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Politik und Gesellschaft
Online International Politics and Society 4/2000 |
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Dick Howard Intersecting Trajectories: Republicanism
in the U.S. and France Like
many inherited historical concepts, „republicanism“ has been understood
differently in different contexts and at different times. This has resulted in confusion, polemic and,
most often, paradoxes that can serve to add depth and richness to
the concept itself. So it
is today. As used in France, republicanism refers to
the political project that found its idealized representation
in the Third Republic. In
the United States, the concept designates the social community
needed to provide a meaningful identity to the participants in a liberal
polity organized to insure abstract individual rights.
The paradox is that in practice French republicans defend just
the kind of formal abstract rights that American republicans denounce
as „liberalism“ while American republicans praise the kind of „identity
politics“ that the French republicans criticize as a threat to the
unity of the nation. The paradox is complicated by the fact that both sides seek the
same result: inclusion. But
the meaning of that concept remains unclear.
Is the system to include the individual, or does the action
of the individual reproduce and validate (or transform) the system? Republican
political theory has served and continues to serve in both countries
as a critique of the existing society.
In France, it has led to the use of the concept of „exclusion“
to replace the notion of „class“ to designate those whom society is
unable to integrate not only into its economy - whose capitalist nature
is often ignored, or reduced to the euphemism of the „market“ - but
into its political life. Republicanism and integration stand together
as a political program.[1] In the United States, the concept is related
to the (often vague) concept of „communitarianism“ that is invoked
to denounce the abstract legalism and competitive egoism of individualist
liberalism which both veil and rationalize a self-denying society
through the politics of „thin democracy.“ It demands a participatory rather than a merely representative democracy,
and stresses personal virtue and „the good“ rather than the individual
rights that serve political liberalism as trumps in the game of life.
The fact that American republicanism can come to imply the
demand for more social - even socialist - measures returns to the
initial paradox. It inverts
the French quest for a political alternative to radical social - or
socialist - demands. This
simple opposition of the French and American representations of republicanism
has the virtue of identifying a problem, but the weakness of remaining
at a formal level. In both
cases, republicanism can play a critical function because it represents
a political solution[2]
to social problems. In both
cases, it proposes guidelines for eliminating exclusion and insuring
inclusion. As such a political concept, it represents
the universal, which is always in a position to denounce the particularity
and division that are characteristic of any society. But for the same reason, social
actors are always able to criticize the formal abstractness of the
universal claims of the political. In its concrete form, this abstract
opposition expresses the difference between social and political forms
of exclusion and inclusion. The
American republican treats social inclusion in a community as a political
project; the French republican sees inclusion in the polity as the
presupposition for a social politics.
In the one case, social action is expected to have political
consequences; in the other, political action is seen as the basis
for social intervention. Historical Symmetries and Asymmetries The
historical genesis of the concept of republicanism in both countries
suggests that the duality between a social and a political interpretation
has always been present in each of them.
In both cases, the concept goes back to the revolutions that
gave each nation its claim to being at once unique and a model to
be universally imitated. In France, political republicanism made its
vital appearance with the events of August 10, 1792 and the Jacobin
dictatorship that followed. It
can be seen as the rejection of the egoistic individualism that emerged
from the „liberté“ achieved in the wake of August 4, 1789 and was
consecrated in the work of the Constituent Assembly.
The republic, legislated into being by the new Convention,
stood for the attempt to achieve an „égalité“ that would overcome
the new forms of social exclusion that had resulted from the political
abolition of the Old Order. In this sense, republican politics and socialism
could be unified for a moment. That
identification of republicanism and socialism explains the passionate
reception of the Bolshevik coup in October 1917 by so many French
republicans, including the dominant historians of the French revolution
Mathiez, Lefèbvre and Soboul. The
attraction of the French to communism was no accident. But it was far from unanimous. The dominant strand of French republicanism
remained political in 1848; and
with the foundation of the Third Republic in 1875 the concept came
to be represented by the brigades of republican „institueurs“ bringing
civilization to the French peasantry along with a crusade against
the old (clerical) order. This republicanism returned to its roots in
the Enlightenment critique of prejudice and privilege, themselves
an older form of exclusion to be overcome by the heritage of the revolution. The
third concept in the French revolutionary trinity, „fraternité“, might
be assumed to represent the form of inclusion that could overcome
the duality implicit in the republican model.
Mona Ozouf’s brilliant sketch of the peregrinations of this
concept, and its critical afterlife in the 19th century,[3]
shows that it could take on either the connotation of true „liberté“
of the individual - for example,
in Michelet’s stress on the centrality of the Fête de la Fédération
(commemorating July 14 and national unity) that joins together free
individuals in a higher union that, emphatically, entails no sacrifice
of individuality - or true „égalité“ within the new social system
- for example, in the Terror’s attempt to unify society by excluding
not just its visible enemies but also its lukewarm camp-followers.
Yet, while fraternity cannot be taken for granted, it cannot
be imposed either; the political republic cannot guarantee social
inclusion any more than the political guarantee of individual rights
won in 1789 insured social equality after 1792. „Fraternité“ offers
no mediation, only an incantation; indeed, it destroys the two poles
whose apparent opposition called it forth.[4] The quest for inclusion that replaces the idealist
vision of a revolution that overcomes all opposition demands a rethinking
of the inherited categories of French republicanism. The curious symmetrical asymmetry of the French
and the American forms of republicanism provides a framework for that
historical project as well as an indication of its contemporary implications. The
American revolutionary model seems to start from social diversity
and work toward political unity as something derivative, secondary
and artificial.[5] This exposes it to the danger that social
diversity - which a republican
would denounce as exclusion (and a socialist decry as social division)
while the optimistic Americans opt for the more benign label of „pluralism“
- will be preserved under the merely formal unity of the political
society. This difficulty too has a history that helps
clarify the issues at stake. Whereas
the French had first to seize state power and use it in order to intervene
into artificially fixed and unequal social relations, America appears
to have been a country already nearly equal and quite free whose self-governing
society was threatened by British political interference after the
Seven Years’ War. To protect the self-governing society - or
more precisely, societies, since there were 13 independent colonies
- such outside political intervention had to be rejected. And this gave rise to that psychological perspective that still
haunts American politics: „that government is best that governs least.“ Its corollary is the demand for a government
of laws, not of men, as if any political intervention at all were
a danger. In this way, the
rights of the individual are supposed to be protected, and equality-before-the-law
insured. But how was this
to make possible the kind of participatory associative social life
admired by observers since Tocqueville.
Such free association would permit the natural development
of fraternal relations on the basis of actions by individuals with
no reference to or need for state intervention.
But that is just what market liberalism claims to provide.
Yet its competitive egoistic basis is hardly the kind of fraternal
community sought by today’s American republicans. The
American revolutionary model is thus no more free of internal tension
and conflict than the French. The
participatory republic that is said to be made possible by the rule
of law and the protection of equal rights can effortlessly - and perhaps
unthinkingly - be transformed
into a liberal democracy whose procedural justice guarantees formal
individual rights that cloak factual relations of competition among
economic agents that make participation increasingly unlikely.
On the other hand, it may seem necessary in times of political
turbulence to sacrifice the pleasures of political participation -
to weaken republican democracy in order to „save“ it from „democratic
overload“ and the perils of ungovernability (or simply rule of the
masses, if not of the mob itself). Can one say that liberty trumps equality in
this context by reducing it to the „merely political“ form of equality-before-the-law?
That is the standard interpretation, but it does not explain
how the resulting social form of inequality constitutes a form of
exclusion. Yet it is this
phenomenon, and not inequality per se (whatever that might mean),
that concerns republicans. The
fact that republican political theory has been reborn in the United States distinguishes it from its French
cousin. The dominant self-understanding
of American political life had been brilliantly expressed by Louis
Hartz’s account of „The Liberal Tradition in America „ (1955). Following Tocqueville, Hartz developed the
old aphorism: „no feudalism, no socialism“ to stress the uniqueness
of America’s historical path. Yet
the brief post-war dominance of Hartz and the liberal „consensus-historians“
was followed by the emergence within the historical profession of
a republican interpretation represented by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon
Wood. Similarly, within political theory, the communitarian
political challenge to de-ontological liberalism theorized by Rawls
began to take shape (at first as the - fore-doomed -search by „radical
historians“ for an „ersatz“-proletariat).
In both cases, the priority of the social system over the action
of the individual was stressed. Fraternité
was the presupposed solution, liberté and égalité the problem. The solution has remained foreclosed, and
the problem is still debated. Meanwhile,
the French seemed to avoid the debate altogether by relegating liberalism
to the domain of the economy while leaving republicanism free to regulate
political relations. In fact,
they were constrained to face the same problems as the Americans,
and their proposed solution - „solidarisme“ - underlines the centrality of the republican
concern with the problem of exclusion.[6] Some Elements of the Debate Today The
most recent sustained political-theoretical critique of American liberal
democracy is Michael J. Sandel’s „Democracy’s Discontent. America in Search of a Public Philosophy“ (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1996).
Sandel’s study is useful in our context because its two parts
correspond to the dualities found in the concept of republicanism.
His conceptual critique of the jurisprudential deformations
of what he calls the „procedural republic“ and the vapid rights-based
individualism that it guarantees is followed by a provocative historical
reconstruction of the devolution by which the republican social institutions
that he claims were instituted by the Founders were transformed into
the liberal abstractness that he described in the first part of the
book. Sandel reconstructs
the historical steps by which political life became subordinated to
the formal and procedural interventions of the courts, whose presupposition
was a rights-based individualism that its judicial then intervention
serves to confirm. He retraces
a trajectory of crucial turning points at which the values of the
participatory social republic were defeated by the formal-individual
rights orientation. This historical-conceptual approach suggests
the possibility of a comparison to the two centuries of French political
evolution. At first glance,
the post-revolutionary French appear to have gone from political to
social-republican politics whereas the post-revolutionary Americans
have passed from social republican politics to formal-procedural politics:
the two seem to have inverted and exchanged their revolutionary trajectory. This reformulates usefully the terms of the
debate. But Sandel doesn’t
succeed in weaving together the two parts of his book into a political-philosophical
synthesis, which may be why his practical proposals for contemporary
America are distressingly modest and stubbornly blue-eyed in their
estimation of the future implications of their eventual implementation. Sandel
unfortunately makes no comparisons to other forms of republican politics. This lacunae is filled, however, by Sylvie
Mesure and Alain Renaut’s recent study, „Alter Ego. Les paradoxes de l’identité démocratique“ (Paris: Aubier, 1999).
The authors reconstruct carefully and artfully the debates
in Anglo-American political theory since Rawls and his communitarian
critics began their quarrels (one of whose first shots, it should
be noted, was fired by Sandel’s earlier „Liberalism and the Limits
of Justice“ (1982). Two important
claims follow from this. While
one cannot abandon the individual rights that are the foundation of
any political or economic liberalism, this need not result in the
formal procedural-individualism denounced by communitarians. Taking the work of Will Kymlicka as their starting point, they reject
the social or cultural exclusionism produced by what they see
as traditional French political republicanism (i.e., the version that
I have identified with American liberalism).
They propose to remedy this defect by what they call a „Copernican
revolution“ that accepts liberalism’s basic claim that society exists
to further the rights of the individual but then reinterprets this
claim to include among those rights what they call „cultural rights“
(e.g., pp. 255-6). These cultural
rights are not to be confused with the kind of „collective rights“
that Kymlicka’s liberalism tries vainly to defend.
Such a concept would move too close to a communitarian position,
threatening the foundation of liberal rights.
Rather, the „Copernican revolution“ implies that the condition
of the possibility of the individual in modern democratic societies
entails necessarily the freedom of the Other. The defense of cultural rights implies returning
to a conception of politics that makes room for the intervention of
political will rather than appeal to a static, juridified conception
of individual rights. In this
way, Mesure and Renaut hope to insure the protection of individual
liberal rights at the same time that they make a place for cultural
rights that are not based ascriptively on an essential or pre-political
social identity of the type they criticize in communitarianism.
Cultural rights on this conception result from a participation
that takes the individual beyond his atomistic, pre-political existence
precisely because that existence presupposes the freedom of „alter
ego“. This
attempt to synthesize American liberalism and French republicanism
may call to mind the approach suggested by the subtitle of Michael
Walzer’s „Spheres of Justice. A
Defense of Pluralism and Equality“ (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
The difference, however, is that Walzer’s concern is to develop
a theory of distributional justice, which he explicitly opposes to
„political prudence“ (for example, p. 292 and passim).
Politics for him is only another „sphere“ in which the conditions
of a just distribution must be analyzed and attained. For this reason, it is not clear how Walzer’s useful attempt to
delimit „spheres“ and to determine criteria of justice within them
could be applied to either the problem of exclusion, or to the redefinition
of political republicanism. Walzer’s
theory would not so much solve the problem as dissolve it, denying
its political character. And
despite shared communitarian affinities, someone like Sandel, or an
earlier critic of liberalism like Benjamin Barber, would certainly
find this theory too „thin“ a description, preferring something more
like a „strong democracy.“[7] But such preferences must be justified politically,
rather than by a static theory of distributive justice of the type
proposed by Walzer. Mesure
and Renaut’s insistence that their „Copernican revolution“ retains
the gains of rights-based liberalism makes their approach more comprehensive
than Sandel’s (or Arendt’s) vision of a classical participatory republicanism. But Sandel’s participatory orientation avoids
the potential slippage of cultural rights to collective rights ascriptively
based on an essentialist identity politics. The politics of Mesure and Renaut’s proposal, on the other hand, are based on the
claim that the modern democratic individual has also a cultural
identity which must be explicitly affirmed if the rights of that individual
are to be fully recognized. As
their book’s title indicates, that identity includes a relation to
the Other as both alter and ego:
as an ego like me, and thus equal to me; but also as alter,
different from me, and guaranteed an equal right to this difference.
Their goal is to preserve a place for both the political determination
of society (protecting cultural rights to overcome a type of exclusion)
and the influence of that same society on political choices
(avoiding the formalism of the liberal government of laws rather than
of men). This reformulation
of the republican challenge is more abstract than Sandel’s but it
also advances the analysis by clarifying now the (inter)relation of
its terms. In doing so, it
poses a new question: is
it the „same“ society that is both the object of political intervention
(to protect cultural rights and insure inclusion) and the subject
that acts on political choices (to produce the new, inclusive cultural
liberalism)? In the first case, the „society“ is passive
and formally liberal; in the second it is active and oriented to the
primacy of the inclusive community.
As with the opposition of liberté and égalité in the case of
the French revolution, the intervention of a third term clarifies
the issue. Instead of fraternité, the concept of „solidarité“, developed at
the beginning of the century by the republican followers of Durkheim,
helps to clarify the underlying presuppositions and difficulties.
„Solidarisme“
claimed to be a social-scientific translation of French political
republicanism. The „social
fact“ of increased interdependence among the actors within complex
modern societies transformed externally determined „mechanical“ or
„segmentary“ forms of social interdependence based on resemblance
(a sort of pre-political identity) into internally motivated „organic“
structures based on the increased division of social labor and the
dangerous new freedom that it made possible. The organic metaphor
not only served to unify the perspective of system and actor as a
way to overcome the duality confronting French republicanism. It meant also that in the normal course of
modern social reproduction, deviations from the norm would occur necessarily
as the organism adapted to shifts in its environment. The question for politics was to determine when these normal deviations
became „anomic“ and thereby threatened social reproduction as a whole.
The association of „anomic“ (as a deviation from the „nomos“
or posited law) with the idea of law and legislation pointed to the
place and problem of how and on what basis politics determines the
stability and reproduction of the whole. But the dilemma which the reformulations of
Mesure and Renaut made clear returns here.
As Christian Ruby shows nicely in „La Solidarité“ (Paris: Ellipses,
1997), the society that results from the political intervention is
not identical to the one whose „anomie“ called for that intervention. „Solidarisme“ is ultimately just another „grand
récit,“ a seamless story with no dark spaces, obscurity or contradiction
that humanity recounts to itself to avoid posing the dilemma of and
taking the responsibility for its own self-creation.
Its sociological functionalism presupposes what it sets out
to prove, becoming a theodicy and leaving no room for the creative
politics that it claims to found.[8] That is no doubt one reason why Mesure and
Renaut think that they can introduce the social concept of „cultural
rights“ without abandoning the gains of a liberalism whose rights-based
individualism claims to make political intervention possible. The
problem - as suggested by the criticism of Walzer -is how to relate
a theory of justice to a political theory in the context of a modern
democracy where the two senses of republican politics seem constantly
to interfere with one another and where contemporary choice and weight
of history are knitted together by invisible iron threads. Beyond the Politics of Will Despite
their asymmetries, contemporary French and American republicanism
agree that „something must be done.“
The French tend still to expect the state to do it, but they
are faced today with the dilemma expressed by Socialist Prime Minister
Lionel Jospin after the decision by Michelin (in the Fall, 1999) to
reduce drastically its work force despite record profits: „L’Etat
n’a pas à administrer l’économie.“ Within days, the leader of his own party, François
Holland, pointed out to Jospin that state intervention is „nécessaire
pour parvenir à une société de plein emploi.“
This little exchange signifies that the two republican visions
remain with us. Granted, the
Prime Minister referred to the economy while the party leader spoke
about society. Does the difference make a difference? Does „full employment“ depend on the economy
or on political choices? Certainly
the one justifies inaction by appealing to the self-moving systemic
laws of the market, the other calls for political action on the basis
of a voluntarism that denies to society the capacity to move on its
own. Looking for a way out, the Prime Minister might recall his earlier
comment on the Michelin affair, that the trade unions should do the
job for which they were created!
In that way, apparently, the two positions would be reconciled
in a version of solidarisme. But
this proposal introduces a new element, for the reconciliation is
based on a model of society in which work remains the crucial
integrative form of social solidarity.
Yet neither form of republicanism - in France or in the U.S.,
or within each country - as based on this kind of economic foundation:
they were both political. But the proposed third way forces us to clarify
what is meant by the political.
After all, communitarian social republicanism claimed to be
political.[9] „Something
must be done.“ But who will
do it? That too is a political question, as Sandel
constantly reminds his readers. The
idea of a self-organizing society whose solidarity is based on its
work recalls the usual image of America at the Founding period. But that picture is not quite accurate. The „republican“ historians who challenged the liberal consensus
showed that the Lockean picture of a „state of nature“ that needs
politics only to avoid „inconveniences“ is misleading.
The participatory republican Sandel underlines the practical
moments at which the republican state and its political institutions
could either affirm the need for participation, or could opt for procedural,
anti-political solutions to the problems facing a maturing economic
society. This implies that the task of republican politics
is the reproduction of the conditions of possibility of republican
politics. This self-referentiality
(or reflexivity) is a virtue in Sandel’s concept of the political,
which is not a means to an economic end - something Walzer rightly
sees as belonging to another „sphere.“
But this doesn’t explain who will be the agent of republican
politics. Sandel’s story becomes a „grand récit“ that encounters the
same problems faced by „solidarisme“: it presupposes what it wants
to prove, and is unable to explain how an apparently good republican
beginning could devolve into the „anomie“ of a procedural republic
that reproduces anti-political liberalism rather than political republicanism.
At one point, Sandel intuits the root of the difficulty.
Government must legislate for (what it takes to be) the common
good. This sets up a potential
conflict between the self-reproducing participatory social conditions
of republican politics and the particular governmental decisions made
at a given moment - decisions which, as representing the common good,
claim universal validity. This
clash between the universal claims of the political state with the
particular vision of the citizens was seen earlier to explain the
critical force of the republican challenge.
Are we now in a better position to suggest concretely not only
„what is to be done“ but who is in a position to do it? Neither
contemporary theory nor political practice suffice on their own; historical
experience interferes with the purity and isolation of both, it is
an irreducible part of the present.
Jospin’s recognition that the self-regulating economy is no
more realistic an option than is the voluntarist intervention by the
state, and Sandel’s insistence on the impossibility of a self-governing
society that has no need of government or the state share a basic
insight into the nature of political action in a modern democracy.
There is no single unique and unified will that can either
act on society from outside of it or that can represent the
self-conscious action of society on itself.
Politics is neither autonomous nor fully dependent on external
conditions that it cannot affect.
The simple imperative that „something must be done“ presupposes
the existence of an unified actor who will „do the right thing.“
And it assumes that there is - out there, somewhere, independent
of politics - a „right thing.“ This
is what I call a „politics of will“.
Its presupposition of the existence of a circumscribed
political agent and end that in modern times is called „sovereignty“
must be explained. Rather
than debate whether „globalization“ has made this notion of sovereignty
obsolete today, it is important to see that such „sovereignty“ was
never real but rather existed as an imaginary representation. But
the imaginary is not simply arbitrary; and its analysis often says
much more about the reality that calls it forth than could any positive
empirical account. A part of that reality is composed by the sedimented
history of the two republican traditions, to which we have to return
to understand the challenges to contemporary politics. The
French version of a politics of will appears in the very title of
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Its silent assumption is that these two types of rights are compatible
and mutually reinforce each other.
The political logic of the revolution makes clear the difficulty
hidden by this presupposition. In
the Ancien Régime, the King was the particular incorporation of the
sovereign and universal will of the nation; after the revolution,
the people as „sovereign“ had
to step into his place. But
the revolutionary elimination of politically instituted hierarchies
of the Ancien Régime meant that the individual as such was liberated;
the particular individual, even in association with his fellows, could
not claim the universality of the sovereign people.
The oscillating history of the revolution can be interpreted
as the conflict of these two wills, that of the particular „homme“
and that of the universal „citoyen“. As a result of their clash, the idea of a political
sphere in which the autonomy of the individual would not be transformed
into a meaningless fiction could not be established because, by definition,
a politics of will can be only total, since a divided will - be it
that of the individual or that of the nation - would be incapable
of willing. In the language of the revolutionaries, the
„pouvoir constituant“ can never be finally and completely expressed
as „constitué“; no institution can once and for all incarnate the
sovereign will of the nation; the past cannot ultimately determine
the future no more than the fathers can determine the freedom of the
sons. As a result, the very
political conditions that made possible the French revolution - the
claim that the people and not the monarch incarnate the will of the
nation - made impossible a successful republican conclusion to the
revolution. That is no doubt
why so many of the revolution’s historians sought comfort in socialism
or communism. Proud
of their revolutionary exceptionalism, the French tend to deny the
radicality of what they call the American „War of Independence.“[10] They are not wrong to do so; its intent was
surely not revolutionary. And
its conclusion neither produced a harmonious union nor conserved an
old Eden of social equality. In
the national Confederation, but even more within the individual states,
disharmony reigned. Too democratic,
too dependent on their constituents, the politicians - who once virtuously
„stood“ for office and were now forced to „run“ for it - found themselves
the victims of raging and transitory societal passions.
Pennsylvania, the most democratic of the states, whose constitution
is often compared to the radical Jacobin Constitution of 1793, is
the paradigm case. Laws passed
during one legislative period were rejected the next; favors were
courted, no one could know what tomorrow would bring.
And this, of course, was not good for business - which needed
formal legal certainties. But
it had another, non-economic, signification, which explains why one
should not attribute the creation of the strong nation state to the
needs of „capital.“ This constantly changing legislative agenda
meant that, over time, it become impossible not to recognize that
the will of the sovereign-people was not One, nor could it be One
and, it became clear, it should not become One.
Politics had other tasks than those of a politics of will. The
practical lessons drawn from the experience of politics were always
more important for the Americans than any political theory. So it was, for example, when the British imposed
the Stamp Act, which the Americans somewhat nervously protested and
then - to their surprise - found that they could do business perfectly
well without the stamp of state authority on their private contracts. So too, in the period that followed the Peace
of Paris and preceded the meeting in 1787 that led to the new federal
Constitution, they came to realize that there was no one pre-existing
and unified subject that had to exercise its „sovereign“ will.
They came to realize, in short, that the place of power is
not occupied by a pre-given social subject; nor ought one to seek
to create such a political subject; the place of power must remain
empty. Their new institutions
incorporated this insight. And it was this insight - rather than the political
institutions invented by their „science,“ or their naturally egalitarian
society - that led them to go beyond a politics of will. It is true that these two options - and the
opposition between them - were both present in the minds of
the Founders. The nature of
their society is evoked in the Federalist
10 to explain why neither despotism nor factious division threaten
the new republic. And the political institutions invoked particularly
in Federalist 51 are based on the intricate scientific machinery of
checks-and-balances. Political scientists will continue to debate
whether these two arguments are or are not compatible; for our purposes,
Federalist 63 is more important than either of them because it appeals
to the American political experience while drawing conceptual lessons
from it. The
choice of a bicameral legislature whose upper chamber bore the aristocratic
title of a Senate needed justification in a political society that
had just overcome the old monarchy.
Of course, the Senate was the result of a compromise that permitted
the smaller states to accept the new Constitution.
But „The Federalist“ could not say that;
it had to argue from principle.
And so it explained that the Senate, like all the branches
of government, was „republican“ in the sense that it was representative
of the sovereign people. But, the argument continued, this form of political
representation differs from that of the Ancients; theirs was based
on popular participation whereas the American - called „modern“ by
„The Federalist“ - form of representation differs because it is based
on „the total exclusion of the people, in
their collective capacity.“ Two points should be stressed in this paradoxical
formula. The people are excluded,
after a comma, „in their collective capacity.“ They are not excluded - pace liberalism - as individuals; that was
also the point implied by Federalist 10's insistence that societal
factions would nullify one another’s force.
More important, the Senate like all the branches of
government is representative - which implies that none of them can
claim to incarnate the One will of the people.
The sovereign people is everywhere and nowhere, which is why
the institutional schema of Federalist 51 insisted that there be no
political „will independent of society itself.“
In this way, what began as a pragmatic compromise at the Philadelphia
convention can be seen also as the theorization of the historical
experience that showed the impossibility of a politics of will claiming
to be the representative of, or having as its end the production of,
the One sovereign people. American pluralism is thus not based on
the nature of American society (or on a naive optimism about good
human nature that needs only to be left alone to bloom under a solitary
sun); it is a political creation - and depends on continual political
action if it is not to become the kind of divisive pluralism that
produces what the French rightly fear today: social division and political
exclusion. Republican Politics: Anomie and Judgment The
historical sketch of crossed republican histories that has been followed
here suggests the introduction of a final conceptual distinction. The philosophical debate between liberalism
and communitarianism, and the historical analysis of the peregrinations
of the republican project, can be reformulated as the alternative
between a „democratic republic“ and a „republican democracy.“ The former concept, of course, designated what was formerly called
the „socialist bloc,“ but it can be seen as a generalization of the
model of republican politics that stresses the pole of égalité and
that insists on the primacy of society or the community.
Such a democratic republic would be ideally a direct democracy
in which society literally translates itself (or its sovereign will)
directly into the political sphere, which thereby loses its autonomy. Thinking that it is based on will, politics shows itself here to
be imaginary; more than an
illusion it is a self-delusion, but it is not without real effect. Due to the paradoxical self-abnegation of society,
which wants only to affirm itself in its sheer positivity and cares
nothing about what it could become, the really existing state becomes
increasingly powerful . Such
a democratic republic was what „The Federalist“ rejected as pre-modern,
and different from the American historical experience. As a politics of will, it presupposes the existence (or desirability)
of a real, or at least potentially real unified sovereign. There is no need to stress the dangerous implications
of this model, which took the form of „really existing socialism.“ But this does not imply that the opposite pole,
republican democracy, avoids these extremes only by becoming what
Sandel rightly denounced as the procedural republic.
That result makes individual freedom abstract while appealing
to the priority of the right over the good, and to the institutions
that insure equality before the law - however that law is made, by
whomever and for whomever. The
communitarian critique of this vision cannot be ignored. The
introduction of the distinction of a democratic republic and a republican
democracy suggests a way to go beyond the increasingly sterile debates
between liberals and communitarians. Sandel in his way, and Mesure-Renaut
in their’s, try to avoid the ahistorical opposition that has dominated
recent Anglo-American political theory.
The „Copernican revolution“ operated on rights-based liberalism
seeks to integrate social considerations by stressing the cultural
dimension of individual identity.
To avoid an essentialist identity politics and its accompanying
problems, it insists that integration takes place in the political
sphere (rather than in the domain of distributive justice that concerns
Walzer). But what this politics
actually looks like is not clear in the French philosophers’ conclusions.
This is where Sandel’s arguments can be reinterpreted and his
blue-eyed practical optimism overcome.
He recognizes the difference of government from the
republican social community whose possibilities for participation
he wants to preserve. In so doing, he helps clarify one dimension of the republican experience
that emerged from the American revolution as it has been interpreted
here. Insofar as each
branch of government is representative, its decisions have the force
of law, they are valid for the entire society - but they therefore
risk appearing as resulting from the kind of procedural formality
that grates on the nerves of communitarians because it reproduces
the opposition of the universal and the particular that republicanism
wants to overcome. Yet insofar as all branches of government are representative,
as we saw, none of them can claim definitively and always to
represent or to incarnate the reality of the sovereign people. Each of them functions, then, like Sandel’s
„government“ in relation to the republican community. This is the structure of a republican democracy:
its republican political institutions insure that the society
remains democratic, pluralist, constantly in movement and defying
fixation. As Tocqueville said
of democracy, what counts in this republican democratic politics is
not what it is, but „what it leads people to do.“[11] Each
of these two types of republican institutions would define and confront
the problem of „exclusion“ differently.
For the democratic republic, exclusion would be a form of „anomie“
whose remedy would be sought through social measures imposed by the
state. Typical would be the attempt to find work for
all and to assume that the old form of social integration based on
productive labor would thereby be restored.
This would entail a slippage away from the more modern organic
integration through social division and individual autonomy toward
a more segmental form of integration based on shared identity. This would explain why such a model could suggest
that manifestations of „cultural identity“ - wearing the veil or other
religious or ethnic signs - must be simply disallowed as threats to
the unity of the society, a social unity that is paradoxically
guaranteed not by the attainment of true social equality but of formal
equality of all citizens as identical members of a legal republic.
This return of the familiar paradox from which we began our
discussion is simply a manifestation of the basic republican duality
that emerged from the French revolution and whose inability to free
itself from a politics of will helps to explain the refusal of cultural
political identity by many French republicans two hundred years later.
As was the case for „solidarisme,“ the root of the difficulty
is that there are no criteria that permit one to know whether the
„anomic“ is a sign of illness or the healthy reaction to a new challenge
to the development of the modern social organism. As opposed to this, Mesure and Renaut, for example, might well see
the veil as a healthy reaction to the leveling tendencies of modern
mass democracy that denies individuals the right to any but an abstract
liberty or identity.[12] The
republican democracy that overcomes the politics of will must be able
to distinguish the anomic from the healthy if it is to deal successfully
with the problem of exclusion. Anomie
is not a discrete real property that naturally belongs to a phenomenon;
it is a political relation. As
implied by its etymology, the anomic is that which doesn’t fall under
the law. Since the law is posited as universal, the
anomic is that which exists as a particular that rejects subsumption
under a pre-given law. Such
a particular phenomenon is not naturally present in the world; it
is also a political relation. Logically,
a particular is only particular insofar as it is one among a plurality
of particulars, without whose presence the particularity of any one
of them could not be known as such.
But the plurality of particulars, in turn, can only be recognized
as particular insofar as it
is related to a universal that is explicitly posed as universal. The concrete form of this logical figure recalls
the relation of government to the republican community suggested by
Sandel and made explicit in the reconstruction of the Americans’ revolutionary
experience: a republican democracy exists insofar as the government
posits laws valid for all at the same time that these laws (which
are „nomoi“, not „physei“) are
never posited as definitive or the irrevocable expression of the naturally
existing sovereign will of the (in principle) united people.
In this way, the particular phenomena that are the concern
of politics are related to the universal claims of the state but they
are never defined exclusively or entirely by that political state. That which counts as political is open constantly to redefinition;
the anomic is not definitively lost, the sign of a fatal illness.
What one branch posits as valid for all may be contested insofar
as some of the people appeal to another branch - which, after
all, is equally its representative. In this way, the anomic can be integrated into
a healthy polity - indeed, it can contribute to the health of that
polity. This
specification of republican democratic politics points to a political
imperative: multiply the number of representative political institutions. This of course cannot be done arbitrarily. But a healthy polity is not one that is fixed
forever and immune to change. There
is no reason to retain only the inherited tripartite logical division
of (pre-existing) powers.[13] Indeed, as opposed to the traditional interpretation,
the American republican vision of checks-and-balances stresses much
less the checks than the balances, which are insured by the fact that
each „power“ (as in a version of Tocqueville’s adage) has an active
interest in maintaining itself that becomes the dynamic and political
reason for counter-balancing the others by insuring that they cannot
pretend to be the sole incarnation of the sovereign popular will. The dynamics of balance in a republican democracy can build from
political experience that lies below the usually accepted hierarchy
of governmental institutions, or it can take its materials from above
that hierarchy. The representative
status of trade unions in a society where the integration through
work is challenged by the global economy suggests one direction to
be pursued; that of the European Union, where misleading rhetorical
criticism of a „democratic deficit“ is based on the implicit goal
of realizing a democratic republican politics of will, is another.[14] One cannot assume that new institutions will
emerge according to the „law“ of subsidiarity, as it is explicitly
proposed in Europe, for that concept is only the translation into
modern garb of the implicit realism of the old Catholic natural law
tradition that restricts the inventiveness of the legislator and denies
the autonomy of politics. Nor can the function of trade unions be reduced
to the direct representation of the real „interests“ of the working
class, as if this class were itself defined as a discrete natural
being needing only to be examined by a faithful observer who can diagnose
its needs. The
corollary to the imperative of multiplying representative institutions
is the recognition that the society or polity that is to be represented
is itself active, plural, and constantly open to innovation. But this pluralism cannot become the basis of an identity politics
that assumes that representatives must incarnate a discrete essential
identity that exists already on a pre-political level. This slippage that rightly worries many French
republicans can be avoided if the political search for inclusion takes
care to recognize that the anomic is not simply a mass of passive
victims outside of social or political relations but that their anomie
is defined precisely by their relation to the universal claims of
the republican democracy. Although
one has to avoid the temptation to romanticize, this relation means
that they are active subjects, and it points to the political
means for distinguishing the anomic from the healthy: the degree to
which the particular phenomenon in question is capable of making itself
„heard“ at the representative level of the different branches that
have multiplied imperatively within the republican democracy.[15] The impetus to seek such a hearing is provided
by the representative republican institutions which, with Tocqueville,
were seen to provide dynamic incentives to action. In this way, by entering public debate, the particular that appeared
to be anomic shows itself to be a legitimate actor with a claim to
recognition as universal; it is then no longer anomic, not outside
the law; it has changed the law by changing its relation to the law. Of course, this recognition can be contested,
and is no more fixed in its validity than any measure passed by one
of the branches of the republican democratic government. But because it comes from society even while
claiming to belong to a lawful („nomic“) universe of discourse and
action, it opens a mediation that makes the intervention of the government
no longer appear abstractly universal.
The limits of procedural liberalism are surpassed by this political
mode of dealing with the problem of modern exclusion. The
theoretical premise of this practical treatment of exclusion goes
beyond the politics of will to what I have called a „politics of judgement.“ The anomic structure of exclusion is simply
another expression of the paradoxical trajectories of French and American
republicanism. That which
is anomic is at once outside of the law and yet it can only be defined
in relation to the representative political institutions that posit
the law. But we saw that the fact that the anomic cannot
be subsumed under an existing law does not mean that it cannot propose
its own lawful claims to be heard and included as representative. This dynamic structure recalls the concept
of the reflexive judgement proposed in Kant’s „Critique of Judgement“
as the means to understand the justification of the claim that a particular
object gives rise to an experience of beauty that is valid universally
for any and all individuals. There
is no pre-given law that defines the beautiful in the way that physical
laws explain occurrences in the natural world.
The beautiful can be said to be
anomic in this sense.[16] The same situation holds for the particular
phenomena that call for political action; they cannot appeal to existing
law even though they must demand recognition as themselves lawful. The process by which this political translation
of the anomic takes place is suggested by the representative structure
of the republican democracy through which the excluded seek to gain
a hearing.[17] While the phenomena designated as exclusion
are real and can be analyzed by empirical methods - unemployment,
homelessness, ethnic discrimination, etc.
- the process of exclusion is a relation governed by a dynamic
which defines the political. At
what point any of these phenomena that are loosely spoken of as „exclusion“
becomes a political problem cannot be determined by pre-existing laws.[18] That relation and its dynamic are the object
of a politics of judgement which avoids the paradoxes of a republican
politics of will. The
politics of judgement has in fact been at work throughout the construction
of this analysis. It does
not express itself as the willful insistence that „something must
be done“ (although the author’s intent is certainly not that nothing
be done). Rather the politics of judgement comes into
play when the attempt to do something has failed, or would lead clearly
to results that are undesirable.
Indeed, expressing a final paradox, the politics of will always
takes precedence over the politics of judgement, just as Kant knew
full well that what could be analyzed in terms of the pre-given a
priori laws of science and morality should fall into their purview.
If I can intervene in the face of a given problem, I should,
and I will. But intervention in the modern globalized society
is often complicated, faced with ambiguity, confronted by paradox. That is no reason to abandon politics. It calls for a redefinition of the political
by means of a confrontation with its limits.
While it appeared that the shared American-French imperative
to criticize and to transform our present institutions led to a return
to the political theory of republicanism and its practical translation,
these reflections have led to the recognition of the need to rethink
not just the theory but especially the historical experience
in which that theory is embedded and from which we it cannot be separated
even when it is facing contemporary problems.
Republican theory can too easily mistake itself for the positive
model for a democratic republican politics of will.
Only when its reflective structure is preserved as a republican
democracy can it fulfill Tocqueville’s imperative to „lead people
to do“ the kind of politics that can effectively define and begin
to intervene politically to overcome the modern phenomena of exclusion. [1]. Of course the excluded don’t represent a threat
to overthrow the system, as did the working class; but the republican’s
working class was never seen as the kind of social-revolutionary
threat that was represented by Marx’s proletariat.
The ground of this difference will be seen below, when we
consider the French notion of ‘solidarisme’ and its Durkheimian
roots. [2]. As will be apparent, one of the roots of the
paradoxical trajectories of the concept is that the French and the
Americans have a different understanding of what counts as „political.“
[3]. C.f., the article
„Fraternité“, in Dictionnaire
critique de la révolution
française,
François
Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds. (Paris: 1989, pp. 731-741). [4]. Mona Ozouf recalls Jean-Paul Sartre’s attempt
to reconcile his existential philosophy with his Marxist ideology
by inventing the concept of „Fraternité-Terreur.“
She doesn’t mention that Sartre’s position goes even further,
in effect justifying Stalinism.
I have tried to show why the existentialist lover of freedom
could find himself going to this extreme in The
Marxian Legacy (Second edition revised, London: Macmillan, 1988). [5]. The Great Seal of the United States, printed
on the back of every US dollar, contains on one side the revolutionary
motto „Novus Ordo Seclorum“ and on the other side the imperative
„E Pluribus Unum.“ [6]. A useful, though in some ways dated, examination
of this French history is found in: Jacques Donzelot, L’invention du social. Essai sur le dúclin
des passions politiques (Paris: Fayard, 1984). [7]. The allusion here is to Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy. Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984). Since
Barber’s index contains no references to republicanism, however
resonant his account may be with some of the categories under consideration
here, I leave aside any discussion of its detailed proposals. [8]. Donzelot, in op. cit., stresses its Rousseauvian presuppositions that identify
the state of nature with Reason and leave no room for political
deliberation - i.e., for error, on the part of democratic individuals. [9]. Challenged from his left in his own party,
and by his Communist Party coalition partners, Jospin tried to have
his cake and eat it too in his September 26th speech
to the Socialist deputies of the European Parliament meeting in
Strassburg: „The market economy does not spontaneously work in harmony.
It needs ground rules to function effectively.“ In our context, Jospin’s claim would be to
combine procedural liberalism with socialism, while ignoring the
question of social solidarity and inclusion that is, however, the
true challenge to modern republican politics. [10]. In the following paragraphs, I will be summarizing
some implications of my essay on The Birth of American Political Thought (originally published in French
in 1986 by Editions Ramsay, and translated into English in 1990
by the University of Minnesota Press).
Its arguments are developed in a more concise and theoretical
form in „Demokratische Republik oder republikanische Demokratie?
Die Bedeutung der amerikanischen und der französischen Revolution
nach 1989" in: Das Recht
der Republik, ed. Hauke Brunkhorst und Peter Niesen (Suhrkamp:
Frankfurt am Main, 1999), and in „République démocratique ou démocratie
républicaine“
in: Argument, Nr. 5, printemps
2000. [11].The citation is
found, significantly, in the chapter on „The Activity Present in
all Parts of the Political Body in the United States: The Influence
that it Exercises on Society,“ which stresses the influence of the
political republic on the social activity of the individual. In:
De la démocratie
en Amérique,
I (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1961), Volume 1, p. 254. [12]. On the other hand, Renaut is more nuanced in
his short essay on L’individu. Réflexions sur la philosophie
du sujet (Paris: Hatier, 1995) in which he tries to set off
his own Kantian-liberal politics against competing French analyses. But this essay was written before Alter Ego, which does not refer back to
it, since its goal was to inaugurate a debate with the Anglo-Americans. [13]. Indeed, one recalls that for many of the early
modern political theorists, the judicial branch did not represent
an independent representative power - and its independence is still
questioned in many modern nations, such as contemporary France! One might also recall that Locke suggests that the so-called „Federative
Power“ - which deals with
foreign policy - should be considered to represent an autonomous
function of government. [14]. Still another
would lie at the level of international law, as suggested in the
provocative study by Agnes Lejbowicz, Philosophie
du droit international. L’impossible
capture de l’humanité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1999). [15]. This metaphor of ‘being heard’ is used effectively
in Jürgen
Habermas’s Between Facts and
Norms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) which also uses the interesting
metaphor of society ‘laying siege’ on the state to which I am also
alluding here. I have tried to analyze critically Habermas’s
attempt to conjoin a discourse theory of law with a communication
theory of society to permit a reconciliation of liberal proceduralism
and the participatory social vision of the communitarians in „Law
and Political Culture,“ reprinted in my Political
Judgments (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). [16]. Of course, this is not Kant’s terminology.
Moreover, it should be noted that Kant is talking about laws
of the natural world, physei rather than nomoi.
Nonetheless, we have seen that in the political world of
democratic republicans, there is a constantly present temptation
to think of the sovereign will as if it also existed physei,
as a natural given. [17]. I cannot develop the technical arguments for
this structural analogy further here.
C.f., Political Judgments,
op. cit., as well as the systematic philosophical treatment in From Marx to Kant (second edition, New York: Saint Martin’s Press,
1993) and French translation De
Marx а Kant (Paris: PUF, 1997). [18]. Who would have thought, in the 1970's, that
European societies could live with 12% rates of unemployment? At what point does racial discrimination „tip“
to become exclusionary? When
and under what conditions do the ill-housed represent an instance
of exclusion? These are
not questions for an objective social science; there are no pre-given
laws under which they can be subsumed and in terms of which their
weight can be measured. They are political questions.
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