[S]trengthened by analysis and description, we must stand ready for unprecedented forms of action that will alternate in a complex strategy the phases of negotiation and consultation and the phases of disruption and open conflict; this very difficult game requires that we have overcome the old schematizations crystallized around the words reform and revolution.
paul ricoeur, “Le conflit: signe de contradiction ou d’unité ?”1
Ricoeur’s hermeneutics stands in solidarity with practical philosophy. It is not meant as ideal theory to be applied to reality, but as constant exchange between existing traditions of thought and the demands of practice. This is certainly true for his reflection on justice. The aspiration to live the good life may find its expression in a general, abstract formula – life with and for others in just institutions – but this aspiration can only be correctly understood as an optative: may it come about that I live with and for others in just institutions! And the optative expresses the aspiration of particular people, to be actualized in specific places, in particular times in history. In other words, justice is not merely theorized a priori, or declared to be in place de facto – justice is still at stake (en jeu) in the complex unfolding of events. Allow me to develop two examples from Ricoeur’s thought to illustrate the last point.
First example: striving for justice, Ricoeur tells us, is a striving for justice mediated or facilitated by just institutions. However the people who strive for such justice are, as socialised and interacting beings, already situated in institutions. Now, the institutional context in which people strive for justice, is not simply just or unjust, but is just to this or that extent (and it may improve or degenerate over time). The more just current institutions are perceived to be, the more people will count on those institutions in their efforts to improve justice; the less just the intuitions are perceived to be, the more people have to take recourse to other means to find justice, while existing institutions become obstructions to the pursuit of a just life. On this end of the spectrum of institutions, the question that arises is thus not simply how to improve the justice of the institutions in which one lives, but how to aspire for justice despite unjust institutions. Moreover, the further institutions fall short of people’s aspiration to live in justice, the more urgent the question becomes of how to aspire to justice without just institutions (of the economy, of the state, etc.). Perhaps we will get our best glimpse of what is at stake in the optative for justice if we focus on the destitute “edge”2 of social co-existence far removed from the relatively well functioning institutions of justice.
Second example: whereas Ricoeur typically speaks of institutions in the plural, most often the state remains the encompassing institutional frame. The state is therefore regularly presented as the prime institution within which one can aspire to live a just life. This does not mean that Ricoeur has a rosy view of the state. For him, the state is a site of conflict (even under democratic constitutions), and it is always marked by a violent residue. Furthermore states are divergent: they differ notably with respect to their constitutional forms and with respect to the quality of justice they can guarantee their citizens. The less just a state is, the more one can expect it to be contested and the more its violent residue may come to the fore, for instance to oppose that contestation. Nevertheless, democratic states – perhaps, especially democratic states – are made for contestation.3 Ricoeur identifies different levels of contestation, corresponding to different levels of perceived injustice. However, the different levels of contestation in democratic states all depend on an institution – namely the democratic ethos – which allows us to engage in disputes in and against the state through discourse. But what happens when we move beyond the sphere of practice of this democratic ethos to the destitute edge of society where people may be excluded from public discourse or where the effect of their participation is strategically neutralized?4 Perhaps we will get our best glimpse of what it means to use democratic forms of contestation, when we can no longer count on their efficacy and when we are therefore compelled to think about recourse to other means, means for which the state makes no institutional provisions, and which may well have to be deployed to advance justice despite the institutions safeguarded by the state.
These two examples show us how Ricoeur’s (later) political philosophy and his hermeneutic anthropology are always moved by the practical stakes of the questions concerning the realization of justice. In this paper I will remain very close to Ricoeur on this point. Exploring Ricoeur’s thoughts on justice, I will confront him with the question of the optative for the good life in just institutions under conditions where such institutions are severely failing and thus obstructing the aspiration for justice. I will approach this question from the position of those who are most tragically on the receiving end of these failures – those who have to cope at the brink of social life. True to a major trend in Critical Theory, I will weave insights from social science into my exploration, since this is a fruitful way of keeping in play the difficulties of prudence in practice.
In the first section of the chapter, I explore the place of conflict and violence in Ricoeur’s work. My focus will be on his political philosophy as framed by his later hermeneutic anthropology. I argue that Ricoeur assigns a major role to conflict in his political thought. But conflict is not always violence, and it is important to see exactly how he demarcates the place of violence in the political.
In the second and third sections, I will pursue my line of enquiry with a detour through labour sociology written in Johannesburg in the last decade or so. This inclusion is motivated in two ways: on the one hand, as stated, the empirical studies will help us retain the practical philosophical thrust that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics calls for; on the other hand, they will help to counterbalance Ricoeur’s strange limitation of reflection on conflict (in the context of a general hermeneutic anthropology) to that in Western modern democracies (more on this demarcation in section 1). It is the silent assumption – still so prevalent in political theory – that one can sufficiently think through something like democracy by focussing on Western examples alone, that I reject. The positive flip-side of my other-than-Western orientation is that it gives me a much better vantage from the miserable edge of social co-existence (which I have shown in my two examples above promise to help us understand Ricoeur’s practical concern with justice well).
Section 2 is devoted to a reflection on “violent democracy.” This will serve as background to introduce the distinction between violence closer to the centres of privilege and violence closer to the precipice of social destitution. In section 3 I explore two ways of pursuing the aim of justice from this “edge”: first, responding to injustice by means of violent action; second, responding by means of contestation, closer to the peaceful possibilities of democracy. In violent democracies it is impossible to understand one without the other. They are both ambiguous attempts at prudential strategies to improve justice where institutions are failing people. Each is defined in relation to the other and for each the other remains a viable alternative. Finally, in section 4, a number of conclusions are drawn regarding the value of this detour for the attestation by capable and suffering humans of their ability to act and to pursue justice. This will also have implications for those whose profession requires thinking about this quest for justice in the second order of theory or philosophy.
1 Conflict and Violence in View of Justice
Conflict is a major concept throughout Ricoeur’s political thought. The salient place of conflict in his thought could be profiled by considering a recurring pattern in his political thought.5 First, with due regard for the factual constitution of politics, he considers political action resolutely from an ethical point of view. Second, this ethical view is split into a positive or constructive side, the aspiration for a good life (i.e. the good), and a negative or critical side, which limits what can rightfully be aspired for (i.e. the right). Third, since there is no theoretical way of resolving the tension between these two ethical dimensions, their conflict has to be arbitrated in practice. Accordingly, by the 1990s Ricoeur’s political philosophy comes to be constructed within three relations of tension: between the good and the right, between “fundamental” ethics and “applied” ethics and between the various social spheres and the political.6 All three of these tensions reflect the fact that struggle and conflict have to be considered an integral part of Ricoeur’s vision of political interaction. Furthermore, to my knowledge, Ricoeur never succumbs to a simple opposition between presumably unethical conflict and conflict-free ethics – ethics is always at stake through the wide range of possible forms of political action of which different kinds of conflict are a part.
The named tensions remain irresolvable on the theoretical level and have to be dealt with by practical, prudential arbitration. But Ricoeur also attempts to reflectively accompany even this passage from the theoretical tensions to their compromise in practice. Arguably the best example of this reflective accompaniment of the question of practice in politics is found in the study on prudence in Oneself as another and a parallel re-articulation in the essay “The fragility of political language.”7 Focussing on the question of prudence in politics, Ricoeur offers his readers a three-tiered schema of increasing depth of conflict. These conflicts range from day-to-day political debates, to debates related to the ultimate ends of government and, finally, to contestations of the legitimacy of the democratic state itself. This typology reflects Ricoeur’s view on political conflict during the last two decades of his work in philosophy.
My reflections in this chapter engage Ricoeur (and also a certain orthodoxy in Ricoeur scholarship)8 with respect to two dimensions of this typology of conflict. (A) On the one hand, Ricoeur demarcates his whole discussion of politics in study 9 of Oneself as another to modern, Western, liberal democracies.9 (B) On the other hand, on all three levels of conflict, his exposition covers only conflict in the form of debate at the expense of other strategies of contestation. One is led to understand that prudence in matters of political conflict can be sufficiently (and perhaps, exhaustively) exercised in debate. This impression is re-enforced when one reads how the levels of prudential contestation are re-thought from the perspective of “the fragility of political language.”10
Both of these demarcations are problematic. (A) Corresponding with the first delimitation, one may simply acknowledge that nothing in the broader set-up of a hermeneutics of the self or anthropology of the acting and suffering human necessitates or justifies this delimitation.11 (B) Corresponding with the one-sided presentation of conflict by means of debate, one might evoke the simple fact of the myriads of contestations of the legitimacy of the state or of parts of it, through violent means.12 These two points overlap in the question of the means of political action that are both strategically effective and prudentially commendable.13 Both the view from the destitute edge of social life in a non-Western context and the possible recourse to violent action help us thematise this point.
This requires some clarification on violence in Ricoeur’s thought. Let us first note that there are many forms of conflict, of which violent conflict is only one set. Since conflict is not necessarily violent, it is possible to write about conflict in politics by side-stepping the question of violence. However, this bracketing is not the rule in Ricoeur’s work, and he certainly was not blind to the continued presence of violence in politics. What better illustration of this fact than the typology of forms of socio-political violence on all scales and in all dimensions of social life, than the pages devoted to an anatomy of war and a physiology of violence in “Non-violent man and his presence to history”?14 Violence retains a place in Ricoeur’s later political thought, up to the last decades of his life. However, his tendency then is to adopt two specific views on violence: the violent residue inherent in all states and the fragility of people exposed to violence.
- (1)The violent residue of the state. The first place Ricoeur explicitly accords to violence is in politics and the institution of the state. This place can simply be read from one of his later articulations of the “political paradox,”15 where Ricoeur attempts to affirm both of two apparently contradictory approaches to politics as articulated respectively by theories of power and by theories of decision: “a reflection on force leads directly to the enigma constituted by the phenomenon of power, whereas a reflection on form, better suited to the concrete rational function of the State, leads to an emphasis on the constitutional aspect characteristic of a State of law.”16 What defines the state, Ricoeur would repeatedly claim (following Eric Weil), is that it is an organisation of collective decision-making and, as rational form, the act by which to reduce the arbitrariness of violence.17 Which violence? The violence of the “grabbers or consolidators of land” and the violence which “in traditional societies, educated people in the ways of modern labour” from which states emerged.18 A residue of this violence remains part of the functioning of the state. In fact, following Max Weber,19 Ricoeur considers the state to be the institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate recourse to physical force within a given territory.20 This legitimate recourse to violence testifies to the fact that the state is not the termination of violence, but a shaping thereof – all states retain a residue of their non-founded violence and authority,21 as can be seen in a variety of phenomena, ranging from the police-force to the power to grant amnesty.22
Therefore, when Ricoeur affirms for decades the paradoxical nature of politics, he argues that (arbitrary) power is “consubstantial to the ‘form’ of the State”23 or again that the political is “an advanced form of rationality” and “an archaic form of irrationality.”24 Sure enough “violence is not the whole of the political [or the state], but its dark side. It implies a constant threat of resurgence, but it is not, in my opinion, constitutive of the state.”25 Note that this is violence committed by the state, despite the rational formation of the state. Correspondingly, already in his first exposition of the political paradox, Ricoeur called for something like an ethics of limited violence, i.e. “the morality of force, of methodological violence, of calculated culpability”26 (as Ricoeur concludes). This is an ethics of the citizens (e.g., in their capacity as labourers and as voters) and of institutions (e.g., the media, the courts of law) to limit the violence of the state. Hence the designation of this efficient ethical action as “techniques or technologies for controlling the State.”27 However, in his later philosophy, Ricoeur would rearticulate the same principle in a much more placid way as “placing domination under the control of the power-in-common.”28
My question will be about the political significance of acts of violence committed by citizens in protest against deficiencies of the state or of other institutions, particularly the economy.
- (2)Suffering under violence. A second place accorded by Ricoeur to violence in his later philosophy is in his discussions of suffering and fragility, in other words, the harm inflicted by violence. An example of this perspective is the 1995 essay, “Autonomy and fragility.”29 Here, the capable human is argued to be fragile and vulnerable, not only because of his/her finitude,30 but because interaction with others holds the possibility of succumbing to the effects of others’ force.31 This negative impact of some people’s actions on that of others, is as multifaceted as the human capabilities of saying, doing, narrating and imputing on which violence infringes. And all of these forms of violence at the hands of others may occur both by face-to-face interaction and by institutional mediations. This wide phenomenology of fragility cautions one not to think too quickly of violence simply in terms of isolated acts of physical violence, but to remain attentive to ways in which such violent actions are interlaced with institutional, historical, symbolic and other forms of violence (which are the echoes of Ricoeur’s physiology of violence in “Non-violent man and his presence to history” in his later work).
However, from this perspective on the vulnerability of human capabilities, violence is implicitly presented as part of a problem, namely the deprivation of autonomy. Surely a hermeneutics of the capable and suffering human requires reflection on the intricate lines of capability and incapability that weave the net of tragedy of action, this tragedy by which some consider themselves compelled to go over to violence?32
Simply attributing naivety to Ricoeur with respect to the reality of political violence should thus be out of the question. However, the combined effect of these two predominant places accorded to violence in his later work amounts to discarding the question of legitimate recourse to violent acts by citizens in democratic politics. Somehow this is understandable if one thinks about the violence of the 20th century and the fate of its victims, and considers in comparison the advantages of social stability in contemporary Western democracies. Besides, major contemporary political philosophers – think of Arendt, Habermas or Rawls – rather support such abstinence.
However, sometimes, though quite rarely and primarily in his earlier work, Ricoeur does concede that recourse to violent means of opposition to the state (i.e., not in cases of wars between countries) may be the only viable option left (as in the citation chosen as epigraph for my chapter). This does not fit well with the decidedly Weberian understanding of legitimate violence as monopolised by the state, prevalent in Ricoeur’s later philosophy. My question in this chapter is about the legitimate or rather ethically justifiable recourse to means of contestation where the state is the adversary or complicit with the adversaries at least to the extent that it is not protecting its citizens against powerful people and institutions. In other words: how can we conceive of the quest for the good life in just institutions, where such institutions are absent or failing, and when the presumed measure of democratic contestation, Ricoeur’s three levels of dispute, have been exhausted?33
By including a discussion of recourse to violent means in the argument of this chapter, I have three objectives. Celebrating intimidation, sabotage, injury and murder is not one of them. First, due attention to the real possibility of recourse to violent contestation opens a larger view on the real range of possibilities of action that exist (or that may not exist) before the final recourse to violence is adopted. The political dimension of a hermeneutics of the capable human cannot avoid this. Second, for the sake of understanding the reasons why people with ethically laudable motives might want to engage in acts of violence, notably where the institutional means of furthering their desire for justice are lacking. A hermeneutic understanding of the quest for justice cannot do without this. Third, under some circumstances, an understanding of the violent option may help us to better understand those options that avoid this avenue. Understanding prudential compromises in practice requires a view on both alternatives.
2 Violent Democracy and the Violence of the Vulnerable
In the preceding discussion, two assumptions regarding political conflicts in Ricoeur’s later philosophy came to light. First, the assumption of efficacy: in democracy all differences can be settled through verbal conflict; second, the assumption of legitimacy: even at the deepest level of dispute, attempts to deal practically with such disputes can draw on wide consent regarding the legitimacy of debate as means of dispute. One of Ricoeur’s most important convictions can be read from these assumptions: the power by which to contest the status quo and to limit domination arises from acting in common,34 but this “commonality” is first of all a matter of language, acting in concert (as Ricoeur affirms, following Arendt).35 This is not to deny that language can succumb to violence (a point Ricoeur affirms repeatedly).36 It means that only through acting in concert can those institutions be instituted which would facilitate the citizenry’s aspiration to live together in justice. In other words: institutions capable of facilitating a life of justice for those who participate in them is the aim of people acting in concert and those institutions depend on the power in common of those who participate in them.
The point I am working towards in this section is to identify a different stance towards institutions: first, of opposing the “justice” claimed to be institutionalized, when such claims are extremely exaggerated or outright false (hence the title of this chapter: “justice despite institutions”); second, of creating ephemeral institutions not as rules by which to participate in justice (following Ricoeur’s definition),37 but merely as means38 by which to oppose injustice. By focussing on this different stance to institutions, I hope to foreground the kind of aspirations for justice that can be better grasped only once we abandon Ricoeur’s two assumptions (as reflected in the subtitle of the chapter).
The best way to achieve this aim is to turn to sociological studies that could widen our scope on people’s political actions and on the kinds of institutions in which they have to act. For the purposes of this chapter I draw on studies on violent democracy, notably in South Africa, which I will present from the perspective of work done by Karl von Holdt (and colleagues) and of which I will render only some key points.
This vantage point is not even that far from Ricoeur’s in his later political philosophy: I will not consider politics outside of democracies or politics in what are sometimes called “democratorships.”39 Presenting another reality of democracy40 places us sufficiently far away from Ricoeur to show how arbitrary and limiting his focus on Western liberal democracies is. Von Holdt’s studies present violent democracy not as something from science fiction, but as a descriptively and analytically valid category. The first gain of examining his work is to demonstrate that, even remaining within theory of democracy, one cannot necessarily count on verbal dispute alone, and therefore one cannot simply assume Weber’s idea of monopoly on legitimate violence in thinking about democratic states. I assume that here too Ricoeur’s motto will hold: explaining more improves understanding.41 My use of sociological studies aims at improving the hermeneutic quality of my reflection on the capable human’s prudential striving for the good life.
The second gain from Van Holdt’s theory is that it helps us to make significant distinctions between two forms of violence that fall outside of the violence demarcated by Weber’s idea of the state’s monopoly on the legitimate recourse to violence in a demarcated territory: intra-elite violence and subaltern violence. I am critical of the phenomenon of intra-elite violence, but this point cannot be thematized here. However, the development of my argument requires the introduction of intra-elite violence and institutional violence as background against which to interpret the phenomenon of subaltern violence. Doing so will help me in reflecting on the aspiration for justice from the destitute edge of social life.
2.1 Violent Democracy: Von Holdt’s Challenge
So let us now travel with Von Holdt42 to South Africa, a choice of case which, I may remind the reader, is not any more arbitrary than the choice to visit France or Great Britain, for instance. In fact, not only was the new democratic state of South Africa at its inception in 1994 hailed the world over as an exemplary constitutional democracy, in some respects, as with regard to gay rights and social rights, its constitution was at that time more progressive than that of many Western democracies. It also fits very well Ricoeur’s schematic understanding of the institution of states: based on a history of violent confrontation, it enjoyed a pacifying transition; now its constitution with its separation of powers and bill of human rights institutes a balance of form and force as described by Ricoeur’s understanding of the “political paradox”43 (discussed above).
In the first decade after democratization, socio-political conflicts in South Africa tended to correspond quite well with the spirit, if not the letter, of Ricoeur’s three levels of democratic conflict: “The period saw a shift towards engagement in electoral politics, parliamentary debate and legislation, and in the institutions of collective-bargaining, land claims, black economic empowerment, and constitutional law.”44 By contrast, recent history has seen an increase in violence of all sorts: violence committed by institutions of the state (the police), inter-elite violence and subaltern-elite violence.45 The question Von Holdt asks as a sociologist is how to understand the “relation between such violent practices and the constitutional democratic order.”46 I follow him in rejecting the ready-made response, of categorically declaring that democracy is the opposite of violent contestation or that the recourse to violence is nothing but a symptom of the failure of democracy.47 To find an alternative understanding of the relation between democracy and violence, let us consider the contemporary situation in South Africa.
Two decades after the dramatic institutional changes, this society is marked by huge inequalities, high levels of joblessness, widespread poverty, failing medical services, dismally performing schools and high rates of crime.48 Insofar as these tendencies reflect a trap out of which the largest portion of society will never be able to escape, one may call this massive institutional violence. However, this is only half of the picture. The tragedy of unequal distribution, and of social participation stabilized by malfunctioning institutions, provokes people to respond. Under such circumstances relations of patronage form – it becomes the very fibre of democratic institutions.49 This means that economic opportunities and political power and influence become objects of dispute in intra-elite conflict. Since the stakes are extremely high (sometimes the difference is as simple as either holding onto political power and an income or returning to a life of poverty), intra-elite conflict boils over into violence (disruption of political meetings, assassinations, abuse of public office, etc.)50 which may be spent inside or outside of the institutions of the state. Associated with this development is the co-option of clients for the interests of the elite in the circuit of violence. All of this happens in a context where the constitution (but also the realities of global trade) imposes significant constraints on the influence that the state can exercise on the economy.51
A detailed examination of these developments brings Von Holdt to the conclusion that in South Africa (and mutatis mutandis in many other countries) violence is not a contingent accident with respect to the institution of a constitutional democracy. Rather, democracy and violence condition each other mutually. Hence he claims that the term “violent democracy” is descriptively and analytically appropriate.52
2.2 Violence Close to the Centres of Privilege and Violence at the “Edge”
One may deplore the constitutive role that violence plays in this society – I do so. However, this is the kind of social setting in which many people aspire for the good life, with and for others in just institutions. It is of no use to simply assert that violence has to be stopped, since this requires setting the social fibre of action aside, an intellectual procedure for which one cannot expect any support from Ricoeur. In order to engage philosophically with this situation, then, we have to work through the terms in which the problem confronts us. Any aspiration to see violence diminish must first deal with it as a reality of social reproduction and of the fibre of some democratic states.
In what follows, I will accentuate Von Holdt’s distinction between intra-elite violence and subaltern violence. In order to better visualise the social dynamics and the personal stakes of these two forms of violence, I will refer to them as violence closer to the centres of privilege and violence at the “edge” (i.e. not as two absolute categories, but as two polar possibilities on a continuum). Although systemic factors contribute to the formation of both of these dimensions of violence in violent democracies, it is safe to assume that those who engage in violence from positions closer to the centres of privilege have greater room to manoeuvre than those who are closer to the edge of society. The latter almost constantly risk, as it were, falling from the edge of social co-existence into that abject, incapacitating and total suffering for which I reserve the name “social death,”53 but have not just yet.54 It is violence at this “edge” that is of interest to me here.
Let me stress again that by turning to violent action I do not intend to compromise the interlacing of political action and the imputation of normativity. Quite the contrary: I am exploring a part of the quest for the good life in just institutions as this quest is practically expressed through complex combinations of abilities to act and prudential calculation, of strategy and ethics. My exploration of violent action is therefore motivated neither by a facile theoretical excitement about revolution (although some allies to my argument may come from revolutionary practice), nor by a belief in the purifying or humanising effect of violence (although I will subscribe to a part of this Fanonian idea in section 4.2). I will argue that one can only take recourse to violence seriously and appropriately respect people who do so, if one considers this recourse as being not inevitable. Not inevitable, in the sense of being the outcome of the work of prudence and the exertion of capabilities, in short, as an option of practice next to other options.
3 Two Ambiguous Strategies to Further the Good Life in Violent Democracies
There is no better way to confront the intensity and complexity – the uncertainty – of life at the edge of violent democracies than to begin with case studies. When, in The course of recognition, Ricoeur wanted to demonstrate how the clearly distinguishable categories of exchanging gifts and exchanging merchandise may be enmeshed in everyday practice, he turned to historiography (that of Natalie Zemon Davis).55 What I attempt to do with the two chosen cases is nothing different: a view on the extremely complex practical situations of violent democracy, will help us gain insight into the distressful decision – which is a distressful indecision56 – of adopting a course of action. In this I follow Ricoeur partially in claiming that “This limit-situation [situation-limite], by which ethics splits into two ethics of distress, is undoubtedly not a constant situation, nor even a lasting or frequent one. But like all extreme things, it throws light on the average, normal situations.”57 However, unlike Ricoeur I do not speak about ethics of conviction and ethics of principle as forms of ethics of distress. And in the following cases violent democracy and the background of neo-liberal politics – the context of distress – are not only durable, but have been normalised. At the edge of violent democracy ethics of distress is often the only form of ethical option left.
3.1 The Ambiguities of Violence at the “Edge”
Labour sociologist, David Dickinson studied the following case.58 In the year 2000 the state-owned postal service, the South African Post Office, embarked on a new strategic organisation of its labour force, in particular its mode of employment. Up to that date, all employees were directly in the service of the Post Office, received their salary from the Post Office, could bargain for wage increases with the Post Office and, if need be, engage in labour action against the Post Office. Then, all positions on the lower levels were frozen and henceforth occupied by labourers provided by so-called labour brokers. These placement agencies were less subject to the constraints of labour rights, and consequently turned out to be more than able to provide the Post Office with a sufficient number of labourers, while reducing the income of these labourers. A decade of this practice revealed the outrageous injustice of this system when labour-broker labourers received a 50% smaller wage than their Post Office colleagues for exactly the same work; at the same time it was practically impossible to oppose this system without being summarily laid off.
But now, is South Africa not a constitutional democracy, with labour rights and institutions charged with protecting and fighting for these rights? It turned out that the labour-broker labourers tried every possible means to further their legitimate cause: labour action (where possible), labour courts, political parties, etc. To no avail. And this is the point: people who were systematically subjected to the violence of exploitation explored all peaceful means and exhausted all institutional possibilities, ultimately all in vain.
In the five months running up to April 2012, a group of these workers, the Mabarete, embarked on a number of protest initiatives, which continued even after they were laid off. Their initiatives included mobilizations of former colleagues, intimidation and harassment of postal workers who did deliveries (typically in townships and not in richer suburbs) and finally “home visits” which included threats to incumbents or relatives of incumbents of the labour broker, the trade unions or the Post Office. It was this combination of active obstruction of the work of the Post Office and drawing the personal life of incumbents into labour disputes that finally moved the Post Office to reconsider its labour practices.
In my view, Dickenson captures the nexus of strategic and normative considerations involved in this case when he explains: “these tactics involved the use or threat of violence. This did not sit comfortably with the Mabarete leadership, but they saw no other option and this form of pressure was only applied after exhausting available legal channels. Given this context, blanket condemnation of violence as an instrument of struggle is likely to cut little ice.”59
If we now resume our role as political philosophers and hermeneuticists of the capable human, after having read Dickenson against the backdrop of Von Holdt’s exposition on violent democracy, how are we to think about recourse to violence at the edge of violent democracies? First, studies such as Dickenson’s show that strategies that resort to violence may really be effective.60 However, it seems fair to speculate that they are not necessarily always so; they might also be ineffective. Likewise, where this violence was limited, it could also have been increased with the hope of being more efficient, sooner.
Second, although I emphasise the recourse to violent means and strategies in order to engage Ricoeur, it would be an error to think of such strategies as devoid of discursive reason. In fact, in some cases such strategies are similar to community protest movements described elsewhere by Von Holdt, of which he says that they “are not inchoate mobs, but are characterised by an explicit discourse about human and democratic rights and constitute an insurgent citizenship struggle against the differentiation of citizenship rights.”61 In Ricoeurian parlance, they are attempts to realise people’s aspiration to live in just institutions. Therefore, they cannot be reduced to the violent means of action. Yet, this point should not be exaggerated, because of the recurrent use of intimidation by protesters to mobilize others to collaborate in their protests. The extremes of mob-violence and mob-justice therefore fall outside of the difficult combination of prudence and forceful means, since it leaves no, or hardly any, room for the discursive moment.62 On the other hand, such recourse to violent strategies cannot be reduced to discursive reason either, in fact, they are as many ways to combine discursive claims to legitimacy with the ultimate recourse to violence. As such, these movements represent a fragmentation and pluralization of the legitimate recourse to violence within the state – against the Weberian idea of a monopoly of such legitimacy63 (this point will be developed further in section 4.3).
Third, affirming the penetrability of violent initiatives by discursive, normative considerations, does not cancel its tragic ambiguity. Again I follow Von Holdt’s caution: “these insurgencies do not constitute an unproblematic notion of expanded citizenship. They have a darker side too, reproducing patriarchal prejudices, xenophobic exclusion, and the use of violence in political and social disputes and to buttress local power – practices which corrode, undermine and restrict the basis of citizenship. Community protests, collective violence and the associational practices that underlie them are ambiguous and contradictory in their implications for citizenship and democracy.”64 Furthermore, some such forms of social contestation are also systemically bound up with violence closer to the centres of social privilege. There can thus be no question of investing messianic hope in courses of violent action initiated under the extremely demanding conditions of life close to the precipice of destitution. Ricoeur’s warning applies: “a freedom that does not become institutionalized is potentially terrorist,”65 provided that we concede that this potential for “terrorism” does not reside primarily in the recourse to violent means, but in the attempt to impose one’s understanding of justice on society despite or at the expense of institutional means of finding justice.66 That is, by the way, why “terrorism” is such an ambiguous phenomenon.67
However, fourth, one should not draw overly simplistic conclusions about the non-institutional character of such contestations. On the one hand, the fact that some social movements of labour protest bind people together for a limited time, around a limited set of objectives, based on only a few shared values, does not mean that there is no institution. Small, ephemeral institutions are still institutions.68 On the other hand, one should be careful to distinguish between the institutions one may aspire to live in because they facilitate one’s striving for justice (and in that sense are provisional ends of our action) and institutions that are instituted as a means by which to achieve the former.
Five, whatever the kinds of institution under consideration, one does well to view institutions too as ambiguous phenomena, because they are constituted in a paradoxical way: whereas institutions are essential to enable individuals to live out their human abilities, they can have this augmenting effect on action only by sometimes obstructing some forms of action or even by being perpetuated at some expense to people.69 This is of great importance for my argument: institutions are the outcome of collective action and in turn condition action (even if actions of a relatively small group of people and only for a short time), but they are always the outcome of action compositions. Whenever we consider an institution in a personified way, its actions have to be considered as a (more or less failed or successful) combination of strategic objectives (means) and normative aspirations (ethics and morality). The valid distinction between these two dimensions (means and ethics/morality) should not seduce us to separate them – in prudent action instrumental and normative dimensions are interwoven and mutually conditioning.70 No theory of social protest, political contestation or civil disobedience can circumvent this point. With these reflections penned, we can move to the second case study.
3.2 The Ambiguities of Refraining from Violence at the “Edge”
In Grounding globalization. Labour in the age of insecurity, Edward Webster, Rob Lambert and Andries Bezuidenhout71 studied the effect that increasing global neo-liberal pressures of competition for share-holder value and decreasing employment security have had on the work and private lives of people in three very different localities in South Korea, Australia and South Africa. They carefully document the devastating fragilization of people’s financial position, the undermining of their social agency and the heavy burden on household life. Especially in the South African case (on which I will mostly focus), the situation is comparable to the life-world realities of the labourers studied by Dickenson in the previous section. The interest of their study for my argument is the wide variety of responses from the people involved and the divergent outcomes they document.
On the one hand they report on varieties of defeat: adaptation to market pressures, retreat into the household, fatalism, migration, etc.72 Although each of these require new action initiatives, they all represent some sort of defeat, since they represent as many instances of an unwilling acceptance of decrease in the good life. These findings can also be translated into a register of the hermeneutics of the capable and suffering human by extensions to Oneself as another like “Autonomy and fragility” (discussed in section 1.2, above).
On the other hand, the authors also document how, in all three cases, some people embarked on experiments in mobilization against the new tendencies in labour management. These experiments vary between imposing new conditions for their support of old political parties, creating community-based support organizations, activism to open local government’s budget for public debate, forming international labour alliances, forming coalitions with ngo’s or protest groups from civil society, etc.73 The authors identify as especially promising the “emergence of transnational activism” and demonstrate in chapter 9 “how labour has begun to work space through engaging scale from the local to the nation-state to the global level. We identify the emergence of new sources of workers’ bargaining power – what we call moral or symbolic power – where unions and community activists have begun to mobilize around the discourse of global justice, faire trade, fair employment and, in the case of South Africa, access to anti-retroviral drugs in the treatment of the aids pandemic. Various new initiatives are currently underway in which logistical power is being carefully and strategically evaluated.”74 Yet a lot of what they get excited about remains in the extension of current experiments,75 while the initiatives they document have resulted in some alleviation of people’s fate, without radical change.
What instruction can the hermeneuticist of the capable human draw from these varied findings? First, the strategies of coping with trying circumstances are – as elsewhere in human life – the outcome of prudential trade-offs of conflicting demands on practice. Correspondingly, each of these actions remains open to our assessment as to its strategic and normative appropriateness.
Second, since this is the case, one cannot declare the avoidance of violent means good without qualification. As commendable as it is for not generating more injuries and deaths, it comes at a price: sacrifice of family life, internalisation of systemic violence, inability to oppose an unjust status quo – in short, considerable sacrifice of the desire for the good life. Ricoeur’s caution from another context may therefore apply here: “Everything happens as if mutual tolerance between people of the word were surreptitiously transformed into tolerance towards states of violence, intolerance towards acts of violence.”76 The rejection of violence does not settle the question of ethics; it represents only one kind of response to injustice and requires assessment as much as violent strategies do. However, one has to be very careful here, since internalization and defeatism are also marks of life beyond the “edge,” where desperation has done its work of reducing agency to almost nothing. Under such circumstances moral assessment from the outside is at best inappropriate, at worst a continuation of structural violence by other means. This fate of social death lies beyond the scope of this chapter.
Third, on the positive side, in as far as the alternative strategies result in positive outcomes, they point to the avoidability of violence without loss of effectiveness. As oppressive and desperate as circumstances may become, they do not thereby automatically make the recourse to violence inevitable. Declaring that “there was no other option,” very often expresses the hopelessness of the situation, but it should not be taken as a claim about real determinism. And in as far as the recourse to violence is avoidable, one may conclude that when it occurs, it is the outcome of a decision, hence strategically and normatively assessable. This decisive point has to be nuanced: it does not mean that there is always an effective, workable alternative to violence; it means that when people embark on a course of violent initiative, they cannot simply be said to be somehow determined by socio-political pressures. Relinquishment and retreat are as much options as outright, ruthless violence. Decision and assessment are what make it human action – and what continue to call for judgement even at the brink of social reality. Again, where people are pushed beyond the edge of destitution into social death, such assessment may well be obscene.
Fourth, the study of the three sociologists demonstrates that institutionalisation, even when provisional and fluid, tends to increase the efficiency of contestation. Hence the instrumental view of such institutions is affirmed. At the same time, the less effective the non-violent means of contestation are, the greater the need for experimentation with new strategies. The three authors’ enthusiasm for “moral or symbolic power” speaks to this point. However, on the road of further experimentation one discovers that the less-violent strategies are not necessarily the exact opposite of the violent options: for instance the recourse to “logistic power” (as in the citation above) which means obstructing the manufacturing process at the factory or blocking public roads,77 is an inch away from intimidation or sabotage.
Fifth, I spent more time exploring the violent option than its non-violent counterpart. This is because the less-violent one corresponds more closely with the forms of discursive contestation already theorized by Ricoeur (as discussed above, section 1). However, the similarity between discursive contestation in the Ricoeurian sense and forms of non-violent protest and local politics described by Webster, Lambert & Bezuidenhout should not be exaggerated. The latter can only be understood as potentially viable or commendable ways of pursuing the good life when the backdrop of violent democracy is born in mind, since the meaning of such strategies depends on this specific context. Furthermore, such non-violent options may still open to violent options in the future, or may for strategic ends be combined with violent strategies. Whatever the case may be, it is decisive to see these non-violent options (and I think here only about the strategically successful ones) are always non-violent options in relation to violent ones. In other words, they are not non-violent because violent options have been defined or demarcated away a priori, but because violent options remain actional alternatives.
This is my point: the violent and non-violent options of composing strategic and normative requirements of social contestation remain horizons of the intelligibility of each other within a context of violent democracy. This is not really a happy ending. In fact, it is not an ending at all, but rather a beginning: the point of departure of all (in)decision about ethical dilemmas in politics, at least in states similar to South Africa. And here, all depends on people’s attestation to their degree of capability under varying depths of tragic circumstances.
4 Conclusion: Attestation of Prudence at the “Edge”
When Adorno declared that “there is no right life in false life,”78 he articulated the desperation of those who would like to do what is right or good, but know one’s action to be decisively bound up by unjust societal conditions that co-determine the meaning of even one’s best-intentioned initiatives. In this chapter I contemplated this problem by means of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the capable human, a philosophy that considers ethical decision making to be a context-bound act. I have zoomed in on a dramatic current case: acting from the “edge” of violent democracies where people are not yet socially dead, but where the optative for the good life has to be pursued despite the pressures of political and economic institutions. In as far as we consider the political dimension of this situation, the capable and suffering human’s ability to take prudent action – i.e. action which is both effective and a fair compromise between ethics and morality – is tested to the extreme. Can one effectively and ethically oppose a structurally violent social order from the edge?
4.1 Conflictual Ethics: Composing Action as Prudent “Relative to Us”
Early in this chapter I presented Ricoeur’s view on ethics as essentially conflictual. For him, ethics is not the avoidance of conflict, tension, struggle or compromise for the sake of peace or principle. Ethics is about striving for a good life with and for others in just institutions by prudentially working one’s way through these tensions in practice. Understandingly therefore, Ricoeur opens the chapter on prudence in Oneself as another with a meditation on tragedy. Sophocles taught Ricoeur to consider Antigone and Creon as tragic agents because they aspire to do good. They enact the extreme possibilities of tragedy that often befall people in their everyday life circumstances. Antigone and Creon are tragic in their attempts to avoid the prudent negotiation, the compromise, between conflicting valid normative claims. Their first imprudence consists in absolutizing their respective positions (morality and ethics) and thus not even seeing the valid side of the other’s point of view. Their second imprudence resides in not being aware of the contradictions in their own view.79
When, in the framework of a general hermeneutic anthropology, Ricoeur limited his view on prudence in politics to Western liberal democracies, he exposed himself unwittingly to such a one-sidedness. This is evidenced most strikingly by his omission of violence as means by which to prudently pursue the good life under certain circumstances. It is of no use to say that this is but a demarcation of his argument, justified by his objective of a hermeneutics of attestation,80 since it is exactly by revoking this unjustifiable limitation to the easiest case of political constitution (Western democracy) and the least dramatic of prudential possibilities (those where recourse to violence is evidently out of the question), that we gain a more sophisticated view on prudential action under tragic circumstances. I opposed this tendency in Ricoeur’s later work, one could say, by doing something similar to what he did with Antigone and Creon: drawing from the work of Johannesburg labour sociologists, I offered two views on the pursuit of the good life from the brink of social desolation.81 Both have their merits, but neither can lay claim to being the solution to all similar situations. It is the tension between the two that guides us right into the intricacies of prudential (in)decision. In these two cases the tension of prudence between ethics and morality is at stake, but they represent something more: they stand for two divergent positions on a continuum of ways to articulate the actional requirements of strategic efficacy and prudential excellence. In short, when unjust circumstances confront people at the “edge” with a practical doubt (soupçon) of their ability to act, only the context-bound, practical compromise between different requirements serves as attestation of the ability to act – we are at the core of Ricoeur’s concern in Oneself as another.
I have concluded above that the two approaches to initiative from the “edge” each form a horizon of intelligibility for the other. Those who hesitate about the course of action may well contemplate (a) the problems when one of these is absolutized – violent escalation, or defeatist adaptation or interiorisation; (b) the internal contradictions of each strategy (visible each time in their divergent outcomes). This is the work of prudence. It has to find the difficult compromises that would maximally avoid these extremes, in ways depending on the contingencies of the context. The optative for the good life requires compromises, and compromises mean rejecting the logic of yes/no, all/nothing, to embrace the conflicting valid claims to varying degrees.82 The degree of ethics or morality, of effectiveness or prudence, of violence committed against others or self-sacrifice depends on people’s assessment of the degree of injustice suffered and the degree of their own capabilities. By developing this point, I have highlighted a major Aristotelian thrust inherent in Ricoeur’s ethics, namely that the practice of virtue is always “relative to us” (pros hémas),83 i.e. it is a matter of practical hermeneutics.84 The tensions involved in this ethical dilemma remain unresolvable in theory; the ultimate response to the question “what then shall we do?” is to be given in practice. Even under extremely trying circumstances both the strategic and normative dimensions of action composition are open to incremental variation: a little bit more peace, a little more force, a bit more patience – but each time with its own difficulties. The point remains attestation of the ability to be responsible: to act and to impute.
4.2 Attestation, Action, Self-confidence
The self-attestation, that happens when agents impute actions to themselves in difficult cases of prudential decision-making, goes to the heart of a hermeneutic anthropology and therefore also has importance for sociology and political theory, in particular for protest theory. Nowhere is this more patent than in the urgent affirmation of the practical ability to deal with dilemmas by impacting on events to this or that degree, by deploying these or those means and by engaging in this or that prudent compromise. The dramatic intensity of recognizing oneself as able or unable to act, can be felt on one’s own body; the consequences of both good and rash decision-making get inscribed in the proximate social environment. Each time the fact of acting, and of acting ethically, serves as attestation to one’s being more than a suffering being, to one’s ability to act. But this attestation is always a weak epistemic confirmation of the degree to which one can recognize oneself as able to act, because the affirmation is always mixed with doubt (to a degree inverse to the strength of affirmation in the attestation). This is why successful action is so significant in augmenting people’s self-confidence to intervene in their own fate – as has been theorized for the political context by Fanon85 and many others, including Von Holdt86 and arguably Ricoeur.87
In such contexts where compromise is called for, there are only not-nice solutions;88 however, we have seen that the agents in question do not therefore consider it indifferent what course of action they choose. Often those who are the closest to the “edge,” those who live under the severest constraints, have the most difficult questions of “dirty hands” to answer – issues about which life in the middle class, despite its own concerns and worries, could remain unaware or at least respond to with less urgency. Therefore, the mere perspective of “putting one’s hand on the wheel of history,”89 of the possible outcomes of one’s action, like causing or tolerating the other’s suffering, may generate a doubt that would undermine the self-confidence in one’s ability to intervene in social reality. On the other hand, what more dramatic instance of attestation and imputation than the realization that even as a victim of structural violence one can engage in a legitimate contestation turning others into victims of one’s own initiative?
Approaching the question of recourse to violence from the perspective of attestation in a context of structural violence thus helps us to avoid two opposite pitfalls. On the one hand we avoid demonizing the agents. If we don’t accord violence due attention, we may miss the desperation and hopelessness of people’s situation and require the exceptional from people who are already tried to the utmost. This applies equally to those who finally decide against violent action. On the other hand, we avoid an exonerating determinism. Living at the “edge” is not yet social death. The people concerned understand themselves not only as able to make ethical decisions and see dilemmas, but as concerned by the practical and ethical dilemmas even when they know what their own interests are. The hermeneutics of their fragile abilities help to describe the position of agents at the edge, however without de-humanizing such people, and to recognize their exceptional efforts and initiatives when we encounter it.
4.3 Justice Despite Institutions
By contemplating the recourse to violent means, we have not abandoned the theme of democracy or of the broader quest for justice, in favour of some vague turn to irrational, erratic or capricious human action. Quite the contrary: we are concerned here with the continued attempt to pursue justice, but under the circumstances of very reduced capability and extremely advanced tragedy, typical of life at the edge of social co-existence. Here the optative for a life of justice has to be realized despite the failing of institutions to which people might otherwise appeal or that they might otherwise attempt to reform by the means typically attributed to democratic interaction, namely debate. Three important findings result from this.
First, while thinking about justice for which the state (if not the global order) is the ultimate frame, we got a view on the formation of (sometimes) short-lived, micro institutions that are instituted as means by which to further justice, not as institutions through which to live out justice. My point is not the dream of “liberty without institutions,”90 but the dream of liberty as it has to be pursued under conditions where the institutions do not facilitate but rather obstruct the exercise of liberty. Under such circumstances, at best this optative can be supported by temporary institutions of protest. There is a definite risk involved in side-stepping the existing institutions of justice, namely the illusion of righteousness without the need to think about means of action or the illusion of equating the interests of a small group with justice for the whole of society (what I have referred to above as “terrorism”).
Second, of course Max Weber knew about intermediary institutions – a big part of his “Politics as a vocation” consists in describing the social mechanisms by which people attempt to gain access to the power of the state.91 However, the ultimate horizon of his understanding of politics in journalism, political parties, trade unions etc. is the question of getting a share in the power of the state defined as the entity which can successfully claim a monopoly on the legitimate recourse to violence. By contrast, in violent democracies the institutionalization of inequalities and the system of patronage undermines the legitimacy of the state’s coercive power; at the same time the violent action of protests from the “edge” fragments the monopoly on this legitimate claim, due to the de facto consent such protests draw from sections of the society. Consequently (even following Weber’s understanding of the embeddedness of responsibility in socio-political reality) responsibility becomes contingent on the realities of intersecting forms of violence and their contradictory claims to legality or legitimacy. In this sense, as we have seen Von Holdt claims, violence and democracy condition each other.
Third, perhaps unexpectedly, but exactly because one cannot deny the ethical fibre of these violent initiatives from the “edge,” and despite the fact that such initiatives may draw our sympathy, we cannot abandon the question of how to evaluate such initiatives, strategically and normatively. Even at the brink of social desolation there is no unconditional or a priori legitimacy. Legitimacy is always qualified: legitimate with respect to the reasonableness of its means, context, amount, extent, etc., in short, legitimacy is determined through prudent judgement. Without some form of prudential consent, legitimation is in fact arbitrary. Taking recourse to violence seriously as moral initiative implies keeping open the strategic and normative assessment thereof.92 Thus, even when we as academics agree with the concerns of the violent at the “edge,” we cannot therefore abolish the question of assessment. This question has only become more complex.93 Respecting precarious and destitute agents as agents of ethics, does not exempt them from responding (even in principle) to concerns. What they have to answer for sometimes includes their compromises that strengthen ties of elite violence, excesses of xenophobia or harassment, and incalculable consequences (as presented in section 2). One has therefore to assume a real ethics of turning to violence (and mutatis mutandis resisting or postponing to do so). Of such an ethics of progressive entry into violence – which is also an ethic of postponing total recourse to maximal violence – the young Mandela gave us a viable idea in his Rivonia speech.94
4.4 Epilogue
Two general observations may be added in conclusion to open a view to further work. Firstly, although I have adopted a geo-politically de-centred view on attestation compared to the versions bequeathed to us by Ricoeur, my point is not to establish a new centre. Again I follow Von Holdt in claiming that the questions of violent democracy are, and may become increasingly part of the West, where the progressive undermining of the institutionalized social support network may stimulate people’s thoughts on the array of means available for understanding their situation and for understanding themselves as agents of justice.
Finally, what I have not developed in this essay, but acknowledged all along, is the significance of Ricoeur’s earlier socio-political thought, that part of his work where he contemplated more openly the ethics of limited violence, “the morality of force, of methodological violence, of calculated culpability.”95 My suggestions is that if Ricoeur’s later hermeneutic anthropology could serve as a social scientific framework by which to interpret many of the issues involved, it could do so much better when many of the insights of his earlier socio-political thought are integrated into his later hermeneutics.
In Contributions et conflits: naissance d’une société, Chronique sociale de France, 1971, 189–204, citation p. 204 : “fort de l’analyse et de la description, nous devons nous tenir prêts pour des formes d’action inédites faisant alterner dans une stratégie complexe les phases de négociation et de concertation et les phases de rupture et de conflit ouvert; ce jeu très difficile demande qu’on ait dépassé les schématisations anciennes cristallisées autour des mots réforme et révolution.” (Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own).
The polysemic term “edge” of which I will deploy only one aspect in this chapter, is inspired by Johan Snyman, “Filosofie op die rand”, Koers 62, no. 3 (1997): 277–306.
On this point Ricoeur follows Lefort, cf. Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 303 / Oneself as another, trans. K. Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 260. The same point is made in Ricoeur, “Langage politique et rhétorique” [1990], in Lectures 1. Autour du politique (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 161–175, here 166–167, 174.
Axel Honneth’s formulation of this problem is still valuable: “Moralbewusβtsein und soziale Klassenherrschaft. Einige Schwierigkeiten in der Analyse normativer Handlungspotentiale” [1981], in Die zerrissene Welt des Sozialen (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 182–200, especially 191–193.
In a previous study, I have presented this pattern by covering examples from the 1940s until the end of his life. Cf. Ernst Wolff, “Responsibility to struggle – responsibility for peace. Course of recognition and a recurrent pattern in Ricoeur’s political thought,” in Philosophy & Social Criticism 41, no. 8 (2015): 771–790, especially 776.
Apart from the texts that will be discussed here, these tensions can be found for instance in Paul Ricoeur, “From the moral to the ethical and to ethics,” in Reflections on the just, trans. D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 45–57 / “De la morale à l’éthique et aux éthiques,” in Le juste II (Paris: Esprit, 2001), 55–68 and “The plurality of instances of justice,” in The just, trans. D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 76–93 / “La pluralité des instances de justice,” in Le juste I (Paris: Esprit, 1995), 121–142.
Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre, 298–305 / Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as another, 256–262. Paul Ricoeur, “The fragility of political language,” Philosophy Today, 31, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 35–44 / Ricoeur, “Langage politique et rhétorique,” cited above.
My point is not to engage with any of his commentators in particular, but to debate with Ricoeur and to attempt a reactivation of neglected potential in his thought.
Ricoeur, Oneself as another, 255, 257, 289. When, in a footnote, Ricoeur states: “One would have to consider in this connection sociological studies on the existence of a political bond without a state, found in certain societies still in existence.” (Oneself as another, 257n28), he has pre-modern societies in mind.
Ricoeur, “The fragility of political language.”
In the fourth section of this chapter I will argue that this demarcation narrows both the political scope of Ricoeur’s later thought and the value that conflict has for the context I refer to here, namely attestation of one’s abilities through acts of prudential conflict.
In sections two and three of this chapter, I will demonstrate that thinking through politics, even democratic politics, requires reflection on violence.
In politics, a course of action can be prudentially commendable only when it reflects a reasonable trade-off between ethical and moral considerations and if it meets either of two further conditions: (1) either it has to be strategically or instrumentally effective, or (2) it has to be symbolically meaningful. Having explored the question of the articulation between political prudence and symbolics (see my forthcoming essay on “Acts of violence as political competence? From Ricoeur to Mandela and back”), in this chapter the focus will be only on the articulation between prudence and strategic efficacy.
Paul Ricoeur, “L’homme non-violent” [1949], Histoire et vérité. (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 265–277, especially 267–270 / “Non-violent man and his presence to history,” History and truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965) 223–233, especially 225–227.
The initial version is Ricoeur’s essay of 1957, “Le paradoxe politique,” Histoire et vérité, pp. 294–321 /“The political paradox,” History and truth, pp. 247–270. I have discussed that essay in “Ricoeur’s contribution to a notion of political responsibility for a globalised world,” in Ernst Wolff, Political responsibility for a globalised world. After Levinas’s humanism (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), 221–266, especially 222–233. The evolution of the “political paradox” in Ricoeur’s work has been studied in detail by Pierre-Olivier Monteil, in Ricoeur politique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013).
“une réflexion sur la force conduit directement à l’énigme que constitue le phénomène du pouvoir, tandis qu’une réflexion sur la forme, plus appropriée à la fonction rationnelle concrète de l’Etat, amène à mettre l’accent sur l’aspect constitutionnel caractéristique d’un Etat de droit.” Paul Ricoeur, “Ethique et politique” [1985], Du texte à l’action, (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 433–448, citation 440 / “ Ethics and politics,” From text to action. Essays in hermeneutics II, trans. K. Blamey & J.B. Thompson (London: Athlone Press, 1991). 325–338, citation, 331 (my emphasis).
See already “La ‘philosophie politique’ d’Eric Weil” [1957], Lectures 1, 95–114, citation 106.
The original reads: “Tous les États modernes sont issus de la violence des rassembleurs de terres; c’est la même violence qui, dans les sociétés traditionnelles, a éduqué l’homme au travail moderne.” Ricoeur, “Ethique et politique,” 441–442 (education to labour is meant ironically) / Ricoeur, “Ethics and politics,” 332 (translation modified).
E.g. Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on ideology and utopia, ed. Georg H. Taylor (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1986), 199; Paul Ricoeur, “Herméneutique et critique des idéologies,” in Du texte à l’action, 367–416, here 378–379/ Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the critique of ideology,” in From text to action, 270–303, here 278; Ricoeur, Le juste II, 259–260 / Ricoeur, Reflections on the just, 225–226.
Cf. Max Weber, “Politics as a vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1991), 77–128, here 78.
Paul Ricoeur, Critique and conviction. Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay (New York : Columbia university press, 1998), 98 / La critique et la conviction (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995), 151.
Cf. Paul Ricoeur, “Avant la justice non violente, la justice violente.” Le genre humain. Vérité, réconciliation, réparation (April 2004), 159–171.
“est consubstantiel à la ‘forme’ de l’État,” Ricoeur, “La ‘philosophie politique’ d’Eric Weil,” 106.
“forme avancée de rationalité” ; “une forme archaïque d’irrationalité,” Ricoeur, La critique et la conviction, 152 / Ricoeur, Critique and conviction, 98.
Ricoeur, Critique and conviction, 105 / Ricoeur, La critique et la conviction, 161. And the same idea formulated with Weber’s understanding of the state’s possible recourse to violence: “for Weber the coercion of the state is finally sustained not by its physical power but by our response of belief to its claim of legitimacy.” Ricoeur, Lectures on ideology and utopia, 195.
Paul Ricoeur, “The tasks of a political educator,” in Political and Social Essays, ed. David Steward and Joseph Bien (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), 271–93, citation 288 / Paul Ricoeur, “Tâches de l’éducateur politique,” Lectures 1, 241–57, here 253.
“techniques de contrôle de l’Etat,” Ricoeur, “Le paradoxe politique,” 321 / Ricoeur, “The political paradox,” 270.
Ricoeur, Oneself as another, 257 / Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre, 299.
Ricoeur, Le juste II (Paris: Esprit, 2001), 85–106, with some parallels of argumentation, for instance, in Paul Ricoeur, “Fragilité et responsabilité,” in Eros and Eris. Contributions to a hermeneutical phenomenology. Paul van Togeren et. al. (eds.) (Dortrecht, et al.: Kluwer, 1992) 295–304.
On finitude in relation to Ricoeur’s understanding of the capable human see Ernst Wolff, “Compétences et moyens de l’homme capable à la lumière de l’incapacité,” Etudes Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies 4/2, 2013, pp. 50–63, here 54–55.
E.g. Ricoeur, Oneself as another, 144–145, 320.
A question not unfamiliar to Ricoeur shortly after the World War: “comment la violence et l’oppression n’appellerait-elle pas la violence de la révolte ?” Ricoeur, “L’homme non-violent,” 269 / “would not the violence of oppression call forth the violence of revolt?,” Ricoeur, “Non-violent man and his presence to history,” 226.
I am thus not thinking of mere retaliation or revenge.
Ricoeur, Oneself as another, 257.
Ricoeur, Oneself as another, 195n, 36.
Cf. Paul Ricoeur, “Violence et langage” [1967], in Lectures 1, 131–140.
Ricoeur’s definition of institution: “By ‘institution’, we are to understand here the structure of living together as this belongs to a historical community – people, nation, region, and so forth – a structure irreducible to interpersonal relations and yet bound up with these in a remarkable sense which the notion of distribution will permit us … to clarify. What fundamentally characterizes the idea of institution is the bond of common mores and not that of constraining rules. In this, we are carried back to the éthos from which ethics takes its name.” Ricoeur, Oneself as another, 194 / Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre, 227. Elsewhere I have commented on the tendency in Ricoeur, when thinking about institutions, to always take as paradigmatic those that have the same scope as a society or a country – “Qui s’organise ? Capacités et incapacités de l’homme organisationnel” (forthcoming).
I have elaborated on the instrumental character of institutions in debate with Ricoeur in “Qui s’organise?” (cited in the previous note), in “Compétences et moyens de l’homme capable à la lumière de l’incapacité,” 51, 53–4, and in “Ricoeur et Giddens: l’herméneutique de l’homme capable et la théorie de structuration,” Etudes Ricoeuriennes / Ricoeur Studies 5/2, 2014, pp. 105–127, here 109–110.
As for instance in Max Liniger-Goumaz’s study on Equatorial Guinea, La démocrature. Dictature camouflée, démocratie truquée. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992.
Whether or not we consider these other forms of democracy as legitimate, is not important for the current argument, since in either case the question of legitimate recourse to violent contestation may be raised.
“expliquer plus, c’est comprendre mieux,” Ricoeur, Du texte à l’action, 25 [missing from English translation].
Karl von Holdt, “Overview. Insurgent citizenship and collective violence: analysis of case studies,” in Karl von Holdt, Malose Langa, Sepetla Molapo, Nomfundo Mogapi, Kindiza Ngubeni, Jacob Dlamini and Adele Kirsten, The smoke that calls: Insurgent citizenship, collective violence and the struggle for a place in the new South Africa. Eight case studies of community protest and xenophobic violence (Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Society, Work and Development Institute, 2011), 5–32. Karl von Holdt, “South Africa: the transition to violent democracy,” Review of African Political Economy, 40, no. 138 (2013): 589–604. Karl von Holdt, “On violent democracy,” The Sociological Review, 62, no. S2 (2014): 129–151.
Ricoeur, Oneself as another, 257.
Von Holdt, “South Africa: the transition to violent democracy,” 590.
Von Holdt, “South Africa: the transition to violent democracy,” 590. Of course one has to keep in mind the long history of pre-democratic violence – for a historical overview of the complex foundation of the South African democracy, see Von Holdt, “South Africa: the transition to violent democracy,” 592–3.
Von Holdt, “South Africa: the transition to violent democracy,” 590.
An overview of such theories of democracy is provided by Von Holdt, “South Africa: the transition to violent democracy,” 591 and Von Holdt, “On violent democracy,” 131–2.
I have given an overview of this situation in “Decolonizing philosophy. On the protests in South African universities,” Books and Ideas, 15 May 2017. issn : 2105–3030. url :
Such a development is of course not restricted to African states. An excellent case of comparison would be patronage or “sottogoverno” in post-World War ii Italian society and politics. Cf. Martin Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1995. Second edition (London/New York: Longman, 1996), especially 334–337. Here, the point of moral ambiguity of this form of patronage is captured succinctly as “a curious mixture of faction networks and a quest for efficiency, of financing party politics and a genuine concern for welfare, of jobs for supporters and moral crusade.” (335).
“Intra-elite conflict thus takes several forms. The first is the struggle for factional control over the coercive instruments of the state. These practices subvert the rule of law from within state institutions. The second is the use of direct violence in the form of assassinations. The third is the mobilisation of collective violence” – Von Holdt, “South Africa: the transition to violent democracy,” 599.
This is the non-spectacular violence, “la violence du droit et de l’ordre” of which Ricoeur wrote in an early essay: Ricoeur, “L’homme non-violent,” 269 / “violence of law and order,” Ricoeur, “Non-violent man and his presence to history,” 226.
Von Holdt, “On violent democracy.” See also Von Holdt, “South Africa: the transition to violent democracy,” 590: “In this article I avoid such assumptions, exploring instead how the interaction between democratic institutions and power relations within the elite and between the elite and subalterns produces particular forms of violence. Rather than democracy and violence being mutually exclusive, democracy may configure power relations in such a way that violent practices are integral to them – producing a social system we may call violent democracy. It may be objected that a violent democracy is not a democracy at all. This is not a helpful stance if we want to understand the dynamics of the kind of actually existing democracy emerging in South Africa, which resembles many other democracies in the developing world. It is all too clear that democratic systems can continuously produce violence without systemic breakdown.”
This term is obviously taken from Orlando Patterson and not my own invention – cf. Slavery and social death. A comparative study. (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1982). However, I define it here with respect to my typology of different social situations of human capabilities, namely as the most acute and pervasive socially inflicted decay of capabilities.
By acknowledging the factors that reduce people’s range of initiative, I have thus not simply hypostasised groups (a socio-theoretic problem energetically opposed by Ricoeur in “Hegel and Husserl on intersubjectivity,” From text to action, 227–245, here 244–245/“Hegel et Husserl sur l’intersubjectivité” [1977], in Du texte à l’action, 311–334, here 334). Here we are not concerned with people who act out of revenge or vindictiveness, but with people who strive for justice from the edge of society. And where just institutions are most failing, the optative for justice may be very strong and the question of improving the conditions for justice the most pressing.
See Paul Ricoeur, The course of recognition, trans. D. Pellauer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 238–243.
Following a fortunate choice of words of Jacques Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas. (Paris: Galilée, 1997), 199–200. This insistence on indecision has nothing to do with claiming the luxury of never-ending contemplation which academics often enjoy, but which cannot be afforded by those acting under the oft unbearable pressures and demands of practice. Insisting on agents’ indecision is a way of taking them seriously in their claim to be acting strategically and ethically.
Ricoeur, “State and violence” [1957], in History and truth, 234–246, citation 246 (translation modified) / Ricoeur, “Etat et violence” [1957], in Histoire et vérité, 278–293, citation 292–3.
David Dickenson, Fighting their own battles. The Mabarete and the end of labour broking in the South African Post Office, swop working paper 2, February 2015.
Dickenson, Fighting their own battles, 33 (my emphasis).
Here I am speaking about violent acts as an integral part of the strategy of contestation – not as mere symbols. This latter possibility was explored in my paper at the 2015 conference of the Ricoeur Society in Krakow, under the title “Acts of violence as political competence? From Ricoeur to Mandela and back” (forthcoming).
Von Holdt “Overview. Insurgent citizenship …,” 25 (my emphasis).
Mob-justice falls outside of my reflection on the turn to violent means for justice, in fact interpreting mob psychology and action requires an entirely different set of conceptual and analytical tools.
What Von Holdt concludes about intra-elite violence with respect to Weber’s thesis holds equally for the implications of subaltern violence: “The rule of law is a foundational institution of democratic regimes, designed to ensure that all citizens are equal before the law and that the coercive agencies of the state are bound by and accountable to the law. The examples above indicate a drift away from the rule of law. But violent democracy is not only marked by the kind of extralegal violence deployed by protesters or police discussed so far – it is marked as well by institutional struggles for control over the instruments of law, that is to say, the instruments of institutionalized coercion over which the Weberian state is supposed to hold a monopoly. This is precisely to avert the equal application of the law to all citizens and the accountability of the state’s coercive agencies.” Von Holdt, “On violent democracy,” 145.
Von Holdt “Overview. Insurgent citizenship …,” 7, similarly Von Holdt, “South Africa: the transition to violent democracy,” 599.
“une liberté qui n’entre pas en institution est potentiellement terroriste.” Ricoeur “Le conflit: signe de contradiction ou d’unité?,” 200 (my emphasis).
This is the problem of one-sidedness and lack of perspective on the internal contradictions in one’s own position that Ricoeur identifies in his reading of Antigone and Creon in Sophocles’ play.
On the problem of ethics leading to “terrorism,” see my critique of Levinas in De l’éthique à la justice. Langage et politique dans la philosophie de Lévinas. Phaenomenologica 183 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007, chapter 9). A similar critique of excessive morality in politics is presented in Axel Honneth, Freedom’s right. The social foundations of democratic life, (Cambridge: Polity, 2014 [2011]), section B.II. (3).
In “Transmettre et interpréter,” Médium 6, no. 1 (2006): 30–47. I laid a basis for this claim. On the minimalist institutionalization of moral freedom, see Honneth, Freedom’s right, 173–205.
This “institutional paradox” has been detailed in debate with Ricoeur in Wolff in “Ricoeur et Giddens: l’herméneutique de l’homme capable et la théorie de structuration,” 109–110 and Wolff, “Compétences et moyens de l’homme capable à la lumière de l’incapacité,” 58–59.
See Wolff, “‘Technology’ as the critical social theory of human technicity,” Journal of Philosophical Research 41, 2016, pp. 333–369; Wolff, “Towards a post-Levinasian understanding of responsibility: the Weberian contribution of Apel,” in Political responsibility for a globalised world. After Levinas’s humanism. (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), 205–219.
Edward Webster, Rob Lambert and Andries Bezuidenhout, Grounding globalization. Labour in the age of insecurity. (Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell, 2008).
Webster, et al., Grounding globalization, 106, 157–158.
Cf. the tabular summary in Webster, et al., Grounding globalization, 215.
Webster, et al., Grounding globalization, 159–160.
Cf. Webster, et al., Grounding globalization, 185.
“Tout se passe comme si la tolérance mutuelle entre gens de parole se muait subrepticement en tolérance à l’égard des états de violence, en intolérance à l’égard des actions de violence.” Ricoeur, “Le conflit: signe de contradiction ou d’unité?,” 199 (my emphasis).
Discussed by the three authors, cf. Webster, et al., Grounding globalization, 207.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Gesammelte Schriften 4. (Frankfurt-am-main: Suhrkamp, [1951]1997), §18, 43: “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.”
Cf. Ricoeur, Oneself as another, 243 / Soi-même comme un autre, 284.
Cf. especially Ricoeur, Oneself as another, 253.
Elsewhere, Ricoeur adopts a more ideal typical schematisation by opposing an “ideology of dialogue” and an “ideology of conflict at all costs” – cf. Paul Ricoeur, “Le conflit: signe de contradiction ou d’unité?,” 193.
Cf. Wolff, “‘Technology’ as the critical social theory of human technicity,” 344–360; Wolff, “Towards a post-Levinasian understanding of responsibility: the Weberian contribution of Apel,” 205–219.
Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics, 1106b36.
This relativism is not absolute as long as it is constituted by the tension between mutually contradicting requirements that are constitutive of Ricoeur’s ethics (as explained in section 1).
This is the (demythologized) point I accept from Franz Fanon, The wretched of the earth. (London: Penguin, 1965), 51–52.
Cf. “Collective violence in community protests constitutes a symbolic disruption of the dominant symbolic order, underpinned by a subaltern symbolic order (or local moral order), through which the subaltern classes are enabled to assert an insurgent citizenship.” Von Holdt, “Overview. Insurgent citizenship …,” 31. However, space does not allow me to do justice to the complexities expounded by Von Holdt on this point.
This could probably be demonstrated, for instance with reference to “Capacities and social practices,” in Ricoeur, The course of recognition, 135–149 in connection with Ricoeur’s reading of Honneth and symbolic political actions later in the same book.
See further Wolff, “For a “good enough” justice,” in Political responsibility for a globalised world, 267–272.
Litteraly: “um seine Hand in die Speichen des Rades der Geschichte legen zu dürfen.” Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf”[1919], in Max Weber, Gesammelte politische Schriften. Potsdamer Internet-Ausgabe, 1999.
“Le conflit: signe de contradiction ou d’unité?,” 200.
Max Weber, “Politics as a vocation,” 81–115. On Weber’s philosophy or responsibility see Etienne de Villiers, Revisiting Max Weber’s ethic of responsibility (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018).
Above, I have already alluded to the significance of coordinating strategic and normative assessments; see again E. Wolff, “‘Technology’ as the critical social theory of human technicity,” 344–360.
Boltanski reached similar conclusions from different perspective, cf. Luc Boltanski, “Critical sociology and pragmatic sociology of critique,” in On critique. A sociology of emancipation. (Polity: Cambridge/Malden, 2011 [2009]), 18–49.
Nelson Mandela, “The Rivonia trail,” in No easy walk to freedom (Essex: Heinemann, [1965]1990), 162–189. And see my “Acts of violence as political competence? From Ricoeur to Mandela and back” (forthcoming).
Paul Ricoeur, “The tasks of a political educator” / Paul Ricoeur, “Tâches de l’éducateur politique,” cited above.