Hanna Fenichel Pitkin: Politics, Justice, Action 9780415743648, 0415743648, 9780415743389, 0415743389, 9781315813561, 1315813564

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin and the dilemmas of political thinking
Radical politics
Radical theorizing
Politics
Judgment
Action
Note
References
PART I: Politics
1. Action and membership (1984)
Note
References
2. Food and freedom in The Flounder (1984)
Notes
References
3. Slippery Bentham: some neglected cracks in the foundation of
utilitarianism (1990)
Natural harmony of interests
Legislation
Education
Notes
References
4. Obligation and consent (1965–1966)
The problem of political obligation
Locke on consent
The theory applied
Justifying political obligation
Notes
References
PART II: Judgment
5. Two selections on Plato’s Republic from Wittgenstein and Justice (1972)
Justice: Socrates and Thrasymachus
Meaning and application
The “is” and the “ought”
Inside and outside views
Some alternative examples
“Showing how it is just”
Form and substance
Wittgenstein and the study of political theory
Notes
References
6. Relativism: a lecture (1984)
Notes
References
7. Justice: on relating private and public (1981)
I
II
III
IV
V
Notes
References
8. Judgment and autonomy (1984)
Notes
References
PART III: Action
9. The Citizen and his rivals (1984)
Notes
References
10. The mandate-independence controversy (1967)
Notes
References
11. Representation and democracy: uneasy alliance (2004)
References
12. Absent authority: Marx (1998)
Marx’s other half
Arendt and Marx
Notes
References
13. The social in The Human Condition (1998)
Relating behavior to the conceptual triad
The conformist and the economic social
Necessity
Institutional structure
Some difficulties in this reading
Notes
References
14. An interview with Hanna Fenichel Pitkin
Intellectual formation and training
Research and writing
Teaching
Index

Citation preview

HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s political theorizing confronts the sense of powerlessness and alienation that marks the modern condition. It does so by embracing plurality, ambiguity, and contradiction, and by remaining attuned to embodiment, needs, and differences – aspects of the human condition that political theorists have, she argues, too often sought to escape or deny. The insights generated by Pitkin’s theorizing not only point to the challenges we face in marshalling our deliberative and shared powers, but also makes accessible to us conceptual and practical tools we can use to address our troubling times. The editor has focused on work in three key areas: 





Politics: Pitkin’s work on the problems of autonomy, moral action, consent, and obligation examines in nuanced ways how persons relate to political collectivities. She explores our tendency to imagine autonomy in ways that deny our interconnectedness and instead project dominance over others, and she limns alternatives to these immature and masculinist conceptions of agency. Drawing out these themes in her readings of literature and classics of political theory, Pitkin illuminates problems of political agency in late modern life. Judgement: Pitkin’s path-breaking work with the language philosophy is most prominently displayed in her work on justice. In selections from this work and others, Pitkin brings together questions of responsibility, the insights of moral philosophy, and even pedagogical practice. Blending ordinary language philosophy and textual study, she offers a complex and subtle set of observations about justice and judgement which open to questions of action and responsibility in the exercise of political freedom. Action: Pitkin’s political thinking draws out images of political action that best heed the ambiguities and complexities of co-action with strangers. Pitkin’s work in these selections reflects upon the ways that people co-create complex, large-scale problems by way of their participation in social norms, their attribution of agency to “the market”, the problem of false necessity, and so on. She diagnoses these problems as a reflection of our alienation from our own shared and collective powers, and offers suggestions for their redirection.

Dean Mathiowetz is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Appeals to Interest: Language and the Shaping of Political Agency and several essays on conceptual history, political economy, and citizenship.

ROUTLEDGE INNOVATORS IN POLITICAL THEORY Edited by Terrell Carver, University of Bristol and Samuel A. Chambers, The John Hopkins University Routledge Innovators in Political Theory focuses on leading contemporary thinkers in political theory, highlighting the major innovations in their thought that have reshaped the field. Each volume collects both published and unpublished texts, and combines them with an interview with the thinker. The editorial introduction articulates the innovator’s key contributions in relation to political theory, and contextualises the writer’s work. Volumes in the series will be required reading for both students and scholars of twenty-first-century politics. 1. William E. Connolly Democracy, pluralism and political theory Edited by Samuel A. Chambers and Terrell Carver 2. Carole Pateman Democracy, feminism, welfare Edited by Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers 3. Michael J. Shapiro Discourse, culture, violence Edited by Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers 4. Chantal Mouffe Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political Edited by James Martin 5. Ernesto Laclau Post-Marxism, populism and critique Edited by David Howarth 6. George Kateb Dignity, Morality, Individuality Edited by John Seery 7. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin Politics, justice, action Edited by Dean Mathiowetz

HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN Politics, justice, action

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Edited by Dean Mathiowetz

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First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Dean Mathiowetz and Hanna Fenichel Pitkin The right of Dean Mathiowetz to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 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. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. 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 Names: Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, author. | Mathiowetz, Dean, 1972- editor. Title: Hanna Fenichel Pitkin : politics, judgment, action / edited by Dean Mathiowetz. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge innovators in political theory ; 7 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016002241| ISBN 9780415743389 (hardback) | ISBN 9780415743648 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315813561 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Political science--Philosophy. Classification: LCC JA71 .P566 2016 | DDC 320.01--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002241 ISBN: 978-0-415-74338-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-74364-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-81356-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Hanna Fenichel Pitkin and the dilemmas of political thinking Dean Mathiowetz

vii 1

PART I

Politics

17

1 Action and membership (1984)

19

2 Food and freedom in The Flounder (1984)

37

3 Slippery Bentham: some neglected cracks in the foundation of utilitarianism (1990)

57

4 Obligation and consent (1965–1966)

81

PART II

Judgment

103

5 Two selections on Plato’s Republic from Wittgenstein and Justice (1972)

105

6 Relativism: a lecture (1984)

132

7 Justice: on relating private and public (1981)

143

8 Judgment and autonomy (1984)

163

vi Contents

PART III

Action 9 The Citizen and his rivals (1984)

181 183

10 The mandate-independence controversy (1967)

205

11 Representation and democracy: uneasy alliance (2004)

225

12 Absent authority: Marx (1998)

233

13 The social in The Human Condition (1998)

253

14 An interview with Hanna Fenichel Pitkin

278

Index

291

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to the following publishers and journals for permission to reprint the chapters in this collection: California University Press for Chapter 1 ‘‘Political Theory and the Modern Predicament’’ in Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought, by The Regents of the University of California (the University of California Press, 1993, pp. 316–340), Chapter 5 “Justice: Socrates and Thrasymachus” in Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought, by The Regents of the University of California (The University of California Press, 1993, pp. 169–192), Chapter 10 “The MandateIndependence Controversy” in The Concept of Representation, by The Regents of the University of California (The University of California Press, 1967, pp. 144–166). Cambridge University Press for Chapter 4 “Obligation and Consent” American Political Science Review, Vol. 59, No. 4, Dec 1965, pp. 990–999 and American Political Science Review, Vol. 60, No. 1, Mar 1966, pp. 39–52. Sage for Chapter 2 “Food and Freedom in the Flounder” Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 4, Nov 1984, pp. 467–490, Chapter 3 “Slippery Bentham” Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 1, Feb 1990, pp. 104–131, Chapter 7 “Justice: On Relating Private and Public” Political Theory, Vol. 9, No. 3, Aug 1981, pp. 327–352. Wiley for Chapter 6 “Relativism: A Lecture” Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1994, pp. 176–187, Chapter 11 “Representation and Democracy: Uneasy Alliance” Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3, 2004, pp. 335–342. University of Chicago Press for Chapter 8 ‘‘Judgment and Autonomy’’ in Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, by Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 307–327), Chapter 9 “Autonomy: Personal and Political” in Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, by Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 3–22), Chapter 12 “Absent Authorit[y]: Marx” in Attack of the Blob:

viii Acknowledgements

Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social, by Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 115–116; pp. 127–144), Chapter 13 “The Social in the Human Condition” in Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social, by Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 177–202. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.

HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN AND THE DILEMMAS OF POLITICAL THINKING Dean Mathiowetz

Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s work takes us to the heart of why politics matters, situating political thinking within the sense of powerlessness and alienation that marks the modern condition. Pitkin outlines this condition by observing that social structures and processes have become so large in scale and so regular in their operations that they appear beyond our intervention. As they grow in complexity, they seem increasingly independent of our collective participation in them; so “objectified,” their effects seem ever more inevitable, and even natural. We thus become subjected, as it were, to our own everyday actions, unwilling to act otherwise, or blind to our power to do so. In such a condition, we both suffer by and are alienated from our collective powers in myriad domains of our lives: work, consumption, political institutions and movements, gendered relations, and so on. Deepening our plight, as we become more subject to broad, systematic effects, we increasingly lionize and fetishize an isolated and isolating individualism—and call it “freedom.” Our capacity for co-action and willingness to accept its responsibilities are thereby further diminished. Some are prone to thinking about these problems in terms of human nature or as effects of institutional intransigency. Others find some person or group, powerful or hidden or both, to blame for them. These approaches, Pitkin notes, tend only still further to diminish our sense of our power over and responsibility for these problems. Pitkin instead characterizes these problems as resulting from a “drift” in our activities toward troubling ends. This drift appears in various guises as “we watch with horror the approach of nuclear war, of ecological disaster, of world famine. Yet,” she points out, “these disasters are not approaching us, it is we who are approaching them by our continuing activities. To avert them we only have to stop doing what we do.” Thus she frames the solution as one of changing our activities, our institutions, and these troubling ends, “deliberately, in accord with our intentions, to achieve certain goals” (Pitkin 1987b, p. 283). The question,

2 The dilemmas of political thinking

then, is whether and how we can marshal our collective and deliberate powers to address the problems. Answers to this question will raise further ones about who “we” are, how to act, and with whom in mind—all of which demand we exercise our capacity to judge. While science, philosophy, and theory can help us to distinguish those things that are open to our intervention from those that are not, our judgments must be further informed by political thinking that reflects our practical concerns and shared experiences. In addressing these problems, Pitkin’s work calls for and models a distinctive approach to political thinking, one that is both radical and democratic. A classical approach to political theorizing, exemplified in many “canonical” texts of political theory, leans on broad, systematic generalizations that ultimately distort the subject matter of politics. According to Pitkin, as political thinkers we instead ought to embrace plurality, ambiguity, and contradiction. Our work must speak to concerns that affect not only a small group, but also other people, some of whom may be quite distant strangers to us, whose lives are none the less connected to our own. In order to be political, our thinking must not only speak to matters that affect these wider communities, but also support a community’s participatory action on behalf of its common interest. Pitkin thus presents a wide constellation of concerns as intrinsic to political thinking. Only by keeping this constellation in mind—contradiction, plurality, and particular contexts on the one hand, widespread connectedness on the other—and only by recognizing tensions among these concerns, can we support the kind of judgment and action that makes political thinking a truly public endeavor. Staying with ambivalence, but always attuned to the need for thinking to enable and inform practical judgments about what to do, Pitkin reveals the dilemmas of theorizing as relatedly conceptual, historical, and psychological. Her close textual and historical analyses of canonical works seek not only to get at the meaning of texts, but also to explore ways that the tensions underlying and supporting public engagement are intrinsic to political thinking. She furthermore explores sources of these tensions in the fundamental human experience of growing up, with its dual tasks of developing autonomy and learning mutuality. She studies the temptation presented by theoretical writing to flee from the ambivalence engendered by these many tensions and to ignore the dilemmas they present for political thinking. For Pitkin, and for others inspired by her work, political thinking is the activity of exploring the tensions in the shared dimensions of our lives while staying with the inevitable multi-sidedness of our attempts to do so. This, according to Pitkin, is the kind of thinking suited to the political radicalism that can address the modern condition. On this note, Pitkin explains that: Our thinking must be . . . radical, cutting through conventions and clichés to the real roots of our troubles, seeing social arrangements large-scale and longrange, as if from the outside . . . Yet the thinking must also be political, in the sense of oriented to action, practical, speaking in a meaningful way to those capable of making the necessary changes. (1987b, p. 288)

The dilemmas of political thinking 3

Pitkin’s work exemplifies the task of the political thinker to meet this paradoxical demand. The heart of Pitkin’s significance as an innovator lies in her work on language and her use of semantic analysis. Throughout her writings, Pitkin demonstrates that the problems arising in political theorizing must be understood in relation to concepts that reflect the everyday problems of political life. Her book on representation shows the beginnings of her interest and effort in this direction, and her groundbreaking study on Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophers applies their ideas to politics. Working through and extending these thinkers’ influence, Pitkin repeatedly confronts ways that theorists have written as though they could resolve the tensions of political life by defining terms and stipulating meanings—in other words, by attempting to exert control over the concepts that reflect the tensions. Pitkin demonstrates that and how such attempts undermine readers’ judgments by driving their objections underground. These attempts thus shut down the pedagogical and political potential in drawing upon what readers already, perhaps only tacitly, know. She similarly views a theorist’s more casual deviations from words’ everyday usage not simply as effects of carelessness, but instead as marking and masking real problems in his or her argument, and real tensions and problems in our condition. So too with the jargon of philosophy and political theory, which not only limits the accessibility of political thinking, but obscures basic tensions and problems by inventing or deploying language that, because it is alien to everyday ways of speaking about and engaging in politics, is often distant from the ways that problems manifest themselves in everyday situations. Pitkin’s pedagogy is similarly marked by her commitment to ordinary language as a technique of analysis and writing. As a teacher, Pitkin’s way is to open paths for students’ shared engagements with texts, by encouraging close reading and attunement to tensions and contradictions as points of departure for political thinking. She demands rigor and care not as matters of pedantry, but rather as enabling students to see the tensions and ambivalence in their own thinking. So enabled, students can explore these tensions and contradictions for what they reveal about politics, as well as about the students, to themselves and each other, as political thinkers. Thus Pitkin’s ways of reading and teaching are not only radical, in the sense sketched above, but also democratic, in their commitment to invite everyone to the shared task of political thought and action.

Radical politics Hanna Fenichel Pitkin was born in Berlin, around the time of Hitler’s rise to power, to a family of Jewish origin. Her family emigrated to Los Angeles when she was six years old. Her father, Otto Fenichel, was a psychoanalyst. Her mother, Clare (née Nathansohn) Fenichel, was an engineering draftsperson; she also had a vocation that she called body work, a kind of therapy quite different, however, from what is usually meant by the term today.1 Her parents were political radicals as well; hence Freudian psychoanalysis, humanist Marxism, and radical politics

4 The dilemmas of political thinking

permeated her upbringing, and these influences have remained strong throughout her life and in her work. She enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles for her bachelor’s degree, completed three semesters at the University of California, Berkeley, before graduating from UCLA, and moved back to Berkeley shortly after earning the degree. She began graduate study soon after, completing her PhD in Political Science at Berkeley in 1961. After short appointments at San Francisco State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she joined the political science faculty at Berkeley in 1966, where she continues to teach as professor emerita (see the interview on pp. 278–290). In light of Pitkin’s long association with Berkeley, it is no surprise that academic lore frequently connects her work to a “Berkeley School” of political theory, said to have flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. One version of this story depicts “the Berkeley School” as centered on theorizing a distinct sphere of life called “the political,” a notion meant, among other things, to counteract political science’s move toward “scientific” models for the study of politics that imitate psychology, economics, or the natural sciences (Hauptmann 2004). A related story about “the Berkeley School” points to the direct political action taking place in Berkeley at that time—the Free Speech Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and the People’s Park protests, including the students’ participation in, and University’s response to, these events—as centrally informing the political theory teaching and scholarship at Berkeley (Disch 2012). Pitkin herself denies there having been such a “School,” stressing the diversity of views and topics within the group of Berkeley political theorists (see pp. 285). But setting aside the question of a “Berkeley School,” can or should we seek the influence of these famous and doubtless significant events at Berkeley in the 1960s in Pitkin’s work? In approaching this question we must bear in mind that Pitkin was in Madison, Wisconsin, not Berkeley, in 1964–1966, though by her own account, she was all too aware of what she was missing back in California. (The Free Speech Movement protests and Sproul Hall sit-ins began in the 1964–1965 academic year; see Schaar and Wolin 1970.) Her writings do not address those events directly, a fact that some have interpreted as reticence, quiescence, or lack of interest (Disch 2012). But seeking influences or intentions leads us away from, rather than into, the significance of Pitkin’s work in relation to its context. Too much focus on the Free Speech Movement can lead us to miss the other forms of radicalism in Berkeley in the 1960s, and before, in which Pitkin was involved. For example, from the late 1950s until 1960 she was a news volunteer at KPFA, the first listener-supported radio station in the United States, known for its controversial political and cultural programming. While still in high school, she was a member of American Youth for Democracy. Later she served on the editorial board of the short-lived periodical democracy, whose masthead was “a journal of political renewal and radical change.” The kind of radicalism we see throughout Pitkin’s political and intellectual engagements is a style of thinking and action that goes to the roots of our problems and remains grounded in people’s genuine needs and everyday activities, while grasping the significance of long-range, broad-scale connections for this thinking and for action.

The dilemmas of political thinking 5

With all of this in mind, Pitkin’s intrinsic orientation toward radical politics makes her work useful for reflecting on the direction and fate of the Berkeley students’ attempts to radicalize the campus, and later, to radicalize their own education. More important, the radicalism in her writing can inform political thinkers’ response to such attempts among students and educators today, or among governors and the governed more broadly. Perhaps the most illuminating way to tie Pitkin’s work to Berkeley in the 1960s is heuristic, in the sense that the events draw our attention to certain features of Pitkin’s work from the time; we may then explore how the work responds to questions raised by the Berkeley rebellion and its immediate and more recent successors. From this point of view, the connections are rich. For example, her essay on obligation and consent (written, incidentally, during her time in Wisconsin), restores our appreciation for resistance and rebellion by asking how consent theories, which set out to understand when such resistance is justified, end up justifying total obedience instead (see Chapter 4). The essay draws us back to the ways that unacknowledged (and unresolved) problems in consent theory highlight the diverse circumstances in which questions of rebellion and obedience arise—thereby strengthening our sense of how to navigate such questions when we meet them in our own lives, whether as dissidents or as people in positions of authority. Pitkin’s exploration of themes related to political freedom can further inform our thinking about radical politics, as it emerged in Berkeley in the 1960s and as it appears (or fails to appear) today. In Pitkin’s view, political freedom demands a kind of “growing up,” involving the acknowledgement of mutuality, interdependence, and shared responsibility—a theme she has explored in her work on Günter Grass’s novel, The Flounder (Grass 1978 [1985]), in her book-length study of Machiavelli, and elsewhere. Like humans growing up, political freedom entails taking responsibility for and improving the cultures within which we live, and which constitute the self and the community, but without losing our sense of play and of creativity about addressing our serious problems. Retaining that sense of play, we can become more effective and less neurotic, recognizing interdependence as the basis for freedom, and acting on that basis. We therefore abandon aspirations toward a false, childish, or individualistic autonomy that perceives interdependence as a threat to greatness. “Grown up” freedom entails, by contrast, recognizing the importance of our bodies and needs; it means bringing their interdependence (and, therefore, ours) into public life and deliberation; it means keeping sight of our needs while learning to practice judgment and articulate compelling and inclusive standards of justice. If our action is to be radical, it must be so in the sense of transforming our condition by going to the roots of our problems, while remaining grounded in our real needs and everyday activities.

Radical theorizing Many readers will come to Pitkin’s work seeking traces of Berkeley in the 1960s and 1970s. Fewer are primed for how Pitkin’s thinking, from the beginning of her

6 The dilemmas of political thinking

career, has been rooted in Marxist and Freudian perspectives akin to those that have animated critical theory for more than a century. These influences are nonetheless quite direct; looking at them sharpens our understanding of Pitkin’s contributions to and innovations in political thought. To say that Marx and Freud were essential influences on Pitkin’s thinking from the beginning may surprise readers of The Concept of Representation (Pitkin 1967). This is not only because these thinkers’ names appear nowhere in the book, but also because the work is very much addressed to the discipline of political science, which is nowadays quite distinct from critical theory. While working on the dissertation that became this book, however, Pitkin was optimistic (as were many political theorists at the time) about the possibility of political science as a kind of Wissenschaft—a systematic way or craft of knowing, involving teaching, learning, and research. Marx and Freud, of course, were themselves social scientists in this sense, and Pitkin brought to the debates of mainstream political science at the time a perspective informed intellectually by these thinkers. Her contribution in The Concept of Representation is supported by their shared desire to liberate people, and to foster people’s genuine autonomy by examining what gets in the way of it. This amounts to a tension between action and explanation, a tension which Pitkin’s work on representation explicated for political scientists concerned mainly with the “democratic” institutions of modern government. For Pitkin, the tension between perspectives emphasizing causation on the one hand, and action on the other, reveals us to be paradoxically both unfree and free-to-become-free; this paradox becomes an invitation to think about what it means to act. Although these are terms in which Pitkin expressed the issue only later in her career, The Concept of Representation stays with this paradox (noting, for example, the ways that notions like purpose or intention bring the two sides together), even as the work’s ongoing audience has become ever more focused on questions of causation and neglectful of action. Sustaining such a balance between ideas in tension is a path that the works of Marx and Freud opened for Pitkin, and in that sense their influence is defining for her work. In all of her writings, she is careful to stay with multiple tensions that she finds not only intrinsic to theorizing and endemic to philosophy (no matter the lengths to which theorists and philosophers will go to skirt them), but also, and more importantly, within each of us. The tensions are here when we ourselves engage, or fail to engage, as citizens and as theorists, in social and political issues. Moreover, the modern condition is revealed in the multiplicity of such tensions, as are its drift and its openness to action and change. Adding another example to the one cited above regarding causation and action will draw out this point. In her writings, Pitkin invites us repeatedly to think about how we relate nature and culture. The tension here is not a simple one of opposing forces: Pitkin reminds us that, among other things, a culture is a cultivation of nature, and that culture becomes “second nature.” When we begin to acknowledge this kind of tension alongside others, Pitkin reminds us not to settle into illusory parallels, like simply correlating nature to explanation and culture to action. Instead, she urges us to explore where and how they do not line up, and thus to appreciate how a second

The dilemmas of political thinking 7

pair complicates the first. Further tensions, like those between views that emphasize individuals and those that emphasize social formations (in other words, between “parts and wholes”), as well as between body on the one hand, and mind on the other, are important, too. They reflect the complexity of our lives and of our language, and thereby must add to the complexity of our political thinking. Throughout her many encounters with tensions like these and the dilemmas they present in thought and action, and across diverse themes and texts, Pitkin demonstrates that a theoretical framework that emphasizes one side at the expense of the other is insufficient for making sense of politics. This is not merely because each side implies the other, but also because the tensions are within each of us, and are intrinsic to politics. They already shape our lives, and ought therefore to inform our thinking, our judgment, and our action. With this in mind, she takes philosophical programs or political ideologies, like conservatism, utilitarianism, or liberalism, to task in terms of their failures or refusals to respond to the dilemmas of political life and thought (on conservatism, see Pitkin 1973; on utilitarianism, see Chapter 4 in this volume). According to Pitkin, to turn our thinking away from these tensions yields naïve, misleading, and possibly even dangerous conceptions of membership, judgment, autonomy, and so on. Of course, circumstances often demand that we act, and to act, we must choose. Sides must be taken; decisions must be made. The importance of agency and free citizenship to Pitkin’s thinking recognizes and foregrounds this fact, with the additional questions it raises about how theorizing and politics intersect. How shall we distinguish the sorts of questions about which we must stay with both sides from those which demand choice and action? Once we have done so, how to choose and act? With questions like these, we encounter the role of political theorizing as a support to our capacities for making practical sense of the dilemmas we face every day when dealing with shared or public problems. Of course, not just any choice will do justice to our situation. Judgment is needed; and in order to judge in matters of shared concern, we rely upon the concept of justice with its myriad entailments. Therefore, the concept of justice too reflects the tensions in our practices and in our thinking. At this point we can bring Pitkin’s abiding concern for dilemmas and tensions back to her most striking innovations as a political thinker, namely in the sensitivity and rigor her work brought to conceptual analysis in political thought. Pitkin’s engagement with language is evident, of course, in The Concept of Representation, but becomes the direct focus of Wittgenstein and Justice (Pitkin 1972). In this text, she studies the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein alongside that of J.L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, bringing ordinary language philosophy to political thought in a defining way, particularly to the concept of justice and the problem of judgment. In that book and beyond, Pitkin has applied the techniques and insights of language and conceptual analysis to ideas central to political theorizing, including reification, obligation, constitution, justice, liberty, and freedom. She continues on this path in ongoing work on the concept of authority. These many engagements blend grammatical analysis with etymology, philology, and conceptual histories in groundbreaking and exemplary ways. She finds within

8 The dilemmas of political thinking

each of these concepts a particular constellation of tensions, uniquely reflective of its role in political analysis, argument, or action. A few of her works focus on actual conceptual analysis, yielding results that are virtuosic, if highly technical. Her work on liberty and freedom, for example, deploys these techniques in order to argue that these concepts differ in substantive and significant ways: freedom being a broader, deeper, and riskier condition, less liable to be achieved within a system of rules or structure of controls (Pitkin 1988). More typically (and as exemplified in the chapters included in this volume), Pitkin’s sensitivity to conceptual history and techniques of conceptual analysis saturates her reading of a text or engagement in intellectual or political debate (see Chapters 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, and 11 in this volume; Pitkin 1967; Pitkin 1987a). With techniques of conceptual analysis at the fore, Pitkin’s work engages many prominent political theorists from the Western tradition, yielding arguments and discussions that remain influential in the ever-evolving teaching of and scholarship on canonical political theory. So, for example, Plato figures prominently in Wittgenstein and Justice, and Pitkin frequently discusses Aristotle, sometimes to articulate a collective version of Kantian moral autonomy (see Chapter 7 in this volume, and Pitkin 1984; for a discussion of Kantian moral autonomy not in reference to Aristotle, see Pitkin 1972, p. 345). Two other authors in particular merit mention here, for the importance of their writing to Pitkin’s way of engaging the tensions and questions she understands as central to politics. Her works on these theorists particularly reveal Pitkin’s strengths as not only an analyst and critic of political theory, but also a historian of political thought. They are Niccolò Machiavelli, whose concepts of manhood, autonomy, and of course, Fortuna, are the subject of Pitkin’s book Fortune is a Woman (Pitkin 1984); and Hannah Arendt, whose concept of “the social” Pitkin studies in The Attack of the Blob (Pitkin 1998). Pitkin draws out each of these thinkers to illuminate, in various ways, the promise of free citizenship and the perils of theorizing that turns away from the dilemmas of political life. With all of this in mind, the ongoing relevance of Pitkin’s work to political thinking is clear. Here I mention but a few examples, not to prioritize themes in her work, but to suggest the variety of topics to which the work collected in this volume directly speaks. The legacy and future of the “linguistic turn” provides one example. Critics of liberalism in the last decade have been particularly worried that its philosophical defenders have overvalued the role of reason and rationality in politics (as well as in aesthetics and ethics), with the result that these liberals have given too flat or disembodied an account of the ways in which people actually form their political judgments. With so much emphasis in recent decades on Kantian deliberation, or Habermasian communicative competence and ideal speech situations, the linguistic turn in social and political thought has increasingly become identified with a flat, disembodied, or calculating rationality. Pitkin’s work with concepts, and with language, is always informed by matters of embodiment, needs, and differences. Her way of engaging with these issues, in the essays that follow and throughout her writing, calls sharply into doubt whether political theory’s attunement to language entails the “flat” rationality critics have seen in it, and also

The dilemmas of political thinking 9

stands as a challenge to political theorists to continue exploring the potential in attention to language. Pitkin’s engagements with embodiment in her thinking about shared agency provide a second example of the importance of her work for political theory today. Pitkin’s work exemplifies ways of thinking about politics as a shared endeavor that respect the relevance of bodies, the everyday activities that sustain them, the ways that these activities shape our ideals and judgments, and so on. These themes are particularly salient in Chapter 2, “Food and freedom in The Flounder,” and Chapter 7, “Justice: on relating private and public,” as I will discuss these works below. But Pitkin does not quarantine matters of embodiment to a few essays; instead she brings them forward throughout her work. The concept of action offers a third example of Pitkin’s ongoing contribution to political thought. Political theorists everywhere nowadays praise action and lament that there is not enough of it. We parse everyday resistance, study political movements, and scrutinize revolutionary moments as exemplifying aspects of action that seem missing from many authorized political channels. With these concerns in mind, we would do well to study Pitkin’s way of handling the concept of action, both in her critical studies of Arendt and in her other works. In them, she raises subtle and cogent questions about action that political theorists must continue to consider: What counts as action? When does it coincide, and when does it contrast with conduct, behavior, or withdrawal? Where is it possible, and when is it warranted? How is it justified, and on behalf of whom? These are only three examples of themes centrally important to political theory today that Pitkin’s work addresses with particular sensitivity and insight. Readers of the selections in this volume and of Pitkin’s other writings will find them rich in other themes as well: the politics of gender and sexuality, the problems confronting a social science of politics, the meaning of free citizenship, and so on. The chapters in this volume are organized around some of the primary questions opened up by Pitkin’s work regarding politics, justice, and action. Each part of this volume emphasizes one of these in turn.

Politics In the opening Chapter 1, “Action and membership,” Machiavelli exemplifies for Pitkin the political theorist who is both fraught with intense ambivalence and inspired to act. Machiavelli ultimately brings these together in an anxious, defensive, and misogynistic effort to model political autonomy on the image of the independent individual—a man free of origins, community or family ties, and obligations. Along the way, Machiavelli nevertheless develops ideas and explores possibilities that resonate with free citizenship, that is, acting in ways that both presuppose and create individuality and community. Pitkin explores the causes and conditions of Machiavelli’s unhelpful turn toward a masculinist, individualistic conception of political autonomy. She finds this conception in many of the images, including “Fortune,” that Machiavelli invokes in his political thinking. But she also opens up

10 The dilemmas of political thinking

the possibility of recovering Machiavelli’s thought as a resource for confronting the dilemmas of political thinking in our own time from an angle that supports political judgment and action in concert. Pitkin thus presents Machiavelli as an exemplar of both the promise and perils of political theorizing—and brings to readers a number of questions that provoke their own thinking about politics in ways that support judgment and action. In Chapter 2, “Food and freedom in The Flounder,” Pitkin takes up the question of freedom, particularly as it touches on aspirations toward liberation, radical thought, and action. Reading Günter Grass’s novel The Flounder (Grass 1978 [1985]), she explores where responsibility for domination lies, whether universal and abstract ideals or the concrete and particular are the foundation for radical change, and what ways of living and thinking about gender hold the most promise for liberation. Pitkin raises the question of what ways of living and thinking “promote a kind of . . . autonomy that is not isolation from others and a kind of power that is not domination” (see Chapter 2 in this volume, p. 49). She suggests answers to this question that engage our concepts of gender, power, and history, by way of thinking about relations not only between women and men, and rulers and subjects, but in relation to animals, food, and essential everyday activities like cooking. Pitkin approaches the tensions found in the work of Jeremy Bentham in Chapter 3, “Slippery Bentham,” illustrating in a quite different way the significance of ambiguity for political thought. It is one thing to recognize tensions or to feel ambivalent; it is quite another to be ambiguous while repeatedly ignoring—or denying—that the ambiguities are there. Pitkin delves into Bentham’s utilitarianism, which, she notes, remains an influential idiom for policy and ethics in our time. With a reading of Bentham informed by her work on Wittgenstein, Pitkin argues that Bentham’s utilitarianism is marked by repeated yet unacknowledged ambiguities. These ambiguities place him on both sides of each significant intellectual problem that his work approaches, and allow him to refuse to acknowledge that the problems exist. The result is what Pitkin calls a “Teflon theory,” since none of our usual criticisms of utilitarianism seem to stick to his account. Pitkin asks what Bentham’s ambiguities reveal about individual psychology and legislative power—and the moral action, individual responsibility, and politics that mediate them. What, she asks, does utilitarianism, with its ambiguities, obscure in its denial of this mediation? What, in our hopes for and dissatisfactions with the modern condition, accounts for the longevity of Bentham’s “Teflon theory?” Part I concludes with Chapter 4, “Obligation and consent.” This is one of Pitkin’s earliest publications, where one finds similar problems at the base of liberalism. Noting that theories of political obligation as resting in consent undergird modern political “common-sense” and liberal political order, she studies John Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government of 1689 and the positions of some modern liberal. How, Pitkin asks, do contract theorists, setting out to offer a doctrine about when or why resistance is justified, end up with a theory that justifies total obedience? Pitkin herself begins by drawing out the multiple formulations of “the problem” of obligation that these theorists address. By subsuming these formulations into one

The dilemmas of political thinking 11

question, she argues, traditional consent theory ultimately abstracts from considerations that are, in practice, relevant for a citizen (or a revolutionary) deciding when (or whom) to obey, disobey, or resist. With this in mind, she explores how political obligation is like promising, an activity that belies the assumption of individual autonomy and separateness that traditional consent theory takes as its starting point. From this observation, Pitkin raises provocative questions about how the language of consent, promising, and law is connected to resistance, responsibility, and judgment. The preceding chapters lay out Pitkin’s perspectives on ways in which some familiar modes of political theorizing reflect, and may even foster, our unwillingness or inability to recognize and exercise our capacities for judgment. We turn now to scrutinize that concept.

Judgment Part II surveys Pitkin’s contributions to the question of judgment and justice, beginning with those inspired by her Wittgensteinian approach. In Chapter 5, “Two selections on Plato’s Republic from Wittgenstein and Justice,” Pitkin first explores the famous encounter that Plato depicts between Socrates and Thrasymachus, examining the contribution of Wittgenstein’s approach for re-thinking usual terms (e.g. “ought” vs. “is”) for parsing this famous debate. To her analysis, she brings the insight that the meaning of “justice” is learned by its use, and that learning this meaning is less about the shared characteristics of the things we call just, and more about the shared features of situations in which “justice” and related words are used. These situations include a range of actions: she cites “doing someone an injustice, doing justice to a delicious meal, getting your just deserts,” and so on. Pitkin goes on to ask how a tension between substance and form in the uses of the word “justice” supports judgment and co-action in matters of judgment and fairness. Pitkin then brings conceptual analysis to matters in the Republic beyond the encounter between Socrates and Thrasymachus. She explores the “ideal society” that Plato presents in this text as designed to draw out the complex meaning of justice, and as illustrating problems, dilemmas, and ambiguities that we face when confronting the matter of equality and human differences, both natural and artificial. Pitkin’s exploration of judgment continues in Chapter 6, “Relativism: a lecture.” Questioning the debate between moral relativism and moral absolutism, Pitkin notes that while this appears to be between irreconcilable positions adopted by different people, the precursor of the debate is ambivalence: each side, she argues, is already in each of us. By exploring the kinds of examples that people frequently marshal, she illustrates this ambivalence about when, how, and why to judge. She shows how the debate demands we extract such examples from the richness of their contexts and particularity of their consequences. The result of this extraction is abstraction: we become fixated on broad generalizations and forget the importance of contexts and consequences, and the role of judgment in weighing them. Pitkin’s intervention is to point out that our practices of judgment, in their

12 The dilemmas of political thinking

everyday contexts, are various, and that the variation is itself significant. Good judgments always attend to contexts and consequences; their variability calls into question the usefulness and coherence of applying a doctrine, relativist or absolutist, to this practice. Pitkin’s discussion in this selection makes visible to us the kinds of questions and sorts of considerations that judgment entails. In Chapter 7, “Justice: on relating private and public,” Pitkin reflects on the significance of our bodies and needs—matters often considered “private”—for the judgments we render in public affairs. Reading Arendt, Pitkin notes both that she (Arendt) sought to exclude the provision of human needs from her account of the public (under the rubric of “household” matters), and that she considered the incursion of these needs into public affairs (e.g. the poverty question) as the eruption of “the social.” Arendt’s reluctance or failure to engage judgment or justice as key concerns of public life becomes, for Pitkin, the question of the intimate relation of judgment to our bodies and needs. Pitkin sets herself the task of conceptualizing the public in a way true to its roots in human needs, and relevant to its consequences for privilege, power, and suffering. In this discussion, she elaborates true citizenship as the experience that teaches us, in ways inclusive of our needs, what justice is and how to exercise political judgment. She explores the dimensions of that experience that enable us to grow in understanding our connections to one another, and in our ability to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. Part II closes with Chapter 8, “Judgment and autonomy,” a chapter from Pitkin’s book-length study of Machiavelli. She examines Machiavelli’s way of articulating human standards and ideas as two-sided. They are conventional, of course, but they are not arbitrary, insofar as they come out of and respond to human needs. How, Pitkin asks, does this two-sidedness of ideals support practices of judgment that are integral to citizenship? Exploring this question, Pitkin develops explicitly the theme of “growing up” into one’s capacity for autonomy, and doing so in ways that support responsibility and political community. She explores Machiavelli’s text for insights about how people can grow into free citizenship, while staying clear of self-defeating paths like the one Machiavelli himself took, extolling manliness rather than fostering capacities for mutuality and co-action.

Action We turn now to a third guiding concern in Pitkin’s work, action. As we do this, it’s worth noting that in the first chapter of this part, as in other chapters above, Pitkin engages a theme that animates much of her thinking, but that this volume represents but incompletely: gender. In Chapter 9, Pitkin shows, as she did when interpreting The Flounder, how ideas of gendered hierarchy overtake us precisely where our situation calls for mutuality. Pitkin explores this theme explicitly in Fortune is a Woman (Pitkin 1984), and approaches it again from a different angle in The Attack of the Blob (Pitkin 1998). These works illustrate how gender anxieties block insights that might otherwise have emerged in Machiavelli’s or Arendt’s treatment of significant political and theoretical ambiguities. Given the complexity

The dilemmas of political thinking 13

of the theme, and Pitkin’s characteristic care in elaborating her perspective, these insights unfold over many of the chapters in this volume, or are so woven into the larger works of which they are a part that excerpting them was not feasible. The student of Pitkin’s work is advised to study these longer works in order to engage her encounter with the political life of gender. Chapter 9, “The Citizen and his rivals,” also from Pitkin’s work on Machiavelli, explores a vision of “manhood” presented by Machiavelli that does not veer into the machismo and misogyny that besets his more famous images. Calling this “the fraternal Citizen” (and emphasizing the distinctiveness of the vision by capitalizing the C), Pitkin explores its relation to a free and healthy collective life, and its bold contrast with images of autonomy conceived in terms of sovereignty or of an isolated actor achieving individualistic goals. From within Machiavelli’s contradictory remarks about what social conditions foster fraternal Citizenship, Pitkin draws out some of its essential attributes. She asks how mutuality might moderate inequality, what value fraternal Citizenship places on conflict and contestation, and whether and how unity may be provisionally achieved by principled interaction. Pitkin’s first work, The Concept of Representation (Pitkin 1967), brings similar thematic questions to the uniquely modern institutions and practices of representation, as we see in Chapter 10, “The mandate-independence controversy.” Here Pitkin addresses the long-standing debate regarding whether a representative serves primarily as an agent for his or her constituency, expressing their already-stated will to the legislative body, or whether instead the representative acts autonomously on constituents’ behalf. Emphasizing that representation is an activity, Pitkin notes that the concept of representation, as “making present something that is nevertheless not present,” sets up contradictory imperatives, and that this paradox underlies and animates the debate itself. She goes on to explore the significance of this paradox for the political actions undertaken by representatives, in light of constituencies’ internal diversity, the limited knowledge of constituents, and so on. She develops a conception of “responsiveness” that addresses this complexity, in particular by leaving latitude for representatives’ judgments and occasions for justification—both of which must be informed by “metapolitical” considerations regarding what is good for someone and who decides. In these reflections, we glimpse the complexity of political action in the matters of modern governance, and the need for a deeper understanding of interdependence to inform how we are to act in the situations when we act for others—which more or less characterizes all situations of shared, participatory action. Pitkin has returned to the concept of representation in recent work, situating it particularly in the context of the claims and hopes of a modern democracy, and within the modern predicament more generally. Chapter 11, “Representation and democracy: uneasy alliance,” is an address that Pitkin gave when accepting the Johann Skytte Prize in Political Science in Uppsala, Sweden, in 2003. In this work, she raises questions about whether representation can facilitate democratic action in the troubled circumstances of our times. She explores this question first by disentangling the concepts of representation and democracy, drawing out their troubled

14 The dilemmas of political thinking

historical relations as a way of loosening the modern tendency thoughtlessly to equate them. With Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a touchstone, she argues that representative government has become a new form of oligarchy, and will remain so unless it is rooted in participatory democratic politics at the local level. After gesturing to Marx, she outlines what she understands to be the main obstacles to democratic politics today. Her reflections raise troubling and urgent questions about the prospect for democracy under conditions that many people today regard (sometimes wrongly) as natural or irreversible. In Chapter 12, “Absent authorit[y]: Marx,” Pitkin shows how Marx’s writing has informed, and can further inform, our thinking about these obstacles. She illustrates this by way of Marx’s unacknowledged influence on the writings of Arendt. As I noted earlier in this introduction, Arendt has long informed Pitkin’s way of thinking about political life and its problems; reflections on Arendt, both brief and more extensive, appear throughout her work. From her first exposure to The Human Condition (Arendt 1958) in graduate school, Pitkin sensed the promise in Arendt’s formulation of problems confronting political action in modern times. But Pitkin remained troubled by the fact of Arendt saying something that seemed (to Pitkin) so similar to Marx’s ideas, while being so critical of him. The trouble was deepened by Pitkin’s admiration for each of these thinkers. Coming to understand the sources of Arendt’s misguided criticism, and how Arendt’s concept of “the social” might have been more productive for Arendt’s own thinking had she herself grappled productively with Marx’s concept of alienation and with other implications of her own thinking, are among Pitkin’s themes in The Attack of the Blob (Pitkin 1998). In this selection from that book, Pitkin’s traces Marx’s influence on Arendt’s work, particularly in a concept that most reflects Arendt’s denial of Marx’s influence: “the social.” Locating this hidden influence of Marx in Arendt, Pitkin explores the importance of his ideas for Arendt, and to themes that have been with Pitkin throughout her career. Thinking expansively through Marx’s work, she explores the problem presented by a hugely, if sometimes subtly, complex social system of deep interdependence. Despite our own co-creation of this interdependence, it demands individual isolation, competition, and mutual exploitation. Cooperation and solidarity often seem ludicrous, impossible, or even dangerous to us, with the result that the social systems we have co-created confront us as an “external, coercive force by which [we] are all constrained” (Pitkin 1998, p. 137). Here Pitkin extends Marx’s picture of market capitalism into a broader “modern condition” that is not solely economic but also psychological. In so elaborating and extending Marx’s concept of alienation, Pitkin shows how Arendt’s well-known criticism of Marx is not only deeply misguided, but also suppresses a crucial dimension of Marx’s argument. Pitkin goes on to explore in detail how Arendt’s distinctive thinking about the social might have been drawn out more productively had she acknowledged a debt to Marx. Pitkin thereby clarifies Arendt’s own treatment of the vexing problems that the social represented in Arendt’s work. This brings us to Pitkin’s own most recent characterization of the overarching political problem that the modern predicament presents to us today. Concluding

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Part III, Chapter 13, “The social in The Human Condition,” traces Arendt’s concept of the social, and, in particular, the problem that Arendt meant this concept to address, even if her handling was ambiguous or incomplete. Pitkin shows that Arendt attempted to formulate “the social” as the absence of politics in a context where politics belongs. Arendt’s own repeated associations of the social with biology and household affairs on the one hand, and with behavior on the other, suggest that (despite her critique of Marx along these lines, and her own occasional assertions notwithstanding) she did see economic concerns as appropriate grounds for action. Arendt likewise saw the social as the condition of our abdicating action to bureaucracies or markets. Exploring the insights and shortcomings of Arendt’s development of this concept, Pitkin advances her own succinct account of the ways that action in concert can address people’s pervading sense of powerlessness. The final chapter of this volume presents an original interview with Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, conducted in the summer of 2013. In this discussion, Pitkin elaborates on her intellectual development in relation to her biography, describing for example the influence of her parents, her love of animals, and the milieu of Berkeley in the 1950s and 1960s. In terms of the latter, she offers an illuminating critique of the idea of a “Berkeley School” of political theory. She offers insight into her own writing process, considers the influence of Hannah Arendt’s work on her own, and reflects, among other things, on pedagogy and on the value of public higher education in a democracy. Together with the writings collected in this volume, the interview offers a rich portrait of a remarkably innovative and influential political theorist whose central preoccupations are as relevant and perhaps even more urgent today than they were a half century ago.

Note 1 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin is not to be confused with Hanna (née Heilborn) Fenichel, her stepmother. Pitkin describes her mother’s “body work” in the interview at the end of this volume; see page 278–279.

References Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Disch, L. 2012. “Democratic Representation and the Mobilization Paradox.” Perspectives on Politics 10(3): 599–616. Grass, G. 1978 [1985]. The Flounder [Der Butt], trans. R. Mannheim. New York: Limited Editions Club. Hauptmann, E. 2004. “A Local History of ‘The Political.’” Political Theory 32(1): 34–60. Pitkin, H.F. 1967. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pitkin, H.F. 1972. Wittgenstein and Justice: on the significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for social and political thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pitkin, H.F. 1973. “The Roots of Conservatism: Michael Oakeshott and the denial of politics.” Dissent 20(4): 496–525. Pitkin, H.F. 1984. Fortune is a Woman: gender and politics in the thought of Niccolò Machiavelli. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pitkin, H.F. 1987a. “The Idea of a Constitution.” Journal of Legal Education 37(2): 167–169.

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Pitkin, H.F. 1987b. “Rethinking Reification.” Theory and Society 16: 263–293. Pitkin, H.F. 1988. “Are Freedom and Liberty Twins?” Political Theory 16(4): 523–552. Pitkin, H.F. 1998. The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s concept of the social. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schaar, J. and Wolin, S. 1970. The Berkeley Rebellion: essays on politics and education in the technological society. New York: New York Review of Books.

PART I

Politics

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1 ACTION AND MEMBERSHIP (1984)

As a political theorist, Machiavelli is difficult, contradictory, and in many respects unattractive: a misogynist, frequently militaristic and authoritarian, uncomplimentary about human nature. What nevertheless makes him worth taking seriously is that his works contain an understanding of politics, autonomy, and the human condition, which is profoundly right in ways that really matter. That understanding consists of a set of syntheses holding in tension seemingly incompatible truths along several dimensions. It is therefore difficult to articulate and to sustain, and Machiavelli does not always sustain it. But the understanding is there, and even when he loses the syntheses he is a better teacher than many a more consistent theorist, because he refuses to abandon for very long any of the aspects of the truth he sees. Thus he manages to be both political and realistic even while articulating a theoretical vision of human achievement. In this chapter, therefore, I frequently refer to the ideas of a thinker called “Machiavelli at his best” and offer an account of how and why the historical Machiavelli diverged from those ideas. In the process, this chapter also makes some suggestions about the relevance of those ideas for our time. For all these reasons, this chapter is more speculative and personal, less grounded in evidence, than the rest of this book (Pitkin 1999 [1984]: 285–306). At his best, Machiavelli formulates an understanding of human autonomy that is activist without megalomania, insisting on our capacity and responsibility for choice and action, while nevertheless recognizing the real limits imposed by our historical situation. He understands the open-ended, risky quality of human interaction, which denies to politics the sort of control available in dealing with inanimate objects. Yet he insists that the risks are worth taking and are indeed the only way of securing what we most value. He also formulates an understanding of autonomy that is highly political. He assumes neither the solidarity postulated by organic theorists nor the atomistic, unrelated individuals postulated by social

20 Action and membership

contract theorists. Instead, he focuses on the way in which citizens in political interaction continually recreate community out of multiplicity. He formulates an understanding of autonomy, finally, that is neither cynical nor hortatory, but realistic: tough-minded about political necessities and human weaknesses without being reductionist about our goals and potentialities. Justice, civility, and virtue are as real, in that understanding, as greed and envy, or as bread and air (though of course people often say “justice” when they are in fact speaking of mere interest or expediency). Although he rarely cites Aristotle and probably had only contempt for the Thomistic Aristotelianism he is likely to have encountered, Machiavelli’s best understanding of politics is importantly reminiscent of Aristotle’s teaching that man is a political animal, meaning not that people are always found in a polis, but rather that, first, politics is an activity in which no other species engages, and, second, engaging in it is necessary to the full realization of our potential as humans.1 For Machiavelli as for Aristotle, this means that we are neither beasts nor gods, neither mere products of natural forces nor beings with unlimited power. We are capable of free agency, but always within the bounds of necessity. We are the products but also the makers of culture, law, and history. We develop our humanness only in the company of others, yet our sociability is never automatic but rather requires effort and care. Finally, for Machiavelli as for Aristotle, our political nature is a function of our unique capacity for judgment. The human being is the polis animal because it is the logos animal, capable of speaking, reasoning, distinguishing right from wrong, and thus of freely chosen action. In terms of Machiavelli’s conflicting images of manhood, the right understanding of human autonomy he offers is closest to the image of the fraternal Citizen. Yet it transcends the misogynist vision and manages to combine the commitment to republican, participatory politics with the fox’s deflation of hypocritical and empty ideals, as well as the appreciation of authority, tradition, and generativity associated with the Founder image. This best, synthetic Machiavelli holds in tension apparently incompatible truths along at least three interrelated dimensions of what it means to be human, political, and autonomous; dimensions so fundamental to these topics that any political theory must address them, if not expressly, then by implication. Autonomy is problematic for creatures such as ourselves in relation to the past, in relation to our contemporaries, and in relation to nature, both around and within us. It is problematic in relation to the past because we are the creatures of history. Our present situation and our very selves are shaped by the past. What can freedom mean for such a creature? Call that the dimension of action. Our autonomy is problematic in relation to our contemporaries because harmony among us is not automatic, as among the insects. We are distinct individuals with often conflicting needs and desires, yet we are also products and shapers of shared societies. Call that the dimension of membership. Our autonomy is problematic in relation to nature because we are both rooted in the natural and capable of transcending it, because we have bodies that need food and shelter and are mortal, and psyches, minds, or spirits that render us capable of distinguishing and choosing right from wrong,

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good from evil, just from unjust. But what is the relationship between natural need or drive and standards of judgment, and what is the basis of those standards— convention, nature, or some transcendent source? Call this the dimension of judgment. A right understanding of autonomy requires synthesis along all of these dimensions, and that is what Machiavelli at his best has to offer. Yet Machiavelli often loses the synthetic tension along one or another dimension and falls into that endless circling among incompatible alternatives which Hegel associated with “bad infinity” (Hegel 1969 [1812–1816]: vol. 1, 152–6, esp. 155). And the psychological and familial themes he employs, though they partly support, ultimately tend to undermine, those syntheses. To be sure, those syntheses are problematic and unstable also because each of the dimensions involves fundamental philosophical problems built into the very structure of our conceptual system, perhaps of our human nature. The dimension of action involves the problem philosophers sometimes call the “freedom of the will”; the dimension of membership, that of “universals and particulars”; the dimension of judgment, the problem of “value relativism” or “is” and “ought.” These are surely among the most formidable, difficult problems ever taken up by philosophers. And Machiavelli was no philosopher; he was not interested in resolving such problems nor particularly self-conscious about them. This is both a strength and a weakness. Precisely because he is not a philosopher, Machiavelli never leaves political reality for very long; but by the same token, he is also not fully aware of the conceptual or philosophical difficulties that complicate his theorizing. The syntheses are problematic not only philosophically, however, but also politically. Machiavelli demanded of himself that his theorizing be relevant to the political realities of his time. Politically, the dimension of action requires that theory guides us about “what is to be done,” and helps us to delineate here and now those things that we must accept as “given” from those that are open to change by our intervention. The dimension of membership requires, politically, that theory speaks to power and plurality, that it not merely articulates abstract truths but makes them relevant to an audience that has—or could generate—the power actually to do what the theory suggests must be done. And the dimension of judgment requires, politically, that justice and right be tied, if not to expedience, then at least to possibility; what is truly impossible cannot be politically right. The political realities of Machiavelli’s situation, as was remarked at the outset, were extraordinarily troubled and intractable. The real difficulties facing Florence, and particularly Florentine republicanism, were just about overwhelming, seeming to defy even the best understanding that political theory might devise. In demanding of himself that his theory address those realities, Machiavelli was sometimes forced into utopian fantasies and enraged distortions—the very kinds of theorizing he rightly condemned in others. But even when allowance has been made for the philosophical difficulties of the subject matter and the political difficulties of his situation, it nevertheless remains true that Machiavelli’s best synthetic understanding is frequently further undermined by the personal and familial themes he himself invokes. The very metaphors and images he employs to convey his insights repeatedly distort or destroy those

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insights. Whether this is because of his own psychic needs and conflicts, or because of his effort to address the psychic vulnerabilities of his audience, must remain ultimately undecided. What matters is to understand the connections between political and psychological considerations in the texts. *** Mankind is the species that makes itself, not just biologically as every species perpetuates its kind, but culturally, through history. Human beings are born less completely developed toward adulthood than any other creature. Thus their development is shaped more by the particular circumstances into which they are born; and those circumstances are less purely natural, more cultural and social than those of any other species. Using our capacity for language and abstract thought, and our opposed thumbs and ability to make tools, we produce a material and nonmaterial culture that forms the environment in which the next generations of humans grow up. Thus to be human is to be the product of a particular society and culture, which is the product of past history. Yet to be human is also to have a share in making history, transmitting, preserving, and altering culture, shaping society. It is we who enact the forces that shape us. As Hobbes said, man is both the “matter” and the “artificer” of “commonwealth,” of community and civilization (Hobbes 1962 [1651]: 19 [1]). Those facts pose a mystery, or rather, whole clusters of mysteries: philosophical, political, psychological. How can a product of causal forces also be a free agent capable of action, creativity, responsibility—to be praised and blamed for its choices and deeds? What does it mean to say that this person did that, is responsible for it, could have done otherwise? On what basis do we make such judgments? Every action has antecedents and every person a past, so is an action really different from an event, a person from an object? What will count as initiating something new rather than just continuing preexisting processes? Do these distinctions mark something objectively real in the world, or are they merely conceptual conventions that we impose arbitrarily and, in the end, inconsistently? These are among the questions with which social and ethical philosophers must deal. But the political theorist is not merely, or not exactly, a philosopher. Philosophy investigates those aspects of the human condition that could not be otherwise and that are so basic we are ordinarily not even aware of them. But politics concerns matters that might well be other than they are; it concerns the question “what shall we do?” Insofar as it directs itself toward matters that cannot be changed, it is misguided and will fail. Politics is the art of the possible. To theorize about politics, then, is not exactly like philosophizing about the human condition or the nature of being. Political theory does teach us about fundamental necessities, not merely those that are given to all humans in all ages but also those that are merely inescapable for us, here and now; but it does so with reference to, and in order to distinguish them from, those other matters that are subject to our choice and power, with regard to which we might successfully act. Thus the political theorist is concerned not

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merely with the philosophical problem of whether humans can ever break the causal chain of history to make a new beginning, but even more with the political problem of how and where and with whom we might take action, given our present circumstances. He delineates, one might say, “what has to be accepted as given” from “what is to be done.” But this delineation is not really as simple as the drawing of a line between unchanging regions. For the political world is composed of human activities and relationships and habits, all of which are anchored in human thought. Change people’s understandings of themselves and their political world, and they will change their conduct, and thereby that world. The political theorist is thus always a teacher as much as an observer or contemplator, and to the extent that his teaching succeeds, his subject matter will alter. So the distinguishing of necessities from possibilities is less like the drawing of a line than like a Gestalt switch: a reconceptualization of familiar details so that realities we feel we have always known suddenly become visible for the first time, familiar things suddenly take on a new aspect. We live our ordinary lives in the particular and the concrete, largely unaware of our remote connections to people we never see, the long-range and large-scale consequences for others of what we do, for us of what they do. On the whole, we know how to use the resources at hand for the immediate tasks we face, how to do what we must daily do. But the factual particulars among which we live can be organized and interpreted by many different theoretical schemas. That is why, as Machiavelli says, “the people” may be deceived “in judging things in general,” but they “are not so deceived” about “particular,” “specific things,” “things individually known” (Discourses 1: 47; Machiavelli 1965: 291–3). It is not so much that we do not see the forest for the trees, as that more than one theoretical forest is compatible with the many trees among which we live. The political theorist, one might say, invites us to a new organizing schema for making sense of our concrete reality. If we accept the invitation, our familiar world will seem changed, and as a result we shall live differently in it. Yet whether we accept the new schema will depend on whether it makes sense of what we already know, makes meaningful what was before confused, chaotic, or intractable. Obviously this will depend both on the truth of a theorist’s vision and on his power as a teacher. Nothing is harder than to get people really to see what has always been before their eyes, particularly since such a changed vision will have implications for action (which may make uncomfortable demands on them) and interest (which may make it offensive to those who now hold privilege and power). Thus the political theorist faces a special problem of communication: in order to be understood, he must speak in terms familiar to his audience, from within a conceptual framework and an understanding of the world that they share. Yet he wants not to convey new information to them, but rather to change the terms, the conceptual framework through which they presently organize their information. It may seem an impossible task; and political theorizing accordingly has its dangers, from ridicule to martyrdom. Yet sometimes it does happen that people are ready for a new understanding, when the old explanations no longer make sense, the old

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rules no longer guide, the old procedures no longer produce satisfactory results, the old ceremonies no longer sanctify. Then a new vision—the right new theoretical vision—may “take” among a large audience and even produce basic political change. Every political theory must expressly or by implication take its stand on these matters, since every theorist has both something to say and some reason for saying it. He wants to convey to an audience some truths, some matters he hopes people will recognize as “given,” so that about other matters they will subsequently act differently than they now do. Even the most radical or relativistic theorist thus teaches respect toward something, and even the most conservative or pessimistic hopes by his teaching to produce some change. *** The idea of fortune in the largest sense—not just the personification of fortune as woman, but that figure together with her various (partial) equivalents, such as nature and opportunity, and their male counter-players, such as virtù, the Founder, and the vivere civile—this whole configuration of ideas is Machiavelli’s particular response to these perennial problems of political theory. Fortune in this largest sense is his way of relating man the “maker” to man the “matter” of “commonwealth,” of relating action to necessity and initiative to tradition. It is his way of addressing an audience in terms they will understand about a changed understanding of their political world that would—if they accepted it—bring them to change their conduct, and thereby their world. What are the consequences of this particular way, Machiavelli’s way, of doing it? Machiavelli presents a political universe that is neither a fixed, sacred order nor a meaningless accident. We face neither eternally valid abstract standards of right that it is our duty to try to approximate, nor inevitable forces moving to predestined goals, nor yet a randomness that defies understanding and effort. Coping with necessity is neither a worshipful seeking nor a scientific predicting. Nor is it a throw of the dice. Instead, it is like dealing with a person—a difficult, unpredictable, even sometimes malevolent person, to be sure, and one larger and more powerful than ourselves, but nevertheless a being with personality like ours, intention like ours, moods and foibles like ours, open to influence to some extent and in some ways, just as we are, yet never wholly within our control. That being can be known as any person can, which is to say, imperfectly, but sufficiently to make the effort worthwhile. The kind of knowledge that will be relevant here will be the kind we have of people, knowledge that leads us to expect the unexpected. It will involve not primarily causation and technical control, but relationship, intention, communication, meaning. But Machiavelli’s fortune is neither merely a person nor just any person; and the personification of our relationship to the universe was hardly an invention of Machiavelli’s. The medieval Christian conception of the world, for example, was also personalized, a relationship to the Father, the Virgin, Christ, and the many saints. Yet it was a very different conception from Machiavelli’s. For God was not

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merely a father, but also the creator of the world, ultimately beyond human comprehension. He presided over an order beyond human influence in which fortune was a relatively minor figure. Machiavelli’s fortune, by contrast, is part of no righteous eternal system, subordinated to no male divinity. She enacts not some predestined justice, but her own whims. But by the same token she is open to human influence, not through prayer or supplication, but rather through courtship, manipulation, and bold challenge. Above all, she is female and thus simultaneously inferior and dangerous. The conception of fortune as responsive to human effort, the revival of virtù as symbolizing that effort, and the specific interpretation of that symbol in terms of virility were widespread in the Renaissance. But it is Machiavelli who presents man’s relationship to the outcomes of human action in terms of sexual conquest—less violent than rape but more forceful than seduction. Thereby he not only anthropomorphizes and sexualizes the givens and the outcomes of human action in history but invests them with those specific desires, fears, and attitudes his male readers already bear toward woman—as unreliable nurturer, as sexual object, as “other.” The consequence is both empowering and constraining; it promotes the striving for autonomy yet renders that goal inaccessible. Personifying fortune in this way means that the boundaries between necessity and possibility in Machiavelli’s world are above all changeable, subject to the whims of fortune on the one side and human effort on the other. What has to be accepted as given varies, for him, with the particular situation and with our own capacities and efforts. We are never all-powerful, but always subject to countless necessities. Yet the limits are always partly up to us to determine, expanding and contracting as we vary in skill, energy, and imagination. Most of all, Machiavelli is an activist, urging us to hopefulness and effort. In drawing the line between what had to be accepted as given and what might be changed, Machiavelli had to address a mixed audience: many of them discouraged about the possibilities for action, others active enough but only in private concerns, particularly the pursuit of wealth, a few driven by ambition to activity in the public sphere, but in a hubristic and selfish manner that only increased the chaos and corruption of public life. His task thus was to rouse men to action, but to action that recognized some limits to human capacities, that did not assume perfect certainty or unlimited human power. So Machiavelli’s activism is of a peculiar kind. It is founded in no promise of guaranteed success or mastery, no alliance with providence or historical necessity. If anything, it is founded in challenge rather than promise. Against Christian otherworldliness, Church hypocrisy, Stoic withdrawal, bourgeois acquisitiveness, factionalism and envy, Machiavelli summons his contemporaries to virtù and to glory. In the cause of community welfare and political liberty, he tries to enlist their concern for manliness, their fear of dependence, their craving for sexual gratification. Machiavelli’s ultimate challenge to his contemporaries is to shame them: stand up, and act like a man! The image of fortune as woman, then, challenges men in terms of their masculine identity: she is there for the taking—if you’re man enough. The political

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universe is meaningful and manageable, yet the image cautions that not just any action will succeed and prepares men for possible failure. It thus challenges what Machiavelli called “ambition,” without promoting the excessive ambition entailed in imagining humans as having godlike power. And yet, the image also has more indirect implications with almost the opposite effect. Machiavelli’s was a time when sexual and familial relationships were in flux and were the focus of considerable conflict. We know, in addition, that certain features of Florentine family life at the time were likely to intensify infantile conflicts. Appealing to the pride in masculinity of men who grow up in such circumstances is likely to be rhetorically effective; but it is also likely, first, to reinvigorate and import into political life the anxieties that trouble their relations with women: their fear of the feminine, their need to prove manliness, and as a consequence, violence, hero worship, relations of command and obedience. Second, insofar as relations between the sexes are troubled by unresolved infantile conflicts, invoking woman means invoking mother and tends to return men to childhood fears and fantasies, trapping them in their own past. That is likely to stir up and import into political life fears of trust and nurturance, yearnings for omnipotence and merging, misleading fantasies of what adulthood means. Machiavelli undermines the very teaching he wants to convey by appealing to his audience’s desire for manliness and thereby also summoning up childishness: fantasies of huge engulfing mothers and rescuing fathers, relationships of domination and submission, an unstable combination of cynicism and exhortation, and misleading conceptions of action, membership, judgment, and autonomy. The appeal to machismo can move men all right, particularly men troubled about their manliness, but it cannot make them free. *** The problem of action concerns human creativity and our relationship to the past, issues Machiavelli confronts in the image of the Founder, in the authority of ancient Rome, and in the doctrines of imitation and the “return to beginnings.” Yet each of these topics remains itself problematic, and specifically so in relation to familial and sexual themes. The Founder image, meant to solve the mysteries of creativity in history, merely re-expresses them. The Founder is the very essence of generative authority, yet must murder his sons. He is supposed to make men out of babies or beasts, yet must assure that they do not themselves aspire to Founder status. He, the solitary patriarch, is supposed to serve as inspiration for fraternal mutuality. Possibly the transition from patriarchal domination to the vivere civile is to be made by a liberating Brutus. Yet Brutus is himself a problematic Founder figure, his conspiracy effective only if the citizenry are already free in all but a formal sense. The Founder is a myth, as Machiavelli the fox well knows, and thus cannot be a genuine solution to any problem in the real world. Yet the problem he is meant to solve—how to “get there from here”—has been solved from time to time in the real world. People have been formed into communities, barbarians civilized, republics

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founded, corrupt institutions renewed. There must be ways to do it. Though there are no Founders, capital F, there are sometimes founders, people who act so that the world is creatively altered after their passing. The image of the Founder, however, blocks rather than facilitates understanding of what human founding is really like. Conjured up as a counterweight to the mythical feminine power, it remains an escapist fantasy, for the mythical proportions of both threat and rescuer dwarf any merely human achievement. Meant to comfort the self, the Founder is actually a fantasy of self-denigration. Instead of empowering, it leaves people helpless, “blaming the princes” for their fate. The doctrine of imitation and the “return to beginnings” are similarly ambiguous and may be read in terms of either paternal rescue or one’s own generative capacities. Thus, imitating the Romans can mean copying their forms and formulas, or it can mean, like them, copying no one. Returning to beginnings can mean recovering terror to renew reluctant obedience, or it can mean de-reification, recovering the self—both its capacities and its real commitments. The one reading offers escape from the engulfing matriarch, but only at the price of self-annihilation, whether through merger or murder. The other is genuinely empowering but liberates only at the price of risk. Read in the latter way, founding can be understood as a universal human potential, so that every moment is an opportunity for initiative (though the options are always limited), and every citizen is a potential (co-)founder. Then the Founder image appears as a symbol of the human capacity for action, but a misleading symbol, for if founding is a shared human capacity, it is neither solipsistic nor a creation ex nihilo. Even the wisest and most charismatic founding fathers are leaders of persons, not molders of material; their authority is the capacity to induce the free actions of other persons. This is not a denial of ancestral authority but the extension to ancestors of that manner of leadership Machiavelli called “the way of freedom.” From this perspective, it is precisely the “irreverent” questioning of inherited tradition, the insistence on one’s own equal freedom to choose and change, that constitutes true reverence, recognition of one’s origins, and renewed contact with the founders. It is true reverence, first, because creating something valuable and lasting is a much more magnificent achievement for fallible human beings than it would be for divinities. It is true reverence, second, because unquestioning dutiful obedience means an implicit denigration of the self by comparison with the sacred ancestors. Therefore it masks a hidden resentment and rebellion; inside the Founder image lurks the fox. And, third, the implicit self-denigration is a partial denial of one’s own capacities—to judge and change, but therefore also to defend and augment the tradition. Adults with full awareness of their powers and responsibilities are more effective guardians of what is to be preserved than dutiful children. To repeat, such an understanding of ancestors and action is offered by Machiavelli but also blocked by his invocation of mythical engulfing mothers and rescuing fathers. For the personal and psychological counterpart of the political theory problem of action is our relationship to our parents: the human problem of growing up. For the small child, adults are indeed larger than life, authors of timeless, sacred, and

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unchangeable rules. The child feels by turns helpless in their power and omnipotent by assimilation to them. It regards the rules as sacred, although it has not mastered them, but is in fact ready to accept any innovation presented to it as authoritative (see Piaget 1962: esp. 13–109). Growing up means acquiring a more realistic view of authority, both the authority of parental figures and that of the principles and practices by which one’s community lives. At the same time it also means becoming oneself competent at those practices and capable of parenting others. It means becoming a master of the rules, a responsible custodian and interpreter of the inherited culture. To the extent that our growing up is troubled or incomplete, traces of the earlier understanding remain in us all and are likely to be evoked by certain images and situations, particularly in times of stress. The transition from total subservience under a godlike authority to autonomous liberty, so problematic in Machiavelli’s political argument, thus does take place in normal psychic development, but as a shift in perception, not in reality. The small child normally perceives in ways that in an adult might be called myth and reification. Parents are not really gods; indeed, the psychological theory examined in this book suggests that such infantile images are more likely to linger into adulthood in proportion as actual parenting was inadequate, the parents absent or unreliable. In any case, the sense in which the transition is a psychic reality does not make it politically feasible. Citizens, or even privatized adults who might become citizens, are not children. And while no doubt we all need authority, adults do not need the kind of authority parents exemplify, and particularly not the kind exemplified by the small child’s images of parents. The projection of those images into politics can only distort political reality. But recognizing that parents are merely human, like oneself, and that our conventions are humanly made must not be confused with the hubristic suppositions that one had no parents, that our conventions have no authority, or that every option is open to us, here and now. Growing up is not the transition from regarding parents as demigods to regarding oneself as a demigod, but the acceptance simultaneously of the human powers and limitations of self and parents. Reification and hubris are equally childish. Growing up means coming to terms with this ambiguous authority of the past: that it is not sacred beyond our challenge, yet that it is in us, and without it, we would not be who we are. To say it another way, growing up means coming to terms with the arbitrariness of the past. Though history is humanly made, it is inescapable. The past is given; the future is open to our action. We are “thrown” into the world, as Heidegger puts it, suggesting a random cast of dice, into some particular time, place, and circumstances not of our choosing. Yet only the unique configuration of circumstances and events that are my life could have made me. We begin helpless and unindividuated; only by being initiated into some particular culture do we become human individuals, capable of autonomy. So my origins, arbitrary as they are, must be accepted, for they are the preconditions of my capacity for choice and action.

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That is what Nietzsche called amor fati, learning to love the accidents that have befallen us, to redeem them as sacred, by our will. It is an extraordinarily difficult doctrine to articulate. It does not forbid tampering with authoritative tradition but says that we cannot change what is past. The will cannot act on the past, Nietzsche says, and martyrs itself in trying. We act always in the present, but all too often the real motivation of our action is the wish to undo some past event, rather than to alter its results in the present. Nietzsche called such backward-looking action “reaction,” because it was not free; and he said it was the product of weakness and ressentiment. Freud called it neurotic and said that neurotics expend vast inner energy continually trying to obliterate something in the past that cannot be obliterated because it is graven in the self. This cripples them and makes their actions ineffectual. Only if one can—in one sense—wholly ratify as if sacred everything in the past and thus everything about the world and oneself is one free to act effectively to change what—in another sense—needs changing about them. But ratifying the past as if sacred does not mean imagining it as sacred. On the contrary, it requires recognizing the historical past as a product of human controversy and choice, at every step actually or potentially political. In Machiavelli’s terms, we must not worship the ancestors and ape them but connect their achievements to our own potential. The past that to us looks so inevitable—partly because it is past and therefore for us inescapable—was for past actors a series of opportunities and choices, often fought out in political controversy, in which some won and others lost. And all that welter of conflicting views, policies, and efforts is our heritage. In recovering the past and seeking out ancestors, we thus have some choice about whom to seek and how to see them—whether, for example, our origins are Roman or Tuscan, and what the choice implies for us now. Both Nietzsche and Freud thought, paradoxically, that enslavement to the past could be cured only by the right sort of recovery of the past. For Freud, neurosis is cured by remembering the past that was repressed into the unconscious. Nietzsche’s metaphor is digestion: to be free for action one must deal with the past in a way that incorporates it, once and for all, and be done with it. Machiavelli speaks not in such psychological and personal terms, but characteristically in political ones, yet his teaching is much the same. The political counterpart of what Nietzsche called ressentiment Machiavelli called corruption. Corrupt people are obsessed with past injustice, desiring vengeance more than any direct gratification. “The reward they desire from victory is not . . . glory” but rather “the satisfaction of having conquered the others” (Florentine Histories 3: 5; 1965: 1146). Thus when they come to power they kill or exile their enemies, making laws “not for the common profit but altogether in favor of the conqueror” (Florentine Histories 3: 5; 1965: 1140). Their real desire being to undo the past, which is impossible, they cannot let the past go or look rationally toward the future. They would rather “go back over past things” endlessly than “provide for future ones” in ways designed to “reunite, not to divide the city” (Florentine Histories 4: 14; 1965: 1202). So they launch escalating feuds or even ally themselves with their own state’s enemies abroad. No law is “more dangerous for a republic,” says

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Machiavelli, “than one that looks back for a long time” (Florentine Histories 3: 3; 1965: 1143). But a different sort of “looking back for a long time,” one that renews contact with origins and founders and recovers the self, is also Machiavelli’s cure for such factional resentment. Only, as already argued, this curative looking back can be understood in either of two ways: the one misogynistic and ultimately crippling, the other genuinely liberating. Developing the former understanding, Machiavelli, like Nietzsche, links resentful factionalism with femininity. Resentment is the passion of the effeminate; factional vengeance is the weapon of fortune within men. So the cure seems to lie in renewed contact with the saving masculinity of forefathers, who will impose murderous discipline. But that cure fails in its liberating intent, for it leaves people still trapped in the past, reliving instead of resolving childhood conflicts. Alternatively, the curative recovery of origins and ancestors can mean recognizing one’s kinship with their great, but human, achievement. It can mean recovering simultaneously one’s own capacity to judge and change or augment what they created, and one’s commitment to that creation which constituted both self and community. This would leave autonomy linked still with adulthood, but no longer with gender; the past would liberate not from feminine but from mythologized parental power. Here, however, the problem of action merges with those of membership and judgment, for an individual is not really free to change the traditions of his community by himself, and not just any action we take will be a right action. Even though free to create, we are nevertheless bound to be reverent toward something already given, and respectful of others with whom we must act if our action is to have political meaning. *** Concerning the problem of membership, Machiavelli is neither a contractarian nor an organicist. He takes it for granted that we are somehow both distinct individuals, each unique and capable of action, and yet objectively interconnected, achieving individuality only in interaction with others. What really interests him, as always, is politics: the possibility of an active, intentional membership enabling us jointly to take responsibility for our objective interconnections, the large-scale consequences for each other of what we are actually doing. Particularly in the Citizen image of manhood, he sees politics as the activity by which free individuals, already objectively interdependent in a society but (therefore) also at odds in terms of interest, need, outlook, desire, repeatedly make themselves into a community, restore and redirect their community, defining it and themselves in the process. Politics thus both partly presupposes and creates both individuality and communal ties. In deliberation and political conflict citizens are forced to bring their individual or class interests and “humors” into relationship with the interests and “humors” of others, producing a renewed recognition of their interdependence and shared membership. In the process, old connections are discovered and new ones made, and all are reminded of their stake in the community, in its policies and the ways

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those policies are made, in its ways of life and ethos, and in each other. This is neither a transformation of self-interest into dutiful self-sacrifice to something external called “the public,” nor a mere refinement of self-interest to the longerrange and more rational, but something like a redefinition of the self, an enlarged awareness of how individuality and community are connected in the self. This political struggle involves both power and principle, each side mustering what power it can, yet also appealing to the other in terms of law, right, justice, and the common good. Indeed, in the vivere civile might and right are interrelated, for law and justice are themselves partly resources of power; and, conversely, a purely abstract “right” that serves no community needs and can muster no community support is politically ineffectual and wrong. Because we are simultaneously both distinct and connected, politics always simultaneously concerns both the distribution of costs and benefits among competitors, and the nature and direction of their shared community, both “who gets what, when, why” and “who we are.” Every law or policy allocates, advantaging some and disadvantaging others; but every law or policy also affects their shared common life and the principles for which they stand. Neglecting either aspect is naive and potentially disastrous. Neglect the former aspect, and you are likely to be exploited under cover of attractive slogans about the public good or to formulate unrealistic policies that do not work. Neglect the latter, and you court “corruption”; your political community is likely to dissolve into factions, each poaching on a public good and on principles for whose maintenance it takes no responsibility. For Machiavelli at his best, the real point is not some unified harmony at which politics theoretically aims, but the activity of struggling toward agreement with and against each other, in which citizens take active charge of the historical processes that would otherwise direct their lives in hidden ways. And that activity is no mere courtly dialogue, but a genuine conflict, in which needs and important interests are at stake. Without passion and struggle there can be no liberty, but only reification, habit, and drift. Yet political conflict must also always be kept within limits; politics is not civil war. The struggle must be kept open and public, rather than clandestine and private. It must involve a genuine appeal to principle, to what is reasonable and what is just; the public and principled aspect of politics must be kept lively in it. And citizens must be kept aware of their interdependence, their shared stake in fair rules and right principles, the civil limits (i termini civili) that forbid wiping out their opponents. These requirements are both prerequisites for and products of a healthy politics (which is one reason why the initial founding of a vivere civile is such a puzzle). The essential element in membership so understood is mutuality; politics is not the domination of some by others, but a relationship among peers; the vivere civile means neither to dominate superbamente nor to serve umilmente. It resembles that outlook Kant later discerned as fundamental to morality: the recognition of other human beings as persons capable of action, like oneself, as members of the “kingdom of ends,” not to be exploited for one’s own purposes like objects, but to be encountered in dialogue as peers with purposes of their own. Yet politics is not

32 Action and membership

morality, and the reciprocity required of citizens lacks the intimacy of moral relationship; political deliberation is not dialogical but multivocal and impersonal. Although citizens must certainly share some degree of commonality to be and remain one community, there is room for much difference and conflict among them; and the mutuality politics requires is a recognition of similarity within difference, a peerhood that does not presuppose total equality, a capacity to continue to live and act with others who are substantially, even offensively, different from oneself. Instilling this capacity for mutuality within difference is a crucial part of Machiavelli’s effort at the political education of his factional fellow Florentines. But the sexual and familial imagery he invokes again partly undermines this effort by calling up images of domination and fears of dependence. The counterpart in personal and psychological life of the political theory problems of membership is our relationship to the “other”: to someone we recognize as simultaneously like ourselves and yet dangerously different. It begins with the task already discussed, of learning to see our parents as human, as persons like ourselves; but it continues into relationships with our contemporaries. To relate actively, without masochistic resentment and yet within civil limits, with a recognition of mutuality, to persons defined as significantly different, in conflict with oneself, requires a certain selfconfidence and tolerance for ambiguity. The “other” threatens the psychic integrity of the self. Whoever is excessively anxious about internal unity, purity, and consistency, who finds it difficult to acknowledge the “other” inside the self—parts of the self that seem alien, dangerous, in conflict with the rest—is likely to project that otherness onto external groups and persons defined as different, and therefore to deny mutuality with them. Ascribing to such external “others” forbidden parts of the self, we then relate to those others as we feel about those parts of the self. This happens in ethnocentrism and in many cultures’ treatment of aliens and outgroups. It happens also between social classes and races, particularly as privileged and dominant groups project forbidden wishes onto subordinated groups, denying their humanity or at any rate their equality, perceiving them as simultaneously contemptible and dangerous: childish, passionate, physical, irrational, uncanny, mysterious. So white Americans tend to see people of color, so gentiles tend to see Jews, so the rich tend to see the poor, so men tend to see women. Relations with the opposite sex are perhaps the most common and certainly the most intimate example of this encounter with the “other,” of the difficulties in achieving mutuality within differences (see Beauvoir 1961: esp. 57, 129; see also Mason 1962). The difficulty exists for both sexes, but, on the whole, men are in the role of the dominant and privileged group here. Women tend to signify infantile relationships for us all, because the care of children is assigned mainly to women in our culture. But it is only for men that the infantile comes to be associated with “the opposite sex,” that group and those individuals encountered as fundamentally different. In Dorothy Dinnerstein’s terms, insofar as a boy’s infantile relationship with his mother remains unresolved and unworked through, he is likely to project it onto his perceptions of all—or all significant, or all motherly, or all authoritative—women; and that relationship is more difficult for a boy to work

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through than for a girl precisely because he is socially constrained to keep mother at arm’s length as “other,” as fundamentally different from the self (Dinnerstein 1976: 107). To the extent that our infantile experience remains unmodified, Dinnerstein says, we all perceive “the threat to autonomy which can come from a woman . . . as more primitively dangerous, than any such threat from a man”; thus we may even welcome male domination as “a reasonable refuge” from the female. “We come eventually, of course, to resent male authority, too,” but not wholeheartedly (Dinnerstein 1976: 112, 175; see also 161). Thus Dinnerstein says that when we abandon the risks of free self-government for the security of some “male tyranny, the big, immediate thing we are feeling the need to escape is not freedom,” but our recollections and fantasies of that “earlier, and more total tyranny” of the mother’s power, as experienced by the infant (Dinnerstein 1976: 187). Consequently, men’s definition of the female as radically “other” both stimulates and undermines their struggle for freedom. Even in the efforts [misogynist] man makes to overthrow male tyranny—male tyranny over males, that is—he rests on the vassalage of woman. Reassured that he has the original despot under control, he can play with the notion of emerging from under the wing of the new one (Dinnerstein 1976: 196). But he can only play with that notion rather than effectively pursue the goal, because his feeling of strength is unstable. He is drawing strength from the subservience of woman for a struggle against the tyranny of man; but he can keep woman subservient only with the strength he draws from the sponsorship of the male tyrant . . . He is balancing terrors, dependencies, against each other; the balance keeps tipping and he keeps slipping back into the patriarchal trap (Dinnerstein 1976: 196–7). Accordingly, relations between the sexes can be taken as one measure of the capacity for mutuality, and thus for the type of citizenship Machiavelli envisages. That is, I think, what Marx meant in claiming that the “species being” of humanity is “sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact” in the relationship between the sexes. From this relationship, he thought, one can judge the “whole level of development” of a people, the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which . . . his human nature has come to be natur[al] to him. In this relationship is revealed, too, the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need—the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being. (Marx and Engels 1979: 83–4) The relationship between the sexes is suffused with natural animal drives and primitive psychic impulses; to the extent that it is nevertheless a civilized, moral relationship of mutuality—each recognizing and indeed needing the other as a person, an end rather than a mere means—our animality has been humanized. This humanizing transformation has occurred only to the extent that the civilized and moral type of

34 Action and membership

relating has become a fulfilling expression of physical and psychic impulse, rather than a duty reluctantly performed. Similarly, Hannah Arendt has suggested a correlation between the attitude men take toward women and their understanding of human action and politics. She sees that correlation exemplified in Christian thought by the choice between the two biblical versions of the creation story. Thus she says that Paul, for whom “faith was primarily related to salvation . . . insists that woman was created ‘of the man’ and hence ‘for the man’” (1 Cor. 11: 8–12), while Jesus, “for whom faith was closely related to action,” cites Genesis 1: 27: “he which made them at the beginning made them male and female” (Matt. 19: 4) (Arendt 1974: 8 n.). Arendt does not elaborate, but the point is clearly related to her observation that action, the human capacity to create relationships and make history, always presupposes a context of plurality, “because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.” This plurality within likeness “is specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life” (Arendt 1974: 8, 7). Certainly in Machiavelli’s texts, misogyny works to undermine the vision of political liberty. Yet if one seeks to generalize about actual politics, no simple equation between free politics and mutuality between the sexes will do. Given the frequency with which actual participatory, republics in history—examples of what Machiavelli would have called the vivere civile, from ancient Athens to modern Switzerland—have excluded or even severely oppressed women, one can hardly argue that democracy presupposes sexual equality, let alone that mutuality between the sexes would promptly produce a just and democratic polity. Even in the psychological and sociological theories examined in this book, the relevant variable is not actual relations between men and women, but how the citizen-men and the child-rearing women feel about those relations. In the second place, a free and participatory political life depends on a lot more than the psychic state of the citizens; that can surely be at most one factor among many economic, social, and cultural considerations. And, in the third place, as Machiavelli’s writings indicate, the appeal to machismo really can move men toward intense bonds with their fellow males, and toward energetic, heroic action. However, the action so motivated is not likely to be coordinated with any public good, and the bonds so motivated are likely to require a rigid, authoritarian discipline. Misogyny, overtly directed only against women, is also and necessarily directed against parts of the male self, since virtually every man was once mothered by a woman and began the formation of his self in relation to her. Needing therefore to expunge or deny those parts of the self they experience as feminine or childish, men who are anxious about their masculinity will be severely limited in their capacity for genuine mutuality—for the combination of trust with conflict—even in relation to other men. Unable to trust beyond their immediate circle of family and .friends, unwilling to acknowledge their interdependencies, they would likely lead privatized lives— not, of course, confined to the household like their women, but concerned with business, for instance, or family status.

Action and membership 35

If such men do move into public life, they do so in order to escape and deny their private selves, the vulnerabilities of the body and their troubling relations with women and children in the household. Fleeing their bodily and domestic selves, they march out to ravage “the sheepfolds of others.” To the extent that they feel threatened by “inner” conflict, psychic or political, they will lack that capacity for limited struggle among peers that differentiates citizenship from civil war, political dispute from the factional disintegration of a community. And so their community is likely to be an army, women safely excluded, the apple tree dutifully left untouched, and their mortality and private particularity left behind as they turn their rage outward against a (psychically) safely external “other.” Theirs, in short, will be a zero-sum world in which the only possible conception of public life is of domination; they will be either fragmented and thus vulnerable to the domination of others or unified and dominated by a single commander for the purpose of dominating others. Machiavelli’s writings never transcended the conventional misogyny of his time. Like the other men of Renaissance Florence, he had virtually no experience of women as citizens or peers, though he had at least some significant experience of the exceptional woman virago, notably in his disastrous early diplomatic encounter with Caterina Sforza. This book has tried to show that his failure to deal with the “otherness” of women as a worldly, realistic difference rather than an uncanny and threatening mystery is not merely unfortunate for women—whose cause he might otherwise have given some early, though doubtless futile, assistance—but also has profound consequences for his teachings about men, about humanness, politics, and autonomy. Because he could not think (or at any rate, did not write) about women as fellow citizens but instead rested even his republican politics on a misogynist ideal of manliness, his own metaphors and images constantly cast doubt on what he most wants to teach. Two great failures of mutuality, one might say, flaw his best vision of political relationship, the one a sin of omission and the other of commission. The one is his exploitation of—his failure to challenge—the misogyny of his time; the other is his militarist imperialism, his failure to extend into international relations the vision he fashioned of political life within a community. This book has argued that the two are intimately interrelated. As with the problem of action, so with that of membership, Machiavelli’s sexual and familial imagery, meant to challenge men out of their concern with private, household matters of wealth and family into the more “manly” realm of political life, also has the opposite effect, arousing images of domination and submission and undermining that capacity for mutuality which citizenship requires. There is, moreover, this difference between the two cases: while Machiavelli’s best understanding of action does represent adulthood, an overcoming of childishness and an acceptance of mature powers and responsibilities, the same cannot be said of his association of political membership with masculinity. Adults are more fit for citizenship than children. Men are not inherently more fit for citizenship than women and will appear so only in a society where women are confined to household and private affairs and denied access to public life. Thus while the equation of humanness with adulthood can lead to distortion if interpreted in terms of an

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anxious and defensive understanding of adulthood, the equation of humanness with masculinity is distorting not just in terms of an anxious and defensive understanding of masculinity, but in terms of any understanding of masculinity at all. Men who deny the humanity of women are bound to misunderstand their own.

Note 1 I do not mean to suggest that Machiavelli’s and Aristotle’s political thought run parallel in all important respects; obviously they do not.

References Arendt, H. 1974. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beauvoir, S. de. 1961. The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: A.A. Knopf. Dinnerstein, D. 1976. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: sexual arrangements and human malaise. New York: Harper & Row. Hegel, G.W.F. 1969 [1812–1816]. Wissenschaft der Logik, 2 vols. Nürnberg: J.L. Schrag; reprint, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hobbes, T. 1962 [1651]. Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott. New York: Collier Books. Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1965. The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert, 3 vols. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mason, P. 1962. Prospero’s Magic: some thoughts on class and race. London: Oxford University Press. Piaget, J. 1962. The Moral Judgment of the Child, trans. M. Gabain. New York: Collier Books. Pitkin, H.F. 1999 [1984]. Fortune is a Woman: gender and politics in the thought of Niccolò Machiavelli. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tucker, R.C. Ed. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn. New York: W.W. Norton.

2 FOOD AND FREEDOM IN THE FLOUNDER (1984)

As we watch in terrified fascination the coming of the third and last world war, in our age of universal television that brings starving children and dying soldiers nightly into each living room, we know less than ever how to think about responsibility. Whose fault is it that the world is as it is? Whose fault is it that I am as I am? Whose job is it to change the world? To change me? For those of us committed to the radical or the liberal left, to human liberation, these questions pose a special dilemma. If we blame oppression on the powerful and privileged who benefit from it, then their victims and we ourselves are likely to seem like helpless objects. Look what they are doing to us! And thereby the possibility of freedom is mystified: how can objects ever become free actors? It may then seem that a magic legislator is required to make the transformation—to import or even impose freedom. In order to realize my powers, don’t I have to recognize my complicity in my own victimization? Yet, if to escape this horn of the dilemma, we stress the victims’ complicity, insisting that freedom cannot be given but must be taken and that it is a constant potential in us all, even the most oppressed, then we are gored by the other horn. For then we seem to be “blaming the victim” and denying the legitimate anger of the oppressed. Recognizing that normally suppressed anger and its legitimacy also seems essential to liberation. The political theorists do not seem able to help us here, for these very issues trouble the interpretation of thinkers like Marx and Freud, Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt. What is the right way to understand the relationship between politics and economics, between choice and necessity in history, between ideals and bodily needs and drives, between public and private, or—in the words of Richard Flacks—between “making history” and “making life” (Flacks 1976: 263–80)? Günter Grass’s (1979 [1977]) epic novel, The Flounder, illuminates this troubling terrain more brilliantly than any didactic work of theory.1 It also ties these questions further to relationships between men and women, to ecology and technology, to

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localism and imperialism, and to the future of the earth. Of course the novel does not “solve” these problems, but it leaves our thinking about them transformed, enriched, and renewed. This chapter is intended only to whet the reader’s appetite for The Flounder and suggest some of the book’s potential significance. Even that much is not easy, for the novel’s structure is almost as complex as life itself. Begin with the author and the context: Günter Grass writes in German and now lives in West Germany, but he hails originally from Danzig or Gdansk, a city that is now part of Poland and known to us as the birthplace of Solidarity, the recent rebellious grass-roots movement of Polish workers and intellectuals.2 The Flounder is, first of all, a patriotic history of Grass’s native city, an act of homage to his people from exile. By “patriotic” here I mean that it is a very loving history, appreciative of what is unique about the region—Pomerania—and its inhabitants— the Pomorshians or Kashubians. I emphatically do not mean imperialistic, warlike, or hero-worshipping (cf. Schaar 1981). From early on, Grass contrasts the Kashubians to both the Germans and the Poles, presenting them as one of those small peoples who mostly suffer history rather than imposing it on others.3 The book’s protagonist is also that sort of man—diffident, ironic, artistic, definitely not macho. Early in the book, in the period of the great Gothic migrations, he does set out rather tentatively into the world to seek adventure, only to be painfully buggered by a Goth behind a gorse bush. Limping home, he foreswears all further attempts at making history.4 But I am getting ahead of myself already. The book is also, more specifically, a gastronomic history of the Gdansk region—a history of food, cooking, eating, and hunger. So it is kin to, and may well be partly inspired by, the “new history”—the work of recent, mostly radical historians who write history either in terms of its physical and economic base (food supplies, sanitation, epidemics, technology) or “from below,” in terms of the lives of the ordinary, forgotten “little” people.5 Like Bertold Brecht’s “worker who reads history,” Grass wants to ask: Young Alexander conquered India. He alone? Philip of Spain wept as his fleet Was sunk and destroyed. Did no one else weep? Caesar beat the Gauls, Was there not even a cook in his army?6 The Flounder is about the “cooks” in the armies of history—meaning both the unsung, anonymous many, and specifically the providers of food. It concerns the relationship between food and political history, food and being human, food and “higher ideals,” and food and freedom. Here, too, one might quote Brecht: First comes food; then comes the moral. You gentlemen who think you have a mission To purge us of the seven deadly sins

Food and freedom in The Flounder 39

Should first think out the basic food position Then start your preaching: that’s where it begins.7 So the novel treats such themes as the invention of cheese and the introduction of the potato and of pepper into Europe, and it is full of recipes. But it does much more than that. Near the outset the author, or rather, the protagonist of the novel, who is the persona of the author (one cannot rightly call him a “hero”), announces that he has all of these cooks inside him, who want to get out or whom he needs to let out. They turn out to be a series of nine (or maybe eleven, depending on how you count) women in Gdansk in different historical periods, who cook. And the protagonist is always, in one or another sense, consort to these cooks: husband, lover, kitchen-boy. In his contemporary incarnation he himself cooks, too, as does his wife, Ilsebill. The series begins in the stone age. Grass says, obviously inspired by archeological finds of certain neolithic sculptures in the region, that in the stone age women had three breasts and nursed the men all their lives long, so that the men were content and there was no history (Grass 1979 [1977]: 14; cf. 20, 260, 262). The women were all called Awa, the men Edek. There was no individuation, no cumulative culture, no cooking, and no awareness of the male role in procreation. The serpent in this neolithic Eden is not a serpent but a fish—the flounder of the novel’s title—who insinuates himself into the men’s eel trap and lets himself be caught, so that he can begin agitating for rebellion. “Listen,” he says to the men, “You don’t want to be babies forever. Down on Crete, at Knossos, really important things are being done – palaces, money, weapons.” And he summons the men to what? Liberation? Patriarchy? At any rate, to making history. He becomes their advisor throughout history, up until the Napoleonic Era, at which point he is so appalled by what they are doing that he withdraws. Grass says that the fish “takes refuge in a low German fairytale,” a tale that is later collected and preserved by the brothers Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm (Grass 1979 [1977]: 42).8 We all know that fairytale, versions of which are found in many parts of the world. It is called “The Fisherman and his Wife,” and it is about a very poor fisherman who catches a magic talking fish, which says to him, “Spare me and I’ll grant you three wishes.” The fisherman is so impressed that he lets the fish go without wishing for anything, but when he goes home, his wife—called Ilsebill— sends him back to wish for a beautiful house. The fisherman goes, though reluctantly and apologetically. To the fish he says, “My wife – her name is Ilsebill – she has a will that’s not my will.” The fish grants them a new house. But the wife immediately has another, more extravagant wish, and then another, and another. She sends the fisherman back again and again, until the fish finally becomes outraged and puts them back in their original hovel, as poor as when they began. It is a classic misogynist story about the insatiable shrew and her poor, henpecked husband. But Grass says there were originally two versions of the story, and the other version got suppressed. The other version is, of course, about a man with insatiable wishes:

40 Food and freedom in The Flounder

He wants to be unconquerable in war. He wants to build, traverse, inhabit bridges across the widest river, houses and towers reaching to the clouds, fast carriages drawn neither by oxen nor horses, ships that swim under water. He wants to attain goals, to rule the world, to subjugate nature, to rise above the earth. Although his wife, Ilsebill, “keeps advising him to be content,” he wants to fly up beyond the stars to heaven, and so, in the end: All the splendor, the towers, the bridges, the flying machines collapse, the dikes burst, drought parches, sandstorms devastate, the mountains spew fire, the old earth quakes, and in quaking shakes off the man’s rule. And cold blasts usher in the next all-covering ice age. (Grass 1979 [1977]: 347) So The Flounder is about our fall into history from the timeless Garden of Eden, about insatiable human wishes and their costs—the man shall labor and eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, the woman shall labor and bring forth children in sorrow. It is about the modern Faustian dream of controlling nature—our source of nourishment—and ending labor once and for all, and about how that dream has brought us now to the brink of total destruction. The novel is also, as the fairy tale suggests, about the relations between men and women throughout the ages—always changing and always the same, different in each age as culture develops, different with each pair of individuals, yet universal. Actually, in this book, the male protagonist is always the same, whereas each woman cook is a unique individual; yet we are also given to understand that all the women are Ilsebill, and all of them cooks from “inside” the protagonist. The book concerns the battle of the sexes and the “division of labor” between them. “We – two roles,” Grass writes in one of the many poems that pepper the novel: Sometime, long before Charlemagne, I became self-aware Whereas you have only perpetuated yourself. You keep peace in the house – I hurry forth. Division of labor. Come, hold the ladder while I climb. Men, in short, have made history, whereas the women stayed home and made life. But recently, through some kind of “inner recycling,” Grass says that Ilsebill is becoming “entirely different, differently strange and self-aware,” and he concludes in ambivalent awkwardness, “May I still give you a light?”9 But gender is just one aspect of the pleasures and difficulties human beings have in living together, the way we both need and hurt each other. The one I love, or need, or simply have to live with always seems to have “a will that’s not my will.”

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That’s why politics is necessary; that’s how marriages struggle along; that’s how babies are able to grow up. Hegel wrote about it in the section of the Phenomenology about lord and vassal.10 What we most want is that another person should acknowledge us as superior and privileged. So we are trapped in our own paradoxical desire. The acknowledgement will satisfy us only if it comes from a person—a being like ourselves; a worshipful cocker spaniel will not do. Yet we crave an acknowledgement of superiority, of unlikeness. So even if we succeed in extracting such an acknowledgement, we really know it must be false. We feel that what frustrates us is the other’s obstreperous will; yet only a creature with such a will could gratify our desire. We imagine that freedom might lie in dealing exclusively with machines, which have no will and can be technically controlled. But without recognition by peers as a person, there is no human life. Think what would become of an infant raised only by machine.11 The fantasy of freedom as mechanical control is a delusion. And the recognition of other people as human, like oneself, which Kant considered the essence of morality and which often feels like constraint to us, is in fact a prerequisite to freedom, both personal and political. But I digress again. In contemporary times, but near the outset of the novel, the flounder returns from the fairy tale in which he took refuge and lets himself be caught a second time, this time by a group of women. He offers to become their advisor, but they instead take him captive, form a women’s tribunal, and put him on trial as responsible for patriarchal, murderous history. The book is the story of his trial. And so this audacious novel is also a spoof of war-crimes trials, such as the trials of leading Nazis by the Allies after World War II, or the trials of lower-echelon offenders in the United States after My Lai.12 Who is responsible for history? The commander or the G.I.? Or the cook? In a sense, of course, the novel answers: the flounder. He is charged with being responsible for history, and the women find him guilty as charged. But is he guilty? And for all of history, or only up until the Napoleonic Era? And what of the future? Who or what is the flounder, anyway? He is after all a myth, his significance symbolic. Here is a fish—something that we ordinarily kill and eat, that is ordinarily incapable of making a sound—and it begins to talk to people, even to teach and advise them. What are we to make of that? What is the relationship between eating and humanness? Dorothy Dinnerstein says that mythical creatures that are half-human and half-animal, like mermaids, centaurs, and this flounder, are symbols of liminality. Violating our conventional categories, they remind us of that conventionality and of our species’ “internally inconsistent” nature. They remind us “that our continuities with, and our differences from the earth’s other animals are mysterious and profound.”13 What we kill and eat is an object, to be used in accord with our purposes. What can talk—not just parrot sounds but really talk, as humans do—is a person, something that precisely may not be used as a mere means for our purposes; for instance, to eat. In Dinnerstein’s terms, growing up may be said to begin with the baby’s dawning awareness that its mother is not just an object—a breast—or a convenient source of food, but is also a person, with needs and a will of her own, a creature capable of recognizing and sponsoring the infant’s own dawning personhood.

42 Food and freedom in The Flounder

After the flounder has been judged guilty by the women’s tribunal, they decide that his punishment will be by public humiliation. They hold a formal banquet before his talk, featuring a main course of flounder (sautéed in tarragon butter with dill, capers, and white wine); and they fling the fish-bones down before him, saying “He was the source of evil. We are gathered here to punish him. Here, Flounder! Here! Look and see what’s left of you . . . You’re mortal! . . . The fact is, you’re dead!” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 520). The flounder is identified by many different speakers in the course of the novel in many different ways: as the Weltgeist, as the spirit of patriarchy embodying the “destructive, life-negating, murderous, male, warlike principle,” and as the serpent in Eden (Grass 1979 [1977]: 138, 152–53, 180, 403, 512).14 Toward the end of the trial, when it becomes evident that he will be found guilty, the flounder, who has grown glassy and transparent in his long captivity, makes a long speech inviting the women to “See through me. Let nothing remain hidden from you” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 510). He admits his guilt and throws himself on the court’s mercy. The protagonist is deeply distressed by this capitulation on the part of the flounder, whom he identifies as a father figure; but he also feels sure that “somewhere in the fishy depths of his existence” the flounder is as slippery as ever, not transparent at all, and is still “snickering” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 511; cf. 153). In his “transparent” peroration, the flounder asks rhetorically, “Who is responsible? Who drives people to destroy one another? . . . Can it still be Beelzebub? Or the so-called death wish? Or is it I, the Flounder out of the fairytale? The warlike and therefore masculine principle?” And despite his admission of guilt and plea for mercy, he then strongly suggests that he is not responsible, that history is made by human choices. The “alternation of war and peace, peace and war” that makes up human history only “presents itself as . . . inevitable,” as like a “law of nature” or a destiny “imposed” by some “supernatural force – take me as a captive example,” the flounder says. In reality history is not predetermined, and it could be other than it has been, if the vicious circle were broken by the intervention of “those who hitherto have made no history.” He means, the flounder explains, “women in their role as mothers.” Is that Grass’s thesis? Ah, but the flounder is such a slippery fish, and he speaks here with an ulterior motive: he is flattering the women because he wants to become their advisor. Accordingly, his speech closes with the words, “I am almost inclined to fear that womankind lacks counsel, sustained, reliable, or, to put it plainly, supernatural counsel” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 513–14).15 A corollary to the question of who is responsible for past history, then, is whether things would be any different if the women took over. Or rather, whether things will be any different when the women take over because Grass seems sure that something of the sort is happening already (“May I still give you a light?”) (for instance Grass 1979 [1977]: 17, 43, 153–54, 268, 384, 504). The flounder succeeds in getting taken on as advisor to the women, or at any rate to a woman, not one of the group who captured and tried him, but Maria, the protagonist’s cousin who still lives in Gdansk (“We Kashubians are all related”), the

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widow of a worker shot down in 1970 when government troops fired on the protesters (Grass 1979 [1977]: 495).16 In the last chapter, the widowed Maria uses the protagonist, her cousin, to get herself pregnant. They do it on the beach; afterwards she wades into the water, calls the flounder, and confers with him for a long time. Then she walks back up the beach toward, and past, the protagonist—and he is surprised that it is not Maria but his wife, Ilsebill. The book closes on the lines: “Ilsebill came. She overlooked me, overstepped me. Already she had passed me by. I ran after her” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 540). What, then, is Grass’s view of the future? The answer is a very tangled web, so I’ll begin by isolating those few strands in the weave that are relatively clear. First, Grass is very much afraid, given the way things are going, that as the women take over they will become killers just like the men. The penultimate chapter of the book is an account of a single afternoon in Berlin, the annual celebration of “Father’s Day,” when by convention the men, and only the men, go out to the park in honor of masculinity. The chapter concerns the group of women who captured the flounder. They are lesbians, but their group includes a bisexual woman who is the protagonist’s former lover and fiancée. She left him to join these lesbians, but she is having second thoughts. On this Father’s Day, these women go to the park and in various ways pretend to be men. For instance, they put on a plastic penis and pee through it. Before the day ends, the protagonist’s former fiancée is brutally raped, first by the lesbians, and then by a male motorcycle gang who eventually kill her. The chapter is a fierce, profoundly fearful attack on lesbianism or, at any rate, on lesbians who imitate men by becoming rapists and killers. But it is also an expression of the concern formulated repeatedly in the novel—that as women take power they will lose whatever in the past distinguished them from the history-makers, so that nothing will change and we shall all be destroyed. But is Grass’s alternative a takeover by the traditionally feminine, as the flounder said, “women in their role as mothers”? Or something else? He says his hopes lie with something called “the third alternative,” which seems to be related to yet another major theme of the novel; namely, birth and new beginnings. The whole book is the story of a pregnancy. It begins with the protagonist and Ilsebill begetting a child (well, no, strictly speaking it begins with a meal, lovingly described, but that is immediately followed by the begetting). The book is divided into nine chapters numbered as “months,” and in the last chapter the child is actually born, by caesarian (it’s a girl). A child in a monogamous society is born a “third” into the dyadic relationship between its mother and father, from which it was begotten. Often it grows up as a third member of that relationship.17 One member of the original dyad is male, the other female, but the child is conventionally supposed to be, at least initially, neuter or asexual. So “third” might mean an alternative to both male and female, or to the traditional masculine and feminine roles: neither the secluded private household nor the macho public arena. Birth is also a common symbol for new beginnings, from the Bible right to Hannah Arendt, who stresses “natality” as fundamental to the human capacity for

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action, and, thus, for politics.18 Grass, too, intends birth to symbolize the human capacity for starting afresh: that we are not fatally condemned by history, or technology, or some flounder to the catastrophe we seem so rapidly to be approaching. We have a choice—never unlimited choice, but always a choice—and the “third alternative” has to do with the recognition of options. The third alternative initially appears in the novel in connection with Awa’s third breast in the stone age, in which it is explicitly related to the human imagination (Grass 1979 [1977]: 14–16, 76). The question of whether the third breast depicted by neolithic sculptors was then “real” or “merely a figment of their imaginations” introduces a topic to which the novel repeatedly returns: the relative reality of imagination, myth, dreams, and art, on the one hand, versus that of so-called hard facts, science, and statistics, on the other (Grass says, “the soft facts and the dreams hewn in stone”) (Grass 1979 [1977]: 100, 172, 179, 290–92, 300). That topic is beyond this article; suffice it to say that imagination is what enables us to envision and then to pursue alternative options. Sometimes what we envision remains only hallucinatory, but at other times we enact it in reality. So the third breast symbolizes the envisioning of alternatives, widening the space for options in the future. It means rejecting the stark “either/or.” Three is the beginning of multiplicity, the series, the chain, and of myth . . . A pathetic lot we’d be without projections and utopias . . . Maybe we’ve simply forgotten that there’s still more. A third something. In other respects as well, politically for instance, as possibility. (Grass 1979 [1977]: 16; cf. “blowing feathers”: 439) That reminds us that the “third alternative” also carries familiar political connotations, suggesting the “third world,” meaning neither the United States nor the Soviet Union, neither corporate capitalism nor bureaucratic communism, but the small, poor, powerless nations, like the Kashubians (Grass 1979 [1977]: 447).19 And that brings us to still another relatively clear strand in Grass’s tangled web of thought about the future: his concern over imperialism, hunger, the population problem, and socialism. Although The Flounder is a patriotic local history and is devoted to the ordinary and the concrete, it still engages large-scale relationships and international concerns. A whole, long sequence takes place in India, in Calcutta, where the protagonist in his contemporary incarnation as a successful West German author has been invited to lecture. Grass—or his protagonist—admits explicitly that he had trouble tying the Calcutta sequence into the Gdansk narrative, yet aesthetically it is absolutely essential and contains some of the most powerful and moving writing in the book. The way Grass ties it in is by marrying off the daughter of one of his cooks to a Portuguese merchant who follows Vasco de Gama to India and sends back shipments of pepper to his mother-in-law, thereby enriching the Gdansk cuisine.20 The modern protagonist’s visit to Calcutta is presented as a recapitulation of Vasco de Gama’s journey.

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The topic of the Calcutta sequence, clearly, is starvation: hunger, malnutrition, the population problem, the relationship between rich and poor nations, imperialism, global responsibility (“I will write about us all at a table eaten bare”) (Grass 1979 [1977]: 19). Conditions in Calcutta, with its teeming masses, its juxtaposition of opulent, “high-tech” modernization with starvation in the bustees (“We prefer not to call them slums”) are horrible (Grass 1979 [1977]: 186). “Well fed,” the modern Vasco visiting Calcutta “suffers under the problem of world hunger” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 178). You can’t get your head around Calcutta; it is enough to drive a well-intentioned liberal visitor frantic. What can one do? Send a postcard with regards from Calcutta. See Calcutta and go on living. Meet your Damascus in Calcutta. As alive as Calcutta. Chop off your cock in Calcutta (in the temple of Kali, where young goats are sacrificed and a tree is hung with wishing stones that cry out for children, more and more children). In Calcutta, encoffined in mosquito netting, dream of Calcutta. Get lost in Calcutta. On an uninhabited island write a book about Calcutta. At a party call Calcutta an example (of something). Rethink the Frankfurt-Mannheim area as Calcutta . . . Recommend Calcutta to a young couple as a good place to visit on their honeymoon. Write a poem called “Calcutta” and stop taking planes to far-off places. Get a composer to set all the projects for cleaning up Calcutta to music and have the resulting oratorio (sung by a Bach society) open in Calcutta. Develop a new dialectic from Calcutta’s contradictions. Transfer the U.N. to Calcutta. (Grass 1979 [1977]: 190) Calcutta is a horror. And yet Calcutta is also beautiful beyond belief, full of color and warmth, and vitally alive, in a way that the Frankfurt-Mannheim area, for instance, is not. Why not a poem about a pile of shit that God dropped and named Calcutta. How it swarms, stinks, lives, and gets bigger and bigger. If God had shat a pile of concrete, the result would have been Frankfurt . . . Vasco writes: but compared to Frankfurt am Main, the people here are alive. Later on he wants to cross out this sentence . . . When Vasco de Gama, hardly able to remember his first landing, returned to Calcutta, he decided to level the city with ten thousand bulldozers and rebuild it by computer. Thereupon the computer vomited up three thousand sixteen-story bustees, another vast slum, only deep-frozen and much lonelier, beyond hope of disaster and totally isolated, since all noise had been absorbed. And Calcutta died . . . Very little was lacking, only the things that matter. (Grass 1979 [1977]: 188, 187, 191)21 Technology and modernization are not the solutions to the world food and population problems. But what is? Later the protagonist’s wife, in her sixth month

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of pregnancy and needing maternity clothes, takes him to one of those import-outlet boutiques as familiar in West Germany as in America, where you can buy cheap clothes made by sweated labor in Hong Kong or Brazil or—in this case—India. Ilsebill enjoys the excursion: “It’s not so bad here in the West. I mean rummaging, trying on, not wanting to buy, being free to pick and choose.” But then she adds, “Of course the things are so cheap there’s got to be exploitation . . . Can you tell me, for instance, what the fat bosses down there pay their seamstresses?” The protagonist thinks, “we owe it all to Vasco de Gama and his successors. He brought down the price of more things than pepper.” Nevertheless they buy a dress, but on the way out they drop their small change into a box labelled “Bread for the World” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 342–43). This, the “free enterprise” solution, is no help either. Another response to the problem of Calcutta that Grass clearly opposes is what he calls “the Chinese world food solution and the great leap forward.” And here we come explicitly to the topic of communism. In the novel, the “great leap forward” is a jump that pregnant Ilsebill makes across a wide drainage ditch. She is in her fifth month. The protagonist “has just come back from a congress at which the future of socialism was discussed,” they go for a walk, and suddenly, on impulse, Ilsebill runs forward and jumps, despite his shouts of “Don’t! Please, don’t!” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 328). She slips and falls, and they fear she may have damaged the embryo, though it turns out that she has not. Still, when the protagonist tries to get her to promise to make no more leaps, she refuses. Grass indicates that she made her leap for ideological reasons: “a concept had hurried on ahead and she leaped after it” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 329).22 Politically, of course, the phrase “great leap forward” originated in Mao Tse-Tung’s attempt in 1958 to revitalize the Chinese revolution by dispersing industry in rural communities. Though an effort at decentralization, the policy was imposed from above and on the basis of doctrine. Eventually it was officially pronounced a failure. Günter Grass’s own politics are no secret to be ferreted out between the lines of his novel. He has been politically active in Germany as a Social Democrat who supported Willy Brandt’s mildly leftish orientation in that party. In the title of another book, Grass characterizes himself politically as a “snail,” a gradualist.23 And in The Flounder, Ilsebill complains that the protagonist “actually provoked her leap” through his “obsessive insistence on slow, gradual, deliberately procrastinating change.” She says: “You with your snail philosophy! How’s there going to be any progress if we have to crawl all the time. Look at Mao and China. They weren’t afraid to take a Great Leap Forward” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 328).24 The issue, then, is one of what Lawrence Goodwyn has called “democratic patience” about relations between leaders and masses in efforts at liberation and social reform.25 It also concerns what Marxists call “false consciousness”: how shall we regard those whose true interests we think we know and share, but who stubbornly refuse to see their interests as we see them—workers who believe in “free enterprise,” women who cherish domesticity, blacks who regard pale skin as “better,” colonized peoples who do not want national independence? Radical

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movements tend to get caught on the horns of this dilemma. Moving too fast means either that you fail for lack of support, or that the harsh methods you must employ to succeed defeat your liberating intent. Moving too slowly means missing the opportunity for action, or selling out your cause through endless compromises and postponements (“The time is never ripe,” as the woman prosecutor says at the flounder’s trial) (Grass 1979 [1977]: 149). What is a contemporary socialist or radical or would-be liberator to do? Grass’s novel concerns Gdansk, and though it was published in 1977 and thus precedes the birth of Solidarity, it does deal explicitly and centrally with the workers’ uprising of December 1970 that was a sort of proto-Solidarity. Grass links and compares it with the medieval uprising of artisans in Gdansk in 1378. Both were precipitated by economic issues (in 1970 the Polish government had attempted to raise consumer prices substantially) (Grass 1979 [1977]: 125, 149). But both medieval and modern uprisings also formulated claims to a share in power, to self-government. And both took place within an established ideological system, not against it. The rebels challenged the power-holders to live by the ideals they professed. In 1970 the workers marched to the Communist Party headquarters and sang the Internationale; it was there that the troops fired on them. In the novel, the protagonist’s friend, the husband of his cousin Maria in Gdansk, is shot down while quoting the Communist Manifesto to the crowd through a megaphone. Both the medieval and the modern uprising were crushed by violent repression, their economic demands granted in order to restore calm, but their political and ideological goals defeated (Grass 1979 [1977]: 116, 120–21, 501). Clearly Grass thinks that the governments of Eastern Europe bear no resemblance to socialist ideals. What is less clear is whether he thinks that’s the fault of those particular ideals, or of ideals in general, or of the way in which those ideals were and are pursued in those countries. He says that the workers of Gdansk struck in 1970 not merely for “rescinding of the price increases but also [for] worker management of the factories – the old, deep-rooted, foolish, beautiful, indestructible dream of self-determination” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 499). He calls the dream foolish; is that his final judgment? The few clear strands in the weave of Grass’s thought leave many important questions unanswered. Connected to those just posed about socialism, there is the broader question of how food is related to ideals and meaning in human life. Grass obviously values the world of the kitchen—its necessities and its pleasures—and opposes hypocritical and empty ideals that neglect that world. But is he flatly for food and against symbolic meaning, or is there another alternative? Second, what would he say of Hannah Arendt’s dispute with Marxist ideas? Like Arendt, he opposes totalitarianism and ideological murder justified on Marxist or any other grounds. But unlike her, he cherishes the household, the traditionally feminine concerns. Is he simply for the household and against the public realm, for oikos economics and against politics, for making life and against making history (but Arendt herself is against the making of history, the idea that history can be made like an artifact)? Or is there another alternative?

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Third, in regard to men and women: does Grass think “women in their role as mothers” should take over the making of history, as the flounder suggests? Or that everyone should retire to the kitchen and stop making history altogether? Or is there another alternative? Fourth, regarding the concrete and particular versus the abstract and general, Grass is clearly a localist, a Gdansk patriot, on the side of the common people and the concrete achievements of the kitchen. Yet there are kitchens in Calcutta, too, and they affect and are affected by those in Gdansk, just as the present is the direct product of a seemingly distant and abstract past. So Grass can’t be simply for the local and against the distant, for the concrete and against abstraction. In short, what is his “third alternative”? Often he seems simply to be saying that past history has been murderous because it is patriarchal—made by men on the advice of the flounder—and that it will destroy us all (in “the next, all-covering ice age”). Men are ruthlessly ambitious and abstractly idealistic. Unable to bear children, they seek immortality instead in life-destroying ways (Grass 1979 [1977]: 392–93). Ideals like freedom, justice, and selfdetermination are beautiful but foolish dreams the men concoct to mask the murderous reality of history. What actually sustains life is the concrete, physical, ahistorical—pregnancy and nurturance—women’s work. Now that the women are taking over history, our hope must be that they will do so in the spirit of ever-loving care of the three-breasted Awa. That may be the right reading of Grass’s intent, as I’ll say again in the conclusion; but it is not the only possible reading, nor my favorite. It is not what I want Grass to be saying. Basically I suppose that I don’t like it because I don’t want to have three breasts and nurture men all their lives. Nurturing babies is wonderful, but men are for fellowship, collaboration, love, and struggle in a mutuality that combines difference with respect. Accordingly, I am suspicious of Grass’s vision of eternal motherly care; I want to ask, “what’s in it for Awa?”26 I do not believe in the ever-loving selflessness of Big Mama; she’s bound to become resentful after a while. And even the most loving mother must sometimes come into conflict with her child, if it is ever to grow up. To become a person, it must develop “a will that’s not her will.” Under Awa’s stone-age care there was no individuation and no history. So I prefer to read Grass as advocating not a return to Awa, nor, of course, a take over by that ridiculous caricature of lesbianism, but something else that is my own interpretation of the “third alternative.” Some might call it androgyny, but that can easily be misleading, for I do not mean an asexual uniformity in which all are equally male and female, all alike and doing the same things. I mean social arrangements in which each is free to be and to become what is natural and right for that individual, a particular personal combination of features we now define as masculine or feminine.27 I mean not a new “third” sex, but a new way of treating gender. Women should be as free as men to act publicly; men should be as free as women to nurture. Our talents are so diverse, our inclinations so varied, that only a fool would define a single pattern of “the good life” for all. But a life confined entirely to personal and household concerns seems to me stunted and impoverished,

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and so does a life so public or abstracted that it has lost all touch with the practical, everyday activities that sustain it. The real point that Grass illuminates for us is that people should grow up, become responsible for themselves, and become capable of mutuality with others both personal and political. Growing up is hampered, among other things, by the rigid and fearful definition of gender roles, whether traditionally dichotomous or revisionistically androgynous. Attempting to conform ourselves to what is demanded, we vainly try to prove that we are not what we really are. Unable to accept forbidden aspects of ourselves, we project them outward onto “the Other,” and then hate those others for what we have ascribed to them. So men, trapped in conventional machismo, struggle endlessly to prove a manliness they themselves anxiously doubt. In the process they get manliness all wrong, thinking that it is about domination, control, and killing, rather than about mutuality, creativity, and responsibility.28 But women, too, can compete in the machismo sweepstakes. And we women have our more traditional forms of destructiveness as well, more indirect and insidious methods of domination, as we vainly and resentfully try to fit ourselves into the straightjacket of what is conventionally supposed to be “feminine.” One way of interpreting Grass’s “letting the cooks out” from inside himself is bringing to full awareness his fantasies and stereotypes of femininity, so that afterwards he may be free to see the real women he encounters as they are, rather than by projection and fantasy. It is a frightening process because he feels as if by letting them out he will lose them—lose his exclusive access to and control over the nourishment they represent (Grass 1979 [1977]: 366, 387).29 What he will gain is greater freedom and a new capacity for intimacy in his relationships. The flounder says, “the only worthwhile action is one that emancipates” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 222). But he is a slippery fish, and everything depends on how that is meant. Read one way, the claim is pompous and silly: as if all the small, useful, enjoyable, ordinary things we do, from folding diapers to watching the sunset, were not worthwhile. But read another way, the claim is not that only extraordinary, heroic deeds are worthwhile, but that even our most ordinary actions should be meaningful, suffused with self and with value. Both personally and politically this reading of Grass suggests that freedom and mutuality go together. Making peace with the forbidden parts of the self, one no longer projects them onto stereotyped “others.” This does not mean an end to conflict, a magic unanimity of wills. But it does help facilitate healthy ways of resolving conflict. It promotes a kind of individual autonomy that is not isolation from others, a kind of power that is not domination. On this reading, the “third alternative” is a kind of power that is neither the blatant, violent domination of warrior males and the traditional patriarchal state, nor the indirect, manipulative domination of resentful mothers who will not (or are not permitted to) let their children grow up and of the modern, bureaucratic, allsmothering state, symbolically matriarchal even though in fact run by men. As to the relationship between food and ideals, the simplistic readings that one might bring to Grass from the categories of Hannah Arendt, or from a vulgar

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Marxism, will not do. It is not that women and food fuse together in the household, making life, whereas men pursue ideals in the public realm, making history. For Grass’s male protagonist emphatically resigns from history, whereas many of his cooks are explicitly political. An eighteenth-century cook promotes soup kitchens for the poor; another is an enthusiast for the French Revolution, ready to kill for its ideals; and the nineteenth-century cook is a socialist, author of a “proletarian cookbook,” who complains to her male comrades, “all you men do is talk. But there’s got to be action, too” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 419). Indeed, it seems that Grass’s women get increasingly political as modernity advances. To be sure, whenever in history the men make their idealistic political speeches, the women “smile” in that age-old, characteristically indulgent way, head slightly tilted to one side, “just a bit frightened, but at the same time amused at so much talk and virile enthusiasm.” And it is true that when Awa smiled that way it was because of her confidence that there would always be hunger, and therefore she would always be needed (and would always have power) (Grass 1979 [1977]: 55). Still, I do not think that the women’s “smile” indicates their opposition to ideals and political action as such. In modern times, at least, it is the women in Gdansk who take professed ideals seriously and “steam up their men” for action. Maria says, Maybe you have to expect such things under capitalism, but they shouldn’t happen in a Communist state. Why, we learned that in school. And if the union doesn’t do anything, we’ll take action without the union. And if the men have no spunk, the women will just have to wake them up. And so they do, telling the men, “don’t show your face in my kitchen until the prices are back down again!” Evidently for these modern women, the point is not a choice between food and ideals, but their obvious interconnection: here food prices are an issue of justice. Grass also develops a wonderful fantasy of the nineteenth-century socialist cook showing up at a recent meeting of the union of food and hostlery workers in West Germany and upbraiding the men for their lack of “historical awareness”: You refuse to recognize that for centuries the male cook was a product of the monasteries and the courts, in other words of the ruling class. We female cooks, on the other hand, have always served the people . . . We had not time to work up fancy sauces. In our ranks there are no Prince Pucklers, no BrillatSavarins, no famous chefs. In times of famine we stretched flour with acorns. It was up to us to find ways of varying oatmeal porridge. The professional cooks in her audience are impatient; they want to get on with discussing their “next round of wage negotiations” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 431).30 What, here, constitutes “mere material concerns” and what ideals?

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The flounder, symbol of patriarchal history-making that he may be, seems to oppose revolutionary ideals and to prefer food. The French Revolution would never have happened, he says, if the beggars and paupers of France had been provided, like those of Bavaria, “with well-heated workhouses and ample community kitchens, if they had been guaranteed full soup kettles with smiling eyes of fat floating on top” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 318). And that, he thinks, would have been a good thing. Similarly, in a poem, Grass imagines himself, in the crapper with my own specific ass. God state society family party . . . Out, the whole lot of you. What smells is me! This certainly sounds like a rejection of the ideals and the claims of the public good in favor of the body and the particular self. Yet the next (and last) line of the poem adds “if only I could weep.” And the title is “Empty and Alone” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 241). Grass does think that empty ideals—ideals not tied to tangible benefits for real people—are evil. When the protagonist’s friend, husband of Maria, is shot down in Gdansk in 1970 while addressing the crowd about ideals and history, “he was hit in the belly, which was full of boiled pork and cabbage, and not, as he had wished in poems (after Maiakovsky), in the forehead.” But Grass adds that when he died, “with his halted blood, his words, too, ceased to flow.”31 Only with their living bodies pumping blood and digesting food can people speak, write poems, formulate ideals, and make history. Intellectuals and ideologues tend to forget that. But that doesn’t mean that ideals are pointless, or that only digestion matters. People need meaning in their lives as much as they need food. They need the connection between meaning and food—among ideals, need, and activity. Infants need both nurturance and human, personal response, and both together; and so do adults. Grass himself does not agree with the flounder about revolution. When he speaks in his own, authorial voice he says that the “lower orders” rebel again and again not merely for food or beer or lower prices, but simultaneously “against . . . authoritarianism and . . . for a little more civil rights” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 204).32 So I want to read Grass in support of something like “synthesis”: an abstraction embodied; a unity that retains instead of replacing particularity and conflict, which is continually recreated out of particularity by conflict. Grass is as much against empty, merely abstract ideals as he is against a life submerged in concrete particulars without larger significance. Dignity is just as practical and tangible as food; injustice hurts as much as torture. Or rather, the deprivation of food is one form of indignity; part of what hurts about torture is the injustice. In this reading, then, what women and workers and other exploited groups hitherto excluded from the making of history have to offer as a “third alternative” is not their immunity to ideals or their unwillingness to kill, but their capacity to synthesize food and meaning. Then their

52 Food and freedom in The Flounder

struggle is simultaneously about both the price of consumer goods and the “old, deeprooted, foolish, beautiful, indestructible dream of self-determination.”33 And that struggle is not really foolish, but only endless, because the individual’s task of growing up and the collective human tasks of justice and dignity and freedom are never completed. It is not that “I” and “you” can never become “we,” but only that “we” must be constantly nurtured and renewed by both care and conflict. Technology can provide no solution to this fundamental human problem, for the solution lies in relations of mutuality, cooperation, and struggle between persons, whether in intimate or public matters (Grass 1979 [1977]: 134–35, 145).34 In this reading, finally, Grass teaches synthesis also with respect to the question of local versus universal, particular versus general. He seeks to combine the perspective of the particular, sentient individual with a God’s-eye overview of the whole. He wants to give the reader a sense of our connectedness, our membership in the great stream of human history. All these past cooks are inside us, not just genetically (because “we Kashubians are all related”), but also culturally: humankind is the species that makes itself through history. Grass wants us to feel how we have developed out of the medieval and the neolithic, how Gdansk is bound to Calcutta, and how we are members of a single species. But he wants to do this without letting the concrete individual get lost in abstractions, statistics, or hypostasized “forces.” He wants to keep vivid the reality of individual suffering so that no one is brutally sacrificed in the name of abstractions. He wants to keep vivid the reality of our distinct, obstreperous wills so that human problems are dealt with rather than glossed over. He wants to keep vivid the reality of the individual capacity for action, for creativity, and for autonomous judgment. Even as we experience ourselves as products of the stream of history and as strands in a network binding Gdansk to Calcutta, he also wants us to understand that history is not a stream—a natural, causal process—but is a record of the actions and choices of people like ourselves. At each moment there were alternative options, choices often fought out politically, in which some were winners and others losers. Only then will we recognize our own options and capacities, and avert the disaster that otherwise seems inevitable. In combining the particular with the universal perspective, Grass wants to preserve the beautiful, rich plurality of the world so that no detail, no individual is lost, even while we become aware of how that detail fits into the larger whole and gains deeper meaning. As an old woman tells the Grimm brothers about the two versions of the fairy tale: “Each one was right. There was room enough for all their ideas. That’s the way nature was in its beautiful disorder: spacious” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 346).35 That is how I want to read The Flounder, and there is much textual support for such a reading. But in the end I must confess that Grass does not always sustain this vision. He is, as he himself acknowledges, too much tempted by Awa (“all that unvarying warmth and bedding down, all that moist, mossy bottom”) (Grass 1979 [1977]: 265). In this respect the women’s tribunal is right when it turns its attention briefly to the protagonist instead of the flounder and concludes that he remains childish:

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Just about everything in his character can be laid to his extreme mother-fixation. Just look at him. He’s getting wrinkles, but he’s still the same breast-fed baby. A common case of arrested development. He can’t bear to lose . . . anyone of [the cooks inside him] . . . he wants to keep them all . . . in short, he’s impossible, a typical male. (Grass 1979 [1977]: 386–87; cf. 15–16) But, I am arguing, he is not a typical male. He is not, for instance, macho. He is also not fully adult. Just as I do not want to have three breasts and nurse men I also do not find the protagonist of this novel attractive as a possible husband or partner, not because he is unheroic, but because he is incapable of mutuality. He has chosen to remain a child, like the protagonist of Grass’s first great novel, The Tin Drum, to which this book alludes more than once; his is “a common case of arrested development” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 386).36 Growing up, he thinks, means accepting complicity in Nazism and murder, and he will not do it. In a society in which that is what adulthood means, who could blame him? Yet Grass’s own novels show that it need not be so, and that it is up to us not merely to refuse but to change such a society. There is a “third alternative” here, a growing up that is neither merely about destroying life nor merely about nurturing life, but about living life in all of its complexity, with all of its pleasures, challenges, pains, and responsibilities. The protagonist of The Flounder never takes responsibility for himself and what he might become. He sees that a change is needed, but someone else will have to provide it: he himself goes limp. He hopes the women will save him, whether by restoring Awa or by taking “revenge” on men and taking their own turn at domination, reducing men to “sex objects” and using them as Maria uses her cousin, as instruments for producing the “sticky and new” man who might enact a different history (Grass 1979 [1977]: 17). The protagonist also has a fantasy in which the ecological threat to the earth posed by technology—or rather, by the technologists, “the stick men who have planned, developed, sanitized, welfared everything to death”—is overcome by a woman, specifically by the female body. He imagines a gigantic Ilsebill lying naked across a lilliputian landscape, her breast and hip blocking access to the site of the proposed nuclear power plant, thereby “obstructing all the plans” of the “men with brief cases full of experts’ reports” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 509).37 Woman’s body, as nature, must save us; there is no need for thought or action by anyone, least of all by the protagonist. As Grass says in a poem called “Man Oh Man,” near the end of the novel, No need to clean up, man; just leave it all be. By your own rules you’re washed up, dismissed from your own history. And only the baby boy in you has leave to play with building blocks for another short while. (Grass 1979 [1977]: 531) Politically, too, one might argue; although the novel eloquently portrays the horrors of Calcutta and the impotence of technological, administrative solutions, it

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presents no viable alternative. It has both the strengths and the weaknesses of Liberalism—or, in central European terms, of Social Democracy—and is sensitive to suffering and to the failures of those who try to alleviate the suffering, it refrains from action. Grass sees the ideologies of others and the terrible atrocities committed in their name, but he imagines himself to have no ideology and tends to equate inaction with innocence. Movingly though he writes about popular uprisings, both medieval and modern, he has no real vision of the positive power of participatory political action. The word “political” appears in the novel most characteristically in the phrase “political mushrooms,” meaning the poisonous toadstools used by a politically motivated woman cook to kill a tyrannical official.38 Political action ultimately means killing to Grass, and it is carried out in secret and alone. Grass clings to the snail’s pace because he fears complicity in murder (even though in Calcutta he does find himself confessing: “In this country I’d be a radical myself”) (Grass 1979 [1977]: 188). He will leave the history-making to others, even if the consequences are another all-covering ice age. And yet, that is not fair to Grass, not merely because he himself has been highly active politically as a citizen, but also because the writing of this book constitutes a political act of the greatest value, and perhaps only his “childishness” makes possible his act. The Flounder lays before us the choices of our time and their implications, inviting us to think, to choose, and to act.39 Günter Grass has given us food for thought.

Notes 1 For help in understanding this work, I thank the students in the two classes I taught about it, as well as George Shulman and Anne Middleton. 2 For biographical information, see Michael Hollington, Günter Grass, The Writer in a Pluralist Society (London, Boston: Marion Boyars, 1980) and Irene Leonard, Günter Grass (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1974). On Solidarity, begin with Daniel Singer, The Road to Gdansk (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981) and Lawrence Wechsler, The Passion of Poland (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 3 Grass’s mother was Kashubian, his father German. 4 He might thus be said to have been turned into a woman and returned to the women’s domain. 5 In the former category, see, for instance, the work of Fernand Braudel. In the latter, Richard Cobb and Georges Lefebvre on France, Edward Palmer Thompson on England, or much of recent feminist historiography, for instance in Berenice Carroll’s collection, Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (University of Illinois Press, 1976), Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Mosher Stuard’s collection, ed., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), or Richard C. Vincent’s “Clio’s Consciousness Raised? Portrayal of Women in Rock Videos, Re-examined,” Journalism of Mass Communication Quarterly 66.1 (1989), p. 155. 6 Bertold Brecht, “Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters,” from “A Worker Reads History,” in Selected Poems, copyright 1947 by Bertold Brecht and H.R. Hays; renewed 1975 by Stefan S. Brecht and H.R. Hays. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. I have taken the liberty of transposing the order of lines so that this short quotation will make clearer sense out of context. On Grass’s quarrel with Brecht, see Leonard, Günter Grass, ch. 5.

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7 Bertold Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, scene 6, “Second Threepenny Finale: What Keeps a Man Alive?” I have altered the translation of the first line quoted from the version given in Ralph Manheim and John Willett, eds., Brecht, Collected Plays (New York: Random House, 1970–1972), Vol. II, p. 201; reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. There is no fully satisfactory English translation of “fressen,” the German word for the way animals eat. Grass says that “when in Warsaw Gomulka and Brandt affixed their names for Poland and Germany” to a treaty, they were “as people said, making history.” But when he himself asks “what is history?” he answers “undoubtedly the Ems Dispatch set a good deal in motion, but the sugar beet far more” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 498, 534). 8 The flounder’s agitation speech is my paraphrase. 9 Excerpts from “Division of Labor” in The Flounder by Günter Grass, pp. 42–43, copyright 1977 by Hermann Luchterhand Verlag; English translation copyright 1978 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 10 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, B. IV. A. 11 Experiments with monkeys along such lines produce severe disturbance; but some species of primates recover well if they are later put in the company of live members of their own kind. 12 Compare also Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking, 1965). 13 Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 2. 14 He is also equated with the sky-wolf from whom Awa—not Prometheus—stole fire for humankind (Grass 1979 [1977]: 293), beginning the separation of raw from cooked; compare Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1964). 15 Cf. p. 51, “maybe I didn’t make the headlines, but I was on trial along with the Flounder all the same,” and p. 97, “the action always revolved around me, . . . I and I alone am responsible.” See also Günter Grass, Der Bürger und seine Stimme (Darmstadt und Neuwied, 1974), p. 125. 16 Maria, although already a mother and again pregnant as the novel ends, “wasn’t cut out to be a cook” (p. 495). Since being widowed she has become “more real,” “getting harder,” “turned to stone,” and never laughs any more. But she laughs with the flounder (pp. 412, 496, 539). The only other woman who consulted the flounder, the medieval Dorothea, is an ominous precedent (see note 22). 17 Clearly this was one of the points of origin for Hegel of the idea of dialectic; see On Christianity: Early Theological Writings by Friedrich Hegel (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), pp. 307–8. 18 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 9, 178, 247. Arendt’s metaphor is paradoxical, since elsewhere she stresses the radical disjunction between natural processes and human action. 19 Compare Grass, Bürger, pp. 12–13, 138–39, 180. 20 “Portuguese merchantmen frequented the port of Danzig from the mid-sixteenth century on” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 219). He may also have brought back the plague (Grass 1979 [1977]: 183). 21 On Calcutta’s beauty also pp. 182–83. On technology, see note 34. 22 Such ideologically motivated action tends to be murderous and thus is said by the flounder to be more a characteristic of men than of women, especially in their role as mothers (pp. 392–93). But he is slippery. One would have to consider the medieval Dorothea who lets her own child boil to death while she herself is rapt in prayer (p. 130); she also kisses the flounder and spends a night with him (pp. 140, 142). 23 Günter Grass, From the Diary of a Snail (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). 24 Cf. Grass, Bürger, pp. 67, 113–14. 25 Lawrence Goodwyn, “Organizing Democracy: the Limits of Theory and Practice,” Democracy, I (January 1981): 50; cf. p. 49. Also, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin and Sara M. Shumer, “On Participation,” Democracy, 2 (Fall 1982), pp. 43–54.

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26 What’s in it for Awa, Grass says, is power. She smiles “in the certainty that there would never be enough, that hunger springs eternal and there would always be grounds for care” and need of her (Grass 1979 [1977]: 500). Female selflessness (“wishless Ilsebills”) is only the flounder’s rhetorical device for seducing the women with visions of power (p. 268). 27 I would say “somewhere along the male-female continuum,” but I doubt that such a unidimensional continuum exists at all. “Jo Freeman’s Rule” is relevant here. The phrase is from Gene Marine, A Male Guide to Women’s Liberation (New York: Avon, 1972), but the rule is from Jo Freeman, “Growing up Girlish,” Trans/action (November–December 1970). It states that the generalizations about “women” that result from comparative psychological testing usually apply only to about two-thirds of those tested. The remaining one third are “exceptions.” As Marine says, “one hell of a big minority” to be labelled “unfeminine” (Marine, Male Guide, pp. 54–55). 28 “But if Lena hadn’t mothered me so mercilessly, hadn’t maintained me so deliberately in infancy . . . I’d never have become a soldier and (out of sheer fear) a hero” (Grass 1979 [1977]: 401). But the speaker is a weak man and a wife-beater; pp. 404–5. Compare Philip E. Slater, The Glory of Hera (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), ch. I; and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 107, 176, 181–82, 185, 196. On conflict cf. Grass, Bürger, pp. 21–26. 29 Cf. p. 18, “Gluttony . . . is only a form of fear”—a line that should be read in the light of Dinnerstein’s work. 30 See also the wonderful dialogue among this cook, Robert Michels, and Rosa Luxemburg, pp. 436–37. 31 Excerpts from “Empty and Alone,” pp. 502–3, from The Flounder, copyright 1977 by Hermann Luchterhand Verlag; English translation copyright 1978 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 32 Cf. pp. 373, 432–33, and 535 as Grass’s response to the flounder’s views expressed on p. 318. 33 Compare Grass, Bürger, p. 181; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 239–46 on the sections of the Paris Commune; and also Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Private and Public,” Political Theory, 9 (August 1982), pp. 327–52. 34 On technology cf. also Grass 1979 [1977]: 18–19, 49, 143, 300. 35 This is a key to Grass’s style as well; the passage continues, “All these thoughts could be set before the reader in their wild luxuriance; little order was needed. The reader would know what to do with them.” Cf. also Grass, Bürger, p. 101. 36 Günter Grass, The Tin Drum, tr. Ralph Manheim (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1962). Cf. Leonard, Günter Grass, pp. 1, 3. 37 The flounder claims that “women . . . will always – even with the fanciest hairdos – be nature”; p. 393. 38 Excerpts from “Man Oh Man,” pp. 344, 364, and 369 from The Flounder, copyright 1977 by Hermann Luchterhand Verlag; English translation copyright 1978 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 39 “The reader would know what to do with them” (Grass 1979 [1977], p. 347); cf. Leonard, Günter Grass, pp. 55–56.

References Flacks, R. 1976. “Making History vs. Making Life.” Sociological Inquiry 46: 263–280. Grass, G. 1979 [1977]. The Flounder, trans. R. Manheim. New York: Fawcett Crest. Schaar, J.H. 1981. The Case for Patriotism. In Legitimacy in the Modern State. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 285–312.

3 SLIPPERY BENTHAM Some neglected cracks in the foundation of utilitarianism (1990)

Jeremy Bentham has not yet received the criticism he deserves.1 Not that he lacks great critics: If Machiavelli is the most maligned political theorist in popular terms, Bentham surely holds the record for being hated by the cognoscenti. Goethe called him “that frightfully radical ass.” John Maynard Keynes considered his ideas “the worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilization and is responsible for its present moral decay.” Emerson called them a “stinking philosophy”; Joseph Schumpeter judged them to be “the shallowest of all conceivable philosophies of life.” Marx called Bentham “the arch-philistine . . . the insipid, leather-tongued oracle of the commonplace bourgeois intelligence.” Nietzsche despised Bentham, and made up a little verse: Soul of wash rag; face of poker, Overwhelming mediocre, Sans genie et sans esprit. 2 Any thinker who evokes that caliber of enmity and that sort of attention, cannot be all bad: Whatever the flaws of his doctrine, it is emphatically not mediocre. Substituting invective for argument, these great minds easily make sport of the mad genius, yet utilitarianism survives unscathed. What is it about Bentham’s ideas that elicit such vehement rejection? What makes them nevertheless so tenacious? Mad genius Bentham was, working from six in the morning until ten at night with time out only to jog around his garden, writing 15 folio pages every day, yet virtually incapable of finishing anything; keeping a keyboard instrument in every room of his house; arranging that after his death his body should be preserved as an “auto-icon” to inspire his followers. Brilliantly inventive, he envisioned not only the notorious “panopticon”—model prison, school, poorhouse, or whatever, built like a spider-web with the “keeper” at its center—but also such devices as a primitive telephone, a system for multiple music printing, reforms for the London police, a

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central heating system, a law school run from his home; schemes for reducing the national debt, detecting forged bank notes, and securing low-interest loans for the poor; a national system of public education, a national health service, a national census; a “frigidarium” for storing food at low temperatures, and a canal to be dug through Central America to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In love with words, Bentham bequeathed us an astonishing array of neologisms, including “maximize” and “minimize,” “codify,” “international,” “rationale,” “eulogistic,” “demoralize,” “deontology,” and “false consciousness.” Bentham was aware of his own genius and fierce ambition, and was deeply ambivalent about both. Feeling unappreciated in his own land, he remarked that he would “like to live the remaining years of his life, a year at a time at the end of the next six or eight centuries, to see the effect which his writing would by that time have upon the world.”3 He also wrote of having “formed a plan of universal conquest,” by which he intended to govern all the nations in the habitable globe after my death. With what weapons? With rhetoric? With fine speeches? With prohibitive and irritant clauses? No: but with reasons, with a chain of . . . articulate and connected reasons all depending upon one principle. (unpublished manuscript quoted in Mack 1963: 273–274) Were Bentham to return today, he would surely be pleased at the extent of his triumph, the influence of his inventions, reforms, and vocabulary, the prestige of contemporary utilitarianism and its derivatives: public choice theory, rational choice theory, game theory, and cost-benefit analysis. More generally, too, he might find ours to be a Benthamic world: in its substituting of administration for politics, its oscillating between laissez-faire liberalism and the welfare state, its bureaucratization, the many large public and private organizations that manage, regulate, and channel our lives. Indeed, some of Bentham’s ideas have become our commonplace assumptions, to the point where one might say that Bentham has triumphed within each of us. This persistent, seemingly insidious power of his ideas is surely part of what so infuriates his famous critics, but their rage does not succeed in silencing the Bentham within. To be sure, not all of Bentham’s critics have dismissed him by invective or aphorism. Numerous more conventional scholars have tried to engage his theory on its merits; in one form or another they have repeated two objections: that Bentham’s account of motivation is simplistic and crass, and that he postulates measuring what cannot be measured and comparing the incomparable. Neither objection succeeds. What a trivialization of human intentionality, the critics say, to suppose that people are and should be attracted only by pleasure and repelled only by pain! What of the higher motives: friendship, patriotism, justice, and motherlove? What about athletes, saints and martyrs, and masochists? But no one who has seriously read Bentham can believe that he oversimplified human motivation. On the

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contrary, he asserts, presumes, pursues, and classifies its complexities through chapter after chapter, and category on category. He himself attacks the common law for reducing all our complex and variegated motives to a single one, as if there were, no such thing as the fear of God, no such thing as regard for reputation; no such thing as fear of legal punishment; no such thing as ambition; no such thing as filial, no such thing as parental affection; no such thing as party attachment; no such thing as party enmity; no such thing as public spirit, patriotism, or general benevolence; no such thing as compassion; no such thing as gratitude; no such thing as revenge.4 Bentham sees all of these motives and more, and classifies them along multiple dimensions by their intensity, duration, purity, fecundity, propinquity, and extent. He is not claiming that people seek pleasure or happiness rather than any of these other goals, but he interprets these and all other goals as forms of pleasure. Similarly, when critics object that such things cannot be measured or quantified, that we do not and cannot calculate before each action, that the “interpersonal comparison of utilities” is impossible, again they have not read Bentham well. He knows that one cannot expect the process of balancing pains and pleasures to “be strictly pursued previously to every moral judgment, or to every legislative or judicial operation.”5 Obviously, such things are not measured like distance or temperature, but we do in fact estimate consequences, and compare their impact on various affected people every time we deliberate. Not only can we do this, we cannot help but do it: “Men calculate, some with less exactness, indeed, some with more: but all men calculate.”6 Neither of these conventional criticisms comes to grips with Bentham’s doctrine. More recently, however, a few scholars have begun to attend to the feature of his thinking that confounds conventional criticism: its extraordinary slipperiness. John Plamenatz already noted in the early 1960s that there is a peculiar ambiguity in Bentham’s way with words (Plamenatz 1965: I, 1–8). Game theorists have pointed out that his “greatest happiness principle” is inherently infinitely ambiguous because it constitutes a “pseudo-maximum problem,” attempting to “maximiz[e] two (or more) functions at once. Such a principle, taken literally, is self-contradictory.”7 More generally, the charge of inconsistency is as old as Bentham criticism itself; yet no one seems yet to have seen the full extent of the damage. While Don Herzog has recently proposed boldly “that we write off utilitarianism as incomprehensible” because it is “radically incomplete,” when he explains this charge it shrinks to the narrower claim that “for all its vaunted precision,” utilitarianism “fails to set out a procedure for making choices,” and thus “cannot tell us what to do” (Herzog 1985: 158, 157, 23, 24). But no political theory in the canon sets out a procedure for making choices or tells us what to do in particular cases. The more specific arguments that Herzog musters against Bentham are merely the familiar, conventional, and

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refutable ones. No critic has yet shown the pervasiveness of ambiguity in Bentham’s thought, or analyzed its nature. This essay will argue that what most characterizes Bentham’s theorizing is a recurrent pattern of unacknowledged ambiguity that allows him to be on both sides of the fence at once—on both sides of every major intellectual fence he encounters—without even admitting that the fence is there. This may be a surprising claim. We are used to charges of ambiguity against allusive thinkers like Hegel or Heidegger—but Bentham? Bentham the rationalist, who insisted that any inconsistent proposition is absurd, who aspired to be the “Newton of the moral world,” whose biographer and interpreter, Mary Peter Mack, holds that despite the difficulties of his style, “after due patience and care, [his] meaning is never in doubt”?8 This essay undertakes to show just how wrong Mack is about that. One Benthamic ambiguity that has been systematically investigated concerns the meaning of his basic precept in its earliest and most familiar formulation: “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” As noted earlier, in the language of game theory, arguably one of utilitarianism’s modern heirs, this principle constitutes a “pseudo-maximum problem,” meaning that, for any given distribution of preferences, it produces not one best solution but an infinite number of equally good ones. In that sense, it is radically ambiguous. In lay terms, the principle can be satisfied by making a few people very happy, or by making many people somewhat happy, or by any one of an infinite number of combinations in between. Bentham himself was troubled about the meaning of his phrase and tinkered with it, although he also continued to use it and seemed never to have seen the full extent of the problem. He introduced the phrase in his earliest book, A Fragment on Government, as the “fundamental axiom” of his new science that was to bring “reform” in the “moral world” comparable to the achievements of other sciences in the “natural world.” The axiom provides: “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”9 Later, Bentham worried that this might imply, contrary to his intent, that the minority’s happiness is not to be considered at all, so he began to speak of “the greatest happiness of the community,” or simply of “the greatest happiness.” Later still, he added an explicit proviso: “in case of collision or contest, the happiness of each party being equal, prefer the happiness of the greater to that of the lesser number.”10 The meaning of this proviso, however, is not clear. It might mean that where the amount of happiness at stake for each person equals that of every other, the greater number receives preference, which seems trivial. Or it might mean that where the aggregate happiness of two groups—those favoring a policy and those opposing it—is equal, the larger group receives preference. But this seems arbitrary: Why should happiness widely distributed be better than happiness concentrated? The only answer acceptable to utilitarianism—that a wider distribution produces greater total happiness—is ruled out by the assumption defining this case: that the wide and narrow distributions produce equal aggregate happiness. In other words, wideness of distributions has already been counted once, in the calculation proving the two policies equal; there is no reason why it should count a second time to break the tie.

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Mack sees no difficulty: “emphatically, numbers counted” for Bentham, she says, citing his doctrine of the diminishing utility of wealth.11 This doctrine, one of four “subordinate principles” elucidating his fundamental axiom, does indeed provide that a “particle of wealth” means more to a poor person than to a rich one, implying that a wide distribution (at least of wealth) will create more happiness than a narrow one.12 But Mack neglects to mention another of Bentham’s subordinate principles exactly counterbalancing this one. The pain of losing what one has, Bentham teaches, is generally greater than the pleasure of gaining something new, so redistribution tends to decrease aggregate happiness.13 Numbers balance amount; security balances equality. Bentham strives to include all the relevant considerations, but the result is a doctrine so “balanced” that it says very little: At best, it provides an exhaustive checklist of considerations to keep in mind, but no way of ranking or ordering them (Harrison 1983: 242).14 The ambiguities of the “greatest happiness principle” seem to be a special instance of a deeper and more pervasive pattern in Bentham’s thought, manifested importantly in his characteristically ambiguous way with words. Central concepts such as “pleasure,” “pain,” “interest,” and “calculation” tend to expand and shrink in meaning in unpredictable and unacknowledged ways. As already discussed, when Bentham reduces all motives to seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, he does not mean pleasure as distinct from joy, delight, satisfaction, relief, gain, success, reward, advantage, and so on. He is using the word “pleasure” very broadly to encompass all of these and more, to stand for any and everything one might seek. Similarly, he does not mean pain as distinct from loss, grief, disappointment, suffering, agony, and so on. He means to group all of these into a single, broad category that he labels “pain,” abstracting that word from its usual contexts and contrasts and stretching it to cover half the world. This much Bentham himself says: “Benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness,” all “come to the same thing” in the principle of utility, and they are further equivalent to avoiding “mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness.”15 What he does not acknowledge is that he cannot rest content with these broadened meanings, but needs to slip back and forth between broad and narrow meanings to sustain his argument. Make the meanings sufficiently broad, and the principle becomes unassailable. At the same time, however, it becomes virtually empty, at best a reminder of basic links in our conceptual system. As with “pain” and “pleasure,” so with “calculation.” If critics deny that one can measure, calculate, or compare such things, the meaning of “calculate” at once expands to meet the threat: Acting means choosing and choosing means calculating, in a very broad sense. Yet as the argument gains invulnerability, it loses content. Every action has some motive and involves some, at lease implicit, choice; that is what an action is. But this is hardly an important new psychology. Nor can the advice to calculate pleasure and pain tell us much if we are already calculating no matter what we do. The very move that makes the advice unassailable—who would object to what furthers his aims?—also makes it pointless. So the meanings must once more shrink, in order for Bentham to be offering observations or advice superior to those of rival thinkers.

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Consider, from this perspective, Bentham’s famous defense of his principle of utility against other theories. He seemed unable to decide whether utility defeats all rivals in open combat, or simply incorporates them and wins by default.16 He recognized only two doctrines distinct from utilitarianism: its perverse opposite (the “principle of asceticism”) and the even more perverse refusal to justify by reasoned argument at all (the “principle of caprice” or of felt “sympathy and antipathy”). The former must either be justified by its alleged beneficial consequences, or forego any reasoned justification. In the one case it thus merges with utilitarianism, in the other, with caprice, which is no justification at all. Given such rivals, utilitarianism wins hands down. But what has been won? If every principle of conduct and legislation is only a version of utilitarianism, there is no reason to prefer utilitarianism to any other principle. Indeed, what can “preferring utilitarianism” mean, if all doctrines are utilitarian? To make preference possible, utilitarianism will have to shrink again and become distinct from its rivals, abandoning the security of its solitude. So, for example, Bentham will have to distinguish between right and wrong ways of applying the universal principle: Other doctrines are utilitarianism “misapplied,” or are “confused” versions of it.17 So, the fluctuating expansion and contraction of concepts continues. Bentham’s most interesting and complex slippages occur neither in the “greatest happiness principle” nor in the movement into and out of tautology, however, but in trying to make sense of the fully developed utilitarian system. That system is not yet evident in A Fragment on Government, which focused exclusively on a single project, legislative reform, and therefore can make do with a single version of its fundamental axiom (deeply ambiguous as even that version may be). By the time of the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, however, Bentham intended to reform not just legislation but morals and psychology as well. Consequently, though he still claimed a single, unified principle, he needed a far more nuanced, complicated, and articulated theoretical system, allowing—as it turns out—for more multiple slippage. The opening chapter, while monistically entitled “The Principle of Utility,” begins with the famous set of cross-cutting apparent dichotomies: Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.18 At the outset, then, one finds what seems a monumental blunder: If “what we shall do” is “determine[d],” how can there be a “what we ought to do” at all? Critics have noted this problem, but have diversely construed it. Many, like Élie Halevy, claim that Bentham here confuses “is” with “ought” or—contrary to the teachings of his mentor, Hume—attempts to derive the latter from the former (Halevy 1960: 12; Harrison 1983: 109; Sidgwick 1874: 412; Steintrager 1977: 34; Lyons 1973: 12).

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Yet Bentham himself thought he had outdone Hume in this regard, that with respect to law and government, he was the first who “drew a clear line (and kept it in a conspicuous state throughout) between that which ought to be and that which is” (Manning 1968: 23). He also claimed, however, to recombine what he had so carefully distinguished, and he saw no logical difficulty in doing so, neither at the beginning nor at the end of his career. Already in the Fragment he distinguished “expository” from “censorial” jurisprudence, only to offer a “compendium” of both together.19 In the Introduction, not only does his one principle take the form of two chains to the throne of pain and pleasure, but Bentham goes on to remark that motives (determining action) and obligations (distinguishing right from wrong) “come . . . to the same thing.”20 Late in life, in the Constitutional Code, he distinguishes the actual human tendency to “self-preference” from the greatest happiness principle that sets “the right and proper end of government,” only to announce his invention of a third principle, the “junction-of-interest-prescribing principle,” to reconcile them: “The first declares, what ought to be, the next, what is, the last, the means of bringing what is into accordance with what ought to be.”21 As this passage reminds us, “ought” can differ from “is” without any logical inconsistency: Every reformer proposes to change some bad “is” in light of a good and different “ought.” Logical problems arise only if “ought” conflicts with a deterministic “ism.”22 Thus critics charge Bentham with trying to combine a deterministic, egoistic, or hedonistic psychology with a utilitarian ethic of the common good (Lyons 1973: 12–18). This is bound to be inconsistent, they say, unless he is assuming the “natural harmony of interests”: that whatever is, is right. But not only did Bentham clearly think that much was wrong in his world; even more, if causally determined individual actions inevitably produce what “ought to be,” the word “ought” surely has lost its usual meaning. Yet Bentham does indeed appear to have held to deterministic psychology and denied “free will.” At least he wrote later that our “internal perception or consciousness” of free choice amounts only to “our blindness as to a part, more or less considerable, of the whole number of joint causes or concurrent circumstances, on which the act of the will, and with it the consequent physical acts, depend.”23 This seems to leave little room for any “ought,” let alone standards of right and wrong. If we act as the stone falls, there can be neither error nor sin. Nevertheless, Bentham’s defenders counter that there are other possibilities here. Perhaps people are inefficiently egoistic, so that utilitarianism could produce the common good by teaching them their true individual interests, which they would then inevitably pursue. Or perhaps a legislator could, by imposing suitable penalties and rewards, alter the balance of pains and pleasures consequent on certain actions so that, after the alteration, inevitable individual egoism would produce the common good (Lyons 1973: 12–18). Deciding whether and how Bentham contradicts himself in this disputed passage and in the system of thought it introduces, then, requires figuring out what exactly

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he is saying. The many interpreters who have struggled to do this sought either to derive a consistent doctrine or to demonstrate a decisive contradiction. But Bentham will not hold still long enough to contradict himself, let alone to produce a coherent doctrine. If, indeed, one single principle is to yield not just “is” and “ought” but also a bridge between them, it obviously must have diverse formulations or applications or subprinciples. What exactly are these? As one moves further into the Introduction, simple dichotomy and even trichotomy blur into multiplicity as Bentham distinguishes ethics from prudence, private from public, and apparent interest from real interest. And multiplicity becomes multiple ambiguity as all these distinctions prove highly unstable. The opening chapter of the Introduction proceeds to “an explicit and determinate account” of what the principle of utility means. That principle, Bentham said, applied both to “every action of a private individual . . . [and to] every measure of government,” assessing each “according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or to diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.” Whose interest is in question? Bentham was neither explicit nor determinate about how to decide. He simply added: “if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community: if a particular individual, then the happiness of the individual.” Bentham was not troubled about what “the happiness of the community” might mean. Happiness, interest, and pleasure (not to mention the absence or diminution of pain) all come to the same thing, and the interest of a community is simply “the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it,” since a community is nothing but “a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are . . . its members.”24 Assuming that Bentham intended “measures of government” to be assessed in relation to community happiness, what standard is to guide the actions “of a private individual”? Is the formula: public measures, public interest; action of private individual, actor’s interest? That seems plausible if there is to be any kind of actions governed by individual interest, or any point to the passage quoted earlier about “the party whose interest is in question.” Yet within a page, Bentham is declaring flatly that: a man may be said to be a partisan of the principle of utility, when the approbation or disapprobation he annexes to any action, or to any measure, is determined by and proportioned to the tendency which he conceives it to have to augment or to diminish the happiness of the community: or in other words, to its conformity or unconformity to the laws or dictates of utility. Indeed, he claims that only in relation to this standard can words like “ought,” “right,” and “wrong” even “have a meaning,” implying that one cannot even sensibly discuss the rightness—moral, political, or prudential—of an action in relation to the happiness of a single individual.25 Nevertheless, the latter standard also continues to reappear. While the above passage refers to the tendency one “conceives” an action to have to augment happiness, and one quoted earlier speaks of the tendency an

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action “appears” to have to augment happiness, between them stands another passage in which the standard is not the apparent but the actual promoting of happiness. Utilitarianism judges an action by “the tendency it has to augment . . . happiness.” This latter way of speaking also continues to reappear.26 In the Introduction, then, one finds a complexly interrelated set of ambiguities, none of which Bentham acknowledges as problematic. We have noted: 1. 2. 3. 4.

the relationship among casual necessity, individual morality, right legislation, and prudence; “actions of private individuals” versus “measures of government”; individual happiness or interest versus community happiness or interest; and apparent, anticipated happiness versus actual, experienced happiness.

Mathematically speaking, the listed ambiguities allow for 32 different combinations. The mind boggles; no wonder Bentham’s critics tend to resort to invective. But the very multiplicity of possibilities is also promising, as a simple dichotomy would not be. Perhaps, a more careful search among the combinations will yet elicit from Bentham a single, consistent doctrine. Bentham’s doctrine is clearest and least problematic at the two extremes, as it were, of his subject matter: in his deterministic psychology and in his standards for right legislation. No doubt that is one reason why both he and his critics see dichotomy here rather than multiplicity (he, dichotomy to be bridged; they, dichotomy that is unbridgeable). Applied to individual psychology, Bentham’s teaching is, fairly consistently, that each inevitably pursues his own apparent happiness. Applied as a standard for right legislation, the teaching is, fairly consistently, the greatest happiness principle, meaning the actual not just the apparent happiness of the community. Between or around these two topics—psychology and legislation—lies a shadowy land ripe for interpretation but also for slippage, a land that includes topics such as standards of prudence or efficiency, ethical standards for individual conduct, and questions of political obligation and resistance. Each of these topics heightens or at least displays the ambiguities in Bentham’s thinking because they are all liminal, akin in some respects to psychology and in others to legislation. Each deserves some more detailed attention. Begin with prudence, efficiency, or practical effectiveness. Standards of prudence are clearly different from what we ordinarily mean by morally right conduct, but they are equally hard to reconcile with a deterministic psychology. Bentham classified prudence in the Introduction as a part of “private ethics,” and called it a “duty.”27 It is that part of ethics which governs actions in which no one but the actor is “interested,” actions which “affect the happiness” of no one else.28 In such matters, the actor has a “duty to himself,” presumably dictated by the principle of utility, to augment his own happiness. As this clearly implies, people do not in fact always augment their own happiness, do not always succeed in augmenting it. Prudence cannot be identified with psychological determinism. People often

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mistake their own interest, misperceive the world, are carried away by passion, or otherwise fail in (the duty of) prudence. Although Bentham said that prudence governs only those actions that affect none but the actor, he also frequently spoke of prudence as applying to other actions as well, perhaps to all actions. For instance, in a typically ambiguous passage: “First law of nature is to wish our own happiness, and the united voices of prudence and benevolence add-seek the happiness of others; seek your own happiness in the happiness of others?”29 Now, whatever it might mean for prudence and benevolence to speak in united voices, if prudence concerns actions that affect only the actor, why should it ever counsel attention to the happiness of others? Perhaps, then, prudence applies to all actions, but defines one’s duty only with respect to those actions that affect no one else, duty with respect to all other actions being defined by the greatest happiness principle. More likely, “prudence” does not always mean prudent self-interest. Certainly, in ordinary usage, one can be prudent in the pursuit of any goal, and by 1819 Bentham was, at least sometimes, explicitly distinguishing “self-regarding” from “extra-regarding prudence.”30 Actions that affect the happiness of others are governed by ethics proper. What is its standard? Some critics, most recently David Lyons, take it as evident from the texts that Bentham’s standard for ethics proper was the same as for prudence: the actor’s own happiness (Lyons 1973: vii, 32–34, and passim). Other critics, most recently Ross Harrison, take it as evident from the texts that Bentham’s standard for ethics proper was the same as for legislation: the greatest happiness principle (Harrison 1983: 263–273). None seems to see the extent of Benthamic slippage. The source of the problem is that, when contrasted to prudence, ethics looks public and seems to concern the good of others, but when contrasted to legislation, ethics looks private or individual and seems to concern the actor’s own good. Thus, distinguishing prudence from ethics in the Introduction, Bentham said that “the persons whose happiness [private ethics] ought to have in view” are exactly the same persons whose happiness legislation ought to consider, that is “the greatest number.” Accordingly, prudence, the duty to self, is only one part of “the rules of moral duty.”31 Yet a few pages later, distinguishing ethics from legislation (and claiming to “recapitulate” the chapter), Bentham said: Private ethics teaches how each may dispose himself to pursue the course most conducive to his own happiness, . . . [while] the art of legislation . . . teaches how a multitude of men, composing a community, may be disposed to pursue that course which upon the whole is the most conducive to the happiness of the whole community. 32 This suggests that prudence, in the sense of prudent self-interest, coincides with the whole of (private) moral duty, and that both together contrast to the happiness of the community. Mostly, Bentham just equivocated:

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A private man ought . . . to direct his own conduct to the production of his own happiness, and that of his fellow creatures. . . . Every act which promises to be beneficial upon the whole to the community (himself included), each individual ought to perform.33 How is one to read the parenthetical phrase: Does it modify, or does it clarify what precedes it? Does what benefits the community oblige only if it coincides with self-interest, or always oblige because it is assumed to include the self-interest of each, since each individual is a member of the community? Bentham wrote as if he saw no problem, yet just a page earlier, he was explaining how people can be motivated to act in the interest of the community—a question that would not arise if self-interest and community interest always coincided.34 The ambiguities evident in Bentham’s treatment of ethics and prudence show up also in his discussion of resisting bad government, and revolution (although for these, one must look beyond the Introduction). If psychology predicts and prudence (and perhaps private ethics, too) counsels self-interested action, but the standard for good legislation is community happiness, what defines right individual action in the absence of good legislation? What is the utilitarian criterion of right conduct when confronting despotism, tyranny, or laws harmful to the community? On this “very interesting question . . . of private ethics,” would Bentham opt for individual selfinterest, or for a continuing duty to a community betrayed by its current laws or rulers?35 Bentham equivocated. Such questions are, of course, central to social contract theory, where they are addressed in terms of the state of nature, natural law, natural rights, and the social contract itself. Bentham was a vigorous critic of such “fictions.” His own discussion of resistance and revolution employed very different language: “Government supposes the disposition to obedience . . . The true rampart, the only rampart, against a tyrannical government has always been, and still is, the faculty of allowing this disposition . . . either to subsist or to cease.”36 How does a utilitarian decide which to do in a particular case? He “should obey . . . so long as the probable mischiefs of obedience are less than the probable mischiefs of resistance.” Mischiefs to whom? Here, at least, Bentham claimed explicitly that interest and obligation coincide: It is people’s “duty to obey just as long as it is their interest, and no longer.”37 The sentence, however, refers to people in the plural and their interest, so it does not reveal whether each individual is obligated to his interest or to theirs. Bentham needed it both ways. Bentham gave different answers to this question in different works. In the Fragment, he suggested community benefit as the criterion, though with a characteristic parenthesis to mark—or mask—potential slippage. It is “allowable to, if not incumbent upon every man,” he said, as if there were no problem, “to enter into measures of resistance when the probable mischiefs of resistance (speaking with respect to the community in general) appear less to him than the probable mischiefs of obedience.”38 Later in his life, however, Bentham declared with equal blandness that a utilitarian must ask himself:

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Of the two masses of evil – intensity, duration, certainty all included – which appears to be the greatest, that to which one believes ones self exposed from continued obedience, or that to which one believes ones self exposed by its discontinuance.39 Perhaps Bentham, disillusioned about those in power by the long struggle over his panopticon, inspired by the success of the American republic, and influenced by democrat James Mill, changed his mind, placing less trust in established authority and more in resisting individuals. But the frequency of ambiguous passages, both early and late, suggests instead that he simply employed on each occasion that side of the ambiguity brought to mind by the argument before him, recognizing no difficulty. Can a deterministic psychology of self-interested individuals be made consistent with a moral (or even a prudential) obligation to pursue the interest of the community? Much will depend on what one means by “self-interest” and by “obligation,” and once again Bentham’s use of these terms is highly unstable. Begin with self-interest. First of all, it undergoes the characteristic expansion into and contraction from tautology. Sometimes, self-interest includes the pleasures of benevolence, sympathy, public service, and the fears of various kinds of sanctions, in which case there is no difficulty in “reconciling” it with community interest at all. At other times, it narrows and contrasts to the interests of others or of the community, so that conflict is likely. Indeed, at one point, Bentham himself noted the danger in making self-interest universal by definition: A truth achieved tautologically is “trite.” That all acts are self-interested is “indubitably true,” he said, in the large and extensive sense of the word interest (as comprehending all sorts of motives) . . . but . . . indubitably false in any of the confined senses in which upon such an occasion the word interest is wont to be made use of.40 Yet community interest is meaningless unless it benefits the members of that community, so each has an interest in the common interest, and the tautology reappears: “That which in the language of sentimentalism is a sacrifice of private to public interest [is] but a sacrifice of self-supposed private interest in one shape to a self-supposed private interest in another shape.”41 As is evident in this passage, the slippage into and out of tautology is complicated by a second fluctuation, between singular and plural interest(s). Sometimes, self-interest is singular, the total or balance of all one’s prospective pleasures and pains at a given moment. At other times, Bentham called each of these many, rival, prospective pleasures and pains an interest, so that one’s self-interests at any moment are multiple and need to be reconciled before one can act. In this latter form, they can easily include the claims of benevolence and sympathy as well as one’s share in the public interest. In his later writings, Bentham often grouped such plural self-interests into two clusters, the individual’s “own particular [or ‘personal’ or ‘individual’] interest” and his “share in the public [or ‘universal’] interest.”42 The minds “of ‘public men,’ at least, are subject at all times to the operation of two

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distinct interests – a public and a private one . . . In the greater number of instances, these two interests are not only distinct, but opposite.”43 There is thus, so to speak, self-interested self-interest and other-interested self-interest, as Bentham made explicit by the time of the Deontology. 44 Even when Bentham was not defining all actions as self-interested in the broad sense, he nevertheless made strong empirical claims, generally to the effect that most actions by most people are self-interested in the narrow sense, but occasionally to the opposite effect. Generally, he held that, while there are saints and heroes who enjoy benevolence, such people are exceptions, found only “in a highly matured state of society, in . . . a highly cultivated and expanded mind, under the stimulus of some extraordinary excitement.” They “cannot reasonably be regarded as being so frequently exemplified as insanity.”45 Nevertheless, he sometimes declared, to the contrary, that benevolence and public-spiritedness are as common as can be. The experience of the American republic, for example, has “proved” that in the “great majority” of people “there does exist the disposition to contribute toward the advancement of the universal interest.”46 These fluctuations are further complicated by the ambiguity between apparent and actual self-interest, the problem of who is to say what counts as a given person’s self-interest. If one’s self-interests at any moment are many, it is easy to see how they might include some of which one is not even aware, and some about which one is mistaken. But if one’s self-interest at each moment is singular, the sum or balance of all considerations manifested in one’s action, then it seems that only the actor himself can define his interest. This view becomes more plausible as each knows his own tastes and reactions better than anyone else: “Generally speaking there is no one who knows what is for your interest, so well as yourself.”47 Yet Bentham often observed, as already noted, that people mistake their own interests, particularly tending to let some immediate pleasure distract them from a greater but more distant one, like Esau selling his birthright for a mess of pottage.48 While it is hard to know the interest of another, it is not easy to know one’s own, either. So, in principle, it is possible to know another’s interest better than he—for instance, to see accurately the prudential or even moral obligations to benevolence to which he himself is blind.49 If the meaning of self-interest is problematic, that of obligation is even more so. What Bentham said about obligation and (what he seemed to regard as its equivalent) duty, is that they are defined by sanctions consequent on failure to perform. “That it is my duty to do, which I am liable to be punished . . . if I do not do; this is the original, ordinary and proper sense of the word duty.”50 Legal duties are acts whose omission leads to legal sanctions, moral duties are those whose omission leads to “popular” sanctions, and religious duties are those whose omission leads to divine punishment.51 Similarly, an “obligation can be understood only as an action commanded by a ‘superior’ who will impose ‘eventual punishment’ for its omission.”52 Religious and popular sanctions can generate religious and moral obligations, just as law generates legal ones, although the nature of the “superior” is left unclear in the case of popular sanctions. If the word “obligation” is used in any other way, “the sound is mere sound, without import.”53

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This is because duties and obligations presuppose the capacity to perform: That which is impossible cannot be obligatory. Action is impossible, Bentham said, without a motive, so one cannot have a duty or an obligation to do anything for which one cannot (does not?) have a sufficient motive. That is why a question of obligation “comes to the same thing as” a question of motive.54 The sanction providing motive is what makes performance possible: “Without eventual punishment, or the apprehension of it, obedience would be an effect without a cause.”55 As the slippery parenthetical phrase indicates, the logical requirement here is the apprehension, not the actual punishment, since it is the apprehension that motivates. Of course, institutions of punishment can be a major source of such apprehension but by no means the only one, nor an automatic guarantee. A more serious problem is that, on this line of reasoning, one can never fail in duty nor violate an obligation, since failure to perform demonstrates the lack of sufficient motive, which amounts to inability to perform, which voids the obligation or duty. Bentham did not acknowledge these difficulties, and continued to write as if punishment and fear of punishment were interchangeable, and to use “obligation” and “duty” also in their ordinary sense, as referring to actions we are supposed to, but may well fail to perform. The appeal to self-interest is a powerful tool, seeming to make the argument irresistible. The appeal to community interest is essential to Bentham’s main enterprise: reform. The notion of a felicific calculus, with the community interest as its sum, combines the two, and is thus doubly seductive. But how exactly does it combine them? By an assumed natural harmony, or by legislative intervention that realigns pains and pleasures, or by reshaping people rather than laws? Which of these alternatives did Bentham adopt? He adopted all of them by turns, as the occasion required.

Natural harmony of interests A community being composed of its members, and its interests therefore being simply the “sum” of their interests, if each of them pursues self-interest (either inevitably, by definition, or mostly, by empirical observation), community interest should automatically emerge. “The mass of national wealth,” for instance, will increase as the wealth of individuals increases, and this is generally the aim of individuals, too. The argument is the more compelling as Bentham (sometimes, but not always) maintained that each is the best judge of his own interest and thus most effective at procuring it. The wealth of the whole community is composed of the wealth of the several individuals belonging to it taken together. But to increase his particular portion is, generally speaking, among the constant objects of each individual’s exertions and care. Generally speaking, there is no one who knows what is for your interest, so well as yourself – no one who is disposed with so much ardour and constancy to pursue it.

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Then laissez-faire seems the ideal policy, and the motto for government becomes “Be quiet!”56 The context here is economic, and some interpreters—notably Halevy—have found a fundamental inconsistency in Bentham’s thought, between a doctrine of the natural harmony of interests appearing in economics and a program of legislation in other areas (Halevy 1960: 17, 118–119, 48). Other interpreters attempt a chronological ordering. Sheldon Wolin, for example, finds that Bentham came to believe increasingly in a natural harmony as he got older; David Lyons, however, finds that Bentham held such a doctrine early, but became cynical in old age (Wolin 1960: 348; Lyons 1973: 16, 42, 50ff). No doubt, the one is thinking particularly of the Deontology, especially in the Bowring version, while the other has in mind the notion of “sinister interests,” for instance in the “Parliamentary Reform Catechism.” But the fact is that Bentham always held both kinds of views. It is true that some of the most striking passages about natural harmony occur in economic contexts and in Bowring’s rendition of Bentham on ethics, but the idea is equally contained in the very notion of community interest as a sum, and plays an important role in Bentham’s later support for universal suffrage: Once the government reflects “the people,” community interest will automatically emerge, for “the people” have no interest “in being governed badly . . . [or] in having their universal interest sacrificed to any separate and adverse interest.”57 Part of the difficulty, to be sure, is the question of what exactly is meant by the “natural harmony of interests.” Bentham was primarily a legislative reformer, so he cannot (consistently) have held that a natural harmony of interests is already in place and functioning. Yet most theorists usually said to believe in such a harmony also advocate various policies or changes in existing arrangements: Why else would they write? Typically, they hold that such a harmony would prevail were it not for various artificially introduced distortions. Individual interests would naturally produce the common good, for instance, if government were in the hands of the people, or if each pursued his own interest correctly and rationally, or if moralists stopped teaching harmful doctrines of self-sacrifice, or if government stopped intervening and learned to be quiet. These are, indeed, Benthamic themes. But should one call such a doctrine the natural harmony of interests? It advocates public action, if only to achieve laissez-faire. It is also problematic with respect to the origin of the artificial distortions: If harmony is natural, how did distortions ever arise? Whatever one calls it, such a view is suggested by many passages in Bentham. But there are also many passages rejecting it: “On every occasion the happiness of every individual is liable to come into competition with the happiness of every other.”58 That is precisely why the utilitarian standard cannot be the happiness of all. That phrase would make sense as a goal only if—what is not the case— the happiness of no one being came into competition with that of any other – that is to say, if the happiness of each, of any one, could receive increase to an

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unlimited amount, without having the effect of producing decrease in the happiness of any other.59 Such a fantasy of “perfect happiness belongs to the imaginary regions of philosophy”; in the actual world, the unequal gifts of nature and fortune will always create jealousies: there will always be opposition of interest; and consequently rivalries and hatred . . . reciprocal security can only be established by forceable renunciation by each one, of everything which might wound the legitimate rights of others.60 Not harmony, then, but “forceable renunciation” produces the interest of the community. Indeed, “society is held together only by the sacrifices that men can be induced to make of the gratifications they demand: to obtain these sacrifices is the great difficulty, the great task of government.”61 Utilitarian legislative intervention, such passages strongly suggest, will be required not just once, to restore some natural harmony, but on a continuing basis. The point, however, is not that Bentham really holds the latter rather than the former view, but that he seems to hold both simultaneously without perceiving any difficulty.

Legislation Bentham was originally and remained fundamentally a legislative reformer, and so the more frequent theme is that only legislative intervention can reconcile naturally conflicting interests. That the uncoerced and unenlightened propensities and powers of individuals are not adequate to [produce the community interest] . . . without the control and guidance of the legislator is a matter of fact of which the evidence of history, the nature of man, and the existence of political society are so many proofs.62 In the absence of law, there will always be significant temptations to evil: actions genuinely in the interest of some but harmful to others or to the community, and actions beneficial to the community that are not in anyone’s individual interest to perform. Legislation must attach appropriate penalties to the former and rewards to the latter, so that the former stop being tempting and the latter become so. “The business of government is to promote the happiness of the society by punishing and rewarding.”63 This is Bentham’s “junction-of-interest-prescribing principle” intended to join “is” to “ought,” making it the interest of each to serve the “universal” interest.64 This does, in one sense, leave everyone better off, since the members are the community, but it is no natural harmony, nor is it accomplished without sacrificing some individual interests. While legislation is Bentham’s most central and persistent solution, it is in some respects not his favorite. Since pain is always an evil—the very definition of evil—

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Bentham prefers reward and prevention to punishment, and the “moral” to the “legal” sanction.65 Furthermore, the corrective intervention of the legislator will work only to the extent that people know about the rewards and penalties he has enacted, calculate their actions rationally, and have enough self-control to act on their calculations. For both these reasons, Bentham is drawn to the alternative of education, changing people rather than penalties.

Education Benevolent Bentham was immensely attracted to the possibilities of education, understood in the broadest sense as including not merely formal schooling but also parental upbringing (“government acting by the domestic magistrate”) and all other forces shaping people’s capacities and character.66 Like many another political theorist, Bentham saw himself as “employed upon the greatest interests of humanity; the art of forming the manners and the character of nations.”67 Panopticon, for instance, was conceived more as a re-educational than as a penal institution, the constant supervision intended not just to restrain but to transform the inmates: “a mill for grinding rogues honest and idle men industrious,” and an unprecedented “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”68 The same project, moreover, could in principle be generalized, as the “progress of society” moved into its third historical “epoch . . . in which all traces of the vindictive principle have been entirely obliterated,” and prevention of crime wholly replaces punishment (Everett 1931: 190–191, quoting an unpublished manuscript). This is the transition to “indirect” or “transcendental” legislation. While “vulgar” or punitive legislation “drags men to its purposes in chains,” so that they resist, suffer, and sometimes “break loose in crowds,” indirect legislation leads them “by silken threads, entwined round their affections, and makes them its own forever” (Mack 1963: 293, quoting an unpublished manuscript). Then, the laws: would infuse themselves, so to speak, into the minds of the people: they would form part of the logic of the people; they would extend their influence over their moral nature: the code of public opinion would be formed by analogy upon the code of the laws, and . . . obedience to the laws would come to be hardly distinguishable from the feeling of liberty.69 Along with Bentham’s insistence that there will always be conflicting interests and thus a need for legislation, accordingly, one finds the recurrent hope of doing the job more gently and more thoroughly through education. “In proportion as [people] and humanized and enlightened,” they will come to govern themselves individually by the internalized principle of utility, and “the deference they pay to its dictates [will become] more uniform.”70 When education is understood so broadly, Bentham becomes slippery about how it differs from legislation. In the Introduction, he distinguished clearly: The “art of education” is one part of the “art of government,” namely that part which “concerns

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the direction of the actions of persons in a non-adult state.”71 But Bentham did not observe his own distinction, even in the Introduction, for he declared that government “operates principally through the medium of education: the magistrate operating in the character of a tutor upon all the members of the state, by the direction he gives to their hopes and to their fears.”72 Education itself, part of the art of government, is a relation of “command on the one side and subjection on the other.”73 And the legislator does much more than attach new punishments and rewards to certain actions. By controlling people’s circumstances, the legislator has “the power of making wrong and right change nature, and determining what shall be morality as well as what shall be law,” and thus of reshaping human beings, for “individuals are what the law has made them.”74 Not only are education and legislation hard to distinguish, but education itself is envisaged in two fundamentally different ways by Bentham: as an enhancement of prudence, and as an enhancement of benevolence, although this distinction is as unstable as the distinction between prudence and benevolence already examined. People always seek happiness but do not always succeed in achieving it, being ignorant, misled, prejudiced, passionate, or irrational. Education can reduce, if not eliminate, these failings, informing people about options and consequences, training them to generalize and compare, instilling habits of prudent calculation, and strengthening the resolve of the weak-willed and the rationality of the impulsive. Such an education in prudence will make people efficient in their pursuit of self-interest. “It is the business of the legislator to endeavor to correct” people’s prejudices, not only “to publish facts,” but also “to assist the public in forming its judgment upon those facts.”75 If one assumes an ultimate harmony of interests, such education in prudence will also produce the community interest. If not, it will need to be accompanied by legislation; indeed, without such an education, legislation may remain ineffective. Bentham also had a second, very different way of imagining education, however, as the enhancement not of prudence but of benevolence. Instead of improving people’s efficiency at pursuing what will make them happy, such an education changes the content of their pleasure, and not in the external manner of legislation, by attaching new penalties and rewards to actions, but by permanently altering character, so that people are genuinely made happy by benefitting others or the community, and made uncomfortable by injustice and the suffering of others. Such education creates new “capacities for happiness by forming tastes with the corresponding powers of gratification” (Mack 1963: 107, quoting an unpublished manuscript). Benevolence may be partly instinctive, “but it is in great measure the produce of cultivation, the fruit of education.”76 If such benevolent people are also efficient, well informed, and capable of self-control, so much the better, but the two visions of education are really very different. To the extent that education as the enhancement of benevolence succeeds, no legislation is needed. While, in the first vision, education both supplements and displaces legislation, in the second vision it wholly displaces. Not surprising, Bentham was often unclear about the relationships of the two visions of education to each other and to legislation, as he was about the nature of prudence and its relation to benevolence. “The more we become

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enlightened,” he said, “the more benevolent shall we become; because we shall see that the interests of men coincide upon more points than they oppose each other.”77 Thus a sentence that starts with general benevolence ends in more shrewd and farsighted self-interest, and the nature of the “enlightenment” involved remains ambiguous. Whether the psychology of self-interest and the utilitarian greatest happiness principle are to be bridged by education or legislation or some combination of the two, there remains the question of the legislator or educator. Even if one can imagine a system of laws or a program of upbringing that would elicit community interest from fundamentally self-interested creatures, how is one to imagine the legislator or educator who introduces, imposes, or administers that system? As a causally determined egoist? As a utilitarian calculator? And if the latter, a calculator of self-interest or the interest of the community? The ontology of Bentham’s deus ex machina, one might say, recapitulated the ambiguities of the utilitarian system more generally. Bentham did not address the question explicitly, and therefore, on this topic, one does not find slippage. Between the lines one can, however, find the elements of two distinct answers, the one characteristic of his early, the other of his later thought. In his early works, Bentham seemed to write for an enlightened despot, imaginary or real (Catherine the Great? George III? Lord Shelburne?), someone with power who is sufficiently intelligent and benevolent to adopt Bentham’s doctrines. As Bentham became a republican and no longer hoped for help from those in power—“sinister interests” and those corrupted by sinister interests—his fantasy shifted from a single, imaginary, or real legislator to a legislature, an assembly of rationally self-interested representatives channeled by appropriate constitutional machinery into producing community interest. The required constitutional changes were presumably to be effected by the great body of the people at large who would benefit from the new institutions, brought at last to see their true interest by Bentham’s teachings. The singular legislator implicit in the early writings was also an educator, and in this function, too, he has a later, democratic counterpart. Public opinion is to become “the principal” means of teaching people the connection between “self-regarding prudence” and “the dictates of probity and beneficence,” a means that will become the more effective “as experience increases and mental culture advances”78 Bentham’s own writing cannot do the job, the postulated progress of civilization will. With respect to the transitional legislator or educator, then, there was a genuine chronological shift in Bentham’s thinking. In other respects, however, he simply vacillated among the various possible ways of making his system coherent, emphasizing now legislation, now education for prudence, now education for benevolence, now a natural harmony of interest or an evolutionary progress of society toward such harmony. Might one not argue, however, that these shifts are a sign not of slipperiness but of simple realism? Surely we know that in fact legislation is useful for some purposes but not all, that laissez-faire is sometimes the best policy, that some but not all goals can be achieved by education. Was Bentham merely saying: choose the policy likely to work in each particular case?

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He surely was saying something like that, at least some of the time. But, as with his tautologies and checklists, such very reasonable advice carries only minimal content. “Do what works” is surely unobjectionable, but it does not help us much, and Bentham would hardly be content to let the great utilitarian system boil down to that. Yet the quest for a more meaningful and yet consistent interpretation of the system introduced in the Introduction fails. In this respect, one must conclude with Plamenatz, “that it is not possible to make sense of what Bentham is saying” (Plamenatz 1949: 72). On closer inspection, Bentham’s single great principle of utility turns out to be not an unbridgeable dichotomy or stable triad, but a swamp. The charge to be brought against him is not the positivist one, that his theory, resting on tautology, is untestable. Very few theories are testable and most political theory is not aimed at scientific description or explanation at all; in any case, Bentham’s theory never stayed tautological for long. Nor is the charge quite the one formulated by Herzog: that Bentham failed to provide a decision rule for political action: No systematic political theory does or can be expected to do that. Herzog’s response would be, so much the worse for systematic political theory; we can do well enough “without foundations,” with the less systematic, more practical thought of writers like David Hume and Adam Smith.79 The question of whether we need or can hope for systematic political theory cannot be addressed here. The point of this essay is only that Bentham’s effort to produce such theory failed not because his principle cannot function as a decision rule, but because he had no consistent principle at all. The charge is not that Bentham was inconsistent and contradicted himself. Every great political theory incorporates, as Hannah Arendt has put it, “fundamental and flagrant contradictions” that, far from invalidating the theory, serve to instruct us about the deep and inescapable tensions in our thought, built into our conceptual system and characterizing our political world (Arendt 1958: 104). Bentham’s inconsistencies were not of this kind or calibre. They could not illuminate conceptual tensions because they were too unstable: At the least hint of tension, meanings shift and claims dissolve. Bentham disguised tensions instead of revealing them: his ideas were too slippery to hold anything in tension. That is the secret of both the infuriating quality and the longevity of his theory: capable of being (almost) all things to (almost) all people, it emerges unscathed from ordinary criticism, ever ready to be “applied” anew. Slipperiness may be one reason, also, why Bentham was unable to finish anything. He must have known (one imagines) that things were not quite coherent yet, but constantly felt that a coherent formulation was almost within reach, given the many interdependent and ambiguous terms to be deployed. The psychology of all this is plain enough. Any competent psychobiographer could trace Bentham’s slipperiness to his ambivalence about his powers, and trace that ambivalence to his troubled relationship with his overbearing lawyer father. But neither such a psychological account of the origins of utilitarianism nor the slipperiness of the doctrine itself, explored in this essay, suffices to explain the longevity of this “Teflon theory.” Slipperiness makes that longevity possible, but

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does not show what in utilitarianism we so persistently crave and seek to resurrect. One suspects that the answer is bound to involve our hope of escaping the risks and disorders of human relationships, by reconceiving those relationships in the language now used for physical objects and mechanical movement. Much in the practice of modern life makes such a reduction seem plausible; much in its profound dissatisfactions makes such an escape seem desirable. But this vital question is obviously a topic for another day. Could one, despite all that has been said here, yet construct out of Bentham’s ideas a meaningful and coherent system of political thought? Herzog, who has examined several leading contemporary versions of utilitarianism in detail, is convinced that it cannot be done (Herzog 1985: 144–157). But impossibility claims are always risky. It may be that contemporary utilitarians, game theorists, and public choice theorists no longer regard Bentham as the founder of their discipline; game theorists, as already mentioned, criticize the “greatest happiness principle.” Perhaps, then, one should only warn contemporary utilitarians: look to your foundations. Could something be slipping down there? Perhaps, someone has produced, or will yet produce, a meaningful and coherent version of utilitarianism. Bentham, at any rate, failed to do so.

Notes 1 For reading and commenting on this essay, my thanks go to Emily Hauptmann, Norman Jacobson, Jennifer Ring, Michael Rogin, John H. Schaar, Mary Skinner, and Mark Tunick. 2 John Maynard Keynes, Two Memoirs (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949), 96; Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955), 55; Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 66; Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Everyman edn., II, 671; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by Marianne Cowen (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1955), 155–156; all of these quotations are cited in Mary Peter Mack, ed., A Bentham Reader (New York: Pegasus, 1969), viii, which refers the reader to Mack (1963), where the sources of all but the Goethe passage are identified. 3 Manning 1968: 75, quoting William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 4. 4 Jeremy Bentham, “The Rationale of Judicial Evidence,” in John Bowring, ed.,Works of Jeremy Bentham (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), VII, 399. 5 Jeremy Bentham, in J.H. Bums and H.L.A. Hart, eds, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: Athlone Press, 1970), 40. 6 Bentham, Introduction, 173–174, see also “Pannomial Fragments,” Works, III, 219. 7 The point is made with regard to the greatest happiness principle, though without mentioning Bentham, in John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 11. It is discussed more extensively in Amnon Goldworth, “The Meaning of Bentham’s Greatest Happiness Principle,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 7 (1969) 315–321. I have also read a still more extended demonstration, complete with a diagram of a hypothetical solution surface, but cannot now retrieve the reference. Various other thinkers make the same point in nontechnical terms. 8 Mack, Bentham Reader, 241.

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9 Jeremy Bentham, “A Fragment on Government,” in J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart, eds, A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government (London: Athlone Press, 1977), 393. 10 Bhiku Parekh, ed., Bentham’s Political Thought (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973), 309, quoting an unpublished manuscript. But Bentham was still using the expression as late as 1827; “Constitutional Code,” in Works, IX, 5. “Pannomial Fragments,” Works, III, 211. 11 Mack, Bentham Reader, xiii. 12 Bentham, “Pannomial Fragments,” Works, III, 228–230. 13 Bentham, “Pannomial Fragments,” Works, III, 226. 14 See also “Pannomial Fragments,” Works, III, 227–228, where Bentham himself noted the trade-off: The only way a legislator can provide for the indigent is “by defalcation from the mass of the matter of abundance possessed by the relatively opulent,” and thus by “a correspondent defalcation more or less considerable, from security of property on their part.” He concluded that “human benevolence can, therefore, hardly be better employed than in a quiet solution of these difficulties,” but it is not clear what would constitute a “solution.” 15 Bentham, Introduction, 12. 16 Bentham, Introduction, 13–33, see also Herzog 1985: 159. 17 For instance, Bentham, Introduction, 15. 18 Bentham, Introduction, 11. 19 Bentham, “Fragment,” Comment, 397, 417. 20 Bentham, Introduction, 284. 21 Bentham, “Constitutional Code,” Works, IX, 5–6. 22 On the problematic issue of distinguishing “is” from “ought,” see my Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), ch. 10. 23 Bentham, “Rationale of Judicial Evidence,” Works, VII, 114. 24 Bentham, Introduction, 11–12. 25 Bentham, Introduction, 13. 26 Bentham, Introduction, 13. 27 Bentham, Introduction, 289, 284. 28 Bentham, Introduction, 284. 29 I am unable to recover the source of this quotation. 30 Parekh, Bentham’s Political Thought, 95, quoting an unpublished manuscript, see also “Deontology,” in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Deontology Together with a Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism, ed. Amnon Goldworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 257–282. 31 Bentham, Introduction, 285, 289, see also “Fragment,” Comment, 440. 32 Bentham, Introduction, 293, my italics, see also J.R. Dinwiddy, “Bentham on Private Ethics,” Revue lnternationale de Philosophie, 141 (1982) 278–300, at 289, quoting an unpublished Bentham manuscript. 33 Bentham, Introduction, 285. 34 Bentham, Introduction, 284. 35 Bentham, Introduction, 292 n s. 36 Bentham, “Pannomial Fragments,” Works, III, 219. 37 Bentham, “Fragment,” Comment, 444–445, see also 491. 38 Bentham, “Fragment,” Comment, 484, my italics, see also 444–445, 487, 491. 39 Bentham, “Pannomial Fragments,” Works, III, 219. 40 Jeremy Bentham, Of Laws in General, ed. by H.L.A. Hart (London: Athlone Press, 1970), 70 n; see also Mack (1963: 231), quoting an unpublished manuscript. 41 Bentham, “Constitutional Code,” Works, IX, 330. 42 Bentham, “Constitutional Code,” Works, IX, 6, 53, 60–62, 67; “Plan of Parliamentary Reform,” Works, III, 453–455. 43 Bentham, “Book of Fallacies,” Works, II, 475. 44 Bentham, “Deontology,” Collected Works, 195.

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45 Bentham, “Constitutional Code,” Works, IX, 61, see also 5; “Book of Fallacies,” Works, II, 482; “Bentham’s Draught for the Organization of Judicial Establishments,” Works, IV, 375; Introduction, 155 n. 46 Bentham, “Plan of Parliamentary Reform,” Works, III, 455. 47 Bentham, “Manual of Political Economy,” Works, III, 33, see also 35, 48, where the context is economics, and “Principles of Judicial Procedure,” Works, II, 28, where it is not. 48 Bentham, “Constitutional Code,” Works, IX, 67, see also Introduction, 290. Bentham’s criterion of “propinquity” specifies that one is right to regard a distant pleasure as less valuable than an immediate one; the error that people like Esau make, presumably, is that they discount the future pleasure excessively. 49 Bentham, “Book of Fallacies,” Works, II, 477. 50 Bentham, “Fragment,” Comment, 496–497. My ellipsis drops the words “according to law,” since a footnote to this passage immediately adds that moral and religious sanctions create moral and religious duties in precisely the same way. 51 Bentham, “Fragment,” Comment, 496–497; “Defense of Usury,” Works, III, 24–28. 52 Bentham, “Pannomial Fragments,” Works, III, 217. 53 Bentham, “Nomography,” Works, III, 293, see also “Fragment,” Comment, 495; “A Table of the Springs of Action,” in Collected Works, 98; Of Laws, 136 n. 54 Bentham, Introduction, 284. Harrison argues persuasively that Bentham did not mean there is no obligation contrary to self-interest, but only that there is no use in discussing such obligation, since only an appeal to self-interest is likely to be heeded in the absence of sanctions; Bentham, 263–277. Harrison has citation to support his reading. Unfortunately, there are also contrary passages, as noted earlier. There is also instability about whether, to have an obligation, one must simply have a corresponding motive (among one’s many motives), or whether it must be the only or strongest of one’s motives. Bentham was slippery between singular and plural “motives(s)” as he was between singular and plural “interest(s).” Sometimes, he tried the notion of having “adequate” motives, although he was unclear about adequate for what; see Introduction, 284. The worst logical difficulty is that if ought implies can, and one can only do what one is motivated to do, then it is impossible to fail in any duty or obligation. The only test of what one can do is what one does. 55 Bentham, “Pannomial Fragments”, Works, III, 217, see also “Nomography,” Works, III, 293; and “Logic,” Works, VIII, 247. 56 Bentham, “Manual of Political Economy,” Works, III, 33. 57 Bentham, “Plan of Parliamentary Reform,” Works, III, 445, see also 450–455; and “Essay on Political Tactics,” Works, II, 301. That Bentham was nevertheless not an outright majoritarian but had regard for minorities is argued by Manning (1968: 104– 112) and Lea Campos Boralevi, Bentham and the Oppressed (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1984). 58 Bentham, “Constitutional Code,” Works, IX, 6. 59 Bentham, “Constitutional Code,” Works, IX, 6; see also “Leading Principles of a Constitutional Code,” Works, II, 269 n. 60 Bentham, “Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation,” Works, I, 194. 61 Bentham, “Anarchical Fallacies,” Works, II, 497. 62 Manning 1968: 21, quoting from an unpublished manuscript. 63 Bentham, Introduction, 74, see also 157. 64 Bentham “Constitutional Code,” Works, IX, 6–7, see also “Pauper Management Improved,” Works, VIII, 380. 65 Bentham, Introduction, 158, 34–37. See also “Principles of Penal Law,” Works, I, 533–534. 66 Bentham, “Principles of Penal Law,” Works, I, 569. 67 Bentham, “Principles of Penal Law,” Works, I, 580. 68 Bentham, “Memoirs of Bentham,” Works, X, 226; “Panopticon,” Works, IV, 39.

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69 Bentham, “Of Promulgation of the Laws,” Works, I, 161, see also “Principles of Penal Law,” Works, I, 568. 70 Bentham, “Principles of Penal Law,” Works, I, 411. 71 Bentham, Introduction, 283. 72 Bentham, Introduction, 68, see also Steintrager 1977: 109, quoting an unpublished manuscript. 73 Bentham, “Panopticon,” Works, IV, 64. 74 Bentham, “Fragment,” Comment, 511; “Bentham’s Draught,” Works, IV, 406. 75 Bentham, Introduction, 183; “Principles of Penal Law,” Works, I, 568. 76 Bentham, “Principles of Penal Law,” Works, I, 561. 77 Bentham, “Principles of Penal Law,” Works, I, 563. 78 Bentham, “Deontology,” Collected Works, 203, 197. There are stronger passages in the Bowring version of the Deontology, but its authenticity is in doubt; e.g. Deontology, ed. by John Bowring (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Browne, Green, & Longman, 1834), I, 97–98, 100–101, 166–168. 79 Herzog 1985: 161–217. Plamenatz suggests, in effect, that Herzog need not have searched farther than Bentham himself, since Bentham excelled precisely at such practical, concrete analyses of particular policy issues, by contrast with his “neglect of difficulties, psychological and philosophical, of which he seems scarcely aware, and the confusions and ambiguities of which he is so often guilty when discussing first principles” (Plamenatz, 1949: 59). Plamenatz still believes, however, that Bentham had some potentially coherent first principles to apply to policy questions.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Everett, C.W. 1931. The Education of Jeremy Bentham. New York: Columbia University Press. Halevy, Élie. 1960. The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris. Boston: Beacon Press. Harrison, Ross. 1983. Bentham. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Herzog, Don. 1985. Without Foundations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lyons, David. 1973. In the Interest of the Governed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mack, Mary Peter. 1963. Jeremy Bentham: An Odyssey of Ideas. New York: Columbia University Press. Manning, D.J. 1968. The Mind of Jeremy Bentham. London: Longmans, Green. Plamenatz, John. 1965. Man and Society, 3 vols. New York: McGraw-Hill. Plamenatz, John. 1949. The English Utilitarians. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sidgwick, Henry. 1874. Methods of Ethics. London: Macmillan. Steintrager, James. 1977. Bentham. London: George Allen & Unwin. Wolin, Sheldon S. 1960. Politics and Vision. Boston: Little, Brown.

4 OBLIGATION AND CONSENT (1965–1966)1

One might suppose that if political theorists are by now clear about anything at all, they should be clear about the problem of political obligation and the solution to it most commonly offered, the doctrine of consent. The greatest modern political theorists took up this problem and formulated this answer. The resulting theories are deeply imbedded in our American political tradition; as a consequence we are already taught a sort of rudimentary consent theory in high school. And yet I want to suggest that we are not even now clear on what “the problem of political obligation” is, what sorts of “answers” are appropriate to it, what the consent answer really says, or whether it is a satisfactory answer. This essay is designed to point up the extent of our confusion, to explore some of the ground anew as best it can, and to invite further effort by others. That such effort is worthwhile, that such political theory is still worth considering and that it can be made genuinely relevant to our world, are the assumptions on which this essay rests and the larger message it is meant to convey.

The problem of political obligation The difficulties begin with the formulation of the problem itself. What exactly is the “problem of political obligation”? It is characteristic that we take it for granted there is a single problem to be defined here, and that nevertheless a dozen different formulations clamor for our attention. The classical theorists on the subject have treated it in varying ways; and even within the writings of Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau it is difficult to say what the theorist’s “basic problem” is, or indeed whether he has one. We tend, I think, to suppose that it does not matter very much how you phrase the problem, that the different formulations boil down to the same thing. But my first point will be that this attitude of arbitrariness or indifference should not be trusted. It is not, in fact, true that any formulation of the

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problem is equivalent to any other. Rather, this supposed single problem is a whole cluster of different questions—questions of quite various kind and scope. And though their answers may turn out to be related, so that an answer to one provides answers to the others also, it is by no means obvious that this must be so. Specifically, I suggest that most of the familiar answers to the problem are satisfactory responses to some of its questions but not to others, and that the answer adopted depends a good deal on the question stressed. For the purposes of this essay it will be useful to distinguish four questions, or rather, four clusters of questions, all of which are part of what bothers theorists about political obligation.2 They range from a relatively concrete and practical political concern with what is to be done, through increasing theoretical abstractness, to a philosophical concern with the meanings of concepts and the paradoxes that arise out of them. Because we are used to treating them all as different versions of one problem, the reader may not at first see any significant differences among them; but the differences should emerge in the course of the discussion. We are told often enough that the theorists of political obligation were not merely philosophers, but also practical men writing about the political needs of their times. They produced: not simply academic treatises, but essays in advocacy, adapted to the urgencies of a particular situation. Men rarely question the legitimacy of established authority when all is going well; the problem of political obligation is urgent when the state is sick, when someone is seriously contemplating disobedience or revolt on principle. (Benn and Peters 1959: 299) Thus we may begin with a cluster of questions centered around the limits of political obligation, the more or less practical concern with when, under what circumstances, resistance or revolution is justified. The theorist wants to promote or prevent a revolution, or he lives in a time when one is taking place, or he contemplates one in the recent past. So he seeks some fairly general, but still practically applicable principles to guide a man in deciding when (if ever) political obligation ends or ceases to bind. They must have a certain degree of generality in order to be principles rather than ad hoc considerations in one particular situation, in order to be recognized by us as theory. But they are also fairly directly tied to what Tussman has called the question “what should I do?” (Tussman 1960: 12). They are guidelines to action. At other times the same practical concern tends to take a slightly different form: “Whom am I obligated to obey? Which of the persons (or groups) claiming to command me actually has authority to do so?” Put this second way, the problem seems to be one of rival authorities, sometimes identified in political theory as the problem of the locus of sovereignty. The former question tends to arise in situations of potential civil disobedience or nascent revolution, where the individual is

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relatively alone in his confrontation of a government. The latter question is more likely to come up in situations of civil war or when a revolution is more advanced, when the individual is already confronted by two “sides” between which he must choose. But as the theorist tries to formulate general principles to guide such a choice, he may be led to a more abstract version of his problem. He may be struck by the seeming arbitrariness or conventionality of human authority: how is it that some men have the right to command, and others are obligated to obey? And so the theorist looks for the general difference between legitimate authority on the one hand, and illegitimate, naked coercive force on the other. He begins to wonder whether there is really any difference in principle between a legitimate government and a highway robber, pirate, or slave-owner. He begins to suspect that terms like “legitimate,” “authority,” “obligation” may be parts of an elaborate social swindle, used to clothe those highway robbers who have the approval of society with a deceptive mantle of moralistic sanctity. Essentially, he begins to ask whether men are ever truly obligated to obey, or only coerced. “Strength is a physical attribute,” says Rousseau: and I fail to see how any moral sanction can attach to its effects. To yield to the strong is an act of necessity, not of will. At most it is the result of a dictate of prudence. How, then, can it become a duty? (Rousseau 1960: Bk. I, iii) Such questions are no longer merely guides to action; they are attempts to describe and classify parts of the social world. Instead of focusing on the individual’s “what should I do?” they focus outward, on the (real or alleged) authority: “what is legitimate authority like?” Finally, behind even this more abstract question, lies what is essentially a philosophical problem, a cluster of questions centering around the justification of obligation: why are you obligated to obey even a legitimate government? Why is anyone ever obligated to obey any authority at all? How can such a thing be rationalized, explained, defended, justified? What can account for the binding nature of valid law and legitimate authority? I call these questions philosophical problems because they no longer seek distinctions or guides to action, but arise out of puzzlement over the nature of law, government, obligation as such. They are categorical questions to which the theorist is led, characteristically, after an extended abstract contemplation of the concepts he has been using. They are reminiscent of other philosophical puzzles, like “do we ever really know anything?” or “do other people really exist?” We have, then, four clusters of questions, any or all of which are sometimes taken to define the problem of political obligation: 1. 2.

The limits of obligation (“When are you obligated to obey, and when not?”) The locus of sovereignty (“Whom are you obligated to obey?”)

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3. 4.

The difference between legitimate authority and mere coercion (“Is there really any difference; are you ever really obligated?”) The justification of obligation (“Why are you ever obligated to obey even a legitimate authority?”)

Obviously the answers to these questions may be connected. If, for example, one answers question three in terms of the reductionist realism of a Thrasymachus or of vulgar Marxism: “there is no difference,” then the other questions become essentially irrelevant. But we should not take it for granted that any answer to one of these questions will automatically provide consistent answers to the rest; we should look to see how familiar answers in fact perform. Our prime interest is, of course, the consent answer, but before examining it, we might look briefly at very abstract, idealtypicalized versions of some of its major rivals. Their brief treatment here would not allow, and is not meant to be a balanced assessment of their merits. It is meant only to explore a little of the complexity of political obligation, and the difficulty of providing a consistent treatment of it. Theories of Divine Right or the will of God, for example, seem much better designed to cope with some of our questions than with others. Saying, with St. Paul, that “the powers that be are ordained of God,” seems a decisive answer (at least for a believer) to our question four. Granted only that there is a God (in the full sense of the word), the fact that he commands certain actions is surely a decisive justification for our obligation to perform them. But applied to our other questions the doctrine is ambiguous. Taken one way, it seems to imply that there is no difference between mere coercive force and legitimate authority, since all power comes from God. Then resistance is never justified, even against a heretical ruler probable who attacks religion. For times when power is in flux, as in cases of civil war, this version of the theory seems to provide very little guidance for action. Taking the doctrine a different way, some divine right theorists have wanted to argue that there is nevertheless a distinction to be made between divinely ordained power and illegitimate power, and that there are times when certain kinds of power must be resisted. Prescription, another familiar response to the problem of obligation, seems more directly designed to give an unequivocal answer to questions one and perhaps three. It teaches that old, established power is legitimate in every case, and there are no limits on our obligation to obey it. But this again is no guide in times of successful revolution; is it obedience or counterrevolution that is then required? And what of occasions when an old, established government begins to act in new and tyrannical ways? Even Burke was sympathetic to the American Revolution. Further, this doctrine has real difficulties with our question four; a government’s age, and our habitual obedience to it, do not seem to justify an obligation to obey. At most the connection can only be made through a number of additional assumptions concerning human reason and the nature of society, and adding up to the thesis that old, accepted government is most likely to be good government. A third, equally well known response to our problem, that of Utilitarianism, is perhaps an even better illustration of the complexities involved. The Utilitarian

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theorist argues that you are obligated to obey if and only if the consequences of obedience will be best on the whole, in terms of a calculus of pains and pleasures. There are, of course, familiar difficulties over the manner of calculation and whether all pains and pleasures are to count equally. But even beyond these, there is a fundamental question left unclear, namely, whose pains and pleasures are to count: your own personal ones, or those of the (majority of) people in your society. Bentham himself says that it is “allowable to, if not incumbent on every man . . . to enter into measures of resistance . . . when the mischiefs of resistance (speaking with respect to the community in general) appear less to him than the probable mischiefs of obedience.”3 But the phrase in the parentheses is of course the crux of the matter. The Utilitarians are notoriously inconsistent on precisely this point saying one thing when they speak of personal ethics and personal decision, and quite another on the subject of legislation and public policy. . . . 4 The theorist founding political obligation in consent responds to our four questions in this way: you are obligated to obey if and only if you have consented. Thus your consent defines the limits of your obligation as well as the person or persons to whom it is owed. Legitimate authority is distinguished from mere coercive power precisely by the consent of those subject to it. And the justification for your obligation to obey is your own consent to it; because you have agreed, it is right for you to have an obligation. But the seeming harmonious simplicity of these answers is deceptive; when consent theory is worked out in detail, its answers to some of our questions begin to interfere with its answers to others. In the first place, there is the problem of exactly whose consent is to count. We have all known, at least since Hume—if it was not already obvious before him—that the historical origins of society are essentially irrelevant to the consent argument. The consent of our ancestors does not settle the problem about our obligation today. Or rather, someone who seriously argues that the consent of our ancestors does settle this problem, is arguing more from prescription than from consent, and is probably not very troubled about political obligation anyway. But even if it is the consent of those now subject to power (or authority) that matters, there are still several alternatives: is it to be the individual’s personal consent that determines his obligation, or the consent of all (or most) of those subject to the government? And is it to be his or their present consent, or consent given in the past? Let us consider the possibilities. (1) You are obligated only insofar as you personally consent right now. Where your consenting ends, there ends also your obligation. What this presumably means is that as long as you accept the government it is wrong for you to disobey it, and right for it to punish any disobedience by you. But as soon as you withdraw your consent, you become free to disobey, and no attempt to punish you can be justified. This doctrine would have the peculiar consequence that you can never violate your obligation; for as soon as you decide the time has come for revolution (withdraw your consent), your obligation disappears. It also means that you can never be mistaken about your obligation, for what you think defines it. This answer comes

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to much the same thing as individualistic Utilitarianism, except that it demands no rational calculation, looking to your will rather than to your welfare. (2) You are obligated only insofar as you personally have in the past consented. This is closer to traditional contract theory. You gave your word, and so you are bound for the future, unless (of course) the government changes and becomes tyrannical. But this position seems to allow the possibility of becoming obligated to a tyrannical government, if you expressly consent to one that was already corrupt. One can avoid that problem by saying such promises are invalid, that you cannot expressly consent to become a slave; but then the argument is already moving away from a consent theory. Then your obligation is no longer merely a matter of your having consented (tried to consent, intended to consent). Further, there seems to be a real problem about why and whether your past promise should bind you now. The classical contract theorists provide a law of nature to take care of this difficulty: it is a law of nature that promises oblige. But why should it seem so obvious and “natural” and self-evident that your promises oblige you, when it is so doubtful and problematic and un-“natural” that law and authority oblige you? (3) You are obligated only insofar as your fellow-subjects consent. One consequence of this position is that the matter is no longer left up to you; you can sometimes be obligated to obey even against your will and your private judgment, and without ever having consented or been consulted. But, if so, how many of your fellow-subjects must consent? All? That is surely impossible. A majority? But that implies that the way to decide whether you are obligated, or whether you should start a revolution, is to take a public opinion poll. And can majorities never be wrong? Are there no occasions in the history of mankind when it was right for a dedicated minority to begin agitating for a revolution, or even to lead or make a revolution? And finally, why should what the majority (or any other proportion) of your fellow-subjects think be binding on you? What justification is there for that? Why should that obligation seem more basic or natural or self-evident than the obligation to obey laws and authority? Because you have consented to majority rule? But then the whole cycle of difficulties begins again. Besides the matter of whose consent is to count, consent theory is also much troubled by the difficulty of showing that you, or a majority of your fellow-citizens (as the case may be), have in fact consented. Most of us have not signed any contract with our government or our society or our fellow-citizens. There is no such contract for us to sign. And while we political theorists may be enlightened about our obligations, we realize that the largest proportion of our fellow-citizens has never contemplated this sort of question at all. If they have consented, it comes as news to most of them. Of course, these facts need not invalidate the consent argument. Perhaps most of us are not really obligated in modern, apathetic mass society; perhaps our government is not really legitimate. But such conclusions seem to fly in the face of common sense. Surely, one feels, if the present government of the United States is not a legitimate authority, no government has ever been. And surely it is absurd to adopt a theory according to which only those people who are

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most educated and aware of their obligations, most moral and sensitive, are obligated to obey the law. Surely it is absurd to suppose that all the rest are free to do whatever they please, whatever they can get away with. A more common move at this stage in the argument is the introduction of some notion of “tacit consent,” demonstrating that even the unaware masses have consented after all. But it appears to be extremely difficult to formulate a notion of tacit consent strong enough to create the required obligation, yet not so strong as to destroy the very substance and meaning of consent. Let us now examine in more detail how these difficulties are encountered and treated in . . . the most famous [consent argument], made by John Locke.5 What should emerge from a review of [his] argument is a somewhat unexpected and different doctrine of political obligation: perhaps a new interpretation of consent theory, perhaps a new rival to it.

Locke on consent Locke tells us in the preface to his Two Treatises that he wants both to “make good” the title of William III to the English throne “in the consent of the People” and also “to justifie to the World, the People of England, whose love of their Just and Natural Rights, with their Resolution to preserve them, saved the Nation when it was on the very brink of Slavery and Ruine” (Locke 1960: 155).6 Apart from the exegetic problems of how much of the Treatises may have been written before the Glorious Revolution and for quite other purposes, the thrust of Locke’s argument makes clear enough that this dual orientation does pervade the work.7 He seeks both to defend the obligation to obey legitimate authority (which is authority based on consent), and to defend the right to resist coercive force in the absence of authority. But Locke moves easily, and seemingly without awareness, from one to another of our four questions about obligation and back again. Often when the going gets difficult on one, he switches to another. Legitimate authority, for Locke, comes from the consent of those subject to it, never from mere conquest (force); and even a consent extracted by coercion is invalid (Second Treatise §176). Thus the limits of a government’s authority are defined by the social contract on which it is based. Strictly speaking, of course, Locke’s contract sets up society, and government is established by society as a trust (Second Treatise §§132, 149, 199, 211). There is no contract with the government. But the government gets its powers (in trust) from “the society,” acting by majority vote. And “the society” has only such powers to give, as it has itself received from the separate contracting individuals. Thus, even for Locke, it is the contract which ultimately determines what powers the government can have. He himself makes this assumption and I shall follow suit, since it simplifies the argument.8 Although Locke sometimes seems to take contract seriously as an account of the historical origins of society, he is nevertheless quite explicit about the requirement that no person is obligated to obey today unless he has himself consented (Second Treatise §116). Most of us have not consented expressly? Ah, but there is tacit

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consent, and its scope turns out to be very wide indeed. Although a father may not consent for his son, he can make consent to the community a condition on inheritance of the property he leaves behind; then in accepting the property the son tacitly consents to obey the government (Second Treatise §116; also §73). But the final definition of tacit consent is even wider, for land is not the only form of property, and property not the only form of right that men enjoy: Every man that hath any possession or enjoyment of any part of the dominions of any government doth thereby give his tacit consent, and is as far forth obliged to obedience to the laws of that government, during such enjoyment, as any one under it, whether this his possession be of land to him and his heirs forever, or a lodging only for a week; or whether it be barely traveling freely on the highway; and, in effect, it reaches as far as the very being of anyone within the territories of that government. (Second Treatise §119) Just as Locke maintained earlier in the Treatise that men have tacitly consented to all inequalities in property, simply by accepting and using money as a medium of exchange, so in the political realm he argues that men have tacitly consented to obey a government, simply by remaining within its territory.9 But now there no longer seems to be much power in the concept of consent, nor any difference between legitimate government and mere coercion. Being within the territory of the worst tyranny in the world seems to constitute tacit consent to it and create an obligation to obey it. Only physical withdrawal—emigration—and the abandoning of all property frees you from that obligation; there is no such thing as tacit dissent. At this point we are likely to feel cheated by Locke’s argument: why all the stress on consent if it is to include everything we do; why go through the whole social contract argument if it turns out in the end that everyone is automatically obligated? It seems that in his eagerness to save the consent answer to our question four (because only your own consent can justify your obligation), Locke has been forced so to widen the definition of consent as to make it almost unrecognizable. He has been forced to abandon his answers to our other questions as well as one of his own initial purposes: the justification of an (occasional) right of revolution. But clearly this is not Locke’s real position. I have developed it this way only because the corrections we must now make are so revealing about consent theory. For despite his doctrine of tacit consent, Locke does not want to abandon either the right of revolution or the distinction between legitimate authority and coercive power. His position is not, in fact, that living within the territory of a tyrannical government or holding property under it constitutes tacit consent to it. Suppose that we ask: to what have you consented when you live in a country and use its highways? Unfortunately, Locke is less than clear on this question. What he says explicitly in the crucial section on tacit consent is that you have “consented,” period; he does not say to what (Second Treatise §119). But apparently, what you consent to is a kind of associate membership in the commonwealth. Full

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membership, achieved only by express consent, is an indissoluble bond for life. The obligation of a tacit consenter, however, terminates if he leaves the country and gives up his property there (Second Treatise §§119, 121). Locke also variously describes tacit consent as a joining oneself to a society, putting oneself under a commonwealth and submitting to a government. Sometimes he simply equates its “joining up” aspects with submission to a government; at other times he regards submission as an immediate consequence of joining (Second Treatise §§73, 119, 120). But in the context of the problems we have encountered, a better interpretation of Locke’s intention here would be this: what you consent to tacitly is the terms of the original contract which the founders of the commonwealth made, no more and no less. You append your “signature,” as it were, to the original “document.” Then if you live or use the roads or hold property under a government which is violating its trust, exceeding its authority, taking property without due compensation, “altering the legislative,” or generally acting in a tyrannical manner, you have consented to none of these things. You are not obligated to obey one inch beyond the limits of the original contract, any more than its original signatories were. You retain the right of revolution, as they did, in case the government oversteps the limits of its authority. So we seem to be led to the position that you are obligated to obey not really because you have consented; your consent is virtually automatic. Rather, you are obligated to obey because of certain characteristics of the government—that it is acting within the bounds of a trusteeship based on an original contract. And here it seems to me that interpreters of Locke have given far too little attention to the degree to which he regards the terms of the original contract as inevitably determined. In truth, the original contract could not have read any otherwise than it did, and the powers it gave and limits it placed can be logically deduced from the laws of nature and conditions in the state of nature. Not only does Locke himself confidently deduce them in this way, sure that he can tell us what the terms of that original contract were, must have been; but he says explicitly that they could not have been otherwise. For men had to give up sufficient of their rights to make an effective government possible, to allow a government to remedy the “inconveniences” of the state of nature. Nothing short of this would create a society, a government. “There, and there only, is political society, where every one of the members” has given up the powers necessary to a society (Second Treatise §87): “Whosoever therefore out of a state of nature unite into a community, must be understood to give up all the power necessary to the needs for which they unite into society . . .” (Second Treatise §99). More power than this, on the other hand, men cannot be supposed to have given; and, indeed, they are forbidden by the law of nature to give more. When the limits of authority are to be defined, Locke invokes the purpose for which the contract was made, the intention which those making it must have had: But though men when they enter into society give up the equality, liberty and executive power they had in the state of nature into the hands of the society,

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to be so far disposed of by the legislative as the good of society shall require, yet it being only with an intention in everyone the better to preserve himself, his liberty and his property (for no rational creature can be supposed to change his condition with an intention to the worse), the power of the society or legislative constituted by them can never be supposed to extend farther than the common good, but is obliged to secure everyone’s property by providing against those three defects above-mentioned that made the state of nature so unsafe and uneasy. (Second Treatise §131, italics mine; see also §§90, 135, 137, 149, 164) Thus men cannot sell themselves into slavery “for nobody has an absolute arbitrary power over himself” to give to another; he “cannot subject himself to the arbitrary power of an other” (Second Treatise §§135, 23). Arbitrary or absolute power can never be legitimate, consented to, because “God and Nature” do not allow “a man so to abandon himself as to neglect his own preservation” (Second Treatise §§90, 168). “Thus,” says Locke, “the law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others” (Second Treatise §135, see also §142). If the terms of the original contract are, as I am arguing, “self-evident” truths to Locke, which could not be or have been otherwise, then the historical veracity of the contract theory becomes in a new and more profound sense irrelevant. For now the Lockean doctrine becomes this: your personal consent is essentially irrelevant to your obligation to obey, or its absence. Your obligation to obey depends on the character of the government—whether it is acting within the bounds of the (only possible) contract. If it is, and you are in its territory, you must obey. If it is not, then no amount of personal consent from you, no matter how explicit, can create an obligation to obey it. No matter how often you pledge allegiance to a tyranny, those pledges cannot constitute a valid obligation, because they violate the law of nature. So, not only is your personal consent irrelevant, but it actually no longer matters whether this government or any government was really founded by a group of men deciding to leave the state of nature by means of a contract. As long as a government’s actions are within the bounds of what such a contract hypothetically would have provided, would have had to provide, those living within its territory must obey. This is the true significance of what we have all learned to say in political theory: that the historical accuracy of the contract doctrine is basically irrelevant—that the contract is a logical construct. The only “consent” that is relevant is the hypothetical consent imputed to hypothetical, timeless, abstract, rational men. Locke’s argument, then, lead[s] us to a somewhat surprising new doctrine: that your obligation to obey depends not on any special relationship (consent) between you and your government, but on the nature of that government itself. If it is a good, just government doing what a government should, then you must obey it; if it is a tyrannical, unjust government trying to do what no government should, then you have no such obligation. In one sense this “nature of the government” theory is thus a substitute for the doctrine of consent. But it may also be regarded as a new interpretation of consent theory, what we may call the doctrine of hypothetical

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consent. For a legitimate government, a true authority, one whose subjects are obligated to obey it, emerges as being one to which they ought to consent (Benn and Peters 1959: 323, 329), quite apart from whether they have done so. Legitimate government acts within the limits of the authority rational men would, abstractly and hypothetically, have to give a government they are founding. Legitimate government is government which deserves consent. I do not mean to suggest that the “nature of the government” theory which thus emerges is really Locke’s secret doctrine, which [he hides] from the casual reader and which has only now been unearthed. Probably [he didn’t see] that his argument was moving in this direction. Rather I suggest that this theory is a better response to the problem of political obligation from [his] own premises—that it is the truth toward which [he was] striving, but which [he] saw only indistinctly. Only in that sense is it “what [he] really meant to say,” and of course [he] also say [s] other things incompatible with it . . .

The theory applied Our new doctrine seems most obviously satisfactory as a response to question three, concerning the difference between legitimate authority and mere coercion. For it teaches that legitimate authority is precisely that which ought to be obeyed, to which one ought to consent, which deserves obedience and consent, to which rational men considering all relevant facts and issues would consent, to which consent can be justified. Anything or anyone else who tries to command us is then merely coercing, and is not entitled to our obedience. This answer to the question is essentially what Wittgenstein calls a “point of grammar”; it reminds us of the way concepts like “authority,” “legitimacy,” “law” are related in our language (and therefore in our world) to concepts like “consent” and “obedience” (Wittgenstein 1953; see also Cavell 1961: esp. ch. 1). To call something a legitimate authority is normally to imply that it ought to be obeyed. You cannot, without further rather elaborate explanation, maintain simultaneously both that this government has legitimate authority over you and that you have no obligation to obey it. Thus if you say that you consent to it (recognize it as an authority), that statement itself is normally a recognition of the obligation to obey, at least at the moment it is uttered. Part of what “authority” means is that those subject to it are obligated to obey. As an answer to question three, then, this doctrine tells us (something about) what legitimate authority is by reminding us of something about what “legitimate authority” means. But of course that is not yet to provide criteria for telling apart the two species—legitimate authority and mere coercion—when you encounter them in reality. Thus, insofar as our real need is for a practical way of deciding whether to obey or resist this government right now, or which of two rival authorities to follow, our new theory seems less inadequate. Its response to our question three does not seem immediately helpful with questions one and two; and surely those are of the most concern to real people confronted with decisions about action. It just does

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not seem very helpful to tell a man considering resistance to authority: you must obey if the government is such that you ought to obey. But neither is traditional consent theory very helpful to this man; indeed, one of its weaknesses has always been this matter of detailed application. Perhaps it is even a mistake to assume that a theory of political obligation is supposed to tell a man directly what to do in particular cases (see, for example, Macdonald 1960). One might argue, however, that such a theory should at least tell him what sorts of considerations are relevant to his decision, direct his attention and tell him where to look.10 And in that regard, I suggest that traditional consent theory is defective, for it directs such a man’s attention to the wrong place. It teaches him to look at himself (for his own consent) or at the people around him (for theirs), rather than at the merits of the government. Where it demands obedience, consent theory does so on the grounds that he or the majority have consented; where it justifies resistance, it does so on the grounds that consent was never given or has been exceeded. Thus the man who must choose is directed to the question: have I (we) consented to this? The new doctrine formulated in this essay seems at least to have the virtue of pointing such a man in the right direction. For it tells him: look to the nature of the government—its characteristics, structure, activities, functioning. This is not much of a guide, but it is a beginning much more usefully related to what men need to think about when they make such choices. Let us consider seriously what sorts of things people really think about when they confront a genuine decision about obedience and resistance, and what sorts of things they ought to think about. But anyone who undertakes to do that is immediately overwhelmed by the complexity and multiplicity of what seems relevant, and by the many different imaginable cases. We need to consider a list of specific cases at least as diverse as these: Socrates, as presented in the Crito and the Apology. An ordinary criminal. An American student engaging in civil disobedience. Mississippi Negro who decides to join a revolutionary group. South African Negro who decides to join a revolutionary group. Minor official in Nazi Germany, who continues to carry out his functions. Even a brief review of such cases teaches at least this much: the occasions for contemplating and possibly engaging in disobedience are extremely varied; and a great many kinds of non-obedience are available, from flight through crime to attempted revolution.11 Some forms of non-obedience are violent, others not; some are personal and others organized; some are isolated actions and others a systematic program of action; some are directed against a particular law or decree and others against an entire system of government. To a person confronted with a real decision about resistance or obedience, it makes an enormous difference what kind of action is contemplated. Circumstances that may justify escape or isolated

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refusal to obey a particular law may not suffice to justify revolution; indeed, some forms of resistance (like civil disobedience) may even be provided for within a political system. Next, we may notice that all of our examples are, or could reasonably be, people in conflict. Socrates may never have been in doubt as to what he would do, but his friends certainly disagreed with him at first; and he cast his own argument in the form of a confrontation between the desire “to play truant” and the admonitions of the laws. All of our examples (with the exception of the criminal?) might have good, serious reasons for resistance. None of them ought to feel entirely free to pursue those reasons without first weighing them against something else—his prima facie obligation to obey. One might say: all these men ought to feel a certain tie to their governments, their societies, in the sense in which Socrates feels such a tie, but some of them might nevertheless be justified in disobeying or resisting. That he does not sufficiently feel such a tie, that he has no (good) reason, no justification for disobedience, is precisely what makes the case of an “ordinary” criminal different from the rest. This is at least in accord with the formula offered by our new theory: normally law, authority, government are to be obeyed and resistance requires justification. You are not morally free to resist as a matter of whim. The real person confronted by a problematic situation about obedience needs to know that, but he obviously needs to know much more. He needs to know much more specifically when resistance is justified and what might count as a justification. Does he learn this by thinking about his own past consent or that of his fellow-citizens, as traditional consent theory would suggest? Or does he learn it by assessing the nature and quality of the government? Our cases of potential disobedience show an interesting division in this respect. Three of them—the student and the two Negroes—seem quite unlikely to think much about their own past consent—when and whether they consented, how often and how seriously, expressly or tacitly, and so on. What they are likely to think about is the “outrageous” conduct and “oppressive,” “unjust” structure of the government, and of the possible consequences of resistance. The criminal (since we have defined him as “ordinary”) is not likely to think about either obligations to obey or justifications for his action. The Nazi might well cite his consent to the Fuehrer, his oath of office, pledges of absolute obedience, and so on, as a justification for continued obedience despite “certain unpleasant government measures that perhaps ought not to have been taken.” And Socrates is passionately aware of his ties to the Athenian laws, the gratitude he owes them for past favors, the power of his past consent to them. Thus both Socrates and the Nazi do seem to look to past consent rather than to the nature of the government. But the significance of this fact has yet to be assessed; for on closer examination, each of their cases reveals an important weakness in traditional consent theory. From the case of the Nazi we can learn that even express consent may not be enough; and from that of Socrates, the difficulties of applying past consent as a guide to action.

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It might be tempting to say that of our six cases, only Socrates is truly moral, for only he thinks about his obligations and commitments to the laws. But the example of the Nazi saves us from this simplistic response, by showing that sometimes past promises and oaths are not enough to determine present obligations. Sometimes a man who cites even an express oath to obedience is being not admirable but hypocritical, refusing to recognize where his real duty lies. We would not want to say that past oaths and promises count for nothing, that they can be ignored at will. We all feel the power of the argument that you ought to be consistent, that it isn’t fair to pick up your marbles and go home just because it’s your turn to lose under the rules you have accepted so far. But that is partly because such a partisan assessment of the rules is likely to be biased. If you can in fact show that the rules are really unfair, then any time is a good time to change them. Again, normally rules and authorities are to be obeyed; when occasions for questioning this obligation arise, what is ultimately needed is an assessment of the rules or authorities. Mere reference to your “going along with them” in the past is not enough. No doubt if a man had no political obligation he could acquire one by a promise or contract. But that by no means proves that political obligation can be acquired only by promise or contract; it may be that a quite independent political obligation is sometimes reinforced by an oath to obey, at other times (partly) countered by a promise to resist. A personal past commitment to obey need not settle the matter. Indeed, the case of the Nazi calls attention to something traditional consent theory seems to have overlooked: the duty to resist. There are times in human history when men are not merely free(d) from an obligation to obey, but positively obligated to oppose the powers that be. The authors of the Declaration of Independence recognized this, despite their heavy reliance on Locke; for they saw resistance to tyranny not merely as man’s right but as his duty. Locke, and traditional consent theory in general, make no provision for such a duty, nor can it be easily accommodated within their framework. There is provision in Locke’s system for majority resistance to a tyrannical government, and a duty to follow such a majority. But individual resistance has a highly ambiguous status at best, and is certainly not a duty (Second Treatise §§121, 149, 168, 203–4, 208–9, 211–12, 220, 232, 240–3). For if political obligation arises from contract, the violation or overstepping of this contract leaves each individual free to do as he likes with regard to the tyranny. True, the individual is still then bound by natural law; but natural law does not command the punishment of offenders, it only permits it. And amending the Lockeian system on this score would obviously require fundamental changes in its individualistic presuppositions. Similarly, traditional consent theory teaches that at times of civil war or successful revolution, when an old authority structure collapses, each individual is free to place his consent anew wherever he wishes and thinks best for himself. If he thinks fit to follow a highway robber then he is free to do so. But when we contemplate real cases, would we not rather want to maintain that even in chaos

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there is responsibility, that even then the individual has some obligation to think of others as well as himself, the welfare of society or mankind as well as his own? It seems that insufficient attention has been given to the failure of traditional consent theory to provide for any obligation to resist, or any obligation to choose responsibly when new authorities must be chosen. Indeed, divine right, prescription and Utilitarianism can accommodate such obligations far more easily than a contract theory can. As for the “nature of the government” or “hypothetical consent” doctrine developed in this essay, it too would presumably require amendment on this score. An enlarged version might hold: your obligation is to obey what deserves obedience and consent, and to resist what deserves resistance and rejection (leaving the important possibility that many persons or agencies deserve neither obedience nor resistance). But it is not obvious to me whether the obligation to resist tyranny should be construed as a part of political obligation at all, or as an occasional alternative to it. The question seems related to that of whether revolution is a special part of political life or a breakdown of the political.

Justifying political obligation We come now to question four, the matter of justification: “why are you ever obligated to obey even legitimate authority?” Here again our “nature of the government” doctrine does not at first seem a very useful answer. For it can only say: because of the nature of the government, because the government is such that you ought to obey it and consent to it, because a rational man would do so. But that answer is not likely to still the question. For someone genuinely puzzled about obligation in this (philosophical) way is likely to persist: “how does that ‘ought’ bind me, why must I do what a rational man would do, what if I don’t want to be rational?” But the reader may have noticed by now that all of the theories and versions of theories we have considered are subject to this same difficulty to some extent. Some seem better designed to cope with it than others; yet we can always push the question further back: why must I do what God commands, why must I do what history teaches, why must I do what is best for me personally, why must I do what I have promised? Even traditional consent theory is liable to this difficulty; and it is remarkable that despite Hume’s early criticism, we continue to believe in consent theory while ignoring this problem. For Hume had already told the consent theorist: “You find yourself embarrassed when it is asked, Why we are bound to keep our word? Nor can you give any answer but what would, immediately, without any circuit, have accounted for our obligation to allegiance.”12 The obligation to keep one’s word is no more “natural” and self-evident and indubitable than political obligation itself; though either may sometimes reinforce the other, neither can give the other absolute justification. The two obligations are essentially separate and equal in status.13 Why, then, does the traditional consent theorist, so doubtful about the validity of political obligation, take the obligation of keeping contracts as obvious? Why, if he imagines a state of nature, is it always

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stripped of political authority but inevitably equipped with a natural law that dictates the keeping of one’s word? Hume uses these questions as a rhetorical device to attack consent theory, but they can also be taken seriously as a way of learning something more about the consent theorist. For a theorist does not choose his beliefs and his doubts. The traditional consent theorist simply finds himself in doubt about (the justification of, or limits of, or validity of ) political obligation; it just seems obvious to him that there is a problem about it. And he simply is not in doubt about promises or contracts; it just seems obvious to him that they oblige. At one level one can argue that both the consent theorist’s doubt and his assumption spring from the peculiar picture of man and society he seems to hold. If your picture of man in the abstract is of a man fully grown, complete with his own private needs, interests, feelings, desires, beliefs and values, and if you therefore never think about how he grew up and became the particular person he became, then he may well seem to you an ineluctably separate unit, his ties to other individuals may seem mysterious or illusory and will require explanation. Given man as such a separate, self-contained unit, it does indeed seem strange that he might have obligations not of his own choosing, perhaps even without being aware of them, or even against his will. Furthermore, self-assumed obligations may then strike you as a way of overcoming this separateness. For it is easy to confuse the fact that promises and contracts are self-assumed, with the idea that the obligation to keep them is self-assumed as well. That is, the person who makes a promise seems to recognize and commit himself to the institution of promises; the person who makes a contract seems to acknowledge thereby the binding character of contracts, so that a later refusal to accept them as binding strikes one as a kind of selfcontradiction. But of course this is a confusion. The making of particular promises or contracts presupposes the social institution of promising or contracts, and the obligation to keep promises cannot itself be founded on a promise. In truth, there is something profoundly wrong with the consent theorist’s picture of man. Every free, separate, adult, consenting individual was first shaped and molded by his parents and (as we say) society. It is only as a result of their influence that he becomes the particular person he does become, with his particular interests, values, desires, language and obligations. The only thing truly separate about us is our bodies; our selves are manifestly social. But surely even the consent theorist knows this, so the problem becomes why he nevertheless holds, or is held captive by, a different and peculiar picture. Could that picture be not so much the cause as the byproduct of his philosophical doubt? After all, consent theorists are not the only ones troubled about political obligation. Political theorists of other persuasions have also been led, or have led themselves sometimes to ask “why are you ever obligated to obey even legitimate authority?” But if none of the theories of political obligation is able to deal adequately with that question, it must be quite peculiar, not nearly as straightforward as it looks. Perhaps it is a question that cannot be fully answered in the ordinary way. But what sort of question is that; and if it cannot be answered, how should it be treated?

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Tussman rejects it as a symptom of “moral disorder”; I would suggest instead that it is a symptom of philosophical disorder, the product of a philosophical paradox. If so, it will not disappear—the theorist will not stop being bothered by it—unless we can show how and why it arises, why anyone should so much as suppose that political obligation in general needs (or can have) a general justification. But that would require a discussion of the nature of philosophical puzzlement far beyond the scope of this essay. What can be done here is something much more limited and less effective. Having suggested that the status of political obligation and of the obligation to keep promises is essentially the same—that neither is more “natural” than or can serve as an absolute justification for the other—we can approach our question four about political obligation by first pursuing a parallel question about promises. For in the area of promises some extremely useful work has been done in philosophy in recent years—work which can be applied to the problem of political obligation (see Austin 1961: chs 3, 6, 10; Rawls 1955: 3–32; Cavell 1964: 94–101). Philosophers have sometimes asked a question like our question four about promises: “why are you (ever) obligated to keep (any of) your promises (whatsoever); why do promises oblige?” This question, too, can be answered in terms of divine commandment or Utilitarian consequence, social or individual; and here, too, the answers are less than satisfactory. “God commands you to keep your word” is no answer to the nonbeliever, nor to someone heretical enough to demand proof of God’s will. The Utilitarian response tends to dissolve the obligation altogether, so that your duty is always to do what produces the best results, quite apart from whether you have made any promises on the subject. And, of course, a consent argument is out of the question here (“you have promised to keep your promises”?). What has been suggested by philosophers is this: “promise” is not just a word. Promising is a social practice, something we do, something children have to learn how to do. It has rules, penalties, roles and moves almost in the way that games have them. Children do not learn what a promise is by having one pointed out to them; they learn gradually about what it means to “make a promise,” “keep (or break) a promise,” “be unable to promise but certainly intend to try,” “have said something which, in the circumstances, amounted to a promise,” and so on. Promising is not just producing certain sounds (“I promise”), for a phonograph might make those sounds, or a man rehearsing a play, or a philosopher explaining the practice, yet none of these would actually be promising. Promising, rather, is taking on an obligation. That is, “to promise” does not mean “to make certain sounds,” but rather “to take on an obligation.” Now, of course, we do not always do what we have promised. Sometimes we act contrary to our obligations, and sometimes we are wholly or partly excused from performing what we had promised. If for example, keeping a promise would frustrate the purpose for which it was made, or would lead to great evil, or has become impossible, we may be excused from performing. So about any particular promise we have made it may sometimes be relevant to ask: am I still obligated to perform or not? That is, normally, in principle promises oblige; a promise is a certain kind of obligation. But sometimes, under certain

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circumstances, there is reason to question or withdraw or cancel that obligation in a particular case. In such circumstances we weigh the alternatives, the possible consequences of performance and failure to perform. But our obligations, including that of the promise, continue to be among the factors that must be weighed in the decision. The obligation of a promise does not simply disappear when there is occasion to question it; it only is sometimes outweighed. But philosophers are sometimes led to wonder categorically about all promises: do they oblige; what are the reasons pro and con; why am I ever obligated to keep any promise? And here, of course, there are no particular circumstances to weigh in the balance; the question is abstract and hypothetical. What sort of answer is possible to this question? First, that this is what a promise is, what “promise” means. A promise is a self-assumed obligation. If you assume an obligation and have not yet performed it, nor been excused from it, then you have an obligation; in much the same way as someone who puts on a coat, has a coat on (compare Cavell 1964: 96, 99). To ask why promises oblige is to ask why (self-assumed) obligations oblige. And to the question why obligations oblige the only possible answer would seem to be that this is what the words mean . . . Now the same line of reasoning can be applied to the question “why does even a legitimate government, a valid law, a genuine authority ever obligate me to obey?” As with promises, and as our new doctrine about political obligation suggests, we may say that this is what “legitimate government,” “valid law,” “genuine authority” mean. It is part of the concept, the meaning of “authority” that those subject to it are required to obey, that it has a right to command. It is part of the concept, the meaning of “law,” that those to whom it is applicable are obligated to obey it. As with promises, so with authority, government and law: there is a prima facie obligation involved in each, and normally you must perform it. Normally a man is not free to decide on Utilitarian grounds whether or not he will do a certain thing, if that thing happens to be against the law or required by law; he is not free to make a decision on his own the way he would be free where the law is silent. The existence of the law on this subject normally constitutes an obligation, just as having promised normally constitutes an obligation, so that one is not free to decide what to do just as if no promise had been made. (This is not, of course, to say that everything claiming to be law is law, that everyone claiming to have authority has it, that every statement alleged to be a promise is in fact one. It says only: if something is a promise, law, obligation, then normally it obliges.) This kind of response to question four is obviously almost the same as the one our doctrine of hypothetical consent yielded to question three: government and authority are concepts grammatically related to obligation and obedience. A legitimate government is one that you ought to obey and ought to consent to because that is what the words mean. But as before, this answer is likely to seem purely formal, and empty. It will not satisfy someone genuinely puzzled about the justification of political obligation . . . But if normally law and authority oblige and resistance requires justification, and if normally judgment is to some extent subordinated to that of the authorities, and

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if revolutionary situations are precisely the ones that are not normal in these respects, then the crucial question seems to be: who is to say? Who is to say what times are normal and what times are not, when resistance is justified or even obligatory? If we say “each individual must decide for himself,” we seem to deny the normally binding character of law and authority. If we say “society” or “the majority” or “the duly constituted authorities decide,” then we seem to deny the right to resist, since it may be the majority or the authorities themselves that need to be challenged. Yet these seem to be the only two alternatives. The matter is very difficult, though the question seems so simple. This essay will only briefly indicate a direction in which a solution might be sought. What needs to be said seems to be this: the decision both is and is not up to each individual. Each individual does and must ultimately decide for himself and is responsible for his decision; but he may make a wrong decision and thereby fail to perform his obligations. But then who is to say someone has made a wrong decision? Anyone can say, but not everyone who cares to say will judge correctly; he may be right or wrong. And who decides that? Each person decides for himself what to say and do; yet people sometimes speak and act in ways that are cowardly or cruel, thoughtless or irresponsible. And it is not merely up to the actor to assess his own action in this respect. Other people who want or need to assess the action may also do so; each of them will make a decision for which he bears responsibility, yet none of the decisions is absolutely definitive. The judge trying a would-be rebel makes a decision; the foreign onlooker asked to give money for a revolutionary cause makes a decision; the historian examining the record in a later generation makes a decision.14 Each of us who talks or thinks or acts with regard to the situation assesses it, and no theory or God or Party can get us off that hook. But that does not mean that all judgments are arbitrary or merely a matter of personal preference or whim. Some decisions are made arbitrarily or whimsically or selfishly or foolishly; others are made on principle, rationally, responsibly. These are ways or modes of deciding; none of them characterizes decision as such. And an individual’s decision does not become rational, responsible or right merely because he thinks it is, merely because he urgently wants it to be. What is ultimately needed here is a better understanding of the role played in our language and our lives by assessments like “he was right,” “he made a bad decision,” “he betrayed the cause,” and the like. Who is to say? I want to answer, each person who cares to, will say—not merely the one who acts, not merely his associates, not merely those in authority over him, not merely the detached historian or observer. No one has the last word because there is no last word. But in order to make that clear, one would have to say a great deal more about how language functions, and why we are so persistently inclined to suppose that there must be a last word.

Notes 1 This chapter presents a condensed version of a two-part article by the same title, appearing in the American Political Science Review in 1965 and 1966. Ellipses and brackets indicate textual changes; further editorial comments appear in footnotes (ed.).

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2 No doubt the problem encompasses more than these four questions, and could be divided up in a number of different ways. Indeed, some aspects of it not covered by these four questions will emerge in the course of this discussion. 3 Jeremy Bentham, Fragment on Government (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. IV, par. 21. 4 Pitkin’s brief exploration of Utilitarianism in the original article prefigures in some ways themes that she explores at greater length in “Slippery Bentham: some neglected cracks in the foundation of Utilitarianism (1990),” which is included as Chapter 3 of this volume. 5 Bracketed text here reflects the condensation of this article; Pitkin’s original included a detailed discussion of Joseph Tussman’s contract theory alongside Locke’s (ed.). 6 This source is more recently available as Locke 1988: 137 (ed.). 7 For a discussion of the evidence on when the Treatises were written, see Locke 1960: Introduction, esp. part III. (Reference available as Locke 1988 (ed.)) 8 For example, Second Treatise §171: “political power” is spoken of as that power which every man has “in the state of Nature given up into the hands of the society, and therein to the governors whom the society hath set over it self . . .” 9 “But since gold and silver, being little useful to the life of man, in proportion to food, raiment, and carriage, has its value only from the consent of men, whereof labour yet makes in great part the measure, it is plain that the consent of men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth . . .” Second Treatise §50. 10 This suggestion is advanced, against Miss Macdonald’s argument, in Benn and Peters 1959: 299–301. 11 Something like this point is suggested by Tussman 1960: 43. 12 David Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” in Sir Ernest Barker, ed., The Social Contract (New York: Oxford, 1960), p. 161. 13 This assertion is not about the relative claims that the two obligations—political obedience and promise-keeping—have on us, where they come into conflict. It seems obvious to me that no single, binding principle could be found to govern such a question. There are occasions when a vitally important promise is clearly a more important obligation than obedience to some minor law; on the other hand, the keeping of a minor promise is no excuse whatsoever for treason. But the assertion that the two obligations are separate and equal is not meant to bear on this question. It is meant only to say: there is no reason to suppose that promising is more “natural” or basic than obeying authority, and hence no reason to derive the latter from the former. 14 Thus not only citizens, but also bystanders and commentators may need to decide about a government. Their problems are not the same, to be sure. The citizen must decide whether to obey or resist; the bystander never had an obligation to obey, so he at most must decide whether or whom to assist; the commentator only makes a judgment. Therefore the evaluation of governments as to their legitimacy, their entitlement-to-be-obeyed-bytheir-subjects, is a topic that ranges beyond problems of political obligation.

References Austin, J.L. 1961. Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Benn, S.I. and R.S. Peters. 1959. Social Principles and the Democratic State. London: George Allen & Unwin. Cavell, S.L. 1961. “The Claim to Rationality.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University. Cavell, S.L. 1964. “Must We Mean What We Say?” in V.C. Chappell (ed.), Ordinary Language. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Locke, John. 1960. Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Locke, John. 1988. Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macdonald, Margaret. 1960. “The Language of Political Theory,” in A. Flew (ed.), Logic and Language: First Series. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 167–186. Rawls, John. 1955. Two Concepts of Rules. Philosophical Review LXIV: 3–32. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1960. “The Social Contract,” in Sir Ernest Barker (ed.), The Social Contract. New York: Oxford University Press. Tussman, Joseph. 1960. Obligation and the Body Politic. New York: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan.

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PART II

Judgment

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5 TWO SELECTIONS ON PLATO’S REPUBLIC FROM WITTGENSTEIN AND JUSTICE (1972)1

Justice: Socrates and Thrasymachus Let us begin by considering, in this chapter, the quarrel that Plato chronicles in the first book of the Republic between Socrates and the sophist Thrasymachus, about the central question of the whole dialogue: What is justice? Thrasymachus responds readily with the notorious contention that “justice is the interest of the stronger,” which he then elaborates to mean that in every society the norms and standards defining what is just and what is unjust are set by the ruling elite, the strongest group in society, acting in its own interest (Republic, 338c–339a). Socrates does not proffer his own answer until much later; when he does, he formulates it in several different, but related, ways. For our purposes, they might roughly be summarized as: “Justice is everyone having and doing what is appropriate to him” (Republic, 433a–434c).2 Socrates and Thrasymachus disagree fundamentally. Yet further reflection reveals that they disagree so fundamentally that they do not really disagree at all. Rather, they seem to be addressing and answering different questions, and their arguments never really meet. Socrates and Thrasymachus understand the question “What is justice?” in different ways. Each of them would insist that his understanding has to do with what “justice” itself really is, as distinct from mere verbal conventions or people’s ordinary, thoughtless assumptions. Yet one could accurately characterize the difference between them this way: Socrates answers the question as if it were about the meaning of the word “justice”; or at least, we can recognize his answer as a plausible definition. This is not true of Thrasymachus’ answer. He is not formulating a phrase more or less synonymous with the word “justice,” but making a kind of sociological observation about the things which people call “just” or “unjust.” The word “justice” does not mean “in the interest of the stronger,” and Thrasymachus is not suggesting that it might. Thrasymachus is trying to tell us something about the things or situations people say are “just.” Socrates, by contrast, is trying to tell us what people are saying about a thing when they call it “just,” what they are saying by calling it “just.”

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Of course, either Socrates or Thrasymachus might be wrong, even on his own level. The word “justice” might not mean anything like “each having and doing what is appropriate to him,” and people’s norms and standards of justice might not in fact be defined by any elite. But it is also possible, one feels, that they might both be right. That would be the case if people had been so brought up that they considered only those things to exemplify “each having and doing what is appropriate to him,” which were in fact in the interest of the stronger, the ruling elite in society. But is that an intelligible supposition? If people used the words “just” and “unjust” as Thrasymachus would, can those words then mean what Socrates says they do? These questions are not trivial, nor are their significance limited to ancient Greece. The dispute between Thrasymachus and Socrates has modern parallels central to political and social concerns. The modern versions, too, generate the feeling that both sides might have something important to say, but that their arguments do not fully meet. The most obvious modern successor to Thrasymachus is the Marxist doctrine of ideology as false consciousness. According to this doctrine, human culture is only a reflection, a superstructure on the economic base of a society; the accepted standards and values and meanings embodied in the culture are in fact a reflection of class interest. So what things people call “just” or “beautiful” or “good” are really determined by what is in the interest of the ruling class in any society. “The ruling ideas of each age have been the ideas of its ruling class” (Marx and Engels 1959: 26). Every ruling class suffers from a “selfish misconception” which “induces” it to “transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from” the modes of production and forms of property of that time (Marx and Engels 1959: 24). Like Thrasymachus, the Marxist teaches that what people call “just” is really only in the interest of the ruling class. But Socrates, too, reappears, for instance in the guise of Karl Barth, who maintains that no such debunking argument can destroy the ideas of justice, truth, beauty, or goodness—the ideas that people mean to talk about when they call things just, true, beautiful, or good. For: Whatever is meant by the idea of justice or of truth cannot be shaken by proving that what was taken for justice or truth in concrete cases was merely the precipitate of the political or economic advantage of some social class. Even if it can be shown that interests – those determined by personal relationships and those determined by class relationships – exercise an undeniable influence over what people consider as the measure of justice or truth; still, this dependence does not vitiate the fact that what the order considered just, was taken to be, was precisely a just order. (Barth 1945: 154; my translation) In other words, even if everything they consider just is really in the interest of the stronger, by calling it “just” they did not mean to say that it is in the interest of the stronger. Rather, they meant to invoke the (Socratic) idea of justice.

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Still another way to think of the quarrel between Socrates and Thrasymachus would be in relation to the dispute in jurisprudence between legal idealism and legal realism. The legal idealist maintains that the law is an ideal set of deductively systematic norms, together with decisions correctly derived from them. No unconstitutional “law” or inconsistent “judgment” can be part of it. The law, from this perspective, is what guides a judge in making correct decisions—a conception roughly parallel to the Socratic understanding of justice. The legal realist responds that this is a meaningless abstraction; the law is really whatever the judges say and decide—right or wrong, consistent or inconsistent. It is found by studying the behavior of judges; it is what guides their actual decisions. From this perspective, the law is what litigants and attorneys actually encounter in court—a conception roughly parallel to the Thrasymachean view of justice. The dispute is also reminiscent of certain basic methodological issues in social science. The Thrasymachean social scientist will argue, with Marx and Durkheim, that men’s ideas about themselves are not to be taken at face value. “Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself,” the science of society cannot understand a society “by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must rather be explained” itself (Marx 1959: 44). Social life is explained scientifically if it is explained “not by the notions of those who participate in it, but by more profound causes which are unperceived by consciousness.”3 The Socratic response is likely to be that human actions are understood only through the intentions and motives of the actors, in terms of the actors’ concepts and norms. This orientation will stress empathy and Verstehen as instruments in the study of man, a phenomenological rather than a behavioral approach. Each side is convinced it is right. Thus, for example, Ludwig Feuerbach argued that gods are really only human inventions, projections of our deepest values, hopes, and needs (Feuerbach 1957). A modern theologian is likely to respond that gods are nothing of the sort; “God” means something wholly different from that. “It is just muddleheaded to suppose that, when you say something about God what you ‘really mean’ is something about men” (Hudson 1968: 62). So the quarrel between Socrates and Thrasymachus seems to exemplify a pervasive and significant issue, and we would like to understand its nature.4 What are they disagreeing about? Words? Facts? Values? If indeed it is possible for them both to be right, why do they seem to be in conflict? How could one formulate a single, unified doctrine that would embrace both their truths simultaneously? I have found the questions here to be multiple and interrelated, and have been unable to treat them in as clear and orderly a fashion as I should have liked.

Meaning and application Someone fascinated with language might at first assume, as I once did, that Socrates and Thrasymachus disagree about the meaning of “justice,” so that their dispute could be authoritatively settled by a study of ancient Greek ordinary usage (and the modern parallel disputes, by English ordinary-language philosophy). Then the

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reason for their disagreement might be that they are using two different kinds of definitions. That idea finds support in Aristotle, who speaks in De Anima of two ways of defining terms, which sound very much like the two positions on justice. He distinguishes between physical definitions, used by natural scientists, and dialectical definitions, used by philosophers. Take the question, what is anger? The latter will say, a desire for retaliation, or something similar; the former, an effervescence of blood and heat about the heart. Of these, the natural scientist designates the matter, the dialectician the form or idea.5 Similarly, Aristotle says, if the question is, “what is a house?” the philosopher will answer, “a covering to prevent destruction from wind and rain and excessive heat,” while the natural scientist will say “stones and bricks and timber.” But Socrates and Thrasymachus are not proposing two rival definitions of “justice.” As we already observed, the word “justice” does not mean “in the interest of the stronger,” and Thrasymachus never suggests that it might. Nor, for that matter, would anyone define the word “house” as meaning “stones and bricks and timber,” not even a natural scientist (no more than a biologist would define “cell” as meaning “carbon and oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen”). Houses do consist of stones and timber, but that is not what the word “house” means. And although Thrasymachus is telling us something (true or false) about justice, he is not defining the word. The meaning of a word, we have said, is what one finds in a good dictionary—a word or phrase that can be substituted for it. The meaning of “justice” has to do with what people intend to convey in saying it, not with the features of the phenomena they say it about. Concerning the meaning of “justice,” Socrates is at least roughly right. But then what might Thrasymachus be right about? From the modern philosophical literature, one might here draw the distinction between “connotation” and “denotation,” and argue that Socrates is interested in the former, Thrasymachus in the latter.6 But that distinction is likely to be misleading and will not really help us here. For while one might argue that Thrasymachus is not interested in the connotation—that is, the meaning—of “justice,” one cannot argue that Socrates is uninterested in its denotation. If Socrates is right about what the word means, he is right both about connotation and about denotation; the word cannot then denote what Thrasymachus says it does. Perhaps, then, Thrasymachus is telling us something new about the phenomena we consider just, something which we had not noticed and which therefore is not part of our definition of “justice,” not part of what we mean when we call those phenomena just. That would make good sense if we consider examples of scientific discovery, where something genuinely new (or at least new to a particular culture) is learned about some class of phenomena. We discover that the earth is not flat but spherical, and in the process of assimilating this discovery our concept of “the earth” changes; the meaning of “the earth” changes. Wittgenstein calls our attention to “the fluctuation of scientific definitions: what today counts as an observed

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concomitant of a phenomenon will tomorrow be used to define it” (Wittgenstein 1968: §79). Thus it may seem that Thrasymachus has observed a hitherto unnoticed concomitant of the phenomena we call “just”: namely, that they are always in the interest of the ruling elite. He is proposing, as one commentator has put it, “an important generalization” based on “supposed facts of psychology and politics,” facts about the phenomena other people call “just.”7 Again one is tempted to say that, while Socrates is talking about the meaning of the word, Thrasymachus is talking about its application, how people apply it to the world, how they use it. But a Wittgensteinian perspective does not seem to permit the kind of dichotomy we have arrived at, between a word’s (Socratic) meaning and the (Thrasymachean) facts of its application or use. Wittgenstein teaches that for most purposes the meaning of a word is its use; that if we are conceptually puzzled about its meaning we should look at its use; that the meaning is learned from the use, is abstracted from it. If Wittgenstein is right about that, then surely Thrasymachus and Socrates must be addressing the same question after all, and they cannot both be ultimately right. We can think about the problem in terms of language-learning. Suppose that there were a society in which Thrasymachus’ thesis is actually true: those and only those situations are considered just which in fact serve the interest of the ruling elite. Could a child growing up in that society ever learn the (Socratic) meaning of the word “justice,” or would it end up thinking that “justice” is synonymous with “in the interest of the ruling elite”? And if it could learn the (Socratic) meaning, how would that learning take place, how can it be explained? If Thrasymachus is right about the use of the word, how could Socrates ever discover a conflicting meaning? This question was centrally troubling to Plato himself, and one could even argue that he invented an entire metaphysics to take care of it. For if Socrates is right about meaning, but Thrasymachus has a valid sociological point about how the word is used, how do we ever find out what “justice” means (Socratic meaning)? All we ever encounter is the “corrupted,” Thrasymachean usage. More generally, it seemed to Plato that all our concepts are only imperfectly embodied in the objects or situations we use them to talk about. No beautiful thing is ever perfectly beautiful, no triangle is perfectly triangular, no pair of like things ever perfectly alike; no bed ever has all bedlike characteristics without any irrelevant ones, and so on. So how do we ever learn what “bed” or “beautiful” mean, when all we have to go on is our flawed, mixed, fallible experience? Plato’s answer relied on the realm of forms, together with the doctrines of reincarnation and recollection. Who finds that metaphysic hard to accept might be more satisfied by a Wittgensteinian approach, the basic elements for which we have by now available and need only to muster. As so often, our sense of a problem or difficulty here arises from the assumption that “justice” is a label for a certain class of phenomena, and that Thrasymachus and Socrates must therefore disagree about what this class of phenomena is (like). Then, indeed, they could not both be right. But “justice” is much more than a label, functions in many other language games, is not learned ostensively from an adult who points and says to the child, “That’s justice.” The meaning of “justice” is not—or not primarily—learned by observing the shared

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characteristics of those phenomena called “just,” but by observing the shared features of the speech situations in which the family of words is used, their verbal and worldly contexts. On the verbal side, this implies that the meaning of “justice” is learned not merely in contexts where something is being called just or unjust, but also in contexts that involve doing someone an injustice, doing justice to a delicious meal, getting your just deserts, justifying a decision or an action, acting in a just cause, and so on. On the worldly side, it implies that the meaning of “justice” is learned from observing the kinds of situations in which the various members of the family of words occur, the kinds of changes in action or affect or relationship that they produce, in short, their signaling functions. Like the meaning of “rain,” the meaning of “justice” can be learned as much from what we do about “it” as from how “it” looks. Like the meaning of “God,” it can be learned even if the phenomenon is never experienced or is experienced only partially or imperfectly. The same problem we have just analyzed in terms of the learning of language arises also in radical translation, in encountering a foreign language without the help of a translator or a dictionary. Suppose that an anthropologist were to come upon a society in which Thrasymachus’ thesis is actually true: those and only those things are considered just which are in the interest of the ruling elite. Would he translate the relevant native word as “justice” or as “in the interest of the ruling elite”? And if he came to translate it as “justice,” how did he discover that to be the correct meaning? Here, too, the answer lies in the larger pattern of the natives’ language and life. As Wittgenstein says, whether a word of the language of our tribe is rightly translated into a word of the English language depends upon the role this word plays in the whole life of the tribe; the occasions on which it is used, the expressions of emotion by which it is generally accompanied, the ideas which it generally awakens or which prompt its saying, etc., etc. As an exercise ask yourself: in which cases would you say that a certain word uttered by the people of the tribe was a greeting? (Wittgenstein 1964: 103)8 We learn the meaning and find the translation from the entire pattern of the word’s use, both the verbal and the worldly contexts in which it, and related words, appear. It is Socrates, therefore, who is right not merely about the meaning of “justice” but also about its overall patterns of use; meaning and use do go together. But that again leaves us with the question of what Thrasymachus might be right about. It now seems as though he is right only about a small part of the word’s use or grammar— about certain shared characteristics of the phenomena labeled “just,” when that word is used for labeling. But then he is surely showing us a discrepancy within the word’s grammar, between the meaning of “justice” and our standards for applying it in a labeling way. If Thrasymachus is right, the things we call “just” are not just, or at least there is good reason to doubt whether they are. We really have not begun to solve the problem until we can account for this kind of discrepancy, and

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explain why Thrasymachus’ position is so powerful if indeed he is wrong about both the meaning and the use of “justice.”

The “is” and the “ought” The conventional wisdom of contemporary political science offers us a loud, clear answer as to the nature of Socrates and Thrasymachus’ quarrel: the latter is concerned with what is, the former with what ought to be. Robert Dahl, for example, interprets the first book of the Republic in precisely that way: the two Greeks “are talking right past one another” because “Socrates was making a normative argument, Thrasymachus an empirical one” (Dahl 1963: 65). Now that assertion might mean that Socrates is concerned with what justice ought to be, Thrasymachus with what it is in fact. But both men claim to be addressing the question of what justice is. If Socrates really intended to reform the concept, to revise what justice now is into something else that it ought to be, we would be entitled to ask him by what standards his proposed idea of justice is better than our present one. Why call that “justice”? But clearly this is not what is going on in the Republic. Socrates is not trying to change a concept; he believes that concepts are absolute and unchangeable, corresponding to timeless forms. He commends his definition as telling us correctly what justice really is, what the word already means. But in any case, Dahl did not intend to argue that Socrates addresses what justice ought to be; he intended to characterize the differing ways in which Socrates and Thrasymachus address the question of what justice is. In that shared inquiry about what is, Dahl says, “Socrates met Thrasymachus’ attempt to describe how rulers generally do act by indicating how good rulers ought to act” (Dahl 1963: 65). Certainly it is true that the imaginary state Socrates constructs in the Republic is not a descriptive account of some actual state, and that Socrates considers it a desirable ideal. Certainly it is true that Thrasymachus tries to describe the way rulers actually behave in all societies. Moreover, Socrates would probably agree with Thrasymachus’ description; and if Thrasymachus is wise and honest, he will agree that Socrates’ ideal exemplifies what most people mean by the word “justice.” So it seems that they can both be right, and even agree, because one is talking about how things are, and the other about an ideal. Then why are they arguing? We imagine them agreeing about the meaning of a word and about the facts of political conduct. But now, which of them is right about what justice is? Does that answer depend on the meaning of the word or on the facts of political life? Must we not say: both? But they seem to be incompatible. Dahl says that Thrasymachus is concerned with the facts of how rulers do act. But if Thrasymachus concludes from his observations that justice is the interest of the stronger, saying, “Everywhere I see men pursuing power and self-interest in the name of justice,” Socrates will respond, “You have been studying examples of injustice, hypocrisy, and corruption, carried on in the name of justice. To learn what justice is, you must ask what it is, in whose name these activities are carried on.”

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Empirical facts will be relevant to the question of what justice is only if they are, indeed, facts about justice; empirical investigation presupposes conceptual definition. Thrasymachus can discover a new fact about the things called “just” only if he can first identify those things. And doesn’t their identification depend on the meaning of “justice”? Sometimes such identification is easy and relatively independent of meaning. To borrow an example from Frege: we say, “The evening star is really the planet Venus,” a factual discovery. It would be absurd for Socrates to respond that this is false because “star” obviously does not mean “planet.” The point of the discovery is precisely that the meaning of “star” has turned out to be inappropriate to that thing, there, in the sky, which is in fact a planet. But such an example depends on a clear identification of “that thing, there,” independent of the meaning of the old concept. Whether Thrasymachus’ facts about how rulers act are relevant to the question of justice depends on what justice means. Similarly with Socrates. Dahl says that he is concerned with the way rulers ought to act. And so he is, since rulers ought to act justly. But we could equally well say that Socrates is telling us how rulers do in fact act when they act justly. That is a question of fact, of what is, not (merely) of what ought to be. Moreover, Thrasymachus’ views are also about how good rulers ought to act. Though there is a dispute here, it is not between what is and what ought to be, nor between facts and values. Both protagonists purport to tell us what justice is, and thereby what men in fact do when they act justly, which has clear implications about right conduct. One might say that Thrasymachus is talking about the facts of what people consider just, and Socrates about what they ought to consider just in the light of the meaning of “justice.” But the meaning of “justice” depends on the facts of its grammar, so this is a dispute about facts, over the implications of two different kinds of facts. It depends on there being an inconsistency in the grammar of “justice,” between what people consider just and what the word “justice” means. What is characteristic about a word like “justice” is that it allows of precisely this kind of inconsistency. Neither pole of the contrast need be subjective or idealistic, and both truly are based on the observation of usage.

Inside and outside views Another way to talk about the dispute between Thrasymachus and Socrates would be in terms of inside and outside. Thrasymachus’ position strikes us as being in some sense outside of the accepted premises, questioning and debunking accepted assumptions, looking on at what other people say like someone from a different world. Socrates, by contrast, is within the traditional premises and assumptions, accepting and affirming them. But it is not easy to specify what this sense we have of inside and outside is really about, what the two men are inside and outside of. One possibility would be that their position relates to their culture and society, the assumptions and values of ancient Greece. Thrasymachus stands back from that culture, sets aside the false consciousness it takes for granted, and looks on detachedly at what the “natives” in fact do. He notices that they in fact use the word “justice”

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for a certain class of phenomena which happen always to be in the interest of the ruling elite. But clearly a man cannot literally get outside his own culture; Thrasymachus speaks and sees as a fifth-century Greek. We might say that he is trying to escape his culture, but that will not suffice for explaining why he seems to have something important to tell us. It doesn’t explain why his discovery, if such it be, is meaningful to us in our very different culture, why his position is still viable today. Of course, Thrasymachus means his discovery to apply to all cultures and societies, but he can hardly have stepped outside of human society altogether. Moreover, Socrates also seems to have stepped outside the traditional conventions, though in a different way. He refuses to accept the conventional standards of what kinds of phenomena or societies are to be called “just.” Even if most people around him consider those things just which in fact serve the interests of the ruling elite, Socrates refuses to accept their standards. He clings to the meaning of “justice” and insists on judging for himself whether the conventional norms are in accord with it. A different but related way of analyzing our sense of inside and outside here would be in relation to the concept of justice itself, its meaning, implications, and presuppositions. Socrates speaks from within the framework of what is supposed to be true of phenomena called “just,” namely that they must involve each having and doing what is appropriate to him. He accepts the intention, the conventions, of the word at face value, and reaffirms them. Thrasymachus rejects these, or ignores them, and looks independently on his own at the common features of phenomena other people call “just.” It is rather like trying to do ordinary-language philosophy by taking a public opinion survey; and the difficulties of Thrasymachus’ position are related to the difficulties of that enterprise we discussed earlier. Thrasymachus, as it were, stands outside the word and observes how others use it, while Socrates uses it himself. But of course that can’t be literally true. They both use the word. We might say that Socrates speaks from within the word’s signaling or quasi-performative functions; his definition is derived from the claim made in calling something “just,” the guarantee given by a speaker who makes that claim. He himself makes the claim, gives the guarantee, takes on the responsibility. Thrasymachus somehow uses the word without making that claim or taking on that responsibility; it is as if he confines himself to the word’s labeling functions.9 We might say that Thrasymachus uses the word “justice” in quotation marks, to mean “so-called justice,” or “what other people call ‘justice.’” When Thrasymachus says that justice is the interest of the stronger, it seems to me, he is using the word “justice” in these kind of quotation marks, but giving the rest of the words in the sentence their full, normal claiming weight. He is saying that so-called (what other people call) “justice” is in fact the real (what I, Thrasymachus, call) interest of the stronger. For it would be patently false to say that what is truly just, in the full Socratic sense of the word, is always in the interest of the ruling elite. And the other alternative, saying that so-called (what other people call) “justice” is equivalent to the so-called (what other people call) interest of the stronger, is not Thrasymachus’ intention. Part of his point is that other people are not aware of the cultural

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hypocrisy, as he is, and that they therefore would not say what he says. Thrasymachus, then, refuses to step inside the concept of justice and take on the burden, the weight, of what is normally guaranteed or claimed in uttering it. He wants to question precisely those conventions.

Some alternative examples We all know that values, standards, and tastes differ from culture to culture, so that what serves as an example of beauty in one culture might be considered ugly in another, and what serves as an example of justice in one culture might be considered unjust in another. But then, do children growing up in radically divergent cultures learn the same concept of beauty or justice, or different concepts? If we answer that from systematically different examples they are bound to learn different concepts, then we ought not to translate the other culture’s terms by our “beauty” or “justice.” And then our initial statement of what “we all know” is wrong; those other cultures do not disagree about what is just, but simply do not have a concept of justice at all. If, on the other hand, we insist that children in different cultures can learn the same concept of beauty or justice, from divergent examples, we must explain how this is possible. Earlier in this chapter we suggested such an explanation: Meaning is not learned merely from labeling examples, from looking at the phenomena people call just, but from the word’s entire grammar, from looking at the occasions when people say “just.” So the same concept may be learned in two different cultures if its overall grammar is the same, if it is used in the same kinds of language games, even if the examples of what is just and unjust are very different. But now we must go on to notice that the answers we are inclined to give to such questions depend very much on the particular examples we examine. The answers will be different for a concept like “delicious” than for a concept like “green.” That should, in the first place, warn us to be cautious about “justice,” and in the second place, may allow us a clearer sense of what is special about it and concepts like it. Suppose that we inquire whether children in radically different cultures can grow up learning the same meaning for the concept “delicious” (granted, of course, that they will learn different words, different sounds, for the concept), even though they learn it from very different examples. We know, for instance, that Eskimos eat substances that are nauseating to us, and eat them with great gusto and relish. When an Eskimo finds his maggoty, rotten whale blubber “delicious,” is he saying the same thing about it that an American child says about his ice-cream cone? The example of a term like “delicious” very strongly suggests an affirmative answer. The meaning of the term depends almost entirely on our relationship to the food—that we want more, that the hostess is pleased, that we offer it to our friends but not our enemies, and so on—and hardly at all on the characteristics of the food. “Delicious” is not the name of a certain set of foods, but a way of saying something about food, namely, that it tastes good. To find out the natives’ word for “delicious,” an anthropologist would not taste their foods, but observe their behavior about food. The meaning of the word seems quite

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independent of a particular culture’s gustatory preferences. So if we construe “justice” on analogy with “delicious,” we will conclude that children can indeed learn the concept even in a culture whose taste in what is just or unjust differs radically from ours. But now we might ask the same question about a word like “green.” After all, we know that different cultures divide up the color spectrum differently. Could children from different cultures learn essentially the same meaning of “green,” though they learn it from quite different examples, so that what exemplifies “green” in one culture would be called some other color in the other culture? Here the answer seems clearly negative. If the term “green” is learned exclusively from examples of blue color, then the meaning that is learned is “blue,” no matter what word is used for that meaning. And if the term “green” is learned from both green and blue examples, then the meaning learned is equivalent neither to the meaning of “green” nor to the meaning of “blue.” In translating that term, we could not simply substitute our word “green” for it. So if we construe “justice” on the model of “green,” we will conclude that it makes no sense to suppose that the word could have the same meaning in two cultures with radically different standards of what is just. The two examples thus suggest conflicting conclusions about justice. “Delicious” suggests that taste is entirely independent of the word’s meaning; so that the kind of observation Thrasymachus makes (noting common features of the things people call just) would simply have no bearing on the kind of observation Socrates makes (the meaning of “justice”). The example of “green” suggests that, wherever standards differ, meaning must differ accordingly, so that Socrates and Thrasymachus could not both be right. We may feel intuitively that “justice” must “lie somewhere in between” words like “delicious” and words like “green,” being more objective than the former and more subjective or quasi-performative than the latter. But that intuitive response neglects a feature of justice that is lacking in both the other examples: the significance of standards. Given any edible substance, we are prepared to believe that some culture considers it delicious if we see that those people want more of it, offer it to their friends, and so on. But such is not the case with examples of justice and injustice. We can allow a certain latitude for differing standards and differing cultures; but not merely any standards will qualify as standards of justice, not merely any example will be an example of justice. If a speaker considers a certain situation just, he must in principle be prepared to show us how it is just, what is just about it. We have no corresponding expectation about “delicious” or “green.” Unlike “delicious,” justice is not merely a matter of cultural habit or personal taste, but implies standards of justification. Unlike “green,” it allows for a kind of disagreement that is neither merely verbal (different definitions) nor merely factual (different perceptions). Though some of our quarrels about justice may result from disagreements about what the word means, and some from disagreements about the facts of a situation, many concern differences in our standards of what is just. Thus, with respect to a concept like justice it makes sense to suppose that there might be a gap, a discrepancy, a conflict, between (Socratic) meaning based on grammar and (Thrasymachean) application based on people’s standards. This makes no sense with

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respect to “delicious,” because the gap is too wide to be a conflict; and it makes no sense with respect to “green” because there can be no gap between meaning and standards. It seems that a concept like “justice” grows out of different sorts of language games, even out of different language regions than either “delicious” or “green,” so that the solution to conceptual puzzles about it will take a different form. Wittgenstein once suggested that one might do well to divide a book on philosophy into sections on different “kinds of words” (language regions?). You would talk for hours and hours on the verbs ‘seeing’, ‘feeling’, etc., verbs describing personal experience. We get a peculiar kind of confusion or confusions which comes up with all these words. You would have another chapter on numerals – here there would be another kind of confusion: a chapter on ‘all’, ‘any’, ‘some’, etc. – another kind of confusion: a chapter on ‘you’, ‘I’, etc. – another kind: a chapter on ‘beautiful’, ‘good’ – another kind. We get into a new group of confusions; language plays us entirely new tricks. (Wittgenstein 1967a: 1)

“Showing how it is just” Justice, then, is not in the middle of a continuum between subjective matters of taste and objective matters of fact; it is a different kind of concept altogether, one that involves standards and the possibility of judgment and justification (as the etymology would suggest). Our standards of what is just and unjust are obviously partly learned, but also subject to alteration by our own choice. Insofar as they are learned, they are learned in the same way, in the same process, as we learn the meanings of words and the nature of the world. To learn a concept like justice, apparently the child must master not merely two but three variables, or dimensions of variation: the meaning of the word, the facts of the world, and the standards for what is considered just. Correspondingly, the radical translation of a term like “justice” presents problems along not merely two but three dimensions. Consider an example adduced by Weldon, bizarre because it is so difficult to imagine occurring naturally, but instructive in its bizarreness. Weldon invites us to: suppose that in Nazi Germany you had set out to discover the German equivalents of English words of appraisal, ‘good,’ ‘honest,’ ‘praiseworthy,’ ‘treacherous,’ and so on. You would have learnt that the correct usage was schön, ehrlich, ehrenwert, unehrlich, and so on. Further you would have found that the German words had the same ‘inference licenses’ attached to them as the English ones. If you were ehrlich you were likely to get a decoration, if you were unehrlich you were likely to go to a concentration camp. So far, so good. But then you might have seen an S.A. man (or a lot of them) beating up a Jew and you might have said ‘Das ist verbrecherisch.’ Your teacher would have said

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‘Durchaus nicht verbrecherisch. Eine ehrenwerte Tat.’ And what could you say then? You might accept the correction in the same way as that in which in the United States you accept the correction ‘We don’t call them braces, we call them suspenders, and what you call suspenders, we call garters.’ But if you did your friends would not have said ‘You have learnt German very well.’ They would have said ‘You are a liar and a hypocrite. You know it is wicked to behave like that, yet you are saying that it is praiseworthy. You are pretending in order to avoid trouble’. (Weldon 1955: 42–43) In short, the German teacher is not correcting his pupil’s grasp of what ehrenwert means, nor his perception of the event they both witnessed. Rather, the teacher simply considers something praiseworthy (ehrenwert) which his pupil considers criminal. They disagree about standards. But Weldon’s example is bizarre among other things because it is rigged by the very language in which he describes it. We are given the authoritative facts by Weldon’s account of what the men see, in which the protagonists are identified and the nature of their actions defined. Would the Nazi have called the action “beating up,” or the equivalent German term? We are told that the various translations the student has learned are really correct, so we know the instructor cannot be correcting his German. In actual life, in situations of radical translation, standards are no more absolutely separable from meaning on the one hand and facts on the other than meaning and facts are from each other. We have only to imagine Weldon’s example as happening to an anthropologist visiting some primitive tribe, and immediately all aspects of the situation become problematic. Has the anthropologist learned the translations correctly? Maybe his language is being corrected. What exactly has he seen? Perhaps it was not a beating, but an official punishment for a crime, or a religious ceremony, or a game. Do the native terms he thinks of as meaning “criminal” and “honorable” really mean quite that, or are they different concepts altogether? And, what are the natives’ standards of criminality and honorableness; what are this particular native’s standards? Similar difficulties can occur without any problem of radical translation; and in practice ambiguous situations must often be left forever unresolved. Consider this true example: An adolescent immigrant German girl in the United States finds herself alone with a middle-aged lady, also a German immigrant and an acquaintance of the girl’s parents. They are making polite conversation when the lady says, apparently with admiration, “My, you are such a self-conscious young lady!” The girl is, of course, puzzled. The lady seemed to be paying a compliment, but self-consciousness is hardly a virtue. Perhaps she meant “self-possessed,” and made a mistake in English? The girl is well aware of being both awkwardly self-conscious and maturely selfpossessed. Hesitatingly, because it seems like fishing for a (further?) compliment, the girl asks, “Self-conscious? You don’t by any chance mean ‘self-possessed’, do you? The two are different in English, you know.” But the lady says firmly, “Oh, very self-conscious.” And there the matter rests . . . Later the girl consults a dictionary

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and discovers that indeed the German word for self-possessed (selbstbewusst) is a compound whose parts separately would translate as “self” and “conscious,” and that there is a different word for self-conscious altogether (selbstbefangen). So the girl concludes that her diagnosis was probably correct, but she will never know for sure. The lady may just have considered self-consciousness as a great virtue, to be politely praised. Ziff suggests that “there is, as it were, a certain principle of exegesis employed” by the speakers of any natural language in coping with ambiguous or odd or deviant utterances. “Roughly speaking, the principle is this: construe what is said in such a way that, with a minimum of interpretation, it is significant” (Ziff 1960: 132). Thus, if I say, “Look, there’s a man!” and someone responds, “No, it’s a scarecrow,” chances are that he is correcting my perception of the facts, not my use of language. If I say, “Look, there’s a shovel,” and he responds, “No, it’s a spade,” chances are much better that he wants to correct the niceties of my English. If I say, “Look, that’s a crying shame!” and someone responds, “No; it’s just wonderful,” the possibilities seem wide open; and clearly one possibility that must be considered is that what I regard as a shame, he regards as wonderful. If I regard as a spade what you regard as a shovel, or if I regard as a man what you regard as a scarecrow, one or both of us must either misperceive facts or be mistaken about the meaning of some word involved. But with terms like “shame,” “wonderful,” or “justice,” that implication need not follow; instead, we might differ on standards. The idea that concepts like “justice” imply standards of judgment can also be expressed by saying: Where someone considers a situation unjust, we expect him to be able to tell us how it is unjust, what’s unjust about it. In the same way, if someone considers self-consciousness a virtue, we expect him to be able to tell us how it is a virtue, what’s virtuous about it. Recall again the example of the anthropologist disagreeing with his native guide about the event they just witnessed; how might their discussion be likely to proceed, given time and good will? The anthropologist would begin to ask questions as best he might, to find out just what (the native thinks) happened, just what the words he thought he knew really mean. And if it continues to seem that the difference is one of standards, then he will ask the native, “Why do you consider that to be honorable?” And everything will then depend on the explanation the native can give, whether he can connect what he says he saw with something the anthropologist can recognize as a principle of honorableness. It will not be necessary that he convinces the anthropologist to agree with his judgment, only that he enables him to see how someone could make such a judgment about honorableness. Much the same thing goes on in the absence of translation problems. Suppose that you have spent the afternoon together with a friend, working in the library, and on the way home he says, “That was most unjust.” You ask, “What was?” and he says, “The afternoon in the library. It was so unjust.” You ask him what he means, and perhaps he says, “Well, there are so many books there.” You say, “So?” and he says, “They’re all different colors.” “But why is that unjust?” you insist. The conversation can continue as long as both your patience lasts; but unless sooner or

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later he can connect up something about the afternoon in the library with something you can recognize as at least relevant to justice, you will not know what to conclude. You will not, for example, conclude that he simply has standards of justice different from yours; not just any standards will be standards of justice. Our concepts are part of a more or less consistent, interrelated system of concepts, so that for us to recognize a situation as an instance of, say, justice, it must be related in appropriate ways to persons, to fairness, or to deserts, or to punishment and reward, in short, to other concepts grammatically related to justice. In this way, the explanation and justification of our judgments, for instance in realms like ethics or esthetics or politics, is very similar to the explanation and justification of meaning when we speak; it is related to the way we show what we meant, and to the way we learn new meanings in learning language, and to the way the meanings of words are gradually extended in language itself. In all of these cases, it is a matter of making or finding or showing connections, building bridges, “showing how A is (or could be considered) B.” In all of these cases, not just any explanation or justification will be acceptable. And in all of these cases, that means simultaneously: not just any attempt at making connections will actually work with the particular person addressed, be causally, psychologically adequate to persuading him; and not just anything you say will, in general and objectively, be an explanation, a justification, a connection. Wittgenstein says that giving a reason, an explanation, a justification is like tracing a path to the point where one is. Giving a reason for something one did or said means showing a way which leads to this action. In some cases it means telling the way which one has gone oneself; in others it means describing a way which leads there and is in accordance with certain accepted rules. (Wittgenstein 1964: 14, cf. 145; Wittgenstein 1968: 525, 536–537, 539, and 196–197; Wittgenstein 1967b: §506) In just this way, explaining what you meant by something you said, when you are questioned about it, means showing paths that lead from your words to other words in the language. They may be paths you yourself took before or while you spoke, but they may equally well be paths which you did not use, though you could have. Thus, the question, ‘On what grounds do you believe this?’ might mean: ‘From what are you now deducing it (have you just deduced it)?’ But it might also mean: ‘What grounds can you produce for this assumption on thinking it over?’ (Wittgenstein 1968: §479; cf. Wittgenstein 1967a: 22)

Form and substance Socrates and Thrasymachus, then, really do present us with yet another case of a dispute based on extrapolation from different aspects of a word’s grammar. But the case is different in kind from any we examined earlier. Instead of saying that both

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protagonists are right in that they start from a grammatical truth, but wrong in extrapolating from it to infinity, ignoring other grammatical truths inconsistent with their extrapolation, we must say something more complex. Socrates is not merely right about part of the meaning of “justice”; he is entirely right about the whole of its meaning. Nevertheless Thrasymachus might be right about justice in some particular society, and that would be an important insight about that society. We are, indeed, in a different region of language here, where grammar “plays us different tricks.” Where with respect to a concept like “anger,” the conceptual puzzle concerns grammatical links among the occasions, expression, and feeling of anger; where with respect to a concept like “knowledge,” the conceptual puzzle concerns grammatical links between the occasions for invoking and those for revoking the concept, between the guarantee given and the evidence available; with respect to a concept like “justice,” the conceptual puzzle has a different sort of grammatical root. The concept of justice shares with many other concepts in the region of human action and social institutions what I have elsewhere called a tension between purpose and institutionalization, between substance and form (Pitkin 1967: 235–240; Tussman 1960: 86). That tension is essential to their function in language, and is the grammatical source for certain characteristic conceptual puzzles about them. The tension may arise through either of two possible historical sequences. Perhaps men conceive some ideal or goal or purpose, and develop an institution or a set of procedures for achieving and perpetuating that goal through time and in the activities of many men. They draw up a set of laws, or institute a school, or create a new agency. But rules require interpretation, and institutions have a way of developing purposes and directions of their own. After a time, men may find themselves torn between their commitment to the original purpose, and their commitment to the institutions that were supposed to bring it about. Or, conversely, society may gradually and without any deliberate intent develop certain institutionalized or ritual ways of proceeding, and from these it may eventually abstract rules or principles or ideals. At first these rules or ideals may be merely descriptive abstractions of how the institution works, but after a time they become critical standards in accord with which the institution can be evaluated and reformed. Again the result is a tension between the “ideal substance” and the “practical form” in which it is embodied. This tension, whatever the pattern of its origin, is often embodied and reflected in the concepts associated with the particular practice or institution. The first kind of causal sequence and its associated tension can be seen, for example, in an idea and practice like that of punishment.10 Punishment is philosophically troubling in much the same way as justice. For on the one hand, punishment means (roughly) harm done to someone in retribution, because he has broken a law or violated a norm. That is what “punishment” means, its Socratic definition. And by that definition it is impossible—grammatically impossible—to punish a man unless he is in fact guilty, has in fact violated the norm. But we have also developed particular institutions for public punishment, and particular formulae and practices for punishing, say, our children; and we have come to call the working of those institutions and practices “punishing.” But those institutions and practices

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sometimes inflict harm on the innocent; and in such cases it makes perfect sense to say “they have punished an innocent man.” Indeed, in some contexts the term has come to be almost synonymous with inflicted harm, quite apart from any guilt, as when we say that a football player can take, or actually took, “a lot of punishment.” (In much the same way, as Austin points out, the term “deliberately,” which originally meant “with or after deliberation,” has come often to mean merely the corresponding outward form: “slowly and unhurriedly, as if with deliberation” (Austin 1961: 147).) The second kind of causal sequence and its associated tension is beautifully illustrated by Piaget’s study of the development of the ideas of fairness or justice, and of rules, among children (Piaget 1962). Piaget maintains that a child’s conception of fairness or justice grows largely out of his relations with his peers, as one among equals; and to study the development of such a conception Piaget examines the way in which Swiss boys play and learn the game of marbles. They characteristically learn the game from other children, not from adults, and they play it with other children. And in the course of learning the game itself—the particular rules and the necessary motor skills and strategic devices—the children also learn, develop ideas about, what a game is, what a rule is, where rules come from, that rules can but may not be broken, that and how they can be changed. At the same time, Piaget’s study shows that the children also acquire some concepts by which they are eventually able to judge the rules themselves and proposed innovations in the rules. These notions include the idea of justice or fairness, and the idea of what Piaget calls “the spirit of the game” (Piaget 1962: 42, 65–76, 98).11 The latter would presumably govern only rules and innovations in the game of marbles (or other games with the same “spirit”); the former would apply in any game among peers, and probably in many other areas of life as well. One might suppose that a concept of the spirit of the game or of fairness learned exclusively from and during the playing of marbles would necessarily be conservative with respect to the rules of that game. Those particular rules and ways of playing from which “fairness” is learned, one might suppose, will define what fairness is. (The meaning and content of “justice” in any society will always be in accord with the institutions in which that particular society embodies justice.) But Piaget shows that such is not the case. The children are able to innovate and to accept innovations, sometimes finding the new ways of playing more fair or more in accord with the spirit of the game than the older ways. That this is possible will seem puzzling only if we think of words as labels, as names. For then it will seem strange that a child who has learned to call all the members of a particular family “Smith” would one day somehow decide that one of them is not really a Smith at all, or that some newcomer is more of a Smith than they. But a term like “fairness” or “justice” participates in much more complex language games than mere labeling and is learned from them all. From the entire context of its use, its verbal and worldly relationships, a child can learn not merely what things are considered just by the speakers who use the word, but also what they are saying about those things by calling them “just.” And that message—the meaning of justice—can then be

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predicated of other phenomena, or even denied of the phenomena in connection with which the word was first learned. More generally though we learn the meaning of terms like “justice” and acquire same standards of what is just in connection with existing institutions and practices, we can and do use them to criticize and change those institutions and practices. Thus, there really can arise tensions between purpose, substance, meaning, on the one hand, and institutionalization, form, conventionalized practice, on the other. This kind of tension can arise only with concepts where meaning is linked to application by way of standards; it cannot arise with a concept like “green,” but equally not with a concept like “delicious.” I would suggest that it arises with respect to concepts of action and social institutions because an important feature of the function of such concepts in our language and in our lives hinges on the duality of purpose and institutionalization: If our purposes and ideals could not be institutionalized, taught, put into practice in regularized ways, they would remain empty and idle, mysterious blessings which occasionally and inexplicably appear among us, but which we have no power to produce or to prolong. Therefore, their embodiment in social practice “or individual action truly is their realization, truly deserves (almost) the same commitment from us as the initial purpose or ideal, is rightly called by the same” name. Yet actions fall short of intention, and institutional practice develops a momentum of its own. We need, always, to hold our concepts partly aloof from the practices and institutions in which they are (supposedly) realized, in order to continue to be able to criticize, to renovate, and to revise.12 Thrasymachus and Socrates debated in a time when, as in our own, a considerable disparity had developed between the meanings of concepts like justice and the standards by which people judged justness, the institutional forms and practices in which it was supposed to be embodied. That is how both Socrates and Thrasymachus stand “outside” the accepted conventions of their grammar. Each has chosen a different branch of the bifurcation. They both agree that the term “justice” is a sham when used in connection with contemporary standards and institutions. But Socrates opts for the meaning of the term, against those standards and institutions; while Thrasymachus opts for the Realpolitik of those institutions, against the traditional meaning of the term. Each position has its concomitant dangers: hypocrisy and ineffectiveness in the one, immorality and a different sort of ineffectiveness in the other. We have said that Thrasymachus might be right about some particular society, where standards of what is just and unjust have become sufficiently corrupted, or social perception sufficiently distorted. But Thrasymachus himself proposed his thesis not about some particular corrupted society, but about all human society whatsoever. And if he is right about that, then what we have said about form and substance, about using the concept of justice to criticize existing practice, is nonsense. If he is right about that, then Socrates’ being right about the meaning of “justice” makes no dent in Thrasymachus’ argument at all; for then that meaning, and the word’s signaling functions, are a colossal fraud, a socially shared and perpetuated illusion. Which is, indeed, what Thrasymachus thought.

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But we need to look more closely at that alleged possibility, that seeming sociological generalization of Thrasymachus. It has all the earmarks of being a typical conceptual “insight,” an extrapolation to infinity like the “insight” that “all is flux” because nothing ever remains absolutely fixed or permanent. Such theses, as we have seen, are not false; we cannot really deny the possibilities they allege. Nor are they nonsensical. Yet they do not fully make sense, either. They need to be treated with Wittgensteinian questions that gradually return the relevant concepts to their home grounds, where their sense is fully clear. Thus we ask when concepts like “flux,” “change,” “permanence,” “fixity,” are used; and find that they are fully meaningful only in particular mutual contrasts. So, too, with Thrasymachus, though the characteristic philosophical fear of or desire for what is hidden is different here. Here the problem is not in our relationship to physical reality—that we might always be mistaken, or that men might always lie in what they say to us; here the characteristic danger or hope is not lies but hypocrisy or bias—that men might be incapable of objective judgment. That difference in philosophical concerns, I think, tells us some important things about the grammatical functions of a word like “justice,” and how they differ from those of a word like “knowledge” or like “see.” But we must ask how it’s possible for Thrasymachus, or for us in following his argument, to step entirely outside all human societies and cultures, and see through their universal illusion? If all human societies in all times have corrupted or biased standards of what is just, standards which serve the interest of the ruling elite only, how is Thrasymachus able to determine this fact? By what standards does he judge or measure those other social standards to be biased? What can the term “biased” mean in the absence of any standards by which bias is to be measured, apart from any contrast with what is straight or fair? The answer would seem to be that Thrasymachus himself implicitly makes reference to the Socratic meaning of “justice,” and that his standards for detecting bias are learned from the claim his fellow-citizens make in judging something just or unjust. In exactly the same way, Marx had a clear and fully articulated idea of true justice by which he judged his own society’s institutions and found them woefully wanting (cf. Dahrendorf 1953). If we ask how he came by that idea in such a corrupt society, the answer would seem to be that he learned from the meanings of words, not just from their apparent reference. The point is that a concept like “justice” includes, in all of us, both form and substance, both conventionalized, traditional social practices and an idea that is an ideal by which to measure them. That idea and ideal are not simply the products, the captives, of the examples from which they are taught, for they are not merely labels and are not taught merely from examples. We are always potentially able to pry the idea loose from some particular example, and reassess its applicability. That, I think, is a major function of political discourse in our lives. It is, of course, a lifelong work, never completed. Thrasymachus can be right about particular societies at particular times to a remarkable degree; it is amazing how blind we can be to the social facts around us, how much habituated to the traditional or accepted ways of thinking, how reluctant to think critically on our own, because critical thought, once begun,

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is likely to require of us remedial action. But the possibility for critical thought and remedial action is always there, and it is kept alive precisely by the meaning of concepts like “justice,” the “ideal” meaning that Socrates insists on preserving. In a society where standards of justice have become corrupted or biased, unrelated to the meaning of “justice” except by the force of habit and inertia, Thrasymachus is right to refuse to accept words at their face value, right to challenge the hypocrisy of corrupted speech. But Socrates is right to refuse to accept, to insist on challenging, corrupted action and corrupted lives. Thrasymachus’ kind of detachment and standing outside of the conventional hypocrisy can help to restore health and coherence inside. But it can do so only in combination with the Socratic definition and its kind of standing outside of corrupted standards. If all societies are necessarily and equally corrupt, if the idea of justice is a sham, then reform, revolt, or maintenance of the status quo are all equally pointless. Clearly, we have not achieved a satisfactory understanding of the nature of Socrates’ quarrel with Thrasymachus, or of other disputes cast in the same form, or of justice and concepts like it. But perhaps some progress has been made. We have eliminated a few of the more tempting wrong approaches, and have tried a few that seem more promising. . . . We have made some progress on the topic of human action and institutions, and their characteristic complementarity of description and rule, of form and substance. . . .

Wittgenstein and the study of political theory13 The most important Wittgensteinian contribution to the study of past political theories is simply an awareness of concepts, a sensitivity to a theorist’s use of language. Wittgenstein is obviously not the only source from whom one might learn such an awareness, but he does give it a particular style and orientation. He teaches us that language is not just a neutral vehicle for the transmission of thoughts arrived at independently of it; the thought is not neatly separable from the language in which it is expressed. And he teaches us something about the way our conception of the world is structured by language. Applied to theorists from other times and cultures, careful attention to concepts is thus a guide to the understanding of a different political world; we learn not to take translations for granted. Applied to theorists from our own culture, attention to concepts yields important clues to the full meaning of a theory. And a Wittgensteinian awareness of the significance, of conceptual plurality and inconsistency helps in the analysis of continuing theoretical controversies. We may start from the fact that some works of political theory are so heavily philosophical that they can usefully be interpreted in their entirety as conceptual inquiries. Such an interpretation should not, of course, be taken as exclusive. Like all criticism, it can be a useful supplement to other perspectives on a work, in proportion as it enriches our access to the work’s complexities and implications. Take Plato’s Republic again. Most contemporary political scientists, in the grip of the fact-value dichotomy, will aver that the Republic is obviously a utopia, a sketch

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of Plato’s ideal society. Perhaps they will add that it also contains a number of primitive empirical observations and explanatory generalizations about actual political life, or an early comprehension of functional interdependence in society. Other, more traditional interpretations include the suggestion that the Republic concerns the well-ordered soul, a vision of what we would now call psychic health of a unified personality, or that it is primarily a book about education. Many of these interpretations seem useful. But they can also usefully be supplemented by a conceptual view, which is in a way naive, because it takes the Republic to be about exactly what the participants say it is about: the nature or meaning of justice. That view would stress its connection with earlier dialogues pursuing the nature of other significant concepts like friendship or courage. And it would suggest an alternative understanding of the political society sketched by Socrates. Perhaps that society is not, or not exclusively, Plato’s ideal of the good society, but rather specifically designed to illustrate the meaning of a particular concept. Perhaps at least some of its important features are as they are because the idea of justice requires them, rather than because Plato happened to like them. Suppose that we accept the ultimate Socratic definition of justice as roughly satisfactory: “justice” means something like each member of a system getting and having and doing what is appropriate to him (be the allocation distributive or retributive or of some other kind). Now, consider in this light the criticism commonly leveled against Plato, that the Republic is undemocratic and inegalitarian, merely a crystallization of Plato’s aristocratic predilections. If the state Socrates envisions is in fact designed to illustrate the idea of justice, then the inegalitarian features may be quite essential, or at least serve an important heuristic purpose. Of course, an egalitarian state, composed of equals who get, and do, and have, like things, could be considered just; it is not unjust. But in a way the justice achieved in such a state is too obvious. As an illustration, such a state is what the mathematicians call a limiting or degenerate case of what justice means. For anyone can cut up a pie into as many equal pieces as there are persons present and give one piece to each person. That’s easy. The real problems and subtleties of justice only begin, and therefore its real nature can only be studied or displayed, where we find unequal, different people, with different needs and abilities, different claims and deserts, so that the problem is assigning different, but precisely appropriate, things to each. In other words, one can really illustrate justice in all its complexity only in a situation where there is a problem about precisely what will be appropriate to each. Consider further the elaborate educational machinery of the Republic which Plato develops with such loving care. That, too, can be seen as contributing to the illustration and understanding of justice. For if the system has a number of different kinds of members, and the problem is to assign appropriate roles and rewards to each, then the essential requirement will be some absolutely accurate and reliable mechanism for classifying the members and ascertaining what is appropriate to each kind. The system will be just only to the extent that it can make such classifications and such attribution and distribution unerringly, without equivocation or ambiguity. Surely this is one reason for the elaborate control of breeding in the Republic,

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and the detailed educational procedures—indeed, for the general intolerance of ambiguity in the Platonic system. Thus, one might defend the Republic, whatever its defects as a political ideal, as being nevertheless a good illustration of the meaning of justice. But I think that many of us will continue to feel profoundly uncomfortable with that suggestion. A cynic might conclude that we are reluctant to believe that a society which does not correspond to our ideal could be the most just; or, alternatively, one could reject the argument developed here and insist that only a democratic society is truly just. But I think that even within the framework of the argument developed, our feeling of discomfort can be understood and accommodated. Perhaps there are other structural features of Plato’s imaginary society which, because of the meaning of “justice” and not merely because of our personal preferences, strike us as profoundly unjust. The justness of the Republic hinges in crucially significant ways on whether the system as a whole finds men or makes them into members of the various classes. It hinges on whether the educational system is engaged essentially in testing and developing the inborn natural capacities of the citizens, separating natural artisans from natural soldiers, or whether it is engaged in shaping men so that some become artisans, others soldiers, others philosophers. The textual evidence on this point is really remarkably ambiguous. Sometimes Plato seems clearly to say that men are made into members of one class or another, often that their natural talents are merely discovered, and sometimes that both processes go on simultaneously (see for example, Republic, II, 337; III, 413–414; IV, 429). The resolution also depends on whether we include the breeding system as part of “the system” which does the distributing and assigning, the system which is just or unjust. For if the breeding system is included, then men surely are made into what they become. Insofar as men are made into members of one class or another by the state in the Republic, the system is, in Plato’s own terms, unjust. This is because the members of some classes are clearly better off than the members of others, as is most obvious with respect to the philosopher-kings. Though they are not richer than artisans or soldiers, and though their power and status are not regarded by them or the other citizens as a blessing, they are profoundly better off than the rest. For, consider what happens to the souls of the lower classes. A just, balanced, healthy soul is one in which reason rules over passion and appetite; each part performs its function, and the function of reason is to rule the rest. But the soul of the artisan is ruled by appetite, and that of the soldier by passionate anger. Only the philosopher-king has, himself, a just soul; only the philosopher-king is able to enjoy the blissful contemplation of the Forms. This advantage is even more clearly revealed in the afterlife. In the Myth of Er, as the human souls choose new lives to live in their next incarnations, we meet an unfortunate fellow who chooses hastily and chooses to be a despot, under the illusion that this will provide him a happy life. Plato tells us the reason for the man’s faulty choice: “He was one of those who . . . [had] spent his former life in a well-ordered commonwealth and become virtuous from habit without pursuing wisdom” (see Republic, X, 619).

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Now, if men are by nature different, so that only a few are capable of wisdom, self-control, and a just soul, then the Republic may well be a just society. For a man who by nature lacks the capacity for self-control or inner virtue, the next best thing is surely some form of benevolent external control, forcing or training him into virtuous habits he does not really understand and has not really made his own. It is sad that he can advance no further, but such is his nature. But if the system makes some men into philosophers with balanced souls, and others into artisans or soldiers needing external control, then it is profoundly unjust to the latter. And this will be true no matter how accurately and reliably it ultimately gives an artisan’s life to the men it has made into artisans, a soldier’s life to the men it has made into soldiers. That may well be one major function of the Platonic Myth of the Metals. If the ultimate role in breeding is left to the gods, or if breeding is denied altogether, then men’s differing capacities are indeed natural and not part of the operation of “society,” and they can be left out of account in the computation of society’s justness. The whole issue has its practical and poignant counterparts, of course, in contemporary questions of social justice, in the conflicting claims of various criteria for attribution or distribution. Shall we assume men by nature equal and assure them only just deserts for achievement or delict? Shall we take note of socially imposed inequalities, and make our distribution on a compensatory basis, seeking to bring everyone up to a level of equality? There is still a further, different way in which one might call into question not the general desirability, but the specific justness, of Plato’s Republic. One might distinguish between substantive and procedural aspects of the idea of justice, and argue that even if the Republic achieves substantive justice (setting aside the doubts we have been discussing) it ignores the concept’s procedural side. For the Republic is at most an ideal, static picture of justice achieved, once and for all. In the city envisioned by Socrates we see, not justice at work, but justice accomplished: an illustration of how the world would look after justice had done its work. But insofar as justice is a procedural conception, having to do with the resolution of conflicting claims, with the creation of fair solutions out of initially ambiguous situations, the Republic misses the point. For the imaginary society is constructed in such a way that genuinely conflicting claims, genuinely multivalued, ambiguous situations cannot arise. There is, one wants to say, no need for justice in the life of that society, because it is already just, once and for all, by definition. The argument is not unlike Wolin’s point that Plato’s political ideal lacks a crucial element of politics, misses the central problem of politics, the continual re-creation of order in a living, plural society where ever new claims arise (Wolin 1960: 43). To say all this in yet a different way, justice is a concept human beings have developed in their dealings with each other; it applies to persons and their institutions. One cannot be just or unjust to an inanimate object. That is, we are not at all clear on what might count as, might be, an injustice to an object. As Cavell says, however justice is to be understood – whether in terms of rendering to each his due, or in terms of equality, or of impartiality or of fairness – what must be

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understood is a concept concerning the treatment of persons; and that is a concept, in turn, of a creature with commitments and cares. But for these, and the ways in which they conflict with one another and with those of other persons, there would be no problem, and no concept of justice.14 From this perspective, the Republic is not so much unjust (since one cannot be unjust to inanimate objects, any more than one can be just to them) as irrelevant to justice. For it treats its citizens as objects, as inanimate materials, not as men. A distribution imposed by fiat from above, on creatures with no claim of their own, programmed to accept as their own what the system assigns, cannot really illustrate the problems of justice but only avoid them. But until now we have been ignoring another crucial aspect of studying the Republic in relation to the concept of justice, another aspect for which a Wittgensteinian perspective is illuminating. We have not yet discussed the problem of translation. Plato was not, in fact, writing about the nature of justice at all. He was writing about the nature of dike or dikaiosyne, Greek concepts we usually translate by our word “justice.” But that is not a very good translation, even if it is the best we have. So it may be that a number of the odd or peculiar things Plato seems to say about justice are not really peculiar views about justice at all, but perfectly ordinary, familiar Greek ideas about dike. Having learned that words are not labels, we will not be surprised that a Greek concept in the same general area as ours can be fundamentally different in structure, quite apart from the question of whether Greek “standards of justice” differed from ours. The Greeks had no standards of justice, but only standards of dike. Ernest Barker tells us, as any good translator should, that “justice” is not an entirely accurate translation of dike. 15 He says that the Greek term “has a broader sweep than our word ‘justice’; is something more than legal; and includes the ethical notions (or some of the ethical notions) which belong to our word ‘righteousness.’” He argues that an accurate translation of the title of Plato’s dialogue, politeia e peri dikaiosynes would be “polity, or concerning righteousness,” that using the word “justice” here would in fact “fail to convey Plato’s meaning.” And he points out that in the Greek of Saint Paul dikaiosyne is regularly translated as “righteousness.” I think that these examples can help us to understand a number of puzzling features of Plato’s argument. For instance, they help us to understand why Plato, like his fellow Greeks, considers that justice is the “master virtue,” encompassing all others and ordering them. This doctrine, which we are taught to accept arbitrarily as simply something the Greeks believed, but which continues to strike us as odd, is hardly odd at all if predicated of righteousness instead. If someone maintains that righteousness is the master virtue containing all others, we might find the locution stilted, but we could see why he would think so. Righteousness means something like doing what is right, performing virtuous actions and being virtuous, so of course it contains all virtues. (A slight new oddness arises, I think, from the fact that in English, righteousness is not really “a virtue” at all.)

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Again, the connection to our righteousness helps us to understand why Plato often treats justice as a personal virtue, a virtue of individual men, why he speaks of “the just man.” We do also call men just or unjust sometimes in English, but the expression obviously has a quite different, much broader impact for Plato. We are likely to call a man just or unjust only in quite specific, narrow contexts—primarily when the quality of his judgments is at stake, in contexts involving his decisions on the relative merits or deserts of two or more persons or groups. For Plato it has a much broader meaning, closer to our “righteousness.” Thus, we would never spontaneously say in English, as Cephalus does in the translated Republic, that a man is just if he tells the truth and pays his debts. Not that such a man is unjust, of course. He is a good man, perhaps, or a dutiful one, or a moral one, or perhaps righteous (though that really sounds much too grandiose for such simple virtues; righteousness for us goes with wrath and glory). So when we read in the Republic of just men, we are always torn between the implications of the English words, which point one way, and the implications of context and argument, which point another (not opposite, but different) way. The difference in meaning between “justice” and dike may also help us to understand why Plato lays so much stress not merely on the system giving to each what is appropriate to him, but on each citizen’s accepting and performing his assigned function. This stress centers in the conjunction of what are to us two quite separate notions, which were not separate for the Greeks but part of a single, untranslatable concept: the notion of a system that gives to each what is truly his, and the notion of a man who is virtuous and fulfills his appointed duties. Plato is, as it were, demonstrating, and at the same time trading on, the connection between justness-righteousness and justness as in a just society. A just man is one who fulfills his justly assigned duties. The concept of justice and the differences in meaning between “justice” and dike stand, then, at the very center of some major features of Plato’s argument in the Republic. The same turns out to be true of a number of other, less crucial but still significant concepts, equally hard to render into English. Thus, one can learn much about Plato and the Republic by studying the various Greek words for knowledge; they lead, for example, to a much better comprehension of the famous but mysterious Socratic doctrine that “virtue is knowledge.” Similar insights can be gained from the study of Greek concepts we translate as “virtue,” “art,” or “love.” At first, one feels that Greek works should perhaps be translated with these crucial words left in the original Greek. But then one begins to suspect that the lesser adjectives and prepositions and conjunctions, the very structure of syntax and rhetoric, play as much of a role as the central nouns. No doubt it would be best to read all works in their original language; but that advice is not very useful.

Notes 1 As the title suggests, this chapter presents two selections from Wittgenstein and Justice: Chapter 8 nearly entire, and a selection from Chapter 13. They are thematically connected by Pitkin’s way of bringing language analysis to Plato’s Republic (ed.).

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2 Actually, Socrates gives several slightly different formulations here, but he seems to consider them equivalent. 3 Emile Durkheim, review of A. Labriola, “Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire,” Revue Philosophique (December 1897), quoted in Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, ed. R. F. Holland (New York: Humanities Press, 1965), pp. 23–24. 4 Any number of other parallels suggests themselves, but not all of them turn out to have the same structure and to be amenable to the same treatment as the quarrel between Socrates and Thrasymachus. Consider Hobbes saying tyranny is merely monarchy “misliked”: Leviathan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 19. Or Burke’s way of characterizing the thinkers of the French Revolution: “On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. . . . The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father are only common homicide”: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1955), p. 87. Or David Hume’s critique of our notion of causality: that really what we call causation is “derived from nothing but custom,” from repeated experience that certain phenomena “have been always conjoined together”: quoted in Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), pp. 671, 665. Compare Wittgenstein 1967a: 24, “The attraction of certain kinds of explanation is overwhelming. . . . In particular, explanations of the kind ‘This is really only this’.” 5 Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Kenelm Foster and Silvester Humphries (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 52. Aristotle himself, being half philosopher and half scientist in an age that did not draw such a distinction, at first seems to opt for the dialectical definition, but then suggests a third, combinatorial compromise definition: “the form; in those materials; for those reasons.” Philip Rieff, who calls attention to Aristotle’s distinction, maintains that only the dialectical definition “makes possible a moral science,” while the physical or natural scientific “style of definition excludes the moral – that is, human – questions altogether”: Freud (New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 16. In this he takes his stand with phenomenologists and other action theorists. But it is important to notice that the coexistence of two kinds of definitions is by no means confined to human, psychological, moral, or abstract concepts. Aristotle’s own second example after “anger” is “house.” So the problem is a general epistemological or semantic one, not merely one about how to study human or moral questions. 6 The literature on this and related distinctions is vast, and virtually every philosopher has his own way of drawing, and labeling, the distinction. Besides connotation/denotation, we find intension/extension, sense/reference, sense/nominatum, signification/denotation, and Sinn/Bedeutung. Major works to look at would include Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Reference,” in Peter Geach and Max Black, eds., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Basil BlackwelI, 1952); Rudolf Carnap, Meaning and Necessity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (London: J. W. Parker, 1843); Charles Morris, Signs, Language and Behavior (New York: George Braziller, 1955); and Gilbert Ryle, “The Theory of Meaning,” in Charles E. Caton, ed., Philosophy and Ordinary Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963). This last discusses some ways in which the connotation/denotation distinction is likely to be misleading. 7 George F. Hourani, “Thrasymachus’ Definition of Justice in Plato’s Republic,” Phronesis, VII (1962), 111; Hourani also cites N. R. Murphy, The Interpretation of Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), p. 2. 8 Compare Ziff 1960: 74–75; and Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1960), pp. 26–27. 9 Compare Austin Duncan-Jones, “Authority,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 32 (1958), p. 243; Bernard Mayo, Ethics and the Moral Life (London: Macmillan, 1958), pp. 194–195; and Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1964), pp. 249–250.

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10 Compare John Rawls, “Two Concepts of Rules,” Philosophical Review, LXIV (January 1955); J. B. Mabbott, “Punishment,” Mind, XLVIII (1939), 152–167; Anthony Quinton, “On Punishment,” in Peter Laslett, ed., Philosophy, Politics and Society (New York: Macmillan, 1956). 11 Piaget’s own findings thus cast doubt on his categorical assertion (1962: 71) that “procedure alone is obligatory” among the older children. 12 But Albert Ehrenzweig warns against saying that form without substance, positive law without natural law, “is purely arbitrary,” while substance without form, natural law without positive law, “is ineffective.” That formulation, he argues, obscures the truth that positive and natural law, and correspondingly form and substance, “are not only supplementary but identical,” because law is intentional, quasi-performative, or as he says, “justice-directed”: “Psychoanalytic Jurisprudence: A Common Language for Babylon,” Columbia Law Review, 65:2 (1965), pp. 1336, 1342. I thank Professor Walter Weyrauch for calling my attention to this article. 13 In this section, which appears as part of a later chapter of Wittgenstein and Justice, Pitkin returns to and further develops the reading of Plato’s Republic that was the focus of the complete chapter presented above. 14 Cavell 1961: 375; compare Giorgio Del Vecchio, Justice, trans. Lady Guthrie, ed. A. H. Campbell (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1952), esp. Chs 7–8. But note that one can “do justice” to inanimate objects, for instance, to a meal. 15 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Sir Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 362.

References Austin, J.L. 1961. Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barth, Karl. 1945. Wahrheit and Ideologie. Zürich: Manese Verlag. Cavell, S.L. 1961. “The Claim to Rationality.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University. Dahl, Robert. 1963. Modern Political Analysis. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1953. Marx in Perspektive. Hanover: J.H.W. Dietz. Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1957. The Essence of Christianity. New York: Harper & Brothers. Hudson, Donald. 1968. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Richmond: John Knox Press. Marx, Karl. 1959. Excerpt from a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In Lewis S. Feuer (ed.), Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1959. Manifesto of the Communist Party. In Lewis S. Feuer (ed.), Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Piaget, Jean. 1962. The Moral Judgment of the Child, trans. Marjorie Gabain. New York: Collier Books. Pitkin, Hannah Fenichel. 1967. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Tussman, Joseph. 1960. Obligation and the Body Politic. New York: Oxford University Press. Weldon, T.D. 1955. The Vocabulary of Politics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1964. Blue and Brown Books. New York and Evanston, IL: Harper & Row. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1967a. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1967b. Zettel, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1968. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan. Wolin, Sheldon S. 1960. Politics and Vision. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown. Ziff, Paul. 1960. Semantic Analysis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

6 RELATIVISM A lecture (1984)

The topic is relativism, especially relativism of judgment, and what I have to say about it is very simple, maybe simple-minded. I cannot offer a sophisticated, authoritative resolution of this problem, only at best some low-level help in trying to think clearly about it. I took up the topic as a teacher, for the sake of my students, who in recent years seem more and more “hung up” on what they call relativism, or the problem of being entitled to judge. More and more our seminar sessions seem to slide into that topic and to stay there, thrashing about helplessly, so that at the end of the semester we have made no progress on it at all, and little progress on anything else. That is the reason why I stick my neck out now on this formidable topic. Alan Bloom begins his controversial book, The Closing of the American Mind, with the words, There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. . . . [This] is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate. . . . The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion . . . [but] to their way of thinking, there should be no tolerance for the intolerant. (Bloom 1987: 25–29) I also recognize the syndrome in my students, though I find that one can be equally sure almost every student believes, or says he believes, that one must stand up for what is right, be committed, get involved, and act against evil. The students are inconsistent, and don’t notice it. That’s Professor Bloom’s point, too, and he concludes from it that the students are in error in their relativism, and that relativism is inconsistent and invalid. But that’s not the only possible conclusion one could reach.

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Discussions among my students on this topic usually take the form of dichotomous choice, a polarization into two groups, each trying to persuade the other of its view, mainly by a mutual guilt-tripping (mobilizing the guilt-feelings of the other group). The relativist group invariably starts from the terrible things that have been done by Europeans in the rest of the world in the name of ethical absolutes. They talk about how European imperialism invaded, colonized, and exploited virtually the whole earth, destroying peoples and cultures everywhere—first in the name of Christianity and civilization, and more recently in the name of development and freedom. All this, the relativists say, was terribly wrong: all those ruined native cultures were valuable in their diversity, and we might have learned from them. Europeans are not more civilized than anybody else; industrial, urban culture is not better than tribal culture, is not more “developed,” but simply different, incommensurable. And then, of course, imperialism abroad has its domestic counterparts: slavery in the past, and today the various rationalizations of injustice in terms of the alleged superiority of those with power and privilege. The relativists find all this intolerable—not just the harm done and the injustice of it, but the disgusting, self-righteous smugness of it, the ethnocentric blindness and arrogance of assuming that your standards are the only valid ones. I listen to the relativists, and I agree. But now comes your anti-relativist or absolutist group, with an equally powerful argument of similar structure: It’s terrible, the things that have been done and have been permitted to happen because people were unwilling to judge, to take a stand, to commit themselves and act to defend what is right. As the relativists invoke imperialism, the absolutists invariably invoke Nazi Germany. If you accept relativism, you will be unable to oppose or even to condemn Nazi genocide. You’ll be like all those “good Germans,” and all those appeasers in other lands, who just looked the other way and let it happen, or were “only following orders.” Similarly, you’ll look the other way about apartheid in South Africa today, or about racism in our own country, or child abuse. (After all, from a relativist perspective, one person’s sexual abuse is another’s loving. Who is to judge?) So as a relativist you will be morally and politically impotent, and therefore complicit in evil. The absolutists find this intolerable. They want to say, These terrible things that happen to people aren’t natural disasters like earthquakes or floods. They are human deeds, humanly fashioned arrangements, and humans can challenge and change them. If you don’t get engaged in stopping them, you’re just not facing up to your responsibilities. I listen to the absolutists, and I agree. So, you see my point. If you’re a relativist, you’re complicit in evil, in genocide, slavery, and child abuse. If you’re an absolutist, you’re complicit in evil, imperialism, slavery, and racism. Either way, you’re guilty.

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The one thing the relativists and absolutists agree on is that you must choose between them. But I want to begin, as I’ll end, by pleading for a recognition of the power of both of these lines of thought, of the hold that both of them have on us. Sensitive to that hold, I basically want to suggest that we refuse the choice which both relativists and absolutists press on us so urgently. (I’ve long held as a fundamental theoretical precept that when a philosopher offers you a dichotomous choice, it’s best to refuse. Refuse both alternatives or accept both, but refuse to choose.) Maybe it’s not true that we must choose either relativism or absolutism or else be complicit in terrible evil. We are all relativists; we are all absolutists; we all have both doctrines in us. So, from time to time today, as a sort of reminder of this point, I shall refer to “the relativist in us” and “the absolutist in us.” Let’s start with a closer look at relativism, at the relativist in us. It’s far from clear what relativism is, what doctrine the relativist in us believes. There are in fact a number of different doctrines here, but there is a kind of skeletal formula or schema that can be filled in and completed in various ways: “ALL _____________ ARE ALWAYS RELATIVE TO _____________” it says, “THEREFORE, YOU MAY NOT/CANNOT _________________.” For example, “All moral judgments are always relative to the culture of the judge. Therefore you may not judge other cultures (or, therefore you cannot validly judge other cultures).” Three blanks to be filled in: call them A, B, and C. A and C may be narrowly or broadly construed, generating more or less extensive relativisms. It may, for instance, be only aesthetic judgments that are a problem, or only moral ones, or political ones. Or it may be all judgment. Or it may extend to all utterances whatsoever, including “cognitive” ones, science, mathematics, everything. This last version of relativism allows for no contrasting category at all of things that are supposed not to be relative. Such very wide relativism is usually called not relativism but skepticism, and its cognitive side, of course, occupies a central place in modern philosophy. I’m more interested in the judgment side, and in the various judgment relativisms. Focusing on B, one can also classify relativisms in terms of what it is that judgments (whether aesthetic judgments, or ethical judgments, or all judgments) are supposed to be relative to. The most frequent categories here are four: 1.

2.

There is cultural relativism, which holds that since judgments are always relative to the judge’s culture, we can’t be objective about and therefore have no right to judge another culture, or people or practices or deeds from another culture. There is personal relativism, which holds that since judgments are always relative to the judge’s particular personal upbringing, history, and commitments, no judgment is permissible at all: you have just as little right to judge another member of your own culture as the practices of some other culture.

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3.

But it’s not exactly clear what constitutes a culture, where one culture leaves off and another begins. Is Europe one culture or many? Is the United States one culture? There are subcultures. Every society is divided by age and gender, and most also by class, ethnicity, geographic area, and lifestyles. So you can get something like “subcultural” relativism, gender relativism, ethnic relativism, and generational relativism. It’s okay to judge within your group, the group that shares your rules/norms/standards, but not outside of it. Examples are legion: You say spanking children is brutal and cruel, but that’s just middle class prejudice. Working class folks hit their kids and get it over with and probably do less psychic damage than the uptight middle class. What’s wrong with black English? It’s a dialect of English with just as much integrity and power of expression as your dialect, which you enforce as “standard English” just because you have the power. You call it emotional and irrational and unprincipled, but that’s just patriarchal bias against the way women think, which is a different morality, maybe more moral than your abstract principles.

—and so on. 4.

Finally, an important version of subcultural relativism is what I’ll call “practice” relativism, which holds that cultures and societies are divided into distinct practices or activities or spheres (Wittgenstein says “language games”), each with its own norms and standards of excellence embedded in the practice, into which you get initiated as you learn the practice. It would be silly to judge a ballet dancer by football standards, and corrupt to make a legal decision by market (profit) standards. It is okay to judge by those agreed, shared standards within a practice or sphere, but not across boundaries, for there are no trans-practice standards.1

Cultural and subcultural and practice relativism all try, as it were, to stake out a stable middle ground between extreme relativism and absolutism, but the way they do it leaves them vulnerable to attack from both sides. There is not only the absolutist in me protesting. The relativist in me also isn’t really satisfied with this relative (partial) kind of relativism. Sooner or later even judgments internal to a practice come to seem problematic to her, by exactly the same logic as was applied to cross-boundary judgments. Every group can be shown to contain subgroups and variations. The logic of relativism is such that it tends to spread: the spheres of permissible judgment get smaller and smaller. In the end, you get down to the individual person and personal relativism. And at that point, the very fact that you want to judge me (negatively) proves that we have different standards, so you have no right to judge

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me. (Maybe we should even dissolve the self here: I have no right now to judge past me’s?) We can all feel the legitimate pull of the relativist argument because it is a logical extrapolation from perfectly familiar features of what we call “judgment” and of our practice(s) of judging. Such features, for example, as: Some matters are simply none of your business. You’re not in charge of the whole world. There are limits on what’s subject to your judgment. Exceeding them is called being judgmental, and it’s a vice. Or again, to judge validly you have to know what you’re talking about. You have no right to judge what you don’t understand. Don’t judge in ignorance. Or again, you can’t judge fairly if you are biased, partial, prejudiced. That’s why judges with a personal interest at stake are supposed to disqualify themselves, and why we have voir dire in jury selection. We’re all familiar with these principles, and the relativist in us simply extrapolates from them, reasoning that since we humans are each and all raised in some particular subculture of some particular culture, and since each (sub)culture privileges some norms, practices, standards, and values over others (that’s what a culture is), we are all biased and prejudiced, we are all more or less ignorant of how it is with other societies, other groups, and other individuals. You shouldn’t be allowed to judge if there is good reason to think that you are ignorant or prejudiced in relevant ways; and why aren’t our generic human fallibility and our generic human enculturedness (enculturation?) such reasons? We can all see the logic of it, feel the pull of it; but there’s also something wrong. Usually the first big discovery my students make when they begin thinking seriously about relativism (and that Alan Bloom detects in his students, too) is that relativism is fundamentally inconsistent, incoherent. It suffers from the “liar’s paradox.” (The fellow from Crete who tells you, “Never believe a Cretan. All Cretans are inveterate liars.”) The total relativist or skeptic in us says, “All claims are merely relative,” and so that relativist or skeptic is helpless when we ask, “What’s the status of that claim, then?” The moral or political or value relativist in us seems to be better off, since she has a contrast group; she says “(Moral) judgments are always merely relative; that’s a fact.” (I.e., that’s a factual claim, not a judgment, and facts aren’t merely relative.) But the moral relativist in us isn’t content to stop there. She insists on continuing: “Therefore you have no right to make (moral) judgments/to judge others, and so forth”—and then the trap springs: that is a judgment. What’s the status of that judgment? Who says I have no right? By what standard? So relativism is deeply incoherent. But from this incoherence one must not leap to the conclusion that absolutism is valid—not only because we still do feel the pull of relativism, but even more because absolutism has its own problems. So, now, what is absolutism? Well, the absolutist in us insists that we do have the right—maybe even the duty—to judge other people and their deeds, other

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cultures and their practices; there do exist valid, transcultural standards (something like Natural Law) by which such judgments can be made. The problem faced by the absolutist in us is not exactly parallel to that of the relativist. The absolutist’s problem is one not so much of incoherence, as of proof. She doesn’t seem to be able to produce the necessary absolute or transcendent or universal standards that she claims, or to prove that the standards she can produce are in fact absolute. Worse yet, it’s not at all clear what an absolute standard is, and would count as one, what such a proof might look like, and who would have to be convinced by it. Clearly, just producing some norm or standard or principle and claiming its universal validity wouldn’t constitute proof, even if you say it very loudly and firmly. What would count here? One of the most commonly adopted strategies I find in the literature is to argue from need: there must be absolute, transcendent standards, because we need them so desperately, because if there aren’t, the consequences would be intolerable. In a way that’s the implication in the guilt-trip examples discussed at the outset: why, without standards you couldn’t even condemn imperialism or racism or child abuse or murder. That this line of argument won’t do—is logically flawed—should be pretty obvious. The fact that we desperately want something to exist doesn’t prove its existence. (On the contrary, that we desperately want something to exist suggests that we should be very skeptical of any alleged proof of its existence, for the proof could so easily turn out to be just wish-fulfillment.) Maybe, if there is no God, all is permitted, and maybe the consequences of that would be horrible, but that can’t prove there is a God. A second, equally futile strategy is to look for actual universals found in all human cultures and times. A surprising amount of energy has been put into this enterprise (surprising because the effort is so obviously futile). Behavioral universals exist, but they don’t help with judgment. Whether there are any norms, standards, or values that are to be found in all cultures is of course an empirical question. There may well be. Some people claim a prohibition against wrongful killing of humans is universal; others cite the incest taboo; still others cite promising or keeping one’s word. But, as Clifford Geertz points out, one can claim such rules as universal only by making their central terms so flexible or so general that they are almost empty (Geertz 1989: 12–34). Wrongful killing may always be forbidden, but if the rules of what’s wrongful vary all over the map, that can’t help justify judgments. (I think here of poor John Locke, arguing that the precepts of Natural Law can be proved like theorems of geometry, and being able to come up with only one example of such a precept: “Where there is no property, there can be no injustice.” True, if you make the terms broad enough. But all that tells you is that the idea of justice is connected to the idea of right allocation. But how does that help if notions of right allocation and of property are utterly diverse?) But even if we could find some such universal norm with stable content—say, a rule against incest between genetic parent and child—would that give us the

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absolute standards we crave?2 Of course not. First, it’s only one slender norm. Second, individuals or subgroups might still reject it. And besides, even an empirically universal human acceptance of some norm remains stubbornly distinct from the norm’s absolute validity. All hitherto existing societies might just have been wrong about something (an important point for feminists, as John Stuart Mill pointed out). Universal assent may guarantee your judgment not being challenged, but it is not sufficient to guarantee absolute standards. Nor is it necessary. Nobody’s assent is necessary. If a standard or norm or rule is absolutely, universally right, then it is right no matter how many misguided idiots disagree with it. The best one can do here is to move to the hypothetical: an absolute, universal rule or standard is one to which everyone should or must assent, to which every reasonable and unprejudiced person will assent. But that’s no real help for justifying judgment, because it’s circular. The “reasonable” people are those who assent. I think the absolutist in us imposes (or suffers from) a notion of absoluteness that is so absolute as to be inherently unattainable, maybe even meaningless. She has accepted the relativist’s notion of what it takes to make judgment legitimate, and so is stuck with trying to produce proof on that, impossible, ground. In effect, I think the answer to the question “whom would the absolutist in us have to convince of the universal validity of her standard?” is—the relativist in us. It is the relativist to whom the proof of absoluteness must be convincing. And the relativist, by definition, is the one whom the absolutist can never convince. It helps to ask, what is it we crave when we look for absolute standards? What so much as gives us the idea that such a thing exists? While we can’t pursue that in detail, let’s just consider a couple of frequently mentioned possibilities here: mathematics and religion. Mathematics is often cited as an example of absolute validity, in contrast to the relativity of judgment. And it’s true that mathematical validity is a matter of deductive proof, not of popular agreement. You don’t seek the mathematical answer by majority vote, and if someone claims a personal exemption from a mathematical proof, you can dismiss that person with a clear conscience. In mathematics there is no room for, “Well, for me the sum of three angles of a plane triangle is 170 degrees, not 180 degrees.” That person doesn’t understand math, or is crazy, or kidding, or whatever, but in any case doesn’t for a moment shake the validity of the particular proof, or of math in general. In math, we don’t have a moral obligation to consider everyone’s alternative views. These features of mathematics are of course sustained by the way we teach and practice mathematics, as Wittgenstein points out: “Something is an axiom not because we accept it as extremely probable, nay, certain, but because we assign it a particular function, and one that conflicts with that of an empirical proposition” (Wittgenstein 1964: 114). An axiom is what we treat as an axiom. And he says, suppose that we taught math as we now teach, say, art or creative writing: “Children could calculate, each in his own way – as long as they listened to their inner voice and obeyed it” (Wittgenstein 1968: 233). The result would not, of course, be calculating or mathematics, and “standards” would become problematic.

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So does that mean we could arrive at absolute standards in morals or politics or art if we taught and practiced those enterprises as we now do mathematics? Would they still be morality or politics or art if we did that? Would they still involve anything we could recognize as judgments? Or only calculations and proofs? Surely if one can imagine such a practice at all, it would be a mockery of morality or politics: if you can dismiss the views of those who disagree with you in a matter of human relations as you dismiss an error in mathematics, that’s just self-righteousness or ideological tyranny. And it could not function as morality or politics do, as anything we could recognize as morality or politics. So either the absolutist in us sets herself an impossible task—to prove the existence of something that cannot exist in this world, that is disqualified as soon as it is shown to exist in this world—or else the absolutist in us proposes that we treat something that does exist in this world as absolute, in which case we are no longer engaged in esthetics or ethics or politics, and no longer exercising judgment. My second example is religion. People often say—and certainly Alan Bloom thinks—that these matters were easier in the old days, when people believed in God and thus in the existence of absolute right and wrong. But were things easier? Or was the same unease then simply given another name? Sure, there were (taken to be) absolute standards: God’s judgment. But humans didn’t have access to God’s mind. Humans still had to make human judgments, and humans were, then as now, known to be often prejudiced and always fallible (then it was sinful and fallible). So the right to judge, and the duty to do so, were in practice problematic to thoughtful people then, as they are now. Sure, God says, “Thou shalt not kill,” but what exactly does that mean, and how does it articulate with “Love thy neighbor as thyself”? What if my neighbor’s life—or his soul—is in imminent danger from an ungodly person? May I judge? Must I? So the existence of absolute standards is not enough; there is also the problem of our access to them, and of applying them in particular cases. That’s why traditional Judeo-Christian doctrine is dual: there is a God who defines absolute right and wrong and even issues explicit commandments to humans to spell it out, but he also made us with free will, and fallible. We must choose; we must apply our notion of the rules, knowing that we will be judged. So we may never suppose that “all is permitted.” On the contrary, there is objective right and wrong. But we also may never suppose that we know with certainty what is right; that would be prideful. There is a God, but we are not God. (Or, there is a God; therefore we are not God.)3 Both the relativist and the absolutist in us agree that valid judgment requires standards whose validity is beyond question, is guaranteed with certainty. But even if there were such standards, our judgments would still be fallible and problematic. So how could such standards—if they are forever beyond human reach—justify our judgments or our right to judge? Judgment has a funny, in-between sort of status. It must differ both from mere expression of personal or cultural preference, on the one hand, and from mathematical or deductive logical proof, on the other. (Kant assigns it a “subjective universality.”)

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I think that what the absolutist in us really craves is an absolute guarantee of the validity of her judgments; she seeks judgment without the burden of guilt (for the judge), without any risk of guilt. And that we can’t have, and a good thing too. The risk of guilt is what keeps judgment honest. So relativism is incoherent, and absolutism tries to prove what is inherently impossible. Yet we can’t get rid of the relativist in us or the absolutist in us. (That’s a philosophical dilemma.) Now what? Well, are we ever entitled to judge other cultures, other groups, other people? But one can’t work seriously on that question without examining the concept of judging and judgment. So many different things can be meant by those words, and depending on which context you are assuming (which picture comes to mind), you are likely to get a very different sort of answer. Asking, “Are we entitled to judge?” may mean, e.g.: 1. 2.

3.

4.

Are we entitled to form an opinion, to ourselves, mentally? Are we entitled to express the opinion we have formed (already many paths diverge here)—and to express the opinion to a trusted friend, in confidence, to a class we are teaching, to the F.B.I., on television . . . Are we entitled to render an official judgment with formal consequence, which is something one can only do if one is in a position to, if one occupies the appropriate role. (Most important and most diverse): Are we entitled to act on our judgment, to judge in the sense of deciding to take action and then acting, as a single deed. To be sure, expressing our opinion or issuing an official judgment already are themselves actions, but there’s an infinity of other actions that might exemplify and express—even constitute—our judgment. They range from casting our individual vote, to imposing our views dictatorially by force of arms; from admonishing a child or advising a friend to killing an enemy; and from long term, deliberate policies to unavoidable emergency choices.

Obviously, I can’t even begin to discuss all these possibilities, but it should be evident just from the list that the question, “Are we entitled to judge?” looks very different if we are imagining it as equivalent to, “Are we entitled to form an opinion?” than if we hear it as “Are we entitled to impose and enforce this by any means necessary (say, by carpet bombing)?” It takes a lot more to justify an affirmative answer to the latter version. Even without the elaboration, for which we have no time, a list of this kind can teach us quite a lot. For instance, it suggests the poverty of a dichotomous choice, such as “you may judge” vs. “you may not judge” (or absolutist vs. relativist). There are cases when you must judge, when you have no right not to judge. There may be other cases when you can’t help but judge, where, for example, anything you do, including “inaction,” will have important consequences.

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In sum, then, a list like this is a good place to start, but it’s where this essay must end. There are problems about cross-cultural judgments, but they are not in principle different in kind from the problems facing other judgments, ingroup judgments. They need not even be greater in degree. And none of them is in principle insurmountable. The fact that, being human, I have been enculturated in some particular subculture of some particular culture does not preclude my learning a little, or a whole lot, about how it is with others, which learning may, or may not, change my standards. A culture, after all, is not a prison or an impermeable container. It imposes a potential for bias, but potential bias is one thing, actual bias is another (and inevitable actual bias still another). Anything that a culture privileges can also be challenged in that culture, maybe not easily, but it can (where else does something like feminism come from?). Sometimes distance blinds us or leaves us ignorant, but lack of distance can blind, too, and make us prejudiced. A valid judgment is one that overcomes or escapes our fallibility and our biases, not one that is guaranteed in advance to overcome or escape them. Yes, my judgments are always made by my standards (how else could they be made? I can at times judge by someone else’s standards, but that won’t be my judgment), but that doesn’t invalidate them a priori. It merely adds one more kind of fallibility to the fallibility of our perceptions, our reasoning, and so on. Judgment requires that I separate my merely personal preferences and my merely cultural habitations, no matter how strong, from universal standards, from my understanding of what standards are universally binding. Judgment requires that I sort this out, and that I judge only by the latter. That can be hard. I may be as strongly repelled by the nauseating food these people eat, or by the way they smell, as by their cruel practice of, let’s say, suttee—burning the widow alive on her husband’s funeral pyre. But I know that the former repulsion is due merely to habituation; the latter I am prepared to apply and defend as a moral universal, which need not mean that its violation justifies bombing raids. In making such judgments we could well be wrong, as I may well be wrong in these speculations about relativism. But we are not inevitably bound to be wrong. With the small comfort of that limited reassurance, I leave the topic to you.

Notes 1 I have in mind particularly Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983) and Alisdair Macintyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 2 The word “genetic” is essential here, since so many cultures have non-biological ways of defining what we take to be biological family relationships. See, e.g., Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” in Ruth Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210. 3 According to Matthew, Jesus taught, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matt. 7:1). But according to Luke, he also upbraided the “hypocrites” who can discern the approaching weather but claim they cannot judge: “Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?” (Luke 12:56–57).

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References Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster. Geertz, Clifford. 1989. “Anti-Relativism.” In Michael Krausz (ed.), Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1964. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, ed. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1968. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 3rd edn. New York: Macmillan.

7 JUSTICE On relating private and public (1981)1

By almost all the available evidence, we are witnessing a widespread turning away from public life. The prevailing disillusionment with established leadership and institutions produces not protest but withdrawal into privacy, yet privatization manifestly is not providing the comfort and security we seek. And all that anyone seems able to muster for calling people back to the care of this republic is the familiar and incompatible pair of devices: the exhortation to civic duty, and the appeal to self-interest. Neither seems to be doing much good. The left diagnoses a “legitimation crisis,” but has its own difficulties in summoning up a public movement. Hardly anyone today would know what to make of Tocqueville’s simple observation that taking away politics from the American would be taking away half his life, let alone Aristotle’s definition of man as the political animal. The possibility that public participation might be intrinsically rewarding, a fulfillment of our nature rather than a burden, is pursued by almost no one. This essay attempts to pursue it through a critical reexamination of the meaning of public and private in the thought of Hannah Arendt, the political theorist who wrote most powerfully on that theme in our time, and who tried hardest to renew our access to politics as a positive gratification, a “public happiness.”

I When we talk of public and private, do we know what we are talking about? Wanting to theorize, we seize on or are seized by the first image that springs to mind: the private is “in here,” personal, intimate, closest to the self, secluded from unwanted others, where we have “privacy” and are free to be ourselves. The public, by contrast, is “out there,” impersonal, distant, formal; whatever goes “out in public” must be ready for “publication,” its “private parts” properly clothed. This is the view developed most recently by Richard Sennett, who speaks in spatial

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metaphors of a “geography” of public and private (Sennett 1977: 16). It is a plausible view. Yet, given this view, what shall we make of the joint-stock, limited-liability corporation, the heart of “private enterprise”? Surely it is neither personal nor intimate, no locus of privacy. The economist obviously distinguishes public from private in a different way, and so would we had our first image been economic. Here “public sector” is divided from private on the basis of ownership, and public means, roughly, government, the state. Hannah Arendt proposed still a different view, but warned that we might experience “extraordinary difficulty” in understanding the “decisive division” between public and private, because we have lost the experience from which those terms derive their meaning, particularly the experience of a genuine public life (Arendt 1958: 28). For her, public is almost synonymous with political, but political is not to be equated with governmental; instead, it concerns action in a community of peers. Neither a crowd of strangers at a movie, nor the Department of Defense would qualify. There is considerable basis in etymology for Arendt’s claim that we have lost some earlier awareness of the value of public life. In its ancient origins, being private did mean being deprived, and in English the public concerns the good of a single communal body before it refers to a collection of individuals seriatim. However, the private is also early associated in English with privilege, the advantages of withdrawal. Nor will it do flatly to equate the public with politics, office, or citizenship, as Arendt sometimes does. Our difficulty in theorizing about these concepts comes partly from the fact that in ordinary use words like “public” and “private” function mainly as adjectives. To turn them into general categories, we must either hypostasize them into substantives, as Arendt does: “The Public” and “The Private,” which makes them seem mysterious entities, seducing us into reification. Or else we must attach the adjectives to some general noun, used metaphorically: the public (or private) sector, sphere, domain, or realm; whereupon we are likely to fall victim to the unexamined connotations of our own metaphor.2 Private and public, it is important to realize, are relative terms. Things in the world are not generally classifiable exclusively as either public or private. It is not just that historically the content of public life has changed. Even more important is the sort of distinction C. Wright Mills drew in The Sociological Imagination, between “the personal troubles of milieu” and “the public issues of social structure” (Mills 1959: 8). Personal troubles “occur within the character of the individual and . . . his immediate relations with others.” So their “statement and resolution” properly lie with the individual as a biographical entity and within the scope of his immediate milieu—the social setting that is directly open to his personal experience and to some extent his willful activity. A trouble is a private matter. Public issues of social structure, however, transcend “these local environments of the individual,” and deal with the organization of many such milieux into the

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institutions of an historical society as a whole, with the ways in which various milieux overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical life. An issue is a public matter. Mills’s distinction, however, leaves unclear the problem of perception (e.g., a lost job perceived as a personal failure or as part of a widespread social condition). Mills also fails to make clear that a social condition becomes a public issue only when it is widely perceived as a problem and as remediable through public action. Our ways of distinguishing public and private, then, are heterogeneous, and the question of who gets to do the defining is itself part of the problem. Still, it may be useful to delineate three dimensions along which we distinguish public from private, and which therefore help to make up our concept of the public. I shall call them the dimension of access or attention, the dimension of impact or effect, and the dimension of governance or control. First, something may be public in the sense that it is accessible to all, open to scrutiny by anyone, visible as a focus of attention. Here the term connects with publicity, public knowledge, public opinion, and going “out in public,” and contrasts with reserved, closed, hidden. Second, something may be public in the sense that it affects all or most of us, public in its consequences and significance. This objective publicness may go unrecognized by the people affected; thus the first and second sort of publicness really are distinct. The decisions of, say, a private corporation can have enormous public impact and importance. Here the opposite of public is not secluded or withdrawn, but personal, of limited impact, affecting only select individuals or groups. Mills’s distinction between personal troubles and public issues, then, telescopes the first and second dimensions of the public: troublesome social conditions are public in their impact, but become public issues only when made the focus of public attention. When they do, it is usually with a view toward the third dimension: public direction or control. This is the publicness of government, public administration, and collective action. It includes Arendt’s main conception. But public direction or control is in itself difficult to define, particularly in times like ours, for a nation may be governed more by “private” aggregations of power than by its official government, and its government may be so dominated by special interests that it functions more as a private than a public agency. What are we to say about multinational corporations, some so large and powerful as to dwarf many sovereign states? Are they public or private? What of hybrids like Amtrak and the Postal Service? What of our public regulatory agencies, so often dominated by the private industry they are meant to control? What of the whole bureaucratic military-industrial complex, with its public largesse for private corporations, its exchanges of high-level personnel between government and industry? Clearly the third dimension for distinguishing public from private contains profound ambiguities between form and substance. Formal control by an official government need not mean actual public control. But then, what is actual, substantive public control? The answer is not easy, but one suspects that our theoretical

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concerns intersect here with our practical, political ones, at a point where Hannah Arendt’s political thought was also focused.

II The distinction between public and private, Arendt tells us, “corresponds to” that between “the household and the political realm” that first emerged in ancient Greece and continued until the onset of the modern age, when it was blurred by the emergence of a third “realm” she calls the “social” (Arendt 1958: 55). In the ancient world, public and private were sharply distinguished, and the former was the locus of value. The public realm, the polis way of life, was what set off Greek from barbarian, what was gradually wrested from the domination of kings and masters, what made possible a free and truly human life. The rise of the city-state meant that man received: besides his private life a sort of second life, his bios politikos. Now every citizen belongs to two orders of existence; and there is a sharp distinction in his life between what is his own (idion) and what is communal (koinon). (Arendt 1958: 24, quoting Werner Jaeger, Paideia (1945) III, 111) The household was a “pre-political realm,” a necessary prerequisite for citizenship, but strictly a means to that higher end. First, that household was ruled by domination and force, by a despotes, while polis life was carried on through speech and reason (Arendt 1958: 26–27; Arendt 1969: 106). Second, by contrast with household inequality and despotic barbarian kingship, citizenship was a relationship of equality. The polis “knew only ‘equals,’” though the Greek notion of equality was different from ours; it had nothing to do with universal natural rights, nor did it assume parity in wealth, talent, or ability (Arendt 1958: 32; Arendt 1965: 23). Rather, it was a special, artificially created equality of status as citizens. Thus, to be a citizen “meant neither to rule or be ruled” (Arendt 1958: 32). Third, citizenship in the polis meant admission to a public “sphere of freedom,” while the private sphere was governed by necessity—not just the domination of the master over the family and slaves, but the “necessities of life” that would rule even the master if he did not have others to provide for him (Arendt 1958: 30). The household was considered the locus of economic life; it was the basic unit of production, as is suggested by the Greek word for household (oikia) which is the root of our word “economics” (Arendt 1958: 29). It was the proper place for labor, for activities “related to the maintenance of life,” Arendt argues, just as the more direct necessities of bodily function and species reproduction are properly hidden away in privacy (Arendt 1958: 28, 30, 62).3 Accordingly, “no activity that served only the purpose of making a living, of sustaining only the life process, was permitted to enter the political realm” (Arendt 1958: 37). Anything “economic” was “non-political . . . by definition,” for

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“everything merely necessary or useful” had to be “strictly excluded” from the bios politikos, the realm of freedom (Arendt 1958: 29, 25). Arendt is highly ambiguous about whether freedom and action are possible in private, or only in the public realm.4 Perhaps she meant to distinguish between action in general, and great or heroic action, which somehow embodies the essence of what action is all about. The former characterizes human beings as such, can occur even in private and social life, perhaps even includes behavior; the latter is confined to the public realm and requires a political arena. Thus Arendt says that “Action needs for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory, and which is possible only in the public realm,” because excellence “by definition requires” the presence of others “as an audience, and not just the casual, familiar presence of one’s equals or inferiors,” but necessarily “the formality of the public, constituted by one’s peers” (Arendt 1958: 180, my emphasis; 49; cf. Arendt 1969: 169). This brings us to self-revelation and the quest for glory. Action is the revelation and expression of self, of human uniqueness. “Variations and distinctions” occur already in lower life forms, “but only man can express this distinction and distinguish himself,” so that it “becomes uniqueness” (Arendt 1958: 176). Thus, “in acting and speaking, we show who we are, reveal our unique personal identities,” disclosing “‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’” we are (Arendt 1958: 179, also 177). The making of objects, even works of artistic genius, cannot reveal who a unique self is, Arendt argues, for the creator is always more than the creation. This may be true of any particular action as well: I am always more than this or that action I have done; but the sum total of my actions, my life story, does tell who I was (Arendt 1958: 180, 186, 210–211). Sometimes it seems that this revelation can take place in private life; Arendt argues that love—which can survive only in private—nevertheless has “an unequalled power of self-revelation,” of disclosing “who . . . the loved person may be” (Arendt 1958: 51, 242). Moreover, in modern life people reveal themselves “only in the privacy of their families or the intimacy of their friends,” while in the ancient understanding, it was the public realm that “was reserved for individuality” (Arendt 1958: 210, 41). “Political man” is characterized by what Arendt, following John Adams, calls “the passion for distinction . . . a desire to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected,” a passion whose “virtue” is the “desire to excel another,” and whose vice is “ambition,” aiming “at power as a means of distinction.”5 Besides distinction, Arendt sometimes suggests that reality itself is at stake here. For: appearance – something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves – constitutes reality. Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life . . . lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence. (Arendt 1958: 50) Thus, the restricted audience of family and friends can provide only a “limited reality” (Arendt 1958: 59, also 51, 199, 208).

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This seems to be partly because the public realm offers a plurality of perspectives unavailable in privacy, and partly because it offers a permanence of remembrance. Only the public realm, a kind of organized remembrance, offers “the possibility of achieving something more permanent than life itself,” an earthly “immortality” (Arendt 1958: 58, 17–21). Works of art, the creations of individual genius, are also lasting, but as we saw, they do not capture the creator’s full self; love captures the essence of the self, but offers no permanence. In the modern world, Arendt argues, the public and private realms have been blurred and largely supplanted by something she calls “society” or “the social,” a “relatively new phenomenon whose origin coincides with the emergence of the modern age.” The social is “neither private nor public, strictly speaking” (Arendt 1958: 38, 28; see also Arendt 1965: 101). In general it seems that the social realm is concerned with economics and production and necessity, which were private in the ancient world; yet it is collective, large-scale, and impersonal. It is a realm of uniformity rather than of individual distinction; it imposes “leveling demands,” and “conformism [is] inherent in” it. It contrasts with the plurality and distinctness once characteristic of public life: “society always demands that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest” (Arendt 1958: 39). Society is also the realm of “behavior,” and “excludes the possibility of action . . . imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to normalize its members, to make them behave” (Arendt 1958: 40). That is why society has made possible statistical social science, which studies the uniformities of behavior that society demands and imposes (Arendt 1958: 42). “Society” has “invaded” and “conquered the public realm,” but there is a significant ambiguity about just what this victory means (Arendt 1965: 223; Arendt 1958: 41). Sometimes we are told that society has “destroyed” the public realm: the public “withers away” until it is about “to disappear altogether” (Arendt 1958: 59, 69, 60; cf. 52, 198–199). At other times the public seems more like a place, which is not destroyed but occupied, as society displaces the former occupant, the political. In this second sense, the public realm need not be political at all, but will house whatever activity a community honors as central and makes the focus of its attention. Thus in some ancient and most medieval cities the public marketplace belonged to the craftsmen and merchants—homo faber Arendt calls them—engaging in public “conspicuous production” (Arendt 1958: 46, 59, 159–161). More recently it is man as laborer and consumer, the animal laborans, that has “been permitted to occupy the public realm” (Arendt 1958: 134; cf. 38, 43, 112). “As long as the animal laborans remains in possession of it there can be no true public realm, but only private activities displayed in the open” (Arendt 1958: 134, 33, 160). But that is precisely what Arendt means by “society”: it is that “curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance” (Arendt 1958: 35). The same ambiguity appears in the relationship of social to political. On the one hand, they are incompatible, the political demanding action while the social precludes it. But on the other hand, Arendt also says that the withering away of the public realm leaves behind certain political forms characteristic precisely of

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society—one almost wants to say “certain nonpolitical political forms.” She speaks of the reduction of the political to “a very restricted sphere of government,” and the reduction of government in turn to administration. She speaks of bureaucracy as “the most social form of government.” She also mentions something like interestgroup pressure politics as a “perverted form of ‘acting together’” that can only bring to the fore those “who know nothing and can do nothing” (Arendt 1958: 40, 60, 203; also 28–29). In On Revolution, Arendt is franker about the meaning of society’s intrusion on the public, allowing that “the social question” might be spoken of “better and more simply” as “the existence of poverty” (Arendt 1965: 54, 50, 86). Crucial to her view is the conviction that prior to our own time, the problem of poverty “could not be solved by political means” (Arendt 1965: 110). Only “the rise of technology and not the rise of modern political ideas” has made the problems of poverty solvable for us (Arendt 1965: 86). To Arendt, these problems are “matters of administration, to be put into the hands of experts, rather than issues which could be settled by the twofold process of decision and persuasion” (Arendt 1965: 86). Accordingly, No revolution has ever solved the ‘social question’ and . . . the whole record of past revolutions demonstrates beyond doubt that every attempt to solve the social question with political means leads into terror, and that it is terror which sends revolutions to their doom. (Arendt 1965: 108) Why is this so? Arendt gives two accounts, one ontological and one psychological or sociological. Ontologically, as we have already seen, economic concerns are by definition opposed to freedom and the capacity for action. Poverty is a “dehumanizing force . . . because it puts men under the absolute dictate of their bodies, that is, under the absolute dictate of necessity.” Thus, When the poor, driven by the needs of their bodies, burst onto the scene of the French Revolution . . . necessity appeared with them, and the result was that the power of the old regime became impotent and the new republic was stillborn. (Arendt 1965: 54) More concretely, it was a particular historical class of people who “appeared on the scene of politics,” and something about them was what ruined politics and aborted the Revolution. “It was people rather than general economic and financial problems that were at stake, and they did not intrude into but burst upon the political domain. Their need was violent, and, as it were, pre-political,” and therefore destructive of politics. Measured against the immense sufferings of the immense majority of the people, the impartiality of justice and law, the application of the same rules to

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those who sleep in palaces and those who sleep under the bridges of Paris, was like a mockery. (Arendt 1965: 86) This “multitude, appearing for the first time in broad daylight” in the French Revolution, “was actually the multitude of the poor and the downtrodden, whom every century before had hidden in darkness and shame,” in the privacy of the household. The public realm was now to “offer its space and light to this immense majority who are not free because they are driven by daily needs” (Arendt 1965: 41). Of the ideas that made the Revolution, “the notion and the taste of public liberty” were “the first to disappear,” says Arendt partly quoting Tocqueville, “because they could not withstand the onslaught of wretchedness which the Revolution brought into the open” (Arendt 1965: 248–249). Once the suffering of the poor “had been exposed” to the public light, what made its appearance “was rage and not virtue,” for “rage is indeed the only form in which misfortune can become active” (Arendt 1965: 106; my emphasis). Thus it seems that for Arendt, because political action cannot solve economic problems, and because misery can become active only in destructive ways, it is best for the poor and the laborers to be kept out of the public sphere. Like women, they belong in the household, with concerns of the body: From the beginning of history to our own time it has always been the bodily part of human existence that needed to be hidden in privacy. Hidden away were the laborers who ‘with their bodies minister to the [bodily] needs of life,’ and the women who with their bodies guarantee the physical survival of the species . . . The fact that the modern age emancipated the working classes and the women at nearly the same historical moment must certainly be counted among the characteristics of an age which no longer believes that bodily functions and material concerns should be hidden. (Arendt 1958: 72–73) But we know that Arendt believes that material concerns (and bodily functions as well) must be excluded from the public realm; so a passage like this one is bound to make one wonder whether she also has her doubts about the “emancipation” of workers and women. Can it be that Arendt held so contemptible a doctrine—one that denies the possibility of freedom, a truly human life, and even reality, to all but a handful of males who dominate all others and exclude them by violence from privilege? And when the excluded and miserable do enter history, can it be that Arendt condemns them for their rage, their failure to respect the “impartiality of justice and law”? Impartiality! Justice! Where were these principles when that immense majority was relegated to shame and misery? On this account, the exclusion of “everything merely necessary or useful” from political life means simply the exclusion of the

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exploited by their exploiters, who can afford not to discuss economics, and to devote themselves to “higher things,” because they live off the work of others. But there is more wrong here than injustice. On this account, I suggest, one cannot even make sense of politics itself; even for those admitted to its benefits, it can be no real benefit. To see what I mean, put two questions to Arendt: What keeps these citizens together as a body? And what is it that they talk about together, in that endless palaver in the agora? As to what unifies the citizenry, Arendt acknowledges that her concept of public action “stresses the urge toward self-disclosure at the expense of all other factors,” and therefore “is highly individualistic” (Arendt 1958: 194). Certainly for the Greeks the public realm “was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody had constantly to distinguish himself,” to prove “that he was the best of all” (Arendt 1958: 41). But more generally as well, citizenship is characterized by “the conviction that the greatest that man can achieve is his own appearance and actualization” (Arendt 1958: 208; cf. 159, 191). Evidently what holds these competitive citizens together is that each needs the others for his audience, as means to his personal end. The polis, Arendt says, “had a twofold function” for the Greeks: it was “supposed to multiply the occasions to win ‘immortal fame,’ that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself”; and, second, it was supposed to “offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech,” to make it more likely that greatness would be permanently remembered (Arendt 1958: 197). “It was for the sake of this chance, and out of love for a body politic that made it possible to them all, that each was more or less willing to share in the burdens . . . of public affairs” (Arendt 1958: 41). Nor, again, is this attitude confined to the Greeks, for when Arendt explicitly asks what “force” keeps citizens together in general, her answer is a traditional and quite offhand invocation of the theory of social contract. Each sees his private advantage in being joined to the others, and therefore binds himself to them by “the force of mutual promise or contract” (Arendt 1958: 245). This is an astonishing teaching for a theorist whose entire doctrine seems in other respects a sustained critique of the utilitarian calculation of self-interest that reduces all things to “the merely necessary or useful,” and particularly of treating human beings as means to one’s private ends, “as one treats other ‘material’” (Arendt 1958: 188). Arendt’s citizens seem no less selfish than any “rational economic man.” And about what are citizens to talk, in the public realm, as each tries to distinguish himself? Economic concerns are excluded, both ontologically and functionally, because the intrusion of “the social” will destroy true public life. For the Greeks, at least, law-making was excluded as well, for they regarded legislation as a prepolitical task, a kind of “making” analogous to the building of a city wall, usually to be accomplished by a single law-giver who would not even be a citizen using the public edifice he constructed (Arendt 1958: 63–64, 196).6 The Greeks deliberated much about warfare; surely that is not what Arendt recommends for us. But then, what does she imagine as the content of political speech and action? And why is this question so difficult to answer from her text?

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Economics is to be excluded because it serves the needs of the body, and the body is a threat to human greatness and freedom, an encumbrance that ties us to our animal nature, something shameful to be hidden in private darkness. Public life, by contrast, is the quest for secular immortality, the hope of being remembered after one’s death so that one’s name and fame live on. Yet, given the curious emptiness of content characterizing Arendt’s image of the public sphere, it is hard to see why such immortal fame should be so important and attractive. It is one thing to hope for heavenly immortality, but the earthly immortal fame Arendt has in mind seems no good once one is dead. Why should I care—and care so much—about whether my name and deeds will be remembered after I am dead and gone? Arendt’s citizens begin to resemble posturing little boys clamoring for attention (“Look at me! I’m the greatest!” “No, look at me!”) and wanting to be reassured that they are brave, valuable, even real. (No wonder they feel unreal: they have left their bodies behind in the private realm.) Though Arendt was female, there is a lot of machismo in her vision. Unable to face their mortality and physical vulnerability, the men she describes strive endlessly to be superhuman, and, realizing that they cannot achieve that goal, require endless reassurance from the others in their anxious delusion. Yet, can this really be what Arendt means? Why should she so undermine her own effort to save public, political life?

III To discover what has gone wrong with Arendt’s account of public life and action, compare her ideas to those of Aristotle, on whom she so frequently draws. Clearly, Arendt’s identification of the public with the political, of both with action, and of all three with what is distinctively human, derives from Aristotle. “Man is a political animal,” Aristotle teaches, a creature that will reach its highest natural capacities only in polis citizenship (Aristotle 1958a: 5–6; cf. 12; Aristotle 1958b: 305).7 Aristotle insists, like Arendt, that politics is a relationship among peers who share in selfgovernment, yet that the equality of citizens also presupposes diversity and plurality among them (Aristotle 1958a: 17, 32, 41, 51, 93, 112–113, 134, 181, 288, 298, 315; Aristotle 1958b: 157). Like Arendt, too, he distinguishes action from making, and associates action and politics with freedom; although Aristotle allows for both private action and private freedom (Aristotle 1958a: 10; Aristotle 1958b: 173).8 He also distinguishes political from household relations, the latter being concerned with “property” and the “necessary conditions” for “life,” while the former is concerned with “the good life,” and “virtue” (Aristotle 1958a: 9, 5, 118, 298–299; cf. 21–29; Aristotle 1958b: 44). What ultimately distinguishes the political association from tribes, alliances, and other groups is “the spirit of [the members’] intercourse” (Aristotle 1958a: 119). All this is much like Arendt’s view. But one crucial difference emerges: Aristotle’s discussion of public and political life makes almost no mention of the agonal striving to distinguish oneself before one’s peers and become immortal. Indeed, if

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anything, for Aristotle “ambition . . . is dangerous to states” and the outstanding individual is a threat to that equality of peers and “spirit of friendship” on which political “community depends” (Aristotle 1958a: 181, 134–136, 208).9 Aristotle’s account, then, does not give rise as Arendt’s does to a sense of the citizens’ anxiety and egotistical striving. On the contrary, for Aristotle, what makes political activity valuable, what holds a polis together, and makes the citizens (in Arendt’s phrase) “more or less willing to share in the burden . . . of public affairs” is justice. Justice is “the good” that is pursued in politics, and therefore the greatest (human) good and that “which is most pursued.” Justice “belongs to the polis,” for it is “an ordering of the political association,” and “consists in what tends to promote the common interest” (Aristotle 1958a: 7, 129). The capacity for justice, moreover, helps to distinguish man from the animals; for that capacity is directly tied to Aristotle’s two ways of defining man, as a political creature and one characterized by logos—language, speech, rationality. The argument of the Politics in this regard is very condensed but very powerful: the reason why man is a polis creature must be connected to his being a logos creature for “Nature . . . makes nothing in vain.” Language “serves to declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse,” and therefore also “what is just and what is unjust.” Thus, man alone among the animals “possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust, and of other similar qualities; and it is association in [a common perception of] these things which makes a family and a polis” (Aristotle 1958a: 5–6). The idea of justice, central for Aristotle, is conspicuously absent from Arendt’s otherwise closely parallel account. Moreover, for Aristotle, although politics and justice are about right and wrong, morality and virtue, they are also about economic privilege and social power. His accounts, not merely of civil conflict and disorder, but also of the various healthy constitutional forms, are pervaded by consideration of wealth, status, and class relationships. Economics is involved in the preconditions for civic membership, for political stability, for particular constitutional forms; and in the consequences of any political act. Obviously wealth is not the point or purpose of politics, but it certainly is a continuing issue in political life; and justice cannot help but take economic considerations into account.

IV For a political theorist of her stature and range, Hannah Arendt had remarkably little to say about justice. Certainly she did not, like Aristotle, place the concept at the center of her political thought; indeed, in her works of abstract political theory she rarely used the word.10 This is not because she opposed justice or thought it trivial, but because she was so determined to save the public realm and political freedom. If justice were permitted into—let alone made central to—public, political life, she feared it would bring with it the dangerous economic and social concerns, the hungry and passionate poor who would destroy what was to be saved.

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In terms of the typology introduced earlier, Arendt’s basic concern was clearly the third dimension, in its substantive rather than merely formal aspect: the shared self-government of a free community, the bios politikos. But to protect it, she felt constrained to sever it from the second dimension, from the economic and social conditions structuring citizens’ lives, in which they have something at stake. The public must be valued for itself, not degraded into a mere means to some lesser end. As Tocqueville said, “Who asks of freedom anything beyond itself, is born to be a slave” (Tocqueville 1955: 169). Yet as a result, Arendt often sounded as if her only concern were with the first dimension of publicness: with publicity, the competitive striving for a memorable public image. Therefore, her way of trying to protect and revive the public succeeds only in making its real value incomprehensible to us. In particular, by banishing justice from her political vision, Arendt denied herself what might well be the most powerful weapon in her cause. The irony is most visible with regard to her concept of action. As the public realm is threatened by the social, so action is threatened by a pair of inappropriate attitudes or states of mind, both connected with the social: the attitudes of expedient utility, and of “process” thinking. A concern for expedient utility characterizes the mentality of homo faber. It is an attitude of technical efficiency, the practical search for the best means to a preconceived end. Applied to human affairs and action, it disposes us to see and treat each other as objects, means to our private ends. Technical thinking makes us concentrate on the means; it narrows our vision so that we forget our responsibility for the ends, the need to deliberate about ends with our fellow actors. This outlook tends to be reductionist and to destroy meaning, symbolic significance, and human relationships, leaving our lives hollow (Arendt 1958: 145, 229). The other attitude inappropriate to action, “process” thinking, is the mentality of the animal laborans. It is essentially the conviction that we are the helpless products of causal forces, historical or social, which leave us no choice or capacity for initiative. Its danger to action and politics is obvious: it renders us passive, oblivious to both our options and our responsibilities. If the technical mentality is associated with “rational economic man” and the profit motive, with the interest-dominated politics of “who gets what, when, where, and how,” then “process” thinking is associated with Marxian economic determinism and with totalitarianism, the readiness to sacrifice millions in the name of historical necessity. So for Arendt, these patterns of thought inappropriate to action are linked with economics and the social question, with the need for alternatives to both communist dictatorship and interest-group liberalism. To ward off the twin dangers of expediency and process, Arendt constantly emphasized the autonomy of action and sought to divorce it from all motives, purposes, antecedent conditions, and consequences. For if we think of action as undertaken for some specific, practical result, we might judge and regard it in utilitarian, expedient terms. And if we think of it as a product of any antecedent condition or intention, we might regard it as part of a causal chain and lose sight of its free nature.11

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Arendt meant to call us from process and expediency to the possibility of glory, of greatness. And “greatness,” which she equated with “the specific meaning of each deed, can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor in its achievement” (Arendt 1958: 206). But besides being obscure, this way of conceptualizing action is self-defeating. For, in the first place, action connected to nothing that precedes or follows it seems pointless and arbitrary. And, in the second place, the appeal to heroism and glory unconnected to any standard of right transcending the individual is bound to produce at best empty posturing, at worst, violence and war. Nothing could be further from Arendt’s intentions. She explicitly disparaged trivial and vain self-display (Arendt 1958: 55–56). Anyone who consciously strives to create a certain self-image is bound to fail; and any society in which this is a widespread motive becomes incapable of public life (Arendt 1958: 179). Where all are engaged in propagandizing each other, none can trust what another says, so that the “revelatory” power of speech is lost (Arendt 1958: 180).12 Despite indications to the contrary, Arendt really was after self-development and not self-display; her goal was the “actualization” or making “patent” of the actor’s “latent self” (Arendt 1958: 208, 175, epigraph from Dante). She was, moreover, aware that all human beings, even the poor, are capable of action and citizenship (Arendt 1958: 5). Accordingly, she herself occasionally acknowledged that “forcing one part of humanity into the darkness of pain and necessity” so that another part might be free is a “violent injustice,” and that at least some of the leaders of the French Revolution acted out of a “deeply and constantly frustrated sense of justice” (Arendt 1958: 119; Arendt 1965: 224). Nor can Arendt have been as hostile to the body and the household, to “women’s concerns,” as she often seemed; after all, she located her major study within a framework of solicitude for the body of our “Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky,” worry lest through our science we import “cosmic processes” into “terrestrial . . . nature even at the obvious risk of destroying her” (Arendt 1958: 2, 268; cf. 16n, 20, 120, 231, 254–264). Nor can Arendt have failed to know that politics has always dealt importantly with social and economic matters, even in the polis. Indeed, she insisted that the public realm will only be stable if citizens are related to each other by some tangible subject-matter, “the objects – the buildings and tools and artifacts . . . that make up our world.” Through these objects, which after all constitute wealth and the means of production, though Arendt does not say so, the public realm “gathers us together” in an ordered way, “prevents our falling all over each other, so to speak.” This world of things in which we have interest is a tangible in-between (inter-esse) relating “those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it.” Far from being threatened by worldly concerns and interests, the public realm requires them, and “most” action is in fact “about some worldly objective reality,” some interest (Arendt 1958: 182; 31, 52–53). Perhaps, then, it is not a particular subject-matter, nor a particular class of people, but a particular attitude against which the public realm must be guarded—Aristotle

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might say an inappropriate “spirit of intercourse.” Perhaps a “laborer” is to be identified not by his manner of producing nor by his poverty but by his “process”oriented outlook; perhaps he is “driven by necessity” not objectively, but because he regards himself as driven, incapable of action. There is considerable evidence for such a reading in the texts (e.g. Arendt 1958: 46, 83n, 199, 255, 322). Arendt was aware that “the social” was brought into the public realm less by the “driven” poor than by their well-fed leaders, motivated by pity, and by the bourgeoisie, motivated by anxiety and greed (Arendt 1965: 69; cf. 84–85, 90, 249; Arendt 1958: 67–68). And the poor themselves became politically active not when most driven by objective necessity, but precisely when they came to see their suffering as actionable, as the bounds of necessity receded (Arendt 1965: 14–15, 56–57). That is why the same popular societies in the French Revolution that made “violent demands” for the “means of subsistence” and for “happiness” were nevertheless also genuine “manifestations of freedom and public spirit,” pioneering “a new type of political organization” that might permit the common people to become “participators in government” (Arendt 1965: 245–248; cf. 218–219 on the early labor movement).

V No account of politics or the public can be right that wholly empties them of substantive content, of what is at stake. No such account can display their potential seriousness and value to us, nor correctly tell us what they are. Political life is not some leisure-time sport for aristocrats, in which they may cultivate their honor and display their prowess. It is the activity through which relatively large and permanent groups of people determine what they will collectively do, settle how they will live together, and decide their future, to whatever extent that is within human power. Public life in this sense is of the utmost seriousness and importance, and potentially of surpassing glory. But it never occurs in the abstract, without content; it always affects the lives of real people. Yet Arendt is surely right to fear the destruction of political freedom in our time, and to link that danger to our ways of thinking about public life. So our task becomes finding a way to conceptualize the public that recognizes its roots in human need and its consequences for power, privilege, and suffering, without incurring the dangers Arendt fears. Could one, for instance, acknowledge the centrality of economic and social issues in public life without reducing political freedom to either mere competitive maneuvering for private profit or a mere by-product of some inevitable social process? The concept of justice, it seems to me, would be central to such a theoretical task, for justice is precisely about the connections between profit and right, utility and meaning, private claim and public policy. Let me try to sketch such an alternative way of thinking, tangent at many points to Arendt’s account. Human beings are, more than any other species, the products of their society. Because we are born more helpless, less developed than any other animal, the way we develop depends more on our environment than is true of any other animal. Because we are tool-using animals that work extensively on our

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world, and because we are language-using animals that not only communicate but conceptualize abstractly, the “environment” that so profoundly conditions our development also varies greatly from one society to another, and from one era of history to another. I am far more different from a woman of ancient Egypt, for instance, than my cat is different from her cat. We are the creatures of culture. But since the culture that shapes us is itself made and changed by human beings (indeed, the nonmaterial culture simply consists in the activity of its members), we are also the creators of culture. That, of course, is what is meant by the claim that “man makes himself.” All species produce their offspring and thereby the species, but human beings also produce a large part of the conditions that shape them. Most of the time, in most aspects of life, we produce those conditions only as unintended by-products of whatever we are engaged in doing. Each of us has a private life with its own needs and purposes, and out of the uncontrolled intersection of millions of such lives, social conditions and historical process emerge. Occasionally, we try as individuals to think publicly, to adapt our private actions to the larger patterns we see in our society. But we know that for most of us these private, isolated acts will make no difference. Of course we are not all equally powerless in our privacy; there is such a thing as private power, and in some societies it can be very great indeed. But it is directed toward private, partial goals, and remains uncoordinated with other powers and interests. When private power becomes sufficiently great, it may even outweigh and control the formally defined public realm, in effect making policy for the whole society in the private interest and under the control of a few. To be sure, power that is formally public may also be exercised by a few in the interest of some part of society. What distinguishes public life is the potential for decisions made not merely in the name of the whole community but actually by that community collectively, through participatory political action, and in the common interest. What distinguishes public life, then, is not that it has important substantive consequences for many people; for that could be true of large-scale private power, or economic activity, or childrearing practices. What distinguishes politics, as Arendt and Aristotle said, is action—the possibility of a shared, collective, deliberate, active intervention in our fate, in what would otherwise be the by-product of private decisions. Only in public life can we jointly, as a community, exercise the human capacity “to think what we are doing,” and take charge of the history in which we are all constantly engaged by drift and inadvertence (Arendt 1958: 5). Not all societies have a public life in this sense. Most aspects of social life are left to evolve through drift and private power. Many activities probably can be successfully conducted only in that way. But the distinctive promise of political freedom remains the possibility of genuine collective action, an entire community consciously and jointly shaping its policy, its way of life. From this perspective, to say that we are political animals is to say that we have the power to take charge of the forces which shape and limit us, and that our full development as human beings depends on our exercising that power. Only citizenship enables us jointly to take

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charge of and take responsibility for the social forces that otherwise dominate our lives and limit our options, even though we produce them. A family or other private association can inculcate principles of justice shared in a community, but only in public citizenship can we jointly take charge of and responsibility for those principles. Kant suggests something analogous in his conception of moral autonomy: that we are not mature as moral actors until we have become self-governing, have learned to take responsibility not only for our actions but also for the norms and principles according to which we act (Kant 1949: 1–208). As long as we live only by habit or tradition, unaware that they mask an implicit choice, there is something about ourselves as actors in the world that we are not seeing and for which we are not acknowledging our responsibility. Kant even speaks of “law-making” here, but he is speaking metaphorically (Kant 1949: 186). We can make laws or rules for ourselves privately, just as we can invent private languages; but only because there are already such things as rules and words, such activities as rule-making and speaking, which are initially and primarily interpersonal. Aristotelian citizenship goes beyond Kant’s concept of moral autonomy: it is concerned not merely with metaphorical legislation enacted by the individual, but with the actual experience of making, applying, and changing the norms by which the community lives through public deliberation, debate, and action. This is the experience that teaches us justice and political judgment. Here what must be learned is not merely mutuality—that I am one person among many others like myself—but also how to make general rules and policies with others who have distinctive views and interests. What are at stake here are not merely hypothetical general maxims, but actual rules and policies which others will enforce and under which we shall all live. It is not just a matter here, as in becoming a moral agent, of relating “I” to “you” or even “I” to “thou,” but of relating “I” to “we,” in a context where many other selves also have claims on that “we”—not just claims I must consider as I legislate, but claims to share equally with me in legislating. In the process, I learn not only about the others, and thus about our collectivity, but also about my own personal stake in that collectivity, my stake in being a member of it and in the conditions of my membership. And I learn these in a context of responsibility, not in abstract thought, but in action which will have broad and tangible consequences. And yet the responsibility is, and must be, shared. Unlike the metaphorical legislation of Kantian morality, political action must look not only to rightness but also to effectiveness and can in general be right only if it is also effective. In public life, rightness and expedience are inextricably intertwined. Of course, politics is competitive and conflictual and has consequences for the relative benefits and burdens of different members of the community. The settling of such conflicts is what politics is for and what it is about. But of course politics is also about defining relative status and power and privilege, which also defines the nature of our community and the norms and principles by which we shall live. In deciding the perennial political question, “What shall we do?” we are inevitably deciding at the same time both what each of us will get, and who we, as a community, will be.

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So Arendt is right: the self is very much at stake in public life, and a narrow concern for expediency and profit will miss the most important consideration of all. Human greatness and glory—and justice—do find their ultimate locus in the public realm. But my fellow-citizens are less an audience before whom I try to present a memorable image of self, than fellow actors in collective self-definition, determining along with me not our image but who we shall be, for what we shall stand. But citizenship and public life cannot do these things unless there are real interests at stake in them, unless the consequences of what we do there really matter to us, and unless we are very much aware of those interests and consequences. We cannot even begin to direct the drift of social forces unless we see those forces truly and deliberate about them in our public forums. Insofar as the polis citizen did not really see the slaves and women around him, did not count them as persons like himself, he did not know himself or his community well, and he was not just. Our public life is an empty form—at best a meaningless diversion for a few, at worst a hateful, hypocritical mask for privilege—unless it actively engages the unplanned drift and the private social power that shape peoples’ lives. As we learned from the difficulties of Arendt’s thought, the appeal to heroism for its own sake becomes trivial vanity, just as greed and need untransformed by considerations of justice and community become debilitating and dangerous. It is no use banishing the body, economic concerns, or the social question from public life; we do not rid ourselves of their power in that way, but only impoverish public life. What we need here is not separation but linkage. It is the connection that matters, the transformation of social conditions into political issues, of need and interest into principle and justice. Far from excluding the social question as unworthy of political life, we need to make it political in order to render it amenable to human action and direction. The danger to public life comes not from letting the social question in, but from failing to transform it in political activity, letting it enter in the wrong “spirit.” That is not a goal to be achieved once and for all, but an endless, lifelong task; what makes us human is the activity itself, not its goal. What matters is learning to make and repeatedly making the transition from private to public, from the narrow self to shared membership in the community. Now, it is precisely justice and concepts like it, banished by Arendt, because they tie morality up with expediency, that enable us to make this transition from private to public, from “I” to “we.” Let us look briefly at just two forms that this transition by way of justice can take, one that might be regarded as a safeguard against the dangers of technical expediency and utility, the other as a remedy for process thinking and apathy. The first outlook, the mentality of homo faber, characterizes us when we come to politics with our private interest firmly in hand, seeking by any means necessary to get as much as we can out of the system. It is a common condition, for the private is immediately visible in our daily lives and face-to-face relationships. But actual participation in political action, deliberation, and conflict may make us aware of our more remote and indirect connections with others, the long-range and large-

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scale significance of what we want and are doing. Drawn into public life by personal need, fear, ambition, or interest, we are there forced to acknowledge the power of others and appeal to their standards, even as we try to get them to acknowledge our power and standards. We are forced to find or create a common language of purposes and aspirations, not merely to clothe our private outlook in public disguise, but to become aware ourselves of its public meaning. We are forced, as Joseph Tussman has put it, to transform “I want” into “I am entitled to,” a claim that becomes negotiable by public standards (Tussman 1960: 78–81, 108, 116–117). In the process, we learn to think about the standards themselves, about our stake in the existence of standards, of justice, of our community, even of our opponents and enemies in the community, so that afterwards we are changed. Economic man becomes a citizen. The second version of the transition concerns the alienated and apathetic oppressed, who do not approach politics with their self-interest firmly in hand, but suffer in private, perhaps seething with a diffuse resentment directed as much against themselves as anyone else. Theirs is the sort of transformation to which C. Wright Mills alludes: what had been accepted as personal trouble comes to be seen as an actionable public issue, a matter of justice. Here we find the housewife who learns for the first time that she is not alone in her misery and boredom, that what troubles her is part of a social structure that can be altered. Here also we find the poor, who, as in the French Revolution, may come to see their situation as a human rather than solely natural product, as imposed and changeable and therefore unjust. They become, as we say, politicized. Their inarticulate and perhaps even unexpressed private “No!” becomes a claim: “No one should be treated like this!” The transformation releases passion, as Arendt feared, but it also enlists passion in the cause of principle, of justice, of the community. In both these patterns of transition we discover connections to others and learn to care about those connections, learn how what we already cared about is embedded in social relationships. And so we discover the value to us of our public institutions, of justice and principle, of mutuality and political action. In the process we learn that we are different than we had thought, that our interests are different than we had supposed. We discover the way our membership helps to define us, and the pleasure of becoming active in relation to it together with others. We learn not only that one can use claims of justice for private advantage, but also and more importantly that we ourselves need impartial justice, that what counts as profit and loss, what counts as part of ourselves, depends on our membership, on whom we call “we” and what we call “just.” In a way, political theory has always been concerned with this transition from private to public, and the relationship between personal and political. Whether in Plato’s great analogy between polity and psyche, or in the various versions of contract theory and utilitarianism, or in Hegel’s and Marx’s efforts at dialectical formulation, the problem is always: How shall we understand ourselves as simultaneously both private and public beings? Most past accounts, it seems to me, sound either like selfishness writ large, or like appeals to dutiful self-sacrifice,

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occasionally like both at once, in contradiction. I am not able to give a better account, but the road toward one surely goes by way of conceptions of what a person is. Surely the right account must be about neither self-interest nor self-sacrifice, but the selfrealization of a not yet completed person—self-realization in both senses of that word: making actual what is potential in the person and coming to realize who one really is. Accurate self-knowledge and responsible self-government have been the dual aspects of human maturity at least since the Greeks. To be grown up means to understand who you are and what you are doing, and to take responsibility for it competently. Since we are all in fact members of one another, connected to others through the conditions and consequences of our actions in countless ways, being grown up means knowing those connections and taking responsibility for the consequences. Only in interaction with many and diverse others, only in relation to the “we,” can we gain that knowledge in a determinate way or make that assumption of responsibility effective. I cannot fully discover who I am, learn public judgment, in exclusively private relationships. And I am not yet fully taking charge of my life and of what I am doing, until I join with my fellow-citizens in political action. Of course, that option is not always open to us. A public life is not to be had simply for the asking. But at least we should know what we are missing in the absence of politics, and of what we are depriving those whom we exclude from public life. Nor should we underestimate the human hunger for justice. It is more powerful than any physical hunger, and endlessly resilient.

Notes 1 I am deeply grateful to Sara M. Shumer and John H. Schaar, and to the students in my Winter 1979 seminar for reading and commenting on this essay. An earlier version was presented in April 1979 to the Conference for the Study of Political Thought. 2 A realm is a kingdom, and we have the right to expect of it a monarch with subjects, a territory with borders. A domain has a master to head the household. A sector has been cut from some larger whole, usually circular in form; a sphere is a ball, a physical object in space. All these locutions suggest a clarity and fixity of boundaries, a mutual exclusiveness of content that is highly misleading. 3 She ignores the extent to which death in battle and the naked body in athletics were eminently public for the Greeks. 4 Freedom is contrasted sometimes to necessity (Arendt 1958: 31, 41, 71), sometimes to liberation (Arendt 1958: 30; Arendt 1965: 22–25, 220–221). Action is not subject to moral standards (Arendt 1958: 205), yet involves forgiveness and promising, which seem more personal than political (Arendt 1958: 240–243). 5 Arendt 1965: 115–116, quoting John Adams, Discourses on Davila, Works (Boston, 1851), VI, 232–233. Adams, in turn, drew his passage on the passion for distinction from Adam Smith, for whom it had almost nothing to do with what Arendt meant by the public. 6 But the Greek idea of law was closer to our notion of a constitution; our idea of legislation closer to their notion of a decree. 7 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Sir Ernest Barker (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 5–6; cf. p. 12; and Nichomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (London: Penguin, 1958), p. 305. Contemplation is a higher activity, but it is more than human,

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8 9 10 11 12

partaking of divinity; Aristotle, Ethics, pp. 30–31, 179, 305–308; Aristotle, Politics, p. 289. Private freedom is a “mean conception,” Aristotle says, while public action is “dignified,” “majestic”; Aristotle 1958a: 258, 288, 18. If he is not ostracized he should be made king, but his excellence will undermine the peer-equality essential to a polis. The concept does appear, although it is not examined, in Arendt 1964. Arendt is thus forced into tortured and tortuous locutions; e.g., Arendt 1958: 9–11, 95, 177, 183, 233, 24. Who consciously aims at immortal fame must choose a premature death; Arendt 1958: 193.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1964. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1965. On Revolution. New York: Viking Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1969. Between Past and Future. Cleveland and New York: World Publishers. Aristotle. 1958a. Politics, trans. Sir Ernest Barker. New York and London: Oxford University Press. Aristotle. 1958b. Nichomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson. London: Penguin. Kant, Immanuel. 1949. “Metaphysical Foundation of Morals.” In Carl J. Friedrich (ed.), The Philosophy of Kant. New York: Random House. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Sennett, Richard. 1977. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Knopf. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1955. The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Tussman, Joseph. 1960. Obligation and the Body Politic. New York: Oxford University Press.

8 JUDGMENT AND AUTONOMY (1984)

The problem of judgment grows out of the relationship of what is distinctively human to what is natural: our own bodies and animal instincts as well as the natural world around us, out of which we construct civilization, technology, morality, politics. The latter, in turn, imply standards for action and judgment, right and wrong ways to do things, good and evil conduct. The status of those standards is a mystery, a cluster of mysteries. The problem of action raises the question of what constitutes the “beginning” of a community or an individual, how causation and the animal turn into the capacity for action and the human. Now come these closely related questions: How does the causally determined natural turn into the moral and political, capable of choosing right from wrong, of judging and being judged? What is the origin of concepts such as justice, virtue, civility, honor, and the practices connected with them? How does any human individual make the transition? And what, accordingly, is the status of our norms of right conduct and judgment, the basis of their validity? Are they merely conventional? Or are they anchored in nature or in some transcendent authority guaranteeing their validity? Such philosophical questions become politically acute in times like Machiavelli’s, when there is a great disparity between the inherited ideals and standards, on the one hand, and people’s actual activities, needs, and feelings, on the other. Traditional forms and ceremonies are experienced as empty, and they no longer sanctify. Traditional rules virtually guarantee failure, for there is “such a difference between how men live and how they ought to live that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his destruction rather than his preservation” (Machiavelli 1965: 57–58 [Prince, ch. 15]. Inherited theories no longer make sense of the world, and actual practice remains chaotic, inconsistent, untheorized. It may be time for new theory, for the (re)creation of value and meaning. But where are they to come from? The political theorist is not merely an observer but also a teacher, a bridge builder offering a new vision of the familiar world and trying to make it accessible

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to people through and despite their old ways of seeing. But how does one teach in such times of dislocation in judgment and action? Confronted by such conditions, a theorist may feel that the most urgent task is to destroy the remaining pretensions of existing ideals and unmask those who exploit them. Moved by a yearning for truthfulness, a rage at the prevailing hypocrisy, he may speak in the cynical mode, teaching that ideals are fraudulent devices, not merely conventional but foisted by the powerful on the credulous. He may, that is, equate truth telling with the systematic description of current, exploitive, and hypocritical practice. Or he may, instead, choose the other side of the gap between ideals and practice, cleaving to the standards to which others only pay lip service—or to some different, perhaps historically earlier, set of ideals—and exhort his audience to live up to those standards. But if the corruption of the time has gone very far, neither of these modes of teaching is likely to be effective. The cynical mode may win popularity but can offer no cure, for it tells only a partial truth and can neither restore nor replace the old commitments. Yet exhortation is likely to fall on deaf ears, for everyone has learned to ignore the familiar cant of preachers and teachers, since taking it seriously so frequently means disaster “among so many who are not good.” Machiavelli is sometimes drawn to each of these modes: cynical in the image of the fox, hortatory in relation to the Founder. Yet at his best he transcends and synthesizes both into what one may justly call a political and humanist realism: a truth-telling theory that perceives in the objective world not only the corrupt and exploitive practices currently pursued, but also their disastrous results, and therefore also the potential practical reality that ideals have. He seeks to theorize the verity effettuale della cosa, but that includes human achievement and potential along with human failure and corruption.1 The cynical theorist, one might say, wants to define human nature by what is most basic in us, to find a secure foundation on which to build: “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.”2 The hortatory theorist, by contrast, defines human nature by what is highest in us, our capacities for transcendence. Machiavelli ultimately rejects both alternatives and the choice between them. At his best, he retains the cynical fox’s animus against utopian, empty, and hypocritical ideals, but not the conviction that all ideals are of necessity like that. He retains the foxy premise that standards of right are human artifacts, and thus cannot be legitimated by their origins, but not the conclusion that they must therefore be illegitimate. His deepest commitment here, as on so many topics, is to action, but responsible, creative action: glory. We are the creatures capable of transforming what is basic into what is glorious. That capacity makes possible real but limited—limited but real—human greatness, and so it defines our responsibilities. Precisely because ideals are humanly made, leaving their care and maintenance to some transcendent power amounts to a failure of responsibility. Yet precisely because some ideals promote an objectively better life for human beings than do others, the cynical refusal to judge and act is equally a failure of responsibility. But here again the sexual and familial imagery Machiavelli invokes tends partly to undermine his teaching. Challenging his audience to a manly acceptance of the

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burdens of human self-fashioning, his imagery often makes that task seem more than human, suggesting a flight into either cynicism, excusing us from the effort, or submission to some rescuing father who will make the effort for us. *** Machiavelli teaches that ideals like virtue and honor, justice and civility—both how we conceive them and how we practice them—are humanly determined. The goals people pursue, the standards by which they judge and act, are shaped by their upbringing, training, and experience, what Machiavelli in the largest sense calls educazione. This includes parental example and admonition, schooling, the discipline of law and public authority, military discipline, religion, and the whole way of life (modo del vivere) into which members of a community are initiated (Machiavelli 1965: 331 [Discourses 2: 2]; Machiavelli 1965: 490 [Discourses 3: 27]; Machiavelli 1965: 500 [Discourses 3: 31]; Machiavelli 1965: 521 [Discourses 3: 43]; Machiavelli 1965: 525 [Discourses 3: 46]; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 1: 496, 501). Yet each of these shaping elements is itself subject to human choice and sustained only by effort. All of them were arranged better in ancient times than in corrupt modern Florence. Some conclude that consequently Machiavelli must also teach that there is no absolute, objective right and wrong, such standards being merely conventions and the only absolute being our origin in nature, which makes no moral distinctions. Indeed, there are passages in Machiavelli supporting such a reading, for the vision of the fox is a cynical vision. But this is not his final or his best position. Rather, he wants to maintain that although man-made and sustained only by effort, ideals enacted are as real as any natural phenomenon. The tyrant is “deceived by a false good and a false glory,” which is to say that the difference between false and real glory is as objective as any other fact about which some may be deceived (Machiavelli 1965: 220 [Discourses 1: 10]; Machiavelli 1965: 302; 1: 53). No mere convention can change such deception into truth. The ideals and practices we create are anchored on the one side in natural need and capacity, on the other side in their practical consequences for human life. These questions can be fruitfully explored in Machiavelli’s treatment of the great Ciompi Rebellion, the revolt of Florence’s wool workers, “the poorest of the people.” At the height of his account of the rebellion, Machiavelli presents an invented speech he ascribes to a man identified only as “one of the most fiery and of greatest experience among” the rebels (Machiavelli 1965: 1159–1160 [Florentine Histories 3: 13] for this and the following quotations). It is a cynical speech, in effect claiming that all property is theft, all power domination, every relationship exploitative, and concluding that the workers should take by force whatever they can, in order to dominate and exploit their former masters. By “nature,” the speaker argues, all men are equal; some claim to be of ancient and noble lineage, but that is mere convention, “for all men, since they had one and the same beginning, are equally ancient.” The fundamental reality is nature; all else is mere convention and as superficial as clothing on the body.

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Strip us all naked; you will see us all alike; dress us then in their clothes and the[m] in ours; without doubt we shall seem noble and they ignoble, for only poverty and riches make us unequal. Poverty and riches, moreover, are both equally unnatural, for “God and Nature have put all men’s fortunes in their midst,” so that wealth goes to those who take it. In the resulting struggle, theft is more effective than work, “the bad arts” more effective than “the good.” Indeed, great wealth, power, and status are always illegitimate at their origin, “attained . . . by means of either fraud or force.” Only the “rapacious and fraudulent” ever emerge from poverty, only the “unfaithful and bold” from “servitude.” Small crimes may be punished, but “great and serious ones are rewarded”; and the successful conqueror, whatever his means, is never “disgraced” by what he has done. After seizing what they want “with trickery or with violence,” the conquerors “conceal the ugliness of their acquisition” by imposing a legitimizing terminology of ideals: Under such “false title,” their ill-gotten gains come in retrospect to look “honorable” to the credulous exploited. Thus the wool workers should not be either “frightened” or “shamed” by the invocation of terms like “noble” and “ignoble,” by appeals to conscience or to “ill fame,” the judgment of others. All of these are mere conventions deployed by the winners to fool the losers. One must look behind ideals and conventions, including religion, to the natural realities of physical life: “When people fear hunger and prison, as we do, they cannot and should not have any fear of hell.” Those who heed the call of “conscience” are naive, disappointingly inadequate as “men,” since their credulity prevents them from acting. “Spirited men” act boldly to seize “the opportunity that Occasion brings,” that is “offered . . . by Fortune.” On this basis, the agitator teaches the wool workers not merely that they should act, but specifically that they ought “to use force” whenever they “get the chance.” Since all power is illegitimate in origin, relations of domination and exploitation are the only possible ones. The only issue is who will be on top, and the speaker urges the wool workers to take their turn, so that the former masters “will have to complain of and fear you,” as the wool workers now complain of and fear their masters. Here is an eloquent formulation of the view that “beginnings” are illegitimate, a return to nature and the body and to force. Anything beyond force, fraud, and the physical is mere convention externally imposed for exploitative purposes. But does Machiavelli mean it? The speech is written with verve and relish; one imagines Machiavelli enjoyed its writing. It is peppered with familiar Machiavellian maxims, suggesting a continuity with the main body of his works. And it is, of course, an invention, inserted in the Florentine Histories without any logical necessity. But Machiavelli frames the speech in disparaging commentary. He says that it was made “in order to arouse” the workers and succeeded in “greatly inflam[ing] their spirits, which were of themselves already hot for evil” (Machiavelli 1965: 1159, 1161 [Florentine Histories 3: 13]. The person in the Ciompi Rebellion for

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whom Machiavelli expresses admiration is not this anonymous (though “experienced”) speaker, but Michele di Lando, a real historical figure who became the leader of the rebellion in its later stages but resisted the extreme claims of the poor, “determined to quiet the city,” and who “publicly proclaimed that nobody should burn or rob anything” (Machiavelli 1965: 1166 [Florentine Histories 3: 16]). Machiavelli says that Michele di Lando surpassed all others in his time “in courage, in prudence, and in goodness,” and that he deserved “to be numbered among the glorious few who have greatly benefitted their native city” (Machiavelli 1965: 1168 [Florentine Histories 3: 17]). It is not obvious what to make of Machiavelli’s praise for Michele di Lando and of the moderate framework in which the cynical speech is set. His letters indicate that Machiavelli felt constrained in writing the Histories by the fear of offending the powerful, particularly the pope who had commissioned the work. So it is in principle possible that the moderating framework is deception, the speech expressing his real views and teachings. That interpretation becomes impossible, however, if one recalls the overall theme of the Florentine Histories, Machiavelli’s investigation of why the Florentine Republic, unlike the Roman, was always unstable. His explicit answer to that question, it will be recalled, concerns factions, “unreasonable and unjust” demands, and a failure to observe limits in dealing with the opposition. Indeed, the preface to the book of the Histories that deals with the Ciompi Rebellion attributes Florentine weakness to the fact that whenever any group or faction gained power in the city, it tried to destroy its opponents utterly, making laws “not for the common profit but altogether in favor of the conqueror” (Machiavelli 1965: 1140 [Florentine Histories 3: 1]). Although the speech does invoke something like courage (“spirited men”) and “honor” and does mention the hope of having “more liberty . . . than in the past,” and although it mentions the wool workers’ complaints about the masters’ “avarice” and “injustice,” it does not really, consistently address the ideals implied in such words (Machiavelli 1965: 1161, cf. 1160 [Florentine Histories 3: 12]; Machiavelli 1965: 1158 [Florentine Histories 3: 12]). It addresses only conquest and revenge, a simple inversion of past oppression, not liberty but what Machiavelli in the preface to the next book of the Histories identifies as “license.” Florence, he says there, has never been well organized, having had at most a “semblance of republican government,” fluctuating as its rulers and constitutions varied, not between liberty and slavery, as many believe, but between slavery and license. The promoters of license, who are the people, and the promoters of slavery, who are the nobles, praise the mere name of liberty, for neither of these classes is willing to be subject either to the laws or to men. (Machiavelli 1965: 1187 [Florentine Histories 4: 1]) In a city that can rightly “be called free,” by contrast, there is reciprocity between opposing classes and groups, and an awareness of common membership in an association valuable to all.

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By these criteria, the speech to the wool workers is licentious, advocating a politics without limits or mutuality, and counseling the workers to exploit the public life for their private advantage by threatening “damage” to “the city” (Machiavelli 1965: 1161 [Florentine Histories 3: 13]). The speaker acknowledges that the consequence of the kind of politics he advocates is “that men devour one another,” but he can envisage no alternative. On the contrary, precisely from the observation that men devour each other he concludes they should therefore use force whenever they can (Machiavelli 1965: 1160 [Florentine Histories 3: 13]). The speech thus displays a fundamental inconsistency characteristic of the fox’s cynical stance. It employs terms like fraud and the conventional contrast between “bad” and “good” ways of getting ahead, “bad” and “good” men. Yet it also insists that standards of good and bad are based on fraud and force, all equally exploitive. If the world is as the speaker claims, the conventional terms and distinctions are meaningless, and he is not entitled to their use. Thus it does not fully make sense to claim that moral standards originate in exploitation and fraud, for the latter terms already imply the existence of standards; if there is no such thing as virtue in mere nature, there is no such thing as fraud, either. Not only is the speech incoherent in this sense, but there is also a problem, given the speaker’s premises, about the nature of collectivity in his audience or in the city. “You see the preparations of our adversaries,” he says, “let us get ahead of their plans” (Machiavelli 1965: 1161 [Florentine Histories 3: 13]). Thus he presents two opposed collectivities: “we” and “they.” Hitherto “they” ruled “us”; soon “we” shall dominate “them.” It is taken for granted that “I” gain if “we” win. But what will be the relations among “us” if all human power is based on force or fraud? If what the speaker says is true, then surely the audience ought to be as suspicious of his motives as of the masters’, and indeed of each other’s as well. The only “natural” unit, it seems, is the isolated individual. There is no reason for anyone among the oppressed to suppose that he will gain even private liberty if “our side” wins, for all that unites “us” is our common oppression, which will disappear when “we” win. Having won, or perhaps already in the process of winning, we shall do what men have always done: “devour one another.” Yet if we do not trust each other, we cannot win; as the speaker points out, it is precisely because the masters are “disunited” that “we” have hopes of seizing power now: “Their disunion will give us the victory” (Machiavelli 1965: 1160, cf. 1160 [Florentine Histories 3: 13]; and Mansfield, “Party,” in Fleischer 1972: 262). Despite its eloquence, despite its use of Machiavellian idiom, then, the speech to the wool workers is not an articulation of Machiavelli’s views, both because he does distinguish between truth and fraud, benefit and exploitation, and because he believes in and teaches about the value of collectivity based on a well-founded mutual trust that is not naive. The fact that standards are human artifacts does not make them fraudulent or illegitimate, for such notions are themselves the products of standards. Still, how any conventional creation can be (or become) more than arbitrary does pose a mystery, like the mysteries of how matter can be (or become)

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animate, how animal can be (or become) human, how individuals can be (or become) collectivity. *** Another approach to that mystery, the apparent opposite of cynicism, is the edifying exhortation to duty. It, too, attracts Machiavelli, yet is ultimately rejected by him. And though opposed to cynicism in a way, it is actually cynicism’s flip side: inside the Founder image lurks the fox. Consider the famous charge leveled by Edmund Burke against the philosophes, that their irreverent questioning of authority would soon destroy “all the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal,” leaving mankind exposed in all its “naked, shivering nature.” What sort of illusions? Burke illustrates: to the philosophes “a queen is but a woman, a woman is but an animal – and an animal not of the highest order” (Stanlis 1963: 458). Calling such beliefs “illusions,” Burke ratifies through his choice of word the cynical view he means to oppose, that a queen is nothing more or other than an animal. To believe otherwise is to hold an illusion, he says, but one with vitally important practical consequences. Where such illusions are believed, power will actually be gentle and obedience liberal. Indeed, the urgency of Burke’s larger argument makes clear that he thinks even more—the survival of civilization itself— is at stake in such illusions. Why, then, does he insist that people must believe illusions to preserve the very tangible and unillusory benefits civility and culture bring to all? Why cannot those benefits directly motivate a knowing, disillusioned civility? Several answers are possible here, all part of Burke’s argument at some point. First, there is the problem of human passion. People—or at least most people, or people of certain social classes—lack sufficient self-control to do what is prudentially in their best interest, unless it is reinforced by certain illusions that engage stronger passions than prudence ever can. Second, even in merely rational and prudential terms, while everyone clearly benefits from civilization, an individual might perhaps benefit even more if everyone else were moral and civilized, while he alone was consummately selfish. Third, the prudential outlook itself, which calculates consequences in terms of costs and benefits, may require a character structure tending to undermine morality and the public good. To some extent, Machiavelli shares each of these views. He says that most men will “be good” only out of fear; that most people want only security and gain rather than glory; that anyone introducing important innovations must manipulate popular illusions, because “many good things are known to a prudent man that are not in themselves so plainly rational that others can be persuaded of them” (Machiavelli 1965: 225 [Discourses 1: 11]). And yet Machiavelli also at times envisions a secular reverence achieved without reification, a human autonomy that is neither dependent on illusion nor further by hortatory preaching. Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls it a political “principle of communion” and says that “by putting conflict and struggle at the origins of social power,” Machiavelli “did not mean to say that agreement was impossible,” but only “meant to underline the condition for a power

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which does not mystify, that is, participation in a common situation” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 216, my italics). At his best, Machiavelli envisions a free politics of citizens holding themselves and each other to the civil limits defined by their particular tradition, a tradition they recognize to be conventional yet honor or alter as conscious “co-founders.” They not only live by their principles but choose those principles consciously, and collectively take responsibility for them. Thus Machiavelli anticipates Kant’s claim that moral autonomy requires not just acting in accord with principles, but positing those principles for oneself. Kant even calls this positing “lawmaking,” but he is speaking metaphorically (Kant 1949: 186). Machiavelli, as always most political, thinks that full autonomy requires not just metaphorical legislation in the mind to govern one’s own conduct, but literal and public political engagement by which the members of a community together continually (re)define their shared way of life. Such a citizenry cherish their shared nomos despite its conventionality and the arbitrariness of its origins, both because it defines who they now are, and because of the way of life it now secures. Thus they look to prudential consequences, yet not in narrowly self-interested ways; they look to glory and the public good, but these ideals have tangible content in their lives; tangible content includes not just profit but principle. Thus they think in terms of a glory that transcends, yet remains connected with, interest and need; and in terms of a self that is distinct from others, yet remains connected with them and with principle. The glory is made meaningful by its content of practical gratification; the needs it gratifies are enlarged and humanized by being tied to glory. As with respect to action and membership, so too with respect to judgment, what is needed is synthesis: a transcendence that is also a continuity. To be human, our standards must transcend the animal, the natural, the necessary, mere force. Yet to be meaningful for us they must also retain—and so we must frequently renew— contact with their “origins” in natural need, the body, infancy and its earliest relationships. A right understanding of the problem of judgment, a reverence without reification, thus rests as the vivere civile does on the mature human capacities for mutuality and limitation, for judicious trust and trustworthiness. And since these in turn are anchored in the “basic trust” of infancy, once again Machiavelli’s best teaching is threatened wherever his imagery evokes misogynist fears and unresolved infantile conflicts. *** The psychological counterpart of the problem of judgment in political theory is, in Freudian terms, the difference between repression and sublimation, the former corresponding to superego domination, the hortatory false piety toward authority associated with the Founder image; the latter corresponding to ego strength and an authority that is not reified. Freud himself never systematically explicated the difference between repression and sublimation (Freud 1953–74, esp. 11: 53–54, 14: 94–95; but also 9: 161, 171, 175, 187–189, 197; 11: 78, 132–136, 178–190; 14:

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245–248; 19: 207). Both are possible outcomes of the encounter of infantile libidinal drives with parents, significant other people, and the world of physical objects and processes. Repression occurs when a forbidden libidinal wish, blocked by the child’s fear of punishment, is forced into the unconscious, where it continues to press for gratification. Energy is continually expended in keeping it unconscious, and neurotic symptoms may result from the inner conflict. Alternatively, however, the libidinal drive may be redirected to a substitute goal that is not forbidden, as when sexual energy is rechanneled into artistic, scientific, or cultural endeavor. Here the substitute activity is a genuine gratification that satisfies the libidinal drive, so no continuing expenditure of inner energy is required. Repression concerns the perpetual struggle between id and superego, which the ego attempts to mediate; sublimation concerns how the ego itself is constituted. A certain amount of repression, a certain amount of instinctual renunciation, is inevitable for anyone in any society; indeed, in his later, pessimistic writings Freud argues that neurosis might well be the necessary price for civilization. But without sublimation, without the rechanneling of libidinal energy into acculturation, we could not become human persons at all. We all begin in infancy, with our instinctual drives. And in a certain mood it may seem that the infant we once were was our only true self, all of its subsequent development a mere overlay of social pressures and external demands. But that does not really make sense, for it would leave the self an impoverished thing indeed. The infant is not yet a developed person, is incapable of action or meaningful choice; its needs and pleasures are infantile. Furthermore, that would mean that the whole development of human culture and history, the self-creation of the human species, was a series of accidents, a process devoid of any agency. If the adult person who acts is only an alien overlay over the core of true self, then not only the true “me” is incapable of action or responsibility, but so were my parents, grandparents, and their ancestors. “Society” shaped us all, but society itself is merely a collection of such nonagents, and no one is responsible for anything. No matter how radically conceived, the liberation of the true self from alien social impositions cannot mean a return to infancy, for then there would be no self to liberate, no one there to take advantage of the liberty, but only total dependence. The id is not a self. The initial instinctual drives are essentially the same for all of us at the start of life; what makes us into unique individuals is the living of a human life, or at least the living through of a human childhood. In that sense, the self is a history much more truly than it is an infant, a body; or an id. Only through our initiation into the cultural world of our parents, ancestors, and peers do we each become capable of particularity as a human self. To be sure, some of the habits and attitudes we acquire in growing up really are and remain alien impositions, and at some point in adolescence or later we may reject them, more or less successfully, as demands that others imposed on us but that we do not ratify. But the self that rejects this or that aspect of its upbringing, of itself, is also a product of that upbringing. It makes no sense to suppose that I might reject as alien every aspect of myself, or even every aspect except those rudiments

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of self with which I was born. For the very capacity to make such rejections, and the standards by which I make them, are the products of my development. By the time I am capable of choice, undertaking deliberately to change myself or the world, I already am some particular individual person with concepts, commitments, standards, expectations, ideals, some of which may be alien impositions I have been indoctrinated to accept, but not all of which can be. In that sense, the individuated self, the person capable of responsible action, is the product of convention, not nature; or rather, of the interaction between nature and convention, infant and world. For there is, of course, historical continuity between the infant I once was and the person I become. And my individual psyche, although it is equivalent neither to my body nor to its natural drives and needs, nevertheless can exist only—how should one put it?—in the most intimate, necessary, one-to-one relationship with this particular body. Psychic life remains embedded in physical life. Furthermore, at least some of the social convention internalized as we grow up becomes so fundamental a part of our selves that it is as if natural, a kind of “second nature” that behaves and must be regarded for us just like the truly or originally natural. And this second nature includes not merely powers and impulses, but also standards of conduct and judgment, goals, ideals. Of course we can be and indeed often are wrong about ourselves, about what in us is alien and what must be accepted as given, or even revered as authoritative. We do not always live up to our own standards (that is part of what is meant by standards of conduct); but we violate them only at a price to ourselves. Although a community is not a person, still, much of this is true of human communities as well. They, too, are formed not just at a moment of “birth” or founding but, on the one hand, have an underlying “nature” that would-be founders must accept as given, and a continuing “natural” life of productive and reproductive needs and activities, and, on the other hand, develop through their history, which they both make and suffer. They, too, might be said to acquire out of that history something like a “second nature”—cultural features so fundamental to the members’ character and relationships, that they must be regarded as if natural for this community. And this second nature also includes some of the community’s standards and commitments. So Machiavelli, for example, speaks of the hereditary ruler as a “natural” sovereign or prince, allegiance and deference to whom has become an unquestioned part of his subjects’ very selves (Machiavelli 1965: 16 [Prince ch. 3]). Yet communities, like individuals, frequently have illusions about themselves and their nature; in particular, they frequently have ideological illusions maintained because they serve the interests of some, to the detriment of others and of the whole. For both individual and community, then, one can say: the self is a product of its history, and thus conventional, yet remains rooted in nature, and part of its arbitrary historical accretion becomes a second nature, defining the very self. Nevertheless, that core may be mistaken and violated by the self in action and judgment. Then there can be moments of insight, in which we recover aspects of the self that have been lost, distorted, or violated. Such moments may be quotidian, or sufficiently dramatic to be experienced as a “rebirth.” That means: a starting over afresh because no longer

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“hung up on” the past; a recovery, therefore, of the self as free actor, of capacities that had been hidden by reification; a recovery, also, of the self as the product of its history and of those parts of that history that had been distorted or disguised. That way of thinking about Machiavelli’s “return to beginnings” appeared already in discussing the problem of action; now a different aspect emerges in the context of judgment. The return to beginnings is a new and right insight into what ideals, standards, and commitments are sacred to us and simultaneously a recognition of our capacity to make—and concomitant responsibility for making, revising, sustaining—them. For the individual, these are moments when “ego comes to be where id was,” to paraphrase Freud; moments when repression is replaced by sublimation. For a community, they are moments when the citizens recover awareness of their stake in the public and at the same time redefine the public in terms of justice, thereby becoming free to act effectively as a community instead of being deadlocked in factional strife or resentfully bound to the past in the form of political vengeance. Though a community is not a person, still there are political counterparts to repression and sublimation: the former, a polity of domination, where some make the rules by which others are forced to live; the latter, a polity of mutuality, where the citizens share jointly in self-government. *** Machiavelli does not talk in psychological terms, yet he does address the problem of human drives and natural needs and discusses how they must be transformed in order to make men fit for the vivere civile, to make animals human. What he says about them differs to some extent, depending on which sort of need he is considering and which image of manhood is most salient at the time. But in general, Machiavelli at his best teaches, first, that human drives and appetites are natural and have to be accepted; ideals that ignore them are vain. Second, however, too much of any of these drives, or the wrong way of handling them, destroys civilization and virtù; thus they are the weapons of mystical feminine power implanted in men. But, third, their open and direct expression and reasonable gratification is the right way of handling them, the way to prevent their excesses. His successful synthesis is a vision of sublimation; its failure takes the form of a vision of repression, the punitive discipline of the Founder. Machiavelli discusses three groups of such drives: hunger or greed, ambition with its concomitant aggression, and sensuality or lust. Politically, each of them threatens to corrupt public life through privatization. Ambition, however, is also the source of civilization and a healthy public life; avarice is more difficult to transform into public terms, and sexuality Machiavelli mostly leaves to repression (and the occasional evasion of repressive authority). In each case, the key to transforming need into value, and private into public, is the capacity to acknowledge limits. Each natural need must be given its due but must be distinguished from its unhealthy extension into limitless craving, when the natural need is mediated by anxiety and becomes obsessive and insatiable. The truly human life requires

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acknowledgment of and provision for our real needs but is undermined by the distorted extensions of drives beyond need. Proper provision for needs also helps to prevent such unhealthy extension. So the greatest danger is the denial of human drives, the setting of ideals for man that are unrelated to his real needs, the sort of “humility, abjectness, and contempt for human things” that is taught by the Church (Machiavelli 1965: 331 [Discourses 2: 2]). Ambition and the closely correlated problem of aggression are most instructive here. Ambition in itself is not a vice but a normal part of human nature that must be accepted; yet it is also a fury that does evil among men. Were it not for ambition, the desire for mastery, men would never grow up, would never leave the matriarchal household or create civilization and the city. Yet excessive ambition, ambition handled in the wrong way, is also what undermines civilization and politics. The distinctions to be drawn here are between two forms ambition may take, and two ways it may be handled. Direct and relatively self-confident ambition, the desire to grow, to develop one’s capacities and be admired for one’s achievements—these are all healthy features without which we could not reach human maturity; they are also capable of (intermittent) satisfaction, like any natural hunger. And they are ready, under appropriate conditions, to be channeled toward public ends and thereby to make men genuinely public-spirited; they are capable of producing a right understanding and pursuit of glory. They are to be contrasted to the resentful, envious, self-denigrating, masochistic ambition that knows no limit because it seeks to silence an inner critic who is never satisfied, because it wants to undo the past. Similarly, the open and direct expression of ambition must be distinguished from its indirect and hidden pursuit; the institutions that politicize ambition and make it public, from those that privatize it and drive it underground. The resentful and insatiable sort of ambition is by its very nature depoliticizing and makes people unfit for citizenship. It leads them to prefer vengeance to success at any other undertaking; thus they court disaster, for instance by inviting foreign forces into the city to support their side in a factional dispute. Where this condition becomes widespread, even men of virtù find it almost impossible to pursue the public good, for the resentfully ambitious are filled with envy of other men’s glory, “grudging,” “ungrateful,” ever ready to “censure” and bring others down, even if all suffer as a result (Machiavelli 1965: 752 [“[Golden] Ass,” ch. 1, lines 97–99]; Machiavelli 1965: 778 [Mandragola, prologue]). The wrong sort of ambition can be minimized, and its dangerous effects for political life controlled to some extent, by acknowledging the right sort of ambition as natural, acknowledging the right sort of conflict as healthy, and providing institutional channels for their expression. “The malignant humors that spring up in men” must somehow “find vent,” and where they are not permitted “lawful” and open expression, they will find “unlawful” methods of private revenge that produce factions and civil war (Machiavelli 1965: 112–116 [Discourses 1: 7–8]). Institutions for the public, open expression of ambition and anger, like the Roman institution of “accusations,” will minimize both the formation of resentful, private ambition and its danger to public life by forcing all into public channels and exposing false,

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merely envious charges for what they are. Ambition and aggression then must be acknowledged, even encouraged, and brought out into the open. The case of hunger and avarice or greed is less clear-cut. Obviously, human beings have bodies that need food; and hunger and the desire “to acquire” are therefore natural and inevitable. Only a fool would locate a city where it might look “glorious” but its inhabitants have no way to make a living. Natural hunger, however, is also capable of (intermittent) satiation through human effort. Its extension into avarice, greed, the insatiable craving for further acquisition for its own sake, is a different matter. It may, in a way, grow out of the natural need, yet it can outweigh even that need itself: the miser will starve himself in order to add to his riches. Avarice is, one might say, natural hunger transformed by anxiety, a vain attempt to provide against all future hunger; it reflects a fundamental distrust of the adult capacity to feed oneself (and others). Like the resentful sort of ambition, avarice privatizes and sets people in rivalry with each other in destructive ways. Being insatiable, it instigates action without the recognition of limits, of commonality, promoting factionalism in the city and displacing the craving for glory by petty and private goals. Machiavelli’s charge against the Florentine bourgeoisie is that there is no “limit or measure to their greed.” They “plunder” each other of their goods; they avoid paying their taxes; they “sell justice”; and they “thirst not for true glory but for despicable honors depending on hates, enmities, disputes, factions” (Machiavelli 1965: 1146 [Florentine Histories 3: 5]). Like Churchmen, “men in trade” are incapable of soldiering, the direct expression of aggression; thus they are incapable of autonomy, forced to follow “the Fortune of others” (Machiavelli 1965: 1079 [Florentine Histories 1: 39]). All Florence’s “evils,” Machiavelli wrote a friend, “proceed from our being in the hands of priests and merchants; neither the one nor the other knows how to manage arms” (quoted in Ferrara 1929: 46). What is worse, neither understands the meaning of glory, so they pursue the wrong sort of goal. Ideally, Machiavelli would like to treat this problem in terms of the opposing interests and “humors” of different classes, reintegrated through political struggle. Bourgeois avarice must be tempered by the nobility’s military spirit and ambition for glory. But in the absence of a Florentine nobility, he must try to teach men of avarice about the value of glory, an extraordinarily difficult task of theoretical bridge building. For the only appeal the merchants can understand is to self-interest, yet their orientation to avarice and self-interest is precisely what must be overcome. Speak to them of glory, and they cannot hear; but speak to them of interest, and you cannot express your message. So Machiavelli insists, on the one hand, that virtù and the vivere civile are the only effective ways to secure wealth, that “riches multiply in a free country,” and on the other hand, that the concern for wealth privatizes people and tends to destroy virtù: “Well-ordered republics” keep “their treasuries rich and their citizens poor” (Machiavelli 1965: 332 [Discourses 2: 2]; Machiavelli 1965: 272 [Discourses 1: 37]). In addition, the topic of avarice is also psychologically more troubling than that of ambition, for ambition draws men away from infantile dependence and is not itself an impulse of sensuality or nurturance.

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For men troubled about dependence, ambition is thus a “safer” drive with which to deal than either avarice or lust. Sensuality, sex, and lust are, in a way, most difficult of all for Machiavelli. Here there seems to be no way to transmute private into public welfare, and the best that can be hoped for is the imposition of a severe, public discipline in support of monogamy and patriarchy, combined with clandestine private freedom for men to pursue sexual pleasure. The reproduction of the species is of course beneficial to the community as well as individually pleasurable, but Machiavelli is not prepared to argue, in accord with Church teaching, that good men will find their sexual pleasure only in the begetting of legitimate children. Nor is he prepared to challenge the mores of his time by suggesting that species reproduction might be reorganized in ways more consonant with human needs and pleasure. Thus “women” remain, in his theory, the most mysterious and in a way the most dangerous threat. Again, there is not much point in blaming Machiavelli for having failed to challenge the misogyny of his time—a topic that surely would have seemed to him remote from his explicit concerns—yet misogyny repeatedly works counter to his best political teachings. Concerning judgment, once again Machiavelli summons us to an acknowledgment of our adult human powers and responsibilities; but he does so by summoning males to their manhood. And once again that turns out to defeat as much as to serve his purpose. For insofar as adulthood and full humanity are pursued out of anxiety about dependence, their pursuit will be distorted by childish fantasies and fears, the need to prove what cannot be proved because it is forever in anxious doubt. Men anxious about dependence will fear to trust anyone or anything and thus will be inclined toward cynicism. They will fear the feminine “other” inside themselves and will thus be powerfully drawn to hortatory hero worship and to repressive ideals. Fearing nurturance or other sensual gratification except under stringent safeguards of discipline, they will seethe with impotent anger, prefer vengeance to direct gratification, and identify with their—real or fantasied—oppressor, all of which tends to generate a conception of autonomy that blocks access to its real achievement. *** Machiavelli urged people to assume deliberate, active, collective control over the conditions of their lives. Yet he urged action framed by the recognition of limits: limits on what is historically possible, here and now, and humanly possible anywhere; limits on what is politically acceptable, capable of enlisting the support of fellow citizens; limits on what is right and deserving of true glory. In teaching this delicately balanced multiple synthesis, Machiavelli also articulated a right understanding of that topic so central to Renaissance experience: autonomy. A wrong understanding of human autonomy, by which Machiavelli himself was frequently tempted but from which he tried to wean us, is as a kind of sovereignty, a self-contained isolation, a solipsistic fantasy of omnipotence. Here, to be autonomous would mean either to be utterly alone, needing no one and nothing outside oneself, or else to be singular in privilege and power—the only person among objects,

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the only human among animals, the only god among humans—capable of dominating and free to exploit whatever is outside the self. Machiavelli at his best, by contrast, teaches an autonomy that acknowledges our necessary interdependencies: that human freedom lies not in eradicating or escaping our necessary connections with others like ourselves, but in acknowledging them and using them to liberate us from other, unnecessary dependencies. “If men wish to be free,” as Hannah Arendt has said, “it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce” (Arendt 1963: 165). That is the point of Machiavelli’s distinctions between liberty and license, between true glory and that false glory by which tyrants are deceived, between genuine autonomy and “doing whatever you want.” Both princes and republics he says need “to be regulated by the laws; because a prince who can do what[ever] he wants to is crazy; [and] a people that can do what [ever] it wants to is not wise” (Machiavelli 1965: 317 [Discourses 1:58]). True autonomy is a matter of accurate self-knowledge and responsible selfgovernment. For both individual and community, it is a matter of getting right the synthesis between our determinant past and our freedom to act, between our objective interconnectedness and our individual agency, between our natural beginnings and our capacity for transcendence. Only through recognizing our particular past and the present world and self it has created do we become free to act effectively. Only in shared political interaction can we come to know accurately, and to take responsibility for, what we are doing. That limits our personal freedom because each of us is only one among many citizens but also expands it because together we can take charge of the social conditions that we collectively create, that would otherwise constrain our individual lives as alien powers. Only by transforming instinct into authority, recognizing the demands of both nature and our human commitments, do we become free simultaneously of and in our necessities. That is the essence of Machiavelli’s understanding of action within a context of necessity, of individual virtù within a context of interdependence, of transcendent value as anchored in particular, secular, historical life. The breakdown of synthesis along any one of these dimensions is “corruption”: the corruption of passivity, of privatization, of cynicism, but also the corruption of mindless action for its own sake, or of hypocritical exhortation to “public” or “higher” duties that are empty. Along each of these dimensions synthesis has always to be actively made. Yet its making is not arbitrary but requires a certain reverence toward self, world, and ideals. The experience of political action among fellow citizens was for Machiavelli the best way to achieve this sort of self-knowledge. Where that process broke down into corruption, as it always tended to do, the next best hope for its restoration lay in leadership, of the sort employing “the way of freedom.” Where even the necessary leadership seemed lacking, or people were so corrupt that available leadership could not help them, there was perhaps an outside chance that political theory might serve. In each case the point was returning people to themselves: to their connection with past and future, to their connection with each other, to their connection with nature and human values, to their capacity for action and a right understanding of the context in which that action must take place.

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That is the heart of what Machiavelli has to teach us. Yet he himself was not able to sustain this vision. On certain subjects, such as relations between men and women, he never achieved it; on others, such as international relations, he at most defined a set of problems and questions pointing toward it. Even in discussing the vivere civile he was unable to sustain the vision consistently. Where he lost it, the loss was correlated with images and metaphors about sex roles and familial relations; particularly with the fear of dependence and of malevolent feminine power, and consequently with an anxious and defensive stress on autonomy, solipsistically conceived, and machismo, whether expressed in the cult of violence, in cynicism, or in submission to a supermasculine leader. Machiavelli summons us from apathy, private acquisitiveness, and reactive violence to heroism and to glory. How shall we assess that summons? Heroism, like so many familiar and apparently simple concepts, turns out on closer inspection to be a profoundly ambiguous notion. Consider two contrasting views of what it might mean; call them the traditionally “masculine” and the traditionally “feminine” view. In the traditionally masculine view, the summons to heroism is a call to leave behind lower for higher things; to give one’s life meaning and purpose by the willingness to sacrifice physical comfort and even life itself for some noble ideal; to leave the household for the public realm, there to express one’s unique individuality in connection with something larger and more valuable than self. Without such opportunity to pursue heroism, human life would be impoverished. And so the men march out to war in pursuit of glory. But now comes the subversive, the traditionally “feminine,” view. The women watch the men depart, look at each other, and shake their heads: there they go again, the fools, making themselves feel important with all that fine rhetoric and shiny equipment, pretending to be fierce to hide their vulnerability. They are marching off to kill other people like themselves—and like us!—just so that they can get away from us and the kids for a while. And we are left, as usual, to cope with the true realities: to tend to the children, the harvest, the cooking and weaving that keep bodies alive. What shall we say of this ancient confrontation of views? Surely there is something right in each. Surely the summons to heroism and glory is often a mask for privilege and exploitation, or for anxious flight from reality. But surely also a life confined merely to the household and care of the body is impoverished. Exclusion from community self-government and a share in making history is a deprivation. To lose or to flee contact with either the public or the private is to lose a part of our humanity. That is as true for the housewife whose life is empty as for her executive husband who imagines that clean shirts appear in his drawer by magic; as true for the alienated worker or apathetic peasant as for the privileged “movers and shakers” who live off of, and are utterly dependent on, the productive labor of others. Machiavelli at his best summons us to heroism rightly understood: to public action for higher goals that nevertheless serve our natural and private needs, action that recognizes both our vulnerability and our capacity as creators and judges. He strives for, and sometimes achieves, a synthesis of the traditionally “masculine” and

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“feminine” views of heroism. But insofar as he excludes or encourages his readers to exclude the women and things feminine from the vision, the synthesis is bound to be lost. Heroism becomes machismo and embodies the wrong conception of autonomy, as sovereignty and domination. The participatory, republican politics of freedom does coexist in Machiavelli’s political theory with protofascism; the key to their complex relationship lies in the metaphor that “fortune is a woman.”

Notes 1 At least in this respect, Martin Luther faced the same problem in the north of Europe as Machiavelli faced in the south. Striving to become a monk, he was obsessively scrupulous and plagued by doubt, unwilling to make the hypocritical compromises customary in his time. His superiors prescribed the traditional exercises: fast, pray, perform rituals. If you behave like a monk, in time faith will come. But Luther could not accept that solution, feeling that the performance of ritual acts without faith was itself sinful—in effect, hypocrisy toward God—and could produce only more sin, never salvation. Confronting the gap between ideals and practice, he insisted on cleaving to the former; and his personal solution turned out to be meaningful for much of Europe. Machiavelli would have scoffed at the proposition that the problems he was addressing were theological in nature, yet he too refused to settle for hypocrisy, to live with the gap between ideals and practice. And he, too, associated the recovery of meaning, value, and virtue with a renewed and more direct access to true paternal authority. 2 “First comes food, then the moral.” But the impact of Brecht’s “Fressen”—the German verb for the way animals eat—is lost in translation. Bertold Brecht, The Three-Penny Opera, sc. 6, “Second Three-penny Finale: What Keeps Mankind Alive?”

References Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Between Past and Future. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing. Ferrara, Orestes. 1929. The Private Correspondence of Nicolo [sic] Machiavelli. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fleischer, Martin (ed.). 1972. Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought. New York: Atheneum. Freud, Sigmund. 1953–74. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1949. Metaphysical Foundations of Morals. In The Philosophy of Kant, ed. and trans. Carl J. Friedrich. New York: Modern Library, 140–208. Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1960–65. Opere, 8 vols. Milano: Feltrinelli. Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1965. The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert, 3 vols. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Meurice. 1964. Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Stanlis, Peter J. (ed.). 1963. Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

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PART III

Action

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9 THE CITIZEN AND HIS RIVALS (1984)

As a standard of manhood, the image of the Founder puts that of the fox to shame because of the Founder’s capacity to father. Yet that implies that the Founder himself is only a means to Machiavelli’s real goal: the new, uncorrupted society to be created. The vision of that society provides yet a third model of true manhood for Machiavelli, different from the manliness of both fox and Founder. Call it the image of the fraternal Citizen, and let the capitalization of the word mark the image as an ideal type distinct from actual citizenship in this or that historical society. The Citizen is Machiavelli’s most profound and promising vision and the most political of his images of manhood. It has the potential for synthesizing what is best in his conflicting ideas about autonomy. Yet it is also the most elusive and difficult to reconstruct from the texts. No single work embodies its world, as Mandragola presents the world of the fox and The Art of War that of the Founder. It has to be constructed from scattered sections and passages, often by implication or contrast with what Machiavelli calls “corruption” or “degeneracy.” Yet the edifying vision of the Founder also contrasts with corruption and degeneracy and must nevertheless be distinguished from that of the Citizen. The manhood of Citizenship is clearly tied to Machiavelli’s republicanism, his deep commitment to politics, and his passionate love of Florence. Yet it is an image drawn at least as much from his reading as from his experience, for it concerns a free and healthy collective life such as Florence never experienced in his time, a way of life to which he refers variously as civic, political, and free: a governo politico or governo libero, a vivere libera, vivere politico, or vivere civile.1 Although the Citizen, like the fox and the Founder, is an image of manhood, it embodies virtù in a fundamentally different way. For both fox and Founder have virtù through their personal, individual autonomy, understood as needing no others, having ties to no others, acting without being acted upon. For the Citizen, by contrast, virtù is sharing in a collective autonomy, a collective freedom and

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glory, yet without loss of individuality. Virtù is systemic or relational. Thus it not merely is compatible with, but logically requires, interaction in mutuality with others like oneself. It lies not in isolation from or domination over others, but in the shared taking charge of one’s objective connections with them. “Each Man by Himself is Weak,” as a chapter title in the Discourses announces, but “The Populace [la plebe] United is Strong” (Machiavelli 1965: 312 [Discourses 1: 57]; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 1: 260). When individuals realize this, they act together to pursue the shared public good and thereby sustain it. When they perceive as (if they were) isolated individuals, their actions become both selfish and cowardly, for “as soon as each man gets to thinking about his personal danger, he becomes worthless and weak,” his virtù vanishes; his actions begin to undermine the community and produce his isolation (Machiavelli 1965: 313 [Discourses 1: 57]). Citizen virtù is thus a matter both of objective activity and of outlook or attitude, each affecting the other. And in both respects, such individual virtù is available only in a republic; it presupposes an ethos and an institutional framework. Individuals can achieve only “such excellence [perfezione]” as the “way of life [modo del vivere]” of their community “permits” (Machiavelli 1965: 500 [Discourses 3: 31]; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 1: 472). A rightly constituted republic, one based “on good laws and good institutions [ordini],” one deserving to “be called free,” has no need, as “other governments” do, of “the strength and wisdom of one man [della virtù di uno uomo] to maintain it” (Machiavelli 1965: 1187 [Florentine Histories 4: 1]; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 7: 271). Rather, its institutions will “by themselves stand firm,” because “everybody has a hand in them” (Machiavelli 1965: 115 [“Discourse on Remodelling”]). In the Citizen vision, this is the only way to achieve strength and virtù, for “only authority freely given is durable” (Machiavelli 1965: 1125 [Florentine Histories 2: 34]).2 That a free republic has no need of the virtù, of one man, however, by no means implies that it has no need of the virtù, of individual men. To say that free institutions sustain themselves is not to deny the role of Citizen effort. Though relational and systemic, Citizen virtù is nevertheless individual and active. It is no mere passive or automatic reflection of some community attribute, in the sense in which Hobbes later argued that the subjects of all sovereign states are equally free, no matter what the form of government, because their state is free in relation to other states (Hobbes 1962: 162); or as an individual serving, obeying, or formed by a great Founder might be said to share in the Founder’s greatness by association. Citizen participation must be genuine, active, and independent, with each individual exercising his own judgment and initiative. Citizen virtù is not the product of a uniform solidarity of identification or obedience. Indeed, in the Citizen vision, precisely plurality, competition, diversity, rather than uniformity, are the source of manly strength. “Where political powers are many, many able men appear; where such powers are few, few” (Machiavelli 1965: 622 [Art of War, bk. 2]). Thus, where “there are more states, more strong men rise up.” Conversely, as already noted, when Rome gradually conquered Europe and unified it into a single state, it thereby diminished the quantity of virtù

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in the region (Machiavelli 1965: 623 [Art of War, bk. 2]). Within a single state, similarly, diversity provides resources beyond those of any individual alone. Success depends on adapting to the times, but no one man can change his character sufficiently to adapt to all times; the matter is different with a collectivity. A republic, being able to adapt herself, by means of the diversity among her body of citizens, to a diversity of temporal conditions better than a prince can, is of greater duration than a princedom and has good fortune longer. (Machiavelli 1965: 453 [Discourses 3: 9]; see also Machiavelli 1965, vol. 1: 20) In a collectivity, moreover, the members can keep an eye on each other, whether that means looking after each other for mutual protection and benefit, or checking up on each other to prevent abuses (Machiavelli 1965: 261 [Discourses 1: 30]; Machiavelli 1965: 1337 [Florentine Histories 7: 1]). Rather than being instilled or imposed from above, in this vision virtù emanates from below; it is generated by the interaction of the citizens. For example, it is much easier for a virtuous army to produce a great general from within its ranks, than for a single commander of however much virtù to transform corrupt cowards into an army (Machiavelli 1965: 463 [Discourses 3: 13]). Accordingly, whereas both the image of the fox and that of the Founder imply contempt for, or at least dismissal of, the populace at large—whether as inert matter to be shaped by the leader or as credulous fools to be manipulated by the fox—the Citizen image locates virtue and glory precisely there. Politically, a people is more prudent, more stable, and of better judgment than a prince . . . governments by the people are better than those by princes . . . if we consider all the people’s faults, all the faults of princes, all the people’s glories and all those of princes, the people will appear in goodness and glory far superior. (Machiavelli 1965: 316–317 [Discourses 1: 58]; see also Machiavelli 1965: 314–315) And, assuming the restraints of law, there is “more worth [virtù] in the people than in the prince” (Machiavelli 1965: 317 [Discourses 1: 58]; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 1: 265). Indeed, while the images of the fox and the Founder imply rule and subordination and construe public life in terms of who dominates whom, the vision of Citizenship stresses mutuality—not a strict equality in all respects, to be sure, but a mutuality of respect and a shared participation among peers, who must take each other into account in the formulation of collective policy. Here Machiavelli comes closest to the ancient Greek conception of free citizenship as meaning “neither to rule nor to be ruled,” as contrasting not merely with slavery but equally with slave ownership (see, for example, Arendt 1974: 32; and Pitkin 1981 [Chapter 7 in the present volume]). Both the image of the fox and that of the Founder are, in these

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terms, fundamentally nonpolitical, even antipolitical understandings of public life and manhood. They conceive human autonomy in terms of radical isolation and sovereignty, the singular actor manipulating others to achieve goals that are his alone, as if they were inert objects and he the only person, as if of a different species. Whether his isolation is defensive and the purposes selfish, or the isolation a mark of grandeur and the purposes noble, the net result is similar. Mutuality, reciprocity, dialogue, the web of relationships that constitute a public arena and create public power, are missing from both images. In both, politics is understood as domination, whether seen by the fox from below or within, or by the Founder from above or outside. In the Citizen image, by contrast, the essential meaning of political relationships that embody true manliness is, as Machiavelli puts it, “neither arrogantly to dominate nor humbly to serve [ne superbamente dominare ne umilmente servire]” (Machiavelli 1965: 314 [Discourses 1: 58]; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 1: 262). *** Citizenship in this sense is thus linked to a kind of equality. But Machiavelli’s political sociology, his discussions of class differences and social equality are scattered, sketchy, and difficult to interpret. Sometimes he speaks of societies as divided into three classes, ranks, or sorts of men: the nobles, the “people [il popolo]” or middle class, and “the plebs [la plebe]” or lower class (Machiavelli 1965: 1032 [Florentine Histories, preface]). At other times he distinguishes only two classes or “humors [umori],” the rich or “great [grandi]” and “the people” (Machiavelli 1965: 39 [Prince, ch. 9; Machiavelli 1964: 76–77]). In Italian as in English the term people is ambiguous, meaning sometimes a particular social class, sometimes the entire membership of society, or all but the singular ruler (as in the passages just quoted in which “the people” are contrasted to “the prince”). Only the nobles or grandi are intrinsically ambitious, crave glory, and desire to dominate others. The people at large intrinsically want only security in their privacy, the absence of oppression (Machiavelli 1965: 39 [Prince, ch. 9]; Machiavelli 1965: 107–108 [“Discourse on Remodelling”]; Machiavelli 1965: 204 [Discourses 1: 5]; Machiavelli 1965: 237 [Discourses 1: 16]; Machiavelli 1965: 282 [Discourses 1: 40]).3 This much is relatively consistent throughout Machiavelli’s works. But it seems to lead him to diametrically opposed conclusions. Sometimes he locates liberty and virtue in the common people and associates it with social and economic equality; at other times he locates it in the ambition of the nobility and thus in class distinctions. In the Discourses he argues that “men of the people” are generally better guardians of liberty in a republic than are the rich or the grandi, because it makes sense to appoint as guardians over anything those “who are least greedy to take possession of it” (Machiavelli 1965: 204 [Discourses 1: 5]). The people want only “not to be ruled” and consequently “to live in freedom,” while the rich and grandi want “to rule.” Accordingly, Machiavelli condemns as “dangerous in every republic and in every country” those wealthy nobles or “gentlemen” who do not work but “live in luxury on the returns from their landed possessions” (Machiavelli 1965: 308, cf.

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310 [Discourses 1: 55]). Both the “corruption” of a people and their loss of the “aptitude for free life spring from inequality in a city” (Machiavelli 1965: 240 [Discourses 1: 17]). The German people, by contrast with the Italians, have maintained “il vivere politico” by preserving “among themselves a complete [pari (peer-ish)] equality” (Machiavelli 1965: 308 [Discourses 1: 55]; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 1: 256). But Tuscany, and Florence in particular, differ from the rest of Italy; in that region there is great potential for “liberty” and “well-regulated government” because, like Germany, it lacks idle “lords of castles” and “gentlemen” (Machiavelli 1965: 309 [Discourses 1: 55]). In the Florentine Histories, by contrast, Machiavelli condemns the Florentine bourgeoisie precisely for having largely eradicated the city’s aristocratic class and forced those few nobles remaining to adopt or pander to the “spirit” and “ways of living” of the common people (Machiavelli 1965: 1141 [Florentine Histories 3: 1]). This deprived the city of the special ethos a nobility can contribute: their ambition and desire for glory, their “ability [virtù] in arms and . . . boldness [generosita] of spirit” (Machiavelli 1965: 1141 [Florentine Histories 3: 1; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 7: 213]). The Roman Republic fared well because its conflicts always increased social inequality there, while the Florentine Republic did poorly because of ever increasing social equality (Machiavelli 1965: 1140 [Florentine Histories 3: 1]; but cf. Machiavelli 1965: 1142 [Florentine Histories 3: 2]). How are such blatant contradictions to be interpreted? Does equality promote or hinder liberty and virtù? Is Machiavelli for or against the nobility? Is his position in the Florentine Histories a distortion of his real views adopted to please the pope who commissioned that work? This cannot be ruled out, but perhaps one can make substantive sense of what Machiavelli says; perhaps he was trying to say something that is difficult to formulate in a consistent manner. The Citizen image of manhood at least suggests the following possible interpretation. Each class or grouping in society has its own distinctive perspective, spirit, and way of life; all of these can contribute toward the good of the whole, yet each of them by itself, unmodified, would destroy the vivere civile and the virtù, associated therewith. They all need to be modified in mutual, political deliberation and struggle. The nobles are a threat because, while they honor and desire virtù, they tend to construe it wrongly as the domination of others, on analogy with military prowess in the face of an enemy. Such military prowess toward foreign enemies is an essential part of republican virtue, and a contribution the nobles can make to the whole, but it is not the correct understanding of citizen virtù in a free state. The common people, by contrast, while they are free of the dangerous ambition to dominate others, tend to be privatized and politically passive; whether from greed or need, they are likely to sell out liberty for security in their private pursuit of material gain. That makes them not only bad soldiers, but bad citizens as well, unless they can be brought to see that public freedom, the vivere civile, is necessary to protect private freedom, and to that extent to lift their eyes from profit to glory. Either class can be a danger to political stability if its intrinsic cravings are outright frustrated, but their mutually transforming political interaction is conducive to

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stability, as well as to the most widespread correctly understood Citizen virtù. This is true both under a prince and in a republic: both should strive to be as inclusive as possible.4 A healthy political manhood, then, requires a plurality of classes and perspectives, yet it requires that they interact in a spirit of mutuality, or the necessary modifications of position will not take place. A certain measure of socioeconomic inequality is entirely compatible with this spirit of mutuality, so long as the society does not value wealth and social status too highly or in the wrong way. What is essential is a genuine mutuality of respect rather than equality of wealth and rank. Thus the exemplary Romans knew how “to honor and reward excellence” even among the lower classes; they sought out virtù wherever it might be found, so that poverty “did not close your road” to political power. “Evidently” that social ethos made “riches” less desirable and important (Machiavelli 1965: 572 [Art of War, bk. 1]; Machiavelli 1965: 486 [Discourses 3: 25]). Extreme disparities between classes may, however, preclude such mutuality across difference. If Machiavelli means something like this by the pari equalita of Citizens, it is no wonder if he seems to be saying that both equality and inequality are essential. His arguments for equality thus must not be read as a rejection of class differences in favor of outright socioeconomic leveling. Nor should they be read as a rejection of leadership and authority in favor of anarchic spontaneity, although on this topic, too, the texts are ambiguous and problematic. Leadership is necessary even in a free republic, for “A Multitude Without a Head is Helpless” (Machiavelli 1965: 287 [Discourses 1: 44]; cf. Machiavelli 1965: 492 [Discourses 3: 28]). A mob can be “formidable” briefly, in the heat of violence, but cannot sustain the political vision and soon disintegrates again into private isolation. “When their minds are a bit cooled . . . each man sees that he must return to his house,” and they begin “to distrust themselves and think of safety either by flight or by treaty” (Machiavelli 1965: 312–313 [Discourses 1: 57]). So leadership, far from threatening republicanism, is essential to it. But how is that claim to be reconciled with the peer equality of Citizens? Furthermore, Machiavelli repeatedly speaks with apparent approval of the way skillful leaders manipulate the people. Where that manipulation is directed toward the common good, the borderline between the vision of the Founder and that of the Citizen seems to blur: the people appear like material to be used by the leader. Where the manipulation is directed merely to the leader’s own interest, contrary to the common good, the borderline between the vision of the fox and that of the Citizen becomes doubtful, and republics no longer seem different from princedoms or tyrannies. Machiavelli says clearly, however, that there are two different styles of leadership, only one of which is suitable for relations among republican Citizens. There are two different ways to “govern a multitude . . . the method [via (way, road)] of freedom [and] . . . that of a princedom” (Machiavelli 1965: 236 [Discourses 1: 16]; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 1: 174). He does not specify the difference between them, but there are some suggestions in the Discourses. In brief, republican

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authority not only must further the common good (which would be equally true of the Founder), but requires a mutuality between leaders and led. Power is “given” by the “free votes” of the led rather than seized by the leaders and imposed on the led (Machiavelli 1965: 267 [Discourses 1: 34]). The people have access to office regardless of wealth or class; so a father knows that if his sons have “abilities [virtù], they can become prominent men [principi] in the republic” (Machiavelli 1965: 322 [Discourses 2: 2]; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 1: 284). Even those who hold no office can bring public charges against corrupt officials and make public suggestions about policy; and they participate in the making of at least some public decisions after open debate. Where Citizen virtù prevails, it is desirable that each one who thinks of something of benefit to the public should have the right to propose it. And it is good that each one should be permitted to state his opinion on it, in order that the people, having heard each, may choose the better (Machiavelli 1965: 242 [Discourses 1: 18]; see also Machiavelli 1965: 222 [Discourses 1: 10]; Machiavelli 1965: 492–493). Only rarely will the people then fail “to accept the better opinion” (Machiavelli 1965: 316 [Discourses 1: 58]). Machiavelli by no means claims that the people are always right, and one of the functions of leadership is to restrain them from hasty action when they are wrong (e.g. Machiavelli 1965: 305–306 [Discourses 1: 54]; Machiavelli 1965: 317 [Discourses 1: 58]). But princes are not always right either, and the people do generally know enough to choose good leaders, making “far better” choices of magistrates “than a prince” does (Machiavelli 1965: 316 [Discourses 1: 58]). Finally, republican authority must be exercised in a way that further politicizes the people rather than rendering them quiescent. Its function is precisely to keep a political movement or action that the people have initiated—such as the march of the “multitude” of armed plebs to the Mons Sacer outside Rome that resulted in the establishment of the Tribunes and enhanced liberty—from disintegrating into riot, apathy, or privatization (Machiavelli 1965: 287 [Discourses 1: 44]). The common people know “particulars,” Machiavelli says; they know their immediate world, they know how to do things in it, they can judge character, they live in the concrete. When it comes to abstraction, to “judging things in general” and at a distance, they may be deceived (Machiavelli 1965: 293, cf. 291–294 [Discourses 1: 47]; see also Machiavelli 1965: 295 [Discourses 1: 48]; Machiavelli 1965: 316 [Discourses 1: 58]). The function of republican leadership is to reconnect the abstract generality of policy options and political principles with the lived experience and practical skill of the led. This will “quickly and easily open their eyes” about false generalities; and it will help them see the relationship their own perceived needs bear to the needs of others, to principle, and to the common good (Machiavelli 1965: 294 [Discourses 1: 47]). Machiavelli does say that when a private citizen rises to high office and becomes privy to details of policy, his views will change, so that he may seem to the people to be betraying them and the policies and principles he was elected to serve (Machiavelli 1965: 294 [Discourses 1: 47]). But that is a sign precisely of ordinary

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people’s ability to govern well once they know the facts. And in a republic of virtù “the people are the princes”; Citizens share in political power (Machiavelli 1965: 316 [Discourses 1: 58]). That need not mean that all participate equally, let alone that all are constantly preoccupied only with public affairs. Not all are ambitious for honor, and that is good; it is essential that the various “humors” interact. But even those many whose primary concern is “security” crave living in “freedom” for that very reason (Machiavelli 1965: 237 [Discourses 1: 16]). What Machiavelli’s Citizen vision implies is not a populist utopia but something like the condition of Florentine politics early in the fifteenth century, whose description by John Rigby Hale was quoted at some length in the first chapter: a condition where none can dominate, where even the nonparticipants take a lively interest in public concerns, and where all share a “political ethos which [takes] for granted the collaboration of responsible citizens as equals in the conduct of public affairs” (Hale 1977: 18; cf. 9, 15). The one topic most in conflict with this vision for Machiavelli is religion. He clearly thinks that religions—at the minimum, religious forms and rituals, but possibly the gods, too—are human inventions; founding a religion is the greatest source of glory (Machiavelli 1965: 224 [Discourses 1: 11]; Machiavelli 1965: 227 [Discourses 1: 512]; Machiavelli 1965: 340 [Discourses 2: 5]; on Machiavelli’s own belief system see Machiavelli 1965: 170–171). He also assigns religion enormous importance, frequently blaming the Church for modern Italian corruption, ascribing ancient greatness to ancient religion, and asserting that most men will be good and will keep their oaths only if they believe themselves observed by divinities who will punish or reward them (Machiavelli 1965: 331 [Discourses 2: 2]; Machiavelli 1965: 224 ff. [Discourses 1: 11]; Machiavelli 1965: 764 [“[Golden] Ass,” ch. 5. lines 118–123]; Machiavelli 1965: 1145 [Florentine Histories 3: 5]). The combination of these two themes—that religion is manmade yet essential to healthy public life— plays havoc with the republican egalitarianism of the Citizen vision. For it introduces one ineradicable inequality in the healthy body politic, between those who believe in the religion and those who know its fraudulence (or at least the fraudulence of its forms and rituals) and can exploit it for public or private good. If the dichotomy were merely between the Founder and later generations, it might still be compatible with the pari equalita of Citizens. But Machiavelli speaks with evident approval of the Roman Senate’s exploitation of the religious credulity of the plebs; he often urges military leaders to exploit the religion of their troops in this way (Machiavelli 1965: 230–231 [Discourses 1: 13]; Machiavelli 1965: 224 [Discourses 1: 11]; Machiavelli 1965: 230–234 [Discourses 1: 13–15]; Machiavelli 1965: 503 [Discourses 3: 33]; Machiavelli 1965: 661 [Art of War, bk. 4]; Machiavelli 1965: 691 [Art of War, bk. 6]; Machiavelli 1965: 723 [Art of War, bk. 7]). All this is meant for the common good, no doubt, though what makes the unbelieving leaders and generals public-spirited is far from clear; but it is hard to reconcile with mutuality between leaders and led and with open access to office for all. The Citizen vision seems to founder on the shoals of religion. Yet sometimes Machiavelli does suggest other possibilities, even on this topic. “Where the fear of God is lacking,” he says, a state can be sustained instead “by

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fear of a prince,” but only during that leader’s lifetime (Machiavelli 1965: 225 [Discourses 1: 11]). Its real “salvation” would require “so to organize it that even after he dies it can be maintained” (Machiavelli 1965: 226 [Discourses 1: 11]). Would that require manipulating religion? Romulus founded Rome, Machiavelli points out, without having recourse to “the authority of God.” But of course Numa introduced religion soon thereafter. Moreover, it is even harder to reform a corrupt state than to found a new one; and even if the latter can be accomplished in a secular manner, the former cannot. And truly no one who did not have recourse to God ever gave to a people unusual laws, because without that they would not be accepted. Because many good things are known to a prudent man that are not in themselves so plainly rational that others can be persuaded of them (Machiavelli 1965: 225 [Discourses 1: 11]). *** A plurality of classes and interests is necessary to the Citizen vision not merely because each has its unique perspective and spirit to contribute to the community, but also because internal conflict is an essential and healthy phenomenon in its own right. If relations among real men in this vision are those of peer mutuality, fraternal rather than paternal and filial, Machiavelli is not one of those romantics for whom fraternity implies a natural or automatic harmony. He never forgets that brothers hate as well as love one another. Thus, whereas the vision of the fox involves a preference for indirect methods and manipulative means, for fraud over force and both over “fighting by laws,” and whereas the vision of the Founder involves a complex combination of fierce ruthlessness directed outward at the enemy with a courtly, idealized internal harmony in which no conflict can arise, the vision of manly Citizenship differs from both in the value it places on internal, political conflict and particularly on open conflict that spurns the means of deceit or indirection. Internal conflict, aggression, ambition, directed and used in the right way, are the sources of strength, health, and growth. Roman republican political life is again the prime example. Some may say that its methods were unlawful and almost inhuman, for the people were shrieking against the Senate, the Senate against the people, there was disorderly running through the streets, locking of shops, the people all leaving Rome . . . (Machiavelli 1965: 225 [Discourses 1: 11]; Machiavelli 1965: 203 [Discourses 1: 4]). But “those who condemn” these “dissensions” are in reality “finding fault with what as a first cause kept Rome free” (Machiavelli 1965: 202 [Discourses 1: 4]). The “perfection” of her government was achieved through “discord,” and “disunion between the plebians and the Senate” (Machiavelli 1965: 200 [Discourses 1: 2]; see also Machiavelli 1965: 202–203 [Discourses 1: 4]; Machiavelli 1965: 239 [Discourses 1: 17]). Indeed, if Rome “had become quieter . . . it would also have been weaker,” deprived of the opportunity for “greatness” and for “growth” (Machiavelli 1965: 209 [Discourses 1: 6]).

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The Roman example, furthermore, indicates a general truth: “those who believe republics can be united,” meaning thereby that they can achieve a uniform cohesion without serious conflict and at the same time be strong and capable of glory, “are greatly deceived in their belief” (Machiavelli 1965: 203 [Discourses 1: 4]). For liberty and good order “have their origin” in the very “dissensions that many thoughtlessly condemn” (Machiavelli 1965: 210–211 [Discourses 1: 6]). Without this sort of challenge, men grow complacent, forgetful, and flaccid, as excessive “ease” makes them “effeminate” (Machiavelli 1965: 203 [Discourses 1: 4]. It is the “cities and provinces that live in freedom” which “make very great gains” (Machiavelli 1965: 332 [Discourses 2: 2]). Where the citizens are self-governing, cities “grow enormously in a very short time,” and conversely, cities have “never” been able to grow and prosper in this way “except when they have been at liberty” (Machiavelli 1965: 316 [Discourses 1: 58]; Machiavelli 1965: 329 [Discourses 2: 2]). Health, growth, prosperity, manliness all depend on the tension of internal conflict, on ambition and energy. Yet obviously conflict and ambition are no guarantees of liberty or political health; they are also dangerous forces that can easily destroy a state or undermine its liberty. “Some divisions harm republics and some divisions benefit them,” but which do which? (Machiavelli 1965: 1136 [Florentine Histories 7: 1]). The entire Florentine Histories, one might say, is a meditation on this topic: why did internal conflict in Rome serve to strengthen the state and enlarge liberty, while in Florence it produced only factional dissension, destructiveness, and weakness? The enmities that at the outset existed in Rome between the people and the nobles were ended by debating, those in Florence by fighting; those in Rome were terminated by law, those in Florence by the exile and death of many citizens (Machiavelli 1965: 1140 [Florentine Histories 3: 1]).5 The contrast is clear enough, but how is it to be explained? Machiavelli says it has something to do with principle, with the reasonableness and justness of the claims leveled by either side, and the two sides’ correlated ability to retain some mutuality, some awareness of their shared membership in a joint enterprise to which each makes distinctive contributions, and hence their ability to set limits on the means they employ in the struggle. The people of Rome wished to enjoy supreme honors along with the nobles; the people of Florence fought to be alone in the government, without any participation in it by the nobles. Because the Roman people’s desire was more reasonable, their injuries to the nobles were more endurable, so that the nobility yielded easily and without coming to arms. . . . On the other hand, the Florentine people’s desire was harmful and unjust, so that the nobility with greater forces prepared to defend themselves, and therefore the result was blood and the exile of citizens, and the laws then made were planned not for the common profit but altogether in favor of the conqueror (Machiavelli 1965: 1140 [Florentine Histories 3: 1]; cf. Machiavelli 1965: 292 [Discourses 1: 47]). The genuine appeal to justice and the sense of mutuality and limits even within serious conflict are further correlated with this other requirement: the conflict must

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be open rather than clandestine and invidious. True virtù requires the open staking of a claim on the basis of right and justice, along with the effort to defend it through organizing power; destructive factionalism, by contrast, relies on evasion, private cabals, and secret intrigues. To “make war openly” is the “more honorable” way, though it is not available to the weak (Machiavelli 1965: 423 [Discourses 3: 2]). The “goodness” of the Roman people is, for example, demonstrated by the fact that confronted by what they considered an unjust financial levy imposed on them by the nobility in the Senate, they “did not think of defrauding the edict in any amount by giving less than was due,” but thought only of “liberating” themselves “from the tax by showing open indignation” (Machiavelli 1965: 307 [Discourses 1: 55]). That is the reason, also, why Machiavelli places so much stress on the Roman institution of accusations. It allowed charges to be brought lawfully against even the rich and powerful who engaged in abuses; where the charges were found valid, the abuses were countered “with public forces and means, which have their definite limits” and therefore “do not go on to something that may destroy the republic” (Machiavelli 1965: 212 [Discourses 1: 7]). And even if the charges were invalid, the possibility of bringing them publicly, lawfully, into the open was essential to il vivero libero, to free political life (Machiavelli 1965: 215–216 [Discourses 1: 8]). For hidden antagonisms seek private modes of expression which divide the community into factions that prefer vengeance to the public good, that consequently may even call in foreign forces to assist their private aims, and that fail to recognize the essential civic or civil limits (i termini civili) distinguishing political conflict from civil war (Machiavelli 1965: 1337 [Florentine Histories 7: 1]; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 1: 452). Where “hatreds do not have an outlet for discharging themselves lawfully, they take unlawful ways.” Unfortunate is the city that “inside her wall” has no safe outlet through which “the malignant humors that spring up” may “find vent” (Machiavelli 1965: 211, 214 [Discourses 1: 7]). The Citizen of a healthy republic uses that “way of fighting . . . according to laws” that is suited to men rather than animals: open and fearlessly direct confrontation rather than sneaky, clandestine, foxy maneuvering; but at the same time a conflict mediated by law, justice, persuasion, community, rather than resolved by naked leonine force. The fraternity of Citizens implies genuine conflict, but it rules out the fratricide essential to Founders like Romulus. There is no mere selfish or lupine factionalism here, nor any fantasy of automatic, painless unity, but a continuing process of genuine, yet contained, conflict. Unity is achieved again and again, neither by a selfless merging with the Founder nor by submission to his repressive discipline, but collectively, in interaction. Such a city offers each Citizen, each class of Citizens, the genuine possibility of fulfilling individual needs, pursuing separate interests, expressing real passions; it does not depend on sacrifice, either voluntary or enforced. Yet the selfish and partial needs, interests, and passions brought into the political process are transformed, enlarged, brought into contact with the conflicting needs, interests, and passions of other Citizens and ultimately redefined collectively in relation to the common good—a common good that emerges only out of the political interaction of the Citizens.

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Politics must deal with those things about which people genuinely care, or it will be trivial and meaningless to them, and they will turn elsewhere. It must involve a genuine confrontation, open and sometimes serious conflict, or the Citizens will not experience in it their real relatedness. Only when the Roman common people went on strike, marched out of the city, and encamped on a nearby hill were the nobles brought to realize their interdependence with that class, their common membership in a single community, and thus to concede reforms that worked “in favor of liberty” (Machiavelli 1965: 203 [Discourses 1: 4]; Livius 1967: 2.32.1–2.33.2). Yet the ultimate resolution of conflict must be mediated by law and justice, not merely enforced; in struggle the citizens discover the value of the rules and principles that protect them all, by turns. They are enlarged by setting their private desires into relationship with considerations of principle and the common good, which they also desire.6 Thus in the Citizen image of manhood, not only ambition, aggression, and conflict find positive value, but so do the self and its desires, the body and its needs; they are to be accepted and transformed, civilized, rather than rejected or repressed. It is “very natural and normal,” Machiavelli says, for human beings to want to aggrandize the self, “to acquire [aquisitare]” (Machiavelli 1965: 18 [Prince, ch. 3]; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 1: 23]). That can be read as foxy cynicism: given half a chance all men are evil, and only the naive believe otherwise. But it can also be read in a different spirit to mean that human institutions that ennoble and civilize us require a foundation in human need and passion. This is the spirit in which Machiavelli relishes the story of Alexander the Great’s choice of the site for the city he planned to found “for his glory,” to bear his name (Machiavelli 1965: 194–195 [Discourses 1: 1]). Urged by an architect to locate the city on the slopes of Mount Athos, where it could be built to resemble “human form” and thus become “a thing marvellous and rare and worthy of his greatness,” Alexander asked only one question: what would the inhabitants live on? The architect was forced to admit he hadn’t considered that, so Alexander laughed and built his city on the fertile plain. A fertile site, as we shall see later, poses problems of its own, but without food and other necessities there can be no city; the “glory” of a city located where no humans can live is ludicrous.7 As the example suggests, the Citizen image of manhood implies a different understanding of what is real than do the images of fox and Founder. The fox, of course, prides himself on his realism, but his reality includes no ideals or principles beyond private self-interest. Ideals and principles can only be shams to deceive the gullible. That view, however, makes even self-justification or self-appreciation logically problematic. Though he may take a certain pride in his unmasking of sham, the fox can ultimately say no better of himself and do no better for himself than he can of and for the rest of mankind, for his reality does not include objective value or principle. The Citizen image implies a realism that includes both ideals and practice, both concepts and observed behavior. Glory, virtue, courage, civility, or the common good can be as real, as objective, as observable as hunger, pain, ambition, or greed. And these different phenomena are connected: civic glory transcends, but also presupposes, a site suitable for human habitation.

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Similarly, the Citizen image implies a different understanding of the nature of the self than do the images of fox and Founder. The fox for all his pride in unmasking and being furbo is a profoundly self-disparaging image. The limits of the self are narrowly drawn around the individual or perhaps his immediate family and their manifest desires; extended connections and higher principles are deflated. The authentic self must almost always remain hidden and is likely to vanish altogether into the various poses the fox assumes. In contemplating the mythical Founder, we are similarly diminished; we become mere matter which he might shape, soldiers he might command, children he might sponsor. In a way, to be sure, we can then overcome this self-disparagement by identifying with his greatness, but only at the price of dissolving our separate selves in his greater glory. The Citizen image, by contrast, is neither selfish nor self-sacrificing, but a way to “give thought to private and public advantages” together (Machiavelli 1965: 333 [Discourses 2: 2], my italics). It concerns the transformation of narrowly defined self-interest into a larger awareness of one’s ties to others, one’s real stake in institutions and ideals. This is a transformation not so much from self-interest to self-sacrifice, nor even from narrowly defined short-range to prudent long-range self-interest, but rather in the understanding of what the self is, of the limits of the self. Accordingly, the Citizen image implies a realistic acceptance of the self and those associated with it—those about whom one might say “we”—acceptance not in the sense of unimprovable perfection, but in the sense of something improvable, worth improving, capable of being improved by the self. We have suggested that the manhood of the fox is drawn mainly from Machiavelli’s experience and that of the Founder from reading and fantasy. The image of the Citizen is mostly from reading and fantasy too, since fraternal citizenship was not a reality in Machiavelli’s Florence. Yet, though it can be used to measure current practice and find that practice woefully “unmanly,” the Citizen image nevertheless suggests that “we” are worthwhile as we are—we Florentines, we Italians, we commoners, we moderns, we human beings—with our cowardice, our ambition, our greed, our envy, but also our courage, our intelligence, our capacity for creating and sustaining the vivere civile: human culture. It is in this spirit that Machiavelli remarks encouragingly from time to time that even the great Romans were only human, like ourselves, and we must not despair of being able to do what they did (Machiavelli 1965: 94 [Prince, ch. 26]). These passages are not a disparagement of Roman greatness, but an attempt to make it accessible, actionable, for modern men. Yet the same outlook can raise even more fundamental problems about ancient Roman greatness. For the forefathers of modern Florence need not be taken exclusively as the Romans; they might instead be taken to be the ancient natives of Tuscany, which “was once powerful, religious, and vigorous [virtù],” until the Romans came and “wiped out” all of this “achievement” (Machiavelli 1965: 341 [Discourses 2: 5]; see also Machiavelli 1965: 328 [Discourses 2: 2]). Perhaps it would be enough—would in important ways even be preferable—to be “merely” Tuscan and Florentine rather than Roman, to be oneself rather than bound to a mythical

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hero? Having withstood torture in prison, Machiavelli wrote to a friend after his release that he had borne his “distress . . . so bravely that I love myself for it and feel that I am stronger [da piu (more)] than you [or I myself?] believed” (Machiavelli 1965: 899 [Letter to Vettori, 18 March 1512–[1513]; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 6: 234). Unlike the sardonic vision of the fox and the sycophantic image of the Founder, the Citizen image is fundamentally at peace with our human condition. Glory and heroism are achieved within that condition rather than by its transcendence. Again one may be reminded of the ancient Greek understanding of man as by nature a polis creature, developing his full potential only in shared responsibility for the nomos by which he lives. Like Aristotle, Machiavelli suggests that this type of manhood, this development of potential virtù, can only be achieved in actual experience of citizen participation. Only in crisis and political struggle are people forced to enlarge their understandings of themselves and their interests. Only in crisis and struggle do they learn the necessity not merely of maintaining religion and justice, but also of esteeming good citizens and taking more account of their ability [virtù], than of those comforts which as a result of their deeds, the people themselves might lack (Machiavelli 1965: 420 [Discourses 3: 1]; Machiavelli 1960–65, vol. 1: 380). Only through practice in self-reliance do people become self-reliant; liberty is an acquired taste. A people that has grown accustomed to being cared for and dominated by others lacks the ability, the virtù, to control itself. It is like a brute beast, which, though of a fierce and savage nature, has always been cared for in prison and in slavery. Then, if by chance it is left free in a field, since it is not used to feeding itself and does not know the places where it can take refuge, it becomes the prey of the first one who tries to rechain it (Machiavelli 1965: 235 [Discourses 1: 16]; see also Machiavelli 1965: 238, 240 [Discourses 1: 17]; Machiavelli 1965: 337 [Discourses 2: 4]; Machiavelli 1965: 451 [Discourses 3: 8]; Machiavelli 1965: 460 [Discourses 3: 12]). If the ruler of such a people is somehow removed, they must promptly submit themselves to another domination; “live as free men they cannot” (Machiavelli 1965: 24 [Prince, ch. 5]). By contrast, a people accustomed to self-government, who have become men in the Citizen image and acquired a taste for public liberty, will fight with the utmost virtù, to keep their autonomy. If a conqueror tries to deprive them of it, they “take awful revenge” on him, as the Romans found when they moved into free, ancient Tuscany: “Nothing made it harder for the Romans to conquer the people around them . . . than the love that in those times many peoples had for their freedom” (Machiavelli 1965: 328, 330 [Discourses 2: 2]). Such virtù and the memory of liberty can even persist through several generations of oppression, as the Florentine signors point out to the duke of Athens before the city’s successful revolt against him: “One often sees [liberty] taken up again by men who never have experienced it, but merely because of the tradition that their fathers have left them they continue to love it” (Machiavelli 1965: 1124 [Florentine Histories 2: 34]; see also Machiavelli 1965: 24 [Prince, ch. 5]).

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*** Here one begins to see the deepest incompatibilities between the Founder and the Citizen images. It is not merely that the one vision of manhood is paternal-filial and the other fraternal; the one repressive and stressing uniformity, the other requiring plurality and conflict; the one hierarchical, the other equalitarian. Two such ideals might still co-exist, in separate but equal spheres, as it were, and at times Machiavelli tries so to place them: they are two types of manliness required in two different sets of circumstances. Founders are best at organizing, initiating, renovating; Citizens are for maintaining and carrying on what has been started. Each task has its own glory. If princes are superior to the people in establishing laws, forming communities according to law, setting up statutes and new institutions, the people are so much superior in keeping up things already organized that without doubt they attain the same glory as those who organize them. (Machiavelli 1965: 317 [Discourses 1: 58]) Founders are required where the task is reforming a corrupt people or welding a dispersed one into a single community, but where a healthy civic life exists the Citizen is required. Though one alone is suited for organizing, the government organized is not going to last long if resting on the shoulders of only one; but it is indeed lasting when it is left to the care of the many, and when its maintenance rests upon many. (Machiavelli 1965: 218 [Discourses 1: 9]); cf. Machiavelli 1965: 226 [Discourses 1: 11]; Machiavelli 1965: 76 [Prince, ch. 19]; Machiavelli 1965: 110, 115 [“Discourse on Remodelling”]) Founder and Citizen, then, are to appear in sequence, the one type of manhood producing the other, each performing his particular task at appropriate times. Yet such a deployment of the images cannot fully succeed, for they have logically incompatible implications. It is essential to the Founder image that the Founder creates manhood where none had existed; but it is essential to the Citizen image that liberty be an acquired taste, learned through actual political participation. According to the one image, authoritarian rule is essential to fit people for selfgovernment; according to the other, authoritarian rule renders them increasingly unfit and engenders habits of dependence (cf. Strauss 1958: 267). Can subordination to a single leader of mythical proportions both promote and destroy virtù in his followers? And what of the crucial transition, from paternal Founder to fraternal self-rule? How is it to be effected, and by which image of manhood and action is it to be construed? It is, of course, a reform, a revolt, quite possibly a conspiracy—that delicate, dangerous topic which so fascinated Machiavelli that he gave it the longest chapters in each of his two primary political works. But if the Founder father is to

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be overthrown by the fraternal horde he has engendered, how should that act of revolt itself be construed: as a great reform by a single, outstanding Founder-reformer, or as a collective activity Citizen peers? Machiavelli says both, construing a conspiracy to establish republican liberty now in terms of the Founder image, now in terms of the Citizen. Brutus, the prime example, certainly seems to be one of the great Founder figures, the “father” of the republic and of Roman liberty. Yet Brutus was successful only because of his good timing: had the Roman people been “corrupt” when he acted, he could perhaps have overthrown the Tarquins, but only to replace their tyranny with another (Machiavelli 1965: 238 [Discourses 1: 16]). That other, later Brutus, for instance, who sought to liberate Rome from Caesar and restore the republic, failed utterly because “the Roman populace loved” Caesar and therefore “avenged him.” Thus, “of all the dangers” that threaten initially successful conspirators, “there is none more certain or more to be feared than when the people love the prince you have killed; for this, conspirators have no remedy” (Machiavelli 1965: 444 [Discourses 3: 6]; see also Machiavelli 1965: 448 [Discourses 3: 7]). Any regime’s “strongest resource against conspiracies,” accordingly, “is not to be hated by the masses.” Those who would alter the political structure of a state should consider the material on which they must work, and determine from that the difficulty of their undertakings. For it is as difficult and dangerous to try to set free a people that wishes to live in servitude as it is to try to bring into servitude a people that wishes to live free. (Machiavelli 1965: 451 [Discourses 3: 8]) The conspirator and reformer, then, is not a Founder of mythical proportions after all, despite the metaphor of a craftsman working on inanimate material in this passage, but rather very much dependent on his human interaction with the people of his community. For a conspiracy to succeed in setting up a republic, the people at large must already be potential Citizens in character, if not yet in practice. But the problem is not just with conspirators and renovators. In a more general sense, each of the three images of manhood constitutes a perspective on the world and on the nature of man. From the perspective of the Citizens, as from that of the fox, there can be no Founders, capital F. Men who are weak or cowardly or narrowly selfish and short-sighted may abdicate their capacity for action to some single ruler, but from the Citizen perspective, no good can come of that. Real men do from time to time found new institutions, or even whole societies, or renovate them fundamentally. But such men are not the offspring of gods; they may be foundlings, but they had ordinary human parents and were conceived in the usual way. In human affairs there are no unmoved movers; we are all shaped by our society and our childhood; yet we are all capable of action and innovation. No leader stands in relation to his followers as a craftsman to material, imposing form on inanimate matter. He must always deal with people who already have customs, habits, needs, beliefs, rules of conduct, who already live somewhere in some manner. And his power is always dependent on their very human responses.

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Does Machiavelli know that the great Founder image is a myth? If he is a fox, or sees from the perspective of a fox, or even from that of the Citizen, he surely must know. Certainly he does not believe that even the greatest leaders were fathered by gods; on the contrary, they are likely to have had humble or shameful origins and precisely for that reason to have invented divine parentage (Machiavelli 1965: 533 [“Life of Castruccio”]). Just so Numa “pretended that he was intimate with a nymph” because in his renovating work he had “need for the authority of God . . . because he planned to introduce new and unwonted laws into the city, but feared that his own authority would not be enough” (Machiavelli 1965: 225 [Discourses 1: 11]). The Founder’s claims to semidivine status are necessary but fraudulent: fraud plays a crucial role in the rise to power from a lowly position. Machiavelli also clearly knows that the origins of states, like those of Founders, are regularly mythologized to camouflage their seamy reality; all beginnings lack legitimacy and thus need to create their own. The conquerors try to wipe out the past and hide the bloody origin of their power. With violence they enter into the countries of others, kill the inhabitants, seize their property, set up a new kingdom, and change the name of the country, as did Moses, and those peoples who took possession of the Roman Empire. (Machiavelli 1965: 345 [Discourses 2: 8]) The Christian religion tries to obliterate the memory of the pagans, as “the Pagan probably did against any sects preceding itself”; and the historians “follow Fortune,” praising the conquerors and denying their guilt (Machiavelli 1965: 340 [Discourses 2: 5]; Machiavelli 1965: 622 [Art of War, bk. 2]). Machiavelli also appears to know that founding is not accomplished in one blow by a single man acting alone. Even within the imagery of the Founder, he acknowledges that more than one generation might be required to reform corruption. Even in Rome, Romulus had to be followed by Numa; and, indeed, Rome was not organized “at the beginning in such a way that she could continue free for a long time” but had to reach “perfection” partly by “chance,” partly by “the discord between the people and the Senate” (Machiavelli 1965: 200–201 [Discourses 1: 2; see also Machiavelli 1965: 358 [Discourses 2: 13]). In the history of Rome “new necessities were always appearing,” so that it was constantly necessary “to devise new laws” for dealing with them (Machiavelli 1965: 295, cf. 297 [Discourses 1: 49]; see also Machiavelli 1965: 527 [Discourses 3: 49]). Thus, far from being created by an unmoved mover at the outset, Rome was the product of a sort of continuous founding by many men, and even by classes in interaction; its “founding” begins to sound rather like the collective, continuing maintenance of a healthy free republic after it has been “founded on good laws and good institutions” (Machiavelli 1965: 1187 [Florentine Histories 4: 1]). Although “two successive reigns by able princes are enough to gain the world,” as can be seen in the example of Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great, such a succession is a rare accident, but in a republic a continual supply of men of virtù should be available, “since the method of choosing

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allows not merely two able rulers in succession but countless numbers to follow one another. Such a succession of able rulers will always be present in every well-ordered republic” (Machiavelli 1965: 246 [Discourses 1: 20]). Yet in the very passage where Machiavelli says of Rome that it was not well organized from the beginning but had to be developed by chance and conflict, he contrasts Rome to Sparta, Romulus to Lycurgus. Even while unmasking the Roman Founder, one might say, he affirms the Spartan one: Rome failed to “gain the first fortune” but “gained the second.” The first fortune, however, would have been “having a Lycurgus to organize her at the beginning in such a way that she could continue for a long time” (Machiavelli 1965: 200 [Discourses 1: 2]). Did Machiavelli regard the story of Lycurgus as a myth? But if Founders are merely a myth, where does significant historical change come from? How did the human animal ever become capable of civility? If it is a matter of human rather than mythical founders, what do they do, and what can a would-be renovator do in corrupt times? Foxiness will suffice for survival in such times, but it cannot transform them. The fox is put to shame by the Founder precisely because of the latter’s capacity as an authority, to father men by inspiring as well as terrifying them. Not only is the fox unable to offer either inspiration or terror, but his way actively undermines their possibility. He can only feed the already existing defensive cynicism of his corrupt world, where “every man will stand aside and sneer, speaking ill of whatever he sees and hears.” In such a world no one would or safely could pursue an ideal like honor, liberty, or virtue; no one will “labor and strain to turn out with a thousand hardships a work that the wind will spoil and the fog conceal” (Machiavelli 1965: 778 [Mandragola, prologue]). That “is the reason, beyond all doubt,” why modern men fail to achieve what the ancients did, and no amount of unmasking and debunking will remedy it. Foxiness is the disease; it can’t be the cure. That is the reason, also, why Ligurio can only rearrange relationships in Mandragola, leaving all the characters better off in terms of their desires, but not really improving their lot in the larger sense, nor changing the corruption of their world. Callimaco can certainly father in the literal sense (and, one might argue, Ligurio vicariously through him), but his and Lucretia’s child will grow up in an atmosphere of adultery and deceit, will be socialized into his parents’ world. The prologue may speak of that world as “degenerate” from ancient greatness, but the play offers no real improvement. If the play were really to be taken as parallel to The Prince, as showing the begetting of a new Italy through the co-operative efforts of a Callimaco-prince and a Liguiro-counselor, then its message would be a most depressing one: you may get your prince into power, but the new Italy will be just like the old. In a context of general virtue and public spirit, the unmasking of a deceit is salutary, but if suspicion becomes so widespread that there is no more trust, men are rendered incapable of citizenship and real manhood. Even a diplomat may be so “clever and two-faced” that he “completely” loses the “trust” of the prince he hoped to fool; and when the ancient oracles were hypocritically exploited by “the powerful” for their own interests, the people’s discovery of this fraud led not to

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indignation but to cynicism: “Men became unbelieving and ready to upset any good custom [ordine (order)] whatsoever” (Machiavelli 1965: 116 [“Discourse on Remodelling”]; Machiavelli 1965: 227 [Discourses 1: 12]). When people have been too often “deceived in the past both by things and by men, of necessity the republic is ruined,” because the people then no longer “have faith” in anyone or anything. Such a condition of disillusionment is not healthy but self-destructive, leading a people to shout “Long live its own death” and “Down with its own life” (Machiavelli 1965: 302–303 [Discourses 1: 53]).8 So the foxy unmasking of a fraud cannot, by itself, inspire corrupt men to virtù; and, indeed, a true or mere fox would not even conceive that project. Machiavelli may have been foxy, but he was not merely a fox. All three images of manhood are his. So now one must ask once more: if a man were not merely a fox but somehow also held a vision of manhood as Citizenship, so that he wanted to transform society and men’s character toward real glory, could he do so? If there are no Founders, what does it take to found, or to renovate? Could a fox with such a vision perhaps inspire, manipulate, and use a lion as a false Founder figure? A lion could certainly frighten men into obedience, but since he lacks true virtù, how could he—or he and the fox together—inspire men? Or would the false appearance be enough? In politics, after all, appearance is everything; it is a realm where “men judge more with their eyes than with their hands, since everybody . . . sees what you appear to be; few perceive what you are” (Machiavelli 1965: 66–67 [Prince, ch. 18]). Could it be after all that the great historical Founders were only lions being used by foxes who had a larger, non-foxy vision? Machiavelli’s treatment of theorists and theorizing is particularly interesting in this regard. In discussing the great historical Founders, and the necessity that they be alone in their organizing activities, he adds: “Still more, it is necessary that one man alone give the method and that from his mind proceed all such organization” (Machiavelli 1965: 218 [Discourses 1: 9]). The action of a Founder, then, may proceed from a mind other than his own; is the “mind” behind the Founder then the real unmoved mover? When he discusses the great Founders in The Prince, as we noted, Machiavelli first sets Moses aside “since he was a mere executor of things laid down for him by God” and since we can learn as much from studying the other Founders, whose “actions and . . . individual methods” did not differ “from those of Moses, who had so great a teacher” (Machiavelli 1965: 25 [Prince, ch. 6]). So Machiavelli as theorist and teacher will examine the actions and methods of past Founders in order to teach future ones; will he then stand in relation to them as God to Moses? But does the Machiavelli who knows that “all, or a large part” of great men have been so ashamed of their obscure origins and humble paternity that they “have made themselves sons of Jove or of some other god,” actually believe that God spoke to Moses? Or does he imagine some earlier fox like himself advising Moses, or perhaps Moses himself as simultaneously lion and fox in one? Generally Machiavelli ranks theorizing, philosophy, and thought relatively low in comparison with effective action in the world. In the ranks of famous men whose fame is well deserved, as we noted, “men of letters” come only fourth, after

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the Founders and fighters. In the Florentine Histories, even more strikingly, “letters” and “philosophy” are disparaged as a sign of degeneration from “ability [virtù]” into corruption: letters come after arms, and . . . generals are born earlier than philosophers. Because after good and well-disciplined armies have brought forth victory, and their victories quiet, the virtue of military courage cannot be corrupted with a more honorable laziness than that of letters; nor with a great and more dangerous deception can this laziness enter into well-regulated cities. (Machiavelli 1965: 1232 [Florentine Histories 5: 1]; Machiavelli 1960–65: 7: 325) Theory, then, would seem to be an “honorable laziness” that corrupts and weakens, almost the opposite pole from the supreme virtù of the Founder. Indeed, in his letter to Pope Leo X on remodeling Florentine government, Machiavelli says that the glory of founding is so great that theorists like Aristotle, Plato, “and many others” who were “unable to form a republic in reality . . . have done it in writing,” wanting “to show the world” that their failure to act was due not to “their ignorance” but only to “their impotence” for “putting . . . into practice” what they knew (Machiavelli 1965: 114 [“Discourse on Remodelling”]). Machiavelli himself was impotent to act in his exile, having been forced out of action into theory; indeed, in 1509 while still in office he had written that “for holding state, studies and books are not enough” (Letter of 26 November 1509, quoted in Machiavelli 1965: 739n). Yet perhaps what is said of philosophy and letters in general is not meant to apply to Machiavelli’s own particular theorizing. In both The Prince and the Discourses he seeks to distinguish himself from the tradition of political theory, insofar as it meant the inventing of unrealistic imaginary states. While most men act by imitation, and while nothing is more dangerous than introducing a genuine novelty, he himself as theorist is “determined to enter upon a path not yet trodden by anyone,” in hopes of thereby bringing “benefit common to everybody” (Machiavelli 1965: 190 [Discourses, preface]). He wants “to write something useful” for action, yet does not plan to act on his own ideas himself, hoping instead like Fabrizio in The Art of War that someone “with more vigor [virtù], more prudence and judgment” will “carry out this intention of mine” (Machiavelli 1965: 190 [Discourses, preface]). Autonomous transforming action is what is most admirable; yet who is the source of such action: the leader who carries it out, or the “author” who first imagines it? Is theory, then, impotence or power? Are Founders mere front men for theorist-counselors behind the scenes? Then whose fault was it that Machiavelli, the consummate fox, failed to find a front man (or front lion) who might reform and unify Florence or all Italy? Surely the times and conditions were unfavorable, the task too difficult. Only a heroic man of mythical proportions could do anything in conditions such as these. Even in combination, a fox and a lion cannot

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produce miracles, cannot turn animals into men. So the Founder has to be real after all, for he is the only hope. The Founder, one might say, is a fantasy of the impotent; and to the extent that the situation looks utterly hopeless, Machiavelli himself is drawn into the Founder image and yearns for rescue. The attraction of magic is proportional to the apparent hopelessness of action. Though the fox tends by nature to demystify and debunk and thereby undermine the image of the Founder, he also in some way continually needs and recreates that image. The servant, the counselor, the underling may have a considerable stake in the greatness of his master or in imagining an even greater one whose greatness he could share by identification. If in addition he fantasises controlling such a master behind the scenes, and if, like Machiavelli, he yearns to transform corrupt men into Citizens of virtù, then he has still further stakes of his own in the Founder image, as a last hope when all else seems blocked. Thus while Machiavelli clearly did not believe in the divine parentage of Founders or the immaculate conception of cities, the image of the Founder is no mere rhetorical device detachedly used to manipulate his readers. There is much reason to think that it was also a symbolic category of his own thinking. In terms of manhood, the relationships among the three images we have examined are extraordinarily complex and ultimately unresolvable because they are nontransitive. Each image is in certain respects superior to, more manly than, the other two; each is in significant ways unsatisfactory, inadequate, or unmanly. And so Machiavelli’s thought in effect circles over them endlessly in various juxtapositions and transformations, the contemplation of any one of the three leading him eventually back to a reconsideration of the others. The image of the fox, though an ideal of manhood in its own right and a source of pride for Machiavelli, is also somehow despicable and unmanly, for the fox acts only by indirection and shuns direct encounter. He is put to shame by the Citizen’s fearless engagement in open conflict and accusation; and a world of foxes and their victims is a world incapable of free civic life. He is put to shame by the Founder’s generative power; and a fox cannot father Citizens—indeed, foxiness undermines Citizen virtù. Thus, by comparison with both Citizen and Founder he is not a real man, but only an animal. The Citizen is an ideal of virtù, “fighting by laws” like a man, rather than in the way of beasts. Yet citizenship seems incapable of generating itself; the Citizen is good at maintenance, but can he father himself? How is a corrupt world to be transformed into one of civic virtue? One who cannot fight by the way of beasts is bound to fail in a world of lions, wolves, and foxes. Only someone who can generate a virtuous world is a real man. By comparison with either the Founder’s generativity or the fox’s cynical knowledge, the Citizen is revealed as a dependent child not yet capable of manhood. The Founder is the ultimate man in terms of paternity, yet, being only a means to the real goal, Citizens of virtù, he must be overthrown. And besides, he is a myth; the fox, or perhaps even the Citizen, can show him up as a mere fantasy, incompatible with the verita effetuale della cosa. The Founder image is thus an escape from reality and from effective action in the world, hence bound up with unmanliness. Then

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the generating of virtù must be the work of foxes, or foxes using lions, after all; and the apparently so masculine Founder is only the product of the theorist, the “mind” that stands behind him and manipulates. Why, then, is the fox again and again beset by self-contempt, by the awareness that he is hiding from something, refusing to face up to things like a man? And so the endless circles continue. What is it that traps Machiavelli, that so divides and confounds his understanding of manhood?

Notes 1 The great frequency with which Machiavelli employs these terms, like the frequency of his use of virtù, is inevitably hidden by even the best translation. 2 Public freedom may even be a source of strength beyond virtù, as in Machiavelli 1965: 286 [Discourses 1: 43]. 3 Sometimes, however, the grandi are more “ambitious” for wealth than for glory (Machiavelli 1965: 274 [Discourses 1: 37]). 4 Concerning a prince (Machiavelli 1965: 39 [Prince, ch. 9]; Machiavelli 1965: 237 [Discourses 1: 16]). More generally (Machiavelli 1965: 448 [Discourses 3: 7]; Machiavelli 1965: 110, 115 [“Discourse on Remodelling”]). Concerning vengeance and violence (Machiavelli 1965: 389 [Discourses 2: 23]). This reading is suggested by Shumer (1979). 5 Ultimately, to be sure, even in Rome an excess of “hatred” between the classes “led to arms and bloodshed” and finally destroyed Roman freedom (Machiavelli 1965: 274 [Discourses 1: 37]). 6 Like many aspects of the Citizen image, justice is a largely implicit and indirect theme; but see e.g., Machiavelli 1965: 1140 [Florentine Histories 3: 1]; Machiavelli 1965: 1166 [Florentine Histories 3: 16]; Machiavelli 1965: 1242 [Florentine Histories 5: 8]; Machiavelli 1965: 94 [Prince, ch. 26]; Machiavelli 1965: 405 [Discourses 1: 28]; and Machiavelli 1965: 3 [“A Provision for Infantry”]. 7 But Alexandria had a “dependent” rather than a “free” origin. Like Florence, it got off to a bad start (Machiavelli 1965: 1931). 8 Machiavelli says that he is quoting Dante’s On Monarchy, but Allan Gilbert points out that the passage is actually from his Convivio, 1.11.54.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1974. The Human Condition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hale, John Rigby. 1977. Florence and the Medici. London: Thames and Hudson. Hobbes, Thomas. 1962. Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott. New York: Collier Books. Livius, Titus. 1967. The History of Rome, trans. B.O. Foster, 14 vols. London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1960–65. Opere, 8 vols. Milano: Feltrinelli. Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1964. Machiavelli’s The Prince, trans. and ed. Mark Musa. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1965. The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert, 3 vols. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pitkin, Hannah Fenichel. 1981. “Justice: On Relating Private and Public.” Political Theory 9 (August): 327–352. Shumer, S.M. 1979. “Machiavelli’s Republican Politics and Its Corruption.” Political Theory 7 (February): 5–34. Strauss, Leo. 1958. Thoughts on Machiavelli. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

10 THE MANDATE-INDEPENDENCE CONTROVERSY (1967)

Representation means the making present of something which is nevertheless not literally present. What I should like to say about substantive acting for others is that the represented thing or person is present in the action rather than in the characteristics of the actor, or how he is regarded, or the formal arrangements which precede or follow the action. But this locution is far from clear, and we still have the task of specifying what kind or manner of action is required here. The suggestion probably most familiar from the literature on representation is that the representative must do what his principal would do, must act as if the principal himself were acting.1 This is a very tempting account because of its obvious proximity to the idea of making-the-represented-present, the idea of resemblance and reflection found in the descriptive view, and the idea of democratic consent associated with modern representative government. But on closer examination it entails problems. If we think of a representative acting not merely for a single principal but for an entire constituency, an unorganized set of people; then “Act as if your constituents were acting themselves” becomes a questionable slogan. If the contemplated action is voting, then presumably (but not obviously) it means that the representative must vote as a majority of his constituents would. But any activities other than voting are less easy to deal with. Is he really literally to deliberate as if he were several hundred thousand people? To bargain that way? To speak that way? And if not that way, then how? The slogan is not even right for a representative acting for a single principal; even representing one man is not a matter of imitation. For example, I am attending a business conference as Jones’s representative, chosen to act for him there because it is a financial conference and he has no head for figures. The time comes to make a decision. I ask myself, “What would Jones do?” But the answer is clear: he would throw up his hands in horrified defeat at the sight of all those figures, and would probably make the wrong decision. Surely it is not my obligation

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or role to do that for him. Imitation is not what is called for here; acting for another is not acting on the stage. But the only alternatives seem to be either that I do what Jones would want, or that I do what seems best for him, in terms of his interest. So, again, the two familiar elements of wishes and welfare seem to be the only available choices. But these two elements form two opposed sides in a longstanding debate, undoubtedly the central classic controversy in the literature of political representation. The question at issue may be summarized as: Should (must) a representative do what his constituents want, and be bound by mandates or instructions from them; or should (must) he be free to act as seems best to him in pursuit of their welfare? This mandate-independence controversy has become encrusted with a number of other issues, partly related but partly irrelevant. It occurs mostly in contexts where political representation is at stake; so the basic question is soon entangled with such issues as the relative priority of local versus national interest, the role of political parties, and the nature of political questions. It tends to be complicated also by the differences between representing a single principal and representing a diverse political constituency. Still, the underlying conceptual problem is worth isolating and examining in its own right. What I shall argue about this conceptual dispute is, first, that the way in which it is usually formulated makes a consistent answer impossible; second, that the meaning of representation nevertheless supplies a consistent position about a representative’s duties; and, third, that this consistent position only sets outer limits, within which there remains room for a wide range of views on how a political representative should act or what distinguishes good from bad representing. A writer’s position in this range of views is correlated with his conception of political life in the broadest sense: his ideas on the nature of political issues, the relative capacities of rulers and ruled, the nature of man and society—in short, what we might call his metapolitics. A number of positions have at one time or another been defended, between the two poles of mandate and independence. A highly restrictive mandate theorist might maintain that true representation occurs only when the representative acts on explicit instructions from his constituents, that any exercise of discretion is a deviation from this ideal. A more moderate position might be that he may exercise some discretion, but must consult his constituents before doing anything new or controversial, and then do as they wish or resign his post. A still less extreme position might be that the representative may act as he thinks his constituents would want, unless or until he receives instructions from them, and then he must obey. Very close to the independence position would be the argument that the representative must do as he thinks best, except insofar as he is bound by campaign promises or an election platform. At the other extreme is the idea of complete independence, that constituents have no right even to exact campaign promises; once a man is elected he must be completely free to use his own judgment. But whatever his precise position, a theorist is likely to invoke the appropriate analogies and adverbial expressions to defend it. A mandate theorist will see the representative as a “mere” agent, a servant, a delegate, a subordinate substitute for

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those who sent him. The representative, he will say, is “sent as a servant,” not “chosen with dictatorial powers,” and so the purpose which sent him must have been the constituents’ purpose and not his own.2 They sent him to do something for them which they might have chosen to do for themselves, which they are perfectly capable of doing and understanding.3 Hence the representative was sent to pursue his constituents’ will and not his own. Other mandate theorists invoke the metaphors of descriptive representation, seeing the representative as a mechanical device through which his constituents act—a mirror or megaphone. As to the national interest, the mandate theorist is likely to argue that the sum of local constituencies is the nation, and the sum of constituency interests is the national interest. Besides, if each representative was not intended to act as an agent of his locality, why was he locally elected?4 Independence theorists, too, have appropriate analogies at their disposal; they see the representative as a free agent, a trustee, an expert who is best left alone to do his work. They thus tend to see political questions as difficult and complex, beyond the capacities of ordinary men. In any case, they argue, a constituency is not a single unit with a ready-made will or opinion on every topic; a representative cannot simply reflect what is not there to be reflected.5 Further, if each representative were pledged to and instructed by his constituency, political compromise would become impossible. It is necessary to leave room for the crucial activities of the legislature itself—the formulating of issues, the deliberation and compromise on which decisions should be based. And, as Burke asked, what sort of a system is it “in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decides; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?”6 Further, the independence theorist argues that the representative, although locally elected, must pursue the national interest, which will by no means emerge automatically from the sum of local constituency desires. He must be left free of instructions so that he can pursue it.7 Moreover, to allow a representative to act only on instructions is to rob him of all dignity and thus to undermine respect for the government.8 These are the two sides of the controversy in primitive form. Frequently they are complicated, however, by arguments about political parties. One argument is that in the modern state the legislator is neither bound by the wishes of his constituency nor free to act in the national interest as he sees it, but that he is bound to act in accord with the program of his political party. Sometimes this view is expressed by saying he is the representative of his party.9 A second possibility is to regard parties as a link between local wishes and national interests. The party presumably has a program on national issues; by electing the member of a certain party, the voters in each constituency express their wishes on this program. The legislator is then bound to this program because of his duty to party and his duty to his constituents’ wishes, and (presumably) because it accords with his view of the national interest (why else is he in that party?).10 Third, it has been argued on the independence side, particularly by continental writers, that the interests of party

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are partial and special and not equivalent to the national interest; so the representative must be left free of party obligations to act in the national interest as he sees it.11 Various compromise positions have been taken. Some writers argue that both extremes are true: the representative has an obligation both to the wishes of his constituents and to the best policy as he sees it; but they do not tell us how to reconcile the two.12 Some maintain that the representative’s duty to his constituency is to plead their cause, to speak for them; but that he must then vote in accord with his own judgment.13 Many writers have argued that time is the crucial factor; that the representative is not bound by every temporary whim or wish of his constituents, but must obey their long-range, deliberate desires. Some seem to take the curious position that a representative must ignore his constituents except just at election time, and that at election time they must remove him if they are not pleased. What is most striking about the mandate-independence controversy is how long it has continued without coming any nearer to a solution, despite the participation of many astute thinkers. Each in turn takes a position—pro mandate or pro independence—but the dispute is never settled. The two sides seem to talk past each other; their arguments do not meet. Each seems convincing when read in isolation. Nor do the compromise solutions seem satisfactory. This state of affairs has led some commentators to reject further (as they put it) normative speculation, and to call for empirical investigation of what representatives in fact do.14 Such investigation leads them either into a survey of historical examples, or into studies of legislative behavior and public opinion in the contemporary world. The historical examples these writers adduce range over every possible degree from mandate to independence. In many political bodies the members have had power to vote or act only insofar as they had explicit instructions from those who sent them. The Imperial German Bundesrat, the modern American electoral college, the United Nations Assembly are examples.15 In other bodies the members were bound by instructions given at the outset of their term of office or even during their term. The practice of instructing one’s representative was explicitly recognized in a number of early American state constitutions. At other times and in other places, legislators have considered themselves almost completely independent of those who elected them. The same variety is found with regard to parties: historical experience ranges from the bound members of the Australian Labor Party to the great freedom enjoyed by American politicians today, or even to the absence of parties in earlier periods. The writers who make such surveys can conclude only that the range of acceptable relationships between representative and constituents is very wide. Similarly, commentators who turn to empirical study of the contemporary American political scene find great diversity. Some legislators pronounce themselves as most responsive to the demands of constituency, and some to those of party, while others maintain that they act on their own independent judgment of the national interest.16 Study of their voting behavior also shows considerable variety.17 Public opinion polls to determine what the people expect from their representatives

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show a fairly even division of opinion.18 The legislators tend to incline toward independence, the people toward mandate, but in each division there is a substantial minority. Empirical investigation is no less ambiguous in its results than the traditional “normative” controversy. Now, a dispute as persistent as the mandate-independence controversy has been may indicate the presence of a philosophical paradox, a conceptual difficulty at its root. The dispute itself may be formulated in such a way as to make settlement impossible. In that case it will not help to turn to historical or empirical evidence, for whatever conceptual ambiguity is at fault will be built into the questions we ask of history or of the population we interview. Our researches will simply perpetuate the initial difficulty on a new level. If such a conceptual difficulty is involved in the controversy, neither a blind choosing of sides nor a new method of amassing more relevant facts will settle it. What is needed is clarification, a demonstration of what is right and what is wrong with each side, and of why they talk past each other. I am not suggesting that the mandate-independence controversy is merely a conceptual paradox that could be settled by philosophical analysis, but rather that it is complicated and made insoluble by such a paradox, that the nonconceptual, political issues cannot be consistently dealt with until the conceptual problem is clarified. We shall therefore turn aside, for a time, from these political arguments to concentrate on another kind of appeal that has been made by both sides—an appeal to the meaning of representation itself. In addition to all the arguments we have examined, both mandate and independence writers insist that the concept itself supports their views. “It just isn’t really representation,” the mandate theorist will say, “if the man doesn’t do what his constituents want.” “It just isn’t really representation,” the independence theorist responds, “if the man isn’t free to decide on the basis of his own independent judgment.” But, rather than putting words into their mouths, let us examine how such views are in fact expressed. For the mandate theorists, we may take a passage from Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton’s early joint book on political parties: Either the representative must vote as his constituents would vote if consulted, or he must vote in the opposite sense. In the latter case, he is not a representative at all, but merely an oligarch; for it is surely ridiculous to say that a man represents Bethnal Green if he is in the habit of saying ‘Aye’ when the people of Bethnal Green would say ‘No.’19 A typical articulation of the same appeal to the meaning of representation by an independence theorist might be Lord Brougham’s: The essence of Representation is that the power of the people should be parted with, and given over, for limited period, to the deputy chosen by the people, and that he should perform that part in the government which, but for this transfer, would have been performed by the people themselves. It is not

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Representation if the constituents so far retain a control as to act for themselves. They may communicate with their delegate . . . but he is to act – not they; he is to act for them – not they for themselves.20 Confronted by two such arguments, does one not want to say that both are right? One can see the logic of each position in turn. It is true that a man is not a representative—or at most is a representative “in name only”—if he habitually does the opposite of what his constituents would do. But it is also true that the man is not a representative—or at most is a representative in name only—if he himself does nothing, if his constituents act directly. But can both views be right when they seem to support opposite and incompatible conclusions about the role of a representative? Perhaps they can if each holds part of the meaning of representation, but extrapolates incorrectly from that part. Imagine a situation in which representing would genuinely be reduced to the extreme of the mandate position, to a mere mechanical reflection or delivery of the wishes of the constituents. Imagine a body somewhat like our modern electoral college, but with any ambiguities removed for purposes of our illustration.21 The members come simply to deliver and announce a decision made in their home districts by the voters. Is this representation? Are these members representatives? The independence theorists say no. But one might speak of them as representing; we would understand at once what was meant. A visitor to the meeting of this body might point to one of the members and ask, “Whom does he represent?” or “What state does he represent?” But this would be representation purely in the sense of “standing for.” The members would represent in much the same way as a group of fifty little girls in a pageant, each labeled to represent a state in the Union. One can tick them off: this one represents Arkansas, that one Oregon. But this is not representing conceived as activity. Approaching the same example with representation as activity in mind, we would have to deny that the body is representative or that its members represent anyone. “You can say that he’s representing Arkansas, but of course he’s really not doing anything. The real decision was made long ago and not by him. This is just a formality.” The real action was taken directly by the state’s voters; no one was acting for them. If they had mailed in their decision, surely one would not say that the envelope that brought it represented them? If we start from the idea of representation as acting for others, then the more we think of the member of this body as a mechanical thing, as a tool or limb or extension of those who act through him, the more inclined we are to say that they acted themselves and that no representation took place. I do not say that my hand “represents” me when I pick up a pen with it; I picked up the pen. This seems to be what happens in the thinking of the independence theorists when they consider whether a representative must obey the wishes and instructions of his constituents. They are thinking of representing as activity, and activity implies a certain minimum of autonomy, of animation. That is why Lord Brougham argues that it is not representation if the constituents have so much control over their representative

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that they act for themselves. “He is to act—not they; he is to act for them—not they for themselves.” Thus there is a good deal to be said for the logic of the independence position, if we are thinking of representing as activity. But there is something to be said for the mandate position as well—not the version of the mandate position that likens a representative to a mechanical device, but a different aspect of the argument. Consider the case of a member of a ruling body who not only fails to follow the instructions of his constituency, but also persists in doing the opposite of what the constituency desires. He may nevertheless be their formal representative, the official holder of the office. But would anyone maintain that he really represented that constituency? Would we not feel that there was something very wrong in such a case? Belloc and Chesterton’s formulation of this issue is compelling: “it is surely ridiculous to say that a man represents Bethnal Green if he is in the habit of saying ‘Aye’ when the people of Bethnal Green would say ‘No.’”22 Only a fool or a hypocrite would try to tell Bethnal Green that such a man was truly, substantively representing them. This does not prove that a representative must obey or even consult his constituents before he acts; at most it proves that he may not act counter to their wishes habitually over a long period of time. If he does, he may still be their representative in name, formally, but is not really substantively so. On this score the case of the mandate theorists is indisputable. The concept of representation itself is what accounts for the truth in each of the two conflicting positions. Being represented means being made present in some sense, while not really being present literally or fully in fact. This paradoxical requirement imposed by the meaning of the concept is precisely what is mirrored in the two sides of the mandate-independence controversy. The mandate theorist says: if the situation is such that we can no longer see the constituents as present then there is no representation, and if the man habitually votes the opposite of their wishes we can no longer see them as present in his voting. At most it might be a formal representation; they will be bound by his vote. The independence theorist says: if the situation is such that we can no longer see the representative acting, but rather we see the constituents acting directly for themselves, then there is no representation; and where he merely carries out their orders they seem to be acting directly for themselves. At most he might be said to stand for them descriptively or symbolically, but not to represent them in his activity. In distinguishing between an agent and a representative, we noted that the agent of a corporation is more like its part or limb, while in the representative the corporation is (conceived as) present in its entirety. If, similarly, we are to think of the entire constituency as present in the action of its representative, two consequences seem to follow. First, if it is present in its entirety, why can it not change its mind here and now? Second, if it is present in its entirety, how can the action it takes here be in conflict with its express wishes? From the first consequence derives what is valid in the independence theory. The representative must have some freedom, some discretion to act, or it is difficult to imagine his constituency wholly present in him. If he is totally bound and instructed, we tend to think of him more as a tool or limb or puppet whose motivating or deciding power is elsewhere. From the

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other consequence derives what is valid in the mandate theory. The representative cannot be persistently at odds with the desires of his constituency, or else it is again too difficult to conceive the constituency as present in him. When they are at odds, we tend to think of him as a separate being acting on his own to pursue his own goals. So, insofar as the mandate-independence controversy contains a conceptual dispute based on the meaning of representation, both sides are right. The seemingly paradoxical meaning of representation is perpetuated in our requirements for the activity of representing: the represented must be both present and not present.23 The representative must really act, be independent; yet the represented must be in some sense acting through him. Hence there must be no serious persistent conflict between them. Thus one might suppose that the best examples of representing as activity would be found where absolutely no conflict could occur between representative and represented, because the latter is a child or otherwise incapable of judging for himself. But that is far from true. The represented must himself be capable of action, have a will and judgment of his own; otherwise the idea of representation as substantive activity is not applicable. Taking care of someone or something helpless or totally incompetent is not representing. To be sure, representing need not necessarily be of a person or persons; abstractions, too, can be represented in the substantive sense of acting for them. Again it is difficult to distinguish such cases from standing for an abstraction symbolically or descriptively, or acting for it in the formalistic sense (as in Organschaft). Griffiths points out that although there are many Labor Party members in the British Parliament, and even some members of the working class, one might still want to deny that there is anyone in Parliament “who fully represent[s] the spirit and traditions of the working class movement. Perhaps only Keir Hardie ever really did.”24 Now, the “spirit and traditions” are not a person, nor are they an organization of which someone can be an official. Further, what the hypothetical speaker is saying of Mr. Hardie and denying of other members is not a symbolic presenting of the “spirit and traditions.” He is not suggesting that Keir Hardie represented that spirit and tradition in the way in which the flag represents a nation or Uncle Sam represents America. What is being discussed here is representation through activity, speaking and voting in Parliament. Similarly, a political speaker may assert that he represents world peace, meaning not that he embodies its qualities by being very calm, but that he speaks and acts to further it. On other occasions we may variously say that someone represents (through his actions) union solidarity, justice, truth, the Christian point of view, the World Spirit, and so on. Such abstractions cannot literally act for themselves and do not have wishes that could be consulted. Yet they can be represented, and we do not feel that their alleged representative is merely taking care of them, as a guardian takes care of a child. What distinguishes the abstraction from the helpless child being taken care of is apparently a matter of how we conceive the situation. If we think of the abstraction as acting through its representative, present in his activity, animating and directing what he does, then we will speak of representation.25 Even a helpless child could be spoken of as being represented in this way; but if we think of him

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(or of an abstraction) as helpless and incapable of action, as being taken care of, then we will not speak of representation. An abstraction does not have wishes and cannot suddenly rise up and object to what a representative is doing in its name. With people, however, that is likely to happen from time to time; thus the puzzle of mandate versus independence arises only when we think of the representing of people, since they may have their own views of what is in their interest and those views may clash with their representative’s decision. The substance of the activity of representing seems to consist in promoting the interest of the represented, in a context where the latter is conceived as capable of action and judgment, but in such a way that he does not object to what is done in his name. What the representative does must be in his principal’s interest, but the way he does it must be responsive to the principal’s wishes. He need not actually and literally act in response to the principal’s wishes, but the principal’s wishes must be potentially there and potentially relevant. Responsiveness seems to have a kind of negative criterion: conflict must be possible and yet nevertheless not occur. But now representing begins to sound like an extraordinarily fragile and demanding human institution. Insufficient independence in the representative destroys the “illusion”; insufficient independence in the represented destroys the “illusion”; conflict between the two independent judgments also destroys the “illusion.” But perhaps these requirements are not, after all, as extraordinary as they seem. I believe that they do rest on a fundamental assumption about human beings and human action, but an assumption which is not confined to the concept of representation, but pervades our entire vocabulary of action. To put it bluntly: we assume that normally a man’s wishes and what is good for him will coincide. Thus if a representative in fact succeeds in doing what is good for his constituents, normally he should not then find himself in conflict with their wishes. This duality can be most fruitfully studied in the concept of interest, which is ubiquitous in representation theory. For, in the first place, the concept of interest forms a kind of link between the representing of abstractions (which do not have wishes) and the representing of people (which do). An interest is itself an abstraction. And just as one can represent world peace or justice, one can represent the interest of world peace or justice. But one can also represent the interest of certain people, of an individual or a group. Sometimes interests are the interests of someone. Thus the interest of consumers, though an abstraction, is an abstraction of a special kind in that it is linked with, referred to, a particular set of people whose interest it is— consumers. Representing the interests of consumers could conceivably require attention to their wishes, whereas representing the interest of world peace could not require such attention because there is no correspondingly relevant group to consult. The concept of interest thus occurs sometimes as attached to a certain group of people and sometimes in unattached form. In this respect it is unlike certain other abstractions—wishes, feelings, opinions—which are always attached, always the wishes, feelings, or opinions of somebody. In the second place, the concept of interest is dualistic in its meaning and in its etymological history, having become bifurcated into two separate senses, the one

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more or less equivalent to welfare (“Is it to your interest to see him?”), the other more or less equivalent to attention or concern (“Are you interested in him?”).26 The former has to do with what is “to someone’s interest” or “in his interest.” “To his interest” is strictly an adjectival form; an action, a law, a measure taken can be described as to someone’s interest. “In his interest” is primarily but not exclusively adverbial; one can act in someone’s interest. One cannot act to someone’s interest. When a court speaks of “interested parties” it does not mean those whose curiosity has been aroused by a case, but those who have legal rights at stake. Similarly, when the eighteenth century condemned the “interested member” of Parliament, it meant not the one who took an interest in his work, but the one who had something personal to gain or lose by his decisions, and therefore could not act with detachment. And we still speak of “vested interests,” and require some government officials to divest themselves of stockholdings to avoid “conflicts of interest.” The converse of being interested in this sense of having something at stake is being “disinterested” or impartial. The other sense of interest, equivalent to attention or concern, has to do with what we “take an interest in,” what we find “interesting.” The converse of being interested in this sense is being “uninterested,” indifferent, unconcerned.27 Etymologically, the word derives by way of French from the Latin interesse, “to be between,” “to differ,” “to make a difference”; and apparently it already had its dual significance in the Latin, meaning “to make a difference” both objectively and subjectively.28 In English the objective sense is much earlier; the word first appears in the fifteenth century, in a legal sense meaning to be objectively concerned in a law suit, to have a legal claim, right, or title at stake. Similarly, the early meanings of “to interest” had this objective reference of having something at stake rather than any psychological one. Even “interesting” meant, quite literally, “important.” Only later were these words applied to a psychological attitude that would be appropriate if one were objectively involved or had something at stake.29 The adjective “interested” was first to be used in this psychological sense; the earliest examples in the Oxford English Dictionary are from the latter half of the seventeenth century; the noun and verb were not so used until late in the eighteenth century. Only the sense of having something objectively at stake can occur as unattached interest. In that case it can be a cause or other abstraction that has something to gain or lose, rather than a person or group. But only animate beings can “take an interest” in something, “become interested” in it, or “find it interesting.” The psychological sense is always attached to a person or persons. The psychological concept of what one finds interesting has been the almost exclusive concern of a tradition of thought in educational psychology. There are any number of studies on what people find interesting, how to arouse students’ interest in their work, vocational guidance through “interest inventory” tests, and so on.30 These studies usually ignore the fact that there is another sense of “interest”; for them (understandably) the word has only a psychological, subjective import.31 In this sense, a person’s interests depend on him as subject, on his reactions. Either the thing interests him or it does not. (Yet even within this sense of the word, some writers distinguish

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between subjective ways of defining what is interesting, like asking the person himself, and objective ways, like watching his behavior.)32 For the other major sense of “interest,” having something objectively at stake, interpretations range from objective to subjective in various senses. At the most objective end of the scale are unattached interests, where there is no particular person or group whose interest it is (and who could, therefore, claim a right to define it). Not only is the interest of world peace not a psychological state, but there is no particular person or group in whom it might be measured. Someone is acting in the interest of world peace if he furthers world peace; that is all. Even attached interests can be conceived as independent of anyone’s feelings or thoughts. In Marxist theory the interest of a class is objectively determinable whether members of the class know it or not. What benefits a class is to its interest; with the passage of time the members of the class will become aware of their interest. But even before they become “class-conscious,” various events may in fact be (or not be) in their class interest; they just do not know it yet. This kind of idea of interests independent of wishes or opinion seems to have flourished in economics, perhaps because profit and loss provide a standard that seems temptingly objective, whether or not somebody wants the profit. In any case, the idea has recently been applied to the sociopolitical world by a political scientist, who argues that people have objective interests—things that are good for them—quite apart from what they happen to want. He even attempts to list some of these interests.33 Thus even attached interest in the sense of what one has at stake can be treated as totally objective and independent of anyone’s thoughts or wishes. But more often complications set in at this point. Once we are dealing with attached interests, the interests of labor, or Jones’s interest, it is difficult to avoid the question whether laboring people or Jones do not or should not have something to say about what their interests are. It can be maintained that their wishes and opinions are relevant in a special way. We are individualists and democrats and relativists in our thinking, not quite content to tell a man what is in his interest without any regard to his wishes. We tend to think that, in the last analysis, each man has the right to define his own good, and, if he rejects something, no one has the right to insist that it is good for him. So most of our modern theories of interest, although they deal with its objective sense of having something at stake, introduce a subjective element. Who but the person involved has the right to say whether he has anything at stake or not, we ask? Who is to tell him he stands to gain or lose in a transaction if he insists that he feels no gain or loss? Thus it is possible to equate interest with having something at stake, but to leave to the individual concerned the final determination of whether he has something at stake. This view originates with Utilitarianism, and it certainly forms a central strand in Utilitarian theory. In much of Utilitarian thought, each person is the only reliable measure of his own interest; no one else can know what it is as well as he does. Hence no representative can ever act in your interest contrary to your wishes. In any event, he probably would not, because he himself is motivated by his own

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interest. But even if he were acting altruistically, he could never know your interest as well as you know it, so he could only act in it by following your express directions. Nothing forcibly imposed against your will can ever be in your interest. Among contemporary political scientists, this view is quite common. A man’s interest is equivalent to what the man wants, and the common interest of society is what the members of society want. The ultimate test of my interest is the satisfaction I experience when once it is attained. No condition barely imposed upon me by an external agency . . . can be in my interest, unless I come ultimately to recognize and accept it as such. . . . The common interest of society, therefore, must be what its members feel and accept as their own, and it can be served by no action merely forced or imposed upon them without their consent and concurrence.34 Similarly, interest is defined as “a pattern of demands and its supporting expectations.”35 Or we are told that it is “the settled and avowed aspirations of a man or group of men,” which they consider “realizable”; and hence that “conflicts of interest” exist only as long as the parties involved feel dissatisfied.36 Or again, another writer sees an interest as “any fairly persistent attitude toward the environment, expressing itself variously as a purpose, claim or expectation, whose satisfaction the possessor regards as a ‘good’ or ‘utility’ and whose frustration by another produces a feeling of disappointment or resentment.”37 We are thus directed to the psychological states of those concerned as the ultimate test of what their interest is. This leads some commentators to confuse this sense of interest with the psychological “finding something interesting.” They write as if what one finds interesting were exactly equivalent to what one considers to be to one’s interest. They define the interest of an individual as that which “seriously enlists his attention,” but when they turn to group interests this leads to confusion.38 For a group as such has no psychological attention that can be enlisted or aroused. As a group, it can only engage in certain activities or pursue certain goals. So the interest of a group becomes “the object which it chiefly seeks.”39 Nor does such a writer seem to feel any inconsistency in the transition. But while it may be true that the objects we seek enlist our attention, it is certainly not always true that whatever enlists our attention is an object we seek. Not everything that interests us is something we consider to be to our interest.40 There are still two possibilities within the idea that interest is what one has at stake, in one’s own judgment. Just as psychological “being interested” could be measured by asking the individual or by observing him, so also, what someone thinks he has at stake can be measured in two ways. One can ask an individual or group what they are after; or one can observe their behavior and draw one’s own conclusions.41 These two techniques have again been termed “subjective” and “objective.” In the subjective camp, “the ultimate test” of interest is the “satisfaction” felt by the one “whose interest it is, when it is attained.”42 The interests of a group, then, are the attitudes which its members share, “towards what is needed or wanted

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in a given situation”; so a group interest can exist even before the group is formed and organized.43 But it can be maintained that these attitudes are to be observed empirically and objectively from behavior.44 For other writers, the interest of a group is not an attitude of its members or any shared “psychological feeling or desire,” but consists entirely in group activity. Interest “is the equivalent of a group. . . . The group and the interest are not separate. There exists only the one thing, that is, so many men bound together in or along the path of certain activity.”45 The concept of interest, then, profoundly embodies the duality of our thinking about who is to say what is good for people. At the one extreme are unattached interests, where there are no relevant wishes to consult; at the other extreme, what a person finds interesting, which is surely up to him. And in between is a wide range in which interest means what a person has in fact, objectively, at stake; yet we also feel that he must eventually have some say in defining what that is. Nor is the duality confined to this term, although it shows up with particular sharpness here. It runs through all our ideas about action, responsibility, and social life, and all our terms in this area are equivocal, some more, some less. Consider welfare. Surely sometimes we can promote a person’s welfare even against his wishes; yet we would not want to say in general that people’s wishes are irrelevant to a definition of their welfare. Or, at the other extreme, consider attached abstractions like wants or wishes. Even here we sometimes tell a child (or someone whom we are teaching, say, how to play chess), “You don’t really want to do that.” Such ways of talking can be abused, to be sure, but they are not always without point. We assume—and our language embodies the assumption—that normally wishes and welfare will coincide, and a person will want that which is objectively in his interest. This may not be true with the insane or with small children, but it is our expectation about normal adults. Men are not children to be coerced indefinitely for their own good.46 That is why our complex expectations about the activity of representing are not as extraordinary as they may seem. We assume that normally if a man acts in the interest of another, the latter will have no objection to what he does. Children and the insane cannot be relied on in this respect, but then they are taken care of rather than represented. Representation enters the picture precisely where the person acted for is conceived as capable of acting and judging for himself; and of such a person we assume that he will want what is in his interest. It might be said that to act in someone’s interest is to do what he ought to want. There is nothing tricky about that “ought”; it simply expresses our assumption about the normal case. And to speak here of a normal case is not to assert that the contrary never happens. Of course men sometimes want something that is not in their interest, nor to their real benefit. When this happens, we assume that there must be an explanation, a reason for the discrepancy. If we are told, “This would be best for X, but he doesn’t want it,” we assume that there must be an explanation. Perhaps he does not know all the facts; perhaps he is not quite right in the head; perhaps it is not really best for him in every respect. The representative’s obligation is to the constituent’s interest, but the constituent’s wishes are relevant to that interest. Consequently, the representative also has an obligation to be

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responsive to those wishes. He need not always obey them, but he must consider them, particularly when they conflict with what he sees as the constituent’s interest, because a reason for the discrepancy must be found. It follows that representation does not require the principal to have formulated “a will” on issues before the representative, or even to know about them. One can represent others on matters they neither care nor know about. What the representative must do is act in his constituents’ interests, but this implies that he must not normally come into conflict with their will when they have an express will. But this prohibition is not equivalent to saying that he represents only when he acts in accord with their actual, conscious wishes. Quite the contrary: leadership, emergency action, action on issues of which the people know nothing are among the important realities of representative government. They are not deviations from true representation, but its very essence. It is often for that very purpose that people choose representatives. Nor is it very helpful to say, as some writers do, that the constituents have a “latent” or “unconscious” or “unexpressed” will on everything, and that a representative must anticipate this will.47 Such statements attempt to express the ideas I am setting forth here, but they are misleading. The fact is that, at least in political representation, the represented have no will on most issues, and the duty of the representative is to do what is best for them, not what they latently want.48 We assume that if the representative acts in the interest of his constituents, they will want what is in their interest and consequently will approve what the representative has done. That is why the most telling and persuasive arguments of the mandate school are couched in negative terms: surely it cannot be called genuine representation if the man habitually does the opposite of what his constituents want! Why? Because surely it cannot be to their interest, if it is always the opposite of what they want. We just cannot believe that there could be good reasons for habitually reaching the opposite conclusions from one’s constituents. Indeed, the word “habitually” strongly suggests that the representative is not acting on the basis of reasons. The deceptive factor here is that the only sure guarantee of not being in conflict with someone’s wishes is to act on his express orders. But a guarantee is not required in representation. It is a commonplace of political life that representatives not only act without knowledge of their constituents’ wishes, but often act contrary to those wishes when they are known. I am arguing merely that the latter case calls for an explanation, not that it does not occur. Thus, when a representative finds himself in conflict with his constituents’ wishes, this fact must give him pause. It calls for a consideration of the reasons for the discrepancy; it may call for a reconsideration of his own views. It is not sufficient for him to choose; it is necessary that the choice be justifiable. Canning, the nineteenth-century British statesman, expressed this idea when he told his constituents, It may happen that your own judgement may occasionally come in conflict with my own. . . . In all such cases, I promise you not indeed wholly to

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submit my judgement to yours; . . . but I promise you that any difference of opinion between us will always lead me to distrust my own views, carefully to examine, and, if erroneous, frankly to correct them.49 But if the representative has reconsidered, and his judgment remains the same, what then? Then he probably will have in mind some explanation of the discrepancy. He is likely to think, and to say, if challenged, that “the people don’t understand the significance of this issue,” or “they would agree with me if they knew all the facts.” If a representative acts contrary to the known wishes of his constituents, some such rationale is necessary. Acting contrary to their wishes is not necessarily wrong, not necessarily bad representation or a violation of a representative’s duty. It may, indeed, be required of him in certain situations. But it is abnormal in the sense that it calls for explanation or justification. And not just anything the representative says will be satisfactory. To say that the constituents would approve what he is doing if they knew all that he knows, may be satisfactory, but other justifications may not be. Thus it will not do for a representative to assert that he did what he did for his own private interest; after all, he is not there for himself. As a matter of political fact, legislators often pattern their actions not on what their constituents ought to want but on what they anticipate their constituents will want (in all their ignorance). This is natural; the legislators want to be re-elected. But the representative’s duty, his role as representative, is generally not to get re-elected, but to do what is best for those he represents. In a democracy, the voters pass the final judgment (or at least a fairly final one) on their representative by re-electing him or refusing to do so. But it does not follow that whatever will get him re-elected is what he is obligated to do, or is equivalent to “true” representation. His re-election is not absolute proof that he is a good representative; it proves at most that the voters think so.50 And again the voters’ opinions, although highly relevant, need not be ultimately decisive. A representative may be unjustly voted out of office, defeated in spite of the fact that he has been an excellent representative. If all this is a correct formulation of what representing as an activity means, if the representative must act independently in his constituents’ interest and yet not normally conflict with their wishes, it follows that the basic question of the mandateindependence controversy is wrongly put. It poses a logically insoluble puzzle, asking us to choose between two elements that are both involved in the concept of representation. In that case, it is not enough to choose between the representative’s judgment and the constituents’ wishes; and there is no rational basis for choosing between them tout court. Representation as an idea implies that normally they will coincide, and that when they fail to coincide there is a reason. Which should prevail depends in each case on why they disagree and which is right. Nor does it help to ask whether the representative ought to act in his constituents’ interest as he sees it or as they see it.51 Both formulations distort; he must act in their interest, period. Their view of their interest may or may not be definitive, depending on the issue and the situation; but if he follows it, it should be because the action really accords with their interest, not because they merely think it does. That is

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why public opinion surveys get equivocal results when they ask: “Ought a representative do what he thinks best, or what his constituents want?” To ask this question is to present people with a puzzling situation which requires more data for a satisfactory answer. One needs to know who is right—he or his constituents? And why do they disagree? Normally, the conflict between what he thinks best (for them) and what they want (as best for themselves) simply should not arise. When it does arise, it will not do to choose blindly between “his side” or “their side.” No wonder the pollsters found responses fairly evenly divided.52 But what is the use in insisting that the representative’s obligation is neither to follow his constituents’ wishes nor to do what he thinks is in their interest, but to do what is, in fact, objectively in their interest? For in any real situation where a decision is to be made, he will have to rely on what he thinks and (possibly) what they think. He needs to know which to follow, but, as we have seen, there is no universal, safe principle to guide one in that dilemma. Neither “follow their wishes” nor “ignore their wishes” will do; the decision must depend on why they disagree, and in a practical case that means his judgment on why they disagree. But the standard by which he will be judged as a representative is whether he has promoted the objective interest of those he represents. Within the framework of his basic obligation there is room for a wide range of alternatives. We have seen that, as traditionally formulated, the mandate-independence controversy cannot be consistently solved, but that one can nevertheless say something consistent about the activity of representing as acting for others. The representative must act in such a way that, although he is independent, and his constituents are capable of action and judgment, no conflict arises between them. He must act in their interest, and this means that he must not normally come into conflict with their wishes. But that is not all that needs to be said about the mandate-independence controversy; it does not “settle” that controversy. The conceptual puzzle embodied in the controversy is by no means the whole of it; even if the puzzle is solved, there is still a great deal of leeway for a variety of views. The conceptual principle sets the limits of representation, of what we are willing to recognize as representing (or a representative) and what no longer qualifies. If a state of affairs deviates too much in one direction or another, we shall say that it is no longer representation at all (he is simply an oligarch; he is simply a tool). But within the limits of what is no longer representation at all, there is room for a variety of views on what a good representative should and should not do. The view that a political theorist develops within that range tends to be correlated with his image of politics, with his position on all the political issues in the mandateindependence controversy, which we set aside at the beginning of this chapter in order to get at the conceptual problem in isolation. His view will depend on whether his model is the representing of abstractions like unattached interests, or of attached interests, or of people. It will depend on what he considers the relative intelligence and ability of rulers and ruled, what importance he attaches to national versus local welfare, how he thinks about political parties, and so on. In the broadest terms, the position a writer adopts within the limits set by the concept of

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representation will depend on his metapolitics—his broad conception, of human nature, human society, and political life. His views on representation will not be arbitrarily chosen, but embedded in and dependent on the pattern of his political thought . . .

Notes 1 Carl J. Friedrich, “Representation and Constitutional Reform,” Western Political Quarterly, I (June, 1948), 127: “representation, and more particularly political representation, is associated with institutional arrangements which are intended to insure that the ‘representative’ participates in whatever authority he is wielding on behalf of those he represents in such a way as to permit one to say that he acted ‘in their stead,’ or ‘as they would have acted, had they been able to participate themselves.’” James Hogan (1945: 141) says: “the representative acting as if the constituent himself were present.” Talleyrand-Perigord in the French National Assembly of 1789, cited in Karl Loewenstein, Volk and Parlament (Munich, 1922), p. 193, said that the deputy is, “l‘homme que le bailliage charge de vouloir en son nom, mais de vouloir comme il voudrait lui-même, s’il pouvait se transporter au rendez-vous général.” And Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania, cited in Luce (1930: 462): “Were my constituents here, what would they do?” 2 For example, Senator Maclay cited in Luce (1930: 462) 3 For example, Richard Overton, “A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens” (1646), Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New York, 1944), p. 113. 4 See for example, Luce (1930: 507); Lewis Anthony Dexter, “The Representative and His District,” Human Organization, XVI (Spring, 1957), 3. 5 Henry J. Ford, Representative Government (New York, 1924), pp. 147–148. Cf. Madison’s views and those of James Wilson, cited in John A. Fairlie, “The Nature of Political Representation,” American Political Science Review, XXXIV (April, 1940), 243–244. This argument is often linked with the view that political questions are too complex and difficult for public opinion to cope with. See for example, Sir Henry Maine, Popular Government, pp. 89–92, cited in Luce (1930: 492). 6 “Speech to the Electors of Bristol” (1774), Burke’s Politics (New York, 1949), p. 115; cf. Hogan (1945: 109); T. D. Woolsey, Political Science, I, p. 296, cited in Luce (1930: 479). 7 This point is often made by Burke. See also Loewenstein, Volk and Parlament, pp. 193–194; Garner (1928: 666). 8 This argument is common among the German theorists: Gerhard Leibholz, Das Wesen der Representation (Berlin, 1929), pp. 73, 92–93, 140, 166; Wolff (1934: 54–60). 9 For instance, Howard Lee McBain, The Living Constitution (New York, 1948), p. 208; Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York, 1957), pp. 89–90; Garner (1928: 665). 10 Gerhard Leibholz, Strukturprobleme der modernen Demokratie (Karlsruhe, 1958), pp. 75–76 et passim; Hans Kelsen, Vom Wesen and Wert der Demokratie (Tubingen, 1929), pp. 21–22. This view is linked with the modern doctrine of the mandate—the obligation of the majority party to abide by voter decisions on the issues in an election; see Emden (1956). 11 Leibholz, Das Wesen der Representation, pp. 98–101, 104, 113, 114; Simon Sterne, Representative Government (Philadelphia, 1871), pp. 51–61. 12 For instance, Carl J. Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Democracy (Boston, 1950), p. 263; or William Howard Taft, Popular Government, p. 62, cited in Luce (1930: 495). 13 For instance, Jeremy Bentham, “Constitutional Code,” p. 44, cited in Samuel Bailey, The Rationale of Political Representation (London, 1835), p. 142. Another compromise position was suggested by Abraham Lincoln as a candidate for the Illinois legislature in 1836: “If elected, I shall consider the whole people of Sangamon my constituents, as

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14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29

well those that oppose as those that support me. While acting as their representative I shall be governed by their will on all subjects upon which I have the means of knowing what their will is, and upon all others I shall do what my own judgment teaches me will best advance their interests.” Cited in Luce (1930: 471). For instance in Eulau et al. (1959: 748); Wahlke and Eulau (1959: 6). The electoral college is not strictly a case in point, since the boundness of electors is a matter of state law, and a few states do not bind their electors. Wahlke and Eulau (1959: 179–189); Dexter, “The Representative”; Frank Bonilla, “When Is Petition ‘Pressure?’” Public Opinion Quarterly, XX (Spring, 1956), 39–48; Eulau et al. (1959); L. E. Gleeck, “96 Congressmen Make Up Their Minds,” Public Opinion Quarterly, IV (March, 1940), 3–24; Hartmann (1945: 105–114); John C. Wahlke et al., “American State Legislators’ Role Orientation toward Pressure Groups,” Journal of Politics, XXII (May, 1960), 203–227; Jones (1961: 358–367). Wahlke and Eulau (1959: 121–149, 197–217); Duncan MacRae, Jr., Dimensions of Congressional Voting (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1958); Turner (1951). Hadley Cantril, Public Opinion 1935–46 (Princeton, 1951), p. 133. These questions were asked in the surveys Cantril reports: “Do you believe that a Congressman should vote on any question as the majority of his constituents desire or vote according to his own judgment?” “Should members of Congress vote according to their own best judgment or according to the way the people in their districts feel?” “In cases when a Congressman’s opinion is different from that of the majority of the people in his district, do you think he should usually vote according to his own best judgment, or according to the way the majority of his district feels?” Results ranged from two-thirds in favor of constituency feelings to more than half in favor of the representative’s judgment. Belloc and Chesterton (1911: 17). Lord Brougham, Works, XI, 35–36, cited in Luce (1930: 442); cf. Hogan (1945: 112); Emden (1956: 4); Leibholz, Strukturprobleme, pp. 21, 145. The electoral college is an unusually popular example in this context, perhaps because it was originally intended to function very differently from the way it does, thus providing a seeming contrast in extremes of representation. See Tussman, “Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes,” Unpublished Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1947, pp. 117–118; Luce (1930: 211); Arthur T. Hadley, Standards of Public Morality (New York, 1907), p. 106; Guy C. Field, Political Theory (London, 1956), pp. 151–152. Belloc and Chesterton (1911: 17). Turner sees the paradoxical duality, but considers it characteristic of American politics rather than of the concept of representation (Turner 1951: 164). A. Phillips Griffiths and Richard Wollheim, “How Can One Person Represent Another?” Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. XXXIV (1960), 188. Cf. Wolff (1934: 46–47). The main expression that is ambiguous as between these two senses is “to have (or possess) an interest.” Writers who attempt to use it as a label for one of the two senses get into difficulties. For example, Lasswell and Kaplan (1950: 24); Cassinelli (1958: 48). I am not sure whether the two senses are sufficiently distinct to be called two meanings. See Paul Ziff, Semantic Analysis (Ithaca, 1960), pp. 176–180. Etymologically, the original meanings of “disinterested” and “uninterested” have been almost exactly reversed. “Uninterested” at first meant impartial, and “disinterested” meant either impartial or indifferent. But by the end of the eighteenth century the latter meaning of “disinterested” had become obsolete, and that function had been taken over by “uninterested.” Perhaps this development accounts for our tendency to confuse the two. Oxford English Dictionary. It is not uncommon for a word to mean both the substance and the outward appearance of a state or condition; thus “deliberately” means not only “with deliberation” but also “as if with deliberation.” J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1960), p. 147.

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30 See for example, John Dewey, Interest as Related to Will (Chicago, 1899); Fryer (1931); Nathaniel L. Gage, Judging Interests from Expressive Behavior (Washington, D.C., 1952); J. P. Guilford et al., “A Factor Analysis Study of Human Interests,” Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, LXVIII (1954), no. 4. 31 The only reference to the other sense of the word I have found in the psychological literature is a footnote by Dewey rejecting the other sense as morally inferior: “It is true that the term interest is also used in a definitely disparaging sense. We speak of interest as opposed to principle, of self-interest as a motive to action with regards only one’s personal advantage; but these are neither the only nor the controlling sense in which the term is used. It may fairly be questioned whether this is anything but a narrowing or degrading of the legitimate sense of the term.” Interest, p. 13n. 32 The distinction is drawn in this way by Fryer (1931). Other ways of distinguishing “subjective” from “objective” interests are suggested by Dewey in psychology and MacIver in sociology. Dewey says that what one finds interesting is both subjective (because being interested is an internal, psychological state) and objective (because one is interested in an object, something outside oneself). Interest, pp. 13–15. MacIver says that the objective interest of a group is the goal or object for which it strives, and that this must be distinguished from its attitude toward that object. Wealth might be a group’s objective interest, cupidity its attitude. MacIver rejects subjective interests, which he apparently equates with attitudes in this sense. MacIver (1931: 48–49); “Interests,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, VIII (1935), 147. For a radically different treatment of “interest” and of the “objective”-“subjective” distinction, cf. Albion W. Small, General Sociology (Chicago, 1905), pp. 372–396, 425–442, esp. p. 435. 33 Christian Bay, The Structure of Freedom (Stanford, 1958), p. 97. See also Plamenatz (1938: 11, 159); but cf. his later views (Plamenatz 1954: 1–8). 34 Errol E. Harris, “Political Power,” Ethics, LXVIII (October, 1957), 2. 35 Lasswell and Kaplan (1950: 23). 36 Plamenatz (1954: 1–2, 4, 6); but cf. his earlier views in (Plamenatz 1938: 11, 159). 37 John Dickinson, “Social Order and Political Authority,” American Political Science Review, XXIII (May, 1929), 295, cited in Frank J. Sorauf, “The Public Interest Reconsidered,” Journal of Politics, XIX (November, 1957), 635. 38 MacIver (1931: 49). 39 MacIver (1931: 158); and more generally (MacIver 1931: 152–171). The same difficulty in transition is found in Avery Leiserson, Administrative Regulation (Chicago, 1942), pp. 5–6. 40 The potential for confusion here is remarkable, as in this passage: “It is because perception is so conditioned by involvement that we can dispense with a politics of disinterest as opposed to a politics of interest and can assume that every action a man takes in politics must be an interested action. All groups in which he participates are interest groups in the true sense that he is interested in them. . . . Some hold his interest more than others.” Alfred De Grazia, “The Nature and Prospects of Political Interest Groups,” American Academy of Political and Social Science, Annals, Vol. 319 (September, 1958), 115. See also Cassinelli (1958: 48). 41 Cassinelli (1958: 51). 42 See note 34 above. The same is true of Dickinson and Plamenatz. Cf. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York, 1927), p. 27, where an interest is “generated” only when people become aware that some matter concerns them. 43 Truman (1959: 34). 44 Truman (1959: 34). Lasswell and Kaplan (1950: 23). 45 Arthur F. Bentley, The Process of Government (Evanston, IL, 1949), pp. 211, 214. Cf. Cassinelli, “The Concept of Representative Government,” (unpubl. thesis, 1950), pp. 22–25; Leiserson, Administrative Regulation, pp. 5–6; MacIver (1931: 49, 152–171). 46 Cf. T. V. Smith, The Promise of American Politics (Chicago, 1936), p. 163; or consult Machiavelli, who tells us that “where men’s lives and fortunes are at stake they are not all insane,” cited in Lasswell and Kaplan (1950: 24). 47 Harold Foote Gosnell, Democracy (New York, 1948), pp. 134–135.

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48 Lewis Anthony Dexter makes a cogent criticism of some public opinion polls on this score, that they tend to elicit an “opinion” from people who might never otherwise utter one, or even think of themselves as having an opinion on the subject. “Candidates Must Make the Issues and Give Them Meaning,” Public Opinion Quarterly, XIX (Winter, 1955–56), 408–414. 49 In an address to his constituents in 1812, cited in Emden (1956: 27). 50 The modern relativistic reader may feel that there is no such thing as “being a good representative—period”; that there can only be “being a good representative in your own eyes,” “being a good representative in your constituents’ eyes,” “being a good representative in Smith’s eyes,” and so on. This view seems to me incorrect. Each of these expressions means something different and is appropriate for use on slightly different occasions—the first no less than the rest. We do sometimes criticize a man for representing his constituency badly even though he has been re-elected and his constituency is pleased with him. And it makes sense to do so. 51 Austin Ranney and Willmoore Kendall, Democracy and the American Party System (New York, 1956), p. 74. 52 See note 18 above. Compare these questions with the more sophisticated ones asked by Hartmann of legislators, and the kinds of answers he got. Hartmann (1945). See also Jones (1961: 365): “Some of the more detailed analyses of the process of representation were offered by senior members who replied that representation on policy was not a simple choice between independent judgment on the one hand and constituency wishes on the other.”

References Belloc, Hilaire and G.K. Chesterton. 1911. The Party System. London: S. Swift. Cassinelli, Charles William, Jr. 1958. “Some Reflections on the Concept of the Public Interest.” Ethics LXIX (October). Emden, Cecil S. 1956. The People and the Constitution. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Eulau, Heinz, John C. Wahlke, William Buchanan and Leroy C. Ferguson. 1959. “The Role of the Representative.” American Political Science Review LIII (September). Fryer, Douglas. 1931. The Measurement of Interests in Relation to Human Adjustment. New York: Henry Holt. Garner, James Wilford. 1928. Political Science and Government. New York: American Book Co. Hartmann, George W. 1945. “Judgments of State Legislators Concerning Public Opinion.” Journal of Social Psychology XXI (February). Hogan, James. 1945. Election and Representation. Cork: Cork University Press. Jones, Charles O. 1961. “Representation in Congress.” American Political Science Review LV (December). Lasswell, Harold D. and Abraham Kaplan. 1950. Power and Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Luce, Robert. 1930. Legislative Principles. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. MacIver, Robert M. 1931. Society: Its Structure and Changes. New York: Ray Long and Richard R. Smith. Plamenatz, John P. 1938. Consent, Freedom and Political Obligation. London: Oxford University Press. Plamenatz, John P. 1954. “Interests.” Political Studies II (February): 1–8. Truman, David B. 1959. The Governmental Process. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Turner, Julius. 1951. Party and Constituency: Pressures on Congress. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wahlke, John C. and Heinz Eulau (eds.) 1959. Legislative Behavior. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Wolff, Hans J. 1934. Organschaft and juristische Person. Berlin: Carl Heymanns.

11 REPRESENTATION AND DEMOCRACY Uneasy alliance (2004)

The concept of ‘representation’ is puzzling not because it lacks a central definition, but because that definition implies a paradox (being present and yet not present) and is too general to help reconcile the word’s many senses with their sometimes conflicting implications. Representation has a problematic relationship with democracy, with which it is often thoughtlessly equated. The two ideas have different, even conflicting, origins. Democracy came from ancient Greece and was won through struggle, from below. Greek democracy was participatory and bore no relationship to representation. Representation dates – at least as a political concept and practice – from the late medieval period, when it was imposed as a duty by the monarch. Only in the English Civil War and then in the eighteenth-century democratic revolutions did the two concepts become linked. Democrats saw representation – with an extended suffrage – as making possible large-scale democracy. Conservatives instead saw it as a tool for staving off democracy. Rousseau also contrasted the two concepts, but favoured democratic self-government. He was prescient in seeing representation as a threat to democracy. Representative government has become a new form of oligarchy, with ordinary people excluded from public life. This is not inevitable. Representation does make large-scale democracy possible, where it is based in participatory democratic politics at the local level. Three obstacles block access to this possibility today: the scope of public problems and private power; money, or rather wealth; and ideas and their shaping, in an age of electronic media. The idea of representation has been getting renewed attention lately, especially in Europe, where the effort to form some sort of regional institutions – less than a state but more than an alliance – has raised countless issues of both theoretical principle and political practicality, many of them involving representation. What

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institutions should there be, with what powers, and how should their offices be filled? Appointment? Elections? On what basis and by whom? Whom or what are these officials to represent? These European concerns also reflect the wider problems raised by our peculiar current combination of unchecked globalization with resurgent localism and ethnic separatism. What sort of political organization, what sort of representation can suit such conditions? Given the gravity, complexity, and urgency of such questions, together with the enormously technological outlook of our time, an audience attending a lecture on representation is almost bound to expect an expert, offering technical, institutional advice: unitary or district elections, winner-takes-all or proportional representation, majority rule or reserved quotas for minorities? Such issues do matter, but I am not such an expert. I fear that my remarks will disappoint you. My own study of representation was not technically oriented but conceptual and theoretical (Pitkin 1967). True, it had its own kind of technicality, relying on the tools of ‘ordinary-language’ philosophy and semantic analysis. But it addressed none of the technical questions, offering at most an overview of this troubling concept’s diversity. The concept does have a central core of meaning: that somebody or something not literally present is nevertheless present in some non-literal sense. But that is not much help. First, the core itself contains an inescapable paradox: not present yet somehow present. And, second, the definition is too broadly vague to help in sorting out the many particular senses, often with incompatible implications or assumptions that the word has developed over centuries of use. The way a city or a mountain is ‘made present’ on a map differs totally from the way a litigant is ‘made present’ by an attorney. The way Macbeth is ‘made present’ on the stage differs from the way an ambassador represents a state, or the way one ‘makes representations about’ something, or what characterizes representational art or a representative sample. And all this is only in English. If one wants to know not just about the word, but about the actual phenomena of ‘representation’ in various times and cultures, things get much worse. Even in German – a language after all very close to English – representation in art or theatre has no conceptual connection with representation in court or in government (Pitkin 1989: 132). That is as far as I got with the concept when I studied it some forty years ago. Since then I have pursued other interests, and in order to engage at least one of them, I want to talk about the relationship of representation to democracy, a topic never raised in my earlier study because at the time I took that relationship for granted as unproblematic. Like most people even today, I more or less equated democracy with representation, or at least with representative government. It seemed axiomatic that under modern conditions only representation can make democracy possible. That assumption is not exactly false, but it is profoundly misleading, in ways that remain hidden if one treats it as an axiom and asks only technical rather than fundamental theoretical questions. The idea of ‘democracy’ is every bit as complex and troublesome as that of representation. Etymologically it means that the people (Greek demos) rule (kratein).

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But the meaning of demos is ambiguous. Is it that all the people jointly are to rule themselves, or that the common (demotic) people are to rule over the (former) aristocracy? And what criteria determine whether the people are in fact ruling? Words such as ‘democracy’ and ‘representation’ furthermore, like the vocabulary of human institutions more generally, have this peculiarity: their use ranges confusingly between expressing an idea or ideal, and designating uncritically the actual arrangements currently supposed to embody that idea (Pitkin 1967). When I speak about democracy here today I mean to raise and acknowledge such difficulties rather than suppress them. Let us just say that by ‘democracy’ I mean popular self-government, what Abraham Lincoln spoke of – though John Wycliffe had used the expression some five centuries before – as ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’ (Lincoln 1980: 231). It is a matter of degree, an idea or ideal realized more or less well in various circumstances, conditions, and institutional arrangements. ‘Fugitive’, Sheldon Wolin calls it (Wolin 1996). That the relationship between democracy so understood and representation is problematic is suggested already by the two concepts’ disparate, even conflicting, histories. Democracy originated with the ancient Greeks. At least the concept did; the practice must surely have been a lot older in some tribes and small settlements. Athenian democracy was won by political struggle, from below, and it was direct and participatory to an astonishing degree. It was also, by our standards, extremely constricted, unrelated to any notion of universal human rights. The Greeks thought of other peoples (barbarians) and of women as being generically incapable of politics. Their democracy also had nothing whatever to do with representation, an idea for which their language had no word. Representation, at least as a political idea and practice, emerged only in the early modern period and had nothing at all to do with democracy. Take England, for example. The king, needing additional revenue beyond that from the royal estates and traditional feudal dues, required each shire and borough to send a delegate to commit the locality to special additional taxes. So representation was imposed as a duty from above, a matter of royal convenience and administrative control. As the practice was repeated, it gradually became institutionalized. Sometimes the delegates were sent with instructions from their communities; sometimes they were expected to report back on what had transpired. Gradually they began to make their consent conditional on redress of grievances, to think of themselves as members of a single, continuing body, and sometimes to join forces against the king. So representation slowly came to be considered a matter of right rather than a burden, though even then the selection of delegates was by no means democratic, often not even accomplished by election. Only when these struggles between king and parliament culminated in civil war in England in the seventeenth century, and subsequently in the great democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, was the alliance between democracy and representation formed. The democrats challenged the twin medieval assumptions, that God assigned to each man at birth his station in a sacred hierarchy, and that the realm was the geographic land and so its affairs were the concern only of the

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king and landed aristocracy. Instead, the democrats held that everyone born and living in the land had a stake in public life: ‘The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he.’ Each has a ‘birthright’ that includes a ‘voice’ in public affairs, and no one is bound to obey a government ‘that he has not had a voice to put himself under’ (Woodhouse 1951: 51, 69). The democrats held as ‘self-evident’ that ‘all men are created equal’ rather than situated in a hierarchy, ‘that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights’, and that governments are legitimate only when they ‘secure those rights’ (Declaration of Independence of the United States of America). Far from consisting in the geographic land, the realm is a nation of citizens, all equally children of la patrie. The common people have no need of any special, anointed ruler or of any special class to govern them; we all are capable of participating in political life, and entitled to do so. So democracy (re-)emerged in the modern world. But, since it emerged in large nation-states rather than small city-states, and since by then the practice of (undemocratic) representation was well established, the alliance seemed obvious. Extend the suffrage, and democracy would be enabled by representation. Since, as John Selden put it, ‘the room will not hold all’, the people would rule themselves vicariously, through their representatives (Arendt 1972: 238). The democrats’ conservative opponents, apart from a few die-hard monarchist absolutists, by this time accepted (undemocratic) representation as traditional. But far from equating it with democracy, they mobilized it as a tool for staving off the democratic impulse and controlling the unruly lower classes. In the debates accompanying the English Civil War, the conservatives said, once you start opening the traditional way of selecting members of parliament to the challenge of principle, ‘you must fly . . . to an absolute natural right’, and then there is no limit; anyone can claim anything. There are five times as many in this realm without (landed) property as with, they said. ‘If the master and servant shall be equal electors . . . the majority may by law . . . [enact] an equality of goods and estate.’ Chaos will result (Woodhouse 1951: 53, 63, 57). In America, similarly, James Madison in The Federalist contrasted representative government – which he called a ‘republic’ – to democracy, rather than linking the two. The ‘pure’ democracy of ancient Greece, he said, presupposed a small city-state, and it was marked by constant ‘turbulence and contention’, by hasty, passionate, and unwise decisions. A representative government as proposed in the new constitution, by contrast, not only would allow for a large and growing republic, but also would ‘refine and enlarge’ – that is, deflect or replace – the views of ordinary citizens by filtering them through a wise, responsible elite, better able to ‘discern the true interests of their country’ (Hamilton et al. 2003: 43–45). But saying that the democrats conjoined representation with democracy while the conservatives contrasted the two ideas is too simple. There was also at least one idiosyncratic democratic voice that warned against representation: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Now, Rousseau spoke not in terms of ‘democracy’, which he regarded merely as a form of executive, but of freedom in a legitimate state. Still, what he said was quintessentially democratic: freedom requires the active, personal participation

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of all, assembled together, jointly deciding public policy. It is therefore incompatible with representation. The English, Rousseau remarked, imagine themselves to be free, but actually they are free only at the moment of casting their ballots in an election; immediately afterwards they sink back into slavery, and cease to exist as a people (Rousseau 1968: 101–102, 110, 141). Well, Rousseau was a romantic and a utopian, hopelessly impractical. By his account, freedom would be possible only in a very small community and among people who are heroically, self-sacrificingly public spirited. ‘As soon as the public service ceases to be the main concern of the citizens’, he wrote, or as citizens begin to say about the public good, ‘What does it matter to me?’, freedom disappears (Rousseau 1968: 140–141). And yet, for all his romantic posturing, Rousseau was on to something about representation. The intervening centuries seem to have proved him right, at least in this respect. Despite repeated efforts to democratize the representative system, the predominant result has been that representation has supplanted democracy instead of serving it. Our governors have become a self-perpetuating elite that rules – or rather, administers – passive or privatized masses of people. The representatives act not as agents of the people but simply instead of them. We send them to take care of public affairs like hired experts, and they are professionals, entrenched in office and in party structures. Immersed in a distinct culture of their own, surrounded by other specialists and insulated from the ordinary realities of their constituents’ lives, they live not just physically but also mentally ‘inside the beltway’, as we say in America (that is, within the ring of freeways that encircle Washington, DC). Their constituents, accordingly, feel powerless and resentful. Having sent experts to tend to their public concerns, they give their own attention and energy to other matters, closer to home. Lacking political experience, they feel ignorant and incapable. (‘The President has access to all sorts of classified information we don’t have’, I’ve heard repeatedly in recent months. ‘He must know what he is doing.’) Not that people idolize their governors and believe all the official pronouncements. On the contrary, they are cynical and sulky, deeply alienated from what is done in their name and from those who do it. Yet in their conduct they continue to support – that is, to refrain from disrupting – the system. Most do not even bother to vote, let alone take any active responsibility for their nation’s public life. Sporadically unruly, distrusting politicians and hating ‘the government’ even while they accept and pursue its largesse, they regard the resulting policies and conditions as if fated. It never occurs to them to think of the government as their shared instrument, or of the public as consisting simply of themselves collectively. (And why should it occur to them, given how things now work?) Clearly, representation is not the only culprit in bringing about this lamentable state of affairs, but it is a culprit. The repeated widening of the suffrage and the many technical improvements in systems of representation have brought about neither the property redistribution and social chaos the conservatives feared nor the effective democracy the reformers expected. The arrangements we call ‘representative

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democracy’ have become a substitute for popular self-government, not its enactment. Calling them ‘democracy’ only adds insult to injury. The late Hannah Arendt, who wrote most eloquently and thoughtfully on these matters, says, ‘Representative government has in fact become oligarchic government’, in the sense that: the age-old distinction between ruler and ruled which the [American and French] Revolution[s] had set out to abolish through the establishment of a republic has asserted itself again; once more, the people are not admitted to the public realm, once more the business of government has become the privilege of the few. (Arendt 1965: 273, 240) Must we accept this as inevitable? Must we acquiesce in Rousseau’s view, with its implication that in a globalized world, democracy is irrelevant? Arendt thought not. From her own study of modern revolutions and ‘social movements’ and from Alexis de Tocqueville’s study of America in the 1830s, she concluded that the struggle for democracy is not yet lost. Genuinely democratic representation is possible, she held, where the centralized, large-scale, necessarily abstract representative system is based in a lively, participatory, concrete direct democracy at the local level. Participating actively in local political life, people learn the real meaning of citizenship. They discover that (some of) their personal troubles are widely shared, and how their apparently private concerns are in fact implicated in public policy and public issues. Thus they discover a possibility based neither on private, competitive selfishness nor on heroic self-sacrifice, since they collectively are the public that benefits, yet disagree on what is to be done. In shared deliberation with others, the citizens revise their own understanding of both their individual self-interest and the public interest, and both together (Pitkin and Shumer 1982). Having these experiences in a context of action and responsibility, seeing the actual results in the world, they also realize (that is, they both perfect and become aware of) their own capacities: for autonomous judgement, for deliberation, and for effective action. Seeing themselves in collective action, they observe their own powers and their shared power. People with this kind of face-to-face experience among their neighbours can then also be effective democratic citizens in relation to their more distant, national representatives. Local direct democracy undergirds national representative democracy. Tocqueville claimed to have observed this in Jacksonian America. He saw a people passionately engaged with their public life, in a not at all self-sacrificing way. Take away politics from an American, he said, and it would be as if ‘half his existence [had been] snatched from him; he would feel it as a vast void in his life and become incredibly unhappy’ (Tocqueville 1969: 243). As recently as the 1960s something like this kind of political engagement still seemed possible in many lands. Today the outlook is considerably more bleak; we democrats have reason to worry. I will conclude by just mentioning three big obstacles that stand in the way.

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The first concerns the scope of public problems and private power. For local politics to be able to provide the experience of active citizenship, it must be real. Something that genuinely matters to people, some problem in their actual lives, must be at stake. A mere pretend politics, a simulacrum of public action without significant content or consequences, will not do. But in our world the conditions that trouble people’s lives are – more and more – large scale. They are by-products of the activities of huge, undemocratic organizations, be they national mafias, transnational corporations, or even government bureaucracies and armies. If the local community’s only water supply is owned by a transnational corporation with headquarters elsewhere (or, effectively, nowhere) and an annual budget larger than that of many states, then there may result local troubles of such overwhelming importance that nothing else matters by comparison, but which cannot be locally handled. The second, related obstacle is money, or rather wealth. Not so much the corrupting role of money in elections which has been the focus of attention in America recently, but the more general, age-old tension between the power of wealth and ‘people power’, meaning the power of numbers and of commitment. (It is unfortunate that Marx is no longer read since the demise of the Soviet Union; for all their faults, his works are useful for thinking about these matters.) The third obstacle is difficult to designate by a single apt name. It is about ideas and their shaping. Deception, propaganda, and indoctrination have always played a role in the rough and tumble of actual political life, but they take on new, disturbing dimensions in our age of electronic media and satellite surveillance, of ‘hype’, ‘spin’, and the ‘infomercial’, of ‘image’, ‘credibility’, and ‘virtual reality’. Watching television from infancy, people not only acquire misinformation; they become habituated to the role of spectator. The line between fantasy and reality blurs (indeed, the line between television image and one’s own fantasy blurs). As for those who set policy and shape the images, insulated from any reality check, they soon become captive to their own fictions. All this does not bode well for democracy, either. Am I being too pessimistic? Perhaps things look more cheerful in other lands. I am painfully aware of the irony of writing today as an American on – of all things! – democracy and representation. I mean, where in the world has representative democracy had a better chance than in America, where its beginnings were so promising and the conditions so favourable? And look at it now! So maybe America distorts my vision. After all, the democratic impulse has proved amazingly resilient, and even the joint-stock limited-liability corporation is only a human invention, humanly changeable, not an inevitability. Can democracy be saved? I am old; it is up to you.

References Arendt, H. 1965. On Revolution. New York: Viking Press. Arendt, H. 1972. Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Hamilton, A., Madison, J. and Jay, J. 2003. The Federalist with the Letters of ‘Brutus’, ed. T. Ball. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lincoln, A. 1980. Selected Writings and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln, ed. T.H. Williams. Hendricks House. Pitkin, H.F. 1967. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pitkin, H.F. 1989. Representation. In T. Ball, J. Farr and R.L. Hanson (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pitkin, H.F. and S.M. Shumer. 1982. On Participation. democracy 2: 43–54. Rousseau, Jean-Jarques 1968. The Social Contract, trans. M. Cranston. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1969. Democracy in America, ed. J.P. Mayer, trans. G. Lawrence. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Wolin, S.S. 1996. Fugitive Democracy. In S. Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Woodhouse, A.S.P. 1951. Puritanism and Liberty. London: J.M. Dent.

12 ABSENT AUTHORITY Marx (1998)1

In addition to what was going on politically while Arendt began work on what would become The Human Condition, two important intellectual influences seem to have been shaping her thought. “Seem to,” because these influences—authorities of a sort for Arendt—were never acknowledged as such publicly by her. Though she often referred to and quoted great thinkers of the past, Arendt rarely acknowledged any major sources of her own ideas. Being neither an academic critic commenting on the great texts nor a historian of ideas in the usual sense, she mostly spoke in her own voice about the substantive issues. Yet there were authorities hidden behind that voice; it was not unproblematically her own, for her relationship to those authorities was deeply ambivalent. That this was so in relation to Heidegger we have already seen, and the issue has received detailed attention in recent scholarship.2 Two other great thinkers from the tradition of political theory, however, seem to have decisively shaped her ideas in this period, though in different ways: Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx. Tocqueville’s influence can only be surmised as extremely likely in light of the striking parallels between The Human Condition and his Democracy in America (Tocqueville 1969), but it cannot be established with certainty, since Arendt never publicly acknowledged his importance to her. Marx, by contrast, plays a prominent role in The Human Condition, which is not surprising, since the book was initially to be a study of his contribution to totalitarianism. Marx appears in the book almost exclusively as the object of Arendt’s severe criticism, but there is something odd about that criticism. Although its overall thrust may well be valid and is surely defensible, its detailed formulations are almost always mistaken, sometimes blatantly so. Arendt’s account of Marx, moreover, leaves out about half of that admittedly inconsistent thinker, and what is missing from her Marx remarkably resembles Arendt’s own ideas in The Human Condition, particularly those about the social. Indeed, what makes Arendt’s hidden intellectual debts important for this study at

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all is the extent to which they occur in the very terrain occupied by the social as Blob.3 Whereas Tocqueville’s name appears just once in The Human Condition, Marx gets considerable explicit attention, almost all of it critical.4 This is hardly surprising, since the book originally was to be a critique of his role in totalitarianism. As Arendt’s project changed, Marx became less central, yet some of his ideas continued to play a crucial structuring role in ways that Arendt did not acknowledge and of which she may not even have been aware. While her detailed criticisms of Marx are often inaccurate, the overall thrust of her critique has considerable merit, except for the fact that it is directed against only one half of Marx’s highly ambiguous teaching. The other side of Marx, which Arendt wholly suppresses or overlooks, remarkably resembles her own argument about the social in The Human Condition. Arendt had seen early on that the role of Marx in (Soviet) totalitarianism was anomalous. Except for Marxist doctrine, every other factor involved in the rise of totalitarianism constituted an important break with the past, contributing to totalitarianism’s unprecedented novelty and our resulting difficulty in understanding it. All of the other factors “emerged only when and where the traditional framework of Europe broke down,” and none of them had any “connection with the great political and philosophical traditions of the West.” Marxism, which obviously did have such connections, was the exception. Thus, Arendt explained, her omission of Marx from the argument of The Origins had been “deliberate,” intended to preserve that book’s internal coherence.5 Now, however, she saw that totalitarianism could be—had in fact been—reached by two distinct routes: a “low road” taken by ordinary people and charted in The Origins and a “high road” taken by intellectuals under the spell of certain doctrines, such as Marxism in the Soviet case, which she now intended to trace.6 The task of assessing Marx’s role on this high road was difficult not only objectively, because of the complex nature of Marx’s writings, but also subjectively, because of their personal significance for Arendt. Objectively, Marx is an extraordinarily ambiguous and complex theorist, his teachings deeply riven by apparently incompatible commitments, somehow held in tension. The history of Marx interpretation surely demonstrates that there are at least two (if not many) Marxes. There is the scientist who discerns what must inevitably happen and who thus need not care what this or that person thinks or even what a class—the proletariat—“pictures at present as its goal,” but only “what the proletariat is in actuality” and what it therefore “will historically be compelled to do.”7 But there is also Marx the political activist who hectors, exhorts, and organizes and who cares very much what people think because he is trying to move them to action, and not just to any action but to the one, right course of action, dangerously misperceived by rival organizers. While logically hard to reconcile, the two Marxes are also almost impossible to disentangle, and the objective task of sorting them out was, by Arendt’s time, made more difficult by the several intellectual generations of Marx interpreters—both scholarly and activist—who had considerably muddied the terrain.

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For Arendt personally, the task of assessing the extent of Marx’s responsibility for Soviet totalitarianism was problematic also because so complexly interwoven with her past and present loyalties to various people, whose own relationships to Marxism were conflicted. She was, after all, the daughter of “socialist” parents, raised by a highly principled and demanding mother who was socially conventional yet admired the rebel Spartacist Rosa Luxemburg.8 Because of the vagaries of “world history,” Arendt’s mother lived with her and Heinrich Blucher in America until 1948, when she decided to return to Europe, but died shortly after arriving.9 The Human Condition was the first book Arendt undertook after her mother’s death. Arendt was also the former wife of a Communist Party member, under whose influence she had first read Marx and Trotsky in Berlin (Young-Bruehl 1982: 95). Now she was the wife of another former party member, a Spartacist street fighter, a Trotskyist who had gradually become “an incisive critic of doctrinaire Marxism” (1982: 124). In America, Blucher had at first adopted an enthusiastic, uncritical Americanism, but had experienced difficulties adjusting to life here and finding work. Shortly after the departure and death of Arendt’s mother, however, he experienced a “brainstorm” and a “surprise attack of productivity” that renewed his political thinking: he would abandon his “narrow” focus on “the American dream,” along with Marxist and all other kinds of metaphysics. Dismissing Marx as a “despot,” he would henceforth think in practical, political terms and identify himself only as “a citizen” (1982: 237–238). Their circle of friends in New York included many leftists and former leftists of all kinds, virtually all of them also trying to clarify their own particular positions in relation to Soviet policy and Marxist ideas. Finally, Arendt’s former teacher and revered intellectual father-figure, Jaspers, although he had never been of the left, also had strong views on Marx, and he pressed them on Arendt in letters. With respect to Soviet totalitarianism, for Jaspers, Marx was unequivocally to blame. “For my part,” he wrote to Arendt when he heard of her project, “I harbor the hope that you will in the end after all find in Marx the intellectually responsible origin of what could lead to totalitarianism. . . . Demons don’t exist, but there is something analogous in people like that.”10 At first Arendt resisted and argued with Jaspers, trying “to rescue Marx’s honor in your sight,” to defend Marx as a revolutionary in spite of himself, “whom a passion for justice had seized by the scruff of the neck.” That passion, she said, connects Marx, in some “not entirely visible but very powerful way,” to Kant.11 Jaspers was outraged: “Marx’s passion seems to me impure at its root, itself unjust from the outset. . . . I don’t see a trace of Kantian spirit there. . . . I can’t see anything else in him but an ‘evil’ person.” Jaspers “would hope for support” in this view, he wrote, from Arendt’s husband.12 She soon reported that Blucher did agree with Jaspers “completely,” but she continued the sentence in a way revealing that this was not quite true: Blucher held that Marx indeed “had no sense of justice, but did have one of freedom.”13 Defending Marx against Jaspers’s charge that he and Hegel had “created” the modern illusion of history as caused by abstract forces, Arendt invokes Marx’s early journalistic attack against Prussian laws forbidding wood gathering on private land.

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Such laws, which put property rights ahead of human need, she says, were what Marx had in mind when he warned against “the abstraction of society, and a rebellion against these things seems to me to be still alive in the later Marx as well.” She wants to defend Marx not as a scholar, “and surely not as a philosopher, but as a rebel and a revolutionary.”14 Jaspers then responds even more strongly, but to Blucher, confessing that he himself has never been able to confront Marx “with anything but hatred.” It was “Marx’s thinking and his personality, with its sense of outrage, its violence, and its dictatorial character filled with hate” that bore “responsibility for what has happened” in Soviet Russia. Marx followed his own personal hatred “in the name of justice, into an abominable vision.” Arendt, by contrast, Jaspers informs her husband, seems “in recent years” to be becoming “very just” and “her tremendous rage is almost extinguished.”15 The published letters do not record whether Blucher agreed, but by May 1953, less than a year later, Arendt had obligingly changed her mind. The more she read Marx, she wrote to Jaspers, “the more I see that you were right. He’s not interested in either freedom or justice.”16 And in the fall of 1953 Arendt delivered a series of lectures at Princeton University subsequently published as an essay opening with the claim that “our tradition of thought,” which began with Plato, was brought to a “definite end in the theories of Karl Marx,” who located truth not in some transcendent realm but within “the sphere of human affairs” and sought to “‘realize’” it in “‘society,’” that is, in “the sphere of living together.”17 The opening paragraph thus sounds as if Marx had come to occupy for Arendt the diabolical, continuitydestroying role that in The Origins she had assigned to totalitarianism. But the essay is considerably more complex and ambivalent than that. In the first place, it is still totalitarianism and not any thinker that accomplished the “break” with tradition (Arendt 1969: 26–27). Second, Marx is also recognized as attempting “to ‘realize’ [philosophy] in politics,” and the young Marx is acknowledged to have defined the human being as “ein tätiges Naturwesen,” which Arendt translates as “a natural being endowed with the faculty of action” (1969: 18, my emphasis, 39). Third, Marx is not alone; he is grouped in this essay with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as standing “at the end of the tradition just before the break” (1969: 28). All three “tried desperately to think against the tradition while using its conceptual tools” (1969: 25). They were “the first who dared to think without the guidance of any authority whatsoever,” but because they were “still held by the categorical framework of the great tradition,” their effort resulted in “self-defeat” (1969: 28, 31). Less than a year later, moreover, Arendt was characterizing the task of “an authentic political philosophy”—the task in which she was then engaged—as focusing the traditional philosophical sense of wonder on “the realm of human affairs,” understood not as “society” but as “the political realm.”18 In other words, she was undertaking the same task as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx, but hoping to avoid their self-defeat. In the same letter in which Arendt conceded to Jaspers that he was right about Marx, she anxiously recorded the advance of anticommunist hysteria in America, so that even as she turned fully against Marx, Arendt was profoundly concerned not to join those despicable former leftists who had become self-righteous Cold

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Warriors, now that (as she had put it in a slightly earlier letter) “every little idiot thinks he has a right and a duty to look down on Marx.”19 Nothing remains visible in the text of The Human Condition of the personal struggle that Arendt underwent, except for the curiously oblique and awkward apologia with which she opens the chapter in which “Karl Marx will be criticized.” Expressing her discomfort only indirectly, through the words used by Benjamin Constant as he set out to criticize Rousseau, Arendt says that, like Constant, she must “console” herself for appearing to join the petty detractors of this great thinker by striving to “disavow and keep these false friends away from me as much as I can.”20 In short, just as Arendt sought a solution different from both Soviet totalitarianism and American Cold War liberalism, she needed a way of understanding Marx that violated neither her ties to Jaspers and others whom she loved nor her own commitments “as a rebel and a revolutionary” to the pariahs of the world and against the unjust “abstraction of society.” Less than a year after beginning her intended study of Marx, Arendt came upon what struck her as a highly important distinction that seemed to promise a solution to these dilemmas. It was the distinction between two kinds of human production: labor and work, or in Locke’s famous phrase, “the labor of our bodies and the work of our hands.”21 The former word, she saw, connected with laboriousness, with heavy, painful bodily effort, and specifically with women’s travail in giving birth. The latter word, lacking these connotations, instead focused on the result, the product (as in “work of art,” “all his works”), a lasting object formed by human artifice. The former thus sorted with the body, biological necessity, and natural processes independent of our will, while the latter sorted with know-how, technical skill, efficiency, and the enduring world of humanly fashioned objects. The importance of the distinction was underlined for Arendt by its ubiquity: “Every European language, ancient and modern, contains two etymologically unrelated words for what we have come to think of as the same activity.” She mentions Greek, Latin, French, and the German distinction between Arbeit and Werk. In all these languages, she says, “only the equivalents for ‘labor’ have an unequivocal connotation of pain and trouble.”22 Not long after coming upon this distinction, Arendt connected it further with Aristotle’s contrast between making, or production (poiesis), and doing, or action (praxis).23 These overlapping contrasts she combined into the three “fundamental activities” of the vita activa that would ultimately organize The Human Condition. More immediately, their discovery seems to have been an intellectual breakthrough for Arendt, enabling her to begin the actual writing of her book. The triad seemed to suggest the third alternative she needed to both Soviet Russia and Cold War America, but also and perhaps more immediately, to offer a way of reading Marx that escaped her painful personal dilemma. Marx, she now saw, had focused entirely on Arbeit, thereby becoming “the greatest of modern labor theorists” with his “seemingly blasphemous notion . . . that labor (and not God) created man or that labor (and not reason) distinguished man from the other animals.” For Marx, labor alone, and not work, was “the

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source of all productivity,” and labor, rather than action, expressed “the very humanity of man.”24 From this narrowness derived most of Marx’s other theoretical faults. The focus on labor accounted for his “consistent naturalism”—he saw humans as a kind of animal, rather than distinguishing sharply as Kant had done between causally determined nature and human freedom Marx “discovered ‘labor power’ as the specifically human mode of the life force,” thus of “natural” or “biological process.”25 He saw humans from a “purely social viewpoint,” which is to say, one that takes “nothing into account but the life process of mankind” or “of society.”26 This meant that Marx neglected the lasting world of objects fashioned by work and of relationships created and sustained in action. “The question of a separate existence of worldly things, whose durability will survive and withstand the devouring process of life, does not occur to him at all.”27 Without an enduring world there can be neither meaning in human life or secure individuality. Marx did not see the meaningless “futility” of a life defined only by endless process, and he had an entirely mistaken notion of human collectivity in which individuality disappears into a single, monolithic mass of “society” or “the species.”28 Neglecting work, he did not care enough about the world; neglecting action, he did not see our responsibility for protecting the world. Thus he missed our true lack, which is amor mundi: “not self-alienation, as Marx thought,” but rather “world alienation” is our problem, “the hallmark of the modern age” (Arendt 1974: 254). Having missed action and individuality, finally, Marx utterly neglected politics and misunderstood freedom. Because of his “materialism,” he took the web of human relationships and the action that sustains it to be a mere “facade . . . an essentially superfluous superstructure” on the determining base of bodily labor.29 Thus, although Marx did want to promote freedom, his viewpoint left him unable even to understand it. In relation to freedom, consequently, Arendt locates “the fundamental contradiction which runs like a red thread through the whole of Marx’s thought.” Having defined humans in terms of labor, he nevertheless intends an ideal, postrevolutionary society in which people are freed precisely from labor. For Marx, Arendt says, “only when labor is abolished can the ‘realm of freedom’ supplant the ‘realm of necessity.’”30 All of Arendt’s specific charges against Marx have some foundation in the texts, yet almost all of them involve misreadings and distortions, sometimes blatant ones. Begin with the central idea of Marx’s alleged obsession with labor, his neglect of work. Marx of course wrote in German, and although Arbeit does translate the English “labor,” it is by no means, as Arendt misleadingly claims, the German “equivalent for ‘labor,’” for the two languages do not encode quite the same distinction. The range of words in the werk- family in modern German is extremely restricted. The verb, as Arendt notes, has become “rather obsolete,” leaving only arbeiten for translating both “to labor” and “to work.” And the noun, as Arendt fails to note, refers only to the product or result, so that only Arbeit is available for the process of production, be it labor or work.31

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Marx’s frequent use of words from the arbeit- family, therefore, cannot indicate a preoccupation with labor to the detriment of work.32 On the contrary, except where context indicates otherwise, when Marx says Arbeit or arbeiten he is just as likely to mean work as labor, or both together. Arendt is thus wrong to read Marx as if he had a choice between work and labor and opted for the latter; and she is doubly wrong, in passages where the context clearly shows that Marx meant work, to conclude that he must be caught in “contradictions,” or reluctantly forced “to admit” something, or “misrepresenting” labor as work.33

Marx’s other half Such errors about language would be silly and trivial were it not for the way they reflect Arendt’s more general, systematic blindness to, or suppression of, one side of Marx. To show that and assess its significance, however, requires a brief account of the Marx that Arendt omits. The place to start is with Arendt’s claim, cited above, that Marx wrongly diagnosed self-alienation rather than world alienation as our basic problem. Now, Marx never says that self-alienation is the basic form of alienation; he merely lists it along with several other forms in the 1844 Manuscripts, without designating any one as fundamental.34 If one nevertheless insists on asking, with Arendt, which form of alienation is “central” for Marx, or even what unifies all the forms into a single concept, the most persuasive answer is none of the listed forms but a different phenomenon, discussed both in the Manuscripts and in many later writings and sometimes designated as “alienation” (Entäusserung or Entfremdung), though some later Marxists, notably Georg Lukács, call it “reification.”35 This phenomenon links all the various kinds of alienation for Marx, both conceptually and causally, and it lies at the center of one major facet of his theory about human beings and history, a facet that remains fundamentally unchanged from Marx’s early writings right through Capital, though of course details vary and emphases shift. According to this theory and this notion of alienation, human beings are indeed a species of animal, but a unique one. What characterizes any species is its “life-activity,” and the characteristic life-activity of our species is that we work or labor (arbeiten) on the natural world to produce what our bodies require for life. Production is our “species-life.” But other animals also do this: gather food, build nests or hives, spin webs or cocoons. What distinguishes humans is “free, conscious” productive activity. While other animals are “immediately identical with” their life-activity, “Man [der Mensch] makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness.” Other animals are conscious, too, but they do not think in general concepts, do not abstract from their immediate experience to formulate generalizations, make plans, invent imaginary situations, or articulate principles and rules. Animals of other species produce only what they immediately need, driven by that need, but “man [der Mensch] produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom.” Humans are creatures that naturally engage in Arbeit even when they do not immediately need its products. We putter

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and play, invent, improve, rearrange, organize, compose, because that is what fulfills us, our “life-activity, [our] essential being.”36 Even with other animals, some of what they produce may continue in use for a considerable time, like a beaver dam or an anthill. But this is far more true of human beings, precisely because of our leisure-time productivity, whose products are not immediately consumed. These humanly produced, lasting objects gradually accumulate around us and form an increasing portion of our world. They all decay eventually, but some of what each generation produces becomes part of the quasi-natural “given” for the next generation, part of the objective world in which it must produce its livelihood. Increasingly with the passage of time, the material environment in which we produce what we need is itself humanly shaped, so that “man contemplates himself in a world that he has created.”37 This contemplating involves our capacity for abstraction and generation, which gives us foresight and imagination, so that some of our leisure production goes toward providing for future needs or toward improving future production. We are the toolmakers. This same capacity also allows us a versatility not available to other animals, whose activities are governed by instinct. Birds’ nests and beavers’ dams are always built in the same, species-specific way, but “man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species” and thus also “in accordance with the laws of beauty.” Third, our capacity for abstraction allows us to generalize about ourselves; to recognize other human beings as members of the same freely creative species, to imagine ourselves in their situation, and thus to become moral and political beings.38 For Marx, human Arbeit on the natural world produces not just physical substances and objects but also at the same time all of the intangible features of nonmaterial culture. While engaged in material productive activity we also produce relationships, habits, skills, institutions, language, mores, character. Here, too, although much is transient, some of the transforming effects always continue, so that with the passage of time the human species cultivates and civilizes itself, developing specifically human, cultural achievements and pleasures. We are the species that produces itself, not just reproducing biologically like all natural species, but also creating and sustaining our specifically human cultures and character. Ultimately, “the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of man through human Arbeit.”39 All this is explicated in the early writings, but Marx is still saying the same things in Capital at the end of his life. In the process of Arbeit, while changing the external world, the human being “changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers,” both as an individual and as a species. As this happens, the form of our activity gradually changes from “its first instinctive stage” to ones that increasingly mark it “as exclusively human,” as subject to our free, conscious control rather than instinctually driven. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect. . . . But what distinguishes the worst architect

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from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (Marx and Engels 1979: 344) The capacity for imagination characterizes the human species from the outset. Architecture, however, is an activity in which we can engage only because countless earlier generations gradually developed the necessary skills, tools, ideas, and character, including the disciplined self-control required for keeping one’s will “steadily in consonance with his purpose” (Marx and Engels 1979: 345). In theory, therefore, we modern human beings ought to feel—and be—enriched and fulfilled by this wealth of cumulative human accomplishment. We ought to feel—and be—at home in a world and in activities that are by now almost entirely humanized. They should wholly suit our needs. But in fact all of the species’ powers and accumulated achievements have not made humans either powerful or free. Indeed, in Marx’s time as in ours, the opposite seems to be the case. Marx sees in this a dual paradox: first, that those who do the actual Arbeit, the physical production of the material wealth underlying our nonmaterial culture, are increasingly impoverished thereby; and, second, that everyone, worker and capitalist alike, finds himself helpless in the face of socioeconomic forces, the “laws of the market.” The workers live like animals, on the edge of starvation and physically debilitated by dreadful working conditions, the amenities of civilization unavailable to them because they have no money. But the capitalists, although safe from starvation, are not really much better off. They have money and what money can buy, though the bulk of profits must be constantly reinvested. But even the capitalists lack access to the actual riches of civilization, since they cannot relate to those riches in ways that bring real fulfillment. They relate to art, for example, only in terms of ownership and money, to knowledge only in terms of technology and profit, and to their fellow human beings only through the competitive selfishness that is forced on all alike by a market economy. Like Arendt and following Hegel, Marx calls this pattern of competitive exploitation “society,” but for him it is only one special kind: society “as it appears to the [bourgeois] political economist” (Marx and Engels 1979: 101, my emphasis). This is “civil society, in which every individual is a totality of needs and exists for the other person, as the other exists for him, insofar as each becomes a means for the other.”40 By society in general Marx means simply “the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner, and to what end.”41 Market capitalism is a highly intricate social system, a system of profound interdependence but one whose shared social arrangements require mutual exploitation and competitive isolation. These shared requirements make it impossible for people to cooperate in solidarity, as they would have to do in order to direct or control the overall consequences of what they are all separately doing. Instead, therefore, those consequences confront them like an external, coercive force by which they are all constrained—workers in order literally to survive, owners in order to survive as owners, to stay in business. “Modern bourgeois society,” in the famous words of

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the Manifesto, is thus “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”42 It is a vicious cycle: precisely because “each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need,” they jointly but unintentionally produce the market’s coercive power over them all, a further “extension of the alien powers to which man is subjected,” which forces him into continued competitive exploitation. Marx says this in the 1844 Manuscripts, in The German Ideology, and in the Grundrisse and is still saying it in Capital. 43 The increasing enrichment, productivity, civilization, and power of the human species, then, is paradoxically accompanied by an increasing immiseration for most (and specifically for those who do the actual Arbeit) and an increasing (or at least an increasingly paradoxical) helplessness for all.44 This is true of human history as such and of capitalism in particular, and it constitutes the central, basic form of alienation for Marx. The alienation of the worker (Arbeiter) means that his Arbeit “becomes an object, [acquires] an external existence” as a commodity in the market, which wields “a power of its own confronting him . . . as something hostile and alien.” Similarly, in history and in capitalism generally, people “become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them” but which they in fact constitute, until finally “all is under the sway of an inhuman power,” which people enact but do not have, cannot wield.45 Arendt thus is not just wrong about which form of alienation is central for Marx, but altogether misses or suppresses this whole line of argument, which greatly resembles some of her own ideas about the social. In the course of explicating this line of argument in Marx, we have also touched on a number of details that Arendt gets wrong about Marx, besides the translation of Arbeit and the basic form of alienation. Thus it is clearly not true that Marx misses the importance of a lasting world of humanly fashioned objects, since the cumulative development of tools and technology is a central tenet of his theory. Nor is it true that Marx aims only at life and abundance for their own sake. Indeed, this is a charge that Marx himself brings against capitalist thinkers.46 Although Marx does aim at abundance, it is never abundance for its own sake, but always for the freedom and humanization to which he thinks abundance is prerequisite. Thus it is flatly false that freedom only begins for Marx where labor has come to an end, and in order to make this out as a “fundamental and flagrant contradiction” central to his thought, Arendt has to misread two passages and reshape a third by elision.47 For Marx, Arbeit can never disappear, both because we are embodied creatures and because it is our species characteristic; but Arbeit is not merely Arendt’s labor. With respect to our natural needs and productive activity to fulfill them, freedom is not the disappearance of Arbeit, but instead “can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature.” Beyond the fulfillment of needs and this sort of freedom, however, lies “that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom.” For Marx, however, the first sort of freedom is prerequisite to the

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second, because only the first ends the basic kind of alienation and thus makes possible the subjection of those forces that have hitherto driven and determined human beings “to the power of the united individuals.”48 Having first said it in The German Ideology, Marx is still saying it in Capital (Marx and Engels 1979: 327, 413, 441). Abundance is a goal, but only because it is the means to freedom. It is also the means to real individuality. Far from wanting to dissolve individuality in some monolithic mass called “society” or “the species,” Marx aims to enhance it by having people take charge of the monolithic mass they already are, a collectivity presently out of control, driving and constraining them as individuals. The value of capitalism, of “modern industry,” and of the abundance they create is that these eventually make possible the “humane development” of individual human beings, allowing each to give “free scope to his own natural and acquired powers” (Marx and Engels 1979: 413–415). Individual development presupposes relationships with others, material abundance, and advanced civilization. “Only in community [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.” In all the “previous substitutes for community, in the State, etc.,” there was personal freedom for at most a few, and even that freedom was severely limited because their community, being only partial and “illusory, . . . always took on an independent existence in relation to them” and became their “fetter.”49 That is why, in his early critique of Hegel, Marx says that democracy is “the essence of all state constitutions” and “the solved riddle of all constitutions,” revealing what a constitution really is by bringing the abstract, formal idea “back to its actual basis, the actual human being[s], the actual people, and establish[ing it] as the people’s own work.” Only in democracy does the constitution appear as what it really is, “a free product of man,” because only democracy is—or continually re-creates—“the true unity of the general and the particular.”50 In true community, “individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association,” because a human being is by nature “in the most literal sense a zoon politikon, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.”51 Marx says this in the early writings; he says it most famously in the Manifesto, and he is still saying it in 1875.52

Arendt and Marx Indeed, Arendt acknowledges that this was Marx’s goal, that his “guiding model,” like hers, was “the Athens of Pericles,” which, Marx thought, “in the future, with the help of the vastly increased productivity of human labor, would need no slaves to sustain itself but would become a reality for all.”53 Nor is the model of Athenian politics all that they share. On repeated occasions in The Human Condition, we have seen, Arendt affirms some proposition she has earlier attacked Marx for affirming. She herself asserts that at a certain stage in the “process” of world alienation, “society became the subject of the new life process”; and she explicitly affirms that this is no mere metaphor. This “society as a whole, the ‘collective subject’ of the life process, [was] by no means . . . an intangible entity,” a fiction, but real.54 Similarly, “Marx’s

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contention that economic laws are like natural laws,” which Arendt first dismisses as the illusory way Marx “wished to see” things, she later affirms as “correct.” It is correct “only in a laboring society,” but of course a laboring society is exactly what Arendt repeatedly claims we have, or are.55 At one point Arendt even seems to acknowledge that what she calls world alienation, which she says Marx ignored in his fascination with self-alienation, in fact is what Marx “denounced” as self-alienation.56 Now, Arendt’s notion of world alienation is not in fact identical either to what Marx means by alienation from self or to his basic notion of alienation, examined above, but it bears some striking resemblances to the latter.57 So Arendt doesn’t just get Marx wrong in detail but also fails to see, or refuses to acknowledge, the extent to which her own doctrine parallels a major aspect of his. Only a fool would claim that Arendt and Marx agree in general or think alike. I am arguing merely that there is an important area of overlap between their theories, that Arendt is blind to Marx’s views within that area, and that the area corresponds roughly to her concept of the social. Of course they wholly disagree about much else, including economics and property; history, class conflict, and process; their different prescriptions and predictions; the absence of anything like Arendt’s concept of the world from Marx’s thought; and Marx’s relative neglect of what politics might look like in a classless world. Arendt’s overall critique of Marx, as distinct from her detailed claims and her selective blindness to the area of overlap, has much merit. Marx often is historicist, pseudo-scientific, determinist, reductionist, disparaging of politics and of ideals as mere “superstructure,” the more so if one ignores the other side of his deeply ambivalent thinking. Nevertheless, given the fierceness of her criticism of Marx, the extent of this tacit parallelism is astonishing. Arendt agrees with (at least part of) Marx as to what human beings are like, what distinguishes them from other animals. Though she attacks his “naturalism,” the truth is that both she and Marx are—rightly—on both sides of the question of our relationship to nature. They both see humans as simultaneously a part of nature and different from all other species, precisely with respect to the natural human propensity to create culture, both material and relational. The ambiguity lies in the concept of nature itself. As Arendt said in The Origins, “Man’s ‘nature’ is only ‘human’ insofar as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a man.”58 Consequently Marx and Arendt largely agree also about what human fulfillment and freedom might look like, specifically that freedom would have to combine individuality with solidarity. They agree that in our present condition we are far from free because we are almost completely subjected to an enormous, seemingly alien power that debilitates and constrains us yet that is even now of our own making. And they agree that our hope for achieving freedom lies in the paradoxicality of this subjection—that the resultants of our own activity now dominate us only because that activity keeps us isolated from each other, incapable of solidarity. So we are not free, yet somehow are free-to-become-free. For Arendt, we have seen, this paradoxicality centers on the social as Blob. It gives rise to the puzzling questions we have encountered more than once already about the ontological status of

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society and its power: whether it is a mere mentalité or an objective reality that genuinely coerces. Not surprisingly, entirely parallel questions are thoroughly familiar in Marx scholarship, though most do not focus on the concept of society. Marx himself did warn in his early writings that “what is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of ‘Society’ as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual.”59 A critic of Hegelian idealism, with its active, personified abstractions, Marx was determined instead to “set out from real, active men” and their objective doings in the world (Marx and Engels 1979: 154). Yet when he observed these doings, he saw that people in his time were in fact objectively driven and constrained by market forces, which were no illusion or empty abstraction. The ambiguity can be seen clearly in Marx’s apparently inconsistent treatment of the bourgeois political economists, whom he calls “fetishists” because they falsely present the market as omnipotent and its requirements as inevitable, yet whose assumptions in this regard he himself endorses as he proceeds to set forth the necessary laws of capitalist development.60 The ambiguity is even more strikingly and persistently displayed in Marx’s troubled relation to Feuerbach, to whose views on religion Marx often both compares and contrasts his own theories. Feuerbach saw religion as an illusion in which people ascribe the best powers, qualities, and aspirations of the human species to imaginary beings and then feel depleted, diminished, and depraved by comparison, helpless before the gods’ power.61 It is the same in history, in capitalism, in political economy, Marx says over and over again: people’s own power, alienated, looms over them like a god.62 But it is in fact their own power; that is why the bourgeois political economists are fetishists.63 Yet Marx also insists, over and over again, that his narrative differs fundamentally from Feuerbach’s, because gods are merely imaginary, their power illusory, but the market is real and its power actually constrains. Consequently, whereas religion can be ended by insight, by a change in people’s thinking, the power of the market can be ended “only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations” that constitute it.64 “‘Liberation [Befreiung]’ is a historical and not a mental act” (Marx and Engels 1979: 169). Marx himself, one might say, had something of a Blob problem. That is, he saw people in the grip of the market, a large-scale force they could not control or direct even though it consisted only in their collective activities, and he himself sometimes pictured that force as a superhuman monster with a will of its own—as does almost every newscaster reporting on Wall Street, relating what the market thinks, likes, believes, intends, and so on. But Marx also thought that people were in his time—although previously they had not been—in a position to change this, that they could jointly take charge of the large-scale resultants of their various activities. So they were unfree but free-to-become-free, in the grip of a monster but only because they still believed in its autonomy and had not yet taken charge. Marx tended to handle this logically problematic teaching by a chronological division of before and after: hitherto determined (first by nature, later by humanly made arrangements out of control), henceforth free because at last in a position to

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take charge. That, however, leaves the transition, the present, highly problematic: the coming or making of the revolution, its difference from all previous revolutions, the nature and permanence of the changes it is to introduce.65 These are familiar issues in Marx scholarship and Marxist movements. One might have expected Arendt to attack Marx on this ground, to reject this chronological sequencing of necessity and freedom in favor of her own, more sensible view that freedom is a constant human possibility in history, rarely achieved and easily lost but always in principle available. One might have expected her to insist, against Marx, that freedom, even after the revolution, must surely depend on just how the collectivity will go about “regulat[ing] the general production”: how that will be institutionalized and enforced, who will play what sort of role in it, what its politics will look like (Marx and Engels 1979: 160). She might, in short, have insisted on the need to teach people explicitly about action, politics, the lost treasure, might even have counterposed Tocqueville to Marx for this purpose and attempted a synthesis of their ideas.66 One could argue that this is in fact what The Human Condition does, implicitly and indirectly. But it patently is not what that book does explicitly and directly. Instead it acknowledges no debt to either Tocqueville or Marx, and it misrepresents the latter’s theory. As a corollary, Arendt’s account remains troubled precisely where it is tangent to Marx’s. As in relation to Tocqueville, so in relation to Marx: she seems to acquire the theorist’s difficulties along with her unacknowledged positive debt to him, because avoiding acknowledgment of the debt gets in the way of her seeing those difficulties and criticizing them. Thus, despite her criticisms of Marx, Arendt herself cannot regard freedom simply and flatly as a constant possibility, without preconditions; otherwise she could hardly maintain that things are getting worse in this respect. She herself, furthermore, needs some explanation of why things have been getting worse, why people persist in behaving in ways that leave them unfree, constrained, and endangered. And the very logic of such explanation, whether historical, psychological, or sociological, seems to conflict with the idea of action and political freedom that Arendt most wants to teach. Putting the same point in a slightly different and more speculative way, one can imagine that, as Arendt worked on this book, the powerful parallels between her own thinking and (half of) Marx’s must have driven her frantic. If Jaspers was right and Marx was diabolical, part of the “high road” to totalitarianism, then extirpating the dangerous parts of his thinking from her own had to be her most important task. Coming to her work on Marx from The Origins of Totalitarianism, with all the dangers of parvenu-like surrender to process still fresh in her mind, Arendt saw the diabolical element in Marx as his materialism, naturalism, determinism, all of which she identified with his focus on Arbeit. Those were the elements she must purge from her own thinking, against which she must protect freedom and the world. As a result, however, Arendt developed a dichotomy every bit as rigid and as problematic as Marx’s chronological before and after, determined past and free future: the Arendtian contrast between the determined necessity of the social and free political action.

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The point of tracing the possible influence of Tocqueville and Marx on The Human Condition, then, is multiple. First, and most simply, it raises the question of why these authorities remain hidden, if indeed they were authorities for Arendt. But that question only matters for our purposes insofar as, second, Arendt may have been encouraged to transform and modify her vision of totalitarianism as Blob into the social as Blob by certain related formulations and images in Tocqueville and Marx. There is also, however, a third, larger point involved. Instead of regarding the Blob as a personal failure of Arendt as theorist, we might note that here are three major political theorists who all encounter difficulties in this same area of their thinking. All three clearly write with liberating intent. All three want to enhance individuality in a good sense but warn against individual isolation in a bad sense. All three criticize other thinkers’ deployment of empty abstractions as interfering with the understanding of freedom, and all three accordingly worry about how to theorize without invoking such dangerous abstractions. Surely it is remarkable that all three nevertheless end up, in their respective ways, envisioning some kind of Blob. Eventually we shall have to ask whether there are ways of treating these issues without a Blob, but we are not yet ready for that.

Notes 1 [This chapter is a condensed version of “Absent Authorities: Tocqueville and Marx” (Pitkin 1998: ch. 7). A few references to Toqueville remain in this version where removing them would have impaired the sense of the text.] 2 Benhabib (1996); Jacques Taminiaux, La Fille de Thrace et le penseur professional: Arendt et Heidegger (Paris: Pavote, 1992); Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 3 [“The Blob” is Pitkin’s term for how Arendt conceptualizes “the social” as “a living, autonomous agent determined to dominate human beings, absorb them, render them helpless” (Pitkin 1998: 3).] 4 For favorable references to Marx, see Arendt (1974: 44, 159, and perhaps 93). There are also various references to his having been right on some particular point. See also Arendt (1977: 54, 61, 69). 5 Young-Bruehl (1982: 276), quoting from Hannah Arendt, “Project: Totalitarian Elements of Marxism” (ca. winter 1952), to Guggenheim Foundation, Library of Congress. 6 Hanna Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence (1992), pp. 186–187, 205; Briefwechsel (1985), pp. 222–223, 241; Jaspers to Blucher, July 21, 1952, Jaspers to Arendt, Dec. 29, 1952. 7 Marx and Engels (1979: 134–135, emphasis in original). 8 Hill (1979: 334); Young-Bruehl (1982: 9, 27–28); Arendt (1994: 7); Günter Gaus, Zur Person (1964), p. 20. 9 Young-Bruehl (1982: 164, 171, 234–236). 10 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, p. 205; Briefwechsel, p. 241; Jaspers to Arendt, Dec. 29, 1952. Although this passage is actually from a letter written almost two years later than Arendt’s “defense” of Marx to Jaspers, quoting it first here seems permissible, since Arendt’s letter of defense makes clear that she is responding to an earlier criticism of Marx by Jaspers, presumably Jaspers to Arendt, April 20, 1950; Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, p. 149; Briefwechsel, p. 185. Note that Jaspers ascribes “something analogous to” the “demonic” to Marx despite having himself earlier warned against ascribing “satanic greatness” to the Nazis or a “‘demonic’ element to Hitler”; Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, p. 62; Briefwechsel, p. 99; Jaspers to Arendt, Oct. 19, 1946.

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34

35

Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, p. 160; Briefwechsel, p. 196; to Jaspers, Dec. 25, 1950. Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, p. 163; Briefwechsel, p. 199; Jaspers to Arendt, Jan. 7, 1951. Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, p. 167; Briefwechsel, p. 203; to Jaspers, March 4, 1951. Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, p. 167; Briefwechsel, p. 203; to Jaspers, March 4, 1951. Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, pp. 186–187; Briefwechsel, pp. 222–223; Jaspers to Blucher, July 21, 1952. Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, p. 216; Briefwechsel, p. 252; to Jaspers, May 13, 1953. Arendt (1969: 17; see also 21). Arendt (1994: 445). Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, p. 137; Briefwechsel, p. 173; to Jaspers, June 3, 1949. Arendt (1974: 79), quoting Benjamin Constant, “De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes” (1819), reprinted in Cours de politique constitutionelle (1872), 2: 549. Young-Bruehl (1982: 277); Arendt (1974: 79), quoting John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, sec. 26. Arendt (1974: 80). Making is a matter of skill and know-how, whereas doing depends on character, virtue, and (practical) wisdom; making has a goal or purpose outside itself (the object made), whereas doing is its own end or goal; accordingly, the former is assessed by the quality of the object made, the latter by the excellence displayed in the activity itself, so that a workman who does a bad job intentionally is less to be condemned than one who does so from incompetence, whereas in action the person who does wrong intentionally is worse than the one who just doesn’t know any better. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1140 a 1–1140 b 30. Arendt thought that Aristotle did not hold to this distinction consistently; Arendt (1974: 196; see also 5, 19, 25). Arendt (1974: 93, 86, 101). Arendt (1974: 108, 111, 98; see also 255, 321). Arendt (1974: 89, 255; see also 103, 108, 117); Arendt (1977: 64). Arendt (1974: 108). Arendt (1974: 135; see also 94, 116–117, 137, 321). Arendt (1974: 183); see also Arendt (1969: 30, 32, 77); Arendt (1977: 62–64, 250, 255–258). Arendt (1977: 104, quoting Marx’s phrases from Kapital, vol. 3, in Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, pt. 2 [1933], p. 873); see also Arendt (1977: 87 n, 105); Arendt (1969: 18, 24–25). Arendt (1977: 81). Arendt also notes that Werk designates the product but not that it designates only the product, never the process. There are various other compound nouns on the Werk- root, but they correspond more to “craftsman” than to “worker.” So for most purposes, Arbeit and Arbeiter must serve for both “labor” or “laborer” and “work” or “worker,” except where “work” is meant in the sense of product. Thus arbeitslos translates “out of work,” überarbeitet translates “overworked,” Arbeiterklasse translates “working class,” and so on. So if anyone was obsessed with labor here, it would have had to be Engels, the translator [actually Ernest Untermann – ed.], not Marx himself, who had little choice about which word to use. But there is nothing wrong with Engels’s translation of Marx’s Arbeit. Arendt (1977: 101–102, 306). Nor does it make much sense to claim that Marx’s aim was for “the distinction between labor and work [to] have completely disappeared” (Arendt 1977: 89); see also Arendt (1969: 18, 24). Marx and Engels (1979: 71–78). He mentions the Arbeiter’s alienation from the product (1979: 71–73) and from the process of production (1979: 73–75), then enumerates four other forms: alienation from nature, from self, from the species, and from other people (1979: 74–78). Philip Birger Hansen is the only Arendt commentator known to me who remarks that she gets Marx wrong on this point, and he does not elaborate. Philip Birger Hansen, Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 37–38. Lukács (1971); Pitkin (1987). There are problems about translating Entäusserung and Entfremdung, Marx’s and Hegel’s two words in the same semantic region as the English

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36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47

“alienation.” Some translators use “alienation” for the one German word, others for the other, and there are good reasons for either usage. Entäusserung is related to aussen, which means “outside”; so it means “outering,” externalization, projection. Entfremdung is related to fremd, meaning “foreign” or “strange”; so it means “foreignization,” estrangement. But the former term is used in German for alienation of property, the latter for alienation of affections. For a thoughtful discussion, see Martin Milligan, “Translator’s Note on Terminology,” in Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (n.d.), pp. 10–13. Marx and Engels (1979: 76, emphasis in original). Where Tucker translates “man,” with its problematic gendered connotations, Marx of course used Mensch, the German word for human being, which is not the same as the word for male human being, Mann. Marx and Engels (1979: 76; see also 128–129, 137, 150, 157). Marx and Engels (1979: 76, 85; see also 78, 83, 86). Marx and Engels (1979: 92, emphasis in original; see also 78, 85–89, 154, 158; with respect to pleasures, see esp. 51, 83–84). Marx and Engels (1979: 92; see also 34–36, 46, 52, 70–73, 87, 93, 223). Marx (1977: 166); see also Marx and Engels (1979: 43–45, 157, and cf. 136). Marx and Engels (1979: 478). Marx and Engels (1979: 93, emphasis in original; see also 71, 160, 292, 376). “Increasingly paradoxical” because it is not clear whether early humans were less dominated by their dependence on nature than they now are by their dependence on money, the market, and each other, or more dominated, or equally dominated. What makes the latter kind of domination and dependence different is that it is collectively self-imposed: nothing constrains us but what we collectively are doing, so that if we could stop. . . . Thus, the proletariat is constituted not by “naturally existing poverty, but [by] poverty artificially produced” (Marx and Engels 1979: 64, emphasis in original). The paradox—not helplessness as such—is what makes alienation (Marx and Engels 1979: 100). Marx and Engels (1979: 72, 163, 100, emphasis in original; see also 71, 292); Marx (1977: 115, 118). Marx and Engels (1979: 333–334, 359). Arendt (1974: 104); see also Arendt (1969: 24). Arendt quotes Marx in German as saying, in The German Ideology, that the communist revolution removes, does away with, or sets aside [beseitigt] Arbeit (Karl Marx, Die Deutsche Ideologie in Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 3:59, quoted by Arendt (1974: 104 n)); see Marx and Engels (1979: 193, 200). Marx does say that—once—but that locution must surely be read in the light of the other passage she also quotes, where he says Arbeit must be aufgehoben—that famous word from Hegelian dialectics that means something both ended and preserved, because transformed (Marx, Deutsche Ideologie, p. 185, quoted in Arendt 1974: 87 n). One might also cite the 1844 Manuscripts, where Marx says that in communism, “The category of Arbeiter is not done away with, but extended to all men” (Marx and Engels 1979: 82). Marx does say that in communist society, life will no longer “begin for the [Arbeiter] where [Arbeit] ceases” (Karl Marx, “Wage Labor and Capital,” p. 77, quoted in Arendt (1974: 89 n). But the context makes perfectly clear that Marx is saying Arbeit should be fulfilling rather than debilitating, by contrast with life under capitalism, where people’s fulfillment (such as it is) begins only when they get off work. He clearly is not saying that communism will make even leisure-time activities debilitating (Marx and Engels 1979: 205). Marx emphatically does not say, as Arendt claims, that “only when labor is abolished can the ‘realm of freedom’ supplant ‘the realm of necessity.’” The famous passage from vol. 3 of Capital that Arendt cites (twice) in support clearly says that freedom begins not where Arbeit leaves off but where that sort of Arbeit which is “determined through want and external utility ceases” (Marx, Kapital, vol. 3, in Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, pt. 2 [1933], p. 873, quoted in Arendt 1974: 104, 87 n). Arendt’s translation of the passage (1974: 104) is correct, better than Tucker’s (Marx and Engels 1979: 441), but on 1979: 87 n she conveniently elides the modifying clause.

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48 Marx and Engels (1979: 441, 193). 49 Marx and Engels (1979: 197); the bracketed insertion is Tucker’s. 50 Marx and Engels (1979: 20–21, emphasis in original). Later, of course, Marx begins using the word “democracy” to mean “so-called ‘democracy’” and no longer praises it; e.g. 1979: 160–161. 51 Marx and Engels (1979: 197, 223). Marx is thus one of the theorists who translate zoon politikon as “social animal,” neglecting the distinction that Arendt stresses. 52 Marx and Engels (1979: 160, 163, 398, 413–415, 491, 531). 53 Arendt (1974: 133; see also 131 n); Arendt (1969: 19). 54 Arendt (1974: 256–257). 55 Arendt (1974: 111, 209). Perhaps we are only “almost” a laboring society, in the “final stage” of its development; see Arendt (1974: 31; 45–46, 126, 134). Perhaps Arendt would argue that Marx’s false claim was self-fulfilling once people believed it (see also Arendt 1973: 349). But such an argument encounters logical difficulties, since the fact that something happens does not prove, even in retrospect, that it was inevitable, like a natural law. 56 Arendt (1974: 209–210). The chain of connection is obscure because spread over two pages of dense text, but Arendt seems to be saying that world alienation is greatest in a consumer society, which is the last and most social stage of a laboring society, because people relate only through the market, and even there relate only to the goods exchanged, not to the other people with whom they exchange. This utter isolation and lack of human relationship (which thus is world alienation) is what Marx “denounced as . . . dehumanization and self-alienation.” 57 Although Arendt sometimes uses the word “world” in the familiar, vaguely totalizing way to mean “everything,” for the most part she distinguishes between the earth, or nature, on the one hand, and the world—in the sense of all that is produced, altered, or sustained “exclusively” by human activity—on the other; Arendt (1974: 9, 52, 134, 204). Thus, whereas “earth alienation” means thinking and conducting oneself as if one were not of this earth but instead had some hypothetical location in outer space, or nowhere at all (Arendt 1974: 1–2, 250–251, 262, 264), “world alienation” is about “flight from” the material culture of humanly made or altered objects and substances and the nonmaterial culture of humanly sustained relationships, institutions, customs, mores, concepts, and civilization in general (Arendt 1974: 209–210, 252–257, 264, 301, 308). It can take the form of introspection, abstraction, loss of contact with common sense, or regression from responsibility for the maintenance of the world (Arendt 1974: 9, 22, 52, 182–183, 198, 254, 272, 284, 300, 312, 320–321; on the last theme, see also Arendt 1969: 196; Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969), pp. 4, 7–8, 14, 16, 18–19). It includes the sort of total individual isolation and loss of relationships that leaves people helpless to direct the overall resultants of what they are separately doing, which Arendt calls “the social” and which, this chapter argues, corresponds to Marx’s central notion of alienation. At the extreme of the social, we “no longer live in a world at all” (Arendt 1974: 134). Marx’s theory includes no elaboration of anything like the Arendtian idea of “world” (but cf. Marx and Engels 1979: 87, 92, 136, 326, and particularly 145, the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach). Seyla Benhabib has noted the debt Arendt’s concept of world owes to Heidegger’s, but for Heidegger the world means only humanly produced or altered material objects; Benhabib (1996: 108; see also xxviii, 50–56, 104–118). Arendt’s account is confusing because it is inconsistent; sometimes she uses “world” in Heidegger’s way (e.g. Arendt 1974: 2, 7, 252–257); sometimes to mean only intangible culture, the web of relationships (e.g. Arendt 1974: 198); and often explicitly to mean both together (e.g. Arendt 1974: 22, 52, 182). 58 Arendt 1973: 455; see also Marx and Engels 1979: 157, where human life “since the dawn of civilization” appears as “a double relationship,” always both “natural” and “social.”

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59 Marx and Engels (1979: 86); the capitalization of “Society” is Tucker’s; in German all nouns are capitalized. 60 Marx and Engels (1979: 321). Marx emphasizes the false, fetishistic nature of their claims on 1979: 327, 421, but seems to endorse such (or comparable) claims on 1979: 323, 335, 413, 422–423. 61 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1957), trans. George Eliot. Evanston, IL and New York: Harper & Row. 62 Marx and Engels (1979: 53–54, 68–70, 72, 143–145). Hence “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism” (1979: 53). In the earliest writings the humanly created god is money (1979: 50, 52, 93, 103–104). But from The German Ideology onward, the gods are the market, capital, and commodities (1979: 163, 292, 319, 321, 376, 422). 63 For Marx, it turns out, the bourgeois political economists were “fetishists” and mystifiers not because they said the market had power and that its regularities functioned like natural laws, but because they presented the market and its regularities as natural laws, as “a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature,” and therefore as not just necessary but eternally necessary, like the law of gravity. Even Marx himself says that the market “at present imposes itself after the manner of an overpowering natural law,” but it is not, and its hitherto necessary laws are now or are about to become changeable (Marx and Engels 1979: 327, 413, my emphasis; see also 225, 421); Pitkin (1987: 270, 279). 64 Marx and Engels (1979: 164; see also 1979: 85, 99, 323; cf. 60, 65). 65 About why this revolution will differ fundamentally from all previous revolutions in history, Marx says remarkably little (Marx and Engels 1979: 64, 193, 438, 482, 518, 597). 66 Along the lines, e.g. of Hill (1979: 335): “Marx did not understand . . . what power really is . . . this strictly political thing.” Marx of course would argue that there is no point in preaching to people about what they should strive to do; but how does one distinguish useless preaching from useful scientific teaching in this area? For some of Marx’s explicit pronouncements on “politics,” see Marx and Engels (1979: 481, 490, 508, 518–520, 523, 538, 606, 634–635). In later writings, Arendt adopts the familiar— but I think ultimately unhelpful—distinction between a political “young” Marx and a disappointed, determinist, “old” Marx after 1848 (Arendt 1969: 30, 39; but cf. Marx and Engels 1979: 24; Arendt 1977: 61–65).

References Arendt, Hannah. 1969. Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing. Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Arendt, Hannah. 1974. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1977. On Revolution. New York: Penguin. Arendt, Hannah. 1994. Essays in Understanding, 1930–1934, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt Brace. Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage. Hill, Melvin A. 1979. Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin. Marx, Karl. 1977. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1979. The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd edn. New York: W.W. Norton.

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Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. 1987. “Rethinking Reification.” Theory and Society 16: 268–293. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. 1998. The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1969. Democracy in America, ed. J.P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. 1982. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.

13 THE SOCIAL IN THE HUMAN CONDITION (1998)

Having traced the genealogy of the social as Blob and examined the historical, personal, and intellectual context of The Human Condition, we are now ready to ask what the social is in that book, what Arendt means by that phrase. This requires separating the idea of the social from the image of the Blob, for whatever Arendt meant by the phrase, she surely did not intend a monster from outer space. She meant to address what she regarded as an enormously important, urgent, growing problem in the real world of politics and history, where real people live and suffer. We shall return later to the Blob, but for now set it aside to ask, simply: What is the social for Arendt when it is not mystified? This chapter pursues that question twice, from two different angles: first by trying to map the social onto Arendt’s other central concepts, and then, second, by trying to reconcile its two so disparate roots, joined in The Human Condition into a single concept: the conformist, or parvenu, social and the economic, or biological, social. To anticipate the results in brief, both approaches lead to the same conclusion: that the social corresponds to none of the ordinary uses or dictionary senses of “society” or “social” but instead greatly resembles what I have sketched as Marx’s fundamental notion of alienation. The way to begin is by asking how the social, juxtaposed as always for Arendt in a dyadic contrast to politics, maps onto the basic conceptual trilogy that structures The Human Condition: labor, work, and action.1 The question may initially seem trivial and its answer obvious. Indeed, the first few steps are obvious, but after that things become problematic, and their investigation therefore rewarding. Clearly politics— the opposite of the social—sorts with action; they are almost synonyms for Arendt (1974a: 180, 188). So the social must contrast to action, but how is it related to work and labor? Answering is not easy, because the concept of the social is conspicuously absent from the chapters where labor and work are discussed, and neither labor nor work is mentioned much where the social appears. Instead of

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labor or work, what appears alongside the social, as action appears alongside politics, is something Arendt calls “behavior.” So our question can be reformulated as: How is behavior related to labor and work?

Relating behavior to the conceptual triad Unfortunately, Arendt never says what “behavior” is, nor does she devote a chapter to it, as she does to each term in her trilogy. What is “decisive” about society, she says, is that it “excludes the possibility of action” and instead “expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.”2 She also equates behavior with “conformism,” which suggests that the concept is a successor to that of the parvenu, as action is the successor of the conscious pariah (Arendt 1974a: 41–42). But that is not much help in relating behavior or the social to work and labor. Should one equate behavior with labor and work combined, as the opposite of action? But Arendt argues that work has mostly disappeared from the modern world along with action, leaving only labor, whereas behavior is—like the social— definitely a modern phenomenon. So perhaps one should equate behavior with labor alone. Arendt does say that ours is “a society of laborers” and that, because society now “embraces and controls” us all, behavior has become “the foremost mode of human relationship.”3 Yet if labor and behavior are the same, why does Arendt introduce the latter term at all? Why not just continue using “labor” throughout? Labor, moreover, is the production of life-sustaining consumption goods through heavy bodily effort, whereas behavior is never said literally to produce anything. People behave, as they act, “with respect to each other,” not with respect to material objects or substances (1974a: 42, my emphasis). If behavior is nevertheless in some metaphorical sense productive, as action is, it surely “produces” the same sort of thing as action produces: the web of human relationships. Also, labor concerns the body, biological processes, and natural necessity, but behavior concerns conformity to artificial norms and conventions. Behavior thus presupposes potential choice, the possibility of misbehavior, and consequently the absence of determining biological necessity. Accordingly, behavior is not exempt from judgment because driven by necessity, like labor, nor judged by standards of efficiency, like work, nor yet judged like action, “by the criterion of greatness.” Instead, at least among “civilized people,” it is judged by “‘moral standards’” in the sense of inherited conventions: “the sum total of mores” as they have been “solidified by tradition.”4 Behavior, in other words, like parvenu conduct, is a kind of uncritical self-subjection to unquestioned rules. So behavior seems in some ways like labor, in some like labor and work combined, in some like action, and in some distinct from all three. In order to sort out this plethora, it helps to return to the ontological question of what sort of reality should be ascribed to these Arendtian categories: are they objective conditions in the world or matters of outlook, attitude, mentalité? Sometimes when Arendt says

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“laborers” she seems to mean a certain class of people, and by “labor” to mean the objective activity of producing food and shelter through bodily exertion. But at other times she uses these words to designate a mode of conduct, a way of doing whatever one does, or even an outlook, so that “labor” is anything done by anyone in a laboring manner or regarded from a labor-ish perspective: as if it were exhausting, biologically necessary, and so on.5 The same kind of ambiguity haunts Arendt’s other central concepts as well. Only by reading these categories as mentalités can one make sense of certain puzzling claims in The Human Condition, such as Arendt’s assertion that initiative— the basic element of action—“is inherent in all human activities,” her equation of labor with whatever is “understood . . . as” labor, or her casual remark that “of course” a laboring society need not be one in which everyone is a laborer, but only one in which “all members consider whatever they do primarily as a way to sustain their own lives and those of their families.”6 Similarly, much about Arendt’s apparent exclusion of economic concerns from politics, so puzzling to her interpreters, makes sense only if one reads “economic” to mean a certain outlook or attitude rather than an objectively identifiable subject matter. For Arendt acknowledges that action and politics mostly and rightly are “concerned with” the sorts of worldly interests we usually identify as economic. Even though action and politics are “directed toward” other people, their “content” is always “exclusively ‘objective,’ concerned with the matters of the world of things in which men move, which physically lie between them and out of which arise their specific, objective, worldly interests” (Arendt 1974a: 182). Indeed, that part of economics we call exchange is entirely “in the field of action.”7 So is the manner in which production is organized, since organization as such “owes its origin to the strictly political sphere of life, to man’s capacity to act and to act together in concert.”8 Until modern times, in fact, economics had altogether been regarded as a “part of ethics and politics and based on the assumption that men act with respect to their economic activities as they act in every other respect” (Arendt 1974a: 42). Even in modernity “economic man” is really “an acting being”; we moderns have merely stopped recognizing this fact.9 It is perfectly possible to address what are objectively economic concerns in an appropriately political manner, as for example the early labor movement did in defending “its economic interests” in a manner that amounted to “a full-fledged political battle.”10 Perhaps, then, behavior and the social should also be read as a mentalité—the parvenu way of thinking, seeing, and conducting oneself—applied in whatever people do. Perhaps Arendt should have focused on the adverb instead of hypostasizing the adjective; the social—behavior—would then be anything anyone does or regards in that manner, socially. Sometimes Arendt even suggests that society is not external and objective but inner and psychic. She seems, for example, to endorse what she calls Rousseau’s “discovery” that the intrusive society he fears, like the “intimacy of the heart” he wants to protect, cannot be “localized” in any “objective tangible place in the world,” that both are “subjective modes of human existence.” Yet by the next paragraph, society is again external, making “demands” on people.11

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Arendt’s central concepts cannot be merely mentalités, however, since she regards each as appropriate only in certain objectively identifiable contexts and harmful elsewhere. The laboring outlook and mode of conduct are right for repetitive bodily activities necessary to maintain life; the working outlook and mode are right for crafting a world of lasting, humanly fashioned objects; the mentalité of action is appropriate where human relationships are at stake. What is destructive is not the laboring or working outlook as such but their “generalization” into contexts where they do not belong.12 In its home context, each has its own positive value.13 Behavior, however, is different. Unlike labor, work, and action, it has no home context of its own, where it is appropriate, justified, necessary, or right. Indeed, Arendt never has anything favorable to say about behavior at all. Apparently its disappearance from our lives would deprive us of nothing worth having. In terms of its objective context, behavior seems like action, since it “produces” only the web of relationships.14 In terms of outlook and manner, however, it resembles labor: an attitude and mode of conduct that would be suited to constant, driven activity that supports life, combined with a fatalistic helplessness. Behavior thus seems to be Arendt’s name for the laboring mentalité appearing inappropriately in contexts where action is called for. Behavior is action manqué, the failure to act, opportunities for action missed or denied, an abdication of one’s human capacity and responsibility to act. Unfortunately, this way of reading behavior renders the distinction between behavior and action newly problematic. If behavior is the failure to act, how does one tell it from deliberate inaction, the considered and responsible decision to do nothing in a particular context, the action of refraining? Is there such a thing as inaction in Arendt’s schema, and how would she classify it? Besides, we know that behavior is by no means equivalent to doing nothing; it often involves obsessive, even frantic activity. And how would Arendt classify misbehavior? Is the deliberate violation of social norms sufficient to constitute action? Though one can find hints here and there, Arendt’s writings provide no decisive answer to these questions. Rahel Varnhagen spoke of herself as “doing . . . nothing,” just “letting life rain upon me,” connecting passivity with the parvenu and thus perhaps with behavior.15 Toward the end of The Human Condition, Arendt speaks of the social as threatening, “the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”16 In The Origins of Totalitarianism we saw suggestions that the mob, like an adolescent rebel, automatically opposed whatever society demanded, which may suggest classifying misbehavior as a kind of (inverted) behavior.17 In The Human Condition, Arendt mentions “non-behavior” as something that society will not “tolerate.”18 There is also one passage mentioning “non-acting” or “abstention from . . . human affairs,” but in a manner so equivocal that one cannot tell whether Arendt regards them as real possibilities or as an illusion that only “seems” to offer “salvation” from the perils of action (Arendt 1974a: 234). Later in her life, commenting on resistance to the Nazis, Arendt wrote that even where “there was no possibility of resistance, . . . there existed the possibility of doing nothing” or, adopting Otto Kirchheimer’s term, the “possibility of ‘nonparticipation.’”19

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About the difference between behavior and action in general, Arendt says somewhat more. Although both are modes of activity with real consequences in the world, affecting human relationships, they differ in significant ways. Behavior is rule-governed, obedient, conventional, uniform, and status-oriented; action, by contrast, is spontaneous and creative; it involves judging and possibly revising goals, norms, and standards rather than accepting them as given. Behavior is routine, action unpredictable, even heroic. Behavior, like parvenu conduct, is self-referential, but action is for the world’s sake; and behavior is isolating, but action is principled and—although based in individual autonomy—oriented toward solidarity with others. Yet obedience to norms, conformity to conventions, and concern for the opinion of others need not, as such, be behavior. In the right context, any or all of these can be action: for example, obedience to norms jointly self-imposed by an active citizenry, conformity to conventions that one has judged autonomously and found valuable, or respect for the opinions of one’s fellow citizens on public issues. Most important, therefore, what distinguishes behavior seems to be that it is thoughtless, mere habit; it involves inauthentically denying one’s responsibility for what one is actually doing in the world or for the norms and standards governing one’s conduct. Behavior apparently means wearing blinkers, construing not just one’s options but one’s capacities too narrowly. Action, by contrast, implies a realistic perception and acknowledgment of both self and world, of one’s powers and one’s situation; it means genuinely, competently taking responsibility for one’s conduct, its consequences, and the norms and standards that govern it. Difficult as the distinction is to draw, and contestable as it always remains, we draw it often enough about our own or other people’s conduct. We all sometimes judge, mostly in retrospect, that we or someone else misread a situation and either failed to do what could and should have been done or wasted effort and resources trying to do the impossible. Most of us have at some point had an experience like Arendt’s account of those who joined the Resistance: discovering that what had hitherto seemed important was really trivial, that what had seemed out of the question was actually easy, that apparently insurmountable obstacles had been self-imposed. If one accepts the distinction between action and behavior despite the difficulties in defining it with precision, and if one accepts the reading that behavior is action manqué, a failure to act where action is called for, then something similar ought to be true of the social and politics. If the social is the large-scale counterpart to behavior, as politics is to action, then the social must be politics manqué, the absence of politics is a context where politics is possible and desirable. Of course, in many situations nothing useful can be done, and in many others nothing needs to be done. Those would not illustrate the social. It would mean actual opportunities for politics missed, denied, or avoided. The social would thus be Arendt’s parvenu writ large, an entire human collectivity’s failure to acknowledge its powers and responsibilities. But a collectivity of human beings as one gigantic parvenu is a metaphor. What would it actually look like in the real world? Surely we have not set aside the image of the Blob

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only to adopt instead an equally metaphorical image of the gigantic parvenu? As a way of demystifying the concept of the social, mapping behavior onto the trilogy of labor, work, and action is not entirely satisfactory. It arrives only at another metaphor, and it is very indirect, proceeding through the notion of behavior, which—after all—corresponds to only half of Arendt’s social in The Human Condition. The relevance of this entire line of inquiry to the economic or biological social remains unclear.

The conformist and the economic social Perhaps, then, we should try again by a different approach, focusing directly on the social to see whether its two so disparate versions, springing from such different roots, actually converge, and if so, how. Begin in the terrain where we have already been working, with the conformist or parvenu social. Here the essence of the social seems to lie in classifying people into arbitrary, merely conventional categories, ranking them by their classification, and treating them in accord with that ranking. Because the classification and ranking must be simultaneously both empty of substance and yet taken with the utmost seriousness, the social necessarily implies some sort of pretense or illusion. “What matters” is that each individual be wholly “equate[d] . . . with his rank within the social framework,” his category.20 Historically, this once meant a person’s actual rank in a hierarchical class system, but, Arendt says, it continues to be “what matters” socially even after classes disappear in mass society. This is because deference itself implies a kind of ranking: some “they” assumed superior to the likes of “me,” whether they be “up there” in an elite or “out there” all around. In mass society, the social is a leveling force, normalizing all into conventional patterns of behavior, but this is merely an extension of what society has always done and meant: forcing people into arbitrary categories. As Arendt would put it later, “no society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types,” because such stereotyping is “necessary” for “social discrimination,” which is itself the basic “constituent element of the social realm.”21 Sometimes Arendt writes as if she opposed classification itself, any and all sorting of human beings into categories, because such stereotyping can never do justice to each individual’s “unique and distinct identity.”22 It can tell us only what somebody is, but never who that person uniquely is.23 Yet, as we have noted, one must classify if one is to use words at all, and even the most free, politically articulated community will therefore employ general categories as its members discuss issues, formulate policies, enact rules, and interpret principles. What distinguishes invidious, social classification from useful, political categorization for Arendt is three-fold. First, social categories are arbitrary, formal, empty, devoid of any substantive point or purpose beyond that of sheer classification itself. If they had a substantive utility, people might accept the categorization on its merits, after independent critical judgment, rather than a priori. Such reasoned, critical acceptance can no more illustrate the meaning of the social than obedience

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can be exemplified by someone happening to do what was commanded because he thinks it a good idea rather than because it was commanded. Conformity to a norm based on such independent judgment is not conformism and does not demonstrate the requisite abdication of one’s own powers, the requisite deference to the social “they.” The parvenu feels unable to institute norms or even to judge them. Social norms and classifications, one might say, are always and essentially created by someone else. They come—Arendt quotes Kafka—from “above,” as something that the individual “receives but does not create.”24 The “they” that creates the norms and categories, however, as we have seen, is not any real group of actual people but hypothetical, a projection by the parvenu or conformist not acknowledged as such. Social norms are always created and imposed by someone else, someone superior, yet this someone does not really exist. There may be real elites; there surely are real other people; but the social “they” is a myth, constructed out of the parvenu’s inauthentic deference: because I cannot make or assess norms and categories myself, the rules must come from elsewhere. That is what makes Kafka’s metaphor, already cited from one of Arendt’s New York essays, so wonderfully apt: “society is a nobody in a dress suit” (Arendt 1978: 82 n.). It is “in a dress suit” because men wear tuxedos only for formal, ceremonial social occasions, and the sartorial details of the dress suit are specified only by tradition, without any functional purpose whatsoever. Society is “in a dress suit” because external forms devoid of meaningful content are all that matters socially, all there is. Unlike political categories, social ones define their members entirely and exhaustively, so the social is best illustrated where inner substance is totally lacking. The stiffly starched shirt-front of the dress suit can in fact stand up by itself, even if it is literally empty. In Kafka’s metaphor it contains “a nobody” both because the social man has absented himself, abdicating his powers and individuality, and because the social “they” he claims to obey is nobody, is merely hypothetical and projected. The point is made more explicitly in Arendt’s unpublished 1965 lectures, where she says that “the greatest evil” is that “committed by Nobodies,” that is, by “human beings who refuse . . . to be persons,” who do not think about what they are doing or what they have done. By this refusal they fail “to constitute themselves into somebodies,” into “persons.”25 The idea is also strikingly reminiscent of passages in Kierkegaard, where Arendt is likely to have encountered it well before she found it in Kafka, so that Kierkegaard may be another (very Christian) source of the idea of the social. He calls it “the public” and says it is “a monstrous nothing [that] cannot even be represented, because it is an abstraction.” It consists of “unreal individuals who never can be united in an actual situation or organization,” because people belong to it only at those “moments when they are nothing.” Whenever they are their authentic selves, they are no longer part of it. In the modern world, more and more people “aspire to be nothing at all,” to merge into “that abstract whole formed . . . by [each participant] becoming a third party (an onlooker).” Yet they are in fact participants whose activities result in concrete consequences, so that their collectivity is not really

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nothing: it is “a kind of gigantic something, an abstract and deserted void which is everything and nothing.”26 Social norms, then, are inherently empty and arbitrary, yet they must nevertheless be taken with the utmost, passionate seriousness. If they are to be social, their emptiness and arbitrariness must not be acknowledged as such, for that again would imply judging them autonomously. Social norms must be obsessively pursued and social classifications passionately applied as definitive, not for their substantive content or practical consequences, but because of their supposed source— the always superior “they” to whom deference is due. The social attitude, as we learned in Rahel Varnhagen, requires not just outward conformity but “a strenuous effort to love”—to love not the content of the norms but their source, one’s social superiors.27 Deference or obedience aimed at some independent practical purpose does not qualify as social. If, as a member of the Resistance, I worm my way into some high-ranking Nazi’s social circle to spy on him, my careful conformity to its norms is not conformism, nor is it social behavior in Arendt’s sense. Social behavior, like the refugee’s pathological instant “adjustment” to each new country, is not the realistic readiness to do what the situation requires but on the contrary an altogether unrealistic propensity to “adjust in principle to everything and everybody.”28 As for Varnhagen, so more generally in the social, “real” means whatever society acknowledges as real.29 Social norms and categories must be taken with the utmost seriousness precisely because they cannot be independently assessed or compared with reality. Without them, neither self nor world exists for the parvenu. This paradoxical combination of arbitrary norms with passionate commitment, third, accounts for the recurrent theme of deception, illusion, hypocrisy, and pretense associated with the conformist, or parvenu, social. We have followed that theme from the parvenu’s hypocritical efforts in the salon and the deceptive promises held out to him by society, through the refugee’s false optimism and denial of his real condition, to that bourgeois hypocrisy which so repelled various groups in The Origins of Totalitarianism as the early bourgeoisie erected a “whole world of fake security, fake culture, and fake life” by publicly “parading” virtues which it not only did not possess but actually “held in contempt,” until we arrived at totalitarianism’s use of ideology to create an “entirely fictitious world.”30 In the social, the element of pretense or deception has become so pervasive that, in a sense, it disappears. There no longer is any independent reality that anyone can perceive or use as a check on social conventions. Each looks to others, or rather, beyond the real others to some hypothetical “they,” to define reality, and—as Arendt wrote to Jaspers during the controversy over her Eichmann book—“each believes what all believe.”31 Utterly isolated and denying their own capacity for initiative and organization, such people cannot act effectively in the world. Instead, they conduct themselves as if they were unindividuated parts of some undifferentiated, gigantic mass and helpless in its grasp. So no one is in charge. This vision of the parvenu social at first seems altogether unrelated to the other version of the social, which centers neither on status, conventions, and rules nor on false appearances, deception, and hypocrisy, but instead on harsh necessity, biology,

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and nature: overwhelming physical realities that impose themselves independently of human will or custom. Indeed, this economic, or biological, social, rooted in the “Imperialism” section of The Origins, is not even connected with the ordinary meanings of the words “society” and “social” in any obvious way. Yet in The Human Condition it has become the more important half of a dual concept, Arendt repeatedly insisting that the social means economics. Thus she equates “the rise of society” with “the rise of the ‘household’ (oikia) or of economic activities to the public realm” and membership in society with playing a central role in its “all-important economic activities.”32 This further connects the social with biology, since household functions are “those related to the maintenance of life” (Arendt 1974a: 28). In the household, and thus later in society, people are “driven by their wants and needs,” which means by “the driving force [of] life itself.” For the same reason, the social connects with labor, since both the productive labor that supplies food and shelter and the reproductive labor by which women give birth are “subject to the same urgency of life” that rules over “the realm of the social” (Arendt 1974a: 30–31). Accordingly, society is “the life process itself . . . channeled into the public realm,” or the “public organization” of that biological force (Arendt 1974a: 45–46). A “social viewpoint” is one taking “nothing into account but the life process” (Arendt 1974a: 89). Rising or channeled into the public realm, this life process is the life of the collectivity, not of individuals. Here “the life of society as a whole, instead of the limited lives of individual men, is considered to be the gigantic subject of the accumulation process” (Arendt 1974a: 116). And not just “considered to be”; the collectivity in fact becomes a “monolithic” unity (Arendt 1974a: 46). The “‘communist fiction’” invented by the classical economists has “by no means remained an intangible entity” but has been made actual in the world (Arendt 1974a: 256). This was accomplished by the industrial revolution, which presupposed the division of labor, which in turn required the emergence of labor from the household, from the “private realm,” where it had previously been subject to “restrictions.”33 When society “first entered the public realm,” it disguised itself as “an organization of property-owners” seeking protection for their “accumulation of more wealth” (Arendt 1974a: 68). It thus seems indisputable that Arendt is talking about the development of wage labor and a market society, so that a central model for her biological version of the social seems to be the market itself: people so organized that each is arrayed separately and competitively against the rest, yet all affecting each other so that their individual activities result in large-scale consequences that none of them can control or even intentionally influence. These consequences therefore confront them with an absolute necessity even though these individuals, regarded collectively, are the market.34 Although primarily and originally economic, this market model of human organization can be applied to all sorts of processes and systems in which “values” are collectively produced by a system of exchange among individuals. Indeed, in a commercial society, ultimately “everything becomes an exchange value, a commodity.”35 When standards, norms, or institutions “become entities of exchange”

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in such a marketlike system, as Arendt put it in an article written while she worked on The Human Condition, “the bearer of their ‘value’ is society,” rather than any particular human being “who produces and uses and judges.”36 This market model of human collectivity does seem close to one familiar use of the word “society,” namely “civil society,” as that notion is developed in Hegel and Marx and their successors. By “civil society” they mean arrangements in which each pursues his own particular, private good (or that of “his” enterprise or “his” family), treating others only as obstacles or means, in a system of unacknowledged interdependence whose resultants confront them all as an alien, inexorable force.37 For Hegel, this atomized mass of conflictual activity has to be unified into a harmonious whole by the state, epitomized in a neutral, professional civil service. Marx rejects this account, along with the political economists’ “invisible hand” of the market, as a myth of harmony that disguises exploitation. The real good of all without exploitation, he thinks, can be achieved neither by the market nor by the state through its bureaucracy, but only by the “associated producers” jointly regulating their “interchange with Nature,” after the revolution.38 Arendt accepts neither Marx’s nor Hegel’s view. She agrees with Marx that bureaucracy and the state are no better solutions than the market, yet she equally rejects Marx’s vision of harmonious collective regulation. For her, the social includes not just the shift from oikia to market but also centralized control of the market in a sort of “gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping.”39 Gunnar Myrdal’s 1953 study, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory, seems to have exercised a decisive influence on Arendt here. This work, which she calls “brilliant,” criticizes proponents of the idea of a “national” or “social economy” (in German, Volkswirtschaft, which Myrdal translates somewhat loosely as “collective housekeeping”) for falsely assuming that there is a unified entity called “society” that has but a single economic interest, by analogy with “the individual who runs his own or his family household.”40 Neither Myrdal nor Arendt questions whether a family household is itself a “unified entity” with “but a single interest” or whether the other members of “his” family household are not also (“the”) individual(s).41 Myrdal’s introduction of the term “housekeeping” for a centrally administered economy may well have connected, for Arendt, with Aristotle’s distinction between political and household rule; at any rate, she adopted the expression. For Arendt, then, bureaucratic administration is no solution to market problems but itself part of the problem. Markets and bureaucracies are fundamentally alike, equally social. In a bureaucracy, understood in Weberian terms as a hierarchical organization based on specialization of function and professional merit, each participant perceives, pursues, and is responsible for only his particular professional task, uncritically accepting instructions from above in all other respects, minding his own business. Bureaucracies deploy large numbers of people for efficiently and undeviatingly carrying out policies that are set and supervised elsewhere and transmitted to the organization by its “head.” Like markets, bureaucracies can be highly effective instruments for certain purposes. What neither markets nor bureaucracies can do effectively, however, is set goals, make overall judgments

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about policy, determine the direction in which a collectivity should move or the principles to which it is to be committed. Accordingly, Arendt opposes not markets or bureaucracies as such; they are two organizational forms among many. She opposes confining a human collectivity to only this sort of organizational device, and specifically, she opposes substituting them for politics. As a substitute for politics, bureaucracy—that “most social form of government”—means the “complete victory of society,” which is to say, being “ruled by an ‘invisible hand,’ namely, by nobody,” just like a market operating by laissez faire. But “rule by nobody is not necessarily no-rule.” Indeed, it may be one of the “cruelest and most tyrannical” forms of rule.42 When they pervade public life and displace politics, bureaucratic and market forms are alike, both equally social and entirely comparable to the flock of parvenus conforming to each other, milling about without human direction. And yet, not entirely comparable. Markets and bureaucracies are somehow worse, more dangerous, and perhaps even more “social” than the flock of parvenus. As we noted when the economic, or biological, social first appeared as imperialism in The Origins, unlike parvenu abdication in favor of some “they,” this form of the social involves abdication to a process, to a force that is moving, going somewhere. Economics and biology add to the notion of surrendering oneself an element of irreversibility. Here, if a parvenu should change his mind, he may find that it is too late; things have changed, moved on. Thus, by The Human Condition, “one of the outstanding characteristics” of the social is its “irresistible tendency to grow.”43 Here as in Marx’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice story, people use their powers in such selfish or foolish ways that they let loose an evil force they cannot control, a force bent on destroying those powers. They let loose the Blob. But does that story make sense? Here is the most crucial point for separating the Blob image from the demystified social. In the first place, as we have seen, such a neat chronological separation of free “before” and helplessly determined “after” does not work, because Arendt, like Marx, needs the present moment (“between past and future”) to be ambiguous, so that we are both trapped and yet free-to-become-free. Second, the notion of people somehow letting natural necessity or biological process into some space or realm from which these were previously excluded is not easy to translate into less metaphorical terms. It is hard to see how human conduct could affect such a metaphysical transformation. Certainly people sometimes allow some human undertaking—say, a cultivated field—to revert, as we say, to nature. But of course natural necessity, the regularities of physics and biology, governed that land while it was under cultivation just as much as before and afterward. Human activities do not escape natural necessity; in one sense they use it, in another sense they are part of it, and in still another sense it is conceptually irrelevant to them.

Necessity That is not to deny the logical difficulties inherent in the relationship between human action and nature and between freedom and necessity. Just for starters,

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there is the confusing bifurcation of meaning in the words “necessary” and “necessity,” which are synonymous sometimes with what is inevitable, sometimes with what is needed.44 Clearly, what someone needs is not inevitably present, will not even inevitably be sought. People do sometimes spurn even what is needed for life itself, whether in a good cause or in a fit of depression. When Arendt is being careful, she hedges her claims to allow for this ambiguity of meaning, speaking only of matters “urged upon” us by necessity or of being driven by “the urges of” necessity, or even of being driven by “wants and needs.”45 Wants, urges, and needs do drive people, but people can also resist them. At other times, however, Arendt is not so careful, and seems to equate necessity in the sense of needs with the inevitability of natural causation—the laws of physics and biology. Sometimes she just seems downright confused, as in her revelatory treatment of behaviorism, the social scientist’s quest for statistical regularities in human behavior. The topic matters, for it is one of Arendt’s few and sporadic efforts to link the economic, or biological, to the conformist, or parvenu, social. What appears in the latter as behavior—anxious conformity to empty norms— seems irrelevant to the former, where causal necessity determines outcomes. But behaviorism is relevant, since it presupposes precisely the sort of observable regularities over large numbers of cases that characterizes natural science. Both conformist behavior and social-scientific behaviorism concern individuals abstracted from their individuality—observable conduct without effective agency. What Arendt has to say about behaviorism, however, is deeply inconsistent. The statistical uniformity sought by behaviorism, she first says, “is by no means a harmless scientific ideal” but instead is “the no longer secret political ideal of [our] society” (1974a: 43). Arendt calls it a political ideal presumably to emphasize that this search for inevitabilities governing human conduct is not itself inevitable but, as she says, “willful,” based on an “assumption” that we need not and should not make and on an unacknowledged (though “no longer secret”) “aim to reduce man . . . to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal” (1974a: 42, 41, 45; my emphasis). Thus behaviorism is not just blind to human action but committed to replacing it by behavior. Yet Arendt herself notes as an “unfortunate truth” that “the more people there are, the more likely they are to behave,” and the human population is surely growing (1974a: 43). By the end of The Human Condition, she is warning that “the trouble with” social-scientific “theories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong but that they could become true” (1974a: 322). She means, of course, that people who believe that they are conditioned, behaving particles will not use their capacities for action. But that is not enough to make the “theories of behaviorism” true, for the unused capacities still exist, as Arendt herself underlines. “Needless to say, modern man” has not lost his human capacities, is not even “on the point of losing them” (1974a: 323). That the problem is not the disappearance of human capacities but the failure to use them is fairly obvious in the conformist social. Rahel Varnhagen and refugees with a mania for “adjusting” are social not because they are causally determined

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but because, although capable of action, they do not act. But the same is also true, though less obvious, in the economic social. Anti-Semitism and racism are destructive in politics not because they somehow “let loose” biology in this “realm” but precisely because they pretend to, presenting as biological and inevitable what is in fact human convention. Imperialism is not a natural growth but on the contrary means adopting as a human policy goal the sort of unlimited growth that sometimes characterizes nature. And the laboring mentalité is dangerous not when people face natural necessity but precisely when they don’t, when that outlook is “generalized” into contexts where action would be appropriate and possible. In short, the social—even in its economic, or biological, version—is not the intrusion of causal necessity into human affairs but the conjuring up of what Roberto Mangabeira Unger has called “false necessities.”46 Arendt is not protesting against our generic human helplessness but fighting against illusions of helplessness, the spurious naturalization of matters that are in fact subject to human choice and action. The social resides in the disparity between what people do because they see it as actionable and what they fail to do because they don’t so see it: disasters that could have been averted, benefits that could have been achieved, and above all, troubles that people are needlessly inflicting on themselves.47 So at the heart of the economic social, which at first seemed utterly unrelated to the issues of false appearance, deception, and hypocrisy that characterize the conformist social, lies a gigantic falsehood, indeed, the very same falsehood as is central to the conformist social: the denial of human agency. Despite all of Arendt’s talk about necessity, nature, and process, the real issue is their simulacra: false necessity, spurious naturalization, pretended inevitability, self-imposed helplessness. And this is as true of the economic as of the conformist social.

Institutional structure Nevertheless, there is something particularly problematic about the economic social that makes it seem more dangerous and less easy to undo than its conformist version, something that Arendt tried to express by picturing it as a surrender to process, to “necessity in motion.”48 That something, however, is not natural necessity let loose in human affairs, but rather what sociologists call “social structure.” In order to avoid confusing it with Arendt’s “the social,” however, I shall call this feature of human collectivities “institutional structure.” The conformist version of Arendt’s social arose as a problem of individual character. Pariahs chose to become parvenus; Arendt summoned them back to conscious pariahdom and to the recognition that the powerful society they sought to mollify was a paper tiger. Yet there also lurked in the background society in a different sense, which wielded real power, making people into pariahs and perhaps even into parvenus. Still, as long as one thought in terms of conformist character, parvenus might change their minds, like Varnhagen at the end of her life, Arendt’s fellow inmates at Gurs rejecting a suicide pact, or apolitical intellectuals who joined the Resistance. An individual parvenu has a character problem, but character

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can change, and the instant it does, the parvenu regains access to his unused capacities. The conformist individual translates into the social only if one imagines large numbers of them, a whole collectivity made up entirely of parvenus. The economic social, by contrast, was from its first appearance systemic, large-scale, impersonal, collective. It was limitless expansion adopted as a public policy, household production developed into a market, people deployed in a bureaucracy. It was never a problem of character, for systems of human interrelationship have no psyche of their own and no character. Instead of character, what they have is structure: a particular, established “web of relationships,” patterns of institutional organization and habitual practice. Now, institutional structure, as Arendt would hasten to stress, is not physical structure; institutions are not buildings. They consist only in the patterned conduct, the relationships, of their participants. Nevertheless they have a certain fixity or inertia of their own, and they can coerce recalcitrant participants. Consequently institutional structure greatly complicates the issues of agency, blame, necessity, and freedom, and thus the possibilities for undoing the social. The conformist social, conceived as a flock of parvenus, does not appear to be structured; it seems a mass of unrelated particles somehow compressed into an undifferentiated total unity. Indeed, in The Origins this was how Arendt saw modern mass society altogether: identical, “atomized” until congealed into a single, “unorganized, structureless mass,” like “a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth.”49 Totalitarianism, she argued, works to dissolve structure, disorienting and isolating people by keeping everything in flux. By The Human Condition, however, and particularly in the economic version of the social, she recognized this pattern of collectivity as itself a form of institutional structure or cluster of such forms—flock, market, bureaucracy—all of which appear structureless to their participants, who feel, and therefore conduct their intentional activities, as if they were unrelated, inert atoms caught up helplessly in a Blob. The participants’ isolation with respect to their intentional activities leaves them incapable of joint action or power. That is the sense in which Arendt says that “to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act” and that whoever “isolates himself . . . forfeits power and becomes impotent.”50 Yet it is crucial to recognize that, on Arendt’s own account, these are not particles but people, that they are not in fact isolated but structurally interrelated, and that they are not inert but very busy, like the frantic, obsessive parvenu. What they are all busily doing constantly results in the social conditions that constrain them all. So the conformist and the appeaser help sustain oppression, the entrepreneur contributes to market fluctuations, and the bureaucrat “only following orders” makes genocide possible. Various forms of institutional structure can produce and perpetuate a condition as if people were inert and isolated particles congealed into a single, “monolithic” unity, which is not a motionless monolith but a moving force constraining them all even though they jointly produce it, because they conduct themselves in ways that preclude their directing or taking charge of it (Arendt

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1974a: 46). Their conduct constantly produces it; it enforces that conduct. That circularity is the social; they are “driven by a process” that consists in their own conduct (1974a: 134). In this sense, the social is a particular mode of interrelationship among people, a form of togetherness in which each thinks himself an isolated atom and behaves accordingly, but they in fact generate collective results that include the continual enforcement of such thinking and behavior on each other, and thus their “normalization” into homogeneity. That is why Arendt speaks of them both as isolated atoms and also as congealed together too tightly, into a mass.51 For Arendt, this social way of living together stands in sharpest contrast to the political way, in which autonomous and responsible individuals, recognizing their objective interdependence, jointly take such charge of it as human beings can— which of course is never perfect, complete, or lasting. The social kind of “unitedness of many into one is basically antipolitical; it is the very opposite of the togetherness” characterizing political membership.52 What people do as individuals has joint, large-scale effects in the world insofar as they simply “live together.” But when they are politically engaged, they do “not merely live, but act together.”53 So acting together, which Arendt also sometimes calls “coacting,” “concerted action,” or—somewhat misleadingly—“acting in concert,” cannot simply mean jointly producing large-scale results; the social does that as well.54 Acting together has to mean something like jointly taking intentional charge of those results, effectively taking responsibility for them. This too involves institutional structure, but it is not social in Arendt’s sense. Because of the systemic nature of institutional structure, individual participants in it may find themselves constrained to behave in certain ways—in order to survive, to keep their dependents alive, or to have any significant effect in the world. And their constrained behavior, in turn, helps to coerce others. This will be true even if they are not by character parvenus, even if a parvenu changes his mind, even if an individual does not believe in what he is doing. Here, by contrast with the conformist social, changing your mind or even your individual conduct is not enough. Here an individual who says “I can’t help it. There’s nothing else I can do” need not necessarily be inauthentic or hypocritical like the parvenu; he may simply be realistic. “Rule by nobody is not necessarily no-rule,” Arendt said.55 And this was Marx’s point, too, in distinguishing his view of the market from Feuerbach’s view of the gods: the gods are imaginary beings without independent power, but the market is real, not just humanly imagined but humanly created in fact, and it has genuine coercive power over its participants, even though it consists only in their structured activity. This is not the intrusion of natural causation or biological necessity into human affairs. People can and sometimes do opt out of institutional structures, though only at great cost, and therefore rarely. But even the individual who opts out is powerless alone to change the structure or to prevent it from continuing to constrain the rest. Viewed collectively, however, these same individuals undoubtedly could change much about what they are collectively doing and forcing on each

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other. Together with a sufficient number of others, the individual participant can do a lot to alter social structure. Not just any and everything, of course, in just any way; not even a politically articulated free community is omnipotent. As Arendt will put it later, the sphere of politics is always “limited by those things which men cannot change at will.”56 Still, viewed collectively, these individuals could change a lot about what they do, far more than any them can change alone. The range of what an individual can effect in institutional structure is quite limited; the range of what the collectivity can do is very broad. The collectivity, however, is subject to far greater inertia than the individual. To change institutional structure intentionally, a large number of individuals would have to change their minds and their conduct more or less at the same time, in more or less correlated ways. There is a coordination problem.57 So collectively these individuals are and are not helpless. They could change the institutional structure they constantly reproduce by their conduct, and change it intentionally, if only they could (re)organize themselves. What therefore becomes crucial is the capacity to form new relationships, new modes of relationship, people’s capacity to innovate institutional structures jointly. That is what Tocqueville called “knowledge of how to combine,” or “the art of being free,” and what French people rediscovered in forming the Resistance, what Arendt called “action” and would later call “founding.”58 Such joint self-(re)organization, however, is precisely what the social rules out. So we have arrived a second time and by a different route at the same conclusion as emerged from mapping the social and behavior onto labor, work, and action. The social is Arendt’s way of talking about a collectivity of people who, though they are interdependent and active—their doings therefore continually shaping the conditions under which they all live—behave individually in ways that preclude coordinated action, so that they cannot (or at any rate do not) take charge of what they are doing in the world. The ambiguity between “cannot” and “do not” is, as we have noted before, crucial, since Arendt—like Marx and Tocqueville—needs to have it both ways with respect to our present moment: that we are right now both unfree (or there is no real problem) and free-to-become-free (or there is no hope). As Reinhardt says, “read in this way, the social is no longer incapable of politicization; rather, it cries out for it.”59

Some difficulties in this reading This, I suggest, is what Arendt’s social is when not mystified by the imagery of a Blob. In a way, this reading of the social, now attained twice by different routes, is utterly unsurprising—no more than a commonsense interpretation of the idea of a parvenu writ large, with institutional structure paralleling character structure, the social collectivity failing to acknowledge and use its powers as the individual parvenu fails to acknowledge and use his. Yet Arendt never explicitly says anything quite like this, and in several important respects this reading is surprising, indeed, even problematic.

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Somewhat surprising, first of all, is that on this reading the social is Arendt’s name for a particular condition that occurs in human collectivities. Whenever, for whatever reason, a human collectivity is in that condition, we have an instance of the social. Whenever the members of that collectivity, in whatever way, begin to take effective charge of the overall resultants of what they are doing, the social ipso facto disappears. Thus the social precludes politics not causally but logically, by definition. It does not destroy politics, swallow up freedom, wreck both public and private, intrude into some realm, or “substitute behavior for action”; it is the absence of action, politics, freedom, public and private from contexts where these would be possible and desirable.60 So the social does not do, or cause, or explain anything. It is not an agent, not a Blob. Instead, it is a condition that itself needs to be explained. Why and how have we modern people gotten ourselves into such a fix that we cannot—or at any rate do not—take effective charge of our own conduct on the large scale when it causes us problems? We shall return to that question in a sketchy way.61 Meanwhile, there is a second, even more troubling respect in which our reading of the social is surprising and problematic. It seems to run diametrically counter to a basic, repeated Arendtian claim. If the social is people who have no control over the large-scale consequences of what they are doing, then politics is the effort to achieve such control. But Arendt often insists that, precisely in action and politics, consequences cannot be controlled, directed, or even foreseen. Our expectation that they might be, she says, derives from the realm of work, where the intended product, the work (for example, of art) is the point, and workmanship lies in controlling this outcome. In work, such control is possible because the worker deals only with inanimate materials, not with fellow creators, so that he “remains master of his doings from beginning to end.”62 Action, by contrast, “produces” only relationships with other actors and creators and does not terminate in any fixed, objective product, so its “consequences are boundless” and it “lies altogether outside the category of means and ends.”63 Actions thus do have consequences—“boundless” ones—but the notion of consequences is problematic in relation to action in a way that it is not in relation to work. What, exactly, was done, and with exactly what consequences, are questions always in principle contestable among fellow actors.64 Actions initiate or change relationships; they “prompt” or “condition”—though they do not “cause”—further actions by others.65 This means that someone who acts “always becomes ‘guilty’ of consequences he never intended or even foresaw” and that one can “never . . . foretell with certainty the outcome and end of any action.”66 Subsequent actions both are and are not part of the outcome or consequences of earlier ones, making guilt problematic, which is why Arendt places the word within quotation marks. These complexities are what prompt Arendt to say that human beings “have never been and never will be able to . . . control reliably” what they “start through action.”67 Nevertheless, she clearly recognizes that actions do have (something like) consequences, of which the actors are (something like) guilty when the consequences do harm. And that implies—logically must imply—that those consequences could

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have been (to some extent) controlled, directed, or intentionally influenced by the actors. None of Arendt’s critiques or strictures would make sense otherwise. If changes in our nonmaterial world bore only a random relationship to our intentions and efforts, if our “actions” simply befell us or popped out of us like hiccups, there could be no such thing as action, no distinction between action and behavior, no way of identifying this as “so-and-so’s deed.” There would be no point in worrying about parvenu scoundrels, about the totalitarian effort to destroy all “consequence and responsibility,” about amor mundi, unless people can intentionally do something about them.68 In countless passages, moreover, Arendt herself referred explicitly to the consequences of action and called on readers to take responsibility for them. She did so in the early New York essays, insisting that “the circumstances under which we live are created by man,” so that the evil which people commit “can and must be prevented” by people as well.69 She was still doing so near the end of her life, as she praised the New Left for its “goals” (another notion that makes no sense unless actions have something like controllable consequences) and its members for their desire to “change things by [their] own efforts” but also criticized them when they seemed insufficiently concerned about “the eventual consequences of [their] demonstrations,” those actual, “practical political consequences” for which they bore “direct responsibility.”70 Our primary concern, however, is not with these early and late writings but with Arendt’s concept of the social in The Human Condition and her insistence there that the consequences of action cannot be controlled. The problem is whether that insistence can be reconciled with the argument of this chapter about what the social is. Two distinctions are helpful here: first, the difference between Arendt’s concern for individual uniqueness and her concern for action, and, second, the distinction between individual action and the politics of a collectivity. Let us take them in turn. Arendt sees the social as a double threat, endangering both unique individuality and spontaneous action. Clearly these two threats are related, but sometimes individuality matters as prerequisite to action, and at other times action is valued as serving individuality. When Arendt presents individual uniqueness as the ultimate value to which action is a means, worldly consequences seem almost irrelevant. Fellow citizens are an audience before whom the individual actor performs, hoping to do something memorable and achieve immortality through them. Politics is a tool for individual self-realization, and the social is mainly a homogenizing agency.71 When, instead, Arendt presents action as the real goal, which presupposes individual uniqueness as a means, fellow citizens appear as co-actors rather than audience, and politics is primarily about founding and sustaining our shared world, rather than about oneself. Then the consequences of action—its worldly results—are its real point, and the social means collective impotence. The former perspective tends to emerge when Arendt is explicating the view of the ancient Greeks, with their agonistic, narcissistic emphasis on heroism as immortality. The latter perspective emerges from the Resistance experience.72 Clearly, our interpretation of the social

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fits better with the latter than with the former, though even heroism presupposes intentional action. But in any case, the fact that Arendt has dual perspectives here demonstrates that she cannot mean flatly and simply that action has no consequences or that those consequences are altogether beyond intentional human influence. The second helpful distinction here is that between individual action and political acting together or coacting. Arendt’s insistence that the consequences of action can never be controlled occurs mostly in the context of isolated individual action, suggesting that it is particularly important for the individual agent to recognize that he is not unique or sovereign, not the only one capable of action and thus in control, but one among peers. Individuals need to be reminded that they act into a web of relationships with fellow agents, each of whom is capable of responding in unexpected and creative ways.73 A politically articulated collectivity, by contrast, though of course it must respect the individuality of its members, does not need reminding of its limitations in quite the same way as the individual agent. Indeed, in joint political action, its members can achieve at least a degree of something like control over the consequences of what they do, which is to say that individuals can sometimes do jointly what they cannot do separately. Joining together freely in mutual commitment, people can achieve a certain “limited independence” from that “incalculability of the future” which otherwise characterizes action. When they are thus conjoined in political action, Arendt says, “sovereignty” and control over what they are doing assume “a certain limited reality.”74 It is not just that Arendt is ambivalent and ambiguous here, but the topic itself involves an inescapable tension. Action is intentional; it must have (something like) consequences that the actor can (to some extent) control, direct, or intentionally influence, or there could be no such thing as action. Yet notions like consequences really do work differently in relation to action than in relation to work on inanimate matter, and the difference does involve the autonomy of one’s fellow actors, who share in interpreting one’s action and whose interrelationships are the medium in which action takes place. Perhaps one should take refuge here in Arendt’s sometimes carefully qualified phrasing: unable to “control reliably,” unable to foretell “with certainty,” achieving only “a certain, limited independence” from incalculability, and so on. Or perhaps one should distinguish proximate or “immediate” consequences from more distant ones, the former more controllable than the latter.75 Or perhaps “control” is simply the wrong word here. Yet each of the available alternatives—influence, direction, guidance, taking charge of, taking care of, seeing to, taking responsibility for—imports its own distinctive and problematic connotations. None is entirely satisfactory. Surely in both individual life and politics we do effect changes in the world and in our relationships, changes for which we bear, or share, responsibility—always contestable but nevertheless real. And our actions often go wrong; things rarely turn out exactly as we intended. So action and politics are like a series of adjustments, seeking to address perceived problems yet often giving rise to new ones at the same time. Control over consequences is never complete, certain, or beyond dispute; yet something like control—the ability to realize one’s intentions in the world—is an

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indispensable component of action and therefore also of coordinated action, of politics. Indeed, it is what distinguishes action from behavior and politics from the social. There remains, finally, a third way in which our reading of the social is surprising. Not only does that reading imply that the social explains nothing; not only does it conflict with Arendt’s insistence that the consequences of action cannot be controlled; but in addition, the social corresponds to none of the ordinary or dictionary senses of the words “society” and “social.” Surprisingly, Arendt’s notion of the social does not correlate directly with any of these two words’ familiar uses: high or respectable society, the social occasions at which its members gather, the social pages of the newspaper that report their doings, social climbing into their ranks, being a socialite, having a busy social life, attending a social occasion, sociability, one’s associates or social circle, an association, social class, social status, social services, social workers, social welfare, social issues, social norms, social diseases, antisocial behavior, social statistics, social science, sociology, or the sociological sense of “society” as meaning (almost) everybody. Even “civil society,” which seems closest to Arendt’s notion, also differs from it in important ways, since she strongly rejects both the Hegelian and the Marxist uses of that phrase. Both a Hegelian civil service and the automatic unity she ascribes to Marx’s postrevolutionary utopia are social to her. Arendt’s use of “the social,” moreover, is almost diametrically opposed to the idea of civil society deployed in the recent literature about the collapse of East European Communism.76 That literature continues the traditional contrast between civil society and the state, although it locates political freedom in the former rather than the latter. Arendt still occasionally used that traditional contrast in The Origins, as we saw, but never by the time of The Human Condition, and never with that notion of freedom. For her, the opposite of the social is not the state or government but politics and political action, which she understands in ways that are fairly close to what recent writers on Eastern Europe mean by “civil society,” or at least to what most interests them about civil society.77 No wonder, then, if Arendt’s teachings about the social are often misunderstood. Without being aware of it, she gradually worked herself into a highly idiosyncratic use of the phrase, one that was almost bound to mislead readers and that may even sometimes have confused Arendt herself. Her idiosyncratic usage may help to explain her hypostatization of the adjective as well. None of this is intended, however, to suggest that Arendt’s deployment of her phrase “the social” is arbitrary or illegitimate. Indeed, we have watched its derivation, step by step, from familiar meanings of “social” and “society,” by a series of ordinary semantic projections of a kind that all competent speakers of a language constantly employ in talking, writing, or thinking.78 “The social,” then, is not a very apt name for the problem Arendt meant to address; yet I know no better one. If the social demystified is a collectivity of people who, for whatever reason—whether because of their character, their institutions, or their ways of thinking—cannot, or at any rate do not, direct or even intentionally

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influence the large-scale resultants of what they are doing, one might say it is people conducting themselves as if they had been swallowed by some Blob that deprived them of their individuality and capacity for initiative, compacted them into an undifferentiated mass. Then the basic question of our study would become: How and why did “as if swallowed by a Blob” become, for Arendt, simply and flatly “swallowed by a Blob”? We are almost ready to address that question directly, but one further prior task remains. It will be useful to look briefly at Arendt’s writings, soon after The Human Condition, in which there no longer is any Blob, and the word “social,” though still centrally important, returns to its adjectival functions. Comparing these writings with The Human Condition, in effect, is still another way to investigate the Blob, by noting what difference in the argument results from its excision. The immediate result of removing the Blob, we shall see, is not a more effective and consistent theory but instead something close to theoretical chaos. The works immediately following The Human Condition, although highly interesting and important achievements, are also deeply inconsistent—not to say incoherent—at the theoretical level, in precisely that terrain which had previously been occupied by the Blob. If nothing else, the chaos revealed by its excision should help to keep us properly humble in relation to Arendt’s failures by showing just how difficult was the task she set herself.

Notes 1 Even the basic contrast of social and political gets shaggy around the edges as we learn that the social has its own characteristic “political form in the nation-state,” its own “form of government” in bureaucracy, and even its own characteristic, albeit “perverted,” version of “acting together” in lobbying and pressure politics; Arendt (1974a: 28, 40, 203; see also 29, 45). 2 Arendt (1974a: 40; see also 45). 3 Arendt (1974a: 126, 41; see also 219, 322). Actually, what Arendt (1974a: 126) says is, “It is frequently said that” ours is a “consumer society,” which “is only another way of saying that” it is a society of laborers; but she continues in a manner strongly suggesting that she herself shares this view. 4 Arendt (1974a: 205, 245). Note the internal quotation marks that Arendt puts around “moral standards,” rightly suggesting that this is so-called, merely conventional, rather than true morality. 5 See Arendt (1974a: 82) on “the homo faber mentality,” and Pitkin (1981: 342). See also Hill (1979: 318); Benhabib (1996: 139, 141, 145, 172). 6 Arendt (1974a: 9, 89, 46, my emphasis). 7 Arendt (1974a: 209; see also 214). 8 Arendt (1974a: 123; see also 47, 87–88). 9 Arendt (1974a: 185; see also Arendt (1977: 244, 271); Arendt (1978: 201–203); Hill (1979: 317–320). And see Lummis (1996: 46, 56): “The economy is . . . political, but pretends not to be,” a way of “depoliticizing political power.” 10 Arendt (1974a: 219). 11 Arendt (1974a: 39). Benhabib (1996: 141) holds that “the only tenable and productive way of distinguishing the social from the political is in the light of attitudinal orientations.” This interpretation, however, then leads her to conclude that the distinction “is untenable” (1996: 172).

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12 Arendt (1974a: 157). 13 On labor, see Arendt (1974a: 108, 120); on work, (1974a: 52, 94, 137). 14 Perhaps it also “produces ‘stories,’” as action does. Since behavior is by definition not distinctive, it may not generate any story worth telling, yet Arendt says “every individual life . . . can eventually be told as a story,” presumably including the life of even the most banal behaving conformist, e.g. Eichmann; Arendt (1974a: 184, my emphasis). 15 Arendt (1974b: xvi; see also 1974b: 94). The topic of guilt by inaction is discussed in Hannah Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” in Bernauer (1987: 43–45); see also Arendt (1965: 91, 233, 247); Arendt (1971: 417–446). 16 Arendt (1974a: 322). 17 Arendt (1978: 314, 317, 331). 18 Arendt (1974a: 43). 19 Arendt (1978: 248–249). 20 Arendt (1974a: 41). 21 Arendt (1969: 155). This essay, on Walter Benjamin, was first published in The New Yorker in 1968 as “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940.” 22 Arendt (1974a: 180; see also 176, 178, 213–214). 23 Arendt (1974a: 10, 177–81, 186, 211, 241–242). 24 Arendt (1978: 87). The Kafka passage allows a reading that implies reference to God, though Arendt’s use of it does not. 25 Bernstein (1996: 195 n. 21), citing Arendt’s unpublished lectures “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” in the Arendt Archives, Library of Congress. 26 Kierkegaard (1962: 60–64, emphasis in original). 27 Arendt (1974b: 199). 28 Arendt (1978: 63). 29 Arendt (1978: 177). 30 Arendt (1973: 328, 334, 362). 31 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence (1992), p. 523; Briefswechsel (1985), p. 559; to Jaspers, October 20, 1963. 32 Arendt (1974a: 33, 218). 33 Arendt (1974a: 47; see also 87–88). 34 On social value as equivalent to “exchange value” on the market, see Arendt (1969: 33); and Hannah Arendt and Kurt Blumenfeld, Korrespondenz (1995), p. 93, Arendt to Blumenfeld, November 16, 1953. One suspects here the influence of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1957), which first appeared in 1944, but though Polanyi was a European refugee who came to America, I have come across no direct evidence that Arendt knew him or read his work. Polanyi’s discussion of the rise of the “self-regulating market system” in the nineteenth century greatly resembles Arendt’s account of the rise of society. Polanyi, however, opposes what he calls “society” to this self-regulating market system; pp. 3, 71, 186. Prior to the nineteenth century, he maintains, not economic gain but all sorts of “social” motives governed human conduct; pp. 30, 46, 57, 67, 153, 250. Nevertheless Polanyi also says that the new market system led to a new way of conceiving society: as a natural phenomenon “subject to laws” comparable to those of physics or biology; p. 125. Social dislocations resulting from market fluctuations called people’s attention to “their own collective being,” and from then on “naturalism haunted” their thinking about public affairs; pp. 84, 126. Sometimes Polanyi even speaks of this not as a new way of thinking about society but as “the emergence of society in a new and distinctive sense,” and in one chapter title flatly as “the discovery of society”; pp. 84, 103, 111: Polanyi thus is another example of the ambiguities concerning the ontology of society we have seen in Arendt, Marx, and Tocqueville. 35 Arendt (1974a: 165); see also Arendt (1977: 221). 36 Arendt (1969: 32–33). This essay was first published in 1954 but is based on a series of 1953 lectures. See also Arendt (1974a 164–66). 37 On the concept of civil society in Hegel, see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 110, 122–23,

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

55 56 57

58 59 60

189, 266–267. For the same in Marx, see Marx and Engels (1979: 26–52, 101, 163, 222). Marx and Engels (1979: 441; the capitalization is the translator’s). Arendt (1974a: 28). Arendt (1974a: 44 n. 36, 28, 29 n. 13, 33 n. 24); see also (1974a: 165 n. 37). But cf. (Arendt 1974a: 8 n. 1, 39–40, 72 n. 80), where Arendt does see this as a problem. Arendt (1974a: 40, 44–45); see also Arendt (1965: 189); Arendt (1972: 29), where she borrows Tocqueville’s phrase, “tyranny without a tyrant.” Arendt (1974a: 45, my emphasis). The meaning of both “necessity” and “necessary” is sufficiently bifurcated that the Oxford English Dictionary groups their various senses (each assigned an arabic numeral) into two broad “branches” (each assigned a roman numeral). (Actually, there are three branches, but the third is minor and obsolete.) Arendt (1974a: 117, 135, 30, my emphasis); for other passages on necessity, see (1974a: 7, 13, 25, 30–32, 64–65, 72, 73, 83, 87, 97–99, 111, 115–117, 119, 177, 234, 255, 317). Roberto Mangabeira Unger, False Necessity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See also Canovan (1992: 23) on “pseudo-natural processes.” Arendt (1969: 170): “It is disaster, not salvation, which always happens automatically and therefore always must appear to be irresistible.” Arendt (1977: 113). Arendt (1973: 317, 315, 478; see also 318). Arendt (1974a: 188, 201). Arendt (1974a: 39–40, 46, 52–53, 182, 214); see also Arendt (1969: 89–90); Arendt (1973: 465–466); Arendt (1977: 86, 93–94, 107, 175). Arendt (1974a: 214). Note that in this passage the social unitedness also contrasts to “commercial” relations among people who are “unequal” (1974a: 214–215). Arendt (1974a: 246, 123). As Arendt will later put it, this turns “a more or less accidental proximity into a political, institution”; Arendt (1977: 267). It is the public counterpart to Augustine’s Christian, who turns the given into the chosen by freely choosing it, but even more like the conscious pariah, who ratifies his situation even though it is the product of an unjust dispensation, in order to fight against that dispensation effectively in solidarity with other pariahs. See also Arendt (1933: 36). Arendt (1974a: 123, 162, 189, 198, 200, 203, 208). Note, however, that all action is, in a sense, interaction or coaction, even if not intentionally coordinated; Hill (1979: 305, 310). See also Benhabib (1996: 111). The phrase “action in concert” may be misleading insofar as it implies a conductor, a composer, and a score; but perhaps if one thinks of a jazz concert, it will serve. Arendt quotes the phrase (1973: 254, 474) from Edmund Burke, Upon Party, 2nd ed. (London, 1850); but it is also found in (the English translation of) Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France (Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), p. 60. Arendt (1974a: 40). Arendt (1969: 263–264). This theme is of course central particularly to social contract theory, though the fantasy of starting over from scratch, all at once, is older still, as in Socrates’ proposal in The Republic to rusticate all adults and raise the children right. For a more fashionable version, cf. Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978). Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J.P. Mayer, trans. G. Lawrence (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 517, 240; Arendt (1977: 35, 92, 161, 204). Mark Reinhardt, The Art of Being Free (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 156; but cf. p. 158, where the social “also can be understood to be among the primary instruments through which politics in our time is carried out” (emphasis in original). Arendt (1974a: 45).

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61 See Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), ch. 12. 62 Arendt (1974a: 220); see also Arendt (1969: 78); Arendt (1994: 3). 63 Arendt (1974a: 190, 207, my emphasis; see also 144, 234). 64 Hence the importance of “representative thinking” (Arendt 1974a: 57–58); Arendt (1969: 241); Arendt (1982: 42–47, 62–77). See also Benhabib (1996: 113). 65 Arendt (1974a: 9–11, 177, 184, 190, 233). 66 Arendt (1974a: 233). See also Arendt (1972: 106). 67 Arendt (1974a: 232–233). Any number of Arendtian teachings seem to hang from this peg. It is the reason why we cannot “‘make’ something in the realm of human affairs— ‘make’ institutions or laws, for instance, as we make tables and chairs,” nor “make” history; (1974a: 188; see also 185–186, 228). It is why recognizing one’s fellow citizens as peers is crucial. It is why Arendt thinks that politics is not aimed primarily at legislation or even policy-making (1974a: 26, 32–33, 63, 189, 194, 196, 225). And it underlies her critique of Plato (1974a: 20–21, 225–226, 228, 230). 68 Arendt (1973: 445). 69 Arendt (1978: 108, 174); see also Arendt (1974b: 10); Arendt (1973: 480); Arendt (1974a: 184, 190). 70 Arendt (1972: 201–202, 227–228). 71 Arendt (1974a: 41, 175–180, 184, 194, 197–198, 206, 220); Arendt (1973: 438, 454–455); Arendt (1969: 171, 263); Arendt (1977: 108, 119); Arendt (1972: 202–203). Even seen from this perspective of individual self-realization, action “has consequences,” but these can be “consciously aim[ed]” at only if one is willing to accept a “premature death”; Arendt (1974a: 183, 193). 72 See particularly Arendt (1974a: 194); Arendt (1977: 281). 73 Arendt (1974a: 190–191, 233–234). 74 Arendt (1974a: 245). But cf. (1974a: 190), where the “consequences” of both individual and concerted action are “boundless.” 75 For example (Arendt 1974a: 184; my emphasis). 76 For recent concern with civil society, see Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, eds., Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992); Pierre Clastres, Society against the State, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Urizen, 1977); Steven M. De Lue, Political Thinking, Political Theory, and Civil Society (Boston: Allen and Bacon, 1997); Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty (New York: Penguin, 1994); John Keane, Democracy and Civil Society: On the Predicaments of European Socialism, the Prospects for Democracy, and the Problem of Controlling Social and Political Power (New York: Verso, 1988); John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State (London: Verso, 1988); Adam B. Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society (New York: Free Press, 1992); H. Gordon Skilling and Paul Wilson, eds., Civic Freedom in Central Europe (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991); Keith Tester, Civil Society (London: Routledge, 1992). 77 Arendt’s views thus resemble and yet differ profoundly from those in this “civil society” literature in ways that recapitulate the relationship of her thinking in the 1950s to the ideas of Nicola Chiaromonte and others of her friends and associates in the circle around Dwight Macdonald and the journal Politics. 78 Pitkin (1972: 61–63).

References Arendt, Hannah. 1933. Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, ed. Ursula Ludz. Munich and Zurich: Piper. Arendt, Hannah. 1965. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin. Arendt, Hannah. 1969. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

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Arendt, Hannah. 1971. “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture.” Social Research 38 (fall): 417–446. Arendt, Hannah. 1972. Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Arendt, Hannah. 1974a. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1974b. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Arendt, Hannah. 1977. On Revolution. New York: Penguin. Arendt, Hannah. 1978. The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman. New York: Grove. Arendt, Hannah. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1994. Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Harcourt Brace. Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage. Bernauer, James W. (ed.). 1987. Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt. Boston, Dordrecht, and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff. Bernstein, Richard J. 1996. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Canovan, Margaret. 1992. “The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought.” Political Theory 6 (February): 5–26. Hill, Melvin A. 1979. Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1962. The Present Age, trans. Alexander Dru. New York: Harper & Row. Lummis, C. Douglas. 1996. Radical Democracy. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1979. The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd edn. New York: W.W. Norton. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. 1972. Wittgenstein and Justice. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. 1981. “Justice: On Relating Private and Public.” Political Theory 9 (August): 327–352.

14 AN INTERVIEW WITH HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN

Intellectual formation and training Dean Mathiowetz: Where did you grow up and what did your parents do? Do you think of any particular aspects of your childhood as especially formative for the questions you have explored as a political theorist? Hanna Fenichel Pitkin: I grew up in Europe. My father, Otto Fenichel, was a psychoanalyst. My parents were both, shall we say, “unaffiliated intellectuals,” not professors, but both in their different ways teachers and certainly intellectuals, and of the Left. They were not members of the Communist Party, though my mother’s younger sister was, and they had friends who were either Party members or fellowtravelers like themselves. My parents certainly considered themselves Marxists, but critical Marxists, humanist Marxists, complicated Marxists. Not Party members, not because that would be a terrible thing to be, but because (as my mother explained to me), they weren’t obedient enough and orthodox enough. They thought for themselves. And, of course, we were Jewish, although not religious. (I think I’m third generation non-religious.) Anyway, for all those reasons Germany was not a good place to be in 1933 when I was two years old. At that point Hitler came to power, and my parents very wisely got me out of there. We went to Oslo, Norway, and lived there for a couple of years, and then for various reasons moved back to the Continent, to Prague, where we lived for another couple of years. And then we came to Los Angeles when I was six going on seven. My mother, Cläre (born Nathansohn), had been both an engineering draftsman, and a practitioner of what she called “body work.” She studied with Elsa Gindler. The work was about improving people’s relationships to their own bodies. She gave lessons, took patients or clients. When my parents divorced after we had been in this country for a couple of years, she needed to resume full-time work, and so she became a draftsman again, and that’s what she did until she retired.

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So, was all this formative for the questions I’ve explored? Yes! My goodness, yes. To begin, the refugee experience, the multi-lingual environment, the background in psychoanalysis, the interest in the body. And of course simply the intellectual background. I grew up with intellectual games and jokes and creative activities. My parents had artist friends and musician friends and friends involved in the theater, as well as kindergarten teachers and, of course, analysts. DM: Tell me more about your mother’s “body work” and its relation to your work. HFP: My mother thought that many people, most people, contribute to their own non-well-being, make themselves feel physically bad, by things that they are doing all the time with their bodies, to their own bodies: constricting here, or keeping tension there, without being aware of it. And so she would get people to pay attention to where their bodies felt uncomfortable and try to make that place more comfortable, and sometimes she would make suggestions about how to do that. But she found that as soon as people succeeded in doing that, immediately they would notice some other part of their body that craved attention. So my mother’s work wasn’t a matter of doing exercises, and mostly it wasn’t a matter of massage or anything like that; it was mostly about awareness, and then little gimmicks to help you ease the discomfort you become aware of, which opens the door to further awareness. Over time, this process changed people’s relationship to their own bodies in some of the same ways in which successful psychoanalysis changes your relationship to parts of your own mind. In both cases you’ve actually been doing something that hampers rather than helps you, although initially you began doing it because it seemed to help you, but later you’re not even aware that you’re continually doing it. DM: Is there any particular aspect of your work to which you might draw our attention in this respect? HFP: Well, what I’ve long been interested in, that echoes both psychoanalysis and Elsa Gindler’s work, is those problems and troubles that people impose on themselves, create for themselves, without knowing it or intending to—both individually and collectively. The latter, of course, is where Marx comes in, and politics, which is a community’s effort to take control of, or alleviate collectively the troublesome large-scale consequences, by-products of what they (or many of them) are individually doing—socially doing, as Arendt might say. There’s another sense, too, in which my parents’ dispositions may be present in my work. Both my parents had, in their different ways, a kind of down to earth matter-of-factness that I picked up, and that I look for in people. I don’t like the theorizing to be too high-falutin’ and pretentious. Or at least, I want the highfalutin’ and abstract stuff to connect with real people and real feelings and ordinary life and genuine needs as distinct from fancy imaginary needs. So, you know, it goes with a Marxian critique of ideology as mere superstructure compared to what people are actually doing to keep themselves alive. Marx and Freud, both of them, were confronting abstracted thought that was more of an escape from reality than a useful theoretical overview. So even as I became a theorist and dealt in abstractions,

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I also tried to stay with down to earth matter-of-factness, and connection to practical reality. Here’s a story about my father that makes the point. He was at a psychiatric conference, and analysts or therapists were discussing what it means and what to do if a patient falls asleep on the couch: how does this affect the transference? Should the analyst interpret? And so on. All very “professional” and pretentious. When my father’s turn came, he said, “I kick the couch.” DM: I know animals are important to you; you get a lot of pleasure in being with and thinking about animals. In some of your work you’ve focused on animal imagery, like in “Food and Freedom in the Flounder” and in Fortune is a Woman. How does this relate to the work you’ve been doing in political theory? HFP: Well, Grass’s flounder and Machiavelli’s lion and fox weren’t exactly introduced by me, were they? But it’s true that I enjoy animals and think about them a lot in connection with political theory, because we humans are obviously a kind of animal, and yet different from the rest in important respects, including (as Aristotle said) our conceptual language and our capacity and need for politics. You may know Dorothy Dinnerstein’s work, The Mermaid and the Minotaur, two mythical beasts that interest her because they are liminal creatures, half-human, half-animal, symbolizing our divided human nature: both biological and cultural. Small children and their acquisition of language are also a way to think about the role of culture in human life, as in the opening of Wittgenstein’s Investigations. The relationship between our biological embodiedness and our cultural and historical development is central for Freud and Marx, and also for Arendt’s critique of Marx. In Freud, there is the tension between his insistence on instinct or drives, and his therapeutic support for the patient’s conscious awareness and control of previously unconscious ideas. In Marx, the tension is between the seemingly determinist notion of “base” and “superstructure,” which Arendt criticized, and Marx’s political activism and stress on revolution. DM: In terms of other personal characteristics that come through in your work, those who know you are aware that you particularly enjoy wordplay and puns. Your writing, of course, places particular emphasis on ambiguity. HFP: The key word here is “play,” which connects with children, and in a way with animals, and certainly Freud has a lot to say about it. “Theory as thoughtplay”—there’s a slogan for you. Theory isn’t exactly a kind of play; that’s not a definition, but it is a characterization of good theorizing, of any kind of creativity. When it comes to politics and political theory, a kind of thought-play about something very serious, as indeed much play is about something very serious. Especially children’s play, and play-acting, are often a kind of practicing, getting ready for grown-up concerns. Play and creativity are about a certain kind of staying in touch with childhood. Not with what we usually consider childish, but as a way of access to the unconscious, a way of sublimating, that is, of dealing consciously and productively with something that’s important and problematic in your unconscious.

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Another thing that feeds into my punning is, of course, my childhood travel as a refugee. I went through four languages before I was seven years old. I didn’t become fluent in four languages, only two; but all this exposure to languages makes you very self-conscious about language. It makes you think about translation problems in your conversations with other people, and conversations with your parents, taking place in two languages, often mixed together. This sets you up for punning. And if in addition those relationships are full of play, which they were, because both my parents (having had happy childhoods, at least in the sense of multiple siblings, with a child-culture in the house) liked to play. They liked to make up poems, sing songs, do puzzles, joke around, and ask questions, read books and read aloud to each other. So, multiple languages going, and people who like to play, add up to puns and with that, an appreciation for ambiguity too. DM: What was your experience like as an undergraduate at UCLA in the early 1950s? HFP: When I started at UCLA, I was living in Los Angeles with my mother, and I was going to major in mathematics, because I had done well with that in high school. When I was getting ready to go to UCLA, I remember reading the catalog and being stunned and overwhelmed by all that was being offered. I wanted to study everything! I was going to major in math because that was something I knew I could do well. DM: That surprises me a little, after your fondness for puns and the richness of ambiguity, as we were just saying; mathematics seems to value quite the opposite. HFP: Well, not exactly; do you know any mathematicians? They are quite different than, say, engineers, or statistically inclined social scientists. They are marvelously strange, creative people. DM: Did you know this when you were thinking of going into mathematics? HFP: No. But maybe the connection you’re looking for between mathematics and puns is games. If you enjoy games, mathematics is not so far from puns. DM: So how did you end up going toward political science? HFP: When I looked at the UCLA catalog it turned out that, at that time, if you wanted to be a math major, there were certain lower-division undergraduate requirements that you had to fulfill, like a year of serious chemistry. I had absolutely hated high-school chemistry. And I had at that time a friend who was in graduate school, and he sort of was my advisor. He said, “Listen, a major doesn’t matter. It’s just a formality. Major in something that doesn’t have a lot of requirements, and you can take as many math courses as you want. I know you’re interested in public affairs, so why don’t you major in political science. It has hardly any requirements.” So I did. . . . And then once I got into political science, I found that they weren’t really talking about the things I wanted to learn. I did find a few intellectually interesting people, particularly in political theory and in public law. And so I took those courses, and then I took courses in philosophy, and in math and history and art history. DM: Whom among your teachers do you particularly remember? HFP: Yes, let’s honor Thomas Jenkin, who taught me political theory—I did the undergraduate, upper-division series in the history of political theory with him.

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Then, a young man in history named William Hitchcock, who taught entirely by discussion in an upper-division history course. He was just a genius at letting people talk about whatever was on their minds with regard to the assigned reading, and somehow making that discussion “work out” so that all the topics that needed to be covered were covered. J.A.C. Grant taught a brilliant course on the origins of the Anglo-American legal system. There was also Abraham Kaplan in philosophy—a very brilliant and witty teacher I greatly admired. And a math professor, Angus Taylor, who wrote such a superb textbook for calculus that I could get an A in the class just from reading it, hardly ever attending class (my graduate-student friends always met for coffee at that hour). DM: What led you to pursue graduate study? HFP: I guess first of all one has to say that I enjoyed and was good at undergraduate study, which is the reason many people continue into graduate work. I started at UCLA, did some of my undergraduate work at Berkeley, and then returned to UCLA to get my degree. By then, I was living with and ready to marry a man, and we planned to stay in Los Angeles one more year and then take a trip to Europe. And I thought, if I’m only going to do one more year of school, I’d like to have something to show for it, and so I should get an MA. I thought that the only field in which I could get MA in one year was political science. But then it turned out that we didn’t go to Europe, and my husband lost his job. While he had huge numbers of college course credits, they weren’t the right courses for a bachelor’s degree. Because we had both separately lived in Berkeley and liked it there, and he had friends there, we decided to move there, and that he should go back to school and finish his degree. I went to work as a statistical clerk, which is one of the ways I had supported myself as an undergraduate, too. Now I went to work at Kaiser Aluminum in Oakland. I was incredibly bored; the work that I was asked to do filled up maybe 10 percent of the time that I had to spend there. But when my husband’s fellow students came over and there were intellectual discussions, I had nothing to say. I felt as if my mind had emptied out. It was just horrible. So we decided that I, too, should go back to school. At that point, when I applied for re-admission, my letters of recommendation were all from political scientists. And I thought: I’ll need to apply in political science to get in. I can always change my field of concentration once I get in. So that’s how I ended up with a PhD in political science. DM: Clearly you decided to stay with the political science program. HFP: I think it was mainly inertia. I mean, I did like political theory and to some extent public law. But I was never fully engaged with or excited by my field until after I finished my degree. DM: What was the intellectual climate like at Berkeley? What left you unengaged until later? HFP: Having grown up in Los Angeles from the time I was six going on seven, and then having visited Berkeley in high school and then again later, I found Berkeley an amazing experience. For a European child, an adolescence in Los Angeles can be very difficult. Berkeley showed me that it wasn’t that there was

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something terribly wrong with me; it was that there was something terribly wrong with Los Angeles. There actually were places in the world where I might fit in. That is to say, politically left-wing, intellectually engaged, down-to-earth places, utterly unlike Hollywood, without all that fakery that was then (and I think probably is still) so pervasive in Los Angeles. Now, I’m sure there are pockets, and I know there are people in Los Angeles who don’t fit that mold, but that sure was my experience. So the intellectual and political atmosphere in Berkeley was very exciting for me. That’s the first and most fundamental thing to say. Berkeley was somewhere where I could be an adult without giving up the pleasure and intensity of childhood, without being alien to myself. Something like that. In terms of the university and the Department, I found some professors very interesting, and loved the general atmosphere, the stuff that was going on all the time off-campus and in the community: the performances, the lectures, my husband’s fellow students, the pioneering local listener-supported radio station, KPFA; it was just really great. And it was, of course, politically very active and engaged. The early ’50s is not that long after the Second World War. Immediately after the War, all of the young guys from the military came back to school under the G.I. Bill of Rights, and they just were older and more mature, and more seriously engaged with the world than kids straight out of high school. They demanded that courses address the real-world problems with which the students were concerned. Berkeley symbolized that for me too. DM: Any professors in particular, particular teachers, in political science or elsewhere, who made impressions on you in graduate school? HFP: Yes. I should mention in particular Sheldon Wolin in political theory, with whom I never took a course, but whose teaching assistant I was. Having already had Jenkin’s courses in the history of political theory, I plunged right in as a graduate student, and became Wolin’s teaching assistant. I learned from him enormously that way. And then, during my time in Berkeley as an undergraduate, I had met Stanley Cavell, who was then a graduate student elsewhere, and we liked each other. When I came back to graduate school at Berkeley, he was on the faculty in philosophy. He served on my dissertation committee. I didn’t actually ever take a course with him, which years later I discovered he didn’t appreciate. He understandably felt that it was kind of an imposition to expect him to guide me and explain things to me personally over coffee rather than in class. But he greatly influenced my thinking. DM: You wrote a dissertation on representation, which was later published as The Concept of Representation in 1967. This book is now considered a classic in political science. What brought you to this topic? HFP: While I was doing my year of MA work at UCLA, I took a seminar with Thomas Jenkin, with whom I’d taken the basic undergraduate course. There was just starting to be in academia an interest in the role of language in philosophy and political theory. T.D. Weldon’s book, The Vocabulary of Politics, had just appeared, and Jenkin had us read it in that seminar. We were each supposed to pick a concept and write a paper about it. He gave us a list of concepts to choose among. On

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the list was “representation,” and I ended up writing a paper on that. When I came back to graduate work at Berkeley, I was influenced very much by Cavell’s interest in language philosophy, especially the work of J.L. Austin or Ludwig Wittgenstein— though I myself didn’t encounter Wittgenstein’s writings until after I had finished my dissertation. I remember going to Sheldon Wolin and asking, “Do you think I could write a dissertation analyzing some concept in political theory?” And he said, sure. And I said, “Well, how about representation?”—in a slightly bored tone of voice. And so it was essentially, again, inertia and accident. DM: After you completed your dissertation, what then? HFP: While I had been writing the dissertation, I was intensely ambivalent about whether to do a PhD at all, because it’s very hard to write a dissertation. It’s really psychologically challenging. You put yourself on the line with incredible effort for an incredible amount of time, at least if you get in your own way, as I did. So I often considered what else I might do instead. For personal reasons, I didn’t want to leave the Bay Area. I looked only at what was possible around here. My first teaching position after completing my degree was at San Francisco State College. Then, for two years I temporized with a two-year terminal non-ladder position at UC, and when that ended, I needed to think about a job somewhere else. Again I thought “what else can I do?” My Communist Party aunt was by profession a journalist, and since I had done some work on the UCLA Daily Bruin as an undergraduate, and I was for almost my entire graduate time at Berkeley a volunteer in the news department at KPFA, I considered journalism. Monterey Peninsula College was going to start a college radio station, and they needed someone to direct it. I applied for that job, but in the end, it didn’t get funded. The next year, what was available was a job teaching political theory at the University of Wisconsin. I was in Madison for two years, and came back to Berkeley in 1966. By that time, the best part of the “beautiful revolution” phase of the Free Speech Movement was over, but there was still a lot going on in the student movement. DM: What memories have especially stayed with you of Berkeley from the mid- to late 1960s? How did the events of those days shape your teaching and writing? HFP: When I got back to Berkeley, because of the Civil Rights movement and the student movement, the world had to some extent come to meet me. It was a good time for me. I was much in sympathy with the students, especially with what had gone on in the two years that I wasn’t here, that I had only read about in the journals, like articles by two of my favorite professors, Sheldon Wolin and Jack Schaar. (I did not mention Jack Schaar when I was talking about formative influences earlier, because he was not a professor of mine, though I did serve as his teaching assistant one time. Eventually he became my husband.) He and Sheldon Wolin had become friends, and in the mid-’60s published some important articles about the student movement, which I read in Wisconsin, yearning to be back where the action was. I was impressed by the extent to which the students in the Free Speech Movement radicalized some of my teachers, both Sheldon Wolin and Norman Jacobson. Jack Schaar and Mike Rogin and I all had some background in radical

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politics, but Wolin and Jacobson were really good liberals and academics quite distant from left-wing politics, and I think from politics altogether. But they cared for their students, and like many people in Berkeley, including many students, they were radicalized by events. The other thing I remember from that time was the truly horrible conflict in the Department, between the political theorists and many important professors in other subfields. On days when there were Department meetings one always had a bellyache. That was, in the end, why Wolin and Schaar left the Department in 1970. DM: In the lore of the field, UC Berkeley Political Science in the 1960s and 1970s was home to a “Berkeley School” of political theory—made up of you and your colleagues, some of whom you’ve mentioned: Sheldon Wolin, Norman Jacobson, John H. Schaar, and also Michael Rogin. Do you think of this group as having formed a “school” in the usual meaning of that term? HFP: In my judgment there’s no such thing as the Berkeley School. There was a magical conjunction of some wonderful people teaching in the same place. It was marvelous to be a professor of political theory at Berkeley for the years that we were together. It had already been marvelous to study here earlier when just some of those people were here. But a “School” implies some sort of coinciding of interests or doctrine, or a guru surrounded by followers, or something like that. That simply was never the case. We did very different sorts of work. We respected each other’s work, and we enjoyed teaching each other’s students. In a way, having studied with one of us did prepare students, prepare the soil, as it were, for the planting of seeds by others of us. And, at various times and in various ways, we were friends as well. But we did very different sorts of research, and except for my following of Sheldon, we could not really have taught each other’s courses. DM: Well, in the narrative about there being a Berkeley School in that time, people often cite, maybe not a doctrine or guru, but a constellation of concerns: a central emphasis on direct action, or there being “the political” as distinct from political science’s emphasis on, say, psychology or economics, or political theory’s emphasis on philosophy. HFP: I challenge you to find anything about “the political” in Norman Jacobson’s writings, or in Michael Rogin’s writings, or even in Jack’s writings. Sheldon did have a lot to say about something called “the political,” and developed a distinction between “politics” and “the political” (which I think is hogwash). Norman, Jack, Mike, never talked about “the political.” I may have done so, a few times early on, but I never thought seriously in those terms. Wanting political theory to address politics is another matter. We all did want that, especially after the Free Speech Movement. Of course we thought of politics more broadly than many of our colleagues, who focused only on electoral politics, but that hardly makes it a “school.”

Research and writing DM: I’ve mentioned that your first book has become a classic. What do you make of its popularity?

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HFP: That’s very complicated. The reason it has become popular, of course, is that institutions of representation are now a lively political issue, especially in Europe. A few years ago I was given a prize by the University of Uppsala in Sweden specifically for this book. I was, of course, very honored, and thrilled. But it was an ambivalent matter for me: I’ve written a lot of books since that one. Why do you give me the prize for this book? It was as if they were saying: “She was very promising at the beginning; nothing very interesting has happened since then.” But I have an additional idea about why that book in particular. That book, perhaps unlike the later ones, proved useful to non-theorists in political science; and that was partly because in writing the dissertation, and maybe even during its publication as a book, I still had hopes for becoming an all-around political scientist. Thinking: “why can’t these people all just get along and think, if not in similar ways, at least in compatible ways? I’ll help them do that.” So it’s a more conventional book in the field than some of my later ventures. DM: Unlike, then, Wittgenstein and Justice. You mention, in the preface to that work, that you came to Wittgenstein’s work after more or less having finished the dissertation on representation. How did this book transform your thinking? What led you to write such an extensive and pedagogical work on Wittgenstein? HFP: I said earlier to you that I had not been very engaged with political theory or political science. It wasn’t getting at the issues that I vaguely sensed I wanted to address. It didn’t have any importance; it was about superficial formal institutions, and things like that. But Wittgenstein somehow showed me why it mattered, how it was connected to human history and language and Marx’s and Freud’s ideas. As I say in the introduction to that book, my first experience in political science after I had discovered Wittgenstein was intellectual loneliness, because there was no one to whom I could talk about his ideas; about the connections I thought were there and the importance I thought Wittgenstein’s ideas could have for political theory. So the book was written very much as a pedagogical text, so that I might have some political theorists, or people with that sort of interest, who knew something about Wittgenstein, so that I could talk with them about my ideas. DM: Fortune is a Woman seems to me to be your most complex book, considering the kinds of textual and historical materials that it draws on, the themes that it addresses, and the methods of interpretation that it deploys. Was there a particular theme, method, text, or question that drove you to Machiavelli’s work? Or were you compelled by some problem in his work that inspired you to bring together all of these themes and approaches? HFP: As with many of my extended writing projects, this book began with the intention of producing something small and manageable. A student’s response to one of my lectures on Machiavelli got me thinking that what I was doing in that lecture was original and worth writing up in an article. The lecture was not at all about Fortune as a woman; it was about Machiavelli’s conflicted visions of manhood, or manliness, but in ways quite different from the eventual book. As I was working on this article, I thought: here you are, you’re writing all this stuff on his visions of manhood; do you have the slightest idea of what was going on in his

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own family or in families at the time, how children were raised, and so on? I realized that I did not. So I pulled a couple of standard works off the shelf, works that I thought would tell me the answer, roughly, you know, for a footnote of one or two sentences. And damned if the two books didn’t contradict each other. And so I had to read further, and the footnote began to grow and grow, and soon the footnote was longer than the article. What had been intended as a footnote launched me on a research project. DM: Would you say your background in psychoanalysis is what helped you to see these conflicts in Machiavelli’s account? HFP: Well, yes, that, in combination with that I am female, and was in a very male profession: at that time much more exclusively male than now. I was brought up on Marx and Freud, but that didn’t apply, or play much of a role, in writing about representation or about Wittgenstein. It certainly first appears in Fortune is a Woman, but then continues in The Attack of the Blob. I was also influenced by the feminism among graduate students in the 1970s and ’80s, though my mother had been a feminist already in the 1920s, and in our home when I was a child it was taken for granted that one could be a woman and mother and an intellectual and a professional. DM: Speaking of that more recent book, The Attack of the Blob (1998) is on Hannah Arendt, though your critical engagement with her work reaches back to the early 1980s. Arendt was, of course, a very big deal to political theorists for those two decades. How would you say that your thinking about her work changed throughout that period? HFP: I think The Human Condition came out, or I first encountered it, while I was a graduate-student teaching assistant to Sheldon Wolin. It interested me because it seemed to coincide with some of the things that he was saying in lectures, and then in addition it interested me specifically because she’s so critical of Marx, and yet, what she herself seemed to be saying (reading her through what Sheldon Wolin was saying), sounded to me very like Marx—the sort of Marx that my parents had been talking about. The contrast between her severe criticism on points where I thought Marx would have agreed with her interested me. And then, The Attack of the Blob really grew in the same sort of way in which the Machiavelli book grew. I had committed myself to write a paper for a panel for the American Political Science Association meeting, thinking: well I can write this short paper on the peculiar thing that happens with “the social” in that book. I framed it to myself at the time as: “why does Hannah Arendt capitalize ‘the Social’ in The Human Condition?” It wasn’t until I was quite far along with the essay, when I actually went to the book to pick up textual evidence, that I discovered that she doesn’t capitalize “social” [laughs]! But I had the commitment, and I had to do the paper that eventually led to the book. DM: The way you describe coming to your work projects highlights the importance of bringing together serendipity and intellectual curiosity. What are you working on now? HFP: I have been working, for a long time now, surely over ten years, on the concept of authority. For a very long time, I was not sure whether I had anything

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like a book there, whether I had anything to say about the concept. It’s a very difficult concept. In retrospect it seems to me that with “representation” I lucked in: at some point its meaning became relatively clear, though God knows there were years of struggle involved. But now that I am retired (though still teaching when I want to), and widowed, I don’t have much else to do, so I’m giving it a try, to see whether I can’t produce a last book. I can say for sure that authority is proving to be a mysterious and difficult concept. Early on already, my question shifted from, “what is authority, really?” to something like, “why is it so difficult to say what authority is?” That was around the time when I discovered that even the Oxford English Dictionary does not define “authority.” They list eight (or, if you count subsections, twelve or thirteen) different senses of the term, each of which they do define; but they don’t define the word as a whole. So I’m not the only one who has trouble with what authority is. Originally I got on to this topic because I taught a course on power and authority; we did authority for a few weeks at the beginning, and then the course turned to power, which is a very difficult concept. After that, it’s a familiar story: at a certain point I was invited to give a paper to a certain group. I was asked months in advance, so it was easy to accept the invitation. I thought: I can do authority; that’s easy (compared to power). I know what I want to say about authority. What an illusion! By the time I was supposed to present the paper, I hadn’t even finished going through the basic literature, let alone knowing what I wanted to say.

Teaching DM: The trend in research universities is to separate teaching and research, pushing the research of ladder faculty, and employing more adjuncts to carry the teaching load. You have always maintained a close relationship to teaching, even while pursuing ambitious writing projects—and the way you describe coming to many of those projects reinforces the interdependence of teaching and writing. How do you understand and/or experience their relationship? HFP: The answer follows my usual pattern. On the one hand, yes, there’s limited time, and you have to divide it up if you want to do both of those things, and there is indeed also one’s personal life; and so there is even more limited time if you want to do all three of those things. On the other hand, one of the best things in life is if you can keep the various things you do related to each other, and be the same person in all of them. Intellectually and emotionally the teaching and the research feed each other. Now, I don’t mean to exclude or put down academics who have a talent very strongly in the one direction and not the other. There are people who are marvelous teachers and whose writing doesn’t amount to much, or whose research is not very interesting. There are people who write wonderful books or do wonderful, stunning research, who aren’t worth a damn as teachers. A really great university has to have room for such people, too. But for me, both the research and the teaching really matter; and so does my personal life. And they

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enrich each other, even though they compete for time. You have to work extra hard if you want all three, but it’s worth it. DM: What does pedagogy contribute to the enterprise of political theorizing? HFP: Theorizing is about frameworks of assumptions. We all have them, couldn’t think without them. Political theory is about frameworks of assumptions that organize and shape how people think about politics and practice politics. In teaching the history of political theory, to my mind, the point is not that the students learn what Plato said or what Thomas Hobbes said. That would be nice, but what really matters is that they learn how to think about multiple, incommensurable frameworks of assumptions. So we ask them to write papers comparing the views of two major theorists they have read, on some specific question. We also combine large lectures by a professor with small discussion sections led by teaching assistants, where the students express and defend their own views about the works they have read (and about the lectures). So the students are not just receptacles for information to be instilled by one who “knows,” but they learn in a practical way how to juggle incommensurable frameworks of assumptions intellectually, how to find evidence in a text, how to handle abstract ideas. The trick is to help students question and criticize their own assumptions, without letting them imagine that one could do without such a framework altogether, or that there are no standards for discerning truth or rightfulness. When I teach such a course, my lectures deal with all sorts of relevant information, but avoid interpreting the texts the students read. That the students must learn to do for themselves, and learning how to do that, learning that they can do it, for instance can find textual evidence for the impressions they form, is exciting and valuable for them. DM: Would you say that this model connects to political theorizing in some way, to citizenship, to democracy? HFP: Well, I’m not saying that this is the right way to teach every subject in every field. But as for political theory, I guess it connects in the desire to help and urge every student to think, even if the results are paltry; better that you think for yourself than to accept what you’ve been told and to parrot it back. This is related to my commitment as a “small-d democrat.” I believe in a politics in which everybody has some capacity to choose and to speak, has a voice that can be heard, although of course, even in a country much smaller than ours that isn’t literally possible. But it is possible, to a much greater degree than current practice in a supposed democracy like ours. DM: You’ve talked about pedagogy in a lecture course, and some of the virtues you found in courses that employ multiple spaces and formats—the larger lecture, the separate, smaller discussion. What about seminars? What’s your goal in the seminar setting? HFP: Well, the seminar is more like a discussion section than like a lecture. You may, at certain points, or for a certain time, want to lecture about something, but it’s important to keep the lectures separate from the discussion, and when you terminate the lecture part and turn to discussion, let the students know that that’s what’s happening. One of the most useful techniques, after you pose a topic or a

290 An interview with Hanna Fenichel Pitkin

question—maybe reformulate it once if that seems useful—is then just to be quiet. There then comes to be this great, brooding silence in the room. Everybody looks at everybody else, and drops their eyes back down. Everybody waits for somebody else to say something, because everybody’s convinced that what they think isn’t worth saying. But finally someone can’t stand it—if you hold out long enough—and the discussion starts. I discovered late that I’m famous for this among my students, that the uncomfortable silence is supposed to be characteristic of my seminars. I actually learned the technique from Norman Jacobson, but it suited me. On the whole, I construct my discussion classes with a view to getting the students to talk. One of the ways that in late years I began doing that in my seminars is to make the first session, the first working session (after the organizing session), wide open, by the choice of readings or the posing of questions, setting a topic on which one wouldn’t need much courage to have something to say. For instance, giving the students a packet of very short readings with different perspectives, and saying “find something in there that seems to you interesting and right about our topic, and we’ll discuss your selections next week, and I probably won’t talk much.” I do that, and when they talk I take notes. Then, the next meeting after that, I show them how much they’ve covered (George said this and Fred said that and Amy said such-and-such and Janice pointed out that . . .). And they begin to get a sense of their own capacities. In some seminars I also open each subsequent meeting with some remarks about the previous meeting and what was accomplished and how it relates to what comes next. DM: You have spent all of your academic life at public universities, mostly at the University of California. Have there been reasons, aside from the practical, that shaped this path? How do you think studying and teaching at a public university has informed your political theorizing? HFP: I don’t know if it has informed my theorizing, but it sure has been important to me, because I’m a “small-d” democrat. I believe everybody should, and everybody can, think. “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I would much rather teach at a public university than at a private one, simply because you meet a better class of people. Your students are more diverse and, in particular, are more from the less privileged and less powerful classes of the society. Those are the people with whom I want to be allied and to whom I therefore want to speak. That, of course, is changing now, because the cost of a University of California education is out of reach now for such a large proportion of the American people, which is bound to play havoc with American democracy. When I started at UCLA I think it cost maybe $25 or $35 a semester, something like that. That’s a public university. I’m grateful to have been a part of it. July 28, 2013

INDEX

absolutism 133–4, 140; standards 136–9 abstractions, representation of 212–3 action 9, 12–5, 44, 52, 154–5; Arendt on 254–6, 269–72, 274n14, 275n54; backward-looking 29; and behavior 256–7, 269–70, 274n14; and causation 6–7; consequences of 269–70, 271–2, 276n71; and freedom 147; individual 271; intentional 271; Machiavelli and 35–6, 177; political 157; problem of 163; spontaneous 270–1; transforming 202–3 Adams, John 147 agency 7, 9, 20 alienation 1, 14, 239–43, 244, 248n34, 248n35, 250n57, 253 ambition 26, 173–5 American Political Science Association 287 American political tradition 81 amor fati 29 ancestral authority 27 apartheid 133 Arendt, Hannah 8, 12, 14–5, 34, 37, 47, 143–61; account of public life 146–53; on action 254–6, 269–72, 274n14, 275n54; and alienation 250n57; on autonomy 154; basic concern 154; on behavior 254–8, 269–70; on behaviorism 264; on Bentham 76; on the body 152; on citizenship 146, 151–2, 155; comparison with Aristotle 152–3; concept of world 250n58; and conformism 258–60; critique of Marx 237–9, 244, 250n56, 280; definition of

public and private 144; economic model 261–3; exclusion of economics 151–2, 255; family background 236; on freedom 147, 156, 161n4, 238, 246; The Human Condition 14, 234–47, 253–73, 287; influences on 234–5, 247, 274n34; on justice 153, 153–6; labor and work distinction 237–9, 248n31, 254–6; on love 147; on Marx 234–47, 262; and natality 43–4; and necessity 263–5; The Origins of Totalitarianism 235–6, 244, 246, 256, 260–1, 266, 272; overlap with Marx 243–5; personal struggle 237; on political action 149–50; on poverty 149–50; Princeton University lectures essay 236–7; on the public and private 143–61; on representative government 229–30; On Revolution 149; the social 146–52, 156, 234, 244–5, 253–73; and social class 258–60; and social structure 265–8; on society 148–9, 243–4, 244–5; on sovereignty 177; and totalitarianism 235, 236, 247, 266; and women 155 Aristotle 8, 20, 108, 130n5, 152–3, 155–6, 162n8, 237, 248n23 art 148 Art of War (Machiavelli) 184–5, 188, 202 Athenian democracy 227 Attack of the Blob, The (Pitkin) 8, 12, 14, 287 Austin, J.L. 7, 121, 284 Australian Labor Party 208 authority 7, 287–8; ancestral 27; and growing up 27–8; legitimate 83–7, 91–2;

292 Index

limits of 89–90; Machiavelli and 26–8; questioning 169; republican 189 autonomy 10, 12, 19–21, 25; and adulthood 30; Arendt on 154; and citizenship 183–4; and duty 169–70; and growing up 28; individual 49; and judgment 163–79; limits of 176–9; Machiavelli and 163–79; moral 8, 158; source of 170; and standards 165–9; true 177 avarice 175–6 bad infinity 21 Barker, Ernest 128 Barth, Karl 106 behavior, and action 256–7, 269–70, 274n14 behavioral universals 137 behaviorism 264 Belloc, Hilaire 209, 211 benevolence 66, 69, 74–5 Benhabib, Seyla 250n58, 273n11 Benn, S.I. 82 Bentham, Jeremy 57–77; ambiguities 10, 59–61, 64–5, 75–7; Arendt on 76; and bad government 67–8; and benevolence 66, 69, 74–5; and community obligation 66–7; Constitutional Code 63; critics 58–60, 63, 66; defense of utility 62; definition of calculation 61; definition of pain 61; definition of pleasure 61; Deontology 69, 71; deterministic psychology 65, 68; and education 73–7; first law of nature 66; A Fragment on Government 60, 62, 67; and free will 63; genius 57–8; on government 73–4; greatest happiness principle 59, 60–2, 66, 75, 77; and human motivation 58–9; influence 58; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 62–70, 73–4, 76; junction-of-interest-prescribing principle 72; and legislative intervention 72–3; Marx on 57; measures of government 64; and motivation 62–3, 70; natural harmony of interests 70–2; and obligation 69–70, 79n54; “Pannomial Fragments” 78n14; “Parliamentary Reform Catechism” 71; and political obligation 85; principle of utility 64–5; propinquity 79n48; and prudence 65–7, 74; realism 75–6; republicanism 75; right legislation 65; and self-interest 68–70, 75; status 57; theoretical system 62–70 Berkeley School, the 4, 15, 285 bias 123, 141 birth 43–4

Bloom, Alan 132, 139 Blucher, Heinrich 236–7 body, the 12, 53, 152 body work 278–9 Brandt, Willy 46 Brecht, Bertold 38–9 Brougham, Lord 209–11 bureaucracy 58, 149, 262–3 Burke, Edmund 84, 130n4, 169, 207 calculation, utilitarian 61 California, University of, Los Angeles 4, 281–2 canonical works, analyses of 2 Cantril, Hadley 222n18 capitalism 241–3 causation, and action 6–7 Cavell, Stanley 7, 127–8, 283–4 Cephalus 129 Chesterton, G. K. 209, 211 Chiaromonte, Nicola 276n77 child development 121–2 China, great leap forward 46 choice 22, 37–8, 42, 44, 53, 63 Ciompi Rebellion, the 165–8 citizenship: and ambition 174; Arendt on 146, 151–2, 155; and autonomy 183–4; complacency 192; and conflict 191–4; and equality 186–91; fitness for 35–6; and Founders 197–204; fraternal 13, 20, 193, 195, 197–8; free 7, 8, 9–10, 12; and leadership 188–9; limits of 31; Machiavelli on 183–204; manhood of 183–4, 194, 196–7, 203–4; mutuality 188; and public life 159; and reciprocity 32; and responsibility 157–8; and the self 195; and virtù 183–5, 193, 196–7, 201, 203 civic duty 143 civil disobedience 82–3, 93 Civil Rights movement 284 civil society 241, 262, 272, 276n77 civil war 94–5, 193 class-consciousness 215 collective participation 1 collectivity 238, 267–9, 271; market model 261–2; strength of 184–5; value of 168–9 communicative competence 8 communist fiction, the 261 community action 2 Concept of Representation, The (Pitkin) 6–7, 13, 283–6 concepts, awareness of 124 conceptual analysis 8 conceptual history 8

Index 293

conflict, and citizenship 191–4 conformism 254, 257–60, 264–8 connotation 108 consent 10–1, 81–7; and authority 86–7; and government 87–9; hypothetical 90–1, 95; limits of 85–6, 89–90; Locke on 87–91; majority 86; and political obligation 85–91, 95–6; and property 88; and resistance 92–5; tacit 87–9, theory of 5, 11, 88, 94-96 conservatism 7 conspicuous production 148 Constant, Benjamin 237 contract theory 10–1, 67, 86–7, 90, 275n57 corruption 29–30 creativity 52, 280 critical thinking 123–4 cultural relativism 134–135 culture 6–7, 20, 141, 157 Dahl, Robert 111–2 deception 231 Declaration of Independence 94 definitions, Wittgenstein on 108–9 deliberation 8 democracy: definition 226–7; direct 230; and equality 228; large-scale 225; Marx on 243; origins 225, 227; participation 228–30; problems facing 230; and representation 13–4, 225–31; representative 229–30; usage 227 democratic patience 46 denotation 108 descriptive representation 207 deserts 119 Dewey, John 223n31, 223n32 Dexter, Lewis Anthony 224n48 dike 128–9 Dinnerstein, Dorothy 32–3, 280 direct democracy 230 Discourses (Machiavelli) 23, 169–70, 174, 177, 184–90, 191–202 Divine Right Theories 84 Durkheim, Emile 107 duty 169–70; and obligations 69–70 economics 255, 261–3 education: and benevolence 74–5; Bentham and 73–7; and legislation 74; Plato’s Republic 125–6; and prudence 74 Ehrenzweig, Albert 131n12 embodiment 9 Engels, Friedrich 248n32 English Civil War 225, 227–8 equality 127, 146, 153, 228; sexual 34

ethics 66–7 evil, complicity in 133 factionalism 175, 193 facts 44, 112 fairness 119, 121–2, 127–8 false consciousness 46–7, 106 feminism 287 Fenichel, Clare (née Nathansohn) 3–5, 278–9 Fenichel, Otto 3, 278, 280 fetishists 245, 251n64 Feuerbach, Ludwig 107, 245, 266 “The Fisherman and his Wife” 39–40 Flacks, Richard 37 Florentine Histories (Machiavelli) 29–30, 165–9, 175, 184–7, 190, 192, 196, 199, 202 Florentine republicanism 21 Flounder, The (Grass) 5, 10, 37–54; beginning 39; Calcutta sequence 44–6, 53–4; close 43; context 38, 47; fall into history 40; Father’s Day chapter 43; the flounder 39, 42–3, 49, 51; the flounder’s guilt 42; and food 38–9; international concerns 44–8; patriotic history 38; perspective 52; poems 40, 53; protagonist 38, 39, 52–3; and relations between men and women 39–41; the third alternative 43–4 food: control over 49; and ideas 49–50; as object 41; role of 38–9; shortages 45–6 Fortuna 8 Fortune 9–10, 24–6 Fortune is a Woman (Pitkin) 8, 12, 280, 286–7 Founder image 26 fraternal citizenship 13, 20, 193, 195, 197–8 fraternal mutuality 26, 31–2 free citizenship 7–10, 12 free enterprise 46 Free Speech Movement 284–5 free will 63 freedom 1, 10, 37; and action 147; Arendt on 147, 156, 161n4, 238, 246; Aristotle on 162n8; fantasy of 41; and interdependence 5; limits of 177; Machiavelli and 167; Marx and 238, 242–3; and mutuality 49; political 5; Rousseau on 228–9 freedom of the will 21 Freeman, Jo 56n27 French Revolution 149–50, 155–6, 160 Freud, Sigmund 6, 29, 37, 173, 279–80; repression and sublimation 170–3 Friedrich, Carl J. 221n1

294 Index

Gdansk 47, 50 Geertz, Clifford 137 gender 12–3 see also women genocide 133 Gindler, Elsa 278–9 God 24–5, 84, 97, 107, 110, 139, 190–1, 227 Goodwyn, Lawrence 46 government: and consent 87–9; legitimate 91, 98; limits of 90; and political obligation 90–1; resistance 92–5; tyrannical 67–8 Grant, J.A.C. 282 Grass, Günther 280; context 38, 47; “Empty and Alone” 51; The Flounder 5, 10, 37– 54; and ideals 50–1; and individual suffering 52; localism 48; and manhood and manliness 49, 53; perspective 52; and political action 54; and socialism 47; support for synthesis 51–2; third alternative 43–4, 48–9, 51–2; The Tin Drum 53; and totalitarianism 47; view of the future 43–4; and women 48, 50 greatest happiness principle 59, 60–2, 66, 75, 77 Greece, ancient 146, 151, 161n3, 161n6, 227–8 growing up 5, 12, 27–8, 49, 53, 161 Hale, John Rigby 190 Halevy, Élie 62, 71 Hamilton, A. 228 Hansen, Philip Birger 248n34 happiness: competition with others 71–2; distribution of 60–1; education and 74; and ethics 66; first law of nature 66; public 143 Hardie, Keir 212 Harrison, Ross 66, 79n54 Hegel, G.W.F. 21, 41, 60, 236, 241, 243, 262 Heidegger, Martin 28, 60, 250n58 heroism 179 Herzog, Don 59–60, 76–7, 80n79 historical awareness 50 history 20, 41–2, 52 Hitchcock, William 282 Hitler, Adolf 278 Hobbes, Thomas 22, 81, 130n4, 289 Hogan, James 221n1 household, the 146, 262–3 human condition, the 1 Human Condition, The (Arendt) 14, 287; on behavior 254–8; on behaviorism 264; critique of Marx 237–9; exclusion of

economics 255; influences on 234–5; labor and work distinction 237–9; on Marx 234–47; and necessity 263–5; overlap with Marx 243–5; the social in 253–73; and social structure 265–8 human drives and motivation 58–9, 173–6 human nature 22, 156–7, 164–5, 174, 240–1, 244, 249n44 human potential 27 human weaknesses 20 Hume, David 63, 76, 85, 95, 130n4 hype 231 hypothetical consent 90–1, 95 ideals, Grass and 50–1 ideas, and food 49–50 ideology, as false consciousness 106 imagination 44, 240–1 imitation, doctrine of 27 immortality 148 Imperial German Bundesrat 208 imperialism 133, 261, 265 independence theory 211–2 individual suffering 52 individuality 147, 270–1 indoctrination 231 inequality 127, 146, 188 infantile experience 32–3 injustice, rationalizations of 133 institutionalization, and purpose 120 interdependence 30; and freedom 5 interest, class 215; common 2; community 68, 70-2; legislative intervention 72–3; national 207; natural harmony of 70–2; self-interest 31, 66, 68–70, 75, 143, 223n31; theories of 213–8, 223n32; universal 69 invisible hand, the 262 is, and ought 111–12 Jacobson, Norman 284–5, 290 jargon 3 Jaspers, Karl 236–7, 246, 247n10, 260 Jenkin, Thomas 281–4 joint-stock corporations 144 Judeo-Christian doctrine 139 judgment 7, 11–2, 52; absolutist standards 136–9; arbitrary 99; and autonomy 163–79; consequences 11–2; contexts 11–2; cross-cultural 141; dimension of 21; and duty 169–70; entitlement to 140; features of 136; and justice 116, 118, 123; and manhood and manliness 176; negative 134–5; objective 123; permissible 134–5; and personal

Index 295

preferences 141; political 158; problem of 163; psychological context 170–3; quality 129; reasonable 138; relativism of 132–41; and representation 218–9; standards of 118, 170; valid 139–41 justice 7, 111–2, 105–29; Arendt on 153, 153–6; Aristotle on 153; biased 123; capacity for 153; and conflict 192–3; cultural variations 114–6; discrepancy in meaning 110–1; empirical investigation 112; and fairness 121–2; fairness 127–8; form and substance 119–24; ideas of 106; inside and outside views 112–4; is and ought debate 111–2; and judgment 116, 118, 123; justification of 116, 119; legal idealism/legal realism dispute 107; Marx on 107, 123; meaning 105–14, 121–3, 125–9; minimum of interpretation 118; objective 123; Plato on 105–14; and private life 143–61; and public life 143–61; and punishment 120–1; the significance of standards 115–6; standards of 116–9, 122–4; transition from private to public 159–61; translation of Greek concept 128–9; usage 109, 113–4; variables 116; as a virtue 128–9; Wittgensteinian perspective 108–9 Kafka, Franz 259 Kant, Immanuel 31, 41, 158, 170, 238 Kaplan, Abraham 282 Keynes, John Maynard 57 Kierkegaard, Søren 236, 259–60 killing, prohibition 137 Kirchheimer, Otto 256 labor 237–9, 248n31, 248n33, 254–6 laissez-faire 58, 71 language 3, 8–9, 284, 286; is and ought 111–2; and meaning 107–11, 114–5; minimum of interpretation 118; translation 110, 116–8, 128–9; usage 109; Wittgenstein and 124 language games 109, 116, 135 language philosophy 7 language-learning 109, 110, 119 law 20, 98 lawmaking 170 legal idealism 107 legal realism 107 legislation: Bentham and 65, 72–3; and education 74; and ethics 66 legitimation crisis 143 Leo X, Pope 202 lesbianism 43

liar’s paradox, the 136 liberalism 7, 10–1, 54 liberation, and social reform 46–7 liberty 171, 186–7, 192 life-activity 239–40 Lincoln, Abraham 221–2n13, 227 linguistic turn, the 8 local politics 231 Locke, John 81, 94, 137, 237; on consent 87–91; Two Treatises of Civil Government 10–1, 87–91, 100n8 love 147 Lukács, Georg 239 Luther, Martin 179n1 Luxemburg, Rosa 236 Lyons, David 66, 71 Macdonald, Dwight 276n77 Machiavelli, Niccolò 5, 8–10, 19–36, 280, 286–7; and action 35–6, 177; activism 25; and ambition 26, 173–5; and Aristotle 20; Art of War 184–5, 188, 202; audience 25; on authority 26, 27–8, 189; and autonomy 163–79; challenge 25–6; on citizenship 183–204; and collectivity 168–9, 184; and conflict 191; context 163; contradictions 19, 20–2, 26; and corruption 29–30; and deceit 200–1; Discourses 23, 169–70, 174, 177, 184–202; and duty 169–70; educazione 165; and equality 186–91; failures 178; Florentine Histories 29–30, 165–9, 175, 184–7, 190–2, 196, 199, 202; on Fortune 24–6; Founder image 26–7, 183–6, 189, 194–5, 197–204; and freedom 167; and growing up 27–8; at his best 19–20, 31, 164–5, 170, 177–9; and human agency 20; on human drives 173–6; imagery 164–5; on leadership 188–9; Mandragola 200; and manhood and manliness 12–13, 20, 25–6, 35–6, 176, 183–4, 194, 196–7, 203–4; on membership 30–6; and misogyny 34–5; and the origins of states 199–200; and political conflict 31; and political interaction 20; and political reality 21; and political stability 187–8; political universe 24; Prince 172, 194, 196–7, 200–2; on property 165–9; and prudence 169–70; and reciprocity 167; and religion 190–1; and resentment 30; return to beginnings 173; and social class 186–91; and standards 164–9, 172; status 19; summons to heroism 178–9; and the transition to self-rule 197–8; treatment of theorists and theorizing 201–2;

296 Index

two-sidedness 12; understanding of human autonomy 19–21, 25; view of politics 30; vision of the fox 165, 168, 185–6, 191, 194–5, 200, 202–3; and women 33–5, 176, 178 Mack, Mary Peter 58, 60–1 Madison, James 228 male-female continuum 56n27 manhood and manliness 12–13, 20, 25–6, 35–6, 49, 53, 176, 183–4, 194, 196–7, 203–4 Mao Tse-Tung 46 market capitalism 14, 241–2 marriage 41 Marx, Karl 6, 14, 37, 106, 231, 279; 1844 Manuscripts 239, 242; and alienation 239–44, 248n34, 248n35, 253; Arendt on 234–47, 262; Arendt’s critique 237–9, 244, 250n56, 280; on Bentham 57; Capital 239, 242–3; Communist Manifesto 242–3; on democracy 243; fetishists 245, 251n64; focus on labor 237–40, 248n33; and freedom 238, 242–3; The German Ideology 242–3, 249–50n48; Grundrisse 242; history of interpretation 235; and human nature 240–1; influence 14; on justice 107, 123; relation to Feuerbach 245; on social relations 241–2; species being 33; and totalitarianism 235–6 Marxism 106 mass society 266 mathematics 138 meaning: and language 107–11, 114–5; need for 51 membership, Machiavelli on 30–6 mentalités 254–6 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 169–70 might, and right 31 Mill, James 68 Mill, John Stuart 138 Mills, C. Wright 144–5, 160 misogyny 34–5 moral absolutism 11–2 moral autonomy 8, 158 moral disorder 97 moral relativism 11–2 morality 31, 153 mutuality 31–4, 188; and conflict 192–3; failure of 35; and freedom 49 Myrdal, Gunnar 262 natality 43–4 natural law 67, 137 natural rights 67 nature of the government theory 90–5

Nazi Germany 93–4, 133 necessity 24, 263–5, 275n44 need 137, 264 negative judgment 134–5 New Left, the 270 Nietzsche, F. 29, 37, 57, 236 nonparticipation 256 obedience: duty of 67–8; and law 98; political 100n13; and resistance 92–5; total 5 obligation 10–1; Bentham and 66–7, 69–70, 79n54; political 81–7; of representation 217–8, 220 oligarchy 14, 209 oppression 93 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt) 235–6, 244, 246, 256, 260–1, 266, 272 other, the, encounters with 32 ought, and is 111–2 panopticon, the 57, 73 participatory action 2 participatory democratic politics 14 past, the, enslavement to 29 patriarchy 33, 42 people power 231 personal preferences, and judgment 141 personal relativism 134 personhood 41 Peters, R.S. 82 philosopher-kings 126 philosophical disorder 97 philosophy 2–3, 22, 201–2 Piaget, Jean 121–2 Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel 1–9; approach to political thinking 1–3; The Attack of the Blob 8, 12, 14, 287; background and influences 3–6, 14–15, 278–85, 287; career 4; The Concept of Representation 6, 7, 13, 283–6; contribution 5–9; dissertation 283–4; education 4, 281–5; Fortune is a Woman 8, 12, 280, 286–7; intellectual formation and training 278–85; interview 15, 278–90; and language 3; pedagogy 3, 289–90; on political thinking 2; radicalism 4–5; refugee experience 278–9, 281; research and writing 285–8; significance 3; teaching career 284, 288–90; Wittgenstein and Justice 7, 8, 286; writing 5 Plamenatz, John 59, 80n79 Plato 8, 289; on justice 105–14; political theory 124–9; Republic 11, 105–29 play, and creativity 280 plurality 2

Index 297

Polanyi, Karl 274n34 polis, the 20, 151, 153 political action 54; participatory 157, 159–60 political activity, value of 153 political association 152–3 political conflict, Machiavelli and 31 political discourse, function of 123 political freedom 5 political interaction 20 political judgment 158 political man 147 political obedience 100n13 political obligation 81; acquisition 94; and authority 83–5, 91–2; and consent 85–91, 95–6; Divine Right Theories 84; formulation of the 81–2; individual 99; justification of 83–5, 89, 95–9; limits of 82, 85–6, 89, 98, 100n14; Locke and 87–8; nature of the government theory 90–5; practical concerns 82–3; and prescription 84; principles 82, 83; problem of 81–7; questions 82–4; to resist 95, 98–9; and resistance 92–5; theorists 82; theory 82–3; utilitarianism 84–5; validity 90; when 82; to whom 82–3 political parties, and representation 207–8 political power 100n8 political science, as Wissenschaft 6 political stability 187–8 political theorists: concerns of 22–3; problem of communication 23–4; role of 163–4 political theory: dangers of 23–4; Machiavelli and 201–2; Plato’s Republic 124–9; role of 7, 22–4; and the transition from private to public 160–1; Wittgenstein and 124–9 political thinking: approach to 1–3; jargon 3; Pitkin on 2 political world, the 23 politics: concerns of 22–4; Machiavelli’s view of 30; making sense of 7; necessity of 41 popular uprisings 54 population problem 45–6 poverty, Arendt on 149–50 power 85; arbitrary 90; political 100n8; private 157 powerlessness 1 practice relativism 135 Prince (Machiavelli) 172, 194, 196–7, 200–2 private life 157; Aristotle on 152–3; definition 143–3; direction or control 145–6; distinguishing 145–6; and justice

143–61; and privilege 144; and public life 143–61; transition to public 159–61 private power 157, 231 privatization 143 process thinking 154 proletariat, the 235, 249n44 promises 95–8, 100n13 propaganda 231 property 88, 165–9, 237 prudence 65–7, 74, 169–70 psychic life 172 psychoanalysis 287 psychological theory 28 psychology: Bentham and 65, 68; and interest 216–7; and judgment 170–3 public action 151 public administration 145–6 public happiness 143 public issues 144–5 public life: and access 145; Arendt’s account of 146–53; Aristotle on 152–3; and citizenship 151–2, 159; definition 143–3; direction or control 145–6; distinguishing 145–6; exclusion from 150–1; and justice 143–61; objective 145; plurality of perspectives 148; potential of 157; and private life 143–61; quest for secular immortality 152; remembrance 148; transition from private to 159–61; value of 144 public opinion surveys 220, 224n48 public realm: stability 155–6; withering away of 148–9 public sector, the 144 publicness 145 punishment 119–21 purpose, and institutionalization 120 radical politics 5 radicalism 3–5 reaction 29 reasonable people 138 rebellion 5 reciprocity 167 relativism 132–41; and absolutism 133–4; and absolutist standards 136–9; complicity in evil 133; cultural 134; doctrines 134–6; helplessness 136; incoherence 140; inconsistency 132; logic of 134–5; personal 134; potential for bias 141; practice 135; subcultural 135 religion 139, 190–1 representation 13, 283–4; of abstractions 212–3; as acting for others 210–1; activity of 213; agents 211–2; appeal to the

298 Index

meaning of 209–11; conceptual problems 206; conflicts of interest 216; consistency 220; constituents 229; constituents will 218; danger of 228–9; definition 205, 225–6; and democracy 13–4, 225–31; democratization 229; descriptive representation 207; deviations from true 218; empirical investigation 208–9; essence of 209; freedom of action 211–2; independence position 206, 207; independence theory 211–2; institutional arrangements 221n1; and interest 213–8, 219–20, 223n31, 223n32; and judgment 218–9; lack of guarantee 218; limits of 206; making-the-represented-present 205–6; mandate-independence controversy 205–21; moderate position 206; in name only 209–10; origins 225, 227; paradox of 211–2, 219–20, 225–6; philosophical paradox 209; and political parties 207–8; political practicality 225–6; public expectations 208–9; representative’s duties 206, 208, 218–19; representative’s obligation 217–8, 220; representative’s status 206–7; responsiveness 213, 218; restrictive mandate 206; Rousseau on 228–9; standing for 210; true 206, 219; usage 226–7 representative democracy 229–30 representative government 14, 205, 226, 229–30 repression 170–3 republican authority 189 republicanism 21 resentment 30 resistance 5; individual 94; justification of 98–9; and obedience 92–5; obligation to 95 responsibility 157–8, 230 responsiveness 13 ressentiment 29 revolution 67–8, 82–3, 94–5 reward 119, 125 Rieff, Philip 130n5 right, and might 31 righteousness 128–9 rights 228; natural 67 Rogin, Mike 284–5 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14, 81, 83, 225, 228–9, 255 Schaar. Jack 284–5 Schumpeter, Joseph 57 science 2, 44

Selden, John 228 self, the 159, 171–3; and citizenship 195; redefinition of 31 self-alienation 239, 244 self-control 127 self-determination 52 self-government 161 self-image 155 self-knowledge 161 self-preference 63 self-reliance 196 self-rule, transition to 197–8 self-sacrifice 31 semantic analysis 3 Sennett, Richard 143–4 sexes, the, relations between 32–4, 39–41 sexual equality 34 sexual pleasure 176 Sforza, Caterina 35 slaves and slavery 185 Smith, Adam 76 social, the 8, 12, 15, 146–52, 156, 234; and alienation 253; and behavior 254–8, 269–70; as Blob 244–5, 247n3, 253, 263, 266, 273; conformist 254, 258–60, 265–8; critique of reading 268–73; definition 253–4, 269, 272; economic 261–3, 266; in The Human Condition 253–73; institutional structure 265–8; and necessity 263–5; political form 273n1; as politics manqué 257; tendency to grow 263; threat of 270–1; usage 272–3 social class: Arendt and 258–60; Machiavelli and 186–91; and virtù 187 social contract theory 67, 87, 275n57 Social Democracy 54 social discrimination 258–60 social norms 258–60 social reform, and liberation 46–7 social structure, Arendt and 265–8 social value 274n34 socialism 47 society, Arendt on 148–9, 243–5 Socrates 93–4; and Thrasymachus 105–15, 119–20, 122–4 Solidarity 47 South Africa, apartheid 133 sovereignty 82, 176–7 species being 33 spin 231 standards: ability to change 141; absolutism 136–9; of judgment 118, 170; Machiavelli and 164, 172; universal validity 136–7, 141 starvation 45–6

Index 299

state, the, origin myths 199–200 state of nature 67, 95–6 subcultural relativism 135 sublimation 170–3 suffering 54 synthesis 51–2 tacit consent 87–9 Taylor, Angus 282 Teflon theory 10, 76–7 theoretical writing, temptation of 2 theory 2–3 third alternative, the 43–4, 48–9, 51–2 Thrasymachus, and Socrates 115, 119–20, 122–4 Tocqueville, Alexis de 143, 150, 154, 230, 234–5, 24–7, 268 totalitarianism 47, 235, 247, 266 Tucker, R.C. 33 Tussman, Joseph 82, 97, 160 Two Treatises of Civil Government (Locke) 10–1 tyranny, resistance to 94 Unger, Roberto Mangabeira 265 United Nations Assembly 208 United States of America, electoral college 208, 222n21 universal standards 137–8, 141 USSR, totalitarianism 235–6 utilitarianism 7, 57–77; ambiguities 10, 59–61, 75–7; and bad government 67–8; Bentham’s defense of 62; and community obligation 66–7; critics 58–60; definition of calculation 61; definition of pain 61; definition of pleasure 61; distribution of happiness 60–1; greatest happiness principle 59, 60–2, 66, 75, 77; and interest 215–6; legislative intervention

72–3; longevity of 76–7; and motivation 62–3; natural harmony of interests 70–2; and obligation 69–70; political obligation 84–5; principle of utility 64–5; and prudence 65–7; and self-interest 68–70; theoretical system 62–70 value relativism 21 Varnhagen, Rahel 256, 260, 264–5 victimization 37 virtù 25, 173–7; and citizenship 183–5, 193, 196–7, 201, 203; individual 184; location of 185; and social class 187 virtue 153 war-crimes trials 41 wealth, power of 231 Weldon, T.D. 116–7, 283–4 welfare state 58 wisdom 127 Wissenschaft 6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 3, 7, 10–11, 91, 280, 284, 286; on definitions 108–9; on different kinds of words 116; on justification 119; and language 124; language games 135; on mathematics 138; on meaning 109; and political theory 124–9; on translation 110 Wittgenstein and Justice (Pitkin) 7–8, 286 Wolin, Sheldon 71, 127, 227, 283–5 women: Arendt and 155; body 53; Machiavelli and 33–5, 176, 178; role of 48; smiles 50 Woodhouse, A.S.P. 228 work 237–9, 248n31, 254–6 Wycliffe, John 227 Ziff, Paul 118

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