Self against being.

Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement, by Phillipe Beneton; translated by Ralph C. Hancock, Wilmington, Del.; ISI Books, 2004. xix + 217 pp.

THE SHELVES OF traditional conservatives are weighed down by the many critiques of modernity that have come forth over the last century and more. This translation of De l'egalite par defaut, originally published in 1997 by the French professor of law and and political science Phillipe Beneton, recommends itself as an addition to one's library, not so much on account of its originality, as of its charm, directness, and unpretentiousness--qualities frequently in short supply in critiques of modernity. On occasion, Beneton does sound a bit like the world-weary European: in his condemnations of McDonald's restaurants, of television news, of professors who sport open-necked shirts. Insofar as this book is saying something new, it is by taking the classic criticisms of modernity and extending them to the period since the 1960s, seeing in this recent period the deepest confirmation of the analyses provided by Charles Peguy, Gabriel Marcel, or Leo Strauss.

The fundamental premise of this work is captured in its title: the period of late modernity (from the 1960s on), which has been characterized by "equality by default." Beneton argues that this period has given up all substantive accounts of equality grounded in the nature of humanity, and instead has turned to an equality based on a formal and empty Self. Equality by default is a purely procedural contract with other equally indeterminate or empty selves--outside of all content and context that might give either limit or meaning to this formal gesture. The result is, as Beneton puts it, "that the modern world is not what Hegel thought, the world of reciprocal recognition; it is instead the affirmation of the self, and of mutual indifference."

The final chapter of the book is entitled "The Self against Being." This nicely encapsulates the argument of the book. Modernity and, above all, late modernity is defined through a purely negatively constructed, detached, and self-enclosed subjectivity (the Self) that is in itself empty: this is the Self of "modernity as confinement." The very character of this modern Self is that it posits itself by retracting all involvement with "being," "substance," "meaning," "nature," "tradition," "authority," or "religion" (to cite some of the terms with which Beneton contrasts the modern Self). The full consequence of modern subjectivity, he argues, is found in the late modern result: politically, culturally, and ethically, life has become "the scorched earth."

Coupled with this account of the character of the modern Self is, according to Beneton, a corresponding account of what lies outside the Self: nature, society, the institutional order. These forms of the "not-Self" are reduced by a procedural, techno-scientific rationality to a contentless, inert Other that is simply available to the Self. Nature becomes resource, society a sphere of contractual relations, and our institutions simply structures to order, without determination, various selves in relation to one another. Again, Beneton is well aware that he is not articulating a new insight here, but building on the accounts of technology of Heidegger, of Ellul, and of many others. What is useful here, however, is the clear connecting of this account of technology to the modern Self and Beneton's drawing out of the implications for that Self of this parallel development. In short, in the age of techno-science the Self nowhere encounters a context or reality that might limit or inform its immediate promptings and activities. The modern Self fulfills itself without regard to reverence, the bonds of community, or the substantive reality of nature.

All of this is clearly argued and presented with flair and directness, but what I found especially of interest in Beneton's account is not what was clear but what was confused. Sometimes, it is a thinker's confusions that are what is most thought-provoking. Here the confusion is about the status of liberal democracy. What is impressive in Beneton's account of modernity is his determination not simply to condemn liberal democracy and equality, but only their most radical and empty forms. Hence, he contrasts equality by default with a substantive equality, a procedural liberalism with a substantive liberalism. Beneton would not then condemn modernity holus bolus: in fact, he argues that liberal democracy, when related to substantive realities, is a positive gain. Indeed, implicit in his whole argument is the claim that liberal democracy and modern equality can be realized only in relation to such substantialities. And this is where there is a confusion in Beneton's account.

At first glance the confusion is simply terminological. What does Beneton mean by "modernity"? He seems to mean at least three different things: (1) the modernity that begins with Descartes and Hobbes; (2) the modernity of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century (often associated with the cultural movement called "modernism") that points to a "fact/value" distinction and is fundamentally given to technology and ideology; and (3) the modernity (late-modernity, as Beneton terms it) of the post-1960s period, often called "post-modernism." It is not that Beneton is simply unconscious of these distinctions; but often he elides them. He tends to argue that the consequences of the 1960s are implicit in the seventeenth-century beginning: in the later period, "the logic of modern principles has been unleashed."

This eliding of the distinctions between these different aspects or phases of modernity is connected to another confusion in Beneton's account. As already noted, he rightly wants to retain and even strengthen a certain form of modernity, what he calls "substantial equality," and the substantive version of liberal democracy. Indeed, the touchstones of Beneton's critique of the contemporary are often the great figures of seventeenth-century French literature--Corneille, Pascal, Racine--who are unthinkable outside of the turn to a modern self.

What Beneton does not provide is a positive account of the source of this modern self and its moral, social, and political embodiment in substantial accounts of equality and liberal democracy. In his account, modernity is characterized as a break with the pre-modern world, the world of substance and meaning. So long as this break is not total and radical the modern Self retains a relation to that original substance and can be seen as a positive development: thus, equality and liberal democracy can be drawn into a substantive older account. (Here the Catholic Church's appropriation of modern rights and democracy is in the background of his account.)

If the modern self is established through a break, and is so inherently negative in its character that its necessary result (and so, inner truth) is equality by default, how is an affirmation of the earlier forms of modern equality and democracy anything more than a compromise with the devil, and a losing compromise at that? So long as modernity's origins are not grounded in the development of the pre-modern, are not seen as an authentic and positive outgrowth of the pre-modern, any affirmation of the early-modern self, even in a conditional form, must be ambiguous at best.

The question that Beneton's account raises is whether it is true and necessary that the modern self be seen as simply negative, simply grounded in a break. What seems to mislead here is Beneton's other confusion: seeing modernity primarily through its 1960s "result." Is it not possible to see the stages of modernity not as logical results of an originally negative beginning, but--as Charles Taylor suggests in his Sources of the Modern Self, a book Beneton himself makes good use of--as corruptions of an original modernity that had a real and positive content? To separate an original modernity from its apparent nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms allows one to ask afresh whether there can be an account of the modern self that understands that self as fundamentally positive, both in itself and in its relation to the pre-modern tradition.

This is not a simply idle question, but rather goes to the heart of how we address our contemporary situation. Beneton begins his reflections on equality by default by speaking of the indifference, and indeed the emptiness, of the university students he encounters, and he cites here as further testimony Allan Bloom's famous Closing of the American Mind (1987). My own experience is the opposite: I find my students full--indeed even over-full--of substance, but in corrupted and inarticulate forms. So I agree with Beneton that what the students say on first encounter is often empty and thoughtless. But I would argue that implicitly they have a fully substantial reality present to them, that what they learn as they encounter the western tradition is not something foreign to them, but indeed their very selves. It is beyond the limits of this review to settle such a debate. However, precisely because Beneton is determined to avoid the simple oppositions of modern and pre-modern, of sell and substance, his book is an excellent place to begin such reflections.

NELL G. ROBERTSON is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of King's College, Halifax, Canada.