‘Democracy Stirs In The Middle East’: with this title a magazine that carries the flame of economic neoliberalism celebrated some months ago the success of the elections in Iraq and the anti-Syrian demonstrations in Beirut.3 Only this praise of victorious democracy was accompanied by commentaries specifying the nature and limits of this democracy. Democracy triumphed, we were told, despite protests by idealists for whom democracy consists in the government of the people by the people, and so cannot be brought to a people by the force of arms. Hence, it triumphed when seen from a realistic point of view, that is, one that separates out the practical benefits from the utopia of the government of the people by the people. But the lesson addressed to the idealists also urged us to be consistent in our realism. Democracy has triumphed, but one must understand the meaning of this triumph: bringing democracy to another people does not simply mean bringing it the beneficial effects of a constitutional State, elections and a free press. It also means bringing it disorder.
One will recall the statement issued by the American Secretary of Defense concerning the pillaging that occurred after the fall of Saddam Hussein. We have, he basically said, brought freedom to the Iraqis. And yet, freedom also means the freedom to do wrong. This statement is not merely a circumstantial witticism. It is part of a broader logic that can be reconstituted from its disjoined elements: it is because democracy is not the idyll of the government of the people by the people, but the disorder of passions eager for satisfaction, that it can, and even must, be introduced from outside by the armed might of a superpower, meaning not only a State disposing of disproportionate military power, but more generally the power to master democratic disorder.
The commentaries attending these expeditions devoted to spreading democracy throughout the world remind us then of older arguments which (but in a far less triumphal tone) invoked democracy’s irresistible expansion. In effect, they merely paraphrase the accounts that were presented thirty years ago at the Trilateral Commission, pointing up what was then called the crisis of democracy.4
Democracy stirs in the wake of American armies, in spite of those idealists who protest in the name of peoples’ rights to self-determination. Thirty years ago, the aforementioned report accused the same kind of idealists – those ‘value-oriented intellectuals’ who fuel a culture of opposition and an excess of democratic activity – of being as disastrous to the authority of the public interest [la chose publique] as they were to the pragmatic actions of those ‘policy-oriented intellectuals’. Democracy stirs, but disorder stirs with it; the looters in Baghdad, who took advantage of their new democratic freedoms to procure more personal belongings at the expense of common property, evoked, in their slightly primitive manner, one of the major arguments that was used thirty years ago to demonstrate the ‘crisis’ of democracy: democracy, said the report writers, signifies the irresistible growth of demands that put pressure on governments, lead to a decline in authority, and cause individuals and groups to become refractory to the discipline and sacrifices required for the common good.
As such, the arguments used to back up the military campaigns devoted to the worldwide rise of democracy reveal the paradox concealed by the dominant usage of the word today. In these arguments democracy would appear to have two adversaries. On the one hand, it is opposed to a clearly identified enemy – arbitrary government, government without limits – which, depending on the moment, is referred to either as tyranny, dictatorship, or totalitarianism. But this self-evident opposition conceals another, more intimate, one. A good democratic government is one capable of controlling the evil quite simply called democratic life.
Such was the demonstration developed throughout The Crisis of Democracy: what provokes the crisis is nothing other than the intensity of democratic life. But this intensity and its subsequent danger have two facets: on the one hand, ‘democratic life’ would seem to be identical to the ‘anarchic’ principle that affirms the power of the people, whose extreme consequences the United States and other Western States experienced throughout the 1960s and 1970s: persistent militant contestation in all domains of State activity; undermining of the principles of good government, of the respect for public authorities, of the knowledge of experts, and of the know-how of pragmatists.
The remedy for this excess of democratic vitality has, if we can take Aristotle’s word for it, been known since Pisistratus.5 It consists in redirecting the feverish energy activated on the public stage toward other ends, in sending it on a search for material prosperity, private happiness and social bonds. Alas! the right solution immediately revealed its flipside: diminishing excessive political energy, and promoting the quest for individual happiness and social relations, meant promoting a vitality of private life and forms of social interaction that led to heightened expectations and escalating demands. And these, of course, had in turn a twofold effect: they rendered citizens insouciant to the public good and undermined the authority of governments summoned to respond to the spiralling demands emanating from society.
So, confronting democratic vitality took the form of a double bind that can be succinctly put: either democratic life signified a large amount of popular participation in discussing public affairs, and it was a bad thing; or it stood for a form of social life that turned energies toward individual satisfaction, and it was a bad thing. Hence, good democracy must be that form of government and social life capable of controlling the double excess of collective activity and individual withdrawal inherent to democratic life.
Such is the standard form by which experts state the democratic paradox: as a social and political form of life, democracy is the reign of excess. This excess signifies the ruin of democratic government and must therefore be repressed by it. This squaring of the circle would once have excited the ingenuity of constitutional artists. But such an art is no longer highly thought of today. Governments get on perfectly well without it. For them, the fact that democracies are ‘ungovernable’ is abundant proof of the need they have to be governed, and that is all the legitimation they need for the care they put into governing them. But the virtues of governmental empiricism are hardly capable of convincing anyone except those who govern. Intellectuals have need of other fare, especially on this side of the Atlantic, and especially in France, where they are at once at one remove from power and excluded from its exercise. For them an empirical paradox cannot be dealt with by the arms of governmental bricolage. They see in it a consequence of some original vice, some perversion at the very heart of civilization, and they apply themselves to tracking down its principle. For them, then, the aim is to unravel the ambiguity of a name, to make ‘democracy’ no longer the common name of an evil and the good that cures it, but the sole name for an evil that corrupts us all.
While the American army was working toward democratic expansion in Iraq, a book was published in France that put the question of democracy in the Middle East under a wholly different light. It was called Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique [The Criminal Inclinations of Democratic Europe]. In it the author, Jean-Claude Milner,6 developed, in a subtle and condensed analysis, a thesis as simple as it is radical. The present crime of European democracy is that it calls for peace in the Middle East, in other words, for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such a peace could mean only one thing, the destruction of Israel. European democracies have pushed for peace between the conflicting sides to resolve the Israeli problem. However, European democratic peace itself was the result of nothing less than the extermination of the European Jews. A Europe unified in peace and democracy was rendered possible after 1945 for a single reason: because, due to the Nazi genocide’s success, the European territory found itself rid of the people that formed the obstacle to realizing its dream, namely, the Jews. A Europe without borders means in effect dissolving politics, which always concerns limited totalities, into that society whose principle is on the contrary limitlessness. Modern democracy signifies the destruction of political limits by means of the law of limitlessness proper to modern society. This will to go beyond all limits is at once served and exemplified by that modern invention par excellence, technology. It culminates today in the desire to do away, by means of genetic manipulation and artificial insemination, with the very laws of sexual reproduction and affiliation. European democracy is the mode of society that bears that desire. In order to achieve its goal, according to Milner, it had to get rid of the people for whom the principle of existence itself is that of kinship and transmission, the people bearing the name that points to this principle, that is the people bearing the name of Jew. Such is precisely, he says, what the genocide brought Europe, thanks to an invention homogeneous to the principle of democratic society, the technical invention of the gas chamber. Democratic Europe, he concludes, is born in genocide, and it pursues the task in its desire to subject the Jewish State to the conditions it lays down for peace, conditions for the extermination of the Jews.
There are many ways to consider this argumentation. One can oppose to its radicality the rationality of common sense and of historical accuracy by asking, for example, if it is really so very easy, without recourse to a ruse of reason or a providential teleology of history, to conceive the Nazi regime as an agent of the triumph of European democracy. Conversely, one can analyse its internal coherence by interrogating the core of the author’s thought, being a theory of the name that is articulated on the Lacanian triad of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real.7 I shall take a third path: one that consists in probing the kernel of the argument not according to its extravagance with regard to common sense nor its conformity to the conceptual network of the author’s thought, but from the point of view of the common landscape that this singular argument enables us to reconstitute, from what it allows us to perceive of the displacement that the term democracy has, in two decades, undergone within dominant intellectual opinion.
This displacement is recapitulated in Milner’s book through the conjunction of two theses: the first radically opposes the name of Jew to that of democracy; the second turns that opposition into a divide between two humanities: on the one hand, a humanity faithful to the principle of kinship; on the other, a humanity forgetful of that principle in its pursuit of the ideal of self-generation, which is just as much an ideal of self-destruction. The Jew and democracy are in radical opposition. This thesis marks the overturning that has occurred of what structured the dominant perception of democracy at the time of the Six-Day War and the Sinai War. At that time, Israel was paid tribute for being a democracy. It was held up as a society that was governed by a State assuring both individual freedom and the participation of the greatest number in public life. The Declaration of Human Rights was viewed as the charter that epitomized this delicate balancing of the collectivity and guarantees of individual freedom. The contrary of democracy at the time was referred to as totalitarianism. The dominant discourse designated States as totalitarian if, in the name of the power of the collective, they denied both individuals’ rights and constitutional forms of collective expression: free elections, and the freedom of expression and association. The term totalitarianism was reserved for designating the principle of that twofold denial. A total State was a State that suppressed the duality of State and society, extending the sphere of its exercise to the totality of collective life. Nazism and Communism were construed as the two paradigms of totalitarianism, founded on notions that claimed to transcend any separation between State and society, those of race and of class respectively. The Nazi State was considered, then, from the point of view it had itself proclaimed, that of being a State founded on race. Hence, the genocide of the Jews was regarded as the realization of the desire this State proclaimed to eliminate a race seen as degenerate and as bearing degeneracy.
Milner’s book proposes the exact reversal of this once dominant belief: henceforth the virtue of Israel is that it signifies the contrary of the principle of democracy; the concept of totalitarianism is divested of any use; and the Nazi regime and its politics of any specificity. There is a very simple reason for this: the properties that were formerly attributed to totalitarianism, conceived as the State devouring society, have quite simply become the properties of democracy, conceived as society devouring the State. If Hitler, whose major concern was not to spread democracy, can be seen as the providential agent of that expansion, this is because what the antidemocrats of today refer to as democracy is the same thing that yesterday’s zealots of ‘liberal democracy’ referred to as totalitarianism: the same thing turned upside down. What was only recently denounced as the State principle of a closed totality is now denounced as the social principle of limitlessness. This principle called democracy has become the englobing principle of modernity viewed as an historical and global totality to which the sole name of Jew stands in opposition as the principle of maintaining the human tradition. The American thinker of the ‘crisis of democracy’ might still oppose (as pertinent to the ‘clash of civilizations’) Western and Christian democracy to an Islam synonymous with the despotic Orient.8 The French thinker of democratic crime, for his part, proposes a radicalized version of the war of civilizations, opposing democracy, Christianity and Islam, all merged together, to the sole Jewish exception.
We can, then, in a first analysis, circle in on the principle of this new antidemocratic discourse. The portrait it traces of democracy comprises traits that until quite recently were attributed to totalitarianism. Drawing up this portrait, then, implies a process of disfiguration: as if the concept of totalitarianism, forged for the purpose of the Cold War, and having lost its function, can be disassembled and its traits recomposed to remake the portrait of democracy, i.e., the thing that was its alleged contrary. We can reconstruct the stages of this process of defiguration and recomposition. It began at the start of the 1980s with a first operation that called into question the two sides of the opposition. The terrain on which this operation was played out was that of the reconsideration of the revolutionary heritage of democracy. The role played by Francois Furet’s work Interpreting the French Revolution, published in 1978, has often been underlined. But the double thrust of the operation he performed has scarcely been noticed. To put the Terror again at the heart of the democratic revolution amounted, at the most visible level, to breaking the opposition that had structured the dominant opposition. Totalitarianism and democracy, Furet taught us, are not really opposed. The reign of Stalinist terror was already anticipated in the reign of revolutionary terror. And further, revolutionary terror had not at all derailed the Revolution; it was consubstantial with its project – it was a necessity inherent to the very essence of the democratic revolution.
Deducing Stalinist terror from French revolutionary terror was not in itself a new thing. This analysis had already been integrated into the classic opposition pitting liberal parliamentary democracy against a radical egalitarian democracy that sacrificed the rights of individuals to the religion of the collective and the blind fury of the hordes. A renewed denunciation of terrorist democracy seemed, then, to entail conceiving a new basis for a pragmatic and liberal democracy finally delivered from the revolutionary fantasies of the collective body.
But this simple reading omits the double thrust of the operation. For the critique of the Terror has a twofold basis. The critique known as liberal – which arraigns the totalitarian rigours of equality before the wise republic of individual liberties and parliamentary representation – was from the beginning subordinated to a totally different critique, one for which the sin of the revolution was not its collectivism, but, on the contrary, its individualism. On this view, the French Revolution was terroristic not for having refused to recognize the rights of individuals; it was terroristic for having consecrated them. Initiated by the theoreticians of the counter-revolution in the wake of the French Revolution, relayed by utopian socialists in the first half of the nineteenth century, consecrated at the end of the same century by the young science of sociology, this first reading can be stated as follows: the Revolution was the consequence of Enlightenment thinking and of its first principle – the ‘Protestant’ doctrine that elevates the judgement of isolated individuals to the level of structures and collective beliefs. Shattering the old solidarities that the monarchy, the nobility and the Church had slowly woven, the Protestant revolution dissolved the social link and atomized individuals. The Terror was the rigorous consequence of this dissolution and of the will to recreate, by the artifice of institutions and laws, a link that only natural and historical solidarities can weave.
It was this doctrine that was once again given the place of honour in Furet’s book. Revolutionary terror, he showed, was consubstantial with the Revolution itself, since the revolutionary theatre in its entirety was founded on an ignorance of the profound historical realities that rendered it possible. It ignored the fact that the true revolution, that of institutions and moral values, had already taken place in the depths of society and in the cogs of the monarchical machine. The Revolution, henceforth, could no longer be anything but the illusion of starting from scratch – at a conscious level – the revolution that had already been accomplished. It could be nothing but the artifice of Terror striving to give an imaginary body to a society that had come undone. As evidence, Furet’s account deferred to the theses of Claude Lefort which postulate the notion that democracy is a disembodied power.9 But it put its trust still further in the work that furnished it with the materials of its reasoning, namely Augustin Cochin’s thesis denouncing the role played by the ‘sociétés de pensée’ in the origins of the French Revolution.10 Augustin Cochin, Furet emphasized, was not just a royalist partisan of Action française, he was someone who had been nourished on Durkheimian sociological science. Indeed, he was the true legatee of the critique of ‘individualist’ revolution that had been transmitted by the counter-revolution to ‘liberal’ thinking and to republican sociology, and which forms the real basis of the denunciations of revolutionary ‘totalitarianism’. The liberalism displayed by the French intelligentsia since the 1980s is a doctrine with a double thrust. Behind its reverence for the Enlightenment, and for the Anglo-American tradition of liberal democracy and human rights, one can discern a very French denunciation of the individualist revolution tearing apart the social body.
This double thrust of the critique of revolution enables us to understand the formation of contemporary antidemocratism. It enables us to understand the inversion in discourse on democracy consecutive to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. On the one hand, the fall of this Empire was, for a somewhat brief time, welcomed as the victory of democracy over totalitarianism, as the victory of individual liberty over State oppression, symbolized by those human rights that the Soviet dissidents and the Polish workers had been appealing to. These ‘formal’ rights were themselves the principal target of Marxist critique, so the collapse of the very regime built on the claim to be advancing ‘real democracy’ seemed to signal their revenge. But behind the obligatory salute to victorious human rights and a rediscovered democracy, the exact opposite happened. As soon as the concept of totalitarianism was no longer of use, the opposition between the good democracy of human rights and individual liberties, and the bad collectivist and egalitarian democracy, also fell into disuse. The critique of human rights immediately reasserted itself. Some construed it in the manner of Hannah Arendt: human rights are an illusion because they are the rights of that bare humanity that is without rights. Such rights are the illusory rights of a humanity that has been chased away from its homes and country, and away from citizenship altogether, by tyrannical regimes. It is well known that this account has made something of a comeback in recent times. On the one hand, it has opportunely come back to lend support to those liberating, humanitarian campaigns of States which, on behalf of militarist and militant democracy, assume the responsibility of defending the rights of those without rights. On the other hand, it has inspired Giorgio Agamben’s account according to which the ‘state of exception’ is the real content of our democracy.11 But the critique could also be construed in the manner of a certain Marxism that both the Soviet Empire’s fall, and the weakening of movements of emancipation in the West, once more made available for all intents and purposes: human rights are the rights of egotistical individuals of bourgeois society.
The crucial thing is knowing just who these individuals are. For Marx they were the possessors of the means of production, i.e., the dominant class of which the State of human rights was the instrument. Contemporary wisdom views things differently. In fact, a series of tiny shifts is all that it is required to give egotistical individuals a completely different face. For a start, let’s replace ‘egotistical individuals’ with ‘greedy consumers’, something which will hardly be denied. Then, let’s suppose that the greedy consumers are a socio-historical species called ‘democratic man’. Lastly, let’s not forget that democracy is the regime of equality and we can conclude: the egotistical individuals are none other than those democratic men and women; and the generalization of commodity relations, of which the Rights of Man are emblematic, is basically nothing other than the realization of the feverish demand for equality that gets democratic individuals fired up and ruins the search for the common good embodied in the State.
Let’s listen, for example, to the music of these sentences describing the sad state into which we have fallen thanks to what the author calls providential democracy:
The relationship between physician and patient, lawyer and client, priest and parishioner, professor and student, and social worker and ‘assisted’ citizen increasingly conforms to the model of contractual relationships between equal individuals (or equal parties); that is, to a fundamentally egalitarian relationship model that is established between a provider of services and his client. Homo democraticus becomes impatient whenever faced with competence, including that of a physician or lawyer. Competence calls into question his own sovereignty. Relationships that he maintains with others lose their political or metaphysical horizons. All professional practices tend to become trivialized in this sense … Doctors are gradually becoming salaried employees of the Social Security system; priests are becoming social workers and providers of sacraments … This is because the sacred dimension – made up of religious belief, situations of life and death, humanist or political values – is diminishing. The professions that gave an even indirect or modest shape to collective values, and thereby instituted them, are affected by the erosion of collective transcendence, be it religious or political.12
This long-winded moan purports to be describing the state of a world that democratic man has fashioned in his various guises: an impassive consumer of medication or sacraments; a trade unionist wanting ever more from the welfare state; a representative of ethnic minorities demanding recognition of their identity; a feminist campaigning for quotas; a student treating school as a supermarket where the client is king. But obviously the music of these sentences that claim to be describing the state of the everyday world in our times of hypermarkets and reality TV is an echo from way back. This ‘description’ of our everyday life in the year 2002 was already written down tel quel 150 years ago in the pages of the Communist Manifesto: the bourgeoisie
has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single unconscionable freedom – Free Trade … The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage labourers.
The description of phenomena is the same. What contemporary sociology has contributed of its own accord is not new facts, but a new interpretation. It claims that the set of these facts has a sole cause: the impatience of democratic man who approaches every relation on one and the same model, i.e., ‘the fundamentally egalitarian relations that obtain between a service provider and his or her client’.13 The original text said the following: that the bourgeoisie has, ‘in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, set up that single unconscionable freedom – Free Trade’; and that the only equality it knows is commercial equality, based on brutal and shameless exploitation, on a fundamental inequality in relations between the service ‘providers’ of work and the ‘clients’ who buy their labour power. The modified text replaces the ‘bourgeoisie’ with another subject, ‘democratic man’. From this point it then becomes possible to transform the reign of exploitation into the reign of equality, and, without further ceremony, to make democratic equality identical to the ‘equal exchange’ of market services. Marx’s text, revised and corrected, says in a word: the equality of human rights expresses the ‘equality’ of the relations of exploitation, which is tantamount to accomplishing the ideals of which democratic man dreams.
The equation democracy = limitlessness = society, on which the denunciation of the ‘crimes’ of democracy is based, presupposes, then, a threefold operation: it is imperative, first, to reduce democracy to a form of society; second, to make this form of society identical to the reign of the egalitarian individual by grouping under the latter all sorts of disparate properties, everything from mass consumption to the claims of special minority rights, not to forget union battles; and finally, to charge ‘mass individualist society’, henceforth identical to democracy, with pursuing the limitless growth that is inherent to the logic of the capitalist economy.
This collapsing of the political, the sociological and the economic into one plane frequently claims to be following in the footsteps of Tocqueville’s conception of democracy as the equality of conditions. But such a claim itself presupposes a very simplistic reinterpretation of Democracy in America. By ‘equality of conditions’ Tocqueville understood the end of ancient societies divided into orders, and not as the reign of individuals always yearning to consume ever more. Further, for him the question of democracy was above all a question of finding the institutional forms equipped to regulate this new configuration. In order to turn Tocqueville into a prophet of democratic despotism and a thinker of consumer society, his two large books must be reduced to the two or three paragraphs of the second book that evoke the risk of a new despotism. Also, one must forget that what Tocqueville dreaded was the possibility that a master-figure, with a centralized State at his disposal, might thereby attain absolute power over depoliticized masses, not the tyranny of democratic opinion that one hears them go on and on about today. The reduction of his account of democracy to a critique of consumer society might have forged a path through some privileged interpretative relays.14 Above all, however, it is the result of a larger process of effacing the political figure of democracy that has been brought about by means of a well-regulated exchange between sociological description and philosophical judgement.
The stages of this process can be quite easily identified. On the one hand, the 1980s in France witnessed the development of a certain sociological literature – often written, as it so happens, by philosophers – saluting the alliance that had been formed between new forms of consumerism and individual behaviour, between democratic society and its State. All of Gilles Lipovetsky’s books and articles capture the supposition quite well. It was a time when pessimistic accounts were arriving from across the Atlantic and beginning to spread throughout France: those of the authors of the Trilateral Commission report, and those of sociologists such as Christopher Lasch and Daniel Bell. The latter called into question the separation between the spheres of the economy, politics and culture. With the development of mass consumption, these spheres were to have become dominated by one supreme value, ‘self-realization’. Such hedonism meant breaking with the puritanical traditions that had lent support to both the taking-off of capitalist industry and to achieving political equality. The insatiable appetites emanating from this culture were to have entered into direct conflict with the sacrifices necessitated by the common interest in democratic nations.15 Now, the accounts by Lipovetsky and others aimed at countering that pessimism. There was no reason, they said, to fear any divergence between forms of mass consumption based on the pursuit of individual pleasure and democratic institutions based on common rule. Quite to the contrary, the very growth of consumer narcissism put individual satisfaction and collective rule in perfect harmony. As a result, individuals were engendered with a much tighter existential commitment to democracy, no longer experienced simply as a matter of constraining institutional forms but as a ‘second nature, an environment, an ambiance’. ‘The more narcissism grows’, Lipovetsky wrote,
the more legitimacy democracy gains, if only in the mode of cool. Democratic regimes with their party pluralism, their elections, and their freedom of information, are in ever closer affinity with the society of personalized self-service, of try-before-you-buy, and of combinatory freedom … It is the very ones who do no more than devote themselves to the private dimension of their life that will remain attached to the democratic functioning of societies by the links woven through the process of personalization.16
However, rehabilitating ‘democratic individualism’ against the critiques emanating from America in reality meant performing a double operation. On the one hand, it meant burying an earlier critique of consumer society, namely that undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s when pessimistic and critical accounts of the ‘era of opulence’ by the likes of J.K. Galbraith or David Riesman were radicalized by Jean Baudrillard in a Marxist mode. The latter denounced the illusions of a ‘personalization’ entirely subjugated to market imperatives, and it saw in the promises of consumerism the false equality that masked ‘absence of democracy and the non-existence of equality’.17 The new sociology of narcissistic consumerism eliminated this opposition of represented equality to absent equality. It pointed up the ‘process of personalization’ that Baudrillard had argued was a lure. In transforming the alienated consumer of the day before into a narcissus who uninhibitedly plays with the objects and the symbols of the market universe, it favourably identified democracy and consumerism. As a result, it complacently offered up this ‘rehabilitated’ democracy to a more radical critique. To refute the discordance between mass individualism and democratic government meant demonstrating a much more profound evil. It meant positively establishing that democracy was nothing but the reign of the narcissistic consumer varying his or her electoral choices and his or her intimate pleasures alike. To the joyous postmodern sociologists, then, came the response from weighty philosophers à l’antique. They reminded us that politics as the Ancients had defined it was an art of living together and a search for the common good; and that what was essential to the very principle of this search and this art was a clear distinction between the domain of common affairs and the egotistical and petty reign of private life and domestic interests. Hence, they said, the ‘sociological’ portrait of joyous postmodern democracy marked the ruin of politics, henceforth subjugated to a form of society governed by the unique law of consumerist individuality. Against this, it was necessary to restore, with Aristotle, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, a clear sense of a politics freed from the encroachments of democratic consumers. In practice, this consuming individual came quite naturally to be identified with the salaried worker, egotistically defending his or her archaic privileges. Doubtless one will recall the flood of literature that poured out during the strikes and demonstrations in autumn 1995 in France to induce in these privileged individuals an awareness of living together and of the glory of public life that they had just defiled with their egotistical interests.18 But, more than these circumstantial usages, what counts is the firmly fixed identity between democratic man and individual consumer. The conflict between postmodern sociologists and philosophers à l’antique set up this identification all the more easily insofar as the antagonists did no more than present, in a well-regulated duo by a journal ironically entitled Le Débat, the two faces of the same coin, the same equation read in two opposing ways.
That was how, in the first part of the operation, democracy was reduced to a state of society. Now we come to the second part of the operation, that is, the one that turns democracy thus defined not simply into a social state that unduly infringes upon the political sphere but into an anthropological catastrophe, a self-destruction of humanity. This further step passed through another well-regulated interplay between philosophy and sociology, one which was less peaceful in its unfolding but yielded the same result. The stage on which this interplay took place was the quarrel over education [l’École]. The initial context of the quarrel had to do with educational underachievement, that is to say, the failure of educational institutions to give children from the more modest classes equal chances to the others. So, the quarrel was ultimately over how equality at school or as achieved through the School ought to be understood. The so-called sociological thesis endorsed the works of Bourdieu and Passeron, highlighting the social inequalities that were hidden in apparently neutral forms of the social transmission of knowledge. It proposed that the School be rendered more egalitarian by removing it from the fortress where it had taken up a position sheltered from society: by changing the forms of educational society, and by adapting the educational content to those students most deprived of cultural background. The so-called republican thesis took exactly the opposite tack: bringing School closer to society meant making it more homogeneous to social inequality. So that School could work to achieve equality only to the extent that, within the sheltering walls that separate it from the rest of society, it could devote itself to its proper task: to supply everyone equally, irrespective of origins or social destination, with the universality of knowledge, using for its egalitarian aims the necessarily inegalitarian form of relation obtaining between the one who knows and the one who learns. It was imperative, then, to reaffirm the vocation of School that had been historically embodied in the republican School of Jules Ferry.19
The debate therefore seemed to bear on the forms of inequality and the means for achieving equality. The terms of the debate were nonetheless very ambiguous. That the standard-bearing book for this tendency was De l’École by Jean-Claude Milner attests to this ambiguity. For what Milner’s book said was something quite different to what was allegedly seen in it at the time. It was very little concerned with putting the universal at the service of equality. It was far more concerned with the relations between knowledges, liberties and elites. And, to a far greater extent than Jules Ferry, it followed in Renan’s footsteps and his vision of elite experts guaranteeing freedoms in a country threatened by the despotism intrinsic to Catholicism.20 This opposition between two doctrines, republican and ‘sociological’, was in fact an opposition between one sociology and another. But the concept of ‘republican elitism’ was sufficient to mask the ambiguity. The hard kernel of the thesis was concealed under a simple distinction between republican universality and social inequalities and particularities. The debate appeared to be about what public authorities could and should do with the means at their disposal to remedy social inequality. Nonetheless, not long afterwards the perspective was put back on course and the landscape modified. In the stream of allegations about the inexorable rise of people lacking in values owing to the torrent of supermarket values, the root of evil would eventually be identified: it was, to be sure, democratic individualism. The enemy that the republican School confronted, then, was no longer the unequal society from which it sought to rescue pupils, it was the pupil him- or herself, who had become the representative par excellence of democratic humanity – the immature being, the young consumer drunk with equality, and whose charter is the Rights of Man. School, it would soon be said, was badly afflicted by one, and only one, evil, which was embodied in the very beings that had to be taught: equality. And what was undermined along with the authority of the professor was not the universality of knowledges but inequality itself, understood as the manifestation of a ‘transcendence’:
No longer having any place for transcendence of any kind, the individual becomes elevated into an absolute value; and if there is anything sacred left it is again the glorification of the individual, by dint of democracy and human rights … So that is how the professor’s authority has been undermined: with the advance of equality, the teacher has become nothing but an ordinary worker faced with [service] users, and finds himself compelled to discuss things equal to equal with his students, who themselves end up being put in the position of judging their schoolmaster.21
The republican schoolmaster, conveyor of the universal knowledge that renders virgin souls equal, simply becomes, then, the representative of an adult humanity in the process of disappearing at the hands of a generalized reign of immaturity; the schoolmaster becomes the last witness of civilization, vainly opposing the ‘subtleties’ and ‘complexities’ of his thought to the ‘impenetrable wall’ of a world doomed to the monstrous reign of adolescence. He becomes the disillusioned spectator of the great catastrophe of civilization, the synonyms of which are consumerism, equality, democracy and immaturity. Before him stands ‘the adolescent-punk who, against Kant and Plato, demands the right to his or her own opinion’, that is, the representative of the inexorable spiral of democracy drunk with consumption, attesting to the end of culture, if not the becoming culture of everything, to the ‘hypermarket of lifestyles’ and ‘turning the world into a “club-Med” ’, and to the ‘plunging of all of existence into the sphere of consumption’.22 It is pointless to enter into the details of the endless literature which for some time has, week in week out, warned us about the new manifestations of ‘package-deal democracy’ and of the ‘poison of fraternity’:23 the howlers of schoolchildren avering the devastating effects of the equality of users; the demonstrations of young, illiterate ‘alterglobalists’ ‘drunk with springtime generosity’;24 reality TV programmes offering alarming testimony to the sort of totalitarianism Hitler would not have dreamt of;25 and a young woman who completely fabricates a racist attack because of a cult of victims that is itself ‘inseparable from the development of democratic individualism’.26 These incessant denunciations of the democratic ruining of all thought and all culture do not only have the advantage of proving a contrario the inestimable heights of the thought, and the unfathomable depth of the culture, of those who loudly announce them – something it would often be much more difficult to do directly. More profoundly, such denunciations permit all these phenomena to be placed on one and the same plane in being related to one and the same cause. The fatal ‘democratic’ equivalence of everything is indeed first and foremost the product of a method that has only one explanation for every phenomenon, whether it be a social movement, a religious or ethnic conflict, changing trends, or advertising or other campaigns. This is how the young girl who, in the name of her father’s religion, refuses to remove her headscarf at school, the schoolchild who opposes the rationality of the Koran to that of science, and the schoolchild who physically attacks teachers or Jewish students, will all find their attitudes attributed to the reign of the democratic individual, unaffiliated and altogether cut off from transcendence. And the figure of the democratic consumer drunk on equality will, according to the mood and the needs of the cause, be identified with the wage earner, with the unemployed occupying the Unemployment Office, or with the illegal immigrant detained in airport detention centres. There is no need to be surprised if the representatives of this consuming passion that excite the greatest fury in our ideologues are generally those whose capacity to consume is the most limited. Indeed, the denunciation of ‘democratic individualism’ works, at little cost, to make coincide two theses: the classic thesis of property-owners (the poor always want more), and the thesis of refined elites – there are too many individuals, too many people claiming the privileges of individuality. This is how the dominant intellectual discourse meets up with those censitaire27 and knowing elites of the nineteenth century: individuality is a good thing for the elites; it becomes a disaster for civilization if everybody has access to it.
Such is the way politics in its entirety is accounted for by an anthropology that knows but one opposition: that between an adult humanity faithful to tradition, which it institutes as such, and a childish humanity whose dream of engendering itself anew leads to self-destruction. It is this change of register that is recorded with a greater conceptual elegance by Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique. The theme of ‘limitless society’ sums up most succinctly the abundant literature that rolls into a single figure called ‘democratic man’ the hypermarket consumer, the adolescent who refuses to take off her headscarf, and the homosexual couple who want to have children. Above all, it sums up the double metamorphosis by which democracy has come to be attributed with engendering both the form of social homogeneity recently accounted for by totalitarianism and the self-generating growth inherent to the logic of Capital.28 In such a way, this theme marks the ultimate achievement of the French rereading of the democratic double bind. The theory of the double bind opposed good democratic government to the double excess of political democratic life and mass individualism. The French rereading suppresses the tension of these contraries. Democratic life becomes the apolitical life of the indifferent consumer of commodities, minority rights, the culture industry, and children produced in laboratories. It comes to be identified purely and simply with ‘modern society’, which in the same blow is transformed into a homogeneous anthropological configuration. It is obviously not irrelevant if today’s most radical denouncer of democratic crime was only twenty years ago the flag-bearer for a secular and republican School. Because it is precisely in relation to the question of education that the meaning of some key words – republic, democracy, equality, society – has radically changed. The question yesterday was about the equality peculiar to the republican School and its relation to social inequality. The question today is only about the process of transmitting knowledge that has to be saved from the self-destructive tendency being born in democratic society. The issue yesterday concerned transmitting the universality of knowledge and its egalitarian power. What it comes down to transmitting today, and what the name ‘Jew’ typifies for Milner, is simply the principle of birth, the principle of sexual division and of kinship.
Fathers of families who commit their children to ‘studying the Pharisees’ can then take the role of the republican instructor that wrests children from the familial reproduction of the social order. And good government, as opposed to democratic corruption, no longer need hold on to, by equivocation, the name of democracy. It used to be known by the name ‘republic’. But ‘republic’ is not originally the name of the government of law, of the people, and of its representatives. Since Plato, ‘republic’ is the name of the government that assures the reproduction of the human herd by protecting it from its bulging appetite for individual goods and collective power. Which is why it can take on another name, a name which traverses, furtively but decisively, this demonstration of democratic crime: good government today rediscovers the name that it had before it had to make way for the name of democracy. That name is pastoral government. Democratic crime has its origin, then, in the primitive scene that consists in forgetting the pastor.29
Not long beforehand this had been made explicit in a book entitled Le Meurtre du pasteur [The Murder of the Shepherd].30 This book has one undeniable merit: in illustrating the logic of unities and totalities employed by the author of Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, it also gives a concrete figure to the ‘transcendence’ so bizarrely invoked by the new champions of the secular and republican School. The distress of democratic individuals, it says, is that of people who have lost the standard by which the One can be harmonized with the multiple and everyone can unite in a whole. This standard cannot be based on any human convention but only in the care of the divine pastor, who looks after both the whole flock and each member of it. This standard manifests itself in a power that democratic speech will forever lack, the power of the Voice, the shock which all Hebrews felt on that night of fire, whilst the human shepherd, Moses, was given the exclusive responsibility of listening to and of explaining the Word, according to whose teachings he was to organize his people.
Henceforth everything can be simply explained by the evils specific to ‘democratic man’ and by the basic division of humanity into a humanity that is faithful, and one that is not, to the law of kinship. An attack on the law of kinship is above all an attack on the sheep’s bond to its father and divine shepherd. In place of the Voice, the Moderns, Benny Lévy tells us, have put man-god or the people-king, that indeterminate humanity of human rights that the theoretician of democracy, Claude Lefort, had turned into the occupier of an empty place. Instead of ‘the Voice toward Moses’ we are governed by a ‘dead-man-god’. Though it is only capable of governing by making itself into the guarantor of ‘petty pleasures’, capitalizing on our great distress as orphans condemned to wander in the empire of the void, meaning equally the reign of democracy, of the individual, or of consumption.31
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