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The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?

Claude Lefort

There was, in the nineteenth century, a widespread and lasting convic-
tion that one cannot discern the transformations that occur in political
society—that one cannot really take stock of what is appearing, disap-
pearing, or reappearing—without examining the religious significance
of the old and the new. In both France and Germany, philosophy, his-
tory, the novel, and poetry all testify to that. This conviction is not, of
course, entirely new, and it can be traced far back in history. I am not
thinking of the work of theologians and jurists, or of their disputations
over the links between the authority of kings and emperors, and that of
popes; no matter how they exercised it, their thought was still confined
within the limits of a theologico-political experience of the world. It is,
it seems to me, in the sixteenth century that we detect the first signs of
a modern reflection upon politics and religion; it is then that a new
sensitivity to the question of the foundations of the civil order is born
as a result of the combined effects of the collapse of the authority of the
Church and of the struggles that accompanied the Reformation, as a
result both of the assertion of the absolute right of the prince and of
challenges to that right. It is, however, still true to say that at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century a much wider debate is inaugurated as a
result of the French Revolution. It is while that event is still a living
memory that there arises a feeling that a break has occurred, but that it
did not occur within time, that it establishes a relationship between
human beings and time itself, that it makes history a mystery; that it
cannot be circumscribed within the field of what are termed political,
social, or economic institutions; that it establishes a relationship be-
tween human beings and the institution itself; that it makes society a
mystery. The religious meaning of this break haunts the minds of the
men of the period, no matter what verdicts they may reach—no matter
whether they look for signs of a restoration of Catholicism, for signs of

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