The first consequence that results from this is that ‘the essential notion of democracy is the people and not humanity. If democracy must remain in a political form, then there are only peoples’ democracies and not a democracy of humanity’.16 The second consequence is that the corollary of the equality of the citizens resides in their non-equality with those who are not citizens. ‘Political democracy’, continues Schmitt, ‘cannot rest on the absence of a distinction between all men, but only on the quality of belonging to a particular people, a belonging which can be determined by a diversity of factors — the idea of a common race, a common faith, a common destiny and tradition. The equality that forms part of the very essence of democracy only therefore applies itself to the interior (of a State) and not to the exterior: within the democratic state, all nationals are equal. The consequence of this for the political question and for that of the public right is: whoever is not a citizen has nothing to do with this democratic equality’.17 It is in this sense that ‘democracy as principle of political form opposes itself to the liberal ideas of the individual’s freedom and equality with every other individual. If a democratic State recognised the ultimate consequences of universal human equality in the domain of public life and of public right, it would strip itself of its own substance’.18
It would therefore be a serious error to oppose abstract equality with a simple principle of inequality. Inequality is not the opposite of equality, but its corollary: one only has meaning in relation to the other. The opposite of equality is incommensurable. Moreover, as we can only be equal or unequal within a specified relationship, there is no equal or unequal in a pure sense. A society where only inequality would reign is also unthinkable, and would be as completely unliveable as a society in which there was only equality. Every society contains and can only contain hierarchical relations and egalitarian relations simultaneously, and both are also necessary to its proper functioning. As Julien Freund writes, ‘equality is one of the normal configurations of social relationships, as is hierarchy. Egalitarianism, by contrast, regards the entirety of these relationships under the exclusive or predominant aspect of equality’.19 Freund continues: ‘Egalitarianism is the ideological doctrine that attempts to make believe that there would be a uniform and universal relationship capable of subsuming the diverse relationships of equality which engender a plurality of equalities […] A uniform, exclusive, and universal relationship implies that there would be a uniform point of view that will be the reason for all points of view. Now the idea of a uniform point of view, exclusive and universal, is contradictory to the very notion of a point of view’.20 That which is best in equality is in fact known as reciprocity: mutual assistance, concrete solidarity, a system of giving and receiving.21 Equality and inequality are based in some sort of reciprocity.
*
‘I hold the history of the world and of societies’, writes sociologist Paul Yonnet, ‘to be wholly interpretable according to two broad principles: the principle of equalisation, and that of differentiation (or the tendency towards similitude and the tendency towards variance), and between these two principles, relationships of rebalancing are always established, as well as relationships of compensation (whether true, false, symbolic, or real), and even of consolation’.22 I share this point of view, and it is why I think that, behind the egalitarian rhetoric, it is actually necessary to read something else: the rise of the aspiration towards homogeneity, towards the reabsorption of differences; the rise of what we could call the ideology of the Same.23
The ideology of the Same proceeds from what is common to all men. It proceeds by only taking account of what is common to them and by interpreting them as the Same. In the absence of a precise criteria allowing them to be concretely appreciated, equality is but another name for the Same. The ideology of the Same therefore poses universal human equality as an equality in and of itself, disconnected from any concrete element that would allow us to precisely confirm or deny this equality. It is an ideology allergic to everything which is specific, which interprets all distinction as potentially devaluing, which holds differences as contingent, transitory, inessential, or secondary. Its driving force is the idea of Uniformity.24 Uniformity is that which cannot bear Otherness, and which aims to bring everything back to unity: a uniform God, a uniform civilisation, a uniform way of thinking. The ideology of the Same remains largely dominant today. It is at once the basic norm (in the sense of Kelsen’s Grundnorm) from which all the others proceed, and the sole norm of an era without norms that does not want to know any others.
This ideology is meant to be both descriptive and normative, since it poses a fundamental identification of all men as an established fact and as a desirable and realisable goal — without ever (or rarely) questioning the origin of this disparity between what is already here and the reality to come. It thus seems to proceed from that which is to that which must-be. But in reality, it is on the basis of its own normativity, of its own conception of what should be, that it postulates an imaginary unitary existence, a simple reflection of the mentality which inspires it.
To the degree that it asserts the fundamental identification of individuals, the ideology of the Same naturally clashes with everything that, in concrete life, differentiates them. It must therefore explain that differences are only fundamentally insignificant secondary specifications. Mankind may certainly differ in appearance, but he is nonetheless the same. Essence and existence are thus disjointed, like soul and body, spirit and matter, and even rights (posited from the attributes of ‘human nature’) and duties (which are only exercised within a social relationship in a precise context). Concrete existence is no more than a deceptive covering that prevents us seeing the essential. It follows that the ideology of the Same is not itself unitary in its postulate. Heir to the myth of Plato’s cave as well as to the theological distinction between created and uncreated being, it is of a dualist structure and inspiration, in the sense that it cannot assert the perspective of the Same without basing itself on something exterior to or transcendent of diversity.
In order to eradicate diversity, in order to lead humanity to political and social unity, the ideology of the Same has the most frequent recourse, in its profane formulations, to theories that place the cause of these distinctions that they regard as a transitory evil in the social superstructure: the effects of domination, the influence of education or environment. (We note in passing that the theories in question identify the immediate causes of the state of affairs that they deplore, but do not question the cause of these causes, that is to say, their initial origin, or the reasons why they constantly re-emerge). Evil (fons et origo malorum)25 is thus placed outside of man, as if the exterior was not primarily the product of the interior. In modifying the external causes, the inner being of man can be transformed, or his true ‘nature’ can be made to appear. In order to achieve this, recourse is sometimes had to authoritarian and coercive methods, sometimes to social conditionings or counter-conditionings, sometimes to ‘dialogue’ and the ‘appeal to reason’, without however obtaining better results in one case or another — the failure never being attributed to an error in the original postulates, but to the still-inefficient character of the means employed. The underlying idea is that of a pacified or perfect society, or at least of a society that would become ‘just’ as soon as one could make all the exterior contingencies disappear that impede the advent of Sameness.
The ideology of the Same was first formulated on the theological plane. It appeared in the west with the Christian idea that all men, regardless of their own characteristics, regardless of what the particular context of their own existence might be, are bearers of a soul in equal relationship to God. All men are by nature equal in the dignity of having been created in the image of the one and only God. This is the reason why Christian society, so widespread that it has been able to endure through the ages, develops from the ideal of One collective body (and power). Hence the observation from Hannah Arendt on ‘the mo
notheistic representation of God — of the God from which man is supposed to have been created’: ‘From here, only man can exist, men being only a more or less successful repetition of the Same’.26 The corollary, which has been developed at length by Augustine, is that of a humanity which is fundamentally one, whose components will all be called to evolve in the same direction by realising among them an ever-greater convergence. It is the Christian root of the idea of progress. Brought down to earth, through the slow process of secularisation, this idea will give birth to that of a common reason for all — ‘one and complete in everyone’, Descartes will say — which all mankind participates in by very reason of his humanity. ‘Thanks to the representation of a world history’, adds Hannah Arendt, ‘the multiplicity of mankind is melded into a human individual that we call Humanity’.27
This is not the place to examine the way in which the ideology of the Same has engendered in the midst of western culture all the normative/repressive strategies so well described by Michel Foucault. Recall only that the Nation-State, in the course of its historical trajectory, is less concerned to integrate than to assimilate, that is to say, to reduce differences even more by making global society uniform. This movement has been furthered and accelerated by the Revolution of 1789 which, faithful to the spirit of geometry, imposed the suppression of all intermediary bodies that the Ancien Régime had allowed to subsist. We no longer want to know anything but humanity and, together with this, a citizenry whose function is conceived as participation in the universality of public affairs. Jews become ‘citizens like the others’, women become ‘men like the others’. That which specifies them in particular, belonging to a gender or to a people, is deemed non-existent or is obliged to make itself invisible by confining itself to the private sphere. ‘The form of the One, from the age of heteronomy’, remarks Marcel Gauchet, ‘will command even the most radical versions of autonomy. The ultimate promise with which the future will be charged will be the restoration or establishment of the collective unity […] The driving question of the ideologies, from this angle, may be summarised in the following manner: how to produce the One collective that produced religion by a means other than religion’.28 In effect, the great modern ideologies dream variously of the unification of the world by the market, of a ‘homogenous’ society purged of all ‘foreign’ social negativity, or of a humanity reconciled with itself by having finally come into its own. The political ideal will be the progressive effacement of borders that arbitrarily separate men. We will say: ‘citizens of the world’, as if the ‘world’ was (or could be) a political entity.
But the ideology of the Same has not only cast the theoretical foundations for egalitarianism. It has also permitted colonialism (in the name of the entitlement of those who are further developed along the path of human convergence to make those who lag behind ‘progress’), while inside Nation-States, they legitimise repression against all kinds of supposed deviations from ‘general’ norms. In the modern era, this tendency toward homogeneity has been pushed to the maximum in totalitarian societies by a central power installing itself as the only source of possible legitimacy. In western postmodern societies, the same result has been obtained by the commodification of the world. It is a gentler yet more effective process: the degree of homogeneity of current western societies largely exceeds that of the totalitarian societies of the past century.
The universalist focus, which tends toward unity, is always correlated with individualism, which leads to separation and dissociation. The ideology which aims the most at the unification of the world is thus the very one that engenders the most division. Such is the strongest contradiction of the ideology of the Same. The universalist focus is necessarily linked to individualism, for it can only present humanity as fundamentally one by conceiving it as composed of individual units envisaged as abstractly as possible, that is to say, outside of any context or form of mediation. This is why it aims to make everything that puts a veil between the individual and humanity disappear: popular cultures, intermediary bodies, differentiated ways of life. We see here that difference and division must not be confused. The ideology of the Same extends its grip by destroying differences, but also by destroying that which ordains these differences, the supple structures, themselves differentiated, in which they inhere. By attacking differences that are always organically ordered, it evokes fragmentation and division at the same time. In the absence of an integrating framework, the fever of the One leads to the dissolution of social cohesion.
The rise of individualism, for which the liberals congratulate themselves, has thus engendered by a perfect logic the advent of the welfare-state, which dismays them. The more the communal structures collapse, the more the State will come to take charge of the security of individuals. Conversely, the more it secures them, the more it deprives them ‘of the maintenance of family or communal belongings, which were previously indispensable protections’.29 Dialectical movement and vicious circle: on one hand, the differentiated society defeats itself; on the other, the homogenising state progresses at the same rate as individualism. The more isolated individuals there are, the more the State can treat them uniformly.
Being both concurrent and opposed to each other, the great clash of modern ideologies has further aggravated the divisions and dissociations produced by the spreading of individualism. The paradoxical result has only made them stronger in their ambition: facing the spectre of ‘anarchy’, of ‘social dissolution’, of class struggle, of civil war or social anomie, they have only pleaded with greater force for alignment in the present and levelling in the future. ‘The very ones who assiduously cast into relief the scale and the inexpiable character of the antagonisms that stir the societies of their times’, Marcel Gauchet further notes, ‘do so in order to emphasise by contrast the promise of resolving the contradictions that the future bears. This is typically the case with Marx. The spectacle of the convulsions that tear the present only serve to reinforce the faith and hope in the unity to come’.30 The problem is that the ideology of the Same can only demand the radical exclusion of that which cannot be reduced to the Same. Irreducible alterity becomes the prime enemy, which must be eradicated forever. This is the resort of all the totalitarian ideologies: it must eliminate these ‘excessive men’ who by their very existence are the obstacle to the advent of a homogenous society or a unified world. Whoever speaks in the name of ‘humanity’ inevitably places his adversaries outside humanity.
The conflicting logic of universalism and individualism is not the only contradiction operating in the ideology of the Same. The latter, for example, sometimes argues from the idea of ‘human nature’ — of a ‘human nature’ reconstructed on the basis of its own postulates — and sometimes by asserting that natural determinations are secondary and that man never assumes his humanity better than when he frees himself from these contingent determinations. These two affirmations contradict each other — and the second is equally contradictory in relation to scientist ideology, according to which man can be integrally explained as no more than a natural object, such that ‘there is nothing to know of him that the natural sciences cannot one day unveil’.31
The corollary of abstract equality is the principle of in-difference. The logical consequence is that, if all men have value, all their opinions have value too. From here arises contemporary relativism and the liberal theory of the necessary neutrality of the State for everything at the level of values and finalities (the ‘good life’ in the Aristotelian sense). But this neutrality can only be apparent, for the very fact of choosing to be neutral has nothing neutral about it. What is more, the liberals obviously do not admit that anti-liberal theories can have the same value as liberal theories. And the opinion that all opinions are valid is clearly not prevented from mobilising itself against some opinions, beginning with the statement that all opinions are not valid.32
There is an obvious contradiction between planetary homogenisation and the defence of the cause of
nations, which implies the recognition and the maintenance of their plurality. We cannot defend both the ideal of a unified world and the right of peoples to self-determination, for nothing guarantees that they will determine themselves in the sense of this ideal. Equally, one cannot defend pluralism as the legitimisation and respect for differences while advocating for the equalisation of conditions which will reduce these differences. Finally, and above all, if all men on earth are ‘the same as each other’, what good is it to proclaim the inalienable rights of unique individuals? How can one celebrate both what makes us singularly irreplaceable and what renders us virtually interchangeable? Certainly, we can always dance around it with formulas, such as ‘equality in difference’. But this expression has no meaning: it only refers to an in-different difference. One cannot sustain the right to difference while thinking that the thing that makes people the Same is fundamentally more constitutive of their social identity than that by which they distinguish themselves from each other. Pietro Barcellona has very aptly spoken of the ‘tragedy of equality’ in order to qualify the paradox according to which one could, by resorting to the notion of equality, at once disqualify all forms of hierarchy and guarantee ‘diversity, the unique character of individuals’.
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