THE TOCQUEVILLE REVIEW LA REVUE TOCQUEVILLE THE TOCQUEVILLE REVIEW LA REVUE TOCQUEVILLE publiée par les Presses de l’Université de Toronto pour La Société Tocqueville avec le concours de l’American University of et de l’Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Economiques

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THE TOCQUEVILLE REVIEW LA REVUE TOCQUEVILLE VOL. XXXVII No. 2 – 2016

CONTENTS

From the “Passion for Equality” to the Struggle Against Inequalities: Realities and Representations 7 Françoise MÉLONIO, and Stephen W. SAWYER – Introduction. Investigating inequalities: A new Tocqueville

13 Michel FORSÉ, Simon LANGLOIS, and Maxime PARODI – Contrasting sentiments of social justice in France and

35 Patrick SAVIDAN – Inégalités et domination: une nouvelle complication démocratique

57 Thomas PIKETTY looks back on the success of Capital in the 21st Century

77 Catherine AUDARD – L’Etat-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » : une comparaison entre Meade, Rawls, Ackerman et Piketty

103 Stuart WHITE – Republicanism and property-owning : How are they connected? Tocquevilliana 127 Elie BARANETS – Guerre et paix : l’héritage méconnu de Tocqueville Tocqueville, America, and Us 153 Marcel GAUCHET – Tocqueville, America, and Us. Preface written in 2016

159 Jacob HAMBURGER – Tocqueville, America, and Us. Avant-propos

163 Marcel GAUCHET – Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies

232 Contributors

From the “Passion for Equality” to the Struggle Against Inequalities: Realities and Representations

The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol. XXXVII, n° 2 – 2016

INTRODUCTION INVESTIGATING INEQUALITIES: A NEW TOCQUEVILLE

Françoise MÉLONIO, and Stephen W. SAWYER

On February 5, 2016 we held the first jointly organized symposium by the American University of Paris and The Tocqueville Review. It has grown naturally out of the shared mission of an international university and The Tocqueville Society, which has had the association of Europe and United States as one of its fundamental traits. Great audacities generally make for short careers. But for more than fifty years the American University of Paris, founded in 1962, has offered higher education to students from all over the world. In the tradition of American “liberal arts colleges,” the university is today recognized internationally as an institution that educates citizens of the world through interdisciplinary and intercultural education. The Center for Critical Democracy, established with the support of the Mellon Foundation at AUP, seeks to contribute to this education of the world's citizens by promoting research and teaching on critical issues faced by our democratic societies and states in the past and today. The CCDS's partnership with The Tocqueville Society and its review are at the heart of this mission. Another audacious endeavor which has proven to last, The Tocqueville Society and The Tocqueville Review are seventeen years younger than the American University of Paris. The first issue in 1979, which included an article by , established the ambition of the review to explore democracy and its characteristics. The project has been marked by its bilingualism and its

8 Françoise Mélonio, and Stephen W. Sawyer interdisciplinarity since. Bilingualism was already a risky bet in a scientific world where English has tended to become the dominant language. But the founders of the journal were convinced that the democratic phenomenon could not be understood without recourse to comparativism and, of course, one does not come to terms with similar problems in the same way in different languages. As for interdisciplinarity, we are inundated with its praises while its actual pursuit seems systematically challenged: rankings, classifications, career management, habits of language and thought have made it difficult to practice in spite of the constant ambitions to do so. And yet, the journal has been transmitted from generation to generation and from continent to continent, under the presidencies of Ted Caplow, David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Henri Mendras, and Olivier Zunz. A very active editorial committee, several of whom have prepared this symposium, such as Catherine Audard, Michel Forsé, Arthur Goldhammer, Alan Kahan, Simon Langlois and Jennifer Merchant, not to mention Laurence Duboys Fresney who has literally carried the journal since the presidency of Henri Mendras and played a major role in the organization of this symposium. The colloquium presented in this issue is entitled: “From the ‘Passion for Equality’ to the Struggles Against Inequalities: Realities and Representations.” It is faithful to the spirit of the journal and the Center for Critical Democracy Studies in its ambition to clarify the present through the past, its trans-Atlantic comparisons, interdisciplinarity, and exploration of the relationship between practices and representations. Coming to terms with the present through the past applies to interpretations of Tocqueville’s work itself as much as the problem of inequality. We are all widely familiar with a reading of Tocqueville that takes as its point of departure a reflection on the passion for equality and the risk of liberticidal government. Such an interpretation is, of course, undeniably present in portions of Tocqueville’s work. It has played a considerable role in the reflection on democracy since the 1970s and in Tocqueville’s resurgence in the decades that followed. But, as the following papers clearly show, such a reading of Tocqueville does not exhaust the question of equality in Tocqueville, far from it. For there is also the question of inequality and the discussion of how, in what ways, and under what conditions it can be remedied. Tocqueville was far from a monochromatic thinker, who Investigating inequalities: A new Tocqueville 9 repeated the same theses without nuance or qualification. It would be impossible to erect him as a theorist with a permanent fear of any intervention by public authorities to tackle problems such as inequality. Let us give merely one example of such modalities of public intervention, which he recognized. Tocqueville, who was fascinated by the American selectmen, did not promote a withered . While he was a fervent critic of a centralized administration, he also praised French public officials, state regulation of transport or education, and even state intervention in times of crisis, including crises of economic inequality. His American investigations pushed him to think in new ways about the relationship between elected and public officials or between elected officials and experts. The notes to his chapter on administration in Democracy in America reveal a kind of fascination with the effective regulation of daily life in New England. “Observe the Town Officer,” remarked Tocqueville, adding the extraordinary display of administrators in the smallest county including “Select men, Assessors, Collectors, Schools, Surveyors of highways.” Amidst this list of administrators, what struck Tocqueville, was not their incapacity to act, but their extraordinary penetration into everyday American life: “law descends into the most minute details,” noted Tocqueville, “it determines both the principles and the means of their application ; it encloses the secondary bodies and their administrators in a multitude of obligations tightly and rigorously defined.”1 He then provided a series of examples: “the State forbids traveling on Sundays without motive… the selectmen authorize the construction of sewers, designate places for building slaughterhouses, and where it is acceptable to build certain types of commerce that may be harmful for the neighborhood.”2 The selectmen shared commonalities with local French councilmen in their connection with the local population, and their electoral base. In Normandy, Tocqueville thus pursued projects in the fashion of the American selectmen: President of the General Council of the Manche, he wrote reports on orphans, railways, the breeding of horses, forage, and stabilizing river banks. All of these things that, from the point of view of the of thought, one might judge a waste of time, but which were quite the opposite: it was here that he practiced the theory found throughout his work. That is, here he showed the importance of the concrete modes of interventionist 10 Françoise Mélonio, and Stephen W. Sawyer administration in the interest of managing specific social problems. The Tocquevillian nightmare of an overwhelming state administration that transformed society into a vast barracks, was in this sense only a portion of the Tocquevillian project on government. It was accompanied by a parallel reflection on what kind of effective public intervention was possible. In particular, there was an interest in the question of inequality and the best ways of remedying it in a country in the process of democratization. The following articles thus push us more toward a recognition of how things have changed rather than stayed the same. And in this sense, they are part of an investigation which obliges us to discover this other Tocqueville: less the critic of the centralizing administration than the one who opened the question – without necessarily reaching a solution – of how to think democracy and administrative power together instead of in opposition. As the critique of centralized administration has become so generalized in recent decades that it seems that we can only find a call for public authority and state power in the darkest realms of our , the administrative critique of democracy has become the old regime of our unequal world. It would seem that Tocqueville’s practical interest in a democratic administration is more urgent than ever. This “new” Tocqueville ties together the passion for equality and the extension of the middle classes, but he also offers tools to understand our common experience in Europe and the United States marked by the rise of inequalities and the perils of a new oligarchy. Tocqueville certainly dreaded the emergence of an industrial oligarchy and was indignant under the Second Empire of the influence of a new industrial and banking ruling class. In the same way, the old regime showed that it was in the richest regions that the revolution took hold, for the passion for equality was increased by the very progress of equality. The growth of inequalities today seems to be accompanied by conservatism or at least a discouragement to act. The following papers also show how the issue of equality can be embraced by diverse disciplines. The economy of inequalities cannot do without the contribution of a study of representations. How to deal with taxation without taking into account fiscal consent? There is hardly anyone in France today who finds it morally gratifying to pay his or her public “contributions,” which many now simply refer to as Investigating inequalities: A new Tocqueville 11 a “tax.” This may be because until 1914 it was considered unnecessary to introduce a tax on income since the Revolution’s promise of equality and universal suffrage were supposed to resolve conflicts and limit inequalities. These inequalities are shown to be felt more widely in France even though they are less extreme than in other comparable countries, no doubt as a partial result of the revolutionary legacy. That the imaginaries of equality do not map directly onto their actual measure must not hide from view that imaginaries are also realities, with major social consequences, since representations are also social facts. Tocqueville’s thought and the global vision of democracy he proposes, or to be more precise his anthropology of the practice of power and the democratic individual, remains peculiarly relevant. Like Balzac, he attributes to the democratic individual an anxiety inseparable from the volatility of fortunes. In a democracy the rich aspire to become richer and all work for a salary, even the President of the United States and public officials (though the aristocratic ethos is still alive through work which is solely remunerated symbolically). Tocqueville therefore considered self-development, the demand for autonomy, and the construction of a capacity to solve problems as a community to be characteristic of democracy. While he remained attached to the model of notables, he recognized the need to confront the problem of durable inequalities and to remedy them in their specificity. He considered the desire for distinction, not the collective preference for inequality; he sought to understand and confront concrete problems of inequality, not the construction of a centralized administration that could only foster formal and abstract notions of equality. The articles that follow show how the shadow of the past allows us to think about the specificity of our moment and confront these problems. They also reveal the necessity of developing new tools and interpretations for coming to terms with them.

NOTES [1] De la démocratie… [La Pléiade], 80. [2] Ibid., 79n.

The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol. XXXVII, n° 2 – 2016

CONTRASTING SENTIMENTS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE IN FRANCE AND QUEBEC

Michel FORSÉ, Simon LANGLOIS, and Maxime PARODI*

Sociologists from many countries have recently paid attention to measures of social justice sentiments. In doing so, they are following the lead of philosophers like John Rawls (1971) or Michael Walzer (1983), among many others, and are now studying the question of justice empirically. Do individuals evaluate justice from the perspective of equity (or fairness) like Rawls proposed? Do they conceptualize different spheres of justice like Walzer argued? Only empirical studies can provide answers to these questions and offer “grounded knowledge”1 (Boudon 2012) that is knowledge that connects philosophical concepts with the actions and thoughts of social actors, at least in contemporary democratic societies. Thus, as Michel Forsé and Maxime Parodi (2005) have shown – with survey data – social actors give priority to the just over the good. From this perspective, the analysis of sentiments of social justice is justified as a complement to the works on social inequalities and poverty, measured objectively (Gini coefficients, poverty rates, etc.) or subjectively (sentiments and perceptions of inequalities). The sentiment of justice defines the normative frame of reference by which social actors elaborate the social representations of inequalities. Are these inequalities at the societal level accepted and considered just or, on the contrary, are they contested and challenged? It is not sufficient to analyze only the determinant factors of inequalities (such as age, social position, gender, etc.), or the context (period, cohort, generation, etc.) to understand the representations and judgments that individuals make. One must also analyze the sentiments of justice

14 Michel Forsé, Simon Langlois, and Maxime Parodi that allow social inequalities to be considered normal, justified, and legitimate, or their very opposites. This contribution will study the relationship between the sentiment of social justice and the representations of inequalities. We shall ask ourselves, of course, whether the perception of inequalities is in relation with the objective inequalities and, if so, what role does reality and perception play on the sentiment of justice. Since inequalities are part of everyday living, we shall first examine how justice is generally perceived in society. This is what we will refer to as macro-justice. But we shall also examine micro-justice that is the sentiment of justice felt by an individual in relation to his own situation. We shall ask ourselves what relationship exists between the subjective sentiment of being personally treated justly or unjustly (as it pertains to income), and one’s judgment of society as a whole. In order to do this, it is important to recognize that while social representations of poverty and inequalities have been studied extensively, investigations on subjective judgments of social justice have barely scratched the surface of the topic. It is for this specific reason that a French research group created the Survey of subjective inequality and sentiments of justice (SSISJ) in June 2009 with a representative sample (n = 1711) of the French population (Forsé and Galland 2011; Forsé, Galland, Guibet-Lafaye and Parodi 2013).2 A recent research group in Quebec also ran a similar survey that included a number of identical questions. The Survey of the social representations of inequalities and poverty (SSRIP) was conducted in April 2013 with a representative sample of the Quebec population (n = 2727).3 As it is always the case with this type of comparison, the results from these two surveys will allow us to differentiate between a singular from a general characteristic. From this point of view, given that France and Quebec have, as we know, many similar cultural and economic elements, it should come as no surprise that the results between both surveys were also quite similar. There are certainly differences but they are rarely extremely important or, at the very least, they do not prevent the majority of survey respondents from having similar orientations. There is, however, one crucial exception. While the majority of the French population consider their society as “rather unjust” (59%), a stronger majority of the Quebec population (70%) consider their society to be “rather just” (Table 1). How can Contrasting sentiments of social justice in France and Quebec 15 one explain such a disparity between two very comparable societies? 4 Their relation to objective inequalities notwithstanding, what role does perception of inequalities play in these divergent sentiments of justice? Table 1 – Macro-justice sentiments in France and Quebec … rather just … rather unjust France is a society … 41 % 59 % Quebec is a society … 70 % 30 % Source: SSISJ and SSRIP.

1. SIMILAR EFFECTS OF SOCIO-DEMOGRAPHIC CATEGORIES In both cases, social-demographic categories tend to have similar opinions and judgments. In France, just as in Quebec, women have a stronger tendency than men to see society as unjust. This tendency is also stronger in the lower classes (blue collar workers and employees), as it is among those who have a low level of education or a low income. This applies to those who report having difficulties in making ends meet. Also, globally speaking, the more one is unsatisfied with one’s life the more one considers society unjust. Among the typical socio-demographic categories, only age has a slightly different effect. In France, it is firstly within the 50–59 age category (and then the young) that we observed the most opposition to the idea that society is just, while in Quebec it was individuals aged between 18 and 35 years of age; whereas a greater proportion of the 50 to 59 age category actually considered society to be just compared to the global average. Without a doubt, the student movement that took place in 2012 against the university tuition hike, one year before the data collection for the Quebec survey, influenced the results. That year, Quebec experienced a long student strike that will be known forever as the “Maple Spring”.5 The strike actually became a social movement that attracted support and sympathy outside of the university circle. Many social demonstrations—some quite violent— that took place in this period certainly captured the imagination of the youth, regardless of their allegiance in this matter. The Quebec government eventually abolished their initial proposal to raise university tuition—thus maintaining the lowest tuition fees in Canada. This social movement certainly increased Quebec youth’s awareness of the politics of university tuition. 16 Michel Forsé, Simon Langlois, and Maxime Parodi

It is noteworthy that in Quebec the disparity of the observed averages between the different socio-demographic categories does not lead to an inversion of the majority. As an illustration, while the working class is the harshest when judging their macro-justice, the majority still see Quebec as a just society. While in France the disparity in the averages can be so wide that it may overturn the opinion of the majority. For instance, in the case of socio- professional categories, among executive managers, the majority of them (55%), as opposed to the French majority, consider their society to be fairly just. All in all, in relative terms, the same categories basically manifest the same tendencies. However, in absolute terms, the judgments diverge between both societies, except when, such as in the last example, this leads in France to an inversion of the majority and therefore closer to the Quebec averages. This is the case for the higher education categories (undergraduate degree or higher)—liberal professions, executive managers and higher intellectual professions, freelancers, and the highest income category (more than a €3000 net monthly income)—or immigrants (with either one or both parents born in foreign countries). That being said, while more than 50% of those in the categories just mentioned believe French society to be rather just, the average in all those categories never reach the 70% level observed in Quebec’s population (except for manufacturers and wholesalers). The explanation of the divergence between France and Quebec does not lie in the difference of opinions in the usual socio- demographic categories because they are rather similar in both societies. There is, however, in Quebec, an exception that leads to the inversion of the majority. Even though the same is not observed in France, the fact deserves to be examined as it is rather substantial. The language chosen by individual respondents (English or French) to answer the questionnaire allows us to distinguish between Anglophones and Francophones. While the latter is more likely to consider their society to be just (75%) than the societal average (70%), the majority of Anglophones (58%) considers it rather unjust (that is, only 42% of them consider it just). Two main reasons explain the macro-justice discontent of Anglophones. A wide majority of Contrasting sentiments of social justice in France and Quebec 17

Anglophones in the province do not appreciate the language laws voted by the government because they restrict their individual liberties (liberty of advertising, liberty for immigrants to choose the language of their children’s education, etc.). Moreover, the Quebec survey was actually carried out shortly after a proposal was presented to the provincial legislature to reinforce the language laws, a political move that undoubtedly stirred up old animosities. This second reason concerns the difficulties of living in a society of French tradition. Thus, on a scale of life satisfaction (1 to 10), Anglophones scored lower (6.43) than Francophones (6.98). We also observed that Anglophones declared slightly lower incomes and many of them declared having difficulties making ends meet even though they generally had a better education. The convergence of both observations suggests that the Anglophone population is younger than the Francophone one, and that is exactly what we observed: the 18 to 35-year-old category Francophones count for only 26% while Anglophones count for 41%. As we have seen, the younger categories are the most sensitive to social injustices, also, since there are many students in the Anglophone population, the student movement we mentioned earlier definitely served to reinforce their sentiment of injustice.

2. THE ROLE OF MICRO-JUSTICE That being said, other aspects, this time comparable, have an influence on one’s perception of macro-justice, and we can ask ourselves whether they can better explain the main divergence that we observed between the two societies. Let us first examine micro- justice, which refers to how individuals feel about being justly or unjustly remunerated. The questions were not formulated identically in both surveys, but we observe the same effect. In France, those who reported earning less than what they considered just (68%) also considered society to be unjust, and vice versa. In Quebec, those who considered that their earnings corresponded wholly or partially to their competence tended to perceive society as being more just, while the opposite was observed for those who do not believe that their salary reflected their true value as an employee. This also holds true for those who claim that their salary is slightly or not at all appropriate (41%), while those who consider it very or slightly so are more susceptible to see their society as just. Contrary to what is 18 Michel Forsé, Simon Langlois, and Maxime Parodi observed in France, in Quebec this does not lead to an inversion of the majority since the majority (54%) of those that consider themselves to be justly remunerated consider society just. However, in France, we remain again far below the Quebec score (70 %), including when respondents say that their income is very or quite fair, since in that case 77 % consider the Quebec society just. A log-linear model with the following three variables, country, micro-justice and macro-justice, demonstrates that the third order interaction is not significant while all second order interactions are indeed significant (Table 2). This means that the relation between micro- and macro-justice does not vary between both countries, it is of similar intensity in France and in Quebec. The difference between the two societies does not appear to stem from there; it comes most probably from the margins which vary significantly between both societies in terms of both micro- and macro-justice. There are more dissatisfied individuals with their salary in France (68%) than in Quebec (41%) and, given the strong and identical relation between micro- and macro-justice, a more severe judgment is reserved for macro-justice in France (59%) than in Quebec (30%). However, the model does show that the disparity between these two proportions is such that this rationale does not explain everything. How might we account for this strong discrepancy in the appreciation of justice regarding one’s own salary? From an objective standpoint, according to OECD data, in 2013, the average annual income in France (US$40,530) was lower than in Canada (US$47,794). The average income in Quebec is difficult to evaluate on the same basis, but, according to Statistics Canada (from corporate data submitted to Canada Revenue Agency), it should be inferior to the national average by about 10.35%, therefore approximately US$43,311. Thus the average income in France was 6% lower than in Quebec. Certainly, we must not draw hasty conclusions according to their gross disparity since it does not take into account local contexts of transfers and redistribution, etc. That being said, it is on the whole understandable that a greater proportion of the French population complain about their income levels. The relation between self- declared income and the sentiment of micro-injustice did prove itself to be valid in both surveys.

Contrasting sentiments of social justice in France and Quebec 19

Table 2: Summary of the log-linear analysis of the relationship between micro-justice, macro-justice and society (France/Quebec)

Stepsa Effects Chi- df Sig. Number of squarec iterations 0 Generating classb Macro*micro*society 0.000 0 Deleted effect 1 Macro*micro*society 0.485 1 0.486 4

b 1 Generating class Macro*micro, macro* 0.485 1 0.486 Society, micro*society Deleted effect 1 Macro*micro* 113.174 1 0.000 2 2 Macro*society 261.371 1 0.000 2 3 Micro*society 176.970 1 0.000 2 2 Final modelb Macro*micro Macro*society 0.485 1 0.486d Micro*society a. At each step, the effect with the largest significance level for the Likelihood Ratio Change is deleted, provided the significance level is larger than .05. b. Statistics are displayed for the best model at each step after step 0. c. For 'Deleted Effect', this is the change in the Chi-Square after the effect is deleted from the model. d. This number also assesses the goodness-of-fit of the model. Here, the gap with the data is not significant. Source: SSISJ and SSRIP.

A subjective finding goes in the same direction. There is a 7 point variation—65% in France and 58% in Quebec—in the proportion of respondents who declared having occasional or frequent budget difficulties at the end of the month. Of course, in both societies, those that are in this situation tend to perceive their society and their income as unjust. However, the effect of an insufficient income on the macro-justice sentiment is about of the same intensity in France and in Quebec. Once again, we have not observed a significant difference in this regard. However, since there are more dissatisfied people with their budget in France, it is reasonable to find greater dissatisfaction as to the sentiment of macro-justice. 3. AUTO-EVALUATION AND SOCIAL MOBILITY In this same perspective of subjective appreciation, we can suppose that the social position in which one evaluates one’s self has consequences on one’s sentiment of micro- and macro-justice, since each time these questions are asked in surveys, this self-position is 20 Michel Forsé, Simon Langlois, and Maxime Parodi correlated either with the level of income or subjective social positions (itself being in relation to one’s objective socio-professional category), of which we have already seen its effect on the sentiment of social justice. In both surveys, the respondents were asked to position themselves on a ten-point status scale from 1 to 10 (10 being the highest). They were also asked where they positioned themselves on the same scale ten years earlier. Globally, we observed that people in Quebec positioned themselves a little higher (5.4) than in France (4.7) and that the comparison with their score from ten years earlier demonstrated a very low intra-generational mobility. The average difference between the two scores ten years apart is actually negative in France (-0.3) while it is nearly zero in Quebec. While these averages differ significantly between both countries, their effects on micro- and macro-justice are similar. The more people rated themselves higher on the status scale or the more they declared an important upward mobility, the more they tended to consider not only society but also their own income as just. This relation with self-reported status is in phase with the effect of income noted above (the higher it is the stronger the tendency to evaluate society as just). Table 3 shows that those who considered society or their income as unjust had on average experienced a downward mobility and rated themselves lower on the status scale than ten years prior. The diagnostic is the same when, instead of absolute mobility, we examine relative mobility, which is the average reported mobility of a category in relation to the global average. Technically, this relative mobility is equal to the residuals in a linear regression of the actual status position by the one from ten years ago. A positive number signifies a stronger mobility than the average while a negative signifies a less than average mobility. We can suppose that this can cause some frustration. In any case it has the same effects in France as it has in Quebec, which are the two societies that have been observed for absolute mobility. These effects are simply more apparent than they were for absolute mobility. If we accept an interpretation in terms of relative frustration, it is clear that the deeper the frustration, the more one will judge society or its remuneration as unjust. All these effects relating to the self-reported status, absolute and relative mobility on macro- and micro-justice are significant (according to analyses of variance) in France and in Quebec. By considering relative mobility, we observed that its impact is not Contrasting sentiments of social justice in France and Quebec 21 significantly different in France and in Quebec as it pertains to macro-justice (p = 0.76), but it is significant as it pertains to micro- justice (p = 0.02). And in this case, it is slightly more pronounced in Quebec.

Table 3: The effects of self-reported status, subjective intragenerational mobility both absolute and relative, and sentiments of micro- and macro-justice in France and Quebec Absolute Relative Autoposition mobility mobility France Average Average Average Personal income Just 5.21 +0.12 +0.45 Unjust 4.47 -0.47 -0.24 Society Just 5.02 -0.03 +0.29 Unjust 4.5 -0.45 -0.21

Absolute Relative Autoposition Mobility mobility Quebec Average Average Average Personal income Just 5.88 +0.37 +0.44 Unjust 4.73 -0.23 -0.48 Society Just 5.58 +0.12 +0.16 Unjust 4.88 -0.18 -0.38 Source: SSISJ and SSRIP.

4. THE IMPACT OF INEQUALITIES From what has been analyzed so far, one feels that the sentiments of justice are related to inequalities, but they are not a mere replica of those inequalities. The inequalities in this particular case are, of course, perceived or subjective inequalities. While these subjective inequalities have a relation with their objective counterpart, they are not its mere reflection of them. They are often underestimated especially in the recent past where there has been a substantial rise in high incomes, which, in turn, has increased income inequality; a phenomenon that has not been fully understood by the general public (Forsé and Parodi 2011). In general, it appears that mid and low incomes are relatively well known, in fact the higher the incomes are, the more they are underestimated. Therefore, on the whole, inequality tends to be underestimated, and it appears to be even more so as the 22 Michel Forsé, Simon Langlois, and Maxime Parodi disparity between low and high incomes becomes wider. From an objective point of view, let us now look at a few key indicators to compare France and Quebec – while keeping in mind the latter’s relationship to Canada.

4.1 Indicators of inequality in France, Quebec, and Canada The Gini coefficient, when applied to disposable income after tax and transfers, is higher in Canada than in France (0.315 against 0.309 in 2011 according to the OECD), but it is systematically lower in Quebec than in the rest of Canada since 1990 according to a recent study by Simon Langlois and Mathieu Lizotte (2014) as well as a study by the Centre d’étude sur la pauvreté et l’exclusion (CEPE 2014). The CEPE (2014, table 21) estimated the Gini coefficient after tax and adjusted it to the size of the family unit. On this basis, in 2011, the Gini coefficient was at 0.313 in Canada, 0.291 in Quebec and 0.308 in France. Income inequality is thus lower in Quebec than in France, but also lower than in the rest of Canada. Concerning this comparison with Canada, Stéphane Crespo and Sylvie Rheault (2014, p. 7) noted that “after a slight decrease between 1976 and 1990, income inequality increased significantly from 1990 on, but stabilized in the 2000s. In the last three decades, [disposable income] inequality was lower in Quebec than in the rest of Canada.” In fact, within the Canadian Federation, Quebec has the best beneficial fiscal and redistributive policies than any other province, but it is at the cost of a higher income tax rate. It is true that all these Gini estimations are not very different, but as far as the French and Quebec comparison goes there is a major difference when we consider the evolution of inequalities between 2000 and 2011 (see Graph 1). In France, the coefficient was rather stable until 2007 (0.293), after which it rose to 0.309 in 2011 (according to OECD data)—or 0.308 for French income when adjusted in the manner as the Quebec CEPE estimates. Both measures for France come from different sources, but the second estimate allows a direct comparison to the situation in Quebec. In Quebec, however, the same measure of inequality was marked by a relative stability during the same period (0.294 in 2000, 0.293 in 2010 and 0.291 in 2011). Overall, while the level of income inequality was not as high in France as in Quebec until 2007, their paths crossed in 2008, and it is now higher in France. Contrasting sentiments of social justice in France and Quebec 23

Graph 1: The evolution of individual disposable income inequality (adjusted by family unit) in France and in Quebec

Source: data from CEPE 2014; graph by authors.

As for the poverty rate, the proportion of the population below 50% of the median income is clearly higher in Canada than in France (0.112 against 0.072 according to OECD 2006); however, the poverty rate (according to various measures) is lower in Quebec than in Canada. Quebec implemented various policies to fight against poverty in 2005 and it is a known fact that various fiscal and redistributive policies have been quite successful to alleviate poverty. It should be emphasized that the poverty rate in Canada as well as in Quebec has been on a structural decline over the past thirty years, although this decline has slowed down since the financial crises of 2008—a crisis that has not affected Canada as much as other developed countries. That being said, the CEPE (2014, table 9) study allows us to directly compare the poverty rates between France and Quebec. The poverty rate of individuals whose income was below 60% of the adjusted median after tax was lower in France (13.3%) than in Quebec (15.2%) and in Canada (18.3%).6 According to the OECD harmonized definition, the unemployment rate has been higher in France than in Canada since 24 Michel Forsé, Simon Langlois, and Maxime Parodi

1993. The unemployment rate is slightly higher in Quebec than in Canada, although it is clearly lower than in France. Thus, in 2008, when the unemployment rate in France was at 7.4%, the lowest according to the harmonized estimates of the OECD, it was 7.2% in Quebec and 6.1% in Canada. Following the global financial crisis of 2008, unemployment rate increased everywhere, but the increase was much more substantial in France. In 2012, the rate was at 9.8% in France, 7.7% in Quebec and 7.3% in Canada. While the rate tends to decline in Quebec and in Canada since 2010, it continues to rise in France up until today. The higher rates of unemployment in France compared to those in both Canada and Quebec is mostly due to their poor economic performance that strongly affects the 15-24 and 55-64 age categories. Overall, the problem of unemployment is more prominent in France than in Quebec. The long-term unemployment rate illustrates this clearly: in France, this rate reached 40.4% in 2012 (it was 37.4% in 2008), while in Canada and Quebec the rate was at 12.7% and 12.2% respectively for the same period. To conclude this objective overview of inequality and economic conditions let us briefly look at the global standard of living as measured by the GDP per capita. Despite fluctuations, the situation has remained rather stable over the years. According to the IMF, in 2013, the GDP per capita (in purchasing power parity) was US$43,253 in Canada, US$39,813 in France and, according to Statistics Canada, US$35,552 in Quebec. If we limit our analysis to the comparison of France and Quebec, we observe that France is in a better situation regarding the standard of living or poverty, however, it is worse off when it comes to income inequality and especially unemployment. In light of these findings, a major difference between France and Quebec appears. The different objective indicators examined show that the long-term tendencies have evolved rather positively in Quebec—despite the slowing down of these trends since 2008— while they have evolved rather negatively in France, particularly with respect to unemployment. Without a doubt, this worsening of the labour market—that tends to increase income inequality—is one of the main reasons why sentiments of micro- and macro-injustice are stronger in France. In fact, many surveys have already documented Contrasting sentiments of social justice in France and Quebec 25 how unemployment is a key economic concern amongst the French population (for example see Bigot et al. 2014, p. 79).

4.2 The perception of inequalities Among a list of twelve possible types of inequalities in the SSISJ survey it was those concerning economic matters that were considered to be crucial in the French society. In this ranking of preoccupations, income inequality was the first concern, living and working conditions the second, and finally concerns relating to employment and job security (precariousness). Even so, economic inequalities are not those that are considered the most unacceptable. It was found that inequalities relating to social identity, such as those relating to sexual orientation, ethnic origin and age for instance, were judged to be clearly inappropriate. Furthermore, the sentiment of macro-social injustice proved itself to be strongly tied to the perception of income inequality and high unemployment. This correlation also applied to micro-justice, but it was not as strong (although it remained highly significant according to ANOVA analyses). The more the French people attach particular importance to economic inequalities, the more they tend to consider not only their society, but also their own remuneration as unjust. Despite these undeniable correlations, it appears that the various perceptions of inequalities cannot be explained in the same way as they are towards injustice. While the latter relate to socio- demographic categories (workers, employees, etc.) as we have already discussed, the perception of extreme economic inequalities is actually the result of a consensus that transcends those categories (Galland and Lemel 2013). There were no notable effects relating to socio- professional categories, to the level of income or to education. Other studies have shown that this is also the case in many other countries. Unfortunately, the comparison with the Quebec survey is not possible since no direct questions were asked on the perceptions of inequalities. Nevertheless, in the Quebec survey it is possible to analyze questions that can be seen as indirect measures of inequality perceptions that are comparable to the French survey. Such is the case for the following question: “should the differences between high and low incomes be reduced in Quebec / in France?” Respondents 26 Michel Forsé, Simon Langlois, and Maxime Parodi were asked to answer according to what they considered “ideal or just” from the following choices: “wholly agree”, “rather agree”, “rather disagree” and “wholly disagree”. While the responses have a normative dimension, it is plausible that the higher one assesses the level of inequalities, the more one will wish to reduce them. The assumption being that perceptions of the level of inequalities can be measured indirectly through this question and can actually be compared to the French survey since it has a direct question on the perceptions of the level of inequalities. An analysis of variance shows without any ambiguity (F=33.92, df=3, p<0.0001) that the more one believes income inequality to be high, the more one believes it should be reduced. It is thus reasonable to believe that this relationship also applies in Quebec. We then observed a substantive difference between France and Quebec. Those who agree (wholly agree or rather agree) to reduce income inequalities represent 75% of the population in Quebec and 89% of the population in France. Such a disparity cannot be explained by a simple sampling error. We can safely conclude that the French perceived higher levels of inequalities in their society than did the Quebecers. Yet this perception is not without relation to the sentiment of macro-justice since in both societies this relation is of comparable strength and statistical significance (see Table 4). In France as in Quebec, those who believe it is necessary to reduce inequalities judge their society to be unjust and vice versa. A log- linear model confirms the interaction between the three following variables (country/society, the opinion on the reduction of inequalities and the sentiment of macro-justice) is not significant (p=0.295), while all combinations of second order interactions were significant. Since the strength of the relation between the perceptions of inequalities and the sentiment of injustice is the same in both societies, the Atlantic disparity in these sentiments is probably due to the fact that the Quebec population see their society as more equal, and this in turn leads to a lesser sentiment of injustice. Of course, this sentiment of injustice is not solely explained by the disparity of income; and this is also why it is not a simple replica of economic inequality. It could be due to a level of poverty that is considered too high. From this point of view, respondents were asked in France and in Quebec if one’s basic needs (housing, food, clothing, health and education) were met in each society. The respondents Contrasting sentiments of social justice in France and Quebec 27 were asked to answer these questions according to the same four- point scale as previously. Once again, the answers were quite different: 51% of the Quebec population think that their basic needs are met against only 31% in the French population. One must be aware that this does not correspond to the objective situation, as the poverty rate is higher in Quebec. Nonetheless, this perception is strongly and significantly correlated to the sentiment of injustice. In France as in Quebec, the more people estimate that their basic needs as unmet, the more they consider society unjust (see Table 5). A log- linear model shows again that the interaction between “country”, “basic necessities” and “sentiment of macro-justice” is not significant (p = 0.127), while all the second order interactions are. Thus it is not the intensity of the relationship between the perception of absolute poverty and the sentiment of injustice that varies between both societies. The disparity between these sentiments arises rather from a perception that poverty is lesser in Quebec than in France, which then leads to a less intense sentiment of injustice. A third question can serve to approximate the perception of inequalities. The respondents were asked to assess whether or not the inequalities in their own country were higher than in other developed countries. The responses were done on the same four-point scale than the previous two questions. Half of the French population (49%) did not agree, as did a sizeable majority for the Quebec population (58%). When people think that there is more income inequality in one’s society than in other comparable societies, they are inclined to consider one’s society as unjust. However, this relationship is significant in Quebec but not in France (see Table 6). A log-linear model shows this time that the interaction between the three variables (comparative inequality, the sentiment of macro-justice and country/society) is significant. The relation between the perception of comparative inequality and the sentiment of injustice is significantly more important in Quebec than in France. But it goes in the direction of an inequality less strongly felt and thus results in a sentiment of more justice rather than less. The frame of reference is nonetheless not the same. The Quebecers compare their level of inequality much more to the situation in the United States than do the French.

28 Michel Forsé, Simon Langlois, and Maxime Parodi

Table 4: The association between opinions on macro-justice and the belief that income inequality should be reduced

Income inequality should be reduced Average French society is … Rather just 1.76 Rather unjust 1.53 (F = 35.11, df = 1, p<0.0001)

Quebec society is … Rather just 2.05 Rather unjust 1.85 (F = 30.42, df = 1, p<0.0001) Source: SSISJ and SSRIP.

Table 5: The relation between opinions on macro-justice and the sentiment that one’s basic necessities are met in France and in Quebec

Satisfaction with one’s basic necessities Average French society is … Rather just 2.74 Rather unjust 3.11 (F = 60.77, df = 1, p<0.0001)

Quebec society is … Rather just 2.37 Rather unjust 2.76 (F = 121.21, df = 1, p<0.0001) Source: SSISJ and SSRIP.

Contrasting sentiments of social justice in France and Quebec 29

Table 6: Relation between the opinion of macro-justice and the sentiment of a difference of income inequality with other developed countries, in France and in Quebec Income inequality in my country is higher than in other developed countries Average French society is … Rather just 2.54 Rather unjust 2.49 (F = 1.37, df = 1, p<0.24)

Quebec society is … Rather just 2.65 Rather unjust 2.41 (F = 58.85, df = 1, p<0.0001) Source: SSISJ and SSRIP.

Based on this premise, it should be noted that Canada (and Quebec) is a country with a social-democratic orientation. Unlike the United States, Canada has implemented a great number of programmes such as public health care, pension plan, social assistance, etc. Canada is clearly different from the United States regarding state intervention in the field of fiscal policies and the redistribution of income—these differences have notably been documented in Seymour Lipset’s Continental Divide (1990). Canada has also developed an equalization payment system that redistributes parts of the national wealth from the richer provinces to the poorer provinces—a system that contributes to reducing inequalities between the vast regions of the country. Moreover, within Canada, Quebec is known to be even more in favour of state interventions with programmes such as affordable daycare centres. Without a doubt, these various measures have an impact on the sentiment of macro- justice in Quebec, notably when the Quebecers compare themselves to the United States. It is therefore not surprising that there is less pessimism in Quebec than in France regarding social inequalities. The French are clearly more concerned than are the Quebecers about the evolution of inequalities in the next five years (see Table 7). In fact, 42% of the French population expect that inequalities will strongly increase as 30 Michel Forsé, Simon Langlois, and Maxime Parodi opposed to 27% of the Quebec population. Furthermore, Quebecers are only slightly preoccupied with income inequality as 43 % anticipate a slight increase against 32% of the French population. Yet, the highly significant relationship between this question and that of macro-justice is identical in France and in Quebec (once again, in a log-linear model with the three following variables, “society”, “macro-justice” and “pessimism”, all of the second order interactions are significant and the third order interaction are not, p = 17%). In France as in Quebec, it is thought that society is just when income inequality is remains stable or experiences a slight increase. It is only when people anticipate a strong increase in income inequality that they tend to consider society as unjust. The very pessimistic do not have the same opinion as others, be it in France or in Quebec, but they are more in number in France. Other surveys have already demonstrated, such as the Dynegal survey in France, that there is a strong correlation between past or present judgments of inequalities and future judgments. As a result, people tend to see the future as it seemed to be in the past and as they perceive it to be today. This theory is coherent with why the level of inequalities are perceived as lower in Quebec than in France, and also explains why the Quebec population is more satisfied with the current state of social justice than the French population.

Table 7: In the next five years, do you believe that income inequality will...

In France In Quebec % % … strongly increase 41.7 27.0 … slightly increase 32.0 42.5 … remain stable 19.5 24.9 … slightly decrease 5.6 4.5 … strongly decrease 1.1 1.1 Total 100 100 Source: SSISJ and SSRIP.

Contrasting sentiments of social justice in France and Quebec 31

CONCLUSION These surveys have not only allowed us to measure the perceptions of inequalities, but we have also become aware of a relationship between these perceptions and the sentiment of macro- injustice. This relation is of the same intensity in France and in Quebec, however, since income inequality and poverty are perceived as greater in France, it follows that they arouse a stronger sentiment of injustice. The same reasoning applies to micro-justice and its relation to macro-justice. This relation is significant in both societies and at the same degree of intensity. In both cases, those who feel that they are unjustly remunerated tend to consider their society unjust. However, since there is a greater proportion of people in France who are dissatisfied with their income, there is consequently a greater sentiment of macro-injustice. It should be noted that the average income in France is lower than in Quebec. It was found that the same principle applies to status (as self- reported) and subjective intra-generational mobility either absolute or relative. The more one positions oneself lower on a ten-point status scale or the more one reports a low upward mobility (absolute or relative), the more one sees his society as unjust. Curiously this significant relationship between the three variables and the sentiment of macro-justice is as strong in France as it is in Quebec. The reason lies in the fact that the French population positions itself significantly lower than the Quebec population and reports less upward mobility that they tend to consider their society unjust. Moreover, the same socio-demographic categories in both populations, namely the most disadvantaged, tend to consider their society as unjust. The global context of economic wealth does not intervene in the expected way. The standard of living (as measured by the GDP per capital in purchasing power parity), being higher in France than in Quebec, we might have expected that this would cause a greater sentiment of injustice in Quebec. Yet, we actually observed the opposite. The same applies to the poverty rate. However, we must emphasize that income inequality (as measured by the Gini index) increased in the 2000s in France (even more so after the 2008 crisis), while this is not the case in Quebec, at least until 2011 (latest available data in the studies cited above). This is without a doubt one of the 32 Michel Forsé, Simon Langlois, and Maxime Parodi reasons that explains why perceptions of inequalities are less important in Quebec. Finally, it is unemployment that appears to be the key contextual factor to understand the divergence observed between France and Quebec. In Quebec unemployment decreased to relatively minor levels, to the point that it probably was not a determining factor in Quebecers’ appraisal of societal justice in 2013. On the contrary, in France the continued decline of the employment rate that has lasted many years – and continues to this day – definitely affected the morale of many households as the employment issue is their most important socio-economic concern. Accordingly, the difficult employment situation is an important reason why the French population tends to cast a negative judgment on the state of social justice in their society. While the various perceptions do not perfectly or exactly match the objective indicators (such is the case with poverty in this study), they lead nonetheless to an appreciation of the global state of the situation and the tendencies of inequalities, which are not disconnected from reality.

NOTES

[1] Our translation of « savoirs fondés ». [2] This is our translation of the Perception des inégalités et les sentiments de justice (PISJ) survey. [3] This is our translation of the Représentations sociales des inégalités et de la pauvreté (RSIP) survey. [4] It should be noted that the question of whether society is just or unjust was not asked in the same order in both surveys. In the Quebec survey, this is the first question that was asked while it is one of the last in the French survey. Also, in France, this question is asked annually in the DREES survey as the opening question (more details on this web site: http://www.drees.sante.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/synthese_bva2009.pdf). This allows us to test whether or not the question order has any effect on the response. This effect is actually minor and shows that the French tend to be more severe when the question is asked as the first question. It appears that when the question is preceded by a summary of social ills, the French usually put the term injustice in perspective. In short, as it Contrasting sentiments of social justice in France and Quebec 33

concerns our present study, the question order effect tends to minimize the difference in the judgement of social injustice between the populations of France and Quebec. [5] This is the translation that was often used by the Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest Anglophone newspaper, to refer to the “Printemps érable”. The name itself is a variation of the “Arab Spring”, the term used to refer to the wave of revolutionary demonstrations that took place in several Muslim countries starting in the late 2010. [6] Excluding Quebec, the federal average is higher at 19.5%.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bigot R. et al., 2014, Premiers résultats début 2014 de l’enquête Conditions de vie et aspirations des Français, Paris, CREDOC. Boudon R., 2012, Croire et savoir. Penser le politique, le moral et le religieux, Paris, PUF. CEPE, 2014, La pauvreté, les inégalités et l’exclusion au Québec : État de situation 2013, Québec, Centre d’étude sur la pauvreté et l’exclusion. Crespo S., Rheault S., 2014, “L’inégalité du revenu des ménages au Québec et dans le reste du Canada : bilan de 35 années,” Données sociodémographiques en bref, Institut de la Statistique du Québec, volume 19, numéro 1. Forsé M., Galland O., Guibet Lafaye C., Parodi M., 2013, L’égalité, une passion française ?, Paris, Armand Colin. Forsé M., Galland O. (dir.), 2011, Les Français face aux inégalités et à la justice sociale, Paris, Armand Colin. Forsé M., Parodi M., 2011, “La perception des inégalités en France depuis dix ans,” La Revue de l’OFCE, Presses de , n° 118, 5-32. Forsé M., Parodi M., 2005, The Priority of Justice. Elements for a Sociology of Moral Choices, Bern, Peter Lang. Galland O., Lemel Y., 2013, “La perception des inégalités en France. Essai d’explication,” Revue européenne des sciences sociales, Vol. 51, n° 1, 179-211. Langlois S., Lizotte M., 2014, “L’indice de Palma, nouvelle mesure des inégalités au Québec et au Canada,” Revue Vie Economique, vol. 6, no. 1, 15-21. Lipset S. M., 1990, Continental Divide. The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada, New York, Routledge. Rawls J., 1971, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Walzer M., 1983, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, New York, Basic Books.

34 Michel Forsé, Simon Langlois, and Maxime Parodi

ABSTRACT

Quebecers see their society as being more just than that of the French. This finding cannot be explained by the relations – which might have been different in each of these two societies – between the micro- and macro- justice, nor by a different effect of self-positioning or subjective mobility on the sentiment of justice in society. These relations are similar in both societies. However, the French position themselves much lower than the Quebecers, they have less confidence in their chances for upward mobility and are much more pessimistic. Unemployment, which is much higher in France, is without a doubt one element that influences these judgments.

* * *

* The authors wish to thank the Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation of the Institut de France and Quebec’s Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture (FRSC) for their financial support as well as David Gaudreault, a master’s student at the Department of sociology of Laval University, for his help in the preparation of the Quebec data. We would also like to thank Mathieu Lizotte for the English translation and Jeanne Valois for the final revision of the text.

The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol. XXXVII, n° 2 – 2016

INÉGALITÉS ET DOMINATION : UNE NOUVELLE COMPLICATION DÉMOCRATIQUE

Patrick SAVIDAN

Au cours de ces dernières années, il a été beaucoup question de la remarquable capacité des plus riches à faire face à la crise. Dans un contexte économique et financier très dégradé, avec une augmentation de la précarité et des inégalités qu’il n’est pas besoin de documenter tant le phénomène est de notoriété publique, les plus riches ont vu leur nombre croître et leurs fortunes s’étendre. Le classement Forbes des fortunes indiquait ainsi que le nombre total des milliardaires avait franchi un seuil historique en 2011, alors que dans la plupart des pays développés la croissance était encore en berne1. Thomas Piketty a établi de manière décisive qu’au vu des tendances observées au long du XXe siècle, nous avons tout lieu de croire que les inégalités pourraient revenir au XXIe siècle à des niveaux au moins équivalents à ceux du XIXe siècle et du début du XXe siècle. Ce type de constat s’accompagne de multiples études consacrées aux « rémunérations obscènes2 » des plus privilégiés. Une vaste littérature s’est développée pour dévoiler l’étendue du phénomène, les visages et les modes de vie qui y sont attachés. Dans le même temps, et de manière plus marquée depuis la crise de 2008, la situation des classes moyennes et défavorisées s’est nettement dégradée. C'est inédit depuis les années 1970 : de cette époque jusqu’en 1983-1984, les inégalités de revenus (après impôts et prestations sociales) ont en effet diminué (rapport interdécile : de 4,6 à 3,4). De 1985 à 2008, elles se sont maintenues approximativement au même niveau. Depuis 2008, elles sont reparties à la hausse. Depuis 2008, 60% des Français ont vu leur niveau de vie plus ou moins diminuer. Plus on descend dans l’échelle des niveaux de vie et

36 Patrick Savidan plus la baisse est nette : –6,3% (–541 euros) pour le premier décile ; –3,3% environ pour les 2 déciles suivants (entre –481 et –420 euros) ; –2,2% pour celui du dessus (–371 euros). En 2002, les 10% les plus riches avaient un revenu 6 fois supérieur aux 10% les plus pauvres. En 2012, cet écart relatif s’est creusé : 7,2 fois plus. En valeur absolue : l’écart relatif est passé de 42 780 à 49 371 euros. Et la situation, du fait de la progression du chômage, s’est sans doute encore dégradée. D’autres méthodes de mesure confirment ce constat : en s’appuyant sur l’indice Gini, on voit que les inégalités ont nettement diminué entre 1970 et la fin des années 1980. Depuis elles sont reparties à la hausse, pour retrouver à peu près le niveau qui était le leur au début des années 1970. Les conséquences ne sont pas seulement d’ordre économique. Il n’est pas simplement question de revenus et de patrimoines, mais aussi de pouvoir. Cette ouverture de la focale à partir de laquelle appréhender la situation d’ensemble a donné prise à tout un ensemble de préoccupations plus directement politiques, se rassemblant autour d’une interrogation : où va la démocratie ? Tocqueville s’inquiétait, dans les dernières pages de La démocratie en Amérique de voir surgir au-dessus des hommes, du cœur même de la démocratie, un nouveau despotisme, celui d’un État devenu tout puissant, « un pouvoir immense et tutélaire » au-dessus des citoyens qui se chargerait « seul d’assurer leur jouissance et de veiller sur leur sort ». « Absolu, détaillé, régulier, prévoyant et doux », il fixerait les hommes dans l’enfance. Selon toute évidence, les sociétés démocratiques contemporaines n’emprunteraient pas ce chemin-là. Pour de nombreux analystes et observateurs, elle prendrait plutôt celui de l’oligarchie. Il existe bien des manières de distinguer les différentes formes d’organisation du pouvoir politique – Montesquieu pour sa part proposait de considérer l’état de la séparation des pouvoirs dans l’État pour les caractériser – mais il semble bien que ce soit, dans le contexte présent, la typologie des anciens qui retienne surtout l’attention, et en particulier cette notion d’oligarchie : il s’agit, à travers elle, de dénoncer la concentration des pouvoirs et leur confiscation au bénéfice d’un petit nombre3.

Inégalités et domination 37

DE L’OLIGARCHIE EN AMÉRIQUE Assistons-nous au retour des oligarchies ? Pour répondre positivement, il faudrait établir l’existence d’une nette corrélation entre le niveau des inégalités et l’orientation des politiques publiques. Aux États-Unis, et pour ce pays, Martin Gilens (Princeton) a mené ce type de recherches, dont il a consigné certains des résultats les plus frappants dans un ouvrage très remarqué qui ne laisse planer aucune ambiguïté : les riches gouvernent4 ! Ce qu’il démontre de manière éloquente, c’est que, depuis plusieurs décennies, les politiques publiques dans ce pays prennent principalement en compte les préférences des plus privilégiés. On voit ainsi très bien comment ces politiques ont pu dès lors renforcer ces inégalités, en un mouvement qui tend à s’alimenter lui- même. La méthode mise en œuvre par ce chercheur est assez simple : il a pris un bon millier de politiques publiques et s’est intéressé aux ancrages sociaux de ceux qui y adhèrent. Ce qu’il observe est assez net : quand les préférences des milieux les plus défavorisés et des classes moyennes divergent de celles des classes privilégiées, elles ne sont absolument pas prises en compte. En revanche, les désirs et préférences des plus aisés sont systématiquement pris en charge par les politiques publiques. Dans la mesure où les préférences du public, aussi imparfaites soient-elles, sont manifestement suffisamment raisonnables pour constituer le fondement d’une politique démocratique, le fait que la « démocratie » américaine soit à ce point indifférente aux préférences du plus grand nombre pose un sérieux problème. Martin Gilens n’a pas œuvré seul à cette entreprise de dévoilement. L’inquiétude est aux États-Unis si vive que l’Association de science politique américaine a mis en place au début des années 2000 une « task force » dont l’objectif affiché était de « rassembler ce que les politologues et autres chercheurs en sciences sociales savent des façons dont les évolutions récentes des inégalités affectent la participation et la gouvernance démocratiques aux États-Unis et d’envisager la manière dont les modes de participation et les politiques influent sur les différentes dimensions de l’inégalité »5. 38 Patrick Savidan

Dans un tel contexte, on peut aisément comprendre le succès qu’y remporta le livre de Thomas Piketty – bien préparé par les travaux qu’il avait déjà menés avec Emmanuel Saez sur l’évolution des inégalités aux États-Unis6. Nous avions De la démocratie en Amérique, nous aurions maintenant également De l’oligarchie en Amérique. Le prix Nobel d’économie Robert Solow, dans un retentissant article publié en avril 2014, a apporté un soutien très net aux thèses de Thomas Piketty. Il a aussi été très clair sur l’alternative qui s’offre à nous : puisque la part du revenu national qui va au travail correspond arithmétiquement aux salaires réels divisés par la productivité du travail, que préférons-nous : vivre dans une société où les salaires réels augmentent mais où la part du revenu national revenant au travail diminue (en raison de l’augmentation de la productivité) ou bien dans une société où l’on maintient la part du revenu national réservée aux revenus réels (en contenant la part des revenus revenant au capital) en s’exposant au risque de les voir stagner, et avec eux la productivité ? Pour Solow, on peut avoir des raisons économiques de privilégier le premier terme de l’alternative, mais il faut comprendre le risque politique réel que cela fait courir à la société : celui de voir se former une oligarchie qui, de plus en plus puissante, pourrait accroître sa domination sur le plus grand nombre. Il écrit : « Si une petite classe de propriétaires de la richesse – et elle est peu nombreuse – en vient à s’approprier une part croissante du revenu national, il est probable qu’elle exercera sa domination sur la société dans d’autres domaines également7. » Rousseau nous avait déjà alerté sur le problème, lui qui, dans son Projet de constitution pour la Corse, nous alertait contre l’illégitimité de la puissance civile lorsqu’elle est exercée par les riches : « Partout où les richesses dominent » écrivait-il, « la puissance apparente est dans les mains des magistrats et la puissance réelle est dans celle des riches. Dans un tel gouvernement tout marche au gré des passions des hommes, rien ne tend au but de l’institution8. » Inégalités et domination 39

Rousseau avait déjà compris que le pouvoir économique se mue immédiatement en pouvoir politique et que le pouvoir politique ainsi indexé sur le pouvoir économique renforce également ce dernier. Telle est la raison pour laquelle la dynamique que permet de mesurer le travail de Piketty et que Solow renomme la « rich-get-richer dynamic » doit être enrayée. « Si la concentration de la richesse continue de croître au XXIe siècle, la perspective est peu réjouissante, à moins d’aimer l’oligarchie » écrit Robert Solow. Le problème est bien l’intense concentration du capital, ainsi que sa pérennité. Mais comment expliquer que le pouvoir économique et politique du plus petit nombre se maintienne, voire qu’il se renforce ? Constater qu’une classe cherche à promouvoir les intérêts de ses membres et du groupe lui-même, c’est une chose. Mais cela ne suffit pas à établir qu’il existe un lien de causalité direct entre les préférences des plus riches et les politiques décidées, votées, mises plus ou moins en œuvre. Que font ceux dont les intérêts ne sont nullement pris en compte par ces politiques ? Comment expliquer cette domination du plus petit nombre ? On peut me répondre que cette domination passe par la maîtrise de l’agenda politique et le recours à des outils symboliques, idéologiques, dans un long travail de propagande. Mais que vaut-elle ? Cette solution, qu’implique-t-elle surtout ? Que les gens, dans leur immense majorité, se font plus ou moins manipuler, qu’ils n’ont pas une vision adéquate de leurs intérêts ? Qu’on les oblige à adhérer à des tendances sociales et à des politiques qui desservent leurs intérêts propres, qu’ils n’ont pas – pour telles ou telles raisons : absence de sens critique, ignorance, abrutissement idéologique, aveuglement – la capacité à voir la nature véritable du problème, ni a fortiori celle de s’en extraire ? Derrière cette forme de servitude volontaire, il y aurait une sorte d’apathie populaire, totalement incompréhensible et désolante, étant donné l’ampleur des injustices et des dégâts sociaux dont pâtit le plus grand nombre. On brandira à cette occasion l’idée de conditionnement mental et politique, en désignant éventuellement la jeunesse comme cible rêvée, 40 Patrick Savidan décervelée, seulement scotchée à ses écrans divers et variés, ou l’âge mûr et son cynisme, mais en exceptant personne a priori ; on invoquera le fatalisme, ce mal qui serait à notre époque ce que la mélancolie ou le spleen fut au XIXe siècle ; on incriminera le sentiment d’impuissance ou le manque de courage. Cette perspective possède un fond de vérité (la raison a ses limites, et peut connaître des intermittences, des moments de brève suspension, des hésitations), mais elle s’arrête trop tôt en chemin et s’expose au risque de se réduire elle-même à n’être que la simple recherche d’un bouc émissaire. Qu’il y ait des intérêts sociaux concurrents et que l’un d’entre eux, disposant de plus de moyens, puisse tenir la corde, ne signifie pas que ce modèle soit intégralement valide. Oui, il y a des privilégiés, mais il est inconcevable que le modèle social et les schémas éthiques qui l’alimentent puissent tenir durablement par le seul effet des stratégies et dispositifs mis au point par une unique classe sociale. Si des politiques qui laissent en l’état des inégalités voire les creusent sont possibles, c’est peut-être aussi parce qu’elles bénéficient du soutien de ceux dont elle ne sert pas les intérêts. Si on s’oriente dans cette direction, on peut alors comprendre que le renforcement de la perception du creusement des inégalités puisse aussi contribuer au creusement de ces mêmes inégalités.

LE SENS D’UNE DROITISATION Dans une étude importante, publiée en 2010, deux chercheurs américains, étudiant la situation dans leur pays entre 1952 et 2006, ont établi que le creusement des inégalités est, de fait, une dynamique qu’alimente aussi l’effet qui est le sien sur l’opinion publique9. Leurs travaux s’appuient sur une méthode d’analyse grâce à laquelle ils avaient déjà montré que l’augmentation des inégalités entraînait presque mécaniquement une demande de baisse des dépenses de l’État10. L’étude de 2010 nous livre plusieurs enseignements complémentaires : après avoir confirmé que les gens sont tout à fait informés de l’évolution des inégalités – autrement dit, une augmentation de la perception des inégalités correspond à une augmentation réelle des inégalités ; ce qui est vrai aussi pour les plus Inégalités et domination 41 pauvres11 –, elle montre que, jusqu’à un certain point, lorsque la perception des inégalités se renforce, les riches comme les pauvres deviennent plus conservateurs sur le plan politique (ce qui se traduit notamment par un soutien électoral plus fort apporté à des partis qui souhaitent une diminution du rôle social de l’État)12 : « Les riches et les pauvres réagissent de la même manière à l’évolution des inégalités » ; ils « deviennent plus conservateurs à mesure que les inégalités augmentent »13 : « L’inégalité économique se renforce elle- même, non en raison d’une absence de réaction des pauvres, mais en raison de la manière dont l’inégalité économique informe les préférences exprimées par les riches autant que par les pauvres14. » Ces travaux, aux résultats en partie contre-intuitifs, suscitent immanquablement la perplexité, en particulier chez les progressistes qui aimeraient bien pouvoir compter sur une sorte de rapport mécanique entre la perception d’une injustice sociale et la mise en branle politique de ceux qui en souffrent en premier lieu, pour y mettre un terme. Ce n’est pas toujours ce que l’on observe. Il y a évidemment des différences importantes entre la France et les États-Unis à cet égard. Aussi ne peut-on pas rabattre exactement de tels résultats ni de telles discussions sur la situation française, même si l’on s’accorde aussi à reconnaître une « droitisation » de la société et des partis. Cette dernière oblige en un sens à développer des hypothèses un peu différentes, précisément pour rendre compte du fait que, un peu plus nettement qu’aux États-Unis, les gens en France puissent, en connaissance de cause, en venir, à regret, à adopter des comportements dont ils savent qu’ils contribuent à creuser les inégalités. Cette progression du conservatisme social prend notamment en France la forme d’une tendance à privilégier de plus en plus les formes électives, privées de la solidarité, au détriment de ses formes publiques ; une tendance à renégocier le rapport à l’Etat-providence, en défendant davantage le principe de réciprocité, en exigeant davantage sur le plan de la conditionnalité des aides et en reculant sur le terrain de l’universalité. Quelques données rapides sur ce point : 42 Patrick Savidan

Depuis 2009, le rôle protecteur et stabilisateur de l’Etat- providence s’est nettement affaibli. En France, comme dans tous les pays européens, cet impact est devenu quasi inexistant en 2012. (Causes probables : Essoufflement des composantes contra-cycliques des prestations de protection sociale et les mesures plus structurelles de consolidation budgétaire prises dans la plupart des pays. Austérité). Alors même les Français continuent de penser que la protection sociale joue un rôle important, on observe que « le soutien de l’opinion à l’État-providence vacille15 ». Entre 2000 et 2013, on enregistre une augmentation du nombre de Français jugeant qu’il est excessif de consacrer un tiers du budget de la France à la protection sociale (on passe de 14 à 21%) et ils sont moins nombreux à penser que c’est insuffisant (on passe de 32% à 15%). Pour la première fois depuis 35 ans, les Français estiment majoritairement que les aides apportées aux familles sont suffisantes : ils étaient 31% à le penser en 2008, ils sont désormais 63%. Dans le même ordre d’idées, la proportion de ceux qui souhaitent une augmentation du RSA (490 euros en 2013) a diminué de 15 points entre 2009 et 2013, alors que celle-ci avait augmenté entre 2006 à 2009 (+ 12 points). Assez symptomatique de ce durcissement des perceptions de l’assistance et de ceux qui en bénéficient : 78 % des Français pensent qu’il faut privilégier les aides en nature plutôt que les aides monétaires16. Plus significatif encore : alors qu’en 2011, la majorité des Français pensait que « le système de protection sociale permet d’atténuer les conséquences de la crise économique en France », ils sont plus nombreux, depuis 2012, à s’inquiéter davantage de la dette que du financement de la protection sociale ; l’écart se creuse en 2013 (6 points) et selon toute probabilité, il s’est encore approfondi depuis17. On observe également une tendance de plus en plus marquée à expliquer par des facteurs individuels la pauvreté et l’exclusion ; s’y manifeste aussi un durcissement des attitudes à l’égard de certaines catégories de la population18 ; ce qu’enregistre d’ailleurs sans surprise l’évolution des comportements électoraux. Il n’est pas anodin que, dans ce contexte général, l’universalité de la protection sociale soit davantage contestée. Le nombre de Français favorables à des allocations chômage ou familiales universelles – des allocations qui ne sont pas, autrement dit, seulement réservées aux plus pauvres ou aux Inégalités et domination 43 seuls cotisants, mais bénéficient à tous, sans distinction de catégorie sociale et de statut professionnel – ne cesse de diminuer depuis 2008. Cette tendance a été confirmée par une étude récente du Credoc19. Comment comprendre cette mutation en cours intervenant dans l’économie de la solidarité (plus de solidarité privée, moins de solidarité publique ou un autre type, plus bismarckien que beveridgien) ? On observera, de ce point de vue, une sorte de convergence inattendue entre la France et les Etats-Unis (inattendue dans la mesure où la perception de la solidarité et du rôle de la puissance publique à cet égard est si différente de part et d’autre) qui, à mon sens s’explique par une forte défiance, croissante en France, à l’égard des gouvernants et une croyance plus faible que jamais en la capacité de ces derniers à trouver et mettre en œuvre des solutions raisonnables aux problèmes sociaux. Cela traduit, chez les Français, un sentiment, qui est aussi un regret : que la situation soit telle désormais que l’individu doive surtout compter sur lui-même et sur les ressources sociales qu’il est en mesure de mobiliser, s’il veut pouvoir se procurer, non pas simplement un certain niveau ou mode de vie, mais le type d’assurance, d’aisance, auquel il aspire pour ses proches et pour lui- même. Cette défiance à l’égard des institutions publiques a pour effet de renforcer les valeurs de la compétition et d’affaiblir celles de la coopération (et les gouvernants ont contribué directement à cette évolution) : les individus cherchent à sécuriser leurs positions mais sont conduits à traiter cette sécurité comme un bien privé, non comme un bien commun. C’est à mon sens ce qui contribue à développer l’oligarchie en Franche, mais pas au sens où nos démocraties deviendraient des oligarchies (c’est à mon avis plus compliqué encore que cela), mais au sens où la tentation oligarchique se démocratise : chacun aspire au type de sécurité et d’aisance dont jouissent les oligarques du nouveau régime. Dans la mesure où il apparaît que la sécurité ne saurait être donnée à tout le monde, nous en sommes réduits à la revendiquer comme une sorte d’ultime privilège, inaugurant ainsi ce qui s’apparente à son troisième âge. 44 Patrick Savidan

TROISIÈME ÂGE DU PRIVILÈGE Nous avions le privilège d’Ancien régime, qui marquait l’institution d’un ordre social et politique fait de rangs, de droits et d’exemptions spécifiques servant les intérêts de classe de la noblesse. Dénoncé et abattu par la « vigoureuse génération » de 1789, il en est resté un, profond, redoutable par les effets qu’il produit : la propriété. Tocqueville voyait celle-ci jouer le même rôle que la naissance dans la production de l’injustice telle que la percevaient ceux qui en étaient privés. C’était pour lui le dernier privilège. Nous n’en sommes cependant plus exactement là. Ou du moins il faut spécifier la place qu’occupe désormais la propriété dans une configuration sociale et normative plus englobante. Ce dernier privilège semble avoir pris pour nous une autre signification. Il semble désormais désigner d’abord une capacité, celle de se soustraire à l’arbitraire, à l’incertitude, au risque négatif20. La faillite politique de l’idéal d’égalité provient de là. Pourquoi ? Parce qu’il s’agit de gagner des positions de contrôle qui permettent d’amortir le choc de l’arbitraire et de la contingence, quitte à le faire peser sur autrui. Les autres, dans une telle perspective, deviennent ainsi de simples variables d’ajustement, un matériau, que l’on espère point trop sonore, qui amortit les coups, en absorbe l’onde de choc mais ne l’extériorise pas, a fortiori ne l’externalise pas. Se met ainsi en place un mécanisme aux effets pervers. Dans le contexte social, politique et économique actuel, nous désirons mieux maîtriser nos conditions de vie. Pour y parvenir, il faut que nous nous soustrayions autant que faire se peut à la domination. Dans une perspective que le néo-républicanisme a contribué à actualiser, cela implique de neutraliser autant que possible les forces qui peuvent exercer sur nos vies des interférences arbitraires21. Or c’est là que le bât blesse. Dans un contexte fortement individualisé, marqué par le sentiment d’une certaine impuissance sociale et économique des gouvernements, sans configuration collective, politique, du temps, s’impose la conviction que, pour ne pas subir l’arbitraire, il faut l’externaliser, pour ne pas être dominé, il faut détenir les leviers de la domination. Ainsi se généralise le goût de l’oligarchie, ainsi se démocratise ou se diffuse la tentation oligarchique. Inégalités et domination 45

De cette évolution, est solidaire un déplacement dans les représentations des divisions sociales en régime démocratique22. Jusque dans les années 1970, la division sociale jugée la plus déterminante, celle à partir de laquelle se structurait légitimement et spontanément l’offre politique, était celle des intérêts socio- économiques. Depuis, tendent à s’imposer comme formes de division les plus problématiques, les désaccords moraux et le pluralisme identitaire. Plusieurs facteurs peuvent expliquer un tel déplacement ; d’un côté, des facteurs liés à la question sociale : désindustrialisation, affaiblissement du marxisme, désaffection pour les organisations politiques d’obédience communistes, montée en puissance du néolibéralisme23 et les mutations du capitalisme24 ; de l’autre, des facteurs marquant le renforcement de préoccupations morales et identitaires : décolonisation, émergence de nouveaux mouvements sociaux, revendications en faveur de l’émancipation des femmes, évolution des mœurs (sexualité, famille, etc.), questions de frontières, d’immigration et d’intégration, développement de certaines technologies dont l’application soulève des questionnements éthiques dont des communautés de croyances ont pu se saisir. Ces pluralismes-là débouchent sur des types de conflit qui sont apparus progressivement plus importants, plus urgents, plus difficiles à surmonter que les conflits socio-économiques traditionnels. Ce déplacement dans l’ordre des préoccupations, de la question des inégalités redistributives à celle de l’identité, me semble traduire aussi une reconfiguration de la figure du conflit et des représentations de la domination. La tentation oligarchique passe par l’appropriation d’un régime d’inégalités, par rapport auquel il s’agit de bien se « placer », pour externaliser les facteurs de fragilisation sociale, selon un mouvement dont les principales victimes, mais non pas les seules, sont des populations repérées selon des critères identitaires. Le durcissement de la société à l’égard des minorités peut ainsi se comprendre comme une conséquence de la logique inégalitaire, tant du point de vue de la protection sociale que dans les rapports au marché du travail25. Il participe de cet effort constant de protection et d’externalisation. 46 Patrick Savidan

Aujourd’hui la lutte s’est en partie individualisée et le type de biens visés par celle-ci a changé, mais quant au principe organisant un partage inégal entre petit nombre et grand nombre, il reste inchangé. Et la tolérance à l’égard de la tendance oligarchique de la société ne peut se comprendre que parce que chacun aspire à cette condition plus protectrice que les privilégiés possèdent. À ce titre, l’ampleur de l’écart n’est pas un problème. On se rappelle ce qu’en disait Tocqueville : ce n’est pas « l’excès de ses privilèges » qui fait périr une aristocratie. « Si chacun croit pouvoir un jour entrer dans un corps d’élite, l’étendue des droits de ce corps sera ce qui le rendra cher à ceux-là même qui n’en font pas encore partie. De cette manière, les vices mêmes de l’institution feront sa force ; et ne dites pas que les chances sont faibles : il n’importe guère si le but est élevé. Ce qui entraîne le cœur humain, c’est bien moins la certitude d’un petit succès que la possibilité d’une haute fortune. Augmentez la grandeur de l’objet à atteindre, et vous pourrez sans crainte diminuer les chances de l’obtenir26 ». Les sociétés de loterie nationale ne s’y sont pas trompées. Leurs stratégies commerciales ne font qu’enregistrer cette particularité de la psychologie humaine à l’âge démocratique encore, que corroborent aussi leurs succès commerciaux27 ! Dans les circonstances présentes, ce dernier privilège dénoue ce qui pourrait sembler une contradiction : la réprobation ne porte pas tant sur la condition des plus riches que sur le fait que cette classe soit parvenue à se barricader derrière ses avantages, à sécuriser sa position culminante et à jouer serré. On leur reproche surtout d’avoir réussi à obtenir ce que chacun semble vouloir pour soi et pour ses proches. Ce qui doit nous conduire à penser que si le privilège en question se maintient, c’est parce qu’une grande partie d’entre nous espère encore pouvoir se mettre, par ses propres moyens, en position d’en bénéficier soi-même.

UNE NOUVELLE COMPLICATION DÉMOCRATIQUE Notre situation politique est ainsi des plus paradoxales. Pour exprimer ce paradoxe, nous pouvons revenir à l’œuvre de Machiavel. Le Florentin a mis en évidence, comme fait premier et irréductible, une division sociale fondamentale qui oppose les Grands et le Peuple et tient au désir des premiers de commander, d’opprimer et au désir des seconds de n’être ni commandés, ni opprimés28. Bien loin de Inégalités et domination 47 condamner cependant un tel conflit et de souhaiter qu’il y soit mis un terme, Machiavel choisit d’en souligner la dimension positive. On le voit au chapitre IV du livre premier de ses Discours sur la première décade de Tite-Live, lorsqu’il déclare que « les bonnes lois » sont en général « le produit de ces agitations que la plupart condamnent si inconsidérément. Quiconque examinera avec soin l’issue de ces mouvements ne trouvera pas qu’ils aient été cause d’aucune violence qui ait tourné au préjudice du bien public ; il se convaincra même qu’ils ont fait naître des règlements à l’avantage de la liberté29 ». Dans une telle perspective, le consensus serait le signe que la liberté vacille ou a déjà sombré. Mais Machiavel ne se contente pas de souligner les vertus de la conflictualité sociale et des protestations ; il va plus loin encore et attire notre attention sur les dangers du conservatisme : pour lui, « les plus grands troubles » viennent souvent de ceux qui veulent « conserver », et non pas tant de ceux qui veulent « acquérir », car « l’homme ne croit s’assurer ce qu’il tient déjà qu’en acquérant de nouveau ; et d’ailleurs ces nouvelles acquisitions sont autant de moyens de force et de puissance pour abuser30 ». L’impossibilité qu’il y a à fixer les choses dans une sorte d’équilibre illusoire – qui n’est d’ailleurs pas même souhaitable – permet de ne pas se méprendre sur la profondeur de la division originaire du social qui continue d’alimenter le conflit dont la république ne saurait faire l’économie. Le peuple, porté par le désir de liberté qui le définit et le souci de ne pas subir l’arbitraire et la domination, est voué à vouloir toujours l’incarner, contre le désir de domination qui anime les Grands. Qu’en est-il cependant de ce désir de liberté que Machiavel attribue si généreusement au peuple ? L’histoire ne nous donne-t-elle pas aussi l’exemple de peuples qui se soumettent parfois à un point que l’on ne peut expliquer qu’en présupposant un certain désir de servitude ? On sait combien cette « complication », pour reprendre la formule de Claude Lefort31, a marqué les esprits. Elle permettait de rendre en partie compte des expériences totalitaires bien sûr, mais aussi, moins dramatiquement, d’expliquer l’inertie politique, l’absence de résistance forte à la domination. Bien souvent, les critiques contemporains du néolibéralisme puisent d’ailleurs encore dans cet 48 Patrick Savidan arsenal de concepts. Est-il vrai que le Peuple puisse se retourner contre lui-même, en cédant à la « fantasmagorie de l’Un32 » ? L’histoire témoigne que cela a pu se produire. Ce qui suffit à nourrir la crainte que cela puisse arriver encore. Comme le rappelle Miguel Abensour, cette complication ne vaut toutefois pas « résignation » : « Il ne s’agit pas de transformer l’énigme de la servitude volontaire en destin, ni d’y voir l’effet de je ne sais quel mystérieux ‘péché originel’ qui affecterait la condition humaine en tant que condition politique. Replacée dans la dynamique du champ politique, cette énigme prend sens en regard de la fragilité de la condition ontologique de pluralité. » Et Miguel Abensour de conclure sur ce point : « Telle est la complication avec laquelle les combattants de la liberté et de l’émancipation doivent désormais apprendre à compter33. » Que les situations de servitude volontaire puissent être renversées, nous pouvons certainement en convenir. Mais cette complication peut-elle aussi éclairer le problème que prétend désigner l’idée de démocratisation de tendances oligarchiques, telle que je l’ai analysée, c’est-à-dire à partir des mutations survenant dans l’économie générale de la solidarité ? Je ne le crois, et d’abord pour ces raisons multiples que nous avons de ne pas aborder aujourd’hui la question des inégalités, et par exemple celle des inégalités de revenus ou des inégalités scolaires, à partir de l’idée de servitude volontaire. Dans ce domaine, nous avons vu qu’il y a en effet conscience des injustices et dénonciation des formes qu’elle prend. La logique affectant l’économie générale de la solidarité et ses effets politiques me donnent à penser que nous devrions peut-être envisager la possibilité d’une complication autre : Machiavel soulignait l’aspiration du peuple à ne pas être dominé, mais la domination ne peut-elle pas être également envisagée comme un moyen de se prémunir du risque d’être soi-même exposé à la domination ? À travers cette possibilité, ce n’est pas simplement un désir d’être Grand parmi les Grands qui, dans nos sociétés, s’affirmerait, mais celui – parce que la médiation de l’État et de la loi ne joue plus de manière adéquate à nos yeux dans le champ social – de résister à la domination, par la domination. Nous consentons, en ce sens, à la domination, mais selon une perspective qui ne correspond pas au schéma de la servitude volontaire. Nous consentons à la domination, Inégalités et domination 49 certes, mais en tant que dominants ou en tant que nous aspirons à l’être34. On comprend alors qu’à la lumière de l’hypothèse d’une diffusion de la tentation oligarchique, nous puissions parler, dans le cas qui nous occupe, d’une manière de céder à l’oppression qui puisse se muer en consentement des dominants (effectifs, potentiels ou aspirants) à la domination. La clef de l’énigme de la démocratisation de la tentation oligarchique se situerait là. Cette thèse peut surprendre. Il faut donc en préciser le sens et la portée. Pour décrire la domination dans une perspective néo-républicaine, Philip Pettit, un philosophe de l’université de Princeton, a proposé d’exclure du nombre des interférences vectrices de domination, celles qui ne sont pas intentionnelles, et s’avèrent liées au hasard, à nos propres limites, aux effets non voulus de la concurrence en vue de l’obtention de biens rares35. Ces spécifications sont importantes parce qu’elles permettent de ne pas diluer la notion de domination, d’éviter que toute interférence devienne, au seul motif qu’elle serait subie, une forme expresse de domination. Dans cette perspective, seule peut être tenue pour un acte de domination l’interférence intentionnelle, telle qu’elle s’exprime par la contrainte exercée sur un corps, sur la volonté (par des sanctions ou des menaces de sanction), par la manipulation (fixation de l’agenda des questions prioritaires, formation non rationnelle des croyances et des désirs des individus, altération des effets de leurs actions). Ce souci de conserver à la domination un sens suffisamment déterminé pour être utile me semble tout à fait nécessaire, mais je me demande toutefois si la notion d’intentionnalité ne devrait pas être élargie. Dans des sociétés telles que les nôtres, la domination semble aujourd’hui plus souvent structurelle qu’intentionnelle. Vouloir réduire la domination ne suppose-t-il donc pas de s’attacher à penser la part intentionnelle du structurel, ou plus exactement de proposer une redescription d’une part du structurel en termes d’intentionnalité ? Quand je m’interroge sur l’éventualité d’une démocratisation de la tentation oligarchique, je ne veux pas dire que les gens puissent vouloir disposer directement du pouvoir de dominer – il existe bien 50 Patrick Savidan sûr de telles personnes, mais nous n’avons pas de raison d’en tirer une norme anthropologique et sociale. Je veux simplement dire que nous participons à la formation et au maintien de rapports sociaux que nous contribuons à définir, pour les raisons que j’ai indiquées précédemment, sur un mode dont nous savons qu’il revient à externaliser autant que faire se peut la domination. Ce sont les rapports sociaux, les pratiques, les institutions résultant de ces interactions qui se révèlent ensuite source de domination pour autrui36. Je prends rapidement un exemple pour préciser ce point. Philip Pettit propose de ne pas décrire en termes de domination les effets naturels de la chance. Il a évidemment raison. Si je reçois une tuile sur la tête par un soir de tempête, j’aurais quelque difficulté à vous convaincre – et c’est heureux – que c’est en raison d’une domination qui s’exerce sur moi. Mais nous savons bien aussi que les choses ne sont pas toujours aussi nettes, que la frontière du « naturel » et du « social », du « social » et du « politique », n’est pas toujours aisée à déterminer. Certaines catastrophes naturelles, telles que le passage de l’Ouragan Katrina, en 2005, sur le territoire des États-Unis, et en particulier dans le Mississipi, le montrent bien. Le nombre de morts et l’amplitude des dégâts ont rapidement révélé l’impact déterminant de facteurs qui étaient d’abord et avant tout sociaux et politiques. La question raciale est devenue une clef de compréhension centrale de ce qui s’était passé, selon des modalités dont la gravité est apparue suffisamment forte pour que soit forgé un néologisme : le katrinagate37. Il y a évidemment une part de malchance à se trouver là au moment où l’ouragan passe, mais il est bien établi que, dans de telles situations, la malchance n’explique pas tout. Ce type d’analyse a pu être mené sur d’autres genres de phénomènes climatiques, par exemple des canicules, avec les mêmes résultats38. Reconsidérer les frontières de l’intentionnel et du non-intentionnel me semble tout aussi nécessaire pour les questions d’incapacité ou de rareté. Ne pas être capable d’accomplir une action peut évidemment tenir à des limitations qui ne doivent rien à la domination. Je ne suis pas capable de courir 100 mètres en moins de 10 secondes, et je serais bien mal venu d’y voir l’expression d’une domination. Mais la capacité peut aussi avoir, nous le savons, des déterminants sociaux et politiques. Un examen critique des principes et du fonctionnement du principe d’égalité des chances, de la manière dont se constitue le Inégalités et domination 51 rapport entre capacité et mérite, permet d’en rendre compte assez aisément39. Quant à la rareté, sans même parler de ses usages marketing, nous savons qu’elle peut être socialement produite40. Dans tous ces cas, il semble que l’intentionnalité, pour n’être pas directe, n’en semble pas moins présente. Et si nous allons au bout de l’idée selon laquelle il ne saurait y avoir, pour nous, collectivement, de prises sur les évolutions souhaitables de notre société sans présupposer que nous puissions être parties prenantes des problèmes à résoudre, alors il nous faut présupposer aussi que des interférences en apparence non-intentionnelles puissent faire l’objet d’une redescription qui en fasse apparaître la dimension intentionnelle. C’est aussi ce qui explique que nous puissions exercer une forme de domination dans la société, sans l’avoir pourtant directement voulu. Allons un peu plus loin dans cette direction. Philip Pettit, cherchant à préciser la notion de domination, souligne qu’il peut y avoir domination même quand aucune interférence ne s’exerce. Ce point me paraît essentiel pour caractériser le type de domination que j’ai en vue lorsque je m’interroge sur l’éventualité d’une démocratisation de la tentation oligarchique. Je ne crois pas que le problème tienne en effet à la surreprésentation sociale de personnes essentiellement mues par le désir de dominer autrui. Suivant en cela la leçon de Machiavel, je conçois plus aisément que le plus grand nombre puisse essentiellement vouloir ne pas être dominé. Cela signifie que, se trouvant en position de domination, il n’est pas assuré qu’il en fasse usage directement. On pourra ici me reprocher un certain optimisme. Je répondrais en soulignant deux choses : d’abord que je ne parle pas ici de situations extrêmes, provoquées par des idéologies violentes et déshumanisantes, mais cherche à proposer une description de mécanismes qui me semblent à l’œuvre dans des sociétés démocratiques injustes, mais relativement stables et inclusives en droit. Ensuite, que la question n’est même pas de savoir – dans un tel contexte – si l’individu use de sa position de domination pour promouvoir un intérêt arbitraire. Le seul fait qu’il soit en mesure de le faire si bon lui semble est déjà en lui-même une forme de domination qui produit des effets de cet ordre. C’est ce que veut dire Philip Pettit lorsqu’il montre qu’il peut parfaitement y avoir domination sans interférence. De cette dernière résultent des effets dont le plus 52 Patrick Savidan manifeste est bien entendu la rupture de fait de l’égalité. Même si la personne en position dominante ne fait pas usage de son pouvoir, « la victime ne pourra jouir du statut psychologique attaché au fait d’être l’égal de l’autre : elle se trouve dans une situation où la crainte et la déférence demeurent constamment à l’ordre du jour, et non pas la franchise qui accompagne l’égalité intersubjective41 ». Cette complication constitue un obstacle majeur à l’émancipation. L’aspiration à l’égalité dans la liberté prend une forme qui n’est pas celle de la servitude volontaire, mais du fait de sa fragmentarisation donne un cours plus libre à la domination, que celle-ci soit assortie d’interférences effectives ou non. La démocratisation de la tentation oligarchique peut se comprendre ainsi. Elle s’intensifie d’autant plus qu’il ne s’agit pas seulement de modifier un état de fait, mais de poser des jalons pour s’assurer une maîtrise de l’avenir. Claude Lefort avait, de manière très suggestive, fait remarquer que tous les conflits dans la société n’ont pas même valeur. Certains permettent à la démocratie d’avancer, d’autres la plongent dans des logiques régressives. Il écrivait : Quand l’insécurité des individus s’accroît, en conséquence d’une crise économique, ou des ravages d’une guerre, quand le conflit entre les classes et les groupes s’exaspère et ne trouve plus sa résolution symbolique dans la sphère politique, quand le pouvoir paraît déchoir au plan réel, en vient à apparaître comme quelque chose de particulier au service des intérêts et des appétits de vulgaires ambitieux, bref se montre dans la société, et que du même coup celle-ci se fait voir comme morcelée, alors se développe le phantasme du peuple-un, la quête d’une identité substantielle, d’un corps social soudé à sa tête, d’un pouvoir incarnateur, d’un État délivré de la division42. Pour Claude Lefort, ces circonstances peuvent provoquer un « dérèglement de la logique démocratique » et entraîner le surgissement de la société totalitaire. Dans les circonstances que je me suis attaché à décrire, il me semble que nous avons affaire à une autre forme de dérèglement : celui auquel préside une sorte de démocratisation ou de généralisation du désir oligarchique. L’insécurité sociale enflamme un désir de certitude qui nous arrache à la logique démocratique. Dans cette configuration, la diffusion sociale d’un conflit qui tend à se fragmentariser, n’étant plus autant inscrite dans l’horizon du droit, perd son sens proprement politique ; elle nous éloigne en tout Inégalités et domination 53 cas de cet horizon auquel, selon Machiavel, nous devons toutes les « bonnes lois ». Le conflit se déconflictualise ainsi, à mesure que la politique et le temps se dépolitisent. Nous nous retrouvons ainsi acteurs et victimes de cette situation. Plus nous en sommes victimes, plus nous en sommes acteurs. Plus nous en sommes acteurs, plus nous en sommes victimes.

NOTES

[1] « Classement Forbes : record absolu du nombre de milliardaires dans le monde », Le Monde, 9 mars 2011. [2] Voir par exemple Philippe Steiner, Les rémunérations obscènes, Paris, La Découverte, 2011. [3] R. W. McChesney, « Introduction », dans N. Chomsky, Le profit avant l’homme, trad. J. Maas, Paris Fayard, 2005 ; David Harvey, « Le « Nouvel impérialisme » : accumulation par expropriation », Actuel Marx 1/2004 (n° 35), p. 71-90 ; et du même A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005. Voir également N. Klein, La Stratégie du choc. La montée du capitalisme du désastre (2007), trad. L. Saint-Martin et P. Gagné, Paris, Léméac/Acte Sud, 2008, et Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011. En France, Hervé Kempf, L'oligarchie ça suffit, vive la démocratie, Paris, Seuil, 2011. [4] Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2013. [5] Voir la page consacrée aux travaux de cette task force sur le site de l’Association de science politique américain, en ligne : http://www.apsanet.org/content.asp?contentid=614. [6] Thomas Piketty et Emmanuel Saez, « Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998 », Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1), 2003, p. 1-39 ; ibid., « Income inequality in the United States, 1913-2002 », dans Anthony B. Atkinson et Thomas Piketty (dir.), Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century : A Contrast Between Continental European and English- speaking Countries, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007. [7] Robert Solow, « Piketty is right », New , 22 avril 2014, en ligne : http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117429/capital-twenty-first- century-thomas-piketty-reviewed. [8] Rousseau, « Projet de constitution pour la Corse », in Œuvres complètes, op.cit., p. 939. [9] Nathan J. Kelly et Peter K. Enns, « Inequality and the Dynamics of Public Opinion: The Self-Reinforcing Link Between Economic 54 Patrick Savidan

Inequality and Mass Preferences », American Journal of Political Science, vol. 54, n° 4, octobre 2010, p. 855-870. [10] Roland Benabou, « Inequal Societies: Income Distribution and the Social Contract », American Economic Review, 90(1), mars 2000, p. 96-129. [11] Nathan J. Kelly et Peter K. Enns, « Inequality and the Dynamics of Public Opinion : The Self-Reinforcing Link Between Economic Inequality and Mass Preferences », op. cit., p. 867 : « On ne peut certainement pas dire que ceux qui se situent au bas de l’échelle sociale deviennent plus conservateurs suite à une augmentation des inégalités parce qu’ils ne voient pas ce qui se passe vraiment. » [12] Cette contribution à la discussion infirme donc la thèse inverse selon laquelle l’augmentation de la perception des inégalités entraîne un déplacement de l’opinion publique vers des positions de type progressiste s’agissant du rôle de l’État. Voir Alan H. Meltzer et Scott F. Richard, « A Rational Theory of the Size of Government », Journal of Political Economy, 89(4), p. 914-927. [13] Nathan J. Kelly et Peter K. Enns, « Inequality and the Dynamics of Public Opinion: The Self-Reinforcing Link Between Economic Inequality and Mass Preferences », op. cit., p. 868. [14] Ibid., p. 856. [15] Régis Bigot, « En 2014, le soutien de l’opinion à l’État-providence vacille », Credoc, Note de synthèse, n° 11, 2014. [16] Ibid. [17] Baromètre opinion DREES 2013, février 2014, op. cit., p. 5. [18] Nicolas Duvoux, Le Nouvel Âge de la solidarité : pauvreté, précarité et politiques publiques, Paris, Seuil/République des idées, 2012. [19] N. Guisse, S. Hoibian & J. Müller, « Regards sur la protection sociale et les politiques de solidarité », Credoc, Premiers résultats, n° S4301, septembre 2015, étude réalisée à partir de 2000 entretiens : (http://www.credoc.fr/publications/abstract.php?ref=Sou2015-4301). [20] En référence à ce que Robert Castel plaçait dans l’individualisme qu’il disait « positif ». Voir, sur ce point, Les métamorphoses de la question sociale, op. cit. [21] Ph. Pettit, On the People's Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy, op. cit. [22] Nous suivons ici l’analyse de Dominique Leydet et Hervé Pourtois dans « Pluralisme et conflit dans les théories contemporaines de la démocratie », Archives de philosophie du droit, n° 49, 2005, p. 71-92. [23] Sur la montée en puissance du néolibéralisme et les difficultés, pour les intellectuels les plus en vue dans les années 1970 et 1980, à en concevoir la nature, voir S. Audier, Penser le « néolibéralisme ». Foucault, le néolibéralisme et la crise du socialisme, Bordeaux, Les Éditions du bord de l’eau, 2015. [24] Dans une bibliographie abondante, je signale la démarche originale de Stéphane Haber qui s’attache, dans Penser le néocapitalisme (Paris, Les prairies ordinaires, 2013), à examiner les formes multiples de tensions et torsions entre « système » et « monde de la vie » qu’entraîne le capitalisme contemporain. Inégalités et domination 55

[25] Anthony F. Heath et Sin Yi Cheung (dir.) Unequal Chances. Ethnic Minorities in Western Labour Markets, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007. [26] Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, op.cit., p. 60. [27] Chiffres d’affaires en hausse constante – tout particulièrement en Italie, en Espagne et en Grande-Bretagne –, rentabilité toujours plus grande, multiplication des points de vente – en France, on en compte près de 45 000, soit environ 1 détaillant pour 1 400 habitants, mieux que les boulangeries ou les bureaux de poste. Voir Les Jeux de hasard et d’argent en France, dir. F. Trucy, Rapport d’information du Sénat, Commission des finances, n° 223 (2001-2002). [28] Cl. Lefort, « Préface » dans Machiavel, Discours sur la première décade de Tite-Live, Paris, Champs-Flammarion, 1985, p. 10. [29] Machiavel, Discours sur la première décade de Tite-Live (1512-1517, publiés en 1531), op. cit., p. 44-45. [30] Ibid., Livre I, chapitre V. p. 48. [31] Voir son lumineux commentaire dans Étienne de la Boétie, Discours sur la servitude volontaire (1548), Paris, Payot, 1978. [32] Voir également de Cl. Lefort, Un homme en trop. Réflexion sur l’Archipel du Goulag, Paris, Seuil, 1976. [33] Michel Abensour, Pour une philosophie politique critique, Paris, Sens & Tonka, 2009, p. 26. [34] Je rejoins ici la thèse de Nicole-Claude Mathieu qui a su montrer, à partir de la condition des femmes, que céder à une domination n’est pas y consentir et que si l’on peut sans doute parler de consentement à la domination c’est d’abord du point de vue de ceux qui l’exercent, et non pas du point de vue de celles qui la subissent. « Quand céder n’est pas consentir », L’arraisonnement des femmes : essais en anthropologie des sexes, Paris, EHESS, 1991, p. 169-243. Dans le cas des ouvriers, voir Michael Burawoy, « Le procès de production comme jeu » (1979), trad. J. A. Calderón, Tracés, 14|2008, mise en ligne : 30 mai 2010. En ligne : http://traces.revues.org/38. Voir également Lucie Goussard, « Le consentement limité au travail. Résistances et consentement des salariés de l’ingénierie automobile », Tracés, n° 14, mars 2008, p. 175-194. Dans cet article, l’auteur s’intéresse aux formes de résistance légère au travail qui peuvent contribuer au consentement subjectif du travailleur. [35] Ph. Pettit, Républicanisme. Une théorie de la liberté et du gouvernement, op. cit., p. 78. [36] En ce sens, l’analyse peut être mise en parallèle avec la notion de « configuration de domination » forgée par Max Weber. Celle-ci me semble articuler de manière forte les dimensions structurelle et intentionnelle de la domination – cette dernière signifiant pour le sociologue allemand « le fait qu’une volonté affirmée (un ‘ordre’) du ou des ‘dominants’ cherche à influencer l’action d’autrui (du ou des ‘dominés’) et l’influence effectivement, dans la mesure où, à un degré significatif d’un point de vue social, cette action se déroule comme si les dominés avaient fait du contenu de cet ordre, en tant que tel, la maxime de leur action (‘obéissance’). » (La Domination, Paris, La Découverte, coll. 56 Patrick Savidan

« Politique et sociétés », 2013, édition critique établie par Y. Sintomer, trad. I. Kalinowski, p. 49). Ce que montre très bien Weber, c’est que l’enjeu pour ceux qui occupent ou aspirent à occuper des positions dominantes est d’assurer la permanence de cette configuration, pour écarter l’instabilité des échanges sociaux susceptible de nuire à la constitution et au maintien de l’ordre qui leur est favorable. Ce qui dans une perspective machiavélienne impliquera de chercher à toujours renforcer les positions acquises. [37] Chester Hartman & Gregory Squires (dir.), There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina, Routledge, 2006. [38] Voir notamment l’excellent ouvrage d’Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006. [39] Je me permets de renvoyer sur ce point à mon ouvrage, Repenser l’égalité des chances, op. cit. [40] Bruno Ventelou, Au-delà de la rareté, la croissance économique comme construction sociale, Paris, Albin Michel, 2001. [41] Ph. Pettit, Républicanisme. Une théorie de la liberté et du gouvernement, op. cit., p. 91. [42] Cl. Lefort, « La question de la démocratie » (1983) dans ibid., Essais sur le politique. XIXe-XXe siècles, Paris, Seuil, 1986, p. 31.

RÉSUMÉ

Depuis la fin des années 1980, les inégalités ont de nouveau augmenté. Les conséquences ne sont pas seulement d’ordre économique mais elles interrogent sur l’avenir de la démocratie. Aujourd’hui tout porte à craindre que la concentration actuelle des pouvoirs et des richesses ne conduisent au retour des oligarchies, où les pouvoirs prennent en compte les préférences des plus riches alors qu'une démocratie prend en compte les préférences du plus grand nombre. Rousseau avait déjà dénoncé cette forme de pouvoir, les études de Piketty et Solow viennent confirmer la tendance actuelle. Mais pire encore le pouvoir de type oligarchique se démocratise : les préférences des riches deviennent aussi celles des plus pauvres. Moins d’Etat-providence et moins de dette publique contre des assurances privées, les puissants parviennent à convaincre les plus pauvres que ces mesures sont bonnes pour notre avenir. Ainsi la seconde partie de cet article pose la question de savoir si la tentation oligarchique ne se traduit-elle pas par un consentement à la domination.

The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol. XXXVII, n° 2 – 2016

THOMAS PIKETTY LOOKS BACK ON THE SUCCESS OF CAPITAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY*

Arthur Goldhammer: I’d like to begin by asking you to summarize the findings of your book Capital in the 21st Century, which has brought the phenomenon of inequality to the attention of a large global audience. In the past you’ve said that the book is not an individual work but the work of an équipe, so perhaps you’d like to begin by telling us something about your team of collaborators, how you put it together, and how the research that went into the book was done. Thomas Piketty: Yes, I’d be happy to, but first let me say how glad I am to be here with Art. I think this book would not have been as successful as it has been without your help in particular. When I read my book in English, I can’t believe I wrote it. Thanks to my contract with Harvard University Press and with you as translator, I knew from the beginning that although I was fortunate enough to be able to write in my own language, I would not be writing for the French public alone. I would be writing for an international audience. And so I conceived the book differently than I would have if I had been writing first for a French audience in the hope that someday it might be translated.

* The following remarks are a lightly edited version of remarks made by Thomas Piketty at a colloquium at the American University of Paris in February 2016. He is interviewed by his American translator and The Tocqueville Review editorial board member Arthur Goldhammer.

58 Thomas Piketty

I met Art at Harvard well before I began writing the book, and we had a very interesting discussion at dinner after the presentation. Art told me that he was translating one of Pierre Rosanvallon’s books at the time, which I already knew from Pierre and others. So I was interested in whether you might possibly be interested in the project, and happily you were. The book’s publication has been an incredible experience for me. The immense success of the English edition had a huge impact on the book’s reception in the rest of the world. Also, at the end of the day, I’m very proud that of the 2.4 million or so copies that have been printed world-wide, about 600,000 are in English, or one-quarter of the total. One-quarter is a lot, but it also means that three-quarters of the world is reading the book in other languages, which is important to remember because sometimes people in the US tend to imagine that English is the only language. In the end, sales in Chinese, Japanese, French, German, and Portuguese are greater than in English. Arthur Goldhammer: If I can interrupt for one moment. Your Japanese translator came to see me, and he confessed that he used my English translation. Thomas Piketty: I was about to say that. I just made this same remark to a journalist from Le Monde. In fact, in Korea I was told that it would be difficult to find a good French/Korean translator and asked whether they could use the English version as the basis of the Korean translation. The English translation was so good that that I said, “Yes, please do use it, no problem. It’s perfect, maybe better than the French version!” So, yes, the English version played a huge role, not only because it was used as the basis of the translation into a number of other languages but also because the success in the US attracted much more attention than the book would otherwise have received. So the first person to whom this book really owes a lot is definitely Art. Now, there’s also another group of people who played an immense role, a very international team that collected the historical data I tried to present and integrate in the book. In 2001 I published a book on the history of income and wealth inequality in France called, “Les hauts revenus en France au XXe,” which was never translated. Now it T. Piketty looks back on the success of Capital in the 21st century 59 will be, but at the time nobody wanted to translate it because it was 800 pages just on France, and this really was too much. But this first book had the virtue of launching an international research project. I wrote a summary version in English, and Tony Atkinson from Britain, who reads French very well, started to do similar work on Britain, and I also began working with Emmanuel Saez on the US, as well as with Facundo Alveredo from Argentina and Abhijit Banerjee from India. So it became a very international research project covering more than 30 countries, and our work has continued since the book’s publication. One of the most interesting impacts of the book is that it led more governments and more tax administrations to open their fiscal archives and historical data than was the case before. Take Brazil, for example. Brazil is not properly covered in the book because we didn’t have access to Brazilian tax records. But then journalists began asking the government why Brazil was not in the book, and eventually we got access to the tax data. Same for Mexico, same for Korea, same for Chile. So we are extending our work in many directions. We are also trying to get access in West Africa. So clearly, the book’s success created pressure that induced more governments to open their archives. Of course, data is not everything, because data is imperfect. It’s always a social construct of some sort, which depends on institutions. Whether or not to adopt a certain kind of tax system or to allow public scrutiny of fiscal records depends on the outcome of a power struggle among institutional actors, who accept or reject a particular tax regime. But the book could never have been written without the data and without a large group of people to collect and analyze it. Arthur Goldhammer: Would you like to say a word about what your research showed? Thomas Piketty: For me, the most striking finding of the book is the level of inequality we found in pre-World I Europe, especially France. Subsequently, the shocks induced by World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the new fiscal and social policies finally accepted by the elite reduced inequality after World War II. More recently, however, starting in the 1980s, the trend toward lower inequality began to reverse for a number of reasons, 60 Thomas Piketty including the conservative revolution in England and the United States, financial deregulation, and the fall of the Soviet Union. These and other political factors have, broadly speaking, changed the atmosphere and the ambient ideology. Prior to World War I, however, there was apparently no tendency for wealth inequality to decrease. That was very striking to me. The French experience is particularly interesting, in my view, because France likes to present itself as a very egalitarian country, but the truth is that elite discourse is highly hypocritical when it comes to equality, in France and everywhere else. Elites can be very imaginative when it comes to justifying inequality. France was in fact the last Western country to create an income tax, in the summer of 1914. The US adopted its income tax in 1913, before the war—it had nothing to do with the war. And Britain made its income tax progressive in 1908. Germany, Sweden, and Japan opted to tax income in the late 19th century. France was really the very last developed country to create an income tax. And it wasn’t to pay for schools, it was to pay for war with Germany. Later, of course, the revenue would be used to pay for schools and to create a welfare state. But what’s interesting and to my mind also very depressing is that, at that time, the discourse of the French elite, the French republican elite, was to say, “Look, we made the French Revolution, that’s enough. We don’t need a progressive income tax. A progressive tax is very useful in an aristocratic country like Britain because they have strict class boundaries and extreme concentration of wealth, so they need progressive income and inheritance taxes, but we don’t, because French society is egalitarian and we are a nation of small property owners.” The problem, of course, is that my data show that the concentration of wealth in Paris in 1914 was the same as in Britain. Aristocratic land holding had ceased to matter by then. Concentration of property meant concentration of business assets, real estate, and financial assets. Being a republic rather than a monarchy did not affect the process by which wealth became more concentrated. This elite hypocrisy is important to bear in mind, and not only in the French case. It’s easy to recognize that hypocrisy in retrospect, but of T. Piketty looks back on the success of Capital in the 21st century 61 course there’s a risk that we might be similarly hypocritical today without recognizing it. Financial globalization today is different than it was a century ago, and it is also justified differently. Many things have changed over the past century. Let me mention the rise of Asia, Africa to some extent, and Latin America, the historical traumas of the 20th century, and the huge failure of communism. Former communist countries such as and have themselves become opponents of progressive taxation and wealth redistribution of any kind. In Asia today wealthy people from Taiwan or Japan or Korea want to die in Communist China because there is no inheritance tax there, whereas in Korea or Japan the tax on large estates is 50%. The historical trauma of communism has thus had very strange ideological consequences. Attitudes toward inequality are therefore very different from 100 years ago, for this and many other reasons. These comparisons are important. So I think the most important finding of my book is that elites were hypocritical about inequality before World War I and we must bear in mind the possibility that they may be again today. Arthur Goldhammer: Now for some questions from the audience. Audience Member 1: Why do you choose a capital tax as your solution? Thomas Piketty: At the end of my book I say that the purpose of capital taxation is not simply or even primarily to raise revenue. It’s rather to generate information about the distribution of wealth so that government and citizens know what is happening. The ultimate goal is to limit on the concentration of power that comes from concentration of wealth. There are different ways to do that. Public ownership is one way. In some cases I think it is still useful. Progressive taxation of private property is another way. It’s a way to make private property temporary rather than permanent. Very wealthy people, billionaires, might be required to return to society two or three or five or ten percent of what they own every year. In the end, such taxation is a way to say, “Look, you own this property but not forever. If you invest productively and earn a huge return on your capital, you will remain wealthy, but if you don’t do anything but live off your 62 Thomas Piketty accumulated wealth, you’re going to have to return part of it to society.” This would of course pose a substantial challenge to traditional notions of property. In addition to public ownership and progressive taxation of private property, there are many conceivable forms of property intermediate between public and private ownership. This includes the non-profit sector of course, foundations and so on. It also includes new forms of participatory ownership such as crowdfunding, as well as new forms of governance and organization. I don’t deal with these issues sufficiently in my book, which is already very long, and in any case there are limits to my knowledge and what I am able to contribute. But I am very much aware that we need an entire new set of institutions and rules. Progressive taxation is only one of them. I make clear from the very introduction of my book that the main force to reduce inequality in the long-run is the diffusion of education and knowledge, not taxation. But taxation can be useful to pay for education. Education plays quite a big part in the book, but new forms of organization and ownership and democratic governance and participatory government are not sufficiently covered. Although there is a chapter in the book where I compare German corporations with Anglo-Saxon corporations. There, the gap between the social value of capital and the market value of capital plays quite a big role. But more needs to be said about these topics. That’s one of the limitations of the book. Arthur Goldhammer: To follow up on this, if I may, an estate tax would be easier to implement than a tax on capital because it can be done within one country. A global tax on capital creates problems of competition among countries, a race to the bottom where capital, which is free to flow from one country to another, can escape national taxes. So unless all countries co-ordinate simultaneously, which is an insoluble political problem, you have this problem of a race to the bottom. That’s the political problem. For the economic problem it seems to me that an estate tax would answer your concern about the exponential growth of wealth over long periods of time. If you confine the accumulation of wealth to a single generation then the problem is reduced, if not eliminated. It’s T. Piketty looks back on the success of Capital in the 21st century 63 at least reduced because you don’t have these great fortunes that continue one generation after another. In the United States we see that there are fortunes that were accumulated at the country’s inception that still exist today at the top of the wealth distribution. If you had a real, progressive estate tax it seems to me that would solve the problem. So why do you prefer this global wealth tax to the estate tax? Thomas Piketty: Well, first, I think we need both, and second, the tax doesn’t need to be global, there’s a lot there’s a lot that can be done at the national level. You say a big part of inequality will be reduced with an inheritance tax alone. Yes and no, because life is long—longer than ever before. When you make a fortune at the age of 30 or 40, or 25, does this mean that at the age of 90 you should still be sitting on $50 billion, so that people have to come to you to ask how they should organize a health system in Africa? This is an important issue, but despite your interest in it, your knowledge is unfortunately limited, and your business experience is not germane. Of course you feel entitled to give answers because it’s in the nature of your position to feel entitled, but it’s not at all clear that the best way to organize a public health care system in Africa is to rely on the preferences of a billionaire who made his fortune in computers. So you know, that’s a problem, life is long, and people who have great ideas at the age of 30 or 40 may not still have the greatest ideas at the age of 90, especially in areas that have nothing to do with the area in which they made their fortunes. I think that’s a serious concern, a very serious concern indeed. Now from a practical, political viewpoint, let me make very clear that capital taxes have always existed and have proven to be more effective than inheritance taxes always and everywhere. And for good reason. In the real world capital taxes already exit, but they are usually called property taxes. The term came into common use at the time of the Atlantic Revolutions of the late 18th century. A new fiscal system was designed at that time, and it focused on land, because landed wealth was the most important form of capital at that time. Wealth is still important, but today it’s financial wealth that matters far more than landed wealth. 64 Thomas Piketty

So the property taxes designed back then were based on real assets like land, real estate, and business equipment—real assets. This was the property tax system that was set up long ago in the US, France, and Britain. The problem is that these systems have not changed very much since then, but the nature of wealth has changed. Property taxes still exist and still generate a lot of revenue, a lot more than the estate tax, in both the US andFrance. And they also bring in a lot more than the progressive tax on net worth that I propose in my book. In France, for example, the property tax is called la taxe foncière. It generates annual revenues of 25 billion euros, whereas the wealth tax, or l’impôt sur la fortune, brings in only around four billion, or one-sixth as much. So the big capital tax is the property tax. The problem is how to adapt these property tax systems that were created 200 years ago to the 21st century. Existing property taxes also have certain peculiar features, which have become apparent since the financial collapse of 2008. For example, if you own a house in the US that’s worth $300,000, but you have a $400,000 mortgage because the price of your house has gone down, so your net wealth is actually negative, you still keep paying the same property tax as someone who has no mortgage or even someone with a net worth $2 million. This makes no sense. No logical reasoning, no economic theory, no political theory can justify this. It’s like this simply because this is the way it was 200 years ago when there was no financial wealth. The system has not changed because financial institutions haven’t wanted it to change. But you can actually ask people what they think. For instance, there’s a very interesting recent paper called, “Do Americans Want a Capital Tax?” And you ask people, okay, here are groups of households with different income and net wealth. How much should an individual with a net wealth of $100,000 pay? Or $1,000,000 or $2,000,000. All told, including income tax, property tax. And you find that for most people it’s common sense that for a given level of income, say $100,000 per year or $200,000 per year, the person with a net worth of $10 million should pay more than the person with a net worth of $2 million or $1 million. At least, when you ask the question to thousands of people online, nobody would say that someone who owns many houses around the country should be exempt from the property tax just because he has T. Piketty looks back on the success of Capital in the 21st century 65 no income. Everybody will say, “Well look, if you have no income, do something with your property. Sell one of your houses to someone who will know what to do with it.” So it’s complete common sense that there should be both an income tax and capital tax. Now, why is it that in practice this capital tax or property tax raises a lot more revenue than the inheritance tax? I think there are good reasons for this. Most people would rather pay 1% property tax each year, 1% of the value of the house each year for 30 years, rather than 30% at the time of inheritance. Maybe that’s partly because of tax illusion because they don’t realize they are paying the property tax, but I think it goes deeper than that. There’s also a very theoretical idea that we should prefer lump-sum taxation at the time of inheritance and let people do what they want in their life with their property. This is really an economist’s idea, so I’m surprised that you accept it. It’s very theoretical because in the real world there are lots of capital market imperfections which make this theoretical idea not such a great idea. For instance, if you need to pay 30% of the value of the home that you inherit from your parents, how are you going to pay for that? Will you be able to borrow this sum and reimburse one percent per year during the next 30 years? You might have to sell the house, which would be unfortunate. So maybe paying 1% per year is better. Also you don’t know how the market value and the rental value and the rate of return to your capital are going to change. For example, if I had inherited an apartment worth 100, 000 euros in Paris in 1972, when I was one year old, nobody would have guessed that it would be worth five million euros today. So it would be been foolish to tax me on the basis of the inheritance at the time and then not tax me for the rest of my life. I think it makes a lot more sense to combine the two. You could have a small inheritance tax and then an annual wealth tax, depending on how the market value of the property and the rental income are changing. So I think what I’m proposing is really common sense and to a large extent already exists, although the existing system will have to be adapted to the 21st century. As for the issue of global cooperation, of course it’s better if you have more cooperation, but, you know, we can have property tax without cooperation. So I think the claim that, 66 Thomas Piketty

“Oh, global wealth tax, we can’t do anything,” is a little bit lazy. It’s not really looking at the issue, which is that property taxes already exist, and we can revise them. So we should not use the lack of perfect global cooperation and a perfect global environment, which of course will never exist, as an excuse not to do what we can do. Arthur Goldhammer: Well I’m older than you are and when you get old you get lazy. Thomas Piketty: Oh no, this was not for you. I interpreted your question as you were repeating what some people… Arthur Goldhammer: I’m playing a devil’s advocate. Audience Member 2 – [Steven Sawyer]: You mentioned the question of how much tax, where most of the tax revenue comes from, and you also mentioned the Third Republic. But the way you describe your distribution is essentially financial or monetary. One of the arguments behind the Third Republic is that, first of all, you do have a massive fiscal revolution because they overhauled their system of indirect taxes. But they never dropped them. So basically fiscal revenue from indirect taxes increased by between 40 and 45% between 1870 and 1873. What did they do with that money? They paid off the debt in two years, and they put it into schools, and then they financed the construction of the railroads. These indirect taxes were obviously regressive, and this may have affected the distribution of wealth. But the revenue was used to build schools, and by 1895 France was the number one education provider in Europe, in the world, in terms of providing education to numbers of people. So is that something to consider, is that important, does it introduce—and of course we also know that the welfare state has always been largely financed by indirect taxes anyway. Is that something to consider? Thomas Piketty: Yes, it’s definitely part of what needs to be considered and part of what I try to consider. But the point is that even if you include indirect tax and all forms of tax until World War I, we had a small government in France just like everywhere. Concretely, you had total tax revenue of 10% of national income until World War I in France, the US, Britain, Germany, Sweden, everywhere. T. Piketty looks back on the success of Capital in the 21st century 67

It’s only after World War I, in the inter-war period, that you have an increase of total tax revenue toward 20, 30 and then in some countries 40 or 50%, at first because of the war and war-related spending, such as war pensions. In the turbulent interwar period you then saw increased social spending, and then after World War II you got the full-blown welfare state. Then, in the 1980s, you saw a stabilization pretty much everywhere, which continues to this day, but at different levels, around 30% of national income for tax revenue in the US, 50% in Sweden, 40% in Germany and Britain, 45% in France. Everybody’s in this range. But until World War I you are below 10% everywhere so, you know, there could be variation by 1870 to 1873 but in the end, in the decades prior to World War I, tax revenues are increasing at the same speed as national income. Government spending is still increasing, because of course you have industrial growth, which gives you more resources to invest. If you have more factories, you can also have more roads. The general growth process includes growth of the public sphere, broadly speaking, in absolute amounts. But in relative amounts you don’t see that. And in the concentration of wealth and assets you don’t see that. And, if anything, you have rising, slightly rising concentration until World War I. But of course, the country is developing and the broadening access to education is part of the growth process and modernization process. And not only in France. Sweden was more advanced in terms of educational achievements than France at the time, Germany also to some extent, some parts of Germany, but I’m not an expert on this. Arthur Goldhammer: Your book has attracted an enormous amount of praise but also a certain amount of criticism. And I wonder which of the criticisms of your book you find most pertinent? I’ll just mention three, and I don’t know whether they’ll be the three that you consider important or not. One is that you have no theory of ‘r’. You have this famous inequality, ‘r’ greater than ‘g’, but all your evidence about ‘r’ is based on empirical, historical data and so there’s no reason to believe that ‘r’ should be at any particular level in the future. The second criticism is related to that. It has to do with the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. And you might want to 68 Thomas Piketty explain, for the sake of the audience, what that means. But Larry Summers, for one, who in general praised your book, said that your arguments about the elasticity of substitution being greater than one, on which the future of ‘r’ depends, is not really sustained by the available empirical studies. And then the third area of criticism has to do with the composition of capital. There are some, like Matt Rognlie at MIT, who argues that the increase in wealth and equality since 1980 is based mainly on the increase in real estate values, and not on productive assets. And he believes that that’s a fundamental critique of your argument. Do you agree with that? Or is there some other criticism that you find most pertinent? Handle the question any way you want to. Thomas Piketty: Well, okay, so I think there has been lots of interesting discussion, critiques. To be honest, the three you’ve chosen, to which I’ll respond, all come from economists, and as I think you know, the problem with economists sometimes is not only that they don’t write books, it’s also that they don’t read books. So this creates problems because at some point, you know, my book was so successful people wanted to write about it even without opening it. First, the question of ‘r’. In fact, there is a series of r’s, so it’s complicated. If it was simple, if everything could be summarized with an elasticity of substitution, the book would not be 800 pages long, it would be short. And maybe it could have been shorter, but I don’t think it could have been 10 pages long. And the stories that Rognlie and Summers want to write are stories that are one page long, or three slides, which is nice, but this is not the story I’m telling because I think the world is complicated. I think the more interesting critiques come from social scientists outside economics, who read books more carefully, generally speaking. For example, there was a special issue of the review Annales - Histoire et sciences sociales, where there are many critiques, many people disagree, but I think the critiques are deeper and more interesting than the ones from economists, generally speaking. The British Journal of Sociology also had a special issue. So there have been many discussions of the book outside economics that I find more interesting. I will say a few words about those three critiques you mentioned, but to me the most interesting and most important general critique is that my book is definitely too much T. Piketty looks back on the success of Capital in the 21st century 69 centered on the Western experience. It’s partly due to data availability but it’s more than that. So it’s partly due to the fact that I was not able to access historical data for China, for Africa, for South America, at least until recently, so this makes me concentrate a lot on Western Europe, North America, and Japan. But it’s more than a question of data availability. It’s also that, as I was saying, the book is very much written as a reflection about the 20th century dynamics of inequality in Europe with the huge shocks caused by the two World , the Bolshevik Revolution and the pressure put by the Communist model on the Western elite in the post-World War II decade, and the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the period, which to some extent brought us back to a new regime of unlimited faith in self-regulating markets. So this is really a book about the shocks of the 20th century viewed from a European viewpoint. And from the viewpoint of India, from the viewpoint of South Africa, from the viewpoint of Brazil, you know, the history looks very different. Because these shocks are important for them because they are embedded into the world systems, the colonial systems, etc., but this is not a book about them basically. So the book is limited in this respect. The good news is that it will not be my last book. I hope to work more on other parts of the world and think more. I’ve been to India several times recently. With Abhijit Banerjee I’ve been working on Indian data for some time now, and I’m trying to think more about the inequality regimes in other parts of the world. But that’s clearly the most important limitation of the book; it has been criticized for that and I think for good reason. Now the other critiques you mentioned: Yes, there’s no theory of the rate of return to capital. Or rather, I think there is a theory but it’s a complicated theory because at the same time you have the usual story of declining return to capital. So if you accumulate more capital and your capital income ratio goes up, the rate of return may decline or it may stabilize. If the capital/income ratio stabilizes at a high level, the rate of return does not have to go to zero. Scarcity of capital is part of what determines ‘r’, but clearly this is not enough. Bargaining power also matters, as does the legal system, which determines the balance of 70 Thomas Piketty power between the workers and owners of capital. This is very important. Thus, there are many institutional factors that determine the return on capital. I tried to show how the capital share of income changed over the course of the 19th and 20th century, and I found political factors in the broad sense of the term are extremely important. In the case of France, for example, the labor share increases hugely after 1968, but after 1993 it goes in the opposite direction. So when you want to explain the dynamics of the capital share and the rate of return, political and institutional factors are at least as important as the supply and demand laws that economists prefer to look at. And my answer about the elasticity of substitution is more or less the same. I don’t think that you can predict the future rate of return to capital simply by looking at the elasticity of substitution of a well-behaved, one sector production function. I use this language at one point in the book in order to show that even if you accept that framework, there’s no reason to conclude that the capital/income ratio cannot continue to rise. If in the future you have new uses for capital, robots that can replace human labor, say, then the elasticity of substitution could be a bit bigger than one. It doesn’t need to be infinity but just a bit larger than one to make a big difference. But I’m not saying that this is what has been happening so far. Maybe this will be important 30 years from now, but at this stage the rise in the capital share is mostly due not to not robots but to traditional capital-intensive sectors like energy and housing. So the Rognlie point, in my view, was the stupidest of all. He is just using our database on housing and saying, look, housing is important. Well of course, this is our database, we completely agree about the fact that housing is important. And he wrote an entire paper saying just that housing is important. Really, what can I say? I agree. In my 2014 paper with Gabriel Zucman we give the full decomposition of wealth accumulation in all countries into what we call volume effect and price effect. And the price effect is mostly this housing price effect and we show that in a number of countries it’s actually more than 100% of the rise in wealth accumulation rate, but that’s not particularly good news. T. Piketty looks back on the success of Capital in the 21st century 71

That’s not particularly good news because it means that for the new generation who don’t have family wealth and who only have their labor income if they want to access property in Paris or London, they will need to earn quite a lot from their labor. So, yes, housing prices are a big part of the story. So what? Does this mean that everything is fine? To me this is an additional reason to be concerned about inequality dynamics and the need to adapt the tax system and legal system to the situation. So, frankly, I don’t see the point of this critique. Audience Member 3 – [Olivier Zunz]: Can I ask a question though? When the problems of the economy are discussed, we talk about many things other than the tax system. Why do you think that reforming the tax system will get at the roots of the problems with today’s economy? I think there’s no easy answer to the question, but I just wanted to hear you think more broadly about the nature of our economic difficulties. Thomas Piketty: Yes, you’re perfectly right, there are many problems other than taxes. I don’t think I’m saying that tax is the key to everything. When I talk about the rise of the social state and the fiscal state, I try to make it clear that the two evolve together. So tax is a big part of the state formation process, and it’s important not for its own sake but for what it means for the state formation process more generally. And for the development of the modern social state. And I also try to make clear that the legal system is incredibly important when it comes to reducing inequality, increasing equality, and regulating the economy. Think of financial deregulation, privatization, patent law, and rent control. These are aspects of the legal system that I talk about in the book at some length. I think maybe even more than I talk about taxation. These things are a very big part of the overall story of inequality. The thing about taxation is that it’s very difficult to have a quiet discussion about it. People get excited very fast. So when they see one page about taxation or a high tax rate, whatever, they focus on that and nothing else. But I think there is a lot more in the book and certainly there’s a lot more in the story of inequality. 72 Thomas Piketty

Audience Member 4: I’ve only read a little bit of your book, the first third or a quarter, but I have a question about the importance of monetary policy in the big rise in inequality we’ve seen since 1980. Thomas Piketty: I don’t think that monetary policy is the main driving force in the increase in capital and asset values, at least in the long run. I think there are other forces that have to do with changes in the legal system that favor private owners of wealth: the end of rent controls, financial deregulation, stock market reform. I would also include demographic factors with the explosion of population growth and more accumulation of assets. Now, that being said, monetary policy can have enormous impact over a period of five to ten years, and right now, certainly, monetary policy is playing an enormous role. But I guess it depends on the timescale you are looking at. If you want to explain the fact that in every developed country between 1970 and 2015 you have a huge rise of the wealth-income ratio, I think this is true irrespective of the short run or even medium run evolution between the 70s, 80s, 90s, today. But, again, we’ve probably been asking too much of monetary policy in recent years. And of course it’s much easier to print billions of dollars or euros than to fix the tax system, because for that you need a parliament and you need people to agree in the parliament, which is difficult. You need people to agree outside the parliament also, which is even more difficult. Whereas monetary policy is simple: you can create billions of dollars and euros in one day. But the problem is you don’t really know what you do with that money. You put it somewhere and, indeed, you can contribute to the bubbles and rising asset prices for certain assets in particular areas of the economy or particular countries. The people who benefit from this are not necessarily the people you would like to benefit from public policy. So I fully agree with you: that’s a big concern, especially now. Arthur Goldhammer: Alan Kahan. Audience Member 5 – [Alan Kahan]: You suggested just now, and many other people have suggested, that spreading education has been an enormous force in reducing inequality. What if we have topped out in our ability to spread education, at least to the developed world? That is to say, there’s a sharply declining marginal return on increased T. Piketty looks back on the success of Capital in the 21st century 73 investment in education, that it was cheap and easy to teach 98% of the population to read and write, and apparently impossible to teach 25% to engage in critical thinking. Thomas Piketty: That would be sad, but I’m not sure we are there yet. Let me say that the spread of education, it’s not so much that it has reduced inequality but at least it has prevented inequality from rising enormously. So it’s not that the inequality of labor earnings today is not less than a hundred years ago. In some countries, such as the US, it has probably become higher than it has ever been. But in most countries it is maybe comparable today with what it was a hundred years ago. But without the education expansion it would be a lot higher today. So if the bottom half or bottom 90% of the population had remained at the same skill level as 100 years ago and only the top 10% had increased their education levels, then inequality would be enormous. And to some extent this growing gap in educational investment between the bottom half in the US and the top 10 or 1% in the US, is I think a primary explanation for rising inequality in the US, and stronger rising inequality in the US than in Europe or Japan. But I think it could be different. It’s clear there are very different educational models. I’m always impressed in the French debate, we talk about university, we look at the tuition regime in the US or in Britain and we say, we don’t have tuition, maybe we should have more, and you know, maybe we could have a little more, but at the same time we don’t look so much at other countries like Germany or Sweden where they have zero tuition, less than in France. In Bavaria there was a referendum two years ago where they voted, there was an introduction of a 200 euro tuition for universities, and they voted it down. And it’s not a particularly left wing territory but there was a majority to say, no, 200 euros per year, that’s too much, that’s a break in equal access to education, let’s put it back to zero. And it’s the same in Sweden, and I think in the end that’s part of the reason why there’s less of an increase of inequality in Sweden or Germany than in the US. So there are very different—you know, there are different ideologies and different policies in the globalized world, so you can have similar technological evolution but still very different outcomes in different countries. 74 Thomas Piketty

Arthur Goldhammer: This answer brings us to politics in the everyday sense and my journalist friends have mandated me to ask you several questions about politics. First of all your mention of resistance to tuition payments brings up the Bernie Sanders campaign in the United States. He’s proposing free tuition for all students. And several journalists have asked me to put to you the question, in the Democratic primary race in the United States, are you supporting Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton? And you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. Thomas Piketty: No, look, of course I support Bernie Sanders with no hesitation. Also, I don’t have the right to vote there so I cannot. But I think it’s really very impressive that he’s doing so well. And I think, you know, look, maybe he’s not going to win, but what he shows, at the very least, is that maybe a younger Bernie Sanders and a less white Bernie Sanders could have won, and maybe will win another time. And not only win the primary but also the general election, because given where the Republican party is going, you know, I think he will win the election and then there will be a major shift in the political regime and public policy of the US. So this makes me full of hope and this confirms the fact that it’s very difficult to predict the future. And people who believe that nothing will ever change and that the Reagan policy regime is with us forever. You know, it’s easier with Clinton and Obama, Democrats, but it’s not with us forever. It will change. Arthur Goldhammer: And here in France you’ve been multiplying your interventions every day since I’ve been here. I’ve seen your name in the newspapers on one petition or another. I know you’ve been asked the question before. Do you intend to become involved directly in politics yourself, and you’ve answered firmly, no? Thomas Piketty: No, I am involved in politics in the public debate but, no, not as a candidate. But look, there are many different ways to be involved in politics. And I’m not sure, you know, the people who are candidates and people who are in office are the ones who are doing the most politics. Because when you see the political discourse of many political leaders, most of the time it’s very vague and when they say something precise it’s only when it has become the dominant consensus and the dominant opinion. T. Piketty looks back on the success of Capital in the 21st century 75

So in the end, who is the slave of whom, I don’t know. But I believe in the power of ideas and books, and I want to keep writing books, that’s for sure. But in the case of the French election, I think we need party primaries now that we have a new political regime in which the extreme right is capturing a third of the vote, the same as or even more than the mainstream parties of the right and left. Nobody could have imagined that the extreme right would do more than 40% in certain regions until last December, so I think already in 2002 the lack of a primary election between left wing candidates was a major mistake. And I can say that as someone who voted for Christiane Taubira at the time, I felt a bit ashamed, the night of the first round in 2002, because I contributed to the fact that the left was not in the second round and that La Pen beat Jospin in the first round. So already at the time it was a mistake not to have a primary election between left wing candidates. But now that the National Front has 30% rather than 15% of the voters, it’s not a mistake, it’s criminal. And especially now, with Hollande’s low approval rating. The very least he can do is to agree to go through the process. He doesn’t have to have 100 debates in little villages, he just has to do two or three TV debates, October, November, at the same time as the right wing candidates, and if he’s the best candidate for the left he will win. And I think this is his only chance for re-election. So it would be a big mistake to have no primary on the left this year, which is where things stand right now. It won’t be good for anyone if Hollande delays the announcement of his candidacy until just before the election. It’s certainly not good strategically for Hollande, and it will surely lead to a political catastrophe next May. Arthur Goldhammer: I think we have time for one more question from the audience. Audience Member 6: I’ve been looking at the International Monetary Fund and one of the things that is so striking about it is that many applied economists there talk about the economy as a technical sphere, like medicine. One thing that I thought was so useful in your book is that you say that’s simply not true, it’s not a technical question, it’s a political 76 Thomas Piketty question. We need to bring all of the social sciences and humanities to bear, and even the novels of Balzac. Economic questions pertain to all of us. On the other hand you don’t actually engage much with the existing literature on inequality, and one of the big gaps within the economics literature is of course gender. If you were to address gender issues, how would that change the kind of argument that you make? Thomas Piketty: You’re right, and that’s again one of the many limitations of the book. I recognize it. Gender is not entirely absent. If you look, for example, at the importance of demographics and immigration in countries like Germany and Japan, I make clear that the real issue behind the scenes is gender inequality. You know, if you assign women to a role that they don’t want after they have children, they will react by not having children, and the population will fall. As I argue in my book, this has huge consequences for the dynamics of wealth accumulation and inheritance. But of course there are many other dimensions to gender than this, family and fertility dimensions, which I do not address in my book. In any case, I’m in the process of escaping from economists. You have to leave me more time. I hope the next book will be more satisfactory from this standpoint. For now, I’ve said where I want to go, but I’m not there yet. Arthur Goldhammer: Well, I think that’s a good note to end on. I hope we’ve aided you with your escape from economics. And we want to thank you very much for agreeing to talk with us today.

ABSTRACT

This article is the edited version of remarks made by Thomas Piketty at a colloquium at the American University of Paris in February 2016. He is interviewed by his American translator and The Tocqueville Review editorial board member Arthur Goldhammer.

The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol. XXXVII, n° 2 – 2016

L’ÉTAT-PROVIDENCE FACE AUX INÉGALITÉS ET LA « DÉMOCRATIE DE PROPRIÉTAIRES » : UNE COMPARAISON ENTRE MEADE, RAWLS, ACKERMAN ET PIKETTY

Catherine AUDARD

INTRODUCTION Les travaux récents d’économistes comme Thomas Piketty ou Anthony Atkinson1 ont mis fin à une conviction, bien établie, que les politiques de redistribution de l’après-guerre menées par l’État- providence auraient définitivement réussi à réduire les inégalités. Or, bien loin d’avoir diminué, les inégalités non seulement de revenus, mais aussi de richesse et de patrimoine, n’ont cessé de croître depuis les années 1980 pour retrouver des niveaux comparables à ceux du XIXe siècle. En parallèle est apparue au sein des sociétés démocratiques une tentation pour l’inégalité qui a accompagné la montée des inégalités et a semblé les légitimer dans l’opinion publique. Patrick Savidan a bien souligné à quel point « nous avons validé démocratiquement l’oligarchisation de nos régimes sociaux et politiques » et combien il est devenu difficile de légitimer la lutte contre les inégalités2. Ce changement de mentalité n’est pas sans évoquer Rousseau et sa description de l’amour propre comme justification des inégalités extrêmes, même parmi ceux qui en sont victimes3. Si les démocraties sont tentées de cette façon par les inégalités, cela ne contredit-il pas la vision de John Rawls qui a dominé la théorie politique démocratique et libérale depuis plus de quarante ans ? Pour lui, « la société juste est un système équitable (fair) de coopération entre citoyens libres et égaux », « où chacun trouve des avantages que mesure un critère adéquat d’égalité », un idéal selon lui

78 Catherine Audard

« implicite dans la culture publique d’une démocratie4 ». Or non seulement les inégalités ont augmenté mais elles apparaissent comme la condition même de la prospérité et de l’efficacité économique, selon le double argument de la hausse de la productivité marginale que récompenseraient les hauts salaires, et du trickle down effect selon lequel toute la société bénéficierait à terme de l’enrichissement des plus riches. Ce genre de perspective où la démocratie avance à tâtons sur un arrière-plan d’inégalités n’est guère attirante, mais elle fait déjà partie de notre présent et définira peut-être notre avenir en l’absence de politiques sociales égalitaires sur la base d’arguments nouveaux. Or, il me semble qu’il existe chez Rawls, comme de nombreux auteurs l’ont montré récemment5, des ressources pour faire barrage à cette légitimation. Je voudrais donc, après avoir (1) examiné les explications que Piketty donne du retour des inégalités, présenter (2) les raisons que Rawls et Piketty avancent pour l’échec de l’Etat- providence à les réduire. Si (3), comme le soutient Piketty, la cause structurelle des inégalités se trouve dans la propriété du capital, est-ce qu’une dotation initiale sur le modèle de la « société des ayant-droits » (stakeholder society) de Bruce Ackerman6 ne serait pas la solution ? Je montrerai (4) que la solution institutionnelle que Rawls propose, à la suite de James Meade, la « démocratie de propriétaires » (Property Owning Democracy, POD par la suite) est en accord avec les solutions avancées par Thomas Piketty. Mais je conclurai (5) qu’elle est plus satisfaisante parce qu’elle justifie les hauts niveaux de taxation requis pour la POD par une conception de la personne et de ses intérêts qui accomplit un véritable changement de paradigme par rapport à l’utilitarisme de l’État-providence. L’égalité qu’il s’agit de favoriser est l’égalité des aspirations et des chances de développer et de réaliser son potentiel grâce à la propriété d’un capital productif, pas seulement l’égalité des besoins de base. En ouvrant le champ des aspirations, une telle vision prend des risques, mais elle peut aussi être suffisamment en phase avec l’individualisme contemporain pour le réorienter vers un idéal rénové de justice.

I - LA MONTÉE DES INÉGALITÉS ET LES ÉCHECS DE L’ÉTAT-PROVIDENCE (PIKETTY ET RAWLS) Dans son livre Le Capital au XXIe siècle, Thomas Piketty présente le résultat de quinze ans de recherches, un vaste tableau historique de l’évolution des inégalités de revenu et de fortune depuis la fin du L’Etat-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » 79

XVIIIe siècle en Europe occidentale et aux Etats-Unis, un travail qui n’avait jamais été accompli sur cette échelle jusque-là.

Piketty et le retour des inégalités injustes Quel est son diagnostic ? Ses conclusions qui ont rendu l’ouvrage rapidement très célèbre sont que les inégalités au XXIe siècle, bien loin de diminuer, ont retrouvé le niveau du XIXe siècle, contrairement à toutes les prévisions. Il propose l’explication suivante de cette évolution. Le taux de rendement annuel du capital (R) a été depuis le XVIIIe siècle en moyenne plus élevé (4-5%) que celui de la croissance de la population et des salaires, du revenu du travail (G) (1%-1,5%), ce qui constitue la contradiction centrale du capitalisme : R>G, et qui explique que les inégalités de fortune et de revenu soient restées stables si longtemps bien que très importantes. Avant la révolution industrielle, le taux de rendement du capital R, la rente foncière dans la société agraire du XVIIIe siècle, est resté constamment supérieur au taux de croissance G, très lent jusqu’à la Révolution française : 0,1% par an alors que le rendement du capital R a progressé de 4-5% par an. Mais la révolution industrielle n’a pas changé cette relation fondamentale et R>G continue de caractériser la répartition de la richesse dans la société capitaliste. G est passé à 1% par an et R à 5-7% par an sans que le rapport change et que les inégalités diminuent. La concentration des richesses est restée stable entre 1789 et 1914 avec 1% de la population possédant 70% des actifs malgré la révolution industrielle. Qu’il s’agisse des rentiers du XIXe siècle ou des entrepreneurs du XXe, le facteur décisif des inégalités a donc été, non les inégalités de salaire, mais la propriété du capital productif et l’héritage qui créent des inégalités de départ insurmontables pour les non-possédants. La seule période où la relation R>G s’est transformée a été entre 1914 et 1970. G est alors devenu très élevé et, pendant les Trente Glorieuses, la croissance G a même été de 5% par an en moyenne. Par contre, pendant cette période, R a beaucoup diminué à cause des chocs extrêmement violents qu’ont entraînés les deux Guerres mondiales, la Révolution russe de 1917 (pensons aux Chemins de fer russes et à la ruine des petits porteurs) et la Grande dépression de 1929. En conséquence, le capital a été en grande partie détruit, son rendement a diminué considérablement et, grâce aux mesures sociales et à la croissance économique, les inégalités de revenu et de fortune 80 Catherine Audard ont fortement diminué. Mais une fois la reconstruction de l’après- guerre terminée, après les Trente Glorieuses à la fin des années 1970, G est retombé à 1% et R a augmenté, retrouvant les niveaux du XIXe siècle. Les taux atteints parlent d’eux-mêmes. En 1914, 1% de la population possédait 70% des actifs. En 2010, aux États-Unis et dans une moindre mesure, en Europe, « le décile supérieur détient souvent jusqu’à la moitié du revenu national » (Piketty, op. cit., p. 40, n.1)7. « La concentration des revenus a retrouvé dans les années 2000-2010 – voire légèrement dépassé – le niveau record des années 1910-1920 » (Piketty, op.cit., p. 37). On pourrait objecter que les inégalités observées dans les sociétés démocratiques contemporaines n’ont rien à voir avec celles du XIXe siècle. Elles seraient le résultat justifié de l’égalité des chances et de la récompense des talents utiles à tous selon l’argument méritocratique. Là encore, Piketty montre qu’il s’agit d’une illusion. Les hauts salaires des managers ont certes remplacé les rentiers de la Belle Epoque, mais le niveau extrême de ces salaires ainsi que le système des stock- options qui les accompagne ont permis la reconstitution rapide du capital productif et sa transmission aux générations suivantes selon un modèle qui n’a rien à envier au XIXe siècle. « Une très forte inégalité du revenu total peut être le produit d’une société hyper- méritocratique … une société de super-cadres … mais rien n’interdit d’être en même temps super-cadre et rentier … et aux enfants de super-cadres de devenir rentiers » (Piketty, op. cit., ch.7, p. 416-417). La justification de ces hauts salaires n’obéit, en réalité, à aucune logique de productivité (Piketty, op. cit., chapitre 9, p. 524). La source en est le pouvoir politique des 1% les plus riches. Il existe, montre Piketty, une corrélation presque parfaite entre la baisse des taux d’imposition des plus hauts revenus et la hausse de ces revenus (Piketty, op. cit., p. 823). Depuis 1980, on constate la baisse des taux supérieurs d’imposition à 30-40% au lieu de 80-90% entre 1930-1980. Ce sont les négociations politiques qui les ont rendu possibles (Piketty, op. cit., p. 825 et 829). C’est donc que, dans l’État-providence, le processus politique a été capté par les 1% et empêche tout relèvement du taux confiscatoire. Seuls des taux d’imposition dissuasifs, du type de ceux appliqués aux Etats-Unis et au Royaume- Uni au XXe siècle, permettraient de revenir en arrière et de mettre fin à l’envol des hauts revenus (Piketty, op. cit., p. 830).

L’Etat-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » 81

Rawls, critique de l’Etat-providence Face à ce diagnostic pessimiste, la théorie de la justice de John Rawls semble pécher par optimisme et avoir perdu toute pertinence. Elle prétend exprimer des valeurs et des principes qui seraient largement répandus dans les sociétés démocratiques contemporaines. Ces principes sont (1) l’égalité « réelle » des libertés fondamentales, politiques en particulier, (2) l’égalité « réelle » des chances et (3) le principe de différence ou de réciprocité qui ne tolère des inégalités que si elles sont utiles pour tous ou pour les plus défavorisés8. Or si les sociétés ont changé aussi radicalement que le constate Piketty, l’égalitarisme rawlsien apparaît dépassé et impuissant face non seulement à « la dérive vers l’oligarchie », mais aussi à la « tentation pour l’inégalité » qu’évoque Patrick Savidan9. Il est certain que, à première lecture, Théorie de la justice (TJ) a pu sembler être un manifeste de la social-démocratie et de l’État- providence. Mais c’est une erreur qui a été bien mise en lumière par les commentateurs récents de Rawls10. En réalité, Rawls se livre dans ses derniers livres à une critique sévère des insuffisances de l’État- providence et de la justice sociale comme assistance. Bien loin d’avoir progressé vers l’idéal démocratique, l’Etat-providence de l’après- guerre que Rawls décrit comme le Welfare State Capitalism, (WSC par la suite)11 a été en partie un échec qu’il avait anticipé même si en 1971 il restait encore relativement optimiste. Bien loin de réduire les inégalités, le WSC les a laissées se développer et là Rawls anticipe sur le diagnostic de Piketty de l’échec de l’Etat-providence. Les inégalités extrêmes de revenus et de fortune qui sont devenues la norme sont bien une menace pour la démocratie car elles concentrent le pouvoir politique entre les mains d’une minorité et Rawls serait d’accord avec Piketty pour parler d’une « dérive vers l’oligarchie » (Piketty, op. cit., p. 741). C’est sur ce diagnostic que Rawls et Piketty convergent et que l’actualité de la pensée de Rawls apparaît. En effet, comme Piketty, Rawls pense que, plus que l’inégalité de revenus, c’est la concentration de la propriété du capital dans les mains d’une minorité (Piketty, ch. 10) qui est la cause structurelle de l’injustice sociale que l’État- providence a été incapable de combattre pour des raisons politiques. D’où ses espoirs dans un programme politique et social qui lutterait pour généraliser la propriété du capital et pour développer une 82 Catherine Audard

« démocratie de propriétaires » (POD). Voici ce qu’il écrit en 1987 dans sa « Préface » à la traduction française de TJ pour expliquer son évolution : Ce que je ferais différemment aujourd’hui serait de distinguer plus nettement entre l’idée de la démocratie de propriétaires (Property Owning Democracy, POD par la suite) introduite au chapitre 5 et celle de l’Etat- Providence (Welfare State Capitalism, WSC par la suite). En effet, ces idées sont complètement différentes mais, comme dans les deux cas on peut avoir une propriété privée des capacités productives, nous pouvons faire l’erreur de les confondre. Une différence majeure est que les institutions de POD et de son système de marchés concurrentiels tentent de disperser la propriété de la richesse et du capital pour éviter qu’une petite partie de la société ne contrôle l’économie et indirectement, la vie politique elle-même. Une démocratie de ce type y parvient non pas en redistribuant une part du revenu à ceux qui en ont moins, et cela à la fin de chaque période, mais plutôt en garantissant une large dispersion de la propriété des atouts productifs et du capital humain dès le début de chaque période, tout cela étant accompagné par l’égalité des libertés de base et la juste égalité des chances. L’idée n’est pas simplement d’assister ceux qui sont perdants en raison d’accidents ou de malchance (bien qu’il faille le faire), mais plutôt de mettre tous les citoyens en position de gérer leurs propres affaires et de participer à la coopération sociale sur un pied de respect mutuel dans des conditions d’égalité (TJ, p. 13). Tout d’abord, et là Rawls serait d’accord avec Piketty, la concentration de la propriété du capital et de la richesse est incompatible avec les principes de justice et la défense de la liberté parce qu’elle représente un risque de dérive oligarchique. Ainsi la valeur réelle des libertés politiques est menacée par « des inégalités très importantes en matière de propriété réelle (celle des moyens de production et des ressources naturelles) si bien que le contrôle de l’économie et de l’essentiel de la vie politique réside entre les mains de quelques-uns12 ». Seule la dispersion du capital permettrait de lutter contre la domination économique et politique d’une minorité. Le WSC ne respecte donc pas le premier principe de justice, en particulier l’égale (fair) valeur des libertés politiques qui seule permet l’exercice des droits de la citoyenneté par tous. Mais il ne garantit pas non plus les deux autres. La juste égalité des chances et le principe de différence sont irréalisables sur la base des seules politiques de transfert de revenus du WSC. Ces transferts garantissent, selon le schéma keynésien, un niveau de vie minimum et un marché de consommateurs, mais sans s’attaquer aux causes structurelles des L’Etat-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » 83 inégalités que Piketty met bien en valeur, au premier chef, l’inégale répartition de la propriété du capital (Piketty, op. cit., ch. 10 et 12).

Deux formes de redistribution À partir de ce diagnostic et des échecs du WSC, il peut être utile de distinguer entre deux formes de redistribution sans nécessairement les opposer. Le WSC a échoué parce qu’il redistribue ex post vers les plus pauvres ce qui est nécessaire à un niveau de vie minimum, mais sans lutter contre les causes de la pauvreté, sans permettre le développement du potentiel de chacun qui permettrait d’y échapper. Ce niveau minimum est certes indispensable à la lutte contre la pauvreté et à la protection contre les aléas de la vie et Rawls veut même en faire un droit constitutionnel13. Mais il est inefficace dans la lutte contre les inégalités et tend à les aggraver parce qu’il ne permet pas de sortir de la pauvreté et de l’assistance. « Lorsque à la fin de chaque période ceux qui ont besoin d’aide peuvent être identifiés … peut se développer une classe déshéritée et découragée dont les membres sont dépendants de manière chronique des prestations distribuées. Cette classe se sent exclue et ne participe pas à la culture politique publique » (La justice comme équité. Une reformulation. JCER par la suite §42, p. 193). Ce minimum social est de plus en plus vu comme insuffisant et les propositions abondent pour le remplacer par un Basic Income ou une allocation universelle, bien supérieure à un minimum social14. Seule une redistribution ex ante par une dotation initiale en capital qui corrigerait le taux de rendement du capital R et sa répartition, et là Rawls est à nouveau en accord avec le diagnostic de Piketty, permettra de lutter efficacement contre les inégalités, pas seulement contre la pauvreté. À la distribution de prestations ex post qui rendent dépendants et sont insuffisantes pour accéder à l’autonomie, Rawls veut donc ajouter la distribution ex ante d’un capital et l’accès à la propriété qui garantissent, au contraire, l’indépendance. D’où son intérêt, comme nous allons le voir, pour une « démocratie de propriétaires ». La prédistribution ex ante est préférable à la redistribution ex post : cette dernière encourage la dépendance et l’assistance, la première garantit la valeur réelle des libertés de base et la juste égalité des chances grâce à la dispersion généralisée de la propriété du capital et du pouvoir politique qu’elle confère. Elle 84 Catherine Audard donne les moyens politiques de résister à l’oligarchisation de la société contre laquelle le WSC est resté impuissant. Mais jusqu’où va la distribution ex ante dans la transformation de l’État social ? Sous-jacent à ce débat, il nous semble qu’il existe un nouvel argument sur lequel nous reviendrons et que Rawls avance pour s’opposer au WSC. Il n’est pas sûr qu’il soit sur ce point en accord avec Piketty qui lui vise plutôt à moderniser l’État social qu’à changer de paradigme15. En effet, pour Rawls, le but de la justice dans une société démocratique n’est pas seulement la survie ou la lutte contre la pauvreté, mais le développement des capacités et l’épanouissement de chacun que seule permet la propriété du capital. Rawls rejette un minimum social qui est toujours trop faible pour permettre l’exercice égal de la citoyenneté et les « conditions sociales du respect de soi ». En d’autres termes, le WSC ne vise pas la justice comme reconnaissance de l’égale dignité de chacun, mais seulement à garantir un revenu social minimum et à compenser la malchance, ce qui ne suffit pas à promouvoir le développement de soi et la citoyenneté.

II - LA DOTATION INITIALE EN CAPITAL (ACKERMAN) Le diagnostic sur lequel Piketty et Rawls sont d’accord est donc que c’est l’inégale distribution de la propriété du capital bien plus que celle des revenus du travail qui est la cause structurelle des inégalités injustes et arbitraires. Face à ce diagnostic, plusieurs voies s’ouvrent.

Généraliser, non pas supprimer la propriété privée du capital Si la propriété privée du capital est la source structurelle des inégalités, ne faut-il pas la supprimer et l’étatiser ou la collectiviser à la suite du marxisme et du socialisme ? Piketty n’a-t-il pas choisi comme titre pour son livre de faire écho à Marx ? Or, aussi bien Rawls que Piketty rejettent la suppression de la propriété privée du capital productif et sa collectivisation dont le coût serait le sacrifice des libertés fondamentales16. Tous deux cherchent à concilier liberté individuelle et justice sociale. Rawls discute Marx longuement dans de nombreux textes17, et s’il s’oppose aux effets destructeurs du capitalisme18, il se situe résolument dans un cadre social-libéral où la priorité des libertés fondamentales reste le principe normatif. Quant à Piketty, s’il n’approfondit pas ses rapports au marxisme, il est clair que son objectif est de transformer le capitalisme et d’arriver à « un L’Etat-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » 85 compromis idéal entre justice sociale et liberté individuelle » (Piketty, op. cit., p. 816). Tous deux proposent donc de généraliser la propriété privée, non de la supprimer. Ils souhaitent réduire les inégalités sociales tout en respectant les libertés de base dont le droit à la propriété personnelle. On retrouve là les idées du « nouveau » libéralisme social19 pour qui la propriété privée est compatible avec la justice si on distingue entre la « propriété en vue du pouvoir d’exploiter » et la « propriété en vue de l’utilité ». Comme on le voit avec le principe de différence de Rawls, un certain degré d’inégalités de revenus et de propriété du capital est compatible avec la justice sociale si elles sont bénéfiques pour tous. Comme l’écrit Thomas Piketty, citant Rawls, « l’égalité est la norme, mais l’inégalité est acceptable si elle est fondée sur l’utilité commune20 ». Dans ce contexte, la défense d’une « démocratie de propriétaires » apparaît comme une idée plausible.

Propriété du capital et citoyenneté Mais c’est un programme qui est également proche du républicanisme21 puisqu’il fait de l’accès à la propriété la condition de la citoyenneté égale pour tous et de la liberté comme non domination telle que Rousseau, par exemple, la conçoit22. Pour le républicanisme du XVIIIe siècle23, pour Rousseau, Harrington, Jefferson, Thomas Paine ou Adam Smith, l’égalité des droits de la citoyenneté doit s’accompagner de l’égalisation de la propriété du capital productif car seule la propriété privée donne les moyens de la citoyenneté égale. Ainsi Thomas Paine qui avait été influencé par Adam Smith propose, dans Rights of Man : Part Two (1792) et dans Agrarian Justice (1797), que l’avènement du gouvernement représentatif soit accompagné d’un nouvel engagement de la société à garantir des ressources matérielles suffisantes pour l’exercice de la citoyenneté, « non comme charité mais comme un droit ». Si la propriété privée est largement et équitablement distribuée, elle est tout à fait défendable car elle permet de concilier la liberté comme indépendance vis-à-vis d’autrui et l’égalité comme non servilité du citoyen, le but étant de lutter contre la domination politique des plus riches sur le reste de la société. Ainsi pour Paine, chaque citoyen à la naissance et à son mariage, ou à sa majorité à 21 ans, devrait recevoir une dotation en capital de la part de l’État. De plus, chaque citoyen aurait droit à des allocations en cas 86 Catherine Audard de chômage et de maladie, à une retraite à partir de 50 ans, toutes mesures qui anticipent à la fois le Welfare State et la POD. Cependant, il ne faut pas oublier d’ajouter à cette liste l’utilisation de la POD qu’en ont faite les conservateurs dans les années 1980 avec la politique d’accession à la propriété du logement généralisée par le gouvernement Thatcher. En enrichissant les citoyens et en développant une classe de petits possédants, une telle politique permettrait de développer la responsabilité individuelle et de désengager l’Etat-providence, ce qui était le but déclaré de Thatcher. Pour Thatcher et les conservateurs britanniques, la « démocratie de propriétaires » était une panacée se limitant à l’accès au logement, une mesure isolée, un outil politique et idéologique pour lutter contre le socialisme en développant une catégorie sociale de petits propriétaires qui deviendraient solidaires du gouvernement conservateur. La POD serait un substitut de la politique de logements sociaux et de prestations sociales, pas un complément. Le danger malheureusement très prévisible et qui s’est avéré réel a été le surendettement de ces nouveaux petits propriétaires et la spirale sociale du déclassement. On voit donc que l’idée est complexe.

La « Stakeholder Society » et la dotation initiale C’est dans cette ligne républicaine que se situe le projet de la « société des ayant-droits » ou Stakeholder society du philosophe américain Bruce Ackerman24. Il s’agit d’une tentative similaire à celle de Rawls pour allier justice sociale, réduction des inégalités et liberté individuelle grâce à la généralisation de la propriété du capital par une dotation initiale en capital sans conditions de ressources, comme un droit de la citoyenneté. Inspirée par l’exemple illustre de Thomas Paine, cette solution serait le meilleur moyen de réaliser à la fois la juste égalité des libertés politiques et l’égalité des chances au sens rawlsien, tout en respectant le premier principe et en améliorant la situation des plus défavorisés (principe de différence). Bruce Ackerman est inspiré à la fois par Thomas Paine et par le souci rawlsien de donner aux libertés politiques et à l’égalité des chances leur juste valeur. L’idée essentielle est que « la tâche centrale du gouvernement est de garantir une égalité authentique des chances ». Au lieu de se limiter aux droits socio-économiques du travailleur comme le WSC, il faut se tourner vers l’idée d’une citoyenneté économique. Le projet est l’attribution d’une somme de 80 000 dollars L’Etat-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » 87

(1999) à chaque jeune de 18 ans sans conditions de ressources quand il accède à la majorité civique et devient citoyen afin qu’il puisse entrer dans la vie avec de vraies chances de réussite. Ce capital est financé initialement par l’impôt. À sa mort, chaque bénéficiaire doit repayer ces 80 000 dollars à un fond commun qui financera les dotations des générations futures, conformément à sa responsabilité de citoyen. Dans une interview de 2012, Ackerman déclare : « L’héritage citoyen propose d’offrir 80 000 dollars à tous les Américains qui décrocheraient l’équivalent du bac, c’est-à-dire un examen national évaluant un niveau minimum de compétence, pas la capacité à intégrer une grande école ; chacun pourrait d’ailleurs choisir à quel moment passer cet examen. En 2008, Anne a réévalué notre chiffrage de 1998, date de la publication du livre. La Réserve fédérale américaine est une mine d’informations sur la répartition des richesses ; s’il y a beaucoup d’inégalités dans la répartition des salaires aux États-Unis, la situation est encore pire en ce qui concerne la répartition des richesses. Or si l’on imposait un impôt sur la fortune à hauteur de 2% des revenus des 3% des foyers américains les plus riches (c’est-à-dire deux adultes possédant plus d’1,6 millions de dollars en fortune réelle), même avec un taux de fraude fiscale de 25 à 30%, on aurait assez d’argent pour financer un héritage citoyen de 80 000 dollars par Américain, s’élevant à un total de 3,7 millions par an25 ». Ce faisant, on encouragera l’accès à la propriété des classes défavorisées et on luttera à la fois contre la pauvreté et les inégalités, la société à deux vitesses. Ainsi sera revivifié l’idéal américain de vivre dans un pays où tous ont une chance équitable (fair) de réussir, « a land of equal opportunity ». Ainsi la liberté individuelle et la justice sociale seraient rendues compatibles. « Notre vision de la citoyenneté économique, écrit Ackerman, est enracinée dans la tradition libérale classique ... C’est à chacun de décider comment utiliser ce capital initial. Chacun est responsable de l’utilisation de cette chance initiale. Triomphes et échecs sont nôtres ». (The Stakeholder Society, p. 5) Comme chez Rawls, cette ambition s’oppose au Welfare State et à la croissance des bénéfices sociaux sans contreparties, ce qui diminue la richesse à partager sans créer de solidarité ou de civisme. Elle s’oppose aussi aux libertariens qui refusent la redistribution et les impôts au nom de la liberté individuelle. La dotation initiale dessine une « troisième » voie entre socialisme et libéralisme et permet 88 Catherine Audard d’accroître à la fois la liberté et l’égalité. Ainsi la « société des ayant- droits » fut l’une des principales idées du Premier ministre Tony Blair durant sa campagne de 1997. Les citoyens ne devraient pas être traités comme les destinataires passifs d’allocations et d’aides calculées selon leurs besoins. Ils devraient plutôt disposer d’un véritable droit aux avantages de la vie sociale, quels que soient leurs succès ou leurs échecs, leurs contributions effectives ou leurs besoins, parce qu’ils sont des participants à ses arrangements coopératifs, ayant des devoirs et des responsabilités politiques correspondants : voter, exercer leurs capacités cognitives et participer aux débats portant sur le bien commun ainsi qu’aux délibérations publiques. Pour exercer pleinement ces droits et responsabilités et pour bénéficier d’une réelle égalité des chances, ils devraient recevoir une dotation initiale. En rendant la promesse de liberté universelle et concrète, écrit Ackerman, tous les Américains sont concernés … Les jeunes de la nouvelle génération affirment ainsi à la fois leur droit individuel à forger leur destin, mais aussi leur identité de citoyens. C’est ce qui créera leur allégeance à la démocratie26. Critique rawlsienne d’Ackerman Si séduisante qu’elle soit, la dotation initiale est loin de représenter en totalité l’idéal rawlsien. Certes distribuer dès le départ, ex ante, des moyens productifs suffisants pour garantir à tous les jeunes indépendance, respect de soi et citoyenneté égale est une mesure légitime qui semble aider à lutter contre les inégalités. Le grand mérite de la dotation initiale est que le principe de l’égalité des chances ne doit pas conduire à se contenter de compenser la malchance (luck egalitarianism) au cours de la vie ou de remédier à la pauvreté, mais il demande de créer une communauté d’égaux. Pour cela, le fait que la société se substitue à la famille pour aider les jeunes à démarrer dans la vie est une excellente mesure, bien supérieure à la fois sur le plan politique, symbolique et moral comme sur le plan économique aux transferts de l’État-providence. Mais ne faut-il pas compléter la dotation initiale par des mesures tout au long de la vie et, surtout, par une taxation vraiment progressive des hauts revenus et du capital? La position d’Ackerman comme celle de la Troisième voie de Tony Blair conduiraient plutôt à justifier une diminution de l’intervention de l’État pendant le reste de la vie, une fois la dotation initiale effectuée. La dotation initiale est présentée comme L’Etat-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » 89 une alternative à la redistribution alors qu’elle en est un complément. La position rawlsienne est donc différente de la Stakeholder Society. Rawls ne pense pas que la dotation initiale se substitue à la transformation structurelle de la propriété du capital. C’est la structure de base de la société qui doit être modifiée si la propriété privée du capital continue à en faire partie sans générer d’injustices. Un ensemble de mesures sociales complémentaires : plein emploi, politique de revenus, services sociaux universels, etc. sont des conditions nécessaires pour que l’accès à la propriété ne devienne pas un fardeau insupportable pour les plus pauvres.

III - LA POD COMME ALTERNATIVE AU WSC (MEADE ET RAWLS) Rawls avance alors l’idée distincte de celle de la dotation initiale, l’idée d’une « démocratie de propriétaires » (POD). L’idée est délicate à bien comprendre et surtout à traduire en français, c’est pourquoi nous avons gardé le terme anglais. Ses ambitions consistent à lutter contre les inégalités les plus injustes grâce à des taux d’imposition confiscatoires du capital et des revenus les plus élevés (70-80% pour la tranche la plus élevée) et à une politique de redistribution qui vise non pas à détruire, mais à généraliser la propriété privée. Son objectif est non seulement de lutter contre la pauvreté, mais surtout de développer la classe moyenne, condition de survie de la démocratie.

James Meade (1964) Mais c’est l’économiste d’Oxford, James Meade (1907-1995)27, prix Nobel d’économie en 1948, dont Rawls a repris en partie les idées, qui a le mieux formulé le programme. Piketty se réclame également de Meade qui anticipe sur ses conclusions avec près de cinquante ans d’avance. En 1964 Meade avait prévu la possibilité que le rendement du capital dépasse celui du travail grâce aux innovations technologiques, entraînant la croissance des inégalités et un nouveau monde dystopique qu’il appelait The Brave New Capitalists’ Paradise (Meade, 1964, p. 33). Le problème de Meade était celui de Piketty face au retour de la Belle Époque et de ses inégalités, l’oblitération des acquis des Trente Glorieuses. Ce qui est remarquable, c’est que la solution qu’il propose se démarque des idées dominantes de l’époque, de l’utilitarisme comme du socialisme et combine différentes stratégies, différentes institutions aussi bien capitalistes que socialistes, transferts de 90 Catherine Audard revenus, plein emploi, services sociaux universels et redistribution de la propriété, pour préserver le dynamisme économique tout en réduisant les inégalités. Il veut créer une communauté de citoyens libres et égaux qui ne n’est pas soumise à la domination politique et économique d’une minorité de possédants. Il fournit ainsi le modèle d’une société juste qui est une réponse aussi bien au socialisme et à la propriété collective des moyens de production qu’au néolibéralisme et au règne des lois du marché. Tout d’abord, et ici il suit Keynes et se situe bien dans la ligne du « nouveau » libéralisme, il recommande d’agir sur la demande de manière indirecte, en élevant le niveau de vie par des transferts de revenus plutôt que, comme les socialistes, par une intervention directe de l’Etat sur les marchés et l’imposition d’un salaire minimum, de nationalisations, d’un contrôle des changes, etc. Il est en faveur d’un Welfare State qui, à la différence du socialisme, agit indirectement sur l’économie et les niveaux de revenus pour plus d’efficacité. Il défend ainsi l’idée d’une allocation universelle (Basic Income) ou « dividende social » qui serait versé à chaque citoyen sans conditions de revenus tout au long de sa vie. Dans Outline of an Economic Policy for a Labor Government (1935) et dans d’autres écrits, il y voit un ingrédient central d’une économie à la fois efficace et juste. Il s’agit d’un revenu minimum garanti plus généreux et moins créateur de dépendance que les programmes du WSC. En complément, il est nécessaire de contrebalancer le pouvoir des entreprises par une organisation des travailleurs qui a pour but d’améliorer les salaires et les conditions de travail et d’assurer le plein emploi et des services sociaux universels. C’est le Trade Union State. Il recommande ensuite de mettre en concurrence le secteur public et le secteur privé et de développer la démocratie et la cogestion dans l’entreprise dans le contexte d’une économie mixte. C’est l’idéal d’une Workplace Democracy. C’est seulement une fois ces conditions réalisées qu’il sera possible de procéder à une large redistribution de la propriété privée du capital grâce à une taxation très progressive du capital ainsi que des successions et des donations. Par contre, l’impôt sur le revenu devrait être limité aux revenus les plus élevés. L’argument qu’utilise Meade comme tous les libéraux sociaux est que la richesse est un produit social et le bien-être de chacun une responsabilité collective, pas seulement individuelle. Il n’y a pas de mérite individuel à obtenir un niveau élevé de revenu ou à posséder un L’Etat-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » 91 capital important car la contribution de la collectivité à ces résultats est beaucoup plus importante que celle de l’individu concerné, comme Rawls s’emploie à le montrer dans sa critique célèbre de la méritocratie28. C’est cette illusion qu’il faut démasquer, l’impôt étant une juste reconnaissance du rôle de la collectivité dans la création de la richesse individuelle. L’après-guerre a vu triompher au Royaume-Uni un autre programme social, celui du socialisme de Beveridge, fondé sur le salaire minimum, les allocations familiales et la sécurité sociale, qui s’est répandu en Europe et a relégué la POD à l’arrière-plan.

Rawls et la POD : les mesures préconisées par Rawls (JCER, §41-42 et 49) Voyons maintenant ce que Rawls garde du programme de Meade. Six mesures caractérisent le programme présenté dans Théorie de la justice (§42-43), mais surtout dans son dernier livre, La justice comme équité (§41 et §49). Toutes, elles insistent sur la prédistribution ex ante et sur la taxation progressive, plutôt que la redistribution ex post alors que Meade combine les deux stratégies sans les opposer. Tout d’abord, Rawls propose de revenir à une taxation très progressive des hauts revenus « pour prévenir des accumulations de richesse qui sont jugées hostiles au contexte social juste, par exemple à la valeur équitable des libertés politiques et à l’égalité équitable des chances » (JCER §49, p. 220). Celle-ci s’accompagne d’une taxation également très progressive de la transmission du capital « pour encourager une dispersion plus large et plus égale de la propriété réelle et des moyens de production » (Ibid. p. 220). Le résultat est une dispersion très large de la propriété personnelle d’une génération à l’autre « qui n’exige pas une croissance économique continuelle de génération en génération » sur le modèle de l’état stationnaire de l’économie mentionné par John Stuart Mill (Ibid., p. 218). Ce faisant, Rawls se situe dans la tradition égalitariste américaine que Piketty analyse très clairement (Piketty, op. cit., p. 816). Ces hauts niveaux de taxation supérieurs à 70% que Rawls demande ont, en effet, existé aux Etats-Unis dès 1919-1922, puis de nouveau dans les années 1937- 1939 pour mettre fin à des niveaux de revenu et de patrimoines jugés socialement excessifs et économiquement stériles. Mais ils sont retombés à 30-40% depuis les années 1970. À cela il ajoute une taxe proportionnelle sur la consommation plutôt que d’augmenter l’impôt sur le revenu qui est injuste pour les revenus les plus modestes. « Il 92 Catherine Audard est possible que le principe de différence puisse être satisfait en abaissant ou en augmentant le niveau de revenu exempt de l’impôt proportionnel sur le revenu » (JCER, §49, p. 221)29. S’inspirant de John Stuart Mill et du mouvement coopératif comme de Meade, Rawls propose d’ouvrir la propriété du capital aux travailleurs, de développer les coopératives, la démocratie dans le lieu de travail afin de mieux réguler le capital en faisant des travailleurs des actionnaires de leur entreprise (JCER, §52, p. 242). Comme Meade, il voit dans la démocratisation de l’entreprise, la Workplace Democracy, la cogestion et l’autogestion comme le développement du mouvement coopératif, une autre voie d’accès à une dispersion de la propriété du capital productif. Enfin, s’il espère, comme Meade, qu’un minimum social puisse être garanti par la Constitution, ce minimum n’est pas celui du WSC, mais il est spécifié par « l’idée de la société conçue comme système de coopération équitable entre citoyens tenus pour libres et égaux… par le principe de différence et l’idée de réciprocité » (JCER, §38, p. 180). La POD doit se traduire par un droit constitutionnel à un capital inaliénable qui garantirait la valeur égale de la liberté politique et de la citoyenneté, pas seulement un droit à l’Etat-providence et à l’assistance. Les mesures préconisées par Rawls consistent donc à généraliser l’accès ex ante à la propriété privée personnelle par la taxation et à empêcher la concentration excessive du capital productif entre les mains d’une minorité. « Une démocratie de propriétaires évite cela, non pas en redistribuant le revenu à ceux qui possèdent le moins à la fin de chaque période, mais plutôt en s’assurant d’une propriété largement dispersée des moyens de production et du capital humain » (JCER, §42, p. 192). C’est donc par la généralisation de la propriété privée et la taxation progressive du capital et de la consommation que la victoire sur les inégalités injustes sera réalisée, pas par les transferts de revenus (JCER, §49). La méfiance de Rawls à l’égard des risques de dépendance que crée le revenu minimum le conduit à opposer la POD et l’allocation universelle alors que les disciples de Meade s’y refusent et n’opposent pas WSC et POD. Rawls reste donc proche de Meade, mais sa critique du WSC peut laisser à penser qu’il penche plus du côté d’un libéralisme social que d’un socialisme libéral même s’il se refuse à trancher. La différence frappante est que Rawls insiste surtout sur les inconvénients de la stratégie ex post et sur la dispersion la plus large possible de la propriété du capital ex ante (par l’impôt sur L’Etat-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » 93 le capital, les revenus et les successions). Mais la POD a sans doute besoin d’être complétée par des interventions ex post tout au long de la vie (allocation universelle, revenu citoyen et WSC) pour assurer le développement du capital humain et des opportunités, à la manière de Thomas Paine qui combine les deux : revenu citoyen après 50 ans et dotation en capital à 21 ans pour garantir la citoyenneté égale pour tous. Peut-être s’agit-il d’une différence de génération, Rawls étant plus individualiste et moins fasciné par le Welfare State que Meade ?

Piketty et le « contrôle démocratique du capitalisme » Comment la POD ainsi définie par Meade et Rawls se compare-t- elle avec les idées de Thomas Piketty qui, comme Rawls qu’il cite rapidement30, est en faveur d’une taxation très progressive des revenus et des patrimoines les plus élevés pour permettre une large dispersion de la propriété ? Quelles sont alors les solutions que propose Piketty pour lutter contre des inégalités, semble-t-il, inévitables ? Comme Meade, il préconise un Etat social qui aurait une mission plus large que l’État-providence ou le Welfare State (Piketty, op. cit., p. 761). C’est cet Etat social qu’il faut moderniser et dont il faut contrôler les dépenses, mais certainement pas démanteler (Piketty, op. cit., p. 769). Comme Rawls, il pense qu’il faut contrôler le capitalisme financier sans le détruire car « la propriété privée et l’économie de marché … jouent un rôle utile pour coordonner les actions de millions d’individus ». L’histoire a montré que l’économie planifiée n’est pas une solution viable (Piketty, op. cit., p. 866-867). L’avenir est dans le développement de nouvelles formes de propriété et de contrôle démocratique du capital (Piketty, op. cit., p. 937). Comme Rawls, il pense qu’il existe des inégalités justifiées si elles sont fondées sur l’utilité commune : il y aurait consensus sur le principe de différence de Rawls (Piketty, op. cit., p. 44, p. 62 et p. 768). Il fait un rapprochement éclairant entre le principe de différence et La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (26 août 1789) dont l’Article Premier dit : « Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits. Les distinctions sociales ne peuvent être fondées que sur l’utilité commune. » La question des inégalités n’est pas celle de leur éradication, mais celle de leur mise au service des conditions de vie des plus désavantagés. Comme Rawls enfin, la solution qu’il préconise à la suite de James Meade est « l’impôt progressif sur le patrimoine 94 Catherine Audard individuel, une institution qui permet à l’intérêt général de reprendre le contrôle du capitalisme tout en s’appuyant sur les forces de la propriété privée et de la concurrence » (Piketty, op. cit., p. 867). Il favorise un impôt sur le capital plus efficace et plus juste que l’impôt progressif sur le revenu inventé au XXe siècle (Piketty, op. cit., p. 755)31. Comme Rawls, il cite James Meade et Anthony Atkinson (p. 821) sur le choc fiscal et la taxation de l’héritage et il note l’influence de J. S. Mill. L’impôt progressif constitue toujours une méthode relativement libérale pour réduire les inégalités dans le sens où cette institution respecte la libre concurrence et la propriété privée tout en modifiant les incitations privées de manière démocratique dans le cadre de l’Etat de droit. L’impôt progressif exprime en quelque sorte un compromis idéal entre justice sociale et liberté individuelle » (Le capital au XXIe siècle, op. cit., p. 816). D’autres voies que la taxation progressive existent certes : la propriété publique des entreprises et la réglementation des salaires des dirigeants (France et Allemagne). De même l’Union soviétique n’a jamais eu besoin d’impôt confiscatoire, même chose pour la Chine (Ibid. p. 816, note 1). Mais ces autres moyens ne respectent pas la propriété privée et la liberté individuelle. C’est pourquoi l’impôt progressif est une meilleure solution. « L’impôt progressif exprime en quelque sorte un compromis idéal entre justice sociale et liberté individuelle » (Thomas Piketty, Le capital au XXIe siècle, op. cit., p. 816). « L’impôt sur le capital permettrait de faire prévaloir l’intérêt général sur les intérêts privés tout en préservant l’ouverture économique et les forces de la concurrence » (Ibid., p. 752, p. 867 et p. 943). Mais, à la différence de Rawls, Piketty pense en termes de mondialisation. Il faut adapter l’impôt progressif au capitalisme patrimonial mondialisé du XXIe siècle : il doit être mondial. Et, surtout, Piketty n’avance aucune conception de la personne qui permettrait de répondre à tous ceux qui sont fascinés par les promesses de réussite pour tous dans une société où les libertés ne seraient plus limitées par les demandes de justice, c’est-à-dire d’une juste égalité des chances.

Objections à la POD Les difficultés que présente la POD sont nombreuses. Pourquoi la propriété privée, pas seulement l’accès au logement mais aussi à L’Etat-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » 95 l’actionnariat, serait-elle supérieure à la propriété collective ou étatique des moyens de production ? Dans quelle mesure sommes- nous devenus plus individualistes ? Ensuite, la taxation extrêmement progressive que demande la dispersion de la propriété va accroître le rôle de l’appareil d’État et de la bureaucratie ainsi que le sentiment d’injustice face à des droits de succession très élevés, par exemple. N’est-ce pas dangereux pour les libertés ? Surtout, l’allocation universelle paraît créer des risques inutiles si elle est mal utilisée par ses bénéficiaires et décourage le goût du travail. De plus, ses objectifs sont contradictoires et oscillent entre individualisme et socialisme. Le but est-il de lutter contre la pauvreté et de maintenir un marché de consommateurs, comme pour Keynes, ou de lutter contre des inégalités dangereuses pour la cohésion sociale en évitant de trop grands écarts de richesse, ce qui est l’argument du républicanisme classique en faveur d’une « société d’égaux » qui permet l’accès de tous ou du plus grand nombre à la citoyenneté et à l’exercice des libertés politiques ? Ou bien est-il, comme Rawls semble le suggérer, de permettre le développement de soi et l’autonomie du plus grand nombre et d’accepter les inégalités qui peuvent résulter de talents inégaux, comme pour le libéralisme de l’individualité inspiré par John Stuart Mill ? Il ne faut donc pas ignorer les nombreuses difficultés d’un programme qui place la redistribution du capital au centre de la lutte contre les inégalités. Sur le plan économique, les risques pour l’appareil productif sont considérables si le capital ainsi redistribué est redirigé exclusivement vers la consommation et pas vers l’investissement. Sur le plan politique, les risques existent d’un autoritarisme grandissant de l’État pour imposer des niveaux insupportables de taxation. Le niveau maximum de l’État social est déjà atteint : entre un quart et un tiers du revenu national, et il est impossible d’aller plus loin (Piketty, op. cit., ch. 13, p. 761). Comment créer un consensus politique quand on avance des chiffres d'au moins 300 milliards d'euros annuels en France (sur la base de 450 euros par mois et par adulte) pour financer un revenu universel ? Or, pour le moment, les minima sociaux en France représentent moins de 25 milliards et même en y ajoutant les allocations familiales (12 milliards), le compte n'y est pas. Quant à la taxe globale suggérée par Piketty, est-ce qu’elle ne demanderait pas un État mondial dont le caractère utopique ne fait pas de doute ? De même, la nécessité d’une 96 Catherine Audard bureaucratie très importante pour réaliser le programme de la « démocratie de propriétaires » risque d’accroître les dépenses improductives et de menacer la démocratie qu’elle est censée mettre en œuvre. Comme le recommande Bruce Ackerman, la redistribution du capital suppose, au moins dans une phase préliminaire, un encadrement des citoyens, un système de « tutorat » pour apprendre aux citoyens à gérer ce capital, à le faire fructifier pour les générations futures, ce qui suggère une forme de paternalisme éclairé et de « despotisme doux » à la Tocqueville plutôt qu’une démocratie de citoyens responsables d’eux-mêmes. Enfin, sans une éthique publique qui valorise les investissements à long terme plutôt que la satisfaction immédiate, sur le modèle des analyses par Max Weber de l’éthique protestante, le système n’est-il pas condamné à l’échec ?

IV - LA JUSTIFICATION DE LA TAXATION DU CAPITAL ET DE LA PRÉDISTRIBUTION : UN CHANGEMENT DE PARADIGME Mais une réponse existe. Elle se trouve dans l’attrait d’une conception de la justice qui justifie la redistribution du capital au nom de ce qui est nécessaire au développement de soi de chacun, de son potentiel et de toutes ses facultés, et qui fait de l’égalité une condition du développement de soi, pas une fin en soi. Le succès de la « démocratie de propriétaires » dépend de son mode de justification et de sa capacité à résister à la tentation pour l’inégalité qui a accompagné la montée des inégalités et semblé la légitimer dans l’opinion publique. Ce qui fait la force de la position de Rawls, c’est qu’à la différence des auteurs que j’ai mentionnés, il justifie la POD grâce à une conception philosophique anti-utilitariste de la personne bien différente de celle du WSC qui restait sous l’influence de l’utilitarisme. C’est ainsi que s’explique son insistance sur l’empowerment des citoyens, que l’assistance ou l’État-providence réduisent à néant. Rapprochons cela du rôle important que joue le respect de soi dans la liste des biens sociaux premiers qu’une société juste garantit à ses membres. Et nous retrouvons alors l’idée classique de développement de soi, centrale aussi bien pour le jeune Marx de 1844 que pour John Stuart Mill en 1859, dans De la liberté. C’est cette valeur du développement de soi qui a été détruite par le modèle mécanique et naturaliste de l’État-providence. C’est cette valeur que Rawls aide à remettre au cœur d’un nouveau paradigme de l’État social au XXIe siècle. Le nouveau paradigme que Rawls oppose à WSC remet en son cœur les L’Etat-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » 97 valeurs du libéralisme : l’autonomie et la capacité à décider de son destin qui s’opposent au welfarisme et à la « prétendue conception économique de la démocratie » (TJ, §75, p.532) qui est une idéologie de technocrates et d’experts qui prend comme référence l’individu- consommateur, pas l’individu-citoyen. En suivant Mill, Rawls propose une conception empirique de la personne comme un être en développement qu’il oppose à l’utilitarisme et à sa description des préférences comme données. L’individualité est faite non seulement de données observables instantanées, mais elle possède un potentiel de développement auquel contribuent ou non les décisions, les choix et les ajustements de chacun tout au long de sa vie qui permettront d’échapper à la pauvreté et d’exercer son statut de citoyen. On voit tout ce qui sépare Rawls du WSC et du socialisme qui, à la suite de Marx, défend l’égalité au nom de l’égalité des besoins de base qu’une société juste doit satisfaire, pas au nom d’une juste égalité des chances de développer son potentiel.

CONCLUSION Ce qui ressort des analyses que nous avons menées, c’est que le choix réside entre trois types d’arguments qu’il est, bien sûr, souhaitable de combiner. Soit on reste dans le cadre du Welfare State et de son amélioration, comme pour Meade et Piketty, et l’accès à la propriété du capital est présenté comme un complément des transferts de revenu ex post, la taxation du capital étant nécessaire à l’amélioration du niveau de vie et à la lutte contre la pauvreté. Mais cet argument ne peut justifier des niveaux de taxation qui peuvent atteindre 80-90% des hauts revenus et des droits de succession. Soit on avance, comme Ackerman et Rawls, l’argument de la citoyenneté et de l’égale valeur des droits et des libertés pour tous. C’est l’argument du républicanisme qui fait de la lutte contre l’oligarchie financière un objectif essentiel du combat pour la liberté et contre la domination des élites. Seule l’autonomie financière permet l’exercice réel de la citoyenneté comme le souligne Rawls. Mais, pour cela, il faut un accord sur la conception de la liberté comme non domination et sur un rôle étendu de l’État et de la bureaucratie pour mettre en œuvre un tel programme, ce qui paraît contradictoire. La réaction du libéralisme social est alors, à la suite de John Stuart Mill et nous avons montré que Rawls est proche de cette position, de reformuler 98 Catherine Audard l’argument en termes de satisfaction des aspirations et de développement de soi, pas seulement de citoyenneté et de participation politique. D’une part, il faut convaincre les citoyens que le développement légitime des aspirations individuelles a besoin pour se réaliser de conditions sociales relativement justes, d’un equal playing field caractérisé par les deux principes de justice : priorité des libertés égales pour tous et égalité équitable des chances ainsi que principe de différence. C’est seulement en reconnaissant que la richesse est un produit social et le bien-être de chacun une responsabilité collective pas seulement individuelle que l’on peut justifier la redistribution du capital au-delà des prestations du Welfare State. D’autre part, il faut comprendre que ces conditions n’assignent pas un destin à chacun, mais sont des moyens, des chances, des opportunités de développement tout au long d’une vie afin de sortir de la spirale de la consommation immédiate et de l’endettement. L’autonomie n’est pas sacrifiée à l’égalité si, grâce à l’accès au capital, les conditions sociales deviennent des tremplins plutôt que des obstacles pour la réussite et l’épanouissement de soi.

NOTES

[1] T. Piketty, Le capital au XXIe siècle, Le Seuil, 2014 ; Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What can be done? Harvard University Press, 2015. [2] P. Savidan, Voulons-nous vraiment l’égalité ? Albin Michel, 2015, p. 251. [3] « L’amour propre n’est qu’un sentiment relatif, factice et né dans la société qui porte chaque individu à faire plus de cas de soi que de tout autre » (J.- J. Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, 1755, 1ere Partie, note 1, p. 196, Paris, GF, 1971). Comme l’écrit F. Neuhouser, l’amour-propre explique « comment les êtres humains peuvent être conduits à rechercher les inégalités pour elles-mêmes, comme manifestations publiques du statut supérieur qu’ils cherchent à atteindre. La gamme des phénomènes humains qui dépendent d’une telle pulsion pour l’inégalité est bien connue et très étendue : la poursuite sans fin de la richesse, la consommation ostentatoire, le désir incessant de compétition et de dépasser les autres… toutes manifestations de la ferveur qu’inspire l’amour-propre d’accroître notre fortune, non sur la base de besoins réels, mais afin de se placer au-dessus des autres », (OC III, 175). Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 79. L’Etat-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » 99

[4] J. Rawls, Libéralisme politique, 1993, tr. fr. Paris, PUF, 1995, (LP par la suite) I §3, p. 40-41. [5] M. O’Neill et T. Williamson (dir.), Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond, Oxford, Blackwell, 2014 ; Thomas Piketty, Le capital au XXIe siècle, op. cit. [6] B. Ackerman et A. Alstott, The Stakeholder Society, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1999. [7] Voir Piketty, op. cit., p. 52, le graphique 1.1. En 2016, la moitié des ménages français concentrent encore 92 % des avoirs patrimoniaux, selon une étude de l’Insee publiée le 8 novembre 2016. [8] J. Rawls, Théorie de la justice (1971, 1999), tr. fr. Paris, Le Seuil, 1987 (TJ par la suite), §11 p. 91 et §46 p. 341, pour l’énoncé final. [9] Rawls n’utilise pas le terme qui se trouve chez Piketty op.cit., p. 833 ainsi que chez Savidan, Voulons-nous vraiment l’égalité ? op. cit., chapitre 17. Un exemple frappant de cette dérive oligarchique est la décision de la Cour Suprême du 2 avril 2014 (McCutcheon v. FEC, 572 U.S.) qui a consacré le pouvoir politique des 1% les plus riches en supprimant les limites au financement des campagnes électorales par les individus après avoir, en 2010, supprimé les limites au financement des campagnes par des entreprises et des syndicats. [10] Martin O’Neill par exemple pense que Rawls offre une véritable alternative au capitalisme (M. O’Neill, op. cit. p. 3.) [11] Il s’en explique longuement dans La justice comme équité. Une reformulation (2001), tr. fr., Paris, La Découverte, 2003, (JCER par la suite), où il distingue entre 5 types idéaux de systèmes sociaux : « le capitalisme du laissez faire, le capitalisme de l’Etat-providence (Welfare State Capitalism, WSC par la suite), le socialisme d’Etat avec économie dirigée, la démocratie de propriétaires (Property-Owning Democracy, POD par la suite) et finalement le socialisme libéral (démocratique) » (JCER, §41, p. 188). Il ne développe pas le cas du socialisme libéral et se concentre surtout sur « la démocratie de propriétaires » que nous allons analyser. [12] J. Rawls, La justice comme équité. Une reformulation (2001), tr. fr, Paris, La Découverte, 2003, §41, p. 190. [13] « Ce qui doit être une disposition constitutionnelle essentielle est l’assurance d’un minimum social qui couvre au moins les besoins humains de base » (JCER, §49, p. 221). [14] Ce débat en France a été initié par l’œuvre d’André Gorz, Misères du présent, richesse du possible (éd. Galilée, 1997) qui oppose le Basic Income ou revenu de base à la dotation initiale et au revenu minimum. Voir aussi P. Van Parijs, L'Allocation universelle (avec Yannick Vanderborght), La Découverte, coll. « Repères », Paris, 2005. Le débat entre allocation universelle et dotation initiale mériterait un autre article, bien sûr. [15] T. Piketty, op. cit. p. 769 : « Il faut moderniser l’Etat social, pas le démanteler ». [16] T. Piketty, op. cit., p. 866-867 : « La propriété privée et l’économie de marché … jouent un rôle utile pour coordonner les actions de millions d’individus ». 100 Catherine Audard

[17] Les rapports entre Rawls et Marx demanderaient une analyse beaucoup plus complète. Contentons-nous de renvoyer à JCER, §52 et à la critique marxiste de Rawls par G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 2. [18] JCER, §41, p. 188. Voir aussi M. O’Neill, op.cit., p. 75 : « Rawls considérait que sa théorie de la justice menait à une critique fondamentale des formes bien connues du capitalisme ». [19] Sur le New , voir J. T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, Oxford, 1986, M. Freeden, The New Liberalism. An Ideology of Social Reform, Oxford, 1986, et C. Audard, Qu’est-ce que le libéralisme? Paris, Gallimard, 2009, chapitre 4. [20] T. Piketty, op. cit., p. 767. Voir J. Rawls, Théorie de la justice, op. cit., §11, p. 92 : « Si la répartition de la richesse et des revenus n’a pas besoin d’être égale, elle doit être à l’avantage de chacun ». [21] Sur les liens entre POD et le républicanisme, voir A. Thomas, Republic of Equals : Predistribution and Property-Owning Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2016. [22] Sur la conception républicaine de la liberté comme non domination et le contraste avec la définition libérale de la liberté comme non interférence, voir P. Pettit, Républicanisme. Une Théorie de la liberté et du gouvernement, trad. fr. par P. Savidan et J.-F. Spitz, Paris, Gallimard, 2004. Parmi les différentes conceptions de la liberté que l’on trouve chez Rousseau, la liberté comme non domination occupe une place prééminente. « On est libre quoique soumis aux lois et non quand on obéit à un homme parce qu’en ce dernier cas, j’obéis à la volonté d’autrui ; mais en obéissant à la loi, j’obéis à la volonté publique qui est autant la mienne que celle de qui que ce soit » (Fragments politiques, Œuvres complètes III, p. 248).Voir aussi Du Contrat social II, chapitre 12 : « il n’y a que la force de l’État qui fasse la liberté de ses membres ». [23] Sur l’histoire de l’idée, voir Ben Jackson « POD, A Short History » in M. O’Neill et T. Williamson, op. cit., p. 33-52. [24] Bruce Ackerman et Anne Alstott, The Stakeholder Society, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1999. [25] Thomas Grillot & Jean-Claude Monod, « Une citoyenneté pour le XXIe siècle. Entretien avec Bruce Ackerman », La Vie des idées, 5 mars 2012. ISSN : 2105-3030. URL : http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Une-citoyennete- pour-le-XXIe-siecle.html [26] B. Ackerman et A. Alstott, The Stakeholder Society, op. cit. p.44. [27] J. E. Meade, Efficiency, Equality and Property-Owning Democracy, G. Allen & Unwin, Londres, 1964. L’intérêt pour les travaux de Meade n’a cessé de croître. Voir R. Krouse et M. McPherson, « Capitalism, Property-owning Democracy and the Welfare State » in A. Gutmann (dir.), Democracy and the Welfare State, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988, et A. Atkinson, « James Meade’s Vision », National Institute Economic Review, 1996, n°157, pp. 90-96. [28] Voir J. Rawls, Théorie de la justice, op. cit., § 17, p. 134 : « Mériter c’est avoir un droit. L’existence de tels droits présuppose un système de coopération effectif… Nous ne méritons pas notre place dans la répartition des dons L’Etat-providence face aux inégalités et la « Démocratie de propriétaires » 101

à la naissance pas plus que nous ne méritons notre point de départ initial dans la société. Avons-nous un mérite du fait qu’un caractère supérieur nous a rendus capables de l’effort pour cultiver nos dons ? Ceci aussi est problématique… La notion de mérite ne s’applique pas [indépendamment] d’un système équitable de coopération sociale. » Voir aussi §48, p. 348-353. [29] Rappelons que l’impôt proportionnel prélève une proportion fixe du revenu (flat tax) et le taux est le même pour tous alors que l’impôt progressif change de taux selon le niveau de revenu et de fortune (son taux est plus élevé pour les plus riches). Voir T. Piketty, Le capital au XXIe siècle, op. cit., p. 796. [30] T. Piketty, Le capital au XXIe siècle, op. cit., p. 768. [31] Sur l’impôt progressif et son rôle dans la modification structurelle de la répartition du patrimoine, voir aussi Piketty, op. cit., chapitre 10, p. 594.

ABSTRACT In this paper, I would like to present some remarks on the idea of a “property-owning democracy”, first presented by James Meade in 1964 as an institutional remedy to the rise of inequality and then developed by John Rawls in his Theory of Justice (1971) and in Justice as Fairness. A Restatement (2001). Far from being obsolete in the present state of increased and extreme inequalities as described by Thomas Piketty in his influential Capital in the XXIst Century, (2013), I will show that Rawls’s focus on inequalities of capital, not only of income, is still relevant today. Only a wide dispersion of capital and property through a return to high levels of taxation can remedy the failure of Welfare State benefits to reduce inequalities. Rawls’s argument is based on the need not only to fight poverty, but also to create economic conditions for civic and social inclusion. He advocates a quasi-republican conception of the person as citizen, not only as consumer, that echoes Bruce Ackerman’s stakeholder society (1999). But he also, and more convincingly in my view, draws on Mill’s conception of the individual as a self-developing being and argues that a property-owning democracy is the condition for her autonomous development.

The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol. XXXVII, n° 2 – 2016

REPUBLICANISM AND PROPERTY-OWNING DEMOCRACY: HOW ARE THEY CONNECTED?

Stuart WHITE

INTRODUCTION Recent years have seen a growth of interest in republicanism in academic political theory (Sandel, 1996; Pettit, 1997, 2012; Skinner, 1998; Honohan, 2002). There has also been a more modest growth of interest in “Property-Owning Democracy” (POD) as a form of economic organization, as advocated by John Rawls (Rawls, 1999). A POD is a market economy, with a significant role for private ownership of the means of production, but in which public authority is used to sustain an egalitarian distribution of productive assets so that market outcomes are more equal than is typical of a capitalist society. The categorisation of Rawls’s theory as “liberal”, combined with the tendency to see “liberalism” and “republicanism” as rival, even opposing schools of thought, might lead one to think that republicanism and POD stand in some kind of rival or antagonistic relationship. There are, however, strong reasons for seeing them as mutually supportive. In this paper I shall explore how POD arguably supports republicanism as a political ideal, and how republicanism also arguably supports POD as an economic ideal. By extension, I shall suggest that liberalism— or, at least, a Rawlsian liberalism—and republicanism are more appropriately seen as mutually supportive than in opposition (see also Audard, 2007; Thomas, 2016). We begin in section 1 with some opening definitions of republicanism and POD. Republicanism, I argue, is helpfully broken down into (a) a conception of political legitimacy; (b) a conception of

104 Stuart White liberty; and (c) a conception of citizenship and politics. In sections 2 and 3 I then set out two ways in which POD supports republicanism. Section 2 discusses how POD supports republican legitimacy, in particular through its support for the value of political equality. I connect this argument to Rawls’s concerns about oligarchy and to his own case for POD. Section 3 discusses how POD supports a concern to secure republican liberty (as “non-domination”). Sections 4 and 5 then consider how republicanism might support POD. Section 4 sketches an argument I have developed elsewhere at greater length that a specifically republican form of citizenship is important to the stability of POD (White, 2012). Left to itself, POD might well have a tendency to generate “individualism” in ’s sense of the term, implying a withdrawal from civic engagement and a consequent erosion of citizens’ support for the institutions that maintain a POD. A Tocquevillian response to this problem is to foster a republican practice of citizenship that counters “individualism” and encourages civic engagement and a concern for the wider public good. While section 4 discusses a potential problem of stability for POD once established, section 5 considers the possible contribution of republican politics to establishing a POD in the first place. The most contemporary section of the paper, it discusses how a specifically republican approach to politics, focused on the constitution-defining role of “We the people”, might be necessary or helpful in pushing back against the ‘oligarchic shift’ that many capitalist democracies, such as in the Euro-Atlantic region, have experienced in recent years. In this way, a republican politics can create conditions more favourable to the establishment of POD. Section 6 concludes with a brief discussion of the wider theoretical implications of the discussion, focusing in particular on the relationship between liberalism and republicanism.

I - DEFINING PROPERTY-OWNING DEMOCRACY AND REPUBLICANISM Let us begin, therefore, by defining what we mean by POD and republicanism. As a term POD originates in UK politics, being initially adopted by Conservatives in the early/mid-twentieth century as a way of describing their proposed alternative to socialism (Jackson, 2012, 36-40). In the 1950s and 1960s, “Revisionists” in the Labour Party in the UK began to develop ideas about how economic equality could be advanced by changes to the distribution of Republicanism and Property-owning-Democracy 105 productive assets and they picked up on the term, in effect contesting its Conservative use (Jackson, 2012, 40-44). This is the context in which the economist James Meade used the term in his influential book, Efficiency, Equality, and the Ownership of Property (Meade, 1964). Here Meade distinguishes four ways in which government can promote economic equality. First, it can use taxation and public expenditure (The Welfare State). Second, it can support trade unions to maintain wages (The Trade Union State). Meade argued that, in the UK of the 1960s, these two approaches needed complementing by two further approaches. One was to take public ownership of capital so that the return on capital was available for distribution to the citizenry as a whole (The Socialist State). The idea was not that the state should itself manage or control businesses. Rather, it should, in Meade’s view, acquire a stake in businesses across the economy and thereby share in the rise in capital value as the businesses grew and in the returns on this capital. Additionally, the state could act to promote a wider dispersion of privately-held wealth, e.g., through reforms to the structure of inheritance tax. This focus on shaping the private distribution of assets, with an underlying egalitarian ambition, is referred to by Meade under the heading of “Property-Owning Democracy”. Meade’s discussion was an important reference point for John Rawls. In his A Theory of Justice, first published in 1971, Rawls argues that the principles of social justice are not satisfied by a free-market capitalist system or even by “welfare-state capitalism”. Justice requires either a system in which the means of production are publicly owned, while production is coordinated through the market (“liberal socialism”); or else a system in which the distribution of productive assets, including “human capital”, is purposively shaped to limit inequality in the ownership of these assets. This is “property-owning democracy” (Rawls, 1999, xiv-xvi, 239-251). The basic idea is that social justice requires more than corrective tax-transfers to limit the effects of class inequality in a capitalist economy. Rather, it requires the abolition of the capitalist economy itself, in the sense of a market economy with private ownership of the means of production and a strong profile of unequal asset ownership. In place of a capitalist society with a stark division between workers and capitalists, justice requires a market economy in which productive assets are distributed so that the distinction between workers and capitalists is blurred. 106 Stuart White

Ideally, the vast majority of citizens would be both in the sense of getting income from the sale of labour-power and from capital. Roughly in line with Rawls’s discussion, let us define a POD for purposes of this paper as follows: Property-owning democracy (POD): An economic system which features (a) large-scale use of the market as an allocative mechanism; (b) large-scale private ownership of the means of production; (c) institutions to limit significantly inequality in private ownership of the means of production and human capital; and (d) a non-trivial public sector, particularly to help with limiting inequality in human capital. At the institutional and policy level, POD is likely to involve some form of taxation on wealth inheritances (Rawls, 1999, 245-246). It is also compatible with, and arguably requires, the idea of a universal capital grant: a scheme under which each citizen would receive a substantial basic endowment of wealth in early adulthood as of right (Ackerman and Alstott, 1999; White, 2015). Although Rawls does note the possibility of “hybrids” of liberal socialism and POD, he presents them as discrete alternatives (Rawls 1999, 240-242). This contrasts somewhat with Meade’s presentation in Efficiency, Equality, and the Ownership of Property. Certainly, in his later work, Meade offers a model of a (more) egalitarian market economy that integrates what Rawls terms “liberal socialism” and POD. In this hybrid, which Meade refers to as “Agathotopia” (the good place), the community owns a sizeable share of productive assets and distributes a “social dividend” to citizens as a share-out of the return on these assets (Meade, 1989). Thus, citizens would derive income from their own work, where earning power is shaped by universal access to quality education; from their own capital, where the distribution of private capital is shaped by policies such as inheritance tax (and, we might add, universal capital grant schemes); and from the social dividend payment which represents their share in the return on the community’s public investment fund. In the discussion below, it will help to keep in mind not only POD as defined above but also this “Agathotopian” model or what we may here term extended POD. If this is how we define POD, what about republicanism? I propose here to define republicanism in terms of specific conceptions of political legitimacy; of liberty; and of citizenship and (the doing of) politics. A political view is more or less republican according to how far it accepts the republican conceptions of legitimacy, liberty and Republicanism and Property-owning-Democracy 107 citizenship and politics (as elaborated below). In an ecumenical spirit, I leave open here the question of how the three conceptions might be understood in relation to one another. I propose that we define republican conceptions of these three sets of ideas as follows. Republican conception of legitimacy: a political system is legitimate, such that authority-holders have the right to issue commands, to the extent that (a) laws and policies are made through a genuinely democratic process and (b) laws and policies reflect collective judgments of the common good. Republican conception of liberty: an individual is free when he or she has the status of non-domination, i.e., is not subject to another’s power of arbitrary interference. Republican conception of citizenship and politics: citizenship is not only a status of holding rights but a practice that involves active participation in political life, animated by a commitment to the common good; politics should give democratic expression to this conception of citizenship. The republican conception of legitimacy has roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (Rousseau, 1994; Cohen, 2009c). It is an attempt to capture what is of value in Rousseau’s claim that legitimacy is tied to the sovereignty of the ‘general will’. I take from this the idea that legitimate law-making must be sufficiently sensitive to the views and demands of equal citizens—that it comes equally from all and, in this respect, is genuinely democratic. At the same time, I take the idea that a legitimate law-making process is one that systematically encourages citizen-legislators to frame proposals that serve the shared interests of citizens, conceived as equals. In this respect, law-making must be oriented to the good of all, to their common good. Thus, equal opportunity for political influence is necessary for legitimacy but not sufficient. It must be complemented by practices through which citizens search for their common good. In contemporary political theory, this latter idea is often elaborated using the notion of “deliberative democracy”, where “deliberation” refers to a form of civic discussion and argument in which citizens offer reasons for legislative proposals that are suitably linked to considerations of the common good (Cohen, 2009a; Freeman, 2000; Young, 2001). Let us now turn to the second republican conception, the conception of liberty. Philip Pettit has recently argued that republicanism is distinguished by a particular conception of liberty, liberty as “non-domination” (Pettit, 1997, 2012; see also Skinner, 108 Stuart White

1998). In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau says that the worst thing that can happen in human affairs is to find oneself living at the mercy of another (Rousseau, 1984, 125). Roughly speaking, freedom as non-domination is the status of not living at another’s mercy. As Pettit describes it, it is the status of not being subject to another’s power to interfere arbitrarily in one’s choices. Skinner elaborates the closely related “neo-Roman” conception of liberty as the status of not being dependent on another’s good will. Both contrast this way of approaching liberty to the idea that liberty consists simply in the absence of actual interference: even if nobody is actually interfering with my choices, their power to do so, at their discretion, if they have such a power, casts a shadow over my choices that undermines my freedom. Note that one can accept that liberty in this sense is very important, as I do here, without also claiming that this is the only significant kind of liberty or claiming that the notion of freedom as non-domination is absent from liberal thought. Finally, turning very briefly to our third republican conception, republicanism is often associated with a particular view of citizenship and with a related, normative view of politics (Nabulsi, 2008). The citizen is appropriately “active” and her activity is centred on political participation, and guided by a commitment to the common good. This model of citizenship, as a virtue-centred practice, has application in the well-ordered republic, but also has application more generally, including in the struggle to create and develop the republic (Nabulsi, 2008; Gourevitch, 2015, 138-173).

II - FIRST CONNECTION: POD SUPPORTS REPUBLICAN LEGITIMACY The first connection between POD and republicanism we shall discuss concerns the way POD arguably supports the republican conception of legitimacy. The basic argument can be set out as follows. The political equality argument: (1) Republican legitimacy requires that law and policy is made through a genuinely democratic process. (2) A genuinely democratic process requires political equality: equality of opportunity for political influence. (3) Equality of opportunity for political influence is undermined by substantial inequality in the ownership of productive assets. Republicanism and Property-owning-Democracy 109

(4) POD prevents substantial inequality in the ownership of productive assets. Therefore: (5) POD helps to maintain equality of opportunity for political influence. Therefore: (6) POD helps to maintain a genuine democratic process. Therefore: (7) POD helps to maintain republican legitimacy. The central concept in the argument is that of political equality, understood as equality of opportunity for political influence (Cohen, 2009b). As explained by Joshua Cohen, equality of opportunity for political influence does not mean that all citizens do in fact have equal influence in law- and policy-making. But it does mean that any inequalities in influence must reflect choices about how far to get involved in political decision-making, and in personal abilities, rather than inequality in the resources that citizens have the opportunity to bring to bear in the political process. One important resource that people can bring to bear in the political process of course is money. In many contemporary Euro-Atlantic polities, candidates for political office have a strong need for funds to finance their campaigns. Those with more wealth are in a better position to offer these funds and, in this way, to exert influence over the platforms and preferences of politicians (Lessig, 2015). The wealthy are also more able to offer other kinds of material incentive to politicians. They can also exert influence through the media and various interventions to shape the flow of ideas (e.g., through the funding of think-tanks). POD acts directly on the background distribution of wealth, however, preventing the large-scale, unequal inheritance of wealth across the generations, and ensuring (or at least promoting) a basic endowment of wealth for all citizens. In this way, it directly limits the inequality of wealth that is one important source of inequality of opportunity for political influence. By helping to protect equality in opportunity for political influence it thereby helps maintain a genuinely democratic political process, which is one key condition for republican political legitimacy. 110 Stuart White

Rawls’s argument for POD appeals in part to its alleged connection with political equality. Rawls is very clear on the threat which wealth inequality poses to genuine democracy: Historically one of the main defects of constitutional government has been the failure to insure the fair value of political liberty. The necessary corrective steps have not been taken, indeed, they never seem to have been seriously entertained. Disparities in the distribution of property and wealth that far exceed what is compatible with political equality have generally been tolerated by the legal system. Public resources have not been devoted to maintaining the institutions required for the fair value of political liberty. Essentially the fault lies in the fact that the democratic political process is at best a regulated rivalry; it does not even in theory have the desirable properties that price theory ascribes to truly competitive markets. Moreover, the effects of injustices in the political system are much more grave and long lasting than market imperfections. Political power rapidly accumulates and becomes unequal; and making use of the coercive apparatus of the state and its law, those who gain the advantage can often assure themselves of a favored position. Thus inequities in the economic and social system may soon undermine whatever political equality might have existed under fortunate historical conditions. Universal suffrage is an insufficient counterpoise; for when parties and elections are financed not by public funds but by private contributions, the political forum is so constrained by the wishes of the dominant interests that the basic measures needed to establish just constitutional rule are seldom presented. (Rawls, 1999, 198-199) One key reason why welfare-state capitalism is not sufficient for social justice, in Rawls’s view, is that it allows for such inequalities of wealth which in turn enable the wealthy to control the economy and “political life itself”. POD (like liberal socialism) acts on the background distribution of wealth to prevent this (Rawls, 1999, xiv- xv, 245-246; Rawls, 2001, 139). It seems clear that in this respect POD is helpful to political equality and, thus, to republican legitimacy. Critics have wondered, however, both about its necessity and sufficiency to political equality and, thus, to republican legitimacy. On the one hand, critics have argued that the problem of “money in politics” can be addressed through laws that directly target campaign finance and the like, removing the need for reduction of underlying wealth inequality. This concern, they argue, consequently does not offer a strong justification for POD as against, say, welfare-state capitalism (O’Neill, 2012, 81- 84). What this argument perhaps underestimates, however, is the Republicanism and Property-owning-Democracy 111 extent to which substantial wealth inequality puts political equality under permanent siege. Specific, targeted laws might help to bolster the defences and manage the threat. But the stability of the democratic polity is surely enhanced if we can lift the state of siege itself, so to speak; this points in the direction of POD—or at least of some system that goes beyond welfare-state capitalism in addressing background wealth inequality. A somewhat different criticism is that even if POD reduces wealth inequality there arguably remains a threat to democracy in that wealth-holders might still have undue political influence by refusing to invest if particular policies are enacted. The democratic state remains, in Marxist terms, “structurally dependent” on capital (Cohen, 1989, 28; White, 2012). This suggests that the democratic state must itself have control over investment, and this moves us away from POD and in the direction of a socialist economy. Admittedly, in the hypothetical case of POD we are imagining, the underlying issue is not really about political equality as, by definition in a POD, wealth is distributed in an egalitarian fashion. But there might still be a threat to republican legitimacy. Even if wealth is distributed quite equally, some policies that citizens would support as voters might be rendered unfeasible by the private investment decisions they can be expected to make in response as wealth-holders. This might be thought to limit the effective sovereignty of the democratic citizen body (White, 2012). This challenge raises issues that I lack space to consider here. But insofar as it is valid, it does point to a limit to POD as a way of supporting republican legitimacy, albeit one that could perhaps be mitigated in a form of Meade-style extended POD that includes a liberal socialist element. A full analysis would also need to consider whether a socialist alternative to POD might not also carry risks to democracy. How would public control over investment work in practice? How would it itself respect political equality? To sum up, POD almost certainly represents an advance in terms of political equality (and, thus, republican legitimacy) relative to contemporary capitalism; whether it is optimal in this respect is a more disputable matter.

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III - SECOND CONNECTION: POD SUPPORTS REPUBLICAN LIBERTY A second important connection between POD and republicanism concerns the potential contribution of POD to securing republican liberty. The basic argument here may be set out as follows. The liberty argument: (1) Liberty as non-domination is supported by economic independence: by having an income that is not dependent on the discretion of another such as an employer, spouse, or state bureaucrat. (2) Economic independence is supported by owning wealth. (3) POD ensures that wealth is distributed across all citizens. Therefore: (4) POD supports economic independence across all citizens. Therefore: (5) POD supports enjoyment of liberty as non-domination by all citizens. The first step in this argument has been developed in recent work by Daniel Raventós and David Casassas (Raventós, 2007; Casassas, 2007). If one lacks access to the goods and services necessary to meet basic needs, then others, who can give one access to these resources, can have an important source of power over you. They can make your access to the goods and services dependent on conforming to their will. If you desperately need the resources, and have no rival source for them, then you are in a position where you have little option but to conform to their will. Consequently, you are in a position where you experience domination: you are subject to another’s power to interfere in your choices at their will. To be dominated, is, on the republican conception of liberty, to be unfree. To lack economic independence, therefore, is to be unfree; or, at least, to be vulnerable to unfreedom. This insight has played a significant role in working-class opposition to capitalism. Consider, as an example, the following passage written by striking cotton-spinners in Manchester in the early nineteenth-century: The master spinners are a class of men unlike all other master tradesmen in the kingdom. They are ignorant, proud, and tyrannical. What then Republicanism and Property-owning-Democracy 113

must be the men or rather beings who are the instruments of such masters? Why, they have been for a series of years, with their wives and their families, patience itself – bondmen and bondwomen to their cruel taskmasters. It is in vain to insult our common understandings with the observation that such men are free; that the law protects the rich and poor alike, and that a spinner can leave his master if he does not like his wages. True; so he can; but where must he go? Why to another, to be sure. Well: he goes; he is asked where did you work last: ‘did he discharge you?’ No; we could not agree about wages. Well I shall not employ you nor anyone who leaves his master in that manner....What then is the man to do? If he goes to the parish, that grave of all independence, he is there told – We shall not relieve you; if you dispute with your master, and don’t support your family, we will send you to ; so that the man is bound, by a combination of circumstances, to submit to his master. (Thompson, 1963, 179) The basic claim is clear: as workers we have no choice in effect but to agree to the terms of employment presented to us by our respective employers and this makes us subject to their will, placed in a position of submission to a “master”. The second step in the liberty argument for POD is that ownership of wealth—of assets that provide an income—establishes a degree of economic independence and therefore diminishes one’s vulnerability to domination. If workers have some wealth, then, as Meade put it, they can “snap their fingers” at an employer and walk out because they know they can live for a time on their own wealth (Meade, 1964, 38-39, quoted in Ackerman and Alstott, 1999, 25-26). Obviously this effect is stronger the more wealth one has. But even a modest amount can arguably give the individual a crucial degree of “independence”, enabling them to search more widely for job offers (or other economic opportunities) and reducing the pressure to scramble into a specific job and conform to the employer’s will. Thus, insofar as POD manages to spread wealth ownership across all adult citizens it helps to promote liberty as non-domination for them. This is why there is a deep connection between the commitment to securing liberty as non-domination and universalising property in some form. Again, however, while POD seems clearly helpful to republican liberty in the manner suggested, critics might question whether it is necessary or optimal in this regard. Raventós and Casassas, for example, both argue that economic independence, and thus republican liberty, is best served by a universal basic income payment 114 Stuart White from the state: each citizen receives an income from the state without any test of willingness to work or of means. A basic income in this sense can surely provide economic independence just as much as ownership of wealth. Indeed, in one respect at least, the basic income approach seems better. Wealth, after all, is always something the individual can lose, e.g., through a misguided investment. If they do, then their economic independence is also lost, at least temporarily, and their liberty is at risk. By comparison, a basic income, paid regularly, and provided it cannot be converted into a capital sum, offers a more secure basis for economic independence. Thus, what really serves republican liberty, it might be said, is not POD but a scheme of (non-mortgageable) universal basic income (Raventós, 2007; Casassas, 2007). In response, we should note that what I have termed extended POD actually involves both a wide dispersion of wealth and a universal basic income: the basic income is the social dividend that each citizen receives as their share of the return on the state’s investment fund. This can of course also be topped up through the tax-transfer system. Still, the critic might argue that even extended POD does not go far enough in this respect. Under extended POD, economic independence is supported by a mix of basic income and dispersed wealth. The latter is still alienable, so would it not be better in principle to have a system in which economic independence depends only on a basic income? To this challenge, I have two responses (for helpful discussion, see also Bidadanure, 2014a, 2014b, 142-170; White, 2015). First, in institutional terms, there is arguably a benefit from having economic independence supported from different directions rather than resting too much on one specific policy. This might make economic independence more protected from the risks of policy change by spreading this risk across different policy instruments. Second, there are intrinsic benefits to citizens holding alienable wealth, e.g., in terms of supporting personally valued investments, which also need to be taken into consideration. If republican liberty is our only concern, perhaps there is a case for basic income alone over the more mixed approach, at least if the former is relatively secure in political terms. But republican liberty isn’t, or shouldn’t be, our only concern. The opportunity to marshal resources to support a valued personal project, commercial or otherwise, is also important, and we might reasonably view a mixture Republicanism and Property-owning-Democracy 115 of basic income and personal wealth holding as striking the most reasonable balance between the interest in republican liberty and this other important interest. If so, then even if an extended POD does not promote republican liberty as much as a system with a higher basic income would, it arguably promotes republican liberty to the right extent in an all-things-considered sense.

IV - THIRD CONNECTION: REPUBLICAN CITIZENSHIP SUPPORTS POD So far we have focused on how POD supports republican commitments. Let us now consider how republican commitments might support POD. A first connection here relates to the stability of POD once established. The basic argument may be set out as follows (drawing on White, 2012). The stability argument: (1) POD creates pressures towards “individualism” (in Tocqueville’s sense of the term). (2) “Individualism” threatens to undermine the sense of justice that is necessary to sustain POD over time. However: (3) Pressures towards “individualism” can be countered effectively by institutions that embody a republican conception of citizenship. Therefore: (4) Republican citizenship helps to increase the stability of POD over time. POD is a market-centred economic system. Although assets are distributed on a relatively equal basis, economic life is still characterised by a degree of competition and differences in reward and success. As I have argued at greater length elsewhere, the image POD conjures up is in some ways similar to what Tocqueville claimed to see in the democracy of the USA in the early nineteenth century. Amongst white men at least, this was a society characterised, in Tocqueville’s view, by a relative equality of education and capital (Tocqueville, 2003, 617). It was a society in which no individual could be assured of staying very rich, but in which there was also a realistic possibility of material advance. Tocqueville argues, of course, that a society that is egalitarian or democratic in this way—based on a wide dispersion of productive assets—carries a significant tendency 116 Stuart White towards individualism: “a calm and considered feeling which persuaded each citizen to cut himself off from his fellows and to withdraw into the circle of his family and friends in such a way that he thus creates a small group of his own and willingly abandons society at large to its own devices” (Tocqueville, 2003, 587). Individualism has both an affective and cognitive aspect. Affectively, it involves the withdrawal from the public sphere, and concern for one’s fellow citizens, described above. Cognitively, it involves having a diminished, inaccurate sense of one’s interdependency with others, a failure to see how one is part of a cooperative social scheme. The cognitive error helps maintain the affective withdrawal. If Tocqueville is correct in this sociological thesis, then this may have implications for a society which bases its economic life on POD. As noted, POD involves ongoing collective action to sustain an egalitarian distribution of productive assets. This is achieved through public policies such as publicly-funded education, stable rules about the taxation of wealth and inheritances and, perhaps, a scheme of universal capital grants. The stability of POD depends, therefore, on the continuation of these policies. This in turn depends on citizens being willing to continue to vote for and otherwise support these policies. This depends on citizens having what Rawls calls an effective “sense of justice” (Rawls, 1999, 41, 274-275). They must have an appreciation of the principles of social justice and of how policies such as the ones just described work to fulfil them. They must be willing to carry any sacrifices this might imply, e.g., in terms of taxation of wealth transfers within the family. Individualism, however, in the sense outlined above, seems to jeopardise this sense of justice. Consequently, if POD does indeed foster individualism in this sense, it looks as if there is instability at the core of POD. Even if the POD is established, its operation will promote cognitive error and attitudes that are at odds with the sense of justice that is needed over the long- run to sustain POD. POD will be self-undermining in practice. In Democracy in America, however, Tocqueville argues that the Americans have found a way to counter the risk of individualism. Participation in democratic self-government at the local level pulls citizens out of their private spheres. In the course of engaging with others to address local problems, they are reminded of how their society is in fact a cooperative scheme and they are encouraged to develop concern for how well this scheme is functioning—a concern, Republicanism and Property-owning-Democracy 117 in other words, for the welfare of their fellow citizens. As Tocqueville puts it: As soon as communal affairs are treated as belonging to all, every man realizes that he is not as separate from his fellows as first imagined and that it is often vital to help them in order to gain their support…When the public is in charge, every single man feels the value of public goodwill and seeks to court it by attracting the regard and affection of those amongst whom we live. Many of the emotions which freeze and shatter men’s hearts are then forced to withdraw and hide away in the depths of their souls. Pride conceals itself; scorn dares not show its face. Egoism is afraid of itself. (Tocqueville, 2003, 592.) Thus, Tocqueville claims that the “one effective remedy” to the “evils produced by equality” is “political freedom”, by which he means primarily here participation in local self-government (Tocqueville, 2003, 595). In his Considerations on Representative Government, influenced by Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill makes a similar argument, referring to the “moral part of the instruction afforded by the participation of the private citizen, if even rarely, in public functions. He is called upon…to weight interests not his own; to be guided…by another rule than his private partialities; to apply…principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common good…” (Mill, 1993, 233). If Tocqueville and Mill are correct in this claim about the morally educative effects of political participation, then we can perhaps see a way in which the potential instability at the core of POD can be addressed. By structuring the state so as to foster a specifically republican form of citizenship, characterised by active participation in political decision- making, the state can counter individualism and in this way possibly help sustain the sense of justice that is necessary to maintain POD (White, 2012). In this respect, republican citizenship putatively supports POD. Clearly, this argument rests on two empirical claims that need further support than I offer here: that POD is subject to a problem of individualism and that institutions that promote republican citizenship are effective in addressing this problem. Moreover, even if these claims are correct, the argument does not show that a republican form of citizenship is strictly necessary to POD, rather than helpful to it. Perhaps there are other institutional responses that can also help to stabilise POD against the risks of individualism, 118 Stuart White making republican citizenship unnecessary (see Hussain, 2012). Nevertheless, we can say that there are reasonably strong considerations for thinking that the promotion of republican citizenship is supportive of POD’s stability.

V - FOURTH CONNECTION: REPUBLICAN POLITICS SUPPORTS POD The argument just set out concerns the stability of POD once established. But POD is not yet established in any nation. Establishing a POD is, moreover, a major political challenge. Because it involves a significant change in property and power relations relative to contemporary capitalism, creating a POD is always likely to be a major challenge. But has the challenge increased? Colin Crouch argues that many Euro-Atlantic polities have shifted over the past few decades towards a “post-democratic” state. Over the first half of the twentieth century the labour movement rose in these polities and, through a combination of party political presence and union organization, gradually balanced the power of the rich and business. The post-war “Keynesian welfare state”, in its various permutations, was a reflection of this (Crouch, 2004, 4-11). During the past thirty or so years, however, power over policy-making has tipped back towards business interests and the very rich: Behind this spectacle of the electoral game, politics is really shaped in private by interaction between elected governments and elites that overwhelmingly represent business interests....while the forms of democracy remain fully in place...politics and government are increasingly slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner of pre-democratic times... (Crouch, 2004, 4, 6). In the USA, important recent studies by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page also point to what one might call an “oligarchic shift” in the way policy-making works (Hacker and Pierson, 2010; Gilens and Page, 2014). Against the background of this alleged oligarchic shift, the prospects for moves towards POD look even more challenging (at least in the Euro-Atlantic polities). In particular, to advance POD- related policies in the context of ordinary politics, given the background of the oligarchic shift, looks like a recipe for limited progress, if not outright defeat. To open up even the possibility of significant moves in a POD-like direction it seems necessary to first counter the oligarchic shift itself. This implies less of an immediate Republicanism and Property-owning-Democracy 119 focus on ordinary politics and public policy and more of a focus on what one might call constitutional politics, a politics that addresses the political system itself and which purposefully seeks reforms to the political system in order to counter the rise of oligarchic power (Hind, 2014; White, forthcoming; see also Ronzoni, 2015). In connection with this it is interesting to see the emergence in recent years of various kinds of citizen politics that incorporate a critique of the existing political system and a demand for fundamental constitutional reform. Examples include—but are by no means exhausted by—the various “movements of the squares” such as the 15-M movement in Spain and the related Occupy movement in the USA and elsewhere (Gitlin, 2012; Ishkanian, Glasius, and Ali, 2013; Kaldor and Selchow, 2014; White, forthcoming); the movement for constitutional reform in Iceland (Landemore, 2015); and perhaps also the independence movements in Scotland and Catalonia. To varying extents, these initiatives have a strong republican quality in two senses. First, they often seem to embody a strong “tribunate” element. They frequently involve attempts to visibly gather the “people” in an open, public setting and in a way that is presented as in opposition to an elite, e.g., as in the Occupy movement’s rhetoric of the 99% against the 1%. Second, also in their practices of open, public assembly, and in some of the demands for political reform that they articulate, these initiatives express the principle of popular sovereignty. They can be understood as efforts to reawaken a working sense of “We the people” as a prerequisite of a democratic politics of fundamental constitutional reform (Hind, 2014; White, forthcoming). With this in mind, we can thus perhaps see a fourth connection between republicanism and POD, which we can set out as follows. The anti-oligarchy argument: (1) Some “capitalist democracies” have experienced an oligarchic shift in recent decades. (2) Policies to move towards POD are made less feasible by an oligarchic shift in power. However: (3) A revival of republican political practices, aimed at democratising reforms of the political system, offers a way of countering an oligarchic shift in power. 120 Stuart White

Therefore: (4) Where an oligarchic shift has occurred, revival of republican political practices, aimed at democratising reforms of the political system, offers a way of increasing the feasibility of policies to move towards POD. It is of course important to acknowledge the limitations of this argument. For one thing, it is not being claimed that democratising reforms of the political system, reducing the influence of the very rich and of business corporations, will necessarily lead to the adoption of POD-like policies. The claim is only that such reforms remove an obstacle to their adoption. But such policies would still have to win popular support, not least amongst the citizens who have become active in the cause of democratising reform itself. Second, the argument as stated conveniently glosses over the question of just how the revival of republican political practices, as exemplified in the movements of the squares, does lead to actual and significant reforms that diminish oligarchic power. This may be one of their aims. But how is it to be achieved? Sceptics will point out that the highly visible public assemblies and protests of the 15-M movement and Occupy have long since disappeared. The sceptic will argue that they have achieved little and that little is likely to issue from them or similar events in the future. In response, it is important to take a longer term perspective than that offered by the critic. It may be that the movements of the squares represented the early stages of a political development that will take many more years to work itself out. It would be rash to assume the eventual success of such a movement, but also is unduly pessimistic to conclude that its initial failure implies ultimate failure. Here one might note the case of Iceland where the initial movement for constitutional reform was halted in 2012 but which, at time of writing, may shortly resume following new legislative elections in 2016. Nevertheless, the objection points to a key issue that movements of this kind need to address —how to expand the opportunities for such movements to make effective interventions at the level of constitutional politics. There is a “bootstrapping” problem here: How does such a movement intervene effectively to change the underlying constitutional structure, so as to make it easier to make such interventions, before an enabling constitutional reform has been made? Republicanism and Property-owning-Democracy 121

CONCLUSION: POD, REPUBLICANISM AND THE LIBERAL-REPUBLICAN DEBATE This paper has set out four ways in which republicanism and POD might be connected. Establishing a POD is at least helpful to republican legitimacy (first connection) and to republican liberty (second connection). It is reasonable, on Tocquevillian grounds, to think that republican citizenship is supportive of the stability of POD (third connection). In addition, a republican politics, affirming popular sovereignty over the constitution and seeking democratic reform, is arguably a precondition for serious policy moves in the direction of POD, at least in Euro-Atlantic polities that have in recent years experienced an oligarchic shift in power (fourth connection). In closing, I want to draw out some wider implications of the discussion for how we think about the relationship between liberalism and republicanism in political theory. Republican political theorists often define their position in opposition to liberalism, and some liberals are happy to reciprocate. Common to both is the tendency to view liberalism and republicanism as complete, self-contained political theories. An alternative perspective is to see liberal and republican ideas more as modules that form parts of a complete political theory. For example, on the question of what social justice is, one might have a liberal module, based on, say, Rawls’s proposed two principles. One might also adopt a liberal module on the question of what kind of economic system secures social justice. POD, as proposed by Rawls, or extended POD as developed in the work of Meade, can also be seen as liberal modules in this sense. At the same time, however, one might adopt republican modules with respect to other ideas, as we have in this paper with respect to what political legitimacy is, what liberty is, and how best to conceive of citizenship and politics. Of course, not every liberal module will be compatible with every republican module. But some might be consistent and even mutually supportive. In the case we have been discussing, for example, the four connections we have explored suggest that liberal modules on justice and economic organization cohere well with republican modules on legitimacy, liberty and citizenship and politics. (Specific combinations might also have an effect on a given module’s content as when the republican liberty module leads us to give greater emphasis than we otherwise might to basic income in the POD/expanded POD economic organization module.) Our overall 122 Stuart White political theory might thus have both liberal and republican elements, and be all the stronger for it. Republicanism and liberalism ought not to be seen as complete, self-contained alternatives but as modular toolkits of ideas that we can usefully draw on and combine in building the best political theory we can.

REFERENCES

Ackerman, Bruce, and Alstott, Anne, The Stakeholder Society, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999. Audard, Catherine, John Rawls, Stocksfield, Acumen, 2007. Bidadanure, Juliana, “Basic Income versus Basic Capital: An Intergenerational Perspective”, paper presented at Summer School on Predistribution and Property-Owning Democracy, University of Minho, July 14- 18, 2014a. Bidadanure, Juliana, Treating Young People as Equals: Intergenerational Justice in Theory and Practice, Ph.D thesis, University of York, York, 2014b. Casassas, David, “Basic Income and the Republican Ideal: Rethinking Material Independence in Contemporary Societies”, Basic Income Studies, 2 (2), 2007. Cohen, Joshua, “The Economic Basis of Deliberative Democracy”, Social Philosophy and Policy, 6 (2), 1989, pp. 25-50. Cohen, Joshua, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy”, in Joshua Cohen, Philosophy, Politics, Democracy, Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 2009a, pp. 16-37. Cohen, Joshua, “Money, Politics, Political Equality”, in Joshua Cohen, Philosophy, Politics, Democracy, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2009b, pp. 268-302. Cohen, Joshua, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009c. Crouch, Colin, Post-Democracy, Cambridge, Polity, 2004. Freeman, Samuel, “Deliberative Democracy: A Sympathetic Comment”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 29 (4), 2000, pp. 371-418. Gilens, Martin, and Page, Benjamin I., “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”, Perspectives on Politics, 12, 2014, pp. 564-581. Gitlin, Todd, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street, New York, Harper Collins, 2012. Gourevitch, Alex, From to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015. Hacker, Jacob S., and Pierson, Paul, Winner-Take-All-Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned its Back on the Middle Class, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2010. Hind, Dan, The Magic Kingdom: Property, Monarchy, and the Maximum Republic, Republicanism and Property-owning-Democracy 123

London, Zero, 2014. Honohan, Iseult, Civic Republicanism, London, Routledge, 2002. Hussain, Waheed, “Nurturing the Sense of Justice: The Rawlsian Argument for Democratic Corporatism”, in Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson, eds., Property-Owning Democracy, pp.180-200. Ishkanian, Armine, Glasius, Marlies, and Ali, Irum S., Reclaiming Democracy in the Square: Interpreting the Movements of 2011-12, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/53474/ , 2013. Jackson, Ben, “Property-Owning Democracy: A Short History”, in Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson, eds., Property-Owning Democracy, pp. 33-52. Kaldor, Mary, and Selchow, Sabine, “The ‘Bubbling Up’ of Subterranean Politics in Europe”, Journal of , 9, 2014, pp. 78-99. Landemore, Hélène, “Inclusive Constitution-Making: the Icelandic Experiment”, Journal of , 23, 2015, pp. 166-191. Lessig, Lawrence, Republic, Lost: Version 2.0: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It, New York, Twelve, 2015. Meade, James, Efficiency, Equality, and the Ownership of Property, London, Allen and Unwin, 1964. Meade, James, Agathotopia: The Economics of Partnership, Aberdeen, University of Aberdeen, 1989. Mill, John Stuart, “Considerations on Representative Government”, in John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government, London, Dent, 1993, pp. 187-428. Nabulsi, Karma, “Mobilisation, Representation and Republican Movements”, Renewal, 16 3/4, 2008, pp. 117-125. O’Neill, Martin, “Free (and Fair) Markets Without Capitalism: Political Values, Principles of Justice, and Property-Owning Democracy”, in Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson, eds., Property-Owning Democracy, pp. 75-100. O’Neill, Martin, and Williamson, Thad, eds., Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Pettit, Philip, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997. Pettit, Philip, On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory of Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012. Raventós, Daniel, Basic Income: The Material Conditions of Freedom, London, Pluto, 2007. Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1999 [1971]. Rawls, John, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 2001. Ronzoni, Miriam, “How social democrats may become reluctant radicals: Thomas Piketty's Capital and Wolfgang Streeck's Buying Time”, European Journal of Political Theory, 2015, DOI: 10.1177/1474885115601602. Publication link: 37c1d566-8f0c-49fd-a201-1e39dec7e351. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, translated by Maurice Cranston, A Discourse on Inequality, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984 [1755]. 124 Stuart White

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, translated by Christopher Betts, The Social Contract, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994 [1762]. Sandel, Michael, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 1996. Skinner, Quentin, Liberty Before Liberalism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998. Tocqueville, Alexis de, trans. Gerald E. Bevan, Democracy in America, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2003 [1835, 1840]. Thomas, Alan, Republic of Equals: Predistribution and Property-Owning Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016. Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1963. White, Stuart, “Property-Owning Democracy and Republican Citizenship” in Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson, eds., Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 129-146. White, Stuart, “Basic Capital in the Egalitarian Toolkit?”, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 32 (4), 2015, pp. 417-431. White, Stuart, “Horizontalism, Public Assembly, and the Politics of Republican Democracy”, in Yiftah Elazar and Genevieve Rousseliere, eds., Republican Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. Young, Iris Marion, Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001.

ABSTRACT

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argues that social justice demands an economic regime like that of Property-Owning Democracy (POD). Rawls’s work is frequently categorised as ‘liberal’ and contrasted with ‘republicanism’. Challenging this opposition, this paper explores four ways in which republicanism and POD are supportively connected. Establishing a POD is at least helpful to republican legitimacy (first connection) and to republican liberty (second connection). It is reasonable, on Tocquevillian grounds, to think that republican citizenship is supportive of the stability of POD (third connection). In addition, a republican politics, affirming popular sovereignty over the constitution and seeking democratic reform, is arguably a precondition for serious policy moves in the direction of POD, at least in polities that have in recent decades experienced an oligarchic shift in power (fourth connection). Liberalism and republicanism are modular toolkits of ideas that, as this paper shows, may be usefully combined.

Tocquevilliana

Les archives personnelles d’Alexis de Tocqueville sont dorénavant disponibles en ligne à l’adresse : http://archives.manche.fr/trucs-et- astuces-details.asp?card=13915807#.VL5bAGc5Cmw

The personal archives of Alexis de Tocqueville are now available online at : http://archives.manche.fr/trucs-et-astuces- details.asp?card=13915807#.VL5bAGc5Cmw

The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol. XXXVII, n° 2 – 2016

GUERRE ET PAIX : L’HÉRITAGE MÉCONNU DE TOCQUEVILLE*

Elie BARANETS

L’œuvre d’Alexis de Tocqueville n’est que rarement mobilisée par les auteurs qui s’intéressent aux affaires internationales. Lorsque cela survient toutefois, comme nous le verrons, c’est avec une tendance à mentionner son travail de manière superficielle, voire tronquée. Réciproquement, les lecteurs attentifs ne relèvent que très peu la dimension internationale de sa réflexion. Notre objectif sera de contribuer à combler ce double manque. Plus précisément, nous soulignons ici l’intérêt à étudier la pensée de Tocqueville à propos des études sur la guerre et la paix dans le cadre de la discipline des relations internationales (RI). Plutôt que de resituer les travaux de Tocqueville dans les conditions exactes dans lesquelles ils ont été produits, nous tâchons plutôt d’en extraire la substance utile pour expliquer la politique internationale aujourd’hui1. À cet égard, son œuvre comporte l’avantage de traiter des sujets qui nous intéressent de manière explicite et précise, de telle sorte qu’un effort d’éclaircissement est bien souvent inutile s’il s’agit uniquement de rendre ses propos univoques. Et ceux de Tocqueville le sont généralement. Exploiter son héritage ne relève par conséquent pas d’une opération intellectuelle hasardeuse.

* Je tiens à remercier Frédéric Coste pour sa lecture critique de l’article dont une première version a été présentée au Congrès des associations francophones de science politique, tenu en février 2015 à Lausanne.

128 Elie Baranets

En l’occurrence, c’est dans sa manière de traiter de la guerre et de la paix dans De la démocratie en Amérique que nous jugeons Tocqueville précieux. Deux débats majeurs au sein de la discipline des RI pourraient ainsi bénéficier de son éclairage. Le premier concerne l’état de paix qui existe entre pays démocratiques : on parle de « paix démocratique ». Le second concerne la propension des démocraties à triompher militairement : on parle de « victoire démocratique ». Outre le fait que l’héritage du penseur français soit potentiellement exploitable sans recours à de grossiers artifices, il existe un autre avantage à s’en référer. Tocqueville affiche des qualités propres aux grands auteurs : sa pensée est profonde, ses explications parcimonieuses, le tout étant au service d’une conception originale du monde. Il propose une vision cohérente de la démocratie réduite à peu d’éléments. Il en déduit ensuite de manière logique les attributs qui seront les siens à l’égard de la guerre, parvenant à lier la question de la paix à celle de l’efficacité au combat. Est-on pour autant certain que Tocqueville ait quelque chose à nous dire et que nous parlions des mêmes processus ? Nous nous penchons sur le comportement de pays dont les régimes politiques sont déjà démocratiques. Tocqueville, quant à lui, adopte une perspective plus dynamique. Il juge, dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle, que la propagation irrésistible de la démocratie doit entraîner des bouleversements majeurs sur les nations aristocratiques européennes. Il étudie les effets empiriques attachés à ce basculement qu’il pressent. Il s’intéresse donc aux changements historiquement survenus, ainsi qu’à venir, en rapport au processus de démocratisation, plus qu’à la démocratie en soi, de manière statique. Pour autant, l’utilité de Tocqueville ne se résume pas à la question des mutations ou du changement de régime, ni ne se cantonne à la période durant laquelle il vécut. Puisqu’il parvient à identifier des régularités attachées à la démocratie, nombre de ses conclusions sont valables à l’égard des unités politiques dont le régime démocratique est institué de manière stable. Que les intentions de Tocqueville ne soient pas identiques à celles des internationalistes contemporains ne doit pas empêcher ces derniers de se référer au premier si sa réflexion est pertinente lorsqu’appliquée à un objet d’étude similaire. C’est du reste ce que nous essayons de montrer en nous interrogeant, tout d’abord, sur le rapport des démocraties à la paix (I). Qu’en est-il Guerre et paix : l’héritage méconnu de Tocqueville 129 ensuite lorsque la guerre survient ? Les démocraties sont-elles disposées à se confronter à l’épreuve des armes (II) ? Comment se comportent-elles, enfin, lorsque la portée de l’affrontement armé grandit et que la guerre atteint une telle dimension qu’elle façonne la vie des hommes en démocraties dans leurs activités quotidiennes et leurs aspirations profondes (III) ?

I - DES DÉMOCRATIES TENDANCIELLEMENT PACIFIQUES Les États démocratiques sont-ils pacifiques ? Les débats qu’a fait naître cette interrogation ont été parmi les plus prolifiques qu’ait jamais connus la discipline des RI. Sans fournir de réponse définitive à cette question féconde, nous soulignons que l’œuvre d’Alexis de Tocqueville pourrait être utilisée à profit par tous ceux qui se la posent. Tocqueville n’abordant pas ce sujet de manière détournée, l’unique précaution terminologique que nous prendrons sera de rappeler que l’égalisation des conditions constitue pour lui le processus qui caractérise la démocratisation. Par conséquent, il n’est pas déraisonnable de considérer, et notamment dans les passages auxquels nous faisons référence, que lorsque Tocqueville invoque le principe d’égalité, c’est en fait la démocratie qu’il nomme et examine. Lorsque le principe de l’égalité ne se développe pas seulement chez une nation, mais en même temps chez plusieurs peuples voisins, ainsi que cela se voit de nos jours en Europe, les hommes qui habitent ces pays divers, malgré la disparité des langues, des usages et des lois, se ressemblent toutefois en ce point qu’ils redoutent également la guerre et conçoivent pour la paix un même amour. En vain l’ambition ou la colère arme les princes, une sorte d’apathie et de bienveillance universelle les apaise en dépit d’eux-mêmes et leur fait tomber l’épée des mains : les guerres deviennent plus rares. À mesure que l’égalité, se développant à la fois dans plusieurs pays, y pousse simultanément vers l’industrie et le commerce les hommes qui les habitent, non seulement leurs goûts se ressemblent, mais leurs intérêts se mêlent et s’enchevêtrent, de telle sorte qu’aucune nation ne peut infliger aux autres des maux qui ne retombent pas sur elle-même, et que toutes finissent par considérer la guerre comme une calamité presque aussi grande pour le vainqueur que pour le vaincu. Ainsi, d’un côté, il est très difficile, dans les siècles démocratiques, d’entraîner les peuples à se combattre ; mais, d’une autre part, il est presque impossible que deux d’entre eux se fassent isolément la guerre2. 130 Elie Baranets

La position tocquevillienne apparaît distinctement à la lecture de ce passage. Il n’est toutefois pas inutile d’en examiner certains éléments, ne serait-ce que pour nous repérer par rapport aux débats contemporains en RI. Le premier paragraphe renvoie au rapport qu’entretiennent les démocraties à la guerre en général. Pour Tocqueville, il est clair que ces dernières sont tendanciellement pacifiques3. Précisons d’emblée que ce n’est pas par cet aspect de son œuvre que Tocqueville se distingue dans l’histoire des idées. Comme on peut l’apercevoir chez des auteurs comme Emmanuel Kant ou Thomas Paine, il a longtemps été consensuel de prêter aux nations démocratiques la capacité ou la volonté de résoudre les conflits sans user de la force armée. Dans la discipline contemporaine des RI, cette proposition est connue sous le nom de « paix démocratique monadique » : les démocraties sont plus pacifiques que ne le sont les régimes non démocratiques. Des auteurs tels que James Lee Ray, Kenneth Benoit, et surtout Rudolph Rummel soutiennent cette thèse4. Cette question a généré davantage d’enquêtes statistiques et de débats méthodologiques que de réflexions théoriques. Par ailleurs, la discipline s’est orientée vers le chemin inverse de celui emprunté par de nombreux philosophes : les auteurs soulignant le pacifisme des démocraties y sont tout à fait minoritaires. L’existence d’un tel consensus n’a que peu favorisé l’éclosion d’un grand débat scientifique sur cette question. En tout état de cause, celui-là n’eut jamais lieu, de telle sorte que l’on peut dire que la paix démocratique monadique n’est pas une proposition qui a marqué les RI. Quant à Tocqueville, il n’apporte pas ici d’éclairage novateur. Pour autant, il est utile de mentionner sa position sur la question, moins pour ce qu’elle représente en soi que parce qu’elle est une partie essentielle d’un tout cohérent qui, lui, est riche d’enseignements. En l’occurrence, Tocqueville considère que les démocraties sont peu enclines à user de la force. On aura noté que cette réticence ne provient pas uniquement d’un calcul coût/bénéfices. L’homme démocratique semble être sous l’emprise d’une force qui le dépasse, et qui le conduit à se détourner de la violence armée. Par ailleurs, Tocqueville évoque les rapports qu’entretiennent les pays démocratiques entre eux, de manière plus instructive et directe Guerre et paix : l’héritage méconnu de Tocqueville 131 cette fois. Le premier paragraphe ne traitait pas explicitement de cette interaction. Tout juste la laisse-t-il suggérer en évoquant la propagation des normes démocratiques. Ce n’est que par la suite que cette dimension est clairement explorée. En l’occurrence, Tocqueville pressent que les démocraties entretiendront des relations pacifiques les unes avec les autres. Or, la paix qui caractérise les relations entre démocraties est le constat qui est précisément à la base du débat que l’on nomme paix démocratique dyadique, (ou, à défaut, simplement « paix démocratique ») assurément l’un des sujets les plus étudiés en RI. L’objet de la discussion ne réside pas dans cette absence de guerre en soi. Il s’agit là d’un fait empirique qui n’est généralement pas remis en cause. Pour des raisons chronologiques évidentes, Tocqueville n’aurait de toute façon pas été en mesure d’apporter un quelconque éclairage sur cette question si elle était posée en ces termes. En revanche, son apport est potentiellement décisif sur ce qui fait l’intérêt du débat : l’identification des origines de cette paix séparée. En l’occurrence, les facteurs mis en avant par Tocqueville sont similaires à ceux que la littérature spécialisée mobilise. Au regard de la paix démocratique, ce n’est donc pas dans la perspective de trouver des hypothèses nouvelles que Tocqueville est utile. C’est bien plutôt parce qu’il peut nous aider à explorer les pistes existantes avec davantage de rigueur et de discernement. L’extrait reproduit précédemment ne peut que résumer la pensée de Tocqueville sur le sujet. Il suffit toutefois à montrer sa pertinence. Après donc avoir examiné le comportement général des démocraties, Tocqueville traite des relations inter-démocratiques. Les explications fournies pour rendre compte de ces deux processus renvoient, dans le premier paragraphe, aux théories « culturelles ». Appliquées à la dimension dyadique, les théories culturelles suggèrent que les normes démocratiques, au sens large, propagent à l’intérieur des sociétés démocratiques des attentes pacifiques, et font percevoir ces mêmes attentes chez les autres nations démocratiques. Dans le second paragraphe, Tocqueville aborde également l’hypothèse de l’interdépendance économique. Pour des raisons exposées par ailleurs, il souligne que l’accroissement des activités commerciales inhérentes au développement des mœurs démocratiques renforce les liens entre les individus, leur conférant des intérêts communs. C’est donc le calcul rationnel des acteurs qui les incite ici à renoncer à user de la 132 Elie Baranets force, puisque, dans de telles conditions, s’attaquer à l’autre reviendrait à se nuire soi-même, indépendamment du résultat de la guerre. En RI, ce sont justement les explications éclectiques, conciliant hypothèses culturelles et économiques de la paix démocratique qui se sont imposées comme dominantes5. Celles-ci ont pour avantage d’être précises, dans le sens où elles permettent d’analyser plusieurs aspects de la démocratie libérale. Elles ont en revanche ce qui, à nos yeux, s’apparente à un défaut : celui de manquer de parcimonie. Leur généralisation est rendue difficile du fait de leur degré élevé de sophistication. La prise en compte d’une multitude d’éléments distincts pour expliquer un processus amoindrit leur pouvoir explicatif. Mais il en est différemment de Tocqueville, pour qui les hypothèses culturelles et économiques ne sont pas deux explications indépendantes, mais deux manifestations d’une seule et même approche, puisque c’est l’essor de conditions égalitaires qui en est à l’origine. Au regard de l’opposition entre théories parcimonieuses et théories éclectiques, on peut donc dire de la vision tocquevillienne de la paix démocratique qu’elle affiche les qualités des premières, sans souffrir des lacunes des secondes. Les politologues intéressés par les affaires internationales pourraient donc avoir intérêt à prêter attention à l’œuvre de Tocqueville. Au lieu de cela, la paix démocratique est associée à Emmanuel Kant, et plus précisément à son essai Vers la paix perpétuelle. Michael Doyle est l’initiateur de cette association, aujourd’hui devenue banale6. Ce rapprochement est pourtant contestable, tant l’approche normative que l’on y trouve diffère du positionnement positif inhérent aux théories de la paix démocratique. Surtout, il n’est pas certain que cette proposition soit représentative du contenu de l’opuscule, et encore moins de l’héritage de Kant dans son ensemble7. Cela ne doit rien enlever à la qualité intrinsèque des théories de la paix démocratique concernées, ni à leur intérêt pour expliquer certains aspects de la politique internationale. Soulignons simplement que, dans de telles circonstances, le recours à Kant est peu éclairant. Pour le coup, il aurait été plus adéquat, et sans doute plus précieux, de Guerre et paix : l’héritage méconnu de Tocqueville 133 puiser dans l’œuvre d’Alexis de Tocqueville8. Le même constat vaut pour un autre débat en RI : celui de la « victoire démocratique ».

II. DES DÉMOCRATIES TEMPORAIREMENT VULNÉRABLES Il serait faux de prétendre que les politologues impliqués dans le débat sur la victoire démocratique ignorent complètement Tocqueville. Une citation apparaît dans The Logic of Political Survival de Bruce Bueno de Mesquita et al 9. Quelques idées de Tocqueville sont rapidement mentionnées par Dan Reiter et Allan Stam dans Democracies at War10. Mais ce n’est que de manière très artificielle que son œuvre est explorée. Dans une certaine mesure, ce constat est généralisable à ceux qui s’intéressent à la politique internationale, ou à des sujets connexes comme la politique étrangère. Deux éléments de sa pensée sont alors régulièrement abordés. Le premier est relatif à son annonce prophétique de la Guerre froide. Le second concerne son analyse de la relation entre démocratie et politique étrangère. Ce n’est pourtant pas là que son œuvre est la plus précieuse. D’une part, en ce qui concerne le premier élément, Tocqueville décrit en effet un système international bipolaire marqué par l’opposition des États-Unis à la Russie plus d’un siècle avant que ce dernier ne se mette en place. D’aucuns y décèleront la manifestation du génie d’un esprit capable de présager de l’avenir lointain avec une clairvoyance unique. Mais cette stupéfiante annonce ne constitue pas un cadre théorique à l’intérieur duquel pourraient s’inscrire les recherches d’internationalistes contemporains. Bien que Tocqueville expose les raisons qui l’amènent à émettre cette prédiction, celles-ci sont formulées dans des termes vagues11. Tocqueville parvient à saisir l’emprise de forces historiques sur le processus qu’il étudie, sans toutefois clairement exposer les rouages intellectuels du mécanisme sous-jacent à son analyse. La prédiction n’est donc pas complètement incantatoire. Elle est néanmoins le fruit d’une réflexion allusive, et donc impropre à constituer une base de travail opératoire. Le second élément, d’autre part, est encore plus régulièrement mentionné que ne l’est le premier : Tocqueville distingue une incompatibilité entre démocratie et enjeux internationaux. Par extension, il met en avant l’inaptitude des régimes démocratiques à formuler une politique étrangère efficace. Il ne s’agit pas là d’un de ses apports majeurs tant ce trait est régulièrement souligné dans l’histoire de la pensée. Sous des formes variables, on retrouve des 134 Elie Baranets traces de cette idée aussi bien dans l’Antiquité chez Thucydide que chez les réalistes du XXe siècle en RI en passant par les libéraux européens tels que , et chez ceux qui compteront ensuite parmi les pères fondateurs de la république américaine, comme Alexander Hamilton. Certes, l’exposé que fournit Tocqueville est plus précis et détaillé que celui que l’on retrouve chez beaucoup d’autres auteurs. En cela, il mérite que nous en disions un mot. Néanmoins, les conclusions qu’il dresse sont conformes à la vision que beaucoup se font intuitivement du rapport entre démocratie et politique extérieure. Pour cette raison, nous serons concis. En considérant jusque dans ses Souvenirs que les démocraties « n’ont, le plus souvent, que des idées très confuses ou très erronées sur leurs affaires extérieures, et ne résolvant guère les questions du dehors que par des raisons du dedans12 », Tocqueville confirme l’analyse qu’il avait produite dans De la Démocratie en Amérique. « La politique extérieure n'exige l'usage de presque aucune des qualités qui sont propres à la démocratie, et commande au contraire le développement de presque toutes celles qui lui manquent13 », disait-il déjà. Ces propos, d’ordre général14, introduisent une argumentation plus précise quant aux origines de cette déficience. Selon lui, le peuple et ses représentants sont des entités dont les intérêts, le rôle, et les caractères nuisent à l’élaboration d’une politique étrangère efficace15. D’une part, que le chef de l’exécutif puisse être élu implique une certaine fréquence de changement quant à l’identité de la personne qui se voit confier la charge de la fonction16. Cela contribue à rendre instables les politiques qui sont menées par le gouvernement. Il s’agit d’un « des vices principaux du système17 » qui touche d’autant plus à la politique étrangère qu’une négociation en la matière « ne peut guère être entamée et suivie avec fruit que par un seul homme18 ». Cette inconstance est d’autant plus nuisible que le pays entretient des relations houleuses avec ses voisins : « Plus un peuple se trouve dans une position précaire et périlleuse, et plus le besoin de suite et de fixité se fait sentir dans la direction des affaires extérieures, plus aussi l’application du système de l’élection au chef de l’État devient dangereuse19 ». D’autre part, le comportement du peuple, et son implication dans les affaires publiques en démocratie, contrarient les exigences qui entourent la conduite efficace de la politique extérieure d’un pays. Guerre et paix : l’héritage méconnu de Tocqueville 135

Cette dernière nécessite constance et patience, lorsque le peuple se montre au contraire versatile et pressé. D’ailleurs, la relative absence de transparence que l’on observe parfois en politique étrangère n’est pas adaptée aux attentes populaires : « La démocratie ne saurait que difficilement coordonner les détails d'une grande entreprise, s'arrêter à un dessein et le suivre ensuite obstinément à travers les obstacles. Elle est peu capable de combiner des mesures en secret et d'attendre patiemment leur résultat20 ». Quant à l’inconstance de l’opinion, elle peut facilement rejaillir sur le chef de l’État en démocratie. Un phénomène que Tocqueville n’observe pas à l’intérieur d’une aristocratie, où la présence d’un corps restreint de membres éclairés empêche cet égarement21, surtout qu’il observe une similarité d’intérêt entre cette élite et le peuple22. Pour ce qui est des États-Unis, Tocqueville veut tempérer la portée de ces facteurs sur la conduite des affaires extérieures. Il invoque, d’une part, les spécificités institutionnelles qu’il y observe23 et, d’autre part, la nature des relations que ce pays entretient avec le monde24. Néanmoins, ces nuances concernent une époque et surtout un pays du fait de ses particularismes25. Les traits majeurs que Tocqueville relève, et qu’il relativise pour le cas précis des États-Unis, décrivent bel et bien les démocraties en général ; des entités qui, en tant que telles, seraient inaptes à mener une politique étrangère efficace. On retrouvera cette attitude démocratique dans les prémices d’une partie consacrée, non pas à la politique étrangère, mais à l’origine et à la portée des erreurs que les Américains commettent26. Tocqueville explique pourquoi le processus démocratique empêche que les représentants interviennent subitement pour réglementer les habitudes néfastes : une telle mesure serait impopulaire et nuirait aux hommes politiques désireux de rester au pouvoir. De telles pratiques ne cesseront que lorsque le peuple sera convaincu qu’il est opportun de modifier son comportement. Les hommes en démocratie sont donc en mesure de mettre un frein à leurs pratiques nocives. Mais leur manque de promptitude à le faire les mettra en grand danger s’ils font face à une menace potentiellement fatale comme celle provenant de forces armées extérieures27. Au-delà de la question de la politique extérieure, Tocqueville aborde plus explicitement celle de la guerre. C’est dans ce registre que 136 Elie Baranets son œuvre est ignorée, alors même qu’il s’agit de ses réflexions les plus utiles. Tocqueville renouvelle son analyse prêtant à la démocratie une plus grande capacité à prospérer, tout en demeurant plus vulnérable que ne le sont d’autres régimes face aux attaques provenant de l’extérieur. Il traite de cette question avec d’autres, au cours de plusieurs chapitres distincts. Pour reproduire sa pensée à propos de ce sujet, et en faire un cadre d’analyse simplifié exploitable en RI, il nous faut la présenter de manière plus ramassée qu’elle n’apparaît dans l’œuvre originale, mais sans toutefois substantiellement en altérer le contenu. Nous proposons pour cela de distinguer trois facteurs à l’origine de la faiblesse des démocraties : un intérêt dans la paix plutôt que dans la guerre, une culture martiale limitée, et, enfin, un manque de reconnaissance envers la carrière militaire28. Dans l’hypothèse de la destruction de leur appareil militaire étatique, et d’une conquête subie par une autre puissance, les membres individuels d’une société démocratique sont moins enclins à créer des foyers de résistance pour combattre l’envahisseur que ne le sont leurs équivalents au sein des aristocraties29. Les premiers craignent en effet de perdre leurs propriétés en se révoltant. Les seconds ont intérêt à se battre pour protéger leur pouvoir politique quand ils en ont, ou bien, lorsqu’ils en sont démunis, n’ont que peu de choses à perdre à prendre les armes si on le leur demande, et ont d’ailleurs appris à obéir. S’observe ici un effet du premier facteur, celui du manque d’intérêt dans la guerre. Ce dernier se manifeste également lorsque, par ailleurs, beaucoup d’individus jugent que l’usage de la force n’est pas une alternative avantageuse en démocratie. Les hommes démocratiques sont en effet parvenus à prospérer par le commerce et l’industrie en temps de paix, de telle sorte que la guerre puisse difficilement paraître comme aussi profitable que ne le sont ces activités à leurs yeux. Tocqueville explique alors ce pacifisme tendanciel par l’effet conjugué d’un intérêt pour la paix et d’un second facteur, plus culturel : « Le nombre toujours croissant des propriétaires amis de la paix, le développement de la richesse mobilière, que la guerre dévore si rapidement, cette mansuétude des mœurs, cette mollesse de cœur, cette disposition à la pitié que l’égalité inspire, cette froideur de raison qui rend peu sensible aux poétiques et violentes émotions qui naissent Guerre et paix : l’héritage méconnu de Tocqueville 137 parmi les armes, toutes ces causes s’unissent pour éteindre l’esprit militaire30 ». À l’image de cette dernière idée, on aperçoit que le manque de culture martiale au sein des sociétés démocratiques est la deuxième variable expliquant leur désavantage au combat. Bien évidemment, la cause plus générale de ce facteur est toujours la même pour Tocqueville : « Les mœurs s'adoucissent à mesure que les conditions s'égalisent31 ». Il ne s’agit donc pas d’une deuxième hypothèse indépendante, mais d’une deuxième manifestation du même processus général. Cette disposition à faire état de compassion s’observe de la part des individus à l’intérieur des démocraties. Elle s’observe également de la part du peuple en entier que ceux-là forment lorsqu’ils sont associés. Mais elle s’applique surtout à leurs semblables. Dès lors, des agissements cruels peuvent tout aussi bien se produire à l’égard de ceux qui sont d’une condition différente, comme le sont l’esclave en interne ou l’ennemi extérieur. Malgré cette nuance, la société démocratique demeure façonnée par cette douceur des mœurs, et apparaît comme mal préparée à l’épreuve de la guerre. Les peuples démocratiques en viennent même à éprouver de l’« amour » pour la paix32, un sentiment préjudiciable en temps de guerre. On observera ici à quel point Tocqueville propose une vision parcimonieuse des processus qu’il étudie : ses travaux permettent d’appréhender ensemble théories de la paix et de la victoire démocratique. En effet, un pays s'expose grandement à connaître la défaite, émet Tocqueville, lorsqu’il a cessé durablement d’aller en guerre, et que cette épreuve survient à nouveau. Or, les démocraties sont moins enclines à prendre les armes, a-t-il déjà expliqué, ce qui favorise alors l’établissement de longues périodes de paix. Une fois de plus, les démocraties apparaissent comme substantiellement défavorisées33. La culture martiale a disparu en démocratie en même temps que l’habitude de recourir à la force. Parallèlement, l’intérêt dans la guerre décroît. Dans de telles circonstances, une situation dans laquelle le métier des armes n’est plus prisé s’observe : il s’agit du troisième facteur. 138 Elie Baranets

En aristocratie, l’inégalité qui règne entre les hommes pénètre dans les rangs de l’armée. En résulte une certaine fixité des grades34. Mais pour être satisfaits, les hommes n’ont pas besoin d’y connaître une grande ascension. Les membres d’une société aristocratique ont appris à mesurer leur ambition. En outre, ils ne perçoivent pas la guerre de manière négative, comme ils ne considèrent pas qu’intégrer l'armée doive être une source d'enrichissement matériel. Un tel choix de carrière apparaît comme honorable en soi. En démocratie, au contraire, l’horizon n’est pas obstrué par ces barrières aristocratiques fixement établies entre les hommes et qui restreignent la grandeur des buts personnels qu’ils se fixent. L’égalisation des conditions permet, autant qu’elle nourrit, l’appétit chez les soldats de gravir les échelons. Mais cette ambition est freinée par l’absence de conflits armés. La paix empêche d’accroître le nombre de fonctions qui sont exercées au sein de l’armée. De plus, ces dernières sont occupées de manière plus durable, puisque les possibilités d’avancement de carrière sont amoindries en raison de l’absence de décès sur le champ de bataille35. Alors que le peuple l’abhorre, la guerre est donc souhaitée par les militaires, et de premier chef par les sous-officiers, du fait de leur progression inaboutie36. S’en suit une mutuelle incompréhension, nuisible aux honneurs attribués à la vocation militaire. Les carrières se paralysent, et dès lors, n’attirent pas les citoyens les plus illustres. Ce dernier élément contribue à affaiblir l’armée de la démocratie, autant qu’à ternir encore plus son image auprès de la société entière. Opérant tel un cercle vicieux, ce mécanisme pérennise une situation qui dote le pays d'un appareil militaire peu performant et accroît sa vulnérabilité aux attaques extérieures37. Les hommes les plus capables se détournent de la carrière militaire, faute de perspective d’ascension hiérarchique. Plus encore, quand cet élément agit de concert avec les autres décrits précédemment, il contribue à amoindrir la qualité des effectifs lorsque vient le temps de saisir les armes. En effet, l’officier ne peut convertir sa lente et précieuse progression au sein de l’armée en avantages qui lui seront profitables dans la société, du fait du manque de considération pour la vocation de militaire qui règne à l’intérieur du pays. Dès lors, « il ne se retire ou n’est exclu de l’armée qu’aux limites extrêmes de sa vie38 ». En temps de guerre, il apparaît alors usé et trop Guerre et paix : l’héritage méconnu de Tocqueville 139 vieux pour conduire efficacement des soldats qui, eux, au contraire, sont trop inexpérimentés. Quant aux douceurs de la vie en démocratie, elles ont attendri tous ces hommes, les rendant inaptes à la rude activité guerrière. Toutes pacifiques qu’elles soient, les démocraties ne sont pas à l’abri d’une guerre39. Les trois facteurs que nous avons soulignés, lesquels ont l’égalisation des conditions comme origine commune, s’influencent mutuellement, et exposent les démocraties au risque de défaite lorsque vient le moment de prendre les armes. Les faiblesses démocratiques que des auteurs comme Thucydide ou Hamilton décrivent sont des maux auxquels on peut remédier en allégeant les contraintes qui pèsent sur l’exécutif40. Celles décrites par Tocqueville s’inscrivent dans un processus social plus profond : des arrangements juridiques et institutionnels ne les corrigent pas. Pour autant, on ne saurait en conclure l’infériorité irréversible des démocraties en guerre.

III. DES DÉMOCRATIES FINALEMENT VICTORIEUSES Tocqueville confère aux démocraties des caractéristiques qui les rendent impropres à combattre efficacement. Qualifier de cette manière la vision de l’auteur français n’est pas totalement infondé, et nous avons nous-mêmes présenté les facteurs qu’il identifie comme étant à la base des difficultés des pays démocratiques : l’intérêt à faire la guerre, la culture guerrière et, enfin, la considération pour la carrière de militaire. Mais si de tels attributs vulnérabilisent les démocraties à court terme, leur influence décroît tandis que la guerre gagne en ampleur, jusqu’à finalement totalement disparaître. Déjà, l’intérêt que le peuple porte en la préservation d’un état de paix, par définition, disparaît lorsque l’état de guerre finit par s’établir. Qu’en est-il plus précisément du fait que les individus, en démocratie, estiment que les gains sont pour eux plus grands à ne pas s’investir dans l’entreprise guerrière, et qu’ils aiment mieux continuer à concentrer leurs efforts pour s’enrichir par le biais d’activités professionnelles ordinaires ? En se développant au sein du pays démocratique, l’entreprise belliqueuse n’est plus ce frein à la recherche de prospérité des hommes. Elle se mue au contraire en une formidable, et même en l’unique source d’enrichissement matériel41. Cette fin ne cesse donc jamais d’être visée par les hommes. Mais la guerre les prive des 140 Elie Baranets ressources qu’ils utilisent ordinairement pour y parvenir, apparaissant elle-même comme l’unique moyen dans cette quête. En s’installant durablement, la guerre fait en outre resurgir chez les hommes démocratiques leur culture martiale, qui ne s’était en réalité jamais éteinte, mais demeurait plutôt enfouie, pour ainsi dire, sous les décombres de la paix42. Les carrières militaires, enfin, s’organisent plus efficacement lorsqu’un conflit armé se prolonge dans le temps que lorsque l’affrontement n’est qu’hypothétique ou naissant. En temps normal, le faible intérêt pour la paix, et le manque de développement de culture guerrière contribuent à rendre l’armée impropre à utiliser efficacement la force. Or, si ces deux facteurs n’opèrent plus dans ce sens, il paraît logique que le troisième facteur s’affaisse à son tour. D’une part, lorsque la guerre devient lucrative, les hommes qui sont intéressés par l’idée de rejoindre l’armée cessent d’être les moins capables d’entre eux, mais apparaissent au contraire comme les meilleurs43. D’autre part, lorsque des mœurs plus belliqueuses gagnent la démocratie, la considération faite à la vocation militaire grandit. Que d’illustres membres de la société l’embrassent désormais contribue ensuite à valoriser le métier des armes, et renforce encore davantage son attractivité44. La mort sur le champ de bataille joue à cet égard un rôle fort louable. Elle accroît les perspectives d’ascension hiérarchique et renforce le prestige de la vocation militaire. L’armée est alors susceptible d’attirer des officiers jeunes et talentueux. Par ailleurs, si l’on a vu que les préférences des sous-officiers différaient de celles du peuple dans son ensemble, Tocqueville ne manque pas de souligner la ressemblance qu’a le soldat avec le citoyen au sein de la société civile. La liberté dont l’homme démocratique bénéficie fait de lui un soldat intelligent, qui applique peut-être les ordres de manière moins mécanique et disciplinée qu’un autre, mais qui ne manquera pas d’obéir à chaque fois que cela sera nécessaire, sa raison même lui dictant de le faire45. On voit donc que les facteurs qui vulnérabilisent les démocraties au commencement de la guerre s’estompent à mesure que cette dernière marque durablement la vie démocratique. Pour autant, cela suffit-il à favoriser les démocraties, ou bien cet élément permet-il seulement de rétablir l’équilibre entre ces dernières et les autres régimes ? Guerre et paix : l’héritage méconnu de Tocqueville 141

Tocqueville explique que l’égalité qui règne en démocratie fait naître des ambitions et des talents qui, dans leur nature, leur étendue et leurs effets, lui sont propres. Lorsqu’ils s’appliquent à la même entreprise, la démocratie s’en trouve favorisée. En démocratie plus qu’ailleurs, les hommes seront dévoués à l’effort de guerre. Tocqueville estime en effet que la perspective de victoire y suscite un intérêt si élevé que perdre la vie pour faire triompher la nation constitue un risque volontiers encouru. Il conclut logiquement que « si la paix est particulièrement nuisible aux armées démocratiques, la guerre leur assure donc des avantages que les autres armées n’ont jamais ; et ces avantages, bien que peu sensibles d’abord, ne peuvent manquer à la longue, de leur donner la victoire46. » Cohérente, parcimonieuse et dynamique, la vision qu’offre Tocqueville des relations entre paix et démocratie est-elle pour autant pertinente d’un point de vue empirique ? À première vue, rien n’est moins sûr. Il semble en effet que le poids de l’opinion, des médias, et des normes libérales au sein des démocraties occidentales contemporaines exposent ces dernières au risque de défaite d’autant plus que la guerre dure dans le temps. Le public se lasse rapidement d’une guerre et manque rarement de montrer sa sensibilité élevée aux méthodes coercitives et à ses conséquences létales. Il s’agit là d’une thèse devenue aujourd’hui tout à fait banale, et que l’on retrouve plus précisément incarnée par les figures dominantes du débat sur la victoire démocratique, à savoir Dan Reiter et Allan Stam47. La thèse de l’« affaiblissement démocratique » semble donc constituer une critique de la vision développée par Tocqueville. Mais il est deux raisons pour lesquelles ce dernier n’y prête en réalité pas le flanc. La première est que la thèse de l’affaiblissement démocratique concerne essentiellement des guerres à propos desquelles l’enjeu pour la nation démocratique n’est pas considéré comme assez important pour qu’elle y consacre une partie substantielle de ses forces matérielles, ni pour qu’elle combatte avec détermination. Or, les conflits armés auxquels Tocqueville fait référence sont d’une autre nature. Ils sont manifestement d’une importance vitale pour le belligérant démocratique. Tels qu’il les décrit peu de temps après les guerres napoléoniennes, ils sont en outre d’une ampleur clairement plus vaste que les guerres limitées qui forment l’échantillon des conflits armés auxquels les tenants de l’affaiblissement démocratique se réfèrent. 142 Elie Baranets

D’autre part, et surtout, ce serait s’égarer sur le plan logique que de penser que les démocraties perdent des guerres par le simple fait qu’elles durent dans le temps. En guerre, comme ailleurs, le temps en soi ne joue pour personne. Il n’est pas ce facteur décisif que l’on décrit à tort, puisque rien ne se passe dans le temps tant que les acteurs n’agissent pas. Le temps n’est que la dimension à l’intérieur de laquelle d’autres forces sont à l’œuvre. Il faut donc observer ces forces, plutôt que de compter vainement les jours qui passent. Les indicateurs temporels, en soi, ne correspondent à rien de concret. Leur utilisation a des vertus heuristiques indéniables. Mais ils ne peuvent être employés au-delà, et considérés comme facteurs, sans devenir des artefacts qui, dès lors, sont tout à fait impropres à être exploités pour juger de la pertinence d’une telle théorie. Lorsque Tocqueville en appelle à la temporalité, il s’agit uniquement pour lui d’une commodité établie dans le but de résumer son propos. Seuls ont de l’importance les trois facteurs que nous avons soulignés, lesquels influencent le cours de la guerre différemment à mesure que cette dernière gagne en ampleur. Logique, argumentée et cohérente, l’analyse de Tocqueville mérite d’être considérée en tant que telle, ou bien il ne fait pas de sens de la convoquer. La mobilisation, et a fortiori l’évaluation de l’œuvre d’un tel auteur requiert que l’examen qui en est fait se conforme un tant soit peu à ce à quoi elle correspond en substance. Pour ces raisons, l’utilisation de telles considérations n’est pas appropriée en tant qu’unique élément de comparaison entre les travaux de ces auteurs, et nous aimons mieux ne pas jeter le bébé tocquevillien avec l’eau du bain temporel48.

CONCLUSION Que faire de l’œuvre de Tocqueville ? Est-elle pertinente pour expliquer la politique internationale aujourd’hui ? Il ne nous appartient pas de procéder ici à un test empirique des hypothèses qu’il émet. Nous les percevons néanmoins comme prometteuses, dans le sens où elles semblent être en mesure de rendre compte de phénomènes à la fois centraux et intrigants. C’est le cas, par exemple, du comportement des acteurs internes face aux enjeux économiques propres à la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Aux États-Unis, la portée de l’affrontement atteignant un stade très élevé, la production de matériel de guerre devenait l’unique industrie susceptible d’enrichir aussi bien les entrepreneurs que les ouvriers. La guerre excitait alors les ambitions personnelles, exactement comme Tocqueville le prédit. Guerre et paix : l’héritage méconnu de Tocqueville 143

Tous s’en saisirent, ce qui ne manqua pas de profiter aux performances militaires américaines. L’intérêt dans, et la culture de, la guerre grandissaient conjointement, permettant à l’armée de disposer d’un arsenal considérable, ainsi que d’en faire profiter ses alliés. Ce fut là un facteur essentiel dans la victoire contre les puissances de l’Axe. La transformation d’une industrie civile en industrie militaire, processus complexe d’ordinaire long, a commencé tardivement. Mais une fois enclenchée, elle s’est réalisée à la fois efficacement et rapidement49. On aura par ailleurs noté que les démocraties européennes et américaine, à cette époque et dans les quelques années qui suivirent, étaient gouvernées par des élites qui entretenaient des rapports étroits avec la sphère militaire. Dans les temps marqués par la guerre, la carrière militaire n’était donc pas dénigrée, et pouvait servir de tremplin pour atteindre des positions élevées au sein de la société civile. De nos jours, alors que ces mêmes démocraties sont en état de paix prolongée sur leur territoire, et conformément à ce qu’annonce Tocqueville, il est beaucoup plus rare de voir des anciens militaires aux responsabilités les plus importantes, et ce sont des civils qui ont dorénavant remplacé les Churchill, De Gaulle et Eisenhower. Seule exception notable au sein des démocraties occidentales : Israël. Les plus hautes fonctions sont régulièrement confiées à des anciens militaires, qui parviennent à faire fructifier à l’intérieur de la société civile leur expérience au sein de l’armée. Les guerres répétées qu’a connues l’État hébreu l’expliquent sans doute, autant que cela crédibilise la vision tocquevillienne de la question. Cela étant dit, l’évolution des techniques ne rend-elle pas l’analyse de Tocqueville obsolète ? Ce dernier souligne les aptitudes toutes particulières des hommes en démocratie à développer leurs activités industrielles en temps de paix, pendant qu’ils délaissent la vocation militaire. Or, depuis que Tocqueville a écrit son œuvre, le rapport entre ces deux sphères a été bouleversé. Loin de s’opposer, ni même d’être étrangères l’une à l’égard de l’autre, elles sont devenues complémentaires, du fait du développement de la mécanisation des activités humaines. Une nation se sert de son industrie pour se doter de capacités militaires conventionnelles redoutables50. Les auteurs réalistes en RI, qui prêtent à la force militaire des États une importance primordiale, font d’ailleurs des capacités industrielles un attribut essentiel de la puissance51. Quant au penchant, selon 144 Elie Baranets

Tocqueville, des hommes démocratiques pour le commerce, il peut contribuer à enrichir la nation, et ainsi profiter aux activités industrielles – et donc potentiellement militaires – du pays. Que cela change-t-il à l’égard de la pertinence des arguments développés par Tocqueville ? La séparation des activités industrielles et militaires qu’il opère est peut-être partiellement datée, mais cela n’invalide en rien la logique de son argumentation par ailleurs. Ce n’est pas parce que l’industrie peut servir l’armée que l’intérêt à faire la guerre grandit52, que les mœurs guerrières se cultivent à l’échelle de la société, ni que la vocation pour une carrière militaire est valorisée. Rien ne nous permet d’émettre que le raisonnement de Tocqueville soit intrinsèquement moins judicieux aujourd’hui qu’il ne l’était au moment de sa production. Peut-être faut-il tout au plus relativiser l’influence de certains facteurs qu’il décrit sur le résultat de la guerre, du fait de l’évolution des méthodes et outils employés pour la faire. Il s’agit donc moins d’invalider la réflexion de Tocqueville que de nuancer la portée de quelques-uns de ses développements, lesquels s’inscrivent dans un cadre général dont on ne peut que souligner l’utilité pour les questions qui nous intéressent. En plus d’analyser paix et performance militaire conjointement, le penseur français considère que la seconde découle de la première sur le plan causal, parvenant à appréhender l’une et l’autre à travers une seule matrice. Tocqueville propose donc une réflexion très détaillée, mais cohérente, sur ce qui fait les forces et les faiblesses des démocraties en guerre. Il souligne, d’abord de manière générale, le manque de continuité très préjudiciable existant en démocratie, et qui favorise l’ennemi. Ensuite, et à propos de la guerre plus précisément, les démocraties apparaissent comme fragilisées en raison d’un manque d’intéressement dans le fait guerrier, d’une faible culture martiale, et, enfin, d’une absence de reconnaissance pour la carrière militaire. Ces caractères démocratiques ont comme origine commune profonde l’égalité des conditions, et s’ils s’observent dans ce sens précis, c’est en raison de la situation de paix prolongée dans laquelle les démocraties se retrouvent. Logiquement, Tocqueville explique comment ils œuvrent dans un sens inverse lorsque la guerre gagne en ampleur, cessant alors de jouer en la défaveur de la démocratie, mais au contraire se transformant en atouts. En termes d’affaires internationales, l’œuvre de Tocqueville est ignorée, ou abordée de manière hâtive. Elle est pourtant formulée dans des termes qui lui Guerre et paix : l’héritage méconnu de Tocqueville 145 permettent d’être aujourd’hui exploitée dans le cadre de débats majeurs en RI.

NOTES

[1] Il nous faudra parfois émettre des remarques contextuelles pour interpréter correctement le sens implicite donné à certaines de ses réflexions. Nous essayons néanmoins de faire un usage le plus parcimonieux possible de ces précisions. [2] Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, Œuvres complètes, vol. II, partie 3, chap. 26, p. 800, Paris, Gallimard, 1962. Toutes nos références à De la démocratie en Amérique renvoient à cette édition. [3] Voir également, vol. II, partie 3, chap. 22, p. 782. [4] En RI, la première pierre de ce débat fut posée par Rudolph Rummel qui, dès 1983, soulignait l’effet pacificateur des régimes les plus ouverts du point de vue des droits politiques et des libertés civiles, ainsi que ceux garantissant le libre-échange, voir « Libertarianism and International Violence », Journal of Conflict Resolution, 27 (1), 1983, p. 27-71 ; Kenneth Benoit analyse le comportement des démocraties dans les années 1960 et 1970, « Democracies Really Are More Pacific (in General). Reexamining Regime Type and War Involvement », Journal of Conflict resolution, 40 (4), 1996, p. 636-657. Son étude statistique est sans doute l’une des plus abouties parmi les tenants de la paix démocratique monadique. On notera toutefois qu’il ne s’interroge pas sur les raisons pour lesquelles, selon lui, les démocraties étaient en général plus pacifiques sur la période concernée. Pour une étude des causes de ce phénomène présumé, on consultera plutôt James Lee Ray, « Democracy on the Level(s): Does Democracy Correlate with Peace? » in John Vasquez (dir.) What Do We Know About War? Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, p. 299-316 ; sans oublier John MacMillan, « Beyond the Separate Democratic Peace », Journal of Peace Research, 40 (2), 2003, p. 233-243. [5] John R. Oneal et Bruce M. Russett, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organization, New York, Norton, 2001 ; Michael Mousseau, « The Nexus of Market Society, Liberal Preferences, and Democratic Peace: Interdisciplinary Theory and Evidence », International Studies Quarterly, 47 (4), p. 483-510 ; Michael W. Doyle, Liberal Peace: Selected Essays, New York, Routledge, 2012. [6] Les références à Kant lorsqu’il est question de la paix démocratique sont tellement répandues qu’il serait aussi fastidieux qu’inutile de renvoyer à des sources bibliographiques pour illustrer cette pratique devenue courante. 146 Elie Baranets

[7] Georg Cavalar, « Kantian Perspectives on Democratic Peace: Alternatives to Doyle », Review of International Studies, 27 (2), 2001, p. 229-248 ; Beate Jahn, « Kant, Mill, and Illiberal Legacies in International Affairs », International Organization, 59 (1), 2005, p. 107-207 ; Scott Gates, Torbjorn L. Knutsen et Jonathon W. Moses, « Democracy and Peace: A More Skeptical View », Journal of Peace Research, 33 (1) 1996, p. 6. Par ailleurs, Gates, Knutsen et Moses s’opposent fermement au rapprochement entre Kant et la paix démocratique pour une autre raison : Kant parlait de « républiques » et non de « démocraties ». Les trois auteurs font preuve d’un mépris singulier envers ceux qui n’ont pas considéré cette nuance comme péremptoire, ibid., p. 6. S’il est vrai que Kant parle de républiques, il est aussi vrai que ces deux termes ont connu une évolution sémantique depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècle. On peut d’ailleurs trouver des justifications chez les théoriciens de la paix démocratique quant au choix de considérer que la « république » à laquelle Kant fait allusion peut renvoyer à la démocratie telle qu’on la conçoit aujourd’hui, voir par exemple, Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post- World, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 4. Nul n’est forcé de considérer que la démarche consistant à assimiler la république kantienne à la démocratie contemporaine soit rigoureuse, et que l’opération soit convaincante. On ne peut néanmoins pas faire comme si aucune précaution n’avait été prise, ainsi que Gates, Knutsen et Moses le laissent entendre. Pour notre part, il est clair que si l’utilisation de Kant comme base d’une théorie de la paix démocratique doit apparaître comme un bricolage intellectuel contestable, la raison en est ailleurs. [8] Bruce Russett semble faire figure d’exception. Principal théoricien de la paix démocratique, derrière Doyle, il évoque en effet les travaux de Tocqueville. Mais il le fait uniquement pour mentionner, de manière tronquée, la thèse prêtant aux démocraties une infirmité majeure en termes d’affaires extérieures. Rien n’est dit sur son apport potentiel aux théories de la paix démocratique. Russett relativise ensuite la portée de l’argument tocquevillien, soulignant qu’il fait sens dans l’environnement anarchique principalement constitué d’États autocratiques, et qui caractérisait la période durant laquelle Tocqueville écrivait. La démocratie s’est depuis propagée, venant instituer de nouvelles normes à l’échelle du système international, ibid., p. 137-138. L’auteur pourrait bien avoir raison sur ce dernier point. Que Russett oppose à Tocqueville la tendance historique de la démocratie à se propager ne manque, par ailleurs, pas d’ironie, tant ce dernier n’a précisément de cesse de souligner son irrésistible ascension. [9] Bruce Bueno De Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2003, p. 129. [10] Dan Reiter et Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002. [11] Vol. I, partie 2, chap. 10, p. 479-480. [12] Alexis de Tocqueville, Souvenirs, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, p. 317. [13] Vol. I, partie 2, chap. 5, p. 262. Guerre et paix : l’héritage méconnu de Tocqueville 147

[14] Dans le même registre, il écrit : « Quant à moi, je ne ferai pas difficulté de le dire : c’est dans la direction des intérêts extérieurs de la société que les gouvernements démocratiques me paraissent décidément inférieurs aux autres », Vol. I, partie 2, chap. 5, p. 261. [15] Internationaliste majeur, Kenneth N. Waltz valide la vision tocquevillienne des lacunes démocratiques en termes de politique étrangère dans Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics: The American and British Experience, Boston, Little, Brown and Co, 1967, p. 8-15. [16] Pour un constat similaire à celui dressé par Tocqueville (bien que pour des raisons différentes) appliqué cette fois aux stratèges, lesquels restent aux responsabilités trop peu de temps en démocratie, voir Ron Schleifer, « Democracies, Limited War and Psychological Operations », In Efraim INBAR (dir.), Democracies and Small Wars, London, Frank Cass, 2003, p. 46. [17] Vol. I, partie 1, chap. 8, p. 144. [18] Vol. I, partie 1, chap. 8, p. 145. [19] Ibid. Tocqueville est plus nuancé pour ce qui est du fonctionnement institutionnel des États-Unis. Il note que, « en Amérique, le Président exerce une assez grande influence sur les affaires de l'État, mais il ne les conduit point ; le pouvoir prépondérant réside dans la représentation nationale tout entière », vol. I, partie 1, chap. 8, p. 144. Cette parenthèse vient atténuer le manque de continuité qui résulte des changements successifs d’hôtes à la Maison Blanche. Il semble néanmoins que cette tentative de modération affiche aujourd’hui une pertinence érodée. Depuis que Tocqueville a produit son œuvre, les pouvoirs réels du président se sont largement renforcés, notamment en ce qui concerne la politique étrangère, que ce dernier la conduit désormais bel et bien. Voir Arthur M. Schlesinger, La présidence impériale, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1976. Tocqueville précise lui-même que le président des États-Unis, ainsi que le Sénat, se voient confier une tâche d’une ampleur plus importante concernant ce domaine, voir infra. [20] Vol. I, partie 2, chap. 5, p. 262. [21] Vol. I, partie 2, chap. 5, p. 263. [22] Vol. I, partie 2, chap. 5, p. 262. [23] « Nous avons vu que la Constitution fédérale mettait la direction permanente des intérêts extérieurs de la nation dans les mains du président et du Sénat, ce qui place jusqu’à un certain point la politique générale de l’Union hors de l'influence directe et journalière du peuple. On ne peut donc pas dire d'une manière absolue que ce soit la démocratie qui, en Amérique, conduise les affaires extérieures de l'État. », Vol. I, partie 2, chap. 5, p. 259. [24] Elles se caractérisent par une double absence : celle d’une quelconque interdépendance avec les autres acteurs sur la scène internationale et celle de dangers pouvant y provenir et menaçant le pays, vol. I, partie 1, chap. 8, p. 145. Mais sur ce point, l’Amérique, a changé depuis 1835, et avec elle son statut. Elle est devenue la première puissance du monde, garantit à elle seule la sécurité physique de plusieurs États, et assure en grande partie la survie matérielle d’institutions internationales. Nous pouvons 148 Elie Baranets

observer que l’isolationnisme prôné par George Washington s’est progressivement mû en interventionnisme au cours du XXe siècle. Il atteindra finalement son paroxysme au début du XXIe siècle, à la suite des attaques du 11 septembre sur le sol américain, venues alors « désanctuariser » un territoire continental jusque-là vierge de toute agression significative. Cela nous permet de revenir sur la deuxième absence : celle des dangers provenant de l’extérieur, ayant été questionnée pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale ainsi que pendant la Guerre froide. [25] Justin Vaïsse s’étonne de ce que Tocqueville ne voie pas dans le patriotisme américain un facteur de puissance, alors même qu’il est décrit par ailleurs comme une source d’atténuation du manque d’adhésion nuisible aux affaires extérieures, Justin Vaïsse, « De l'infériorité des régimes démocratiques dans la conduite des affaires extérieures : une relecture contemporaine de Tocqueville », The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, 30 (1), p. 137-158. Quand bien même nous exécuterions cette démarche à sa place, il n’en resterait pas moins que cette nuance concernerait avant tout les États-Unis, du fait de leur histoire et de leur culture, et pas nécessairement les pays démocratiques. Il ne s’agirait donc pas d’une disposition générale, ou bien, si elle devait l’être, nécessiterait d’être formulée en tant que telle. [26] Vol. I, partie 2, chap. 5, p. 256-259. [27] Vol. I, partie 2, chap. 5, p. 257. [28] Ces facteurs ne sont pas tout à fait indépendants les uns des autres. Ils ont l’égalisation des conditions comme origine commune. De même, et ainsi que nous le verrons, ils sont susceptibles d’interagir, et de renforcer mutuellement à la fois l’ancrage et l’impact qu’ils connaissent sur la gestion d’une crise armée en démocratie. Mais dans la mesure où leurs effets recouvrent des champs distincts au sein de la société démocratique, et surtout au sein des études de Relations internationales, nous pensons qu’ils requièrent un examen différencié, cela facilitant par là-même leur identification aux problématiques contemporaines. [29] Vol. II, partie 3, chap. 26, p. 802-805. Tout au long de son ouvrage, mais de manière plus manifeste encore à l’égard de la guerre, Tocqueville confronte explicitement la démocratie à l’aristocratie. L’égalité des conditions propre à la première, et dont il perçoit la propagation, menace irrésistiblement, à terme, l’existence de la seconde. Cela explique la tendance qui est la sienne à se focaliser sur la comparaison entre ces deux régimes, occultant dès lors les modes d’administration plus autoritaires. Les conclusions qu’il tire de cette démarche précise voient ainsi leur pertinence limitée à cette stricte comparaison. En revanche les propos qu’il tient de manière plus générale sur les traits des démocraties ont vocation à être généralisables au-delà. [30] Vol. II, partie 3, chap. 22, p. 782. [31] Vol. II, partie 3, chap.1, p. 676-681. Pour observer la consistance théorique de la pensée de Tocqueville à propos de notre sujet, voir vol. II, partie 3, chap. 22, p. 785. [32] Vol. II, partie 3, chap. 26, p. 802. Guerre et paix : l’héritage méconnu de Tocqueville 149

[33] Vol. II, partie 3, chap. 26, p 793-794 et p. 796. [34] Vol. II, partie 3, chap. 22, p. 783-784. [35] Vol. II, partie 3, chap. 22, p. 783 et s. [36] Au même titre que les militaires en général, les sous-officiers sont incapables de traduire comme avantage dans la société civile démocratique leur avancement de carrière. En outre, la spécificité de leur condition implique qu’ils disposent d’un grade hiérarchique trop bas pour qu’il leur fournisse un quelconque confort, qu’ils entrevoient donc, sans qu’ils puissent l’atteindre. Leur frustration est en partie liée à la situation de statu quo qui accompagne les temps de paix, vol. II, partie 3, chap. 23, p. 792-793. [37] Vol. II, partie 3, chap. 22, p. 782-789. Dans le but de remédier à cette situation génératrice d’inquiétudes et de tensions auprès de ceux qui détiennent tout de même des armes susceptibles de se retourner contre le pouvoir, les gouvernants en démocratie peuvent avoir tendance à multiplier les charges militaires. Cette mesure, en plus d’être coûteuse, n’offre pas de solution satisfaisante pour Tocqueville. Lorsque les possibilités d’ascension se multiplient, alors le nombre de candidats intéressés également. Par conséquent, les chances d’accession à la fonction supérieure n’augmentent pas. Seule la prise de conscience éclairée des enjeux attachés à cette question auprès des citoyens apparaît pour Tocqueville comme le remède à un mal, autrement inéluctable. [38] Vol. II, partie 3, chap. 24, p. 794. [39] Vol. II, partie 3, chap. 22, p. 782-783. [40] Tocqueville lui-même estime que le fait guerrier restreint les libertés civiles, d’abord par les institutions, puis par les mœurs. [41] Vol. II, partie 3, chap. 24, p. 796. [42] Vol. II, partie 3, chap. 24, p. 797. [43] Ibid. [44] Bien que Tocqueville ne formule pas expressément cette idée, on pourrait, à ce stade, conclure que le cercle vicieux « dévalorisation- recrutement médiocre-dévalorisation » se voit remplacé ici par un cercle vertueux de nature inverse « valorisation-recrutement prestigieux- valorisation ». [45] Vol. II, partie 3, chap. 22, p. 789, et surtout, vol. II, partie 3, chap. 24, p. 798-799. L’idée est réutilisée par Dan REITER et Allan C. STAM qui, pour le coup, mentionnent Tocqueville. Ils soulignent que l’individualisme inhérent aux sociétés démocratiques confère à ses membres un esprit d’initiative supérieur. Cela améliore les aptitudes militaires des soldats comparés à ceux des nations non-démocratiques, Democracies at War, op. cit, p. 64-65. Plus généralement, la thèse de la supériorité occidentale dans la guerre est aujourd’hui incarnée par l’historien militaire Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage et Culture. Les grandes batailles qui ont fait l’occident, Paris, Flammarion, 2002. Selon lui, les dispositions non militaires caractéristiques de l’occident – et plus particulièrement de la démocratie – en termes politiques, économiques et culturels, se traduisent en avantage militaire décisif. [46] Vol. II, partie 3, chap. 24, p. 798. 150 Elie Baranets

[47] Dan Reiter et Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War, op. cit. [48] Elie Baranets, « À qui profite le temps ? Une analyse critique de la référence au temps dans les études sur la guerre », Temporalités [En ligne], 21, 2015. [49] Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, London, Pimlico, p. 232-242. [50] Dans une certaine mesure, cela est peut-être également vrai dans le sens inverse, puisque les temps de guerre ont favorisé de multiples inventions, qui furent ensuite utilisées en temps de paix à des fins civiles. Mais cela n’est pas en lien direct avec notre questionnement. [51] Voir John M. Earsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New-York, Norton, 2001 ; Raymond Aron, Paix et Guerre entre les Nations, Paris, Calmann-Levy, 1985 ; et surtout Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Boston, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2006. [52] En tout cas, pour la majorité. Certes, l’intensification des liens entre sphères militaire et industrielle a créé une catégorie d’hommes d’affaires intéressés par la guerre. Mais l’influence de ce « complexe militaro- industriel », selon la formule proposée par Dwight Eisenhower, s’observe en marge des mécanismes démocratiques.

RÉSUMÉ

Lorsqu’elle n’est pas complètement ignorée, l’œuvre d’Alexis de Tocqueville est généralement traitée de manière superficielle par les auteurs qui s’intéressent à la politique internationale. Réciproquement, les lecteurs attentifs de ce dernier ne s’intéressent que peu à la dimension internationale de sa réflexion. Cet article a pour objet de contribuer à combler ce double manque, en soulignant l’intérêt qu’il existe à mobiliser la pensée de Tocqueville à propos des études sur la guerre et la paix. Tocqueville élabore un cadre d’analyse novateur pour questionner le caractère pacifique des États démocratiques, que ce soit en général, ou dans leurs relations mutuelles. Il propose également une réflexion cohérente et empiriquement pertinente sur les forces et les faiblesses des démocraties en guerre.

Tocqueville, America, and Us

The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol. XXXVII, n° 2 – 2016

TOCQUEVILLE, AMERICA, AND US PREFACE WRITTEN IN 2016

By Marcel GAUCHET Translated by Jacob Hamburger

The following article originally appeared in 1980. It is typical of a certain intellectual moment in France, one that fits into a much larger ideological moment—a global one, really—that one might call the “liberal turn” in our recent history. Two dates come to mind: May 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the British elections, and November 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States. In France at that time, the liberal turn had none of the same political effects. Quite the opposite: in May 1981, it was François Mitterrand’s left-wing government that came to power, after spending 23 years in opposition. In the intellectual sphere, however, the subsequent move towards liberalism was profoundly felt, perhaps more so in France than elsewhere, because it marked a real rupture with the country’s tradition. After all, for the British and the Americans, a turn towards liberalism merely involved a return to what had been the dominant inspiration of their history. But for the French, this called into question the double heritage that their political culture was based on, both a revolutionary and statist past. The most striking illustration of this impact is the series of lectures that Michel Foucault devoted to the subject between January and April 1979, now famous since its publication in 2004 under the misleading title, The Birth of Biopolitics. “The problem of liberalism presents itself to us, in effect, in its immediate and concrete reality,” Foucault says in order to justify this break from his initial program.1

154 Marcel Gauchet

But I would cite two other important titles that perhaps offer a better idea of the tremors taking place at the time. François Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution, published in 1978, was a thunderclap in what had seemed to be the clear skies of the Marxist orthodoxy that read the bourgeois revolution of 1789 in light of the social revolution to come.2 Furet’s insistence that “the French Revolution is over” had the effect of revealing that the emperor— “Revolution,” that is—had no clothes. In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition expanded on this analysis by extending it to all “grand narratives” of progress or emancipation.3 If the “immediate and concrete reality” of the liberal question, both in France and elsewhere (even in China!), was most apparent in the discussion of the role of the state in the economy, there was an additional discussion to be had concerning the decisive event in our national history that was the Revolution and, in a broader sense, the clashing visions of history caught up in the interpretation of this event. This was the array of questions that served as the background for the reflections I developed in “Tocqueville, America, and Us.” Even independently of my own case, however, this moment nourished an entire intellectual generation, lending its particular color to the reevaluation and reappropriation of the liberal tradition that became this generation’s task. Among the major thinkers contributing to the renewal of the problem of liberalism, one also cannot fail to mention the impact of Louis Dumont’s Homo æqualis, which appeared in 1977. Dumont tackled the subject formidably, bringing to light the link between the development of the notion of economy and the affirmation of individualism from Mandeville to Marx. Pierre Rosanvallon took on a similar exploration in his 1979 Le capitalisme utopique.4 As for my own approach, I attacked the problem from a more political angle. The guiding thread throughout my work was the manner in which liberal thought emerged in France out of both the heritage of the Revolution, and the tradition that directly challenged this heritage. In this sense, my study of Tocqueville was inseparable from my work editing the political writings of Benjamin Constant, which I took on at the same time and which also appeared in 1980 with a long preface entitled “The Lucid Illusion of Liberalism.”5 My thesis was, in short, that liberalism is blind to what makes it possible, which is at the same time the social dynamic in which it appears. It sees quite clearly the sphere that constitutes the central articulation of this society, a

Tocqueville, America, and Us. Preface 155 sphere that centers around the rights of individuals, in which the liberty of Moderns is distinguished from that of the Ancients. But this visible sphere of society in turn conceals a hidden part, the foundation on which the exercise of personal liberties rests. This includes, similarly, the correlates of the equality of conditions that elude Tocqueville’s grasp. His exposition of the prodigious transformative power of equality, which his American laboratory reveals to him, easily leads him to forget the implications of this power for the organization of the collectivity. From this point of view, America is as deceptive as it is instructive. If what we seek is to comprehend the destiny of an egalitarian society, then, we will find it useful to come back to the old Europe that we first had to leave. But I had yet another reason to become interested in Tocqueville, one that takes us away from the scene of politics. I was determined to exhaust the meaning of “the equality of conditions” by taking into account a dimension that had hardly concerned Tocqueville, namely, the interiority of this individual who is considered as an equal. Modern individualism has gone hand in hand with an attribution to the individual of a self-relating existence that we have recently taken to calling “psychological” or “psychic.” One cannot conceive of the modern condition without grasping the importance of this life ruled by the interior. Conversely, it is impossible to conceive of the homo psychologicus outside of our society of equal individuals. I became convinced very early on that it was indispensable to connect and explore in parallel the exterior and interior facets of this new human condition. Now, the essential source of our knowledge of this internal experience turns out to come from the pathological expressions it takes on. The Freudian discovery of the unconscious is the most telling example here. This line of thinking led me to plunge into the psychopathological continent and its history, in intimate collaboration with Gladys Swain, who provided a psychiatrist’s scientific point of view. We could scarcely avoid an encounter with the uncontested monument of the field at the time, Michel Foucault’s L’histoire de la folie, and what resulted was a radical challenge to the perspective Foucault proposed in his presentation of the birth of psychology around 1800. This was the object of La pratique de l’esprit humain, which we published together, also in 1980.6 Far from being a story of exclusion, as Foucault insists, the history of madness is on the

156 Marcel Gauchet contrary the history of an inclusion that reveals the hidden architecture of the interior world. The birth of psychiatry marks a decisive step in this process, as psychiatry finds in what is apparently unreasonable the reasonable traces that allow it to be accessed and deciphered. It was in this context that I found Tocqueville’s judgment so illuminating; here, the notion of the equality of conditions seemed to me to take on its fullest meaning. For what is that “third equality,” if I dare to name it, that is irreducible to abstract juridical equality, but also distinct from equality in a concrete sense? There is an “imaginary equality,” Tocqueville responds, that pushes us to find everywhere around us the figure of the “fellow man” who resembles us [le semblable]. What Tocqueville evidently has in mind is the contrast with the hierarchical separations of the aristocratic age, which imposed an insurmountable distance between superiors and inferiors. But here we must expand the range of applications. The sentiment of dissimilarity in aristocratic society did not stop at differences in social status; it clung to the ensemble of various differences at work in the interpersonal sphere. The otherness of the madman only represents the extreme case of such differences. The egalitarian inversion consisted in the identification of one’s fellow man that transcends the differences of fact that create barriers between beings. This identification touches even the madman; despite all that separates him from “common sense,” one learns in the democratic age to recognize his place within the circle of similarity, even if that place is behind or against the rest. It touches as well, beyond relations between masters and servants, relations between the sexes or between people of different ages. It touches our relations even with other sentient beings, namely animals. It is in this sense that the “imaginary” equality that Tocqueville identified has consequences that reach far beyond the narrow field of politics. This third equality is one of the most revolutionary motors of our culture, constantly obliging us to revise our idea of the human in light of the imperative to find our fellows in what once appeared as “other” or outside the boundaries of humanity. I continue to believe that the unveiling of this crucial and poorly understood dynamic remains the mark of Tocqueville’s profound genius.

Tocqueville, America, and Us. Preface 157

NOTES

[1] Michel Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France, 1978- 1979 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004), 25. The English translation was published in 2008 as Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. G. Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). On the context surrounding this course, Serge Audier’s recent book is immensely clarifying: Serge Audier, Penser le « néolibéralisme ». Le moment néoliberal, Foucault et la crise du socialisme (Paris: Le Bord de l’eau, 2015). [2] François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). [3] Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979). [4] Louis Dumont, Homo aequalis. Genèse et épanouissement de l’idéologie économique (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); Pierre Rosanvallon, Le capitalisme utopique, (Paris: Seuil, 1979). As a result of these similarities, I saw it fit to treat both works in the same review: “De l’avènement de l’individu à la découverte de la socitété,” which appeared in the Annales ESC in 1980. [5] Benjamin Constant, De la liberté chez les modernes (Paris: Pluriel, 1980). This edition has since been reprinted in Pluriel’s Folio Collection under the title Ecrits Politiques. [6] Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, La pratique de l’esprit humain. L’institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). Published in English as Madness and Democracy: The Modern Psychiatric Universe, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). This work should be read as a prolongation of an earlier work by Gladys Swain, Le sujet de la folie. Naissance de la psychiatrie (Toulouse: Privat, 1977). I have written on this trajectory in her work in the preface to the posthumous writings of Gladys Swain, Dialogue avec l’insensé (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).

The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol. XXXVII, n° 2 – 2016

TOCQUEVILLE, AMERICA, AND US AVANT-PROPOS

Jacob HAMBURGER

A partial English translation of this article appears under the title “Tocqueville” in a 1995 volume of essays on political philosophy edited by Mark Lilla for the series New French Thought.1 The stated aim of this volume was to introduce English-speaking readers to a new generation of French thinkers who had rediscovered political philosophy in a country that had for decades cast it aside. The prestige of such intellectual trends as existentialism, Marxism, structuralism, and post-structuralism, each in their own way, distracted generations of French thinkers from properly political questions. It was the generation of thinkers whose intellectual development was shaped by the failed revolution of 1968 and the revelations of the true extent of the atrocities of Communist regimes that brought politics, and liberal politics in particular, back to the center of their writings.2 The New French Thought volume, with this narrative in mind, sought primarily to showcase essays by members of this intellectual generation—which includes Marcel Gauchet along with Pierre Manent, Luc Ferry, and Gilles Lipovetsky—that focus on great thinkers of the liberal canon, new understandings of the history and key concepts of modern politics, or critiques of the illiberal aspects of contemporary French intellectual life. Translating and reprinting the entirety of Gauchet’s essay today in 2016 is—in a sense—a far less ambitious undertaking. The first English publication of “Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous” sought to present the revival of liberal political thought (or, rather, thought about liberal politics) as a contemporary intellectual phenomenon. In other words, its aim was to diagnose a shift in the

160 Jacob Hamburger overwhelming philosophical trends of its own day, a break between the vanguard of today’s thinkers and those of previous decades. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was good reason to regard the present moment as the result of a long process of ideologisation and de-ideologisation. But almost thirty years since the essay’s original publication in Libre, however, there are equally good reasons to reconsider this narrative. This is not to say that such a redemptive tale of French intellectuals’ return to liberalism and the critique of totalitarianism is entirely false or historically outdated. Far from it. Reading “Tocqueville, America, and Us,” one finds a characterization of totalitarian extremism, for example, that remains contemporary. My only suggestion is that we are better served today by a more ambivalent analysis of the status and success liberalism in French thought of the last several decades. It is therefore my hope that a complete English translation of this essay will not only help introduce Anglophone readers to Gauchet's work (which has been too little translated), but also aid in understanding the historical specificity of the so-called liberal moment in France. Gauchet's essay is a particularly good example of what can be gained by today's English-speaking reader. One finds in “Tocqueville, America, and Us” not only an early version of the analysis Gauchet expands some years later in Le désenchantement du monde, but also an engagement—though mostly implicit—with many of the most prominent voices of twentieth century French intellectual life. In this early essay, Gauchet remains close to the teaching of his erstwhile mentor Claude Lefort, who characterized democracy as essentially a site of confrontation and conflict. His discussion of the notion of alterity in society draws on both the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas and the work of French anthropologists such as Claude Lévi- Strauss and Pierre Clastres.3 And it is hard to read Gauchet’s polemical engagement with what he takes as the prevailing academic orthodoxy without noticing a thinly veiled jab at the work of Michel Foucault, anticipating his later criticism of Foucault’s history of madness. All of these engagements, furthermore, take place through a reading of Tocqueville, whose “revival” in the 1970s—largely thanks to Raymond Aron—is itself a major turning point in French intellectual history. To read this early work in Gauchet’s career is therefore to place oneself at a major crossroads of twentieth century French thought.

Tocqueville, America, and Us. Avant-propos 161

More importantly, though, Gauchet’s take on Tocqueville remains a powerful discussion of issues that define the present moment. And there is no better way to make this clear than by presenting a complete version of the original 1980 essay. The previous translation reproduces only two of its original sections. As the second of these sections is the longest and perhaps the richest of them all, this is not in itself a misrepresentation of Gauchet's intentions. The first thirty pages of the articles give a relatively concise presentation of the conflictual nature of democracy, as well as the danger of totalitarianism that democratic societies produce within themselves. But the main drawback of the decision to end the essay in this manner—undoubtedly taken out of concerns for the essay’s length— is that this discussion of totalitarianism gets the final word, leaving the reader with an implicit call to vigilance against this internal threat of democracy. Important as the notion of totalitarianism is for Gauchet, this is not the ending that French readers of this well- known essay would have seen. And it is in the subsequent sections that we find some of the issues and discussions that remain as relevant today in 2016 as they did in 1980: for example, Gauchet’s treatment in section IV of gender difference, identity, and animal rights in light of Tocqueville’s characterization of equality in democratic societies. In light of recent struggles for transgender issues, inclusiveness on college campuses, and environmental justice—to name only a few pressing issues in recent events— Gauchet’s emphasis of the notion of totalitarianism can in fact start to look like one of the least durable aspects of his analysis. Finally, Gauchet’s French prose is difficult, but unmistakably contemporary. To facilitate the readability of the text, I have often introduced my own paragraph breaks into the text where they do not exist in Gauchet’s original. I include certain recurrent French terms in brackets to avoid confusion in cases where I have found it necessary to translate them using varying English equivalents. My overall aim in translating this piece has been to facilitate clarity and preserve the intended meaning rather than to mirror the style of the original.

162 Jacob Hamburger

NOTES

[1] Mark Lilla, ed., New French Thought: Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). The New French Thought series also published Gauchet’s most well known work, Le désenchantement du monde, as The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). [2] See Lilla’s provocative introductory essay in this volume, “The Legitimacy of the Liberal Age,” in New French Thought, 3-34. [3] Clastres as well as Lefort were along with Gauchet contributors to the journal Libre that originally published this essay. A short-lived interdisciplinary publication, the journal itself is a fascinating document in French intellectual history.

The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol. XXXVII, n° 2 – 2016

TOCQUEVILLE, AMERICA, AND US: ON THE GENESIS OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES*

By Marcel GAUCHET Translated by Jacob Hamburger

I The aim in the following pages is to consider Tocqueville’s thought less for its own sake than for its contemporary significance. What does democracy mean today, what has it become, and what can Tocqueville’s way of thinking about it tell us about its future? His great study of America remains an incomparably vibrant source for understanding our political universe, one that appears astonishingly present each time one revisits it.1 In naming what he called “the equality of conditions,” he put his finger squarely on one of the key notions that give meaning to the recurring dynamics of contemporary society, a concept that still demands elucidation despite its apparent simplicity. Tocqueville is one of those rare authors fortunate enough to have been right despite themselves. History has been uncharacteristically kind to him, going far enough down the path he imagined to have both reached and surpassed the limits of his imagination, thereby vindicating the essentials of his thought at the expense of its occasional naiveté or timidity.

* Originally published as Marcel Gauchet, “Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous : sur la genèse des sociétés démocratiques,” Libre, Politique-Anthropologie- Philosophie, n°7 (1980), 43-120. This article is an expanded version of a presentation given in May 1977 to the political working group of the journal Esprit.

164 Marcel Gauchet

In this regard, it is all the more instructive to examine the limits, the dead ends, and the blind spots of Tocqueville’s thought as well as his unique capacity for penetration and premonition. For our hindsight today makes evidently clear a certain systematic blindness in Tocqueville’s work, a tendency to overlook the true historical role of certain aspects of the democratic phenomenon that have revealed themselves to be essential. This shortcoming both explains and is exemplified by his detour in America itself. Tocqueville sought out a country where in the absence of any other history, democracy had been established as if by nature. In the American experiment, presumably, the absence of historical obstacles to democracy had allowed it to realize its complete essence, starting from a base of free and equal individuals. Having gone in search of democracy in the New World, however, Tocqueville lost sight of the alternate paths towards democracy that were being forged contemporaneously in the Old Continent. He failed to consider the ways in which the American example of the new political order was in fact contrary to the normal advance of modernity. For in the European historical experience, the democratic order was ultimately forged and imposed in the very same arenas that Tocqueville judged to be the crucial obstacles towards its establishment. In fact, given the persistent antagonism between the forces of reaction and revolution at work in the Europe of his day, Tocqueville could not avoid misunderstanding the ultimate historical significance of the democratic fact in its American context as well. Though he skillfully identified a central and universal trait of modern societies, the multifaceted and indefinite process of equalization, what he observed was only one face of democracy, only one of its possible developments. In the final analysis, the American case was the least likely and the most idiosyncratic form that it could have taken, the special circumstance in which the principles of a political regime precede society, so to speak, and literally serve as its model. What Tocqueville excluded, in his overly transparent framework, was a sense of the turbulent transformations that shook the old universe of organic, hierarchical unity. Through an arduous adjustment of its functional principles, one that often manifested itself through desperate rebellions, this society produced another kind of democracy on the other side of the Atlantic. This was democracy as a way of being much more than as a political system; or rather, it was a

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 165 political system that expressed deeper elements of the social world that the special American case could not fully articulate. A democracy, in this sense, that bore within itself the specter of totalitarianism. While this potentiality was precisely absent from the American destiny, at least according to the country’s origins, Europe’s history of the last century is unintelligible without it as a horizon and possible endpoint. Tocqueville’s work, however, did not completely fail to foresee the most momentous implications of this crucial divergence. In the final sections of Democracy in America, the geographical return to Europe coincided with a shift in perspective towards the kinds of despotism that threaten democratic nations, a shift he referred to as a “return to himself.” Our task here, in short, is to continue these acts of return as far as possible, to measure, as far as our present history allows, the distance between Tocqueville’s America and the errant pathway of our own European world.

II There is an underlying problem that not only profoundly justifies Tocqueville’s American detour, but also holds the key to explaining what appears today as his paradoxical blindness towards the destiny of Europe. This is the problem, in abstract terms, of democratic society’s agreement [adéquation] with itself.2 His starting point, at bottom, is the scandalous failure of the Old World nations to recognize and affirm their inevitable democratic future. Tocqueville does not have words strong enough to express this idea, and the resulting formulations are well known. The democratic revolution advances through an unstoppable movement, “the oldest, most continuous, most permanent fact known to history” (I, Intro., 1). Only the language of religion and the categories of the absolute are sufficient to capture a notion of this subterranean power at work over the long history of European societies. How can one fail to recognize the “certain signs” of the will of God himself? “The gradual development of the equality of conditions is therefore a providential fact. It has the essential characteristics of one: it is universal, durable, and daily proves itself to be beyond the reach of man’s powers. Not a single event, not a single individual, fails to contribute to its development” (I, Intro., 6).

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In the face of a phenomenon so far removed from the intentions of its actors that it is sustained equally by “those who strove to ensure [its] success” as “those who never dreamed of serving it”—by “those that fought for it” as well as “those who declared themselves its enemies” (Ibid.)—what can one do but leave one’s partisan preferences aside and assume the position of the humble witness? As Tocqueville attests, “this entire book was written in the grip of a kind of religious terror occasioned in the soul of the author by the sight of this irresistible revolution, which for centuries now has surmounted every obstacle and continues to advance amid the ruins it has created” (I., Intro., 6-7). Logic would have it, he suggests, that in the presence of such a momentous alteration in the direction of human history, individuals would unanimously follow its directions. And nations, for their part, understanding that “to wish to arrest democracy” would be “tantamount to a struggle against God himself,” would firmly and completely resolve to “accommodate to the social state imposed on them by Providence” (I, Intro., 7). On the contrary, nothing of the sort has played out in actual historical experience. What did take place is perhaps best described as a blasphemous blindness of the “Christian peoples” before the fate that their “sovereign master” had assigned them. Tocqueville’s judgment was clearly correct that “the gradual and progressive development of equality,” the salient feature of the democratic age, constitutes both “the past and future of mankind.” The peoples and leaders of Europe in his day, however, proved utterly ignorant of this movement, and thus incapable of allowing any sort of historical consciousness to guide their actions. No one among the heads of state had either the discernment or the intelligence to make sense of the social revolution at work: “It has come in spite of them, or without their knowledge” (I, Intro., 8). At times they were stupid enough to believe that it was in their power to oppose it; otherwise, all they could manage was to endure it, to prostrate themselves before what they could not understand. Hence the inevitable confusion in which those who ought to have been the natural allies of democracy became its enemies, and, conversely, those who fought in its name found themselves engaged in undermining its foundations and its prospects for the future. Through an inexplicable perversion, European societies remained obstinately unaware of their true democratic nature. They underwent fierce struggles over whether or

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 167 not to accept a social state that was largely already in place, and against which they are utterly powerless. They remained strangely powerless both to take on in earnest their place within the democratic order, and to begin to organize themselves accordingly, as if their intention had been to exacerbate the pressures and tensions of the democratic order. “Thus we have democracy,” Tocqueville writes, “minus that which ought to attenuate its vices and bring its natural advantages to the fore. We already see the evils it entails but know nothing as yet of the good it may bring” (I, Intro., 8). This was the situation that demanded of Tocqueville to undertake his detour in America. In order to understand democracy according to its fundamental principle, it was necessary to travel beyond the intellectual and moral disorder of the Old World. Beneath this state of disorder that prevailed in Europe, in fact, the true nature of democracy lay hidden. Tocqueville nonetheless sought to discover it in a society that, in contrast, lived in a fundamental harmony with its democratic social state. For Tocqueville, in other words, American society is the concrete response of Providence to an abstract need. It gives form to what one could not help but dare to imagine: a society in agreement [coïncidence] with the democratic principle.3 This is a society that not only accepts, but also positively embraces a social and political order built on the equality of conditions, allowing it to reach its full development. For “there is one country in the world in which the great social revolution of which I speak seems almost to have attained its natural limits. It has been effected there with simplicity and ease” (I, Intro., 14). There is therefore for Tocqueville no need to risk the errors of speculation. A book already lies open in which to study the essential correspondence [adéquation] of institutions and mores with their historical destiny, that is, the generative fact of equality. Upon inspection, it is less obvious than it might seem exactly how to determine what, in Tocqueville’s words, a “complete and undisturbed” correspondence or continuity between a society and its cardinal ruling principles looks like. On a most basic level, the task is not a difficult one; it is simply a matter of observing the full, unrestricted development of the principle of popular sovereignty that follows directly from the recognition of equality between individuals. In the United States, this principle has been “put into practice in the most direct, the most unlimited, the most absolute manner.”4 “It

168 Marcel Gauchet expands with freedom’s expansion and meets no obstacle on the way to its ultimate ends” (I, 1.4, 62). The formulas Tocqueville employs to describe it have since become famous: “The people reign over the American political world as God reigns over the universe. They are the cause and end of all things; everything proceeds from them, and to them everything returns” (I, 1.4, 65). Such statements lead us to a second level of analysis that permits an account of the positive adhesion of the collectivity, both symbolic and concrete, to its general mode of operation. The principle of popular sovereignty, according to Tocqueville, is “reflected by mores” as much as it is “proclaimed by laws.” American society recognizes itself for what it is in each and every one of its parts; it grasps and embraces itself with neither obscurity, nor drama, nor violence. It is here that we arrive at a third level of analysis, whose most immediately tangible and “obvious” aspect does not obscure for long its problematic character. The correspondence [adéquation] between society and the essential fact of democracy effectively amounts to both a civil peace and a unity of the collectivity. To observe these consequences, despite their undeniably empirical character, implies a basic background representation of society and history. It is precisely this representation that the entire meaning of the democratic experience as we understand it today renders impossible to grasp, or at least calls radically into question. At this point, on the most solidly factual ground of Tocqueville’s inquiry, we come into contact with the lure of America. The observation is indisputable: while throughout recent history, “all the nations of Europe were ravaged by war or torn by civil discord, the American nation has remained, alone in the civilized world, at peace. Nearly all of Europe has been turned upside down by revolutions; America has not even had riots.” (Pref. 1848, 910). The year was 1848 when Tocqueville added these words to his book. For the past sixty years, he writes in the same avertissement de la douzième édition, the American people had been “not only the most prosperous but the most stable of all the peoples of the earth” (Ibid.). The partisans of revolution that Europe knew so well were scarcely to be found in the United States, if at all; the American worldview appeared to be deprived of all populist inclinations. There was nothing accidental in Tocqueville’s having devoted a chapter of the second volume of Democracy in America (1840) to demonstrating that, contrary to what superficial speculation might suggest, the social state of

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 169 democratic nations does not lead them towards violent transformations of laws, doctrines, and mores, “but rather leads them away [from such transformations].”5 Tocqueville’s descriptions of concrete mechanisms of stabilization, homogenization (“The principal opinions that men hold become similar insofar as their conditions are alike” [II, 3.21, 755]), and perpetuation of the established order and its system of belief do not exhaust his reasons for thinking that an authentically democratic society naturally avoids the kind of social discord that can only be resolved through revolution. There is a deeper, unstated reason, found in disparate traces throughout his work, that falls under the domain of Tocqueville’s latent “metaphysical” representation of the establishment of democracy. Countless times, the remarks on this subject that issue from his pen bear the mark of a certain relativism. As he tells us at one moment, “equality constitutes the distinctive characteristic of the era”: it is simply because it is, with no further explanation (II, 2.1, 582). Another day, then, some other notion of the relation between individuals should similarly be able to impose itself in a similar way, replacing the values of democracy. It merely suffices to push the expression of this relativism to its conclusion, however, to see how it constitutes only a marginal impulse that hardly fits with the predominant orientation of the work. In fact, Tocqueville clearly leans in the other direction. His overall guiding tendency is to consider democracy in its modern—that is, egalitarian—form as anything but an accident of history, a merely contingent and revocable decree. In truth, it is easily discernable that the background of his argument is an insistence on the idea that democratic equality is fundamentally the realization of history’s design, as if by divine will. It is Tocqueville’s manner of understanding religion that disposes him towards such a thought. The profoundest meaning of Christ’s message is none other than equality: “Christianity, which made all men equal in the sight of God, will not shrink from seeing all citizens as equal in the eyes of the law” (I, Intro., 12). There is therefore nothing shocking in the realization this message in the world against the will of men, or without their being conscious. The democratic age is the flowering of the religious ideal, as the American example confirms quite powerfully. Christian revelation, however, only hastened the coming to light of a principle that had been in a sense

170 Marcel Gauchet immanent in all societies, though long relegated to obscurity. The advent of democracy therefore represents for Tocqueville the open manifestation of a truth of human society that it was always hidden within it. “The principle of the sovereignty of the people,” he writes in one instance, “which to some extent always underlies nearly all human institutions, is ordinarily wrapped in obscurity.” Tocqueville cites as evidence the “intriguers in all times and despots in all ages” who understood how to invoke this principle in order to exploit it for their own gain (I, 1.4, 62, italics added). The role of the modern age is less to have invented the principle of popular sovereignty than to have let it fully manifest itself. And yet there is another indication in Tocqueville’s work of what the democratic social state has accomplished. The notion of equality that he develops implies in effect that there can be nothing beyond equality, for it both serves as the logical foundation for the relation between men (that is, insofar as it creates a resemblance between individuals), and at the same time allows each individual to seeks his own fulfillment independently. In other words, the true danger of this world does not lie where passing appearances might suggest. The threat is not to be found in the efforts of subversives, but rather the immobilizing aspect at work in all social unrest. What Tocqueville fears, he writes, is that “the human race will stop progressing and narrow its horizons. I fear that the mind will forever subdivide itself into smaller and smaller compartments without producing new ideas, that man will exhaust his energies in petty, solitary, and sterile changes, and that humanity, though constantly on the move, will cease to advance” (II, 3.21, 760). Under these conditions, how could one be surprised that democratic society, where it attains a direct and authentic self- expression, is a society at peace with itself? It is destined to achieve internal tranquility, a life in conformity with the profoundest demand that has ever been placed on human societies. Democracy reconciles society with itself, and revolutions, from this perspective, no longer appear as anything other than an inevitable vestigial effect, condemned to collide with democracy’s merciless resistance. On this point, Tocqueville’s thought is nothing if not clear. The democratic social state, he writes, ultimately imposes itself through deadly violent efforts. He continues:

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Even after… a great revolution ends, the revolutionary habits it creates live on for quite some time, and deep turmoil follows in its wake. Since all this takes place as conditions are tending toward equality, people conclude that there is a hidden relation and secret bond between equality itself and revolution, such that the former cannot exist without giving rise to the latter” (Ibid., 747). A temporal coincidence does not amount to an intimate bond, and in reality, what appears as revolutionary in the early days of democracy, far from belonging to democracy itself, is only a residual inheritance of the process through which it was born. Egalitarian democracy as such marks the entry of humanity into an age where great revolutions have ceased to be necessary. Even if “little ones” remain possible, on the whole the internal logic of democracy’s social mechanism tends to proscribe them. Hence the privilege of the United States in exhibiting the true face of democracy: the privilege of new beginnings. In Europe, the sovereignty of the people had to reverse the old order in order to establish itself, and the aftermath of this unforgiving struggle continues to cause confusion and resignation. In the United States, in contrast, democracy did not have to completely destroy an established aristocratic regime in order to gain its foothold. “The great advantage of the Americans is to have come to democracy without having to endure democratic revolution and to have been born equal rather than become so” (II, 2.3, 589). Tocqueville, in sum, found in the United States a satisfying resolution to the problem posed by the historical path of European societies, long caught up in a struggle between “two contrary principles.” In the first place, America provides confirmation that societies are wholly capable of embracing the democratic social state. The conflicts of the Old Continent might have led one to think that the extension of equality propels us into an era of indefinite civil discord, in which every step towards popular sovereignty is paid for by an aggravation of social warfare. It would thus appear, in other words, that democracy could never protect itself against the contestation of its principle. On the contrary, the European situation seemed to have been proven anomalous and probably transitory in light of the American example: the spectacle of a society fully adapted to its democratic nature; organized according to “natural appearances” and “free movements”; in accordance with all the

172 Marcel Gauchet formal requirements that give rise to the equality of conditions. In the second place, correlatively, only once an unreserved acceptance of democracy is realized is there proof that democracy alone holds the potential for a profound collective peace or harmony, in other words, for an authentic social unity. It might seem that the society that sees itself as democratic and acts accordingly, granting the equal right of participation in its affairs to all its members, would thereby ferment a spirit of disunion. Such a society, in fact, achieves precisely the opposite, tending towards a fundamental spiritual and moral agreement within itself. In the final analysis, this agreement actually presents itself as a burden, namely the concerning threat of conformism. Thus we arrive at the crossroads of our critical examination, the point of divergence between the American and European political universes. This is also a blind spot in Tocqueville’s vision, the point where the American reality begins to serve as a shroud over further reflection. We discover a limit of Tocqueville’s representation of society in his obstinate confinement within the perspective of the idea of a necessary cohesion of the social. Tocqueville’s opinions on the matter are unequivocal: What keeps large numbers of citizens subject to the same government is much less the rational determination to remain united than the instinctive and in some sense involuntary accord that results from similarity of feeling and likeness of opinion. I cannot accept the proposition that men constitute a society simply because they recognize the same leader and obey the same laws. Society exists only when men see many things in the same way and have the same opinions about many subjects and, finally, when the same facts give rise to the same impressions and the same thoughts (I, 2.10, 430-1). He sets for himself, moreover, to show that the inhabitants of the United States fulfill precisely these conditions. The same idea appears in the second volume: It is easy to see that no society can prosper without such beliefs, or, rather, that none can survive that way, for without common ideas, there is no common action, and without common action, men may still exist, but they will not constitute a social body. If society is to exist and, a fortiori, to prosper, the minds of all citizens must be drawn and held together by certain leading ideas (II, 1.2, 489).

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There can be no society, in other words, without a vibrant intellectual unity. The misfortune of Europe—and particularly of France—the legacy of revolutions, is to have lost this unity amidst a general anarchy, in which “it almost seems as if the opinions of mankind are nothing more than intellectual dust, blown about by every wind and unable to coalesce into any fixed shape” (II, 1.1, 487). Intellectual unity is in no way merely reducible to either unanimity or identity: “Although the Anglo-Americans have several religions, they all look at religion the same way”; they are divided when it comes to forms of government, but “they do agree about the general principles that ought to rule human societies” (I, 2.10, 431). On a number of issues, their “public opinion is endlessly divided,” but a penetrating observer could not help but discern, behind the many “political factions” that they form, “the two great parties that have always existed in free societies.” Of these parties, one “wants to limit the use of public power,” while the other seeks “to extend it” (I, 2.2, 202). All this takes place, however, within a common umbrella of presuppositions, such that no in either party dares attack “the present form of the government or the general course of society” (Ibid., 201). Tocqueville makes a comparison that helps to clarify what he insists is a kind of general congruence of minds: The republican principle reigns in America today as the monarchical principle dominated France under Louis XIV. In those days the French were not just friends of monarchy; they could not imagine the possibility of putting anything else in its place. They accepted it as one accepts the course of the sun and the succession of the seasons. They were neither advocates nor adversaries of royal power. This is how the republic exists in America: without combat, without opposition, without proof, by a tacit accord, a sort of consensus universalis (I, 2.10, 459-60). Here again, the spontaneous convergence of human souls is not enough. Tocqueville must add to the picture that other indispensable factor, the intervention of a spiritual power that limits human pretentions: in other words, religion. In addition to intellectual unity—and in order to provide some way of reinforcing or guaranteeing it by giving it shape—some kind of stopping point to thought is essential, one that only faith in the divinity can provide with any value. In truth, the role that Tocqueville assigns to religion is difficult to determine. He attempts in vain to link the uniformization of opinions to the equalization of conditions, as would reassure him of the chances of seeing established the consensus he finds

174 Marcel Gauchet indispensable. One senses that he is at the very least tempted to think that only a body of dogmatic beliefs—sheltered from the contestation inherent in experience, as if the beliefs themselves came from the beyond—can in the final analysis assure a firm conjunction of minds. For Tocqueville, “equality places men side by side without a common bond to hold them together” (II, 2.4, 590); or rather, “in a nation where ranks are almost equal, no obvious bond brings men together” (II, 3.20, 747, italics added). Does the similarity of ideas suffice, then, in order to counterbalance this tendency toward the dispersion of individuals and their closedness unto themselves? Or is something else needed, a unanimous conviction in which something can be explicitly shared, as if by common sight? The latter is in fact what Tocqueville suggests: “How can society fail to perish if, as political bonds are loosened, moral bonds are not tightened?” But the words that follow lead us even higher in the hierarchy of necessities: “And what is to be done with a people that is its own master, if it is not obedient to God?” (I, 2.9, 340). There are other paths towards making sensible an individual’s belonging to a community besides beliefs regarding the final ends. For example, there is daily participation in local affairs, insertion within an intense associative life: “The free institutions that Americans possess, and the political rights of which they make such extensive use, are, in a thousand ways, constant reminders to each and every citizen that he lives in society” (II, 2.4, 593). But there is on the other hand a decisive function in which religion is thoroughly irreplaceable: the circumscription of human affairs within their bounds of viability. For what is inconceivable is the utter abandonment of peoples to their own devices. There is an element of dissolution in the faculty of the human spirit that seeks to rest on nothing but its own talents, though this element is radically impossible to accept. Normally, reason will on its own choose some stopping point to bow before a superior power. Once again, Tocqueville sees in the excesses of revolution the primary transgressions, on this matter, for which the Old Continent found itself the theater. It is an “accidental and particular cause,” he writes, “at work among us that prevents the human spirit from following its bent and drives it beyond its natural limits.” That cause is “close alliance between politics and religion” (I, 2.9, 347). Rigidly associated with the old princes of Europe, Christianity became the enemy of the popular forces in the process of taking power there, to

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 175 the extent that the triumph of equality seems to have only been made possible by the eradication of faith. In the United States, on the other hand, a strict distinction between domains of social life—one that sheltered revealed truths from the vicissitudes of public debate—allowed not only “man’s natural state with respect to religion” to flourish (Ibid., 345), but also religion to exercise its indispensable task of providing souls with satisfaction in the moral sphere. Without this task, the maintained existence of is inconceivable. Tocqueville doubts, he says, “that man can ever tolerate both complete religious independence and total political liberty, and I am inclined to think that if he has no faith, he must serve, and if he is free, he must believe” (II, 1.5, 503). This is not at all to say that the organization of society should depend on a religious jurisdiction. On the contrary, it is far more fitting to leave “to human discussion and effort” everything the principle of equality imposes in an absolute manner. But though it would be vain to seek to constrain liberty of judgment and the independent movement of the individual to the sphere of collective administration, it would be equally so to wish to establish a sphere of “certain and final” moral rules, beyond the reach of human power to the extent that they are recognized as emanating from the divine will. Thus, bound by “truths it accepts without argument,” confronted in the moral world by intangible imperatives according to which “everything is arranged, coordinated, anticipated, and decided in advance” (I, 1.2, 49), “the human spirit never sees a boundless field of possibilities before itself6: for all its audacity, it sometimes runs up against seemingly insurmountable barriers. Before it can innovate, it is forced to accept certain basic assumptions and to mold its boldest conceptions to certain forms, and in the process it is slowed down or even brought to a halt” (I, 2.9, 337). As these words suggest, the distinction between the moral-religious world and the political world does not imply that there is no interaction between the two. There is a political effect to be expected as payment for faith in the world beyond. This effect is based, among the conditions created by the principle of popular sovereignty, on the prohibition against church ministers’ explicit intervention in public affairs, as well as their willingness to recognize a sphere of action that is entirely malleable according to human initiative. It is the autonomy of religion with respect to the political that renders it politically effective. Tocqueville

176 Marcel Gauchet sums up his views on the matter with a particularly suggestive formula: “Thus even as the law allows the American people to do anything and everything, there are some things that religion prevents them from imagining or forbids them to attempt” (I, 2.9, 338). The necessity of intellectual unity, and the necessity of limits to human thought before the decrees of divine intelligence: Tocqueville judges these two conditions that he finds realized in the United States to be not only in accordance with [correspondre à] the “natural” inclination of the democratic social state, but also fundamentally linked with one another. This is the case not only because a common belief in a certain number of truths sheltered from debate has a solidly unifying effect on individuals. Much more profoundly, it is because to fundamentally question the rules that govern the relations between human beings, the values that command their social life, is to instill an irreconcilable division within the community. Or, to put it inversely, antagonism between social groups can only arise when the notion of a universal understanding of the human world and its final ends is called into question. What is the intuition that motivates Tocqueville’s distinction between the free administration of the citizens’ concrete existence and interests, and the consensual servitude to a transcendent master of one’s destiny? This latter notion, in its original conception, precisely excludes the possibility of a human world—including its ultimate legitimations—completely administered by human beings. It is an exorcist’s intuition, born from the fear of the abyss opened up by revolution. In fact, the intuition is pertinent, for there is indeed an intimate relation between the establishment of a society within an unlimited self-interrogation—the decision to cross “the wide and limitless space” that extends before those that recognize no masters but themselves—and civil conflict, or even revolutionary struggle. It is with quite good reason that Tocqueville sees “irreligion” as the passion par excellence that gave the French Revolution its particularly extreme character. In earlier times, he observes, There was always, even during the greatest shocks, a point that remained solid. But during the French Revolution, as religious laws were abolished at the same time as civil laws were turned upside down, the human spirit entirely lost its grounding. It no longer knew what to hold on to, nor where to stop itself. One saw as a result the appearance of a hitherto unknown species of revolutionary, one that had an audacity, to

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the point of folly, such that no novelty could surprise him, nor could any scruple slow him down. These were revolutionaries that never hesitated before the execution of a plan. And it would not do to believe that these new beings were the isolated and ephemeral creation of a single moment: they have since formed a race that has perpetuated itself and begun to populate all civilized parts of the world.7 It is indisputably by virtue of this total power of questioning, this infinite right to endeavor that it set free within European society, that the French Revolution marks the beginning of a new era. What is shocking is that the same man who so clearly discerns the essential link between social conflict and the extension of what is most problematic for man—and who, furthermore, does not fail to emphasize the permanence of and increasing number of these êtres nouveaux who have begun to push the limits of the questionable—this man nonetheless sees in this new situation nothing but “fortuitous and passing” deviations from the course of history. No less shocking is that this same man who appears so convinced of the irrepressible nature of the movement towards the equalization of conditions, confronted in 1848 by the workers’ uprisings, can only regard these proletarians as strangers to the new world he describes. There is no question for him other than how to contain or eliminate these movements. Not for a second does he address the question of the integration of these excluded classes, despite his own characterization of the advance of history that must inevitably lead to such an integration, and in fact has done so.8 All of these many blind spots, in truth, point to a single one regarding the later developments of democratic European societies. If the century that has passed between him and us has established anything, it is that we must reverse Tocqueville’s terms, taking as essential traits of democracies what he saw merely as accidents of revolution. This goes as much for the internal disputes about superficial forms of government as for debates over the most fundamental values that sustain and guide the human adventure. At the end of our historical experience, we discover as the essential originality of the democratic experience neither intellectual unity nor the limits of human intelligence before the ultimate justifications of existence. To bind individuals together by virtue of the opposition between them, engaging them in a limitless enterprise of questioning the meanings that forge their social unity: these are the activities we have discovered to be crucial properties of the societies established

178 Marcel Gauchet on the Old Continent. These societies have been put into place with no small hardship, under the contradictory pressures of the revolutionary will and the retrograde rejection of both republicanism and equality. Democracy, contrary to what the American experience might suggest, does not consist primarily in a deep agreement of minds. It tears apart sources of meaning and creates a merciless antagonism of thought. The democratic age, to return to Tocqueville’s formula, is the age in which society forces each man to conceive of everything for himself, and which puts all men in a position to dare to do anything. These possibilities arise insofar as democratic society is one of conflict, whose structured stands definitively outside of the dimension of unity that Tocqueville insisted must follow the divisions of the revolutionary age. This conflict is as much the result of the natural relations that arise between equals as of the necessities inherent in the very existence of the social. The peculiar fate of European democracies is to have developed largely in ignorance of their own foundations. Their development has been marked less by a clear self-comprehension, than by a tendency in practice to produce a harmony [adéquation] of society with itself by means of its political forms. The obsessive richness of the unity- identity structure that hangs over all of Tocqueville’s thought directly explains this dynamic. Tocqueville’s originality lies in that he places the intimate adjustment of the individual, a general and absolutely necessary one, within the collective process, that is, within the free development of equality. It is in this regard that he sees the United States and its institutions as a model. But this preoccupation in itself is in no way particular to Tocqueville. It was the preoccupation of all thinking people of his century, and particularly that of democracy’s adversaries. For them, the illusions and prejudices that Tocqueville describes are particularly alarming, as they fundamentally threaten what they find to be the indispensable unity of the social body. Tocqueville ultimately presents an entirely different vision of this social unity, which he finds newly reconstructed once equality is fully in place. The basic worry behind any authentically reactionary thought is that only a return to what was, the reestablishment of old hierarchies, can restore that organic solidarity between men without which there is no society worthy of the name. Though Tocqueville shares this worry with the reactionaries as he embarks on his research in the United States, he finds there a society capable of accepting in

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 179 full, and without social discord, the absence of explicit links between persons that once produced collective cohesion. What is remarkable is that under such circumstances, this resolute rejection of the republican regime in the name of social unity nonetheless played a determining role in establishing political conflict as a constitutive factor of society. What we know as democracy today was fashioned in an essential aspect by the opposition to democracy. The presence within society of a party hostile to the sovereignty of the people led easily to the creation of a space for radical social debate: a space that engages the very essence of the collective order, and within which the society’s internal conflict of interests—which go beyond the contestation of ideas concerning political systems—is able to express itself freely. Far from dwindling out, as Tocqueville predicted, the “struggle of contrary principles” has proved itself a mirror in which our society projects and deciphers a rupture even more crucial than the transition between the hierarchical past and the egalitarian present. This is the division between the possessors and the dispossessed, between the proprietors and the proletariat (which Tocqueville insists “does not exist in the United States”). In the same manner, the totalizing discussion imposed by the existence of a reactionary project has made it possible to question without constraints the limits and ends of the human community. This questioning begins from the simple fact that there is a complete contradiction between the interests of some and those of others. Make no mistake: this antagonism between retrograde conservatism and a necessarily revolutionary republicanism—whose perverse deviations from and rejections of what should be the course of history Tocqueville deplores—has served as the arena for the central aspect of the democratic process that is the figuration of conflict. From within the battle, ultimately contingent, between the partisans of the old order and those of the new—as well as the symbolic order that results from it—a new political perspective arises. This perspective gives a political expression to the social conflict par excellence, namely, the class conflict. The real mode of operation of the modern democratic system is to be established around this representation, which is at the same time a neutralization, of this division that is in no way accidental, but rather must be admitted (however insensibly) as inherent to the structure of democratic society.

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As Alain Bergougnioux and Bernard Manin so profoundly observe, the creation of the workers’ party marks the crucial moment of the crystallization of this process.9 The entry onto the scene of a class-based party effectively requires a complete reorganization of the political arena, beginning with a redefinition of the nature of all other parties. Their various attachments or correspondences to definite social forces become indispensable criteria to consider. As a result, the competition for power is transformed into a legitimate expression of the antagonisms that pervade the social body, by means of the mechanism of delegation. The implication of this process is that the violence contained in these oppositions—virtual, symbolic violence materialized in real social relations—is effectively reduced. But once again, one cannot stress enough the extent to which the struggles that the principle of equality imposed on the peoples of Europe have profoundly influenced the continent’s destiny. It is these struggles that gave an initial form to what democracy ultimately demands that we acknowledge: the existence of an irreconcilable tension at the heart of society. Once again, we must avoid the conclusion that this slow emergence of a scene of conflict came about as a result of human conscious thought. Nor should we believe that the peaceful functioning of the system that came as its result has had anything to do with a deliberate calculation. Quite the contrary, in it was in its fervent opposition social disaggregation—a consequence of popular sovereignty—that the reactionary or counter-revolutionary party actually helped give form, despite itself, to the democratic division. In the same manner, it was in placing at the forefront of its program the resolution of all of the old antagonisms of society that the revolutionary workers’ party achieved the result of structuring the political system as a means of expression of social conflict. This important consequence, incidentally, also allowed a separation of the State to manifest itself freely. On the one hand, there is the sphere of private interests and the various collective groupings that the convergences and divergences of these interests produce. On the other hand, there is the sphere of the legitimate representation of the divisions of the social body, where the play of diverse social forces is translated into power that applies to the whole of society. From the earliest beginnings of the modern republic, to the axiomatic conception of the autonomy of individuals who deliberate

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 181 on the form of the contract that is to unite them: in both cases, the place of the political tends to appear precisely as the site of identification between power and society. Power, in other words, is nothing but the idealization of society in action. From this we can trace the unanimous character of democratic politics in its earliest state, for example, the will to unity that obsessed the French Revolution and that led to its proscription against factions and parties. The Revolutionists’ identification between the people and the various representations of the people returned unceasingly to this ideal. We can trace as well the idea of democratic voluntarism, which flows to us, with no significant break, from the ancient representations of power as the sheer will to maintain collective cohesion, the conformity of the world of men with the order of its destiny. In both cases, power plays a role in the concrete coincidence between all parts of the social body with the overall project that founds and guides it. Historically speaking, the figuration of conflict has been the mechanism that has definitively liberated the social from all traces of the archaic form of political will. From the moment where it becomes the cornerstone of the political field, however unconsciously, civil society becomes correlatively autonomous. From then on there exists an independent, self-organizing domain of human activity, coherent unto itself, that delegates power to its principal actors according only to divisions within the sphere of public power. The mechanism of representation, far from conspiring to establish a coincidence of the collectivity with itself, amounts rather to an affirmation of the distance between the place where conflicts are formed (society) and the place where they are exhibited and resolved (the State). In the same way that social conflict is pacified through its symbolic representation, the difference of the State is neutralized through its symbolic manifestation. The representative mechanism is not only the recognition of the autonomy of politics with respect to civil society, but also the demonstration of the ways in which power arises from society, and only from society, even if only to become separate from it. We thus find ourselves faced with a system whose very life is to foster those divisions that are necessarily invisible on the surface to social actors, who refuse or even seek to suppress them. For though the State is symbolically separated from its occupants, it presents

182 Marcel Gauchet itself in its own official discourse as both the immediate and organic expression of the general will, and a specialized executive power. It claims, furthermore, to perfectly integrate both of these tasks concerning the collective interest. The social forces and groups in conflict, at the same time as they reinforce the State in their actions, seek tirelessly to put an end to its pernicious effects and its artificial character—in other words, to deny its reality, or to proclaim its inevitable overcoming. To put it briefly, democracy in no way implies self-recognition as such. Democracy is the result of interaction between parties equally ignorant of the truth of democracy, and at times ideologically anti-democratic. To be clear, the aim here is not to deny, for the mere sake of paradox, the existence of explicitly democratic parties, whether republican or liberal in name. These parties are democratic to the extent that they accept competition between a plurality of organized opinions. Without this acceptance, it seems, there could be no conceivable evolution towards a representation of the irreconcilable in public life. The point is only that the final reality of the democratic fact essentially belongs to the underlying logic of the collective social process. This process is ultimately prior to the open contests for power, that is, the defined rules of political regimes and the ideologies of institutions. All of these are spaces where this democratic reality resides. Consider, for example, the confrontation of parties as Tocqueville conceives it, following the American example. What does this confrontation suppose if not a general consent to the “generating principles of the laws,” and to the concrete foundations of society, and an all-encompassing intellectual communality? All of these effectively refuse to deal with the divergences of view that exist, however considerable they might be. In other words, Tocqueville ultimately supposes a continuous unity and agreement [adéquation] of society with itself, without any “natural and permanent dissonance between the interests” of diverse classes of citizens, and correlatively, without any questioning of the foundations of the society’s organization. It is indispensable to dispense with all of these presuppositions if one is to grasp the real mode of functioning, at its core, not of democratic regimes, but of the democratic societies that have come to exist on the Old Continent, where the very legitimacy of democratic institutions has never ceased to be a matter of debate.

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What has been at stake in these debates is the content of communal bonds. In its opposition to the conciliatory illusions of liberal republicanism, the class critique of the workers’ movement has played a major role in shaping the symbolic arena of the irreconcilable that constitutes the heart of modern democracies. The political organization of the proletariat has introduced a new dimension of distance into the “normal” spread of parties. It is nonetheless true, however, that at the same time as it denounced the myth of collective concord, this party brought about the further illusion of the eventual abolition of social divisions. This illusion helped to renew the very same proposition that had guided the other parties regarding the proper form of society, namely, the necessity of cohesion and a unified destiny. One can therefore make the claim that democracy has been made independently of the efforts of democratic parties to promote it. That is, if we understand by “democratic” those parties capable of discerning and affirming its novel truth. Democracy has been advanced despite a generalized denial of its true articulations on the part of its own social agents. It was established without the knowledge of its creators, and in fact as the result of their combined blindness. Or rather, as the intersection of various undertakings each opposed in its own way to the authentic spirit of democracy, for all of them were inspired in some way by the idea of a society’s ultimate agreement [adéquation] with itself. It is this idea that had dominated human history in its entirety, and the rupture therewith that represents the democratic age’s most essential novelty. True democracy, in our societies, can only be understood as lying beneath the surface of the beliefs and aims of social actors. Without a doubt, it is concretized in rules, forms, and institutions that grant it its explicit practical character. Nevertheless, as a social process, it is engendered and continues to develop largely unconscious of itself. But is this process destined to remain unconscious? The answer to this question is quite another affair, one in which the shocking return of totalitarianism threatens to intervene as a decisive factor. As the conditions for their emergence became little by little the subject of a combative misunderstanding, it became clear that democracies carry within them, by their very nature, the prospect of their own totalitarian negation. The possibility of totalitarianism was inscribed from the beginning into the democracies that developed on

184 Marcel Gauchet the Old Continent. It follows them as their inverse, their inseparable double. It owes its structural features to the contradiction between what is explicit and what is implicit in democracy’s mode of functioning. That is to say, the contradiction between the manifest content of opposing ideologies, and the underlying reality of the symbolic system in which they operate. Democratic society, at its most profound, is one of conflict, but one in which there is no one who does not dream of social unity (however they may conceive it). It is therefore permanently threatened by the spilling over of discourse into the real, the attempt to concretize ideologies of unity in political action. This is the essence of totalitarianism, whether in its counter- revolutionary form of a strong organic solidarity guaranteed by the reestablishment of a hierarchical structure (the fascist variant); or in its “progressive” form of a superior and definitive type of unity—as opposed to that of prior ages—achieved by resorbing class antagonisms and the separation of the State within a historically completed totality (the communist variant). The same dynamic can occur even in the form of an aggravated republicanism, in which popular sovereignty is invoked as an aspiration of unanimity in contrast to the artificial divisions created by the parties. Although the latter case is better described as a plebiscitary authoritarianism than a totalitarianism strictly speaking, and may be ultimately more peaceful, the reconciliatory aspect of such a regime is no less embedded in the totalitarian perspective. The essential point to take away from all of this—now more than ever, since totalitarianism has become the object of a recent “discovery”—is the historically regressive character of the totalitarian project. Totalitarianism proceeds most fundamentally from a refusal; from a reaction against the novelty of democracy and all that it reveals; from a blind will to return to the explicit cohesion of the human community. This cohesion, to repeat, is the ideal that has dominated human history, from its origins in the emergence of the State and social classes to our own time. It has done so primarily by means of religion; that is, by means of the conformity of society to a pre-established plan, as well as the intimate solidarity that occurs despite immense differences in real social status. It is as if humanity, arriving at the moment where religion begun its retreat and the very reasons for collective organization were put to a general debate, fainted before the unbearable spectacle of its own truth. As if it found

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 185 itself incapable of withstanding the free expression of its internal oppositions that it discovered as the structure of the social world at the very moment when religion ceased its millenarian function of obscuring them. Totalitarianism is the return of the religious principle within a world on the verge of having dispensed with religion. It is the undeniable spirit of guilt that religions have mobilized from the very beginning. It is the senseless perseverance of that which democratic modernity has rightly rendered impossible: the full and total coincidence between society and a predetermined eternal truth (a truth that imposes the ultimate choice between returning to it, and the end of history itself). It is without a doubt the most unfathomable mystery of human societies—this savage, unanimous, obstinate refusal to consider themselves directly—to which the existence of religions has always born witness. What an enigma it is, this denial of their power over themselves, of the true nature of their articulations, which we might have thought to be definitively established. But even if the roots of this apparent difficulty of the human species to accept itself for what it is remain totally opaque, what is quite clear is that the totalitarian phenomenon represents the virulent resurgence of an immemorial passion for self-misunderstanding that we know to be profoundly embedded in the unconscious order of human groups. It is at the same time true that totalitarianism is inseparable from modernity; it would be inconceivable during an age of religion, for the simple reason that religion, when it was in full force, fulfilled the role that totalitarianism seeks in vain to reestablish.10 This is not to say that totalitarianism is itself religion, but rather that it tends towards the resurrection—within a universe where religion has ceased to exercise a power over the social, if not to exist at all—of collective cohesion that religions once assured. Quite strangely, in totalitarianism an alliance is realized between the ancient and the new. For it is also true that it mobilizes, with the State as its instrument, a social factor whose rise to power is strictly correlated with the decline of transcendence. Totalitarianism must completely reintegrate into the human sphere justifications that hitherto had depended on the world beyond. Only then do the project of an exhaustive appropriation and a complete remodeling of society by a detached power become imaginable. It is in this sense that one can characterize totalitarianism

186 Marcel Gauchet as the fulfillment of modernity, carrying the potential to fully exploit of its limits, embodying its most developed expression. Here again, we must not neglect the other side of the phenomenon. Here again, the question is useful as to the aims towards which such an all-powerful statism is mobilized. For if the means of totalitarianism properly belong to modern politics, which has been liberated from religion, the design it pursues can only be retrograde. It represents at bottom nothing but a nostalgic repetition of the ideal social form that has always emanated from the religious vision of the human destiny: the good old days where everyone thought the same; where each person occupied a clear place at the same time as his or her belonging to the collective was tangible; and where the interests of all, without competition or confrontation, converged towards a manifestly unique end. Behind every totalitarianism, whether consciously or not, there is the radical impossibility to break free of this original model of social life, rooted for millennia in the human spirit and protected by the religious understanding of things. This model was profoundly shaken by the democratic revolution. It was, then, in order to recover a world on the verge of being lost that the new power of the State was mobilized in vain, from the very moment that it no longer found itself oriented towards the beyond, towards a God that holds the final word in all knowledge and power. If there has been any actualization of the phantasmagorical project of domination inscribed in the radical pretention of our societies to become their own possessors, it is the dream—both achieved and in process—of the full collective identity that produced the ancient transcendental dispossession of meaning. Such an actualization exists only by virtue of the spectral reincarnation of a fading past. This hypothesis has the merit, if nothing else, of cohering with the real conditions out of which totalitarianism has sprung. Nowhere in the countries where it has it been imposed has it appeared without fracturing the long secular process of the construction of the modern national State. Nowhere has it emerged as the natural and inevitable product of the growth of the modern political apparatus. On the contrary, every context in which it has appeared has been one marked by the archaism, or relative inefficiency, of the development of State structures. In each case, the national State in its canonical form had but the weakest roots, as a result of its recent constitution (e.g.,

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Germany and Italy), or because of the historical power of the old imperial model against which modern nations have been constructed (e.g., Russia and China, although the imperial problem was present in a less direct way in both Germany and Italy as well). Totalitarianism has served over and over again as a means of reinforcing the modern State during its bouts of impotence, rather than, as it claims, as the result of the State’s logical development. And finally, each time that it has been established has been on the heels of a period of political liberalization. Whether in open reaction to the disaggregation that results from this liberalization, or rather in favor of the resulting agitation, totalitarianism always arises in order to extinguish the authentic democratic possibilities that these periods reveal. Totalitarianism was born as if under the double necessity to establish through superhuman effort a State that mirrors the nation, the materialization of its absolute sovereign power; and, at the same time, to return in haste to an intangible coherence, to an unfailing unity, to the mystical solidarity of the old society that had collapsed in a mere instant. Always and everywhere, it has been a violent entry into the era of the monopoly of the State over the definition and organization of society. But totalitarianism has nonetheless understood itself as the means of reestablishing an exact coincidence [adéquation] between society and itself, in which there is no contradiction between men and society is presumed to be coextensive with the State, absorbed within it. Since the very origin of human societies, this coincidence [adéquation] has been the embodiment of an obsessive, inexhaustible ideal, whose reproduction par excellence has been found in religion. The appearance within democracy of an open arena of the conflicts that constitute the social—the scission between the State and society, the antagonism between classes—represents an extraordinary rupture with this idea of coincidence. Such a rupture has been experienced as intolerable in those places where a slow and imperceptible process did not prepare the way for it. Let us not, then, proclaim the return to a “political spiritualism,” or any other miserable over-the-counter “monotheism,” that is to be the safeguard against the totalitarian danger built into our social atheism. It is assuredly not by returning to religion, but rather by finally ridding ourselves of it that we will effectively guard against totalitarianism. It is not out of the lack of religion that totalitarianism is born, but rather out of our insufficiently having eradicated it, our inability to step out

188 Marcel Gauchet of its spaces. Totalitarianism is the terrible symptom of the tensions inherent in our societies, the monstrous compromise between opposing logics of the collective establishment. It belongs historically to the pathologies of the transition between two epochs. It is at its deepest the reaction to the difficulty for the human race to break from the primordial reflex that has always prevented it from seeing itself for what it is. The immensity of the stakes of the democratic age is that in it, we have undertaken to defeat and dispossess this age-old reflex. The absolutely new dimension introduced by democracy—of which totalitarianism is a desperate conjuration—is the complete absorption of society into a process of self-questioning, by means of its own division. All previous societies had answers at their disposal, ready in advance and unanimously accepted (or nearly so), serving as self-explanations and self-justifications regarding their ultimate character. Such answers were infinitely varied in terms of their content, but constructed on an identical model: things are the way they are because the Others or the Gods, the Absolute Other or the all-powerful One True God wanted them that way. The radical originality of democratic society is that it questions its very organization, and as a result produces antagonistic responses. On the one hand, with the separation of the State comes the paradoxical possibility of society’s complete seizure of itself. This possibility creates in democratic society a perspective in which power is fully capable of modeling and organizing itself (a power symbolized most purely by the idea of “revolution”), at the same time as it produces a sign of that same society’s dispossession of such a power. For it is from outside of itself, and in a sense from against itself, that this power becomes operative. On the other hand, with the division of classes and the idea of their structurally opposed interests, appears a different but no less profound challenge to the idea of a simply just or acceptable order of collective existence. No longer does the sentiment exist in a comprehensible manner that society rests on a stable and definitive base. Rather, it becomes certain that the solutions to its problems are to be found wholly within itself. The point is not merely that democratic society necessitates the asking of questions; the democratic social process itself takes the form of a question. It is therefore in vain that actors within this society oppose themselves only to fully formed answers. No matter how deep down they dig, all

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 189 they will find is the manifest impossibility to resolve any debate whatsoever, the mental abyss of infinite possibility. This underlying dynamic of incertitude, this relentless destabilization of what had once been unquestionable, these infinite resources of contestation stemming from the very structure of democratic societies: all of these represent without a doubt the dimensions before which Tocqueville found it necessary to bring his analysis to a halt. Not that he failed to discern them. He speaks quite clearly of “yawning void of almost limitless proportions” into which more or less “every revolution” has had the effect of throwing the human spirit (II, 1.1, 487). It is with full awareness of what he was doing, and therefore more significantly, that he cast these elements as contrary to the normal progression of society, destined as a result to a merely transitory phase of history. His repugnance for them should not be surprising if one considers the paroxysmal reactions in our own century against the progressive entry of the entire human race into the anxiety of a debate free of “natural” foundations. Far from having become more respectable since Tocqueville’s time, the perspective in which nothing is contestable, nothing capable of being established in opposition to what is, has only grown more and more hopeless. Its degeneration has reached the point where it has ultimately sparked the totalitarian project of restoring a secure collective base, a society that knows itself unquestionably for what it is, an organization of the world once again definitive and determined in all of its parts. Let us examine, in our own time, the edifying spectacle that today’s intellectuals offer us in palinode. Freshly delivered from their adhesion to totalitarian ideologies, our intelligentsia has nothing to offer us but an exchange of one faith for another: anything to continue refusing to acknowledge the abyss of social possibility. Man “left to himself,” as Tocqueville puts it, remains an intolerable idea for man. Never the less, if there is in our universe a “universal, durable” phenomenon—one that “daily proves to be beyond the reach of men’s powers”; one that “all events,” as well as “all men,” conspire to develop even in opposing it11 —it is the inscription of societies in a self-interrogation that is unable to be closed. This self- questioning proceeds from an internal cleavage, which ravages the entire society without mercy. Its instances of direct violence undoubtedly tend to fizzle out, and its explicit concrete stakes often

190 Marcel Gauchet become obscured. But the necessity of this interrogation always reveals itself at its barest and most profound when the prospect of eliminating the enemy within social conflict disappears; when the grip of the State is loosened, and the aim of State politics becomes dispossession rather than coercion. We have arrived in all likelihood at a turning point, in this sense, where something of the ancient economy of misunderstanding has been defeated. Our understanding may stand to benefit from its inevitable encounter with its totalitarian other, which is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. This is without a doubt a positive result of the return from the cataclysmic collision of totalitarian illusions with reality. But it is also the exhaustion of the historical functions of political parties, each one blind to their conflictual presence alongside one another within a larger whole. Each party denying to the others their right to existence, claiming to seek their elimination and in so doing impose its own vision of a reunified society, such blindness had the effect of bestowing upon party conflict a radical character. It appeared as a clash of two worlds, one that spread throughout all aspects of human activity without exception. If we are witnesses today to a significant loss of potency of these confrontations, it is because they have lost their former mandate. Nothing remains in our world beyond the limits of discussion. The problematic dynamics of democracy, furthermore, need no longer pass through a combatively exclusive representation of the good society. It has been established that social life on the whole is rightly the subject of debate, and this debate inevitably manifests itself through oppositions. Such oppositions therefore do not in the least tend to disappear; they are tacitly recognized, and show themselves following the obligation either to impose themselves by force, or to achieve recognition by persuasion. We must have no illusions here: with society’s total power over itself that it finds in the State, with its internal antagonism between visions of the social and the human destiny, we are far from reaching a stopping point. Perhaps the reverse is true, that we are merely at the beginning of establishing a collective atheism (though, it must be said, perfectly compatible with private faith), over a century in the making, the social logic of democracies. For contrary to what Tocqueville believed, democratic society not only has no need of limits

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 191 established by divine command, but it is precisely that society that organizes itself by liberating a practical force of questioning. This power internal to democracy is destined without fail to turn individuals away from the divine. Prevailing opinion matters little here; it is within the very mechanism of the social where the disappearance of God is to be found. As long as the powers of refusal at work within them—both totalitarian passion and the religious denial—do not carry democratic societies away, in a general twist of fate that no one can dismiss outright, their development according to their “natural bent” will make them the tomb of religion.

III “If, after attentively studying the history of America, one carefully examines its political and social state, one becomes firmly convinced of the following truth: that there is not a single opinion, habit, or law, I might almost say not a single event, which the point of departure cannot readily explain” (I, 1.2, 33). It helps to complement this claim of Tocqueville’s with another: “America is the only country in which it has been possible to witness the natural and tranquil course of a society’s development and to pinpoint the influence of a state’s point of departure on its future” (Ibid., 32). Tocqueville’s reasoning here is flawless. The seminal fact of the democratic universe is the equality of conditions. There exists a nation that has not only been constituted entirely ex nihilo on the basis of the equality of conditions, but has also developed with constant fidelity to its founding content. Consequently, it is as if the origin itself has made transparently evident the ultimate product. The democratic regime supposes, furthermore, the logical anteriority of its independent citizens with respect to the mode of government that results from their sovereign association. America then offers the unique historical example of a society where sovereign power is effectively—and not merely in principle—crystallized from below; where the exercise of the deliberative function is intensified to the extent that one remains close to the first elements of the social body; and finally, where the generalized practice association permanently reenacts the founding of the political contract. How better to judge the future of the democratic nations—having entered the age of popular sovereignty more or less in a state of confusion—than on the model of a society whose historical evolution

192 Marcel Gauchet forms a single process with a logically necessary development of principles? We must add only that there is a downside to Tocqueville’s privilege of the beginning, namely, his break with democracy’s conditions of emergence. Tocqueville pays for the clarity with which he observes the American “point of departure” by obliterating what had previously allowed it to take place. It is here where Tocqueville is led most astray in his perspective on the future of democratic societies in general. In the longue durée of the process of equality’s engenderment, the exemplary American case proves in reality to be highly particular. The marks of democracy’s origins cast a veil over its historically creative mechanisms and its inescapable prolongations. For the dynamic of equality has been the bearer of a radical rupture in the course of human affairs, and its rich effect has been a new beginning, a re-foundation of societies on entirely different bases. If this dynamic is truly proper to equality, and if it is more than a mere re-composition of the same elements of the social fabric, it is also a dynamic that belongs to the social articulations that produced the equality of conditions. That is to say, the internal scissions, the separation of the State, and the class oppositions that gave the public life of modern democracies, contrary to what Tocqueville believed, an irreducibly conflictual character. The specific difficulty that democratic societies faced as they stumbled through their gestation on the Old Continent, furthermore, was to have realized two apparently incompatible series of factors: the principle of popular sovereignty and the reality of the separation of the State. That is to say, the necessity of an active representation of the general will alongside the obligation to take into account an effective set of antagonisms. What Tocqueville saw in the United States was the perfectly peculiar—and therefore deceptively “pure”— example of a society spared since its origin from these constraints. As a result, America never had to confront the historical challenge of synthesizing the imperatives of the democratic age with the heritage attached to the genealogy of equality. Tocqueville’s is therefore a blinding clarity, illuminating the general movement of history (which provides “the flame that our fathers lacked,” in his words) while at the same time tacitly rejecting the reasons for its generation. There is nothing more curious in Tocqueville’s work than the absence of a systematic account of what he takes to be the causal factor of a number of the historical necessities that weigh on the

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 193 evolution of the democratic phenomenon. This is not to say, however, that he fails to reflect on the origins of equality, for this is precisely what The Ancien Régime and the Revolution sets out to accomplish. He observes, on the one hand, that “it was the absolute kings who did most to level ranks among their subjects” (II, 2.1, 584). On the other hand, he considers the expansion of social power—each day “more centralized, more enterprising, more absolute, and more extensive” (II, 4.5, 813)—as a consequence resulting from the spread of equality. And in Europe in particular, this expansion of centralized power is the result of “secondary and accidental causes that Americans do not have to contend with” (II, 4.5, 803). Centralization tends to produce equality; equality tends to produce centralization. The point here is not to chastise Tocqueville for having failed to establish definitively the correlation between the two movements of equalization and the expansion of the State. Nevertheless, between the notions of equality as effect and equality as cause, there is a fundamental void. Any historical analysis of democracy as the result of a reciprocal interaction of elements that are at the same time inseparable from its future is essentially contradictory. This supposed democratic State, in enlarging its own prerogatives, comes to detach itself as a result from society and appear above it in its entirety, therefore exerting an equalizing influence over it. It is clear that such a State would never simply disappear, as if by magic, the day when its activity of reducing its subjects to the equivalence of individual identity will have resulted in subverting social hierarchy in favor of the sovereignty of equals. Such is the task of The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, to show the essential continuity of this statist factor within and beyond the revolutionary rupture, both instigated by the concentration of power, and conspiring to expand it further. Now, despite having been the most effective agent in establishing popular sovereignty, the separated State is no less in contradiction with the essential principle of the latter. It is difficult to reconcile the autonomy of its political instantiation with the concept of representative transparency. The turning of administrative power against the very society it means to govern from the outside, furthermore, does not sit well with the abstract notion of a government by the people and for the people. All of this speaks directly to what is most fundamental. For if the detachment of power is not absolutely irreconcilable with equality

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(which is able, according to Tocqueville, to become embodied in a single entity that guarantees in exchange the equivalence of all), it tends nonetheless to impinge upon the territory of liberty. This latter is the independence of individuals who are only equals by virtue of their autonomy with respect to one another. Under these conditions, how could democracy have been historically constructed if not as the fruit of the interaction of elements belonging to heterogeneous temporalities, those whose contents are logically opposed? And let us say nothing of the problem of reconciling the imperative to represent the will of all of the citizens with the existence of a conflict between their interests that is recognized, at least tacitly, as irreconcilable. This is the aspect of modern societies towards which Tocqueville remained the most resolutely closed off until the very end. Rather than turn towards an analysis of this nature regarding the State, whose elements are nonetheless at his disposition, Tocqueville prefers to envisage the example of a society founded purely on the basis of equality. It is as if this society contained within itself the principle of a fundamental change of the social structure so radical that sooner or later, the last vestiges of the conditions that brought it about were inevitably bound to disappear. As if the new world was to completely escape from a progressive reconstruction of the one that came before, on the basis of the relation of equivalence and similarity between individuals. Without a doubt, we have touched on the fundamental position, suggested by the very logic of his democratic object, which both guides and blinds Tocqueville: the postulate of a complete foundation [instauration].12 For him, democracy is at its core a total redefinition of the social order on the basis of the entirely new social material of independent human beings. It is the radical beginning of a new history, starting from premises entirely different from those of the past. There is no use seeking in it a secular process whose signs can be found throughout prior human experience. Democracy is a decisive discontinuity, a reinstitution of the human community on bases hitherto unseen. It implies a complete redefinition of the terms of social life, down to the finest details. It is one thing to speak of a progressive movement of equality that begins within an aristocratic universe, where each man is attached to his fellows through a chain of dependencies uniting superiors and inferiors. It is quite another to speak of the genuine establishment of a society of individuals, independent beings that recognize themselves

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 195 as equals with no hierarchical difference between them, and that participate identically in sovereign power. The privilege of America is to have laid bare this truth concerning foundations. By virtue of a fortuitous encounter between the principle and the event of foundation, America reveals within the state of freedom its founding and generating dynamic of equality. Nothing is more significant in this regard than the leap Tocqueville makes from the centralization of the European State as a cause, to centralization as an effect. What is most interesting from the point of view of the liberation of democracy’s central characteristics (as opposed to the point of view of historical understanding) is not so much the notion of continuity, but rather what follows properly from the fact of equality, what it produces in its own right. From this perspective, equality is considered as a source destined to supplant and absorb all other historical sources, the only such source free of the contaminations of the past. Hence the revolutionary illusion inherent in the democratic process that one finds at the root of Tocqueville’s uncertainties regarding the nature and foreseeable future of democratic societies. An effective illusion, true in a sense, of a pure foundation, in which society can be entirely reconstructed from a first principle. This principle, for Tocqueville, is the equality of conditions. Without much infidelity to his intentions, we could choose alternatively to call it individualism, a term Tocqueville employs himself. But where Tocqueville uses this term to describe a relatively circumscribed domain of democratic life, we understand it in a much more expansive sense. Individualism is a reversal of the explicit ontological priority of a society considered explicitly as a whole over and above each of its members taken in isolation. In democratic society, the logical priority of the individual is no less explicit: the individual is understood as detached from society, the latter being the result of a contract of association agreed upon by originally independent beings. These contracting agents are radically equal by virtue of this independence, their rigorously identical status conferred upon them by their origin. If there has been such a thing as a democratic “revolution”— independent of actual revolutionary events—it has consisted in this inversion of the foundations of society. Its direct consequence has been a complete change in the status of the political. In the old world

196 Marcel Gauchet of social hierarchies, where the primacy of the collective was expressed as a dependence of each social agent on a superior, the political order was understood as preceding by its nature the will of men. Once individuals are recognized as primordially autonomous, on the other hand, the political acquires a subordinate rank. It appears as derivative, the product of the free and deliberate activity of human equals. Tocqueville’s intervention appears within this historico-ideological process. His aim is to restore the democratic process to its founding efficiency by revealing it as both an elementary (viz., beneath which no analytic decomposition can proceed) and internally rich fact of an entirely new world. His theoretical vision simultaneously results from, reflects, and perpetuates both the return and the rupture that have taken place within the order of society’s founding representations. As a result, Tocqueville reproduces the illusion specific to democracy by overlooking the fact that it was society itself—at a certain moment in its history, as a result of deep transformations in its articulations— that gave rise to the individual. This forgetfulness follows from the notion of the original sovereignty of equals, a conviction that goes more or less unseen within the social mechanisms that assure the unity and identity of democracy. In other words, Tocqueville helps pass on the illusion according to which there were only individuals at the beginning of society. Given the indisputable fact that there are individuals, this ontological postulate of their anteriority effectively translates into the idea of a concrete social autonomy. There are, then, hidden from view in this illusion, structures that impose unconscious symbolic constraints on social life. Tocqueville reproduces a form of this illusion in his deduction that democratic society emerged entirely from the intrinsic dynamic of equality. In fact, democracy was created through the interaction between the manifest content of our societies (the rights of individuals), and the latent content (the constraints of political articulation, the separation of the State, and the full-frontal oppositions between men). Or, alternatively, the interaction between social atoms (independent and equal individuals) and the all- encompassing society that produced them. The social whole created human individuals as such by presenting itself to them in an indiscernible manner, while never ceasing to contain them entirely along with their incessant imperative to pursue their ends. One sees

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 197 therefore how America was able to pose itself as the perfect decoy. It has been separated from this matrix of equality whose engulfing presence was unmistakable in Europe, spared from the constraints in the social unconscious—ever-present but nearly always overlooked— of the production of collective unity. It perfectly embodies, then, the illusory democratic ideal of a society left to its most basic social components: individuals, or equals.

IV Even if the hidden element of the democratic phenomenon ultimately escaped him, if he only indirectly perceived it, Tocqueville nonetheless proved himself—and remains to this day—an unequaled analyst of its overt developments. That is to say, the dynamics that follow from the new status conferred on the political agent, and from the general recategorization of relations between men entailed by the tacit postulate of their self-sufficiency. One cannot read him on this point without being struck by the strangely contemporary intelligence of his examination of a total social fact. But what is striking above all is the pertinence of his identification of the central tendency at work over the longue durée of Western history: the tendency towards the reduction of alterity in human life. The subsequent development of this reduction, and its spectacularly profound effects over the century following the publication of Democracy in America, have nonetheless been obstinately ignored by our most notable contemporary “thinkers” today. There is an incisive Tocqueville to be liberated from his lukewarm “liberal” flatterers—or rather, a polemical Tocqueville to be opposed to our mediocre professors of official subversion, or any other patented slanderers of a history they do not understand. For what Tocqueville calls equality is one of the core sources of meaning—effective meaning, meaning in action, meaning destined towards concrete incarnation, rather than meaning through mastery of concepts—that have shaped what is most original in our society. Tocqueville’s equality is what Castoriadis would call a “central imaginary signification,” a power that penetrates all established social relations, an inextinguishable source of fluctuation in the positions of social beings with respect to one another. All of this is well known, from certain points of view, but Tocqueville continues to be one of the few—and perhaps the only one—capable of making sense of the surprisingly coherent unity at the heart of our history.

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It is not an easy task to reconstruct what Tocqueville understands by the “equality of conditions.” He clearly does not mean equality in the juridical sense—the identity of men before the law, itself characterized by its own unity—though from the point of view of an equality “introduced by absolute power and under the watch of kings,” this legal sense of the word is far from secondary. Nor does Tocqueville have in mind the economic sense of equality, the “real” equality that our good old tradition has taught us to demand, in opposition to the abstract “opium” of equality before the law. There is nonetheless something strange, from the point of view of our ordinary conceptual schema, in that Tocqueville writes ceaselessly of equality and its irrepressible movement without hardly blinking an eye at the inequality of fortune that he clearly takes to be all but inevitable. It is surprising that he does not undertake to imagine the disappearance of this inequality among the foreseeable evolutions of democracy. What is important here is less the gap between the goods that individuals enjoy, than the existence of a graduated spectrum within the social world, though one without any gaps considered to be impassable. It is this dimension that gives a concrete reality to the mobility of democratic societies, where anyone can legitimately claim any social position, in contrast to the perpetuity of aristocratic regimes where the position of each member is irrevocably fixed. “[W]ealth and poverty, command and obedience, may accidentally put a great distance between another,” Tocqueville writes concerning the effects of the mobility of social status, “but no matter: public opinion, which is based on the ordinary order of things, pulls them back towards the common level and creates a sort of imaginary equality between them despite the actual inequality of their conditions” (II, 3.5, 674). From the point of view of the structural truth of democratic equality, an “imaginary equality” can therefore be more important than a “real inequality.” The point is that the “real inequality” in question in no way creates the perception of different natures between individuals in the public mind. In times of , in contrast, no equality of fortunes could have abolished the essential difference between beings. What constitutes men as equals in the democratic age goes far deeper superficial characteristics related to wealth, or even to position in social hierarchies. What is at stake, to remain in private terms, is the impossibility to posit a difference of any profound substance, or

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 199 of an intimate nature between individuals, no matter what accidental superficialities distinguish them in role or place. This is what Tocqueville means positively by “the general notion of ‘one’s fellow man [le semblable]’”13 (II, 2.2, 586). The idea recurs on numerous occasions in his writing, with a consistency of expression that allows a glimpse into the gravity of his reflection on the subject. Does he mean to identify the originality of modern times by opposing them to antiquity? “The most profound geniuses of Greece and Rome, the most comprehensive of ancient minds, never hit upon the very general yet at the same time very simple idea that all men are alike” (II, 1.3, 496). But this is the same criterion Tocqueville uses to establish the break with aristocratic peoples, where each caste has its opinions, its feelings, its rights, its mores, and its own separate existence. Thus, the men who belong to a particular caste do not resemble everyone else. They do not share the same way of thinking or feeling, and they scarcely even think of themselves as belonging to the same humanity (II, 3.1, 655). Inhabitants of only see, then, “members of their own caste as their fellows.” This is in contrast—in a passage on the softening of mores as a result of the equalization of conditions, central to Tocqueville’s understanding of equality—to when the ranks in a nation are roughly equal and everyone thinks and feels in almost the same way, then each person can judge everyone else’s sensations in an instant: all he has to do is cast a quick glance at himself. Hence there is no misery that he cannot readily conceive, or whose extent is not revealed to him by a secret instinct. No matter if strangers or enemies are involved: his imagination instantly puts him in their place. His pity is thereby tinged with something personal, causing him to suffer when the body of his fellow man is torn to pieces (Ibid., 658). The idea is reprised again, with some shift in perspective, in a note that is of interest among his positions taken on the “imaginary equality” that obliterates “real inequality,” illustrating the ambivalence of Tocqueville’s thought. The “fellow man” appears this time in a discussion of what we call today the phenomenon of the mass: “When citizens are divided into castes and classes, not only are they different from one another, but they have neither the taste nor the desire to look alike,” to the extent that “even those who are naturally alike aspire to create imaginary differences between themselves.” In contrast, “when a nation has a democratic social state…. [m]en resemble one another, and what is more, they suffer in a sense from

200 Marcel Gauchet not resembling one another” (II, 2.3, 780). This time, rather than an (“imaginary”) underlying unity—fully compatible with marked differences on the surface—we are confronted with an explicit desire for sameness that drives the entirety of individual expression. These two positions are less contradictory than they might seem. They simply do not operate on the same level of description. In the case of the relation between master and servant, the situation is exemplary as a historical junction point and a logical limit. This dynamic helps to establish how equality arises between and within individuals, as well as to discern what exactly the relation of “fellows” consists in, if there is to be one at all. How is it that beings as essentially different as a master and a servant, from the point of view of the old aristocratic mentality, can be taken as fundamentally the same, despite the effective gap between their positions? It is equality’s abstract component that emerges through such an operation, in which the democratic understanding instinctively bypasses its accidental features in order to get right to the substance. Whereas the spirit of hierarchical societies would have directed them to construct separations of status and roles based on group affiliation, “race,” nature, or any other value distinction between men, democratic societies are driven to neglect all visible, concrete, and natural disjunctions. This in favor of an identity that one can only call abstract, as it appeals to a general form independent of given characteristics, and, at its core, intangible as such. Such an identity is achieved by separating individuals from the facts that define and situate them, in order to bring out an equality between them that is in principle never fully realized. For this reason I have advanced on many occasions the idea of structure. For the equality at issue here is only conceivable in the set of relations in which it is indefinitely embedded. What creates equality between beings is not discernable in itself, that is, within any particular individual. It is caught up in the socially defined manner in which these beings encounter and place themselves with respect to one another. In other words, the source of equality is to be found in the structure of a relation that directs them—in a manner difficult for the historian to notice—to disregard their real or natural differences, whatever they may be, as soon as they become patent. Instead, the democratic man is to recognize himself in the other, as Tocqueville so finely observes, in such a way that he is to be incapable of witnessing

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 201 the other’s suffering without involuntarily putting himself in his fellow’s place, blindly feeling his pain in his own body. The structure of this recognition is like a mirror that society holds up to itself, tending to dissolve practical separations in favor of a community of belonging. This community, however, remains indefinite in that it is ultimately detached from all effective determinations. But the mirror effect is nonetheless mutual, by virtue of its strange property of revealing something inexpressible to everyone in the person of the other. We are all each other’s fellows, despite our apparent differences. And once this faceless resemblance is established, the mirror effect can easily play a role in sounding the call to superficial similarity. When personal differences are experienced as mere cover for a profound social identity, they become intolerable. The ultimate impossibility of attaining full self-recognition in the other, then, stokes an anxious attachment to its superficial manifestations. But here, we have entered into a discussion of elements that are logically secondary, whose particular sphere of application is limited, concerning equality’s drive to capitalize on the currency of general and effective identity. Such an identity is only conceivable through a mode of relation based on a primordial link with the other, symbolically ensuring that the movement of recognition does not come to a halt before differences of fact. It is only because the other is experienced as fundamentally the same that one seeks to resemble him completely and exactly. The phenomenon that secures the interminable character of the quest for equality is double. First, there is the fact that there is no exact conformity possible in the human species. But even more importantly, the identity pursued in the search for similarity is of another order than that of fact. It disqualifies in advance all attempts to translate and grasp it in a concrete figure. “In democratic nations men easily achieve a certain equality but not the equality they desire. That equality recedes a bit further every day, yet it never disappears from view, and as it recedes it entices them to chase after it, invariably it eludes their grasp” (II, 2.13, 628). Let us not fail to see what keeps equality out our reach and prevents its realization: in equality, there is an invisible object that men pursue within the realm of the visible. In the background of Tocqueville’s reflections on equality is the feeling of the major originality of modern societies, which makes them all but incomparable with “any previous time anywhere in the

202 Marcel Gauchet world” (I, intro, 6). Liberty has long existed in other ages, under different skies. Equality, on the other hand, is wholly new. The aristocratic societies of the past, Tocqueville’s unfailing and convenient reference point, from this point of view merely reflect the law that had prevailed throughout all time. It is precisely this law that egalitarian democracy has shattered: that man is other to man. It is a fact that the entirety of previous societies have been uniformly—even if under diverse banners and following different modalities—societies of otherness [de l’autre],14 societies that express themselves most fundamentally according to a dimension of alterity. This dimension is first expressed as religious dependence, the establishment of society’s foundation as radically other with respect to human beings, such that it is entirely outside their creative power: things are as they are because others have willed them as such, and our task is to preserve them as they are by forbidding ourselves to meddle with them. The persistent force of this original form of men’s division amongst themselves continues to mystify the rupture that has allowed them to escape from it. If this division guarantees the community its equality and unity in the absence of a detached power, it forbids the recognition of the humanity of other societies: we are the only men; the others are simply something other than mankind. The decisive rupture with this primordial division is the birth of the State. With this event, alterity is thus rendered contestable, and the primitive heteronomy becomes problematic. The State represents the transposition of alterity to the interior of society. The founder- and legislator-gods cease to be purely beyond the human realm; they now have their representatives, or even incarnations, among men, and it is this delegation that defines the fortification of social power. It is at this moment in fact that man becomes an other for man, for there now exists between members of the same society a difference of nature and of value. The final limit of this difference is the polar opposite of the figure of the God-man: the status of the non-human pure and simple, the slave. The advent of political domination, the introduction of divine alterity into the human world, brings with it the establishment of a heterogeneity within the human species between the dominant and the dominated. It is this heterogeneity that was epitomized by the idea of superior “races” in our European aristocracies. The State does not bring alterity into existence, but rather redirects its movement, changes its point of

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 203 application, and transfers it from the exterior to the interior. In so doing, the State places alterity directly within human experience, establishing it as a tangible agent of oppression. Alterity thus enters the scope of political struggle and collective debate, and as a result becomes practically capable of being overcome insofar as it is an object of intellectual questioning. There is no doubt, then, that the birth of State domination must be seen as a great step towards human emancipation. If the other is embodied in man himself, then man is potentially capable of surmounting the otherness that has plagued him since his beginnings: that which he has denied himself in desperation, the other that he has forced himself to construct for the large part of his history. But the alterity that has been placed within the social sphere cannot be reduced to a mere transcription of the hierarchy between the dominant and the dominated. This point demands some precision concerning the so-called hierarchical principle, that is, the intricate relation that it entails between alterity and solidarity. As Louis Dumont has taught us to discern, the intrinsic difference in nature of the superiors lends symbolic significance to the preeminence of the whole over its parts; of the ensemble over its particular elements; of society established once and for all over the wills of human agents. That which separates men, and radically so, is therefore also what assures them their common setting, their co-belonging within an coherent general framework. Hence the appearance of such seemingly paradoxical forms of collective cohesion as the essential division postulated between social beings and their mutual frame of reference in exteriority. These nonetheless go hand in hand with intense social bonds between “strangers,” of whose strangeness our mode of recognizing reciprocal identity gives only vague hints. What is true of the political bond remains such in a general fashion: alterity—understood as both what separates social beings and what brings them together under the sign of otherness [le dehors]—in no way contradicts their feeling of being integrated by necessity within an all-encompassing unity. It is therefore possible to be rigorously “excluded,” conceived as an “other” or treated as non-human, while at the same time perfectly “integrated.” This is what one sees in the case of disgraced beings of all kinds in Europe before the age of equality: the invalid, the blind, the insane, and the like. The joyfully lauded “insertion” of these

204 Marcel Gauchet groups into the community—that is, before their gruesome re- exclusion at the hands of the moderns—has recently inspired no small number rambling portraits, both picaresque and academic in style. For if the socialization of these luckless creatures (whether in terms of their physical characteristics, or of their social belonging, that is, their very humanity) is not a matter of doubt—if it is true that they have been explicitly admitted as partaking in the human condition—it is all the more noteworthy that this incorporation was possible only by means of an internal exclusion. These “others” were henceforth to be locked up within their own difference, taken as the sign of an incurable divergence from the common lot of man. For such crimes, laughter appeared as the most merciful punishment. In such a case, it is clear that familiarity is quite opposed to the feeling of intimate closeness or sameness. It is born, rather, as the inverse reaction to the radicality of difference. And as a result, it is precisely at the moment where the peaceful certitude of the possibility of interacting with a wholly other—or rather with an intrinsically other—begins to subside that familiarity is undone. The spectacle of difference becomes wholly intolerable and demands to be eradicated. This is the origin of exclusion in the modern sense, the favorite topic of so many of today’s frenzied bien-pensants. What these commentators fail to notice even for an instant is that exclusion is called into being by the emergence in the social world of a vision of the same. It is a worried reaction to an alterity with no certain consistency or foundation. From its beginnings, exclusion is preoccupied by the contradiction that it is ultimately destined to reproduce through its own self-erasure: the simultaneous inclusion of the other in the self and the recognition of the self in the other. On the one hand, it has become impossible to assure oneself of the self-evidence of any form of difference. No concept of such difference could allow us to coexist unprobablematically with the deformed man so enticing to stare at, the blind man so disturbing in his stumbling about, and the madman so amusing to engage in teasing conversation. Hence the somewhat confused need to build up our defenses against forms difference that we, for better or worse, nonetheless recognize as in no way interfering with the identity of belonging. Our confusion is an inseparable mix of the repressive urge and charitable intention: we must sweep these people from view, all the while taking them into our care. All this appears in the context of

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 205 what is, on the other hand, a society ever more openly threatened by the will to sameness, a deep urge to abolish the internalization of alterity-exteriority. This will extends all the way down to the most closed of spaces, without making an exception for those on the margins or in confinement. It was in the universe of exclusion, then, that the conditions developed for the centuries-long operation that has led us to locate the terms of the human condition in the very places where its boundaries had been breached. I have stressed on many occasions the natural basis of the disjunctions that prevent the recognition of one’s self in the other, but this does not in the least equate to a prohibition against recognizing the other in a more basic sense. On the contrary, despite its implication of a separation between individuals, the imperative towards reciprocity includes the possibility of compelling social agents to recognize the existence of others while nonetheless considering them to be of a completely different nature. The equality that arises from this exchange, it is worth noting, in no way resembles the equality exalted by the modern age. This equality stems from the identical positions of beings who, each one caught up in himself, fail to grasp their common characteristics. Modern equality, in contrast, sees its role as opening each individual to the other, removing all modes of separations that otherwise render their contact purely exterior.15 The crucial role of “natural” criteria in the formation of these intrinsic differences between men is at least partially connected to the necessities of the divide between nature and culture. At bottom, society is revealed to rest on—and in opposition to—a nature that must be symbolically distinguished from it. It is thus in nature that the exteriority between social agents must have its logical foundation. The exteriority that exists between the sexes, such as the division between the masculine and the feminine, constitutes one of the most remarkable mutations—in its generality, its persistence, and its rootedness in our mentality—of the principle of a divide grounded in nature. Such a principle has organized the world’s inequalities since the dawn of society. The cornerstone of the alterity that separates women for men lies in all likelihood in the force of the female body, the vital necessity that pervades it, the autonomous cycle of fertility that it reveals. While this natural power is necessarily internal to society, it points to a dangerous beyond, that with which society would never mistake for itself. It is against this

206 Marcel Gauchet beyond that society is compelled to reaffirm the preeminence of what is properly cultural or authentically social, that is, the masculine. Inequality, then, in the historical sense of the term as a characteristic of the societies that have preceded our own, is to be found here in its structural nature, a structure independent of actual spectrums of political and economic status. From the latter point of view—that of high and low, powerful and powerless, rich and poor— man and woman are thoroughly equal. But they are in fact quite distinct from one another, and what separates them is a very real inequality historically anterior to the advent, with the State, of inequality in political or economic terms. Inequality is not merely the fact that one is valued higher than another; it is rather the condition for such unequal valuation, the drawing of a strict line of dissimilarity between two beings. This line is taken to demarcate strictly different forms of internal life, signaling a natural division so complete that the very idea of recognizing one’s self in such a heterogeneous other loses its meaning. It should be added that all such scissions, in the ways in which they define the terms of social belonging, mobilize either participation in or exteriority with respect to the collective idea of truth, which provides them their validity. There could never have been such a thing as an egalitarian revolution without a fundamental challenge to this organizing principle, this ancient and original way of relating to one another. The birth of equality was thus the end of a general economy of alterity, of a system of beings closed upon themselves in their differences. It was the emergence of an entirely new mode of apprehension of the reality of others that allowed individuals for the first time to make their identities open and available to one another. Tocqueville’s original genius was to have perceived the precise nature and conceptual implications of the changes taking place in the general relations between individuals. He was able to grasp like no other the ripple effects that stemmed from the introduction of similarity into human relations, from its initial penetration into the heart of social life, to all of its effects on daily life. There can be no equality that does not at the same time instill individual political rights, in other words, the sovereignty of the people. No more can be there equality without economic rights; the presupposition of equivalence of participative roles in the domain of citizenship necessarily has effects on the domain of the collective production of

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 207 wealth. On this point, however, as I have already discussed, Tocqueville is not at his most articulate. But going beyond these explicit institutional and legal transformations concerning the conceptual identity of the individual, the discussion becomes more complex than it might seem if we consider the following question: where must we fix the limits of the individual’s participation in the decisions that concern him? The dynamic of equality—in the broadest and profoundest sense—a largely unconscious one, consists in the erosion of social alterity. It is this insight that remains Tocqueville’s unparalleled contribution. His analysis sheds light on the unique source that unites the innumerable aspects of a complex operation of the reduction of difference or dissimilarity in the human sphere. And this operation is far from complete, continuing radically to shape our encounters with the other. The form of dissimilarity that is most grounded in human experience is that of social distance, the invocation par excellence of aristocrats, and the idea that separates the races of masters and servants. But it is also the form that derives from the precedents set through the exercise of authority in general. This is the tendency to impose, often through the imperative of “respect,” a difference of nature between those who command and those who obey. It is almost trivial to note that it is out of this dynamic that the anti- authoritarian spirit at work today has its primary origin and sphere of application. The point is even more obvious when it comes not only to the existence of authority, but to its “style” as well: in other words, its presuppositions of the identity of those who wield it. Tocqueville’s reflections on the altered relations between master and servant in the democratic social state conserve today all their lucidity. Some men command, so be it, but it must be made clear that their subordinates could just as easily reverse the roles. In democratic society, it must be understood that whatever authority exists is in no way based on claims of intrinsic superiority. Tocqueville’s account of what he calls “the softening of mores” remains even more convincing. What he describes is the democratic man’s impulsive recoil against any and all recourses to violence against his fellow. Such a transformation of human instincts comes about both as a result of a new image of the other and the conditions surrounding the relations one’s relation thereto, and a suppression of one’s inner aggressions, however “spontaneous” or “natural” such

208 Marcel Gauchet violent instincts might seem. Though this suppression takes place at society’s—or rather, bourgeois society’s—behest, it is thoroughly private and individual. And when the individual is confronted with an other that no longer appears to have nothing in common with himself, when he regards this other, rather, as being of the same flesh, restraining his “normal” inclinations to murder and destroy is no longer difficult for him. Violence—the sign of otherness—dismantles itself through peaceful means, without discipline, control, or any other such intimate tortures. Only by virtue of the social internalization of alterity, the cultural separation of beings rather than bestial instincts, have we taught ourselves to reject what for our ancestors was a habitual feature of life. Relations between the sexes and ties of kinship are but two domains where the individualist revolution—as well as its corollary process that brings together liberated individuals into a relation where mutual identification becomes possible—has irreversibly transformed intersubjective conditions. This transformation has had enormous consequences for the formation of what one experiences internally as identity, consequences of a profundity that we are only today beginning to understand. These transformations in the understanding of personal identity continue to define our conceptions of individual rights: contemporary movements that understand newly earned rights of women as a wholly unprecedented civil right are a case in point. One searches in vain if one locates the raison d’être of such movements anywhere other than in the establishment of the age of equality. To be sure, such movements can only progress through long and difficult struggle, and their results must be ceaselessly defended. But in the final analysis, they have their basis in the fundamental source of legitimacy in our society, and derive from it an invincible power that can be effectively opposed by nothing except the brute force of inertia. On this point, then, Tocqueville was right in ways he never could have imagined, and what prevented him from fully anticipating what has come about is by no means the least interesting aspect of his work. In Tocqueville, the categories of the past appear as infinitely persistent, like an immovable dead weight, while he nonetheless remains completely certain of their inevitable decline. He seems to be perfectly convinced that the social movement through which “democracy destroys or modifies the various inequalities to which

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 209 society gives rise,” could not leave untouched “the great inequality between man and woman, which has seemed until now to be based on eternal foundations in nature” (II, 3.12, 705). The American example is a confirmation for him that the general democratic tendency to bring all individuals to the same level must necessarily make woman the equal of man. Tocqueville nonetheless maintains certain reservations—this too from his observations in America—namely that such equality could not be achieved without in some way dealing with real forms of difference. Americans, he writes, believed that because nature had made man and woman so different in physical and moral constitution, its clear purpose was to assign different uses to the diverse faculties of each. They judged, moreover, that progress lay not in making dissimilar beings do virtually identical things but in seeing to it that each acquitted itself of its task in the best possible way (Ibid., emphasis mine). He continues: Americans do not believe that man and woman have the duty or right to do the same things, but they hold both in the same esteem and regard them as beings of equal value but different destinies.... [They] have thus allowed woman’s social inferiority to persist but have done all they could to raise her intellectual and moral level to parity with man (II, 3.12, 708). The example is striking of an author’s reversal of his own intuitive premises once presented with a decisive difficulty. This difficulty, it seems, reaches the very foundations of the categories Tocqueville had carefully chosen in order to characterize a universe no longer composed of “dissimilar beings.” What is even more striking is his appropriation of the very same mode of judgment that he pronounces to have disappeared.16 For if there is a fundamental feature of the mentality of the traditional world of alterity, it is certainly the equation of all natural dissimilarity with differences of nature. In contrast, Tocqueville correctly perceives (even if he misreads the crucial case) that the mystery of equality is that its feeling of resemblance and its will to similarity skip over all natural obstacles. Equality gets beyond the merely visible, endowing all individuals with a rather militant notion of identity with their fellows, indifferent to, or even in blatant contradiction with, what is manifest on the surface. One could even say that the development of equality only reveals its

210 Marcel Gauchet true meaning once it frees itself resolutely from the need for sensible certainty, revealing the possibility of recognition where it had never before been apparent. Equality indeed makes possible such a recognition between man and woman—not, as Tocqueville thought, with respect to a permanent difference, but indifferent to and independently of the very real distinction between the sexes. But this possibility is thrust aside, finding its expression only in the acknowledgment of the interchangeability of social roles. What is at issue here is best illustrated by examining the spectacular feat of acrobatics necessary in order to overcome the problems posed by differences in appearance. This leads to such extremes as the declaration of the child’s status as an autonomous individual, blatantly ignoring the obstacle of biological immaturity. The status distinction between masculine and feminine divides beings that are equally capable of providing for themselves, and thus comparable, at the very least, on the basis of this autonomy. The inferiority separating child from adult, however, is quite final by comparison, based as it is on the material dependence of the smaller creature on the larger. It is precisely regarding seemingly insurmountable barriers of this sort that equality reveals its true genius. It does not deny reality, but rather merely adapts itself to its constraints. Equality’s move consists in a simple interpretative substitution of the ontological regime of difference that had once prevailed.17 The new regime is the inverse of the old, in which difference is de-substantialized at the same time as it is fully embraced. As a result, nothing prevents the adult from recognizing the child he dominates, despite the latter’s complete dependence, as his fellow [semblable], that is, an essentially autonomous individual that is entitled to be treated as such. In vain do the partisans of common sense attempt to remind us of the insurmountable character of the child’s minority. No one denies this fact, but the overwhelming mode of recognition in democratic society constantly demands that we seek to discover ourselves in what is apparently dissimilar from us. It is this imperative that leads us to erect the child as an “equal.” It seems clear going forward that even the boundary between species will not suffice to bring the movement of equality to a halt. We can expect no less than a revolution in the way we understand our relationship with animals, consisting in the strange, quasi-social sense of individual identity that we have already

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 211 come to bestow upon them. This upending of our anthropological concepts—still a relatively quiet one at present, but unquestionably radical—has begun despite the barriers that our common sense normally posits between animals and ourselves. The “humanity” of the animal will thus in all likelihood be at the center of future epistemological revolutions, brought forth out of the long march of equality. These further revolutions, then, will resemble the one that led us to integrate the potential for madness into our definition of man. Here too, the basis for such integration is the recognition of one’s fellow despite all “natural” alterity, as well as the will to bestow the rights of the individual even to those who lack full the full capacities for autonomy. But to what other source than the dynamic of equality, as I have presented it here, can we trace the intellectual revolution that has transformed the status of peoples who were once viewed as “others” par excellence? That is to say, peoples without writing, without the State, without history. This revolution, begun over the course of the last century and by no means finished, has undone the certainty of our superiority as “civilized” men over the “savages,” and brought the so-called “primitive” world onto the same plane as our own. While this world operates according to a system of thought radically at odds with our own, follows a different institutional logic, and adheres to a set of values without equivalent in our society, we now face an absolute imperative to recognize this world as equivalent to the one we live in. We find ourselves compelled to discover actively a way of understanding this world that makes it coherent with the complexity and fullness we find in our own society. If a conscious break with ethnocentrism—that is, the project of identifying all human a priori systems as representing equally valid, absolutely original choices—has ever been conceivable, it is as a result of the disintegration of all traditional appeals to otherness as a result of the unending advance of equality. But it was our society that was the first to have been driven from within its own development to consider the relativity of its own fundamental principles and ideals with respect to those of other societies. Ours is thus the first society of equality. Let us add to this observation, in a Tocquevillian vein, the steady albeit roundabout manner in which our society makes use of even its most committed adversaries in the development of equality. In other words, those who

212 Marcel Gauchet misunderstand or oppose society’s equalization are no less agents in bringing it about. For if we were to constrain ourselves to take both official dissent and popular outcry at their word, we would be unable to see the overall process at work in the West over the last several centuries as inspired by anything other than exclusion, rejection, and isolation of the other. Representatives of this denunciatory discourse consider everything but the social origins of their own supposed insight into this refusal to accept difference. But this sort of denial turns out to be quite an effective instrument of what it denies, for the fundamental tendency of the democratic social movement is the reduction of all possible forms of alterity in human life. It is therefore simply not true that the system of modern attitudes towards human madness is constructed on a new form of exclusion (even if the inclusion of madness into the human sphere has historically been accompanied by de facto exclusion). But it is nonetheless certain that the recent myth of the so-called “Great Confinement” has proved quite effective both in completing a transformation that had long been underway, and in bringing to light the identitarian requirement [exigence identitaire] that had hitherto been obscured. One can rely on the same sort of reasoning in all instances of protest against the supposed exclusion of our social universe, which is inclusionary by its very essence. That is to say, everywhere the “right of difference,” or the right to an equivalent status within difference, is invoked. Such varied cases are all attempts to further advance a process of equalization that turns out upon examination to have been long at work, but whose natural progress is indefinite. But in order to complete the picture, it is indispensible to add that the patent lack of understanding on the part of these so-called radical critics plays directly into the hands of a conservative skepticism, one that finds in their protests the proof of its perennial diagnosis of the “natural” limits of equality. Such limits may well exist, but are of no concern for equality properly understood. Despite their naïve claims to “lucidity,” then, the conservatives are no better informed than the radicals as to the equality’s real movement. The paths that equality has already taken—including those taken by the radicals—in no way exclude others to come. The proper role of equality, furthermore, is to reverse and exceed whatever limitations nature might assign it, to reduce their scope if not to completely dissolve them. It is thus on the plane of the confused mob, which Tocqueville described so well,

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 213 that democracy continues to advance; it is here where all work together in common, “some in spite of themselves, others unwittingly—blind instruments in the hands of God” (I, intro, 6). It is necessary to say a word about God in order to close this chapter on equality. Between the establishment of equality and the exit from the religious universe, there is a direct and intimate linkage. As I have stressed, religion was both the primordial symptom and the functional keystone of the human world organized according to alterity. It was the first and most fundamental manifestation of the other for man: an encounter with the established law and the norms of the community as the products of an infinitely superior power, and thus radically beyond human control. How could it be possible to bring the immense task of the destruction of inequality based on heterogeneity or natural division—the task that we have inherited, witnessed, and continue to carry forward—to a halt before the obstacle of the division between the natural and the supernatural? How could God, the epitome of exteriority and otherness, not fall into its sights? How could we believe for a single instant, as Tocqueville does, in a separation between a political sphere dedicated entirely to human affairs, and a moral sphere dominated not by individual wills, but by an intangible exteriority? The erasure of alterity can do nothing but strive to reach its final conclusions. There is therefore no reason to doubt that it will achieve the complete disintegration of all possible signs of dissimilarity between man and himself, which inevitably includes the idea of a moral regime in which man must submit to an authority that does not derive from himself.18 Religion and equality are therefore two antithetical orders, two radically opposed means of understanding the human condition. They also therefore represent two distinct ages of the human world, the two great periods of universal history. The former has been completed and exhausted, while the latter has hardly begun.

V But it is here that the modern dynamic of equality’s claim to have radically re-founded human society is revealed as somewhat deceptive. We must probe beneath the surface of this establishment of a social universe whose principles, entirely its own, render it wholly self-sufficient. As it contains within itself the principle of a complete

214 Marcel Gauchet society, equality tends to hide from view anything that does not itself derive from equality, above all its own social conditions of emergence. To go even further, equality itself frequently plays an active role in casting a shroud over its fundamental determining factors, obscuring a clear understanding of their true functions. The primary example here is the State, which, in the classical understanding of the superiority of the social whole over each of its members, embodies the will to maintain the unity of the community. It therefore appears as the arena where society’s organic cohesion finds its primary expression. And, crucially, beginning with the advent of equal individuality, in many ways its own creation, the State comes to separate itself from society, simultaneously realizing its full structural power, and rendering it effectively invisible. There is little doubt, then, that in an essential sense Tocqueville’s intuition remains just that it was by means of the State—specifically the singular development that it saw in the West—that the individual was created. The original roots of this phenomenon in Christianity and the struggle between Church and Empire, remain largely to be elucidated.19 It was only with the rise of the sovereign State and the political system we know today as absolutism beginning in the late sixteenth century that a profoundly new form of political power appeared in Europe, whose direct consequence was the creation of an entity no less novel: the detached, self-sufficient individual. It is true that the so-called absolutist State remained within the scope of the traditional role of political institutions, intimately linked to the idea of collective unity ontologically prior to individuals. But at the same time, while this State continued to see itself as fixed to the social body, its innovation was to have broken decisively with the principle of hierarchical continuity. It ceased to occupy the highest place in a long hierarchical chain, in which the relation of each to his direct superior provided a reference to a higher power outside of the concrete hierarchy. The immediate theoretical effect of the collapse of this hierarchical structure was the appearance of the category of the political, standing for a distinct form of power. Its practical effect was the administrative affirmation of the properly political notion of power, to the detriment of all “intermediate” or “natural” forms of power that have their basis in the concrete existence of the individual (e.g., the family, seigneurial relations, corporations). Resting on the implicit principle that the State exercises the same right to rule over

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 215 all of its subjects, no matter what differences hold between them, this affirmation proved an extraordinary advance for equality. As Tocqueville puts it, once it has achieved this radical superiority, at least in its potentiality, “the arm of the government searches each man out individually in the crowd in order to make him bow, isolated from the rest, to the common laws” (II, 3.8, 686). The individual as such was born out of this materialization of a new social power in the form of the modern State. This new State was completely incommensurable with the old hierarchies; in vain would one attempt to describe it merely as the highest rung of a long social ladder. Rather, its relation was direct with each person, and it thus permitted all social agents to conceive of themselves independently of their family, class, and trade distinctions—in other words, in terms of their abstract individuality. There now emerged a sphere of society in which the fact that I was born into this family, that I live in this place, or that I occupy this position, is of no importance. Let us make no mistake that the State became the mirror in which the individual was able to recognize himself in his independence and self-sufficiency, free from the constraints of his belonging to real social groups. The modern State—that is, the State that presents itself as the ultimate center of social life—enabled humanity for the first time to take full responsibility over its own affairs. And despite the common notion of the individual’s enmity towards the State, the latter is at once the originator, protector, and greatest partner of the former. The idea of opposing the individual and the State is therefore nothing short of derogatory; their apparent rivalry is in truth the sign of their mutual cooperation. Wherever the individual appears, there is the State, and it is impossible for one to vanish without the other.20 Beyond this initial phase of gestation, both the individual and the State have each achieved their own form of separation in complementary ways. The separation of the individual reaches its culmination in triumph of the democratic principle that sovereign power emanates from the free will of all the citizens, gathered together on the basis of their autonomy, and thus their prior equality. No longer does the State appear as a link to an order beyond and prior to all human intentions; on the contrary, it is now clearly understood as fundamentally derivative and secondary. The State, it appears, succeeds the individual, emerging from their association on

216 Marcel Gauchet separate ontological grounds. After having itself created the individual, the State becomes a creation of individuals. But here we arrive at the inherent illusion of the egalitarian age: the separation of the State becomes manifest, in the form of its juridical posteriority, only at the same time as its function, its specific logic, becomes invisible. In former times, the State, seen as preceding society, found itself essentially linked to it. As a result, its role was explicitly defined: to hold together a collection of men, to give permanent, visible, and tangible sense to the cohesion of the community. The democratic revolution by no means eliminates this function, but rather, it requires that it be executed in the realm of the unconscious. It becomes impossible to affirm the social whole openly as such. Since it is taken to result from their free contractual consent, the whole can no longer legitimately impose constraints on individual agents. But the dimension of the social whole nonetheless remains indispensable as a latent horizon for individual action. To a certain extent, the institution of the social itself begins to follow the State’s pathways toward practical action. For relieved of its duty to guarantee an order founded in the exterior (viz., in God) in order to unify the human community, the State becomes free to acknowledge a practical form of exteriority that its symbolic function of domination under absolutism had required it to contain or deny. As the State’s domain of prerogatives and responsibilities shifts and spreads, it finds itself in a position to produce a wholly new dimension of social totality. The new totality conceived and taken on by the modern state has the symbolic character, even if unconsciously, of coming from beyond society. A second aspect of the separation of the State inherent in the democratic revolution—a separation on the level of social dynamics rather than that of principles—brings us to the problem of Tocqueville’s The Ancien Régime and the Revolution: to what extent did the State that resulted from the French Revolution carry forward the centralizing State project of the ancien régime? Put in other terms, to what extent was the old form of social control reinforced by the Revolution? The answer, it seems, is to be found in a fundamental change that has taken place in the mode of production of social cohesion. Held apart from the new society it helped to establish, but as cut off from the hierarchical intermediaries as it could afford to appear, the State during the ancien régime was limited in its

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 217 administrative power by the impossibility of pushing its exteriority to its full implications. It was still constrained by both the symbolic task of representing an alien, transcendent will, and the administrative task of maintaining a centuries-old internal order. But there is nothing that prevents a State governed solely by human will, in contrast, from setting itself up completely beyond the social body. The modern State finds in this new exteriority the intellectual means to put into action a new regulatory regime that leaves virtually nothing untouched. The State of visible domination thus gives way to the State of total administration. The State therefore once again takes up its role as the symbolic embodiment of the social, but in an occult manner. It fulfills this symbolic task by producing the feeling—both essential and intangible for the individual—of belonging to a universe where it is possible to exert control over the whole, which becomes at least from a certain point of view comprehensible and malleable. The State’s empirical function as a manager and its symbolic function as the producer of a holistic dimension are therefore inseparable from one another. The symbolic operation finds itself completely embedded in the State’s practical organization, but without for a moment making this relationship visible. It is this dynamic that we have in mind when we speak of the spontaneous erasure of State functions. The necessity that the State responds to most profoundly in its action tends by its very nature and internal development to hide itself from view, as does the original separation that produced this necessity. The superiority of the premodern State was clearly apparent. The new administrative State, in contrast, appears to assimilate itself into society, avoiding obvious symbols of grandeur. It insists on the perfectly ordinary character of the tasks it performs for those it administers, and works hard to cultivate its image in this regard. Such appearances inevitably could not last long before skilled analysts, and Tocqueville remains the most skilled of all in observing this radical point of view of exteriority. His guidance reveals the true direction of State activity that disguises itself with an innocent claim to immanence. Hence Tocqueville’s penetrating force in identifying the tendencies that we have seen reach their full explosive conclusions in the totalitarian State. With every advance of the democratic revolution towards separation of the State, then, both its basis for action in exteriority

218 Marcel Gauchet and the underlying necessity that drives it retreat further into the invisible. This effect is aided by the founding illusion of modern society, namely, that of an original gathering of equal individuals. It thus appears that the political in its entirety was contained in this assembly of citizens, and that all power is merely their delegation for the sole purpose of imposing and executing the general will. Under these conditions, the actual genesis of democracies takes place, at its core, through a tumultuous and teetering conflict between the manifest principles of democracy, and the invisible necessity that is nonetheless deeply felt by social actors as an authoritative constraint. In theory, power arises from society and has no other substance than that which the mechanism of representation confers on it. Practically, however, it is impossible to satisfy ourselves with such a definition. We cannot help but feel the exigencies of our social mechanism that it fails to capture, that is, the real meaning of political power and its uses. It is clear for us today, retrospectively, that this definition does not adequately establish the difference between power and society, its exteriority, not to mention that it fails to account for the role of power as a symbolic founder of the public realm. To take a concrete example from the French experience, this contradiction between democratic principles and the deep necessities of the political order gave rise, in the wake of a Revolution wracked by the impossibility to conceive of discontinuity (between the people and their representatives, between the government and the nation, etc.), to the Bonapartist solution.21 Only if we understand Napoleon’s rule as an attempt to reconcile or synthesize the exteriority reintroduced into the essence of the State with the continuity maintained between the State and the nation, we recognize its success in achieving stability. Power imposed from on high, but that secures the general consent of the people; power that appears to fall from the sky that nonetheless justifies itself by the collective will alone. It was by presenting itself in such a manner that the Bonapartist regime was able to link together the opposite ends of the chain, so to speak, to forcibly make compatible (however crudely or contradictorily) the theoretical sovereignty of the people and the practical division between the State and society. Even the liberal adversaries of the Napoleonic system—Constant, for example—would find themselves forced to rely on the principle of this solution, no matter how critical they were of the tyrannical aspects of Bonaparte’s rule.

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 219

In the long run, the liberal way of understanding the political form that best guarantees the prospects of a “republican constitution in a large country” rests on two basic cruxes: the impossibility of completely removing power from society, and the obligation— difficult to justify, but nonetheless taken as inevitable—of mitigating the representative mechanism with a “preserving power”: in other words, an impenetrable form of difference behind State power, such as that of heredity. And things have in fact played out along these lines. What we have seen has overwhelmingly been the progressive conquest by society of forms of power that had once been seen as exterior or heteronomous [non-choisi] (monarchies, coups d’état, etc.), forms of power whose visible difference allows a robust formulation of the need for representation. As a result, power’s exteriority does not lead to its being dissolved within society. Our experience is thus better characterized as the socialization of the difference of the State, than by the release of State power into the interior of society in strict conformity with the democratic ideal. In other contexts, for example in England, other paths forward have been possible. But the general problem that all emerging democracies have faced, at least in Europe, is one and the same: how to reconcile the explicit notion of democracy—government of the people and for the people, or a power internal to society—with the invisible and insurmountable constraints imposed by the function of the State, which suppose its fundamental division with society? As I have already indicated, the factor that has allowed the system to stabilize itself is the political integration of conflict, the appearance of the internal division of society in the arena where power is contested. The representative mechanism thus ceases to have as its sole task the expression of a governmental will according to the ideal criterion of unanimity. The symbolic recognition of the division between social agents takes on a value of its own.

VI The other fundamental correlate of equality, its major agent in society, is the presence of conflict. One of the factors that have most decisively contributed to the equalization of conditions is the antagonism between classes. Such open opposition between men and groups is a social dimension that is inseparable from the replacement of hierarchy with individuality. Despite all appearances, collective

220 Marcel Gauchet conflict is an integrative force. While hierarchical society took great care to distinguish between ranks, creating what would seem to us to be an infinite source of friction, it left no space in principle for the expression of a conflict reaching down to the very definition of a social order. Each man occupied a pre-defined position within a social whole taken to be eternal; as a result, there was no possibility of a social dispute that could call into question the necessity of the collective unity as a whole. All such disputes were inherently particular: never between master and serf, but only between this master and this serf. One might say that the affirmation of the preeminence of the collective—which implied at each rung of the ladder the preeminence of the superior over his subordinate— juxtaposed different social beings without turning them against one another. The old society, then, linked these beings together precisely by means of what separated them, rendering meaningless the prospect of a confrontation on the basis of this difference. As a difference of being or of nature, this difference as such remained unquestionable. From this point of view, the appearance of a social movement that calls into question the nature of the social organization, however diffusely, and that tends to prefer an opposition between social agents to their mere juxtaposition, is the surest sign of the defeat of the hierarchical principle and the advent of equality. It is a sign that the supposed harmony between the present society and the true foundation of societies in general is debatable to say the least (and to signify this is not the same as merely to seek via reason the legitimacy of the current order). It is a sign, furthermore, in one sense or another, that supposes on an ideal plane its own contradictory figure. The suppression of any and all discussion of the correspondence between the just order and the actual order is one of the fundamental conditions of the maintenance of inequality. For the latter consists in a relation between beings on the basis of complementarity, that is, an attachment created by difference itself. As a result, each being is confined to a separate and special nature that is nonetheless necessary to all the others. There is thus an internal (and not merely consequential) link between equality—understood as a mode of social relations that permits each member to see himself in the other, or as social debate that calls the bond between fellows into question—and social

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 221 conflict, a structurally obligatory result of an encounter under the pretenses of similarity. The moment of radical opposition is necessary for equality. No one proves to be more similar to you than the one whose thinking is most antagonistic to your own, whom you are therefore obliged to recognize as thinking in his unique determinate manner (e.g., according to his particular interests). It is not, as the cliché would suggest, merely an effect of “social physics” (viz., the impossibility of containing a force that exceeds all obstacles one would put in its path) that with the workers’ movement the class struggle has intensified and taken a central place in European societies over the last century. After all, our century has proved that a determined political regime and a dominant ruling class are perfectly capable of reducing otherwise considerable social forces to silence. It is surely not out of impotence that the bourgeoisie, once in power, failed to establish an “industrial despotism,” which was always within their means. The explanation lies beyond mere questions of the balance of social power at a given time in society. It is the intervention of “providence,” the proper genius of equality, that one must take into account: namely, the manifestation of an antagonism between social agents, one that entails a contradiction between the ideas of what society is and what it should be, and crucially, one that stems from real divergences of interest. The development of this antagonism is the extreme but exemplary case of the relation of resemblance established between individuals. It is equality and nothing else that provides the class struggle the legitimacy that has made it what it is today, disarming the age old reflex of our historical mentality to sacralize the notion of unity without discord. There can be no equality without a confrontation with the other. This confrontation is in fact contained in the very logic that presents the other to me as essentially identical, and consequently obliges me to recognize him as my indisputable equal. I arrive at this conclusion, no matter what differences of position may separate us, not by accident, but in keeping with the very order of the world in which we must coexist. The open development and tacit institutionalization of social warfare only became possible insofar as it reached the furthest depths of the inter-individual relation. It was the particular form of this relation engendered by equality that gave such conflict its necessary and partially legitimate expression.

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It becomes of little use to dwell on the decisive contribution of the class struggle to the establishment of equality once we have examined in detail the essential elements of its original manifestation. Historically speaking, one might say that the antagonism between classes has centered on the State as the principal agent of equality. Both sides understood the State as the dynamic factor that places all individuals on the same level, leading to recognize one and other as interlocutors with equal right to judge concerning the highest ends of collective organization (regardless even of competence, the only legitimate criterion for determining social position). All this took place in European societies that nonetheless remained attached to the aristocratic value of eminence and hierarchical notions of severe restrictions on social participation. Is it not in this crucial role of integrating the excluded that the workers’ movement has in fact acted as an agent of equality? And is it not here—that is, in a dynamic quite independent from the movement’s explicit aims—that we must seek to understand its contemporary disappearance from the scene of history? Is it not the case that this movement has largely fulfilled its historical mission, despite the ideological mission of total emancipation—viz., the inclusion as partners in the collective process of all those that had been heretofore reduced to silence and excluded from social decisions—that served as its foundation? And is it not also the case, furthermore, that now that it has more or less achieved its aim that was the most direct consequence of the logic of equality, it has undergone a shift in its raison d’être, in its capacity to create and pursue an alternative vision of society? My suggestion is not that an untempered form of equality has become predominant in our societies, for this is far from our reality. It is, rather, that the workers’ movement has succeeded in establishing representation as an incontestable right. As a result, the specific problem posed by the existence of a proletariat excluded from civil life has been in most tangible senses resolved. In other words, the basic principles of equality have been established everywhere in our society. To be sure, this relative inclusion of the working class does not entail that the political conflict for social recognition must simply evaporate, nor, as Tocqueville dreamed, that it will be replaced by a global consensus regarding the general form of society. This conflict simply changes shape, moves to new

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 223 battlefields, uses different means, and, silently, takes on evolved forms of expression—all this without in the least disrupting the divergence that has taken place in our collective practice regarding the existence and final ends of the human community. To be precise, what we are witnessing today is the detachment of our willed representations of the social from the concrete phenomenon that had traditionally lent them their support. This is, namely, the idea of exploitation: the opposition of interests between those who benefit and those who suffer from the prevailing economic organization. Slowly over the years, the object and stakes of the collective division have shifted towards the social whole itself, or rather, its natural dynamics and underlying values. Closely related to this shift was the transition from an image of a social whole composed of separate groups or blocs, to that of a complex, integrated pyramid, where the divide between managers and workers permeates each level. The old social division, animated by the fact of a system of production and distribution of wealth that by its own inner logic called the justice of its foundations into question, little by little gave rise to a division that is no less profound, one that directly confronts the social whole as such. As a result of this mutation, still in progress, the political debate and the struggle for power will in all likelihood take on a hardly recognizable shape. It is far less likely that they will lose much of their intrinsic radicality, that is, their articulation of the egalitarian process. Through their open opposition, men have come to recognize themselves as the same; it is what divides them that they have found the secret of their common identity. The same logic will continue to determine their path forward, though through different means. This is no longer equality as an indefinite process of creation. The day we are all identical, we will be in perfect agreement, but the more similar we find ourselves to one another, the more immediately we discover our fundamental disagreement. From the point of view of the symbolic production of the social, the appearance of an open antagonism within society reveals the paradox we have seen concerning the State. Once the establishment of the collective sphere begins to occur directly within the social process—in State action or the opposition between groups, rather than via the traditional symbolic subordination to the social whole— the necessity of such an establishment becomes invisible. In one

224 Marcel Gauchet sense, it remains as apparent as ever, directly linked to explicit social practice. But at the same time, this necessity becomes automatic and unconscious, thereby ceasing to appear or be recognized as a necessity. The problem that results is the difficulty of maintaining a space in both our ordinary notions and the rules that govern our institutions for a reality that inescapably constrains our social life, but nonetheless escapes our consciousness. This difficulty has given rise to laborious, fumbling attempts to wed the visible and the invisible, to adjust for better or worse the conscious to the unconscious. For conflict is an essential factor of socialization. It is a supremely efficient mode of integration and cohesion. Capable of calling into question the established social order as a whole, it is a means of bringing individuals together to address common questions, rendering them attentive—often despite themselves—to their belonging to a structured whole that is both comprehensible and transformable, and thus within their control. And in its roundabout way, conflict is a no less stable mechanism than that which had proclaimed a social order willed by gods and ruled by kings. If it violently sets men against one another, disuniting them in appearance, the value of social conflict is that it at the same time affirms a community of belonging more profound than the differences that separate them: a single society, a single set of stakes at the center of their confrontation. Social warfare is therefore in no way similar to warfare between foreign nations. It is rather a means for all parties present to affirm the equal collective rights that they share even with their adversaries. On this point, the lessons of history, and particularly concerning the nationalist bent of revolutionary workers’ movements in general, speak for themselves. To struggle against capitalism is at the same time to claim a possession over the nation as a whole. In contrast to the illusion of proletarians who have nothing in common with their masters, what unites workers with the capitalists within their borders is stronger than what unites the workers of all nations. This became true precisely from the moment when the social antagonism entered the political system, despite the values of unity and unanimity and the myth of the general will, so deeply ingrained in the idea of political representation. As social unity is forged through the visible division between classes, not only does the true function of conflict tend not to make

Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the genesis of democratic societies 225 itself visible, but its deepest reality is in fact in contradiction with the appearances it creates. It should not surprise us, then, that we have integrated conflict into society in perfect ignorance of this reality. The miracle of democracy is the balance it has managed to strike between the explicit discourse of society, and the unconscious material process at work behind it. In this light, the entry of conflict into the political system—via the workers’ parties and all parties based on class— marks a major turning point in the formation of democracy. Not only does it represent the assimilation of a necessary element of society that had long been hidden, but it also reveals the cornerstone that guarantees the coherence of the democratic mechanism as a whole. This political assimilation achieves a crucial synthesis between contradictory and complementary imperatives: the simultaneous correspondence and separation between power and society. As the social struggle for power cuts across the collective, society as a whole is represented in its raw components on the political scene. But at the same time, the difference is sharpened between the immediate social reality (viz., class), and the properly sphere in which it is reflected. Society makes sense of itself through the State, but society, as it is revealed in terms of its autonomous and spontaneous organization between interest groups, is distinct from the State. The principle of the representative sovereignty inherent in equality is thus reconciled with the actual social articulations that derive no less logically from the appearance of a world of equals. It is this reconciliation that constitutes the genesis of democratic societies.

VII Perhaps I should restrict myself to speak only of the birth of European democratic societies, for it is clear that a very different society has developed from the “American starting point.” America’s is a society founded on a chance encounter between ideology and reality, where from the very beginning political practice has stemmed from and corresponded to the abstract principles of democracy: namely, the original freedom and independence of individuals, the sovereignty of the people, representative institutions based in real communities, and the progressive attempt to raise the humblest citizens to the highest level. The development of American society has consisted in the convulsive labor of adjusting these principles, imposed by the nature of a society of individuals from its origins, to the great changes of history. In other words, its task has been to

226 Marcel Gauchet insert the novelty of democracy into the historical continuum, to reconcile the explicit rules of republican government with the socio- historical conditions that made it possible to re-found the political order on the normative base of the sovereignty of equal citizens. The democratic State is a power that emanates wholly, in theory, from the founding will of all the citizens. In practice, however, this State that derives its decisive qualities from the birth and development of equality is secretly reinforced in its role by the triumph of the latter. It thus becomes equally impossible to absorb the State into the social body, as it is to give official sanction to the fact of its detached and autonomous position. Though individuals are equal in principle, the social facts they inherit from the old aristocratic order create an immense distance between statuses. The result has been an explosive contradiction between the defeated norms that nonetheless remain present, and the ideals openly claimed by groups—a contradiction that has given rise to no small amount of struggle to reduce this tension. Hence the rise of the prolonged revolutionary instability and the periodic ruptures that have led our societies towards their relatively stable democracies, as well as the interlacing of the deepening of equality, the growth of the State, and the institutionalization of civil conflict that ultimately gives them their particular character. American society, on the other hand, established more or less on the basis of egalitarianism, was not forced in the same way to mobilize an open conflict between its citizens in order to establish equality as a fact. No more did it have to rely on political authoritarianism in order to maintain this equality. In America, rather, free institutions, in charging citizens with “responsibility for the administration of minor affairs”—in other words, placing the means to govern their immediate environment, such as the ordinary practice of political rights and the use of associations, directly into their hands—provide “in a thousand ways, constant reminders to each and every citizen that he lives in society” (II, 2.4, 592-3). Similarly, a vibrant religious life and the active feeling of community that results from belief have allowed American society to harness its internal elements of cohesion. It has therefore avoided having to produce a collective identity either by means of the sweeping administrative power of the central State, or through a dramatic confrontation of the totality of the citizenry with the scene of power.

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Here again, it is striking how things have evolved since Tocqueville’s time. In particular, certain crucial historical factors and social logics—the absence of which was the foundation of the American situation—have been disarmed to the point that we no longer take them into account. Perhaps America, not having directly inherited them, is currently in the process of generating them internally in its own fashion. Is it inconceivable that little by little, the autonomous cohesion from below achieved by the American form of administration is now being replaced by the irresistible growth of the State? Can we be completely certain that under specific constraints, political debate will not unconsciously come to oppose to one another representations of collective ends that are practically and fundamentally irreconcilable (to say nothing of the profound impact the American workers’ movement has already had in affecting a divergence between parties, though less pronounced and characteristic than in Europe)? And what if, in a certain sense, the future of America is Europe?

NOTES

[1] One could imagine these remarks of his, for example, as having been inspired by the spectacle of our television series and our prophetic titans of the intellect: “One of the distinctive characteristics of democratic centuries is a taste for easy successes and instant gratification. This can be seen in intellectual pursuits as well as other areas of life. Most people who live in ages of equality are bursting with an ambition which, while keen, is also lackadaisical. They want to achieve great success instantaneously, but without great effort. These contradictory instincts lead directly to a search for general ideas, with which they flatter themselves that they can paint vast subjects with little effort and command the attention of the public without difficulty. I do not know, moreover, whether they are wrong to think this way, for their readers are as afraid of delving into things as they are and usually look to works of the mind only for facile pleasure and effortless instruction” (II, 1.3, 498). [Translator’s note: For citations of Democracy in America where Gauchet provides the full citation, I supply the corresponding passage from Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: , 2004). Parenthetical citations refer to the

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volume of Democracy in America, the particular section and chapter heading, and the pagination of the Library of America (LOA) edition. Where these citations are not given, translations of Tocqueville are my own.] [2] [Translator’s note: The French word adéquation presents particular difficulty for the English translation, since the most literal English translation might be a nonexistent neologism such as “adequateness,” viz., the fact of one thing’s being a proper fit for another, or being in harmony with it. It is a term employed frequently in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and of which Gauchet consequently makes great use. Occasionally, Gauchet uses relatively synonymous terms such as coïncidence or correspondence, whose English cognates are less effective than other English synonyms. Depending on the context, then, I render these terms as “agreement,” “correspondence,” “coherence,” “harmony,” or “coincidence,” and include the French in brackets where the cognate is not used.] [3] For Tocqueville, though extremely instructive, America’s place in world history is contingent and places no constraints on it: “I am not at all convinced that [the Americans] have hit upon the only form of government that a democracy may adopt” (I, Intro., 14), [Translator’s note: This footnote appears in the original in parentheses.] [4] [Translator’s note: This quotation, which Gauchet does not cite explicitly, appears in Tocqueville’s 1848 preface to the 12th edition of Democracy in America, which appears in the LOA edition on pages 909-11, note 3.1. I will refer to further citations from this preface parenthetically with the abbreviation of Pref. 1848 and the pagination from the LOA volume.] [5] Tocqueville continues in the second volume: “I am not arguing that a nation is safe from revolution simply because conditions among its people are equal. But I do believe that, whatever institutions such a people may adopt, great revolutions will always be infinitely less violent and far more rare than is generally assumed, and I can easily imagine a political state which, when combined with equality, would make society more stationary than it has ever been in our West” (II, 3.21, 753). [Translator’s note: This citation appears in the main text of the original.] [6] [Translator’s note: Here, I have altered Goldhammer’s translation of the original citation from Tocqueville in order to facilitate continuity with Gauchet’s word choice and intended meaning. Goldhammer renders Tocqueville’s original “Ainsi l’esprit humain n’aperçoit devant lui un champ sans limites” as “Thus boundless opportunity is never what the human spirit sees before it.” The rest of the citation follows Goldhammer.] [7] [Translator’s note: Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, Œuvres Complètes, tome deux, vol. I, p. 208.] [8] My allusion here is to Tocqueville’s Souvenirs, an astounding text in that it confirms the possibility—one that is well known, but always demands to be rediscovered—of the coexistence within a single individual of the most clear-sighted genius and the most systematic obtuseness.

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[9] Alain Bergougnioux and Bernard Manin, La Social-Démocratie ou le compromis (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979). [10] I have developed this point in “Politique et société: La leçon des sauvages,” Textures, n°10-11, 1975. Cf. in particular pp. 67-78, La puissance du sacré. [11] [Translator’s note: Gauchet paraphrases, though he does not cite, these words from the introduction to the first tome of Democracy in America (I, Intro., 6).] [12] [Translator’s note: Here, the closest English equivalents of the French word instauration, “foundation” or “establishment,” do not capture the sense intended by Gauchet when he speaks of Tocqueville’s postulat de l’instauration: namely, that Tocqueville has in mind a complete, or completely new terrain on which to found institutions. Translator’s note] [13] [Here, I follow Goldhammer in rendering le semblable as “fellow” or “fellow man.” The literal meaning of the word semblable is closest to “similar,” “like,” or “bearing a resemblance,” but in the social context intended by Tocqueville and Gauchet it clearly refers to one’s fellow democratic citizens that one recognizes as essentially similar to oneself. Translator’s note] [14] [Translator’s note: I have substituted “otherness” for a more literal rendering such as “the other” in order to avoid confusion, as “the other” has become something of a term of art in Continental philosophy (cf. Kojève, Levinas, etc.). Gauchet uses the term as roughly synonymous with “alterity,” a quality of society rather than the figure of the other as such.] [15] I have analyzed in detail, through a somewhat different approach, the exact nature of the mutation that has been effected from the logic of the compulsory recognition of the other—and of its corollary, a reciprocal separation—to an economy of resemblance (the recognition of the self in the other), or co-penetration, with Gladys Swain in La pratique de l’esprit humain. Cf. in particular the chapter entitled “La société des individus et l’institution de la parole.” [16] This analysis applies as well to Tocqueville’s pessimistic diagnosis of “the position held by the Negro race in the United States” in the first volume of Democracy in America. Here, he takes up the essential vestige of the world of inequality at the heart of an egalitarian society, the locus of its most persistent pathologies. The race question adds to the mere appearance of the inhumanity of the other the real practice of servitude (“this man, who was born in degradation, this alien placed in our midst by servitude – we scarcely recognize him as possessing the common features of humanity.... [W]e come close to regarding him as something intermediate between brute and man” [I, 2.10, 394].), and invests the status of alterity with a visible means of separation (“the immaterial and transitory fact of slavery combines in the most disastrous way with the material and permanent fact of racial difference” [Ibid.]). It is this latter feature, the establishment of inequality as a natural fact, that Tocqueville regards as an insurmountable obstacle:

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In the past there existed among us great inequalities whose origins lay solely in legislation. What could be more factitious than a purely legal inferiority! What more contrary to man’s instincts than permanent differences established between obviously similar people! Yet these differences persisted for centuries. In many places they persist to this day. Everywhere they have left traces which, though they exist only in the mind, time is hardly able to efface. If inequality created solely by the law is so difficult to eradicate, how can one destroy an inequality that seems to possess an immutable basis in nature itself? As for me, when I consider how difficult it is for an aristocratic body of any kind to merge with the mass of the people, and the extreme care that such bodies take to preserve for centuries the artificial barriers that separate them from that mass, I despair of seeing the disappearance of an aristocracy founded on visible and imperishable signs (I, 2.10, 394-5). If inequality rests on differences merely believed to be natural, what is to be done with differences that are actually founded on nature? Modern equality reveals its true face when it collides with barriers of this sort. [17] This regime had manifested itself most concretely in societies where there is a strict division of classes based on age, such that the life of a single human individual appears as a succession of distinct forms of being. [18] This investigation into the process of the dissolution of otherness must also take into account its effects on the social landscape and the organization of temporality. In societies of former times, difference took the form of discontinuities in the visible world: on the one hand, the architecture of daily life, and on the other the materialization of hierarchical power, or the gulf between the world and the beyond, in the form of grand monuments. If, as has often been observed, our society is incapable of erecting authentic monuments in this robust sense, it is because it is a society of equality. As such, it has lost the sense of an order of alterity that it would have once sought to capture in stone. Our world can no longer tolerate images that go against the grain of the homogeneity that exists between equal fellow citizens. In a similar fashion, the tendency of our age is to eliminate all major ruptures in the social experience of time. The fundamental transcendent alterity that had once expressed itself in rituals and festivals has been replaced by the banality of the day-to-day passage of time. In other words, egalitarian temporality is an experience of time devoid of major discontinuities, in which there is no need to distinguish between radically different hierarchical orders. The only original form of alterity that exists in our society consists in the following paradox, more specular than spectacular, and often exacerbated by the media: on the one hand, democratic society assures each of its participants that his fellows are as close to him as possible, in every way similar; but on the other hand, the logic of the collective imaginary literally projects the image of this fellow into another world, and invests it with an essential difference. The modern form of the division of power is the distinction between those who participate in social visibility and those who do not. Equality thereby falls into its own trap to the extent that in creating the figure of the fellow, it situates him in a framework of radical exteriority. Hence the thoroughly political

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problem posed by today’s media, a problem that nonetheless derives from the equality of conditions in Tocqueville’s sense of the term. [19] For an overview of the essential elements of this problem, see the article by Louis Dumont, “La conception moderne de l’individu: Notes sur sa genèse, en relation avec les conceptions de la politique et de l’Etat, à partir du XIIIe siècle,” Esprit (February 1978). [20] A major consequence of this relationship is that the production of equality is necessarily at the same time the production of an important kind of inequality. The State, despite its radically egalitarian effects, cannot help but establish its own distinctions of status and power. It therefore eliminates “natural” dissimilarity in favor of a “functional” division between managers and workers, governors and those they govern. [21] The Revolution’s failure to admit discontinuity, particularly during the Terror, is excellently discussed in Bernard Manin, “Saint-Just, la logique de la Terreur,” Libre, n°6 (1979).

ABSTRACT

When it was originally published in 1980, Gauchet's essay provided an innovative application of Tocqueville to the political world of the late twentieth century. Appearing now for the first time in a complete English translation, Gauchet's reading of Democracy in America still offers a strikingly contemporary portrait of social conflict and personal identity in an age of egalitarianism.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Catherine AUDARD, Department of Philosophy, and Chair of The Forum for European Philosophy, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Elie BARANETS, docteur en science politique de l'Université de Bordeaux.

Michel FORSÉ, Directeur de Recherche au CNRS (CMH, Paris).

Marcel GAUCHET is Director of studies emeritus at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and editor of Le Débat.

Jacob HAMBURGER is a translator and a graduate student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

Simon LANGLOIS, Professeur titulaire, Université Laval, Québec.

Françoise MÉLONIO, Présidente de la Société Tocqueville.

Maxime PARODI (Sciences Po, OFCE).

Thomas PIKETTY, Directeur d'études à l'EHESS et professeur à l'Ecole d'économie de Paris.

Patrick SAVIDAN, Professeur de philosophie politique et éthique, Université Paris-Est (Créteil).

Stephen W. SAWYER, directeur de publication de The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville.

Stuart WHITE, Jesus College, Oxford.