The Citizen, Restricted Individual
 « Above all, » writes Marx in 1844, « we note the fact that the so called rights of man, the droits de l'homme as distinct from the droits du citoyen, are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society, i.e., the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community. » Recalling the definition of liberty in the different Declarations ( « power to do anything which does not harm another » ) [1791 Declaration of the Rights of Man] , he notes : « The limits within which anyone can act without harming someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself. » This right « is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself. [5] » Regarding these famous passages from On the Jewish Question, Lefort writes that Marx doesn't grasp the sense of the historical mutation which is consecrated in the Declarations, and by which « power is assigned limits and right is fully recognised as existing outside power. » In opposition to Marx's communism, and to the notion of the human Community, Lefort makes himself the apologist of separation. « The rights of man », he explains, « appear as those of individuals, individuals appear as so many little independent sovereigns, each reigning over his private world, like so many micro-entities separated off from the social whole. But this representation destroys another : that of a totality which transcends its parts. » Lefort sees the disappearance of transcendence in the disembodiment of the law ( which is no longer incarnated by the king ) and he opposes this happy relativisation, which would have taken hold of social relations, to the Communist project which, for him, would reinstall a society « like a single body », leaving no space for the « indeterminate », for the « uncircumscribable » [ l'« incernable » ] -- in other words : for liberty. Lefort's strong point is that he bases his argument on a reality which is shrugged off too quickly, if not by Marx, at least by vulgar marxism : the presence of democracy at the heart of capitalist social relations. The conception of the individual as a micro-unity, Lefort tells us, « discloses a transversal dimension of social relations, relations of which individuals are the terms but which confer on those individuals their identity, just as much as they are produced by them. For instance, the right of one individual to speak, to write, to print freely implies the right of another to hear, to read, to keep and pass on the material printed. By virtue of the establishment of these relations, a situation is constituted in which expression is encouraged, in which the duality of speaking and hearing in the public sphere is multiplied instead of being frozen in the relation of authority, or being confined in privileged spaces. » It is easy to show the ridiculousness of this idyllic vision, to recall for example that the right of Messrs Hersant, Maxwell or Berlusconi to speak, to write and to print freely presupposes for others only the right 'to swallow their soup and keep silent' - or to read nothing and to distribute a slim little-read magazine. But that doesn't exempt us from seeing what Lefort underlines : the rights of man don't guarantee a mode of being, a purely static human nature, but a mode of acting, an activity which is at the foundation of existing society. Lefort himself assigns a purely mystical concept of right, like an « uncontrollable domain » ( « foyer inmaîtrisable » ), as the origin of this « manner of being in society ». Returning to the fiction of a man without determination, as the editors of the Rights of man had expressed it through their theory of the state of nature, he assures us : « The rights of man reduce right to a basis which, despite its name, is without shape, is given as interior to itself and, for this reason, eludes all power which claims to take hold of it... for the same reason they cannot be assigned to a particular period... and they cannot be circumscribed within society... » In historical reality, from the beginning rights indeed had a « figure », perfectly circumscribed within one society. In his draft of the Declaration, Marat wrote : « As long as nature abundantly offers men enough to feed and clothe themselves, all is well, peace can reign on earth. But when one of them lacks everything, he has the right to snatch from another the superfluity in which he abounds. What am I saying ? he has the right to snatch what is necessary, and rather than perish of hunger, he has the right to cut his throat and devour his palpitating flesh ( ... ) The love of preference which each individual has for himself leads him to sacrifice the whole universe for his happiness : but the rights of man being unlimited, and each man having the same rights, from the right which all individuals have to attack, they all have to defend themselves; free exercise of their rights necessarily results in war and the evils without number which accompany it... It is these frightening evils which men wanted to avoid, when they met in a body. For that purpose, it was therefore necessary that every member of the association engaged to harm the others no more, that he handed over to society his personal vengeance, the care to defend and protect himself; that he renounced the common possession of the products of the earth, to possess a part as his own, and that he sacrificed part of the advantages attached to natural independence in order to enjoy the advantages offered by society. Here we have arrived at the social pact. [6] » This vision of man as an isolated, selfish individual, always ready to murder to satisfy his individual needs doesn't in any way correspond to anthropological and historical data. It is impossible to conceive man at his origin in the form of an isolated individual who would then have to enter into relations with others ! In reality, this aggressive monad, haunted by fear of scarcity resembles nothing of what is known of prehistoric man, but is a fantastical projection of the bourgeois individual in a situation of competition. Notes [5] Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, ( Lawrence & Wishart ), 1975. P. 162. [6] Les déclarations des droits de l'homme de 1979, Textes réunis et présentés par Christine Fauré, Payot, 1988. See also, for example, the draft of Sieyès which conceived citizens as « shareholders of the grand social enterprise ». |