The Emergence of the Liberal Center
The French Revolution immediately encounters conservative/reactionary social forces. I have defined such forces as those which refuse modernity, the latter being understood as founded on the proclamation that ‘man’ (today, the human being) makes his own history, while reactionaries reserve the right of initiative to God (and His Church) and to ancestors (in particular, aristocrats).
Consequently, in the Revolution, the moderate democrats (for whom democracy is inseparable from the defense of property) and the radicals (who discover the conflict between the values of liberty and equality) begin to clash. The objective conditions of the era do not allow them to get beyond certain limitations and confusions. The radicals, who are moving towards socialism, will only achieve autonomy from the Jacobin tradition of the radical revolution beginning in 1848. The struggles occur around the distinction made by Sieyes (and emphasized by Wallerstein) between active citizen and passive citizen, the surpassing of representative electoral democracy, initially based on restricted voting rights and later on universal suffrage, and the method of managing the economy (governed by private property and competition).I have proposed a representation of this conflict in which I emphasize the philosophical debate initiated by the Enlightenment concerning ‘rationality’. The crystallization of the bourgeois social project disconnects the management of politics (confided to an electoral democracy based on restricted voting rights followed by the advent of universal suffrage) from the management of the economy (controlled by private property and competition). These two dimensions of reality are then reconnected by the artificial—and false—assertion of the ‘natural’ convergence of rationalities: the rationality of political choices and that of the market.
The social struggles of the disadvantaged against the power of the exclusive beneficiaries of the new liberalism (a power which is linked to a conservatism that is gradually moderating, in that it accepts evolution and modernity) compel advances that are both political (universal suffrage) and social (freedom of workers to organize, denied at the beginning in the name of liberalism). Nevertheless, the European socialism that crystallizes in this context will be, in turn, gradually integrated with capitalist modernity through the evolution of liberalism, which consequently becomes ‘centrist’ and capable of adopting social postures.
The conservatism of the state itself—the Bonapartism of the Third Empire and Bismarck in Germany—is used to speed up the evolution of the liberals themselves. In my opinion, it remains the case that this evolution, which crowns the success of centrist liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century, cannot be separated from the imperialist position of the centers in the world system of capitalism/imperialism.Wallerstein offers important analyses on these questions that, in my opinion, skillfully complement the writings of Marx and Hobsbawm, among others. I will not go into that here. The centrist liberalism that is triumphant in Europe and the United States, then, develops in all dimensions of reality: (1) it is the ultimate expression of the ideology that is still dominant today (‘the liberal virus’); (2) it formulates the method of managing the political practice of representative electoral democracy (in which suffrage ultimately becomes universal), the definition of the sharing of powers and the rights of the citizen; (3) it combines this formulation with economic management based on respect for property; (4) it provides legitimacy for new fundamental social inequalities (wage workers versus capitalists and property owners); (5) it combines this group of rights and duties with the assertion of ‘the national interest’ in relations with other nations of central capitalism; (6) it combines all of these practices implemented in the centrist liberal nation with the practices of domination exercised over the ‘others’ (the imperialist dimension of the project).
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