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Aldo Schiavone: Pressure from minorities destroys the universality of humanity

2020-09-04T17:39:28.789Z


FIGAROVOX / GRAND ENTRETIEN - If the notion of equality is at the heart of Western identity, the technological revolution has transformed its foundations, believes Aldo Schiavone. Faced with the perils that threaten Western civilization, it is, according to him, necessary to reinvent a model based on a new definition of equality.


Aldo Schiavone is a historian, he headed the Italian Institute of Human Sciences.

He is one of the greatest specialists in Roman law.

He recently published

Pontius Pilate

(transl. Fr. 2016, Fayard) and

Une histoire de equality

(2020, Fayard).

FIGAROVOX.

- In your book, “A History of Equality”, you retrace the construction of the notion of “equality”.

In the early days of modernity, how did the Industrial Revolution change our relationship to work and thus to equality?

Aldo SCHIAVONE.

-

Now that it is coming to an end, we can well say: the season which the West has passed through over the past two centuries has been the glorious age of work as a total human fact, whose radiance has invaded every aspect of our civilization.

However, the age which has now passed is not that of work in general, but rather of one of its historical forms in particular: labor as a commodity, that is to say, labor provided in exchange for a remuneration, mass labor producing material goods: it does not matter whether it is fabrics from the steam looms of England at the end of the 18th century, or cars assembled on factory assembly lines European and American countries of the second half of the last century, work sculpted social classes and gave lives their shape and consistency.

Aggregates of men and machines, which in addition to producing commodities, have constituted a particular form of equal and horizontal link between workers, never achieved until then, because capitalist production does not build only commodities, but also social relationships.

Capitalism, at the time of the rise of the Industrial Revolution, was at the origin of a network of relationships made up of disciplines, sweat, skills and interdependencies of solidarity which have engaged and profoundly modified the lives of generations whole.

It is these social relationships that have modified the modern relationship to equality between individuals.

Capitalism, at the time of the rise of the Industrial Revolution, was at the origin of a network of relationships made up of disciplines, sweat, skills and interdependencies of solidarity which have engaged and profoundly modified the lives of generations whole.

Thus, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, for the first time in history, work and equality were connected to each other, socially and culturally, in an ever more intimate way, until reaching, end of the twentieth century, a breaking point as dramatic as it was sudden, with consequences to date unpredictable.

The structure of labor-commodity - its material conditions of existence and its legal and cultural regime - began to take shape precisely when the transition to the economic leap of modernity began, and is one of its demarcation points. , with the birth of the State and the technological leap, at the end of a stagnation of more than a millennium.

The trinomial - State, work, technique - sums up, with a fourth element - the birth of the individual - the entire historical-conceptual horizon of the full maturity of the West.

To what extent has modern law enabled the notion of individual identity to emerge?

What are the consequences?

The construction of the individual that economics, philosophy and theology have set up in the shadow of the great European states with the strength of an authentic anthropological device needed yet another trait to be complete, a character which also brought him back to the history of equality: a politico-legal framework.

Regarding the strictly political aspect, we owe a lot to English thought, then to the French Enlightenment.

As for the legal level, its solidity was in large part guaranteed by the return to play of Roman law, disguised in the form of natural law, and interpreted as "equal right" par excellence;

that is to say, an order where all the subjects appear as abstract figures, placed on a plane of complete parity vis-à-vis the law - of an entirely formal law, according to the great invention of thought Roman legal.

The notion of individual identity was obtained by means of two progressive adjustments in the continuity of one and the other - even if they were pursued in different philosophical and historical contexts: jusnaturalism in the first case (Domat, Leibniz) and romantic historicism in the other (Savigny, Puchta).

Hasn't the French Republic made it possible to alleviate the inequalities that you consider induced by the economic model which emerges with the Industrial Revolution?

Indeed, this is the case in France, as in the whole of Western Europe.

In each of the European nations, there was the will to make the quality of life of citizens acceptable.

Even if in reality, it was not until the end of the 1970s and a stabilization of the capitalist model, following the oil shock, for this to be put in place.

After the Industrial Revolution, each of the European nations wanted to make the quality of life of citizens acceptable.

Even if in reality, it was not until the end of the 1970s and a stabilization of the capitalist model, following the oil shock, for this to be put in place.

In the revolutionary moment, the purpose of institutional, social and cultural construction was to create a close link between politics, democracy and work, based on an idea of ​​work as a unifying and intrinsically egalitarian anthropological experience, and as a distinctive feature of the human being.

It was not a question of a communist overthrow of the bourgeois universe with the aim of freeing the worker from his capitalist chains, but of integrating work into a democratic policy capable of conferring on it a wide range of recognition and which makes it possible to promote a better disruptive relationship between income from work and income from capital, consequently leading to the superposition, or even the identification, of worker and citizen.

It was in this context that the technological revolution that was to change the social condition of the planet matured and exploded.

The end of the working age is an event that fills our time: its importance and its consequences keep confusing us.

It has not yet been grasped to the full extent of its scope, neither historically nor conceptually.

However, work as a specific activity of the human species has not ceased to exist.

We can simply note that a historical way of working, which was constitutive of our modernity and our way of thinking, is no more.

"The twentieth century is the first which has truly unified the world [...] A phenomenon full of hope, but also of contradictions, because the universalization of individualism destroys it in a certain way, compromising the exclusivist character of its foundation. ”

How does this contradiction take shape, according to you?

The contradiction takes the historical form of an explosion of the always problematic relation between individuality and equality: a relation which crosses all modernity, and which has reached its goal.

In the 19th century, the idea of ​​equality followed two paths to assert itself;

on one side opened the way traced by the Marxist movements, by the socialist revolution in Russia and by the establishment of the first regimes that it had engendered;

on the other hand was emerging that which would lead to the full democratic transformation of liberal systems, to the constitutionalization of equality as a not only formal notion, which to be achieved directly implied the power of the State, without however never question the capitalist system of the economy and of society.

The 20th century was the age when what we have defined as the individual form of the human evolved into an unlimited mass individualism, which developed across the globe: from Shanghai to Berlin, Moscow to Tokyo and Los Angeles

The twentieth century, for its part, is the first moment which truly unified the world: with wars, goods, migration, ways of life.

It was the age when what we have defined as the individual form of the human - supported by the muscular growth of consumption, communications and the uniformity of lifestyles - evolved into mass individualism. unlimited, which has grown from one end of the globe to the other: from Shanghai to Berlin, from Moscow to Tokyo and Los Angeles.

Finally, we note that the more the spaces of equality grew, the more its recognition and its emancipatory value were shattered in the contemporary emergence of a network of socially hidden diversities until then.

These individual diversities necessarily acted on the configuration of the equal, confirming and denying it simultaneously.

In recent decades, minority aspirations have grown in our Western societies.

In the name of equality, don't we exacerbate, on the contrary, the differences?

The emergence of minorities is the most remarkable indicator of the crisis in the relationship between individuality and equality.

This is the reason why we must think about the development of a new paradigm of equality - this is the heart of my book - otherwise we will not be able to advance a millimeter in relation to the difficulties we are facing. have to face.

And the furrow that emerges leads to separate the idea of ​​equality from the historical and anthropological form of the individual, and to no longer consider individuality as the only conceivable figure of the human.

If we define the human only by the individual, his universality necessarily suffers, and risks being reduced at any moment to a construction that is only abstract.

It is necessary to succeed in constructing and articulating, while remaining well within the horizon of history, an alternative form of the human: a figure which does not merge with the “I” of the individual, nor with the “We” from the Rousseauian and socialist tradition, but identified by the impersonality of the “he”, of the “non-person”, which, outside of every man, allows everyone to exist and to think, and not to drown in the prison of endless self-representation.

The emergence of minorities is the most remarkable indicator of the crisis in the relationship between individuality and equality.

We must think about the development of a new paradigm of equality, otherwise we will not be able to move forward a millimeter in relation to the difficulties we have to face.

If this is achieved initially, it will then be conceivable to renew equality to another reference, to a different way of constructing the universality of the human being: his impersonality.

We must therefore leave to the individual only the task of representing the profile of particularity and singularity, of the finite, of negation, of difference, the latter up to gender diversity, which weighs so heavily in the experience of our time.

And we entrust to the construction of the impersonal the staging - political, ethical, legal - of the infinite universality of the human being, of the provisional negation of difference: with its reason and its affirmative, conservative ethics and identity.

And above all, with its intrinsic equality.

Equality must become the form par excellence of the human impersonal.

The split between individuality and equality has hitherto been impossible for reasons which fall within the material and cultural horizon in which modernity has developed.

Now it is no longer so.

The technological leap makes it possible to separate what was previously inseparable: the distinction between the two forms of the human: the individual and the impersonal, reserving for each of them distinct social functions.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2020-09-04

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