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Althusser - Politics and History PDF

183 Pages·2006·0.75 MB·English
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Louis Althusser Politics and History Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx Translated from the French by Ben Brewster 'Montesquieu: Politics and History' first published by Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1959, © PUF,1959; 'The Social Contract' first published in Cahiers pour l'Analyse, no. 8: L'Impensé de Jean- Jacques Rousseau, n.d., © Le Graphe; 'Marx's Relation to Hegel' first published in Hegel et la Pensée Moderne by Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1970, © PUF, 1970. This translation first published, 1972 © NLB, 1972 Prepared © for the Internet by David J. Romagnolo, [email protected] (July 2003) Pdf version by [email protected] (March 2006) Acknowledgments 6 Translator's note 7 Part One MONTESQUIEU: POLITICS AND HISTORY Foreword 13 1. A Revolution in Method 17 2. A New Theory of Law 31 3. The Dialectic of History 43 4. 'There are Three Governments . . .' 61 5. The Myth of the Separation of Powers 87 6. Montesquieu's Parti Pris 96 Conclusion 107 Bibliography 108 Part Two ROUSSEAU: THE SOCIAL CONTRACT Foreword 113 1. Posing the Problem 116 2. The Solution of the Problem: Discrepancy I 125 3. The Contract and Alienation 135 4. Total Alienation and Exchange: Discrepancy II 140 5. Particular Interest and General Interest, Particular Will and General Will: Discrepancy III 146 6. Flight Forward in Ideology or Regression in the Economy: Discrepancy IV 155 Part Three MARX'S RELATION TO HEGEL 161 Index 187 page 6 Acknowledgments : We are grateful to J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd for their kind permission to use extracts from The Social Contract and Discourses, translated by G. D. H. Cole, and from Émile, translated by Barbara Foxley, both published in Everyman's Library. page 7 Translator's note : Quotations from the works of Montesquieu in Part One of this book have in general been taken from the four-volume translation by Thomas Nugent entitled The Works of Monsieur de Montesquieu, published in London in 1777. References to the Spirit of Laws give the Book number in Roman and the chapter number in Arabic numerals: thus, SL, VIII, 9 means The Spirit of Laws, Book VIII, Chapter 9. Quotations from Rousseau in Parts One and Two have been taken either from The Social Contract and Discourses, translated by G. D. H. Cole, in the Everyman's Library edition of 1966, or from Émile, translated by Barbara Foxley, in the Everyman's Library edition of 1957. Page references are to these editions. However, the translator has taken the liberty of altering these translations whenever questions of consistency of terminology, or facilitating the reader's understanding of Althusser's commentary, have arisen. Quotations from Marx, Engels and Lenin in Part Three have been taken from the standard English translations of their works, published in England by Lawrence and Wishart. page 8 [blank] page 9 Part One Montesquieu: Politics and History page 10 [blank] page 11 To apply the ideas of the present time to distant ages, is the most fruitful source of error. To those people who want to modernize all the ancient ages, I shall say what the Egyptian priests said to Solon, 'O Athenians, you are mere children.' The Spirit of Laws, XXX, 14. Montesquieu made us see . . . Mme De Staël France had lost her claims to nobility; Montesquieu gave her them back. Voltaire page 12 [blank] page 13 Foreword I make no claim to say anything new about Montesquieu. Anything that seems to be new is no more than a reflection on a well-known text or on a pre-existing reflection. I simply hope that I have given a more living portrait of a figure familiar to us in marble or bronze. I am not thinking so much of the inner life of the Seigneur de la Brède, which was so secret that it is still debated whether he was ever a believer, whether he loved his wife as she loved him, whether past the age of thirty-five he experienced the passions of a twenty-year-old. Nor so much the everyday life of the Président de Parlement tired of parliament, of the lord absorbed by his lands, of the vineyardist attentive to his wines and his sales. Others have written of this, and they should be read. I am thinking of a different life, one which time has cloaked in its shadow, and commentaries with their lustre. This life is, first, that of a thinker whose enthusiasm in legal and political matters never waned to the end, and who spoilt his sight by too much reading, hurrying to win the only race with death that really concerned him, his completed work. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not the curiosity of his object, but his intelligence, which is all Montesquieu. His only wish was to understand. We have several images of him which betray this effort and his pride in it. He only delved into the infinite mass of documents and texts, the immense heritage of histories, chronicles miscellanies and compilations, in order to grasp their logic and disengage their grounds. He wanted to seize the 'thread' of this skein which centuries had tangled, to seize this thread and pull it page 14 to him so that the whole followed. The whole did follow. At other times he felt himself lost in this gigantic universe of minute data as if in a boundless sea. He wanted this sea to have shores, he wanted to give it them and reach them. He reached them. No one went before him in this adventure. It is as if this man, who was enough in love with ships to discuss the design of their hulls, the height of their masts and their speeds; who devoted enough interest to the first peripli to follow the Carthaginians down the coasts of Africa and the Spaniards to India, felt some affinity with all sea-rovers. Not in vain does he invoke the sea when he finds himself in the wide open spaces of his subject: the last sentence of his book celebrates the longed-for approach to land. It is true that he set out for the unknown. But for this navigator, too, the unknown was simply a new land. That is why Montesquieu reveals something of the profound joy of a man who discovers. He knows it. He knows he is bringing new ideas, that he is offering a work without precedent, and if his last words are a salute to the land finally conquered, his first is to warn that he set out alone and had no teachers; nor did his thought have a mother. He notes that he really must use a new language because he is speaking new truths. Even his turns of phrase betray the pride of an author who illuminates the ordinary words he has inherited with the new meanings he has discovered. In that moment when he is almost surprised to see its birth and is seized by it, and in the thirty years of labour which constituted his career, he is well aware that his thought opens up a new world. We have got used to this discovery. And when we celebrate its greatness, we cannot but let Montesquieu be already fixed in the necessity of our culture, as a star is in the sky, perceiving only with difficulty the audacity and enthusiasm he must have had to open to us this sky in which we have inscribed him. But I am also thinking of another life. Of the life too often masked by the very same discoveries that we owe to him. Of his preferences, his aversions, in short, of Montesquieu's parti pris in the struggles of his age. A too soothing tradition would like Montesquieu to have cast on the world the gaze of a man without page 15 interest or party. Did he not himself say that he was a historian precisely because he was detached from every faction, shielded from power and all its temptations, free of everything by a miraculous chance? Capable precisely of understanding because free of everything? Let us do him the duty, which is the duty of every historian, of taking him not at his word, but at his work. It has seemed to me that this image is a myth, and I hope to show it. But in showing it I should not like anyone to believe that Montesquieu's enthusiastic parti pris in the political struggles of his time ever reduced his work to a mere commentary on his wishes. Others before him set out for the East -- and discovered Indies for us in the West. page 16 [blank] page 17 Chapter One A Revolution in Method It is a received truth that Montesquieu is the founder of political science. Auguste Comte said it, Durkheim repeated it and no one has seriously disputed their judgement. But perhaps we should step back a little in order to distinguish him from his ancestors, and to see clearly into what it is that thus distinguishes him. For even Plato stated that politics is the object of a science, and we have his Republic, Politics and Laws to prove it. All of the thought of antiquity lived in the conviction, not that a science of politics was possible, which is a critical conviction, but that one could go ahead with it straight away. And the moderns themselves took up this thesis, as is clear from Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza and Grotius. Of course, the Ancients should be criticized not for the claim to reflect on the political, but for their illusory belief that they had produced a science of it. For their idea of science was borrowed from their own knowledges. And as the latter, with the exception of certain areas of mathematics, not unified before Euclid, were no more than immediate glimpses or their philosophy projected into things, they were complete strangers to our idea of science, having no examples of it. But the Moderns! How could the mind of a Bodin, of a Machiavelli, of a Hobbes or of a Spinoza, the contemporaries of the already rigorous disciplines triumphing in mathematics and physics, have remained blind to the model of scientific knowledge that we have inherited? And in fact from the sixteenth century on we can see the birth and growth in a joint movement of a first, mathematical physics, and of the demand for a second, soon to be called moral or political physics, which aimed for the rigour of the first. For the

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References to the Spirit of Laws give the Book number in Roman and the .. Can one thus authorize a political sociology of religion and morality? The.
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