Abstract
Claude Lefort, French philosopher and activist, exponent of the anti-totalitarian moment in France, has developed an original theoretical proposal on democracy and totalitarianism. When he distanced himself from the creed of the proletarian revolution as an instrument of understanding of human action, he focused on the understanding of the political as a space in which the social emerges, in which it takes shape. The idea that society acquired a unity through the revolutionary project was overturned by the knowledge that the social cannot be contained; it cannot be the object of appropriation and unification through action or knowledge without threatening freedom and the existence of society itself. Democratic political society can only be heterogeneous, in which the conflict cannot be resolved precisely because the various interests in society are irreducible and asymmetrical. Machiavelli, in the Lefortian thinking, had identified the sense of the political at the beginning of his institution, in which the division and disagreement between classes are the foundation of social relations. This view is opposed to the classical conception of dissent as a moment of collision between passions and reason, where the disorder compromises the political structure. Social conflict indeed is an irreducible resource for the existence of human relations, public space and political society. In the clash between two realisms, Lefort shelved the Marxist one to deepen the turmoil of the ‘divine Machiavelli’, replacing in his theoretical vision the Machiavellian idea of the political as a social dimension to the Marxist dominance of the production forces; the political is the way in which society represents its legitimacy and presupposes conflict as inescapable, a way to guarantee political freedom. Plurality and irrepressible diversity will be instruments for guaranteeing democracy.
At the end of the 1950s, Claude Lefort started drafting Le travail de l'æuvre. Machiavel (Machiavelli in the Making; Lefort, 2012), which was published a decade later. Since 1972, the impressive Lefortian work dedicated to the Florentine Secretary has added and enriched the exegetic and interpretative manualist thinking of Machiavelli, that still today does not exhaust the horizons of reflection on the origin of the Modern State.
Luis Althusser gives us a measure of the Lefortian talent for providing a deepening insight on the father of modern political thought that, by virtue of the original interpretative proposal that arises, is innovative compared to the endless literature on Machiavelli. Althusser says: For I know of no analysis as acute and intelligent of an author who, from the time he wrote, has always perplexed his readers. And although Lefort denies offering an ‘interpretation’ of them, I am not aware of any commentary on The Price and the Discorsi on Livy that goes so far in understanding Machiavelli's cast of mind and turn of phrase – and never mind the transcendental philosophy à la Merleau-Ponty in which it is arbitrarily wrapped. Should it ever be discovered – as the outcome of an investigation of unprecedented meticulousness – for whom Machiavelli wrote, we owe it, in the first instance, to Lefort. (Althusser, 1999: 3)
The third section is dedicated to a critical reading of some of the most relevant secondary interpretations of Machiavelli's thinking. The fourth and fifth sections, plus the conclusion, form the focus of the work, in which the author dwells on a direct reading of The Prince and the Discorsi, with a review of the topics contained in the various chapters of the two works, and in which we can read its original interpretive delivery.
Claude Lefort was one of the central figures for the analysis of the politique, opening up new perspectives of investigation into political philosophy in France. If we were to bring Lefort thinking into a specific current of studies, it would be quite complicated given the varied spectrum of hermeneutic themes and approaches we encounter in its analytical production. No doubt his writings can be placed within the phenomenological and philosophical speculation, to which he had been introduced by his master Maurice Merleau-Ponty, of whom he was a student at Carnot High School between 1941 and 1942, decisive years for the development of his ideas about society and socialism.
We could use the key concept of indeterminacy, which he used to investigate the phenomena that inhabited his time, to define his heterogeneous intellectual path, since this term connotes his entire theoretical dimension, both in the approach to the analysis of History and in the development of his theory of democracy.
It is in the first phase of his theoretical elaboration that Lefort devotes himself to investigation of the philosophy of history and existentialist phenomenology. The problem of the interpretation of works, history and social phenomena is central throughout his philosophical commitment: reality and history unfold within the texts in a relationship of reciprocity because in them (the works) history is inscribed with his time. The process through which thought is questioned and revealed in the interpretation certainly represents an itinerary for Lefort, a path that in the question of the thing that is being analysed brings to light the question itself: the ways of the sense of the work that the writer gives and that the reader acquires are always open and never give definitively.
In the indetermination that perennial questioning produces lies the sense of phenomena, of the social facts that in their mise en forme are given to history, of the history itself never definitive and of the method of the Lefortian analysis, anchored to a continuous dialectic with the present in all its manifestations: there is no starting point that is absolute and there is no closure that is definitive.
In his youth, Lefort was a Marxist, of Trotskyist orientation, who in the militant journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, founded together with Cornelius Castoriadis, placed at the centre of his reflections the model of socialist society, the revolutionary movement and criticism of Soviet bureaucracy. This first speculative phase undergoes deep incursions into the existentialist phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, thanks to whom he had access to the journal Les Temps Modernes, in defining the objectives of his theoretical research and social analysis. Lefort, in writing his remarks on the conflicting nature of societies inscribed in the Marxist philosophical framework, incorporates Merleau-Pontian suggestions, declining his reasoning in a phenomenological approach anchored to the hic et nunc, rejecting the veils of developing a general theory, which is likely to be the same as what Merleau-Ponty called pensée du survol – literally ‘fly over thinking’ or ‘thinking from above’ (Landes, 2013). This first phase will close not without having introduced the author on a philosophical path that will be at the base of his subsequent investigation, with the abandonment of Trotskyism – a political and ideological orientation that had not been able to grasp, according to Lefort, the totalitarian nature of the Soviet bureaucratic regime (Lefort, 2005: 227) – and of the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, after his ideological conflicts with Cornelius Castoriadis.
The second Lefort is the one who with Machiavelli discovers a different outcome in the political articulation of social division (the famous Machiavellian moods/umore that divide society), in which difference establishes the symbolic place of power, which is configured as a mirror of society itself and its institution, contrary to the Marxist idea that the origin of social conflict lies in the logic resulting from capitalist rule. Social stratification and conflict are inherent in society, according to this perspective, in a division that allows the birth of the State as a universal and permanent phenomenon and which cannot be reduced to an empirical conflict. Thanks to the influence of Machiavelli's reading that is condensed in the writing of his work, through a demanding analysis of his two masterpieces, The Prince and the Discorsi, Lefort will elaborate his theory on modern democracy as a form of society in which individuals and institutions are constantly mise à l'eprouve of indeterminacy. The Merleau-Pontian debt and Machiavellian influence will lead him to the deepening of the democratic phenomenon also through the experimentation of his reversal in the totalitarian system.
To understand the theory of the symbolic dimension of power, we must delve into what was the central work in the path of Lefort, which represented the definitive distance from Marxist social class readings, the authors of an organic vision of society, where the proletarian class would have the mission to realize the triumph of unity, to welcome the concept of the social as a place of division and perpetual conflict.
The limits of Marxism can be summed up within that ontological determinism which considered the political only in subordination to production relations, thus materializing in a limited social point of view. The refusal to adopt an orientation that ‘prétend de trouver le fondemnt de la réalité social dans les seuls rapport de production’ (Lefort, 2005: 347) led Lefort to approach Machiavelli as the autre Marx, as the thinker of modernity who filled the gap of the ‘politique’ left by Marx – who saw it as the place where the instrumental exercise of power manifested itself – developing the discourse on the dimension of the political à l’egarde du social.
Social conflict and symbology of power
Machiavelli for Lefort is the one who inaugurated the advent of modern philosophy through a break with classical and Christian tradition, eschewing the metaphysical and theological assumptions of the cosmological and natural order. Lefort says: With him, they say, political discourse came to be: not of course a reflection on the essence of good government or the art of governing, but a discourse that aims at politics as such, that circumscribes its domain and breaks all ties with metaphysics and theology […] something was written, for the first time, that either never should have been. (Lefort, 2012: 5–6)
The political, understood as a constituent of the social, is founded in Machiavelli on the principle of a permanent conflict in society, which establishes power as a symbol and mirror of society itself. This conflict is not natural in the sense of primal, as if it were arising from a historical necessity, but comes from the clash between two types of appetite or desire, that of dominating and that of not being dominated, from which the social order establishes itself.
This conflict gives meaning and form to the political. Machiavelli speaks of it in the chapter on the principato civile of The Prince: Perché in ogni città si trouvono questi dua umori diversi: e nasce, da questo, che il populo desidera non essere comandato né oppresso da' grandi e e' grandi desiderano comandare e opprimere el populo; e da questi dua appetiti diversi nasce nelle città uno de' tre effetti: o principato, o libertà o licenza. (Machiavelli, 2013: 97) It is indeed of an opposition constitutive of the political that one must speak, irreducible, at first blush; and not of a distinction made on the basis of the facts, for what make Grandees the Grandees and the people the people is not that they have by their fortune, their mores or their function a distinct status associated with specific and divergent interests; it is, as Machiavelli clearly says, that one group desires to command and oppress, and the other not to be. (Lefort, 2012: 140)
The power of the Prince, despite being of a social nature, is still an exercise in domination that must be resolved in a choice of support of one or the other desires: the grandees know that they cannot dominate the people, and choose the Prince to make sure that through him their appetite is fulfilled; the people on the other hand choose the Prince because, acknowledging that they cannot resist the oppression of the grandees, they see that he is the only figure who can protect their desire not to be dominated. The Prince in both cases is a screen functional to the expectations of one of the two moods. In his eyes, the people's request is preferable because, unlike the grandees who consider him equal and aspire to power, the people are more willing to obey since there is no claim to sharing in power but only to a need for protection, the non-domino that the Prince is called to meet. The people's desire not to be dominated by the grandees merges with that of the Prince to dominate, and even if the people will still be subjected to another genus of domination, this will be perceived as the lesser evil: The people, thinking to find in him a defender in the struggle against their class adversary, put themselves in the clutches of a new master and thus take up the cause of a submission that they loathed. Non-power and absolute power cling to one other in a darkness that it is essential to maintain. (Lefort, 2012: 141–142)
What excludes the assumption from which the contractual theories were based is that the source of the princely power is therefore the social, the result of a very specific choice that sees the Grandees as a succumbing party. In fact, the contractual tradition was based on the assumption that the establishment of the State, by means of the contract, in order to remedy the human condition of the State of nature and the general insecurity of that condition, was a collective benefit in which a third collect the interests of all, resolving the conflict resulting from fear.
Machiavelli affirms a new idea then left out in the classical analysis of the political and also in subsequent theoretical speculations, such as liberal and Marxist thought, for which, although with different and opposite outcomes, the elimination of the conflict was necessary for the realization of a harmonious society. The divergent interests and desires that clash in society are conflicting and at the same time immeasurable, therefore irrepressible because they are not placed on a symmetrical plane that would allow the prevailing of one, the annulment of the other. So, which is the position of the Prince's figure? In Lefort's interpretation of Machiavelli, the Prince assumes a mediating function through which society, divided into essence, can relate to itself. This mediation, however, should not be understood as socially embodied, because it must be considered from the symbolic point of view: the third element of mediation, in this case the Prince, is an imaginary representation that solves the intrinsic fragmentation of society. It is with what Lefort calls mise en scenes of power, through the symbol of the Prince, that society is reflected in its division and at the same time self-understood: La où le pouvoir politique se circonscrit à l’intérieur de la société, comme cet organe qui lui confère son unité, là où il est censé tirer son origine du lieu même censé s’engendrer sous son action, c’est la scène du social qui apparaît, c’est son institution qui se présente sur cette scène, ce sont dans les événements qui s’y jouent dans les rapports qui se nouent entre les individus et les groups que se repère la trame du ‘réel’. (Lefort, 1978: 283)
In a concise way, we can infer that the reading of Machiavelli leads Lefort to confirm his idea of power as a configuration of the social, from which it originates, and from which division is realized the symbolic unity of the political. The political essentially exists by virtue of social conflict: ‘It is at the heart of instability that power is established and consenting to the movement that carries society to the extreme consequences of civil strife’ (Lefort, 2012: 423). This, however, assumes that the Prince must accept indeterminacy as the political main path, because no one can think of choosing a position that assumes the characteristic of the permanent; it is à l'épreuve de l'incertaine. It is through conflicts – necessary for the symbolic representation of political unity – that social reality is manifested as indeterminate and as real. The birth of the social dimension is connected to the Prince's hold on power, who in turn symbolically reproduces it in political unity, legitimizing himself and never forgetting that the division is permanent.
In the same way as in The Prince, Machiavelli proposes his theory of conflict in the Discorsi. For example, when referring to the republics, he writes: Io dico che coloro che dannono i tumulti intra i Nobili e la Plebe, mi pare che biasimino quelle cose che furono prima causa del tenere libera Roma; e che considerino più a' rumori ed alle grida che di tali tumulti nascevano che a' buoni effetti che quelli partorivano; e che non considerino come e' sono in ogni repubblica due umori diversi, quello del popolo, e quello de' grandi; e come tutte le leggi che si fanno in favore della libertà nascano dalla disunione loro, come facilmente si può vedere essere seguito in Roma. (Machiavelli, 1984: 71)
It is thanks to the turmoil that Rome was able to become a free city, Machiavelli says, in which the need of the people not to be dominated has given rise to the need for laws to regulate the desire for freedom. This is because the interests at stake are not symmetrical and conflict can no longer be oriented, as in the struggle of the Marxist-inspired class and the liberal conservative tradition, towards the taking of power and the ambition of dominance on the antagonistic interest, given its irreconcilability. It is within the social space defined by immeasurable interests, producers of class conflict, that the law is established.
Along this perspective, Discorsi represent a work in continuity with The Prince. In fact, although the two are based in different realities, with the Principality in one and the Republic in the other, if the focus of investigation is represented by the research of the political and the nature of power, the differences between the two works are tapered. Lefort observes that between The Prince and the Discorsi one can see a change of perspective in identifying the origin of the political: if in the first case this is established starting from the instance of power and therefore from the point of view of the Prince, in the Discorsi the analysis of the political starts from the bottom, from the turmoil in society (Lefort, 2012: 217).
Between The Prince and the Discorsi we intercept that common thread that becomes the basis of the theoretical framework at the foundation of the free States: the union between grandees and people in The Prince and between nobles and la Plebe in the Discorsi. In the Discorsi, the thesis advanced is that order arises from disorder, and that in society conflicting moods and desires are a resource for the establishment of a solid Republic. The greatness of Rome was due to that of the union – as a prerequisite of political freedom – which had allowed the law alone to act as a medium between antagonistic interests. Already in the pages of The Prince Machiavelli had pointed out that in the republiche è maggiore vita (Machiavelli, 2013: 83) despite in Republics there will be more hatred and extreme conflict. This vitality resided precisely in that anonymous power exercised by law in society, by which people were no longer subject to the prevarication of their fellowmen as equal.
Here is the reference to the Lefortian logic of the representation of power as a symbolic place, which by virtue of the fact that it cannot be identifiable with any subject, serves as a guarantee of freedom in its anonymity (of power). But Lefort adds: Law cannot be thought beneath the emblem of measure, nor traced to the action of a reasonable authority, which would come to put a limit to the appetites of man, nor conceived as the result of a natural regulation of those appetites, imposed by the necessity of group survival. It is born of the excessiveness of the desire for freedom, which is doubtless linked to the appetite of the oppressed – who seek an outlet for their ambition – but does not reduce to it, since strictly speaking it has no object, is pure negativity, the refusal of repression. (Lefort, 2012: 229) The Tribunat in which the power of the law is expressed has the effect of impeaching the occupation of power by one person – whether of the prince or of oligarchs – and in this sense it is only effective as an organ of negativity. (Lefort, 2012: 228)
As regards the interrelationship between order and disorder, which is related to the discourse on freedom, the Machiavellian message received by Lefort is not to consider the search for and establishment of order as a possibility of composing the disorder that has arisen from the desires at stake because, trying to promote order by means of the suppression of class conflict, the result would be that of the ‘degradation of law and liberty’ (Lefort, 2012: 229).
Instead law will be the one that constantly relates itself to its foundation, that is, respect for social division, a configuration that takes into account and guarantees the desire of the people not to be oppressed. The denial of this desire would involve the destruction of freedom for an obvious condition of injustice, since the law is configured in its legitimacy to the extent that ‘donne une échappatoire publique au désir de non-oppression’ (Molina, 2005: 190).
A peculiar emphasis must be made on the transfiguration of power in a non-place that in fact represents the key to reading all the interpretative theory on which the analytical Lefort reflection stands. The configuration of power as a symbolic place comes from its transliteration within a physical semantic assumption of the place. The genesis of the use of the image of the physical dimension as a point of place of power, both in the sense of its democratic (non-place/lieu vide) and totalitarian (the occupation of the empty place of power) exercise, seems traceable in the words of Machiavelli. He uses for example the symbolic metaphor of the occupation of freedom in many parts of the work: ‘Essendo i popolari preposti a guardia d’una libertà, è ragionevole ne abbiano più cura; e non la potendo occupare loro, non permettino che altri la occupi’ (Machiavelli, 1984: 73).
The denial of freedom, its usurpation, is like an occupation that results in an illegitimate takeover of power. We find the use of the word ‘occupy’ in the same sense of the occupation of freedom even in the Istorie Fiorentine when Niccolò Fortebraccio started a war against Lucca to occupy the freedom of others. Machiavelli uses the same word referring also to tyranny in various passages of the Discorsi, e.g. when speaking of how the Church State, despite having exercised its temporal imperium, it had failed to ‘occupy the tyranny’ of Italy and make it Prince (Machiavelli, 1984: 96). But even more significant is what Machiavelli describes on the creation of the Decemvirato and the suppression of the Tribunato della Plebe. Appio Claudio Crasso, having held an authoritarian attitude contrary to the interests of the people, had wanted – says Machiavelli – to occupy the tyranny (Machiavelli, 1984: 152). The exercise of a subversive power, which does not take into account the prerogatives of the people, again physically places itself, as if materially occupying the property of others, in the kingdom of freedom.
The assimilation of territorial occupation with a symbolic one of a form of exercise of power, from which the internal skeleton unfolds at the genesis of the totalitarian event, therefore seems to find its primary source in the inspiring Machiavellian thought.
Within the analysis of Machiavelli's works, Lefort traces the assumptions for the development of his theory of democracy. The fact that the people are identified as the pole from which the legitimacy of power demands and at the same time it is remarked that this legitimacy stems from the fact that it is the foundation of the law only by virtue of its dislocation from the place of power, serves to Lefort to demonstrate how the renunciation of power makes it (the power) a legitimate political instance. In Machiavellian work, Lefort finds the genesis of the themes that will follow the development of his thinking: the transcendent nature of the political as a consequence of social conflict, and the impossibility of resolving conflict as an element that leads to the reflexive recognition of society with itself. Of course, we could also find the prodromes, or at least the basis, of his theory on totalitarianism.
Lefort gives us his deep analysis, stemming from the dialectical confrontation with Marxist orthodoxy, and affirms the subordination of Marx to the perspicacity of Machiavelli that marked a point of advancement in the study of the democratic dimension of the social. Machiavelli had already understood the difference between the State and civil society and their relationship with power as a third element that, placed at a distance between them (and therefore in the symbolic) allows to explain the evolutions between the classes ‘embodying for the dominated the transcendence of law and the State’ (Lefort, 1978: 237).