Re-Imagining a Politics of Life: From Governance of Order to Politics of Movement
208
Re-Imagining a Politics of Life: From Governance of Order to Politics of Movement
208Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783481019 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/30/2014 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d) |
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Re-Imagining a Politics of Life
From Governance of Order to Politics of Movement
By Leonie Ansems de Vries
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Leonie Ansems de VriesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-101-9
CHAPTER 1
Sovereignty, War, Nature
On what basis is political order founded? What makes the state, as the order conceived to produce and manage political relations, legitimate? These questions lie at the heart of modern political thought. Hobbes's notions of the social contract and the state of nature can be regarded as inventions in response to these questions. Hobbes's concern with political order and legitimacy arises in the context of political, religious and scientific revolutions, which uproot and call into question the understood natural order(ing) of God/the state/man in the world (and beyond). As Connolly (1988: 2) describes it:
In modernity, the insistence upon taking charge of the world comes into its own. Nature becomes a set of laws susceptible to human knowledge, a deposit of resources for potential use or a set of vistas for aesthetic appreciation. ... Human and non-human nature become material to work on. The world loses its earlier property as a text upon which the will of God is inscribed and through which humans can come to a more profound understanding of their proper place in the order of things.
These transformations imply a partial move away from God as the basis of all authority and the ascendance of man and nature — understood as 'material to work on'— in its place. Hobbes's thought expresses the effort to found political authority on the basis of the nature of man rather than through God. These interrelated phenomena — the problem of the foundation of political order and authority; and the centrality and equality of man/men within this order(ing) — mark the birth of political modernity.
This twin concern distinguishes Hobbes from Aristotle, who had little concern for the legitimate foundations of political order; in his thought the existence and legitimacy of political order are given. Man is by nature a social and political animal and hence the state constitutes a natural order. In The Politics Aristotle's interest is to explain which form of government or constitution is best — i.e., the rule of which group would assure the best-ordered society. His political theory accordingly revolves around the problem of the relations among groups or factions that are unequal in nature rather than the equality of individual subjects. Nonetheless, Aristotle's thought is of considerable influence to Hobbes as well as to Kant and more contemporary conceptualisations of political life.
Hobbes's idea of a movement from a state of war to a peaceful political society is one of the most influential motifs shaping our modern political imagination. The twin notions of the social contract and the state of nature can be said to form the crux of the explanation of the foundations of political order proposed by Hobbes. Placed at the origin of political order(ing) — i.e., in the movement from state of nature to political society, and at the point where the subject confers his rights to the Sovereign who thereby gains legitimacy — the social contract solved the problem of foundation.
The engagement with the thought of Hobbes and Kant in relation to questions of foundation, order(ing) and legitimacy in this chapter will suggest that their accounts of political order are not "founded" on a contract but function on the basis of circularities. These circularities of time, consent and rationality establish a surface of ordering that obfuscates the less than orderly and illegitimate foundation of political order. Put differently, the "solution" to the problem of foundation put forward by Hobbes, Kant and other liberal thinkers is not the social contract per se. Rather the problem is "solved" through circulations. Common to Hobbes and Kant is a conception of politics as the governance of order and the order(ing) of governance of a particular yet naturalised domain reproduced through circulations.
HOBBES: POLITICS, CIRCULATION AND (NON)WAR
Hobbes's The Leviathan, written in the context of political, religious and scientific upheaval, is a political tract in defence of the sovereignty and legitimacy of the state. Different commentators on this work emphasise, single out and/or combine various aspects of this contextual complexity. Connolly, for instance, highlights the continued influence of religion in Hobbes's thought, as well as his nominalist inclination. Sheldon Wolin (2004: 219), too, remarks upon Hobbes's nominalism, yet the scientific revolution constitutes the primary focus of his commentary. In the context of upheaval, order was to be restored 'by a political philosophy purged of Aristotelian and scholastic influences and reshaped according to the models of mathematical and scientific thinking.' In other words, political theory must be informed by science rather than by God. An interesting aspect of Wolin's account is his attention to the question of (dis)order. He finds in Hobbes an acknowledgement that political crisis is also political potential. For Hobbes, Wolin (Ibid. 217–18) writes, 'chaos was the material for creativity, not a cause for resignation ... [w]hether disorder took a political or religious form, it aroused the impulse to build societies.' Wolin (Ibid. 22) goes as far as to suggest that 'creative destruction' becomes the starting point of philosophical method — a method in which scientific method replaces supernatural powers.
It could be said that, if Connolly's work neglects the influence of natural science, then Wolin pays insufficient attention to the continued role of God and faith in Hobbes's political writing. Both scholars omit other aspects, such as Hobbes's engagement with the work of the vitalist anatomist William Harvey. Of course, any perspective on Hobbes's thought — or that of any other thinker — will be partial and arbitrary: a plethora of aspects, phenomena, events and circumstances produce and shape thought in various ways; and interconnect in ways that are impossible to trace and/or definitively categorise. Hence, no such attempt will be made here. Rather, the focus is on specific, and much neglected, aspects of Hobbes's thought, namely the movements of circulation and (dis)ordering, which bring to light the radical potential immanent to his defence of political order. This will be the focus of the engagements with both Hobbes and Kant in this chapter and the next.
Hobbes's concern with the foundation of authority results in a theory in which sovereignty is founded through the individual subject and vice versa. The passage from a state of nature characterised by war and savagery in which life is violent, dangerous and insecure to a state in which a powerful sovereign assures the possibility of security and peaceful relations — i.e., politics — is, however, less than straightforward. The problem of foundation is "solved" through a circularity that simultaneously founds authority and renders impossible the (temporal) origin of state power. That is to say, Hobbes introduces an indefinite temporality in which sovereignty and the subject "originate" in a circular process. A discussion of Foucault's alternative reading of Hobbes's Leviathan will set the stage for this perspective of circulation. In the lecture series Society Must Be Defended Foucault portrays Hobbes as a theorist of peace and the law. For Foucault, Hobbes represents a juridical view of power based on the theory of sovereignty and the idea of the contract, in clear distinction to his own conception of power, which, in this lecture series, is expressed in terms of forces of war. Through the notion of politics-as-war, Foucault seeks to expose that which the juridical model of sovereignty conceals: the continuous reproduction of those relations of power and domination that ultimately sustain political order(ing).
Thus, according to Foucault (2003: 16), political power constitutes a continuation of war by other means. Rather than putting an end to war and establishing peace through a contractual agreement, political power conducts a permanent 'silent war' by re-inscribing a particular relationship of force in the institutions of society and the bodies of individuals. Whereas the contractual model of Leviathan erases the notion domination, Foucault's (Ibid. 27–28) model of politics-as-war highlights its continued existence. Thus emerges the key genealogical distinction between a philosophico-juridical discourse of peace and a historico-political discourse of war. Foucault's twin aim is to trace the genealogical development of the discourse of politics-as-war from its beginnings in sixteenth- and seventheenth-century revolutionary counter-state formations, and to expose how this discourse is eventually appropriated by the state itself so as to formulate a modern biopolitical security discourse.
In distinction to more popular readings of Leviathan, Foucault (Ibid. 92) asserts that was is not the starting point for Hobbes. The Hobbesian state of war is not a historically specific war characterised by battle, blood and victory. Instead the 'war of all against all' is based on equality, which means that it cannot end in victory or in a relationship of domination. The Hobbesian state of war is marked by minor differences, minute variations of individual strength that do not lead to actual war but to a state of 'unending diplomacy' or 'relationships of fear' (Ibid). The state of nature is a state of calculated presentations of strength, expressions of will and mutually intimidatory tactics.
Indeed, Hobbes (1996: 84) himself asserts that the 'war of all against all' is not a battle per se but a tract of time marked by a disposition to war: 'so the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.' Foucault asks how this state of war gives birth to sovereignty and emphasises that even in what Hobbes calls 'sovereignty by acquisition' the determining factor leading to the establishment of sovereignty is not defeat in war but fear. Rather than being 'the motor behind political order', Foucault (2003: 97) concludes, war in Hobbes is 'a clash of presentations'; the state of war is in fact 'nonwar':
Hobbes turns war, the fact of war and the relationship of force that is actually manifested in the battle, into something that has nothing to do with war. Basically, Hobbes's discourse is a certain "no" to war. It is not really war that gives birth to States, and it is not really war that is transcribed in relations of sovereignty or that reproduces within the civil power — and its inequalities — the earlier dissymmetries in the relationship of force that were revealed by the very fact of the battle itself.
The notion of the state of nature operates as a device to mask the coercive history that underlies sovereign power. The narrative of the social contract thus "solves" the problem of foundation by banning war from the discourse of politics.
Foucault's exposure of the war, conquest and domination that ground sovereignty and inscribe its workings is incisive, however, his focus on the myth of the contract neglects the more productive function of war in Hobbes's thought. This will come to light by bringing in the notions of circularity and circulation. The latter is borrowed from Foucault who, in the lecture series following Society Must Be Defended entitled Security, Territory, Population, describes emerging liberal modes of governance in terms of circulation. A discussion of a different reading offered by Connolly will pave the way for a conceptualisation of Hobbes as a theorist of movement and circulation. Connolly treats Hobbes as a liberal thinker and focuses on the production of a specific kind of (self-interested) individual whose freedom is marked by continuous regulation. Although Connolly does not articulate it thus, his analysis strongly suggests that the legitimisation of sovereign authority depends on circularities.
Rather than an actual period preceding the institution of the state, the state of nature is an ex post facto imposition intended to warn subjects against disobedience and, in the same move, legitimating sovereign authority. By constructing the state of nature Hobbes (1996: 85; see also: Wolin 2004: 236) does not intend to portray what preceded the state of political order but 'what manner of life there would be, were there no common power to fear.' As Connolly (1988: 29) puts it: 'The state of nature is shock therapy. It helps subjects to get their priorities straight by teaching them what life would be like without sovereignty. It domesticates by eliciting the vicarious fear of violent death in those who have not had to confront it directly.' Hobbes's construction of the state of nature is directed at subjects already part of a sovereign state, and especially at those who pose a threat to this order(ing) — i.e., those who must be convinced not to rebel but to abide by the laws and regulations of the state (Ibid. 28–29). In this sense, Hobbes does not construct a foundation of political order: there is no beginning, no foundation: one is already a subject.
Of interest here is also George Kateb's reading of Hobbes. His contention is that although one of Hobbes's chief concerns is to ward off rebellion, disorder and sedition, he equally holds that '[t]he talents and energies of the potentially seditious are indispensable, but they must be properly channelled' (Kateb 1989: 366). The very (irrational) force of disruption that threatens the sovereign state is not simply negative or destructive but can, if properly regulated, be diverted into a productive means to maintain order. Connolly goes even further by suggesting that the potentially dangerous passions simultaneously constitute the very founding force of order.
Connolly accordingly rejects the widely accepted view that Hobbes's political theory rests on the assumption of self-interested individuals. Rather, he argues, individuals become self -interested through their education in civil society. For Hobbes, the self-interested individual is not so much the problem as the solution. Referring to Hobbes's fundamental conviction that 'man is made fit for society not by nature but by education', Connolly (Ibid. 26–29; see also: Hobbes 1991: 110) suggests that the self-interested individual is not so much the starting assumption as the end product of Hobbesian politics. It is an artifice conducive to a well-ordered society. Individuals do not naturally fit the political order they are assumed to have founded through consent. Only the normalisation of the individual into a rational, self-interested, calculable subject creates the possibility of peaceful order (Connolly 2002a: 69). As Hobbes (1996: 100–101) himself asserts, compliance, the fifth law of nature must be crafted; a process not unlike building an edifice:
there is in men's aptness to society, a diversity of nature, rising from their diversity of affections; not unlike to that we see in stones brought together for building an edifice. For as that stone which by the asperity, and irregularity of figure, takes more room from others, than itself fills; hindereth the building, is by the builders cast away as unprofitable, and troublesome: so also, a man that by asperity of nature will strive to retain those things which to himself are superfluous, and to others necessary; and for the stubbornness of his passions cannot be corrected, is to be left, or cast out of society, as cumbersome thereunto.
Accordingly, the main problem of Hobbesian political rule is to convert a being that is initially dominated by his passions into a calculating, prudent and self-interested subject. Crucially, the domain of human passion constitutes not simply a threat to political order but also an important instrument for its creation and reproduction. In Hobbes, Connolly (1988: 29) argues, the domestication of life proceeds in part through the deployment of the fear of death, which induces subjects to regulate themselves and to accept external regulations. This fear is a passion necessary for the establishment and preservation of an orderly society. While the production and reproduction of political order(ing) functions mainly through the containment of passion, the latter, in the form of fear, also plays an important role in this endeavour.
Connolly here hints at the productive potential of disorderly forces, which tallies with Wolin's assertion that, for Hobbes, 'chaos was the material for creativity', a productive force for building societies. Neither Connolly nor Wolin further explore this thought. Connolly draws attention to Hobbes's reassertion of the importance of order and the need to regulate disordering forces into movement reproductive of order. He describes Hobbes's method as 'part of a political strategy of regulation and control': 'it operates to delegitimize irregularity, disruptive thoughts, and actions flowing outside the channel of Hobbesian reason' (Ibid. 34).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Re-Imagining a Politics of Life by Leonie Ansems de Vries. Copyright © 2015 Leonie Ansems de Vries. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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