Читать книгу Politics, Economy, and Society - Paul Ricoeur - Страница 10

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.

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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 administration of things (and supposing that planning is a progress) is also progress in the governance of persons. The apportionment of the great financial costs of the Plan (investments and consumption, well-being and culture, etc.) represents a series of global decisions concerning the life of individuals and the meaning of their life: a plan is an ethics in action, and by this means, a manner of governing men and women.

All these threats are tendencies, as are the resources of reason, order, and justice that the State develops as the history of power unfolds. What makes the State a great enigma is that both tendencies are contemporaneous and together form the reality of power. The State is, in our midst, the unresolved contradiction of rationality and power.