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Paul Ricoeur’s work is rarely viewed through the lens of political philosophy. And yet the question of power and the desire-to-live-together in the polis is his constant preoccupation and the substance of numerous writings.¹ However, none of these themes are presented as part of an overall system in which they are a part. Lectures 1. Autour du politique is composed of studies coming from a wide range of periods and treating apparently unrelated topics.² Ideology and Utopia deals with the political from the standpoint of the social imagination, but the anthropological and epistemological reflections on this topic do not extend to the institutional forms of the political.³ This last aspect is indirectly approached in two other collections, notably through a reflection on the law.⁴ Finally, the most fully developed text on the political as such is to be found in the series of three studies on ethics, morality, and practical wisdom in Oneself as Another.⁵

Generally speaking, Ricoeur assigned a limited scope to each of his writings; he himself characterizes his thinking as a style that privileges fragmentation. This is singularly the case in political matters, where he seems to have been unconcerned about confining to oblivion so many studies never to be republished. The selection of the texts collected here has been guided by the concern to repair this oversight by restoring Ricoeur’s political project in its coherence and in the diversity of its centers of interest.⁶ An initial criterion, that of chronology, has prevailed: retrieving the most salient features of the development of his thought over a period of six decades. This is complemented by a thematic criterion, which has led to retaining the most significant texts and – a more difficult task – setting aside those deemed circumstantial: those with less apparent philosophical intent, as the content was focused on a question specific to a point in time.

The first section brings together texts from the 1950s and 1960s, written in the context of the Christianisme social [Social Christianity] movement during the period, from 1958 to 1970, when Ricoeur was its president. Is there any need to underscore this fact? Since these writings, which contain reflections that remain entirely pertinent today, are related to a political and theological context that is now distant from our own, we have provided in notes, when necessary, some information useful for understanding them. It was indeed within the framework of this Protestant movement that the philosopher first developed his political thought. Far from a Christian apologetic, it was for him a matter of articulating conviction and responsibility, paying particular attention to giving an account of the tradition within which he placed himself, through the mediation of the public debate he solicited. On the basis of this foothold, an evolution ensued, and over its course the philosopher continued, little by little, to strip his formulations of their theological or biblical references, as if increasingly to open them up to discussion in secular terms.

In this respect, the text “The Adventures of the State and the Task of Christians” constitutes the exception that proves the rule. For this 1958 article is the transposition in theological terms of “The Political Paradox,” the seminal text published the preceding year in the journal Esprit, after the Soviet repression of the Budapest uprising in October 1956.⁷ In these circumstances, the “Christians’ task” is to demonstrate with respect to the State both responsibility, by actively participating in democratic institutions, and critical vigilance. In the first instance, Ricoeur dismisses, back-to-back, anarchism and the apology of submission. In the second, he rejects both millennialist utopia and sterile criticism. The central point is focused on the double-sided reality which is the State, a protective and pedagogical institution, but at the same time the power that is potentially subjugating through lies and illusions.

The parallel with respect to the argument of “The Political Paradox” is clear: the political is the realm of an extreme tension between “rationality” – the explanation it gives of the world – and “irrationality,” which is seen in the use of force, repression, totalitarianism. This internal tension is constitutive of the political, for the claim to provide a total meaning to the world generates violence: the more one desires the good, the more one is inclined to impose it. In this way, Ricoeur warns the citizen, the guardian of democracy, against any totalizing system of explaining the world, any dogmatic understanding of history. As a corollary, power should be divided and controlled. Ricoeur declares himself to be in favor of a political liberalism, that is, a State respectful of limits to its domain and confident in the liberty of its citizens.

In his effort to grasp the political as such, Ricoeur discerns an evil specific to it, the grandeur of the political ambition and its claims. The result of this is a critique of Marxism, published in 1959 in “From Marxism to Contemporary Communism.” If Marxism succumbed to political evil with Stalinism, this is because it, quite wrongly, made political domination the consequence of another evil: economic exploitation. In this text, Ricoeur presents a diagnosis of “the petrification of Marxism.” The following year, however, in “Socialism Today,” he is no less critical in the face of “the gradual downfall of the great dream of the founders of socialism,” degraded to the welfare state. The heirs of Marx and Proudhon are in serious danger of turning away from the fundamental significance of work in human activity, to the benefit of a simple socialization of abundance and, finally, to the promotion of the “common man” (l’homme quelconque). Beyond the question of Ricoeur’s political allegiances – he, the great reader of Marx, is not himself Marxist, but socialist in his leanings – it is his philosophical approach that is especially to be underscored. The terms, “dream,” “decline,” and “petrification” seem to suggest that political evil is accompanied over time by the ideological rigidness of utopia in the domain of the social imagination.

In addition to the preceding two criteria, there is a third, methodological one. It is conveyed in the ample reflection on “Hegel Today,” from 1974, which opens the second section.⁸ Political evil has its counterpart on the level of thinking, which requires elucidation. What is at issue is the temptation of synthesis, of totalization, the illusion that leads thought astray. Applying this observation to the work of philosophy itself, Ricoeur states his “invincible points of resistance” with respect to Hegelian absolute knowledge. There are intractable aspects of human experience that do not allow themselves to be totalized within a theory. They remind us of the sense of limitation and of the impossibility of attaining a view of the whole. With Kant, we come back to an awareness of the limits of knowledge. From this perspective, the fragmentary style Ricoeur has adopted is highlighted as a philosophical strategy in opposition to the claims of a definitive synthesis. In this sense, there is good reason to see in the texts collected in this volume less an ensemble that forms a system, than exercises of systemization in the critique of system-building.

The reflection on Hegel nevertheless leads to a proposal. In fact, Ricoeur advances the possibility of a function that would be related more to the imagination than to knowledge, here a utopian function, which would be the site of figures portraying the realization of man, in the forward projection of his freedom – rather than in the mode of totalization. The theme of imagination, clearly present in Ricoeur, thus finds an application in the political field. One has only to consider on this point writings that can be found elsewhere.⁹

The next three texts date from the 1990s. “Morality, Ethics, and Politics” (1993) provides a summary of Ricoeur’s political thinking as it has progressively unfolded since “The Political Paradox.” It is not without importance that this text was published in Pouvoir, a journal intended for constitutional scholars and political figures, as if to solicit a dialogue with interlocutors who were not necessarily philosophers. The major interest of this article is to have set out a multi-storied architecture, after the model of Oneself as Another, superimposing an anthropology, an ethics, and a politics. The political sphere occupies the top level. Among other developments, two new “paradoxes” are added to the first. This construction no longer concerns the cognitive realm alone, but also includes action, sensibility, and temporality. It requires that the citizen be capable of reconciling opposites, combining belonging and distancing, identity and otherness, conviction and responsibility.¹⁰ A democratic ethics comes to light, which strives to make both the institution and protest possible, relying on the lived experience of conflict internalized in individuals.¹¹

In “Responsibility and Fragility” (1992), as well as in “Morality, Ethics, and Politics,” Ricoeur conceives of the political by linking it to the ethical.¹² This is the corollary of political liberalism. Indeed, once the State abstains from intervening, not everything is political. There are apolitical, or pre-political, margins where civil society flourishes. However, the freedom of action animating social mores and ethical life produces a certain sense of the desire-to-live-together, which in a democracy serves to impress its orientation on the political. In return, democracy is entrusted to the protection of the citizenry, auditors of its fragility. This is highlighted in the 1992 article. To do this, Ricoeur identifies the points of fragility belonging, precisely, to the three figures of the “Political Paradox,” providing to citizens the corresponding themes of vigilance and participation.

Ethics and politics are in a relation of mutual critique. Political institutions are necessary to limit the violence of social mores and actions; but, conversely, they have legitimacy only in the service of democratic ethics. The question of legitimacy, notably, refers back to the question of determining what constitutes authority. In “The Paradoxes of Authority” (1997), an unpublished lecture,¹³ Ricoeur reflects on the vertical axis of domination. He defines authority as a combination of asymmetry and concealed reciprocity, once authority is viewed to exist only as recognized. In this way, he shows that obedience can be exercised in the name of autonomy – and not against it – if it intervenes in response to a proposal that calls upon one’s autonomy. In this case, domination does not found power, but the other way around. The relation of domination only covers over and occults the roots of a desire-to-live-together, constitutive of the power stemming from acting-in-common (in Hannah Arendt’s sense).¹⁴ This brings to light a positive foundation of the social bond, which does not stem from fear. These are the stakes of grandeur: either the citizen obeys power because, in its calling upon him, he grows in stature; or, ceding to the inebriation of grandeur, domination diminishes him, drawing his criticism and his just revolt.

The third and fourth sections extend the perspective to themes related to the economy, society, and to Europe. One should speak of society in the plural here to mark the pluralist dimension affecting these reflections on tolerance, the situation of the foreigner, identity, and, of course, the issues at stake in the difficult elaboration of a European ethos. Broadening the horizon in this way is all the more necessary as, up until the 1980s, the political is often envisaged by Ricoeur in its function of mediation between the economic and the cultural, in reference to the Kantian trilogy of the passions of possession, power, and value.¹⁵ But this manner of problematizing no longer appears as systematically after this period, as if the neo-liberal turn prevented drawing any clear line between these three spheres, as they were being overtaken by the logic of the market. In this new context, Ricoeur approaches the economic sphere with a series of probes, as it were, in the studies on money and crisis.

One can then wonder what remains of the critique addressed in the 1960s to the ambition of a “bourgeois” society centered on well-being alone and of a socialism in danger of becoming the promoter of the common man. More circumspect, the argument does not, however, seem to be absent, even as it adopts new forms. This is the case in “The Struggle for Recognition and the Economy of the Gift,” a lecture given by Ricoeur while he was preparing The Course of Recognition, the last work published during his lifetime.¹⁶ Fearing that an infinite demand for recognition would produce only an insatiable expectation, he introduces a remedy in the struggle for recognition: the gift. This represents the utopian incentive that can keep social exchanges from lapsing into violence. Instead of the unlimited thirst for money, Ricoeur proposes a respite from the race for production and for enrichment. This is doubtless the mark of a continuity – beyond the evolutions of historical context and the shifts in his own thinking¹⁷ – a constant preoccupation that runs through his entire meditation on the political: the aspiration for freedom.