Politics, Economy, and Society

Writings and Lectures

Paul Ricoeur, Kathleen Blamey

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509543885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

The philosophy of Paul Ricoeur is rarely viewed through the lens of political philosophy, and yet questions of power, and of how to live together in the polis, were a constant preoccupation of his writings. This volume brings together a selection of his texts spanning six decades, from 1958 to 2003, which together present Ricoeur's political project in its coherence and diversity.

In Ricoeur's view, the political is the realm of a tension between "rationality" (the attempt to provide a coherent explanation of the world) and "irrationality, " which manifests itself in force and repression. This"political paradox" lies at the heart of politics, for the claim to explain the world generates its own form of violence: the more one desires the good, the more one is inclined to impose it. Ricoeur warns citizens, the guardians of democracy, against any totalizing system of thought and any dogmatic understanding of history. Power should be divided and controlled, and Ricoeur defends a form of political liberalism in which states are conscious of the limits of their power and respectful of the freedom of their citizens.

Ranging from questions of power and repression to those of ethics, identity, and responsibility, these little-known political texts by one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy, politics, and theology and to anyone concerned with the great political questions of our time.

1
The Adventures of the State and the Task of Christians

The Twofold Biblical “Reading” of the State

It is of critical importance for a Christian interpretation of the State that the New Testament writers handed down to us not one but two readings of political reality: one, that of Saint Paul, leads to a difficult justification, the other, that of Saint John, to a tenacious distrust. For one, the State is the figure of the “magistrate,” for the other, it is the figure of the “Beast.”

We must begin by allowing these two figures to take shape within us, keeping both of them as possibilities, contemporaneous with one another, in every State we encounter.

Saint Paul, addressing Christians in the capital of the Empire – who were little inclined to recognize the authority of a pagan power, foreign to the Good News and, moreover, compromised in the trial that ended in the slow death of the Lord – calls upon his correspondents to obey not out of fear but as a matter of conscience: the State, wielding the sword, which punishes, is “instituted” by God for the “good” of the citizens. And yet this State has a very strange place in the economy of salvation, very strange and very precarious: the apostle has just celebrated the greatness of love – love, which creates reciprocal ties (“Love one another in brotherly love”) – love which forgives and repays good for evil. Now, the magistrate does not do that: the relation between the magistrate and the citizens is not reciprocal. He does not forgive, he repays evil for evil.

His province is not love but justice; the “good” he serves is, therefore, not the “salvation” of humankind, but the maintenance of “institutions.” One could say that through him a violent pedagogy is continued, a coercive education of human beings as members of historical communities, organized and governed by the State.

Saint Paul does not say (and perhaps does not know) how this pedagogy, penal in nature, is related to Christ’s charity: he only knows that this instituted order (taxis in Greek) realizes God’s intention concerning human history.

And at the same time he attests to the divine meaning of the institution of the State, Saint Paul reserves the possibility of an opposing reading. For, at the same time as this State is an “institution,” it is also “power.” Following the somewhat mythical conceptions of the era, Saint Paul pictures a more or less personalized demon hiding behind each political entity; now, these powers have already been vanquished on the Cross – at the same time as the Law, Sin, Death, and other powers – but are not yet annihilated. This ambiguous status (“already” but “not yet”), on which Oscar Cullmann¹ has decisively commented, does much to illuminate the theological significance of the State: intended by God as an institution, half-way between condemnation and destruction as power, altogether out of kilter with the economy of salvation, and in reprieve until the end of the world.

It is therefore not surprising that in another historical context, where the evil of persecution overwhelms the good of order and the law, it is the figure of the “Beast” which serves to denote the evil power. Chapter XIII of the Apocalypse depicts, moreover, a Beast, wounded, doubtless mortally, but whose wound is healed for a time; the power of the Beast is not so much the power of irresistible force as of seduction. The Beast produces marvels and demands the adoration of the people; it subjugates through lies and illusions (a description, as we see, close to that of the “tyrant” in Plato, who reigns only thanks to the “sophist,” who first twists language and corrupts belief).

This twofold theological grid is full of meaning for us: hereafter we know that it is not possible to situate ourselves in an anarchism motivated by religion, under the pretext that the State does not declare its belief in Jesus Christ, but nor can we take refuge in an apology for the State in the name of “submitting ourselves to the authorities.” The State is this two-sided reality, at once instituted and fallen.

The Twofold History of Power

We therefore have to orient ourselves in the political sphere by means of this twofold guidance. The modern State advances both along the line of the “institution” (what Saint Paul terms taxis), and along the line of “power,” seduction, and threat.

On the one hand, we can indeed say that there is progress on the part of the State in history; it is even admirable that after so many tears and so much blood, the juridical and cultural accomplishments of humanity have been able to be saved, renewed, and carried further, in short, that humanity continues beyond the fall of empires, as a single being who never ceases to learn and to remember. This perpetuation of humanity, protected by the “institution,” is a kind of verification by history of Saint Paul’s risky affirmation that all authorities are instituted by God.

I will offer four signs of this institutional growth of the State in history.

1. The State is a reality that tends to evolve from an autocratic stage to a constitutional stage. All States are born out of the violence of amassers of territory, wagers of war, inveiglers of dowries and inheritances, subjugators of peoples, unjust conquerors. But we see force moving toward form, becoming enduring by becoming legitimate, associating ever more groups and individuals with the exercise of power, promoting discussion, submitting to the control of the subjects. Constitutionality is the juridical expression of the movement by which the will of the State is stabilized in a law that defines power, divides it, and limits it. To be sure, States succumb to violence through war and dictatorship, but the juridical experience is preserved; another State, somewhere else, welcomes it, and continues it. However slow it may be, however halting, the movement of de-Stalinization, the liberalization of Soviet power, will not escape this law’s tendency, in which, for my part, I see a verification of Saint Paul’s wager on the State.

2. A second sign of this institutional growth of the State is the rationalization of the State by means of its administrative body. There is not sufficient reflection on this important fact, which is just as characteristic of the modern State as its legal system. A State worthy of this name is today a power capable of organizing a body of civil servants, who not only carry out its decisions but develop them without having political responsibility for them. The existence of government service as a politically neutral body has radically transformed the nature of the political. In it, a part of the function of the magistrate is realized, that is, the part of power without political responsibility. This development of a public administration (on the basis of which we judge in part the capacities of young States that have recently emerged in Asia and in Africa) is based in the prolongation of technical rationality, more precisely, in the industrial organization of labor. In this way, power, which is fundamentally irrational as a demonic force, is rationalized by the legal system expressed in the constitution and by the technical prowess expressed in administration.

3. A third sign of institutional progress lies in the organization of public discussion in modern societies. However perverted and subjugated it may be, public opinion is a new sort of reality, which has developed on the basis of a certain number of “political vocations” studied by Max Weber in the past. Militants, office holders, members of parties and unions, journalists, opinion and human relations experts, publicists, and journal editors are the administrators of a new reality, which is an institution in its own right and the organized form of public discussion. Perhaps we should reserve the word “democracy” to designate the degree of participation by citizens in power by means of organized discussion (rather than calling “democracy” the constitutional stage that follows the autocratic stage).

4. Finally, the appearance of large-scale planning represents the most recent form of the institution of the State. The reduction of chance to the benefit of forecasts and long-term projects presents in the economic and social sectors of the life of the community the same kind of rationality which had long since triumphed in other sectors. When the State assumed the monopoly of vengeance and constituted itself as the sole penal force of the community, it rationalized punishment: a table of penalties henceforth corresponds to a nomenclature of infractions. In the same way, the State has defined in a civil Code the different “roles,” their rights and their duties – the role of father, husband, heir, buyer, contracting party, and so on. This codification has rationalized and, in a sense, already set out the plan of social relations. The grand economic plans of the modern State are in line with this double rationalization of the “criminal” and the “civil” and belong to the same institutional spirit.

***

I think we have to state all of this, if we are to give the slightest meaning to what is taking place before our eyes and to avoid an unlimited irrationalism, without bounds and without criteria.

But at the same time we state all this, we have also to say something else, which manifests the endless ambiguity of political reality. All growth in the institution is also a growth in power and in the threat of tyranny. The same phenomena that we have traced under the sign of rationality can also be viewed under the sign of the demonic.

Thus, simultaneously in Germany and in Russia, we have seen constitutions serving as alibis for tyranny. The modern tyrant does not abolish the Constitution, but finds in it the apparent forms and sometimes the legal means for his tyranny, playing with the delegation of powers, the plurality of offices, exceptional forms of legislation, and special powers. The central administration, branching into every aspect of the social body, in no way prevents political power from being completely insane at the top, as we saw during the dictatorship of Stalin. Quite the opposite, to the tyrant’s madness it offered the technical means of an organized and long-lasting oppression. Opinion technologies, moreover, deliver the public over to ideologies at once passionate in their themes and rational in their schematization; the parties become “machines,” where technological prowess in organization is equaled only by the spirit of abstraction driving their slogans, programs, and propaganda.

Finally, the great socialist plans provide the central power with the means of pressuring individuals in a way that no bourgeois State has managed to assemble. The monopoly of ownership of the means of production, the monopoly of employment, the monopoly of provisions, the monopoly of financial resources, and hence of the means of expression, scientific research, culture, art, thought – all these monopolies concentrated in the same hands make the modern State a considerable and formidable power. There is no point in thinking that the government of persons is in the process of being transformed into the administration of things, because all progress in the ...