it does not become a slogan for small groups of intellectuals who declare that they have taken sides and who are content with anti communism. they refuse to contemplate or even perceive that momentous event. They can be ignored. For the sole motivation behind political philosophy has always been a desire to escape the servitude of collective beliefs and to win the freedom to think about freedom in . because of their philosophical culture. Although they live in an era in which a new form of society has emerged under the banner of fascism on the one hand and under that of socialism on the other.1 The Question of Democracy My purpose here is to encourage and to contribute to a revival of political philosophy. I am more concerned with those intellectuals and philosophers who claim to belong to the left or the far left. when. which inclines them to break with dogmatic beliefs. because of their desire to find some meaning behind the events. is usually banished from scientific language or relegated to the vernacular. even though they claim to be in search of rigorous knowledge. the simple word I have just used. apparently on the grounds that everyone defines it in accordance with their own wishes or interests. although it must be admitted that there is as yet little enthusiasm for the task. not from public opinion. Our numbers are. By doing so. And yet they abandon it to the vagaries of public opinion. What surprises me is that most of those who ought to be best-equipped to undertake it because of their intellectual temperament. no doubt. but from political philosophy. who might be expected to have become sufficiently disenchanted with the rival dominant ideologies to want to discern the preconditions for the development of freedom. that is. 'Freedom'. but they have been increasing for some time. small. are and remain stubbornly blind to the political. confused as they may be. or at last to shed some light on the obstacles that stand in its way. I am not alone in working to that end. they would of course have to give new meaning to the idea of freedom. no matter how much noise they make. they cut themselves off. In order to do so. as we have seen their kind before. that take place in our world. in Eastern Europe. juridical. and so on. let it be noted. as I said. the scientific or the purely social. the permissible and the forbidden. but how many intellectuals are still haunted by the spectre of the correct theory. no economic or technical determinations. surprised: how can they handle ontological differences with such subtlety. of the essence of what was once termed the 'city'. the standardization of collective life and mass conformism? Even if we do agree that history has given birth to a monster. however. while the principle which generates the overall configuration is concealed. relations and activities which appears to be political. the . It is obscured in the sense that the locus of politics (the locus in which parties compete and in which a general agency of power takes shape and is reproduced) becomes defined as particular. Lacan. Cambodia. Political sociologists and scientists. Vietnam. This approach implies a surreptitious reference to the space that is designated as society. for their part. but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured. without ever examining the form of society within which the division of reality into various sectors appears and is legitimated. It appears in (he sense that the process whereby society is ordered and unified across its divisions becomes visible. the just and the unjust. of course. be a mistake to restrict ourselves to a critique of Marxism. They obtain their object of knowledge by constructing or delineating political facts. such as the economic. as distinct from other spheres which appear to be economic. and the abolition of universal suffrage or its conversion into a farce which gives one party ninety nine per cent of the vote. and it forgets that no elements. the juridical. what caused the mutation? Was it an economic cause. This even raises the question of the constitutiOn of the social space. moreover. Giving them a form implies both giving them meaning (mise en sens) and staging them (mise en scene). They are unable to discern servitude in totalitarianism. the true and the false. They are unable to discern freedom in democracy. which they regard as particular facts and as distinct from other particular social facts. an experience which is at once primordial _ and umquely shaped by our insertion into a historically and politically det�rmined framework. from ancient despotism as much as modern democracy differs from classical democracy). because political science emerges from the suppression of this question. Yet now that we are faced with the rise of a new type of despotism (which differs. not in what we call political activity. world-wide ambitions. Political sociologists and scientists find the preconditions that define their object and their approach to knowledge in this mode of appearance of the political. that is being constructed in the USSR. the delimitation of a sphere of institutions. or Cuba. It may well be admitted that it is not socialism. The fact that something like politics should have been circumscribed within social life at a given time has in itself a political meaning. If we are to reinterpret the political. but general. and then fall back upon such crass realism when the question of politics arises? Marxism. or does it relate to the rise of state bureaucracy?' I am. It claims to be able to provide a detailed survey or reconstruction of that space by positing and articulating terms. we must break with scientific points of view in general and with the point of view that has come to dominate what are known as the political sciences and political sociology in particular. the suppression of freedom of association and freedom of expression. 'social' being defined as designating modes of relatiOns between groups or classes. of the form of society. a technological cause. vie with one another in exploiting the combined resources of Heidegger. and a meaning which is not particular. 'What are you talking about? Is it a concept? How do you define it? Does not democracy mask the domination and exploitation of one class by another. it destroyed the old relationship that once existed between philosophy and naivety by teaching us that the establishment of a concentration-camp system. It would. by forging specific systems of relations. no elementary structures. despotism itself is becoming invisible. But such feelings have no lasting intellectual effect.10 On Modem Democracy The Question of Democracy II society. among other things. no entities (classes or segments of classes). it has always borne in mind the essential difference between the regime of freedom and despotism. They are given meaning in that the social space unfolds as a space of intelligibility articulated in accordance with a specific mode of distinguishing between the real and the imaginary. because democracy is defined as bourgeois. Jakobson and Levi-Strauss. or even by combining them into an overall system. in China. tells us nothing about the nature of Soviet society. philosophers ask. we find expressions of sympathy for the dissidents persecuted by communist regimes or for popular uprisings. do not attempt to define politics as a superstructure whose base is to be found at the supposedly real level of relations of production. and no dimensions of social space exist until they have been given a form. or indeed tyranny. the aesthetic. the extermination of millions of men and women. Whenever they hear the word 'totalitarianism'. or 'true' socialism as they quaintly say. as though the observations and constructs did not themselves derive from the experience of social life. This observation is in itself an invitation to return to the question that once inspired political philosophy: what is the nature of the difference between forms of society? Interpreting the political means breaking with the viewpoint of political science. by the belief that it will reveal the laws that govern the development of societies and that it will enable them to deduce a formula for a rational practice? At best. of a despotism which has. But the most remarkable thing of all is that the withering away of that ideology has done little to set thought free or to help it return to political philosophy. The political is thus revealed. has been through this stage too. One effect of this fiction is immediately obvwus: modern democratic societies are characterized by. It emerges from a desire to objectify. A logic of identification is set in motion. and who show that the analyst is working within a perspective forced upon him by the need to defend his economic or cultural interests. By ascribing neutrality to the subject. to represent the aspirations of the whole people. or arbitrarily. We then fall back on value judgements. and through the formation of a multiplicity of microbodies (organizations of all kinds in which an artificial socialization and relations of power conforming to the general model are reproduced). But it is important at least to recall that the Soviet regime acquired its distinctive features before the era of the socialization of the means of production and of collectivization.12 On Modern Democracy The Question of Democracy 13 normal and the pathological. the spirit of the movement. the new power is accountable to no one and is beyond all legal control. this is brought about through the agency of the ubiquitous party which permeates everything with the dominant ideology and hands down power's orders. the sphere of law and the sphere of knowledge. at its highest level. but only if we specify that it is modern and differs from all the forms that precede it. It prevents the subject from grasping the one thing that has been grasped in every human society. It takes power by destroying all opposition. Power makes no reference to anything beyond the social. despotic. we are concerned with the most characteristic features of the new form of society. In the case of German or Italian fascisms. Modern totalitarianism arises from a political mutation. State and civil society are assumed to have merged. it rules as though nothing existed outside the social. the party and the proletariat are one. from a mutation of a symbolic order. in such a way that nothing can split it apart. in a single individual. totalitarianism does not result from a transformation of the mode of production. as in Nazism -may well turn everything to account as circumstances demand. and is governed by the representation of power as embodiment. and it merges with a knowledge which is also embodied. in the crude statement of preferences. The proletariat and the people are one. between truth and lies. as though it had no limits (these are the limits established by the idea of a law or a truth that is valid in itself).' Let me say simply that if we ignore distinctions that are basic to the exercise of the intellect on the grounds that we cannot supply their criteria. Well-founded as it may be. and to possess a legitimacy which places it above the law. the corollary of the desire to objectify is the positioning of a subject capable of performing intellectual operations which owe nothing to its involvement in social life. it relates to a society beyond which there is nothing. social division. either hypocritically. A condensation takes place between the sphere of power. the course of events is of little import. Leo Strauss's attacks on what might be termed the castration of political thought as a result of the rise of the social sciences and of Marxism are sufficiently eloquent for us not to dwell on the issue here. ultimately. They are staged in that this space contains within it a quasi-representation of itself as being aristocratic. But for our purposes. we lose all sense of the difference between forms of society. It fails to recognize that any system of thought that is bound up with any form of social life is grappling with a subject matter which contains within it its own interpretation. both in its fascist variant (which has for the moment been destroyed. the egocrat. monarchic. Whilst there develops a representation of a homogeneous and self-transparent society. What in fact happens is that a party arises. though we have no grounds to think that it might not reappear in the future) and in its communist variant (which is going from strength to strength) obliges us to re-examine democracy. The fiction of this subject is vulnerable to more than the arguments of critical sociologists and Marxists who object to the distinction between factual judgements and value judgements. Knowledge of the ultimate goals of society and of the norms which regulate social practices becomes the property of power. which is assumed to be a society fulfilling its destiny as a society . but it can never be challenged by experience. claiming to be by its very nature different from traditional parties. of a People-as-One. and whose meaning is a constituent element of its nature. as circumstances demand. We can use the term despotism to characterize this regime. The theory or if not the theory. as they adapted themselves to the maintenance of capitalist structures. whatever changes they may have undergone as a result of increased state intervention into the economy. The rise of totalitarianism. and the party are one. and if we claim to be able to reduce knowledge to the limits of objective science. we break with the philosophical tradition. The widespread view to the contrary notwithstanding. we have only to turn to the critique that opens Natural Right and History. between authenticity and imposture. and the change in the status of power is its clearest expression. this argument itself comes up against limitations which will not be examined here. the one thing that gives it its status as human society: namely the difference between legitimacy and illegitimacy. is denied. the point does not have to be stressed. I would like now to draw attention to what reinterpreting the political means in our times. and at the same time all signs of differences of opinion. beneath the cloak of a hierarchy in the determinants of what we take to be the real. belief or mores are condemned. and at the same time power itself claims to be the organ of a discourse which articulates the real as such. If we refuse to risk making judgements. between the pursuit of power or of private interests and the pursuit of the common good. it deprives the subject of the means to grasp an experience generated and ordered by an implicit conception of the relations between human beings and of their relations with the world. Such a neutral subject is concerned only with detecting causal relations between phenomena and with discovering the laws that govern the organization and the workings of social systems or sub-systems. As we know. in all its modes. Power is embodied in a group and. democratic or totalitarian. the politbureau and. What he fails to see. and what we are in a position to observe. Society appears to he a community all of whose members are strictly interdependent. the assertion of difference (of belief. We can ignore other features. which I have described at length elsewhere. He posits the idea that a great historical mutation is taking place.he explores change in every direction. He traces this contradiction by examining the individual. a century and a half have gone by since the publication of Democracy in America. Tocqueville usually tries to uncover an inversion of meaning: the new assertion of singularity fades in the face of the rule of anonymity. but who is. and he arrives at that conclusion because. to be striving towards a goal . on the other hand. It is only recently that Tocqueville has become a fashionable thinker. in his view.I have given some indication of these elsewhere2 .equality of condition . an intellectual reluctance (which is bound up with a political prejudice) to confront the unknown element in democracy. or may emerge. I will merely state that in his attempt to bring out the ambiguous effects of equality of condition. as a result of equality of condition.14 On Modern Democracy The Question of Democracy 15 produced by the people who live in it. and he puts forward the idea of an irreversible dynamic. Even this brief outline allows us to re-examine democracy. history. he looks at things from both sides. but which. He then examines public opinion as it conquers the right to expression and communication and at the same time becomes a force in its own right. to make. His investigations are important to us in several respects. and what it is about it that leads to its overthrow and to the advent of totalitarianism. is increasingly dedicated to the task of standardizing norms of behaviour and. thinks and speaks for itself. he examines power. We therefore enjoy the benefits of experience and have the capacity to decipher things that its author could only glimpse. the spirit of innovation is sterilized by the immediate enjoyment of material goods and by the pulverization of historical time. an exploratory incision into the flesh of the social. finally. Anyone who undertakes such a project can learn a great deal from Tocqueville. takes an interest in social bonds and political institutions. because it is drawn to the pole of the collective will. at the same time. precisely because it destroys all the individual instances of authority. which has been set free from the arbitrariness of personal rule. At every moment of his analysis. who has been released from the old networks of personal dependency and granted the freedom to think and act in accordance with his own norms. and which threatens to become unlimited. in forms of sensibility and forms of knowledge. impoverished and at the same time trapped by the image of his fellows. there is also. The thing that marks him out from his contemporaries is in fact his realization that democracy is a form of society. except to the people in the abstract. opinion or morals) fades in the face of the rule of uniformity.new signs of servitude. and so on. But it is not simply his lack of experience which restricts his interpretation. isolated. In its turn. When seen against the background of totalitarianism. is that another influence or ' . democracy too is seen to he a form of society. in the individual. Tocqueville helps us to decipher the experience of modern democracy by encouraging us to look back at what came before it and. in its wake. which is inherent in democracy. appears to belong to no one. The distinctively modern feature of totalitarianism is that it combines a radically artificialist ideal with a radically organicist ideal. now that agglutination with them provides a means of escaping the threat of the dissolution of his identity. and becomes an anonymous power standing over them.and to be living in a state of permanent mobilization. The image of the body comes to be combined with the image of the machine. at the same time it is assumed to be constructing itself day by day. and which. it acquires a new depth and cannot be reduced to a system of institutions. His explorations lead him to detect the ambiguities of the democratic revolution in every domain. and our task is to understand what constitutes its uniqueness. and reveals the underside of both the positive . as it were. But his intuitive vision of a society faced with the general contradiction that arises when the social order no longer has a basis seems to me to be much more important than his reputation. Without wishing to discuss the difficulties into which he stumbles . or as an interference with the workings of the machine). law. etc. language. but it does open up a very fruitful line of research which has not been pursued.a term which it would not be appropriate to discuss here. As I cannot develop my criticisms here. to look ahead to what is emerging. that he has been defined as the pioneering theorist of modern political liberalism. as it becomes detached from subjects. moves from one side of the phenomenon to the other. the recognition that human beings are made in one another's likeness is destroyed by the rise of society as abstract entity. omnipotent. and that he does not pursue his explorations by examining the underside of the underside. literature.the creation of the new man .let me simply observe that his explorations are usually restricted to what I have termed the underside of the phenomena he believes to be characteristic of the new society. in religion. in the mechanisms of public opinion. accepts the new demands that are born of changes in mentalities and practices. He examines law which. Nor am I trying here to reveal the contradictions totalitarianism comes up against. True. democracy stands out against a background: the society from which it emerges and which he calls aristocratic society.new signs of freedom -and the negative . I am not saying that Tocqueville's analysis of this contradiction. as a parasite on the body. to acquire an ambition to take charge of every aspect of social life. such as the phenomenon of the production-elimination of the enemy (the enemy within being defined as an agent of the enemy without. Although he attempts to locate the fundamental principle of democracy in a social state . I believe. is irrefutable. even though its premisses had long been established. of state and society were first outlined. On the contrary. But this agency is no longer referred to an unconditional pole. because it is constructed under the slogan of creating a new man. can be seen to be born of other facts. is accompanied by the disentangling of the sphere of power. We would of course also be mistaken If. The exercise of power is subject to the procedures of periodical redistributions. while at the same time he was. m Its very form. it cannot be occupied -it is such that no individual and no group can be consubstantial with it . as cause and effect relations have no pertinence in the order of the symbolic. by the irruption of a new meamng of history. This phenomenon implies an institutionalization of conflict. The locus of power is an empty place. Far from being reducible to a superstructural institution whose function can be derived from the nature of a mode of production. the sphere of law and the sphere of knowledge. It represents the outcome of a controlled contest with permanent rules. it will be enough to stress certain of its aspects. We would be wrong to conclude that power now resides in society on the grounds that it emanates from popular suffrage. Being at once subject to the law and placed above laws.16 On Modem Democracy The Question of Democracy 17 counter-influence is always at work and that it counteracts the petrification of social life. formal . by levelling and unifying the social field and. or only the men. gave the . as . There is no need . the increasing heterogeneity of social life that accompames the domman�e of so�Jety and state over individuals. . as a substantial unity. the meanmg of what IS cy thus proves to be coming into being remains in suspense. in his own person.to dwell on the details of the institutional apparatus. . the historical society par excellence. the monarchy was the agency which. by inscribing itself in that field. The locus of power becomes an empty place. This does not mean that he held unlimited power. Its effects are revealed by the appearance of ways of thinking and modes of expressiOn that are won m the face of anonymity. The indeterminacy we were discussmg does not pertam to the or�er of empirical facts. Once power ceases to manifest the principle which generates and organizes a social body. the phenomenon of disincorporation. Here. This model reveals the revolutionary and unprecedented feature of democracy. by. it marks a division between the inside and the outside of the social. as political activity became secularized and laicized. once it is most clearly attested to by the new position of. the principle that generated the order of the kingdom. This is not in fact a matter ofrecovering from a loss of memory but. in such a way that the hierarchy of its members.vtewpomt of the law in check. and it therefore gave society a body. On the one hand. Democra . The regime was not despotic. the mere mortals. between mortals and the transcendental agencies represented by a sovereign Justice and a sovereign Reason. a society which. and they cannot be regarded merely as effects. remain within the limits of a. . institutes relations beween those dimensions. . . of the stereotyped language of opmwn. by. Power was embodied in the prince.and it cannot be represented. which we mentioned earlier. made possible the development of commodity relations and rationalized activities in a manner that paved the way for the rise of capitalism. of recentenng our investigations on something that we failed to recognize because we lost all sense of the political. The important point is that this apparatus prevents governments from appropriating power for their own ends. I have tried on several occasions to draw attentiOn to th1s mutatiOn. the distinction between ranks and orders appeared to rest upon an unconditional basis. power. other-worldly pole. he condensed within his body. hke the gradual extension of equality of condition. as they themselves urge u� to identify those features which pomt to the formatiOn of a �ew despotism. from incorporating it into themselves. The prince was a mediator between mortals and gods or. by the unfolding of multiple perspectives o� historical kno":'ledge as a result of the dissolution of an almost orgamc sense of durauon that was once apprehended through customs and traditions. Under the monarchy. a latent but effective knowledge of what one meant to the other existed throughout the social. rather. pnnce originally developed in a theologico-political matrix. which was at once mortal and immortal. and that the first separatiOn of state and civil society occurred. and in that sense. him made and terntory a sovereign power within the boundaries of both a secular agency and a representative of God. And because of this·. to the order of economic or soc1al facts wh1ch. Just as the birth of totalitarianism defies all explanations which attempt to reduce that event to the level of empirical history. power was embodied in the person of the prince. Only the mechanisms of the exercise of power are visible. so long. and is tacitly recognized as being purely symbolic. welcomes and preserves indeterminacy and which provides a remarkable contrast with totalitarianism which. as the terms of the contradiction continue to be displaced. It is in effect within the framework of the monarchy. who hold political authority. m our turn we claimed to be able to limit our explorations to the undersid of the underside. simultaneously. m the modern world. that the features. or that of a particular type of monarchy which. claims to understand the law of its organization and development. His power pointed towards an unconditional. Such a transformation implies a series of other transformations. the guarantor and representative of the unity of the kingdom. The kingdom itself was represented as a body. so the birth of democracy signals a mutation of th� symbolic order. descnptwn If we simply extend Tocqueville's analyses. we must recognize that. We will. however. � secretly designates itself as a society without history. The singularity of democracy only becomes fully apparent if we recall the nature of the monarchical system of the Ancien Regime. the nse of demands and struggles for rights that place the . it remains the agency by virtue of which society apprehends itself in its unity and relates to itself in time and space. so long as the democratic adventure continues. and which. technical. and in which the exercise of power depends upon conflict. law and knowledge. in which that which has been established never bears the seal of full legitimacy. should not make us forget that it stems from a new symbolic constitution of the social. in its dependence upon a political discourse and upon a sociological and historical elaboration. And just as the figure of power in its materiality and its substantiality disappears. tend to be asserted. that no one has the answer to the questions that arise. as Tocqueville foresaw. which was once linked to the person of the prince or to the existence of a nobility. There is always a possibility that the logic of democracy will be disrupted in a society in which the foundations of the political order and the social order vanish. a process of questioning is implicit in social practice. and as to the legitimacy of what has been established and of what ought to be established. It is this which leads me to take the view that. chosen to concentrate upon a range of phenomena which are.markers of certainty. I am not suggesting that it therefore has no unity or no definite identity. I have been forced to ignore a major aspect of the empirical development of those societies which are organized in accordance with its principles . without the actors being aware of it. Nor am I forgetting .and this would merit a lengthy analysis . the emergence of an anonymous power facilitated the expansion of state power (and. I am certainly not forgetting that democratic institutions have constantly been used to restrict means of access to power. cannot put an end to this practice. that social Interdependence breaks down and that the citizen is abstracted from all the networks in which his social life develops and becomes a mere statistic. the important point is that democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the . leads to the emergence of a purely social society in which the people. which are relations of domination and exploitation. always bound up when popular sovereignty is assumed to manifest itself. and it is always dependent upon a debate as to its foundations. And that in turn· leads me to at least identify. It is at the very moment . more generally. but also by socialists -and this resistance cannot simply be imputed to the defence of class interests. The fact that it operates within the density of class relations. makes the paradox of democracy more palpable than the institution of universal suffrage. the conditions for the formation of totalitarianism. the legitimation of purely political conflict contains within it the principle of a legitimation of social conflict in all its forms. if not to explain. A dialectic which externalizes every sphere of activity is at work throughout the social. the people nor the nation represent substantial entities. In my view. to be defined under the aegis of knowledge and in accordance with norms that are specific to them. the nation and the state take on the status of universal entities. The relation established between the competition mobilized by the exercise of power and conflict in society is no less remarkable. the power of bureaucracies).a development which justified socialist-inspired criticisms. for example. usually misunderstood. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power. but he mistakenly reduced it to a dialectic of alienation. law and knowledge assert themselves as separate from and irreducible to power. it seems to me. in which differences of rank no longer go unchallenged. could once be articulated as a result of a belief in the nature of things or in a supernatural principle). at every level of social life (at every level where division.18 On Modern Democracy The Quesrion of Democracy 19 ceases to condense within it virtues deriving from transcendent reason and justice. Or to put it another way. recognition of the autonomy of knowledge goes hand in hand with a continual reshaping of the processes of acquiring knowledge and with an investigation into the foundations of truth. a new relation to the real is established. The erection of a political stage on which competition can take place shows that division is. the meaning of the transformation can be summarized as follows: democratic society is instituted as a society without a body. It was provoked by the idea of a society which had now to accept that which cannot be represented. Similarly. As power. scientific. The young Marx saw this only too well. knowledge and the enjoyment of rights to a minority. and in which any individual or group can be accorded the same status. which is always dedicated to the task of restoring certainty. But neither the state. so the autonomy of law is bound up with the impossibility of establishing its essence. and as to the basis of relations betweel self and other. If we bear in mind the monarchical model of the Ancien Regime. this relation is guaranteed within the limits of networks of socialization and of specific domains of activity. to be more accurate. In this brief sketch of democracy. I have. Their representation is itself. and especially the division between those who held power and those who were subject to them. moreover. Economic. The dimension of the development of right unfolds in its entirety. on the other hand. pedagogic and medical facts. When individuals are increasingly insecure as a result of an economic crisis or of the ravages of war. in a general way. when conflict between classes and groups is exacerbated and can no longer be symbolically resolved within the political sphere. Number replaces substance. law and knowledge become disentangled. as a society which undermines the representation of an organic totality. on the contrary.that. in which right proves to depend upon the discourse which articulates it. the disappearance of natural determination. constitutive of the very unity of society. when power appears to have sunk to the level of reality and to be no more than an instrument for the promotion of with ideological debate. Nothing. It is also significant that in the mneteenth century this institution was for a long time resisted not only by conservatives and bourgeois liberals. when the people is assumed to actualize itself by expressing its will. just as the exercise of power proves to be bound up with the temporality of its reproduction and to be subordinated to the conflict of collective wills. and that the work of ideology. it is also still true to say that a change in the economy of power is required if the totalitarian form of society is to arise. modes of organization and modes of representation. do we not have to investigate the effects of that development? It is one thing to say that social. in modern philosophy. Whilst this is certainly true. When one recalls how certain great philosophers were drawn to Nazism. 2 Human Rights and The Welfare State As soon as we begin to ask ourselves about human rights. that they create themselves by discovering and instituting rights in the absence of any principle that might allow us to decide as to their true nature and as to whether their evolution does or does not conform to their essence? Even at this early stage. I return to my initial considerations. It seems strange to me that most of our contemporaries have no sense of how much philosophy owes to the democratic experience. for the image of an organic community. Even if we attempt to avoid it and simply examine the import of an event such as the proclamation at the end of the eighteenth century of the rights known as the rights of man. In conclusion. then we see the development of the fantasy of the People as-One. and when at the same time society appears to be fragmented. We begin by asking ourselves about the meaning of the mutation that occurred in the representation of the individual and of society. we cannot ignore the question. other difficulties lie in store. for an embodying power. at least in its early stages.20 On Modem Democracy the interests and appetites of vulgar ambition and when. The question takes us further still if we ask whether . Even if . It is quite another to say that they derive from the same inspiration. 1 We must first ask ourselves if we can in fact accept the formula without making reference to a human nature. our investigations appear to be guided. it appears in society. once they have come into contact? It appears to me that the question is worth asking. the ability to break with the illusions of both theology and eighteenth.and I believe that the organizers of this de bate would accept the hypothesis . It is sometimes said that democracy itself already makes room for totalitarian institutions. a nostalgia for the image of a society which is at one with itself and which has mastered its history. to Stalinism. A similar necessity led him to move from the idea of the body to the idea of the flesh and dispelled the attractions of the Communist model by allowing him to rediscover the indeterminacy of history and of the being of the social. if we reject the notion of human nature. one begins to wonder whether. That question leads to another: can the effects of that mutation elucidate the course of history up to the present time? To be more specific: is it the case that human rights merely served to disguise relations established in bourgeois society. Or. that they fail to recognize it as the matrix of their investigations.we agree that the institution of human rights has come to support a dynamic of rights. quasi-religious faith. the beginnings of a quest for a substantial identity. in turn. or did they make possible. But can we restrict discussion to the idea of a separation between philosophical thought and political belief? Can either remain unaffected. that they do not explore its matrix or take it as a theme for their reflections. For can we in fact say that human beings have embarked upon a voyage of self discovery. for a social body which is welded to its head. and. demands and struggles which contributed to the rise of democracy? Even this is too crude a statement of the terms of the alternative. or even give rise to. for a state free from division. in a word.and nineteenth century rationalism does not carry with it. economic and cultural rights (notably those mentioned in the United Nations Charter) arise as an extension of those original rights. we find ourselves drawn into a labyrinth of questions. and it is yet another to take the view that they promote freedom. at least by a reading and interpretation of the facts. to a much greater and lasting extent. if not by observation. and that we might be able to shed some light on it by following the evolution of the thought of Merleau-Ponty. without surrendering to a teleological vision of history. If we adopt the latter course.
Report "Democracy and Political Theory - Claude Lefort"