Politics, Economy, and Society. Paul Ricoeur
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party machinery, the false reality of ideologies unrelated to the real problems of the day, and the absurd proliferation and pretentious dogmatism of French political parties. Doubtless, two parties would be sufficient, on condition that they integrate many contradictions, resolved in concrete forms of governance, and that internally they encourage ongoing and open discussion. This is the essential condition for reinvigorating public opinion.
3. We then have to invent new ways for citizens to participate in power other than the election system and parliamentary representation. Here we can learn from the efforts in Yugoslavia, Poland, and other examples of producing new forms of representation for groups of workers and consumers. If a labor-based economy is in view which makes work the dominant economic category, only a political system in which workers would be represented as workers could make this labor-economy a civilization of workers. The task of inventing new forms of representation is perhaps to be combined with the reinvigoration of political parties; it is not simply a matter of defending democracy but of expanding it.
4. Finally, we have to, as people say, reinforce the authority of the State, but in a different way than is often stated. This would not be the primary task if reinforcing the authority of the State is taken to mean increasing the indirect power of several pressure groups over a weak State which, moreover, has not changed its centralized structure and relies on artificial parties, lacking substance, and without internal democracy. And yet this is what is commonly called reinforcing the authority of the State. Now, if this expression has a meaning, it signifies that civil power has authority over military power, over the police and the administration, that the decision-making power belongs to the executive and not to technocrats, that the executive is answerable only to popular representation and not to pressure groups, be they beet farmers or oil magnates.
This action is reasonable action and presumes that the State can be reasonable, that it is reasonable to the extent that it is the State, and that it can become ever more so.
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However, this reasonable task in view of a reasonable State does not exclude – but, quite the opposite, includes – a vigilance that never lets down its guard, directed against the ever-increasing threat of an unreasonable and violent State.
This vigilance takes several forms.
1. It is first of all a critical vigilance on the plane of reflection. Political philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Marx has never ceased returning to the theme of political perversions or alienations. But this vigilance wavers when political evil is believed to come from somewhere other than the political sphere, from the conflicts of classes or groups, and that having a good economy is sufficient for having a good political system. Constant reflection on the evils proper to the political, on the passions of power, is the soul of all political vigilance directed against the “abuse of power.”
2. But this vigilance must also take the form of an appeal and an awakening. It is sometimes necessary to appeal to the State on the basis of its founding values. Every State rests on an implicit or tacit consent, on a “pact” that seals a set of common beliefs, common ends, a common good (this is the “good” Saint Paul was speaking of when he said that the magistrate exercises constraint “for your good”). The State can and must be judged on the basis of the values that justify it. Thus, citizens can never be exempt by the State from serving these ideals, and have the duty to condemn actions incompatible with these ideals (exactions, we have to call them); protests against torture flow from this source. At the limit of protest, there is the possibility of illegal actions which have the value of testimony with respect to the “good” upon which the State itself is founded. These acts, in appearance harmful, are in reality very positive; they reaffirm and firm up the ethical foundation of the nation and of the State.
3. Finally, this vigilance has to take a properly political form and link together with the institutional reform we were speaking of earlier. Indeed, we have at one and the same time to reinforce the State and to limit its power: this is the most extreme practical consequence of our entire analysis. This means the following: in the period when we have to extend the competencies of the State in the economic and social arena and to move forward along the path of the socialist State, we have to take up once again the task of liberal politics, which has always consisted in two things: dividing power among various powers, and controlling the power of the executive by means of popular representation.
Dividing power means, in particular, ensuring the independence of judges which the political tends to subjugate. This is what Stalinism ran up against, because the tyrant could not have purged and liquidated his political enemies without the complicity and subservience of the power of the judiciary. But the division of power perhaps implies the invention of new powers which the liberal tradition has not known; I am thinking in particular of the necessity of guaranteeing, and even of establishing the independence of, cultural power, which in fact covers a vast domain, from the university (which has not yet found its appropriate place, between independence with respect to the executive and the anarchical freedom of competition) to the press (which currently has a choice solely between State support or capitalist support), passing by way of scientific research, publishing, and the fine arts. The socialist State, more than any other, requires this sort of separation of powers, by reason of the very economic concentration of power it exercises; more than any other, it needs the independence of judges, of the university, and of the press. If citizens have access to no sources of information other than those of the State, socialist power immediately veers toward tyranny; the same is true if scientific research and literary and artistic creation are not free.
However, power cannot be divided unless executive power is controlled. And here I want to recall how misleading is the dream of the withering away of the State, originating in anarchism and integrated into communism. To be sure, the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois State, its military and police forces, can wither away, but not the State as the power of organization and decision-making, as a monopoly of unconditional constraint. In any case, the State has to be reinforced before eventually withering away. And the problem is keeping it from subjugating people during the no doubt lengthy period in which it will still have to be reinforced. Now, the control of the State is the control by the citizens, by the workers, by the base. It is the movement of sovereignty from the bottom up, in opposition to the government’s movement from the top down, and this bottom-up movement has to be willed, managed, defended, and extended in opposition to the tendency of power to eliminate the forces out of which this bottom-up movement has come. This is the entire meaning of the liberal combat.
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I have said that there is not a Christian politics, but a politics of the Christian as a citizen. It must be said that there is a Christian style in politics.
This style consists in finding the just place of the political in life: elevated but not supreme. An elevated place, because the political is the primary education of the human species, through order and justice, but not the supreme place, because this violent pedagogy educates human beings in external freedom, but does not save them, does not free them radically from themselves, does not make them “happy,” in the sense of the Beatitudes.
This style consists as well in the seriousness of the engagement, without the fanaticism of faith. For the Christian knows that she is responsible for an institution that is God’s intention with respect to human history, but she knows that this institution falls prey to a vertigo of power, with a desire of divinization that clings to it, body and soul.
Finally, this style marks a vigilance that wards against sterile critique as well as against millennialist utopia.
A single intention animates this style: making the State possible, in accordance with its proper destination, in this precarious interval between the passions of individuals and the preaching of reciprocal love, which forgives and repays good for evil.
Notes
1 1 Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, tr. F. Filson (Eugene, OR: Wipf