Итог полностью

28 h is no coincidence if opinion polls demonstrate the contradiction between two antagonistic principles of legitimacy, namely technocratic science and the democratic will, by alternating questions that appeal either to the judgement of an expert or to the wishes of the militant.

29 The violence of political polemics, and the constant recourse to ethical questioning, whose weapons are most frequently ad hominem arguments, can also be explained by the fact that mobilizing ideas owe part of their credit to the credit of the person who professes them. Furthermore, it is not merely a question of refuting them, by means of a purely logical and scientific argument, but of discrediting them by discrediting their author. By giving a free rein to ways of combating adversaries not only in their ideas but also in their person, the logic of the political field provides a highly favourable terrain for strategies of resentment: in this way, it offers to the first-comer a means of attaining, most often by a rudimentary form of the sociology of knowledge, theories or ideas which he would be incapable of submitting to scientific criticism,

30 E. Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, tr, E. Palmer (London: Faber. 1973), pp. 94-100.

31 Ibid., p. 99.

32 Ibid.,p. 143.

33 The extreme caution which defines the accomplished politician, and which can be measured in particular by the high degree of euphemiza-tion of his discourse, can doubtless be explained by the extreme vulnerability of political capital, which means that the politician’s trade is a high-risk profession, especially in periods of crisis when, as can be seen in the case of de Gaulle and Petain, small differences in the dispositions and values involved may be the source of totally incompatible choices, (This is because the essence of extra-ordinary situations is to abolish the possibility of compromises, ambiguities, double-dealing, multiple memberships, etc., authorized by the ordinary recourse to multiple and partly integrated criteria of classification, by imposing a system of classification organized around a single criterion.)

34 One result of this is that the politician is a close associate of the journalist, who holds sway over the mass media and who thus has power over every kind of symbolic capital (the power of 'making or unmaking reputations' which Watergate showed in full measure).

Capable, at least in certain political situations, of controlling a politician’s or movement’s access to the status of a political force really counting for something, the journalist is, like the critic, bound to play the role of someone who points out the qualities of someone or something while being unable to do for himself what he does for others (and the attempts he may make to mobilize in favour of himself or his work the intellectual or political authorities which owe something to his action as a favourable judge are condemned in advance). Thus he is united to those he has helped to make (in proportion to his value as a favourable judge) by a relation of deep ambivalence which leads him to oscillate between admiring or servile submission and treacherous resentment, ready to speak his mind the minute the idol he has helped to produce commits some blunder

35 Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society < p. 324,

36 ‘Instead of leaders they have become bankers of men in a monopoly situation, and the least hint of competition makes them crazy with terror and despair’ (Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 1922-1926, pp, 17-18). 'In many respects a union leader represents a social type similar to the banker. An experienced banker, who has a good business head and is able to foresee with some accuracy the movement of stocks and bonds, wins credit for his institution and attracts depositors and investors, A trade-union leader who can foresee the possible outcome as conflicting social forces clash, attracts the masses into his organization and becomes a banker of men' (ibid,, p. 77).

37 The opposition between the two kinds of political capital is the source of one of the fundamental differences between elected representatives in the Communist Parly and those in the Socialist Party: ‘Whereas the great majority of socialist mayors refer to the fact that they are well known public figures, whether this is due to family prestige, professional competence, or services rendered in the course of some activity or another, two thirds of the Communists consider themselves first and foremost as delegates of their party’ (D. Lacome, Les notables rouges (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1980), P 67).