If the French and Haitian revolutions of the late eighteenth century remain two of the most decisive political events of modern times it’s not because they affirmed the liberal freedoms that are so easily (because unevenly) commemorated today. To assert the rational and collective will of the people as the source of political authority and power was to reject alternative conceptions of politics premissed on either the mutual exclusion of society and will (a politics determined by natural, historical or economic necessity), or the primacy of another sort of will (the will of God, of God’s representative on earth, or of his semi-secular equivalent: the will of an elite entitled to govern on account of their accumulated privileges and qualifications). The arrival of the will of the people as an actor on the political stage over the course of the eighteenth century was itself a revolutionary development, and it was experienced as such by the people themselves. Dialectical voluntarists have confidence in the will of the people to the degree that they think each term through the other: ‘will’ in terms of assembly, deliberation and determination, and ‘people’ in terms of an exercise of collective volition. A dialectical voluntarist assumes that collective self-determination – more than an assessment of what seems feasible or appropriate – is the animating principle of political action. It is to conceive of terrain and way through a dialectic which, connecting both objective and subjective forms of determination, is oriented by the primacy of the latter.Īffirmation of such relational primacy informs what might be called a ‘dialectical voluntarism’. It is to remember, after Marx, that we make our own history, without choosing the conditions of its making.
Instead it is to remember, after Sartre, that obstacles appear as such in the light of a project to climb past them. It is not to disregard the obstacles or opportunities that characterize a particular terrain, or to deny their ability to influence the forging of a way. It is not to assume that the ‘real movement which abolishes the existing state of things’ proceeds through empty or indeterminate space. It is not to suppose that a will creates itself and the conditions of its exercise abruptly or ex nihilo. To say that we make our way by walking it is not to pretend, however, that we invent the ground we traverse.
It is to privilege, over the complexity of the terrain and the forms of knowledge and authority that govern behaviour ‘adapted’ to it, the purposeful will of the people to take and retain their place as the ‘authors and actors of their own drama’. It is to insist that in an emancipatory political sequence what is ‘determinant in the first instance’ is the will of the people to prescribe, through the terrain that confronts them, the course of their own history. Or, to adapt Antonio Machado’s less prosaic phrase, taken up as a motto by Paulo Freire, they assume that ‘there is no way, we make the way by walking it.’ To say that we make the way by walking it is to resist the power of the historical, cultural or socioeconomic terrain to determine our way. Recent examples of the sort of popular will that I have in mind include the determination, assembled by South Africa’s United Democratic Front, to overthrow an apartheid based on culture and race, or the mobilization of Haiti’s Lavalas to confront an apartheid based on privilege and class.Ĭonditioned by the specific strategic constraints that structure a particular situation, such mobilizations test the truth expressed in the old cliché, ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’. Like any kind of will, its exercise is voluntary and autonomous, a matter of practical freedom like any form of collective action, it involves assembly and organization. The will of the people Notes towards a dialectical voluntarism Peter hallwardīy ‘will of the people’ I mean a deliberate, emancipatory and inclusive process of collective selfdetermination.
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