Category: Political philosophy

Why Does Politics Matter

Laat Sunday, I had lunch with some friends and one of them asked me about what I was doing. I said a few words about my current political philosophy class when she blurted out: “I am not at all interested in politics.”

Her remark wasn’t confrontational nor was her follow-up question: “Why does politics matter?”

I said: “Because politics is ultimately about life and death even when it deals only with seemingly small matters.”

“That’s a good answer,” she agreed. “But, you know, I was close to death some while ago. The doctors had practically given me up. Since then, I care only about the here and now – like us sitting around this table, eating and drinking together and enjoying each other’s company. ”

Was she wrong?

Not at all, I think. Politics is an existential matter but there are times and contexts when our concern with it has to give way to something more immediate.  Not everybody will be drawn to politics and for all of us there are moments when politics fades into the distance. This is a dilemma for democracy. Should we expect everyone to be politically engaged? There are democratic states where every citizen is required to cast a vote in elections – with limited exceptions. Does this require too much? We may want to have engaged citizens, but should we demand this by law? And if not, what are our expectations abut political participation of the citizenry? We may deplore a low voter turnout in an election? But what would be an acceptable figure?

Adrian Vermeule: The confusions of the common good

Conservative legal scholars have discovered the common good.  And that might be a good thing. What calls itself “conservatism” in modern parlance is often associated with a radical individualism and has thus little or no regard for common concerns. With Adrian Vermeule is the eloquent spokesmen for a group of conservative legal scholars who have rediscovered the common good. Here is a report from Politico on one of their recent conferences:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/12/09/revolutionary-conservative-legal-philosophy-courts-00069201

But the devil is, as always in the details in these debates. One may be attracted to speak with Aristotle and in accord with Catholic social doctrine of the common good, but who determines what that good is? 

Will it be Professor Vermeule at Harvard and his fellow warriors? Will it be some doctrinal authority in Rome? Or an assembly of evangelical clergymen reading the tea leaves of the Bible?

Is there even one single fixed common good? Do we not commonly need to compromise between what is good for some and what is good for others? How will we go about determining that compromise? There are, as we have found out, irreconcilable differences in what people regard as a common good? How much order and how much freedom are called for in a good society? There are likely to be deep disagreements between us concerning this question and these are will be linked to our most profound understandings of who we are.

If the common good is what benefits most, but not necessarily all, who will have to be sacrificed and how extreme may that sacrifice be? Aristotle spoke of the common good of the Greek polis, and he tried to convince himself that even slaves would be its beneficiaries.  But were they? In the footsteps of Aristotelian philosophy, the Catholic Church has advanced its own understanding of the common good.  Protestants may be forgiven for thinking that the Church’s conception of the common good has been somewhat self-serving.

If there is to be a politics of the common good, there must be a political process for determining that common good, The task can’t be left to Professor Vermeule and his fellow members in the Federalist Society. But what shape would that process have?

Would the common good be determined by majority opinion?

Would there be the need to achieve some consensus?

I would despair of the Congress of the United States or the Supreme Court declaring what the common good is. The best we can imagine is an open, political process in which we struggle together to define the parameters of a good society. The outcome of any such struggle will inevitably tentative and in need of revision. Aristotle once argued that all our actions aim (though perhaps only indirectly) at a single ultimate good. But what reasons do we have to accept his conclusion. His argument for it is certain flawed.

There may be no such thing as “the common good.” What there is and has to is rather the ongoing search for such a good. Human social life in its historical dimension is that search, In trying to make a life together we are travelers on a long road into the future but there is no single, ultimate destination to which the road leads. There is only search just as music there is only the search for harmony, not a single, fixed, eternal harmony to which all our musical efforts aspire.

Let’s resist those who want to use the idea of the common good to subject us to their will.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/politics-and-the-search-for-the-common-good/6850B6D511984131083F7E6540352EF3

 

Hannah Arendt as a diagnostic political thinker

Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition is an unusual and entirely original contribution to political philosophy. It is distinguished, in particular, by the diagnostic approach to politics it pursues. The book can serve as an illustration of characteristic features of this type of political thinking.

The title of the work deserves our attention in this context since it may easily mislead us. Arendt does not, in fact, assume that there is a single and fixed “human condition” which determines how we can, do, and should act politically. She holds, rather, that the human condition changes over time; that it is historically specific and profoundly variable. It is because of her adherence to this view that Arendt avoids talk of “human nature” – a term which is usually taken to identify a determinate human essence from which we can deduce both how humans act and how they should act. For Arendt there is, in fact, no human nature in this particular sense. There are only the varied conditions in which we find ourselves. The conditions of life in “the modern age” which are the predominant concern of her book thus differ for her profoundly from those of previous eras – such as, in particular, the condition of life and politics in classical Greece at the time of Socrates. While she often refers back to the classical period, she does not believe that we can or should try to re-enact it. Her reference is meant, instead, to highlight the radically distinct character of our modern situation.

Arendt’s begins The Human Condition not with a general reflection on what that condition might be. The first sentence of her book reads: “In 1957, an earth-born object made by man launched into the universe.” The book begins, thus, with a reference to a particular, contingent, and recent event, a singular historical fact: Russia’s 1957 launch of the first extra-terrestrial satellite (“Sputnik”) one year before the publication of Arendt’s book. To grasp the implications of that beginning, contrast it to the first sentence of Hobbes’ De Cive which says: “The faculties of human nature may be reduced unto for kinds.” Hobbes starts in this way with a general and dogmatic assertion about “human nature” from which he proceeds to derive the supposedly universal “conditions of society or of human peace “ as “fundamental laws of nature.” (De Cive, chapter 1) Equally striking is the contrast between Arendt’s first sentence and that of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia which asserts dogmatically that human beings are bearers of rights with which the state may not interfere. Where Arendt begins thus with a reference to a simple empirical fact, Nozick starts off from a large-scale and unargued normative claim. The contrast between Arendt on the one side and Hobbes and Nozick on the other, provides in this way a vivid illustration of the difference between diagnostic and non-diagnostic approaches to political philosophy. Where the one proceeds “inductively” from the particular to philosophical reflection, the other starts deductively from general, high-level claims about human nature or human rights and seeks to derive from them conclusions about politics. Where the one begins with a current contingent event, the other advances from supposedly timeless truths.

The Soviet authorities had launched Sputnik to signal the technical and military prowess of Russia. The event sent shockwaves through America’s political establishment and led to vast new investment in education, science, technology, and military preparedness. But this is not Arendt’s concern. She does not see herself as a political commentator. Her goal is, rather, to reflect philosophically on the event. She is concerned thus with the way the extra-terrestrial satellite changes how we see ourselves, our relation to the earth, and to the other living things on it. Quoting a contemporary comment that Sputnik signals a first step “toward escape from man’s imprisonment to the earth” she contraposes to this the fear that it might lead to a “fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living things under the sky.” The earth has until now been “the quintessence of the human condition.” Cutting that link or seeing it in a new way will thus transform that condition. An escape from the earth would mean that we cut our last tie that makes us “belong among the children of nature.” The future man who makes his appearance in this way seems to be possessed by “a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift, from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange … for something he has made himself.” But is this how we want to turn? What will we lose of the human condition as it now is? Our question has to be “whether we wish to use our new scientific and technological knowledge in this direction,” Arendt concludes, “and this question … is a political question of the first order.”

There are other signs of profound changes in the human condition to which Arendt proceeds at this point to draw our attention. The truths of the modern scientific world view, she writes, can only be demonstrated in mathematical terms and established through technological means, they “no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought.” This means ultimately that we can no longer understand the world in human terms and will need artificial machines to do our thinking for us. And that, she concludes, is surely a matter of political significance. Another disturbing fact is the advent of automation which may liberate us from “the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity.” While this development may be attractive, our problem is that the modern age has created a society in which human beings are measured entirely by their labor. “We are confronted, in consequence, with “the prospect of a society of laborers without labor… Surely nothing could be worse.”

Sixty-five years after the publication of The Human Condition the world looks somewhat different from the way Arendt describes it. She has no sense that extra-terrestrial life is a far way off and exists even today mostly only in the wild imaginings of Elon Musk and the writers of science fiction. Arendt has as yet no inkling of the digital media and how they have begun to transform all aspects of human interaction. She pays no attention to the growth of the human population and the shifts in global population patterns. She knows nothing of the devastations of the environment and their political bearing. She is unaware of a decline of Western power and the rise of other centers of global influence. A diagnostic view of our own time will, no doubt, look different from hers. This is to be expected because the diagnostic perspective is always limited and constrained by the place of the diagnostician.

What is surely of major interest in Arendt’s book is the way it illustrates the diagnostic approach to politics. This is how Arendt describes her own, diagnostic agenda: “What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears…. What I propose therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”

 

Political Philosophy: What to read

Philosophers have written copiously about politics. There is, moreover, no sharp dividing line between “philosophical” writings on politics and other kinds of writing on this topic. So there is no end to what one might read under the heading of “political philosophy”. Here is a list of 17 significant texts, some classical and some modern, some short and some long, some famous and some not so famous, some highly readable and some very demanding. The selection is, of course, mine; others might add to it or subtract from it. I will add some comments on what makes these writings interesting and important.

 

  1. Plato, Protagoras

The ancient Greeks invented democracy, but we know little of their reasoning about this new form of government. The first philosopher to have developed a “democratic theory” seems to have been Protagoras, the founder of the Sophistic School and a close associate of Pericles, the great democratic leader of Athens. Unfortunately, all of Protagoras’ writings have been lost. The best account we have of his thinking about democracy is found in the dialogue Protagoras written by Plato, a sharp critic of both the sophists and of democracy.

Protagoras appears to have argued that all human beings have an equal basic capacity for fairness and companionship. We can develop this capacity through education and thus create a condition in which all (mature, educated) citizens are equally capable of making political judgments.

Also of interest is Plato’s dialogue The Statesman (Politikos) in which he lays out his counter-picture to Protagoras’ democratic conception of politics.

2.  Plato, Republic

The ancient Greek title for this dialogue is Politeia which means the constitution or order of the polis, i.e., the Greek city state, and this is, in fact, the concern of the dialogue. The name “Republic” goes back to Cicero’s Latin and may be misleading for modern ears.

This dialogue is the first comprehensive treatise on politics written by a Western philosopher – at least, the earliest we have. Protagoras is supposed to have written another Politeia, now lost, from which Plato is said to have borrowed. We are, however, not in a position to say whether and to what extent he did.

Plato’s dialogue covers a wide range of topics: the concept of justice and of a just institution, the origin of the polis, forms of government, the rise and the decline of systems of government,  the place of the philosopher in the polis, and, above all, the blue-print of an ideal (or happy) city ruled by philosopher kings who live a completely socialized life without private property and without individual families. In addition there is in this happy city an athlete-warrior class and a civil society concerned with the matters of daily practical life; in a well-ordered city each class will perform its assigned role and not aspire to more.  On the basis of this account Plato has been hailed as a forerunner of a socialist conception of the state and also derided as a proto-fascist. A third possibility is to see Plato as anticipating the modern idea of the political rule of experts.

One of the central themes of the dialogue is the assumption that the order of the polis corresponds precisely to the order of the human soul. There is thus not only a democratic form of government but also a democratic man; not only tyranny but also tyrannical man. In Plato’s story, a well-ordered human mind corresponds to the order of the ideal, happy city.

Plato’s dialogue raises fundamental questions about politics that are still of interest today and it remains for that reason still worth reading, even though our political world is so very different from Plato’s.

As far as Plato’s political thinking is concerned, it is also useful to look at his later dialogue The Laws which offers what one might call a more realistic picture of politics.

3.  Aristotle, Politics

Like his master, Plato, Aristotle wrote philosophical dialogues; but in contrast to Plato’s dialogues, none of Aristotle’s have survived. His Politics contains – scholars assume – an edited version of Aristotle’s lecture notes. These may even have originated on different occasions. This would explain certain apparent inconsistencies in the text.

Aristotle begins his Politics famously with the claim that we are political beings by nature. Even some animals, such as the social insects, are political beings, though in a lesser sense than humans.  Distinctive of human beings is that they possess reason and can therefore deliberate on which form of life is the best.

Like Plato, Aristotle holds that we have the choice between different forms of government and that we must determine which of them is the best. Also like Plato, he argues that this is not democracy. But he is equally opposed to the Platonic idea of a state ruled by philosopher-kings. In book 2 of the Politics he strongly defends private property and the individual family as natural and, indeed, necessary for a good life.

In a further contrast to Plato, Aristotle concerns himself also with the question which form of government is viable at a given moment, departing from Plato’s idealistic reconstruction of politics and adumbrating thus a standpoint of political realism. That inclination towards realism is particularly evident in Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, an account of the development of Athenian democracy and a fascinating description of its institutional structures and practices.  No student of Aristotle’s political philosophy should miss this short treatise which went missing for two thousand years and was rediscovered in Egypt only in the late nineteenth century.

Aristotle’s Politics should be read in conjunction with his Nicomachean Ethics which adds significantly to his understanding of politics. In particular, Aristotle elaborates his conception of justice in two books of the Ethics. In Book 1 he argues, moreover, that ethics should be considered a part of politics since it is the political community that ultimately determines what ethical principles get taught. And in book 10, he maintains that political life is not the highest possible form of existence. Higher than it is contemplative life which we can partake in when we philosophize. But we have practical needs and even the philosopher is human. Pure contemplation is possible only for “the God.” For us, political life – complemented, it seems, by philosophical reflection – is the highest, most desirable, and most natural form of existence.

4. Xunzi, Xunzi

Political philosophy as we know it in America and Europe tends to be focused narrowly on the West. The history of politics extends for us from the Greek polis to a modern nation state in the West. Political philosophy begins for us with the Greeks and ends with John Rawls. We are rarely concerned with the political history of other parts of the world and when we are, we project our Western philosophical concepts and ideas outwards .and apply them unthinkingly to other parts of the world.

The Chinese thinker Xunzi (ca 310-238 BCE) and his eponymous treatise may be a good antidote to such forgetfulness. The Classical thinkers of ancient China were intensely concerned with politics. Confucius argued in his Analects that rulers must rule through moral example. Shang Yang and Hanfei, his legalist opponents, maintained instead that the state must be ruled by law not by personal virtue. Xunzi, a heterodox Confucian, holds that humans are by nature deficient. They require nurture and social order to flourish, but this can be created and preserved only if there exists a social hierarchy. Subjects must be subjects and rulers must be rulers . The proper education of the prince becomes for that reason an essential political task.

5.Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

This is really a political pamphlet rather than a philosophical treatise but it reverberates with political idea. Machiavelli seeks to instruct a prince on how to establish and maintain a territory and to eventually unify Italy under his rule. Such a prince must be both strong like a lion and wily like a fox. He must be ready to use violence, though in a controlled and deliberate fashion. Conflict is an inherent part of politics. The prince can’t be guided only by moral principle but must act according to political opportunity and necessity. He has to rely on reason but is also dependent on luck (fortuna).

Machiavelli seeks to advance in this way a “realist” view of politics. This view is further developed in his History of Florence. In his writings we also find a new emphasis on the distinction between the institution, the state (lo stato), and its ruler.

6. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan

7.  Benjamin Constant, Political Writings

8. Immanuel Kant, Toward Eternal Peace

9. F. W. G. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of Right

10. Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

11. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

12.Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

13. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

14.  Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty

15. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

16. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

17. Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics

 

 

The Deficiency Theory of Human Nature and Its Deficits

Thomas Hobbes writes famously in chapter 13 of his Leviathan that human life under natural conditions is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”[1] In order to live a social rather than a solitary life, a comfortable rather than a poor one, in order to live in a pleasantly civilized way rather than a nasty and brutish one, and in order to be long-lived rather than cut short in years, Hobbes argues, humans need to overcome their natural condition and create an artificial world, a second nature, a state, a commonwealth. Fortunately, they have “reason” which “suggesteth convenient Articles of Peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement.”[2] These “laws of nature” allow them to create the desired “commonwealth” with its “commodious living.” But it is not inevitable that they will succeed in this undertaking. Hobbes writes in De Cive: “Men come together … not because naturally it could happen no otherwise, but by accident.”[3]

We can summarize his view in five points. (1) Humans must pursue a common good, if they are to thrive, (2) but they lack the natural capacity to pursue that end. (3) For they are naturally concerned only with their own private interest. (4) That may still allow limited and unstable forms of social interactions but it prevents the formation of organized society. (5) With the help of reason they can, however, construct conditions which make it possible to pursue the common good.

It is evident that Hobbes does not mean to say that human beings are like a species of solitary animal. For unlike solitary animals, humans cannot flourish in the wild. “It is true, indeed,” Hobbes writes, “that to man, by nature, or as man, that is as soon as he is born, solitude is an enemy.”[4] But man is also not “a creature born fit for society.” The Greeks and specifically Aristotle, called him a zoon politikon; “and on this foundation … they build up the doctrine of civil society … the preservation of peace and the government of mankind.” But this is “certainly false and an error proceeding from our too slight contemplation of human nature.”[5]

The natural inclination of human beings is rather to look only after themselves, their own private interests, and their own business. In the human case – in contrast to the genuinely solitary species – that turns out to be a serious deficiency. Even in the state of nature, human beings can and do, however, engage in some social interaction. In order to overcome someone stronger, a person may, for instance, even in the state of nature act “by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself.”[6] Humans will thus act at times with “forces united.”[7]  They also compete with each other for scarce resources and thus become “enemies.” Mutual fear (or “diffidence” to use the original term) will make them seek “augmentation of dominion over men” and in their effort to gain glory, they will strive to “over-awe” each other. It is for such reasons, “that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war.”[8]  Competition, mutual fear, the desire to over-awe others, and warfare are, of course, all social phenomena. Human beings in the state of nature are for this reason not really  solitary beings. Their sociality is, rather, of an exclusively negative sort, restricted to eliminating, terrifying, over-powering, and fighting others.  Their kind of sociality is, moreover, highly unstable; it certainly cannot provide peace or security and thus prevents, among other things, the formation of any organized form of “society.” The most we can expect in this situation is “that brutish manner” which consists in “the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust.”[9] The conundrum is how to overcome this deficit in human sociality, how to create a positive sociality that allows for peaceful interactions, co-operative forms of living, of living well despite the preoccupation of human beings with their own private interests.

If “deficiency” refers to the absence of some quality and “deficit” to an insufficient degree of a quality, we can say that Hobbes combines a deficiency and a deficit view of human nature. Human beings lack, according to him, a natural capacity to pursue the common good and are in this way deficient.  And their deficiency restricts them to a limited, negative form of sociality. This is the deficit for which they are trying to make up. We can call this, then, the deficiency/deficit conception of human nature.

This conception was not Hobbes’ invention. We can find an earlier version of it in Protagoras, the sophistic Greek philosopher. In Plato’s eponymous dialogue, Protagoras explains his understanding of politics by means of a creation story in which human beings are initially left “naked, unshod, unbedded, and unarmed” and thus in a state of deficiency.[10] Their lack of social skills prevents them from living and working together. “They sought to save themselves by coming together and founding fortified cities, but when they gathered in communities, they injured one another for want of political skill.”[11] We can’t quite say then that these creatures are genuinely solitary since they appear to have the need and the desire to form communities, but they definitely lack the social skills for doing so. They can’t even successfully join forced long enough to defend themselves against wild animals, they are incapable of conducting war, and have no grasp of “the art of politics, of which the art of war is a part.”[12] Thus far their deficiency. But humans are also given a sense for mutual respect and justice, but this only in a rudimentary or dispositional form.  Wit the help of these, they can begin to form human communities but they suffer initially from a deficit in social skills which they need to overcome with nurture and education.

Protagoras’ story was given a new life in another creation myth that Plato told in his dialogue Politikos (The Statesman). In Plato’s version, the God Kronos created the world and initially took care of everything. But at some point, he withdrew from the cosmos and thus left humans to take care of themselves. But they turned out to be insufficiently equipped to rule themselves. The consequence is that they are bound to come to a bitter end unless the God returns to resume his divine nurture and save them. In this version, the human deficit is not apparent at the beginning, as it is in Protagoras’  account; it becomes manifest only after God has withdrawn. Politics is thus the doomed effort of human beings to take care of things in the face of God’s absence. Plato’s story is, in turn, reminiscent of that told in the Biblical book of Genesis. It, too, can be said to contain a version of the deficit conception of human nature. In the Garden of Eden, so we are told, Yahweh took care of all human needs. When Adam and Even make an attempt to take care of themselves, they are expelled from the garden and find themselves leading a life of bitterness and struggle. In the end God must come back once more to redeem his creation.

Hobbes will have known the Biblical story, but was he familiar with his other antecedents? His words certainly remind us of Protagoras, though it will become evident on a closer look that there are significant differences between the two views. We can see in any case that the deficiency/deficit theory of human nature has in one form of other had a long career.

I note in passing Nietzsche’s characterization of the human being as an underdetermined animal (das nicht festgestellte Tier), a more recent version of the deficit theory of human nature which has exerted influence on both philosophy – Max Scheler and Martin  Heidegger – and  anthropology – Helmut Plessner and Arnold Gehlen. Gehlen speaks thus explicitly of humans as “deficient beings” (Mängelwesen).  Deficit theory is, moreover, not confined to the Western tradition of political thinking. We can find another version of the it in the Chinese philosopher Xunzi. who is commonly said to have held that human nature is evil. But this rendering of his thought is misconceived for two reasons. The first is that the Chinese tradition does not operate with the Western and Christian concept of evil and the second that Xunzi is not arguing that human beings are permanently flawed. He is arguing instead, like Protagoras, that human beings are initially deficient and need to be socialized through nurture and education.

For all its wide spread and attraction, the deficiency/deficit theory of human nature is, however, incoherent. We can see this most clearly when we return to Hobbes. The first thing to notice is that his account of the all-important moment of transition from the state of nature to that of social and political order is utterly sketchy. It is, in fact, incomprehensible. We must ask: would solitary beings or, rather, beings restricted to pure negative forms of sociality be sharing a language in which to settle on articles of peace? And why would such nasty and brutish creatures be willing and able to negotiate with each other and put trust in the outcome of their negotiations? The answer has to be that asocial or minimally and negatively social beings can’t turn themselves by negotiation into positively social beings. Something similar holds for Protagoras and Xunzi. Beings with an innate deficit in social skills will not be able to turn themselves into social beings through education for it is only positively social beings that can educate each other.

Given this evident shortcoming of the deficiency/deficit theory, we need to ask why it has nonetheless been considered plausible. The answer seems to be that its proponents, either consciously or unconsciously,  see the life of the species on the model of the life of the individual human being. This looks at first sight like an attractive comparison. Don’t we sometimes speak of early human history as “the childhood of mankind”? The comparison is nonetheless misleading. It is, of course, true that the new-born baby is helpless and appears to lack functional social skills. Protagoras’ description of the initial condition of the human species as “naked, unshod, unbedded, and unarmed” fits precisely that state of a new-born baby. The denizens of Hobbes’ state of nature are, of course, more sinister creatures. Protagoras’ natural man is said to lack even the art of warfare whereas Hobbes’ counterpart is mysteriously equipped with precisely that art. For all that, he/she/it is just as helpless in trying to establish a proper social life as Protagoras’s unformed baby-like being.  Like new-born children, Hobbes’ creatures could, of course, never survive on their own. The new-born baby does so only because it is born into a social group (“the family”). It is this group which takes care of the child and helps it to become socialized. It should be obvious that the human species would be long extinct, if its initial state had been akin to that of a new-born because there would have been no one to take care of it.

The theory of evolution tells us that at any point in its development, the human species must have been fairly well adapted to its conditions of life because otherwise it would not be here today. There is no moment in that history in which the human species was in a state of deficiency or deficit. Human sociality is not a belated product of rational choice, but the outcome of a long, slow process of habituation and adaptation. The evolution of social behavior, it turns out, has proved beneficial in the process of natural selection. It is true that human beings are born helpless and without immediately available social skills. But this does not indicate that the species as a whole was initially in that state. The helplessness of the human child indicates, rather, that it belongs to a highly socialized species. Asocial species have no helpless offspring – otherwise they would die out.

Aristotle was closer to reality at this point than Hobbes, Protagoras, and Xunzi. He said that human beings are by nature political and that political institutions exist by nature. Hobbes attacked him, of course, for comparing animal gregariousness to human sociality. He had some justification for this in that neither he nor Aristotle had an evolutionary outlook. Both treated species as substantially fixed. And in that case it is not obvious why features found in one species should help to explain those in another.

The lack of an evolutionary perspective had another limiting effect on Aristotle. Like others, he found the closest affinity to the sociality of the human species in the life of the social insects. But insects are far apart from us on the evolutionary tree of life. A more instructive comparison is that of human sociality with the social life of primates. We can see from it that complex forms of social interaction, including nurture of the young, are already highly developed in some of primate species. It is reasonable then to conclude that the human species is “naturally a social species with complex skills that include both the capacity for teaching and for learning as well as a variety of other social and political skills.[14]

Aristotle appears right, also, in thinking that the distinctive form that human sociality has taken is largely due to the possession of a capacity for an advanced form of language. But his claim to that effect has been widely misinterpreted.  It has been taken to mean that humans have a mental capacity for rational thought whereas Aristotle’s term “logos” refers to language as a social phenomenon. Aristotle  recognizes  that some animals use primitive sign systems to communicate with each other. But only human logos or language allows for complex forms of deliberation. The possession of such language characterizes the distinctive form of human sociality and it provides the human species with a tool for conceiving new forms of socialization. Where animal gregariousness is fixed, human sociality is thus malleable. It is characteristic of human sociality that we can choose between different forms of political order. It is from this kind of sociality that also our distinctively human individualism has emerged. That is evident from the fact that we define ourselves as individuals by means of language.  Human individuality is, in other words, a product (we might even say, a by-product) of human sociality and it is maintained only by this form of sociality. It is this individuality, moreover, that gives human politics its distinctive character.  Aristotle conclusion that political institutions are by nature prior to the individual – an idea that was, surely, incomprehensible for Hobbes – is the outcome of this line of thinking.

Aristotle’s lack of attention to the social life of primates (in fact, his lack of knowledge of this pre-human form of sociability) had, however, also the  consequence that he downplayed the role of conflict in human life, in contrast to Hobbes who highlighted this aspect of human behavior. Warfare, competition for resources, and social fear are not fundamental to Aristotle’s way of thinking. He knows that there is warfare and that political institutions must be ready to deal with conflict and violence. But war signals for him a failure of politics. Aristotle would never have been able to assent to Clausewitz’ characterization of war as the continuation of politics by other means and he would have been even less receptive to Carl Schmitt’s and Michel Foucault’s reverse description of politics as the continuation of war by other means. For Hobbes there is a constant struggle for power in the natural condition of the human species. Where human beings seek to over-awe each other in his world, Aristotle assumes that there is a natural and fixed order of rank between them. The struggle for power is thus secondary for him. This view is once again linked to Aristotle’s conception of animal gregariousness and its relation to human politics. The interactions of the social insects are  genetically determined and there is, as a result no warfare, no competition for resources, no mutual fear, nor a struggle for power in the beehive or the antheap. The life of the social insects is one of positive sociality. To say it in other words: where Aristotle’s sees human society as a fundamentally collaborative undertaking and based on a natural drive to cooperation, It is for precisely this reason that Hobbes considers Aristotle’s account of animal gregariousness irrelevant to the understanding of human sociality and politics.

If Aristotle and Hobbes had paid attention to (or known of) the sociality of primates, they  might, however, have both felt the need to revise their accounts. For in primate life we certainly find all the elements of negative sociality that Hobbes had identified. There is conflict, competition for resources, there is mutual fear, and there is a constant ongoing struggle for power. But this is not sufficient to justify his account of human politics. The actual situation is, rather, that in primate life we find both negative and positive sociality conjoined. It is thus not the case, as Hobbes thought, that negative sociality is primary and fundamental and that positive sociality is a secondary and derivate construction designed to overcome or, at least alleviate the facts of negative sociality. But Aristotle’s view is also unsatisfactory for looking only at the life of the social insects he did not see that species more closely related to us depict a more complex pattern of sociality. The right picture is then that Aristotle and Hobbes have each identified only one side of human sociality and thus of human politics. A properly evolutionary view will have to recognize that we share with our pre-human relatives a mixture of both negative and positive social drives and capacities. It is this mixture that contributes to the characteristic complexity and volatility of our kind of social and political life.

There is, however, nothing inherently deficient in this. The peculiar dual nature of human sociality has contributed greatly to the success of our species. The deficiency/deficit theory of human nature is for that reason misguided. This does not mean that the combination of positive and negative social drives and capacities that has proved so successful in the struggle for human survival will continue to do so forever. It may turn out that our specific biological endowment will eventually bring about the decline of the species. At that point we would discover that human nature has finally become deficient. It is not the case then that deficiency marks the initial state of human evolution (and is “natural” in that sense). The deficiency of human nature may rather be still ahead of us. And it may then turn out that we lack the means for creating a second nature that will allow us to overcome that deficiency.

Notes

[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Michael Oakeshott, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, p. 82 (Hereafter cited as “L”)

[2] L, p. 84

[3] Thomas Hobbes, De Cive or The Citizen, edited by Sterling P. Lamprecht, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York 1949, p. 22. (Hereafter cited as “C”)

[4] C, p. 21, note.

[5] C, pp. 21-22.

[6] L, p. 80.

[7] L, p. 81.

[8] L, pp. 81-82

[9] L, p. 83.

[10] Plato, The Protagoras, 321c in Plato, Protagoras and Meno, , translated by W.K.C. Guthrie, Penguin Books, London 1956

[11] Ibid, 322b.

[12] Ibid.

[13] In De Cive, though not in Leviathan, Hobbes also recognizes the role of education in socializing human beings. He writes there: “Man is made fit for society not by nature, but by education.” (p. 22. footnote)

[14] Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics. Power and Sex Among Apes, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, rev. ed. 1988.

The Transfer of Power. The model of Hong Kong

We commonly distinguish regimes by how they are ruled – or, rather, by the way we say they are ruled. Thus, a democracy is a regime in which, as we say, the people rule. In reality, “the people,” of course, never rule. It would be more correct to say that in democracies someone rules with the approval of the people. But even that is usually only a euphemism since the people get only ever so often a chance to express their approval or disapproval. Of monarchy we say similarly that it is a system in which a monarch rules when it may be in reality a powerful minister who does the ruling while the monarch provides a pleasing façade.

It is more helpful to distinguish regimes by the way power is transferred. We can then say that democracies are regimes in which power is transferred on someone by the approval of the people. A transfer of power can, of course, take a variety of forms. In democracies, for instance, it may be brought about through regularly scheduled elections. In a monarchy that transfer may, on the other hand, be regulated through a system of inheritance. If the king does the actual ruling, this may involve the transfer of power to his oldest son. If the king’s minister did the ruling, the transfer may be still be effected through the system of inheritance but in an indirect fashion. Power is transferred from one minister to another through the system of inheritance that elevates the oldest son of the king. There is, of course, also the possibility that no actual transfer of power occurs, if the old king’s minister stays on with the new one.

The transfer of power takes on a particularly interesting form when it involves a change of regimes not only one that exchanges those operating within a regime. A transfer of power from one political party to another in a democratic election is one thing, the transfer of power – e.g., from a monarchical system to a democratic one – is something quite different. We then often speak of a “revolution.” The event may even involve some violence. But not always and the regime-transformation is not necessarily a revolutionary one. Regimes also change though processes of slow attrition. A democratic regime may thus turn by stages into an autocracy; elected leaders may slowly become a ruling family. The façade of the earlier form of regime may hold up for a while, even as the system of power behind it and the way power is transferred is changing.

I have been particularly interested in recent years in the hybrid political system of Hong Kong adopted in the handover of the British colony to China in 1997. The agreement struck between two countries was supposed to guarantee political autonomy to Hong Kong for the next fifty years under the formula “One country, two systems.” One weakness of the agreement was, from the start, that it never specified the exact nature of the distinctive Hong Kong “system.” The other one was that the agreement had nothing to say about what would happen at the end of the fifty-year period.  For the British government the hope was, probably, that in those years China would adopt a more democratic system and that there would be eventually an easy merger of the Hong Kong and Chinese political systems. But China has, in fact, remained firmly in the control of its Communist Party. And so we are left with the question of how the transfer of power in Hong Kong is to be reconciled with the Chinese one. In mainland China that transfer is not effected by the will of “the people” but by secretive maneuverings in the higher echelons of the party. That has left the question of the ultimate relation of Hong Kong to China at the end of the “one country, two systems” period wide open. Would the political autonomy of Hong Kong be re-affirmed at that point by the Beijing rulers, as some have hoped? Would the People’s Liberation Army one day march into Hong Kong and overthrow its political system?

The National Security Legislation that has recently been imposed on Hong Kong by the Beijing authorities provides some answers. The first thing to note is that this legislation may not have the support of the citizens of Hong Kong, but it has definitely been accepted and even hailed by the supposed rulers of Hong Kong. That class, which had never been elected in a genuinely democratic fashion, had obviously already been coopted by Beijing. We can only speculate on their motivations. Had they always been silently adherents of Chinese Communism? Had they cynically calculated that Beijing would, in any case, eventually take over and that it was in their own best interest to go along with this? Did they see themselves perhaps as being no more than helpless driftwood on the stream of historical inevitability? Or were they calculating that Hong Kong could maintain and perhaps even increase its economic wealth by politically giving in to China?

For all its political limitations, Hong Kong has until now had many of the trappings of a liberal democracy: the right of people to express their views freely, a colorful, free press, the right to demonstrate, a variety of political parties. The puzzling question (certainly for the powers in Beijing) was always: how do you integrate such a system into the one-party, heavily controlled system of China? The new National Security Law is meant to provide tools for achieving that end. By means of threatened and actual punishments it is meant to limit the expression of public and democratic opinion. Certain things can no longer be said; certain political candidates may no longer be active; certain rebellious individuals are to be silenced.  Changes in the education curriculum are to produce a more pliant generation. Plans for the integration of Hong Kong into a new Southern Chinese Economic zone (“The Greater Bay Area”) and the resulting promise of increased wealth are supposed to sweeten the bitter political pill.

Will these maneuvers succeed in merging Hong Kong smoothly into the Chinese political system? Or will Beijing eventually be forced to use stricter measures as in Tibet and Xinjiang? It is clear, in any case, that the policies the Chinese authorities are pursuing in Hong Kong are not uniquely tied to the Communist system. They are just as available elsewhere. We have seen democracies overthrown by a variety of means: by military take-overs, by invasion, by violence in the street, even by democratic elections. China is now trying something else, a new kind of transfer of power from one kind of regime to another brought about through a co-option of the established elite, the step-by-step reduction of political liberties, the re-education of a new generation, and the promise of economic development. These tools are available also elsewhere and one can see them, in fact, being used by interested parties in a number of Western democracies. The transfer of power within democracies is always in danger of becoming a transfer of power from democracy into another kind of regime.

 

 

The Puzzle of Power

Let us be frank and admit that there is no such thing as power – just as there is no such thing as “the elephant” or “the rhinoceros.” It pays to be nominalist in all these cases and avoid a metaphysics of power just as much as a metaphysics of biological kinds. A noun makes us look for a corresponding object and an abstract noun for an abstract entity. Wittgenstein has shown how that misleads us. So, no power, but no harm will be done with the term, if we take it in the right way. Let us say, then, that there exists a field of relations of something affecting (bearing on, controlling, shaping, transforming, destroying, etc.) something in some way or other. Like Foucault, we can call this the field of relations of mobile inequality. It is from this field that we usually pick a subset we call relations of power. But the choice is wide open. Thus, we end up with disputes about the nature of power, disagreements about how power is to be defined. These arise only from an ill-conceived essentialism and should be relegated to the metaphysical dustbin.

There is no single thing called “power.” There is no single subset of relations of mobile inequalities that properly constitute relations of power. We can speak, for instance, of the power of nature, or of the power of individual agents, or that of institutions, or speak of power only when the relations in question are considered to be legitimated, or when groups of agents work in unison. In each case we are carving out a different domain from the field of relations of mobile inequality. There is no disputing about which is the right one.

This being so, it may be best to think first about the totality of mobile relations of inequality. Foucault has proposed that we call them all power relations. His notion of power is, thus, a bare, minimal one; but we can proceed from it, if the need arises, to richer and more restrictive notions. We can talk, for instance, of social and political relations of power, which are, in fact, the ones that interest Foucault. There is much to recommend this method of starting from a bare concept and then to advance through a process of conceptual enrichment. But we need, perhaps, first to make more explicit what is meant by mobile inequality. Instead of calling the relations in question “mobile” we might also speak of them as “active” or “dynamic.” We are, in other words, not considering conceptual, logical, or mathematical relations of inequality. To say that proposition Q derives from proposition P does not mean that P exercises power over Q. We also don’t mean comparative relations of inequality. “A is taller than B” does not imply a power relation. We are concerned rather with mobile, active or interactive, relationships that generate a dependence and thus an inequality of one relatum to the other. “Going for a walk together” is a dynamic relation in which the partners interact with each other; but, as a symmetrical one, it is not a power relation. “Persuading someone to come along for a walk” is, on the other hand, an example of a power relation in the intended sense.

This broad notion of power proves its usefulness when we start thinking about social and political matters. It allows us to specify different mechanisms and functions of power in society and politics. We can distinguish, for instance, between prohibitive and productive relations of power. While judges exercise power mostly in a prohibitive manner, teachers are meant to exercise power productively. Society and culture exemplify both prohibitive and productive power. Power relations are, in fact, ubiquitous in society – though, of course, not universal. There are symmetrical social relations in addition to the asymmetrical ones. Sometimes the symmetrical relations arise from and are, in fact, constituted by (asymmetrical) relations of power. Social equality is often a fragile achievement teetering on a multitude of relations of inequality.

Our minimal notion of power helps us, further, with characterizing the relation between the social and the political. Power operates both in society and politics. We need to ask then: what is specific about political power? Here again we must say: there is no unique and prescribed way of doing so. We can carve out political relations from the totality of relations of mobile inequality in more than one way. Politics, like power, is not a natural kind. We can define politics, political power, and relations of power in more than one way and it is not the case that one of these definitions is the right one. And because politics is not a natural kind, it does not make sense to assert, like the Aristotelians, that we are political by nature. The only thing we can possibly say is that power relations are endemic to human life and in this sense “natural.” The identification of a particular subset of power relations as political is always a pragmatic choice. The reasonable thing is to look for a concept of political power that is diagnostically useful. But our choice will always be contestable. Hence the disputes over what is political and what is not. Is the enforcement of morals a political matter? Is religion a political concern?

In order to clarify the issue, we must revert to the previous strategy and begin with a minimal characterization of political power. This, too, is Foucault’s way of proceeding. We can follow him in saying that political relations of power are relations that exercise power on relations of power. Political relations are, thus, of second- or higher-order. The law giver, for instance, acts politically in passing laws that regulate the social interactions of citizens: these laws forbid, regulate, or nurture certain exercises of power. They forbid child abuse, regulate business, and nurture a political consciousness. Any political exercise of power can, in turn, be subject to an exercise of political power. The legislature’s exercise of power may be reviewed by a court. In a modern state there are characteristically multiple levels of the exercise of power on political relations of power. Political power thus operates in a multi-level fashion.

Foucault’s minimal concept of political power has its uses but it can also mislead us. The exercise of power on power relations is ubiquitous in society – even in those parts we normally consider to lie outside politics. Parents exercise power on relations of power when they encourage, control, or intervene in their children’s play. Given our minimal concept of political power we will have to say that the parent is then acting politically. A large class of social relations involves, in fact, the exercise of power on relations of power. We are forced to conclude that social life is suffused with politics. Some of Foucault’s readers have come to believe that he has made the stupendous discovery that politics is everywhere. But that “discovery” is due only to his choice of a minimal concept of political power. By using it we draw attention to analogies between private, family, and social life, on the one hand, and what we are used to call more narrowly politics, on the other. The danger of Foucault’s way of speaking is that we come to think of these domains as more similar than they actually are. We may thus be misled into thinking that family life is really (against all possible evidence) just as cold, calculating, and self-serving as large-scale politics can be or, alternatively, that large-scale politics is just as personal and petty as family life often is.

Such concerns justify the introduction of a narrower concept of political power. Given the obvious difference between the informality of family and social life as against the formalized exercise of power in the state, it makes sense to isolate the concept of an institutional exercise of power as a distinct notion. Doing so has, however, significant implications. Frans de Waal has argued that we can identify political power relations in the life of primates. Could this not be helpful for understanding the evolution of human politics? If we insist that politics presupposes an institutional order, we may lose hold of this insight. But talking about “chimpanzee politics” may also lead us to overlook the distinctive character of the human variety. We can try and navigate around this difficulty by distinguishing between a “proto-political” exercise of power in animal life and the properly political exercise of power in an institutional order. It may even be useful to distinguish a whole variety of uses of the term “political.” But our language is not helpful in giving expression to that possibility. A solution may be to use the term with numerical subscripts.

To speak of political power in the more specific, institutional sense forces us to be clear about the nature of institutions. Institutions we may say, for short, are, in fact, complexes of power relations or, more typically, multi-level, staggered, and hierarchical complexes of power relations. But this is still not enough. We need to add that such complexes are commonly built on a material base, require material means, and have material effects: they have a location, they occupy buildings, they process documents, they manage machineries and armaments. If we speak of institutions as systems of rules or practices, we will overlook this material aspect. The material base of institutions changes, of course, over time and with it the political relations of power. Political power is thus not a fixed quantity, but something that has a history.

The history of human power has, in fact, a dual character. There are the actual relations of power and there is their interpretation. Power is most effective, Foucault has argued, when it is invisible and thus remains uninterpreted. But what we think and say about power can both enhance and deplete it. When we believe that someone has power, his exercise of power may become more effective. When we say that someone is legitimated to exercise power, we will be more ready to submit to it. Saying that someone “has power” means that he is capable of exercising it or that he is legitimated to exercise it. It is possible to have power in one sense but not in the other. Both the exercise of power and its interpretation change over time.

This history displays what Carl Schmitt has called a dialectic of power. The more centralized and complex power relations become, the less they will be controllable by individual agents. The concentration of power and its dispersion go hand in hand. The rulers of modern states have enormous power, but their exercise of power is dependent on those who supply them with information, on the one hand, and those who execute their decisions, on the other. Donald Trump has all the power of an American president at his disposal but his decisions are determined by what he has just seen on television. So, who is the one who actually exercises power in this situation? And when the president issues one of his intemperate commands, a judge or a bureaucrat or a general may well obstruct its execution. So, who exercises power over whom at that moment? It may make sense to speak of a sovereign holder of power in simple settings, but in the complex institutional arrangements of modern life sovereignty becomes an illusion. There is no one to whom the people could hand over all power and there is no power which could be handed over entirely to the people. Forms of government constructed on the principle of sovereignty exist – but only in the imagination. And it must be admitted that this imaginary sovereignty can redirect the actual flow of relations of power.

The cycle of birth and death leads, in any case, to a constant transfer of power. At every moment someone gains and someone loses power. The transfer of power may go on gradually and unnoticed; it can also be visible and programmed or even sudden and violent, chaotic and unforeseen. Systems of political power (monarchy, dictatorship, democracy, etc.) differ not only in the way power is exercised within them but also – and perhaps more importantly – in how it is transferred. Many factors determine the nature and speed of that transfer: biological, economic, cultural, and ecological. Technological development contributes greatly to the instability in the distribution of power in human hands. As a consequence, human history results in a constant accumulation and concentration of power in some places and its dispersion in others. The balance of power is always in flux. If those in power were actually able to control this process, relations of power would already have settled in a stable pattern a long time ago. But there are instabilities, revolutions, the acquisition and deprivation of power. There is, however, no natural law that this cycle will go on forever. Who can say what the ultimate outcome will be: a complete absorption of power into a single centre, a black hole that attracts and annihilates all power around it, or a dissipation of power into an anarchic cloud of galactic dust?

The process is not entirely in our hands. The human exercise of power depends on what the material substratum will allow or what it requires. In institutional contexts those constraints will be particularly stringent since the functioning of the institution is so dependent on its material base. Our increasingly technologized world may eventually come to circumscribe the possibilities and thus the power of human agency. In the end, the power of nature is bound to overwhelm that of human action.

What hope is there?

Democracy in China. The Coming Crisis is a tightly argued  new book by Ci Jiwei that sets itself the dual task of analyzing China’s democracy deficit while doing so in a genuinely philosophical manner. Such an exercise in a “diagnostic” style of political philosophy is greatly more challenging than the usual abstract and normative theorizing of our political philosophers. It faces the twofold challenge of having to give a plausible account of the political reality that serves as its material and to produce substantive new philosophical insights on that basis. Ci manages both tasks with great assurance. His book is bound to become essential reading for anyone concerned with China’s political prospects but it will also prove to be of interest to  anyone who wants to think realistically about politics and political philosophy.

Ci’s major thesis is that China must undergo a process of democratization in the next few decades or face potentially disastrous instability. Ci seeks to make his case for Chinese democracy in “prudential” rather than purely “normative” terms – a “case for democracy without falling under its spell,” as he puts it, aligning himself with John Dunn’s “realistic” view of democracy.  (p. 17)  In agreement once again with Dunn, Ci holds, furthermore, that political philosophy must proceed in a diagnostic and prognostic manner rather than in abstractly theorizing terms. He quotes Dunn as saying: “History, if anything, can tell us how we have come hither; moral philosophy, perhaps, what to make of the fact that this is where we now are. But political theory has no choice but to tell us how to act, given that this is indeed where we now are.” (p. 385)

Ci, one of the leading Chinese philosophers today and a professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, is the author also of  Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution (1994) and  Moral China in the Age of Reform (2014).  I have for long been an admirer of these volumes and particularly of the first with its penetrating analysis of China’s drift from Maoist utopianism to an always already implicit hedonism and its original take on philosophical ideas from Confucianism to Nietzsche.

Conjoined to these two earlier works, Democracy in China can be seen to make up the concluding volume of a trilogy that aims at  a sweeping, philosophically imbued picture of China and Chinese politics from 1949 through the coming decades. The entire work situates itself at the intersection of philosophy, history, and politics – not an easy place to occupy as we can see from the few philosophers who have done so successfully. Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault come, first and foremost, to mind. Ci’s book is a remarkable new contribution to this genre.

While Democracy in China may be read as a continuation of the two earlier volumes, it also treads critically different ground. With their focus on China’s recent past and immediate present, the two earlier books could draw on confirmable historical circumstances. In seeking to ground philosophical reflection on historical realities, they could thus adopt a strictly diagnostic tone of voice. The new book, with its view to the future, is inevitably forced to follow another, prognostic procedure – one that is inevitably haunted by greater uncertainty than the diagnostic one. But in what other way can a historically oriented form of political philosophy become practical and prescriptive? Neither the past nor the future are completely knowable, but we can still acquire at least a skeleton knowledge of it. With respect to the future, hesitant conjecture is, however, the closest we can come to real knowledge. Thus, we know who the successors of Mao were and more or less what they did, but we cannot know who Xi Jinping’s successor will be or what he will stand for.  Ci is fully aware of this asymmetry and acknowledges it again and again in the course of his book, but it certainly makes for a more tentative agenda than his earlier writings. History has ways of diverting its course in unexpected directions and we cannot ignore that possibility when it comes to the future of China. So, what grounds do we have for assuming that Ci’s carefully reasoned scenario will actually play out?

There is another striking uncertainty in this book and that concerns its intentions. Who are meant to be its readers? One might think that its most important readers, the ones who will have most to learn from the book and the only ones who can make practical use of its lessons, will be members of the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party. But what likelihood is there that they will come across a book written in English by a Hong Kong philosopher and published by Harvard University Press in America? And if they were to become familiar with the book, would they be ready for its lessons?

These considerations are not meant to disparage Ci’s work, but they make me think that the book’s significance should not be measured by whether it will contribute to the rise of democracy in China, that Ci’s is after all a work of philosophical reflection and that its importance will lie in how it contributes to a deepened understanding of our political and historical reality. I am inclined at this point to invoke Machiavelli’s Prince. That book, too, was intended as a guide for political rulers; but it lives on now as an account of the working of political rule.

We can say, in any case, that Ci’s book has two dimensions: one political and the other philosophical. The political dimension concerns the future of China – a matter surely of the greatest significance. Whatever China’s future may be will have an impact on the global political order. If China should eventually become a full-fledged democracy, it will be the largest democracy the world has ever seen. To manage a democratic system of that size will, no doubt, be extremely challenging. The ancient Greeks believed that democracy could truly function only in small city states. We now have mass democracies but at the price of deviating radically from the model of the original. A Chinese democracy will have to be a political system of an entirely new and as yet unforeseeable form of democracy. But whatever form it will have, a Chinese democracy will also give a boost and a new direction to democracy around the world. If China should, on the other hand become unstable, that too will have global repercussions. Ci’s reflections on the future of China  certainly make clear what is at stake.

But the significance of his work is not exhausted by this. The other dimension of his book is the philosophical one. From his thoughts about China, Ci extracts many new philosophical insights concerning, not least, our very understanding of democracy. His work serves thus also as an exemplary exposition of the diagnostic mode of political philosophy.

Ci Jiwei, Democracy in China. The Coming Crisis, Harvard University Press 2019

 

 

Democracy at the Starline Social Club

Jim Miller came to Oakland last week to promote his latest book and I had the pleasure to introduce him at a book presentation organized by Timothy Don at the Starline Social Club in Oakland. It was the night of the election and we were in a space next to the barroom.  So, as the evening proceeded, we could hear the moans and cheers from the bar as election results were coming in. It sounded like democracy at work while we were talking about its history, theory, and prospects.

Miller’s book is an exhilarating roller-coaster history of democracy, tracing its vertiginous ups and downs from ancient Athens to the present. The story is told in a vigorous, bracing fashion. It spells out the ideals that have propelled democratic activists but it also describes the turmoil, chaos, and bloodshed that have accompanied the history of democracy.

 

 

 

The Empire of Disorientation. A Preface (2nd draft)

It was the day after the election of Donald Trump when I first realized that we are living now in an empire of disorientation. That morning I faced 200 students who were so distraught that I had to cancel a scheduled examination. Some of my colleagues said soon afterwards that we needed to meet in order to console each other. The media and the commentators were profoundly puzzled that morning and in the days to come about the election and what it meant. Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, was at a loss for words, her supporters destroyed.  Even Trump himself, we are told, was stunned by the unexpected turn of events. I have begun to understand since then that the disorientation that everybody felt that day was, in fact, a symptom of a more wide-spread and, in fact, pandemic condition. My initial picture of the United States as an empire of disorientation gave thus way to the recognition that the empire of disorientation is our new, global reality.

Disorientation is a virulent form of uncertainty. Uncertainty as such is a normal feature of life and an inescapable one in politics. Both in daily life and in politics we are regularly called upon to make decisions when we are uncertain about the circumstances about what we really want. When the circumstances are sufficiently narrowly circumscribed and the action considered sufficiently small, we may find it easy enough to decide. But as soon as we contemplate any larger course of action that presupposes extensive knowledge of the existing conditions and of the likely outcome of our actions and when the question why we mean to act and for what purpose is not clearly settled, we will be inclined to hesitate, dither, postpone the decision, or try to evade it altogether. Such situations are not unknown in politics. Forced finally to make a decision, we become painfully aware of the gap between our deliberations and the action we finally decide on. Sometimes we roll dice or toss a coin or look for an omen to help us along.

Political action responds to uncertainty. It seeks to alleviate and overcome our insecurities. But it also exploits them and generates new ones. Uncertainty is never removed from politics. In normal times such uncertainty remains manageable. But when it magnifies and multiplies  coherent action becomes more and more difficult. It is then when we speak of disorientation. Political uncertainty arises from normal limits to our knowledge and from the normal conflict of our desires. But when it rises too far, it becomes toxic. The resulting disorientation manifests itself as a comprehensive failure of understanding where we are and what we want. We lack, in other words, not only information but also the words and concepts to think coherently. My claim is simply that we are moving today from a (normal) politics of uncertainty to an (abnormal) politics of disorientation and that on a global scale.

This book was initially motivated by the astonishing rise of Donald Trump into the political stratosphere. But it was never meant to focus exclusively on the 45th US President. My aims have always been broader, more analytic, more theoretical – certainly not journalistic, even less polemical, and not at all party-political. I turn to the figure of Donald Trump, instead, only as emblematic of a larger narrative which concerns the increasing instability of our institutional arrangements and the global crisis into which we are heading.

That Trump signals a state of growing political disorientation is clear from the difficulty we have in trying to understand him and what he stands for. His critics have called him a populist and even a fascist; but are these terms really explanatory or adequate? Trump identifies himself as a Republican and a conservative; but is this not just one of the changing veneers he has used in his lifetime?  Our confusion is deepened by the fact that across the “democratic” West, old political affiliations are losing their hold. The ideological strands seem to have become entangled in new, unexpected ways. And so the familiar arrangement of political views on a scale from “Left” to “Right” has become less helpful. The new complexity of our global word makes it increasingly difficult to grasp what is going on and makes predicting the consequences of our actions more hazardous.  The resulting uncertainties afflict everyone: ordinary citizens, but also the members of the political class and even, so it seems, the president of the United States. We find ourselves, in other words, in an empire of disorientation.

We must ask ourselves then how we can our way in this condition. It appears likely that we can expect only tentative and provisional answers and that they can be reached only in a number of steps. The first step will have to be a closer look at the normal uncertainty that affects all politics. Only then can we move on to consider the state of disorientation in which we now roam. It may turn out that our condition of disorientation is constitutive of a new political reality and not a mere obstacle to understanding it. In a third chapter, I turn to the question how we can describe Trump’s politics more adequately. I begin with the question whether we should think of him as a populist or, at least, as an advocate of some populist policies. It will quickly become apparent that the term “populism” is too imprecise to capture either Trump or his policies. “Populism” may, in fact, only be a rhetorical façade behind which another kind of politics is hidden. In the fourth chapter I will consider the more promising idea that we are witnessing the emergence of a plutocratic regime. The plutocratic turn in politics is certainly not limited to the United States and the accelerating concentration of wealth and political power across the globe suggests far-reaching changes in the way politics is conducted.

But to speak of plutocracy as the new political paradigm can’t be the end of the story. For the rule of the rich, though not universal, has been common in history. Over time plutocracy has, moreover, had many different embodiments. In order to understand what plutocracy could mean in the twenty-first century, we must raise the broader question of the material and the moral conditions under which this form of politics is now being re-invented.

Contemporary plutocracy is made possible by technological means that have brought about new forms of economic accumulation, new forms of communication, and an entirely new globalized system of human interaction. As a result, we are witnessing a re-arrangement of power relations across the globe. In order to understand this process, we will need to consider the peculiar dialectic of these relations, their weaving back and forth in processes of concentration and dispersion. Given these fluctuations we should not be surprised to discover a transformation and deformation occurring at every level of human society. Hannah Arendt has argued that we are by no means “naturally” political beings, that human politics is, rather, a historical and contingent arrangement, and that the conditions for its existence may disappear. She conceived of this possibility as taking the form of a rigidly administrative “post-political” state. It is also possible that our disorientation will lead to disorder and chaos, and the ultimate destruction of the entire human form of life. In either direction, technological change would appear to be a decisive factor.

The disappearance of politics in Arendt’s sense is not inevitable. But do we have the moral resources to prevent it? We need to remind ourselves here of Nietzsche’s observation that we are living increasingly under nihilistic conditions. Nihilism does not here mean the total collapse of values. Our nihilism manifests itself rather in their proliferation which as such makes those values arbitrary and evanescent. Our kind of nihilism consists, in other words, in a “desublimation” of values: in values losing their value. It is in this desublimated climate that plutocracy is now re-instituting itself with the help of technological means. Our twenty-first century variety of version of politics may thus turn out to be a nihilistic techno-plutocracy and as such the antecedent of a post-political future.

In order to flesh out these speculations we must begin with a closer look at the political ground. I start, therefore, with Donald Trump and then broaden my perspective to the overall political condition.  It is essential then to distinguish from the start between the individual case of Trump’s presidency and the broader political transformations it signals. An exclusive focus on Trump and his idiosyncrasies may lead us to overlook that his election, though by no means predetermined, was also no fluke. It marks one significant place on a road that stretches both backwards and forwards; it signals an increasing destabilization of the political order; it indicates that we can no longer take the assumptions of the classical modern state for granted; and it points to an uncertain political future. There is a second reason why we must not limit our attention to the person of Donald Trump. We don’t know as yet how successful his presidency will be. If it is and how it is, will force us to rethink where we are politically. But Trump’s political edifice is also a ramshackle affair and may eventually collapse under its own weight.  If that happens, our preoccupation with Trump may mislead us in another way, making us think that the old order is still with us, is stable and has been saved — when its disintegration may, in fact, be only taking another course. In thinking about where we are politically, we need to be aware of the forces of transformation that are at work and these are of global reach and not limited to Trump’s America. But this does not mean that dynamics of global politics is the same as America’s. Different parts of the world exemplify different stages of political development. And how these develop depends on local as well as on global conditions. We can be fairly sure that China will never become like the United States and the United States is not likely to turn into a replica of China and the destiny of Europe is bound to be different from both. We must therefore avoid speaking about global politics as if it were just an extension of the turbulences, tremors, and tragedies of Trump’s regime.

The model for my book is Ci Jiwei’s Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution (Stanford University Press 1994) a work that has not yet received the attention that it deserves. The book  undertakes a philosophical diagnosis of Chinese history from Mao’s revolution to the mid-nineties. It describes the historical course as a shift from utopianism to a hedonism that constitutes a nihilistic “desublimation of values.” My goal is to supplement Ci’s story with an account of the development of American and global politics in a direction that encompasses both an individualistic hedonism and an aggressive nationalism as another embodiment of the nihilistic “desublimation of values.” It may turn out that the development of China and that of Trump’s America and the rest of the global community resemble each other and can be considered parts of one story.

My line of thinking has its origins in two earlier books. The primary objective of Heidegger’s Crisis. Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany was to explore the political entanglement of Martin Heidegger and other German philosophers during the nineteen-thirties and forties. My discussion aime in this way at raising a series of interrelated questions: why is political philosophy such a treacherous subject? How are we to conceive the role of philosophy in politics? How is philosophy shaped by the political circumstances in which it operates and how does it respond to those circumstances? Are philosophers qualified to define ultimate standards and norms of political action, as they have sought to do for such a long time? Or is the function of philosophy more modestly to help us diagnose the political realities, to provide concepts for its understanding, and thereby to prepare the ground for practical choices? German philosophy in this period proceeded in the midst of a political crisis and this raised the further question how one should think about such crises and, in particular, about the German crisis of that moment. My concern was to show that, in spite of their political missteps, Heidegger and some of his fellow philosophers had come to a few enduring insights. They had understood that the crisis they faced had to do with the emergence of nihilism, as Nietzsche had identified it before them, and that this development was, in turn, related to the technological transformation of our human reality. And this story remains of interest because the crisis the German philosophers diagnosed is continuous with the one we face in the age of Trump. It is the continuation of this story that concerns me in this book.

This present work also takes off from Politics and the Search for the Common Good, a book in which I set out a critique of the normative thinking that dominates political philosophy till today. I sought to argue that it is an illusion to assume that we can determine the common good once and for all by means of abstract, philosophical reasoning. The common good has to be worked out, instead, In a political manner. We must therefore reject the claims of the normative thinkers as being an authoritarian appropriation of a political process. I called, instead, for a diagnostic form of political thinking in which philosophy sets out to contribute to an understanding of our political reality by providing analyses and concepts. In his theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx famously noted that the philosophers have so far only sought to understand reality, but that the real task is to change it. We may be allowed to ask how the philosophers are supposed to do this. The answer may be that they can do so only by helping us to interpret the situation in which find ourselves. Coming to think of it, we might even say that this is, in fact, also what Marx himself ultimately did.

Politics and the Search for the Common Good ends with reflections on the way that technology shapes and transforms our political practice; how power gets distributed and redistributed by means of technology; and how this leads over time to both concentrations and dispersions of power. And to this, the book adds as a concluding thought, that the way this happens is not full accessible to our understanding and that politics is therefore inherently a domain of uncertainty. It is this uncertainty that constitutes the starting point of the present work.

Political Realism vs. Political Realism

Trump must be a puzzle to our political realists. He certainly shares their scorn for seeing politics in moral terms. Unlike George W. Bush, he doesn’t speak of an axis of evil in the world; and unlike Obama and the Democrats, he is little concerned with the issue of human rights. As an amoral capitalist he believes in self-interest and the exercise of power, in the use and pursuit of money in politics.

But he is also not much interested in the actual political realities. He sticks to a simple picture of what the world is like, despises experts, and ignores advice. In his factual claims he is often quite unrealistic.

Trump makes us understand that the term “political realism” is ambiguous. In one sense it is a general belief about how human beings act and a set of policies derived from this. In another sense it refers to the recognition of the concrete facts on the political ground. Trump shows us that the two don’t necessarily go together. Political realism can, in other words, go hand in hand with a lack of realism.

Robotic Doves Circling over Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish from 1975 was the first book to raise the question of the surveillance state. The book was about changes in the practice of punishment and how these illustrate the emergence of a modern disciplinary society. But disciplinary society was for Foucault also and above all a society of surveillance. Hence the French title of the book: Surveiller et Punir. Foucault brilliantly illustrated his point by recalling Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon – an architectural design of a prison, conceived by the utilitarian philosopher, that allowed for the continuous surveillance of the prisoners and for their disciplining. In his presentation of this conception Bentham had already suggested its wider uses in schools, hospitals, factories, and workhouses.

Our society has developed much further into a surveillance society since Foucault published his book and certainly since Bentham wrote his treatise on the panopticon in the late 18th century. This has not escaped the attention of social scientists and there exists now an extensive literature on the topic of surveillance. For all that, we still need to reflect much more on this theme.
A useful stimulus to this end comes from a new report on a further step in the development of surveillance drones in the form of robotic birds. In the US, Europe, and China this development is well advanced. The Chinese are, in fact, already using robotic doves extensively in their rebellious Xinyang province. It’s worth looking at this article and the enclosed video from the South China Morning Post:

Click here