The Enlightenment still walks among us. Or rather, it lingers like a spectre – insisting it is alive, rational, and universal, while we, its inheritors, know full well it is a ghost. The project I’ve begun – call it my anti-Enlightenment collection – is about tracing these hauntings. Not the friendly ghosts of warm memory, but the structural ones: rationality unmoored, democracy designed to fail, presentism enthroned as law.
This collection began with Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail, which anatomised the Enlightenment’s misplaced faith in rational self-governance. The rational individual, Enlightenment’s poster child, turned out to be less a citizen than a figment – a ghost conjured to make democracy look inevitable.
It continues now with Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present, which dissects the structural bias of presentism – our systemic privileging of the living over the unborn. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Bacon, Smith, Bentham, Montesquieu: each laid bricks in an architecture that secured sovereignty for now while exiling the future into silence. Debts accumulate, climate collapses, nuclear waste seeps forward through time. The unborn never consented, yet institutions treat their silence as assent.
Why a Collection?
Because ghosts travel in packs. One essay exposes Enlightenment’s hollow promises of reason; another its structural bias toward immediacy. The next will follow a different haunting, but always the same theme: Enlightenment’s bright lantern casts a shadow it refuses to see. The collection is less about reconstruction than exorcism – or at least acknowledgment that we live in a haunted house.
Ghost by Ghost
- Rational Ghosts – Enlightenment democracy promised rational citizens and self-correcting systems. What it delivered instead was structural irrationality: Condorcet’s paradox, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, and a politics rigged to stumble over its own claims of reason.
- Temporal Ghosts – The unborn are disenfranchised by design. The Enlightenment’s “living contract” fossilised presentism as law, leaving future generations to inherit debts, ecological ruin, and technological lock-in.
There may be more hauntings to come – economic ghosts, epistemic ghosts, technological ghosts. But like all spectres, they may fade when the season changes. The calendar suggests they’ll linger through Día de Muertos and Hallowe’en; after that, who knows whether they’ll still materialise on the page.
Philosophics 
Yes, the political asceticism to which Rousseau enjoins us was not part of the “democratic” project, as Robespierre’s Terror was the perfect example: the concept of “popular sovereignty” was only instrumentalized for tyrannical purposes, for domination, and not taken into account the educational implications that it “logically” engenders. This is the main subject: what domination is hidden behind apparent “dysfunctions”, or other “illogicalities”, “paradoxes” of the system of delegation of sovereignty that we inherit in the West.
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You’re exactly right. Rousseau’s asceticism, his demand for civic formation before participation, was excised from the democratic experiment. What remained was the empty shell of “popular sovereignty,” ready to be weaponized. Robespierre proved that a concept meant to discipline desire could just as easily sanctify it.
I’d agree that what’s usually dismissed as dysfunction – corruption, apathy, short-termism – is less a flaw than a design feature. Enlightenment democracy hid domination in plain sight by delegating sovereignty without cultivating judgment. Temporal Ghosts simply extends that critique forward in time: domination of future citizens disguised as rational governance. The ghost isn’t Rousseau’s; it’s ours.
I’d only add that Rousseau’s call for civic formation before participation is itself an act of domination. It’s the soft face of biopower: shaping the citizen’s soul so the state needn’t police the body. Foucault would see it as the moment consent becomes manufacture, not expression.
So the problem isn’t just that popular sovereignty was betrayed; it’s that it was born through discipline. The Terror wasn’t an aberration; it was a logical culmination of Enlightenment pedagogy: obedience dressed as virtue.
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I was speaking more of a permanent, “lifelong” civic asceticism to which Rousseau enjoins us; I think his legacy is devalued, misinterpreted, and its application stems from biased interpretations. This is why all that remains of popular sovereignty is an empty shell.
Rousseau’s democracy has never yet been applied, or only exceptionally, temporarily, locally. The civic asceticism Rousseau calls for is closer to the process of individuation, which can also be translated, particularly from the Stieglerian perspective, as cognitive deproletarianization. This is to be distinguished from biopower, which is a top-down, “capillary,” invisible process whose objective is “disciplinary,” and not any kind of civic/political capability (disciplinary control through the panopticon produces only docile minds and bodies, which “fall silent” in the face of naturalized expertise). Furthermore, a form of civic asceticism is practiced in so-called primitive peoples (see Clastres’ stateless society), where specialization is “driven out” because it is linked to the centralization/concentration of power. It’s so interesting to connect anthropology, history, politics and philosophy!
Thanks for sharing.
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That’s an insightful elaboration. Thank you. I agree that Rousseau’s ideal of civic asceticism can be read as individuation rather than subjection, especially when refracted through Stiegler’s ‘deproletarianisation’. My hesitation is that even self-discipline tends to reproduce hierarchy once formalised – education morphs into pedagogy, capability into credential. That’s where my reading folds back toward Foucault’s concern with how freedom gets administered.
Still, your point about Clastres is compelling: societies that “drive out specialisation” do seem to cultivate autonomy without installing surveillance. It’s a useful reminder that civic formation need not become civic domestication.
I welcome cross-disciplinary approaches; each is a lens with its own gaze, focal point, and frame. It’s better to collect perspectives before getting prescriptive. Some of my lenses are more polished than others – and some have gone missing, if I ever had them.
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For Clastres, the “wild democracy” of so-called primitive peoples prevents the centralization and specialization of power. Power is shared and continuously contested in an ongoing effort to avoid appropriation and concentration. This view aligns with Claude Lefort’s conception of democracy as an “empty place of power,” a space where power is perpetually disputed.
Clastres and Lévi-Strauss show that in these societies, accountability lies with the chief towards the people, not the other way around. The chief embodies power but does not exercise coercion; the whole society holds power by continually renewing its laws.
This vision is dramatically reversed with the rise of the first city-state empires like hydraulic Egypt, Mesopotamian city-states, Chinese Legalism, Assyrian militarization, and the Ming’s celestial bureaucracy. These states are based on the concentration of technique, bureaucracy, and military power, giving rise to a global map closed around Promethean techno-domination.
This historicization explains why contemporary systems of delegated sovereignty cannot free us from the quagmire they helped create. They are the product of a cognitive dissonance driven by the repetition of a distorted Rousseauist ideal—the popular sovereignty as an “empty shell”—and the prevailing managerial rationality described by Lefebvre.
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Thank you. I appreciate the anthropological perspective. I am only tangentially familiar – but interested – in this space. I try to absorb this and history as I continue on this journey.
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“Empty shell” and not “empty place of power.” Here lies the illusion: a “shell” is not a “place of power.” Power deserves better.
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“In his book How to Govern a People-King? A New Treatise on the Art of Politics (2019), Tavoillot argues that democracy is not only about popular sovereignty but fundamentally about the necessity of making decisions amidst conflicting interests. He challenges the idea that politics can be reduced to automatic administration or mere management, underscoring that political decision-making is an art that keeps democracy alive and effective.”
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But the right question to ask would rather be: “How does a people-king govern and govern itself?”
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“Contrary to Freud, who saw sublimation as a necessary renunciation of drives, Marcuse identifies a « repressive desublimation »: capitalism artificially liberates desires (through advertising sexualization, consumerist hedonism) only to better channel them towards system-compatible objects. This false freedom reinforces alienation.”
https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2025/05/04/herbert-marcuse-la-culture-de-masse-comme-outil-de-domination/
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Oops, here’s the english version of the post : https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2025/09/29/herbert-marcuse-mass-culture-as-a-tool-of-domination/
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