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THINKING THE ‘SOCIAL’ WITH CLAUDE LEFORT Brian C. J. Singer

ABSTRACT This article examines Claude Lefort’s writings in order to think about the ‘social’, understood as separate from the political, and in its separation, as a strictly modern ‘phenomenon’. Prior to the modern democratic revolution, the collective order was presented through the representation of power, itself identified with both law and knowledge, and referred to a transcendent source. At a first moment, the modern democratic revolution, under the sign of the general will, renders power immanent. At a second moment, it separates power from law and, above all, knowledge, such that three domains emerge, each with its own logic, its own notion of representation, its own divisions. The ‘social’, in a sense, arises between these two moments. At one level, it appears as an event in, and in consequence an object of, knowledge, once knowledge need no longer be, primarily, a knowledge of power or law, that is the enunciation of the principles by which the latter establish the order, coherence and sense of the world. At another level the ‘social’ emerges as a response to the difficulties presented by a strictly political representation of societal order – difficulties in no small part due to the revolutionaries’ inability to countenance the separation between the three domains. In this regard the ‘social’ appears as a presupposition that serves to stabilize an inherently conflictual political order. It is, however, an ‘empty’ presupposition, without determinate content, and therefore also a source of uncertainty. While this emptiness proves a stimulus for the construction of new savoirs, it also accounts for the fragility of all discourses that would speak in its name (social science, social theory, sociology). The article concludes with a few words about the ‘death of the social’. KEYWORDS

Claude Lefort • political • power • representation • social

Claude Lefort is known primarily as a thinker of the ‘political’, particularly as it emerges with modern democracy. This article asks if his thought Thesis Eleven, Number 87, November 2006: 83–95 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd DOI: 10.1177/0725513606068777

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can also serve to think about the ‘social’. The claim of this article is that the social was only ‘discovered’ during the 18th and 19th centuries, and that this discovery must be related to the modern democratic revolution. Warrant for this claim can be found in one of Lefort’s more difficult essays, ‘Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies’ (Lefort, 1982). As this essay’s central thematic concerns ideology, his comments on the social remain quite brief. They are, nonetheless, highly suggestive, and need to be unpacked and expanded. Near the beginning of the essay, Lefort draws a distinction between the ‘institution of the social’ and the ‘discourse on the social’, which corresponds roughly to that between ‘an order of practice and an order of representation’ (1982: 183). The social here applies to all societies. Still, he makes it clear that the social appears explicitly as such, in discourse, only in modern societies. Earlier societies spoke of the social in non-social terms, as they had not disentangled ‘the social order’ from ‘the order of the world’ (1982: 187). The suggestion is that the social order was confused with the natural or, as more likely, the super-natural world, such that the institution of that order was represented as proceeding from an extra-social, transcendental source. In modern societies the social order is deemed immanent to society and, therefore, intelligible in its own terms – this ultimately being what is meant by the ‘discovery’ of the social. Of course, many have noted that, as long as religion remained dominant, the nature of social being was misrecognized. The promise of Lefort’s discussion lies in its association of secularization with the idea of a change in the ‘symbolic order’. The latter is defined not just as ‘a system of oppositions by which social forms can be identified and articulated with one another’ (1982: 194). He adds that the character of these oppositions depends on ‘the configuration of the signifiers of law, power and knowledge’ (1982: 186). With a change in the symbolic order, there is a change in the relations between law, power and knowledge, and consequently, in each of these terms’ signification. Consider the character of this change, if only schematically. CONFIGURATIONS OF POWER, LAW AND KNOWLEDGE In the religious symbolic order, at least in its pre-modern Christian variant, the three terms are all referred to a divinity that is all-powerful and all-knowing, the source of all law, and guarantor of the world’s coherence, integrity and intelligibility. Human power, knowledge and law must participate in, and be modelled on, divine power, knowledge and law in order to render the latter visibly present to the human world. As power, law and knowledge converge within the figure of the divinity, they will also converge, if less perfectly, when re-presented in human institutions. Thus there is neither law nor knowledge outside the position of power: the law is defined through the power that gives it substance, while power is defined through

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the law that gives it form. A power that separates from its law is no longer power, but its corruption. Similarly, knowledge is only genuine knowledge if it is validated by power, and serves to sustain power and its law. Ultimately, power speaks truth in order to sustain a lawful world. Truths that lie outside the orbit of power appear senseless because they would refer to a disorderly and incoherent world. This has implications for the distinction between ‘the institution of the social’ and the ‘discourse on the social’ (here a politico-theological discourse on a social ‘under erasure’). Institution appears present only to the extent that it is represented in the theological-political discourse, for the latter renders present the power, law and knowledge without which there would be no institution. Institution thus appears via discourse, the latter appearing less a discourse about the ‘social’ than a discourse constitutive of the ‘social’, as it relays the divine word constitutive of the order of the world from which the ‘social’ is not yet disentangled. Words are often not just words; they mould the institutional world. And acts are often ritual acts because they communicate between worlds. Power here bears, comparatively speaking, an explicitly symbolic dimension. Modern democratic power is less explicitly symbolic: as the place of power is ‘empty’, its occupants no longer incarnate the constitution of an order. Nonetheless, modern democratic regimes still entail a symbolic order, the emptying of the place of power itself implying a new ‘configuration of the signifiers of power, law and knowledge’. In effect, as the three terms no longer refer to a single extra-social source, they separate and pursue their own particular ‘logics’. This article looks at this separation from, above all, the perspective of knowledge and its transformation. The latter is, indirectly, the focus of Lefort’s essay, ideology being a form of knowledge, an unsatisfactory form to be sure, but one still subject to the changes being examined. In modern democratic regimes, knowledge (like power and law, moreover) is general, and in several senses. Everyone can, in principle, become knowledgeable, and should receive an education. Everyone is a potential source of knowledge, and deserves to be heard regardless of position. And everyone can become his own object of knowledge, with his own personal archive. All this supposes that knowledge, if it is not to become an instrument of oppression by the few, must be dissociated from the position of power, or at least the position of the power-holders. This last statement suggests a qualification, for power is divided between the immediately visible positions occupied by the power-holders and the sovereign position they claim to represent. One wonders if this separation from knowledge also applies to the sovereign, particularly in matters of political judgement. After all, if constitutions never declare the all-powerful sovereign people to be all-knowing, knowledge and power are still conjoined, if only tentatively, in the figures of the general will, common sense and public

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opinion (Singer, 2004b). These are figures with considerable symbolic potency, for much of their truth value depends on their place of enunciation. A similar argument can be made regarding the relation of knowledge to law. Knowledge is no longer restricted to a concern with (the power of) law. Paradoxically, the separation of knowledge from law is perhaps first evidenced by the development of a division in law, between scientific and juridical law – a division crucial to ‘the disentangling of the social order from the order of the world’. This division implies not just a distinction between two forms of causality, but between laws that must be stated in order to be effective, and laws that do not. Stones fall according to the law of gravity independent of whether anyone, the stones included, recognizes these laws; by contrast, juridical laws will not be obeyed if not known. This is to say that the statement of juridical law, when enunciated from a position of power, bears considerable symbolic efficacy (an efficacy greater than the figures of the previous paragraph). Scientific laws, of course, are even more effective for being ‘real’ rather than symbolic. And yet, if the division between the two laws rigorously corresponded to that between ‘the social order and the order of the world’, knowledge and law would not be separated relative to the social order. For knowledge of the social order would still be restricted to knowledge of juridical law, even as knowledge of the latter would be considered directly constitutive of that order. The discovery of the social thus requires the development of an extra-juridical knowledge of the social order which, if not necessarily modelled on scientific law, still has to gesture to an underlying ‘reality’. Such knowledge, however, is not, at first, demanded by the modern democratic revolution. When democracy is defined in terms of a general accord that establishes the nation, the existence of the national society depends on general knowledge of the accord and agreement as to its wisdom. To pose the existence of a ‘hidden’, non-consensual social order, that demands a different kind of knowledge, cannot but appear to interfere with the accord’s transparency and, potentially, its purchase. THE SOCIAL DISTINGUISHED FROM THE POLITICAL When one speaks of a ‘social contract’ in, say, the manner of Rousseau, one has yet to discover the social, at least as distinct from the political.1 Lefort speaks of two disentanglings: first, ‘the disentangling of the political and the mythical-religious’, and second, ‘the disentangling of the political and the non-political within the social order’ (1982: 187). This second disentangling, the discovery of the social proper, should be understood as proceeding from the political, as its discovery of a terrain that marks the limits of its empire. This accords with what we know about those generally considered the pre-revolutionary precursors of social theory: Montesquieu criticized contractualism, and legislative hubris more generally, while the

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Scottish Enlightenment sought to oppose civic republicanism (Pocock, 1985; Singer, 2004a). It also accords with the common argument that the postrevolutionary development of social thought in the 19th century was a response to the shortcomings of the French Revolution.2 The discovery of a non-political social was not, however, simply a matter of intellectual history; it also served to stabilize the separation of knowledge, law and power which the democratic revolution momentarily threatened to erase. Consider for a moment this revolutionary democratic imaginary that refuses to separate the political from the non-political. Power, law and knowledge here all appear general: the sovereign encompasses all citizens; the law brooks no privileges; and the political truth is born of a general accord. Moreover, the generality of one term blends into the generality of the others: if the voluntas of power is not general, then the laws passed will not be in the general interest, and the nation will not live up to its concept. In a sense, the three terms again converge, though from within a position of immanence. This renders what Lefort terms the ‘play of divisions’ difficult and, in the context of the French Revolution, murderous, any sign of division threatening the republic one and indivisible with symbolic collapse (Singer, 1986). Thus the continuous purges, as well as the festivals that reiterate the original act of political constitution with a display of general assent. A non-political social, by contrast, points to a half-buried stratum of collective existence not directly encompassed by rights, laws or powers – a stratum that bears signs of a minimal consistency and intelligibility, though it is not the immediate object of a knowing gaze or consenting will. Much of our problematic can be resituated in terms of the question of representation. With the political disentangled from the mythical-religious, representation no longer refers to the rendering present to this world of an order that originates in another through a power that bridges both. But what then does representation refer to? What does it mean to represent a collectivity? The answer is less simple than it appears. One cannot simply say that representation no longer participates in the formation of the represented, that the representation merely reflects, at a distance, a pre-existing, sovereign principle. Much depends on what sort of representation one is talking about – a representation of power, law or knowledge? The problem with the revolutionary democratic imaginary is that it confuses the three forms, which then makes it difficult to separate the representation from the represented. What is the nation? Within social contract theory it is given through its constitution. As a written document, the latter is by definition a representation, but a representation of what? Let us say that it reiterates truths that, by virtue of their self-evidence (and by the self-evidence of their virtue), are present to each and every citizen – as if the constitution were merely a piece of paper representing a contract already present in hearts and minds. But even what is based on purportedly self-evident truths does not really exist until it has been declared to exist. Moreover, here we are speaking of a

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declaration of law that constitutes the sovereign nation that declares the law. If, then, a constitution genuinely takes hold, it will be no mere piece of paper; it will appear sacrosanct, not because inspired by God, but because confounded with the sovereign act that founds the nation. One cannot underestimate the enormous symbolic efficacy of the representation of the law here. The real problem emerges with the translation from the representation of law to that of power. One might think such a translation unnecessary, even impossible. After all, if in the register of the law the referent (the represented) cannot be easily separated from its enunciation (the representation), in the register of power the representatives and represented refer to two different groups of people. However, as the sovereign people is constituted through the (fundamental) law, the representational logics of law and power overlap, opening the way for a logic of substitution that operates in the following manner. The sovereign power constituted by the (fundamental) law refers to the general will of the people that exists to maintain and extend the law. But this will cannot manifest itself directly, at least not continuously, as the nation is too large to assemble in person. Instead it must manifest itself indirectly through its political representation, with the proviso that the latter reflect the national will as closely as possible (a proviso that appears all the more necessary as, prior to the Revolution, political representation was considered inherently aristocratic, a filtering mechanism for the promotion of superior individuals to positions of authority). The tendency, then, is to read not just the ‘general will’, but the nation’s very existence, off the representative will. Thus the propensity to postpone elections which, while periodically permitting the direct manifestation of the sovereign will, threaten to reveal that will as internally divided and different from its representation. Indeed, all political divisions, whether within or between representatives and represented, appear as a direct menace to the nation one and indivisible, the Terror being the attempt to ensure the survival of the sovereign by forcing nation and representation to coincide. The dramatic, ultimately unsustainable, character of such a logic underlines the need to separate polity and society. If events at the level of political representation are not to directly threaten the ‘order of society’, the latter must appear as existing relatively independent of political representation, which is to say, it must be represented in terms other than those of law or power. The second disentangling, in short, supposes the existence of different forms of representation corresponding to the different spheres. Once polity and society can be distinguished, democratic political representation no longer represents the collectivity, identified with the sovereign power and its act of foundation. When the order, coherence and identity of the collectivity are no longer suspended on its political representation, politics can be ‘desacralized’. Political representation need no longer embody the wholeness and wholesomeness of the social bond. It refers instead to a

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political competition only loosely connected to a society that exists on its own terms. If modern democracies have instituted a distinct political sphere open to the play of division, it is not just because of the establishment of a division within power (between the sovereign people and its representatives), but also because of a division from power that allows the national society to appear as more and other than the sovereign. Everything that has been said so far suggests that the discovery of the social is not exclusively a matter of knowledge. Nonetheless it remains primarily such as the presence of the social depends on a change in the representation of knowledge consequent to its separation from power and law. In the religious symbolic regime, where the ‘order of the social’ is rendered present through the representation of an extra-social power, knowledge appears as a necessary moment of, and inseparable from, power and its representation. In the revolutionary democratic imaginary, as knowledge of the social order is still equated with knowledge of power at its source (even if the latter is no longer extra-social), the enunciation of knowledge remains joined to the expressions of law and power, with all the corresponding symbolic effects. By contrast, the emergence of the social from the political supposes a form of knowledge that separates political representation from national existence, discourse from institution, enunciation from its referent, and words from things. This last phrase refers to Foucault’s Les mots et les choses and, more precisely, his discussion of the shift from the classic to the modern episteme that separates words from things. ‘The space of order, which served as a common place for representation and for things, for empirical visibility and for the essential rules . . . is from now on shattered.’ This order resides ‘henceforth outside representation, beyond its immediate visibility, in a sort of behind-the-scenes world even deeper and more dense than representation itself’ (Foucault, 2002: 259). It seems odd to pair Foucault with Lefort3 – still, Foucault’s history illuminates a change, relative to knowledge, in the very sense of representation, a change that, I am arguing, consummates the differentiation of knowledge from law and power. Henceforth, the social appears as the moment of collective existence that lies ‘outside representation’, the signifier of a reality that slips beneath the surface of law’s empire, and resists power’s diktat. As such, the social appears as that which is not immediately apparent, a tangled skein at once synchronic and diachronic, an index of the depths below that replaces the light from above. In its gesture to an underlying reality, the social solicits new savoirs – social sciences, social theories, sociology – themselves the occasion for the creation of new empiricities. Returning to Lefort’s original terms, the emergence of the social requires a separation between ‘the institution of the social’ and the ‘discourse on the social’. Once the latter admits its distance from institution, it becomes a discourse about the social, i.e. a discourse that makes truth claims about social institution. Here the sense of the term institution must be specified. I

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assume that Claude Lefort draws it from Merleau-Ponty, and notably from his 1954–5 course at the Collège de France, which Lefort recently edited. In the preface he writes: Merleau-Ponty explicitly distinguishes between the problematic of institution and that of constitution (in the Kantian sense). He rejects, with the idea of a constituting consciousness, the idea of a world within which nothing can be discovered that has not been constituted by that consciousness’ activities. Understood in its double sense, institution supposes that the instituting and the instituted do not coincide. (Lefort, 2003: 7)

The discovery of the social, then, implies a discovery of the institutional dimension of collective life beyond the constituting consciousness of the political. This discovery points beyond the sense of the social as an association formed by the enunciation of an action in common. In its refusal to be reduced to the terms of power, law and contract – terms that are inevitably the expression of a (conjunction of) will(s) – the social now demands the ‘admission’ of a difference between discourse and institution, enunciation and referent, representation and ‘reality’. Such is the supposition of the emergence of genuine social knowledge: ‘the attempt . . . on the basis of instituted knowledge, to bring thought into contact with the instituting moment’ (1982: 202). One must add, if the non-coincidence of the instituting and instituted is to be acknowledged, it is not just the difference between discourse and institution, but the irreducibility of this difference, that must be admitted. According to Lefort, ideology is the attempt, once the difference between representation and reality has been posed, to dissimulate the ‘real’, or what in reality is unwanted and unexpected. In this attempt, ideology tries to narrow this difference in order to neutralize the effects of division and historicity that bespeak the uncertainties of ‘the instituting moment’. But where once institution could only be presented through discourse, and reality only through representation, the temptation now is to seek to narrow the distance from the side of reality, i.e. by enjoining a discourse that would hide behind the facts. Such a discourse would represent reality as devoid of discourse (including an instituting discourse) and represent itself as the selfdecipherment of that non-discursive reality. It would, in effect, conceal its own coherence behind the erasure of the signs of its difference, as though the coherence of its speech were immanent to ‘reality’ alone. Here we touch on a matter that goes beyond ideology: the illusion that shadows the emergence of the social, ‘namely that the institution of the social can account for itself’ (1982: 201) – as if social reality could be represented as independent of representation, and simultaneously as the latter’s source or cause. In what Lefort disparagingly refers to as ‘sociologisms’, the discourse on the social speaks in the name of reality by presenting itself as simultaneously external to and engendered by the reality it ‘reflects’. However, the difference cannot

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be indefinitely disguised; eventually the facts escape even the most ‘realist’ discourse, which can then only play catch-up. Representation inevitably falls short of social reality, and not just because the distance between the place of enunciation and its referent cannot, in the end, be disguised. Nor because there is no single place of enunciation and, therefore, no single perspective on the referent (politicians, lawyers and sociologists all represent social reality differently, as do economists, artists, shopkeepers, workers, industrialists, etc.). Ultimately, the failure is inscribed in the very nature of the object, the social, wherein the instituting continuously breaks through the instituted. The social, once distinguished from the political, is a source of stability. Being rooted in the bedrock of an evolving history, and dispersed through a variety of spheres, it proves relatively impervious to shifts in power. The social is also a source of uncertainty – the topos of an ‘institution’ ultimately experienced as ‘ïnsaisissable’ and ‘immaîtrisable’ (Lefort, 1981: 173). The discovery of the social signals a new ontology of collective life, suggestive of a new openness to institutional creativity, and a new sensitivity to reality’s indeterminacy. In its dual aspect this discovery must be considered a political event (if one that points beyond the political4), as well as an event in knowledge. Indeed, as a source both of stability and uncertainty, the social appears as the necessary presupposition of modern democracy, serving to ground its regime of representations. However, as a presupposition, the social is without determinate content, and all attempts to specify its content prove rather fragile. THE FRAGILITY OF THE SOCIAL When the social was still indistinguishable from the political, and conceived as an association, its meaning was clear. It was the result of an explicit conjunction of wills based on a shared interest. In its dependence on the will, it appeared an abstraction, at once descriptive and normative, from all the particulars of position, communal belonging or regime type. Its instrument, the contract, appeared as both the most natural (as it accords with the nature of the free will) and most artificial of devices (as that will, freed of all natural constraints, produces a purely conventional agreement). Modern liberalism still draws on the individualism, egalitarianism and ‘spiritualism’ that such an understanding implies.5 However, once the social is distinguished from the political, it is no longer an object of volition, and appears neither natural nor artificial, but seems to occupy an intermediary zone of its own, wherein conventions appear ‘natural’ while nature appears mutable. Society is now presented as a given, a strictly empirical entity, devoid of any normative imperative to conform to its definition as a general, conscious accord. The result is that the idea of the social becomes even more abstract, to the point where it loses even its descriptive value, encompassing all of collective life in all its aspects. Thus the tendency of sociologists

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to define their discipline tautologically, as the study of society, or of social relations, social interactions, etc. In truth, the new, institutional sense of the social does not simply replace an earlier, contractual sense, the idea of a contractual association being too deeply rooted in the democratic imaginary to simply disappear. Not only is the idea of social relations as constituted of a common accord still very much present in normative political theory, but the idea that such relations are constituted of individual wills comes to define the basis of economic theory. One is tempted to speak of a shift in the apprehension of ‘the order of the social’ from the one big contract of the general political will to the many little contracts of the market economy. The latter economic representation points to an invisible principle of order that limits and, thereby, stabilizes the political, while maintaining much of the contractual imagination. In other words, it does what the properly social does, but in a way that is, at once, more certain (given its law-like determinations), more providential (given its promise of a utilitarian utopia), more flexible (with its mix of nature and artifice, it appears to reconcile the instituting and the instituted), yet still upholds the free will as the source of all action. Thus there are those – most famously, Margaret Thatcher – who claim that society does not exist; as well as those for whom society exists, but as the sum of the interaction of individual wills, sometimes associating, sometimes competing. Most often the inaugural gesture of the disciplines that speak in the name of the social is to deny, if not necessarily the hegemony of the polity or economy, then the hegemony of their associated paradigms. One calls on the social in order to criticize the ‘spiritualism’ of political theorists and the ‘instrumentalism’ of economists, and to invoke some broader, denser and ultimately more realistic perspective. Yet the prestige of the two more established disciplines remains largely unscathed. Anyone who has taught sociology knows that the pull of the discipline, however large its claims, is towards ‘residual’ areas like deviance, gender, race and ethnicity, etc. The social, however, need not seek to encompass the political or the economic in the name of the whole. It can claim an intermediary status, sometimes pitched diacritically towards the political, as with Hegel’s concept of civil society squeezed between family and state, or Hannah Arendt’s concept of the social distended between oikos and polis. And sometimes towards the economic, as in the neo-Habermassian version of civil society (Arato and Cohen, 1992) or more indirectly, in the attempts to supplement economic capital with social capital or trust (Putnam, 1994; Seligman, 1997). Often the social is invoked to speak less of the theoretical limits than the very real failings of economy and polity. One thinks of the designation, beginning in the 1830s, of ‘the social problem’ at that point where democratic republicanism appeared incapable of responding to market dysfunctions (Castel, 1995; Donzelot, 1984); or of the responses to that problem, ranging from Social Catholicism to socialism, social democracy and the World Social Forum. Or one thinks, in related terms, of the social as a set of policies,

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social policies, and their corresponding forms of ‘governance’, e.g. social welfare, social insurance or social work. Once the question of the social’s emergence is posed, the possibility of its disappearance has to be countenanced. Indeed, ‘the end of the social’ has already been announced; though as the term has several meanings, the social has been subjected, rhetorically at least, to several deaths. Sometimes its death or decline is attributed to the increased hegemony of (the representation of) the economic. If identified with a form of governance, the end of the social refers simply to the waning of the welfare state (Rose, 1999). If identified with a bounded society, understood as the container of the nation-state, the reference is to economic globalization (Giddens, 1990: 63–78). Sometimes what is understood is the end of the ‘idea’ of society – society as a normative order underwritten by an idea of justice embedded in the public sphere – an idea crushed by the sheer positivity of system functioning (Freitag, 2002). At other times, one seems to be speaking of the death of the ‘instituted’, with the social turning liquid, dissolving the durability and externality that sociologists equate with social structure (Bauman, 2000; Dubet, 2002). Lastly, there is the death associated with a loss of referentiality, the claim that the social no longer seems real, but appears a simulation, the product of the increasingly tactile immediacy of media representations (Baudrillard, 1983). All these different deaths, though not entirely coherent with each other,6 appear to touch, in almost systematic fashion, on the different elements of the emergence of the social as described here. The more interesting of these deaths speak to the difficulty of engaging the distance established by the division between institution and representation, practice and discourse, fact and value, which afford the social its principle of visibility. Something of this is anticipated by Claude Lefort when, at the end of the essay under discussion, he speaks of an ‘invisible ideology’ – though the very fact that he still calls this an ideology suggests a note of caution.7 The implication is that the division between the institution of the social and the discourse on the social still holds, although it may now be harder to represent. After all, if ‘the configuration of the signifiers of law, knowledge and power’ are no longer quite the same as they were, no-one would suggest that they have fused into the representation of a constituting consciousness at the source of collective life. Rather the implication is that the disarticulation of these signifiers has proceeded apace, such that the diacritical markers that demarcated the social no longer hold with the same firmness, leaving the social both more pervasive and more difficult to pin down. The elaboration of this claim, however, would require another article.

Brian Singer teaches at Glendon College in sociology, and in the graduate programmes in Sociology and Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto. He has written one book, some dozen articles in different journals, and translated several works from the French. [email: [email protected]]

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Notes 1. Though there can be no doubt that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book of the same name did much to spread the use of the term ‘social’ (Williams, 1976: 243–7). 2. Saint-Simon, Tocqueville, Marx, Comte and Durkheim can and have all been read in this manner. There is no need to turn to a Bonald or de Maistre, with their attempt to ground a community – as opposed to a society – in a revived political theology. 3. Foucault hardly speaks about the appearance of the social (not least because of his difficulties in speaking about the political); he does, however, speak of the emergence of the ‘human sciences’. 4. Much of what is called nation-building should be understood as the attempt to establish the presence of a ‘pre-political’ society. In an earlier article I tried to examine the emergence, within the French Revolution, of elements of a ‘cultural’ understanding of the nation in response to the aporias of a strictly voluntary, contractual understanding (Singer, 1996). 5.

The representative principle, at its root, consists in wanting to produce the political and, more generally, the social bond, by the will alone, that is, from the human soul alone. Our period is perhaps not very religious, but, in the political and social order, it is quite “spiritualist.” We want all our ties, even corporal ties, to have their origin, cause and duration in a purely and sovereignly spiritual decision. (Manent, 2004: 230; my translation).

Note the author, a political theorist, tends to fold the social into the political. 6. One death suggests the end of social work; another that the social has been reduced to social work. One sees representation (the representation of the norm) absorbed into the facts, while another sees the facts absorbed into representation (by the media). 7. He describes the ‘invisible ideology’ in terms of a double movement: ‘eliminating the distance between the discourse on the social and social discourse, inserting the first into the second’; and ‘dissociating [this latter enterprise] from the affirmation of totality’ (1982: 225).

References Arato, Andrew and Cohen, Jean (1992) Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Baudrillard, Jean (1983) In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . . . or the End of the Social. New York: Semiotext(e). Bauman, Zygmunt (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Castel, Robert (1995) Les metamorphoses de la question social. Paris: Fayard. Donzelot, Jacques (1984) L’invention du social. Paris: Fayard. Dubet, François (2002) Le déclin de l’institution. Paris: Seuil. Foucault, Michel (2002) The Order of Things. London: Routledge. Freitag, Michel (2002) ‘The Dissolution of Society within the “Social”’, European Journal of Social Theory 5(2). Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lefort, Claude (1981) L’Invention démocratique. Paris: Fayard

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Lefort, Claude (1982) The Political Forms of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lefort, Claude (2003) ‘Préface’, to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Institution et La Passivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954–55). Paris: Éditions Belin. Manent, Pierre (2004) Cours familier de philosophie politique. Paris: Gallimard. Pocock, J. G. A. (1985) Virtue, Commerce and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, Robert D. (1994) Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rose, Nikolas (1999) Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seligman, Adam B. (1997) The Problem of Trust. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Singer, Brian (1986) Society, Theory and the French Revolution. Studies in the Revolutionary Imaginary. London: Macmillan. Singer, Brian (1996) ‘Cultural versus Contractual Nations: Rethinking their Opposition’, History and Theory 35(3). Singer, Brian (2004a) ‘Montesquieu, Adam Smith and the Discovery of the Social’, Journal of Classical Sociology 4(1). Singer, Brian (2004b) ‘Intellectuals and Democracy. The Three Figures of Knowledge and Power’, CTHEORY, http://www.ctheory.net/default.asp Article: A147. Williams, Raymond (1976) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Glasgow: Fontana.