Ricoeur Across The Disciplines - (6 Ricoeur and Political Theory Liberalism and Communitarianism)
Ricoeur Across The Disciplines - (6 Ricoeur and Political Theory Liberalism and Communitarianism)
Ricoeur Across The Disciplines - (6 Ricoeur and Political Theory Liberalism and Communitarianism)
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Ricoeur and Political Theory 103
Liberalism
omy carries with it entitlements that cannot justly be infringed upon. These
entitlements are at the base of all of our sound relationships with one
another, including our political relationships. Accordingly, the fundamen-
tal issue confronting citizens of modern political societies is how to devise a
just or fair system of stable institutions and practices that recognize and
protect these entitlements. We are obligated to work for political institu-
tions and practices that distribute to each person his or her fair share of
public goods. Put otherwise, we are obligated to make sure that no person
is made a scapegoat for the benefit of others.4 The appropriate liberal insti-
tutions aim to insure that each citizen has an equal opportunity to seek his
or her self-defined personal fulfillment.
As both Rawls and Ronald Dworkin make plain, modern liberal political
thought and the objectives it aims for rest upon a strongly individualistic
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104 Ricoeur Across the Disciplines
conception of the person and its kind of identity. Consider first Rawls.
A person, he says, is “someone who can be a citizen, that is, a normal and
fully cooperating member of a society over a complete life.”5 By virtue of
the fundamental moral powers that all persons possess, namely, the power
to think and form judgments and the power arising from a sense of justice
and a conception of the good, every person can adopt and maintain or
revise a conception of the good life, a life that consists in “a more or less
determinate scheme of final ends, that is, ends we want to realize for their
own sake, as well as attachments to other persons and loyalties to various
groups and associations.”6
Rawls does not claim that his conception of the person has the status of
metaphysical or ontological truth. Rather, he presents it as the conception
that one ought to adopt for the purposes of constructing a theory of a just
pluralistic and democratic political society. Under a substantive conception
of the self, one might, for example, include the notion that we are all
children of a God who has given us a revelation about how we should live.
Such a person would have reason to give expression to this belief in several
ways. For example, people holding this belief might well be guided by it in
their religious affiliations or in how they educate their children. Rawls
would not object to their doing so. But he would call for them to confine
themselves to the Rawlsian conception of the person when they participate
in the political institutions and practices that govern their society.
Given his conception of the person, Rawls argues that each person is
equally entitled to legal protection of his or her fair share of public goods.
Likewise, each person is obligated to accept the obligations that this
sharing imposes. Because of the ineliminable differences in the health,
talents, and opportunities that distinguish persons from one another, a fair
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distribution of benefits and burdens cannot reasonably aim for sheer arith-
metic equality. To do so would, for example, unfairly disadvantage those
who suffer from handicaps not of their own making. It would make them
scapegoats. To avoid this, the system for distributing public benefits and
burdens ought to insure that whatever social and economic inequalities
exist or are produced among individual members are so arranged that they
are “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.”7
Rawls calls this distributional principle the “difference principle.”
Another important and prominent version of liberalism is the one
defended by Ronald Dworkin. Though Dworkin’s disagreements with Rawls
are by no means insignificant, for present purposes I want to call attention
to the affinities between their conceptions of the person and his or her
basic rights and responsibilities. No less than Rawls, Dworkin emphasizes
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Ricoeur and Political Theory 105
the uniqueness and autonomy of each person. And like Rawls, Dworkin
wants to insure against any form of scapegoating. But unlike Rawls, for his
version of liberalism Dworkin looks “not to principles that are distinctly
political or even moral but rather to principles that identify more abstract
value in the human situation.”8 In Dworkin’s view, there are two such prin-
ciples that, when taken together, “define the basis and conditions of human
dignity.”9
According to the first principle, each human life possesses a special kind
of intrinsic value. Once a human life has begun, it matters whether that life
successfully realizes its potential or fails to do so. To realize one’s potential
is an objective value not only for the person in question but also for the rest
of us. For Dworkin, “a human life’s success or failure is not only important
to the person whose life it is or only if and because that is what he wants.
The success or failure of any human life is important in itself, something we
all have reason to want or to deplore.”10 This first principle thus asserts
a fundamental equality among all people.
Dworkin’s second principle, the principle of personal responsibility,
requires each person to accept “a special responsibility for realizing the
success of his own life, a responsibility that includes exercising his judg-
ment about what kind of life would be successful for him.”11 Of course, each
of us can rightly seek advice about how we should live, but what each of us
ultimately decides is a matter of individual responsibility. This second
principle gives expression to the idea of liberty.12
For Dworkin, these two principles are formally individualistic. That is,
“they attach value to and impose responsibility on people one by one.”13
They do not deny that some community or tradition may be crucially impor-
tant to the success of some people. But the principles do demand that each
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106 Ricoeur Across the Disciplines
liberalism’s emphasis on free choice and the individual’s rights against gov-
ernmental interference. For liberals, a good political society is one in which
individual people
Communitarianism
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Ricoeur and Political Theory 107
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108 Ricoeur Across the Disciplines
Taylor explicitly draws the contrast between his conception of the self
and those found in individualistic liberalism. The liberal conceptions
“picture the human person as, at least potentially, finding his or her
own bearings within, declaring independence from the webs of interlocu-
tion which have originally formed him/her (sic), or at least neutralizing
them.”26 What these liberal conceptions fail to acknowledge is that however
original a person is, however far he or she goes beyond the confines of
thought and value that hold sway in his or her community, “the drive to
original vision will be hampered, will ultimately be lost in inner confusion,
unless it can be placed in some way in relation to the language and vision of
others.”27 In short, however original or autonomous I may be in the concep-
tions I hold about what counts as a worthwhile way to live my life, I must still
make sense of myself through interlocution with people who are somehow
fellow members of the discursive community I inhabit and to which I am
always somehow indebted.28
Taylor’s conception of the self fits well with the basic communitarian
claim that for a good life, we have to “experience our lives as bound up with
the good of communities out of which our identity has been constituted.”29
These communities are not like bridge clubs or square-dancing clubs,
membership in which has little to do with a normal person’s basic sense of
identity or well-being. Rather, the relevant communities are those based on
(a) some geographical location that we in some fashion regard as “home,”
or (b) some shared history that has moral significance for its members, or
(c) some sustained face-to-face interaction marked by sentiments of
cooperation, mutual trust, and altruism.30 Unlike liberal organizations,
whose members join or leave them at will, communitarian communities are
constituted by the durable commitments that their members have to one
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another.
Communitarians take it that there are many different worthwhile forms
of communal life in today’s world. Many of these communities do not
compete against one another. Indeed, many people today would find that
having a full good life would require them to participate in more than
one of these communities. For example, one might find that a full good
life requires participation in an appropriate professional association,
a religious tradition, and some political party or organization. Accordingly,
“the distinctive communitarian political project is to identify valued forms
of community and to devise policies designed to protect and promote them,
without sacrificing too much freedom.”31
Walzer, as I have indicated, recognizes that the dissociative impulses
resident in individualistic liberalism threaten a political society’s stability.
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Ricoeur and Political Theory 109
ing dialectical interplay between these two sorts of tendencies, and Ricoeur’s
alternative conception of the self reveals why this is the case.
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110 Ricoeur Across the Disciplines
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Ricoeur and Political Theory 111
taken. These initiatives inaugurate something new. But they also have con-
sequences that last for some time and that form the context for subsequent
initiatives. Narratives tell of the dialectical relationship between these initia-
tives, which take place in some present moment, and some set of recollec-
tions and expectations or aspirations that constitute the past and future
horizons of every initiative.
Narratives give expression to the distinctive mode of time that Ricoeur
calls historical time. Historical time is in principle public time. It is the time
in which one can recognize sequences of generations and detect traces that
predecessors have left behind and learn of debts that one owes to them.
Without at least a latent sense of this indebtedness, Ricoeur claims, there
could be no meaningful history.39 Historical narratives, then, deal with the
interventions of the human power to act into the ordered processes of the
material and cultural worlds. They recount moments when agents, who
recognize their power to act, actually do so, and sufferers, who are subject
to being affected by actions, actually undergo them. Furthermore, they
report the outcomes, whether intended or not, of these interventions.
In doing so, such narratives are indispensable resources both for sound
political reflection and responsible political practice.
Ricoeur’s conception of personal identity as a narrative identity can
account for both the liberal emphasis on the self as a unique individual and
the communitarian emphasis on the self as a member of shared community
or society upon which he or she depends to lead a meaningful life. With the
liberals, Ricoeur argues that every action, even though it is always part of
some interaction, is imputable to a particular agent as his or her own
individual performance. There are, for Ricoeur, no higher order agents.40
To maintain its capacity to act and thereby express its ipse-identity the
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Ricoeurian self must be able to dissociate itself when necessary from per-
sons or institutions that threaten to prevent it from exercising its ability to
initiate. Though the self can and often does coordinate its action with the
actions of others in order to perform a so-called group action, for example,
playing a game as a member of a team, each self’s action remains its own
and can be imputed uniquely to it.
With the communitarians, on the other hand, Ricoeur agrees that
a person can perform an action only if he or she has the benefit of some
resources that only a community or society can provide. For example, to make
a legally binding will, a will that insures that the testator’s wishes are honored,
there must be legal institutions that have the necessary power to enforce the
will. The agent’s recognition of the need for these enabling resources gives
rise to the associative impulses that communitarians emphasize. The self is
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112 Ricoeur Across the Disciplines
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Ricoeur and Political Theory 113
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114 Ricoeur Across the Disciplines
always subject to being stifled by the actions of others, and the ineliminable
danger that, in the domain of politics, the ruler will abuse the state power
that he or she controls.
These constitutional rights are of two sorts. They reflect both the
“dissociative” and the “associative” relationships between the citizen and
the state. The person who is a citizen, on the one hand, is more than the
creature of the state. On the other hand, belonging to and participating in
a state is a necessary condition for a person to flourish.46 Constitutional
rights recognize both of these sorts of relationship. They give recognition
to the individual as well as the communal dimensions of a person’s relation-
ship to society and its members. In so doing, they reflect the kind of com-
plex self, with its narrative identity, that Ricoeur describes.
Even though the establishment of a regime of constitutional rights does
temper the risk that rulers will abuse the people they rule, it cannot make
them fully immune to such abuse. For one thing, constitutional rights are
worthless unless they are respected and enforced. But enforcing them
against violations, especially violations committed by government officials,
is no simple matter. As legal practice in the United States shows, govern-
mental officials often have immunity to punishment for violations of consti-
tutional rights that they commit in the course of discharging their official
functions. Giving such immunity may well be a practical necessity for recruit-
ing and maintaining a corps of competent officials, but it also weakens the
efficacy of the rights in question. The task, which by its very nature can
never be definitively accomplished, is to strike a balance that grants no more
immunity than is practically necessary to ensure effective governance.47
The difficulties involved in enforcing constitutional rights point to a
more fundamental issue concerning constitutions. Though constitutions
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are designed to establish a permanent, stable framework for the laws that
make political life possible, they neither are nor can be made immutable.
They always display marks of the historical era in which they were adopted
and ratified. Furthermore, they are unavoidably open to interpretation.
In principle, they are always subject to additions, subtractions, and amend-
ments. And they can be wholly abrogated. In short, like the interactions
that initially established them and that subsequently interpret and apply
them, constitutions can never achieve a definitive, ahistorical validity.
These considerations provide evidence that Rawls has overstated the
degree of stability that one ought to aim for in a constitution. As part of his
ideal theory for a just, stable, pluralistic democratic society, Rawls calls for a
constitution that rests on a stable overlapping consensus among its reason-
able citizens. By definition, a pluralistic society is one in which its citizens
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Ricoeur and Political Theory 115
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116 Ricoeur Across the Disciplines
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Ricoeur and Political Theory 117
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118 Ricoeur Across the Disciplines
Animosity of these sorts neither is nor has been rare. Indeed, such
animosity is so frequent that it gives plausibility to the Hobbesian view
that the natural state of relations among both individuals and states is one
of war.63 One could hardly be faulted for being skeptical about how politi-
cally successful even widespread Ricoeurian forgiveness would turn out
to be. At least at first blush, his claims for forgiveness seem utopian, if not
downright foolish.
The 2008 military conflict between Georgia and Russia has by no means
resolved the deeply rooted hostility between these two peoples. Relations
between China and Tibet likewise reflect a seemingly hopeless antagonism.
In war, the principal virtues are force and fraud or deception. Whatever
peace is to be established comes about through each of the competing
parties’ recognition that it is in its own best interests to refrain from seeking
competitive advantage by exercising the war virtues. From this “realist”
perspective, Ricoeurian forgiveness is at the least politically irrelevant and
perhaps even dangerously irresponsible.
The historical record certainly provides evidence in support of this
“realist” view. Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that the conditions
that gave “realism” its plausibility no longer obtain. The present threats to
the human habitability of substantial parts of the earth are now and for the
foreseeable future so severe and imminent that there is little reason to trust
that reliance on calculations of national self-interest can successfully deal
with them. Consider, for example, the multifaceted challenge of climate
change. Only concerted international cooperation has a chance to ward off
calamity. It would take blind faith to trust that the policies and practices
necessary to meet such a challenge will turn out to be in the national interest
of each of the states.
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Faced with the need for global cooperation among peoples and states
that share a history so deeply marked by both physical and cultural aggres-
sion, one has reason to resist the temptation to dismiss Ricoeurian forgive-
ness as politically irrelevant. Perhaps such forgiveness would prove futile.
But, on the other hand, what alternative is there that shows more promise
for generating the kind of cooperation without which our recent situation
will lead to disaster?
In any event, both the capacity to forgive and the need to be forgiven
spring from the twofold identity that constitutes the Ricoeurian self. By
virtue of its ipse-identity, the self is able to offer forgiveness no matter what
it has suffered, while in virtue of its idem-identity it can appreciate what it
means to be a member of a suffering people. Unfortunately, of course, it is
also by virtue of its twofold identity that the self can also refuse to forgive.
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Ricoeur and Political Theory 119
Notes
1
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1971).
2
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xxiv.
3
Ibid., xxv.
4
See, e.g., Paul Ricoeur’s comments on Rawls in Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another,
trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 230.
5
Rawls, Political Liberalism, 19, 30.
6
Ibid., 19.
7
Ibid., 6; also 282–285.
8
Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006), 9.
9
Ibid., 10. In this context, Dworkin is explicitly focusing on American society, but
clearly he regards American society as paradigmatic for liberal democracy.
10
Ibid., 9–10; my emphasis on “any”; Dworkin’s emphasis on “reason.”
11
Ibid., 10.
12
For present purposes, I take it that the extension of Dworkin’s term “a human
life” covers only normal adult human beings and normal children. It does not
cover embryos or fetuses. Whether this extension is too restrictive is not directly
relevant to the issues at stake in this essay.
13
Ibid.
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14
Ibid., 32.
15
Michael Walzer, Thinking Politically (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007),
120.
16
Ibid., 105.
17
Ibid., 106.
18
Ibid., 105.
19
Ibid., 109–112.
20
Ibid., 111.
21
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1989), 23.
22
Ibid., 15.
23
Ibid., 35.
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid., 36.
26
Ibid.
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120 Ricoeur Across the Disciplines
27
Ibid., 37.
28
Ibid., 37–39.
29
Daniel Bell, “Communitarianism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed.
Edward N. Zalta (online), 15.
30
Ibid., 15–17.
31
Ibid., 15.
32
Walzer, Thinking Politically, 110–112.
33
Paul Ricoeur, “Morale, éthique et politique,” in Pouvoirs, Révue française d’étudés
constitutionelles et politiques, (1993), 5.
34
Ricoeur’s conception of action corresponds to Martin Heidegger’s conception of
Care as the fundamental way in which persons exist and inhabit the world.
See Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 74–75.
35
Paul Ricoeur, “De l’Esprit,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 92: 2 (1994): 248. On
Ricoeur’s metaphysics of action, see François Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les sens d’une vie
(Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 651–652.
36
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 119–121, 165–168. See also, Paul Ricoeur, “From
Metaphysics to Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy Today 39:4 (1996): 451–454.
37
See Paul Ricoeur, “Individu et identité personnelle,” in Sur l’individu, editor
unnamed (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 55–72. This volume contains the papers presented
at the Colloque de Royaumont in October 1985. See also Paul Ricoeur, “Ipséité/
Altérité/Socialité,” Archivio di Filosofia 1 (1986): 17–33. Ricoeur presented this
latter paper in January 1986, before his Gifford Lectures that later became Oneself
as Another.
38
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 165–166. Taylor also concludes that personal identity
is a narrative identity. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 47–48.
39
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David
Pellauer (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988), 108–118. The theme of
indebtedness to others figures prominently in Ricoeur’s later works. These are
debts that are in principle never fully repayable. Debts of this sort are of capital
importance in his ethical and political thought.
40
Paul Ricoeur, “Practical Reason?” in From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey
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Ricoeur and Political Theory 121
46
Paul Ricoeur, “Who is the Subject of Rights?” 10.
47
For one study that sheds some light on the issue of enforcing constitutional
rights, see Bernard P. Dauenhauer and Michael L. Wells, “Corrective Justice and
Constitutional Torts,” Georgia Law Review 35:3 (2001): 903–929.
48
For Rawls’ own account of what counts as a reasonable comprehensive doctrine,
see his Political Liberalism, 58–61.
49
Ibid., 164.
50
Ibid., 161.
51
Ibid. Taking these matters off the political agenda amounts to Rawls’ effort to put
brakes on what Walzer has called liberalism’s dissociative impulses.
52
See, e.g., Daniel Callahan, “Unsustainable: Hard Truths about the ‘American
Way of Life,’” Commonweal 135:12 (June 2008): 12–14.
53
See in this connection, Bernard P. Dauenhauer, “A Good Word for a Modus
Vivendi,” in The Idea of a Political Liberalism: Essays on Rawls, eds. Victoria Davion
and Clark Wolf (Lanham, MD:. Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 204–220.
54
Ricoeur’s fullest account of forgiveness is in the epilogue “Difficult Forgiveness”
to Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 457–506. Also see Paul Ricoeur,
“Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 21:5
(1995), 3–11; and “Le pardon peut-il guérir?,” Esprit 2 (1995): 77–82.
55
See in this connection, Paul Ricoeur, “Responsibilité et fragilité,” Autres Temps,
76–77 (Spring 2003): 127–141.
56
Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 474–478. See also Karl Jaspers, The Question of
German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Dial Press, 1947).
57
Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 475; translation modified.
58
Bernard P. Dauenhauer, “Responding to Evil,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy
XLV:2 (2007): 207–222.
59
Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 493; translation modified.
60
Ibid., 472–474.
61
Ricoeur, “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,” 9.
62
Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 125.
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63
What I call here the “Hobbesian view” does not do full justice to Hobbes’
complete view. But it does point to the widespread belief that the only rational
justification for one state to cooperate with another is that its cooperation is
ultimately conducive to satisfying its own objectives. In the last analysis, how the
other state fares is irrelevant.
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