CLAUDE LEFORTAnd why should this demand for anamebe wholly ascribed to either the register of
religion or that of ideology? Perhaps more than any other, the idea of the nation urges us
to make a distinction between the symbolic, the ideological, and the religious.
The difficulty of analyzing modern democracy arises because it reveals a movement that
tends to actualize the image of the people, the state, and the nation, and because that
movement is necessarily thwarted by the reference to power as an empty place and by the
experience of social division. The movement of which we are speaking must be described
with greater precision: when society can no longer be represented as a body and is no
longer embodied in the figure of the prince, it is time that people, state, and nation
acquire a new force and become the major poles by which social identity and social
communality can be signified. But to assert, in order to extol it, that a new religious
belief takes shape is to forget that this identity and this community remain indefinable.
Conversely, to find in this belief a sign of pure illusion, as liberal thought encourages us
to do, is to deny the very notion of society, to erase both the question of sovereignty and
that of the meaning of the institution, which are always bound up with the ultimate
question of the legitimacy of that which exists. It means, for example, reducing power—or
the state, which is wrongly confused with power—to an instrumental function, and the
people to a fiction that simply masks the efficacy of a contract thanks to which a minority
submits to a government formed by a majority; and, finally, it means regarding only
individuals and coalitions of interests and opinions as real. If we adopt this view, we
replace the fiction of unity-in-itself with that of diversity-in-itself. We thereby deny our-
selves the means to understand that, far from signaling a regression into the imaginary,
the aspirations that have been manifested in the course of the history of democratic socie-
ties under the slogans of establishing a just state or emancipating the people have had the
effect of preventing society from becoming petrified within its order, and have re-estab-
lished the instituting dimension of right in the place of the law that served to establish
both the respective positions of rulers and ruled, and the conditions for the appropriation
of wealth, power, and knowledge.
If we reject both these modes of interpretation (not forgetting that they were outlined
as a result of the constitution of a new type of society), might we not finally be able to
detect the paths by which a return to the religious might be effected?
A return? It will be objected that the term presupposes that the religious never disap-
peared. Indeed. But it is one thing to say that beliefs have survived in their traditional
form and quite another to accept that a fire which has gone out can be relit. It is, more-
over, worth asking, as Merleau-Ponty used to ask, whether anything in history has ever
been superseded in an absolute sense. In the present case, the analysis we were outlining
reveals the possibility of situations in which the symbolic efficacy of the democratic system
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