Althusser - Politics and History

183 Pages·2006·0.75 MB·English

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.

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page 9

Part One

Montesquieu:
Politics and History

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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

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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
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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
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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.

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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