Int Rev Econ DOI 10.1007/s12232-015-0242-z RESEARCH ARTICLE
Accumulation as eternal recurrence: theology of the bad infinity Robert Urquhart1
Received: 13 October 2014 / Accepted: 19 August 2015 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015
Abstract The paper re-evaluates Schmitt’s (Political theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty, trans. George Schwab. Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2005: 36, 48, 65) claim that although all ‘‘significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’’; the theological was replaced in the nineteenth century by ‘‘exclusively scientific thinking’’; leading in the twentieth, to ‘‘the onslaught against the political,’’ in which it ‘‘vanishes into the economic or technical-organizational’’. Some modern political concepts, especially sovereignty, have theological origins; and economics claims to be pure positive science. Nonetheless, the political is necessarily worldly, whereas economics is theological in its origins and remains so. The political is worldly in accepting the principle of plurality as ‘‘the law of the earth,’’ taking worldly freedom as its aim (Arendt 1968: 146–50, Arendt in The life of the mind. Harcourt Brace and Company, New York, 1978: 19). Economics is theological first, because, like the one god, it is essentially singular and postulates an order beyond human knowledge and agency. Three stages of economic theology are sketched: the primitive theology of Adam Smith; the pseudo-theology of neoclassical economics; and the true theology of Marx’s account of capitalist accumulation. The paper uses Eliade’s (The myth of the eternal return or, cosmos and history, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series XLVI. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1965) account of the ‘‘archaic ontology’’ of pre-modern societies in which order is beyond human knowledge and agency; realizes itself through the eternal recurrence of archetypal agents and acts; and abolishes history. It also uses Agamben’s (The kingdom and the glory: for a theological genealogy of economy and government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2011) description of the development of the word oikonomia. It argues that the line of modern political thought based on sovereignty & Robert Urquhart
[email protected] 1
Department of Economics, University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA
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and regarded as central by Schmitt, is a politics that has been colonized by economics, and must be a form of domination. Liberation from economic theology can only come from a revival of a true politics that aims at freedom. It is true that such a politics has never yet succeeded in separating itself from domination (Clastres in Society against the state, trans. Robert Hurley. Urizen Books, New York, 1977); but that is the subject of another discussion. Keywords
Economic theology Domination Politics Freedom
JEL Classification
B1 B4 B5
It was the ‘strange God’ who perched himself side by side with the old divinities of Europe on the altar, and one fine day threw them all overboard with a shove and a kick. It proclaimed the making of profit as the ultimate and the sole purpose of mankind. Karl Marx And just because he’s human He doesn’t like a pistol to his head. He wants no workers under him, And no boss over his head. Bertolt Brecht
1 I Adam Smith never mentions Providence in the Wealth of Nations. This is striking because he appeals to it so frequently in The Theory of Moral Sentiments—along with other terms for the divine: Director of nature, Author of nature, Author of our nature, etc., from which it is clear that nature overall is providentially ordered—and in contexts sufficiently similar to some in the Wealth of Nations. Thus, the ‘‘invisible hand’’ in The Theory of Moral Sentiments is the hand of Providence (Smith 1976a: IV.I.10). We can speculate on the reason for the difference—my own opinion is that he was seeking a sober, ‘‘scientific’’ presentation in the later work on which the appearance of Providence would have jarred—but there is no way of knowing. We are, I think, on stronger ground in taking it that he continued to see Providence at work in the human world: that is, the invisible hand of the Wealth of Nations is also the hand of Providence, and the ‘‘natural course of things’’ is laid down by the Author of nature. We are on stronger ground here for a number of reasons. First, the place of Providence is not modified in the successive editions of The Theory of Moral Sentiments published before and after 1776.1 Second, many arguments in the Wealth of Nations sound very much like the providential arguments of The Theory of Moral 1
Note especially the sameness of the providential language in the first edition (1759) to additions made in the sixth, published in 1790 (for example, Smith 1976a: III.2.31; VI.ii.3.2). For an account of the successive editions see Smith (1976a: 34–46).
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Sentiments: for example, the role of the propensity to exchange; the foolishness of the nobility in the late middle ages; and, of course, the invisible hand itself (Smith 1976b: I.ii; III.iv.10; IV.ii.9). Third, nature, as an organizing force producing harmony and prosperity, is present throughout the Wealth of Nations: in the propensity to exchange; ‘‘the obvious and simple system of natural liberty’’; and, perhaps above all, in ‘‘the natural course of things’’ (Smith 1976b: I.ii.1; IV.ix.51; e.g., I.x.a.1, I.xi.m.9). All that is missing is the explicit ascription to nature of a providential design. Providence pervades the Wealth of Nations in all but name. The market, realizing itself through the pursuit of individual self-interest in the endless repetition of the system of exchange relations allied with the division of labor, is a natural and so providential order. Smith’s commitment to arguments from Providence was distinctly old-fashioned in his own time. Hume, Steuart, and Ferguson, for example, do not make such arguments. But the argument of the Wealth of Nations was the future of the great science of economics. The primary claim of this science, set forward by Smith, is that the naturally self-equilibrating market is beyond human knowledge and agency: ‘‘no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient’’ to comprehend or direct its course (Smith 1976b: IV.ix.51). Smith thus establishes a necessary theological basis for economics that can be understood through Mircea Eliade’s account of the ‘‘archaic ontology’’ of eternal recurrence. In this ontology, first, order is beyond human knowledge and agency; second, it realizes itself through the eternal recurrence of archetypal agents and acts; third, in its realization it abolishes history (Eliade 1965: 3–6). In regard to Smith, two things are to be noted. First, the archaic ontology is only barely ‘‘secularized’’: that is, Smith himself seems to think that the order of the market is providential and divine.2 Second, the order is beyond human knowledge or agency and realizes itself through the endless repetition of the archetypal act of exchange. In this, it effects an escape from politics: the automatic order of the market largely dispenses with external political requirements. Government is reduced to administration.3 But however important the escape from politics may be, Smith cannot see his way to abolishing history. He does not think that the order (providential as it is) can guarantee everlasting prosperity (Smith 1976b: II.v.22; III.iv.20; I.viii.43, I.ix.14, 15). There is, then, a contradiction between the providential perfection of the order and its ultimate tendency toward dissolution. For these reasons, I will characterize Smith’s view as a primitive theology of economics. Smith’s view stands in contrast to modern mainstream economics in its developed neoclassical form, which may see itself as an advance insofar as it can claim to have abolished history along with politics. It can do so by the double reduction of all to the single, isolated individual, and to a quantitative formulation in which everything can be measured on a single quantitative scale. This is much more than a ploy to guarantee the dominance of quantitative models. The single, isolated individual conceived as 2
For Eliade, the archaic ontology distinguishes pre-modern from modern, but he also notes its secularized reappearance in the modern, and, in particular, in political economy (Eliade 1965: 3, 146).
3
The account of the proper functions of government, setting tasks that are ‘‘plain and intelligible to common understandings’’ makes this clear (Smith 1976b: IV.ix.51). The account, in the Lectures on Jurisprudence, of the greater need for police in Paris than in London also makes clear that the free and secure functioning of the market reduces the need for police and for policy (Smith 1978: 332–3).
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eternal and unchanging in nature is the necessary entity of the economic order from which the quantitative formulation follows. All individuals, in all times and places, adhere to the same logic of choice. Lionel Robbins’s celebrated definition of economics already makes this clear, later rational choice accounts only formalize the idea more fully (Robbins 1935: 16; Becker 1976a). All choices can be aggregated, just as all individuals can be aggregated: this is taken for granted with easy nonchalance in the textbooks today.4 But the principle that the whole is nothing more than the sum of individuals and their choices is already enunciated by Bentham (1988: 3).5 Its implications are most fully developed by J.B. Clark, who says, first, that ‘‘measurements of utility are never made by any other than a single independent being,’’ and that Society as ‘‘one great isolated being’’ is such, just as is Robinson Crusoe on his island (Clark 1967: 81). Second, the individual human being is the atomic unit of society, and, ‘‘like the monad of Leibniz,’’ is a perfect microcosm, ‘‘a mirror of the universe’’ (Clark 1967: 90). Society is an individual, and the individual is society in miniature. No gap in aggregation is possible. This singular structure has a curious modus operandi: an automatic process leads to the best result, yet the result is instantaneous, occurring without the passage of time. In the primary and defining case, a limited mass of natural resources is allocated among an unlimited mass of human wants. The resources, having been parceled out as original endowments of individuals, are allocated through exchange so as to satisfy wants (maximize utility) to the greatest possible extent. Edgeworth’s (1881) pure exchange model is the paradigmatic example.6 The mechanism of the market is so perfect that time and history are of no significance—it will bring about the maximizing result. In the lapidary assertion of Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian: ‘‘Technology changes. Economic laws do not’’ (Shapiro and Varian 1999: 2). Politics is reduced to the economic order, simply added to the circular flow diagram as another agent making choices according to the same maximizing logic as the others.7 This static model, far from being a limitation, is the necessary embodiment of market order. In contrast to Smith, with whom the plural is still all too evident, politics and history can be eliminated through the singularity of the order: it is all one thing. In neoclassical economics division of labor is eliminated as a necessary element of economic theory.8 4
For example: ‘‘The choices that people [individuals] make, when added up, translate into societal choices’’ (Case et al. 2014: 2). Hicks’s discussion of consumer demand is also useful here, for he says that a ‘‘study of individual demand is only a means to the study of market demand’’, but we get to the market demand curve simply by adding up individual demand curves (Hicks 1946: 34).
5
The single quantitative scale also goes back to Bentham; but Jevons has a particularly clear formulation: pain and pleasure connected as -, 0, ?: the negative and the positive linked by zero (Jevons 1957: 58). 6
It is worth noting that although allocation occurs through exchange, exchange is never necessary— individuals can always stick with their original endowment. Need does not enter in (see below).
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Becker is particularly important here as most consistent in recognition of the need to reduce all to ‘‘the economic approach to human behavior’’ (Becker 1976a). The reduction of household to firm most clearly expresses the logic of this approach (Becker and Michael 1976b).
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Robbins’s marvelously snobbish contempt for discussions of the division of labour enforces its elimination from serious theoretical consideration. The exaggerated tone may also reflect a half conscious recognition of the ideological character of the move (Robbins 1935: 65, 70).
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Neoclassical economics—most notably in the model of general equilibrium— gives an exhaustive quantitative representation of the market order. It nonetheless leaves intact the primary claim that the market is beyond human knowledge or agency: for all its precision, the model shows that not we, but the market, knows best. We must recognize the oddness of this. No one makes such a claim for the family or the state, for example, or any other field of human endeavor. Nor is it the kind of claim made by science. Scientists will always acknowledge that there are things that they do not know, but not that the central element of their particular study is in principle unknowable. There is, of course, a place where just such claims are made and that is in the realm of theology (and this is why it made sense to invoke the theological in regard to Smith). The economic order is supposed to function entirely through immanent laws, usually treated as in some way natural (as is suggested by the assertion of Shapiro and Varian); and neoclassical economics claims the status of value-free positive science. But the demand is immediately put in question by the character of the result of the process as the best possible. For this strongly suggests some agency outside of the order itself, and the continued appeal to the image of the invisible hand—both by economists and by lay defenders of the market order—reinforces the suggestion. The continued assertion of the primary claim, with its theological aura, is thus explained. Neoclassical economics secretly retains the role of the providential that was only barely veiled in the Wealth of Nations. The providential (or theological) element cannot be admitted explicitly, but it must remain: science, it seems, is not quite enough. Belief—and belief in a mystery—is needed also. The uneasy cohabitation of science and theology in neoclassical economics is an indication of its ideological character.9 The entangling of theological and scientific permits an elision of the positive and the normative in which each can either support or hide behind the other as need arises. The market as best is demonstrated by the impenetrable ‘‘scientific’’ complexity of the model’s apparatus, while the austerity of quantitative technique is humanized by the claim for social welfare. The instantaneity of the process avoids challenge just because we know that the result is the best possible—we know, that is, that we are not meant to plumb the mystery, and must not seek to, lest we share the shame of doubting Thomas.10 Instantaneity also supports the necessary claim that the entire order is the result of autonomous individual choices— choices by independent individuals with no necessary relation to one another—and that all these choices are embodied in exchange.11 Since the primary case, the paradigm for all others, has no production, production can be treated as derivative. No account of an articulated process of production and exchange permitting the 9
‘‘If the lion had consciousness, his rage at the antelope he wants to eat would be ideology’’ (Adorno 1973: 349).
10 Or worse than shame, as is suggested by the answers given by Augustine and Luther to the question: ‘‘‘What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?’ ‘He was getting hell ready for people who pry too deep.’ And ‘He sat in the forest, cutting rods to beat those who ask impertinent questions’’’ (Agamben 2011: 162). Doubt would at least constitute the crime of le`se-majeste´ against the sovereignty of the market. 11
Individuals must ‘‘be free from social values … or any values which are not completely manifested in market dealing’’ (Knight 1921: 78).
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reproduction of the system as a whole has to be given.12 Here again we see why the division of labor must be eliminated as a necessary theoretical category, both because it imposes a necessary structure on the economy; and because it creates necessary social relations of production according to which society is divided into classes. For it follows that the sum of individual and random exchanges motivated by the sum of subjectively autonomous individual choices cannot possibly generate the economic order.13 Marx makes a similar critique of those whom he names the ‘‘vulgar economists’’ (Marx 1977: 174, fn. 34; 732–3; 1002–3). This ideological formation rests on two theoretical displacements. First, needs are displaced by wants. Each individual begins with an initial endowment and can simply remain with it. Exchange is the central mechanism of the system, but it is never necessary.14 The naturally unlimited character of wants follows from this. There is no necessary minimum, but individuals always want more. Scarcity then guarantees a maximizing result. The ideological character of the elimination of need is particularly apparent in regard to the supply of labor: like any other suppliers, suppliers of labor do not need to supply it. Second, history is displaced by nature. The same unchanging economic laws lie behind all differences and all historical change. This does create an odd ambiguity: on the one hand, the same thing is always happening in all societies across history; there is nothing distinctive about the modern, and certainly nothing distinctive about capitalism. On the other hand, the free market clearly is the best, most natural, order, and earlier societies ‘‘irrationally’’ obstruct it. Marx has a lot of fun with this: ‘‘The economists have a singular way of proceeding. For them, there are only two kinds of institutions, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. … Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any’’ (Marx 1977: 175, fn. 35). But the ambiguity seems of little concern to economists. Neoclassical economics does recognize some real and historically determined features of the capitalist economy, albeit in mystified form, hypostatized as natural and unchanging. Unlimited wants are a proxy for the goal of unlimited accumulation. While ‘‘the egoistic bourgeois isolated artificially by capitalism … [with] an isolated individual consciousness a` la Robinson Crusoe’’ (Luka´cs 1971: 135) becomes the model for human nature. It celebrates the market, even recognizing it as capitalist, while also masking its specifically capitalist characteristics—and this is the point of finding nothing historically distinctive in capitalism. The ideological character of the theory makes it not only pseudo-science but also pseudo-theology. The failure of neoclassical economics both as science and as theology is preordained by the true theology of Marx. I say ‘‘true’’ here because Marx identifies the order of the capitalist mode of production with that of religion. Human beings 12 Robbins’s mockery of the ‘‘so-called theory of production’’ is again relevant here, as is the curt dictum: ‘‘The problem of technique and the problem of economy are fundamentally different problems’’ (Robbins 1935: 35, 65). 13
Becker, again, is very well aware of the issue here, and when he gloats about ‘‘the problems created … by the human capital concept’’ for the ‘‘belief in the exploitation of labor by capital’’ (Becker 1993: 16), he seems also to have a clear understanding of the enormous ideological significance of human capital theory. 14
Yet again, the need to eliminate division of labour as a necessary category is clear.
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project ideas and purposes into the world, forming social relations and a human world of use things, but these ideas and purposes return as objective structures of domination (Marx 1977: 165, Marx and Engels 1975: 331). Theology and capitalism are the products of human agency; they are true because the objective structures are real. But because this reality is human, its laws can be broken and negated (Adorno 1973: 355). Capital in the person of the capitalist, Marx (1977: 739) says, ‘‘ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake’’. But the goal is not the production of use-values; nor even of value; but the production of surplus-value, the substance and subject of unlimited accumulation (Marx 1977: 1037). This is the goal proclaimed by the ‘‘‘strange God’ … as the ultimate and the sole purpose of mankind’’ (Marx 1977: 918). The unlimited accumulation of capital occurs through an endlessly repeated cycle that changes only by continually expanding. The vast volume and enormous variety of useful things created by the uniquely productive power of capital exist only to serve as bearers of value, homogeneous and immaterial, while individuals exist only to serve as bearers of the necessary functions of capital through which surplus-value is produced: capitalists and enterprises as personifications of their capital; those employed by them as bearers of homogeneous human productive activity. Archetypal repetition reappears. Individuals are only given meaning as atoms in an endlessly repeated process. But the archaic archetypes, acts and actors, had real content. Heroes and gods have their own characters, they do specific things, and these give meaning in later times to ordinary individuals and their actions. The capitalist ‘‘archetype’’, however, empties all individuals, all acts, and the system itself, of content. Nothing is real, nothing has meaning except in the purely formal and quantitative dimension of surplus-value. Unlimited accumulation of capital is the primary social instance of what Hegel calls a bad infinity: the formless and indeterminate infinity that is nothing but the possibility of always adding one more (Hegel 1975: 137–8). The infinity is both of endless repetition and of increasing quantity through accumulation. It brings out another contrast with the archaic. In the archaic eternal recurrence the point is what recurs and its archetypal meaning. With accumulation, the only point is the recurrence itself, devoid of all meaning. No other goal exists than to continue accumulation (Marx 1977: 254). It might seem, then, that another contrast with the archaic is that whereas the archaic order is backward looking, accumulation looks forward, constantly moving into a new future. But this is not so. Looking backward is something that they share. Accumulation also seeks to put a stop to history and to time. The claim of capital to be forward looking lies in unparalleled technological innovation, unimaginable before. But in spite of the possibilities for a just and humane society thereby opened, the only real purpose of all this extraordinary change and innovation, with all its intelligence and skill, is the maintenance of the established exploitative order. (In this way, the assertion of Shapiro and Varian quoted above is accurate at least as a description of the capitalist mode of production). The only significant change is that capital becomes more adequate to its concept. Change is the progressive loss of substantial content or meaning as the concept works to reduce the concrete heterogeneity of the world to identity with itself (Adorno 1973). With accumulation, as with the archaic order, it is the first event that is repeated.
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However inadequate the neoclassical attempt to eliminate time and history, it does point to a real aim of capital, though one realized very differently than the general equilibrium model. The capitalists impose the passage of time on workers, making them give up their lives to the production of surplus-value through alienated labor. It is true that the capitalists also will age and die, but not overly fanciful to suggest that in accumulation they store time, and store it for themselves. Just as they make alienation their own property (Marx and Engels 1975: 36), so the endless temporal cycle of accumulation is their own. Capital lays claim to a standing outside of time, or, rather, to being the absolute concept within time as eternal that regulates all else by subjecting it to the passage of time. The corporation, capital personifying itself as potentially immortal, gives a new and concrete reality to this concept. Capital is as ruthless to the capitalists as it is to the laborers: it alone survives. But the capitalists, personifications of capital, are truly selfless, they are ‘‘truly [themselves] only, and precisely, insofar as [they] cease to be so’’ (Eliade 1965: 34). What they give themselves up to, however, is meaningless, the bad infinity can have no other content than its own empty repetition. If what Adorno says of the absolute idealists can more or less be said of the capitalists, it hardly has the same stature in this application: ‘‘They glorify time as timeless, history as eternal—all for fear that history might begin’’ (Adorno 1973: 332). This fear gives the full measure of the emptiness, the triviality of capital behind its vast, self-important and world-spanning apparatus, in showing just how far the capitalists are willing to go in order to prevent history—a truly human history—from beginning. Marx’s true theology reveals the capitalist mode of production as a system of domination operating through objective, seemingly natural, laws that are in reality social relations and products that develop through the objectification of human purposes. It not only accounts for the ideological character of mainstream economics, including the neoclassical version, but also shows the ground of its mystifications in the commodity form, and the appearance of formal freedom and equality. Oddly, however, neoclassical economics, in the ideal model of perfect competition, comes remarkably close to unmasking the structures of domination that it works so hard to conceal. For in this model, individuals have absolutely no control over the conditions they face and can never do other than the one thing that these conditions dictate to them: the freedom that individuals are supposed to have in perfect competition is the negation of freedom (Urquhart 2012).15
2 II This account of the primitive, pseudo-, and true theologies of economics indicates the need for a substantial re-evaluation of Carl Schmitt’s famous claim that, while all ‘‘significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’’; in the nineteenth century the theological element was 15 Indeed, the model may be seen as a particularly crude version of Marx’s ‘‘theology’’, in that the subjective desires of individuals are objectified and aggregated in the market supply and demand curves, and it is these that then dominate individuals as an objective order beyond their control.
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repressed and replaced by ‘‘exclusively scientific thinking’’; leading, in the twentieth, to ‘‘the onslaught against the political,’’ in which it ‘‘vanishes into the economic or technical-organizational’’ (Schmitt 2005: 36, 48, 65). It is true that many modern political concepts, especially the concept of sovereignty, have theological origins; and it is also true that economics lays claim to the status of pure positive science. But we have already seen that this claim masks the theological origins of economics; we now need to understand that the theological origins of some modern concepts notwithstanding, the political is primarily, and necessarily, worldly. It is so, first, in that, in contrast to the singularity of economics, the political always answers to the plurality of the world (Arendt 2005: 93).16 All later developments in the West are bound to the origin of politics in the ancient Greek polis. The political, for the polis, is a public sphere in which citizens come together as equals in speech and action for the purpose of freedom; the political, therefore, must be plural: it takes place among many (Arendt 1958: 175–7, 1968: 148). The two things, many equals and the goal of freedom, form the core of the political, and its necessary worldliness. The political is constituted in the world by the citizens, individuals: it is in them, or nowhere. Politics depends on no other order. Pericles makes this clear in the Funeral Oration, telling the Athenians, today, that they are the equals not only of their fathers, but of the ancestors who founded Athens, and of the heroes sung by Homer (Thucydides 1972: 144–8). But it follows from this, also, that the course of the political is necessarily unpredictable: founded on speech and action, it partakes of the unique human capacity to begin (Arendt 1968: 165–71). The order of the polis is among equals; it requires nothing else to constitute itself. But, materially, it does require another order: that of the household (oikos), dedicated to the necessities of the life process, and defined by inequality and domination (Arendt 1958: 32). The household is ruled by the master—despote¯s in Greek, dominus in Latin—who is husband, father, and owner of slaves, as well as citizen of the polis. The master’s rule is by oikonomia, usually translated as ‘‘art of household management’’. Two passages from the Aristotelian corpus show the significance of the distinction between polis and oikos while also foreshadowing the entire future development of politics, economics, and their relation to one another. First, at the beginning of Politics, II, in asking how unified a polis should be, Aristotle develops the argument at the beginning of book I against Plato’s contention that a polis is a large oikos, an oikos a small polis, by rejecting Socrates’ claim in the Republic that it should be as unified as possible (Aristotle 1984a: 1252a9–13, 1986; 1261a14–16, 2001)17: it is obvious ‘‘that a polis may at length attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a polis … since the nature of a polis is to be a plurality’’: in becoming more unified it will turn into a family and then into an individual (Aristotle 1984a: 1261a16–17, 2001, replacing ‘‘state’’ with ‘‘polis’’). 16 The line of thought here and in all that follows has some similarity to the far more intricate argument of Giorgio Agamben (2011), though ending in a quite different place. However, Agamben does not recognize the significance of the distinction between plural and singular, hence between politics and economics—and this is odd, because he has read Arendt, although he does not mention her in this book. 17 In citations from Aristotle I give page numbers for the Revised Oxford Translation along with the standard Bekker references.
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This gradation is the inverse of another: a household is more self-sufficient than an individual, a polis is more self-sufficient than a household (Aristotle 1984a: 1261b10–12, 2002). The citizens of a polis must not only be many but must also be different from one another: the move from polis to household to individual is toward greater and greater homogenization (Aristotle 1984a: 1261a22–4, 2001). The second passage, from the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise on Economics, says, simply, that whereas politics is concerned with many rulers ‘‘the sphere of economics is a monarchy’’ (Aristotle 1984b: 1343a3–4, 2130).18 Rule in the household, as singular, is not political. In the Politics, Aristotle says that there are three different kinds of rule in the household, corresponding to its three distinctive relations: despotic for that of the master to his slaves; kingly (so monarchical) for the father to his children. He does describe that between husband and wife as political, but this is not really so: the husband, as superior, always rules the wife; and there is just one husband, one wife (Aristotle 1984a: 1259a38–1259b16, 1998). Aristotle is not only distinguishing the oikos from the polis, but also showing the danger to the polis of becoming too much like an oikos. That he had good reason to see danger is shown in the future of the two. Domination in the oikos nullifies freedom and equality in the polis: and the oikos exacts revenge on the polis in practice. Already in Greece, the Hellenistic schools turn away from the polis, and Stoicism, in particular, develops the image of oikonomia as the order of the cosmos as a whole—the cosmos as household embodying an absolute order. But the difference between Greek and Roman is crucial. The political is less developed in Rome, and the household has a far more commanding place. Moreover, the dominus, with patria potestas, has the power of life and death over all within his domus—domination is absolute. Within the Roman orbit, two vast developments occur. First, the political order of the Republic, such as it is, is annihilated by the economic order of the Empire. Second, Christianity, become the Roman state religion, takes on the imperial economic form. In these, economy—oikonomia—never loses its link with the household.19 In the later Roman Empire this is obvious: the Emperor is Dominus. But even in the earlier period the paternal character of the Emperor was a part of the effort to show that no real break with the Republic had occurred. Christianity is founded on the image of the family, and God’s rule is always that of Father. Oikonomia does not move away from the household, the Emperor’s household has become the world, and God’s the entire universe. (Needless to say, this is a tremendously over-simplified account: Rome transformed Christianity, but Christianity also transformed Rome; moreover, the meaning of the term ‘‘oikonomia’’ developed, and not only in a single manner. 18 The author of the Economics was familiar with Aristotle’s views, but also departs from them: for example, he says that the oikos and oikonomia, are prior to the polis and politics (in which Bodin and Montchre´tien will follow him, see below); but, especially, he turns oikonomia into a general function with no necessary connection to the oikos, speaking of the oikonomia of a king, a satrap, a polis, and an individual; moreover, the function is above all that of providing revenue (Aristotle 1984b: 1343a14–16, 2131; 1345b11–13, 2134; e.g., 1345b29–31, 2134). 19
Giorgio Agamben’s account of the development of the concept of oikonomia from its Aristotelian origins through the early Church fathers is valuable, although he does not sufficiently recognize the continuing presence of the household, and, thus, the fundamental distinction between the oikos and the polis, economic and political, singular and plural (Agamben 2011).
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But what must be emphasized here is the coming together of Empire and Christianity in the continuing relation of oikonomia to the household.) With the emergence of absolute monarchy in the early modern period, the Imperial and the Christian come fully together. Jean Bodin, and Antoyne de Montchre´tien attest to this. For Bodin, (1955: 1, 6) it is not only that a commonwealth is ‘‘the rightly ordered government of a number of families … by a sovereign power,’’ but also that ‘‘the well-ordered family is a true image of the commonwealth, and domestic comparable with sovereign authority’’. Sovereignty is perpetual, absolute, and indivisible, and its most adequate embodiment is hereditary monarchy (Bodin 1992: 1, 27). The subjects of the sovereign are bound absolutely by the laws given to them by him, he answers only to the laws of God and nature (Bodin 1992: 13, 23, 25). God stands to the monarch as the monarch stands to his subjects, and the head of the household stands to its members: each stands as father. Moreover, among all earthly rulers—the prince, the magistrate, the captain, the master, etc.—only the father ‘‘has a natural right to command … the father, who is the image of Almighty God, the Father of all things’’ (Bodin 1955: 12). The family is model for the commonwealth, the father for the sovereign. Montchre´tien adds a technical term: political economy (e´conomie politique).20 ‘‘Economy’’ continues to mean ‘‘art of household management,’’ political economy is the art of management of the king’s household, that is, of the entire kingdom.21 The family, once more, is the model: ‘‘good domestic government is the patron and model of the public [government]’’; and since the ‘‘house comes before the city; the city before the province; the province before the kingdom22 … the art of politics depends on the mediation [de´pend mediatement] of the economic’’ (Montchre´tien 1889: 17–18, my translation for this and other citations from Montchre´tien).23 Providence assigns everyone to their proper place at birth, so that there is ‘‘one and the same spirit bringing about [operant] all things in all’’ (cf. Agamben 2011: chap. 5). Political economy must—‘‘only and principally’’—imitate Nature, but it cannot leave the management of things up to Providence and Nature. The ancients were wrong to think that they could do this. Active management by ‘‘the police of the State’’ (la police de l’Estat) is required (de Montchre´tien 1889: 14, 18, 15). Here again the family is model and mediator: ‘‘in the State as well as in the family’’ people need to be directed according to ‘‘their particular and proper inclination’’ (de Montchre´tien 1889: 31).
20
Variants of the term can be traced back to the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics, but Montchre´tien, in the Traicte´ de l’Œconomie Politique (1615), is the first to use it in a title as the general name for the subject matter of his treatise.
21 The pseudo-Aristotelian Economics had detached oikonomia from the household, and treated it as a general function; but the Christian usage had returned it to the management of God’s household (see fn. 19, and Agamben 2011: 23–5, though Agamben tends to lose sight of this). 22
This formulation is derived from Bodin, and, ultimately, from the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics, see fn. 18.
23 Montchre´tien’s prose is, to put it crudely, quite rough and ready. What he means is usually clear, but often does not follow the rules of later French grammar and syntax; it is often hard to translate literally and smoothly at the same time.
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As the father in economy, so the king is the central figure in political economy; and as the father is the image of God, so the king ‘‘must execute on earth the functions of God’’ (de Montchre´tien 1889: 336). Among many images of the king, the central one for Montchre´tien is that of the king as patron of his subjects (e.g., de Montchre´tien 1889: 337). ‘‘Patron’’ (in French) is a complicated term: etymologically, it comes from the father; its Roman use, of patron as related to client, is very clearly defined; it also means patron saint; finally, it refers (more colloquially) to the master (and in the feminine, the mistress) of domestic servants.24 Montchre´tien draws on all of these meanings: The patronal embraces God, family, and the superior who protects an inferior. In political economy as a patronal system, the king realizes Providence (God’s will) on earth. The necessary relation (liaison) between him and his subjects, as that between the master and the members of his household, is that of ‘‘right commandment [and] faithful obedience’’ (de Montchre´tien 1889: 18).25 Oikonomia is the foundation of political economy. The central characteristic of oikonomia in its long career, and through all its transformations, from the ancient household to global capitalism is illuminated by the insistence of both Bodin and Montchre´tien on the vital necessity of restoring to the father his ancient power of life and death over wife, children, and slaves (Bodin 1955: 12; Montchre´tien 1889: 344); and this in turn reveals the true character of sovereignty as principle of state power. Bodin distinguishes two forms of legitimate monarchy, both wielding sovereign power: royal monarchy, in which subjects are secure in their persons and property; and despotic monarchy, in which the prince ‘‘governs his subjects as absolutely as the head of a household governs his slaves … [He] is master of both [their] possessions and [their] persons’’ (Bodin 1955: 56–7, 61). The third form, tyrannical, is not legitimate. Bodin (1955: 58) views royal monarchy as the fitting form for Europe. But the image of sovereignty is the father’s rule over the family, including the power of life and death over wife and children: that is, a despotic power over both their possessions and their persons. That the almost logical necessity of this was understood at the time emerges from Walter Benjamin’s great work on seventeenth-century Trauerspiel: ‘‘the theory of sovereignty which takes as its example the special case in which dictatorial powers are unfolded, positively demands the completion of the image of the sovereign, as tyrant’’ (Benjamin 1998: 69). Despotism always stands very close behind royal monarchy, in waiting; and the despot is always potentially a tyrant. Sovereignty as a ‘‘political’’ principle implies despotism. But sovereignty is founded on the despotic power of the head of the household: it is not a political principle at all, it is an economic one. The head of the household—despote¯s, dominus—commands. Wife, children, slaves do not answer him, they obey. Where 24
It later comes to mean ‘‘employer’’ or ‘‘boss’’ as well.
25
The Traicte´ was dedicated (in 1615) to Louis XIII, then 14 years old; and to the queen mother, Marie de’ Medici, then serving as regent. Montchre´tien certainly adhered to Disraeli’s dictum that when addressing royalty you should lay it on with a trowel. Within two years, Louis took control in a coup, exiling his mother to Blois, and executing her closest supporters. Montchre´tien finally despaired of the existing conditions, and joined the Huguenot rebellion. He was caught, killed, and his body dragged through the streets. If he is the patron of political economists, we may at least pray to him to be spared his fate.
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only one speaks, language is no longer discourse at all, ‘‘it communicates decision, dictum, command’’ (Marcuse 1991: 101). But what is true of the household is true of the state in which a sovereign rules. The monarch, as sovereign, ‘‘banished the citizens from the public realm into the private realm … and monopolized for himself the right of action’’ (Arendt 1973: 130). The public realm now becomes private, the household of the monarch, ruled as any other household is ruled, despotically. The singularity of the monarch, commanding, turns government into a mechanism. Since the Roman Empire the basic form of government has been ‘‘economic and technical-organizational,’’ not political. Patronal political economy as the exercise of sovereign power is a focal point for understanding the economic in general. But it is not recognized as such because it is so completely rejected by the more developed order that succeeds it, creating the confused idea of a seeming assault of economics on ‘‘politics,’’ whether seen positively or negatively. But what has really happened is only that economy in its development moves beyond patronal political economy. Both monarch and household have become inadequate for its functioning. What has changed and what has remained the same? The place of the household has changed. The new order, as theory, corresponds to the actual emergence of what Karl Polanyi calls the disembedded economy, distinct both from household and state (Polanyi 1971). The family ceases to be a center of production (so, of economic activity); and the economy, now standing on its own, is governed by impersonal market forces. What has not changed is the grounding of economy in domination. But if this is so, then from where does economic order now come? Is it still directed by a sovereign power? Adam Smith has already given us the answers to these questions. Order has been returned to Providence and Nature—with whom, according to Montchre´tien, the Ancients had erroneously placed it—and sovereignty, snatched back into the heavens, is taken from the monarch and given to the invisible hand.26 The economy, now a sphere of competitive interaction ordered by impersonal market forces, stands in a contradictory relation to the private sphere of the household. On the one hand, it tends to dissolve the private sphere into itself, subjecting it to its domination. On the other hand, the family, freed from oikonomia, ceases to be founded on the principle of domination and becomes a truly personal realm of intimate relations, at least potentially opposed to the domination of the market. Neoclassical economics, showing its own inner commitment to domination here, assumes that only the first tendency exists: no theoretical distinction between economy and private sphere is possible.27 Each individual is an isolated, atomic entity interchangeable with all others, a specimen. This extreme view shows how domination continues to function, and becomes more effective, in the new market 26 Foucault’s discussion of the contrast between Smith and the Physiocrats is very valuable here (Foucault 2008: 284–6). Smith’s rather ironic reference to the actual, temporal, sovereign (Smith 1976b: IV.ix.51), that Foucault describes as ‘‘hypocritical’’, itself points to where real sovereignty lies. 27
Thus, in the demand curve, no distinction can be made between wanting, choosing, buying, and using, all subject to the same law. The identity of household and economy is made explicitly in Becker’s theory of consumption, with the household actually becoming a firm (Becker and Michael 1976), but it is the necessary implication of the neoclassical assumptions.
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order. Economy is no longer an art practiced by individuals—dominus or king. It is the inner order of the system, operating such that all individuals behave in the way that realizes the automatic process—that is, they cease to be individuals. In neoclassical economics, echoing the Christian idea of the harmony between free will and the will of God, all individuals are free to choose as they will, but they will make the equilibrating choice. The early political economists (especially the parsons) were far more brutally honest: so Joseph Townsend says that legal constraint or force is quite unnecessary, the spur of hunger will bring the industrious poor to heel by a ‘‘peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure’’ (Townsend, quoted in Marx 1977: 800; see also Polanyi 2001: 118–20). However viewed, though, the market conforms to what economy has always been: economic order, in principle and from the beginning, is domination, whether by the dominus (father, emperor, or king), by God, or by the market. The market, like the ancient father, has the power of life and death over all its children. This is to be seen in the normal condition of the working class in the Industrial Revolution; and in the recurrence of the worst conditions of the Industrial Revolution in every new industrialization: in the ‘‘normal’’ conditions of overwork, deprivation misery and oppression; and in the fires and the collapse of factories in which thousands die. All these things show, moreover, that the process of primitive accumulation is never completed and that its history will always continue to be written ‘‘in letters of blood and fire’’ (Marx 1977: 875). But the power of life and death continues in ‘‘advanced’’ capitalist countries also, in the little daily deaths of alienation, insecurity, unemployment, under-employment, and the continual petty theft by employers of their workers. As though in a strange kind of recognition, the market’s power of life and death is also to be seen, quite plainly if in sanitized form, in the neoclassical model of perfect competition. And it is visible in the core idea that the market is beyond human knowledge and agency, sovereign as objective law: so, just as the blest must feel no sympathy for the damned (Agamben 2011: 163–4), we, the lucky ones in the market lottery, must feel no sympathy for the slaves, the unemployed, the under-employed, the over-worked, the workers in sweatshops, etc., lest we impair the efficiency of the market. Political economy, whether in its patronal or its market form, does not politicize economy, it economizes politics. The state is no longer a polis. In the patronal form it is, rather, the despotic rule of the king over his household. In the market, order is beyond human knowledge, the king is inadequate. The political—the police functions of the state—can now to a large extent be taken over by the discipline of the market (as Townsend argues, and as Smith had already suggested). ‘‘Politics’’ had already been reduced to administration; now it can be reduced further. If the monarch was a skilled artisan, functionaries in the new order are simply machine operatives. The monarch is gone, and the state an appendage of the market. But the order is still single, sovereign, and best. Bentham’s first, lapidary sentence, in one of the new order’s fundamental texts, confirms its basis in sovereignty; its singularity; and the location of sovereignty beyond human control: ‘‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure’’ (Bentham 1988: 1, emphasis in original). The two masters ordain one single quantitative scale, positive and negative, on which
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everything that exists can be measured (Jevons 1957: 58); as they guarantee, in their purely subjective operation, the singularity of the social whole as nothing more than the sum of the individuals making it up (Bentham 1988: 3). Economics, the science of the new order, is the science of the single: the isolated individual, the atomized whole, where, as Clark understands, both individual and aggregate = 1. Economic theology as it emerges in Smith has a long pre-history, though one that it itself does not understand. It is the history of the long revenge of economy on politics; the subjection of the political to the economic; of freedom to domination. The political was always complicit in its own defeat, however, for although domination is always the betrayal of politics, the utmost the polis could achieve was to push domination outside itself, hidden away in the oikos. But the structures of domination created by the economy, and realized in the bad infinity of accumulation, can only be destroyed, if at all, by the political.
3 III Absolutist government is apolitical. The apolitical state order is continued and extended—both in theory and in practice—in the modern period, as can be seen in both Hobbes and Locke. Although the state is now understood to be purely instrumental (no more glory), it is an instrument of coercion over the people. The main line of bourgeois, individualist political theory, both liberal and conservative, continues from Hobbes and Locke, as apolitical political theory in which the state is the instrument of the economic order (Urquhart 2014). But there is, of course, another line of political thought, also going back to the beginnings of the early modern period, in a complicated relation to the absolutist-apolitical line, both looking back to ancient models. The term ‘‘civic humanism’’ is a valuable description of this other view, and its core is an ideal of citizenship grounded in virtue (Pocock 1975). It affirms plurality against singularity, and the single enemy against which it fights is the absolute monarch, who, monopolizing the public sphere destroys it. One form of this fight was the attempt to recreate the republican form of government; but this also required the recovery of speech as essentially public. Habermas describes this effort as the creation of a public sphere of rational-critical debate (Habermas 1989). Speech is, in its essence, plural: its deformation in the singularity of command and directive, though of immense force, contradicts this essence (see above). Civic humanism takes freedom and equality as its goals, and these are necessarily political in their constitution, they thus find expression in public happiness: the happiness of citizens engaging together in speech and action, and in this, constituting freedom and equality. Arendt, speaking of Montesquieu’s idea of the republic, brings these ideas together in a passage that must be quoted at length: The experience upon which the body politic of a republic rests is the beingtogether of those who are equal in strength, and its virtue, which rules its public life, is the joy not to be alone in the world. To be alone means to be without equals: ‘One is one and all alone and evermore shall be,’ as a
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medieval nursery rhyme dared to indicate what humanly can be conceived as the tragedy of one God. Only insofar as I am among equals am I not alone, and in this sense the love of equality that Montesquieu calls virtue is also gratitude for being human and not like God (Arendt 2005: 67). The absolutely worldly and plural character of the political, against any transcendent, singular order, is affirmed here, accepting all contingency, accident, possibility of failure. There is no other human world. The civic humanist attempt to recover the political maintains its distinctive character through the eighteenth century. But it is then progressively diluted and merged with the triumphant economic-administrative view of the state. Sovereignty is now the unanswerable sovereign power of the economic order, the new order, never before known, that no longer requires personal domination, but that operates as objective law, as though it were the enactment of God’s will on earth endlessly accumulating surplus-value without limit, for ever and ever, amen (Marx 1977: 1025–8). Henceforth it seems that any ‘‘political’’ debate must take place only on condition of acceptance of this order as given. As a result, politics comes to be seen either as irrelevant, or as the mere jockeying for position among interest groups: so all ‘‘political’’ positions other than one’s own are suspect. But politics in its original character as the speech and action of many together, constituting a public space of freedom and equality, has not disappeared: or, rather, it repeatedly reappears in a specific situation, that of revolution (Arendt 1968: 4–5). All modern revolutions (and ‘‘modern’’ here is strictly redundant) have begun with spontaneous popular uprisings creating forms of direct democracy that vary from revolution to revolution—corresponding societies, clubs, soldiers’ and workers’ councils—but which are similar in that they constitute a public space and establish a spontaneous and flexible field for speech and action. The use of social media in the Arab Spring was one more such form. This first moment of revolution, for which the image of spring is entirely appropriate—1848 was (and must always be remembered as) the springtime of peoples—has always, in every case, been crushed, or repressed, or pushed aside, in one way or another. That is, it has always failed, either in the overall defeat of the revolution (as in 1849), or, in the ‘‘successful’’ revolutions, in its supersession by the ‘‘professional’’ revolutionaries, the revolutionary parties which return the revolution to yet another version of the established economic-administrative order and the principle of sovereignty: the return to domination. But there is another common feature of the revolutionary springtime, something that has always been there in every revolution, and that is the extraordinary manifestation of public happiness in the revolutionary moment of speech and action itself. Hannah Arendt, borrowing a phrase from the great French poet and Resistance leader Rene´ Char, calls this happiness the lost treasure of revolutions, for it does not survive the springtime, and in the aftermath is forgotten as if it had never been—yet it always returns again when the people again take to the streets (Arendt 1968: 4–5, 1973: chap. 6). This public happiness, consciously or not, is happiness in the recovery of the political, where the political is the possibility of an order that is not based on domination. In trying to understand it, we can understand more of what the political is, and a way to do this is to follow a line of
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thought in Arendt’s work that shows both the connection between action and speech in the significance of action; and the way in which speech and language themselves, as necessarily arising from plurality, create a necessary link between speech and thought. Meaning is integral to action, action is always significant. This is why action requires speech, and why, Arendt argues, speech and action as such are the two things that necessarily occur among human beings, and that are unthinkable without plurality (Arendt 1958: 175–7). Language is the ground of plurality. Speech, as the enactment of language, is always dialogue; so, my thoughts, in language, are also dialogue. The inner, subjective, dialogue of thought (the two-in-one, as Arendt calls it) is only possible because of the outer dialogue with others. The basic principle for both inner and outer is simple: ‘‘the dialogue of thought can be carried out only among friends’’ (Arendt 1978: 189).28 Arendt herself says that this principle ‘‘has no political relevance unless special emergencies arise’’ (Arendt 1978: 192). Nonetheless, and on her own showing, it does illuminate both the political and its manifestation in public happiness.29 For it connects Montesquieu’s ‘‘joy not to be alone in the world’’ with the joy of dialogue, on the one hand, and the experience of speech and action together with others in the revolutionary moment on the other. John Adams’s remarkable statement, noted by Arendt, that the American Revolution succeeded because of the power of the revolutionaries to have ‘‘confidence in one another, and in the common people’’ (quoted in Arendt 1973: 181), is a completion of this line of thought as well as a sign of its actuality in political experience. Arendt’s view stands in the clearest contrast to Schmitt’s externalized concept of the political as founded on the distinction between friend and enemy, starting with what is between states (Schmitt 1996: 26). Within, the state aims to maintain a ‘‘normal situation … of total peace … tranquility, security, and order,’’ all unified under a single sovereign (Schmitt 1996: 46). There is never anything to talk about, only the decision by the one, sovereign power, modeled on the one, all-powerful God (Schmitt 2005: 59–64). Schmitt’s contempt for speech is made explicit in his acceptance of Donoso Corte´s’s definition of the bourgeoisie as the ‘‘discussing class’’. Bourgeois liberals never decide anything, they engage in endless and futile discussion, never admitting to enmity. But Schmitt’s politics is not what is in common among friends, but against enemies.
28 Michel Foucault, in an interview shortly before his death, makes a similar argument in different terms when asked why he did not engage in polemics: ‘‘In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation.’’ All involved accept this. ‘‘The polemicist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking … the person he confronts is … an enemy … whose very existence constitutes a threat’’ (Foucault 2003: 18–19). The description of the polemicist seems almost a direct reference to Schmitt’s definition of the political below. 29 Arendt says that attending the trial of Adolph Eichmann was one of the main things that led her to the study of mental activity, including thinking: for she came to see not only what Eichmann did, but Nazism itself as a failure of thought (Arendt 1978: 3–6).
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The state as sovereign will ‘‘decide also on the domestic enemy’’; and it holds ‘‘the verdict of life and death, the jus vitae ac necis’’ over its own subjects, just as against the external enemy in actual war (Schmitt 1996: 46). But the failure to understand the origins and character of sovereignty, its ground in the private realm, shows here also. Adorno, writing in the shadow of the Second World War, and what he regarded as the hollow victory over Nazism, understands the true meaning of the friend–enemy distinction: For the so-called man of affairs with interests to pursue, plans to realize, the people he comes into contact with are metamorphosed automatically into friends or enemies. … Anyone who has made it his concern to judge people’s suitability sees those judged, by a kind of technological necessity, as insiders or outsiders, as belonging or alien to the race, as accomplices or victims. The fixed, inspecting, hypnotic and hypnotized stare that is common to all the leaders of horror, has its model in the appraising look of the manager asking an interview candidate to sit down[.] … It means the equation of the dissimilar, whether it be the ‘deviationist’ or the members of a different race, with the opponent. In this respect National Socialism has attained to historical consciousness of itself: Carl Schmitt defined the very essence of politics by the categories of friend and enemy’’ (Adorno 2005: 131–2). Economy and state are continuous, ‘‘political’’ and economic sovereignty emerge from the domination imposed by the head on the members of his household. Of course, if the only point here was to attack Schmitt, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. But there is much more. Bourgeois liberals (and conservatives) share with critics such as Schmitt a false opposition between economics and ‘‘politics,’’ each asserting one against the other. Schmitt offers a useful summary, at once historical and conceptual. ‘‘The extraordinarily intricate [liberal] coalition of economy, freedom, technology, ethics, and parliamentarianism has long ago finished off its old enemy: the residues of the absolute state and a feudal aristocracy; and with the disappearance of the enemy, it has lost its original meaning. Now new groupings and coalitions appear.’’ With these, economy and technology no longer appear so innocently as the engines of continuing ethical progress. ‘‘Economy is no longer eo ipso freedom; technology does not serve comforts only, but just as much the production of dangerous weapons and instruments’’ (Schmitt 1996: 76). Putting aside Schmitt’s touching concern about the production of dangerous weapons, we can re-interpret this as follows. Liberalism did not so much finish off absolutism as bring its administrative-economic structure to a more adequate level. Domination and violence were always integral to the economic order, but in the nineteenth century they were at least partly hidden away in the factory districts and the colonies. Schmitt and the liberals are not so far apart after all. He champions the ‘‘political’’ against the economic, yet founds his idea of the political on an economic concept, sovereignty. Hayek, for example, as a representative of the liberalconservatives, champions the economic against the political. But his state must be coercive. He can neither limit the power of the state, nor eliminate the sovereignty essential to the economic order (Hayek 1960: 20–1; Urquhart 2014). Both sides confuse themselves by treating anything to do with the state as ‘‘political,’’ and then
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counterposing it to the economic—though each has its reasons for remaining confused. Both continue to support the order of domination that has changed so much, while yet in crucial ways invariant. So we return to consider again what has changed and what has remained the same. The economic order has always been one of domination; and, it must ensure that the same things continually be repeated. Economy must provide for the necessities of life, for the conditions of the life process (Arendt 1958: 96–100). Domination in familial and social relations answers to the domination of natural necessity over human life. Repetition arises from the continual recurrence of needs, domination from their commanding power. This is so for all three forms—ancient oikonomia, patronal political economy, and the market economy dedicated to accumulation. Domination and repetition are the invariants. How each operates, or, rather, how the former secures the latter, is what has changed: and this can now be elaborated further. Oikonomia and patronal political economy exist in orders that they only partially determine, performing a necessary function within the order, providing for its necessities. They are never simply the automatic life process, but are held by human relations, and by use things creating a human world, if one that is hierarchical and exploitative. Domination in both is direct, personal, ‘‘political’’ or religious; visible and understood, even if mystified as given by the will of God. Accumulation, by contrast, is an end in itself, everything else provides for it. This is why it can become an automatic process—if a self-contradictory one. The endless repetition, the bad infinity of accumulation becomes the only purpose and meaning. The human world of use things, on all scales, from the city to the knife and fork, are progressively deprived of meaning, and often of substance.30 The inversion by which the economy as accumulation of capital becomes the end not only allows the emergence of an automatic process, but also of domination as an objective, impersonal, order, ruling as though a law of nature. For, as Townsend foresaw, needs still must be satisfied: the power of capital is its monopoly on the means to satisfy needs in a situation in which all useful products are commodities (Marx 1977: 1002–4). Domination is the more total and inescapable because it seems to come from the nature of things, to which all acquiesce in their freedom to choose. How can a bad infinity ever end? The order of market and accumulation seems entirely different from the earlier economic orders. But all three are alike in domination and repetition: and economic rationality is the patria potestas of the dominus transmuted into objective and universal law. Moreover, once economy is freed from any wider, non-economic, order—once, to use Polanyi’s term, it becomes disembedded—then the logic of accumulation, of the bad infinity, will necessarily assert itself. In this way, the order of accumulation—the bad infinity of eternal recurrence—must be seen as the most complete, self-sufficient form of economy, limited only by its own inner contradictions. From its standpoint, the others seem incomplete, although just how this relation is to be understood is very much open to question. To state it in 30
‘‘Not least to blame for the withering of experience is the fact that things, under the law of pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus, either in freedom of conduct or in autonomy of things, which would survive as the core of experience, because it is not consumed by the moment of action’’ (Adorno 2005: 40).
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this way is neither to claim or deny a dialectical movement in economy.31 Any attempt to escape from economic domination faces a terrible dilemma. Marx sees liberation in overcoming the automatic character of the capitalist mode of production and replacing it with conscious social organization for the universal satisfaction of needs. By itself, however, rational control will not eliminate domination but maintain it. The order will remain economic and technical, guided by economic rationality as it coordinates a social system of large-scale production world-wide. ‘‘Social’’ individuals will have to conform to this order. Arendt claims that if ‘‘the October Revolution had been permitted to follow the lines prescribed by Marx and Lenin, which was not the case [that is, Stalinism supervened], it would probably have resulted in bureaucratic rule [the rule of nobody]’’ (Arendt 2005: 78). Her overall argument here is problematic, not least because of her very limited understanding of Marx’s theory, but the specific point is persuasive. However, Bakunin cannot solve the problem that he correctly identifies in Marx. Both anarchism and Marxism see the state, so, politics, as never anything other than an instrument of class domination, necessarily to be eliminated in a communist society. The difference is that Marx sees a necessary role for the state during the revolution, while Bakunin insists on its immediate elimination at the outset (Marx 1974: 333–8; Bakunin 1990: 137–8). But this difference has nothing to do with the future organization of the economy, and here Bakunin is close to Marx’s vision of worldwide social coordination of large-scale production. ‘‘Each person will, of course, be free to work alone or collectively. But there is no doubt that … collective labor will be preferred by everyone.’’ This is so because ‘‘association marvelously multiplies the productive capacity of each worker’’—a point taken directly from Marx (1977: 541); because of ‘‘the pressure of circumstances,’’ ‘‘the force of realities’’; because of ‘‘the very nature of the work’’ (Bakunin 1971: 92, 200, 285, 363).32 The worldwide coordination will be directed by ‘‘an industrial parliament, supplied by the associations [of worker cooperatives] with precise and detailed global-scale statistics’’ (Bakunin 1971: 93): in short, a worldwide technical order dictated by the objective exigencies of the economy. Bakunin turns from individual to collective property (Bakunin 1990: 198), silently accepting Marx’s critique of Proudhon. However, powerful this critique, though, it is Proudhon who holds to the basic goal of the escape from domination: the liberation of individuals. Neither Marx nor Bakunin can resolve the contradictions in their ideas of the individual. Marx cannot make up his mind between the true concrete uniqueness of the individual in all ‘‘his human relations to the world— seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving’’ (Marx 1975b: 351); and the social individual who will continue to be shaped by the ‘‘universal development of the productive forces’’ (Marx and Engels 1976: 47, 49) even after the revolution. This ambivalence— running through all his work, early and late—arises largely because he is so taken 31
‘‘Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape’’ (Marx 1973: 105). But this must not be read deterministically.
32 The last phrase is from James Guillaume’s ‘‘Ideas on Social Organization’’ (1874). Guillaume was a close friend and associate of Bakunin; this text expresses views developed in Bakunin’s circle (see Bakunin 1971: 356–7).
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with the large-scale, the total social system of production that will break apart the narrow framework of private ownership, outdoing the capitalists at their own game. Bakunin (1970: 55) seems so much more clearly on the side of the concrete individual imbued with life itself ‘‘wholly fugitive and temporary, but also wholly palpitating with reality and individuality’’. Science ‘‘concerns itself with individuals in general, but not with Peter and James’’ (Bakunin 1970: 58): but Peter and James and all other living individuals are what matter. Nonetheless, if individuals, absolutely free as they must be, do not accept the rules of the commune they will be left without its protection; just as a commune that does not accept the laws of the provincial federation of communes will not be entitled to its benefits or protection (Bakunin 1971: 81–3). Science must never be permitted ‘‘to govern Peter and James’’ (Bakunin 1970: 58): yet the industrial parliament must impose a sovereign technical order based on all the most up-to-date scientifically verified statistics on Peter and James and everyone else. The problem for both Marx and Bakunin is that the economic continues to be determining of individuality: but the economic is necessarily grounded in domination, enforced by the primary claim of economic theology that its workings are beyond human knowledge and agency—for even Marx and Bakunin see the imperatives of economic order as unanswerable. Liberation cannot come from the economy, nor from its transformation into a new kind of economic order that merely brings forth another form of domination and repetition. What is to be done? Clearly, neither bourgeois liberals and conservatives, committed as they are to economic domination; nor reactionaries such as Schmitt, who seek to escape from the economic through the absoluteness of sovereignty, have any answer. In a sense, though, the answer is simple. Politics must not wither away, it must be recovered and, for the first time, truly realized. Freedom and equality are political, not economic, concepts. But this is much too simple, and obviously brings forth the question: why on earth would anyone think that politics can be an escape from domination? The first part of an answer to this is entirely negative: if the domination invoked by economic theology is to be overcome, then it can only be overcome by the political—escape can only be rejection of theology and return to the worldly. But, then, is there any reason to think escape possible? A first step is to distinguish between the state and the political. The state is very generally understood to be, for good or ill, an instrument of domination. Marx, Bakunin, Bodin, Montchre´tien, Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Schmitt, and Hayek (naming only writers already mentioned here) hold this view. But if the state is always domination then the polis is a very odd state. The state relation is command and obedience between ruler and ruled. But in the polis citizens rule themselves together for the purpose of freedom: domination is explicitly rejected and relegated to the household. Domination remains necessary, but it is precisely not a political relation. So there is an important, though very tricky, distinction between politics and the state, on the understanding that we accept the definition of the state as an instrument of domination (and independently of whether we think that is a good or a bad thing). For the goal of the state so defined is to maintain order through a structure of command and obedience, while the goal of politics (the goal of the polis) is to
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realize the freedom and equality of citizens, and it is a goal that the citizens, together, must realize for themselves in speech and action. The apolitical view, in its liberal-conservative form, seeks to protect individuals from the state, while actually surrendering them to the economic order and its patria potestas. The political view offers the possibility of escape from this domination by denying sovereignty and thereby claiming the right to override the dictates of the economy. Beyond the political problem, what new kind of relation could be established with the economic to limit the hold of the claim that its rationality has the binding force of natural necessity? Marx, in two early texts, does suggest a solution at least to this second problem. In the 1844 Manuscripts he says: ‘‘man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need … hence man also produces in accordance with the laws of beauty’’ (Marx 1975b: 329). Human beings are free in relation to production; the law they follow is not that of necessity. In ‘‘Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy’’ (also from 1844), he contrasts the self-loss and impotence of production and exchange under the conditions of private property with the properly human production in which I objectify my individuality in the product, finding pleasure in experiencing my personality ‘‘as an objective sensuously perceptible power beyond all shadow of doubt.’’ In the reciprocal bond with you, another producer, I am confirmed ‘‘both in your thoughts and your love. … Our productions would be as many mirrors from which our natures would shine forth. … My labour would be the free expression and hence the enjoyment of life’’ (Marx 1975a: 277–8, emphasis in original). The singularity of the economic is rejected; all productive activity, even by one person, is grounded in plurality. Against the satisfaction of needs in a purely instrumental and self-regarding relation, stands the mutual expression of individuality, manifesting the necessary plurality of human life. The possibility of a life for individuals that is freely chosen even in the face of natural necessity, ordered by another kind of law, is enunciated. The rule of the ‘‘laws of beauty’’ cannot be that of the dominus. These are laws that can be freely taken on, freely determined, by individuals coming together (in speech and action). While a collective is singular individuality goes along with plurality, it points toward the possibility of breaking the hold of the transcendent and impersonal economic law realized in the political. The escape from the structures of domination of capitalism must come from a rejection of economic theology. The specific theological element is the postulation of the economic order as beyond human knowledge and agency, and it can only be rejected by embracing not only the worldliness but also the contingency of the political—that is, we must reject the comforting illusion of an order that we do not control, but that will still somehow take care of us. It requires, as Adorno says, breaking the hold of the totality, ‘‘the huge weight of historical necessity,’’ through recognition of the simple yet very hard claim that ‘‘[o]nly if things might have gone differently … [then] things might be different some day’’ (Adorno 1973: 323). But there is nothing easy in this, especially because the political itself has always hitherto so completely failed to reject its complicity with domination. Pierre Clastres, in a formulation that owes much to Marx, writes: ‘‘The political relation of power precedes and founds the economic relation of exploitation. Alienation is
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political before it is economic; power precedes labor; the economic derives from the political; the emergence of the State determines the advent of classes’’ (Clastres 1977: 167–8). This formulation—adjusting for the use of the word ‘‘political’’— does not exclude the polis. The truth of the liberatory potential of politics remains to be proved; and the problems it will raise may be more intractable even than the problem of economic theology, that of abolishing the bad infinity of the unlimited accumulation of capital. But that is the subject for another discussion.
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