Justice and the Market

...P.R.: It seems, in fact, that one expects the process of discussion itself to make values manifest...

...There is a radical posturing that often borders on the "betrayal of the intellectuals" (trahison des clercs...

...now we have to convince them...

...We have renounced, with good reason, a certain social utopianism, which inspired dreams of a transparent, limpid future, and which ended up legitimizing a totalitarian ideology...

...The French Socialist party still partly supported a project of an administered economy in the 1970s...

...This regulative function has two aspects: one is related to the public authority, to the state, and the other to the contractual regulations of civil society...

...we have to refer to different values, such as respect for life, for all life, and even more to a projection of this respect into the future...

...From the moment one makes the choice, which we mentioned at the beginning, to renounce violence—that is, to coexist with the adversary—one necessarily enters into the logic of compromise...

...Here I come back to the central line of inquiry...

...By what authority can we impose costly measures to preserve the environment...

...An Ethic of Responsibility M.R.: I am in complete agreement...

...One system of social organization prevailed over another because it was imposed by force...

...In these conditions, the critique of politics is not easy...

...The secularization of the state was thus conceived as a process of putting convictions in parentheses...

...But what have we established...

...We no longer kill or reduce to silence those who are not in agreement with us...

...I would say that democracy is the regime in which all conflicts are open...

...Ends, finalities should not always be associated with bad utopias...

...The political actor has no choice: to act politically, he must legitimize his action...

...The very idea of political action, then, is vigorously rejected...

...Instead, what we need to begin today is a critique of capitalism as a system of distribution that identifies all goods as commodities...

...But then it is necessary to confront the question of money, of the distribution of wealth, which is less exalting than enthusiastic invocations to violence, or the contemporary withdrawal into an irritable skepticism...

...Since we are clarifying our respective vocabularies, I would say that in my mind market society, which you have defined in a precise and original manner, is not in contra506 • DISSENT Justice and the Market diction to a wish to create a workable version of what I still call socialism, even with its original aura of utopianism...

...Can we simply rely on rules of procedure...

...PAUL RICOEUR: If we are to discuss the kind of society we live in and what kind of society we wish to promote, then we must agree on a common description...

...and on the other hand, politicians are accused of yielding too much to consensus, of no longer having a specific body of independent ideas, of no longer articulating the values that must weld together a historic community...

...M.R.: The question must be reformulated thus: according to what values do we rank the goods to which we want to give preference...

...But shouldn't some of the ideas that were part of this utopia of a better future be saved...

...We need, once again, to give substance to the idea of a living secularism, one that provides for confrontation between diverse convictions, nourished by the diversity of our cultural heritage, which is for me the Judeo-Christian heritage, that of the Greeks and the Romans, the heritage of the Enlightenment and that of nineteenthcentury socialism, to which we must of course add today the Islamic traditions, and perhaps others still...

...Hence the necessity of understanding public opinion, of listening to it without embracing it demagogically...

...One example: the extraordinary legitimacy among intellectuals that Castro has enjoyed for so long, and which he still seems to enjoy a little compared to the absolute indifference that this same intelligentsia later showed toward the prodigious reconstruction of democracy in post-Franco Spain...

...No one form of legitimacy can definitively win the upper hand because it is always susceptible to challenge...

...And this is no accident...

...Clearly it cannot be done according to the laws of the market...

...New light is being thrown on notions like "moderated capitalism," "social democracy," and "market economy...

...The idea imposed by the church of a "moral economy" crumbled under the assaults of those who enriched themselves, especially the bourgeoisie of the towns...

...We have a lot of trouble acknowledging the proliferation of conflicts and the corresponding necessity of their orderly regularities...

...However, today the inquiry is even more ticklish for a politician to the extent that the state has lost a great deal of its legitimacy, and consequently, political action has lost a great deal of credibility for the citizen...

...We cannot accomplish this all at once, but it ought to be possible to establish for each epoch and each society an order of priority, as a result of democratic discussion...

...How are we going to secure the adoption of whatever system emerges as the best...

...He not only acts in the name of the sovereign people, he acts in linkage with them, you might say...

...It seems to me that there is a strong tendency in French society for conflict to present itself always in a somewhat archaic form, which makes it unamenable to negotiation and arbitration...

...The question, then, is the following: what values are capable of emerging, beyond simple procedural rules of exchange, that would shape the choice of priorities...

...That there are no longer any values that are capable of eliciting consensus and imposing limits on the market or the reign of commodities and of money...

...Humanity has actually known several ways of responding to this question, but for the longest time the preferred response has been war or coercion...

...This absence of planning for the future is not unconnected with the decline of conceptions of history in terms of ends or design...

...Translated from the French by THOMAS B. HARRISON q 510 • DISSENT...

...If you keep referring to values, people regard you as an archaic vestige...

...In other words, we should not distribute in the same manner goods like education, health, and commodities, and, even more so, such benefits of citizenship as the right of association, freedom of expression, the right to security, and so on...

...That said, I am of course searching for new sources of legitimacy other than that of the market...

...For reasons of space and to omit references purely local to French life, we have edited and abridged the text, indicating cuts by ellipses...

...Now, many social processes do not depend on state intervention but on collective negotiation regulated by contracts or agreements...

...Of course this is the case with social partnerships, but also with institutions, like the medical ethics committee or the conseil superieur de l'audiovisuel, even if they do not yet play the role they ought to...

...In the French context I think it is useful to recall the old Catholic mistrust of money...

...That this is no longer the case represents an advance of civilization...

...What in fact is the result of such a procedural vision of democracy...

...Thus it is not only the critique of the administered economy but the reality of it, too, that has blocked the social imagination...

...But respect for life also requires respect for the freedom of the other...

...We have here a new human right, or rather a new understanding of human rights: their projection into the future...

...From Procedures to Values P.R.: From this agreement on the idea of a plurality of categories and goods, let us move on to the question of what conception our society can have of itself when we cease to perceive it in terms of the capitalism/socialism cleavage...

...Democracy, one could say, at once demands rules and procedures for arbitrating conflicts and also convictions and values to sustain the procedures of arbitration and to decide among competing values . . . . M.R.: I am always struck by the curious tropism of the French intelligentsia, which consists of favoring, in a romantic manner, both violence and perspectives a little too apocalyptic for my taste...

...In those early years the socialist movement did not envisage bringing into being a society different from the existing system of production but rather constructing something else, alongside it, in the name of a mainly ethical legitimacy, and therefore not in the name of the alleged "direction" of history...

...This responsibility for the future enables us to answer your question about the distribution of goods...

...But when we see the accumulated results of past pollution, we discover damage that is frightful...

...Doesn't it lead to renouncing the idea of utopia, or even any possible conception of the common good...

...M.R.: From this point of view, I would plead for the reintroduction of a regulative function in the life of our societies...

...P.R.: The absence of transcendent values has been given a name in the French tradition, that of secularism (lalciser...

...Moreover, those like Vaclav Havel, who devised the idea of "antipolitics," are obliged today to accept political action because they are responsible for the fate of their communities...

...We must quickly undertake a critique of capitalism in the form you have mentioned...

...Either it is said that there are no values or else values are affirmed in a purely voluntarist and arbitrary manner...

...this an undeniable fact...

...FALL • 1991 • 507 Justice and the Market is equally valid at the heart of the economic sphere, where too often concern for the long term is sacrificed to the short term...

...Without such compromise, it is illusory to distinguish "spheres of justice" and the plurality of goods (market or nonmarket), to which you alluded...

...That is the reason why it requires known and accepted procedures...

...Either one is not sufficiently political, or else one is excessively political, which is identical with graft and Machiavellianism . . . . I fear that speaking in terms of abstract values like liberty, equality, and solidarity merely reinforces an ambivalence with regard to politics...

...in other words, they are based on the hypothesis that heterogeneous actions must occur all at once, with no regard for time...

...Rather than engage in conflicts over the distribution of money, one turns to other enthusiasms: nationalism, the class struggle, anti-imperialism...

...What we called the critique of totalitarianism has given rise to a vehement denunciation of political action itself...

...P.R.: In short, you're saying that we can discern, even in radical critics of Bolshevism, the musty odor of Bolshevism itself, of revolutionary nostalgia...

...For once, it is I who feel archaic here...

...Procedure is the form of the discussion, but it needs to have a content...

...This is what you call the procedural vision of the state, a vision implied by the idea of a society of law...

...How can we ensure that the system that wins approval is not a pure and simple market society, given over entirely to competition...

...In the West, medieval society was the last to have an ethical and religious regulation of the economy, through a legitimacy that was extraordinarily powerful because not subject to secular debate...

...Can we still act without a utopia of this kind, a positive utopia...

...Because I am not prepared to 508 • DISSENT Justice and the Market renounce the values that underlie my political activity...

...This is not the case with me, though not because of any nostalgia or an inability to imagine another model...

...But utopianism makes another demand, that of the Harmonious Man (l'homme reconcilie), of people no longer prey to fragmentation and division, or alienation...

...Those who are scandalized by this situation talk about a "feeble consensus" FALL • 1991 • 509 Justice and the Market or else are nostalgic for armed conflicts...

...We now conceive of "goods" not as an antithesis between a single Good, in which all individuals partake in indistinct fashion, and a moral individualism that endlessly fragments the conception of the Good...

...Its failure has aggravated the problem...

...Take one of the greatest problems on the planet today: the environment...

...But these procedures are not distinct from the values that must underlie them...

...This denial of time is accompanied by a rejection of concert among actors, of coordinating actions with a view to future consequences...

...Today, we hear in the East European countries demands for the freeing of the market, for the absolute reign of the economy of money...

...The great struggle for secularization was a struggle to break from a legitimacy founded on tradition and to substitute for it a legitimacy founded on argumentation...

...In this sense, the legitimacy of the secular state requires no strong conviction...

...If it is true that there is no alternative to democracy, we must not be content with simply opposing a moral discourse to a self-contained economic logic...

...Plainly, references to the market are obligatory...

...There is something unseemly about all this, especially when one refuses to discern the real conflicts of today, which revolve around the regulation of money and the redivision of wealth...

...And when we say that they should not renounce politics, that they should preserve at least a few of the prerogatives of the state, they have the impression that we are dangerous accomplices of the Gulag...

...Along with the early founders of socialism, I call socialism the collective wish for social justice, for less arbitrariness, for a reduction of inequality to a level that corresponds to the distribution of talents, risks, and responsibilities...

...Now, between liberal individualism, which refuses to accept any idea of a common good, and the desire to renew the telos of the ancients, there appears in outline a type of society where the question of goods is posed without necessarily referring to the simplistic antithesis between market and nonmarket...

...The drive for accumulation, then, produced a social rapaciousness—all the stronger because the market was a form of freedom and to the extent that there were no more impediments to the ability of the rich and powerful to enrich themselves further—by exploiting the work of others...

...it * Ed...

...Since we no longer make use of transcendent values, plainly there is no value available to us other than respect for human life...

...This latter dimension is very new in French society, because it has always relied on the state...

...But right now it is difficult to carry on this debate...

...The rejection of violence and brute force does not imply the disappearance of antagonisms, of relations of force and conflict...

...I think we have to admit that the critique of the administered economy is over—more precisely, that while the critiques of both totalitarian societies and even the welfare state must be pursued for as long as necessary, it is in a certain sense behind us...

...but are they really equivalents...

...That is why it seems necessary to clarify the vocabulary that you yourself have used repeatedly in your speeches...

...And if not, how can they be distinguished...

...money is dirty, and it is not romantic...

...You have sometimes given the impression of resigning yourself too quickly to the end of ideology and thus renouncing any project for society...

...There is an allure to violence that is always dangerously tempting for intellectuals...

...One great weakness of the laws of the market resides in the fact that they suppose, so to speak, a quasi-absolute contemporaneity of actors and moments of exchange...

...We cannot produce without polluting...

...We should try, then, to make explicit the values that underlie this or that choice, and transmit this explanation to public opinion...

...We come to the second part of our inquiry: how to organize a hierarchy of these goods...

...This view of things was suggested to me by Michael Walzer, of the American political journal Dissent, who in his book Spheres of Justice argues that a purely procedural view of justice is inadequate, and that we should take into account the nature of the goods to be distributed...

...And we have tried to make it a value in itself, to make it something positive and substantial...

...Democracy is a system in which legitimacy is always in question, always being debated...

...Socialism was first of all an ethical utopia, the utopia of a radically nonmarket society, corresponding on the level of ideas to, say...

...That which is good, that which is bad—how are they to be distinguished in order to evaluate the systems for distributing goods...

...Nevertheless, there are conflicts that urgently need to be brought into the open: the regulation of social welfare and health expenditures, the relationship between television and the market, the treatment of Third World debt, and so on...

...It seems to me, first of all, that a certain kind of intellectual, the kind who sanctified Sartre, has veered sharply from ultraleftism and Maoism toward a valueless void, which is part of this concern for procedure...

...This idea of respect for human life enables us to link environmental protection, questions of bioethics, and also urgent requirements like economic regulation at the global level...

...We saw this in France with people like Andre Glucksmann,* for whom the individual must henceforth struggle above all against the evils of power and institutions—in short, guard against evil rather than concern oneself with establishing the common good, since in his view the destiny of all utopian projects is to end up with concentration camps...

...These goods are precisely the ones that require strict regulation and prohibitions, and also expenditures that the laws of the market alone are not able to justify...

...Note: A "New Philosopher" of the 1970s who had been a radical in the 1960s...

...I would augment this question with another one that you might say is more practical, or in any case less directly conceptual, and one that increasingly confronts me as a politician: how will we and how can we decide in favor of this or that system of distribution when several systems confront and compete with one another, despite what you said about the definitive horizon of democracy...

...Content can only come from conviction, which is another term for enunciating the values that inform our actions...

...P.R.: But doesn't the critique of the administered economy, of bureaucratic "socialism," and even of totalitarianism too often end up extinguishing all social imagination, all visions of social transformation...

...Either values are seen as things that politics muddles or destroys or else one contents oneself with more or less restrained panegyrics to "communication...

...But then the risk is that democracy has no criteria to put forward other than its own procedures...

...Some say that economic modernization, of which you are a leading proponent, has unleashed the market in the most brutal form...

...all legitimacy other than that of the market has been dangerously weakened...

...It takes into account the central question of what our conception of society should be...

...But let us not forget that we have just had a narrow escape...

...this can be done by relating them to a vision of society conceived as a system of distributive institutions...

...The failure of the administered economics in the East actually leaves a whole series of questions for the West...

...All the more so because the "springtime of peoples" in the East has convinced even the most recalcitrant that it is within our democracies— and democracy constitutes our definitive horizon—that we must build the most just future possible...

...In the first place, values are, so to speak, suspended, put in parentheses...

...How then can we convince those who adopt other systems of distribution...

...It's necessary to live with a democratic culture that at once entails compromise, concert, and the reality of conflict...

...As Edgar Morin has noted, the more complex the society, the more it creates conflicts that are not necessarily conflicts to the death, or civil wars...

...To these questions we have to bring answers that engage our convictions...

...We thus avoid the FALL • 1991 • 505 Justice and the Market quandary that lies in wait when we either want all goods to be market goods or want certain goods to stand totally outside the market . . . . MICHEL ROCARD: I am very sympathetic to this approach...

...There are confrontations between divergent interests and between divergent convictions...

...procedural rules are not values in themselves...

...These are terms to which you have resorted on occasion...

...Consequently, the problem is to determine which of these goods are best distributed according to the rules of the market and which require a different mode of distribution—and if so, what kind...

...Hence the strange situation we are in: on the one hand, politics is blamed for creating an excessive passion for conflict, for being still too bound up with nostalgia and utopianism...

...He has since resigned...

...To do this, we cannot limit ourselves to simple procedures, to formal rules of allotment, . . . as is the tendency with other American theorists— notably John Rawls, the author of The Theory of Justice, which has had an important resonance in France, and which Walzer specifically criticizes...

...But accepted on what basis...

...There is a paradox here, for at the same time many reproach me for carrying out a politics that is overly cautious, and you have suggested that any reference to socialism is not without ambiguity...

...Here I come back to your inquiry into the links between procedures and values...

...This conception cannot be based on an extension of market logic into all spheres of social and political life...

...We must put an end to intellectual oscillation between unanimity and civil war...

...Questions of values thus are not distinct from questions of procedure, for while there are domains proper to state intervention and those proper to contractual negotiation like the economy, others must be invented from this point of view: bio-ethics for example, and of course health, education, culture, and so on...

...I detest the word consensus, which, finally, can be made to mean everything and anything, but something very much like it is at stake here: the enlarging of consent through the medium of democracy or some form of compromise...

...Marxist deviations subsequent to this movement resulted in a gigantic defeat, the defeat of the command economy in the communist world, which, in its ruin, has dragged down, for many, the very idea of socialism...

...Ens...

...Fourierism and on a practical level to all those mutual aid societies, cooperatives, and labor exchanges (bourses du travail), which provided hiring structures that avoided the marketing of human beings...

...We have at our disposal some procedures, which certainly need to be improved, for arriving at a negotiated treatment of conflicts...

...it quickly becomes a radical indictment of political action itself...

...one becomes enslaved to a conception of society solely as a function of the capitalist organization of market goods...

...Too much talk of the market quickly becomes advocacy of the naked logic of the marketplace and of the capitalist as chief economic actor...

...In the latter case, there was an unfolding of political intelligence, competence, and mutual respect that made Spain, in a few years, one of the most flourishing and best administered democracies in the contemporary world—and all this, I repeat, in the face of total indifference...

...I therefore agree with you that certain types of goods must not be dependent on the market, and others must enter into graduated relations with market forces...

...And I believe that this is not without its effects on the imagination and thinking of young people...

...Only thus, it seems to me, will we be able to clarify notions like moderated capitalism, social democracy, or even socialism...

...We speak instead of kinds of goods, whose distribution must be organized in the fairest way...

...This ethic of responsibility for the future does not stop at the threshold of the market...

...Yet this phenomenon is ambiguous insofar as it testifies, at the same time, to an advance in democratic consciousness...

...There are goods (environment, health, education) that involve the future, and we cannot dispose of them as we please...

...It can also be made the basis for a certain respect for the market, insofar as the market is one of the constitutive elements of freedom...

...Paul Ricoeur is a leading French philosopher, and Michel Rocard was prime minister of France when this conversation took place...

...What is responsible for this...

...That is why I suggest that we start with the concrete situation, one that's characteristic of modern democracy: namely, the dialectic between conflict and concert...

...My question can be raised with more urgency: according to what criteria do we distinguish between goods that depend on the market and those that do not...

...It is convenient to reduce all conflicts to a single conflict and seductive to envisage this conflict as total conflict, like a war...

...Humanity must make itself capable of protecting and preserving its environment— not only acting for itself but also for the humanity to come...

...Now, which values are we likely to favor today...

...I would suggest that we not take the capitalism-socialism antithesis as our starting point but rather start from the idea that society, as a network of institutions, consists in the first place of a vast system of distribution— distribution not in the narrow economic sense but in the sense of a system that provides all sorts of goods and benefits: economic goods, certainly, but also goods like health, education, security, national identity, and citizenship...

...There are many possibilities of misunderstanding here...