Democracy to Totalitarianism

As some of you may know, I've spent a good part of the past few weeks reading Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis. I'm still not entirely sure what to make of them, but, at the very least, reading them has been an excellent corrective to my Foucauldian/Deleuzian tendencies. Among other things, Lefort is a first-rate theorist of democracy, totalitarianism and bureaucracy. Indeed, it is quite possible that Lefort was the first to use totalitarianism as a theoretical concept. While the word 'totalitarianism' pre-dates the second World War, it wasn't until well after the War that the concept was imbued with any theoretical content; previously it was descriptive. Lefort's major intelocutors, it is worth noting, are Arendt and Strauss.

Lefort's political theory emphasize the central place for the comparison of regimes. Thus, the basic question of all political philosophy should be, "What is the nature of the differences between forms of society?" A regime consists in two elements: the constitution, or the form of government, and the style of existence, or the mode of life. The former is the "structure of power" that describes what is legitimate and defines the legitimate basis for the ordering of social ranks. The latter refers to the "mores and beliefs" that testify to the existence of "a set of implicit norms" that determine the distinction between good and evil, moral and immoral, just and unjust, noble and ignoble, etc. However, a regime consists in more than just this. A regime also represents itself to itself such that the structure common to all regimes (constitution and mode of life) is given content. This representation of itself to itself constitutes the symbolic order, which concerns Power, Law and Knowledge individually and in relation to one another. Lorna Weir and Brian Singer, in a (forthcoming) manuscript entitled "Politics and Sovereign Power: Considerations on Foucault", describe Lefort's symbolic order in the following way:

[The symbolic order] is to be understood in terms of the articulation of knowledge, power and the law [...] each taken in itself, but above all in relation ot each other. For the claim here is that the presentation of an orderly, meaningful world in common that extends beyond restricted localities is very much dependent on how power, knowledge and law and their interrelations are themselves presented and represented

Consequently, regimes can be compared either structurally or symbolically. Although Lefort defines regimes, in the first instance, on the basis of their structure, it is their symbolic differences that he most thoroughly pursues.

Democracy is, above all, defined by "the empty place of power"; "this apparatus prevents governments from appropriating power for their own ends, from incorporating it into themselves". In order to prevent the empty place from becoming filled, democracy institutionalizes conflict through the regular and periodical redistribution of power and permanent rules controlling contests. Following from the empty space of power, law and knowledge are similarly relativized. Both are always open for debate and their respective foundations are always in question. Thus, structurally, we could say that the constitution is permanent, but the mode of life is always open to questioning. This division -- conflict -- at the core of society is what, in fact, constitutes society.

This brings us to the question of how a democratic society can turn into a totalitarian society. The following is taken from the end of his essay "On Modern Democracy", which can be found in the collection Democracy and Political Theory (Polity Press, 1988). The volume is, sadly, long out of print.

In my view, the important point is that democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge, and as to the basis of relations between self and other, at every level of social life (at every level where division, and especially the division between those who held power and those who were subject to them, could once be articulated as a result of a belief in the nature of things or in a supernatural principle). It is this which leads me to take the view that, without the actors being aware of it, a process of questioning is implicit in social practice, that no one has the answer to the questions that arise, and that the work of ideology, which is always dedicated to the task of restoring certainty, cannot put an end to this practice. And that in turn leads me to at least identify, if not to explain, the conditions for the formation of totalitarianism. There is always a possbility that the logic of democracy will be disrupted in a society in which the foundations of the political order and the social order vanish, in which that which has been established never bear the seal of full legitimacy, in which differences of rank no longer go unchallenged, in which right proves to depend upon the discourse which articulates it, and in which the exercise of power depends upon conflict. When individuals are increasingly insecure as a result of an economic crisis or of the ravages of war, when conflict between classes and groups is exacerbated and can no longer be symbolically resolved within the political sphere, when power appears to have sunk to the level of reality and to be no more than an instrument for the promotion of the interests and appetites of vulgar ambition and when, in a word, it appears in society, and when at the same time society appears to be fragmented, then we see the development of the fantasy of the People-as-One, the beginnings of a quest for a substantial identity, for a social body which is welded to its head, for an embodying power, for a state free from division.

A different answer from our oft-cited Agamben, and one worth considering.

Comments

[Alain]

Craig, thank you for posting this. My initial reaction is that it sounds alot like traditional liberalism. I am curious if Lefort thinks that there is anything structurally about Democracy that either leads to or prevents totalitarianims?

[Craig]

The cheap answer is "yes and no". Lefort is one of those people who distinguish between "economic liberalism" and "political liberalism". He's not the former, but he is, in a sense, the latter. To further complicate matters, he's as hostile to totalitarianism (especially the "real existing" communism of the USSR) as he is to what he calls the "bureaucratic capitalism" of the west. It would follow, it seems, that he would be equally hostile to our contemporary neo-liberalisms and neo-conservatisms. (My French isn't good enough to do the translations and, it seems, few are interested in doing it -- he's still alive and still writing.)

It's quite clear that his main sources for his democratic theory are the French Revolution, Tocqueville and Kantorowicz's political theology. Whether (or not) that equates to a "traditional liberalism"... I don't know.

The structural question is another matter entirely. I'll return to it presently.

[Mukhter Hossan]

Democracy in Conflict with Totalitarianism.