Politics and economics: Beyond the contamination thesis Ryan Walter Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, 4072, Australia.
Abstract The relationship between politics and economic knowledge is contested. One general view claims that economics should be devoid of politics because of its corrupting effects, while another view posits the converse – that politics can be distorted by the impact of economic knowledge. Both views hold that the solution is to remove the influence of the one on the other. I construe these two broad views as variations on the same contamination thesis, the idea that politics and economics are separate domains and so should not contaminate one another. I suggest that this thesis is a version of the political/non-political distinction required by the ubiquitous ideal of a self-governing community, and that it therefore exhibits the limitations intrinsic to this ideal. The remedial possibilities of Michel Foucault’s investigations into governmentality are then briefly explored. Contemporary Political Theory (2011) 10, 444–462. doi:10.1057/cpt.2010.35; published online 12 July 2011 Keywords: economics; Foucault; Habermas; polis; Schmitt; self-government
There are multiple contesting views on what the relationship between politics and economic knowledge should ideally be and what it actually is. It is possible to impose order on the morass of views by noting whether it is economics or politics that is positioned as under threat from intrusions by the other. What I will call the view from economics is concerned that economics contains a political element and is made impure by it. That is, this view suggests that when economics is not neutral, or contains political bias, its intellectual integrity, and therefore its role as a neutral or scientific counsellor to politics, is compromised. The view from politics posits the converse – that politics is distorted by the impact of an economic knowledge that has exceeded the bounds it should have observed as a neutral counsellor. r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/
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This second view will be familiar to most political theorists, especially via theories of ideology critique and rationalization. As ideology, economic discourse naturalizes social relations through its benign representations of those relations in pseudo-scientific terms. Similarly, the rationalization thesis presents technical knowledge as reformatting social life according to a bureaucratic logic. Both views suggest that economics has improperly intruded into domains beyond its remit, and this mirrors the claim found in the view from economics that politics has ventured into economic knowledge where it does not belong. In this study I construe the view from economics and the view from politics as variations on the same contamination thesis: the claim that politics and economic knowledge are separate domains and so should not contaminate one another. I then argue that this general thesis is an inadequate attempt to preserve the ideal of a self-governing community, an ideal that we can be relieved of by turning to Michel Foucault’s investigations into governmentality. To be clear, this study is not pushing the hackneyed point that economics is a socially constructed knowledge; this argument is typically marshaled to refute claims regarding the scientificity and value-neutrality of economics. Instead, the question is what the existence of economics and the economy mean for the ideal of a self-governing community that, in one shape or another, informs the majority of contemporary political theory. The ideal of a selfgoverning community brings with it the idea of a sphere of political action and, by implication, an attending non-political sphere, as seen in the troubled but resilient public/private distinction. The contamination thesis is another example of the general political/non-political strategy that the ideal of self-government requires. It is the effectiveness of this tactic in relation to economics that I am concerned with. I proceed in three steps. First, the view from economics is set out. I consider some classic statements from Schumpeter and Myrdal, and then Marx, as specific instances of this version of the contamination thesis. Second, the view from politics is considered, with Habermas and Schmitt standing as divergent examples of the general way this view can be mobilized. Finally, I show how both perspectives rely on the same unsustainable demarcation between politics and economics, and suggest that Foucault’s study of the different political rationalities that inform governmental practices allows this difficulty to be elided.
The Contamination Thesis I: The View from Economics Joseph Schumpeter’s The History of Economic Analysis is a comprehensive effort in the history of economic ideas and a recognized classic in the field. He r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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is a good place to start because he represents a powerful tradition in the self-understanding of economics. This self-image is neatly captured in his claim that his work is a study of the progress of economic analysis, where progress is defined as movement towards the economics of the present: the new apparatus poses and solves problems for which the older authors could hardly have found answers even if they had been aware of them. This defines in a common-sense and at any rate a perfectly unambiguous manner, in what sense there has been ‘scientific progress’ between Mill and Samuelson. It is the same sense in which we may say that there has been technological progress in the extraction of teeth between the times of John Stuart Mill and our own. (Schumpeter, 1954, p. 39) Functioning in tandem with progress is Schumpeter’s category economic analysis, which is used to excise from the investigation all but ‘the analytic or scientific aspects of economic thought’ (Schumpeter, 1954, p. 3). This category allows systems of political economy (economic policies based on normative principles) and economic thought (public opinions regarding economic topics) to be excluded from historical investigation. Schumpeter’s notion of economic analysis is underwritten by a non-Marxist rendering of the science/ideology opposition. Economics is insulated from ideology, understood as the pre-analytic act of ‘vision’ that identifies the phenomena to be studied, because science is a process in which facts and theory are set in an ‘endless relation of give and take’. This process coagulates into scientific models that are then subject to ‘increasingly more rigorous standards of consistency and adequacy’. The great virtue of this process is that in time it will ‘crush out ideologically conditioned error’, leaving only ‘ideologically neutral’ elements. Moreover, it will do this ‘automatically and irrespective of the desires of the research worker’ (Schumpeter, 1954, pp. 41–44). Schumpeter does not construe politics as a long-term threat to economics because of the mechanics of scientific progress, and ideology is rendered as an inevitable but ultimately harmless element of intellectual endeavour.1 A starkly different view is taken by Gunnar Myrdal. Economics, Myrdal claimed, had political implications built into its very engine of analysis – its trade was ‘political recommendations presented as results of economic analysis’. This situation was a result of the historical growth and development of economics out of natural law theory and utilitarianism. For example, neoclassical economists work with utility as a subjective measure of value and then aggregate these utilities under such names as general welfare and social value. This is not objective analysis, we are told, but a political argument, namely, that society should govern itself according to a specific version of utilitarianism (Myrdal, 1953, pp. 13–14, 16). 446 r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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The costs of such practices for economics are not only that it is engaged in an intellectually dishonest species of labour, but also that it is consequently riddled with logical fallacies. These fallacies are seen to be ‘inevitable when economic theory attempts the logically impossible feat of arriving at political conclusions without political premises’ (Myrdal, 1953, pp. 13–14). The task of economics, Myrdal insisted, is not to slyly dabble in politics but to ‘analyse and explain causal relations between economic facts’. Politics, by contrast, is concerned with fears and wishes. The link between the two should therefore be one in which economics only provides knowledge that enables society ‘to forecast future events and thus to take precautions and fulfil our wishes rationally’. Economics is an aid to the project of pursuing politics through rational means (Myrdal, 1953, pp. 1–2). To restore economics to a state that will enable it to perform this task requires that its hidden political content be purged. This can be done through honesty and reformulation. The need for honesty relates to the political content of assumptions which are typically disguised by a ‘quasi-objective formulation of a “principle”’. Especially important is the link between economic analysis and political interests, an issue best addressed in any specific case by proposing ‘alternative solutions, each one corresponding to some special interest’. In this way the link between policy and sectional interests can be made explicit and the subject of open challenge. Economics could then return to its role as neutral counsellor: ‘a scientific theory of how policy can serve concrete interests’ (Myrdal, 1953, pp. 191–193, 196). Reformulation is more challenging. It involves recognizing that the ‘perpetual game of hide-and-seek in economics consists in concealing the norm in the concept’. Once this is done, the political content of economic concepts can be removed, allowing economic discussion to be ‘shifted from the normative to the logical plane’. This, in turn, involves building an analysis that does not take the ‘institutional set-up for granted’, or, the ‘legal order, and the customs, habits, and conventions’ that a given society possesses. This reflects the fact that ‘it is the institutional set-up over which the political struggle is often fought’ (Myrdal, 1953, pp. 192, 196). This is how to render economics both politically neutral and useful. Turning now to Marx, while Schumpeter understood ideological contamination as entering economics through individual researchers, Marx’s understanding is closer to Myrdal’s, since he portrayed it as a systemic problem. Caution should be exercised when construing Marx in relation to the contamination thesis, since Marxism represents a methodological challenge to the practice of parcelling a social totality into distinct parts, such as state, society, economy and ideology, and such parcelling is a precondition for the contamination thesis. r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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This methodological stricture is famously encountered in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where we are told that the ‘mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general’ (Marx, 1969, p. 503). This maxim is seen at work in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In this text Marx argued that while the internal divisions within the Party of Order, between the legitimists and the Orleanists, appear to reflect diverging principles or allegiances to different branches of the royal family, they ultimately derive from clashing forms of property – landed property against finance and industry (Marx, 1926, pp. 54–55). Party politics are thus seen as an expression of more deep-seated forces and relations. It follows that to understand economic science as an aspect of intellectual life that exists independently of the material base is to violate Marx’s guiding premise. Instead, the content of economics should be approached as expressing social conditions. When Marx’s writings on political economy are examined this style of analysis is indeed encountered, and it should not be taken to mobilize the contamination thesis; however, this analysis is also supplemented by other styles, some of which do reproduce a version of the contamination thesis. This point is not intended as a criticism of Marx’s methodological fidelity to Marxism, but to highlight the ubiquity and tempting nature of the contamination thesis. Marx’s most sustained engagement with classical political economy is found in Theories of Surplus Value, which Kautsky prepared from manuscripts left by Marx and published as the fourth volume of Capital. Marx located seventeenth-century writers, such as John Locke and Sir Dudley North, within a general conflict between capital and landed property, where land rent and usury are continuously defended and attacked as the economic standards of each class (Marx, 1951, pp. 26–33). Here, then, is an example of Marx grounding his analysis of economic knowledge in material conditions in the same way that he did in The Eighteenth Brumaire, in which material class interests are seen to be expressed in intellectual discourses in a relatively straightforward manner. If we turn to Marx’s reading of Adam Smith, however, then a different style of analysis can be detected. Unlike the summary treatment of Locke and North, Smith is discussed in detail for almost 100 pages, and he is apportioned a near equal measure of praise for his ‘scientific merit’, ‘theoretical strength’ and ‘great advance’, as he is blamed for his ‘contradictions’, ‘confusion’ and ‘scholasticism’ (Marx, 1951, pp. 107–197). In short, instead of being read as a simple ideologue, Smith is raised to the level of a fellow scientist. But not quite. While Smith is portrayed as having made genuine contributions to political economy, it is nevertheless the bourgeois brand of political economy. 448 r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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On Marx’s reading, the key issue is that Smith studied capitalist economic relations as if they were the only possible economic relations, instead of recognizing that they belong to a definite historical epoch. For example, Smith developed two notions of productive labour, the first defines productive labour as labour that produces capital, while the second identifies productive labour with the creation of commodities (Marx, 1951, pp. 148–175). Both definitions are examples of ‘bourgeois thick-headedness, which regards the capitalist forms of production as its absolute forms – hence as eternal, natural forms of production’. This historical myopia makes it possible to ‘confuse the question as to what is productive labour from the standpoint of capital with the question as to what labour is productive in general, or what is productive labour in general’ (Marx, 1951, p. 177). (The true definition of productive labour is labour that is directly transformed into capital.) Smith thus emerges as having risen above the fray between land and capital to discern some of the essential categories of political economy, yet his theoretical horizons were still those of capitalism. Social relations can therefore condition intellectual life directly, as in Locke, or indirectly, as in Smith; neither formulation presents economics as contaminated by politics because neither construes the two activities as separate. Yet there is a third general mode that Marx used to relate political economy with politics – the polemic. In Theories of Surplus Value it is the dii minorum gentium or vulgarizers of political economy who, perceiving themselves as belonging to an unflattering category, ‘unproductive labour’, reacted to their relegation with polemical interventions into the field (Marx, 1951, pp. 175–176). The crucial index for Marx seems to be the unscientific character and intent of these interventions: bourgeois science may be flawed, but at least it is intended to be science.2 This idea is also encountered in some of Marx’s prefatory comments in volume one of Capital, where he distinguished between scientific bourgeois political economy, of which he saw Ricardo as the last great exponent, and vulgar political economy, which followed after him. Marx had particularly in mind the period after 1830, when the ‘class-struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms’, with political economy providing the theoretical form. As a result, ‘it was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not’. It happened that ‘genuine scientific research’ was replaced by ‘the bad conscience and the evil intent of the apologetic’ (Marx, 1977, 24–25). To bring the discussion of Marx to a close, two points need to be noted. First, Marx presented political economy as subject to multiple determinations – from scientific progress, from social relations, and from the immediate r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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needs of the class struggle. Second, this last determination does involve a version of the contamination thesis, since it presents political economy as invaded by a political element that corrodes its scientific basis. Unlike the influence of social relations, when political economy is used as a vehicle for political polemics it fails to fulfil its function – to produce scientific insights within the limits set by prevailing social and intellectual conditions. Relative to Schumpeter, Marx portrayed the danger that politics represents to the integrity of economics as far more systemic in nature, since it is conditional upon the state of politics not the idiosyncrasies of individual researchers. What should be noticed here as common to both is the way economics is in danger of becoming a political terrain, instead of remaining a scientific one, even though science is construed in diverging ways by the two thinkers. For Myrdal, economics was already engaged in politics because of the way it constructed its arguments, building political conclusions in from the beginning. Here, too, the solution was to purge economics of its political content and thereby enable economics to resume its role as a servant to politics. While these authors represent classic statements on the relationship between politics and economics they should not be seen as dated, since together the theoretical architecture of their positions still houses current work. Recent Constructivist International Political Economy, for example, has been concerned to set aside the distinction between positive and normative in favour of describing the ontological and constitutive power of economic ideas.3 In this vein Jacqueline Best and Wesley Widmaier have demonstrated how the focus on micro-level processes over macro-level processes in recent economic theory has ‘constrained the scope for economic and ethical debate’, to the advantage of individualistic premises. Because these authors treated normative commitments of this type as implicit in all economic argument, and therefore inescapable, they did not advocate the removal of normative content from economics. Instead, they called for ‘political leaders and scholars alike to recognize and justify’ their normative commitments (Best and Widmaier, 2006, p. 627). This diagnosis of contamination is equivalent to Myrdal’s identification of the inbuilt biases of economic argument, and the reflexivity proffered as a coping mechanism is likewise a renovated form of Myrdal’s plea for honesty.
The Contamination Thesis II: The View from Politics To illustrate the contamination thesis from the point of view of politics the divergent analyses of Habermas and Schmitt are now brought to view. The Habermasian concern is that economic knowledge crowds out political communication, while Schmitt’s complaint is that economics misrepresents the nature of the political. The key point to be made is that Habermas and 450 r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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Schmitt share the same fundamental assumptions about the relationship between politics and economics, namely, that politics has a specific and distinguishing function that is compromised by an over-reaching economic science. One of Habermas’s principal endeavours has been to combine two approaches to studying social life: systems theory and hermeneutics. The former component draws its inspiration from Parsons’s treatment of society as a set of interrelating sub-systems. For example, in his AGIL model Parsons (1966) specified adaptation to the external environment as occurring through the economy (A), while the polis provides goal attainment (G). Each subsystem has its own specialized steering media – money for the economy and power for politics – that ‘spare us the costs of dissensus because they uncouple the coordination of action from consensus formation in language’ (Habermas, 1987, p. 263). In contrast to these systems that self-regulate non-normatively, social life is sustained by communicatively achieved consensus that directly engages the lived meanings of subjects, or lifeworld. Indeed, we are told that consensus is only possible if ‘communicative practice is embedded in a lifeworld context defined by cultural traditions, institutional orders, and competences’; the lifeworld context makes interpretation possible (Habermas, 1987, p. 124, p. 262). This system/lifeworld dyad is twinned by the communicative action/ strategic action opposition, where the former is directed towards achieving mutual understanding and the latter to achieving ends (Habermas, 1984, pp. 286–295). From here Habermas could construe the major fault line of modern societies as the uncoupling of system and lifeworld. On the one hand, sub-systems are necessary in complex societies because they are efficient relative to consensusforming communicative action, as when markets allocate resources through prices that arise from anonymous commercial interactions. On the other hand, increasing complexity and system differentiation sees norm-free systems break off from the lifeworld only to then attempt to subordinate it to their own requirements. We should therefore recognize that increases in complexity are often achieved ‘at the expense of a rationalized lifeworld’ (Habermas, 1987, p. 186; emphasis in original). Weber’s rationalization thesis is therefore reshaped by Habermas to refer to the institutionalization of system or means-ends logic (McCarthy, 1984, pp. 36–37). This process threatens the lifeworld and the communicative rationality that sustains it: ‘it is characteristic of the pattern of rationalization in capitalist societies that the complex of cognitive-instrumental rationality establishes itself at the cost of practical rationality; communicative relations are reified’ (Habermas, 1984, p. 363). The economy, economics and economic management together represent an example of a sub-system institutionalizing itself and encroaching upon the r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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communicative relations of the polis. As a science, economics only ‘concerns itself with the economy as a subsystem of society and absolves itself from questions of legitimacy’ (Habermas, 1984, p. 4). Yet legitimacy is essential to the maintenance of society, and this requires ‘satisfying the conditions of a rationality that is inherent in communicative action’ (Habermas, 1984, p. 397). Habermas has also expressed the danger that arises here in the more familiar language of technocracy, where the politician ‘becomes the mere agent of a scientific intelligentsia’, in this case the economist, who ‘elaborates the objective implications and requirements of available techniques and resources as well as of optimal rules of control’ (Habermas, 1971a, pp. 63–64). We may note here that several aspects of economics are easily accommodated by Habermas’s portrait. The single most influential essay on method in economics, for example, is Milton Friedman’s The Methodology of Positive Economics, where he nominates predictive capacity as the primary criterion against which knowledge should be judged (Friedman, 1953). In tandem, we can see clearly the elitist spirit of means-ends rationality in John Maynard Keynes’s comment on the role of economic expertise in government: ‘I believe that the right solution will involve intellectual and scientific elements which must be above the heads of the vast mass of more or less illiterate voters’ (Keynes, 1971, p. 295). The problem, then, is to capture the benefits of economics as a science necessary for the management of a sub-system while keeping it harnessed to the public sphere, to which Habermas assigned ‘a critical and controlling function in relation to the transposition of technology into practice’ (McCarthy, 1984, p. 15). Such a robust public sphere in turn requires a different kind of rationalization of the lifeworld, one that substitutes reasoned discourse for tradition and hence raises the public sphere to a condition where it is capable of mobilizing the cultural resources necessary to resist system colonization (Sitton, 1998, pp. 70–71). For Habermas there is a need for a similarly dialectical reconciliation to be played out within the discipline of economics. As it currently stands, economics is a normative-analytic science that ‘presupposes hypothetical maxims of action’, and accordingly concerns itself with strategic action, the only form of action ‘that can be grasped in a theoretically rigorous way within a normative-analytic framework’. Yet the price of theoretical rigour is empirical poverty, for economic action is modelled as ideal action under ideal circumstances, and hence ‘no empirically substantive lawlike hypotheses can be derived’ (Habermas, 1988, pp. 2, 46, 48). Worse, economics perpetuates a ‘purely instrumental notion of policy rationality’ by treating policy as a terrain for optimization, and not political engagement. This blindness to communicative rationality directly corresponds with the model of strategic action built into economic reasoning (Dryzek, 1992, pp. 108, 113–114). 452 r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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It follows that economics needs to develop a more satisfactory account of human behaviour and society, and acquire a critical dimension regarding its role in politics. The first point relates to the ‘asocial and ahistorical’ nature of mainstream economic argument, which limits its analysis to epiphenomena such as markets (Wisman, 1990, p. 123). A reformed economics would centre the social formation of individuals – including the prevalence of non-strategic or communicative action in everyday life – and the evolution of the economic system in historical time (Small and Mannion, 2005, pp. 228–230). The second and related change would see economics become a critical social science, one that can ‘determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed’. This would include a ‘critique that destroys the illusion of objectivism’ (Habermas, 1971b, pp. 310, 316). More plainly, economists would need to relinquish their monopoly on determining the feasible ends and means of economic policy in favour of joining public debate over these very issues (Wisman, 1990, pp. 118–119). The precise nature of these transformations is admittedly elusive, but the key idea is clear enough: instead of undermining the communicative rationality and hence legitimacy of the polis, a reformed economics would make a positive contribution to its government. Technocratic rationalization would therefore be reversed by a public sphere that works with, not against, economic knowledge so that society is directed according to its own discursively formed will. In the terms of my contamination thesis, an invading economics is transformed by politics – in the form of communicative rationality – to become a dutiful ally. To now shift attention to Carl Schmitt, the danger of economics lies not in its ability to crowd out public debate, but in its misrepresentation of the nature of the political. For Schmitt, politics is not communication aimed at agreement, but struggle of the most intense kind – struggle for life against enemies. Economics is therefore engaged in a great shrouding exercise when it portrays life as harmonious exchange or socially beneficial competition. In attempting this deception economics is just one of the anti-political forces seen in the West since the sixteenth century, joining a list including theology, metaphysics, humanitarianism and technology. These forces designate ‘various intellectual spheres’ in which the European mind has ‘found the center of its immediate human experience’ (Schmitt, 1993, pp. 131–132). A centre represents an attempt to neutralize an earlier centre that has become a site of conflict by providing new ground for minimum agreement and peace. Successive failed attempts at neutralization have always engendered new attempts: ‘Europeans always have wandered from a conflictual to a neutral sphere, and always the newly won neutral sphere has become immediately another arena of struggle’ (Schmitt, 1993, pp. 137–138). r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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For Schmitt, the very idea of a neutral sphere represents a misunderstanding of the nature of the political. The political is struggle, and cannot be neutralized: the political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping. (Schmitt, 1996a, p. 29) That is, the political arises when an antagonism becomes so extreme as to make two groups enemies. Hence, while war is a relevant concept, the ‘political does not reside in the battle itself, which possesses its own technical, psychological, and military laws’ (Schmitt, 1996a, p. 37). Rather, the political resides in the mode of behaviour which is determined by this possibility, by clearly evaluating the concrete situation and thereby being able to distinguish correctly the real friend and the real enemy. (Schmitt, 1993, p. 37) Politics therefore consists in choosing between friends and enemies. In the modern configuration it is the state that provides the dominant friend-enemy grouping, hence Schmitt’s claim that ‘the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political’ (Schmitt, 1996a, p. 19).4 The problem with economics is thus that it cloaks the political with a mild representation of society’s overriding problem: it ‘has attempted to transform the enemy into a competitor y In the domain of economics there are no enemies, only competitors’ (Schmitt, 1996a, p. 28). As a result, economics also involves the attempt to dominate other domains of life by installing the mistaken idea that ‘one needs only solve adequately the problem of the production and distribution of goods in order to make superfluous all moral and social questions’ (Schmitt, 1993, pp. 133–135). The effect of this neutralizing force is to weaken politics, and with it the state, since ‘under no circumstances can anyone demand that any member of an economically determined society, whose order in the economic domain is based on rational procedures, sacrifice his life in the interest of rational operations’ (Schmitt, 1996a, p. 48). The principles of a liberal economic order are incapable of sustaining such a request, the ‘self-understood will to repel the enemy in a given battle situation turns into y an economic calculation’. Here, then, Schmitt’s concern is the displacement of an existential force (politics) by a technical one (economics). The effect is to ‘deprive state and politics of their specific meaning’ (Schmitt, 1996a, p. 72). The deception could be seen in Germany, where for a time the ‘solution to all problems was said to be the elimination of politics y All matters should be decided by technical and economic experts’. This view was eclipsed by its 454 r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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reverse: ‘it now appears that economics has been entirely politicized’ (Schmitt, 1998, p. 216). This situation is no better. In an address, Strong State and Sound Economy, Schmitt distinguished between the qualitative total state and the quantitative total state.5 The phrase ‘total state’ is intended to convey ‘the contemporary state’s undreamt-of new means of coercion and possibilities of the greatest intensity’ (Schmitt, 1998, p. 217; emphasis in original). The adjectives qualitative and quantitative describe how these powers are deployed. In the qualitative total state ‘the new powers of coercion belong exclusively to the state and promote its escalation of power’. The quantitative total state, by contrast, ‘is one that penetrates all domains and all spheres of human existence, one that knows of no state-free sphere because it can no longer discriminate’. This state is total not in terms of ‘political energy’, but in terms of ‘pure volume’. This description is said to apply to the German party-state: ‘its volume has been expanded to a monstrous degree. It concerns itself with all possible affairs’. The economy is one of the domains that the weak German state ventured into and consequently perpetuated a ‘confusion of the state and the economy’, dispersing its energy and thereby weakening it further (Schmitt, 1998, pp. 217, 220–221; emphasis in original). What was needed was a strong state, devoid of the illusions of economics, which could then correctly perceive where its power was needed and where it was not. In Schmitt’s account of the relation between politics and economics the latter is an anti-political force, an attempt to neutralize politics by rendering it in less hostile terms. At the same time, deciding which parts of the economy are the state’s prerogative and which are to be left alone (or depoliticized) is construed as a political act, and one that can only be performed by a strong state that is capable of distinguishing threat from non-threat. Economics has encroached on politics to the latter’s detriment, for its misrepresentations of the nature of the political weaken the state and misdirect its energies. The corrective is a reassertion of the primacy of the political and a corresponding recognition of its unique intensity. Schmitt’s conception of the political is therefore divergent from the one that emerges in Habermas’s work. In fact, we might see Schmitt’s (1988) polemical portrayal of parliamentary democracy as endless talk as the inverse of Habermas’s communicative rationality. Still, the rendering of economics as occluding a basic aspect of the human condition sits comfortably with Habermas’s treatment of economics as reifying communicative relations. For in both thinkers politics is given an existential quality – for Habermas communicative rationality is inherent in discursive interaction, while in Schmitt politics is inherent in human groupings – and this quality gives politics an autonomy that needs to be respected. Similarly, in both thinkers economics is ignorant of this special quality and so compromises the autonomy that politics should be given. r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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Recalling the view from economics, we can see a reciprocating valorization of the autonomy of economics. This autonomy derived not from the existentially invariant nature of economics but from its ability to function as a science. For Schumpeter this was inherent in economic science, for Marx it was partially manifest and partially latent, and for Myrdal it was to be realized by a reconstruction of the protocols of economic argument. Crucially, the utility of economic science lay in its ability to serve politics – for Schumpeter and Myrdal as counsellors, and for Marx as part of a scientific theory of society that will then provide the basis for a scientific politics. Both versions of the contamination thesis present the autonomy of politics and economics as the reason to keep the two activities separate or appropriately related, where the proper relations or boundaries will allow politics and economics to connect in ways that do not compromise the autonomy of either. It is the tenability of this claim to autonomy that I now wish to call into question.
Beyond the Contamination Thesis: Rationalities of Government Barry Hindess (1991, 1994, 1995) has argued that the majority of our modern conceptions of politics are based on extensions of the Greek metaphor of the polis – a self-contained unity of people who are self-governing. Hannah Arendt claimed that for the Greeks the polis ‘denoted a very special and freely chosen form of political organization’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 13). Politics in this sense of a ‘freely chosen form of political organization’ should be distinguished from more restricted uses, where politics only refers to the actions of political parties, or self-interested factions within society, or, as in the phrase ‘office politics’, to the strategic manoeuvrings of agents in local settings. Because politics in this sense refers to the government of the polis by the people, it can be contrasted with non-political spheres that are not subject to collective government. For example, the private sphere, where parental or selfgovernment are the relevant types of rule. It is here that we can bring the economy into view: the economy is a non-political domain, though it is clearly relevant to the life of a self-governing community, which gives rise to the need for an autonomous and specialized science. Thus, if politics is to retain its autonomy it must find a way to bring both the economy and economics into appropriate relations with political or self-governing activity. As seen above, the tactics here vary considerably – from rendering economic science as a neutral counsellor to politics to prophesying its transformation into an ally of public communicative action. The general neutralizing strategy – drawing a distinction between political and non-political domains – and the accompanying local tactics – setting out 456 r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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the appropriate connections between politics and economics – are required to preserve the ideal of the self-governing community. To see the limited effects of these coping mechanisms consider the rise of the economy as an ontological reality, as described by an autonomous science, economics. One influential narrative of this process comes from Karl Polanyi, who developed the notion of the disembedded economy: ‘instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 60). At issue for Polanyi was the institutional connection between economy and society, where the economy is defined with reference to a philosophical anthropology of human needs: the economic denotes man’s dependence for his living upon nature and his fellows. It refers to the interchange with his natural and social environment, in so far as this results in supplying him with the means of material want satisfaction. (Polanyi, 1957a, p. 243) Although the dependence of ‘man’ on nature is timeless, it can be institutionally specified in diverse ways, and three forms can be identified empirically: reciprocity, redistribution and exchange (Polanyi, 1957a, pp. 250–252). When reciprocity and redistribution are the dominant forms of integration ‘no concept of an economy need arise’, because it is ‘almost impossible for the observer to collect the fragments of the economic process and piece them together’, since ‘his emotions fail to convey any experience that he could identify as “economic”’. The essential correlate is the absence of specifically economic institutions that inculcate a desire for material gain, and so the economic process ‘runs in the grooves of different structures’, such as family, politics and religion (Polanyi, 1957b, pp. 70–71). In Polanyi’s schema the rise of the market economy represents a great transformation because it is the only form of economy that attempts to dominate society institutionally: ‘a self-regulating market demands nothing less than the institutional separation of society into an economic and a political sphere y normally, the economic order is merely a function of the social order’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 74). While Polanyi’s story relates primarily to the institutional setting of economic behaviour, Michel Foucault’s account emphasizes the intellectual construction of the economy as a distinct sphere via the emergence of political economy, and the concomitant rise of new techniques of government fitted for this sphere. A key leg of Foucault’s argument is the rise of physiocratic thinking in relation to grain regulation in eighteenth-century France. In opposition to a system of legal regulations aimed at preventing scarcity in grain, physiocray shifts the unit of analysis from the phenomenon of scarcity in a market to ‘the reality of grain’ as a series of connections and contingencies r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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that will include periods of high prices and scarcity. The remedy therefore shifts too, from a juridical prevention to an ‘apparatus’ for managing a multi-faceted domain of production, distribution, world markets, climate patterns and so on. Scarcity is no longer an event, then, but just a part of the normal course of things that will accompany the life of the population (Foucault, 2007, pp. 34–42). The emergence of population as an object for governmental attention is the other key leg of Foucault’s argument. Echoing the treatment of political economy in The Order of Things (2002, pp. 275–286), the formation of the population as a ‘subject-object’ coincides with the displacement of ‘the analysis of wealth’ by political economy. More plainly, an analysis of the circulation of money and goods is replaced by a study of the interrelations between profit, demographics, production and consumption. Population functions as ‘a datum that depends on a series of variables’ and, as a result, ‘the relation between the population and sovereign cannot simply be one of obedience’. Instead, population should be seen as ‘a set of processes to be managed at the level and on the basis of what is natural in these processes’. This object is then inserted into ‘economic practice’, becoming ‘the privileged correlate of modern mechanisms of power’ (2007, pp. 70–71, 76–77, 79). What should be taken from Polanyi and Foucault’s different narratives is that the economy came to be understood and managed as a distinct sphere with its own nature. For the argument at hand, the important implication is that the existence of an autonomous sphere with its own nature places obvious limits to a community’s ability to govern itself. At the same time, the community’s scope for self-government is subject to other agencies; in this case the development of an expert knowledge that disembedded the economy. Note that the different versions of the contamination thesis are unable to cope with this type of contamination – the emergence of positivities – because the coping mechanisms are geared to manage the how of government, and not the what. That is, contamination from economics is guarded against on the basis of distributing the economic between the political and the non-political. We can construe the emergence of the economy as giving rise to more sophisticated elaborations of the political/non-political distinction, such as the ubiquitous state/society/economy triad; but that is all. It should be clear that the difficulties involved here owe something to the fabulous character of the polis, which generates the need to imagine politics as self-government. A way around this impasse is offered by Foucault’s work on government and power. Two of Foucault’s comments on sovereignty will serve to indicate his different approach to politics. The first is a vivid image that follows his advocacy of a positive and technical conception of power in lieu of a repressive and legal one: ‘We need to cut off the King’s head: in political theory that has 458 r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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still to be done’ (1980, p. 121). The second comment relates to the notion of an art of government specific to the government of a state: ‘Whereas the end of sovereignty is internal to itself and gets its instruments from itself in the form of law, the end of government is internal to the things it directs’ (2007, p. 99). Foucault’s broader argument, to which the second quotation belongs, is that an autonomous art of government of the state came to be formulated in the sixteenth century. The development of this art was, however, blocked by, inter alia, the theory of sovereignty in the seventeenth century, which conceived government on the model of sovereignty, law and right (Foucault, 2007, pp. 100–101). In other words, self-government and legitimacy dominated thinking about government, and this inhibited the evolution of technical and intellectual regimes that attended to more than just the legal/constitutional facet of the state. For example, viewing the economy as an autonomous domain requiring a specific form of governmental reason suggests a practical approach to government – one where ‘the end of government is internal to the things it directs’, in this case, the economy. Foucault’s narrative goes on to describe how the development of an autonomous art of government was ‘unblocked’ in the eighteenth century,6 during which the sovereignty model of government was effectively outflanked by governmental rationalities that provided their own premises and conceptions independent of questions of law and right. Yet as Foucault’s polemical metaphor of the King’s head suggests, academic political theory has been slow to realize this historical development and uncouple itself from the theory of sovereignty.7 If this is right then in conjunction, and as the first quotation from Foucault suggests, we need to move beyond a juridical model of power to properly understand the techniques through which domains such as the economy are managed. What, then, does the analysis of politics look like after Foucault’s regicide? 8 The most striking feature is that government is no longer equated with the government but now encompasses institutions and agencies beyond the state. The uniting feature is simply that these things happen to a given population, of which the state is one component. As a consequence, an autonomous and normative basis for government and its actions – which derives from the metaphor of a self-governing community – is no longer presumed. There are only rationalities of government and accompanying technical practices.9 In relation to politics and economics, if we accept this view then we would treat economics as just another political rationality alongside that of the selfgoverning community. From the point of view of governmentality, the political/non-political distinction is only a self-serving illusion propagated by the sovereignty model. Or alternatively, we could see the partitioning of an economic from a political domain as a tactic of governmentality when, for example, self-interested behaviour is portrayed as beneficial to the community when it occurs in the economic domain, but as corrosive to democracy when it r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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occurs in the political domain. Hence, instead of two autonomous activities and a concern that the connections between them are of the appropriate kind, as in the contamination thesis, we would see only distinct rationalities (and their attendant practical programmes) attempting to inculcate divergent forms of behaviour and achieving varying degrees of success. One of the effects of adopting this perspective is that the concern with contamination gives way to agnosticism. Recall the discussion of Habermas, for whom political communication provides the means by which a community can participate in their own government, thereby lending that government legitimacy. The problem with economics is that it represents an external or non-political source of government. That is, government of the economy is not tied to the discursively formed will of the people but to a rationalizing expert knowledge. This is presented by Habermas as a clear transgression of boundaries that needs to be corrected by a reassertion of the political against the alien contamination of economics. On the basis of Foucault’s analytics, however, the nature of the interaction between politics and economics would be a matter for empirical investigation, not theoretical anxiety. One might begin this investigation by noting that for Habermas and Schmitt, along with almost all contemporary political theory, the economy and economics feature as components awkwardly inserted into the argumentative structure of normative political theory. To see this more clearly, consider John Dunn’s claim, in his conclusion to The Economic Limits to Modern Politics, that ‘any coherent modern political theory must contain, at a minimum, three elements’. The first is an account of the good life for the individual, the second is prescriptions for the distribution of power, and the third is ‘a conception of sound economic policy’ (Dunn, 1990, p. 195). Dunn’s claim illustrates the point that if politics is government of the polis, then a boundary between politics and economics cannot be drawn successfully. On the other hand, such a boundary is required by the ideal of the self-governing community.
Notes 1 The idea of ideology’s benign and banal nature also emerges in Schumpeter (1949). 2 Althusser’s influential reading of political economy also used a science/ideology distinction, but here the pivot is not the intentions of subjects but the notion of an epistemological break. See especially chapter seven of Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar, 1970). This procedure involved some telling difficulties, for which see Hindess (1993, pp. 323–328). 3 For an overview see Abdelal (2009). 4 Schmitt’s affinity with Hobbes has been well noted. For Schmitt on Hobbes see Schmitt (1996b). 5 For the theme of the total state see also the first three chapters of Schmitt (1999). 6 See Foucault (2007, pp. 87–114). 460 r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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7 For the best extension of this theme see the conclusion to (Hindess, 1996). Ian Hunter has sounded the strongest cautionary note against demoting sovereignty in this way (Hunter, 1998). 8 There is extensive empirical literature here. The best surveys are (Dean, 2010) and (Rose, 1999). 9 Note that Barry Hindess has raised concerns about the completeness and adequacy of this vision, especially when the existence of self-directing agents and the international system are taken into account (Hindess, 1997, 2005).
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