CLAUDE LEFORTthe experience of anobjectiveworld, of a world that is what it is independently of particu-
lar collective experiences, arose—at least partially—in the course of history (and it is
tempting to describe it in Husserlian terms as a transition from the socio-politicalUmwelt
to theWelt) would, of course, be a formidable task, and a further task for political
thought.
For the moment, however, we will restrict ourselves to an examination of the differ-
ence between political philosophy and political science. We can agree that the latter en-
counters problems that bear the hallmark of philosophical research, but for political
science they are of course no more thanproblemsto be circumvented, along with other
problems, during the process of reconstructing or describing the workings of society. In
fact, the theorist who analyzes politics in terms of power relations cannot but ask himself
how and why they stabilize in any given configuration in such a way that the dominant
power does not have to exercise its authority openly, irrespective of whether he grants
them their own logic or sees them as a reflection or a transposition of class relations that
are themselves determined by a mode of production. He cannot but ask how and why
they succeed in eluding the understanding of actors, how and why they appear to be
legitimate or in accordance with the nature of things. Apparently, then, his problem is
how to account for the process of the internalization of domination. But he resolves that
problem by looking beyond the frontiers of politics for the nature and origins of the
process, by appealing to the mechanisms of representation he finds in the spheres of law,
religion, or technical-scientific knowledge. Similarly, the theorist who defines the speci-
ficity of political action by subordinating it to functional imperatives (ensuring the unifi-
cation or cohesion of the social whole, making it possible to formulate and achieve general
objectives) is not unaware of the fact that his definition is purely formal. He therefore
accepts that such functions can be performed only if social agents internalize the political
imperative. And in order to account for that, he invokes the values and norms that deter-
mine behavioral models within a given system of culture. But he then assigns specific
functions to those norms and values; he seeks to find the preconditions for their efficacy
within the coherence of the system whence they derive. In short, whatever the schema of
the reconstruction or description may be, his approach always consists in isolating rela-
tions and combining them in order to deducesocietyfrom these operations. The fact that
certain of these relations are assumed to provide a key to the modes of the internalization
of the social should deceive no one. The theorist is moving to an external element. When
he speaks of law, religion, science, values, norms, and categories of knowledge, he is
simply filling in the blanks in a pregiven schema of actions, practices, and relations (de-
fined in either materialist or formalist terms). The second operation depends upon the
first. Precisely how the object is repositioned to allow the transition from the level of the
real or the functional to the so-called level of the symbolic is of little import. Precisely
how the element of the imaginary or of language is introduced is of little import. The
conclusion that, in the last analysis, power relations, relations of production, or functional
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