When one looks into the bottom of the human heart, one mostly finds instincts that are contrary to equality; and these instincts are the most violent of all, since they are called pride, envy, egotism, intolerance, the passion to enjoy and dominate. Thus, how have men held on to equality for so long? The response would not be without interest. It is simply because they see in equality the first claim of their pretensions and the direct means of raising themselves above the others. If one turns this proposition over in one's mind, one will find it just: and if it slightly rumples certain naive people, it throws a very bright light on politics and social life. It makes visible the fact that revolutions, before being developments of principle, are explosions of needs, passions, interests and ambitions, which does not at all prevent revolutions from being legitimate, at least when they are accomplished; it is better not to speak about future revolutions.
This view permits one to give society a definition that in part summarizes the thinking of this book: Society is a state of war ruled by laws.
The external order is only apparent. In reality, it is war that agitates in the depths of social life and it is a war for which the motivations are no different from those that make nations take up arms; each succeeds in life in the name of his interests and passions, in the name of his nature, which constitutes his individual law. In what it establishes or in what it prohibits, the law only determines the conditions of combat and the weapons that are permitted. It is completely a world of arrangements, intrigues and artifices; an art of proceeding, attacking and defending; a social strategy of which the deep knowledge is the universal instrument. The struggle takes place man to man, class to class; and power, positions, credit, fortune and celebrity appear like culminating points around which the eternal melee of the ambitions incessantly moves.
No doubt this spectacle appears in all times, but modern societies show the struggle in conditions unknown until now. No class distinction keeps activities in their sphere; the entire social mass is called to the arena; the career is open to all individual initiatives and nothing can set limits to the future of the most obscure individual if he or she has the genius of his or her ambition.
How can equilibrium maintain itself in similar conditions? How can this ardent competition not incessantly pass from civil war to social war? How among the individuals thus accumulated, pressed by needs, desires and hatreds, could everything not end at a given moment in an immense jacquerie[1]?
What could make the masses support the yoke of work and indigence? Religious beliefs? The empire of philosophy? The love of the prince or the love of country? One cannot respond to these questions. Is it the brakes of the laws? But when there are no longer those who are interested in defending them, on the one hand, and [there are] those who are interested in overthrowing them, on the other hand, their powerlessness is soon demonstrated. Is it the small number of men whom society satisfies, compared with the thousands of underprivileged people? A single one of their quivers, if communicated to all, would cover the earth in ruins in a moment; and yet no one stirs or each gets back into order when he or she comes to be troubled.
Here we have a secret of the social organism that one does not ordinarily reveal.
What one must at first ascertain is that equality delivers nothing or almost nothing of what it promises. One has proclaimed the equality of rights; [yet] one remains in the presence of an inequality of forces. The distinctions of birth are suppressed, but those that pertain to the superiority of natural faculties subsist and they suffice to reconstitute privileges, to raise barriers between men that are as practically insurmountable as those that previously separated the different classes of society. Each can only take the position that he or she can take. Some elevate themselves to superior regions by their energy and their talents, while others can only conquer intermediate positions or are violently carried back to the last ranks of society, where it is necessary -- willy nilly -- that they remain.
If this is true, what to conclude? That there are, at the bottom of the human soul, imperative instincts by virtue of which men submit and subordinate themselves. Like the diverse groups of which society is composed, individuals are attracted to or kept in distinct spheres by forces of attraction and gravitation whose very principle is in them and whose control they cannot escape. At base, all of the connections between people are ruled by the reciprocal aptitudes to exercise domination and submission; they subordinate themselves by themselves and necessarily the ones to the others, following the degree of moral force that is in them and that assigns them -- whatever they do -- a determinate place in the social order.
There is a kind of fatalism here that consists in the fortuitous distribution of intelligence and moral force, like other social advantages. Power, fortune, position and celebrity are so many natural monopolies, which can only belong to a certain number of privileged people. Life can be envisioned as a lottery in which there are only a certain number of winning numbers. Those who win discriminate against the others.
Now one understands what is pitiless and fatal in the clash of human wills, surrendered to their own enthusiasms and only contained by the brake of the laws. In a way, it is a return to the violence and liberty of nature. This melee of men resembles the crowds accumulated in the public places too narrow to contain them. Those who do not have flanks strong enough to bear the crowds, or whose head is not quite raised above the multitude so as to be able to breathe, will be choked off. In the play of social forces, all that is weak is inevitably crushed. This is the law of combat: it is the fatum[2] of modern times. Treading upon the feet of his competitors, the man who falls is no longer anything; he is a cadaver that must disappear from the battlefield. The noise of the crowd stops his groans and, in the melee, one only hears one cry: Succeed! Attain!
Succeed! Attain! Do not these words completely summarize a civilization, and is not the last word of contemporary social philosophy to seek as one attains? If one hopes to learn something here, one would do well to meditate upon the following reflections:
I. When one knows life, it would be a stupidity to inform the others.
II. Those who have best observed the things of life are generally those who succeed the least.
III. The initiation of all to the secrets of social life would not teach their use.
[1] A revolt, typically by peasants.
[2] Latin for "destiny" or fate."
(Anonymous [Maurice Joly], first published 1868 by Editions Amyot. Reprinted by Editions Allia, 1992. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! February 2008.)