I am responding to psychologist Stéphanie Bertholon-Allagnat’s comments on political anxiety on France Info earlier today, as well as to the related article in Le Monde, https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2025/05/28/la-politico-anxiete-ou-quand-la-politique-nuit-a-la-sante_6608927_3232.html.

Ms Bertholon-Allagnat argues (in her radio appearance) that today we have moved from the use of fear as an instrument of power, as found in Machiavelli, to anxiety. This highly interesting observation resonates with my personal reflections on the increasingly complex forms of violence inflicted by the upper classes upon the lower classes—that is, essentially, by political and economic power upon the people. Bourdieu has already made a significant contribution in this area with his highly relevant notion of symbolic violence, a corollary of the upper classes’ contempt for the lower classes.

That anxiety is more complex than fear is self-evident: fear always has a far more identifiable cause than anxiety, whose cause is thoroughly diffused among different phenomena and different people. The chief difficulty lies in being able to identify who is responsible for that anxiety when doing so is relevant—and sometimes it is!

Indeed, to locate the cause of anxiety in the awareness of death, as has been the case since Heidegger—with Kierkegaard (the dizziness of freedom) and Freud (castration anxiety, psychic conflict) as forerunners of what I call individual anxiety—is not nonsensical. But if we are to take a political position, these are essentially right-wing philosophies, with the familiar flaw of deliberately turning a blind eye to the social and political causes of anxiety, as though they were inessential, too remotely connected to the profound and salutary understanding of one’s cherished little self.

We ought to consider the instrumentalization of anxiety as a political means of exercising power and, potentially, as a more complex form of psychological violence capable of causing prostration.

Within a broader framework than that of the preceding paragraph, my suggestion in the paragraph before it is merely a special case of the problem posed by philosophy’s attempt to identify the ontological origin of violence in human beings. Once again, this attempt passes over the social and political causes of violence insofar as violence is very often organized* violence inflicted by those in power upon the people (far stronger in more distant times, but still present today in increasingly complex forms). Raphaël Ehrsam, Senior Lecturer at Sorbonne University, reiterates this idea in his course “⁠Contemporary Thought on Violence⁠” (2024–2025 academic year, second semester).

A prime minister resigns less than twenty-four hours after his appointment, then is reappointed less than a week after his resignation, following two governments that each lasted less than a year: from individuals who hold their task in such high regard, we are entitled to expect more in terms of social responsibility and mutual understanding. Moreover, if these were merely functional, managerial tasks, we might take some comfort in telling ourselves that, aside from these moments of governmental change or resignation, the job gets done. But I see the following problem here: politics is not a managerial task, a functional task; the role of a politician is to give expression to a certain number of the desires of the people or of a portion of the people, and one cannot inflict upon them the anxiety-inducing violence of removing or appointing, within the space of a few hours, someone entrusted with such a mission (within the framework of representative democracy), without keeping them at all informed of the internal difficulties within the institutions of power, but simply presenting them with a fait accompli; this manner of presenting people with a fait accompli is alienating, as though internal problems existed only within the traditional family, for instance, whereas they very often concern the entire community, whose members must be aware of the difficulties faced by some of its social sectors or by its institutions of power, if it has any. This way of governing, by systematically concealing difficulties, constitutes a major form of anthropological alienation. The problem, of course, is that if we were told about these difficulties, there would in any case be an extremely high probability that this was no more than a political strategy for remaining in power.

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*It is the organized character of violence, particularly when it is inflicted by the stronger upon the weaker, that constitutes a “⁠monstrosity per defectum⁠”—Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy—arising here not from a lack of instincts, precisely, but from a society’s inability to allow its members to discharge their aggressive drives in a healthy, egalitarian, and regulated manner, so that the society may maintain itself within the empathic fabric proper to any healthy and fruitful social group. Demanding without caring is the greatest anthropological monster of all. We shall not be joyful because we are powerful; rather, we shall be powerful because we are joyful.