ABSTRACT
Consider the following depiction. Under an autocratic state, in what is juridically the private sphere, a new form of public life is constituted. No legal authority, no political power is claimed here, only the power of conscience, the authority of morals. In effect a new social realm is carved out from the state, or in other words, the social world is reduplicated as civil society and state. Initially the institutional spaces for the new "society" are provided by private homes, clubs, cafés and educational institutions. Soon its activity finds a true medium in some legal, illegal, and emigré publications. Society is unable to directly challenge the state, yet its very process of self-institution as well as its monopoly of moral legitimacy delegitimizes a state based exclusively on raison d'état, while the weapons of public criticism begin to erode a sovereignty based on secrecy. Public enlightenment thus helps to constitute a social movement whose apolitical claims appear entirely hypocritical to the established powers. The repressive activity of the state can reprivatize society, or drive it underground and even force it to turn (against its own principle) to secrecy. Nevertheless, the parallel society survives on the basis of its intellectual authority and especially the moral solidarity of its members. The apparently purely spiritual operation of a republic of letters using the medium of critical public opinion continues to exercise political influence and achieve political results. From the polemical point of view of the state, the ongoing challenge to raison d'état threatens to institutionalize not civil society, but civil war. Thus Reinhart Koselleck (writing in 1959), to be sure in my free adaptation, depicts in Kritik und Krise the political crisis of the French Enlightenment. All of us are indeed familiar with similar depictions, as well as juxtapositions such as society or civil society against state, nation against state, social order against political system, pays réel against pays légal or officiel, public life against public power, etc. While the analogies between a depiction of the eighteenth-century struggle against absolutism, and the self-understanding of the contemporary actors are striking, from the point of view of the social theorist they are necessarily disquieting. Can self-interpretations remain politically relevant when they reproduce the orientation of a very different social and political epoch? It may be that the twentieth-century historian is engaging in unacceptable backward projection, but also that the metaphor of the actors is a hopeless projection of something already past into the present and future. Of course, there cannot be much doubt about the great mobilizing power of these dichotomies, shown especially by recent Polish experience. Nevertheless, the general theoretical validity of the constructs and thus their usefulness for orientation cannot be thereby automatically assumed.
