French Political Philosophy

This paper looks closely at Tocqueville’s analysis of modern individualism.  It begins by exploring what he means by “individualism,” turning next to individualism’s possibilities, and then considering individualism’s dangers to both the individual and society.  Finally, it examines some of the remedies Tocqueville sees to the problem of individualism, endeavoring to situate those remedies within a broader context of Tocqueville’s thought and analytic method.

En este artículo propongo interrogar la manera en la que Claude Lefort interpreta a Maquiavelo. En primer lugar, examinaré el estatuto que adquiere, para Lefort, el conflicto y la división social en la obra del Maquiavelo. En segundo lugar, desarrollaré la manera en la que este descubrimiento conduce a Maquiavelo, tal como es leído por Lefort, a elaborar una distinción entre diversas formas de organización política que rompe con la clasificación clásica de las formas de gobierno

En estos tres artículos, que aparecen por primera vez en castellano, bosqueja el autor, junto a una teoría general de la representación política, una relectura del problema permanente de la clasificación de los regímenes. Destaca en ellos particularmente el tratamiento de la cuestión de las causas de la corrupción de todas las formas de gobierno, incluida la democracia. Maquiaveliano riguroso y consciente, Freund no esquiva ninguno de los grandes problemas que siguen dividiendo hoy a quienes se acercan --no siempre libres de prejuicios-- a la realidad tantas veces poco complaciente de la política.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Fundamental Political Writings includes the Social Contract, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and “Preface to Narcissus.” Each text has been newly translated, and includes a full complement of explanatory notes. The editors’ introduction offers students diverse points of entry into some of the distinctive possibilities and challenges of each of these fundamental texts, as well as an introduction to Rousseau’s life and historical situation, from his early years in Geneva to his final years in relative solitude. Each text is accompanied by images from the original editions. The volume also includes annotated appendices that help students to explore the origins and influences of Rousseau’s work, including excerpts from Hobbes, Pascal, Descartes, Mandeville, Diderot, Voltaire, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Joseph de Maistre, Kant, Hegel, and Engels.

Primer volumen en lengua española dedicado a la presentación de la biografía, líneas fundamentales del pensamiento y obra, mediante compilación bibliográfica exhaustiva, del filósofo de lo político y sociólogo francés Julien Freund (1921-1993), cuya obra consagrada a "La esencia de lo político" (1965), tempranamente traducida al español (Editora Nacional, Madrid 1968) es considerada con general asenso como una de las obras clave del pensamiento político europeo del pasado siglo XX. No obstante, su obra científica trasciende con mucho aquel único título, especialmente decisivo, como se intenta mostrar en estas páginas, donde se recoge un extraordinario número de registros bibliográficos adscritos a campos temáticos de enorme variedad. Inaugura este título la Colección dedicada al "Realismo político europeo" en la editorial Isabor-AVK Verlag, bajo la dirección de J. Molina Cano (Universidad de Murcia), director asimismo de la Sociedad de Estudios Políticos de la Región de Murcia, impulsora de esta publicación

This paper sets out an ambitious critique of contemporary political scientists, political historians and others concerned with the history of democracy. It argues that overwhelmingly the history of democracy relies on an overtly Eurocentric narrative that emphasizes the keystone moments of Western civilization. According to this narrative, democracy has a clear trajectory that can be traced from ancient experiments with participatory government in Greece and to a lesser extent in Rome, through the development of the British parliament, the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, and then finally onto the triumphant march of the liberal model of democracy across the globe over the last 200 years, particularly under Western tutelage. Histories of democracy that focus exclusively on these events not only privilege Europe and its successful colonies, but also miss the broader human story of the struggle for and achievement of democracy.

This presents us with a distinct challenge. For those whose heritage does not include a direct link to Greek assemblies, the American Congress or the French Revolution, the 'standard history of democracy' provides a distant and exclusive narrative, which limits one's ability to embrace democracy. This paper concludes by noting that, as democracy spreads out across the world today, political scientists not only need to break down the intellectual orthodoxy that democracy has exclusively Western roots, but also to embrace a more global view of democracy as a political practise that has been present at various times and in sometimes unfamiliar ways in the complex histories and rich cultural traditions of most of the people of the earth.

Jean Bodin lived and wrote in a France marked by political chaos: feudal nobles challenged royal power, and the potential outbreak of civil war between Catholic royalists and Huguenots was a perpetual threat to stability. Fully cognizant of the immanent dangers of anarchy and bloodshed that beleaguered Europe, Bodin committed himself to defeating the politically disintegrating forces of his day. He feared that a republic of competing factions provided a weak foundation for social order, and thus felt the need to formulate a theory of politics that would point to an indisputable source of political authority.  Consequently, Bodin set out to inquire into the nature and locus of sovereignty, “the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth … the highest power to command.”

François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari: Biographie croisée (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 2007), ISBN: 978-2707158727, translated as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), ISBN: 978-0231145602

nombre -on les décrivit un jour avec ironie comme le parti sur le canapé * -, il existait déjà des différences en leur sein. Comme Victor de Broglie le rappelait dans ses mémoires : « M. Royer-Collard avait pour lui l'autorité ; M. de Serre l'éloquence ; M. Guizot l'activité d'esprit sur toutes choses, la hauteur des vues, et la diversité des connaissances ; Camille Jordan était le plus aimable et le plus attachant » (Broglie 1886, vol. II, pp. 10-11). Il n'est pas surprenant que leur petit nombre ait suscité diverses plaisanteries et moqueries qui tournaient en dérision le sentiment de supériorité et d'exceptionnalité qu'on leur prêtait. Le jeune Charles de Rémusat composa un poème qui fut chanté dans les salons de Paris avec des éclats de rire : « Avant-hier, écrivait-il, quelqu'un m'y présente [au parti des doctrinaires], le parti s'était attroupé, toute la faction pensante se tenait sur un canapé 24 . » Citant une remarque ironique, Thureau-Dangin notait : « Ils sont quatre, disait malicieusement un journal de gauche, qui tantôt se vantent de n'être que trois, parce qu'il leur paraît impossible qu'il y ait au monde quatre têtes d'une telle force, et tantôt prétendent qu'ils sont cinq, mais c'est quand ils veulent effrayer leurs ennemis par leur nombre » (Thureau-Dangin 1876, p. 79). Lord Acton remarqua également que les doctrinaires étaient « le groupe d'hommes d'Etat le plus intellectuel du pays, mais, comme les partisans de Peel en Angleterre, ils étaient des "chefs sans partisans" 25 . » Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard (1763-1845) fut le chef initial des doctrinaires. Philosophe de formation, il enseigna à la Sorbonne et fut influencé par Thomas Reid et la philosophie écossaise du sens commun. Comme d'autres libéraux français, Royer-Collard souscrivait aux principes de 1789, s'opposait à la monarchie (ou au pouvoir) absolu(e) et dénonçait la Terreur de 1793-1794. Sous la Restauration, il jouissait d'un immense prestige qui culmina à la veille de la révolution de Juillet avec son élection à la présidence de la Chambre des députés. En cette qualité, il fut l'un des principaux auteurs de l'importante Adresse des 221, adoptée le 16 mars 1830, qui affirmait le droit de la chambre élue de n'être pas d'accord avec l'opinion du roi sur la nomination de ses ministres. Royer-Collard possédait à la fois un profond respect pour l'autorité et la liberté et un grand esprit d'indépendance 26 . Esprit cartésien, élevé dans la tradition de Port-Royal, c'était un grand orateur dont l'éloquence inhabituelle et le style élégant laissaient une profonde impression à son auditoire. Après la révolution de 1830, il finit par se détacher de la politique de la monarchie de Juillet. Ses célèbres discours parlementaires des années 1820 furent rassemblés et Guizot mit en lumière le rôle des institutions,

An analysis of the affinities between Raymond Aron and Alexis de Tocqueville published in a collective volume, edited by Jose Colen and Elizabeth Dutartre-Michaut at Presses Universitaires a Vienne & Astier, with a foreword by Pierre Manent.

De 1945 à nos jours, la France a connu deux grands cadres institutionnels dans lesquels se sont façonnés et déployés le système politique et le système de partis, et développées différentes formations politiques. Une nouvelle Constitution est péniblement mise sur pied au lendemain de la deuxième guerre mondiale. Elle instaure la iv e République, marquée par le poids de l'Assemblée nationale.

How did Tocqueville manage to write Democracy in America at such an early age? The chapter seeks to answer this question by examining the intellectual context in which his masterpiece was written. It explores Tocqueville’s intellectual dialogue with members of his generation (T. Jouffroy, Charles de Remusat) or prominent contemporaries such as Chsteaubriand and Lamennais.

In Cambridge Companion to Democracy in America, ed. Richard Boyd, Cambridge UP, 2022, pp. 69-99.

The article explores the question of whether Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a libertarian or a totalitarian and, in the process, hopes to bring some clarity to much of the apparent confusion in the literature on the question. As one of the 18th century social contract theorists emerging from the Enlightenment movement, he was most well-known for his promotion of the general will which advocates contended showed his inclination towards popular and democratic governance. On the other hand, critics point to the absolutist tendency that accompanies membership once an individual consents to be part of the community. This essay explores the terms for each of these tendencies, the context in which Rousseau offered his solutions, and the temperament of the times in which Rousseau lived, including Rousseau's own personal temperament that no doubt affected his dispositions.

La "Philosophie du progrès" è un opuscolo costituito da un Avant-propos e due lettere, che Proudhon redige con l'intento di rispondere alle domande di Romain Cornut (1815 - ?), avvocato e pubblicista francese. "Ciò che domina in tutti i miei studi, ciò che ne fa il principio e la fine, la cima e la base, la ragione, in una parola: ciò che dona la chiave di tutte le mie controversie, di tutte le mie disquisizioni, di tutte le mie deviazioni; ciò che costituisce, infine, la mia originalità come pensatore, se posso attribuirmene alcuna, è che affermo risolutamente, irrevocabilmente, in tutto e per tutto, il Progresso, e che nego, non meno risolutamente, in tutto e per tutto, l'Assoluto": così Proudhon decide di aprire la prima delle due lettere. Lo scopo è quello di tracciare le linee di una scienza che permetta di fare dell'agire storico qualcosa di calcolabile, emancipando l'uomo da ogni azione che sia affidata, nel suo compimento, a qualsivoglia fede. Solo così sarà possibile riformare la società, dal momento che "La teoria del Progresso è il binario della libertà"

The story of French liberalism is, we are often told, one of exceptions, eccentricities, and enigmas. Compared to their British counterparts, French liberals seem more reluctant to embrace individualism. Whereas liberals in the English-speaking world typically espouse what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty”—a sphere of private autonomy from which the state is legally excluded—French liberals have often proved highly accommodating towards “positive
liberty”—that is, liberty insofar as it is tethered to collectively defined ends. A new wave of scholarship seems, however, to be emerging, in which the paradigm of exceptionalism takes a back seat to considerations that, at first glance, would seem to be more conventional and less polemical in their approach to the history of French liberal thought.

This paper suggests that the philosophical contributions of the French democratic theorist Miguel Abensour offer a unique model for the practice of the history of political thought. Under the influence of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theory, Abensour can be seen as applying a method of thinking in constellations to the study of historical texts, the critical rearrangement of conceptual elements drawn from the latter generating new dialectical images that reveal something previously obscured about the object of investigation. The history of political thought on this model is less about the recuperation of a definite textual intelligibility than the revelation of social and political alterity.

: 57-65.] This biography by Marie Fleming is highly recommended as a comprehensive, readable survey of the life and ideas of Reclus. The book is a revised and improved edition of Fleming's earlier The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Elisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism, which was already the best source of information on Reclus in English. While the only other extensive study in English, Dunbar's Elisée Reclus: Historian of Nature is useful for those interested in Reclus as a geographer, Fleming's work is far superior as a presentation of Reclus as a complex human being and a fascinating historical figure. She gives the events of his life a rich context in nineteenth-century European history, in the radical milieu of that period, and, most particularly, in the events and ideas of the anarchist movement of the epoch. Where the work is weakest is in the area of theory. Fleming hardly mentions Reclus' most important work of social theory, L'Homme et la Terre, an impressive six-volume study, and she makes only a few brief references to other theoretical discussions.

ABSTRACT
Inspired by the subtitle of the Italian edition of an essay by David Lyon, I intend to ask the question behind the apparent heterogeneity of contemporary practices of surveillance, we can recognize a 'surveillance philosophy'? A few years ago we used to define these practices in terms of 'disorganized surveillance'. Today, under the pressure of danger ubiquitous, control devices tend to converge in centralized databases. I will argue that this philosophy exists, and its core is the simulation, that is, the systematic anticipation of risky behaviors.

Inspiré par le sous-titre de l'édition italienne d'un essai de David Lyon, je me propose de poser la question: derrière l'apparente hétérogénéité des pratiques contemporaines de surveillance, y-a-t'il une 'philosophie' de la surveillance? Il y a quelques années, on utilisait pour définir ces pratiques les termes de 'surveillance désorganisé'. Aujourd'hui, sous la pression du danger omniprésent, les dispositifs de contrôle ont tendance à converger dans des ordinateurs centralisées. Je soutiens que cette philosophie existe, et son noyau est la simulation, c'est-à-dire l'anticipation systématique des comportements à risque.

I analyze the contemporary notion of a world without preordained principle, ground, or substance and argue that this inversion of the tradition of metaphysical thinking remains parasitic on metaphysics. I show that ontological anarché is firmly oriented around the notion of arché, which entails a process of denial and asceticism by its proponents. In moving beyond the tragic opposition of arché and anarché, I suggest we turn to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy helps to undermine the traditional opposition of something and nothing, arché and anarché, by demonstrating the co-originality of the two together in being-with. I conclude that the proper notion of the modern human community is precisely that its ground or arché is not the ground, principle, or, substance of the premodern era but rather spirit or relationality: the com-of community.

In the latter half of the 1970s, Michel Foucault’s reflection on power eventually led to the emergency of the categories of biopolitics and apparatuses of security. As the article contends, rethinking freedom as an inherent element of power relations became a troublesome issue, particularly concerning the birth of political economy. Foucault attempted to overcome it by analyzing governmentality and introducing the idea of pastoral power. However, some key passages of the 1979 lectures on neo-liberalisms offer the clue to show the potential of Foucault’s intuitions and the necessity of moving beyond the preliminary limits of his frame of thought.

Abstract

Claude Lefort’s work is often cited and appraised for its contribution to the renewal of political philosophy as well as for its significant impact on democratic theory. However, there is one important part of Lefort’s writings that has been neglected by political theorists: the question of interpretation. This article examines the philosophical and political implications of Lefort’s interpretative theory presented in his book Machiavelli in the Making. In analyzing how Lefort understands the central notion of «work of thought» (oeuvre de pensée), the aim is to illustrate the way in which his conception of the work of thought prescribes an art of reading that can be considered as a general theory of interpretation.

Résumé

La pensée de Claude Lefort est généralement associée au renouveau de la philosophie politique et à la réflexion sur le statut de la démocratie moderne. Il est cependant un domaine – auquel une large part de ses écrits est consacrée – qui demeure négligé ou bien se trouve relégué au second plan : celui de l’interprétation. Dans cet article, nous cherchons à répondre à la question suivante : Lefort propose-t-il, notamment dans son ouvrage Le travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel, une méthode de lecture des textes du passé ? Nous défendons l’idée qu’il existe bel et bien un « art de lire » lefortien et que celui-ci trouve son point d’appui dans la redéfinition de la notion centrale d’oeuvre de pensée. L’analyse des « propriétés » de l’oeuvre et des tâches qu’elle assigne au lecteur permet de dévoiler les articulations de la théorie interprétative de Lefort et de montrer de quelle façon celle-ci constitue l’un des fondements de sa pensée du politique.

This essay will explore three aspects of Montaigne’s relationship to the political:  1. What does Montaigne teach us about politics? What kind of guidance does he offer us about good political life?; 2. What type of regime would be most conducive to Montaignes?; 3. What would a regime of Montaignes look like?  This final question contains two particularly interesting aspects: first, whether politics would exist in a world of Montaignes, and secondly, whether a world of Montaignes would be a community in any meaningful sense, or whether it would merely be a collection of independent individuals.

This is a final draft. Please cite only the published  in Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson, Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics: The Betrayal of Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 211-236.

Despite the fact that historians analyze emotions of classical antiquity, the term 'emotion' itself is a rather recent term that appears only in the fifteenth century. The 'invention' of the word 'emotion' is a French one, but it quickly reaches other languages, such as English. At first the word 'emotion' has a political meaning and designates an uprising or a popular rebellion. The present study proposes first to examine the precise context of the formation and appearance of the word 'emotion', which oddly has not attracted systematic study so far. In reality, the investigation of the political origins of the word will prove that the political agitation and upheavals of France at the time are not enough to explain the appearance of the new term. It is indisputable that political realities have their room in the cultural and political context of the invention of the word emotion, but this article will argue that the indispensable and constitutive element to the formation of the word 'emotion' is the imaginary body politic that is profoundly transformed during that is profoundly transformed by Nicole Oresme. This article will demonstrate how and why the body politic image should be considered as the metaphorical cradle of the word 'emotion' that since then has completely lost its political resonance

English abstract (article in French): Although the theorists of the “return of the political” insist on thinking action on its own terms, i.e. in the absence of philosophical groundworks, they often invoke Eurocentric narratives about Western history to justify the critical force of their mode of thought. A first part of this article traces this provincialism of the political in the work of Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis. In a second step, it presents the encounter between Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Johnson Forest tendency around C. L. R. James and Grace Lee Boggs as an occasion to overcome this provincialism, sketching a counter-history that is both shared and divided within the transnational spaces of the Black Atlantic. Finally, a third part stages a dialogue between the “return of the political” and recent contributions in decolonial theory which, inspired by Merleau-Ponty, propose a rethinking of the universal beyond its imbrications with colonial domination

In the mid-20th century the Western world saw crisis of liberalism that resulted in the rise of illiberal ideologies on the political left, in the form of Marxist Communism and on the political right in the forms of Fascism and National Socialism. In response to these developments, a flurry of intellectual activity assessing the nature and depth of the crisis sprang up, searching for ways to sure up the crumbling liberal edifice, or perhaps for the possibilities of some post-liberal order. Many of these thinkers reached back to pre-modern, Medieval and Ancient philosophers and ideas in order to better understand the roots of liberalism-its sources and its nature-and to provide a way to step outside of the milieu of the time by way of comparison. In doing so, they hoped to uncover the source of the problems within liberalism and assess its prospects for the future.

The first two volumes of Avènement de la démocratie (I. La révolution moderne and II. La crise du libéralisme 1880-1914) published in autumn 2007 inaugurate the systematic exposition of Marcel Gauchet's strong theory of democracy understood as a process of historical construction of a society 'departing from religion', namely, in which religion has ceased to be a principle for structuring the social. As a 'political mise en forme of autonomy', democracy requires that historical analysis and theoretical reflection are developed together. The awareness of its own being in history builds an autonomous society. Thus, in order to understand the latter, it is necessary to interpret the work of history, its hidden legacies and illusory aspirations, and how these overlap and oppose each other within social realities.

Les socialistes français, en dépit de leur adhésion active aux politiques néo-libérales prônées au niveau de la communauté européenne, n’ont toujours pas (article écrit en 1991) entrepris de reconstruction de leur doctrine. Bien que le parti socialiste soit "aujourd’hui devant un problème de définition" et qu’il lui faille "assumer en pensée ce qu’il a pratiqué en fait comme socialisme de gouvernement", il n’y a encore en ce domaine que des tentatives et celles-ci ne semblent pas faire l’unanimité. Certains sans doute préfèrent rester dans le flou, y voyant le moyen de garder leur spécificité par rapport aux forces politiques centristes. Tel n’est pas cependant le cas de la "deuxième gauche", courant politique qui a très tôt refusé "la démission intellectuelle de l’ensemble de la gauche" et pensé qu’il était nécessaire d’aborder de front la question du renouveau idéologique afin d’éviter un passage brutal" d’un socialisme doctrinaire et archaïque à une absence à peu près complète de conviction". Pour cette gauche soucieuse d’atténuer "la tension entre une théorie radicale et une pratique opportuniste", il faut sortir de l"’état de schizophrénie idéologique" dans lequel vit désormais le socialisme français, état vécu comme éminemment préjudiciable au fonctionnement politique de la société française. Il est alors nécessaire de trouver la voie de "passage d’une social-démocratie classique à un programme de justice sociale dans le cadre d’un système économique libéral qu’on se refuse désormais à mettre en cause". On a conscience cependant que cette voie est bien étroite vu, d’un côté, "l’épuisement simultané des principales sources de la pensée de gauche" y compris le "républicanisme social qui plonge ses racines dans le jacobinisme", de l’autre, le risque de passer "instantanément de la condamnation radicale du profit, de l’argent, des mécanismes mêmes du marché (...) à une apologie sans réserves du capitalisme classique et du libéralisme simple". L’ajustement de la doctrine à la pratique doit en conséquence passer par la promotion d’une nouvelle philosophie politique suffisamment fine pour concilier une réhabilitation du marché et une doctrine sociale ne se réduisant pas à la justice procédurale des libéraux doctrinaires, pur décalque des mécanismes théoriques du marché concurrentiel. Plus précisément, cette philosophie doit permettre de refonder plus largement le concept d’équité dans une conception de la justice sociale qui reconnaisse explicitement et simultanément les contraintes de marché et le caractère politiquement intolérable de certains de leurs effets sociaux. C’est dans ce contexte qu’est apparu le "rawlsisme à la française". Par cette expression, on entendra ici l’ensemble de ceux qui, politologues, historiens, philosophes, économistes, journalistes, administrateurs et politiciens, pensent trouver dans la "théorie de la justice" de John Rawls des "justifications argumentées" pour relier l’exaltation actuelle des vertus du risque entrepreneurial et le traditionnel attachement de la gauche à la justice sociale. Est rawlsiste dans le contexte français celui qui, considérant que la philosophie politique de Rawls est "la plus rigoureuse et la plus profonde des théories de la justice formulées depuis longtemps", s’active "à introduire cette pensée dans le débat public et à réfléchir sur les pistes qu’elle ouvre" pour résoudre les problèmes de légitimité du néo-libéralisme de gauche.

In a series of texts ranging from the late 1970's to 80's, Etienne Balibar arguably produced some of the richest and most ambitious insights into the question of the epistemological status of politics within the trajectory of Marx and history of Marxism. With its rigor, characteristic of Althusser's influence on the previous generation -(the elements of whose purchase on 'textual production' being most seriously developed and practiced by Macherey's study 1 ) -Balibar occupied a position from which diverse theoretical layers, gaps, contradictions, limitations and determinate possibilities in Marx's changing conception of politics can be assessed.

Maria Neklyudova
“Dead kings must always be judged after their demise”: The
afterlife of an ancient Egyptian custom in THE Russian and
European literature of the 16th TO 19th centuries.

In his Bibliotheca historica, Diodorus Siculus described a peculiar Egyptian custom of judging all the dead (including the pharaohs) before their burial. The Greek historian saw it as a guarantee of Egypt’s prosperity, since the fear of being deprived of the right to burial served as a moral imperative. This story of an Egyptian custom fascinated the early modern authors, from lawyers to novelists, who often retold it in their own manner. Their interpretations varied depending on the political context: from the traditional “lesson to sovereigns” to a reassessment of the role of the subject and the duties of the orator. This article traces several intellectual trajectories that show the use and misuse of this Egyptian custom from Montaigne to Bossuet and then to Rousseau–and finally its adaptation by Pushkin and Vyazemsky, who most likely became acquainted with it through the mediation of French literature.