Politics, Economy, and Society. Paul Ricoeur
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power, which is fundamentally irrational as a demonic force, is rationalized by the legal system expressed in the constitution and by the technical prowess expressed in administration.
3. A third sign of institutional progress lies in the organization of public discussion in modern societies. However perverted and subjugated it may be, public opinion is a new sort of reality, which has developed on the basis of a certain number of “political vocations” studied by Max Weber in the past. Militants, office holders, members of parties and unions, journalists, opinion and human relations experts, publicists, and journal editors are the administrators of a new reality, which is an institution in its own right and the organized form of public discussion. Perhaps we should reserve the word “democracy” to designate the degree of participation by citizens in power by means of organized discussion (rather than calling “democracy” the constitutional stage that follows the autocratic stage).
4. Finally, the appearance of large-scale planning represents the most recent form of the institution of the State. The reduction of chance to the benefit of forecasts and long-term projects presents in the economic and social sectors of the life of the community the same kind of rationality which had long since triumphed in other sectors. When the State assumed the monopoly of vengeance and constituted itself as the sole penal force of the community, it rationalized punishment: a table of penalties henceforth corresponds to a nomenclature of infractions. In the same way, the State has defined in a civil Code the different “roles,” their rights and their duties – the role of father, husband, heir, buyer, contracting party, and so on. This codification has rationalized and, in a sense, already set out the plan of social relations. The grand economic plans of the modern State are in line with this double rationalization of the “criminal” and the “civil” and belong to the same institutional spirit.
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I think we have to state all of this, if we are to give the slightest meaning to what is taking place before our eyes and to avoid an unlimited irrationalism, without bounds and without criteria.
But at the same time we state all this, we have also to say something else, which manifests the endless ambiguity of political reality. All growth in the institution is also a growth in power and in the threat of tyranny. The same phenomena that we have traced under the sign of rationality can also be viewed under the sign of the demonic.
Thus, simultaneously in Germany and in Russia, we have seen constitutions serving as alibis for tyranny. The modern tyrant does not abolish the Constitution, but finds in it the apparent forms and sometimes the legal means for his tyranny, playing with the delegation of powers, the plurality of offices, exceptional forms of legislation, and special powers. The central administration, branching into every aspect of the social body, in no way prevents political power from being completely insane at the top, as we saw during the dictatorship of Stalin. Quite the opposite, to the tyrant’s madness it offered the technical means of an organized and long-lasting oppression. Opinion technologies, moreover, deliver the public over to ideologies at once passionate in their themes and rational in their schematization; the parties become “machines,” where technological prowess in organization is equaled only by the spirit of abstraction driving their slogans, programs, and propaganda.
Finally, the great socialist plans provide the central power with the means of pressuring individuals in a way that no bourgeois State has managed to assemble. The monopoly of ownership of the means of production, the monopoly of employment, the monopoly of provisions, the monopoly of financial resources, and hence of the means of expression, scientific research, culture, art, thought – all these monopolies concentrated in the same hands make the modern State a considerable and formidable power. There is no point in thinking that the government of persons is in the process of being transformed into the administration of things, because all progress in the administration of things (and supposing that planning is a progress) is also progress in the governance of persons. The apportionment of the great financial costs of the Plan (investments and consumption, well-being and culture, etc.) represents a series of global decisions concerning the life of individuals and the meaning of their life: a plan is an ethics in action, and by this means, a manner of governing men and women.
All these threats are tendencies, as are the resources of reason, order, and justice that the State develops as the history of power unfolds. What makes the State a great enigma is that both tendencies are contemporaneous and together form the reality of power. The State is, in our midst, the unresolved contradiction of rationality and power.
Our Twofold Political Task
Before drawing some consequences for action on the basis of this double reading of political reality, is there a need to recall two essential rules?
First rule: it is not legitimate (nor even possible) to deduce a politics from a theology. For any political commitment is at the point of intersection of a religious or ethical conviction, of information of an essentially profane nature, of a situation that defines a limited number of available possibilities and means, and of a more or less risky option. It is not possible to eliminate from political action the tension arising out of the confrontation of these various factors. In particular, conviction which is not tempered by a reflection on the possible would lead to a demand for the impossible by demanding perfection: for if I am not perfect in everything, I am perfect in nothing. On the other hand, a logic of means, not tempered by a meditation on ends, would easily lead to cynicism. Purism and cynicism are the two extremes between which political action moves, wavering in its calculated culpability back and forth between the morality of all or nothing and the technique of realization.
Second rule: political engagement makes no sense for the Church but only for believers. This seems clear in principle, but it is not yet the case in fact: Churches are themselves cultural realities that weigh in the balance of power, and there still remains a more or less unacknowledged, residual, shameful politics of the Church. This is why the secularism of the State has not yet been realized: we are witnessing the death-throes of political and clerical Christianity, and this interminable agony is demoralizing for believers and unbelievers.
It is therefore in terms of the political responsibility of the Christian individual that we must now draw the conclusions of the preceding contradictory analysis.
If this analysis is correct, we have to say that we must at one and the same time improve the political institution in the sense of greater rationality and exercise vigilance against the abuse of power inherent in State power.
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What sort of institutional improvements are we particularly responsible for today?
1. It seems to me that, first of all, we have to continue constitutional evolution in a reasonable direction, one that takes into account the appearance of new nations in the geographical area controlled by the French State. The number one problem of French politics is transforming the centralized State, inherited from the monarchy and from the Jacobin Republic, into a federal State, capable of bringing together on an egalitarian basis the nations that have emerged within its borders; this invention of new structures would genuinely promote rationality, for it would consist in adapting constitutional reality to the historical, cultural, and human reality of the modern world. The alternative will be decisive: either we do this, and new ties will be made with peoples overseas, or else we do not do this, and these peoples will carve out their own destiny apart from us, even against us.
2. Next, we have to reinvigorate the life of political parties. We cannot say that the experience of multiple political parties is doomed, and that this pluralism simply reflects class divisions: we need a political instrument that will allow citizens to enter into discussion in order to shape and to formulate opinion. The existence of several parties would still be essential, even in a classless society, because it translates the fact that politics is not science, but opinion; there is only one science – and even this is not entirely true – but there are several opinions on questions concerning the direction of public policy. Thus, it is in the interest of democracy that the parties survive the death threats resulting from the weight of