Most fundamental right

This opinion piece, from the World Affairs Journal in which Pascale Bruckner defends the recent French ban on the burqua, is from a few months ago, and has doubtless been discussed elsewhere. This debate has been written about brilliantly (in very different modes, for instance, by Joan Scott and Cecile Laborde), and I haven't got anything in particular to add, except to stand back and gape at the following double-whammy:

An individual’s most fundamental right is to free himself or herself from his or her origins: Muslims should be able to leave Islam, become atheist, not observe Ramadan, or convert to Buddhism or to Christianity in the same way that Christians can fall away from their faith and shop for other forms of belief. (In fact, the French press have noted many cases of Muslim aggression against other Muslims who chose not to have children; and as for apostates, they routinely face death threats.) The burqa (or the North African niqab or the Middle Eastern hijab) is a direct challenge to the ideal of laicization since it dramatically violates the principle of equality between men and women.

An individual's most fundamental right is to be set free from their origins? This seems like a pretty clear example of the internal tensions of contemporary French republicanism coming to the fore in statements that are either obvious falsehoods or can only be taken in a radically revolutionary sense. And then there is the breathtaking association of "the ideal of laicization" with "the principle of equality between men and women." Even leaving aside the question of whether, in fact, passing a law banning a kind of clothing worn only by women is indeed forwarding this principle, the idea that French laicite means gender equality cannot possibly be more than, say, 30 years old. Certainly there was very little sense that the 1905 separation or other 3rd Republic policies to remove the Catholic Church from public life, were pursued with any acceptance of gender equality--indeed precisely the opposite is arguably the case.

Chapter One, The Philosophy of Money

As part of my continuing attempt to be more educated in classical sociology, I’m beginning to read Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. I have so far read the first chapter of this rather large book. This chapter is an enormous amount of philosophical ground-preparation, about subjectivity, objectivity, relativism, and value--and then about ten pages discussing money in the vocabulary so constituted. Simmel is a frustrating writer. Yet he’s rewarding, if only for the occasional passage like this one,

All general and particular systems of knowledge meet in this form of the mutual interdependence of thought processes. If one attempts to understand the political, social, religious or any other cultural aspects of the present time, this can be achieved only through history, i.e. by knowing and understanding the past. But this past, which comes down to us only in fragments, through silent witnesses and more or less unreliable reports and traditions, can come to life and be interpreted only through the experiences of the immediate present. No matter how many transformations and quantitative changes are required, the present, which is the indispensable key to the past, can itself be understood only through the past; and the past, which alone can help us to understand the present, is accessible only through the perceptions and sensibilities of the present. All historical images are the result of this mutuality of interpretative elements, none of which allows the others to come to rest. Ultimate comprehension is transferred to infinity, since every point in one series refers to the other series for its understanding. (pg 110)

I have not yet looked at the substantial (monograph-sized) introduction to this translation, but Simmel is working within an explicitly Kantian horizon. I don’t know enough to be able to judge what he is doing more finely than that.

His treatment of relativism is satisfyingly thoroughgoing. The Comtean-Durkheimian sociological relativism that I am more used to seems always to pull up before crashing into the more serious consequences of this line of thought. Simmel is adamant, and iterates a similar point often: it is true to say that the apple is falling towards the Earth, but it is also true to say that the Earth is falling toward the apple. In a familiar (common at this moment) formulation, he says that Science “has abandoned the search for the essence of things and is reconciled to stating the relationships that exist between objects and the human mind from the viewpoint of the human mind” (101). Hi handling of norms and laws, of objectivity through relativity—all this smacks of a slightly different tradition of philosophy of science than the French that I’m more familiar with—when he discusses measurement, it seems to owe something to Fechner, but perhaps I think this because Fechner’s is one of the few theories of measurement I’ve read anything about.

He gets, at the end of the chapter, finally to a set of definitions of money,

In this sense, money has been defined as ‘abstract value’. As a visible object, money is the substance that embodies abstract economic value, in a similar fashion to the sound of words which is an acoustic-physiological occurrence but has significance for us only through the representation that it bears or symbolizes. If the economic value of objects is constituted by their mutual relationship of exchangeability, then money is the autonomous expression of this relationship. Money is the representative of abstract value. From the economic relationship, i.e. the exchangeability of objects, the fact of this relationship is extracted and acquires, in contrast to those objects, a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbol. Money is a specific realization of what is common to economic objects—in the language of the scholastics one might call it universale ante rem, or in re or post rem—and the general misery of human life is most fully reflected by this symbol, namely by the constant shortage of money under which most people suffer. (118)

The last cryptic bit is made more clear, perhaps, by this,

For money represents pure interaction in its purest form; it makes comprehensible the most abstract concept; it is an individual thing whose essential significance is to reach beyond individualities. Thus, money is the adequate expression of the relationship of man to the world, which can only be grasped in single and concrete instances, yet only really conceived when the singular becomes the embodiment of the living mental process which interweaves all singularities and, in this fashion, creates reality. (128)

No wonder it is also the symbol of our misery.

Sources of Reaction

Il existe aujourd’hui un genre de fanatisme scientifique qui menace d’être funeste à la science: il ferait tout sauter pour éprouver un explosif, il perdrait un État pour tirer des archives et mettre en lumière un document ‘intéressant’. Ce système anarchique et révolutionnaire est de source métaphysique. Il n’a rien de rationnel. Proprement il consiste à remplacer le dieu des Juifs par la Curiosité, dite improprement la Science, mis sur un autel, faite centre du monde et revêtue des mêmes honneurs que Jéhovah. Cette superstition ne mérite pas plus de respect que les autres. Bien qu’elle soit fort à la mode parmi les savants, Sainte-Beuve ou l’empirisme organisateur lui donne son nom véritable: tantôt passion féconde, tantôt pure monomanie.

Maurras, Charles. Trois idées politiques: Chateaubriand, Michelet, Sainte-Beuve. [1898]

Anti-Constitutionalism

S'ils invoquent l'exécution littérale des adages constitutionnels, ce n'est que pour les violer impunément. Ce sont les lâches assassins qui, pour égorger sans péril la République au berceau, s'efforcent de la garrotter avec des maximes vagues dont ils savent bien se dégager eux-mêmes.

Robespierre, 5 Nivôse II (25 December, 1793)