Masses, Classes, Ideas

Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx

Etienne Balibar, James Swenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415906029
• eBook ISBN: 9781134567584
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

In Masses, Classes, Ideas, well-known French philosopher Etienne Balibar explores the relationship between abstract philosophy and concrete politics. The book gathers together for the first time in English nine of Balibar's most influential essays written over the last decade, which have been carefully revised and reordered in logical succession with an original preface.

Balibar discusses the influence of political philosophy on collective movements, touching on issues of religious and class struggle, nationalism and racism, the rights of man and the citizen, and property as a social relation. He seeks to explain the novelty of Marxist philosophy and political theory with respect to the classical doctrines of "state" and "revolution." Masses, Classes, Ideas also examines the limitations and aporias which have become manifest in Marxist philosophy and critically assesses its legacy, offering a provocative contribution to the project of renewing democratic theory.

 

PART ONE

DILEMMAS OF CLASSICAL POLITICS
Insurrection vs. Constitution

1

SPINOZA, THE ANTI-ORWELL
The Fear of the Masses

For Emilia Giancotti

With this intentionally untimely title. I shall attempt to formulate the problem on the basis of which it would be possible to understand and discuss what makes Spinoza’s political thought (or better, if we share on this point the conception brilliantly put forth by Negri, Spinoza’s thought, inasmuch as it is thoroughly political)¹ indispensable for us today, however aporetic it might appear. In fact, I believe that it is impossible to reduce the positions of the “renegade Jew” from the Hague, despite their deductive appearance, to a single definition, even if considered as a tendency which would progressively prevail over others in his intellectual itinerary. It seems to me, on the contrary, that what he is heading toward, or what we head toward when we undergo the experience of reading him and attempt to think in the concepts he offers us, is a complex of contradictions without a genuine solution. But, not only can the problems he poses not be returned to a time irretrievably past; it is precisely this complex of contradictions that makes them unavoidable for us today, conferring on his metaphysics a singular critical power and constructive theoretical capacity. Perhaps this is the sign by which we can recognize a great philosopher.²

As a result, there is no question of fictitiously resolving these contradictions by taking a position beyond the point reached by Spinoza in his inquiry, or the place that he occupies in a historical evolution whose meaning we believe we possess. In this respect, the demonstration produced by Pierre Macherey in his Hegel ou Spinoza³ seems decisive to me. Every reading is certainly a transformation. But the only effective (and therefore instructive) transformation is one that rejects the ease of retrospective judgment, which refuses to project onto Spinoza’s contradictions a schema (dialectical or otherwise) that he himself would have already invalidated. As a result, it is the inverse that is important: to bring to the fore, if possible, contradictions characteristic of his thought that turn out to be at the same time entirely current, and in this way enable us to understand both what there is for us to think in Spinoza’s concepts, and how the latter, in their turn, can be active in our own inquiry, without any pre-established solution.

The Ambivalence of the “Mass Standpoint”

French translators, although often less than rigorous on this point, have rendered Spinoza’s multitudo, in certain contexts, as “mass.” They have sought neither to emphasize systematically the relationship that brings together different uses of multitudo, nor to clarify the successive or simultaneous utilization of notions which interfere with it, such as vulgus, plebs, turba, and also populus (to which I shall return). But they have been sensitive to that which, in the use that Spinoza makes of it, calls for a confrontation with much more recent problematics—crossing over at least a century-and-a-half of “individualist” philosophy—which have been formulated in what has been called the age of masses or crowds, and of mass movements. On the condition that all the nuances of Spinozist argumentation and terminology are taken seriously—which will lead to the perception that it is not a matter of a finished concept but of a persistent problem, reformulated several times—this comparison is justified and illuminating.

Spinoza is centrally inscribed in the context of a period in which the transformations of the state, the formation of the modern “absolutist” state in the midst of revolutionary troubles and violence, caused the emergence of the problem of mass movements as such, and hence of their control, their utilization, or their preventive repression. Neither this preoccupation, nor the corresponding reference to the theoretical pair imperium/multitudo belongs to Spinoza alone: it is enough to read Hobbes to see that. But Spinoza’s originality appears from the outset in the fact that for him the “mass” is itself the principal object of investigation, reflection, and historical analysis. In this sense, one can say that Spinoza is, in his time and beyond it, one of the very few political theorists who does not take as his central problem the constitution of the state (or of the state order or even of the state apparatus) and thus reduce the existence of mass movements to a pre-existent “nature” or horizon which threatens the security and stability of the state. Spinoza seeks above all an explanation of the causes and logic proper to mass movements. This goes well beyond the fact of conferring on the multitudo a symbolic positivity, in order to make it the other name for the “people” or for “civil society,” and to proclaim in it the foundation of political and juridical order. In Spinoza the “mass,” or to put it better, the masses, become an explicit theoretical object, because in the last analysis it is their different modalities of existence, according to historical conjunctures and according to economies or regimes of passion, that determine the chances of orienting a political practice toward a given solution.⁴

This is why we must reach the point of inquiring, problematically, whether or not the originality, the irreducibly subversive aspect of Spinoza’s thought, confirmed by the reactions that it provoked right from the beginning—in short, to borrow Negri’s striking expression, the “savage anomaly” of Spinozism—consists in the fact of having adopted in theory the “standpoint of the mass,” or the “mass standpoint,” on politics and the state. This standpoint is neither that of the state itself in its different variants nor a popular or democratic standpoint, nor, strictly speaking, a class standpoint.

If we must nevertheless adopt a deliberately ambivalent formulation, it is also for another reason. “The fear of the masses” should be understood in the double sense of the genitive, objective and subjective. It is the fear that the masses feel But it is also the fear that the masses inspire in whoever is placed in the position of governing or acting politically, hence in the state as such. So that, arising in the context of the power (puissance) of the masses and their movements, the problem of the constitution or reform of the state is first posed in the context of that fear—which may be as extreme as panic or may remain rationally moderated, but which never purely and simply disappears. We must try to understand how this reciprocal fear might be balanced, so as to make room for other, more constructive forces (those of love, admiration, devotion, as well as those of common, rationally perceptible utility), or else on the contrary how it can maintain itself to the point of threatening the dissolution of the social body. For the masses are all the more frightening and uncontrollable the more they are terrorized by natural forces or by the violence they suffer, and this violence in its turn is all the more immoderate in that tyrannical power, in fact, feels secretly disarmed before them.

Two observations may thus be formulated.

First, by taking as his object the very dynamic of the fear felt and inspired by the masses, with its possible reversals, Spinoza did not fail to conceptualize the affective ambivalence that characterizes it. Neither fear without hope nor hope without fear: this proposition is deduced immediately from the primitive division (joy and sadness) to which the concept of “desire” is submitted as the “very essence of the human.” Now, it is this concept of desire—complex from the start—that in the Ethics becomes the explanatory principle of all emotional life.

Spinoza’s whole effort certainly tends to define a “path” which permits this life, individually or collectively, to be oriented toward increasing the power of acting, toward the preponderance of joyous passions, thus reducing as much as possible the empire of sadness, fear, and hate. Yet it is doubtful that, at least at the collective level, a complete reduction of psychic conflict would ever be possible, bringing an end to the fluctuatio animi in the soul of the masses. This reduction is always something we strive for, a conatus, as Spinoza puts it. Hence it is only in a limit situation, entirely problematic and probably Utopian, that we could escape this determination, and that political practice could cease to be governed by reciprocal fear and the vacillation between love and hate.

And yet—this is the second observation—it is not any more possible to ignore everything in Spinoza’s text that evokes the ideal, or at least the model (exemplar) of the neutralization of the passions, and strives to define its conditions in relation to both the individual and the collectivity. This is the case each time Spinoza traces the program of institutions conforming to nature, in which each person’s desire to conserve his own being would be directly expressed in a rational recognition of the collective interest. This is also the case in the figure of Christ.

Further, we cannot help but notice another ambivalence, all the more remarkable in that it can in certain respects be formulated in Spinozist categories, and as such thereby authorizes a sort of self-criticism of the system itself. I mean the ambivalence betrayed by Spinoza’s attitude, his own position regarding the “masses”. Let us recall how it is manifested in some decisive moments of Spinoza’s writings.

First there are the scholia of proposition 37, part IV of the Ethics, which are echoed by chapter IV of the Theologico-Political Treatise, and which formulate the hypothesis of a city directly constituted by persons “living according to the guidance of reason,”⁵ who are consequently free from the desires and fears that the vulgus—that is, the vulgar or the crowd—obey, but who are capable of ruling themselves directly by the perception of the “common notions” of all humanity. Without entering here into the never-ending discussion regarding the exact nature of the “wisdom” defined in the Ethics by the third kind of knowledge and by the “intellectual love of God,” we may nevertheless pose the following question: once it is possible to find a path, however arduous it might be, to free oneself from the passions, that is, to combat sad passions not only by reinforcing joyous passions but by developing active affections, which would immediately result from an adequate knowledge of causes, does not the hypothesis posed one moment but just as quickly rejected (since “men” in general do not live according to the guidance of reason) become in turn a reality, either as the “end” of history or as the project of a society of free persons, bound together by friendship and by the common enterprise of knowledge and living together, without internal or external conflict, in the midst of the crowd of others? But such a society would thus reconstitute, whether or not one wishes it, a “state within the state (imperium in imperio).” This is true even without taking into account that by projecting a pure exercise of intelligence for a small number that would coincide with a retreat from the collectivity, or at least with a neutralization or negation of the effects of society on the individual, Spinozist “wisdom” would once again become the watchword of an asceticism, of an absolute autonomy of the individual, in short, the fantasy of a “self-mastery” that completely contradicts Spinoza’s analysis of the concatenation of natural causes and the development of the power of bodies.

More plainly still, the guiding thread of the argument of the Theologico-Political Treatise leads to a definition of a regime by which antagonistic passions—essentially the religious passions that are generated by the inevitable difference of opinions regarding the divinity (that is, the supreme subject from whom the moral commandments of love and justice seem to emanate), and which thus transform this love into mutual hate— may be neutralized. But this neutralization, which is indeed at this point explicitly a reduction of the “mass” as a form of social existence, is equally problematic.

It leads Spinoza to define—not only regarding Mosaic theocracy, but also regarding Dutch democracy such as it is or should be—a modality of obedience to the law in which love and the conscious choice of the lesser evil would be entirely substituted for the fear of punishment. Must we, then, represent such obedience as the resurgence of the limit case that we evoked a moment ago (as Ethics IV, proposition 73 moreover suggests), and which we might be tempted to define, according to a dialectic that is hardly Spinozist, as an “obedience/nonobedience,” a “state/nonstate” (as Lenin would later say), or, if one wishes, a withering away of the state in the fulfillment of its end? Or must we generalize the surprising formula of chapter XVII, which evokes the “constant practice of obedience” of the Hebrews (“by reason of habit it must have no longer seemed like servitude to them, but freedom”), while combini...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One Dilemmas of Classical Politics: Insurrection vs Constitution
• 1 Spinoza, the Anti-Orwell: The Fear of the Masses
• 2 “Rights of Man” and “Rights of the Citizen”: The Modern Dialectic of Equality and Freedom
• 3 Fichte and the Internal Border: On Addresses to the German Nation
• Part Two Antinomies of Marxian Politics: Materialism, History, and Teleology
• 4 The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism
• 5 In Search of the Proletariat: The Notion of Class Politics in Marx
• 6 Politics and Truth: The Vacillation of Ideology, II
• Part Three Frontiers of Contemporary Questioning the Universal
• 7 Fascism, Psychoanalysis, Freudo-Marxism
• 8 Racism as Universalism
• 9 What Is a Politics of the Rights of Man?
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments