by Dish Staff
Adam Kirsch revisits Simone Weil’s 1943 essay, “On the Abolition of All Political Parties”:
“Political parties,” she writes, “are organizations that are publicly and officially designed for
the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice.” The member of a party delegates his conscience to the party, accepting its verdict on all political and moral questions; a person will do “as a Communist” or “as a Nazi” things that he would never do as himself. Once again, Weil brings the discussion back to the question of truth. Independent thought, she writes, necessarily seeks the truth: “If … one acknowledges that there is one truth, one cannot think anything but the truth.” It is only when one stops searching for truth and starts calculating partisan advantage that one falls into what Weil calls “inner darkness.”
It is obvious that Weil’s argument against parties stands or falls by her definition of truth. Truth, as this deeply religious thinker sees it, is unitary and self-subsistent: it exists somewhere “out there,” and our job is to look for it. There is a right answer to every political question, which every individual, and society as a whole, would necessarily discover if we approached it with pure hearts. Parties, by intervening between the individual and the truth, frustrate this quest; they stifle the conscience and confuse the mind. “Mendacity, error,” she writes, “are the thoughts of those who do not desire truth, or those who desire truth plus something else. For instance, they desire truth, but they also desire conformity with such or such received ideas.”
But what, one might ask, is the “truth” about a question such as taxes? Is an income tax rate of 35 percent more in conformity with the truth than a rate of 40 percent? Is this the kind of question to which, as in mathematics or religion, there is only one correct answer?
The Dish 