[D66] Review: On the Abolition of All Political Parties

[A.O.]

Review: On the Abolition of All Political Parties, by Simone Weil

In an era of disillusionment with political parties, the republication 
of the French philosopher’s forceful treatise on abolishing them 
couldn’t be better timed

Jan-Werner Mueller

First published:
Sat, Mar 21, 2015, 01:22


Book Title:
On the Abolition of All Political Parties

ISBN-13:
978-1590177815

Author:
Simone Weil

Publisher:
New York Review Books

Guideline Price:
£8.99

In our political lexicon, extremist is not a good word: it denotes 
someone uncompromising and possibly self-sacrificing. But, then again, 
saints might be called extremists of sorts. The French philosopher 
Simone Weil, who has often been called a saint among intellectuals, was 
always willing to sacrifice for a political cause. Despite being 
physically frail she toiled at a Renault assembly line in order to share 
the fate of the workers (although she was eventually fired, as she could 
not keep up); she lived in unheated flats and gave her money to the 
poor; and she volunteered on the side of the soldiers fighting Franco’s 
fascists in Spain (but had to be evacuated after stepping in a pot of 
boiling oil). During the second World War she worked for Gen de Gaulle’s 
Free French in London. But she also starved herself, refusing to eat 
more than what she (wrongly) thought to be the ration of her compatriots 
in Nazi-occupied France.

Eventually she died in a sanatorium, in Kent, aged 34. Among her London 
writings had been a memorandum that demanded the abolition of all 
political parties in postwar French democracy. De Gaulle had called some 
of her proposals mad, but, mad or not, Weil’s cogently argued 
reflections force us to rethink why we take it for granted that 
democracy must come with political parties, even if, today, parties are 
less popular than ever.
Elegant

It is easy to see why the publishing house of the premier American 
literary magazine, the New York Review of Books, would choose just now 
to bring out Weil’s memorandum as an elegant little book. The US 
Congress is more polarised than ever, although the term polarisation, 
while widely used in the American media, is misleading: the Democrats 
have remained in a place that in Europe might well be described as 
centre-right; it’s the Republicans who have moved sharply rightward and 
cannot afford to compromise, lest their representatives be challenged by 
Tea Party purists. However, Weil was not an advocate of compromise, or 
what in the US would be called bipartisanship, which means, in effect, 
that the extreme right is willing to do a deal with the centre-right. 
She wanted to get rid of partisanship altogether.

Weil said that parties were organisations “designed for the purpose of 
killing in all souls the sense of truth and justice”. They inflamed what 
she called “collective passions” and made it impossible for party 
members to think for themselves. She complained that they never spoke 
their own mind but prefaced whatever they might contribute to political 
discussions with statements such as “I, as a socialist . . .” Weil 
concluded that “if one were to entrust the organisation of public life 
to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device”.

Weil was born into a Jewish family but violently rejected Judaism and 
eventually turned to Catholicism. Yet she chose to remain on the 
threshold of the church, attending Mass, spending many hours talking to 
priests, but hesitating to be baptised. Part of her reluctance had to do 
with her view of the Catholic Church as something like the ur-party: a 
collective, highly disciplined organisation that had invented the idea 
of punishing deviations from proper doctrine. Modern parties, “secular 
little churches”, according to Weil, had inherited the notion of heresy. 
Even worse, they would always become their own ends, instead of a means 
to attain the public good. Hence they engaged in a kind of idolatry, as 
only God, according to Weil, was his own end.

Weil’s criticism of parties makes little sense unless one shares her 
belief that there is a clearly discernible common good for any country. 
Weil was sure of it; her main philosophical ally in this conviction was 
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had invented the notion of the “general 
will”. Through it, a fully unified people unfailingly aims at the public 
interest. Rousseau had demanded that there be no debate among citizens 
at all, so as to avoid factions coming together on the basis of shared 
special interests. Weil thought people could talk but, ideally, do it in 
small circles around intellectual magazines like the ones to which she 
contributed in the 1930s and 1940s.

Rule by saints It’s easy to reject or even ridicule such claims. Weil 
has been charged with advocating something like “rule by saints” (such 
as herself) in ways that reminded one of her fiercest critics, Conor 
Cruise O’Brien, of the very regime that she was fighting against in the 
1940s: Marshal Pétain’s authoritarian (and Catholic) Vichy state. She 
has been called everything from antiliberal to antipolitical to,

God forbid, being a “pure intellectual”.

Such charges overlook that Weil, like many others, was reacting against 
the instability and party scandals of the French Third Republic, which 
virtually everyone, from de Gaulle to the French collaborators, held 
responsible for France’s defeat in 1940. Weil, impressed by her 
experience in England, was willing to concede that, for the 
Anglo-Saxons, conflict among parties was more like a sport with 
aristocratic origins. But for French political life, parties would 
always be fatal; hence Weil was horrified by the prospect of a Gaullist 
political party forming.

Still, the coherence of Weil’s proposal rises and falls with the idea of 
a single truth, or a single common good – ideas that democrats today 
tend to reject in the name of pluralism. Or do they? Mostly as a result 
of the euro crisis, many European countries are now dominated by two 
political phenomena that seem completely opposed yet, curiously, mirror 
each other: technocracy, which holds that there is only one correct 
policy, usually austerity, and populism, according to which there is one 
morally pure people who have been betrayed by corrupt elites. For 
neither is political debate necessary: the technocrats always know 
what’s right, and, for populists, the people can’t err. And, just as 
there is no need for debate, there’s no need for political parties.
Technocrat or populist?

Would Weil be a technocrat or a populist in today’s Europe? Probably 
neither. She was against whipping up collective passions in the way 
populists do. And the truth she hoped for was moral and spiritual, not a 
supposedly infallible economic theory. Her problem with parties, after 
all, had been that they always turned intolerant, and neither 
technocrats nor populists are known for their tolerance of other points 
of view.

So why, then, do we need parties? Edmund Burke, one of the first 
thinkers to justify them under modern conditions, had argued that 
parties provide something like a legitimate opposition. Without what 
political scientists call regulated rivalry there can be no democratic 
accountability. Parties structure political choices for an electorate in 
a way that Weil’s intellectual magazines never could (and in a way that 
the internet cannot today). Although none of them possesses the truth 
and nothing but the truth, the messy conflicts and coalitions among them 
can ideally ensure that what John Stuart Mill called their fractional 
truths might produce coherent policy.

Alas, today, the problem is precisely that the euro crisis has made 
opposition and accountability within nation states much more difficult. 
Can you really vote against the troika? Parties have fewer members and 
less stable support among voters, which led the late Irish political 
scientist Peter Mair to the conclusion that modern “party democracy” was 
over. Yet we only know how to do democracy with political parties. 
Weil’s proposal to abolish all of them does not help much in figuring 
out how a postparty democracy might work. But her impassioned plea makes 
us think harder about why we still need legitimate partisanship and 
which forms it might take beyond traditional party machines.

Jan-Werner Müller teaches politics at Princeton University. He is the 
author of Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/review-on-the-abolition-of-all-political-parties-by-simone-weil-1.2145931