Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Chapter 3: “Beyond the Positivity of the Social: Antagonisms and Hegemony”; Chapter 4: “Hegemony and Radical Democracy.” London: Verso, 2014 (second edition).

 

In their first two chapters, Laclau and Mouffe traced the course of the “Crisis of Marxism,” the embarrassing failure of ‘scientific socialism’ to deliver on its prediction, namely, the proletarian revolution. Increasingly, Marxian thinkers saw the need to make political strategy and choice, even free will, central to socialist politics, to give politics its independence back, refusing to claim that political life merely ‘reflects’ underlying social and economic forces. This led Antonio Gramsci to hold up “hegemony” or ruling as indispensable to socialist politics, just as it has been to political life from the beginning. 

“We now have to construct theoretically the concept of hegemony.” The authors thus follow in the line of modern epistemology, which inclines to make knowledge a matter not so much of perceiving as of making. Leo Strauss (a thinker the authors do not consult) remarks that Machiavelli shoulders aside the metaphor of knowledge as seeing (offered by Plato and the other philosophers of classical antiquity) and the metaphor of knowledge as hearing (as prophecy, hearkening to the voice of God) in favor of the metaphor of knowledge as touching, ‘grasping.’ Unlike seeing and hearing, touching perceives by means of direct contact with the object perceived; simultaneously, it affects that object, lays it open to grasping, shaping, making. Modern theory is no longer ‘merely theoretical.’ Modern, Machiavellian, philosophy thinks of thinking as intervention, construing—not quite the creatio ex nihilo of the Biblical God, who fully knows what he has fully brought into being, but somewhat in the imitation of, and sometimes as a rival to, Him.

As historicists, the authors understand their effort not as a dialectical ascent from the ‘cave’ of convention, lit by fires ‘built’ by its rulers, to sunlit nature, but as a “strategic movement requiring negotiation among mutually contradictory discursive surfaces” (emphasis added). This isn’t quite Socrates’ political philosophy, which does indeed require dialogue, strategically inflected, with fellow citizens inside the political ‘cave,’ because Socrates aims at an ascent to a nature that the authors deprecate. They would stay within the cave, while rearranging and indeed reconstructing the fires and idols within it. The objects within the cave are the only things there are, at least for political purposes. Political life requires speech or articulation, implying “some form of separate presence of the elements which that practice articulates or recomposes.” Those elements, they maintain, “were originally specified as fragments of a lost structural or organic totality.” By “originally,” they mean in the thought of the late eighteenth century, the thought of German Romanticism. The Enlightenment thinkers of the generations immediately preceding them had dismantled, at least to their own satisfaction, the cosmos of Christendom and of the classical philosophers who preceded it, ‘disenchanting’ the world. The Romantics undertook “an eager search” for “a new synthesis,” a reintegration of body and soul, reason and feeling, thought and the senses. Politically, they sought a modern equivalent of the ancient polis in the face of the modern state, with its complex civil societies of many ‘classes,’ increasingly bound together by impersonal, scientistic bureaucracies—a disenchantment, indeed. But any synthesis must be, well, synthetic—artificial, therefore unlike “the natural organic unity peculiar to Greek culture,” as they conceived it. [1] 

As the poet-philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin explained it, Romanticism upheld “two ideals”: reducing human needs to their “natural simplicity” while aspiring to “the highest cultivation” through “the organization which we are able to give ourselves.” Laclau calls the first ideal “articulation,” the second, “mediation.” They describe the distinction as “a nebulous area of ambiguities,” not nearly so clear as the Romantics wanted it to be. Enter Hegel, whose work “is at once the highest moment of German Romanticism” and the first fully post-Enlightenment “reflection on society.” Hegel takes the fragments of the modern world and reunites them in a grand synthesis by means of his historical dialectic—history conceived as the rationally understandable unfolding of the Absolute Spirit. The “cunning of reason…leads separation back to unity,” in “the highest movement of rationalism,” “the moment when it attempts to embrace within the field of reason, without dualisms, the totality of the universe of differences.” Unfortunately, “this synthesis contains all the seeds of its dissolution” because “the rationality of history can be affirmed only at the price of introducing contradiction into the field of reason.” By this, the authors evidently mean that the principle of contradiction, first articulated by Plato’s Socrates in the Republic, states simply that the same thing will not do, or suffer having done to it, opposites, in the same part, at the same time, in relation to the same thing. (So, for example, to say that a child’s top both stands still and moves isn’t a contradiction, since it stays still with respect to its axis while moving with respect to its circumference.) Socrates leaves it at that; if two opinions contradict one another, one or both must be false, insofar as they are contradictory. Hegel would like to treat opinions and indeed everything else as if they were paints of opposite colors; when mixed together, they form a new color. This is “introducing contradiction into the field of reason,” thereby undermining the principle of reasoning itself. [2] In making Hegelian dialectic a supposed science explaining the dialectical unfolding of economic-material relations in society, Marx and his followers imported such “ambiguities and imprecisions” into socialist theory.

Thus, “this area of ambiguity constituted by the discursive uses of ‘dialectics’ is the first that has to be dissolved.” The authors undertake to do so by denying that ‘society’ is a coherent totality, rationally understandable because governed by laws of dialectical development, its elements ultimately to be harmonized as if it were a Hegelian syllogism, the grand concluding synthesis of a set of theses and antitheses. The elements of ‘society’ are “diverse” and “precarious,” contingent on one another, ever-shifting—more Heraclitean than Hegelian. “The social itself has no essence.” Human beings determine the ‘nature’ of these contingent relations. More, they determine the identities of the elements themselves—nowadays, for example, as ‘L,’ ‘G,’ ‘B,’ ‘T,’ ‘Q,’ and on, perhaps, to infinity.  That is, social relations and identities are not “merely ‘cognitive’ or ‘contemplative’ but instead defined by “an articulatory practice which constitutes and organizes social relations.” Today’s complex “industrial societies” see “a growing proliferation” of such relations and identities. Analyzing “articulation” will “give us our starting point for the elaboration of the concept of hegemony.” This requires establishing “the possibility of specifying the elements which enter into the articulatory relation” and then determining the relations among them. 

Before doing so, they offer a critique of some “theoretical discourses” which move in the direction they seek but remain “inhibited by the basic categories of an essentialist discourse”—essentialism being the claim they are most eager to refute because they regard it as limiting egalitarianism, and thereby preventing a radical democratic politics. They begin with the then-famous French Algerian Marxist, Louis Althusser. Althusser rejected both Stalinism and the fashionable ‘Marxist humanism,” which described Marxism as a benign extension of Enlightenment thought. His own “structural Marxism”—holding, against Lenin, that the modern state is not the instrument of the bourgeois class but a framework ensuring the viability of capitalist enterprise—diverged from the current line of the erratic French Communist Party leader, Roger Garaudy, who was promoting ‘socialism with a human face,’ at the moment. For the authors, Althusser’s analysis exhibited an unrealized potential. Althusser demystified the modern state by denying Hegelian immanence; the state isn’t really the instantiation of ‘God,’ that is, the Absolute Spirit. Such concepts as state and society have symbolic meaning but they are not to be taken literally as coherent causes, as drivers of ‘History.’ “Society and social agents lack any essence, and their regularities merely consist of the relative and precarious forms of fixation which accompany the establishment of a certain order.” But Althusser failed to take this idea far enough. He retained an ‘essentialist’ notion of economic life, thereby “laps[ing] into the very defect he criticizes.” He sees that the state, society, and even individuals are not essences, but he takes the economy as “an abstract universal object…which produces concrete effects,” determining the character of society. What Althusser implied but did not realize was a “critique of every type of fixity, through an affirmation of the incomplete, open and politically negotiable character of every identity.” The presence of other identities prevents the “suturing” of my own identity. That is why the working class has not been and can never be what Marx said it would be: the unified and decisive driver of the last stage of history. 

Having established that point, the authors can now offer four definitions of the terms that serves as touchstones for their theory. They define “articulation” as “any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identify is modified as a result of the articulatory practice.” A “discourse” is “the structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice.” A “moment” is a position differentiated by an articulation with a discourse. An “element” is “any difference that is not discursively articulated.” That is, talking about something or someone changes the thing or person talked about. If I say I’m an angel and you say I’m a rotter, both of those claims alter what and who I was before the claims were made. It is not merely an exaggeration to regard this as a theory which gives some credence to the belief that saying something make it so—although only some credence, as the authors will soon explain.

Given these definitions, one must pay careful attention to “the characteristic coherence of the discursive formation” one is examining, the “dimensions and extensions of the discursive,” and the “openness or closure exhibited by” that discursive formation. The coherence one perceives in a discursive formation owes its existence not to “the expression of any underlying principle external to itself,” such as a law of history. ‘Values’ are relative to each other. They “depend closely upon one another.” They can be seen to cohere only in the sense that they coalesce, for a time, a “moment,” in a regular “system of structural positions.”

One must also reject “the distinctive between discursive and non-discursive practices” because “every object is constituted as an object of discourse.” The dichotomy between “the linguistic and behavioral aspects of a social practice” is a false dichotomy. For example, while it is true that an earthquake “is an event that certainly exists,” independently from what anyone wills, the question of whether we think of the earthquake as a natural phenomenon or an act of God “depends on the structuring of a discursive field.” It is in that sense that saying something about an event ‘makes it so.’ Discursive structures, furthermore, are not mental but material structures; speech is an act. Articulation is “a discursive practice [emphasis added] which does not have a plane of constitution prior to, or outside, the dispersion of the articulated elements,” whether that plane is mental or material. “The main consequence of a break with the discursive/extra-discursive dichotomy is the abandonment of the thought/ reality opposition, and hence a major enlargement of the field of those categories which can account for social relations.” Metaphor, for example, no longer takes second place “to a primary, constitutive literality of social relations.” Laclau and Mouffe to this extent may be said to ‘poeticize’ political thought.

They are careful not to take such “moments” too far. They are limited, if not ‘essentially’ defined by exterior factors. Positing something doesn’t entirely make it so. “The transition from the ‘elements,'” the differences not discursively articulated, “to the ‘moments'” in which they are, “is never fully realized”; “there is no identity that can be fully constituted.” “Here we arrive at a decisive point in our argument”: ‘society’ is not “a sutured and self-defined totality.” It has “no single underlying principle fixing—and hence constituting—the whole field of differences.” Identities are never fully fixed within it. “Neither absolute fixity nor absolute nonfixity is possible.” In this, they partake of the ‘postmodernism’ of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida, with their insistence “on the impossibility of fixing ultimate meanings.” There are, however, “partial fixations”; if there were not, “the very flow of differences would be impossible,” and a night in which all cows are black would descend upon us. The authors call these (temporarily) “privileged discursive points of this partial fixation” “nodal points.” Identities float, but they are identities. “The practice,” the act, “of articulation, therefore, consists in the construction of nodal points which partially fix meaning; and the partial character of this fixation proceeds from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity.”

Where does this leave the human individual, the “subject”? Laclau and Mouffe stand with Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger in denying the accounts of both rationalism and empiricism, which view the subject “as an agent both rational and transparent to itself,” unified and homogeneous, and as the “origin and basis of social relations,” as in social contract theory. They regard the critique of rationalism as definitive, although of course, given their own anti-essentialism, this amounts to a tacit admission that the critiques themselves might be redefined. To the authors, subjects are really “subject positions,’ identities that exist in relation to other identities, in many ways unfixed. This is why they reject ‘humanist’ Marxism. “What is important is to try to show how ‘Man’ has been produced in modern times, how the ‘human’ subject—that is, the bearer of a human identity without distinctions—appears in certain religious discourse’s, is embodied in juridical practices and is diversely constructed in other spheres.” ‘Man,’ as produced or constructed, is indeed “a fundamental nodal point from which it has been possible to proceed, since the eighteenth century, to the ‘humanization’ of a number of social practices,” but today it must be understood as only a nodal point, lest a presumption of fixity interfere with the project of radical democracy. The same goes for feminism. It, too, must avoid a rigid dichotomy of feminine and masculine, both ‘essentialized’ and thus distorted. And, obviously, the familiar Marxist dichotomy of capitalists and proletarians brings distortions in its wake, which is why Marx’s supposedly scientific predictions never came true. Nodal positions are established politically, not by the immanent nature or historicity of subjects. “Neither the political identity nor the economic identity of the agents crystallizes as differential moment of unified discourse, and…the relation between them is the precarious unity of a tension.” Human subjects do not give meaning to themselves or anything else, since “the subjectivity of the agent is penetrated by the same precariousness and absence of suture apparent at any other point of the discursive totality of which it is part.” Articulation is hegemonic, a political act of agents interacting with one another. 

Social antagonisms are not the same as physical collisions, although they can lead to physical collisions. And social antagonisms are not, strictly speaking, contradictions, which in logic amount to the juxtaposition of two entirely opposite ideas, as in the impossibility, ‘blackwhite.’ A social antagonism arises when “the presence of the ‘Other’ prevents me from being totally myself.” For example, “it is because a peasant cannot be a peasant that an antagonism exists with the landowner expelling him from his land.” This renders the peasant’s ‘being a peasant’ precarious, partial, so long as the landowner can kick him out. Thus, “antagonism, far from being an objective relation,” like a physical collision or a logical contradiction, “is a relation where in the limits of every objectivity are shown.” The landowner may be able to dispossess the peasant, and indeed the peasant, or more likely a group of peasants, might be able to dispossess the landowner. “The limit of the social must be given within the social itself as something subverting it, destroying its ambition to constitute a full presence.” The social is no more fully constituted than the persons who interact within it. At the same time, antagonism also has its limits in the continued existence of the antagonists. The dispossessed peasant or landlord need not be destroyed; new social relations may coalesce. 

Considered politically, antagonism takes place not so much among individuals as among social groups. The authors give the example of the antagonism between peasant culture and urban culture. As “not one but two societies” within a political community, a “millenarian rebellion” may occur—a “fierce, total and indiscriminate” assault on the city. “The only alternative is massive emigration towards another region in order to set up the City of God, totally isolated from the corruption of the world.” On the more mundane level, Benjamin Disrael considered the “two nations” in England, the poor and the wealthy; another example is the Continental antagonism between the old, throne-and-altar monarchies and the regimes of popular sovereignty. As a statesman, Disraeli sought to unite the two nations into one, avoiding revolution, by extending voting rights to the working classes and meeting some of the social demands of the workers. Laclau and Mouffe call this policy of expanding and ‘complexifying’ the political sphere the “logic of difference.” As complexity increases, the demands of one group antagonistic to the existing regime might not collaborate with another group just as antagonistic, but on different grounds. For example, feminists might not collaborate with racial minorities. Such struggles are democratic but they are not “popular” in the sense that they consist of ‘the people, united.’ 

How, then, to achieve democratic “hegemony” or rule? The Marxist claim that a socioeconomic class could be the agent to achieve this has failed, thanks to “the generalized crisis of social identities” that democratic social complexity itself has caused. But if “nodal points” are possible to establish, then Gramsci’s notion of social antagonism as a “war of position” becomes salient, if imperfect. He is right to think that a popular identity needs to be constructed, cannot be assumed to exist as a precondition of antagonism. He is wrong to think that there is one main antagonism, the working class against the capitalists. “We will therefore speak of democratic struggles,” not the grand “popular” one, a plurality of struggles. As the authors put it in their somewhat tiresome jargon, “The hegemonic dimension of politics only expands as the open, non-sutured character of the social increases.” In a complex, modern society, “there can be a variety of hegemonic nodal points,” not just one (e.g., ‘capitalism’). “Insofar as the social is an infinitude not reducible to any underlying unitary principle, the mere idea of a center of the social has no meaning at all.” This plurality must become “the starting point” of social-democratic analysis. This disposes of ‘totalitarian’ forms of Marxism. The Soviet or Chinese Communist attempts to harmonize the entirety of a modern society into one coherent thing is impossible. Instead, the various social groups, understanding their own precariousness in relation to all the others, will need at times to cooperate and resist all the others, with no supreme Leader or Party to ‘guide’ them. “No hegemonic logic can account for the totality of the social and constitute its center, for in that case a new suture would have been produced and the very concept of hegemony would have eliminated itself.” To rule means to rule over someone or some thing, but ‘totalitarianism’ absorbs all into one, an impossibility. However, “it would be equally wrong to propose as an alternative, either pluralism or the total diffusion of power within the social, as this would blind the analysis to the presence of nodal points and to the partial concentrations of power existing in every concrete social formation.” No one “logic” can account for such complexity. This means that “a ‘scientific’ approach attempting to determine the ‘essence’ of the social would, in actual fact, be the height of utopianism.” Marx and his followers have decried the folly of ‘utopian socialism,’ but they have fallen into it from another angle.

Democracy arose in the first half of the nineteenth century, socialism in the second half. As a result, a unified popular pole, “far from becoming more simple” to obtain, as Marx predicted, “grew increasingly difficult” to obtain “as the growing complexity and institutionalization of capitalist society” led to “the corporatization and separation of those sectors which should ideally have been united as ‘the people.'” Politics saw “the very identity of the forces in struggle” subjected to “constant shifts,” calling for “an incessant process of redefinition.” Mere economic-class antagonism “is incapable of dividing the totality of the social body into two antagonistic camps, of reproducing itself automatically as a line of demarcation in the political sphere.” For “radical democracy” to form, a “radically libertarian and more ambitious” politics will be needed. 

Even granting this, why is radical democracy good? In search of an answer, one must turn to the authors’ discussion of “the democratic revolution.”

On the grounds (as it were) from their rejection of anti-essentialism, they rule out not only history but nature as a source of right. Admittedly, with “the anthropological assumption of a ‘human nature’ and of a unified subject,” one can reject at least some forms of subordination, namely, those that stunt human nature itself. In rejecting “this essentialist perspective,” they need another approach. They begin by distinguishing subordination from oppression, and both of these from domination. A relation of subordination is one in which one “agent is subjected to the decisions of another”—an employee to an employer, a child to a parent. A relation of oppression is one in which subordination has sparked antagonism. A relation of domination is one in which subordination is “considered as illegitimate from the perspective, or in the judgment, of a social agent external to” the subordinate and his subordinator. So, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft vindicated the rights of women by transferring the more generally accepted principle of “political equality between citizens”—a social agent external to men and women as such—to “the field of equality between the sexes.” Citing Tocqueville, Laclau and Mouffe take his democratic revolution, “the end of a society of a hierarchic and inegalitarians type, ruled by a theological-political logic in which the social order had its foundation in divine will,” society’s replacement of that with the “affirmation of the absolute power of its people,” as morally dispositive. The argument of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, an argument from natural right, derives its authority not from the substance of its claims but from its “establishment of a new legitimacy,” the “invention of democratic culture,” by means of “provid[ing] the discursive conditions which made it possible to propose the different forms of inequality as illegitimate and anti-natural, and thus mak[ing] them equivalent as forms of oppression” (emphasis added). That is, saying it made it so, once French society assented. 

This democratizing tendency in modern societies, beginning in the political realm, argued in the realm of male-female relations by Wollstonecraft, eventually influenced discourses on economic inequality, with socialists “putting in question” the “forms of subordination” seen in the workplace and “demanding new rights” for the workers. This is as Tocqueville predicted, when he wrote, “It is impossible to believe that equality will not finally penetrate as much into the political world as into other domains. It is not possible to conceive of men as eternally unequal among themselves on one point, and equal on others; at a certain moment, they will come to be equal on all points.” Tocqueville worried about that, not because he sought to defend the privileges of the titled ‘aristocracy’ to which he belonged but because the effort to achieve thoroughgoing equality in all spheres of human life might well put an end to liberty, the precondition of moral conduct, either under a Napoleonic despotism or under a softer, bureaucratic despotism. To their credit, Laclau and Mouffe share some of his caution, humanity having seen tyrannies far worse than anything Napoleon attempted, and bureaucracies at least as stultifying as those Tocqueville envisioned. Nevertheless, as socialists, they remain fixated on ‘capitalist’ oppression. Indeed, “a good proportion of the new political subjects have been constituted through their antagonistic relationship to recent forms of subordination, derived from the implanting and expansion of capitalist relations of production and the growing intervention of the State.” These include “the waste of natural resources, the pollution and destruction of the environment,” the ills of urbanization, and even the attempts to meliorate social equality by means of “the Keynesian Welfare State,” which “has been accompanied by a growing bureaucratization” of State practices, which is “one of the fundamental sources of inequalities and conflicts.” Indeed, “expansion of capitalist relations of production and of the new bureaucratic-state forms” have proven “mutually reinforcing” in many instances. “Given the bureaucratic character of State intervention, this creation of ‘public spaces’ is carried out not in the form of a true democratization, but through the imposition of new forms of subordination,” resulting in “numerous struggles…against bureaucratic forms of State power.” By this (and again consistent with their socialism) the authors mean not the resistance of small businesses against public and corporate bureaucracies but rather such phenomena as the “Welfare Rights Movement” in the United States, whereby clients of the Welfare State demand more benefits, more transfers of wealth from the upper and middle classes to themselves, in the name of social equality. Once again, “the categories of ‘justice,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘equality’ have been redefined and liberal-democratic discourse has been profoundly modified by this broadening of the sphere of rights.” 

On the level of ‘culture,’ the “new mass culture” has “profoundly shake[en] traditional identities,” as it “contains powerful elements for the subversion of inequalities.” In particular, the young “constitute a new axis for the emergence of antagonisms,” since the they are simultaneously advertised to, treated as consumers, and thereby enticed to spend money they don’t have, “stimulat[ing] them to seek a financial autonomy that society is in no condition to give them.” This generates antagonism, antagonism further exacerbated by the erosion of family bonds, and especially parental authority, which grates against egalitarian sentiment. Liberty, now reconceived as ‘diversity,’ not only disoriented parents and the bourgeoisie but the left, especially the ‘Old Left’ of Marxism, ill-disposed to an emerging “radical and plural democracy.” “Pluralism is radical only to the extent that each term of this plurality of identities finds within itself the principle of its own validity, without this having to be sought in a transcendent of underlying positive ground for the hierarchy of meaning of them all and the source and guarantee of their legitimacy.” Radical pluralism is democratic insofar as its self-constituting, self-validating character has been universalized; everyone gets to do it. At the same time, radical democracy, precisely because it has no foundation below it, no essence within it, and no standard above it, teeters on precarity, even more than previous societies have done.

The authors identify the main threat to a democratic outcome as “neo-liberalism,” initiated by Friedrich von Hayek’s “violent attack on the interventionist State and the various forms of economic planning that were being implemented” in the mid-1940s, when he published The Road to Serfdom. Although Hayek argues that the Welfare State will cause “the power of the law” to decline, the power of bureaucracy to increase, Laclau and Mouffe are having none of that. “In reality”—that is to say, in terms of their own agenda within agon of the Left in the precarious democratic world—the issue “is the very articulation between liberalism and democracy which was performed during the course of the nineteenth century,” the extension of asserted democratic rights from the political to the economic sphere. Hayek’s “central political objective,” individual liberty, ought to outweigh egalitarianism. “All State intervention” in the name of “social or redistributive justice,” “except in connection with matters that cannot be regulated through the market, is considered as an attack on individual liberty.” Oddly, they associate Hayek with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who aimed to “remove public decisions more and more from political control and to make them the exclusive responsibility of experts”—a bureaucratizing move Hayek would have detested. Hayek criticized democratic political control of the economy, but had no objection to political engagement in any decent regime, so long as it permitted individual liberty, very much including property ownership. This (very likely deliberate) confusion enables the authors to claim that neoliberals propose “a new definition of democracy which in fact would serve to legitimize a regime in which political participation might be virtually non-existent.”

They are surely right to contend that “the form in which liberty, equality, democracy and justice are defined at the level of political philosophy may have important consequences at a variety of other levels of discourse, and contribute decisively to shaping the common sense of the masses” in “the constitution of a hegemonic left alternative” to neo-liberalism. At this point, they admit that the plausibility of neo-liberal ideas in contemporary politics owes much “to the growing bureaucratization of social relations.” To refute it, one must challenge “possessive individualism,” the claim that “the rights of individuals,” including property rights, exist “before society, and often in opposition to it.” However, to defend pre-social, pre-political individual rights, neo-liberals understand what Locke, the American Founders, and many other earlier thinkers and statesmen now called ‘liberals’ understood: that government is necessary to secure those rights. Since they reject scientistic-bureaucratic government, the authors argue, neo-liberals recur to “a set of themes from conservative philosophy,” particularly conservatism’s “profoundly anti-egalitarian cultural and social traditionalism.” This is the real agenda; neo-liberals fly “under the cover” of liberty, but in fact only intend to “legitimate inequalities and restore the hierarchical relations which the struggles of previous decades had destroyed.” They offer no proof of this charge; given the intended audience of their book, they don’t need one.

In face of this threat, acknowledging the precarity of all hegemonic arrangements in democracies, Laclau and Mouffe declare that “the task of the Left therefore cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology,” as Marxists do, “but on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction of a radical and plural democracy.” As they have previously (and indeed repeatedly) remarked, there are no natural rights inherent in individuals because “the meaning of the liberal discourse on individual rights is not definitely fixed.” “The radical changes which are necessary in the political imaginary of the Left, if it wishes to succeed in [ahem!] founding a political practice fully located in the field of the democratic revolution and conscious of the depth and variety of the hegemonic articulations which the present conjuncture requires” must begin with overcoming “the fundamental obstacle” to that revolution, namely, any “essentialist apriorism” that “sutures” the social. From there, the Left will need to reject its own inclination to establish “privileged points”; for Marxism, this was the claim that socioeconomic classes drive ‘history.’ This error has led to the political ruinous claim that “the expansion of the role of the State is the panacea for all problems,” and that a technocratic economism will serve as the basis for State action against capitalist inequality. More, the “classic concept of ‘revolution'” as propounded and practiced by the Jacobins, animated by essentialist apriorism and instantiated in statism, must also be abandoned. This concept “implied the foundational character of the revolutionary act,” but this perspective “is incompatible with the plurality and the opening which a radical democracy requires.” Revolution should be reconceived as process. The Left should encourage more autonomous “spheres of struggle and the multiplication of political spaces,” against the “concentration of power and knowledge that classic Jacobinism and its different social variants imply.” In this effort, socialism will become not the but “one of the components of a project for radical democracy.” Socialism is indeed “necessary to put an end to capitalist relations of production, which are at the root of numerous relations of subordination,” but it is no more than that. Socialists need to understand that, accept it, and act accordingly.

To say this, however, raises “a whole set of new problems.” Where and in what form shall Leftists determine the antagonisms they wish to foster in the ever-shifting terrain of social and political activity? To what extent can pluralism comport with the commonalities of “equivalences” among the many social actors? Can this neo-Heraclitean conception of human life really lend itself to “define a hegemonic project,” or is it a mere recipe for anarchism?

In terms of “equivalences,” Leftists should regard them as “family resemblances” (a phrase borrowed from Wittgenstein), not entities lending themselves to systematic unity. For example, feminists should think of the State as “an important means for effecting an advance, frequently against civil society in legislation which combats sexism”—the supposed ‘patriarchy’ of the family, pay differentials, and so on. Fortunately, the vast modern State itself “is not a homogeneous medium…but an uneven set of branches and functions,” whose internal conflicts may be turned toward egalitarianism in civil society. “Neither the State nor civil society is the surface of emergence of democratic antagonisms.” The same goes for political parties and (although they do not yet see it) business corporations, which can also be induced to deploy power in the service of egalitarian claims. “What we are witnessing is a politicization far more radical than any we have known in the past, because it tends to dissolve the distinction between the public and the private, not in terms of the encroachment on the private by a unified public space, but in terms of a proliferation of radically new and different political spaces.” This thoroughgoing politicization will, the authors hope, prevent anarchy, since disputes will center on ruling, albeit in the fluid manner they envision, not on not-ruling.

This is where Laclau and Mouffe define the newest ‘New Left’ project, which is in some respects a reprise of the Popular Front strategy of the 1930s, without the ‘essentialist’ Marxist assumptions that made the Communist Party such an untrustworthy partner in that movement. The Left must expand the “chains of equivalence” to include “anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-capitalism.” Notice that these will indeed be “chains” of equivalence, “symbols of a unique and indivisible struggle.” Yet, somehow, “each of these struggles retains its differential specificity with respect to the others.” There is no contradiction, they claim, so long as no one group on the Left seeks preeminence over the others—the working class over feminists and civil rights advocates, as seen in the past. No one group serves as the foundation of the struggle; instead, each mixes its efforts with the others, limiting the others while strengthening the Left as a whole against the Right. “From this we can deduce a basic precondition for a radically libertarian conception of politics: the refusal to dominate—intellectually or politically—every presumed ‘ultimate foundation’ of the social.” If the Left fails in this, the familiar “Rousseauian paradox”—that “men should be obliged to be free”—must triumph, and they are back to some new version of Bolshevism. Here, a Marxian phrase actually helps: “The free development of each should be the condition for the free development of all.” Marx is referring not to socialism but to the end of history, to communism. Laclau and Mouffe want communism without state socialism, without the dictatorship of the proletariat or of anyone else.

Admittedly, “this total equivalence never exists,” given the precariousness and “unevenness” of the social. Equivalence, “the demand for equality,” ought always to be “balanced by the demand for liberty”—a “radical and plural democracy.” This tension need not descend into contradiction because reality, including human individuals, is fluid. The appropriate defense against bureaucratic excesses on the Left is not “to return purely and simply to the defense of ‘bourgeois’ individualism,” as neo-liberals want to do. Rather, we need “the production of another individual, an individual who is no longer constructed out of the matrix of possessive individualism” along the lines of “‘natural’ rights prior to society.” Such natural rights conduce to claims of private rights. Instead, individual rights ought to be defined “only in the context of social relations which determine subject positions,” rights “which involve other subjects who participate in the same social elation,” rights which “can only be exercised collectively,” in accordance with a “social theory [that] defends the right of the social agent to equality and to participation as a producer and not only as a citizen.”

But what about the chain of democratic equivalences”? The authors recognize a threat in it. “Paradoxically,” this “very logic of openness and of the democratic subversion of differences” brings with it “the possibility of a closure far more radical than in the past.” Once all “traditional systems” are broken, now that “indeterminacy and ambiguity turn more elements of society into ‘floating signifiers,’ the possibility arises of attempting to institute a center which radically eliminates the logic of autonomy and reconstitutes around itself the totality of the social body.” That is, if there are no standards exterior to society to which citizens can appeal—no divine or natural laws, not even the supposed laws of history—then “the logic of totalitarianism” might recur, “an attempt to re-establish the unity which democracy has shattered between the loci of power, law and knowledge.” To avoid this, and to avoid the opposite pole of anarchy, “an implosion of the social and an absence of any common point of reference,” the “experience of democracy should consist of the recognition of the multiplicity of social logics along with the necessity of their articulation,” an articulation “constantly recreated and renegotiated,” with “no final point at which a balance will be definitively achieved.” Partial social stability can prevail by undertaking “the search for a point of equilibrium between a maximum advance for the democratic revolution in a broad range of spheres, and the capacity for the hegemonic direction and positive reconstruction of these spheres on the part of subordinated groups.” Leftist utopianism remains where it should be, in the quite different minds of those who seek the elimination of their own subordinate positions in society, but at the same time think seriously about what the conditions of the equality they aspire to should be. These many utopias should never be allowed to coalesce into one, as that would result in a reprise of totalitarianism. This limited utopianism will avoid the other danger, the mere pragmatism of “reformers without a project.”

Thus, for the newest New Left, “the epistemological niche from which ‘universal’ classes and subjects spoke has been eradicated, and it has been replaced by a polyphony of voices, each of which constructs its own irreducible discursive identity.” An egalitarian Heracliteanism reigns over all, preventing any one ruler from destroying either equality or liberty. Latterly, their attempt has been encapsulated in the slogan, ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’—a reformulation of the now somewhat long-in-the-tooth New Left ambition to maximize incommensurables. In abandoning the modernist epistemology of ‘grasping,’ they recur to the Biblical epistemology of hearing—their “polyphony of voices”—replacing the God of the Bible with the lesser god of Vox Populi.

 

Notes

1. That Greek philosophers themselves did not understand the polis to be simply natural or “organic” may be seen in the Platonic-Socratic metaphor of the cave and throughout Aristotle’s Politics.
2. The authors identify the philosopher who formulated this critique of Hegel as the German Aristotelian, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg in his 1840 book, Logische Untersuchungen. It is fair to say that they do not follow Trendelenburg into Aristotelian ethics or politics.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Second edition. London: Verso, 2014.

 

First published in 1985, reissued with a new preface a decade after the collapse of the Soviet empire derailed Marxist ‘praxis’ in Central and Eastern Europe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy has become a touchstone for the newer iterations of the New Left, the Left that departed from many if not all of the tenets of ‘scientific socialism’ as formulated by Marx and Engels, and especially as it had been propounded by V. I. Lenin. Precisely because Marxism attempts to unify theory and practice, the initial success of Leninist Marxism in Russia and its failure elsewhere (notably in Germany), funneled socialists into Marxism-Leninism. Prior to the Bolshevik revolution, the authors contend, Marxian thought had become “increasingly diversified,” but after it this “creative process” was derailed. Initially, the divergent voice of Antonio Gramsci, raised in the 1920s, received no fair hearing from mainstream socialists. This is no longer so, as “the problems of a globalized and information-ruled society are unthinkable” within the frameworks of either the idealist-Hegelian or the Marxist-materialist versions of historicism.

Marxist materialism, especially, centered on socioeconomic classes as the drivers of ‘history,’ i.e., the course of human events. Socioeconomic classes are sub-political groupings. Laclau and Mouffe vindicate a political understanding of socialism, and of modernity generally. Modern political life, even in commercial republics, isn’t simply dominated by economics and by the ‘capitalists’ who enjoy considerable sway within them. Politics has its own integrity as an independent variable, as it were, in the course of events, influenced by but also influencing social and economic life. Marxism additionally suffers from an epistemological deficiency, “the illusion of immediacy.” That is, its proponents assume that reality presents itself to our minds, through our senses, very much as it is, with little regard to the filters imposed by language and other ‘cultural’ phenomena. This is reminiscent of Socrates’ criticisms of the Greek natural philosophers and his turn to political philosophy, but Laclau and Mouffe are Socratic in no other way. They cite such philosophers as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, the structuralists, and the deconstructionists as the relevant critics of epistemological “immediacy.”  Behind them all is Nietzsche with his doctrine of the will to power, oriented as it is not to seeking truth but to enhancing life, very much in opposition to Socratic inquiry. Nietzsche follows Machiavelli and subsequent ‘moderns,’ who reduce politics to power, a motif the New Left has continued. Laclau and Mouffe borrow the term ‘hegemony’ from Gramsci; for him, the heart of ‘politics’ is power, not only physical but ‘cultural’—the power intellectual frameworks exert upon our thoughts, and through thoughts our actions. To understand politics as hegemony “retriev[es] an act of political institution that finds its source and motivation nowhere but in itself.” Human beings can choose their political actions; those actions are “contingent,” not simply determined by sub-political forces that drive it on. “This privileging of the political moment in the structuration of society is an essential aspect of our approach.” If politics is to some important degree self-determining, one of the most important ‘scientific’ predictions of Marxism-Leninism cannot be true; there can be no “withering away of the state,” as Lenin claims in The State and Revolution. 

Further, the fundamental cause of ‘history,’ the famous dialectic of class conflict Marx posits, cannot account for what Laclau and Mouffe call “social antagonism.” “Antagonisms are not objective relations,” susceptible to scientific explanation and prediction, “but relations that reveal the limits of all objectivity,” limits seen precisely in the importance of free choice, of ‘subjectivity,’ in class conflict and politics alike. “There is no ‘cunning of reason'”—whether guided by Hegel’s Absolute Spirit or Marx’s dialectical materialism—which “would realize itself through antagonistic relations.” Social antagonism is quite real, and political conflict registers that reality, but it doesn’t work the way Marx said it did, and it therefore should not issue in a regime of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’—in practice the dictatorship of a political party, often itself dictated to by a tyrant. The authors favor not tyranny or oligarchy but a regime of “democratic socialism.” It will remain to be seen if that is not itself a contradiction in terms.

However that may be, the authors wish “that the collapse of the Soviet model would have given a renewed impetus to democratic socialist parties,” instead of discrediting socialism itself and empowering “neo-liberalism,” as seen in the administrations of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. As of the turn of this century, socialists themselves had retreated, “redefining themselves euphemistically as ‘center-left'” parties. Consistent with their political approach, Laclau and Mouffe demand regime change, revolution, “the establishment of a new hegemony,” a new power structure. “No doubt it is a good thing that the Left has finally come to terms with the importance of pluralism and of liberal-democratic institutions, but the problem is that this has been accompanied by the mistaken belief that it meant abandoning any attempt at transforming the present hegemonic order.” What is needed, then, is a regime of “liberty and equality” that extends “the democratic struggles for equality and liberty to a wider range of social relations,” as Left elaborates “a credible alternative to the neo-liberal order, instead of simply trying to manage it in a more humane way.” This will require, among other things redefining the adversaries of the Left. There is no such thing as “a non-exclusive public sphere of rational argument,” since regimes always define what is just and what is unjust, including and excluding as they go. “We will never be able to leave our particularities completely aside in order to act in accordance with our rational self.” But socialists should nonetheless strive to approximate “a harmony that we cannot attain” in practice. More egalitarian distribution of economic goods, yes; more egalitarian distribution of social ‘recognition’ (older writers would have said, ‘honors’), yes to that, as well. “Our motto is: ‘Back to the hegemonic struggle,”” the regime struggle that socialist preoccupation with sub-political causation and ’causes’ had obscured.

In constituting a new socialist strategy, socialist organizers have a much more complex task than that envisioned by Marxists. Feminism, ethnic and national ‘movements,’ demands for ‘gay rights,’ environmentalism, anti-nuclear protest, struggles “in countries on the capitalist periphery,” all “imply an extension of social conflictuality [sic] to a wide range of areas, which creates the potential, but no more than the potential, for an advance towards more freed, democratic and egalitarian societies.” The proletariat can no longer serve as the central organizing point for socialists, as it now stands exposed as “the illusory prospect of a perfectly unitary and homogeneous collective will that will render pointless the moment of politics.” Today’s social struggles are too “plural and multifarious” to make such a simplistic conception of society plausible in theory or useful in practice. ‘History’ as conceived by the Left, ‘Society’ as conceived by the Left, as intellectually comprehensible and practically ruled as if rational and transparent, susceptible to “a founding act of a political character,” a ‘social contract,’ can no longer be sustained. “Today, the Let is witnessing the final act of the dissolution of that Jacobin imaginary.” Marxism’s “monist aspiration to capture with its categories the essence or underlying meaning of History,” seen in its bestowal of an “ontologically privileged position of a ‘universal class,'” the proletariat, must be abandoned. But Marxism in its several permutations formulated between the death of Engels and the ascendancy of Lenin must be understood, as its theorists at that time already understood many of the problems inherent in the original theory. As early as the 1890s, a century before the failure of the Marxist-Leninist regimes and indeed some two decades before the founding of the Soviet Union, these theorists understood that Marxism was in crisis.

The key concept of hegemony arose as the response to that crisis—again, well before Gramsci, although he would articulate it better than his predecessors. The authors begin with Rosa Luxemburg and her book, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions. Published in 1906, it addressed the violent labor conflicts that has wracked Europe for the past ten years or more. Luxemburg believed the mass strike a means of uniting the working class on the road to revolution in Europe. She therefore needed to connect economic struggle with political struggle. In Germany, unlike Russia, the working class was fragmented, thanks to parliamentarism, which reflects the ordinary “course of bourgeois society,” in which “the economic struggle is split into a multitude of individual struggles in every undertaking and dissolved in every branch of production.” This fragmentation could only be “overcome in a revolutionary atmosphere.” Social democrats, she wrote, must show the proletariat “the inevitable advent of this revolutionary period, the inner social factors making for it and the political consequences of it.” The workers will then see the part their actions take in the larger “struggle against the system,” “the revolutionary process as a whole.” The spontaneous, contingent character of these events (it contemporary equivalent being the ‘flash mob’) exceeds the control or planning of trade union or political ‘leaders,’ many of whom are already compromised by the commercial and parliamentary life within the Kaiser Reich. 

Laclau and Mouffe applaud Luxemburg’s attempt to link economic and political struggle. But she failed to understand that economic and class struggles do not automatically cohere. Economic class partakes of necessity; spontaneous political action partakes of freedom. Each is “the purely negative reverse of the other.” Political subjects do not necessarily act in their economic-class interests, and the failure to see that this blinds socialists who are too committed to the determinist theory orthodox Marxism. The struggles against imperialism, the fights against fascism, the complexity of meeting the challenges posed by bourgeois reforms intended to perpetuate capitalism—all of these reveal not determinism but indeterminacy. All raise questions that require “a socialist answer in a politico-discursive universe that has witnessed a withdrawal of the category of ‘necessity’ to the horizon of the social.” 

Luxemburg was reacting to the passive, more or less apolitical democratic socialism of Karl Kautsky. If ‘History’ marches on, whatever human beings say or do, Kautsky, writing in the 1890s, assumed that socialists need only wait, propagandizing and organizing, reinforcing working-class identities without much political action at all. As he put it, “Our task is not to organize the revolution but to organize ourselves for the revolution; not to make the revolution but to take advantage of it.” In this “war of attrition,” allies beyond the working class are useless, or even worse than useless, because they must, as per Marx, become increasingly ‘reactionary’ as the revolutionary crisis nears. Capitalism will change and eventually collapse, “but this change is nothing more than the unfolding of its endogenous tendencies and contradictions.” 

But by the end of the decade, the Czech parliamentarian Thomas Masaryk called Kautsky’s complacency into question, announcing “the crisis of Marxism.” “This crisis,” the authors write, “which served as the background to all Marxist debates from the turn of the century until the war, seems to have been dominated by two basic moments: the new awareness of an opacity of the social, of the complexities and resistances of an increasingly organized capitalism; and the fragmentation of the different positions of social agents, which, according to the classical [Marxist] paradigm should have been united.” “Marxism finally lost its innocence at that time.” Kautsky himself attempted to ‘save’ Marxism, admitting that trade unionism alone could not “guarantee either the unity or the socialist determination of the working class.” These ends could only be achieved in a frankly political struggle, subordinate trade unions to the socialist party. Nonetheless, the part should maintain its own unity, and thereby working-class unity, by making itself “the depository of science, that is, of Marxist theory.” Determinism remains, under the formula that the “sole freedom consists in being the consciousness of necessity,” a consciousness “guaranteed by Marxist science.” Kautsky would redeem Marxism by giving it a slightly ‘Hegelian’ inflection. Still, Laclau and Mouffe deem this an advance toward acknowledgment of a dualism between a “logic of necessity” and a “logic of contingency.” 

Another socialist who diverged somewhat from Marxism was Max Adler, a key figure among the Austro-Marxians. Given the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s dual monarchy and the many nations within it, Adler saw that working-class unity “depended upon constant political initiative.” “In this mosaic of social and national situations, it was impossible to think of national identities as ‘superstructural’ or of class unity as a necessary consequence of the infrastructure.” The Empire’s political economy was obviously too complex to be conceived in terms of Marxian dialectic, at least in the straightforward, not to say stark form that Marx and Engels gave it. Further, Adler grounded his philosophy not only on Marx or on Hegel but on Kant. The universality of Kantian ethics “broadened the audience for socialism and also broke with determinism. In sum, Marxian historicism did not seem plausible. All this notwithstanding, the Austro-Marxists never completely broke with the dichotomy of the logic of necessity and the logic of contingency, reluctant as they were to give up on at least some degree of confidence that the workers ‘must’ win, in the end.

The Marxian ‘Revisionists’ took things a step further, carving out some “particular spheres” of political initiative, spheres undetermined by economic forces, for socialists to undertake. Like Adler, the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein questioned Hegelian-Marxian historical determinism, but he also pointed to changes that had occurred within capitalist civil societies, beginning with the monopoly firms that had begun to dominate the economic landscape in the second half of the 19th century. The middle classes and the peasantry were not sinking into poverty; no serious economic crisis loomed. Even the modern working class was “not the dispossessed mass of which Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto.” This being so, “socialism had to change its terrain and strategy, and the key theoretical moment was the break with the rigid base/superstructure distinction that had prevented any conception of the autonomy of the political.” What, then, can be done to unite socialists? Only a political party founded on “the general interest of those who depend on income for their labor” could be sufficiently broad to wield any real political power. Organizing such a party, however, “escapes the chain of necessity.” “History was not a simple objective process: will also played a role in it.” As with Kant, “the autonomy of the ethical subject was the basis of Bernstein’s break with determinism.”

Bernstein’s analysis had weaknesses of its own, however. He clung to the Marxist claim that the working class would lead the socialist party. And although he abandoned historicist dialectic, he retained a faith that history’s general trend was evolutionary; he was a ‘progressive.’ And each step in the progress toward democratic socialism was irreversible. He optimistically assumed that the modern state itself would become “increasingly democratic as a necessary consequence of ‘historical evolution.'” Even as Bernstein sat in the parliament of the Weimar Republic, Mussolini ruled Italy and Hitlerism gathered strength in Germany. Laclau and Mouffe argue that socialist advances are “always reversible.” Moreover, if the ‘law of progress’ isn’t really a law at all, and if “the worker is no longer just proletarian but also citizen, consumer and participant in a plurality of positions within the country’s cultural and institutional apparatus,” then the eventual regime form that issues from a party led by workers may not be socialist at all. Under those circumstances, “democratic advance will necessitate a proliferation of political initiative in different social areas,” and “the meaning of each initiative comes to depend upon its relation with the others.” 

Still another, and much more dramatic, response to the crisis of Marxism was formulated by Georges Sorel under the term, ‘revolutionary syndicalism.’ Sorel rejected historical determinism entirely, taking from Marx only the recognition that the proletariat could become the agent with the moral fervor needed to “supplant declining bourgeois society,” constituting itself “as a dominant force and impos[ing] its will on the rest of society.” That is, Sorel took as much or more from his contemporary Henri Bergson’s élan vital as from Marx. Sorel’s version of class warfare derives from Bergsonian élan and, behind it, Nietzsche’s will to power. Initially, Sorel democratized Nietzsche, urging the proletariat to grasp the “heroic future” he wanted it to realize. But as socialism in his native France, and neighboring Germany, became increasingly unheroic, content with parliamentary jockeying, he began to invoke not the practice but the “myth” of the general strike, writing that “strikes have engendered in the proletariat the noblest, deepest and most moving sentiments that they possess.” Their violence “is the only force that can keep alive the antagonism described by Marx,” even if this force is no longer primarily literal, as it was for Luxemburg, but, well, literary, poetic—a spur to spiritedness to be set against middle-class tepidness. This led some of his followers to the supplementary myth of nationalism, which they regarded as the best sentiment to bring about the triumph of “heroic values over the ignoble bourgeois materialism” of present-day Europe. Sorel himself welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution, not nationalist myth, as the sort of violent upheaval that could spread across Europe and wreck the bourgeoisie.

In Russia, Lenin and Trotsky stayed within the framework of Marxian determinism, but the Social Democrats had developed “the concept of ‘hegemony.'” It was Antonio Gramsci who combined this with Sorel’s concept of the socialist historical ‘bloc,’ not as a material-economic entity (which partakes too much of modern-bourgeois self-interest) but as a bearer of heroism in the all-too-mediocre modern world. Russian social democrats (for example, Alexander Plekhanov) introduced ‘hegemony’ “to describe the process whereby the impotence of the Russian bourgeoisie to carry through its ‘normal’ struggle for political liberty forced the working class to intervene decisively to achieve it.” That is, the working class in Russia wasn’t impelled by material conditions; it chose to enter the political struggle. Whereas in Europe the move from economic conditions to political action occurred within the proletariat and was directed against the bourgeoisie, in Russia the bourgeoisie hadn’t won its own liberty, and so the proletariat took up that fight on its own. If “the bourgeois class cannot fulfill its role…this has to be taken over” by the workers. The “democratic tasks remain bourgeois, even when their historical agent is the working class.” This is what the Russian social democrats meant by ‘hegemony.’ 

Lenin also saw that “hegemony involves political leadership within a class alliance,” but despised political liberty. He would mouth the principles of ‘bourgeois democracy’ in order to establish useful alliances with useful idiots before the revolution, but after his victory he would abolish the liberties prized by his erstwhile allies. Lenin “transferred” the “ontological privilege granted to the working class by Marxism” from the workers to “the political leadership of the mass movement”—that is, to himself, as the leader of the vanguard party of the vanguard class. The Communist Party “knows the underlying movement of history, and knows therefore the temporary character of the demands uniting the masses as a whole.” The Party becomes “the seat of epistemological privilege,” the “depository of science,” establishing “a rigid separation between leaders and led within the masses.” This “possibility” of what Laclau and Mouffe rather delicately call an “authoritarian turn” was “in some way, present from the beginnings of Marxist orthodoxy.” “Leninism evidently makes no attempt to construct, through struggle, a mass identity not predetermined by any necessary law of history,” a law “accessible only to the enlightened vanguard.” And “because the real working class is, of course, far from fully identifying with its ‘historical interests'” as defined by Marxist-Leninist rulers, “the dissociation” between leaders and led “becomes permanent,” and an ossified oligarchic regime develops, within a couple of generations. “The roots of authoritarian policies lie in this interweaving of science and politics,” the authors observe, weakly; throughout the book, the mass murders of ‘Left’ tyranny/totalitarianism remain scrupulously unmentioned. The closest they come is to allow that “a martial conception of class struggle…concludes in an eschatological epic.” A few pages later, we learn of “the great merit” of Mao Zedong’s “analysis of contradiction,” which transcended class struggle, narrowly conceived. Under Mao, this did indeed broaden the killing field.

The lesson Laclau and Mouffe would rather draw is much more benign. The variety of egalitarian “agents” needs “political construction and struggle” to realize revolutionary potential; unity is “not the expression of a common underlying essence” that crystallizes of its own accord, like the chemicals in a children’s chemistry demonstration. This is where Gramsci intervened, “broaden[ing] the terrain of political recomposition and hegemony, while offering a theorization of the hegemonic link which clearly went beyond the Leninist category of ‘class alliance.” In one way, Gramsci re-Hegelianizes Marxism by insisting that political organizing requires not only “a coincidence of interests” that make alliances possible—alliances that are likely here today, gone tomorrow—but shared moral and intellectual principles. (Not without reason: the long list of Communist betrayals eventually made prospective allies rather wary of any coalition. Principled collaboration likely provides a strong bond.) “Thus, everything depends on how ideology is conceived.” For Gramsci, “ideology” is neither a mere epiphenomenon, reflecting the material interests of a given class, nor a pattern of abstractions. It is “an organic and relational whole, embodied in institutions and apparatuses, which welds together a historical bloc around a number of basic articulatory principles.” Nor is ideology the result of “ideological inculcation by a hegemonic class of a whole range of subordinate sectors,” relieved of their ‘false consciousness’ by an enlightened vanguard. All the partners contribute. “For Gramsci, political subjects are not—strictly speaking—classes, but complex ‘collective wills’.” That is, many “dispersed wills with heterogeneous aims are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world,” and many of those wills have little or nothing to do with the economic class of the ones who will. Politically, this means that Gramsci, unlike Lenin, does not recommend seizing the power of an existing state but the formation of a state ‘from below,’ within a civil society; this new-formed state will displace the ruling state. 

The authors demur on one point. Gramsci retains the assumption that the working class is the fundamental driver of egalitarian revolution. “This is the inner essentialist core of Gramsci’s thought, setting a limit to the deconstructive logic of hegemony.” That is, taking a social entity to have an essence, and indeed to take society itself to have one, puts a limit to the capacity to deconstruct it in a sufficiently radical manner, preparatory to making it thoroughly egalitarian. As a result, Gramsci also retains the Marx’s military metaphors, with the “war of position” only partially displacing “class warfare.” True, Gramsci’s “war of position” runs deeper and wider than that of Marx and Lenin, working toward “the progressive disaggregation of a civilization,” not a mere economic system, “and the construction of another around a new class core.” This means that “the identity of the opponents, far from being fixed from the beginning” (capitalists) “constantly changes in the process”—civilizational opponents in what would later be called a ‘culture war’ are numerous and diverse. Gramsci would unify a diverse Left, which would then divide, and eventually defeat, a diverse but increasingly disunified Right. Yet Gramsci’s insistence on valorizing a working-class core for the Left leaves his dilution of Marxist militarism incomplete. What is needed is a genuinely radical historicism (it must be said, likely drawn from Heidegger, not Hegel or Marx), in this case one that remains true to egalitarianism of a certain kind, namely, “democratic plurality.” The authors evidently expect this combination of democracy with pluralism, thoroughly institutionalized, to prevent both tyranny and eventual bureaucratic ossification— a vindication of democratic socialism against Bolshevism and its imitators. Institutionalized pluralism will block any tyrant from dominating the state while bringing contestation into the state apparatus itself, making bureaucracy political, not ‘scientific’-geometric, liable to rigidity.

Social-democratic parties after the First World War exhibited a “narrowly classist mentality,” incapable of “hegemoniz[ing] the broad range of democratic demands and antagonisms resulting from the post-war crisis.” They became “a mere parliamentary instrument of trade unionism.” Such classism made the tyrannical regimes and parties of the Left strong, bringing one of them to power in Russia and threatening the ‘bourgeois democracies’ elsewhere. Lacking the tyrannical devices of the ‘hard’ Left, democratic socialists remained weak. They lacked the political heft needed to achieve regime change, revolution. This left them with alternatives: “either to participate in bourgeois cabinets in order to obtain the maximum number of social measures favorable to working-class sectors; or else, to enter into opposition and thereby to double [their] impotence.” Further, their continued faith in the ‘iron laws of history’—specifically, economic determinism—inclined them to neglect the serious political organizing needed to forge the needed links to groups outside their own milieu. 

Mugged by the reality of the Great Depression, democratic socialists changed strategy. The Depression put the working classes under pressure, making the ‘classism’ of socialists more cogent and politically effective. The ‘planned economy’ began to seem a sensible alternative to the increasingly sharp ups and downs of capitalism. “The ‘planism’ of the 1930s was the first expression of the new type of attitude,” an attitude known as Keynesianism in the Anglosphere, but which Mouffe in particular understandably associates with her fellow Belgian, Henri de Man. President of the Belgian Labor Party and eventually Minister of Finance from 1936 to 1938, de Man successfully implemented the nationalization of bank credit while retaining capitalist enterprises—much to the fury of his fellow social democrats, who accused him of fascism, a charge his collaboration with the Nazis after the 1940 invasion did nothing to deflect. The authors prefer to point to de Man’s “attempt to recast the objectives of the socialist movement in a radically new, anti-economist” direction.” “He was one of the first socialists seriously to study psychoanalysis”; he criticized “class reductionism” and understood “the necessity of a mass bloc broader than the working class,” the “need to put forward socialism as a national alternative” (again, raising the then-lively specter of fascism in the minds of his colleagues), and the need of a Sorelian “myth” as a means of “cement[ing] the diverse components of a collective socialist will.” “The ‘Plan’ was, therefore, not a simple economistic instrument; it was the very ais for the reconstitution of a historical bloc which would make it possible to combat the decline of bourgeois society and to counter the advance of fascism.” If so, Nazism, to say nothing of de Man’s own shortcomings (of which the authors do in fact say nothing), aborted the effort.

Democratic socialism remained self-handicapped in the decades following the Second World War. “Planism’ remained very much in vogue, aiming “to establish a mixed economy in which the capitalist sector would gradually disappear”—a “road of transition to socialism.” This aim was vitiated by “a more technocratic variant” aiming at “merely to create an area of State intervention which would correct—particularly through the control of credit—the imbalances inherent in the course of capitalism,” with no intention of eliminating capitalism itself. In both variants, “social democracy became a politico-economic alternative within a given State form, and not a radical alternative to that form.” 

In all of this, economic life remained, “the last redoubt of essentialism” on the intellectual map of the Left, the last driver of a supposed march of ‘History’ toward socialism. Along with other economic determinists, Marxists posit laws of socioeconomic motion which “exclude all indeterminacy resulting from political or other external interventions.” Further, “the unity and homogeneity of social agents, constituted at the economic level, just result from the very laws of motion of this level.” And finally, “the positions of these agents in the relations of production must endow them with ‘historical ‘interests,’ so that the presence of such agents at other social levels…must ultimately be explained on the basis of economic interests.” The problem with this is simple enough: the Greek word economia means the management of the household but ‘the economy’ in the modern sense means political economy, the way goods and services are managed within a state. But political life is, as the authors like to say, contingent, subject to public choices. Indeed, Aristotle remarks that the three fundamental forms of ruling—husband-wife, parents-children, master-slave—are already easily discernible within the household, which forms the basic unit of the political community. 

Marxism takes these assumptions and draws from them three “theses”: the noncontingent “neutrality” (politically speaking) of productive forces in the economy; the inevitability of increasing “homogenization and impoverishment of the working class”; and that class’s “fundamental interest in socialism.” All of these claims are false. Labor-power isn’t politically neutral because it isn’t a commodity. “The capitalist must do more than simply purchase it; he must also make it produce labor.” He must rule the workers in the workplace. This makes the labor process “the ground of a struggle,” in which the vigilance, technical control, and (in larger firms) bureaucratic control of the bosses confront workers who do not necessarily want to be watched and controlled. At the same time, the workers “of the world” do not necessarily unite, as Marx and Engels would have them do, being divided by social conditions having nothing directly to do with labor such as race and sex. Neither homogenization nor impoverishment of the workers has occurred, nor have they universally flocked to socialist parties—themselves divided between social democrats and Leninists. “In our view, in order to advance in the determination of social antagonisms, it is necessary to analyze the plurality of diverse and frequently contradictory positions, and to discard the idea of a perfectly unified and homogeneous agent, such as the ‘working class’ of classical [Marxist] discourse.” 

“Since Kautsky, Marxism knew that the socialist determination of the working class does not arise spontaneously but depends upon the political mediation of intellectuals.” And with Gramsci, “politics is finally conceived as articulation and through his concept of historical bloc and profound and radical complexity is introduced into the theorization of the social.” It remains to take the final theoretical step, to recognize that “the logic of hegemony,” which, as a political logic requires articulation (speech, especially definition) and contingency or choice, and behind choice, strategy, should result in what socialists now call ‘identity politics’—struggle over the definition of the many social groups itself, and over demands for ‘recognition’ or power broadly conceived not only as physical force but as ideology, ‘myth,’ ‘values.’ As a consequence, “unfixity has become the condition of every social identity,” since identities are self-defined and “relational,” fluid as they interact with other self-identifying groups. Identity politics is genuinely political in the authors’ sense of the word, inasmuch as it consists not of scientifically discernible laws, as if the course of events were like the course of a river, governed and also rationally governable by the laws of physics, but of free wills. Democracy or egalitarianism comes in because such a politics insists that all identities are equal; there are no more “privileged” subjects with superior access to historical laws, inasmuch as no such laws exist. “There are no privileged points for the unleashing of a socialist political practice; this hinges upon a ‘collective will’ that is laboriously constructed from a number of dissimilar points.” This practice cannot be defined at the outset but will rather become defined, and redefined, as the social-group wills whose interaction constitutes the collective will confront opposition forming and reforming political bonds with one another, and with newcomers. Indeed, “the very notion of ‘hegemony’ should be put into question, although the authors will come to affirm it in the ‘theoretical’ chapters that follow.

In these opening chapters of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe thus provide an instructive critical account of the “Crisis of Marxism” that began in the late nineteenth century but continues to this day. Their own theoretical justification for socialism occupies the book’s third chapter.

 

 

Jan Patocka: Plato and Europe. Petr Lom translation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

 

A student of Husserl and a friend of Vaclav Havel, Jan Patocka became one of philosophy’s martyrs, dying of a heart attack in 1977 after a police interrogation. Czechoslovakia was ruled by the Communists in those days, and, as everywhere else, they had little patience with dissidents. His book consists of lectures delivered in friends’ homes; barred from teaching in Czech universities, he spoke as a citizen in good standing in what Havel famously called “the parallel polis.” Is a philosopher fully a citizen only in a parallel polis? 

Patocka contends that “philosophical reflection…should somehow help us in the distress in which we are; precisely in the situation in which we are placed, philosophy is to be a matter of inner conduct.” Under the tyrannical Communist regime, it can hardly be a matter of outer conduct; for decades, Athenian democrats tolerated Socrates in the agora, but Czechoslovakia’s ‘totalitarians’ were hardly so patient. Patocka concurs with Aristotle’s judgment, that “our reality is always situational.” The simple act of reflecting upon our situation changes it, although one might then ask “whether by reflection reality is improved.” It is, at least, clarified. Any human situation begins with opinion; those who reflect upon it may be moved to a critique of it, in the hope of approaching the truth of the matter. How, then, shall we reflect? First, look at the situation—the “reality in which I am, in which others are, and in which things are.” “The most interesting and most characteristic thing about situations is precisely that we have not given them to ourselves, that we are placed into them and have to reconcile ourselves with them.” They may in part be humanly made, but not, at least initially, by us. These givens include material things, our mortality (“We are a ship that necessarily will be shipwrecked,” and the universe itself is entropic), consciousness, and the overall “human situation,” the situation not only of ourselves and of those we know but of our species. “To philosophize, I think, means to meditate within the entire situation and to be its reflection.” Contra Marxism, philosophy “is not established in the way that scientific truths and scientific systems are: philosophy is not established objectively.” This includes the social sciences. 

This is because “the situation is not totally an objective reality.” It consists of our reflection upon it, as well as its reflection in us. It also comprehends not only the present but the non-present, namely, the future. “A situation is a situation precisely because it has not yet been decided.” True, to think is to objectify; “we do not have any other means, we cannot even think otherwise,” since we always think about something. But this is not yet knowledge. For example, in thinking about “the times” in which we live, one might consider the art of the time, “the sense of life” portrayed in, say, a novel by Milan Kundera or a speech by Eugene Ionescu. In so considering, we will need to attend “to what is new in contrast to what used to be, something that is not just repetitive, that expresses something that is its very own.” Ionescu “tried to put into words this entire spirit of the times,” arguing that helplessness and alienation characterize it most distinctively. He refers to lack of human control over human affairs, the sense that large forces carry us along and away, explained by “contradictory prophets” who by their contradictions give us no firm guidance. Impersonal and unstoppable, these forces resemble the “will to power,” but it is a ‘will’ without a subject. In this situation, art is no longer joyful, as it was for Mozart or for the builders of Chartres Cathedral. Such a situation, such a “spirit of the times,” invites philosophic reflection, as thinkers long for the clarification such reflection might bring. 

“But the question is, when we go to the roots of our contemporary disequilibrium, whether we do not need to go to the very origins of Europe and through these beginnings to the very relation between mankind and its place in the world; or rather, whether the disequilibrium we are positing today is not something that concerns solely European man in a particular historical period, but rather regards man sui generis today in his relation with the planet.” Why the planet? Because not very long ago, “Europe was the master of the world,” bringing it to capitalism, “the network of world economy and markets,” controlling world politics thanks to its “scientific-technological” power, developed by its uniquely rationalistic or modern-scientific civilization. While Europe “wrecked itself” in the world wars, the rest of the war inherited its powers and “will never allow Europe to be what it once was.” Europe arrived at this condition because it combined such “enormous power” with political disunity, leading to wars among its sovereign states. “The internal logic of the European situation” played out in modern technology being deployed in massively destructive wars, wars made possible by political disunion. This Europe of sovereign states in turn arose from the ruins of the Roman empire, destroyed by the estrangement of the people from the Roman state—a point that neither Patocka’s friends in the “Underground University” nor his enemies outside of it would have failed to connect to the prospects of the then-regnant Soviet empire. Medieval Europe maintained a less worldly union, “the project of the kingdom of God,” which Patocka associates with Hellenistic Greece’s universalism; when that spiritual-civilizational source of union crumbled under the assault of modern philosophers and the statesmen they instructed, Europe was set both to conquer the world and to lose it. But it must nonetheless be said, Europe under its several iterations lasted a long time, and it survives, if in truncated form, today.

Having identified the sources of Europe’s disequilibrium, Patocka asks two questions: How did the longstanding equilibrium arise, “keeping humanity at the same time in a state of spiritual elevation and in balance with the natural ecological situation on this planet”? And could a new equilibrium come about, “so that we could again find hope in a specific perspective, a specific future,” unlike that of Europe in the ongoing ‘Cold War’? 

It is true that “in a certain sense,” the world is always in decline. Things come into being, then pass away. “But philosophy says: no, the world is not in decline, because the core of the world is being, and being has no beginning and will not perish, being can neither begin nor end—it is eternal.” From “the perspective of modern science,” this “discovery of eternity” is “incomprehensible,” inasmuch as modern science experiments, examines changing and indeed effects change as the means examining those things. But the metaphysics of the philosophers resists modern-scientific claims. In resisting the ‘inevitablism’ of modern science, its claim to discover natural-historical laws that are not only irresistible but all-encompassing (Marxian ‘dialectic’ being a specimen thereof), Greek philosophers exert human freedom. They did so by thinking about the human being, the being who thinks, insisting that, as philosophers, as lovers of wisdom, they must attend to “the care of the soul,” care of the thing that thinks, the distinctively human thing. 

Why care for the soul? “Because man, or the human soul—that which knows about the whole of the world and of life, that which is able to present this whole before its eyes, that which lives from this position, that which knows about the whole and in that sense is wholly and in the whole within this explicit relation to something certainly immortal, that which is certainly eternal, that which does not pass away beyond which is nothing—in this itself has its own eternity.” Animals perceive parts of the whole, but not the whole, not Being. Philosophers justify care of the human soul as the way to fulfill the good of that distinct human nature, even as animals seek to fulfill the good of their own, quite unreflective, natures.

Beyond the formidable powers of modern science, then, “Can the care of the soul, which is the fundamental heritage of Europe,” prior to modern-scientific Europe, “still speak to us today? That is, “speak to us who need to find something to lean on in this common argument about decline, in this weakness, in this consent to the fall?” Why is it necessary to care for the soul? What is its significance?

He begins with a discussion of Husserl’s Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology. Husserl begins with a discussion of appearance. To appear, something must be ‘here’; and it must not only be present, but it must show itself to us. Appearance is preliminary to knowing. It is also preliminary to acting, and when we act, we want to know what is good and what is evil. Whatever a person “marks as good and evil has to show itself to him.” Since “good and evil are something that regards us, at the same time we show ourselves to ourselves.” If Satan says, “Evil, be thou my good,” he is showing himself to himself (and to others, if they hear him say that). “Phenomenon, then, in this sense means the showing of existence: things not only are but also they are manifest.” Notoriously, however, appearance is not necessarily reality. How are appearance and reality related to one another? “How are they distinguished and how to, do they overlap, how do they meet?”

Evidently, if something manifests itself “it manifests, appears to someone.” Mind usually occupies itself “with something other than itself,” but is “also an existing thing,” a part of being. For ordinary purposes, we have a sense of knowing them so long as we perceive them with “something like clarity,” that is, without confusion. “We work with the concept of appearing; yet at the same time this concept itself is not clear to us.” In knowing a thing, in this modest way, we also sense that there are things that are not present, not manifest. “The nonpresent also shows itself here,” sending us from our immediate surroundings to more distant ones,” “further and further away,” finally “encompass[ing] everything there is.” To see a part is to acknowledge, implicitly, the whole. Any particular thing “is within the framework of this universal showing,” and every “individual thesis” or opinion “is a part of the universal thesis”—of my more or less certain opinion of the character of the whole. “All our life takes place within the very showing of things and in our orientation among them.”

“We have two theses before us: on the one hand, in what manifests itself we always have, in some way, the whole, and manifesting itself equally constantly points to some kind of whole.” These two kinds of manifestations are given; we did not choose them. “The manifesting world in its whole has always already engaged us and has always already imposed its law upon us” “existence shows itself, something that is not our creation, a matter of our free will.” Because we have minds, themselves parts of the whole, we judge the things we perceive, telling ourselves “whether they are or are not, that they are probable or doubtful and so on,” and moreover “every judgment of this kind takes place within the framework of the general thesis, the thesis of the whole.” If, for example, the framework or thesis of the whole that orients you excludes the possibility of angels, if an angel appears before you, you will be inclined to judge it to be illusory. “All our cognitive activity takes place in systems of judgment and is thus the product of our conscious action, directed toward an end.” 

Returning to manifestation at the simplest level, the situation in which “I have things at the tip of my fingers, here, in their sentient actuality,” it is the case that if I go away from those things, when I no longer see them, except in ‘my mind’s eye,’ I have no reason to suppose that they have changed. They are still what they were when I left them. They are the same, but in a different way. This means that manifestation itself, showing, is not “any of those things that show themselves.” Manifesting itself “forms a certain solid interconnected system,” unifying our experience of sense perception and memory of things perceived. This unity of experience is prior to experience; it structures experience. 

In ordinary life, we don’t concern ourselves with this point. “We are interested in things after all. They interest us in what, which, and how they are.” To know in the sense of ‘science’ is to know the things. “Showing, phenomenon, that on the basis of which things are for us what they are, is itself constantly hidden from us.” Science tells us nothing about manifesting. Yet “nothing has been such a cause and axis of human questioning about the nature of things as manifesting.” How do we distinguish appearance from reality? Here is where ‘Europe’ comes in—specifically, ancient Greece, and even more specifically, Greek philosophy. “The conception of the soul in philosophy from its Greek origins consists in just what is capable of truth within man, and what, precisely because it is concerned about truth, poses the question: how, why does existence in its entirety, manifest itself, how why does it show itself?” Although philosophy originated in ancient Greece, it is neither a narrowly Greek or European, since “manifesting, light in the world,” is “something that distinguishes man from all else”: a tortoise does not think of the whole. This being so, this “human privilege” also “places duties before man,” endows him with responsibilities that go with his capacity to think of the whole. If the human soul is unique, distinctive, in this way, “care of the soul,” the human soul that so thinks, “follows from the proximity of man to manifesting, to the phenomenon as such, to the manifesting of the world in its whole, that occurs within man, with man.” 

Husserl argues that this means that our thoughts are not merely instrumental, “ready-made tools to acquire more and more experiences.” We are interested in the things, in the experiences of them, but we are also interested in “determining how various manners of givenness are connected,” the “structure of the phenomenon as such.” If, for example, I think of the present, I see that “the present is possible only so long as there is also the past and the future,” things “present as not-present.” “In the presence of the past…the past is present like that which no longer can be present: and the future is present as such, like something which has not yet gotten to presence in the eminent sense of the word.” There is, then, “the world of existent things” but also “the world of phenomenal structures,” the “world that is” and “the world that shows itself.” Phenomenology “looks for the presuppositions of the structures of individual showing.” Science knows the human being “from the natural development of this physical universe.” Phenomenological philosophy investigates “something that is the proper concrete base of the physical universe.” It seeks to understand “the nature of the fact that things in their entirety manifest themselves to us, and what this means.” Contrary to Marxian historicism, “this is not a matter of some kind of immanent teleology or some kind of real factor that the phenomenon would realize with some kind of immanent purposiveness.” 

The moral dimension of this human capacity to investigate, to care for this “phenomenological domain,” this “awareness of man as a creature of truth,” is presented in what Patocka calls myths. In “the biblical myth of the tree of knowledge,” man is damned by his attempt to seek knowledge of good and evil; so too in the Sumerian myth of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, in the Greek myths of Hercules and of Oedipus. “All these myths have the same meaning: man is at the same time a creature of truth and this truth is damnation for him” because “it shows his own precariousness, his place in the universe, which is overpowering in his regard.” But “the greatness” of Greek philosophy, what “made Greek philosophy what it is” and what “made it the foundation of all European life” is that it “developed a plan for life, one that stated” that knowledge “is not damnation, but human greatness.” Philosophers contend that the man who makes clarity, truth, “the law of his life, and with the help of this law in every domain in which man is involved,” can point the way to “make at least the human world a world of truth and justice.” Thus, the soul, the thing that “is capable of truth on the basis of a peculiar, untransferable, only-in-man-realized structure of the phenomenon as such,” deserves the utmost care. “Man can either capitulate and degenerate into mere existence,” or he can “realize himself as a being of truth, a being of phenomenon.” “The history of Europe is in large part, up until, let us say, the fifteenth century, the history of the attempt to realize the care of the soul.”

Given his task of understanding the situation of Europe now, in the mid-1970s, Husserl concerns himself not “with the Platonic ascent from the cave,” which would entail a further investigation of manifestation, but “with that second Platonic act—the return back down to the cave.” We want to understand “our reality.” That reality has been “deeply determined by philosophy.” We are philosophizing within the cave, and the modern cave has philosophic markings engraved on its walls. 

This means that Europe as it now exists partakes of the philosophic ascent from the cave, its departure from a pre-existing “mythical framework.” Myth is manifestation that has yet to be reflected upon. It is therefore truthful, in a sense. The truth of myth is the fact that human beings live in a world that both accepts us and “crushes and constantly threatens us.” This latter, “horrible” reality is not only outside us but “within all of us.” Madness “can break through in life everywhere. Like Oedipus, “we are left to blind wandering.” Like Adam and Eve, we are punished in our quest for knowledge. Like Gilgamesh, we would build a city in the face of “everything instinctive and elementary,” which must be “broken and tamed” if the city is to be built and sustained. “This duality is at home in all myths,” this “polarity of that other, the strange, belonging to the night,” in contrast to “the domestic, held fast, the daily.” The myths register “the natural world as the world of good and evil.” They make us aware of both good and evil. Myth does not console, it does not support; it is the “harsh revealing of our revealedness/nakedness.” 

Oedipus, “this two-sided creature, of dual-meaning, a creature who is both damned and sacred,” is truly human, a human presented mythically, poetically. “The uncovering of the whole world by Greek philosophy is the continuation of this myth,” at attempt to “penetrate behind the ordinary blind wandering, or behind the ordinary unclarity and unawareness in which we move.” The execution of Socrates by the Athenians is itself a sort of sacrifice of the one who, like Oedipus, looked in, sought and found truth. At the same time, Socrates is also the philosopher of The Republic, the philosopher of ‘The Regime,’ the just regime, the one in which “those like Socrates can live and do not need only to die.” Europe “grew out of this” quest for a just regime.

The mythical framework in which Plato and his Socrates philosophize “both helps and hinders [philosophy’s] origin and development.” But “it hinders before it helps.” This is because to question, as philosophers do, “means precisely to find an explicitly empty space, to find something that in a certain sense is not there.” Myth gets in the way of that because it is already there. It presents itself as “something like a picture of the world in its entirety,” “occup[ying] in some manner the whole world.” Those who accept the myth do not see the need for, do not like the practice of, questioning. They already have the answer. At the same time, “philosophy does not begin ex abrupto.” It needs something to question, and myth is that something. Philosophers need myth, opinion, to get started in their philosophizing, even as myth or prevailing opinion restrains them, threatens them with punishment if they look at it with a questioning eye. In myth, “man is the being that dares to penetrate into the domain that is not his, it breaks into somewhere, where from its origins it was not really at home.” The philosopher dares to compare one myth to another, seeking the meaning beneath the meaning each myth imposes. Myths are enunciated by prophets. A prophecy gives a people “clarity about what is,” representing “that which reality is,” revealing what “is not the domain of man but rather of the gods.” Unlike man, the gods know everything. They know what blindly wandering man knows not. Myth or the revelation of the gods is a kind of founding, drawing out a system of morals from nature, morals that are a part of that reality but need accentuation, emphasis, in order to serve as guides to blindly wandering man. Myth founds “a certain custom, a way of life,” a pattern by which it tells us to live—a regime, as the political philosopher, Socrates, would say. The myth “determines the meaning and the path of this wandering in a way that is for us at first unfathomable.” Philosophy attempts to fathom it.

In doing that, philosophy brings “an entirely new possibility of the human spirit” to light, “a possibility that also did not have to be realized and in fact the majority of peoples, even the highly cultured, do not know it at all.” Myth takes “the manifest” as “the sphere of the gods,” related to human beings in the past by their prophets, and makes it present but only in imagination, “a deficient form” of presence. Philosophy wonders; it “asks its question face to face with the amazing primeval fact of the manifestation of the world.” It looks not to manifestation as image but to the archē, the principle of things. There is no wonder or amazement in myth, which provides answers ‘not to be questioned.’ Philosophy begins with “amazement” “not about particular real things, but rather about this primeval reality,” seeking clarity “about the fact that things are,” seeking their existence and structure. “Myth does not even dream that it would be possible to justify something, explain it, answer the question ‘why’ in any other than through some kinds of stories.” Fundamental to philosophy is that it sees two things: “something shows itself” and “this showing itself.” “Philosophy can begin to look for the structure of things only as long as the question of the structure of discovering has already first emerged.” The structure of discovery exists within the soul, which must be cared for, for that reason.

Patocka notices this care in the thought of the earliest philosophers, the ‘pre-Socratics.’ Aphoristic Heraclitus, he of the ‘dark’ or hard-to-understand sayings, imitates the Delphic oracle, “tak[ing] on the function the god had” at Delphi: “he is the one to whom belongs the function of manifestation in its entirety,” dividing each thing “according to [its] nature.” His “lightning” or “fire” means “the flash, manifestness.” Once thig have been divided, logos or reason collects them, putting them together in order to see them as parts of a whole. ‘Everything moves,” he famously says; motion is the passage of objects through spatial and temporal phases; at the same time, “motion is also manifesting,” of “approaching and receding, coming into presence and leaving from presence.” Philosophy “from this primeval beginning” bears “a dual movement of thought,” as seen in two philosophers, the ‘nature-philosopher,’ Democritus, and the political philosopher, Plato. 

Democritus “set out on a quest for the whole, that means after what is eternal,” by means of mathematics and especially geometry. In so doing, “Democritus erected the concept of philosophy as science,” as a set of “scientific explanations.” He discovers two principles; “the unlimited”—empty, homogeneous geometric space—and “the indivisibles”—the atoms, which move within that space but “in themselves are completely unchangeable, eternal, and for this reason form the foundations for possible constructions.” In so doing, he “penetrate[s] beyond the region of what is visible in the ordinary sense of the world,” thanks to one form of reasoning, geometry, which shows us the characteristics of the space in which the atoms move, and another form of reasoning, which shows us that the infinitude suggested by geometry cannot be the whole of reality because geometry would take the matter that is manifestly present in the world and keep on dividing it forever. Hence the need for atoms, which cannot be divided. 

None of this seems to leave any place for care of the soul. If the soul is an unusually refined structure of atoms in space, why care for it? Democritus begins by noticing that “the human spirit thirsts after explanation,” an explanation of the divine, the eternal, begging the question, “Where does this thirst originate?” It originates in the soul, and in his soul more than in most. The soul “wants to see the truth,” wants to see “the unconcealment of things.” It can only succeed if it “maintain[s] absolute purity of sight and purity of its internal substance. This “impulse to the eternal leads in Democritus to the discover of one’s soul, to the care of one’s soul.” Such purity, he contends, requires shedding the bonds of family and polis, turning away from the passions that lead the soul to becoming preoccupied with ‘one’s own.’ In the tradition, in myth, the soul appears as a form—as seen, for example, in Egyptian tomb paintings. That is, it is seen from the outside, “from the other’s point of view.” “Form is something I see, it is the soul for the other, not the soul that I am.” Democritus understands his soul from within, as that which “lives in contact with the eternal.” True, it lives briefly, it is not an immortal soul, “but this does not matter, because this contact with the eternal is the same in man and in god”; “that is why the soul is in its own way eternal, even if dissolves into atoms” in death. 

“For this peculiarity, there is created something in European life that has never been created anywhere else in the world,” a new “human possibility” that “steps into the radius of all other human possibilities.” “Europe as Europe arose from this motif, from the care of the soul.” “It became extinct” when “it forgot about it.” Its decline into dogmatism—so evident in the fascism of Patocka’s youth and the communism which prevailed in his country after the Nazis were expelled—also betokened the extinction of the philosophic quest for the concealed “something upon which stands” the unconcealed. The soul must remain awake; to remain awake, it must be cared for; if not cared for, it is no longer fully human, it no longer undertakes the philosophic quest; and Europe is no longer Europe. 

To recover the practice of caring for the soul, Patocka explains “the method of care.” The soul is not a thing to be cultivated in the way one cultivates a garden. It discovers itself only in seeking the truth about what it does not know and being truthful, whether or not truthfulness happens to be to the advantage of the person whose soul it is. “In Democritus, to care for the soul means to care for it so that it might be able to live near what is eternal, so that it might be capable of a life in that grand presence”—that “will naturally be a life of thought.” Knowledge is “the presence of what is,” as distinguished from what he calls “bastard knowledge,” which is obscure and unclear—hence its ‘illegitimacy’ or ‘bastardy.’ 

Plato, too, cares for the soul, but he reverses Democritus’ intention. Plato commends care for the soul “not so that the soul might journey through the universe just as what is eternal,” but “so it will be what it is supposed to be.” The quest for understanding, rightly undertaken, improves the soul, makes it “what it can be.” Plato is a political philosopher, not a natural philosopher. He considers, first and foremost, not the cosmos but his fellow Athenians, “invit[ing] people to think.” In so doing, he reveals their ignorance; in revealing their ignorance, he reveals “their secret dispositions for tyranny,” despite their purportedly freedom-loving affection for the regime of democracy. The soul achieves its best condition, its right order, not in contemplating the heavens but in dialoguing with fellow citizens. “The soul that really cares for itself takes on a solid force, just as every though worthy of the name is a defined thought, specifying ideas, having a specific thesis about those ideas.” This is no “pallid intellectualism” but an “attempt to embody what is eternal within time, and within one’s own being, and at the same time, an effort to stand firm in the storm of time, stand firm in all dangers carried with it, to stand firm when the care of the soul becomes dangerous for a human being”—not only in ancient Athens but in modern Prague. “The care of the soul in a lawless city endangers a human being,” the “kind of human being that stands for the care of the soul, just as that being endangers the city,” which is built on ignoble lies, not truth. The “whole existence” of Socrates “is a provocation to the city,” as he “is the first who, face to face with =secret tyranny and the hypocritical remains of old morality, poses the thought that the human being focused on truth in the full sense of the word, examining what is the good, not knowing himself what is the positive good, and only refuting false opinion, has to appear as the worst of all, the most irritating.” Philosophy begins in wonder, but there can be very little wonder at the effect Patocka’s talks must have had among his listeners, gathered in someone’s apartment, in a city under the rule of a Communist oligarchy which based its claim to rule on having ‘all the answers.’

The regime of Plato’s Republic is the regime “where Socrates and those like him will not need to die.” “This is that singular thing about Europe”: “only in Europe was philosophy born in this way, in the awakening of man out of tradition into the presence of the universe.” From Greece to Rome, where “the Stoics really did educate mankind about the universal human tasks of a universal empire,” philosophy took its way. Rome fell, like the Greek polis, because it could not “convince its public that it was a state of justice.” Europeans regrouped and continued their quest, attempting “to bring the city of justice into reality, a city to be founded not on the changeability of human things as Rome was, but rather on absolute truth, so that it would be the kingdom of God upon earth.” The Roman Catholic Church “would not even be possible” without the Platonic thought. Nietzsche was right to say that Christianity is Platonism for the people, but right in the wrong way. He said it with a sneer because he “overlooks what is most fundamental about the phenomena of Socrates and Plato, that is, the care of the soul.” Christendom fell, not because it was too weak and unworldly but because the care of the soul “became pretty much unrecognizable under the weight of something, something that might be deemed a concern, or care about dominating the world.” That is, in turning from Plato and Christianity to Machiavelli, Europe stopped caring for the soul. And “is not Nietzsche’s search for eternity, his attempt to leap from history into what is beyond time proof that it is absolutely necessary to reiterate care for the soul even under new circumstances?”

“Philosophy is the care of the soul in its own essence and its own element.” Political philosophy undertakes this care in dialogue among citizens. Patocka understands the philosophic stance as zetetic—not “the suspension of all judgment,” much less an endorsement of the dogma of moral relativism, but as the quest for truth with the knowledge that one knows one doesn’t know. So understood, philosophy proceeds from one way station of “provisional hypothetically fixed opinion” to another, more coherent way station. “In the end we want only what we can answer for in this manner, what we either see with such clarity that it withstands every kind of imaginable inquiry.” This implies that philosophy never rests in one soul only, or in “some kind of system” (Hegelianism, Marxism, utilitarianism, pragmatism) but continues on, among many thinkers, dialoguing with one another, over space and time. The philosophic quest requires more than intelligence; it requires courage, moderation, justice, and wisdom. Courage, because the philosopher puts himself at risk in the city; moderation, because the passions interfere with clear thinking; justice, because it remains true to itself, rejecting sophistry, especially self-sophistry; wisdom, “in knowing not knowing in the form of temperate and disciplined investigation, because it submits all other human affairs to this thinking struggle.” Philosophy gives itself “a certain standard for its own being,” one that is “unified, constant, and exact,” and therefore almost surely to be at odds with the standards of the city, which are seldom well-reasoned and may well resist the provisional character of philosophic opinion, being based on law, which accepts provisionality at its own risk. The city knows a rival regime when it sees one.

If philosophy is “living in the truth,” how much truth can a city, a political community, withstand? After all, the city’s population consists mostly of non-philosophers. They can surely see through the blatant lies of, say, their communist rulers, but to what extent can they live in the truth? Christianity teaches that they can, but only with God’s grace to guide them. Can modern Europe, post-Christian Europeans, do any such thing?

If they were to attempt this, Europeans would have human nature on their side. Man is “by nature a being to whom the world shows itself” and in attending to the world we “form ourselves in some kind of way.” Patocka identifies “three currents of care of the soul.” He calls the first current “ontocosmological,” that is, ontological and cosmological. He is thinking of Plato’s theory of the ideas. The philosopher looks at the many opinions in light of the principle of non-contradiction, the principle of logos or reason, seeking the “unity” behind those opinions. An idea is free of contradiction; ideas “serve to give us clarity about things,” show us the shape of things, enable us to think of nouns. Tom, Dick, and Harry are seen to be men, and therefore a certain kind of human being. “Things cannot manifest themselves to us other than on the basis and through the mediation of the ideas,” and “that manifesting is something other than what manifests itself,” an “entirely different kind of structure.” “Men” and “human” are other than Tom, Dick, and Harry, yet they group those guys into discernible categories, clarifying our thought about them, showing them to be of a different nature than, say, Fido, Rex, and Spot, a trio of dogs. The word ‘trio’ suggests number, but the ideas are “the most fundamental, most elemental numbers,” as they do not ‘add up’: indivisible (and more so than atoms, which turned out to be quite divisible, and with interesting consequences), “they are accessible only to our logos.” ‘Ontocosmologically,’ being has limits, seen in the ideas. Logos, which perceives the ideas, is the core of the human soul. To live in terms of logos is to be most distinctively human, to be caring for the soul in the right way.

To live in those terms “poses the question of the lawful arrangement of life in the community from the point of view of the thought of the just life,” since human beings live in political communities. Each polis has a set of beliefs held in common by those who live within it, part of its regime. “The common way of seeing and the way of seeing of the philosopher are inevitably in conflict.” This is the second “current” of care for the soul, “the care of the soul in the community as the conflict of two ways of life.” To say that the care of the soul forms “the essential heritage of Europe,” what “in a certain sense made European history what it is,” does “not mean that these thoughts were realized here,” but only “that they were a certain ferment, without which we cannot conceive of European reality.” Hence the other sense of ‘political philosophy,’ namely, the need for a ‘politic’ or prudent philosophy. 

“The community itself does not see that the philosopher, who is the thorn in its side, is in reality—mythically spoken—the envoy of the gods.” (Ironically enough, Socrates’ accusers call him an atheist, but not so ironically inasmuch as they mean the gods citizens worship.) To kill the envoy of the gods is “the peak of injustice” which “at the same time…always seem[s] just.” Socrates “performs the constant task of unselfish caring for the community, in the sense that he is constantly thinking only about its good,” and takes the hemlock as his reward, while a perfectly unjust man, one who conceals the tyrannical longings of his soul throughout his life, “will succeed in life.” From appearance, then, the unjust man is better. This brings Socrates to induce his dialogic partners to construct a ‘city in speech’ that accords with reasoned speech, with logos, as an illustrative parallel of the soul, which is much harder to see than a city, even one made only of words. Socrates takes Adeimantus and Glaucon up a rational ladder, from the subhuman ‘city of pigs,’ which aims at satisfying the needs and desires of the body, to the courageous city of the guardians, their spiritedness moderated by careful education so that they guard, rather than attack, their fellow citizens. The educators of the guardians are the philosophers, citizens of “the sharpest insight,” the ones “who decide what the community will do.” Reason ruling, spiritedness guarding, the appetites obeying: “Here we have a picture of what each of us individually is within himself”—what each of us is ‘in idea,’ insofar as we conform ourselves to the idea of ‘human.’ Reason discovers the ideas, which are defined, limited, and therefore limiting if heeded by the spiritedness that has the capacity to overcome the appetites. Without the rule of reason, spiritedness and appetites have no limits, incline to swell “into infinity.” “Care of the soul is that which Socrates does, constantly examining our opinions about what is good,” keeping them within the limits of the ideas. 

This leads back to the third “current” of care of the soul, which flows in the individual. Why would an individual care for his soul? In other words, why philosophize? Because “the soul that is cared for is more, it has a higher, elevated being.” It is more—what? More what it should be, more what its nature is, more fully satisfied in its own being. This is why Socrates says that a philosopher must be compelled to return to the ‘cave,’ the polis, the community ruled by unexamined opinion. In so returning, he will not want to rule, as philosophers do in the city in speech, but he may want to find a way to reform the city in some modest but crucially important way, making it a place both safe for philosophers and from philosophers. (Philosophers, too, need to reform themselves, as a part of their ongoing soul-discovery and concomitant soul-reform, their philosophizing.) If no one in the city does this, they city declines, and “we”—we Europeans, we humans—are “responsible for our decline.” Decline usually wins because the “general tendencies of our mind and all our instinctive equipment” incline toward materialism, toward caring for our bodies instead of our souls. To fortify the reasoning part of the soul against its powerful appetites, and especially to tame the spirited part of the soul, to make it into reason’s guardian, not its enemy, Plato’s Socrates proposes a religion, but a new kind of religion, the world’s first “purely moral religion.”

What is a moral religion? Judaism has moral elements; the Decalogue contains “moral precepts.” “But the Jewish God is the wrathful god who punishes in a manner beyond all human measure.” His thoughts are not your thoughts, He tells His prophet. Unlike the ideas, he partakes of infinitude, spiritedness without limit, or at least without humanly measurable, humanly understandable, limit. To reach Christianity, Judaism “passed through Greek reflection,” thereby becoming “the ferment of the new European world.” “In Christianity, the moment of insight occurs in that Christian dogmas are not considered as something to be accepted blindly.” [1] In rejecting Christianity, modern Europeans turned toward materialism, toward a science animated by “quantitative progress,” toward a ‘mass’ society in that sense, and in the sense of ‘mass’ or majority rule, democracy without rational limits—the sort that worried Tocqueville, thrilled Stephen Douglas, repelled Abraham Lincoln. Morality implies freedom. “We are free because we always stand between…two alternatives, in the question of good-evil, truth-untruth.” Hence Lincoln’s argument, that Douglas, in saying he ‘didn’t care’ whether slavery was voted up or down in the territories, was “blowing out the moral lights around us”—first and foremost the unalienable rights of liberty and equality.

“Philosophy today, in today’s world, is nothing” because “the world is still obsessed by the thought of seizing reality, as far a possible, the most intensive, and as far as possible greatest extent, and to draw from it as much and as quickly as possible.” We do not adequately care for our souls, concentrating our minds instead on our machines. Science, technology, “and this whole modern, emancipated an enlightened world” has “an enormous significance and its own justification,” but “who is going to reflect upon this justification and its limits?” Thomas Masaryk called this condition “discouragement in the field of philosophy,” the confinement of academic philosophy to modern positivism and linguistic inquiry, “where the task of philosophy consists in showing the impossibility of traditional philosophical questions and answers.” The merit of Heidegger is that he at least concerns himself with the “ancient thinkers like Aristotle,” again, philosophers who thought about nature, “the foundation of existence, what makes existence existence.” The “guiding theme” in Heidegger’s philosophy is manifestation, of Being “showing itself,” of things “dis-covering themselves.” Also like the ancients, he looks inward, considers how it is that the soul cognizes, “why interpretation is interpretation in the light of being,” how we attempt to discover the “internally meaningful structure” of things and of Being. “I can only get to the problem of being through the problem of showing,” “put[ting] together what belongs together in the thing and separat[ing] what does not belong together.” Heidegger differs from Plato, Patocka sees, in his historicism: “In Plato being is the great whole,” which “unfolds in a kind of grand topography,” whereas “in Heidegger it is such that being in its own essence is the surfacing of something hidden and coming into manifesting into the manifest” in an unending dynamic. Nonetheless, they share one important thing: both philosophers want “to live in truth.” 

As indicated, Plato develops the principle of the care of the soul in three directions: a “systematic ontology,” which “brings the soul into connection with the structure of being”; a “teaching about the state,” whereby “the care of the soul is both possible and is the center of all state life and also the axis of historical occurrence”; and “the individual fate of the soul,” the soul’s confrontation with death and the question of the meaning of “individual human existence.” Without Platonic philosophy, including Platonic political philosophy, “Europe would have an entirely different form” than it has. Platonic philosophy isn’t only logic, dialectical thought; he also maintains that “philosophy begins where something begins to be seen, where meaningful speech leads us to the thing itself,” an intellectual eros for understanding what is, seen in the ideas, “the measure of what is.” Plato is “the philosopher of radical clarity,” even as he knows that “the cave does not cease to exist,” that no comprehensive ‘enlightenment’ is possible for human beings. The soul “stands at the boundary of the visible and the invisible.” It thinks; it judges. “Judgment means to say something else about something,” to ascend from the cave of opinion, the visible, into the realm of the ideas, invisible in the cave, to discover “the internally meaningful structure” of nature. The philosopher cares for the soul because the soul, “that which moves by itself,” which “constantly lives the [erotic] impulse to get to existence either through thinking, to unity with it itself, or through irrationality to fall into not-existence.” In thinking, in the life of thinking, the soul seeks “to be in unity with one’s own self”—the “work of a whole life.”

Aristotle retains a suggestion of the Platonic ideas in his ‘formal’ causes. Human life, including philosophy, moves not so much ‘up’ from the cave of political life and its conventional opinions as ‘horizontally’ toward the human ‘end’ or telos. That is, man remains a political animal, at home in the cave; the political philosopher finds a place in the polis. “The movement of the human being—qua human—lies in the human capability to comprehend the movement of all other beings, that he can take them into himself and give them, in his own mind, in his own proper existence, a certain place.” Properly placed within the polis, the human soul is the place in which “things show themselves to be that which they are.” This, too, requires care of the soul. In this, despite his disagreements with Plato, he is also “the continuator of the path of philosophical movement.” At the same time, he puts more emphasis on human action, which “is also comprehension of its own kind,” a prudential understanding which is not clarified by the Platonic ideas. “For the Platonic idea regards what is always, what already is, but we need principles for the realization of something that is not yet, that does not exist.” Human beings aim at happiness, which is not bliss (“this is utterly false”) but “doing well.” Doing well consists not of experiencing pleasure (animals do that) nor even of honor (which depends upon others’ opinions, which may be mistaken). In practice, happiness or doing well, fulfilling the distinctively human nature, inheres in political life, in ruling and being ruled by deliberation, whereby persons decide “what people in the whole, everyone together, is permitted and is not permitted, how their life goals are to be harmonized.” This is not the highest human life—the philosophic life is even more self-sufficient, closer to the divine, the permanent, the finest harmony. “It is the life of constant spiritual discernment.” 

“Aristotle’s thinking is that against which the European tradition leaned and from which it nourished itself for one thousand years.” Marx dismisses all that as “ideologists’ illusions.” Within the Marxist cave, in the apartments where his Underground University met, Patocka dissented. “What is at stake and what was at stake for philosophers from the very beginning—and this we are trying to comprehend—is to analyze the very ground upon which human acting unfolds as the acting of a being that understands itself—even in deficient modes.” Contra Marx, “Aristotle sees that human action is not blind causality.” In moral insight—insight attained in the course of exercising human freedom—what is “uncovered” is “that which I am.” 

Just as this core of European civilization differs from Marxist (and other forms of) determinism, it also differs from the character of other civilizations. Paraphrasing Husserl, Patocka remarks that all other civilizations uphold myths, traditions “with which a human being has to identify with his life, essence, [and] custom; that they have this peculiar stamp that you must immerse yourself in them, step into the continuity of their tradition.” Europe differs from this because “everyone understands European civilization”; “the principle of European civilization is—roughly spoken—two times two is four.” That is, European civilization is general in its particularity, capable of becoming universal, “while those others, should they be generalized, would signify the swallowing up of all others by a particular tradition, but not by the principle of insight into the nature of things.” In Europe, “all human problems are defined from the perspective of insight.” European civilization “cannot be understood except from this point of reference that we call the care of the soul,” cannot be understood without ‘Plato,’ without the philosophic quest and especially the thoughtful care which makes that quest possible and inheres in that quest. “I maintain that history in this understanding—not history as the substantial history of man in every civilization and every tradition formed by peoples somewhere—is the history of Europe.” The tension between “the tradition of insight” and European traditions that are conventional gives rise “to the sentiment that something is not quite right” with Europe, a sentiment Romanticism, among other movements, has registered. “This problem is not any less urgent than it has always been, indeed, it is more urgent now.”

 

Note

1. It is true that Christianity includes provision of eternal, infinite, punishment, a point Patocka overlooks.