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PoliticalChronicle:France,theSovietUnionandYugoslavia

PoliticalChronicle:France,theSovietUnionandYugoslavia

byDickHoward

Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:3+4/1987,pages:360367,onwww.ceeol.com.
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POLITICAL CHRONICLE: FRANCE, THE SOVIET UNION AND YUGOSLAVIA

ETHICS and POLITICS


Dick Howard This paper attempts to do three things, in order to open up a broader discussion of our theme. It seeks first to address the topic proposed generally for our discussion. It then proposes a contemporary illustration of the topic in order to show the implications of the theoretical question we are treating. Finally, it makes some theoretical proposals, drawn from my own recent work. The latter aspect of the paper is, I fear, too brief. I can only hope that my manner of confronting the first two issues at least arouses your curiosity concerning the conclusions.

(I)

The Relevance of Philosophy

Had the title of our meeting posed the choice, ethics or politics, the philosopher's task would have been simple. Either politics would be shown to be an "art," if not a mere "technique"-in all events, dependant ultimately on a rational ethics; or a neo-aristotlean rehabilitation of phronesis would have had to legitimate the philosophical dignity of politics while relativizing the assertions of moral a priori's. Similarly, the disjunctive formulation of our title would have made things easier for the political thinker. Either politics is a "higher" form of an ethics limited to individual rights and neglecting social duties; or ethics is an ultimately ungroundable value-choice which the responsible politician must but cannot ultimately avoid. In both cases, the conflict apparently set up by the disjunctive formulation is avoided. A "critical philosophy," in the footsteps of Kant and/or Marx, is not so shy, or so self-assured. The problematic conjunction of ethics and politics is historically specific. Classical philosophy's foundation in natural law was destroyed by the advent of a modernity which Leo Strauss and his followers never tire of denouncing. The diagnosis is correct, although Strauss was hardly the first to encounter the problem. Jiirgen Habermas' Philosophical Discourse of Modernity points to Hegel as the first to make the diremption of the moral and the political, the individual and the social, faith and knowledge, the immanent principle of systematic philosophy. We need only recall Hegel's early attempts to understand the tragedy of Greek Sittlichkeit or the paradoxical salvatory message of the Jew Jesus, and their transfiguration in the world-historical panorama of the Phenomenology. This Hegelian attempt to hold together both sides of the conjunction defines our modern age. Hegel's successors attempt to
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break out of this uneasy conjunction by emphasizing one or the other of its constitutive poles. Habermas' political, and moral, imperative is that we must "complete the Enlightenment" and realize the modern project. But no more than Strauss, Habermas does not explain the relation of his general description of modernity to its concrete forms. Its "realization" remains abstract, its relation to the Enlightenment (or its individual-philosophical form) is unclear. Hegel's prescriptive power fell short of his diagnostic skill. The Philosophy of Right distinguishes between abstractly universal Moralitiit and concretely experienced Sittlichkeit. Within the latter, "civil society" is based on a principle of particularity which seems to recall the imperatives of morality, but whose limitations make necessary the presence of a state. l Hegel stresses the specificity of the modern state, which "has prodigious strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity to progress to its culmination in the extreme self-subsistent personal particularity, and yet at the same time brings it back to the substantive unity and so maintains this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself."2 But Hegel does not explain the concrete origin and nature of this state which, it will be recalled, is only the first moment of a movement that engulfs it within intra-state relations before absorbing it into World History as "the Court of the Last Judgment." The Hegelian state might be interpreted as the symbolic form of the classical conception of "the political." It is that moment in which a society represents itself to itself as different from its empirical form. Marx of course denounced the Hegelian "illusion of politics"--but he did so on the basis of a shared premise: the primacy of civil society, which defines a problem for Hegel, and presents a solution for Marx. Civil society is the real "place" where ethics and politics are united, as a question or an answer. The result is that social theory replaces both ethics and politics. The liberal contractualist, whose invisible hand provided Hegel the model for the Cunning of Reason, appeals to it as does the Marxist materialisation of this historical teleology. Philosophy, ethics and politics are simply variants of social theory-as the Marxist Habermas tried to show in Knowledge of Human Interests. The autonomy of ethics and the specificity of politics emerge against the backdrop of the failure of social theory and of its liberal or communist incarnations. Totalitarian societies call forth an ethical response from the individual which acquires a political implication of which its agents may not have been conscious because the totalitarian system (in principle at least) conjoins ethics and politics. We might then address our topic by asking what kind of a balance these societies could permit such that neither the ethical nor the political extinguish the other. The "self-limiting civil society" of pre-coup Poland could serve as a case in point. Rather than speculate on which might have been had not December 13, 1981 intervened, I want to look at the example of a liberal society because it seems to illustrate the more frequently considered and intuitive disjunctive formulation of our topic. A closer analysis will show the philosophical importance of the conjunctive formulation.

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(11)

From November 22 through December 8, 1986 French students forced the government to withdraw its proposed educational reform. The shock was double: the reform was a rather modest attempt to adapt an outmoded system to a new society,3 while the students' outraged reaction did not express the sociological attributes expected of their individualist, pre-yuppie generation. The commentators were quick to seize upon the contrast of the Winter of '86 with the Spring of '68: the former was a movement based on ethics, the latter was the product of political demands. The comparison forgets that the students' movement continued to the 10th of December, concluding with a demonstration commemorating the brutal death of a student at the hands of the police. The slogan of this final protest was "Plus jamais ca," and it was not without importance that the dead student was a beur, a French citizen of Algerian origin, with whom the students felt the need to show solidarity. The comparison further neglects the fact that, in withdrawing its educational reform, the government also cancelled the winter session of Parliament, annulling a series of other measures on its agenda. 4 But the comparison probably was true-in the political eyes of the government, which recalled that the "excesses" of May were followed by a massive reaction providing victory for the "parti d'ordre" in June 1968. This explains the brutal behaviour of the Minister of the Interior, and the use of 'agents-provocateurs' (identifiable to the TV-watching public by their yellow scarfs!) during the demonstrations. The relevance of the 68-86 comparison for the government, and its irrelevance to the self-understanding of the movements, suggests a theoretical distinction. The present government called itself liberal in its campaign against the Socialists in 1986, but it is composed, uneasily, of three distinct groups-neo-liberals (the PR), centrists (the CDS), and a hard right that can only be called the "parti d'ordre" (the RPR). It has constantly to worry about holding the 12 per cent of the vote that went to the far-right National Front; and its various leaders have to think within the perspective both of the present "co-habitation" with a socialist President, and of the upcoming May 1988 presidential elections. This means that governmental politics have a double sense: to the everyday give and take of politics is added a symbolic dimension which means that each measure has a resonance beyond its immediate goals. Measures taken aim not only at their immediate results; they seek to create a "climate of opinion." This was the case for the proposed privatization of the prison system, for the reform of the nationality code, and of course for the educational reforms. 5 From this point of view, the students were not protesting simply against a measure that touched their personal concerns; they were not putting into question particular programs (la politique) but the assumptions carried by, and implicit in, the politics of this regime (le politique). This does not make the students political "revolutionaries," in the sense attributed to 1968. The results of '86 suggest, rather, that the '68ers misunderstood the implications of their actions for the same reasons that transformed the 'ethical' revolt of 1986.

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The French students of 1968 can be seen as an inverted image of the coalition government attacked by their successors. They were a combination of political movements fused by the catalyst of the March 22nd Movement. The critique of the University, from which the movement began, turned quickly to the capitalist nature of the society served by that institution. 6 Once the Universities were engulfed, the premises of the movement condemned it to political paralysis. Some, like the Maoists who were to become the Gauche Proletarian, went so far as to leave the barricades of May 13 for the workers' quarters, from which alone salvation was to be hoped; others, like the PSU and many autonomous leftists, were captivated by the idea that state power might be seized through a 'long' Revolution in which Mendes-France would play the role of Kerensky in February 1917; others, like the communists, played the card of realism and reform against the "anarchist provocations" of the students. With isolated exceptions, like the authors of La Breche,7 no one could conceive of the movement on its own terms-despite its own selfidentification in graffiti and slogan, and its own practice which did, for many, changer la vie. It was as if the political premises of the movement's actors blinded them to the moral implications of their own actions. But the movement did not end with the June triumph of the party of order, any more than the "self-dissolution" in December 1986 marks the conclusion of the new struggle. 1968 became gradually what it had been all along: a cultural mutation hidden by an imaginary political schema drawn from the past and needing a new political representation to understand its own future. 8 That "political representation" turned out to be, in fact, "ethical." The political agenda that emerged from May '68 took first the form of the demand for workers' self-management. This orientation could be formulated within the framework of Marxism. This explains why, although condemning the invasion of Czechloslovakia in August 1968, the movement did not draw the ethical implication that this self-management is simply a form of moral autonomy. The "socialism with a human face" that had been crushed in Prague was instead given the political form of "Euro-Communism," which permitted the first steps toward a Common Program of the Left that finally came to power in 1981. A different attitude was suggested by the critique of totalitarianism, rendered vivid by Solzhnetsyn and popularized by the so-called "new philosophers." Even the self-managed form of Marxism that was supposed to insure that "real democracy" replace the formalism of bourgeois institutions, was sharply challenged, in theory but also by events. When the Vietnamese victory brought the tragedy of the "boat people," and Pol Pot's political enforcement of the true community proved to be terror, politics was condemned; it was reason run rampant, totalizing particularity, destroying society. Only the individual moral stance-whose foundation is a value choice!-could stop this machinery. It was a short step to the consecration of this return of the disjunction of ethics and politics in the wake of 1968 in the form of the primacy of individualism as ethical value choice. From this perspective, 1968 prepared the anti-political generation which "logically" should not have emerged as a political force in the winter of 1986. The age of morality became the "era of the void," the defense of particularity,

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the atomism of the solitary entrepreneur. The ruling Socialists' 1983 rejection of the national and republican mission of "La France" in favor of an "austerity" politics seemed to consecrate the replacement of politics by the administration of things; meanwhile ethics, in Foucault's phrase, turned around "the care for oneself." The disjunction of ethics and politics seemed ultimately to imply the demise of both as the "liberal" inversion of their totalitarian conjunction. This conclusion was refuted de facto by the students. Its philosophical foundation, in the abstraction typified by Strauss and Habermas' theories of modernity, is put into question at the same time. Philosophy need not abandon either itself or the concrete so easily.
(Ill)

A Philosophical Explanation of Political Confusion

The disjunction of a political '68 and an ethical '86 cannot be maintained. Nor is the modern attempt to explain their empirical conjunction by means of social theory adequate. Marx's rejection of the "political illusion" is no more acceptable than his denial of ethical autonomy in his critique of the notion of the Rights of Man (in "On the Jewish Question"). '68-'86 are not defined by their empirical effects, or by their declared or imputed intentions; that is the point of view of the policeman (or that of the present French government). '68-' 86--unlike the "free schools" movement of 1984-reacted to the symbolic implications of politics. As one provincial lyceen put it, they knew that they would not achieve full equality of their schools with the privileged Parisiens, but "we have to fight for the principle." In so doing, he continued, "we lived what our parents experienced in 1968." He described that experience as learning to listen to others, to debate with them and to take each other seriously. He didn't use the word, but what he was describing-at the level of principle and that of experience-is what the French are coming to know as democracy. 9 The conjunctive framework of modernity is not determined by socioeconomic conditions; nor does it presage totalitarianism. Marx's reduction of the political and the ethical to the social blinded him to the radical novelty that Strauss and Habermas glimpsed, but only abstractly. The separation of ethics and politics is only possible within a constantly threatened unity conceptualized by Hegel's modern state. The dissolution of that state into World History was not a conceptual error. Such a state cannot exist once and for all; that would be the dream of the party of order, if not of the totalitarian party. But that state does exist, symbolically; it is that which makes possible a democratic society in which politics and ethics are conjoined necessarily. Such a democratic society is not that empirically real "society" to which Marxism and liberalism would reduce politics and ethics. Tocqueville's political liberalism suggests an approach to its philosophical (or phenomenological) description. IQ Volume One of Democracy in America describes democracy as a "social state" (etat social), determined by the conditions of equality found in the New World. Political liberty appears to be the consequence of this social equality. Volume Two inverts the perspective. Democracy is defined by liberty, yet threatened by the forces of equality which, in the earlier analysis,

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made it possible. This dilemma, which Tocqueville rediscovers in the foundations of the Ancien Regime, defines our modernity. Liberty and equality, morality and politics: in the language of philosophy, their relation is that of the visible to the invisible; neither is possible without the other, but neither has an identity which is determined apart from the other. The movements of '68 and '86 were democratic movements which demonstrate the inseparability-and the "reversibility"-of ethics and politics. Their disjunctive contrast is misleading; it fixes them as eternally opposed essences, never to be reconciled. '68, and '86, refute the disjunction. This leaves open the question, why were these movements successful where others failed? Are there "lessons" to be drawn from them? Have students replaced Marx's workers as the "universal class"?11 Or are we confronted here with types of "new social movements" of which feminism, ecology or pacifism might also be illustrations?12 These empirical questions can be reformulated theoretically. What are those particular conditions which call forth the moral-political response of modern individuals? And what explains the receptivity of modern polities to these responses? Marx thought he had found the answer in the structure of capitalist civil society which produces the proletariat as its own grave-digger. This solution translates empirical reality into the language of principles. The movements of '68 and '86 inverted this procedure; they began from principles-political or ethical-and remained at that apparantly modest level. (For this, they earned the undesired and misguided praise of their journalistic elders, who constantly marvelled at their "maturity.") Their "success" cannot be judged empirically, as they knew in calling for an "Estates-General" in the spring to re-evaluate the situation. Their success is measured also in the slogan of their final demonstration: Plusjamais ca! In the context of the politics of the proposed Spring meeting of an Estates-General, this slogan poses ethics as a political question that can neither be avoided nor resolved once-and-for-all. Tocqueville said of democracy that he loved it not for what it was but for what it fait faire. Democratic politics preserves the capacity of society to act, demanding now the increase of political freedom, now that of economic equality. The ethical and the political cannot be distinguished, assigned to one or the other pole. The democratic task is not Habermas' "completion" of the Enlightenment and realization ofmodernity. That goal rings still of the Marxian critique of the "illusion of politics," to which it seeks to put an end in reality. Democractic philosophy has, rather, to return to Kant, to the philosopher who asked the question "What is Enlightenment?" and to the political thinker whose "Cosmopolitan History" postulated the creation of civil society as the greatest, and most difficult, task for humanity. These two Kantian themes point to the democratic realization of the aim of "critical theory," to put Reason back on her Throne without the sacrifice either of the ethical or of the political. The conjunction of ethics and politics transforms philosophy; Reason's throne is constantly in question, while its necessity is constantly reaffirmed. This is perhaps why Kant's critical system ends with a theory of judgment.

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NOTES

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2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

This necessity does not depend on the empirical problems encoutered within the particularism of civil society. Hegel insists, in the Remark to Paragraph 258, that "If the state is confused with civil society, and if its specific end is laid down as the security and protection of property and personal freedom, then the interest of the individuals as such becomes the ultimate end of their association, and it follows that membership in the state is something optional." The Philosophy of Right, trans. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 156. The nature of this "state," which is different from the sort of "welfare state" (the "Not-und Verstandesstaat") with which the discussion of civil society concludes, needs to be made explicit. I will return, briefly, to this question below. A more inclusive interpretation is found in my From Marx to Kant (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985). Hegel, ibid. paragraph 260, p.161. France increased its mandatory school attendance age to 16 only in 1959. The percentage of high school students receiving the high school diploma permitting them to enter the university is still under 30%. One proclaimed goal of the reform was to increase this to 80% by the year 2000. At the University level, the system is divided into the elite Grandes Ecoles and the Universities, whose diplomas are in principle equal (as are those of all high schools). In principle, any student with a high school diploma can go to any University. In fact, the Universities are unequal, and their admissions are more or less open. The reform wanted to take this into account, making a virtue of necessity. It also proposed differentiated tuition rates (in a ration of 1 to 2, or to 3)- a small matter in fact, given the low cost of tuition, and the benefits available to those holding student ID's. The importance of the reform was not its empirical content-although the students could at first protest only against this-but the political implications it symbolized within the broader framework of the right-wing government that came to power in 1986, as we will see. The cancellation also showed weakness on the part of the government, which was immediately seized upon by various discontented groups which had heretofore felt too weak to push their demands in the form of strikes. The withdrawal was supposed to show the "statesmanship" of the government; it remains to see whether it will continue this path in the face of the new agitations, or return to the disciplinary image it had adopted prior to December. The Paris correspondent of Die Zeit wrote with astonishment and disdain that "since the end of the War, no other Western democracy has capitulated unconditionally in the face of demonstrators." (19 December, 1986). It should be recalled that the proposed educational reforms of the socialist government, and particularly the attempt to move toward a fully secular system, met with massive opposition before being ultimately withdrawn in 1984. The "liberal" government was forced by electoral imperatives to please specific clienteles. Its tactics were overlain with the rhetorical flourish of any "party of order." This explains its policies on naturalization and drugs, as well as its reaction to the wave of terror bombings during the Fall. Beneath the rhetoric lies of course another reality, somewhat evident in the de-nationalization of industry, less clear in the reforms of labor law (firing procedures, flexible hours, etc), hidden in budgetary decisions. But before attributing these moves to "capitalist machinations," one should recall that many of these proposals were made by the Socialist government after 1983. If they are being pushed with such vigor now, it is for their rhetorical symbolism more than for their real effects. It is in this context that the assassination of a beur was felt so strongly by the students. In the case of the Universities, the Minister charged with the reform, M. Devaquet, was less subtle He explained that his proposed law would increase the role of full professors in university governance because, having reached this stage in their career, they had more free time to devote to the institution than those younger persons still climbing the academic ladder. This is of course simply a cynical way of preparing what commentators called "the revenge of the mandarins" against the liberalization of the Universities begun in the wake of May '68 (the Faure Reforms) and continued under the socialist Minister, A. Savary. M. Devaquet's political naivete was apparant also in his statement that the Cabinet would decided on modifications of his bill depending on the size of the next day's demonstration . . . which of course was enormous! This was clear already in the pre-May pamphlet, "Pourquoi les sociologiques," distributed by the March 22nd Movement at Nanterre, and reprinted in Esprit, juin, 1968. The answer, of course, was that sociologists are there to regiment and discipline the working class. Claude Lefort, Edgar Morin and C. Coudray (a.k.a., Cornelius Castoriadis), La Breche (Paris:

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

Fayard, 1968). This volume was published in June; Morin's contribution had already been published in Le Monde in May. This is the theme of Dany Cohn-Bendit's new book (and television series), Nous l'avons tant aimee la Revolution (Paris: Barrault, 1986), which is a compilation of interviews with actors from the different movements of the 60's. Cohn-Bendit seems to think that, while not giving up his ideals, he can understand now the need to realize them through a reformist, but democratic (his stress: constantly) politics. The argument is not convincing theoretically because its premise about the political nature of the movements separates the ethical from the political, distorting both. Interestingly, Cohn-Bendit does not seem to consider the American civil rights movement as part of the 60's movements. His own perspectives come out more clearly in a recent article, "Ich lebe da, wo ich verliebt bin," in Die Zeit, 12 December, 1986. It is worth noting here that at the moment when the demonstrations threatened to get out of hand, a group of "ex-68'ers" formed themselves into groups identified by their white helmets and intervened in order to preserve the success won by the "maturity" of the movement in the eyes of the public. (See, Le Monde, 12 decembre, 1986). I say "coming to know," because the republican political tradition remains strong on the left, where jacobinism and Marxism combine easily (as Lenin had noted already in "One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward," and as those Ministers who opposed the 1983 austerity program argued). The French are coming to know democracy through their concern with the critique of totalitarianism; and they are coming to know it through the sobering experience of the Socialist Party in power and now in "cohabitation." This explains in part why the right has reacted more as "the party of order" than as the "party of capital." It also explains the hope for success of the Socialists' present electoral strategy: the re-election of Mitterrand in 1988 against a divided right, and the attempt to draw centrist deputies from the CDS toward a left government without calling for immediate parliamentary elections in 1988. The result would be that, by the 1991 parliamentary elections, a democratic left could win power on its own. I am borrowing these remarks from Claude Lefort, who makes clear the phenomenological underpinnings of his argument in a seminar on Merleau-Ponty offered at Stony Brook, Fall, 1986. On Tocqueville, see especially his "On Reversibility," translated by Martha Calhoun in Telos, Nr. 63, Spring, 1985. Under the title, "Who will Dare Reform the Schools?," Le Monde's Frederic Gaussen proposed an analysis whose implications point toward the dilemmas of modern democracy. (Le Monde, 11 decembre, 1986; see also Gaussen's earlier article of 25 novembre, 1986). The schools involve a vast public-parents, who are voters; teachers, who are unionized; students, with no representatives; yet this public is not linked to the political system by any "transmission belts." Politics, in the everyday sense of the term, becomes an impossible risk in these conditions. Yet political action is necessary because our modern societies make education the ticket to individual success. Individual pressure from below meets political imperatives from above. The result can only be explosive. It need not, however, be "revolutionary." Indeed, at the height of the December demonstrations, Le Monde's front page (12 decembre, 1986) headlined first that "Student Protest has Enlarged the Splits among the Components of the Majority," and in another article on the same page, "The Paris Stock Market is in its Best Form." On the question of "new social movements," see the issue of Social Research (Vol. 52, Nr. 4, Winter, 1985) edited by Jean L. Cohen, and her excellent introductory essay, "Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements."

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