Masses, classes, ideas: studies on politics and philosophy before and after Marx

277 Pages·1994·10.744 MB·English

by  Balibar, Étienne

MASSES, CLASSES, IDEAS

MASSES, CLASSES. IDEAS
Studies on Politics and Philosophy
Before and After Marx
Etienne Balibar
translated by James Swenson
Routledge • New York & London
Published in 1994 by
Routledge
An imprint of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.
29 West 35 Street
New York, NY 10001
Published in Great Britain in 1993 by
Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane
London EC4P 4EE
Copyright © 1994 by Routledge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or repro-
duced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Balibar, Etienne
[Essays. English. Selections.]
Masses, classes, ideas: studies on politics and philosophy before
and after Marx
Ettienne Balibar; translated by James Swenson
p. cm.
Includes biographical references and index.
1. Political Science—Philosophy. 2. Philosophy—Marxist.
3. Ideology I. Title.
JA74.B33 1993
320.01—dc20
93-19168
CIP
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Balibar, Etienne
Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before
and After Marx
I. Title. II. Swenson, James
320.01
ISBN 0-415-90601-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 0-415-90602-4 (paperback)
CONTENTS
Preface
Part One
Dilemmas of Classical Politics:
Insurrection vs Constitution
1 Spinoza, the Anti-Orwell: The Fear of the Masses 3
2 "Rights of Man" and "Rights of the Citizen":
The Modern Dialectic of Equality and Freedom 39
3 Fichte and the Internal Border: On Addresses to the
German Nation 61
Part Two
Antinomies of Marxian Politics:
Materialism, History, and Teleology
4 The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism 87
5 In Search of the Proletariat: The Notion of
Class Politics in Marx 125
6 Politics and Truth: The Vacillation of Ideology, II 151
Part Three
Frontiers of Contemporary Politics:
Questioning the Universal
7 Fascism, Psychoanalysis, Freudo-Marxism 177
8 Racism as Universalism 191
9 What Is a Politics of the Rights of Man? 205
Notes 227
Index 247
Acknowledgments 251

PREFACE
The essays I have collected in this book were written between 1982 (the first,
on "Spinoza, the Anti-Orwell") and 1991 (the last, on "What Is a Politics of
the Rights of Man?"). They are logically independent from one another and
can be read separately (with the sole exception of chapter 6, "Politics and
Truth," which is a continuation of the previous essay on "The Vacillation
of Ideology in Marxism" [chapter 4], and would also benefit, so I believe,
from a preliminary reading of chapter 5, "In Search of the Proletariat").
However, I have presented them in a successive order, which I hope will help
the reader understand their common objectives and some of the underlying
hypotheses.
I do not claim to present a systematic doctrine of political philosophy.
But I certainly believe that the questions I have asked while rereading
certain classical works or addressing current issues, the criteria according to
which I have measured concepts of different origin, and the correspondences
I have tried to establish between different periods and contexts all refer to
some very crucial issues in our understanding of the political tradition. Like
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PREFACE
many of my contemporaries, I am trying to set this tradition to work again
in the very uncertain conjuncture we are living in. This involves transform-
ing the tradition from the inside.
A first and central issue is already indicated by my subtitle: "Studies on
Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx." To American and English
readers, it will recall a well-known book: C. E. Vaughan s Studies in the
History of Political Philosophy before and after Rousseau, published in 1925
in Manchester. It was through this book that many of us first became
acquainted with (among others) the doctrines of Spinoza, Locke, Fichte, and
Mazzini. I have no pretension to match the breadth of scope and richness of
content of that great classic, but I want to retain something of its method.
What appeals to me in the analogy between a "before and after Rousseau"
and a "before and after Marx" is not only a matter of formal characteristics.
Let me explain more precisely.
We find ourselves today at nearly the same chronological distance from
the writing of the Communist Manifesto, Capital, or the Anti-Duhring, as
political thinkers or activists at the beginning of this century (among them
the first generation of "Marxists") found themselves with respect to the
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality or the Social Contract. And it could
be claimed that, by virtue of their intrinsic conceptual power as well as
their controversial legacies in the experiences of revolutions and counter-
revolutions, the impact of Rousseauism and Marxism in their respective
"centuries" (I mean the centuries that came after them) have been fairly
comparable. (This might also suggest that a withering away of the interest
in Marx in the coming decades is not any more likely than a forgetting of
Rousseau was in the twentieth century). We could even trace a closer analo-
gy between the meaning and lasting effects of Rousseau s asking the famous
question, at the beginning of the Social Contract (I, 5): "What makes a
people a people?"1 and the impact of the questions asked by Marx, Engels,
and some of their followers concerning the role of class struggles, mass
movements, and the socialist/communist Weltanschauung in modern poli-
tics. Actually the latter set of questions concerns the revolutionary unity of
the people (or, as I say in chapter 2, "the people s people": the working class
or the proletariat) just as the former concerned the state unity of a people
(ein Volk—versus das Volk to recall the symptomatic oscillation which took
y
place in the recent events of East Germany, before the fall of the Wall). So
the latter appears in a sense as simply pushing one step further the inner ten-
sion of "insurrection" and "constitution" which is so typical of modern
democratic political thought, and is clearly exhibited in Rousseau's writings.
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PREFACE
But this takes us to the core of the analogy which I would suggest is
implicit in my essays and above all in their assemblage: the fact that I want to
evaluate the degree of originality of Marxist political theory with respect to
its forerunners (the exact nature of the "break" it represents), and discuss
the kind of irreversible constraints it imposes on its successors (that is,
on ourselves), just as it once proved necessary to evaluate the degree of
originality and the kind of irreversible threshold represented by Rousseau,
in order to understand modern democratic thought. Because Rousseau
had broken with past "constitutional" theory on a decisive point (regarding
popular sovereignty, and the "immanent" nature of legislation), it would not
prove possible to think of politics after him in the traditional way (as an "art"
of the rulers); as a result, the very use of his predecessors, be it of Locke, or
Spinoza, or even Machiavelli or Aristotle, would become twisted and deter-
mined by the new "paradigm" he framed. Because Marx and Engels (who
in this respect are hardly separable, in spite of their very different casts of
mind) had broken with past "ideological" representations of the motor
forces and the orientation of history, it proved impossible to think of politics
after them in the traditional way (as a realization of the "will," or the "ends"
of Reason). The contemporary "crisis of Marxism" poses no objection to
that; on the contrary it is the best proof of it, particularly inasmuch as it
leads many of us to reread classical, pre-Marxist authors, in order to find
some foundations for an alternative view of the relation between law, the
state, social interests or social struggles, or more simply (an orientation
which I share to a large extent) to elicit clarification of the central aporias of
Marxism itself and ways to get out of them.
Admittedly neither Rousseau nor Marx and the Marxist tradition can be
isolated from their historical destiny. Rousseau has a necessary connection to
the French Revolution (although the Revolution was not exactly a
"Rousseauist" process, nor was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen a Rousseauist text: but who could argue that, without the Discourse
and the Contract, the radical, motor forces of the Revolution could have
found their genuine language?). Similarly, Marx cannot be read apart from
the history of the labor movement and other revolutionary or reformist
movements before and after the Soviet Revolution (although it certainly was
not a Marxist revolution, but rather a revolution, and later on a counterrev-
olution, carried on in the name of Marx, which is something quite different
and much more ambiguous). My objective here, however, is not directly
social and political history. It is concentrated on the intellectual implications
of Marxism and some other doctrines that can be compared with it (both
ix