Antifa and Elephants

In the wake of Charlottesville, the question of how best to respond to a growing and emboldened fascist movement is pressing. People, by and large, take one of two lines. 

The Antifa line is: punch Nazis. That is, confront fascists whenever and wherever possible, show them that their public presence will not be tolerated, and try to make them scurry back to their holes to hide in the dark. 

The liberal line is: sunlight kills more Nazis than punches. That is, speak out and hold demonstrations, if necessary, but don’t respond with violence, which will only spread and encourage the fascists to become more radical and dangerous. 

By and large, people taking one line don’t have any patience for those taking the other. Liberals think Antifa play into fascists’ hands, and escalate social upheaval. Antifa think liberals give cover for fascists, and roll over in the face of the growing threat.

I’m not going to take sides on this question of tactics. Not because I don’t have an opinion (my opinion: the Antifa are usually right about the present situation in the US), but because I want instead to call attention to certain features of both arguments, features that (a) are endemic to arguments about political tactics, and that (b) make it very hard to even imagine settling those arguments in the same time-scale in which they are made and are salient as motivational and justificatory frameworks for action.

First of all, both sides in this non-debate rely on a privileged stock of historical examples. The Antifa think, especially, of the Battle of Cable Street, when rioting Londoners stopped Mosley’s British Union of Fascists; the BUF never recovered. The liberals think, especially, of Weimar Germany, where they see escalating street battles between fascists and communists preparing the ground for Hitler’s rise.

These different historical lodestones derive from different analyses of the social dynamics of fascism. Liberals tend to see the fascist seizure of the state as a backlash phenomenon: increasingly violent social struggle stokes the demand for “law and order,” which the authoritarian far-Right is able to capitalize on. The thought is that most people are basically apolitical, and just want to go about their day-to-day lives. The more political disorder – of whatever sort – intrudes upon that day-to-day, the more likely this mass of people is to become reactionary, to demand that someone, anyone, put an end to the protests, the fighting, the disruption. If this is right, then keeping the political temperature down, and keeping the state’s monopoly of violence intact, seems like the safest path.

The Antifa, of course, thinks this is not right. For the Antifa Left, the state is not a third party mediating social conflicts; it is on the side of the dominant party in those conflicts. If you expect the cops to handle the fascists, you’re going to be disappointed to find out that too many of the cops are the fascists.

To be sure, there are plenty of far-Left analyses that stress the danger of backlash. Gramsci, for instance, advised communist partisans not to mimic the fascists’ militia units lest the symmetry of the opposed civil warriors license the state’s suppression of “all sides” – a suppression which would inevitably be led by the military and police elements that also support or even comprise the far-Right’s militia cadres. Precisely because the Left sees the state as on the side of the dominant, it has always worried about provoking the “legitimate monopolists” of violence. This is why the Left ought to always prefer (and does, in fact, usually prefer) public, mass struggle to clandestine and small-cell operations. 

However, it is also why the Antifa do sometimes embrace tactics that especially rile liberals. Because Antifa expect the police to be on the side of the fascists, they are especially wary of being identified. Hence, they are especially wary of being filmed. Hence, they sometimes attack reporters covering protests. This seems to have happened twice in Charlottesville, and it has Jake Tapper and Jonathan Chait especially up in arms.

Fundamentally, liberals don’t want private individuals making judgment calls about when physical violence is appropriate. And they don’t want this because they think such private judgments are both unaccountable and given to indefinite expansion.

I understand this liberal perspective. I don’t want unaccountable people making decisions about the meting out of physical violence, either. But I also think that liberals (a) overestimate how accountable the public authorities are for the violence they mete out, and (b) underestimate the checks that Antifa ideology and organization place on Antifa violence. 

Leaving the policing of violence to the authorities is not, in the world we actually live in, leaving it in democratically accountable hands. And whatever tendency there might be for political justifications of violence to expand their mandate, this tendency runs up against certain counter-tendencies. It is easier to maintain the discipline, fervor, and group-cohesion necessary for mounting effective street battles in the face of actual, armed Nazis, but much harder to do so with each step on Chait’s slippery slope of inference.

More importantly, for me, is that the liberal opposition to Antifa tactics – like the justification of Antifa tactics themselves – relies upon a predictive model of social and political dynamics that operates on a timescale a thousand times larger than that of the Twitter controversy cycle. To be frank, we cannot know whether the Antifa opposition to the brown shirts of Charlottesville helps or hurts the struggle against fascist resurgence in America. 

At some point in the future, perhaps we will be able to retrospectively ascertain this, but even this is unlikely. Certainly liberals do not look at the Battle of Cable Street and say, well, in that case Antifa tactics worked. Rather, they will explain the failure of fascism in Britain by pointing to the stability and good order of the British government, the elite consensus around the rule of law, or some such. And the Antifa will certainly not grant that communist battles with Nazis in Weimar Germany drove the electorate into the arms of the Right. Even if each side granted the other its preferred historical case, there would be no basis for generalizing the conclusion.

In the end, we all want to act as if the deeds of a discrete set of addressable agents are consequential and variable, even as we treat the actions and reactions of  everyone else as predictable constants. Liberals want to hold Antifa responsible for any reactionary backlash. Antifa want to hold those who stand by and do nothing responsible for the belligerence of the far Right. And we may not have the conceptual tools to do otherwise, to knit together our ethical discourses of individual responsibility and our social scientific discourses of large-scale movement and change. 

The long-term and large-scale dynamics of history are always the elephant in the room. If there is no agreement about those, I don’t see how there could ever be any rational argument about political tactics. 

Can sucking up make you free?

Daniel Oppenheimer has a very thoughtful essay on Mark Lilla and Corey Robin in the Washington Monthly. Among his observations is this: "Modern secular liberal society, of the sort Lilla prefers, will survive and flourish only if it’s able to reckon with the insights of those who critique and reject its premises. In fact it’s one of the necessary virtues of liberal society, for Lilla, that it’s capable of reckoning and sometimes even reconciling with its critics and haters. It’s also one of the responsibilities of liberal intellectuals to act as facilitators of this process." I think this really does get at the self-conception of many liberal intellectuals.

But then there is also this: "From this perspective an intellectual like Robin, who conspicuously rejects that conciliatory role, makes sense as a villain. And yet by this standard of villainy, many of the reactionary intellectuals whom Lilla respects and even admires would count as villains. These were people who had no interest in serving modernity, or contributing to its stability, because they saw it as hollow or rotten at its core, not worth serving or shoring up. They were not, in other words, liberal intellectuals, and had no desire to be. I would guess that Robin would say the same of himself, though from a very different ideological vantage point than most of Lilla’s subjects. So why not extend to him, and to the class of left-wing intellectuals of whom he’s fairly representative, the same intellectual courtesy, the same kind of sensitive, nuanced, historically informed and emotionally reserved critical treatment that Lilla is able to give to the subjects of his book, from whom he has more distance, either in time, space or ideology?"

Yes, why not? Why are many liberal intellectuals more understanding and sympathetic -- and astute -- readers of the anti-liberal Right than of the anti-liberal Left?

This has me thinking of an argument Philip Pettit makes in "On the People's Terms." Arguing against Isaiah Berlin's conception of freedom as non-interference, Pettit subjects it to what he thinks is a reductio ad absurdum. He argues that, if we are free so long as we are not being coerced or threatened, then this entails "that ingratiation -- toadying, kowtowing, and cosying up to the powerful -- can give you freedom of choice." It is not a very charitable or sympathetic thought, I admit, but I wonder if what Pettit thinks an absurdity is not actually a sincerely held belief of many liberal intellectuals: that getting cosy with the powerful can make you free.

When Lilla attacks Robin, when Jonathan Chait attacks young leftists, the animating intuition is that if the outsiders, rebels, and radicals of the world would just be nice to those in positions of power, their complaints would, if not evaporate, at least be significantly ameliorated. They can put themselves easily in the shoes of those who rule and govern, and can appreciate that ruling is hard. They also think that large differentials of power and wealth are inescapable, and so we ought to mitigate their dangers by attending to the resentments and complaints of the wealthy and powerful, to keep them in good humour lest they desire to employ their wealth and power more intrusively and despotically. And, from where they stand, why would they think otherwise?

What's Left of Liberalism?

Oy, does this thing still work?

So, Matt Yglesias thinks he has no enemies to the left.  I haven't waded through all of the post he is responding to, but...

Issue numero uno: de Boer says of Yglesias that he is "one of the most vocal of the neoliberal scolds, forever ready to define the 'neoliberal consensus' as the truth of man and to ignore left-wing criticism."  To this, Yglesias responds: 

I don’t really know what it means to criticize a writer for holding that his own views are “the truth of man.” Obviously, I agree with my political opinions and disagree with those who disagree with me. If I didn’t agree I’d change my mind.

But you're not being criticized for believing what you say -- you're being criticized for believing what you believe!  The problem is content, not sincerity. 

Issue numero dos: Yglesias avers, "while I’ll cop to being a 'neoliberal' I don’t acknowledge that I have critics to the 'left' of me."  He then rattles off a list of his primary policy concerns (to which I'll return), before saying:

I recognize that many people disagree with this agenda, and that many of those who disagree with it think of themselves as "to the left" of my view. But I simply deny that there are positions that are more genuinely egalitarian than my own. I really and sincerely believe that liberalism is the best way to advance the interests of the underprivileged and to make the world a better place.

The unspoken assumption throughout is that Left = egalitarianism.  No one is more egalitarian than Yglesias, hence no one is further to the Left than he.  Now this assumption has a long history.  In academic circles it certainly runs back to the 80s, when the Marxists stopped calling themselves Marxists and started calling themselves egalitarians, when historical materialism went out the window, to be replaced by neo-Kantian moral theory.  

If this assumption is taken on board, then those who thinks of themselves as being to the Left of liberalism are actually just sentimentalists and wishful thinkers -- they will the end of equality without willing the means of liberal government, which is the only mechanism for achieving equality.  Genuine egalitarianism is liberal egalitarianism.

As someone who thinks of himself as to the Left of liberalism, and who has never hoisted the banner of Equality!,  I'd like to register an objection.

Equality always has to be specified.  Equality unmodified means nothing; we must answer the question: Equality of what?  For Yglesias, it is equality of economic freedom, greater equality of economic outcome (wealth), and equality of respect and recognition -- pretty much the standard Rawlsian package.  Thus, look at the specific issues that concern him:

1. More redistribution of money from the top to the bottom.
2. A less paternalistic welfare state that puts more money directly in the hands of the recipients of social services.
3. Macroeconomic stabilization policy that seriously aims for full employment.
4. Curb the regulatory privileges of incumbent landowners.
5. Roll back subsidies implicit in our current automobile/housing-oriented industrial policy.
6. Break the licensing cartels that deny opportunity to the unskilled.
7. Much greater equalization of opportunities in K-12 education.
8. Reduction of the rents assembled by privileged intellectual property owners.
9. Throughout the public sector, concerted reform aimed at ensuring public services are public services and not jobs programs.
10. Taxation of polluters (and resource-extractors more generally) rather than current de facto subsidization of resource extraction.

Most of these -- 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 -- are nothing more than efforts to extend and perfect the market.  They internalize externalities, eliminate rents, etc.  Now I don't necessarily disagree with all of these things, but every one of them implies that we need more and better markets.  The remaining concerns -- 1, 3, and 7 -- aim to establish the non-market prerequisites of these more and better markets.  

Nowhere is there even a hint of the thought that an increase in market freedom might lead to a decrease in other sorts of freedom, or to less happiness, or to any other bad outcome.  Nowhere is there any mention of something like a guaranteed basic income, or of any other policy that would reduce the need for people to rely upon wage labor to live.  Nowhere is there any attention to global macroeconomic dynamics like the swelling of the global surplus population -- the hundreds of millions of people who do not participate in any meaningful economic activity whatsoever.  Nowhere is there any reference to tax competition.  Nowhere is there any hint that all these wonderful markets might depend upon the existence of a labor market, including a market for bare subsistence wage-labor, with all the poverty and desperation that market implies.

In short, nowhere does Yglesias hint that more and better markets might themselves be problematic.  That's not to say that the Left is or ought to be in favor of fewer and worse markets, but to say that the Left, since Marx, has been centrally opposed to the notions of freedom and equality that find their ground in "the market" -- the surface appearance of capitalism.

So, I say to Yglesias: sorry dude -- there's definitely plenty of room on your Left, and it's populated with enemies -- like me.

The Anti-Political Pathology of the American "Left"

I haven't linked to anything Glenn Greenwald has written in a very long time. This is partly because I have not been paying nearly as much attention to US politics since Obama's election. This is partly the recoil from paying way too much attention to everything in the lead-up to the election, and partly an attempt to inoculate myself against the mind-numbing depression caused by the daily ups and downs of the political "conversation" in the US. My dad works for a senator, and I can see the toll taken on him by the ceaseless chatter and clatter of the thousands of little Don Quixotes at work slaying the dragons of their political opponents, and by the nauseating stew of opinion and analysis served up by the news media. I sort of made up my mind that the guy I wanted to win had won, and I wasn't ready to be disheartened by attending to the daily atrocities committed by the best-guys-available-at-the-time.

But here is a link to something Glenn Greenwald has written.

His basic claim is that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party sucks at politics. They suck at politics because they are incapable of making a credible threat to vote against the tiniest incremental improvement on some issue where they would like to see major reform. Their mantra is, "Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good," but the effect is that the "better than nothing" becomes the enemy of the good. The HCR debate has guaranteed that the Obama administration will never make any major moves to placate progressives within the party because they know full well that the progressives will always back them no matter what. The progressives have destroyed any leverage they might have had with the administration because they have proven themselves unwilling to sink the health care bill, even though it lacks any of their "must have" provisions.

First of all, I think this analysis is spot on.

Second, I think it can be generalized to cover much of the dynamic that obtains between (relatively) liberal and (relatively) conservative blocs in most major political debates in North America. In short, liberals suck at politics because they aren't willing to accelerate the contradictions. The notion that things might have to get worse in order to get better, and that a responsible effort to make things better therefore has to accept making things worse as a valid strategy -- this is beyond the pale of most liberal thought.

If the anti-war "left" had decided to make life really hard for Bush, they could have. Obstructionism is obviously not an entirely lost art in US Congress, and those opponents of the war who had the misfortune of not being elected members of the legislature could have been infinitely more extremist in the expression of their opposition to the war than they were. But that would have entailed making life worse for people other than Bush as well -- soldiers, one's fellow citizens, one's family, etc. It would have meant taking on board the responsibility for causing deaths, even. Being anti-war could not be passed off on one's conscience as being anti-killing, or anti-suffering, or the like. It would mean taking a decision against a concrete policy or act, rather than against only abstract generalities. (If you've decided to oppose this war, then nothing prohibits you from making war against those who would take us into this war, but if you have "decided" to oppose War, there is very little you can do to stop any actual war, which will always be a concrete course of action, carried out by people with guns.)

This unwillingness to make things worse in order to get what you have decided upon as your goal means the progressive left will always get steamrolled by those who are willing to say "Give me what I want or I'll destroy something both of us care about."

The Left and Liberal Government (After Foucault)

Foucault's lectures on "The Birth of Biopolitics" have been rattling around in my head. I think they present a real challenge for the Left, in the sense that they articulate the lack of what Foucault refers to as a socialist governmentality. In fact, on might even say that, in the West, there is currently no governmental alternative to liberalism. What does this mean?

Well, first we should set aside the sense in which "liberalism" names a partisan position in North American electoral and cultural politics. Liberals in this sense tend to embrace liberal government for some issues (drugs, abortion, etc.) while rejecting it for others (minimum wage, environmental regulations, etc.). There is no neat fit between the mode of government and partisan identification, even if there are discernible patterns.

Likewise, I think it is necessary to set aside the sense in which "liberalism" names a theory of state legitimation. In this sense, liberalism asks the question: When is it obligatory that I obey a coercive power? To which liberalism answers: When that coercive power is necessary (and sufficient?) to secure a sphere of equal liberty for myself and my fellows, who are equally obligated thereby to obey. This morality of power and obedience -- basically, the social contract tradition -- has some relationship with liberal government, but is not identical to it. Hobbes offers a liberal legitimation of the state, but not a liberal theory of government. Smith proposes liberal government, but not a liberal legitimation of the state. (Foucault talks about this as the "strategic" difference between "revolutionary" (natural rights, social contract) and "radical" (utilitarian) strands within liberalism. The difference is strategic because the two strands can support one another in various ways, but are not reducible to moments in a dialectical unity.)

Liberalism as a mode of government names the technology of power that governs a natural-social phenomenon by establishing a normal range of incidence and keeping the phenomenon within this range by means of state action on the environmental variables that tend to affect incidence. In other words, liberal government accepts the thing to be governed as an ineliminable (natural) fact of the social world, and, rather than trying to forbid or otherwise abolish it, manages it indirectly by affecting those variables that encourage or discourage it by appealing to individuals' interests. In short, liberal government is economic government, government that understands and respects the economic incentives that produce harmful or unpleasant phenomena, and tries to manage problems by restructuring the incentives.

Now, when things are put in these terms, it seems, in fact, that liberalism is the only governmental game in town. The Right has a moral discourse and an effective political rhetoric, but no independent art of government. The Left has a critical discourse, but neither an effective political rhetoric nor an art of government. Mainstream liberalism has government all locked up -- but has neither a critical nor a moral discourse, and is largely lacking in the political rhetoric department, too! (Hence, the sorry state of the Democrats in the US and the Liberals in Canada, both of which must pin there hopes of electoral success almost entirely on the incompetence of their Rightist competition.)

This is a problem for the Left in that, aside from the momentous problem of, y'know, actually taking power, we have no independent practice of government by which we might wield the power of the state should it somehow fall into our hands. There are, of course, distinctive ends we would like to achieve, but when you ask: How would we go about, e.g., redistributing land, establishing a basic income, etc? the only answers that seem forthcoming are: a) a magical faith in the will of the people (a simple decree, anyone?) and b) ask the economists.

We're All Israeli Now

...and it has nothing to do with the easy availability of good falafel.

I just watched Waltz with Bashir (an excellent movie, by the way), and was struck by the contemporaneity of the depiction of Israel's 1981 invasion of Labanon. The catch-all extension of "terrorist" was central to this feeling, I think. But I would go further and say that Israel is now, in many respects, the exemplar of the West, in the way that the US used to be, and Britain was before that. The striking difference is that previous exemplars have also been military hegemons, even if exemplarity and hegemony have not been completely synchronous. Israel remains a client state of the US militarily, but nonetheless articulates in the sharpest way the experience of being Western at the current moment. It is ideologically hegemonic without being militarily or economically so.

What I mean is that the Occupied Territories, the terrorist, the border wall, the settlements, the car bomb -- all originally Israeli phenomena -- are now archetypes of Western life in the same way that cowboys and Indians, the frontier, and the goldrush used to be. What it is to be European or American now takes its reference, to some critical extent, from what it is to live in the midst of enemies who are at once akin to you and alien, and whose mode of life and struggle confound the partitions between secular and religious, military and civilian, national and international, which confounding leads us to question the very reality of those seemingly foundational distinctions in our own societies.

One of the fairly explicit lines of thought advanced by one character in the movie is that Israel has such a hard time remembering and facing up to its role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre because the whole complex of mass murder and camps is overwhelmed by the memory of the Holocaust. According to this argument, there is among Israelis a massive psychic investment in seeing themselves as the victims of the camps, an investment that makes it impossible to see and recall their complicity with anything that resembles the camps in any way.

Regardless of whether this is a good or bad descriptive account of the Israeli psyche, it suggests to me in the context of the present that one of the reasons for Israel's new centrality to Western consciousness is the liberal repudiation of violence. To whatever extent liberalism cannot acknowledge its own complicity --not an accidental or mistaken involvement, but an essential and necessay participation -- in the violence of the past, neither can liberal Westerners see or recall the violence of the present as their own.

"Conservatives" -- bad liberals, authoritarians -- are thus so far necessary for the Western liberal psyche that if they didn't exist they would have to be invented. Conservatives do the things that liberals can then repudiate as merely accidental to Western liberalism. This sort of point is made by liberals about conservatives all the time: that no failure of conservatism is possible, since failure can always be attributed to insufficient conservatism. But this is just one more sign that "conservatives" are liberals in the broad sense; the same structure of repudiation is endemic to liberalisms left and right. Every liberal liberal says they wouldn't bomb Afghanistan, wouldn't invade Gaza, wouldn't target Hamas leadership with missile strikes, wouldn't build a wall, wouldn't hold people without due process, etc. But every liberal liberal who has the chance to do otherwise ends up doing all of these things -- perhaps with greater circumspection than would a conservative liberal, but doing them nonetheless.

To be Israeli, in this sense, means to struggle with self-recognition in this way, to hate and condemn what one does, and yet not be able to do otherwise.

Strauss Contra Neoconservatism

I'm working on a paper that, in part, involves a discussion of Strauss. Hence, I've been reading quite a bit of the fellow of late. I'm also going to be chairing a panel at APSA that will include Nicholas Xenos, Anne Norton, and Shadia B. Drury, all of whom have written anti-Strauss books (all of them, generally, arguing for a connection between Strauss and the Bush-era right in America). Given the repeated attempts to link Strauss to the neoconservative practices of extra-legal executive action, I thought the following passage from On Tyranny--Strauss is responding to Eric Voegelin (p. 180)--was interesting:

To stress the fact that it is just to replace constitutional rule by absolute rule, if the common good requires that change, means to cast doubt on the absolute sanctity of the established constitutional order. It means encouraging dangerous men to confuse the issue by bringing about a state of affairs in which the common good requires the establishment of their absolute rule. The true doctrine of the legitimacy of Caesarism is a dangerous doctrine. The true distinction between Caesarism and tyranny is too subtle for ordinary political use. It is better for the people to remain ignorant of that distinction and to treat the potential Caesar as a potential tyrant. No harm can come from this theoretical error which becomes a practical truth if the people have the mettle to act upon it. No harm can come from the political identification of Caesarism and tyranny: Caesars can take care of themselves.

This passage uses precisely the sort of Straussian argument that his liberal critics find so pernicious--some truths are better kept quiet--in order to defend the sanctity of the rule of law. It is better not to admit that extra-constitutional rule might be necessary and even salutary in certain extraordinary situations because such an admission, while true, makes it more likely that extra-constitutional rule will be exercised in completely non-extraordinary conditions. And such an argument has obvious affinities with a liberal argument against legalizing torture: even if torture would be necessary in the "ticking time bomb" scenario, the torturer-hero of such a situation will be able to break the law to do what is necessary. You can't encode the state of exception in a rule without making the exception the norm.

From a liberal point of view, the problem with neoconservatism is that it makes the state of exception into the normal state of affairs. But that is precisely Strauss's criticism of Voegelin's theory of Caesarism. So, maybe liberals should make peace with Strauss, eh?

UPDATE: I was sloppy in my assimilation of Anne Norton's thesis to those of Drury and Xenos. Norton draws sharp distinctions between Strauss, students of Strauss, and Straussians. She is very critical of Straussian neoconservatism, but does not link Strauss himself to the neoconservative project, and generally casts Strauss as infinitely superior to Straussians and as critical (avant le lettre) of many of their positions and practices.

My Research

In a recent discussion with a colleague, I was asked to articulate my current research interests, and I thought it would be worthwhile to expand and write down what I said.

In the first place, I am motivated by a certain fidelity to particular figures in the history of political philosophy--Marx and Aristotle, primarily--to defend the honor and virtue of their thinking. I believe that most and the most readily accessible interpretations of these thinkers are quite strikingly bad. I find Capital and the Nicomachean Ethics to be incredibly compelling works, but when I turn to the characterizations of these works that are found in much of the secondary literature or that function as shorthand in general discussions of political and ethical philosophy, I find them to be unintelligible or incoherent or banal.

I take this mismatch to be at least in part the consequence of Marx and Aristotle standing not merely outside but in opposition to the main current of modern political philosophy that stretches from Hobbes and Locke to Rawls and Habermas. It is Aristotle and Marx above all others who have served that tradition as enemies the denial of whom defines and cements the community of interlocutors. The refusal of Aristotle's politcal naturalism was just as necessary for early modern theorists of sovereignty, contract, and civil society, as the refusal of Marx has been for 19th and 20th century thinkers of liberalism, proceduralism, and the legal codification of rights.

This refusal comes at a price, since the modern conceptual framework that has grown up around the artifactual state (sovereignty, general will, property, claim rights, mechanisms of enforcement, representation, personality, etc.) functions as a grid of intelligibility, a set of landmarks by which to recognize and respond to theoretical assertions, but it is a grid that is largely alien to the thought of those refused thinkers, Aristotle and Marx.

Therefore, the first aspect of my research is merely to attempt to read Aristotle and Marx on their own terms, and to develop, to the extent that I am capable, a compelling account of their political thought that begins from those points where the modern grid of intelligiblity fails to grasp them. To some extent, this involves a sort of artificial naivite, an approach to their texts that seeks to identify and begin from the phenomena they themselves begin from, instead of taking any contemporary question or recognized problem as a beginning point and then seeking an answer or resolution in Marx or Aristotle. The latter method risks importing precisely the mainstream conceptual framework that I claim makes Marx and Aristotle so difficult to understand. To this extent, then, my method of reading must owe something to a sort of Heideggerian phenomenology that seeks first the pragmata of the text being read, attempting to suspend or bracket the questions and claims of mainstream political theory (basically, contemporary liberalism).

On the other hand, however--and this leads me to the second aspect of my research--the political theories of Marx and Aristotle are not simply outside modern liberalism, they are opposed to it. Therefore, there must be points of critical contact between the mainstream discourse and the discourses produced by Marx and Aristotle. Thus, at some point, the naivite must be put aside and the project of rediscovery must become a project of critique. Once Marx and Aristotle have been rearticulated to a certain level of concreteness, I feel the need to intervene in the contemporary mainstream in order to press on certain perceived weak spots in that discourse: its lingering technocratic flavor, its reduction of politics to the state with its laws and administrative functions, its reduction of all ruling to domination or the right to coerce, its assumption that needs and desires are pre-politically and privately articulated, etc.

As a particularization of this critical project--and this is the third and final aspect of my research--I am especially interested in political violence, both as a phenomenon and as a problem for liberal/modern political theory. You could say that the whole problematic of the modern state has been organized around the hypothesis that violence could be minimized or even eliminated by being concentrated or monopolized. A daring and dubious hypothesis!

Built into the modern political problematic are a host of such daring and dubious hypotheses: that violence is identical with coercion; that violence is therefore fundamentally a problem of the will (rather than of the body, or of life, or of measure, or...); that violence is therefore essentially a problem of the borders between soverign wills; that violence can only be authorized by a prior (necessarily unauthorized) violence; that legitimate (authorized) violence is not really violence at all (so, for example, the criminal wills his or her own punishment); that, therefore, violence as such (the unauthorized--but this is redundant--violation of a will) is always wrong and is to be reduced to an absolute minimum; that the wrongness of violence consists in its injustice (rather than its immoderation, its ugliness, its...). There are surely more.

Even some of the most cogent critics of modern political philosophy--I'm thinking of Arendt here--subscribe to the identificcation of violence with coercion, which seems to me to be entirely without justification (that is, I've never found anyone who even attempts to justify this identification, which is not to say that such a justification could not be given, just that no one seems to feel the need).

I think both Aristotle and Marx (and sundry post-Marx Marxists) approach violence with very different basic assumptions, and that the perspective afforded by these different assumptions might go a long way towards rethinking the place or non-place of violence in politics. I'll try to lay out some of these differnet assumptions in future posts.

Anyway, there we are: my research interests. Any thoughts, questions, pointers, criticisms?

More on Locke, that sneaky SOB

Ah, Locke on property!

McGill was once the home of James Tully, eminent scholar of Locke. As much as I hate to criticize one with whom, but for the arrow of time, I would have been a colleague, I have profound reservations about his A Discourse on Property. Some of these stem from my general apathy towards Skinner-esque historical work. And some stem from my partisan desire to defend C. B. Macpherson (Another Canadian! Canada rules!!!), who comes in for some rough treatment, some of which is probably fair enough, but some of which is certainly way off base (I'm happy to share, if anyone's curious).

Setting aside these two issues, however, I am mostly annpoyed by the lengths and depths of Tully's credulousness. He gets so caught up in Locke's "obvious" distaste for money, for instance, that he actually seems to be convinced that Locke was some sort of Rousseauian romantic, longing for the good old days before money corrupted us all.

But the case I really want to talk about is this: Tully denies that Locke is a defender of private property, arguing that, in fact, Locke is arguing for a system of private use rights within common claim rights (mumbo jumbo for: Locke is SO NOT a tool of incipient capitailism, man!).

Why is this a sign of credulousness, you ask?

Because in order to make this argument, Tully has to take at face value all that stuff Locke says about 1) the earth being given to us by God for our common ejoyment, and 2) this end of enjoyment also limiting our natural right to property--we can't let anything spoil, and we have to leave as much and as good for others.

Not to get all Straussian, but Locke obviously thinks this is a bunch of bunkum, deployed only to sucker the rubes into thinking he's way more conservative than he is. Well, I'm not suckered.

First of all, the claim that the earth is meant for our use means only that nothing non-human has any rights. There is no teleology immanent in nature such that it is fitted for our use. That is why labor makes property; it distinguishes the thing upon which it expended from the commons by giving it a purpose it did not have by nature. Locke says this pretty explicitly (Sec.28).

Second, the natural limits of property are no limits at all, on Locke's own terms. Since nature is of no use to us withou labor, there is no objective grouds for determining spoilage: one man's spoilage is another man's scienc project, or art project, or whatever. Moreover, for the same reason, the person who apprpriates nature always necessarily leaves as much and as good for others. Without being apprpriated, nature is no good whatsoever. Therefore, Locke says that "he that incloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniencies of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind," averring only that he has here drastically underestimated the productivity of labor (Sec. 37).

It's merely the icing on the cake that money comes along and, by our tacit consent, overthows all barriers to prperty accumulation and inequality. They were barriers with no real existence to begin with.

Therefore, I say unto James Tully, "You've been had, sir; taken in and swindled."

Locke on the Duty to Resist and Legitimate Slavery

One of my favorite things about teaching is the discovery of new insights and connections that takes place, unbidden, when I'm standing up in front of the class, responding to questions and quizzical looks. In precisely this way, I think that I had my first real thought of the new term today.

I'm teaching Locke's Second Treatise, and wrestling with the sheer, unadulterated normativity of it. Warren Montag has claimed that Locke vacillates between a juridical and a physical concept of power throughout the Treatises, and that may be, but what impressed me immediately was the consistently juridical usage in the opening chapters of the Second Treatise. That is, whenever Locke uses "power" in these pages, what he means is "jurisdiction." Power is always shot through with right, such that humans in the state of nature have the power to do only what they also have the right to do (see, for example, Sec. 8, where "one man comes by a power over another" when that other violates the law of nature).

The difficulty, for me, came in understanding the various things Locke says about slavery in light of this normative concept of power.

On the one hand, Locke defines "the perfect state of slavery" as "the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive." The conqueror is lawful because the captive violated the law of nature, and the conqueror is acting according to his or her natural right to execute that law, seizing by force the body of that "degenerate" and "noxious" "beast of prey" who has "forfeited his own life." Here is slavery that accords with right.

On the other hand, the people of England saved themselves from "the very brink of slavery" by consenting to William of Orange's conquest, and the very criminal who initiates war in the state of nature does so by attempting "to get another man into his absolute power," i.e., to "make him a slave." Here is--threatened--slavery that is a breach of right.

The thought that occurred to me in class is that submitting to slavery is itself a breach of natural right, and therefore justifies--slavery. In other words, the only slavery that is wrong, according to Locke's theory, is slavery that threatens but never arrives, or slavery that has been thrown off through resistance. Actual slavery, by the slave's submission to it, is completely compatible with natural right. In Hegel's terms, the one who chooses life over freedom loses the right to both, debasing his or her humanity. That the slave submits to another who also breaks the law of nature doesn't matter.

In other words, I think that Locke advocates not merely a right of resistance but a duty of resistance. The flip side of this duty to resist, however, is a justification of all actually existing slavery. The real is rational, and the rational is real.

PS: This was meant to be an hypothesis, offered by one who is certainly far short of an expert in Locke. I'd be curious to hear from people who really know their way around Locke as to the merits and deficiencies of my argument. Especially that bit about how it doesn't matter whether the master is just as much in violation of the law of nature.

UPDATE: Edited slightly.

Comprehensive Goods, Comprehensive Evils, and the Problem of Resentment

I'm reading Zizek's new "book," Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. It is, as is to be expected, a hodge-podge of funny anecdotes, revealing examples, vague half-arguments, and prickly insights.

One of the vague half-arguments that I find most promising goes something like this: it is a mistake to call terrorists--Muslim or Christian or whatever--"fundamentalists" because "all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish," are essentially indifferent towards non-believers (p. 85). True believers find only self-confirmation in the lives and sins of heathens and apostates. They therefore have a sovereign disregard for non-believers. To become a terrorist, to declare war on unbelievers, is to admit that you are not motivated by faith at all, but by temptation and resentment. It demonstrates that you can only confirm your own goodness and faith by destroying or humiliating those who live otherwise, that is, by destroying those upon whom you have projected your own doubt and self-hatred.

What this suggests to me is something I already thought, but something for which I now have new and improved arguments: that the familiar liberal wariness regarding "comprehensive doctrines of the good" is utterly misplaced. Comprehensive doctrines of the good, according to the wary liberal, must remain private because whenever their believers get there hands on the coercive apparatus of the state we end up embroiled in religious wars. For this reason, liberalism eschews any summum bonum and leaves all metaphysics to the purveyors of commoditized wisdom and the hucksters of the spirit.

But what if the real danger is not coercive belief (and the attendant disagreements about the finer points of doctrine), but self-destructive resentment? If Zizek is right, liberals need to take Nietzsche much more seriously than they do, and as a brutally honest friend rather than a vicious enemy. The real threat to liberal society is not the fundamentalists who would impose their own good on everyone else, but the bad consciences who would renounce their own good just for the sake of depriving other of their goods also. The resentful subject would rather destroy itself or foreclose its own enjoyment than permit another (resented) subject's enjoyment.

I think it is for this reason that I am especially suspicious of the "liberalism of fear" proposed by Judith Shklar. Shklar claimed that liberalism had no summum bonum but only a summum malum, cruelty and the fear born thereby. This seems to me to make the resentful subjectivity coextensive with liberalism--liberals renounce all pursuit of the good, and seek only to police everyone else's pursuit thereof. Obviously, this liberal resentment is, in one sense, the polar opposite of the terroristic resentment with which I began, and I'm sure that many of the "friends of Shklar" I know will protest my characterization, but that's why I'm writing this on my blog and not in Political Theory. But the allergy to unabashed and public discussion and pursuit of a positive good is too similar to Zizek's diagnosis to go unnoted.

UPDATE: Edited to repair egregious misspelling.

UPDATE 2: Ripped from today's headlines... Fanaticism is not the problem, my friends. This sad-sack didn't believe passionately in anything at all, from all accounts. He was certainly not "cruel" in Shklar's sense of the word: driven by the pursuit of "some end, tangible or intangible," to "the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group." And despite the greater pretense to some sort of "political strategy," I would say the same about Tim McVeigh or al-Zarqawi or the like.

I have this label for some posts: "Conservatives want you to be unhappy." It started out a bit tongue in cheek, but I'm going to double-down on it: the fact that this chump in Tennessee read O'Reilly, Savage, and Hannity is unsurprising, for modern American conservatism has become the opposite of fanaticism, a political movement under the banner of resentment, intent upon standing athwart the pursuit of happiness by others, yelling 'Stop!'

The flip-side is that liberalism is not guiltless here, either. Despite at least one promised rebuttal, no friend of Shklar has yet stepped forward to defend the liberalism of fear against the vague guilt by homology charge in my main post. As it stands, the charge probably doesn't even merit a defense--it's pretty imprecise and seems like a conclusion without premises. Nonetheless, I think there is more to my doubts about Shklar than my sense that she has mis-identified her real enemy. The liberalism of fear is a liberalism that fears "a society of fearful people," and, by extension, the systematic cruelty that fosters such a society. But maybe, just maybe, systematic cruelty isn't the worst thing for human beings to face. Maybe we're actually better equipped to live our lives and be reasonably happy under the rule of fairly severe coercion than under the constant threat of explosive resentment. And maybe the principled avoidance of the former condition as the summum malum actually fosters the latter condition.

Maybe we need a bit more cruelty in our lives if we are to be happy at all.

Anti-Liberalism and Political Theory

I just read something I probably should have read years ago, Stephen Holmes' "The Permanent Structure of Antiliberal Thought." (It was blown up into a book, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, I believe.) Since I definitely consider myself an anti-liberal in some sense (Aristotelian, and hence "conservative," but also Marxist, and hence "radical"), I feel a bit silly for having missed Holmes' essay until now.

Holmes claims "to identify twenty fundamental fallacies or intellectual failings of antiliberalism: six theoretical confusions and fourteen historical errors." That's quite a bit to tackle. I'll say only this about the "fourteen historical errors": I'm sympathetic to Holmes' point on some of these, but he seems, in the midst of his list, to forget that he is supposed to be pointing out historical errors. That is, he begins by pointing to claims anti-liberals make about the liberal tradition that distort the history of that tradition (no liberal actually believes in pre-social human beings, for example), but then he ceases making historical claims at all, and reverts to supposed conceptual confusions (like the anti-liberal skepticism about state neutrality).

Leaving those fourteen points aside, however, what about the six basic theoretical or conceptual confusions? As I understand them, they are:

1. Anti-liberals criticize liberalism by appeal to some sort of ideal community, but never flesh out the institutions of that community in enough detail to allow for comparison; they get their gauzy ideal, while liberals have to defend a richly detailed and specific set of institutions and rules.
2. Anti-liberals make an is/ought error, "deducing" the value of social life from the fact of social life, which is morally neutral. They do not differentiate good sociality from bad sociality.
3. Similarly, they do not acknowledge the possibility of virtuous self-interest. Anti-liberals conflate selflessness with good and selfishness with bad.
4. Anti-liberals vacillate between 1) provocative but indefensible claims about some form of society that is to replace liberal society and 2) defensible but trivial claims about the forms of community that should supplement liberal society.
5. Anti-liberals vacillate between saying that liberal theory is wrong (that society isn't really what liberal theory says it is) and saying that liberal theory is an unfortunately correct description of what society has become.
6. Anti-liberals behave as if a theoretical critique of liberal theory will itself do the work of reforming society.

I'm very sympathetic to (6); it's basically an application of The German Ideology. Anti-liberal academics are ideologues and idealists. Hard to argue with that.

I'm also sympathetic, to some extent, with (3), but it hardly seems to be a complaint about anti-liberalism as such. Rather, that seems to be an attack on a certain Christianity that pervades normative discourse. Certainly it cannot be applied to Aristotelians--we love ourselves best! This also sits uneasily with Holmes' own (correct) assertion that a "self-exception taboo" is central to liberalism. Conflating self-regarding behavior with bad behavior is problematic, I agree, but conflating self-excepting behavior with bad behavior is not obviously less problematic. Erecting fairness as the moral absolute is just as questionable as is erecting selflessness as such.

The other "confusions" (1, 2, 4, 5) all seem to be of a piece, and strike me as methodological. Here it seems to me that Holmes wants anti-liberals to play the same game that liberals play (a bit of righteous indignation at what he perceives as self-excepting behavior?). Liberal political theory (and political life) centers on discussing the rules and procedures we all should agree to follow, and the institutions that would best embody and secure the acceptance and stability of said rules. Basically, Holmes wants anti-liberals to join in that discussion. He says to anti-liberals: tell us more about this community you want, about its rules and institutions, its decision-making criteria for the use of state coercion, etc. When anti-liberals don't join this conversation, he accuses them of playing unfairly, of criticizing liberalism without opening themselves up to the same critical scrutiny.

This is obviously the complaint in (1) and (4), but I think it is also at work in his complaints about what I would call anti-liberalism's appeal to authenticity. Holmes thinks there is an is/ought error (2) or an outright contradiction (5) at work whenever anti-liberals say something to the effect that liberal society is not a "real" society, or that an authentic community acknowledges itself in ways that liberal society cannot. But, while "become what you are" is a paradoxical ethical demand, this does not mean that it is a nonsensical ethical demand. Or, if it is, then I doubt that liberalism can escape this nonsense any more than anti-liberalism can, despite the fact that the structure of the liberal theory game posits the ideal as something we can articulate outside of and prior to our action that would implement (or approximate) that ideal. Kant and the Kantian strand of liberal theory have always been on-board with the immanence of the norm to the domain ruled by the norm.

Anyway, have other thoughts about Holmes' article, but this is long enough already. I will say just one more thing: I've been reading a lot of very defensive liberals recently. George Sher's Beyond Neutrality opens with this astonishing bit about how "todays liberal thinkers are waging a necessary and courageous battle on behalf of certain vital but embattled Enlightenment attitudes," a battle against the dark forces of postmodernism, which would "reduce all political and intellectual disagreements to so much jockeying for power and advantage." Holmes' essay fairly drips with a similar sense of being embattled; one of his points against the anti-liberals is that they "uniformly underestimate the fragility and beleagueredness of the liberal tradition." Has this defensiveness passed out of liberalism? Was this just a symptom of the times (Holmes wrote in 1989 and Sher in 1997)? Was liberalism really so precarious (as a political theory) so recently? It just seems incredible to me now.