Il pensiero politico francese dell'800Il pensiero politico francese dell'800di Sandro Chignola - Over the last years, my research focussed on the history of political concepts and in particular on the history of the concept of society in the XIXth century. My basic assumption is that it is not useful (nor it is possible) to reconstruct the historical formulation of the main problems of political theory and philosophy without considering the transformations of the logical assets from which the conceptualization of politics depends. Concepts to which we usually refer as universal (individual, power, representation, state and society among others) have an historical origins and refer to a precise mode of conceptualization of historical experience and politics. Political concepts are not universal but, on the contrary, appear to investigation as historical contingent and strictly bounded to a particular way of understanding the general relations between humans.
This means that in view of reconstructing the genesis of the conceptual separation among civil society and the State, I had to refer to a particular conceptualization of politics: that of german posthegelian liberalism and that of french postrevolutionary liberalism of restoration.
Hegel is the one who first breaks down the unity of the concept of politiké koinonia, the aristotelian concept which is translated in latin by societas civilis, and which remains apparentely costant in european main linguistic areas (civil society, société civile, burgerliche Gesellchaft, società civile). Hegel separates what the tradition unifies: i. e. the juridical and sovereign center of decision (the State), and the area of economic activity with its mechanics of self-regulation and reproduction (the society). A separation that is litteraly impossible in the context of the society of the ancien règime, whose regulation still assumes the direct participation of corps and états to the government of a common good, the integral incorporation of citizens to the political body by means of intermediate bodies that do not recognize free individuals or private subjects and a differentiation between the private subject of economic exchange and the political citizen is not yet at disposal.
Working through the hegelian differentiation, I had to register the tough impact it had on the paradigm of the german science of the State (Staatswissenschaft). German liberal and conservative thinker of the first half of XIXth start to interrogate about the necessity of distinguishing a specific object of scientific investigation (the society) and about the necessity of founding a new discipline (the science of society, Gesellschaftswissenschaft) with a different and an autonomous status as it regards the science of the State. It is the general paradigma of Politics that is involved in such a distinction: administrative law, constitutional law, science of politics registered progressively that differentiation, which at the same time encountered hard academic resistence.
This means that after Hegel I worked through authors like Lorenz von Stein, Robert von Mohl, Ahrens, Riehl, Treitschke, Schmoller.
Similar problems are involved in France. The great Revolution of 1789 propose a rousseauian concept of sovereignty which implicates the radical depoliticization of society. As everybody knows, the law Le Chapelier – in view of saufegarding the perfect transparence of the volonté générale - forbid the constitution of any partial society inside the Nation. My interest of research falled on Tocqueville as the author who first analyzed this process on the long term of the transition between ancien régime and revolution and on the lawyer who first codificate the french administrative law (Cormenin, Macarel, Foucart, among others) as the divulgator of a notion of utilité publique that legitimize administrative centralization and make society, now made of private citizens, strictly dependent from the centre of political decision. What is at stake, as a correlate of the differentiation of State and society is the differentiation of a public sphere from a pure private sphere of existence.
I decided to consacre the main part of my time to an extensive research of the french restoration liberalism. In this context, not only Tocqueville maturated his own interpretation of democracy, but an innovative conception of society was elaborated. In particular, I have found necessary to reconstruct the idea of a representation of society in the first political and historical writings of Guizot, the reformulation of a theory of natural right in Jouffroy, Remusat and Cousin and the connected idea of an elaboration of a science of history necessary to criticize the abstractism of the XVIIIth century political philosophy and to legitimize the political hegemony of the middle classes.
To stabilize the french society after the great revolution it appeared necessary to conciliate the idea of equality (the main conquest of the french revolution) with a hierarchisation of competence and political responsibility which at the same time permit order and progress. What is meant, is the necessity of rearticulating a bound among civil society and State, by means of which the middle classes of “capacity” rejoin the government and assume the rôle of leading civilisation and progress. The separation of civil society and the State appears at the same time necessary and dangerous. Necessary, because it was through the conceptual separation of the real society of free equal men from the absolute State that the Revolution was prepared and the civil rights were conquered. Dangerous, because insisting on this separation after 1814 and a restoration that sanctified the principle of equality in the Charte and in the Code civil, means to indefinitely reproduce a situation of crisis and of potential anarchy.
French liberalism was consequent enough to polemize either against ultraroyalism or against democraticism. What both of them have in common is the idea of the absolute power of will. It does not matter wether this is the absolute will of the King (Maistre, Bonald) or the absolute general will of the people (Rousseau). Guizot, among others, thought it possible to rework the idea of the sovereignty in that of the sovereignty of the mind (souveranité de la raison) as embodied in the middle classes by which the progress of civilisation depended in the last centuries. This means to recover a principle of differentiation inside society (not all men are equal from the point of view of capacity and they are not equally minded) which not interfere with the principle of equality recognized by the constitution (all men are considered equal from the point of view of the law). State and society are thought as unified in the synthesis which assigns a direct political responsibility to a social class as a natural representant of the progressive movement of civilisation. If France, regarding to its social constitution, have to be perceived as totally new after the revolution (no more social power of nobility or social influence of the old corporate bodies. Just free and equal men are the subject of social relations), new mechanism of representation have to be invented that do not recognize the individual will as the starting point of political decision. A representation of society (“photographed” in its complexity of capacities, differences, natural hierachies of influence and power) depends not from the idea of will, but from the extraction (said Guizot) from society of the competences usefuls to govern its process. By means of this extraction, society directly govern itself. And the separation of civil society and the State is over.
In view of reconstructing these problems, I have extensively worked through the political writing of Guizot (with particular reference to the ‘2Os and to the essay published in “Le Globe” in 1826, Philosophie politique. De la souveranité), I have read the political writings of Royer-Collard edited by Barante; and studied the philosophical works and essays of Cousin (in particular his Du Vrai, du Beau, du Bien and his very important Cours de philosophie morale, 1819-20), Rémusat (the essays in “Revue des deux Mondes” concirning Burke, Maistre, Bonald, Tocqueville, Lamennais, France and representative government, the administrative centralization; the very important essays edited in Passé et présent; the Courses on the History of philosophy and on the History of english philosophy), Damiron (History of Philosophy in the XIXth century, Cours de philosophie), Jouffroy (Cours de droit naturel). Obviously, I have read all these authors with reference to the most important literature on the subject (Rosanvallon, Roldan, Kelly, Jaume among others).
I have to thank all the personal working at the libraries of the MSH and of Sorbonne who help me very much.
All the materials that I have taken from this extensive reading (that has concerned not only the political writings of the quoted authors, but also authentically philosophical questions regarding the moral foundations of the civil society, Jouffroy’s, Damiron’s, Remusat’s and Cousin’s polemics with scottish moral philosophy and the utiltarianism, their critical involvement with the question of the psychology as inherited from french and english philosophy of the XVIIIth century and so on) will be used for writing some chapters of a new book that I am planning for 2004-2005.
I am grateful to the MSH and the EHESS for having offered to me such a significant possibiliy of research.
Paris, december 13th 2002
Sandro Chignola