^ Political capital is a form of symbolic capital, credit founded on credence or belief and recognition or. more precisely, on the innumerable operations of credit by which agents confer on a person (or on an object) the very powers that they recognize in him (or it). This is the ambiguity of the fides, analysed by Benveniste:w an objective power which can be objectified in things (and in particular in everything that constitutes the symbolic nature of power -thrones, sceptres and crowns), it is the product of subjective acts of recognition and, in so far as it is credit and credibility, exists only in and through representation, in and through trust, belief and obedience. Symbolic power is a power which the person submitting to grants to the person who exercises it. a credit with which he credits him. a fides. an auctoritas, with which he entrusts him by placing his trust in him. It is a power which exists because the person who submits to it believes that it exists. Credo, says Benveniste, ‘is literally “to place one’s kred". that is “magical powers”, in a person from whom one expects protection thanks to “believing” in him’?1 The kred, the credit, the charisma, that 'je ne sals quoi' with which one keeps hold over those from whom one holds it. is this product of the credo, of belief, of obedience, which seems to produce the credo. the belief, the obedience.
Like the divine or human champion who. according to Benveniste. 'needs people to believe in him. to entrust their kred to him, on condition that he lavishes his benefits on those who have thus supported him'?2 the politician derives his political power from the trust that a group places in him. He derives his truly magical power over the group from faith in the representation that he gives to the group and which is a representation of the group itself and of its relation to other groups. As a representative linked to those he represents by a sort of rational contract (the programme), he is also a champion, united by a magical relation of identification with those who. as the saying goes, ‘pin all their hopes on him’. And it is because his specific capital is a pure fiduciary value which depends on representation, opinion, belief, fides, that the man of politics, like the man of honour, is especially vulnerable to suspicions, malicious misrepresentations and scandal, in short, to everything that
threatens belief and trust, by bringing to light the hidden and secret acts and remarks of the present or the past which can undermine present acts and remarks and discredit their author (and this takes place all the more completely, as we shall see. the less his capital depends on delegation)?3 This supremely free-flowing capital can be conserved only at the cost of unceasing work which is necessary both to accumulate credit and to avoid discredit: hence all the precautions. the silences and the disguises, imposed on public personalities, who are forever forced to stand before the tribunal of public opinion, their constant need to ensure that they neither say nor do anything which might contradict their present or past professions of faith, or might show up their inconsistency over the course of time. And the special attention that politicians must give to everything which helps to produce the representation of their sincerity or of their disinterestedness can be explained by remembering that these dispositions appear to be the final guarantor of the representation of the social world that they are seeking to impose, of the ‘ideals’ and ‘ideas’ which they are striving to get people to accept.34
