Chapter Three
The Contract and Alienation
We can now return to total alienation. It was the solution, but an impossible because unthinkable one. Discrepancy I has made it possible, because thinkable.
If total alienation is possible, despite the contradiction of its concept, it is because of the nature of the Second Recipient Party: which features the same men as the RP1. It is possible because it is purely internal to the liberty of the individuals: it is possible because men give themselves totally, but to themselves.
To think Rousseau's novelty we must return to the classical contracts. In them, the two Recipient Parties are prior to the contract and different from one another: e.g. the People and the Prince. It follows that it is always a matter of a juridical contract of exchange: give and take. Not only is the contract an exchange, but if we try to apply the category of alienation to it, it turns out to be a partial alienation. The individual only cedes a part of his rights in exchange for his security (there is one exception: Hobbes, whom I shall discuss later). In Rousseau what is striking is the fact that the individual has to give everything, to give himself entirely, without any reserve, in order to receive something 'in exchange', even when exchange has no more meaning. Or rather: in order that the possibility of an exchange acquire a meaning, it is necessary that there be this initial total gift, which can be the object of no exchange. Hence Rousseau poses as the a priori condition of any possible exchange this total alienation which no exchange will compensate. The constitution of the Second Recipient Party, i.e. the community, is thus not an exchange but the constitution of the a priori condition of possibility of any (real or empirical) exchange. I shall return to this conclusion in a moment.
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This theory of total alienation enables Rousseau to settle theoretically the 'terrifying' problem posed by the 'devil' Hobbes to all political philosophy (and to all philosophy as such). Hobbes's genius was to have posed the political problem with a merciless rigour in his theory of the state of war as a state, and to have claimed that the contract founding civil society was not a give-and-take contract of exchange between two Recipient Parties. Hobbes's contract, too, depends on a total alienation which the individuals agree among themselves to the advantage of a Third Party who is a Recipient in that he takes everything (absolute power), but is not a Recipient Party to the Contract since he is external to it and gives nothing in it. This Third Recipient Party, too, is constituted by the Contract, but as an effect external to the contract and its Recipient Parties (all the individuals contracting with one another to give everything to the Prince: it has been called a contract of donation, thinking of modern life-insurance contracts, i.e. to use a term which carries real weight with Hobbes, contracts of insurance against death). A total alienation in externality, to an external Third Party constituted by the Contract as an absolute Prince, this is Hobbes. Naturally, there are gaps in this 'system': what 'guarantee' is there against the despotism of a Prince who is not even bound by the exchange of a promise? How can one entrust oneself to his 'interests'? How is one to represent to him (and think) his 'duties'?
Rousseau's theoretical greatness is to have taken up the most frightening aspects of Hobbes: the state of war as a universal and perpetual state, the rejection of any transcendental solution and the 'contract' of total alienation, generator of absolute power as the essence of any power. But Rousseau's defence against Hobbes is to transform total alienation in externality into total alienation in internality: the Third Recipient Party then becomes the Second, the Prince becomes the Sovereign, which is the community itself, to which free individuals totally alienate themselves without losing their liberty, since the Sovereign is simply the community of these same individuals. Finally, the rejection of any transcendence took, in Hobbes, the form of the factual transcen-
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dence of the Prince's externality to the contract. Rousseau is alone in remaining in immanence, without any recourse to a Third Party, even if it is a man. He accepts the law immanent in Hobbes's state of war: he only changes its modality.
Rousseau's advantage here is to be more 'Hobbesian' than Hobbes himself, and to retain the theoretical gains of Hobbes's thought. Rousseau's social body does indeed have all the categories of Hobbes's Prince. The community has all the attributes of a natural individual, but transposed into the 'element' of union: it is not a question here of a real individual (some man or some assembly which is the Prince) but of a moral totality, of the moral person constituted by the alienation of all the individuals. That power is in essence absolute, that it is inalienable, that it is indivisible, that it cannot 'err', all these scandalous theses of Hobbes's are repeated word for word by Rousseau, but converted to the new meaning conferred on them by the internality of alienation.
Let us consider only one of these theses: the essentially absolute character of any sovereign power (a 'philosopheme' which contains, in its order, the very principle of the Kantian conception of a priori conditions of possibility). The tiny but decisive difference separating Rousseau from Hobbes stares us in the face when Rousseau, who thinks in Hobbes, simultaneously thinks what he needs to protect himself from Hobbes's 'difficulties', in particular from the 'crux' of the 'guarantees' of the contract of alienation, which, in classical philosophy, inevitably takes the form of the problem of the Third Man. Indeed, if a conflict arises who will arbitrate between the People and the Prince? Hobbes's solution is to suppress the problem, but by suppressing the right to a guarantee. Hence obvious 'factual' difficulties. Rousseau confronts the problem without faltering. He too will suppress it, but without suppressing the right to a guarantee: by realizing it, which makes it superfluous. Hobbes certainly 'felt' that in order to suppress this problem, the contract would have to be no ordinary contract, the violation of which always requires the intervention of a third man, an arbiter -- hence his contract of total alienation, but in externality
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which is merely to transfer the problem into the individuality of the Prince (his interest, his conscience, his duty). Rousseau's master-stroke is to see that a problem cannot be resolved simply by its suppression in a mere factual transfer, but only by really making it superfluous.
To suppose that a third man is required to arbitrate in a conflict between two RPs to a contract is in fact to suppose that a third man outside the civil society of the contractors is required for that society to exist, and it is thus to suppose that civil society does not exist, since it leaves outside itself the very condition of its own existence: that third man. Hence it is to suppose that without saying so one is still in the element prior to the Social Contract, that principle is being settled by fact, the a priori conditions of all exchange by the empirical conditions of exchange, etc. The problem of the third man then becomes the index and proof that the political problem has been badly posed: the radical reduction which lays bare the a priori constitutive essence of the juridico-political has not been attained. In other words, to invoke the necessity for the third man is to admit that one is still in the element of violence and that one is still thinking the problems of civil society in the categories of the state of nature and the state of war.
In Rousseau's theory of total alienation this 'difficulty' disappears: there is no longer any need for an arbiter, i.e. for a third man, because, if I dare use the expression, there is no Second Man, because the Second Recipient Party is identical with the First, because for him individuals only ever contract with themselves, because the total alienation is for him purely internal. Between the individuals (subjects) and the Sovereign, there is no need for an arbiter, since the Sovereign is nothing but the union of the individuals themselves, existing as members of the Sovereign, in the 'form' of union.
Of what use is this new philosophical object, the Social Contract? For the 'resolution' of all these 'problems'. But the solution to these problems is never anything but the effectivity of Discrepancy I, which permits a non-contract to function as a con-
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tract, i.e. to make this Second Recipient Party, which is in fact the solution itself, appear to be one of its conditions. The 'true' problems are elsewhere: they must be pursued, for the effect of Discrepancy I is to 'chase' them constantly ahead of their supposed solution. Up to the point where it will be clear that the problems, which anyone might think at their beginnings, are really at an end, because their 'solution' was installed from the beginning, even before they appeared. Discrepancy is also inversion of sense.
Discrepancy II
The peculiar fact about this alienation is that, in taking over the goods of individuals, the community, so far from despoiling them, only assures them legitimate possession, and changes usurpation into a true right and enjoyment into proprietorship. Thus the possessors . . . have . . . acquired, so to speak, all that they gave up (SC I, IX, p. 18).
I have started with the most astonishing, the most 'concrete' text, since it concerns the 'goods', the 'properties' of individuals. Note in passing a second 'so to speak ' (an index of the denegation of the Discrepancy, as in the previous case). This 'everything' that they give includes their goods. They give them, but to get them back as they gave them (except for the subtraction of taxes).
As they gave them? No: wearing the new 'form' of property, replacing mere possession. A particularly precise case of the change in 'manner of existence' produced by the Contract.
Each man alienates, I admit, by the social compact, only such part of his powers, goods, and liberty as it is important for the community to control; but it must also be granted that the Sovereign is sole judge of what is important (SC II, IV, p. 24).
On this occasion the deduction is made within total alienation itself, i.e. the result of the exchange of alienation is shifted back onto it and then immediately removed from it. Hence: total alienation only applies to a part of that whole. How better express: it must be total so as not to be total. Discrepancy II.
Let us draw up the whole account in terms easily commensurable. What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses. If we are to avoid mistake in weighing one against the other, we must clearly distinguish natural liberty, which is bounded only by the forces of the individual, from civil liberty, which is limited by the general will; and possession, which is merely the effect of force or the right of the first occupier, from property, which can be founded only on a positive title.
'Account', 'commensurable', 'loss', 'gain'. The language of accounts. The language of exchange. Result: the exchange is advantageous.
limitation of alienation, produced first on alienation itself by its total character. This mechanism is identical with the 'clauses' of the contract. If they have to be scrupulously respected without changing them one iota, this is in order to ensure the effect of the self-regulation and self-limitation of alienation itself.
The undertakings which bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual; and their nature is such that in fulfilling them we cannot work for others without working for ourselves. Why is it that the general will is always in the right, and that all continually will the happiness of each one, unless it is because there is not a man who does not think of 'each' as meaning him, and consider himself in voting for all? This proves
that equality of rights and the idea of justice which such equality creates originate in the preference each man gives to himself, and accordingly in the very nature of man. It proves that the general will, to be really such, must be general in its object as well as its essence; that it must both come from all and apply to all. . . . (SC II, IV pp. 24-5).
The matter is clear: behind rights, behind reciprocity, it is only ever a question of 'the preference each man gives to himself', of individuals who only 'think' of themselves, of 'working for themselves'. The mechanism of total alienation imposes on 'the preference for oneself', on the particular interest, a transformation whose end-result is, in one and the same movement, the production of the general interest (or general will) and the self-limitation of total alienation in partial alienation, or rather in advantageous exchange.
Rousseau expounds the logic of this mechanism in the paragraphs of Chapter VI which immediately follow the exposition of the clause of total alienation. The last one sums them up:
Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over which he does not acquire the same right as he yields over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he has (SC I, VI, p. 12).
This contract which is not an exchange thus paradoxically has an exchange as its effect. We now see why this total alienation can be both 'incompatible with man's nature' (SC I, IV, p. 8), and not contrary to it. In the Social Contract, man does not give himself completely for nothing. He gets back what he gives and more besides, for the reason that he only gives himself to himself. This must be understood in the strongest sense: he only gives himself to his own liberty.
exchange on the other. This unthought 'problem' is 'chased away' and 'thrust aside'. The solution is itself a problem: the problem that Rousseau is to pose in the.terms of particular interest and general interest (or particular will and general will). But already we suspect that this 'problem' itself can only be 'posed' on the condition of a new Discrepancy III.
Discrepancy III
essence? To be general: both in its form and in its content, as a decision of the general will, relating to a general object.
. . . when the whole people decrees for the whole people, it is considering only itself; and if a relation is then formed, it is between two aspects of the entire object, without there being any division of the whole. In that case the matter about which the decree is made is, like the decreeing will, general. This act is what I call a law (SC II, VI, p. 30).
And Rousseau adds: 'When I say that the object of laws is always general, I mean that law considers subjects as a body and actions in the abstract, and never a particular person or action.'
I should have wished to be born in a country in which the interest of the Sovereign and that of the people must be single and identical. . . . This could not be the case unless the Sovereign and the people were one and the same person ('Dedication' to the Discourse on Inequality).[1]
This dream is realized by the Social Contract, which gives
Sovereignty to the assembled people. The act of legislation is indeed never anything but the Social Contract combined, repeated, and reactivated at each 'moment'. The primordial 'moment' which 'has made a people a people' is not a historical 'moment', it is the always contemporary primordial 'moment' which relives in each of the acts of the Sovereign, in each of his legislative decisions, the expression of the general will. But the general will only exists because its object exists: the general interest.
If the opposition of particular interests made the establishment of societies necessary, the agreement of these very interests made it possible. The common element in these different interests is what forms the social tie; and were there no point of agreement between them all, no society could exist. It is solely on the basis of this common interest that every society should be governed (SC II, I, p. 20).
We are now confronted with the problem of the relations between particular interest and general interest. But we have seen particular interest intervene in the very mechanism of the self-regulation of total alienation:
Why is it that . . . all constantly will the happiness of each one, unless it is because there is not a man who does not think of 'each' as meaning him, and consider himself in voting for all? This proves that equality of rights and the idea of justice which such equality creates originate in the preference each man gives to himself, and accordingly in the very nature of man (SC II, IV, pp. 24-5),
As a passage from the Geneva Manuscript (an early draft of the Social Contract) specifies, this preference is no more than another name for particular interest:
As the will tends towards the well-being of the wisher and the particular will always has as its object the private interest, the general will, the common interest, it follows that the last is or should be the only true motive force of the social body . . . , for the particular interest tends always to preferences and the public interest to equality.[2]
The paradox that springs from a comparison of these passages is the fact that the particular interest is presented both as the
foundation of the general interest and as its opposite. To 'resolve' this contradiction, let us see how Rousseau treats it practically vis-à-vis the theoretical problem posed by the conditions of validity of voting.
The general will is always right and tends to the public advantage; but it does not follow that the deliberations of the people are always equally correct (SC II, III, p. 22).
In principle, the general will is the resultant of the particular wills:
. . . take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel one another, and the general will remains as the sum of the differences. . . . the
grand total of the small differences would always give the general will (SC II, III, p. 23).
If such is the principle of the mechanism for the declaration of the general will, how can the deliberations of the people be incorrect and therefore fail to declare the general will? For the mechanism to carry out its function properly, two supplementary conditions are needed:
If, when the people, being furnished with adequate information, held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication one with another, the grand total of the small differences would always give the general will, and the decision would always be good (SC II, III, p. 23).
Hence the people must have 'adequate information', i.e. there must be 'enlightenment', which poses the problem of its political education.
It is therefore essential, if the general will is to be able to express itself, that there should be no partial society within the State, and that each citizen should think only his own thoughts SC II, III, p. 23).
An absolute condition for Rousseau: that the general will really is interrogated in its seat, in each isolated individual, and not in some or other group of men united by interests which they have in common, but which are still particular with respect to the general interest. If the general will is to declare itself, it is thus essential to silence (suppress) all groups, orders, classes, parties, etc. Once groups form in the State, the general will begins to grow silent and eventually becomes completely mute.
But when the social bond begins to be relaxed and the State to grow weak, when particular interests begin to make themselves felt and the smaller societies to exercise an influence over the larger, the common interest changes. . . . (SC IV, I, p. 85).
Note: the general will survives nonetheless, unalterable and correct: 'It is always constant, unalterable and pure; but it is subordinated to other wills which encroach upon its sphere.' The proof: in the most corrupt individual the general will is never destroyed, but only eluded.
being the object of a denegation inscribed in the ordinary use of the concept of particular interest. This denegation is inscribed in so many words in his declaration of impotence: human groups must not exist in the State. A declaration of impotence, for if they must not exist, that is because they do exist. An absolute point of resistance which is not a fact of Reason but a simple, irreducible fact: the first encounter with a real problem after this long 'chase'.
in demarcation from its real double, the 'general interests' which Rousseau calls 'particular' because they belong to human groups (orders, classes, etc.) -- so the 'pure' particular interest of the isolated individual (what he obtains from the constitutive origins of the state of nature) is a myth, whose nature is visible once it is seen that it has a real 'double' in the general interests of human groups that Rousseau calls 'particular' because they dominate the State, or struggle for the conquest of its power. As in the previous cases, we can spot this Discrepancy, but only beneath the verbal denegation of a play on words: here the juggling with particular and general, concepts which properly belong exclusively to the individual and the Sovereign, but which serve theoretically to reduce the Discrepancy introduced into Rousseau's conceptual system by the emergence of the following irreducible phenomenon: the existence of the interests of social groups. The interest of these social groups is sometimes called particular, sometimes general, for the good of the Cause, the cause of the ideological mirror couple particular interest/general interest, which reflects the ideology of a class domination that presents its class interests to particular individuals as their (general) interest.
philosophy of politics by distancing itself through this Discrepancy III which constitutes it. By this procedure it could be demonstrated that the classical difference of and opposition between the external and internal criticism of a philosophical theory are mythical.
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The solution to the existing 'theoretical difficulties' is entrusted to practice. It is a question of managing to suppress, in the reality which can no longer be avoided, the social groups and their effects: the existence of orders, of social classes, of political and ideological parties and of their effects.
The essential moments are to be found in the theory of manners and morals (moeurs), education and civil religion. In its principle this attempt has the aim of setting up the practical arrangements for a permanent moral reform intended to cancel out the effects of the social interest groups which are constantly arising and active in society. It is a question of ceaselessly defending and restoring the 'purity' of the individual conscience (i.e. of the
particular interest which is in itself the general interest) in a society where it is threatened by the pernicious effects of 'particular' groups.
Along with these three kinds of law goes a fourth, most important of all, which is not graven on tablets of marble or brass, but on the hearts of the citizens. This forms the real constitution of the State, takes on every day new powers, when other laws decay or die out, restores them or takes their place (les supplée), keeps a people in the ways in which it was meant to go, and insensibly replaces authority by the force of habit. I am speaking of morality (moeurs), of custom, above all of public opinion; a power unknown to political thinkers, on which none the less success in everything else depends. With this the Great Legislator concerns himself in secret, though he seems to confine himself to particular regulations; for these are only the arc of the arch, while manners and morals (moeurs), slower to arise, form in the end its immovable keystone (SC II, XII, pp. 44-5).
The cause in these unwritten key laws is the action on the 'particular will' which is embodied in the 'manners and morals'. 'Now, the less relation the particular wills have to the general will, that is, morals and manners to laws . . .' (SC III, I, p. 48). But the 'manners and morals' are no more than the penultimate link in the chain of a causality that can be depicted as follows:
Laws->public opinion->manners and morals->particular will
For their part, the social groups can be relied on to act automatically, by their mere existence as well as by their undertakings and influence, on each of the moments of this process. Hence it is indispensable that a counter-action be exercised on each of the intermediate causes. The Legislator acts par excellence on the laws. Education, festivals, civil religion, etc., on public opinion. The censors on mannas and morals. But the Legislator only intervenes at the beginning of the historical existence of the social body, and the censors can only preserve good manners and morals, not reform bad ones. It is thus at the level of public
opinion that action can and must be constant and effective. Hence the importance of the education of the citizens by public means (festivals) or private means (Émile): but education cannot be enough without recourse to religion, i.e. to religious ideology, but conceived as civil religion, i.e. in its function as a moral and political ideology.
That is why it is necessary to return to earth and to attack those dangerous human 'groups' in their very principles. And, remembering the main theses of the Discourse on Inequality, to speak of reality, i.e. of 'goods', of property, of wealth and of poverty. In clear terms: the State must be maintained in the strict limits of a definite economic structure.
. . . the end of every system of legislation . . . reduces itself to two main objects, liberty and equality -- liberty, because all particular dependence means so much force taken from the body of the State, and equality, because liberty cannot exist without it. . . . By equality, we should understand, not that the degrees of power and riches are to be absolutely identical for everybody; but that power shall never be great enough for violence, and shall always be exercised by virtue of rank and law; and that, in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself: which implies, on the part of the great, moderation in goods and position, and, on the side of the common sort, moderation in avarice and covetousness (SC II, XI, p. 42).
Here Rousseau adds a note:
If the object is to give the State consistency, bring the two extremes as near to each other as possible; allow neither rich men nor beggars. These two estates, which are naturally inseparable, are equally fatal to the common good;
from the one come the friends of tyranny, and from the other tyrants (SC II, XI, p. 42n).
The central formulations of this passage repeat, but vis-à-vis their political effects, certain even of the terms of the Discourse on Inequality: 'From the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared.'[1] This possibility marks, with the beginning of the division of labour, the beginnings of dependence, which becomes universal when, all the land being cultivated and occupied, 'the supernumeraries . . . are obliged to receive their subsistence, or steal it, from the rich,'[2] and the rich are able to buy or constrain the poor. It is this reality which haunts the second practical solution of the Social Contract.
Such equality, we are told, is a speculative chimera which cannot exist in practice. But if its abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we should not at least make regulations concerning it? It is precisely because the force of circumstances tends continually to destroy equality that the force of legislation should always tend to its maintenance (SC II, XI, p. 42).
Clearly, it can only be a matter of regulating an inevitable abuse, an effect of the force of circumstances. When Rousseau
speaks of 'bringing the two extremes as near to each other as possible', it is a question of the following impossible condition: to go against the force of circumstances, to propose as a practical measure a solution 'which cannot exist in practice'. It is hardly necessary to note that the two 'extremes' have all that is required to constitute themselves as human groups defending their 'interests' without caring a jot about the categories of generality or particularity.
different kind: a transfer, this time, the transfer of the impossible theoretical solution into the alternative to theory, literature. The admirable 'fictional triumph' of an unprecedented writing (écriture): La Nouvelle Heloïse, Émile, the Confessions. That they are unprecedented may be not unconnected with the admirable 'failure' of an unprecedented theory: the Social Contract.
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Part Three
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From what I know of it, these were not, believe me, in that very special period, ordinary commentaries. What M. Hyppolite said then helped several of his students to orientate themselves 'in thought', as Kant put it, i.e. also in politics. M. Hyppolite has certainly forgotten the words he then uttered: but not everyone has forgotten them. I am here to bear witness. Against what common sense, the common sense of financiers and lawyers, tells us, there are many writings that blow away, but a few words that remain. No doubt because they have been inscribed in life and history.
Thesis 1 (a statement of fact). The union, or fusion of the Workers' Movement and Marxist theory is the greatest event in the history
of class societies, i.e. practically in all human history. Beside it, the celebrated great scientific-technical 'mutation' constantly resounding in our ears (the atomic, electronic, computer era, the space-age, etc.) is, despite its great importance, no more than a scientific and technical fact: these events are not of the same order of magnitude, they only bear in their effects on certain aspects of the productive forces, and not on what is decisive, the relations of production.
Thesis 2 (a statement of fact). Marxist theory includes a science and a philosophy.
Thesis 3. Marx founded a new science: the science of the history of social formations, or the science of history.
Thesis 4. Every great scientific discovery induces a great transformation in philosophy. The scientific discoveries which open up the great scientific continents constitute the major dates in the periodization of the history of philosophy:
Marx, almost everyone in the human or social sciences says he is more or less a Marxist. But who has taken the trouble to read Marx closely, to understand his novelty and take the theoretical consequences? Without exception, the specialists of the human sciences one hundred years after Marx work with outdated ideological notions like Aristotelean physicists carrying on with Aristotelean physics fifty years after Galileo. Where are the philosophers who do not take Engels and Lenin for philosophical nonentities? I believe they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Not all Communist philosophers even, far from it, think well of Engels and Lenin as 'philosophers'. Where are the philosophers who have studied the history of the workers' movement, the history of the 1917 Revolution and the Chinese Revolution? Marx and Lenin have the great honour to share the fate of intellectual pariah with Freud and to be travestied when they are discussed as he is travestied. This scandal is not a scandal: the relations that reign between philosophical ideas are what are called relations of forces, ideological, and therefore political relations of forces. But it is bourgeois philosophical ideas that are in power. The question of power is the number-one question in philosophy, too. Philosophy is indeed in the last instance political.
Thesis 5. How is Marx's scientific discovery to be explained?
will be taken only for what it is: the index of a problem, and the indication of the schematic conditions for it to be posed.
Which means very schematically that Marx (Capital) is the product of the work of Hegel (German Philosophy) on English Political Economy + French Socialism, in other words, the Hegelian dialectic on: Labour theory of value (R) + the class struggle (FS).
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Chapter Four
Total Alienation
and Exchange:
I was perhaps a little hasty in saying that the Social Contract was not a 'true' contract because it contained no exchange: total alienation excluding all possible exchange as a function precisely of its total character. And yet the Social Contract also functions as a juridical contract between two Recipient Parties: give and take. The individual gives everything -- and receives nothing in exchange. The paradox of total alienation which appeared to us as this non-exchange, the condition of possibility of all exchange, does nevertheless produce an exchange. This is where I shall inscribe Discrepancy II.
Just as Rousseau noted Discrepancy I in remarking that the Social Contract was a contract of a 'private and peculiar' (particulier) type, he connotes Discrepancy II in the same way by saying that total alienation produces a 'peculiar' (singulier) effect:
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Another text is even more categorical:
We are really in the accountability of an exchange. Listen to Rousseau in SC I, VIII, p. 16. It is an accountable balance:
Thus we have both ends of the chain. On the one hand total alienation, on the other a real advantage. How can a total alienation be transmuted into an advantageous exchange? How can a total alienation, which could not receive anything in exchange that would be its equivalent, which appeared to us as the condition of possibility of all exchange, immediately and in itself take the form of an exchange, and even an advantageous one? What mechanism produces this astonishing effect?
This mechanism is a mechanism for the self-regulation, self-
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'The clauses of this contract are so determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would make them vain and ineffective' (SC I, VI, p. 12).
What clauses? One formal clause: equality in total alienation. But also something which is not a clause, but a cause: interest.
Equality. Each gives all he is and has, whatever he has. All men are equal in alienation, since it is total for each of them. This is a formal clause, for men have unequal possessions, and we know that the exchange is advantageous to the one who possesses the most, for it is he who risks the greatest loss in the state of war.
Interest. This is what opens up the 'play' in the formal clause of equality, which allows interest to come into 'play'. 'The conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.' Why? Whoever wanted to make them 'burdensome to others' would make them burdensome to himself, automatically, as a function of the formal equality implied by total alienation. Hence it is certainly equality which plays the part of limitatory regulator even within total alienation. But this formal equality would be a dead letter were it not made active at each moment by the interest of each individual. The reciprocity of the contract lies in the formal equality produced by the total alienation. But this reciprocity would be empty and vain if the individual interest caught up in it did not really bring it into 'play'.
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This is one of the points in Rousseau's theory which makes any Kantian 'reading' in terms of a morality thoroughly impossible. Strictly speaking, 'total alienation' might be taken for an expression designating the transcendence of the order of morality with respect to any interest. But total alienation produces its effects precisely only because it presupposes within it the determinant effectivity of interest. For Rousseau, interest (which is the form of self-respect in the system of social relations, state of war or contractual society) can never be 'put into parentheses' or 'transcended', except by itself. Without the effectivity of interest, there would be no self-regulation, no self-limitation of total alienation, nor its conversion into 'advantageous exchange'. It is because the interest of each individual is active in total alienation that each individual receives back what he gives and more besides. He will want for others what he wants for himself, as a function of the equality imposed by the clause of total alienation. But he would not want anything for others if he did not first want it for himself. The general interest is not the product of a moral conversion that tears the individual away from his interest: it is merely the individual interest forced into the generality of equality, limited by it but simultaneously limiting in its effects the total alienation which is the basis for this general equality.
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We can now specify the nature of Discrepancy II. Discrepancy I lay in the difference in theoretical status of the two Recipient Parties, and in the fact that the Social Contract was not a contract of exchange, but the act of constitution of the Second Recipient Party.
What was 'chased away' at the first moment as a result of Discrepancy I reappears at the second moment in the form of Discrepancy II: the false contract functions as a true contract nonetheless, for it produces an exchange, and even more, an advantageous exchange. What had been 'chased away' at the first moment has now been 'caught up with' and thought at the second moment. But at the cost of Discrepancy II: between total alienation and the exchange it produces, between total alienation and the interest which ensures its self-limitation, self-regulation, by realizing this total alienation as an exchange.
But then we can go further: in the mechanism which inscribes the effectivity of the interest of each individual in the necessity of the universal (and hence egalitarian) form of total alienation, there is a Discrepancy of theoretical status, unthought, unassumed. In other words, it is not the same interest that produces the total alienation on the one hand and acts in it to realize it as an
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To sum up: Discrepancy I concerns the difference between the RP1 and the RP2. Discrepancy II concerns the difference between total alienation and advantageous exchange. Discrepancy III is about to appear in the 'problem' of the general interest or general will, or, what amounts to the same thing, in the problem of the law.
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Chapter Five
Particular Interest and
General Interest,
Particular Will and
General Will:
All the remarks that follow presuppose a knowledge of the arrangement and nature of the Institutions that emerge from the Social Contract: the Sovereign (or legislature), the Government (or executive), the nature of the acts of the Sovereign (laws) and of the Government (decrees), and the subordinate relation of the Government to the Sovereign, for which it is no more than the 'official' or 'clerk'.
This arrangement reveals two orders of reality:
1. A basic, essential reality: it is on the side of the Social Contract and the Sovereign, on the side of the legislative power and law. There is the 'life' and 'soul' of the social body.
2. A secondary reality, whose whole essence it is to be delegation and execution, mission and commission: the Government and its decrees.
As a first approximation, the difference between these two orders of reality can be expressed in the statement that the essence of the former is generality and the essence of the latter particularity. Two categories which, in their distinction, dominate the whole 'nature', i.e. in fact all the theoretical 'problems', of the Social Contract. Let us look at this slightly more closely, examining the object par excellence which realizes the essence of the Sovereign: the law.
What is a law? The act proper to a Sovereign. What is its
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Let us consider this double generality of the law.
1. The generality of the law is the generality of its form: 'when the whole people decrees for the whole people'. The whole people = the entire people assembled together, decreeing for itself as a 'body', abstracting from the particular wills. The will of this body is the general will. Hence we can write: generality of the law = general will.
2. The generality of the law is the generality of its object: 'when the whole people decrees for the whole people '. The object of the law is the 'whole people', as a 'body' and considering only 'itself', abstracting from all particularity (action, individual). We can write: generality of the object of the law = general interest.
The unity of the law can then be written: general will = general interest.
This couple can only be explained by its opposite: particular will = particular interest. I think we know what particular will and particular interest are (cf. the Discourse on Inequality). The whole difficulty lies in understanding the generality of the will and of the interest as the same generality.
Rousseau's dream:
1. The Social Contract and Discourses, op. cit., p. 145.
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2. Book I Chapter IV. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), vol. III, p. 295. The last sentence is paraphrased in SC II, I, p. 20.
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In the people as a whole, in fact, voting has as its object the promulgation of laws, i.e. the declaration of the general will. How is one to proceed in order to know the general will? The principle is posed in SC IV, I, p. 86: '. . . the law of public order in assemblies is not so much to maintain in them the general will as to secure that the question be always put to it, and the answer always given by it.'
This passage means:
1. that the general will always exists, since it is, as the title of this chapter states, 'indestructible';
2. but that three conditions have to be brought into play for it to be able to declare itself.
It must first be asked a pertinent question, one which essentially relates to it: concerning not a particular object but a general object.
This question must be asked it in a pertinent form, one which really interrogates the general will itself and not the particular wills.
Lastly the general will must answer this question, i.e. existent as it is, it must not be 'mute', as happens when 'in every heart the social bond is broken'.
Supposing that a general question has been asked it, and that the general will is not mute, it must be interrogated in the forms required by its very nature if it is really to answer the question asked. This is the whole problem of voting rules:
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But above all (and this is the decisive point) there must be no 'factions' or 'partial associations' in the State, above all no dominant partial association, for then what is 'declared' will no longer be the general will but a partial will, if not quite simply a particular will: that of the dominant group.
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The individual: 'Even in selling his vote for money, he does not extinguish in himself the general will, but only eludes it. The fault he commits is that of changing the state of the question, and answering something different from what he is asked. Instead of saying, by his vote, "It is to the advantage of the State," he says, "It is of advantage to this or that man or party that this or that view should prevail"' (SC IV, I, p. 86).
We are now in a position to specify the nature and theoretical function of Discrepancy III.
I said: I think we know what particular interest is but we do not know what the general interest is. But Rousseau says that the general interest is the common ground of the particular interests. Each particular interest contains in it the general interest, each particular will the general will. This thesis is reflected in the proposition: that the general will is indestructible, inalienable and always correct. Which clearly means: the general interest always exists, the general will always exists, whether or no it is declared or eluded.
What separates the general interest from itself, the general will from itself? Particular interest. We have a total contradiction: particular interest is the essence of the general interest, but it is also the obstacle to it; now, the whole secret of this contradiction lies in a 'play ' on words in which Rousseau calls the particular interest of each individual in isolation and the particular interest of social groups by the same name. This second interest, which is a group, class or party interest, not the interest of each individual, is only called particular with respect to the general interest. It is a 'play' on words to call it particular in the way the interest of the isolated individual is called particular. This 'play' on words is once again the index of a Discrepancy: a difference in theoretical status of the isolated individual and social groups -- this difference
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But precisely the theoretical denegation, by the ambiguous use of one and the same concept ('particular interest'), of this 'resistant' fact allows the theory to develop without resistance, in the commentary on the mirror couple: particular interest/general interest. However, on closer inspection, we can see the Discrepancy at work even in this couple.
The general interest: its existence has as its sole content the declaration of its existence. Rousseau does not doubt for a moment the existence of a general interest as the foundation for every society. That the ideology of the general interest is indispensable to the real societies which served as references for Rousseau is certainly true. But in the Social Contract, Rousseau never treats the general interest as an ideology or myth. Its real existence is so little in doubt for him that he affirms its unalterable and imperturbable existence, even when the general will which declares it has become mute. Here the theoretical Discrepancy begins to reveal a quite different Discrepancy: the Discrepancy which installs this philosophy in the Discrepancy between it and the real which its birth required from the beginning.
The same is true, in mirror form, for the particular interest. For, the general interest is no more than the mirror reflection of the particular interest. The particular interest, too, is the object of an absolute declaration of existence. The two declarations echo one another since they concern the same content and fulfill the same function. And they are discrepant with respect to the same reality: the interests of social groups, the object of a denegation indispensable for the maintenance in working order of the mirror categories of particular interest and general interest. Just as the general interest is a myth, whose nature is visible once it is seen
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The Discrepancy now appears to us in all its breadth, and in a new form. It no longer concerns some or other point internal to the theory. It is no longer a question of the status of the Second Recipient Party (Discrepancy I) or of the status of the exchange in total alienation (Discrepancy II). This time it is a question of the very Discrepancy of the theory with respect to the real; for the first time the theory has encountered social groups in existence. Having reached this point, I can make one suggestion and one comment.
The suggestion. It would undoubtedly be very interesting to go back along the path we have just completed, but this time starting from Discrepancy III as the reason for all the earlier 'problems' and Discrepancies. That would be to start from the dis-articulation of Rousseau's philosophy, i.e. from the point at which it is articulated onto the juridical ideology of the society in which Rousseau lived, constituting itself as an ideological
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The comment. It is that in the object involved in the denegation of Discrepancy III (social groups, orders, classes, etc.), Rousseau has finally reached what he began with as a problem: the result of the Discourse on Inequality. And this comparison would no doubt give pertinent results for the ideological concepts underpinning all the theoretical space of the Social Contract: liberty, self-respect, equality, etc. The famous liberty in particular, solemnly attributed to the man of the first state of nature, the reserve and sacred depository for one-never-knows-how-long, i.e. for the Future of Morality and Religion (and for the General Will, i.e. for the General Interest) -- it would become clear that the natural man has no need or use for it: that the whole of the Discourse on Inequality can quite well do without it. And it would also be seen what the social groups are all about: is it not the body of the 'rich' who take the initiative in the Social Contract, whose arguments are there denounced: the very 'deliberate' undertaking of the greatest imposture in the history of the human race? The true Social Contract, now a 'legitimate' one, thus finds at the end of the displacement of its concepts the very same realities whose existence and implacable logic had been described in the Discourse on Inequality.
One last comment. If Discrepancy III now concerns the Discrepancy of the theory with respect to the real, it can no longer be a question of a mere theoretical denegation. The denegation can only be a practical one: to denegate the existence of human groups (orders, classes) is to suppress their existence practically. Here I inscribe Discrepancy IV.
Chapter Six
Flight Forward in Ideology or
Regression in the Economy:
Discrepancy IV
Recall the conditions for the 'sound' functioning of the consultation of the general will. The people must be enlightened, and no intermediary human groups must be imposed between it and the general will. Rousseau will conduct the two tasks abreast, in one and the same operation, which takes two forms, the second being an avowal of the failure of the first, and vice versa. Flight forward in ideology and (or) regression in reality. Discrepancy IV, which is perfectly 'practical' (but naturally implies theoretical effects) 'separates' the two forms of this alternating attempt. Here I can only give a few brief indications.
1. T H E F L I G H T F O R W A R D I N I D E O L O G Y
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Listing the various sorts of laws, Rousseau distinguishes political laws, civil laws and criminal laws. But the essential remains unspoken:
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Flight forward into ideology, as the sole means of protecting the particular will from the contagion of those so-called 'particular', i.e. social, 'interests' of the famous 'intermediary' groups. A flight forward: for it has no end. The ideological solution, that 'keystone' which holds up to heaven the whole political arc, needs heaven. Nothing is as fragile as Heaven.
2. R E G R E S S I O N I N ( E C O N O M I C ) R E A L I T Y
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In the economic reforms he proposes, Rousseau aims to proscribe the effects of the established economic inequality, and especially the grouping of men into those two 'naturally inseparable' 'estates', 'rich men' and 'beggars'. The criterion he retains is that 'no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself'. He expresses out loud, but without thinking its practical preconditions, the old dream of economic independence, of 'independent commerce' (Discourse on Inequality), i.e. of (urban or agrarian) petty artisanal production.
'Flight backwards' this time, in economic reality: regression.
That it is a dream, a pious wish, is well known to Rousseau:
1. The Social Contract and Discourses, op. cit., p. 199.
2. ibid., p. 203.
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In a word: Rousseau invokes as a practical solution to his problem (how to suppress the existence of social classes) an economic regression towards one of the phenomena of the dissolution of the feudal mode of production: the independent petty producer, the urban or rural artisanate, what the Discourse on Inequality describes in the concept of 'independent commerce' (universal economic independence permitting a 'free' commerce, i.e. free relations between individuals). But to what saint should one entrust oneself for the realization of this impossible regressive economic reform? There is nothing left but moral preaching, i.e. ideological action. We are in a circle.
Flight forward in ideology, regression in the economy, flight forward in ideology, etc. This time the Discrepancy is inscribed in the practice proposed by Rousseau. This practice concerns not concepts, but realities (moral and religious ideology which exists, economic property which exists). The discrepancy really is in so many words the Discrepancy of theory with respect to the real in its effect: a discrepancy between two equally impossible practices. As we are now in reality, and can only turn round and round in it (ideology-economy-ideology, etc.), there is no further flight possible in reality itself. End of the Discrepancy.
If there is no possibility of further Discrepancies -- since they would no longer be of any use in the theoretical order which has done nothing but live on these Discrepancies, chasing before it its problems and their solutions to the point where it reaches the real, insoluble problem, there is still one recourse, but one of a
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Marx's Relation to Hegel
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I should like to thank Monsieur Jean Hyppolite for the great honour he has done me in inviting me to his Seminar. I am greatly indebted to M. Hyppolite. Among many other achievements, he will go down in the history of French philosophy as the man who has had the courage to translate Hegel and sponsor the publication of Husserl. He has pulled French philosophy away from the reactionary tradition which has dominated, I say dominated (for fortunately there have been other elements beneath this domination), its whole history since the French Revolution, a reactionary tradition reinforced by the academic reigns of Lachelier, Bergson and Brunschvicg. In this tradition French chauvinism took the form of the simplest kind of stupidity: ignorance. M. Hyppolite has had the courage to fight against this ignorance. We owe to him our knowledge of Hegel, and through Hegel, the beginnings of an understanding of, among other things, the distance separating Marx from Hegel. Let us not speak of the fate French philosophy has reserved for Marx. Brunschvicg, who thought Hegel mentally retarded, regarded Marx and Lenin as philosophical nonentities. M. Hyppolite has also had the courage to speak of Marx, and of Freud, those great damnés de la terre for academic bourgeois philosophy.
Everyone more or less knows this now. But it is worth saying.
Let me add that I have a debt to M. Hyppolite that he will not suspect. If I have been able to glimpse the revolutionary theoretical scope of Marx's work in philosophy, it is thanks to a very dear friend, Jacques Martin, who died five years ago. Now Jacques Martin was privileged, under the Occupation in Paris, to hear M. Hyppolite, then a professeur de khâgne (teacher in Letters in the preparatory class for the École Normale Supérieure), comment on certain passages from the Phenomenology of Mind.
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I should like to put forward a few schematic themes about Marx's relation to Hegel.
I renounce rhetoric and maieutics, whether Socratic or phenomenological. In philosophy, the true beginning is the end. I shall begin at the end. I shall lay my cards on the table so everyone can see them. These cards are what they are: they carry the stamp of Marxism-Leninism. Exposed in this way, they will naturally have the form of a conclusion without premisses.
Let me start with a fact. The Marx-Hegel relationship is a currently decisive theoretical and political question. A theoretical question: it governs the future of the number-one strategic science of Modern Times: the science of history, and the future of the philosophy linked to that science: dialectical materialism. A political question: it derives from these premisses. It is inscribed in the class struggle at a certain level, in the past as in the present.
To understand the contemporary importance of this fact of the Marx-Hegel relationship, it must be understood as a symptom, and explained as the symptom of the following realities. In order to situate the symptom, I shall state these realities in the form of Theses.
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We are living in the necessary effects of this fusion, of this union. Its first results: the socialist revolutions (USSR, China, etc., revolutionary movements in Asia, Vietnam, Latin America, Communist Parties, etc.).
(a) This union realizes the 'union of theory and practice'.
(b) This union is not an established fact but an endless struggle, with its victories and defeats. A struggle in the union itself. With the 1914 War: the crisis of the Second International. At present: the crisis in the International Communist Movement.
The union brings together: the Workers' Movement and Marxist theory. Here I shall only discuss Marxist theory. What is Marxist theory?
In the great classical tradition of the Workers' Movement, from Marx to Lenin, Stalin and Mao, Marxist theory has been defined as containing two distinct theoretical disciplines: a science (designated by its general theory: historical materialism) and a philosophy (designated by the term dialectical materialism). There are very special relations between these two disciplines. I shall not examine them in this paper. I shall suggest the following: of these two disciplines, science and philosophy, it is the science that has the place of determination (in the sense defined in Reading Capital and closely specified by Badiou in Critique, May 1967).[1] Everything depends on this science.
1. 'Le (Re)-commencement du matérialisme dialectique', Critique, no. 240, May 1967.
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The foundation of the science of history by Marx is the most important theoretical event of contemporary history.
Let me use an image.
There are a certain number of sciences. They can be said to occupy a certain site in what can be called a theoretical space. Site, space. Metaphorical notions. But they convey certain facts: the proximity of certain sciences; relations between neighbouring sciences; domination of certain sciences over other sciences; but simultaneously sciences without neighbours, insular sciences (isolated positions in a void: e.g. psychoanalysis, etc.).
From this standpoint it is possible to consider that the history of the sciences reveals the existence, in this problematical theoretical space, of great scientific continents.
1. The continent of Mathematics (opened up by the Greeks).
2. The continent of Physics (opened up by Galileo).
3. Marx has opened up the third great continent: the continent of History.
A continent, in the sense of this metaphor, is never empty: it is always already 'occupied' by many and varied more or less ideological disciplines which do not know that they belong to that 'continent'. For example, before Marx, the History continent was occupied by the philosophies of history, by political economy, etc. The opening-up of a continent by a continental science not only disputes the rights and claims of the former occupants, it also completely restructures the old configuration of the 'continent'. A metaphor cannot be spun out indefinitely -- otherwise I should here say that the opening-up of a new continent to scientific knowledge presupposes a change of terrain or an epistemological 'rupture', etc. I leave you the trouble of the temporary needlework required to bring all these metaphors into agreement. But one day we shall have to drop all this sewing and patching for something quite different: to make a theory of the history of the production of knowledges.
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1st continent (Mathematics): birth of philosophy. Plato.
2nd continent (Physics): profound transformation of philosophy. Descartes.
3rd great continent (History, Marx): revolution in philosophy, announced in the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach. End of classical philosophy, no longer an interpretation of the world, but a 'transformation' of the world.
'Transformation of the world': an enigmatic word, prophetic but enigmatic. How can philosophy be a transformation of the world? of which world?
Whatever the case, it is possible to say, with Hegel: philosophy always arrives post festum. It is always late. It is always postponed (différée).
This thesis is very important to me: in a certain respect (its theoretical elaboration), Marxist philosophy or dialectical materialism cannot but be behind the science of history. Time is needed for a philosophy to form and then develop after the great scientific discovery which has silently induced its birth.
All the more so in that, in Marx's case, the scientificity of his discovery has been fiercely denied, fought and condemned by all the self-styled specialists of that continent. The so-called Human Sciences still occupy the old continent. They are now armed with the latest ultra-modern techniques of mathematics, etc., but they are still based theoretically on the same outworn ideological notions as they were in the past, ingeniously rethought and retouched. With a few remarkable exceptions, the prodigious development of the so-called human sciences, above all the development of the social sciences, is no more than the aggiornamento of old techniques of social adaptation and social readaptation: of ideological techniques. This is the great scandal of the whole of contemporary intellectual history: everyone talks about
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If we take seriously what Marx tells us about the real dialectic of history, it is not 'men' who make history, although its dialectic is realized in them and in their practice, but the masses in the relations of the class struggle. This is true for political history, general history. For the history of the sciences, making due allowances, the same is true. It is not individuals who make the history of the sciences, although its dialectic is realized in them, and in their practice. The empirical individuals known for making such and such a discovery realize in their practice relations and a conjunction wider than themselves.
This is where we can pose the problem of the relations between Marx and Hegel.
I shall give an extraordinarily schematic figuration. I hope it
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To pose it thus in outline, I shall start once again from an indication of Engels's, taken up and developed by Lenin and known by the name of the Three Sources of Marxism. Sources is an outdated ideological notion, but what matters to us is the fact that Engels and Lenin do not pose the problem in terms of an individual history, but in terms of a history of theories. They establish a pattern involving three theoretical 'characters': Classical German Philosophy, English Political Economy and French Socialism. Say: Hegel, Ricardo and Babeuf-Fourier, Saint-Simon, etc. To simplify and for expositional clarity, I shall partially set aside French Socialism and consider only Ricardo and Hegel, as symbolic representatives of English political economy and German philosophy respectively.
I shall then return to the extremely general diagram of 'theoretical practice' which I proposed five years ago in an article on the Materialist Dialectic.
Diagram I
.GIF)
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R + FS = raw material, object of Marx's theoretical practice
H = instruments of theoretical production, the product of the work of the Hegelian dialectic on Ricardo is then Capital = M.
[What we tried to do in Reading Capital can be represented, in thoroughly indicative fashion, by the following diagram:
Diagram II