CLAUDE LEFORTlegitimating power, we adopt the artificial point of view that we described as characteristic
of science. They derive, of course, from what we have called the shaping [mise en forme]
and staging [mise en sce`ne] of society, and from the process of giving it meaning [mise en
sens]. The only problem is to determine whether or not they are essentially religious.
It is also true that, even if we do take the view that these notions are essentially
religious, we will not necessarily agree as to how they are to be interpreted. It is one thing
to say—in a society based upon individual freedoms—that Christianity delivers human
beings from the domination of needs and from the image of their temporal finiteness,
that it inspires in them a feeling of community, fraternity, and obedience to an uncondi-
tional moral principle, and that, in the absence of Christian belief, there would be no
place for an ethic of service to the state or for patriotism. It is quite another thing to say
that the very principle of Christianity implies a depreciation of worldly values, that reli-
gious feeling has broken with Christianity, is being re-created, and is now invested in love
of the nation or of humanity. According to the former argument, social morality and the
state still rest upon religion, to cite Hegel once more; according to the latter, social moral-
ity is self-sufficient because it has become religious. But, important as that distinction
may be, it does not alter the terms of the question we are asking, for both interpretations
appear to accept that anything that expresses the idea of having social roots, of sharing a
feeling of belonging, of identifying with a principle that shapes human coexistence, must
derive from a religious feeling.
Is this beyond all doubt? Do we not have to ask whether the religious might not be
grafted onto a more profound experience as a result of somedeterminaterepresentation
of origins, community, and identity?
Our brief comments on the notion of the ‘‘people’’ in democracy suggest that it is
bound up with an ambiguity that cannot adequately be translated into religious terms.
The people do indeed constitute a pole of identity that is sufficiently defined to indicate
that it has the status of a subject. The people possesses sovereignty; they are assumed to
express its will; power is exercised in their name; politicians constantly evoke them. But
the identity of the people remains latent. Quite apart from the fact that the notion of the
people is dependent upon a discourse that names the people, that is itself multiple, and
that lends the people multiple dimensions, and that the status of a subject can only be
defined in term of a juridical constitution, the people are, as we have noted, dissolved
into a numerical element at the very moment of the manifestation of their will.
A similar ambiguity arises if we examine representations that have been accorded a
religious significance. When we speak of the state as a transcendent power, we mean that
it has its own raison d’eˆtre, that in its absence society would have neither coherence
nor permanence, and that, in that sense, it demands unconditional obedience and the
subordination of private interests to the imperative need for its preservation. But we then
fail to see that democracy disassociates political power from the existence of the state. It
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