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CAN THE PROBLEM OF THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL BE RESOLVED? LEO STRAUSS AND CLAUDE LEFORT Gilles Labelle

ABSTRACT The starting point of this article is that there is a kind of ‘hidden dialogue’ that Claude Lefort is trying to conduct with Leo Strauss on the theologico-political problem. If Strauss claims this problem to be ‘irresolvable’, Lefort seeks to show that the ‘permanence of the theologico-political’ in modernity is only an appearance, as democracy has, in the last instance, succeeded in ‘cutting’ the knot tied between the theological and the political in pre-modern societies. Moreover, while Strauss associates recognition of the irresolvable character of the theologico-political problem with moderation, Lefort takes the exact opposite view, insisting on the lack of moderation, even excess, that weighs particularly on modern politics consequent to any attempt to amalgamate the theological with the political. KEYWORDS problem

Claude Lefort • modernity • Leo Strauss • theologico-political

INTRODUCTION There is no shortage of reasons to compare the writings of Leo Strauss and Claude Lefort. One might note that Leo Strauss was always concerned with the fate of political philosophy, whose very existence, he believed, was put in question by the development of modernity; for example, he wrote in 1959 that ‘political philosophy is in a state of decay and perhaps of putrefaction, if it has not vanished altogether’ (Strauss, 1959: 17). Similarly, in 1983 Claude Lefort declared that he sought the ‘restoration of political philosophy’, the latter being questioned by social scientists, and neglected by philosophers Thesis Eleven, Number 87, November 2006: 63–81 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd DOI: 10.1177/0725513606068776

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themselves (Lefort, 1986: 17). And while Leo Strauss was never interested in the work of Lefort (his opus magnum on Machiavelli appearing one year before Strauss’ death in 1973), Lefort, for his part, often wrote on Strauss (see in particular Lefort, 1960, 1972 and 1992). What is more, and this is precisely what I wish to demonstrate in this article, it seems to me that certain of Lefort’s ideas can be better understood if related to Straussian claims – as if the former constituted a sort of response to the latter, even when Strauss is not explicitly mentioned. This is particularly the case, in my view, with respect to Lefort’s discussion of the theologico-political problem. If Strauss claims this problem to be ‘irresolvable’ (see Tanguay, 2003), Lefort seeks to show that the ‘permanence of the theologico-political’ in modernity is only an appearance, as democracy has, in the last instance, succeeded in ‘cutting’ the knot tied between the theological and the political in pre-modern societies (Lefort, 1986: 299). Moreover, while Strauss associates recognition of the irresolvable character of the theologico-political problem with moderation, Lefort takes the exact opposite view, insisting on the lack of moderation, even excess, that weighs particularly on modern politics consequent to any attempt to amalgamate the theological with the political. I will first expose the basic elements of Leo Strauss’ position on the theologico-political problem and its importance; I will then compare them with Lefort’s position while insisting on the ‘hidden dialogue’ that he is, in my view, conducting with Strauss. 1. LEO STRAUSS: FROM THE DEBATE BETWEEN THE ANCIENTS AND THE MODERNS TO THAT BETWEEN REASON AND REVELATION Strauss is often presented as a defender of the Ancients against the Moderns, or of ‘classical political philosophy’ against ‘modern political philosophy’. This is not untrue, so long as one understands the ‘return to the Ancients’ to be a means of returning to the no less fundamental debate opposing (philosophical) Reason to mythology and (religious) Revelation. According to Strauss, if classical teaching supposes Reason incapable of definitively overcoming mythology and Revelation – a failing that constantly recalls philosophy to more moderate positions – modern teaching, by contrast, claims to have settled the problem of the theologico-political once and for all, and thus tends towards immoderate, even extreme positions. In order to grasp the meaning of this thesis, one must consider what, according to Strauss, the Ancients teach. 1.1. The meaning of Classical teaching according to Strauss The most important point Strauss draws from classical teaching is the idea of an independent good that exists beyond human experience, even as

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it is expressed in or through it, and gives rise to philosophy as an essentially endless quest led by the few. According to Strauss, the pre-Socratic philosophers were the first to discover ‘ancestral morality’, that is, the anchorage of law in customs and traditions that differ between cities. This discovery gives birth to what he calls ‘conventionalism’, the claim that cities are based on conventions that can be considered relative, i.e. contingent or arbitrary. This leads the first philosophers to oppose convention to nature: the many submit to convention, but the few can model their lives on the search for power or pleasure, which would alone be natural. For the pre-Socratics, there exists no mediation between convention and nature, only a pure and simple opposition, at least according to Strauss’ interpretation (Strauss, 1954: 126–8). Socratic philosophy draws on this foundational teaching while modifying a number of its basic elements. Like conventionalism, Socrates considers there to be a close relation between the laws and ancestral morality. He also agrees that there is a difference between what exists by convention and what by nature. However, he holds that convention and nature are not simply opposed: the distinctive feature of his method, as based on maieutics or dialectics, consists in discovering what exists by nature from convention. Conventions are manifest, above all, in doxa, but every opinion ‘points beyond itself’. Doxa, in other words, bears a ‘vision of the ideas’ or ‘of the articulated whole’, and is thus concerned with what Strauss calls the ‘being of things’ (Strauss, 1954: 125). Now every designation of being is immediately a designation of its ‘quid ’, that is to say, of its ‘figure’, ‘form’ or ‘character’, which Strauss says is synonymous with its ‘nature’, or with the ‘idea’ to which this being refers. We can give a simple example. A statement like ‘It is just that . . .’, which is a matter of opinion, inevitably refers to the idea of justice. One can only distinguish between what is just and unjust if one presupposes that something like justice exists (even if one cannot perhaps define it in a precise or coherent manner). The idea of justice in its turn refers, according to Strauss, to what is considered the ‘good’, which according to Socrates in The Republic is ‘the cause’ of all other ideas (Plato, 1968: 517b). In this sense, there is a movement from opinion or ‘common sense’ (‘It is just that . . .’) to ‘something’ partially hidden or absent (the idea of justice and the good) – this ‘something’ being simultaneously revealed in part by opinion and by the effort that opinion calls forth (since it is by questioning the distinction between the just and unjust that one can hope to uncover what is justice and the good). This is precisely what Socrates understands by philosophy which, beginning with opinions, makes them deliver, by a method based on systematic questioning, what they naturally bear, that is, what they both mask and reveal: the ideas, nature and, ultimately, the good. To philosophize, in this sense, ‘consists, therefore, in the ascent from opinions to knowledge or to the truth, in an ascent . . . guided by opinions’ (Strauss, 1954: 124).

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Socratic philosophy thus points to the ‘good life’, a life directed by the virtues associated with the ideas and the good (Strauss, 1954: 127). In other words, Socratic philosophy points to ‘natural right’, that is, to what should exist by nature. Since natural right always supposes a certain distance relative to conventions, it can only ‘act as dynamite for civil society’ (Strauss, 1954: 153). This is why Strauss does not hesitate to ‘liken philosophy to madness, the very opposite of sobriety or moderation’ (Strauss, 1959: 32). As only the few are inclined to pursue ‘natural philosophy’, and as the confrontation between the few and the many inevitably leads to the victory of the latter (as illustrated emblematically by the trial of Socrates), philosophy’s principal task after Socrates will be to learn moderation. Plato’s writings, according to Strauss, illustrate such an apprenticeship. In contrast to Socrates’ teaching, which was essentially oral, Plato’s is written, thereby lessening the risk of alarming opinion, all the more so as philosophy teaches an ‘esoteric art of writing’ that aims, if not to deceive, then at least to avoid shocking the uninformed reader (Strauss, 1952). Moreover, Platonist philosophy, in Strauss’ view, implicitly admits that the good, and the perfect realization of the good life, establishes a horizon and represents objectives which are largely unattainable, such that philosophy will probably never become wisdom or an understanding of the whole. Thus Socrates, when questioned about the nature of the good in The Republic by his young interlocutors, either ducks the question or responds rather vaguely. This is why Strauss insists on the fact that Plato, whether in The Republic or The Laws, presents the realization of the ‘best regime’, which should be governed by learned and wise men, as ‘improbable’, being dependent on ‘chance’. It should thus be considered, in the last instance, a ‘utopia’, as moreover Aristotle understood it (Strauss, 1954: 138–43). The immediate consequence of the lesson learned (and then taught) by classical philosophers after the trial of Socrates was, according to Strauss, an awareness among the Ancients that the theologico-political problem is insurmountable. Once the philosopher admits that the good, which is in principle the object of his quest, is not within his reach, he finds himself unable to substitute natural right for convention; he can no longer turn natural right into a positive law that can then be opposed to mythology or poetry, which, if they do not found conventions, at least legitimize them. Among the Islamic or Jewish Platonists, such as Al Farabi or Maimonides, the conflict between philosophy and theology is explicitly posed as insuperable. In order to completely vanquish monotheist Revelation, Reason would have to be able to fully explain the whole or totality of things in a way that leaves no room for the idea of a divine Creator who loves humanity. This appears impossible, not just because monotheist Revelation, by identifying God with the Creator of the universe, makes him into an omnipotent being who, by definition, is mysterious and invisible (an omnipotent being cannot be represented, since to represent it would be to delimit its power; moreover,

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how can one prove the non-existence of a mysterious or invisible being?); it also appears impossible because the good as conceived by philosophers constantly appears to escape them. This is not to say that philosophy cannot exist, since its theological adversary has never been able to demonstrate the impossibility of the philosophical life (despite claiming that philosophy may be condemned to lose its soul for refusing to follow the only true, divine law). It is to suggest, however, that philosophy must accept that, in the end, it is only a wager on a way of life centered on the (unachievable) quest for the good. Philosophy, in other words, must admit its limits; it can only be moderate as it can never be absolutely certain of incarnating the good life (Strauss, 2004: 67). In a sense, here lies the privilege of the few, since the many, being ‘philosophically challenged’, submit more or less blindly to laws and conventions they do not question, though the latter may be neither entirely just nor good. It is precisely the moderation of classical political philosophy that, Strauss claims, modern philosophers reject. They would complete the quest for wisdom by making the good not the object of an endless quest but a positive reality within reach of not just a few philosophers but the many non-philosophers. As such, the Moderns radically reject the problem of the theologico-political; the good can no longer be a mystery about which theology and philosophy argue endlessly, when it is literally available to everyone. Such a position, in Strauss’ view, can only encourage a movement towards a lack of moderation, that is, to extremes, as illustrated by the ideologies formative of the contours of modernity. 1.2. The meaning of the Moderns’ teaching according to Strauss Philosophical modernity is deployed, according to Strauss, in three successive ‘waves’, all of which establish the idea of the good as conceived by classical philosophers on a completely new basis. It is important to present, if only briefly, these three waves in order to suggest where, in his view, they are heading. 1.2.1. Modernity’s first wave: Machiavelli and Hobbes Modern philosophy’s point of departure, according to Strauss, is the work of Machiavelli. The latter’s ‘realism’ is based on the fact that the Ancients aimed ‘too high’: human beings, for the classical philosophers, have to strive for virtue; for the Church Fathers and theologians humans strive for charity and the other Christian virtues. In these circumstances the best city is either unrealizable (as Plato admits) or tyrannical (as in the case of the Christian communities). For Machiavelli this impasse can be avoided by lowering the criteria that define the best city; one must construct ‘low but solid’, to use Strauss’ expression (Strauss, 1958: 296). In other words, one must start with men as they are and not seek to elevate them; one must start with their deceitfulness, cowardice, egoism, etc. in order to construct cities.

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This demands what Machiavelli calls virtù – an understanding of men and the skill to choose the means that suit the circumstances, with their moral or immoral character counting for little. Hobbes’ work, Strauss claims, follows in Machiavelli’s wake. But Machiavelli, in Hobbes’ view, accords too much to the prince’s virtù, and in this sense remains utopian. Although Hobbes conceives nature in a mechanical fashion, such that it can only be known by posing hypotheses that must then be verified experimentally, there is, nonetheless, one aspect of nature which can be known with certainty and which must be relied upon when constructing cities: ‘Whereas the philosophy or science of nature remains fundamentally hypothetical, political philosophy rests on a nonhypothetical knowledge of the nature of man’ (Strauss, 1954: 201). And not only is knowledge of human nature possible according to Hobbes, it is immediately accessible to each and every person. In effect, to know oneself, one has only to examine oneself to discover that one’s strongest passion is the fear of death (Strauss, 1954: 180–1). For Hobbes, each and every person thereby has immediate access to the universal, natural right expressing ‘something that everyone actually desires anyways’ (Strauss, 1954: 183). In this sense Hobbes is the ‘first plebian philosopher’ (Strauss, 1954: 166), as the few philosophers and the many non-philosophers all have, in a sense, equal and immediate access to wisdom. Each person has access to the good; better, each person egoistically and subjectively defines his good as the desire to continue living. Hobbes thereby takes up the Platonist project of founding a sage city, but rather than seeing it as a utopia, as did Plato, he proposes to realize it, this city being based on the fact that there is no longer any difference between philosophers and non-philosophers, as everyone is in possession of the good. According to Strauss, this plebian philosophy lacks moderation, since it leads to the unconditional embrace of a natural right that, beyond all doubt or questioning, is deemed to incarnate the good. This is why the Hobbesian edifice defines such a large part of political modernity, that is, the ideology of liberal societies, based on a shameless dedication to the most brutal egoism – thus, the unlimited accumulation of goods and capital, and the endless development of markets and techniques, irregardless of the consequences (Strauss, 1983: 229–31). 1.2.2. Modernity’s second wave: Rousseau and Hegel The Hobbesian solution was, as is well-known, severely criticized by Rousseau. His main objection was that Hobbes reduces humanity to the odious figure of the proprietary individual or bourgeois. All of Rousseau’s efforts are devoted to restoring to the idea of humanity a nobility irreducible to this figure. To be sure, like Hobbes, Rousseau claims that in the state of nature humans’ primary concern is their self-preservation; humans, in other words, follow their own particular will. Nonetheless, a clear-sighted legislator can resist by pursuing a general will, thereby reviving the figure of the citizen in opposition to that of the bourgeois.

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This being said, despite his critique of Hobbes, Rousseau ends up, according to Strauss, deepening Hobbesian premises. In effect, the idea of the general will recovers, at least tendentially, the claim that everyone is capable of exercising virtue and seeking out wisdom and the good. Rousseau too considers valid the dissolution of the difference between philosophers and non-philosophers, just as he considers possible, as a consequence, the realization of the best regime based on the possession of wisdom. In this sense, Strauss believes that Rousseau must be considered a crucial figure in the gestation of modern historicism. If the general will embodies the search for virtue and the good, then the latter are henceforth to be defined in such a manner that they differ according to time and place. The good now appears a historical and relative good, such that one day the citizens may be asked to submit to positive laws that are said to embody the good, though they violate all that was once considered to constitute natural law. There is, it is true, an important, moderating element in Rousseau, namely his doubt concerning the Moderns’ ability to fully know the good. In effect, Rousseau admits that the majority will remain guided by, above all, their egoistic desire for self-preservation, the general will seemingly condemned to remain more or less utopian. The inhabitants of the modern city appear destined to remain torn between two conceptions of the good, one that speaks of particular wills and the other of the general will. Even so, beyond all desire for self-preservation, and at a distance from the crowd, a small number of ‘solitary dreamers’ will seek to recover the ‘sweetness of all existence’ (Strauss, 1959: 53). These are the dualisms that Hegel seeks to overcome, according to Strauss. Hegelianism proceeds, first and foremost, from a reflection on history, onto which the essentials of the teachings of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau are projected. If, as Hegel claims, men are egoistic, deceitful, mendacious, etc. and if the general will – here the ‘spirits’ of different peoples – is relative or contingent, this does not in the least prevent one from seeing the accession of the good in terms of a complex, dialectical and global process that ties men, cultures and societies together, as though a ‘ruse of reason’ had transfigured the meaning of human action. Once again, philosophy claims the practical realization of the Platonic project of the best regime, with the search for wisdom and final accession of the good depending on the merger of philosophy with non-philosophy, the latter identified with the totality of human acts, both reasonable and unreasonable, as given historically. For Strauss, Hegelianism completely buries the good in history, thereby preventing it from becoming the object of a quest, as it is now located in each and every person’s deeds. The good in Hegel does not even correspond to what everyone wants or desires, but to what everyone does, such that one can no longer think the distinction between fact and right. Just as Hobbesian philosophy gave birth to liberalism, Rousseau’s philosophy supplemented by Hegel’s gives rise to what Strauss calls progressivism, that is, the idea that history bears a principle of order within itself

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that tends to justify everything that happens. For Strauss, the consequences can only be disastrous, as much for philosophy (reduced to being the handmaid of a history that embodies and realizes the good) as for humanity itself (with entire generations sacrificed in the name of the good’s realization). 1.2.3. Modernity’s third wave: Nietzsche Just as Rousseau protested against Hobbes, Nietzsche protests against Hegel’s historicism. There is something classical about Nietzsche’s point of departure: he opposes the possession of the good by all with the distinction between the few and the many, between the ‘masters’ or ‘supermen’ and the large number of ‘slaves’ or the ‘weak’. However, once again, the result is that modernity’s logic is deepened rather than contested. If Nietzsche’s claims retain a certain ambiguity, it is still the case that he often appears to reject the existence of the good as given by nature in order to identify it with the subjective will of the few (Strauss, 1983: 175 and f.). In this regard Nietzsche is very much a part of modern subjectivism, and if a politics can be deduced from his work, it would in all likelihood pay little attention to the limitations one might wish to impose on the domination of the masters or supermen. He thus opens the way, in Strauss’ view, to the welcoming of radical subjectivism, historicism and relativism. If Hobbes and Hegel were the fathers of, respectively, liberalism and progressivism, Nietzsche must be considered, if only indirectly, the inspiration for regimes and ideologies that combat the latter, lauding a brutal decisionism, even brute force, to the point that their lack of moderation ‘made discredited democracy look again like the golden age’ (Strauss, 1959: 55). 1.2.4. Modern teaching and the end of the theologico-political problem Given this analysis, the Moderns’ approach to the theologico-political problem has to be situated at the antipodes of that proposed by the Ancients. While the latter learned moderation from the confrontation with mythology and monotheist Revelation, the Moderns stopped taking the theologicopolitical problem seriously as a matter of principle, and abandoned all moderation. Since the Moderns allege that they can positively know the good, they conclude not only that the good bears no mystery, but also, and as a consequence, that Revelation’s claim to define it as having its origins somewhere other than in human Reason is completely invalid. In principle, mythology, theology and Revelation are simply tissues of foolishness and superstition. What belong to their terms of reference can serve, at best, as instruments for those societies in a position to know the good and construct their constitution on its basis. Machiavelli, for example, considers Roman religion or Revelation as essentially political tools of greater or lesser use to the Prince (Roman religion being indisputably superior to Revelation, which tends to deny all significance to worldly glory and, by extension, political activity). But Machiavelli

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does not seek an explanation of the whole to oppose to Revelation; that is, he never directly confronts the latter. Hobbes for his part is perfectly aware, Strauss claims, that the identification of man’s most fundamental passion with the fear of death implies atheism, in that it supposes the disappearance of the Christian idea of a retribution or punishment post mortem. This is why he must be considered the real father of the Enlightenment. Rousseau and Hegel approach the theologico-political problem a little differently, as they tend to reduce Revelation to a manifestation of a more fundamental order that ultimately gives it its sense, whether in terms of the people’s spirit or History. In the end, however, the result remains the same: the theologicopolitical problem is eliminated or circumvented rather than confronted, since it can make no legitimate claim capable of leading to a debate on the good. In a certain sense, Nietzsche, in one dazzling phrase, reveals the truth of the Moderns regarding the theologico-political problem by proclaiming the ‘death of God’, that is, the Christian religion’s incapacity to structure societies by appraising them in the light of an idea of the good. In sum, the Moderns, in contrast to the Ancients, do not take seriously Revelation and the problems it poses for Reason, notably, by suggesting the latter’s limits. What Strauss considers the Moderns’ lack of ‘intellectual integrity’ is a logical consequence of this position, with its claim to possess knowledge of the good. Its outcome is the ideologies that would submit men to the good supposedly embodied by the different regimes – liberal, progressive or reactionary-aristocratic – which, as the 20th century has revealed, represent potentially major calamities for humanity. Leo Strauss’ efforts to revive classical political philosophy must be understood in the light of the critiques he addressed to these regimes (as well as, to be sure, of his own lived experience). In other words, his efforts must be understood in the light of his desire to restore a sense of measure or moderation by returning to the classic debate about the meaning of the good, the quest for which cannot and must never be considered ended. If it is so imperative to consider the theologico-political problem ‘unsolvable’, it is because this problem points precisely to the debate’s present significance.1 2. CLAUDE LEFORT: ‘PERMANENCE OF THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL?’ Claude Lefort’s reflections on the problem of the theologico-political stand at the opposite pole to those of Strauss but are formulated in such a fashion that they gain, to my mind, from being read as a response to him. Essentially, Lefort maintains that the theologico-political problem is not a source of moderation in modernity but, on the contrary, of excess; that the dissolution of the boundaries between philosophers and non-philosophers, which is, as Strauss stresses, intrinsic to modernity, rather than dissolving the idea of the good in subjectivism, contributes on the contrary to preserving it

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as the object of a quest; finally, that the modern democratic regime therefore represents a ‘solution’ to the theologico-political problem, which prevents us concluding that it is ‘permanent’ or insoluble. 2.1. The foundations of the ‘theologico-political matrix’ In order to understand what Lefort means by what he calls the ‘theologico-political matrix’, we must briefly examine his definition of the concept of the ‘symbolic institution’, which is fundamental for him. First, we may try to understand what the symbolic is not for Lefort. His approach involves a critique of the social sciences, which treat the social space as existing ‘in itself’, that is, a space for the scientific observer which is delimited by what gives it coherence, whether it be force or power, a set of functions (for the functionalists), social relations of production (for the Marxists), etc. In these conceptions, the symbolic is necessarily derivative, ‘grafted onto something which is supposed to carry its determination in itself’ (Lefort, 1986: 259). Lefort insists that the symbolic is not to be considered as derivative. There are many formulations indicating that for him the symbolic is primary, that it ‘commands/controls . . . access to the world’ (Lefort, 1986: 261). The ‘generative principles’, the ‘guiding schema’, terms equivalent to the ‘symbolic institution’, ‘command a configuration of society, which is both spatial and temporal’ (1986: 256). These statements on the primacy of the symbolic will gain from being related to other statements, which seem at first sight somewhat enigmatic. Lefort repeatedly insists that the symbolic institution is based on a need, which is beyond the control of humanity and thus in this sense imposed on it: ‘the opening of human society to itself is caught up in an opening which is not its own such that humanity “experiences a difference”, which does not come in and through history’ (Lefort, 1986: 262). This is also the meaning of statements affirming that society defines itself in relation to an outside (1986: 265). The symbolic institution of the social ‘is not itself a social fact’ (Lefort, 1978a: 506). In other words, the social does not institute itself symbolically – which would suppose that the social space exists ‘in itself’ or that it preexists symbolic institution, making its advent secondary; on the contrary, the symbolic imperative, which is given with the very existence of socialized humanity and represents in this sense an ‘enigma’ (Lefort, 1986: 265), is what institutes the social space or brings it into existence. Posing the question in this fashion raises the question of religion. Its very structure not only affirms that society’s opening to itself is ‘caught up in an opening which is not its own’; religion also provides society with a ‘figurative mode’, which is originary because all-encompassing, that is to say, a mode of ‘dramatizing the relations that humans establish with what transcends empirical time, the space in which they form their own relations’ (Lefort, 1986: 263). This is also the reason, as political anthropology shows, why the political, to the degree that it expresses the symbolic dimension,

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tends to be originarily intermeshed with religion. In this sense Lefort registers the importance, at least up to the 19th century for Western societies, of a ‘theologico-political matrix’ in which are inextricably intermeshed what he calls ‘the already politicized theological and the already theologized political’ (Lefort, 1986: 293). In order to grasp its meaning, we need to examine the particular meaning Christianity has given it. 2.2. The theologico-political matrix in Christianity and its apparent ‘persistence’ If Lefort’s views on the particular meaning of the Christian theologicopolitical matrix are brief (far less elaborated than Marcel Gauchet, 1997), they are nevertheless crucial for grasping the apparent permanence of the theologico-political in Western modernity. Let me reconstruct them as follows. The starting point is Christianity’s politically original attitude to theocracy, its refusal in principle of a single power acting as the guardian of the sources giving meaning to the visible and invisible worlds (Lefort, 1986: 296). This impossibility draws on the christological motif that no one, neither Pope nor Emperor, may claim formal identification with Christ, that is to say, install himself in his place in order to assure the union of heaven and earth. Christianity assumes from the beginning the existence of two powers, the one mainly but not exclusively concerned with the things of this world, the other mainly but not exclusively concerned with the invisible world – powers which are both imperfect (because inferior to the power incarnated in Christ and to be re-incarnated at the end of time) but nevertheless inspired (and hence legitimated), that is, illuminated or guided by the Holy Spirit, a manifestation of God among humans. The outcome is a dynamically complex schema (Lefort, 1986: 293): two powers which are indissociable but must not be confused, simultaneously complements and rivals, since each in its own way refers to the Holy Spirit and hence is incapable of asserting complete preeminence over the other (Lefort, 2000: 32). Concretely, this schema, which is constantly reworked symbolically by the test of events (Lefort, 1986: 293), forms the axis in Christian societies, along which the dualisms intermesh and ceaselessly revolve around images relating to the mystical body of Christ in the Church and in the various earthly cities, and to the double body, natural and supernatural, of Christ and of the King (Lefort, 1986: 295). But rather than seeking to follow all the complex moves which give meaning to the theologico-political matrix in the course of the Christian Middle Ages, we need to consider the birth of the modern nation and state, integral on the one hand to political modernity and witness on the other to the extraordinary importance of the theologicopolitical matrix in modernity. Thus, according to Lefort, the articulations of the modern world emerge from the foundations of the Christian world. From the 14th century on, in France in particular, a new idea of the Kingdom takes shape, as the

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realization of a mystical body, informed by the Holy Spirit, such that the territory circumscribed by royalty becomes a veritable ‘holy land’ and its people, chosen by God, the incarnation ‘of a privileged fashion of realizing humanity’ (Lefort, 1986: 298). The body of the King’s subjects, like the King’s body, is conceived as dual: visible and invisible, natural and supernatural, mortal and immortal, corruptible and incorruptible. The King is mortal but the Royalty in him is immortal; the Kingdom is an ensemble of living beings, which also has an immortal dimension, because it is inscribed in a lineage of the dead, the living, and the coming generations, a lineage through which France appears as a living, even eternal ‘person’.2 The sovereign state and nation, which define political modernity, are thus undeniably and paradoxically born of the theologico-political matrix (Lefort, 2000: 37). This schema is so important that it continues up to the end of the 19th century and is to be found where least expected, in the thinkers who undertake its critique, as is best illustrated for Lefort by the work of Michelet. Michelet undertakes an acerbic critique of the theologico-political schema. He explicates the construction of royalty through its assumption of the Christian conception of grace. One tradition of interpretation, going back at least to Augustine, supposes that God accords his grace to whom he will, without mortals being permitted, short of blasphemy, to question the reasons for divine decisions. In the absolute monarchy justice is to the King what grace is to God: the king determines justice and injustice sovereignly just as God decides salvation or damnation. However, once he has established this, rather than ridding himself of the theologico-political schema, Michelet reentangles himself in it in his refounding of justice. Arguing that the people’s love of the sovereign does not rest solely on fear, in other words, does not spring solely from the royal will, Michelet maintains that it also springs from the desire to see justice and the good incarnated in this world (Lefort, 1986: 286). This desire for the just and good Law, incarnated in a guardian, thus appears simultaneously as the desire for the ‘One’, since the body of the King, acting as the guardian of the Law or intermediary between eternal justice and human reason, is the object of all gazes, which can only communicate in him (Lefort, 1986: 288). In this sense, the desire for emancipation and for servitude converge rather than diverge (Lefort, 1978b). These desires find satisfaction, moreover, in that their object, the King, is not only immortal but also mortal, even ‘human, all too human’. If Christ can be held up as the model of imitation, it must not be forgotten that he is not only perfectly human but also perfectly divine, according to the famous formula of the Councils, such that he remains in fact inimitable. Against this, the weakness of the King, which does not prevent his privileged communication with the invisible, is human in a completely different sense; if he calls for sacrifice (to die for him), he is also the source of rejoicing, since he resembles his subjects (he may even be touched) at the same time as he offers them justice and the good in this world. Now, rather than breaking with this

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schema, after having carefully uncovered its functioning, Michelet redeploys it, according to Lefort, by substituting the People for the King: the guardian of the Law, the intermediary between justice and this world, is no longer the King, an impostor, but the People (with a capital to distinguish it from the regular populace). Michelet’s republicanism appropriates rather than opposes the monarchy’s constant staging of its anointed role, ‘the anointed for him has become the people’ (Lefort, 1986: 281). It leads Michelet as far as envisaging that France, as the bearer of a spiritual mission, and as the setting for the possible liberation of the human race (Lefort, 1993: 59ff), is called upon to export the ‘social Word’ to the whole world. In other words, the political-theoretical matrix nourished French expansionism, even colonialism (the great difficulty that the French Left has had breaking with colonialism is deeply rooted in its history). The French example is far from being unique in modernity, as we can observe in the case of the civic humanism of Italian cities since Dante’s work on universal monarchy (Lefort, 1993); it offers a curious mixing of the work of humanism with that of Christianity in order to ‘fabricate transcendence in this world. Ancient maxims, exalting Reason, Justice, Wisdom or the immortal Fatherland, join with religious references to magnify and immortalize the City of man’ (Lefort, 1992: 319). The good citizen is similarly defined for Milton or for Harrington as ‘God’s Englishman’ (Lefort, 1993: 57) and the Commonwealth is held to incarnate ‘a new chosen nation, a new Israel . . . dedicated like an empire to unlimited expansion’. And how can we forget that the Americans are the faithful inheritors who embrace with fervour republicanism, mobilizing all these themes . . . that of the chosen people, that of the double heritage of the ancient city and of Israel, that of a unique moment in which mankind’s history reveals itself, even that of a society destined for the first time to immortality. (Lefort, 1993: 58)?

In sum, contra Strauss, far from leading philosophers and societies to moderation, the permanence of the theologico-political in modernity has nourished the imperial temptation in the nation-state, which found there its primary sources of legitimation. Rather than leading to thinking the limits of human action, as Strauss believed, the intermeshing of the theological or the religious with politics led to a justification of unlimited expansion in the name of the spirit which peoples or nations were thought to incarnate. In order to reach this conclusion Lefort contests Strauss’ way of posing the problem by placing at the centre of his analysis the concrete effects that Christian theology has had in societies: instead of simply positing a divine law to which humans should submit (and which only philosophers would be capable of questioning), Christian theology assumed an extremely complex relation between the visible and the invisible worlds, that is to say, a presence of the Holy Spirit in the world that gave powerful support to the existence and deployment of authority and power. The fact that the Holy

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Spirit is deemed to ‘blow’ everywhere and nowhere meant that the theologico-political problem, far from bringing about a debate on the good, led to authority and power claiming it as their privileged possession – and as a consequence, it was deemed to confer legitimacy on expansion in order to spread the good tidings. This does not mean that societies were incapable of conducting a debate about the good. On the contrary, Lefort proposes a thesis which is exactly the opposite to that of Strauss: as the boundaries between the few philosophers and the many non-philosophers dissolved, the good ceased to be the prerogative of the few and became the stake in an interminable debate which acts as a moderating factor in modern societies. 2.3. Philosophy, non-philosophers and the Law First we must clarify the meaning that Lefort gives to the Law (with a capital) by recalling our starting point: the symbolic institution of the social ‘is not a social fact’ since it is not the social which produces the symbolic institution but the reverse. Concretely, this institution manifests itself as a certain number of ‘markers of certitude’ which give social life its consistency by enabling the ‘discrimination of the real and the imaginary, the true and the false, good and evil, the just and the unjust, the natural and the supernatural, the normal and the abnormal’, etc. (Lefort, 1986: 258). Lefort calls the set of these distinctions the Law. It is true that Plato and the Ancients believed that one could probably never arrive at a final definition of justice, the good, etc. This did not stop them believing, however, that these entities existed naturally, that is, beyond all conventions. While insisting on the imperfection of the powers governing the earthly city after the death of Jesus Christ, Christianity also represented the Law as anchored in divine order and in nature (thus Aquinas distinguished between eternal, divine and natural Law, etc.). According to Lefort, modernity is distinguished by its refusal of a location for the Law outside the social space in some ‘other’ identifiable place (Lefort, 1978a: 512), such that the Law could be considered either natural or divine. Machiavelli was the first to have thought this explicitly. Machiavelli is thus the first philosopher to have stated that ‘there is never a foundation in itself’ (Lefort, 1972: 435) and thereby to have made it clear that the human game has neither an extra-mundane origin nor goal, guaranteed by Nature or God. In other words, the game is played for ‘worldly glory under the threat of death’; everything depends on the ‘heroism’ of humans in this, the only world we have (Lefort, 1972: 555–6). Now, it is precisely the fact that the Law is ‘absent’ in the sense that it lacks all reference to a set of unquestioned foundations, which ensures all the more its ‘presence’ at the heart of the social space (Lefort and Gauchet, 1971: 10ff). It is the object of a quest which has become interminable, because one can no longer hope to state once and for all the criteria of good and evil, justice

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and injustice. Modern society is always ‘in quest of its foundation’ (Lefort, 1986: 270). Another way of putting it is to say that Machiavelli is the first thinker of the ‘originary division’ which traverses all societies. There is an intrinsic link between the absence of secure foundations and the ‘social division’, which allows us to say that socialized humanity lives in originary separation from the Law (in the sense that it does not possess it), which generates a kind of ‘institutional space’ (Lefort, 1972: 485) in which conflicts and debates about what is just or unjust, permitted or forbidden, take place. The Law in this sense appears as the stake of social division; conversely, the Law affirms its presence in the fact that there is social division and conflict. The non-philosophers, the dispossessed and the oppressed, appear as the true guardians of the Law, according to Lefort, because it is they who suffer wrong, who are driven to constantly pose the question of the good, the just, the legitimate, etc. and, going with this, the question of the legitimacy of those who command in the name of the Law. For Lefort, again contra Strauss, it is not the philosophers who are the guardians of the Law, of the idea of justice or the good, but – exactly the inverse of Plato – essentially the non-philosophers, who thereby reappropriate and realize the task traditionally reserved for philosophers, at least to the extent that they constantly protest or revolt against the reigning order. This, for Lefort, is the meaning of the famous thesis at the beginning of Chapter IX of The Prince, according to which ‘these two classes are found in every city . . . the people do not want to be dominated or oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles want to dominate and oppress the people’ (Machiavelli, 1961: 34). Lefort understands it to mean, on the one hand, the desire to question commands made in the name of the Law signifies the refusal to be dominated or oppressed by the Law and its guardians; and, on the other, the desire to believe in a well-founded Law, which prescribes everyone his allotted place and thus may dominate or oppress. Modern democratic government is founded, according to Lefort, precisely on the recognition of the originary division between the City and the Law; recognition of social division is the ground on which nonphilosophers question the Law, no longer anchored in nature or divinity, and make themselves its true guardians. 2.4. Modern democracy The ‘logic’ intrinsic to democratic government is founded in two essential features: to the extent that it rests on a ‘new determination-figuration of the place of power’, which makes it an ‘empty place’ (Lefort, 1986: 265), democracy makes the Law the stake and hence tends to conceive the social space as a space founded in a permanent questioning. These formulations, especially that which turns power into an ‘empty place’, can easily give rise to misunderstandings. What does Lefort want to say here? Not as one might at first think, that nobody exercises power in

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democracy; in fact, we could say that Lefort means precisely the contrary. Basing himself on the fact that the place of power is represented in democracy as the stake of a competition between individuals, none of whom possesses it as a right, it indicates that such competition, even if it is formally regulated by the institution of universal suffrage, makes it apparent that the exercise of power in fact derives in the last instance from cunning, persuasive capacity, even utilization of intimidation or force (what Machiavelli calls virtù). In other words, the democratic exercise of power appears as the prerogative of ordinary human beings, ‘simple mortals’ (Lefort, 1986: 27), who enjoy no privileged relation to a transcendence (God, Nature, cosmic order), capable of legitimating this exercise. In this sense, democracy partakes fully in what Weber termed the ‘disenchantment of the world’. The place of power appears empty to the extent that it refers only to itself, to its pure immanence – and it is precisely this permanent suspicion which weighs on power. Machiavelli was the first to acknowledge this, constantly insisting that power can become at any time the object of the hatred and contempt of the people, with the result that power just as constantly stages the right of its possessors to act as the guardian of the Law or as bearers of a form of transcendence (Lefort and Gauchet, 1971: 15; Lefort, 1972: 369–98). One may well object that democratic leaders are regarded as acting in the last instance in the name of the people. The people, however, is far from designating a positive entity; the people in democracy actually points to the ‘enigmatic arbitration of Number’ (Lefort, 1986: 266–8). Universal suffrage rests on a ‘fiction’ which posits that the place of power is ‘filled’ in the last instance by the people. We must bear in mind that in the very process whereby the true sovereign expresses itself through the suffrage, we observe the ‘decomposition of society into political atoms’ through the conversion of citizens into ‘accounting units’, which take the place of classes, groups, and social movements. This ‘simulacrum of dissolution’, this ‘degree zero of sociality’, effected by universal suffrage, withdraws all substance from the ‘supposed social body’ at the very moment it is considered to express itself (Lefort, 1981: 148). With the result that modern democracy, contrary to its etymology, does not consecrate the demos as sovereign but inscribes on the social tissue an unprecedented dispossession. It is therefore necessary to separate the explicit discourse of modern democracy from what it tacitly does (Lefort, 1986: 299). It proclaims the sovereignty of the people and the advent of autonomy, that is, the advent of a Law which is good because it is made by those to whom it applies. What it institutes, however, is a world in which the people is ‘unfindable’ (to borrow Pierre Rosanvallon’s (1998) expression), and in which the quest for the Law opens onto an indefinite future. In this sense, we may say that this is the first regime, whose institutions and effective functioning allow us ‘to pierce the enigma of the institution of the social’ (Lefort, 1981: 150): in other words, modern democracy reveals for the first time in history that the social space is incompatible with

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any notion whatever of a definitive ‘solution’ to its constituent ‘contradictions’. It brings to the surface ‘the questioning which inhabits the institution of the social’ (Lefort, 1981: 82), or better, it reveals the fundamentally questioning nature of the social tissue (Lefort and Gauchet, 1971: 18). Whereas the persistence of the theologico-political matrix feeds the claim to possess the good or incarnate the spirit, and hence, imperial ambitions, democratic logic by contrast reveals the always fragile character of societies, authorities and powers, their incapacity to achieve complete legitimation. This is why modern democracy has a very special relation to the theologico-political matrix. In respect of the latter, there is a double democratic operation. On the one hand, while keeping the question of the Law open, that is, the question of the good, just, etc., modern democracy is not based, as Strauss thought, on a positive (or subjectivist) conception of the good which would amount to a straightforward rejection of Revelation. Modern democracy doesn’t assert that the good is no longer a mystery, it even maintains the contrary according to Lefort, in the sense that it has to take seriously the kernel of Revelation, that is, it claims to convey its sense. In other words, one could say with Lefort that modern democracy preserves (in a quasi-Hegelian sense) – at the very moment it abandons the form in which it was presented – the most difficult and precious question bequeathed to us by the religious past of humanity, the question of the good. But, as we have just emphasized, democracy has clearly moved beyond the religious form in which the question of the Law or the symbolic institution was posed, since its logic aims to guarantee everyone unlimited (in principle) access to its interrogation. It is the dispossessed, the oppressed, the damned of this world, those who have nothing and suffer wrong, who in fact keep the question of the Law open (they are not in the cave, they don’t cease to break their chains in order to escape). Democracy thus denies one the right to speak in the name of the Law; it holds the place of power ‘empty’, the place reserved for those identified as its legitimate guardians. By definition, this must seriously undermine not only the religious institution but what gives it its consistency on the symbolic level, that is, the representations that give meaning to the idea that there exist privileged ways (and even privileged beings) for enunciating the good or the Law. This is why modern democracy works to deprive the theologico-political matrix of meaning – its persistence in modernity is nothing but appearance (Lefort, 1986: 299). The aim of this article has been essentially to read and elucidate Lefort’s position in relation to the theologico-political problem, while undertaking an investigation of the foundations of Strauss’ position. The two positions are so opposed – point by point, the one seeing moderation where the other uncovers excess and vice-versa – that one could speak of a hidden dialogue, at least of Lefort’s effort to elaborate a certain number of theses relating to some of the structuring intuitions of Strauss’ thought. It would be therefore quite legitimate to reverse the process, not by asking how Strauss’ theses

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constitute an answer to Lefort, but by asking what basis they offer for a critique of Lefort. Namely, it needs to be asked whether Lefort’s conception of democracy, which makes the non-philosophers, to the degree that they desire not to be dominated or oppressed, the guardians if not of the Law at least of an institutional space in which the debate is kept open, whether this conception does not entail – as with Strauss’ charge against modern historicism – embedding the good in history, thereby depriving us of a measure that could be opposed to existing reality. Translated from the French by David Roberts and Brian C. J. Singer.

Gilles Labelle is Professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of numerous papers and articles on contemporary French political philosophy (Merleau-Ponty, Rancière, Lefort, Abensour, Gauchet, etc.). Most recently he has published ‘“Institution symbolique,” “Loi” et “Décision sans sujet.” Y a-t-il deux philosophies de l’histoire chez Marcel Gauchet?’ (Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses, 34(3–4) 2004: 469–93). He is currently working on a book on Miguel Abensour and French political philosophy. [email: [email protected]]

Notes 1. This is not the place to develop the idea, though it is nonetheless necessary to emphasize that this interpretation of Strauss as a philosopher obsessed with moderation goes completely against the recent doxa that makes him into the father of American neo-conservative war-mongers. In order to understand the more visible ‘Straussian’ positions as regards American foreign policy, one would have to consider, in order to avoid all distortions, the role of certain of Strauss’ disciples (notably Allan Bloom) in the establishment of a current that united the different tendencies of American conservatism towards the end of the 1980s. 2. As General de Gaulle will still maintain (see Bouthillon, 1995). And perhaps this is also François Mitterand’s conception, beyond socialism, of the indivisible history of the nation with which he seems to have been obsessed (see Faux et al., 1994).

References Bouthillon, Fabrice (1995) Les schèmes qu’on abat. À propos du gaullisme. Paris: De Fallois. Faux, Emmanuel, Legrand Thomas and Perez, Gilles (1994) La main droite de Dieu. Enquête sur François Mitterand et l’extrême-droite. Paris: Seuil. Gauchet, Marcel (1997) The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lefort, Claude (1960) ‘Machiavel jugé par la tradition classique’, Archives européennes de sociologie 1: 159–69. Lefort, Claude (1972) Le travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel. Paris: Gallimard.

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Lefort, Claude (1978a) Les formes de l’histoire. Essais d’anthropologie politique. Paris: Gallimard. Lefort, Claude (1978b) ‘Le nom d’Un’, in Étienne de la Boétie, Le discours de la servitude volontaire, pp. 247–397. Paris: Payot. Lefort, Claude (1981) L’invention démocratique. Paris: Fayard. Lefort, Claude (1986) Essais sur le politique. XIX et XX siècles. Paris: Seuil. Lefort, Claude (1992) Écrits. À l’épreuve du politique. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Lefort, Claude (1993) ‘La modernité de Dante’, in Dante, La monarchie, pp. 6–75. Paris: Belin. Lefort, Claude (2000) ‘Nation et souveraineté’, Les temps modernes 610: 25–46. Lefort, Claude and Gauchet, Marcel (1971) ‘Sur la démocratie: le politique et l’institution du social’, Textures 2–3: 7–71. Machiavelli (1961) The Prince (trans. and ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato (1968) The Republic (trans. with notes and interpretive essay by Allan Bloom). New York: Basic Books. Rosanvallon, Pierre (1998) Le peuple introuvable. Paris: Gallimard. Strauss, Leo (1952) Persecution and the Art of Writing. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Strauss, Leo (1954) Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strauss, Leo (1958) Thoughts on Machiavelli. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strauss, Leo (1959) What is Political Philosophy? and Other Essays. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Strauss, Leo (1983) Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strauss, Leo (2004) The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy’ in Faith and Political Philosophy. The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964 (trans. and ed. by Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper), pp. 217–33. Columbus, MO: University of Missouri Press. Tanguay, Daniel (2003) Leo Strauss. Une biographie intellectuelle. Paris: Grasset.