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PDF FormatNonetheless, a strong and vibrant civil society generally also boasts a solid normative core around which all of its elements unite, however much they might disagree with each other on other matters.61 The presence of this shared political, legal, or cultural foundation is a necessary condition for the prevention of chaos in public life. In the United States, for example, this role is filled by the Constitution, seen by Americans as the common ground upon which their multifarious nation stands. Alexis de Tocqueville described the importance of this constitutional consensus to the unity of America’s restless civil society in 1835, in his Democracy in America:
There is nothing more striking to a person newly arrived in the United States, than the kind of tumultuous agitation in which he finds political society. The laws are incessantly changing, and at first sight it seems impossible that a people so variable in its desires should avoid adopting, within a short space of time, a completely new form of government. Such apprehensions are, however, premature; the instability which affects political institutions is of two kinds, which ought not to be confounded. The first, which modifies secondary laws, is not incompatible with a very settled state of society; the other shakes the very foundations of the Constitution, and attacks the fundamental principles of legislation; this species of instability is always followed by troubles and revolutions, and the nation which suffers under it is in a state of violent transition.
Experience shows that these two kinds of legislative instability have no necessary connection, for they have been found united or separate, according to times and circumstances. The first is common in the United States, but not the second: The Americans often change their laws, but the foundation of the Constitution is respected.62
The propensity of civil society to coalesce around certain shared ideals explains why it can—despite its ostensibly clamorous nature, and even though it sometimes takes the form of opposition to the power of the state—end up reinforcing the existing order, and protecting it from collapse.63 The contribution of civil society to the durability of the democratic state was pointed out by the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who identified it as the primary reason for the tarrying of the “imminent” proletarian revolution in Western nations. In the notes he wrote during his incarceration in an Italian prison in 1929 and 1930, he explained that the power of bourgeois democracy relies not only on the state’s coercive apparatus, but also, and mainly, on the formation of a consensus within the intricate system of civil society, which “operates without ‘sanctions’ or compulsory ‘obligations,’ but nevertheless exerts a collective pressure.”64 Because consensus is reached through persuasion and negotiation, democratic societies benefit from an inner strength that enables them to absorb the hardest of blows. A direct revolutionary challenge of the kind that brought down the authoritarian regime in czarist Russia could not be as effective against this type of political and economic order. As Gramsci writes:
The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy’s entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter; and at the moment of their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defense which was still effective. The same thing happens in politics, during great economic crises. A crisis cannot give the attacking forces the ability to organize with lightning speed in time and in space; still less can it endow them with fighting spirit. Similarly, the defenders are not demoralized, nor do they abandon their positions, even among the ruins, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future.65
Gramsci understood something that is lost on many critics of democratic regimes: That the close-knit and dynamic networks that constitute civil society, while sometimes appearing to be a bedlam of conflicting wills and interests, are in fact capable of serving as “shock absorbers.”66 In times of crisis, it is actually the organized disharmony of liberal democracy that proves a more reliable mechanism of defense than anything offered by the centralized power of the autocracies.
The resilience of “bourgeois” democracy became clear to many other radicals a generation later, in the wake of the events of May 1968 in France. From the Left’s point of view, the affair started on a promising note: Clashes between students and authorities at the University of Paris at Nanterre led to its closure, and students at other academic institutions soon joined in. The intervention of the police only escalated the situation, and soon the city’s Latin Quarter became the scene of violent clashes with students. On May 13, the labor unions declared a general strike in sympathy with the protesters, nearly bringing the country to its knees. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators thronged the streets of Paris, and everywhere could be heard slogans of the approaching revolution and the downfall of the hated bourgeois establishment. The government of Charles de Gaulle was on the brink of collapse; the president himself, who had found temporary refuge in an air force base in Germany, dissolved the National Assembly and announced that new elections would be held in June. In a speech broadcast on May 30, de Gaulle demanded that workers return to their jobs immediately, and threatened to declare a state of emergency.
But then the crisis passed as swiftly as it had begun: Workers returned to their posts and the students returned to the classrooms, and police regained control of the streets. In the general elections in late June, de Gaulle’s party and its allies won a resounding victory. Dreams of a new social and political order evaporated.
What caused the dissolution of the closest thing to a popular rebellion a Western country has faced in the last fifty years? Any answer to this question will have to take into account the willingness of the government to reach a compromise with the demonstrators; the support granted to the regime by the lion’s share of the public, which loathed the anarchy in the streets; the veiled threats by the government to unleash the army; and the reservations of the Communist Party itself.67 However, as Lefort remarks, “The best explanation of the survival of the regime” lies in the fact that “the development of the strike… was embedded in a dynamic of conflict which… is always inherent in democracy.”68 The French Republic’s success in overcoming the turmoil of 1968 without declaring a state of emergency can be attributed to the fervent nature of the democratic system. This does not mean that the disorder characteristic of free societies is tantamount to anarchy. In fact, the liberal paradigm that has developed since the eighteenth century is precisely an attempt to manage disorder; that is, to create a society that is at once free and properly organized.
The organizing principles and methods of liberalism were addressed at length by French thinker Michel Foucault, who devoted a considerable part of his critical work to an analysis of power relations in modern society. In a lecture delivered at the Collège de France in 1978, Foucault described the historical appearance of an art of government that he calls “governmentality,”69 which he identifies primarily with liberal thought. Unlike the sovereign authority, which endeavors to ensure the obedience of the citizens by subjugating them, governmentality is not dependent on direct coercion and does not derive from a single source.70 It is, in fact, an extremely complex pattern of procedures, institutions, analytical methods (mainly statistics and demographic research), and tactics, the objective of which is the regulation of the population in order to ensure its health, welfare, and security, and the ability to monitor and control it from a distance. In a society that respects individual freedom, this objective is achieved primarily by encouraging individuals to discipline themselves, and to modify their behavior according to accepted norms. As a form of power and knowledge, governmentality has become the dominant mode of Western politics. According to Foucault, “this governmentalization of the state is a singularly paradoxical phenomenon, since if in fact the problems of governmentality and the techniques of government have became the only political issue, the only real space for political struggle and contestation, this is because the governmentalization of the state is at the same time what has permitted the state to survive.”71
At this point, the contrast between the two governmental models we have compared throughout the discussion becomes even more striking. The concept of the state of emergency is based on the assumption that the best way to deal with a threat to the stability of the political and legal order is to enforce a more strict and oppressive order, by means of centralized, sovereign violence;72 on the other hand, the administrative paradigm of liberal democracy strives to preserve a social structure that is largely characterized by flexibility and impermanence. Liberal democracies are not terrified of disorder; instead of trying to deny or conceal it—which is impossible—they work to manage and administer it.
This is not meant to suggest that democracy has no need for the state of emergency. In extreme cases, especially when society is threatened by an external enemy or wide-ranging terrorist activity, there may be no alternative. The ability to handle social discord does not make the state immune to the extreme violence of a determined enemy. Yet liberal democracies will always look first to other strategies for handling crises, strategies that do not entail the open negation, however temporary, of the ideological and institutional infrastructure on which they rest.
