- ISBN-10:
- 0822346079
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822346074
- Pub. Date:
- 01/01/2010
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0822346079
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822346074
- Pub. Date:
- 01/01/2010
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
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Overview
Abélès examines the new global politics, which assumes many forms and is enacted by diverse figures with varied sympathies: the officials at meetings of the WTO and the demonstrators outside them, celebrity activists, and online contributors to international charities. He makes an impassioned case that our accounts of globalization need to reckon with the preoccupations and affiliations now driving global politics. The Politics of Survival was first published in France in 2006. This English-language edition has been revised and includes a new preface.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822346074 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2010 |
| Series: | Public Planet Books Series |
| Pages: | 250 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Marc Abélès is a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and he holds a research professorship at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is the author of numerous books, including Anthropologie de la globalisation, Le Spectacle du pouvoir, and Quiet Days in Burgundy: A Study of Local Politics.
Read an Excerpt
The Politics of Survival
By Marc Abélès
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4607-4
Chapter One
The End of the Brilliance That the Future Will Bring
When the American essayist Francis Fukuyama published The End of History, his text experienced immediate repercussions, well beyond the boundaries of his own country. What strikes us, in hindsight, is less the newness of the thoughts he was expressing-after all, Hegel had analogous ideas-but precisely the interest that the book and its provocative title fueled. The end of history: although many had the sense that the clock was still turning, something had broken at the end of the twentieth century. It was as if the vision of time that westerners shared and that they never stopped imposing on the rest of the world had become untenable. Until then, in fact, one bragged about being part of History. Whatever their disagreements, the Moderns shared the same appetite to transform the world, to go forward. No natural catastrophe, no horrible conflict that weakened the world during the last two centuries had eaten into this optimism, this faith in the powers of human reason, and in the resources of science and technology put into place by our fellow human beings. Man had progressed beyond monkey, and he had even managed to reach the moon. The end of the 1970s is in this respect distinctive. On earth, Southeast Asia was put to fire and sword, and sustained the ravages of American military technology, whereas the same great power managed to win its bet with the moon landing of three of its astronauts.
At the time, the criticism of U.S. imperialism was virulent. Nonetheless, American technical performance was unanimously applauded, as the sign of progress in human history, just like the discoveries in biology and the rapid developments of the computer industry, which appear as good news for a world insisting on its infatuation with modernity. I emphasize these two words, modernity and progress, because they constituted the leitmotifs for many generations, evoking the hope of a better world. In hindsight, it seems contradictory that the two great global conflicts of the last century, instead of tainting this hope, were able to fuel new expectations. Antagonistic ideologies found, in these conflicts, a favorable mold to develop and affront one another. In fact, modernity and progress only made sense when comforted by the idea that a human community-in this case, a state, a nation-had taken over its own destiny. Hence the preeminent role of the political as a materialization of this irreplaceable power of human beings to conduct their own affairs, to transform the world, giving themselves laws and collective goals.
The importance given to politics in this worldview is inseparable from Western humanism that emphasized the Promethean dimension of our societies. The civilized being, "industrious" as described by Enlightenment philosophers, came up with sufficient regulations to guarantee the possibility of carrying out his activity without hindrance. The first motive in the invention of civil duties, according to Hume, "is nothing but self-interest" (1992, 544). The formation of political power came within the framework of a more global dynamic aiming to promote a society of producers. The need for politics is the consequence of the individual's rise in power. The civil state constitutes the promise of a pacified world. Accepting certain constraints, whose intensity varies according to the regime in power, the individual enlarges his capacity to act. The political institution is the most efficient means to assure the safety of individual rights on his person and property, and to make order reign in the exchange relations of individuals. "But government extends farther its beneficial influence," writes Hume, "and not contented to protect men in those conventions they make for their mutual interest, it often obliges them to make such conventions, and forces them to seek their own advantage, by a concurrence in some common end or purpose" (1992, 538). This amounts to saying that in accepting the political state, men find themselves stimulated by their belonging to the group. The supreme cunning of the political consists in making private interest prevail at the exact moment when it seems to subject that interest to collective goals.
We would certainly say that Hume was a sly old fox, insensitive to the rhetoric of the free polis, which was so precious to philosophers since antiquity. It is true that, unlike Locke and Rousseau, he refuses to endorse the idea of an original social contract that would preside over the edification of "civil society." All this seems to him a pure and simple invention, and he prefers to hold onto a more pragmatic vision of things. Humans need politics to produce and reproduce; in addition, politics, under the displayed ideals of justice, has the advantage of promoting industry. Neither more nor less. This view of the public realm, as unromantic as it may be, seems to me to be very significant. In just a few lines, it draws the conditions of Enlightenment individualism. We knew that modernity rhymed with progress; but all of those who believed in development of science and more generally of productive forces must take political function seriously. Or, as Marx would say, no infrastructure without superstructure. For the establishment of a power and the struggles that start to harness this power are inseparable from the process of world transformation. Politics, science, and industry now form an indissoluble triangle.
This collusion between politics and modernity, and the way it frees itself in postrevolutionary bourgeois society from the religious sediment that enveloped it (even if the sacred remains present in certain aspects of republican sovereignty), could not be without consequences for the view of power that imposed itself progressively in Western democracies. This vision is realized through two key ideas. First of all, political activity is conceived as a vector of emancipation and its access becomes a true collective issue. Next, power as a center of decision must be able to remediate the imbalances created by progress. From liberal thinkers to Marx, the attempt has been made to find rationality in politics. There is an art of governance on which social peace and economic growth depend. It is about finding good measure, but this involves drawing the limits of action.
There is no surprise in the extraordinary abundance, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of treatises about the art of governance, as well as many reflections comparing the advantages and disadvantages of different political regimes. Through these texts, as in daily practice and power struggles, we perceive a real tension between what might be expected from the political realm. On the one hand, there is the hope that politics can somehow transcend itself, become a positive agent in the social dynamic, raising itself above particular interests and imposing a worldview that takes global evolutions into consideration. On the other hand, there is the more prosaic sentiment that politics remains stuck in sometimes sordid games that privilege the selfishness of the powerful.
Of course, in Europe during the entire nineteenth century, the state continually reinforced itself while simultaneously allowing criticism. It was in the name of progress that Marx pointed to the inadequacy of this political form, highlighting the way in which it sharpens social contradictions instead of helping to resolve them. At the same time, the bourgeois political power denounced by the author of Capital is a dynamic element in the system since it participates in the logic of accumulation that leads to the hegemony of one class over another. The state fully plays its part in the process that engenders a transnational capitalism harnessing human activity in even the most remote regions of the planet. Instrumentalized by the bourgeoisie, politics operates nevertheless with remarkable efficacy. According to Marx, it is there where the sword must be carried, and the revolution leads ineluctably to the conquest of the state apparatus by the working classes, with the instauration of a proletarian dictatorship. As we know, Marx's proclaimed objective was the decline of the state, which did not signify the end of politics, but its appropriation by all of society.
Without getting into a debate about the relevance of the Marxist viewpoint, we can observe Marx's fascination with politics, which he gives a special status in relation to other domains of social activity. As Miguel Abensour indicates, "Indeed, there is for Marx a sort of sublimity in the political realm. The exaltation is proper to the political sphere: in regard to other spheres, it is above and beyond" (Abensour 1997, 80). It is as if everything connected to the government were invested with a particular aura. There is no longer a true separation between religion and politics, which highlights the celestial metaphors that decorated Marx's first writings, and continued to do so later on. Marx's ambivalence is caused by his fascination for the sacredness of a domain that allows the individual to detach himself from his selfish interest in order to access the universal, and his hate for the manipulative reality of power. The state is the instrument par excellence of a certain power dynamic, of the violence that a minority exercises on the whole of society.
But, unlike Weber, whose view of the profound connection between power and violence fuels a pessimistic vision of politics, Marx sees the condition for emancipation in the political realm. History goes forward, propelled by modernization and industrial progress. Of course, the change, far from attenuating the forms of exploitation of man by man, exacerbates the contradictions between productive forces and relations of production. But it is precisely from the political struggle that the surmounting of such contradictions can come, along with the instauration of a new type of relations of humans among themselves and with nature. From this point of view, Marxism is characterized by unfailing optimism. Even the idea to construct a political organization of the masses, susceptible to overthrowing the powers in place and to carry out radical change, reflects the confidence which was never refuted in the positivism of political practice.
This confidence is largely based on the belief in the ephemeral character-on the scale of human history-of the institutions of power. "The state, then, has not existed from eternity. There have been societies that managed without it, that had no idea of the state and state authority" (Engels 1990 [1884], 272), which is similar to the idea that the day will come when we will have to file the state away in the "cabinet of Antiquities." This does not mean that politics will disappear but that they are susceptible to being embodied in new relations-Marx is vague on this point, evoking associative forms between producers. If we topple into utopia here, it is due to the fact that history never stops, and that it becomes necessary to imagine ourselves in the future, even if it means that we have to invent all sorts of preferentially reassuring possible futures. The eschatology of a classless society is the most spectacular expression of the religion of progress.
If we now consider the attitude of liberal thinkers toward the state, it is easy to see the distance that separates them from the Marxist vision. They consider politics with distrust. They never stop complaining about the weight of the state. It is clear that one of their fundamental preoccupations involves the avoidance of any encroachment of the state onto the individual sphere. According to these thinkers, the best way to protect freedom is to avoid letting politics take the lion's share. Politics must be limited in its impact. Is that to say that sycophants of property and of the market have come to stigmatize the state? Things are far more complex, as Pierre Manent (1995 [1987]) has noted. On the one hand, the main worry of liberals is to avoid the hold of politics over civil society or over economic relations that are at the origin of wealth and whose central principle is private property. In this view, the preservation of individual liberty is the foundation of the social edifice. It matters that the people's sovereignty is practiced in a limited and relative manner. It is necessary, however, that the primacy accorded to individual freedom does not become synonymous with atomization. Benjamin Constant warns that "the danger of modern liberty is that, once absorbed in the joy of our private independence, we too easily renounce our right to share in political power" (1980, 509).
Civilization has experienced progress since antiquity, the economy prospers, and people are more connected: but does this mean that men must sacrifice the political dimension of freedom in favor of a purely selfish vision of their individual happiness? The public sphere would not be left to lie unsown: if they take it out on Rousseau, if they oppose any encroachment on civil society's sovereignty, liberals are completely aware that the state must take its part in the work of collective improvement. In fact, beginning with the French Revolution, the necessity to support institutional design and to enlarge the sphere of governance was part of a large consensus. Both Tocqueville and Marx are aware that this design is indispensable to resolve the social problems caused by the modern industrial economy. It shows how, in order to counter inequalities, "a third party, that of a central power whose mission is to symbolize, guarantee, and realize equality and resemblance" is constructed (Manent 1995 [1987], 107).
Driving itself toward a better future, society needs to be (well) governed. Technical and scientific progress is the condition of well-being. The world progresses in big leaps, and, in this dynamic, the place of politics, instead of being a problem, becomes crucial. We even find that the entrance into modernity is in line with the state's vampirization of all that was part of social ties and the practices of sociability. The establishment of systems of assistance entrusted to the public administration and which substituted for the forms of charitable protection illustrate this evolution. We are dealing with "the State's monopoly over instituting the social bond" (Gauchet 1997, 196). The figure of the welfare state that dominated the postwar period is without a doubt the most fully realized form of a certain relationship between the individual and the polis, devoted to redistribution. It implies that the individual participates actively in social solidarity, fulfilling her "social citizenship" (Rosanvallon 1998, 50). The history of the welfare state is marked by a growing mutualization of risks that makes the state the guarantor of social cohesion.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Translator's Note ixPreface to the English Edition xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
1. The End of Brilliance That the Future Will Bring 21
2. Globalization and the State: A False Debate? 41
3. Virtual Europe, a Space of Uncertainty 57
4. Understanding the Displacement of Politics: From Convivance to Survival 87
5. A Necessary Detour 125
6. From Power to Humanity 143
7. The Economy of Survival 161
8. Toward a Global Politics 189
Conclusion 207
Bibliography 211
Index 219