CLAUDE LEFORTformations? How do they, in their turn, exploit a given state of culture, law, or religion?
Theorists and observers are only too willing to formulate such problems. Indeed, those
who take a relational, a Marxist, a functionalist, or a descriptive stance urge us to use our
historical experience as a means to identify the various modes of the articulation of social
relations, subsystems, and superstructural levels. But it is still true to say that any attempt
to conceptualize the ways in which the combinations vary derives from the preliminary
operation of breaking down social data in order to find something intelligible. And it is
also true to say that that operation is inspired by a principle that erects the subject into
being a pure subject of knowledge, gives it a scientific neutrality, and guarantees it its self-
assurance by virtue of the coherence of its constructs or observations.
We arrive at a very different idea ofthe politicalif we remain true to philosophy’s
oldest and most constant inspiration, if we use the term to refer to the principles that
generate society or, more accurately, different forms of society. It would be absurd to
claim that we then apprehend the political in its wider acceptation. We are elaborating a
different idea, and we are guided by a different requirement of knowledge. We do not
need to evoke the centuries-old debate that makes up the history of political philosophy
in order to specify the meaning of this idea or of this requirement, for it is not relevant
to our purposes to ask how the philosopher’s search was, in the past, guided by his
investigations into the essence of man, into the transition from a state of nature or into
reason’s self-realization in history. The idea that what distinguishes one society from
another is itsregime—or, to be more accurate and to avoid an overworked term—its
shaping[mise en forme] of human coexistence has, in one form or another, always been
present, and it lies, so to speak, behind the theoretical constructs and behind advances in
philosophical thought that are tested against the transformation of the world. In other
words, it is simply because the very notion of society already contains within it a reference
to its political definition that it proves impossible, in the eyes of the philosopher, to
localize the politicalinsociety. The space called ‘‘society’’ cannot in itself be conceived as
a system of relations, no matter how complex we imagine that system to be. On the
contrary, it is its overall schema, the particular mode of its institution, that makes it
possible to conceptualize (either in the past or in the present) the articulation of its di-
mensions, and the relations established within it between classes, groups, and individuals,
between practices, beliefs, and representations. If we fail to grasp this primordial reference
to the mode of the institution of the social, to generative principles, or to an overall
schema governing both the temporal and the spatial configuration of society, we lapse
into a positivist fiction; we inevitably adopt the notion of a presocial society and posit as
elements aspects that can only be grasped on the basis of an experience that is already
social. If, for example, we grant to relations of production or the class struggle the status
of reality, we forget thatsocial divisioncan only be defined—unless, of course, we posit
the absurd view that it is a division between alien societies—insofar as it represents an
internal division, insofar as it represents a division within a single milieu, within one
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