New Liberalism

Merleau-Ponty's programmatic political stance, formulated in the Epilogue of *Adventures of the Dialectic* (1955). A "sort of new liberalism" (AD 224) that (a) refuses the dictatorship of the proletariat, (b) accepts Communist action and revolutionary movements as "a useful menace, a continual call to order" (AD 225), (c) takes Parliament as "the only known institution that guarantees a minimum of opposition and of truth" (AD 225), and (d) defines a noncommunist left by a double position: posing social problems in terms of struggle and refusing the dictatorship. The stance is articulated via three terms — new liberalism, a-communism, noncommunist left — that together name a single post-Marxist program. The position is explicitly the revision of MP's 1947 "Marxist wait-and-see" position in Humanism and Terror; the Korean War triggered the revision.

Key Points

  • The "new liberalism" passage: "If we speak of liberalism, it is in the sense that Communist action and other revolutionary movements are accepted only as a useful menace, as a continual call to order, that we do not believe in the solution of the social problem through the power of the proletarian class or its representatives, that we expect progress only from a conscious action which will confront itself with the judgment of an opposition. Like Weber's heroic liberalism, it lets even what contests it enter its universe, and it is justified in its own eyes only when it understands its opposition" (AD 225).
  • A-communism: "agnosticism... is here a positive behavior, a task — as, on the contrary, sympathy is here an abstinence" (AD 209). Not anticommunism, not fellow-traveling, but the refusal to let one's politics be organized around the USSR.
  • The noncommunist left is a double position: "a left which is not a left which fails to speak publicly about communism or one which, together with it, fights its enemies. To deserve its name, it must arrange a ground of coexistence between communism and the rest of the world. Now, this is in fact possible only if it does not adhere to the principle of communism" (AD 210).
  • Parliament is re-endorsed: "Parliament is the only known institution that guarantees a minimum of opposition and of truth" (AD 225). MP does not endorse parliamentary mystifications; these "can be denounced in Parliament itself."
  • The condition of the formula: "The only postulate of this attitude is that political freedom is not only, and not necessarily, a defense of capitalism" (AD 226). The new liberalism detaches political liberty from economic liberalism.
  • Continuous with Weber's heroic liberalism: the new liberalism carries forward Weber's commitment to "legitimize adversaries" and to accept that truth is pursued in struggle (AD 225).

Details

Why "New"

MP calls this liberalism "new" to distinguish it from three positions he explicitly rejects:

  1. Classical liberalism: the "previous liberalism" (Ch 1) that "ingenuously considers itself to be the law of things" and treats its historical contingency as metaphysical necessity. The new liberalism admits it is itself a product of history.
  2. American-style anticommunism: the Cold War posture of treating the USSR as absolute other and treating one's own system as the beneficiary of that contrast. "A politics founded on anticommunism is in the long run a politics of war and in the short run a politics of regression" (AD 201). The new liberalism is "a-communist," not anticommunist.
  3. Free-enterprise libertarianism: "A noncommunist left is no more linked to free enterprise than to the dictatorship of the proletariat. It does not believe that capitalist institutions are the only mechanisms of exploitation, but it also does not judge them to be any more natural or sacred than the polished stone hatchet or the bicycle" (AD 226).

What remains is a liberalism that is procedural (values the institution of parliamentary opposition), post-economic (not tied to a particular economic system), and heroic (in Weber's sense — accepting the reality of violence while working to constrain it). MP takes this to be what survives of the liberal tradition once its 19th-century confidence is critiqued.

A-communism as Positive Task

The shift from "sympathy without adherence" (1947) to "a-communism" (1955) is the book's central political move. "Sympathy" had been the stance of Humanism and Terror: one does not join the Communist Party but one treats Marxism as the only philosophy that "dares to develop its consequences." The sympathizer reserves judgment, waits for the revolution to return to its proper course, refuses to organize anti-communist actions.

By 1955, MP says this stance has become incoherent. It depended on "the margin between communism and noncommunism" — a margin "reduced by the state of war" (AD 229). The Korean War replaced "Marxist wait-and-see" with "communist action" in fact: any opposition to Western action could be read as support for Soviet action. The choice was not between communism and anticommunism; but "it was necessary to know whether one was communist or not" (AD 229).

A-communism is the positive stance that emerges. It is not an abstention. It is a commitment: "to have a positive politics, to pose and resolve concrete problems instead of living with one eye fixed on the U.S.S.R. and the other on the United States" (AD 209). Where sympathy was deferred judgment, a-communism is present engagement; where sympathy kept one at a distance from both sides, a-communism requires one to act independently of the Cold War binary.

The Noncommunist Left

The concrete political form MP proposes is the noncommunist left. Its structure is:

  1. Position on class struggle: "The social problem is beginning to be known, and, besides, a system of conscious lives will never admit of a solution the way a crossword puzzle does" (AD 226). The noncommunist left agrees that capitalist exploitation is exploitation, that the proletariat (or its equivalent) has legitimate demands, that these demands expose the illegitimacy of existing arrangements.
  2. Position on the dictatorship of the proletariat: refused. The dictatorship is "the caricature of permanent revolution"; a party that claims to be the proletariat ends in Sartre's ultrabolshevism or Stalin's terror.
  3. Position on communist parties in the capitalist world: they have a right to exist; they should not be outlawed; they have an organic relation to the working class. "The Communist Party is and must be legal" (AD 224). But the noncommunist left does not join them, because to do so is to accept the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat thesis.
  4. Position on parliamentary institutions: kept. "Parliament is the only known institution that guarantees a minimum of opposition and of truth" (AD 225). Parliamentary mystifications (agenda-manipulation, opportunism) are critiqued, but the institution is preserved because it is the only one that structurally guarantees opposition.
  5. Position on the USSR: agnostic. "The discussion is open" on whether the USSR exploits its workers. The noncommunist left does not assume the discussion is already closed in either direction.

This program is programmatic rather than argued; MP explicitly says "this is not 'a solution,' and we know it full well" (AD 226). Its role is to mark where a coherent post-Marxist left could begin, not to spell out what it would legislate.

Heroic Liberalism: the Weberian Inheritance

The adjective "heroic" (AD 225) is deliberate. Weber's liberalism, Ch 1 argued, was "militant, suffering, heroic" (AD 27) because it "admits that all politics is violence — even, in its own fashion, democratic politics." This is what MP inherits. The new liberalism is heroic in the same sense: it does not promise that its institutions are innocent; it acknowledges that parliamentary politics is also a field of force; it does not expect that its defense of opposition will be met with gratitude.

The inheritance distinguishes MP's position from two easy misreadings:

  • It is not a return to a neutral "procedural" liberalism that imagines itself above the fray.
  • It is not a return to the 19th-century liberal confidence that freedom and reason must win. Rather, it is the form of liberalism that survives the demolition of both. It takes up political freedom as a task to be pursued in full knowledge that history offers no guarantees.

The Korean War as Trigger

MP is explicit about why he changed his mind. "The Korean War and its consequences confronted us with a condition of history from which the postwar years had only apparently freed us" (AD 231). The war "raised this 'different question,'" he says — the question of what a "sympathy without adherence" means when the USSR initiates military action through a local proletariat. The war did not produce a new position instantly; it was "the event that was the occasion of a growing awareness" (AD 231).

The structural argument behind MP's revision: "Marxist critique and Marxist action are a single movement. Not that the critique of the present derives as a corollary from perspectives of the future — Marxism is not a utopia — but because, on the contrary, communist action is in principle only the critique continued, carried to its final consequences, and because, finally, revolution is the critique in power. If one verifies that it does not keep the promises of the critique, one cannot conclude from that: let us keep the critique and forget the action" (AD 232). The "Marxism remains true as critique" of Humanism and Terror turns out to have been "Kant in disguise" — an absolutization of a negation without historical cashing-out. The new liberalism is what one is left with when one refuses the Kantian trap.

What the New Liberalism is Not

Several positions the new liberalism is sometimes confused with:

  • Not social democracy: MP does not argue for reformist gradualism within capitalism. He argues for keeping both the social-class-struggle register and the parliamentary-institutions register in view — which is more radical than social democracy in its class analysis and more institutional in its means.
  • Not Cold War liberalism: MP explicitly rejects anticommunism. "A politics founded on anticommunism is in the long run a politics of war."
  • Not a third-way centrism: MP does not propose finding a middle point between communism and anticommunism. He proposes refusing the binary: a-communism is not moderate anticommunism; the noncommunist left is not a soft leftism; new liberalism is not old liberalism plus good intentions.
  • Not Rawlsian proceduralism: the framing of the noncommunist left is agonistic, not consensual. "The noncommunist left is not a left which fails to speak publicly about communism"; its existence depends on taking a stand against the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Positions

  • MP (1947): Humanism and Terror's "Marxist wait-and-see" and humanism-in-extension. MP's position in 1947.
  • MP (1955): the new liberalism. Explicit revision of the 1947 position; the Epilogue's self-revision is staged in a closing dialogue (AD 233–34).
  • Sartre: "sympathy without adherence" which MP diagnoses as disguised adherence in the state of war. "If Lefort is a Marxist and consequently a realist... he renounces in practice working with and for the proletariat" (AD 185). Sartre cannot sustain a noncommunist left position.
  • Weber's heroic liberalism: the precursor.
  • Lefort: the formation of the noncommunist left was the position of Lefort, MP, and the Socialisme ou Barbarie current; Lefort's later political philosophy elaborates the institution of democratic opposition.
  • Raymond Aron: Ch 1's foil. Aron defended Alain's "politics of understanding" as the only politics possible; MP argues that "understanding" must be supplemented by class-struggle analysis. MP's new liberalism has more in common with Aron than with Sartre, but rejects Aron's anticommunism.

Connections

  • revises humanism-in-extension — the 1955 rupture with the 1947 "Marxist reprieve"
  • inherits Weber's heroic liberalism — "Weber's heroic liberalism" cited explicitly at AD 225
  • is grounded in revolutions-true-as-movements-false-as-regimes — one cannot ground politics on the premise that revolutions-as-regimes preserve the truth of revolutions-as-movements
  • contrasts with ultrabolshevism — Sartre's position is the pure negation of the new liberalism
  • preserves a role for the communist parties in the capitalist world — they function as "useful menace" and "continual call to order"
  • is the political form compatible with interrogation — a politics that keeps "the discussion open"
  • requires action-at-a-distance — politics and philosophy in "promiscuity" from the depths of their difference
  • is anticipated by Montaigne's "ironic and solemn, faithful and free" and Machiavelli's virtù (see action-at-a-distance)
  • is the political cognate of MP's method of hyper-dialectic — refusing synthesis without collapsing into skepticism
  • is a form of a-communism — the two are aspects of the same stance

Open Questions

  • Does the new liberalism have political teeth? MP concedes that "this is not a solution." Critics have argued that the noncommunist left, as MP defines it, cannot generate concrete political action because it defines itself negatively (not communist, not anticommunist, not reformist, not revolutionary). Lefort's later work explicitly tries to give the position more programmatic weight through "the institution of democratic opposition"; MP himself does not develop the program.
  • Is "heroic liberalism" compatible with political organization? Weber's own failure to found a political party is cited (AD 27). MP offers no theory of the party-form that would institutionalize the new liberalism. This is arguably the project Lefort, Castoriadis, and Socialisme ou Barbarie attempted.
  • How does the new liberalism relate to the later ontology? MP rarely returns to explicit political philosophy after 1955; the Signs Introduction (1960) recasts the themes as action-at-a-distance but does not develop the noncommunist left program. Whether the new liberalism is abandoned, absorbed, or just deprioritized is unclear.
  • Can the new liberalism accommodate the colonial question? The 1947 essay (Humanism and Terror, Ch 7) gave strong weight to the "Indochinese or Arab" interlocutor; the 1955 Epilogue is much less attentive to anti-colonial struggle. The Algerian War and the French New Left of the 1960s–70s pressed questions MP had not fully engaged.
  • Is the Weberian inheritance sufficient? MP's "heroic liberalism" borrows Weber's Verantwortungsethik but does not fully develop the institutional structure that Weber's own political writings sketched (the legitimate orders of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft). A more robust Weberian inheritance would bring into view state institutions, bureaucracy, and legitimate authority — which MP barely touches.

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