Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics. Paul Ricoeur

the diversity of projects never ceases to grow, a rule of the game that will make coexistence possible is ever more urgent. This future, however, raises in return the entirely new question regarding the people who are excluded from this rule of the game. The result of this exclusion is a form of poverty completely unlike the poverty of the nineteenth century, which was placed along the same scale as wealth. Today inclusion and exclusion are incommensurable. I want to express how politically disturbing I find the increasing numbers of people who are socially excluded. There are people who are totally outside, even outside of any alternative, and this is without precedent. I have frequently worked with people like the ATD Fourth World [Agir Tous pour la Dignité Quart Monde]. There is now a fringe of marginal people who are no longer members of the social contract. How are they to be integrated? By helping them to find work, housing? But, precisely, looking for work or housing implies that one belongs to the social body. This is a big question posed to Western societies: can they integrate everyone? I don’t know if this is inscribed within the Marxist framework or if, instead, exclusion has taken the place of exploitation. In the latter case, are the same descriptions, the same explanations, the same remedies still valid?

      It remains to be seen whether exclusion takes the place of exploitation or whether it is the form of exploitation pushed to extreme, something like the modern version of the old concept of Lumpenproletariat about which so many contradictory things have been written…

I am thinking here of a text that was fundamental, despite its narrowness and its excesses – the Communist Manifesto of 1848. The hypothesis is that the proletariat are part of the social circle because they had to organize themselves into a class among the other classes. Those excluded today are no longer capable of forming a class. They are “outsiders” [“hors classe”]. This raises new questions concerning parliamentary democracy, majoritarian democracy. There now exists a sufficiently large number of people who are satisfied to no longer allow the disadvantaged to become the focus of a political alternative. This is for me a matter of serious concern. I had begun to reflect on this problem during my years in America. While American society still has a large capacity for integration, those who have left the system no longer constitute even an alternative. I do recognize how the American Democratic Party has served for a long time to represent the minorities it includes. In this way, minorities were directly part of the system. Today in the United States, a quarter of the population lives in real poverty. In France, the problem of exclusion concerns all the parties on the Left, including the Communist Party. Is it around those most disadvantaged but who still remain part of the system, or starting with those who are outside the system, that the possibility can be envisaged of joining the excluded together with the included who are at the bottom of the social ladder?

Notes

      1  1 Interview with Arnaud Spire, Humanité, 90th Anniversary special edition, April 21, 1994.

      2  2 Paul Ricoeur, Philosophie de la volonté; I. Le Volontaire et l’Involontaire (Paris: Aubier, 1950). Philosophie de la volonté; II. Finitude et culpabilité; 1. L’Homme faillible; 2. La Symbolique du mal (Paris: Aubier, 1960; Le Seuil, 2009). Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, tr. E. V. Kohak (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966). Fallible Man, tr. C. Kelby (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965). The Symbolism of Evil, tr. E. Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

      3  3 Paul Ricoeur, La Métaphore vive (Paris: Le Seuil, 1975). The Rule of Metaphor, tr. R. Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978).

      4  4 Olivier Mongin, Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Le Seuil, 1994; Points Essais, 1998).

      5  5 Ricoeur, History and Truth, pp. 247–70.

      6  6 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 170.

      7  7 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 268.