In light of recent discussions, I have decided to publish this post/article ahead of schedule. I have refrained from sharing further details for now, as this is intended merely as an introduction to a more extensive analysis. For the time being, I will informally address some of the key theses of Saint Justās philosophical thought: political ontology, epistemology, the philosophy of history, and the transcendental subject. In a few monthsāI hopeāI will release a much more detailed article; until then, here is a brief introduction.
On various occasions, I have come across diverse comments regarding Saint-Justās political thoughtācomments that, whether favorable or unfavorable, warrant discussion. Why read Saint-Just today?
Miguel Abensour asked himself this same question in the last century, but what does the current century hold in store? Saint-Just possesses a dual dimension: the historical (whether objective or subjective) and the philosophical, owing to his singular body of thought. History itself has set about chronicling and reevaluating his role in the Revolutionāthough largely through inconclusive studies that merely perpetuate the bloodthirsty image inherited from the Thermidorian period. It could be said that the first serious attempts to uncover his objective historical figure (if such a thing can be termed "objective") emerged from the historiography of Albert Soboul in the mid-20th century. Until then, his status as a generator of philosophical thought had been overlooked. How might we justify studying him as a singular thinker? The premise may lie in the incompleteness of his historical image and the vast array of philosophical and historical interpretations surrounding himāthe majority of which are mythological.
What better way to understand him than to set aside these preconceptions about his thought? As Alain Badiou put it:
These attempts, frequent in historiography, sacrifice the name because they rule out grasping Saint-Justās thoughtāwithin the realm of interiorityāas a political singularity. To succeed rationally in this task, one must detach the name from any direct conceptualization (thought cannot be a thought of the name, nor a thought of revolutionary politics as such), even while the name is, in fact, precisely what is being thought in Saint-Justās thought. (Metapolitics, Alain Badiou)
It has been a historiographical error to interpret Saint-Justās thought through sociological categoriesāor to view his ideas as the ātotalityā of Jacobin revolutionary thought, treating material conditions as a direct derivation thereof. The fact is that a profound understanding of philosophical thought requires analyzing the thought itselfāthat is, its internal categories, organization, logic, and the soundness of its argumentation.
Such an approach imposes a problem onto his work without acknowledging that Jacobinism comprised a diverse array of political actors who generated a vast body of political thought from varied perspectivesāperspectives that inevitably give rise to contradictions when one attempts to unify Jacobin theory (as a meta-theory)
Therefore, the study of Saint-Just must remain grounded in the internal logic of his thought, establishing its own terms of analysis. In other words, Badiou suggests that we must avoid generalizing Saint-Justās ideas; by examining his thought on its own terms, we can unpack his concepts and utilize them as an interpretive framework. Through this re-examination, we can answer the question: is it necessary to read him today? (I will be addressing this in greater depth in future posts).
It is pertinent to define the abstraction of his thought, so I will begin with his ontology. What is ontology? It can be distinguished from metaphysics based on the aspects of philosophy they seek to problematize. Metaphysics can be briefly defined as the study of beingāand, consequently, the philosophical study with the broadest scope. It seeks the primary causes of reality; this study is more properly the domain of theologyāthe study of Godāor, within philosophy, the study of Substance. It addresses the immanence of being and modes of existence (the various contingencies of beings, whether their attributes are mutable or immanent, etc.). One could say that the function of metaphysics is to establish a horizon defining the meaning of human disciplines. Yet, it is a branch that has been discarded due to the inability to advance its study and is, thereforeāfor manyāconsidered dispensable for other disciplines. Ontology, for its part, is the study of the classification of beings (modes of substance) and, consequently, the relationships between these beings and their classifications. While ontology is identified by philosophy, it is through mathematics that the method for truly understanding these relationships is established.
An interesting example can be found in the study of geometry, where the properties of objects help us establish relationships with other objects. Ontology is always useful when seeking to abstract the various functions of beings, as it enables us to identify analogies and patterns that would otherwise be impossible to perceive. The application of ontology has been presentāoften without the authors explicitly realizing itāin political theory.
Here, I will focus exclusively on the ontology of Saint-Justās system, taking its singular nature as a starting point. Political ontology concerns the being of politics or the thought of politicsāin other words, meta-politics. As a meta-political thinker, Saint-Just seeks to understand the nature and meaning of the relationships between individuals, and it is upon this foundation that he constructs his utopia.
Nature is a circle in which the order of worldly things constitutes, for us, the midpoint. Every individual situated within this circle also becomes its center, for the relationships remain homogeneous: from the goal toward the individual and from the individual toward the goal. (Lānature, Saint-Just)
Nature possesses two fundamental dimensions: it is a circle (a geometric body or a space) and it produces order (subjective)āimplying the absence of emptiness, meaning that at least two beings must exist in order to relate to one another. The order of things consists of their relationships. This order is the medium through which a being expresses itself; a being can only find expression through its relationships with other beings. Furthermore, we can intuit that a being's existence depends on its relationship with other beings. The being becomes a center, the singularity of which lies in its spatial location; yet its natureāby virtue of its relationship to orderāis determined by its purpose or its fulfillment.
Thus, there is a dual dimension to beingābeing itself and its "ought-to-be" (the goal)āand just as there is a relationship between one being and another, the same analogy applies to the relationship between being and its goal. This can be understood as an orientation that gives meaning to being. The relationship between being and being, and between being and its "ought-to-be," is known as dialectics:
According to Feuerbach, Hegel eliminated the contradiction between thinking and being as Kant conceived it, but he did so by transforming objects into predicates of thought: he conceived of objects as predicates of thought that thinks itself. (Introduction to the Science of Logic by Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel)
Being acts as a subject and its object as a predicate, with the distinction between the two arising from their unfolding within the relationship. Consequently, from a dialectical perspective, the goal is conceived as the internal determination of being itself. Determination is the action affirmed or denied regarding the subject within its dialectical process. The nature of these relationshipsāwhether between beings or between a being and its "ought-to-be"āis such that it preserves the attribute of their ordering. In other words, the individual expresses itself in relation to others and to itself; these relationships, by their very nature, seek to preserve and reproduce the order of things. The logic governing the order of things is ideal, whereas its expressions are material. We can only access the order of thingsāthat is, comprehend the idea or attribute from which all relationships deriveāthrough their material expressions. Accessing this order entails identifying the issues inherent in these relationships; since our primary reality is material, it is only when we become conscious of this that we can begin to engage in abstraction and establish relationships.
Saint-Just establishes this as a stateāor an order of things. His theory posits various levels of the state through which relationships are expressed. For instance, the physical order is simply the system of government, while the moral order represents the ideal form of law or legislation. All these orders are entities that interrelate and possess both meaning and a predicate. This arises from an ideaāor central conceptāthat reproduces these relationships and the ways in which these entities express themselves through them. Collectively, this constitutes what Saint-Just terms "nature." He draws a significant distinction between what he regards as two states: the political state and the social state. Each possesses its own nature, from which the relationships between its constituent elements derive.
Saint-Just offers a significant definition for political science, as he is among the first to recognize the incompleteness of politics and its development as a science.
Politics had previously been regarded as a factual science; that is, the framework adopted was a definition of human nature viewed as an immanent quality capable of universalization. Theories of legislation were developed based on a confusion between human nature and the nature of politics.
Consequently, it was assumed that the human being possesses a predetermined nature as an individualāone that does not arise through relationships with other individuals. By rejecting the validity of the concept of an a priori human nature, Saint-Just establishes his method: the search for the foundation of a different state must begin by reasoning about structures in their prior or non-coercive state (the social state)āin other words, by inquiring beyond the historicity of political events.
Furthermore, it remains essential to continue raising critical questions when translating theoretical concepts into practical politics. Since the validity of the premise cannot be confirmed through objective a priori facts, the only way to validate it is through effective application. Marx revisits this issue within the framework of historical materialism when he states: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."
These relationships cannot be contractual, private, or personal. Where nature ends, the contract begins. Social life is, therefore, the homogeneous relationship that unites menāthe sole eternal principle of their preservation. The social state does not derive in the least from convention, and the art of establishing a society through a pact or through modifications of force is the very art of destroying society. (Lānature, Saint-Just)
As A. LiĆ©nard aptly noted in his introduction to Saint-Justās political theory: āThe consequence of this inversion of Rousseau is the rejection of the entire problematic of the social contract. For Saint-Just, the contract is not the origin of society, but the origin of its corruption. Society pre-exists it, and the contract destroys it.ā Far from being a mere disciple of Rousseauāas liberal and Marxist historiography has incorrectly claimedāhe seeks a synthesis between Rousseauās liberal thought (specifically his concepts regarding equality) and the rejection of any need for a coercive, statist contractual order. In other words, it is a reversal of both the philosophy of history found in Rousseau and the fundamental principle of his thesis. It is for these reasons that he can be called an anti-Rousseauian.
A state is the arrangement of relationships among beings. The ācurrent state of affairsā is nothing more than the arrangement of relationships characterized by domination or enslavementāthat is, the state of war or the political state. Aggregations are merely the history of the discourse justifying such a state. Thus, from this perspective, the reality of the theory of political history is nothing but a collection of confusions, presuppositions, and justifications regarding human vices and how to make themāas far as possibleāmore bearable. One of the central questions Saint-Just seeks to answer is: āHow has the human social state been lost?ā He holds a pessimistic view of history; the history of the state of domination stems from the juxtaposition of the social state of peoples and the state of war between them. Peoples introduced a state of war into the polis that could only be sustained through the force of dominationāa factor that ultimately shaped the will of the prince. To quote LiĆ©nard:
The social contract introduces antagonistic relationsāpolitical relationsāinto a non-antagonistic society; relations that previously existed only in dealings with those outside the group. It introduces a state of war into society. The contract institutes an anti-nature; it is the very foundation of usurpation. Indeed, it divides into two contracts: a first between individuals, and a second between the collective body of those individuals and the prince. It establishes a power relationship that had no reason to exist.
It is from this logic, which rejects the prince based on his very existence as a concept, that the argument regarding the King's trial stems; a matter I shall address later.
In his introduction to the selected speeches of Maximilien Robespierre, Žižek notes that the execution of the kingāviewed from an āontologicalā perspectiveāwas driven by Saint-Justās determination as expressed in his speech regarding the king.
This constitutes a negation of the negation, defined as follows: Its matrix does not consist of something being lost and then recovered, but simply of a process of transition from state A to state B: the initial, immediate negation of A negates Aās position without abandoning its symbolic boundaries; consequently, a further negation must followāone that negates the shared symbolic space of A and its immediate negation. (ā¦) The gap between the systemās negated ārealā death and its āsymbolicā death is essential: the system must die twice.
It is, therefore, the negation of the state of domination that generates these relations and the subject of the āmaster.ā It is not enough merely to bring about the death of the physical subject based on the charges leveled against him in a given context; one must also denounce as illegitimate any order derived from that state. It means killing the (subjective) principle itself.
Revolution, as a historical moment, comprises a set of diverse conjunctures and class contradictions. It begins when the subjugated people become conscious of the material conditions that keep them enslaved, driven, first and foremost, by the need to overcome their wretched circumstances. As a social collective, the people did not stir until the prevailing evils grew so severe that their very survival was threatened. War against the oppressor became necessary; feudal bonds had to be broken to advance their history. There was, indeed, widespread exhaustion regarding the corrupt institutions of the Ancient RĆ©gime; it was precisely this internal corruption and neglect of the people that ultimately led to the regime's overthrow. Rather than being merely an immediate, disruptive eventāthough, in its entirety, it is certainly thatāthe revolution is, historically speaking, a progressive process. The Terror was not even on the horizon in 1789; it only emerged when material conditions rendered it necessary for the revolution's survival. The Terror represents the final resort for resistance as the revolutionary event draws to a close.
Saint-Just was well aware that the Terror was a historical phase of the revolutionāone that could end up becoming institutionalized if no way out of that phase were sought. It was a matter of the utmost importance, for as he himself said:
Terror can rid us of the monarchy and the aristocracy; but who will free us from corruption?ā¦ Institutions. Let us not doubt it; we think the job is done simply because there is a machine in government. (Fragments of Republican Institutions)
The Terror was beginning to go too far, and new legislative methods had to be devised, for not even he trusted in the constitution's ability to stand on its own. Revolutions rely on mortal men to come to pass, yet they offer no guarantee of human emancipation. The revolutionary spirit is essential for destroying the old order and founding a new one. The transcendent subject is born of this consciousnessāof the realization that the bodyās mortality pales in comparison to the project that revolution entails.
Call them saints, martyrs, madmen, poets, or fanatics: the decisive capacity to leave oneās life imprinted upon the project represents both the ultimate expression of the human will and the limit of its fragility. Saint-Just posed the maxim: "What do those who desire neither virtue nor terror want?" His own answer, as A. Badiou notes, was: "They desire corruptionāwhich is simply another name for the defeat of the subject."
We can thus identify three axes along which the revolutionaryās spirit and mortal body unfold: Life, beyond mere existence, is the full expression of the human being moving toward self-realization, which is nothing other than emancipation. Death is the subjectās defeat, the extinction of the dream, and the melancholy born of losing faith in utopia. It is evident that, within revolutionary thought, the defeated subject is nothing more than the living dead:
God, protector of innocence and truth: since You have led me among wicked men, it has undoubtedly been to unmask them. Circumstances are difficult only for those who fear the grave. I implore the grave as a blessing of Providence, so that I need no longer witness the impunity of crimes plotted against my homeland and humanity: Truly, it matters little to leave behind a wretched life in which one is condemned to die either an accomplice to crime or a helpless witness to it. (Fragments from Republican Institutions)
Thus, willful death becomes a new axis, inaugurating transcendence through the negation of previous ones. In the words of Žižek:
Through subjective destitution, the subject is radically split: into a pure void and into the object that he himself is (dust, as Saint-Just well knew). In this way, we transcend mortality and enter the state of the āundeadā: it is not a matter of life after death, but of death-in-life; we leave behind the notion of a warm, normal everyday life, as well as our total immersion in the secure and stable world of customs. (Saint-Just: Subjective Destitution as a Political Category. Slavoj Žižek. 2025)
Little can be done to verify the details of Saint-Justās final day, the night of 9 Thermidor, with absolute certainty; however, his writings and actions reveal a complete alignment of his will with the revolutionary project. His actions, now a matter of historical record, are the subject of the first section of this essay. Before being a politician or a philosopher, he was a poetāand a tragic one at that. Never wavering from his principles, he chose to die for them, fully aware of the implications of an act that endures as a touchstone for the development of modern political philosophy.
Revolution has its limits: what is best known as the exhaustion of the revolution.
The great crisis facing all revolutions lies in the capacity, sustained over time, to establish the new order before the historical event concludes or the revolution dies. The French Revolution marked the limit of this; it falls to posterity to transcend it. Saint-Just recognizes the flaw in the revolutionary process here; he knows that his era will not be the one to give birth to human freedom, but rather the one sowing the seed that, in the fullness of time, will eventually establish it:
The revolution has frozen; all principles have weakened. Nothing remains but red caps worn by intrigue. The exercise of terror has sickened crime, just as strong spirits sicken the palate. Undoubtedly, the time to do good has not yet arrived. The particular good that is done is merely a palliative; one must await a general evil great enough to make doing good possible. What produces the general good is always terrible, or seems strange when it begins too soon. Its thrusts have no other aim; they must topple all that opposes them, and every lossāevery victory over monarchismā must bring with it and consecrate a republican institution. There is talk of the Revolutionās "height." Who shall set that height? It is fluid. There have been peoples who fell from greater heights. (Fragments on Republican Institutions, p. 979)
It is necessary to further develop the Jacobin project, for we must show concern for the development of institutions and, in any case, establish a scientific theory regarding this new category of institution. However, this merits a more extensive and rigorous study.
This is something I intend to address in a follow-up to this post.
In the meantime, I have found a way to introduce his thought without making any unnecessary oversimplifications.
