CLAUDE LEFORTown times. The judgment of history, which he evokes so often, appears to have gone
against him, to have denounced his blunder. In more general terms, we would then have
to conclude that, if those thinkers who sought the religious truth of the political revolu-
tion they had witnessed (and I am referring to the democratic revolution) seem so alien
to the sensibilities of our time, it is because they had no understanding of the new. But
can we leave matters at that, and wax ironic about their wild imaginings? For these think-
ers, the ancien re ́gime was something that had existed in living memory. They still lived
in the gap between a world that was disappearing and a world that was appearing, and
their thought was still haunted by questions that knew no limits—by which I mean that
it was not yet restricted by any presuppositions as to how to define objects of knowledge
or as to how to define politics, religion, law, economics, or culture. Might we not ask
ourselves whether these thinkers may, even if they were mistaken, have had a singular
ability to grasp a symbolic dimension of the political, of something that was later to
disappear, of something that bourgeois discourse was already burying beneath its sup-
posed knowledge of the real order of society?
Before we attempt to answer that question, we must first define our terms.
It is certainly a fact that political institutions have long been separated from religious
institutions; it is also a fact that religious beliefs have retreated into the realm of private
opinion.^2 The phenomenon is observable even in countries where Catholicism remains
the dominant religion. True, this statement has to be qualified if we also take into consid-
eration those European countries that have come under totalitarian domination. But,
while that phenomenon is thought-provoking, let us ignore it for the moment in order
to concentrate on our general observation. Does it have any meaning in itself? Can we
say that religion has simply disappeared in the face of politics (and survives only on the
periphery of politics) without asking ourselves what its investment in the political realm
once meant? And do we not have to assume that it was so profoundly invested therein as
to have become unrecognizable to those who believe its effects to have been exhausted?
Can we not admit that, despite all the changes that have occurred, the religious survives
in the guise of new beliefs and new representations, and that it can therefore return to
the surface, in either traditional or novel forms, when conflicts become so acute as to
produce cracks in the edifice of the state?
According to the former view, the ‘‘modern’’ notion of politics is not in doubt and
derives from our actual experience. According to the latter, it is an index of our ignorance
or disavowal of a hidden part of social life, namely, the processes that make people con-
sent to a given regime—or, to put it more forcefully, that determinetheir manner of being
in society—and that guarantee that this regime or mode of society has a permanence in
time, regardless of the various events that may affect it. Following that line of argument
would not necessarily take us back to those interpretations (and they are, moreover, con-
tradictory) that regarded the link between the religious and the political to be indissoluble,
but we would at least have to recapture something of their inspiration.
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