The Political Meaning of Unconscious Guilt

Abstract

Modern political science finds some degree of power everywhere, yet many people feel increasingly powerless; guilt is a universal experience, yet political science has almost entirely ignored it. I am not presently concerned with why guilt has been an excluded problem; even poverty, until a few years ago, was left to the economists.' Nor do I wish to raise in general terms the question of the relevance of guilt to politics. I will, instead, focus on one type of guilt, inquiring into its political meaning. The term comes from Freud, yet the essential idea of unconscious guilt goes back to antiquity. In both cases, it is offered as an explanation of individual and collective behavior. If we are to believe Freud, this type of explanation is doubly important to us today, for the increasing sense of guilt in modem society is largely unconscious.2 Unconscious however, is not really an explanation; it is, at bottom, a metaphor of reconstruction, a weapon of war in the struggle to shape political society.