Here is a summary of “Note sur la suppression générale des partis politiques” written by Simone Weil and published posthumously in 1950.

Key takeaways:

• A political party is:
  • A maker of collective passions.
  • A collective pressure that impedes individuals’ autonomous and critical thinking.
  • A power-hungry machine concerned solely with its own growth.
• Political parties are totalitarian in their roots and their aspirations.
• Only in rare coincidences have political parties’ actions been aligned with the search for public good, justice, and truth.

1. Political parties are makers of collective passions

This argument is based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s work. The latter – a famous 18th-century French philosopher – assumes that :

• Reason consistently aligns with justice and utility.
• Wrongdoings are born of passions.
• Reason is the same in everyone, but the passions that drive us differ.

Drawing on these assumptions, Rousseau claims that if many individuals are confronted with the same problem, their solutions would converge in their just and reasonable parts, but diverge in their unjust and unreasonable parts.

Therefore, Rousseau argues that a collective will, as expressed by the people, is likely to be just and reasonable, since individual passions would cancel each other out.

Danger arises when passions become collective. Simone Weil writes that if a unique collective passion seized a whole country, the latter would be unanimous in wrongdoing. However, should several collective passions coexist, the country would be torn apart. Unlike individual passions, a small number of powerful collective passions would be unable to cancel each other out. Simone Weil asserts that these collective passions would collide with each other in such a noise that anyone else promoting justice and truth would be barely audible.

Simone Weil regards political parties as a means whereby individuals with similar passions come together to endeavour to impose their solutions on the rest of society. By transforming individual passions into collective ones, political parties foster divisions and power rivalries that undermine justice, truth, and the public good.

2. Political parties impede their members’ autonomous and critical thinking

In her essay, Simone Weil argues that, to survive and succeed, political parties must forsake intellectual integrity and honesty. According to her, they pressure people to always take sides – either for or against a given idea – and then to consider only arguments that bolster their stance, while dismissing any contradictory view. Such an approach prevents cognitive dissonance and ensures that political militants remain aligned with their party’s dogma.

Cognitive dissonance : mental state in which a person experiences tension due to an inconsistency between their beliefs (e.g. idea A is the best) and their experiences or actions (e.g. idea A may not be the best, and idea B is actually valid). Sources: Oxford Reference and Cambridge Dictionary.

Members of political parties usually have a strong desire to belong. As a result, they tend to comply unquestioningly with their party’s rules and principles. Simone Weil points out that no suffering awaits those who forsake justice and truth, whereas those who disobey their party’s dogma expose themselves to sanctions. These sanctions can inflict serious harm on one’s personal life, career prospects, friendships, and public honour. Simone Weil takes the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the epitome of a party that stifled its members’ aspirations for justice and truth.

Furthermore, Simone Weil asserts that party members do not seek to examine how their party’s decisions serve the public good, truth, and justice, because doing so would require a tremendous intellectual effort. This raises the following question: how can people agree with and support ideas they do not understand? To this, Simone Weil would answer that they do so simply by submitting unconditionally to the authority from which those ideas stem.

3. Political parties solely care about their own limitless growth

According to Simone Weil, it is far easier for political parties to simply exist and grow than to develop a genuine conception of the public good and seek to realise it. She highlights an inversion of ends (conception of the public good) and means (political parties):

• Political parties’ end goal is actually their own growth.
• Doctrines serve primarily to legitimise the existence of political parties. Because they are both unrealistic and vaguely formulated, they also justify parties’ endless pursuit of power.

As a result, a political party’s growth is regarded by its members as a criterion of good. Yet Simone Weil argues that, once one’s criterion of good is something other than good itself, the very meaning of good is lost.

Simone Weil’s recommendations

Simone Weil would want all politicians to stop saying to their voters “I am a member of party X, therefore I think that…”. Instead, she would rather hear them say:

• “Whenever I examine a new political or social issue, I vow to set aside any affiliation with this or that group and to focus solely on the common good and justice.”
• “I agree with Mr. A on subject X, but disagree with him on subject Y”.

In Simone Weil’s view, political alliances should be strictly ad-hoc, formed case by case according to affinities on specific issues. They should also never be formalised or permanent.

Indeed, she advocates the suppression of political parties, which she sees as fostering collective passions that divide societies and undermine truth and justice. Serving truth and justice requires genuine thinking, yet a group cannot think. Hence, only individuals, not political parties, can serve truth and justice.

Simone Weil also adds that politicians should ideally be non-professional and should not live isolated within a political microcosm, cut-off from ordinary life.