Civil Society and the Spirit of Revolt

...Albert Camus declared upon learning of Hiroshima that "our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery...

...Many, like Ignazio Silone, had been communists...

...They were forced into various kinds of exile and were deeply disillusioned by the rise of Stalinism, the brutal forced collectivization and the purges, the betrayal of the Spanish Republic, the authoritarianism of the local Communist parties in Italy, France, the United States...

...Yet this cannot be the last word, for as Peter Kropotkin noted in his 1880 essay entitled "The Spirit of Revolt," those "prudent and cautious ones" who are preoccupied with political order forget the intrusion of "the unexpected...

...but such freedom is far removed from meaningful democratic participation...

...They argued that the modern world has been driven to disaster by a dangerous faith in human power...

...This model of politics is not a pipe dream or academic construction...

...As a form of practical politics it is frequently unable to move beyond politics as usual and to generate creative solutions to public problems...

...Neither liberalism, wedded to the idea of the individual as the seat of autonomous reason, nor socialism, wedded to the idea of a progressive working class, could come to terms with the mass society that had developed...

...A rebellious politics is a politics of voluntary associations, independent of the state, that seeks to create spaces of opposition to remote, disempowering bureaucratic and corporate structures...

...the astonishing array of democratic political discussion groups, clubs, and associations that sprung to life as a result of the policy of glasnost (I rely here upon Geoffrey Hosking's excellent The Awakening of the Soviet Union [Harvard, 1991...

...It is hard to pin a label on this model...

...The models here are the eighteenth-century French societes de pensees and nineteenthcentury Russian kruzhki, enclaves where a vigorous public sphere was created amid the authoritarianism of official political life...

...Furthermore, Russia has historically been a wellspring of ideas that helped to inspire the resistance writers on whom I have drawn...

...even when it makes an impact, its energies tend to evaporate or become absorbed into the broader political currents...

...Both are suspicious of utopianism in politics, of forms of insurgency that might disturb the orderly course prescribed by constitutional government or by the logic of history...

...For this reason much of what is good about liberal democratic societies—civil rights and liberties, minimal social security, environmental protection, women's rights, workers' rights—is a result of cycles of political rebellion that go beyond the normal forms of liberal politics...

...A model for this is the activism of Dr...

...As Camus noted, pure and unadulterated virtue is homicidal...

...Mass media governed by the profit motive, making minimal demands on the intelligence of their consumers, frustrate this...

...And beneath such indifference there often lurk feelings of alienation and resentment, with dangerous, antidemocratic implications...

...They forget that even the best political institutions become ossified, remote, impervious to the need for change...

...I'm concerned with man's health...

...In their efforts to struggle against a specific evil—in this case Nazism—and to achieve quite specific results —the liberation of their country from totalitarian rule—they had discovered their own capacities for creative action...

...In his famous essay on "The Power of the Powerless" Vaclav Havel tells the story of a simple greengrocer in communist Czechoslovakia who loyally posts a sign in his window proclaiming "Workers of the world unite...

...Rieux in Albert Camus's 1947 novel The Plague, an allegory of the resistance to Nazism...

...Finally, it is self-limiting, guided by a healthy awareness of its own partiality and a ceaseless reflexivity about itself: the means it employs, the limitations of its vision, and the existence of alternative projects and groups with which it must come to some rapprochement...

...In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie...

...What does this mean...

...even if it does not exclude specific groups of people, the kinds of demands it makes on people leaves it ill-suited to the low level of political commitment most citizens prefer...

...This is why they speak so powerfully to many Westerners, citizens of liberal democratic states, who are not contending against totalitarian oppression but are seeking fertile spaces in their own political deserts...

...In such a society individuals behave neither like Kantian reasoners, nor like Tocquevillean participants in a vibrant civil life, nor like Marxian socialists seeking to transform capitalism...

...Among its proponents were a number of Western political intellectuals, most of them European, who had participated in the resistance to Nazism during World War II...

...they exist in tension with it, operating below the state and across state boundaries, challenging the sovereignty of the nation-state while also energizing its representative institutions...

...Such oases are not wholesale alternatives to liberal representative government...

...Anarchist is perhaps a close approximation, but this term evokes associations—relentless negativism, propaganda of the deed—that are misleading...

...He declares, "Salvation's much too big a word for me...

...Yet in their writings they converged upon a common view of politics...

...For these thinkers it was above all revolution that threatens freedom, by unleashing popular radicalism and consolidating political power in the hands of revolutionary elites...

...Politics in the West is diverse, and it includes those, like myself, who hope to learn from your experience of civil resistance against communism...

...The author thanks Jack Bielasiak, Mitchell Cohen, Jeffrey Hart, Russ Hanson, Boris Kapustin, Ian Shapiro, Dina Spechler, and Greg Sumner for their helpful comments...

...In so doing they testify to an important kind of political experience with profoundly democratic implications...

...Rieux, a leader of the resistance, SUMMER • 1993 • 359 refuses any macro-political program, preferring to work tirelessly with his small band of dedicated colleagues...

...Both had produced bureaucratic and disempowering mass political organizations, both saw the centralized nation-state as the principal agency of politics, and both had lost touch with the humanistic impulses that had originally motivated them...

...In the face of the failures of liberalism and Marxism to support a vibrant democratic politics, the resistance had presaged a new model of politics...

...It has many sources, in political theory and political experience...

...He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game...

...And as a form of democratic government it is seldom able to sustain public solidarity and participation...

...But such efforts sustained a sense of dignity and empowerment and, eventually, helped to undermine an oppressive state...

...Bureaucratic states and remote political parties frustrate this...

...Second, it is present-oriented, intended not to realize a grand historical objective but to afford proximate forms of mutual solidarity and empowerment...

...What relevance do they have to your society, which is struggling to create a new form of constitutional politics consistent with political and economic normality...

...A rebellious politics of civil society is a politics of vigorous argument about political alternatives...

...The conditions of modern mass society tend to reduce civil society to a state of conformity and apathy...

...Rather, it is a politics of moral suasion, seeking to constitute oases in the desert, to afford its practitioners a sense of dignity and empowerment, and to affect the political world through the force of its example and through its very specific, proximate results...

...and it does not look as if they are fading from the scene...

...The kinds of experiments in political resistance that have flourished in your country's recent past are inspirational examples of a courageous politics that afforded opportunities to those who felt constrained by the conditions under which they lived and worked...

...Nothing monumental, nothing even political in the commonly understood sense...

...She was fond of quoting an aphorism of Rene Char, the French poet who had participated actively in the French Resistance: "Our heritage was left to us by no testament...

...The liberal rule of law is an indispensable condition of personal and political freedom...

...In socialist theory, especially in Marxism, modem civil society is considered compromised by the property relations of capitalism...

...By giving meaning to their lives and the lives of those close to them, people are able to resist the sense of futility that threatens to swallow them up...

...All of these frustrating things are with us...

...I begin with this text because I believe that it speaks to certain aspects of your recent experience...

...Equally indispensable are the kinds of social and economic reforms long supported by social democratic movements for, as your country is only beginning to learn, the untrammeled market is far from benign, and the state is not the only source of suffering and injustice...

...This model did not give up on the possibilities for political radicalism and refused to make its peace with the disempowering structures of modernity, even if it did give up on the idea of a total transformation of society or a radical transcendence of modernity...

...For socialists this appears as a deep-seated commitment to channeling rebellious impulses in the proper, "progressive" historical direction...

...As Arendt pointed out, such a politics is evanescent...

...What mattered most was that these members of the resistance "had become challengers, they had taken the initiative upon themselves and therefore, without even noticing it, had begun to create that public space between themselves where freedom could appear...

...But it was not simply their struggle against tyranny that mattered...

...Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who fled Hitler, and who is best known as the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, was one of these intellectuals...

...Arendt writes that "without premonition and probably against their conscious inclinations, they had come to constitute willy-nilly a public realm where—without the paraphernalia of officialdom and hidden from the eyes of friend and foe alike—all relevant business in the affairs of the country was transacted in deed and word...

...For both liberalism and socialism the state is the principal concern of politics, whether the problem is to limit the state, as in liberalism, or to further empower it in the name of justice, as in socialism...

...But let me return to my point of departure and remind you that a similar kind of resistance was undertaken by an earlier generation of European intellectuals...

...These figures opposed fascism and communism, but they opposed capitalism as well...

...This does not mean that such a politics has no practical objectives...

...Instead, the institutions of bureaucratic government, corporate decisionmaking, and mass media advertising render individuals more and more the recipients of images and directives...

...There is a rich Russian anarchist tradition that includes the writings of Tolstoy, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Voline, Emma Goldman, but also the kinds of political experiments that culminated in the institution of the soviets...

...These intellectuals discovered in the experience of resistance an exhilarating sense of 358 • DISSENT solidarity, a sense of what was politically possible through dedicated activism among small committed groups of people, which starkly contrasted with their disillusionment with parliamentary politics, state bureaucracies, and revolutionary parties...

...At the same time, its small-scale, pluralistic refusal to privilege class politics, and relative lack of interest in questions of state power, distinguish it from socialism...

...The modern world is a world of enormous progress, and also enormous injustice, homelessness, and ecological disaster...

...I don't aim so high...

...the journalists, writers, and historians who sought to preserve the integrity of their professions, and in so doing created small oases of freedom and integrity amid a political desert...

...It is voluntaristic and has often downplayed the importance of enduring organizations, including state organizations, and underestimated the virtues of political parties and parliamentary institutions as means of holding government accountable...

...For your own recent experience offers a vivid testimony to what I am speaking of...

...Others, like Simone Weil, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Nicola Chiaromonte, were members of the independent left, attached to various worker and antifascist organizations but unconnected to formal parties of the left...

...They formed a set of overlapping networks—many wrote for the American magazine called politics between 1944 and 1949—but they did not constitute an organization or formulate a common program...

...It may be clear why we would wish to applaud such resistance, but it is reasonable to ask how it might instruct those concerned with constructing a post-totalitarian politics...

...I need not tell you that such an order is a vast improvement over both the party-state that long ruled Russia and the fractious tribalism that now threatens many parts of the world...

...Both liberalism and socialism had been guilty of such unbridled confidence in human power...

...Nor was Camus alone in criticizing modern technological society...

...In them, the intrinsic tendency of people to create things of value is realized...

...For, as Arendt points out, every Allied soldier had fought against tyranny...

...Their freedom was left to them by no one...

...The most horrifying versions of this hubris were the ideologically driven programs of Nazism and Stalinism, the typical totalitarian regimes...

...I am thinking of people like Andrei Sakharov, whose scientific pursuits led him to become a resister, joining together with others to form a network of people committed to supporting freedom of thought and conscience...

...But the achievement of a stable liberal order is not an unmixed blessing...

...So Kropotkin insists that "the structure of society is something that is never finally constituted," that is always in the process of change...

...I might also mention the Green movements in Western Europe, or European Nuclear Disarmament (END), the influential peace movement, or the Helsinki Citizens Assembly established in 1990...

...Neither does it lobby the state to achieve specific advantages, as do interest groups...

...and for me his health comes first...

...The great virtue of civil society, in this view, is that it inhibits such revolutionary tendencies, encouraging what Tocqueville called "selfinterest rightly understood," thus helping to sustain orderly social life and the rule of law...

...Havel tells us that organizations like Charter 77 were constituted by small changes, small acts of conscience...

...They had become citizens of an elementary republic —the republic of resisters, of the "true France" —that existed in the interstices of official French society, a kind of citizenship that, paradoxically, was antipolitical, defined against the state...

...The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki epitomized this dangerous faith...

...Of course this tradition is not without its own difficulties...

...Liberalism and socialism have been two of the most important modern ideologies, and their contest to achieve state power has defined the landscape of modern politics...

...Such a politics is often directed against the state, but it does not seek to control the state in the way that political parties do...

...Such acts carry with them positive values...

...Yet they are examples of a form of resistance directed against the kind of regimes that seem to have passed from the historical scene...

...As Tocqueville saw, a healthy associational life—thriving churches, rotary clubs, professional associations, and other groupings— and the civic culture of toleration that it promotes, can be the foundation of a stable democratic order...

...It is not a mindless negativism but an openness to new ideas and forms of empowerment and a principled opposition to the bureaucratic tendencies of modern life...

...This kind of politics has three main characteristics...

...The insurgent character of such a politics distinguishes it from liberal constitutionalism...

...It was taken up by them in their efforts to struggle against their indignity...

...I use "your" in the broadest sense here, to refer to those Russians, and more generally to those subjects of the former SUMMER • 1993 • 357 "Soviet bloc," who have in different ways resisted the dictates of the Communist partystate and sought to create spaces of freedom...

...The idea of self-limitation was a crucial lesson for these writers, whose experience had instructed them that in politics all values are relative and any claims to absolute righteousness or moral purity dangerous, encouraging arrogance and acrimonious conflict...

...In a number of essays Arendt reflected on the political meaning of the resistance to Nazism...

...to totalitarianism, but they also proclaim an equally resounding "yes...

...These writers experienced firsthand the traumas of Nazism and Stalinism...

...They testify to the power of the human spirit and to the creative abilities of people to find ways of asserting their autonomy under disempowering circumstances...

...Such a politics would be contrary to mass politics...

...There is a wonderful irony in my being invited to your country to speak to you about this...

...Socialists have traditionally paid much attention to the way in which the market institutions of civil society eviscerate human relationships, producing inequalities and indignities...

...It may well be that the most pressing historical task now before your country is to create liberal democratic institutions...

...Yet between the cracks of this landscape an alternative 356 • DISSENT model of civil society has often surfaced...

...It is above all for this reason that we need to keep the spirit of revolt alive...

...many, like Victor Serge or Dwight Macdonald, had gravitated toward Trotskyism...

...but they have too often failed to see the importance of limiting political power through the rule of law, and to recognize the benefits of social networks independent of the state...

...Havel suggests that it is not done out of ideological conviction, but simply out of habit, as a way of getting along...

...To draw again from Albert Camus, they involve a resounding "no...

...SUMMER • 1993 361...

...In her book On Revolution Hannah Arendt described such efforts as "islands in a sea or oases in a desert," where "those who belong are selfchosen, those who do not belong are selfexcluded...

...Although such activities might seem of limited relevance in a post-totalitarian age, I would suggest that they have a broader significance...

...Havel then imagines what would happen if the greengrocer one day took down his sign, if he began to tell others what he really thought, perhaps even to express solidarity with those with whom he shared common views...

...For they are a valuable treasure, with untapped riches to offer...

...At its best it embodies positive ideals of human dignity, but the simple fact of the matter is that for good reasons most people crave the security and peace of mind that only a 360 • DISSENT more normal form of politics— a constitutional politics—can offer...

...Such groups would not need any compulsory rule...

...its concern is not limited to resisting state interference but to challenging the diverse sources of human oppression and indignity and to employing various means, including at times extraconstitutional ones, in order to press these challenges...

...In liberal theory such networks are considered to have moral priority, and the state is seen as a means of protecting them...

...The problem, then, is how to organize a This article is based on a lecture given at a conference on Liberalism and the Preconditions of Democracy held at the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow in May 1992...

...As Andrea Cafi, the Russian anarchist, wrote: "Today the multiplication of groups of friends, sharing the same anxieties and united by respect for the same values, would have much more importance than a huge propaganda machine...

...Arendt explains: the collapse of French society in the face of totalitarian power had created a vacuum in French politics, which had become the province of collaborators and fools...

...It is important to see this not simply as a problem of political engineering but as a problem of the self-empowerment of democratic constituencies...

...It would not seek to involve everyone at once or to incorporate itself in any grand scheme...

...There is a fine yet fateful line separating healthy forms of toleration from mere indifference...

...Yet this elusive tradition has not passed entirely from the scene...

...This gave them little room on which to stand, and yet it also gave their radicalism an open, nondoctrinaire character...

...Our world needs more of this...

...but these flow out of the activity itself, and radiate, so to speak, from it in often unpredictable ways...

...It would be presumptuous of me to interpret your own recent history for you...

...Modernity, in its sheer scale and impersonality, frustrates this...

...Developed by such Enlightenment thinkers as Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Paine, and taken up in systematic form by Hegel, it refers to those human networks that exist independently of, if not anterior to, the political state...

...I think of your own samizdat movement and Charter 77...

...Even those nineteenth-century liberal theorists who did not postulate a state of nature anterior to politics— Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexander Herzen— saw civil society as the realm of freedom, and considered the state a dangerous means of preserving freedom that always threatened to exceed its proper function...

...It is elitist...

...For liberals this appears as a fear of extralegality and a temperamental commitment to moderation...

...What grounds political activity is not a leap of faith about the future, but the sense of efficacy and integrity that is bound up with what responsible agents can and do accomplish in the present...

...These subjects had become citizens through their resistance to oppression...

...Ivan Jirous, the Czech democrat, articulates a similar idea when he observes that "these independent activities are their own goals...

...Why does the shopkeeper do this...

...The spirit of revolt shakes things up...

...Those of you interested in a transition to democracy have much to learn from the Western experience of liberal constitutional government and a mixed economy...

...I hope that in your understandable concern with political normality you will not forsake more rebellious forms of politics...

...socialist working-class movement, to conquer political power—whether by reform, revolution, or some combination of the two—and to use the state in order to transform civil society...

...Liberals have traditionally paid a good deal of attention to the problem of political despotism, but have often failed to pay equal attention to the ways in which certain institutions of civil society itself may systematically limit individual freedom...

...But this has also poisoned twentieth-century liberalism, which has been corrupted by its faith in the nation-state, in technology, and in limitless economic growth as solutions to problems of human justice...

...Instead it would work at the margins of mass politics, challenging its organizations and priorities, disturbing its order through the force of example and moral appeal...

...Yet I submit that the idea that mankind has before it a single "task" prescribed by "history" is thoroughly discredited...

...Such associations are not mass organizations but smaller groups capable of affording real empowerment and sustaining authentic commitment...

...He gives his freedom a concrete significance...

...Into this vacuum were sucked tens of thousands of resisters who had never participated in the official business of the French Third Republic...

...He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity...

...Let me then use the term "rebellious," which I draw from Albert Camus's essay The Rebel...

...This vision of civil society is an eclectic one...

...It is a politics of critique, pointing out discrepancies between ideals and realities...

...Yet to call this model an alternative to liberalism and socialism is misleading, for its principal defenders reject totalizing ideologies and grandiose conceptions of political transformation...

...They would not rely on [mass] collective action, but rather on personal initiative and effective solidarity, such as can be developed only by friends who know each other well...

...These are instances of a rebellious politics of civil society...

...This is the limit of liberal democracy...

...Within the constraints of such a society civil and political freedom are possible...

...It has appeared at various times in the twentieth century—the revolutionary soviets, the Hungarian worker councils of 1956, the American civil rights movement—only to become suppressed, or coopted, or otherwise to fade from the scene...

...First, it is self-constituted, undertaken by voluntary associations, more or less spontaneously formed, that are organized to resist specific injustices...

...Thinkers like Arendt and Weil also argued that modern economic and political processes instrumentalize the world, uproot peoples and communities, continually expropriate and transform nature and people, recognizing no limit...