Since this book was published in France towards the end of 1987, the crisis of ‘real socialism’ has profoundly upset the political and social balance in a large part of the planet. Western capitalism has triumphed in appearance, but it is confronted with a major challenge : how to integrate the societies of Eastern Europe, now totally destabilised, into a new world order whose contours are not yet well established. This destabilisation is all the more worrisome for Western capitalism because a large part of what is called the Third World is also completely out of balance. The collapse of ‘real socialism’ is not the end of history as some have claimed too hastily, but rather the beginning of a new history — one which will no longer be marked by the Manicheanism of the Cold War, the struggle of Good against Evil. The débâcle of ‘real socialism’ will bring with it, in time, the end of the ‘free world’, that is, the end of a system of political and ideological self-defence by conservative forces. It will then be easier to see the world in a different way, to rediscover hidden or repressed questions, and to invent new ones which help to understand the world and society better.

But in order to move in this direction, thought must of course avoid the temptation of making tabula rasa of the past, rendering impossible any live and innovative relation to tradition. Brutal corrections and judgements without appeal indeed make it impossible to grasp the present and the path towards the future. Thought which seeks to be critical should take distance from immediate reality and must therefore labour upon tradition to make it say what it has not yet been able to say — to make it dialogue with the problems of the present. This obviously implies a refusal of both commemorative deference to tradition and arrogant disdain for what has preceded us and shaped our present in countless ways. Now, we cannot help observing that rigid behaviours which refuse to look towards tradition or to question the unarticulated dimension between us and it, constitute the dominant trend in the world of culture today. Weak thought is chasing away strong thought because it seems much easier to let oneself flow with the current.

The debate which has taken place in France since 1987 over Heidegger illustrates this regrettable situation. Victor Farias’ book Heidegger et le nazisme, which showed that Heidegger’s engagement in favour of Nazism was stronger than the philosopher himself had admitted, was welcomed with jubilation by some and consternation by others. The former sought to discredit once and for all one of the most important philosophers of our time ; the latter tried, on the contrary, to shelter him from criticism with complicated but fragile intellectual constructions. With a few rare exceptions, one being Jacques Derrida in his book De l’esprit (1988), the participants in this dispute did not succeed in posing the most essential questions, in particular those concerning the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and the culture and society of his time. All observers of good faith know that there is a world of difference between Nazi ideological elaborations on the one hand — the philosophical theses defended by the likes of Rosenberg, Bäumler and Krieck for example — and the philosophical theorisations of Martin Heidegger on the other. But that does not dispense us from asking about their points of convergence, their common blindness about the society in which they all lived. Like many intellectuals of his time, Heidegger had a contradictory attitude towards the problems of modernity : he hated the prosaic character of capitalist society, its individualism, and its mercantile spirit. Yet he believed a revival of communitarian spirit could be brought about by playing on the subjugation of the masses by an élitist cult of heroes, using all the modern techniques of mobilisation. It was thus through a militarisation of capitalism that he sought solutions, failing to realise that the institution of a permanent state of war in society cannot favour the slightest spiritual revival. The publication in 1989 of Heidegger’s ‘Beiträge zur Philosophie’, written in 1936, shows that he began to realise the dangers of a total mobilisation on the eve of the Second World War. Characteristically, however, he still appears convinced in this text of the validity of élitism in the face of what he saw as an inevitable decline that must be prepared for in order to make possible a new beginning (the arrival of a new era in the history of being).

Heidegger thus shared certain conceptions with the Nazis and other reactionary currents — the opposition to democracy and the exaltation of the national community, for example — but on many other questions he thought differently. In particular, his critique of modernity, already present in Being and Time as the critique of modern ways of thinking and theories of knowledge (see his text on Kant and the problem of metaphysics), grew little by little into a critique of subjectivism in social practices and social relations and a critique of technology. It is clear that in these developments of his thought, Heidegger moved further and further away from the activist reactionary mythologies. It is true that even before he encountered Nazism, the constituent elements of his thought maintained complex, sometimes conflictive, and even unstable relations with each other. Heidegger was simultaneously or successively a Catholic scholastic thinker, a heretical disciple of Husserl, a man of dialogue with Protestant theology, a philosopher of man’s poetic relation to the world and a demolisher of traditional ontology. Prior to his turn to quietism after the Second World War, there was enough of a discrepancy between his thought and the dominant currents to produce fruitful questionings which bore new problematics. In the 1930s and 1940s, Heidegger was an anxious and tormented thinker. (See the account of Georg Picht in Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger, Pfullingen, 1977, p. 203). His attempts to achieve a new level of thought beyond metaphysics — a renewal of thought - put him in a different position from those who, like him, experienced the forward march of modernity as an uprooting process and abandoned themselves to fundamentalist reactionary impulses. Heidegger was all at once the rural dweller of Messkirch, the hermit of Todtnauberg, and the philosopher ready to undertake any audacious initiative to overturn the commonly agreed-upon views about consciousness and its modes of labour in the world. Heidegger in fact lived according to several different modes of time : a nostalgic mode of the past, an anxious mode of the present, and the expectant mode of an undefinable future.

These imbalances certainly sharpened his philosophical eye, allowing him to see beyond immediate reality and to perceive the confinement of thought in automatic social mechanisms and the forms of organisation which determined their functioning. When Heidegger asserted that science does not think, he was obviously not claiming that scientific discoveries and problematics are without cognitive scope ; he was worried mostly about the absence of reflection by science on its own suppositions and its own paths forward (towards what unknown dimension ?), problems that could only turn science into a machine for processing and conditioning thought and social practices. These interrogations, to say the least, remain pertinent today : for example, what sort of labour and what sorts of social effects are produced by organised intelligence and its artificial extensions ? It is quite remarkable that these considerations have played practically no role in the discussions about ‘the case of Heidegger’. Police-style investigations and counter-investigations have prevailed over real debate. In a grotesque manner, the mass media have retained only one theme : ‘Is it still possible to read Heidegger ?’ So much, then, for Heidegger’s questionings and anxieties : all is well in the best of all worlds. Those who doubt this are guilty and need not be listened to.

Since the open crisis of ‘real socialism’ Marx has been treated, even more than Heidegger, as a candidate for execution, at least in France. For many people, Marx is at the origin of a monstrous error, Marxism, which discredits him forever after. And of course those who continue to use his work can only be incorrigible fanatics, irresponsible illusion-mongers or else potential totalitarians. Marx can now be attacked by any means at all, without reading him seriously and without worrying about what he really said. Marx is nothing more than a dead dog who must continually be killed. This is a hysterical attitude which speaks volumes about many intellectuals’ refusal to think. It is often forgotten that in Marx’s thought there is a theorisation, or the germ of one, about modernity, that is, an attempt to apprehend the contradictory sociability produced by capitalism. Following the example of Hegel, that great theoretician of bourgeois society, Marx is convinced that the rise of a sociality conditioned by individuality is an irreversible fact. Of course, he denounces the dissociation among individuals produced by the logic of valorisation, but one practically never sees him, in his mature works, advocate a new organicism (the dependency of the individual on the community). He is well aware that the subject of market exchanges and juridical relations is not yet really an individual because interindividual exchanges are restricted and made permanently dissymmetrical by rigid social arrangements (automatic social mechanisms and the institutions that serve them). But he also knows that this not-yet-individual is not a cipher either, for he or she erodes the traditional forms of sociality and does not let the fragmented and dissymmetrical sociality of capitalism go unchecked ; (s)he tends to become a multifaceted individual, autonomous in the connections (s)he establishes with the world and with other people. The overabundance and pluralism of interindividual and social exchanges exist only in appearance because individuality and sociality are largely empty and the ground underneath them is constantly disappearing. Marx allows, at least implicitly, that social transformation cannot be reduced to the passage from one mode of production to another and that it has something to do with removing the obstacles blocking the development of the qualitative dimension of intersubjective symbolic exchange, exchanges between individuals and between groups, and the constitution of dynamic networks of interaction.

Social transformation must therefore be seen as the construction of a deliberate, reconstituted, flexible sociality as well as the construction of an individuality unburdened of rigid identities and roles that prevent personal fulfilment. In spite of Marx’s brilliant intuitions and the recurring expression of libertarian themes in the thought of many Marxists, this is not the perspective which has won out in the radical sectors of the workers’ movement. What the latter have seen fit to retain is that the sociality born with the bourgeois era was essentially the law of the jungle and destructive anarchy, and that bourgeois individualism is completely negative in its consequences. It is thus not so surprising that in the peripheral countries of Western capitalism, the tendency of traditional socialities to dissolve has not been understood in all its complexity and its positive characteristics. Many revolutionaries have seen in this situation only the portent of a corrupting capitalist sociality, mixed with elements of decadence from the older order. From that position, there is only a short step to counterposing a bad reality to an ideal, abstractly conceived sociality - and that step was taken, for example, during the October Revolution in Russia and during the period of war communism. Socialising virtues were attributed to state coercion and industrial discipline (Taylorism) when in fact their effect was to check social and individual spontaneity and pose considerable obstacles to social exchanges. Under Stalinism the destructive potential of this bureaucratically administered sociality was dramatically revealed by the massacres perpetrated during the forced collectivisation and the Moscow trials. But even in the absence of such massive terror, in the period now referred to by the Soviets as the ‘stagnation’, one could observe the deleterious effects of state-managed sociality upon social bonds and individual identities : restriction of social and interindividual relations, their lifeless character, the prostration of people before institutions, competition for the favours of those in power, political and cultural conformism, and so forth. The negative effects on Soviet society, as revealed by the events from 1986 to the present, have been terrible.
It is interesting to note in this regard that a man who took the work of Marx very seriously and grasped the scope of certain Marxian analyses of modernity - Max Weber — had accurate premonitions, as early as 1917-18, of the oppressive and desocialising character of state-managed sociality. Unlike many, he did not predict the collapse of the Bolshevik dictatorship, nor did he consider it impossible that it could function economically. He did see it as an extreme manifestation of the tendency towards the étatisation of the social, present in all the capitalist societies as a result of the advancing bureaucratisation of institutions and major associations (political parties and trade unions). For Weber, the Bolshevik dictatorship was a dictatorship of soldiers and lower-ranking officers in revolt, led by intellectuals ; it did not rest on a solidly structured working class and less still, of course, on an organised peasantry. It drew its strength from the disarray and collapse of its adversaries in a situation in which the old propertied classes and the rising bourgeoisie showed themselves incapable of proposing viable solutions for the other groups in society. In this context, the dictatorship, in order to fill the social and political vacuum it had itself created, could only produce, and reproduce on an expanded scale, bureaucratic state forms, in the absence of diverse counterweights such as associations, autonomous professional organisations, and economic enterprises free of the tutelage of the state. The only possible outcome, if the Bolshevik dictatorship was in fact to survive, was the progressive disappearance of the mediations between individuality and sociality, leaving face to face a hypostatised command-sociality and an encircled, restricted individuality.

This damning judgement of the Bolshevik revolution did not imply, however, that Weber was an a-critical sycophant of the capitalist order of his time. He was quite aware that the mediations between the individual and the social — markets, administrations and enterprises, for example — were problematical and could very well turn against the individual. Means which imposed themselves on ends and instruments of exchange which dictated their law to social exchanges were so many dangers for the socialisation of the individual and the individualisation of the social, that is, their mutual interpenetration in interactions and communication, in language games and symbolic exchanges. Weber asked in fact whether capitalism, which had been so favourable to the rise of individualism (under particular and extremely complex social circumstances), would then proceed to impoverish it and even subjugate it to uncontrolled social exchanges. He wanted a polarity to be maintained between individuality and sociality, that is, the possibility for individuals to take their distance from the social in which they are immersed, in order to plunge back in with new interrogations. There should not be complete continuity between subjectively produced meanings and significant objective structures, but rather, precisely, permanent elements of discontinuity that prevent the individual and the social from becoming rigid. Weber did not really analyse the automatic social mechanisms and arrangements which ossified the mediations between the individual and the social, but his pressing interrogations about the individual’s danger of falling into servitude and the danger of social relations becoming barren and inhabited only by schemas and phantom-actions, go well beyond those of Marx. Weber should be an integral part of any reflection about the emancipation of sociality and the development of the individual.

We now know that the ‘great doctrines’ or the theodicies disguised as philosophies of history are bankrupt and that the human and social sciences are ridding themselves little by little of the great schemas of explanation. This should be applauded and the narrow spirit of systems or schools of thought should be quietly repudiated. But at the same time it must be gradually and painfully rediscovered that thought needs interrogations — that the displacement of horizons and points of view is indispensable to thought, for it must live in a constant state of tension. The book you are about to read, in spite of all its imperfections, seeks to move in this direction. In a certain sense, it was a solitary venture, but it benefited greatly from discussions I have had with friends who share my anxieties and my hopes : Johann Pall Arnason, Sami Nair and Denis Berger. Hélène Deville played an important part in preparing the manuscript and Jim Cohen performed the translation with great care. My thanks to all of them.

J.-M. V. February 1990