to envision the emergence of a cohesive and durable Europeanness and in our evaluations of European politics we would have to take this into account.1 Zygmunt Bauman’s empirical analysis is interesting and his message certainly popular. It seems, however, that his pessimistic conclusions derive from overly idealistic criteria of normality. His analysis does not seem incompatible with the view that human choices form the backbone of human existence. The change he observes appears to relate mainly to the time factor. Arguably, what has changed is mainly the durability of identities.
Against this background it is pertinent to ask, how one should conceive of Political Man. First of all, one can distinguish between a conception of Political Man as rational and on the other hand as fundamentally irrational. The rational view is epitomized by rational choice theory; the irrational view by post-modernism. Now both of these positions are unhelpful. I propose that one should opt for a third position, a broader view depicting Political Man as both rational and non-rational. The term non-rational should not be misunderstood: It does not seek to denote a conception of Political Man as unpredictable, but rather seeks to broaden our understanding of rationality to include i.a. spiritual and emotional motivations. Very few analysts would assume that Political Man is purely irrational, thus I prefer to contrast the rational view of Man with the view that Political Man is often motivated by non-rational motives but that he is capable of rational behaviour. Please note that I avoid the term irrational. This is because irrational has purely negative connotations. What I want to stress is that non-rational political behaviour may have both positive and negative consequences. Having a realistic understanding of Political Man enhances our explanatory capacity and makes for moderate reactions and moderate political solutions. British, political history with its pragmatic incrementalism and its sense of the importance of political ritual, shows how a broad conception of Political Man can help keep extremism at bay.
Secondly, one may distinguish between the ontological view that holistic structures constitute the main phenomena in human existence and, on the other hand, the view that acting human beings are the main entities. Holistic or structural theories depart from the assumption that structures are not the products or aggregations of agency but take on a life of their own, or, in the more radical versions, constitute the real entities behind everyday phenomena – the classical example being Platon’s dualistic notion of the realm of ideas lurking behind the surface of human action. As Jerrold Seigel has argued, Platon is only the first in a row of Western thinkers, including Hegel, who reasoned in terms of a fundamental dualism in existence and conceived of individual freedom as fundamentally constrained.
However, there is another tradition in Western thinking that emphasizes precisely the freedom, potential and responsibility of human beings. It is a powerful current in British political thinking and also in French philosophy. In France holism represented by sociologists like Durkheim fought a fierce battle with highly individualist conceptions of Man, the likes of which were not found in Britain or Germany. In thinkers such as Maine De Biran, Benjamin Constant, J.J. Rousseau and later among artists and philosophers like Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Bergson and Sartre, we find the notion of the perils of social life to the individual.2 The most important figures are, in my view, Henri Bergson and the early Jean-Paul Sartre, in whose works we find a political existentialism, which would seem to hold promise as a way out of contemporary theoretical predicaments. Ironically, the late 20th century emergence of influential, holistic theories such as discourse analysis represented by theorists like Derrida and Foucault were largely the result of borrowing from German philosophers, mainly Nietzsche.
The key concept in Sartre’s early philosophy, which is essentially a theory of freedom, is the concept of autonomy. Sartre believed that individuals are or may become self-determining and that the self may develop a sense of its own authentic identity. Essentially, Sartre defined personal autonomy in terms of an ability to “negate” situational pressures and achieve a form of “critical distance” between the self and the situation. Here Sartre is inspired by Descartes, who stressed i.a. “the active use of doubt” to escape from the influence of external forces.3 In abstract formulations that may easily be misunderstood Sartre argued that the Self has to first engage in a kind of “nihilating withdrawal” from the situation by means of questioning, thus bringing a kind of creative “nothingness” into the world. Precisely the power to “nihilate” is indestructible. The essence of Man is then his ability to detach himself from the world in “systematic doubt” and hence the possibility of suspending the situation and suspending his judgement in an “Ecstatic” detachment. This line of thinking is, I would argue, very promising. It is reminiscent of Kant’s distinction between freedom in the negative and in the positive sense, and it reappears in the influential book “Penser L’Europe” by Edgar Morin, in which Morin defines the European spirit as “l ‘Esprit qui nie toujours”.4 All this, however, does not make the early Sartre an extreme voluntarist. What he calls “facticity” remains important in his ontology, but remains clearly secondary. Sartre thus offers a clear argument in favour of voluntarism, while arguing that human beings have at one and the same time facticity and transcendence (or free consciousness). This notion is much more helpful than the rather ambiguous, social constructivist paradigm arguing that structure and agency are mutually constitutive, and the holistic social constructivist analysis, in which language and meaning is always social. Autonomy it would seem is one of the few universal human needs. Importantly, autonomy is (even) more important than liberty. One may be free without being autonomous. But one can hardly be autonomous without being free. In other words, autonomy is a deeper and more ambitious goal in human life. Liberty has a strong legal dimension, whereas autonomy relies upon human acts of will.
Jean Paul Sartre: 1905-1980. French existentialist, philosopher and writer. Photo shows Sartre at the Café de Flore, 1945. Photograph: © RMN/ Michèle Bellot. © Estate Brassaï - RMN
Returning to Sartre he goes on to show, with considerable psychological perspicaciousness, how human beings are forever yearning to “fill the void of consciousness with solidity or meaning”. Man is tempted to try to bridge the irrevocable divide between disembodied consciousness (the for-itself) and concrete situation (facticity, the in-itself). Sartre calls this “bad faith”, since it amounts to a renunciation of authenticity. This notion is reminiscent of the irresponsible “flight from freedom”, which Erich Fromm was concerned about in the 1960s. Group-think and stereotyping are typical examples of this.
Sartre’s sophisticated thinking also provides insight into the non-rational nature of human beings. Far from pinning his hope in some starry-eyed “mutualism”, Sartre wants us to face the uncomfortable fact that mutual antagonism is a fact of life. This pessimistic outlook is perhaps the less promising part of his thinking, but instead of focusing upon the pessimist key in which his philosophical voice is pitched, one may also regard his thinking as realistic; a set of assumptions that makes political set-backs understandable, and a set of premises that seem very useful in trying to come to terms with contemporary politics and identity in all its fluidity.
My position, which I call integrism, leans upon Sartre’s ontology but without embracing his early view of human beings as totally devoid of social needs. His voluntarist ontology is usefully elaborated in his theory of character, which I find promising notwithstanding the somewhat different normative conclusions Sartre later drew from his philosophical reflection.5 A person’s character is normally defined as a set of traits and these can be defined as relatively stable inclinations to think, feel and behave in certain ways in certain situations. Importantly, in Sartre’s view, character traits do not determine behaviour, and are within the agent’s control. In Sartre’s view, character consists in life projects.6
