Contemporary political theorists in context 9780203003138, 0203003136, 9780415357289, 0415357284, 9780415357296, 0415357292

Table of contents :
The inter-war debate: new theories of the state : Weber
Gramsci
Schmitt --
Post-war debates: the recovery of politics : Arendt
Oakeshott
De Beauvoir
Adorno --
Contemporary debates: rights, identity and justice : Rawls and Nozick
Kymlicka
Foucault.

Citation preview

Contemporary Political Theorists in Context

This exciting new textbook presents a clear framework for students to understand how  themes and issues in political thought have emerged and developed throughout the twentieth century. Charting the progression from the preoccupation with the boundaries of the modern state, through to the current debates on rights, identity and justice, the three parts of the book enable the ideas of significant political thinkers to unfold through a telling of the key political events that gave a social context for their thought: • • •

Part I: The inter-­war debate – Weber, Gramsci and Schmitt Part II: Post-­war debates – Arendt, Oakeshott, De Beauvoir and Adorno Part III: Contemporary debates – Rawls, Nozick, Kymlicka and Foucault.

Written in an accessible and concise format, features include: • • •

‘rewind’ and ‘fast forward’ indicators to easily guide students around the text discussion points, revision notes and further reading in each chapter informative text boxes to highlight key concepts, people and events.

By exploring an often ignored relationship in political thought, the influence of thought upon historical change and the influence of historical change upon theory, this text delivers new and exciting angles from which to approach politics today. Following on from Political Theorists in Context (Isaacs and Sparks, 2004), Contemporary Political Theorists in Context is essential reading for all students of social and political theory. Anthony M. Clohesy is a senior lecturer in the International Academy at the University of Essex, UK. Stuart Isaacs is a senior lecturer in Social Policy and Sociology at London Metropolitan University, UK. Chris Sparks is a lecturer and researcher in Sociology and Politics at the Creative Community and Social Innovation Research Centre, Institute of Technology, Sligo, Ireland.

Contemporary Political Theorists in Context

Anthony M. Clohesy, Stuart Isaacs and Chris Sparks

First published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2009 Anthony M. Clohesy, Stuart Isaacs and Chris Sparks All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Clohesy, Anthony M. Contemporary political theorists in context/Anthony M. Clohesy, Stuart Isaacs and Chris Sparks. p. cm. 1. Political science–History–20th century I. Isaacs, Stuart. II. Sparks, Chris, 1956– III. Title. JA83.C536 2009 320.09292–dc22 2008043457 ISBN 0-203-00313-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-35728-4 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-35729-2 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-00313-6 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-35728-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-35729-6 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-00313-8 (ebk)

Corinna, Joe, Stuart’s ‘not so small family’ and ‘Arthur the Navigator’

Contents



Acknowledgements



Introduction

viii 1

PART I

The inter-­war debate: new theories of the state

7

  1 Weber

9

  2 Gramsci

22

  3 Schmitt

36

PART II

Post-­war debates: the recovery of politics

53

  4 Arendt

55

  5 Oakeshott

72

  6 De Beauvoir

88

  7 Adorno

104

PART III

Contemporary debates: rights, identity and justice

117

  8 Rawls and Nozick

119

  9 Kymlicka

133

10 Foucault

146



159

Index

Acknowledgements

Mark Devenney, Kate Duke for editorial support, moral support and guidance, Jackie O’Toole, Majella Mulkeen, John Pender, Deirdre Scott, Perry Share and Orla Walsh for comradeship, and finally Craig at Routledge for his patience and guidance.

Introduction

This book is the second in a series1 about the ways political theorists engage with political existence; that is, the ways that they engage with the politics of their time and theorise from it to expose and explore the enduring principles of political life. In setting out and examining how various significant twentieth-­century theorists have set about this task, our presentation examines the capacity for theory to explain experience and the capacity of theorists to establish a degree of critical objectivity in regard to the political context that frames their lives. In particular, we examine the ways in which our selected political theorists work with and on the core ideas shaped and nurtured through constant use into the tools of the tradition of political theory. While the first book in the series discussed these issues in a presentation of political theory from the 1600s to the 1900s, this book concentrates on the rich context of the twentieth century. Thus, we present here an examination of how contemporary political theorists, sometimes at great personal risk, sought to understand and explain the dynamics of power that brought forth the two great wars, the Nazis, the terror of the nuclear age, the fantastic wealth of ‘modern industrial’ and ‘post-­industrial’ capitalism, the welfare state and globalisation. Facing such scenarios, the theorists of the twentieth century sought to expose the enduring fundamental political dimensions of social life and, in the light of these, to explain their manifestations in different local settings. Thus, whether discussing how to build enduring polities, the politics of Nazism, the systemic disempowerment of women, or issues of distribution that arose with the affluence of the post-­war western world, each of our selected theorists addresses the enduring political fact that in every society, power is disseminated disproportionately among different social sub-­ groups, and these groups – each with its own interpretation of the best ethical, economic and cultural mode of living for their society – use their share of power to try to shape the social development of their society. Although the analytic approaches and specific intentions of our selected theorists are diverse, their work constitutes a coherent body of thought. For example, a common theme that emerges is the way that all considerations of political life can be seen to be shaped by the push and pull of its competing elements, with each developing its own ideas about how things should be ordered and each engaging in strategic action towards their own desired outcome. A second theme is the centrality of intra-­communal conflict. This raises the question of whether communality, traditionally understood as the goal of political life, can only be aspired to and never achieved. Underpinning this suggestion is the question of whether pursuing communal membership necessarily involves the generation of conflict, making peaceable communality impossible. If the quest for communality is not inherently tied to conflict then the constancy of conflict is due to the complex relation of particular needs and fears and the universal grounds for establishing communal life. In this case, clear thinking can establish a rational means to deal with and possibly even eradicate the causes of conflict.

2   Introduction As we shall see, this is the approach taken by Arendt, Rawls and, in regard to gender politics, de Beauvoir. However, if the quest for communality does produce the anti-­communal conflicts that bedevil it, the principles of conflict need to be recognised as fundamental to political existence and incorporated into ‘realistic’ assessments of what degree of stability can be ensured and under what conditions. This is the approach taken by Weber, Gramsci and Schmitt. As this preliminary discussion indicates, one thing that our chosen theorists do have in common is that, in articulating their concern with the perennial stuff of politics through the particularity of their situation, each reveals (deliberately in most cases – by default in the case of Rawls) how often unforeseen environmental changes can unhinge social arrangements and set groups against each other, leading to the fall into internal conflict or the peaceful settlement of internal differences. These historically contingent factors ensure that all societies are in their own way unique. Thus, although different periods introduce different problems they are all political because it is this that expresses how the enduring struggle for community is racked by the ineradicable tendency to destructive conflict.

Theorising the political Political life is, therefore, a rich mix of action and ideas played out dramatically over time. The role of political theorists in the political world is to provide an understanding of this complex action. Theorists critically examine the coherence of commonly held ideas about politics; they observe the effect of such ideas on political action and analyse the social constructs that are built by that action, and which in turn provide its social context. As critical examination always reveals incoherence at the level of ideas, and confusion at the level of action, theorists invariably suggest modifications and alternatives to the political world they observe. Seen in this way, the political theorist appears as a kind of objective observer, viewing the life-­world of politics as if from above (to varying degrees this perspective is evident in all the theorists presented in this text), but each in their own way recognises that they have to deal with the simple fact that they are not external observers, since they are intimately involved in the world they reflect upon. So each is working with the fact that they live and work within a political world, and as a result their theorising is bound to be affected by the cultural norms and values as well as the academic methods and intellectual puzzles which prevail in the world of ideas of their time. In addition, like all members of a political society, theorists are affected by the prevailing concerns and sometimes dramatic events that shape or disrupt their common world. This further complicates the relationship between their theory and the world in which they live as their critical reflections and prescriptions for change impact on the understanding of their contemporaries and on later generations for whom they might be seen as guides for political activity in the future. In this way, theory integrates with action. The arguments and analyses of the most influential political theorists have significantly affected the course of political action and, with it, the shaping of the political world. In order to understand the ideas of particular political thinkers (and to provide a substantive critique of their work), we must examine them in context, not only the context of their times – their particular historical setting – but also their philosophical and theoretical context. If we abstract authors from their intellectual and temporal environment, we are in danger of distorting their work and of committing the crime of turning their ideas into a form of dogma. Thus, there is a central tension involved in the activity of political theorists. Their goal is to be critical observers, viewing the political world as if they stand outside it, and yet, in order to achieve the truthfulness required for accurate observation, they must recognise that they are also actors involved in the world they attempt to observe. Anyone

Introduction   3 who hopes to understand the social effects and political functions of political theory must address this tension in the activity of theorising, the specific questions it raises about the relationship of the theorist to the world of action on which they are commenting and helping to shape, and the more general questions it raises about the relationship of theory to action. These questions are the underpinning themes of this book.

The politics of the twentieth century In the twentieth century we can see how the problem of political existence has been shaped by scientific knowledge and the new technologies that it generated. In addition, we find new ideologies of collective identity which were in part informed by scientific understanding that sought to govern and direct economic power as a feature of social engineering. So we see how the emergence of Nazism, fuelled by eugenics theory and a mythologised conception of racial destiny, led to the construction of a statist economy and the closing down of civil society in pursuit of total governance and the eradication of difference. Similarly, we can see the emergence of the Stalinist projects that sought to combine scientific knowledge, technical development and social engineering to construct a totalitarian social order. In contrast, liberal polities attempted to deal with the uncertainties of pluralist politics, market economics and, in the case of the European powers, failing empires, without obvious clarity or success. This unique milieu of ideas and activities dramatically contextualised the concerns of political theorists of the time. For these theorists, the core questions underlying the political issues of the day were whether to eradicate the uncertainties of collective human existence once seen as ungovernable, or whether to acknowledge them as enduring uncertainties of knowledge and being; whether to put faith in the truth-­revealing capacity of science as a tool for governance of socio-­economic order or to evaluate it with reference to traditional philosophical conceptions of the limits of possible understanding; whether to tackle the causes of war and inequality once and for all or to understand these causes as part of the enduring framework of our lives. Also, hardwired into these questions are the fundamental philosophical issues that underpin any discussion of the political: how can we know ourselves and what dare we do?

Book outline: theorists in context Part I: The inter-war debate – new theories of the state (Weber, Gramsci, Schmitt) The first grouping of theorists brings together the work of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Antonio Gramsci. These are all theorists whose lives and concerns overlapped in the ‘inter-­ war’ years that shaped the twentieth century’s two purposefully designed totalitarian regimes: fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Weber and Schmitt both experienced and discussed the failures of the monarchic German state and the subsequent tension-­ridden politics of the Weimar Republic. They both saw the constant tendency towards conflict – the push and pull of competing social groups and the arbitrariness of the goals sought by them – overwhelming the political community’s capacity for clear, decisive, self-­expressive action. Weber’s overarching theoretical perspective was already fully mature by this time. The Weberian view is that modern peoples have constructed a legal rational culture in which the means to realise our ends can be analysed and rationally pursued, but which fails to provide clear grounds for our choice of ends – the sources of our desires are never fully rational and so must always remain beyond us. Weber argued that the politics of his time

4   Introduction clearly showed that we cannot escape either the violence or the arbitrariness of people’s choice of ends. Carl Schmitt, observing the same scenario, argued that the constant situational presence of competing collective identities in any political situation brought with it the ever-­present potential for conflict. Each theorist is concerned with the uncertainties and stresses involved in political activity over-­invested in the rather romanticised ideal of an awesome charismatic leader who could embody the authentic self-­expressive will of the collectivity in decisive sovereign action. While Weber died before witnessing what such a charismatic leader would do to political existence, Schmitt did witness and, initially at least, support Hitler’s charismatic dictatorship. Here we see the danger of romanticising the character of the political. Gramsci, by contrast, was one of the many unfortunates whose lives were reduced to enduring the effect of charismatic dictators. Having been imprisoned by Mussolini for being a Marxist agitator, he wrote his political theory in coded notes smuggled from his prison cell. His work, a powerful critique of the burgeoning Italian fascist regime, attempted to explain how the ongoing economic depression led to a totalitarian regime rather than the emergence of a communist revolution. Gramsci’s analysis re-­introduced political concepts into what was in danger of becoming a totally economistic Marxist discourse – discussing hegemonic power through ideological control, strategies to develop and popularise ‘counter hegemonic’ discourses, and the importance of strategic sabotage and subterfuge in engaging with dominant enemies through a subtle ‘war of position’. With such ideas, he signalled a significant shift within Marxist theory from the idea of politics and superstructural activity generally being determined by the base or economy. However, he nevertheless remained trapped within a ‘classist’ paradigm that limited his interpretation of hegemony. So, although he recognised that the economic situation in Italy at the time clearly showed that strategy and leadership was vital (there were no pre-­determined outcomes), he did not move away from the idea that the situation had to be considered in the broader Marxist context of class and emancipation. Part II: Post-­war debates – the recovery of politics (Arendt, Oakeshott, de Beauvoir, Adorno) Part II of this book groups together three theorists, Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott and Theodor Adorno, whose reflections on the experience of the totalitarian project developed into contemporaneous but distinctly different critical assessments of the scientific rationalism that underpinned the project of modernity. At this time also, a strong new voice emerged in political theory in the writings of feminist theoretician, Simone de Beauvoir, articulating the idea of women as active contestants for political power. Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt were both German Jewish intellectuals who managed to escape the Nazi-­state by moving to the United States. From this position of safety they were able to reflect on the causes and consequences of the Nazi totalitarian project that almost destroyed European society. Adorno argued that the problem with post-­Enlightenment thought (modernity) was that, in its quest for certainty and perfection, it consistently reduced difference to sameness. This approach had led to projects of human perfectibility that culminated in the eradication of difference and totalitarianism. Modern thought, argued Adorno, had become a denial of, and eventually a brutal crime against, the complex tension-­ridden condition of human ‘Being’. Hannah Arendt rooted the emergence of totalitarian states in a loss of sense of what politics is and what it does. Arendt combined the existentialist concept of ‘being-­in-the-­world’ with the notion of politics as a form of practical, self-­preserving activity and self-­humanising

Introduction   5 communal interaction. The roots of anti-­human totalitarianism, she argued, lie in the replacement of political sensibility with the unworldly abstractions of science. This shift in mind-­set has alienated the western world from its fundamental creativity. Interestingly, both theorists retain a high degree of contemporary relevance. Adorno’s analysis resonates through contemporary discussions of globalisation, multiculturalism and democratisation, while Arendt’s discussions of polity and power resonated through the velvet revolutions of Eastern Europe. Oakeshott’s work can also be said to be a reaction not just to totalitarianism and war, but also to the underlying mind-­set from which they developed. In Rationalism in Politics (1947), his most famous essay, he outlines how a particular mode of thinking was in danger of reducing politics to a technical rational exercise of human manipulation. In this respect, Oakeshott exhibits Weber’s sensitivity to problems of the large bureaucratic state. From another standpoint, he also precedes Foucault (see Part III below) in highlighting how ‘discourses’ can develop that construct and constrain political debates. De Beauvoir’s theory is developed contemporaneously to that of the preceding post-­war theorists and shares with Arendt a philosophical basis in European existentialism, and with Adorno a leaning towards liberation politics. However, she approaches the challenges of the post-­war world from the perspective of a feminist, arguing that the most fundamental dehumanising processes are products of an elaborately constructed gendered world dominated by the interests of self-­ serving and self-­defining ‘men’. The core idea in de Beauvoir’s work is that, while some dimensions of the difference may exist between male and female humans, those qualities that are understood as quintessentially feminine or masculine are in fact not expressions of an enduring and unchanging natural order, but rather are social products. Women, she argued, are ‘a product elaborated by civilisation’ to serve men’s sexual passion, to produce the male offspring that inherit their father’s worldly goods and to carry out the domestic functions of child-­rearing and housekeeping that are seen to follow from them. She presented a stark picture of a radically unequal society which is not natural and inevitable, but rather is artificial and unnecessary. Her readers understood that it followed from her argument that this world order could and should be deconstructed. At this point, de Beauvoir’s theorising moved into the terrain of a political manifesto for a feminist challenge to what became known as the patriarchal order and a new, intellectually powerful movement developed as a significant presence in the late twentieth-­century world. Part III: Contemporary debates – rights, identity and justice (Rawls and Nozick, Kymlicka, Foucault) In Part III we consider two contemporaneous but largely separate discourses. The first ‘Anglo-­American’ discourse revolves around the discussion of liberal theorists whose work has been a dominant force in late twentieth-­century political thought. This begins with a comparison of the work of John Rawls (whose A Theory of Justice has been suggested by some commentators to have single-­handedly re-­defined the status of political theory) and Robert Nozick. For Rawls, writing in the context of the American ‘Great Society’ era of affluence, the liberal-­democratic state can and should be the guarantor of social justice. Rawls sketches out a notion of how such a state could make a positive impact to ensure that its members were provided with basic rights and more-­or-less equal opportunities. Rawls used a constructivist technique similar to that used by Kant in his formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Rawls hoped that this technique would show us the underpinnings of what we can all conceive as a ‘just state’. Rawls’ work became a critical fulcrum in an ongoing intellectual combat between communitarian thinkers and radical libertarian thinkers. The influence of this

6   Introduction latter group on the development of US and European politics and policy since the late 1970s has been of historical significance. The hugely influential Anarchy, State and Utopia by Robert Nozick provided the foundation for a revised libertarian and New Right politics in America, where it was eagerly adopted by Ronald Reagan’s Republican party, and in Britain where it appealed to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives. More recently, it can be seen to inform the shift from social democratic politics in France, under President Sargozy. For this reason, we give Nozick’s work full consideration. Nozick’s theoretical position is developed from his reaction to Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. He questioned the primacy of one of Rawls’ two basic principles of justice: that of arranging social inequalities so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. His ideas are specifically opposed to state intervention in people’s daily lives. In general, Nozick favours the so-­called ‘night-­watchman’ state that corresponds to his concept of liberty. Any interference with individual choice is construed by him as an unjustified infringement by a coercive state. Such arguments have been adopted by various anti-­state groups in the United States over the last 20 years with deeply problematic consequences for American political life. The second chapter of this part of the book provides, to some degree, a ‘bridge’ between the dialogues around liberal/libertarian theory that took place during the 1970s and 1980s (discussed above) and the influence of postmodernism (discussed below). Will Kymlicka’s multicultural liberalism attempts to usurp the traditional liberal position by arguing that liberalism can (and does) take account of minority group rights. In a sense operating upon the same lines as postmodern attempts to bring in marginalised groups politically, Kymlicka puts forward a forceful argument for social inclusion. However, his perspective has been criticised by a range of opponents, some within the broad school of thought that is liberalism, others from outside. In particular, gender-­equality theorists and those that argue for a more participatory, engaged and discursive political democracy have challenged his liberal assumptions on multiculturalism. Nevertheless, his voice is an important one in which to acknowledge the increasing diversity and difference entering political thought and practice in the 1990s. This chapter attends to the increasing importance of identity politics with which political actors began to struggle during this decade. The final chapter of this book considers the parallel development of what became known as postmodern theorising, focusing on the most insightful and influential European thinker of the late twentieth century, Michel Foucault. As we write this, the energy and invention of the postmodern ‘moment’ has subsided and its impact on political theory and action is open to question. Despite this, Michel Foucault’s work on the primacy of power, governance and self-­creation retain a vital contemporary political significance. Interestingly, many of the reservations of political theorists have been rooted in the anti-­foundationalism of Foucault’s approach. It seems that, despite his radical insights into power, his anti-­foundationalist stance blinded him to issues of justice, emancipation and progress, at least in terms of how these categories are traditionally understood. This chapter critically examines those critiques of Foucault and suggests that it is problematic to assume that he was not concerned with the fundamental political issues, although he clearly did not understand them in a traditional ‘Enlightenment’ context. We explore the ways in which, towards the end of his career, his distinction between ‘marginalisation’ and ‘problematisation’ can be read as a recommendation for those societies that allow for critical reflection. This suggests that, although for Foucault the subject is always implicated in power structures, it remains important that we remember our duty to develop a ‘cultivated’ relationship with knowledge. Note 1 The first book is: Isaacs, S. and Sparks, C. (2004) Political Theorists in Context, London: Routledge.

Part I

The inter-­war debate New theories of the state

1 Weber

No machinery in the world functions so precisely as this apparatus of men and, moreover, so cheaply. Rational calculation reduces every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how to transform himself into a somewhat bigger cog . . . the passion for bureaucratization drives us to despair. Weber (1921)

Max Weber was one of the founding fathers of the discipline of sociology. However, the political impact of his work is immense and it continues to resonate in a number of contexts. He is perhaps best known for The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), in which he examined the relationship, or what he called the ‘elective affinity’, between Protestantism and capitalism. His legacy is also considered in the context of rationalisation (zweckrationalitat) and bureaucratisation. For Weber, these developments led to a disenchantment with the world (a concept he took from Schiller) because they subordinated the spiritual dimension of our lives to the ‘iron cage of reason’ and a deadening ethos of instrumentality. This was one of the central themes that informed the analysis of the Frankfurt School, and it is examined later in this volume in Chapter 7. As we will see, it also has a resonance in the work of Arendt, Oakeshott and Foucault, also examined in this volume. This chapter will also examine the important themes he raised in his celebrated essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’, written towards the end of his life. I begin, however, by situating Weber’s work in the context of the profound social and political changes that took place in Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Nineteenth-­century Germany The two most significant developments in Germany during this period were, unquestionably, industrialisation and the emergence of a unified German state. Coming to Germany much later than in Britain, industrialisation profoundly changed the nature of German society. Its effects have been summarised as follows: ‘[t]he industrial revolution hit the continent full force after Germany’s unification in 1871, leading to massive social dislocations, rapid urbanisation, incipient class conflict, and the formation of revolutionary political movements’ (Scaff, 1998: 34–5). The process of unification is no less important. It can be traced back to the Congress of Vienna in 1815. This led to the emergence of a new German ­confederation of 39 states and four free cities. By far the most important and powerful of these states was Austria, under the leadership of Metternich whose objective, above all else, was the preservation of social and political order. However, the deeply conservative culture

10   The inter-war debate that prevailed during these years was upset in 1848 when the middle classes, or ‘bourgeois liberals’, demanded, among other things, constitutional government, political rights and habeas corpus. Initially sympathetic to this call for reform, King Frederick William grew wary of it and Austria’s transition to a more progressive settlement was thwarted. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Bismarck, arch realist and esteemed member of the Junker class, had replaced Metternich as the most powerful figure in Germany. Bismarck became Prime Minister of Prussia in 1862 and embarked on a highly aggressive foreign policy, defeating Austria in 1866, and France in 1870. In 1871 he presided over the creation of the new German Empire (the second Reich). Bismarck is remembered primarily for his military nationalism and the Kulterkampf – the policy of marginalising Catholics who were concerned about the social implications of his liberal economic policies. However, any study of Weber should remember Bismarck’s other legacy, namely, the extraordinary welfare system he established in Germany. This included health insurance (1883), accident insurance (1884) and old-­age insurance (1889). These measures restored Bismarck’s relationship with the Catholic Centre Party, a grouping that shared his concern about the growing popularity of the Socialist Democratic Party. Although Weber was sensitive to the social needs these benefits were intended to meet, he thought that they represented an ominous tightening of the state’s bureaucratic regulation of society. Although Weber was alarmed by the mindless idolisation of Bismarck, he thought the rule of Emperor Wilhelm (who assumed effective control of the country after Bismarck’s resignation in 1890) far worse as he had little understanding of the scale of the problems facing Germany at this time. These problems culminated in the First World War, an event that was welcomed by Weber because he felt that it was only in the wake of such a cataclysmic event that the German nation could confront the enormity of the social, political and economic challenges facing it. This period is important for any study of Weber as his experience of it informed much of his later work about the importance of strong leadership and political vocation. There has been much speculation about how Weber would have reacted to the authoritarian leadership that emerged in Germany in the 1930s. This is an important question and I return to it below.

Weber’s life and times Weber was born into a wealthy Protestant family in Erfurt (formerly Prussia) on 21 April 1864. His mother was a deeply religious woman from a staunch Huguenot background. His father’s disposition, always more secular, led him towards a career in the National Liberal Party (NLP). This party was opposed to the authoritarian rule of Bismarck but recognised the value of the national unity it encouraged. To foster this sense of unity a strong economic foundation was vital. The NLP was, therefore, fully in support of Bismarck’s policies of laissez-­faire and colonial expansion. The Weber household during the 1870s and 1880s was a centre of political debate in which all of these issues were passionately discussed. There is little doubt that this fervent political atmosphere had a profound effect on Weber who, in his early youth, identified far more with the world of his father. However, this affiliation changed in later life as he developed a passionate interest in religion and grew to resent what he saw as his father’s indifferent attitude to his family. Weber’s first step into his father’s world came when he began his legal studies at the University of Heidelberg in 1882. After three semesters here he embarked on his military

Weber   11 service in Strasbourg. Leaving the army in 1884, now aged 20, Weber resumed his legal studies in Berlin and Goettomgem. After graduating Weber practised as a lawyer in the Berlin courts, completed a PhD dissertation on the history of trading companies in the middle ages (1889) and a habilitation on the history of agrarian institutions (1891). Weber’s uncertainty about whether to follow a legal or academic career was resolved when he was appointed to a professorship at the Frieburg University in 1894. In his now infamous inaugural address the following year he set out his political position in no uncertain terms.

Key event: Weber’s 1895 inaugural address It was during this address that Weber outlined the importance of maintaining a realist foreign policy. He argued that it is ‘only in a hard struggle between man and man that elbow room can be won in our earthly existence’. Weber was deeply concerned about the threat to German sovereignty and culture posed by the Russians and Poles to the East and the growing economic power of the United States and Britain to the West. He argued that in order to protect Germany it was vital that the economy remained the preserve of the state, a view that ran counter to Adam Smith’s widely held free-­trade theory. It also ran counter to the prevailing neo-­Kantian argument that mankind’s destiny was to live in universal harmony.

After his appointment to the prestigious University of Heidelberg in 1896 and his marriage to Marianne Schnitger in the same year, life for the young Max Weber looked promising indeed. However, when Weber’s father died in 1897, his life took a most unexpected turn. Much has been written about Weber’s ambivalent attitude to his father, but his death seems to have been a trigger for a serious mental collapse that resulted in Weber having to resign his university position and spend time in a sanatorium. His friend Friedrich Meinecke remarked that his collapse had all the characteristics of a classical Oedipal conflict. However, by 1901 Weber’s intellectual forces were fully restored and although he did not return to teaching until the final years of his life, the period from 1903 until his untimely death in 1920 was characterised by an extraordinary degree of activity and the publication of all of Weber’s major political and sociological texts.

Intellectual influences Kant Weber subscribed to a neo-­Kantian methodology in that he held that action could not be reduced to universal laws of causality. For Kant, empiricism was limited because it failed to account for morality and freedom. So, although for Weber it was important to work within a context of objectivity and value-­neutrality, it was also important that human action be understood in the context of the meaning the actor gives to it. Although Weber’s hermeneutical approach – what he called ‘verstehen’ or Interpretative Sociology – held that action is not reducible to economic or social structures, he argued that its interpretation did require a conceptual apparatus to allow the social scientist to compare its ‘multitude of particularities’ with research findings from other societies and cultures. It was for this reason that Weber relied on the concept of the ideal type.

12   The inter-war debate Key concept: ideal type This is an abstraction or heuristic device (capitalism, rationality, the Protestant work ethic and charismatic authority would all be examples) that allows for a ‘gathering together’ of related concepts under one heading. This makes possible the production of general but meaningful statements about the world. Although the category of the ideal type does not claim to capture the specificity of the different phenomena gathered together under it, it is argued that it remains too general a device to be useful for explaining society. Weber identified four ideal types useful for understanding and interpreting behaviour: zweckrational (rational means to pursue rational ends), affectual (emotion), traditional and wertrational (rational means to pursue irrational ends).

Although Weber was critical of the philosophical assumptions made by positivism, it would be misleading to describe his epistemological approach as unequivocally idealist. Rather, his approach understood action as resulting from an unfathomable interplay between the subjective will and the ‘forces of society’. For Weber, therefore, unlike Marx, action and identity could not be reduced to economic laws. However, like Marx, he disavowed the existential or phenomenological perspective that focused exclusively on the constitutive role or inner life of the subject. Marx Much has been said of the seemingly stark theoretical and political differences between Marx and Weber. However, it is important that these differences are understood in a wider context in which their affinities can also be considered. Weber remarked that the intellectual world of his time had been formed in large measure by the work of Marx and Nietzsche. They had defined the major themes for the 20th century: the question of social justice, the nature of the capitalist economy, the fate of western civilisation, the problem of our relationship to history and knowledge, modernity and its discontents. (Scaff, 1998: 35) As noted above, the most cited difference between Marx and Weber was that Weber’s work was less determinist than that of Marx. That is, Weber was more willing to include an account of ideas and culture (which, for the later Marx, were epiphenomenal) as part of his theory of history and society. It is worth remembering, however, that although Weber did not share Marx’s view about the inevitable collapse of capitalism, he did come to see it as having its own inner developmental or evolutionary logic. To put it less theoretically, for Weber, as for Marx, the realm of the economy was hugely important in terms of the profound influence it exercised over our social, cultural and political lives. In other words, Weber agreed with Marx that any explanation of social action must have an economic or materialist dimension. This is linked to the theme of alienation. Certainly Marx and Weber differed in their understanding of this concept. For Marx, it was understood in the context of ownership of the means of production whereas, for Weber, it results from the twin processes of rationalisation and bureaucratisation. However, both Marx and Weber shared the view that alienation (or, for Weber, disenchantment) was a tragic consequence of modern life as it denied freedom and the possibility of meaning. In this sense it is possible to regard both Weber and Marx as ‘liberals in despair’, although Marx, unlike Weber, foresaw a resolution to the

Weber   13 problem of alienation. Another important difference that needs to be acknowledged is that, for Weber, the prospect of such a resolution, in the form of communism, would result in what he called the ‘dictatorship of the administration’ which would exacerbate the problem of alienation rather than alleviating it. Key concept: disenchantment For Weber, disenchantment refers to how the rise of modernity, bureaucratisation and secularisation had resulted in the rationalisation of religion and the displacement of a way of being in the world governed by belief in God, tradition, ritual, myth and magic. This process, which culminated in the ‘Protestant work ethic’ was, for Weber, deeply damaging to human beings and it is the source of much of his pessimism about the future.

Other related differences can be noted, such as Weber’s criticism of Marx’s view of class as an unmediated ontological category. For Weber, this was a meaningless metaphysical assertion that told us nothing about the complexities of the real world. In this sense Weber’s account of social stratification was more nuanced and less reductionist than that of Marx, and he was more concerned with showing how our relationship to political monopolies also has a significant effect on our life chances. On the question of religion a clear difference is discernible. While Weber understood it as a respite from the demands of a brutally mechanised society, Marx saw it as a means of distracting the attention of the workers from the objective reality of their economic position. Weber was also more ambivalent than Marx about the nature and impact of science, which he saw in terms of its capacity to disenchant and emancipate. However, in his essay ‘Science as a Vocation’ he stressed the importance of ensuring that science did not enjoy privileged access to politics as he thought this would lead to the emergence of a ‘scientistic’ view of society and the further erosion of the autonomy of politics. Finally, we should consider what many see as a tension in Weber’s work concerning its precise theoretical status. Concerned to distance himself from evolutionary or teleological accounts of history, Weber was firmly positioned in the ‘counter-­Enlightenment’ camp. However, at the same time and rather perplexingly, his account of the development of rationality appears to be compatible with ‘grand narrative’ accounts. Such accounts chart the course of history as following a pre-­destined path unmediated by politics, history and culture. At the end of this chapter I examine how, on this and on many other issues, Weber’s legacy remains tantalisingly ambiguous. Discussion point Is Weber’s account of the development of rationality consistent with his rejection of a teleological view of history?

Nietzsche We have seen how Weber’s inaugural speech at the University of Freiburg in 1894 was resonant with the spirit of Nietzsche. Weber’s primary concern here was to show the importance of strong national leadership for Germany at a time when he felt its essential

14   The inter-war debate values and destiny were at stake. This is sometimes seen as the sociologisation of Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’. The ‘will to power’ is a complex and frequently misunderstood concept in Nietzschean philosophy. It does not refer to a Darwinian instinct to acquire power to maximise survival chances. Rather, it relates to a quest to control those forces that govern our lives, those forces that seek to reduce us to the level of the ‘common herd’. In this sense the ‘will to power’ was seen by Weber as an aesthetic demand that we become free. This is an abstract formulation, but it was important for Weber’s view of the charismatic leader who, as the embodiment of the ‘will to power’, represented a means of escape from the ‘polar night of icy darkness’ – Weber’s memorable description of the terror of modern societies’ embrace of rationality. However, it should be remembered that Weber was deeply ambivalent about the figure of the leader, or ubermensch. Indeed, in many respects, he favoured the legal-­rational mode of authority as a more stable and democratic alternative, hence his enthusiasm for British parliamentary democracy. This is ironic as it is precisely this mode of legitimation that Weber saw as the antithesis of the romanticist tradition in German poetry which championed the life-­affirming, Dionysian spirit over the life-­denying conformity represented by the Apollian, ‘ontologically destructive’ life order of rationality.        Fast forward to Adorno Chapter 7 Adorno, following Weber and Freud, described how modernity crushes our life spirit.

Weber is considered a dark and pessimistic figure because he was unable to foresee the means by which we could escape the destructive ‘life order’ of rationality and modernity. The charismatic figure of the ‘overman’ is considered as such a means but, for Weber, the prospect of the emergence of such a figure was remote. In this context there has been much speculation about how Weber would have responded to the form of politics that descended on Germany in the post-­Versailles period. I have mentioned that Weber thought of the First World War as an opportunity for Germany to ask itself many of the hard questions it had been avoiding since the founding of the state in the nineteenth century. Although he was passionate in his denunciation of the Versailles settlement (as wholly unjust to a nation seeking merely to defend itself) there is no reason to suppose that he would have considered what followed it as anything other than a diabolical descent into a deep moral abyss. In Thus Spake Zarusthrustra, Nietzsche famously announced the death of God. For Weber, this aphorism captured perfectly the deep pathos of modern life, a pathos that could only be overcome by the emergence of new prophets or the rebirth of old ideals. The task of such prophets was no less than the creation of new meaning. Weber said that a Weltanschauung can never be the product of advancing empirical knowledge and that, therefore, the highest ideals, which move us most powerfully, are formed for all time only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us. (Weber, cited in Scaff, 1998: 39) This suggests an openness to the figure who could restore the spirit stolen from mankind by the age of reason. However, this does not mean that Weber would have been sympathetic to National Socialism, which he surely would have seen as the ghastly culmination of Enlightenment rationality rather than an ethical response to it.

Weber   15        Fast forward to Oakeshott Chapter 5 See how Weber’s nostalgia for pre-­modernity compares to Oakeshott’s ‘intimations of tradition’.

Calvinism, capitalism and a culture of rationality Weber is probably best known for his work on the Protestant work ethic and its relationship to the emergence of capitalism. Although Weber wrote more about other religions such as Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism, his work on Protestantism and capitalism provides the key to understanding the tensions contained in his most specifically political text, Politics as a Vocation. I examine this in detail below, with particular reference to what Weber called the antimony between the ‘ethic of responsibility’ and ‘ethic of conviction’. One of the central questions for Weber was how and why western societies changed from systems based on tradition and value-­oriented action to systems based on rationality and purposeful action. Or, to put it another way, what were the necessary conditions for the emergence of modern capitalism in the West? The first thing to note here is that Weber was not arguing that capitalism had not occurred before. Thus, he acknowledged that economic systems of transaction, exchange and profit had, albeit in different forms, existed in, for example, ancient Rome and the Italian city-­states of the Renaissance. However, he did argue that the form of capitalism that emerged with the industrial revolution in the West was a genuinely new phenomenon (involving the rational organisation of formerly free labour on an unprecedented scale) and that it was of the utmost importance to explain why it happened, perhaps why it could only have happened, in the West. To put the matter simply, Weber argued that what was missing in other societies (and in Antiquity), but present in the West, was a religious sensitivity or, more specifically, the presence of ‘worldly ascetic values’ characteristic of a number of Protestant sects, particularly those influenced by the teaching of Calvin. Key people: Jean Calvin (1509–1564) Calvin was one of the most significant figures in the Reformation movement that challenged the supremacy of the Catholic church in the sixteenth century. He is important for Weber as, more than any other theologian, he is associated with the idea of the ‘total sovereignty’ of God. This idea, formulated in Institutes of the Christian Religion, refers to how the sovereignty of God entails pre-­destination and salvation. This is because it is a doctrine, based on the teachings of St Augustine, claiming that everything that happens in the world, including our fate after death, is the result of the will of God. This challenged the dominant view that our actions as human beings were significant. For Calvin, human beings, stained by original sin, can do nothing to alter their fate.

These post-­Reformation sects were inspired by St Augustine’s belief in ‘pre-­ destination’. Acceptance of this doctrine meant that believers could do nothing in this life that would affect their fate after death. However, as this was a difficult reality to accept, many were drawn to a way of life that gave them a sign that they were among those chosen for salvation. But what sort of life could signify such a calling? Weber’s argument here is that a life of industry, wealth and investment, a life that eschewed worldly pleasures in

16   The inter-war debate order that one’s duty in world affairs be fulfilled, was seen as a sign that one had been chosen to serve the greater glory of God on earth. By contrast, a life of penury, or a life devoted to the pursuit of earthly pleasures, was seen as a fall from grace and indicated that one faced an altogether different destiny. Such a view was very different to the prevailing Catholic and Scholastic worldviews that emphasised humility and meditative practices as a means of communing with God and seeking his forgiveness. For the Calvinist sects, by contrast, it was as if one’s economic status or ‘credit rating’ was a sign of one’s moral worth and, therefore, a sign of one’s worthiness for a place in heaven. For Weber, this ‘ethos of industry’ was a crucial factor in ushering in a spirit of capitalism, a form of economic life that relied on a strong culture of investment and a disciplined workforce. However, as we have already discussed, it is important to note that Weber was not making a strong argument about causality: We have no intention whatever of maintaining such a foolish and doctrinaire thesis as that the spirit of capitalism could only have arisen as the result of certain effects of the Reformation, or even that capitalism as an economic system is a creation of the Reformation. On the contrary, we only wish to ascertain whether and to what extent religious forces have taken part in the qualitative formation and the quantitative expansion of that spirit over the world. (Weber, 1905: 19) Despite this qualification, Weber’s work in this area has come under sustained attack. Anthony Giddens, in the Preface to the 1976 edition of the 1905 text, summarises some of the more important criticisms. Thus, he points out that Calvinism was actually deeply anti-­ capitalist in its worldview; that Weber wilfully misrepresents Catholicism, which was far less antagonistic to accumulation than Weber asserts; that Weber’s research was empirically flawed in that there was actually no correlation between Calvinism and capitalism; and finally, that there was nothing theologically distinctive in Calvin’s notion of the calling. Whatever the merits of these arguments about Calvinism and the origins of capitalism, what remains clear is that, for Weber, our imprisonment in the iron cage, by whatever means it came about, was a tragic reality for human beings. He asked: ‘what could we oppose to this machinery in order to keep mankind free from this parcelling out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life’? (Weber, cited in Gerth and Mills, 1948: 21). In the next section of this chapter I outline Weber’s response to this question.

Legitimacy, violence and the ethic of responsibility Let us begin this section with an examination of Weber’s claim, made in his celebrated essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’, that the state has a monopoly of legitimate violence which, when exercised, constituted the practical expression of its sovereignty. There is still some confusion about what Weber meant with this statement. Was he arguing that, simply as a matter of empirical truth, only the state could exercise legitimate violence? Or, was his argument that the state exercised legitimate violence as a result of it being seen as legitimate – if, in other words, it was in authority? The first interpretation is a straightforward legalistic formulation that needs no further elaboration. However, the second interpretation is more complex as it deals with a jurisprudential conception of legitimacy. In short, it implies that legitimacy exists when there is a belief in it. This interpretation is plausible

Weber   17 given that Weber’s interest in this question was in the practical modalities of how power was legitimated (i.e. through charisma, tradition or legal-­rational forms), why people obeyed the state and how one system of legitimation replaced another. However, although this tells us little about when it is right to obey the state and when it is right to resist it, it is not the case that Weber disregarded the ethical dimension of this question. As we will see below, the 1920 essay is dedicated precisely to an exploration of the ethical implications of state action. Key concept: legitimacy The issue of legitimacy is a complex one that goes back to classical times. Aristotle, for example, argued that rule was only legitimate when its purpose was the good of society as a whole. In a similar vein, Rousseau, somewhat elliptically, suggested that the necessary condition of legitimate rule was the formulation of the General Will. More recently, Habermas has argued that legitimacy has certain indissoluble conditions such as an ethic of deliberation made possible by a society in which communication is transparent and undistorted by the politics of domination. David Beetham has argued that it is vital that we look at how legitimacy is actually brought about. For him, two conditions have to be met. First, that power be exercised according to established rules, whether in legal codes or societal convention. Second, that these rules are widely shared by all in society, i.e. that the people freely consent to them. Debate continues around what precisely constitutes a valid process of consent, with neo-­ Marxists disputing social contract theory and arguing that authority in modern liberal democratic society is only achieved by the ‘manufacturing’ of consent. Habermas has drawn our attention to ‘crises of legitimacy’ that occur when effective challenges to the political system are made. Conversely, conservatives argue that one of the main problems in contemporary society is precisely the lack of authority and trust in our institutions and political practices.

How are the issues of rationality, disenchantment and legitimation linked to the substantive theme in Weber’s essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’? Let us recap on Weber’s basic theory. The defining question for Weber was how a culture of rationality came to replace the mysticism of earlier societies whose values were founded on tradition or charismatic leadership. We have mentioned how Weber examined the role played by the Calvinist doctrine of pre-­ destination in effecting this transition and how, although more democratic in some respects, the culture of legal-­rationalism has led to a crisis of meaning and disenchantment. One of the main reasons for this was that in such a world we could not justify, by a shared system of values, the ends we chose to pursue. This is a complex issue, so let us be quite clear here about what is at stake. For Weber, earlier societies were able to provide a sense of moral or ethical cohesion because of the existence of common values enforced by the power of tradition or the figure of the charismatic leader. In contemporary society, however, due to the prevailing culture of rationality and individualism, such modes of justification are absent. This means that, although we seek the most efficient means to realise our ends, the choice of ends is arbitrary. For Weber, this implied that we now inhabit a relativist moral universe in which our choice of ends lie beyond any meaningful process of reckoning. This relativism can be understood in the context of Weber’s reading of Nietzsche. It can be summed up in the following: ‘ultimate Weltanschauungen clash, world views between which in the end one has to make a choice’ (Weber cited in Gerth and Mills, 1948: 117). This has an almost existential overtone. Indeed, it was Kierkegaard who remarked on the act of decision as a ‘moment of madness’. That is, a decision has no absolute rational foundation that could justify it over

18   The inter-war debate alternative courses of action. For Weber, this meant that politics had a tragic character as it was forever unable to reconcile different ends. Indeed, it was precisely this irreconcilability that constituted the practice and nature of politics. In other words, for Weber it was precisely because the ingredients of politics were conviction, passion, violence, power and irreconcilability that it was truly the ‘realm of diabolical forces’.        Fast forward to Rawls Chapter 8 Rawls argued, by contrast, that the moral choices we make are premised on the foundational concept of fairness.

For Weber, in such a world there was no room for morality and it was only those who understood such realities that could survive and prosper. However, he argued that important ethical questions lay beyond this stark, Hobbesian worldview. Although he identified with the strong leader, passionate in the pursuit of his vocation (as opposed to the vainglorious leader who seeks power for its own sake), he recognised that, in the pursuit of those convictions, the leader should be sensitive to the consequences of his actions. In other words, for Weber, a ‘mature personality’ had to possess convictions and a sense of responsibility for the consequences of the actions taken to realise those convictions. This is the ethical antimony he identifies in ‘Politics as a Vocation’: the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility. The relationship between these two ethics has been the subject of much academic debate. Before Weber wrote the essay his work had focused primarily on the means of politics, that is, he was concerned with what he saw as the ‘distribution of violence’ in society and the modalities of decision-­making. The essay, therefore, introduced a new ethical imperative to his work, namely, that the end does not justify the means. It is for this reason that Weber was highly critical of absolutist or deontological systems of ethics that paid no heed to the practical consequences of our actions. However, for Weber, this does not mean that a leader should be so hampered by what may or may not happen that he is unable to act at all. Nor does it mean that a leader should compromise on his ‘identity’ or ‘core values’. Moreover, for Weber, leaders can only be held responsible for those consequences that are ‘foreseeable’ and should not be held to account ex-­post-facto. Within this approach, therefore, political leaders retain considerable scope to pursue their convictions unhindered. Discussion point It is interesting to reflect on how such an approach to the issue of political accountability has informed recent initiatives such as, for example, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. It will be remembered that the principle aim of this body was to facilitate a process of healing and closure rather than to instigate proceedings against those deemed to have transgressed the law.

We examined above the charge that Weber’s account of legitimacy amounted to no more than a belief in it. That is, that it did not identify the necessary moral conditions for legitimacy. The question here is whether the same criticism can be levelled at the theory articulated in Politics as a Vocation? In other words, does this work fail to identify the conditions that need to be met

Weber   19 to justify a conviction or end? This is important because if, as he claims, we are responsible for the consequences of the actions we employ to realise our ends, albeit with the aforementioned caveats, then consistency demands that we must also be responsible for the choice of our ends. In other words, the same mode or moral argumentation should apply to the consideration of both ends and means. However, this is precisely what Weber does not do. Why was he prepared to allow such relatively scant moral scrutiny to the articulation of ends? This is an important question as it allows us to draw together a number of disparate strands in Weber’s work. One response to this has already been discussed, namely, that he thought that there was no way of finding an ultimate justification for what we do, of making different values coincide. However, another response is that Weber’s emotional trauma caused by society’s loss of faith in God and the subsequent inability of human beings to experience meaning led him to over-­invest in the redemptive power of the prophet to deliver us from our tragic fate. To allow the prophet the freedom to pursue his ends effectively he has to be given considerable power even when the ends he might choose are inimical to our freedom. It is important to remember here that, for Weber, the idea of democracy had little or no intrinsic value and it should only be supported when it was of value to the maintenance of a strong state. It is in this context, therefore, that the tension between Weber’s liberalism, manifested in his yearning to restore our freedom, and his yearning for meaning in the form of a prophet whose presence may be inimical to freedom, comes starkly into view. This is not a matter, as we have seen, of Weber being prepared to accept the message of any prophet at any price. It is, rather, a matter of seeing Weber’s emphasis on the consideration of consequences as a means by which he can provide an ethical counterbalance, albeit an insufficiently robust one, to the granting of such power to the figure of the prophet who represents our only hope of salvation and meaning. Is this balancing act, this reassurance, convincing? The answer is ‘no’. Why? Because instead of focusing on the consequences of our actions, Weber should have paid more attention to the importance of the democratic values and institutions that need to be secured in order that our freedoms be protected. By not doing so we see clearly the risk Weber was prepared to take in order that the Faustian pact made by humanity with the forces of modernity, a pact that destroyed the natural rhythms of our life, could be renounced.

Legacies and interpretations As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Weber is a giant of modern social theory. There can be no doubt about that. However, it is interesting to note that during his lifetime and in the years immediately after his death he remained a rather obscure figure. The fact that he became so well known is largely due to the efforts of three people. The first is his wife Marianne who, in 1926, published his biography that, despite its hagiographical tone, is magisterial in its scope and authority. The second is Johannes Winckelmann who systematically assembled (and substantially edited) all of Weber’s work during the 1920s and 1930s. The third and, according to Weber scholars such as Kieran Allen, by far the most significant was Talcott Parsons, the leading theoretician and ‘champion of the American version of liberal capitalism’ (Allen, 2004: 6). Parsons was interested in promoting an interpretation of Weber as the archetypal value-­free sociologist who reported on society rather than taking a normative stand on it. It will be remembered that American academia at this time was in the midst of a highly charged ideological battle into which Weber was posthumously drawn to strengthen the rhetorical arguments of those committed to the

20   The inter-war debate virtues of capitalism and the free market. One important figure in this battle was Friedrich Von Hayek, a talismanic figure for the British Conservative party in the early 1980s, who recognised the significance of Weber as an important figure in the battle to establish a neo-­ liberal economic hegemony. This battle for the ideological soul of Weber assumed wider proportions and soon attracted attention from many other leading sociologists and theorists from both the United States and Europe. Ranged against those who sought to ‘Americanise’ Weber, such as Parsons, Seymour Martin Lipset and Daniel Bell were figures such as C.W. Mills and the Frankfurt School whose analysis, as we will see later, was hugely influenced by the work of Weber. The central question was clear: to what extent was Weber an advocate or a critic of contemporary society and capitalism? Today the intellectual climate in which Weber’s work is considered and examined is less ideologically polarised and it is possible to make a more balanced and considered assessment of it. One aspect of this debate that does now seem clear is that the value-­free Weber of the American Right, the Weber who remained above politics and criticism, is simply not a plausible interpretation. As we have seen, his work was far more politically engaged than suggested by Parsons. In fact, we can conclude that Weber’s work was far more nuanced, subtle and complex than suggested by either of the two protagonists in this ideological debate.

Conclusion Weber has left us with a significant body of work that ranges across issues such as methodology, rationality, religion, science, democracy, leadership, nationalism and the nature of history. However, rather than interpreting the ambiguity that informs Weber’s understanding of many of these issues as a shortcoming, it should rather be seen as testament to a tormented thinker and theorist who refused easy solutions and whose work, as a result, resists any neat theoretical categorisation. How does this ambiguity present itself in Weber’s work? There are many examples. Consider, for example, his advocacy of value-­ free research, a recommendation that has generated conflict within academia to this day. Weber argued that certain ‘phases’ in the process of acquiring knowledge could be objective but it is certainly not clear that this position is consistent with his claim that other stages are necessarily contaminated with ideology and prejudice. Consider also the following: (1) science (both emancipatory and disenchanting); (2) the legal-­rational mode of legitimation (alienating yet fair and democratic); (3) nationalism (necessary for the protection of culture but leading to the destruction of individual dignity); (4) capitalism (awe­inspiring in its energy and dynamism yet destructive of the human spirit); (5) democracy (of little intrinsic value but having many practical advantages); (6) socialism (an ethically rich ideology but one he felt personally unable to support because of his wealth); (7) realism (Weber was a confirmed realist but one who regarded pacifism as a morally super­ ior set of ideas and practices). The list could be extended. However, to repeat, none of this detracts from Weber’s reputation or challenges his rightful position as one of the West’s leading social and political theorists. In fact I would argue that his legacy lies precisely in his ability to intuit and articulate the complexity of such issues. Reading Weber one becomes acutely aware of a mind in turmoil. It is as if a tumultuous battle is raging within him, a battle in which his instincts as a man and the force of his intelligence as a theorist are unleashed to confront each other in mortal combat. It is here, in his refusal to reconcile these competing instincts and forces, that the tragedy and greatness of Max Weber can be found.

Weber   21

Revision notes 1

2

Weber’s writing is extremely dense and should certainly not be attempted by those with little or no prior knowledge of the general trajectory of his work. Fortunately there are many excellent commentaries on his work that can be read in conjunction with the original texts. It is important to have some understanding of the work of Kant, Marx and Nietzsche before embarking on a study of Weber. Weber, like any other major thinker, has to be understood as part of a complex web of thought and ideas. Therefore, a working knowledge of history, philosophy and political and social theory will greatly aid the ability of students to understand and appreciate his work. It is perhaps best to commence one’s Weber studies with the question of methodology and the related epistemological themes of verstehen, positivism, value-­free research and the ideal type. These issues pervade all of Weber’s work from the Protestant work ethic (which is an accessible text) to his work on rationalisation which is considerably more difficult.

Bibliography Allen, K. (2004) Max Weber: A Critical Introduction, London: Pluto. Gerth, H. and Mills, C.W. (1948) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Scaff, L. (1998) ‘Max Weber’ in Stones, R. (ed.) Key Sociological Thinkers, London: Macmillan. Weber, M. ([1905] 1958) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Further reading I have mentioned Marianne Weber’s 1926 biography, which is generally regarded as the most authoritative account of Weber’s life: Max Weber: A Biography (1975) New York: John Wiley. Other notable works include Rheinard Bendix’s (1960) Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait, London: Heinemann; and Paul Honigsheim’s (1968) On Max Weber, New York: Free Press. Those interested in a more systematic overview of Weber’s political concerns should turn to David Beetham’s (1974) Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics, London: Allen and Unwin; or Wolfgang Mommsen’s (1989) The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber: Collected Essays, Cambridge: Polity Press. Perhaps the best known undergraduate text providing an overview of Weber’s life and a selection of a number of his key essays is H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (1948) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

2 Gramsci

Reflecting on it, we can see that in putting the question ‘what is man?’ what we really mean is: what can man become? That is, can man dominate his own destiny, can he ‘make himself’, can he create his own life? We maintain therefore that man is a process, and more exactly, the process of his actions. Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere: 1343

Introduction Antonio Gramsci remains an iconic figure in the history of twentieth-­century politics. This is because, in addition to being a key figure in the evolution of Marxist thought, he was a committed political activist of immense personal courage who remained, until his tragically early death in 1937, dedicated to the founding of a new political order in Italy based on the socialist principles of equality and justice. Gramsci was born into a relatively prosperous or Signori family in Sardinia on 22 January 1891. The fourth of seven children, Antonio’s early life soon underwent profound change. Two events in particular need to be recorded here. First, at the age of four, he suffered a fall that left him with stunted growth and a permanent disfigurement of his back. Then, two years later, the family was plunged into financial turmoil as a result of the imprisonment of his father for administrative abuses. These events had a profound effect on the young Antonio, who became intensely self-­conscious of the differences that he felt now marked him. As a result, he began to direct his considerable energy into intellectual pursuits. This was encouraged by, among others, his elder brother Gennaro, who regularly sent the young Antonio political articles, including copies of Avanti, the newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Despite the hardships, Gramsci managed to complete his school studies and in 1911 he won a scholarship to the university in Turin. Although his subject was literature, it soon became clear that Gramsci’s passion was for politics and it was not long before he was immersed in debates about issues such as the importance of ideas in political struggles and, more concretely, the deteriorating international situation, revolutionary syndicalist politics in Italy and what was known as the ‘southern question’ – the debate about the relationship between the economically impoverished south of Italy and the heavily industrialised and relatively wealthy north. When Gramsci formally dispensed with his studies (without graduating) in 1915 to commit himself to journalism and revolutionary politics he could have had little idea of the future that awaited him. This was because, in 1915, there was no discernible sign of the fascist cloud that would descend over Italy in the years after the First World War. Gramsci, as a committed socialist, would find no safe haven in this vicious new environment. In 1926, when friends were making plans to get him out of the country, he was

Gramsci   23 arrested by Mussolini’s soldiers and charged with ‘conspiratorial activity, instigation of civil war and incitement to class hatred’. On 4 June 1928 he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment by a military tribunal. It is alleged that the final words of the prosecuting attorney, Michele Isgro, were that ‘for twenty years we must stop this brain from working’. Gramsci died from a brain haemorrhage in prison in 1937, but during his 11 years in confinement the authorities certainly did not succeed in stopping the working of his brain. Indeed, it was during Gramsci’s prison years that he wrote one of the great works of European political literature – the Quaderni del Carcere – the Prison Notebooks. These volumes (30 notebooks) only came to the attention of the world in the years after the Second World War as a result of the heroic efforts of, among others, Gramsci’s sister-­in-law Tania Schucht and his great friend, the economist Piero Sraffa, who supplied Gramsci with books throughout the period of his incarceration and, on his death, smuggled his papers out of Italy. Key concept: fascism Fascism is the term coined by Mussolini to denote the idea of social unity and strong leadership. It is now usually understood in the context of charismatic leadership, populism and the promotion of ethnic or racial supremacy. Fascism has important social and political conditions such as a collective need for spiritual renewal and the perception of social, political and economic degeneration or collapse. Usually associated with the period of the 1930s, it has continued in various forms throughout the world to the present day. It remains a highly contested concept. For example, it is claimed that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified on the grounds that it was a fascist state.

Intellectual influences The years between 1915 and 1926 saw Gramsci develop the intellectual framework that would inform the theoretical themes of the Prison Notebooks. As we will see, during these years Gramsci was also extraordinarily politically active. It is this combination of activism, coupled with his commitment to reshaping the intellectual orientation of European socialism, that mark Gramsci out as a truly unique figure in the history of twentieth-­century thought. In order to understand Gramsci’s intellectual journey and how it informed his analysis of the rapidly changing and hugely complex political situation in Italy during these years it is necessary to take a brief step aside to philosophy or, more specifically, to eighteenth-­century German idealist philosophy. Idealism: Kant, Hegel and Croce Idealism is a complex concept in philosophy and has many different meanings. By the eighteenth century its most eloquent advocate was Bishop Berkeley, who held the rather strange view that nothing existed in the world except ideas. Thus a chair does not really exist, all that exists is the idea of it. Later in the same century Immanuel Kant argued that our capacity to experience objects in the world (which, for him, did actually exist) presupposes certain mental categories without which the world would be incomprehensible to us. In the Critique of Pure Reason he argued that it is these categories that make possible what he called synthetic a priori judgements; that is, non-­tautological judgements we know to be true independently of our experience. However, it is with Hegel that idealism assumed a

24   The inter-war debate form that really interested Gramsci. Kant’s contribution to epistemology was to distinguish between what can and cannot be known with certainty. In this, his task was to bring together the two dominant schools of philosophical thought that existed at the time – empiricism and rationalism. Hegel, by contrast, was less concerned than Kant with identifying the limits of what could be known. In Phenomenology, Hegel’s most influential contribution to philosophy, he described the history of philosophy as the progressive accumulation of knowledge that would culminate in the final revelation of truth and freedom. This teleological interpretation of historical development posited the idea of history moving through different stages in its quest to reveal what Hegel called its highest form of spirit, or Geist. It was this worldview that Marx famously inverted by replacing the idea of spirit with a more materialist force as the engine of historical development. Now, how do these metaphysical speculations deepen our understanding of Gramsci? To answer this we need to look at the work of Benedetto Croce, a towering figure in the intellectual life of Italy in the early twentieth century. Croce is known primarily in the field of aesthetic theory, but his version of philosophical idealism attracted a lot of support in Italy, including that of the young Gramsci. Croce differed from Kant in that he did not think we could know of the existence of a transcendental realm in which the essence of an object, what Kant called the noumenon or thing-­in-itself, could be located. Croce was an idealist, however, in that he believed in the importance of ideas and moral values as a means of governing history’s transition to a higher plane of consciousness and freedom, a transition that took place in what he called the ethico-­political sphere. In this sense, his inspiration was Hegel rather than Kant. This was significant for Gramsci because it led him, albeit indirectly, to a new way of thinking about politics. One of the problems with Marxism (as interpreted by materialists such as Plekhanov and Kautsky), was that it gave us little motivation to act to change the world. After all, if the future was already decided, then surely all acts of political resistance were futile? However, Croce, despite holding to the Hegelian conception of history as a history of freedom, held the view that the realisation of freedom in its highest form required each age to understand its prevailing ideas about culture, philosophy, art and ethics. This was important because it was these values that provided the moral foundation and guidance for the action required for change. Key people: Marx Gramsci agreed wholly with Marx’s view about the exploitative nature of capitalism, but did not agree with the proposition that capitalism’s inherent contradictions would lead to its eventual and inevitable demise. For this to happen the workers had to be capable of decisive political action. The difference between Marx and Gramsci, therefore, went beyond the question of strategy. At the heart of it lay a radically different interpretation of the nature of history and the role of politics in guiding it.

However, despite Croce’s theoretical advances, Gramsci thought that he failed to understand the deeper political implications of his own work which, for Gramsci, remained speculative and abstract. Although Croce’s idealism held him to the view that human subjects are constituted by history and constitutive of it, he did not, according to Gramsci, appreciate what this implied for each new generation committed to shaping the future. In other words, for Gramsci, Croce did not understand that which should be the theoretical cornerstone for any progressive form of politics: the philosophy of praxis or action.

Gramsci   25 Key concept: praxis Praxis is a key concept for any study of Gramsci. Unlike theories that assume that objective social and economic conditions structure our actions, praxis considers the concrete needs of people at a given time and the taking of appropriate action to meet those needs. This is important because it introduces contingency into the relationship between structure and agency. It is precisely because this relationship can never be fully determined, or have a preordained resolution, that a meaningful conception of politics is possible. However, this point was not fully realised by Gramsci himself as he did not grasp that such a view of history had implications for our understanding of all of the categories of social life, including class. This article of faith within Marxism that stipulated the pure or unmediated nature of class has few advocates today. Indeed, for most of the contemporary Left, the exposure of its intellectual incoherence was seen as vital for the very survival of socialism as a meaningful body of thought.

This view of history as contingent, coupled with decisive leadership and the articulation of a political strategy designed to address the specific conditions obtained within a particular society at a given time, provides the key link between Gramsci’s life as a philosopher and his life as a political activist. In the Prison Notebooks he commented: In this sense the real philosopher is, and cannot be other than, the politician, the active man who modifies the environment, understanding by environment the ensemble of relations which each one of us enters to take part in. If one’s own individuality means to acquire consciousness of these relations, to modify one’s personality means to modify the ensemble of these relations. (Gramsci, cited in Hoare and Nowell-­Smith, 1977: 352) Thus, despite their differences, both philosophical and political, it was under the influence of Croce that Gramsci ‘struggled to restore the elements of praxis and totality to Marxist theory by reinvigorating the active or subjective dimension without which the revolutionary process itself could not develop’ (Boggs, 1976: 21). Gramsci and Lenin This introduction to Gramsci’s intellectual background will conclude with a brief discussion of Lenin, whose leadership of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia Gramsci greatly respected. Like Gramsci, Lenin was imprisoned by the authorities for subversive activity. It was during this time that he worked on his manuscript, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. However, it was the anti-­economistic position outlined by Lenin in his 1902 manuscript, What Is To Be Done?, that really commanded Gramsci’s admiration. This text is important for Gramsci as it explicitly recognises the relative autonomy of the political and cultural superstructures of the state from its economic base. This represented a significant shift within Marxist theory and it appealed to Gramsci because it acknowledged the need for decisive action at the superstructural or political level guided by the intellectual, theoretical and moral leadership of the proletariat. For Gramsci, this leadership, or hegemony, was vital to the task of overthrowing capitalism. Indeed, without it the struggle against capitalism would fail, leading to the ascendancy of reformist elements within the party willing to compromise with the capitalist class.

26   The inter-war debate Key concept: hegemony In ‘On the Southern Question’ Gramsci stated:

[t]he Turin communists posed concretely the question of the hegemony of the proletariat: i.e. of the social basis of the proletarian dictatorship and of the workers state. The proletariat can become the leading [dirigente] and the dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilise the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois state. In Italy, in the real class relations that exist here, this means the extent that it succeeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses. (Reproduced in Forgacs, 1988: 173) Winning hegemony or consent, therefore, meant political struggle at all levels, ideological, political, cultural and, where necessary, by means of armed struggle. Gramsci recognised that the assumption of power without the active support of the workers would represent a pyrrhic victory as it would have been achieved without the necessary work having been done at the ideological level. As a result, it would be vulnerable to future attacks.

Autonomous intellectual leadership of the proletariat was also important for Gramsci as it would afford the working class an insight into all of the different ways capitalism sustains itself. It would allow the workers to recognise that any successful challenge to existing power relations had to confront the complex ideological web of ideas that existed within civil society. This was a web that kept the people down, not by physical force, but by its sheer persuasive power. For Gramsci, because the capitalist and bourgeois class had been in a position of hegemonic power for so long, the working class had not received the necessary education to understand the objective reality of its economic position and the nature of the struggle that confronted it. In fact, according to Gramsci, the workers and peasants retained a very ‘uncritical view of the world’ (Nemeth, 1981: 76) and retained a ‘chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions about it’ (Audi, 1999: 665). This condition was characterised by Gramsci as ‘common sense’. This is not to be confused with Marx’s notion of ‘false consciousness’ that pointed to the total misrecognition of reality. However, it is partially analogous to it in that it referred to a naïve way of being in the world that failed to understand the power relations that constitute it. Crucially, for Gramsci, this common sense was vulnerable to new ideas. He argued that it is not something ‘rigid and stationary but something in continuous transformation, becoming enriched with scientific notions and philosophical opinions that have entered into common circulation’ (Forgacs and Nowell-­Smith, 1985: 421).        Rewind to Weber Chapter 1 Compare Weber’s understanding of the concept of ‘legitimation’ with Gramsci’s interpretation of ‘hegemony’ and ‘common sense’.

For Gramsci, therefore, it was crucial that a new generation of working class or organic intellectuals emerged who understood how reactionary forces infiltrated the fabric of

Gramsci   27 society at every level and how they could be challenged. This was important for Gramsci’s understanding of the Russian revolution. Russia had a relatively undeveloped capitalist economy with a limited range of civil society actors. It was, as a result, appropriate in this context to launch what Gramsci termed a war of movement, involving a direct assault on the centres of power. In other more advanced societies that had more sophisticated and resilient civil societies, such as Britain, a war of position was considered by Gramsci the more appropriate strategy for a successful social and political insurrection. In these more advanced societies, therefore, it was imperative to educate the working class, to change their values and ideas and prepare them for the task of seizing power. Although Italy had a relatively backward capitalist structure, its working people, particularly the peasants, remained in the ideological grip of powerful reactionary forces such as the Catholic Church. In this environment therefore, a war of position was required for a successful counter-­hegemonic struggle.

A snapshot of Italian politics, 1917–1920 Before examining how Gramsci put these theoretical ideas into practice it is important to make clear the nature of the task that confronted Italian socialists in the immediate post-­ First World War period. By 1917 Gramsci had established himself as one of the leading voices on the Left, writing regular columns in socialist journals such as Avanti, Il Grido del Popolo and La Citta Fitura. One of the important themes of his writing in these journals was how the momentous events in Russia in 1917 affected the political situation in Italy. The background to the Russian revolution was the First World War. The 20 million Russian deaths caused by this conflict led many Russian socialists to conclude that the strategy of reformism (the legal transition to socialism) favoured by most European socialists had to be replaced with a revolutionary programme committed to directly, and violently if necessary, challenging the structures and centres of imperialist and capitalist power. However, the situation in Italy was different in that most socialists there were still prepared to act within the law in order to influence the liberal governments in power during this period. Gramsci was fiercely opposed to this ‘collaborationism’ – a strategy he thought would only benefit a minority of relatively prosperous workers in the north of Italy at the expense of the peasants in the south. However, Gramsci also disagreed with those on the extreme Left of the PSI who withheld their support from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia on the grounds that the economic conditions that should precipitate revolution did not exist. For Gramsci, this adherence to strict Marxist orthodoxy and determinist historical laws was counter-­revolutionary. He put it as follows: This is the revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital. In Russia, Marx’s Capital was more the book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat. It stood as the critical demonstration of how events should follow a predetermined course: how in Russia a bourgeoisie had to develop, and a capitalist era had to open, with the setting-­up of a Western-­type civil­ isation, before the proletariat could even think in terms of its own revolt, its own class demands, its own revolution. (Avanti, 24 December 1917, cited in Hoare, 1977: 34–7) Thus, for Gramsci, the choice for revolutionaries was either to wait for the emergence of a ‘scientifically valid’ revolutionary situation or to act decisively to seize power when an

28   The inter-war debate opportunity arose. Gramsci firmly supported the latter course because it recognised the need to create, by decisive political action, new possibilities for the future. Responding to accusations of ‘utopianism’ made against Lenin by the Marxist ‘pseudo scientists’, Gramsci claimed that it was those unable to see history as the free development of ideas and energies who were the utopians and the philistines. To the modern ear, this now seems a rather arcane argument. However, it has to be considered within the political and theoretical context that prevailed at the time. Thus it should be remembered that, unlike today, there was at this time a strong sense that a fully fledged political and social revolution was a real possibility and that, as a result, questions about the best strategy for the Left to adopt were highly significant. This was certainly true in Italy where, according to Gramsci, capitalism was particularly vulnerable. It was, therefore, vital that the Left was ready and prepared when an opportunity arose.

The Turin insurrection The February 1917 revolution in Russia was precipitated by an international women’s day anti-­war demonstration. When, in August of 1917, the workers of Turin, again led by proletarian women, led a similar armed revolt against the war and the economic policies of the government, the Left, including Gramsci, sensed that this might be the moment to widen the struggle to the rest of Italy and precipitate a national revolution. However, after more than 500 workers were killed by the army, government forces soon regained control of the city. For Gramsci, the main reason for this failure was the lack of an organised party leadership to coordinate events and broaden the struggle beyond the north. To ensure these mistakes were not repeated Gramsci launched the journal, L’Ordine Nouvo (The New Order). The objective of this journal was to articulate a blueprint for a workers’ takeover of the industrial centres of production in the north of the country. The plan was that new factory councils, or committees of the workers, would be established to take control of the means of production. These bodies would then elect ward committees (comitato rionale) to establish wider political control of the regions. By the beginning of March 1920 these proposals had been adopted by many of the large Turin-­based unions, including FIOM, the metalworkers union that represented over 16,000 workers. When the main automobile unions, including Fiat and Lancia, also established factory councils the employers took fright and decided to lock them out of the factories. This led to a general strike involving more than 200,000 workers. The government responded to this by once again sending in troops who eventually broke the strike. This led Gramsci to write a long criticism of the PSI and the CGL (the socialist trade union) in an article, ‘Towards a Renewal of the Socialist Party’, in which he blamed the reformists in the party for their failure to support and widen the strike. For Gramsci, such indecision was fatal to the revolution as it allowed the capitalist class time to regroup and prepare its defences. This was an implicit criticism of the leader of the PSI, Amadeo Bordiga, who, according to Gramsci, was too ‘theoretically purist’ and insufficiently cognisant of the stark realities of political struggle. In September 1920 another opportunity presented itself when, after the breakdown of negotiations about wages, the workers occupied the factories throughout northern Italy. Prime Minister Giolitti, although under pressure from the factory owners to break the occupation, chose not to intervene, opting instead for a more conciliatory response that promised the workers more control over the running of the factories. Gramsci was deeply suspicious of this attempt to appease the workers and argued against any form of compromise with the class enemy. However, he soon recognised that

Gramsci   29 the working class leadership was, once again, chronically ill-­prepared, both politically and militarily, for a fully fledged confrontation with the state. As a result, he reluctantly agreed with Bordiga that a mass national insurrection should not be advocated. For Gramsci, there was no doubt about where the blame lay for the failure to make the necessary political and military preparations. Shortly before his arrest in 1926 he reflected on the failure of 1920 in the following terms: If the movement failed, the responsibility cannot be laid at the door of the working class as such, but at that of the Socialist Party, which failed in its duty, which was incapable and inept, which was at the tail of the working class, not its head . . . the failure of the workers was as a result of the failure of the Socialist Party to attain state power . . . these problems should have been confronted by the Socialist Party and by the unions, which instead capitulated shamefully, giving the immaturity of the masses as a pretext. In reality, it was the leaders who were immature and incapable, not the class. This was the reason why the Livorno split took place and a new party was created, the Communist Party. (Unita, 1 October 1926, cited in Forgacs, 1988: 106–9) The occupation ended in September 1920, with the PSI and CGL voting by 590,000 to 400,000 to limit the aims of workers to winning recognition of the factory owners for trade union control in the plants and, on 4 October, the workers returned to the factories. However, even Gramsci could not have foreseen the long-­term effects of this episode. The capitalists had been terrified by the threat that had been posed to their interests and they now looked increasingly to Mussolini’s emerging squadristi (armed gangs) to protect those interests. This had two immediate effects on the workers. First, the limited promises that had been made to them by the factory owners were immediately withdrawn; and second, their unions were destroyed. It was now clear that Italy had entered into new political terrain. This would be confirmed in 1922 with Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ and the official beginning of the fascist era. Key event: the rise of fascism in Italy Since the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century, governments were unable to provide the stability, prosperity and national pride demanded by the people. By 1922 the country was in a state of total chaos and significant sections of the people accepted that the authoritarian rule offered by Mussolini’s fascist party was the only way forward. Because of their fear of socialism and working class radicalism, the party found willing support among the wealthy landowners and industrialists. A combination of economic reforms, the promise to restore national greatness and pride, the tacit support of the Roman Catholic Church and the threat of violence also led many in the deeply divided working class to accept the inevitable. In 1922 when the Fascists marched on Rome there was little effective resistance and King Victor Emanuel III had little choice but to offer Mussolini the position of Prime Minister.

The emergence of the PCI Gramsci was desperately frustrated by this turn of events and he resolved that the workers should never be betrayed again in this way. To this end, in 1921 he co-­founded, with

30   The inter-war debate Bordiga, the Italian Communist party (PCI), leaving behind those in the PSI who continued to have faith in the constitutional path to socialism. This is how Gramsci described the potential significance of Livorno: The break between communists and reformists that will occur at Livorno will have the following special significance. The revolutionary working class will break with those degenerate socialist currents that have decayed into state parasitism. It will break with those currents that sought to exploit the position of superiority enjoyed by the north over the south in order to create proletarian aristocracies. . . . [t]he workers emancipation can be secured only through an alliance between the industrial workers of the north and the poor peasants of the south – an alliance designed to smash the bourgeois state. (L’Ordine Nuovo, 13 January 1921, cited in Forgacs, 1988: 120) Tensions remained high between Gramsci and PCI leader Bordiga about the value of maintaining informal links between communists and socialists. Gramsci supported the decision taken by the Comintern in December 1921 to launch a united front policy. This signalled a policy of cooperation rather than alliance between communists and socialists. However, this was opposed by Bordiga, who saw little value in maintaining such links. Partly because of these tensions and partly because of growing fears for his health, Gramsci spent most of the following two years in Russia where he worked with Togliatti, another of the leading theorists in the party, on how the Left should respond to the new realities of Italian politics. On his return to Italy in 1924 he assumed the leadership of the PCI, replacing the increasingly ineffective Bordiga, and immediately began to put the ‘southern question’ at the heart of future PCI strategy. During his time in Russia he had spent time studying the work of Bukharin, who had argued that any future communist strategy must have the peasants at its centre as this constituency represented the majority of working people. This theme, above all else, represented the core of Gramsci’s thinking for the rest of his time as a free citizen, as well as being at the heart of the themes he sought to develop in the Prison Notebooks.       Fast forward to Adorno and Foucault Chapters 7 and 10 Gramsci, like Foucault but unlike Adorno, remained confident that, if the right strategy were adopted, a transformation in power relations was possible.

The ‘Lyons Theses’ and some aspects of the ‘Southern Question’ These two texts were the last of Gramsci’s substantive writings before his arrest. In the first he sets out to show how the bourgeois alliance of powerful industrialists and landowners was vulnerable to the revolutionary power of the proletariat. This was because it was an alliance based on compromises between non-­homogeneous groups. Gramsci put it as follows: In a wide historical perspective, this system is clearly not adequate to its purpose. Every form of compromise between the different groups ruling Italian society in fact becomes an obstacle placed in the way of the development of one or other part of the

Gramsci   31 country’s economy. Thus new conflicts are produced and new reactions from the majority of the population; it becomes necessary to intensify the pressure on the masses and the result is a more decisive tendency for them to mobilise in revolt against the state. (‘Lyons Theses’, 1926, reproduced in Forgacs, 1988: 142–64) For Gramsci, this was one of the important reasons for the emergence of the fascists who sought to replace the tactic of agreements and compromises with the project of achieving an organic unity of all the bourgeoisie’s forces in a single political organism under the control of a single centre, which would simultaneously direct the party, the government and the state. (‘Lyons Theses’, reproduced in Forgacs, 1988: 88) However, despite the obvious dangers, Gramsci sensed that the emergence of fascism presented an opportunity for the Left. There were two reasons for this. The first was that the Catholic Church, an integral agent in the new political formation, would find it increasingly difficult to integrate the masses into the fabric of the bourgeois state that would now be seen as clearly opposed to their essential interests. The second was that, as a result of the exclusion of the petty bourgeois class from the fascist–capitalist alliance, the ideological grip of the reactionary forces would be further weakened, making possible a link between the southern peasants and the mass of workers in the north. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci argued that a new mass party of the workers, what he called a ‘modern prince’, was the only way in which these disparate and disaffected elements could be integrated into a coherent and cohesive anti-­capitalist struggle. At the head of this party must be a cadre of ‘organic intellectuals’ able to counter the immense political and economic power exercised by the ruling classes represented by, among others, Croce, the Catholic Church and the landowners. For Gramsci, therefore, the single most important task of the PCI was to cement this alliance between those ‘naturally unified by the process of production’ and guide it politically towards the solution to its problems. Thus it was vital to assert that the alliance of urban and rural classes was not a synthesis of heterogeneous elements, but an authentic class movement with the imprimatur of the proletariat firmly stamped upon it. This is precisely what Gramsci understood by hegemony – firm intellectual leadership that would dictate strategy and articulate the democratic demands of the masses, not ex cathedra, but from below. In ‘On the Southern Question’, Gramsci further developed this theme. Here he sets out the nature of the task faced by the proletarian leadership to win the consent of the peasant masses and incorporate their demands into a revolutionary transitional programme. This required, above all, challenging and reversing the dominant cultural representation of the southern peasants: [i]t is well known what kind of ideology has been disseminated in myriad ways among the masses of the north by the propagandists of the bourgeoisie – the south is the ball and chain which prevents the social development of Italy from progressing more rapidly; the southerners are biologically inferior beings, semi-­barbarians, or total barbarians, by natural destiny; if the south is backward, the fault does not lie with the capitalist system or with any other historical cause but with Nature, which has made

32   The inter-war debate the southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric and the Socialist Party was to a great extent the vehicle for this bourgeois ideology within the northern proletariat. (Reproduced in Forgacs, 1988: 171–85) The reversal of such deeply ingrained cultural opinions was indeed an immense task, but it represented only one aspect of the struggle facing the party at this time. Its other vital task was to reconfigure the positivist tenets of Marxist theory that still pervaded its ideological disposition and instincts.

Revolutionary politics and Marxist theory: the emergence of the historic bloc By the time of Gramsci’s imprisonment in 1926 he was clear about how Marxist theory should inform the action of the PCI. To examine this more carefully we need to return to the earlier Marx of The Theses on Feuerbach and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. These were texts in which the political and cultural superstructures of the state were accorded significant autonomy from its economic base. As we have seen, it was Gramsci’s affinity with these texts that led him to Croce, who thought that moral and ethical bonds were vital to the well-­being of society. In other words, for Gramsci, politics was always more than a reflection of economic developments. This is not to argue that Gramsci thought that there was no link between the two spheres. Rather, for Gramsci, it was important to stress that this was always a far more complex relationship than that posited by Marx in, for example, the Preface or Capital. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci put it as follows: ‘it is not true that the philosophy of praxis detaches the structure from the superstructures when rather it conceives their development as intimately connected and necessarily interrelated and reciprocal’ (reproduced in Forgacs, 1988: 193). The important point here for Gramsci, to put it simply, is that politics matters. The problem with orthodox Marxist theory was that its adherence to a preordained theory of history and identity as already given meant that it had little conception of the importance of politics as a means, the only means, of shaping the future. This insight is vital for Gramsci’s understanding of the southern question as, for him, this situation was one in which the economic and class interests of one group in society were being denied. In order that this situation be effectively addressed it was vital that the right political strategy was followed. In other words, it wasn’t enough to wait for structural contradictions at the economic level to ‘work themselves out’. What was important was that the intellectual class articulated the nature of the political task facing the workers and inspired them to revolutionary political action. This link between the ‘objective conditions’ that existed at the economic level and the political strategies to be adopted at the superstructural level holds the key to understanding, not just the Prison Notebooks, but the entire Gramscian legacy. Perhaps the most widely misunderstood of all the celebrated Gramscian categories is that of the historic bloc. Widely assumed to mean an alliance of social forces, it actually refers to a specific theorisation of the relationship between base and superstructure that restores their reciprocity and dialectical unity. In practical terms this meant that, in order that the southern question be addressed effectively, the Left must be united and ready to embark on the appropriate political strategy. In hindsight it is clear that Gramsci underestimated the resilience of the fascist regime and the unique form of capitalism it espoused. Or, to put it another way, he overestimated the capacity of a philosophy of praxis to reconfigure the power relations that had been

Gramsci   33 established during the fascist period. In this sense it could be argued that, although the philosophy of praxis was a theoretical advance on the stale determinism of classical Marxism, its moment of application to the conditions that obtained in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, was fatally ill-­conceived. In order to understand why this was the case we need to turn briefly to the development of Marxist theory after Gramsci as it was only in the years after his death that the fundamental tensions within his approach to politics became fully apparent.

Gramsci and the post-­Marxist turn It is important to note here that Gramsci was not the first theorist in the Marxist tradition to challenge the orthodox certainties of the Second International. His significant predecessors in this regard include Rosa Luxembourg, Edward Bernstein and George Sorel. Sorel was important for Gramsci because he was prepared to go further than anyone else to challenge the notion of a pre-­constituted proletarian class identity. In other words, he understood class identity as something that required political articulation. For Sorel, this problem was understood in the context of the ‘myth of the general strike’. Sorel saw myth as necessary as, without it, working class identity was in danger of fragmentation. In this sense, the idea of the general strike operated as a regulative ideal. To advocates of orthodox Marxist theory, however, this was heretical as it implied that the triumph of the workers was not guaranteed. More significantly, however, it implied that the category of class did not exist as a given category in society, but was a construct whose meaning required supplementary action at the superstructural level. This, by now, familiar post-­structuralist position has a resonance in Croce. As we have seen, he thought that a good society required the articulation of political morality in the ethico-­political sphere. Although Sorel and Croce could not be further apart politically it is clear that, at least in this limited sense, both had a clear sense of the political and the importance of power in determining the nature and outcome of political struggles. This emphasis on power reminds us that the outcome of political struggle will always depend on the strength of identities, the resilience of prevailing and dominant myths, the power of alliances and the efficacy and appropriateness of competing strategies adopted to further a particular set of interests. The problem with Gramsci’s theorisation of the situation in Italy during the inter-­war years was that, despite incorporating many of the theoretical advances made by Lenin, Croce and Sorel, he failed to move beyond a basically essentialist interpretation of them. Thus, despite his appreciation of, and sensitivity to, the complexities and contingencies of history and politics, he remained stuck in a classist paradigm that skewed his understanding of the nature of the struggle facing the workers. This is now the standard deconstructionist criticism of Gramsci found in post-­Marxist literature. The most telling contribution from this tradition comes from Laclau and Mouffe: Thus, Gramsci’s thought remains suspended around a basic ambiguity concerning the status of the working class which finally leads it to a contradictory position. On the one hand, the political centrality of the working class has a historical, contingent character: it requires the class to come out of itself, to transform its own identity by articulating to it a plurality of struggles and democratic demands. On the other hand, it would seem that this articulatory role is assigned to it by the economic base – hence, that the centrality has a necessary character. (1985: 70)

34   The inter-war debate This is an important intervention as it allows us to see that, although Gramsci understood the base/superstructure relationship in the context of praxis, he could not move beyond theorising class as a necessary category that would find its moment of pure realisation. In this, it is clear that his analysis was flawed both empirically and theoretically. One of the reasons why Italy did not witness the social and political insurrection predicted by Gramsci was that there was no necessary class relationship between the northern proletariat and the southern peasants. This is not to say that a more politically effective relationship between them could not have occurred. The argument is more that had such an event occurred it would not have represented anything other than a fortuitous historical conjuncture. However, despite these lacunae in Gramsci’s thought, it is important to stress that his work provides the key historical and theoretical link between the materialism of orthodox Marxist theory and the more theoretically nuanced work of the contemporary Left in Italy and elsewhere. It is in this context that his legacy should be considered.

Conclusion Although Gramsci was unable to break decisively with the tenets and precepts of orthodoxy, his appreciation of the relative autonomy of politics, the role of culture and the need to acknowledge the specificity of power relations is now recognised as a significant moment in the history of political theory. However, the debate about how these concepts are to be understood today goes on, and in this sense Gramsci remains an important figure in terms of the framing and articulation of many important political and theoretical questions. It is true that the way Gramsci understood society in the context of competing classes offers little insight into the complexities of power and the multiplicity of identity in contemporary society. So, although Gramsci was wrong to assert that it was our essential class interests that were at stake, he was right to articulate, in a way that was intelligible to the Left at the time, how the constitution of our subjectivity is informed by processes far beyond our control. Despite the unprecedented experience of freedom enjoyed today in liberal-­democratic societies, this entanglement in power and ideology remains a defining feature of our political world. Discussion point It is widely thought that, because of our prevailing culture of individualism and consumerism, we are now experiencing a profound sense of disconnection from politics and a crisis of meaning. How should we interpret attempts to reintegrate young people back into the political system? Are they valid efforts to instil an ethic of citizenship or another means of concealing inequality and legitimising capitalist relations? In what way can knowledge of Gramsci’s work help us to understand these questions?

Revision notes 1

2

Gramsci is at the heart of the debate that is conducted in many of the chapters of this book. This concerns the question about the nature of history and its relationship to politics, power and identity. Although Gramsci was able to break with a Hegelian view of history as having a pre-­ determined end, his views on class remained stuck within Marxist orthodoxy. His

Gramsci   35

3

work is important, however, in that it prised open a space within Marxist theory for future generations of theorists to articulate more refined accounts of the role of power and ideas in the constitution of our politics and identity. Gramsci’s work is significant for many contemporary debates and political struggles. His emphasis on the importance of ideas and how they are articulated is at the very heart of how we think about modern politics and its relationship to the mass media.

Bibliography Audi, R. (1999) The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boggs, J. (1976) Gramsci’s Marxism, London: Pluto Press. Forgacs, D. (1988) A Gramsci Reader, Selected Writings 1916–1935, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Forgacs, D. and Nowell-­Smith, G. (1985) Selections from Cultural Writings, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hoare, Q. (1977) Selections from Political Writings, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hoare, Q. and Nowell-­Smith, G. (1977) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso. Nemeth, T. (1981) Gramsci’s Philosophy: A Critical Study, Sussex: Harvester Press.

Further reading The most comprehensive and accessible summary of Gramsci’s work can be found in the four-­volume set published in the United Kingdom by Lawrence and Wishart. These are Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Selections from Political Writings (1910–1920), Selections from Political Writings (1921–1926) and Selections from Cultural Writings. There is of course a vast secondary literature on Gramsci. Three of the more accessible accounts are Bocock, R. (1986) Hegemony, London: Tavistock Press; Femia, J. (1981) Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process, Oxford: Clarendon Press; and Bobbio, N. (1988) ‘Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society’ in Keane, J. (ed.) Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, London: Verso.

3 Schmitt

Political thinkers are all aware of the concrete possibility of an enemy. Their realism can frighten men in need of security. Schmitt (1985a)

Carl Schmitt entered the public domain in the 1920s as a political and legal theorist with a series of works influenced by Machiavelli’s conception of political life as the pursuit, capture and maintenance of power and by the fierce realism of Hobbes’ notion of human power relations as the continuous face-­off between dangerous self-­serving identities. Schmitt applied and developed these ideas in a heady mix with Catholic authoritarianism and legalistic precision, to present the political world as a ‘state of nature occupied by equally aggressive self-­serving and mutually dangerous nation states’. This world, he argued, manifested in clear form the fundamental, primary political dynamic of a Hobbesian stand-­off between self-­serving powerful political identities. This scenario he defined as the ‘friend enemy’ dualism lying at the heart of all political life. The impact of Schmittian theory on the dominant liberal and challenging socialist conceptions that struggled for hegemonic power over the politics of the early twentieth century was immediate. It derived from the clarity of its critique of the built-­in self-­deceits of liberalism that dominated the twentieth-­century world and the insightful perception of the threatening uncertainties that constitute political existence generally and that were particularly overt in a Europe that was beset by massive wars and ongoing economic crises.

Schmitt: life and times All of this we shall explore, but not before noting at the start that none of it is contentious enough in itself to turn Schmitt into the political and academic pariah that he became for much of the twentieth century. This public odium derived from his decision to vulgarise his theories – causing much intellectual damage to their integrity in doing so – to suit the ideo­ logies of the German Nazi party which he joined in 1933 (the moment at which they rose to power) and served, at least initially, with some gusto as Professor of Politics at Berlin, a post to which he was appointed by Helmut Goring.

Schmitt   37 Key people: the Nazi Party (NSDAP), 1920-1945 The Nazis were initially one of many fringe parties operating in the hyper-­pluralist and conflict-­ ridden waters of the Weimer Republic. As the politics of the Weimer became increasingly polarised between Left and Right extremes, the Nazis skilfully employed propaganda which capitalised on working class resentments and right-­wing nationalism, by claiming that the State’s capacity to win the First World War had been fatally undermined by an international alliance of communists and Jews. In 1933, having gained mass electoral support, the party assumed power, initially within the terms of the Weimar constitution, but after the president’s death, Hitler overturned all elements of democratic life, establishing the one-­party totalitarian state known as the Third Reich. The Nazis enforced their ideology of Aryan supremacy, scapegoated Jews and communists for all the nation’s economic and military failings and set about the programme of mass genocide known today as the Holocaust. They also took Germany into the Second World War, which was to destroy many of Germany’s resources (along with the resources of many other European nations), kill approximately 60 million people and eventually destroy the Nazi leadership itself.

At the time of joining the Nazis, Schmitt was 45 years old, and up to this point, he had led an uneventful middle class life, working at his academic and legal career. In 1921 he became a professor at the University of Greifswald, and at this time could be defined as catholic conservative, most interested in issues of constitutional law. However, it is also at this time that we see the first clearly Schmittian offering enter the public domain of political discourse. While employed as legal counsel for the Reich (central state) government in a constitutional court case centred on the respective limits of regional and federal government, he successfully argued for the centralising of power in the national state body, over and against the federal distribution of powers as set out in the constitution of the Weimar. His success facilitated the destruction of the federalist republic – a process which eventually ended when elements of his legal reasoning from this case were deployed by the Nazis as justifications for the imposed dictatorship of the ‘Fuehrer’ state. Around this time he also produced an essay, ‘On Dictatorship’, which explored the weaknesses in the recently established and highly pluralistic Weimar Republic. In this he argued for the need for a strong presidency, with the power to make decisive sovereign decisions over the heads of and against the perceived interests of competing economic and cultural lobbies. This essay can be viewed as the first of a series of works, including Political Theology (1922), The Crises of Liberal Democracy (1923) and The Concept of the Political (1932). These works explicated the Schmittian position on the source and dimensions of state sovereignty, the connection of sovereignty to the enduring identity of a political community and the relationship of the political community to those external to it – all bound together by the fundamental and continuous uncertainty faced by a community struggling to exist in a world of strange and threatening otherness. It is this body of work (with some lesser post-­war additions) which many political theorists consider as authentically ‘Schmittian’ and which contains the insights into the political and challenges to liberal politics that still endure in their coherence and relevance today.

The ethical conundrum of dealing with Schmitt Schmitt’s career as an ideologue working for the Nazi regime, particularly his public demand that the ‘jüdischem Geist’ (Jewish spirit) be extricated from German law, creates problems for anyone using his ideas today. We have to ask, ‘what is the ethical and intellectual status of the work that we are looking at?’ In fact, historical evidence suggests that

38   The inter-war debate his Nazi writings were opportunistic attempts to ingratiate himself with the people in power rather than conscious expansions of his serious political thought. The substantive difference between his genuine political theory, written in the period 1922–1932 and the anti-­ Semitic statements that followed, was exposed at the time by the SS publication Das Schwarze Korps, which pointed to statements made by Schmitt before Hitler took power in which he publicly criticised the Nazis’ racial theories. It is possible that Schmitt’s ethical failures express his inability to cope in the face of a problem that he perceived all too well – the dark heart of political life as a struggle for existence. What we shall see is that Schmitt articulates and then explores the existential uncertainty at the heart of politics: the uncertainties involved in identifying who we are and what we need, identifying who others are, the significance of what they are doing, and evaluating the relationship between ‘us’ and ‘them’. It is an exploration that involves the scary proposition that, not only is the modern world of nation states a Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ writ large, with each state acting to preserve its life in a dangerously uncertain strategic power game, but also that this state of nature cannot be brought to a civilising end by a mighty Leviathan. For Schmitt, the sovereignty of each and every state is the essential life-­giving quality of its being and so cannot be handed over in principle or practice to overarching regional or global government. At the start of the twenty-­first century, the struggles of the UN and associated bodies to contain the continuing global war of each against all show why this element of Schmitt’s analysis retains relevance. As the squabbling ‘democracies’ fail to act in coherent unity, and anti-­democratic alternatives challenge for power, Schmitt’s withering and powerful critique of modern liberal politics and his presentation of dictatorial alternatives can also be seen to be an insightful critical discussion of the fundamental problems of modern political times. Discussion point Compare and contrast the relative struggles and successes of the United Nations and the European Union in establishing and managing elements of overarching governance over aggregates of nation states. Consider to what degree, if any, the sovereign powers of nation states are fundamental building blocks of global political power.

Key event: the failure of the Weimar republic The Weimar was designed to produce a radically democratic modern polity in the wake of the failed monarchic Germany. The republic’s constitution produced a franchised population, using a proportional representation electoral system to produce a powerful parliamentary government with a relatively weak presidential overseer. The electoral system allowed the extremely anti-­democratic far Left and Right factions to enter parliament, destabilise it from within and use its authority to engage in coercive actions against other social groups. The communists inspired by the Russian revolution wanted the same in Germany and accused the social democratic government of working for capitalist oppressors against the international working class. The extreme Right hankered for a monarchic dictatorship and so worked hard to sabotage the parliament from within. The presidency was constitutionally underpowered and so the president was unable to halt the anarchic subversions of the state. With right-­wing coups, left-­wing strikes and the army splitting into factions, the Nazi party skilfully used the electoral system to enter government, whereupon they swiftly captured the presidency, burned down the parliament building and asserted complete control under Hitler’s dictatorship.

Schmitt   39 The fertile period of Schmitt’s academic life corresponded with a period of intense crisis in the German nation state. Following the defeat of the Great War and the sudden end to the monarchic regime that had conducted the state’s war effort, German political life took on the form of a pluralistic democracy known as the Weimar Republic. The republic was born when German society was subjected to severe economic storms. Forced to pay massive and unaffordable reparations for the costs of the war and hit by the great depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the republic’s currency collapsed completely and its economy entered a period of hyper-­inflation. Mass poverty and extreme hardship swept though German society, stimulating a culture of resentment that fed into mass support for anti-­democratic parties of the Left and Right, which was most skilfully exploited and converted into mass support by and for the Nazi Party. The implications of this dramatic political implosion – fuelled and ignited by external enemies – were not lost on Schmitt. His writings on the crisis of liberalism, on dictatorship and on the fundamental tensions of friend and enemy in political life are clearly drawn from his contemplative observations. What makes his work relevant to liberal and social democratically minded people in the present is that the failure of that democratic system to hold together under the intense pressures exerted by the push and pull of self-­interested, combative political agencies highlights in-­built weakness in the liberal system generally and the ever-­presence of anti-­democratic forces working to destroy it.

The political Given that Schmitt’s ideas are developed by consideration of a lived-­in situation – a failing environment in which the order of life is cracking apart – it makes sense that he chooses to think not in the abstract of ‘politics’, but of the existential condition of living politically. For this reason, Schmitt does not use the term ‘politics’ (something that people do) but rather ‘the political’ (a fundamental condition of human being). People exist in human communities, each one located in a particular time and space – in a geographical environment over a historical timeframe. They must learn to work their environment and shape themselves to it if they are to continue existing. In this activity, they shape themselves into a communal entity and shape the environment in which they live into their adapted ‘homestead’. However, this activity and the environment in which it works are full of actual and potential dangers; people may make the wrong decisions about resources and create famine, or poison themselves or fall to localised environmental catastrophes. This constant possibility ensures that humans can easily fall into internal disputes about how to act to secure themselves and their future. Also, other people may enter the terrain from outside and seek to use it for themselves, so generating territorial disputes. Such events typically create tensions between the newcomers and those who define themselves as having a prior claim, as the security of each group is, at least potentially, put at risk by the presence of the other. These concerns are a fundamental and constant feature of every human community’s efforts to continue. They are the political condition of their existence. Seen this way, the political is a unifying and inclusive activity. It is about expressing the community’s collective understanding of its worth, of its needs and its imagined goals. At its simplest, the political takes expression in the collective volition of a unified body politic (a homogenous republic), but as we have already noted, communities have tendencies to internal disputation. These constantly manifest in policy disputes, that is, in debate and argument about how to manage the day-­to-day life of the community – a debate framed by a common sense of the need to produce and distribute resources in order to secure the community and

40   The inter-war debate driven by different perceptions of how best to do this. The differences signify a second function of policy dispute, which is to provide a means to publicly display ideological differences between competing sub-­groups within a society. Different opinions about what people need and need to do are directed by differently imagined potentials for these peoples. So disputes about the ways in which things are done easily become rendered into wider and more fundamental ideological disputes about destiny. Here, we see a contrasting feature of the political. From this perspective, political activity consists of strategic action aimed at creating or maintaining enough power to order society into a desired form. Making strategy is exclusive because it involves only some of those whom the strategy is intended to affect. It does not include those who stand in some way as impediments to the goals of the strategists. The need for strategy within such action reveals that the actors seek to obtain their goal with reference to some potentially limiting and/or threatening ‘other’. In this situation, political strategists move in a condition of possible danger that gives their actions an element of risk. The strategic element of their action is intended to overcome the danger that the presence of ‘the other’ generates. It directs political activity into strategies of opposition, expressing recognition of, and maintaining, the permanently potential conflict with ‘the other’. Thus, strategic action implies actual or potential conflict between people, and when this conflict is raised from a dispute between associates to the level of ‘us’ against ‘them’ it takes on what Carl Schmitt terms the ‘friend enemy’ dimension of political life. For Schmitt, the presence of ‘the enemy’ is a fundamental condition of the human condition. People exist as members of collectivities, and in doing so they produce the existential fundamental ‘others’, as another collective external to the community. Thus, ‘the enemy is not any competitor . . . he is not the private adversary whom one hates’ (Schmitt, 1996: 28); the enemy is a ‘public’ enemy. The character of the enmity is also distinct from private hostility for the public other since it is, in its otherness, beyond the realm of its opponent’s knowledge. It is the unknown quality that makes it ‘other’, as opposed to just unwanted or different. As an unknown factor, the other appears as a potential threat, but the root of the threat lies not in any overt signal of hostility the other may enact, but rather, in the potential dangers that might lurk in the mysterious quality of strangeness of the other. For this reason, the threat is ever-­present, is not clearly defined and, significantly, is not even definitely intended by the other. It is impersonal and constant by virtue of the differences which, by defining the actors as separate groups, make them ‘other’ to each other. The potential threat therefore operates regardless of the intended relationship of the groups involved. So, no matter how friendly or well intentioned the other is, the simple fact of their presence suggests a potential scramble for resources, and the common sense of this potential marks out boundaries of defensiveness – of readiness for any eventual dispute. The otherness produced by the existence of plurality of self-­defined communities politicises them; each needs to define who they are what belongs to them and what they value and seek to preserve of this. Such activity involves identifying the threatening others also in existence and strategically preparing to meet unknown threats from them. This mutual defensiveness is intensified by the fact that, while the definition of ‘we’ from which the self-­defining ‘community’ derive a sense of ‘ours’, may also define the other as ‘them’, it does not, in itself, extend to defining what is ‘theirs’. The activity of definition is designed only to identify what of ‘ours’ ‘they’ are not entitled to; there is no mutual interest or concern, no ready ground for inter-­community relations. Thus, the mutual defensiveness that characterises international politics is not an aberration from a peaceful norm of harmonious human co-­existence; it is a base existential

Schmitt   41 feature of human existence and as such, colours all human relationships with danger and shapes them into ‘we’ and ‘other’. So the creation of the friend–enemy dynamic is the fundamental core of every community’s politicisation – the self-­definition of its status as a collective identity: this is summarised in Schmitt’s statement: ‘an enemy exists only when, at least potentially one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity’ (Schmitt, 1996: 28).        Rewind to Weber Chapter 1 Compare Schmitt with Max Weber’s similar framing of the dimensions of inter-­state politics.

Here, Schmitt articulates what became a core feature of twentieth-­century international relations theory: the ever-­present potential for war between nations. Notions of a global community of humankind are rooted in a misunderstanding of the human condition. ‘It is’ argued Schmitt, ‘self-­deluding to believe that the termination of modern war would lead to world peace’ (Schmitt, 1996: 54); ‘the concept of humanity excludes the notion of enemy’ (Schmitt, 1996: 54) because we aren’t enemies as humans but as national collectivities. This inter-­nation dimension of Carl Schmitt’s analysis has led commentators to place his work in a retrospectively defined cannon of great ‘international relations’ theorists, linking his ‘realistic’ assessment of the constancy of potential conflict in human affairs with that of Thucydides, Hobbes and Machiavelli. In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt invited such comparisons, but he was fully aware that Hobbes and Machiavelli were concerned with all dimensions of the political – that they were as sensitive to the internal tensions that beset human efforts to establish collective modes of living, as to the external threats to communities. For this reason, he would class his work and that of his forebears as philosophical enquiries into the authentically political conditions of human life rather than as the less comprehensive study of international affairs. Like them, he experienced the confusing self-­destruction of a fractious and internally divided polity, and clearly he felt that he shared with them a sensitivity to the capacity for polities to implode from within. So in what he saw as the tradition of authentic political theory, he argued that, not only are the points of contact between national communities fraught with tense anxieties and loaded with potential for conflict, but there is also internal tension involved in the self-­production of a defined community as well as tendencies for communities to fragment internally.        Rewind to Weber Chapter 1 Contrast Schmitt’s unease with plurality to Weber’s discussions of how to manage pluralist democracy.

Schmitt accepted the point made by pluralists, that societies typically manifest an internal diversity of access to wealth and education, which, combined with religious and/or ethnic sub-­cultures, produces different social sub-­groups, ‘religious institution(s), nation, labour union, family, sports-­club, and many other associations’ (Schmitt, 1996: 41), all of which lay claim to people’s loyalties and direct their interests. He worried however, that far from manifesting a happy balance of interests, such scenarios promote tendencies for internal

42   The inter-war debate fragmentation of society. These tendencies, he argued, arise from the fact that these groups, each with its own interpretation of the best ethical, economic and cultural mode of living for their society, try to shape the direction of their society’s development in any number of diverse and often contrary directions. While the need for survival and the common desire for peaceful and sociable existence often calm the tensions that arise and aim the people towards consensus and social co-­existence, the underlying sub-­divisions of ‘we’ and ‘them’ that run their tension lines through the fabric of pluralist society are inherently combative and conflict-­prone. If these tensions are allowed to run their own course ungoverned, the overarching need to protect the common entity can be lost in the din of internal rows. Then, the order of society becomes lawlessly shaped by the push and pull of its contesting elements, each developing its own ideas as to how things should be ordered and defining the other as enemy. At this point, internal conflict falls into civil war and the polity is lost.

Summary of ‘the political’ Taken as a whole, ‘the political’, as presented by Schmitt, is the combative and potentially conflict-­ridden engagement with who the ‘we’ of the community are, what the destiny of this ‘we’ might be and how in practical terms to secure it and develop its potential. In this vision, the political is mysteriously contrary: it is both full of tensions and potential conflict, and at the same time it is a resolving of these tensions into one unified body politic. The possibility here is that this ambiguity veils a fundamental incoherence at the heart of Schmitt’s conception. On the other hand, it might reveal a fundamental tension at the heart of the political itself. To get a sense of which of these two possibilities is most likely, we have to explore the ambiguity at the heart of Schmitt’s notions of the political; looking to see where it facilitates exploration of the mutually constituting opposites which are a core element of the political, and where its obfuscation of the tension-­point between conflict and resolution undermines its capacity to function as a mode of understanding the dimensions of power that shape the destinies of peoples.

The polity and the state At the outset of The Concept of the Political, Schmitt stated that ‘The concept of the state presupposes the political’ (Schmitt, 1996: 19). In this statement, he was setting out a core argument about the purposeful function of the state. The state uniquely functions as a body designed for governance of the political; it is drawn into being by the need for political actors for governance of the push and pull of their power plays. Its function therefore is to attend to the fundamentals of the political condition. For Schmitt, every community matures into a body politic in the act of defining itself; its goals, its needs and its self-­perceived essential character. In this, its members determine their common sense of what their collective identity is and what it is not. Implicit (but not argued) in this presentation is the idea that the establishment of territory authentically marks out the people’s domain – that is, the territory in which they have forged their common existence and through which they express their mode of living. It will involve marking out who is and who is not a member of the ‘local’ community. The politicising social activity of embedding a local culture into the local environment is only obliquely referred to by Schmitt, but its function as the economic and cultural terrain for the complex construction of community and of sub-­communal tensions is the logical and implicit proposition that silently precedes his claim that the final act of legitimising a community’s

Schmitt   43 claim to ‘its’ territory is a core task that a state is designed to perform. States perform this task by formally codifying and enforcing the identity of the community that they protect and serve. This involves identifying and protecting its territory and its rules of membership. For Schmitt, this is the moment at which a society becomes a polity: the moment when it becomes self-­reinforced by its own state.

Key concept: legitimacy In his Political Theology, Schmitt argued against Weber’s relativist notion that the essence of authoritative legality is derived from its functional utility as a technical mechanism for rational construction of economic and social order. He first pointed to relativism’s difficulty in providing any constant and authoritative ethical foundations for normative guides or assertions in law. He then argued that the brute reality of friend–enemy dynamics – the constant existential fact that communities that exist are in danger of being destroyed by otherness – provides the single super-­strong ethical bulwark against total relativism. Schmitt argued that legitimate law is the codification of norms and values that manifest the authentic existential presence of a communal culture – a culture already, and a long time in place, working and by this very fact definitively shaping the constitutions of its constituent members in the face of constant threatening otherness. This conservatism sets the foundations for Schmitt’s constant refrain that the legitimate origins of the state’s authority to pronounce terms and conditions of membership and its power to enforce them lie in its role as the protector of the authentic manifestation of the community over time and in its traditional place of belonging in the world.

The nation state and national security It is worth noting, given Schmitt’s fall into the racialist nationalism of Nazism, that at this point he made it clear that he saw no natural preordained world order of national communities, nor would he fall for the then popular notion among political theorists that every nation should by natural right have its own state. Rather, he argued historically that, ‘the political can derive its energy from the most varied of human endeavours, from the religious, economic, moral and other antitheses’ (Schmitt, 1996: 43). His core point was that ‘the political entity is, by its very nature, the decisive entity, regardless of the sources from which it derives its last . . . motives’ (Schmitt, 1996: 43–4). So the political and the politicised self-­definition of a society in the construction of a representative state isn’t, in itself, an expression of predefined permanent and foundational collective personalities – such as race or nation. He noted, however, that it so happens (for unnamed reasons) that ‘since the nineteenth century’ (Schmitt, 1985b: 9), nationalist self-­definitions have come to be the most common politicising force for self-­defining communities. In this non-­nationalist – and potentially pluralistic – way, Schmitt presented ‘national homogeneity’ as the definitive communal identity and thus the nation state as ‘the decisive political entity’ (Schmitt, 1996: 46) of the twentieth-­century world. In the twentieth century, it is nation states alone that have the capacity to enforce a community’s self-­definition, to decide what is rightfully theirs, and in so doing impose nationalist definitions of economic status, and cultural norms and values in terms of national citizenries’ rights and duties and decisively act to resist any threats to this situation. Here, Schmitt is conceptually framing the moment of the political – the moment when self-­ defining collectivities create an empowered entity designed to preserve their integrity

44   The inter-war debate against internal and external threats; an authentically political definition of sovereignty as a powerful act in which a representative state enforces a collectivity’s self-­definition and claim to territory; the existential actuality of nation state politics: each and every state has enemies, actual and potential, internal and external and they must always be alert to the need to go to war with them. Such a defining framework sets the task of discussing how nation states keep external international threats at bay and internal social tendencies towards civil conflict in check. As regards external threats, Schmitt’s definition of the necessity and function of nation states sets out a permanent external condition of threat and danger. Every state acts in a world of other states – powerful entities operating beyond its borders and beyond its governance. The mere fact of their presence poses a constant potential threat: ‘As long as a state exists, there will thus be in the world more than just one state’ (Schmitt, 1996: 53). Each state is a powerful entity whose sole point in existence is self-­preservation of the political community it defines and serves. States exist vis-­à-vis one another in the same way as Hobbesian individuals in the state of nature. They are mutually respectful and suspicious of each other’s power and needs, locked in dangerous circles, facing off and seeking the means to parlé the conditions for an enabling truce. In a global state of nature, states need to be on constant alert. This does not mean that each and every state is in constant disagreement with its neighbours. States can negotiate settled relationships through diplomacy, using diplomatic agencies to cultivate economic and cultural exchanges that establish trans-­state friendships. This, indeed, is how the world works without dissolving into the chaos of total full-­time war. However, in a world comprised of states, the potential for disagreement over values, over resources, for misunderstandings about arrangements is constant. This constancy means that no state can ever safely drop its guard against damaging conflict with another: ‘the ever present possibility of conflict must always be kept in mind’ (Schmitt, 1996: 32). This applies even between long-­standing friendly nations. For it is the most unusual situations – when the routine of relations is punctured by the novelty of events – that new and potentially threatening situations arise, customary practice cannot cope and each state must take its self-­preserving action. In such situations – labelled the ‘state of exception’ by Schmitt – the cloaking of diplomacy cannot easily hide the raw nature of the political situation. Mutually threatened communities reduce to their essential political form as ‘fighting collectivities’ and face-­off: ‘one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity’ (Schmitt, 1996: 28). Thus, alertness means military alertness, which is a constantly necessary feature of the political condition of human life. Discussion point You will see here that Schmitt’s presentation could be used to describe international politics of our times, but: (a) do you think it decisively explains it?; (b) do you think it validates individual state’s combative behaviour?

In regard to internal threats, Schmitt’s focus is on the potentially last moments of a polity afflicted with internal conflict – the moments of crisis – the extreme moments where the internal differences generate threatening internal fissures which split the identity of the polity into a friend–enemy dualism. When Schmitt writes, ‘If domestic conflict between parties have become political . . . the most extreme degree of internal tension is . . . reached; i.e. the domestic . . . groups are decisive for armed conflict’ (Schmitt, 1996: 32), he is referring to the

Schmitt   45 degeneration of a polity into civil war. Not only does this threaten to rip the polity apart from inside, but it weakens the integrity of the state on the global stage – ‘the intensification of internal antagonisms has the effect of weakening the common identity vis-­à-vis another state’ (Schmitt, 1996: 32). This double-­edged vulnerability must be policed, controlled and, at times of crises, dealt with by the state. For this to happen, the state must have the power and the will to act over, above and often against powerful social sub-­groups. In practical terms, Schmitt recommended that it would be wise for any political community to build into its constitution the conditions to establish a temporary dictatorship in times of fundamental crisis. This device enables the state to close civil and political society, to impose an order of uniform behaviour, forcing social groups into subservience and conformity. Such a dictatorship would ideally last until that situation is the norm and can be left to continue without day-­to-day state enforcement. Such an arrangement means that the state must be on the alert – ready to intervene and to close down civil society in states of emergency. State agencies must therefore monitor political differences among the community, impose controls when they threaten the integrity of the community, and even eradicate them when the threat becomes overt. For Schmitt, this is not just a policing issue, it is a logical proposition that the state must strive for political uniformity among those it represents or it cannot act to represent them as a whole. Here we see that Schmitt, like Rousseau, understood the people’s self-­expression to be the expression of their existential presence as a community – a single unified entity. Democratic politics therefore could never simply depend on voting mechanisms for aggregating the multiple views of self-­interested elements. Indeed, sometimes some people need to be forced into obedience with the practical demands of living in accordance with the general will of ‘the people’, a task that requires the people’s will to be expressed in the form of dictatorial coercion.        Rewind Book 1: Political Theorists in Context See Chapter 6 for Rousseau’s theory of sovereignty.

Such dictatorship, while occasionally necessary, is an aberration from the full self-­ expression of a unified community, and as such, can only function for a short duration; it is a mechanism for crisis management in ‘states of exception’. Full safety from the tendencies towards conflict can only be met by a homogenous, unified republic and this could only be achieved by maximising social, economic and cultural uniformity in the community itself. Democratic polity, Schmitt says, involves ‘if the need arises – the elimination or eradication of heterogeneity’ (Schmitt, 1985b: 14).

The crisis of liberal democracy Schmitt’s scary conclusion undermines his sophisticated discussion of a fundamental tension between politics as a state of collective self-­expression and politics as a self-­ purging process. The difficulty at the root of Schmitt’s dictatorial democracy model is that the idea of the ‘other’ as enemy creates a dynamic trend in the thinking process towards regarding every different situation and every new identity as a threat. This is also a core dynamic in Nazi conceptualisation of otherness, and it is what made Schmitt’s

46   The inter-war debate thinking so attractive to them. When such thinking drives political action, the trend towards identifying enemies becomes an ever-­present dynamic towards finding and eradicating ‘others’ within the state territory. Such a trend ensures that the integrity of the body politic as expressed, and thus the integrity of its collective volition, is always at risk. Overly fearful governments easily lurch into panoptic governance, undermining the polity they seek to preserve. In such situations citizens come to be seen as actual or potential enemies within, vigilantes prosper, civility withers and, ironically, the uncertainties and dangers that lurk within the society become its defining and potentially terminating features. In these ways, the element of the political that is the desire for a unified ‘people’, undermines the possibility of achieving another core element – the open, discursive communality in which people can discuss and define their identity. If we explore Schmitt’s discussions of the tensions between the anarchic tumultuousness of pluralist civil society and the governmental goals of any state, we find not only that Schmitt’s frightening conclusions sit uneasily with his sophisticated analysis, but also that his analysis has much to offer anyone seeking to understand the dynamics and centrality of this vital and difficult tension in modern political life. The failing of the liberal democratic Weimar showed to Schmitt the dangerous anti-­ political tendencies within liberalism. Liberalism, Schmitt reminds us, is profoundly individualistic, ‘protecting individual freedom and private property’ (Schmitt, 1996: 70). Working from an individualist conception of ‘humanity’ as an overarching aggregate of free-­thinking and acting individuals, it confuses an individualistic notion of equality – we are all equally endowed and able as free-­thinking acting individuals – with the political equality of rights and duties which are bestowed upon those selected and approved for membership of a particular community. Liberals, Schmitt argued, could not see that for a political community only members of that community had rights and duties. Or that those rights and duties did not spring from natural and common humanity, but from the political considerations of the community itself. For these reasons, liberal democratic systems are hung out on ‘a confused combination’ (Schmitt, 1985b: 9) of a profoundly anti-­political ‘individualistic–humanitarian ethic’ (Schmitt, 1985: 9) and the political equality of citizens. The confusion of liberalism obscures its fundamental antagonism towards that core element of the political which is the definition of the citizen as a member of a unified collectivity: the polity. Hence, liberalism ‘evades or ignores state and politics’ and concentrates instead upon ‘the polarity . . . of ethics and economics, intellect and trade, education and property’ (Schmitt, 1996: 70). Furthermore, Schmitt argued, despite the movement of twentieth-­century liberalism away from individualism and towards pluralism, the core anti-­political stance that characterised liberalism remained evident. Pluralist modifications of liberalism simply shifted the view of society from an aggregate of self-­seeking free-­moving individuals to an aggregate of self-­seeking competing economic and social associations. This transmutation from individual competition to the competition of self-­seeking social groups did not shift liberal thinking from its fundamental suspicion of power and wilful blindness to the needs of collective being: ‘Liberalism provides a series of methods for hindering and controlling the state’s and government’s power’ (Schmitt, 1996: 70). Ironically, Schmitt notes, liberals’ desire to establish a liberal polity has led them to use the legal and coercive state mechanisms that they subvert. The result is the catastrophic self-­subversion of the governing class. The constant desire to minimise state power and action weakens the authority of the liberal state itself, and in doing so weakens its power to act, so that in the moment of crisis, liberal anti-­statism bleeds the state of the necessary power to take decisive nation-­preserving action.

Schmitt   47 So liberals may take control of a state, but in doing so they are likely to disempower it and to unravel the polity. Having captured the modern nation state, they undermine its power to define the people’s enemies and to act against them. As a consequence, the state, with its formal capacity for coercion and normative rule, becomes a target for the competing sub-­groups, each of which sees its potential as their instrument of domination over all others. The liberals encourage subversive groups to occupy the parliament and through this they seek access to the functionary elements of the state. In this way, the legislative, executive, judicial, law enforcement and social service institutions become the site of combat. The overview of Schmitt’s analysis is that, in societies that have become dominated by liberalism, this politicised anti-­politics takes expression in constitutions in which the power of the state is inhibited and checked at every turn by the rights of the citizens, as defined in the liberal ideology. Such a constitution reduces the state to one player in a marketplace of power-­hungry players, leaving society as the battleground for the ensuing Hobbesian conflict of each powerful sub-­group against all. For this reason, Schmitt argued, liberalism doesn’t fit with democracy, democracy being the expression of ‘the will of the people’ speaking as a whole, unified community.

Schmitt’s answer to the problem of state–society relations It was the experience of the Weimar that convinced Schmitt of the veracity of Hobbes’ formula – that when dangerous self-­seeking political actors face-­off, it is necessary for there to be a more powerful third party, a frighteningly powerful, decisive singular identity to impose obedient compliance. It is important to note, however, that despite his antagonism towards liberalism’s idealisation of plurality, he was aware that the cultural and economic vitality of communities depended on some degree of heterogeneity and that permanent state dictatorship would be seriously detrimental to this vitality. His concern was to establish a means of constraint over economic or cultural sub-­cultures, only if and when they attempt to coercively impose their conception of the ideal identity of the community against the organic, already-­existing condition of that community. To this end he came up with the idea of a kind of ‘open and shut’ system of ‘emergency only’ dictatorship – the idea of state action placing restraints on any social sub-­groups trying to convert other sub-­groups, or indeed that state itself, into enemies. This he referred to as the expression of sovereignty, which takes place decisively and in the most overt and pure form only in the ‘state of exception’. The state of exception theory allows for unspecified periods of social and political relaxation, during which it is not only possible but desirable for pluralist civil society to thrive. State sovereignty does not ‘at all imply that a political entity must necessarily determine every aspect of a person’s life or that a centralised system should destroy every other organisation or corporation’ (Schmitt, 1986: 38–9). Cultural and economic groups are necessary, but they must be capable of maturing their identities and their perspectives within the cohesive whole of the existing political community. From this perspective, the degree to which the cultural or economic groups within a community can shape or bend political decision-­making without threatening the integrity of the polity’s unified identity is, in turn, an expression of how fully they have become an expression of that society’s identity. In short, the practical maturity of the community’s cultural and economic groups’ activities and of the political whole which they constitute is the signature of the community’s and the sub-­groups’ political authenticity. Nevertheless, while a mature community can accommodate and negotiate difference without significant internal stress, the fact that such differences carry the constant potential for the emergence of friend–enemy dynamics

48   The inter-war debate ensures that the state ultimately decides where the limits of cultural and economic self-­ expression are – the rights of the citizenry are only those guaranteed by the state, and the limits are set where threat to the secure order of the polity emerge. The constitutional design set out by Schmitt was a representative and responsive parliament, legislating in tandem with an overseeing sovereign executive, with the authority to form itself into a ‘commissarial dictatorship’ – an infrequently used, ultimate decision-­ making body with the total authority and coercive power to enforce its decisions on the parliament and all other politically active bodies within the state territory. This is Schmitt’s attempt to articulate a practical, technical solution which recognises and governs the benefits of social plurality in the light of the ever-­present possibility of community-­destroying conflict.

The problems with Schmitt’s ideal constitution The practical worthiness of Schmitt’s concept can be seen in the fact that provision of this kind of centralised state dictatorship in times of grave emergency prevails in many modern liberal democracies. The recent ‘war on terror’, for example, has led some western states to apply limited ‘open–shut’ restrictions on basic liberal principles of free movement, privacy or right to assembly. Of course, this very example highlights the central problems with such commissarial decisions. How can we be sure that our leaders will be able or willing to return civil liberties to society when the crisis is over? What if, as in the case of the Nazi dictatorship, the enemy is defined as permanent and ever present? This raises another question: as the executive is not blessed with some super-­powered ability to see with absolute certainty the full objective dimensions of the threat to the community (and may even be a threat to the community itself), how can it be relied upon to judge accurately, and indeed more accurately than any other involved political body, the constitutional features of a moment of exception? How can a leadership which is self-­serving and harmful to the polity be removed without destroying all order in an internal war?

Discussion point Noting (a) the difficulties in operating ‘open–close’ dictatorial powers in a democratic system, and (b) the historical tendencies for democratically appointed governments to operate limited variations of such powers in times of crisis, consider whether temporary dictatorship for times of emergency is a democratically viable mode of crisis management.

Commentaries on the problems in Schmitt’s conception of the political In Leo Strauss’ Notes on Carl Schmitt: The Concept of the Political (Strauss, appendix in Schmitt, 1996), he argued that the critical value of Schmitt’s anti-­liberalism rests in its function as a kind of mirroring process – projecting the flaws of liberalism to its advocates. However, it is little more than an inverted liberalism – an anti-­liberalism – and as such, lacks the conceptual means to imagine any other way of doing politics. It functions as a critique, but not as an alternative vision of the political. The sharp point of this insightful criticism is that the friend–enemy dynamic as presented by Schmitt does not

Schmitt   49 provide solid grounds for imagining the construction of a polity – hence his ambiguity when dealing with plurality and democracy and with dictatorship and representative government. Thinking further on Schmitt’s failures in this regard sheds some light not only on Schmitt’s conceptual difficulties, but also on the problems facing the many ‘realist’ theorists from Machiavelli through Hobbes to the present day. In their explorations of ‘the war of each against all’, the lust for power and the problem of sovereign power, they were all driven by a fascination with and/or an aversion to the fundamental uncertainties of political existence. These uncertainties can be conceptually separated into three defined strands: a basic uncertainty as to the status of the strange others and the conditions in which they are presented; a strategic uncertainty as to how to effectively manage any actual and potential danger generated by the presence of the strange ‘others’; and a psychological uncertainty which involves insecurity about the integrity of the self-­defining collectivity stimulated by the challenging, uncertain relationship with the stranger. Together, these three uncertainties produce the condition of fearfulness which realists such as Schmitt so expertly articulate. Schmitt’s insight into the core propositions of realism reveals, however, a weakness running through this whole school of thought. The weakness is the reduction of complex and fluid social and political relationships to a simple and inflexible friend–enemy dualism. John Keane (Keane, 1988) takes up this theme, pointing out that the classic liberal designers understood fully that tensions between civil associations and between the creative but anarchic tendencies of civil society as a whole and the needy desire for predictability that drives state regulators, express the essential fine balance that stands between self-­ expressive communality and the tip-­over into chaos or dictatorship. Schmitt, however, confuses the ideal of the republic as a unified single entity – the Republic – with the complex, conflict-­ridden fact of the actual politically minded associations that he observes. In so doing, he confuses the conflict-­ridden attempt of participants in a communal debate about the collective identity with the idealised outcome of such discourse – a definitive, legal, certified and enforceable agreement on all points of the common identity. For this reason, he is able to identify the complexity and plurality of liberal constitutions as their core weakness, but not to recognise – as the classical liberal theorists did – that, as mechanisms for facilitating the diversity and difference that is necessary for a fully inclusive debate about who and what the polity is, these frail and complex constitutions are the polity’s core strength. Chantal Mouffe (1999), takes up this point, arguing that liberal constitutions are designed to retain the core uncertainties of political existence even as they manage them. For Mouffe, Schmitt’s primary error is to see the complexity of liberal constitutional politics as a mask for a simple contradiction, whereas it actually expresses a subtle paradox. The paradox takes expression in an essential difficulty for liberalism, which is that the strength of its core approach – the management of fear-­inducing uncertainty through the establishment and maintenance of a governing device – is also its weakness. Summarising these critical points, we can say that Schmitt’s argument over-­stresses, but does usefully point out, that the constant danger of liberal constitutionalism is that uncertainties such as the variable and different sub-­identities within the polity, the struggles between them and the unforeseeable effects of their actions on the future, all impact on the existential experience of living, generating profound fears. What he never fully conceded is that the paradoxical tension that runs through state and society relations is not a problem to be solved, but is rather a definition of their existential relationship. A second point that emerges here is that while Schmitt articulates with fantastic precision the fearful dimensions of enmity, what he is not clear about is that such fear can be

50   The inter-war debate unreasonable. In his classic sociological essay ‘The Stranger’, Schmitt’s contemporary, Georg Simmel (1971) explored the ways in which people tend to get unsettled by strangers without good rational cause. This typically occurs when significant numbers of culturally distinct immigrants arrive in a previously culturally homogeneous society. In such situations, it is unreasonable but common for the self-­defined ‘indigenous’ population to define the others whose presence generates fear as ‘enemies’. Schmitt himself fell into this trap, not only in his call for an eradication of heterogeneity, and more monstrously, his call for a cleansing of German politics from the Jewish spirit, but also throughout his line of reasoning in a constant reduction of strangeness to enmity. In this reductive thinking, Schmitt’s argument unintentionally shows us something profound about the limits of political sensibility and it is this: the failure of the political thinker/actor to comprehend that which is beyond the political can stimulate a fearful scepticism ensuring that the otherness of the other is left unexplored, while the identity of the other is tactically addressed as an object to be eradicated. On this point, we see clearly the suitability of Schmitt’s theory for vulgarised use, by those whose political sensibility is reduced to the eradication of otherness. This sensibility sat at the core of Nazi’s political understanding. It is also rife, sadly, in present-­day political life as various types of purist fundamentalists, driven by a gut-­level fear of difference, seek to eradicate it with little regard to the human cost. Schmitt exposed the constancy of fearful uncertainty as a feature of political existence. Inadvertently, he also showed us that fear of the ‘other’ and the uncertainties that the presence of otherness signifies, drives the desire to hunt out and destroy agents of danger without and within. In the collapse of his theorising into an assertion of the need for eradication, and in the use of such a conclusion for dogmatic purposes by the Nazis, we also see that where there is cultural heterogeneity, this fear-­driven quest for safety can become twisted into a drive for the security of sameness. The ultimate cost of such activity is the loss of the political community itself.

Revision notes 1

Schmitt’s political theory is shaped by and responds to the economic and political crises of the German nation state in the inter-­war years.

2

Schmitt presents a dual notion of the political: a b

c

3

the political is the empowered self-­expression of a self-­identified community; the political is also the strategic necessities imposed upon all communities by the ever-­presence of others. This is the condition he defines as the ‘friend–enemy’ dynamic underpinning all political life; the political community will always be threatened by external ‘others’. It can also be threatened internally if the communal identity is sufficiently challenged by self­assertive sub-­groups.

Schmitt argued that: a b

liberal democracy in Germany showed that the tendencies to internal division can overwhelm the political community if protective constitution is not in place; a pluralistic constitution doesn’t allow for the unitary power necessary for effective exercise of sovereignty: a combined expression of power and authority by the ultimate decision-­making body;

Schmitt   51 c

4

the constitution needs to provide for ‘commissarial dictatorship’ to take authorised power when external or internal challenges gravely threaten the secure continuation of the political community.

Critics say: a

b

Schmitt’s notion of the political contains two possibly contradictory elements. These take expression in the practical difficulty of establishing a viable democratic constitution with in-­built periodic dictatorship. Schmitt’s critique of liberalism/pluralism highlights the difficulties of holding together unity out of diversity, but doesn’t provide any alternative means to govern diverse communities.

Bibliography Keane, J. (1988) Democracy and Civil Society, London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (ed.) (1999) The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, London: Verso. Schmitt, Carl (Schwab, G. trans.) (1985a) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Schmitt, Carl (Kennedy, E. trans.) (1985b) Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schmitt, Carl (Schwab, G. trans.) (1996) The Concept of the Political, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simmel, G. (edited by Levine, D.) (1971) On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Further reading The best place to start is with two key Schmitt texts: the first text to go to is The Concept of the Political. This is a short, clean and clear discussion by Schmitt of the friend–enemy concept at the heart of his political theory. The second primary text to visit is Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. This contains his insightful critique of liberal democratic politics. I would recommend the classic Ellen Kennedy translation as Kennedy is one of the most knowledgeable scholars of Schmitt’s oeuvre. Other texts that you might find useful and interesting are: Bendersky, Joseph W. (1983) Carl Schmitt, Theorist for the Reich, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bendersky’s work on Schmitt details his role as a jurisprudential advisor to the right-­ wing parties that successfully assaulted the Weimar Republic and as a political theorist articulating themes of homogeneity and dictatorship that were to become core elements of the Nazi ideology. Two interesting contextualising treatments of Schmitt’s intellectual and political development are Balakrishnan, Gopal (2000) Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, London: Verso; and Müller, Jan-­Werner (2003) Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-­war European Thought, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Part II

Post-­war debates The recovery of politics

4 Arendt

The art of politics teaches men how to bring forth what is great and radiant. Arendt (1958)

Arendt’s political philosophy is run through with a rich critical engagement with the eventful, fast-­changing world in which she lived. She was born to a German Jewish couple living in Hanover in 1906. In 1975 she died, as an American citizen and an internationally renowned intellectual. Her life spanned an era encompassing four major wars, the development of the Keynesian welfare state and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. The vigour and individuality of her work derives from the eclectic and insightful mix of theoretical sources that she modifies and deploys in her arguments.

Arendt’s life and times Arendt’s awareness of the complex plurality of her German Jewishness informed every aspect of her political thinking, as did a sense of herself as an intellectual with a task of critical analytic judgement to perform. In 1924 she began her academic life, studying theology at the University of Marburg, and from this moment on, wherever Arendt went in the world, she never ceased to be anything other than self-­reflexively intellectual. Her interest in political theory and practice however, arose out of circumstance. In her early years at university, Arendt had no interest in politics but, as a young German Jewish intellectual, she was unable to ignore the rising Nazi movement that would soon overwhelm the German Republic. In later reflections Arendt said that, by 1929, the situation was such that she realised that she would have to engage with her political environment. So she threw herself into an engagement with politics (Young-­Bruehl, 1982: 91). Within a year, the issues of identity and belonging, with their intrinsic references to nation, culture and polity, had moved to the front of Arendt’s thinking. The shift from theology to philosophy, however, began even before the politicisation of her thinking. Shortly after starting at university, Arendt had begun a passionate involvement with the new philosophy of existentialism and its intellectual ‘star’, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger, however, became romantically attached to Nazism, a development that cast clear and obvious obstructions in the path of Arendt’s relationship with him. Subsequently, Arendt developed her own existentialism-­ based philosophy of political community. But the immediate impact of the Nazi regime led her into political fight and flight. In 1933, she began helping German Zionist organisations to publicise the plight of the victims of Nazism. She was arrested by the Gestapo, before escaping to Paris, where she remained until 1940, working with resistance organisations.

56   Post-war debates For a short time, she was held in a German transportation camp, escaping to the US in May 1941. Arendt established herself in the US, becoming an American citizen in 1951 – the year that her first major work, Origins of Totalitarianism, was published. Key people: Martin Heidegger Heidegger introduced existentialist phenomenology to the world in his work Being and Time (1927), triggering a diverse but intense movement towards existentialism among many European philosophers (the list includes Arendt, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir). Heidegger showed little of the political sensibility of these thinkers. He became the Nazi state’s leading philosopher, damaging his credibility considerably, but thanks in large part to the work of Arendt, not enough for his philosophy to be ignored. It remains a considerable influence on European philosophy today.

Although she remained based in the US for the rest of her life, she never fully integrated with any of its communities. Arendt’s position as outsider was reinforced by the unwillingness of some established academics to fully accept her as a genuine political philosopher. Displaced, at odds and critically engaged with her world, Arendt’s condition inspired two contrasting and constant leitmotifs to her work. The first, that a full political sensibility is only possible for those who do not fit into society – who are defined as pariahs; the second, that to live fully as a human being, every person needs a place in the world. The sense of this paradox runs through her concern that a common experience of modern existence is to have no singular simple identity and no easy fit in an obvious home in the world. Key ideas: phenomenology and existentialism Immanuel Kant had left modern theorists with the philosophical dilemma of an apparent gap between the interior world of the subject and the objective facts of their worldly condition. He argued that while we can know things as they appear to our minds, we can never know them as they are in themselves. Subjective knowledge of the world, he argued, involves producing images of the external world in the mind. Thus we know things as they appear to us (phenomena), but these things exist independently of our knowledge of them as things in themselves (noumana) and as such they are external to and beyond the reach of our knowledge. Phenomenology tackles this dilemma by arguing that things are as they appear in the context of their appearance. Edmund Husserl, the initiator of phenomenology, argued that humans live on a day-­to-day basis in a world of objects that they construct intuitively without analysis. These categor­ised objects are the empirical world. With science and theory, we derive from these factual objects a conceptual notion of their ideal form. These concepts of things enable us to regard them in abstraction from the life-­world and in doing so, to come to understand their qualities and potentials, but at a step away from their reality. As this last remark suggests, Husserl’s method rapidly re-­instates the problem of knowing how to understand things intellectually as they are in the world. Martin Heidegger’s existentialism – a modified form of phenomenology – overcame the perceived divide of knowing and being by showing it to be the product of a way of thinking about things and nothing to do with things in themselves. Like Husserl, he argued that the world is a human construct – the product of how we know things, but he argued that it is confused imagination which posits the notion that anything exists before the act of knowing. In short, the world and the one who moves through it come into existence together in a moment of active, creative existence: being-­in-the-­world. Thus existence is a creative project for each and every individual being, in which they as the creative actor and their context are actualised.

Arendt   57

Arendt’s philosophy of the human condition: the vita activa Arendt grounds her exposition of political life and its threatened survival in modern times in an exposition of its ‘rightful place’ in the human condition which she terms ‘the vita activa’. ‘With the term vita activa I propose to designate three fundamental activities: labour, work and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life has been given to man’ (Arendt, 1958: 2). They are also in a fundamental tension with each other and this tension manifests between the processes and product of activity, meeting animal drives (labour), instrumentalist materialism (work) and the humanising communicative action of the citizen of the public realm.

Labour A constantly recurring theme in Arendt’s work is the cyclical motion of the natural process of life. At the basic animal level of species-­being, humans live in the continuum of nature and, as an elemental part of nature, the human’s animal-­life consists of the cycle of birth, growth, eating, sleeping, procreating and dying. It is within this level of existence that labour is located. It ‘obeys the orders of immediate bodily needs’ (Arendt, 1958: 100) and is typified in activities such as making food and building a home. Labour preserves and grows the human animal and therefore is fundamental to the continuance of the human species. Categorically laborious activities extend from activities that service the immediate needs of the individual, to activities such as crop growing which provides food for many, or child rearing which maintains the species as a whole. Because it is a direct response to our bodily demands, labour also expresses the solitary condition of our basic animal existence: ‘Imprisoned in the privacy of his own body, caught in the fulfilment of need in which nobody can share’ (Arendt, 1958: 118–19), the Animal laborans is always alone with the experience of their physical condition. In this sense, labour is a solitary and private activity expressing the enslavement of the individual by their natural condition. In Arendt’s scheme of analysis, labour’s basic animality, the fundamental futility of enduring for the sake of it, the anti-­human isolation of the labourer’s consciousness, make it the very antithesis of what a fully fulfilled human existence should be.

Work and the world Humans, of course, do not live merely as animals; we rise above our animality through the activity of ‘work’. Work manifests an instrumental perception of natural things (including animals and Animal laborans) as resources to be exploited in fabricating or ‘reifying’ ideas for new products into material objects. Key concept: reification In traditional philosophy the term is used to describe situations in which a person mistakenly refers to a concept as the moving agent of an event (e.g. ‘the force of history made him kill his mother’). Following Hegel, many German philosophers, including Arendt, used the term to describe the act of making an idea of how things could exist into a situation in which, not only do they come to exist, but they do so as independent parts of the framing context of their makers lives. The invention of money is an example of this.

58   Post-war debates        Rewind to Weber Chapter 1 Examine the origins of the Weberian concept of technical instrumentalism developed here by Arendt.

Work destroys natural processes which the fabricator (Homo faber) perceives as something (s)he can manipulate, break up and use as the material for use-­objects which constitute their man-­made artificial world. Homo faber thinks and acts with technical precision, using the controlled and guided violence that ‘is present in all fabrication’ (Arendt, 1958: 139) to govern nature into an artificial world (as exemplified by the destruction of forests for timber and the mining of minerals in which the earth is ripped open and the local environment devastated): ‘Homo Faber has always been a destroyer of nature’ (Arendt, 1958: 139). Thus the activity of work is intellectually informed, it is technical and it produces enduring goods (which may be conceived as wealth or capital), in distinction from labour, which is an almost thoughtless expression of the enduring natural cycle. The world made by Homo faber stands opposed to the natural earth from which it is wrought, an alternative, artificial, enduring context in which we can exist in common over and against our natural habitat and animal condition. The product of work can be called material goods. The world is conceived by Homo faber as a workshop and a market, producing and distributing usable and tradable objects. But Arendt argues that it is more than that, because its value is not solely down to the utility of all the made objects that constitute it, it is down to their endurance as familiar and understandable parts of an organised totality. We can all manoeuvre through our lives by negotiating around these objects, which together map out a meaningful and usefully ordered context for our lives. Key concept: praxis Praxis is the ancient Greek term meaning to creatively and practically convert our understanding of how things can be into the actual condition of our world. Its unique feature is that it is a revelatory activity – human beings not only brought their ideas into being, but also in doing so they revealed their essential selves to their contemporaries and to themselves and this revelation of unique person and all their qualities (good and bad), retold in historical storytelling over time, would ensure the enduring public recognition of the person long after their animal body had expired. Thus, through praxis humans transcend the limits of their animal being and become unique and immortal. For these reasons praxis is distinct from techné, the craft which reifies ideas into objects. Techné is a private engagement with nature – an expression of our constant grappling with the material conditions of our existence. For Aristotle, the distinction between praxis and techné mirrored the distinction between the naturally private, naturally bound sphere of life and the public transcendent sphere of life. Karl Marx was very attracted to the idea of praxis, but rendered it in the more prosaic form as the manifestation of well-­understood principles of humanising society through practical-­ oriented, theoretically inspired action.

Action and appearance in the world Arendt’s portrayal of Animal laborans and Homo faber is striking, because neither possesses the qualities of the self-­reflective, creative, moral creature that we recognise and

Arendt   59 value as archetypically human. Indeed, Arendt’s portrayal was intended to show how much of our conscious activity is not definitively human, in order to highlight the special and unique quality of the element of our active life that is. This element is the type of activity that Arendt defined as ‘action’, which she intends to re-­express the ancient Greek concept praxis. Action/praxis is self-­expressive activity, distinct from making (techné), for although the latter facilitates self-­expression to some degree, it is restricted by the terms of the routine necessarily involved in the production of worldly objects. For this reason, Arendt argued, pure self-­expressive activity must be the activity that is most independent from the restrictions that its materiality places upon it. Such action, as we saw in the example of naming, takes the form of ‘word and deed’ (Arendt, 1958: 176). Discussion point Arendt’s distinction of work and action involves a distinction between the aims and activities of the manufacturer and marketer (entrepreneurs) and the aims of the civic actor. Do you think that civic service and entrepreneurship are necessarily completely separate?

The definitive quality of action is its capacity to ‘reveal actively’ the ‘unique personal identities’ of each and every one who acts ‘in the human world’ (Arendt, 1958: 179). In this event, our capacity for action shows to us who we are, what our powers of creativity are, and also the moral responsibilities arising from such powers. It is the activity that strives to shape the world to a desired order even as it signals the intent to do so. Words are a vital attendant to action – they provide the proof of the actor’s intention, carrying messages of subjective understanding and intent from one person to another. As such, they connect isolated islands of individual experience into one inter-­subjective world. They create a second level to the world – a level of inter-­subjective commonality which generates a common sense – a general understanding – of what the worldly objects produced and commonly encountered are, what they should or could be, and what they are worth. In this way, words create and maintain the intellectual and creative level of worldly reality and in so doing, enable it to transcend the material context of its production as a place of significance and meaning.        Rewind to Gramsci Chapter 2 Compare Arendt with Gramsci’s idea of ‘common sense’.

The core idea here is that the capacity for action to reveal and develop the unique qualities which mark out each and every person as an individual member of human kind lies in its world orientation: action transforms aggregates of worldly objects into situations. These situations provide the contexts for events, which, in turn, are the dramatic context of humans’ self-­revelatory action. The drama of action is produced by the collision of the dynamic energy of wilful human action with the profound uncertainties with which any situation involving human action is imbued. The dynamic quality of this continual creation expresses human actors’ inherent ability to act and speak in any way they choose. Conversely, the push and pull of the diverse understandings, intentions and actions of all those involved shapes an overall set of constraints on each individual’s freedom to act, and by acting, to take control of

60   Post-war debates their situation. Within this sea of activity, the limits of each individual’s experience, the particularity of each person’s understanding, the limits of knowledge, and the novelty of every action ensures that no one actor can be sure about what they or others will do next. They therefore cannot know what exactly is about to occur. Typically, and much to the bewilderment of many involved, such situations are shaped and moved by the actors’ lack of full knowledge of all the dimensions of their situation. Action scenarios provide an uncertain framework for their participants, because they are characterised by a lack of clear common objectives among the actors, many of whom come into situations with different understandings of what is going on and different hopes for what will follow. As a consequence of these uncertainties – the uncertain framework of individual action and the actor’s incomplete knowledge about and misguided understanding of their situation – the dramatic situations which frame human action are also characterised by a lack of certainty about their eventual outcome and a lack of certainty about the eventual destiny of those involved. Thus, individually and collectively, ‘we are not the authors of our destinies’, but rather ‘the actor(s) and sufferer(s)’ of our unfolding, uncertain lives (Arendt, 1977: 45). So, here is the drama of the human condition: thinking and acting for ourselves, we are the wilful human agents in the creation of events, but, not knowing just what our actions will lead to, nor, due to our unique and particular situation in relation to events, having full understanding of the objective dimensions of what is occurring, we cannot be the authors of events. In the end, each and all of us is subject to constant novelty and constant uncertainty.

Plurality and the web of relationships For Arendt, one of the most important features of human action is the communalising relationships built between people by their interactions, for it is in the binding together of disparate experiences that aggregates of individuality become collectivities. The conduct and witness of ‘words and deeds’ (Arendt, 1958: 176) provides the basic requirement of a functioning pluralistic community, that is, that each and all are able ‘to look upon the same world from one another’s standpoint, to see the same in very different and frequently opposing aspects’ (Arendt, 1977: 51). If human action is a dramatic interplay of human actors endeavouring to work out what their situation is, and to give a meaningful order to it, the relationships that it produces and which constitute the collectivity will be diverse and complex. They will also be as fleeting as the communicative interaction that produces them. To capture this transient complexity, Arendt composes the concept of ‘the web of human relationships’ (Arendt, 1958: 181–8). This web is the network of communications produced by word and deed and is made up of the push and pull of a multiplicity of different intangibles – ideas, understandings, intentions and apprehensions. It is enacted through time in the ongoing formulation of entirely new situations. Central to all this is the idea that plurality is the substantive content of the realm of action, a realm which provides the context for each individual’s self-­disclosure to occur and to have meaning. Self-­revelatory action requires witnesses to verify the act and thus the presence of the actor, and to make judgement on the qualities and consequence of the act and thus on the calibre of the actor. In short, ‘plurality is the basic condition of both speech and action’ (Arendt, 1958: 175). This plurality – the realm of the equal and the uniquely distinct – is no less than the public sphere.

Arendt   61

The public and the private In making this presentation, Arendt is intentionally presenting the public sphere as a distinct sphere of life, to be contrasted with its opposite, the private sphere of the familial household, which meets the species’ needs for security of life and reproduction through procreation and provides the labouring body’s need for food, rest and warmth. In setting up this dualism, Arendt is in fact endorsing the ancient Greeks’ original bifurcation of the vita active household and public life. However, she adds to it the notion of the market as a bridging quasi-­public sphere where people meet and discuss worldly objects and trade, but as Homo faber, always regarding each other as exploitable means to their own individual ends. For this reason, the market in itself is no more than an aggregate of private individual intentions. For Arendt, the public sphere in contrast, is essentially pluralistic, not just because it is comprised of a plurality of distinct individuals, but because it roots us into objective reality. Because the world is an artificial, human-­made construct, its objective status can only be relative. It cannot exist prior to or independently from the imaginations and the activities of those who produce it. The world’s capacity to provide an overarching context for every individual’s life is derived from the capacity of communicative action to inter-­relate distinct subjective positions and interpretations.

Action and politics Arendt’s notion of action, though self-­expressive, was also world-­oriented and as such, a form of practical creative action, or praxis, which the ancient Greeks understood as the definitive and self-­preserving activity of the political community, or polis. This idea works as follows: if people are to exist as creative individuals, they must act in concert, to establish and maintain a set of conditions in which creative action is enabled and protected. Such a set of conditions would amount to a public space in which to gather, speak and act. The public sphere is in essence an event (the gathering together of individuals to form a public), which is concerned to maintain its constitution as a public-­thing (republic). Thus, the public sphere is simultaneously made up of speech and action and provides the protective framework in which speech and action can prosper. The sphere is the realm of politics, in that it is the core and condition of the polis – the self-­preserving community of actors. This may seem remote from the common modern conception of politic, but it is recognisably political in its details. The framework of the public sphere can only be maintained by common consensus of its dimension. By definition, the sphere must give central place to public debate, and if the communality is to exist in a common world, it must also be the means to the pluralistic attainment of objectivity. For this reason, the political consensus will form around these necessities (or it will fail to hold). Thus there is an obligation to participate in public debate. It is an obligation that requires freedom for each participant to speak their mind, which in turn demands equality of citizenship. This necessarily involves equal status for each opinion-­giver as a participant in the pluralistic construction of coherent understandings of the situations that the community encounters. The equality of membership of a political community is the basic condition of citizenship – to be a citizen is ‘to be among one’s peers’ (Arendt, 1958: 41). Such equality is rooted in freedom of thought and free speech, for ‘everybody has to distinguish himself from all others’ (Arendt, 1958: 41). Here Arendt is articulating the notion of ‘equal but different’, which is a basic element of what is now called the politics of difference.

62   Post-war debates Equality of citizenship, Arendt argued, must also be independent of social standing. Social inequalities must not impinge on the ability of, or opportunity for, each member to voice their understanding, argue the point or give an opinion, for in such situations the basic needs of each person, their need to keep favour with their ‘social superiors’ in order to keep their job, house or some other feature of basic security, impinges on their liberty to think and independently, stunts their individual development and reduces them to servants of another’s will. The equality of citizenship does not, however, require equal status be given to each opinion. The quality of opinions varies in correlation with their capacity to explain phenomena and to persuade listeners of their veracity. For this reason, while the speaker has equal status as a member of the debating body, their opinions are to be tested in debate. It is such debates that lead to public judgement on the quality of the opinion and the status of the opinion holder as a thinker and debater.

Action, power and politics These debates develop our skills at being ourselves and provide us with the skilled judgement to know with a degree of sureness what our situation actually is. In this way action empowers us to do something together to shape our world and to order its relationship to nature. The capacity for any people to produce political power ‘corresponds to the human ability to . . . act in concert’; power, ‘belongs to a group’ (Arendt, 1973: 113). It is not a possession of the strong ruler or a direct consequence of possessing arms, power is an energy produced when people come together in speech and action and it ‘remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together’ (Arendt, 1973: 113). Thus the polity is not constructed by military power or written constitutions, it is a public space constituted by the ongoing participation of its members in fully public discussion and communal activity, focused on its constituent needs and aimed at its self-­ preservation. Such a public space is vital to human existence: ‘To be deprived of it, is to be deprived of reality’ (Arendt, 1958: 199). Only by living in a political community can people get a grasp of the objective conditions of their lives. Only by living in a polis can individuals be their selves in the world. Yet the public sphere is pressured in times of scarcity by the animal drive for self-­ preservation, and in times of plenty by the individualist self-­serving of Homo faber, so it often fails to survive or even to come into existence. Simply engaging in communal discourse and action does not do enough to maintain the public sphere. Indeed, ‘although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them . . . do not live in it’ (Arendt, 1958: 199). What is needed to preserve the public sphere is a specific type of praxis specifically aimed at its maintenance as a designated and protected space for the continuation of word and deed. This praxis is the political engagement with the ongoing task of constituting the public community. Contrasted with the conflict-­ridden notions of real politic, which characterised the political debate of her time and ours, Arendt’s vision of political life appeared hopelessly romantic, but the subtlety of her argument is that in challenging the conception of politics as a ruthless pursuit of the means of governance, it highlights and explains complex and confusing features that are commonplace in modern political life and that the real politic accounts gloss over. The scenario of confused endeavour set out in her account of human interactions, the complex and confusing web of relationships, the uncertainty of outcomes, the push and pull of contesting actors, looks markedly like what we would commonly see as the world of politics today. Arendt’s discussion of modern politics takes full note of the

Arendt   63 fact that it is full of tacticians who, like chess players, seek to elicit certain reactions from opponents as a means to obtaining strategic objectives. She was all too well aware that such activity conforms to the Machiavellian idea of politics as cunning strategic power play, and she noted that such activity, particularly on the international stage, represented the common acceptance of the Machiavellian principle that people can obtain power and control their destiny through the cunning deployment of force, to govern resources and people into the formulations they desire. Arendt counters that what the Machiavellian political actors struggle against is the fact that every reaction to an action is an action, and thus an unexpected initiation of events, in itself. For this reason, no actor can be sure that they will be what they desire. The creative novelty that drives and runs through every aspect of the web of human relations ensures that no one person or group can control the course of events, despite deciding on what actions they take.

       Rewind to Weber Chapter 1 See the similarity of this argument with Weber’s discussion of creativity and process.

The tendency of professional politicians to miss this point, Arendt claimed, is due to their confusion of politics with governance – the technical activity of making and imposing of laws. The legislator is not engaged in communicative action, but in translating ideas into objective form, in a manner similar to an artisan building the city walls. As a form of techné, law-­making and the imposition of law involves violence, in the form of coercive policing. This law-­making typifies all aspects of governance as techné; the management of the procedural (and therefore repetitive and predictable) systems that order social life. In contrast to procedural, coercive governance, political action generates power through the practical creative engagement with each novel and uncertain moment of communal existence. Politicians, who are trained to view human society as a functional system to be engineered and managed through the creation and imposition of regulatory laws, will always miss the point that the exceptional moment requires, not governance from a ruler or ruling elite, but creative thought, public discussion, collective decision-­making and communal action.

Discussion point How might Arendt’s distinction between politics as praxis and governance as techné be used as a tool for critical analysis of contemporary governmental politics?

The rise of ‘the social’ Arendt, uniquely, used the term ‘social’ as a completely negative designation. The social, says Arendt, is a hybrid, incorporating elements of both the public sphere of action and the private sphere of work and labour, in such a way that the presence of each undermines the integrity of the other and as a result, neither of them can exist in a coherent or full form.

64   Post-war debates Public action is reduced to private work – for example, choosing between political manifestos is reduced to private shopping for policies that serve individual and familial interests and life styles. Private lives are constantly exposed to the public – examples here would be media and state intrusions into and exposure of individuals’ sexual, religious and familial activities. Arendt argues that the rise of the social ‘from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere’ (Arendt, 1958: 38) was driven by the growing dominance of market-­driven economic life over all other aspects of human living, and by the prioritisation of the economy in the emerging ideology of liberalism. As liberalism – an expression of the consciousness of Homo faber (the producer and exchanger of worldly goods) – transforms into capitalism, the notion of production and exchange becomes seconded to the ideal of production for consumption. People become fascinated and then caught up in a novel, unnatural and endless cycle of production and consumption of their own making. As capitalist economies develop, everything and everyone increasingly becomes valued as consumable commodities; valued not for their enduring worldly status, but for the instant gratification that might be obtained by their consumption. Arendt was pointing here to the way that things are increasingly made not to endure, but to be used up quickly, with a maximum of short-­term gratification. Less clearly, but perhaps even more interestingly for our time, is the implication that, oddly and fetishistically, we become Animal laborans, the labourer and consumer, and we become the product of our labour and the object of desire that we wish to consume.

The social and socialism For Arendt however, unfettered capitalism was not the fullest expression of the social. Although economic liberalism drives the rise of the social, the intellectual and practical processes that have created the social and promote socialism, socialist government systematically reduces political life to social engineering and the technical governance of economic processes and social order. For Arendt, the crucial point is why social management became such an attractive idea for so many political actors and thinkers in modern times. In pursuing this question she argued that, as production and exchange of consumer goods – the organic ‘life process of society’ – came to be the prized dynamic of the liberal world (Arendt, 1958: 255), the desire to manage and direct the governance of the process becomes its governing principle. Arendt pointed to the derivative origins of the term ‘economics’ in the Greek Oikia Nomos – household management (Arendt, 1958: 33) – arguing that it is but a short step from concern with economic governance to household management – that is, to becoming focused on the welfarist management of animal needs, the state involving itself with family structures, dietary behaviour, sexual behaviour and reproduction. The household thus becomes the object of ‘political’ concerns. Basic animal and familial activities are no longer private, but subject to the ‘merciless exposure’ of public life (Arendt, 1958: 35) and to the controlling force of government. Conversely, ‘democratic’ politics is no longer the public activity conducted by the people together, transparently and openly in practical engagement with common circumstances (praxis). It becomes ‘governance’; a form of technical procedure (techné) designed and operated to shape and direct the economy of family and private life. It functions most efficiently under the logic of managerialism. Relationships of equality and openness give way to hie­ rarchies of knowledge, centres of command giving performative directives to outer layers of increasingly inferior bureaucratic functionaries.

Arendt   65        Rewind to Weber Chapter 1 See how Arendt is pursuing a Weberian conception of bureaucratic governance.

By the twentieth century, Arendt argues, the emerging social sphere, in a curious mix and match of capitalist commodification and socialist governance, has eroded and negated the core dualism of the ancient world; everything is simultaneously public and private, and as a consequence is neither of these things. This situation removes the basic conditions for human action. It therefore negates the human’s potential attainment of individual creative existence and it precludes the public discourse from which derives the attainment and maintenance of a pluralistically constructed objective reality rooted in the truth of common experience. As a consequence, people in modern society have become doubly alienated. The individual human is alienated from their creative self, and they are severed from the pluralistic communality that constructs a trustworthy, real world in which they can establish their place of belonging. As the enduring world is a construct held together by inter-­personal communicative action, alienation manifests in the disintegration of the world itself; no thing is valued for its endurance, rather it is designed to be consumed by the market, is transient and impermanent. In a world of permanent liquidity, there can be no firm locations, no enduring landmarks, no solid foundations, no grounds for judgement, no certainties about what will happen next. Arendt argued that in such situations, anomic and self-­absorbed individuals will run in panicky uncertainty to anything or anyone who appears to provide answers to the uncertainties, and are likely to fall for ideologies that claim to explain the causes and to be able to eradicate them, thus providing the cure for the fear-­inducing uncertainties of the dissolving world. This scenario, according to Arendt, accounts for the rise in popularity of socialist governments. This style of government, she argued, attempts to replace the lack of worldly solidity with the apparent certainties of dogma which is replicated in all ‘public’ media and dominating discourse in all open spaces. Where unfettered capitalism deconstructs the solid common world, socialism fills the common space with state governance. The lack of a public space and its constituent public discourse leads to the loss of a common world, without which each and all suffer from the loss of the pluralistic perspective needed to make informed and sophisticated judgement about their individual and collective situation. No-­one can know what is going on in the massive social complex they inhabit – everyone lacks knowledge and consequently each and all lack the power to constructively act in regard to their situation. In its attempt to eradicate the radical uncertainties and individual isolation produced by unfettered commodification, socialism creates a mirror image of radical replicated isolation in the form of manipulated masses.

Totalitarianism and the loss of politics For Arendt, the threading of Nazi and Stalinist ideologies with socialist rhetoric was not coincidental. The thread, she argued, stemmed from a misconception, originating with Marx, that humans’ definitively self-­expressive activity is labour. This misconception was applied by socialist governments and then appropriated by clever and ruthless gangsters to establish anti-­human totalitarian regimes. The viscous conclusion of this process was the distillation of all the negatives of socialism into the form of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism entails the total governance of space and time – a scenario which expresses and maintains

66   Post-war debates the loss of the public world. The first movement from socialism towards totalitarianism occurs when the plurality of the formal political process is reduced to a singular movement/ party state – the complex pluralisms of the political constitution are fused into a single technical tool designed for total governance of human existence: the single party state.

Arendt’s critique of Marx’s theory of labour Arendt’s critique of Marx’s theory rests on her claim that Marx confused the basic distinct elements of the human condition, labour (work) and action (praxis), conflating them into one activity which he defined as creative labour. This led him to believe that the human world was made by labour and that political action was a form of creative labour. Marx then encouraged a politics focused on the labouring condition of humanity, confusedly raising the concern with our animal condition of being to the status of a concern for our creative souls. Arendt argued that Marxist politics, even undertaken by the most philanthropic of souls, could not move their activities much beyond devising labour programmes.

The reduction of public authorities to a social tool enables totalitarian governors to occupy or close down spaces and places for public discourse – the parliament, media, the street. The loss of public space pulls from under the populace the ground upon which they may establish common sense understandings of what is happening around them and to them. The space for public discourse is closed and replaced with a centrally governed repetition of the state ideology. The lack of a place for debate and the lack of a space for creative action ensures that the fallacies of the ideology cannot be challenged and so, despite their inevitable lurches into ludicrous explanations for those events which have escaped state governance (natural disasters, technological or economic failures), the totalitarian ideology thrives uncontested and the richly textured and often surprising objectivity established by public discourse is replaced with superficially all-­explanatory, one-­dimensional dogma. The development of totalitarian regimes involves a shift from a politics of fear to a state of organised and constant terrorism. The trick of totalitarianism, which provides its purposeful energy and determines its principle of organisation, is the production and mainten­ ance of an organised state of constant uncertainty. To achieve this, totalitarians always construct a politics of fear, which they themselves recognise to be grounded in falsity, but which is necessary to clear the public sphere of difference, frighten any opposition into silence, and mobilise the masses to eradicate all forms of otherness. To this end, prospective totalitarians present their party as the guardians against threatening uncertainties. Any social, cultural or political uncertainty is pounced upon and transformed through propaganda into a fundamental threat attributable to and located in alien ‘others’, lurking within society and/or threatening from nearby external locations, and given apparent reality through covert acts of terrifying violence, all of which are ascribed to the imagined threatening aliens. The people become an animated mass; angrily driven by gut-­level fear, they set about eradicating the imagined cause of their fearfulness – hunting out and destroying agents of danger without and within. Totalitarians know that, where there is cultural heterogeneity, this fear-­driven quest for safety can become twisted into a drive for the security of sameness and that the ultimate end of such activity is the loss of civil society itself. Overly fearful citizens demand panoptic governance, undermining the world they seek to preserve. In such situations, citizens come to be seen as actual or potential enemies within, vigilantes prosper and civility withers.

Arendt   67 It is at this point that the shift to a mature and fully operational totalitarianism becomes possible. In situations where the totalitarian regime is mature, the politics of fear is replaced by the rule of terror: ‘Total terror uses the old instrument of tyranny but destroys at the same time also the lawless, fenceless wilderness of fear and suspicion which tyranny leaves behind’ (Arendt, 1986: 466). In its pure state, totalitarianism has eradicated all points of opposition. On achieving full control of the state and all forms of media, totalitarianism ‘replaces propaganda with indoctrination’ (Arendt, 1986: 341), which no longer confronts genuine opinion (as does the pseudo discourse of propaganda), but replaces discussion altogether with enforced pseudo truths. In this way, the totalitarian state is in total control of time and space and what passes for knowledge. It is not contested, has no enemies and therefore doesn’t need to mobilise the masses to serve its ends. It doesn’t need the mechanisms of propaganda and violence which produce and maintain uncertainty and fear. Total control enables the imposition of a state of terror; fearful uncertainty about the present and future is replaced with the production of terror-­inducing certainty: the state is monitoring all the dimensions of your life and controls your fate.

The regime of terror Arendt controversially argued that Nazism and (with less conviction) Stalinism were unique among governmental systems in that they alone had more or less completely become regimes of terror. Her case, as set out in Origins of Totalitarianism, rested finally on her portrayal of Nazi extermination camps as microcosms of the pure regimes of terror aspired to by larger totalitarian regimes. She argued that these camps were not some super-­intense manifestation of the politics of fear, although the creation of a politics of fear was a necessary prerequisite for their establishment. Such camps were, in fact, beyond politics, for no form of politics, no matter how corrupted, can function through the use of pure terror. Terror is useful to gangsters because it radically destabilises and weakens people, rendering them malleable for use. However, terrorising situations produced by acts of violence barely last longer than the terrorising act of violence itself, and while they may initially endure in the echoing form of ongoing fear, constant repetition of threats inevitably reveal them to be merely threats, unless they destroy their victim. Here, Arendt made the important point that terror is quite distinct from fear. Fear is a response to the uncertainties of a situation, while terror is produced by a perception of the certainty of one’s own destruction. The stark conclusion drawn from this distinction by Arendt was that government through terror alone requires constant proof of the real certainty that threatened destruction will occur. Everyone living under the regime must actually know that they will be destroyed. Thus, the functional principle of totalitarianism is the certain destruction of each and every human being within the society on which it feeds. In this vein, Arendt presented the death camps established under the Nazi regime of terror as exercises into anti-­human governance. They were, she argued, exemplars, showing to all who looked, that regimes of terror are scenarios where all power has gone, where only brute violence and the certainty of death remain – not simply the death of the human animal, but a step­by-step degradation of the human person until only a broken animal barely fit for slaughter remains. Before their physical destruction, the camp inmates were destroyed as moral individuals, a process which was effected by the minute-­upon-minute terror of the daily regimes. Here, wrote Arendt, was the evidence that showed how ‘the reduction of a man to a bundle of reactions separates him as radically as mental disease from everything within him that is personality and character’ (Arendt, 1986: 441). The process was completed by the forced participation in the brutalisation and destruction of their comrades (this effect extends to the

68   Post-war debates German soldiers who, having had their capacity for judgement and knowledge of truth stunted by social indoctrination, fall into the destruction of fellow human beings). Once they are destroyed as moral agents, the camp inmates become an isolated and compressed mass of pointless beings whose superfluous existence is ended in physical destruction. Arendt’s point here – in keeping with her whole philosophy – is that it is not the physical destruction of the human animal which is the real horror of the camps. The real horror of the concentration and extermination camps lies in the fact that the inmates, even if they happen to keep alive, are more effectively cut off from the world of the living than if they had died because terror enforces oblivion. (Arendt, 1986: 443) The space for action is closed, the victims are silenced, stunted, then broken until they disappear from the world of actors. It is here, at this bleakest point, that Arendt’s fears end; on a reflection of the horrors of her contemporaries’ recent past, on a warning in post-­war times to those who, to her way of thinking, persisted in the corruption of their political freedom by reinforcing processes of social slavery.

Critical comments Over the years, three constant themes have emerged in critical re-­evaluations of Arendt’s works. At the philosophical level, there have been challenges to her three-­part notion of the vita activa. There has also been negative reactions to her conception of politics itself, and there has been strong criticism of her conception of totalitarianism. In more recent times, Arendt’s work has also become a critical target for feminist political theorists.

Critiques of Arendt’s categorisation of activities Commentators such as Noel O’Sullivan (De Crespigny and Minogue, 1976) and Bihku Parekh (1981) disputed the possibility that human activity could be coherently sub-­divided into three competing elements (labour, work, action). They noted that many activities conducted on a day-­to-day basis involve elements of at least two of Arendt’s categories, or were hard to fit into any specific category. In her defence it can be argued that it is not necessary to read the activities as fully distinct and mutually exclusive. The distinction Arendt tries to establish is between the limits and aims that three different levels of consciousness bring to bear as they are actively expressed in the discernibly distinct public and private spheres of human activity.

Critiques of Arendt’s conception of politics Arendt’s arguments have long been dismissed by self-­defined ‘political realists’. They argue that, if politics is always conducted between equals in an inclusive community and is a public self-­revealing expression of participants in an established public sphere, there is nothing political to discuss about the dynamics of the participants relationships. It is too perfect to be real and too settled to be political. There is some power to these criticisms. However, her conception of politics as public discourse and communal action, with its core idea of pluralistic communal generation of power did influence young theorists of a growing alternative position, and in the late twentieth century it became part of the common language of peoples in Eastern Europe’s ‘velvet revolutions’.

Arendt   69 Key works: Orwell’s 1984 Orwell’s masterpiece was written in 1948 – during the same time span as Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. While his world presents a fictional future, it is one which bears a striking resemblance to Arendt’s portrayal of totalitarianism. Orwell’s fictional world is drawn from his perceptions of socialism, Nazism and of the broader social tendencies prevalent in the Britain of 1948. Like Arendt, he concentrates on the governance of all aspects of life, the use of propaganda to create ongoing political fear which tips over into terror, the closure of public space, the loss of a solid and secure common world and the destruction of the judging, acting human individual.

Discussion point Are there discernable tendencies towards totalitarianism in contemporary social and political scenarios?

On Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism has never been readily accepted by the academic or political world. From the outset, the argument in Origins of Totalitarianism was challenged on the basis of its historical claims. Political historians queued up to take Arendt to task for her impressionistic presentation and for incorrect details (Young-­Bruehl, 1982: 250–8). The discourse of political theorists was pressured by the heat of the empiricist historians, to such a point that a supportive commentator, Margaret Canovan, felt forced to concede that ‘if we turn her thought trains to their source . . . we find . . . her thinking about Nazism and Stalinism may be something of an embarrassment’ (Benhabib, 1996: xxi). However, it can be pointed out in Arendt’s defence, that the book is not a historical account, but is a historically informed, philosophical engagement with the loss of political life, presented as the formulation of its opposite in the tradition of dystopian writers such as George Orwell.

Feminist critiques of Arendt Arendt’s work has been marginalised in feminist political theory because of its lack of sensitivity to the gender specificity of the conceptualised sphere of politics in the tradition of political thought. This line of criticism is summed up in Adrienne Rich’s comment that ‘The withholding of women from participation in the vita activa, the “common world”, is something . . . from which she does not so much turn her eyes as stare straight through unseeing’ (Benhabib, 1996: 2). Despite this problem, Arendt’s work has some attractions for some feminists, not least because, underpinning her conception of authentic being-­in-the-­world is her notion of ‘natality’, understood as ‘bringing into being’ (Arendt, 1958: 176), in which Arendt twins the act of birthing with the communicative activity of speech: ‘If the creative capacity of human action corresponds to the fact of birth . . . then, speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualisation of the human condition of plurality’ (Arendt, 1958: 178). Arendt here is presenting philosophical foundations for a politics built on discursive communality between diverse but equal citizens. Such notions have since been fully articulated in feminist discourse.

70   Post-war debates

Final comments: dark times – past and present Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, with the shock of the Holocaust fresh in the mind, and the overarching threat of world destruction through nuclear war shadowing the light of each day, the bleakest prospects easily appeared as likely outcomes. Arendt’s call to ‘men in dark times’ can be seen as an appeal to the traditional political cultural sensitivities of her contemporaries. Seen this way, Arendt’s argument has a degree of historical interest for us, but it holds much more interest than that, for her analysis presents us with a scenario which is familiar from our own times. From our perspective, the rich mix of inventiveness applied in a very focused way to the crises of her times – to the politics of genocide, the creation of masses of refugees, the destruction of the earth, the violation of the human body, the rampant commodification of everything we make and indeed of our own selves, and the loss of a commonly sensed reality rooted in a common world – can be described as a fearful glimpse of the loss of modern people’s roots in pre-­ modern culture, and with it the loss of modernity itself. It is, in short, a fearful glimpse into our times. In Arendtian terms it is not hard to see or evaluate the current reduction of politics to economic management in national politics and the overwhelming of national polities by transnational economic elites in a progressive globalisation of capitalist economics and the self-­absorbed consumerist aesthetic which serves it. Most tellingly, perhaps, we can critically observe the new politics of fear – the manipulation of mass opinion in the creation of an ideological ‘war on terror’, the restrictions on civil liberties and the creation of new camps which isolate and dehumanise their inmates in processes that are worryingly close to those described by Arendt. The dangers that beset the political world of the mid-­ twentieth century and those that beset our own times are not as clearly distinct as we might have imagined.

Revision notes 1

2 3

4

Work and labour are necessary antecedents to action, but are less than fully humanising activities. Action consists of words and deeds expressing opinions, revealing presence and mediating individual perceptions into a common sense understanding which frames and guides human action. Politics is activity that is geared towards creating and preserving the public sphere necessary for humanising action. The social is conceived as a hybrid of the private household and the public sphere of politics. Governance is a modern misconception of politics, in which the hybrid public and private spheres are maintained. Totalitarianism is the opposite of humanising politics. It is a system designed to reduce human actors to amoral malleable beings to be consumed by labour and replaced when used up. Its logic is the regime of terror that prevails in its purest form in concentration camps.

Bibliography Arendt, H. ([1951] 1986) The Origins of Totalitarianism, London: André Deutch. Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, London: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. ([1961] 1977) Between Past and Future, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Arendt, H. ([1972] 1973) Crisis in the Republic, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Benhabib, S. (1996) The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, London: Sage.

Arendt   71 De Crespigny, A. and Minogue, K. (1976) Contemporary Political Philosophers, London: Methuen. Honig, B. (ed.) (1995) Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. Parekh, B. (1981) Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy, London: Macmillan. Young-­Bruehl, Elisabeth (1982) Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Further reading A book which provides a good introduction to the major ideas in Arendt’s work, as well as setting out and considering many of the criticisms of her work during her lifetime is Canovan, M. (1974) The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, London: Dent. It is highly suitable for anyone who is new to political theory and wishes to learn more about Arendt. For more recent interpretations of Arendt’s work, addressed in a more sophisticated manner than in her 1974 book, see Canovan, M. (1992) Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. It is a useful follow-­on text for advancing knowledge and deepening understanding of Arendt’s thinking. In Benhabib, S. (1996) The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, London: Sage, Benhabib examines Arendt’s thinking in the context of her experience and engagement with her condition as a Jew and as a woman, critically engaging with the traditional commentaries on Arendt and highlighting Arendt’s relevance to current times. To see Arendt’s core ideas about action, power and polity set out in a way that links them into a discussion of her categories of activity and contrasts them with other major modern and late modern theories of power, see Parekh, B. (1981) Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy, London: Macmillan. This is a very useful text for any student attempting to grasp the place of Arendt’s ideas in late twentieth-­century theory.

5 Oakeshott

Moral rules are abridgements . . . [which] concentrate into specific precepts considerations of adverbial desirability which lie dispersed in a moral language and thus transform invitations into prescriptions, allegiances to fellow practitioners into precise obligations. Oakeshott (1975)

Introduction Michael Joseph Oakeshott was born on 11 December 1901 in Chelmsfield, Kent and died just after his birthday in December 1990, at home in his former fisherman’s cottage in Acton, Dorset. Oakeshott was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he obtained his BA in 1923 and his MA in 1927. He became a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College in 1924, where he lectured, interestingly enough, in History until 1949. However, between 1940 and 1945 he undertook his military service with the Royal Artillery regiment, obtaining the rank of Captain. He moved on from Cambridge, briefly, to Oxford University, Nuffield College, as a Professorial Fellow for a year until becoming, most controversially, Professor of Political Science (a title that carries some irony, as we shall see) in the liberal-­minded London School of Economics and Political Science, a post he held from 1951 to 1969. During his tenure in the Political Science department, Oakeshott was credited with both improving academic standards and renewing the emphasis on personal freedom and responsibility. While there he also lectured at the universities of Birmingham and Manchester and was also a visiting Professor at Harvard University in 1958. From 1966 he was made a Fellow of the British Academy. Although Oakeshott’s curriculum vitae has him down as both a Professor of History and Political Science, in actuality he was neither. He is largely known for his philosophical writings, particularly (but not exclusively) those that concern politics. His work spans a period of over 50 years. His first book-­length exposition of his philosophical system, Experience and Its Modes, appeared in 1933, his last, On Human Conduct, in 1975. In between and, indeed, after (including after his death), came scores of articles on subjects such as religion, education and aesthetics. There is even one early text (written with G.T. Griffith) cheekily entitled ‘A Guide to the Classics; or, How to Pick the Derby Winner’! Oakeshott was nothing if not a maverick and I say that here not only for his witty use of a scholarly title for his book, but also for writing a ‘how to’ guide when he spent his whole academic life arguing against the possibility of such guides for conducting human affairs. This is the thesis most famously represented in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, first published in 1962.

Oakeshott   73 Throughout most of his career Michael Oakeshott was taken as either a small ‘c’ or large ‘C’ conservative by most of his critics. Many dismissed what he had to say because of this. Yet few rejected the charm of the man or his seductive writing style. One commentator described his writing as having ‘sentences, like Greek architecture, . . . at once beautiful and austere’ (McCabe, 1994). Several publications and book-­length commentaries since Oakeshott’s death have presented readers with more of Oakeshott’s thoughts, illustrating the depth of his thinking beyond a mere ideological classification. In particular, the publication of two volumes of collected essays, Morality and Politics in Modern Europe (1993) and Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life (1993) illustrate that far from having politics at the centre of his thought, Oakeshott actually had a moral concern. It is this view on Oakeshott that is argued for in this chapter. That is, Oakeshott ought to be taken as a philosopher who, on occasion, had something to say about politics from his particular philosophical point of view (an argument I have put forward in my book-­length text of Oakeshott’s work (Isaacs, 2006)). This perspective goes against most mainstream interpretation. It has been the norm to categorise Oakeshott either as a ‘conservative’ or a ‘liberal’ political thinker. At the time that Oakeshott was Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, the most readily available tools for scholars who wished to understand his work were either empirical or ideological. As the former was not applicable in his case, the latter held sway. So it was that Crick set the tone for the analysis of his work at this time by categorising Oakeshott as a ‘Tory pamphleteer’ (Crick, 1963). The above view became orthodox for many years. Yet over the last 15 years or so, commentators have begun to emphasise the liberal elements of his thought. For example, Franco argues that Oakeshott is a ‘classical liberal’ whose work can be set within the ‘liberal–communitarian’ debate.        Fast forward to Rawls and Nozick Chapter 8 See Chapter 8 for a discussion of contemporary liberalism and the challenge it faced from libertarian thinking in the 1980s.

Even when authors acknowledge that Oakeshott’s work is not easy to categorise they still often attempt to do so. As is the case with Lessnoff (1999), who argues that there are two Oakeshotts, who may be said to be divided between an ‘early’ and a ‘late’ philosophy (the first, more or less, conservative, the second, more or less, liberal). Although these studies have been rewarding in many ways, the desire to ‘box’ Oakeshott politically remains a key concern. The problem is that by employing this method they either subsume his thought under their political categorisation, or miss important parts of Oakeshott’s philosophical system. This chapter aims to add to the small but growing number of commentators who challenge the new orthodoxy that takes the defining characteristic of Oakeshott’s work as his liberalism. It is the contention here that this perspective, like all attempts to label his thought ideologically, reduces the overall content of what Oakeshott has to say. In terms of his political thought it is argued that rather than understand his political essays as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’, what he has to say about political theory and political practice ought to be contextualised within his philosophical system as a whole. In addition, it is maintained that his political writings are intimately bound to his theory of morals. For example, his

74   Post-war debates challenge to rationalism is, above all, a critique of the foreclosure of moral experience that the rationalist theory of knowledge implies. Such an argument does not follow the line that politics is unimportant for Oakeshott. On the contrary, it is argued that understanding the relationship between politics and morality in his philosophy indicates how important politics is for him. Politics is of great consequence for Oakeshott because it is intertwined with the general maintenance of the moral association that constitutes the civil condition. Moreover, politics provides a bridge between the private world of individuals and the public world of civil association. However, for Oakeshott all human activities have their limits and politics is no exception. Politics is important to practical living, but it is not the whole of life. Oakeshott’s work stands against the politicisation of all human activities (for example, in art and education) without denying that political thought and practice are legitimate and in specific ways rewarding endeavours.

The philosophical background to his thought Broadly speaking, Oakeshott’s philosophical system stems from the idealist tradition. The philosophical idealism which his thought is associated with begins by identifying reality with experience. Experience is self-­authenticating. There is nothing outside of it; there is no reality beyond experience to make it valid. Everything in experience is an idea, that is, part of consciousness. In this sense the world is a mental construct. Things exist, but never independent of ‘mind’. Thus, this kind of idealism is a system in which the objects of external perception are held to consist of ideas. Key concept: idealism Idealism refers to any philosophy that argues that reality is somehow dependent upon the mind rather than independent of it. Essentially idealism has it that our understanding of reality reflects the workings of our mind, that the properties of objects have no standing independent of how minds perceive them. However, we ought to be wary of generalised definitions as there is a deep history to the development of idealist thought and there are significant differences through the ages.

Although there are forms of idealism as old as Plato, Oakeshott’s work can be placed within a tradition that was largely initiated by Kant’s transcendental idealism. Kant termed the objects of experience (which exist in time and space – the necessary conditions of experience) ‘things-­in-themselves’. These objects were unknowable. He maintained that ‘things’ which we generally regard as purely external to ourselves are actually made of ‘forms’ or ‘moulds’ that exist in the individual’s mind, as well as from something outside of the mind. That which we know is a combination of these two elements; the subjective and the objective. ‘Things-­in-themselves’ are only known by coming into contact with the mind (and in this way they are ‘transformed’). Kant’s transcendentalism comes from his argument that phenomenal experience depends upon synthetic a priori (antecedent to experience) judgements. In other words, our experience presupposes a realm of unknow­ able reality which affects the sense but which we can only perceive in forms ordered by the a priori categories in our minds. Kant concluded that the empirical phenomena that science took as the sole reality were mere appearances. The empirically real world was ‘ideal’; a picture due to the functioning

Oakeshott   75 of the brain. As a result of this philosophical investigation Kant gave supremacy in his thought not to science and ‘pure’ reason but to practical reason and the will. His metaphysics led him to the opinion that the variety of experience should not be subordinated to the intellect alone. It is this point of view, along with Kant’s strong notion of the self, that is maintained in Oakeshott’s thought. Building upon the foundations of Kantian metaphysics, Hegel constructed an idealist philosophical system in a different manner. He agreed with Kant that what we can know must be imposed by the mind (that is, that the world is a world of ideas). But he rejected the ‘thing-­in-itself’ as unintelligible. Although Kant had stated that we could never know the ‘things-­in-themselves’, he maintained that ‘things’ were still there. This view betrayed an empirical realism in his thought that stood in a relation of tension to his transcendental idealism. Kant never fully explained how the categories of the mind and the ‘things-­inthemselves’ came together. It was through this gap that Hegel took German idealism. Hegel proposed that all that exists must originate in the mind. In so doing he offered an ‘objective’ notion of mind in contrast to Kant’s metaphysical subjectivism. For Hegel, all existence was a ‘form’ of one mind. The subjective/objective distinction only existed as precipitates of an undifferentiated experience prior to them both. This was Pure Being or the Absolute. The Absolute was the ultimate reality, an objective fact in which all things participate and from which all self-­consciousness originates. The Absolute was the essence of the world.

Key people: Hegel (1770–1831) Oakeshott cites Hegel as one of his greatest influences. Hegel’s monistic idealism sought to develop a philosophical system that could integrate a number of supposedly binary oppositions into a ‘Whole’ or ‘One’ so as to show how all things are ultimately relational. Mind and nature, the subject and the object, the state, history, art, religion and philosophy were all involved in this great enterprise. His work is one of the most influential in western philosophy, having an impact on Marx, the British idealists, Sartre, and more recently on contemporary thinkers such as Jacques Lacan and Jurgen Habermas.

Hegel associated truth and rationality with the Absolute. He maintained that thought progressed through various historical stages. Each historical movement was part of a rational evolutionary process which would end with its final realisation in the Absolute. When this occurred humankind would understand the true identity of all existence and their own being (they would become God, a role some have argued Hegel assumes for himself). Like Hegel, Oakeshott presents a monistic idealism (at least in Experience and Its Modes). Furthermore, he too maintains that ‘the real is rational, and the rational is real’, a central tenet of Hegel’s dialectic. However, he strips his metaphysics of any appeal to an essentialist transhistorical Absolute. In so doing Oakeshott avoids the tradition of rationalist (as distinct from rational) thought that the ‘Left’ Hegelians adopted, most notably Marx. At Oxford University, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a small but highly regarded circle of philosophers developed a school of English idealism. Of this set, Francis Bradley had the most influence upon Oakeshott’s thought. In Appearance and Reality, Bradley put forward his own notion of the Absolute which maintained Hegel’s monism but equated the Absolute with the world of all human experience. Bradley maintained that the objective world could not be viewed as a collection of properties, as empiricism demands.

76   Post-war debates Rather, the unity and character of things is given in the relatedness of its properties (that is, in relation to its ‘other’). Every appearance was a constituent of reality. This reality he terms the Absolute or Immediate Experience. Thought, through its analytical activity, breaks up the whole which is experience into an apparent plurality. These different spheres of experience are distinguished by their contents. Bradley called them the ‘modes of experience’. The modes are independent worlds of experience that exist in isolation from each other. Although he never gave a systematic account of the modes, Bradley maintained that among the separate worlds of human experience were the modes of science, religion and politics as well as the distinct experiences of sensory perception, dreams and desire. All human action took place within one of the modes. For Bradley, the only truly worthwhile action was directed towards the self-­realisation of the whole of experience (rather than with a particular mode of experience). This could be obtained through reflection upon all human thought, that is, through contemplation of all the different modes of experience. And this was the activity that was known as philosophy.

Oakeshott’s philosophical thought By the 1930s, when Oakeshott published his first (and only) book-­length account of his philosophical system, the idealist premise from which he began his elucidation was widely considered to be refuted by a new form of empiricism. In the modern era empiricism has had a strong tradition in British philosophy, starting with Locke and running through Berkeley and Hume. In the twentieth century this tradition was enhanced by advanced scientific explorations (such as the physics of Einstein) and the New Mathematics. These discoveries laid the ground for the logical positivism of Russell, Whitehead et al. It is against the dominance of this field of British philosophy that Experience and Its Modes must be understood. Given that part of the argument set out here is that Oakeshott’s political writings have to be understood in the context of his philosophy (and moral concern) the term ‘philosophy’ (as Oakeshott understood it) needs a little further explanation. Oakeshott understood the term philosophy to a be a form of human experience that aims to use thought to explain the presuppositions of all other areas of human life. These other areas Oakeshott calls (at various times) the ‘modes of experience’, the ‘voices of mankind’ or human ‘practices’. What is meant by each of these concepts shall be explained below. Suffice to say here that each of these terms are used by Oakeshott in a relatively consistent manner to capture the character of four main areas of human discourse: science; the arts; practice (which includes politics); and history. In his earliest work Oakeshott states that philosophy is able to undertake this explanatory task because it is the only type of experience that has no presuppositions, being pure thought. However, this view is later revised. What remains the same for Oakeshott’s understanding of philosophy throughout is that philosophy is taken to be a critical theoretical standpoint from which to assess all other areas of human life. Philosophy cannot take the place of or ‘solve’ the ‘problems’ of any other human activity. Rather, it is a theoretical posture outside of the activities themselves. As an outsider, philosophy can never subscribe any specific remedies even though under its own terms it may see ‘errors’. The criterion by which philosophy seeks to explain science, history, practice and the arts is one of coherence. The notion of coherence is one that arises out of the idealist philosophical tradition. Without coherence, Oakeshott argues, each of the worlds of human experience could not function. It is the role of the philosopher to illustrate how these worlds maintain their identities, even in the face of the idealist-­inspired critique that no one human activity can, in itself, be completely coherent.

Oakeshott   77 Discussion point Is it possible to separate theory and practice, and philosophy from ‘practical life’ as Oakeshott understands it? Many critiques have argued that this position merely trivialises philosophy, or turns it in to an ‘aesthetic’ enterprise. Oakeshott argues forcefully that it is actually ‘morally’ dangerous to bring theory and practice together. What do you think? Political activists would argue that ideas are developed about society and politics and then put into practice. Karl Marx is perhaps the greatest example of someone who believed in this. Gramsci (see Chapter 2) also develops this idea of ‘praxis’. Compare Oakeshott’s views with those of Gramsci and try to form an idea of where you stand in this debate.

Although his philosophical system underwent some revisions, it stayed remarkably true to the original ideas set out in Experience and Its Modes. The conceptual language may have changed over the years, but not the basic principles upon which these ideas were constructed. In this respect we would argue against Lessnoff, who maintains that Oakeshott’s early philosophical thought did not leave many traces in his later work and if it had he ‘would not have become the great political philosopher of later years’ (Lessnoff, 1999). In Experience and Its Modes, ‘experience’ is described as what is concrete, the ‘given’, the Whole and, even, the Absolute. All that is experienced takes place within it. Experience constitutes a world of internal relations that is coherent and complete, a ‘One’, not a ‘Many’. Experience implies thought and judgement (and a thinking and judging self) and so it is to be understood as a world of ideas. All sensations, perceptions, intuitions and feelings are degrees of judgement and, therefore, ideas. Experience, then, is a world of ideas. It is not that experience is constituted by particular ideas. Rather ideas are ‘arrests’, ‘accidents’ or ‘arbitrary points’ which analysis or abstraction have ‘broken’ from experience. They are what have fallen short of the whole or concrete. Each arrest is a world of abstract ideas (a mode) that is achieved in experience. That is, what can become complete and maintain itself. The modes are distinguished from other worlds in respect of the precise assertions that they embody. Oakeshott states that the development of a world of ideas proceeds by way of ‘implication’. That is, the unity of a given world of ideas is achieved solely on the basis of its internal relations, and not in relation to other systems of ideas. This understanding of experience as a world of ideas is not based upon the elements of a mode being united by an essence, principle or common factor. Rather, Oakeshott’s notion is of a fluid and plural unity in which every element is indispensable and yet none immune from change. The unity of a world of ideas stems from its coherence. By this, Oakeshott refers to a ‘process’: ‘What is achieved in experience is an absolutely coherent world of ideas, not in the sense that it is ever actually achieved, but in the more important sense that it is the criterion of whatever satisfaction is achieved’ (Oakeshott, 1933). The number of modes, Oakeshott suggests, may be infinite. But the most common, and the most open to philosophical analysis are history, science and practice. Each of these might be understood as a self-­sufficient meaning system or discourse. Historians, scientists and individuals in the practical mode view the world from different systems of meaning. For example, the scientist analyses H2O, which is different from the everyday practical understanding of water. Oakeshott maintains that the subject understands the things of experience only as part of a ‘mode of behaviour’ (that is within a particular discourse). The ‘things’ which make up a

78   Post-war debates particular mode have no essence. The identity of a ‘thing’ is only maintained by its relations in a mode. And in so far as ‘modes of behaviour’ are never fixed, the identity of any thing in reality has no fixed or original substance. Ideas belong to one mode only. The modes are irrelevant to one another. To confuse them amounts to what Oakeshott calls ‘ignatio elenchi’, the fallacy of arguing to the wrong point. This occurs when the assumptions of one world of experience passes to another (and this is important when it comes to his critique of rationalism in politics). However, Oakeshott maintains that this is an inherent feature of the modes. The various worlds of experience always pertain to be the coherent concrete world of the whole of experience, but only philosophy can be identified with the totality of experience and, therefore, with truth and reality. Philosophy is a manner of thinking which is dissatisfied with anything less than a complete and coherent world of experience. Its chief responsibility is to present a ‘criteria’ (a point of view) from which to highlight the validity of the modes and clarify their basic presuppositions and purposes. Oakeshott states that it is not a kind of experience but experience which has become self-­critical and self-­conscious: ‘Philosophical experience, then, I take to be experience without presupposition, reservation, arrest or modification’ (Oakeshott, 1933).

Oakeshott and ‘political’ philosophy Philosophy for Oakeshott is then not the sum total of all experience, nor is it a specialised form of knowledge. It cannot take the place of the modes, nor can it abolish them. It is nothing more than a critical standpoint and nothing less than an explanation of the modes of human life. This view of philosophy that Oakeshott presents makes a fundamental distinction between theory and practice. Philosophy is concerned with a manner of explanation. The only thing that matters with a philosophy is its coherence. Time and place are irrelevant, philosophy and history are distinct. Practice is understood to be a mode of human experience that is based upon a world where individual actions attempt to alter unsatisfactory circumstances for preferable states of affairs. This may be done, in Oakeshott’s view, for selfish or unselfish reasons. Politics is part of practical life. It involves ‘attending to the arrangements’ of particular circumstances. There can be no ‘political’ philosophy as such because politics falls short of the criteria of philosophy; the pursuit of an absolutely coherent world of ideas. A purely ‘political’ philosophy would be an attempt to take a particular mode of experience, that of practice, as the standpoint of the totality of experience. Therefore, to speak of a ‘political philosophy’ is a non-­sense and a misnomer. Although Oakeshott acknowledges that every philosophy necessarily has a time and a place (and that texts may always be read in a historical mode), it is insignificant to it as philosophy. Whether it is coherent or not has nothing to do with its setting. So, when we look at the ‘classic’ texts of political thought we do not look for their authors’ political dispositions, still less their political opinions. The concepts which they use, ‘justice’, ‘natural law’, sovereignty and so on, must be understood as explanatory concepts – part of their systems of thought. To abstract Mill’s ‘democracy’ from his philosophy would be to distort it’s meaning. Such concepts should not be given the appearance of explanations themselves. This reduces the philosophical content of an author’s work. When their ideas are treated in this manner it turns them into a ‘political theory’. A philosopher who has a sophisticated understanding of political life has his thought misrepresented and is labelled a

Oakeshott   79 ‘democrat’ or ‘liberal’ or whatever. What are truly explanatory terms are taken to be prescriptive concepts with an injunctive force. All that is properly philosophical about their work is lost. In The New Bentham (Oakeshott, 1991) Oakeshott’s method is employed to expose Bentham as a political theorist rather than the philosopher he pertains to be. Against those who see in his ideas the operation of a keen and original mind, Oakeshott argues that Bentham is a philosophe par excellence. Those who defend him do so on misconceived grounds. His greatness is attributed to his anticipation of contemporary views. But this ignores the undeveloped character of his thought. The preoccupation with the supposed effects and influences of a philosopher not only results in a misjudged opinion about their stature, but also prevents a true understanding of their thought. Bentham belonged firmly to the eighteenth century according to Oakeshott. The grounds and reasons underlying his conclusions were those of this time, he was nothing if not a conventional thinker. Bentham never examined his own presuppositions and never attempted to elucidate his first principles. As well as exposing intellectual pretenders, Oakeshott applied his method to distinguishing writers of originality. He did this most profitably in his work on Thomas Hobbes. Much has been made of the fact that Leviathan was said by Hobbes to be ‘occasioned’ by the present disorder. But in his study Oakeshott does not emphasise this historical reading. Rather, he looks at what he calls Hobbes’ master concepts of ‘will’ and ‘creation’. Oakeshott warned against abstracting certain political opinions from Hobbes’ thought that might reduce the philosophical manner of his thinking to a handful of simple propositions. He believed that commentators had not appreciated the systematic character of his work, but had taken his writings as a mere collection of ideas. Moreover, he argues against the inappropriate moral reading of Hobbes. For example, the claim that Hobbes presents a picture of human nature as essentially self-­centred: When we turn to what Hobbes actually wrote, and treat it as a systematic whole, we find that the essential selfishness of man is not, in Hobbes, a premise, but (if the doctrine is to be found anywhere) is a conclusion, the result of a long and complicated argument. His premise is a doctrine of solipsism, a belief in the essential isolation of men from one another, and expounded as a theory of knowledge. (Oakeshott, 1946) Oakeshott’s views about the character of political thought lead him to a not unsurprising sceptical conclusion about its possible achievements: The analysis of general ideas associated with political activity in so far as it removes some of the crookedness from our thinking and leads to a more economic use of concepts, is an activity neither to be overrated or despised. (Oakeshott, 1991) Oakeshott hoped that the possible benefit of such an analysis might be a more profound understanding of political activity and our political tradition. This could, possibly, make us less prone to the seductions of political ideologies that purport to offer a clear lead in political conduct, when no such guides exist. This comment seems to indicate that Oakeshott unites theory and practice, at least, to some degree. But in reply to such suggestions he always denied this possibility. In a well

80   Post-war debates known exchange of views, Raphael (1964) criticised Oakeshott’s understanding of political thought. First, he argued that past political philosophers had practical as well as theoretical purposes in their writings and it was false to separate the two. Second, to recommend an explanation is tantamount to recommending a way of thinking and, thus, a type of behaviour. On the first point, Oakeshott replied (Oakeshott, 1965) that it was plausible that philosophers had practical aims but he doubted whether these general prescriptive expressions could be related to particular recommendations about what to do in practical circumstances, which was how political decisions were derived. Furthermore, even if this could be shown it would not provide strong grounds for maintaining the position that political thought was both explanatory and practical. Nor could it show that such an activity would be capable of reaching valid conclusions, which, of course, it could not do for Oakeshott because of irrelevance. To assert that a philosopher is to be found writing in an explanatory manner and an injunctive one is to say nothing more than that he is both ‘philosopher’ and ‘preacher’. On Raphael’s second point, Oakeshott argues that this is an equivocal proposition. A writer who offers us an explanation ‘recommends’ it as just that, an explanation. This does not carry injunctions about how to behave in particular circumstances. To reach a decision about what to do and to recommend it as an argument does not require recourse to a philosophical explanation of conduct – the two are separate. I have mentioned this confrontation because it also focuses upon Oakeshott’s theory of modality, as well as the distinction between theory and practice. In terms of the latter, I think Oakeshott does largely sustain the division between theory and practice. As I have shown, its conceptual premise stretches back to his theory of human action and knowledge given in Experience and Its Modes, and is described in different conceptual language in Rationalism in Politics and throughout his body of work in an amazingly consistently manner. In relation to his theory of modality, I think it is worth reiterating Oakeshott’s reply to Raphael’s first point. He states that an individual may write as ‘a philosopher’ and ‘a preacher’. This implies a fluidity of movement between the modes of thought. It may be that there is an argument to suggest that Oakeshott never sufficiently sets out this fluidity, and he does describe the modes as irrelevant, the ‘voices’ as not finally meeting, so implying that there is some kind of distance between the modes of thought. But it is equally true to say that under Oakeshott’s terms it is also possible to understand the modes as discourses that may be interpreted at the same moment under the mind-­set of both, say, philosophy and practice. There may be an ambiguity here, but unless we are to take Oakeshott’s philosophical system as incredibly rigid and fixed (which would seem to go against the analysis set out here as well as the whole tone of his thought) then there must be room for interpreting Oakeshott’s thought as open and allowing for more than one process of thought, one form of explanation, one way of arguing a point at the same time.

Oakeshott, practice and politics In Political Education (Oakeshott, 1991a) another theoretical mark is set down. Alongside the notions of ‘conversation’ and ‘voices, ‘language’ and ‘literature’ the idea of ‘tradition’ is introduced. This concept was re-­articulated in On Human Conduct (Oakeshott, 1975) in terms of the more philosophically exact notion of ‘practices’. Had Oakeshott used this term earlier, much of the negative controversy that surrounded the notion of ‘tradition’ might have been avoided. For him ‘tradition’ is used not in a historical manner but a philosophical one. Furthermore, it takes his work into the terrain of non-­foundationalism more overtly than perhaps any of the concepts we have looked at so far.

Oakeshott   81 Oakeshott’s ‘tradition’ carries with it no injunctive force but attempts to explain the preconditions that enable human actions to take place. Human activities are, inevitably, ‘traditional’. A ‘tradition’ is a further elucidation of the idea that a practical or moral self is ‘free’ in so far as they belong to a world in which their individual, self-­determined character is a presupposition. ‘Tradition’ is not, therefore, a constraint upon an individual’s ‘freedom’ but part of its precondition. In practical discourse we reflect upon proposals about what to do, and recommend or justify them in argument (Oakeshott, 1991a). In deliberating upon a situation that arises in practice we bring with us a variety of beliefs, emotions, approvals and disapprovals, preferences and aversions, feelings and so on. All these pull in different directions. They do not constitute a self-­consistent ‘principle’ capable of delivering an unequivocal message about what we should do. It is this whole world of deliberation that Oakeshott calls a ‘tradition’. Practical discourse is the process by which we elicit from this ‘tradition’ decisions about what to do in particular circumstances. ‘Traditions’ do not only appear in individual propositions but exist also in institutions and a whole range of activities. Oakeshott maintains that while the voice of practice is one that consists largely of argument, the deliberating procedure that he calls a ‘tradition’ is a conversation. This, it seems to me, is because it is the whole world of experience from the standpoint of practice. Oakeshott continues that ‘tradition’ is not fixed, but rather is dynamic. However, change is slow and its main feature is that of continuity. In On Human Conduct Oakeshott relates this to the idea of ‘nodal points’. In an unfortunate but rather cheeky use of Burke’s (1986) phrase, Oakeshott characterises ‘tradition’ as constituted by the past, present and future; between the old, the new and what is yet to come. But that his usage is different to Burke’s is not only discernible by what I have argued above, but also by his understanding of the practical past, that shall be shown in the next chapter. It is, of course, ‘tradition’ as it applies to politics that is of the greatest concern to Oakeshott in this essay. Like any other activity that is part of practice, politics depends upon a ‘traditional’ manner of behaviour. Because of this understanding of human activity, politics is defined as ‘the activity of attending to the arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together’ (Oakeshott, 1991a). It is ‘attending’ rather than ‘making’ because the activity builds upon existing circumstances. Furthermore, the arrangements enjoyed always exceed those needing attention. Oakeshott describes political activity carried out in this manner as ‘the pursuit of intimations’. This is not a description of what motivates people or even what people may think they are doing, but what they succeed in doing. In making a practical decision of a political kind we determine the relative importance in the given circumstances of the various intimations that derive from our ‘tradition’. We may, as a starting point, characterise what Oakeshott is saying here as nothing more radical (or reactionary) than that which has been understood under the categories of political science to be the ‘incremental’ character of decision-­making. Furthermore, although he would never consider it important (much less a possibility) many studies that attempt to explain the British system of government correspond to Oakeshott’s position. There is a likeness here but, of course, in the end this is a philosophical concept. As I have mentioned above, the idea of ‘intimations’ may be traced to Bradley’s understanding of ‘inference’ that appears in Experience and Its Modes as ‘implications’. The idea of ‘inference’ was used by Bradley to illustrate the constructed and ever-­changing understanding of identity that constitutes a world of ideas. Oakeshott took this notion to explain the manifold, fluid character of knowledge within a mode of experience. Now we find it here, in essay form.

82   Post-war debates The notion of intimations is designed to show that the kind of knowledge that illuminates political practice is not a guide, an ideology or dogma of any kind. In politics we rely upon what we already know as part of our ‘traditional’ way of acting. Relevant political reasoning exposes the sympathy for a particular intimation and attempts to demonstrate that it should be recognised. But, Oakeshott admits, his notion is an elusive concept. There is no way to elucidate the intimations worth pursuing without making mistakes, and the effect of a pursuit may not have the intended result. This is an inherent part of political practice. This view is expressed in perhaps his most famous quote. In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea: there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-­place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to stay afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion. (Oakeshott, 1991a) It follows from all that has been said that, for Oakeshott, governing is a specific and limited activity. It is the provision and custody of general rules of conduct that enable people to pursue the activities of their choice. Government does not decide where the intimations are going, but upholds and amends laws to ensure the ground rules for their coexistence. It keeps the conversation going but does not determine what is said. The business of ruling so perceived would be based upon a form a government understood as ‘civility’. This is an idea that does not receive its full elucidation until On Human Conduct. It is not hard to see why it is that Oakeshott has been taken as a liberal. The language of ‘conversation’, ‘voices’, ‘tradition’, and ‘intimations’ all adds up to a view of politics that resembles many of the features of classical liberalism. It recalls, for example, Hobbes’ and Locke’s ideas of a limited state and a large civil society. If there is one area in which Oakeshott appears most as a classical liberal it is in his economic views. In the Political Economy of Freedom (Oakeshott, 1947/8) he argues that the right to private property is a form of economic organisation that is compatible with the political freedoms that we enjoy.        Fast forward to Rawls and Nozick Chapter 8 On issues regarding private property, see Chapter 8 regarding economic liberalism and redistributive justice.

The ‘freedom’ he discusses is not a developed theoretical construct, but a ‘way of living’. Freedom begins not with an abstract definition but with what is already there. That is, Oakeshott is not concerned to outline an ideological point of view but merely to try and explain philosophically what it is we take as our political freedom. The most notable feature of this he finds as the absence of large concentrations of power. This is maintained by the rule of law. It is this character of our political system that Oakeshott argues private property upholds. The idea of private property put forward is one that neither tolerates monopolies nor is merely laissez-­faire. Rather, it is one that is maintained by the law in order to promote ‘effective competition’.

Oakeshott   83 It is notable that in these essays there is a moral component. Whenever Oakeshott discusses economics (and this is a task undertaken as a philosopher not an economist) he always subordinates it to a moral concern. For example, he writes that ‘maximum productivity’ is one of the most damaging moral superstitions of our time. This is because the ‘good life’ here is understood as nothing more than the enjoyment by more and more people of more and more of everything. Here Oakeshott outlines what in On Human Conduct he describes in more detail as an enterprise association. This is an instrumental form of association that he argues has most often been taken for the whole of the civil condition. But what is lacking in such associations is that they do not allow for the full expression of moral actions. In respect of what he says about economics, Oakeshott may be taken as a classical liberal, but, I would argue, that such a view fails to see the overall philosophical context of what he is saying. We could, if we were searching for political labels, find others. He is, of course, often associated with ‘conservatism’, and has been associated with anarchism. While these labels may be useful in a limited sense, in the end they reduce Oakeshott’s thought. Politics was important for Oakeshott as part of his general philosophical concern with practical experience and the moral life. Only by divorcing politics from this context have writers been able to stick labels upon what he has to say. Oakeshott’s idea of philosophy is to explain rather than prescribe. As government is part of our practical life he theorises it the way that he sees it and that, inevitably, means taking account of the British liberal tradition. In so doing he draws not upon an ideological criteria but on the idealist understanding of the state which takes this concept in broad terms. In one of his first articles about the state (Oakeshott, 1993b) he addresses the question of its character. He argues that although we are faced with countless theories about the state, this should not prohibit analysis. To be a concrete fact the state must be self-­subsistent. That which fulfils this criteria is the, ‘totality in an actual community which satisfies the whole mind of the individuals who comprise it.’ Oakeshott goes on to reject the separation of the state from society and ends up with a definition of the state that fits the general character of British idealism. That is, the state is understood not merely as a ‘political machine’, but comprises social and political influences, institutions and associations. It is only in relation to the state so conceived that individuals enjoy their freedom (and in this there is something of a Hegelian point of view). Oakeshott’s understanding of economics and the state reveals not a ‘political’ point of view but a philosophical one. It should be clear that his notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘intimations’ stem from a particular idealist tradition of understanding the world of human conduct. All that being said, there is an aspect of Oakeshott’s writing that is undoubtedly conservative. This is not an ideological persuasion but an intellectual style underlined by a philosophical standpoint. In On Being Conservative, Oakeshott outlines what he takes to be the contemporary character of the conservative disposition. Conservatism, he says, has nothing to do with nostalgia for the past but is a tendency to esteem what is familiar in the present. It is a disposition that appeals to those able to enjoy current opportunities and this is more likely to be found in the old than the young. The conservative is wary of change (which is only revered by those who esteem nothing), he prefers slow innovation and values continuity. The conservative understands that not all modernisation is an improvement. Oakeshott acknowledges that the fascination for what is new predominates. Nevertheless, the conservative disposition is appropriate in many situations and is often the usual course of our inclinations. Whenever activities involve present enjoyment and not the pursuit of profit, reward or result, they can be said to be conservative. This includes a large variety of human activities, not least of all friendship.

84   Post-war debates        Rewind to Schmitt Chapter 3 See Schmitt for a very different, and more ideological, version of conservative thought.

Oakeshott’s conservatism is not based upon a belief in the wisdom of history. Nor is it a view of the world he wishes to prescribe. But underlying his conservatism is a philosophical explanation of the way we act. That is, within a ‘tradition’, the ‘voice’ of which belongs to a world of experience in the ‘conversation’ of mankind. Oakeshott’s conservatism is indicative of the general intellectual style that may be said to be the central strain of philosophical political theory. In this respect he is in a long line of thinkers from Plato to Arendt. There is a conservative strain that runs through the tradition of political theory, which is intellectual rather than political. Arendt’s ‘web of relationships’ is a good example of the kind of limits to human action that political philosophers have discerned since Plato.

Rationalism and politics Given all that has been said, what is the most appropriate way to approach the most famous of Oakeshott’s essays? I would like to suggest that it ought to be situated alongside a broader understanding of his ‘politics’ and philosophy as a whole. Moreover, I think it can be seen as articulating a central theme of his work, but in a particular way. Underlying the caricature of the rationalist that we find in this essay is a philosophical position that is spelt out in Experience and Its Modes and On Human Conduct. It is a view that looks upon rationalist knowledge as one that, more than any other, diminishes the possibility of a moral life. This is because the rationalist is symbolic of a kind of technical knowledge that undermines moral conduct. As we have seen, morality and ‘religion’ reside in practice. They rely for their very existence upon a form of knowledge that is learnt, hard to articulate other than in the doing, and governed by non-­quantifiable criteria. This sensibility is put at risk by the dominance in practical experience of the type of knowledge that the rationalist promotes. In Rationalism and Politics Oakeshott is concerned with modern rationalism and its penetration into politics. His critique is not confined to any particular political persuasion. So, while he deemed Marxism to be the most ‘stupendous’ of all political rationalisms, he also berates Hayek for devising a plan to resist all planning. The propositions of rationalism are, initially, set out by way of a characterisation of a ‘rational man’, a person governed solely by reason. Such an individual is equipped with all the modern techniques of analysis. Armed with these he believes that he may find an infallible guide in political activity. All political problems (and for the rationalist politics is primarily about solving a series of problems) may be resolved by the intellect and by rational technocratic administration. The rationalist holds no other conception of politics than that of seeking perfection. He has no sense of the variety of life or its ambiguity, things which makes universal prescriptions unworkable. Nothing exists which is of value to him. He has no understanding of accumulated experience, custom, habits or tradition. Everything needs to be changed, destroyed, criticised. The only appreciation of political practice that he enjoys is derived from a chosen ideology: ‘That formalised abridgement of the supposed substratum of rational truth contained in the tradition’ (Oakeshott, 1991b).

Oakeshott   85 At the centre of rationalism there is a doctrine about knowledge that supplies the rationalist with his belief in the intellect and faith in prescriptive politics. This was the conviction that man could reach an ever-­greater understanding about himself and thereby increase his control over his environment. In opposition to this point of view, Oakeshott maintains that all human activities involve two distinct but interrelated types of knowledge. First, technical knowledge that can be formulated into rules – such knowledge has the appearance of certainty and is amenable to being written down in books. Second, practical knowledge that cannot be formulated into rules – it is a form of knowledge that is acquired in practice, and because of this it appears to be imprecise. However, no activity is complete without it. This notion of practical knowledge has similarities to Ryle’s ‘knowing how’ and Polanyi’s ‘tacit knowledge’. The rationalist is under the illusion that technical knowledge is the only kind there is. But knowledge of a technique is not conjured from thin air, it presupposes and reformulates knowledge that is already there. It is only by ignoring or forgetting the total context of knowledge that a technique can be made to appear self-­contained and certain. The world, according to Oakeshott, is littered with rationalist projects. Amongst their number are; ‘The Declaration of the Rights of Man’, The Beveridge Report, nationalism and any grand plan for global government. What Oakeshott was attempting to do in this essay was to illustrate how technical rationalisation had come to dominate political life, and to point out how this was a consequence of the Enlightenment obsession with scientific method.        Rewind to Weber Chapter 1 See Weber’s classic sociological interpretation of modern technical rationalisation.

That is not to say that science, as a manner of thinking, was to blame for rationalism. Rather, the problem was that science had been taken out of its modal criteria and applied to an irrelevant world of experience. Politics was, therefore, not understood as part of practice but as a set of ideas that could be set down and related in ideologies, rules and books. Just like the cook who makes a dish not from experience but from a pre-­set list of ingredients, political practitioners developed all manner of guides for their business but, as Oakeshott puts it, ‘it generates ideas in their head but no taste in their mouths’ (Oakeshott, 1991b). For Oakeshott practical experience presupposes a judging, willing self, and a self-­ reflective individual responsible for their acts. The character of practice is such that there is no sure way of either deciding upon an action (from a ‘tradition’) or making sure of its outcome (we can only ‘intimate’). In contrast, the rationalist takes practice as a field of problems that can be solved under the terms of science. The rationalist has the conviction that what is needed is to find the correct method for determining the right technique. This could then be generally applied to all contingent circumstances. Oakeshott’s criticism is a philosophical one. By understanding practice in this manner, the rationalist challenges the very thing that makes practice distinct, and the sensibility that enables selves to act as reflective, responsible moral agents. Given this line of reasoning, I do not think that it is too much of an exaggeration to suggest that we may understand Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics as a critique of an immoral persuasion of thought. Furthermore, it is not any one particular political persuasion that Oakeshott sets out to challenge, but the character of all ideological knowledge that Oakeshott finds morally abhorrent.

86   Post-war debates

Revision notes 1

2

3

4

Political philosophers are often ‘boxed’ ideologically. Michael Oakeshott has been termed a liberal thinker and a conservative one. However, while there are good arguments for this type of categorisation, ultimately they are not helpful for understanding his thought. Oakeshott himself claims to be a philosopher, not an ideologue, and his notion of philosophy ought to be taken in the way he defines it. For purposes of analysis and critique this is the most appropriate way to approach his work. What he has to say about politics is a consequence of his philosophical system. This is a system of thought that began in his earliest writings in the 1930s and developed through to his last works nearly 50 years later. To abstract what he says about politics from this body of philosophical thought would lead to misinterpretation. There is a moral concern in his work. His thesis against rationalism in politics is tied to a concern about a certain loss of reflective human action that is distinctive and important to human conduct. In this view he shares the post-­war concern with the way that totalitarian and authoritarian polities attempted to impose rational technical models of thought and political dogma above self-­reflection and analytic thought. Critics of Oakeshott point to his separation of theory and practice as anti-­political. They argue that taking this line of argument would be a negation of radical political action and assumes a sceptical acceptance of the current social conditions and inequalities.

Bibliography Bradley, F.H. (1969) Appearance and Reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burke, E. (1986) Reflections on the Revolution in France, London: Penguin Books. Crick, B. (1963) ‘The World of Michael Oakeshott: Or The Lonely Nihilist’, Encounter 20: 65–6, 68, 70–4. Franco, P. (1990) The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, London: Yale University Press. Franco, P. (2004) Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction, London: Yale University Press. Greenleafe, W.H. (1996) Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics, London: Longmans. Isaacs, S. (2006) The Politics and Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, London: Routledge. Lessnoff, M.H. (1999) ‘Michael Oakeshott: Rationalism and Civil Association’, in Lessnoff, M.H., Political Philosophers of the Twentieth Century, London: Blackwell. McCabe, D. (1994) ‘Reviews of “Religion, Politics and the Moral Life” and “Morality and Politics in Modern Europe” ’, Commonweal 21 (22 April). Nardin, T. (2001) The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press. Raphael, D.D. (1964) ‘Professor Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics’, Political Studies 12: 202–15.

Works by Michael Oakeshott Oakeshott, M. (1932/3) ‘The New Bentham’, Scrutiny 1: 114–31. Oakeshott, M. (1933) Experience and Its Modes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oakeshott, M. (1946) Hobbes’ Leviathan (edited and introduced), Oxford: Blackwell. Oakeshott, M. (1947/8) ‘The Political Economy of Freedom’, Cambridge Journal 2: 212–29. Oakeshott, M. (1965) ‘Rationalism in Politics: A Reply to Professor Raphael’, Political Studies 13: 89–92. Oakeshott, M. (1975) On Human Conduct, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Oakeshott   87 Oakeshott, M. (1991a) The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education (edited by Fuller, T.), London: Liberty Press. Oakeshott, M. (1991b) Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (edited by Fuller, T.), London: Liberty Press. The edition referred to here is the ‘new and expanded’ text edited by Tim Fuller. Oakeshott, M. (1993a) Religion, Politics and the Moral Life (edited by Fuller, T.), London: Yale University Press. Oakeshott, M. (1993b) Morality and Politics in Modern Europe (edited by Letwin, S.R.), London: Yale University Press.

Further reading There are a great deal of good secondary texts now available on Oakeshott’s work: Nardin, T. (2001) The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, expresses a view on the lines of the one argued here, where Oakeshott is considered as a philosopher rather than a political theorist. Some theorists fall between the ‘political’ interpretations of Oakeshott’s work and those that interpret him as a philosopher. For example, Podoksik, E. (2003) In Defence of Modernity: Vision and Philosophy in Michael Oakeshott, London: Imprint Academic (Imprint Academic have produced a whole series of mainly hardback monologues on aspects of Oakeshott’s work), takes Oakeshott to be a type of liberal while appreciating the philosophical dimension of his work. There are a number of strong criticisms of Oakeshott’s work too that are worth considering, particularly regarding Rationalism in Politics. This has been deemed to be: a tract against reason – Postan, M. (1948/9) ‘Revulsion From Thought’, Cambridge Journal 2: 395–408; too broad or abstract – Crick, B. (1963) ‘The World of Michael Oakeshott: Or The Lonely Nihilist’, Encounter 20: 65–6, 68, 70–4; Jaffa, H.V. (1963) ‘A Celebration of Tradition’, The National Review 15: 360–2; Archer, J. (1979) ‘Oakeshott on Politics’, Journal of Politics 41: 150–68; or based upon a fictitious adversary – Kettler, D. (1964) ‘The Cheerful Discourses of Michael Oakeshott’, World Politics 19: 483–9; Koerner, K. (1985) Liberalism and its Critics, New York: St Martin’s Press.

6 De Beauvoir

It is not a question of abolishing in woman the contingencies and miseries of the human condition, but of giving her the means for transcending them. de Beauvoir (1997)

Introduction As with many ground-­breaking texts, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1951) was dynamic both as a work of theory and as a political statement of intent. It provided intellectual articulation of many of the frustrations and hopes of women in the post-­war period and began the process of putting together an effective strategy for change. For questioning young women in particular, de Beauvoir’s work not only provided a theoretical launching pad for the deconstruction of traditional gender roles, it functioned as a ‘work-­with-attitude’; a book to read, to debate with your friends and to carry in public – to show people where you were coming from and intended going to. Many women professionals and academics today remember The Second Sex as one of a select few books which kick-­started modern feminist debate and for this reason they look back to its impact as a point in the past to which current feminists can return, to see how much has been achieved in understanding the condition of women and the political and social relations between women and men. While the modern feminist movement is historically bound up with the emergence of the women’s movement in the 1960s, feminist critiques of the gendered society did not begin in such recent times. Feminist writings of a sort have been around as long as women have been disempowered and an enquiring student can look back as far as the ancient Greeks, finding all the way clear prescriptions for the exclusion of women from power and from public life. However, it is the eighteenth-­century radical, Mary Wollstonecraft, who is generally regarded as the first influential feminist theorist of the modern world. Advancing the claims for general equality made popular in Paine’s Rights of Man, Wollstonecraft wrote a resounding statement of women’s rights in a democratic egalitarian world: A Vindication of the Rights of Women. It was this work’s ground-­breaking analysis of the social construction of the ‘feminine’ social being that de Beauvoir reworked through a more sophisticated theoretical model, some 150 years later. While 150 years separate them, they share the core idea that, while some dimensions of difference may exist between male and female humans, those qualities that are understood as quintessentially ‘feminine’ or

De Beauvoir   89 ‘masculine’ are in fact not expressions of enduring and unchanging natural order, but social products. Women are, ‘a product elaborated by civilisation’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 10). They are distinguished from men by their social functions: to serve men’s sexual passion, to produce the male offspring that inherit their father’s worldly goods and to carry out the domestic functions of child-­rearing and housekeeping that are seen to follow from them. The implication of Wollstonecraft and de Beauvoir’s arguments is that people have constructed womanhood over time and that people can deconstruct it – at least to some degree – if they wish, for, far from being an expression of an entrenched natural predetermined order of being, the condition and status of womanhood is contestable. From Wollstonecraft to de Beauvoir and into the twenty-­first century, feminists have challenged the supposed naturalness of womanhood and have sought to show the artifice involved and its perversely debilitating effects on women so defined. Thus the basis of the feminist political argument is the sociological point that the construct ‘womanhood’ should be contested, as it is designed to ‘gratify the appetite’ of men for sexual playthings and domestic slaves and clearly therefore negates the potential of those who have to endure it. The political agenda that stems from this challenge to the normative constructions of womanhood involves engaging all the points of patriarchal power where such constructions are generated.

Key concept: patriarchy Patriarchy literally means, ‘rule by the father’. Its explicit adoption as political terminology stems from Christian arguments for forms of paternal rule rooted in Adam’s ‘God-­given and inalienable right’ of rule over Eve. Such arguments were used, for example, to explain the ‘divine right of kings’ – a form of patriarchal governance supposedly given authority and delegated power as part of the king’s selection as Adam’s successor by God. In modern times, the term is applied to social and political systems that allocate unequal power wealth and status upon their members on the basis of their gender, giving positions of power to males and positions of subservience to females. It is commonly accepted that most western societies have been patriarchal in this sense. There is some disputation as to whether they have been significantly changed as a result of the impact of feminist argument and action.

Thus historically and conceptually the foundational point of a feminist manifesto is the liberation of women from the constraints imposed by living in a world shaped and directed by men: ‘It is vain to expect virtue from women until they are in some degree independent of men (Wollstonecraft, 1985: 154). Wollstonecraft made the point that liberty is not merely freedom from a world that oppresses, it is a condition of being – the life of liberty – that requires the intellectual and physical capacity to take up and make the world you want to live in. De Beauvoir takes this point further: liberty is a condition: ‘It is not a question of abolishing in woman the contingencies and miseries of the human condition, but of giving her the means for transcending them’ (Squires, 1999: 55). Thus, it is fundamentally about empowering women to take up and use independence to create a different life-­world – a world in which each and every woman can perceive and undertake her own life project.

90   Post-war debates Key person: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) Wollstonecraft’s first employment was working as a schoolteacher in London. Her experiences during this time convinced her that young girls were being socialised into servitude for the purposes of an aristocratic patriarchy. This belief intensified after spells working for an aristocratic family in Ireland and travelling across France. Radicalised by her experiences, Wollstonecraft joined a group of visionary writers and revolutionary radicals, including William Blake, Tom Paine, William Wordsworth and William Godwin, whom she later married. In 1792 she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, now regarded as a foundational feminist text. She argued that rational thought is common to all humans and is the basis for an egalitarian democratic society rooted in rationally based moral judgement and intelligent love. Such a society is impossible while females were shaped into weak, over-­emotional, ornamental dolls who could not participate equally with men in political, economic and academic life. These themes were partially developed in a series of other works: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), History and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution (1793), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and fictionalised in the posthumously-­published Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. Wollstonecraft died shortly after giving birth to her daughter, also named Mary, who went on to write Frankenstein.

This task is to be undertaken in a scenario where men are empowered and women are disempowered, which makes women’s liberation an issue of relative power between men and women. In de Beauvoir’s words: ‘Women on the whole are today inferior to men; that is, their situation affords them fewer possibilities. The question is: Should that state of affairs continue?’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 24). The gauntlet is thrown to those who think that it should and the task for feminists is set out in what amounts to a call to self-­liberating action.

De Beauvoir: life and times Commentators on The Second Sex have often dwelt on the statement: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 259), which not only sums up the core intellectual argument of the book, but also serves as a fittingly reflective comment on de Beauvoir’s own growing into womanhood. This is significant, for she was a biographer of her own life (writing numerous self-­revelatory books) and her theoretical reflections are overtly entwined with her reflections on her own life experiences.        Rewind To Arendt Chapter 4 Make a comparison with Hanna Arendt’s un-­gendered notion of natality and personhood.

Born in 1908 and raised in Paris in a stuffy bourgeois household, de Beauvoir was trained to be polite, well-­mannered and suitably cultured in the small arts that constituted the contemporary bourgeois model of domestic bliss. She wrote of this time, ‘I was good little girl’ (Crosland, 1992: 5) – a telling phrase indicting her passivity and lack of dynamic presence, a condition which she identified in The Second Sex as a core element of the socialisation of girls into the passive servitude of womanhood. She recounted how she had a lonely, unfulfilling childhood, full of wistful self-­absorption and, in later years, suppressed sexuality. The world outside, however, was changing apace. The first half of the

De Beauvoir   91 twentieth century was marked out by the struggles of competing political powers and competing political ideologies. The rise of racist nationalism in the first decades of the century developed into fascism, while the development of workers’ movements and anti-­ capitalist Marxism fuelled the Russian revolution, leaving the legacy of the Soviet Union. The presence of powerful fascist and communist states seriously threatened Europe’s ‘great’ Imperial powers, France and Britain, and the ideologies of fascism and communism seriously challenged the dominance of liberal-­democratic ways of explaining the dimensions and spread of power. The subsequent ideological contest was about fundamental questions of the good life, the relative power and happiness of social classes and of different ‘races’, and because throughout all these issues there was (and still is) the constant issue of the political, economic and social divide between genders, the arguments were run through with the less clearly defined and less self-­consciously undertaken discourse about the status of women. The Leninist revolutionaries explicitly sought to tackle gender inequalities during their first years of power, but this commitment was quickly swept under by the burgeoning tides of anti-­Semitic neo-­nationalism (and later by terroristic purges of all public discourse characteristic of Stalin’s regime). In Italy and Germany, the fascist deification of woman as housekeeper, mother and wife took long-­held and commonly held notions of womanhood and distilled them into their fundamental elements, presenting the modern world with the image of the Aryan wife and mother, tilling fields, raising children and pleasing her soldier-­husband. The absurdity of this image soon became highlighted by the very real involvement of women of all western nations in traditional ‘male occupations’ during wartime. In the intellectual world, all these issues were run through the mill of the newly burgeoning social sciences into questions of how people are shaped by and shape their social world. Underpinning this activity was philosophical enquiry into what it is to be a modern human living in the modern world. While unaware of most of these developments in childhood, upon reaching young adulthood, de Beauvoir benefited from the upheavals that these world-­shattering conflicts wrought in all aspects of life. At the age of 17 she went to study at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Here, she found liberty to think, talk, dress and act in ways that had been denied by her conservative upbringing. She began a process of self-­development, discovery of her capacities and examination and evaluation of her desires. Significantly, the liberty was that granted by entry into a self-­consciously intellectual world – exploration of the self and of social and political norms and values – was de rigour. In this environment she found herself moving among young people who were to become some of the most influential European thinkers of the mid-­twentieth century, including Jean Paul Sartre, who was to become an iconic figure for the radical left-­wing student movement of the 1960s and was also to become de Beauvoir’s life-­long partner. By the 1960s, the relationship between these two intellectuals and activists had itself taken on iconic status. Sartre and de Beauvoir were intellectual superstars feted by left-­ wing radicals for practising an open sexual relationship and espousing, radical ‘anti-­ imperialist’ activism, including the violent revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. In all of this, de Beauvoir’s public status was largely due to her role as Sartre’s partner – something of an irony given that she had already published The Second Sex. Clearly the ‘women’s liberation movement’ had a lot of work to do, and in the 1970s de Beauvoir was to be found at the forefront of this work. She became president of the Ligue Francaise pour le droit des femmes, organising pro-­abortion demonstrations, promulgating feminist ideas as editor of Nouvelles Feminism, and publishing and editing feminist theory in the journal Questions Feministes.

92   Post-war debates

Intellectual influences Sartre Sartre’s intellectual influence on de Beauvoir was profound. She embraced Sartrean existentialism, using it to develop her critical perception of a fundamental distinction between the relationship of men and the world which they create and the position of women as a created part of that man-­made world. The root of existential thinking is that human beings and their world are not two distinct entities. The world does not exist before the human who lives in it. There is no pre-­ordained and meaningful cosmic order and so every individual moves in a context of meaningless and indifferent circumstance. As the identity of anything is defined by its function and fit with its context, the lack of a meaningful context threatens the individual with meaninglessness. Unless they impose their idea of meaning and value on their circumstances, their very being has no meaning, no destiny and no value. Living a purposeful life therefore, is making the context of that life meaningful. The individual must evaluate their situation and its constituent elements and impose definitions on it. In this way, the actor’s world is produced by them as a meaningful context of understood objects within which they navigate and from which they can gain a sense of identity and belonging. Also, in this activity, humans become more than just another part of the natural process of life. They can impose their own definitions of their own worth and pursue the potential ends they desire for themselves. Each life becomes a self-­creation project as the world and the one who moves through it come into existence together in a moment of active, creative existence: being-­in-the-­world.        Rewind to Arendt Chapter 4 See Chapter 4 for an outline of Martin Heidegger’s existentialism.

Sartre put his own special spin on the existential proposition, asking the rhetorical question: ‘What do we mean when we say that existence precedes essence?’ and answering, ‘We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself and surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards’ (Sartre, 1948: 28). Thus, ‘Man is nothing but what he makes himself’. In this formulation, the quality of human existence is ‘authenticity’, that is, being­for-oneself. People don’t always act in this way. They often allow themselves to fall into acting as if they were merely behaving in accordance with fixed determinants set by the outside world – they act as if not able to act. To be human is to creatively act – to project yourself into the meaningless-­ness of experience and to shape out of it a life-­in-a-­world. At any given time, this involves assessing and discriminating between possibilities, that is, choosing and exercising choice in meaningful action. Ironically, the human condition is one of compelled choice. Not choosing is not possible – one chooses not to make a choice. Not acting is also not a choice: only death enables total inaction; all other apparent inaction is in fact minimised action, a pretence at powerlessness and a denial of responsibility. People do act as if they can’t act of course – typically they fail to act in dangerous scenarios. For example, people often watch as others commit or suffer acts of violence – and afterwards say ‘there was nothing we could do’; they fail to take responsibility for their world and their lives. This failure Sartre called ‘bad faith’ – deceiving oneself as to the range of choice and action possible, in order to avoid the responsibility that one bears as the author of one’s world for the condition of one’s world.

De Beauvoir   93 Key concept: authenticity Authenticity is a core concept of Sartre and de Beauvoir’s existentialism. The modern world is presented as a world that is shaped and driven by anti-­human processes, most notably, the imposition of capitalist imperatives to perform as a functionary in the continuous mass-­ production of material goods and wealth. Acting in accordance with these external pressures alienates individuals from their own unique creative selves. They continually shape themselves to fit the expectations of others, act as if the imposed demands to perform in line with social and work expectations are normal and in doing so lose touch with their creative self – they become inauthentic and act in ‘bad faith’.

As this discussion indicates, the core of Sartrean philosophy typifies existentialist thinking in its individualism. Like Heidegger, Sartre argued that, to fully exist ‘in oneself’, one must live ‘for oneself’. Sartre did note, however, that each of us has to negotiate a terrain, a world that is also being constructed by others. We exist among others who also attempt to impose their will on our experience. In our relations to these others, we experience a push– pull of intention and action, from which a common world – a world of many individually invented parts – is constructed. It is in the power struggles to impose definition on the shape and meaning of the world that many people surrender responsibility for their lives, allow the definition of their being to be imposed by others and drift in a condition of ‘bad faith’, taking on identities which appear to be circumstantial, but which are – like all identities – constructs, specifically self-­negating in that they are constructs which the actor in bad faith allows to be imposed on them by others.

Discussion point Sartre and de Beauvoir suggest that the modern mode of living leads us to fabricate fake identities and this in turn suggests that we might be able to know and enact an alternative anti-­ modern ‘genuine self’. How viable do you find this notion?

Existentialist feminism De Beauvoir took Sartre’s existentialism and refocused it onto gender relations. Womanhood, she argued, is a construct, like manhood, which is enacted by the individual so defined: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 259). However, while being a man is a self-­actualising project, womanhood is largely an imposed social construct, shaped by the patriarchal norms and values that produce a man-­made world – a world of objects to be used and enjoyed by men in pursuit of their individual and societal projects: ‘humanity is male and man defines women not in herself but as relative to him’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 47). To be a woman is to be a household servant, and/or a sexual plaything, and/or a procreator of male lineage, all in the service of the world of men. To be a woman in such a context is not to be self-­made, in the existential sense of enacting one’s human being, but rather to be an object among others in a world designed by and for men.

94   Post-war debates

The political argument The political import is clear: patriarchally defined and enacted gender definitions are disempowering for female human beings. They construct the defining essence of womanhood as a lack of creative energy – the definitive quality of authentic human being – womanhood is an essential emptiness. In this way, the active person is removed and the frame of the female body is hollowed out and made ready for easy access and manipulative use by the (male) creative active subject. Womanhood is therefore ‘otherness’: it is a lack of self and a lack of project. So profound is that lack of presence that ‘the truth is that man today represents the positive and the neutral’, that is the male and the human being, whereas ‘woman is only the negative’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 15); ‘He is the subject, he is the absolute, she is the other’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 16). That this is a political act, an imposed negation of human potential is made clear: ‘Only the intervention of someone else can establish the individual as an “Other” ’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 48). However, the manipulation of female humans into serviceable women and their subsequent use by men is not simple exploitation of a passive and powerless body. Women are human actors with all the vital capabilities – reason, will, physical strength – needed to determine their own existence. De Beauvoir stated clearly that women are thinking beings ‘aware of’ their ‘own consciousness or ego’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 16f.) and despite any reduction in their adult capacity for free thinking and creative action, this fact proves what is also clear, that female humans, like males, are born with and cannot easily be relieved of the potential capacity for rational critique, for dynamic action, for self-­ defining creativity. So the question that springs to mind is, ‘why do they allow their being and purpose to be defined as use objects for men?’ Hot on the heels of such a question, is a further set of questions such as: ‘how are women made to enact their own negation?’; and ‘are women overwhelmed by some anti-­rationalist power, or deceived by some tricky promises into handing over the sovereign rights to their being?’ Behind all these questions is the thought that it must take some powerful artifice not only to wrench the human essence from half the population, but also to do it in a manner that seems to be the natural outcome of a pre-­ordained order. It was the social and political theorist, Antonio Gramsci, who exposed how such power exists in the form of ‘hegemony’ – the powerful imposition of a dominant social group’s definition of who is who and the proper order of things through constant and forceful use of terminologies, customs and rituals, to the point that the definitions take on the appearance of natural facts. De Beauvoir began to explore and expose the hegemonic production of womanhood.        Rewind to Gramsci Chapter 2 See Chapter 2 for a detailed presentation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.

Gramsci argued that hegemonic domination works through the feeding of a mixture of seductive illusions and violent bullying. De Beauvoir applied this formula to the hegemonic construction of womanhood, noting that girls were taught that happiness is to be found in narcissistic adoration of one’s body, and the dumb pleasures of lazy torpor – leaving responsibility for the economic and political condition of their lives to fathers or husbands (giving stressful, time and energy-­consuming work to others). Of course, giving up responsibility is also a tacit authorisation of fathers’ and husbands’ governance of their

De Beauvoir   95 condition as daughters and/or wives. If women do not readily accept the terms of this arrangement, they are forced into obedience by physical and mental abuse – applied most directly through private beatings and public vilification. De Beauvoir observed the workings of this hegemonic process and noted that, as Gramsci argued, the persuasive force of an ideology that constantly bombarded all social members with claims that the masculine dominance was natural (claims framed in the scientific language of the times) and right (claims framed in the most common religious/ethical language of the time), combined with the promised (if largely unobtainable) pleasures of narcissistic irresponsibility, was enough to ensure that direct intense coercion was not a constant necessity. Seduced and obedient, women acted as collaborators in their own negation by embracing inauthentic subservient lives in which the persona was of ‘a marvellous doll’ desiring to be ‘cuddled and dressed up’ by others (de Beauvoir, 1997: 306). Like Wollstonecraft before her, de Beauvoir was fascinated and somewhat appalled by the way her contemporaries routinely surrendered responsibility for their condition to men, living, as she would put it, in ‘bad faith’. Consequently, on those occasions when the material conditions of women’s lives exposed the existential gap between the promised life of leisure and the actual life of servitude, the normalised, legalised and routinised use of coercion to enforce obedience (in short, conjugal rights) appeared to most observers (men and women) to be the forceful assertion of the natural order.

Patriarchal hegemony De Beauvoir argued that, from the foundation of the western world, men have used their existential independence from others to explore, penetrate and establish a telling degree of control over their environment and its constituent parts. From their fortress of possessed territory, built and protected by cleverly devised use-­objects (tools and tool-­based technologies), men have advanced a conception of the complete human as one who, through the controlled use of violence, imposes their will onto nature and so masters it for his purposes. This principle for fully human action and descriptor for fully human being is infused into the principle of social order and used as the blueprint of full social membership. The idea that such a being is masculine is rooted in the perception that female beings are unable to approach nature as an outside enforcer. In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir quoted judiciously from Aristotle and his intellectual followers to make the point: ‘The female is female by virtue of lack of certain qualities, said Aristotle’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 16). His Catholic advocate, Thomas Aquinas (a man whose influence on Catholic doctrine and thus on the ideology of pre-­modern Europe was immense), ‘pronounced women to be “an imperfect man” ’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 16). Her point here is that the Aristotelian argument that dominated the Christian world stated that human creative essence (the self-­expressing soul) was that part of human being that was free from the enslavement of bodily needs, independent of the natural cycles of procreation, birth, growth, decay. Men had the opportunity to achieve liberty from nature – to overpower it and use it for their own ends, but women were biologically caught in the reproductive cycle to such a degree that they could never achieve full independence. They had rational minds and creative intellects, but these were routinely overwhelmed by the passions and strictures of their animal being as imposed by the menstrual cycle, the child-­ bearing cycle, and by their overwhelming desire to mother their offspring. Thus, according to de Beauvoir’s reading of Aristotle, women’s human potential is negated by their animality.

96   Post-war debates In modern times people look more to science than to philosophy for persuasive definitions of categories of life and explanations of their function and purpose. De Beauvoir notes, that in her time ‘anti-­feminists began to draw not only upon religion but also upon science, biology, experimental psychology, etc’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 23) to produce pseudo-­scientific proofs of the Aristotelian division of humanity into dominant rational artificer-­governor and subservient, emotional, naturally bound servant. She admits that the power of the ancient and modern patriarchal division of the human species into dominant male and subservient females derives from its rootedness in one simple fact – women are biologically distinct and they do carry the burden of maternity: ‘ensnared by nature, the pregnant woman is plant and animal . . . she is a human being, a conscious and free individual, who has become life’s passing instrument’ (Tong, 1989: 212). Thus the ancient philosophers and the modern scientists are not wrong to point out that females are locked into the primal cycle of life with an intensity and constancy that definitively distinguishes them from males of the species. They are wrong, however, to assume that humankind does not have the means to reflect on experience, to evaluate it, and to manufacture a chosen order of existence out of, and often in opposition to the principles of the natural condition of being. While there is one significant and fundamental biological fact that distinguishes the male and female condition, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are relatively autonomous social constructs who produce and reproduce in a wide and varied range of types in ways that make reference to, but are not bound and shaped by, biological conditions of being. De Beauvoir pointed out that such an argument can itself be found in the traditions that espouse natural gender division. ‘It has been said that the human species is anti-­natural’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 67) she noted, highlighting the significantly anti-­natural artifice involved in constructing human societies or human worlds. Her point here is that the definitive artificiality of social order shows that it cannot be that our natural condition as males or females simply determines our social being. The determinants of our social identities as men or women are the cultural modes of self-­definition and production, enacted by conscious reflective beings in the inter-­subjective project known as a society. A society is not a form of species life, for species life is trapped in an endless, futureless reproductive cycle, while ‘it is in a society that the species attains the status of existence – transcending itself towards the world and towards the future’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 68). In accepting the biological difference, while tackling the claim that this difference defines all aspects of gendered social being, de Beauvoir draws the reader’s focus to the point of tension between the objective physical constitution of life and the subjective critical engagement with the experience of it. This focus served her argument that the social construct of womanhood is a dialectic of subjective experience and objectification. The objectification of genders shapes the ideal of the masculine for males to enter and, to the degree that they are able to ‘shape up’, become pro-­active, aggressive yet rational and independent – experien­ cing the liberty and power of one who walks on the earth, uses it and shapes it into objects designed to meet his needs and facilitate his desires. In contrast, females growing up find themselves identified as part of the men’s world of use-­objects. They can find no place or space in their definition of being in which to explore or develop their creative intelligent capacities, and no means to live out a self-­fulfilling project, but instead find themselves an object for use in the projects of the men they encounter in their lives. Thus they attempt to fulfil themselves within the limited constraints of enacting service to more powerful men. Whereas men typically seek glory through their deeds, a woman typically ‘aspires to ­glorification of her body through the homage of the males to whom this body is destined (de Beauvoir, 1997: 362). For men, fulfilment of their passion consists in taking and possessing

De Beauvoir   97 the object of their desire, for women, ‘erotic transcendence consists in becoming prey’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 361). Experientially, the attempt to achieve fulfilment by enacting the role of woman is a limiting and eventually self-­defeating exercise. ‘The harshly truthful mirror’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 429) shows the limits of the ‘promising futures’ they see for themselves, either the failure to ‘look the part’ or the limits of being in ‘looking the part’. Having exposed the artificiality of traditional notions of femininity, de Beauvoir, briefly but significantly, nudges towards a complete deconstruction of the link between biological being and social identity, suggesting that the social limitation of a falsely subservient ‘femininity’ is one reason why some girls move towards lesbianism.        Fast forward to Foucault Chapter 10 See Foucault to explore the most influential of subsequent explorations of sexuality.

What’s interesting here is the way that de Beauvoir’s exploration of lesbianism drew people’s attention to the fact that cross-­gender sexualities challenge the basic assumptions underpinning the idea that gender is a simple manifestation of primary sexual identity. She argued that while social factors, biology and individual history ‘all play a part’ in a person choosing to engage in homosexual or heterosexual activity, ‘no one of the factors which mark this choice . . . is the determining element’. Thus homosexuality, ‘like heterosexuality, is an attitude chosen in a certain situation . . . it is at once motivated and freely adopted’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 444). What is expressed here is not only a sense that all sexualities are at least partially socially constructed, but also a challenge to the idea that homosexuality is a simple, unmediated expression of a natural ‘third way’ (or, in negative terms, a kind of mutated sexuality) – an idea which still permeates the discourse of many self-­defining ‘heterosexuals’ and ‘gay’ people today. Discussion point The idea that gender is at least partially socially constructed has long been agreed by social scientists. The issue for you to consider here is whether gender has any necessary link to biologically defined sex.

On women’s liberation Clearly, de Beauvoir argues, in the world of identities shaped by such an ideology, women suffer a dual constraint on acquiring full citizenship, and they do so, not because of their biological condition, but because of the interpretation of this condition, the iconic significance given to their constructed identity, and the consequent fabrication of differently powered social groups – genders, each of which enacts a fetishisation of supposedly natural sexuality. This weird, self-­transfixing enactment of supposed ‘sexually defined’ being is reproduced through language, customs and rituals that constantly define females as passive, subservient, pleasure-­giving, caring and hardworking servants of the needs of males. This powerful imposition of ideological constructs as apparently natural fact is an example of what Gramsci

98   Post-war debates defined as ‘hegemony’ and de Beauvoir self-­consciously took it upon herself to undertake to expose the falsity of this hegemonic construct and its full political implications. Thus, having systematically analysed and exposed both the artificiality of gendered norms and the unequal power relations they produce and maintain between men and women, she used the later stages of The Second Sex to explore the changes in the social and political condition of women that could follow. This could not be a simple and easy list of demands for change. For, as we have seen, de Beauvoir did accept Aristotle’s point that an enduring significant difference between man and woman is the relative involvement of men and women in the processes of procreation and child-­rearing. De Beauvoir believed that this harsh ‘fact’ would remain even after the many illusions concerning the natural attributes of the genders were exposed, and any ‘realistic’ liberation programme would have to address this. She found this problem taxing: ‘The advantage man enjoys . . . is that his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter to his destiny as a male’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 691). The implication is that women’s destiny is irresolutely split by countervailing vocations and destiny. Women as a category of human being are, to de Beauvoir’s way of thinking, pulled asunder on one hand, by their bondage to natural cycles of reproduction and the imposed need to please and serve men (to attain the social status of valued women), and on the other, by their capacity and will to act as thinking independent individuals, in short, as fully equipped human beings. In an attempt to resolve these apparent problems she trawls through the economic and social history of women’s involvement in economic life and the difficulties faced by the constant presence of the fact and possibility of pregnancy, and concludes that the liberation of women from this destructive bind can be obtained through strategic action aimed at addressing the core tension at the heart of the condition of womanhood, this being the concurrent action of two factors; sharing in productive labour and being freed from slavery to reproduction. On an individual basis, this means that women should seek to enter the world of men: ‘If woman is to be a complete individual, on an equality with man, woman must have access to the masculine world, she must have access to the other’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 694). They must enter not only the world of high art and intellectual work, which women already had significant access to, but also the world of economics and politics, from which women were largely excluded – a world where individuals can pursue their projects using their intellectual and physical powers to construct situations which present their creative presence in the world. However, ‘the woman who is emancipated from man is not for all that in a moral, social, and psychological situation identical with that of man’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 691), ‘the fact of being a woman today poses peculiar problems for an independent human individual’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 691). For women to enter the masculine world as active independent agents, they must liberate themselves from their biological condition and they must challenge the social construct of femininity: at this level the tasks become social and political, applying to the liberation of women as a social grouping and must therefore be undertaken collectively. De Beauvoir began her discussion of the distinction between individual and collective goals by noting that, during the Second World War, and in the immediate post-­war world, it had served men to allow women into public life, and that particularly in America, with its more individualist culture, this had enabled more women to successfully enter professional life. But she argued that such advances are only seen as privileges by men anxious to hold onto their superiority over women: ‘The fact is that oppressors cannot be expected to make moves of gratuitous generosity’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 738), women must ‘continue their ascent and the successes they are obtaining are an encouragement for them to do so’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 738).

De Beauvoir   99 A fundamental change in the conditioning of all females, she posited, would be to institute modes of enabling socialisation and education for young girls: ‘If [a girl] were encouraged in it, she could display with the same lively exuberance, the same curiosity, the same initiative, the same hardihood as a boy’ (de Beauvoir, 1997: 308). As we know from the many changes in education over the last 40 years, these types of basic changes do go a long way to producing strong, confident young women who are ready and able to act creatively in public life. They do not however, address the biological tie into familial life which drags independent women back into domestic servitude. So, de Beauvoir argued for the socialised availability of contraception, enabling women to enjoy their sexual being as men do – that is, without the constant imposition of possibilities of pregnancy (de Beauvoir, 1997: 148–52). Where contraception has not worked and a woman finds herself trapped into motherhood, de Beauvoir suggests the social availability of legalised abortion (de Beauvoir, 1997: 502). With the biological constraints removed and with an equalising socialisation for females and males, the routine and thoughtless reduction of women to domestic tools and their exclusion from public life would cease. Those who wish to maintain the status quo would have to argue for it, and to win the argument they would have to produce compelling evidence, which de Beauvoir believed they would be unable to do. Interestingly, de Beauvoir’s challenge to the patriarchal order has since been developed in an intellectual debate supported and nurtured by the women’s liberation movement. As she predicted, the status quo has been hard to defend in the face of sustained criticism, and subsequently girls and women have experienced many liberating changes in their social and political possibilities. Discussion point Have the crude and overt inequalities between men and women that de Beauvoir highlighted and opposed been overcome, or are they more subtly embedded in the culture of the twenty-­ first-century western world?

Commentaries De Beauvoir is lauded for her single-­minded exposure of the intensity and totality of the manipulation of women’s identity by patriarchal socialisation. Her work presented readers with the first comprehensive review of gender definitions and their impact on women’s political and social condition over time. The impact on intellectual women readers was particularly significant, firing their imagination and leading to some powerful re-­ assessments of gender relations in modern society, including Betty Friednan’s massively influential The Feminine Mystique and Shulamith Firestone’s revolutionary The Dialectic of Sex. However, as the feminist theoretical discourse has developed, reacting to and taking on some elements of other theoretical perspectives, two outstanding issues have come to dominate assessments of her work. First, she has come in for some criticism from later feminist theorists over some aspects of her argument that there is a fundamental bond between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Second, she has been criticised for presenting women’s liberation in typically masculine individualist terms. On the first point, Carol Pateman argues that de Beauvoir’s retention of some traditional notions of biological femininity locks her into ‘Wollstonecraft’s dilemma’ (Pateman, 1989:

100   Post-war debates 196–7), that is, the dilemma of how to have the same condition of liberty enjoyed by men while still having special conditions by virtue of being women. Pateman is referring to the fact that, although Wollstonecraft argued that women’s liberty depended upon them obtaining the same freedom to participate in public as men – that is, freedom from time and energy-­consuming household duties and child care – she believed that only women could be trusted to possess naturally engrained qualities of compassion, care and a sense of familial bonds and she was therefore loath to allow any elements of child-­rearing and attendant household duties to be left to men, even if this would enable women to participate in public life. De Beauvoir moved away from this trap by pointing to the social construction of many aspects of mothering but, Pateman notes, she did not break from traditional conceptions of child-­bearing, nor entirely from traditional notions of feminine sexuality which, she claimed, pull them towards monogamy while men are naturally free to have polygamous sex. It is a situation with which de Beauvoir indicates she is unhappy, but which she cannot explain away because she is still bound by naturalist conceptions of sexuality, On the second critical point, many commentators have noted that de Beauvoir tended to present women’s liberation in highly individualist terms. She suggested, for example, that one way women might become more pro-­active and independent might be ‘to pick up in the street a partner for a night or an hour (de Beauvoir, 1997: 696); another would be to go after and get high-­powered professional work (de Beauvoir, 1997: 691). This kind of individualistic feminism was taken up and popularised in the US by Betty Freidnan’s The Feminine Mystique, where she argues that every women could free herself from domestic drudgery by getting educated and searching out a fulfilling career. Core to this argument was the idea that housework and mothering actually needed only to take up a little time and that a new kind of superwoman could easily manage to combine her household duties while competing with men in the worlds of business and politics. This model of the successful woman still holds high cultural currency in the western world today, while failing in every way to supply a means of relief from domestic servitude and the long hours of work experienced by many women, particularly those living in poorer districts, belonging to low status immigrant grouping or ethnic minorities, or living in traditional working class communities. The similarities between some aspects of The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique highlight that, while de Beauvoir did argue that women’s oppression was the oppression of a social group, and while she did actively participate in the collective activities of the women’s liberation movement, in The Second Sex she presented few elements of any argument as to how a women’s movement could effectively act collectively. In her examples, she discusses the struggles of the movement and its failings over many centuries, and in discussing the details of women’s situations, tends to use fictional stories, stories about friends, or reflections on her own growing up. This tendency to dwell on the interiors of experience and to discuss the condition of women by referring to the singular ‘woman’ is probably due to her philosophical grounding in existentialism. Despite their socialist leanings and their intense activism, de Beauvoir and Sartre had difficulty in conceptualising social solidarity because they used existentialist categories of meaningful action. Existentialism, by presenting meaningful existence as an individual’s being-­in-the-­ world, conceptually locks itself into individual experience. This point of origin presents all existentialist theorists with a struggle to conceptualise collective experiences and situations. The problem for Sartre resides in his conception of authenticity as individuals acting for themselves (a concept which de Beauvoir keeps as a core element for her conception of ‘authentic womanhood’).This is particularly troublesome for anyone trying to conceptualise a communality as both Sartre and de Beauvoir were.

De Beauvoir   101        Rewind to Arendt Chapter 4 Make a comparison of the Sartrean idea of the contested world with Hannah Arendt’s pluralist notion of ‘the world’.

Some feminist critics see de Beauvoir’s individualist existentialism getting tied into the kind of inherently patriarchal thinking that she set out to challenge. Jean Bethke Elshtain (1981) pointed out that de Beauvoir’s acceptance of the authentic individual as one who is radically individual – who acts in regard to, but is not reduced to, the condition of their material being – is an acceptance of a masculine conception of human being. She notes that de Beauvoir’s struggle with the problem caused by women’s bodily capacity to incubate other living beings and, to her mind, become dominated by natural processes, is rooted in a deep discomfort with the female body. Elshtain certainly has no difficulty in finding negative statements about women’s bodies in The Second Sex. De Beauvoir went so far as to write that ‘pregnant women were mixtures of “plant and animal” ’, they ‘scare children and make young people titter contemptuously’ she wrote scornfully, because they are ‘a conscious free individual’ who, (to de Beauvoir’s horror) have given themselves over to ‘become life’s passing instrument’ (Tong, 1989: 512–13). It is not without irony that commentators have noted that such phrases characterise the argument put forward by Aristotle for the exclusion of women from citizenship. Crucially, they display a fundamental and conceptually crippling ambivalence that runs through de Beauvoir’s writing.

Feminist theory after de Beauvoir Despite the limits of her existentialist approach and her ambivalence to the female condition as she understood it, de Beauvoir’s work has a historical greatness about it. It introduced the feminist agenda to academia, to left-­wing liberation movements and to young, thinking women and men. It set an agenda for debate about gender, it challenged the status quo, and it exposed the details, the absurdity and the destructiveness of the imposed domestification of women. Perhaps the most fruitful element of her analysis lay in the very point on which she has been criticised, for while her conception of socially constructed gender was never fully free from her morbid dislike of biological functions, she introduced the first clear split between them, and this was the launch pad for her insightful distinctions between the social function of imposed gender roles and their supposed expression of natural inclination. This conceptual split has enabled feminist sociologists to construct a critical analysis of different ways in which girls and boys and women and men might unfurl themselves in thought and action. De Beauvoir is also credited for enabling others to perceive the distance between the biological facts of procreation and the social and psychological artifice that is involved in erotic sex. Interestingly and notably, in her discussion of homosexuality de Beauvoir’s analysis opens the door for a conception of all apparent ‘sexual identities’ as social constructs built from the fetishisation of biological sexual distinctions, sign-­posting later discussions by a number of feminist theorists, most notably Shulamith Firestone (1971), of how sex itself has been constructed as an activity in which women are made compliant servants of men’s power. Some ‘radical’ feminists such as Andrea Dworkin (1987) have come to equate the social norm of penetrative sex as a hegemonically socialised mode of domination by men of women through imposed physical violation – in short, as rape.

102   Post-war debates Others have explored how sex has been and can be experienced, evaluated and enjoyed and/or suffered in a vast plurality of ways. Luce Irigaray (1977), for example, imagines female sexuality as a condition beyond the language and concepts of patriarchy and thus something unknown to the patriarchal world. Male sexuality, she argues, is phallocentric (penis fixated) and single-­minded, while ‘woman has sex organs just about everywhere’ and can experience a plurality of sexual pleasures (Tong, 1989: 228). Julia Kristeva takes the final step in completely unhinging sexual identity from biological identity. Any person, she argues, can identify with those aspects of experience labelled feminine or masculine. It is a choice they make in the context of identity-­shaping experiences. Thus, given the opportunity to engage fully with available discourses of sexuality, male or female can adopt and mix and match from the full range of intellectual and sensual experiences known to human kind. In this last argument we can see how far debate about gender, sexuality and biological condition of being has come in the 50 years since de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, and from this we can see the Pandora’s box it opened, for now the once universal common sense that gender roles were tied and bound by unchanging biological conditions has been so effectively challenged, that its proponents have to argue their case in debate with a ­plurality of alternatives, each of which influences general opinion and lifestyle.

Revision notes 1

2

3 4

De Beauvoir’s social and political theory is underpinned by an existentialist philosophy. She develops her arguments concerning the relationship of men and women from the existentialist proposition that to be human is to be a self-­actualising individual who constructs his or her own identity and the world of understood objects that frames it. De Beauvoir’s feminism develops from a perception that the world that she and women before her lived in was constructed by and for men. Men were the creative subject and women were one of many serviceable objects constructed for men’s use. De Beauvoir developed the notion of gender as a social construction, rooted in but not determined by natural, sexual conditions of being. De Beauvoir’s philosophy has become subject to criticism on two broad fronts. First, it is subject to criticisms levelled at existentialism generally. These are that (a) existentialism’s radical individualism precludes the possibility of conceptualising collective identities necessary for any coherent explanation of social phenomena; and (b) the notion of a primary permanent active being prior to and underpinning social identities is anachronistic. Second, the connection of socially constructed gender identities to antecedent natural sexual states of being creates tensions in de Beauvoir’s analysis of the possible dimensions of womanhood – notably between the idea of woman as radical free agent and of females as naturally determined child-­bearers.

Bibliography de Beauvoir, S. ([1951] 1997) The Second Sex, London: Vintage. Crosland, M. (1992) Simone De Beauvoir: The Woman and Her Work, London: Heinemann. Dworkin, A. (1987) Intercourse, New York: Free Press. Elshtain, J.B. (1981) Public Man, Private Woman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

De Beauvoir   103 Firestone, S. (1971) The Dialectics of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, New York: Bantom. Humm, M. (ed.) (1992) Feminisms: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Irigaray, L. (1977) Ce Sexe qui n’ene est pas un, Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Pateman, C. (1989) The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. Sartre, J.P. (1948) Existentialism and Humanism (trans. Philip Mairet), London: Methuen. Squires, J. (1999) Gender in Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. Tong, R. (1989) Feminist Thought, London: Routledge. Wollstonecraft, M. (1985) A Vindication of the Rights of Women, London: J.M. Dents & Sons.

Further reading Reading on de Beauvoir falls into three broad categories: works that place de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in the context of the development of feminist writing, works that concentrate on de Beauvoir’s social and political philosophy and biographical works. Works in the first category select and present the core social and political themes for comparison with other feminist writers. Such books are useful to students wishing to get a sense of de Beauvoir’s place in the tradition of feminist theory. Three works in this mode are: Tong, R. (1989) Feminist Thought, London: Routledge; Humm, M. (ed.) (1992) Feminisms: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf; and Pateman, C. (1989) The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. Three useful works concentrating on de Beauvoir’s social and political philosophy are written or edited by Margaret Simmons: Simmons, M. (1999) De Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield; Simmons, M. (1995) Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania Press; and Simmons, M. (2006) (ed.) The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. A work which provides a clear and coherent portrayal of the development of de Beauvoir’s thought in a biographical context is: Crosland, M. (1992) Simone De Beauvoir: The Woman and Her Work, London: Heinemann

7 Adorno

All are free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free, since the historical neutralisation of religion, to join any of the innumerable sects. But freedom to choose an ideology – since ideology always reflects economic coercion – everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same. Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)

In 1923 Felix Weil established the Institut fur Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research (ISS)) at the University of Frankfurt. Throughout the following decades the ISS, which became known simply as the Frankfurt School, attracted a dazzling array of intellectuals interested in examining two key questions: how had human life become so damaged? Where might salvation lie? Figures such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse struggled throughout often deeply traumatic lives to find answers to these questions, often strongly disagreeing with each other in the process. These figures are now all long gone, but the spirit of their endeavour lives on in the work of others, including most notably, Jurgen Habermas, the best known of the ‘second generation’ of critical theorists. This chapter will focus on the work of Adorno because, of that first generation of critical theorists, his work, though notoriously difficult, has had the most enduring and significant impact on contemporary social and political thought. As we will see, it is an extraordinarily eclectic body of work that reflects a lifetime of thought about philosophy, religion, politics, sociology, science, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, music, culture and art. However, before looking at it in more detail, it is necessary to say something here about the social and political circumstances that gave rise to critical theory, the movement in which Adorno became such an important figure.

Germany in the 1920s and 1930s The inter-­war years in Germany were a time of profound social, political and economic dislocation. Following defeat in the First World War, Germany had to endure what it regarded as the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and its demands for contrition and reparations. This was followed by the failed socialist revolution of 1919 that culminated in the execution of the celebrated Marxist icon Rosa Luxemburg. This insurrection had been inspired by the successful Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, an event that, according to strict Marxist theory, was not supposed to happen because of that country’s relatively undeveloped capitalist system. The general sense of political disorientation engendered by these events was compounded by a series of ideological and theoretical divisions within the

Adorno   105 German Left between orthodox Marxist elements centred around Karl Kautsky and those more sympathetic to the ‘revisionist’ programme of Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein’s contribution to post-­Marxist theory is important as he was one of the first to express doubts about the vulnerability of capitalism and the inevitability of its collapse under the weight of its own ‘inner contradictions’. One way of understanding the emergence of critical theory is to see it as filling a theoretical gap between these two factions. Thus, although critical (albeit tentatively in the early stages of its existence) of the ontological and epistemological assumptions of orthodox Marxism, the Frankfurt School was also critical of the Bernstein faction within the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which it felt had abdicated its responsibility to represent the interests of the working class. However, in its early years, the ISS, under the directorship of Carl Grunberg, lacked a distinctive theoretical imprimatur. It was not until the early 1930s, under the inspirational leadership of Max Horkheimer, that it began to develop the systematic body of ideas that is now so familiar within political theory. However, shortly after Horkheimer’s accession, the ISS was forced into exile. As well known Jewish intellectuals, there was no safe haven in Germany after 1933 for Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin or, of course, for countless other Jews. With the exception of Walter Benjamin, who died trying to flee to Spain, the leading members of the ISS escaped to other parts of Europe and the United States where they remained for the duration of the tumultuous years that followed. It would be 17 years before Adorno would settle again in Frankfurt, and it was here, back home, that he would spend the last two decades of his life.

Overview of Adorno’s life and work Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund was born into a prosperous home in Frankfurt in 1903 (he changed his surname to Adorno, his mother’s maiden name, in 1938). His father, a Jew who had converted to Protestantism, was a wealthy wine merchant and his mother, an Italian Catholic, was an accomplished classical musician. A prodigiously talented student and musician, he graduated from his high school at the exceptionally young age of 17. He went on to attend the prestigious University of Frankfurt (today known as the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitat), where he studied philosophy, musicology, psychology and sociology. He finished his studies there in 1924 with a dissertation on Edmund Husserl, a subject he would return to in later life. However, despite his interest in philosophy, Adorno’s real passion at this stage was music. He began his formal music training in Vienna in 1925, where he met Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. Adorno was particularly interested in the latter’s revolutionary ‘atonality’ and he wrote about it enthusiastically (rather to the embarrassment of Schoenberg) in a series of philosophically informed essays. However, Adorno persisted with his pure philosophical work and was eventually awarded his Habilitation, the degree necessary for a formal academic career in Germany, in 1931. Even at this early stage of his academic career the broad philosophical orientation that would inform all of Adorno’s later work was discernible. This can be summarised in terms of his resolute rejection of the possibility of a reconciled society or totality. Hegel famously argued that the ‘whole was the true’ – the idea that history’s inevitable reconciliation of difference would result in a fully transparent and universal system of meaning. This was the theme of Adorno’s inaugural lecture at Frankfurt, in which he launched a powerful polemic asserting that the ‘whole was the untrue’. In other words, his argument was that truth resides in the realm of the inassimilable fragments or particularities that make up our world. It is in this important theoretical context of irreconcilability and the importance of

106   Post-war debates not reducing difference to sameness that much of Adorno’s later work about the dialectic, immanence, negativity, exchange value and the non-­identical can be understood. A full explanation of all of these terms follows below. After leaving Germany in 1934 Adorno spent a short period in Vienna, but eventually came to settle in Oxford. Unable to secure a tenured academic post, his time was spent studying philosophy, particularly the work of Hegel. It was from Oxford that, in 1936, he submitted an essay to Horkheimer’s Zeitschrift fur Sozialkunde entitled ‘Uber Jazz’ (On Jazz). This was Adorno’s first critical essay (published under the pseudonym Hektor Rottweiler) on the nature of modern culture. Put simply, his argument was that modern culture, in particular the new idioms in jazz and popular music, was deeply corrosive and damaging to the human soul. For Adorno, the newly emergent ‘culture industry’ represented a latter day ‘opium of the people’ designed to dull the senses to the iniquities of modern society and capitalism. Adorno has been fiercely criticised for this position on the grounds that it is borne of an elitist worldview and a failure to move beyond an essentialist understanding of culture. There is substance in this accusation as it is true that Adorno did theorise the value of culture almost entirely in terms of its capacity to promote an ethos of reflexivity and negation. This is why he was drawn to the music of Schoenberg and the avant-­garde writing of, among others, Samuel Beckett, George Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. For Adorno, these works were important precisely because they had the effect of disorienting and unsettling us, of forcing us to question and subvert ‘grand narrative’ schemes of totality and reconciliation. Adorno’s position here can be contrasted to the realist view of culture articulated by Georg Lukacs and Bertolt Brecht. Here we find the idea that the value of culture is determined by its capacity to inspire revolutionary action by an ‘epistemologically privileged’ working class. Adorno was adamantly opposed to this instrumental view of art as it stripped it of its autonomy and purposelessness. However, I argue below that Adorno’s thought, despite its insistence on inassimilability and difference, remained trapped in a ‘quasi-­transcendental’ theoretical framework or what we might call a ‘metaphysics of despair’. In 1937 Adorno married Margarethe Karplus, and the following year he accepted an invitation from Horkheimer to move to the United States. Based initially at the University of Princeton, and now an official member of the ISS, Adorno spent the next three years engaged in collaborative work with another ‘sociologist-­in-exile’, Paul Lazarsfeld, on the political and cultural effects of the mass media. During this time his intellectual relationship with Max Horkheimer deepened and, when the ISS moved to Berkeley in 1940, Adorno followed Horkheimer to California. It was from there that he co-­wrote and published, with Horkheimer, the hugely influential Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947. It was also Adorno’s experience in California that inspired the publication of another of his most celebrated texts, Minima Moralia. This was a collection of philosophical and theoretical aphorisms on the theme of ‘micrological’ thinking, the idea that social and philosophical analysis must issue from the realm of ‘lived experience’. This phenomenological appeal to the inner life, the lived life, is what Adorno understood by immanence, the idea that thought always issues from specific material contexts and that its purpose is the satisfaction of basic human needs. Shortly after the end of the Second World War Adorno returned to Germany and in 1949 he became Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Frankfurt. In 1958 he became the Director of the ISS, taking over from the older and, by then, less dynamic Max Horkheimer. During the final years of Adorno’s life he was characteristically prolific. The two best-­known and important works published during this time were Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory, published posthumously in 1970.

Adorno   107 Key event: student radicalism In the late 1960s Europe was convulsed by an unprecedented degree of student radicalism. This resulted in the CDU/SPD coalition government’s introduction of emergency laws to counter the threat it perceived to the stability of the state. Tension escalated after the police killed a student during a visit to Germany by the Shah of Iran. The left-­wing faction among the student leadership accused Adorno, whose support they assumed would be forthcoming, of failing to support their cause. This coincided with an attack on Adorno from right-­wing elements who argued that it was at least partly as a result of his work that such instability had arisen in the first place. Unsurprisingly, Adorno was deeply anxious and traumatised by this situation and, while on vacation in Switzerland he suffered a heart attack and died on 6 August 1969. Adorno felt desperately hurt by the actions of his students who could not understand his unwillingness to be the activist figure they demanded. This is a complex issue. I would suggest that at the heart of it is Adorno’s deep philosophical trepidation that action of the sort demanded by the students would lead to a roughening of our sensitivity to the importance of retaining a negative or critical stance to all political action, even those ‘projects of resistance’ for which we have political sympathy.

Intellectual influences Although significant philosophical and theoretical differences existed between the members of the Frankfurt School it is fair to say that, as a group, their collective enterprise was informed, above all, by the work of Kant, Hegel, Marx and Weber. It is also important to record the important influence of Freud and Nietzsche. We can also refer to more contemporaneous influences such as Lukacs and Bloch who, although sympathetic to the theoretical orientation of critical theory, were never formal members of the Frankfurt School. As far as our specific examination of Adorno is concerned it is also important to record how his thought was significantly informed by the work of his contemporaries within the school, most notably Horkheimer, Benjamin and Marcuse. Kant and Hegel Let us begin by considering the influence of Kant and Hegel, whose legacy of philosophical idealism dominated the intellectual climate of Germany in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is generally recognised that Kant is the dominant figure in modern western thought. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s ‘transcendental idealist’ argument held that knowledge is only possible if we assume that human beings possess an innate capacity to make sense of the world. Without such a capacity (the Categories of Knowledge), no understanding of the world would be possible. We would, in other words, be mesmerised by a ceaseless flow of sense impressions with no conceptual means of making them intelligible. For Kant, this meant that any claim to absolute knowledge, acquired through reason, is immediately subverted on the grounds that we can only experience and have reliable knowledge of that which these categories make possible. So although we can have knowledge and understanding of the conditions of experience, the content of that experience must be finite and contingent. Now, in what way is this Kantian mediation between Cartesian rationalism and Humean empiricism relevant for our study of Adorno? Although Adorno had serious criticisms of

108   Post-war debates Kant’s overly neat separation of the noumenal world (of which Kant thought we could know nothing) and the phenomenal world (Adorno thought that these two realms were far more mutually implicated) he was sympathetic to the substance of Kant’s argument, or at least one reading of it, namely, that we could not impose concepts, acquired through reason, onto objects in the world. In this sense it could be argued that Adorno materialises Kant’s critical philosophy in that he focuses less on the transcendental categories of perception and more on the material conditions of knowledge. His argument in short is that, given the materialist and thus contingent origin of knowledge, we cannot subsume nature to the ‘false reign of reason’. Adorno’s materialist emphasis is also that which most critically distinguishes his version of dialectical theory, what he calls negative dialectics, from that of Hegel. In Phenomenology, Hegel outlines a theory of idealism that culminates in the final reconciliation of difference. Although Adorno’s work is deeply informed by Hegel’s concept of the dialectic, he fundamentally disagreed with the teleological strain in it that pointed to the overcoming of the incompleteness of identity and the emergence of a fully transparent world. For Adorno, by contrast, the importance of the dialectic lies precisely in the consciousness of non-­identity between subject and object. That is, consciousness of the necessary failure of any attempt to assimilate difference and particularity into a universal system of thought. For Adorno, such attempts to produce meaning by asserting the sovereignty of reason are self-­ defeating as they have the effect of deepening our experience of meaninglessness rather than alleviating it. This is one of the most important themes of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the 1947 text Adorno published with Horkheimer. This is an important text and I examine below some its main arguments and their relevance for our understanding of politics. Marx and Weber At first sight Weber’s influence on the thought of Adorno would appear more discernible than that of Marx. Weber’s analysis of modern life entangled in the tentacles of instrumental rationality resonates loudly in critical theory’s depiction of contemporary societies decimated by the forces of modernity and petrified social relations. Marxism on the other hand, particularly those versions of it that privilege the working class as the necessary agent of social change, seems far removed from the figure of Adorno who saw in such messianic assertions precisely that intellectual hubris and ‘forgetfulness of history’ that he thought so damaging. However, although Adorno owes a significant intellectual debt to Weber, it is the spirit of Marx that inhabits his work in a far more profound way. Marx’s withering critique of capitalism and his deep appreciation of the ‘materiality of thought’, the idea that who we are and what we aspire to be cannot be separated from our social and economic circumstances, were hugely important for Adorno. This spiritual affinity between Marx and Adorno suggests that critical theory was less a repudiation of Marxism and more of a refinement of it – a new Marxism for the age of late capitalism. We get a sense of the importance of materialism in Adorno’s work from a passage in Simon Jarvis’s text on Adorno in which he compares his subject’s relationship to Weber and Durkheim: Under capitalism and especially under late capitalism, social relations, which are indeed made by human individuals and which would be nothing without those individuals, have taken on an apparently autonomous and objective existence. It is indeed illusory to think that social relations could be presented as wholly autonomous from the relating individuals. Yet the autonomy of social relations is not simply a mistake,

Adorno   109 but a ‘real illusion’. Social relations are no longer interpretable as the sum of the subjects participating in and making them. Durkheim’s contribution, against Weber, is to point to this. (Jarvis, 1998: 45–6) This is an important point for Adorno who, although critical of Durkheim’s conception of structures as ‘invariant’ (existing independently of human consciousness), was sympathetic to his view that structures were facts that were ‘out there’ playing an important role in constituting our consciousness, a position that sits uneasily with Weber’s emphasis on verstehen and individual understanding. Another aspect of Marx’s work that informed the thought of Adorno related to ‘commodity fetishism’. For Marx, one of the defining features of modern capitalism was how it strips the commodity of its social and economic history and its ‘use value’ (its value in meeting human needs) and presents its ‘exchange value’ as an inherent property of the commodity itself. The primary interlocutor between Marx and Adorno in this context was Lukacs, who argued that this principle of economic life under capitalism (which he termed ‘reification’) had now extended into the organisation of every aspect of society and had led to the emergence of what he called an ‘exchange society’.

Key people: Georg Lukacs Adorno’s enthusiasm for modernism was anathema to Lukacs, who accused Adorno of having retreated to the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’. Although Lukacs was in agreement with Adorno about the damaging effects of capitalism, he thought modernism represented the ‘emptying out of history’ and a triumph of literary style over concrete materialist analysis. Adorno’s thought, by contrast, remained sympathetic to modernist literary figures such as Andre Gide and the social realism of figures such as Dostoevsky.

Although Lukacs argued that human consciousness had now been thoroughly infiltrated by this inexorable and insidious market logic, he thought that a ‘non-­reified consciousness’ remained possible. However, he thought that such freedom was only possible for those subjects within society who suffer the daily brutality and indignity of life under capitalism. This was an important argument for Marxist theory as, without it, the working class was vulnerable to the ‘bread and circuses’ on offer from capitalism and the path to revolution was thwarted. For Adorno, however, this idea of the working class occupying a privileged epistemological position was the product of a fatally flawed analysis. For him, the working class was no less vulnerable to being compromised in a Faustian pact with the capitalist devil than anyone else, and it is for this reason he felt so pessimistic for the future. Discussion point This idea of a group of people as ‘epistemologically privileged’ is echoed in some contemporary feminist literature. Sandra Harding, for example, has argued that women experience patriarchal society differently to men. One of the problems Adorno would have with this position is that if fails to appreciate that the category of women is itself highly differentiated. However, it could be argued that such a position, despite being theoretically problematic, is politically and strategically effective.

110   Post-war debates

The Dialectic of Enlightenment In this text, Adorno and Horkheimer expound the thesis that the Enlightenment – ‘the 18th century transition from ignorance to the light of Reason’ – had reverted to barbarism and myth in its promise to exhume from the human soul all traces of unreason and irrationality. Thus, paradoxically, the attempt to banish unreason ushered into the world a new and more virulent form of unreason. It is in this sense that, for Adorno, reason had become irrational. Thus, humankind’s rush to gain intellectual, technical and political mastery was accompanied by a failure to understand that human flourishing in the world is a complex matter that is not well served by claims to intellectual omnipotence. This is not to suggest that Adorno and Horkheimer had an uncritical attitude to pre-­Enlightenment society or that the Enlightenment itself had no progressive potential. Their position is summarised as follows: ‘Myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ (Adorno and Hork­ heimer, 1973: xviii). Bernstein expands on this: ‘The very same rationality which provides humankind emancipation from the bondage of mythical powers and allows for progressive domination over nature, engenders, through its intrinsic character, a return to myth and new even more absolute forms of power’ (Bernstein, 1991: 101). For Adorno, the Enlightenment quest to elevate humankind above nature, a quest whose origins can be traced back to Hebrew scripture and Socratic philosophy, was unprecedented in its scale and had resulted in the ‘wholly enlightened earth becoming radiant with triumphant calamity (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1973: 1). To put the matter less prosaically, Adorno and Horkheimer claimed that the Enlightenment resulted in the banishing of conceptual self-­reflection and a willingness to subvert autonomy to idealist precepts. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is a long and complex text, and it is beyond our scope here to examine all of its many and varied arguments. However, two of its important themes can be singled out for examination. The first is about culture and its relationship to politics. The second is about psychoanalysis and whether it can inform an effective politics of resistance. The culture industry The substantive point made here by Adorno and Horkheimer is that culture was unable to function as a site of resistance to capitalism.        Rewind to Gramsci Chapter 2 Gramsci remained markedly more optimistic than Adorno that the Left could exploit culture to mount an effective counter-­hegemonic attack against those ideological forces that served the interests of capitalism.

Before considering Adorno’s verdict on the Enlightenment’s legacy, it is worth remembering that the Dialectic of Enlightenment was written in 1947, a time when the western world was still experiencing the seismic aftershocks of the impact of mass media. For Adorno, the rise of mass media was characterised by an unprecedented avalanche of ‘low culture’ in the form of television and popular music. It is interesting to reflect on how this claim stands today in a world in which culture has become globalised on a scale that was unimaginable in the immediate post-­war years. On the one hand it is difficult to deny the sheer pervasiveness of the consumerist web through which the consciousness of the modern subject is now mediated. However, at least some of what Adorno dismissed as ‘low culture’ and lacking a critique of

Adorno   111 capitalist society is now directed at subverting consumerism and the value system that sustains it. So, although we appear to have been beaten into submission by the neo-­liberal ‘end of history’ mantras of the global corporations, there remains a vibrant counter-­culture in which at least the idea of a less reified life is preserved. Although there are many examples of counter-­cultural movements being co-­opted by capitalism, it can and should be argued that we retain our capacity for critical self-­reflection. The key question here then is whether Adorno’s view of the modern subject as a political and cultural dupe was too simplistic and crude? As mentioned earlier, there was considerable disagreement between critical theorists about the relationship between capitalism and culture. Walter Benjamin, for example, disagreed with Adorno’s claim about the insidious function of ‘low art’ and culture. His argument was that cultural forms such as television were actually more effective in puncturing what he called the aura that surrounded many of society’s dominant economic and political ideas. Key people: Walter Benjamin Benjamin remains the most enigmatic of the critical theorists. While drawn to the practices of modernism as a means of challenging established truth claims, he was also keen to champion the plain speaking, realist discourse of Brecht, as well as Jewish mystical practices such as those found in the Kabbala. Benjamin’s religiosity was informed particularly by the work of Ernst Bloch who was the most openly spiritual of the figures sympathetic to the Frankfurt School.

In this context we can consider the influence of critical theory on the newly emergent British cultural studies in the 1950s. In its early stages, figures such as Raymond Williams chronicled the integration of the working class into capitalist society and concluded that only ‘high art’ could provide an effective antidote to the social conditions of capitalism. However, over time a different view emerged, one that retained for mass culture the capa­ city to promote a radical class consciousness. Although there are problems with the analyses of Benjamin and British cultural studies, they were right to question Adorno’s overly schematic depiction of a society ravaged by the excesses of modernity.

Key concept: negation At the heart of Adorno’s analysis of culture is the idea of negation. This is important because it refers to the capacity of the subject to reflect dialectically or negatively. It was this capacity that, for Adorno, was threatened by the emergence of mass culture that closes down those spaces in which we can experience the world in a different way. This can be examined in the context of mimesis. For Plato, mimesis referred to the attempt to represent eternal truths and essences. However, for him, any attempt to represent those truths and essences in the material world results in their corruption. This is because, for Plato, nothing in the material world was able to represent the immutable ideas that reside in another realm of existence – the world of forms. Adorno, on the other hand, argued that representation in modern culture was damaging because it denied the autonomy or ‘being’ of objects in the world. It is for this reason that Adorno favoured modern or abstract art that recognised the autonomy of objects, a form of art that recognised difference and otherness as essential features of existence. Indeed, for Adorno, it was the function of art to remind us of that which must remain unrepresentable and free of domination. So, whereas for Plato the problem was with how the ‘ideal world’ is corrupted by material objects, for Adorno, the issue was how modern culture denies the autonomy of the object.

112   Post-war debates In this sense Adorno’s argument is similar to that of Heidegger. The position taken in Being and Time, Heidegger’s 1926 masterpiece, was that the history of western philosophy is a history of the forgetting of Being, a history of how our desire to secure knowledge to firm philosophical foundations had led to a forgetting of the fundamental philosophical question: why is there something rather than nothing? The interesting issue here is that Heidegger and Adorno are both considered as anti-­foundationalist philosophers whose ideas were important for later movements in continental philosophy, such as deconstruction, post-­structuralism and discourse theory – traditions that all argue against the idea of transcendental or metaphysical speculation in philosophy. The question here is whether their attempts to banish metaphysical speculation resulted in its reintroduction in a different form? Thus, it could be asked how can we understand the concepts of Being and negation in anything other than a metaphysical context? Psychoanalysis and the authoritarian personality The value of psychoanalysis for social and political theory remains highly contested. Freud’s argument in Civilisation and its Discontents was that modern society demands the repression of our natural and aggressive instincts. This involves a complex process in which the id (the site of desire, drives, instincts and the pleasure principle) is confronted by the superego (the site ensuring the integrity of the ‘reality principle’). Standing between these sites of desire and order is the ego, whose mediative function is to maintain a psychic equilibrium between these competing demands. Freud characterised the outcome of this epic struggle as the repression of desire and a general state of unhappiness. This analysis appealed to critical theorists who shared Freud’s concern to identify and address the causes of our anxiety and unhappiness. Key people: Herbert Marcuse In Eros and Civilisation (1956) and One Dimensional Man (1964) Marcuse argued that we have to understand how society seeks to control us. Thus, we need to recognise how capitalism ensures the production of consumer desires beyond our basic survival needs (surplus repression). He also considered the idea of ‘repressive desublimation’. Desublimation suggests a process of ‘freeing of desire’, of making that which was unavailable or forbidden easily accessible. However, for Marcuse, these new freedoms are now understood in an exclusively economic register. As a result, society extends its authoritarian hold over us. Consider the example of sex. The argument here would be that different forms of sex, once forbidden, are now widely available in every variation. However, this aspect of our lives has now been commodified in a way that was inconceivable in past times. So, in becoming ‘free’ we become more subject to the economic imperatives and control of society. To counter this threat to our freedom Marcuse called for the ‘Great Refusal’ and a radicalised social theory to expose the process whereby modern society ‘hangs garlands of flowers on the iron chains that bind us’.

Marcuse remains the iconic radical figure of the 1960s, and it is clear why psychoanalysis, with its promise to ‘free the unconscious’ was of great interest to him. Adorno, by contrast, invested less in the potential of psychoanalysis to effect revolutionary political and social change. Why then was he interested in it? One theory recently put forward suggests a more instrumental reason for the centrality of Freud within the work of both Adorno and Marcuse:

Adorno   113 [psychoanalysis] provided a glue that united Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse against Eric Fromm, while helping downplay the internal political differences within the school. Orthodox psychoanalysis provided a convenient symbolic foil for the Frankfurt school since Horkheimer and Adorno would identify with Freud’s cultural pessimism while Marcuse could creatively re-­create libido theory in the course of his argument for a cultural and sexual radicalism. (McLaughlin, 1999: 109–39) McLaughlin is making a powerful argument against Adorno’s embrace of psychoanalysis. He points out that the only member of the school to have any serious psychoanalytic training was Eric Fromm, but for a variety of political reasons he had fallen out of favour with both Horkheimer and Adorno, who criticised those aspects of his work that sat uneasily with their wider political objectives. According to McLaughlin, Adorno and Horkheimer thought Fromm was trying to revise Freud’s view that the drives were a ‘biological reality’ that were being suppressed by modern society. Adorno’s argument was that if this was conceded in favour of a more historical or cultural analysis, the political ‘cutting edge’ of psychoanalysis and critical theory would be lost. McLaughlin notes that Fromm’s criticisms of Freudianism in this respect are now widely supported within contemporary psychoanalytic theory. What we seem to have here then is a questioning of Adorno’s integrity and his intellectual judgement. There is, however, another and more concrete context in which Adorno’s embrace of psychoanalysis can be examined. This relates to his 1950 study on the ‘authoritarian personality’, which examined the social and psychological roots of anti-­Semitism and fascism. The aspect of Freud’s work that is relevant here is the Oedipal complex. Let us remind ourselves of Freud’s argument in this context. Freud argued that inappropriate sexual desire is internalised and repressed during childhood, and he explained how this repression could lead to profound psychic and sexual tensions in later life. The important political implication of this relates to how these repressed desires find an outlet or means of expression. Adorno argued that some societies are vulnerable to authoritarianism because it provides a socially acceptable way in which those means of expression can be realised. More specifically, the argument is that authoritarian or fascist societies articulate a populist view of the nation that relies on the exclusion of certain social or ethnic groups and, as a result, it becomes acceptable for certain minority groups to be marginalised and discriminated against. Adorno’s argument is that, through psychoanalysis, we can understand this violence and domination as the expression of those desires established at an earlier stage. At the time of writing there are many instances of systematic discrimination against minority groups who are targeted and blamed for the wider social and political ills of a society. One example concerns the treatment of the Roma community in Italy. The important question here is to what extent psychoanalysis helps us to understand what is happening in these places? It is of course a highly speculative approach which cannot be tested empirically. For the positivist tradition, dominant in the United States at the time Adorno worked in this area, this failure represented a fatal methodological flaw. Now, although we should not judge the intellectual coherence or value of a theory by its capacity to pass tests posed by positivism, we need to be careful about reducing the complex origins of ethnic violence, authoritarianism and fascism to a model of childhood experience. A general criticism of psychoanalysis is its tendency to reduce the complexities of the social and political to the psychical realm. From a Popperian perspective the problem with it is that it is unfalsifiable and unscientific. To repeat, this should not

114   Post-war debates lead us to reject it as a way of helping us to gain insight into the complexities of society, but neither should we be dogmatic in imposing it as a necessary framework through which all of our deliberations have to be mediated and inscribed.        Rewind to Arendt Chapter 4 Examine the differences in her explanation of the nature and origins of authoritarianism.

Contemporary political resonance Let us now consider the value of Adorno’s work for our understanding of democratic politics in the twenty-­first century by examining it in the context of multiculturalism. It is interesting to note how the discourse of multiculturalism has evolved in recent years. Having been subject to withering criticism from the Right, it is now the target of attack from the Left on the grounds that it fails to promote a shared set of values necessary for a stable, cohesive and more equal society. More specifically, the argument is that, although the recognition of cultural differences is important (although, to avoid the charge of relativism, only to a point), this must not be at the expense of the integrity of western liberal-­democratic values. This is an important argument in any society concerned with the danger of fragmentation and the erosion of the conditions for meaningful dialogue between diverse ethnic groups.        Fast forward to Kymlicka Chapter 9 A fuller discussion of ‘liberal multiculturalism’ can be found in Chapter 9.

However, it is also important to remember how, behind the cover of the seemingly innocent demand for integration, the interests of the dominant community are often given precedence over marginalised voices. Now, it may be that at times an ‘assimilationist’ model of integration is appropriate. However, a consequence of this emphasis on what we should share can sometimes be the emergence of a disposition that is insufficiently sensitive to that which is unfamiliar, to that which it does not understand. Now, what does this have to do with Adorno? Well, as we have seen, he was concerned primarily with the question of autonomy and identifying how that which is aesthetically and culturally distinctive becomes lost in modern culture, whose default setting of domination and control reduces all difference to sameness. So, how would Adorno have responded to the challenges posed by multiculturalism? No doubt he would have seen aspects of it as a threat to his cultural order, to his sense of how things should be. And yet, a generous reading of his work suggests he would have been concerned that alternative cultures and ways of life were not being afforded recognition and protection from the ravages of the ‘sameness’ of the West’s political and cultural values. One could object here that we simply cannot transpose Adorno into a contemporary cultural setting and second guess how he would react. This is a mistake as there is no valid reason why we should not look to those who have preceded us in order to enhance our understanding of the present and guide our choices for the future. Indeed, such violence, if this is what it is, is vital in order that the strongest possible arguments can be made for the positions we wish to defend.

Adorno   115 Similar questions arising from Adorno’s work can be raised in the context of the debates about globalisation and democratisation. Thus, we can ask to what extent is it legitimate to impose, directly or indirectly, a particular way of life onto others from different cultural backgrounds? Again, it is key to stress the argument that it is important to fight for those values we believe to be right but we should remember that the vigorous promotion of so called democratic freedoms can be perceived as a wholly undemocratic form of neo-­ colonialism that is unwilling to hear dissenting voices. Once again we can only surmise how Adorno would react to the twenty-­first-century world and its complex and competing ethical demands. I would suggest that one important lesson of his work is that we must acknowledge the integrity of other voices and think carefully before imposing political systems onto groups with different cultural values. This danger of hubris echoes throughout many other social and political discourses. For example, our quest to control nature through gene therapy, cloning and other reproductive technologies presents unique and profound ethical challenges. Although these developments promise a deepening of our knowledge of science and the prospect of a better world in many ways, it is not so clear that we really understand the wider ethical implications of these developments. One suspects that, in such contexts, Adorno would have been receptive to Ulrick Beck’s notion of ‘reflexive modernisation’, which reminds us of how every ‘great leap forward’ along the royal road to progress results in the generation of new and anticipated problems. One last consideration: higher education was once seen as an area of society that should be protected from the pressures and demands of the economy, an area of life in which thought and learning were seen as valuable ends in themselves. This vision is now seen as hopelessly naïve as higher education has become a sector whose ostensible function is to prepare students for life as productive workers. Disconcertingly, this is now how many students conceive of the purpose of these precious years. This particular cultural shift, as well as anything else, provides testimony to the importance of Adorno’s warnings about the nature, and tragedy, of modernity.

Conclusion As with all the figures discussed in this text, Adorno represents a complex mixture of tensions and contradictions. Such is the nature of this endeavour we call political theory. Throughout the chapter we have considered Adorno’s injunction to live at an angle to the world and not impose our particular version of truth onto it. However, this raises a number of problems. As we have seen, Adorno was deeply pessimistic about the modern world. For him, our anxiety had to be seen in the context of a forgetfulness of that which allows us to flourish in the world, a forgetfulness of autonomy and freedom. This is why he was so critical of modern culture, and indeed post-­Enlightenment thought generally, which had the effect of sacrificing wisdom and meaning to knowledge, control, order and domination. However, is it the case that we have been so dehumanised? Here it is useful to consider the public/private distinction. Undoubtedly the public realm can be understood in terms of what Habermas calls the ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ – the process by which society is rendered intelligible only in the context of instrumental or economic criteria. But have our private lives been similarly infiltrated by this inexorable process of colonisation? Clearly, there is no clear line of demarcation between the private and the public. However, the assertion that we now lack the capacity to reflect meaningfully, or ironically, on our situation should not be accepted uncritically. Moreover, even if Adorno was right about the

116   Post-war debates ‘reification of consciousness’, one question would be ‘so what?’ – what precisely is being lost here? The issue at stake here is less about whether Adorno was a cultural elitist, and more whether he simply lacked the empathy to understand that which makes the lives of others bearable. No doubt we can raise questions about the effects of consumerism and popular culture, but for many, if not most, people they provide some respite from harsh and difficult lives. This is more than an oversight from Adorno. I would argue it represents a deep emotional blind-­spot within his worldview that detracts from the overall humanity of his project.

Revision notes 1

2

Adorno’s work is difficult and translations of it are not always of the highest quality. When coming to his work for the first time it is advisable to begin with a clear introductory account to enable you to identify the main themes that run throughout his work. One of the most frequently asked questions about Adorno relates to popular culture which, as we have seen, Adorno understood as part of the problem of modernity rather than a solution to it. It is worth reflecting on whether the distinction he made between popular culture and modernist work such as, for example, that of Alban Berg remains valid. More specifically it is worth reflecting on the relationship that now exists between modernity and culture. Has it changed since the 1950s? Is culture more autonomous or subversive in today’s world or does it still function in the way Adorno described?

Bibliography Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. ([1944] 1973) Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Allen Lane. Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1994) Reflexive Modernisation: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bernstein, J.M. (ed.) (1991) The Culture Industry, Selected Essays on Mass Culture, London: Routledge. Freud, S. (1961) Civilisation and its Discontents, New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Heidegger, M. (1926) Being and Time, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Jarvis, M. (1998) Adorno, Cambridge: Polity Press. McLaughlin, N. (1999) ‘Origin Myths in the Social Sciences: Fromm, the Frankfurt School and the Emergence of Critical Theory’, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 24(1): 109–39. Marcuse, H. (1956) Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, London: Routledge. Marcuse, H. (1964) One Dimensional Man, London: Routledge.

Further reading Adorno is a difficult theorist, so even the more accessible secondary literature requires considerable effort. A thorough introduction to critical theory is provided by Wiggershaus, R. (1993) The Frankfurt School, Cambridge: Polity Press; Held, D. (1980) Introduction to Critical Theory, London: Hutchinson; Martin, J. (1984) Adorno, London: Fontana; Dews, Peter (1987) Logics of Disintegration: Post-­structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, London: Verso; and Connerton, Paul (1980) The Tragedy of the Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part III

Contemporary debates Rights, identity and justice

8 Rawls and Nozick

The trouble with government regulation of the market is that it prohibits capitalistic acts between consenting adults. Robert Nozick (1974)

The bad man desires arbitrary power. What moves the evil man is the love of injustice. John Rawls (1971)

Introduction Nozick was a libertarian thinker. He was often called a conservative, but he certainly refuted this claim himself. He also rejected the idea he was a liberal. Indeed, in his work we see an argument that is pro-­free market, but also pro-­individual rights, including minority rights, such as gay rights. These rights were not simply subordinated to economic arguments – rather they were based upon attempts to define a philosophically ethical standpoint for the character of the state and its relations to citizens. There is a genuinely radical edge to his thought in his expression for the desire that drugs, sex, pornography and other illicit items be bought and sold just as morally as buying food and clothes under his free market principle of self-­ownership. Robert Nozick fits no neat category ideologically. Neither liberal nor conservative, he was a critic of utilitarianism and knew few boundaries in the subject matter of his own writing. This spanned across science, issues of rights and literature. He was a ‘career’ philosopher who spent his life in academic institutions in the United States, primarily at Harvard. However, he was no simple ivory tower scholar, and as a testimony to the general popularity of his work and his accessible writing skills he was the winner of an American National Book Award. John Rawls was also a Harvard man, teaching at the university for almost 40 years. In A Theory of Justice, which is examined here, Rawls attempts to reconcile liberty and equality in a principled way, offering an account of ‘justice as fairness’. Central to this effort is his famous approach to the seemingly intractable problem of distributive justice. Published in 1971, this text has often been cited as single-­handedly reviving political theory as a discipline, following the almost pervasive impact of positivism and empiricism after the Second World War. While this claim may be somewhat exaggerated, there is little doubt that it would be impossible to have a series of lectures (or a book!) on contemporary political thought without some time being devoted to this seminal works study.

120   Contemporary debates In this chapter I seek to compare these authors, starting with Nozick. Although his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Nozick, 1974), was in many ways a reply to Rawls, it is appropriate to start with this point of view as Nozick’s ideas are often taken as secondary to Rawls’ – merely a response. Situating them this way around gives Rawls the right of reply, for once, and allows us to see where Rawls might differ from Nozick from a slightly different standpoint than is the norm.

Robert Nozick Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a Lockean-­inspired attempt to justify a minimal state that would be largely confined to the role of basic securities and protections. Following the traditional-­modern ‘state of nature’, Nozick sees the state as emerging by an ‘invisible hand’ that does not usurp anyone’s rights, and progresses from a simple protectorate towards a modern functional minimal state. All in all, Nozick presents a defence of the libertarian state in a popularist albeit theoretical manner. This seminal work has had a wide influence, particularly in the United States, where it has become standard reading for political science students. It has been said that it even influenced a trilogy of cinematic movie-­making that looks at the ‘hidden’ controls behind immediate social power – this trilogy was the Matrix series! Key people: John Locke Nozick is influenced by the well known seventeenth-­century liberal, thinker, John Locke. For a detailed summary of his work, see Isaacs and Sparks (2004).

Nozick’s argument is based on the opinion that all human beings have ‘absolute self-­ ownership’. This entitles us to our basic freedoms: of contract, civil liberties and property rights. If we have such a ‘natural’ entitlement then consequently it follows that we must respect the same right for others. Nozick (following Kant’s moral perspective) argues that we are obliged to treat others as ‘ends and not means’. As a consequence of this ethical standpoint, the argument develops a political and social implication: that as individuals (and despite not being a liberal, as such, Nozick is an individualist) we cannot expect others to take responsibility for our actions and life chances, and that includes collective welfare provision. So according to Nozick, all redistributive taxes are therefore immoral. Public schools, roads, national parks, welfare systems, minimum wages, rent control, corporate subsidies, social housing and universal healthcare cannot be justified. In a British context, Nozick would understand the NHS and the British welfare system with its wide array of benefits, tax credits and so on as undermining the fabric of the human condition. It is important to note that in many ways this is a moral argument, a philosophical one, and not an out-­and-out politically conservative (or Conservative) one. It is important that, given this context, any critique of Nozick is based on the philosophical and moral sustainability of his thought, rather than the outcome of these ideas in political, social and economic terms. In support of this last point it can be stated that Nozick himself, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, shows no interest (as an ideologue or economist might) in attacking interventionist government based on a means of measuring their success or lack of it. He moves towards an argument for a free market because from the logic of his thought they are moral. Nozick

Rawls and Nozick   121 specifically challenges other theories where ‘distributive justice’ is taken as a measure of political and social effectiveness, particularly, of course, John Rawls’ theory of justice. In this thesis Rawls argues that privately held wealth be redistributed in order to benefit the less well-­off. In contemporary political thought, then, there is a substantive debate to be investigated by making some comparison between these authors work, as we shall see. To conclude what may be regarded as a theoretically sympathetic argument to Nozick’s position (albeit, as stated below, a critical one), he is not focused upon economic inequality because he believed that what mattered was not the presence of inequality, but the process by which that inequality arose. Was the process the outcome of a just or moral set of interactions between individuals? If so, the outcome itself (remembering the Kantian-­influenced moral position) was irrelevant. The state Nozick’s theory of the state and in a sense his libertarian apologia for the existence of states in the first instance is that they can legitimately be or become minimal. While no actual existing state matches Nozick’s theoretical edifice (as was the case for Locke and other social contract theorists), his notion of the state is set as an ‘ideal type’ to explore further moral questions and questions around justice. Ideally, states ought to develop through an evolution – through an ‘invisible hand’. This follows the Lockean social contract theory of the state that the state tacitly evolves through a set of micro-­agreements and contracts between the ruled and the rulers in regard to their rights and duties. Individuals would not surrender their rights to the state if this were not the case, and the case for all, according to Nozick. The state becomes the guardian of individuals’ self-­ownership and the rights to property which stem from that self-­ownership. However, this is only the case up to a certain degree. Nozick’s stages of the development of the state illustrate the boundaries that are in place in this contract. Nozick argues that there is a certain moral necessity to the way in which the stages of the state ought to develop. He begins by stating that individuals (individual anarchists in his sense, in the state of nature or anarchy) act morally and pacifically – that is, ‘attempts in good faith to act within the limits of Locke’s law of nature’ (Nozick, 1974). Key concept: social contract theory Social contract theory is nearly as old as philosophy itself, but was particularly prevalent among modern political theorists, most famously Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. It is the view that a persons moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement between them to form ‘society’. In the twentieth century, John Rawls’ Kantian version of social contract theory revived this idea, and was followed by others such as David Gauthier. More recently, philosophers have criticised social contract theory, most notably from a feminist standpoint. They argue it is an incomplete picture of our moral and political lives, and may in fact disguise some of the ways in which the contract is itself parasitical upon the subjugations of classes or persons.

Nozick states that for the contract to work, each individual or ‘protective agency’ would require that each of its ‘clients’ renounces the right of retaliation against aggression, and they do this by refusing to protect them against counter-­retaliation. His assumption, and

122   Contemporary debates again it is a Lockean one, but it is an ‘assumption’ nevertheless, it is that agents will exhibit good faith and non-­aggressive behaviour in the free market. Obviously Nozick believes it makes economic and social sense that within the market protective agencies try to agree to matters peacefully, otherwise the consequences for both or all parties would be disastrous. Moreover, this is how rule-­making becomes a convention, through this type of negotiating of disputes between parties in the marketplace: ‘Thus emerges a system of appeals courts and agreed upon rules. . . . Though different agencies operate, there is one unified federal judicial system of which they are all components’ (Nozick, 1974). Such rule-­making constitutes law and is, of course, the basis for civil society. Here we have an indication of why, for Nozick, the free market may be a moral entity, not simply a gift to the rich, as others have suggested.        Rewind to Gramsci and Adorno Chapters 2 and 7 See the Marxist critique of private property and the free market.

That said, we can point to an issue here that because of his starting point from the Lockean (early-­modern Christian-­inspired) methodology, there are clear in-­built assumptions in his work that he does not examine. These will always be the focus of criticism, as they have been. However, in terms of logical consistency, and for the sake of its explicit theoretical standpoint, it seems somehow too easy to go down this road of critique. After all, Nozick’s position is clear, warts and all, and it would be perhaps more generous to suggest we ‘go with the flow’ and follow his reasoning through rather than dismiss it out of hand. Nozick continues that out of both the anarchy of the state of nature and the anarchy of the system of rule-­making and the associated bodies that would arise to attempt jurisprudence over them, there would emerge, like an invisible hand, one dominant protection agency in each territorial area, in which most people would be included. He argues that unlike other goods that are ‘comparatively evaluated’ an overarching protective service would face no other competition. This is because the nature of the protective service of this general kind would create conflict and potentially violence if there were competing forces at stake. He maintains that, ‘since the worth of the less-­than-maximal product declines disproportionately with the number who purchase the maximal product, customers will not stably settle for the lesser good, and competing companies are caught in a declining spiral’ (Nozick, 1974). Nozick’s contention that a dominant agency would develop in each geographical area is an example of an a priori attempt to decide what the free market would do. Again this would seem to go against the historical stages actually undergone by modern nation states, especially as Nozick even stipulates that such an emergence would constitute a ‘unified federal system’. However, again, along the lines of theoretical consistency there is little wrong with this argument, if we do not take it as a literal understanding. So, assuming that a dominant protective agency has come into being, what is next in the development to an ultra-­minimal state? Shouldn’t the dominant agency have the right to defend its clients against these rash actions? Nozick claims that the dominant agency has a right to prohibit risky procedures against its clients, and that this prohibition thereby establishes the ‘ultra-­ minimal state’ in which one agency coercively prohibits all other agencies from enforcing the rights of individuals. So, what has happened to the peaceful resolution of disputes? Why can’t the dominant

Rawls and Nozick   123 agency and the independents agree to arbitrate or adjudicate their disputes, preferably in advance? Here we encounter Nozick’s (rather odd) ‘thus’ clause, which incorporated such voluntary agreements into one ‘unified federal judicial system’. In short, if every time the dominant agency and the independents work out their disputes in advance, then by definition it precludes the peaceful settlement of disputes without a move onward to the compulsory monopoly of the ultra-­minimal state. The dominant agency, Nozick claims, has the right to bar ‘risky’ activities engaged in by independents. Whether the independents have the right to bar the risky activities of the dominant is not raised. This then sets up an important issue of democratic control. Nozick is effectively, at this stage, arguing that power resides in a central body, in what almost seems (were we to stop here) like a contradiction of his libertarianism. The territorial protective agency is in effect a monopoly power, and one that can potentially use force against someone because of their risky activities in the market. A number of critics have seen here that in fact Nozick’s minimal state could become a ‘maximal’ state, even a totalitarian state.        Rewind to Arendt Chapter 4 An analysis of totalitarianism in the work of Hannah Arendt can be found in Chapter 4.

How does Nozick proceed from his ‘ultra-­minimal’ to his ‘minimal’ state? He maintains that the ultra-­minimal state is morally bound to ‘compensate’ the prohibited, would-­be purchasers of the services of independents by supplying them with protective services and it is this that becomes the minimal state and the basis of the social contract that sees individuals give up some of their self-­ownership. This decision is an explicit one in the way that Nozick describes it, and the process of an invisible hand seems lost here. However, more importantly, Nozick’s principle of compensation for this contract is perhaps the weakest philosophical concept that he develops. Mostly I have forgiven Nozick the assumptions apparent in his work because of the tradition of social contract theory and Lockean thought it is situated in, but the notion of compensation that is deployed by him here is, simply put, weak theory. Nozick asks whether property rights means that people are permitted to perform invasive actions ‘provided that they compensate the person whose boundary has been crossed?’ His answer is ‘yes’. However, this seems to fly in the face of the notion of rights he suggests he is upholding. Violations of rights are still violations, whether they are ‘compensated’ or not. In fact, it is not clear that what Nozick is talking about is actually compensation at all, i.e. recompense for a crime or injustice committed. It seems to be a mere payment of some kind for a permissible act of injustice. Furthermore, there appears to be no way of knowing what the compensation is supposed to be. Nozick’s theory depends on knowing what is appropriate compensation, but how is this measured or even knowable? If we cannot possibly know what will make a person as well-­off as before any particular change, then there is no way for an outside observer, such as the minimal state, to discover how much compensation is needed. This kind of question perhaps appears unimportant to Nozick because he considers the ultimate compensation that he is offering to individuals through this social contract to be the protection of the state. Even ardent anarchists, as well as others, ought to embrace this compensation as the state, he argues, treats everyone uniformly. For example, Nozick draws on Locke’s treatment of property rights on unused land and maintains that no one

124   Contemporary debates may appropriate unused land if the remaining population who desire access to land are ‘worse off’. In such a way he wishes to convey the fairness of the final arbiter of law and property rules if left to the state. But it could be argued that everyone should have the right to appropriate as his property previously unowned land or other resources – why ought it be left to the (possibly overbearing) state to decide? Is the state necessarily the best means of law and distribution?

Key concept: theories of property rights Below are three competing theories of property rights in political thought: Liberal: a central tenant of liberal capitalism is that property rights encourage wealth generation and efficient allocation of resources based on the operation of the market. From this evolved the modern conception of property as a right, which is enforced by law (see Adam Smith, John Locke). Socialism: socialism is critical of private property rights. It argues that the returns from private property ownership are inequitable and divisive, creating different social classes and leaving only a few wealthy individuals. It overall promotes individualism and conflict over collectivism and equality (see George Orwell, Tony Benn). Communism: communism argues that only collective ownership of the means of production through a polity (though not necessarily a state) will assure the minimisation of unequal or unjust outcomes and the maximisation of benefits, and that therefore private property (which in communist theory is limited to capital) should be abolished (see Karl Marx and Marxism).

Another important point in Nozick’s analysis is that the state can outlaw risky activities upon compensation only if no one has the right to engage in ‘non-­productive’ (including risky) activities or exchanges, and that therefore they can legitimately be prohibited. Nozick concedes that if the risky activities of others were legitimate, then prohibition and compensation would not be valid, and that we would then be required instead to negotiate a contract with them, whereby they agree not to commit the risky act in question. The basis of a ‘productive’ exchange is one where each party is better-­off than if the other did not exist at all. A ‘non-­productive’ exchange is one where one party would be better off if the other, quite literally, dropped dead. Thus, ‘if I pay you for not harming me, I gain nothing from you that I wouldn’t possess if either you didn’t exist at all or existed without having anything to do with me’. So, Nozick’s principle of compensation maintains that a ‘non-­productive’ activity can be prohibited provided that the person is compensated by the benefit he was forced to forego from the imposition of the prohibition. Interestingly, Nozick applies his non-­ productive and compensation criteria to the problem of blackmail. He argues that blackmail is to be outlawed by asserting that non-­productive contracts should be illegal, and that a blackmail contract is non-­productive because a blackmailee is worse-­off because of the blackmailer’s very existence. In short, if blackmailer Smith dropped dead, Jones (the blackmailee) would be better-­off. Or, to put it another way, Jones is paying not for Smith’s making him better-­off, but for not making him worse-­off.

Rawls and Nozick   125

John Rawls, ‘a theory of justice’ So far the basic ideas of Nozick’s thought in Anarchy, State, and Utopia have been set out. It can be seen that without being himself a liberal, as such, he takes a liberal theory in order to argue for a minimal state. It has been seen that this argument leads into a notion of ‘stages’ based upon social contract theory in regard to how the minimal state develops. All this is well and good, but what are the specifically political implications of his work? Well obviously some of these can already be discerned. Minimal government means limited government, that is, limited intervention into the private sphere (the household, lifestyle choices and entrepreneuring) of individuals. That he is concerned with individuals and not communities, states as a ‘night-­watchman’ rather than as a welfare agency, is clear. In common with all other limited government, laissez-­faire theorists, he also has no theory of taxation or redistribution elements to fiscal policy. Also, he treats ‘protection’ as a universal understanding, without really giving the details of how much protection shall be supplied by the state, and to whom. Like rational choice theory, a presumed ‘empty signifier’ appears to be the conceptual edifice of the individual, rather than actual social cleavages that may have different needs. So while all the goods and services on the private market are produced on the basis of relative demands and cost to the consumers on the market, there is no such criterion for protection in the minimal, or any other, state. Moreover, the minimal state that Nozick justifies (as pointed out above) is a state that seems to only serve the interests of private business – there is no explanation or justification in Nozick’s work here of, for example, the form of voting and representation, democracy, checks and balances to political institutions, or indeed, who and what these are! Similarly, although philosophically committed to a Kantian notion of rights, he does not detail what these rights are and his theory of rights is, like his argument for government – minimal. All in all, what is presented seems to be a very apolitical political theory. Perhaps one way of teasing out the political implications of his work is to contrast it with that of perhaps the most well known contemporary political theorist, John Rawls. Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971) appeared in 1971, and in many ways Nozick’s work is a critique of that book. Rawls’ basic argument is that all social primary goods (that is, liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-­respect) are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favoured. Like Nozick, he too was influenced by John Locke, although this time there can be no doubt that Rawls may be fairly and squarely termed a liberal. From Locke he particularly takes the idea that free people need to agree on some ground rules in order to live together in harmony. However, Rawls was also influenced by some aspects of utilitarianism, particularly those adopted by the classical liberal theorist John Stuart Mill, as well as the great utilitarian himself, Jeremy Bentham. He wanted to refine Bentham’s well known utilitarian maxim that one ought to act (and the state ought to act) to maximise good (pleasure) to the greatest aggregate. The flip-­side to this was that minimising pain was also a social goal. Either way, under the lens of this kind of utilitarianism our actions are judged good or bad depending on the consequences they have for you and for others. Rawls argued that within the much-­maligned utilitarian theory the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ idea had some merit. However, it could be abused, leading to the ‘tyranny of the majority’ (e.g. Nazi Germany’s mistreatment of the Jews and the United States’ mistreatment of African Americans). Rawls’ appropriation of some aspects of utilitarianism attempted to guard against this common source of injustice.

126   Contemporary debates Finally, Rawls was also influenced by Kantian thought, as was Nozick, in particular his intuitionism. This was an acknowledged set of first principles to be subscribed to, but without the priority ordering, in the Kantian sense. From this diverse and deeply intellectual set of influences Rawls wanted to explore what a person’s ‘goods’ were, that which was needed for the successful execution of a rational long-­term plan of life, given reasonably favourable circumstances. He argued that in order for individuals to achieve their potential they needed liberty, opportunity income, wealth and self-­respect. To each of these he attached specific conceptual meaning. As with all works of theoretical or philosophical depth, I would urge the reader to explore these herself, given the limited space available here to detail such concepts. Suffice to say here, as Rawls states, a sufficient degree of these ‘goods’ gives the poss­ ibility that each person may have his or her own plan of life although, of course, what is good (in the micro sense) to each may vary. Rawls also uses the language of the social contract as Nozick does (opening them up further for political comparison). Right is set down in the social contract as the same for everyone (influenced by the ‘veil of ignor­ ance’ – see below) and can be summarised in his principles of justice. The first principle is liberty: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all. The second principle concerns ‘wealth’: that is social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: a b

to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle; and attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

In terms of the second item particularly, this also operates under the ‘difference principle’ that states that in order for any change to be accepted as an improvement it must help the least advantaged representative person. It can be seen that unlike Nozick, the notion of rights is spelt out far more thoroughly in Rawls’ work: ‘The difference principle is a strongly egalitarian conception in the sense that unless there is a distribution that makes both persons better off (limiting ourselves to the two-­person case for simplicity), an equal distribution is to be preferred’ (Rawls, 1971). In other words, there should be no differences except those that can be justified on grounds of efficiency. By ‘efficiency’, Rawls (who adopts the concept of efficiency that is associated with Pareto in the field of economics) uses a negative definition. No system can be called efficient if there is an alternative arrangement that improves the situation of some people with no worsening of the situation of any of the other people. In general, there are many arrangements that are efficient in this sense. Not all of them are equally just; other principles of justice must be invoked to select the most just arrangement. Rawls explicitly addresses the fact that there will be situations where there will be a necessity for a priority of justice, and that the two primary principles will be in conflict with each other. Rather than compromise between them in such cases, he takes the position that there is a specific priority order. First there is the ‘priority of liberty’. The principles of justice are to be ranked in lexical order, and therefore liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty. There are two cases: a

a less extensive liberty must strengthen the total system of liberty shared by all;

Rawls and Nozick   127 b

a less than equal liberty must be acceptable to those with the lesser liberty.

The second principle of justice is lexically prior to the principle of efficiency and to that of maximising the sum of advantages; and fair opportunity is prior to the difference principle. There are two cases: a b

an inequality of opportunity must enhance the opportunities of those with the lesser opportunity; an excessive rate of saving must on balance mitigate the burden of those bearing this hardship.

Although all this might seem rather convoluted and unnecessarily pedantic, Rawls maintains that rational people (i.e. the vast majority of us, when we understand it!) will unanimously adopt his principles of justice if their reasoning is based on general considerations, without knowing anything about their own personal situation. This he terms ‘the original position’. Such personal knowledge might tempt people to select principles of justice that gave them unfair advantage, rigging the rules of the game. This procedure of reasoning without personal biases Rawls refers to as ‘the veil of ignorance’. In short, Rawls asks us to imagine a social contract drawn up by self-­interested agents negotiating under a veil of ignorance, unaware of the talents or status they will inherit at birth. He argues that a just society is one that these pre-­social individuals would agree to be born into, even knowing that they might be dealt a poor social or genetic hand. This is as long as there was a broad social safety net and redistributive taxation (short of eliminating incentives that make everyone better-­off). These social provisions, however, do not come without mutual obligations and duties. Rawls insists that individuals have to support just institutions, have mutual respect for public bodies and individuals, try to maintain their own self-­respect and that of others through mutual aid. They should also not harm others and, sounding a little like a village vicar, be faithful! By this he means an almost existentialist sense of keeping your promises to others as a means of maintaining individual integrity. If you can close your eyes and repeat all of this last paragraph without thinking of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair you will be doing well! Indeed, this kind of liberalism pervades party politics in the United Kingdom to such an extent that if you listened to the speeches of the two major parties and their leaders you would see many of the elements of Rawls’ liberalism. Despite the Conservative and New Labour names, the two leading mainstream political parties in Britain are without doubt ‘liberal’ parties somewhere along the lines of Rawls’ thought. What has been presented has been all rather cosy and respects, absolutely, the rule of law and even more so, of course, the rational rule of justice. However, Rawls does have a small wild streak, where he considers the issue of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is, by its nature, an act responding to injustices internal to a given society, appealing to the public’s (rather than an institutionalised) conception of justice. Civil disobedience can be justified, according to Rawls, if the following three conditions are all met: •

If the injustice is substantial and clear, especially one that obstructs the path to removing other injustices (e.g. poll taxes and other burdens on the right to vote). This certainly includes serious infringements of the principle of liberty and blatant violations of the principle of fair equality of opportunity.

128   Contemporary debates • •

If the normal appeals to the political majority have already been made in good faith and have failed. Civil disobedience is a last resort. If there are not too many other minority groups with similarly valid claims. The just constitution would be eroded if too many groups exercised the choice of civil disobedience. The resolution of this situation is a political alliance of these multiple minor­ ities to form a working majority coalition.

Given that Rawls’ work is probably the most discussed political thought in contemporary studies of the subject today, the above provides but a brief overview of the complexities of his thought in this text (he has of course written more since and revised some of his ideas – see below). Similarly, criticisms of his work run far and wide. As well as being criticised by communitarian thinkers and other authors who do not share his liberalism, even within the liberal field of studies there has been significant challenges to his work.

       Fast forward to Kymlicka Chapter 9 Take a look at the work of a liberal theorist who does try to take on some of the challenges of communitarian position and group rights.

From those who might be expected to be sympathetic to his ideas, critique has centred around a number of key themes. For example, the stability of the type of state and the rights within it that Rawls outlines. Many have argued that human nature would not work in its favour and that simple envy between individuals would undo its basic premise. Furthermore, Rawls seems to assume an inevitable ‘progress’ and acceptance of rights, when no such assumption can be made. The strictures imposed by the ‘war on terror’ since 9/11 and the specific handling of human rights issues in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay might indicate, it is argued, that human rights and issues of justice are not on an inevitable trajectory upwards. Furthermore, issues regarding self-­respect are rather nebulous and individuals will have very different ideas of their boundaries. This is particularly the case in relation to material goods. One only has to look at the Premier League in English football to see that the prize of great wealth can often undermine personal loyalty and achievement.

Rawls and Nozick Such are some of the general points and critiques of Rawls’ major work. The question now remains, how does the work of the two authors relate? Furthermore, we need to explore how a comparison of their ideas can help us to understand the political content of what these authors have to say and their contemporary relevance. We may start by saying that both authors share an interest in the relationship between the state and the individual. This is an area of inquiry that is fundamental to political thought and in this sense places them both at the heart of what politics is all about. Furthermore, each author does so with consequent implications for the role of government. To start with, Rawls acknowledges the tension between an individual and society as a whole. The principles of justice which we

Rawls and Nozick   129 have looked at briefly above are the principles that he maintains are the best to reconcile the interests of the two parties. Society is described as a ‘cooperative venture for mutual advantage’, although ‘it is typically marked by a conflict as well as by an identity of interests’. Conflict occurs because humans are self-­interested. It is important to note here that, unlike Nozick’s free market, for Rawls ‘conflict’ as it is implied is taken as a realistic norm, but nevertheless as something that needs to be dissipated as far as possible, and in this sense is a negative not part of political discourse (perhaps even a moral ‘bad’ rather than a moral ‘good’). That conflict is seen as something that is undesirable in politics and in civil relations is an assumption of Rawls’ that could have political consequences and is worth considering. Trying to make politics devoid of conflict and setting the goal of social harmony as a ‘good’ denies that conflict is part of social negotiation and political aspirations. Think of political settlements in Northern Ireland and South Africa that actually have become more stable because of an acknowledgement and attempt to live with conflict, rather than eradicate it. Although Nozick does not specifically criticise Rawls on this point, there is much in Anarchy, State, and Utopia that is a direct response to his Harvard colleague’s theory of redistributive justice. Indeed, this text may be seen as a testing-­out of whether such a form of justice is possible. Rawls is more openly criticised by Nozick for infringing upon the freedom of individuals. This critique of Nozick’s can be seen right at the very beginning of his argument where he sets out his foundational points. Like Rawls he opens his discourse with some thoughts on Kant and concludes that the categorical imperative should be stated as to ‘minimalise’ the use of persons as means. But Nozick then asks rhetorically, ‘But why may not one violate persons for the greater social good?’ This cannot be done simply because there is no such thing as a social good, according to Nozick. Instead, ‘there are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others uses him, and benefits others. Nothing more.’ No entity exists to represent society as a whole; society is merely an aggregate of individuals. Social goods, social welfare or social justice are all bogus terms used to justify coercing individuals to benefit each other. This, in effect, forces someone to be used as a means to further the good of others. However, Rawls argued that from the ‘original position’, a rational person would freely choose the second principle stated in A Theory of Justice. If an individual chooses to be used as a means, it is no longer a violation of the diluted categorical imperative. Such a position as this, of course, highlights why it is that Nozick was, during the 1980s, looked upon as the philosopher of the New Right, particularly in the United States under the Reagan administration and in Britain under Margaret Thatcher. This philosophical statement is echoed in one of Thatcher’s most famous speeches (made to Women’s Own magazine in October 1987) where she declared, I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

130   Contemporary debates Key concept: the New Right Perhaps the phrase that captures the ideology of the New Right the most is ‘the free market and the strong state’. Although this may seem a contradiction, they were mutually compatible parts of a doctrine of ideas that developed from the 1970s. They particularly influenced the Conservative Party in Britain under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Essentially the New Right sought to introduce Monetarist free market economic policies, alongside strong law-­ and-order legislation. In some part, and to a greater degree in the United States, there was also a belief in the traditional family and Christian values.

Another point of tension between Nozick and Rawls concerns the very central tenant of distributive justice. Nozick argues that there is no central distribution processes or single person or group that may be entitled to control all the resources and, furthermore, has the authority to decide how these will be distributed. Distribution, he continues, is a result of choice: ‘What each person gets, he gets from others who give to him in exchange for something, or as a gift . . . the total result is the product of many decisions which the different individuals involved are entitled to make.’ In a free society, Nozick maintains, each individual uses each other to their own ends in accordance with the freedom they have to do so. Whether or not the distribution resulting from these transactions is ‘just’ would be the question for Rawls. Really the authors are coming at the moral aspect of the question of distribution in different ways. Nozick insists that just transactions are ones that are permissible in a free society, and that their outcomes are always unknown. Indeed, there is no way of judging them, no Archimedean point from which they might be ‘objectively’ judged. Rawls, however, believes that society can set basic principles of transactions in order to facilitate justice taking place in a fair and distributive manner. It is one of those times in political philosophy, one of those frequent times one can say, that when two authors are compared, seemingly around the same subject, there is often a point at which they stop conversing with each other as their arguments have taken them so far down the road that they can no longer be merely ‘compared’. Rather, the student of these ideas has to go back and think through the entirety of the authors arguments in order to make up ones’ own mind. Such is the toil of political thought! Another point that Nozick makes in relation to Rawls’ work is the lack of historical character to his principles of justice. Rawls does present an ahistorical, conceptually abstracted version of this principle. Nozick describes the type of principles that Rawls advocates as ‘current time-­slice principles of justice’ rather than historical. He holds that, ‘the justice of a distribution is determined by how things are distributed as judged by some structural principle(s) of just distribution’. In essence he is critiquing Rawls for presenting a contemporary yet merely fashionable or current strand of thought in terms of the principles of justice. One that takes it that all that matters with this principle is ‘what people get’. He has a point here. If we were to consider Rawls’ arguments in terms of the multi-­various philosophical and practical discussions that pre-­date it, we would find many competing accounts and changing ideas about ‘who gets what’ through the ages, to say the least. Rawls would argue that the ‘veil of ignorance’ leads to equality and fairness in the original position. And that it is a strength in his non-­historical view. Yet the veil of ignorance in this case may well be masking the fact that Rawls has not really justified his approach unless we accept that everyone should agree to rationally abandon the historical context for the sake of equality.

Rawls and Nozick   131

Revision notes Nozick 1 2 3

Nozick rejects nearly all of what Rawls theorised. Only the most ‘minimal’ state can ever be justified. Nozick has an entitlement theory to determine if exchanges between people are legitimate. This has three parts: the transfer principle, which holds that goods or services ‘freely acquired from others who acquired them in a just way are justly acquired’; the acquisition principle that states that people are entitled to holdings initially acquired in a just way; and the rectification principle, which requires that any violation of the first two principles be repaired by returning holdings to their rightful owners, or a ‘one time’ redistribution to the ‘difference principle’.

Rawls 1

2 3

4 5

The basic rules of society, when chosen through a ‘veil of ignorance’ about your own personal circumstances, would be based upon two principles; the liberty principle and the difference principle. The liberty principle holds that people would require minimal civil and legal rights to protect themselves. The difference principle states that everyone would want to live in a society where improving the condition of the poorest becomes the first priority since behind the ‘veil’ anyone could potentially fall into this category. A society is just if it satisfies these conditions. A right is an ‘entitlement or justified claim on others’. These require both negative and positive obligations, meaning that others are required to not harm anyone (negative obligation) and surrender portions of their earnings for the benefit of low-­income earners (positive).

Key criticisms 1

2 3 4

According to Nozick, Rawls was an ‘end-­state’ theorist of justice (non-­historical) meaning that he looked at the outcome of transactions to ensure ‘at the end’ everyone was equal. According to Nozick, the criticism of this is that it does not matter how the redistribution from citizen to citizen takes place, so long as everyone is equal in the end. In Nozick’s theory there is no way to justify the voting or democratic procedures of any state. Nozick’s minimal state would, on his own grounds, justify a maximal state as well.

Bibliography Isaacs, S. and Sparks, C. (2004) Political Theorists in Context, London: Routledge. Nozick, Robert (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York: Basic Books. Rawls, John (1971) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

132   Contemporary debates

Further reading Further philosophical texts by Nozick worth exploring are: Nozick, R. (1990) The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, New York: Pocket Books; Nozick, R. (1994) The Nature of Rationality, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. To look further into the work of John Rawls, move on to: Rawls, J. (2005) Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press; and Rawls, J. (2001) Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, 2nd edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. For secondary texts we recommend, Kukathas, C. and Pettit, P. (1990) John Rawls’ ‘Theory of Justice’ and Its Critics (Key Contemporary Thinkers), Cambridge: Polity Press; and Lacey, A. (2001) Robert Nozick (Philosophy Now), Chesham: Acumen Publishing Ltd.

9

Kymlicka

A comprehensive theory of justice in a multicultural state will include both universal rights, assigned to individuals regardless of group membership, and certain group-­differentiated rights or special status for minority cultures. Kymlicka (1995)

Introduction Will Kymlicka is a busy man – he is a Canadian political philosopher best known for his work on multiculturalism. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen’s University at Kingston, and Recurrent Visiting Professor in the Nationalism Studies programme at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. He also recently finished a term as president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. One of his main concerns throughout his work is to provide a liberal theory of minority rights. In this respect his most well known book is Multicultural Citizenship (Kymlicka, 1995), and it is to a study of this text that this chapter is devoted. In Multicultural Citizenship, Kymlicka focuses on a theoretical question that is also an extremely important and widely discussed contemporary issue, that of multiculturalism and group rights. He argues that in the past, liberalism has either been inadequate in looking at this issue or has not been able to consider group rights within its model. That is, the liberal model has historically and in most of its modern guises tended to be considered to be concerned exclusively with individual rights. Kymlicka wants to rise to the challenge of being a liberal who has something to say about what has been generally understood as a matter of community rights. In so doing he considers issues that have been raised by social movements and by other theorists. In working through this conundrum from a liberal point of view he attempts to provide a model as well as some policy guidelines. In this respect it can be understood that he wishes to situate himself not merely as a political theorist, but as a political activist as well. For him, the two go hand in hand – there is no distinction in his work between political theory and practice. He uses concrete examples to elucidate and extrapolate upon his ideas. The bulk of examples are Canadian, using the histories and political struggles in Quebec, although touching upon other ‘first nations’, immigrants and ethnic groups.

134   Contemporary debates Key concept: the liberal/communitarian debate In the 1980s this debate emerged between those who argued the case for individual rights as the basis for constitution law and state security (liberals) and those who maintained that there has been too much emphasis on individual liberty in the western political tradition and not enough emphasis upon communities (communitarians). Although this is a crude dichotomy, and one that many thinkers sought to challenge almost as soon as it arose, it is a useful way of starting to place certain thinkers and articulating their position, as long as this is not taken too far. Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, Kymlicka and Richard Dworkin are well known contemporary liberal theorists. Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Alasdair McIntyre and Amitai Etzioni are similarly well established contemporary communitarian thinkers.

Kymlicka’s work is rooted in contemporary social analysis in that it examines the ethnic and racial diversity of societies, and the increasing connection among these societies (with modern forms of transportation and communication). These increased connections have raised the issues of identity and rights to the forefront of the way in which we think about our place in society and the world. It affects individuals as political beings, how we interpret our individual experiences, as well as informing the terms and conditions of public policy. In short, Kymlicka’s work gets to the heart of current political debates about soci­ eties that will only become increasingly diverse in terms of ethnicity. The questions raised here are, then, especially important issues to consider.

Liberal multiculturalism: an overview Kymlicka argues that cultural diversity has become a central feature of contemporary society, and it seems likely to become more so in the immediate future. Increasing contact among societies as a result of improved communication and transportation has made for population movements and population change. For example, in the authors’ home country of Canada there has been increased diversity as the result of altered patterns of immigration, with many people from different ethnic backgrounds migrating there. This rise in cultural diversity also has its unsavoury dimension. Ethno-­cultural conflicts have become the main type of political violence around the world in the post-­Cold War era. One only has to think of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, as well as long-­term conflicts like that in the Middle East between Palestinians and Jews. Increasing cultural diversity, then, has led to increasing tensions about relations between various ethnic majority and minority groups. Political and social action of various ethnic minority and majority groups have made their presence felt. Again, Kymlicka refers to the example of Canada where ‘first nations’ peoples have become more politically active and have demanded that their social and political demands be honoured. The issue of the relations between Quebec and Canada have dominated much political discussion in Canada in recent years. This raises the issue of rights for individuals and groups who feel that they have not been equitably or justly treated. What are these rights, how extensive are they, and do they adhere to the group or just the individual? Finally, government policy and practical initiatives have changed in an attempt to deal with some of these demographic, social and political changes. Policies related to immigration, land claims, self-­government, language and customs have all changed in recent years. The multicultural policy of Canada is a notable example. The easy question to ask at this stage, however, is can the Canadian example be generalised in the way that Kymlicka suggests?

Kymlicka   135 Key concept: first nations This is a term of ethnicity that refers to the aboriginal peoples in Canada who are neither Inuit nor Métis people, although collectively the latter groups also constitute Canada’s aboriginal peoples. First nation people have traditionally been termed ‘Indian’, and the government of Canada classifies them in this manner. However, for both practical (dwindling numbers and inter-­marriage) and ethical (‘Indian’ had a negative connotation historically) reasons the term aboriginal is generally now preferred. The use of the term ‘first nations’ is also a controversial one in Canada. This is because the UN and other international organisations do not recognise this term officially, preferring to use the term ‘indigenous’ people.

Kymlicka’s approach to cultural diversity is focused on ethno-­cultural groups. These are defined as ethnic groups, national minorities, nations, and peoples. Some of the most confusing aspects of contemporary political theory to try to get to grip with are the many different definitions that have been conceptualised around these groups. As noted in the introduction, Kymlicka’s position on these issues is to start from a clear liberal point of view. He sets his analysis firmly within the tradition of liberalism. Key concept: liberalism Liberalism takes the individual as the basis of society, analysed as autonomous and having free will to act. Consequently the emphasis for liberals is on individual freedom, defined as freedom from coercion, or the ability to have a degree of moral self-­determination and, sometimes, individual happiness. Tolerance and respect for the rights of others are also part of this, so that pluralism in social and political affairs is a necessary feature of a liberal society. Freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of association are some of the rights that have typically been associated with liberalism and liberal democracies. As a political philosophy, liberalism has often been seen as primarily concerned with the relationship between the individual and the state, and with limiting the state’s ability to hinder the liberties of citizens.

Given that individualism and individual rights are often viewed as the defining characteristic of liberalism, so it has been the case that there are only minimal or, more often, no group rights that are theorised as part of liberal thinking. All rights adhere to the individual, and liberalism has often been criticised for being excessively individualistic. In contrast, Kymlicka argues that, ‘Liberalism also contains a broader account of the relationship between the individual and society – and, in particular, of the individual’s membership in a community and a culture.’ It is this argument that Kymlicka pursues in Multicultural Citizenship, and where, as stated above, he argues that group rights are part of liberal thought. Moreover, he maintains that group rights can be viewed as admissible within liberalism and even necessary for liberal freedoms and equality. Kymlicka begins his argument with some definitions. His argument rests on what he understands as the increase of ‘societal cultures’ which provide ‘members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres’ (Kymlicka, 1995). Culture is used, ‘as synonymous with a nation or a people’, and multiculturalism is used as ‘an umbrella term for every group-­related difference in moral perspective or personal

136   Contemporary debates identity’. The author makes a distinction between the existence of a culture which may be protected by special rights, and its character which is the subject to the free decisions of members of the group. He begins the defence of this position by distinguishing two types of ethno-­cultural groups. First, national minorities in multi-­nation states and, second ethnic groups in polyethnic states. Any particular state could be a combination of these, as is the case with Canada. Indeed, Kymlicka maintains that most states have aspects of each, although Canada is more clearly an example of a country with at least two national minor­ ities and many ethnic groups. National minorities are groups that have in common some or all of a history, community, territory, language or culture. Each of these is sometimes referred to as a ‘nation’, ‘people’ or ‘culture’. Each of these may have become a minority involuntarily through conquest, colonisation or expansion, or it could have voluntarily agreed to enter a federation with one or more other nations, peoples, or cultures. Kymlicka defines national minorities in terms of culture and argues that if these minorities wish to retain their cultures, they should be recognised as distinct. The group rights that may be associated with national minorities are self-­government rights or special representation rights. While these have to be worked out on a case-­by-case basis, Kymlicka makes a strong case for these rights where national minorities have a claim to be peoples or cultures. For Kymlicka these are not temporary rights, but are rights that should be recognised on a permanent basis, because these are inherent rights of the national minority. Of course, these groups could decide to secede, and this may be the best solution in some cases. But in other cases, it may be possible to accommodate the rights of national minorities through a combination of self-­government and special representation rights. In terms of polyethnic rights, Kymlicka argues that immigrant groups are generally ethnic groups and therefore can be accorded what he calls polyethnic rights in a polyethnic state. Kymlicka notes that immigration is voluntary (he deals separately with the issues of refugees, and the issue of asylum seekers was one that largely came after the publication of Multicultural Citizenship and so is not directly broached) and argues that immigrants generally wish to integrate into the society and culture they enter. At the same time, they may wish to retain some aspects of their culture, and retention of these is especially important to them. Among the rights that Kymlicka argues could be given to these ethnic groups are policies related to ending racism and discrimination, education, some types of affirmative action, exemption from some rules which may violate religious practices, and public funding of cultural practices. Why such rights are so important to national minorities and ethnic groups is outlined as an important part of his argument, developed in chapter 5 of Multicultural Citizenship, related to his definition and conceptual piecing together of his understanding of ‘culture’. Kymlicka has many useful comments concerning the meaning of culture and the importance of culture for individuals. The particular culture that is discussed here is societal culture, the history, traditions and conventions that go along with a particular society, and the set of social practices and institutions that are associated with the societal culture. A culture of origin provides a basic resource for people, and integration into a new culture is difficult for people. In these circumstances, it may be important to strengthen the culture and provide protections for various minority groups. But note that this leads in quite different directions for national minorities than for immigrant ethnic groups. The latter generally wish to integrate – the protections may not need be permanent – and are often fairly limited. For national minorities, the argument may lead in the direction of strengthening their societal culture, as a permanent feature, with extensive self-­government rights. Kymlicka does not argue for self-­government rights for ethnic groups seeing this as divisive and also against his general liberal outlook.

Kymlicka   137 It is important to understand that Kymlicka is a very nuanced thinker and he does not shy away from dealing with problem cases and examples which do not fit his approach. He recognises that each group, or parts of groups, may require different types of treatment. One example is African-­Americans in the United States who are neither a voluntary immigrant group nor a national minority. In general, African-­Americans have desired integration and an extension of full individual rights to them, rather than requesting group rights. A second group that may not fit is refugees, who leave their country and culture involuntarily, and may or may not wish to enter the culture of the new country where they find refuge. Some may wish to return to their country of origin, others may become more similar to voluntary immigrants. By stating the cases that do not fit neatly into his initial categories, Kymlicka illustrates that he is not merely a systematiser or crude empiricist. He tries to take into account the various ‘real life’ circumstances of individuals and groups. This is all part of his attempt to remain ‘grounded’, and ensure his theory matches the complex realities of the social situations of the many diverse minority groups that he refers to. So it is not surprising to find that as well as not being restricted, even by his own categories, for the sake of being able to theorise his brand of liberal multiculturalism, he is open to discussing illiberal cultures and how liberals can deal with them. These are cultures which limit the liberty of members and where respect for individual freedom of choice is limited or nonexistent. These could be national minorities or societal cultures that people decide to leave when they become immigrants. Both groups may try to maintain illiberal traditions in North America or wherever they immigrate to. Being a liberal, Kymlicka does not agree with these traditions and practices, but argues that if national minorities are to be self-­governing, then liberals cannot selectively intervene on some of these issues. This is an important policy point, because some first nations groups may argue that they should not be subject to, for example, the Canadian courts and legal system if they are to be truly self-­governing. For ethnic groups, maintaining such practices is inconsistent with integration into a liberal society. For example, treatment of girls and women within some cultures seems inappropriate – customs such as arranged marriage, female circumcision and so on. For these groups, Kymlicka argues that internal restrictions on group members be limited or nonexistent. He argues for external protections for these groups, although should they wish so, liberal rights should exist for individuals within them Discussion point Cultural relativity is an attempt to understand the cultural development of societies and social groups under their own terms; that is, without trying to impose absolute ideas of moral value or trying to measure different cultural variations in terms of some form of absolute cultural standard. In this sense, under specific circumstances, any form of human behaviour can appear to be good or bad. A good example here is our attitude to the killing of another human being. In peacetime this may be considered to be murder or manslaughter, whereas in war this may be considered a duty. As this example suggests, what is significant is not the act itself (taking the life of another person), but the social context of the act (in this instance, the moral background against which the act is viewed). However, the concept of cultural relativity does present problems, since if we apply it politically we have to accept any form of behaviour as acceptable as long as it conforms to the cultural expectations of the society in which it takes place. In terms of Kymlicka’s thought, the question to ask yourself is does he deal with this question adequately? And do you agree?

138   Contemporary debates To continue his argument that liberalism may incorporate multicultural group rights, Kymlicka maintains that the liberal tradition is not exclusively individualistic, but that this exclusive focus on individualism is of recent origin. Here he employs practical examples to overcome the less-­sure ground of theory – which in the liberal tradition has been more or less individualistic. He argues that all liberal societies recognise group rights in some form – even the United States, where liberal democracy is considered most dominant. There, Kymlicka notes that the rights of aboriginal peoples and native Hawaiians may differ from those of other Americans. One of the ways that liberals considered groups to be important was through recognition of the nation state as the basic unit of society. John Stuart Mill, one of the most consistently liberal political theorists, argued that a liberal system of self-­ rule would work only if the population constituted a national group or a single background. Nineteenth-­century liberals generally supported assimilation of minority groups, colonisation and imperialist expansion. The Marxist and socialist tradition in the nineteenth century was little different, with the assumption that the great powers – France, Britain, Germany – should be nation states, but that small nationalities should disappear. More recent socialists have adopted a variety of different approaches, but many of these have the same problem, they emphasise class and the achievement of socialism over the cultural and national issues. Many assume that these issues are part of ideology that is used by the economically and politically powerful to divide the weak and oppressed. As a result, the socialist tradition does not have a strong theory of culture. In chapter 8 of Multicultural Citizenship, Kymlicka addresses the issue of tolerance within the liberal state. By requiring freedom within and equality between groups, Kymlicka’s approach may fall into the same trap that Mill and Marx did. Some have questioned on what basis liberal emphases on individual rights could be forced on cultures that do not have such a tradition. Kymlicka argues that liberals cannot force such traditions on other countries, and should go easy on attempting to enforce such individual rights in national minorities. However, for ethnic groups that voluntarily come to a liberal, democratic country, and who wish to integrate into such a society, requiring recognition of individual rights in these groups does not seem unreasonable. In fact, rights such as those in the Canadian Charter may generally be supported by such immigrant, ethnic groups and individuals in those groups. Key concept: Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms Kymlicka refers to this charter a number of times in his argument. The charter sets out fundamental freedoms (freedom of conscience, religion, thought, expression, association, etc.), as well as citizens democratic rights. In addition, it also covers minority language and education rights, unlike many modern constitutions or the Bill of Rights.

As a basis for group rights, Kymlicka makes two arguments. The equality argument is that some minority rights actually increase equality, and that true equality requires different treatment for different groups. The problem is that depriving groups of rights such as language and access to land may leave a group culturally disadvantaged and unable to fully participate in society. Examples include land and fishing rights for aboriginal people, imposing few restrictions on the majority but having an especially important impact on improving the position of aboriginal people. Part of the argument here is that the state

Kymlicka   139 cannot be culturally neutral, there is usually an official language, particular procedures are used in the exercise of power, and there is the determination of boundaries that may affect representation for communities of interest. With respect to polyethnic rights, holidays, work-­week scheduling, education and public symbols may all present problems for some ethnic groups. Historical agreements such as treaties, terms of federation and agreements concerning boundaries and use of language should also be recognised, especially for national minorities. This may create problems for groups that never did cede control, and there the equality argument would have to be used. Some difficult cases such as the Hutterites may emerge here, where promises were made many years ago, and where internal restrictions are severe. Individuals in these groups do have the possibility of exit, but when doing so may be severely disadvantaged culturally and economically. Cultural diversity is a third argument that is sometimes used to argue for special minority rights. Kymlicka is generally sceptical of these, arguing that national minority rights may do little to increase diversity within the majority culture, and could even reduce it. For example, it would seem that special rights for Quebec might reduce cultural diversity in western Canada. The argument here is that one has to be clear concerning diversity within a culture as opposed to diversity between cultures. For the majority, increased cultural diversity is likely a positive development, but this is diversity within the culture. This can be achieved, and presently is occurring, by having more immigrant groups integrate into the majority culture. Group rights here adhere not just to the national minority or ethnic groups, but may be part of the rights of individuals in these groups. For example, special land rights for aboriginal people may be part of the rights of the aboriginal group. But hunting and fishing rights may be primarily important for individuals in these groups. Similarly, allowing Sikhs to avoid wearing motorcycle helmets is a special right that individual Sikhs may wish to exercise. In the final chapter of his book, on solidarity and social unity in the nation state, Kymlicka seems to be uncharacteristically pessimistic. For ethnic groups, he argues, integration is key, and many newcomers are among the most committed citizens. In Canada, through multiculturalism, these newcomers are tolerant of and welcome diversity, and seek to work to create a better society. With respect to ethno-­cultural minorities, Kymlicka is very optimistic in terms of creating a shared civic identity. Where he is more pessimistic is with respect to national minorities. While he supports group rights for these, he also recognises that these rights are inherently divisive, are not integrative, and do not support the same sense of shared civic identity. Kymlicka does note though that as a liberal, if a group wishes to separate, and members of the group consider that this improves their situation, the liberal solution would be to permit or encourage separation. Finally, Kymlicka notes that the shared identity associated with the nation state may be difficult to develop in a multi-­nation, polyethnic state like Canada. In fact, he refers to Canada as having a situation of deep diversity, with diverse cultural groups and diverse ways of belonging. He presents no magic solution or national goals, but argues that all groups have to work at developing the sense of shared identity if they want Canada to stay intact.

Commentaries As might be imagined, Kymlicka’s liberal multiculturalism has been much discussed, analysed and critiqued. Partly this is due to the fact that since Multicultural Citizenship was

140   Contemporary debates first published multiculturalism has become a priority on the political agenda of most developed states. This has been heightened since 9/11 and, in a British context, since the attempt by extreme, so-­called ‘Muslim’ fundamentalists to blow up a large part of the London underground system. The issue here has been not so much the terrorist attacks per se, but the fact that many of those convicted of the attempted bombing in London were asylum seekers who came to Britain at a young age. This has made for a widespread scepticism amongst the population, reflected in the media and political debates, regarding the success of multicultural policies. Yet government must deal with a growing ethnically diverse population. Inevitably government must make decisions, and they will favour some identities (usually the majority) over others. This is becoming more difficult as ‘societal cultures’ expand. In particular, a population that now includes many people from Eastern Europe (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia) have taken advantage of the expansion of the EU to come to Britain in search of better-­paid work. Increasingly, decisions that involve support of minority ethnic groups is coming under scrutiny and being politicised to a greater degree than it has ever been. So it is that issues such as wearing a headscarf (in France), religious symbols at school, work or other public places (equally an issue in the secular Muslim state of Turkey as in the United Kingdom) and the appropriateness of the full hajib, where the wearers face is covered, have become important public debates in the twenty-­first century. So although Kymlicka’s work is very timely, and the issues of multiculturalism from a public policy point of view are increasingly important, the sensitivity of such issue is now heightened. As would be expected, academic criticisms of multiculturalism in general and liberal multiculturalism in particular have not been in short supply. Brian Barry is well known for his argument that multiculturalism introduces more problems than it solves and its policies have in fact hindered the progress of the values of liberty and equality so much that, ‘the implementation of such policies tends to mark a retreat from both’ (Barry, 2002). Overall, Barry argues that multiculturalism is a threat to liberal egalitarianism. This is because it places traditional liberal rights as a secondary concern, it has the danger of fragmenting society and being divisive, and finally it takes away the attention from what he understands to be the most pressing issue of socioeconomic inequalities. He argues that multicultural defence of group rights under the banner of the ‘politics of difference’ (a reference to the philosopher and feminist Iris Young) and/or the ‘politics of recognition’ (an argument developed by Kymlicka’s fellow Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor (although he is often termed a ‘communitarian’)) have not proven successful. Instead, he calls for renewed attention to the general concept of universal rights as a means of guaranteeing protections. A problem with Barry’s argument, and those like it, is that it takes a very generalised swipe at multiculturalism, as if there were only one strand of multiculturalist thought. Although Barry does recognise differences, he does treat this area of study as a monolithic entity. In so doing he fails to give a detailed reading or get to grips with the complexities and nuances of arguments such as Kymlicka’s. I would argue that a more productive, constructive criticism is to be found in particularistic studies of areas within multiculturalism or specific author-­focused critiques. One of the most vociferous critiques of multiculturalism that has developed in this regard is from the perspective of gender studies. Feminists and those interested in gender equality have argued that while different approaches to cultural protection may be developing in many western countries, this tendency has tended to shy away from the implications for gender equality. Susan Okin argued that the French government’s experience in trying to conciliate feminism and multicultural rights is illustrative of this tension. She notes that during the 1980s when the French government

Kymlicka   141 allowed immigrant men to bring multiple wives into the country there was no effective political opposition to this. But this was despite the fact that it soon became clear that the women affected by this polygamy regarded it as an inescapable and barely tolerable institution in the African nations they came from. She concludes that ‘the French accommodation of polygamy illustrates a deep and growing tension between feminism and multiculturalist concerns to protect cultural diversity’ (Okin, 1999).

       Rewind to de Beauvoir Chapter 6 See de Beauvoir’s analysis of classic feminist theory.

The case study that Okin states here raises the question regarding the fact that studies of multiculturalism, including Kymlicka’s text summarised here, have not addressed the question of whether or not ‘societal cultures’ facilitate the control of men over women. She argues that those interested in group rights tend to treat cultural groups as monoliths, and to pay more attention to differences between and among groups than to differences within them. Yet minority cultural groups, like the societies in which they exist, are gendered, with substantial differences of power, advantage and opportunity between men and women. She also maintains that advocates of group rights pay little attention to the private sphere and the issues of domesticity. Many liberal advocates of group rights, including Kymlicka, argue that individuals need to be allowed to have their own culture and that only within such a culture can people develop a sense of self-­esteem, self-­respect or the capacity to decide what kind of life is good for them. But such arguments typically neglect the different roles that cultural groups ask of their members and the context in which persons’ senses of themselves and their capa­ cities are first formed and in which culture is first transmitted, the realm of domestic or family life. (Okin, 1999) Gender equality critiques of multiculturalism point out that the sphere of personal, sexual and reproductive life provides a central focus of most cultures. Religious or cultural groups are often particularly concerned with laws, rules and customs surrounding marriage, children and family life in general. So when multiculturalists argue for ‘special circumstances’ or sensitivity to particular cultural practices, these are bound to have a greater degree of actual impact on the lives of women than of men. Home is not merely ‘where the heart is’, a rose-­tinted safe haven from the harsh realities of the social world, but remains a key institution of socialisation. In fact, most contemporary feminists and gender-­equality commentators would agree that the private sphere and the public sphere are intimately bound. The degree of responsibilities (financial and emotional), the potential for individual choice and the location of resources and decision-­making at home has a major impact on who can participate in and influence the public or civic cultural life. Globally, many societies and cultures are patriarchal, attempting to bring women’s sexuality and reproductive capabilities under male control. Such practices make it all but impossible for women to choose to live independently of men, or to be celibate or lesbian, or not to have children. There are unfortunately all too many examples of cultural practices that violate

142   Contemporary debates women’s rights. As de Gusmão (2008) points out in her study, in some countries young girls are forced to undergo genital cutting so they become ‘more marriageable’. UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, estimates that 130 million women, most of them in Africa, have undergone genital mutilation. Each year more than two million girls undergo the procedure, some of them in infancy. Egypt (where the court overturned the ban on cutting of girls’ genitals), Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan account for 75 per cent of cases. In some countries, as many as 95 per cent of girls are affected. However, more than six African nations south of the Sahara have now instituted bans, which are enforced with fines and jail terms. The procedure is also barred in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Djibouti, Ghana, Guinea and Togo. Other countries, among them Uganda, discourage it. The danger is, from this critical feminist perspective, that if views like Kymlicka’s are allowed to hold sway then ‘cultural defence’ cases may be put forward in law where a defendant is accused of rape, violence or abuse, but cites their particular cultural customs and traditions. Kymlicka’s ‘special rights’ and his sensitivity to limiting intervention, even of what may appear illiberal practices (as he puts it), does not seem virulent enough in such cases of clear injustice and suffering. In this respect, an individual’s human rights would be negated by group rights, and this seems to be unreasonable given the basis of minority rights thinking is to ensure the dignity of all. Kymlicka would, of course, not wish to condone such miscarriages of justice, but it has been left to gender-­equality theorists to highlight this danger that does seems under-­developed in Kymlicka’s own work, at least in Multicultural Citizenship. A further response to liberal multiculturalism has come from those who have argued that this perspective has a number of limits upon it because it is shackled by certain liberal presumptions that have become entrenched in mainstream and popular theories. This may be called the democratic deliberative approach, and many feminists have supported this viewpoint.        Rewind to Rawls and Nozick Chapter 8 See how the democratic-­deliberative approach is critical of the body of thought that has developed around the ideas of well known ‘distributive’ contemporary liberal theorists like Rawls and Nozick.

Since the early 1990s there has been a turn towards the notion of deliberation in democratic theory, and this debate began largely as a consequence of debates around multiculturalism. As one would expect there are a number of different approaches within this school of thought (perhaps Habermas is the most well known proponent). However, in general it may be stated that this approach reassesses the relation between democracy and justice. It is argued that the inter-­connectedness between democracy and justice had all but been lost in mainstream liberal theory. Political thinkers either dealt with one or the other and theorists of justice tended to believe that what was deemed to be ‘just’ in the distribution of social goods could be settled as a matter of speculative theory. However, deliberative democratic theory maintains that this disregard for a conception of democracy actually de-­politicises these debates. In other words, if there is no democratic process or dialogue or conversation, how do we know what is ‘just’ to different groups and cultures?

Kymlicka   143 Deliberative democrats, then, take the democratic process itself as being the mechanism to transform real social needs into public policy. In order that this is the case, it requires that citizens participate in authentic deliberation, as opposed to simply expressing their existing preferences. By ‘authentic deliberation’, what is meant is more than merely supporting the representative party system or simply the act of voting. How then might this view be seen as critical of Kymlicka’s multiculturalism? In order to make that step we need first to be clearer about what is meant by ‘authentic deliberation’ and how it might be different to the distributive justice model that Kymlicka’s liberal multiculturalism is tied to. Authentic deliberation requires that parties abandon their usual instrumental behaviour in seeking preferential outcomes, and instead seek to reach a consensus by way of dialogue within a free and equal setting. Participating in this discursive practice is different from participating in the decision-­making process of the mainstream liberal model of democracy. For deliberative democrats, participation in the democratic process is a transformative process. Through public discussion with a variety of different people from diverse social circumstances, new information and experiences can be learnt that test the individual’s own views and test prejudices and misinformation. What Kymlicka lacks, according to this view, is a genuine engagement with the nuanced situations of individuals within minority groups and sub-­groups of minority groups (minorities within minorities – such as the position of women). One could counter­argue that it is just not practically possible for a society to accommodate the social needs of all minority group members. However, the danger is that anti-­discriminatory laws that do not engage in a deliberative democratic process with people within minority groups could actually exacerbate inequalities. It ought to be remembered too, that for those advocating the deliberative approach this ought to be the character of political dialogue in general, and not just applicable to minority groups. In that sense, were this type of accommodation sought it would be more practicable if it were already generally applied. Discussion point Every student of multiculturalism who is also interested in gender equality must ask of themselves these fundamental questions: Why should special accommodation to members of minority groups be granted, if at all? What are the limits of accommodation? How might tensions between the pursuit of justice for cultural minorities and the pursuit of gender justice be addressed?

Monique Deveaux (2006) has developed a deliberative democratic approach that attempts to situate women who belong to minority cultural groups as an integral part of the democratic process of decision-­making regarding the various developments of their communities’ traditions, customs and futures. She argues for this case by maintaining that women ought to be part of the formal decision-­making process and involved in constructing new and more inclusive forums for mediating cultural disputes. She maintains that the democratic approach to cultural conflicts is preferable to the liberal one, which wrongly focuses upon the compatibility or incompatibility of particular social customs and arrangements from within a strictly liberal paradigm. This approach, she maintains, does not adequately stress the importance of a cultural community’s own active involvement in evaluating and transforming their social practices. Some liberals have expressed their concern that the deliberative approach might

144   Contemporary debates reinforce the positions of powerful members of the cultural community and would actually end up silencing vulnerable individuals. This would particularly affect women in a patriarchal culture. Other liberals have been less sceptical about this kind of dialogue, but still limited by their liberal mindset when it comes to how it would be applied. Such a view can be attributed to Kymlicka. He believes that deliberation by cultural communities and the liberal state is a critical part of the process of reform, and preferable to policies of mere prohibition. But for him and others like him dialogue is conceived largely as a form of mediation that brings minority communities together with the majority community, rather than a way for cultural groups to work through issues more independently. In addition, for Kymlicka, the framework of liberalism in which such deliberation would take place imposes necessary constraints on both the form and outcome of deliberative solutions to cultural disputes. Where cultural practices and arrangements are seen to violate liberal principles protecting individual rights (such as freedom of religion or sexual equality), Kymlicka maintains that these general liberal principles are sacrosanct. However, the difficulty with this approach is that the initial construction of the problem is as a problem of either licence or prohibition. Kymlicka has in mind a question along the line of ‘which minority cultural practices should the liberal state permit, and which ought it to prohibit? Whereas Deveaux argues that those committed to resolving a cultural conflict ought to begin by asking a series of questions about the disputed customs and the social contexts in which they are practised. These questions might be constructed along the lines of: ‘Why and how has a particular custom come to be questioned or contested?’; ‘Who is insisting that a practice takes a particular (tradition or amended) form, and who benefits from this?’; ‘Whose authority is challenged, and whose is reinforced, by a dispute over a particular custom, or by the introduction of a new form of that custom?’ The deliberative democracy approach and the feminist critique are a constructive means of analysing Kymlicka’s work in Multicultural Citizenship. These perspectives highlight a number of flaws and assumptions that may be associated with liberal multiculturalism. Fundamentally they alert us to the way in which liberalism itself may not necessarily take account of the differing views and micro-­power politics within a minority group. Furthermore, these approaches question how even anti-­discrimination laws might be detrimental to the less powerful members of a cultural group. However, deliberative democracy has been accused of being rather utopian in its belief in ‘authentic deliberation’, particular in a globalised, multimedia world where debate and opinion are in a continual state of flux, making clear deliberation impossible. In addition there is also the practical complication of gathering experiences and views in mass societies, particular in ones where substantive public political debate is minimal.

Revision notes 1

2 3

Kymlicka looks at national minority groups (that have been incorporated into a larger state) and ethnic groups (loose associations of peoples who have immigrated). He examines the position of these groups within multi-­nation states (states which contain more than one nation) and/or polyethnic states (states with distinctive – usually non-­ assimilated – groups with particular family lives, associations and cultures). In particular, Kymlicka is interested in ‘societal cultures’, a culture that is not just historic but has common institutions and practices. As a liberal, Kymlicka maintains that group rights are secured through liberal rights. Individuals within societal cultures should have the opportunity to choose to what extent they participate in the societal culture, and liberal rights will protect and respect

Kymlicka   145

4

these choices. Liberals ought not to intervene in all instances of illiberal practice without proper consideration and sensitivity to the customs of minority groups. Feminist have argued that multiculturalism can often be negative in terms of women’s rights and well-­being. In addition, deliberative democratic theory has challenged the way in which liberals understand the issues integral to multiculturalism.

Bibliography Barry, B. (2002) Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism, Cambridge: Polity Press. de Gusmão, S.B. (2008) Women Rights in Cultural Minority, online, available at: http://gedi.objectis. net/artigos/Women_Rights_in_Cultural_Minorit.pdf. Deveaux, M. (2006) Gender and Justice in Multicultural Liberal States, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dryzek, J.S. (2006) Deliberative Global Politics: Discourse and Democracy in a Global World, London: Polity Press. Gutmann, A. and Thompson, D. (2004) Why Deliberative Democracy?, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kymlicka, W. (1989) Liberalism, Community and Culture, London: Clarendon Press. Kymlicka, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Okin, S. (1999) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Further reading Will Kymlicka is a very active writer and numerous publications have come out since Multicultural Liberalism, although this remains his ‘classic’ text. At the same time as this text appeared he edited a collection of 16 essays: Kymlicka, W. (1995) The Rights of Minority Cultures, Oxford: Oxford University Press. All these essays are worth exploring, and Kymlicka provides an excellent introduction and ideas for further reading. More recently he has published: Kymlicka, W. (2007) Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. As the title suggests, this takes the issues of multiculturalism in terms of their consequences for globalisation and universal human rights. He has also co-­edited a collection of work that situates his longstanding interest in the rights of minority groups with that of differing welfare systems: Banting, K. and Kymlicka, W. (2006) Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary democracies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finally, Kymlicka has a website where you can have access to his Citizenship, Democracy and Ethnocultural Diversity newsletter as well as providing useful links to other democracy and diversity sites: http://post.queensu.ca/~kymlicka.

10 Foucault

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than ‘politicians’ think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think. Foucault, cited in Eribon (1991: 282)

Introduction At the time of his death in 1984 Michel Foucault was perhaps the most famous intellectual figure in the world. Feted by many as a progressive and radical free thinker who gave a voice to the excluded and marginalised, he was reviled by others for his ‘gesture politics’ and his failure to engage responsibly with the realities of contemporary society. Beyond academic circles his fame rested more on his extravagant private life and the pursuit of what he called ‘limit experiences’ – experiences often of a sexual and/or violent nature which, he claimed, represented liberation from the dull conventionality of bourgeois society and the false dichotomies of pleasure/pain, desire/aversion and morality/immorality. Foucault’s work resonates across a broad range of academic departments, most notably sociology, history, politics and philosophy, but it is not clear which, if any, of these is his natural home. From a methodological perspective he is equally hard to pin down. He famously resisted the label of structuralist, but he was no more content with post-­structuralist, phenomenologist, existentialist or Marxist. How can we evaluate the work of Foucault today? In this chapter I argue that there is a generous reading of it in which he emerges as a theorist committed to a politics of truth and justice. As we will see, this can be a difficult argument to sustain. For some theorists such as Habermas, Foucault’s emphasis on the power–knowledge relationship represents a significant problem for any claim that his work is concerned with ethics, truth and justice. After all, if there are no fixed criteria to differentiate between competing ethical arguments, then why, and how, should we struggle for a better, fairer, more democratic and just society? Foucault responded to such criticisms by arguing that changing society was not actually a matter of justice in the first place. Rather, it was about providing an opportunity to the disempowered to exact revenge on those in society responsible for marginalising them. Moreover, Foucault claimed that political change will never lead to the elimination of unequal

Foucault   147 power relations because new patterns of domination will inevitably appear. This is because it is our destiny to remain trapped in a groundless, spinning vortex of power in which unstable identities compete against each other for hegemonic status. One criticism made of the early work of Foucault was that his conception of the subject, despite its emphasis on individuality, remained too ‘structurally entangled’, leaving insufficient room for agency and freedom. This entanglement is epitomised by Foucault’s theorisation of the subject–society interface as ‘power meeting itself’. What this means is that, for Foucault, both the subject and society are no more than the product of power relations. However, it is important to stress that, for Foucault, the subject should not be reduced to its structural or societal conditions of existence. Crucially, it is always more than that. However, in that case, what is the subject and what is its ontological status? Foucault, even in his later writing, did not argue for a liberal notion of the subject as sovereign. As we know, he was highly critical of the claims of existentialism and phenomenology in this regard. One way we can understand the subject in Foucault is to see it as the difference between the societal forces that bring it into being and the acts of power that issue from it. In the same way that Foucault linked power and knowledge without collapsing them into each other, he sought to convey the deep symbiosis between the subject and the forces of society in the same non-­reducible way. By the time Foucault was engaged in his final project, The History of Sexuality, he was examining more closely the idea of the subject as a more autonomous being. I examine the implications of this shift of emphasis later in the chapter. Discussion point There are two broad responses to Foucault’s work. The first is that it failed to move beyond a philosophy of relativism and, as a result, it offered little, if anything, to a serious ‘politics of emancipation’. From this perspective, any truly emancipatory form of politics must transcend the particularism of power and identity and identify universal political and ethical axioms that can inform our quest to live well in the world. The second response is that it is precisely upon Foucault’s recognition of the constitutive nature of power that our ideas about ethics and living well should be constructed. Thus it is important that we acknowledge that ideas about justice emanate from a subjectivity that is always and already saturated with cultural, linguistic and political specificity. This acknowledgement is important because it allows us to recognise the arbitrariness of identity and the injustice of domination and exclusion. This second response also suggests that, throughout Foucault’s work, there was an implicit commitment to truth, a commitment to recognise the true nature of history and identity as fleeting, transitory and provisional. In his later work this commitment was seen in the context of a demand that we remain true to ourselves and steadfast in our quest to live well in the world.

Overview of Foucault’s life and work Foucault was born into a prosperous family in Poitiers, France in 1926. His father was an eminent surgeon who hoped Michel would follow him into the medical profession. However, Michel had different ideas and in 1946, aged 20, he entered the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure d’Ulm in Paris to study philosophy and psychology. Although desperately unhappy during much of his time here, he went on to pass his Aggregation (the higher degree necessary for teaching) in 1950. During his time as a normalien he became passionately interested in the philosophical ideas that dominated French intellectual life in the post-­war period. Of particular significance was the debate between Marxists and existentialists. Foucault’s

148   Contemporary debates introduction to existentialism was through the lectures on Hegel by Jean Hyppolite and Maurice Merleau-­Ponty. Foucault’s reading of Sartre and Heidegger was also important in informing his ideas about this tradition. Although sympathetic to its serious moral tone and emphasis on individual responsibility, Foucault grew tired of existentialism, at least in its Sartrean manifestation, on the grounds of what he called its ‘transcendental narcissism’. By this he meant that its conception of the subject as sovereign failed to account for the constitutive role of history, politics, culture and language. Foucault’s relationship with Marxism was always more complex. Although he was explicit in his denunciation of Stalin’s Russia, he remained convinced throughout his life that Marxism was the one philosophy that we could not go beyond. This is evident in his enthusiasm for the work of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem. These philosophers of science were important for Foucault as they drew on the Althusserian concept of interpellation, which examined how economic and social forces structure and inform our understanding of the world. One of Canguilhem’s specific concerns in this regard was how the institutionalisation of medical knowledge sets limits on what can be thought and said about the body and illness. This perspective on the power–knowledge relationship was significant in informing Foucault’s intellectual development and marked the cornerstone of his archaeological investigations that examined how, within particular historical epistemes, our knowledge and understanding are structured. Foucault referred to this archaeological approach as a ‘history of the different worlds that human eyes have seen’. His later shift to a more genealogical methodology in the mid-­1970s retained this broad structuralist emphasis but, in addition, focused on why historical change takes place, how ‘micro-­level’ dislocations and disjunctions combine to usher in the contours of new historical epochs and how we come to understand what he called the ‘history of the present’. This latter point was of particular importance for Foucault as it was concerned with exposing the strangeness of the present. This referred to his concern to promote a critical reading of history in order that we can understand how the violence inherent within it excludes alternative ways of living in the present.        Rewind to Adorno Chapter 7 Despite their differences there were points of convergence between Adorno and Foucault. For example, both were influenced by Bataille, Blanchot, Artaud, Sade, Mallarme and Beckett who, as artists and writers, challenged the boundaries of conventional thought.

After graduating from the Ecole Normale, Foucault spent time in Sweden, Poland and Germany where he was employed as a lecturer and cultural attaché. During this time he continued to work on a doctoral thesis and when, in 1960, he returned to France from his self-­imposed exile, he submitted the dissertation that would become known as Folie et Deraison, or Madness and Civilisation. This text was generally well received in France and was the first of many distinguished publications that would follow over the course of the next two decades. It was followed in 1963 by Naissance de la Clinique and, in 1966, by his most philosophically ambitious book, Les Mots et les Choses, translated as The Order of Things. By this time Foucault had moved to Tunisia, where he remained until the student insurrection in 1968. This was a significant event for Foucault and it marked the beginning of a more politically engaged period of his life in which he became involved with different groups, most notably the Prison Information Group, which campaigned for prisoners in French jails. It was also at this time he became the head of a philosophy

Foucault   149 faculty at Vincennes, where he remained until his appointment as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the College de France was announced in 1970. By this time he had published a response to the criticisms made of Les Mots et les Choses under the title L’Archeologie du Savoir – the Archaeology of Knowledge. His work with the Prisoners Information Group led to the publication of Discipline et Punir in 1975. This text is generally thought to mark Foucault’s transition from an archaeological to a genealogical position in that it signalled a shift of emphasis from the synchronic, unconscious, epistemes that regulate our thought towards a more diachronic approach that was immediately more sensitive to how and why epistemes collapse and are replaced with new systems of thought and knowledge. More concretely, Discipline et Punir was a text that fundamentally challenged traditional thinking about the role of the prison in modern society: But perhaps one should reverse the problem and ask oneself what is served by the failure of the prison; what is the use of these different phenomena that are continually being criticized; the maintenance of delinquency, the encouragement of recidivism, the transformation of the occasional offender into an habitual delinquent, the organization of a closed milieu of delinquency. Perhaps one should look for what is hidden beneath the apparent cynicism of the penal institution which after purging the convicts by means of their sentence, continue to follow them by a whole series of brandings. Can we not see a consequence rather than a contradiction? If so, one would be forced to suppose that the prison, and no doubt punishment in general, is not intended to eliminate offences, but rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them; that is not to much that they render docile those that are likely to transgress the law, but that they tend to assimilate the transgression of the laws in a general tactics of subjection. (Foucault, 1975: 272) Key concepts: archaeology and genealogy The difference between ‘the quasi-­structuralist archaeology of discourse developed in the 1960s and the more Nietzschean-­inspired genealogical studies of the 1970s’ has been described as follows: ‘[whereas] archaeology describes the rules of formation that structure discourses, genealogy examines the historical emergence of discursive formations with a view to exploring possibilities that are excluded by the exercise of power and systems of domination’ (Howarth, 2000: 49). The genealogical approach has also been described as the attempt to ‘shatter the aura of legitimacy that surrounds us’ (McNay, 1992: 14, cited in Stones, 1998: 253).

As we have seen, the late Foucault was more interested in the role of the subject as a constitutive entity, as a site of energy and self-­transformation. This shift is most evident in his last major project, Historie de la Sexualite. This was a hugely ambitious project and, at the time of his death in 1984, only the first of a planned six volumes had been published. The second and third volumes were compiled from his notes and were published posthumously under the titles La Valonte de Savour (The Use of Pleasure) and Le Souci de Soi (The Care of the Self). I look at these texts at the end of this chapter. Foucault’s death has been the subject of much speculation, much of it of a rather unpleasant and voyeuristic nature. One question was about how much knowledge he had of his illness (which was AIDS related) and whether he took appropriate precautions to ensure the safety of others. It is speculated that he knew about the dangers to himself and others but saw death from such

150   Contemporary debates a lifestyle as the ultimate aesthetic and political statement. A full and candid account of this and other aspects of Foucault’s life is given in the most intimate of the many biographies of Foucault, James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault.

Intellectual influences Kant, Marx, Weber and Nietzsche It is widely thought that Nietzsche was Foucault’s most significant philosophical influence and, although there are important points of divergence between them, it is undoubtedly the case that this was an important intellectual relationship. Before examining it in more detail, let us deal with three other important influences: Kant, Marx and Weber. In Foucault’s most systematic engagement with traditional philosophy in Les Mots et les Choses he considered the implications of Kant’s view that, as finite beings constituted by space and time, we cannot know about the world as it is in itself. For Foucault, Kant’s ‘Copernican turn’ was significant because it established the limits to what could be known through reason – a position that, perhaps more than any other, informed Foucault’s thought. Kant’s conception of finitude resonates in Marx’s depiction of the subject as a product of economic and social conditions. Although Foucault was dismissive of Marx’s ideas of false consciousness and the estrangement of the proletariat from knowledge of objective reality, he was deeply impressed by Marxism in two distinct senses. First, in its appreciation of how knowledge is constituted within specific socio-­economic conditions and, second, in its understanding of how the promise of change is so deeply woven into the social and psychological fabric of the human condition. So, although dismissive of any simple notion of progress or emancipation, Foucault understood these ideas as necessary horizons that structure our experience of life in the most profound way. A similar ambivalence pervades Foucault’s response to Weber. So, although he agreed with Weber about the dangers of legal rationalism, he was critical of his underlying premise about how it repressed a more authentic human spirit. Discussion point It is interesting to speculate about how Foucault would have responded to Micheal Hart and Antonio Negri’s Empire. This text, which has been described as a form of ‘Marxist poetics’, argued that the globalised world order, or empire, is vulnerable to new revolutionary forces because traditional capitalist structures, such as the state, have been eroded. The emergence of this new revolutionary agency, or political subjectivity, referred to as the multitude, would have been of great interest to Foucault. One imagines that he would have been particularly sympathetic to Hart and Negri’s call for the anti-­capitalist front to be as broad as possible, including, if necessary, religious fundamentalist groups.

Foucault’s intellectual debt to Nietzsche can be examined in the context of his 1971 essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’. Here Foucault, following Nietzsche, argued that history is no more than a sequence of different modes of domination. In other words, he argued that there was no rationale to the course of history, no invisible hand guiding it and no telos inherent within it. For Nietzsche, what there was instead was the irrepressible desire for human beings to be masters of their destiny and to subject others to their ends. It is through this life-­affirming process of becoming that, for Nietzsche, humanity achieves

Foucault   151 greatness, glory and dignity. For Nietzsche, this Dionysian spirit of affirmation finds its ultimate expression with the idea of the eternal return: the desire for the cycle of life to continue forever. For Foucault, this rhetoric was magnificently liberating and provided the perfect setting for his personal quest for ecstatic rapture and pleasure. More importantly, Nietzsche’s radically deconstructive reading of morality and history provided the theoretical framework for Foucault’s genealogical approach. As we have seen, this approach has been criticised by critics such as Habermas and Walzer, who argued that it does not provide us with a compelling argument about why we should act to change the world. After all, if change results merely in one system of domination replacing another, then what is the point of it? In a similar vein Foucault has been criticised for undermining the very idea of political resistance: What does resistance mean when the power to be resisted is conceived as generating the very conditions of resistance that oppose it? [As] resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power what does it mean to be an agent when the subject that resists is but the product of this generative power. (Huquembourg and Arditi, 1999: 663) How should we respond to these charges of relativism? Let us consider them in the context of Foucault’s work on madness. The important point Foucault made here was that the designation of ‘madness’ was the product of modern psychiatry, a discipline that had an interest in presenting the ‘absence of reason’ as a clinical condition that could be controlled and contained. Stripped of its aura as an exotic other, madness became a threat to reason and order. Foucault’s argument here is that madness was not a condition discovered by modern psychiatry but a category constructed by it for its own ends. Now, where is the ethical moment in Foucault’s intervention? One response would be that it lies in his claim that responsibility must now be accepted by those who designate others as insane. However, more importantly, it lies in his commitment (1) to show that history is full of such moments of misrecognition; (2) to reveal how history covers over the traces of its dislocations and contradictions; and (3) to uncover history’s deep implication in politics and power. The commitment to examine the nature of our relationship to history is at the heart of all of Foucault’s work. Indeed, it is what we might call the quasi-­transcendental moment in it. Therefore, we should not accept uncritically the charges of relativism made against Foucault because within his characterisation of history as ‘a succession of changes in power relations’ a deep well of complex ethical implications resides. Discussion point In his recently published Black Mass, Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007) John Gray argues that those who reject religion, such as Richard Dawkins, remain trapped within the confines of utopian thought. This is because, for Gray, all these secularists have done is to replace God with another deity in the form of scientific progress. He makes the same argument against Nietzsche. Thus, although he rejected Christianity, Gray claims that Nietzsche remained trapped within a deeply religious or millenarian mind-­set. The question here is whether the same could be said of Foucault? Thus, precisely because he saw power as an ineradicable feature of existence it can be argued that Foucault, like Nietzsche, saw power in a transcendental or mystical context that is similar to a religious outlook.

152   Contemporary debates

Power, truth and politics Let us now examine in more detail the political implications of Foucault’s theory of power and the power–knowledge relationship. We examined above Foucault’s argument about the nature of modern psychiatry and the implication that madness is no more than a linguistic category articulated for political reasons – a signifier without a signified. This theorisation of the power–knowledge relationship resonates in a number of contemporary political contexts. Consider, for example, the issue of AIDS in South Africa. The problem here was that the government’s sensitivity to the politics surrounding this issue led a climate of doubt and scepticism in which it became possible to question that any reality existed independently of the competing discourses about it. More specifically, the problem was that the argument that AIDS was caused by the HIV virus, which was being spread by people having unprotected sex, became so politicised that the relationship between language and reality effectively collapsed. The important issue at stake here is that, although we always experience reality through the lens of discourse and power, there is a reality out there and it will impact on our lives irrespective of how we articulate it. We can consider the example of climate change in the same way. Here we have another issue that many, particularly in the United States, think is a conspiracy designed to undermine western societies and the conditions for capitalism. This, therefore, is another example of how sensitivity to the power–knowledge relationship can lead to a radical scepticism about the capacity of language (or science) to reflect accurately the nature of the world. Now it could be argued that what is happening in both of these cases is no more than powerful groups seeking to protect their economic and political interests. No doubt this is an important aspect of these debates. However, these situations remain important examples of how our sensitivity to the discursive nature of knowledge can blind us to the fact that knowledge sometimes can tell us something that is true about the world. The important point here is not that Foucault was wrong to focus on the social and cultural conditions that lead to the production of knowledge. Far from it. His emphasis on how power is internalised and naturalised, a form of governance he understood as ‘governmentality’ or the ‘conduct of conduct’, is a vital reminder of how power works in modern society. It is important as it allows us to understand the implications of the transition from the pre-­ modern mode of power that marked itself, literally, on the body of the citizen, to one whose objective was to gain the ‘compliance of the soul’. However, none of this should blind us to the fact that there is a reality out there and that we ignore it at our peril. Foucault’s quest to expose the power and violence that lurks within our political identities and settlements raises other significant political questions. We can only suppose how he would have reacted to the events in the United States on 11 September 2001. However, it is plausible to suggest that he would not have been unequivocally critical of those young men who sacrificed their lives to attack the economic heart of western capitalism. How can this situation allow us to reflect on Foucault’s account of politics and power? It is clear why Foucault would have been deeply interested in the complex political questions we face in the post-­9/11 world. He would have been particularly interested in the claim made by governments that in order to protect our bodies from the effects of mass terrorism, those bodies have to be subject to the most intense scrutiny, surveillance and interference. In the context of Britain this debate goes to the heart of the relationship that should exist between the individual and the state in a liberal democratic society. But the more important question raised in the context of the contemporary international situation is the following: does a Foucauldian analysis, so attuned to the complexities of power and the importance of seeing

Foucault   153 things from the other side, have an inherent bias to those arguments that seek to subvert dominant power relations even when those arguments might lack moral legitimacy? The answer to this question is a clear ‘yes’. Foucault’s ambivalence to liberal societies stems in part from what he saw as the insidious way in which they exercise violence over us, how their values penetrate deeply, yet imperceptibly, into our minds and souls (and, as we have seen, our bodies) and how, as a result, those values become naturalised, leading to a weakening of our capacity to reflect critically on society. We should consider here whether such a view renders Foucault guilty of a ‘performative contradiction’. After all, if the tentacles of power sustaining liberal society are so all-­embracing, then how has he been able to reveal them so successfully and how has he retained his capacity for meaningful critical reasoning? However, a more significant criticism of Foucault in this context is his failure to acknowledge that, although liberal societies may have forgotten the contingency of their origins, the values they embody may be legitimate and worthy of protection. Of course there are grounds for resistance to the values of liberal societies, but the argument that resistance should be supported simply because of its transgressive capacity is weak. While it is important that liberal societies are scrupulous in examining the terms under which they designate groups as mad, bad or dangerous, this should not be at the expense of failing to defend their values. Foucault’s position around these issues lends support to the view that he would have sided with any exotic regime, no matter how barbaric, on the grounds of its capacity to undermine the dominant order, expose its hidden power and destroy the hypocrisy that sustains it. The charge against Foucault then is that, in his determination of keeping visible the power and violence that underpins society, he failed to defend values even when they are, or at least might be, legitimate. Discussion point The work of the late Richard Rorty is instructive here. His pragmatist or ‘liberal ironist’ position implied that, although there was no rational underpinning for liberalism, we should nevertheless defend it unconditionally.

The importance of maintaining the visibility of power relations remains relevant in many contemporary political situations. Consider the example of Sinn Fein. Although this is a political party that is now committed exclusively to constitutional politics in Northern Ireland, it recognises that this process of normalisation serves to conceal the true nature of the Northern Ireland state which, in its view, remains fundamentally unjust. How should a political movement act in a post-­conflict situation in which its fundamental demands have not been met? Clearly it now has to understand electoral realities and attend to the day-­today issues of politics and the ordinary demands of its constituents. However, the problem Sinn Fein faces is that every resolution of a problem serves to make less visible the underlying and ‘fundamentally unjust power relations’ that characterise and sustain the Northern Ireland state. The same tension can be found within certain strands of feminism. As the position of women is seen to improve in society, the power that sustains patriarchal power becomes less and less visible. What should be the response of radical feminism to improvements in the lives of many women? To deny that any improvements have occurred is not plausible, but any such acknowledgement serves to undermine the foundation of its analysis of society. Consider also the Third Way project of the first Blair government in Britain. Here

154   Contemporary debates we witnessed the project that in many ways improved the lives of many people. However, it was a project constructed on the theoretical premise that conflict in society can be eradicated. How should those on the Left that are critical of this approach react to this new political reality? To deny that any progress has been made to help the least well-­off seems less than politically astute. However, at the same time, any concessions made to the ‘politics of triangulation’ will lead to a weakening of the anti-­capitalist critique. So, although Foucault was right to remind us of the importance of keeping visible the strands of power that sustain our political identities and settlements, political survival sometimes depends on engaging in political activity that has the effect of naturalising a political settlement and making those strands less visible.        Rewind to Schmitt Chapter 3 These issues are vital for Schmitt, for whom it was vital to retain a strong sense of the political: the famous ‘friend–enemy’ distinction.

Finally, we can consider Foucault’s analysis of the state and why it led critics such as Habermas to argue that this was the ‘elephant in the room’ in Foucault’s work. The argument here is that because Foucault saw power everywhere, he failed to see that, within its shapeless grid, there are vital political and economic ‘nodal points’ or nerve centres whose importance and significance cannot be overstated. For critics such as Poulantzas, the state is vital for our understanding of politics as it is the site of production for legitimation and consensus. These concepts are central to Foucault’s work and he does acknowledge the role of the state in producing and sustaining them. However, for Marxists, he does not give sufficient emphasis to how the state oppresses freedom in order to sustain the conditions for capitalism. As we have seen, for Foucault, the state–subject relationship was more complex and it was important not to see the exercise of state power purely in terms of the negation of freedom. Key concept: power Power is arguably the most important concept in Foucault’s work. Indeed, it is central to all approaches of the study of politics. Foucault’s interpretation does not rely on a simplistic notion of how power is used to get someone to do something they do not want to do or something that is not in their best interests. What is important for Foucault is to understand how our desires and choices are themselves the product of power and how when we exercise those choices we, in turn, exercise power. To put it simply we can say that, for Foucault, because nothing is fixed or pre-­ordained about history, society, identity and politics, everything is the result of power and we cannot conceive of anything outside of its remit.

The charge levelled against Foucault here, then, is that he was not a good revolutionary or ally in the fight for justice and equality. This accusation that Foucault was confused about the key political issues of power and resistance is widespread in the literature about his work. Hoy, for example, has commented on the ‘undifferentiated power he ascribed to modern society. With this profoundly pessimistic view went a singular lack of interest in choosing particular sites of intensity that are often successful in stopping the progress of

Foucault   155 tyrannical power’ (Hoy, 1986: 151). For Hoy, Foucault also failed to differentiate between the power of an institution to subjugate individuals and the fact that individual behaviour in society is frequently a matter of following rules or conventions. He cites Peter Dews’ comment that ‘without this distinction every delimitation becomes an exclusion and every exclusion becomes equated with an exercise in power’ (Hoy, 1986: 151).

Ethics and politics In the previous section we considered the charge that Foucault’s focus on power and the ‘violence of history’ resulted in a political or moral ‘blind spot’ that prevented him from recognising the necessity of declaring a responsible political allegiance or commitment. However, we should be clear that the argument was not that Foucault was uninterested in morality or ethics. It was, rather, about whether his consideration of morality and ethics in the context of power/knowledge renders them meaningless? The issue examined here is how, with his later writing, Foucault’s ethical and political engagement changed. More specifically, we look at the ethical and political implications of Foucault’s late writing about the requirements of ‘self-­care’ and the importance of developing a ‘cultivated’ relationship with knowledge. In order to consider these issues let us turn to Foucault’s last published work, The History of Sexuality. The first volume of this ambitious work can be read as a straightforward genealogical reading of the history of sex. Foucault’s intention here was to draw our attention to the role of power in constructing modern discourses of sexuality. Thus, although he acknowledged what he calls a biology of sex in terms of, for example, reproductive systems that exist and function outside our interpretations of them, he stressed that this reality is only accessible to us through a world of discourse. The constructed nature of our attitude to sexuality is easy to discern. Consider, for example, the reactions prompted within contemporary society to the issue of paedophilia. Widely condemned as inherently wicked, it remains important to acknowledge the cultural specificity that informs this response. In other societies, such as that of ancient Greece, this practice was seen very differently. Consider also how attitudes have changed to homosexuality, nudity or the idea of sexually active and liberated women. The inescapable conclusion is that our attitudes to these issues are mediated by the environment into which we are socialised. However, as we saw in the earlier section, this emphasis on the contingency of our values renders Foucault vulnerable to the charge of relativism. In the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, however, this genealogical emphasis became muted and in its place emerged an exploration of the ‘ethical construction of the self’.

The ‘care of the self’ and the ‘use of pleasure’ As we have seen, one of Foucault’s concerns throughout his life was to expose the temporal nature of our ideas, our identities, our politics and our philosophies. It is this concern for truth that generates the passion of his genealogical studies that exposed the violence that is inherent within our political identities and settlements. However, in his later thought, we see a different conception of power emerging, one that is less concerned with exposing the violence of the past and present (what Paul Ricoeur has termed ‘the epistemology of suspicion’) and more concerned with exploring how power exercised by the subject allows him to live well in the world. We should be clear that Foucault at no time disavowed his earlier archaeological or genealogical approaches for a view of the subject as free from

156   Contemporary debates power relations. However, the emphasis undoubtedly shifts from a history of the present to a concern for how subjects can attain a degree of self-­mastery over their destiny and how they can become attuned to what Foucault calls the ‘aesthetics of existence’. For Foucault, because the sexual ethics of the ancient Greeks emerged around issues which were neither prohibited by moral precepts nor governed by laws, they demonstrate a historical example of the practice of freedom. For the Greeks, acts associated with pleasure should be regulated, not by universal legislation or morality, but by a cultivated personal art which involved judgement, knowledge and ‘dominion over oneself’ (Foucault, 1992, vol. 2: 91). The important distinction made by Foucault in this text is between problematisation and marginalisation. The former referred to how citizens in the ancient world, free of Christian notions of guilt about sex, sought to attain self-­mastery over their desires. This quest for moderation, the supreme virtue and telos of life in antiquity, was not available to most within ancient Greek society – for example, women or slaves, whose choices were far more constrained. This inability to develop oneself as a subject who can exercise control and power over oneself is characterised by Foucault as marginalisation. Discussion point Although Foucault was critical of phenomenology, his late work suggests openness to the idea of Being and the idea that western philosophy’s quest for truth had deprived us of our capacity to reflect on the important philosophical truth that we exist in time and there is nothing beyond our contemplation of existence. In this context we can understand Foucault’s claim that Heidegger was the essential philosopher and that his entire philosophical development was determined by his reading of him (Lotringer, 1989: 326).

What significance does this distinction between problematisation and marginalisation have for our understanding of Foucault and his relationship to ethics and politics? As we have seen, the ethical moment in Foucault’s earlier work resides in his commitment to reveal the truth about the nature of history and the violence of the present. His move towards a more hermeneutic position, where the self is seen as a work of art to be reflected on and refined, could therefore be seen as a shift that signalled a lessening of the importance of morality and ethics in Foucault’s work. Where is the unrelenting anger in this late phase of his work? Where is the commitment to expose the arbitrariness of exclusion? Had Foucault now become the Nietzschean moralist or private nihilist1 that had always lurked within him, the figure that forgets the injustice of the world for a commitment to the individual subject as an aesthetic project? We can argue that this characterisation of the trajectory of Foucault’s work is wrong because his late work did retain the commitment to truth, although this was now seen more in terms of an aesthetic commitment to a particular way of living or being in the world. However, the absence of any clear reference to the collective needs of society, to justice, democracy or equality in these late writings will confirm, for some at least, that Foucault really was no more than a philosophical anarchist who was never really interested in justice or morality. It was noted in the beginning of this chapter that, although it can be a difficult argument to sustain, there is, throughout Foucault’s work, a deep ethical impulse. Moreover, it is plausible to imagine that, if he had been able to continue with his work, he might have examined more systematically the distinction between problematisation and marginalisation and the conditions for the cultivation of the self. Although he was clear that we could

Foucault   157 not transpose the thought of the ancients to the modern world, it is possible to read his late work as a suggestion that the cultivation of the self does require a particular form of political community and that we have a duty to strive towards its realisation to enable everyone to flourish in the world. But what does this mean in practical or political terms? A commitment to liberal democracy perhaps? We have noted the complexity of Foucault’s relationship to liberal democracy and we can only speculate here on where his work in this area may have led. However, if such an argument can be sustained it would go some way to reviving Foucault’s reputation as a serious and normatively engaged political theorist.

Conclusion This chapter has suggested that there is a clear ethical dimension in Foucault’s work. In the archaeological and genealogical studies this is evident in his commitment to truth or, more specifically, his commitment to exposing the temporal nature of identity and all of our political settlements. This prising open of history allows us to see the ubiquity of power and its role in the processes of marginalisation and exclusion that mark the past so indelibly. Foucault’s work is often stripped of this ethical dimension because he was reluctant to be seen as a theorist sympathetic to any of the traditional approaches to ethics such as deontology, consequentialism or virtue ethics. His later work, concerned with promoting the idea of the subject as an aesthetic project, is perhaps even more vulnerable to the charge that he was unconcerned with morality or ethics. Thus, it can be argued that this period of his life and work represents a retreat from the implicit ethical commitment of his earlier work that saw him seeking to restore the dignity of society’s excluded groups. However, here too we can see a commitment to truth, a commitment to an ethics of the self that restores meaning to how we conduct our lives. For many this will never be enough. Where in this work is the anger of the earlier work and, moreover, where is the commitment we have to each other? Where is the outright condemnation of those societies that systematically deny the opportunity to so many to live well and flourish in the world? We search in vain for any easy answers to these questions in Foucault’s work. However, despite this, we cannot dismiss his work as unconcerned with ethics. On the contrary, even if we have fundamental disagreements with the conclusions he reached we must acknowledge that considerations of morality, ethics and justice were at the centre of every aspect of his life and work.

Revision notes 1 2

3

Does Foucault’s later work, in which the genealogy is muted for a focus on the power of the subject, lose the critical purchase of the earlier work? Foucault’s later work implied an Aristotelian view of the subject, i.e. the subject was directed to the telos of self-­creation. Is this an attempt to ‘smuggle in’ a metaphysics denied in the work of others? If so, what are the consequences for Foucault’s position on power and contingency? In what ways does a political commitment run the risk of eclipsing the presence of power? In what way could this be a problem for democratic theory?

Note 1 This idea has been explored recently by Simon Critchley (2007: 15). The private nihilist is the figure who, in the face of meaninglessness, dedicates himself to the pursuit of individual pleasure.

158   Contemporary debates

Bibliography Critchley, S. (2007) Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, London and New York: Verso. Eribon, D. (1991) Michel Foucault, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foucault, M. (1975) Discipline and Punish, New York: Vantage. Foucault, M. (1984) ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.) The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1992) The History of Sexuality, vols 1–3, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Grey, J. (2007) Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, London: Allen Lane. Hart, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Howarth, D. (2000) Discourse, Buckingham: Oxford University Press. Hoy, D. (ed.) (1986) Foucault: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Huquembourg, A. and Arditi, J. (1999) ‘Fractured Resistances: The Debate Over Assimilationism Among Gays and Lesbians in the United States’, Sociological Quarterly 40(4): 663–80. Lotringer, S. (ed.) (1989) ‘The Return of Morality: Interview with Gilles Barbadette and Andre Serla’, in Foucault Live, New York: Semiotext(e). Miller, J. (1993) The Passion of Michel Foucault, London: Simon and Schuster. Stones, R. (ed.) (1998) Key Sociological Thinkers, London: Macmillan.

Further reading There is an extraordinary secondary literature on Foucault and it is worth consulting some of it before embarking on original readings. Gary Gutting has written a very accessible introduction: Gutting, G. (2005) Foucault: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. He has also edited a good collection of articles: Gutting, G. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, New York: Cambridge University Press. The Foucault Reader cited above provides a good overview of his work, containing original extracts from many of his books and essay in addition to some interesting interview material. For an excellent collection of lecture notes and shorter articles see Rabinow, P. (ed.) (2000) Michel Foucault (Ethics): Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin; Faubion, J. (ed.) (2002) Michel Foucault (Aesthetics): Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 2, Harmondsworth: Penguin; and Faubion, J. (ed.) (2002) Michel Foucault (Power): Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, Harmondsworth: Penguin. A critical account of his work is found in Merquior, J.G. (1985) Foucault, London: Fontana Press. A review of his work from the perspective of discourse theory is found in Howarth, D. (2002) Discourse, Buckingham: Oxford University Press.

Index

action 58–66; see also praxis Adorno, T. 104–16 Aesthetic Theory 106 animal laborans 57–8 Arendt, H. 2, 4, 5, 9, 55–71, 84, 90, 92, 101, 123 authenticity 47, 92–3, 100 Barry, B. 140, 145 Benjamin, W. 104–7, 111 Blair, T. 127 calvinism 15–17 capitalism 9, 12, 15, 16, 19–21, 27–9, 31–8, 58, 64, 65, 70, 91, 93, 104–8, 110–12, 119, 124, 150, 152, 154 citizenship 30, 34, 43, 46–8, 55–7, 61–2, 66, 69, 97, 101, 119–31, 133–45, 152, 157; see also multiculturalism communism 13, 91, 124 communists 4, 37, 38, 91, 124, 126, 129 communitarianism 6, 73, 128, 134, 140 concentration camps 70 conservatism 6, 9, 20, 37, 83, 84, 86, 119, 120, 127, 130 constitutions 10, 30, 34, 37, 38, 45, 47–51, 61, 66, 128, 134, 138, 153 Critique of Pure Reason 23, 107 Croce, B. 23–5, 31–3 culture 3, 9, 11–17, 20, 24, 34, 39, 41–3, 47, 55, 70, 98, 99, 104–6, 110–11, 114–16, 133, 135– 42, 144–5, 148 De Beauvoir, S. 56, 88–103, 141 Deveaux, M. 143–5 Dialectic of Enlightenment 104–10, 115–16 dictatorship 4, 13, 26, 37–9, 45, 47–9, 51 disenchantment 9, 12, 13, 17 Dworkin, A. 101–2 economy 1, 3, 4, 22–3, 25–9, 31–3, 36–7, 39, 42–8, 50, 64, 66, 70, 90, 91, 94, 98, 104, 108– 12, 115, 119–22, 126, 130, 138–40, 148, 150, 152, 154

Enlightenment 4, 6, 14, 85, 104–6, 108–10, 115, 116 existentialism 5, 55–6, 92–3, 100–3, 147–8 Experience and its Modes 72, 75–7, 80, 81, 84, 86 fascism 23, 29–31, 91, 113 Feminine Mystique 99–100 feminism 4, 5, 68, 69, 71, 88–91, 93, 96, 99–103, 121, 140–5, 153 Firestone, S. 99, 101, 103 Foucault, M. 5, 6, 30, 97, 146–58 Freidnan, B. 99 Freud, S. 14, 107, 112–13, 116 friend-enemy 36, 39, 41, 43–4, 47–51 gender 2, 5, 6, 69, 88–91, 93–4, 96–9, 101–3 Germany 9–11, 13–14, 37–8, 50, 55–6, 68, 91 Gramsci, A. 2–4, 22–35, 59, 77, 94–5, 97, 110, 122 Heidegger, M. 55–6, 92–3, 112, 116, 148, 156 Hegel, G.W.F. 23–4, 34, 107 hegemony 4, 20, 25–6, 31, 35, 94–5, 98 Hobbes, T. 18, 36, 38, 41, 44, 47, 49, 79, 82, 86, 121 homo faber 58, 61–2, 64 Horkheimer, M. 104–10, 113 human rights 128, 142, 145 Husserl, E. 56, 105 ideal type 11, 12, 21 Idealism 23–4, 74–5, 83, 107–8 idealist 12, 73, 75–6, 83, 107, 110 Irigaray, L. 102, 103 Isaacs, S. 73n5, 86, 120n4, 131, 159n1 justice 5–6, 12, 22, 58, 61–2, 64, 78, 82, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125–32, 133, 142–3, 145–7, 154, 156–7 Kant, I. 5, 11, 21, 23, 24, 56, 74–5, 107, 108, 120, 121, 125, 126, 129, 150 Kautsky, K. 105 Kymlicka, W. 5–6, 114, 128, 133–45

160   Index legitimacy 14, 16–18, 20, 26, 34, 42–3, 115, 121–4, 131, 149, 153–4 Lenin, V. 25, 28, 33 Lessnoff, M.H. 73, 77, 86 liberalism 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, 17, 19, 20, 27, 34, 36–9, 45–51, 64, 72, 73, 79, 82, 83, 86, 87, 91, 111, 119–20, 125, 127–8, 132 libertarianism 6, 119–21, 123 Locke, J. 76, 82, 121–5 Lukacs 106, 107, 109 Luxemborg, R. 33 Machiavelli, N. 36, 41, 49 Marcuse, H. 104, 105, 107, 112–13, 116 Marx, K. 12, 13, 17, 21, 32, 58, 65–6, 75, 77, 107, 108, 109, 124, 138 Marxism 4, 22, 24–8, 32–5, 66, 84, 91, 104, 105, 108, 109, 122, 124, 146–8, 150, 154 Minimia Moralin 106 multiculturalism 5, 6, 114, 133–45 Mussolini, B. 23, 29 nation-state 36, 38–9, 43–4, 47, 50, 122, 136, 138–9, 144 national socialism 14; see also nazis nationalism 10, 20, 37, 43, 85, 91, 133 Nazis/Nazism 1, 3, 37–8, 43, 50, 55, 67, 69; see also national socialism Nietzsche, F. 12–14, 17, 21, 149–51, 156, 158 Nozick, R. 5–6, 73, 82, 119–32, 142 Oakeshott, M. 4–5, 9, 15, 72–87 obligations 72, 121, 127, 129, 131

plato 74, 84, 111 pluralism 46, 51, 66, 135 political philosophy 71, 78, 103, 130, 133, 135 positivism 12, 21, 113, 119 postmodernism 6 praxis 24–5, 32–4, 58–9, 62–4, 66, 77 rationalism 4–5, 17, 72, 74, 78, 84–6, 107, 150 rationality 12–15, 17, 20, 75, 108, 110 Rawls, J. 2, 5–6, 18, 73, 82, 119–32, 134, 142 revolution 4–5, 9, 15, 22, 25, 27, 28, 30–2, 38, 55, 90–1, 99, 104–6, 109, 112, 150, 154; see also velvet revolution rights of man 85, 88 rights 5–6, 10, 43, 46–8, 119–26, 128, 131–44; see also human rights; women’s rights Schmitt, C. 2–4, 36–51, 84, 154 social contract theory 17, 121, 123, 125–7 socialism 20, 23, 25, 27, 29–30, 64–6, 69, 124, 138 socialist 10, 22, 27–30, 32, 64–5, 100, 104, 138 totalitarianism 4–5, 56, 65–70, 123 velvet revolution 68, 91 Weber, M. 2–5, 9–21, 26, 41, 43, 58, 63, 65, 85, 107–9, 150 women’s rights 88, 90, 103, 142, 145