Essence of the Political
* Book: L’essence du politique. Julian Freund.
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Description
JEAN-MICHEL LE BOT:
"His own contribution to sociology is significant [3]. At the heart of it, we find his main book, L’essence du politique (The Essence of the Political), first published in 1965. It will be the subject of the present paper. We will begin, however, by giving some information on the life of his author (our biographical sketch is based almost entirely on the biographical information given in the afterword by Pierre-André Taguieff to the new French edition, in 2004, of The Essence of the Political)."
Discussion
JEAN-MICHEL LE BOT:
"Freund’s purpose, since the first formulation of his thesis project in 1949, was to identify, under the name of “the essence of the political”, drawing on his training as a philosopher but also on his experience of the Resistance, the specificity of this human reality, the political, alongside other human realities such as science, economics, religion and morality. In french Freund speaks of “le politique” (masculine) that he differentiates from “la politique” (feminine). “La politique” (which we will translate by “politics”) is a “practical and contingent activity, expressed in variable institutions and in all kinds of historical events” (Freund, 2004, p. 1). “Le politique”, by contrast, is a special area of social relations, distinct from the economic, moral or religious domains. The political domaine is an “essence” : it remains the same through centuries and millennia, independently of “historical variations, spatial and temporal contingencies, regimes and political systems” (ibid.). Freund argues that this political domain is based on three main characteristics which he calls its “presuppositions” : the relation between command and obedience, the relation between the private and the public, the relation between the friend and the enemy. After a first part of the book laying the methodological bases of his work, Julien Freund devotes the second part of The Essence of the Political to the study of each of these ’presuppositions’. We will give here a brief definition of them, accompanied, if necessary, by observations on the points of convergence with Jean Gagnepain’s model.
The relation between command and obedience
There is no political without a relation between command and obedience. This is the meaning of this first presupposition. The fact that the command in modern societies is “less and less by personal and direct orders and more and more diffuse through a huge apparatus of auxiliary agents” (ibid. p. 104) combined with the fact that “the movement of democratization completed by an extension of legal formalism and legalism has, so to speak, tempered the style of authority” (ibid., p. 104-105) have made it possible to lose sight of the importance of command and obedience. But these undeniable transformations in the mode of exercise of command did not lead to its disappearance. The need to obey has not disappeared either. Even if he is not always aware of it, the contemporary citizen – and on this point Freund agrees with Tocqueville – “depends much more than formerly on the State” (ibid.) and has to submit to an ever increasing number of laws. “People grumble against taxes, but they pay” (ibid.). Doctrines which, like liberalism, wish to “reduce as much as possible the intervention of the State in order to let the economic and social activity evolve as spontaneously as possible” (ibid.) can not completely eliminate the command. They can only delude themselves on this point, insofar as even liberal democracies remain political regimes, thus inseparable from the relation of command and obedience.
His development on command and obedience is an opportunity for Freund to discuss the Weberian typology of forms of domination. The starting point is the definition of the political power, which Freund borrows from Weber. According to Weber, power (Macht) “is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests” (Weber, 1978, p. 53). Domination (Herrschaft) “is the probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons” (ibid.). In Freund’s words, domination is “the deployment in time and space of a power that has succeeded in enforcing its orders, whatever the means and reasons for this supremacy” (Freund, 2004, p. 142). Domination thus has the same bases as power, but it is, we would say, an institutionalized power. Freund then mentions the three types of domination or authority distinguished by Weber : charismatic, traditional and legal. He does not only, however, repeat Weber, pointing out that “this convenient classification is far from exhaustive. It does not take into account, for example, a type of domination that has acquired in recent decades a growing importance : the ideological type”(ibid.). Freund, at the time he was writing his thesis, thought of Nazi ideology but also of communism, whose effects of domination were irreducible to the types hitherto defined by Weber. But islamic fundamentalism is probably another good example of this ideological type of domination.
The relation between private and public
If command and obedience are necessary elements for the definition of the political, they are not the only ones. They find themselves in areas that, according to Freund, are not political : that of the company, for example, or that of the family. There must be another criterion (or “presupposition”) that “specifically defines the sphere of political command and obedience” (ibid., p. 280). This criterion is the distinction between the private and the public. It may be objected, Freund remarks, that since the distinction between the private and the public only appears with modernity and liberal doctrines, it is not a part of the essence of the political. But this objection, according to him, does not hold. Although it has not always been made clear, the distinction between the private and the public “underlies all known political structures” (ibid., p. 281-282). There is no independent community without any social activity to protect its members “as they form that community and as such have a common good to protect that is the raison d’être of the community” (ibid., p. 292). But this particular social activity, which Freund calls public or political, never covers all activities or social relations. Some of these activities or relations are outside the public sphere and as such are described as private. But the two realities are fundamental : one is not the origin of the other. “The two notions, though contrary, are correlative, and one can not think of one without thinking of the other” (ibid., p. 295). Their boundary, however, “is not definitive or invariable. [...] A case that belongs traditionally to the private sphere can come under the authority of the public and vice versa”(ibid.).
If the boundary separating the public from the private thus vary throughout history, no political system can put an end to this distinction “without perishing itself”. A power that totally suppresses the private by introducing itself everywhere becomes totalitarian. It is precisely this, according to Freund, that defines totalitarianism. Totalitarianism “is a gigantic effort to erase the distinction between the individual and the public, by eliminating this intermediate reality between the public and the personal that is civil society” (ibid., p. 298-299). In fact, even the Soviet and Nazi regimes which, in the words of Hannah Arendt, engaged in a “totalitarian movement” (Arendt, 1951), failed to remove the distinction between the public and the private. The Soviet family, for example, kept its autonomy and the regime had to agree, despite its ideology, to maintain a private agriculture, in the form of household plots (личные подсобные хозяйства). But the totalitarian effort to erase the distinction between the public and the private led Freund to ask “if totalitarianism [...] is still politics, although, apparently, it appears as a kind of political paroxysm” (Freund, 2004, p. 299-300). Such a question makes sense from the point of view of the sociology of the person. Totalitarianism, indeed, can be seen as an attempt to reduce the person to the subject, when it is not to the individual, by disregarding the boundaries which she/he gives to her/himself and which allow her/him to define the degrees of “privateness” and “publicness”. There is something common between totalitarianism as a political enterprise and the systematic intrusion or submission scenarios encountered in certain perversions and psychoses. But the principle of autonomy, in the etymological sense of the term, which is precisely the person, also makes it possible to understand why the totalitarian movement can never completely succeed in erasing the difference between the private and the public. As shown by the literature of the camps all along the 20th century, even in those prison conditions where totalitarian enterprise is at its maximum, inmates often succeed in maintaining a relative autonomy [7].
The relation between the friend and the enemy
The two previous relations are not yet sufficient to define the political comprehensively “because they respectively determine the formation and the internal organization of a community, not its relations with foreign communities” (Freund, 2004, p. 488). What defines the latter is the distinction between the friend and the enemy. “The friend-enemy conceptual pair may therefore appear to be above all the presupposition of foreign policy ; but it goes without saying that its action will have repercussions on the inner life of a community, because no State is once and for all safe from a civil war” (ibid.). Freund here relies on the works of Carl Schmitt, one of his masters together with Raymond Aron. It is on this point, that of the necessity of an enemy, real or virtual, that the disagreement with Jean Hyppolite crystallized. The latter wanted to believe in the possibility, albeit distant, of a humanity reconciled with itself, without war and therefore without an enemy. He could not agree to continue to be the supervisor of a thesis in which it was asserted that there is no political where there is no enemy (Taguieff, in Freund, 2004, p. 831).
It is on this point however that Gagnepain is perhaps closer to Freund. “The enemy federates us”, Gagnepain writes, “and the medieval Church understood that, when it decided to unite the Christian West at the expense of the Turks” (Gagnepain, 1991, p. 35). He develops the same idea in his Introductory Lessons to the Theory of Mediation when he says that “the Romans defined the civis as the opposite of the hostis. It is because their had the same enemy that their became fellow citizens. People only unite against others ! I believe in the necessity of conflict, in the necessity of the hostis. If we do not give ourselves points of opposition, we can not federate a people” (Gagnepain, 1993, p. 139). Even if Gagnepain, to our knowledge, never explicitly refers to Simmel and Weber, the above quotation makes it possible to include him, alongside Freund, in the sociological tradition of these authors rather than in the functionalist tradition of Durkheim. Contrary to Durkheim who tended to see in any conflict a manifestation of social disorder and anomie, Simmel, more dialectician, insisted on the socializing function of conflict. But he also observed that the existence of an external enemy is not always enough to federate a collectivity : “the condition of strife [...] pulls the elements so firmly together and places them under an impulse of such unification that they have to get along with each other or completely repel each other ; for that reason too an external war is sometimes the final means for a State shot through with internal hostilities to overcome them ; sometimes, however, precisely that allows the whole to disintegrate definitively” (Simmel, 2009, p. 283). A good example of such a disintegration is given by the last years of Tsarist Russia, when the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary increased the internal tensions and led to the February Revolution. Another example is given by France during the Nazi Occupation : many historians do not hesitate to describe as a “civil war” the fight between the Resistance movements and the collaborationists.
For Gagnepain as for Freund, therefore, the political is the realm of conflict, of controversy, possibly of war. It may be tempting to generalize the statement by asserting that the friend-enemy opposition does not only concern foreign policy but also domestic politics, where the “left”, for example, exists only in its opposition to the “right”, the same process occurring within each camp a bit like the same pattern is reproduced in fractals at all scales. This temptation to generalize, however, calls for two remarks. The first is that the notions of “right” and “left” are not, for Freund, part of the essence of the political. They are historical notions, polemical and electoral, which express an opinion. They are also very circumstantial and local, having appeared in France in August-September 1789 during the debates of the Constituent Assembly over the royal veto, that is to say at a relatively recent date (Freund, 2004, p. 825). It would be anachronistic to project them, for instance, on Ancien Egypt at the time of Akhenaton or on imperial Roman Gaul at the time of Childeric I. They don’t apply very well either to post-Soviet Russia, whether that of Boris Yeltsin or that of Vladimir Putin [10]. These observations invite us not to translate too quickly the concepts of synallactic and anallactic proposed by Gagnepain (1991, p. 109 sqq.) by the concepts of left and right, as is sometimes done for the sake of simplification but at the risk of anachronism. The second remark is that Freund has a more restrictive definition of the enemy than Gagnepain. This is what emerges from its definition of the State “as a political unity which has only external enemies and which only tolerates adversaries within it, that is to say people who may disagree on the general policy of the existing government and constitute a ‘legal’ opposition, without questioning the existence of the political unity as an absolute sovereignty within clearly demarcated boundaries” (Freund, 2004, p. 569).
I do not believe, however, to distort Freund’s thought by asserting that the difference between the adversary and the enemy is only a question of degree : “as soon as internal rivalries evolve in the direction of the distinction between friend and enemy, the civil war will arise which risks annihilating the political unity of the State” (ibid., p. 445). This was the case in countries where the Marxist parties, in order to seize the power, clearly assumed the designation of the enemy on the basis of the irreducible opposition, according to them, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It was particularly clear in Lenin’s ideology. “Revolution is war”, he wrote. “Of all the wars known in history it is the only lawful, rightful, just, and truly great war. This war is not waged in the selfish interests of a handful of rulers and exploiters, like any and all other wars, but in the interests of the masses of the people against the tyrants, in the interests of the toiling and exploited millions upon millions against despotism and violence”. Freund points out in this connection that, for Schmitt, one of the characteristics of Marxism was “to have given to classical liberalism the sense of the enemy” (ibid., p. 511, see also p. 576). For one of the essential principles of classical liberalism, until then, was precisely the negation of the existence of the political enemy “so as to allow only economic competitors to subsist” (ibid., p. 493). But the rhetoric of the class struggle was reconciled in many cases with a reformist political practice. Only empirical study can determine, in matters of domestic policy, whether one remains in a conflict of opinion between opponents or enters a more acute conflict between enemies. What is certain is that there is no politics without adversary and that the latter is not necessarily the class adversary. This is another point of convergence between Gagnepain and Freund. The first reproached Marx for having reduced the social struggle to the class struggle by considering only “the particular case of the relation between capital and labor” (Gagnepain, 1993, p. 138). The second added that “the Greeks could have said with as much accuracy that history is the struggle between the cities. [...] The political struggle is multifaceted and can not be reduced to a single type of conflict. It is related to all possible forms of enmity, that is to say, it arises as soon as the distinction between friend and enemy is affirmed in any aspect whatsoever” (Freund, 2004, p. 538).
To conclude on this point, let us give a last important precision relative to the concept of enmity : Freund’s perspective is not a normative or prescriptive one, that would call to build any policy on the designation of an enemy. It only takes into account the fact that enmity exists and that not wanting an enemy does not give the assurance of not having one. The enemy often “imposes himself upon us by his own will, without us having chosen or even desired him” (ibid., p. 483). This was expressed in another way by Winston Churchill’s remark to Neuville Chamberlain after the latter’s signing of the 1938 Munich Agreement : “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war”. But it was also discovered, too late for them alas, by those Westerners who, before falling into the hands of their jihadist executioners, sometimes imagined themselves as citizens of a world transformed into a vast playground for tourist encounters."