Origins and Theoretical Foundations of Convivialism

Abstract

Convivialism can be seen as an attempt to go beyond the great modern political ideologies: liberalism, socialism, anarchism, and communism, while preserving them (aufheben). It is their heir. But its other main source, beyond the sociological tradition, is the anti-utilitarianism and gift paradigm developed over the past forty years by La Revue du MAUSS (Anti-Utilitarian Movement in Social Science), named after the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, author of the Essay on the Gift (1925).

One can only congratulate and thank Ms. Bing Song for opening here a field of discussion between Eastern and Western thought. The task is more than urgent and necessary as the risks of misunderstandings between these two mental universes are great, whereas, obviously, we will not be able to independently, and certainly not antagonistically, confront the multiple perils that threaten our planet. Starting from the notions of gongsheng or kyōsei (in Chinese or Japanese), translated as symbiosis, is a good exercise because they immediately pose a problem. Ms. Bing Song thinks that there is a strong proximity between these notions and convivialism. She is probably right, but it is necessary to point out at the outset that this is by no means obvious at first. First of all, convivialism is a political philosophy, whereas the notion of symbiosis has its origins in biology and life sciences. From one field to the other, the transposition is not as easy as one might think.

But it is from one culture to another that the translation is the most difficult. Here, for example, is how my friend Marc Humbert, professor of political economy and former director of the French House in Japan, explains the difficulties he had in having the first Convivialist Manifesto translated and published in Japanese. Our friend Zhe Ji, a sociologist and professor of Chinese civilization at National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris (INALCO) had translated an Abstract of the First Convivialist Manifesto into Chinese under the title Manifesto of the Principle of Symbiosis 共生主义宣言, kyôsei in Japanese, gòngshēng in Chinese. The Japanese translation was done by Hiroko Humbert and revised by editors Nishikawa and Ôe. The title finally chosen was 共生主義宣言-経済成長なき時代をどう生きるか, Manifesto [of the Symbiosis Principle] Convivialist—How to Live in an Age Deprived of Economic Growth?¹

Marc Humbert writes me that he and his wife Hiroko would have preferred to use convivialism in katakana rather than symbiosis. He explains:

What posed a problem for our Japanese friends (as well as for some Chinese) is that they like spontaneous harmony and do not appreciate the principle of accepting conflicts and opposing each other (even if it is “without slaughtering each other”), in short, democracy as we want it. It was also very difficult to translate the principle of creative opposition. With pressure to mitigate as much as possible the recognition of the possibility that there may even be conflicts to be resolved. When the seminar for the presentation of the book took place in 2014, I had to work hard to make people understand that convivialism was quite different from symbiosis, which has a natural and spontaneous side.

For his part, Augustin Berque, director of research at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (and also a convivialist), a great connoisseur of Chinese and Japanese (not to mention a number of other languages), wrote to me:

The problem is that both the Japanese kyôsei 共生 (“symbiosis”, often written as 共棲 in biology) and the Chinese tianxia 天下 (“all under tian”) could be understood in meanings far removed from what we mean by conviviality. For example, the architect Kurokawa Kishô 黒川紀章 (1934–2007), who was a champion of “kyôsei thinking” (kyôsei no shisô 共生の思想), was able to present as such a delirious redevelopment project for Tokyo from an ecological point of view (proposing in particular to fill in the bay which is in fact the lung of the giant city), not to mention the landscape. As for tianxia, it is “all under tian” (which has always connoted: “under the boot (of the Chinese empire”).

As we can see, the agreement between oriental thoughts of symbiosis and convivialism is not necessarily self-evident. Perhaps it was the translation of the Convivialist Manifesto into Chinese and Japanese as Manifesto of the Symbiosis Principle that gave Ms. Bing Song the idea that the translation from one to the other was natural. However, according to what she writes in “Symbiosis and Planetary Philosophy,” (in the Berggruen Institute’s 10-Year Anniversary report), it is rather the idea of interdependence in the subtitle of the first Convivialist Manifesto: A Declaration of Interdependence (2013), that caught her attention.² I like, at least, her attempt to relate symbiosis to what she calls the “philosophy of codependency and mutual embeddedness.” And I fully agree with her statement that the international signatories of the two convivialist manifestos:

…called for a recognition that relationality and interdependence are the essence of human existence and our relationship with the environment. They advocated a new civic and political philosophy of convivialism and promoted the art of living together. Convivialism and the notion of gongsheng or kyosei may not share the same philosophical roots, but their ethical and policy aspirations are much the same.

Are our ethical and policy aspirations much the same? I hope so. But we have to show it by comparing our respective philosophical roots. For my part, I will try to describe some of the roots of convivialism as I see them, knowing that other convivialists would certainly see others, since one of the central characteristics of convivialism is precisely its principled acceptance of theoretical and ideological pluralism. Convivialism can be arrived at from very different theoretical or religious foundations. Before I ask about some of the philosophical roots of convivialism, let us try to see quickly what it is all about.

A Few Words About Convivialism

If we were to present it in the shortest possible terms, we could say that convivialism is a philosophy of the art of living together by cooperating or opposing without slaughtering each other. This philosophy has developed through two manifestos. The first, published in 2013, was signed by more than sixty intellectuals, academics, and activists, mainly French-speaking.³ The second, subtitled “For a Post-Neoliberal World” and published in 2019, was co-signed by nearly 300 personalities from 35 different countries.⁴ But what is most notable is that they come from very diverse ideological backgrounds, ranging from, say, the left of the left to the center-right. What has brought them together is a sense of absolute urgency in the face of all the dramatic crises that threaten us: the climatic and environmental crises, the economic and financial crises, the social crises, the geostrategic conflicts and wars, the moral crises, etc. Through all these crises, the very survival of humanity, moral or physical, is more and more clearly at stake.

The second certainty they share is that it will be impossible to avert all these threats without breaking free from the domination exercised on a global scale by a capitalism that has become rentier and speculative over the last fifty years. To put it another way, and in the words of the American economist Kenneth Boulding, humanity cannot survive by aiming for ever more infinite economic growth in a finite world.⁵

The third certainty they have in common is that it is impossible to escape the reign of rentier and speculative capitalism without opposing it with a political philosophy more powerful and relevant than the neoliberalism that constitutes its specific ideology. The modern political ideologies of which we are all, in various ways, the heirs, liberalism, socialism, anarchism, or communism, are not dead, but, for various reasons, they are no longer up to the task of our time. Convivialism can be seen as an attempt to go beyond them, to aufheben them as Hegel used to say, i.e., to preserve them (to keep what must be saved) while going beyond.

Hegel’s statement lays the groundwork for identifying the initial philosophical foundations of convivialism. It positions convivialism as the successor, and potentially the inheritor for all, of the various doctrines that have shaped modernity, which has sought to encapsulate the very essence of the democratic ideal. But the relationship of convivialism to its predecessors will be better understood if we state the principles (four in the first manifesto, five plus one in the second) on which the co-signatories agreed beyond their diversity by trying to reach a common axiological denominator.

In the Second Convivialist Manifesto, the principle of common naturalness appears first, affirming the interdependence of humanity and nature. It is perhaps the one that comes closest to the symbiotic vision of gongsheng or kyōsei.

The second principle is the principle of common humanity, which refuses all a priori discrimination based on skin color or religious affiliation.

The principle of common sociality affirms that for humans, the greatest wealth is that of the ties they form with each other. It is radically relationalist in inspiration.

The principle of legitimate individuation posits that it is legitimate for each human subject to seek recognition of his or her singularity.

The problem is that if each person fights to be recognized as having (at least) as much value as all the others, the result may be a war of all against all and a general tipping into what the ancient Greeks called hubris, the absence of limits and the desire for omnipotence. Contemporary rentier and speculative capitalism can be seen as the most paroxysmal manifestation of hubris ever known. Hence the necessity of the fifth principle, the principle of creative opposition. Opposition between humans, which is inevitable (and which it is dangerous to deny), is only legitimate and desirable as long as it is a factor of creativity. As long, in other words, as it contributes to the development of science, arts, and culture (including sports). Or as long as it contributes to the preservation of nature, in the sense of common humanity and common sociality. As the anthropologist-sociologist Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) wrote (to which I will return), “men must learn to oppose each other without slaughtering each other and to give themselves without sacrificing themselves.”⁶

Since, among other things, we cannot pursue infinite growth in a finite world, and these five principles are subordinated to a transversal categorical imperative, the categorical imperative of controlling hubris, whether in the economic domain (the most visible today), but also in the domain of power or of technosciences.

If we think about it carefully, we realize that each of the convivialist principles, with the exception of the first one, more or less faithfully takes up what is at the heart of each of the great political ideologies of modernity. The principle of common humanity is at the heart of communism, the principle of common sociality is that which inspires socialism, the principle of legitimate individuation anarchism, and the principle of creative opposition liberalism. Each of these principles, pursued for its own sake, in ignorance or contempt of the others, self-destructs or corrupts. Love of others turns into sacrificialism and dictatorship. Socialism becomes bureaucratic and statist; anarchism turns into chaos, and liberalism becomes rentier and speculative capitalism. Convivialism seeks the right balance between these four principles while respecting the common naturalness and avoiding the unleashing of hubris.

First Remarks on the Origins and Theoretical Foundations of Convivialism

These brief indications already give a first idea of the intellectual sources of convivialism. As we can see, they are multiple. It would be possible to summon here all the thinkers who have contributed to the formation of the political philosophies of modernity, and even beyond. Marx (and many others), of course, for communism and the principle of common humanity. But also, long before him, one of the founder of Christianity, Saint Paul, when he proclaimed: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Proudhon or Kropotkin⁷ for anarchism; Pierre Leroux and Jaurès for socialism; Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau or Tocqueville for liberalism, and so on.⁸

In the same way, one will have felt the harmonies that exist between certain convivialist principles and symbiotic approaches. The principle of common naturalness forbids to consider nature as a simple set of inert material resources to be exploited. Between nature and humanity there is a mutual embeddedness. The principle of common humanity emphasizes the interdependence of all humans. More precisely, the central idea of convivialism is that we will only be able to overcome the climatic, economic, geostrategic, or moral challenges that lie ahead of us if all humans manage to agree clearly on some basic principles. Universalizable principles, even if their interpretation or application will necessarily be local.

And More Specifically… The Anti-Utilitarianism of MAUSS

I first proposed the word convivialism on the occasion of a colloquium organized in 2010 in Tokyo by Marc Humbert on the theme “Is a convivial society possible?” This title and the expectations of the conference clearly referred to the work of Ivan Illich. Among others, Serge Latouche,⁹ considered as the world pope of degrowth, and Patrick Viveret, known in France as the philosopher of what he proposes to call the civic society, participated in this meeting. I had a certain number of disagreements with both of them, but we quickly agreed that in view of the global emergencies it was necessary to insist more on our convergences than on our divergences. The word convivialism allowed us to put forward these convergences. And, little by little, these convergences extended to hundreds of intellectual or activist personalities.

For my part, I consider convivialism to be the political philosophy that is largely the result of the theoretical work carried out for more than forty years within the framework of La Revue du MAUSS (Mouvement anti-utilitariste en science sociale, Anti-Utilitarian Movement in Social Science) that I founded in 1981–82 with some friends. It is impossible, of course, to summarize here this work, which has been pursued through nearly two to three thousand often rather long articles (not to mention as many book reviews) and more than fifty books. I will retain here only a few points that seem to me particularly relevant in relation to convivialism, organizing them according to the two meanings (in French) of MAUSS: Mouvement anti-utilitariste (en science sociale), on the one hand, and an homage paid to Marcel Mauss, immortal author of the Essai sur le don (Essay on the Gift, 1925), on the other.¹⁰

On Anti-Utilitarianism

In the canonical history of philosophical ideas, utilitarianism is the doctrine of Jeremy Bentham, so called by his disciple John Stuart Mill. It consists of two propositions that seem to pull in quite radically opposite directions. The first one states that the only motive of human actions is the search for personal interest (or happiness, or utility)¹¹ that allows maximizing pleasures while minimizing pains. The second asserts that the only admissible criterion of justice is the search for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which, it is easy to see, can, and even must, lead to sacrificing the interests of the few. The first criterion seems to value an absolute egoism and the second a radical (and sacrificial) altruism. Bentham himself explains that the tension between these two principles can only be resolved by a rational legislator, who knows perfectly well how to calculate pleasures and punishments and how to handle rewards and punishments in order to ensure that the interest of each individual is to contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Let us put it more simply and call utilitarian the doctrines that postulate that the only motive of individuals is to calculate their individual interest (or their utility, or their happiness) and that the motive of the rational legislator is to calculate the happiness of the greatest number. Or again, utilitarianism is an axiomatic of individual and collective interest that is supposedly calculable.¹² Thus understood, utilitarianism is infinitely older and more general than Bentham's doctrine alone. I have, for my part, tried to show that Plato's philosophy, at least in its exoteric dimension, represents a form of utilitarianism. In a great history of moral and Western philosophy, my colleagues Christian Lazzeri, Michel Senellart and I have convened about twenty specialists to show how all the debates in political philosophy since antiquity are organized around an opposition between utilitarian and anti-utilitarian propositions.¹³ But this central debate does not only concern the West. As far as I am allowed to judge, the School of Legalism in China, which includes thinkers like Han Feizi, and the Mohist school developed by Mozi, for example, are typically utilitarian. It is on this basis that they oppose, for example, Confucius or Mencius.

What is wrong with utilitarianism? Three things, mainly. First of all, it is false that men always seek their own happiness (or else they do it very badly) and, just as false, that they only seek to satisfy their individual interest. Second, it is wrong to postulate that this happiness, individual or collective, is intrinsically calculable. The more one tries to calculate it, to organize it in the form of calculability, the more likely it is to go amiss or be destroyed. At last, the sacrificial dimension of utilitarianism (sacrificing the happiness of the few to that of the many) easily leads to the justification of all massacres.¹⁴ If utilitarian approaches prove to be erroneous, what theoretical resources can we rely on? The theoretical bet that animates the Revue du MAUSS since its debates is that it is necessary to revisit political philosophy and social sciences starting from the discoveries of Marcel Mauss in the Essay on the Gift.¹⁵

Some Discoveries of Mauss and of MAUSS

Marcel Mauss is both very and too little known, an illustrious unknown in a way. He is perhaps the most quoted author in anthropology, but he is very little quoted in sociology and even less in moral and political philosophy. However, in the Essay on the Gift (1925), he gathers a considerable ethnological material, which concerns a great number of cultures, whose philosophical, moral, and political implications are quite essential according to the readers and friends of the MAUSS Review. Let us recall in a few words that Mauss is the nephew and intellectual heir of his uncle Emile Durkheim, the great name of classical sociology with Max Weber. On Mauss, who read and who knew so many languages, his students said: “Mauss knows everything.” In the Essay, he gathers and synthesizes all the ethnological literature of his time to show that social relations in archaic societies were not based on the market, barter, or contract (which invalidates the philosophies of the social contract) but on what he calls “the triple obligation to give, receive and return.” In a word, on the gift Let us understand that this is not altruism and charity. The gift that he describes such as the paroxysmal example of potlatch practiced by the Indians of the North-West of America, is an agonistic gift, a form of war for generosity. The lessons that can be drawn from this abundant text are multiple, almost inexhaustible. I can only retain three of them here, three plus one.¹⁶

The first, and here I quote Mauss, is that “man has not always been an economic animal coupled with a calculating machine. It is only a short time ago that he became one.”¹⁷ Or again: “Economic man is not behind us, but in front of us.”¹⁸ Let us translate: the utilitarian man is neither natural nor universal.

The second is that the gift constitutes the political operator par excellence. It is the gift that, by showing the value of both the giver and the receiver, makes it possible to transform enemies into friends, or at least into allies. It testifies to a desire for alliance and friendship.

Mauss does not explicitly draw out the third lesson himself, but he strongly suggests it. And, here again, it goes completely against utilitarian doctrines. It is that humans, of course, pursue individual interests, starting with the concern for their own preservation. But from the first days of their lives, they are also attentive to others, open to otherness, and ready to cooperate. I propose to say that humans are driven by both self-interest and interest in others (which I also call lovingness, aimance). But there is also a whole set of things that we do out of social obligation and a sense of duty. Symmetrically, we aspire to create, to act freely, to play. I propose to speak of “libercreativity.” Instead of the utilitarians’ single motive, individual interest, we have four motives organized in two pairs of opposites: interest for oneself and interest for others, obligation and libercreativity. One of Mauss's lessons is that these four motives must always be roughly balanced. I would be tempted to think that hubris, excess, results from the hypertrophy of one of these motives when it overrides all the others.

But, since we are talking about hubris, let us develop the implications of the agonistic dimension of the gift highlighted by Mauss. The gift makes it possible to affirm both the value of the giver and the value he recognizes in the receiver. I said earlier that the gift is the political operator par excellence. But we could just as well say that it is the recognition operator par excellence.

Here we touch on another philosophical (and sociological) continent, the one that is organized around the theme of the struggle for recognition. This expression refers to the book of the German philosopher and sociologist Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition.¹⁹ In this book, Honneth revives Hegel's analyses, but, strangely enough, leaves aside almost completely Hegel's most important work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, and its central chapter, the one on the dialectic of master and slave (or master and servant). In France, before the Second World War, on the contrary, a philosopher of Russian origin, Alexandre Kojève, was going to seduce, and even to subjugate all the French intelligentsia, by insisting on the central role that occupies human affairs i.e., “the struggle to death for recognition.”²⁰ Let us go to the most essential and to the shortest, by drawing from the lessons of Hegel, Mauss and Kojève at the same time: humans want to be recognized as having value. I would add that they want to be recognized as having value as donors, for their generosity, or for their creativity (their libercreativity).

Conclusion

This brings me to my conclusion. The most obvious problem we face today is global warming. A good part of the world's youth rightly says they suffer from eco-anxiety. A small part of them, symbolized by Greta Thunberg, is mobilizing to put pressure on states and on the big companies. They are right, because it is indeed imperative to reconsider our relationship with nature and the environment, for example, in a perspective inspired by the thought of symbiosis (in other words, gongsheng or kyōsei). I have not said anything here about how the paradigm of the gift developed in the MAUSS Review can help here, because Frank Adloff does it excellently in this same volume. But I fear that these actions will prove largely insufficient because they do not address the ideology that has ruled the world for half a century, i.e., neoliberalism. This term, neoliberalism, is of course open to discussion. I propose to characterize it by the belief in the following six propositions²¹:

• 1. Greed, the thirst for profit, is good. Greed is good.

• 2. There is no such thing as society, only individuals.

• 3. The richer they get, the better, because everyone will benefit from the trickle-down effect.

• 4. The only desirable mode of coordination between human subjects is the free and unfettered market, and this market (including the financial market) regulates itself for the greater good of all.

• 5. There are no limits. More is always better.

• 6. There is no alternative.

In fact, all these propositions follow logically from the first one (“greed is good”), which in turn stems logically from utilitarianism, or from what I have called the axiomatics of interest. From the certainty that humans are nothing but homo economicus who aim to satisfy their needs more and more in order to escape scarcity. Now, if this were the case, if indeed conflicts between humans arised from material scarcity and the difficulty of satisfying all needs, then nothing could save us from ecological catastrophe, since we should be unable to produce more and more, ad infinitum, in a finite world.

Fortunately, anti-utilitarianism shows that this vision of human nature is largely false. Humans are just as likely to act out of interest in others, out of a sense of duty, or out of a taste for creativity, as out of material interest alone. They are governed less by need than by the desire to be recognized as having value. But this, unfortunately, does not simplify things. As we have seen, if this desire to be recognized is not channeled, then it very easily tips over into hubris. I was saying just now that the most obvious problem facing humanity is global warming. But it will be impossible to deal with it if we are unable to respond to the hubris of the desire for recognition that is now exploding on a global scale. From morning to night, young people are socially obliged to display their value on social networks. The dominated religions, the former colonized countries, the still-forbidden sexualities, the women so long assigned to an inferior status, all want to reach at least the same value as the former dominants. The old empires defeated and dismantled by the West want their revenge. And the West, on the other hand, intends to continue to present itself as the very embodiment of the valuable.

The global hegemony exercised by speculative capitalism and neoliberalism generates what we could call (echoing Judith Butler's Gender Trouble) a recognition trouble. It creates a type of society in which all collective references are shattered, leaving only individual consumers as legitimate subjects. From then on, no one knows who recognizes whom, in what capacity and in what terms. There is a generalized identity panic in the world, which leaves only the accession to the summit of wealth, prestige, and power as a model of success. It is therefore up to us to draw as quickly as possible the features of a type of society in which one will be recognized for one's contribution to art, culture, science, sports, sociability, cuisine, the good life and, of course, the fight against environmental degradation, more than by money and power. A convivialist society, then. Or, if you prefer, a symbiotic society. The advent of such a society, consciously anti-hubristic, supposes that extreme poverty, misery, and extreme wealth are declared outlawed. Perhaps the best way to achieve this will be to finally fight effectively against tax havens. In any case, this would be the surest way to fight against corruption and organized crime, which are flourishing at a rapid pace.