Realm of Lesser Evil

Jean-Claude Michéa on liberalism

Jean-Claude Michéa’s The Realm of Lesser Evil is a penetrating analysis of the formation and logic of liberalism. In his opening chapter, he shows how liberal order emerges in response to a new form of warfare, “ideological civil war” (10). Early modern political theorists, economists, and ordinary people are “haunted” by the fear of civil war, especially religious war (11).

That’s a standard take on early modern European politics. But Michéa shows how crucial it was for the development of modern political culture.

Hobbes and others claim that the “natural” state of human life as a “war of all against all.” This isn’t a result of comprehensive analysis, but merely “a philosophical transposition” of civil war. It treats Europe’s post-Reformation chaos as a universal characteristic of human society.

Civil war drives modern conceptions of progress, which are “anchored less in the attractions of some earthly paradise than in the desire to escape at all costs from the hell of ideological civil war” (13). Earlier civilizations made sacrifice (for king, country, Jesus) the highest form of heroism; modernity is the first civilization to make “self-preservation the first (or even the only) concern of the rational individual” (14). Liberal freedom is the ability to secure our private enjoyments, to be left at peace (citing Benjamin Constant, 14).

To make war less enticing, liberalism deflates the desire for glory and the pretension to know the Truth. To combat the first, theorists unmask heroic virtue as mere self-love; to combat the second, they promote relativism. Or, in postmodern terms, war was prevented by deconstructive suspicion and by multicultural relativism (15). If liberalism had a Twitter account, it would have created #NeverAgain.

Liberalism it the “realm of lesser evil”: It’s evil but at least avoids the evil of civil war.

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Writing in the 1670s, Pierre Nicole turned the pessimistic anthropology of Jansenism into an apology for liberal order.

"Men," he wrote, "being devoid of charity out of the derailment of sin, remain none the less filled with needs and are dependent on one another in countless ways." How can these needs be met without charity? Cupidity moves in to save the day: "Cupidity has . . . taken the place of charity for meeting these needs, and it does so in a manner that cannot be sufficiently admired" (quoted in Michéa, 72).

When true religion is driven out, and charity with it, it's possible "to live in as much as peace, security and convenience as if in a republic of saints. . . . However corrupt this entire society might be internally and in the eyes of God, outwardly there was none better regulated, more civil, more just, more peaceful, more honest and more generous; and what is all the more admirable is that, while being inspired and moved simply by self-love, and entirely devoid of charity, yet the form and characteristics of charity are visible on all sides" (72).

If we want to reform the world, "in other words to banish all vices and crude disorders, and to render men happy in this life, all that is needed, in the absence of charity, would be to give all of them an enlightened self-love that was able to discern their true interests" (72).

One might note that a better ideal – the kingdom of charity – hovers just outside of Nicole's discussion. His point seems to be that cupidity and self-interest is the best we can do. It's the "realm of lesser evil.” Still, it is remarkable that a Christian thinker like Nicole could conclude that a society can be peaceful, just, and fairly charitable while being "corrupt" in the "eyes of God." Civil order and peace are here completely detached from the blessing of God.

And the rest of the story is: Nicole taught Pierre Le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert and the latter was read by Adam Smith.

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Michéa’s aim is partly to trace the unconscious roots of liberalism.

Liberal egotism is the uneducated egotism of infants, who "desire to be all-powerful" (118) and express "boundless rage" (119; quoting Christopher Lasch) against anyone who fails to gratify. If parents fail in the task of "primary" socialization into a world of giving, receiving and assistance, "such subjects find themselves inexorably bound . . . to the initial desire for omnipotence, and as a consequence, lacking the ability to 'grow up'" (119).

This immaturity can express itself in "the pathetic need to become 'rich' or 'famous,'" in which people see lives "as the occasion for personal revenge." This will to power is a "sad passion": "there is no such thing as a happy tyrant" (120). The effort to climb to the top is frustrated: "those who have devoted their whole 'life' to climbing the steps of a hierarchy (of any kind) have never done more than 'crawl vertically'" (120, fn 13). Modern fascination with childhood, he argues, is precisely a fascination with unashamed egotism (119, fn. 12).

Michéa discerns Oedipal dynamics at the roots of this immaturity, which results in a "matriarchal" drive to power that is ironically overlooked by those who make war against every form of patriarchy. Drawing on Zizek (who draws on Lacan), he distinguishes the symbolic law of the father from the Superego of the mother. Paternal authority says, "You've got to visit your grandmother, whether you want to or not. And you'll behave, or else." The "bad mother" has a different kind of appeal: "Even though you know very well how much your grandmother wants to see you, you shouldn't go unless you really want to" (122-3).

The matriarchy makes the choice seem like a free choice, but that's a ruse. If the child refuses to go, the appeal turns to emotional blackmail: "How can you be so mean to grandma? What did she do to deserve it?" (123).

The matriarchy "imposes as a duty the subject's unconditional love, and by this fact, functions above all by emotional guilt-tripping . . . in modes of complain and accusation." It looks like soft power, but it "establishes a control far more radical [than the patriarchy], in so far as it cannot be assigned any kind of limit" (123). It exercises control "for their own good " and in the name of love, and often makes the subjects "blame themselves for their own ingratitude and moral shabbiness" (124). Meanwhile, the bad mother plays out "her crazy will to power . . . as an exemplary form of love and sacrificial devotion" (124).

Totalitarian systems trade in matriarchal domination by demanding love for the leader (134), and nationalist liberalism often treats the state as the "motherland" for which children are called to die: "death in battle [is seen] as the accomplishment of an act of love between children and mother" (135). As Menenius says in his opening parable in Coriolanus, a city can become an "unnatural dam" that eats up her own children. This explains why the modern dismantling of "patriarchal" disciplinary systems never brings the freedom it promises. It misses a primary, and subtle, form of domination.