry’ with no care for efficiency. While anyone may become a candidate for the Gulag, the process taken as a whole is not arbitrary. A double political logic presides over the system of exclusion that produces this singular microcosm and is its reflection. On the one hand, the rejection of particularity is founded on the image of a society without division, the classless and egalitarian ideal that the Soviet Union pretends to incarnate. On the other hand, the reality of this ideal of social unity can be made visible only by the act that forcibly eliminates particularity. Lefort uses a phrase from Solzhenitsyn as a chapter title that describes the active process by which particularity must first be affirmed (in the persons of those who are incriminated in order for it to be eliminated (by their incarceration and relegation): ‘[t]he people becomes its own enemy’. In really existing Soviet society, the divisions among the people need a political intervention in order to preserve the unitary and harmonious socialist self-image. The Gulag is the Other whose necessary existence paradoxically mirrors the united society and preserves its self-image by actively eliminating particularity.

To achieve this socialist goal, the empirically divided people in turn need a friend, whom Solzhenitsyn labels ‘The Egocrat’. The affirmation of the unity of the people by the elimination of particularity means—as in Stalin’s famous declaration of 1934—that the withering away of the state can occur only by a maximum reinforcement of that same state. The state must be able, through the mediation of the party, to penetrate the entirety of society, to unite with the society in order thereby to unite the people. But this reinforcement of state power at the same time separates it from the particularity and plurality of really existing society whose social divisions it must at first implicitly affirm in order to justify its active intervention to eliminate them in the name of the preservation of unity. The will and the knowledge that guide its action must come from somewhere; they must be the action of someone. This is the role of the Egocrat, whose knowledge provides leadership for the little Egocrats who populate the party and the bureaucracy. The necessity separation of the Egocrat from the divided society that is unified by his action explains why Stalin’s cult of personality could play the historical role that it did. No objective limits, no social interests, nor any physical constraints impose a ‘reality principle’ on this monstrous ego.⁸⁰ The hymns to Stalin’s glory testify to the Egocrat as the representation and the incarnate unity of the principles of power, law, and knowledge. The political truth and the ontological unity of the people relate to one another just as do the visible and the invisible.

Stalin’s paradoxical proclamation that the withering of the state demands the increase of its power and its presence at once expresses, conceals, and reflects the reality of totalitarianism. The bureaucratic organs of the state integrate society into a unity; this process of unification hides the social divisions implied by the presence of particular interests; in so doing, it produces the real end of any autonomous mode of individual socialization. In such conditions, Stalin’s claim is true; the power of the state is invisible because it is omnipresent. But this practice simply reformulates the paradox. If the people is a homogeneous unity from which particularity is excluded, it has to have the form of a self-maintaining organism. Solzhenitsyn expresses the new paradox by describing the bureaucracy as the ‘organs’ at the same time that the willful intervention of the Egocrat contradicts the self-representation of the bureaucracy as rooted within society’s socialist unity. What is more, assumed possibility of such a willful intervention presupposes that society is simply dead material capable of being shaped externally by those possessing power and knowledge because it has no inherent lawfulness of its own. The result is an internally contradictory vision of society as artificially formed from without to the idea of society as an internally unified organism. The resulting contradiction must be overcome by the action of the organs. The frenetic activism of the party and its mass organizations thus challenges the idea that society is a truly unified organism. Ultimately, the Gulag resolves the logical contradictions insofar as the elimination of particularity affirms the unity of society, while the deracinated zeks are made into the kind of merely artificial material that can be shaped at the will of the party in power.

Neither Solzhenitsyn nor Lefort equates totalitarianism with Stalinism. Lefort had already analyzed the new conception of politics created by the Leninist militant acting in the name of History. Solzhenitsyn describes a similar phenomenon within the camps. The individual subjective ‘I’ is absorbed in the communist communal ‘We’ when a camp guard or judge asks disclaims responsibility by asking: ‘what else could we do?’ This is an expression of the communist ‘We’, which includes also the socially excluded zek in a collective subject by identifying power with law, acting and justifying its action as if everyone were equal and equally subject to a common law. Those in power do not ask the zek to agree with them in obeying a law whose necessity is imposed on each individual as a responsible individual subject; a unique point of view beyond the reach of any single individual incarnates for them a power to which all are subject regardless of their particular positions.

The Bolshevik becomes a new man—an abstractly equal incarnation of ‘Man’—who has access to knowledge simply and solely by virtue of membership in the communist ‘We’. Should the Bolshevik find himself in the Gulag, he explains his imprisonment as an error, or the result of a plot, a heritage from the old regime, the testimony of false witnesses, or simply as an incidental fact that has no general implications for understanding the nature of the regime, its need for violence, and perhaps injustice in order to lay the foundations of socialism. All of these elements culminate in the affirmation of the need to reinforce social discipline; the party-science serves to justify a submission that is not imposed by external necessity but is the result of obedience to a rational power presented by the reason of the party.⁸¹ The communist becomes ultimately a kind of moralist, someone who thinks well (a bien-pensant), whose good thoughts serve as a kind of protection from the material and particular reality of the Gulag. This moralism does not pretend to convert others, nor does it seek power, as was the case for the Leninist militant; Solzhenitsyn describes those who practice this morality as communists ‘for the love of the Art’. Lefort stresses that their action manifests a narcissism reflecting in reality a ‘love of the Same’ that reduces difference and novelty to what has already been thought and predicted. The rhetorical affirmation of the onward march of History ultimately hides their desire for a society without history.

Lefort draws out the political challenge that the bien-pensant covers over by taking seriously the communist’s appeal to Marx. This strategy is suggested by Solzhenitsyn’s own ‘literary investigation’. Marx thought that capitalism was preparing the bases of socialism by making society increasingly homogeneous through its destruction of intermediary classes and its leveling of all work to abstract labor. Lefort doesn’t mention the concept, but this is of course the expression of the ‘real abstraction’ by virtue of which knowledge of fact becomes equivalent to knowledge of principle, making possible the self-knowledge of society and justifying the ‘use’ of Marxism. When work becomes fully abstract, and thus transparent to itself, the difference of public and private, individual and collective, is dissolved; power, law, and knowledge become identical in a world without difference. The Gulag is the extreme realization of this abstract ontology. The symbolic difference between the facts and that which permits them to appear as they are is denied; power is treated as real and defined by its function; law appears to emerge only from the necessities imposed by the social division of labor ; and knowledge describes the causes for these supposedly real functions. The resulting positivism, like the knowledge of the bien-pensant, serves to deny the need to question the appearances as appearances, permitting only their subsumption into an already given schema. The bien-pensant elaborates complex causal patterns of thought in order not to have to think the newness of the new.

The analysis of totalitarianism has to avoid the confusion of the symbolic logic that gives form and meaning to the material processes taking place in that society—which is total and totalizing—with the inability of this symbolic logic to penetrate entirely the reality of the society.⁸² The Gulag is the political truth of the totalitarian project insofar as it has no economic rationality, obeys no legal criteria, and also because the Egocrat is not just a classical despot ruling by fear alone; its existence realizes the radical elimination of particularity and makes visible to society the unity which is denied by the reality of social division. The paradoxical goal of totalitarianism is to deny social division by identifying power, law, and knowledge with the real. The result, however, is fundamentally unstable because power, law, and knowledge are symbolic moments that are constituted according to a specific logic which is imposed upon a reality separate from it. The triple incarnation of power, law, and knowledge must be only temporary because its realization destroys the symbolic foundation on which the autonomy of each of the three was built. Although Lefort sometimes appears to assume that an ‘existential’ will to freedom is expressed in the resistance to totalitarianism, his argument is essentially political.⁸³ Totalitarianism is not simply despotism, lawless tyranny, or a new theocracy; those classic political forms preserve, even while violating it in fact, the symbolic distinction of power, law, and autonomous knowledge. The question of the conditions of the possibility of this new political form is not simply factual; the symbolic mutation must be analyzed.

Lefort concludes Un homme en trop with an analysis of popular revolts against totalitarianism. These collective actions are signs ‘that permit us to glimpse the history that undermines totalitarianism’ (UH, p. 253). He doesn’t explain what he means by ‘history’ in this context, but he clearly refers to political history (and implicitly to a history of the political). Lefort does not develop a history of political forms, analogous to Marx’s History of social formations. The dual demand for an ontological and a political moment in the critique of the Marxian legacy is reflected in the equal co-presence of the historical and political moments. Recalling the Marxian notion of revolution as developed within the legacy, political history for Lefort attempts to capture an experience that is neither a ‘before’ nor an ‘after’ but rather the question (or the utopia) that Habermas called a ‘challenge’ and a ‘virtual center of self-understanding’ and which Gorz defined as the political. If society is not to be an accidental dispersion of autonomous atoms, it must be able to identify itself as a society and as this society. Society’s quest for its own symbolic self-refection is its political history. Political history in this sense does not concern only ‘politics’ or ‘power’; that is the sphere of positivist history. Political history does not take place in society because society is not a pregiven and neutral space; society is always already politically instituted, in both its unity and its divisions. Totalitarianism, like the positivism of ‘political science’,⁸⁴ attempts to deny this political history by eliminating the reality of social division such that a real presence—the ‘friend of the people’, the Egocrat, or the party—can claim to incarnate this symbolic social identity, making it an ideological ‘reality’.

This concept of political history explains why Lefort insists that totalitarianism can be understood only through its relation to democracy, which ‘it overthrows at the same time that it takes over certain of its characteristics and increases them fantastically’ (ID, p. 170; cf. p. 41). This relation explains why opposition to totalitarianism does not entail the option for liberal democracy and certainly not for economic liberalism.⁸⁵ It is incorrect to attribute political victories such as winning the rights of association, freedom of the press, unions and strikes, let alone the extension of suffrage, to a ‘liberal bourgeoisie’ that in reality did all that it could to limit such new freedoms. Democracy must be understood as a form of political history. This explains the claim that just as democracy is the key to a critical understanding of totalitarianism, so too totalitarianism is the key to a critical interrogation of democracy. The blindness of the left to totalitarianism is explained by the fact that the totalitarian claim to replace the formal institutions with ‘real democracy’ is not empty rhetoric (ID, pp. 83,105–6). ‘Cannot totalitarianism be conceived as a reply to the questions contained in democracy, as the attempt to resolve its paradoxes?’ (ID, p. 174). This is not to say that democracy is the ‘cause’ of totalitarianism or that it carries its ‘seeds’. That claim would confuse a symbolic with a causal logic. Lefort’s choice of ‘the limits of totalitarian domination’ as the subtitle for L’invention démocratique expresses their relation as political history.

Democracy is a ‘historical society par excellence; it is a society which, in its form, welcomes and preserves indetermination. This self-understanding contrasts remarkably with totalitarianism which, while proclaiming the creation of the new man, in reality is structured against indetermination, pretending to possess the law of its own organization and its development, and secretly creating itself in the modern world as a society without history’ (EP, p. 25). The link between the ‘indetermination’ of democracy and its historical character expresses the singularity of the political institution of democracy. Democracy does not refer to an empirical political practice or an institutional arrangement. In several essays on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Lefort shows that Tocqueville’s concept of the ‘democratic revolution’ describes more than an economic liberalism existing within an increasingly egalitarian society which constrains it to create a strong state based on the tyranny of opinion. That interpretation remains at the level of the positivism of political science; its implicit identification of Tocqueville’s ‘tutelary state’ with totalitarianism is based on the same error. Tocqueville is not a liberal in the classical tradition; if private individual freedom must be protected against the state, it must also be defended by the state against the power or other private interests.

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America famously begins from the social fact of equality; but for Lefort this fact is only apparently responsible for the purity of the American model of democracy. As his analysis moves on, the former student of Merleau-Ponty shows how this visible equality puts into question the ‘invisible’ freedom that had led the aristocratic French author to affirm his support not for what democracy does, but for what it ‘makes people do’ (fait faire)—for example, in the creation of a multitude of associations that startle the habitué of a hierarchical society. The relation of visible equality to that invisible freedom is inverted in Tocqueville’s second volume, published five years later; now freedom is the focus of the analysis and the democratic quest for a now invisible kind of equality (which exists in the form of mass opinion) constitutes the threat represented by the ‘tutelary state’. ‘Democracy’, in other words, expresses indeterminate structured play of visibility and invisibility, freedom and equality, power diffused into society and society erecting itself as power. Democracy is a political form that is historical and ‘reversible’; its character is ‘indeterminant’ and ‘indeterminable’.

The historical and indeterminate character of democracy does not yet define or fix its political form as constantly renewed critical interrogation. Its reversibility means that no positive institutions can guarantee its continuation. This is clear by comparison to the Ancien Régime (to whose analysis Tocqueville turned after his brief period of political engagement after returning from America. Its hierarchical political structure made directly visible its social foundation. When the centralizing absolute monarchy attempted to ensure its domination by means of administrative centralization, it had the unintended consequence of spreading the corrosive symbolic principle of equality that would eventually undermine the visible edifice of power. The Revolution of 1789 not only destroyed what Marx called ‘the illusion of politics’; it invented a new political actor, society, in which all individuals are said to be equal in principle even though that equality cannot be made real and visible to all citizens. In the place of the old hierarchy where each knew his place, equality now brings individual alienation in the crowd; in reaction, the temptation is to make social equality visible in the political personage of le peuple. It is this symbolic shift—not the overthrow of the monarchy—gave birth to the ‘idea of revolution’. The possibility of totalitarianism emerges when the revolutionary idea that society must be made visible to itself in the existence of a real political actor coexists with the indeterminacy of democracy . Before leaping to a pessimistic conclusion, Lefort insists that there is another side to democracy and that the French Revolution had another implication. The individual who is lost in the crowd and influenced by the vagueries of popular opinion is also freed from the constraints of the old hierarchy; the traditional bases of truth and justice are put into question by the resulting uncertainty. As with the social experience of democracy in America, the individual becomes agitated, disquieted, constantly forced to affirm himself or herself; democracy for the individual is not an end in itself; as in society, it is to be appreciated for what it ‘makes one do’ (fait faire).⁸⁶

Tocqueville’s liberalism, as opposed to that of Guizot (from which, as is well-known, Marx borrowed the notion of class struggle), is not concerned to put an end to the effects of the Revolution. The French liberals of the nineteenth century sought to create representative political institutions that would reincorporate ⁸⁷ the society that the Revolution had liberated from the visible institutions of monarchical hierarchical society. The French literature and the politics of that century are haunted by the anomic new society whose description by Tocqueville has parallels in Quinet, Chateaubriand, and Michelet (to whom Lefort devoted separate essais), as well as in the Manifesto of Marx, the Philosophy of Right of Hegel, and the reactionaries Burke, de Maistre, and de Bonald. Lefort’s historical reconstruction of the ‘bourgeois ideology’ that he had analyzed conceptually in the ‘Esquisse d’une genèse de l’idéologie dans les sociétés modernes’⁸⁸ shows that nineteenth-century representative political institutions failed to tame the social excess and indeterminacy of democracy by subsuming it ideologically under visible Ideals and Rules. The ground for the failure of bourgeois politics and its ideology is found in the identification of the empirical institution with its symbolic effects in the real. This makes it liable to empirical criticism because these symbolic Rules and Ideals can never be fully realized. Even Tocqueville’s attempt to understand the transition from the Ancien Régime to the Revolution was vitiated by this categorial confusion of empirical action and symbolic effect. The equality of conditions instituted by the centralizing monarchy is not simply or only a reality which ‘causes’ revolutionary change; it is a symbolic, and a thus also a political, process. Its roots lie in the transformation of the absolute monarchy toward the modern form of the state.

From the standpoint of the history of the political, modernity is marked by the disappearance of any external standpoint in terms of which society can be made visible to itself, named or unified. As a result, the modern state is defined by its paradoxical relation to both a presence and an absence: the presence of a modern society to itself depends on the absence of any external source of legitimation. From this point of view, the absolute monarch is the secular manifestation of the religious belief in the incarnation of god as man; the monarch’s ‘two bodies’⁸⁹ represent the divine within the kingdom, immortality within finitude, and permanence amid change. In this way absolute monarchy in the territorial state establishes the symbolic conditions in which the effects of the democratic process begin to be felt in the real world. ‘The King is dead; long live the King’ expresses the denial that power is truly incarnate in this particular empirical monarch. The principles of power and authority are clearly differentiated; the absolute monarchy in effect presages the creation of the Rechtsstaat , the rule of law rather than that of men. The overthrow of absolutism, in turn, creates a paradoxical situation in which society is at once the only source of legitimacy and yet it itself needs to be legitimated. Legitimate power becomes an absent presence; no single person or institution can claim to be its incarnation. The search for the authority of a legitimate power is affirmed even though the establishment of the rule of law means that the place of power must always remain empty. This emptiness of the place of power makes democracy possible at the same time that it explains why, once established, democracy constantly puts itself into question. Because the legitimacy of any temporary institutional power must be challenged, the indetermination that is essential to democracy preserves its historical character.

Lefort’s analysis of the symbolic mutation represented by the democratic revolution illustrates the specific notion of the political that underlies his analysis and points to its practical implication. Democracy is not the (‘ideological’) creation of a dominant class, the ‘bourgeoisie’, that introduces the procedures of election and the separation of powers in order to mask the exploitative nature of capitalist economic relations. Although he knows that ‘politics’ is concerned with the acquisition and the use of power, Lefort insists that its basis is the symbolic function exercised by ‘the political’, which he defines as the ‘generative principle of society’. Lefort first presented the distinction of the two spheres in an early essay in order to explain that ‘the reason that power is the privileged object of knowledge of the political, is that power conditions the mise en forme and the mise en scène of a social ensemble’ (ID, p. 118). By insisting on these symbolic dimensions, Lefort emphasizes the fact that the political is not produced as a reaction to, or as the expression of, external constraints or particular interests. Lefort’s thesis can be illustrated by Toqueville’s Democracy in America, to which he returns frequently. At the outset of the ‘Introduction’, Tocqueville writes that during his travels in America he came to see that equality was the ‘generative fact [fait] from which each particular fact seemed to emerge [descendre]’. Reading closely and contextually, Lefort points out that the generative fact has a different status from the particular fact(s); the latter are not caused by the former—they emerge from it. Equality as symbolic generates a sphere of meaning within which the particular facts acquire a significance that is not inherent in their empirical existence (e.g., a factual difference between men and women, among classes and strata of society is perceived as an inequality that expresses an injustice that must be remedied).

The political defines the relations a given society defines as politically legitimate and socially just. In a later essay, Lefort adds a third symbolic dimension to his definition, referring to the ‘mise en sens’ by which the meaningfulness of individual experience is instituted by the symbolic matrix of a society (EP, p. 257). These three symbolic structures define the spheres of political legitimacy, social justice, and forms of individuation that, in turn, ‘generate’ the forms of power, law, and knowledge in a given society. In a modern democracy, society is both object of representation and the agent of representation. As a result, there can never be a perfect identity of the institutional representation of social relations, which must be valid for all of the members, and the particular conditions of each of them. As a result, democracy will always be marked by indeterminacy, interrogation, and self-criticism. That is why democracy, as distinct from other social formations, has an inherently historical ‘mode of being’ (EP, p. 254). As opposed to ‘societies without history’, this means that an essential aspect of modern democracy is that the place of power, law, and knowledge must remain empty at the same time that society constantly attempts to incorporate itself, giving ‘flesh’ to its understanding of the nature and limits of power, law, and knowledge. In this way, the distinction between the symbolic and the real is preserved, insuring that not only the difference between society and the state is maintained but also that society itself remains divided because no person or group of people can claim to have a monopoly of the symbolic. As a result,  democracy is the only political form that legitimizes political conflict.⁹⁰ This conflict is expressed in the political history of democracy.

Lefort’s demonstration of the unique symbolic structure of modern democracy does not imply an option for ‘bourgeois liberalism’ or the abandonment of struggles for social change. He repeats his insistence that the historically existing bourgeoisie has constantly opposed democracy. His preface to L’invention démocratique situates Lefort’s arguments in the contemporary politics of France where the ‘Union of the Left’ came to power in March 1981 in an alliance of the Socialist and Communist parties. Toward the end of his argument, Lefort asserts that

[t]he worst evil is this: a democratic society without the representation of democracy at the same time that it is blinded to the nature of totalitarianism and to the logic of its expansion. It becomes a society blind to itself, foreign to itself, and ultimately disarmed. (ID, p. 36)

The threat of totalitarianism is not only a question of Soviet foreign policy⁹¹; the danger may come from economic crisis or war that creates a situation

where the conflict among classes and groups increases and no longer finds its symbolic resolution in the political sphere, when power appears to sink to the level of reality and appears as something particular serving the interests and appetites of vulgar and ambitious persons–in a word, when power appears in society–and when, at the same time, society appears as cut up; at that point the phantasm of the united people, the quest for a substantial identity, for a social body held together by its head, for a power which incarnates society and a State freed from division appears. (EP, p. 30)

The advocates of a revolution that would introduce ‘real democracy’ can find an audience in these conditions, in the West or in the democratizing Third World because democracy appears unable to live with the representation of its own indetermination and is afraid to confront the question of its history. This argument does not commit Lefort to a defense of democracy as defined institutionally; political democracy is not identical with any specific social and economic structures. As with Tocqueville, Lefort defends democracy for what it incites people to do (fait faire) because that is all that democracy ‘is’.

The place of Lefort’s thought within the self-critique and historical appropriation of the Marxian legacy is clearest in his discussion of the political implications of the concept of the rights of man.⁹² The issue was posed as a result of the growing respectability of the critique of totalitarianism in the French left in the wake of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago; it took a positive form in the action of dissidents in Eastern Europe such as the Czech Charter 77 and the Polish Solidarnosʹcʹ. The debate took place on two fronts: against the ‘Marxists’, for whom only economic ‘rights’ are real, and against the ‘new philosophers’, for whom morality had replaced political thought. Like Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror , Lefort agrees with Marx’s criticism of the hypocrisy of the moralists’ humanistic defense of ‘abstract man’. He recognizes as well that the fragmentation and alienation that Marx saw hidden by this abstract ideology of rights is also present in totalitarian society, which recognizes no rights and whose political state not only rationalizes exploitation within civil society but interferes in all forms of individual socialization. From this point of view, it is totalitarianism rather than bourgeois democracy that is the expression of what Marx called the ‘political illusion’. This contrast explains the need to examine the specificity of the bourgeois forms that Marx called ideological. While Marx was not wrong to denounce the exploitation masked by liberalism’s rhetoric of equality and justice, his debunking of the illusions of ideology in order to make visible a reality hidden behind alienation led him to neglect the ‘invisible’ political institutions, of which the ‘rights of man’ are an expression.

Lefort proposes a Marxian analysis that demonstrates that Marx himself was unwittingly a victim of ideology. He had criticized the French Declaration of the Rights of Man without looking at what these rights signify in actual social relations. His interpretation of the guarantee of freedom to do whatever does not harm others as the expression of a bourgeois, egoistic monad, separate from others and seeking to be protected from them, neglects the fact that ‘the freedom to do whatever’ entails a liberation from the constraints of monarchical, hierarchical society that makes possible new types of social relations. Similarly, Marx neglects the new mode of access to public space when he criticizes the separation between the private and public neglects in Articles 10 and 11, which guarantee freedom of opinion and the right to communicate those opinions. These are not the rights of isolated monads; they are based on a distinction between knowledge and power, not that between bourgeois and citizen. Marx’s criticism of the right to security as another bourgeois limitation neglects the fact that it forbids arbitrary arrest and establishes the presumption of innocence. The latter, insists Lefort in a laconic phrase is ‘an irreversible acquisition of political thought’ (ID, p. 61). It expresses a symbolic mutation in the representation of the political, maintaining the distinction between power and law that makes possible criticism of the action of those exercising power. Marx is led to neglect these political implications because his analysis focuses strictly on really existing society, which he treats as if it could be understood in its sheer positivity. This leads him to neglect the importance of the new public space created with democracy.

Marx’s criticism of the ‘abstract man’ created by bourgeois society is reinterpreted by Lefort.⁹³ ‘Man’ has rights by virtue of a triple paradox. Society is ideally one, yet it cannot represent or incarnate itself as a single body; as a result, no mode of activity can be forbidden by an external agency. Further, the rights which belong to ‘man’ are given by no one; no power ratifies the Declaration of Rights, which are given by ‘man’ to men through a self-declaration. Finally, as individual, these rights cannot be swallowed up into any all-encompassing totality; as individual, they are ‘transversal’, which means that their exercise demands their acceptance by others (ID, p. 66). As a result, what Marx criticized as ‘abstract man’ having no social determinations is shown to have the positive implication that the nature of man is indeterminable; like democracy itself, the democratic individual is necessarily open to history. Rights can be increased; acquired rights serve as support for new demands; but rights can also be invoked to prevent the development of other, different rights.

This symbolic mutation brings with it a new relation to politics. Rights exist only by means of their enunciation, and in their practice, which is plural and historical. Misunderstanding this democratic structure can mean a loss of freedom as rights become the province ruled by lawyers, judges, or political parties.⁹⁴ The multitude of new demands for changes in sexuality, the family, children and women, prisoners, farmers, and even judges emerging from society since May 1968 suggests a different possibility. ‘Are not these diverse rights affirmed on the basis of a consciousness of right, with no objective guarantee and, equally, with reference to publicly recognized principles that have in part been written into law and can be mobilized in order to destroy the legal limits that still constrain them’ (ID, p. 71). Demands for economic rights against arbitrary dismissal like those by minorities of all types combine ‘the idea of a legitimacy and the representation of a particularity’ (ID, p. 74). The result demonstrates the symbolic efficacity of the concept of right anchored by a democratic society from which interest and social division are not excluded. It founds the historicity of democratic society on the permanence of the conflictual struggle for right.

Lefort is not proposing a new variant of what I have called a theory of practice, suggesting that struggles for rights embedded in democratic society need only to recognize their radical nature in order to transform the society as a whole. His proposal is founded in the self-critique of Marxism, which permits him to recognize the radically new politics of democracy. The plurality of rights, and their indefinite particularity, means that they cannot be regrouped into one platform acted upon by a single agency. Rights cannot be guaranteed by the state; they are won and held only in and by their practice; if they acquire a reified status as ‘natural’ they may well be lost. The search for a power which could guarantee rights presupposes the division between power and society as a reality that needs to be overcome by creating a ‘real democracy’ that could guarantee rights without the need for citizen participation. That is the road to illusion.

The analysis of the relation of democracy to totalitarianism shows the omnipresence of the totalitarian possibility within the movement for human rights. Lefort concludes his argument by recalling that it is ‘the Soviets, the Poles, the Hungarians, or the Czechs or the Chinese in revolt against totalitarianism who teach us to decipher the sense of political practice’ (ID, p. 83). To learn from the East, the West has to realize the specificity of democratic politics, of the totalitarian temptation, and therefore the need to combat the abuses which ‘bourgeois democracy’ at once permits and condemns. This dual critical task avoids the other temptation that tries to propose practical measures on the basis of a purportedly radical theory.

As opposed to a Marxist theory of practice, Lefort’s critique of Marx’s ‘realism’ and his stress on the symbolic nature of the political show that the goal of an immanent critique of contemporary societies can lead to their totalitarian negation. The analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s ‘literary investigation’ showed that the demand for truth is ‘politically founded’. But its foundation is not to be found a theory for practice.

I did not mean [insists Lefort] that it serves a political goal, however justified and important … it is an unconditional demand for knowledge and, precisely as such, it is completely political because it confronts not simply the collective lie … but a vision of humanity fantastically enfolded into itself, bundled up stiffly in its certainty, where knowledge is strictly conditioned by power (UH, pp. 131, 133)

Democracy as political history is a different critique; it is its own self-critique, in theory as in practice. It is constantly open to the new, which it refuses to reduce to the already-known; at the same time, it builds from the existing acquired rights that are constantly put into question by the conflict which its symbolic articulation generated by the absence of any incarnate realization of the unity of power, law, and knowledge. In this sense—and not as an empirical set of institutions—democracy becomes the locus of radical politics.

10.5.2 Cornelius Castoriadis: Ontology as Political

Although his analysis of totalitarianism differs from Lefort’s, Castoriadis also recognizes the fragility of democracy.⁹⁵ He distinguishes democracy—whose crucible is the Greek experience that Europe received as a sort of legacy—from both capitalism and totalitarianism, which share a different ‘imaginary institution’. The transformation of the Greek heritage took place toward the fourteenth century with the passage described by the philosopher of science, Alexandre Koyré, as the passage from the ‘closed to the infinite world’. A new magma of imaginary social significations was created, the most important of which were the mathematization of a world that was now assumed to be thoroughly rational, the quest for mastery and domination over nature, and the idea of unlimited development within a universe characterized by its artificiality. These ontological presuppositions are said to be shared by capitalism and so-called socialist societies. The contradiction of the existence of a rational nature accessible to knowledge with the idea of an artificial world open to domination is bridged by the project of unlimited economic development, which can be pursued by different political means whose results are either a ‘fragmented bureaucratic capitalism’ or a ‘total bureaucratic capitalism’. The former permits democracy to exist within its pores while the latter destroys it (so far as is possible).

From the perspective of an instrumental rationality, ‘total’ bureaucratic capitalism appears superior to its ‘fragmented’ Western version because of its forceful unification of all facets of society. From this perspective, totalitarianism is a threat to capitalist democracy. But democracy is not the product nor the necessary accompaniment of capitalism; it is the expression of a different ‘imaginary institution of society’ that challenges both fragmented and total bureaucratic capitalism. Like any institution of society, Greek democracy is not defined only by its political institutions; it is also represented in philosophy, tragedy, and the personage we know as that ‘Greek man’ best described in Pericles’ Funeral Oration (Cf. DdH, pp. 282–306). Modern Europe, East and West, is at once a radical rupture with the Greek ‘imaginary institution’ and yet it also continues to share in the Greek legacy. This apparent contradiction needs clarification.

The political ontology articulated in L’institution imaginaire de la société can be reinterpreted from the perspective of the democratic project as incarnated by the Greeks. The analytic richness of that approach is evident in Domaines de l’homme, a collection of Castoriadis’ earlier writings from the decade that followed the publication of L’institution imaginaire. The Greek inspiration is emphasized in the titles of its four sections: ‘Kairos’, ‘Koinônia’, ‘Polis’, and ‘Logos’. Castoriadis explains that he had first intended to organize these writings starting from the most general and moving to the more concrete implications of his philosophical position. However, as Aristotle put it, ‘Plato was right to be uncertain and to ask whether the correct path (odos) begins from principles (arkhai) or moves toward principles’. The odos becomes Castoriadis’ méthodos, a movement to and from principles, alert to the moments when the principles find their realization, and where reality calls for principled action. This is the ground for the title of this collection and for the others that he would go on to publish over the next years as pointing to ‘crossroads in the labyrinth’.

The choice of the term ‘Kairos’ for his concrete interventions calling for the movement from principle to its realization, does suggest a priority accorded to practice; Castoriadis instead translates the concept as a ‘moment of decision, a critical occasion, a conjuncture in which it matters that something be done or said’ (DdH, pp. 7–8). This same orientation is stressed in the first lines of his renewed analysis of totalitarianism as it appears in the Soviet Union of the 1980s His book’s title, ‘Devant la guerre, does not mean before the war but facing up to war. The book is not concerned with prediction or perspectives; its goal is to offer an analysis of the contemporary world that is necessary in order to orient oneself in it’ (DLG, p. 7). This intellectual attempt to move from reality to principles is more complicated than it appears. As he explained in an empirical analysis of the socio-economic problems of underdevelopment that was republished in Domaines de l’homme, ‘[w]hat we can do is destroy the myths which, more than money and arms, are the most formidable obstacle in the path of reconstruction of human society’ (DdH, p. 154). This principled method of politics is not a theory for practice; Castoriadis is treating ‘crossroads in the labyrinth’. Ontology—Castoriadis’ theory of the magma—cannot be separated from the political project that belongs to the critique of the Marxian legacy.

Castoriadis insists on the consistency of his political project which began with dissent from the Trotskyist variant of Marxism. His theoretical rupture with Marxism was consummated in ‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’, published in Socialisme ou Barbarie  in 1964–65, and reprinted as the first part of L’institution imaginaire de la société. Castoriadis’ critique used Marx against Marxism. A similar critical method had guided his earlier analyses of the Soviet Union; he insisted on the need to ‘read Capital in the light of Russia, not Russia in the light of Capital’ (DdH, p. 187). From that point of view, he concludes, ‘Marx represents the ultimate extension of the imaginary social significations of capitalism: determinism, progress, productivism, economism and especially the social phantasm of unlimited expansion of “rational” mastery’ (DdH, p. 21). He made the theoretical basis of this analysis explicit in the 25 theses published in his 1982 summary of ‘The Social Regime in Russia’. The concept of a ‘social regime’ does not refer to the party apparatus in power; the classical political term ‘regime’ describes the institution of a society in all its facets. By comparison, the concept of ‘totalitarianism’ has the disadvantage of suggesting that Soviet society is fixed once and for all, standing outside of history and only capable of change by a radical revolutionary rupture that can come only from outside forces.⁹⁶ Devant la guerre proposes a renewed analysis of the Soviet Union, integrating the earlier results into the new historical conjuncture that Castoriadis tries to explain. Castoriadis’ thesis brings together his ontology with his critical Marxian reading of Russian reality; total bureaucratic capitalism pushed to the limit is said to found a new ‘social regime’ relating to its predecessor as capitalism had related to Greek democracy.⁹⁷

Castoriadis’ attempt to leave a place for historical change within his model of totalitarianism applies the critical method that digs beneath the surface features and their ideological self-justification to Soviet society. ‘The “will” of the regime is seen as the anonymous and largely blind result of all of its efforts and its inertias … And that “will” can be read in its results’ (DLG, pp. 160–61). ‘Power’ in the Soviet Union is the expression of a relation that is not entirely visible to an external observer because it is not located in some individual or group that could be revealed by a ‘perfect and total investigation’. ‘The invisible—and the important—aspect of power is in the last resort that which produces effects without needing specific “acts” in order to manifest itself’ (DLG, p. 280). This argument is consistent with a Marxist analysis which would stress, for example, that ‘Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Ford, Vanderbilt, etc. were never President of the United States’, any more than parliaments in capitalism are dominated by businessmen, or even that ‘the National Association of Manufacturers did not telephone to Wilson or Roosevelt the order to enter the First or the Second World War’ (DLG, p. 266). When Russia was dominated by total bureaucratic capitalism, power could be said to be located in the communist party; and Stalin was the ideal bureaucrat (DLG, p. 247n). But, not only did the Terror threaten the bureaucrats; objectively, the nature of a bureaucracy leads it to lie to itself about the real conditions of society, to preserve its position at the cost of efficiency, and to mask its ineptitude by appeal to ideology. ‘Since Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s overthrow, this ideological justification has disappeared; Brezhnev inaugurated the notion of ‘really existing socialism’, and the influence of his chief ‘ideologue’, Suslov, can hardly be compared to that of Stalin’s Zhdanov. The creation of a new man, the transformation of nature, and the visions of a radiant future have fallen by the wayside’ (DLG, p. 28; DdH, p. 57). This sober analysis of the Soviet reality suggests that the Marxist analysis will have to be rethought in this case as well as in the face of advanced capitalism.

The changing function of ideology is one sign of the new relations in the Soviet Union; the Marxist critic however continues to look for the real underlying key to the functioning of society. Castoriadis is struck by a paradox that leads beyond Marxism. A society whose civilian productivity is notoriously inefficient and qualitatively unsatisfactory has nonetheless come to rival—Castoriadis says in fact to surpass—the United States in the military sphere. This suggests the hypothesis that power in the Soviet Union belongs to a new ruling group, the modern army. Castoriadis underlines the modernity of the new formation. The justification for his thesis depends on his insistence that, because the Soviet Union is a social regime, it cannot be analyzed by Marxist methods. The ‘army’ is not simply men in arms; as has been known since the great mobilizations for World War I, modern military power encompasses the entirety of the way a society lives and functions. The military institution demands industrial production lines; it entails the direction and deployment of science and technology; it invades social life through educational institutions, vocational decisions, and the economic advantage it gives those who work for it. Castoriadis provides empirical documentation for the existence of a separate military society, with its own privileges, life-style, and rewards. He explains that the army could assume its dominant role in the post-Stalin era because it was ‘the only one of the sectors of the bureaucracy to succeed in modernization … For the other sectors, if the irrationalities and the chaos of the Stalinist period have been somewhat limited, it is difficult to pretend that their functioning differs qualitatively from what existed before 1953’ (DLG, p. 270). For this reason, Castoriadis calls the new Soviet society a stratocracy.⁹⁸

The significance of ideology changes within such a stratocracy. Marxist analysis, which remains fixated at the level of the relations of production, cannot grasp the changed nature of the regime (DdH, p. 180). Castoriadis’ distinction between total and fragmented capitalism suggested that totalitarianism brings the logic of capitalism to its paroxysm. But in principle totalitarianism can never be fully realized; the state cannot absorb the society, even through the mediation of the all-powerful communist party. The attempt to engineer a totally rational unity produces massive irrationality; the self-representation of society, its ideology, contradicts its reality. Within the universe of capitalist significations, ideology as rational and scientific, transparent and explicable, is essential to the legitimation of social institutions. When it is translated into the regime of total bureaucratic capitalism, its self-contradiction reduces it to a mere empirical instrumentality serving to justify power and domination; it can no longer legitimate, even negatively, its promise of a radiant future. The ideological goal of controlling thought is modified; it suffices for it to produce behavioral conformity. Ideology becomes a ‘lexitechnique’ (that might be today called ‘Orwellian’) in which language functions as a ‘code’ that destroys the signifying function that is essential to human language (DLG, pp. 233ff ).⁹⁹ This reduction of meaning to code seals the demise of ideology within the new social formation. The destruction of human signification is manifest in the ‘massive production of Ugliness’ and an ‘affirmative hatred of the Beautiful’ (DLG, 238ff ). It produces ‘a new anthropological type’, the cynic, whose mass social production of what the dissident novelist Alexander Zinoviev calls ‘homo sovieticus’ testifies to the void which permits the birth of the stratocratic society and which it in turn reproduces.

A new imaginary organizing principle of society must emerge to fill the social-historical vacuum left by a communist party incapable of formulating goals for itself or for society at large. The modern army constructs a reality based on ‘the ennobling of effective and efficacious Force in and by the national–imperialist imaginary’ (DLG, p. 253). Although some commentators interpret this development as reflecting a return of traditional Russian nationalism, Castoriadis argues that the ambient cynicism of Soviet society destroys the weight of tradition, culture, and the past. ‘Russia’ has become an empty signifier; the only content it can acquire is ‘brute force for the sake of brute force’ (DLG, pp. 222ff ). Because the military sector is the only functional element within Soviet reality, the new signification that fills the cynical void is reinforced. Castoriadis insists on the historical novelty introduced by this new social organization. The classical Greeks had recognized the decisive role of force, but they conceived of it as an external necessity and limit that society must confront in order to achieve its own goals. The Soviet heir to the capitalist project of unlimited domination makes explicit the role of force as its underlying imaginary signification. This new phase goes beyond the totalitarianism that drew its power from the divisions and conflicts of democratic society; it is ‘a new historical animal’ that transforms the old goal of total domination over human beings into the goal of external domination (DdH, p. 217f ). This is why Soviet control over East Europe no longer depends on the mediation of the ‘sister parties’ but (at least since the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia) is enforced by the reality of the Red Army.

Castoriadis concludes from this analysis that the Russian stratocracy poses a direct and external threat to western democratic nations. A Marxist analysis would suggest that ‘[e]xternal expansion, in this situation, is the only “solution” for the regime … because the use of military force is the only thing that present Russian society can do. We are facing a society which constitutes itself in order to do this: expand its domination, its Empire, while preparing itself to make war’ (DLG, p. 217). Stratocratic society, Castoriadis warns, ‘is destined to prepare war because that is all it knows, and can do’. But he adds to this functional account the expectation that ‘[t]his expansion does not take place in the Hitlerian form of rapid and brutal poker moves that bluff the adversary. It has its own slow and weighty rhythm’. The reason that Castoriadis nonetheless dramatizes this threat lies in his ontological, Marxian approach to social formations. This methodological approach is clear in his choice of a point for historical comparison.

When Islam was unleashed in the Orient and the Mediterranean, and spread within a century from a few Arab tribes to conquered lands reaching from Spain to the boundaries of India whose populations it assimilated, the cause was not their GNP, their technology, their ‘fire-power’, their numbers or their ‘degree of civilization’. An other–a new–type of society had emerged, a new institution of society was created, new (religious) imaginary social significations were imposed … The confrontation between Russia and the United States opposes two societies, two social–historic regimes. (DLG, pp. 78f )

This does not mean, as some critics argued at the time, that Castoriadis casts his lot with ‘the West’, let alone with Reagan’s projects for rearmament.¹⁰⁰ He reaffirms his argument that the critique of capitalism remains valid, adding that critique does not justify ‘critical support’ for ‘really existing socialism’. The unpublished second volume to Devant la guerre promised to examine the question ‘Can and should one defend liberal oligarchies?’ The answer would surely not have been similar to Trotsky’s definition of Stalinism as a ‘deformed workers’ state’ whose infrastructure is ‘socialist’. Castoriadis also promised that his second volume would conclude with a chapter trying to answer the question: ‘What can we do?’ His support for the Polish movement was evident in his preface to the Polish translation of his text.

Without waiting for his answer, it is clear that Castoriadis’ analysis of what he called the stratocracy posed a serious challenge to the Marxian legacy from within that project. The inability of Marxism to think of war as anything but a product of capitalism is a reflection of that challenge (DLG, p. 18). But Castoriadis’ argument is more radical than just that strategic consideration . Devant la guerre closes with a critique (no doubt directed against Lefort) of what he calls even the most critical Marxist.

If he criticized Marxism, he put in the place of the ‘economic’ the ‘political’: he has created or assimilated a conception of the ‘Party/State’ as the dominant instance in Russian society in a way that is – or appears to him to be – intelligible, arguing that it functions by means of ideology, which is something that he understands. But the military? Phooey! How vulgar, how unworthy, what an aberration. Brute Force: that destroys the rationality of history. (DLG, p. 281)

Castoriadis insists that ‘brute force’ is the new imaginary signifier that explains the functioning of Russian society. He refuses to equate the stratocracy with known political forms such as ‘Bonapartism, Pretorian domination, Latino–American dictatorships’. ‘[F]or the first time in history’, he asserts, ‘we are witnessing the birth of a society in which the place of religion or any other magma of imaginary significations has been occupied by a “signification” that does not signify: brute force expresses nothing but brute Force for its own sake’ (DLG, p. 282). The refusal to recognize this new, apparently ‘irrational’, reality results from ‘the same motivations, the same refusal to admit that history can also be that, as was the attitude of those who indignantly denounced Machiavelli’s Prince’ (DLG, p. 230).

In spite of his aggressive criticism of the Russian regime, which is coupled with a warning to Western democratic governments, the ruthless logic of Castoriadis’ criticism of both of them recalls the existential despair of Max Horkheimer in 1940, when he faced the unfathomable emergence of the ‘authoritarian state’. The critical theorist asserted despairingly that ‘[s]ociological and psychological concepts are too superficial to express what has happened to revolutionaries in the last decade: their will toward freedom has been damaged’. Two years later, with Adorno, he composed the Dialectic of Enlightenment, putting reason itself to a critical test. Castoriadis’ account of Soviet society’s descent from totalitarianism can be read as his variant of a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ that has become fully out of control. The imaginary logic that culminates in the senseless world of force leans on an empirical description of Soviet society in order to give flesh to its categories. The thesis illustrated by these examples is not presented as a theory of practice; its movement from principle to reality is better understood by analogy to a Marxist theory for practice. As such, Castoriadis’ theory cannot be refuted by appeal to empirical realities. The argument depends ultimately on his commitment to his ontology whose implications permit him a small measure of political optimism. In addition to an analysis of the ‘decomposition of Western societies’ and a criticism of ‘Russian strategy and the US non-strategy’, the second volume of Devant la guerre promised to explain the ‘specificity of European creation’. This became the guiding thread of the next phases of Castoriadis’ work and the subject of many of the seminars that he taught at the École des Hautes Études. Reflecting particularly on the Greek legacy, including Thucydides’ account of the decline of Athenian democracy, Castoriadis argues that the threat to democracy is above all internal to it, a failure of imagination, an absence of judgment. From this perspective, the despairing analysis of the descent into the realm of brute force of the stratocracy can be understood as an attempt to shock Western democracies into critical self-reflection.

In an essay on ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, Castoriadis recalls that the foundation of his ontological project was built on the idea of a ‘circle of creation’ which, for society, is the expression of its ‘self-institution’ (DdH, pp. 261ff.). This intuition had been present implicitly in his critique of Marxism. The Marxist failed to understand that relations of production cannot be determined only in terms of other relations of production; that assumption reduces Marxism to a form of positivism which does not understand that social institutions themselves must be instituted (DdH, pp. 81–2). Ironically, religion seems to at least recognize the difficulty insofar as it knows that the world that is instituted as this world is based on nothing—no thing explains the world of meaning instituted by religious belief. Religion covers over this act of creation by appealing to a visible image of its invisible creation, displaying a rich imagery to cloak the divinity. The religious attempt to relate the visible and the invisible expresses a form of ‘heteronomy’ that denies the autonomy of creation (DdH, pp. 364–384). This heteronomy, which is clearly manifest in religion, exists also as the internal threat to democracy insofar as it does not recognize the contingency of its own existence. The threat presents itself when, as with religion, the stability of a world of shared meaning is said to depend on a ‘divine’ guarantee: the ‘rationality’ of capitalism, its laws and commandments, and that ‘invisible hand’ of the market.

The legacy of the Greeks for the European project is the notion of autonomy which, ultimately, accepts the paradoxes of the ‘circle of creation’.¹⁰¹ Politics takes place in history, but ‘history’ in and for itself has no meaning. History is the field in which meaning is created—or, as heteronomous, it is the space where the senseless (like fascism or stratocracy) can emerge. Returning to his ontological thesis, Castoriadis insists that being is not ‘in’ time; it exists ‘by time’, by means of time. More strongly, he insists that being is time; it is a kind of existence that must become and that is promised to become, what Castoriadis calls the à-être. Time as well as history cannot be thought without the creation which brings them forth as new forms (eide). This creation is made possible by the ‘excess of what is over what it is’ as determined or fixed by its properties (DdH, p. 378). Traditional ontology, like positivist empirical science, negates this creativity when it interprets Being as fully determined; for the same reason, it cannot understand time because it treats things as being always and only what they are. As a result, any change appears to have been predetermined, as if the new were merely a spatial succession seen with the eyes of an absolute observer situated outside of time itself.

The political implication of this ontological account is that a society that denies its own autonomy cannot explain its own institutions; it is incapable of questioning itself, of self-critique. The Greek example serves to demonstrate that a society can be organized in a manner that keeps open the question of justice in ‘an interrogation without end’ (DdH, pp. 241ff, esp. 255ff.). That is why Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians describes 11 ‘revolutions’ that fundamentally changed its laws.¹⁰² This recognition of the idea of revolutionary change signifies that the Greeks accepted the challenge of autonomy, which remains the legacy of democratic politics.

European history has been marked by attempts to inherit the Greek legacy of the autonomous institution of society. Autonomy is not the simple opposite of ‘class domination’, nor is it the absence of rules. Castoriadis accepts the Freudian idea that the infans is a radically a-social and even anti-social monad that is biologically unfit for social life. Institutions that socialize it do violence to the immediacy of its desire by imposing its sublimation. These institutions create sense, meaning, and a shared social world. They can also make possible an infinite interrogation of this sense and world. Castoriadis insists that the ‘leftist’ critique of Freud’s supposed ‘paternalism’ misunderstands the fact that civilization emerges only when face-to-face relations, which can only take the forms of fusion or of domination, are replaced by acceptance of the legitimacy of a third party outside them whose word becomes law. He admits that this civilizing process can also legitimate forms of domination or encourage the development of religious faith; it can also lead to the introduction of a fourth figure which delegitimizes the power of the third party or replaces it by the kind of collective oath postulated by Freud in Totem and Taboo as the collective basis of the law that governs society. The upshot of these claims is that the institution of the law need not be heteronomous; the Greek example shows that it can take place in a public space organized through participation in its establishment and interrogation.¹⁰³ There can be no human collectivity without rules, however they are instituted; although they can become alienating, rules like those of language are the also condition of liberation. Heteronomy, or alienation, is possible only because its foundation is the autonomy whose creativity is guaranteed by the vertiginous ontological experience of Being as existing without foundation as a ‘magma’ being as à-être.¹⁰⁴

Contemporary European history expresses a combination of the Greek legacy of autonomy as the search for truth and justice with the very different creation of capitalism and imperialism that build on the imaginary framework of bureaucratic domination. The result as a ‘mixed society with a dual institution, in which social division, domination by bureaucratic capitalism, and imperialist domination of the Third World co-exist with the democratic elements that popular struggle has succeeded in imposing on the institution of society’ (DdH, p. 88). Although it did not invent war, racism, or exploitation, Europe practices them at the same time that they are contested due to the continued presence of the other, democratic origin of its imaginary institution. This dual structure explains its crucial difference from the Soviet Union. The activation of the democratic legacy within the dual institutions of European society can only be understood in relation to the project of autonomy. Democracy, once again, is not simply a set of formal institutions and the corresponding practices; the Greek heritage preserved in the dual European societies remains active.

Castoriadis’ political ontology sheds light also on debates concerning the development of the Third World as well as illuminating the political role of the Rights of Man. The project of ‘development’ (which is not only economic) imposes capitalist institutions on other cultures. When well-meaning critics base their criticism of this ‘cultural imperialism’ on the idea that it violates the ‘rights of man’, they conceal an ontological assumption that they share with their adversaries. Both parties deny the autonomy they want to affirm. Proponents of the need for economic development appeal implicitly to its supposed ‘rational necessity’, while supporters of the rights of ‘Man’ base their argument on another abstract product of reason. Castoriadis’ rejection of the former argument is not surprising. His counter position explains as well his critique of the latter. One of the ‘contemporary functions of the simple discourse on the ‘rights of man’ and its praise of ‘individualism’ is to hide a flight from political and historical responsibility’ (DdH, p. 110). Castoriadis’ insistence that autonomy and responsibility condition one another is crucial to his understanding of democracy. The nature of this ‘responsibility’ is again embedded in the practical political legacy of Greece.

European culture at least since Herodotus’ Histories has been open to other forms of social experience; this recognition of otherness forces it to question itself and to relativize its own institutions. The twin inventions of democracy and philosophy in Greece were coupled with, and enriched by, this same openness that imposes the need not only to question oneself, but also to learn to think in the place of the other, and to relativize one’s own institutions. Such cultural openness is a constituent of the democratic experience that should not be confused with a cultural relativism. It needs always to be complemented by the search for universality that is born with and essential to philosophy. The origin of democratic universality cannot be external to society, natural, or divine, because that would deny its freedom. It can only emerge from what Castoriadis calls an ‘improbable’ historical choice that asserts the equality of all as the condition of the freedom of each. Freedom and equality, and their universality, are expressions of autonomy. They are the result of a political choice for which citizens must recognize that they are responsible. That is why Castoriadis was critical of the peace movements of the 1980s whose ‘zoological politics’ claimed that the right to (physical) life was, in the last resort, the first human right to which all others should be sacrificed. The failure of democracies to accept responsibility for their own democratic institutions appeared to him as the expression of an internal threat to Western societies that led Castoriadis to write Devant la guerre. That book, which seemed to be focused on the devolution of Soviet Russia, was intended to speak to democratic societies (and the peace movements active during the 1980s in the face of the soviet threat).

There is no limit on what democratic societies can will or do; their freedom is founded on nothing other than their free self-willing. The Greeks were aware of the dangers of this radical democracy; they warned against what they called the hubris which results from the paradoxical assertion that autonomy knows no limits and, as a result transgresses the democratic institutions on which that autonomy depends.¹⁰⁵ Democracies can also destroy themselves insofar as they will their unfreedom insofar as they prefer life to the risks of war, opting for a ‘zoological politics’. The danger exists also when they can try to institute protections of their freedom in the form of written constitutions whose (heteronomous) sanctity is maintained only for so long as it pleases the enemies of freedom. Castoriadis refuses all forms of representative democracy; he insists that only participation in the choice of values breaks radically with the inherited habits of heteronomy. In this way, political democracy is not limited to the philosophical domain of ‘the political’. Democracy exists as the constant self-questioning of all facets of life. Castoriadis’ ontological foundation expands the sphere of political action. He insists that democracy cannot exist without the equality of participation whose presupposition is the equality of conditions. The essence of democratic political debate concerns the question of what is necessary for such equal participation, while democratic practice concerns the struggle to realize these equal conditions. In this way, like justice and freedom, equality is not an answer to the opening of an infinite interrogation.

The ontological circle of creativity that founds autonomy furthers the development of the kind of political judgment that chooses democracy while remaining conscious of the limits imposed by its very limitlessness. Castoriadis illustrates his thesis with reference to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The defender enlightenment rationality tried to explain how the individual judgment of the beauty of a singular work can be justified as universally valid without appeal to pre-existing rules of science or of morality. Kant’s dilemma expresses the ‘primitive circle of social–historical creation’ (DdH, p. 272). The emergence of the new that characterizes the beautiful work cannot be explained on the basis of a pre-existing structure. Yet judgment and taste must be sufficiently developed to recognize the artist’s creation as truly art. Kant appeals ultimately to the creative instinct of ‘genius’ that works according to a ‘natural teleology’ that is not explicable by the causal principles of science or logic. ‘The “genius”’, insists Castoriadis, ‘is at once a particular case and yet the expression of historical creation in general. The reception of the work of art is a particular case of the active and self-creative participation and cooperation of human communities in the institution of the new–in the institution tout court’ (DdH, p. 280). The ability of the community to receive and to recognize the novelty of the new is as mysterious as the artist’s ability to create it. For this reason, Castoriadis suggests that Kant’s Critique of Judgment defines implicitly the relation of philosophy to politics as the relation of the visible to the invisible whose ‘consubstantiality … does not signify the identity and still less the dependence of one of the terms on the other’ (DdH, p. 308).

Like politics, philosophy has no external foundation on which to base its questioning of established values. To philosophize is to create forms of thought in order to think what is beyond thought; ‘to think is to aim at what is other than thought while knowing that this other can only exist in and by thought’ (DdH, p. 309). This paradoxical relation of thought to being means that philosophy can never distinguish what it contributes to the object from what the object presents for it to think about. This is why philosophy cannot tell politics what it ought to do any more than politics can define the nature of philosophy. That does not mean that philosophy and politics are for this reason identical. Whereas philosophy seeks to preserve its paradoxical independence from the world, ‘political thought/will’ does not seek to know the other but to make itself other, to change itself on the basis of nothing but itself. Politics is not based on philosophy, nor is it deduced from ontology; its goal is not to produce ‘a rational political philosophy’ (DdH, p. 15). The central terms in Castoriadis’ philosophical-political vocabulary are responsibility and elucidate. Political responsibility was seen to be essential to the project of autonomy; its imperative is to be constantly aware of the creative, foundationless, democratic choices whose autonomy is veiled by diverse forms of heteronomy. Philosophical elucidation replaces the (heteronomous) quest for exhaustive rational (or reductive) explanation on the basis of ‘identitary-ensemblist’ logic-ontology. Castoriadis insists that the two activities belong together:

To break the hold of the identitary–ensemblist logic–ontology in its diverse disguises is a political task belonging directly to the work for the realization of an autonomous society. What exists, as it is, permits us to act and to create: but it does not dictate anything to us. We make our laws; that is why we are responsible for them. (DdH, p. 413)

Although Castoriadis’ ontology founds both his philosophy and his politics, that ontology is not a ‘system’ which replaces or determines either philosophy or politics. Castoriadis’ ontology reinserts the Marxian legacy into its Greek, and European, matrix. The dialectic of enlightenment was a correct description; but it misunderstood its own political implications. It is a theory of autonomy, not a philosophy of history.

Castoriadis’ méthodos that begins sometimes from principles and sometimes moves toward them can be characterized by a Greek aphorism that Castoriadis does not directly cite: philosophy begins in wonder. This attitude seems to characterize not only what he refers to as his ‘thought/will’ but also his style, whose polemical vigor and mocking examples aim to incite his reader to see the world anew. This was Marx’s style as well, when the desire for system and rationality did not weigh on his pen. One illustration will suffice to situate Castoriadis’ place in the legacy in this context. ‘The most important contemporary social and historical transformation … which was at work for three-quarters of a century, is neither the Russian Revolution nor the bureaucratic Revolution in China, but the change of the situation of woman and her role in society’ (DdH, p. 160). He adds that the same holds for youth and now even for children. Significantly, this advance was not in the program of any political party; it is an autonomous creation, putting into question the domination of heteronomous values. This practical expansion of the forms of democratic equality, justice, and freedom constitutes the pole that can oppose the external threat to democracy posed by the Russian stratocracy. Devant la guerre was no more written for the Russians than was Capital for the capitalists. However real the external threat, the internal danger is that democracy misunderstands its own precarious political judgment.¹⁰⁶

The Marxian legacy that Castoriadis and Lefort appropriate critically returns finally to the question of ‘the political’ that was opened by the Greeks and renewed by Machiavelli. The politics of democracy is neither a theoretical nor a practical solution to the question of ‘the political’. Democracy is nothing other than the question that makes both theory and practice possible and necessary. Criticizing the claims of Marxism and the relation of its ‘solutions’ to the totalitarian project permitted Castoriadis and Lefort to propose a new conception of radical politics, a politics of the new. With it, the question of the New Left returns.

10.6 The Legacy as Present History

Horkheimer’s co-author of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, T. W. Adorno, began his own philosophical master-work, Negative Dialectics, with a stark affirmation: ‘Philosophy, which once seemed antiquated, remains alive because the moment of its actualization was missed’. The philosophy he refers to is Marxism; his goal was to retain a rational instance from which to judge and to criticize. Praxis alone can offer no answer to the failure of theory. The classical proletariat will not return; it cannot be pasted together from the shards of a disintegrating Western society. These negative elements exist; the practical critique of western capitalist society continues and will continue. It is tempting to think that since capitalism represents the ‘enemy’, the movements that challenge it will have to coalesce and converge as its united and really existing negation. That would demand the creation of something like a ‘new working class’. Modern society, which is plural, fragmented, and divided against itself lacks the kind of unity that could be expressed by such a unitary actor. In spite of its divisions, that society is also united by a shared sensibility that articulates the values that give meaning to the diverse projects that constitute its warp and woof. This unity is not social; it is not visible in society because it is the condition of the possibility of society’s vision of itself. The unity of society is political and philosophical. Adorno’s aphorism is right, but for the wrong reason. The attempt to ‘actualize’ politics or philosophy was seen to lead toward a totalitarianism that makes the Other of society visible by destroying the very divisions that constituted it.

The Marxian legacy rediscovers political history when it abandons the logic of History. Adorno’s separation of critical reason from the world it criticized was based on an adherence to a negative theory of History; the deconstruction of that theory reveals only society, in its difference, fragmentation, and lack of inherent sense. The negative option separates critique from politics; the deconstructive option transforms society into its own self-critique. In both cases, the critique plays ultimately a positive role in the narration, refusing to open itself to the question of history. That history, which is the Marxian legacy, cannot be thought separately from its political flesh. Democracy is not simply the opposite of totalitarianism; it is not an empty form, a container within which social plurality persists unconsciously in its own way. The structure of democracy can be understood as revolutionary (and utopian): it exists neither before its action begins nor in its finished result; democracy simply is (or is not). It is not a theory that can be used for future political action nor is it a theoretical expression of an already existing politics. The path to the question of the legacy that has been traced here excluded both of these options. The Marxian critique of totalitarianism that uncovered its positive political sense showed that democracy is rooted in society, which cannot be reduced to the unconscious play of social forces. This constraint explains why democracy cannot be given a visible figure or situated in a fixed place; at the same time, it provides the material stimulant that poses the question of revolution that animates the Marxian legacy. This paradoxical unity of negation and affirmation is expressed by the assertion that democracy simply is. The present history of the legacy illustrates this claim.

For their own reasons, Habermas, Gorz, Lefort, and Castoriadis have all stressed the ‘new social movements’ which are the contemporary manifestation of the New Left that The Marxian Legacy tried to theorize. In their different formulations, each points to the need for a political interpretation of these social phenomena. This ‘politics’ is not confined to questioning the relations between the state and society, nor does it lie within the institutions of the state.¹⁰⁷ It takes the form of an implicit question that society poses to itself about itself and about the project that animates it. Although this is not necessarily the intent of the actors, it is the implicit sense that gives meaning to their actions and is the source of their ambivalent potential. The accent placed on their social character in the self-understanding of these new movements expresses their refusal of what Marx called ‘the political illusion’. Opposing society to the state, they seek to anchor their democratic ideals in a refusal of the institutions of ‘bourgeois democracy’. The legacy’s critique of Marxism warns against the double danger implicit in this orientation. For Marx, the end of ‘the political illusion’ led to the affirmation of bourgeois social relations; for Lefort’s Marxian critique, this denial of the political implications of the Rights of Man limited the ability to conceive of a struggle for the expansion of these rights. The critique of ‘bourgeois democracy’ is blinded to the allure of totalitarianism that is latent in the promised achievement of ‘real democracy’. That promised realization, which animates the positive extension of democracy’s self-criticism to new questions of right and justice, is also an internal threat to its continued existence in a global world where the reality of the threat of totalitarianism cannot be denied.¹⁰⁸

The new social movements can be interpreted as a reaction to the expansion of welfare-state (or bureaucratic capitalism) into the pores of social and individual life. A second interpretative option understands them as the internal development of a modern society whose capitalist economy does not define exclusively its nature. The former option is chosen by Habermas and Gorz, the latter by Lefort and Castoriadis. The refusal to define modern society by its economy is consistent with the critique of Marxism. One way of drawing its implications, suggested by Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen,¹⁰⁹ is to develop the concept of ‘civil society’ whose rich depiction by Hegel tended to be restricted in Marx’s critique of the idealist philosopher. Civil society is the public sphere which is not identical with the ‘state steering mechanism’ described by Habermas, nor reducible to the privacy of an indefinable ‘life-world’ from which occasionally arise empirical ‘challenges’. The creation and expansion of civil society can be understood as the concretized expression of the politics of democracy. The new social movements that continue to emerge within it and which articulate its momentary structure are not the result of a quest for ‘identity’ by atomized and alienated victims of capitalism; nor do they express what Hegel called ‘corporate’ interest groups seeking to get their way. The new movements are civil society, whose domination by the capitalist economy represents only a singular moment in political history. The contemporaneous emergence of social movements like the Polish Solidarnosʹcʹ for its part recalls that totalitarian societies are not societies without history; their refusal of historical change is the result of political choice. As Lefort demonstrated already in his analysis of Hungary, their struggle is part of the democratic project. It is their own path to the discovery of the Marxian legacy.¹¹⁰

Just as it is an error to interpret political history solely with the categories of the economy, it would be wrong to think that the new social movements constitute the essential common denominator of the contemporary globalized world. Two opposed political orientations occupy space that abuts the Marxian legacy. The neo-conservative critique, which Habermas correctly deemed a threat, is not simply the reflection of capitalist political interests. Neo-conservatives are troubled by the ‘excesses’ of democracy which, for the legacy, are precisely the expression of the virtues of democratic politics. The much criticized report of the Trilateral Commission that insisted on the need to ‘restrain democracy in order to save democracy’ addressed what Castoriadis designated as the impossible and yet constantly present question of democratic self-limitation. Similarly, Jean Kirkpatrick’s neo-conservative distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian government is shallow and self-serving (of American foreign policy interests), but a better argument for the importance of the specificity of the critique of totalitarianism is suggested by Lefort.¹¹¹ It is not sufficient to reduce these neo-conservative positions to their self-interested legitimatory function. The presence of similar analyses encountered within the Marxian legacy suggests that the neo-conservative criticism is not without foundation, however much its authors’ political use of it has to be criticized. In Western societies, where the welfare-state and social-democratic political projects have lost their force of attraction, and where what Gorz called ‘the road to paradise’ no longer depends on the creative potential of both capitalism and the working class, a New Left politics cannot remain attached to the old images of Marxism. The alternatives to the neo-conservative, or neo-liberal, politics that have come increasingly to prominence are neither reducible to the defense of the acquired benefits of the welfare state nor the all-or-nothing demand for social revolution. As did Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, Lefort rightly insists that the rulers of society are certainly not proponents of increasing the sphere of democratic participation. Castoriadis’ insistence that democracy is only practicable where the equality of condition among the participants prevails points out that the democratic project is not without material consequences.

The second contemporary political orientation that challenges the Marxian legacy is labeled ‘post-modernism’. The utilization of the prefix ‘post’ (like that of ‘neo’) suggests either that the phenomenon to which it is attached is ambiguous or that the theorist is uncertain whether and why the phenomena are in fact new. Habermas’ attempt to criticize both neo-conservatism and post-modernism for their refusal of the project of the Enlightenment is not without foundation. Marxism can be understood as the most consequent expression of the realization of an enlightened society. One of the more influential formulations of neo-conservatism, written by a veteran anti-Stalinist leftist strongly influenced by Trotsky in his youth, carries a title that is significant in this context. Daniel Bell’s analysis of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) followed the threat of his studies of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) and The End of Ideology (1960). The link of Bell’s neoconservative politics with the theories of post-modernism challenges the premises of both liberalism and Marxism. One of the premises of post-modernist theories is a critique of the aesthetic idea that if a true avant-garde can realize the essence of art, it will make a revolution that will change the world.¹¹² Post-modernism, like philosophical deconstructionism, rejects the notion of a subject separated from and acting on the world; it envisions a plurality of micro-subjects operating lateral strategies in a society whose essential normlessness makes immanent critique impossible. It would be too easy to reduce this ‘micro-political’ vision to a reflection of commoditized consumer culture that represents what the Situationists in the 1960s described (borrowing freely from Lukács) as a ‘society of the spectacle’. More difficult, but more necessary, is the attempt to understand post-modernism as a challenge to the legacy and the political questions it poses.

New social movements, neo-conservatism, and post-modernism do not exist in a vacuum. The inherent instability of democracy and the threat of totalitarian antipolitics create a climate encouraging an uncritical search for solutions. It would be naive to ignore the role of capitalism or the existence of imperial interests. The realities of racism, sexism, and the ecological destruction of the environment can no more be forgotten than the massive stockpiles of atomic ‘deterrents’. This list of qualifications can be extended by any morning’s reading of the newspaper (or, in today’s conditions of media monopoly, some newspapers). More important than these negative appearances is the lack of an ability to conceptualize the existing positive vectors. The decomposition of the left, fragmented into self-interested and identity-based coalitions seeking to defend a welfare state that some of them had condemned as ‘pre-totalitarian’ until the long economic crisis began after 1973, while others withdrew sullenly in the face of established political party machines that offer little space for citizen participation. In this context, the return to Marxism by the ‘left’ is not surprising; that theory offers certainty, explaining failures in the present while promising if not preparing future successes. Solzhenitsyn’s bien-pensants do not exist only in totalitarian societies. The critique of Marxism that reclaims Marx’s legacy is not simply a theoretical project. Its politics cannot avoid the ambitious and ambivalent encounter with the political which remains a legacy needing active participation to realize its inherited potential. That will be the task of a New Left that is able to translate the critical potential of the new social movements into the political interrogation that is the Marxian legacy.

Footnotes

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 developing 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 developing 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 developing 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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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This essay was discussed earlier, in Chap. 8.

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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’.

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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 ).

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 sniping 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 developing 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.

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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.

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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.

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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 ).

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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 ).

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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).

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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.

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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.)

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 helping 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.

Index ¹

A

‘Actuality and Utopia’ (Ernst Bloch)

Adorno, T. W.

Adventures of the Dialectic (Merleau-Ponty)

Alienated

alienation

art

artist

Althusser, Louis

A priori

Arendt, Hannah

Aristotle

Authoritarian state

B

Baier, H.

Bakunin

Balzac, Honoré de

Bateson, Gregory

Bebel, August

Being

Being and Nothingness (Sartre)

Benjamin, Walter

Bergson, Henri

Bernstein, Eduard

Bloch, Ernst

Bolshevik

bourgeois

Bourgeois/Bourgeoisie

culture

democracy

individualism

philosophy

radicalism

revolution

science

society

theory

Breakdown theory

Brecht, Bert

Bruegel, Pieter

Bukharin, Nikoli

Bureaucracy

C

Capital (Marx)

capitalism

capitalism, bureaucratic

Capitalism, contemporary

capitalism, late

Capitalism, liberal

Capitalist

Capitalist society

Cardan, Paul (pseudonym of C. Castoriadis)

Castoriadis, Cornelius

Castro, Fidel

Cezanne, Paul

Chaulieu, Pierre (pseudonym of C. Castoriadis)

Civil society

Class consciousness

Class struggle

Clastres, Pierre

Communicative action, (theory)

Communist

Community

Consciousness

Contradictions, contemporary

contradictions, non-contemporary

Coudray, Jean-Marc (pseudonym of C. Castoriadis)

Critical theory

Critique

D

Daily life

Darkness at Noon (Koestler)

Deconstruction

Democracy

Democritus

Dialectic

Dialectical

Division of labor

E

Economic

Engels, Friedrich

Enlightenment

existential

Epistemological

Existentialism

Existentialist

Experience

F

Fascism

fascist

Frankfurt School

Fetishism

Fetishized

Flesh (Merleau-Ponty)

Foucault, Michel

Freedom/necessity

futurity

Freud, Sigmund

G

German Idealism

German Ideology, The (Marx)

Goal

final

Gorz, Andre

Gramsci, Antonio

Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn)

H

Habermas, Jürgen

Hegel, G. W. F.

Heidegger, Martin

Heritage

See also Legacy

Hermeneutics

Herodotus

Historical materialism

History and Class Consciousness (Lukács)

history

Horkheimer, Max

Hitler, Adolf

Human

Humanism and Terror (Merleau-Ponty)

I

Idealism

idealistic

Identity

Ideological

Ideology

Inheritance

Institute for Social Research

Institution

institutionalization

Instrumental reason

See also Rationality

K

Kant, Immanuel

Korsch, Karl

L

Labor

Lacan, Jacques

Lefort, Claude

Legacy

See also Heritage; Inheritance

Legitimation

Legitimation Crises (Habermas)

Lenin, V. L.

Leninism

Life-world

Luhmann, Niklas

Lukács, Georg von

Luxemburg, Rosa

M

Machiavelli

Maoist

Marcuse, Herbert

Marxian legacy

Marxian theory

Marxian heritage

Marxian theory

Marxism

Western

Marxism as question

Marxist

Mass strike

Mass Strike (Luxemburg)

See also Marxism, Western; Theory and Practice

May 1968

mediations

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice

Metaphysics

Militant

Modernity

Moral, see Theory, moral

Motivation

N

Nature

Negation

Negt, Oskar

New Left

New social movements

Not-Yet

O

Offe, Claus

Ontological/ontology

Orthodox

Other

Otherness

P

Parsons, Talcott

Party

Pessimism

Phenomenology

Philosopher

Philosophical/philosophy

Plato

Political (the)

Positivism

Post-modern

Potlatch

Power

practico-inert

pragmatism

praxis

Prince, the, (Machiavelli)

production, forces

proletariat

psyche

Proletariat

Psychoanalysis/psychoanalytic

Psychological

R

Radical theory

Rationality (theory)

Reality and truth

Reason

Rechtsstaat

Reconstruction (theory)

Reification

Religion

Revolution

Revolutionary

Revolution, French

Rights

Rorty, Richard

Russia

S

Sartre, J.-P.

Scarcity

Schütz, Alfred

Self-identity

Social

Socialism

Socialisme ou Barbarie

Socialization

Social relations

social system ( see System, social; Theory, social)

society

Soviet Union

See also Russia

Stalin, Josef

Stalinism

Structure

Student

Subject

historical

philosophy of

revolutionary

Subject-object

Superstructure

Surplus-value

Symbolic

Systems

social

theory

T

Technology

Theorist

Theory

critical ( see Critical theory)

moral

practice

proletariat

radical

revolutionary

social

systems ( see Systems, theory; Theory, traditional)

traditional

Theory and practice

Theory of evolution

Theory of history

Theory of labor

Theory, Marxian ( see Marxian theory; Theory, moral)

theory, rational

Third International

Tocqueville

Totalitarianism

Totality

Totalization

Transcendental

trade unions

Trotsky, L.

truth

U

Universalization

Utopia

W

Welfare state

Weber, Max

We-object

We-subject

Working class

World, the

See also Proletariat

Z

Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung

Footnotes

1

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.