Democratic disquiet
'Esprit' re-reads Claude Lefort on disquieted democracy; 'Mittelweg 36' analyses authority and its opponents; 'Merkur' fears for German parliamentarism; 'dérive' surveys the urbanist precursors of 1968; and 'Vagant' considers nostalgic Russians and melancholy Norwegians.
Claude Lefort (1924–2010) was one of the most important French political philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, part of a group that includes Raymond Aron, Francois Furet and a rising generation of thinkers (Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, Bernard Manin) who were to revolutionize how we think about democracy. Yet he remains little known to the public.Esprit has decided to change that by publishing a groundbreaking special issue dedicated to Lefort, entitled ‘L’inquiétude démocratique’.
Totalitarianism: Lefort’s most important idea was to define democracy as an ‘empty space’. Before the French Revolution, power was incarnated directly in the body of the King: l’Etat c’est moi, as Louis XIV famously put it. But now that the King’s head has been chopped off, no one can claim to fully incarnate the ‘people’. The desire to do so – whether Stalin or Hitler – is in fact a totalitarian one, and in doing so Lefort pointed out that totalitarianism is not a separate regime but a pathology of democracy itself. The same might be said of populism today, as Pierre Rosanvallon, professor at the Collège de France, explains in interview. Populists claim to truly incarnate the people, and fall into the same trap of wanting to occupy that ‘empty space’.
Human rights: Lefort also made a key intervention in debates surrounding human rights in the 1970s, as Samuel Moyn writes. Lefort criticized the ‘moralizing’ view of the ‘new philosophers’ such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, who took human rights to be abstract pre-political rights that should be used to measure how oppressive different regimes are. Instead, Lefort argued that rights are part of a political project of the constitution of society.
Untamed democracy: As Antoine Chollet points out, human rights are part of what Lefort called ‘démocratie sauvage’, which might be translated as ‘untamed democracy’. With his friend Cornelius Castoriadis, Lefort directed a review called Socialism or Barbarism, which worried about the bureaucratic threats to democracy. The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 led them to ask whether democracy and communism where compatible.
Lefort separated the bourgeois, tamed and ‘institutional’ aspect of democracy from its ‘untamed’ aspect, in which there is a continual and unpredictable struggle to defend and expand human rights. With Trump in the White House and Brexit in Europe, that call to reclaiming politics seems as relevant now as it was then...
In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti famously used the figure of the conductor to illustrate the difference between ruler and leader: while, for the orchestra, the conductor is a Herrscher who commands his orchestra, for the audience he is a charismatic Führer invested with authority. Introducing the current issue of Mittelweg 36, editors Christoph Michael and Grit Straßenberger pick up on Canetti’s metaphor as the basis for a discussion of the ambiguities of authority and political leadership.
see also
Claude Lefort (1924–2010) was one of the most important French political philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, part of a group that includes Raymond Aron, Francois Furet and a rising generation of thinkers (Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, Bernard Manin) who were to revolutionize how we think about democracy. Yet he remains little known to the public.Esprit has decided to change that by publishing a groundbreaking special issue dedicated to Lefort, entitled ‘L’inquiétude démocratique’.
Totalitarianism: Lefort’s most important idea was to define democracy as an ‘empty space’. Before the French Revolution, power was incarnated directly in the body of the King: l’Etat c’est moi, as Louis XIV famously put it. But now that the King’s head has been chopped off, no one can claim to fully incarnate the ‘people’. The desire to do so – whether Stalin or Hitler – is in fact a totalitarian one, and in doing so Lefort pointed out that totalitarianism is not a separate regime but a pathology of democracy itself. The same might be said of populism today, as Pierre Rosanvallon, professor at the Collège de France, explains in interview. Populists claim to truly incarnate the people, and fall into the same trap of wanting to occupy that ‘empty space’.
Human rights: Lefort also made a key intervention in debates surrounding human rights in the 1970s, as Samuel Moyn writes. Lefort criticized the ‘moralizing’ view of the ‘new philosophers’ such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, who took human rights to be abstract pre-political rights that should be used to measure how oppressive different regimes are. Instead, Lefort argued that rights are part of a political project of the constitution of society.
Untamed democracy: As Antoine Chollet points out, human rights are part of what Lefort called ‘démocratie sauvage’, which might be translated as ‘untamed democracy’. With his friend Cornelius Castoriadis, Lefort directed a review called Socialism or Barbarism, which worried about the bureaucratic threats to democracy. The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 led them to ask whether democracy and communism where compatible.
Lefort separated the bourgeois, tamed and ‘institutional’ aspect of democracy from its ‘untamed’ aspect, in which there is a continual and unpredictable struggle to defend and expand human rights. With Trump in the White House and Brexit in Europe, that call to reclaiming politics seems as relevant now as it was then...
In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti famously used the figure of the conductor to illustrate the difference between ruler and leader: while, for the orchestra, the conductor is a Herrscher who commands his orchestra, for the audience he is a charismatic Führer invested with authority. Introducing the current issue of Mittelweg 36, editors Christoph Michael and Grit Straßenberger pick up on Canetti’s metaphor as the basis for a discussion of the ambiguities of authority and political leadership.
In German politics,
with its centripetalism and conflict aversion, authority becomes centred on
charismatic leaders. When this charisma fails, ‘the danger arises that the
authority of the liberal democratic order itself is fundamentally questioned’.
While populist-left anti-authoritarianism overlooks the function of
institutions in enabling pluralism, rightwing populism sees pluralism as the
dilution of the ‘will of the people’ that is better articulated in
authoritarian form. The confusion of authority and authoritarianism by both
left and right is an ‘important reason for why liberal democracies and the
theory of political liberalism has so little with which to counter the populist
critique’.
1968: The argument that the anti-authoritarian
individualism of the ’68ers spawned a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ is only partly
accurate, argues historian Bernhard Dietz. As was pointed out at the time, the
management jargon of the 1970s, with its motivational psychology and talk of
the human being as ‘resource’, sought to re-legitimize the economic system
without challenging capitalism as such. However, the shift in management
culture began at least a decade earlier. For example, a study published by the
sociologist Heinz Hartmann in 1959, criticizing German management culture as
paternalistic, elitist and irrational, was on the mark when it came to heavy
industry, but overlooked processes of de-hierarchization and scientization
already underway in other sectors.
Epistemic
authority: The authority
of experts is not a problem for democracy as long as it is institutionally
coupled with processes of popular deliberation, argues Felix Wassermann. New,
mixed forms of consultation and deliberation can ‘contribute to making
democracy viable in the future – and perhaps to making it resistant to
populist, anti-consultative attacks’... read more:
see also
The
destructive origins of capitalism: The 'military revolution' in 16th century
Europe. Robert Kurz
