Emma Planinc’s Regenerative Politics is an ambitious and provocative book that aims to wake liberals up from their dogmatic slumber. Based on an archaeology of the concept of regeneration in France in the 18th and 19th centuries, it calls readers to embrace a “regenerative politics”—a term used to invoke a form of emancipatory discourse beyond the traditional divide of right and left politics.
Regenerative Politics starts with a stark diagnosis of liberal democracies today. Criticized from both ends of the political spectrum, they fail to inspire allegiance. On the far-right side, liberal democracies are seen as degenerate. On the left, liberal humanism appears as the oppressive discourse that promoted colonialism and bourgeois universalism. What connects these seemingly disparate critiques, Planinc argues, is a rejection of the idea of the “human” and with it, of a liberal conception of “human rights,” seen as the only acceptable normative foundation of humankind. Planinc’s main concern is that liberals have become complacent; they presume that rights are self-evident and therefore do not need justification. Instead of relying on a self-determining agent, liberalism based itself on an already determined subject. All the institutions that we inherited from liberals—human rights, constitutions, parliamentarism—are presented here as obstacles to self-determination insofar as liberals treat them as given that only irrational individuals could want to reject. Yet, large parts of the population do not consider themselves to belong to this supposedly universalist definition of humankind and therefore become enemies of liberal democracies.
Planinc’s call for a new politics relies on a history of the concept of regeneration in modern French political thought. Chapter 2, “The Palingenetic Consciousness,” develops the idea of regeneration in the natural sciences in 18th-century France, mainly in the works of Buffon and Charles Bonnet. The humble polyp here appears as an object of admiration for enlightenment scientists. Cut up into several pieces, the polyp “regenerates” into several different polyps, revealing, for Buffon, that the mode of creation in nature is “palingenetic.” Planinc recounts how, by analogy, scientists proposed to see the human capacity to transform their institutions as a form of “second birth” since they possessed a “palingenetic consciousness.” The Enlightenment therefore developed a new vision of human nature in which “human beings were capable, by nature, of remaking themselves by remaking their political world” (p. 33).
Chapter 3, “The Right to Renounce Dependence,” argues that Rousseau’s concept of human nature came from Buffon; while there is a human prototype, humans are characterized by their capacity to transform themselves. The two fundamental characteristics of humans for Rousseau (freedom and perfectibility) are redescribed by Planinc as the capacity to regenerate, even though Rousseau himself does not use the term. In her reading, Rousseau displaces the concept of regeneration from the scientific domain to politics. The Social Contract is thus presented as proposing “a particular vision for the regeneration of the corruption of human beings in the world” (p. 78). According to this vision, which was transmitted to the French revolutionaries, humans have only one fundamental right: the “right to renounce dependence,” i.e., the right to refashion conventional rights.
Chapter 4 proposes an overview of the use of the idea of “regeneration” during the French Revolution. Planinc wants to separate the question of “regenerative politics” from the terror and aims to show that the language of regeneration was also central to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. By showing the immense influence of Rousseau on the revolutionaries (a point on which I agree with her), she argues that what really matters in the Declaration of Rights is not so much its content as its very existence, which exhibits the capacity of humans to transform their world and themselves. Chapter 5 retraces the postrevolutionary opposition of liberals to the Revolution’s “regenerative politics,” especially that of the Jacobins. The argument here, based more on the 20th-century historiography of the period than on an analysis of 19th-century documents, takes liberals’ embrace of inalienable rights and their rejection of concepts such as absolute sovereignty as equivalent to a rejection of “regeneration” as such.
The final chapter calls for a new type of politics that Planinc calls “regenerative.” Her main contention is that humans have the right to argue against rights, and that rights “can survive” only as long as humans actively sustain and defend them, which can happen only if they also question them. Planinc argues that the contemporary world displays a lack of openness toward this possibility. The “first right to make and remake ourselves…has been lost in today’s conception of the rights of human beings. We have retained the universalism of the Declaration’s aspirations but not the vitalism,” she concludes (p. 150). The presumed sanctity of human rights seems to foreclose the possibility of “regenerative politics.” Planinc situates her call outside the range of the right and the left and insists that she is aware of the risks of such a call, given that the groups advocating for regenerative politics have historically been, sometimes, maybe often, on the fascist side of history. It is certainly not her intention to follow such a path, though she thinks that it is “worth the risk” to question the path that liberalism has taken.
Given the form of the Critical Dialogue section of Perspectives, I would be interested in asking the author some questions. I commend Planinc’s enterprise for investigating the historical transformation of liberalism and its fear of the French Revolution. Yet, I am uncertain what the program of “regenerative politics” finally amounts to, in part because I am unclear about the exact meaning of regeneration outside the context in which it became clearly a political program (i.e., during the French Revolution and during fascism). In such contexts, the idea was explicitly to eradicate the past to create an entirely new future, in which institutions would have to be rethought. Regeneration is not just self-determination; it is bringing new life to what is dead—or what needs to be actively destroyed for a new life to start. Yet, Regenerative Politics also uses the term in a much thinner way, sometimes conflating it with the simple idea of self-determination, which is another term for freedom understood as autonomy. Humans are said to be “self-regenerative” in the sense that, as free agents, they can transform their institutions. In this case, regenerative politics could simply mean democratic politics, or politics based on popular sovereignty, or maybe even only self-government. Given the implications of these different forms of politics, readers might benefit from a clearer understanding of the concept of regeneration and perhaps a more concrete sense of what embracing a “regenerative politics” asks of them practically.
Another aspect that I was curious to hear more about was the reason why religion, nationalism, and race have so little place in the book, given their clear presence in historical moments when regeneration was invoked. In my view, the racial dimension is crucial to regenerative politics because the critics who take liberal democracies to be “degenerate” are often white supremacists (as is Guillaume Faye, quoted on p. 2) or nationalists. Degeneration is the loss of racial purity, and regeneration is the name of regaining this purity (the reconquête in Faye’s terms). Why not critically consider the racialist and nationalist aspects of the concepts of degeneration and regeneration through history? As for religion, the idea of regeneration during the revolution was deeply religious, as the abundant scholarship on the issue shows. Can any regeneration escape the religious domain where the concept of “being born again” originates? Can there be any regenerative politics without a religious frame to channel the violence and the direction of being born again? If religion, nationalism, and racialism are so historically entrenched with regenerative politics, is the latter really “worth the risk”?
Regenerative Politics is not a book that will leave its readers indifferent. The historical work that Planinc proposes is well researched and original. The normative proposal of embracing regenerative politics without determinate content is divisive by design, as the book traces the uses and abuses of degeneration and regeneration since the Enlightenment. What direction such vitalism takes today remains an open, and as Planinc argues, urgent concern.
