ClaudeLefortonModernDemocracy

ClaudeLefortonModernDemocracy

byCarolC.Gould

Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:3+4/1990,pages:337345,onwww.ceeol.com.

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REVIEW ESSA Y

CLAUDE LEFORT ON MODERN DEMOCRACY

Carol

c.

Gould

Claude Lefort's Democracy and Political Theory is a translation of Essais sur le politique (xixe-xx e siecles) , a collection of previously published articles. 1 The essays are grouped under four headings: "On Modern Democracy"; "On Revolution"; "On Freedom"; and "On the Irreducible Element". Although the essays have the coherence of a single point of view, the first group presents the fundamentals of his approach to the theory of democracy and this will be the focus of my discussion here. It is appropriate to note at the outset what I take to be the strengths of Lefort's position and our areas of agreement, before proceeding to the criticism of his views. Perhaps the basic strength of Lefort's approach is his emphasis on democracy and on rights as central categories of a renewed political philosophy, rather than simply on questions of power or of class analysis. Likewise, he correctly rejects certain polarities that have characterized nineteenth- and twentieth-century political thought. Thus he repudiates (unsurprisingly) totalitarian, organic, or as I would say holist, modes of political and social organization, but he does not take recourse instead in an abstract individualism or what is called in the United States neoconservatism, and in France, neoliberalism. Further, Lefort rightly argues for a mediation rather than a contraposition of the individual and the social; and rejects the polar alternatives of an essentialist, or as he puts it, naturalist theory of human nature on the one hand and a relativist historicism on the other. In Lefort's account, democracy is understood by contrast with earlier forms of social and political life where society was taken as an organic totality and power was embodied and distinctively situated in the ruler or the "head" of state. Democracy represents "a political mutation of the symbolic order", or "a symbolic reconstitution of the social" , in which power has no canonical location and where legitimation of authority or the use of power is always in question. Democracy therefore is characterized by Lefort as involving conflict or division among competing interests or claims, whether of individuals or of groups and characteristically among political parties; and therefore, an ongoing contestation of prevailing authority which requires periodic elections of representatives. For Lefort, those rights and liberties that are characteristic of such a democracy have their origin in the very act of being asserted and claimed as rights, specifically in the French and American declarations of rights at the end of the eighteenth century. This notion of
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democracy as entailing the legitimation of conflict, periodic elections, rights, and liberties is intended to be seen in stark contrast not only with the earlier forms of polity as organic totality but also with modern totalitarian regimes. We may see from this that Lefort's conception of democracy is limited to the domain of the political and indeed even to the particular view of political democracy associated with American pluralist theory, for example, in the works of Schumpeter or the early Dahl. It is true that Lefort does not accept a simple identification of the political with government or the state. In fact, he proposes that democracy introduces a new "public space, which is always in gestation, and whose existence blurs the conventional boundaries between the political and the non-political" (p. 35). Nevertheless, Lefort distinguishes throughout between the political and the economic, as for example in his commendation of Hannah Arendt's distinction between these realms or in his discussion of human rights. And therefore, the idea of extending democracy beyond the political thus defined either does not occur to him or is rejected as introducing the dangers of totalitarianism. Likewise, although he talks of a "new democratic society" (p. 25), which presumably extends democracy to the social, the social is understood here in terms of the public as a whole. Thus he writes, "Politics can exist only in the presence of a space in which human beings recognize themselves as citizens, in which they situate one another within the limits of a common world ... " (p. 49). Lefort thus fails to see how democracy is relevant to economic life or to social institutions of smaller scale than the public as a whole. Specifically, Lefort seems to share with Arendt the idea that the economic is a mere sphere of needs to which democracy is irrelevant. But clearly there are common "worlds" (in his phrase), or what I would call common activities, within this economic sphere, for example, firms or companies, to which democratic modes of decision making would be appropriate, involving rights of participation for all who work in the firm. Likewise, in social life, there are situations where people pursue common activities with shared goals, whether institutionalized or not, to which democratic participation would be relevant. Arendt was wrong, I think, to limit the idea of a common world and of action among equals to politics and to exclude it from the economy, which is relegated to the private. Equality for her emerges only in public, that is, as the equality of citizens and not as fundamental human equality. But there is a strong and extended argument that could be given for such fundamental human equality. I have given a version of it in my book on democratic theory.2 On the basis of the equal agency of all individuals, I argue for a principle of equal positive freedom, that is, a prima facie equal right to the conditions of self-development. The normative consequences of such a principle of equality are a requirement of reciprocity in the private sphere understood as the domain of the personal; and a requirement for equal rights to participate in decision making not only in political and social life but also in common economic activity such as that engaged in by members of the same firm. More generally, I argue that whenever individuals engage in a common activity, their freedom requires an equal right to participate in decision making concerning the course of that activity. Further, the principle of equal

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positive freedom also requires some degree of equality in the distribution of the material and social conditions for self-development. It should be noted that here the distinction is not between the private as including both the personal and economic, and the public as the political and social, as it is for Arendt and seemingly for Lefort as well. Rather, I would define the private as the personal and the noninstitutionalized interpersonal - what we call private life in colloquial usage - and the public as including the political, the social, and the economic of various scope,where these typically involve institutionalized forms of common activity. Lefort would probably agree with the criticism made of Arendt here concerning equality, that is, on her limitation of it to equality among citizens rather than as fundamental human equality, though I am not sure on what basis he 'Nould justify this fundamental equality. However, he agrees with Arendt on the separation of the political and the economic, which he also seems to see as a division between the public space of politics and the private sphere. And while he is appropriately critical of Arendt's lack of interest in modern democracy interpreted as political democracy, he does not recognize that democratic modes of decision making are required within the economic sphere as well. It is clear that what Lefort fears is that the failure to separate these two spheres will lead to totaliarian domination of economic life by a state apparatus. But what he fails to see is that the spheres may be kept separate, as I propose they should be in my book, and yet hold that democracy is analogously required in each of these spheres. If we characterize Lefort's limitation of democracy exclusively to the political as a limitation of scope, we may also suggest that his view suffers from a limitation of form. Because he sees democracy as essentially constituted by conflict or division, he focuses almost exclusively on voting and elections among contesting parties as the paradigmatic form of democratic practice. Thus according to Lefort, in democracy "the exercise of power is subject to the procedures of periodical redistributions. It represents the outcome of a controlled contest with permanent rules. This phenomenon implies an institutionalization of conflict" (p. 17). What is overly narrow about this conception of democratic process is that it ignores the importance of democratic participation in decision making contexts other than voting in elections. Thus it fails to take into account the role of participation in discussion, the possibility of agreement by consensus, and voting in nonelectoral contexts, for example, on specific policies or procedures. These modes become important on a model of democracy which sees it as pervasive throughout the various contexts of social life and in which such participation itself is a condition for individual self-development. Such an alternative view does not denigrate the essential role of elections nor the absolute requirement of openness to contestation. Nor does it amount to a requirement for participatory democracy in all situations. Clearly, not everyone should participate in decisions about everything, and such participation includes representational forms and need not be participatory in every context. Nonetheless, the requirement for democracy cannot be captured simply by a model of elections and parties. Granted, Lefort does

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discuss the idea of a public space of discourse in politics in which legislation may constantly be put in question, but it remains unclear whether this bears on participation in decision making in specific situations. Indeed, Lefort's model of multi-party electoral politics is curiously reminiscent of American pluralist theories of democracy. In such theories, democracy is seen as essentially a way of maintaining equilibrium among groups with conflicting interests, by periodic elections in which elites representing these interests compete for power at the ballot box. There are many problems with this pluralist theory, not the least of which is that it reduces democracy to the instrumental function of maintaining political equilibrium and excludes such factors as common interests and participation. Turning now to Lefort's discussion of human rights: Lefort appropriately recognizes the importance of human rights for political theory and correctly, I think, gives a central role to civil liberties and political rights. However, he seems to feel it necessary to hold that such political freedoms and rights have priority over economic and social rights, (a position, we may observe, that is analogous to Rawls's notion of a similar lexical ordering). Here, again, Lefort appears to be moved by the specter of an orthodox Marxist emphasis on economic rights at the expense of political liberties and rights. One may sympathize with his rejection of this alternative one-sidedness, especially in view of the totalitarian consequences that such a position has engendered. But Lefort's subordination of all economic and social rights to the political is one-sided as well. On Lefort's view, liberties and political rights constitute what he calls political freedom, which he sees as required for democracy. But it seems clear that the major economic right to means of subsistence is equally required for democracy, since without means of subsistence human beings would not survive and hence could be neither free nor democratic. Without life nopolitics. That is to say, without a human right to security of one's person or without a human right to means of subsistence, there can be no democracy. This is not to say that subsistence rights are prior to civil and political rights or can replace them, but rather that neither by itself is sufficient for democracy and they are both jointly necessary. I would hold that these are both-basic human rights, but I see them as required not simply by democracy alone, but more fundamentally by the value of freedom. Indeed, democracy itself is an essential condition for this more fundamental value and is therefore justified by it. This seems to contrast with Lefort's strategy of taking democracy as a value in itself. On the view I propose, human rights are rights to the conditions of freedom and include both basic and non-basic rights. On this view, civil liberties and political rights on the one hand (that is, what has been called negative freedom) and rights to means of subsistence on the other are basic rights in as much as they are among the conditions for any human action whatever. Thus the difference I have with Lefort on the scope of human rights is that I believe we need both basic political and economic rights and that we needn't choose between them. There is one parenthetical remark to be made here concerning Lefort's treatment of Marx and especially of Marx's view of rights. This is an old issue. But Lefort's reading of Marx seems to be unfair to Marx's own view and to

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the text, though his criticisms surely do apply to the views of a significant number of Marxists. Lefort's Marx has no use for so-called bourgeois rights and sees them as manifestations of "bourgeois egotism" - this based mainly on Lefort's reading of Marx's essay "On the Jewish Question". But Marx's criticism of the political rights of freedom and equality is that they are abstract and are undermined by concrete inequalities and lack of freedom in social and economic life, ~nd thus that they are inadequate in themselves. In fact, the thrust of Marx's "On the Jewish Question" is to argue against Bruno Bauer, who rejected political emancipation as a false goal, that such political emancipation is a condition for human emancipation. This is further supported by Marx's analysis elsewhere, for example in the Grundrisse, to the effect that abstract freedom of the individual and abstract equality are necessary but not sufficient conditions for full human freedom. Marx's specific critique of rights and of "abstract morality" is that they are used as claims of universal freedom to mask real inequalities and domination in social and economic life. In view of my two previous comments about Lefort's conceptions of democracy and of rights, we may now briefly consider his attempt to overcome the polarity between the individual and the social. I would agree with his critique of totalitarianism with regard to its organicism and its presupposition of a radical interdependence of individuals. But if I understand Lefort correctly, I would differ with the alternative he proposes to this organicism or holism. The alternative is what Lefort calls division or conflict among competing voices in the public space, given what he calls "the dissolution of the markers of certainty" and the systemic ambiguity of the locus of power. But this division does not yet yield differentiated, concrete individuals with agency. Rather, individuals appear only in aggregation in interest groups or as isolated voices in the situations of conflict that for Lefort are paradigmatic of democracy; or they appear simply as numbers, as statistics, once loose of their previous social bonds, and therefore as an anonymous crowd or "das Man". Whatever individuation Lefort acknowledges is defined by, and is for the sake of, the model of democracy he proposes. This is clear also from his account of freedom as essentially political freedom which serves as the condition for democracy, rather than conversely as the freedom of the individual for which democracy is the condition. This latter view is the one I have argued for in my book, but it should be stressed that it is not a conception of freedom for isolated individuals but rather for what I have characterized as social individuals or individuals-in-relations. Likewise, I have trouble with Lefort's conception of the social. Because he construes the alternatives as organic, totalistic sociality on the one hand and division or political conflict on the other, there seems to be no space left for the important phenomenon of non-totalistic and non-conflictual common activity. Such common activity, I would hold, is defined by shared goals and joint or cooperative activity to realize such goals. Lefort seems unable to acknowledge this sort of common activity - which is usually on a smaller scale than the common or public interest of society as a whole - because he

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identifies the common interest or the public good with an overarching one which opens the way to social domination and political control ostensibly in the interests of society as a whole. But assuredly there are many such cases of non-totalistic and non-conflictual social activity, for example, in the contexts of work, education, and voluntary associations, where there are shared goals to varying degrees and cooperative activity to realize them. Where in the present such activities are not yet marked by democratic participation in decision making or where the goals are not yet freely determined though jointly pursued, I would argue that there is a normative requirement grounded in the equal freedom of agents for such democratization. We now turn to what probably is the most central philosophical issue in Lefort's argument and in his rethinking the political. This is his claim for epistemological uncertainty as the essential condition for democracy. Related to this is his rejection of naturalism - or what we call essentialism - in the conception of human nature, on the one hand, and of historicism, on the other. To summarize Lefort's complex view very briefly as I understand it: Wc need to rethink the political for our own time, recognizing the new character of modern democracy (as against classical views) and against the background of twentieth century totalitarianism. Its fundamental character is that it introduces a new public space in which there is no locus of power and which is essentially conflictual. What power there is is distributed by regular elections. Legitimacy is always open to question; or as Lefort puts it, "[M]odern democracy invites us to replace the notion of a regime governed by laws, of a legitimate power, by the notion of a regime founded upon the legitimacy of a debate as to what is legitimate and what is illegitimate - a debate which is necessarily without any guarantee and without any end" (p. 39). For him, this debate and this new public space replaces any doctrine of natural rights as constitutive of democracy; and was initiated by the American and French declarations of rights at the end of the eighteenth century. The condition for this ongoing debate accordingto Lefort is in his phrase "the dissolution of the markers of certainty" (p. 19), the recognition of a "fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law, and knowledge" (p. 19). There are some crucial questions I would like to raise concerning Lefort's view. What exactly is the force of this "uncertainty" or "indeterminacy" which he alleges to be at the root of democracy? If it means no more than lack of dogmatism and tolerance for alternative views, a fallibilistic attitude which admits the possibility of being wrong in one's cherished views, then there is nothing very striking or interesting in Lefort's claim. This is simply liberal open-mindedness and one could wholeheartedly agree without difficulty. If the dissolution of the markers of certainty means no more than that the old sources of authority, truth, and power - for example, God, the church, the prince, the party no longer command epistemic or political obedience - that is true but it is hardly a new observation. Obviously, Lefort means something more. He must mean that we cannot know what is right or what is true or what is just, and that any claim to such knowledge is suspect and incipiently totalitarian in its import. On this side of

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the Atlantic too, the preoccupation with postmodernism and the loss of the old privileged access to truth is a familiar theme (all too familiar), but I don't think Lefort is simply an epistemological sceptic. Rather, his claim, like Merleau-Ponty's, is for the indeterminate nature and the ambiguity of our knowledge. But it seems to me unclear why this should support democracy. It could just as well support something else. For example, one way of putting legitimacy in question is simply to opt out of the political altogether, to withdraw in the face of uncertainty and cultivate one's garden, leaving the public space to the public-minded. Another alternative response to uncertainty is more dire, but not unknown. Out of a certain kind of historicism and relativism, with an emphasis on history and contingency and a critique of certainty, there arose the view that what was required was a resoluteness of the will. I am obviously suggesting the direction that Heidegger took, where listening to the call of being and openness led to support for the unification of the will of the people and its embodiment in a leader, namely, full-blown totalitarianism. Clearly, this is just the opposite direction from that which Lefort sees as following from the condition of uncertainty and I surely am not accusing Lefort of following Heidegger's direction here. Rather my question is whether the uncertainty has any more of a relation to democracy than it has to this quite opposite mode. Thus there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to think that the dissolution of the markers of certainty would lead to debate or to a public space or to democracy. Lefort is very explicit in rejecting on the one hand what he calls naturalism, that is, a view of some basic human nature as the ground of rights and the basis of democracy, e.g. that human beings are by nature free and equal and have inalienable rights; and on the other hand historicism, namely, the view that different political forms have their equal validity as historical phenomena and that political values are historically relative. His stance against naturalism is quite clear but it is not obvious how he can avoid historicism. This is not to say that he thinks that alternative political forms are equally valid in their respective historical contexts. He is obviously for democracy and not for totalitarianism, and presumably not simply because he lives in a liberal, democratic society. But the question is on what grounds he can favor democracy, given that he has rejected the traditional grounds. Sometimes he sounds outrightly historicist as if he is simply reporting on the new public space and its features, as a historical phenomenon, or as the appropriate one of its time. But there seems to be no normative argument other than a clear preference for democracy and for the human rights which happen to have been established, whether in the originary act of constituting the new symbolic order or in the achievements of later democratic practice. Further, as I suggested earlier, the systemic uncertainty which is the condition for the democratic debate leaves it open as to what values and what rights will happen to be legitimated or delegitimated, as majorities shift historically. But since all of these views are no more and no less intrinsically legitimate than the others that vie with them, why isn't this as classic a case of historicism as one may wish?

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Lefort's answer seems to be that there is a will to truth, "the experience of a 'primal ability' to discriminate between truth and falsity, the just and the unjust, good and evil ... a need to judge and be judged, an experience that attests to a universal intention" (pp. 5-6). Granting such a universal intention without accusing Lefort of being naturalist or transcendental about it, there is no way of determining where this intention will lead us, given the condition of uncertainty, since the specific decisions or choices under uncertainty, for example, concerning the existence of rights, may not only be various but contradictory as well. It is true that, on Lefort's view, this universal intention in the face of uncertainty serves as a motive to preserve the public space against its debasement, since it presumably may always give rise to a questioning of any established opinion. But there are two issues that come up then. The first is why people should enter into the public space of democratic debate at all unless there is a common interest that it serves. But of course, if there is, then this already mediates the categorical division and conflict that Lefort takes to be definitive of democracy and would suggest a different conception than the one he presents. Second, and most crucial, how can a debate defined only in terms of an abstract principle of difference support and protect human rights? Why wouldn't it be possible to democratically deny that there are rights that an individual or a group of individuals has, since on this view the very fact of having these rights has no other ground than the decision to acknowledge them. And in fact Lefort seems to accept this. There would therefore seem to be no normative ground on which to object to the violation of rights, though there remains the presupposition that such an objection may be forthcoming in the debate, simply on the grounds that for any position taken it is possible to argue an opposing position. This is indeed a thin reed on which to rest the support of basic human rights, since such rights would be subject to the political fashions of the moment. Lefort does not want to acknowledge this kind of relativism of rights; yet at the same time he does not want to accord a natural status to these rights either. It seems to me that we can avoid the polarity without the ahistorical essentialism of a natural rights view, but yet with a stronger support for rights than the ultimately historicist view that Lefort appears to end up with. My own view is that rights are grounded in the recognition of the fact of human freedom as the basic character of human being. Very briefly, I have argued that agency or the capacity for free choice is what marks human beings as human and that the exercise of this agency is a process of self-development through social interaction, and requires freedom from constraint and access to objective conditions, both material and social. Further, I have proposed that individuals have prima facie equally valid claims, that is to say, equal rights to the conditions of self-development. Thus human rights are understood as necessary conditions for freedom conceived as self-development. I have suggested that an approach in terms of what I have called social ontology is needed in order to provide a non-relativistic argument for human rights, and yet one which is not essentialist, since it does not posit any fixed conception of human nature or any fixed mode of self-development other

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than what is chosen by the agents themselves under the constraint of the equal positive freedom of all other agents. My argument for democracy likewise is that it is a fundamental social condition for freedom understood as self-development; more specifically, that participation in decision making about the common activities in which one engages, whether political, economic, or social, is required as such a condition. Rather than a value in itself or ungrounded as simply a politicalhistorical fact, the value of democracy thus derives from that of freedom as the fundamental value. While I agree with Lefort about the importance of democracy, for him it seems based on the uncertainty which therefore denies power to any authority, whereas on my view it is based on the requirements of freedom. The common interest that such freedom generates is an interest in providing, among other things, the political structures that will support the rights that individuals require for the exercise of their agency, in both individual and common activity. The centrality of the freedom of individuals in this view provides a normative basis for assuring their human rights against majorities in a constitutional framework within which decision making by majorities can rightfully proceed. It seems to me that Lefort's account does not offer such normative support for the rights that both of us agree need to be protected.
NOTES 1. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), first published as Essais sur le politique (xixe-xx e siecles) (Paris: Seuil, 1986). Quotations from this work in the text will be indicated by reference to page numbers in parentheses at the end of the quotation. 2. Carol C. Gould, Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics, Economy, and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), see especially chapter 1.