Autor: Manent, Pierre

Buch: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Titel: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Stichwort: Guizot 1; Rückblick: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Constant (Carl Schmitt: keine liberale Politik sui generis); 19. Jhdt.: poltische Hauprichtungen: wenig Position, viel Kritik; Versuch einer Position: Comte, Proudhon, Péguy, Guizot; Todesstrafe: Anachronismus

Kurzinhalt: The evolution of the nineteenth-century political mind was therefore characterized by a strange critical circle. Each of the three basic political attitudes—liberal, reactionary, revolutionary—was first defined polemically to show that the other two ...

Textausschnitt: 93a The very purity of Constant's liberalism obliges us to pose troubling questions. If liberalism is to remain faithful to its original inspiration, is it forever condemned to adopt its original attitude of opposition? Must it always pit the individual against power, even the power of political institutions originally founded on this individual—that is, against liberalism? (Fs)

93b Hobbes "invented" the individual to solve the theologico-political problem, to ward off the disasters produced by the conflict between the two powers; he then founded absolutism on this doubly "polemical" individual.1 To cope with this absolutism, Locke and (in his own way) Rousseau pushed Hobbes's approach further, and invented another individual, this time essentially pacific and even solitary. This individual became the basis of a new sovereignty—represented in Locke's case, unrepresentable in Rousseau's—supposedly capable of protecting property and liberty without despotism. After the French revolutionary experience proved that unlimited sovereignty was a great danger to liberties, Constant then set himself up against the principle and invoked instead an individual sphere radically external to and, in principle, invulnerable to this sovereignty. He did not so much base his assertion on a new interpretation of human nature or the state of nature as on an interpretation of history. Nonetheless, this individual continued to play a "polemical" or "oppositional" role. Constant preserved the first moment of liberalism, where the "natural" individual was posed against the social order, and rejected the second one, where this "natural" individual was "overcome" and in a sense repudiated so that popular sovereignty could be established. To preserve liberty, he accepted the first, negative moment of original liberalism and turned it against its second, positive or constructive one. It therefore appeared that liberalism was essentially a negative or critical political doctrine, not a positive or founding one. This would prove to be the theme of the right-wing critics who attacked liberalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Carl Schmitt put it, "there is no sui generis liberal politics, there is only a liberal critique of politics."2 (Fs)

94a This criticism would be unanswerable if it could not be turned equally against the right. And Constant, we have seen, already returned it by pointing out that the enemies of liberalism are in fact purely critical or polemical, that their apparently positive references are anachronisms, that they have no principles for offering a serious and sincere opposition to liberal individualism. One can add that the leftist critics of liberalism, in particular the Marxists, also conceived of themselves explicitly as critics. They proposed no new principles to counter those of liberalism; they simply turned its own principles against it, showing that liberalism, in the form of capitalism, "contradicts itself" and hence necessarily calls for a new, noncontradictory state of society, about which one can say nothing except that in it man will be reconciled with himself and with nature. (Fs)

94b The evolution of the nineteenth-century political mind was therefore characterized by a strange critical circle. Each of the three basic political attitudes—liberal, reactionary, revolutionary—was first defined polemically to show that the other two were either "purely critical" or else "self-critical," that is contradictory. There was, of course, an effort within each position, to found itself positively, and no longer merely critically. Within the antiliberal and antirevolutionary position one finds the "positivism" of Auguste Comte, which distinguished itself from the "retrograde school" and was opposed to it; within the socialist or revolutionary school, authors like Proudhon or later Péguy sought a substitute for the merely anticapitalist definition of socialism. And within liberalism, Guizot was certainly the author who most clearly endeavored to deliver liberalism from oppositional habits which were carrying it along. (Fs)

94c Liberalism had long been in opposition, but Guizot wanted it to govern. He expressed the essentials of his governmental liberalism at the beginning of the 1820s, when the reaction following the assassination of the Duke de Berry threw him, paradoxically, into the opposition. The state was governed, or at least greatly influenced by, the "ultras" who wanted to reestablish the ancien régime. In Guizot's eyes, they understood nothing about the new France, though they were more irritating than truly dangerous. Seeking to reinforce their power over a society that wanted nothing to do with them, they had no idea of how to achieve their goals because they were ignorant of the "means of government" in a representative regime founded on the distinction between state and society. A striking analysis of the change that had taken place in the modern era in the relationship between power and society can be found in his volume entitled De la peine de mort en matière politique (1822). (Fs)

94d The first years of the Restoration were marked by innumerable conspiracies, real or imagined, against which the government was tempted to react—and sometimes did react with the death sentence. Guizot tried to show that these violent measures were unreasonable because they could no longer serve their stated end. Social power was no longer attached to individuals or families whom it would suffice to strike down in order to safeguard the political power from threats:

Where are they now those eminent, avowed chieftains, whom it suffices to destroy to destroy a party? Under what proper names are influence and danger now concentrated? Few men have a name, and even those who do are insignificant. Power has abandoned individuals, families; it has moved away from the homes it formerly occupied. It has spread throughout society: there it circulates rapidly, hardly visible in any specific place, but present everywhere. It attaches itself to public interests, ideas, feelings which no one person disposes of, which no one person even represents fully enough for their fate to depend for one moment on that person's. Because if these forces are hostile to power, let it search: in whose hands will it find them deposited? On which head will it strike them? There are Calvinists, members of the League, but there is no longer a Coligny or Mayenne. Today the death of an enemy is only that of a man; it neither bothers nor weakens the party he served. If power is reassured by this, it is mistaken; the danger remains the same because this man did not create it.3

95a In these conditions, the death penalty became a dangerous anachronism. However—and this is the second part of Guizot's reasoning—the weakness of the political death penalty in no way signified that political power was undergoing an intrinsic weakening in modern times. Quite the contrary: the acts of power are simply scrutinized with much more interest and anxiety than formerly. And this anxiety of society had its origin in a growth of power's own orbit:

The bourgeois, whose affairs departed very little from his guild, whose thoughts rarely went beyond the walls of his town, now knows himself to be engaged and jeopardized in the most important matters, in the most remote deliberations. The words raison d'état, political necessity, which before struck him as obscure words whose authority he accepted without trying to understand their meaning, now stir up worrisome ideas and agitating feelings. He is right to be much more worried than before. The government that in former days also had its separate, higher, greater, but nevertheless special and restrained sphere, has itself become much more general, more directly and universally associated with the interests and life of all citizens. Does it need money? It calls on everyone. Does it make laws? They are for everyone. Does it have fears? Everyone can be their object. For power, there are no longer the great and the small; it is now connected with the village magistrates just as much as with the heads of state. One political power now affects people everywhere and can find motivation anywhere at all. Why be surprised that the government's condition and the people's disposition have changed? These changes are reciprocal and correspond to each other. If power no longer holds any mysteries for society, this is because society no longer holds any for power; if authority meets minds claiming to judge it, this is because it has something to ask or do everywhere; if power is asked to legitimize its conduct, this is because it can use all its force and has a right over all citizens; if the public is getting much more involved in government, the government is also acting on quite another public, and power has grown hand in hand with liberty.4