JULIA KRISTEVA
The Strangers
The
Enlightenment, and the French Revolution as well, has spawned a
wealth of ideas about such concepts as nation and foreigners, mankind
and the masses; these have become more and more complex, for we are
still living with that inheritance - its dignity, its contradictions, its toler–
ance, and its pitfalls - and can project our present sensitivities onto them.
As we can pick out just a few of those aspects that are inherent in what I
shall, to simplify matters, call the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment,
let us think whether a society without foreigners is possible.
Beginning with Montesquieu's neostoicism and including Diderot's
pantomime of human strangeness or the cynicism of cosmopolitans re–
belling against all sacred values, the eighteenth century was to hand
down to the Revolution an ideology of human equality that, from the
"rights of man" to the "rights of the citizen," proved hard to manage
when facing the onslaughts of political passions, war, and the Terror.
Without dodging the problem of our antagonisms but in opposi–
tion to Hobbes who posited a state of war inherent in nature and in
human society, Montesquieu (1689-1755) affirmed the notion of
human
sociability
at the outset of
The Spirit of the Laws
(1748). More timorous
than malevolent, human beings would nevertheless join together natu–
rally, and their political constructs could hardly be the art of "building
iniquity into a system" but on the contrary would succeed in working
out a "moderate form of government." Such a sociability has forerunners
with Cartesianism (the jurist Jean Domat), Christian theology (Fenelon),
English neostoicism and empiricism (most particularly with Locke and
Shaftesbury). It found its anchoring in the economic history of the eigh–
teenth century, which Montesquieu attentively scrutinized and described
as a period of increasing wealth, of unprecedented expansion of trade,
and of economic and political liberalism that, in his eyes, would insure
Editor's Note: From Julia Kristeva's
Strangers to Ourselves,
forthcoming from Columbia
University Press. Copyright
©
1990 Columbia University Press. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher.
