In Praise of Politics

Alain Badiou, Aude Lancelin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509533688, 9781509533671
• eBook ISBN: 9781509533701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Against the backdrop of an alarming rise in authoritarianism and the crisis of liberal democracy, few would consider extoling the virtues of politics today. Yet in this lively dialogue with journalist Aude Lancelin, leading French thinker Alain Badiou argues that it is precisely through politics that humanity can still achieve its most ambitious aims.

As power becomes ever more concentrated in the hands of the state and global corporations, the role of the citizen is reduced to little more than ritual. But Badiou emphasizes that politics is concerned not just with power and the state, but also with justice. So the central question of politics is "What is a just power?", and the debate over politics is fundamentally about the norms to which power is subject and its relationship to a community – a community that is able to take control of its own destiny and provide its own direction, based on a shared standard of justice.

This engaging dialogue, in which Badiou articulates his view of politics with exceptional clarity, will be of great value to anyone interested in radical politics today.

1
What Is Politics?

What a strange idea, we’ll be told, to be coming out in praise of politics in the year of a presidential election [2017], when that election was distinguished above all by its exposure of a broken-down landscape ever more shockingly abandoned to the free play of the forces of capital. One really has to wonder what might still be of interest to a philosopher in such a case. How do you respond to people, young people in particular, who can’t imagine politics as anything other than an arena for cynicism and opportunism?

That kind of feeling can only be understood by asking, first, what exactly is meant by the word “politics.” It’s a long story. From the beginning of the story, several millennia ago, the idea was that politics was power, the issue of the assumption and exercise of state power vis-à-vis established communities, communities whose members were known and identified. The first definition therefore considers that the central – indeed, sole – issue of politics is state power. It’s a simple definition but one that nevertheless runs through all of history: it was still Lenin’s definition, for example, and is still ours as well, in a rudimentary form, when politics is reduced to the electoral choice of a president.

This definition may give rise to a very cynical conception of politics as consisting of competition, rivalry, and ruthlessness, with the aim of seizing power, assuming it, and wielding it as one sees fit. There are theorists of politics so conceived, foremost among them being undoubtedly Machiavelli. Machiavelli described in an extremely sophisticated, positivistic, one might even say “technical,” way the various methods of struggle for the seizure and assumption of power as well as the qualifications needed for engaging in that kind of fight. He occupies a unique position as a theorist of politics, if it is conceived in these terms. Admittedly, we see little else today than that fight, with all that entails in terms of baseness, corruption, deceit, violence, and so on. But then, the author of The Prince had already showed that these elements were strongly associated with the question of politics and its exercise.

In contrast to this vision there developed, over a very turbulent, complex history, and in close connection with philosophy, another conception of politics: one that holds that politics has a constitutive relationship with justice. Throughout their historical existence (admittedly not a very long one, about twenty centuries), philosophers have endeavored to give a precise definition of justice. But whatever the definition, if the idea of justice is involved in the definition of politics then it can no longer be defined simply as the struggle for power. The central question becomes: “What is a just power?” And the debate over politics is less about the exercise of power than about the norms to which power is subject, its relationship to the community, and its objectives.

Between politics defined as power – focused entirely on the power of the state – and politics defined as justice – focused on questions like “What of the community, the relationship among its members, its aspirations? What of categories like equality and freedom?” – there is both a connection and a conflict. There is a connection because, ultimately, justice cannot remain a purely abstract idea with no bearing on the reality of the state. So, the question of justice is also, necessarily, the question of a just power. And, on the other hand, there is a conflict, because power divorced from the concept of justice is subject to the degradations that have occurred throughout history and of which the 2017 presidential election in France is but one episode. And hardly a brilliant one, considering all the corruption and sinister developments it involved.

The conflict between justice and power itself has a long history. Plato had already attempted to establish the standards for a state governed by the idea of the Good and had shown, through a very sophisticated analysis of the different “types” of government – oligarchy, democracy, timocracy, and anarchy – that it was no easy task. Relatively late in the day, no doubt around the eighteenth century, with Rousseau in particular, and later through the efforts of such nineteenth-century revolutionary thinkers as Marx and Engels, of course, but also Proudhon, Fourier, and Feuerbach, not to mention Auguste Comte and Blanqui, the hypothesis that justice may actually be incompatible with power emerged. Consequently, the perspective on politics changed: state power might only be a transitory instrument, one that was necessary for a whole period of history but would be replaced by the establishment of a justice that would be, as it were, in the hands of humanity itself. This might be the dialectical movement that overcomes the opposition between justice and power.

Your philosophical system defines politics as a “truth procedure,” along with love, art, and science. In what sense do you mean this? Certainly, there’s a general belief that nothing could be further from politics than a concern for truth …

Sure, and as a matter of fact Machiavelli defined politics broadly as a sovereign art of lying. An ability to lie has always been considered a necessity for politicians in general, if only to win power by making promises that won’t be kept. When I define politics as a “truth procedure,” I obviously mean politics in the second sense we’ve just considered, namely when it is organically linked to the category of justice.

Is this an idealistic vision? I don’t think so at all. I know – I had firsthand experience of this for many years – that politics is also, and perhaps above all, a practice, a process. It requires participants, activists, organizations, and popular movements, and all those things combined make for a very complex process, which yields the truth about what the community deserves to be, based on its political activity. Namely, a community no longer subject to arbitrary authorities or inexplicable divisions but a community, a collectivity, that is its own guide and provides its own direction, based on a shared standard of justice.

Whenever a novelty of this kind occurs in the political field, that is, whenever a new opportunity arises of doing away with an old, unjust, inegalitarian, and divided order in favor of an order that could be regarded as humanity’s exerting of control over its own destiny – whenever something like that occurs, it’s an innovation, a creation, in the domain of history. And that innovation has a very special destiny because it is an exception to the general regime: state administration and indifference to any idea of justice. It is well known that revolutions have always enthralled huge crowds precisely because they offered such novelty. Their historical destiny is another story. But the revolutions I have in mind, from the most egalitarian phase of the French Revolution (1792–4) to the Cultural Revolution in China (1965–70), by way of the revolution in Haiti led by Toussaint Louverture (1791–1802), the Paris Commune (1871), and the Russian Revolution (1917–29), have already demonstrated historically – and this is an irreversible, established fact – that collective ownership of justice is possible. This is what I call a truth. A truth of what? Of a human community’s ability to take control of its own destiny and form of organization.

A moment ago, you mentioned a community that is its own guide, that takes control of its own destiny, as being the just system of government, the one we should strive for, the most desirable one. In our democracies, as everyone knows, the people’s role is usually limited to choosing from among a handful of candidates and, once power has been handed over to one of them, the people disappear. More often than not, they even become nuisances and have to be told to let the grown-ups handle things. When they are consulted, which is rarely the case, that decision is immediately regretted, and their input is usually ignored. So, I would simply ask you this question: in what sense are we still living in a democracy, in your opinion?

We need to go back to the definition given that word today. Ever since the invention of the parliamentary system by the English in the late eighteenth century, democracy has been conceived of not as a real figure of collective life but as a form of the state. That the word “democracy” actually ultimately means only one form of state among others is something Plato had already remarked on, and so did Lenin. What is the defining feature of that form of the state? Its defining feature is that it presents itself as a representation: the representatives of the people, the elected officials, the members of legislative assemblies, are responsible for managing the affairs of the state.

In the eyes of this system’s proponents, it operates “democratically” since the people are regularly consulted, and, after all, they are free to remove the leaders they don’t like and elect ones they do. If that’s all democracy is – the representative figure and the electoral organization of political life – then I’d say that we’re living in a democracy, but I’d add … so much the worse for us. And so much the worse for democracy. There is obviously another conception of democracy that corresponds to its Greek etymology: demos (the people) / kratos (power). Rather than including the idea of representation, this “power of the people” makes it illegitimate. This issue has been debated for a long time: Rousseau, for example, who was one of the foremost theorists of democracy in the eighteenth century, thought that the English-type representative figure did not merit the name “democracy,” that it wasn’t democratic because it was the periodic designation of representatives who in actual fact did more or less whatever they felt like and lied through their teeth to the people.

In any case, if we use the word “democracy” we need to specify which meaning we’re giving it: an electoral and representative system subordinated to state power, or actual processes that are the possible expression of a popular will on specific issues. The latter definition is clearly the operative one in certain circumstances. It emerges or has emerged, for example, in general assemblies during factory strikes or in the recent history of occupations of deliberative spaces in some countries. Large mass movements don’t designate stable, electoral delegations. They decide on their ideological and practical orientation in various types of gatherings of the people themselves, and on their instruction – in small or mass meetings – by speakers and leaders in whom people have confidence, a confidence justified by their experience, not by representative procedures.

I think that we know, that everyone knows, that the system we live in isn’t democratic in the authentic sense of the word. Especially since – and this is important – we’re not even sure that the people we vote for in the electoral ritual, who are supposed to represent us, are really the ones who decide what’s going to happen in the real world. It seems obvious that there are masters whose power is far greater than that of our elected officials. The heads of multinational corporations, who are not elected by anyone and are accountable only to shareholders concerned solely with their financial gains, have far more influence with our governments than any popular assembly. The economic and financial issue today, even in the opinion of the elected leaders, no matter who they are, is so tough in terms of governance that not only do our representatives ultimately do nothing but represent, but most of the time they’re only doing it for show. They have no real power when it comes to most of the important issues. What with international pressure, organizations like the European Commission that are accountable to no one, the heads of major corporations, the transnational power of the banks, the threat posed by agencies that determine countries’ financial “rating,” not to mention the military and other state administration bodies, an entire apparatus of power revolves around the state, stringently limits its freedom of action, and reduces the ordinary citizen’s contribution to a pathetic summons, every four or five years, to take part in something that is just a charade of decisions that have already been made elsewhere.

Isn’t the sense of democratic dispossession we feel an inevitable evil in countries as large as ours, though? You mentioned Rousseau a moment ago, and that happens to be one of his objections to the idea of mass democracy in The Social Contract. He thought that true democracy could not exist other than in small communities, small countries, where the people could be consulted frequently and in a very direct way …

Here we’re getting into an examination of the political process conceived of not as periodic state-mandated appointments but as a thoughtpractice exercised by the people themselves for specific purposes. To my mind, that’s what politics is about, first and foremost. I think we need to conceive of politics without immediately connecting it to the state. If we’re completely fixated on the state, the first thing we’ll say is: politics is about seizing control of the state, because if we don’t seize control of the state we can’t do anything, we have no power. But that’s not true. Politics includes, for example, the crucial element that is the vision we have and uphold of what humanity, or at least the community to which we belong, should become. This community exists in the form of large countries, of course, but it also exists on a wide variety of scales. It is represented at the national level, at the town or village level, in large companies, in foreign worker hostels, and so on. So, society is actually a complex network, within which there is always the possibility of calling meetings and discussing what people wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1 What Is Politics?
• 2 The Communist Hypothesis
• 3 Revolutions Put to the Test of History
• 4 What Does “The Left” Mean Today?
• 5 Macron, or the Democratic Coup d’état
• Conclusion
• End User License Agreement