THE PROPOSITION OF EQUALIBERTY

I would like to propose some formulations that will help orient us among the presuppositions of a characteristic discussion of the 1980s. At once a subject for specialists and a matter of public debate, this discussion is marked by a tendency to substitute the theme of the relations between ethics and politics for that of the relations between the Political and the social, and perhaps more profoundly to reinscribe the latter within the former. It sees—on the right, but also on the left—the question of revolution give way to that of citizenship, at least insofar as what is at stake at a deeper level is not a reformulation of the question of revolution in terms of citizenship, and thus also civic-mindedness and civility, whether one invokes a renewal of citizenship (going beyond the simple recognition of individual rights) or advances the idea of a "new citizenship."

This is why it is not surprising that a central theme of ongoing debates—quite apart from any coincidental anniversaries—concerns the unfolding and historical impact of the French Revolution, and more specifically its "founding" text, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, the meaning and nature of whose universality are again being questioned. In focusing on this text myself, I am conscious of the double risk of antiquarianism in relation to the interpellations of present history and of Eurocentrism or even Francocentrism that comes with such an approach to the problem of the Political. But even if the question of "the rights of man" were only a mask or a lure, which I do not think it is, it would still be worth the trouble to try to assess the reasons for the gap between their statement in the past and a current democratic problematic. And even if this statement corresponds only to the fictive universalization of a particular society or culture, which I also do not think it does, it would be equally necessary to inquire anew into its reasons, unlike the intellectual movements and currents of social struggle that shaped the idea of "revolution" for us in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I will address, in a more or less elaborated way, four aspects of this question.

First, if it is true that for us the statement or rather the series of statements of 1789 has long since lost the self-evidence it claimed, if it is true that a gap has emerged in many ways between the prerequisites of freedom and those of equality, which were previously inseparably associated, how should we interpret the reasons for this?

Second, how should we interpret the relation between the statement of the Declaration and the specificity of the revolutionary event? Should the collective practice that finds its expression and weapon in this institutional text be thought under the heading of a subject (humanity, civil society, the people, social class), or rather that of a conjuncture and a conjunction of forces? Without there being any question of proposing here an analysis of the character of the revolution of 1789–95, the choice of the second option will lead me to say a few words on the originality of the Declaration's statements in relation to what is commonly considered its ideological "source," the classic theories of natural right.

Third, coming to what is probably the essential point, I will examine the status of the statement and the enunciation of the proposition that, it seems to me, is at the heart of the Declaration and allows us to understand its logic: the proposition that identifies—in extension and then in comprehension—freedom and equality. What interests me above all here is the truth of this proposition, which I will call the proposition of equaliberty, and on this basis the rupture it produces in the Political field. But these are equally the reasons for its instability, the forms in which an incessant division has developed out of what had been produced as a unity of opposites. What follows from this is a system of reference, a topos for classifying and interpreting the different strategies, theoretical as well as Political, that have confronted this dilemma over at least two centuries, and from which in reality we have not escaped.

Fourth and finally, though in an inevitably very allusive way, I would like to at least pose the following question. If it is true that the revolutionary proposition identifying freedom and equality constitutes the incontrovertible and in a certain sense irreversible statement of a Political truth, if it is also true that the inscription of this truth in the very history that produced it is immediately characterized by instability and in a certain sense decline, and if it is true finally that its return in contemporary politics is at least a sign of the demand for a new practical inscription, under what conditions would that inscription be thinkable at the end of the twentieth century? Such a question will have to remain largely open, and no doubt aporetic. At least it will be possible to illuminate the reasons for this by negatively outlining what, in the contradictions of modern politics, has remained silent, and more fundamentally finds itself necessarily repressed in the topos constructed around the Declaration.

FIRST, THEN, WHEREIN LIES the contemporary relevance of the revolutionary statements? I said it a moment ago: in the paradoxical form of an apparently irreducible split between concepts or values that are felt to be equally necessary. No doubt this is a contrario witness to the interdependence of equality and freedom in the form of the periodic return of authoritarian ideologies positing that life in society, or human nature, requires both the imposition of hierarchy and the promotion of individual or even collective in equality. But the permanence of the critique of the rights of man, inaugurated at the beginning of the nineteenth century by counterrevolutionary thought, does not, conversely, make their own consistency self-evident. Contemporary liberalism is not alone in positing that, beyond very strict limits (that have a juridical form), freedom and equality are mutually exclusive. This conviction is widely shared by socialism and more generally by the social progressivism of different minorities at...