History of European Ideas. Vol. 2. No. 4. pp. 349-355. 1981. Pnntcd ,n Great Britain.

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REVIEWS

POLITICS AND MYTH

Mythes politiques modernes, Andre Reszler (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981).

L’Intellectuel contre I’Europe, Andre Reszler (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976).

Andre Reszler’s recent book on modern political myths reminds us that, no matter what specific political philosophy they espouse, or what practical politics they promote, political thinkers have always sought their nourishment in myth. In older times this was done more openly; in modem times, on the whole, more surreptitiously. Since myth is a fundamentally religious notion - by which I mean that myth should be seen as directed at once toward the &men&m numinosum of Rudolf Otto’s definition of the ‘holy’ and, in temporal terms, toward the primordial illo tempore of which Mircea Eliade speaks so often in his studies of the history of religion - and since politics clearly deals with the affairs of the profane world of everyday time, the age-old relationship between religion and politics has an obviously paradoxical character, at least at first sight. But the apparent tensions between the two is vastly reduced when we realise that the central problems that confront both the religious and the political mind are in many respects homologous. Thus, and in spite of their radically different ways of framing it, both religion and politics must address the question of power (including violence). Let us note that in religious philosophy, for instance, widely influential thinkers such as Gerardus Van der Leeuw identify the ‘sacred’ precisely with ‘the powerful’; or, to mention the more recent post-phenomenological and post-structuralist works on RenC Girard (La violence et le sacre’ and Des chases cache’es depuis la fondation du monde), posit a direct relationship between the ‘sacred’ and ‘violence’ (Girard sees ‘sacrificial violence’ and ‘victimage’ as responses to the chaotic conditions brought about by what he calls ‘mimetic violence’). Both religious and political philosophy, then, have to account for the mysterious reality of power and for a host of phenomena deriving from it, phenomena that can be grasped only in terms of such perennial theologico-political distinctions as: good/evil (including the problem of theodicy, that is, the origin of evil in the world), right/wrong, legitimacy/illegitimacy, purity/corruption, just/unjust, renovation/innovation, decline/rise, etc.

Modernity, in spite of its rejection of the traditional Judeo-Christian con- sciousness, and in spite, more specifically, of its attempt to desacralise completely the linear concept of historical time introduced by Judaism and reaffirmed by Christianity, has been unable to alter significantly the old relationship between political and religious thought. The question of myth is therefore as relevant today as it has ever been. The only difference from other

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periods is that modern myths - including the myth of modernity itself - use other means for asserting themselves: ‘science’ instead of ‘revelation’, ‘criticism’ instead of ‘belief’, ‘demystification’ instead of ‘persuasion’, legiti- macy based on ‘revolution’ instead of ‘tradition’, etc.

But, as Andre Reszler shows in his impressively learned and perceptive study, even these means are (functionally) much less new than they look. That is to say, even when they appear to be as non-mythical as conceivable, their appeal continues to be mythical, and so are the goals they are meant to promote. Usually, it is true, modern (political or other) myths try to conceal their mythical nature - and this is so, among other things, because the term ‘myth’ has acquired, in a great variety of contexts, plainly derogatory conno- tations. Only very few modern political thinkers (Georges Sore] is one of them) have candidly recognised the necessity of myth and have then proceeded to oppose certain myths (myths of revolutionary violence such as the ‘general strike’ in the case of Sore]) to other myths, seen as performing the ideological function of supporting and justifying an unjustifiable status quo. As a scholar, Professor Reszler approaches the whole question from a naturally different perspective. His main concern is to identify, describe and analyse the major political myths of modernity from an ideally impartial point of view. The fact that such an ideal is practically unattainable does not mean that the attempt to achieve it is not worthwhile. So Andre Reszler works from the assumption that in and by itself myth (even when hidden under the most anti-mythical, that is, ‘scientific’ appearances) is neither a good nor a bad thing. Its positive or negative effects depend less on its content-which is necessarily ambiguous - than on the way it is interpreted and applied. Thus, the myth of the ‘three ages’, originally formulated by the Italian mystic Joachim of Flare in the twelfth century, has been adopted for quite different purposes by such diverse ideo- logical representatives of modernity as Lessing, Turgot, Auguste Comte, Bakunin, Alfred Rosenberg and even Hitler (in his conversations with Rauschning). Obviously, the mere fact that such conflicting ideologies as Comtian progressivism and Nazi racism make use of the same myth does not establish any link between them. Nor can we say that one interpretation is closer to the ‘original message’ of the myth than the other. But, if this is so, one might ask: what is the use of identifying the sources of modern political mythology? The answer is that the usefulness of such an approach will become apparent only when we see all the main myths that are at work in modern political thought. And even then, what we should expect to get from such a study is no more than a higher degree of political awareness and, perhaps, self-awareness.

Since modernity as a rule has tried to cover up its myths (including its own mythical nature as a secularised version of Judeo-Christian eschatology), one of the foremost tasks of the student of political thought, as Reszler sees it, is to uncover these myths and deal with them as such. What has long gone unrecog- nised must first be recognised for what it is.

Ni apologie, ni plaidoirie, [Reszler writes in the concluding paragraph of his book,] cet essai a pour but d’Cclairer la fonction du mythe dans I’imaginaire

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politique des deux demeirs siecles. Le mythe politique n’appelle ni condamnation ni rehabilitation. R&it de faits que ont eu lieu dans le temps lointain des origines,. . . il est neutre. (p. 221.)

The novelty of Reszler’s approach is summarised by the epithet ‘neutral’ attached to the notion of myth. For practically all modem political thinkers (including scholars of political thought) myth has been anything but neutral; it has been considered mostly in negative terms (as ‘fiction’, ‘lie’, ‘ideology’, ‘false consciousness’, ‘self-deception’, etc.) and occasionally in positive and partisan terms, as a powerful tool for manipulating the political imagination of the masses. For the scholar, though, the problem is to conceive myth primarily as a means of getting a better understanding of the intricate ideological con- flicts of modernity. And, surprisingly, the apparoach to myth as a neutral category, instead of further muddling the issue, as one might have expected, turns out to play a clarifying, and sometimes even a heuristic, role. As we read through Reszler’s study we realise that the identification and ‘mapping’ of the fundamental political myths of our time effectively helps us to make sense of the otherwise unmanageable complexity of modem political theories and countertheories.

But what does Reszler mean by ‘myth’, apart from underscoring its ‘neutrality’? Acknowledging his indebtedness to the reflections on myth of such authors as Denis de Rougemont, Karl KerCnyi, Thomas Mann and, last but not least, Mircea Eliade, Reszler advances the following definition:

. un mythe est une histoire ou une fable symbolique qui Cclaire un nombre illimite de situations plus ou moins analogues a partir d’un Cvtnement historique ou d’un Cvenement qui aurait eu lieu a l’origine des temps (l’illo tempore de l’ordre social, du phenomene civilisateur). . . . En matiere politique, le mythe Cclaire la nature du pouvair. . 11 definit, sous for-me de ‘citations’, le mode de comporte- ment politique. . . . De plus, il forrne la structure previsionnelle des interpre- tations politiques et philosophiques de I’histoire et montre le caractere ‘inevitable’ de la continuite ou de la volonte de rupture. (p. 219.)

Professor Reszler starts his book, quite naturally, with a detailed analysis of the modern ideology that has most openly made use of myth, namely, anar- chism. We note, in passing, that Reszler has been interested in the study of anarchism for a long time (he is, among other things, the author of the first attempt to reconstruct an ‘anarchist aesthetics’ - see his L’esthe’tique anarchiste, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973). As a fundamentally anti-intellectualist form of socialism, anarchism is less prone (in spite of the efforts of a Kropotkin to give it a ‘scientific’ foundation in his well-known Science and Anarchy) to the ideology of scientificism that so deeply pervades the works of Marx and Engels and the whole tradition of ‘scientific socialism’. That is why, as Professor Reszler persuasively argues, the socialist mythology in general can be best reconstituted taking the political philosophy of anar- chism as a point of departure. Its constitutive myths are, as the author sees them, Revolution, Progress, Prometheus (symbolising the power of change and technological knowledge), the (future) Golden Age or the New Jerusalem,

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the ‘people’, the ‘new man’, etc. The anti-religious trend of the Enlightenment, continued and developed by socialism within the broader frame of roman- ticism, culminates in the total reversal of the relationship between the divine and the demonic: God becomes the symbol of arbitrary and oppressive absolutism (Bakunin’s God and the State is the most complete political trans- lation of romantic Satanism), while the Devil is perceived as the exemplary revolutionary here who, in the very act of destroying, creates. (‘To destroy is to create’, Bakunin used to say.) Other literary myths of romanticism are par- ticularly relevant to anarchism: the Wandering Jew (Sore1 sees in his legend ‘le symbole des plus hautes aspirations de I’humanite’), the high-minded Robber and the Noble Savage (a carry-over from the previous century, but endowed with new hyperbolic qualities in the great style of romanticism).

The second section of the book, ‘Mythe et philosophie de I’histoire’, returns to the problem of modern political mythology (and social mythology in par- ticular), but addresses it from a new angle. Romantic historicism, Reszler argues, as summarised by the various philosophies of history that it produced, has as much to do with the future as with the past. If they look to the past, the philosophers of history do so not for the sake of the past itself, but as a means of discovering the elements and the articulations of their ‘futurological’ projec- tions. The already-mentioned Joachim of Flore, with his apocalyptic ‘futurology’ derived from his theory of the three ages - the age of the Father, the age of the Son and the coming age of the Holy Ghost - is, in Professor Reszler’s eyes, the distant model of a host of modems, such as A. Comte, Fourier, Cousin, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel and, eventually, Marx and Bakunin, to limit ourselves to the nineteenth century. That all these people think, in spite of very substantial differences in both their orientation and the quality of their thought, in the broad terms of the myth of progress is undeniable. That the apocalyptic version of progress of Joachim of Flore, based on the idea of discontinuity and rupture, is somehow relevant to all of them is also acceptable, although it leads to widely different formulations and programmes (even in the case of directly related philosophies, such as Hegelianism and Marxism). Where I would differ from Professor Reszler is in his assessment of Joachim of Flare, in whom he tends to see the first explicit theorist of progress. The history of the myth of progress is certainly much older. Progress as a world-historical category is implied, for instance, in Saint Augustine’s comparison (drawn in The City ofGod and in other writings) between the development of mankind as a whole and the development of the human individual through the ages of life (for details and bibliographical references, see Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity, p. 26 and notes).

Actually, as Professor Reszler himself suggests several times (but without devoting analytical attention to it), the idea of progress is contained in the concept of linear historical time of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition. One might add that this is the main reason why the related ideas of progress and modernity are exclusively Western. It is also worth noting that in the Judeo- Christian tradition the eschaton (the end of history) coincides with the telos (the goal of the absolute negation of time, achieved in eternity). In many of the secularised versions of this model the eschaton is eliminated and the telos.

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eternity, is interpreted as infinite time. Hence, the doctrine of infinite progress that emerged in the eighteenth century. But in some modern and politically radical versions of the same model (in anarchism as well as in Marxian social- ism) the eschaton is preserved: the end of exploitation and injustice is at hand and the goal (the perfect society that can only be ‘eternal’) will be attained through a final revolutionary upheaval. The myth of Revolution (as Reszler observes, along the lines suggested by Norman Cohn in his classic study The Pursuit of the Millenium or by Eliade in his Aspects du mythe) functions analogously with the myth of the Millenium or the Apocalypse.

Although the myth of decline is both older and more widespread than the myth of progress, it achieves its full significance, I would argue (and Professor Reszler would probably agree), only when it enters into a dialectical relation- ship with the Western myth of progress. Reszler explores some of the outstand- ing paradoxes of this relationship in his richly-informed, full of insights, ‘Le mythe du declin (pp. 58-92). Although he does not discuss the famous simile about dwarfs and giants attributed to Bernard de Chartres (a major figure of the twelfth-century ‘Renaissance’), a few words about it will be in order here since, to my mind, this simile offers the best succinct illustration of the com- plexities and perplexities involved in the dialectic of decline and progress. The moderns, Bernard thinks, are like puny dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants (the ancients); thus, although they are incomparably smaller than their predecessors, they can see farther. The advancement of learning, Bernard seems to believe, is a cumulative process: there is progress even in decline and, conversely, there is decline even in progress. Seen in this light, certain striking assertions made by late nineteenth-century ‘decadents’ (such as: ‘Decadence is progress’ or: ‘Progress is decadence’), lose much of their paradoxical charac- ter.

Without breaking his engagement to scholarly ‘impartiality’, Professor Reszler seems personally to find the mythology of decline more congenial than the mythology of progress (the latter taken in both its ‘indefinite-growth’ and its ‘eschatological-revolutionary’ versions). Thus, he readily accepts the Nietzschean equation between modernity and decadence and, again following Nietzsche, sees the various modem attempts to escape decadence as mere manifestations of the spirit of decadence (cf. p. 82). Consequently, section III (‘Le mythe de la societe nouvelle’), section IV (‘L’homme nouveau’) and section V (‘Heros, sauveurs et chefs charismatiques’) advance the view that most if not all the political mythologies of the ‘new’ and of ‘salvation’ are nothing but symptoms of decay, dominated by what Nietzsche used to call the ‘will to death’. Externally, the approach remains detached and objective; hence the elegant accuracy of the numerous expository-analytical parts of these three sections. The internal principles of organisation of the material are, however, less ‘neutral’, insofar as they place the questions under discussion within the general perspective of decadence as elaborated not only by Nietzsche but also by perhaps the most brilliant Nietzschean philosopher of our time, E.M. Cioran. The excellent chapter ‘L’homme nouveau’ illustrates the point I have just made. Limiting the discussion to the twentieth century, the ‘new man’ appears as ‘uomo fascista’ or as ‘socialist man’, both ‘ideals’ resulting

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from the typically modern urge to do away with the complexities of the past and to transform the old (and often self-contradictory) individual human being into a mere anonymous cog in the great social mechanism of which both rightist and leftist totahtarianisms dream. The possible success of ‘revolutionary pedagogy’ is clearly if indirectly linked to such evidently ‘decadent’ Western theories as those concerning the so-called ‘death of man’ (see the chapter ‘Mythe et << mort de I’homme,,‘): modernity is pervaded by the ‘will to death’.

Far from criticising Professor Reszler for the secret polemical dimension of his book, I view this dimension as the unifying principle of rich body of seemingly heterogeneous ideas, whose discussion in a single study might other- wise have appeared as injustified or arbitrary. And, after all, if politics is never ‘neutral’, why should political myths be so? Still, I believe that the author did the right thing when he set out to treat political myths as if they were neutral. Without consciousness of this ‘as if’, the book would have been too scholarly for a ‘personal’ essay and too ‘personal’ or even ‘idiosyncratic’ for a scholarly study. The ‘as if’, even though half-transparent, has helped Professor Reszler to strike the ‘right balance’.

If in Mythes politiques modernes the author tries to hold in check his natural polemical inclination, in his previous essay, L’lntellectuel contre I’Europe, he allowed the same inclination full freedom of manifestation. Conceived in part along the lines of Jacques Ellul’s Truhison de l’occident (1975), Reszler’s book is a significant contribution to the larger contemporary debate about the meaning of Western civlisation. The contribution consists of a critical history of anti-European attitudes and ideas promoted by European intellectuals from the Renaissance (Las Casas, Montaigne, Bodin) to our time (Sartre, Levy- Strauss). We might note that in L’lntellectuel contre [‘Europe Reszler already makes frequent use of the term ‘myth’ - thus, he speaks of the ‘myth of Progress’ (asking himself whether this is not an anti-European myth? - p. 17), of the ‘myth of Decline’ (p. 20) and extensively of the ‘myth of the Noble Savage’ (throughout the whole first part of the essay, ‘Du mythe du Bon

Sauvage au primitivisme culturei’, pp. 25-90). The methodological difference between L’Intellectuel contre 1’Europe and Mythes politiques modernes is that in the former the author is explicitly and cuttingly anti-anti-European (which accounts for his ‘demythologising’ attitude, at least insofar as the myths he deals with have a manifest or even latent anti-European content), whereas in the latter he not only broadens his definition of myth but adopts, as pointed out earlier, the principle that myth is an essentially neutral category.

I agree only in part with the main thesis of L’lntellectual contre 1’Europe (namely, that the European intelligentsia has often been guilty of misunder- standing and rejecting the truly creative values that Europe has contributed to world culture). I think that, while convincingly underlining its negative aspects, Professor Reszler tends to ignore or minimise the positive features of European self-criticism. As Denis de Rougemont has suggested, Europe is basically a ‘cultural invention’, and certainly this invention would have been impossible if the ‘centrifugal’ forces of parochialism, localism, regionalism or nationalism (in whatever form) had prevailed. If this is true, then we may say that cultural self-criticism has been one of the constitutive elements of

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European consciousness and has led to its traditions of tolerance toward pluralism, difference and even dissent. That critical self-examination can occasionally become too severe and even self-destructive is also true, and insofar as Reszler’s essay brings up such instances, especially in the modern period, his polemical approach is justified. But, on the whole, he tends to forget that one of the most characteristically European contributions to world civilisation remains the ‘esprit critique’ whose legitimacy is founded on pre- cisely a dialogic willingness to accept criticism from the outside and even to anticipate it through self-criticism. Like many other distinctive features of the European mind, this critical and self-critical dimension has resulted, among other things, from an original combination of Europe’s two major cultural sources: the Hellenic heritage (and more specifically the Socratic tradition of irony and self-irony) and the Judeo-Christian heritage (and more specifically its tradition of moral self-questioning). But Andre Reszler is quite right to point out the dangerous slippage of European self-criticism, especially during the last century or so, toward self-negation and self-derealisation on the one hand, and toward an uncritical acceptance of non-European values and world views on the other. Such a slippage, with its ideologically disorienting effects, brings about the moral-intellectual conditions that favour what Jean-Francois Revel has aptly called ‘the totalitarian temptation’. Will pluralistic Europe resist that temptation?

L’htellectuel contre I’Europe is not only a brilliant polemical piece but also a highly stimulating work. One may occasionally disagree with its author, but even such disagreement has the rare quality of producing insight. And beyond that, the book challenges its reader to articulate his own opinions with the same forcefulness and elegance with which the author argues his case, a case that, one cannot help feeling, is at once valid and alarming.

Indiana Universiry Matei Calinescu