David Brooks: Better in the original German

Sorry. I find little to disagree with in either the Brooks or Schmitt. I just consider conditions described a positive development, if understood correctly.

“In an age of global markets and global media, the power of the state and the tank, it is thought, can pale before the power of the swarms of individuals.”

Swarm

However, I just can’t seem to get a grip on where you are coming from.

“We continue to see the enemy as a subject that faces us – instead of experiencing it as a relationship that binds us – we confine ourselves to the struggle against confinement. We reproduce the worst relationships of dominance under the pretext of an alternative. We set up shops for selling the struggle against the commodity.”

– Call , Anonymous

Brooks is scared by his inner German.

War-wanter wants war. Film at 11.

There is such a thing as non american Schmittianism?

My understanding is that Schmitt was resurected after 9/11 by American political scientists and only (re*?) entered the rest of the world through them.

*I mean, how much could the NSDAP regime possibly have care aboutjustifications by academics, even earlier on before Hitler became a totalitarian dictator.

This impossible world Brooks seems to be discouraging us from considering bears an uncanny resemblance to the republic we did have shortly after the founding fathers established it.

This seems awful generous to the writer of Bobos in Paradise.

If you say: ‘ “state and politics” are ineliminable. In fact, that’s the majority view of political thinkers in general, from Aristotle to Augustine to Hobbes to Kant to Hegel to Arendt, no.’

Then I think you are using both terms – and “state” especially – in so wide a sense as to be hardly saying anything at all.

tony lynch @ 13

Fortunately, Brooks and Schmitt are refreshingly clear in what they mean: they mean war and diplomatic strong-arming.

An even better language: http://youtu.be/340YeUb6P7c

he’s focused on the friend-enemy distinction as the essence of politics, an enmity at its highest and most intense level.

The “market place of ideas”, or the selection of an agent to negotiate my and my groups interests in a “deal”, or competition over resources and distribution, or …well, from Wiki “Habermas”:

His most known work to date, the Theory of Communicative Action (1981), is based on an adaptation of Talcott Parsons AGIL Paradigm. In this work, Habermas voiced criticism of the process of modernization, which he saw as inflexible direction forced through by economic and administrative rationalization.[15] Habermas outlined how our everyday lives are penetrated by formal systems as parallel to development of the welfare state, corporate capitalism and mass consumption.[15] These reinforcing trends rationalize public life.[15] Disfranchisement of citizens occurs as political parties and interest groups become rationalized and representative democracy replaces participatory one.[15] In consequence, boundaries between public and private, the individual and society, the system and the lifeworld are deteriorating.

Hell, it all looks like economics to me, with the state as the settler of bets, accounts, transactions under relatively amicable conditions. Like a Board of Exchange.

Schmitt didn’t say there was all that much “politics” goin on, or that it happened very often, or that it should. Politics happens when negotiation is impossible. The nation or state is that collectivity (polity) that comes into existence only under terminal or existential threat, and decides to fight. All else is parties.

I am suddenly reminded of Gramsci’s conception of the Party.

I don’t get it. Is he saying that the power of people to withdraw their consent is illusory? And if it is illusory, as he thinks it is, then why should the state or military be concerned about it? Or is Brooks as usual only joking, in the fashion of Leo Strauss?

Is he saying that the power of people to withdraw their consent is illusory?

I was assuming that he simply didn’t conceive of the withdrawal of consent as a political act. After all, politics is what war machines do, not the sort of thing the masses could even aspire to.

Brooks appears to think that there is a unique Civilization that must be defended from “menaces” like Putin and the Islamic Republic. That’s a silly view, but we are talking about Bobo; and it’s diametrically opposed to a Schmittian view that makes conflict the essence of politics. He criticizes individualism for being lax and naive, not for emptying politics of its meaning. If you wanted to make Bobo sound a little more sophisticated and a little more in line with classical republicanism, you could take him to mean that our civilization has a unique value for us; he still wouldn’t be a Schmittian. Is there a reason to reject his plain statement that he’s concerned about “menaces to civilization” and interpret him as advocating conflict for its own sake?

To paraphrase Dr Freud, sometimes a schmuck is just a schmuck.

@ 29:
I don’t want to get into an endless argument about interpreting Schmitt. (I don’t have the time). But 1) the friend/foe distinction is, as I said, in the first instance, a descriptive/analytic/functional device, equivalent to, say, the notion of supply/demand equilibria among neo-claasical economists. 2) Schmitt does think that the political is “transcending”, but precisely in a secular sense, because of the failure of traditional notions of transcendence. 3) Schmitt’s writings from the ’20’s are quite topical and situated, and they should be read with reference to their historical context. 4) I have plenty of reservations about the notion of “decisionism”, but it is not just to be found in existential thought, but in, e.g., Weber and Popper. But it does focus on a fundamental historical contingency with respect to what is “rational” or “reasonable”. 5) I’m not converting Schmitt into something “anodyne”, but rather citing him as a possible source for avoiding such complacency. (Just read all the mistaken commentary here on CT about the Ukraine crisis). That there is more to politics than “norms”, (which are a type of counter-factual), should spare us lots of mistaken idealism. 6) Comparing Schmitt to Bobo is silly: the one is a paid blathering idiot; the other is a malignant intelligence. Those are incommensurable “values”. (And the criticism that there are more than mere “values”, as liberalistically conceived, to politics, is part of Schmitt’s sting.)

Here’s what I don’t think you grasp in your whole approach. Elsewhere at CT, I made the distinction between economic action/activity and political action/activity, (since that’s more fruitful than pretending that they belong to completely separate domains). The former concerns (functional analysis) of the generation and distribution of more-or-less material surpluses; the latter concerns the resolution of social conflicts and the securement of authoritatively binding agreements. But the thing is that there is no basis for “authority” whatsoever. There are no prior “foundations” for it, even as it is an inevitable requirement for cooperative social existence. (I could also provide a linguistic argument). What you miss about conservative and reactionary thinkers from intellectual tradition, in claiming that they are only concerned about maintaining elite material and social privileges, ( as if “elites” could be abolished entirely and is if “liberal” bourgeois elites weren’t laying claim to their own privileges), is that whole problem of groundless “authority”. The erosion of the credibility of traditional beliefs as providing any basis for the “legitimation” of authority and thus social order is what terrifies them far more than any loss of wealth or privilege. And the (neo?)liberal assumption that some combination of “identity politics” and technocratic management could fill that “void” without exercizing any conflicting “authority”, equally groundless, is just question-begging.

That’s fine, but it’s a totally different claim. If Schmitt’s politics were truly irrelevant to his writing, none of this would matter.

Now you’re saying that Schmitt wasn’t really a Nazi, but a different kind of authoritarian nationalist. It’s still the case that his writings need to be interpreted in ways that make sense, given his political commitments.

I liked John Dodd’s Violence and Phenomenology a lot which goes from Clausewitz to Schmitt to Unger to Arendt and Patrocka. Re-reading it tonight.

“War is the health of the State.” Wasn’t a Nazi said that.

Dodd:

This means in turn that the power of the political entity for Schmitt is also in an
important sense “unpolitical,” a kind of non-politics; it rises to a level that
both transcends politics and remains opaque to it, a status fully consonant
with the existential seriousness of war:

Schmitt

The state as the decisive political entity possesses an enormous power:
the possibility of waging war and thereby politically disposing of the
lives of men. The jus belli contains such a disposition. It implies a dou-
ble possibility: the right to demand from its own members the readiness
to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies.

Frankly, any pacifist or internationalist argument coming from Americans is just absurd.

With every breath we take we give permission to launch those thousands of nuclear warheads on whom Obama targets. And of course, we give him permission to dronedead babies.

No? How ya stopping him?

There exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no pro-
gram no matter how exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful,
no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other
for this reason. If such physical destruction of human life is not moti-
vated by an existential threat to one’s own way of life, then it cannot be
justified. Just as little can war be justified by ethical and juristic norms.
If there really are enemies in the existential sense as meant here, then it is
justified, but only politically, to expel and fight them physically.

Schmitt became some sort of Nazi, but part of what he was doing at the beginning was arguing against Clausewitz’s conception of instrumental war.

Maybe we do have to read Schmitt in a way that makes sense, but do we have to read Bobo in a way that makes sense? He’s a colleague of Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, and Ross Douthat. I don’t look to the NYT op-ed page for sense-making. Do you?

Read on its own, Bobo’s column seems to be designed to make agency and leadership disappear into the shadows and down the memory hole. Presumably, he doesn’t want to make the most basic connection between popular distrust of elites and the untrustworthiness of elites. We’re exhausted by Iraq and Afganistan — no mention of the vaunted military, which cannot win a war against the poorest, most disorganized enemies in any finite period of time, within any finite budget — and that military, as polls show (and Brooks tellingly quotes polls, not leaders) is the most trusted American institution.

Bobo claims Americans “have lost faith in the idea that American political and military institutions can do much to shape the world” — something he might have called the decline of soft power in another column. No mention of the trashing of international law in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Of the use of indefinite detention or torture. No mention that the “worst of the worst” at Guantanamo turned out to be mostly hapless and unlucky. No mention of how the reconstruction of Iraq turned into an orgy of corruption and incompetence. No mention of how this squandering of principle left the West with no principled argument in its dispute with Russia over Ukraine and Crimea.

I don’t know much about Schmitt as a political philosopher — I know a bit about his place in the historical pageant. He was an advocate of what we might call a Shock Doctrine of Disaster Politics: to a country disillusioned, led by squabbling liberals with few convictions and no competence, he offered the-political-emergency-answered-by-a-dictator as a constitutional philosopher’s stone, able to transmute the body politic from base elements to noble ones, and revive the authority of law.

Maybe, Bobo is a closet authoritarian, waiting for the Great Dictator, but I doubt it, and see little evidence for such an interpretation in this silly column. Bobo is a well-paid blatherer, not a visionary, as some other commenter pointed out. He does not have thoughts of his own, so much as he tries to mirror the thoughts, such as they may be, of his readership. He studies his audience — probably why he’s so familiar with polls — and his elite audience doesn’t want to hear about how they are incompetent, untrustworthy greedheads, who are destroying their country and the world. His audience wants to hear about how there is, inexplicably, no audience for quality programming leadership in the prime demo anymore. The more superficial reading you give Bobo, the more accurate the interpretation is likely to be.

So many wasted pixels over Brooks. The right ignores him because he writes for the NYT. The left (rightfully) loathes him as an apologist for Plutocracy. His only audience are the totebagger “liberals” who read the NYT and listen to NPR.

@41
what is a “totebagger ‘liberal'” and how is one distinguished, if at all, from an ordinary ‘liberal’?

@42

I imagine some people read Brooks and his kind to find out what the Line is. I can’t take the NYT or NPR, but I have been subscribing to the NYRB for this purpose.

I subscribed to the NYRB for a while in the 80s/90s, still glance at it occasionally, and all I can say is that is an *inefficient* decision, b.c a lot of the NYRB is art history, literature and other matter that has no direct, unambiguous political content. Moreover, the notion that the NYRB has a Line (capital L) is a little weird. The NYRB has been edited by the same person since its start in 1963. It reflects, no doubt, his tastes, predilections, whatnot. The NYRB tends to have a fairly stable (though not completely fixed, of course) group of contributors, many of whom it stays w until the person in question is no longer alive. Nothing nec. wrong w that, but none of it suggests that the NYRB’s purpose is to propagate a Line. It cd be seen as cliquish but not esp. Line-ish.

Unless, of course, one believes, as anarcissie no doubt does, that every ‘mainstream’ publication in a capitalist society will necessarily reflect the views of the Ruling Class, so in that sense it doesn’t matter which you choose: you cd get The Line equally well from Atlantic, Harpers, NYRB, New Yorker, etc.

@43 LFC
A totebagger liberal – a person who is willing to give minor lipservice support to general ‘popular’ liberal causes but rarely commits much of themselves beyond that.

The term comes from the fundraising efforts – Public TV, NPR, World Wildlife Fund…dozens of others, send out direct mail or host fundraising drives where if you give a particular amount, usually $50 but sometimes less, you get a totebag. The main purpose of the totebag being you can then carry it around when you go to pilates or your yoga session or leave it on the chair at Starbucks so that everyone knows you support liberal causes.

The other popular term is ‘bike path liberal’ which is a person who supports nice easy liberal-ish causes like putting in a bikepath or cleaning up a park, maybe even a food drive or something but really doesn’t want to opine on or tackle tougher questions like wealth inequality, racism, gender rights etc.

Quite often a bike path liberal and a totebagger are one in the same and feel they have quite a bit of liberal credibility as a result of both their contributions and their actions.

@Anarcissie
in the last few months NYRB has published a number of propaganda articles about Ukraine
The only thing I’m aware of is the online piece by Snyder which I only glanced at. I wdn’t call anything he writes ‘propaganda’ (even if I don’t agree w it) — tho I’m sure we disagree on that. (He is one of their regulars, which prob suffices as an explanation for why they run anything he feels like writing.)

@Trader Joe: thks (sort of thought that was what was meant.) But I don’t believe I’d heard the terms ‘totebagger’ or ‘bike path liberal’. (Out of the loop, middle-aged, whatever.)

Harold @46
but their few articles that do have political content too often are sadly indistinguishable from Brooks and Friedman in objectionable tone (especially) and content

As you may know, the NYRB’s politics (such as they are) have not been entirely constant, I wd say. As I suggested above, some of it simply depends on the regulars and their part. interests/views/hobbyhorses. But in the 60s, before I became aware of it and was too [cough] young to be a reader of such a publication (tho I suppose some *extremely* precocious 12-yr-old somewhere may be reading it now), it ran a steady stream of anti-Vietnam-War pieces.

Then in the 70s, when I was aware of it, it ran quite good pieces, as I recall, by the historian Geoffrey Barraclough (orig an expert on medieval Germany) on intl rels and North-South rels. I actually have a tattered hard copy of a Nov. 1978 NYRB on my shelf, with a Barraclough piece (“The Struggle for the Third World”) on the cover. Then for many years it ran the often incisive commentary of Stanley Hoffmann. Another contributor I used to look out for was James Joll. Joll is no longer alive, and neither (I’m fairly sure) is Barraclough.

My earlier impression of NYRB was that they were sort of center-left, sort of liberal, in the tote-bag sense, but maybe a little wetter. Thus when something neoconnish popped up, a little latter-day Drang nach Osten, I was surprised enough to notice it.

“become much more sober and academic in its advancing years”

that’s prob. right, I think, though unlike you I didn’t read it from inception

hix @7
My understanding is that Schmitt was resurrected after 9/11 by American political scientists and only (re*?) entered the rest of the world through them.

Although as Corey pointed out @18, Schmitt had been engaged w by various & sundry writers before 9/11, hix is not *totally* wrong, I think.

As someone who casts an occasional eye on the Intl Rels journals, I saw during the GWBush admin a definite jolt/uptick of interest by certain IR types (not only or even mainly American, necessarily) in Schmitt and also Agamben. I’ve never really read either one and have no present intention of doing so, but it got to the pt in the Bush admin where one wd glance at a journal and dang if there wasn’t an article intoning, in the opening graphs, “sovereign is he who decides the exception.” (I don’t remember actually whether this is Schmitt or Agamben and at this hour, I don’t much care.)

Also, in a Barnes & Noble (!) some months ago, I came across a nice paperback edition of ‘Concept of the Political’ (maybe it’s the one Corey links in the OP) w a long intro by, iirc, Tracy Strong. Wd that have been published w/o 9/11 and the Bush GWOT response and the ensuing controversies over interrogation, detention, torture, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, drones, etc etc?

That edition came out in 1996
I stand corrected. (For some reason I thought it was later.)

geo @54:

I don’t want to get into this much here for obvious reasons. And I have no idea why you think that a caused volition would be unproblematic and not somehow “metaphysical”. But “decisionism” wouldn’t imply that the decision is necessarily unmotivated, only that it is contingent and “prior” to any cause or reason, in the sense that it can’t be derived or deduced from such priors. IOW the decision and its commitment do not depend on some prior knowledge and its implications, but give rise, through its clarifying moment, to the relevant knowledge and implications.

As to the sense in which the political would “float free” of other issues, it’s that a) it is not reducible to any prior given issue or set of issues, and b) an issue, say, religious differences, might be simply that, but when it “rises” into the political or becomes politicized, it is ,as it were, super-charged by the political and becomes subject to the criteria and antagonistic dynamics of the political realm.

I can’t remember the periods/dates now but when I was studying Schmitt a bit in coursework I believe my Prof made the observation that there had been something like 3 Schmitt revivals in (anglophone) political theory.

Sorry, John, to be trying your patience, but yes, I guess I am arguing for a naturalistic, deterministic view, if that means there is no free will, no uncaused volitions, nothing radically undetermined or ex nihilo. The idea that naturalism renders change or novelty incomprehensible seems beneath you: after all, “explain” simply means “account for by means of or with reference to preceding circumstances or causes.” Marx was one kind of naturalist or materialist, William James another; neither of them imagined it was necessary to have recourse to a non-physical reality to explain the appearance of change.

When you say “orders of meaning emerge and change historically, but not simply as a reflection of and adaption to prior orders of existents, which the former frame, interact with and change,” it seems to me you’re merely conjuring with words. To “frame, interact with, and change” things seems to me to name exactly the same events as to “reflect” or “adapt to” them. Only the terms are different and more “dynamic,” “existential,” etc.

As for Rorty, I take his point about anti-foundationalism to be that we should stop using terms like “deterministic reductionism” and “physicalist-reductionist” altogether and get on with the business of just describing things and accounting for them causally in any way that works, ie, get some sort of foothold in this puzzling world rather than puzzling ourselves further with metaphysical notions like “radically undetermined” or “existential freedom.”

WT: we can’t explain what we need to explain by referring solely to what is … already known

Not to be glib, William, but in that case, how can we explain it? Surely not by what is unknown? If you mean that we can’t yet explain a great many things, I’m of course with you. But doesn’t that just mean we have to know more before we can explain them? Of quantum entanglements, as I mentioned, mussen wir schweigen. And as for poets, they are (as Lawrence said of novelists) “dribbling liars.”

the massively irrational outcomes of so many massively rational enterprises

“Rational” has two meanings: “agreeable to reason” (ie, reasonable) — an evaluative term — and “based on reason” (ie, in accordance with prevailing canons of reasoning) — a descriptive term. One can have a rational (in the latter sense) explanation of irrational (in the former sense) behavior.

let alone ontological ones

That’s just what I’m suggesting.

I don’t quite know who reads, and is influenced by, Brooks, and I do think it is an interesting question. One can tell for certain that the readers comments on his columns are mostly critical, mocking and unkind. And he does get a lot of comments, and readers vote for comments so you can tell what the majority thinks, at least among the online readership. So maybe people read him for the pleasure of finding flaws in a weak argument?

As for the NYRB, I would like to briefly join in that off-topic conversation to point out how uneven the quality of the contributions is. There are some real gems, and then there are a host of poor reviews which fall in two categories: those that uncritically praise the book under review without reviewing it, and those where the reviewer mostly writes about their own pet topic without reviewing the book. It is a mystery to me why the editors tolerate these non-reviews, and why the readers don’t complain more. Unfortunately one has to contend with the rubbish (e. g. check out http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/20/women-at-the-top/, seems unbelievable to me in 2014) to not miss the gems.

[sorry, this relates to another thread, now closed, hence my putting this here]
@GiT
I meant to ask you this earlier: in the Fanon passage you quoted in the CA02 thread, what does lactification mean (in the phrase “lactification hallucinatoire”)? I can’t find a translation for the word on a couple of quick looks, but presumably something to do w/ milk? (hallucinatory milkiness? milky hallucinations?) Which doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense…

Thanks, that makes more sense.

Geo:

It’s one thing to say, “I don’t understand X”, where X may be a person or a topic. It’s another thing to say, “X “must” be impossible”, (according to my presuppositions). Your question, in response to my attempted explication, was broadly humean, in it’s understanding of human agency, (aka “freedom). (The small case indicating a general philosophic type, rather than any specific thinker). But surely you “must” recognize that there are other possible views and perspectives on such a matter, (which absorbs so much solipsistic attention)?

What I found strange in your response to my very limited effort at explication, was,- (aside from being rather off topic),- that you seem to deny any possibility for basic choice, as a criterion of “freedom”, even as you might wish to uphold such “freedom”. (Which, in fact, strikes me as utterly “unempirical”, as well as, denying the entire topic of conversation). And your insistence that a continuous chain of causal explanations must provided the basis of “reason”. (Which ignores the distinction between reasons and causes. And one of the basic points of the criticism of “metaphysics”, is that explanations are something that humans do, amongst other things, and that any complete or total explanation thereby explains nothing, least of all about what humans are actually doing). In fact, “reasons” are things that humans say, causes, as explanations, are only part of what humans say and do, and one can’t “hide out” from the responsibility and indeterminacy of human sayings and doings by reducing them to something pre-given.

How can something come from nothing, you ask, (with naivete about the “metaphysical” origin of your question)? Well, where does human natural language and its meaning-generating and world-disclosing capacities comes from? From nothing is as good an answer as any other, unless you think you can provide some other-than-mythical “causal” account. (Likewise, quantum mechanics has nothing to do with brain theory, except in the trivial sense that its causal substrate involves electrons). And so human action could be described as a “miracle” (CR), precisely against the background of such “naturalistic” reductionism. (Though Schmitt was far more concerned with the case of “collective action” rather than individual agency). To claim that politics belongs to the “natural and social world” ignores that humans are socio-cultural beings, not reducible to prior conditions, constraints and antecedents, even if not “free” of such matters. And that the conflicts that result aren’t simply to be academically explained.

(Materialism vs. idealism is a metaphysical aporia and one wouldn’t want to be impaled on either horn of the dilemma. But, as to Rorty, he was basically just recycling arguments from Wittgenstein and Heidegger into an Analytic idiom, hence his “naturalism” and “pragmatism”. But I’ve found him tone-deaf with respect to his sources, (including pragmatists), and far too willing to simply accede to the status quo, with his style of banal provocation).

Look, I haven’t been “defending” Schmitt here, only trying to explicate some of his points and their potential significance. (Just as I was trying to clarify the actual historical record with respect to Admiral Horthy on another thread). But he does raise some problems and questions about “sovereignty”, law, and the bases of “authority”, which aren’t easily answered. That he failed to answer them or that his answers were shit, (which amounts to the same thing), doesn’t vitiated the “force” of the questions, which unsettled “liberal-democratic” complacency. He was a lawyer who became an accidental political theorist in quite specific historical contexts. (He wasn’t a philosopher, and if you want to address such “deep” questions, Heidegger would be a better source, even as he was politically an idiot). It should be plain that some of the issues he raised are still quite germane. That CR responds to Schmitt’s polemical vein with a similar polemical vein doesn’t do his interpretative skills any credit. He just wants to re-enforce his “side”, without the same willingness, however denegated, to engage with “the other”, the very “enemy” that Schmitt was in implicit dialogue with, even if in opposition.

I am a bit surprised to see determinism invoked with regard to human behavior or politics. Surely, that’s not a serious objection to the questions raised by Schmitt? That social “causation” must be conceived of as homologous (you all must have known that I would feel compelled to use it in a sentence) with Newton’s physics? Or, am I misunderstanding geo entirely?

Do I trust myself to rephrase that (and there is a lot more just in my notes) in one or two sentences that Martha Nussbaum would find coherent? Probably not.

The revolutionary subject in the revolutionary act self-alienates from the Symbolic to the Imaginary? And returns when the fires cool down. Since there can be no personal or private Symbolic, the revolutionary cannot explain herself to someone attached to the hegemonic Symbolic, or describe “what comes after.”

The revolutionary subject is our Other.

(Suddenly awakening in the middle of the night, after struggling to hold the jaws of alligators shut…)

geo:

Physicalism, as the thesis, no mindedness without embodiment, such that all mental attributes “must” have a causal, physical substrate or basis, is likely “true”. But of itself, such a thesis conveys little. “Physicalism” doesn’t even imply atheism, or necessarily vitiate religious beliefs; Mormons. e.g, might be quite comfortable with such notions. (Whole tomes and infinite papers are dedicated to trying to make it out, one way or another, but how much depends on such efforts, I’m not sure). At any rate, there are not 2 things, “mind” vs. “matter”, but rather a 3rd thing, “information”, and that 3rd thing is really the “hard problem”.

As for “materialism” vs. “idealism”, I said it’s an aporia. Rough-sketch, reduced form, the aporia is as follows. If one starts from the premise that all phenomena must be derived from physical causes, then ones requires concepts or ideas about material causes. Oops! Where do they come from. Usually no such account is forthcoming and likely no such account can satisfactorily be completed in fully consistent terms. But if one starts from the premise that all phenomena must somehow be “constituted” by mind, spirit, intentionality, etc. , then one must take on ever-increasing loads of material contents, such that it becomes increasingly implausible that any rational purpose could account for such twisted complexity. Materialism inadvertently slips into idealism and vice versa.

As to “metaphysics”, the point isn’t that our claims don’t or can’t have any “metaphysical” implications, but rather that such implications are undecidable, can’t be made out and certified by rational means in any fully satisfactory way. That is why Rorty, among others, would say that says that terms like “reductionist physicalism” can be dispensed with. Not because they are completely meaningless as discursive constructs, but because the effort to provide some supernal guarantee or certification of such constructs, which they seemingly promise, necessarily fails.

All human knowledge, understanding. experience and action or activity is mediated by our meanings and concepts, (which is not to say, “constituted” by them). There is simply no way to strip our meanings and concepts off of the world or out of our consciousness, and compare them either to the things or experiences themselves.

Your distinction between coerced and “free” action is downright Hobbesian. But it doesn’t explain what the “thing” that can other be coerced or free is in the first place. Likewise your insistence that language comes from “biology and culture” is a muddle and petitio principii and the functionalist/instrumentalist “justification” given doesn’t help your case. Natural language, and the symbolic thinking and communication that it enables, opens up the world and gives rise to culture. And the semantic range that it affords can’t be reduced to prior causes.

I’m just surprised that you remain caught up in traditional substantialist metaphysics, with your insistence that something can’t come from nothing. The classical notion of substantia/ousia interprets being as that which remains the same amidst all change, thus as what is permanent. continuous, and perpetual, “eternal”. But in the course of the 19th and onto the 20th century, historical awareness and thinking took hold. And “history” involves changes in meanings, norms, basic conceptions, leaving behind the certainties, self-evidence or securities of traditions. And that is precisely what classical substance metaphysics can’t explain or account for.

To get back to Schmitt, he was raising basic questions about sovereignty, law and legitimate authority, precisely because he experienced them as being in crisis, with the traditional understandings no longer “holding”. If law requires a sovereign source, which promulgates and coercively enforces it, just what anymore constitutes the identity and unity of a people gathered under such sovereignty? Especially since not only are we dealing with modern structurally-functionally differentiated societies and democratic demands, but also because domestic and inter-national politics have become inter-penetrated in the post-war order/chaos. Civil war has spilled beyond borders even as global domination threatens. (Ironically, it was his very struggles with the notion that sovereignty derives from “the people” and thus must be “democratic” that drove him, given his priors, into collapsing into totalitarianism). But the single most interesting question he raises, if not uniquely, then signally, is the constitutional paradox of the constituting/constituted power. That still deserves consideration.

geo:
“I may give as my reason for loathing Henry Kissinger that he’s a callous, deceitful, arrogant, and self-aggrandizing mass murderer; but others may ascribe my hatred to such causes as envy or repressed sexual attraction.”

I have not been reading the latter stretches of this thread so much as grazing them, but I am very glad I caught this sentence. Laughed out loud.

the single most interesting question he raises, if not uniquely, then signally, is the constitutional paradox of the constituting/constituted power. That still deserves consideration.

I agree with this observation, and I’ve read all of JCH’s comments on this thread with interest, while recognizing the difficulty and perhaps the impossibility of what he’s trying to do here – among other things trying to defend an in any way impartial interest in the enemy to that enemy’s enemies. (THE ENEMY was the title that Gopal Balakrishnan gave to his very useful intellectual biography of Schmitt, published in 2000). Quite often, this difficult exercise coincides with another difficulty-if-not-impossibility: of trying to do philosophy on a blog comment thread.

Without hope, I’ll point out that it is just a bit more than merely ironic that those perplexed by the theory of the primacy for politics of the friend-enemy distinction so frequently and perhaps universally operate from friend-enemy presumptions in their discussion, or most typically in their refusal of actual discussion, of the same concept. That this problem would tend to recur is one strong implication of the theory underlying Schmitt’s “Concept of the Political.” A second or corollary implication is that this concept of the political implies a politicization of the concept, and finally collapses into or is revealed to rely upon, is an argument or the argument on, the concept of concepts at all. The question of the sovereign decision ex nihilo turns out to be a form of the more general and more basic question of existence ex nihilo – another form of the “why is there something and not nothing?” and another form of the “why am I bothering to offer a comment on a blog thread?” or “why am I declining to continue this discussion?”

86: Sorry, not yet. But I’ll keep trying

Then let me toss more Breckman at ya. Breckman has written extensively on the Left Hegelians and Romanticism.

“Let me conclude the present chapter by linking once again the
Left Hegelian critique of Romantic symbol theory to the
broad themes of this book. Ambiguity and positivity are of interest to more
than the aesthetic theorist who recognizes the need to preserve
hermeneutical complexity in approaching the expressive art object.
The question is also of paramount concern to democratic political theory.

For over two hundred years, the revolution unleashed by the
struggle to replace personal power by impersonal institutions has inter-
twined and overlapped with the invention of quasi-transcendental entities
like State, Nation, and, of course, Class. The historical and conceptual in-
tersections of the democratic project with these new “immanent deities”
compel us to recognize the unavoidable symbolic dimension of politics.
Radical democracy demands preservation of nonidentity between the
symbolic and the real, renunciation of full possession, acknowledgment of the
power of symbols, and recognition that the impossibility of fixed and uni-
vocal meaning opens the symbolic domain to the possibility of a constant
activation of the quest for autonomy. ”

And from there he moves to Marx, and the attempt at a
materialism that de-symbolizes. It fails.

Your objection to materialism seems to be that decisions/choices/meanings/symbolic thinking/concepts/consciousness etc. aren’t “things,” i.e., medium-sized dry goods.

You are right and if I may, misreading JCH*. Materialism and Idealism meet in the “Symbol,” the empty and opaque signifier without referent that determines the horizon of meaning. “Freedom” or “Capital” are real mental “things,” void but because void are useful for structure. We spend a lot of our time saying what “Freedom” is not, not torture etc, IOW, “Freedom” as void is not constitutive, but our relation to the Void is constitutive. Maybe.

What Foucault and Butler are trying to do is show the ways these empty signifiers, like gender and sexuality (or Revolution!), work as sites of power.

Maybe for Schmitt too, state/politics and friend/foe are symbols, empty signifiers. Arendt famously described totalitarianism as the hurricane surrounding the eye.

*JCH does a lot of the work, differently and better early in 83. I could have pasted parts here. I am just a rank amateur, reading way over my level.

To say that the “unavoidable symbolic dimension of politics” (mcmanus quoting @89) is not new would be an understatement. See, e.g., Harold Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity, published in the mid-1930s. (Or, for that matter, see The Prince.)

But evidently mcmanus finds his time better occupied w Butler, Breckman, Lacan, Levinas, Zizek, etc. I’ll give Breckman at least one thing: Adventures of the Symbolic is one cool title. Since I’m probably (actually, strike “probably”) never going to read the book, just thought I’d mention that.

” the “force” of the questions, which unsettled “liberal-democratic” complacency”

Well, no. Hitler upset liberal democratic complacency, and made clear that the political approach of Schleicher, Papen and the rest, who put him in power rather than make an alliance with the Social Democrats, was a road to disaster, and that Schmitt’s political ideology pointed straight in that direction. The fact that he chose to become Hitler’s lickspittle is, as you say, not strictly relevant to his earlier writings, but certainly helps to hammer the point home.

The conclusion, for liberal democrats, is that “questions” like Schmitt’s are in the same category as the “questions” of people like Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, useful in understanding the thinking of our enemies, but not deserving an answer that treats them as legitimate participants in debate.

Sorry, Bruce, but I don’t see that any of the questions you pose require a radical rethinking of our ordinary usage of “cause.” Like every word, it’s part of a way of life, and its meaning is the way we use it for our common purposes. We usually use “cause” to help us figure out how to get things to happen or not to happen. We also apply it to rare or even singular occurrences, like the rise of Christianity or the Big Bang, but more loosely, with the understanding that we can’t really test, and hence prove, our conclusions. That is, like many other words, it’s not wholly univocal, unambiguous, hard-edged. Still, we generally use it consistently enough to understand one another and even sometimes agree with one anothers .

To your examples: Why does the 8-ball go left rather than right? As you note, there’s a straightforward answer, with a high degree of precision and certainty. Why did your neighbor watch the movie? If she’d never heard of it before, seemed very taken with your description, and generally shared your opinions about movies, you’d be provisionally justified in concluding that your mentioning the movie caused her to see it. If it really mattered to you to know why she watched it, you might ask her. But then, if she’s a compulsive liar or often doesn’t seem to know her own mind, you still wouldn’t be certain. But of course there are innumerable things whose causes we are uncertain of without concluding that they have no causes.

What causes a disease epidemic? As you say, we’ve worked out preliminary, in some cases more than preliminary, approaches to answering this question. What causes a crime epidemic? There’s much less agreement about how to go about answering this question, as well as about how precise or certain any answer can be. But there’s plenty of discussion. Some people may think we already know the cause(s); many people may think we’ll never know the cause(s) with any useful degree of certainty/precision. But no one thinks that crime epidemics have no causes.

The same is true of natural phenomena like global warming and historical processes like elite greed and short-sightedness. Some answers to what causes such things are fairly precise and widely agreed on; some are less precise and more controversial. But no one says: “Global warming exists, but it has no cause” or “Elite greed exists, but it has no cause.”

That intuition exists and is important, surely no one disagrees. But why do you think that means that some acts or conditions have no causes?

Anarcissie: Yes, it’s true, “completely determined” sounds like overkill. There is quantum indeterminacy, and also statistical uncertainty. And there are the limits of human cognition — we are biological systems, organisms, and may simply be incapable of grasping some (many) interesting things, including many causal relations. I’m mainly reacting against the traditional notions of free will and spiritual substance, which are fundamental to the notions of sin and eternal punishment, which haunted my childhood.

(I didn’t read Geo’s last post before writing my reply. So my construct of Geo’s position is a bit of a strawman, but it’s a strawman composed of argument people of Geo’s persuasion often make, so it might be useful to argue against it anyway)

Can someone explain to me why supposedly intelligent people spend time worrying about what D Brooks says or thinks ?
I’ve got way more important things to do, like examine the lint in my navel.

Heidegger helped the Nazis take over the university he was charged with protecting. Carl Schmitt justified murder. Both should have been executed for their crimes.

As for David Brooks, this is a complete misreading. He’s arguing that the US public has chosen to ignore once again the rest of the world. For all the ability of citizens to withdraw their consent, Aleppo is burning, the Pakistani government executes Christians for blasphemy, North Korea remains hell on earth.

The key question is liberalism. Schmitt is anti-liberal, while David Brooks looks to the foundation and maintenance of a liberal order as the cornerstone of geopolitics. Any liberal order demands institutions that safeguard rights, and in the international realm that institution is primarily military force.

Oliver Cromwell was necessary. That doesn’t make Whigs into Tories.

JQ @93:

See @87.

M. & H. have nothing to do with any issue here. There basically just junk social science, though there’s is not the only kind of subsidized junk social science.

If you want to blame any single individual for the rise of Hitler, other than the man himself, of course, blame Kanzler Bruening (Center Party) and his 6 million. But after he was through, there simply wasn’t any possible parliamentary coalition left. The majorities of parliament were all “anti-constitutional”, including the traditionalist conservative parties. Hence the resort to Article 48 presidential rule, after repeated failed elections, which Schmitt did advocate under the circumstances. The Center Party (RC center right) and the SPD both had been repressed under the 2nd Reich and formed the back-bone of the Weimar Republic coalitions, but that alliance couldn’t muster any majority or even a stable minority government. (If you check the last 4 elections, that coalition went from 47% to 39% to 37% to 36% of the vote. In the last vote the CP peaked at 17% and the Nazis declined to 33%). So you’re not only making a historically fallacious retrospective argument, but one based on historical fantasy. By 1932, with the rise to prominence of the Nazi Party, (which, of course never attained an electoral majority and even declined in its vote share in the last election), just about everybody thought the end of the Weimar constitution was nigh, and the longing for some resolution via some sort of strongman authority was palpable. Gen. von Schleicher was an inveterate intrigue and clearly thought he should be that man on a white horse. He sought to split the Nazis by drawing of Roehm and the “left” of the party and forming an alliance with other labor groups as a new basis for ruling. The alternative was a Reichswehr coup, (which in the event would have been better than what did happen). But the von Pappen faction, representing traditional conservations and industrialist, (who sought a policy of cartelization and reflation), instead made a deal with Hitler, no doubt thinking that they could use and control him for their purposes, rather than vice versa. Von Schleicher and Roehmer were both murdered in the “Night of the Long Knives”. Von Pappen was tried at Nuremburg and acquitted. Schmitt’s Nazism was a kind of death bed conversion.

At any rate, we do know, in the concrete instance who the “enemy” was for Schmitt: it was Marxism, and that was because behind the mask of Marxism, he perceived the devil himself, anarchy. But, as I’ve said, it is the problems and questions that Schmitt raised, not any “solutions” he might have offered, nor his personal political preferences, that retain interest today. And you’re just refusing to grasp the level of generality at which those sorts of questions occur. To simply presume that the formal proceduralism of “liberal democracy” automatically conveys “legitimacy” and resolves all questions of conflict and “authority” is naive at best. And to presume that all such political conflicts can be resolved by rational discourse and persuasive argument, such that impassible conflicts can never arise is utterly complacent. (That is, e.g., to willfully ignore all the problems of “democratic deficits” and Crouch’s “post-democracy” that riddle the world today). Besides which, politics has never been a pre-eminent realm of rationality and substantiated opinions and devoid of strategic manipulations. (Here in the U.S., we have Congress critters who seem to think that they can effectively legislate the laws of physics!). Your stance just reminds me of Brecht’s quip that if the people will not obey, just dissolve the people and elect a new one.

Im sorry, 87 is completely incomprehensible and as much as I can make out the argument it seems to be working from a straw man of liberalism “that it doesn’t recognise politics/power/a Friend enemy dichotomy” ,as if any of these concepts are anything but very basic building blocks for any basic theory.

Watson Ladd @103

1) Is Brooks echoing Schmitt? My answer to that is I’m not sure, b.c. I don’t know enough about Schmitt and I’ve read only the OP excerpt, not the full Brooks column. Corey thinks the answer is yes, so I’m assuming there are at least reasonable arguments on that side. But as I say, I’m not expressing a view on that.

2) Putting Schmitt temporarily to one side, what is Brooks, on the face of it, saying? If past performance is any guide here, it’s going to be a mixture of platitudes (which, being platitudes, are hard to disagree with) plus a dose of recycled generic realism (the world is still a dangerous place, there are still malign people, we just can’t all join hands and sing kumbaya etc) plus a few things that he’s sprinkled in from whatever he happens to have been reading the night before he wrote the column. There may be a Schmittian flavor but it wd prob be in the nature of salt and pepper on an already baked dish, or so I’d guess.

3) There’s also the Brooks false-dichotomy or, better, false-polarity move. So here it’s the “liberal order” is either “a single system organized and defended by American military strength” or “a spontaneous network of direct people-to-people contacts, flowing along the arteries of the Internet.” As if there were nothing in between these two options.

4) As to your (Watson’s) “Any liberal order demands institutions that safeguard rights, and in the international realm that institution is primarily military force.” This is a quasi-platitude that tells nothing about the more interesting and pertinent questions, e.g. *who* wields the force, *how* it’s wielded, and *when* (under what circs and conditions). Also says nothing about, e.g., unilateralism vs multilateralism. It’s also not quite a correct statement inasmuch as there are actually various insts and mechanisms that “safeguard rights” in the “intl realm.” It’s true, at a very general level, that as long as there is no world govt in the strong sense, the system remains one in which force is the ‘last resort’. But this is so general as to be pretty uninteresting.

This strikes me as merely dancing around Godwin’s law.

As far as I can tell, the post’s comparison makes anyone who argues for (1) the need for national and military strength in order to (2) combat some “menaces to civilization” into Schmitt.

It proves too much.

The problem with Brooks’s column is not the assertion that appropriate military force and large organizations have an essential role to play in global progress, but in his assertion that a significant number hold to the dysfunctional and naive atomistic view of politics and power that he attributes to them. The world is just a little more complicated.

Both should have been executed for their crimes.

This is possibly not the position standing most firmly opposite Schmitt and Heidegger.

That’s a fair response Corey, and I actually went back and took a look at some of Brooks’s earlier work. I read your essays on fear, and on neoconservatives, which I liked even as I disagreed with parts, and I read the two articles by him that you cited.

However, I think you’re misreading Brooks. Partially.

And I say this because, for reasons surpassing my own understanding, I went back and read some of the things he wrote before 9/11.

Brooks is a political romantic in the sense that he believes people are nourished and elevated by grand, unifying projects and purposes. Brooks dislikes the notion of a culture that shrinks an individual’s purpose in life to the welfare of his particular self.

But, those grand, unifying projects and purposes need not be war, or a fundamental division between friends and enemies. He’s not Schmitt.

Let me cite what seems to be the best evidence of this. In 1997 Brooks directly addressed the question of national greatness in an article entitled A Return to National Greatness: A Manifesto for a Lost Creed in The Weekly Standard.

Now here, surely, one would expect to find any affinities for Schmitt painted vividly and unmistakeably.

Instead, Brooks chooses as his model for unifying and elevating national projects: the Library of Congress.

He writes: The librarian of Congress at the time, Ainsworth Spofford, gave pride of place to American heroes like Benjamin Franklin and Robert Fulton in the pantheon of historical likenesses that covers the walls. Spofford and his colleagues saw the building as a statement of American greatness — and as a way to elevate America to greatness.

And even as he invokes the metaphor of conflict, he’s more often talking about something other than actual conflict with other human beings, much less war. For example:

During the 23 years it took to design and build the library, more people immigrated to America than in the previous 250 years combined. The nation’s population almost doubled, and white Americans settled more land in these years than in the preceding three centuries. Cities grew exponentially. Slums spread. It was a period of labor unrest.

But menaced by these threats to national cohesion, Americans redoubled their devotion to American nationalism. Hit by economic blows to their confidence, they reasserted their faith in themselves. Faced by anxiety and intellectual uncertainty, they did not succumb to malaise or cynicism. Instead they counter-attacked, with big projects like the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the Library of Congress.

The counter-attack was not the division of the world into friends and enemies, or the conscious affirmation of eternal war against some necessary, and human, enemy. It was in collaborative, constructive projects.

The malaise of the 1990s that Brooks discusses elsewhere, the fear (yes) that America was turning into a giant, tepid kitchen (paraphrasing), is specifically described in this article as:

The designers must have felt in their bones what Tocqueville observed: Democracy has a tendency to slide into nihilistic mediocrity if its citizens are not inspired by some larger national goal. If they think of nothing but their narrow self-interest, of their commercial activities, they lose a sense of grand aspiration and noble purpose. “What frightens me most,” Tocqueville writes, “is the danger that, amid all the constant trivial preoccupations of private life, ambition may lose both its force and its greatness, that human passions may grow gentler and at the same time baser, with the result that the progress of the body social may become daily quieter and less aspiring.”

Now, without question, what he terms “an active foreign policy” is part of what he thinks America’s role should be in its achievement of “national greatness.” But that doesn’t necessarily involve war (he cites the Panama Canal as an example), and even when it’s mentioned, it is as one piece of a larger picture:

For much of this century, liberals possessed high aspirations and a spirit of historical purpose. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the New Deal, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier — these were efforts to aim high, to accomplish some grand national endeavor. Liberals tried to use American preeminence as a way to shape the world, fight communism, put a man on the moon. But then came the 1970s, and suddenly liberalism became a creed emphasizing limits.

The emphasis on friend and foe, on defining human elevation through a politics of antagonism directed at another group of people, is absent here in a way that it is not in the portions of Schmitt you cited.

So I think you have Brooks right in that he’s a political romantic, in a sense. He does think that political action is as important as political ends. But I think you have him wrong in your emphasis on military conflict, and so far as the comparison to Schmitt goes, that is the crucial point imho.

“Regime change” may not be war “technically” but it is still a grand national project that involves killing people, or inciting other people to kill people, a lot of the time. I think Brooks is sending basically the same message as his friend Jonathan Chait did some days ago, when Chait lamented that Americans didn’t seem to have the stomach for killing “for an ideal”. http://rjwaldmann.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-five-minutes-hate-of-chait.html

As far as Schmitt being RC, nineteenth century popes also adamantly insisted on this right to engage in “regime change” from afar. So the notion of a purported “right to meddle” in the internal affairs of other countries is nothing very new. The historian J. B. Bury inveighed against it in no uncertain terms in his “History of the papacy in the 19th century: liberty and authority in the Roman Catholic Church” (1930?), as I recall. I don’t know if 20th century popes still insist on it. They probably do; in any case, one needn’t be an isolationist to oppose it.

I suppose the Kristols and Kagans thought the Cold War “rejuvenated” people’s souls — and many of their relatives’ and friends’ pocket books. Just wanted to add that Bury’s book consisted of lectures delivered in 1908 and published postumously.

JCH @ 122

With relation to the metaphysics of the constituting power, it’s also worth mentioning Rawls’ somewhat tortured attempt to define that constituting power in a colorless, tasteless vacuum, which he does, it seems to me, precisely in order to deny the metaphysical source of his definition. To be serious about converting freedom into political obligation, without being condemned as yet another obscurantist metaphysician, is apparently a lot harder than it looks.

“We will care a lot more about ends–winning the war–than we will about means. We will debate whether it is necessary to torture prisoners who have information about future biological attacks. We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders, and continue fighting. In an age of conflict, bourgeois virtues like compassion, tolerance, and industriousness are valued less than the classical virtues of courage, steadfastness, and a ruthless desire for victory.” –David Brooks

Money and the catbird seat for me, tragedy for you. Indeed, that’s how it has been playing out. And to what end? More blood and plunder for David Brooks, &co. More tragedy for you and your stupid “bourgeois” values. Don’t say he hasn’t been honest about what the deal was.

You know, even though Halasz had been talking about the context for Carl Schmitt in the early 1920s, somehow I had forgotten one of my very favorite and instructive moments of European history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%80%931919#Further_revolts_in_tow_of_the_revolution“>German Revolution 1918-19 …Wiki, focused here on the Liberals and Social Democratic unleashing the Freikorps on the Spartacists and Munich.

I was reminded by Buring of the Communist Leader’s House Near Kiev by Maiden paramilitaries.

Darn. Is every peace-loving law-abiding rational-scientific Social Democracy born in the slaughter of the opposition (with eyes averted from the hired thugs)?

JCH: Thank you for the lengthy philosophy tutorial. I’ll be pondering it for quite a while. Meantime, a very partial and inadequate response.

The only difference between the “Higgs boson” and metaphysical claims is that in the former case there is some hope of empirical substantiation, in highly pre-suppositioned ways, whereas in other projects there is never any possibility of providing clear criteria for deciding between one claim or the other. But both are equally obscure.

The second sentence seems to me in flat contradiction to the first. The mode of verification of a statement may not be the whole of its meaning, but the absence of any imaginable verification procedure seems to me equivalent to meaningless. I’m not just alluding to the dear, deluded old Vienna Circle, but also to Hume’s well-known anti-metaphysical dictum (quoting from memory): “You are holding a book in your hand. Does it contain any reasoning concerning facts or numbers? No? Does it contain any poetry or imaginary narrative? No? Then commit it to the flames, since it can contain nothing of value?”

All “metaphysical” claims fail, in principle and not just “so far”, but that doesn’t imply that they are simply unintelligible or unconstruable.

Indeed, it implies the opposite. They cannot be known to fail if they are completely unintelligible. Disproven claims are, by definition, intelligible.

If “metaphysical” claims or projects were simply unintelligible, then how could we possibly read the whole prior tradition of philosophy and see how its various and sundry claims fail in their aims, even as they uncover partial truths that still inform “our” understandings?

Yes, that’s a hard question, but I don’t believe, as you evidently do, that it’s unanswerable. Here’s a first pass at it: A large part of the history of philosophy consists of attempts to answer such intuitively plausible questions as “What is Being?” and “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Those of us who believe that no one has ever formulated a satisfactory, or even intelligible, answer to these questions have begun to wonder if posing those questions isn’t the wrong way of responding to the experiences that give rise to them. Maybe we should write poetry instead, or do neurophysiology, or insure that everyone has enough to eat, a place to sleep, a decent education, medical care, etc, and then come back to those experiences. At that point, they may suggest different, more promising questions. I suspect this is also what Rorty would say, and is part of what he meant by “the priority of democracy to philosophy.”

Re Levinas: of course it’s impossible to conclude from the little you quote that he’s “spouting nonsense.” But the very little I’ve read of him did, I admit, give me that impression, on the whole.

You’re insisting in the guise of “anti-metaphysics” on metaphysical criteria of your own.

This sounds a little like the believer’s tired retort: “But atheism is a religion too!”

you want to uphold a liberal conception of “freedom”, while denying any possible account of such a “thing”.

I thought I made it pretty clear in a previous comment that defining “freedom,” in the sense of “absence of coercion,” is a practical matter, i.e., for legal definition and political debate. It has no reference whatever to uncaused volitions or spiritual substances.

Insistence on causal determinism, aside from being a fairly primitive account of causal issues, is a reaction formation against traditional “free will”

Yes, which is why Rorty rightly proposed that we drop both causal determinism and free will and just get on with figuring out what we want to mean by “cause” and, more important (since we have at least a working definition already, and a lot of urgent problems to deal with) what causes what.

. I prefer the term ” human agency”, but then you seem to have no account of any such thing. … What is the “nature” of such “freedom”, as a real phenomenon, not an illusory epi-phenomenon? How is it possible? Why is it valuable and what would give it “value”?

Here’s a tentative account: People do things and give reasons why, which may or may not be identical with what appears to others the causes of their doing those things.

What is freedom and why is it valuable? Freedom is (again very roughly) an individual’s sense of control over her own (or a group’s sense of control over its own) fate. This is valuable to most of us in 21st-century capitalist democracy’s because when we look back, in the course of our education/socialization/acculturation at the lives of the people we identify with, things seem to have turned out better for them when that had that control than when others had it.

any human agency is not individual, atomistic, but bound up in interactions with others, such that there are no acts or intentions without interactions, such that the first-person solipsistic account of “intentional agency” is severely deficient, not at all sufficient “common sense”

Yes, I agree. At the risk of driving you back into the alligator’s jaws, what made you think I wouldn’t?

And now to the “direct issues” that all of the above is a “derailment” from:

any legal system requires a sovereign source, as the promulgating and enforcing power, and that any legal system is riddled with indeterminacies, which requires a political “supplement” to be sustained. The sovereign source and the popular basis need to be reconciled, extra-legally, in any narrow sense. Hence, he claims, the sovereign is what/who decides the exceptions. So who or what is the sovereign power that can back and enforce the authority and legitimacy of law? And what is its popular basis?

I’m afraid I don’t see the paradox here. I’m not sure what you mean by “indeterminacies” or “supplement,” what the distinction is supposed to be between the “sovereign source” and the “popular basis.” Perhaps you could illustrate historically? [As CK does @128.] My account of the process you describe in the above paragraph would be: Historical contingencies sometimes give rise to a group with enough of a common life to warrant their constituting themselves a democratic polity. This may happen in the state of nature or after overthrowing a previous regime. They talk about how to do this, agree on procedures, send delegates, agree on rules (including rules for interpreting and modifying the rules or withdrawing from the polity), and submit the scheme (ie, constitution) for popular ratification. When conflicts arise that cannot be reconciled within the constitutional scheme (including the rules for amending the rules), they may peacefully separate or engage in civil war. This seems to be the constitutional history of United States. What examples did you have in mind?

So what is the distinction between the “constituting/constituted power”? The constituting power gathers together and forms “the people” that would be subject to a constitution, as authorizing sovereign power.

I’m missing something: why can’t “the people” be the “constituting power”; ie,gather themselves together once the course of their history has made it seem advisable to enough of them to do so? Isn’t that (to a reasonable approximation) what happened in the US?

CK @128: [Schmitt] happened to be saying, at that moment … “Guys, this is what you always do, always have done, and must and will sooner or later do, if you want to survive at all, and survival doesn’t mean, because it’s never meant, preserve a perfectly orderly and lawful regime of peace and freedom: It means preserve some type of self-contradictory or hybrid mess sustained by an order that, in addition to maintaining some space for your ideals, also maintains some space for my different ones.”

This is a useful formulation. But there’s no reason why a democratic socialist couldn’t say such things. The legitimacy of curbing or suspending civil liberties in a supreme emergency is perfectly commonplace. What was novel in the Weimar situation was that the supreme emergency, or catastrophe, seemed to some people about to result not from external aggression or internal rebellion but from a free election. I would have thought that the disagreement between Schmitt and his liberal opponents should only have concerned whether preemptive action was necessary and feasible rather than whether it was legitimate. The — very heavy– burden of proof is always, of course, on those who propose extra-legal action. Schmitt apparently failed to convince enough people, perhaps because he embedded his argument unnecessarily in swathes of fallacious or unintelligible terminology, as German philosophers are wont to do.

I’m prepared to cut Schmitt a great deal of slack, both because I’m undoubtedly too quick to give up trying to make sense of Germanic philosophy and also because intellectually serious people like you and JCH seem to think Schmitt was on to something important. But about David Brooks, you’re vastly, almost recklessly over-generous. You put his argument this way:

We’re going to or ought to sacrifice some ideal liberalism-individualism for the sake of some reinforced nationalism-patriotism-statism … You may not like the medicine, but will be good for us for a number of reasons, and it will be necessary whether or not you’re ready to call it good. … i[I]t won’t be in the least unusual, and there neither is nor ever has been any real alternative.”

And for what purpose should we make this sacrifice, which will very likely entail “organized mass violence”? Because “the collapse of Communism finally posed or allowed for the posing of the question of the American-led international liberal-humanitarian order unambiguously.” I wish you’d been a little less ambiguous about the “American-led international liberal-humanitarian order.” If you meant “global capitalist regime,” you ought to have said so forthrightly. Because if you think that the history of American foreign policy offers the slightest evidence of concern for humanitarianism (if understood as democracy, human rights, relief from poverty and deprivation, etc.), except rhetorically and for public-relations purposes, then I’m afraid you are, as you cavalierly label us believers in international law and global solidarity (though no doubt only possible after decades or centuries of gradual, painful, continually contested efforts, which only makes it necessary to begin immediately, on however small a scale), “tragically detached from reality.”

Corey @123:
I agree that that Brooks piece is very revealing, in its tone as much as anything else.

geo @133:
One of the interesting things about the history of US for. policy is the tension between, on one hand, universalist ideals and reformist goals, often sincerely held by policymakers and, on the other hand, the lethal/violent means that they often adopted either in the name of those ideals or sometimes to further more ‘hard-headed’ objectives. Your one-dimensional view of the history of US for. policy, deriving (?) from Chomsky, turns a complicated history into a simple morality play (with US=bad) and deprives that history of much of its genuine interest. I wd recommend that you read David Milne’s bk about Walt Rostow to see how the archetypal Vietnam superhawk cd also be sincerely preoccupied w poverty alleviation (at its base, a moral/humanitarian issue). From this vantage, his career encapsulates the tragedy of Cold War liberalism. You wd never ascribe cardboard one-dimensional qualities to literary figures or philosophers, but apparently have no problem doing so in the case of everyone who has ever been involved w the formulation of US for. policy from 1783 to the present.

CK: it seems to me that to deny even “the slightest evidence of concern for humanitarianism” in American policy ever and overall would be very close to saying, and for a self-styled humanitarian virtually the same as saying, that we might as well have let the Nazis have their way.

No, it would not be close to saying that. The United States fought Nazi Germany because a German victory would have made a globally-integrated, American-led economy — always the fundamental goal of US foreign policy — impossible. It opposed the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist regimes for the same reason. It is a very good thing that the US defeated, ie, helped the USSR to defeat Nazi Germany, just as wage slavery is a far less painful and degrading thing than chattel slavery or totalitarian subjection. But this hardly proves that capitalists care about workers. It is advanced technology and the partial successes of past worker resistance that make capitalist exploitation more endurable than slavery or totalitarianism.

among the fruits of that victory was the opportunity to impose an order of international law, entailing a global regime of human rights law and a range of global institutions, all in keeping with long-standing American aspirations, adopted under American tutelage, echoing American documents

Indeed, not just an opportunity but a partial fulfillment of those hopes: ie, the UN Charter, which the US helped draft, publicly supported, and has spent subsequent decades ignoring or subverting. The notion that the US has acted substantially in conformity with the Charter, our global Constitution, is as absurd as the notion that the ideals expressed by embody “American aspirations,” rather than the rhetoric in which the US has traditionally concealed its subversion of popular self-determination throughout the world, except to the extent that such self-determination would, at least temporarily, result in that society’s becoming more open to American economic penetration and control.

About the historical context of Schmitt’s argument: thanks for the elaboration, but I don’t see that they make clear why, whatever the Weimar Constitution said, it would not have been possible for a liberal, if convinced that a humanitarian catastrophe — indeed, the annihilation of civilization — would follow from not acting preemptively against the Nazis, to support such action.

LFC: more later perhaps (I’m out the door), but there’s nothing simplistic or one-dimensional about claiming that it’s possible to find a consistent tendency in a given history, though sometimes modified by circumstances and always camouflaged by propaganda, whether or not the actors immediately concerned are aware of the constraints they must act under and whatever their motives may be.

I think you’ve formulated the traditional liberal perspective quite well, and it seems to me perfectly correct — there is indeed a general obligation to sacrifice and take risks on behalf of the rule of law. The case for setting aside the rule of law — whether by outlawing a political party or torturing a terror suspect — must be overwhelmingly strong: a very high probability, perhaps approaching certainty, of supreme catastrophe if extra-legal measures are not taken. Which is why no one is entitled to condescend in retrospect to those “true believing liberals” of Weimar. It was an exceptionally difficult decision, and I’m not sure they weren’t right to find Schmitt’s arguments unconvincing.

Murder Rewarded

Pabst and Runge could have used 139 in their defense.

Extra-constitutional means should be used for extraconstitutional ends, IOW, a new constitution, new system, new government; not to preserve existing power structures and institutions. Once the state of exception is declared, all bets are off for everybody.
That’s why such conditions are usually accompanied by dictatorial powers and internal repression, and followed by liberal acquiescence and forgetting…reconciliation committees, rewriting of regulatory legal regimes to protect the victors, and the like. The state of exception is not really exceptional, but the foundational presumption of the liberal state.

Pabst and Runge could have used 139 in their defense.

Yes, of course they would have. Now, let’s see: in the Nazi/liberal case, the “supreme emergency” to be avoided would have been genocide, wars of aggression, racial caste rule, and the permanent and universal abolition of civil liberties, and the remedy was simply the outlawing of certain activities. In the Socialist/Noske-Pabst-et al case, the “supreme emergency” would have been a workers’ state with abolition of class rule, no aggressive warfare, and full civil liberties, and the remedy was assassination. You be the judge.

Distinctions, Bob. Without them, there’s just people yelling at one another.

Does Obama have any choice? It seems to me capitalism is just doing its thing.

Corey @123: This is me again: That war as the gut-check of the nation business — not exactly Schmitt, of course, but more of a Brooksian version of Schmittianism. American Schmittianism if you will. Political romanticism, politics as the highest good, with violence always around the edge.

Well, but I think those two articles by Brooks should be read in context. They were written in the two months following 9/11, as an American invasion of Afghanistan was ongoing, as many wrestled with doubts and fears about the costs of that conflict, and as many feared additional attacks in the near future. The sentiments he expressed, particularly about being shocked from the, in retrospect, easy comforts of the 1990s, were largely shared, as I recall, by The New York Times editorial page, among others.

I think an American Schmitt would be inclined to discuss the centrality and need for conflict in times of peace as well as war. So I would expect Brooks, if he fit that description, to be concerned during the 1990s with the absence of military conflict and the need to find new enemies. I would expect a Schmitt to argue vehemently for the necessity of military conflict when peace was most ascendant and most accepted.

But a political writer musing about the importance of steadfast national dedication during war in the weeks following 9/11, and the testing of that dedication by the conflict joined in Afghanistan? That’s less revealing of a particular philosophy than the fact that the writer has a pulse and is cognizant of major contemporary events, imho.

Bruce Wilder 03.17.14 at 8:59 pm @ 148 —
All right, ‘Capital’. I think you could grant capitalism metaphorical agency, though, even if it’s merely a category of social behaviors and forms. As for Mr. O, I think he must dance with the one who brought him.

john c. halasz @150
I realize this was addressed to geo, but as a reader of it I find quite a lot here to object to, from the mischaracterization of geo’s politics (closer to Chomsky than Irving Howe [at least in the latter part of his life]), to the implication that J.L. Austin was a political philosopher (which he wasn’t, afaik), plus several other things that it’s too late to go into.

” to the implication that J.L. Austin was a political philosopher”

John Austin, 19th century philosopher of legal positivism and, pursuant to that, sovereignty; not John L. Austin, 20th century philosopher of language. At least I assume that’s the case.

p.s. Though on reflection you’re probably right.

JCH:

the problem for liberalism has always been this: how does liberalism deal with its “illiberal” opponents and yet still “incorporate” them under liberal rule or hegemony[?]. At some point, “illiberal” means must be deployed, which is deeply corrosive of such “liberal” hegemony.

I grant you that the above effectively summarizes the typical appearance of the problem, but it does so in a way that conceals or only partly and inconsistently acknowledges internal contradictions that bear directly on the matter in question, or effectively comprise the matter truly in question.

To state and address the matter sufficiently clearly, we will need to abide by a sufficiently strict definition of terms. If we define modern liberalism as the doctrine of the primacy of the universal rights of human beings, for early modern theorists of liberalism the “natural right” or “inalienable rights” of “men,” there can be no “liberal rule” or “liberal hegemony” or liberal “incorporation” of the illiberal. There will be only intrinsically non- or anti- or illiberal or always incompletely or qualifiedly liberal arrangements that may be more or less conducive to the liberation or fuller liberation of human beings, or to the full realization or flourishing of human beings as free and equal individuals.

In other words, strictly speaking there is not and cannot be a “liberal state” as such, in the sense of a political administrative state whose principles of organization will be strictly speaking liberal principles. We may imagine that the universal uncompromising and homogeneous adoption of liberal doctrines would produce a “liberal state of things,” and we can argue that different governmental orders will promote, foster, safeguard, protect, and allow for liberal aspirations more or less successfully than others, but whatever political-administrative state there is, to whatever extent it is at all, will be non-liberal on its own terms, and “anti-liberal” in the sense that its ordering principle will be contrary to, place limitations upon the liberties or otherwise free pursuit of happiness of equal individuals.

So, we can re-phrase your statement as follows: The problem for liberals has always been this: How much illiberalism must really be tolerated or which illiberal means must be employed for the sake of whatever best achievable realization of liberal ends?

In this form the question re-states and expands upon the classical political question on human flourishing or the best society or the good by giving modern natural right a privileged position, but it also allows for realism, or for cognizance of the reality of illiberal or pre-liberated or constrained, etc., social, political, and economic relations and environments: the liberalist version of The First Noble Truth.

We could, as some have, seek to dispense with every form of natural right, aka bourgeois values, but we mostly, even in these relatively radicalism-friendly parts, remain visibly and even dramatically reluctant to do so. Even among those ready to put all systems of social, political, and economic relations as they understand them in question, I think we today will find few speakers, even here, ready to surrender freedom of speech and conscience, or truly prepared to dispense entirely with the modern idea of the individual, of of individuality as a form of life worthy of respect and protection. So they or we are still children of Locke and nieces and nephews of our Uncle Sam to that extent, or in other words we are mostly still meaningfully liberals whether or not under socialistic or other advisement. In that connection, according to this same theory of the necessarily hybrid character of all real-existing liberal political orders this side of the apocalypse, all liberals will always remain liberals only under advisement.

Since we, as individuals and in all real existing societies, are always also at least potentially, more likely flagrantly, “illiberal” in at least some respects regarding free realizations of some conceived interests of others – in murdering their rivals, say, or in stealing from their neighbors, or in abusing or effectively enslaving their employees, or in disposing of waste upstream from us – a second perhaps equally valid, or at least impartial way of re-phrasing the big question arises: The problem for us all has always been this: How much liberalism must really be tolerated, or which liberal means must be employed, for the sake of whatever best achievable realization of our not necessarily or entirely or simply liberal ends? (To declare this question impermissible would be to declare oneself an ideological or committed liberal, but illiberally, as an illiberally liberal liberal.)

In other words, the problem for the doctrines following from the asserted primacy of modern natural right under whatever name or configuration, including all of our very post-modern or supposedly post-modern but still recognizably and in the final analysis typically modern configurations, will always remain a matter of reconciliation of contradictory commitments, specifically commitments to the good of and for individuals as individuals and the good of and for collective or social entities.

The early modern political philosophers, I will maintain, did rather exhaustively examine these questions and the related ones on the nature of power or the origins of authority that you also raise. They did provide answers. They knew we wouldn’t all like them or fully understand them. Indeed, to a very significant degree they not only acknowledged, but rather depended on the latter – that is on general incapacities of understanding. They hoped and trusted that enough of us would accept and implement them, under whatever modifications. If we are in fact still living with those answers, showing no sign of succesfully implementing alternative ones, then Hegel was right, as far as we can say, to claim that in his time humanity had reached the end of history in principle.

The problem for Schmitt – who in some ways ironically, in other ways perhaps quite accurately was later charged with the crime of Hegelianism by his Nazi comrades – as for us in relation to Schmitt’s thought, or for that matter in relation to Brooks’ thought, is the simultaneous emergence into consciousness and into politics of a fundamental, or foundational, element of that answer, which upon every re-statement seems to re-embroil us in paradoxes and unacceptable logical as well as moral contradictions, for instance as the assertion of the actual rationality of acceptance of the seemingly irrational or perhaps never fully rationalizable – of that which, if ever actually fully rationalizable or fully thinkable, will remain not fully thinkable or rationalizable on terms accepted or understood by the same multitude, and by its tribunes, upon whose acceptance its success, to their benefit, would depend.

For related reasons, whoever presumes to think through these matters openly, honestly, and impartially, is likely to be greeted (if recognized and heard at all), by some or perhaps a large measure of opposition and incomprehension, while being left to wonder which is worse.

geo: always worth keeping in mind. On the other hand, though JCH clearly can fend for himself if he feels a need to, I should note for whoever is still reading here that I don’t think he deserves to be lumped in with me. Obviously, I have taken note of some prior complaints on my deficiencies as a communicator – not a brand new experience for me. I mainly had in mind, however, the normal resistance to uncomfortable implications, and old problems of philosophy and public life that I consider to be relevant to this discussion.

ok, so I was right the first time.
The other Austin was, as GiT mentioned, a legal philosopher. Known for his work The Province of Jurisprudence Determined and for his definition of “law” as “the command of the sovereign” (which facts I prob. needed once to get through some exam or other and that’s really about all I remember off the top of my head).

(a comment in moderation)

“Labor, universally fraternal relations, love of life, the passion for free creation of beauty, all these values animate the life and activity of the libertarian communists. They have no need of prisons, executioners, spies and provocateurs, whom the statist socialists and communists employ in such huge numbers. As a matter of principle, the libertarian communists have no need for the hired brigands and killers of which the prime example and supreme chief is, in the last analysis, the State. Oppressed brother! Prepare yourself for the establishment of that society, through reflection and organized action. Except, just remember that your organization must be solid and consistent in its social activity. The sworn enemy of your emancipation is the State: it is best embodied by the union of these five stereotypes: the property-owner, the soldier, the judge, the priest and the one who serves them all, the intellectual. In most instances, the last-named of these takes it upon himself to demonstrate the “legitimate” entitlement of his four masters to punish the human race, regulate man’s life in its every individual and social aspect, and in so doing, distorting the meaning of the natural law in order to codify “historical and juridical” laws, the criminal outpourings of pen-pushers on a retainer. ”
— Nestor Makhno.

One take away from the analysis @ 166 is that if certain economic conditions (competitive global capitalism, bourgeois civil-libertarian democracy) align the self-interest of nations even partially with human freedom and welfare, we should promote the spread of those conditions (absent feasible and superior alternatives).

PS – And, of course, blogging.

JCH@170: What’s wrong with morality? All the Very Serious Persons at the Times, Post, Foreign Affairs, New Republic, and other fonts of conventional wisdom prattle about expediency.

Geo@169:

Agreed that blogging is unlikely to be useful, in so far as it is philosophical blogging. But that’s ok- as Aristotle said, the highest study is also the most useless.

@170″The West and Russia should have been cooperating on the “Finlandization” of a perennially unstable Ukraine, rather than insisting, in defiance or ignorance of history and geo-politics, that Russia had no legitimate security concerns, or that the EU had any real interest in the development of Ukraine).”

No doubt, although I am not too clear about what “Finlandization” means.

Again @170 “Then one can better direct one’s analytic and critical attention to the neo-liberal globalization of capitalism, which has done so much to undermine the “authority” and operating room of sovereign national governments, and their abilities to actually provide for their own citizens, or address national or international ‘problems’.”

I suppose this means the gobbling of Ukrainian land by multinational agribusiness and chemical weed killer manufacturers and seed patenters.

***
As far as what is wrong with morality, as JCH has pointed out, morality is also behind the criticisms of morality. It’s morality (settling disputes in a just manner) all the way down.

Matt@173: I’m shocked, shocked that you misunderstood me so. I meant to include blogging among the indisputably useful activities.

One of my touchstones in regard to these issues is the work of Bob Altemeyer on “right-wing” authoritarian followers — a common cluster of political attitudes, which forms a type of sorts in the spectrum of human ambivalence. Altemeyer makes his book, The Authoritarians, available online as a free pdf.

He describes some social experiments, in which people, who score fairly high on an index of authoritarian attitudes, are sorted into various groups by themselves and mixed with others, with different attitudes, and asked to perform some task or play a game together. The results can be kind of scary. In particular, combining a bunch of authoritarian followers with a sociopathic social dominator in the leadership role — the lethal combination — is a recipe for catastrophe.

One thing I’ve gotten from reflecting on the results reported by Altemeyer is that liberal hegemony is a vitally important project — the left shouldn’t expect to make everyone into a true-believer liberal or social democrat (ain’t gonna happen), but it is vitally important to do everything we can to keep at least a large part of the population, who are inclined to be authoritarian followers, away from sociopathic demagogues. A modicum of hypocrisy in service to liberal hegemony is a good thing, and the manufacture of consent a necessary task.

geo might want to revise: “The myth of the market, of its superior efficiency and compatibility with freedom, [WAS] part of our ruling ideology.” The liberal hegemony of the immediate post-WWII era is an empty shell. We still say the words, but we all know their falsity. As James K Galbraith wrote in The Predator State, the right gave up on all that in the late 1980s, and the left mouths the words out of fear and lack of engaged imagination.

I’m generally in agreement with john c. halasz @ 170 about what I would like American foreign policy to look like, though I’m not so sure that arguments from reason and evidence about practical expedience are likely to be effective. As Altemeyer points out, right-wing authoritarian followers are highly resistant to reason and evidence, as well as susceptible to demagogic leadership. Many American foreign policy institutions are heavily weighted in their personnel toward exactly the wrong kind of personalities, and practices — the culture of secrecy and censorship — compound the problem. It doesn’t help that Obama seems to think he gains credibility by giving Republicans and right-wing technocrats free rein in key positions. The culture inside the military-industrial complex seems increasingly paranoid and insular. digby at Hullabaloo had an interesting note the other day (3/18 11:00 AM): someone had caught the distinguished journalist, Tom Ricks, on twitter, playing McCarthy to Glenn Greenwald — cultivating his sources, no doubt. These institutions, by the psychopathology of their own cultures, make themselves invulnerable to criticism. No one is going to make a cliche out of calling the CIA, an institution of serial failure, though it certainly is, and consequently there’s little hope of reforming or dis-establishing it. Incompetence breeds competence.

Another thing I would note, in general, about American leadership post-Cold War. During the Cold War and immediate post-WWII period down to 1970, there were American leaders, who were genuinely interested in the country performing well. It was both a product of the competition with the Soviets, and an outcome of the experience of WWII facing societies gone mad. (The Soviets had had their own experience, which is why it remained, mostly, a cold war and a competition to perform.) If you look at the people JFK appointed into foreign policy roles, you see the concern for competence. Edwin O. Reischauer as Ambassador to Japan. Can anyone imagine Juan Cole at Yale, let alone as, say, Ambassador to Egypt?

Sometime, in the mid to late 1980s, America’s elite began to abandon their concern with competence or performance — not just in foreign policy, but across the economy. Merit was removed from the meritocracy, in favor of systematic disinvestment. This is a general phenomenon in American domestic life; it is why we live with so many potholes, and why Johnny can’t go to college without accepting a life of debt peonage. One of the weirder residuals of American exceptionalism is thinking the military, with their fancy toys, has been an exception to this process.

The same kind of rotted thinking that drives the fumbling and bumbling of American foreign policy drives the conversion from trickle-down economics to the belief that jobs and prosperity can be had from fracking.

[Not as far from Carl Schmitt as it seems.]

They want to think that their lying and cheating and stealing is somehow moral.

geo @ 171:

I’d thought we’d been through some of this above. “Morality” concerns personal conduct in private affairs. Political matters concern public issues and conflicts. One way to make out the distinction between morality and ethics is, as Ian Welsh puts it, morality concerns how you treat those you know, whereas ethics concerns how you treat those that you don’t know, though that’s a bit short-circuited. Another way to make out the distinction is that morality only deals with issues of “right and wrong”, whereas ethics concerns issues of the good or goods and the sustenance of social relations. Or ethics is about acts and material and symbolic exchanges with respect to relations with others qua other, i.e. completely separate human existences. (Which is one way that “utilitarianism” falls short: a perennial complaint is that it lacks any criterion for the differentiation or separation of persons). But the key there is that anything good or just or right involves an acknowledgement of the other, and a certain amount of estrangement from which such criteria would arise.

In addition, there must be a distinction between ethical norms, ( about rightness, goodness and justice) and norms about “truth” and cognition, (about facts, functions, and theoretical frameworks), which are separate normative “dimensions”. (Anything that involves the derivation and application of a concept is “normative”, insofar as concepts can be well or poorly derived and applied. One of the key problems with positivism is that, though it claims that scientific theory is the uniquely valid form of knowledge and the rest is just “poetry” or “emotion”, it lacks in principle the normative resources to “justify” such a claim).

So what is “wrong” with “morality, you ask? Well, for one thing, it takes a certain amount of “amorality” to pry apart ethical and cognitive claims to see how they might fit together, in variable patterns of inference and implication, rather than just assuming that they run together, undifferentiated, into some POV or another. And for another, moralistic claims can be just as egotistical as self-interested ones, (and the former can serve to disguise the latter), especially if held self-righteously, (which is a vice rather than a virtue). Moralism can be self-denying, insofar as it replaces the very other that is the “object” of its concern.

But to return to the basic topic here, as I said above, with respect to both Schmitt and Arendt, moralizing public-political issues renders them all the more irresolvable, “absolutizing” political conflict and rendering it potentially all the more “deadly”. Because politics involves potentially competing “moralities”, which aren’t resolvable by political means, and which distract from resolvable public-political issues. (Which distraction is often the point, “strategically”, in crafting “wedge” issues, for electoral manipulation, as with abortion or gay rights, both of which belong to the private domain). Moreover, a basic distinction between public-political issues and private domains is “necessary” to the preservation of both, if only because the private “household” domain raises future citizens, even if the public support or regulation of “household” affairs is “necessary” for maintaining any “just” public realm. (Needless to say, the invocation of the “private household” realm has nothing to do with the maintenance of “private” business corporations). So public “justice” can’t and mustn’t be reduced to private “morality”.

Absolute and inconceivable justice belongs to “God” alone, the voice in the whirlwind. Human worldly and political justice is always compromised and “corrupted”. That doesn’t mean that standards shouldn’t be applied and the heavens cursed, that emendation shouldn’t be achieved. But it does mean that political and economic conditions and constraints should be acknowledged. And that political judgments are of a mixed kind, not reducible to “morality” alone. They are “prudential” judgements, in an old-fashioned idiom, involving not just ethical considerations, (usually expressed as political “legitimation”, the required “operational” extent of which I questioned above, but also involving more cuttingly questions of the common and public “good”), but also matters of means/end relations, and estimates of prevailing power relations. In that sense, they are “expedient”. Which doesn’t involve short-sighted manipulation or opportunism, the usual excuses of “pragmatic” and “realistic” political operatives, including our fearless leaders, who seek to maintain the established status quo (ante), which gave rise to their “success”. But rather involves some “clarity” about what they or we are actually doing and what we’re willing to take responsibility for. But, hey, geo, I’m not the one advocating for “pragmatism” as the fount of democratic “morality”, and then expecting that reality will comply, least of all on account of an “anti-foundationalism”, which should prohibit any appeal to “first principles”.

If I’ve done any good here, it’s to have made out the distinction between “authoritarianism” and “authority”, especially to the left-of-liberal end of the political spectrum, to which I belong, which too often lazily conflates the two, forgetting that we all must assert our “authority”, rather than conceding it, even as finite human beings. And to have moved any readers off their priors, unsettling them, and causing them,- (though that’s not quite the right verb),- some mite of anxiety, (if never enough). If so, then I’ve done my job.

B.W. @ 179:

The “original” study was “The Authoritarian Personality” by Adorno et alia. They used a “controversial” methodology of in-depth sociological interviews and “content analysis”. And they used anti-Japanese racism in CA during the War, as a proxy for German anti-semitism.

JCH:

Of anxiety you have indeed
Meted me out many a meed.
Let’s now resort to pragmatism
And forego any future schism.

@184:

Because of the inevitably collective “nature” of human life, any collective will generate power and power-relations. Even somehow the most perfectly egalitarian society or political community would generate power-relation, just egalitarian ones. And the notion of absolute, unbounded “freedom” makes about as much sense as absolute unbounded anything. (Even the idea that “freedom” is a quantity to be maximalized, frequently expressed even by mere liberals, rather than a quality to be cultivated, is dubious). Further, not only are societies not sums or sets of pre-existent individuals, they are also not sums or sets of bilateral relations: there is always an implicit third that structures any bilateral relation. So the issue of “authority” is always at least a bit “excessive”, can’t be contained within the bounds of the cognitive, the voluntary, the egoistic. So you’re right that the idea that the sovereign, the constitution, the ruling class or political elite derive from the people, “the consent of the governed”, and rule “justly” in their name and for their benefit, is always at least a bit of a swindle. But it’s a swindle derived from a paradox.

The state or government as sovereign has traditionally been portrayed as a power over life and death, in war-making and criminal justice. Which is another way of saying that it is the risk-bearer of last resort, and with the advance of societies into full modernity, its functions have become extended and differentiated in that regard. The anarchist notion that the state is the sole source of oppression, injustice and evil, and if only the state were eliminated, such tendencies would disappear, is naive and illusory at best, and could refer to a primitive agrarian commune at most, not to highly complex and differentiated large-scale societies with advanced production economies, (unless you believe that the “spontaneous orders” of capitalist corporatocracy will always provide the proverbial lamb in the bush). The anarchist dream of a completely free and completely equal society that would be spontaneously and harmoniously ordered without any state or political structure is tantamount to the impossible fantasy of a purely descriptive and transparent language that would sheerly and simply reflect the pristine orders of the world. But language just doesn’t work that way.

So I’m afraid the rough beast will always be sloughing toward… and we have met the enemy and it is us.

Obviously I’m not suggesting that Geo should mount a Maxim gun to the back of his minivan and fight the Man. I only object to legitimizing and idealizing of what you call “at least a bit of a swindle”. It doesn’t matter what they write into their constitution and how it was ratified: there are always plenty of lawyers and other lackeys around to demagogue it any way they like, or to achieve the same result without violating the formal terms, or violate the terms and keep it secret. We see it every day. Where is the paradox, though? Just see it for what it is: a group of people exercising power for their own benefit, and no paradox.

Have just been glancing at the introduction in Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: US Foreign Policy since 1900, which is somewhat relevant to my earlier conversation w/ geo — though Halasz possibly might find it more congenial (Ninkovich quotes Heidegger on p.9). (Unfortunately my preferred browser is not working at the moment so I’m not able to copy and paste easily, otherwise I wd do so w that passage.)

The flirtation with irrationality in discussions of the constituting/constituted order begin, it seems to me, in the process of defining a legitimate authority. Endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights seems too fanciful, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun too cynical, one person, one vote too glib.

However passive their inclinations, once individuals become aware of the temporal origins of the customs and institutions that have shaped them, they can’t help but become political animals, and that’s when the fun starts. Brooks may want to focus on what we owe to our traditions, as seems customary for folks who imagine themselves in the catbird seat (whether they’re actually sitting there or not.) It’s equally customary for the rest of us to switch subject and object, and ask what our traditions owe to us.

Yes, we are in a certain sense ingrates, or would be if our Creator did indeed exist, and had in fact endowed us with the constrained circumstances we find ourselves in. Before we bend the knee to any authority less grand than the Deity hisself, though, we’ll be needing the answers to some very personal questions. Bruce Wilder, geo, and john c. halasz have a solid handle on the difficulties involved in providing reasonably just answers that can also keep the lights on and the wheels turning, but in my opinion that doesn’t get us any closer to explaining — let alone defanging — the eternal recurrence embedded in the questions themselves.

Some “we” will take that power, so a political struggle to constitute, rationalize and control power becomes as inevitable and as perennial, if not perpetual, as power, itself. As jch wrote above, “. . . the rough beast will always be sloughing toward… and we have met the enemy and it is us.”

Defending only a null is a powerful rhetorical pose, but it is an empty political program. At its best, anarchism is a promise to re-invent the organization of the state, on a diverse, distributed and cooperative basis, which can be a very good thing. At its worst, it is a profound and nihilistic pessimism that promotes what it purports to despise.

I know this, because I’ve been in a bar fight.

190

With Arendt, I would say power is a property of social organization, just as strength is a property of the individual.

This is the god’s honest truth, except completely trivial and of no consequence.

The practical freedom of the individual isn’t the absence of the power, but an individual’s claim on power, as a member of a social organization, and claim on, share in, and recognition of a public good.

“Freedom” is not something you can define away, it’s something you feel.It’s a state of mind. And “public good” is a subjective value, individual judgement. “Let’s kill all the lawyers”, for example, has been a popular “public good” programme at least from the time of Shakespeare, so would you, personally, be enjoying your “freedom” if it was to be implemented by your social organization, despite all your protests?

It sounds like perhaps you find your “freedom” in cooperation with like-minded individuals, which makes a lot of sense. And then what you’re missing is a community of Bruce Wilder-like individuals. But if such a community was to materialize somehow, would you really need any cops, judges, lawyers, and politicians there? I don’t think so. Apart from expelling an occasional imposter, you should be able to get along with other Bruce Wilders just fine.

I had hoped to get a serious answer, even if my question was too earnest and wide-eyed to merit one. Well, all right, a bar fight. That is, indeed, a vision of a human social order. May I suggest that its prospects are rather limited and are likely to be of short duration?

A bar fight with Hell’s Angels? This is really the best you guys can do?

All right, let’s assume human beings are so bad that their inevitable social order is a bar fight with Hell’s Angels. We would not be here now if this were so, but let’s assume it anyway. Then, given the constant advance in weapons, demolition, and other technologies, it is inevitable, as the means of destruction improve and the power struggles go on, that humans will eventually destroy themselves, or at least set themselves back to the point where tiny, dumb remnants survive as hunter-gatherers in remote, isolated places. While the transition to one of these states of affairs may be very exciting, the aftermath seems pretty boring and not worth thinking about much.

This isn’t speculative, it’s obviously inevitable. This metaphorical bar fight includes a guy in the back room supplying the participants with hand grenades and machine guns, and they’re not really in a bar but a prison yard. No one gets out.

‘Formerly, man could not do as he desired. Now, he can do as he desires; and he must change his desires, or perish.’

This is interesting, because the Hells Angels is exactly the kind of community of like-minded people you should be inspired to join or organize yourself. Except that in your bar you won’t fight (because it sounds like you don’t enjoy it), but instead play Thelonious Monk records and discuss Sartre or something. The Hells Angels don’t need any authority at their bar, and neither will you at yours. If one of the Hells Angels shows up at the door, tell him that this is not his kind of establishment, the one he wants is two blocks over. The important part is that neither you rule over Hells Angels, nor they rule over you, nor someone else rules over them and you both.

anarcissie @ 194:
”
‘…reasonably just answers that can also keep the lights on and the wheels turning…’

One might ask whether we really need the state to do this. That is, do we — the real we — need a permanent, ubiquitous institution with the power of life and death over its subjects, a power which must be exercised at least occasionally to make itself believable.”

It’s hard for me to understand the point of the question. Must the lights be kept on, and the wheels turning? Of course they must. If so, someone must do it. In the absence of the state, who will? Assuming someone will (why would they?), again, in the absence of the state, what prevents that someone from becoming ‘a permanent, ubiquitous institution with the power of life and death over its subjects, a power which must be exercised at least occasionally to make itself believable?’

Just to clarify, I don’t imagine the emergence of the state as a pretty fairy tale. The actual history of the state in, say, England, since the Dark Ages, is a miserable, bloody tale of unconscionable, sociopathic greed and abuse. The struggle to turn the state into a practical utility, dispensing old age pensions and doing public health inspections, has been a long one, with many reverses, and we seem to be losing battles once again, with elites, Thelma and Louise like, driving civilization toward the cliff.

“Most people I know despise politics and want no part of it. ”

It is their good fortune to live in ordered states which permit them to ignore the source of that order while benefiting immensely from it. Plus, they don’t really ignore politics, they engage in it, by, for example, posting arguments against government on the internets.

Most people I know

Always a winning argument.

Ze Kraggash: I don’t need you explaining why politics is better than a desert island, I need you to explain why it’s better than voluntary cooperation.

Well, there’s that matter of conflict and opposed interests, I mentioned. You don’t get mutual interest in voluntary cooperation in a pure form, abstracted away from conflict and opposed interests. It’s a package deal. Cooperation entails conflict. So, the simple answer is that pure “voluntary cooperation” is not on offer. Politics is on offer.

Even in an “horizontal” market exchange of good for good, we’d have conflicting interests in the terms and warranties, between the parties to even the simplest bilateral trade. And, in a highly organized society with a deep division of labor, there’s going to be a lot of “vertical” relationships in the organization of production and distribution, aka hierarchical regulation, in which people submit to coordination by rule-governed direction or supervision.

Sure, it’s unpleasant. I don’t think most people like being bossed around. I don’t. Most people don’t like conflict, either. Haggling, hassling, fighting — also unpleasant.

Good luck arranging social cooperation without those features of conflict in exchange. Ain’t goin’ hap’n. To get any of the benefits of social cooperation, you have to take politics. The quality of the politics will determine just how much you will benefit from social cooperation. Doing away with politics — not an option.

Ze Kraggash: “Complex and deep division of labor” is a good point, but perhaps it’s just a phase, perhaps increasingly complex technology is going to reduce the depth of division of labor?

OK, that’s just more muddle than I can handle.

I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but might one ask that people not keep conflating “state” (in the sense of a modern state), “political authority” (sovereign or otherwise), and “politics”? Those things aren’t even extensionally equivalent, let alone conceptually identical.

Examples of why it might help:

1. Dissatisfaction with politics need not in any way imply opposition to the state. It might, e.g., be an expression of a (possibly misguided) desire for a more efficient state formation.

2. Politics, e.g. of compromise and coexistence, can exist without anything like the machinery of the modern state. Indeed, they have, so we know that they can. Of course, given certain social conditions, this might well be impossible, but given some other conditions, it could of course be possible. That one could rule out such a social formation a priori strikes me as implausible.

“Ze Kraggash” sounds like an Eastern European name (Byelorussian?), though, of course, it could be held by someone whose family has immigrated to the West. But it’s really hard to make out what he intends to say here, given the number of conceptual sollecisms and contradictory things he seems to be saying. “Freedom” is the same as “power” and both are merely “subjective feelings”? Likewise any question of the “public good” is merely “subjective”. Politicians will always just use their “authority” to benefit themselves, to steal, lie and cheat. (This last sounds very much in the veins of “Virginia School” public choice theory, a la Buchanan and Tullock). People just want to be “free” of politics, (which ignores that such a sentiment is just what power-holders and their political operatives seek to instill, because a de-politicized and indifferent mass public is all the easier to rule over, cow and manipulate, as Gen. Pinochet was not the first, nor last to “discover”). “So would you, personally, be enjoying your “freedom” if it was to be implemented by your social organization, despite all your protests?” Aye, there’s the rub, the fundamental absurdity of it all. But absurdity is not an objection to, nor explanation of “existence”.

His image of a world full of Bruce Wilders is pretty funny in a Gogolian sort of way, everyone chasing after their rivalrous noses, (while trading in dead souls). But I prefer the short prose fragment from Kafka, in his inimitable tone, at once child-like and sober, solemn and lucid, about the longing to journey into the mountains, because there you can meet all the nobodies and there you can feel free.

At any rate, anyone who has read B.W.’s rants over the years, knows that he is the Benjamin Button, -(or is it the Merlin?),- of liberal political theory: the further he goes back in time, the more Whiggish he gets.

The accumulation of military means of annihilation, rampant capitalist dysfunction, hierarchical domination, class and caste privilege, the extraction and exploitation of “resources”, who knew? (Aside from the fact that the possibility of nuclear annihilation, though still with us, has decreased in likelihood, even as the possibility of environmental catastrophe is ever rising, so the dual aspect of state power might still be worth considering). But hollow, somewhat snobbish attitudinizing just won’t do. (In the old jargon, the distinction is between “abstract” and “determinate” negation). And just why is it that the self-proclaimed anarchists fail to grasp the “an-archic”, i.e. without ground or foundation, and therefore “abysmal” nature of basic political questions?

One of the basic questions I’ve been raising here is, just how much “legitimation” of “authority” is required for any state to still “hold power”, operatively function? (Contrary to j.s., I don’t think I’ve made any of the conflations he identifies). Or IOW what happens when the “legitimation” of a state collapses? We’ve seen that happen in any number of circumstances, historically and geo-politically speaking. The case of the Soviet Union and its “satellite” regimes, (communist party-states, in which not even the “nomeklatura” and its apparachniks believed in its reigning ideology or Byzantine “political theology”), is a recent case in point, though none of them, (with the singular exception of Tito’s Yugoslavia, which was a much “freer” and developmentally accomplished regime), are much to be mourned. But then what happens in the resulting “void”? TINA? Perhaps bog-standard (neo-)liberals are as clueless as monarchist legitimists once were.

geo @ 152:

You haul 16 tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.

jch,

My comment was very much not directed at you. I would never think to suggest that you would make such an error.

john c. halasz @ 219

On Whig historiography and the apposition of temporal and spatial metaphors for progress:

How long did it take to transform the father and master of Padre Padrone into the NSA’s panopticon? How far really were — are — the huddled masses from the golden door?

In my view we should probably talk less about progress and more about scale and complexity, not to mention the evolution of a collective consciousness which adds layers to our meta-analysis seemingly ad infinitum, with precious little concern, except in passing, for the actual good it does us — or doesn’t do us, as the case may be.

A set of generic points. I’m using ‘government’ to refer to an overt, legitimated institution whose powers including the origination of coercive force. By ‘state’ I mean all those institutions, relations, processes, and so on, which the government creates, defends, and regulates, for example corporations — and even families, to the extent that these are instituted by the government.

There seem to be two arguments here for government and the state. One is that it is necessary or at least preferable to have a permanent institution to suppress certain behavioral pathologies, for example, the polity generated by a group of truculent Hell’s Angels in a bar fight. This need, if it exists, could be satisfied by the sort of minimal state envisioned by Nozick (for instance). In this arrangement, when the government tortures, imprisons, or kills someone, it is only as a supposed last resort, and this is all it ever does. In other words, we have a fantasy which I am unable to take very seriously, although as we know some people are fond of it. Hence the bar-fight proof doesn’t do much for me. In any case, any form of government seems to attract and empower the very sort of people it is supposed to suppress, and employing the pathological to suppress pathology doesn’t seem to have worked out very well, as witness the history of the United States in the last half of the 20th century, for one of myriad examples.

The other is that the state is the way to get big, important things done. My dissatisfaction with this proposition is twofold: first, I don’t see any logical upper limit to the possibilities of self-organization. Second, as mentioned before, the government remains credible only as long as it at least occasionally exerts its powers in a sovereign, arbitrary manner, that is, people have to be knocked off now and then to show that it can be done. So these big projects, if they can truly be carried on only by the state, are marked with blood. That raises a moral issue: how many people are we going to kill in order to have really big airplanes, fly to the moon, and so on? We might even be able to compute the necessary ratio of executions to a given size of airplane.

One of the important aspects of the modern state is its totality.

john c. halasz: One of the basic questions I’ve been raising here is, just how much “legitimation” of “authority” is required for any state to still “hold power”, operatively function? . . . Or IOW what happens when the “legitimation” of a state collapses? . . . what happens in the resulting “void”? TINA? Perhaps bog-standard (neo-)liberals are as clueless as monarchist legitimists once were.

I think liberals have always had a tendency to be a bit clueless about legitimacy, thinking it a bit of magic, an example of the power of symbolism and ritual. In this, they are not different from the monarchists, I guess. For the liberals, elections and numerical majorities and idealistic constitutions confer legitimacy; for the monarchists, genealogy and religious sacrament.

In practice, there’s a reflexive relationship between operative functioning, as you put it, and legitimacy. Lose a war, fail to collect taxes, debase the currency — in general, fail to make decisions that resolve conflicts and solve problems, allowing the conflicts to become chronic and the problems, acute — and the legitimacy of a ruling class or system erodes.

Functioning is not the same thing as quality of performance, though I’m not sure how to make the distinction. Politics is, per se, about resolving conflict — conflicts that are inherent in social cooperation — not about making the trains run on time, though that might be a bonus. Having the capacity to repress conflicts, or otherwise release the pressure, when conflicting claims add up to more than the total surplus, is critical.

The surplus is produced by social cooperation, and the total surplus might be larger under “fair” terms, conceived of, say, as the bargain made in free, competitive markets. This was the classic liberal claim. It’s why Adam Smith thought slavery “uneconomic”. The surplus might also be larger, if less of it is frittered away in disputes — this is, I presume, the point behind proposals to kill all the lawyers. And, it is quite possible for the ruling class to seek extraction, at a cost to others, disregarding entirely the theoretical possibility of a larger total surplus, because such a total could only be realized by reducing the relative or absolute share of a parasitic elite.

The state’s functional capacity for regulative violence and repression, often plays a dramatically prominent role, when it all unravels; it often gets cast as the Fat Lady singing the end of the Opera. For the Soviet Union, the security apparatus was the linchpin. Louis XVI did not have the troops. Papen took the Prussian police away from the Social Democrats (and Carl Schmitt confirmed it).

But, the reflexivity of the relationship between legitimacy and operative functioning remains key: the state must function, dynamically resolving conflicts, to remain legitimate, meaning that it must find ways to resolve conflicts that add up to more than the total surplus.

Repression to reduce or isolate claims can work. My precious Whigs legitimated the Glorious Revolution — which wasn’t a revolution so much as an invasion and conquest by a foreign monarch aided by a cabal of highly-placed traitors — by systematically marginalizing in politics large swathes of the population by religious tests and class distinctions, even while mouthing pieties concerning universal rights and securing property rights. (My peeps! Gotta love their creativity!)

One way to see the Great Depression and New Deal is as a prolonged stalemate in the struggle over the distribution of income, in which the Second World War created a context for resolution. (The inability of macroeconomics to acknowledge conflicting interests might be its greatest intellectual handicap, and the source of its usefulness to the plutocracy as ideology. Just a passing thought.)

In the most advanced countries, the monetary and financial system forms an institutional core for distributing and regulating the value of claims to surplus, and, whether a safety valve exists or is used, depends on how those systems are structured and administered. Historically, the differing fates of the Bourbons and the House of Hanover, turned on the differing outcomes of the Mississippi Bubble and the South Sea Bubble. Britain ended up with a central bank, and its burgeoning national debt became ballast for the ship of state; France imported its bankers, and its debt caused the ship of state to capsize. More recently, the Euro has been used to put enormous pressure on the social welfare state. We’ll see how that works out for the legitimacy of the European Union.

TINA? I think that’s more an inevitable tactic, in the herding of cats, than anything else. There are other tactics for coordinating consensus that inevitably resurrect the past. How long did the French go on reviving corvée after 1789? If we can still trace the boundaries of the Roman Empire across the Balkans, what does that tell us?

The most interesting case for eroding legitimacy may be that of neoliberalism in the U.S. at the present moment. American politics lacks any vocabulary but that of market liberalism, but no one believes it. The rich just take more and more and more, every day. To the point where billionaires are having paranoid fantasies about being rounded up for internment. And, the masses wonder what is eroding their precious freedom to shop.

I expect js. thinks I’ve bulldozed all his distinctions. Oh, well.

@225

” This need, if it exists, could be satisfied by the sort of minimal state envisioned by Nozick (for instance). In this arrangement, when the government tortures, imprisons, or kills someone, it is only as a supposed last resort, and this is all it ever does. In other words, we have a fantasy which I am unable to take very seriously, although as we know some people are fond of it. ”

How is one to read this? You doubt there’s any need for an agency to suppress mayhem; and, if there actually is such a need, it’s a fantasy to think the state can do it. Is that about right?

One of the important aspects of the modern state is its totality.

Starting from a point of dealing with its totality is somewhat ambitious.

“I don’t see any logical upper limit to the possibilities of self-organization.”

Do logical limits have anything to do with it? I thought the practical limits were enough.

I expect js. thinks I’ve bulldozed all his distinctions. Oh, well.

Not in that comment! At least what I understood of it. (Sorry, BW, sometimes you have amazing shit to say—better than anything I’ll ever say in a comment thread, and sometimes I can’t make heads or tails of what you’re talking about.)

Sorry j.s., you seem to have not understood a thing that’s going on here. It doesn’t boil down to the simple logical triplet of necessity, possibility, contingency. It’s not about “logic” at all. (Politics is fundamentally a *practical*, not a theoretical matter!) It’s about the strange “alchemy” of the political that goes on not just within but in-between people’s heads (and bodies) between “freedom”, “authority”, “legitimation”, “violence” and “power”. (That there can be stateless societies is not an issue, because such stateless societies have existed. Though not without any sort of “politics”: nowadays even chimpanzees have “politics”. Nor is it reducible to a merely functionalist matter, though B.W. often tends that way). The “argument” here has been about some fundamental questions and problems concerning the necessarily political existence of human being, that don’t have any simple, nor invariant answers, that always lurk in the background of such arrangements and always can re-emerge into the foreground, in cases of exacerbated conflict or crisis. It’s not about any simple “dialectic” of argument. Rather, in many of the comments here, it has actually been about the incomprehension and various evasions of those sorts of questions.

And Anarcissie, least of all, hasn’t made much of an argument. (In many ways his apparent position is just sheerly anti-political in Arendt’s sense). To the notion that all political orders are potentially violent, he asserts that actual violence, quite adventitiously, must be periodically demonstrated to “prove” the existence of a political order. That’s rather like the sophism, that it is law that causes crime, because crimes must be defined by law, and without laws there would be no crimes. And thus all the obvious ills and injustices of this world, including complexity and differentiation itself, are to be wished away by fiat, because government. As I said, just rather hollow and snobbish attitudinizing.

Schmitt obviously viewed politics as an especially high “vocation”, (though not necessarily the only such), but one needn’t share his preferences on that, as on much else. (I myself don’t pay much attention to daily “topical” political chatter, as pointless and manipulated propaganda, and tend to look on the current course of political affairs with some combination of disgust and horror). But if you ignore politics, that doesn’t mean that politics will ignore you.

SO then you invoke the progress “we” have made in recognizing and protecting, (how?), the rights of minorities (or even majorities). But “rights” are political-legal institutions. Those who “possess” rights have already been invested by a system pf power. (There is a very real sense, in which they give you your rights, in order to take away your freedom: if you’ve ever been arrested, you know how that feels). Rights are only “inalienable”, (though never “natural”), in the sense that their violation doesn’t vitiate their (counterfactual) status as norms. (And inalienability was precisely said to be a distinguishing feature of “sovereignty”). My own view of the value of rights is not that they are “absolute”, (as if descending from the heavens), but that they enable a “higher”, more productive resolution, or, at least, pursuit of political conflict. But politics is pre-eminently the realm of alienation, of passing over into otherness, (which is why it is prey to resentment, anger, anxiety, hatred, and the like, and their manipulation). But insisting on “rights” as the sole “substance” of politics is curiously de-politicizing, (especially in international affairs). And the ever greater enumeration of rights does not somehow guarantee “progress”. To the contrary, not only might they serve to maintain entitlements, in the classic liberal fashion of perpetuating (“substantive”) inequality in the very name of (formal) equality, but they might just promote the “juridification” of political conflict, leading to the reversal of “substantive” progress. (I myself am Frankfurt Schoolish by origin, and everything in my political experience since I left school, at the beginning of the Reagan era, seems to confirm their post-War prognosis that the persistence of capitalism would mean ever-continuing forms of political regression). At any rate, rights are neither a substitute for, nor an explanation of the generation of social recognitions upon which the solidarities underpinning any political order depend.

And no one has bothered to attempt to address a question I raised above. How can there be an effective public sphere without a sovereign state, which it would rise up against and purport to regulate, (even as the state balances out conflicting “parties”). Arendt herself notably evaded that problem. But then the public sphere is one of those things that is always already said to be in decline, the moment the issue is broached and arises.

Schmitt is not exactly anyone’s cup of tea. But it’s the questions and problems he raises that persist, long after his demise. And no matter how nasty the man, that doesn’t permit a lack of hermeneutic probity is grappling with his work. At any rate, I just picked up from Macleod a reference to a contemporary thinker I didn’t know of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_W._Kahn

But then, why is this thread still open? I thought they were all closed by automatic timer.

This faith in violence as the inevitable dominating principle of human culture seems quasi-religious to me. I concede it’s possible that that’s just the way people are, but I don’t see it as obvious or necessary. Certainly it is peripheral to the conduct of most people’s lives, and to the life of the human community as a whole, regardless of its repute.

@ 241

“Faith” in violence? This seems like an abuse of language to me.

Personally, I have (most of the time) faith in human nature. Specifically, faith in the ability of people to learn & grow for the better. That doesn’t mean human nature isn’t also extremely dismal as well. But speculating about worlds far removed from our own is mostly escapism. A refusal to look at what is, here and now.

“Consider the fate of those who flocked to Catalunya in 1936. First they denounced the state, then they joined it, then they fought for it, and then lost? Hardly an argument for the efficacy of anarchism against hostile regimes.”

Anarchism has been tired only a few times, even if we count more obscure episodes, like Mazdakist communism in 5th c. Persia. Every time (I believe) it failed destroyed by an outside force.

The idea of politics as the conduit for “public good” (as it’s perceived by the poster) has been tried a million times, failing every time from its own contradictions.

That a society is “ordered” is not necessary a great sales pitch for most members of that society, as there is a good chance it’s ordered precisely for the purpose of exploiting and oppressing them. Sure, most of them might prefer the devil they know, but that is not much of an argument still.

(once more into the breach…)

@241, Mattski, and Anarcissie and others: Following from the mention of Kahn’s work and specifically his focus on “sacrifice,” the link between faith and violence is more profound than a simple one-way transaction. I want to say more “complex,” but in another way the problem is that it’s so simple and immediate we have a hard time talking about it directly, even while we never actually stop talking about it. This connection also goes to the larger speculative discussion about the state-as-we-know-it and theoretical alternatives, and points to a particular liberal blind spot characteristic at least as much of those on the fringes of modern liberal discourse – anarchists, libertarians, communists, and their early modern precursors – as of those at the moderate and compromising center. This blind spot or possible blind spot is centrally evoked in the Schmittian challenge to liberalism, and understanding it might help to explain to claim that the political is uniquely defined by the potential for lethal violence.

Setting aside Anarcissie’s presumption of a necessity for “arbitrary” exercises of power, the question of “blood sacrifice” attaches to the notion of a “higher” or “broader” (we might also say “more basic,” or “eternal,” etc.) meaning of life and death, the death or life that points beyond itself. The ability to demand and to perform an authentic sacrifice rests on the notion of a reason for being beyond “merely being” (also beyond “mere being”) or of a meaning of “life, liberty, pursuit of happiness/property” necessarily resting beyond the horizon of any individual’s own life, liberty, pursuit of happiness/property.

The political-theological not only meets but tends to overpower and overwhelm the political-philosophical, or the rational-liberal, on this ground, since the “side” whose believers will die and (usually) kill for their beliefs possesses distinct advantages in any actual political struggle over the side that cannot produce a reason for doing so, or, put differently, that depends on mere reason as understood within the limitations of liberal thought for doing so.

The same mechanism, the ability to act on “faith” and in mutual confidence, on a firm basis of shared and effectively reflexive expectations, and so on, supplies the historical solution of the coordination problem, in diverse settings – thus the common utilitarian justifications for religion (it gets the job done). Fortunately or not, what makes cooperation possible for peaceful or anyway practical purposes, at sacrifice of labor and will, makes cooperation possible for aggressive purposes or war, up to and including “supreme sacrifice” and the demonstration of “no greater love.” How can we presume that justification of the latter sacrifice is simply false or inauthentic without implying that the former must also be inauthentic? One implies the other, and without them we are left with nihilism, since if nothing means anything and everything means nothing, then, if we’re consistent, we should be utterly indifferent to the fate of the world, and finally indifferent even to our own meaningless failures to remain consistently indifferent: The Humean proposition that reason alone cannot motivate action extends to any action of moral judgment and the political resistance it might engender, or, as he famously put it, “‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” (My own view is that everyone here still arguing on these matters, especially those ever schooled in common social-scientific reductions of the “fact-value distinction,” should read or re-read Hume on the origin of government from the Treatise of Human Nature.)

Since there are, however, actually few to no true nihilists, we’re left with the prior state of play. Whether thought “truly” meaningful or not, those notions of the meaningful are all we have, and apparently will determine our actions whether or not in some perfectly consistent sense they “ought to.” (As Hume concedes.) We cannot expect those ill-equipped on either score – to accept the justifiability of any sacrifice at all for the common purpose that may not be the individual’s first preferred purpose or satisfactorily “reasonable” purpose, and to accept the justifiability of supreme sacrifice – to prevail in a contest against those who do not experience this difficulty. Furthermore, as long as resources are not available to all in superfluous abundance, there will be contests, and whatever differences there are will define what matters at all, will constitute the basis for a “life and death” struggle.

This is not an argument for a fascistic cult over “free people,” but a recognition that a free people whose freedom embraces “higher” etc. bonds as real bonds, as bonds no less real than any other human constructs, including specifically the construct of the primacy for right of the category of the individual (metaphysical individualism underlying modern liberalism including all or most modern anarchism), will discover advantages: not marginal advantages, but every advantage in the world, since these are also, as noted, the criteria for the organization of great projects, the trans-generational continuity of law, the general expectation that promises will be kept and pacts observed, the promise of “eternal life,” and so on.

The free or so-called free people may excel in some forms of working and fighting more than others, it may develop superior skill at “making the other bastard die for his country,” it may in fact seek and achieve obscene “kill ratios” on its own behalf: The sacrifice of the enemy to the national god, even the goddess of democracy, mostly suffices, even if it’s never completed without at least the willingness to offer one’s own head. Even, for example, many of the most ardent critics of the American drone assassination program, who focus on loss of innocent life, sooner or later will also be found complaining about the “cowardice” of remote control killing, though they may be deluded if they think that higher levels of risk to the combatants necessarily implies less combat.

It would seem logical and rational to think so, that mortal danger would be an effective barrier, rather than an ineluctably powerful force of attraction, but it needs to be the latter only for a few, if need be only for one “last man,” to re-inaugurate the entire cycle, never mind that the barrier, to remain a barrier, requires someone willing and able to embrace the moral and physical danger from its other side.

248.2: Yes :)

“the” virtual world; “the” internet; “an alternative” public sphere

It is a very big step to relinquish grand narratives and totalities. I lose the fans of coherence and consistency.

Here’s List from Jodi Dean

Another List From Deterritorial Investigations

I have looked at Paul Kahn, but from his titles and descriptions, he looks too close to the “Theological Turn” of Agamben, Zizek, Laruelle and the folks around Adam Kotsko.
I won’t go there. Yet.

Sorry j.s., you seem to have not understood a thing that’s going on here. It doesn’t boil down to the simple logical triplet of necessity, possibility, contingency. It’s not about “logic” at all.

I wasn’t thinking that the only kind of necessity (or possibility) is logical necessity. Anyway, I’m sympathetic to a lot of what you say, though I don’t see how it affects what I was saying. (E.g., I didn’t talk about rights at all—you’re of course correct that if we’re in the a realm characterized by rights, then we’re in a specifically political realm. But again, this doesn’t affect my claim.)

“This means we are fed, & clothed, & housed,”

Not all of us. I see people sleeping in doorways every day.
Sorry, I’m on a road, I’ll try to reply later.

Liberalism, in the wider sense, requires a suspension of attempts to resolve certain paradoxes, such as the contradiction between freedom (especially for the ruling class) and coercion (especially for the lower orders)

First, I apologize for insufficient due diligence. I wasn’t taking your remarks in the proper, full context of this thread. But I still want to add my 2 cents:

There is too much conceptualizing going on here. (JCH & CKM, in my view, are classic examples of dead-end pedantry. “Conjuring with words,” in geo’s apt phrase.) I am skeptical that your use of the term “liberalism” above carries much meaning. ISTM, what is really happening here is that you are refusing to grapple directly with the “paradox” as you put it between freedom and coercion which is a necessary condition of any social group. It has nothing to do with some abstract ideology (“ism”) but rather everything to do with what happens when people interact with each other. An essential part of the life of a community is the adjudication of disputes. An essential part of the adjudication of disputes is the submission of individual desires to the desires of the community as expressed by the ‘authority’ of the community whether it is ‘the Chief’ or ‘the State.’

Blaming fundamental problems of civilization on “liberalism” is just nonsense.

Yes. “The desires of the community” often don’t exist. If 51% are “pro-life” and 49% “pro-choice”, then you have 2 communities, not one. The solution is to de-legitimize the “wrong” “desires” in moralistic terms (as bigotry or treachery, for example), which really is a soft form of totalitarianism.

Mattski @255:

“Faictz ce que vouldras.” Translation: Suit yourself, YMMV. But what you call “conjuring with words” might be involved in, ya know, actually thinking, questioning, and understanding rather than just taking one’s assumptions unreflectively for granted. And “dead-end pedantry” might reflect actual grappling with contradictory and even paradoxical matters, rather than settling for the hobgoblin of little minds.

But, hey, I’m not the one who thinks that “neo-liberalism” is just a term for “whatever people don’t like”, rather than a determinate term with an exact origin, (of which you seem quite ignorant). And who makes utterly unreflective appeals to “civilization” and “human nature”. IOW I’m not a shallow, conformist, self-complacent opinionator who can’t think about or see anything beyond a highly restrictive doxa.

@256:

Hunter-gatherer groups, insofar as they can be known, (post-contact and marginalized), have very high murder rates. And many tribal formations, aside from witchcraft, magic and the like, operate on pre-conventional systems of cycles of honor and blood revenge. As for contradictions and conflicts, they don’t disappear because repressed: implicit/explicit, in-itself/for-itself.

@257:

Desire is desire of the other.

@258:

“Capitalism” is a double-edged sword. You, at least, should “know” better, Bob. Ya know, the shifting interactions between “the forces and relations of production”. Nor is liberalism just reflective of capitalism; there can be highly illiberal forms of the latter. That liberalism might be chronically unable to rationalize and cope with the famous underlying contradictions, and thereby unable to fully take responsibility for assuming “power”, (especially in its social democratic form), is more to the point. But I don’t think you’d want to return to “base/superstructure” reductionism.

@ 259

Just as it is difficult to appreciate good baseball if you have not seen bad baseball, so it is difficult to appreciate kindness & warmth if you have not seen first hand the irascible & argumentative.

Anarcissie,

OK. But the principle of personal freedom is an abstract idea. If it it is treated as an ‘idol’ rather than a useful approximation of an unattainable ideal then it produces confusion more than insight.

Personal freedom sounds great. Clearly, personal freedom is bounded and impinged upon by the existence of other people. We imperfect humans are struggling to find better forms of governance. It isn’t easy, and the greedy and ruthless will generally elbow their way to positions of influence which is a constant hindrance. I don’t see any choice but to push onward, tinkering with the levers of politics, law and culture as best we can.

What I don’t get is why anarchism doesn’t put an immense burden on my freedom. I can send my kid to school and know X standards are being met. It’s quite nice. Is my anarchist alternative to search among isolated conglomerations of individuals that precisely meet my needs? (Not that my present system is The Best of All Possible worlds: certainly other systems could provide me with an elementary school I don’t have to bother too much about.)

The larger aspect of the conversation is how you represent the arguments in this thread to anyone but the people likely to participate in it. Who will sit still to be convinced?

Anarcissie: I think the uneasy paradox wherein one accepts both ideally unrestrained freedom and institutionalized coercive force — and the ongoing conflict between them — really is a peculiar characteristic of liberalism, not ‘a fundamental problem of civilization’. . . . By ‘contradiction’ I meant the contradiction between the principle of personal freedom and the principle of coercive state power, not conflicts between individuals.

It really is just playing with words, if the terms have no political-economic referents. A non-liberal state would frame things in differently flowering rhetoric, to be sure, but every society must decide delegation of decision-making and distribution of goods, and those with an institutional state, must arrive at some rules for mediating some of those choices through their state institutions. That’s all that your so-called contradiction labels — a sideways glance at some aspects of liberal rules of delegation and distribution — and every society must have some such rules, which it will worry over. Nothing peculiar to the liberal state in that.

Liberalism contemplates a rationally constrained state power, and rationalized regulation of conflict between the state and individuals on a theory of individual rights and limited government, as well as both collective or shared enterprise and state-regulation of the economic relationships and interactions among individuals (marriage, business contracts; defining assault, property, etc.) on a theory of nominal political equality. In liberal theory, the state is an instrumentality for society, governed by institutions, ultimately answerable to society’s body politic, and normative standards for policy must be expressed in general rules and contemplate a general welfare.

If there’s a contradiction in liberalism, it is in the insistence that the good of the state — the general welfare — must be reducible to the good of sundry and all individual humans, without a fully articulated theory of how the good of individuals “adds up” to a general welfare for the society, whose servant the state is. The reverse of this contradiction is the problem posed by Schmitt: where is the good of a state, which is a mere instrumentality of a collectivity that doesn’t exist as a cohesive social entity apart from the state, its instrument. What creates a sense of public purpose to govern the state? What generates a sense of public duty owed to the state, among individuals?

But, there’s no “contradiction” between the liberal conception of the freedom of the individual and the liberal conception of the state as an instrument facilitating economic cooperation, unless you think systems of economic cooperation by means of intensive specialization and trade can emerge without some coercive restraints. For the liberal, the freedom of the individual rests on the state’s monopoly of coercive power, rationally applied to constrain the strategic options of other individuals and groups. Not a contradiction, but a foundation, a means to transform a Hobbesian state of nature into a highly organized, productive and cooperative society. And, by liberal lights, a fundamental problem of civilization.

C.K. MacLeod @247
I’m bothered by much of this comment (and also, as usual, by some of jch’s, but I’m not going to go there, because it’s late here).

from your 247:
This is not an argument for a fascistic cult over “free people”
I’m relieved to hear it, because some of what preceded this statement certainly sounded that way to me. For instance, this passage:

The political-theological not only meets but tends to overpower and overwhelm the political-philosophical, or the rational-liberal, on this ground, since the “side” whose believers will die and (usually) kill for their beliefs possesses distinct advantages in any actual political struggle over the side that cannot produce a reason for doing so, or, put differently, that depends on mere reason as understood within the limitations of liberal thought for doing so.

A few years ago I happened to read Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism, and it strikes me that this paragraph I’ve just quoted would be quite at home in a tract of Mussolini’s, or perhaps D’Annunzio’s, just to name two fairly likely possibilities out of a number of them.

As for this:

Even, for example, many of the most ardent critics of the American drone assassination program, who focus on loss of innocent life, sooner or later will also be found complaining about the “cowardice” of remote control killing, though they may be deluded if they think that higher levels of risk to the combatants necessarily implies less combat.

Well, some critics of drones may refer to the “cowardice” of remote-control killing, but I think many don’t. Moreover, you don’t seem to take on board the fact that, given that the U.S., at least, has no draft, those exposed to the risks and danger of combat are, and have been in recent years, a small percentage even of the relevant-age population. I’m not sure *exactly* how this would alter your statements about the need for supreme sacrifice and so on, but I have a feeling it has some relevance.

@ 266

I agree.

;^)

Bruce Weber, #268 – I hope you enjoyed the Hume, and get why I suggested it/him (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzG_J7RCGS0).

As for the economic and other analyses explaining Schmitt or the moment to which he was reacting, I tend to view them as parallel. Schmitt addresses liberalism from the perspective of a Catholic jurist, a conservative statist who privately nurtured some, I don’t know, rather Gothic notions about himself and the universe, sometimes expressed in a manner one might have thought beneath his dignity. It’s probably necessary to keep his “other side” always in mind, to stay sensitive to the points where the two sides turn into the same side, and also to acknowledge the differences between him/his situation and ourselves/our situation, but it produces a standing temptation to let our own theo-political prejudices guide us nowhere further than where we began.

Sorry for the digression: What I meant to say is that I think you’re right that the political-economic haunts the Schmittian legal-philosophical, but it’s not coincidental that the ghost also went by the name “liberal.” You probably know the economics much better than I do, but, as I understand it, Germany like other countries but more so was being crucified on the famous cross of gold, according to the dictates of all of the best 19th century “liberal” political economic wisdom. It also had to deal with the terms of Versailles, with the destruction of the Wilhelmine state (more than a narrowly political matter), with the loss of millions of war dead and the re-integration of millions of soldiers, and with multiple types of humiliation and guilt all at once, with all of traceable to the “liberal” powers.

My point isn’t that there was psychological displacement or transference of some type going on in Schmitt’s writing, though there might very well have been, as there would have been in Weimar culture generally. I tend to view all of these different ways of telling the story – as an economic story, a philosophical story, a cultural-historical story, maybe a dialectical materialist or a mass-psychoanalytical or even a theological story, as transparent to each other. Each may seem convincing on its own terms, but will feel incomplete. If you’re strongly committed to one, then the other will tend to seem empty or distorted, or maybe just overly convenient: the economist thinks economics says it best; the film fan thinks it was all in the movies, really, in fact was all a movie…

with all of [it] traceable to the “liberal” powers.

Not all. Liberalism was left “holding the bag”, while more blameworthy parties hid in the shadows. Liberalism victimized itself (and the moderate left and centre) in choosing to play this role, and it was a choice, a fatal choice, but there were other deeper sources of pathology.

Their side, specifically, on: “mere reason as understood within the limitations of liberal thought” does not provide adequate grounds for persuading people to defend a state.

@274 – I’ll try to remember to take another look at the Robin passage you cite. Since I don’t have the time to develop the thought here, and since it’s bad manners to pimp one’s blog, I’ll just agree with what I take to be your point that the professionalized military may not be able to serve the same functions in a mass political-cultural process of binding sacrifice that mass mobilizations may have.

Give us war, O Lord,
For England’s sake,
War righteous and true
Our hearts to shake. –Paul Cushing, published in National Observer (1892)

Song of the Sword (by W. E. Henley, dedicated to R. Kipling)
I am the sword ….
Sifting the nations,
The slag from the metal,
The waste and the weak
From the fit and the strong…. William Ernest Henley (d. 1903)

The Damoclesian sword of war ever hanging over a country has its value in keeping up the manliness of a people, in developing self-sacrificing heroism in its soldiers, in uniting classes, creeds and parties, and in showing the pettiness of party politics in its true proportion. ” —Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the boy scouts (1914). Baden-Powell was evidently very much opposed to war, as a matter of fact, but in 1914 looked on the bright side, hoping for the establishment of universal peace once it was over.

In the end, it always seems to come down to whose ox is being gored. The problem with liberalism, from that perspective, is that it views itself as the untouchable ghost in the machine, supreme in its cost-benefit analyses, and the rest of humanity — be it the grandmother blown apart by a Hellfire missile in her okra patch in Afghanistan, the Mexican subsistence farmer with no more market for his surplus maize, the 200+ passengers in a disappeared airliner, or the foreclosed putative homeowner in North Las Vegas — are mere artifacts that appear, briefly, on the screen of the liberal panopticon.

That a disembodied intelligence is no intelligence at all — an insight as old, at least, as Petronius’ slashed wrists — is something, no matter what the well-meaning will tell you gratis, that the 21st century has yet to enter into its calculations. One way or another, what is owed will be paid, even by the 1% who pride themselves on their invulnerability to the concerns of mere mortals.

Are you sure it isn’t about resentment?

I guess if you go to Harvard you don’t need a foundation.

(js., why would that be funny?)

@bianca:
You asked “is there a rational foundation for their position”? (by “their” meaning mine and BW’s).

To that, speaking for myself, I said I wasn’t really staking out a “position.”

And your reply is: “I guess if you go to Harvard you don’t need a foundation.”

And my reply to that is: I guess if you go to Columbia you become good at asking people questions they feel no particular need to answer (such as “is there a rational foundation for their [your] position”?).

More seriously, I infer that you thought I was saying that reason alone is sufficient to motivate fighting for the state. But actually, I wasn’t saying that, because I’m not sure whether it is. Kant was big on reason, so js.’ suggestion that Kant thought that reason was sufficient is no doubt correct (and js., as he’s mentioned in another thread, wrote his dissertation on Kant).

Anyway, the point is: I wasn’t making a claim; therefore I don’t need a ‘foundation’ and I don’t have to produce a list of Big Name Thinkers. The fact is that 18th and 19th and 20th cent. liberals spent a fair amount of time thinking about peace and its preconditions; probably less time thinking about what is required to motivate ‘the ultimate sacrifice’ etc. in time of war.

js., why would that be funny?

Oh, I guess I was just thinking that a lot of people seem to think of Kant as totally wacko (not that I do), so that his supporting a position might actually be taken to count against the position. Very happy to be wrong about this.

Re the “mere reason” bit (and without having read this thread super closely): I think I see why LFC would react in the way he did, and on occasion I might react the same way, but it’s actually central to the classical liberal tradition that mere reason is not sufficient to secure allegiance to the state, even if the state itself is a broadly liberal one. You see this in the “fraternité” part of the famous French slogan, which is supposed to signal a sort of affective connection or identification. Of course, what’s at issue here is not the relation between a citizen and the state, but I think it’s not irrelevant.

So also, there are parts in Leviathan where, e.g., Hobbes conceptualizes the state as an organic whole (most explicitly in chap. 24: “Of the Nutrition and Procreation of a Commonwealth”), and again I think at least part of what this sort of thing is supposed to do is allow for and encourage a kind of extra-rational identification with the state. You can really find this sort of thing all over the place if you look for it.

My point is just that elements of extra-rational—tho not of course anti-rational—identification with the state aren’t a threat to the liberal tradition; indeed the liberal tradition is happy to avail itself of such. I guess you could define the liberal tradition or the liberal state much more narrowly to avoid this result, but I suspect the definition would end up being question-begging if you really wanted to limit it to strictly rational appeals.

js@292: As a doctrinaire Rortyite, I distrust all non-fuzzy distinctions. Can you give an example of a “strictly rational” appeal, and then an example of a strictly emotional one?

Bianca:
I wasn’t offended, so no apology is necessary. I took your remark as a barbed joke, and I attempted to reply in kind. So if that’s what you mean by ‘acting snippy,’ yes, that’s what I was doing.

Turning to the substance: I’ve been less than clear, which is my fault. What follows is more or less thinking aloud, but I have to do that b.c I haven’t thought about this question all that much. Actually, there seem to be two questions here.

(1) What has actually motivated people to fight for ‘the liberal state’? An ‘easy’ case to discuss would be WW2, b.c in that conflict, (imperfectly) liberal states were in a fight to the finish with illiberal ones. The answer, I would assume, is that different motives, from the pedestrian to the idealistic, moved different people to volunteer or respond to a draft call, and probably a mix of motives operated even in the case of a single person. Of those soldiers who saw combat (a minority of the total enlistees), what motivated them during combat was primarily loyalty to and concern for their immediate colleagues, but the question here is what motivated people to enlist in the first place, and the answers to that question are almost certainly, I wd think, messier and more ambiguous. Moreover, I’m not sure (per geo, above) that one can neatly separate ‘strictly rational’ appeals or motives from purely emotional ones. Clearly, all the belligerent countries engaged in propaganda and appeals to the emotions (that’s what patriotic ritual and stirring oratory is all about), but in the case of the fascist regimes, such appeals were sharper, more insistent, and more extreme (for lack of a better word).

(2) The second question is: what does ‘the liberal tradition’ of political thought say about whether reason is enough to motivate loyalty or allegiance to the state, and on this I think js. is probably correct when he says that liberal theorists, on the whole, saw reason alone as not being enough. I say “on the whole” because I would assume (caveat: I’m not a historian of political thought) that Kant or maybe, say, Paine or Jefferson would lean more to the reason side, whereas, say, Tocqueville, who talks about “the martial spirit” in Democracy in America, would lean more to the emotion side. (Just to name a few names.) But with those shadings or qualifications, I would think js., who I’m quite sure is better read in the canon of political thought (or political theory) than I am, is basically right.

As far as reason and love, although I am not myself theistically inclined, I do admire the great philosophers and theologians who throughout the ages maintained that these concepts are not necessarily in opposition.

Reason seems to be in opposition to desire, in as far as reason refers to impassive observation of what is. Desire (and aversion) are cravings, or impulses to action towards objects or states of affairs in the world. But “love” is a tricky word with many uses. It sometimes has a strong connotation of desire. But the man who said, basically, “love is attention,” really hit it deep I think.

So at a fundamental level reason = observation which is attention, which is love. If we carry this over to our personal relationships it makes more than quite a bit of sense.

As I sit across the table from my lover, do I listen? Do I pay attention?

Whatever the case, I am sure the slogan fratérnité of the French army had little to do with “gens” or racial feeling.

Yikes! Where’d you get “racial feeling” from what I said? I’m just talking about the affective (emotion-based or whatever) component in the liberal tradition of citizen-state relations, or rather in the conceptualization of this relation within the liberal tradition. And part of the whole point of this tradition is that ‘fellow-feeling’, say, need not be tied to any “given” or “natural” categories. This is basically how you get civic republicanism (which I guess I’m treating as part of liberalism broadly construed–others may disagree).

The (American Heritage) dictionary definition of “rational” boils down to “based on logic”; the definition of “emotional” boils down to “based on feeling.” Does this offer sufficient grounds for characterizing an appeal or motive as either rational or emotional or not both? Let’s see.

Rather than offer an example, you simply reformulate the distinction: rational refers to “enlightened self-interest,” emotional or affective to “sympathy.” Does this simply mean “self-regarding” vs. “other-regarding,” so that to benefit oneself is a rational motive, while to benefit another is an emotional one? Suppose one plays music to some friends. Is the desire for one’s own enjoyment of the music rational and the desire for the others’ enjoyment emotional? Suppose one wants to impress these friends, or be liked by them, or introduce them to a new source of pleasure. Is one or all or none of these motives a case of enlightened self-interest? Suppose one gives up a place in a lifeboat, or simply a seat on the subway, to an older person or a child or pregnant woman because one thinks it’s the right thing to do, or because c0nvention dictates. Is the former decision rational and the latter emotional? In any (every) case, why? Why is acting from principle rational but not emotional — why adopt one principle rather than another, or follow principles at all, except that to do so makes it easier to live with oneself?

It’s true that Hume said that reason is and ought always to be the slave of the emotions. But I suspect that two and a half centuries later, after Freud, Nietzsche, James, Lawrence, Wittgenstein, and Rorty, he’d cheerfully acknowledge that that formulation was simply the best he could come up with at the time, given the linguistic and conceptual resources available, and that any attempt to render the distinction between reason and emotion precise or absolute was simply another metaphysical will-o’-the-wisp.

It was “slave of the passions”, geo, not “emotions”. Yes, historical vocabularies change, but “passion” is traditionally equated with patient rather than agent, i.e. something undergone and even suffered, rather than something actively pursued, but not something that has to do with self-satisfaction. And leaving aside that solecism identifying “reason” solely with logic, it’s not clear that its “demands” were traditionally to be identified with self-interest, “enlightened” or otherwise, or that “principles” should be adopted on such a basis. (One of the more astute comments from Luhmann is that the severe rigorism of Kant’s moral philosophy, whereby actions could only stem from entirely disinterested maxims, and any motivational basis was already “pathological”, was actually a sociological symptom of the crisis in “morality” as a medium of social integration. Of course, Kantian moral philosophy is already second-order, applying to an implicit de-moralization first-order actions, and his political thought was thoroughly utilitarian).

O.K. Carry on…

jch: It was “slave of the passions”, geo, not “emotions”

The famous quote is from the Treatise of Human Nature. Throughout that work, Hume uses “passion” and “emotion” interchangeably. Viz: Book I, Part I, section 1: “under this name [“impressions”] I comprehend all our sensations, passions, and emotions”; I, I, 3: “Our internal impressions are our passions, emotions, desires, and aversions”; II, I: “Of the first kind are all the impressions and all the bodily pains and pleasures; of the passions and other emotions resembling them”; ibid. “the passions of love and hatred, grief and joy, pride and humility”; ibid: “under the indirect passions I comprehend pride, humility, ambition, vanity, love, hatred, envy, pity, malice, generosity, with their dependents; and under the direct passions, desire, aversion, grief, joy, hope, fear, despair, and security”; ibid: “I shall now explain those violent emotions or passions, their nature, origin, causes, and effects.”

From these and countless other passages, including the immediate context of the “slave of the passions” quote (Book II, Section III, part 3), it is crystal clear that Hume uses “passions” and “emotions” interchangeably throughout the Treatise, and that your correction was entirely gratuitous and without point.

As for your observation that “leaving aside that solecism identifying “reason” solely with logic, it’s not clear that its “demands” were traditionally to be identified with self-interest, “enlightened” or otherwise,” I presume it’s directed toward js, since the identification of “rational” with “enlightened self-interest” was his. I dissented from his attempt to distinguish sharply between the rational and the affective, but at least I understood (I think) what he was on about, for which — given the quantity of sheer fustian emitted in the course of this thread — I’m grateful.

Yes, historical vocabularies change, but “passion” is traditionally equated with patient rather than agent, i.e. something undergone and even suffered, rather than something actively pursued, but not something that has to do with self-satisfaction.

1) p.s. to my 295 re WW2: the USSR was not a liberal democracy of course, and I wouldn’t want to give the impression I’d glossed over its crucial role in the war (so pls adjust accordingly).

2) @jch 303: Kant’s political thought is “thoroughly utilitarian”? It’s been a while since I’ve read Perpetual Peace or any other of the political writings, but that strikes me as a bizarre remark.

mattski @297:
v. Murdochian, I think (as in Iris, not Rupert)

It seems to me that the indeterminacy at the core of our behavior as individuals is a lot more radical than most of us can bring ourselves to believe. If we could actually find some transcendental promontory from which to view it, I suspect we’d find a derivative indeterminacy at the core of our collective behavior. If so, distrusting all non-fuzzy distinctions isn’t a bad way to go. At least it’s honest about our limitations, and reasonably modest about what we’re trying to achieve. If it leaves us no more than a wary self-mediation as consolation for our efforts, so be it. We could do a lot worse.

This discussion appears to be operating on misleading characterizations of both Hume and Schmitt. Neither was arguing against reason, which would be a self-contradictory position for a philosopher or theorist of any type to take.

There’s a discussion possible even on this point, but I’m going to set it aside. Though Hume has some very interesting things to say about the limits of reason or type of reasoning, much of the Treatise of Human Nature is devoted to explaining just how entirely reasonable many seemingly non-rational or never-rationalized sentiments are, and how, further, it’s no insult to faith, love, morality, honor, experiences of beauty, etc., to demonstrate that they can be explained by the purposes they serve and the sometimes relatively complex interest calculations embedded in seemingly spontaneous reactions. I brought Hume up originally in relation to the argument on anarchism. On the origins of government, quite typically, Hume argues for the in fact thoroughly rational basis of laws, customs, conventions of authority, and so on, and furthermore for the higher rationality of abiding by them unthinkingly in most cases: We can’t expect people to write a dissertation on traffic patterns every time they approach a stop sign. It goes better if they just stop because that’s what you do at a stop sign: It’s rational and socially useful conduct, but not actively reasoned conduct. The alternative of debating every stop sign “rationally” is what would be irrational.

Schmitt wasn’t a dadaist or surrealist or crypto-deconstructionist or nihilist or primitivist, even though there may be interesting points of contact between his approach and diverse radicalisms – for instance, as JCH mentioned earlier, between his critique and Lukacs critique of “bourgeois science,” what many today call “scientism.” He was arguing against ideological rationalism of a certain type, not against rationality per se, or for the higher rationality of an approach to law and politics that admitted what, from the “astonishingly systematic” liberal perspective of his time, was treated as irrational because non-rationalizable from that perspective, for instance in terms of the Weimar constitution or the possibilities of any written constitution.

I’m not suggesting that the philosophical or even anthropological questions are irrelevant, just that examining them usefully in this context requires careful and somewhat rigorous attention to terms and underlying assumptions, even if it sometimes forces us to write more, and more complicatedly, in order to say usefully less.

mattski:
Take the comment as a compliment. That was its intent.

At least Zizek has a whole tome on Hegel. Does Foucault even spend any time on Hobbes other than a few mentions in his lectures?

LFC, I was joking. (But equally frustrated that I didn’t understand the reference!)

:^)

Corey Robin @ 315

I don’t know that getting liberalism, in its many guises and precursors, wrong, was a particular problem in this thread. It’s authority, which is not getting its due. Liberalism is a label we use for a set of political convictions that question the need for and usefulness of authority, often by supplying a rationalization for authority, which undermines or subtly subverts the authority of authority, so to speak. Exactly how feelings (an individual’s appetites, emotions, passions, whatever) work with, for and against “reason” in these various liberal rationalizations and critiques (do we suppose a state of nature? a social contract? a natural propensity in the individual to sympathy? utilitarian calculation?) is less important when confronting Schmitt, than whether liberals get authority, right — in particular, whether liberals get the relation of authority to feelings, right. That’s the challenge here: the relation of authority to feelings (and, through feelings, social identification and coordination).

If authority can ask for the sacrifice of life, and get it, more or less voluntarily, that’s poses a bit of a challenge to the secular humanism of liberals, who seek the ground of the good in the feelings of the individual. Not because liberal rationalizations cannot find defenders for the liberal state, willing to risk life and limb, for their communities or relatives or friends, but because the act of authority, itself, can provoke the feelings.

The other side of authority, which is less dramatically bloodthirsty, is that authority works by breaking the incentive bound. Authority doesn’t care if, or to what degree, you feel like stopping at that stop sign. Authority wants you to stop, regardless of your feelings in the matter in the moment. Authority may be acting rationally, in the enlightened self-interest of the community, but the individual in being made to comply, is acting in his own enlightened self-interest, not from a consideration of the need to coordinate traffic, but by consideration of authority’s capacity to impose risks and penalties completely unrelated to the costs and risks of running a particular stop sign on a particular day and time.

The politics of how authority comes to be enforcing a system of rationalized traffic control, or anything else, which authority coordinates by seemingly arbitrary rules and penalties, which reason may be able understand after a fashion, can be a bit murky in liberal theories. I don’t propose to review how that problem is treated by liberal theorists, but it is the problem, which those repulsed by liberal politics and longing for authoritarian alternatives, often point to. Liberal politics, with its obsession with opposed rights, and habitual falling back on compromise, cannot break the incentive bound, and, therefore, cannot produce authority, legitimacy and order.

Bruce, yikes. Conceptualizing run amok.

Does CR mean I was a fascist or a libertarian for not wanting to go to Vietnam? Or are they the same?

Oh wait, liberalism can only be failed?

LFC 03.27.14 at 10:50 pm @ 332:
‘… In other words, the Vietnam War can’t be blamed on liberalism as it’s being discussed in this thread. …’

Well, capitalism. Did anyone come to a conclusion about capitalism and liberalism? One and the same? Twins? Entirely different?

I always thought the Vietnam war could be blamed on Cardinal Spellman (not a liberal).

As for Locke’s ideas being based on theology, that seems to me fairly trivial. St. Thomas Aquinas has been called a liberal by some, because he hinted that power derived from the consent of the governed. Other theologians were more forthright and flatly stated that the church councils had the power to depose the pope.

All the enlightenment ideas are in some sense based on theology (or humanism, which is the same thing, since it too is based on theology).

I think CR brings out the pedantry in people because his tone sometimes seems a a bit cavalier. For example, Mr. Causabon was not mocked for his erudition. He was mocked because he didn’t know German, and the language in which in his day real scholarship was being written. George Eliot (who did know German) thus made him a stand-in for the typical English academic of his day.

Harold@335
Causabon is a cold, formal, pompous, somewhat pathetic or pitiable character, who pretends to a vast erudition he doesn’t possess, and so Corey’s “a clusterfuck of Causabon-ry” effectively conveyed his exasperation. It wasn’t esp. nice, but it was well within the bounds of the unwritten house rules, in my opinion, and it’s the one phrase from this thread I’m sure I’m going to remember.

Nevertheless, Causabon’s lack of German, not his other qualities (or lack of them) was what made him a fraud in George Eliot’s eyes. He was the professional academic, seen through the eyes of the impassioned amateur.

But my argument was less with Schmitt than with the rest of you, who as I’ve said don’t seem to know the liberal tradition all that well. You know this caricature called “liberalism,” which is a repository for everything you dislike about modernity, but not really liberalism in its variety.

Yes. Exactly.

I don’t find “like” or “dislike” to be a very useful or interesting way to discuss the question of modernity or any other significant historical or philosophical question, and I’ve also already addressed and re-addressed the tendency to treat an interest in Schmitt as a display of suspicious “sympathies,” which is akin to the depiction of an interest in problems of liberalism as some kind of unreasoning hostility to “liberal antagonists.” To respond in detail on such speculation about me would be to act as though I presume anyone much cares or has much reason to care how CK MacLeod feels about these topics. Nor do I find it particularly interesting that one or another writer may have held a different view on a particular question: Suggestions for further reading are harmless and often welcome, at least where not offered so condescendingly as to reduce interest, but in most instances to be presented with such a reference is to be presented with an opinion about an opinion, and possibly a cultural-historical footnote, not actually to be presented with that view in any form useful in a discussion under way.

So it would seem that at least in the blogger’s longer reply to me above, there isn’t really much to be discussed, especially since I have too many shelves that need re-stocking to spend very much time on the ways that, say, a relatively narrow, contextualized statement about a particular ideological expression gets misconstrued as a misconstrual… of a philosophy that’s really a theory that’s really a critique that’s really one of a constellation of concerns.. If I saw much reason to believe that Professor Robin was interested in discussion, I’d pause to disabuse him of additional odd notions he seems to be entertaining about my understanding of John Locke’s thought and specifically of his theological (or soteriological) argument for freedom of conscience and his influence especially in America, but Professor Robin does not appear to be very interested in discussion, at least not with a Schmitt-loving Strauss-adulating modernity-hating liberal-bashing fucking inerudite pedant and probably center-right deviationist class traitor too like me.

The more interesting note bringing me back to this thread is Mr. Halasz’s remark about his being disturbed. Though I would never be so bold as to declare myself neo-Hegelian, I think I more agree with jch than disagree with him on the topics we have been actually-discussing – so I am of course delighted to think that something I had to say succeeded in disturbing him. I don’t think I quite said what he thinks I said, but I might have said something like it, or pointed in its direction. I mentioned torture in connection with the sovereign demand for sacrifice, and drones in a related context, though specifically as seeming in the eyes of some to fall short as offerings to the popular demiurge.

Setting aside such nuances as in the latter case, I think torture and drone assassination are more or less automatically disturbing, or that not to be disturbed by them at all might be taken as a symptom of sociopathy. At the same time, their inevitably disturbing character would also be a sign of their sacrificial utility or one might even say their trans-utility. Trans-utility: It is now a commonplace in criticism of the “enhanced interrogation” program to say that “torture doesn’t work,” but to say so presumes several things about the purposes or possible purposes of torture, and misses the ways that torture is virtually guaranteed to “work,” not specifically as a means of obtaining so-called “actionable information” from a captive, which might qualify torture as a resort to “expediency,” but as a means of asserting a different kind of truth, an intensely disturbing one, about ourselves, and about an other than liberal morality as the actually operative morality even or especially within the world’s leading liberal democracy. Something similar can be said about the drone program and even about the wars of the ’00s in general. Our liberalistic culture insists on “reasonable,” usually meaning narrowly instrumental, justifications for embarking upon such policies as for embarking on any policies at all, and also sometimes for abandoning them in shame, perhaps while promising never, ever to do that kind of thing again. When their sacrificial instrumentality (or trans-instrumentality or the instrumentality of trans-instrumentality) is better understood, then both the promises and the normal mode of discussion become harder to take seriously.

Observations along these lines lead Kahn in what I think is his most disturbing book, SACRED VIOLENCE, to make a strong statement about liberalism and its incapacities.

To most liberals, torture appears as a display of pure power: the torturer says to the victim, “I can do this to you, and there is nothing you can do about it.” This asymmetry of power is anathema to liberal morality, which insists on the equal dignity of and respect for every individual. From the liberal perspective, law has no place for torture and politics must be circumscribed by law. Most academic work today is little more than repeated demonstrations that torture violates the fundamental principles of liberalism. In truth, liberalism has nothing interesting to say about torture.

It is easy to apply the same statements to the drone program, as another frontal assault on a liberal ethos or sensibility, directly on key elements of any recognizably liberal philosophy/theory/critique/tradition/constellation. With theories of sovereignty, as for sovereigns, it’s just the opposite.

That liberalism may not have anything interesting to say about torture doesn’t mean that torture doesn’t have very interesting things to say about liberalism. Just to scratch the surface (of Hume’s finger): If, as I think is easily demonstrable if not simply obvious, the mixed liberal-democratic regime form operates according to simultaneous but contradictory liberalistic and sovereign/sacrificial concepts, then our inability to get our story straight, or to stick to the same story for very long, to bounce from W to O while maintaining a somehow simultaneously comforting and disturbing continuity between them, becomes easier to understand.

“That’s just philistinism, in typically CT collective fashion, (though I don’t know if Holbo or Quiggin is the worst “violator” in that regard).”

john c halasz, I don’t know whether this is philistinism on my part, but I admire the faux-delicacy, amidst the crockery-smashing. Many a heedless commenter might have penned such a sentence. How many would have paused, taken out tweezers, placed obviously functionless scare-quotes around ‘violator’, then resumed their headlong course?

@345:

It’s a boundary patrolling move you often use, (hence the scare quotes, since it’s not a huge violation, just what it is). I often wonder what the implied opposite is, classicism? Needless to say, “romanticism” usually designates an historical period in the arts and more broadly in culture. (But even there, one should be careful. Hegel, for example, who stems from that time, was a trenchant critic of romanticism, and I personally don’t think “expressivist” interpretations of his work are correct). What it’s not is a sign of much interpretive acumen.

@ 346:

We’re talking Schmitt, not Heidegger here, (who was the prolly the much lesser anti-semite). But if anti-semitism were to be the sole criterion, as a reductio ad hominem, then much of European culture would have to be tabooed or banned. Frege was reportedly notably anti-semitic. And 2/3 of the German philosophy professors’ association joined the Nazi Party. (It was the collapse of a whole culture, a highly accomplished one, into barbarism, not just a few individuals, which is what should remain shocking). So because Nicolai Hartmann (d. 1936) joined the Nazi Party, are we to ban the notion of “emergentism”? For that matter, Zofia Kossack-Szczucka was notably anti-semitic. And most Nazi-affiliated thinkers were execrable mediocrities. It was a wildly incoherent hodge-podge of an ideology, hollow at the core, as Arendt noted a long time ago. (You can see the same sort of thing with Jobbik or Golden Dawn nowadays). Only a few Nazi-affiliated thinkers are worth considering much anymore, not because, but despite their affiliation. And we were explicitly discussing Schmitt’s Weimar writings, where it was precisely his wrestling with the notion of “democracy” that led him to collapse into the embrace of the “total state”. Which, at least differs from the more usual conservative stigmatization of “democracy” as excessive individualism.

But then you, JQ, don’t do Holbo’s romanticism thing. Rather you say things like economics is automatically utilitarian, and that Marxists are “aristocratic”, without any apparent awareness that they might be working from aristotelian rather humean conceptions of human agency and ends or goods, such that a more thorough-going egalitarianism than you are willing to tolerate, might also be less “leveling”. And though it’s far too late to revive the “glories” of the past, you seem to assume that works of art are reducible to individual hedonic preferences, are simply ordinary consumption commodities, like ice cream, and resent any claims for “distinction”.

There is a tacit manoeuvre that I call “putting oneself in the right”, which is just a “higher”, more intellectualized form of CYA. So maybe you two guys could spent just a wee bit of time analyzing your own reaction-formations.

One last remark. During the Iraq War build-up, it was a common-place among opposing liberals that the neo-cons derived from Strauss. (Actually, if that rather obscure emigre professor had much influence on the American right, it was much more in jurisprudence, with the Federalist Society and the like). I don’t recall Schmitt coming up much in that connection (maybe because of Godwin’s law), but it would be a mistake. I think, to consider Dubbya as the deciderer as acting in a “Schmittian” role. I think recognizing the consequences and implications of collapsing and thereby assuming the sovereignty of another nation would have been more a Schmittian, or even just plain Hobbesian, approach.

But then this is all just words conjuring words, without referents or consequences… and on the tubz no less.

“Romanticism” round bout these parts is usually connected to the ecstatic submission in a swoon to the passions, the void, the transcendent, the sublime, and becoming something other than a bourgeois moderate neo-keynesian Democrat. Who are grounded in pragmatics, doncha know.

IOW, a quasi- proto- or crypto- fascist or revolutionary socialist

I have not read all this thread and it is unlikely that I ever will. But from browsing it seems that this didn’t ever get picked up, except as a point of debate, or by someone who suggested those referred to so condescendingly were a lot of murderers anyway:

“In the case of a bunch of hunter gatherers running round the woods there is no contradiction because there is no state … ” @256

So I would like to suggest that the implication, oh these savages, how far beneath the civilized man they are, is something that someone should have picked up a long way further back.

And also note that they had/have laws, customs, rituals, elders, … etc – which also suggests that a bit more definition of what the state is, and is not, might have been useful.

@ 349

Speaking as a bourgeois moderate neo-keynesian Democrat, I don’t mind a little ecstatic swoon to the passions. It’s just that I try to do that sort of thing in a comparatively private setting.

I don’t recall Schmitt coming up much in that connection (maybe because of Godwin’s law), but it would be a mistake… I think, to consider Dubbya as the deciderer as acting in a “Schmittian” role. I think recognizing the consequences and implications of collapsing and thereby assuming the sovereignty of another nation would have been more a Schmittian, or even just plain Hobbesian, approach.

Schmitt’s later writings are quite on point here, but, precisely because they sought to define the limits of an American global project, and forecasted disaster in the inevitable encounter with those limits – the disordering effects of the attempt to orient a global order under liberalism or liberal universalism – they have also been dismissed as unacceptable exercises in self-justification on behalf of the vanquished enemy.

The current lead post at the moment at the blog called The Disorder of Things is doubtless something bob mcmanus would love. I’m not linking — let him Google if he’s interested.

@ 348:

Yes, it’s true that I tend to use a lot of quotation marks. It’s a tic of mine. Sometimes it’s to highlight the word rather than the thing; more often it’s a suspension, a kind of mini-epoche, to consider the word and thing together. Rarely are they “scare quotes” in the sense of “snarky so-called undermining”. But to imply that it’s merely an evasion of accountability or responsibility for what I type, (because I couldn’t really “mean” it, in accordance with full “reflective equilibrium”, which the consistency of all my beliefs demands), is just a cheap shot. In fact here, I’ve put my personal belief preferences largely aside, in order to explicate Schmitt’s questions, problems, even puzzles. Obviously, I haven’t advocated for any of his “solutions”. (As an aside, I recall once a commenter here, obviously a recent philosophy grad, who claimed that all his beliefs were “rationally justified”. Which struck me as a bit like Baron von Muenchhausen’s claim to have extracted himself from the hole he had dug himself into by pulling himself out by his own pony-tail).

And, in fact, you do use, often enough, the term “romanticism” in just the way I indicated. Many years ago, you posted, with apparent surprise, that Schmitt had written a critique of “political romanticism”, implying that he must be some kind of romantic nonetheless, )even though, as far as I know, he didn’t write anything of artistic or cultural matters). More recently, you claimed that Heidegger was a romantic. When I replied that, no, if he’s to be correlated with any artistic category, (which is something he commented on extensively), then it would be expressionism, a modernist movement or style. At which you scoffed.

So no, I don’t think I’m off the mark there. My remark about Hegel wasn’t just fussiness. The point was this: even some “great” writers that stemmed from the historical romantic era, already transcended it, (e.g., Hegel, Hoelderlin, Beethoven), abutting on modernism. And claiming any exclusive take on or inheritance of modernity is just fool’s gold.

I’ve never claimed to be a writer or stylist. I’m just a typist, expressing his stray thoughts, picking proteins from his brain, hopefully in a somewhat on topic and focused manner, in response to the chaos of comment threads. (I’m grateful if I manage to catch even 80% of my typos). But you just don’t know if I’m a dog, (even though I actually am).

@351:

That comment was mine, and the only point was that hunter-gatherer bands would have no mechanism for dealing with murder, (since according to some reports, they often have a language with just two tenses). It wasn’t a claim that they are just savages, but just a riposte to an anarchist claim that politics is dispensable.

@352:

I take it you mean the anti-semitism question, rather than any discussion of the work anywhere. But, in fact, Heidegger’s case has been extensively combed over, and there is little evidence that he was strongly, let alone virulently, anti-semitic, or that is what motivated his actions or positions. At most, it was a certain cultural-nationalist snobbery. (His wife apparently was another matter). That he collaborated with anti-semites, despite his rejection of Nazi “biological” racism, which he did express, is another matter.

But if you’re saying, pay attention to the complexion of the work and not the person, and the good but mediocre and “great” but evil are equally possible, I’d agree.

@354:

I don’t know who first coined the term “Counter-Enlightenment” (Berlin?), but it’s a fairly recent vintage. As to when “the problem of authority” politically first arose, there’s no clear answer. Perhaps with the Reformation, perhaps with the emergence of nation-states, perhaps with the violence of the French Revolution. But especially with the emergence of “full” modernity in the course of the 19th century, whereby the accelerating pace of historical change equally eroded any sense of unreflective or secure traditions, not open to question, the “problem”, amidst crises in worldly affairs, became exacerbated. One of Hegel’s basic claims was that with the arrival of “full” modernity, in which not only rational freedom had to be reconciled with objective truth, but the differentiation of institutional and discursive domains required some sort of “integrative” account, modern societies had to derive their own legitimating “authority” from their own “resources”, rather than relying on some sort of “external” or transcendent source.

bob mcmanus @ 358

If we’re lucky — and talented — I suppose we can live in this brave new world as William Gibson. If we’re neither, we can live in it as a barista, I suppose — at least for a while. I’m to old to live in it at all, except maybe in my imagination. Fortunately, I won’t have to.

It does seem to me, though, that any politics-as-remedy worthy of the attentions of a Negri — or a mcmanus, for that matter — will appear to arise suddenly, and be irresistible. I do admire you for trying to spot the early signs, and it is fun following along somewhat goggle-eyed in your wake. I can’t say, though, that I’ve been able to linger anywhere along the way with much conviction.

#359/jch

I was referring to anti-semitism specifically.

Am I wrong to think that you may not have been keeping up on H’s newly published “Black Notebooks”? ( http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/03/why-does-it-matter-if-heidegger-was-anti-semitic.html ) In other words, I think you can expect statements on “little evidence” to meet with strong opposition from now on.

“And, in fact, you do use, often enough, the term “romanticism” in just the way I indicated. Many years ago, you posted, with apparent surprise, that Schmitt had written a critique of “political romanticism”, implying that he must be some kind of romantic nonetheless, )even though, as far as I know, he didn’t write anything of artistic or cultural matters). More recently, you claimed that Heidegger was a romantic. When I replied that, no, if he’s to be correlated with any artistic category, (which is something he commented on extensively), then it would be expressionism, a modernist movement or style. At which you scoffed.”

Sorry, I don’t remember this particular exchange but, for what it’s worth, my first reaction is to scoff at you all over again.

Let’s start just with this. Your objection, above, seems to be that it is absurd to call Schmitt a romantic because he wasn’t an artist, and romanticism is an artistic category – more generally a ‘cultural’ category. And … I guess Schmitt wasn’t … a culture? Anyway. You then say that it isn’t right to call Heidegger a romantic either. Same reason, I guess. But then you admit that it might be ok to call Heidegger an expressionist. That is, you concede that there could be some sense in trying to get what a philosopher is up to by applying a term that is, more standardly, an artistic movement/style term. But once you’ve admitted that, you’ve given up the game. If it could make sense to think of Heidegger as an expressionist it could make sense to think of him as a Romantic. And, by extension, it could make sense to think of Schmitt as a Romantic. It no longer makes sense just to rule out the thought with dictionary of art history border policing. ‘This term refers to a period in art history, it is verboten to apply it to philosophers!’ You don’t think it’s verboten any more than I do, so what’s the point, pretending otherwise? If you think I’m so wrong to call Schmitt a Romantic, the proper thing to do is address my reasons for calling Schmitt a Romantic? Fair enough?

I am aware, of course, that both Heidegger and Schmitt would be perfectly horrified by being called Romantics. I didn’t offer the suggestion because I thought they would like it. I offered it because I thought it contained a kernel of cross-categorial truth. (Sometimes it’s good to color inside the lines, but you can’t always be coloring inside the lines. Sometimes the lines aren’t right.)

“I don’t think the objection to the use of “romantic” as a derogatory and insulting term”

Harold, it’s reasonable to object to the use of ‘romantic’ as blanket derogatory. But I have never used ‘romantic’ as a blanket derogatory term. Calling Schmitt a romantic isn’t an objection to romanticism. It’s an objection to inappropriate expressions of romanticism. His sort of philosophy isn’t supposed to be romantic, but that’s not because being romantic is bad. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Beethoven.

“It just seems imprecise and, well, I won’t say philistine, but really unfortunate, to lump Schmitt, a Nazi, in with Leopardi, George Sand, and Beethoven, say.”

Harold, I really don’t think that can be right. Schmitt and Beethoven were both German. You wouldn’t object to me calling Schmitt a German on the grounds that this lumps him together with Beethoven. If I say Schmitt is a romantic, that isn’t an attempt to smear Beethoven by association.

I think the thing to do is wait for john halasz to give his considered objection to my use of the term ‘romantic’. Either he’s got an argument or he doesn’t.

“It’s just that if it were me, I would substitute some other term, because I recoil on general principles to it being used as a smear.”

I don’t yet have any indication of what john halasz thinks the problem with my usage is, but if he thinks I’m using ‘romanticism’ just as a smear, then the problem is simply that he has misread me.

Were the Spartans romantics? I wouldn’t think so. Is corportatism romanticism? No.

The ball is really in john halasz’ court. He has gone to the trouble of calling me the worst violator – worst “violator” anyway. He can explain what he meant by that, if anything. I suspect, from the scare quotes, that he didn’t mean anything. But I could be wrong.

Well, if he wants to explain himself, he’s welcome to.

I was quoting from memory a conversation from a recording of a conversation with a well known anthropologist (now deceased), no doubt I got the details wrong; and since he wrote in the 1930s and 40s he would seem a “romantic” to Roy Belmont.

I recoil on general principles to it being used as a smear.

I may be mistaken and hope to be corrected if I am, but wasn’t John Holbo accusing Schmitt of not realizing the romanticism implicit in his world view? So, it isn’t that being a romantic is such an embarrassment (although there *might* be something inherently immature about it) but believing oneself to be above that when in fact one isn’t above it… now that is an embarrassment.

@374 You don’t think that the Greeks and Romans used oracles for the same purpose? I don’t see what is racist about a comment except my error in making what appeared to you to be a general statement, rather than one about a specific a specific tribe, the name of which I don’t know. The context of the conversation was the relationship between the economics of hunting and religion. The professor was the president of the American Anthropological Association.

The obvious fact is there are similar mechanisms in all religions, which is why kings and emperors called themselves “God’s anointed” or even God. Perhaps that was what Schmitt was getting at with his talk about with “the decision”. In any case, Schmitt’s philosophy may have had genuine insights, but from a practical standpoint, insofar as it led to Hitler, it was a disaster, obviously. As that of the neocons equally.

Thanks, Val. Will do. If you are addressing me, I have to protest that I never said anything whatsoever about blood, honor, witchcraft, running around in the woods, or purportedly high rates of murder, though I think someone else may have. Only about deciding which direction to hunt, which one could do by tossing bones or consulting an oracle, but the important thing was getting everyone to agree to some decision and stick to it, rather than none at all.

But does he yearn after the infinite?

I learned about Dunning-Kruger here at CT. Thank you CT.

Harold, I’m sure it’s an unconscious racism, not your fault, not unique to you. But it is 2014.
If you got here through the usual means, you must have seen somewhere along the way at least some mention of the objections by indigenous people to continued use of racist stereotypes and European fantasies as factual descriptions of their often violently eradicated ways of life.
There’s an innocence in your response, and in your illustration itself, but the toxicity it carries isn’t harmless.
Haruspex, runes, tarot, yeah I get it. But the mind-set’s right out of the “They don’t feel pain like we do” playbook. A delusional arrogance so fully acquired it just seems like common sense.

Harold @ 379
My comment above was addressed to john c. halasz @ 359.

There is a lot of confusion on this thread, with both you and him responding to comments of mine that weren’t originally about you! Pity there isn’t a reply button.

The book is worth reading.

But does he yearn after the infinite?

If he doesn’t he ought to.

Corey Robins:

I think that authority issue is not in fact a problem for liberalism. Liberalism has not had nearly as much difficulty as some here seem to think in generating and justifying authority.

The authority issue is a problem for — sorry, to say this, but it’s true — a certain kind of conservative thinker who is absolutely sure, no matter the evidence, that authority needs to be something that’s, oh, I don’t know, more than what it in fact often is. . . . That authority issue is a problem that was essentially invented by the Counter-Enlightenment, and you see versions of it over and over again, most recently in the neocon critiques of the liberal welfare state . . . My reading of this tradition is that it reflects less an actual problem in the world of politics — liberal states seem to have zero difficulty in getting their citizens to sacrifice their lives for the state (or at least they have, on the whole, no more difficulty than do non-liberal states), and that’s because liberalism as theory and practice has almost never looked like the caricatured picture that has been presented here — than it does a longing of conservative theorists . . . In other words, far from being a sign of greater realism or more muscular reasoning on the right, it’s a sign of romantic longing.

Contra Holbo, you don’t have to be an Hegelian to see that period movements can be antithetical to what has gone before, or may be going on contemporaneously. If you possess the superhuman power of the historian to remember the future, you might even see a movement as antithetical to what follows. That doesn’t mean we can use one movement’s name as an antonym for another, and play wordgames productively, but still we can see relationships and dependencies, recognizing that what is said, is often said in dialectic with historical circumstances and other movements. In short, these things have a history.

Liberalism, historically, was antithetical to authority of a certain kind: received, traditional, hereditary, un-rationalized, and the original liberal answers included appeals to universal principles, the assembly representative of the whole people, and the constitution. These answers were not created systematically or ab nova; they were ad hoc contradictions of inherited tradition: the constitution corresponding to the charter, assemblies corresponding to traditional vehicles for giving counsel and consent to kings, universal rights corresponding to the grant of particular privilege, etc. Liberalism cantilevers precariously off the same foundation structures it proposes to tear down. Of course, authority (and solidarity) are core problems.

Liberalism has, in historical fact, sometimes had a great deal of difficulty governing, making decisions, building institutions and elevating competent leadership, responsive to circumstances. The French Revolution, quite famously, failed to usher in competent liberal governance. It took Napoleon Bonaparte to resolve many of the problems fully manifest in 1789, which a decade of republican wrangling had failed to adequately address. It was Napoleon, who forced through the law code that bears his name, for example. It was Napoleon, who instituted a Bank of France. It was Napoleon, who found terms by which the secular French state could live with the Catholic Church. It was Napoleon, who moderated the venality of the French haute bourgeoisie to a dull roar of corruption. The capacity of Napoleon to cut through these political problems like an Alexander cutting the Gordian knot made a definite, albeit varied, impression. What do we imagine Hegel apprehended that day in Jena, when he saw world-history riding thru the streets on a white charger?

Schmitt’s critique of liberalism belongs to Weimar Germany, a place and period of liberal failure (where the most celebrated Casaubon was the unlikely Otto Spengler! What does that tell you about the mood?). So, to claim “Liberalism has not had nearly as much difficulty as some here seem to think” is, at the very least, ahistorical. Liberalism, between the world wars in Europe and the Americas, was, generally, pathetic. In Germany, its failures opened the door to a collapse into barbarism. Schmitt had some genuine insight into the constitutional problems of governance, which the liberal, moderate and social democratic parties couldn’t manage to address in the circumstances. (Schmitt as “romantic” just seems bizarre to me.) That non-liberal parties did find an opening in the failure of Weimar is, of course, an historic tragedy of monumental proportions; that liberalism may still carry some disability, potentially fatal to civilization, ought to concern us. [Especially when (neo)liberal governance is doing such a bang-up job in our own day, creating, once again, economic depression and political upheaval, within spitting distance of the peak oil / climate change/ overpopulation cliff.]

Liberalism recovered somewhat from the inter-war debacles, in part because some liberal critiques of the social and political order — the American New Deal and the postwar German ordo-liberalism and Keynes’ polemics might stand as examples — did address important problems, and provided a way out of crisis and collapse created by reactionary failures. Those patches, now aged and obsolete, seem to have fallen off. Just noticing. Not feeling the romance, though.

My “original” point with respect to the appeal to anthropological issues was this: all human groups will have some sort of “politics”, i.e. modes of dealing with conflict and achieving social cohesion or integration. However, the carrying capacities of such “politics” will differ by scale, complexity, and cultural levels of understanding. (Hence the reply to Anarcissie, that he was being somewhat irrelevant to the topic at hand, in appealing to “primitive” peoples in arguing for the possibility of non-state political organization). Anthropological “literature” presents a wide variety of different accounts of various tribal peoples and their ways, some rather irenic, others rather bellicose, which is part of the point of the discipline. (The discipline runs into some troubles, insofar as it attempts to describe differing ways without any normative judgments, which isn’t quite possible, and insofar as it has several competing methodologies of explanation and/or interpretation and the referents in which such should be “grounded”, e.g., functionalist, structuralist, hermeneutic, socio-biological, and the like). But what it doesn’t, by its very “constitution”, provide is some sort of “universal” evidence to decide political disputes, nor accounts of “human nature”.

So with respect to hunter-gather bands, (which largely had already been displaced on marginal lands, by larger tribal organization, before “whites” had made contact, with the obvious exception of AUS), the two tenses, present time and dream time, have been reported of Kalahari Bushmen and Inuits, which implies very limited time-horizons, which goes together with little capacity to regulate issues such as murder, within constraints of social cohesion. (They also would operate within an entirely animistic conceptual or mental “world”). Witch-craft practices, (which should be distinguished from healing practices), have been interpreted as a means of maintaining social cohesion and equilibrium in the face of growing and potentially disruptive social conflicts; they could even be conceived as a type of “jurisprudence”, except that the explanatory scheme is entirely circular and impervious to correction. Pre-conventional honor-and-revenge tribal systems have been reported too many times to be mentioned, though the Pashtun are legendary in that regard, (which is one of the reasons drone strikes are inadvisable, since, as Gen. McCrystal among others has admitted, it creates more enemies than it kills, hardly a “pacification” strategy.)

As to the Aussie case, I am aware of the Aboriginal “song-lines”. Graeber also tells of a curious Aboriginal exchange ceremony, in which the sharing of women substitutes for the potential fro aggressive combat. But the idea that we could return to some pristine and pure “state of nature”, uncontaminated by the evils of whites, (even though plenty of non-white civilizations have perpetrated similar violences and conquests), is just sheer romanticism, in the pejorative sense.

So Harold retails an anecdote, and is assailed for his evident “racism”. But not to worry, he’s been offered forgiveness for his unconscious, provided he accepts “correction” and enters into the secularized version of holy communion, re-entering the community of universal humanity. But aside from that, in most cases, it is better to address intentions, rather than search endlessly after concealed motives, (which is a paranoid mentality, even if it’s “objectively” warranted by the relevant conditions), and that someone can harbor racist or other objectionable prejudices and still raise a valid point or even do a good deed, the posture of moral superiority and righteous purity is itself objectionable, as if, out of their own heads, such apostles of “political correctness”, (the stupidest political “strategy” ever devised), could eliminate all human differences and the prejudices they invite, and bring about a redemptive reign of universal love. The mis-recognized religious impulse is perhaps the silliest thing about it.

If one would want an example of “the infinite” breaking through a finite and temporal political order, consider the case of transformations in the sense or conception of “justice” within a polity. Is it really just a matter of enlarging the scope of application of pre-existent norms? And thus an extension of rights, as already defined? Or does it involve, insofar as it isn’t just re-arranging the musical chairs, a “prior” alteration in social recognitions and relations and a genuine transformation of “subjectivities” or “souls” involved, something more akin to religious conversion than to an extension of law. That would be more in line with Levinas than Schmitt. But I don’t think it involves any “romanticism”, even if it might involve some anthropological, (in the philosophic, not the social-scientific, sense), sense of “religion”, though that too can be entirely secular. It doesn’t involve the vanquishing of political questions of inclusion/exclusion, but, in fact, might involve the intensification of such “contradictions”. But that is something that the “deductions” of liberal “normative political philosophy”, with its universalizing, but ahistorical pretensions can’t quite accommodate, which is why such moralism ends up re-enforcing the status quo. The discontinuities of futural and quite other potentials, (which uncertainly might be for better or for worse), are anathema to its claims for “rationality”, even if it is pleased to claim retrospective credit.

But then “universal humanity” is in actuality much more defined by its differences, oppositions, and prejudices than by its singular abstract substance. But then “prejudices”, i.e. prejudgments, are not to be necessarily abhorred or dissolved, following Gadamer, insofar as they form the operative basis of understanding.

Another thought: liberalism is that political carpetbag with ample room for both the sons of liberty, and the father of his nation. I’m not so sure, given BW’s observations about the limits of its resilience, that it really is the better wisdom to leave it unpacked behind the couch.

It seems such a clear eyed and logical view of the world doesn’t extend into the present.

I doubt that any discourse held in public can be entirely autonomous. It is annoying, I admit, to listen to erudite discussions which go on and on about solving the world’s problems without any apparent reference to the real world as most of us perceive it. I do wonder, though, if what we’re reacting against isn’t so much the supposed lack of relevance in such discussions as what seem to us to be insufferable attitudes on the part of those involved in them.

As we were saying a couple of hundred comments or so ago, attributions of causation in such complex situations are always problematic. Still, there is a feedback loop between thought and action, I think, even when its workings seem impossibly attenuated, and beset at every exit by reactionary demonstrations of power. If we don’t get where we want to go, someone else will give it a bash; an idea seemingly wasted here will crop up somewhere else in the hands of someone who can actually make use of it. And if the whole enterprise comes to ruin in the end, it will necessarily be a different ruin, one that might even be less resistant to repair.

But perspective is important.

Yes, and it’s astonishing to see the volume of rhetoric on this thread devoted to making a souffle out of,

“How dare Locke & Mill get my hopes up like that.”

john c. halasz 03.30.14 at 1:14 am @364 https://crookedtimber.org/2014/03/11/david-brooks-better-in-the-original-german/#comment-519314

After breaking my brain on this subject over the last two days, I’m more convinced than ever that the Heidegger-Schmitt parallel is at least as relevant and instructive as it looks like it might be on first glance. Our inability or refusal to think Heidegger through is entirely of a piece with our inability or refusal to think Schmitt through.

I have the impression that the two men never developed a significant personal or professional relationship, though a friendly, collegial, and somewhat substantial letter from Heidegger to Schmitt does survive, written in 1937, in other words from the approximate onset of the eclipse of their Nazi… detour, around four years after they joined the Nazi Party along with millions of other relative latecomers to the cause: They both chose May Day 1933 to sign the political contract in blood. (I will guess this was a popular choice for its political-historical resonances, not sheer coincidence.)

The certainty of their shared untruth, the presumption of its simple wrongness, constitutes our truth, our right. It’s why anyone interested in Schmitt or Heidegger or both must be interrogated and re-interrogated for suspicious sympathies. The operation of the taboo, or of its enforcement, shows up in that New Yorker piece, whose reference to the Prospect “defence of Heidegger” includes slanderous speculation about the latter’s author: “”This makes me wonder about Rée as well”: In other words, “This would-be neutral summary of Heidegger’s thought about Judaism makes me think that Rée is also a racist/anti-semite/Nazi symp.” The tendency appears in the comments under Rée’s post, where a voluble self-styled philosopher claims to have identified “radical evil” not in the Nazis or the Holocaust or total war, but specifically in post-structuralism. It shows up on this apparently immortal discussion thread from top to bottom – in the ritual shaming of Harold, in Robin’s presumptions about diverse commenters here, the CT-typical proud announcement of the latest proscriptions, and in the “Australian” demand to ignore the “philosophical justifications” of the “anti-semitic Nazi shit.” It is a political-theological demand by the self-styled enemies of the political-theological, a dedicated need-not-to-know about themselves, to leave the sacred Grundnorm (along with its own origins) undisturbed.

I’ll add here before I get back to the shelves, that I think to understand Levinas on the missing Face, you also have to consider Buber, whom Levinas acknowledges directly, and, perhaps even more, Rosenzweig and Hermann Cohen, both of whom, Rosenzweig more explicitly, Cohen more simply “reasonably,” seek to trace the outlines of the Face (or face to higher face). I’ve put HEIDEGGER’S SILENCE on my reading list. So I’ll recommend in return Peter Eli Gordon’s book on Rosenzweig and Heidegger, which I first read before tackling STAR OF REDEMPTION: Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy . It points to a further explanation for Heidegger’s silence, and possibly to Heidegger’s own need-not-to-know.

Autonomous discourse? Is that anything like the Context of No Context, being referenced on another thread?

Whatever one might usefully say about the Nazis, or the various flavors of fascism — and the fascist ideology did seem like the collective Id exposed — their racism or antisemitism was not unconscious. Totalitarianism demanded political engagement.

Political correctness is the euthanasia of consciousness raising, in the politics of a state, which has been converted into a public-private partnership condominium. All political issues are labeled with euphemisms, to emphasize our detachment and disengagement: runaway corruption and predation becomes economic “inequality”. Professional spokes-models will discuss “inequality” without openly accusing anyone, expressing concern of course, and be refuted effortlessly with the absurdity of “equality” of material outcomes as an ideal standard and questions about the propriety of resentment and envy as motives.

wholistic

The generally-accepted and original spelling is “holistic”. From greek “holos”, as in “hologram”, “holocaust”, &c. If the word were from “whole” it would have a long o, see.

Not a political theorist, so just a tag at the end of an interesting thread. Schmitt’s line of thought seems to me to reflect the outlook of a military officer (very Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany): there is an enemy, you have to decide, you cannot be certain, doing nothing is likely the worst option, whatever you do may be countered, there is no ultimate goal (only local victories), success demands creativity and the free exercise of will, solidarity and brotherhood count…..

As compared to classical liberalism, which tends to cast politics as a C19 House of commons debate: an argument among social equals, looking to numbers and persuasive ability, with a strong emphasis on good manners.

roy belmont @404:

“they haven’t achieved complete moral and cultural enlightenment.”

But that’s precisely what isn’t possible to achieve. Just who would decide upon that?