Beyond Friend and Foe 9004188002, 9789004188006

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Beyond Friend and Foe

Heins, V 2011, Beyond Friend and Foe : The Politics of Critical Theory, BRILL, Leiden. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [4 March 2022]. Created from rmit on 2022-03-04 10:09:45.

Social and Critical Theory A Critical Horizons Book Series Editorial Board JOHN RUNDELL, DANIELLE PETHERBRIDGE, JEREMY SMITH, JEAN-PHILIPPE DERANTY, ROBERT SINNERBRINK

International Advisory Board WILLIAM CONNOLLY, MANFRED FRANK, LEELA GANDHI, AGNES HELLER, DICK HOWARD, MARTIN JAY, RICHARD KEARNEY, PAUL PATTON, MICHIEL WIEVIORKA

Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

VOLUME 9

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Beyond Friend and Foe The Politics of Critical Theory

By

Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

Volker Heins

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011

Heins, V 2011, Beyond Friend and Foe : The Politics of Critical Theory, BRILL, Leiden. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [4 March 2022]. Created from rmit on 2022-03-04 10:09:45.

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heins, Volker, 1957Beyond friend and foe : the politics of critical theory / by Volker Heins. p. cm. -- (Social and critical theory, 1572-459x ; v. 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18800-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Critical theory--Political aspects. 2. Frankfurt school of sociology. 3. Sociology--Political aspects. I. Title. II. Series. HM480.H45 2011 301.01--dc22 2010048233

ISSN 1572-459X ISBN 978 90 04 18800 6 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.

Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.

Heins, V 2011, Beyond Friend and Foe : The Politics of Critical Theory, BRILL, Leiden. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [4 March 2022]. Created from rmit on 2022-03-04 10:09:45.

Contents Volume Foreword Acknowledgments

vii ix

Introduction: Critical Theory and the Political Chapter One Knowing the Worst: Critical Theory as Trauma Narrative

29

Chapter Two From Factions to Rackets: The Traps of Conspiracy Thinking

54

Chapter Three Flâneurs without Borders: Benjamin and the Cultural Politics of Travel Writing

78

Chapter Four Its Others

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1

Meanings of Barbarism: Civil Society and 108

Chapter Five Orientalizing America: Habermas and the Changing Discourse of Europe

137

Chapter Six Age of Access? The Place of Property in Critical Theory

166

Chapter Seven Realizing Honneth: Redistribution, Recognition, and Global Justice

192

Chapter Eight From Persons to Peoples: The Politics of Recognition in International Society

214

Bibliography Index

241 255

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Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved. Heins, V 2011, Beyond Friend and Foe : The Politics of Critical Theory, BRILL, Leiden. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [4 March 2022]. Created from rmit on 2022-03-04 10:09:45.

Volume Foreword

Since its beginnings the Frankfurt School was engaged in the political critique of contemporary society. Volker Heins’ Beyond Friend and Foe. The Politics of Critical Theory amply shows the legacy and continuity of this engagement, and the relevance of The Frankfurt School across its three generations for political critique today. Beyond Friend and Foe is another welcome addition to the books already published in The Social and Critical Theory Book Series and highlights the relationship between politically inspired critiques of social suffering and democratic aims.

Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

John Rundell, Series Editor The University of Melbourne, Australia

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Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved. Heins, V 2011, Beyond Friend and Foe : The Politics of Critical Theory, BRILL, Leiden. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [4 March 2022]. Created from rmit on 2022-03-04 10:09:45.

Acknowledgments

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My deepest thanks go to Axel Honneth and Reinhard Wolf in Frankfurt, and to Jeffrey Alexander and Ron Eyerman at Yale University for sharing their thoughts on some of the essays collected in this volume. I also wish to thank Karin Bauer, Sidonia Blättler, José Brunner, Tom Crosbie, Peter Dietsch, Michael Flitner, Dick Howard, Heikki Ikäheimo, Stephen Kalberg, Jacob Levy, Catherine Lu, Shane O’Neill, Meital Pinto, Thomas Pogge, Till van Rahden, Matthias Revers, Jensen Sass, Michael Scharping, Jonathan Seglow, Nick Smith, Ivana Spasic, Simon Thompson, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and the editors of the Social and Critical Theory book series, in particular Danielle Petherbridge, for their comments and encouragement. Liz Breese and Kyla Mandel were kind enough to read parts of the manuscript and have greatly improved the final product. Christoph Gödde and Michael Schwarz helped me to find my way in the Theodor W. Adorno Archive in Frankfurt and Berlin. Thanks also to Rodney Livingstone who translated earlier German draft versions of the first two chapters, and some of excerpts from unpublished texts by Adorno. Finally, I would like to declare my gratitude to my wife, Mechtild Manus, and my son Philipp, for their love and patience and much more. Earlier drafts of the chapters were presented at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, the 2006 annual conference of the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) in Chicago, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, the 2006 Workshops in Political Theory Conference at Manchester Metropolitan University, the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham, the Centre for European Studies, Carleton University Ottawa, the 2006 annual conference of the Council for European Studies in Chicago, the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast, the Centre de Recherche en Éthique at the Université de Montréal, and the McGill Political Theory Workshop. All the chapters with the exception of the first and the Introduction

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x • Acknowledgments

are based on previously published articles that have been revised and in most cases substantially reworked. Chapters 2 to 8 draw on material from the following publications: “Critical Theory and the Traps of Conspiracy Thinking,” Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 33, no. 7, 2007, pp. 787–801; “Flaneure ohne Grenzen? Zur Politik und Moral literarischer Reiseberichte,” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 6, no. 2, 2009, pp. 23–55; “Civil Society’s Barbarisms,” European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 7, no. 4, 2004, pp. 499–517;

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“Orientalising America? Continental Intellectuals and the Search for Europe’s Identity,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 34, no. 2, 2005, pp. 433–48; “The Place of Property in the Politics of Recognition,” Constellations, vol. 16, no. 4, 2009, pp. 579–92; “Realizing Honneth: Redistribution, Recognition, and Global Justice,” Journal of Global Ethics, vol. 4, no. 2, 2008, pp. 141–53; “Of Persons and Peoples: Internationalizing the Critical Theory of Recognition,” Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 2, 2010, pp. 149–70. I would like to acknowledge permission from the publishers for using these publications in the present book.

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Introduction Critical Theory and the Political

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This book addresses the question of how authors writing in the tradition of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory contribute to our understanding of politics—or what is now fashionably called “the political”—in contemporary society. For some commentators this question is rather pointless; they argue that Critical Theory might still be interesting for philosophers, media scholars or musicologists without, however, possessing a “political dimension.”1 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in particular, have often been caricatured as increasingly worldweary pessimists whose postwar thinking had become too bleak, uncompromising, and despairing to sustain a politics or at least a consistent way of reflecting about politics. For many, the situation changed with the works of Jürgen Habermas and the rise of the so-called second generation of critical theorists who were introducing themselves as enlightened democratic activists while at the same time distancing themselves from the alleged political deficit of the founders of

1

D. Howard, “Political Theory, Critical Theory, and the Place of the Frankfurt

School,” Critical Horizons, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 271.

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2 • Introduction

the Frankfurt School. Yet, from Alvin Gouldner to Chantal Mouffe the charge of being “apolitical” or “anti-political” has also been leveled against Habermas and his curious idea of dissolving political antagonisms and cultural barriers by means of language.2 The same has been said about Axel Honneth’s critical theory of recognition.3 In this Introduction, I will begin to discuss these criticisms by exploring the meaning of the political and how different Frankfurt School authors relate to this meaning. I won’t waste time in denying that there is, of course, an element of disdain for politics in some of the prominent early representatives of Critical Theory, a shrinking back before the ugly and sinister aspects of political struggles that is quite common in twentieth-century European culture— Yeats’s horror of “weasels fighting in a hole” comes to mind. I also admit that the behavioral ideal professed by Adorno or Walter Benjamin, to name only these two authors, is not revolutionary activism, but rather what we might call engaged passivity: the faculty shared by many heroes in modernist fiction of seeing things differently from others and being quietly subversive. It is safe to say that not only for Benjamin the “changing of attitudes” was ultimately more important than the changing of “external circumstances.”4 Furthermore, it is worth noting that Herbert Marcuse, one of the more ostentatiously political authors of the Frankfurt School, was fond of flirting with paradoxes such as defining “political freedom” as the “liberation of the individuals from politics” and defending an “unpolitical position” in the face of the Cold War as “the only political truth.”5 In this perspective, “politics” was

2

See A.W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, New

York, Seabury Press, 1979, pp. 38–39; C. Mouffe, On the Political, London and New York, Routledge, 2005, p. 87. Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

3

See J.-P. Deranty and E. Renault, “Politicizing Honneth’s Ethics of Recognition,”

Thesis Eleven, vol. 88, 2007, pp. 92–111. 4

W. Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in

Selected Writings, ed. H. Eiland and M.W. Jennings, trans. E. Jephcott et al., Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press, 1996–2003, vol. 2, p. 216. 5

H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial

Society, Boston, Beacon Press, 1964, p. 4; Marcuse, “33 Theses,” (1947) in Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 1: Technology, War and Fascism, ed. D. Kellner, New York and London, Routledge, 1998, p. 217.

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Introduction • 3

seen as an exercise mired in false alternatives, inimical to ambiguity, creativity and individuality. None of this implies that Critical Theory is lacking a political dimension or elements of a political theory. The claim that Critical Theory is unpolitical hinges on the tacit assumption that political theories deal primarily or exclusively with what modern societies officially classify as politics, or what Adorno calls “the sphere of so-called politics.”6 A much better working definition has been given by Wendy Brown who proposes to reassert the singular value of political theory by recovering our constitutive orientation to the problem of how collectivities are conceived and ordered in the contemporary world, a world that poses as a most urgent and open question what kinds of collectivities currently or will next order and contain humanity.7

A great advantage of this definition is that it does not prejudge the question whether collectivities are always or primarily ordered by a modern state and politics as we know it. Thus, alternative modes of coordinating social behavior and shaping a collective consensus are taken into account. Seen in this light, political theory is open enough to encompass politics and nonpolitics, state action and nonstate action, as possible means to “conceive and order” collectivities in the contemporary world. This way of looking at the task of political theory leads us right into the heart of the project of a critical social theory. While it is true that many members of the Frankfurt School wrote a lot more about music, literature, moral philosophy or psychoanalysis than about politics, I contend that there is more implicit political thinking even in the writings of a figure like Adorno than meets the eye.8

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6

T.W. Adorno, Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft (1964), ed. T. ten

Brink and M.P. Nogueira (Nachgelassene Schriften IV, vol. 12), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2008, p. 206; emphasis added. 7

W. Brown, “At the Edge,” in What is Political Theory?, ed. S.K. White and J.D.

Moon, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 2004, pp. 117–18. 8

See also E. Hammer, Adorno and the Political, London, Routledge, 2006;

L. Zuidervaart, Social Philosophy after Adorno, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, ch. 6; E. Walter-Busch, Geschichte der Frankfurter Schule: Kritische Theorie und Politik, Munich, Fink, 2010.

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4 • Introduction

In what follows, I want to draw attention to several broad themes that can be teased out of the discourse of the Frankfurt School. The point of departure of my enquiry is the focus of early Critical Theory on the suppression (I) and the dissemination of politics (II) as well as on the recoding of the political, by which I understand the replacement of the friend/foe distinction by a new type of victim/perpetrator distinction (III). Members of subsequent generations like Habermas and Honneth accept the thesis that political identities do not have to be constructed around antagonistic friend/foe discriminations, although they reject the idea of the impossibility of politics. The main difference with regard to political theory between what some have called the second and the third generation of Critical Theory is that Habermas is a staunch anti-realist, whereas Honneth’s theory contains elements of a critical realism (IV). I conclude with an overview of the chapters of the book (V).

I. Suppression of politics Politics means conflicts over rules and decisions that bind all members of a collectivity. Without conflict there is no politics, but not every conflict is political. A conflict, from which any party can withdraw at any time, because it would not be affected by its outcome, is not political. A central theme running through the writings of first-generation critical theorists is that the very possibility of politics is being undermined from both sides: either conflict is suppressed altogether, or the object of struggles shifts away from binding rules

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and decisions, thereby turning political into nonpolitical conflicts. In this section I discuss the first possibility (suppression of politics), before I take a look at the second possibility (dissemination of politics) in the next section of the Introduction. The suppression of conflicts is the result of the monopolization of power resources. In order for conflicts to emerge, power resources must be dispersed, for example by differentiating between the state, the economy and civil society. Since the 1930s, the members of what was later to be called the Frankfurt School were convinced that the dominant trend in modern societies pointed toward extreme political inequality, the hegemony of social power over democratic institutions, and the exclusion of the vast majority of people from relevant decision-making. This general diagnosis was maintained even after the end of European fascism, and was widely shared across

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Introduction • 5

the divide between the “inner circle” (Adorno, Horkheimer) and the “outer circle” (Neumann, Kirchheimer, Benjamin and others) of first-generation Critical Theory.9 Genuine politics is being suppressed when injuries and injustices caused by the exercise of power do not result in political conflict.10 Such a situation may arise as the result of two different strategies, either by making the access to regulative institutions such as political parties and public offices more cumbersome and expensive, or by monopolizing the communicative institutions of the society.11 The first strategy targeting regulative institutions has been sketched out by Otto Kirchheimer who drew attention to the formation of large, often state-subsidized political parties and professional associations with a tendency toward inter-party and state-party collusion at the expense of more inclusive ways of doing politics. He predicted rising barriers to entry for newcomers outside the establishment and a downward spiral of increasing cartelization of political power and public disaffection. Under these circumstances, new social groups advocating substantial change in one area or another may still arise and garner some attention and sympathy. But their action “does not,” according to Kirchheimer, “reach the political level; it disappears in the vast sea of formless discontent till the day of final reckoning.”12 The second strategy aimed at the suppression of politics uses communicative institutions such as the media. Here the goal is to shape the very preferences and desires of the people in such a way that public conflicts against the interests of the powerful do not erupt. Even Franz Neumann, who does not believe in the death of politics, sees the emergence of a new mode of operation of

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9

On this distinction, see A. Honneth, “Critical Theory,” in Honneth, The Fragmented

World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. C.W. Wright, Albany, SUNY Press, 1995. 10

See M.E. Warren, “What is Political?,” Journal of Theoretical Politics, vol. 11, no. 2,

1999, p. 221. 11

The distinction between these two types of institutions has been introduced by

J.C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere, New York, Oxford University Press, 2006, chs. 5–7. 12

O. Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty,” Journal of Politics, vol. 6, May 1944,

p. 143.

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6 • Introduction

political power that increasingly targets the “soul” of the subjects and achieves “a marked degree of habituation of the ruled.”13 Power becomes more intrusive as it moves beyond the ability of overcoming resistance toward tapping and channeling the motivational sources of possible resistance. Its workings now induce an effective “distortion of the drives”14 in line with the functional requirements of the social system. All this is achieved primarily through the mass media. Class conflicts are replaced by highly asymmetrical interactions between political and cultural elites and the “masses.” When the dominant elites are faced with serious threats to their rule, they appeal to collective emotions rather than to reason in order to effectively co-opt the masses. To the extent that these efforts are successful, the masses morph from a promising target of revolutionary propaganda into a source of anxiety for intellectuals who increasingly see themselves as members of a threatened minority. “With the consolidation of a small stratum of monopolists brought about by concentration and centralization, cultural activity takes form more and more exclusively as domination of the masses.”15 It is important to note that for Horkheimer the cultural process of shaping preferences and motives is strictly top-down and unidirectional. Leaders who represent the perspectives of the ruling classes influence the public, whereas the public has no way to influence the preferences of their leaders. Nor do non-elite groups have the means of counterbalancing the irrational propaganda of the ruling classes. Yet, even for Horkheimer in the 1930s, the masses are far from being uniformly susceptible to propaganda. He still retains some hope that the working class is less psychologically dependent and gullible than other sections of the population. As stated at one point, the masses are “not yet”16 able to formulate their own independent politics.

13

F.L. Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and

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Legal Theory, ed. H. Marcuse, Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1957, p. 9; see also Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944, 2nd ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 1944, pp. 436–39. 14

M. Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the

Bourgeois Age,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, trans. G.F. Hunter et al., Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1993, p. 108. 15

Ibid., p. 83.

16

Ibid., p. 87.

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Introduction • 7

These remnants of historical optimism faded in the 1940s when Horkheimer and Adorno lost their faith in the transformative power of class conflict and democratic reform, and settled instead for a theory of power as manipulation and seduction. This shift is marked most visibly by the chapter on the “culture industry” in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Whereas Max Weber defined power as the chance to overcome resistance, the concept of manipulation suggests a broader concept of power based on “means of undermining resistance.”17 As Robert Goodin has pointed out, manipulation implies subtle interference, usually by unknown agents or forces. There are many formulations suggesting that Adorno and Horkheimer had exactly this kind of interference in mind when they explored the phenomenon of the culture industry. Without a shred of intimidation or force, the mass media perform the miracle of spiriting away the last remaining thought “that resistance is possible.”18 Yet other features of the culture industry seem to evade the label of manipulatory politics. Thus, manipulation typically causes people to behave in a manner that runs counter to what they really want.19 It is a technique of luring away individuals or groups from pursuing their true interests or needs. However, in the “administered world” there is no way of establishing the putative interests of subjects, because the individuals have lost control over the formation of their own beliefs and preferences. Marcuse, for example, believes that “individualization” is a misnomer for strategies aimed at the consolidation of “stereotyped dependability” and the dissolution of the “self into a series of required actions and responses.”20 These extreme statements culminate in the animal metaphors (“amphibians,” “ants”) used by Adorno and Horkheimer

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to characterize the de-subjectified and thoroughly manipulated citizens of modern society.21

17

R.E. Goodin, Manipulatory Politics, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980, p. 8.

18

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans.

E. Jephcott, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 113. 19

See Goodin, Manipulatory Politics, pp. 13–19.

20

Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” (1941) in Collected

Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 1, p. 54. 21

On citizens as “amphibians,” see Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlight-

enment, p. 28; on “ants,” see the references in chapter 2 of this volume.

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8 • Introduction

Crucially, Horkheimer and Adorno take it for granted that the culture industry serves the “system,” without claiming that this industry necessarily does a disservice to its consumers. They choose their words carefully when they explain that modern individuals willingly “succumb” to what is provided for them by the media (and politics) and that they “insist” on their products which are seen as comforting.22 These terms suggest that consumer-citizens are seduced rather than manipulated by the power of the culture industry.

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Manipulation and seduction share the characteristic of skillfully undermining resistance. Both presuppose the freedom of the individuals that they subvert. Yet manipulation is based on deception and withholding information, whereas seduction also works where people recognize certain offerings as false. We can be seduced even if we know that the seducer is fooling us and without giving up our fundamental beliefs about what we ought to do. We succumb to temptation because of our moral weakness, not because of cognitive deficits. Indicating that he is aware of this difference, Adorno sometimes seems to openly favor a view of the culture industry as seductive rather than manipulative: “That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false.”23 As a seductive institution, the culture industry and its political analogues do not make people really happy, and leave them with a recurrent sense of anticlimax. The consumer-citizens remain strangely frustrated without knowing what else to desire or even how to articulate this frustration. Of course, since the authors do not present a particularly clear line of thought, the text on the culture industry allows for quite different interpretations. Do citizens see through the artificiality and emptiness of cultural merchandise and “recognize” it as false, or are they “deceived” as the chapter title in the Dialectic of Enlightenment suggests? Are they actively collaborating, or are they nothing but malleable material of media strategists? Finally, are we dumbed down into subservience by the system, or is it our “pernicious love” for the products of the culture industry that “outstrips even the cunning of the

22

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 106.

23

Ibid., p. 136.

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Introduction • 9

authorities”?24 These inconsistent propositions show that the sources of cultural power remain ultimately obscure. The writings on the culture industry can also be read as contributions to a political theory of the present age, insofar as their authors claim that the differentiation between culture, the economy and politics has collapsed. Advertising works like political propaganda and vice versa, so everything that can be said about the culture industry applies as well to the mechanisms of the modern “audience democracy”25 and the packaged opinion provided by spin doctors. In both fields power is exercised by making certain choices irresistible. By focusing on ways in which power shapes the will of subjects instead of breaking it, Critical Theory revived and recontextualized John Stuart Mill’s insight that freedom is not only threatened by repression but even more so by our tendency to collude in our own subjugation.26 Following this line of reasoning, Horkheimer and Adorno anticipated crucial elements of what was later developed into full-fledged “radical” conceptions of power and theories of the power elite.27 The animal metaphors employed by them illustrate that they regarded the drift towards socioeconomic atomism and moral indifference as the political fate of all modern political regimes. Those metaphors also reveal a misanthropic streak that is reminiscent of, but also much darker than, for example, Tocqueville’s talk of the “flock of timid and industrious animals”28 that is, for him, the citizenry of modern democracies. Moreover, they indicate that the victims of the system are also something else: perpetual fools and suckers unworthy of solidarity.

24

Ibid., p. 106.

25

See B. Manin, The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1997, ch. 6. Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

26

See J.S. Mill, “On Liberty,” in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. J. Gray, Oxford,

Oxford University Press, 1998, ch. 3, p. 68. 27

See S. Lukes, Power: A Radical View, London and New York, Macmillan, 1974;

C.W. Mills, The Power Elite, New York, Oxford University Press, 1959. 28

A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. A. Goldhammer, New York,

Library of America, 2004, p. 819. Horkheimer and Adorno explicitly refer to Tocqueville in Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 105.

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10 • Introduction

II. Dissemination of politics From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s dystopian fear that a “private monopoly of culture”29 is about to control the entire public discourse of society, thereby eroding the democratic public, seems premature, at best. There are, in fact, strong indications that the outcome of political struggles in contemporary societies cannot be predetermined by social elites and state bureaucracies. Rather, moral ideas about citizenship and human rights are regularly evoked to overcome social power. Likewise, much of the lament about the decline of solidarity and civic idealism does not stand up against critical scrutiny.30

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Much of what is worth keeping in early Critical Theory is related to the phenomenon of dissemination of politics. Several decades before thinkers like Michel Foucault, Adorno realizes that relations of power are perpetuated outside the formal realm of politics, in particular by cultivating certain ways of speaking and writing, doing research and relating to works of art. Conversely, he believes that the return of fascism has to be countered by changing these seemingly innocuous, pre-political practices. This approach to the study of power and conflict is based on the distinction between politics as “activity” and politics as sphere or “field.”31 A broad current in Critical Theory rejects the Hegelian conception of the political as a distinct part of society which at the same time stands in for the whole of society. Once this conception is abandoned, politics loses its traditional anchorage in the state and changes its forms and sites. Thus, against the fixed view of early Critical Theory as a nonpolitical theory I would rather argue that, if anything, its authors interpret society in the light of an overpoliticized morality. Critics have pointed out, for example, that Adorno, smelling evil everywhere, passionately rejected

29

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 105.

30

See, for example, J.C. Alexander, The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and

the Democratic Struggle for Power, New York, Oxford University Press, 2010. 31

See J. Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics, New York, Basic

Books, 2000. The same dualism can also be found in Adorno, Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft, pp. 66, 68.

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Introduction • 11

numerous composers and performers without even really listening to their music.32 From a different angle, Kirchheimer and Neumann also analyzed the dissemination of politics in contemporary capitalist societies. Both were studying the transformation of regulative institutions of law and politics, and the power of semi-private associations to drain power away from the democratic state. They maintained that politics becomes problematic because its object is shifting: organized struggles are no longer about binding decisions in the form of general laws, but about dividing up markets, controlling barriers to entry, and regulating predatory practices. These struggles are, then, no longer waged by social classes with universalistic aspirations, but by powerful special interest groups and “rackets” set up to protect their members and threaten nonmembers, always with an eye on what best serves the goal of self-preservation and rent-seeking. The concept of rackets, as it is used by Horkheimer, Adorno, Kirchheimer and Neumann, can be best understood as a way of challenging the standard view of the relation between the domestic and international politics. Usually, this relation is imagined as one between different “spheres” of action, the first regulated by principles of law and justice, and the second only by the unprincipled pursuit of power. Whereas Habermas and others have expressed the hope that the international relations between states can be subject to the same forms of institutional control that structures the relations between groups within states, first-generation critical theorists turned this “domestic analogy”33 on its head: instead of being

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domesticated and civilized by international law, the logic of international anarchy gradually eats into the domestic politics of modern constitutional states, pitting competing social groups against each other as if they were separate states.

32

Christian Béthune calls Adorno’s writings on Jazz a pithy, but simplistic “théorie

écran” that glosses over the complexity of its subject. See C. Béthune, Adorno et le jazz: Analyse d’un déni esthétique, Paris, Klincksieck, 2003, pp. 139–48. 33

On this concept and its history, see A. Linklater and H. Suganami, The English

School of International Relations: A Contemporary Reassessment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, ch. 2.

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12 • Introduction

Another way of looking at rackets is to think of them as conceptual spin-offs from the “small groups” and revolutionary conspirators into which, according to Horkheimer and Benjamin, modern social classes are slowly disintegrating. The difference between those small groups on the one hand, and rackets on the other, is that Horkheimer and Benjamin saw some of the former quite favorably, for they seemed to be still dedicated either to the practical transformation of society in accordance with the real interests of the majority, or to a new concept of social transformation as messianic interruption of progress and linear time.34 None of this applies to rackets which resemble miniature versions of the “crowds” described by twentieth-century mass psychology: de-subjectified social hordes held together by fear, submission and hostility toward the Other. Making a mockery of the idea of free association, they epitomize the enduring relevance of personal relations of trust and dependence within the reputedly rational systems of law, economy and politics. From the perspective of the history of political thought, rackets are extreme versions of the “factions” already dreaded by Rousseau, Madison and Mancur Olson as threats to the very existence of a sovereign constitutional state. The reason why these groups are not only nasty, but a structural threat to politics, was given by Neumann who argued that without a shared orientation toward collectively binding decisions backed up by the state, political struggles devolve into gangsterism. His prime example was the regime of Nazi Germany which according to him did not form a state in the European sense of the word, but operated like a criminal “gang.”35 Without the horizon of a state-centered constitutional order that determines whether a

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specific conflict is political, even the friend/foe distinction becomes meaningless.36 An ever-changing world of economic predators and their victims is fundamentally different from a world in which political groups are able to represent large populations and project definitive notions of who is the Other to be opposed at any cost.

34

See Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements,” pp. 56, 78–79; W. Benjamin,

The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press, 1999, p. 339. 35

Neumann, Behemoth, p. 522.

36

See the reading of Neumann in W.E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the

Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1997, pp. 41–42.

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Introduction • 13

Seen in this light, “dissemination” by rackets destroys politics no less than “suppression” by monopoly and manipulation. The difference between the inner and the outer circle of Critical Theory is not so much about the relevance of group conflicts in modern liberal polities—the concept of “rackets” is crucial for understanding the political theory of both circles—, but about the assessment of the likelihood of the suppression of politics. A member of the outer circle like Kirchheimer only claims that the social success of individuals and groups depends more and more on “access to organizations”37 rather than on access to markets. At the same time, the notion that society can be regulated by a “general cartel,”38 formed by all relevant groups, is firmly rejected. Both circles agree, on the other hand, that the weakening of the state does not usher in a stateless utopia of free associations and open discourse. Rather, they expect a situation in which elected legislatures are replaced by political and bureaucratic elites who take decisions without democratic authorization, and who know at the same time how to make people feel good about those decisions.

III. Recoding of the political At this point, I wish to return to Adorno’s writings which are caught up in a performative self-contradiction: Adorno rejects “a two-tiered classification dividing the sheep from the goats”39 while simultaneously expounding the most radically dichotomizing social theory one can imagine. On many occasions, he characterizes modern society as literally barbaric: populated by “barbarians”40 and driven by a “barbaric success-religion.”41

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Far from being apolitical, much of this rhetoric is motivated by the goal to convey prophetic messages rather than by the desire “to analyze

37

Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty,” p. 161.

38

Ibid.

39

Adorno, “Philosophy and Teachers,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catch-

words, trans. H.W. Pickford, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 27. 40

Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. Jephcott, London,

Verso, 2005, p. 182 (entry 117); Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, New York, Continuum, 2007, p. 15. 41

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 187 (entry 119).

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14 • Introduction

society.”42 Evoking the structured binaries of civil society, the founders of the Frankfurt School exclude any compromise between the motives, relationships and institutions of the barbarians and their opponents among the threatened minority of “[t]ruly cultured individuals” and “intellectual, spiritual people.”43 However, neither Adorno nor any other critical theorist assimilates the distinction between barbarians and intellectuals to the distinction between friends and foes. The reason is that, for them, the key binary opposition to make sense of modern society is not friend/foe, but perpetrator/victim. In the current conjuncture, not only intellectuals but anybody can become a passive victim of hugely asymmetrical exclusion or persecution at the hand of his fellow humans. The sociological analogue to the shift from a paradigm of struggle to a paradigm of persecution is the turn from the proletariat as a symbol of unjust suffering to the fate of the European Jews.44 Even though other thinkers have followed the same intuition,45 the shift from friend/foe to perpetrator/victim is crucial for an adequate understanding of the politics of Critical Theory. How exactly do these two distinctions, friend/foe and perpetrator/victim, differ? In my view, the main difference is that perpetrators and victims, unlike friends and foes, are not involved in a struggle in which each party wants its own will to prevail. The mutuality of actions and counter-actions that defines a struggle is replaced by one-sided courses of action against groups who are not given the opportunity to form a collective will in the first place. Social and political struggles between classes are superseded by assaults on the powerless. As Adorno writes, class struggles are replaced by situations in

42

Honneth, “Max Horkheimer and the Sociological Deficit of Critical Theory,” in On

Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives, ed. S. Benhabib et al., Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press,

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1993, p. 187. 43

Adorno, “Philosophy and Teachers,” in Critical Models, pp. 19, 21.

44

This last point has been stressed by O. Eisenstadt, “Levinas and Adorno:

Universalizing the Jew after Auschwitz,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, vol. 14, nos. 1–2, 2006, p. 140. 45

See, for example, A. Camus, Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947, ed. J. Lévi-

Valensi, trans. A. Goldhammer, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 255–76. Camus speaks of the opposition between “victims” and “executioners” in wartime Europe, which is not congruent with the friend/foe opposition.

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Introduction • 15

which even the once-proud European proletariat ceases to be a contender for power and morphs into “a defenceless object or victim”46 of the ruling elites. The members of the inner circle of Critical Theory emphasize the completely passive nature of victims in the age of suppressed politics. Conversely, they reject the notion of active self-sacrifice as deeply ideological. Already the young Adorno is highly critical of “the fetishistic autonomization of sacrifice”47 in the philosophy of Kierkegaard. More explicitly political attempts to revive the figure of the classical hero, who chooses self-sacrifice in the name of sacred cause, are dismissed as false consciousness. “The venerable belief in sacrifice is probably itself a behavior pattern drilled into the subjugated, by which they reenact against themselves the wrong done to them in order to be able to bear it.”48 Those who sacrifice themselves for whatever they were told is a worthy end are, then, also victims. There is more to be said about the specificity of the perpetrator/victim distinction. Social and political struggles between foes are self-defining, even if they are often influenced by third parties. Parties to a conflict define themselves as such. Victims, on the other hand, need a witness who ascertains their status as victims, often by turning to a wider public of initially disinterested people. Even if they can speak for themselves after having escaped the situation that defines them, victims depend on witnesses to make their claim to victimhood credible. Foes create a self-sustaining bipolar relationship, whereas the situation of someone who is a victim, of persecution for example—“a typical fate in our time”49—, gives rise to a tripolar relationship that includes not

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only victims and perpetrators, but also witnesses. The relevant question is no longer, like for Carl Schmitt, “Who is the enemy?” or “Who is to be fought?,” but rather “Who is the victim?” or “For whom do we speak?” Writing from the perspective of witnesses and advocates, the members of the Frankfurt School have developed a social and political theory that is fundamentally

46

Adorno, Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft, p. 53.

47

Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor,

Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 112. 48

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 41.

49

Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–65, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge,

UK, Polity Press, 2006, p. 18.

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16 • Introduction

other-regarding, even though the Other on whose behalf Critical Theory speaks remains ill-defined.50 Furthermore, in light of recent attempts to draw inspiration for democratic thought from Schmitt’s theory of the political, it is interesting to note that Adorno was well aware that the friend/foe opposition was likely to survive as a cognitive scheme long after its demise in the real world. It is my contention that the rejection of this cognitive scheme, and by implication, the rejection of any kind of neo-Schmittian revival, is at the heart of the politics of Critical Theory. Let us consider the following paragraph from one of Adorno’s postwar lectures: At any rate, I have a clear recollection that even as a child I violently resisted the assertion that “he who is not for me is against me.” My dislike arose because this statement seemed to lay claim to the ethical position that it is wrong to be lukewarm and that a person has to take decisions for himself, while behind that claim lay the compulsion to acquiesce in certain alternatives or particular decisions that do not actually follow from the authority of autonomous thought that is being appealed to in the concept of decision, but are being imposed on one in an alien manner, from outside.51

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If the new emphasis on the perpetrator/victim discrimination constitutes one half of the early politics of Critical Theory, this quotation encapsulates the other half. It contains two important points. First, the fact that the others are not “for” us does not imply that they are “against” us; they may simply differ. Intergroup differences must not be assimilated to antagonisms. Also, there is no inherent tendency of intergroup differences to turn antagonistic. Second, the thinking in terms of friend and foe, or more specifically, the political doctrine of decisionism undermines the “freedom of decision,”52 because it presupposes the existence of a collective “we” that is opposed to “them.” However, humans are free only when they have a stake in the very conception and ordering of the collectivity they are told they belong to. Freedom does not

50

See S. Chambers, “The politics of Critical Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to

Critical Theory, ed. F. Rush, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2004. 51

Adorno, “Einführung in die Dialektik,” Theodor W. Adorno Archive (Frankfurt),

1958, Vo 3212. 52

Ibid.

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Introduction • 17

mean that we can choose what we want, but that we are in control of what we want or, in other words, that we nurture the ability to differ from ourselves. Democracy is not only about drawing a line between “us” and “them,” but also, and more importantly, about institutionalizing new ways of creating the “we” that is marked off from “them.” This may also include the creation of “new ways of belonging”53 out of the specific situations of citizens in modern capitalist society. Does the multiple recoding of the political—from friend/foe to perpetrator/ victim, from antagonism to difference, and from the self-evidence of collectivities to their creative destruction and transformation—pave the way for an apolitical or post-political perspective on society? It is certainly true that the constitutive ethos of Critical Theory differs from other types of activist thinking. Intellectuals in this tradition define themselves as witnesses and advocates for the “victims of history”54 without, however, sharing the fate of the victims. Critical theorists are not organic intellectuals in the Marxist sense of leaders who have grown out of and identify with a particular social class and its historic attempt to reinvent itself out of an experience of suffering. And yet, the Frankfurt School as a particular historical instantiation of Critical Theory has certainly contributed to the self-reeducation of Germans (and others) and hence to the conception and ordering of new political collectivities in Europe. From Adorno to Habermas, Critical Theory took part not only in theorizing the political and social situation of postwar capitalism, but also in the performative politics of drawing a new we/they distinction. As an

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undercurrent of the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s, this politics did not pollute national or social others, but rather the temporal other of the Nazi past which was considered symptomatic of the dangers of the modern condition as such.

IV. Realism and anti-realism Much of what I have written so far, in particular about the recoding of the political, is shared by the entire cluster of authors working within the

53

K.A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New Haven,

Conn., Yale University Press, 1957, p. 157. 54

Adorno, “Einführung in die Dialektik,” Vo 3065.

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18 • Introduction

expanding project of a critical social theory. This entire tradition of modern European thought is adamantly opposed to a political theory based on the friend/foe distinction, even if critical theorists from Neumann to Habermas have more or less actively supported various war efforts.55 At the same time, the rejection of the friend/foe opposition does not preclude new approaches to the problem of the constitution, ordering and stitching together of collectivities, and hence new ways of thinking politically. In fact, the replacement of the friend/foe distinction by the victim/perpetrator distinction has given rise to new civil discourses and associations advocating the political and legal prevention of unnecessary suffering at the hands of powerful states and corporations.56 Against the backdrop of the shared purpose of connecting, in the words of Adorno, “the quest for the good life” to the “quest for the right form of politics”57 the differences within the critical theory project cannot be defined in terms of a divide between an unpolitical first generation and a more consciously political second or third generation. A better way of slicing the theory is to contrast realist and anti-realist approaches within the project. Raymond Geuss defines realist political philosophies as being concerned with “the way the social, economic, political, etc., institutions actually operate in some society at some given time, and what really does move human beings to act in given circumstances.”58 Defined in such broad terms, many firstgeneration theorists were probably more realistic in their studies of the fascist mentality or the transformations of the liberal state than so-called classical realists like Machiavelli or Hobbes who built their theories on a highly

55

See B.M. Katz, “The Criticism of Arms: The Frankfurt School Goes to War,” Journal

of Modern History, vol. 59, no. 3, 1987, pp. 439–78; N. Head, “Critical Theory and its Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

Practices: Habermas, Kosovo and International Relations,” Politics, vol. 28, no. 3, 2008, pp. 150–59. 56

See V. Heins, Nongovernmental Organizations in International Society: Struggles over

Recognition, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 57

Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, UK,

Polity Press, 2001, p. 176. 58

R. Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008,

p. 9.

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Introduction • 19

stylized and selective view of human nature. Habermas’s early work on the transformation of the public sphere falls in the same category of realist philosophy, as does Honneth’s action-theoretic approach to the sources of conflict in contemporary society. Much of the later works of Habermas, however, testify to an increasingly radical anti-realism and to what Geuss calls an “applied ethics” model of political philosophy. In particular Habermas’s writings on the future of the European Union and the constitutionalization of international law betray the belief that politics ought to consist primarily in the implementation of antecedently established normative principles. Instead of exploring the sources of state behavior or mechanisms able to change this behavior, he declares what states should do in order to live up to the standards of his own philosophy: the right to go to war should be abolished; states should surrender their sovereignty to global deliberative forums; at the same time, they should “lend” their soldiers to enforce international law everywhere; entire continents like Africa should reorganize themselves following the “model” of the European Union, etc.59 Yet, we are not told how we get from here to there. How can we build institutions that are able, to use Hobbes’s famous expression, to overawe modern states into surrendering their sovereignty? Who is going to outlaw war after having ended all ongoing wars? How can we persuade citizens to accept international bodies as legitimate expressions of the General Will of humankind? What does it take to persuade other continents to follow the model of the European Union, which after all is not very popular even among

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its own citizens? Habermas, who occasionally admits that in the real world there are no “suitable actors”60 able and willing to realize all those noble ambitions, reduces the idea of critique to the propaganda of a “fantastic scheme”61 of global reform.

59

See Habermas, “A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society?,” in

Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. C. Cronin, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2008, pp. 325, 333; Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project, trans. C. Cronin, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2009, pp. 123, 114. 60

Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project, p. 123.

61

M. Cooke, “Redeeming Redemption: The Utopian Dimension of Critical Social

Theory,” Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 30, no. 4, 2004, p. 422.

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20 • Introduction

Habermas’s democratic theory is mostly concerned with legal mechanisms of conflict resolution, not with the sources of conflict in modern societies. With regard to global society, he even denies the very existence of deep differences that could lead to conflicts. He declares, for example, that “Asiatic societies cannot participate in capitalistic modernization without taking advantage of the achievements of an individualistic legal order,” that is, without becoming Western-style liberal democracies. Not democratic activists, but systemic forces and the “hard-to-resist imperatives of an economic modernization” push the Rest to become like the West by making democratic regime change unavoidable.62 In my view, this combination of Eurocentrism and systems

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theory relegates Habermas’s late political theory to the margins of what can still be called a critical theory. Despite being indebted to Habermas’s discourse theory, Honneth’s critical theory of recognition can be read as an attempt to reverse the anti-realist drift of the former. Honneth radicalizes Habermas by shifting the focus from the coordination of action through language to the conflict of actors for justice. By bringing a strong concept of struggle back in, recognition theory removes the victim/perpetrator opposition from the privileged position it held in Adorno’s Critical Theory without, however, returning to a way of thinking in terms of friend/foe antagonisms. Honneth does not deny the continuing relevance of the victim/perpetrator opposition which helps us to understand the behavior of individuals and groups who are so scarred with the marks of moral wounds inflicted on them that they have lost the confidence and trust in each other needed to bring about change. Honneth appears to adopt weak versions both of the “suppression of politics” and the “dissemination of politics” theses of the founder generation. Restating the first thesis, he insists that justice claims are often not even represented in the political field, either because of the ideological closure of the political system or because of the lack of organization and self-confidence on the part of those who wish to make those claims. The theory of recognition is as much interested in the conditions of individual

62

Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. M. Pensky,

Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2001, p. 124. For an alternative perspective, see V. Heins, “Globale Marktgesellschaft oder zivilisatorische Differenz? Das Beispiel Indiens,” Berliner Debatte Initial, vol. 21, no. 1, 2010, pp. 106–13.

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Introduction • 21

autonomy as in the conditions of public voicelessness. The constellation of perpetrators and passive victims is a limit case of a struggle for recognition which has crossed into something else. The thesis of the dissemination of politics reappears in Honneth’s works, too, although in a different, more normative guise. Qualifying Adorno’s observation that life in modern societies, regardless of their form of government, tends to rob individuals of their sense of autonomous self, he criticizes overly state-centered and rights-based approaches to the problem of justice as onesided and insufficient. Following Hegel, recognition theory is concerned not only with the politics of the state, but also with the politics of the workplace and the private sphere of family life and intimate relations. The evils of humiliation and disrespect cannot be simply outlawed by establishing rights. The goal of a decent society is more ambitious than the goal of a society that respects human rights. In this context, recognition theory has also grown more sensitive to different modes of power which can be exercised either as control through others or as neglect by others; both these modes are analyzed as sources of potentially crippling moral injuries.63 Whereas the limit case of victim/perpetrator constellations has a place in the theory of recognition, the same cannot be said about friend/foe antagonisms. Honneth makes it clear that his concept of struggle differs from Marxist or Weberian concepts in that it tries to combine “the conflictual and the peaceful.”64 Struggles for recognition are, then, struggles by disrespected and marginalized groups (or even states) for inclusion into a larger moral community. Scholars interested in “struggles for recognition” as a new research program

63

On the dual face of power as control and neglect, see Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism,

p. 157. For Adorno’s downplaying of the difference between democracy and dictatorCopyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

ship, see, for example, Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 109. For a convincing interpretation and defense of Honneth’s “political theory of recognition,” see J.-P. Deranty, Beyond Communication: A Critical Study of Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2009, ch. 11. 64

L. Boltanski and A. Honneth, “Soziologie der Kritik oder Kritische Theorie? Ein

Gespräch mit Robin Celikates,” in Was ist Kritik?, ed. R. Jaeggi and T. Wesche, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2009, p. 89.

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22 • Introduction

have devoted much attention to the concept of recognition, but I believe that the concept of struggle deserves no less attention. This is all the more true since in recent times Honneth has explicitly rejected the mainstream of liberal justice theories in favor of a more realist approach. Expressing his frustration about the “old malaise of the mere juxtaposition of political philosophy and political action”65 he criticizes the premise shared by most contemporary theorists that principles of justice should be distilled from thought experiments about hypothetical original positions or ideal speech situations before being applied to an under-researched social reality which is lamentably bound to fall short of the moral ideal. In contrast to “proceduralist” and “constructive” approaches, Honneth gives the theory of recognition a more sociological turn. Instead of being applied from the outside to social reality, norms of justice can often be read off or at least “reconstructed” from the historical material of real social struggles. Rather than relying on the abstractions of political philosophy, Honneth writes, it is wise to understand and give more credit to the moral convictions held by citizens “even before all theory.”66 My impression is that although the realist turn of Critical Theory gives rise to new problems—in particular the problem that Honneth prejudges the outcome of empirical studies by designing the concept of a struggle for recognition in such a way as to exclude immoral and uncivil struggles—it clearly points the way toward a new balance between political theory, sociological research and social criticism.

V. The chapters of this book

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This book offers a thematic account of the changing political thought of critical theorists from Adorno to Habermas and Honneth. The term “political thought” is taken here in its broadest sense, including theoretical works on political concepts as well as more narrowly defined political writings.

65

Honneth, “Das Gewebe der Gerechtigkeit: Über die Grenzen des zeitgenössischen

Prozeduralismus,” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 6, no. 2, 2009, p. 3. 66

Ibid., p. 20. This line of reasoning resonates with the argument presented in

Alexander, The Civil Sphere, ch. 1 (“Possibilities of Justice”).

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Introduction • 23

The book also seeks to establish the relevance, or irrelevance, of the politics of Critical Theory for contemporary political theory. Readers will be offered an inside perspective, developed out of primary texts including a few unpublished sources from the Adorno Archive at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which will be combined with the outside perspective of non-Frankfurt School traditions such as cultural sociology.

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Chapter 1 elaborates on the transition from the friend/foe to the victim/perpetrator binary that is at the heart of Critical Theory. More specifically, I show the surprising results of reading first-generation Critical Theory through the lens of sociological trauma theory. This theory claims that the symbolic representation of painful occurrences through language and art leads to a “cultural” traumatization far beyond the circle of those originally affected by those occurrences; cultural trauma, in turn, can set in motion processes of reflection and sensitization to the suffering of others, followed by identity revision. My thesis is that Critical Theory is itself such a comprehensive narrative, one that begins with National Socialism, but expands from there to attribute the status of a cultural trauma to modern society as such. The end result is by no means mere resignation but rather a specific transformation of our understanding of politics and society. I argue that in particular Adorno has attributed a traumatic status to society itself. Sociology is reshaped in the image of a trauma narrative. Although not usually fond of other sociologists, Adorno praises Durkheim’s concept of social constraint as being akin to his own idea that society confronts each of us as a gruesomely alien, objective power. At the same time, he is taking this idea of society to its traumatic extremes. Not only are individuals powerless vis-à-vis society; they are literally disappearing. The paradox emerging from this claim is that in order to perceive and criticize society as traumatizing, the individuals need to develop a structure of experience that makes them sensitive to the destructiveness of social mechanisms; yet this very ability to make experiences is said to be destroyed as well by the subject-shattering power of society. The chapter concludes with a suggestion of how to navigate this paradox by drawing on insights of cultural trauma theory. Chapter 2 addresses the theme of the dissemination of politics in Critical Theory by taking a close look at the reappearance of what James Madison called “factions” in the guise of conspiratorial “rackets” in Horkheimer

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24 • Introduction

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and Adorno. Historically, blatantly untrue and defamatory conspiracy theories were both elements of cultural traumas and responsible for courses of action that were in turn traumatizing for those who were portrayed as evildoers by conspiracy theorists. At the same time, conspiratorial agreements at the expense of the common good between powerful groups in society do indeed exist and have occasionally been uncovered. Against this backdrop, the chapter describes different ways in which Critical Theory has looked at rackets and conspiracies. First, an attempt is made to show that Max Horkheimer’s notes on “rackets” are an ambitious but flawed attempt to theorize conspiracy. It is argued that Horkheimer’s theory is imbued by the very conspiracy thinking that he proposed to criticize. Second, I suggest recovering Franz Neumann’s concept of “political alienation” as a more appropriate starting point to think critically about the ethical and epistemological questions raised by conspiracy theories. I then move on to discuss Adorno who has fleshed out the concept of political alienation by making some interesting observations about paranoid systems of meaning-making and their disastrous political consequences. Neumann’s and Adorno’s reflections are symptomatic for a broader shift of focus from objective conditions to the workings of the mind. Chapter 3 is concerned with the subject of cultural difference and antagonism in critical theory reflections on modern travel and travel narratives. What forces shape our collective sensitivity to differences between “us” and “others”? Who decides about the significance of these differences? What follows from that for the structure of attitudes of respect or disrespect for distant strangers? Against the backdrop of such questions, my aim in this chapter is to explore a particular segment of media representations of distant strangers, namely the genre of travel literature. Drawing on Walter Benjamin and recent contributions by various theorists on classical and modern travelogues, the chapter presents some fresh ideas about how this important genre at the intersection between factual and fictional media contributes to changing civil discourses about the world. I first show how Critical Theory contains different models for reflecting on modern travel that can be applied to the criticism of travel writing. I then explain how Edward Said’s study of Orientalism came to dominate the debate. Next, I review and revise the critique of Orientalism by offering a reading of a few selected literary texts. In my

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Introduction • 25

conclusion I hope to show how these reflections might turn out to be useful for rethinking the connections between travel, travel writing and the contours of new forms of a global civil consciousness.

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Chapter 4 explores recent attempts to reconstruct the concept of civil society in the spirit of a critical theory of society. The vocabulary of civil society is not only employed by observers but also by participants in political life involved in struggles over the meaning of solidarity and self-government; and that this has been the case since several centuries. Citizens not only struggle within the institutions of civil society, but also for “civil society.” The language of civil society is widely used as a powerful tool for making sense of democratic experiences, for framing political demands, and for challenging adversaries. The concept is marked by traces of the antagonistic usages that different groups at different times have made of it. Before becoming an international code word for more inclusive and more global forms of solidarity, “civil society” was used to defend individual liberties, the stability and prosperity of the political realm, and ideals of civic mutuality and reciprocity. The chapter explores the concept of civil society by identifying a number of implicit oppositional terms and the respective semantic fields, which in different historical contexts have lent meaning to the concept. Three such oppositional terms and counter-meanings will be distinguished in turn and traced back to different traditions of European social and political theory: the barbarisms of order and of disorder, and the realm of toil and material necessity. It is argued that the multiple meanings and counter-meanings of civil society are connected by a deep structure of discourse. Chapter 5 discusses recent attempts to make sense of the European Union as the most important twentieth-century experiment in transforming friend/foe antagonisms into relations of negotiated differences within a common legal and political framework. The main body of the chapter lays bare the tensions in Habermas’s political writings on Europe and the European Union: the tension between the goal of strengthening a spatially based European collective identity and the goal of respecting and “including” those who are deemed outsiders to Europe; the tension between rejecting loyalty to cultural traditions and grounding European identity in a subset of those traditions; the tension between tracing political rifts between Europe and the US to “deeper” cultural self-understandings and the refusal to do so; and the

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26 • Introduction

tension between the plea for more powerful and centralized EU institutions and the call for more democracy. I argue that while Habermas and other philosophers of Europe effectively criticize cultural essentialism and technocratic anti-politics, they still apply a normative binary code, sometimes to other regions and cultures and sometimes to traditions, identifications and loyalties deemed anachronistic. Although directed against any resurrection of a political theory based on friend/foe discriminations, their polarizing narratives seek to freeze authoritatively the meaning of “Europe” by expurgating its Other. In particular Habermas’s vision of Europe is problematic because it underestimates the deeply particular nature and the uniqueness of the historical circumstances that gave rise to the European experiment; the flip side of this flaw is Habermas’s penchant for expanding the idea of European unification, which has proved successful in particular circumstances, into a universal doctrine of how the entire world should be conceived and ordered.

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Chapter 6 to 8 are dedicated to aspects of Honneth’s critical theory of recognition. Chapter 6 attempts to clarify the place of property in the politics of recognition. The absence of a discussion of property rights has been particularly striking in the recent debate about the balance to be struck between “recognition” and “redistribution” as competing or overlapping principles of justice. I argue that property is an economic institution which is shot through with moral expectations. As such, it sits at the point of intersection between struggles for recognition and struggles for redistribution. Fleshing out this argument, I proceed in three steps. First, I show that the history of modern capitalist society cannot be reduced to a history of and apologia for the limitless expansion of property, a process not corrected until the advent of the workers’ movement. On the contrary, there is a specific liberal critique of property. In this context, Critical Theory is interesting because it broke with both liberal and Marxist critiques of property. The history of Critical Theory can be read as a history of the replacement of property by other factors that were now seen as more fateful sources of political wrong turnings, cultural deformations and avoidable social suffering. To replace property, various representatives of the Frankfurt School have succeeded in presenting the public with an array of new targets for criticism, among them the destructiveness of “technology,” the power of vast, opaque “organizations” or the domination of society by manipulatory “rackets.” Second, I explain that the neglect by

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Introduction • 27

critical theorists of the persistent implications of property would not be a matter for regret, were it not for the fact that contemporary societies are still marked by a host of social conflicts that can be described only as conflicts about property. These include conflicts about intellectual property rights such as patents or copyright, disputes about control of and trade with one’s own body parts or those of others including their underlying genetic materials, and lastly, disputes about land rights. All these disputes prompt questions about both social and global justice. In light of this, I go on in the third section to discuss how a recognition theory of justice helps us to better describe and evaluate contemporary struggles over property institutions.

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Chapter 7 examines the relationship between Honneth’s critical theory of recognition and debates on distributive justice. My first task is to draw attention to the indifference to questions of moral identity and the technocratic nature of much of the debate on global distributive justice. Second, I briefly examine the exchange between Honneth and Nancy Fraser about the relationship between redistribution and recognition in contemporary capitalist society. What I find striking here is that Honneth has hitherto shown scant curiosity about the problems of a global moral order. The exclusive focus on the domestic conditions in a small number of highly developed societies is mirrored by the corresponding absence of any reference to the dimension of recognition in theories of international distributive justice. Third, I go on to consider whether it is possible to “globalize” recognition theory in the same way as Thomas Pogge has attempted to globalize Rawls’s Theory of Justice. In order to lay the groundwork for such a project, I explore possible global extensions to Honneth’s catalogue of love, legal equality and achievement as principles of recognition which define moral thresholds of what individuals can reasonably expect from each other in terms of mutual attention and respect. I argue that such additions are essential if we refuse to limit our social and ethical analysis to domestic conditions. The reason is that as soon as we broaden the scope of reflection to include transnational or global struggles, we cannot take the existence of agreed-upon principles of recognition for granted. I conclude this chapter with a few remarks on what I believe are the two main problems in the theory of recognition that need to be addressed if we wish to broaden the concept of struggles for recognition so as to include transnational conflict over justice claims.

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28 • Introduction

Chapter 8 makes an attempt to establish a place for recognition theory in the study of international relations. Such an attempt appears to be promising given the often heard claims that states and peoples have been “humiliated” or “disrespected” by other states or peoples. These situations are said to be the result of military defeats, sanctions and embargoes, the non-admittance of countries to regional alliances or power blocs, or negative stereotypes held by outsiders and reinforced by the remarks of foreign emissaries or journalists. Conversely, the struggles for easing the burdens of military defeat, lifting embargoes, admitting countries to regional clubs, and extracting apologies from alleged offenders are seen as struggles for recognition aimed at protecting the symbolic identity of large collectivities. The question I wish to ask is whether the neo-Hegelian theory of recognition helps us to shed light on such conflicts and strivings. While some authors have already answered this question affirmatively, my own answer will be more careful. In particular, I am convinced that recognition theorists need to avoid the twin mistakes of the fetishization of the state and its romantic dismissal as empty abstraction. The fetishization of the state implies a full convergence between interpersonal and international recognition: states or peoples deserve and thrive on the fullfledged recognition by others. The romantic dismissal of states as empty abstractions implies the notion of two completely separate justificatory systems (one for natural persons, one for states). My own argument is that recognition theory should be developed in such a way as to strike a middle course beyond this false alternative. I proceed in four steps. First, I offer a reading of Honneth’s theory of recognition as a romantic political theory in which states do not seem to have any moral standing of their own. Second, I discuss the opposite view which takes states to be moral persons. Third, I then argue for a conception of recognition that takes the specificity and irreducibility of international society seriously without falling into the trap of turning states into fetishes. I conclude with a reflection on the place of states and peoples in the critical theory of recognition.

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Chapter One Knowing the Worst: Critical Theory as Trauma Narrative

Among the most persistent clichés of contemporary intellectual history is the idea that right through to its paradigmatic core Critical Theory was moulded by the allegedly resigned and apolitical attitude of its founders. Thus a historian of the Frankfurt School speaks of the “detached observer”1

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perspective from which Horkheimer and Adorno were said to have judged the development of modern capitalist society. In what follows I would like to rebut this interpretation and replace it with a counter-assertion. The notion that early Critical Theory (as opposed to Habermas’s work) is fundamentally apolitical is misleading because it blurs the distinction between being the helpless prisoner of circumstances and the attitude of withdrawn contemplation. Early Critical Theory, however, can only be understood by looking at it in the context of the traumatic experience of National Socialism, flight and

1

H. Dubiel, “Herrschaft oder Emanzipation? Der Streit um die Erbschaft der kri-

tischen Theorie,” in Zwischenbetrachtungen: Im Prozeß der Aufklärung, ed. A. Honneth et al., Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1989, p. 513.

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30 • Chapter One

exile to which its mostly Jewish exponents as well as countless of their contemporaries were exposed. Their contribution to the political thinking of the present consists in having creatively transformed these unprecedented historical and personal experiences of impotence and terror into a theory of modern society as such. If they were “detached” in their attitude toward the social trends of their age, this could at best be in the same sense in which a car driver feels herself detached when facing another car coming straight at her from the opposite direction. In the present age, when intellectuals compare having their fingerprints taken when entering a foreign country to the tattooing of inmates in concentration camps,2 it is difficult to recreate in our minds the exceptional historical situation in which Critical Theory came into being. Perhaps we should remind ourselves that individual members of the Institute of Social Research were not only stripped of their citizenship, but had actually been imprisoned in concentration camps where they had escaped being murdered only by a hair’s breadth. This had been the fate of both the China expert Karl August Wittfogel and the political sociologist Paul Massing, both of whom later researched anti-Semitism together with Adorno and others. How close to disaster the politically innocent Adorno must have come can be gauged from the fact that as late as April 1933 he advised his friend Siegfried Kracauer to return from exile in Paris to the allegedly greater safety of Berlin: “There is complete peace and quiet; I believe that the situation will stabilize itself.”3 In retrospect the shock was all the greater when the founders of the Frankfurt School realized just how close they had come to not “escaping from the German gas chambers”4 for which they had been destined through no fault of their own.

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Even so, it would be wrong to maintain that Critical Theory was a hostage to the traumatic experiences of its protagonists, much as travellers who have been involved in a train accident are said to be traumatized and still display

2

See G. Agamben, “Bodies Without Words: Against the Biopolitical Tattoo,” German

Law Journal, vol. 5, no. 2, 2004, pp. 168–69. 3

Letter to Kracauer, April 15, 1933, in T.W. Adorno and S. Kracauer, Briefwechsel

1923–1966, ed. W. Schopf, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2008, p. 308. 4

Adorno, “Fragen an die intellektuelle Emigration,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed.

R. Tiedemann et al., Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1997, vol. 20.1, p. 353.

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Knowing the Worst • 31

the symptoms of some sort of psychic injury years later. On the contrary, from its very inception to its institutionalization as the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory can be reconstructed as a process that reflected on the events associated with National Socialism and digested them in an extraordinarily productive way. Following the American sociologists Jeffrey Alexander and Ron Eyerman, we can pinpoint this process more precisely as a “trauma process.”5 By this we understand an intellectual practice in which specific, extremely painful and disturbing events are taken out of their temporal context and are endowed with meanings that irrevocably alter the identity of collectives that are larger than the group originally affected. Sociological trauma theory asserts that occurrences in themselves are not traumatic but only the narratives that retrospectively transform the material of these occurrences into unforgettable, iconic events. Only in this re-narrated form can experiences be reawakened, commemorated and transmitted to following generations as components of a collective memory. Where a massive historical injury has been assimilated into a comprehensive narrative, and has therefore become communicable, Alexander and Eyerman speak of a “cultural trauma,” as opposed to a psychological or physical trauma. Cultural trauma theory is based on the insight that the same event may not traumatize everyone equally, and may, in fact, not traumatize some people at all. Facts don’t speak for themselves, not even the facts of raw suffering. As Cathy Caruth argues, an experience registers as traumatic not because of the inherent content of an occurrence but “solely in the structure of its experience or reception.”6 These structures of experience are, in turn, shaped by cultural categories.

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It is the symbolic representation of painful occurrences through language and art that conveys a sense of “acute discomfort”7 that goes far beyond the circle of those originally involved, and is capable of setting in motion a

5

See J.C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Alexander et al.,

Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2004; R. Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. 6

C. Caruth, “Trauma and Experience: Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in

Memory, ed. C. Caruth, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 4 7

Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” p. 10.

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32 • Chapter One

process of reflection on and sensitization to the suffering of others. My thesis is that Critical Theory is itself such a comprehensive narrative, one that begins with National Socialism, but expands from there to attribute the status of a cultural trauma to modern society as such. The end result is by no means mere resignation but rather a specific transformation of our understanding of politics and society. I wish to develop this thesis in four stages. First, I will depict Critical Theory as a trauma narrative in which a particular group of people affected informs the public about the nature of a great injury and the characteristics of its victims, and thus creates a complex relation between itself and the society it is criticizing (I). I will go on to develop two implications of the idea of Critical Theory as a trauma narrative: on the one hand, Adorno’s criticism of every form of secular theodicy (II) and on the other, his concept of a democratic pedagogy for postwar Germany and beyond (III). I conclude by arguing that Critical Theory should be read as an exercise in conceptualizing modern society itself as traumatic (IV).

I. A new trauma narrative

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Every trauma process is introduced by the original carrier group affected, which, finding itself in a particular historical situation, attempts to use whatever symbolic means it has at its disposal to translate a terrible occurrence or a chain of such occurrences into a new language that connects with a broader public. In the case of the first generation of critical theorists this occurrence is the Holocaust, including the “traumata of emigration.”8 The group affected, which creates a new language to signify this occurrence and uses it as the starting point for a traumatic construction of modern society as a whole, consists not of dispassionate observers, but of individuals who have escaped that particular fate and can therefore appear before an audience-public as credible witnesses. Critical Theory arises from the experiences of a group caught up in an “era of persecution.”9 The authority this confers on them contributes to the

8

Letter to Kracauer, October 17, 1950, in Adorno and Kracauer, Briefwechsel 1923–

1966, p. 453. 9

Adorno, “Vorwort zu einer Übersetzung der Prismen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol.

10.2, p. 804.

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Knowing the Worst • 33

success of a cultural process in which a public is to be convinced of the truth of the proposed interpretation of the past so that it is prepared to empathize with the pain of the victims. According to Alexander, the narrative needed to achieve this end must do four things. It must provide information, first, about the nature of the injury which stands at the beginning of the trauma process; second, about the nature of the victim who is traumatized; third, about who is responsible for inflicting the injury, and fourth, about the relations between the victims and their moral witnesses, on the one hand, and the addressees of the trauma discourse in society at large, on the other.10 I now offer a brief sketch of Critical Theory’s response to these four questions.

What happened? For some writers, Franz Neumann foremost among them, the best explanation of racism and anti-Semitism is still the one provided by classical Marxist doctrine, according to which they are a surrogate for class struggle or a pretext for wars of expansion and annihilation.11 For Adorno, on the other hand, the Holocaust (“Auschwitz”) is “the most extreme social fact,” one which he says “cannot really be understood.”12 At the same time, he and other representatives of the Frankfurt School make general statements about the society in which this extreme social fact was possible. The most important statement is that the economic exploitation of a subject class and the conflicts resulting from it have ceased to be the central evil of modern society; the class struggle has been replaced by the persecution of defenseless people. It is this evil that

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has found its apogee and symbol in the Holocaust, which did not initially possess that name. In 1950, Max Horkheimer und Samuel Flowerman spoke of “the mechanized persecution and extermination of millions of human beings only a short span of years away in what was once regarded as the citadel of Western civilization.”13 By the end of the 1950s Adorno has become

10

Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” pp. 12–15.

11

See Neumann, Behemoth, pp. 125–27.

12

Adorno, “Einleitung zu Emile Durkheim, ‘Soziologie und Philosophie’,” in

Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8, p. 277. 13

M. Horkheimer and S.H. Flowerman, “Foreword to Studies in Prejudice,” in

Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, New York, W.W. Norton, 1950, p. v.

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34 • Chapter One

more cautious, when he characterizes the same occurrences as “a horror that one hesitates to call … by name.”14 To put it bluntly, we might say that with the passing of the Marxist theory of revolution the Jews take the place of the proletariat, or rather, even the proletariat ceases to be regarded as an antagonistic social class and morphs into “a defenceless object or victim standing outside society.”15 Horkheimer, and more particularly Adorno, are describing the transition from a conflict between hostile classes to a one-sided assault on individuals and groups who are stigmatized, injured or annihilated simply on the grounds of their membership, real or imagined, of a deeply polluted collective. This new situation has ceased to be a struggle since the concept of struggle implies that the opposing parties want their own aims to prevail. Struggle implies a mutuality of actions in the context of a dynamic process, in the course of which winners and losers emerge. Persecution differs from struggle because it does not leave in its wake losers whose will to win has been broken, but simply victims whose convictions and political views count for nought. The particular characteristic of victims is that quite without any action of their own and without any intention on their part to engage in political struggle, they are sought out and destroyed by a more powerful social agent. The victim in this new, completely passive sense differs fundamentally from the idea of someone who actively chooses self-sacrifice in the name of a higher goal. The political point in emphasizing the figure of the passive victim is its relevance to a retrospective critique of the illusions of liberalism, including the illusions of assimilated Jews in Germany before the war: They believed that only anti-Semitism disfigured this order [of the harmonious society], which in reality cannot exist without disfiguring human beings. The persecution of the Jews, like any persecution, cannot be separated from

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this order. Its essence, however it may hide itself at times, is the violence which today is openly revealed.16

What is noteworthy here is the idea that the violence of the persecution is said to be the “essence” of every political order of the present. This assertion

14

Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models, p. 89.

15

Adorno, Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft, p. 53.

16

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 138–39.

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Knowing the Worst • 35

is complemented by the further assertion that in modern societies domination “inevitably” becomes “persecution.”17

Who are the victims? Early Critical Theory gave two answers to the question about the identity of the victims of the new logic of persecution. The first answer is contained in the “Elements of Anti-Semitism” in the two versions of Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1944 and 1947. Here Horkheimer and Adorno claim that a person’s moral and political intentions are immaterial for deciding whether he or she is to become a victim. But even in the persecutors they observe a striking “lack of intention.”18 What arouses the will to persecute the Jews are not any intrinsic qualities on the part of the Jewish minority, but simply their situation of being defenseless as a minority. “Rage is vented on those who are both conspicuous and unprotected.”19 If all defenseless people can become victims, then the situation of the European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s is nothing special. In fact Horkheimer and Adorno write that “the victims are interchangeable.”20 This thesis of the interchangeability of the victims can already be found in Horkheimer’s essay of 1940, “The Authoritarian State,” where he notes about the concentration camps that “in principle anyone could be there.”21 But if it is true that Jews were merely arbitrary victims, it remains unclear why anyone would aspire to a deeper understanding of antiSemitism. The thesis that the victims are arbitrarily chosen is in competition with another strand of argument that Horkheimer sketched in “The Jews and Europe” in 1939: The sphere of circulation, which was decisive for the fate of the Jews in a dual fashion, as the site of their livelihood and the foundation of bourgeois Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

democracy, is losing its economic importance … The Jews are stripped of

17

Ibid., p. 164

18

Ibid., p. 140.

19

Ibid.

20

Ibid.

21

Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader,

ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt, New York, Continuum, 2002, p. 103.

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36 • Chapter One power as agents of circulation, because the modern structure of the economy largely puts that whole sphere out of action. They are the first victims of the ruling group that has taken over that canceled function.22

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This reflection echoes debates about the nature of National Socialism at the exiled Institute of Social Research in New York between 1939 and 1941. In those debates Friedrich Pollock to whom the Dialectic of Enlightenment is dedicated put forward the thesis of an emerging “state capitalism.”23 According to that thesis, the Jews had become victims not simply because they were “conspicuous and unprotected,” but also because they had become economically superfluous. Looked at more closely, this argument really consists of two parts. In the first place, as the actual or imagined agents of circulation—that is, as brokers, go-betweens, border crossers, and travelers—the Jews were exposed to popular resentment, especially if they had become wealthy through their activities in the sphere of circulation, such as banking. The reason for this resentment lay in the deep-rooted European ideal of self-sufficient production for the benefit of the producers.24 The labor expended transforming the material of nature was thought to be value-creating and worthy, whereas merely facilitating the flow of goods and money was regarded as parasitical and unworthy. The idea that European society had of itself was that of a society of producers in which non-producers were suspect from the outset. Horkheimer sidesteps the stigmatizing implications of the identification of Jews, the sphere of circulation and capitalism, and leaps beyond it with the far more extreme thesis that the sphere of circulation and the market will disappear altogether. The consequence is that sectors of the population that have specialized in these unproductive intermediate activities become first superfluous and then (and for that very reason, as Horkheimer implies) the “first victims” of state capitalism.

22

Horkheimer, “The Jews and Europe,” in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed.

S.E. Bronner and D. MacKay Kellner, New York, Routledge, 1989, pp. 89–90. 23

See F. Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” in The Essential

Frankfurt School Reader, pp. 71–94. 24

See J. Parry, “On the moral perils of exchange,” in Money and the Morality

of Exchange, ed. J. Parry and M. Bloch, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 85.

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Knowing the Worst • 37

Who is responsible? The narrative of Critical Theory radically enlarges the circle of victims, and in the same way it enlarges the circle of potential perpetrators. At a superficial glance, those responsible for the events that later became the focal point of a new trauma drama are the “fascist leaders” behind whom “a gigantic apparatus and the real holders of power”25 can be discerned. At the same time, Horkheimer and Adorno emphasize that the paradigm of the persecution of the defenseless is not confined to the specific situation of Nazi Germany. Furthermore, the difference between democracy and dictatorship is of secondary importance. The concept of “totalitarianism” does indeed occur occasionally in some of the American texts of the exile phase, but unlike in Hannah Arendt’s writings, it plays no systematic role.26 The German sociologist EvaMaria Ziege has taken the trouble to compare the mimeographed New York edition of Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1944 with the printed Amsterdam edition of 1947. In so doing, she uncovered some interesting conceptual substitutions. Thus “exploitation” is replaced by “suffering,” “capitalism” by “economic system” and, most importantly, “class society” simply by “society.”27 Ziege regards these changes as no more than tactical adaptations to the emerging culture of the Cold War, whereas my suspicion is that with their sharply dichotomizing discourse Horkheimer and Adorno were on their way to declaring that modern society as a whole is a traumatizing evil. A similar picture emerges from their empirical work of the late 1940s, in particular, from Antisemitism among American Labor.28 This study provided evidence in support of the hypothesis that in the United States news about the

25

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 194.

26

See E.-M. Ziege, Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie: Die Frankfurter Schule im

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amerikanischen Exil, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2009, p. 223. 27

Ibid., p. 117.

28

This major project, which was funded by the American Jewish Committee (AJC)

and the labor unions AFL and CIO, was a collaborative effort by Adorno, Gurland, Löwenthal, Massing and Pollock. The findings were never published. In the early 1950s, a version revised by Paul Lazarsfeld was planned but it failed to appear. The unpublished, four-volume report is available at Columbia University and at the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives in New York.

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38 • Chapter One

persecution of the Jews in Europe before and during the World War II did not arouse much sympathy for the victims; on the contrary, it reinforced anti-Semitism. Even if this hypothesis could not be verified without qualification, it is true that anti-Semitic prejudices were very much in evidence both in the American working class and among non-white immigrant groups who were themselves the objects of discrimination. The “potential fascist” was a threat in almost every social milieu and could not be confined to a particular social class.29 But if neither political forms of government nor social class membership are of any use as reliable predictors for the readiness to persecute minorities or to acquiesce in their persecution, then almost anyone can become a persecutor, including today’s persecuted. This is precisely the conclusion arrived at in the “Elements of Anti-Semitism.” Not only are the victims interchangeable, every victim can also become a persecutor at any time.30

Moral witnesses and the wider public

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Critical Theory differs from empiricist or “scientific” theories of society in that it is intrinsically addressed to victimized groups of human agents and developed with the goal of contributing to the self-knowledge of these groups, and hence to their enlightenment and liberation.31 The members of the first generation of critical theorists were themselves victims of the general social situation they describe. As survivors, they were also moral witnesses32 who attempted to share the traumatic representation of their own experience with a wider public. Wittfogel and Massing, for example, gave literary accounts of their brief incarceration in concentration camps before their immigration to the United States. Both were also witnesses in a legal sense, since they had been present at the scenes of violence as prisoners. Wittfogel especially, a former inmate of the concentration camp in Esterwegen in the north of

29

See Ziege, Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie, pp. 180–228.

30

See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 140.

31

See R. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 1981, pp. 63, 76. 32

On the concept of moral witness, see A. Assmann, “History, Memory, and the

Genre of Testimony,” Poetics Today, vol. 27, no. 2, 2006, pp. 261–73.

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Knowing the Worst • 39

Germany, gave a vivid account of the special situation of the Jews in the concentration camp system: A communist is a dangerous political enemy with whom one had fought only yesterday and on whom one could take one’s revenge now that he was defenceless. The imprisoned Jews, however, were not so much political opponents as what we might describe as metaphysical ones. They are, we learn from National Socialist propaganda, a kind of animal. They are evil in human form, infinitely wealthy, infinitely cunning, and infinitely harmful.33

Adorno is a moral witness of a different kind since he like no one else places the events associated with the Holocaust at the very heart of his writings and communicates them as a cultural trauma. He employs an astonishingly simple rhetorical strategy to persuade a mostly younger audience consisting of neither victims nor perpetrators to listen to the stories of witnesses and pay heed to their message. This strategy consists in constantly finding new ways of telling them that, although we are living “after doomsday,”34 the catastrophe keeps going on. “Auschwitz” is the cipher for a unique event in the past and at the same time the blueprint of a pattern that can be discerned, albeit in attenuated form, in a myriad of other events. In a posthumously published lecture given in April 1968, Adorno puzzles his students with the statement: “Ausschwitz is a prototype of something which has been repeated incessantly in the world since then.”35 Here “Auschwitz” is introduced as a heuristic metaphor meant to encourage an inquiry into an ongoing series of events. Although this metaphorical use of “Auschwitz” seems somewhat at odds with Adorno’s preference for approaching empirical objects on their own terms, without any attempt to subsume the particular under the general,

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33

K.A. Wittfogel, Staatliches Konzentrationslager VII: eine “Erziehungsanstalt” im

Dritten Reich (first published 1936 in London under the pseudonym Klaus Hinrichs), Bremen, Temmen, 1991, pp. 53–54. See also P.W. Massing, Fatherland (published under the pseudonym Karl Billinger), New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1935. Massing was imprisoned for some months in 1933 in the concentration camp in Oranienburg. 34

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 54 (entry 33); emphasis added.

35

Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford, CA, Stanford

University Press, 2000, p. 18.

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40 • Chapter One

it certainly didn’t fail do impress his audience. In other lectures, “Auschwitz” appears as a metonymy for society as such: “by Auschwitz I mean of course the entire system … The horror of our day has arisen from the intrinsic dynamic of our own history; it cannot be described as exceptional.”36 The Holocaust and modern society, past and present, survivors and descendants are all linked up by such analogies, which are pervasive in Adorno’s writings. After the war, Critical Theory not only helped to ensure the persistence of an abiding memory for the younger generation; it also furnished this memory with a powerful contemporary relevance.

II. Against theodicy Critical Theory has turned the terrible events and actions of what we nowadays describe with such shorthand terms as “Holocaust” or “Shoah” into a traumatizing grand narrative with the political aim of creating a community of “secondary” witnesses who can authenticate and preserve the witness accounts of survivors and make them a part of a system of collective everyday orientation.37 At the center of this narrative stands the paradoxical statement that something as dark and obscure as the Holocaust can shed light on modern capitalist society as a whole. Society is to be made comprehensible by starting out from something incomprehensible. Adorno takes this thesis and radicalizes it even further: modern society is to be thought about by starting simply and solely from the fact of the Holocaust. He may go even further:

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there can be no thought at all without the consciousness of horror. “A human being who is not mindful at every moment of the potential of extreme horror at the present time must be so bemused by the veil of ideology that he might as well stop thinking at all.”38 But how are those who are still capable of thought actually to think? Above all else, Adorno insists on the extraordinary character of the evil represented by the Holocaust. This evil does not really have a name; it is, as Horkheimer

36

Adorno, History and Freedom, pp. 7–8.

37

On the concept of secondary witnessing, see Assmann, “History, Memory, and

the Genre of Testimony,” pp. 267–70. 38

Adorno, History and Freedom, p. 203.

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Knowing the Worst • 41

writes, “the inexpressible” (das Unausprechliche)39 as such. Horkheimer and Adorno do not merely refuse to think of the Holocaust as just another major crime in the history of mankind; they even write as if they would like to apply the Jewish commandment “Thou shalt not make a graven image” to extreme evil. The Holocaust is thus treated as a “sacred evil”40 in the sense given to it in Emile Durkheim’s sociology of religion, that is to say, as a symbol that is inexplicable in ordinary terms and that makes us recoil in horror. The particular nature of this construct, however, is that this sacred evil is not at all separate from the profane world but impinges on it and permeates it. That is the meaning of the oft quoted but little understood aphorism 5 of Minima Moralia which reads that in the world of today “there is nothing innocuous left.”41 At one point in his lectures on metaphysics, Adorno draws a parallel with Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil in order to define his own thoughts more precisely: For no matter how one may view the works of Hannah Arendt, and I take an extremely critical view of them, she is undoubetedly right in the identification of evil with triviality. But I would put it the other way round; I would not say that evil is trivial, but that triviality is evil—triviality, that is, as the form of consciousness and mind that adapts to the world as it is, which obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.42

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This principle of inertia assumes various forms which Adorno repeatedly criticizes. In doing so, the goal is to fashion Critical Theory as a trauma narrative. In the light of this goal all “trivial” systems of thought that adjust themselves to the world as it is and refuse to take cognizance of sacred evil

39

Letter to Hartmann, December 13, 1955, in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, ed.

A. Schmidt and G. Schmid Noerr, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1985–96, vol. 18, p. 330. 40

See Alexander, “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The ‘Holocaust’

from War Crime to Trauma Drama,” in Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology, New York, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 50. 41

See Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 25.

42

Adorno, Metaphysics, p. 115.

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42 • Chapter One

have to be rejected. Triviality in the field of theory comes in two forms. The first is empiricism or “positivism.” Adorno was highly critical, as is well known, of what he dismissed as “so-called factual research,” which he saw as “a pretext not to recognize or to talk about the things that hurt.”43 Whereas positivism is seen as blinding the public to the reality of evil, other systems of thought neutralize and camouflage evil in the same moment in which they recognize it. Modern versions of theodicies are an example. In fact, Adorno’s philosophy is bluntly opposed to the tradition of “comforting Enlightenment”44 that can be found most obviously in Leibniz’s writings on the problem of theodicy. Theodicies are systems of thought that attempt to harmonize the existence of contingent sufferings with the belief in a rational dispensation of the world (or a kind and omnipotent God), and so to make those sufferings both intelligible and significant. In this spirit Leibniz declared that the discord between revelation, reason and history, which manifested itself in the eyes of many contemporaries in such horrendous events as the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, was merely an illusion. By contrast, Adorno regards the apologetic thesis of the profound rationality of the world as the expression of a deluded system that is itself implicated in the evil that it pretends to explain. In Negative Dialectics he makes an explicit connection between Voltaire’s critique of theodicy and his own description of the Holocaust as an iconic event that resists the categories of commonsense. After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate … The earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz, and the visible disaster of the first nature was insignificant in comparison with the second, social one, which defies human imagination as it distills a real hell from human evil. Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered

43

Letter to Franz Böhm, January 1957, quoted in S. Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A

Biography, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2005, p. 384. 44

On this concept, see A. Altmann, “Aufklärung und Kultur bei Moses

Mendelssohn,” in Ich handle mit Vernunft: Moses Mendelssohn und die europäische Aufklärung, ed. N. Hinske, Hamburg, Meiner, 1981, pp. 5–6.

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Knowing the Worst • 43 the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience.45

At the same time, Adorno holds fast to the twofold attempt to make “senseless suffering”46 comprehensible by means of philosophical education and to play his part in contributing to the abolition of the “undiminished persistence of suffering, fear and menace”47 in modern society. In the process he turns the intentions and concepts of classical theodicy upside down. Rational reality and its laws are replaced by the objective circumstances and subjective dispositions in which the causes of evil lie. A human rationality that sees some good germinating in every evil is rejected in favor of a fearless confrontation with the horrors and empathy with the victims.

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If Adorno excoriates the tendency to seek meaning in terrible events as “the cardinal sin,”48 he is thinking less of classical theodicy than of those “secular theodicies” or “sociodicies” that are an aspect of the deep structure of the modern social sciences.49 Thus, Marxists, Malthusians, and modernization theorists have all acknowledged real suffering on the part of their objects of study, but they also considered them inevitable and meaningful in the light of an intelligible cause or purpose. Marxism, in particular, was certainly fueled by moral outrage, but Marx himself, not to mention his numerous followers, was at times remarkably callous about the suffering in particular of distant others, such as colonial subjects. In what can be seen as a classical exercise in secular theodicy, he famously vindicated the “misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan” in terms of universal progress toward the radiant future of modernity.50 Thomas Malthus, the founder of modern political economy, interpreted famines as necessary checks on excessive population growth for which the unrestrained reproductive behavior of the poor was to blame.

45

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 361–62.

46

Ibid., p. 203.

47

Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy,” in Critical Models, p. 14.

48

Adorno, History and Freedom, p. 9.

49

See A.J. Vidich and S.M. Lyman, American Sociology: Worldly Rejections of Religion

and Their Directions, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985, p. 281. 50

See K. Marx, “The British Rule in India” (1853), in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected

Works, vol. 12, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1979, pp. 125–33.

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44 • Chapter One

For their part, liberal modernization theorists valued the potential fruits of modernization above its enormous human costs. In short, Adorno makes two implicit conceptual distinctions: between meaningful and senseless suffering and between inevitable and avoidable suffering. Critical Theory is a traumatic narrative precisely to the degree to which the Holocaust can be reconstructed as both senseless and avoidable. This reconstruction was undertaken with an unambiguous political end in view, as I hope to show in the remainder of this chapter.

III. Democratic pedagogy

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Like other representational processes that have given rise to master narratives of historical suffering, Critical Theory did not evolve in an institutional vacuum. Rather, the process unfolded within the wider institutional arena of the system of higher education, to which a core group of remigrated German intellectuals added the “Frankfurt School,” as it was beginning to be called from the late 1950s onwards. The choice of this particular institutional arena implied that intellectual activity was linked not only to social research, but also to the teaching and recruitment of students. It is worth noting that the founders of the Frankfurt School did not see teaching as a burdensome task that pales in significance compared to their preoccupation with theoretical work, but as one of the main reasons why they wanted to return to Germany at all. After all, only in Germany and Europe where they were hoping to find young intellectual audiences attuned to their traumatic interpretation of the present age. Only here they were confident to teach students how to fix social reality with an “evil gaze”51 that penetrates through the innocuous surface of consumer capitalism and liberal democracy. The reasonableness of this preference for Europe cannot be our concern here. It is certainly impossible not to notice the tensions between the former refugees’ profuse praise for the democratic virtues they experienced in their years of exile in the United States, their despairing comments on the state of mind of ordinary Germans after the war, and their unshakeable belief in the healing powers of German self-cultivation or Bildung.

51

Th.W. Adorno and U. Jaerisch, “Anmerkungen zum sozialen Konflikt heute,” in

Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8, p. 177.

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Knowing the Worst • 45

Unsurprisingly, Horkheimer and Adorno were largely sharing the goal of the reeducation policy developed by the American occupying power. Regime change was not enough in Germany; they agreed with the inventor of the term “reeducation” that, after having removed the old rulers, the “spirit and instincts”52 of the ruled had to be transformed, too. However, they did not believe in the attempt to force the Germans into shame and repentance simply by informing them about what happened under National Socialism. It was not enough, Adorno noted, to confront the citizens of post-Holocaust Germany with the “facts”53 of the mass killings of Jews and others, as did American soldiers who right after the war made it a duty for citizens living near Buchenwald or Dachau to visit the liberated concentration camps or to watch documentary films at local theaters. The idea of Adorno’s “democratic pedagogy”54 was instead to turn to the young generation and their lingering sense that “the past has not yet been mastered.”55 In an intriguing choice of words, he suggested that this situation of living in a void of meaning had left “a wound” in the psyche of Germans, “although the idea of wounds would be rather more appropriate for the victims.”56 Being aware of the psychoanalytic theory of trauma, Adorno feared the political fallout of an expected delayed onset of symptoms of collective psychic wounds. Whereas the overall trend in postwar Germany was to downplay the fate of the Jews and other victims in favor of a rhetoric of reconciliation of Germans with their own past as well as with their respective senior partners in the global Cold War,57 the Frankfurt School started out early to burn the Holocaust into the consciousness of at least sections of the student population. A recurring motif in Adorno’s writings is the educational ideal of making the young

52

L. Schwarzschild, World in Trance: From Versailles to Pearl Harbor, New York, L.B.

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Fischer, 1942, p. 413. 53

Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models, p. 102.

54

Ibid., p. 99.

55

Ibid., p. 90.

56

Ibid., p. 91.

57

See V. Heins and A. Langenohl, “A Fire That Doesn’t Burn? The Allied Bombing

of Germany and the Cultural Politics of Trauma,” in Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering, ed. R. Eyerman et al., Boulder, Colo., Paradigm Publishers, 2011.

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46 • Chapter One

generation willing and able to face the horrors of the recent past without taking recourse to metaphysical consolations. He wanted students to grow emotionally and intellectually sensitive, not only to be able to appreciate works of art, but even more so to be able to take in, absorb and communicate the traumatic rendering of the barbarous crimes of Nazi Germany. “Precisely the most brutal phenomena cannot be grasped at all without an extraordinary degree of sensitivity and sophistication.”58 The hope was to educate a critical mass of intellectuals able to live up to this high standard, who would then spur a process of democratic identity revision in West Germany.

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The strategy used to further this goal presents a striking paradox. The double premise of Adorno’s political philosophy is that Auschwitz is a unique and incomprehensible real-world event—the ultimate Evil that cannot be named—, and at the same time a free-floating “bridging metaphor”59 that allows uninvolved individuals to interpret an indefinite number of other terrible events as somehow akin to the situation that led to the elimination of the Jews in Europe. A different way to put this is to say that on the one hand Auschwitz was senseless; secular theodicies do not merely cover up the horror; they are complicit in the production of horror. On the other hand, Adorno’s philosophy is all about meaning work that relates Auschwitz to the present and the future of society. Instead of elaborating on historical facts, Adorno crafts a compelling narrative which in its own particular way makes sense of those facts. Wilhelm Hennis, a conservative critic, has called the teaching practice of the Frankfurt School “seductive,”60 which is probably correct for precisely this reason: Adorno filled large auditoriums and attracted a wide readership because he offered a narrative that integrated the horrendous events surrounding the disappearance of the Jews from Europe into the larger framework of a sociological theory. The projection of a trauma claim prompted the audience-public not only to identify with the victims of the concentration camps, but also with victims of the Vietnam War or the nuclear bomb—situations that, according to Adorno, had “certain catastrophic

58

Adorno, Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft, p. 119.

59

Alexander, “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals,” pp. 67–76.

60

W. Hennis, “Max Weber als Erzieher,” in Hennis, Max Webers Wissenschaft vom

Menschen, Tübingen, Mohr, 1996, p. 111.

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Knowing the Worst • 47

similarities”61 with Auschwitz. By encouraging the search for such “similarities”—while at the same time rejecting any “identifying judgment”62 that would equate Auschwitz with other events—Adorno contributed to a Holocaust narrative in support of universal standards of judgment for present and future generations. As an emerging cultural trauma, this reading of the Holocaust began to foster sorrow and pity for other victims of other crimes and atrocities such as induced famines or indiscriminate warfare. The immense popularity or, as Karl Jaspers complained, the “authority”63 of Critical Theory in the 1960s and after was, of course, limited to sections of the student population and the educated classes who were unhappy with the weak democracy of postwar Germany and the West in general. Critical Theory tapped into this dissatisfaction by refusing to offer a progressive and evolutionary narrative that interprets the Holocaust as an accident or a shamefully low point in Western history from which Germany and the rest of the world would move forward toward a brighter future. Nor did the Frankfurt intellectuals present a tragic narrative that aims at restoring the pride of the victimized Jewish people by retrieving its collective past as a cultural resource for a distinct new identity.64 Instead of a progressive or tragic narrative, the Frankfurt School relates the past to the present and the future by means of what I would call a prophetic narrative. Critical Theory is a prophecy with an audience.65 In particular Adorno’s lectures and public talks testify to this. Like the pre-exilic Hebrew prophets, who were portrayed by Weber in his essays on Ancient Judaism, Adorno is keen to create awareness for the cata-

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strophic state of the world and the need for radical moral change in order to

61

Adorno, History and Freedom, p. 8; see also Adorno, Metaphysics, pp. 101, 116.

62

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 149–50.

63

In 1966, Jaspers wrote to Hannah Arendt about Adorno: “It seems that Adorno is

becoming an authority in the Federal Republic, highly respected.” See L. Kohler, ed., Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1926–1969, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1992, p. 638. 64

For the distinction between “progressive” and “tragic” narrative frameworks as

ways of representing a traumatic past, see Eyerman, Cultural Trauma, chs. 4 and 5. 65

For the mistaken view that Critical Theory is a “prophecy without an audience,”

see Y. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 86.

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48 • Chapter One

avert (a repetition of) the worst. The audience is called upon to pause and reflect, to distrust “the great and the rich” and to turn away from the general “corruption”66 of society, as the old prophets would have expressed themselves. The opposition of the ancient prophets against the early bureaucratic and military regimes of the great powers of Egypt and Assyria is reenacted by the opposition of Critical Theory against the “totally integrated” and “administered” society. Both ancient and modern prophetic intellectuals are relentlessly pessimistic and despair about the apathy of the masses in the face of imminent cataclysms. As Weber writes, “They view the world as doomed precisely at the height of seeming happiness.”67 Axel Honneth has remarked that even in his philosophical works, Adorno often does not bother to argue in support of his far-reaching propositions. Instead, he seems to be writing a highly original kind of “modern prose” rather than a “scholarly text,” relying not on arguments, but on “intuition” and “subjective experience.”68 From the perspective I am suggesting in this chapter, this is hardly surprising. Adorno takes great care in crafting a pedagogical and prophetic narrative, and he is aware that arguing is only one among several ways of conveying meaning. Another important way is wisdom, and Adorno is rightly famous for his many wisdom statements of various sorts, in particular aphorisms and maxims. Wisdom statements captivate the attention of the public, and allure them to do the right thing, although they “cannot be applied to situations,” as Benjamin states: “Instead, they have a kind of magical character: they transform the situation.”69 Unlike other

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propositions, these rules and precepts are capable of creating their own justification. In other words, when people encounter wisdom statements, they often believe them simply because these statements are worded in a way that is emotionally satisfying; they sound right. When Adorno writes an aphorism

66

M. Weber, Ancient Judaism, ed. H.H. Gerth and D. Martindale, New York, Free

Press, 1952, pp. 277, 305. 67

Ibid., p. 305.

68

Honneth, “Performing Justice: Adorno’s Introduction to Negative Dialectics,” in

Honneth, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, trans. J. Ingram, New York, Columbia University Press, 2009, pp. 71, 78, 82. 69

Benjamin, “On Proverbs,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 582.

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Knowing the Worst • 49

like “Whatever the intellectual does, is wrong”70 or “For only despair can save us,”71 he does so in order to deepen his emotional connection with the audience and to strengthen his charismatic claims to authority. In this sense, Adorno is not writing conventional philosophy, nor is he writing inductive sociology, but rather a narrative that has enormous power precisely because he mixes aphorisms, charisma and non-philosophical critiques of philosophy. The outcome is a supremely successful story about twentieth century society, based to a large extent on Adorno’s use of wisdom statements whose power allows him “to purify the lessons of his life” and to “transform experience into tradition.”72

IV. Society as cultural trauma

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To dramatize the scandalous nature of the specific condition of the proletariat in capitalism, Marx declares that “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”73 Adorno makes use of equally gothic images to show that not just the workers but rather everyone without exception is being robbed of human autonomy: the more modern society advances, “the more each one of us is devoured by it down to our fingernails.”74 In such sentences, unexpected echoes of old fairy tales and myths resurface in the midst of modern democratic society. Adorno’s writings abound with terms for painful emotions such as fear, anxiety, horror, shame and compassion.75 This vocabulary is an additional indicator of the traumatizing narrative Adorno and his colleagues wanted to produce in order to shake their audience out of the self-satisfied inertia of everyday life in postwar Germany.

70

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 133 (entry 86).

71

Adorno, “Keine Angst vor dem Elfenbeinturm: Ein ‘Spiegel’-Gespräch,” in

Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20.1, p. 405. 72

Benjamin, “On Proverbs,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 582.

73

Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1876), Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin, 1976, p. 342.

74

Adorno, Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft, p. 112.

75

A search for emotion terms in the German e-book version of Adorno’s collected

writings yields 314 results for “horror” or “terror” (Grauen or Schrecken), and 534 for “anxiety” or “fear” (Angst or Furcht). The respective results for Weber, who was certainly no less a pessimist than Adorno, are 10 and 112.

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50 • Chapter One

Specifically, Adorno uses Auschwitz not only as a bridging metaphor to draw attention to the Vietnam War or other events, but also to dispel the illusion that anybody in the modern world lives on terra firma. The message is not simply: identify yourselves with the victims of barbarism! It is also: you too are victims! Every one of you is an “object”; no one enjoys genuine “protection”!76 “The world is a system of horror”!77 In some of his lectures at the University of Frankfurt he makes clear that ultimately modern society itself is traumatic. On one occasion, he quotes an SS concentration camp guard who was said to have told one of his victims: “Tomorrow you shall wind from this chimney as smoke to the heavens.” Adorno continues: When I said that these experiences affect everyone, and not only the victims or those who narrowly escaped them, I did not mean only that the experiences I have tried to characterize are of such terrible violence that no one whom they have touched, even from a distance, so to speak, can ever escape them … By saying that I also referred to something objective, and, again, my intention in pointing this out is that you should not simply equate the things I am speaking of today with the subjectivity of the person who experiences them. A situation has been reached today, in the present form of the organization of work in conjunction with the maintenance of the existing relations of production, in which every person is absolutely fungible or replaceable, even under conditions of formal freedom. This situation gives rise to a feeling of the superfluity and, if you like, the insignificance of each of us in relation to the whole. That is the reason, located in the objective development of society, for the presence of the feeling I have referred to, even under condi-

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tions of formal freedom.78

This quote illustrates how Adorno’s rhetorical strategy aims to integrate and connect with a wide gamut of experiences. He is making three points. First, comparatively harmless feelings of being superfluous at the workplace or elsewhere in society are confirmed as justified and reasonable. Second, the situations that give rise to those feelings are not isolated episodes with no

76

Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 37–38 (entry 17).

77

Ibid., p. 113 (entry 72).

78

Adorno, Metaphysics, p. 109; for a similar line of reasoning, see also Adorno,

History and Freedom, pp. 17–18.

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Knowing the Worst • 51

meaning beyond the individual case, but symptomatic for the ways of modern society. There is a continuum of experiences that secretly links everyone to the prisoner in the German camp who is being mocked about his imminent death and disappearance. Third, there is not much room for politics in all this. All situations in which individuals feel powerless and superfluous express the very nature of modern capitalist society, and thus cannot be changed through the exercise of constitutional rights. Going yet one step further, Adorno begins to reshape sociology in the image of a trauma narrative. Although not usually fond of other sociologists, he praises Durkheim’s concept of social constraint as being akin to his own idea that society confronts each of us as a gruesomely alien, objective power. As a “French Jew,” Adorno explains, Durkheim understood that “society” makes itself felt whenever the individual feels overwhelmed by forces he cannot control or overcome; society is “that what hurts” (das, wo’s weh tut).79 In his lectures in the 1950s and 1960s, the “opaque, coercive, violent nature of the faits sociaux, of society”80 is becoming something of a mantra for Adorno and his audience. This idea of society is taken to its traumatic extremes. Where British conservative politicians once proclaimed that “There is no such thing as society, but only individuals,” Adorno’s Critical Theory turns this slogan on its head. Not only are individuals powerless vis-à-vis society; they are literally disappearing. Human beings no longer take on the form of “the individual” in the sense that actions are no longer driven by individual motives and desires.81 The modern individual is represented as living “only at the mercy of society,” being constantly “debased,” made “insignificant,” “liquidated,” turned into a “specimen” and “a torturable entity.”82 Individuals (or what has remained of them) are exposed to an absolute, impenetrable,

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79

Adorno, “Philosophie und Soziologie,” Theodor W. Adorno Archive (Frankfurt),

1960, Vo 5511, 5487. 80

Ibid., Vo 5519; see also Adorno, Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft,

p. 151. 81

See Adorno, “Notizen zur neuen Anthropologie” (1941), in Adorno and

Horkheimer, Briefwechsel 1927–1969, vol. II: 1938–1944, ed. C. Gödde and H. Lonitz, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2004, p. 453. 82

Adorno, Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft, p. 99; Metaphysics,

pp. 108, 110.

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52 • Chapter One

disruptive, well-nigh unbearable otherness called Society. The paradox emerging from this claim is that in order to perceive and criticize society as traumatizing, the individuals need to develop a structure of experience that makes them sensitive to the destructiveness of social mechanisms; yet this very ability to make experiences is said to be destroyed, too, by the subjectshattering power of society.83 How can we escape this paradox? Obviously, society as a whole cannot be traumatic in a clinical sense; there would be nobody left to write about society, to begin with. However, it makes perfect sense to read first-generation Critical Theory as an attempt to taint capitalist society as a cultural trauma, that is, as an endless series of horrendous events that can be narrated in such a way as to improve the resilience, autonomy and solidarity of individuals. Like other narratives, Critical Theory revolves around symbolic dichotomies. Yet, Critical Theory goes further than other theories in that it applies a binary code of pure and impure, sacred and profane, to all possible kinds of even minuscule social phenomena and activities. If society is a totality, then its characteristics are reflected in all of its parts. From Adorno’s highly idiosyncratic perspective almost any kind of behavior might ultimately lead to, justify or blind people to the logic of persecution of defenseless individuals. One reason for calling the theory “critical” is that the impure side of the cultural scheme is heavily overcrowded. Adorno engages in a polluting discourse not just about nationalism, positivism, Homer and Hollywood, but also about “semi-erudition,” homosexuality, traveling, television, conventional politics, the music of Debussy, Elgar, Sibelius, Stravinsky and countless others, and jazz—the word reminded him of “Hatz,” which is the German term for the chase of game or other wild animals.84 On the pure side, there is nothing left

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but certain forms of art and of thinking—forms of “identification with the victims, and of alert awareness and remembrance.”85 No neutral zones exist between good and evil, salvation and damnation.

83

See M. Jay, “Is Experience Still in Crisis? Reflections on a Frankfurt School

Lament,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. T. Huhn, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. 84

See Adorno, “Über Jazz,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17, p. 102.

85

Adorno, Metaphysics, p. 113.

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Knowing the Worst • 53

Yet, I should emphasize that little of this symbolic labor is to be taken literally. Adorno’s social theory has been characterized as “unhistorical,” “undifferentiated,” “reductionist” and even “crude,”86 but these terms miss the principle pedagogical thrust of Adorno’s work which does not propose to investigate modern society in a scientific manner; the point is less to exchange arguments about social reality than to communicate an attitude toward this reality. “Cultural trauma occurs,” writes Jeffrey Alexander, “when members of a col-

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lectivity feel that they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness.”87 Yet, for Alexander, all this happens within society, whereas for Adorno society itself is horrendous; the purpose of theorizing is to leave indelible marks upon the consciousness of those who have been sensitized to the ongoing horror society as such inflicts on its hapless subjects. Critical Theory is a prophetic narrative that is designed to be self-defeating. The individual is declared dead in order to favor conditions that allow for “extreme individuation,” which in turn is the “placeholder for humanity.”88 Consequently, between the individual and humanity, there is no place for “organized society,” as Adorno asserts in one of the many striking passages in his lectures. Putting in a good word for the “Cynical school,” he rejects the “uninspected premise” of sociology since Auguste Comte: “That premise is the conviction that it is better for such a thing as an organized society to exist than for it not to exist.”89

86

See Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans.

K. Baynes, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1991, ch. 3 (on Adorno’s social theory). 87

Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” p. 1.

88

Adorno, “Progress,” in Critical Models, p. 151.

89

Adorno, “Philosophie und Soziologie,” Vo 5472.

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Chapter Two From Factions to Rackets: The Traps of Conspiracy Thinking

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The replacement of the symmetrical relationship between friends and foes by the asymmetrical relationship between perpetrators and victims is at the core of the political thought of first-generation Critical Theory from the 1930s onwards. This conceptual innovation implies a sustained focus on extreme inequalities of power, the new figure of the passive victim, and the nexus between terror and trauma. As a result, the theoretical interest shifts from the problem of how to achieve true emancipation to the question of how social groups become potential or real targets of denigration, violence and persecution. Particularly Adorno’s dense essays on contemporary culture should be read as contributions to understanding the production of destructive ideas and beliefs that shape and condition the politics of capitalist democracies. The production of those ideas and beliefs is explained both in terms of manipulative interventions by politicians or other public figures and of underlying “dispositions” and “mechanisms”1 that characterize

1

Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. S.

Crook, London, Routledge, 1994, p. 47.

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From Factions to Rackets • 55

the ways in which people make sense of their lives in modern society. According to Adorno, the dominant political and economic “system of rule” is no longer based on false consciousness, as if it would suffice to undermine the present order by telling people the truth, but on “sick consciousness”2 that requires more than true stories and better information in order to recover. This sick consciousness is, first and foremost, a paranoid consciousness. For Adorno and Horkheimer, paranoia is not simply a more or less widespread personality disorder, but a chronic condition permeating the entire modern society and its politics. We all share, to a lesser or greater degree, a penchant for reading threatening meanings into seemingly insignificant occurrences and actions, for suspecting others of plotting against us, and for being obsessed with warding off the manipulative influence of others. This psychic condition is undoubtedly a fertile ground for conspiracy thinking, which in turn can have highly disquieting political consequences. For this reason, the political psychology of conspiracy thinking figures prominently not only in the chapter on the “Elements of Anti-Semitism” in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, but also in less well-known writings by Horkheimer, Adorno and other pioneers of a critical theory of society such as Franz Neumann.

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I begin this chapter with a brief review of the definitions and criticisms of conspiracy thinking. Mainstream critiques suffer from an inability to distinguish between rationally unacceptable conspiracy theories and rational hypotheses about actual conspiracies (I). I then show that such a distinction seems to make its first appearance in Horkheimer’s notes on the role of “rackets” in modern capitalist society. I argue, however, that this attempt at a critical theory of socially harmful group formations is misconceived (II). Instead, I loosely follow Neumann in putting forward the idea that the popular appeal of conspiracy theories can be thought of as the expression of social and political alienation which is widespread in a society governed by technocratic elites shielded from the population at large. Yet, as it turns out, this is but a first step in the direction of a critical social theory of conspiracies and conspirational patterns of thought and conduct (III). I then move on to discuss Adorno who has fleshed out the concept of political alienation by making some interesting observations about paranoid systems of sensemaking and

2

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 163–64.

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56 • Chapter Two

their political consequences (IV). I conclude with a few remarks on some ambiguities of Adorno’s political psychology (V).

I. Conspiracy thinking According to received wisdom, modern society is determined by anonymous

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mechanisms and constraints: systems, markets, faceless bureaucracies. Society without a human subject is the corollary to a nature without morality, the study of which has taken the place of the age-old popular belief in spirits and witches with inscrutable powers to harm or benefit us. However, this picture of a modern society without either organizing center or background subject has done little to modify the ideas of many citizens about the origins of particular events and trends. Society continues to be regarded as the product of secret agreements: “They are all in cahoots.” Let us first clarify the terms. Conspiracies are agreements by secret groups to influence events by covert action in such a way that the members of those groups benefit, while others are harmed. Conspiracy theories propose explanations of (usually very bad) events in terms of the causal efficacy of some powerful, well-connected group, which is hidden from public view. When taken to its most extreme conclusion, society itself can be explained as the result of conspiracies.3 Conspiracy theories embrace a broad spectrum of genres and range from ambitiously plotted narratives about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center in New York City as an “inside job” down to millenarian world views cultivated by right-wing militias and short-wave radio stations in the United States. Many conspiracy theories have grown up around the deaths of Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy or Princess Diana. In Cairo journalists have recently reported that “evidence” exists to prove that the tsunami that ravaged the coastal regions of the Indian Ocean at the end of 2004 was in reality a side effect of a top secret nuclear test on the high seas conducted by Israeli and Indian armed forces.4 This list could be extended indefinitely.

3

See K. Popper’s definition of “the conspiracy theory of society” in The Open Society

and Its Enemies, London and New York, Routledge, 2003, p. 104. 4

See J. Nasr, “Egyptian paper: Israel-India nuke test caused tsunami,” The Jerusalem

Post, January 6, 2005. For an analysis of the bigger picture, see M. Gray, Conspiracy

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From Factions to Rackets • 57

The standard criticism is that conspiracy theories are based on psychologically conditioned misperceptions: “A conspiracy theory is the fear of a nonexistent conspiracy. Conspiracy refers to an act, conspiracy theory to a perception.”5 Along similar lines, Hannah Arendt has located conspiracy theories in the framework of her analysis of manipulative totalitarian movements and their propaganda.6 Where the fear of conspiracies is immune to every rational consideration it serves only to fuel political terror—a mechanism that has been shown to have been at work in the dynamics of the French Revolution.7 Finally, in the 1960s the American historian Richard Hofstadter, who was the first to react against the rationalist trend in early political science by emphasizing the influence of unconscious motives and status anxiety on political actions, showed that even in liberal democracies conspiracy thinking can create a specifically “paranoid style.”8 Conspiracy theories are characterized by a specific style of thinking that constitutes a threat to the survival of liberal democracy and that may become a vehicle for the rise of totalitarian forms of rule if collective anxieties become focused on a single fantasmatic enemy, such as “the Jews” or “Trotskyism.” Liberal analysis privileges the scrutiny of political leaders and the specific distortions of perception to which the role of leadership may be subject in modern societies. Politicians have adversaries that may represent a threat and they thus face the problem of having to generate trust without themselves placing too much trust in their environment. Vigilance and the careful observation of one’s adversaries are important cognitive presuppositions for the profession of the politician and the costs of placing one’s trust recklessly may

Theories in the Arab World: Sources and Politics, London and New York, Routledge, Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

2010. 5

D. Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where it Comes From,

New York, Free Press, 1997, p. 21. 6

See H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

1973, ch. 11. 7

See T.E. Kaiser, “From the Austrian Committee to the Foreign Plot: Marie-

Antoinette, Austrophobia, and the Terror,” French Historical Studies, vol. 26, 2003, pp. 579–617. 8

R. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, New York, Knopf, 1965.

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58 • Chapter Two

be exorbitantly high. The entirely rational fear of falling prey to dirty tricks and inscrutable machinations may however become a public danger if it can establish itself unimpeded by any separation of powers or any settled procedure for proving its claims.9 A more recent wave of interest in conspiracy theories likewise circles round the relations between political power and politically useful knowledge or ignorance. At the same time, a series of displacements has become visible. Thus interest today focuses less on dictatorships than on liberal democracies, less on the contents of conspiracy theories than on their formal epistemology, and less on leaders than on the masses who frequently cling to these theories in contrast to their rulers. Typical of the more recent trend is the work of Elaine Showalter who regards conspiracy theories not as the products of political manipulation, but as “hysterical narratives” which, like the proverbial attacks of migraine and fainting fits of an earlier age, point to profound emotional disturbances in society.10 As with traditional hysteria, symptoms today are likewise dependent on context: while hysterical Europeans constantly imagine American secret services pulling the strings behind various conspiracies, Americans like to populate their own everyday theories—more originally, no doubt—with extraterrestrials. In general, conspiracy theories seem to testify to the “boundlessness of our imaginative power”11 as well as to our ability to use this potential in the most limited of ways. The small set of bogeymen that has always been targeted by conspiracy thinkers doesn’t show much of an evolution.

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Other contemporary diagnoses regard the proliferation of conspiracy theories as the expression of the pathology of neoliberal capitalism which has converted the permanent insecurity of all conditions of life into a kind of second nature and has thrown individuals back on their own resources. The

9

See, for example, D.A. Ritchie, “Are you now or have you ever been? Opening the

records of the McCarthy investigations,” Journal of Government Information, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 463–69. 10

E. Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture, New York,

Columbia University Press, 1997. 11

H. Popitz, Phänomene der Macht, Tübingen, Mohr, 1992, p. 51.

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From Factions to Rackets • 59

result is a “claustrophobic solipsism”12 which drives human subjects into a paranoid search for meaning through the medium of conspiracy thinking. As in the Middle Ages, folk devils armed with poisoned arrows are perceived lurking behind the world of things. A variant of this argument interprets conspiracy theories as loser theories of average white males who have been unable to come to terms with the political gains achieved by women and minorities in the United States and other democracies and project themselves as victims of an epoch-making plot.13 Conspiracy thinking here no longer serves to legitimize the rulers but to provide psychological relief to the ruled and the frustrated. The advantage of all these approaches is that they ascribe the collective thoughts and feelings that are expressed in conspiracy theories not to individual acts of manipulation, but to sources deeply embedded in the structure of society. At the same time, they are situated entirely between the poles of enlightenment and deception, intellectuals and masses. The relationship between critical social theory and conspiracy theories is not like that of serious causal explanation to wild speculation or enlightenment to superstition. Unlike the writers of the classic counter-Enlightenment, conspiracy theorists do not believe that the world contains a great, unfathomable mystery that will defeat all attempts at rational explanation. They are rather hyperrationalists who do not simply proclaim a truth, but actively “track” it, as epistemologists say.14 Like all paranoids, they hunger for reliable information. They mistrust experts and ready-made media offerings. In itself this attitude is by no means irrational. Given the conditions characterized by globally networked society, active conspiratorial agreements in economics and politics are altogether likely and can sometimes also be made plausible by

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12

M. Featherstone, “The obscure politics of conspiracy theory,” in J. Parish and

M. Parker, eds., The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and the Human Sciences, Oxford, Blackwell, 2001, p. 31. 13

See, for example, A. Strombeck, None Dare Call It Masculinity: The Subject of Post-

Kennedy Conspiracy Theory, Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Davis, 2003. 14

See S. Roush, Tracking Truth: Knowledge, Evidence, and Science, Oxford, Clarendon

Press, 2005.

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60 • Chapter Two

the presence of chains of circumstantial evidence.15 Referring to the Russian October Revolution, even Neumann conceded that some hypotheses about conspiracies are at least “partly true.”16 After their own fashion, conspiracy theorists might be capable of being attentive critics who try to get to the bottom of things and who still operate in harmony with the rules of a liberal public sphere even though they may seem to have abjured the public use of their reason.17 Does it go too far to define their ideas as twisted everyday variants of critical theory that have gone off the rails—or, conversely, to scrutinize critical theory to uncover its share in conspiracy thinking?

II. Horkheimer as a conspiracy theorist? In order to find an answer to this, we must try to define the precise nature of the kind of interpretations of society offered by conspiracy theories. For present purposes, I want to distinguish four different phenomena. First, there are real conspiracies and cover-ups—the usual scams and shady dealings involving the rich and powerful—that are revealed as unpleasant collections of interconnected facts without, however, being perceived as threatening the core values of a society. Second, some real conspiracies are subject to a more radical symbolic interpretation that represents them as “polluting” the very center of society. Facts are turned into a moral symbol which in turn galvanizes public mobilization in support of political renewal. In recent U.S. political

15

See, for example, G. Bettin and M. Dianese, La strage: Piazza Fontana, verità e

memoria, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1999; P. Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, New York, W.W. Norton, 2003; D. Satter, Darkness at Dawn: Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003; J. Bondeson, Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2005. 16

F.L. Neumann, “Anxiety and Politics,” in The Democratic and the Authoritarian

State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, ed. H. Marcuse, Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1957, p. 284. 17

See J. Dean, “Theorizing Conspiracy Theory,” Theory and Event, vol. 4, no. 3,

2000.

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From Factions to Rackets • 61

history, “Watergate” is the prime example.18 Third, there are alleged and unproven conspiracies that only small fragments of the population consider to be real. Since there is no consensus about the “facts” at issue nor about their possible moral significance, public mobilization fails to materialize. Fourth, there are alleged and unproven conspiracies that form the basis of robust belief systems which actually result in the mobilization of the masses against stigmatized outsiders. The last two categories of rationally unacceptable conspiracy theories evidently go beyond simply asserting the existence of conspiracies in the criminal sense of the word. They can be recognized not so much by their object as by the peculiar architecture of their basic methodological assumptions. Critical social philosophers and conspiracy theorists appear to share some specific convictions about how the social world actually works. According to the latter, nothing is as it appears, everything is interconnected, and nothing happens by chance.19 Adorno, for example, writes that the world is not “as it presents itself with its façade;” and that all actions are intertwined in a noncontingent manner.20 Conspiracy theorists baffle us because they take one further step and turn the conspirators’ intentions of controlling all the variables in a situation, of deceiving all outsiders and of cooperating with one another as closely as possible into the premises on which to base their own investigations into suspected conspiracies. The separation of conspiratorial groups from the rest of society, their boundless power and lack of scruples, as well as the no less boundless ignorance and gullibility of ordinary people

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outside the conspiracy, are all presupposed without further explanation. As a result, theories about real-world conspiracies are not falsifiable. They are feeding and reinforcing both a pre-existing suspicion toward any “official” truth and a solipsistic sense of self-assurance and superiority toward the noninitiated. In contradistinction to all this, Horkheimer’s notes on “rackets”

18

See J.C. Alexander, “Watergate as Democratic Ritual,” in Alexander, The Meanings

of Social Life. 19

See M. Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary

America, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2003, pp. 3–4. 20

Adorno, “Einführung in die Dialektik,” Theodor W. Adorno Archive (Frankfurt),

1958, Vo 3025; “Philosophie und Soziologie,” Vo 5486.

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62 • Chapter Two

seem initially to be a first step towards a rational and critical theory of social and political conspiracies in modern capitalism. Yet what is surprising is that Horkheimer is itself far from immune against the kind of conspiracy thinking he had set out to analyze. The concept of the racket is taken from colloquial American usage. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno use it as a synonym for cliques, gangs and other established groups that act protectively towards their own members, while externally they attempt to circumvent the market process by misappropriating economic income and by deceiving the public. Rackets are an outcome of paranoia which in turn is reinforced by racket-like social bonds: “Paranoid forms of consciousness tend to give rise to leagues, factions, rackets. Their members are afraid to believe their madness on their own. Projecting it, they everywhere see proselytizing and conspiracy.”21 Furthermore, rackets are not to be thought of as remnants of premodern times, but as the “basic form of rule”22 in what Horkheimer saw as the emerging new form of “state capitalism.” As literally “conspiratorial groups” (verschworene Gruppen)23 they symbolize the persistence of relationships based on personal connections and loyalties at the heart of the supposedly anonymous systems of law, economy and science. Rackets are also perceived as symptoms of historical decay. Core institutions of modern society tend to regress to the medieval origins of European modernity when people

21

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 163. Social historians locate

the origins of rackets in the heterogeneous economy of the big cities of the early twentieth century in which the waves of immigrants played a key role. In cities such as Chicago artisans, small-shopkeepers, building workers, tailors, etc., formed associations that functioned like private governments. They raised taxes, enforced their own Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

rules and exerted influence through their multifarious connections. From the very outset, the concept “racketeering” that arose in the 1920s combined forms of collective self-organization with elements of gangster criminality. See A.W. Cohen, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. 22

Horkheimer, “Die Rackets und der Geist,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12, p. 287.

23

Horkheimer, “Herrschende Klasse, die von Rackets beherrschte Klasse und die

Rolle der Fachleute,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, p. 334.

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From Factions to Rackets • 63

sought franchises and immunities from external powers by constituting new towns or other corporate entities through collective oaths, and when protection rents where still the main sources of profit for entrepreneurs. However, they are lacking the strong ethos of those early modern forms of association. From the perspective of democratic theory, Horkheimer’s reflections bear a certain resemblance to Rousseau’s fear of unenlightened “communication”24 between private citizens, or to the concerns expressed by the framers of the U.S. Constitution about “factions” working against the rights of others as well as against the common good. Like factions, rackets are indeed “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”25 In Adorno’s psychoanalytic terms, rackets are an expression of “collective narcissism”26 that runs counter to the spirit of cooperation beyond one’s own “in-group” on which democracy is based. In the state-capitalist society dominated by rackets there are no such things as a separation of powers, a government that represents the people, or even a people able to bring about significant changes. Unlike Rousseau or Madison, Horkheimer no longer believes in democratic politics as a remedy to the ills of conspiratorial politics. Overall, Horkheimer’s scattered notes fail to yield a fully coherent picture. Rackets are introduced as collective egoists that secure economic and political spoils for themselves on the basis of their special knowledge. This picture gives the impression of the disintegration of society into a profusion of conspiracies. On the other hand, Horkheimer detects a trend towards the “centralization of power”27 and “a growth in the number of rackets and their

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24

J.-J. Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” in The Basic Political Writings, trans.

D.A. Cress, Indianapolis and Cambridge, Hackett, 1987, II, 3, p. 156. 25

See Madison’s Federalist, no. 10, in A. Hamilton et al, The Federalist Papers, ed.

G. Wills, New York, Bantam Classic, 1982, p. 51. 26

Adorno, “Bemerkungen über Politik und Neurose,” in Gesammelte Schriften,

vol. 8, p. 436. 27

Horkheimer, “Herrschende Klasse, die von Rackets beherrschte Klasse und die

Rolle der Fachleute,” p. 335.

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64 • Chapter Two

powers of coordination”28 that goes even beyond the boundaries of the nation state. Rackets amalgamate and reduce the rest of society to ant-like “physiological individual beings” and compliant objects of “manipulation.”29 This conception, according to which doctors, trade unionists, politicians, academics and corporate managers obey the same rapacious logic while at the same time working closely together, possesses features that are themselves unmistakably redolent of conspiracy thinking. In the society imagined by Horkheimer as little as possible is left to chance (or the market), everything is interconnected and nothing is as it appears. Unaccountable executives, bureaucrats and experts dominate on a global scale and hardly anyone takes notice. Critical social theory is conceived as the attempt to uncover the coordinates of conspiratorial networks. Insights produced by theory, however, don’t change anything since no one wants to hear the truth. It is no wonder that Horkheimer regarded the assassination of John F. Kennedy as the work of a “conspiracy” which had initiated a “new phase in world history” and believed in all seriousness that Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s successor as President of the United States, had played some kind of a sinister “role” in it.30 Horkheimer does not explain how and why rackets collaborate even though they have no interest in each other, and why they are not compelled to include other sectors of the population in their deals. Moreover, it is an irony that by reducing the exercise of power to the activities of conspiratorial gangs, Horkheimer has allowed himself to be taken in by one of those Hollywood clichés typical of the culture industry that he and Adorno criticized so mercilessly elsewhere.31 More importantly, however, Horkheimer has isolated the question of the truth of his theory from any conceivable empirical evidence. In this connection he explicitly defends the figure of the

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28

Ibid.; see also Horkheimer, “Theorie der Rackets,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14,

p. 340. 29

Horkheimer, “Fachmann, Führer und die Vernunft,” in Gesammelte Schriften,

vol. 14, 310; Horkheimer, “Der Fachmann,” ibid., p. 359. 30

Horkheimer, “Der internationale Faschismus,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14,

pp. 310–11. 31

See J.S. Nelson, “Conspiracy as a Hollywood Trope for System,” Political

Communication, vol. 20, 2003, pp. 499–503.

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From Factions to Rackets • 65

“paranoiac” who holds fast to a particular definition of reality in the teeth of all counter-arguments: Paranoid behavior manifests itself as an unconditional adherence to one’s point of view, a refusal to be dissuaded from it, a determination to treat it as an absolute even when it cannot be “proved” … But where is the criterion by which he can be shown to be a paranoiac rather than a witness to the truth? … Every piece of knowledge that is regarded as an absolute has something paranoid about it; but if it makes no claim to absolute validity it is not knowledge.32

Unlike Adorno who believed that “ideas that are too heavily defended against the danger of error are of course lost in any case,”33 Horkheimer appeared to be a staunch anti-falsificationist. The sentences just quoted also give us some idea of the cost incurred by what was meant to be the critical assertion that in their essence things are fundamentally different from the way they appear, and this makes it desirable for the relation between essence and appearance to be subjected to empirical control.34 This mode of critical theory does no longer see its own critical perspective to be acceptable by all human beings because it does not reckon with the possibility of overcoming the effects of manipulation. Utopia or true liberty is no seen as a goal that can be achieved by real social agents. Horkheimer has bequeathed to us elements of a critical theory of actual conspiracies, but by shielding it from critical objections, his theory itself assumes something of the character of conspiracy theories. He tends to depict trade-union bosses, politicians, doctors and others as actors

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who do not just exploit favorable situations for their own purposes, but who are impelled by a deep-seated disposition to enter into collusive agreements to the detriment of society as a whole. Here too we find Horkheimer

32

Horkheimer, “Über die Wahrheit [II],” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, p. 265.

33

Adorno, “The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer,” New German Critique, no.

54, 1991, p. 162. 34

This was one of the central points of dispute in the debate between Horkheimer

and Otto Neurath, who was wrongly labeled a “positivist.” See J. O’Neill and T. Uebel, “Horkheimer and Neurath: Restarting a Disrupted Debate,” European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 12, 2004, pp. 77–105.

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66 • Chapter Two

succumbing to a form of conspiratorial thinking instead of shedding light on it for us.

III. Neumann on political alienation Conspiracies are a special case of strategic cooperation and at the same time they are the object of a particular species of everyday theories. I do not wish to advance any hypothesis about whether communication about conspiracies is on the increase, or whether, if it is, that increase corresponds to a growth in actual conspiracies. It only seems clear to me that conspiracy theories have lost none of their appeal for the mass public in spite of numerous advances in democratization, liberalization, and the expansion of education. Horkheimer made the attempt to incorporate quasi-conspiratorial alliances in his analysis of the age of “state capitalism” without actually focusing on the problematic nature of conspiracy thinking. Yet there are at least two reasons why such a focus would be desirable. First, theories about dangerous conspiracies can themselves constitute a danger if they are unprovable and if they concentrate the minds of the public on a single imaginary Other, thereby whipping up public anxiety. Second, conspiracy theories can be interpreted as rationalizations of the mute, inarticulate suffering of those who believe in them. Whereas older political theory emphasized the first aspect, more recently it is the second factor that has been stressed. Believers of these theories are no longer regarded as potential public enemies,

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but as suffering, angst-ridden scaremongers. In search of a provisional hypothesis that does justice to this suffering, I propose that we should explore Franz Neumann’s concept of “political alienation”35 as an alternative to Horkheimer’s quasi-conspiratorial account of political events. For Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer and other members of the so-called “outer circle” of the early Frankfurt School the power of organized groups in contemporary capitalist society was of primary interest. However, unlike “inner circle” protagonists such as Adorno and Horkheimer they did not accept the concept of an “all-embracing super group” controlling

35

See Neumann, “Anxiety and Politics.”

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From Factions to Rackets • 67

social life and the production of truth: “No general cartel dominates our society.”36 The point of Neumann’s hypothesis was rather that alienation makes people wrongly believe in such all-powerful cartels. Alienation means: before the individual starts believing in alien powers bent on plotting against her, she feels herself to be an alien. Becoming an alien, psychologically speaking, implies being unable to connect to others in a meaningful way. The social world becomes all smoke and mirrors. However, this sense of disconnect and meaninglessness captures only half of the experience of alienation. The other half is constituted by a strong feeling of powerlessness vis-à-vis society. Neumann has given us some hints about what causes this syndrome and how it plays out in the public sphere. Following Freud’s theory of the human psyche, he is convinced that every society, not just a modern or capitalist one, is based on the repression of instinctual gratification. However, the “alienation of labor,” which he believes to have been on the rise since the beginning of the industrial revolution, makes things considerably worse. The combination of stultifying work and bourgeois values increases feelings of anxiety and alienation among sectors of the middle classes and makes them “most susceptible to Caesarism,” that is to authoritarian political leaders.37 In addition, market competition increases the fear of social degradation and favors the spread of all kinds of “persecutory anxiety.” Conspiracy theories made available by authoritarian leaders strengthen these anxieties.38 Feelings of helplessness and loss of intentionality are enhanced by the imagination of a surplus of intentionality on the part of scary behind-the-scenes actors. These affective

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dispositions, which are generated within society, lead to the growing inability of citizens to think independently and to take part in the public life of their communities. Thus, anxiety feeds into “political alienation” defined as “the conscious rejection of the whole political system which expresses itself as apathy because the individual sees no possibility of changing anything in the system through his efforts.”39

36

O. Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty,” pp. 161–62. The distinction between

“inner” and “outer” circles of the Frankfurt School has been introduced by Honneth, “Critical Theory,” in The Fragmented World of the Social, pp. 61–91. 37

Neumann, “Anxiety and Politics,” p. 288.

38

See ibid., pp. 284–5, 280.

39

Ibid., p. 290.

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68 • Chapter Two

Neumann appeared to have in mind a vicious circle whereby lacking options for meaningful participation in political and economic life lead to apathy, growing apathy to the consolidation of secretive elite governance, elitism to the spread of conspiracy thinking, and conspiracy thinking to even more apathy. Although he does in principle not give up on the possibility of changing socially distorted views of reality, Neumann fails to show a way out of the self-propelling downward spiral of passivity and misperceptions. This is partly due to his inclination to overgeneralize the experience of National Socialism which he believed could be defeated only from the outside— through war and “psychological warfare.”40 The focus on this particular historical context also explains other shortcomings of his approach. Specifically, he tended to answer the question of how conspiracy theories serve their powerful producers much better than the question in what way they serve their apathetic adherents who willingly embrace them. By looking at conspiracy theories as being handed down to the masses from on high, rather than passing through a marketplace of ideas where they have to be accepted, he also neglected the question of the relationship between conspiracy thinking and democracy.

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IV. Adorno as a political psychologist Unlike the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories Neumann had in mind at his time, the sorts of theories I mentioned at the outset—about the death of celebrities, disasters and atrocities—are far from stirring society to its depths. In contemporary Western societies at least, those who actively produce and cherish unwarranted conspiracy theories are hardly more than small sect-like groups. More important than these groups and their motives is the fact that conspiracy theories are believed and accepted, although to an uncertain extent, by a much broader audience. The production of conspiracy theories is less interesting than their popularity and ready absorption by sections of the public. This perspective is analogous to the focus on the “susceptibility”41 of ordinary citizens to fascist political propaganda which was central to the studies on

40

See the preface to the first edition in Neumann, Behemoth, p. x.

41

Adorno et al., Studies in the Authoritarian Personality, in Adorno, Gesammelte

Schriften, vol. 9.1, pp. 150–53.

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From Factions to Rackets • 69

The Authoritarian Personality. Similarly, Adorno was as much interested in the audience for conspiracy theories as in the manipulatory techniques employed by political demagogues or corporate strategists to exploit paranoid fears and desires for meaning. Against this backdrop, I now want to turn to his writings as a pool of ideas for political psychologists. The most important point is that Adorno does not define paranoia primarily as a mental illness or an expression of sheer irrationality, but rather as a dysfunctional everyday heuristics that allows people to interpret an otherwise incomprehensible world. Modern paranoia has a firm basis in reality. There is nothing irrational about representing and experiencing society as being out of control and thus scary. Critical Theory does, in fact, confirm and reinforce this popular view of capitalist society. Writing during the Cold War, Adorno stresses that the “sense of threat is real enough and some its expressions such as the A and H bombs are about to outrun the wildest neurotic fears and destructive fantasies.”42 Oddly enough, the paranoid’s search for hidden connections and the machinations of the powerful appears to be structurally cognate with the research program of Critical Theory itself, which is all about penetrating the “thin façade”43 of the official version of things. While criticizing the masses, Adorno admits that they do have a sense about what is wrong with modern society: [T]he world appears to most people today more as a “system” than ever before, covered by an all-comprising net of organization with no loopholes where the individual could “hide” in face of the ever-present demands and tests of a society ruled by a hierarchical business set-up and coming pretty close to what we called “verwaltete Welt,” a world caught up by administration. It is this reality situation which has so many and obvious similarities with paranoid systems of thinking that it seems to invite such patterns of

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intellectual behavior, as well as compulsive attitudes.44

In spite of these distant family resemblances, conspiracy thinking differs from Critical Theory, among other things, in that the former is much more popular than the latter. Reorganizing and supplementing Adorno’s scattered remarks

42

Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, p. 156.

43

Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society,” in Critical Models, p. 110.

44

Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, p. 155.

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70 • Chapter Two

on the subject, I suggest to distinguish between ultimate, intermediate and proximate conditions of this popularity. First of all, Adorno can be read as elaborating on Neumann’s worthwhile hypothesis that social and political alienation is the ultimate condition for the spread of conspiracy thinking. For Adorno, the individuals are powerless visà-vis the forces of society, and they suffer from this state of powerlessness. They experience themselves as playthings of uncontrollable powers. The individual may not be an “ant in an ant heap,”45 as Horkheimer has put it in one of his fits of misanthropy, but she may well feel like one and be treated as if she were one. Like Weber, Adorno employs mechanical metaphors to describe capitalist society, but, unlike Weber, he insists that the “mechanism” (Getriebe)46 of society remains opaque and unintelligible to those caught up in its movements. “Naïve persons fail to look through the complexities of a highly organized and institutionalized society, but even the sophisticated ones cannot understand it in plain terms of consistency and reason, but are faced with antagonism and absurdities.”47 Adorno believes that the opaqueness of society translates into attitudes and behaviors that are equally opaque and unintelligible.48 The combination of powerlessness on the part of the individuals and inscrutability on the part of society is dimly perceived as unbearable and triggers projective fantasies. Projection, a psychoanalytic term much used by Horkheimer and Adorno, is the replacement of painful internal feelings and perceptions, whose content is being distorted in the process, by external perceptions.49 This replacement is experienced as superficially

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gratifying. However, as individuals ascribe social and political ills to the

45

Horkheimer, “Fachmann, Führer und die Vernunft,” p. 310.

46

Adorno, Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft, p. 30.

47

Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, p. 57.

48

See his statement about the German composer Richard Wagner: “The impenetra-

ble mystery of his blind intolerance is rooted in the no less impenetrable mystery of the processes of society” (Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. R. Livingstone, London, Verso, 1981, p. 15). 49

See Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories, ed. P. Rieff, New York, Collier, 1963,

p. 166. See also Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society” as well as Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment. On the

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From Factions to Rackets • 71

malevolent intentions of a hidden Other, they avoid facing their growing dependence and powerlessness in a rational manner.50 Whereas powerlessness, paranoia and projection are ultimate conditions for the rise of politically dangerous paranoid world views, the phenomenon called “semi-erudition”51 by Adorno is an intermediate condition. Unfortunately, this term tells us more about Adorno’s own idealized conception of “true” education and his powerful revulsion against the petit-bourgeois than about social reality. Using a Nietzschean argument, he argues that the semi-educated person needs “irrational creeds” that promise insights “by bringing the complex to a handy formula and offering at the same time the pleasant gratification that he who feels to excluded from educational privileges nevertheless belongs to the minority of those who are ‘in the know’.”52 If this was true, those who enjoy “educational privileges” would never have bought into conspiracy theories. In line with his praise of the educationally privileged, Adorno sometimes contradicts his own claim that both the “sophisticated” and the “naïve” fail to understand society. Thus, in his reflections on public opinion, he confines ignorance to the latter group: “For naive consciousness the opacity of the world is obviously increasing, whereas in so many aspects it is becoming more and more transparent.”53 Still, the argument about the pleasure to be gained from otherwise worthless knowledge is not without merit. Conspiracy theories are in fact marketed and coveted as cultural products that promise rare states of emotional intensity and excitement, something that is sought by individuals who want to distinguish themselves from society instead of renewing it.54 Like sometimes other theories as well, conspiracy theories are seen as interesting, because they reject widely accepted accounts of crises and offer fantastic catch-all

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“dogmatic” use of Freud’s language by these two authors, see Ziege, Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie, pp. 121–22. 50

See Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, p. 154.

51

Adorno, “Theorie der Halbbildung,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8, pp. 93–121;

Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, p. 61. 52

Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, p. 61.

53

Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society,” p. 110

54

See Honneth, “Organized Self-Realization,” p. 469.

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72 • Chapter Two

explanations of the world’s travails and woes instead. In contemporary culture, the truth “behind the appearances” has assumed the character of a commodity since nothing sells as well as the exposure of scandals and revelations about actual or imagined secrets. Conspiracy theories manufacture secrets as well as their solutions which are then made available to consumers in all media formats. I think it is fair to assume that this kind of sensation-seeking individualism can nurture an attitude of political cynicism which is different from the apathy analyzed by Neumann. Lack of generalized trust leads to the rejection of the rules of the democratic system, whereas cynicism favors a strategy of “playing” the system, although with low expectations and no real respect for the rules. Furthermore, there are important proximate conditions for the spread and acceptability of conspiracy theories. These conditions can be either political or economic. Given the historical context of Nazism and Stalinism, the early proponents of a critical theory of society were focused mostly on political strategies of mobilizing paranoid thoughts as a means of displacing the blame for complex problems onto a scapegoat. However, the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment also mention that the symbolic products of irrationalism are “peddled in the market.”55 In both cases the critique is directed not only against the content of the products pitched to a gullible public but also, and even more so, against their mode of diffusion. Behaviors and habits of thought can spread by different mechanisms, and Adorno is convinced that imitation lies at the very heart of our being human. Through imitation we learn to

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understand and appreciate the intentions and desires of others. He also believes that capitalism poisons our gift for imitation by putting a premium on self-centeredness and instrumental action.56 The spread of paranoid belief systems is a test case for this impaired ability to consciously imitate others. Paranoia undermines trust in strangers and prompts people to withdraw into themselves.57 Consequently, it tends to spread throughout the social body,

55

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 141.

56

See Honneth, “A Physiognomy of the Capitalist Form of Life: A Sketch of

Adorno’s Social Theory,” in Honneth, Pathologies of Reason, ch. 4. 57

See Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models,

p. 98.

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From Factions to Rackets • 73

not by imitation, but like a virus that moves through a population, taking hold in each individual it infects. In the ninetieth aphorism of Minima Moralia (“Institution for deaf-mutes”), Adorno describes how under the spell of market forces words and sentences change their character and begin to “form a zone of paranoiac infection.”58 In many of his texts, Adorno uses the same metaphoric language linking paranoia, evil and contagiousness—a language that itself exhibits a paranoid fear.59 Politics as well as markets are described as trigger mechanisms for this fearsome and thought-defying contagion.

V. Some ambiguities In this chapter, I have suggested to read Adorno not for the truth of his exceedingly general and vague propositions about modern capitalist society, but for his political interpretations of seemingly marginal publications such as astrology columns and his acute insights into the pervasive character of paranoid states of mind—insights that largely correspond to the observations of recent socio-psychological research.60 Likewise, I have interpreted Adorno against the grain of popular misconceptions that present early Critical Theory as a political theory of manipulation of the masses from above. In reality, Adorno was more interested, first and foremost, in the psychological needs of modern individuals, and in how these needs make them susceptible to propaganda, commercials, astrology and other influences.61 Finally, Adorno’s

58

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 138.

59

See, for example, Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical

Models, p. 98; The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 31; Negative Dialectics, p. 243; “Wagner, Nietzsche, and Hitler,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19, p. 408; “Donald Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

Brinkmann, Natur und Kunst [book review],” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20.2, p. 509. 60

See D. Freeman and J. Freeman, Paranoia: The Twenty-First Century Fear, Oxford,

Oxford University Press, 2008. 61

See explicitly Adorno et al., Studies in the Authoritarian Personality, p. 151. More

recently, it has been noted that “problems with self-esteem regulation” and the need to compensate for “feelings of inferiority” are key to understanding paranoid fantasies. See S. Bone and J.M. Oldham, “Paranoia: Historical Considerations,”

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74 • Chapter Two

diagnosis is singular in the way it unveils a curious combination of rational and irrational, healthy and pathological elements at the core of conspiracy theories and related narratives. The irrational is not only a fateful, unintended consequence of rational strivings, but also one of the very ingredients of rationality, and vice versa. Yet, Adorno’s writings also contain a number of striking ambiguities that point to limits of his theory. By way of conclusion, I want to consider three of them. First, Adorno has provided two incompatible accounts of the paranoid state of mind. The first describes conspiracy theories as a mere “spleen” or a “fantasy” (Hirngespinst) devoid of any reality outside the psyche of individuals.62 The second emphasizes that contemporary paranoids, while perhaps exaggerating imminent threats, are at least in one respect intellectually superior to their nonparanoid fellow-citizens: instead of being blind to reality, they are aware that the world itself offers “a strong reality basis for everybody’s sense of being persecuted.”63 These quotes indicate that Adorno appears to be unsure about what exactly is wrong with paranoid narratives and conspiracy theories. Sometimes he suggests that these narratives are wrong because they make reality tolerable without granting people more than a false sense of meaningfulness and community. While from the standpoint of Critical Theory this is wrong in itself, it is also wrong because of the consequence that existing power relations are perpetuated by narratives designed to make them bearable. A different answer is that conspiracy theories are wrong because they are the result of what might be called the fallacy of misplaced

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“personification.”64 This concept is introduced by Adorno to criticize the mental habit of judging the properties and outcomes of the functioning of abstract mechanisms such as markets and bureaucracies as if they were reducible to the blameworthy actions of single persons or groups. Personification is a

in Paranoia: New Psychoanalytic Perspectives, ed. J.M. Oldham and S. Bone, Madison, Conn., International Universities Press, 1994, p. 5. 62

Adorno, “Veblen’s Attack on Culture,” in Adorno, Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber,

Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1981, p. 90; Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 141. 63

Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, pp. 165–66.

64

See Adorno, Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft, p. 60.

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From Factions to Rackets • 75

cognitive defect because it limits empirical efforts to the study of epiphenomena without seeing through the appearances of society; and it is a moral defect because it leads to scapegoating which in turn can have “fascist implications.”65 While much this critique seems plausible, Adorno never reflects on the structural affinities between conspiracy thinking and Critical Theory itself, although he emphasizes the kernel of truth contained in contemporary paranoid narratives. Both ways of thinking presuppose the existence of an ordered social universe in which hardly anything happens by chance; in which everything and everybody is connected; and which is essentially different from how it appears to the naïve. At the same time, Critical Theory is post-conspiratorial to the extent it no longer assumes the existence of autonomous persons and groups who conspire to pursue some self-chosen evil end. Instead, the main principle of connection between individuals—the alldevouring, all-leveling “principle of exchange”66—is itself anonymous.

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Second, both Adorno and Horkheimer have wrongly taken the authority of the mass media for granted. In reality, however, public trust in the veracity of media coverage is low. Many ordinary audience members today believe that media companies are motivated by profit, serve propagandistic goals, even stage events. In other words: they believe in the existence of a culture industry designed to fool them.67 The situation is hardly better for other institutions such as governments, universities, churches, or committees of experts which also do no longer enjoy the privilege of being seen as undisputed sources of true knowledge. The massive growth in free expression spurred by online forums and blogs is a reason as well as a result of the erosion of trust in established authorities as the guarantors of knowledge. Yet all this is not simply good news for conspiracy theorists, who have to navigate the paradox of striving to get their stories endorsed by trusted institutions, while maintaining their image as outsiders to the system. Adorno noted a kind of “disbelief”

65

Ibid., p. 204.

66

See, for example, Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. S. Weber Nicholsen,

Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1993, pp. 28, 87. 67

See P.D. Healy, “Believe It: The Media’s Credibility Headache Gets Worse,” New

York Times, May 22, 2005.

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76 • Chapter Two

and “suspicion of phoniness”68 among the readers of the astrology columns of the Los Angeles Times, but he did not solve the puzzle of how dangerous “mass movements”69 can emerge from bodies of false knowledge nobody really believes in. In my view, conspiracy thinking flourishes at the intersection of two major trends that characterize contemporary society: first, the restricted opportunities for the meaningful participation of individuals in a technocratically reduced democracy, and second, the unlimited possibilities of communication that are symbolized by, and available through, the Internet. When sections of the population believe that there is nothing to be gained from political engagement because “things don’t change” anyway; when at the same time more and more can be known, while less and less knowledge seems to be reliable and indisputable, then we have a situation that is conducive to, among other things, conspiracy thinking.

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Third, Adorno and even more so Horkheimer have underestimated the strength and the consequences of the “will to truth”70 in modern societies. Conspiracy theories themselves testify to the strength of the will to truth, but so do efforts to thwart or uncover real conspiracies. In all this, democracy plays a bigger role than was acknowledged by first-generation critical theorists. It is true that as long as the ultimate conditions of alienation remain unchallenged, democracy per se cannot break the cycle of distorted perceptions of power, disaffection and cynicism. This is not to deny that democracy profoundly affects the mechanisms for the production and distribution of conspiracy theories. The same mechanisms that make it hard to launch lasting conspiracies among powerful actors simultaneously stimulate collective fantasies about such conspiracies. Successful conspiracies are thwarted above all by the difficulty of preventing the emergence of disaffected members of involved organizations and, when it comes to the crunch, of stopping them from telling the truth and “blowing the whistle.” Numerous examples make it clear that, contrary to what some writers maintain, conspiracies tend to be uncovered not just because of luck or mere coincidence. An example is the FBI agent Mark Felt who many years after the event revealed that he was

68

Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, p. 49.

69

Ibid., p. 46.

70

Horkheimer, “Über die Wahrheit [II],” p. 265.

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From Factions to Rackets • 77

the mysterious source known as “Deep Throat” during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, and that it was he who had provided reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward with the detailed information about the inner workings of the Nixon administration that culminated in the fall of the government. Although it is undeniable that Felt broke internal FBI rules, today he is celebrated as hero.71 From this I conclude that in a society where the rules for distributing social honors are so effective that they can undermine the cohesion of small closely knit groups even in federal police headquarters, it is unlikely that the secrecy in which every successful conspiracy is shrouded can be kept for a long time. A society that not only claims a right to know but also spreads incentives to tell the truth and to reward acts of individual dissidence is “incapable of keeping a secret anyway.”72

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The flip side of this is that the successful exposure of collusive agreements and the occasional confessions of an insider only help to stimulate collective fantasies further. As soon as something comes to light, people suspect to see only the tip of the iceberg whose gigantic bulk is inaccessible and remains swathed in obscurity. The public not only tends to explain conspiracies in terms of group-specific dispositional factors, but also ascribes the exposure of such arrangements to individual heroes as opposed to the effectiveness of structural incentives. Where the necessary receptivity of a public consisting of alienated citizens is a given, conspiracy theories will run riot even if information of every kind is freely available and if governments are periodically compelled to open their archives.

71

See H. Kurtz, “Would Deep Throat Be a Hero in 2005?,” Washington Post, June 1,

2005. 72

G.F. Kennan, “Morality and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 64, 1985–86,

p. 214. Note also the example of the whistleblower site WikiLeaks which has embarrassed Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, the Scientology sect, African kleptocrats and the Pentagon by publishing secret material online.

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Chapter Three Flâneurs without Borders: Benjamin and the Cultural Politics of Travel Writing

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The potentially harmful political implications of traveling and, more specifically, of travel writing, have been widely debated at least since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism.1 Travel writing is, first and foremost, about the aesthetics of difference, that is, about how other places and peoples appear to our senses. The aesthetics of difference, however, is closely interwoven with ethical and political considerations about distant strangers. The genre of travel literature contributes to the shaping of our collective sensitivity to differences between “us” and “others.” At the same time, there seems to be a growing market for travel writing, probably because the genre projects the ideal of an authentic mode of travel which is timeconsuming and sometimes hazardous, but which also contains an ancient promise recalled by Walter Benjamin: “Distance is the land of wishes come true.”2 Like popular

1

See E.W. Said, Orientalism, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978.

2

W. Benjamin, “Betrachtungen und Notizen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed.

R. Tiedemann et al., Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1972–89, vol. 6, p. 209.

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Flâneurs without Borders • 79

biographies, travel books invite their public to join in the spectacle of the astonishing exploits, encounters and feats of endurance made by extraordinary individuals.3 Travel literature is a medium in which the modern cult of the individual is constantly celebrated anew. The traveling writer is a hero the reader would like to emulate. Where this has been ruled out, it is at least possible to adopt his views on what is going on in remote lands. Theoretically at least, this makes travel literature into a medium in which distant places and peoples can be thought of as potential beneficiaries of an expanded moral solidarity.

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Before digging deeper into this problem, I begin by showing how the tradition of Critical Theory contains a number of models for reflecting on modern travel that can be applied to the criticism of travel writing. The critique of travel put forth by Horkheimer and Adorno, in particular, is interesting not least because it anticipates in part the postcolonial criticism of the “Orientalist” slant of European world views (I). I then explore the figure of the modern traveler and Said’s critique of Orientalism—a critique that resonates with Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s criticism of Homer’s Odyssey. Since literary travel accounts continue to shape the public’s moral geographies of the international order, the genre is the object of mounting interest on the part of such branches of the social sciences as postcolonial studies, the study of international relations and political theory. As will become clear, what dominates the field is the critique of travel writing as neocolonial in the broadest sense (II). In the third section, I review and revise the critique of Said, Adorno and Horkheimer by offering brief readings of a few selected literary texts. The essence of my claim is that while the model of Orientalism may still apply to certain travelogues, it is otherwise an interpretive straitjacket (III). More helpful in gaining a better understanding of important countercurrents in contemporary travel writing are some of Benjamin’s thoughts on the matter. In my conclusion I hope to show how these reflections might turn out to be useful for rethinking the connections between travel, travel writing and the contours of new forms of global ecumenical consciousness (IV).

3

See L. Löwenthal, “The Triumph of Mass Idols,” in Löwenthal, Literature, Popular

Culture, and Society, Palo Alto, CA, Pacific Books, 1968.

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80 • Chapter Three

I. Three models of travel critique The Frankfurt School is known for its critique of everyday practices which sets out to expose their apparent harmlessness as a sham. Thus for Adorno watching TV or listening to jazz is not just a waste of time but a practice involving the listener’s surrender to a manipulative system. The aura of radicalism that surrounds this critical method derives from its strict binary cod-

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ing of social reality. The “right” life has no truck with the “wrong” life;4 where “education” (Bildung) disappears, “barbarism” looms,5 and so forth. This binary scheme of good and evil, sacred and profane has also been applied to the activity and promotion of travel. In fact, the sections on Odysseus in Dialectic of Enlightenment can be read as a critique of travel and travel literature. Odysseus is criticized as the prototype of the bourgeois (or even the fascist) because during his voyage he immunizes himself against any contamination by foreignness, as symbolized by the Sirens’ song. Homer’s hero thus anticipates the “civilized traveler” who learns nothing and moreover swindles the “savages” in supposedly less civilized regions.6 This is the first of three models of the critique of travel and travel literature within the tradition of Critical Theory. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, modern travel is a tool or an expression of the globalization of hegemony. This theme will be further developed later on by Said. With a certain amount of good will, the text by Horkheimer and Adorno can also be read as a criticism of two other travel writers: Plato and Daniel Defoe. In book twelve of The Laws, Plato looks at travel as a source of civic danger and moral pollution because it exposes unprepared travelers—in particular those who are “under forty”7—to all kinds of confusing impressions and alien mores. According to the Greek philosopher, only degenerate and poorly governed states do not need to bother about their citizens mingling with foreigners or “going for trips abroad themselves whenever they feel like it and wherever their wanderlust takes them.”8 Daniel Defoe is significantly

4

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 39.

5

Adorno, “Taboos on the Teaching Vocation,” in Critical Models, p. 190.

6

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 39.

7

Plato, The Laws, trans. T.J. Saunders, Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin, 1970, p. 500.

8

Ibid.

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Flâneurs without Borders • 81

more liberal, although he too condemns as sinful the unbridled Romantic urge embodied in his hero Robinson Crusoe to travel to far-off places merely for the sake of seeing them. In Defoe’s view, in order to acquire moral legitimacy, travel must have concrete aims, such as furthering international trade or founding colonies.9 Horkheimer and Adorno reverse the thrust of these two criticisms. Modern travel is profane, not because the exposure to foreign knowledge pollutes the civic mind but, on the contrary, because genuine experiences of foreignness are increasingly eliminated by technology and instrumental rationality. Similarly, Horkheimer and Adorno reject the “civilized traveler” who wants to subjugate the world, and is as such idealized by Defoe. This criticism of travel as a practice that serves the purpose of expanding hegemonic relations or giving expression to them was subsequently revised by Adorno. In entry 77 of Minima Moralia, Adorno, having recently returned from exile in the United States, admits to his nostalgia for a certain type of “civilized traveler.” Thus he recollects the delights of rail journeys in Europe— the old Europe of his fond memories—and contrasts them with the cold efficiency of transcontinental express trains in America: What made up the voluptuousness of travel, beginning with the goodbyewaving through the open window, the solicitude of amiable accepters of tips, the ceremonial of mealtimes, the constant feeling of receiving favors that take away nothing from anyone else, has passed away, together with the elegant people who were wont to promenade along the platforms before the departure, and who will by now be sought in vain even in the foyers

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of the most prestigious hotels.10

This remark was presumably intended just as seriously as the comment he made in a lecture in Frankfurt that in an increasingly homogeneous world travel is senseless because there are no longer any genuine differences between countries and towns. The differences we perceive are simulated and

9

See M.E. Novak, “Robinson Crusoe’s Original Sin,” in Novak, The Economics and

the Fiction of Daniel Defoe, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1962, pp. 32–48. 10

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 119.

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82 • Chapter Three

“have an anachronistic air, almost like that of a fancy-dress ball.”11 Whoever flies long distance discovers that airports all over the world resemble one another. Even worse, it is hard to resist the impression that other differences between individual towns exist largely only to motivate passengers to travel from one to another, from Karachi to Naples or elsewhere. But for this marketing interest, what these airports all symbolize would be taken further, to the point where the cities they serve would likewise be ruthlessly—I almost said buried beneath them.12

The infrastructures of modern travel are the expression and vehicle of the profane hegemony of the “exchange principle” that guarantees uniformity and calculability worldwide. Decades later, Jean Baudrillard has had similar thoughts. Long-distance air travel, he notes, is no longer about discovering other places or people. The only thing frequent flyers discover during long flights is the abstract relationship between time, space and speed, and the effects of these factors on the human body.13 Whereas the first model of travel critique describes modern travel in functionalist terms as a means of securing global hegemony, it is unclear from the vantage point of the later Adorno why people should wish to travel at all. If we extend his line of thought, travel literature would in fact amount to the donning of a “fancy dress” of difference to world regions with the aim of disguising their fundamental sameness. Unlike the critique of travel as a function of power-seeking, this second model sets out to demonstrate the senselessness of modern travel.

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The third critical model differs from the first two. It is to be found in outline in Benjamin’s notes on the flâneur and on flânerie as shorthand for a distinctive research methodology guided not by ideas and concepts but by physical

11

Adorno, History and Freedom, p. 15.

12

Ibid., p. 109. As if referring to this quote, Habermas has claimed that globaliza-

tion also creates new cultural differences, even “in the vicinity of Heathrow Airport” (Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, p. 75). 13

See J. Baudrillard “The Sidereal Voyage,” in J. Baudrillard and M. Guillaume,

Radical Alterity, trans. A. Hodges, New York, Semiotext(e)/MIT, 2008, pp. 82–83.

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Flâneurs without Borders • 83

objects and real-world encounters. I suggest reading Benjamin’s work as a reflection on the conditions in which travel can be an expression of freedom, a medium for the creation of meaning, and a way of subverting conventional values and world views. The flâneur is a traveler no less than Odysseus or Robinson Crusoe, insofar as we define traveling not just as the conquest of large geographical distances but as an advance into unknown, unsafe terrain. Depending on who one is and where one is living, even crossing a street can be a journey.14 In this sense, flânerie is a special case of small-scale travel. However, it also true that Benjamin’s flâneur embodies a social and political situation in which the “European encounter with the Other is postponed,” as Rob Shields writes.15 Since he does not leave the imperial metropolis Paris, the flâneur encounters the non-West only in the form of merchandise and symbols from the colonies. Benjamin’s thoughts are centered on the difficulties of defining “home” in a context of the global circulation of goods and persons. For Horkheimer and Adorno, Odysseus’s voyage epitomizes the selfpreservation and self-hardening of the bourgeois subject and hence, paradoxically, stasis. Benjamin’s representation of motion, observation and writing as the typical practices of flânerie in the modern metropolis lends itself to a very different interpretation. He highlights the “non-conformism”16 of the wandering city dweller, which he regards as an antidote to the mutilation of experience through the modern division of labor. Blind self-preservation is replaced by self-questioning and perceptual fluidity. An additional factor is that the

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flâneur himself describes his forays in words and pictures. His specific talent consists in condensing “far-off times and places”17 into literary and sociological snapshots. In Benjamin’s case the writing down of impressions, an action that Francis Bacon recommended to every young traveler—“Let him keepe

14

See R.L. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search

of Knowledge, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 12. 15

R. Shields, “Fancy footwork: Walter Benjamin’s notes on flânerie,” in K. Tester,

ed., The Flâneur, London and New York, Routledge, 1994, p. 78. 16

Benjamin, “[Nachträge zu den Anmerkungen der Bände I bis VI],” in Gesammelte

Schriften, vol. 7, p. 743. 17

Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 419.

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84 • Chapter Three

also a diary”18—enters into the definition of the flâneur. In the process, the phenomenology of aimless curiosity and individual roaming around culminates again and again in metaphors drawn from a religious vocabulary. Paris is “the promised land” of the flâneur and the modern cityscape is the “properly sacred ground of flânerie”;19 the flâneur is the “unassuming passer-by with his clerical dignity and his detective’s intuition.”20 The kind of travel that can be analogized to Benjamin’s concept of flânerie is a form of highly individualized, out-of-the-ordinary, voluntary and nonpurposive spatial mobility that leads from familiar to unfamiliar places. Traveling entails the temporary disconnection from the profane world of the division of labor which is replaced by a state of enhanced freedom in a new time-space continuum. At the same time, the traveling subject reimagines the world taking her cues from the objects and people she encounters. Like the short-distance wanderer, the traveler is motivated not by instrumental reasons, but by sheer “love of travel”21—something Benjamin explicitly confessed to himself. The difference between Benjamin’s city dweller and the heroes of contemporary travel narratives is that the latter, instead of postponing the encounter with the non-Western Other, are catching up with her. Moreover, instead of focusing on a single metropolis and its dream worlds, they are mapping “the global ecumene”22 of an increasingly interconnected world society. As the British political scientist Debbie Lisle explains, travel writers deal primarily with the “differences” between the traveler’s home and the societies to which she travels.23 This brings issues of mutual

18

F. Bacon, “Of Travel,” (1610) in Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial

Writing in English, 1550–1630: An Anthology, ed. A. Hadfield, Oxford, Oxford University

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Press, 2001, p. 34. 19

Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 417, 421.

20

Benjamin, “The Return of the Flâneur,” in Selected Writings, ed. H. Eiland and

M.W. Jennings, trans. E. Jephcott et al., Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press, 1996–2003, vol. 2, p. 264. 21

Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 621.

22

See U. Hannerz, “Notes on the Global Ecumene,” Public Culture, vol. 1, no. 2,

1989, pp. 66–75. 23

See D. Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 40–43.

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Flâneurs without Borders • 85

recognition, cultural imperialism and pseudo-respect to the fore, making travel books into “political texts.”24

II. The figure of the traveler and the cultural politics of travel writing While travel is no longer the rare social privilege it once was, the travel activities of the authors of travel literature are fundamentally different from other forms of mobility. To start with, travel writers differ from ordinary tourists. Unlike the latter, they are characterized by a powerful individualism, by the unconventional nature of their routes and destinations, their interest in social diagnosis and, frequently, their decision to journey with leisurely or pre-industrial form of transport (on foot, on bicycles or by boat or train). Furthermore, travelers with literary ambitions are normally neither exiles nor on the run. They are not normal tourists but like the latter they are traveling voluntarily and without being subject to any particular economic or political pressure. Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish traveler in America, called them “amateur emigrants.”25 The fact that their emigration is merely tentative and not intended to be final distinguishes travel writers from the figures of “marginal man” and the “newcomer” that have become prominent in the sociology of the early twentieth century.26 The marginality of travel writers is transitory and self-chosen. They consciously seek insecurity through exposing themselves to unconventional travel experiences, but the flipside of this is normally provided by a solid foundation of bourgeois security.

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Here the difference between the genders is, of course, crucial. Historically, women embarked on journeys not only to free themselves from geographical constraints, but also from the ideological constraints of their assigned role in patriarchal society. Being “at home” had quite a different, less comforting

24

Ibid., p. xii.

25

R.L. Stevenson, The Amateur Emigrant: From the Clyde to Sandy Hook, Chicago,

Stone and Kimball, 1895. 26

See R.E. Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” American Journal of

Sociology, vol. 33, 1928, pp. 881–93.

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86 • Chapter Three

meaning for them than for their male fellow-citizens.27 The same is true for women who traveled from the colonial periphery to the West. “I lifted the veil from my face before I boarded the train,” wrote a Bengali woman about her departure for England in the 1890s.28 Today, travel writers are still mostly men who have found a professional backbone of their literary activity in their work for news agencies, mass media, the diplomatic service or occasionally even the secret services of their native countries. This cushion distinguishes the figure of the traveler from that of the “stranger” in the sociology of Georg Simmel. What the traveler and the stranger have in common is what Simmel calls the “freedom of coming and going,”29 in other words, a ready willingness to move around. To be sure, this willingness is typically much greater in the case of the traveler than the stranger who, as Simmel emphasizes, frequently prefers to remain in the place he has once arrived at. In contrast, ever since the Renaissance the European traveler has been educated not to remain in one place too long. As Bacon writes: “Let him not stay long in one Citty, or Towne.”30 Simmel’s description of the stranger includes one further feature: his impartiality and “objectivity.”31 The stranger “surveys conditions with less prejudice; his criteria are more general and more objective ideals; he is not tied down in his action by habit, piety and precedent.”32 It is precisely this privileged view, however, that has been denied to the traveling stranger ever since the publication of Said’s Orientalism. A critical trope well known ever since antiquity maintains that after his return home, the traveler likes to tell stories that are vastly exaggerated or simply invented.33 Said radicalized this critique by

27

See M.S. Schriber, Writing Home: American Women Abroad 1830–1920, Charlottes-

ville, VA, University of Virginia Press, 1997, p. 134. 28

Quoted in S.K. Das, “In the Land of the Masters: Indian Travelogues on England,”

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in Das, Indian Ode to the West Wind: Studies in Literary Encounters, Delhi, Pencraft International, 2001, p. 189. 29

G. Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. K.H. Wolff, Glencoe, Ill., The Free

Press, 1950, p. 402. 30

Bacon, “Of Travel,” p. 34.

31

Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, p. 404.

32

Ibid., p. 405.

33

See Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, ch. 3.

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Flâneurs without Borders • 87

declaring that the travel literature that came into being during the period of overseas European expansion was a driver and source of legitimation of the colonial project. As more or less conscious agents of colonialism, European travelers were not merely occasional liars and boasters. For Said, the misunderstanding and distortion of conditions in non-European regions of the world was systematic in nature. A further factor was that literary representations of non-Western Others circulated by travelers in the emerging public sphere of their mother countries encountered not disbelief and criticism but acceptance and applause. It is true enough that, like Simmel’s strangers, Said’s travelers claimed to be objective; but they did so merely to be able to measure an uncomprehended alien reality by the standards of their own unexamined expectations and ideals. “Orientalism” is the shorthand expression for an operation supported by powerful interests that projects reified “Oriental” attributes onto non-Western world regions in such a way as to legitimate intervention in the cultural space so created. Thus from the very outset, colonial travel literature established that the inhabitants of Asia, Africa and the New World were not only notable for their striking absence of virtue and civilization as these are understood in Europe, but even more importantly, they also suffered from the lack of sensible government, a lack that in the final analysis, so it was believed, could only be made good by outside intervention.34 At this point, I wish to examine Said’s critique of Orientalism a little more closely. The fact is that from my perspective it is by no means clear what

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Orientalism is or what precisely is wrong with it. Said defines his key concept at one point as follows: “The essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority.”35 From the context we can see at once that Said does not criticize all thinking in moral

34

For a comprehensive collection of travelogues written in the context of British

colonialism and imperialism, see T. Fulford and P.J. Kitson, eds., Travels, Explorations and Empires, 1770–1835: Travel Writings on North America, the Far East, North and South Poles and the Middle East, 8 vols, London, Pickering & Chatto, 2001–02; P.J. Kitson, ed., Nineteenth-Century Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Consolidation, 1835–1910, 8 vols, London, Pickering & Chatto, 2003–04. 35

Said, Orientalism, p. 42.

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88 • Chapter Three

categories of superiority and inferiority. His own text confirms on every page that it is impossible to place a high value on certain ideas, practices and institutions without at the same time thinking less well of other ideas, practices and institutions and hence dismissing them as inferior. Nor does Said imply in general that every blanket negative judgment of specific aspects of nonWestern societies is suspect. He himself makes such negative judgments on occasion.36 The threshold of Orientalism is crossed only when the scheme of superiority/inferiority is applied to entire cultural regions that are then classified as coherent moral and functional wholes. Although this criticism is illuminating, it must be said that Said’s line of argument is often ambivalent. He frequently seems to criticize the misinterpretation of the Orient that arises from the fact that the “cultural apparatus”37 of Orientalism is resistant to the apprehension of the genuine Orient and its inhabitants. But on occasion he seems to dispute the existence of this separate Orient and to treat the mere drawing of a stable boundary between West and East as the source of the problem. Thus in the introduction to his book, he expresses the hope that his criticism will eliminate not just a false picture of the Orient, but the categories of “Orient” and “Occident” as such.38 Regrettably, this ambivalence is never resolved. Of central importance to the critique of Orientalism is the assumption that there is a close link between the Western interpretation of the Orient and the desire to dominate the Orient. An important link in this context is supplied by the European travelers who visited India, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Tunis or Jerusalem, chiefly in the nineteenth century, and who have left descriptions of their journeys.39 Said makes two claims about this type of literature and its authors. First, many of these writers were less interested in the countries

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36

For example, during the run-up to the First Gulf War in 1991, he wrote an op-ed

column in the New York Times, in which he objected not just to the American “will to war,” but also to the “remorseless Arab propensity to violence.” See Said, “A Tragic Convergence,” in Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian SelfDetermination, 1969–1994, New York, Pantheon Books, 1994, p. 286. 37

Said, Orientalism, p. 204.

38

Ibid., p. 28.

39

Ibid., pp. 166–97.

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Flâneurs without Borders • 89

they were visiting than in their own egos. In their eyes the Orient was a fairly arbitrary setting, a background against which they could reinforce their own identity and “character.” Second, notwithstanding their often idiosyncratic motives, back home these travel writers were accorded the status of “expert witnesses.”40 Not only have individual travelers identified their own sense of superiority towards the countries they were visiting with the cultural superiority of their own nation.41 Even more dubious is the fact that for their part the governments of the home nations identified themselves with the projections and fantasies of more or less neurotic individuals. It was only in this way, so Said asserts, that travel narratives could succeed in becoming part of the stock of knowledge of the world claimed by European elites. Said’s critique of Orientalism was constitutive for the establishment of postcolonial studies as an academic discipline and hence for the cultivation of a systematic interest in exploring the literary and scholarly genres that focus on the relations between Europe or the West with the rest of the world. More recent criticism of literary travel books has likewise based itself on Said’s principal work. A good example is provided by Lisle’s prize-winning analysis of recent travel literature referred to above. In Lisle’s view the entire genre is still overshadowed by Orientalism because it admits of only two sorts of places in the world: secure, civilized and dull home bases and insecure, less civilized, and hence exciting travel destinations. This binary division is transformed into easily readable literature that helps to legitimate and trivialize existing global power relations and is therefore structurally “conservative.”42

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As in colonial times, therefore, Western writers choose not only their travel destinations but also their rhetorical tropes in accordance with what is basically an Orientalist code.43 Consequently, then, Lisle criticizes not just individual authors and works, but the genre as such. Lisle regards the distinction between a secure, familiar home base and the insecure, unfamiliar travel destinations, which lies lie at the foundation of all travel and all travel literature, as itself the product of an ultimately “colonial

40

Ibid., p. 192.

41

Ibid., p. 193.

42

Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, p. xi.

43

Ibid., pp. 272–74.

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90 • Chapter Three

geographical imagination.”44 This strikes me as far-fetched. Lisle confuses the physical dangers that may lie in wait en route or in travel destinations with moral hazards. Whereas physical risks (disease, violence, etc.) are often exaggerated baselessly and equated with the absence of civilization, certain moral hazards cannot be avoided even with the best will in the world. The reason for this lies in the fact that travelers voluntarily renounce what Russell Hardin has called the “epistemological comforts of home”—the pleasures of familiar streets, foods and dialects that enable us each day to accept without question the fallacy that things ought to be the way they are, because that is the way they are.45 In the best case, travel resembles exemplary aesthetic experiences which likewise have transformative power in the sense that they shatter assumptions about needs, interpretations and appropriate behaviors that hitherto we have taken for granted. The dilemma that arises, however, is that when we are abroad the same experiences that might be able to neutralize the unfounded moral feelings of superiority of travelers together with their “corrupt geographical knowledge”46 not infrequently have the opposite effect and reactivate precisely those very feelings of superiority and confirm them. Good travel books are a reflection of this dilemma. Moreover, Lisle argues that when cosmopolitan writers claim to admire the Others they encounter they unquestioningly presuppose their otherness and thus naturalize cultural differences. Put simply, positive stereotypes of strangers are often not much better than negative ones. This argument varies Said’s unelaborated criticism that there is something wrong with the

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mere drawing of boundaries between large cultural groups. Lisle vacillates between criticizing stereotypes, attribution errors and clichés, on the one hand, and the much wider criticism of writers who in general make “explicit judgments about other people” in foreign countries, on the other hand.47 This last point is inconsistent: Lisle herself makes judgments about other people when, for example, she sympathizes with the victims of Western “cultural

44

Ibid., p. 172.

45

See R. Hardin, One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict, Princeton, Princeton

University Press, 1995. 46

Ibid., p. 63.

47

Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, p. 71.

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Flâneurs without Borders • 91

imperialism.”48 At the same time, her criticism is blunted by its failure to explicate normative criteria. What exactly, we may ask, was wrong with Hannah Arendt’s attitude when she made a whole string of unfriendly judgments about the “average German”49 after her visit to Germany in the winter of 1949–50?

III. Western and nonwestern travelers: a few examples In the remaining part of this chapter I wish to take a closer look at some examples of contemporary travel writing. I abandon the exclusive focus on Western (English-speaking) writers who predominantly travel to non-Western (nonEnglish-speaking) countries by including both Western, but not Englishspeaking writers, and non-Western, although English-speaking writers who visit the West. By reading those texts we get a sense of whether their authors remain cocooned in unshakeable beliefs impervious to reality, or whether they stumble upon new truths. In Benjamin’s terms: do travel texts contribute to or express the restoration of the “possibility of experience”50 under the adverse conditions of the modern division of labor? Moreover, I am more interested in the question of whether literary representations of travels help to encourage feelings of contempt for strangers? Is the recognition accorded to strangers in these texts false and ideological? Are there signs in these travel accounts pointing to a degree of cultural reflection that goes beyond Orientalism and related forms of clichéd thinking? These questions are addressed by briefly discussing selected travel narratives by Rory Stewart, Giorgio Manganelli, Stephan Wackwitz, R.K. Narayan and Amitava Kumar.

Stewart

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Rory Stewart’s book about his journey through Afghanistan, The Places In Between, shows how much has changed since Westerners wrote travel texts as

48

Ibid., p. 117.

49

H. Arendt, “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany,” Commentary,

vol. 10, October 1950, p. 343. 50

Benjamin, “[Nachträge zu den Anmerkungen der Bände I bis VI],” in Gesammelte

Schriften, vol. 7, p. 743.

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92 • Chapter Three

“celebratory narratives of European superiority,” to quote Mary Louise Pratt’s characterization of colonial travel literature.51 Stewart has taken the concept of flânerie to extremes when he asked himself why one should stop walking at the boundaries of one’s own city or country: I talked about how I had been walking one afternoon in Scotland and thought: Why don’t I just keep going? There was, I said, a magic in leaving in leaving a line of footprints stretching behind me across Asia.52

So the young reckless Scotsman began his global walking tour by crossing parts of Iran, Nepal and Saudi Arabia. Like nineteenth-century flâneurs, he was “concentrating on details,”53 trying to record objects and encounters including traces of the past in the slowly changing surroundings of what appears to be the periphery of the modern world. Then he decided to walk from Herat to Kabul right after the fall of the Taliban, again driven by sheer curiosity about a little known region where Persian, Hellenic and Hindu cultures “merged into one another or touched the global world.”54 In his book,

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Stewart is effectively questioning many of his own and his readers’ unexamined assumptions. First of all, “Afghanistan” as a monolithic Other ceases to exist. Like other country names, the name “Afghanistan” suggests the existence of a well-defined society, whereas in reality we find a social and political pluriverse with few fixed commonalities. Stewart is traveling in the footsteps of Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana, but he is also inspired by the account of the Indian Mughal Emperor Babur who did a similar journey in the early sixteenth century. He walks from village to village, about forty kilometers a day, always with his dog and a letter of introduction from the Tajik warlord Ismail Khan. Moving in dangerous territory, the traveler not only makes observations, but is also himself observed, examined and grilled by his potential hosts/hostage takers. The progress of his journey depends on the giving the right answers, but also on his detailed knowledge of his environment. Crucially, the author knows some Dari and Farsi, and knows enough about

51

M.L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London, Routledge,

1992, p. xi. 52

R. Stewart, The Places In Between, Orlando, FL, Harcourt, 2006, p. 25.

53

Ibid., p. 27.

54

Ibid., p. 25.

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local manners, rules of etiquette, and dress codes to guess the origins of the people he meets. Stewart’s account downplays the differences between his own culture and the culture of the region he visits. Unlike other authors, he abstains from sweeping comparisons between Afghans and Westerners. Instead, he makes an attempt to narrow the gap between himself and the Afghans intellectually and morally. By eating their food, speaking their languages, exposing himself to the same harsh environment, Stewart is no longer a passing observer who looks at others from the outside. Unlike other contemporary travel writers, he is not patronizing the “poor” Afghans. His basic attitude is not one of bending down to the locals as victims, but one of becoming like them, at least partly. In this, Stewart might have followed a cultural script developed in Edwardian England where eccentric young men had similar inclinations to transform themselves into Arabs or other people with completely different cultural backgrounds.55 In any case, his travelogue offers a new view of the configuration of the travelers’ individual self, the collective self of his culture of origin and “the others.” Afghanistan is portrayed as a highly diverse entity that exists mainly in the heads of Western policy-makers. Stewart writes perceptively not only about the antagonism between the Hazara (who are Shia) and the majority of Afghans (who are Sunni) but also about Tajik and Aimaq communities and their relationships with the Taliban, the Americans and other groups. Occasionally he gains insights into the political gamesmanship and duplicity of some of his hosts. The picture that begins to emerge is far more

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complex than the one presented by both critics and advocates of the US-led invasion of 2001. In all his descriptions, Stewart is far from objectifying a nonWestern Other as a foil for his own, or a Western Self in general. The situation of “in-betweenness” is shared by the traveler, who at one point calls the journey a “journey to myself,”56 and the “travelees,” who are also on various journeys of their own kind. Toward the end, being in between places allows Stewart to make some acute observations, not of Afghans, but of other foreigners engaged in postconflict

55

See P. Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s

Covert Empire in the Middle East, New York, Oxford University Press, 2008. 56

Stewart, The Places In Between, p. 73.

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94 • Chapter Three

and reconstruction work. Having arrived in Kabul after months of walking without meeting but a very few Westerners (some soldiers, some aid workers), he conveys something of the sense of utter bewilderment that Afghans themselves must feel when they listen to the numerous United Nations and NGO people from abroad. He believes that “neocolonialism” is too charitable a term for much of this new elite, because colonial administrators at least tried hard at getting to know their subjects and dedicated their entire careers to this task. By contrast, today’s international bureaucrats seem to have neither the time nor the means to study the world into which they intervene. They are not serious travelers. “Their policy fails,” he concludes in a footnote, “but no one notices.”57 However, Stewart is himself no stranger to the experience of failure. After his return from Afghanistan the thirty-year old accepted a job offer from the British Foreign Service to become interim governor of the province of Maysan in the newly conquered Iraq. This very particular experience has also been documented in a much acclaimed travel book.58 At the heart of this narrative, which covers Stewarts experiences and observations between October 2003 and June 2004, is the description of the grotesque mismatch between the formal power of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the lack of knowledge of the conditions and the dynamics of social and political mobilization in Iraq. Importantly, Stewart includes himself in this criticism and gives his readers a frank account of how he struggled to get some respect from his Iraqi partners and clients, often to no avail.59 The Iraqis seemed to

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see things he did not see. Time and again, he gets into situations where he has to ask himself which side is culturally and intellectually superior: “Was the man naïve, or somehow steps ahead of me?”60 Stewart is repeatedly jarred into an examination of his role and of the war itself. He undergoes a selftransformation at the end of which he concludes that Western states do not have the knowledge and the resources to establish democracies in hostile

57

Ibid., pp. 247–48, n. 59.

58

Stewart, The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq,

Orlando, FL, Harcourt, 2006. 59

See, for example, ibid., pp. 43, 72–73.

60

Ibid., p. 64.

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Flâneurs without Borders • 95

environments. Even if Western elites were still controlled by a consistently Orientalist mindset, it would not help them to govern non-Western countries. Stewart’s narrative also sheds light on the relationship between the experience of governing and the activity of writing. For postcolonial critics Stewart must be some kind of bête noire—a British travel writer who not only writes about the non-West but who has also pursued a brief career as a foreignappointed governor in an occupied country. On reflection, however, Stewart’s case does not exemplify the contribution of travel writers to contemporary forms of imperialism. Quite the opposite. Not even the profound individual knowledge, the cultural sensitivity and political goodwill of Western intellectuals can rescue botched experiments in foreign occupation.

Manganelli

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The Italian avant-garde writer Giorgio Manganelli merits attention not only because he has written travel narratives but because he has also discussed, if only briefly, the phenomenon of Orientalism at roughly the same time as Edward Said. Thus he criticizes an Italian scholar of Islam for portraying the Arab Orient as simultaneously senile and immature.61 According to Manganelli the “Orient” is used to this day as an imagined Other to mark the margin of Western culture. Very much like Said, he believes “that a specific approach to the idea of the Orient also contains a specific idea of Europe.”62 Manganelli’s response to this cultural mythology about binaries and boundaries is to undertake journeys to regions beyond Europe and to write about what he sees. The aim of these journeys is to discover what is specific to these foreign civilizations without attempting a comparison with one’s own country of origin. “Comparisons are odious,” seems to be his unspoken motto. Manganelli has attempted to put his program into practice in a collection of shorter travel pieces from the 1970s and 1980s. Like Stewart, he recognizes immediately that conventional talk of foreign “countries” is misleading because outside the West the names of countries often fail to describe national

61

G. Manganelli, L’infinita trama di Allah: Viaggi nell’ Islam, 1973–1987, ed. G. Pulce,

Rome, Quiritta, 2002, p. 78. 62

Ibid., p. 79.

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96 • Chapter Three

units but are really just shorthand for highly heterogeneous entities whose unifying principle may be unclear or open to dispute. Pakistan, for example, is deemed by Manganelli to be “absolutely incomparable”63 with European societies. Despite his aversion to national comparisons, however, we soon perceive that Manganelli cannot deny his own origins and that he has fairly conventional ways of viewing people and things. He is amazed by the women on the streets of Peshawar, dressed in their black or blue veils, is enchanted by Baghdad’s labyrinthine bazaars and finds the prospect of soon being in Kabul “endlessly seductive.”64 Manganelli’s Islamic Orient is, to quote some of his favorite adjectives, archaic, proud, warlike, alluring and incomprehensible—a place that invites us “to dream for hours on end and to fantasize.”65 The traveler feels disturbed only by the signs of Westernization (for instance in Kuwait), which he compares to a veil that conceals the true silhouette of the cities. This Westernizing trend is ascribed to the symbolically impure influence of profits from the export of oil.66 Much of what Manganelli writes can still be described as Orientalist, although the language he uses is one of pure astonishment that studiously refrains from making moral judgments about the Orient. He is content with what Adorno dismissively called “the wide-eyed presentation of mere facts” (die staunende Darstellung der bloßen Faktizität).67 A good example is his slim volume Esperimento con l’India (The Indian Experiment), which is based on his travels in India in the 1970s. The text contains numerous descriptions of sensual impressions, such as the sickly sweet smell that greets the traveler

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arriving in Bombay airport and whose principal component is not always sandalwood. On occasion, the author reflects on how his own expectations had been shaped by sanitized literary representations of India such as Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, which according to him have made it difficult

63

Ibid., p. 57.

64

Ibid., pp. 37–38, 66, 51.

65

Ibid., p. 49.

66

Ibid., p. 47.

67

Adorno to Benjamin, November 10, 1938, in Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete

Correspondence 1928–1940, ed. H. Lonitz, trans. N. Walker, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 283.

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for whole generations to develop an unprejudiced view of the country.68 Manganelli’s narrative, moreover, is reflective in a different sense. The author attempts to construct a view of himself from outside by detailing his own reactions to the solicitations of pimps and beggars. Those reactions follow a pattern that streetwise Indians know all too well. The Westerner is not used to death and so he attempts in his crude fashion to influence his gods in his favor. He strives to be “good,” which proves he has only a fragmentary understanding of the journey of the soul. The Westerner has money, is lecherous and weak; he is therefore made of the right stuff for pimps and beggars.69

Of course, understanding the ways in which beggars are tapping into their mark’s sense of goodness, is not a very unusual accomplishment. But the point here is that Manganelli complicates the colonial asymmetry between observers and observed, and between people who act and people who are acted upon. Although Manganelli concludes with a conventional statement about how Asia is fundamentally different from the West, he overturns the clichés of the Orientalist world view. The Indians know us better than we know them. The Western world, not India, is monstrous. Similarly, Manganelli ascribes to himself and to his own culture of origin the supposed attributes of shallow emotionality, moral velleity and susceptibility to seduction that colonial writers habitually ascribed to Indian civilization.70 Conversely, Indians are credited with a measure of cool observation and competence in dealing with the actual reality that hapless Westerners seem somehow to have lost.

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Wackwitz Unlike Manganelli who revels in the sensual qualities of characteristically Oriental scenes, other writers have tried to deemphasize the otherness of the East. An example is Osterweiterung (Eastern Enlargement) by the German

68

See Manganelli, Esperimento con l’India, Milan, Adelphi Edizioni, 1992, pp. 16–18.

69

Ibid., p. 37.

70

See T.R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,

1994, ch. 3.

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98 • Chapter Three

writer Stephan Wackwitz. This is an account of travels that straddle and put into question the boundaries between East and West. The itineraries run through Eastern European countries that are now firmly integrated into the European Union and thus by definition “Western”—the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia. What makes this narrative particularly intriguing is that Wackwitz, perhaps unwittingly, adopts a reflexive and playful attitude toward the vocabulary of Orientalism. Thus, the East is dangerous for Western middle-class men, but its dangers are confined to leaky ceilings and “menacingly groaning and rattling elevators.”71 Bratislava is different from Berlin, but the difference is “pleasing.”72 Most importantly, although the countries and their languages were initially completely foreign to him, Wackwitz is repeatedly struck by a strong sense of déjà vu whenever he walks the streets of certain towns in Poland, almost as if he had been there before in a previous life. He calls this his “Katowice feeling” after the city in Silesia in southern Poland. Katowice has the look and feel of a place that could be home for Wackwitz, as do other towns in the region. Wackwitz sometimes does not quite know where he is, not because there are no city centers and local characteristics, but because these characteristics, for example neo-Gothic red brick churches, evoke memories of German cities such as Berlin or Stuttgart. As a result of this fusion of images and impressions, he develops a heightened awareness of the contingency of cultural and territorial boundaries including the boundaries between East and West.73 Dennis Porter has argued that such déjà vu experiences, which are quite common in modern travel writing, can be interpreted as indicating “the desire to recover

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an original lost home.”74 This may be true for Wackwitz as well, although I should stress that his sense of home abroad must not be interpreted in any political or nationalist sense. Rather, for him the Eastern enlargement has turned out to be, first and foremost, an intensely exhilarating enlargement of consciousness.

71

S. Wackwitz, Osterweiterung: Zwölf Reisen, Frankfurt, Fischer, 2008, p. 101.

72

Ibid., p. 112.

73

See ibid., pp. 38–39.

74

D. Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing,

Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 12.

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Flâneurs without Borders • 99

Wackwitz also reveals the layer of dark history underneath contemporary East European societies. He visits regions in Poland that not long ago were systematically “combed through”75 by the Einsatzgruppen, special squads in charge of killing Jews and others civilians deemed unfit to live during World War II. Something of this history comes alive through his encounter with a survivor of the genocidal war waged by the Germans at that time.76 Passing through haunted lands, the traveler becomes aware of moving within a vast “intra-European colonization area”77 that has been devastated and brutalized throughout the centuries by Germans, but also by Russians, French and Turks (who vandalized Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth century). Adorno once made a rather mysterious comment about the geographical space that opens up east of Vienna: “Here somewhat to the East, the Puszta casts its spell to keep people away from the landscape and its flora, as if the endless plains were unwilling to be disturbed.”78 Although quoted by Wackwitz, his entire book can be read as a refutation of Adorno’s claim about the European East as a wilderness or as a space that has ever been good at keeping intruders at a distance. Wackwitz revisits historical lands that, instead of keeping people away, have attracted barbarians of all sorts who brought mayhem and destruction to the locals and their environment. In this sense, the narrative describes a reverse frontier experience about a space that has seen far too many “travelers” in the past, mostly of the wrong kind.

Narayan

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One of the weaknesses of the critique of travel literature inspired by Said is that it ignores the journeys of non-European writers in Western countries. This is unfortunate because these journeys have also been documented and need to be read in their own right. I limit myself to a few remarks about travelers from India.

75

Wackwitz, Osterweiterung, p. 80.

76

See ibid., pp. 65–82.

77

Ibid., p. 142.

78

Adorno, “Wien, nach Ostern 1967,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.1, p. 430;

quoted in Wackwitz, Osterweiterung, p. 10.

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100 • Chapter Three

The first thing that strikes readers of modern Indian travelogues is that they often reflect an attempt to construct a civilizational Self in a way analogous and yet different from the Orientalist construction of non-Western Others. This is certainly true for nationalist writers and travelers like Mohandas Gandhi. Before Gandhi, Indians journeying to London or other European capitals were often simply awestruck by artifacts of the industrial age such as steamboats or railways. Big ocean-going ships, in particular, were almost masochistically admired as symbols of Western power and organizational talent.79 As a result, travelers began to think of their home country as backward and underdeveloped. This perspective changed only with Gandhi and some of his traveling contemporaries who began to create new meanings that helped to foster a sense of civilizational pride among Indians. When Gandhi traveled in Europe he inverted the values taken for granted by his predecessors so that the awesome and outstanding became banal and threatening. The Eiffel Tower, for example, was for him not a symbol of rationality and progress, but of sheer folly.80 Intriguingly, Gandhi had particularly strong misgivings about modern technologies of transport against which he set his own “spiritual and political ideology of walking” and of traveling as an endin-itself81—an ideology that exhibits distant family resemblances with the models of travel critique introduced by Frankfurt School theorists. Post-independence writers distinguish themselves from the older generation of admirers and detractors of the West by their relaxed self-confidence as members of a nation that has ceased to be subject to foreign rule. The linger-

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ing contempt and insecurity that complicated colonial encounters between Britons, in particular, and Indian travelers largely disappears, and so does the anxious preoccupation with symbols of civilizational progress or backwardness. A good example for this new attitude is R.K. Narayan’s My Dateless Diary, a travelogue on the United States first published in 1960.82 The Indian

79

See Das, Indian Ode to the West Wind, pp. 190–93.

80

See J. Majeed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and

Iqbal, Basingstoke, UK, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 82. 81

Ibid., pp. 91, 82–86.

82

R.K. Narayan, My Dateless Diary: An American Journey (1960), New Delhi, Penguin,

1988.

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Flâneurs without Borders • 101

novelist walks the streets of New York “without aim,”83 gives talks and accepts dinner invitations in Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin, at a time when people of South Asian origin where not yet a familiar fixture in the American cultural landscape. Being fully aware of this demographic fact, Narayan recounts how he is constantly interrogated by his hosts as well as by strangers in ways that exhibit genuine curiosity, but sometimes also genuine silliness. While duly answering the recurring questions about sacred cows and the saintly old man Gandhi, Narayan returns the ethnographic gaze he is exposed to and comments on the strange headgear of women, the lousy coffee and American TV. He calls the United States “the land of comfort, gadget and beefsteak.”84 The important point here is that there is not the slightest whiff of contempt in such remarks. Narayan is a complete stranger to European-style cultural snobbery. He does not attack American culture. Nor does he defend India, which is also not necessary because the Americans he meets like to stress the imagined commonalities between the two countries, such as the fact that “we both got rid of the British.”85 Regarding India, he feels that a country so large and diverse cannot be made the subject of general judgments at all.86 Narayan notes cultural differences, but he admits that he has a hard time taking sides and making judgments. He enjoys the “pleasures of indecision.”87 Indulging in these pleasures, he discusses (with the sociologist Edward Shils) the alternative between joint family and nuclear family, or ponders the difference between beggars in India and beggars in America.88 The bottom line is that Narayan cares for and engages the American Other by weakening the normative asymmetry between his own culture of origin and

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the culture he is visiting. While positive value-statements made by Western travelers about non-Western destinations often sound shallow or sanctimonious, Narayan credibly asserts that his travel account is “a sort of subjective minor history of a country that I love.”89 He does not deny the reality of deep

83

Ibid., p. 179.

84

Ibid., p. 50.

85

Ibid., p. 110.

86

See ibid., p. 49.

87

Ibid., p. 177.

88

Ibid., pp. 73, 180–81.

89

Ibid., p. 8 (Foreword of 1988).

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102 • Chapter Three

differences between peoples and places, and the concomitant dangers of getting “culturally mixed up”90 in unhealthy ways. Still, using irony as his main narrative strategy, he is deflating the totalizing pretensions of competing civilizational discourses, thereby making room for reflexivity and mutual understanding.

Kumar Without classifying America as inferior, unholy or impure, Narayan still expresses some concern about the fusion of Eastern and Western civilizational patterns. In this, he differs from the much younger Amitava Kumar who is not worried about “cultural mixing,”91 partly because he believes that cultural mixing is a defining feature of India itself, which is his native country. Kumar’s book Bombay-London-New York is a travel book in the broad sense of a narrative “generated by travel,”92 although it talks about many more things than the travel experiences of the author. In fact, the book is also about the works by mostly diasporic South Asian writers that Kumar reads or recalls during his long journey from India to the United States where in the meantime he has become a college professor of English. For Kumar, there is a close link between South Asia, the English language, and traveling. He notes that the first book ever written in English by an Indian author was a travel book.93 More importantly, Kumar is attempting to fuse and broaden the genres of travel writing and literary memoir so as to escape the dullness of academic, including postcolonial, theorizing.94

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Kumar’s text represents another structural possibility of reflecting on travel in the present age. First of all, Kumar did not like his poor and lawless hometown of Patna in the province of Bihar. “Home is bliss,”95 writes Paul Theroux,

90

Ibid., p. 50.

91

A. Kumar, Bombay-London-New York, New York, Routledge, 2002, p. 31.

92

J.-P. Rubiés, “Travel Writing as a Genre,” in Journeys, vol. 1, no. 1, 2000, p. 6.

93

See Kumar, Bombay-London-New York, p. 130.

94

See Kumar, “Theory by Other Means,” Rethinking Marxism, vol. 17, no. 2, 2005,

pp. 275–79. 95

P. Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar,

Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2008, p. 90.

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Flâneurs without Borders • 103

but for Kumar home was “a place where rats carried away my mother’s dentures.”96 As a consequence, the young boy always wanted to leave the benighted province where he was born. But as cities like Delhi and Bombay also proved to be disappointing, Kumar’s frustration turned into the more radical “desire to leave for the West”97 on a one-way ticket. Kumar’s narrative is thus founded on the romantic theme of ascent which allows him to describe his journey from East to West as an experience of progress and personal growth. Fatalism is replaced by a future-oriented exodus motif. Not only was Kumar eager to go west, he also wanted to become someone else by instantly and forcefully adopting allegedly Western habits. “On my first day in America, I ate beef and drank beer.”98 He sought “romance” and sexual experiences, to which he attributed the magical power to “make me an insider”99 of American society. However, what makes Kumar’s narrative truly interesting is a second layer of impulses and motifs that complicates the linear model of progress. Having settled in America, he becomes “nostalgic for home” and even enjoys reading E.M. Forster or watching a kitschy adaptation of Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown on TV. In the eyes of the Indian émigré, massmediated neo-Orientalism including the portrayal of Indians as “erotic and dangerous”100 evolves from a tool of political power into a source of seemingly innocent pleasure. So where is home for Kumar? The answer flows from the line he draws between himself as a traveler and the figure of the “tourist citizen” whom he sees incarnated in those Indian-Americans who feel at home in both worlds,

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“citizens of the West who have easy access to the East.” Unlike these “hybrid souls,”101 Kumar continues to use expressions like “we Indians,”102 although he knows that there is no home he can return to and that the very concept of home has become elusive.

96

Kumar, Bombay-London-New York, p. 12.

97

Ibid., p. 110.

98

Ibid., p. 17.

99

Ibid., p. 146.

100

Ibid.

101

Ibid., pp. 21, 178. He explicitly refers to the Bengali-American writer Jhumpa

Lahiri. 102

Ibid., p. 176.

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104 • Chapter Three

IV. Travel writing and the global ecumene My brief reviews of selected literary travel narratives have shown that the attempt to read these texts through the lens of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critique of the Odyssey or Said’s critique of Orientalism submerges the richness and diversity of the genre. Western travelers no longer look down on non-Western peoples and places all the time. Also, non-Westerners have begun to travel to and write about Western lands. Still, there is something to be said in favor of the critique of travel as a function of power relations. Manganelli, in particular, exemplifies the tendency of Western travelers to ascribe redemptive cultural features to certain non-European regions that separate them from the profane reality of the West. Yet, the dichotomy of East and West is undermined by the fact that the author deludes himself into believing that there is a spiritual affinity between his mind and the regions he is visiting. This vague feeling of affinity is not supported by any geographical, historical or any other knowledge of the foreign culture. We are witnesses to strong positive value-statements about distant peoples and places that are made with a minimum of knowledge about them. The result is a recognition of others that is based on not knowing them—an inconsistent “éloge dans la méconnaissance,”103 as Todorov calls it. Put simply, Manganelli’s search for culturally redemptive spaces would be hampered by too much positive knowledge. It would as well be frustrated by intimations of modernity in distant lands such as the symbols of oil wealth in Arabia mentioned by Manganelli, which do not fit his preconceived notion of the pure Orient.

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A kernel of truth is also contained in Adorno’s critique of the senselessness of travel against the backdrop of what he sees as a trend toward increasing cultural homogeneity. Benjamin’s account of the age of mechanical reproducibility also suggests that, as the metropolitan population has grown massively throughout the world, cities themselves become increasingly

103

T. Todorov, Nous et les autres: La réflexion francaise sur la diversité humaine, Paris,

Seuil, 1989, p. 298. This is Todorov’s definition of “exoticism.” For a related perspective on the problem of false or ideological recognition, see Honneth, “Recognition as ideology,” in Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, ed. B. van den Brink and D. Owen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Flâneurs without Borders • 105

interchangeable.104 Of course, it bears emphasizing that the indistinguishability of cityscapes or people can itself be the object of a puzzling and illuminating experience, as travel writers such as Robert Kaplan have demonstrated.105 While the critiques of travel and travel writing advanced by Horkheimer and Adorno are not without merits of their own, they share a limited understand-

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ing of the autonomy of meaning-making which is rooted in the communicative institutions of civil society. Horkheimer and Adorno as well as Said tend to treat travel writing simply as tool of domination, and meaning-making as the wagging tail of political power and economic imperatives. Only Benjamin has a good grasp of the autonomy of meaning-making that also finds expression in many contemporary travel texts. Contra Adorno, I would argue, for example, that the trend toward greater homogeneity does not imply that travelers perceive things that way. Consider texts by authors who have undertaken journeys to places that are by no means obviously different from their homes. Some of these texts show that there is apparently no need to travel to distant, hot, poor and chaotic places in order to experience difference and otherness. People have the ability to “otherize” even the familiar and the nearby. For many Europeans, for example, it is sufficient to travel to the United States to be overwhelmed by a sense of strangeness. Thus, the French traveler Baudrillard has likened the United States to a “completely different planet,” a huge cultural desert that is “fantastically different”106 from the world inhabited by Europeans. Ironically, travel texts that come close to the old “celebratory narratives of European superiority” (Mary Louise Pratt) are today often written by nonWestern authors like Amitava Kumar, who cast themselves in the role of vicarious conquerors of the West. Part of the richness of the genre results from the fact that today writers from very different parts of the world travel and write about their travels. These writings in turn exhibit a wide range of

104

See S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project,

Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1989, p. 330. 105

See R.D. Kaplan, An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, New York,

Random House, 1998, pp. 29–31. 106

Baudrillard “The Sidereal Voyage,” pp. 90–91.

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106 • Chapter Three

observations and value-statements about places and peoples that cannot simply be inferred from the traveler’s culture of origin, as we have learned from comparing Kumar and Narayan. Throughout the world, but certainly in the West, travel writers now look like avatars of Benjamin’s flâneur. The triumph of masculine power is replaced by its “attenuation;”107 the arrogant controlling gaze of colonial authors is replaced by humility, insecurity and sometimes utter powerlessness. Wackwitz is uncertain about how to rebuild a cognitive map of the newly enlarged European Union, and admits to be lost between East and West. Stewart’s Iraq experience is the most drastic example of a complete erosion of the possible even to walk freely and see anything at all because of the dangers of any physical outdoor movements. At one point, Stewart can observe the day-to-day lives of ordinary Iraqis only through the bulletproof windows or the observation slits of armored vehicles. A twohundred yard walk in the sun becomes a rare luxury.108

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A consequence of the homogenization of cities is that the flaneuristic instincts of writers have turned to places which have not yet been dragged into the mainstream of global development. If they come from Western countries, they tend to leave the dazzling world of commodities and big city crowds for places at the margins of modernity. As even the remotest places on earth become accessible sites of fleeting apparitions, shocks and modern “desolation” (Trostlosigkeit),109 the whole world turns into a hangout and a labyrinth to explore for hyper-observant travel writers. The aimless wanderings that generate impressions and observations, which in turn serve as cues for further musings, aesthetic and moral judgments as well as the joyful play of associations, are now part of the same transnational cultural flows which they often bring to consciousness. Bad travelogues confirm the certainties held by the writer and her public, while good travelogues succeed in confronting and shaking unreflected certainties. To different degrees, all the literary examples mentioned above are reflexive in the sense that they do not only represent distant places and peoples but also their own specific ways of representing

107

E. Wilson, “The Invisible Flaneur,” New Left Review, no. 191, 1992, p. 109.

108

See Stewart, The Prince of the Marshes, pp. 184, 140 (and personal

communication). 109

Benjamin, “Central Park,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 169.

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Flâneurs without Borders • 107

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these places and peoples. In all these cases, the writers have faced a foreign reality and were thrown back upon the workings of their own mind while making observations and judgments. The boundaries and binaries readers and writers live by are thus brought to light. This might indeed be the new civilizing mission of literary travel narratives: if not to spur social transformation, at least to cultivate an awareness of the culturally constructed and thus malleable nature of the boundaries between core and periphery, and between “us” and the “others.”

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Chapter Four Meanings of Barbarism: Civil Society and Its Others

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In their seminal book published in the early 1990s, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato take on the grand task of a “reconstruction” of the concept of civil society in the spirit of a critical theory of society.1 Civil society is defined as the sphere of associational life, intimate relations and organized communication that exists between the state and the market economy. The authors make clear their conviction that at the end of a century of failed political utopias, only this particular sphere promises to generate new impulses and movements for “freer, more democratic societies”2 across the world. For this reason, the concept is considered central for a critical political and social theory. Unfortunately, Cohen and Arato have confined their ambition to the reconstruction of an analytical category largely in the vein of Habermas’s general social theory. A dualistic model of state versus society is replaced by a tripartite framework; the idea of progress is attenuated by a more complex stage model of societal

1

See J.L. Cohen and A. Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, Cambridge, Mass.,

MIT Press, 1992. 2

Ibid., p. 421.

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Meanings of Barbarism • 109

development; and the less tangible forms and effects of communicative “influence” are assigned a proper place in the theory, along with “power” and “money.” However, what is completely missing from this picture is a sense that the vocabulary of civil society is not only employed by critical observers but also by participants in political life involved in struggles over the meaning of solidarity and self-government; and that this has been the case since several centuries. Citizens not only struggle within the institutions

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of civil society, but also for “civil society.” The language of civil society is widely used as a powerful tool for making sense of democratic experiences, for framing political demands, and for challenging adversaries. The concept is marked by traces of the antagonistic usages that different groups at different times have made of it. Before becoming an international code word for more inclusive and more global forms of solidarity, “civil society” was used to defend individual liberties, the stability and prosperity of the political realm, and ideals of civic mutuality and reciprocity. The important point here is that, like other political concepts, civil society is not only a theoretical category that serves to slice up the social world in a certain manner, but also a deeply polarizing concept that creates an “ideal society” in the minds of everybody; and this ideal society is, as Durkheim has rightly emphasized, very much part of the “real society.”3 Noncivil social spheres like the state and the economy may have their own ways of functioning, but whether they are perceived as resources or as threats depends entirely on the articulations of civil society. In other words, what Jeffrey Alexander writes about the institutions of civil society applies to the concept of civil society as well; both “crystallize ideals about solidarity with and against others in specific terms … They articulate specific claims and binding demands for inclusion and exclusion, for liberation and for repression.”4 Following up on this comment, the present chapter explores the concept of civil society by identifying a number of implicit oppositional terms and the respective semantic fields, which in different historical contexts have lent meaning to the concept. Three such oppositional terms and

3

See E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. C. Cosman, Oxford,

Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 317. 4

Alexander, The Civil Sphere, p. 70.

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110 • Chapter Four

counter-meanings will be distinguished in turn and traced back to different traditions of European social and political theory: the barbarisms of order and of disorder, and the realm of toil and material necessity. It is argued that the multiple meanings and counter-meanings of civil society are connected by a deep structure of discourse. A striking feature of some of the recent debates is the shifting focus from questions about the boundaries and elements of civil society to questions regarding the concept itself as embedded in different traditions of social and political thought.5 Following this conceptual turn of the debate, this article examines the language of civil society by looking at the ways in which its construction has rested upon oppositional terms and the construction of moral worlds, which are thought to threaten its continued existence. Whereas “civil society” is often introduced as a freestanding concept, which refers to the moral foundations of liberal democracy, I argue that the entire vocabulary is steeped in a history of largely ignored counter-meanings. This history needs to be explored more thoroughly in order to salvage the concept from the maddening ambiguity, which has befallen its uses in social theory as well as in political criticism. As a member of the large family of polemically charged “asymmetrical counter-concepts”6 engrained in much of modern political language, “civil society” points to implicit notions of the “uncivil” and of “non-society.” Like the prominent dualism of friend and foe, the conceptual pairs in which “civil society” appears reveal “a grid of possible antitheses”7 which accounts for the meaning and the critical thrust of this powerful vocabulary in different historical contexts.

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The first antithesis to “civility” is “barbarism,” a term with a long history mostly linked to Europe’s failing grasp on non-European peoples and societies. Following Michael Oakeshott, I start by showing that there are two distinct concepts of the barbaric, each with its own lineage; there is a barbarism

5

See S. Chambers and W. Kymlicka, eds., Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society,

Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002. 6

See R. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt,

Suhrkamp. 1979. 7

Ibid., p. 258.

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Meanings of Barbarism • 111

of order as well as a barbarism of disorder.8 In the first section, I discuss the evil of a total loss of order threatening to eat into the body of society. The horrors of social disintegration, political violence, and religious fanaticism threatening both the individual and the collective self are older than the anxieties created by the authoritarian state, and were thus at the center of much of early modern political theory (I). Next, I explain the barbarism of order as another incarnation of anti-civil society. The excess of order is as bad as the complete loss of order. In modern society, the barbarism of order materializes in the form of an over-integration of society by unaccountable political institutions driven by hermetic fantasies of total control and domination (II). In addition, the grid of antitheses to the idea of liberal civility implies a third counter-meaning, since much of civil society discourse also holds the promise of escaping from the material hardship of toil and physical production. The world of hard work and necessity has its share in the discourse on civil society without fitting into the two rubrics of barbarism (III). Finally, I propose a semiotic reading of the discourse on civil society that uncovers its deep structure, which helps us to elucidate even some of the more recent attempts to apply the category of civil society to global social relations (IV). I conclude with a few remarks on why, in my view, the concept of civil society is indispensable for any critical social theory (V).

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I. Barbarism of disorder In his posthumously published book on politics in modern society, Niklas Luhmann asserted that the vocabulary of civil society, in the course of its most recent philosophical and journalistic boom, lost any reference to reality: “The current readoption of this term on the basis of historical reconstruction smacks of such evident enthusiasm that, whenever one asks what it might possibly exclude, the answer one gets is: the reality.”9 It is intriguing to take a closer look at this accusation of intellectual “enthusiasm” (Schwärmerei). Luhmann does not seem to suspect that his critique links “civil society” with one of the

8

M. Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, ed. T. Fuller, New

Haven, Yale University Press, 1996, ch. 2. 9

N. Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2000, p. 12.

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112 • Chapter Four

concepts it had historically been introduced to oppose. Quite inadvertently he has therefore laid down a track that it is worth pursuing.

Fanaticism Before the idea of civil society was retrieved as a concept in the war of words against the threat of an overly powerful state, it was aimed against the danger of the absence of any kind of governmental order. In the beginning, fear about the destabilizing consequences of enthusiasm, fanaticism and Schwärmerei was paramount. In the late seventeenth century, the term “enthusiasm” had a decidedly negative ring among political philosophers because it was associated with absolute knowledge claims of religious sects that threatened the establishment and maintenance of civil society.10 The word “fanatical” derives, as Dominique Colas has shown, from the Latin fanum, which means: temple, holy site. Here we broach the semantic field of hallucination, of the visionary and other powers of imagination that are resistant to rational discourse. A likewise demonstrable older spelling—“phanatic”—might refer to the Greek phantasma, whose root is phos or light.11 Isaiah Berlin, for example, once used this spelling in his description of a Soviet commissar: “all his countenance bore an expression of a phanatic.”12 This definition emphasizes the cognitive deficits of fanatics that are as important as their behavioral deficits. Fanaticism is more than a strong commitment to ideas or beliefs. It embodies a compulsion to act on one’s ideas and beliefs without any trace of epistemological humility. Fanatics presume that they

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have privileged access to an absolute truth which is shielded from the opinions of others as well as from fresh experiences. Because they are psychologically completely dependent on a real or imagined object, fanatics feel that

10

See J. Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts, Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 187. 11

See D. Colas, Le glaive et le fléau: Généalogie du fanatisme et de la société civile, Paris,

Grasset, 1992. See also the early treatise by S. Höchheimer, Bestimmte Bedeutungen der Wörter Fanatismus, Enthusiasmus und Schwärmerei, Vienna, Stahel, 1786. 12

Quoted in M. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, New York, Henry Holt & Co, 1998,

p. 36.

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Meanings of Barbarism • 113

they have to protect this object by any means.13 One important social consequence of this stance is that fanatics seek relationships only with people who are like-minded while shunning all others. Fanaticism is the opposite of the critical faculty to scrutinize doctrines and evidence, and thus the opposite of the ability to draw and to discern distinctions. It is no accident that it was representatives of Critical Theory who saw in the loss of this ability an ominous characteristic of their time. Adorno recognized this characteristic, ironically, in the student movement of the late 1960s, which gave itself a lot of credit (some of it quite undeserved) for its critical attitude. In a discussion in December 1967, for example, the Frankfurt School sociologist dismissed the tendency of radical student groups to willfully ignore the difference between a fascist and a democratic state: “And I would say,” Adorno stated, “that it would be abstract and, in a problematic sense, fanatical if one were to overlook this difference.”14 Here Adorno made a plea for cultivating a clear sense of reality against the political bigotry of those who were confusing social criticism with its opposite. According to Adorno, we may conclude, the fanatic is a person who distinguishes himself or herself by making no distinctions and by being unable to do so. If one searches for the origins of this line of reasoning, one comes across early modern Europe’s religious disputes in which the entire semantic field of the fanatical and the fantastic was politically charged by often violent denominational quarrels. Jean Calvin and Philipp Melanchthon, in particular, fought against the Anabaptist sects of their time, who propagated adult baptism and primitive communitarian lifestyles, as well as against others whom they called fanatics or fantasts. Regardless of the fact that later on Calvinist sects

13

See A. Memmi, Dependence: A Sketch for a Portrait of the Dependent, trans. P.A. Facey,

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Boston, Beacon Press, 1984, pp. 129–38. 14

Adorno et al., “Über Mitbestimmung, Regelverstöße und Verwandtes: Diskussion

im Rahmen einer Vorlesung am 5.12.1967,” in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VI, ed. R. Tiedemann, Munich, edition text und kritik, 2000, p. 167. The connection between fanaticism and the inability to allow for new experiences was emphasized by Adorno in the context of post-war group experiment on “guilt and defense.” See Adorno, “Schuld und Abwehr. Eine qualitative Analyse zum Gruppenexperiment,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 9.2, pp. 272–73.

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114 • Chapter Four

were themselves sometimes regarded as fanatical—because they did not distinguish between sin and crime15—Calvin may be regarded as a pioneer in the critique of fanaticism and, by extension, as an early analyst of modern politics. In his Institution de la religion chrétienne, the magnum opus he completed in 1535, Calvin formulated (among other things) the basic idea of Reformationist iconoclasm against the effervescence of “fantasie” and against the “fantosmes” of the Catholics.16 This also had an adverse affect on the old teaching about miracles. Like many Protestants, Calvin participated in developing the concept of the pure fact. What he expected of true miracles was that they would be evident of their own accord, and that they could not take place in secret. The superstitious sectarian was second only to the devil as a threat to cognitive clarity, as a source disturbing sound belief, and as a contaminator of the powers of imagination. In other circumstances, furthermore, the subject of discussion is the “sectes phantastiques,” whose pseudo-Christian or openly godless lifestyle not only called into question the Gospel, but also threatened the unity of the political commonwealth in Calvin’s adopted hometown of Geneva. The fanatics are opponents of “civil” government because they seduce the simple- and feebleminded into a “dissolute lifestyle” (vie dissolue) and annul the basic distinction between justice and injustice. The consequence is that everyone gives into his impulses unscrupulously, abuses Christian liberty in order to allow himself every kind of carnal licentiousness and to take pleasure in bringing the entire world into disorder and in upsetting every kind of human decency [toute police, ordre et honnesteté humaine].17

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Much like modern political thinkers from Weber to Gramsci or Hannah Arendt, Calvin views the errant wanderings of collective fantasies not disciplined by any kind of empirical experience and sound argumentation as the

15

See Oakeshott, Morality and Politics in Modern Europe, New Haven, Yale University

Press, 1993, p. 17. 16

J. Calvin, Ioannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, ed. E. Cunitz and E. Baum,

58 vols, New York, Johnson Reprint Corp., 1964, vol. 3, col. 129–30. 17

Ibid., vol. 7, col. 155.

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Meanings of Barbarism • 115

root cause of “barbarian” practices endangering civility.18 As if following up on exactly this point, Oakeshott much later concludes: “Thus, engagement in politics entails a disciplined imagination.”19 In book IV, chapter 20 (“Du gouvernement civil”) of his opus, Calvin takes a staunch position against the “fantastiques” as he systematically explains the need for a strict separation between earthly and heavenly matters while at the same time showing equal concern for both. By contrast, the fantasts, whom he consistently likens to barbarians, mix up the two spheres and regard it as beneath their dignity to concern themselves with the “dirty and profane matters that have to do with the hustle and bustle of this world.”20 Little wonder, Calvin remarks, that the social world shaped by such an attitude is hardly suitable to live in. Anyone who disputes the utility of a well-devised “ordonnance civile” by invoking the vanity of all earthly endeavors in light of eternity is accused of “inhuman barbarism.”21 Calvin is modern because he no longer views the just order of things as cosmologically given. Instead, he sees it as something that has to be actively constructed through power and exertion of will. The core of a civil order in the making is envisioned in institutions that respect and reward its citizens’ public-minded activities while punishing reprehensible activities. Only in this way can the elementary “discipline of human societies”22 be maintained. It is no exaggeration to say that the consciousness of the indispensability of politics in a modern sense emerges first with Calvin.23 Suddenly the “hustle

18

See, for example, Arendt’s characterization of the phantasms of a “Trotskyite con-

spiracy” in Stalin’s Russia. The political art of totalitarianism “consists in using, and at the same time transcending, the elements of reality, of verifiable experiences, in the chosen fiction, and in generalizing them into regions which then are definitely removed Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

from all possible control by individual experience” (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 362). 19

Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975, p. 164.

20

Calvin, Ioannis Calvini Opera, vol. 4, col. 1127.

21

Ibid., vol. 4, col. 1126, 1128.

22

Ibid., vol. 4, col. 1137.

23

See R.C. Hancock, Calvin and the Foundation of Modern Politics, Ithaca, NY, Cornell

University Press, 1989.

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116 • Chapter Four

and bustle of this world” not only captures attention; it also gets counted as capable of being influenced and reformed. More importantly, religion no longer functions as an instrument of the existing system of authority, but as a medium for establishing a civil commonwealth under conditions of extreme turbulence. Calvin interpreted the urban environment of his time as the barbarian counterpart of a politically constituted civil society. His public sermons are full of accusations of moral decay, often dramatically depicted. Dastardly brigands, dissolute blasphemers, and all sorts of shady characters are populating Calvin’s picture of his contemporary world. Often, admittedly, these colorful depictions of decay are “self-denying prophecies,” intended to mobilize countervailing forces and so ward off some ominous fate—a rhetorical form of sociological prophecy which later has been taken up by Max Weber and others.

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With a view not toward some impending end of time, but rather toward a political community of citizens still to be created, Calvin challenges his public to self-scrutiny and moral repentance. In so doing he distinguishes himself from the Old Testament prophets he frequently takes on as a model. The political aim of establishing a well-ordered republic also explains the enormous significance of the seemingly purely theological dispute about the prohibition of images. In order for the civil order to endure, according to Calvin, it must rest on the foundation of a simple, generally comprehensible religious creed that will be accepted as such without substantial dispute—“sans controverse.”24 Here, too, lies the ultimate political meaning of the radical Reformationist prohibition of images. Calvin knows that the relationship between the visible and the sayable is fraught with tension, and that the comprehension of images can never be completely controlled by means of discourse. Images are a poor method of religious instruction because they create a space for fantasy-guided interpretive controversies, which become dangerous when the religious creed forms the foundation of the bonum civile itself. In this case, it has to be kept out of public dispute. The essentially political character of Calvin’s sermons, which aim at the establishment of civil forms of political coexistence, becomes also clear in the way he poses his angry indictments under the proviso of moderating

24

Calvin, Ioannis Calvini Opera, vol. 3, col. 55.

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Meanings of Barbarism • 117

self-restriction. Calvin distinguishes most emphatically—even if, from today’s perspective, this can barely be recognized given his own tirades and misdeeds—between genres of political speech in which undisciplined imagination turns the world’s most righteous cause into its opposite and those “iustes plaidoyeurs”25 who contribute to moderating public passions by displaying this very kind of moderation.26

Animality Traces of the critique of fanaticism and of the barbarism of disorder may be recovered in exemplary fashion in the writings of Arendt, Weber, and Gramsci. As George Kateb has shown, Arendt’s entire political thought is geared toward the dual goal “to differentiate man from nature and save man from phantasm.”27 Thus, in chapter 7 of her Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt discusses European colonizers in South Africa in Calvinian terms as inhabitants of a “phantom world” who had “escaped the reality of civilization.”28 The Boers in particular are regarded as inventors of a lifestyle which systematically renounces productive and cooperative labor in favor of “lazy drudgery.”29 This attitude, in turn, is held partly responsible for the phantasms of racism. In a similar vein, Weber shows that it was not Calvinist-influenced asceticism that produced the modern-day phenomenon of individuals acting like submissive human cogs in the machinery of society. Rather, Calvinism and like-minded religious movements aimed at changing individuals and their civic environments in a way that would allow them “to lead a watchful, aware, alert life.”30 The prerequisite for this was seen in the taming of the

25

Ibid., vol. 4, col. 1148.

26

For a lucid defense of Calvin against Karl Barth’s influential suspicion that Calvin

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introduced “something primal, wild, undomesticated, and demonic” (Barth) into Christianity, see D. Pellerin, “Calvin: Militant or Man of Peace?,” The Review of Politics, vol. 65, 2003, pp. 35–59. 27

G. Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, Totowa, NJ, Rowman &

Allenhald, 1984, p. 3. 28

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 186, 190.

29

Ibid., p. 195.

30

Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings, trans.

P. Baehr and G.C. Wells, New York, Penguin, 2002, p. 81.

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118 • Chapter Four

individual’s inner nature and imagination. This motif runs through the whole of Weber’s political criticism of his age. As he left no doubt that democratic politics is made with the “head” alone— and not with the “heart” (traditionally regarded as the seat of fantasy and of emotions)—he sticks to a basic distinction which resonates with much of modern civil society thinking.31 Weber introduced the notion of “affective

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politics” in order to characterize forms of emotional mobilization that went against established rules of political behavior and organization. As far as he takes aim at the political Left, he mostly criticizes their “affective politics” of fear and rage. Much the same is true for his critique of the Wilhelmine monarchy and the monarchist “literati” of his time. Emotionalized politics is seen not only as notoriously unsuccessful, but also as undemocratic. The argument goes as follows: While the affective politics of monarchists, syndicalists, and Spartakists is capable of driving the masses to the streets, these masses are unable of immunizing themselves against outer-directed manipulation by hidden persuaders playing with public emotions. Weber sees a paradox in the fact that “democracy of the street” is really no democracy at all, because it simply enhances the influence of demagogues without contributing to the construction and consolidation of rational associational structures. The close connection between his assumptions about the masses, emotion, and democracy also emerge from the fact that Weber directly translates the popular, rationalist idea of a hydraulic mechanism governing the “discharging” of emotions into the equally popular metaphor of the political “pressure” of the street.32 The masses of the big cities and collective emotions are not only statistically correlated; they reflect each other as categories of political thought. An analogy is posited between the pressure of collective emotions on political institutions and the pressure of surges of emotion on the neural synapses governing rational actions in individuals, and the same vocabulary is used to describe the two processes. Affective action can no more be regarded as a genuine form of action than a mass of people driven by

31

Weber, “Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order,”

in Weber, Political Writings, ed. P. Lassman and R. Speirs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 230. 32

See, for example, Weber, “Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,” in Political

Writings, p. 124.

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Meanings of Barbarism • 119

emotions can be said to be capable of acting. On the contrary, what the masses do is described in terms of “surging,” “erupting” and “flaring up”—recurrent images in Weber, suggesting both the violent and the ephemeral nature of such experience. Weber saw imperial and then revolutionary Germany after World War I in the grips of emotional epidemics fueled by irresponsible demagogues aiming at a war-torn, highly excitable society. To pursue rational policies in Germany, he wrote early in 1920, would be impossible “as long as lunatics of right and left are able to run amok in politics.”33 During his own brief period of political activity after the war, Weber himself was perfectly prepared to make use of demagogic methods in order to drive home his views. In the months immediately following the revolutionary events of November 1918, he appeared in many towns as a prominent and eloquent campaign speaker on behalf of the newly founded liberal German Democratic Party. These public speeches, which were in part written down verbatim by reporters who were present, do indeed recall Jean Calvin’s angry outbreaks on the streets of Geneva. In January 1919, for example, he fumed: “We see nothing but dirt, filth, dung, mischief and nothing else besides. Liebknecht belongs in the madhouse and Rosa Luxemburg in the zoo.”34 He saw a far greater danger, however, in the German bourgeoisie’s obsession with the phantasm of the Communist “spectre of ‘revolution’ ”35 and in the irrational fear generated by this kind of undisciplined imagination. Like Antonio Gramsci after him, Weber was early to recognize that radical social-

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ism in the “West” never really had a chance. The scary image of the red specter, however, led the bourgeoisie to withdraw mentally into a porcupinelike defensive posture and to remain largely hostile even toward the moderate leaders of the labor movement. Weber’s entire political critique may be read as a critique of the Wilhelmine bourgeoisie’s habitual inability to act in

33

Weber, “Sachliche (angeblich ‘politische’) Bemerkungen am 19.1. [1920 zum

Fall Arco],” in Zur Neuordung Deutschlands: Schriften und Reden 1918–1920, ed. W.J. Mommsen and W. Schwentker, Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. I/16, Tübingen, Mohr, 1988, p. 272. 34

Weber, “Deutschlands Vergangenheit und Zukunft,” speech given in Karlsruhe

on January 4, 1919, in Weber, Zur Neuordnung Deutschlands, p. 441. 35

Weber, “Parliament and Government in Germany,” p. 167.

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120 • Chapter Four

its own long-term interest by getting rid of irrational haunting images of Communism and to search for lasting constitutional compromises with the rising labor movement. At this point it is helpful to briefly consider Gramsci’s use of the civil society vocabulary. Unlike Weber, Gramsci explicitly uses the term “civil society” (società civile). For him the term designates those institutions that regulate political and social action in modern societies via psychological and educational incentives without directly applying governmental coercion. Interestingly, Gramsci casts the social raw material of passions and interests, which is subjected to the refinement of civil society’s multiple institutions, in a language of the barbarian and bestial. In contrast to Marx, however, for whom barbarism and civilization could be ascribed to entire countries,36 Gramsci de-territorializes these labels, which he uses to characterize the inner nature of human beings not yet fully adjusted to the requirements of modern society and Taylorist workplaces.37 It is interesting, in this context, to observe how both Weber and Gramsci are deeply impressed by the American model of society, in which they see a historically quite unlikely combination of comprehensive social rationalization

36

As for Marx’ concept of barbarism, it is important to know that in 1848 he

came out in favor of a Franco-German military attack against Russia in the name of European liberty: “If the Prussians ally with the Russians, the Germans will ally with the French and lead a united war of the West against the East, of civilization against barbarism, of the republic against autocracy.” The quote is taken from unpublished manuscripts which will be made public by the new edition of the collected works of Marx and Engels (J. Herres, “Der Schakal Rußlands. Karl Marx Imperialismuskritik: Außenpolitik als Klassenkampf,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

21, 2002). 37

There is, admittedly, a tendency toward territorialization of the barbarism motif

to the extent that Gramsci believes that maladjustment to modernity is much worse in the countryside than in the city (Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Turin, Einaudi, 1975, vol. 3, p. 2148). In spite of numerous differences between Gramsci and Adorno, the latter appears to share this feeling when he writes even after World War II that the “debarbarization of the countryside” (Adorno, “Education After Auschwitz,” in Critical Models, p. 196) is an important political goal.

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Meanings of Barbarism • 121

and missionary idealism. What interests Gramsci about the case of the United States is the direct contribution made by the large and small institutions of civil society—from empirical social research to the Rotary Club—toward the productive rationalization of society. The result is twofold: first, a “lean” state, and second, a systematic psycho-physical adjustment of the working population to the requirements of industrial mass production. I will briefly expand on both aspects. Much like Weber, who denounces the “coffee house intellectuals” and idling flâneurs of the modern metropolis as instigators of a purely affective politics, Gramsci and also Horkheimer see among those groups not subjected to the discipline of productive labor a danger of “regressive” propaganda for moral instability and sexual licentiousness.38 For Gramsci, the United States of the 1920s and 1930s are the exemplary site of a social “battlefield of desire,”39 where a progressive entrepreneurial class achieved decisive victories over human nature without having to rely primarily on state repression. Instead, new instruments of civil leadership and fine-meshed “regulation” (regolamentazione) of everyday life were deployed, instruments that, in contrast to the militarization of work in revolutionary Russia, influenced not only workers’ external behavior, but also their moral motives and convictions. Consequently, and just like Weber, Gramsci distinguishes between the measurable aptitude of a population for work and the mental inclination to work.40 From Gramsci’s perspective, the Bolsheviks’ overemphasis on governmental and military coercion—their “mechanical utopianism,” as it was later called by the American sociologist Max Lerner41—is not to be rejected on moral grounds, but because it is simply ineffective. To the extent that he regards the

38

See Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. 3, p. 2163; Weber, “Suffrage and Democracy

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in Germany,” p. 124; Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Age,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science, p. 67. 39

P.N. Stearns, Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America,

New York, New York University Press, 1999. 40

See Weber, Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit: Schriften und Reden 1908–1912,

ed. W. Schluchter and S. Frommer, Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. I/11, Tübingen, Mohr, 1995, p. 242. 41

M. Lerner, America as a Civilization, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1957, p. 942.

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122 • Chapter Four

authoritarian state as incapable of securely establishing new production methods, he indirectly pleads for “democratic” forms of political control.42 Civil society aims not only at creating a correct “consciousness” by persuading and educating the population; rather, it literally penetrates into the nervous system of the individuals by taming the barbarous and “animal” portions of the personality. Gramsci speaks about “subjugating the natural, that is to say the bestial and primitive instincts” through a ring of institutions that surround modern industry.43 He further urges the conclusion, again reminiscent of Calvin, that a lack of self-control over sexual and violent instincts goes hand in hand with symptoms of “religious fanaticism,”44 as they may especially be observed in some of the rural provinces of southern Italy.

II. Barbarism of order While modern barbarism and fanaticism are the hot antitheses included in the discourse on civil society, rigid governmental command structures, insuperable hierarchies, and soulless discipline are the stuff of a cold antithesis: For the skeptic, there is a barbarism of order no less to be avoided than a barbarism of disorder; and the barbarism of order appears when order is pursued for its own sake and when preservation of order involves the destruction of that without which order is only the orderliness of the ant-heap or the graveyard.45

The critique of the barbarism of order has inspired the great modern experiment in constitutional democracy. A locus classicus is Alexander

42

F. Dubla, Gramsci e la fabbrica: Produzione, tecnica e organizzazione del lavoro nel pen-

siero gramsciano (1913/1934), Manduria, Piero Lacaita Editore, 1986, p. 173. Here lies the Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

main difference between Gramsci and Sorel. What Sorel praises about Bolshevism is precisely the violent modernization of Russia and the disciplining of the workers, which he understood as “Europeanization.” See M. Freund, Georges Sorel: Der revolutionäre Konservatismus, 2nd ed., Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 1972, pp. 253–54. 43

Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. 3, p. 2160.

44

Ibid., p. 2148.

45

Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith, p. 35.

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Meanings of Barbarism • 123

Hamilton’s warning against the dangers of large standing armies and a powerful military establishment—institutions that might lead to a situation in which, he feared, “the military state becomes elevated above the civil.”46 In the twentieth century, Arendt as well as Weber and Gramsci have contributed to this lineage in the traditional critique of the barbarism of order. Much of the politics of Critical Theory is also directed more against the over-integration of society by a paranoid system of public and private apparatuses of domination than against the prospect of social disintegration. Horkheimer’s early essay “Egoism and Freedom Movement: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era” represents an influential attempt to interpret the fear of animality—of “bestial” drives and “instinctual” impulses and goals47—as little more than ideological expressions of the bourgeois fear of genuine freedom. The problem is not the loss of order, but too much order. Arendt in her report on Eichmann in Jerusalem, Wittfogel in his study on Oriental Despotism, and again Horkheimer in his essay on “The Authoritarian State,”48 published in 1940, concur with Weber’s thesis that bureaucratic

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administrative methods really can be applied “to all kinds of administrative tasks”49 that arise in a modern society or that can be thought up by powerful groups. Both share Weber’s view that bureaucratic power can cultivate something dangerously close to “automatic obedience.”50 After World War II, most critical theorists certainly would have sided with George Orwell’s neo-Weberian diagnosis that “the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards … an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.”51

46

Federalist, no. 8 (Hamilton), in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, p. 42.

47

Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, pp. 51, 53.

48

Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader,

ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt, New York, Continuum, 2002. 49

Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. G. Roth and

C. Wittich, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1978, p. 223; emphasis added. 50

Ibid., p. 53.

51

G. Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb,” The Tribune, October 19, 1945.

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124 • Chapter Four

Now, it is worth noting that Weber’s critique—just like Arendt’s—is not directed against the existence of modern bureaucracy as such, in which he rather sees a rational bulwark against the advance of charismatic movements; bureaucracy turns into a threat to liberal civility only at the point where the historic link between modern society on the one hand, and the potentials of activist-nonconformist lifestyles are replaced by the pervasive rule—not of bureaucracy itself but—of “bureaucratic ideals of life.” Bureaucracy thus becomes the object of an indirect critique to the extent that it brings forth a new species of people who love “order” more than freedom.52 Weber’s criticism of the “barbarism of order” is centered on this crucial distinction between the evolutionary “bureaucratization” of modern societies and the increase in the poisonous power of ubiquitous administrations over the sources of the self and shared “life ideals.” Here civil society is merely the absent referent in a discourse about the most assertive variants of a coming uncivil, state-dominated society, which Weber described by drawing his well-known analogy to the ancient Egyptian kingdom of serfs. Now, it is interesting to see the extent to which Weber’s pessimistic analysis of his time was part of a zeitgeist reflected in very different genres and political camps. Thus, Weber was familiar with Jack London’s novel The Iron Heel, published in 1908, famous for its stark imagery of humans dominated by machines and machine-like institutions which crops up over and over again throughout the twentieth century, including in some of Adorno’s lectures in the early 1960s: “Mankind has reached a point today where even those on the commanding heights cannot enjoy their positions because even these have been whittled away to the point where they are merely functions of their own function.”53

52

Weber, “Die wirtschaftlichen Unternehmungen der Gemeinden,” in Wirtschaft,

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Staat und Sozialpolitik: Schriften und Reden 1900–1912, ed. W. Schluchter et al., Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. I/8, Tübingen, Mohr, 1998, pp. 362–63. 53

Adorno, History and Freedom, p. 6. Even Adorno’s adversaries from the camp of

modernization theory have at least envisaged the possibility that society could be decivilized and de-subjectified through the pincer movement of social anomie and bureaucracy: “There are many who feel similarly that, whether through conformism, fanaticism or rigidity, American society will succumb to the final impersonality of the Age of Insects” (Lerner, America as a Civilization, p. 950).

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Meanings of Barbarism • 125

One of the perhaps most impressive literary images of the future of a modern society whose members are simultaneously bureaucratically controlled and recklessly following their impulses is Alfred Döblin’s expressionist novel Berge, Meere und Giganten (Montains, Seas, and Giants), published in 1924. Here Döblin paints the picture of the decline of the old European nation-state under the impact of a borderless mass society. Like Weber or Jack London, Döblin sees the masses as a politically defeated and oppressed appendage of the “industrial body” and the “huge syndicates” of society. They have gone soft, but pitiless, and they can easily be seduced by mass spectacles and pseudo-parliaments. And here, too, reigns an “enormously lavish bureaucracy,”54 which no longer organizes any kind of commonwealth or civil society, but rather becomes a variable of the same gigantic technical forces that it once believed it could master. Weber, London, Döblin, Adorno: all these authors see European-American modernity as the forerunner of an anthropological mutation in which rational fear ceases to be a force, as it was for Thomas Hobbes, contributing to the foundation of a civitas. Instead, fear itself originates in a political order that is as unjust as it is insurmountable. Ultimately, these counter-utopias have ceased to portray the bureaucracy and the masses, states and social movements, calculating and fanatical mindsets as opposites. Rather, they are parts of the same totalizing reality which can be read in two different ways, as if subjected to a gestalt switch.

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Gramsci, too, cultivates a double-edged pattern of criticism, pitting his concept of civil society both against idolizing the state and fetishizing social movements.55 Weber had already observed in the syndicalist ethic of brotherliness cultivated by independent trade unions an unavoidable antidote to the domination of party bosses and the “barracks-like character of our factories.”56 One may also find in the young Gramsci a strong impulse that is antiauthoritarian and critical of the state, an impulse that goes back to Georges Sorel’s then influential critique of rule by “politicians.” Gramsci explicitly

54

A. Döblin, Berge, Meere und Giganten (1924), Stuttgart, dtv, 1980, p. 21.

55

N. Bobbio, Gramsci e la concezione della società civile, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1977, p. 36.

56

Weber, “Das Verhältnis der Kartelle zum Staate,” in Wirtschaft, Staat und

Sozialpolitik, p. 279.

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126 • Chapter Four

criticizes the “German” ideal of the all-powerful state that stands above the interests of individuals and society while supervising and controlling all its expressions of life. He wrote in September 1918, The socialists have recognized the mistakes they made when their doctrine contributed to strengthening a monstrous conception of the state … They were deceiving themselves when they accepted that the socialist regime would be a continuation of the centralistic despotic state of the bourgeoisie that deprives individuals of autonomy and any revolutionary élan.57

The “socialists” mentioned by Gramsci include, of course, early Frankfurt School figures like Franz Neumann who attempted to redefine socialist ideals in terms of a new balance between autonomously formed social forces and state intervention.

III. The realm of toil and brute material necessity The central locus and source of democracy are public arenas where questions about how to live together are discussed, and where political decisions are contemplated, criticized and finally taken. With this view of democracy in mind, certain basic distinctions in the recent history of social theory—between labor and interaction, or between production and the free play of political speech—have entered current conceptions of civil society as unquestioned premises. Accordingly, the world of material production seems to represent a third counter-meaning to liberal civility and its institutional forms, along with

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the all-encompassing, unresponsive state and with violent social disintegration. Cohen and Arato, for example, describe the “economy” as a world apart and sufficient unto itself, whereas civil society is largely based on “the removal of important spheres of life from the economy.”58 While it is reasonable to assume that there are important spheres of life beyond the economy, one could also argue, with Adorno, that “our work” is still in many ways the

57

Gramsci, Il nostro Marx, 1918–1919, Turin, Einaudi, 1984, pp. 298–99. In this news-

paper article Gramsci relies on the testimony of the Berlin student Jakob Feldner, who fled to Switzerland in 1916 in order to avoid the draft and the militaristic culture of Germany at that time. 58

Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, p. 491.

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Meanings of Barbarism • 127

“defining part of our life.”59 The frequently expressed demand to radicalize liberal democracy by strengthening a restrictively defined civil society is, upon closer inspection, quite modest, since it seems to aim only at publicly raising additional questions about how to live together after work—questions which have so far been neglected or repressed by official politics. Against this idea of simply expanding the scope of what can legitimately be discussed in public, some critics of civil society have argued in favor of a different model of moving beyond liberal democracy. Axel Honneth, in particular, has proposed to replace the deliberative ideal of unbounded public conversation by a model of expanded forms of social cooperation.60 This idea of a democratic way of life based on the cooperative problem-solving activities by individuals linked through the division of labor overcomes the opposition between communication and labor and their assignment to radically different “systems” of social action.61 The central insight is that even if the development of civil society is bound to be largely an after-work activity, many of the skills needed to be a good citizen are learned at work. Following up on this insight, Nicholas Smith has taken a further step by reconceptualizing work itself as a potential context of both moral injury and cultural esteem for the contributions of individuals and groups to the common good.62 Historically, French and British syndicalists, American pragmatists, and Italian neo-Marxists can be cited as advocates for a perspective in which the world of material production and cooperation is included into the realm of politics instead of being relegated to a separate and largely invisible sphere of

59

Adorno, “Einführung in die Dialektik,” Vo 3131.

60

See Honneth, “Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation: John Dewey and the Theory

of Democracy Today,” in Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

Cambridge, UK, Polity, 2007. 61

Strictly speaking, the critique of the categorical opposition between communica-

tion and labor was already laid out by Weber, who purposely suggested that early industrial sociology should investigate “to what extent conversation is possible during work” and what are the consequences of this kind of labor-based conversation (Weber, Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit, p. 149, n.). 62

See N.H. Smith, “Work and the Struggle for Recognition,” European Journal of

Political Theory, vol. 8, no. 1, 2009, pp. 46–60.

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128 • Chapter Four

social action. The recent so-called “productivist turn” in democratic theory bears a distant resemblance to this tradition insofar as it struggles not for a democracy based on the liberation from the constraints of the market and the international division of labor, but rather on the inclusion of all citizens into socially responsible “production communities” shaped by an “ethos of efficiency.”63 In this productivist conception and its historical precursors, it is no longer just the “citoyens,” but also the “producers” who are seen as carriers and inspirers of democratic innovation. This influential recent contribution to democratic theory, which tries to close the gap between citizens and of producers, deviates from a intellectual history which has stylized them for a long time as irreconcilable opponents.

“Citoyen ou producteur?” The social and moral opposition between citizen and producer—“citoyen ou producteur”—emerges in the early 20th century, especially in the syndicalist labor movement in France. This muddled international current, which was prematurely discredited by Georges Sorel’s later sympathies for fascism, has an interestingly tense relationship with some of the normative claims of civil society discourses. With sometimes reformist, sometimes revolutionary goals in mind, the syndicalists debunked liberal representative democracy as inadequate. The contemporary citizen was seen as nothing more than an electoral citizen ruled by representatives evading his and her control. To the extent that modern citizens were even pleased about this comfortable revocation of freedom, syndicalists despised them as mentally “incompletely de-monarchized [mal démonarchisé].”64

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Against this background, writers like Maxime Leroy argued for the active promotion of other forces of civil freedom pointing beyond the institutions of liberal democracy. At this point, in a manner quite similar to John Dewey’s

63

W. Streeck, “Einleitung: Internationale Wirtschaft, nationale Demokratie?,” in

Internationale Wirtschaft, nationale Demokratie: Herausforderungen für die Demokratietheorie, ed. W. Streeck, Frankfurt and New York, Campus, 1998, p. 46. 64

M. Leroy, “Citoyen ou Producteur?,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vol. 26,

1919, pp. 669–84. In the way people think about politics, the head of the king still hasn’t rolled, as Michel Foucault puts it much later.

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Meanings of Barbarism • 129

theory of democracy, the cooperative character of modern labor relations came into play: “La liberté prendra, grâce au travail, un caractère cooperative.”65 Society should be renewed proceeding from the material production and the division of labor, and in a manner that puts “competence” in place of “authority.” The values regarded today as characteristic of civil society— mutual recognition and respect for moral rules—were seen as embodied by an active, increasingly professionalized population which outshined the old hierarchies and the narrow, barracks-like character of earlier worlds of labor. Ultimately, the new society reshaped by the self-imposed discipline of a cooperative population would stem the twin evils of excessive bureaucratic organization and social disintegration. In other contexts like Germany’s non-Communist council movement after 1918, reflections took place about reorganizing a future society in which collective labor would no longer be, as it were, a brute activity carried out in obscurity, but would instead develop into an “ethical factor” of social life. Workers councils were widely viewed as the political expression of this reassessment of productive activities, and British socialists, in particular, tried to transfer some democratic principles to industry.66 While both Britain and France had many moderate followers of syndicalism who influenced jurisprudence and political science, others gave a more radical turn to the idea of the political power of social cooperation. In what is conceivably the greatest opposition to Hannah Arendt’s idea of liberal civility, the Italian syndicalist Arturo Labriola called for treating “the art of cultivating the earth or of steer-

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ing railroad trains as a public matter”67 instead of leaving the public sphere to intellectuals and civil servants. Revolutionary syndicalists also celebrated the unleashing of productive forces and the world-opening role of capitalism while reserving only scorn and derision for the “sentimental and humanitarian democracy”68 of a citizenry remote from the realm of production.

65

Ibid., p. 679.

66

J. Lovell, “Introduction,” in G.D.H. Cole, The World of Labour, ed. J. Lovell,

Brighton, Harvester Press, 1973. 67

A. Labriola, Il Socialismo Contemporaneo, Rocca San Giovanni, Casa Editrice

Abruzzese, 1914, p. 420. 68

Ibid., p. 441.

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130 • Chapter Four

A limited vindication of this in many respects highly questionable intellectual current may point to fact that some representatives of syndicalism were more or less aware of the idea that “the type of community necessary for a dynamic democracy must unfold not within the political sphere, but pre-politically within structures of a cooperatively experienced division of labor.”69 In light of this tradition, today’s often increasingly dematerialized and transnational networks of productive labor might be studied as possible sources of selfrespect and as an area for rehearsing experimental and cooperative capacities which are indispensable for strengthening civil society.

Global civil society and neo-barbarism

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In order to see how the relations and antitheses between civility, work, order and barbarism are being reworked in current social theory, it is worth turning briefly to the recent debate on “global civil society.” Contributors to this debate believe that transnational publics, new advocacy groups in the fields of environmental politics or human rights, as well as new international norms form the backbone of an emerging global analogue to historical civil societies. In particular, much of Ulrich Beck’s recent sociological writing may be redescribed as a transfer of an older semantics of civil society to now presumably global social worlds. The sociology of the “second modernity” identifies segments of the middle classes from highly industrialized societies as carriers of a new, essentially borderless civil society. According to Beck, they stand opposite the “natives [Eingeborenen] of the work society,”70 who are vegetating at the lower level of first modernity where people still believe in their nations and in old-style industrial progress. This polemical contrast, which clearly revives an Arendtian opposition between a society of free citizens and the realm of “hard physical toil,”71 recurs in the distinction made by Beck between increasingly mobile and still largely sedentary sections of the population. Many conceptual oppositions in the sociology of globalization are of this kind which allows for grey areas and pragmatic reconciliation. Another example is Beck’s

69

Honneth, “Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation,” p. 233.

70

U. Beck, Was ist Globalisierung?, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1997, p. 207; emphasis

added. 71

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 192, n. 12.

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Meanings of Barbarism • 131

dismissal of the “productivist turn” in democratic theory cited earlier in favor of a less “producer-oriented” and more “consumer-oriented democracy.”72 Unlike Weber or Arendt, the sociology of the “second modernity”, which is inspired by a fundamentally optimistic mood reminiscent of early modernization theory,73 does not have an equivalent to the barbarism of order. In this regard it diverges from the path of much of classical social thinking. However, there is a strong emphasis on the barbarism of disorder which is seen as a true challenge to the prospects of global civil society. The contrasting worlds of cosmopolitan citizen-nomads and immobile working “natives” are reconciled within a larger framework of stages of modernity. The true threat to be faced by global civil society comes from the muffled voices from a noncivil counterworld described by Beck in a way similar to Arendt’s chapter on South Africa in Origins of Totalitarianism. Beck sees the disruptive potential emerging from an amorphous global underclass driven by nothing more than “bare survival interests” and a neo-barbarian mindset which epitomizes the “opposite of civilization.”74 Here the sociologist associates himself with an increasingly influential discourse on the return of barbarism—a discourse focusing on the moral significance of failing states, disintegrated societies, and a multitude of new “uncivil” wars in various parts of the world. Unfortunately, and in contrast to classical sociological modernity, the theme of neo-barbarism is again linked to particular spaces and territories rather than to the abysses of human nature. Of course, in the allegedly borderless world of globalization there are no longer impenetrable gates at which the barbarians might knock—they are already in. But still, Beck’s sociology of our time implies a moral geography, which tends to translate the grid of antitheses to the idea of liberal civility into a global map of moral capabilities

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72

Beck, “Wie wird Demokratie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung möglich?,” in Politik

der Globalisierung, ed. Beck, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1998, p. 35. 73

See the trenchant critique in J. Alexander, “Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo: How

Intellectuals Explain ‘Our Time’,” in Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology, New York, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 224–28. 74

Beck, “Das Zeitalter der Nebenfolgen und die Politisierung der Moderne,”

in U. Beck et al., Reflexive Modernisierung: Eine Kontroverse, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1996, p. 91.

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132 • Chapter Four

and aspirations. The domestic “natives” bound to their workplaces are given a chance to climb up the ladder of modernization. The non-Western world, however, is “panting more or less hopelessly”75 after reaching the safe shores of at least a primary modernity before getting sucked into the maelstrom of neo-barbarism. Thus, as it revives strong notions of the uncivil (and non-societal) states of nature, the discourse on global civil society has a downside, like many of its predecessors.

IV. Civil society’s barbarisms: a semiotic reading So far I have attempted to unfold the “grid of possible antitheses”76 which lends meaning to the concept of civil society. In so doing, I have also tried to follow up on a remark made in passing by Adorno, who emphasized the need to avoid lumping together all the world’s evils into one Big Bad Thing and hence “to differentiate in the negative.”77 My next step is the attempt to sort the material previously collected for an intellectual history of civil society thinking along the lines of a structural semantic analysis as it was introduced by A.J. Greimas and his school. In this influential tradition, the analysis of textual meaning is conducted as differential analysis of the deep structure of narratives. Individual meanings are defined by their position in a system of cultural units and, therefore, by their difference to other units of meaning (“semes”). This is extraordinarily helpful if one tries to reconstruct the semantic variants of a notably vague concept like that of civil society.

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Like other symbolic systems, social theories including those centered around the concept of civil society can be treated as constructions which possess their own force and validity quite independently from empirical and rationalist

75

Ibid., p. 28.

76

Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft, p. 258.

77

See Adorno’s letter to Thomas Mann, April 13, 1952, in T.W. Adorno and T. Mann,

Briefwechsel 1943–1955, ed. C. Gödde and T. Sprecher, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2002, pp. 102–103: “Among the demands placed today on the historical ability to react, one that should not be ranked last is the persistent need for differentiating in the negative. The fact that one was not sufficiently capable of doing this in Germany at the time, and that one equated Brüning with Hitler, was itself partly to blame for the disaster.”

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Meanings of Barbarism • 133

considerations. With this premise in mind, Greimas bases his examination of cultural productions on the concept of basic oppositional semantic structures. The primary relation of his well-known “semiotic square” is thus formed by the relationship between two opposing terms. Yet the intriguing thing about Greimas’s approach of explaining both the semantic coherence and the narrative organization of symbolic systems is that he does not simply talk of paired opposites, but instead carefully distinguishes different ways of setting up oppositions. The classic semiotic square initially establishes an axis between contrary terms such as “black” and “white.” These terms are contrary because they are set against each other while simultaneously presupposing each other, sometimes to the point of overlapping (“grey”). A square results when the contrary terms of the primary relation are being supplemented by their corresponding contradictory terms, which are “not white” or “not black.”78 One can replace these color specifications with concepts from modern political theory. In a tradition inspired by theorists from Arendt through Habermas, “civil society” stands in an oppositional, but not in a contradictory or negational, relationship to the world of labor and toil. This elementary semantic structure based on two contrary terms can now easily be supplemented adding the respective contradictory units of meaning to “civil society” and the “realm of toil,” which are “barbarism of order” and “barbarism of disorder,” respectively. The outcome, following Greimas, may be depicted as a semiotic square (Fig. 1). civil society

the realm of toil presupposition

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S1

S2

S2

contradiction

barbarism of disorder

S1 barbarism of order

Fig. 1. Civil society and its others

78

A.J. Greimas, “Elements of a Narrative Grammar,” Diacritics, vol. 7, Spring 1977,

pp. 23–40.

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134 • Chapter Four

The powerful distinctions between physical production and communicative interaction have shaped the standard Western discourse on civil society in such a way as to conceive the relationship between citizens and producers as rich in contrast, but also as one of reciprocal presupposition. Even Hannah Arendt, who is strongest in emphasizing the gulf between the social roles of the citizen and of the animal laborans, demonstrates in her chapter on the Boers in South Africa that she sees in the work ethic of sedentary farmers or other producers a certain antidote against the danger of moral and civic decay. On this point, there is a lot of convergence between otherwise distant writers like Gramsci or Weber, who likewise (as we have seen) draw a sharp typological distinction between workers and non-workers. In the discourse on civil society, there are two contradictory relationships: one between labor and the anti-labor of the barbarism of disorder, and one between civil society and the barbarism of order. Interestingly, at least the first of these two relationship variants have also been prominent in major non-European contributions to the discourse on civil society. Thus, Gandhi criticized the colonial policy of introducing modern technologies because it would endanger a vital precondition for the envisioned democratic republic of indigenous producers. He also criticized the planned increase in industrial productivity by machines and other scientific aids because it was seen as being matched by a phantasmatic intensification of consumerist cravings and the spread of false images of happiness leading the human mind astray. Gandhi’s call for a revival of cotton spinning in the context of India’s struggle for national independence was therefore not only part of an economic, but also of a moral program of taming the “restless bird” as he vividly called the human mind’s powers of imagination.79

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V. The end of civil society? Terms have a tendency to creep into writing and thinking without an adequate understanding of their deeper implications and ambiguities.

79

Quoted in P. Chatterjee, “Gandhi and the critique of civil society,” in Subaltern

Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. R. Guha, Delhi, Oxford India Paperbacks, 1994, p. 158.

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Meanings of Barbarism • 135

This observation also applies to “civil society,” one of the most widely used concepts in European social and political theory. Given the ambiguities of the discourse around this concept, in particular its wavering between deliberative and republican critiques of liberal democracy, social philosophers such as Honneth have presented the case for dropping the concept altogether.80 However, the wholesale dismissal of the vocabulary of civil society implies a problematic disengagement and detachment of social theory from the multiple ways in which this vocabulary continues to be used by many people in order to emphasize or question real-world solidarities across the boundaries of groups and nations. Instead of turning a blind eye to these antagonistic usages in both scholarly and everyday discourses, I have thus proposed to sort out the ambiguities of the concept by carefully dissecting its meaning in different contexts. One effective way of doing this is to subject given narratives to a differential analysis of their deep structure. Such an analysis teaches us not just to uncover grids of oppositional terms implicit in various conceptions of civil society but also to draw a distinction between different kinds of oppositions. This in turn may help us to better understand the way in which key contributors to the debate on civil society reconcile contrary claims like, for example, defending the independence of civil associations while simultaneously advocating “a strongly positive theory of the state.”81 The focus on contrary terms, which somehow have to be reconciled, also resonates with the liberal-democratic requirement to mediate between conflicting social goods and opposing moral worlds. At the same

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time, political theory must be aware of the possibility of adamantly antagonistic claims, which threaten to precipitate liberal democracies into the twin hells of excessive order or no order at all. More specifically, the semiotic square sketched out here fulfills the important heuristic function of a model structure against which to compare different discourses on civil society. Similar or divergent structures of meaning in this field can be made transparent and opened for further discussion. It is instructive to see how deep structures may also be found in contemporary extensions

80

See Honneth, “Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation,” p. 237, n. 2.

81

M. Walzer, “Equality and Civil Society,” in S. Chambers and W. Kymlicka, eds.,

Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society, p. 47.

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136 • Chapter Four

of classical concepts of civil society, as for example in the currently fashionable discourse on global civil society. Moreover, as I have briefly pointed out with reference to Gandhi, representatives of non-European ethical traditions have developed their own semantics of barbarism, work and political order which may or may not be compatible with the requirements of a liberal polity.

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Finally, by focusing on implicit oppositional structures, the approach of dissecting instead of dismissing “civil society” challenges the managerial twist that has recently been given to the concept of civil society by many global political and economic institutions. These institutions are thriving on the phantasma of a “borderless” world and on strategically engineered fictions of moral consensus. The task at hand is to dispel these phantasms of bland consensus by highlighting the competing principles and impulses, which continue to contend beneath the universal rhetoric of civil society.

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Chapter Five Orientalizing America: Habermas and the Changing Discourse of Europe

The European Union is a set of institutions without being at the same time the object of a collective imagination. Citizens know that the EU exists, but it is a body without a strong meaning attached to it. The outright rejection of the European Constitutional Treaty by French and Dutch voters in 2005 has reminded the public once more of the amazing gap between the capacity of the Union to pull countries into its orbit and its equally impressive inability to construct a shared “horizon of meaning” for its citizens or anything close to a “dramatic representation of its destiny.”1 In short, Europe suffers from a

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symbolic deficit. This is the point of departure for Jürgen Habermas and other authors, whose writings on Europe should be understood as interpretive efforts aimed at giving meaning to the institutional complexity and evolving nature of European integration. These efforts are ultimately about applying the cultural

1

Z. Laïdi, A World Without Meaning: The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics,

trans. J. Burnham and J. Coulon, London, Routledge, 1998, pp. 75–76.

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138 • Chapter Five

scheme of European civility and its opposites to international affairs. Intellectuals have made the EU—currently comprised of twenty-seven member states—into the symbolic center of a binary discourse that not only distinguishes between Europe and non-Europe, but also identifies at least some nonmembers of the EU as essentially inferior. In this context, “Europe” has become a serious subject not just for lawyers or policymakers, but also for political philosophers, including those who count themselves among critical theorists. Since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1991, the eastern enlargement of the EU, and the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty, we have witnessed numerous contributions both on the philosophical concept of Europe and the institutions of the European Union. In the decades before, “Europe” was mostly perceived as an ends-oriented, fairly effective technocratic institution working for the benefit of almost everybody. Today, the EU is increasingly presented instead as an end-in-itself, a community with a particular set of values and a political identity of its own. Accordingly, public discourse has shifted from stressing the “sameness” of Europeans within a larger family of Western nations to highlighting the “differentness” of Europe vis-à-vis the world in general, and the United States in particular.2 As in earlier eras, intellectuals apply the normative code of civil versus uncivil societies to entire countries, political cultures or mentalities. These new global civil narratives do not evolve gradually, but in leaps, as dramatic political circumstances and crises usher in periods of intense meaning-making. An example is the global civil discourse surrounding the beginning of the US-led

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war against Iraq in 2003, when Habermas and other Continental intellectuals interpreted the massive anti-war rallies all over Europe as a symptom of rising popular enthusiasm for “Europe” as opposed to “America.” Since then, many European intellectuals have sought to reassert Europe as harbinger of a global idealpolitik that connects European civil society with a counterhegemonic foreign policy. At the same time, Habermas has insisted that the

2

I should add that this public discourse on differences between “Europe” and

“America” does not necessarily translate into policies, not even at the symbolic level of United Nations resolutions. See, for example, V. Heins et al., “The West Divided? A Snapshot of Human Rights and Transatlantic Relations at the United Nations,” Human Rights Review, vol. 11, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–16.

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Orientalizing America • 139

debate is not about defining a European Self in opposition to its non-European Other, but about the EU as a real-world experiment in the “Inclusion of the Other.”3 In this chapter I wish to address the tensions that are likely to baffle readers of Habermas’s political writings on the EU: the tension between the goal of strengthening a spatially based European collective identity and the goal of respecting and “including” those who are deemed outsiders to Europe; the tension between rejecting loyalty to cultural traditions and grounding European identity in a subset of those traditions; the tension between tracing political rifts between Europe and the US to “deeper” cultural selfunderstandings and the refusal to do so; and the tension between the plea for more powerful and centralized EU institutions and the call for more democracy. I argue that while Habermas and other philosophers of Europe effectively criticize cultural essentialism and technocratic anti-politics, they still apply a normative binary code, sometimes to other regions and cultures and sometimes to traditions, identifications and loyalties deemed anachronistic. To varying degrees, their polarizing narratives seek to freeze authoritatively the meaning of “Europe” by expurgating its Other. Using stronger terms, we might ask whether critical theorists have signed up to a project which aims at an ethical closure of “Europe” at a time when boundaries between peoples and other collectivities have become increasingly flexible and negotiable.

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To answer this question, I proceed in six steps. I start by making the neo-Durkheimian argument that discourses of Europe, like any other political discourse, regulate social perceptions and evaluations by typifying social relationships and institutions in terms of the sacred and the profane (I). Illustrating this argument, I then briefly recapitulate Habermas’s thesis of the “Divided West,” which was formulated on the occasion of the US-led Iraq War in 2003 (II). Next, I discuss a text by the social-democratic political scientist Thomas Meyer, who has popularized Habermas’s discourse on the EU. In spite of being little more than a cartoon version of Habermas’s thesis, Meyer’s essay has the distinct advantage of bringing out into the open the more troubling, Eurocentric potentials of Habermas’s Euro-republicanism (III). Meyer’s

3

See J. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. C. Cronin

and P. De Greiff, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1998.

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140 • Chapter Five

text highlights a possible misreading of Habermas, which Habermas has subsequently corrected. This is the subject of the following section, in which I explore some of the complexities of Habermas’s thinking on Europe. In particular, Habermas attempts to square the circle by wrapping the EU in the rhetoric of progressive universalism without polluting the United States or other countries as morally inferior (IV). I then go on to discuss Habermas’s more recent essays on European affairs, which are focusing less on the moral geography of the EU than on its uncertain future (V). Further, I argue that Habermas’s political philosophy of Europe is based on ill-founded premises, which tell us something about the shortcomings of his version of critical theory (VI).

I. Europe and its others

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Collective identities are created, first of all, by drawing a boundary between in-group and out-group members. This elementary operation requires that differences among in-group members are downplayed, while commonalities are emphasized. Simultaneously, the constitutive binary of insiders/outsiders is routinely translated into the moral binary of superior/inferior; this, in turn, can easily be transformed into the dualism of friend and foe. In fact, these two operations are so tightly intertwined that in the real world they collapse into a single cultural scheme. Still, I believe it is important to analytically distinguish between the two steps: the drawing of a boundary and the self-elevation of insiders at the expense of outsiders. A third step consists in essentializing the boundaries of collective identities as having deep roots in memory, race or culture. The consequences of this third step are particularly momentous in the case of modern nations, which are based on shared understandings about the primordial connection of people to territories. These understandings have made wars between nations both more likely, and more intense. Nations were imagined in analogy to extended families with female sexual life as their core value requiring control and protection by “brothers” against illegitimate foreign invaders-polluters.4 In all these constructions of identities and counter-identities intellectuals have played a crucial role.

4

See A.M. Banti, L’onore della nazione: Identità sessuali e violenza nel nazionalismo

europeo dal XVIII secolo alla Grande Guerra, Turin, Einaudi, 2005.

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Orientalizing America • 141

Europe was never supported by a strong, transregional collective identity, although its inhabitants always imagined it as a special place. These imaginings can be traced back at least to the sixteenth century, when artists began to produce allegorical paintings of the then known four continents of the earth, often investing “Europe” with symbols of superior civility, such as crowns and books. This sense of superiority of European civility was later elaborated by travel writers, geographers and missionaries who represented the Middle East and other world areas as Europe’s barbarous Other.5 This “Orientalist” strain persists to this day,6 although since the late eighteenth century Europe as an imagined unity receded from the popular imagination in favor of new ideas of sovereign nationhood. During the age of competitive sovereign nation-states, the idea of Europe became a bone of contention between countries who struggled over which people is best suited for representing European civilization. Rather than a shared European idea there have been international conflicts over ways of turning ideas about Europe into foreign policy aims, including policies of integration. Both in Germany and France, Europe as a political project was a concern well before World War II. Already in the early nineteenth century, radical democrats advocated a European republic of free peoples—which they hoped would include the United States of America.7 A hundred years later, conservative intellectuals in those countries as well as in Austria and Spain turned

5

See Said, Orientalism.

6

Traces of Orientalism can be found, for example, in Ulrich Beck’s writings on

Europe. Given his declared intention of making the public look afresh at Europe and the world, one is amazed at the tired clichés he draws on to describe non-Europe. In his Cosmopolitan Vision (trans. C. Cronin, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2006), Africans

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are completely stripped of agency as “Africa” is associated with “suffering” or with the need to raise the “conscience of the world” (ibid., pp. 6, 177)—as if Africa did not belong to this very world. India figures only in connection with “cuisine” and “diaspora” (ibid., p. 10). The Middle East and the Balkans are reduced to a “powder keg” (ibid., p. 137). This supposedly new discourse on Europe takes non-Europe as little more than a blank screen that invites the projection of faded images of passivity, sensuality and unpredictable violence. 7

See J. v. Görres, “Der Allgemeine Friede, ein Ideal,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1,

ed. M. Braubach, Cologne, Gilde, 1928.

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142 • Chapter Five

“Europe” into a fighting creed against the despised “liberal 19th century.” Inspired by texts like Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West and disgusted by what was perceived as the great leveling out of society by democratic, technological and humanitarian impulses, the future of the old continent was envisioned as a revamped version of the transnational Holy Roman Empire. In Germany, the dichotomy between the historical and religious landscape of old Europe on the one hand and the forces of liberalism, capitalism and the enlightenment on the other hand was elaborated in numerous books and journals. Soon controversies erupted over the question whether Europe was more likely to self-destruct (that was Spengler’s view) or whether it would fall prey to the Jews, who in any case should be pushed out of Europe and back into “the eternal night,” as the writer Otto Dickel ominously recommended already in 1921.8 By this time in France, conservative “nonconformists,” some of them with anti-fascist leanings, celebrated the ancient regions of Europe—la patrie régionale—against the alienating power of the centralized nation-state.9 But the Nazis were no less determined to defend “Europe” against Anglo-Saxon and Slavic intruders. Thus, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels advertised the bombing of Dresden in February 1945 by the British Royal Air Force as proof that the Allies had betrayed European culture in a self-destructive manner. A little later, ripples of various conservative waves of Europeanism could be seen in the way in which Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer began to think about the institutional design of the new European Gemeinschaft.

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Given the existence of nation-states, any attempt to repeat the ideological operation that had led to the anchoring of collective identities in separate national territories at the European level was unlikely to succeed, in particular against the backdrop of a history of ferocious wars among Europeans. Yet the outcome of World War II opened an avenue for building a European identity by representing not foreigners, but the primordial underpinnings of

8

Quoted in D. Pöpping, Abendland: Christliche Akademiker und die Utopie der Anti-

moderne 1900–1945, Berlin, Metropol, 2002, p. 46. 9

See J.-L. Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années 30: Une tentative de renou-

vellement de la pensée politique francaise, Paris, Seuil, 1969. See also the late E. Jünger, The Peace, trans. S.O. Hood, Hinsdale, IL, Regnery, 1948.

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Orientalizing America • 143

nations themselves as barbarous. Here is one of the few points of continuity between the pro-European stance of Habermas and the anti-nationalism of earlier representatives of a critical theory of society. Adorno, for instance, describes “nationalism” as the “heritage of barbarically primitive tribal attitudes,”10 which somehow survives in modern society although it has become completely dysfunctional. The reason, he stipulates, is that in the face of the compulsory coalition of nations into great blocs under the supremacy of the most powerful country, which is already dictated by the development in weapons technology alone, the individual sovereign nations, at least in advanced continental Europe, have forfeited their historical substance. The idea of the nation … has itself become a barrier to the obvious potential of society as a totality.11

It goes without saying that, for Adorno, the replacement of nation-states by larger power blocs was no cause for celebration. First generation Critical Theory has rightly been called Eurocentric,12 but its representatives were certainly not pro-European in the sense of advocating the emergence of a new “great bloc” under the supremacy of Germany or France. From the point of view of political theory, this is the most striking difference between the first and the second generation of critical theorists. Whereas the members of the old Frankfurt School were suspicious of the state and power blocs formed by states, Habermas’s political theory is centered on his vision of European federalism. He has even remarked that it is this particular subject that “today gets me worked up the most.”13 I now turn to the reasons for this excitement.

II. Dividing the West

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While in many ways inspired by and centered on Western societies, Habermas’s general social philosophy does not, categorically speaking,

10

Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models, p. 98.

11

Ibid., p. 97.

12

See M. Pensky, “Globalizing Theory, Theorizing Globalization: Introduction,”

in Globalizing Critical Theory, ed. Pensky, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, p. 10. 13

Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project, p. 56; translation modified.

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144 • Chapter Five

privilege particular cultures or geographical regions as more attuned to the full realization of communicative rationality than others. At a more political level, however, Habermas has given in to the attractions of his own particular culture. For example, taking up a theme of old Frankfurt School cultural criticism, Habermas complains about the flooding of the world by “the standardized products of a mass culture (overwhelmingly shaped by the United States).”14 More explicitly, in an article co-signed by Jacques Derrida against the participation of some European governments in the Iraq War, he has listed a number of features which according to him distinguish the European “political mentality”15 from its American counterpart. These features are: secularism and distrust of the public display of religious beliefs, trust in the state rather than the capitalist market, a preference for social solidarity over individual merit, skepticism toward technology and technological progress, and high esteem for international law and nonviolent conflict resolution. This last point also includes the rejection of the death penalty.16 All of these features are, of course, highly valued by Habermas who in turn attributes them to an otherwise ill-defined European collective. Yet, it would seem that some of the qualities are shared by outsiders to the EU. On further reflection, it is open to doubt whether some of the virtues attributed to the European mentality are indeed unambiguously positive, as Habermas wants us to believe. Trust in the state instead of the market can be just a euphemism for trade barriers to imports from developing countries or for subsidizing agricultural surpluses; Europe’s sense of solidarity may come at the expense

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of non-European immigrants, and so forth. But the real question is not so much whether Habermas gets the facts right out of which he spins his claim about a distinctive European identity. The point is rather that he invokes collective representations which make sense, as they resonate with a shared repertoire of meanings. Far from being universal, this repertoire of meanings is well-established only “in our latitudes.”17 Throughout modern history,

14

Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, p. 75.

15

Habermas and Derrida, “February 15, or: What Binds Europeans,” in Habermas,

The Divided West, p. 45. 16

See ibid., pp. 46–48.

17

Ibid., p. 46; translation modified.

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Orientalizing America • 145

Europe has nurtured an “Orientalist” political discourse about itself which arranges concepts of the sacred and the profane, of civilization and barbarism, in patterns of binary opposition which are then imputed to entire geographical areas. It resonates when we are told, if sotto voce rather than explicitly, that Europe’s Other is somehow less law-abiding than Europeans are, less ready to accept the benevolent interference of the state, more easily misled by their unenlightened religious beliefs, and more prone to violence and unruly individualism. Habermas draws on the script of a civil code which classifies motives, relations and institutions as either pure or impure, sacred or profane. At the level of motives, Europe’s others were always represented as irrational. Their relationships were castigated as self-interested and calculating, and their institutions as lawless and arbitrary.18 My general observation is that in spite of embracing the eastern enlargement of the EU, intellectuals are forging a European identity by reinventing an “Eastern” mirror-image to Europe. For the most part, Europe’s others are indeed located eastward and southward of the EU. However, as Iver Neumann has demonstrated, in struggles over the representation of political communities “the East” is not necessarily geographically east. Rather, it “has been cut loose from its geographical point of reference and has become a generalized social marker in European identity formation.”19 In a hugely ironic twist, the place once held by different eastern others in European identity formation has been taken by an imagined “America,” at least from the perspective of some critical theorists. This twist could not have been predicted

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by Hannah Arendt who gave a lecture in 1954 at Princeton University on “The Image of America Abroad,” in which she analyzed ideological distortions and their reasons, while having no doubt that European representations of America were radically different from Orientalist “images of Africa or Asia or the South Sea Islands.”20

18

For more on the binary codes of civil narratives, see Alexander, The Civil Sphere,

ch. 4. 19

I.B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: “The East” in European Identity Formation,

Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999, p. 207. 20

H. Arendt, “Dream and Nightmare,” in Arendt, Essays in Understanding: 1930–

1954, ed. J. Kohn, New York, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994, p. 411.

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146 • Chapter Five

III. “Oriental” America? I now turn to a recent essay by the prominent German social-democratic intellectual Thomas Meyer, who has radicalized Habermas’s thesis of the “Divided West” in such a way as to taint America as the new Orient, even if he has no illusions that European powers could once again turn America into a colony. Meyer describes the relationship between the emerging European

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polity and at least some non-European areas not in terms of overlapping, but of mutually exclusive identities. The EU is not only defined by whatever is considered morally and politically desirable, from the welfare state to “participatory party democracy” and a “cooperative foreign policy”21 full of concern for the well-being of non-Europeans. It is also radically distinguished from other geopolitical entities which are defined by the lack of these quality attributes. While this seems to indicate a disappointingly uninspired return to Eurocentrism, Meyer’s reasoning is ultimately more complicated. In order to avoid the trap of Orientalism, he embraces the notion of a multicivilizational Europe which goes beyond simply the inclusion of the geographically immediate eastern others to a fundamental change in the founding members of the EU. He is aware that the process of enlargement has changed the status of the hitherto sealed and self-evident eastern border, such that it may soon be turned into a transition zone not only between nations, but between entire civilizations. With the potential inclusion of Turkey and the countries of the former Yugoslavia, the EU might develop into a “postwestern” space.22 This implies that Europe is different from others, although these others can strive to become European despite their cultural baggage. In line with a tradition of liberal political thought, Meyer’s essay dismisses both “natural boundaries” and the concept of self-contained civilizations as bases of political communities. Yet, like Habermas and other advocates of a “strong and independent” Europe, Meyer is impatient with the technocrats of the European status quo who believe that they can forever eschew questions of political

21

T. Meyer, Die Identität Europas: Der EU eine Seele?, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2004,

p. 137. 22

G. Delanty, “The Making of a Postwestern Europe: a Civilizational Analysis,”

Thesis Eleven, no. 72, 2003, pp. 8–25.

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Orientalizing America • 147

identity by simply optimizing the output of the EU machinery “for the people.” But he is no less critical of those who, like the British political theorist Larry Siedentop, seek to root the political identity of Europe—and of European governance “by the people”—in cultural homogeneity.23 For Meyer the identity of Europe and membership to its institutions must be based on political and constitutional achievements alone, which in principle can be secured, as well as squandered, by any political community on earth. Being a good European country is not an innate status but a virtuous activity. And yet, a closer look shows that culture as the key variable for explaining unbridgeable geopolitical divides is reintroduced through the backdoor. Meyer is careful to speak only of “political culture” in order to be faithful to his professed anti-essentialism. The degree of responsiveness of different world regions to European political values is said to vary with certain characteristics of their political culture. These political cultures cannot be changed easily. Hence, some countries or populations are culturally handicapped in being able to grasp European civil values.

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Along these lines, Meyer suggests tracing back European misgivings about United States government policies to deeper cultural divisions. Samuel Huntington’s epic tale on the clash of civilizations is not criticized for its tendency to essentialize cultures, but for its vision of a historical West unified by a common worldview and common beliefs. Following Meyer, we may continue to talk loosely of Europe and the US as western democracies only if we bear in mind that it is “not the same West”24 these political entities inhabit. Consequently, suggestions of a division of labor between America and Europe, for example between US military enforcement and European peacekeeping, are flatly rejected.25 By making explicit what remains implicit and haphazard in Habermas’s writings, Meyer moves beyond these authors, and crafts a radically polarizing discourse on Europe’s identity. Terms marked as positive or negative are systematically ascribed to either “Europe” or “America.” Meyer shows little patience with untidy cases that do not fit neatly into his binary discourse. Predictably, Britain is reviled as a “burden”

23

See L. Siedentop, Democracy in Europe, Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin, 2000.

24

Meyer, Die Identität Europas, p. 144.

25

Ibid., pp. 118–19.

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148 • Chapter Five

and even a “threat” to the EU.26 Like anglophobic German writers in the nineteenth century, Meyer holds up the Turks as more civilized than the British.27 Occasionally, this widely read author laces his rhetoric with militaristic metaphors, for example, when he pictures symbolic “trenches and ramparts”28 to keep Europe and America apart. Meyer represents modern-day America as if it were the old East which had been looked down on by colonial Europeans. In his reading, America is first of all, and in contrast to Europe, violent.29 Violence is linked to other fatal features like lawlessness and the perennial immaturity of American political culture: “The realist notion that ultimately there is no other way of building something durable on earth than by using force, is immature, almost politically pubertal,” he writes. “This seductive idea is as charming as the Wild West where there is only as much law as the powerful are willing to tolerate.”30 As a corollary to this, Meyer contrasts the European welfare state with the “failures of plutocracy”31 in America—a term much used by pre-World War II Europeanists, who by way of analogy linked “America” to the “rule of money” and “individualist excess.”32 The master variable explaining the uncivil nature of modern America’s political culture is its innate missionary spirit, which in turn is fuelled by what Meyer calls “fundamentalism”— another ill-defined term that is close to the “degrading superstitions”33 of backward colonial subjects: At times, the Christian missionary idea and overwhelming power are amalgamated in a dazzling way which is hardly compatible with legitimizing

26

Ibid., pp. 145–46.

27

See, for example, C.L. Paalzow, Über Aufgeklärtheit, Barbarei und Vorurtheile, Berlin,

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Schön’sche Buchhandlung, 1823, pp. 87–88. 28

Meyer, Die Identität Europas, p. 138.

29

Ibid., pp. 118–19.

30

Ibid., pp. 140–41.

31

Ibid., pp. 144.

32

E.J. Jung, Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, 2nd ed., Berlin, Deutsche Rundschau,

1930, pp. 246–255, 260. 33

T.R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994,

p. 184.

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Orientalizing America • 149 ideas of the West like democracy, pluralism and human rights … [The] fundamentalist stream in the main current of American political culture becomes a problem for the whole world … It is not only alien to political Europe, but also a good part of what Europe’s identity is being directed against.34

Predictably, the elements of this representative civil discourse on Europe are, by way of homology, linked together. Uncivil motives (“fundamentalism”) correspond to uncivil social relationships (“immature”), which in turn give rise to arbitrary, law-defying, purely power-based institutions (“Wild West”). Conversely, Europe is represented as constructive and law-abiding, but also as mature and grown up. These imputations are interesting for two reasons. First, in characterizing America’s political culture as childlike and immature, Meyer relies on one of the most common tropes that Europeans were fond of applying to their colonial subjects in India and elsewhere.35 Second, some of Meyer’s imputations are based on simple inversions of signifiers which structured the views on eighteenth century Europe held by American revolutionaries. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, described the old European powers as “destructive.”36 Meyer turns Europe into the true heir of old America— mimicking earlier Americans such as Thomas Paine who thought of America as a better version of Europe.37 Europe is represented as the sole bearer of the values of enlightenment betrayed by America, implying that Europe has once again no other choice but to embrace its own global “civil mission.”38

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Caught in a tautological loop, Meyer affirms that European and American political values differ because they are incompatible, not—as one might suspect—because of different positions held by the US and the EU within

34

Meyer, Die Identität Europas, pp. 138–39.

35

See Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, pp. 192, 199, 229–30. It is also worth noting that

“political immaturity” was Max Weber’s main charge against Germany’s political culture prior to World War I—a charge which is now redirected against Europe’s Other. 36

Quoted in G. Dijkink, National Identity and Geopolitical Visions: Maps of Pride and

Pain, London, Routledge, 1996, p. 54. 37

See T. Paine, “Common Sense” (1776), in Collected Writings, ed. E. Foner, New

York, Library of America, 1995, p. 23. 38

Meyer, Die Identität Europas, pp. 202, 142, 119.

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150 • Chapter Five

the international hierarchy of states. America does not stray from common ideals cherished also by Europeans, but subscribes to other ideals that are at odds with civilization as understood by Meyer (“democracy, pluralism and human rights”). Moreover, we are led to understand that “the whole world” is against America or, to put it differently, that an invigorated Europe stands in for the whole world. This metonymic use of “Europe” as a manifestation of the essence of humankind (“the whole world”) further strengthens the case for a global European “mission,” the contours of which unfortunately are never specified.

IV. Gauging the depth of the division

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The writings on Europe by Habermas and Meyer, which were at least partly motivated by the intense global drama of the run-up to the controversial invasion of Iraq, illustrate the important sociological insight that the normative codes of civil societies are binary, and that these codes are applied both domestically and globally. The writings discussed so far also testify to the irony that the professed ideal of rational politics is undermined by the authors the very moment in which they enter the public sphere themselves. Their interventions are made not in terms of rational arguments but in terms of conventional symbolic codes. Habermas and Meyer engage in signifying practices with the goal of distributing actors and events along the cultural scheme of sacred and profane. At least Habermas shows some awareness of the moral perils involved in dichotomous geopolitical discourses that militate against his own stated belief in rational consensus-building. A moral geography that divides the world in sacred and profane zones is at loggerheads with Habermas’s discursive concept of universal morality. Although advocates of a “situated Euro-republicanism”39 have offered an enthusiastic reading of his political essays on Europe, there is no way in which Habermas could move ahead on this path of a re-spatialization of what is good and what is evil in modernity without disowning his own philosophy of communicative action.40 39

H. Friese and P. Wagner, “The Nascent Political Philosophy of the European

Polity,” Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 3, 2002, p. 358. 40

The allusions to a binary moral geography in The Divided West also sit uneasily

with the philosophy of Habermas’s co-author Derrida, who has affirmed that the

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Orientalizing America • 151

He has so far not been able to resolve the tension between the political desire to define Europe’s identity and his overall theory which radically precludes the option of elevating a spatially bound political community above the rest of the world. As a result, his characterizations of the European project tend to be murky and inconclusive. Habermas rejects the American missionary spirit, only to affirm the need to define Europe’s “own political mission.”41 He continues to describe European secularism as an expression of “neutrality toward worldviews,”42 while at the same time contributing to the construction of a new, distinctively European worldview. After the publication of his anti-war manifest “February 15, or: What Binds Europeans” Habermas has shifted into reverse gear, as if afraid of the can of worms he opened by grounding a political rift between the US administration and European governments in “deeper”43 cultural differences. In an interesting turnaround, he later insists that the decision to invade Iraq was not the expression of a fundamentally different collective mentality, but the contingent result of the distorted worldview of an American president who had come to power under quite dubious circumstances. Contradicting some of his interpreters, he writes, “We should not try to read a deeper meaning into these contingencies by engaging in grand theorizing.”44 The bottom line is that, as the Iraq drama passes, Habermas appears no longer to be willing to map proverbial traits of the uncivil—lawlessness, inhumanity, aloofness toward the world—onto entire world regions. Rather, he explicitly argues against turning political rifts into cultural differences, and cultural differences into symptoms of essential otherness. Apart from being supported by empirical evidence showing the almost complete convergence between Europeans and Americans in areas such as global

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United States may be a rogue state—but so are all other states as well. See Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 102. 41

Habermas, The Divided West, p. 74.

42

Habermas and Derrida, “February 15, or: What Binds Europeans,” p. 46; transla-

tion modified. 43

Ibid.

44

Habermas, The Divided West, p. 50.

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152 • Chapter Five

human rights policies,45 this less dramatic view has the distinct advantage of being in line with Habermas’s theory of communicative action. According to this theory, the fault lines within the West or between different world regions in general are, like all spatial divisions, shallow, whereas the only deep division is temporal. Habermas’s fusion of developmental psychology and neo-Weberian rationalization theory allows him to distinguish between groups or populations who are stuck in traditions and other groups or populations who have overcome tradition in favor of reason. Unlike Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas no longer employs animal metaphors (“ants,” “amphibians”) to characterize his unenlightened contemporaries, but he nevertheless sees large sections of them as being condemned to unreason. He writes: The more cultural traditions predecide which validity claims, when, where, for what, from whom, and to whom must be accepted, the less the participants themselves have the possibility of making explicit and examining the potential grounds on which their yes/no positions are based.46

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In light of this succinct statement, it seems obvious that Habermas cannot justifiably mark off the social space of Europe by “cultural traditions” that are intrinsically superior to other traditions. He presents a salvationary discourse about the power of reason that is linked to an understanding of cultural traditions as impure and threatening. But if cultural traditions are per se problematic, how can a European identity be grounded in a particular subset of those traditions? As the quotation reveals, Habermas combines a dichotomous perspective that opposes reason to tradition with a gradualist perspective (“the more, the less”) that implies the possibility of progress for everyone. Of course, like other evolutionary thinkers before him, Habermas temporalizes the difference between cultures or mentalities by tainting some of them as anachronistic. Thus, on the occasion of the intervention against Serbia on behalf of the Kosovo Albanians in 1999, Habermas mentioned the “historical

45

See Heins et al., “The West Divided?”

46

Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Ration-

alization of Society, trans. T. McCarthy, Boston, Beacon Press, 1984, pp. 70–71.

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Orientalizing America • 153

non-simultaneity of clashing political mentalities” and his suspicion that countries like Serbia—but also “Libya” or “Iraq”47—are contemporary heirs of an aggressive nationalism that used to be universal, but has in the meantime been surpassed by a more postnational mindset. This clash between aggressive nationalism and postnationalism is also framed as a clash between “bestiality” and “humanity.”48 From this perspective the military intervention in Kosovo, which was supported by Habermas, was directed against an enemy who was located and targeted in geographical space, although to many Europeans it felt like hitting evil regimes located in their own past.49 This entire strand in Habermas’s international thinking develops in accordance with his social theory of a universal morality that transcends substantive cultures, including the reputedly universal culture of Europe. In light of this theory, the critique of the United States or other non-European polities can only be provisional and empirical. Accordingly, Habermas has often insisted that Europe cannot define its identity in opposition to the United States or Asia or any other region. He calls upon Europeans to develop their sense of identity democratically and “through a non-pejorative differentiation from the citizens of other continents.”50 Regarding America, he goes one step further by emphasizing the opportunities arising from the “lucky accident of world history that the sole superpower is the oldest democracy on earth.”51 Habermas clings to the binary of insiders/outsiders that constitutes European identity, but expects citizens not to look down on outsiders as being inferior. His vision of a strong Europe is not about opposing America, but about a cosmopolitan strategy to harness the power of this country in order to establish a new law-based international order. In this reading, the EU would not be a 47

Habermas, Time of Transitions, trans. C. Cronin and M. Pensky, Cambridge, UK,

Polity Press, 2005, p. 29. Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

48

“Bestiality and humanity” was the original title of Habermas’s article “From

Power Politics to Cosmopolitan Society” on the Kosovo intervention. See Habermas, Time of Transitions, ch. 2. 49

See V. Heins, “Crusaders and Snobs: Moralizing Foreign Policy in Britain and

Germany, 1999–2005,” in Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy: Pitfalls, Possibilities and Paradoxes, ed. D. Chandler and V. Heins, London and New York, Routledge, 2007. 50

Habermas, The Divided West, p. 81; emphasis added.

51

Ibid., p. 110.

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154 • Chapter Five

new international actor which polemically defines itself against others, but would rather resemble a Russian doll nested within a larger doll.

V. Habermas’s Eurofederalism Habermas seized upon the global social dramas of the Kosovo intervention and the invasion of Iraq as opportunities to operationalize his moral and political philosophy. This contribution to a new discourse on the meaning of Europe reflects the general outlook of Habermas’s theory by transforming the idealized image of the competent moral subject and the modern democratic welfare state into a program for reforming the EU. Thus, the citizens of Sweden or Germany, for example, are expected to enlarge their horizon of civic solidarity in such a way as to include the citizens of Greece or Spain as members of the same political community, and vice versa. For this to happen, it is necessary to overcome primordial attachments to ethnicity, language, locality and kinship as well as the “invented” cultural traditions of the modern nation-state which, like other traditions, predetermine the acceptability of claims, speakers and publics. Yet, Habermas makes it clear that, for him, the particular political form of the nation-state already sets the stage for postnational modes of governance and imagination. Unlike early conservative advocates of European unification, Habermas does not reject the nation-state as an alienating power undermining the wholesomeness of substantive lifeworlds. On the contrary, he argues for radicalizing the “painful process of abstraction” that has already transformed collective identities: [If ] the emergence of national consciousness involved a painful process of abstraction, leading from local and dynastic identities to national and democratic ones, why … should this generation of a highly artificial kind of civic solidarity—a “solidarity among strangers”—be doomed to come to a final Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

halt just at the borders of our classical nation states?52

Although he defines the European project as a movement toward overcoming the nation-state, Habermas hopes that the EU will one day “acquire the

52

Habermas, “Why Europe needs a Constitution,” New Left Review, no. 11,

September-October 2001, p. 16.

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Orientalizing America • 155

character of an authentic state.”53 He would like the EU to become more statelike and more democratic at the same time. In order to become more like a state, the EU needs, according to Habermas, the following things: its own army, a constitution, the ability to raise taxes on its own, a convergence of tax rates and social policies in all member states, a common foreign policy, and an elected president.54 In addition, the European anthem should be played more often, and its blue flag with the circle of stars should be more visible.55 To address the alleged “democratic deficit” of the EU system, Habermas suggests more referendums and concerted efforts to make national public spheres more responsive to each other.56 All of these hints indicate that Habermas wants the EU to be move toward a large scale replica of the nationstate—minus linguistic and ethnic homogeneity. This is his vision of the endstate of European integration. The moral order of this yet to be realized political entity is, like every moral order, based on the opposition between purity and pollution. The symbolic “dirt” that must be kept out of Europe is the anarchy of states and the anarchy of global markets. The anarchy of the society of states is the result of the collective narcissism of nation-states and the asymmetrical relationship between foreigners and fellow-citizens. Competition between national collectives and their states can push humanity down to a new state of nature characterized by “a social Darwinist lowering of inhibitions towards the use of violence.”57 Economic globalization, on the other hand, weakens the autonomy of nation-states without, however, civilizing international society. Instead of

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overcoming the asymmetrical relationship between foreigners and nationals globalization merely bypasses this relationship by treating citizens and noncitizens alike as consumers, investors, or workers. Against both nationalism

53

Habermas, Time of Transitions, p. 86.

54

Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project, pp. 57–58, 103.

55

Ibid., p. 81.

56

Ibid., pp. 86–87, 103. For a critique of Habermas’s nation-state analogies, see K.-H.

Ladeur, “ ‘We, the European People’—Relâche?,” European Law Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, 2008, pp. 147–67. For an analysis of the alleged democratic deficit of the EU, which is in reality an “accountability deficit,” see G. Majone, Europe as the Would-Be World Power: The EU at Fifty, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, ch. 6. 57

Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project, pp. 89.

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156 • Chapter Five

and globalization, the EU is represented as being the world’s best example of a postnational politics as well as having the potential to “catch up with global markets”58 by regaining the administrative capacity to correct unjust and harmful market outcomes. Habermas thus contrasts his idea of European civil society to a barbarism of disorder marked by social disintegration, instability and violence (see chapter 4 in this volume). Although Habermas’s reflections on the EU have become less sanguine over time, their underlying assumptions are distinctly optimistic and forwardlooking. As mentioned above, Habermas starts by making the valid point that civic solidarity can expand across all kinds of social, ethnic and national boundaries, and that schools, the mass media, and historiography can foster this expansion. He is perfectly right in noting that civic solidarity does not come to a halt at the borders of nation-states. But why should solidarity come to a halt at the borders of the EU? If, as Habermas writes in the Theory of Communicative Action, solidarity is rooted in autonomous cultural processes of mutual understanding that cannot be instrumentalized by bureaucracies or corporations,59 then how can he justify the redrawing of moral boundaries of solidarity along the lines of the administrative and economic boundaries of the EU? In fact, drawing on Kant’s political philosophy, Habermas does anticipate a cosmopolitan end-state of global solidarity. He believes that this perfect end-state is not currently on the agenda, but that political modernity has already begun to move in this direction, which will take full shape as soon as international law is vigorously expanded into a Kantian cosmopolitan rights-

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regime. Again, this strand of thinking does not fit well with the notion of an ethical closure of the European federation in which at some point in time Britons and Poles are expected to vouch for each other as fellow citizens, but not, for example, Italians and Brazilians. This is the first inconsistency in Habermas’s Eurofederalism. The second inconsistency is the result of his inability to think outside the box of statist categories of politics. Habermas insists that Europe needs a clear-cut distinction between members and nonmembers, self and other, but also a

58

Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, p. 109.

59

Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System:

A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy, Boston, Beacon Press, 1987.

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Orientalizing America • 157

super-state—“an effective political apparatus through which collectively binding decisions can be implemented.”60 Recalling America’s Federalists in the eighteenth century, Habermas asks the Europeans to unite under one centralized popular government. The Union in its current form is seen as an anomaly, an awkward, half-finished construction that has to be turned into a proper state in order to make sense. Whatever else we might think about this statist teleology, I find Habermas’s desire to see the birth of yet another sovereign state to be at odds with his equally strong emphasis on the need to establish a Kantian cosmopolitan rights-regime—Weltbürgerrecht— that constrains state behavior to a point where it even “bypasses”61 the sovereign state altogether. Habermas’s constant invocation of the US analogy and the “United States of Europe”62 suggest that Europe must become independent. Yet, Habermas also speaks of “the obsolete notion of the relative independence of the subjects of international law.”63 I do not see how to reconcile the tension between the call for turning the Union into a proper state with all the trappings of other sovereign states and the push for new ways of governing global society that bypass sovereignty; or the tension between asking to shield the independence of Europe and declaring the very concept of independence obsolete. The only way out of this conundrum would be to apply Habermas’s idea of a policy of “graduated”64 European integration to the entire world in such a way that some states have lesser rights to be sovereign and independent than others. His defense of the military intervention against Serbia provides hints in this direction. Here Habermas distinguishes between a “first” world of “peaceful and prosper-

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ous” states with more or less cosmopolitan standards, and a “second world” of states marked by “internal instability” and “authoritarian rule” whose irrational leaders pursue dangerously “expansionist” foreign policies.65 This dichotomous reading of international society suggests that, for Habermas, not only the West is divided, but the world itself. And unlike the internal

60

Habermas, Time of Transitions, p. 76.

61

Ibid., p. 20.

62

See, for example, Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project, pp. 58, 80.

63

Ibid., p. 98.

64

Ibid., ch. 6.

65

See Habermas, Time of Transitions, pp. 29–30.

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158 • Chapter Five

transatlantic split within the West, this second divide is conceived in terms of the civil/uncivil binary.

VI. Europe as a civilizational ideal Since the early days of the supranational European Coal and Steel Community the European project has been driven by a politics of memory as well as by a politics of hope. This combination is at the heart of Habermas’s thinking and has also been expressed in the preamble of the now defunct Constitutional Treaty: “Europe, reunited after bitter experiences, intends to continue along the path of civilisation, progress and prosperity.”66 The formulation is telling, for it implies a progressive narrative and a close connection between “Europe” and the “path of civilisation.” It could have been taken from the new critical discourse on the EU, which is essentially about the “formation of an ideal”67 in the sense of Durkheim’s sociology of religion. In spite of having strayed from the path of civilization in the past, Europe is introduced as something sacred; it is separated from the profane world of power politics and the neoliberal laws of the jungle. In some respects, this operation resembles past efforts in constructing the identity of nations by drawing a line between ingroup and out-group members, elevating and hailing the attributes of the in-group as superior, while polluting the attributes of the excluded outsiders. In his essays on The Divided West, Habermas has briefly toyed with the idea of such a rhetorical strategy before leaving it to some of his lesser disciples. His

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progressive narrative does not primarily pollute geographical others; the polluted category consists of the temporal other of a violent and painful past which is opposed to the freedom of a redemptive future. A moral geography resurfaces only as the result of the global simultaneity of postnational, peaceoriented and inclusive mentalities on the one hand, and anachronistically nationalist, aggressive and exclusionary mentalities on the other. In conclusion, I want to demonstrate that Habermas’s European thinking is based on ill-founded premises that have little connection with any critical theory of society. The tasks of such a theory, if it does not want to remain

66

“Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe,” Official Journal of the European

Union, vol. 47, 16 December 2004, p. 3. 67

Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, p. 317.

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Orientalizing America • 159

merely utopian, are three: it has to develop a vision of the goals and objectives which define a new society, identify the obstacles to be overcome in achieving the desired society, and address social agents who are willing and able to remove those obstacles. Referring to these three steps, I wish to make three points on how Habermas defines the goals, obstacles and transformative social agents of the European project. First, Habermas’s vision of the goals and objectives of the EU is still distorted by lingering traces of Eurocentrism, although he ultimately resists the temptation to orientalize America or other former European colonies. Second, he misidentifies the obstacles in the way of realizing his (questionable) ideal. Third, he has little to say about who is going to bring about the changes he wants to see. (1) What is the substance of Habermas’s European ideal? The short answer is: an attenuated version of the American republic. An attenuated version because the normative blueprint of Habermas’s political Europe does neither require a “colonial rebellion” nor a “social revolution.”68 The former is replaced by a somewhat more self-confident attitude vis-à-vis the United States, the latter by the assumed willingness of taxpayers in well-off European countries to transfer resources to their poorer neighbors. Yet, like the American founders, Habermas also believes that the future EU needs to act more like a proper state with a strong government. After military insecurity between the European states has been eliminated, a constitution has to shield the independence of Europe, which is necessary because otherwise the integrity of the Union would be threatened by what Habermas ominously calls “the

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hands of others.”69 Another purpose of a politically united Europe is to increase the “global political weight of the Union.”70 Habermas is convinced that without more political power for the EU, pressing global problems including poverty alleviation, international security, energy policy, human rights and global justice cannot be solved in a just manner.71 His main argument for strengthening the Union appears to be that the EU potentially

68

G.S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, Chapel Hill, University

of North Carolina Press, 1998, p. 91. 69

Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project, p. 57.

70

Ibid., p. 82.

71

See his “European Politics at an Impasse: A Plea for a Policy of Graduated

Integration,” ibid., ch. 6.

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160 • Chapter Five

embodies cosmopolitan norms of justice and fairness, whereas the old nationstates and non-European powers are locked in cycles of self-serving power games. Yet the claim that the EU is somehow more cosmopolitan than its component nation-states strikes me as implausible. The EU and its core countries continue to be deeply engaged in institutional practices of non-egalitarian political and human classification that do not, in principle, differ from the practices of traditional national states. On the Canary Islands, for example, Europeans continue to build both holiday camps for tourists and deportation camps for refugees; tourists who became victims of disasters are mourned while undocumented African and Asian travelers who died on their journeys in the opposite direction meet with indifference.72 Habermas’s response to such observations would be to conceive of the EU as a necessary, yet intermediate step toward cosmopolitan deliberation and problem-solving. Thus, in connection with his rosy views of the potentials of the EU, he places some hope in international organizations. He admits that the expanding universe of organizations such as the World Trade Organization still “reflects the asymmetry of existing power relations.” Following up on this undoubtedly correct observation, Habermas claims that the just solution of the global problems of humankind is contingent on the increase of power wielded by the EU: “the political weight of an EU empowered to act and negotiate in the domain of foreign policy is required … for the arduous task of constructing a new world order”73 in the spirit of Kant’s cosmopolitanism. Why is the EU uniquely well-

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equipped for this task? The answer is because a constitutionalized EU would foreshadow a world organization able and legitimated to negotiate and implement just solutions for global problems.74 In short, a politically constituted EU would replace the arbitrary exercise of power by fair negotiations and the global rule of law. The EU would be the power bloc to end all power politics. It remains unclear, though, how Habermas arrives at this conclusion. The United States of Europe, it seems to

72

For this example, see H. van Houtum and F. Boedeltje, “Europe’s Shame: Death at

the Borders of the EU,” Antipode, vol. 41, no. 2, 2009, p. 226. 73

Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project, p. 94.

74

See ibid., pp. 93–94.

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Orientalizing America • 161

me, would alter existing power relations by adding its own weight without changing the structure of the international system. A new enlarged in-group would emerge out of a bunch of smaller in-groups, which in turn would decrease the total number of units in the system. Habermas would reject this “realist” assessment because he assumes that global political power wielded by Europeans is intrinsically beneficial for others, and that it does not corrupt its holders the way power corrupts others. Once such a view is accepted, it follows that the transformation of the EU into a global player brings about a qualitative leap for the international order. This unwarranted conclusion is even more surprising when we consider that Habermas makes no attempt to assume the perspective that others might have on the Union, including those who were the primary victims of the “bitter experiences” mentioned in the preamble of the Constitutional Treaty, many of whom are not candidates for joining the EU. (2) What are the obstacles to be overcome on the way to a politically united Europe? Here Habermas points not the “populations,” but to the “governments” of the member states as the main culprits.75 It is because governments

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dither that popular support for more ambitious European goals melts away. Another obstacle is the still underdeveloped consciousness of Europeans as Europeans. The current EU has left the state of nature of collective physical insecurity, but has not yet arrived at the stage of civil society. Not only is there no European constitutional government, there is also no “European public sphere.”76 Since Habermas thinks about the EU largely in analogy to the rise of nation-states, he is optimistic that the sense of civic solidarity can be gradually enlarged beyond the boundaries of single states, if the mass media and school curricula can be brought in line.77 The populations of the member states need to develop a shared consciousness of the specificity of their way of life, how this way of life differs from other forms of life, and how outside forces threaten Europe. Although not framed in terms of a friend/foe opposition, this last point is crucial for Habermas’s argument: “Threats to this form of life, and the desire to preserve it, are spurs to a vision of Europe capable of

75

Ibid., p. 102.

76

Habermas, Ach Europa, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2008, p. 91.

77

See Habermas, Time of Transitions, p. 87.

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162 • Chapter Five

responding inventively to current challenges.”78 Once a stronger collective identity within an expanded in-group emerges, the purpose of a European federal republic might be more readily accepted: to fend off the consequences of market anarchy that are harmful not simply for vulnerable members of society, but for an imagined European way of life. Habermas is, of course, right to argue that there are no natural boundaries of civic solidarity. Still, I see two problems. First, as I mentioned before, he expects the citizens to develop their own sense of solidarity following the tracks laid by the EU as it exists. Thus, the citizens of Lithuania, Romania or Greece are to be treated as being “like us,” but not the citizens of Norway, Israel or Serbia. Using his own terminology, one could say that Habermas wants to marry the systems logic of the EU with lifeworld concerns that follow their “own inner logic.”79 Second, although the expansion of civic solidarity is a welcome development, I doubt whether civic solidarity has to be expanded at the expense of more localized or ethnocultural loyalties, as Habermas seems to think. In his enthusiasm for centralization and “harmonization” he forgets the other tradition of federalist thought that values the competition for citizens’ loyalty and sympathy between the federal government and its provincial sub-units. Habermas thinks of national and ethnocultural identifications as something to be overcome in a linear process of abstraction and purification, whereas it might be more appropriate to see them, as Jacob Levy has suggested, as possible counterweights against the power of the central state and thus a resource for federalism.80

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(3) Who is going to transform the precitizens of the preconstitutional entity of the current EU into full-fledged citizens of a European republic? This is a classic question of modern political theory. With no political authority and no public sphere to rely on, the drafters of a constitution are incapable, in Rousseau’s phrase, of using “either force or reasoning.”81 Rousseau solved

78

Habermas, “Why Europe needs a Constitution,” p. 9.

79

Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, p. 323.

80

See J. Levy, “Federalism, Liberalism, and the Separation of Loyalties,” American

Political Science Review, vol. 101, no. 3, 2007, pp. 459–77. 81

Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” II, 7, p. 164.

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Orientalizing America • 163

this problem by introducing the figure of the legislator, who takes “recourse to an authority of a different order.”82 Similarly, Habermas starts with postnational deliberators engaged in the practical discourse of transnational constitution-making. Once this process has been concluded, the constitution, if well done, will slowly “take root”83 in the collective consciousness. Again like Rousseau, he balances this top-down approach by stressing the importance of the consent of citizens to the new order. In a kind of Euro-populist turn, he suggests that postnational deliberators and the citizens of Europe are largely in agreement with regard to the future of the Union. This conviction has not been shaken by the popular rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in the Netherlands and France, which was interpreted by Habermas not as a protest against further integration and expansion of the Union, but as a protest against the absence of a European welfare state able to counterbalance the effects of “unbridled markets”84 in Europe. This interpretation is capricious for a number of reasons. Apart from the fact that open, “unbridled” markets have only been partially realized—in particular the massive and growing services sector of the EU economy is not integrated—one should recall that open markets are the very basis of European integration, whose founders were convinced that trade among nations would foster mutually beneficial relations and reduce the likelihood of war. If it were true that the Dutch and French voters are opposed to the free movement of goods, persons and capital within the EU, the European project would indeed be threatened to its core. The reality is, however, that vast

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majorities of Europeans are not against the single market, but against evergrowing powers for European policy-makers. Habermas himself has given the reason for this opposition: in its current institutional form, he writes, Europe is “an elite project above the heads of the peoples concerned.”85 His illusion is that the EU could be democratized without fundamentally affecting the institutions, methods and goals of integration process itself.

82

Ibid., p. 164.

83

Habermas, Time of Transitions, p. 87.

84

Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project, p. 56.

85

Ibid., p. 80.

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164 • Chapter Five

The European integration did not accidentally lead to the expansion of the executive power of the supranational EU Commission and the corresponding decline of the ability of national parliaments or ordinary citizens to hold the Commission accountable for policy failures; it is based on a trade-off between integration and democracy.86 If philosophers were able to sing the equivalent of a European people into existence, this people would support the economic free trade zone that is anathema to Habermas, but not much more.87 In sum, Habermas’s political philosophy of Europe fails on two counts. First, whereas one could argue that historically Europeans were good at surprising the world with something new, Habermas’s Eurofederalism is rooted in tired and misleading analogies between the nation-state and the EU. Not enough thought is given to other possible futures of the EU, which might not become a bigger nation-state, but perhaps a laboratory for less hierarchical, more experimental and networked modes of governance; not a new power on the world stage, but perhaps an innovative force able to influence the exercise of power by others. Second, the fact that Habermas’s European ideal is lacking in originality does not imply that it is easy to realize. The philosopher fails to show a path of how to anchor his overambitious concept of a European volonté générale in the mundane realities of the volonté de tous. In his late articles on Europe, Habermas shows a tendency to circumvent this dilemma by dismissing the relevance of the latter. Whereas in Between Facts and Norms he has reduced the public sphere to its function as a “warning system”88 for political deci-

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sion-makers, he now seems to regard the views and opinions of real citizens as malleable in the hands of suitably qualified experts. In a plea for an

86

See, in particular, Majone, Europe as the Would-Be World Power, pp. 158–65.

87

See ibid., p. 129. Habermas’s celebration of France and Germany as “core Europe”

is misplaced, too. In early 2010, when it became public that the government of Greece had fudged statistics in order to be able to join the eurozone, and other EU members were considering subsidies and loans for the country on the verge of defaulting, majorities in those countries expressed a preference for kicked Greece out of the euro zone. See B. Crumley, “In Paris and Berlin, Fury Over a Greek Bailout,” Time Magazine, February 16, 2010. 88

Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and

Democracy, trans. W. Rehg, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1998, p. 359.

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Orientalizing America • 165

integrated European economic government, published in 2010, he calls upon the political elites of the European Union to remain unfazed by the lack of public support, reassuring them that carefully crafted “deliberation” would yield more favorable results for the European statebuilding project than mere “opinion polls.”89 In statements like these, Habermas betrays his inclination to view the world from purely ideal perspectives and with little patience for what the European project is really about: creating a peaceful regional order

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out of the states and peoples as they actually exist.

89

Habermas, “Wir brauchen Europa!,” Die Zeit, May 27, 2010.

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Chapter Six Age of Access? The Place of Property in Critical Theory

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The concept of property is notable for its absence from the critical theory of society, including the theory of recognition. This has become particularly striking in the more recent debate about the balance to be struck between “recognition” and “redistribution” as competing or overlapping principles of justice.1 If Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, the two adversaries in this debate, had been aware of the role of property in modern society, they would have been forced to conclude that property is both things: it is the object and target of redistributive policies; at the same time, it is protected by rights and deeply intertwined with demands for recognition. Property is an economic institution which is shot through with moral expectations. As such, it sits at the point of intersection between struggles for recognition and struggles for redistribution. A further factor is that as a concept of property is hard to pin down. This gives rise to a twofold task.

1

See N. Fraser and A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical

Exchange, trans. J. Gelb, J. Ingram, and C. Wilke, London and New York, Verso, 2003.

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Age of Access? • 167

On the one hand, it is essential to clarify the role of property in the politics of recognition; on the other, the concept itself must be defined with greater precision. A powerful early example of modern thinking about property is Locke’s famously broad concept of property that cuts across the distinction between being and having. Locke argues in the Second Treatise that what I own is what

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I am, in other words, my person, my actions and whatever can be attributed to me as the result of my own labor.2 Later on, the concept of property was narrowed down to the lawful power to exercise control over external objects of whatever kind, without however wholly disappearing from the center of political theory. This central role is maintained throughout the entire tradition from Locke via Hegel and down to Marx and derives from the circumstance that property is always two things at once: it is the guarantor of freedom and self-realization but at also the source of potentially illegitimate social power. We might have expected this ambiguous status to give rise to a sustained interest in property. In the event, however, property has tended to fall out of fashion as an object of political theory and analysis of contemporary society. It is particularly noteworthy that in this process the critique of power has become detached from any critique of property. Thus, when seeking significant sources of power nowadays most authors look less at property than at modern organizations, strategic communications or knowledge. This abandonment of the theoretical preoccupation with the concept of property stands in striking contrast to the return to a practical critique of property and the realities of a plethora of conflicts relating to property in contemporary society. Locke could still be confident that his own nose belonged to him, while today the courts are asked to decide whether, for example, I may still retain control over infected tissue that has been removed from my body and whether in that sense my own illness still belongs to me.3 The links between property

2

See J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690), ed. P. Laslett, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1988, II, § 27–30. 3

See J.A. Bovenberg, Property Rights in Blood, Genes and Data: Naturally Yours?,

Leiden and Boston, Martinus Nijhoff, 2006, p. 5.

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168 • Chapter Six

and one’s own labor have long since been broken, and today we see the further dissolution of all the fundamental conditions that enable us to identify what the proprium of property actually is. What had always seemed to be the self-evident and fixed nature of property—not for nothing did the concept have its roots in the image of an enclosed piece of land—evaporates in the flux of social and legal constructions. At the same time, this process is accompanied by very real conflicts of all sorts. These conflicts over, for example, a wide range of “pirated” goods are defined by moral expectations whose legitimacy can be judged only in the light of a conception of just property. In what follows I assemble material for such a critique of property. In so doing, I use the term “property” as being synonymous with ‘private’ property, since private property is both the logical starting point for the development of modern forms of what appears to be non-private or collective property and the focus of justice claims associated with it.4 Moreover, I distinguish the critique of property from the criticism of the market. “Property” is different from and more fundamental than the “market,” partly because property is an independent source of social power in a way that is quite different from the market, and partly because it is possible to obtain goods in order to withhold them from the market and prevent their commercialization in the long term.

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I proceed in three steps. First, I wish to show briefly that the history of modern capitalist society cannot be reduced to a history of and apologia for the limitless expansion of property, a process not corrected until the advent of the workers’ movement. On the contrary, there is a specific liberal critique of property. In this context, Critical Theory is interesting because it broke with both liberal and Marxist critiques of property. In addition, it explicitly and from the very outset advocated the study of other sources of power (I). Second, I explain that the neglect by critical theorists of the persistent implications of property would not be a matter for regret, were it not for the fact that contemporary societies are still marked by a host of social conflicts that can be described only as conflicts about property. These include conflicts about intellectual property rights such as patents or copyright, disputes about control of and trade with one’s own body parts or those of others including

4

See R. Castel, Les métamorphoses de la question sociale: une chronique du salariat, Paris,

Fayard, 1995, ch. 5.

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Age of Access? • 169

their underlying genetic materials, and lastly, disputes about land rights (II). All these disputes prompt questions about both social and global justice. In light of this, I go on in the third section to discuss how a recognition theory of justice helps us to better describe and evaluate contemporary struggles over property institutions (III).

I. The rise and demise of the critique of property The historical assumptions underlying modern capitalist society include not only the expansion and consolidation of private property but also the criticism of property and its curtailment. Frequently, only the first aspect is noted. This leads to the characterization of the history of western modernity since the eighteenth century as a one-dimensional process in which “more and more actors, objects, relations, spheres of law, and territories fall under the spell of the concept of property.”5 A linear interpretation of this kind, how-

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ever, overlooks the no less significant, countervailing process in which goods and subjects were excluded from the realm of property. Thus, nowadays neither public offices nor inhabited national territories may be bought and sold, something that seemed perfectly natural to Montesquieu, for example, or to the diplomats who negotiated the sale of over 800,000 square miles of the vast French Louisiana territories to the United States in Paris in 1803. Above all, however, the thesis of a limitless expansion of property ignores the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the North Atlantic world. This marked a break with the past of enormous importance; its consequence was that, henceforth, one could be the lawful owner only of things (plus, perhaps, of oneself). Since then, it has become generally accepted that we can purchase services but not the people who perform those services. The reason is that rights were no longer derived from the status in society but were lodged in the human subject as such. The moral progress represented by this massive curtailment of the institution of property can be gauged when we recall the scenes that were played out in the slaveholding States of the confederacy before the American Civil War. From historians like Walter Johnson we have learned

5

H. Siegrist, “Die Propertisierung von Gesellschaft und Kultur: Konstruktion und

Institutionalisierung des Eigentums in der Moderne,” Comparativ (Leipzig), vol. 16, nos. 5/6, 2006, p. 43.

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170 • Chapter Six

about many of the minutiae of being a slave: how on market days slaves would be washed and groomed, after which they would be carefully sorted into more or less homogeneous groups according to various physical characteristics such as size, age and sex. How they would then be put on display in different price ranges like goods and exposed to the expert gaze of prospective buyers who would closely inspect their teeth and their physical condition. And how buyers would frequently try to beat the price down for such defects as limps or missing fingers before these workers imported from overseas could change hands.6 Only with the abolition of human property did it become possible to credit those who had been held as slaves with the universal attributes of freedom and reason that they shared with all other human beings. Or, more precisely, only the onset of recognition of all our fellow-humans as full possessors of the attributes of freedom and reason made the abolition of human property possible. It is not for nothing that Hegel did not view the relations between “master” and “servant” simply as an abstract model for the better understanding of power relations in general. On the contrary, he regarded the need to overcome the historically specific relations between slaves and slave owners as the central premise for the development of “self-consciousness” and hence of bourgeois society as such.7 Similar considerations also persuaded Hegel to reject as immoral the idea contained in Roman law that children are the property of their parents. Thus the rise of modern capitalist society was accompanied by the strengthening of specific property rights, but also by a

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more than rhetorical drumbeat attacking the ownership of particular goods such as slaves, children, public offices, and territories. In addition to external limits, however, the modern critique of property has also attempted to define the internal limits of property. The crucial internal limit arises from two circumstances. First, there can be no property in the absence of a legal authority that protects it and resolves disputes both between property owners and between property owners and those who own no

6

See W. Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Cambridge,

Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999, ch. 4. 7

See T. Burns, “Hegel, Identity Politics and the Problem of Slavery,” Culture, Theory

and Critique, vol. 47, no. 1, 2006, pp. 87–104.

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Age of Access? • 171

property. Governments have to define property rights and answer questions such as, for example, whether I may eat the apples that fall off the neighbor’s tree into my yard, whether the state has to compensate food producers whose products have been seized for health reasons, whether spouses have a right to one another’s income, and whether this applied to gay couples as well. Moreover, the state itself depends on taxes that it can collect only if it has the right to lay hands on the property of others. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton drew attention to this basic fact by insisting that in the final analysis all sources of income must be capable of being accessed for the benefit of the public good, particularly in times of emergencies.8 He thus anticipated the idea that private property is intrinsically connected to certain public responsibilities. Property is not a natural given but the product of legal provisions to which tax law, among other things, makes a far from insignificant contribution.9 The second internal limit of property arises from the fact that, even where property rights are well-protected, they regularly help to undermine the property rights of many individuals or groups. More precisely, the rights to keep, use and control assets that have been legally acquired as property by some often make it impossible for many to keep and use an adequate amount of assets as property. In this specific sense, the guarantee of the right to own property is synonymous with the denial of the right to own property. This had already been noted by Marx in his newspaper commentaries on “The Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood”: “By my private ownership do I not exclude every other person from this ownership?”10 Subsequently, too, Marx criticized capitalism not so much because it protected property as because it is based on “the worker’s lack of property” and “the theft of other men’s working time.”11 Modern capitalism, Hannah Arendt concurred, is a continuous

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8

See Federalist, nos. 13 and 23, in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, pp. 71,

133–34. 9

See L. Murphy and T. Nagel, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, New York,

Oxford University Press, 2002. 10

Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood” (1842), in K. Marx and F. Engels,

Collected Works, vol. 1, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1975, p. 228. 11

Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1857–58), Berlin, Dietz, 1974,

pp. 414, 593; emphasis added. Jon Elster has pointed out that Marx’s terminology

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172 • Chapter Six

“process of expropriation”12—a proposition that has again been proved to be true by key features of neoliberal finance capitalism such as asset stripping through mergers and acquisitions, the raiding of pension funds and their decimation by stock and corporate collapses, and credit and stock manipulations. The peculiar dynamic of accumulation through expropriation distinguishes the right to own property from other basic rights such as the right of free expression or assembly where the unconstrained exercise of one’s rights by one group is not impaired by the fact that other groups can also exercise the same rights. In a word, private property is indispensable, but cannot be universalized.13 From the point of view of classical liberal political theory, property, like a powerful lens, seemed to concentrate all the advances and all the ills of bourgeois society. Liberal theory welcomed the fact that property helped people to express themselves and underpinned their liberty. At the same time, even resolute defenders of property such as the drafters of the American constitution realized that property owners exploited their exclusive rights of action to claim a disproportionate share of the national wealth and to exclude nonowners from bourgeois society. Marx’s criticism of the theft of other people’s labor time reveals something of the normative ambivalence of the older liberal position, which simultaneously defended property and criticized it. This ambivalent attitude toward property can no longer be discerned in the first generation of representatives of the Frankfurt School. Interestingly, the critical theory of society remained caught in a curious contradiction as a result of which it declared capitalism to be the ultimate foundation of all the ills

is somewhat misleading. The concept of theft presupposes an object that existed before the act of theft takes place, whereas Marx evidently has in mind a process in Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

which the act of theft coincides with both the production of the stolen property and that of the “property owner” who has been robbed. See J. Elster, Making Sense of Marx, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 222–29. 12

Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” in Arendt, Crises of the Republic,

New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, p. 212. 13

See L.S. Underkuffler, The Idea of Property: Its Meaning and Power, Oxford, Oxford

University Press, 2003, pp. 140–41; J.W. Singer, Entitlement: The Paradoxes of Property, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000, ch. 1.

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Age of Access? • 173

afflicting the present age, while at the same time it radically downplayed the notion of property as the central source of power in modern society. As early as in the 1940s, Herbert Marcuse writes: “The process of production now tends to dissolve the link between the traditional form of property and social control.”14 If property is mentioned as relevant, then usually as an essential and now threatened safeguard for freedom. In this sense, Horkheimer notes in the late 1930s that “private property has outlived itself.”15 According to the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, both liberty and property wither away in the “civilization of employees”: “the possibility of becoming an economic subject, an entrepreneur, a proprietor, is entirely liquidated … All have become employees.”16 Even the bourgeoisie becomes proletarian in the sense that its members live, work, consume and die without accumulating family properties to be handed down to the next generation.17 In a similar vein, Wittfogel links the absence of freedom in China to the weakening of property rights.18 The history of Critical Theory can be read as a history of the replacement of property by other factors that were now seen as more fateful sources of political wrong turnings, cultural deformations and avoidable social suffering. To replace property, various representatives of the Frankfurt School have succeeded in presenting the public with an array of new targets for criticism, among them the destructiveness of “technology,” the power of vast, opaque “organizations” or the domination of society by manipulatory “rackets.” The conflicting tendencies within the School were united on the question of aban-

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doning the long tradition of the critique of property because no one wished to believe any more that property could still occupy a central position as a source of power or that the legitimacy of property rights could be the object of social conflicts in the future. By the same token, a further reason for their reluctance

14

Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” (1941) in Collected

Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 1, p. 64. 15

Horkheimer, “The Jews and Europe,” p. 82.

16

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 123.

17

See Adorno, “Notizen zur neuen Anthropologie” (1941), p. 460.

18

Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, pp. 228–29.

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174 • Chapter Six

to defend property was that they had ceased to believe in the ideal of the free individual that theorists from Locke to Hegel insisted was to be realized through the ownership of property. The norm formulated even by Marx that “the security and happiness vouchsafed by property should be made available to all,”19 had lost all its force, according to Horkheimer in the 1930s. Where “property rights” are still spoken of it is only to point out their damaging consequences and to assert that they do not make people free but only “impenitently malign.”20 This line of a critique of capitalism without a critique of property was perpetuated by subsequent generations of critical theorists including Habermas and, more recently, Honneth and his collaborators.21 Critical theorists have continued to disconnect power and property, very much in agreement with the broad current of post-World War II sociology that has focused on power elites, mechanisms of social closure or the new class of experts—all theories that explain social power without focusing on the private ownership of property, thereby reducing property to a residual category.

II. Struggles over property as struggles for recognition Unfortunately, however, the disappearance of the critique of property leaves a painful lacuna, since conflicts over property arrangements continue to be a significant feature of contemporary liberal-capitalist societies. It is, therefore, essential that we develop a vocabulary that is appropriate for dealing with

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these conflicts. As we will see, these conflicts are evidently about the distribution of material resources, but also about the recognition of rights, the value placed on contributions toward the reproduction of society, and the degree of consideration to be shown to specific hardship cases. Conflicts about property are always at the same time conflicts involving the justification and

19

Horkheimer, “Diskussionen über die Differenz zwischen Positivismus und mate-

rialistischer Dialektik” (1939), in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12, p. 438. 20

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 34 (entry 14).

21

See M. Hartmann and A. Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism,” Constellations, vol.

13, no. 1, 2006, pp. 41–58.

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Age of Access? • 175

redefinition of property itself. Before outlining some of these conflicts I would like to interpolate the useful minimal definition of property given by the prominent British legal scholar James Harris in his book Property and Justice. According to Harris, property consists not of objects but, first, of binding rules governing access to particular possessions, and second, of the right to make use of and exercise control over possessions.22 The emphasis Harris places on “trespassory rules,” that is, rights of access, means that the protection afforded to property is not an afterthought. Quite the reverse, in fact: property is not legally constituted until trespassory rules are properly codified. Trespassory rules enable property owners to exclude the rest of the world from making use of their property. Communal property is likewise defined by trespassory rules that affect all non-members of the community. In this abstract sense all property is “private.”23 Even the socializing or nationalizing of property involves drawing a line between collective property and categories of people who have no rights over property, such as non-citizens, non-proletarians or non-party members. To illustrate this point by way of example: 90 per cent of the richest Chinese are children of Party officials or bureaucrats.24 Property does not necessarily mean that others will be excluded in fact, only that they can be excluded at any time and without much ado by way of argument.25 Trespassory rules draw a line between a secured inner world and a potentially threatening or otherwise unwelcome external world of interlopers. It is not for nothing that drawing a line through property has been used

22

See J.W. Harris, Property and Justice, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996, ch. 3.

23

“[C]ollective ownership is, if you reflect for a second, a contradiction in terms,”

as Arendt has put it in “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” p. 214. Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

24

See G. Walden, “A Greater Leap,” Times Literary Supplement, August 8, 2008, p. 3.

Walden is drawing on statistics compiled by J.-L. Domenach, La Chine m’inquiète, Paris, Perrin Asie, 2008. 25

This is why it is wrong to make a logical leap from the possibility of access to

goods to the “disappearance of property,” in other words, to the disappearance of the option of refusing access. This fallacy underlies a well known book by J. Rifkin, The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, New York, J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000.

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176 • Chapter Six

as a model for drawing lines through the sovereign state, which likewise institutionalizes territorial trespassory rules after its own fashion.26 Now, trespassory rules do not tell us anything about the contents of a property institution and whether an estate or a resource is being put to good use. It is for this reason that the spectrum of possible uses (the “ownership spectrum”) forms the second element of Harris’s definition of property. Private property literally possesses an infinite number of possible uses. This observation carries the implication that property is not automatically identical with the market. Each of us is free to let his property go to rack and ruin instead of using or selling it—a point that was already made by the French anarchist PierreJoseph Proudhon.27 Such uses or abuses should be distinguished in their turn from the right to transfer property to other persons. This right is more strictly regulated and varies according to the distribution of power within a society as well as to the nature of the property concerned. We can readily imagine a social order that guarantees private property but severely limits the right to transfer it, thus hampering the development of a market economy. The fact that one may be permitted to buy a handgun in a particular country, for example, does not mean that one has absolute freedom to sell it on, lend it or bequeath it. Within modern liberal societies there is a spectrum of the transferability of property. At one end there is property in money form with its numerous derivatives that are directly defined by the nature of their transferability. At the other end there are such phenomena as so-called usufruct, which allows a person to take possession of let us say a plot of land and to derive benefit from it, but without conferring on him the right to sell or bequeath it. Or again, there are the “moral rights” of authors or artists which may be upheld in courts of law but which cannot normally be transferred.28

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26

See K. Burch, “Property” and the Making of the International System, Boulder,

Colo., Lynne Rienner, 1998, pp. 143–47; see also the analogy between “territory” and “property” in J. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 38–39. 27

See P. Garnsey, Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution,

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 177. 28

The distinction between ownership rights and contractual rights, the use and

transfer of property has been much emphasized and discussed in the recent literature. See, for example, Harris, Property and Justice, ch. 3.

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Age of Access? • 177

Evidently, any given trespassory rules are just as open to moral challenge as are institutional use privileges and control powers. Conventional conflicts about distribution, therefore, are only one aspect of a far greater complex of property disputes. Such conflicts frequently focus on the design of the institutions governing property themselves by pressing for changes in trespassory rules or for limitations to the rules governing the use and transfer of property. Disputes about property are interesting precisely because the relationship between property and justice is so complicated. The fact is that weakening property rights, whether by relaxing the rules governing access or by restricting the rights of use, does not automatically lead to the creation of greater social justice. It is rather the case that individual private property is itself a component of a just social order. This has prima facie validity at the very least, as Harris adds cautiously, appealing to Hegel for authority.29 Significantly, Hegel criticizes the idea of “communal property and a ban on the principle of private property”30 not as impracticable but as unjust because it fails to recognize the inner connections between the development of subjective freedom and the establishment of institutions of property. The difficulty of judging property as a matter of principle and without regard to context makes it advisable to put the question of the value of property institutions to the test by measuring them against the empirical material of observable, real world conflicts. Therefore, I now briefly survey some key conflicts in contemporary capitalist societies that are waged about ownership rights to land, the human body, and products of the human mind. The triad land/body/mind sounds more comprehensive than is intended. In actual fact, I focus only on a few selected disputes that seem to me to help advance our thinking about a critique of property appropriate to our times.

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Land The starting point for all modern disputes about property is the question of what is to be regarded as property and treated as such. I have already referred

29

See ibid., pp. 236–37.

30

G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A.W. Wood, trans.

H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, § 46.

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178 • Chapter Six

to the example of slavery and its gradual abolition. Another example is provided by the disagreements among the early European settlers in New England about whether the native Indians could lay claim to any rights over the land that they exploited. The predominant view was one that went back to Locke and maintained that enduring property rights could be secured only by cultivating the land and not simply by roaming through a landscape. But equally, individual voices were raised in defense of the idea that such practices as hunting or wood-burning were effective forms of appropriation. The Indians, so they observed, had as much right to their land as the King of England could claim the Royal Forests.31 James Madison too marshaled constitutional and philosophical arguments to defend the land rights of some Indian tribes, in particular the Cherokees, against the ultimately successful attempts to expel them by force.32 I mention these historical details because disputes about land rights remain a source of conflicts even in contemporary liberal societies. The case of Jewish settlements on privately owned Arab lands in the West Bank, which are illegal by Israel’s own standards, is a prominent example.33 But there are also less-publicized struggles of indigenous inhabitants of the neo-European settler societies in the former British Empire (USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) that have flared up once again since the 1960s. Social movements on the part of the descendants of the native peoples found symbolic expression in such events as the occupation by thousands of Indians of the abandoned island of Alcatraz offshore San Francisco in 1969. From the very outset, such

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movements have been about ownership rights and “sovereignty.” In Canada alone there are several hundred unresolved legal disputes about collective land rights today. Some of these disputes have triggered violent clashes, for example, those of the Mohawks of Quebec and Ontario who have several

31

See W. Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New

England, New York, Hill and Wang, 1983, p. 57. 32

See J. Levy, “Indians in Madison’s Constitutional Order,” in James Madison and the

Future of Limited Government, ed. J. Samples, Washington, DC, Cato Institute, 2002, pp. 125–29. 33

See, for example, I. Kershner, “Israeli Advocacy Group Begins Campaign to Help

Palestinians Sue Over Settlements,” New York Times, January 31, 2009.

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Age of Access? • 179

times blocked the heavily used railway line linking Montreal and Toronto. Such echoes of the Wild West, however, should not make us forget that in all the countries affected legal mechanisms for conflict resolution have been put in place, although none of these countries has ratified the relevant international treaties such as the “Convention concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries” of the International Labour Organization (ILO), whose purpose is “to recognize the rights of ownership and possession of the peoples concerned over the lands which they traditionally occupy” (Article 14), as well as to prevent persons not belonging to these peoples from securing the ownership of any lands so protected (Article 17). Indigenous struggles for property rights in democratic countries are directed toward agreements with governments in which native inhabitants are granted a group ownership which like all ownership has two facets. It is governed, first, by trespassory rules that prevent all those who do not live in particular territories traditionally inhabited by the indigenous population from exploiting these territories or that make their exploitation dependent on the approval of the native population. Second, the relevant agreements specify certain use privileges such as, for example, particular hunting or fishing rights. All such cases are instances of typical struggles for recognition that assume the form of struggles for good title that will result in an equitable distribution.34

Bodies

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Another prominent area of conflict concerns disputes about the ownership of and trade in human bodies or body parts. Locke’s formula about man’s ownership of himself—“every Man has a Property in his own Person”35—has acquired a totally unexpected relevance again. Two empirical trends have spurred new discussions about the meaning of self-ownership. The first is the traffic in human beings and the various types of forced labor associated with it and that are now officially treated as a new form of slavery.36 The second is

34

See Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” pp. 150–59.

35

Locke, Two Treatises, II, § 27.

36

According to official estimates, around 800,000 people were smuggled across

international borders in 2006. Half of these were minors and 80 per cent were women and girls. See U.S. Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report 2007, p. 8.

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180 • Chapter Six

the worldwide illegal trade in body organs which are supplied for the most part from Chinese sources.37 To be sure, it has been these developments in the realm of the transfer of organs and body substances that have led to a situation in which few writers are prepared to take the notion of the self-ownership of the human person all too literally. The consensus of legal opinion on both sides of Atlantic has been best formulated by Stephen Munzer, when he argues that people do not “own” their bodies in the full sense of the word, even though they possess certain limited or “weak” rights of ownership to it.38 Thus no one disputes that I can do with my hair what I want and that I can sell it to a wigmaker if I wish. More generally, my body belongs to me in much the same way as my life or the coming weekend “belong” to me, namely in a figurative sense that bears no relation to the structural characteristics of property institutions. No one doubts that serfdom is impermissible even if the affected person enters into it of her own free will. Nor is it possible for people to take out a patent on their own person as was recently attempted by an artist from Bristol, England, who applied to the British Patent Office for this purpose.39 Furthermore, both in the United States and the member states of the European Union there has been an unambiguous prohibition, up to now at any rate, on the commercial sale and purchase of the organs of both the living and the dead.40

37

Some of the reasons for this situation have been analyzed in D. Matas and

D. Kilgour, Bloody Harvest: Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China, Woodstock, Ontario, Seraphim Editions, 2009. 38

S.R. Munzer, A Theory of Property, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990,

pp. 40–41. 39

See B. Amani and R.J. Coombe, “The Human Genome Diversity Project: The

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Politics of Patents at the Intersection of Race, Religion, and Research Ethics,” Law and Policy, vol. 27, no. 1, 2005, p. 152. 40

Even radical market-oriented proposals from the vicinity of conservative think

tanks in the United States do not go beyond calling for a strengthening of the claims and property rights of transplant centers at the expense of surviving dependants. Furthermore, the debate has focused on claims on organs belonging to the dead, not to those still living. See D.L. Kaserman and A.H. Barnett, The U.S. Organ Procurement System: A Prescription for Reform, Washington, DC, American Enterprise Institute Press, 2002.

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Age of Access? • 181

This fairly robust consensus about the limits of body rights has only recently begun to crumble, following the development of new technologies and business opportunities. In the first place, it is possible nowadays to remove organs, tissue, egg cells and DNA safely from living or dead bodies and to transport them in sealed cold chain systems, store them over the long term in bio-banks and implant them in other bodies. This gives rise to a variety of novel, frequently lucrative opportunities that have led to the emergence of an independent bio-economy. These opportunities in turn help to unleash a struggle for property constituting use privileges and trespassory rules. We may summarize the current consensus (which may not last forever) by saying that human beings have a right to bodily integrity and hence to access to their own bodies and its component parts, but not to the use privileges or vendor rights in the sense intended by property law. Such rights belong instead to what Harris terms “the first knowing appropriator.”41 From a distance, this interesting new coinage is reminiscent of colonial discourse in which a no-man’s land is appropriated by “discovery” and first sighting. In actual fact, the Moore case has become the starting point for a series of initiatives that radicalize Locke’s concept of self-ownership and attempt to procure for every citizen rights of ownership over her own body. Under the slogan of protecting the “genetic private sphere,” particularly in the United States, new laws claiming to enhance the protection of the personality are continually under discussion. These initiatives are frequently supported by well-networked groups of patients and foundations. Some of these groups have established independent databases and tissue banks and have built up groups of researchers with whom they collaborate on the basis of contracts that explicitly recognize the rights of all patients to own their own bodies.42

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Products of the mind A number of new conflicts arise from strong disagreements about the status and scope of ‘intellectual’ property. Here we have a case where in fact the modern “limitation of the concept of ‘property’ to material goods”43 is to some

41

Harris, Property and Justice, p. 354.

42

See Bovenberg, Property Rights in Blood, Genes and Data, pp. 123–26.

43

Weber, Economy and Society, p. 113.

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182 • Chapter Six

extent in the process of being reversed. The dynamic of intellectual property rights or of Immaterialgüter, to use the term favored by German legalese, is driven by interests arising from the advances in information and biotechnologies. We can see an expansion of intellectual property rights in a number of directions. First, it can be observed that the historically lower barriers protecting intangible assets move closer to those of material goods. Intellectual property rights, such as patents, trademarks and copyrights, are increasingly treated as forms of property like any others. Second, intellectual property rights are expanding into new fields such as computer programs or the genetic material of living creatures. Third, the use of international treaties, in particular, the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of 1994, to raise and materially extend the standard of protection, also led to the removal of spatial limitations and to a global legal regime to which even developing nations would have to accede.

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The property disputes arising from these trends can be divided into two principal lines of conflict. First, there are conflicts between producers and thwarted consumers or competitors. These conflicts result from raising the standard of protection for particular goods, which take on the form of territorial barriers to market access. Some of the implications of this situation became apparent to all the participants only with the worldwide HIV/Aids crisis. Aids activists in South Africa and international aid organizations have established a connection between granting patents for drugs, the ban on the parallel import of cheap generic drugs to treat Aids patients as a result of the TRIPS Agreement, and the avoidable death of these patients. Whereas the United Nations and various foundations call on the public and politicians to provide more aid, more radical critics go one step further and castigate the industrialized nations not simply for doing nothing or too little to help the world’s poor, but for introducing new property rules that only intensify what is already a catastrophic health crisis.44 Second, there are conflicts between originators and consumers or users that arise partly from opposing economic interests, partly from diverging interests in

44

See V. Heins, “Human Rights, Intellectual Property, and Struggles for Recognition,”

Human Rights Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2008, pp. 213–32.

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Age of Access? • 183

fidelity to the original works, and in the distribution and adaptation of intellectual products, whether in the form of sound, text or image. Copyrights and brand rights illustrate once again the normative ambivalence of property. On the one hand, intellectual property directly serves the self-realization of authors and composers who through their works become magnets of public recognition (as well as the beneficiaries of royalties derived from their copyright). On the other hand, however, intellectual property rights threaten the freedom of self-expression and the aesthetic autonomy of users and practitioners, since they set increasingly narrow limits to the creative practices of borrowing, revising, reinterpreting and sampling.45 Intellectual property rights are felt to be restrictive as soon as the mere re-arrangement of a preexisting artifact becomes a consciously cultivated practice. However, such rearrangements are symptomatic of an age of experimental and post-auratic art, or indeed from the new web-based communities, hosted services and virtual worlds, in which the line between makers and partakers is being systematically blurred. Of course, the fact that outright abolition of copyright is no solution becomes obvious in cases in which, instead of lone creative talents being exploited by media corporations, we find artists seeking to defend their individuality against industrial pirates. For example, the singer Tom Waits successfully sued a major German car manufacturer for having ignored his explicit objections and for having gone ahead with a commercial enhanced by a vocal accompaniment that was intended to remind the listener of Waits’s own distinctive baritone voice.46

III. The place of property in struggles for justice

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The examples sketched here make a number of things clear. Disputes about property have not been relegated to the past. Rather, they continue to inform

45

See, for example, J. Demers, Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects

Musical Creativity, Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press, 2006. 46

See B. Sisario, “Still Fighting for the Right to His Voice,” New York Times, January

20, 2006. For a detailed discussion of this case, see A. Danoff, “The Moral Rights Act of 2007: Finding the Melody in the Music,” Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship and the Law, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 181–207.

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184 • Chapter Six

contemporary societies. Moreover, such disputes give new meaning to Wittfogel’s insight that “property is a political phenomenon,”47 closely tied up with questions of democracy and the politics of recognition. Property institutions affect the balance of power within a society and can damage the autonomy and sense of self-worth of citizens. At the same time, property can satisfy the needs of individuals, strengthen their autonomy and become a legitimate expression of achievement. From this I conclude that the fairness of property arrangements cannot be judged in abstracto. Does this mean that social-democratic jurists such as Ernst Fraenkel and Karl Renner were justified in thinking about property as neutral and “beyond good and evil”?48 The short answer is: not entirely. It is more accurate to say that it can be “good” or “evil” depending on context.

Just property Property is “good” in the sense that it is a right like other rights, even if there is a centuries-old controversy about whether property rights are human rights.49 Because owning property is a right it becomes important to distinguish carefully the exclusive character and the use privileges integral to the concept of property from the effects of property distribution in an economy based on private ownership. This distinction is in its turn central to our understanding that property is two things at once: a right, and hence a dimension of mutual recognition; and a reference point for demands for material redistribution. Property is a right that, like all rights, protects individual

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autonomy; at the same time, it is an invitation to cooperate with others. This interactive character is something property rights have in common with other rights that for this reason, according to Honneth, “should be understood as independent, originary sources of social recognition in modern societies.”50

47

Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, p. 228.

48

E. Fraenkel, “Karl Renner: Die Rechtsinstitute des Privatrechts und ihre soziale

Funktion” (1929), in Fraenkel, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1: Recht und Politik in der Weimarer Republik, ed. H. Buchstein, Baden-Baden, Nomos, 1999, p. 367. 49

See Garnsey, Thinking about Property, ch. 8.

50

Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or

Recognition?, p. 252.

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Age of Access? • 185

The implication of this view is that economic redistribution in favor of relatively disadvantaged sectors of society may itself be unjust if property rights are infringed. To underscore this last point I give a somewhat drastic example. The German historian Götz Aly has shown that the “Aryanization” of Jewish property in Nazi Germany and the countries that were occupied during the war in part benefited poorer sectors of the population in the Reich itself by contributing to the construction of a perverted kind of “welfare state.”51 If this assertion turns out to be empirically sustainable, it would not only be an extreme case of overlap between redistribution and radical disrespect, but also an instance in which the flouting of property rights in the course of a centrally planned redistribution policy is closely intertwined with the flouting of every other right to which human beings can lay claim. Making a complete mockery of the deep legal turn of the twentieth century that has led to FDR’s Second Bill of Rights and the introduction of true welfare state reforms, Nazi Germany launched massive expropriations without compensation that violated property rights and were a prelude to or symptom of the violations of other basic rights. Aly’s narrative can also be turned on its head. While redistribution can be unjust, the restitution of goods can develop into an urgent question of justice. Is it difficult to deny, for example, that Jewish families have a right to the return of works of art that were stolen from their immediate forebears by the Nazis. And I do not see how this right to restitution could be diminished or reduced in scope merely because those who reclaim their stolen works of art already own a large number of other works of art. This line of reasoning can be read as a defense of Hegel’s assumption that at its most basic level a theory of property must be “distributionally blind.”52

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Struggles over redistribution must be subordinate to the recognition of the right to own property, if they are to be more than plundering raids in which

51

See G. Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State, trans.

J. Chase, New York, Henry Holt and Co., 2007. Aly seems to argue against Horkheimer and Adorno who noted in passing that the Aryanization of Jewish property “primarily benefited those at the top” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 139). 52

Harris, Property and Justice, p. 246.

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186 • Chapter Six

those in power at a given time will have the upper hand. Put differently, we also have to accept that the protection of property rights can be an imperative of social justice, even if demands for greater equality are not met.

Socially embedded property However, the characterization of property as a subjective right is incomplete and leaves important considerations out of account. Emile Durkheim has already emphasized that property rights make no sense if proprietors do not use these rights in ways that promote the “moral aims”53 of a cooperative society. Without mentioning Durkheim, various North American authors have recently made the same point. Carol Rose maintains that property is surrounded by a rhetoric of “heroic autonomy” even though in reality it is a profoundly social institution in which “autonomy and cooperation are inextricably intertwined.”54 The Canadian legal scholar David Lametti defines this idea more precisely, arguing that actual property institutions cannot be separated from the wider moral context of the society in which they are embedded. Referring to the threefold distinction introduced by Ronald Dworkin, Lametti insists that, alongside “rights,” “duties” and “goals” also enter into the design of these institutions.55 Accordingly, duties and goals are not to be thought of as principles that are external to property and restrict its freedom. On the contrary, property is brought into being as a composite, plural institution from the outset. From a different theoretical perspective, we might say that property as a legit-

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imate institution is not only defined by legal rights. Property arrangements can also be judged and shaped by requirements of “care” to be given to nonowners; moreover, they can be justified as well as criticized in light of the principle of “achievement” that generates social esteem according to

53

E. Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, trans. C. Brookfield, London,

Routledge & Paul, 1957, p. 122. 54

C.M. Rose, “Propter Honoris Respectum: Property as the Keystone Right?,” Notre

Dame Law Review, vol. 71, 1996, p. 365. 55

See D. Lametti, “The Morality of James Harris’s Theory of Property,” in The

Properties of Law: Essays in Honour of James Harris, ed. T. Endicott et al, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.

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Age of Access? • 187

contributions to the good of others.56 Of course, property rights are not tied directly to one’s own achievements or consideration toward the needy. Yet they become triggers of social conflict if their contribution to the general welfare is no longer evident or if it appears as if they can only be enforced at the expense of the basic needs of others. It was already Madison who criticized the tendency “to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially unmerited accumulation of riches,”57 but without being able to provide any indication of what the criteria for judging the appropriate measure of legitimate property might be. At the stage of societal development we have reached today a consensus has emerged according to which a distinction has to be drawn, more clearly than does Madison, between personal and fungible forms of property, in order to direct specific expectations at both forms of property. For example, it may be asked of intellectual property rights whether they increase the forces of innovation in actual fact and at an acceptable cost, and so contribute to specific socially desirable goals. This may be the case in some branches of industry, while other sectors like the fashion industry, for example, flourish in great measure without protective laws.58 Social goals also turn out to be an important source of property critique, particularly where the task is to resist granting rights in the first place. The disputes I have referred to about the rights of individuals to own their own bodily materials are another example. If it is the case that the storage of tissue samples in biobanks helps to advance research and the development of new medicines, then the radical transformation of the rights to one’s body into

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property rights must be prevented. Garrett Hardin’s famous argument that communal possessions lapse in the absence of the protection and the incentives conferred by property rights can also be turned on its head: the multiplication and extension of property rights might hamper or prevent the development and use of biobanks and comparable modern forms of

56

See Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, ch. 5.

57

J. Madison, “Parties” (1792), in The Writings of James Madison, vol. 6 (1790–1802),

ed. G. Hunt, New York, Putnam, 1906, p. 86. 58

See K. Raustiala and C. Sprigman, “The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and

Intellectual Property in Fashion Design,” Virginia Law Review, vol. 92, no. 8, 2006, pp. 1687–777.

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188 • Chapter Six

communal property.59 At the same time, however, this example shows that the social goals against which property must be measured may be contentious in their turn and in need of justification.

The new critique of property The new critique of property focuses on the critique of the global diffusion of ownership, shifts from criticizing possessions to criticizing the behavior of owners, and stresses the difference between social and global justice. I end this chapter with short comments on each of these three points. (1) The classical critique of property focuses on the monopolization of valuable assets in the hands of identifiable private business actors. Yet, momentous events like the so-called subprime mortgage crisis that erupted on the U.S. housing market in 2007, before spilling over into the domestic and global stock markets, have changed the direction of critique. Among others, Robert Ellickson has emphasized the dramatic problems resulting from the diffuse ownership of homes made possible by the invention of mortgage-backed securities that spread property rights across countless investors operating from around the world.60 Instead of a property monopoly we have an extreme diffusion of entitlements, and instead of real assets, we have asset-backed securities and other financial products that have ended up being worth nothing. Although the justice implications of this case are far from obvious— people who cannot afford a house are evicted, investors who miscalculated lose their money—one could argue that diffuse property arrangements have a potential to weaken the sense of responsibility of the stakeholders involved, thereby making global crises more likely which in turn tend to hit the poorest hardest.

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(2) The classical critique of property focuses on the sheer quantity of goods at the disposal of property owners, while neglecting the conduct of those

59

See Bovenberg, Property Rights in Blood, Genes and Data, pp. 142–47; M.A. Heller,

“The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 111, 1998, pp. 621–88; G. Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, vol. 162, 1968, pp. 1243–48. 60

See R.C. Ellickson, The Household: Informal Order around the Hearth, Princeton,

Princeton University Press, 2008.

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Age of Access? • 189

property owners. The project of a critical social theory contains elements that point to a reversal of this relationship. In a lecture given at Frankfurt University, Adorno alludes in passing to the implicit norms and “class discipline” that regulate the use of large accumulations of private wealth. These norms make it unlikely that “very rich people use their money for purposes that do not fit in with specific, very restrictive notions of what is approved of by bourgeois society.”61 Accordingly, property rights must be distinguished from the norms that govern the use of property. It follows that any contemporary critique of property should be directed, first and foremost, against wrong uses of property and the rules that offend us because they encourage or legitimate such uses. Among others, Terry Nardin has elaborated on this point by criticizing the distributive justice literature for being concerned primarily not about “conduct” but “possession.” According to him, it would be wise “to abandon the assumption that we should start with ‘stuff’ and ask how it should be distributed, and instead start with agents (who might be either natural or artificial persons) and ask what principles should govern their conduct toward one another.”62 The bottom line is that what rich people have is less important than what they do with what they have. This new critique of property nicely dovetails with the project of a critical theory of recognition. Honneth, in particular, has recently criticized the entire tradition of liberal theories of justice for framing justice essentially in terms of the fair distribution of transferable goods. Against this dominant “paradigm of distribution” he suggests to define justice as a type of reciprocal social rela-

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tionship that allows for autonomy and inclusion. Patterns of social recognition and disrespect do not reside in things, but in behaviors toward others. Goods can contribute to the fostering or undermining of such relationships without providing themselves the material of justice.63 (3) The norms governing the use of property may be implicit or else they may assume the shape of formal rules. Outrageous uses of property and formal

61

Adorno, History and Freedom, p. 179.

62

T. Nardin, “International Political Theory and the Question of Justice,”

International Affairs, vol. 82, no. 3, 2006, p. 456. For a similar argument, see S. Ringen, What Democracy Is For: On Freedom and Moral Government, Oxford and Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007, p. 65. 63

See Honneth, “Das Gewebe der Gerechtigkeit.”

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190 • Chapter Six

rules that offend us because they encourage or legitimate such uses can only to a degree be identified independently of social contexts. To the extent that independence from contexts is a given, we can speak of minimum global standards of justice. These standards are typically less demanding in comparison with the standards that obtain in organized political communities. Standards of global justice require that outsiders, too, should contribute to their protection.64 These outsiders include foreign investors, donor states, international organizations and nongovernmental organizations that lobby on behalf of the dispossessed.

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This enables us to answer to the question of the relations between social and global justice as far as property relationships are concerned. If it is accepted that the same principles of recognition that underwrite the legitimacy of property also establish its boundaries, then all rules that offend against human rights or the duty of basic protection for the weak are morally unacceptable. Thus, for example, patents for medicines are illegitimate if it can in fact be proved that the assertion of such property rights is causally responsible for the death or other avoidable injuries to patients. The duty of owners to have regard for the vital needs of non-owners is not only moral, but can also have legally binding force, even on a global scale. Thus, the strict application of patent rules has been suspended for certain classes of goods (drugs for Aids patients, etc.) and globally homogeneous property rights have to be replaced by the new concept of a “graduated” protection of property tailored to particular conditions and hardship cases.65 However, as soon as we leave the field of basic rights which correspond to basic human needs, it is difficult to envisage global analogues to the social rights, duties and goals governing the legitimate use of property assets in domestic contexts. Legal rules and moral expectations regarding the legitimacy of self-enrichment and nepotism, the inheritance of wealth or the political use of private wealth to obtain public office vary widely across the

64

See D. Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice, Oxford, Oxford University

Press, 2007, ch. 7. 65

See T. Cottier, “From Progressive Liberalization to Progressive Regulation in

WTO Law,” Journal of International Economic Law, vol. 9, no. 4, 2006, pp. 779–821.

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Age of Access? • 191

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world. There is certainly no consensus on what Madison called the “unmerited accumulation of riches.” Nor is there a global equivalent for Honneth’s recognition principle of achievement. Thus, while property relations are not external to, but imbricated with the relations of recognition that constitute the moral order of society, there are no globally shared understandings of recognition principles that we could apply to legal property relations once they expand beyond international borders. Here as elsewhere global justice is sui generis, not a mere extension of what constitutes social justice in domestic contexts.

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Chapter Seven Realizing Honneth: Redistribution, Recognition, and Global Justice

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It is generally accepted today that many consequences of the actions of individual citizens, firms and states reach far beyond the boundaries of given political communities, and that this leads to an expansion of moral responsibilities. As a result, there is a certain shift toward cosmopolitan, other-regarding attitudes which find expression in the growing number of international nongovernmental organizations and similar groups. This trend is paralleled by discussions among scholars and policymakers about global distributive justice and the means to achieve it through more effective foreign aid, different world trade rules or and the acknowledgment of the forgotten contributions of postcolonial peoples to the common good of humankind.1 Even if it may be true, as some have argued, that due to the steep rise of per capita income in China and other parts of Asia, income inequality between nations has shrunk in

1

See, for example, S. O’Neill and C. Walsh, “Recognition and Redistribution in

Theories of Justice Beyond the State,” European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 8, no. 1, 2009, pp. 123–35.

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Realizing Honneth • 193

recent decades,2 this otherwise welcome development has badly failed millions of people still living in chronic poverty. This poverty of large portions of the world’s population that has been made visible and exhaustively measured is felt to be not simply unjust but intolerable, particularly among people who are relatively affluent. As Thomas Nagel has put it, “We live in a world of spiritually sickening economic and social inequality.”3 The fact that the suffering of distant strangers is felt to be intolerable is by no means merely a symptom of idiosyncrasies confined to particular strata, as can be seen from global surveys which show that a majority of the global public today considers the need to “reduce the gap between the Rich and the Poor” to be the most pressing of all issues.4 Against this background of dire facts and changing sensibilities, this chapter examines aspects of Axel Honneth’s critical theory of recognition. This theory builds on a well-established tradition of Hegelian social and political philosophy that has in recent times been revived by a number of theorists, of whom Honneth is among the most prominent. While the multifarious developments around Honneth’s theory of recognition have yet to lead to new synthetic efforts, I believe it is safe to identify two of its key strengths.

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First, the theory of recognition is a useful thinking tool that captures the fundamental moral dimension of social struggles without discounting utilitarian motives as irrelevant or nonexistent. Honneth inverts the Marxist model of the critique of ideology; instead of dispelling the moral illusions of historical agents engaged in power struggles, he proposes to uncover the moral core of struggles that are apparently fought over economic interests alone. Collective action is spurred by subjects experiencing injuries to self in the form of disrespect, denigration or undue indifference. The theory complements older accounts of “why men rebel”5 which had already made clear that protest and opposition to institutions cannot be explained as consequences of deviant behavior, political indoctrination or economic deprivation.

2

See G. Firebaugh, The New Geography of Global Income Inequality, Cambridge, Mass.,

Harvard University Press, 2003. 3

T. Nagel, Equality and Partiality, New York, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 5.

4

See Gallup International, Voice of the People 2006: What the World Thinks on Today’s

Global Issues, Montreal, Transcontinental Books, 2006, ch. 1. 5

T.R. Gurr, Why Men Rebel, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1970.

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194 • Chapter Seven

Second, Honneth regards moral feelings as not only driving empirical struggles, but also as justifying them. Collective experiences of damaged recognition are an “innerworldly instance of transcendence”6 that both explain efforts toward social transformation and provide the normative criteria for evaluating those efforts. On a superficial level, Honneth seems to restate Hobbes’s claim that serious conflicts can be provoked even by small gestures of disrespect such as “a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other signe of undervalue.”7 However, unlike Hobbesian conflicts, struggles for recognition hold the promise of a better society. These struggles involve a triadic structure: they are waged by subjects who draw on already institutionalized norms of mutual recognition that are perceived as not being fully applied to their respective life situations. These already well-established norms make struggles for recognition legitimate and mark their difference from irrational, Hobbesian desires for applause, honor or fame. Through this double movement of the inversion of the critique of ideology and the narrowing of the gap between the critical standards of observers and the practical motives of participants in social life, the theory of recognition puts the real experience of subjects back to center stage. This has consequences for the way we think about global distributive justice, as I will show. The remainder of this chapter is divided into four sections. My first task is to draw attention to the indifference to questions of moral identity and the technocratic nature of much of the debate on global distributive justice (I). Second, I briefly examine the exchange between Honneth and Nancy Fraser about the relationship between redistribution and recognition in contemporary capitalist society. What I find striking here is that Honneth has hitherto shown scant curiosity about the problems of a global moral order—unlike the late John Rawls and some of his students and critics, as well as Fraser.8 The exclusive

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focus on the domestic conditions in a small number of highly developed societies is mirrored by the corresponding absence of any reference to the

6

Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or

Recognition?, p. 238. 7

T. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. C.B. Macpherson, London, Penguin, 1985, p. 185.

8

See Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, New

York, Columbia University Press, 2009.

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Realizing Honneth • 195

dimension of recognition in theories of international distributive justice (II). Third, I go on to consider whether it is possible to “globalize” recognition theory in the same way as Thomas Pogge has attempted to globalize Rawls’s Theory of Justice. In order to lay the groundwork for such a project, I explore possible global extensions to Honneth’s catalogue of love, legal equality and achievement as principles of recognition which define moral thresholds of what individuals can reasonably expect from each other in terms of mutual attention and respect. I argue that such additions are essential if we refuse to limit our social and ethical analysis to domestic conditions. The reason is that as soon as we broaden the scope of reflection to include transnational or global struggles, we cannot take the existence of agreed-upon principles of recognition for granted (III). I conclude this chapter with a few remarks on what I believe are the two main problems in the theory of recognition that need to be addressed if we wish to broaden the concept of struggles for recognition so as to include transnational conflict over justice claims (IV).

I. Distributive justice without recognition

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There are several reasons for the moderate but widespread turn toward otherregarding ethical attitudes reaching beyond national borders. Among its intellectual roots is the slow demise of secular theodicies. Following Arthur Vidich and Stanford Lyman, by secular theodicies—or “sociodicies”—I understand belief systems that permit individuals to make their perception of massive social suffering compatible with their belief in a rational and morally acceptable order of things.9 An example of such a theodicy is traditional Malthusianism, which declared famines to be the consequence of unbridled reproduction on the part of a morally feckless underclass. Other instances are Marxist and liberal theories of progress which until recently interpreted the suffering of colonial peoples, rural populations driven off the land and victims of industrialization of every kind as the by-product of a transition to modernity that was inexorable and had therefore to be accepted. More recently, secular theodicies have lost their persuasive force and this has encouraged the spread of an international discourse about human rights and

9

See Vidich and Lyman, American Sociology, p. 281.

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196 • Chapter Seven

the combating of poverty. Human rights discourses favor more generally the elimination of any ethical dualism based on the division between an in-group morality confined to one’s own society and an out-group morality for foreigners—a development that Max Weber saw foreshadowed in the work ethics of modern capitalism. We are living in an interregnum in which the old theodicies of social suffering have lost their force while a new cosmopolitan belief system has not yet succeeded in establishing itself. In this situation political theories of global justice have the role of a stand-in since they discuss norms that are still far from effectively shaping the day-to-day behavior of the general public or policymakers.

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Contemporary debates in this field have taken off with Rawls’s Theory of Justice,10 which I will not discuss here. From the perspective of the theory of recognition its chief merit lies in the fact that, unlike many subsequent authors, Rawls does not restrict the scope of distributive justice to material resources alone; inequalities in rights and liberties are central to his theory as well. Moreover, with regard to material inequality Rawls elaborated on the intuition that many income differences are morally insignificant. For instance, it is morally irrelevant whether American soccer players earn more or less than footballers in the English Premiership. Rawls’s “difference principle” only entails that anybody who gains from his or her social position and natural endowments may do so only on terms that improve the situation of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. This line of reasoning has paved the way for a conception in which the value of distributive justice could be formulated not in terms of numerical equality but in the gratification of the needs of the worst-off members of society. Put differently, redistribution is not ipso facto just; there can even be such a thing as redistributive injustice. Prominent among the downsides of Rawls’s early theory is, above all, its lack of a global outlook. The theory is constructed in such a way as to appeal primarily to the enlightened public of present-day Westerners. Rawls develops principles of justice that encourage the critique of excessive social and economic inequalities within nations, but has little to say about the same

10

J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 1971.

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Realizing Honneth • 197

inequalities in global society.11 Rejecting this limitation, Pogge has suggested to “realize” Rawls by overcoming the inconsistencies inherent in the attempt to confine basic requirements of justice to the domestic sphere. Thus, while accepting the premise that only individual persons are the ultimate units of moral concern, Pogge insists that it is imperative to think globally from the start by focusing the attention on “the globally least advantaged” and the prospect of a “well-ordered world society.”12 Many subsequent discussions on

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global distributive justice have followed this line of critique which does three things: it keeps the individualism of Rawls, opens up to include all individuals on earth, but also restricts the debate on global justice by focusing only on inequalities in material goods (or the rights regulating access to these goods). In particular, contemporary cosmopolitan critics tend to single out “poverty” as the sole cue for thinking about the non-West. The problem of poverty is then formulated with reference to an older panacea, namely the “transfer” of material resources. Such resources are available by definition since their scope is defined in relation to the lack of resources of the poor. It follows that global theories of justice regularly end up in the simple demand for international contributions in the name of solidarity. Resistance to such levies is ascribed to the same power constellations that are used to explain resource inequalities in the first place. No attempt will be made here to give even the sketchiest account of the manifold debates surrounding these developments. Instead I confine myself to three comments on the limitations of any theory of justice that concerns itself only with the distribution of resources, however global its outlook may otherwise be. First, important questions regarding both the givers and the recipients of international transfers have been ignored. In particular, scarcely any thought has been given to the socio-moral premises that have to be developed if a political majority is to be created in favor of a radical redistribution policy that goes beyond national frontiers. What would have to change for higherearners throughout the world to begin to think of non-citizens in distant climes as effectively their equals?

11

See Pogge, Realizing Rawls, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 250.

12

Ibid., pp. 242, 216; emphasis added.

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198 • Chapter Seven

Second, theories of distributive justice are typically blind to the potential for social disdain that lies in the very process of redistributing goods. A gift, according to Marcel Mauss, “debases” the person who accepts it, especially if he has no prospect of ever reciprocating. The beneficiaries of charity, he noted, are constantly at pains to suppress “the unconscious harmful patronage of the rich almoner.”13 This important idea shines through the words of a Sudanese official who in the mid-1980s commented on international aid efforts for his famine-stricken country: “It is painful for us to accept these gifts that you bring us,” he said. “It is painful to listen to your admonitions as to the manner in which we are using what you are giving us. The Sudanese way is to bestow gifts upon people who come to this country, not the other way round. While you are doing a noble thing, it is hurting us.”14 These comments are a strong reminder of the costs of approaches that fail to take the recognition effects of redistributive policies into account. Third, we can go one step further and question the very premise shared by many who have written in the footsteps of Rawls that matters pertaining to justice are concerned primarily with the distribution of resources. Writers of the early modern period, such as Calvin, realized that even bread, water and sunshine lose much of their value in countries that are badly governed.15 Raymond Geuss has made polemical use of this insight to attack the Rawlsian approach in both its parochial and global variants which, he believes, “doesn’t make much sense as a contribution to understanding or dealing with the social and political world.”16 Summarizing his critique, he asks rhetorically,

13

M. Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925),

trans. I. Cunnison, New York, W.W. Norton and Co., 1967, p. 63; see also R. Forst, “Justice, Morality and Power in the Global Context,” in Real World Justice: Grounds, Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

Principles, Human Rights, and Social Institutions, ed. A. Follesdal and T. Pogge, Dordrecht, Springer, 2005, p. 33. 14

Quoted in F. Deng and L. Minear, The Challenges of Famine Relief: Emergency

Operations in the Sudan, Washington, DC, Brookings Institution, 1992, pp. 91–92. 15

Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1535), ed. J.T. McNeill, 2 vols,

Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1960, col. 1488. 16

Geuss, “Neither history nor praxis,” in Geuss, Outside Ethics, Princeton, Princeton

University Press, 2005, p. 31.

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Realizing Honneth • 199 Are reflections about the correct distribution of goods and services in a “wellordered society” the right kind of intellectual response to slavery, torture and mass murder? Was the problem in the Third Reich that people in extermination camps didn’t get the slice of the economic pie that they ought to have had, if everyone had discussed the matter freely and under the right conditions? Should political philosophy really be essentially about questions of fairness of distribution of resources?17

II. Recognition within domestic boundaries Theorists of global distributive justice oftentimes think like technocrats who believe that justice can be engineered without bothering about what real people think or feel. It is for this reason that their advocates do not see democratic principles as inviolable.18 Unlike many contributions to the debate on global distributive justice, Honneth’s critical theory of recognition is attuned to real people’s sense of moral identity. The key intuition of this alternative critique can be expressed by recalling the important insight of Judith Shklar who insisted that our policies will always be unjust, however well-intended they may be, “unless we take the victim’s view into full account and give her voice its full weight.”19 Honneth puts the individual person at the center of his theory, and in contrast to Rawls and Pogge, he systematically reflects on the “self-understanding of victims”20 of injustice. Similar to other theorists of recognition, Honneth starts from the proposition that individual identity and a healthy sense of self are formed through conflictual social relations of recognition. “Recognition” is defined as a reactive behavior that responds to valuable attributes in others, while at the same time constituting central aspects of personhood.21 Honneth’s influential reconstruction of a morality of equal

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respect (and a concomitant phenomenology of insult) relies on the tripartite

17

Ibid.

18

See R.J. Arneson, “Democracy is not intrinsically just,” in Justice and Democracy,

ed. K. Dowding et al., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. 19

J.N. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990, p. 126.

20

Ibid., p. 36

21

Honneth, “Recognition as ideology,” p. 336; H. Ikäheimo, “Recognizing Persons,”

Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 14, nos. 5–6, 2007, pp. 233–34.

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200 • Chapter Seven

distinction between recognition in the form of “love” or “care,” which allows individuals to develop a steady sense of self-confidence; recognition which grow out of the legal “respect” for basic rights, which in turn fosters citizens’ self-respect; and recognition as “esteem” based on achievements and contributions to a common good, which makes people feel worthy and special, and adds to their sense of belonging.22 In all of these dimensions, the close connection between interpersonal relations and relations-to-self is crucial. Only attitudes of recognition, crystallized in everyday behaviors and institutions, allow for the steady development of autonomous individuals and communities in modern society. Social and political struggles in modern liberal capitalist states are ultimately and always about these forms of recognition.

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It is important to note that for Honneth questions of distributive justice are not external to struggles for recognition. Rather, he is interested in patterns of distribution of material goods only to the extent that these patterns impinge upon the self-esteem of those who contribute to the production of wealth. Although this “culturalist reduction of the economy”23 has been criticized as one-sided, it can be defended from the vantage point of a political theory that is primarily interested in the question of what motivates citizens to engage in distributive struggles, and what are the normative benchmarks that allow us to evaluate the legitimacy of redistributive policies. Without a background of experiences of disrespect, many struggles over the redistribution of resources would simply not take place; nor would we be able to establish whether observable struggles are morally justified or not. In my reading, this does not imply that the level in the income of individuals or social groups exactly mirrors the extent to which their labor is socially esteemed. Honneth would probably not claim, for example, that at any given moment the average basic salary of a footballer in the English Premiership as opposed to the income of college professors necessarily expresses corresponding degrees of social recognition. His point seems rather to be that drastic historical changes in the distribution of wages and benefits across different groups can only be

22

Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, chs. 5 and 6; Honneth, “Redistribution as

Recognition,” in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, pp. 138–50. For an in-depth analysis, see S. Thompson, The Political Theory of Recognition: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2006. 23

Deranty, Beyond Communication, p. 412.

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Realizing Honneth • 201

understood as the result of efforts by groups who have been struggling for a revaluation of their hitherto undervalued contribution to the reproduction of society.24 Unfortunately, this interesting and innovative theoretical perspective on social struggles is also distinguished by its one-sided privileging of purely domestic conditions. Like Rawls who first restricted the applicability of his criterion of justice to liberal constitutional democracies, Honneth, too, provides little guidance on how to investigate transnational conflicts over rights and resources. This narrowed focus is reminiscent of the debates about Rawls’s theory before it was criticized and “realized” by Pogge. Thus, Honneth explicitly states that his interest is limited to conflicts taking place only in “highly developed capitalist countries.”25 His question is how “moral progress can be evaluated within such societies.”26 What is excluded are debates in which the moral experiences and sufferings of social groups in less developed countries become visible, as well as the particular relations between societies that arise from the moral discontent with a world order that is perceived to be unjust. The boundaries between societies are regarded as self-evident, as is the choice of a particular geographical scale of social analysis. What reasons can be adduced to justify this narrowing of focus? We might begin by supposing that conflicts about recognition arise only in highly developed societies. Such conflicts show less developed societies what their future will be and for that reason may be said to function as the “reference societies” described in classical modernization theory.27 However, that is not what Honneth actually says. On the contrary, his own criticism of such a development in stages is implicit in his rejection of the idea of a

24

Honneth’s idea of the inseparability of economic struggles from struggles for

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respect can be traced back to the early Frankfurt School studies on anti-Semitism, which however highlighted the flip side of this connection. As Paul Massing (Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany, New York, Harper, 1949, p. 80) wrote: “German anti-Semitism was woven into a sociopolitical struggle” for redistribution in favor of non-Jews. 25

Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” pp. 112, 120.

26

Ibid., p. 185; emphasis added.

27

R. Bendix, “Tradition and modernity reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society

and History, vol. 9, 1967, pp. 292–346.

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202 • Chapter Seven

“linear chronology”28 of distribution conflicts which are successively superseded by conflicts about recognition. An alternative interpretation might concede that struggles for recognition may indeed be universal and are not confined to a sub-group of regional societies, while still insisting that such conflicts do not normally arise between societies or between groups in distinct societies. Again, there is no evidence that Honneth wants to consciously exclude transnational relations from his theory. In discussing the work of Sartre, he has explicitly mentioned colonialism including anti-Semitism and the European persecution of the Jews until 1945 as examples of drastic misrecognition.29 Yet these remarks have never been translated into a systematic consideration of transnational relations of mutual recognition. Since the proliferation of such relations cannot be denied, it would be necessary to explain why transnational conflicts about recognition fail to materialize or why the transnational disputes that do arise and that are couched in the cultural vocabulary of “mutual respect”30 are actually concerned with matters other than recognition.

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In addition to confining his discussion to highly developed societies in the conventional sense, Honneth introduces a second limiting factor, since he wishes only to take into consideration conflicts that feed off claims that can be inferred from the already institutionalized principles of recognition characteristic of liberal modern societies. These principles are law, love and achievement. Citizens in “highly developed capitalist countries” expect and demand recognition according to these three principles which constitute an “institutionalized recognition order” running on socially well-established “discourses of justification.”31 This emphasis on the internal connections between the subjective expectation of being recognized and institutional principles of recognition allows us to still condemn some particular forms of action although they can be understood as the product of a wounded sense of self-worth. Honor killings or terrorist outrages, for example, cannot be rendered acceptable by the fact that those responsible for them feel themselves to have been slighted.

28

Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” p. 122.

29

See Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, pp. 156–59.

30

C. Brown, “Cultural diversity and international political theory: from the Require-

ment to ‘mutual respect’?,” Review of International Studies, vol. 26, 2000, pp. 199–213. 31

Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” pp. 137, 145.

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Realizing Honneth • 203

If the desire for recognition is released from the institutional framework of a moral and juridical order, it is no longer possible to determine whether the demand for “respect” or the insistence that one has been “disrespected” is anything more than the expression of a purely empirical assertion of power. Depending on the situation, every gesture or action can be interpreted as the symbolic expression of respect or disrespect without its being clear to what degree we are in fact under an obligation to respect such symbolic practices or to placate those who feel offended by their violation.32 The problem hinted at here has been visibly magnified by the worldwide media coverage of an increasing variety of situations and possible interpretations which have come together to produce an enormous increase in the global potential for giving and taking offence. In the debates that have been inspired by this new global situation, Honneth’s theory would presumably come down on the side of a resolute defense of liberal human rights. The problem that I perceive is not so much one that arises from establishing a variant of Rawls’s “well-ordered society” into a general standard to be applied to other societies and states. What seems dubious to me is rather the tendency to refuse to acknowledge transnational conflicts simply because a particular social model—and a particular scale of social analysis—are tacitly assumed to be the self-evident foundation of all relevant social conflicts. In fact, recognition is held to be a form of behavior of which we are capable only “to the degree to which we are integrated into the second nature of our own life-world.”33 However, if the limits of the theory of

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recognition really are the limits of our life-world, then theory has no purchase on the analysis of conflict situations that are concerned with the very creation of a recognition order or the shaping of a “second nature” that could then become the focal point of struggles for recognition.

III. Recognition without borders It is by no means easy to emulate Pogge’s project of globalizing Rawls with regard to Honneth’s theory of recognition which suffers from parochialisms

32

See J. Raz, “Respecting people,” Raz, Value, Respect and Attachment, Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 173–74. 33

Honneth, “Recognition as ideology,” p. 336; emphasis added.

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204 • Chapter Seven

not dissimilar to those criticized by Pogge twenty years ago. The first difference is that by indexing social positions to make them readily comparable, Rawls in a way invited the question of why he declined to comment on “a global order in which the social position of the least advantaged is unimaginably worse than that of the least advantaged in the developed West.”34 From a recognition-theoretical perspective, things are more complicated, because there is no linear measure for recognition. As long as people are not desperately poor, there is no simple way to decide whether a person living on two dollars a day in a poor, but free country is really worse off than, for example, the French malheureux described by Pierre Bourdieu in The Weight of the World, all things considered.35 Mindful of the three-dimensional nature of recognition—and the comment by Geuss quoted above on people in concentration camps—we may also question the assumption that “the least advantaged” are always and almost by definition located outside the “developed West.” The first step toward “realizing Honneth” would be to search for emerging global equivalents of the principles of recognition identified by Honneth. As I have pointed out, according to Honneth, liberal capitalist society can be reconstructed as an institutional order in which love, subjective rights and the just rewarding of achievements are autonomous spheres of recognition that form both the terrain and the engine of the central conflicts of the present age. On a world scale, however, these principles of recognition are backed at best by weak institutions. I propose to examine these weak institutions in sequence and to search for adequate ways of conceptualizing them, before taking a closer look at the implications of an expanded vision of mutual recognition for the field of justice-oriented foreign policy. The question I wish to raise is whether the critical theory of recognition can be modified so as to include societies and lifeworlds other than our own.

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Love Unlike other forms of mutual recognition, love is scale-neutral. Growing numbers of transnational marriages, long distance relationships and global

34

Pogge, Realizing Rawls, p. 268.

35

P. Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, trans.

P.P. Ferguson, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1999.

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Realizing Honneth • 205

child adoptions show that close emotional relationships between parents and children as well as between adults have little regard for spatial boundaries. In spite of many cultural differences, the basic form of love as reciprocal recognition between “a small number of people”36 is probably universal, although Honneth is mistaken in assuming that the increasing independence of affective relationships from economic and social pressures is the result of the modernization of any society regardless of its civilizational background.37 More importantly, however, Honneth has neglected other, nonpersonal forms of love that potentially involve very large numbers of people. Thus, a neglected parallel phenomenon to love as a principle of recognition are the forms of the “ethic of brotherliness” explored by Weber, in particular that of “acosmistic love” and its non-Christian analogues.38 This term has now completely fallen out of fashion, but in Weber’s day it was quite a familiar concept drawn from the sociology of religion. It signified a radically otherregarding ethic that was sublimely indifferent to the social ordering of the world and sought to transcend it. Weber uses expressions such as “acosmistic love” or “love ethos”39 to describe an attitude of impersonal helpfulness or devotion to a “neighbor” in need, the term “neighbor” here being understood typically in the broadest possible sense as including people who are socially very distant or who have come from faraway places. Such a love ethos is obviously more than a simple extension of personal love to more people beyond those to whom we feel emotionally close. On the other hand, it is also a far cry from the rhetorical politics of “pity” criticized by Hannah Arendt in

36

Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 95.

37

See Heins, “Globale Marktgesellschaft oder zivilisatorische Differenz?”; Honneth,

“Redistribution as Recognition,” in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 139. Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

38

See R.N. Bellah, “Max Weber and world-denying love: a look at the historical

sociology of religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 67, 1999, pp. 277–304; M. Symonds and J. Pudsey, “The forms of brotherly love in Max Weber’s sociology of religion,” Sociological Theory, vol. 24, 2006, pp. 133–49. See also David Owen’s reflections on wider forms of love-recognition in D. Owen. “Self-government and democracy as reflexive co-operation, in Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, ed. B. van den Brink and D. Owen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007. 39

Weber, Economy and Society, p. 1120.

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206 • Chapter Seven

her account of the French Revolution.40 The object of personal love is distinguished by its particular outstanding qualities, whereas a universalistic love ethos forsakes all distinctions in favor of recognizing all humans as “needy creatures.”41 To the extent to which historical or new forms of an ethic of brotherliness entail an element of unconditionality and self-sacrifice, they are indeed forms of love. However, the Samaritan-type of love is asymmetrical. Samaritans draw their very identity from assisting others, whereas the same cannot always be said of the beneficiaries of brotherly love.

Rights Unlike love, legal recognition is scale-sensitive for the simple reason that subjective rights are protected by institutions of the modern territorial state. Of course, there are also human rights enshrined in numerous Declarations and Covenants, and overseen by various United Nations bodies. But human rights cannot be routinely enforced as long as they have not been included into state constitutions. Joel Feinberg coined the useful term “manifesto rights” to pinpoint the paradox that publicly asserting one’s rights sometimes precedes their embodied juridical existence.42 In contrast to established rights, manifesto rights leave open both the question of the obligations they entail and the identity of those on whose shoulders they fall. In the transnational conflicts of the present day, claims may not be channeled through well-established “discourses of justification” and may have little scope for appealing to already institutionalized forms of recognition. In such conflicts the vocabulary of

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human rights makes available an indispensable rhetorical tool with which to formulate urgent demands for recognition or to create a scandal when such demands are rejected. Unlike struggles for recognition in well-ordered liberal democracies, however, we see how on the global stage appeals to human

40

See Arendt, On Revolution, New York, Penguin, 1990, ch. 2; see also V. Heins,

“Reasons of the Heart: Weber and Arendt on Emotion in Politics,” The European Legacy, vol. 12, no. 6, 2007, pp. 715–28. 41

Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 95.

42

See J. Feinberg, “The nature and value of rights,” in Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and

the Bonds of Liberty: Essays in Social Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1980.

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Realizing Honneth • 207

rights are frequently accompanied by second-order conflicts about how to define these rights appropriately.43 Interestingly, Honneth himself has alluded to a global extension of the law-based form of mutual recognition. Thus, inspired by the optimism of the early post-Cold War years, he has called for a “project of moralizing world politics”44 aimed at turning manifesto rights into enforceable claim-rights. Unfortunately, he has so far not dealt with the thorny issues surrounding the question of whether and how the moralization of world politics is compatible with the assumption of states as equals, and of how to define the moral division of labor between nonstate actors, sovereign states and great powers in the process of establishing a global recognition order.

Achievement Solidarity and meritocratic recognition in the light of a horizon of shared values also presupposes a nested hierarchy of bounded spaces. There is no global equivalent to those ethical values and goals that “comprise the cultural self-understanding of a society.”45 This does not imply that ethical frameworks of orientation are necessarily coextensive with administrative or territorial boundaries. Twenty-four hour companies in which teams contribute to a common good around the world are an obvious example for the existence of sector-specific standards of evaluation that completely ignore any borders. Honneth has no doubt about the status of “achievement” as an autonomous

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sphere of recognition although he rightly insists on the ideological nature of definitions of achievement.46 What counts as a contribution to a common good is often heavily contested as Honneth shows when he points to the recent history of feminist struggles over the definition and comparative

43

See Heins, “Human Rights, Intellectual Property, and Struggles for Recognition.”

44

Honneth, “Is Universalism a Moral Trap? The Presuppositions and Limits of a

Politics of Human Rights,” in Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2007, p. 198. 45

Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 122.

46

See Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” p. 141.

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208 • Chapter Seven

evaluation of childrearing and housework.47 There are plenty of analogous cases in the international field. For example, cultural value patterns continue to grade the knowledge and work of people in remote non-Western areas as worthless. Activist social scientists, anthropologists and others have highlighted the role of millions of small farmers all over the world in maintaining and developing plant varieties that are the “raw material” for more visible and rewarding activities like scientific plant breeding or drug discovery. Like the underappreciated activities of household labor and care work, which over the last decades were at the center of feminist struggles, the unrecognized activity and qualification of caring for crop species or medicinal plants has given rise to transnational struggles for compensation and acknowledgment.48 Various treaties and agreements have transformed the new values about what counts as a contribution to the social reproduction of global society in binding legal commitments. Such questions about the appropriate value to be placed on achievements are frequently overlaid and exacerbated by conflicts about the compensation to be paid to the victims of past crimes and misdeeds of the great European powers. These conflicts cover the entire spectrum of material and symbolic practices from compensation and debtcancellation right through to gestures of public apology for unpunished historical crimes.

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Brotherly love, manifesto rights, struggles for market access and benefit sharing—these transnational extensions of established recognition principles permit us to go beyond an exclusive focus on domestic conflicts within the most advanced societies. Thus, new phenomena emerge on the margins of our attention. I include here not just struggles for material resources and mutual respect on a higher plane (such as those between entire nations and regions), but also interpretive struggles about how to frame social realities in a situation where geographical “scale” is not a pre-given fact but a rhetorical stake for competing actors.49

47

See ibid., pp. 152–55.

48

See M. Flitner and V. Heins, “Modernity and life politics: conceptualizing the bio-

diversity crisis,” Political Geography, vol. 21, 2002, pp. 319–40. 49

Here I differ from Nancy Fraser who bases her argument on an objectivist read-

ing of globalization which makes us believe, first, that the salience of international

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Realizing Honneth • 209

IV. Two unsolved problems Ethical foreign policy is arguably one of the paradigmatic fields where such struggles can be studied. This field is constituted by a highly heterogeneous set of organizations that respond (or claim to respond) to the needs of distant strangers. Honneth clearly acknowledges that politics is not exhausted by state actions, implying that social analysis might legitimately concern itself with non-state actors as well as state actors. In the attempt to understand the dynamics of struggles for recognition, he even gives precedence to actors populating “non-state spaces where the initial efforts to delegitimize the prevailing distribution order are undertaken.”50 As long as states are the only drivers of justice-oriented foreign policy, the field is likely to be dominated by egocentric activities that indirectly serve the interests of the donor countries even though directly they address the needs and preferences of others.51 Affluent West European nations, for example, lend support to their poorer East European neighbors because they wish to open new markets or erect buffer zones against immigrants from even poorer regions.52 Even when states act disinterestedly and come to the aid of strategically uninteresting victims, they are generally concerned with enhancing their own moral prestige. The general public, on the other hand, is composed of private persons who are more or less morally sensitive and who through their donations or

and transnational organizations keeps “growing,” justice claims are “increasingly” eschewing the nation state, more and more things flow around the globe “with supreme disregard for borders” (Fraser, “Reframing justice in a globalizing world,” New Left Review, no. 36, November-December 2005, p. 71), and, second, that all this has groundbreaking ethical implications. Unlike Fraser, I believe that many statements made by globalization sociologists are little more than interesting half-truths. There is much evidence indicating that the norms of sovereignty and territorial integrity have actuCopyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

ally been strengthened in recent decades. While I do agree that we should globalize the frame of ethical debate, I do not think the old frame is inadequate because the world has changed. 50

Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” p. 151.

51

Feinberg, Harm to Others, New York, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 74–75.

52

See G. Vobruba, “Self-interested aid: belated modernization and interwoven

interests between east and west,” Crime, Law and Social Change, vol. 25, no. 1, 1996, pp. 83–93.

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210 • Chapter Seven

volunteering time support disinterested humanitarian projects or else a variety of goals aimed at aiding development. NGOs act as moral brokers between distant strangers. The core of these organizations is recruited from among “public-spirited zealots,” who do not simply act selflessly, but whose own well-being and identity depend on the success of their efforts to contribute to the well-being of others.53 At a crucial point of his criticism of Fraser, Honneth’s argument culminates in the following conclusion: What motivates individuals or social groups to call the prevailing social order into question and to engage in practical resistance is the moral conviction that, with respect to their own situations or particularities, the recognition principles considered legitimate are incorrectly or inadequately applied. It follows from this, first of all and contra Fraser, that a moral experience that can be meaningfully described as one of “disrespect” must be regarded as the motivational basis of all social conflicts: subjects and groups see themselves as disrespected in certain aspects of their capacities or characteristics …54

Summarizing my own critique of Honneth, I would point out two flaws in his account. First, Honneth presupposes the existence of principles of recognition that have already assumed robust institutionalized form. As such they are no longer controversial and need henceforth only to be properly “applied” to avoid arousing feelings of disrespect. This is based on the assumption that something that must still be fought for in large portions of the globe, namely

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stable, democratic conditions, already exists. Thus what is missing is the realization that the analysis of domestic conflicts that can be understood in the context of already institutionalized forms of recognition must be supplemented by the study of struggles over the very establishment (or indeed the undermining) of these forms of recognition. Second, Honneth neglects other-regarding models of action based on an ethic of brotherliness. These carry the implication that it is not just one’s own experiences that can act as the cause of social conflicts. Instead, the field of global

53

See Feinberg, Harm to Others, pp. 73, 76.

54

Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” p. 157; emphasis added.

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Realizing Honneth • 211

ethics shows very clearly that groups of people may intervene on behalf of others by assuming the role of advocates and in this way help to influence the course of conflicts in a multiplicity of ways. Honneth’s theory harks back to the model of the workers’ movement and, to a lesser extent, the struggle against colonialism, which are for him prototypes of modern social movements concerned with self-liberation.55 He thereby ignores the alternative model of the nineteenth-century British and American crusade against slavery in which the antislavery sentiment among mostly white non-slaves was crucial for creating a moral climate that encouraged rebellions and ultimately led to the abolition of human bondage. However, it would be incorrect to say that abolitionism only acted as a catalyst for a movement of self-liberation. The historian David Brion Davis has demonstrated that the abolition of slavery cannot be explained by the resistance of slaves which was motivated by moral experiences of being treated with utter contempt. Resistance including the mass exodus of people of African descent from Confederate plantations during the American Civil War did play a role, but overall slave resistance in Brazil, the Caribbean and the North American mainland was much stronger before the abolitionist movement gained mass support.56 The key factor was that white non-slaves, with considerable help from black ex-slaves such as Frederick Douglass and others, empathized with others and acted vicariously for them, ultimately achieving a success which, according to Davis, “may have no parallel”57 in the history of the western world. The contribution of this particular type of a social movement to moral

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progress has another facet relevant to recognition theory. British and then American abolitionism was motivated by a strong desire to turn labor into a dignified activity that enhances the “sense of self-worth”58 in everybody engaged in it. Abolishing slavery was thus a decisive step toward the

55

See Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, ch. 8; Honneth, “Redistribution as

Recognition,” p. 131. 56

See D.B. Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World,

New York, Oxford University Press, 2006, ch. 11. 57

Ibid., p. 331.

58

Ibid., p. 248. On struggles over what counts as work, see also Smith, “Work and

the Struggle for Recognition.”

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212 • Chapter Seven

institutionalization of the principle that achievements deserve recognition, and of the idea that it makes sense to struggle over assessments of different kinds of social labor and their comparative contributions to the common good. To recap: I have argued that the advantages that Honneth’s theory possesses over current theories of global distributive justice can be attributed to the inclusion of the self-understanding of the victims of injustice and the multidimensionality of the concept of recognition. Still, the current stage of development of a critical theory of recognition bears some resemblance to the debate on Rawls’s theory of justice before it was subjected to a cosmopolitan critique by Pogge. In my view, the woefully underdeveloped international implications of Honneth’s theory call for a similar operation. To some extent, internationalizing the theory simply means applying it to different segments of social reality and taking the changing politics of scale of contemporary social actors into account. In other respects, however, the proposed broadening of perspective also affects some of its key methodological assumptions. Recent trends toward a moralization of foreign policy in the form of armed humanitarian interventions, human rights conditionalities in foreign aid allocation, changes in military ethics or voluntary efforts to repair the harm caused by predecessor governments were partly engendered by sustained responses to “feelings of damaged recognition.”59 Yet we have to ask whose

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feelings count. A major weakness of the theory of recognition is that it does not systematically pay attention to people who act vicariously for others without having themselves gone through a history of disrespect. I believe that this is a serious lacuna for a theory of social conflicts in contemporary society which are often fueled by the concern for others. Significantly, some of these “others” would not even be able to respond to injustice themselves, because they are not born yet as recent contributions to the debate on climate change, intertemporal equity and “climate-proof” aid policies have illustrated. The other bedrock assumption of the theory of recognition is that efforts to delegitimize a prevailing system of distribution are always “starting from

59

Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” p. 135.

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Realizing Honneth • 213

institutionalized, legitimating principles of recognition”60 that seem to be set in stone. This assumption collapses as soon as we broaden the scope of social analysis to include global struggles. From a global perspective it is implausible to assume that determined activists confine themselves to redeem the normative “surplus” of already valid moral claims.61 In moral foreign policy debates on issues such as child labor, legitimate uses of violence, women’s rights or the place of religion in society there is rarely an established consen-

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sus on what counts as a valid moral claim. Some groups are fighting for the very institutionalization of principles of love, rights and solidarity, while others delegitimize those principles in the name of exclusivist notions of honor, religion or tradition. In either case, there is no reason to take a common normative framework for granted. In its current pre-cosmopolitan form, the theory of recognition makes us believe that we stand on firm ground, whereas in reality we are building on shifting sands.

60

Ibid., p. 158; emphasis added.

61

See Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution

or Recognition?, p. 258.

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Chapter Eight From Persons to Peoples:The Politics of Recognition in International Society

In everyday conversations, we often speak about countries or peoples that have been “humiliated” or “disrespected” by other countries or peoples. These situations are said to be the result of military defeats, sanctions and embargoes, the non-admittance of countries to regional alliances or power blocs, or negative stereotypes held by outsiders and reinforced by the remarks of foreign emissaries or journalists. Conversely, the struggles for easing the burdens of military defeat, lifting embargoes, admitting countries to regional clubs, and extracting apologies from alleged offenders are seen as struggles for recognition aimed at protecting the symbolic identity of large collectivities. The question I wish to ask is whether the neo-Hegelian theory of recognition helps us to shed light on such conflicts and strivings. While some authors have already answered this question affirmatively,1 my own answer

1

See, for example, A. Wendt, “Why a World State is Inevitable,” European Journal of

International Relations, vol. 9, no. 4, 2003, pp. 491–542; T. Lindemann, Penser la guerre: L’apport constructiviste, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008; R. Wolf, “Respect and Disrespect in International Politics: The Significance of Status Recognition,” in: International Theory, vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, forthcoming.

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From Persons to Peoples • 215

will be more careful. In my view, the attempt to internationalize the theory of recognition must avoid two traps: first, the trap of what I call, following Judith Shklar, a political romanticism that treats the state and international affairs as empty abstractions with no bearing on the real relationships between human persons; and second, the trap of what Michael Taussig calls “state fetishism,”2 which conceptualizes states and peoples as persons writ large, endowed with a consciousness of its own kind.

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Once we have avoided the twin mistakes of the fetishization of the state and its romantic dismissal as an empty abstraction, we can explore a third way of utilizing the concept of recognition for a deeper understanding of international society. This third way is based on the premise of the twin disanalogies between persons and states, and between domestic society and international society. Since states and peoples are not persons, they neither deserve nor need recognition in the full sense of this term. I do accept the claim that states and other actors in international society struggle over material resources as well as over non-material assets such as prestige, honor, moral standing, greatness and respect, but unlike in modern liberal polities these struggles are not waged in the light of universally accepted norms of mutual recognition. For this reason, they do not hold the promise of a better society. Yet, it would be wrong to conclude that the disanalogies between persons and states, domestic and international society imply a complete disconnect between international society and genuine struggles for recognition. States and the international society of states have a place in recognition theory, insofar as in the modern world sovereign states are one of the preconditions for establishing institutions geared toward the vital need of persons to be recognized and having their identities fulfilled. Although modern states often make the lives of their citizens miserable, they are more likely to generate justice than its main competitors: colonies or protectorates run by unauthorized foreign “Guardians, or Curators”3 or territories run by competing gangs and rackets.4

2

M. Taussig, “Maleficium: State Fetishism,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed.

E. Apter and W. Pietz, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1993. 3

Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 219.

4

Note that Franz Neumann has argued in Behemoth that Nazi Germany was a non-

state. This important point has recently been emphasized by R. Hilberg, “The Relevance of Behemoth Today,” Constellations, vol. 10, no. 2, 2003, pp. 256–63.

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216 • Chapter Eight

In order to unfold my argument, this chapter is divided into four sections. In the first one, I offer a reading of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition as a romantic political theory in which states do not seem to have any moral standing of their own (I). In the next section, I briefly discuss the opposite view which takes states to be moral persons (II). I then argue for a conception of recognition that takes the specificity and irreducibility of international society seriously without falling into the trap of turning states into fetishes (III). I conclude with a reflection on the place of states and peoples in the critical theory of recognition (IV).

I. Recognition and romanticism

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Honneth’s seminal study The Struggle for Recognition begins with a broadside against Machiavelli and Hobbes, who are criticized for their claim that “individual subjects and political communities alike oppose one another in a state of constant opposition over interests.”5 Against this preoccupation with utility-maximizing behaviors Honneth’s own theory suggests that “individual subjects and political communities alike” struggle not only for “self-preservation,” but also, and primarily, for “recognition.” So far, however, theorists of recognition have written a lot more about struggles for recognition between individuals and groups than about struggles between political communities. In sharp contrast to Machiavelli and Hobbes, Honneth takes the “social framework of a political community” as a given, and focuses on struggles for recognition between individuals and groups “within” that framework.6 From this, the question arises whether the model of the struggle for recognition is limited to conflicts within political communities, or whether it is applicable to higher-order conflicts between political communities as well. If it turns out that concepts of recognition are applicable only to domestic struggles within states, then there might still be a place for the theories of Machiavelli and Hobbes in the analysis of international conflicts. Perhaps there are two different moral grammars for domestic and international conflicts respectively. This, of course, would drastically limit the explanatory value and normative appeal of recognition theory.

5

Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 7.

6

Ibid., pp. 7, 134; emphasis added.

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From Persons to Peoples • 217

At the center of the theory of recognition are relations between persons and the relations-to-self emerging from interpersonal relations marked by respect, esteem and affection, or the lack thereof. The quality of these relations is seen to be crucial for the understanding of wider structures of social and political injustice. The theory starts from the proposition that individual identity and a healthy sense of self are formed only in and through conflictual social relations of recognition, which are analyzed through the prism of the moral psychology of natural persons. Given this focus on natural persons and the whole range of relationships persons can have vis-à-vis other persons, Honneth is not so much interested in establishing general principles of justice, but in defining more broadly the appropriate conditions for a life worth living. These conditions are to be deduced not from ideals of citizenship, but from human nature. They are typically explicated in terms of their consequences of certain behaviors and institutions for the well-being of individuals. This does not mean that the theory has no room for demands of recognition put forth by collectivities. Struggles for recognition are in fact collective struggles. Yet, Honneth does not seem to believe that collective actions or experiences belong to a class of its own. In particular, he tends to ignore the specificity of large-scale historical events and their impact on persons and the societies they form.

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His discussion of violence in The Struggle for Recognition is instructive in this respect. When he mentions “physical abuse” and the ego-shattering experience of “being defencelessly at the mercy of another subject,”7 he does not distinguish between isolated individual experiences and those experiences that individuals share with countless fellow-citizens in the event of wars or other emergencies. Yet, there is a difference between the loss of self-confidence experienced by an individual victim of violence and the effect, for example, of a massive military defeat on a civilian population—an effect that has been described as “a sudden collapse of the most anxious expectations, and a complete crushing of self-confidence.”8 In hindsight, even many survivors of the bombing campaigns against Germany in World War II, and certainly their successors, have come to see the violence unleashed against them as necessary or unavoidable, though hardly as welcome or just. 7

Ibid., p. 132.

8

C. v. Clausewitz, On War (1832–34), ed. M. Howard and P. Paret, Princeton,

Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 255.

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218 • Chapter Eight

The harrowing experience of being bombed was not automatically perceived as an insult or a sign of disrespect, or, if so, did not automatically damage the sense of self-worth of the victims.9 There are two lessons to be drawn from this example. First, as Jonathan Seglow rightly points out, we should distinguish more clearly between verbal and physical aggression on the one hand, and injuries to self-respect on the other.10 Individuals exhibit different degrees of resilience in the face of aggression and other forms of intentional disrespect, and resilience can be learned. Second, collective disasters lend themselves to a dynamic of reconstructive interpretations that often reshape entire societies, even though the difference of scale may not matter to the individual victim. While it is true that torture or rape can shock individuals out of their most basic selfconfidence, regardless of their cultural background, it is also true that painful experiences are processed differently in different societies, particularly if those experiences are collective in nature. Although Honneth emphasizes the history and relevance of citizenship rights, his tendency to focus on the anthropological needs of natural persons and their relations-to-self bears a strong resemblance to the existentialist impulse to dismiss politics and “the citizen” in favor of “the human being” stripped of any membership to political communities. As early as in the 1950s, Judith Shklar has eloquently described this powerful “romantic” stream of contemporary thought according to which there is a very clear conflict between “the man” and “the citizen.” All political institutions are only so many means of transforming the former into the latter. All are “intervening abstractions” that prevent us from recognizing each other as individuals … All politics are mere barriers to genuine per-

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sonal relationships.11

9 10

See Heins and Langenohl, “A Fire That Doesn’t Burn?” See J. Seglow, “Rights, Contribution, Achievement and the World: Some Thoughts

on Honneth’s Recognitive Ideal,” European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 8, no. 1, 2009, pp. 61–75. 11

J.N. Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith, Princeton, Princeton

University Press, 1957, pp. 146, 151.

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From Persons to Peoples • 219

Honneth’s theory has in fact been interpreted in a way that comes close to Shklar’s account of post-war political romanticism. Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault, for example, have pointed to the striking “underdevelopment of the political” in the theory of recognition. They conclude, a little prematurely, as I will show, that “In Honneth’s theory, recognition tends to be conceived of as a single interaction between me and you.”12 If this reading was correct, there would be no need for a distinctly international version of the theory of recognition; the goal would be to simply expand the scope of interpersonal recognition so as to include all human beings, regardless of their membership in different political communities.

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Honneth’s article “Is Universalism a Moral Trap?,” which was first published in German in 1994, provides an interesting attempt at such a blending of individualism and cosmopolitanism in the spirit of Kant’s project of a perpetual peace. In this text, in which much of the wild optimism and end-of-history mood of the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall are still palpable, Honneth (following Kant) draws an analogy between “individuals” and “nations”13 to explain the prospects for moral progress in the post-Cold War world. This analogy between persons and states is intertwined with a second analogy between the development of the rule of law in modern states and the development of the international sphere which is expected to move from the antediluvian forms of structural animosity built into the system of states to some kind of international rule of law. Progress in international society thus mirrors and complements the progress of modern Western-type societies. For Honneth, the new prominence of human rights signals the transition from a politics grounded in the distinction between friends and foes to a politics centered on the distinction between victims and perpetrators. Taking inspiration from Kant’s belief in the human species’ capacity of learning, Honneth seeks to refute neo-Hobbesian accounts that reject the politics of global human rights as a way of “overburdening” the capacities of states in an irredeemably lawless world, in which states are forced to fend for themselves like undersocialized humans in the state of nature. Instead he adopts a vision of planetary

12

Deranty and Renault, “Politicizing Honneth’s Ethics of Recognition,” p. 99.

13

Honneth, “Is Universalism a Moral Trap? The Presuppositions and Limits of a

Politics of Human Rights,” in Honneth, Disrespect, p. 197.

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220 • Chapter Eight

social integration based on innovative regimes of global governance and conflict resolution. He sides with those who have resolved to continue the project of moralizing world politics … Because new democratic movements have developed worldwide, allowing a multitude of civil actors to co-determine the course of world politics, for the first time in history a politics of human rights has acquired room for effective action. A foreign policy aimed at the worldwide implementation of human rights as a means of peacemaking—this is the slogan we can use to summarize the ideas of those who … argue for the Kantian model of international relations.14

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It is not unreasonable to take the view that democratic states and movements have played a significant part in establishing innovative regimes of inclusion and protection that reach across state boundaries. However, some caution is needed before assenting to Honneth’s claim that these developments give rise to an unprecedented and unequivocally positive model of ethical foreign policy. Of course, there can be no doubt that over the last decades we have witnessed an enormous expansion of human rights norms and assertions. For example, human rights are no longer only for citizens but also for non-citizens such as undocumented immigrants. They have also ceased to be the domain of liberal elites in the West and have taken root in countless non-Western regions and movements. In addition, the old separation between the law of war and the law of peace has been gradually replaced by legal opinions and treaties containing clear stipulations regarding “non-derogable” human rights obligations which cannot be suspended even in times of war or public emergencies. Yet, this expansion into ever new fields and dimensions of social life is not accompanied by an increasingly robust consensus on the meaning of human rights. On the contrary, the more the universe of human rights expands, the less these rights seem to work as an agreed-upon frame of reference. This negatively affects the ability to ease conflicts between groups and nations whose common humanity has been invoked in numerous human rights

14

Ibid., pp. 198–99.

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From Persons to Peoples • 221

treaties. The situation is likely to become more complicated as different categories of human rights cease to be pitted against each other along the familiar fault lines of East versus West or North versus South—fault lines that might soon be rendered obsolete by globalization. The worldwide row that erupted over a Danish newspaper publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in October 2005 is a case in point. This event has revealed, among other things, unprecedented tensions between U.N. human rights officials and a small Scandinavian democracy.15 Honneth uncritically accepts the notion that human rights automatically “trump” all other rights and concerns. More importantly, he underestimates the contested nature of human rights themselves, which are far from being a neutral ground for the solution of international crises. Quite the opposite is true. Interpretive conflicts over the meaning and applicability of human rights tend to drive policymakers, activists and peoples apart. While Honneth correctly observes that human rights are regularly “placed above the basic rights codified in the individual nations” in order to “recognize the individual person as a subject of international law,”16 it is not at all obvious that this is always and necessarily a good thing. On reflection, his argument invites dissent on two points of critical importance. The first point concerns the empirical consequences of the inherently contested nature of human rights and hence of the legitimacy of intervening in other states (by whatever means) in their name. If the thesis is correct that there is no universal consensus on the meaning of human rights, then the elevation of these rights above the

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sovereignty of nations would divide the world rather than unite it around common ideals. If unacknowledged, the divisive nature of the language of human rights becomes even more pronounced. This is why critics have highlighted the paradox that the discourse of international human rights, far

15

Denmark was rebuked for its “intransigent defense of unlimited freedom of

expression” at the expense of international “religious harmony.” See Commission on Human Rights, “Situation of Muslims and Arab peoples in various parts of the world” (Special Rapporteur Doudou Diène), U.N. Economic and Social Council, E/CN.4/2006/17, February 13, 2006, pp. 10–11. 16

Honneth, “Is Universalism a Moral Trap?,” p. 210.

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222 • Chapter Eight

from establishing the global rule of law, has a tendency to make foreign policy more arbitrary and temperamental.17 My second point concerns the theoretical core of Honneth’s brief discussion of post-Cold War international affairs. His account is predicated on the assumption that only individual human beings are relevant units of moral concern. On this view, states or peoples are little more than what Shklar quoted as “intervening abstractions” that merely complicate the realization of respectful interpersonal relations. To be sure, for Honneth states can be promoters of, as well as obstacles to, the realization of human rights. Yet, the cardinal point is that they have no moral standing of their own, as they can only act as mediators or conduits between the administrators of the international law of human rights, who are firmly placed “above” the states, and individuals who can claim equal basic rights both within and without the boundaries of their respective national envelopes.

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In short, Honneth regards individual human rights as templates for the progressive institutionalization of the recognition principle of equal legal respect on a worldwide scale. His argument converges with the view held by many theorists of international justice that massive human rights violations entitle outsiders to intervene in other states’ internal affairs on behalf of the victims. The language of human rights implies the notion of “international responsibility.”18 However, it is a thin line between placing an ill-defined but sacrosanct set of human rights above individual nations and legitimizing unaccountable international officials as the ultimate arbiters of the global order. In my view, cosmopolitanism becomes unacceptably strong when it postulates a broad and vague set of goals elevated to the sacred status of human rights, while at the same time endorsing human rights as the doctrinal basis of legitimate outside interventions into other peoples’ affairs. Strong political cosmopolitans hold that in “an ideal world, international interventions, military and otherwise, would be able to fix all varieties of domestic

17

See the contributions in D. Chandler and V. Heins, eds., Rethinking Ethical Foreign

Policy: Pitfalls, Possibilities and Paradoxes, London and New York, Routledge, 2007. 18

Honneth, “Is Universalism a Moral Trap?,” pp. 211–12.

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From Persons to Peoples • 223

dysfunctions”19—a view that denies national societies the autonomy and the responsibility to define and “fix” their own problems. Here cosmopolitanism borders on benevolent imperialism. By remaining vague about the scope of human rights and the moral standing of peoples, Honneth’s text is not immune to a similar reading. But even if we exclude such an unfavorable reading as unwarranted, other problems remain. Any kind of cosmopolitanism favors other-regarding policies in which outsiders channel resources to distant strangers, either because they believe to be morally or causally responsible for the bad situation those strangers are in, or because they are the only ones who can remedy the situation. Accordingly, Honneth hopes to see powerful democracies and international agencies “enforcing” human rights through advocacy, sanctions and “soft power.”20 However, this model sits uneasily with his general theory of recognition in which moral progress is described not as a result of benevolent international interventions, but rather of moral claims made by disrespected subjects themselves who draw on already firmly established principles of recognition (see chapter 7 in this volume). But if this is true, how can we account for the motivations of people who act on behalf of distant strangers without having themselves gone through experiences of disrespect? Another sort of problem emerges when we consider Honneth’s decision to posit the existence of two types of society, one of which achieves the institutionalization of principles of recognition on its own while the other needs foreign intervention. This notion seems to be based on the assumption that

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the recognition principles of individual achievement, legal equality and personal love are ultimately uncontroversial and universally accepted. But this is far from certain. Struggles for recognition are waged by subjects who believe that, “with respect to their own situations or particularities, the recognition principles considered legitimate are incorrectly or inadequately applied.” 21

19

C. Lu, “Humanitarian intervention: moral ambition and political constraints,”

International Journal, vol. 62, no. 4, 2007, p. 949. 20

Honneth, “Is Universalism a Moral Trap?,” p. 212.

21

Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution

or Recognition?, p. 157; emphasis added.

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224 • Chapter Eight

With regard to human rights, Honneth makes the similar claim that the only problem is that of the correct “application of human rights.”22 This analogy, however, is misleading. Human rights have given rise to more profound struggles that are not only fought over the correct application, but also over the very substance of these rights. Recent controversies over free speech, for example, have shown that one and the same activity can be interpreted both as an exercise and a violation of human rights. Contemporary struggles in this field are thus about the implementation as well as about the justification of rights. The fact that there are occasionally or perhaps even increasingly “calls for intervention”23 from distant societies does not imply that citizens in these societies desire or accept the same set of enforceable rights that are deeply rooted in other societies, although that is the way Honneth appears to frame it. In a more recent article on Kant’s philosophy of history, he comes close to suggesting that humanity would arrive at the same insights if its collective learning process was not “halted or interrupted by the instruments of power.” 24 Here again, politics and power are viewed merely as disruptive factors responsible for the non-emergence of an ideal world.

II. Respect and state fetishism An alternative to Honneth’s focus on natural persons and their human rights is contained in the little monograph The Law of Peoples by John Rawls. Rawls’s international political theory has drawn much criticism from cosmopolitans

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who have accused him, among other things, of acquiescing in lower or less comprehensive standards of human rights protection for what he calls nonliberal or “decent hierarchical peoples.”25 While this critique may be justified, it misses the more important point that, for Rawls, peoples should be taken as persons too, and need to be recognized as something more than, or different

22

Honneth, “Is Universalism a Moral Trap?,” p. 212.

23

Ibid., p. 211.

24

Honneth, “The Irreducibility of Progress: Kant’s Account of the Relationship

Between Morality and History,” in Honneth, Pathologies of Reason, p. 16. 25

Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pp. 62–70.

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From Persons to Peoples • 225

from, mere collections of individuals. Rawls offers a more sophisticated, philosophical version of the nineteenth-century legal concept of the people and its state as a “real person” 26 with its own dignity. For the purposes of this chapter, it suffices to emphasize two key aspects of his international theory: the idea of the primacy of peoples over the individuals out of whom they are composed, and the related idea of the moral personhood of peoples that we already find in Kant, who calls the state a “moral personality” (moralische Person).27 In the same vein, Rawls introduces state-based peoples as agents who honor agreements, remember their past and insist on “receiving from other peoples a proper respect and recognition of their equality.”28 This idea that peoples (or states) are the ultimate units of a theory of international society in the same way as individual persons are the ultimate units of a theory of domestic institutions is controversial; so is the idea that peoples or states are persons that deserve and thrive on respect in the same way as individual persons deserve and need respect.

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I contend that the first idea—states as ultimate units of international society— is easier to defend than the second one—states are moral persons deserving respect. Rawls’s main argument for the prioritization of peoples (or states) in international theory is that there is no agreed-upon set of authoritative political institutions and their supporting belief systems—what he calls a “public political culture”—that spans the entire globe. Rather, the global political culture itself, to the extent it exists, privileges states. In practical terms, the primacy of states in international life means, for instance, that whenever individuals cross an international border, their passports and visas and the privileges associated with them, and not domestic standards of legal equality, become all-important in the interaction between border officials and travelers. This is not to deny that citizens from different countries increasingly connect with each other for all kinds of purposes. Yet, the facts of

26

J.C. Bluntschli, Deutsche Statslehre und die heutige Statenwelt: Ein Grundriss mit

vorzüglicher Rücksicht auf die Verfassung von Deutschland und Österreich-Ungarn, 2. rev. ed., Nördlingen, C.H. Beck, 1880, p. 13. 27

I. Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Political Writings, ed.

H.S. Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 94. 28

Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 35.

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226 • Chapter Eight

globalization, which in recent times have inspired much sociological speculation, have in no way weakened the normative claims to sovereignty, selfdetermination and territorial integrity. While I follow Rawls up to this point, I am not convinced by the argument that peoples and their states deserve more than legal and diplomatic respect. In fact, it remains unclear what Rawls means by respect in the international relations between peoples. He has drawn even more criticism for his claim that there are two different types of peoples, “liberal” and “nonliberal” ones, who should mutually respect each other. These two types of peoples produce two different types of government through different mechanisms of authorization: free and equal elections, as in the case of liberal peoples, or some sort of hierarchical consultation, as in the case of nonliberal peoples. Both liberal and nonliberal peoples are governed by representatives who can be held accountable. For this reason, and regardless of what individuals from nonliberal peoples prefer, the coercive institutions that build the framework of liberal societies cannot be transposed to a global level without arousing the wrath of nonliberal peoples: If liberal peoples require that all societies be liberal and subject those that are not to politically enforced sanctions, then decent nonliberal peoples—if there are such—will be denied a due measure of respect by liberal peoples. This lack of respect may wound the self-respect of decent nonliberal peoples as peoples, as well as their individual members, and may lead to great bit-

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terness and resentment.29

Here Rawls moves from the primacy of peoples to the claim that peoples are moral persons who ought to be recognized as equals even if they are nonliberal. Withholding respect from nonliberal peoples and their governments is considered unjustified as long as nonliberal peoples do not degenerate into outlaw states. Among other reasons, nonliberal peoples deserve respect because they protect at least some human rights, even if they sign up only to a slimmed-down version of the catalogue of universal human rights.30 While Honneth hopes to see powerful liberal states enforcing human rights on a

29

Ibid., p. 61.

30

See ibid., pp. 65–67, 78–81.

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From Persons to Peoples • 227

worldwide scale, Rawls not only argues for restrictions on the implementation of human rights, but also for a differential justification and graded validity of these rights. In other words, the point of Rawls’s theorizing is that recognition in international society does not emulate the standards of recognition prevalent in liberal societies, and that international society must be considered sui generis. The domestic and the international are not comparable, not because the former can be ordered according to principles of justice, whereas the latter is doomed to remain in a perennial state of nature, but because the order of international society emerges without an overarching central authority. Consequently, deep moral and political differences are bound to persist in the world. This state of affairs suggests two possible responses. One could argue that liberal states have no choice but to put up with nonliberal states including the laws and principles defended by opinion leaders in those states. This attitude might also include tact as well as certain “ideological” forms of recognition, defined by Honneth as politically motivated acts of praising others which, however, do not imply true moral appreciation and the prospect of material change.31 In contrast to such a pragmatic and situational

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political attitude Rawls calls for an international ethic of principled toleration of holistically defined nonliberal peoples and states. Even if we accept Rawls’s claim of the primacy of peoples (or states) in international life, we may still reject his imperative to fully respect nonliberal states in the moral sense of the term. Not unlike Honneth, Martha Nussbaum has criticized Rawls for turning states and peoples into fetishes that blind us to the rights and needs of human persons. “Rawls’s theory of international justice,” she writes, “neglects the inviolability of each person that is key to Rawls’s domestic theory. But persons are persons, and violation is violation, wherever it occurs.”32 Nussbaum’s critique converges with Honneth’s emphasis on the needs of natural persons. Both these anti-Rawlsian philosophies share a tendency to focus on the well-being of individual subjects rather than on the integrity of political communities.

31

See Honneth, “Recognition as ideology.”

32

M.C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership,

Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 253.

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228 • Chapter Eight

III. The specificity of international society Rawls bases his international theory on the concept of the personhood of peoples, but rejects the analogy between domestic relations within states and the international order. “Justice” means something else in liberal polities than on a global scale. Honneth, by contrast, shares Habermas’s belief in the future of a “global domestic politics,”33 in which states contribute and submit to the decision-making of global negotiation forums in the same way as citizens contribute and submit to the authority of their nation-state. Again unlike Rawls, he distances himself from the parallelism between persons and states, which has made a brief appearance in his 1994 article on human rights in the post-Cold War era. This move against the person/state analogy is motivated by the realization that this analogy might be, and has in fact been, used to uncritically transfer the conceptual apparatus of the theory of recognition from interpersonal to international relations. But if states are persons, they too might deserve and could ask for respect, esteem and perhaps even for love. Anticipating the troubling consequences of such a proposition, Honneth has revised his earlier position in unambiguous terms: The main difficulty we face in applying the category of recognition to international relations is revealed by the obstacles we run into on our search for an appropriate theoretical vocabulary. As soon as we try to give a name to the dimension of respect involved in state conduct, we find that the only terms at our disposal are too psychologically or mentally laden. We speak, slightly helpless and awkwardly, of a striving for recognition or a need for respect, even though we know that such psychological concepts don’t appropriately describe the matter at hand. As long as we only transfer the concept of recognition from the interpersonal level to the behavior of social groups or movements, we don’t seem to have any terminological problems … But

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such a conceptual transfer is much more difficult, and the conceptual problems become much broader, once we switch from the level of group struggles to relationships between nation-states. Here we can no longer speak of collective identity, particularly because the obvious increase of ethnic and cultural subgroups has started to make the illusion of a nationally

33

See, for example, Habermas, The Divided West, ch. 8.

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From Persons to Peoples • 229 homogenous population disappear for good. Even where, for historical reasons, the idea of the nation-state has been able to gain a toehold, the state apparatus cannot be viewed as the executive organ of a collective identity, because the tasks it carries out—providing for security, preserving power and ensuring economic coordination—obey their own set of rules.34

There are two arguments here. First, the “ethnic and cultural” heterogeneity of contemporary states has made the notion of an imagined political body that is composed of the small bodies of its citizens, like the Leviathan on the title page of Hobbes’s book, implausible and unattractive. And second, even if this image was still convincing, the conduct of the state in international society does not express the identities and feelings of its citizens, and is not organized in such a way as to cater primarily to the needs for recognition felt by its own citizens or the citizens of other countries, although the fulfillment of some of those needs can be a byproduct of foreign policies. By saying that states are neither persons nor expressions of the needs of persons for recognition, Honneth is close to admitting that his own philosophy of recognition does not provide the “appropriate theoretical vocabulary” for coming to grips with the symbolic dimensions of the relations between states. The analogy of persons and states is misleading, as Honneth has rightly pointed out, but the same is true for the “domestic analogy,” which suggests that the relations between states are amenable to the same forms of institutional control as the relations between groups within states.35 The pursuit of order and justice in the international sphere is regulated by specific, historically evolved institutions such as international law, diplomacy, war, foreign

34

Honneth, “Recognition between States: On the Moral Substrate of International

Relations,” in T. Lindemann and E. Ringmar, eds., The Struggle for Recognition in Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.

International Relations, Boulder, Colo., Paradigm Publishers, forthcoming. I quote the version of this chapter that was presented by Honneth at the conference on “The Politics of Misrecognition,” Centre for Ethnicity and Citizenship, University of Bristol, January 2010, pp. 4–5. 35

See the critique in Linklater and Suganami, The English School of International

Relations, ch. 2. The person/state analogy and the domestic/international analogy often go hand in hand (for example in Wendt, “Why a World State is Inevitable”), but not always. Hobbes, Rawls, Habermas and others accept only one of these analogies.

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230 • Chapter Eight

espionage, and the privileged role of great powers. These institutions do not simply replicate domestic institutions. At the same time, certain things are not regulated at all by international institutions, in particular many questions about who owes what kind of respect to whom. The sui generis nature of international society can be illustrated by starting from Honneth’s example of the transformation of the premodern symbolic order based on honor and prestige. In the course of modernization, Honneth maintains, the old feudal concept of “honor” has been split into two new ideas: the democratic idea of “equal respect” for every citizen and the meritocratic idea of “social esteem” for each citizen according to her contributions to the common good.36

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Did anything analogous happen at the level of the relations between states? The analogy is obviously incomplete. First, one could argue that the international analogue to the concept of equal respect for all citizens is the process of decolonization and the opening of international society to non-European peoples after World War II. However, modern states do not in every respect have equal rights. Some states are great powers with special rights and responsibilities. Interestingly, this inequality is itself enshrined in international law and routinely accepted by middle and small powers including their citizens. The veto power conferred to the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council is an expression of this consensual legal hierarchy which does not have an equivalent in domestic settings. Second, apart from legal inequality there is also an element of constitutive anarchy in international society. This anarchy manifests itself, among other things, in the fact that states have a right to exist, but self-defined peoples have no right to be recognized as states. Peoples do not pre-exist in collections of natural persons, but are the result of struggles over power and ideas for which there are no uncontroversial normative standards that would offer guidance in adjudicating claims to self-determination. The recognition of new peoples as states has therefore been called “not a matter governed by law but a question of policy.”37

36

See Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” pp. 140–41.

37

H. Lauterpacht, Recognition in International Law, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1947, p. 1.

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From Persons to Peoples • 231

Third, there doesn’t appear to be an international analogue to the concept of merit-based social esteem. Of course, like groups within states, states within international society may also contribute, in varying degrees, to the good of others, or the common good of humanity. However, because of the lack of an institutionalized principle of what counts as an achievement, these contributions are often hugely overrated by the performing state, and severely underrated by all others including the beneficiary states. Consider, for example, the debate about whether Iraqis should be grateful for the American contribution in blood and treasure to ending the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in 2003, or whether they should fight for apologies, reparations and other types of restorative justice.38 Fourth, even when states agree on the meaning of achievement, there is no necessary connection between the denial of esteem by one nation and a diminished sense of collective self-worth among the members of another nation. Depending on their history and their position in the hierarchy of states they can decouple the fabrication of a positive collective self-image from the opinions of mankind, at least to some extent. It has also been observed that under certain circumstances generalized negative attitudes toward another country do not harm their target, but the nation afflicted by those attitudes.39 The privileged legal standing of great powers combined with the anarchical dimension of international society and the absence of an agreed-upon international principle of achievement means that international society bears many similarities with the kind of “prestige order”40 that Honneth believes

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has been overcome. It would be mistaken to assume, as Honneth does, that there is anything premodern about prestige. In fact, the pursuit of the particular form of respect and indirect power that is generated by prestige is one of the distinctive features of the international order. Unlike Hegelian recognition, prestige is not a prerequisite of agency and autonomy but a consequence of

38

See R. Brooks, “Those Ungrateful Iraqis!,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2006.

39

See A. Embree, “Anti-Americanism in South Asia: A Symbolic Artifact,” in

Embree, Imagining India: Essays on Indian History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 192. 40

See Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” p. 141.

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232 • Chapter Eight

public displays of power and agency. Prestige is a positional good that is held and enjoyed by few and cannot be shared with all without losing its value. Daniel Markey has pointed out that the “individual or collective desire for public recognition of eminence”41 played a central role in classical theories from Thucydides to Rousseau and was often seen as a potential danger to the rational pursuit of self-preservation. Prestige is accorded to great powers which provide collective goods such as security and open markets to others. Small and middle powers sometimes seek to redefine the prestige order in more moral terms, for example by advocating or launching peacekeeping operations, humanitarian interventions, or other kinds of ethical foreign policies. Oftentimes, however, prestige is completely decoupled from any contributions to larger international goals. States struggle for prestige by investing, for example, in wasteful space programs or the development of nuclear arsenals that jeopardize peaceful relations with other nations. Although the objects of prestige change over time, there is much evidence that symbolic prestige goods such as nuclear weapons continue to motivate the conduct of states eager to join the ranks of great powers. Depending on the historical situation, the prestige gained by an assertive government can enhance the self-esteem of entire national populations regardless of whether material benefits are secured.

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The pursuit of prestige is embedded in institutions that constitute a diplomatic culture ruled by certain forms of respect between the representatives of nation-states. The diplomatic culture consists of norms, rules and institutions designed to improve relations between mutually recognizing states. The classical form of respect required at the micro level of face-to-face interactions between diplomats is “tact,” a behavior defined by The New Oxford Dictionary of English as “adroitness and sensitivity in dealing with others or difficult issues.” Tact is a nonmoral form of mutual respect that is neither based on sympathy nor on any shared commitment to common goals. Rather, tact is part of a repertoire of symbols and practices designed to make courteous encounters possible precisely when representatives of states have

41

D. Markey, “Prestige and the Origins of War: Returning to Realism’s Roots,”

Security Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, 1999, p. 126.

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From Persons to Peoples • 233

antagonistic goals and values. There are, for instance, tactful ways of personally handing a declaration of war between diplomats and representatives of the host country, who in the process may ritually express their high consideration for each other.

IV. States and peoples in the critical theory of recognition In the remainder of this chapter, I wish to sketch a theoretical perspective that escapes the twin traps of hypostasizing states or peoples (state fetishism) and abstracting from their existence and significance (political romanticism). As I have argued, the basics of Honneth’s version of recognition theory predispose him to fall into the romantic trap. In his “Formal Conception of Ethical Life,” in which he outlines the hypothetical terminus of all successful struggles for recognition, he focuses on the general prerequisites for complete “individual self-determination” and the “personal integrity of subjects.”42 This utopia does not seem to have a place for the idea of particular peoples seeking recognition as identifiable, bounded, self-determining political communities. Honneth affirms the primacy of universal individual rights and needs over states and peoples, in line with the venerable tradition of a cosmopolitan liberalism and Montesquieu’s self-description: “je suis homme avant d’être François.”43 At the same time, however, he is aware that the very conceptualization of different forms of interpersonal recognition always presupposes a horizon of collectivity. Individual well-being and personal integrity require a

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sense of belonging to communities, although Honneth writes more about the need to be included in communities than about those communities themselves, which he tends to take for granted. His moral and political utopia envisions the expansion of the space of interpersonal recognition by peacefully circumventing or subverting nonliberal institutions, wherever they are. Apparently not being impressed by the realities of deep cultural and political divisions in the world, he projects the

42

Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, pp. 174–75; emphasis added.

43

Montesquieu, “Pensées,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. A. Masson, Paris, Nagel,

1950, p. 140.

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234 • Chapter Eight

evolutionary narrative of liberal modernity onto a global scale. Rawls’s idea that liberals should to respect nonliberal institutions in non-Western regions is firmly rejected, if only implicitly. Honneth’s consistently liberal perspective is certainly appealing to many readers. Against the widespread tendency to continuously enlarge the circle of objects worthy of recognition, he reminds us of the original anti-authoritarian thrust of the concept: we owe recognition to our living and breathing fellow-humans; no respect is due to institutions, since they are sources, not receivers of recognition;44 as long as we take care to avoid double standards and the intentional denigration of minorities we are free, then, to mock religious and political doctrines or institutions. The Frankfurt version of recognition theory encourages policy-makers and the public to distinguish between unavoidable concessions to practicality, which make instant worldwide democratization infeasible or prohibitively costly, and the adaptive conclusion drawn by Rawls to enshrine nonliberal institutions and morals in a conception of ethical international life. All this seems to suggest that there is no place in the theory for a distinctly international variant of recognition. However, following up on earlier remarks on collective struggles for recognition, through which stigmatized and oppressed groups such as European Jews and colonial peoples seek to “maintain a kind of collective self-respect”45 by fighting for their own state, Honneth has begun to reconsider the relevance of forms of “generalized recognition”46 for moral progress in international society. In particular, he acknowledges the

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importance of states as sources of recognition or disrespect for their own as well as for other populations. The category of belonging to a people is no longer regarded as a mere abstraction introduced artificially into interpersonal relations, but as something that is refracted in the consciousness and habitual responses of individuals. Individuals feel the dual need to belong to

44

See Honneth, “Recognition as ideology,” p. 345.

45

Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 156.

46

Honneth, “Recognition as ideology,” p. 345.

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From Persons to Peoples • 235

a self-governing political community and to see this community recognized by their own state officials as well as by nonmembers.47 In an argument reminiscent of Durkheim, Honneth calls state officials and politicians “interpreters of the experiences and desires of their own respective citizenry.”48 As interpreters they preserve the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the public by expressing those experiences and desires in a particular way: not “directly” but “indirectly and symbolically.”49 In similar terms, Durkheim has declared that the state does not embody the “collective consciousness,” but is rather “a special organ whose responsibility is to work out certain representations which hold good for the collectivity.”50 For Honneth, the state also has the additional task of expressing the experiences and desires of its own population in such a way as to make them chime with those of other populations. On top of this interesting (and unacknowledged) adaptation of Durkheim’s concept of the state, the new turn of Honneth’s political philosophy also entails some surprising concessions to Rawls’s international theory. Honneth writes, We can assume that a state’s citizens, regardless of the cultural, ethnic or religious differences that might divide them, are very keen on seeing their country accorded due respect and honor by other countries. The political representatives of other communities are to “recognize” that upon which a community founds its self-image—the challenges it has overcome in the past, its power to resist authoritarian tendencies, its cultural achievements, etc.51

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In this passage, Honneth concurs with Rawls on two points: he puts significant weight on the psychological unity of peoples, and he stipulates that the “political representatives” of a country have a moral obligation to “respect and honor” other nations according to their own self-image. Unlike Rawls, 47

For an elaboration of the implications of this point, see V. Heins, “Three Mean-

ings of Equality: The ‘Arab Problem’ in Israel,” Res Publica, vol. 17, no. 3, 2011, forthcoming. 48

Honneth, “Recognition between States,” p. 11.

49

Ibid.

50

Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, p. 50.

51

Honneth, “Recognition between States,” p. 8.

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236 • Chapter Eight

however, he runs into an inconsistency between making other nations’ selfimage the criterion for respect and prejudging what kind of self-image is worthy of international respect. Many nations may base their self-image, to quote Honneth’s example, on their “power to resist authoritarian tendencies,” but others may have a very different, nonliberal idea of themselves. It seems that Honneth picks the easy cases and shies away from the more difficult question of how to deal with nations that have not and do not intend to overcome their problematic past or their authoritarian impulses. The fact that he is putting the word “recognize” in scare quotes also indicates that Honneth is not sure whether recognizing the characteristics and achievements of peoples is homologous to recognizing persons. What he seems to have in mind is more than tact, but less than genuine recognition. In fact, gestures of recognition in international politics—the acknowledgment of the suffering of others, the appreciation of the achievements of others, etc.—are described as an expression of the “soft power”52 of democratic states; even if they are made in good faith, they have an instrumental value. The contours of this peculiar kind of recognitive relation between one country’s political representatives and another country’s population is reminiscent of the tradition of Woodrow Wilson’s ethical foreign policy once characterized by a veteran British diplomat as an attempt to “penetrate the fog-barrier of governments, politicians and officials”53 by addressing ordinary people in foreign lands directly.54 Honneth undoubtedly has a point when he argues that there is a connection between the lack of empathy and moral imagination on the part of politi-

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cal leaders engaged in protracted conflicts, and the exacerbation of those conflicts. The inability of Israel’s political establishment and many ordinary Israelis to put themselves in the shoes of the Palestinians, and the corresponding insensitivity on the part of many Arabs to understand the historical plight of the Jewish people, is an obvious example of such a struggle for

52

Ibid., p. 20.

53

H. Nicolson, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method, New York, Macmillan, 1954,

p. 84. 54

Honneth’s example is the speech given by Barack Obama in June 2009 in Cairo, in

which the American president sought to woo and win over Muslims in Egypt and beyond. See Honneth, “Recognition between States,” p. 10.

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From Persons to Peoples • 237

recognition. My critique begins with the absence in Honneth’s analysis of an accounting for the relatively autonomous power of meaning-making in politics. Although Honneth presents a strong case for more empathy in international relations, for the normative advantages of the power to attract over the power to coerce, and also for respect as a variable that makes certain desirable political outcomes (such as peace and reconciliation) more likely, I believe that his central causal claim needs qualification. Referring to the conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians, and between Weimar Germany and the Western powers over the Treaty of Versailles, he suggests that there is a link between the lack of sympathy and respect on the part of strong and victorious states, and the readiness of weaker and vanquished peoples to engage in or support extreme violence. This, however, underestimates the role of key symbolic patterns in different political cultures and the ways in which political actors can draw on these patterns in constructing generalized understandings from contingent events including the benign or hostile gestures of foreign powers.

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For example, Honneth states that after World War I “widespread feelings of collective humiliation among the German population due to the Treaty of Versailles” helped to create a “justification for an aggressive policy of reparations and revenge.”55 While this is certainly correct, it is by no means certain that the Allied powers, once they were tainted by the rising Nazi movement as driven by a vicious global conspiracy against Germany, could have done much more to dispel those feelings of humiliation. In order to include Germany in the moral community of nations it would have taken more than “globally visible and clear signals”56 of the goodwill of the Western powers; what was lacking was a strong public able to read those signals and absorb their message. The fact that in the course of the 1920s the economic burdens imposed on the Germans by the Versailles settlement were significantly eased and that Germany had been invited to resolve her political differences with Western Europe’s major powers in a process of reciprocity and compromise, did little to free the minds of many Germans from the powers of

55

Ibid., p. 13.

56

Ibid., p. 20.

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238 • Chapter Eight

“demonization and resentment.”57 The reason is that significant sections of the German public had been cocooned in myths of betrayal, heroism, national destiny and righteous victimhood that made them deaf to reconciliatory messages from abroad, and attuned to the most egregious of fear-mongering falsehoods. My more general point is that the need of a people to have their own sufferings, achievements or self-image recognized by foreigners varies with the way in which the foreign world is collectively represented. Politically salient narratives can be crafted both to downplay and to dramatize the relevance of external audiences. West Germany’s struggle to overcome her moral pariah status in international society after 1945 is a good example of one end of the spectrum of susceptibility to the opinions of outsiders. Under the specific historical circumstances of postwar Germany, the self-regard of many ordinary citizens required that outsiders, too, bought into certain self-exonerating stories.58 Very different is the case of France under President Charles De Gaulle, who openly ridiculed the very concept of “world opinion,” including the anxiety to make a good impression abroad, as an American aberration to be replaced by the more dignified concept of grandeur.59 The pursuit of grandeur, insofar as it resonated with large sections of the French public, allowed the French to immunize a positive self-image against possible negative valuestatements from abroad. Israel is another, more extreme example of a country where many leaders justify their indifference toward world opinion by quoting a verse from the Book of Numbers in the Hebrew Bible: “The people shall dwell alone, and not be reckoned among the nations.”

57

Ibid. On the post-Versailles peace settlements and steps to include Germany in

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the international community, see P.O. Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919–1932, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006. 58

See, for example, B. Etheridge, “The Desert Fox, Memory Diplomacy, and the

German Question in Early Cold War America,” Diplomatic History, vol. 32, no. 2, 2008, pp. 207–38. 59

See F.A. Ninkovich, Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in the

Twentieth Century, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 256.

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From Persons to Peoples • 239

In order to take these variations into account, the critical theory of recognition has to be supplemented by a narrative theory of politics and the state. Narratives organize random occurrences and turn them into meaningful events. They are crucial for the emergence of a “people” in the first place and thus directly relevant to the very existence of any modern state. Nationalist and secessionist narratives typically claim that sovereign statehood is needed to fend off threats against the physical integrity of the people, their rights, and their way of life. Peoples are not originally defined by “common sympathies,”60 but rather by struggles over competing narratives about themselves that are often fuelled by deep antipathies tearing at the fabric of the national collective. As Erik Ringmar writes, narratives constructed for the state and by the state “specify who we are and what role we play in the world; how our ‘national interests’ are to be defined, or which foreign policy to pursue.”61 They are at the center of struggles for persuasiveness and authenticity. When such struggles are lost, narratives sound inauthentic and artificial, and public representatives look like actors hampered by an unconvincing script. In normal times, there is a broad consensus on identity-relevant narratives and a high level of fusion between stories, story tellers and audiences, although this fusion is never total. At other times, the public questions the dominant narrative to a point when even the own native country “may be a dubious value,”62 as Max Weber remarked in 1919. In extreme cases, no unifying narrative binds the people together and even drastic experiences likes wars and revolutions are interpreted in all kinds of ways: as threats to the sacred core of the community, harbingers of liberation, or a tribunal of sorts.

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Narratives about the state rely on the rhetorical figure of pars pro toto that compels us to accept a portion of our history, imaginings, projects, and characteristics as representing the entire state. We are persuaded to see something

60

Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 23.

61

E. Ringmar, “On the Ontological Status of the State,” European Journal of

International Relations, vol. 2, 1996, p. 455. 62

Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed.

H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, New York, Oxford University Press, 1958, p. 126.

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240 • Chapter Eight

as something else. If Nietzsche was right in calling the “equation of unequal things”63 the defining motive of all rhetoric, then, I conclude, politics is fundamentally rhetorical in character. This narrative perspective incorporates other theoretical perspectives as stories about possible sources of conflicts over recognition in international society. Thus, states may define themselves as Hobbesian prestige-seekers, in

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which case they do not care much about gestures of disrespect from other states and peoples. Alternatively, they may pose as Rawlsian moral persons defending the dignity of their respective cultures against foreign interference. Or they may see themselves and encourage others to see states as Honnethian tools for the realization of universal human rights. The perspective on states as narrative institutions opens a field of research that focuses on meaningmaking processes both inside and outside of states. The outcomes of these processes determine whether particular acts or conditions trigger international demands for recognition in the form of official apologies, reparations, foreign assistance or similar measures. The main point here is that in international society there is much less agreement on what constitutes an unjustified expression of disrespect or a valuable contribution to the good of others than in domestic societies (or perhaps in private transnational organizations or corporations). Foreign aid, for instance, has been described as humiliating, while bombing raids have been welcomed even by some of the potential victims. The theory of recognition may explain the existence of dangerous feelings of disrespect in global politics, but does not tell us which state actions have what kind of effects on the self-respect and self-esteem of distant strangers.

63

F. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth:

Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the early 1870’s, ed. and trans. D. Breazeale, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press, 1979, p. 83.

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242 • Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., and Siegfried Kracauer, Briefwechsel 1923–1966, ed. W. Schopf, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2008. Adorno, Theodor W., and Thomas Mann, Briefwechsel 1943–1955, ed. C. Gödde and T. Sprecher, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2002. Agamben, Giorgio, “Bodies Without Words: Against the Biopolitical Tattoo,” German Law Journal, vol. 5, no. 2, 2004, pp. 168–69. Alexander, Jeffrey C., The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology, New York, Oxford University Press, 2003. Alexander, Jeffrey C., “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2004. Alexander, Jeffrey C., The Civil Sphere, New York, Oxford University Press, 2006. Alexander, Jeffrey C., The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power, New York, Oxford University Press, 2010. Altmann, Alexander, “Aufklärung und Kultur bei Moses Mendelssohn,” in Ich handle mit Vernunft: Moses Mendelssohn und die europäische Aufklärung, ed. N. Hinske, Hamburg, Meiner, 1981. Aly, Goetz, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State, trans. J. Chase, New York, Henry Holt and Co., 2007. Amani, Bita, and Rosemary J. Coombe, “The Human Genome Diversity Project: The Politics of Patents at the Intersection of Race, Religion, and Research Ethics,” Law and Policy, vol. 27, no. 1, 2005, pp. 152–88. Arendt, Hannah, “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany,” Commentary, vol. 10, October 1950, pp. 342–53. Arendt, Hannah, Crises of the Republic, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution, New York, Penguin, 1990. Arendt, Hannah, Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, ed. J. Kohn, New York, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. Arneson, Richard J., “Democracy is not intrinsically just,” in Justice and Democracy, ed. K. Dowding et al., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Assmann, Aleida, “History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony,” Poetics Today, vol. 27, no. 2, 2006, pp. 261–73. Bacon, Francis, “Of Travel” (1610) in Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630: An Anthology, ed. A. Hadfield, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001. Banti, Alberto M., L’onore della nazione: Identità sessuali e violenza nel nazionalismo europeo dal XVIII secolo alla Grande Guerra, Turin, Einaudi, 2005. Barkun, Michael, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2003. Baudrillard Jean, “The Sidereal Voyage,” in J. Baudrillard and M. Guillaume, Radical Alterity, trans. A. Hodges, New York, Semiotext(e)/MIT, 2008. Beck, Ulrich, “Das Zeitalter der Nebenfolgen und die Politisierung der Moderne,” in U. Beck et al., Reflexive Modernisierung: Eine Kontroverse, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1996. Beck, Ulrich, Was ist Globalisierung?, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1997. Beck, Ulrich, “Wie wird Demokratie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung möglich?,” in Politik der Globalisierung, ed. Beck, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1998. Beck, Ulrich, Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. C. Cronin, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2006. Bellah, Robert N., “Max Weber and world-denying love: a look at the historical sociology of religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 67, 1999, pp. 277–304. Bendix, Reinhard, “Tradition and modernity reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 9, 1967, pp. 292–346. Benjamin, Walter, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann et al., 7 vols, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1972–89.

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Bibliography • 243 Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, ed. H. Eiland and M.W. Jennings, trans. E. Jephcott et al., 4 vols, Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press, 1996–2003. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press, 1999. Béthune, Christian, Adorno et le jazz: Analyse d’un déni esthétique, Paris, Klincksieck, 2003. Bettin, Gianfranco, and Maurizio Dianese, La strage: Piazza Fontana, verità e memoria, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1999. Bluntschli, Johann Caspar, Deutsche Statslehre und die heutige Statenwelt: Ein Grundriss mit vorzüglicher Rücksicht auf die Verfassung von Deutschland und Österreich-Ungarn, 2. rev. ed., Nördlingen, C.H. Beck, 1880. Bobbio, Norberto, Gramsci e la concezione della società civile, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1977. Boltanski, Luc, and Axel Honneth, “Soziologie der Kritik oder Kritische Theorie? Ein Gespräch mit Robin Celikates,” in Was ist Kritik?, ed. R. Jaeggi and T. Wesche, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2009. Bondeson, Jan, Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2005. Bone, Stanley, and John M. Oldham, “Paranoia: Historical Considerations,” in Paranoia: New Psychoanalytic Perspectives, ed. J.M. Oldham and S. Bone, Madison, Conn., International Universities Press, 1994. Bourdieu, Pierre, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, trans. P.P. Ferguson, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1999. Bovenberg, Jasper A., Property Rights in Blood, Genes and Data: Naturally Yours?, Leiden and Boston, Martinus Nijhoff, 2006. Brooks, Rosa, “Those Ungrateful Iraqis!,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2006. Brown, Chris, “Cultural diversity and international political theory: from the Requirement to ‘mutual respect’?,” Review of International Studies, vol. 26, 2000, pp. 199–213. Brown, Wendy, “At the Edge,” in What is Political Theory?, ed. S.K. White and J.D. Moon, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 2004. Buchanan, Allen E., Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism, Totowa, NJ, Rowman and Littlefield, 1982. Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1989. Burch, Kurt, “Property” and the Making of the International System, Boulder, Colo., Lynne Rienner, 1998. Burns, Tony, “Hegel, Identity Politics and the Problem of Slavery,” Culture, Theory and Critique, vol. 47, no. 1, 2006, pp. 87–104. Calvin, Jean, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1535), ed. J.T. McNeill, 2 vols, Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1960. Calvin, Jean, Ioannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, ed. E. Cunitz and E. Baum, 58 vols, New York, Johnson Reprint Corp, 1964. Camus, Albert, Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947, ed. J. Lévi-Valensi, trans. A. Goldhammer, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006. Caruth, Cathy, “Trauma and Experience: Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. C. Caruth, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Castel, Robert, Les métamorphoses de la question sociale: une chronique du salariat, Paris, Fayard, 1995. Chambers, Simone, “The politics of Critical Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. F. Rush, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Chambers, Simone, and Will Kymlicka, eds., Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002. Chandler, David, and Volker Heins, eds., Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy: Pitfalls, Possibilities and Paradoxes, London and New York, Routledge, 2007.

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244 • Bibliography Chatterjee, Partha, “Gandhi and the critique of civil society,” in Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. R. Guha, Delhi, Oxford India Paperbacks, 1994. Clausewitz, Carl von, On War (1832–34), ed. M. Howard and P. Paret, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1976. Cohen, Andrew Wender, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Cohen, Jean L., and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1992. Cohrs, Patrick O., The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919–1932, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006. Colas, Dominique, Le glaive et le fléau: Généalogie du fanatisme et de la société civile, Paris, Grasset, 1992. Commission on Human Rights, “Situation of Muslims and Arab peoples in various parts of the world” (Special Rapporteur Doudou Diène), U.N. Economic and Social Council, E/CN.4/2006/17, February 13, 2006. Cooke, Maeve, “Redeeming Redemption: The Utopian Dimension of Critical Social Theory,” Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 30, no. 4, 2004, pp. 413–29. Cottier, Thomas, “From Progressive Liberalization to Progressive Regulation in WTO Law,” Journal of International Economic Law, vol. 9, no. 4, 2006, pp. 779–821. Cronon, William, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, New York, Hill and Wang, 1983. Crumley, Bruce, “In Paris and Berlin, Fury Over a Greek Bailout,” Time Magazine, February 16, 2010. Danoff, Aurele, “The Moral Rights Act of 2007: Finding the Melody in the Music,” Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship and the Law, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 181–207. Das, Sisir Kumar, “In the Land of the Masters: Indian Travelogues on England,” in Das, Indian Ode to the West Wind: Studies in Literary Encounters, Delhi, Pencraft International, 2001. Davis, David Brion, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, New York, Oxford University Press, 2006. Dean, Jodi, “Theorizing Conspiracy Theory,” Theory and Event, vol. 4, no. 3, 2000. Delanty, Gerard, “The Making of a Postwestern Europe: a Civilizational Analysis,” Thesis Eleven, no. 72, 2003, pp. 8–25. Demers, Joanna, Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity, Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press, 2006. Deng, Francis, and Larry Minear, The Challenges of Famine Relief: Emergency Operations in the Sudan, Washington, DC, Brookings Institution, 1992. Deranty, Jean-Philippe, Beyond Communication: A Critical Study of Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2009. Deranty, Jean-Philippe, and Emmanuel Renault, “Politicizing Honneth’s Ethics of Recognition,” Thesis Eleven, vol. 88, 2007, pp. 92–111. Derrida, Jacques, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2005. Dijkink, Gertjan, National Identity and Geopolitical Visions: Maps of Pride and Pain, London, Routledge, 1996. Döblin, Alfred, Berge, Meere und Giganten (1924), Stuttgart, dtv, 1980. Domenach, Jean-Luc, La Chine m’inquiète, Paris, Perrin Asie, 2008. Dubiel, Helmut, “Herrschaft oder Emanzipation? Der Streit um die Erbschaft der kritischen Theorie,” in Zwischenbetrachtungen: Im Prozeß der Aufklärung, ed. A. Honneth et al., Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1989. Dubla, Fernando, Gramsci e la fabbrica: Produzione, tecnica e organizzazione del lavoro nel pensiero gramsciano (1913/1934), Manduria, Piero Lacaita Editore, 1986. Dunn, John, The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics, New York, Basic Books, 2000. Durkheim, Emile, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, trans. C. Brookfield, London, Routledge & Paul, 1957.

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Bibliography • 245 Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. C. Cosman, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001. Eisenstadt, Oona, “Levinas and Adorno: Universalizing the Jew after Auschwitz,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, vol. 14, nos. 1–2, 2006, pp. 131–51. Ellickson, Robert C., The Household: Informal Order around the Hearth, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008. Elster, Jon, Making Sense of Marx, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985. Embree, Ainslie, “Anti-Americanism in South Asia: A Symbolic Artifact,” in Embree, Imagining India: Essays on Indian History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989. Etheridge, Brian, “The Desert Fox, Memory Diplomacy, and the German Question in Early Cold War America,” Diplomatic History, vol. 32, no. 2, 2008, pp. 207–38. Euben, Roxanne L., Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006. Eyerman, Ron, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Featherstone, Mark, “The obscure politics of conspiracy theory” in The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and the Human Sciences, ed. J. Parish and M. Parker, Oxford, Blackwell, 2001. Feinberg, Joel, “The nature and value of rights,” in Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bonds of Liberty: Essays in Social Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1980. Feinberg, Joel, Harm to Others, New York, Oxford University Press, 1984. Firebaugh, Glenn, The New Geography of Global Income Inequality, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2003. Flitner, Michael, and Volker Heins, “Modernity and life politics: conceptualizing the biodiversity crisis,” Political Geography, vol. 21, 2002, pp. 319–40. Forst, Rainer, “Justice, Morality and Power in the Global Context,” in Real World Justice: Grounds, Principles, Human Rights, and Social Institutions, ed. A. Follesdal and T. Pogge, Dordrecht, Springer, 2005. Fraenkel, Ernst, “Karl Renner: Die Rechtsinstitute des Privatrechts und ihre soziale Funktion” (1929), in Fraenkel, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1: Recht und Politik in der Weimarer Republik, ed. H. Buchstein, Baden-Baden, Nomos, 1999. Fraser, Nancy, “Reframing justice in a globalizing world,” New Left Review, no. 36, November-December 2005, pp. 69–88. Fraser, Nancy, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, New York, Columbia University Press, 2009. Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. J. Gelb, J. Ingram, and C. Wilke, London and New York, Verso, 2003. Freeman, Daniel, and Jason Freeman, Paranoia: The Twenty-First Century Fear, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008. Freud, Sigmund, Three Case Histories, ed. P. Rieff, New York, Collier, 1963. Freund, Michael, Georges Sorel: Der revolutionäre Konservatismus, 2nd ed., Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 1972. Friese, Heidrun, and Peter Wagner, “The Nascent Political Philosophy of the European Polity,” Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 3, 2002, pp. 342–64. Fulford, Tim, and Peter J. Kitson, eds., Travels, Explorations and Empires, 1770–1835: Travel Writings on North America, the Far East, North and South Poles and the Middle East, 8 vols, London, Pickering & Chatto, 2001–2. Gallup International, Voice of the People 2006: What the World Thinks on Today’s Global Issues, Montreal, Transcontinental Books, 2006. Garnsey, Peter, Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Geuss, Raymond, The Idea of a Critical Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981. Geuss, Raymond, Outside Ethics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005.

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246 • Bibliography Geuss, Raymond, Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008. Görres, Joseph von, “Der Allgemeine Friede, ein Ideal,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. M. Braubach, Cologne, Gilde, 1928. Goodin, Robert E., Manipulatory Politics, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980. Gouldner, Alvin W. The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, New York, Seabury Press, 1979. Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere, 4 vols, Turin, Einaudi, 1975. Gramsci, Antonio, Il nostro Marx, 1918–1919, Turin, Einaudi, 1984. Gray, Matthew, Conspiracy Theories in the Arab World: Sources and Politics, London and New York, Routledge, 2010. Greimas, Algirdas J., “Elements of a Narrative Grammar,” Diacritics, vol. 7, Spring 1977, pp. 23–40. Gurr, Ted G., Why Men Rebel, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1970. Habermas, Jürgen, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. T. McCarthy, Boston, Beacon Press, 1984. Habermas, Jürgen, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy, Boston, Beacon Press, 1987. Habermas, Jürgen, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1998. Habermas, Jürgen, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. C. Cronin and P. De Greiff, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1998. Habermas, Jürgen, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. M. Pensky, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2001. Habermas, Jürgen, “Why Europe needs a Constitution,” New Left Review, no. 11, September-October 2001, pp. 5–26. Habermas, Jürgen, Time of Transitions, trans. C. Cronin and M. Pensky, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2005. Habermas, Jürgen, The Divided West, trans. C. Cronin, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2006. Habermas, Jürgen, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. C. Cronin, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2008. Habermas, Jürgen, Ach Europa, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2008. Habermas, Jürgen, Europe: The Faltering Project, trans. C. Cronin, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2009. Habermas, Jürgen, “Wir brauchen Europa!,” Die Zeit, May 27, 2010. Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. G. Wills, New York, Bantam Classic, 1982. Hammer, Espen, Adorno and the Political, London, Routledge, 2006. Hancock, Ralph C., Calvin and the Foundation of Modern Politics, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1989. Hannerz, Ulf, “Notes on the Global Ecumene,” Public Culture, vol. 1, no. 2, 1989, pp. 66–75. Hardin, Garrett, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, vol. 162, 1968, pp. 1243–48. Hardin, Russell, One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995. Harris, James W., Property and Justice, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996. Hartmann, Martin, and Axel Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism,” Constellations, vol. 13, no. 1, 2006, pp. 41–58. Head, Naomi, “Critical Theory and its Practices: Habermas, Kosovo and International Relations,” Politics, vol. 28, no. 3, 2008, pp. 150–59. Healy, Patrick D., “Believe It: The Media’s Credibility Headache Gets Worse,” New York Times, May 22, 2005.

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Bibliography • 247 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A.W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991. Heins, Volker, “Civil Society’s Barbarisms,” European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 7, no. 4, 2004, pp. 499–517. Heins, Volker, “Orientalising America? Continental Intellectuals and the Search for Europe’s Identity,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 34, no. 2, 2005, pp. 433–48. Heins, Volker, “Critical Theory and the Traps of Conspiracy Thinking,” Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 33, no. 7, 2007, pp. 787–801. Heins, Volker, “Crusaders and Snobs: Moralizing Foreign Policy in Britain and Germany, 1999–2005,” in Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy: Pitfalls, Possibilities and Paradoxes, ed. D. Chandler and V. Heins, London and New York, Routledge, 2007. Heins, Volker, “Reasons of the Heart: Weber and Arendt on Emotion in Politics,” The European Legacy, vol. 12, no. 6, 2007, pp. 715–28. Heins, Volker, Nongovernmental Organizations in International Society: Struggles over Recognition, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Heins, Volker, “Realizing Honneth: Redistribution, Recognition, and Global Justice,” Journal of Global Ethics, vol. 4, no. 2, 2008, pp. 141–53. Heins, Volker, “Human Rights, Intellectual Property, and Struggles for Recognition,” Human Rights Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2008, pp. 213–32. Heins, Volker, “The Place of Property in the Politics of Recognition,” Constellations, vol. 16, no. 4, 2009, pp. 579–92. Heins, Volker, “Flaneure ohne Grenzen? Zur Politik und Moral literarischer Reiseberichte,” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 6, no. 2, 2009, pp. 23–55. Heins, Volker, “Of Persons and Peoples: Internationalizing the Critical Theory of Recognition,” Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 2, 2010, pp. 149–70. Heins, Volker, “Globale Marktgesellschaft oder zivilisatorische Differenz? Das Beispiel Indiens,” Berliner Debatte Initial, vol. 21, no. 1, 2010, pp. 106–13. Heins, Volker, “Three Meanings of Equality: The ‘Arab Problem’ in Israel,” Res Publica, vol. 17, no. 3, 2011, forthcoming. Heins, Volker, Aditya Badami and Andrei S. Markovits, “The West Divided? A Snapshot of Human Rights and Transatlantic Relations at the United Nations,” Human Rights Review, vol. 11, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–16. Heins, Volker, and Andreas Langenohl, “A Fire That Doesn’t Burn? The Allied Bombing of Germany and the Cultural Politics of Trauma,” in Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering, ed. R. Eyerman, J.C. Alexander and E.B. Breese, Boulder, Colo., Paradigm Publishers, 2011. Heller, Michael A., “The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 111, 1998, pp. 621–88. Hennis, Wilhelm, “Max Weber als Erzieher,” in Hennis, Max Webers Wissenschaft vom Menschen, Tübingen, Mohr, 1996. Herres, Jürgen, “Der Schakal Rußlands. Karl Marx Imperialismuskritik: Außenpolitik als Klassenkampf,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 21, 2002. Hilberg, Raul, “The Relevance of Behemoth Today,” Constellations, vol. 10, no. 2, 2003, pp. 256–63. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (1651), ed. C.B. Macpherson, London, Penguin, 1985. Höchheimer, Simon, Bestimmte Bedeutungen der Wörter Fanatismus, Enthusiasmus und Schwärmerei, Vienna, Stahel, 1786. Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, New York, Knopf, 1965. Honneth, Axel, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. K. Baynes, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1991. Honneth, Axel, “Max Horkheimer and the Sociological Deficit of Critical Theory,” in On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives, ed. S. Benhabib et al., Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1993.

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248 • Bibliography Honneth, Axel, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. J. Anderson, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 1995. Honneth, Axel, “Critical Theory,” in The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. C.W. Wright, Albany, SUNY Press, 1995. Honneth, Axel, “Redistribution as Recognition: A Response to Nancy Fraser,” in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. J. Gelb, J. Ingram, and C. Wilke, London and New York, Verso, 2003. Honneth, Axel, “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder,” in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. J. Gelb, J. Ingram, and C. Wilke, London and New York, Verso, 2003. Honneth, Axel, “Organized Self-Realization: Some Paradoxes of Individualization,” European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 7, no. 4, 2004, pp. 463–78. Honneth, Axel, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2007. Honneth, Axel, “Recognition as ideology,” in Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, ed. B. van den Brink and D. Owen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Honneth, Axel, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, trans. J. Ingram, New York, Columbia University Press, 2009. Honneth, Axel, “Das Gewebe der Gerechtigkeit: Über die Grenzen des zeitgenössischen Prozeduralismus,” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 6, no. 2, 2009, pp. 3–22. Honneth, Axel, “Recognition between States: On the Moral Substrate of International Relations,” in T. Lindemann and E. Ringmar, eds., The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations, Boulder, Colo., Paradigm Publishers, forthcoming. Horkheimer, Max, Gesammelte Schriften, 19 vols, ed. A. Schmidt and G. Schmid Noerr, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1985–96. Horkheimer, Max, “The Jews and Europe,” in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. S.E. Bronner and D. MacKay Kellner, New York, Routledge, 1989. Horkheimer, Max, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, trans. G.F. Hunter et al., Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1993. Horkheimer, Max, “The Authoritarian State,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt, New York, Continuum, 2002. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2002. Horkheimer, Max, and Samuel H. Flowerman, “Foreword to Studies in Prejudice,” in T.W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, New York, W.W. Norton, 1950. Houtum, Henk van, and Boedeltje, Freerk, “Europe’s Shame: Death at the Borders of the EU,” Antipode, vol. 41, no. 2, 2009, pp. 226–30. Howard, Dick, “Political Theory, Critical Theory, and the Place of the Frankfurt School,” Critical Horizons, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 271–80. Ignatieff, Michael, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1998. Ikäheimo, Heikki, “Recognizing Persons,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 14, nos. 5–6, 2007, pp. 224–47. Jay, Martin, “Is Experience Still in Crisis? Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. T. Huhn, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Johnson, Walter, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999. Jung, Edgar J., Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, 2nd ed., Berlin, Deutsche Rundschau, 1930. Jünger, Ernst, The Peace, trans. S.O. Hood, Hinsdale, IL, Regnery, 1948. Kaiser, Thomas E., “From the Austrian Committee to the Foreign Plot: MarieAntoinette, Austrophobia, and the Terror,” French Historical Studies, vol. 26, 2003, pp. 579–617.

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Bibliography • 249 Kant, Immanuel, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Political Writings, ed. H.S. Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991. Kaplan, Robert D., An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, New York, Random House, 1998. Kaserman, David L., and A.H. Barnett, The U.S. Organ Procurement System: A Prescription for Reform, Washington, DC, American Enterprise Institute Press, 2002. Kateb, George, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, Totowa, NJ, Rowman & Allenhald, 1984. Katz, Barry M., “The Criticism of Arms: The Frankfurt School Goes to War,” Journal of Modern History , vol. 59, no. 3, 1987, pp. 439–78. Kennan, George F., “Morality and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 64, 1985–86, pp. 205–18. Kershner, Isabel, “Israeli Advocacy Group Begins Campaign to Help Palestinians Sue Over Settlements,” New York Times, January 31, 2009. Kirchheimer, Otto, “In Quest of Sovereignty,” Journal of Politics, vol. 6, May 1944, pp. 139–76. Kitson, Peter J., ed., Nineteenth-Century Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Consolidation, 1835–1910, 8 vols, London, Pickering & Chatto, 2003–4. Kohler, Lotte, ed., Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1926–1969, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1992. Kornbluh, Peter, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, New York, W.W. Norton, 2003. Koselleck, Reinhart, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1979. Kumar, Amitava, Bombay-London-New York, New York, Routledge, 2002. Kumar, Amitava, “Theory by Other Means,” Rethinking Marxism, vol. 17, no. 2, 2005, pp. 275–79. Kurtz, Howard, “Would Deep Throat Be a Hero in 2005?,” Washington Post, June 1, 2005. Labriola, Arturo, Il Socialismo Contemporaneo, Rocca San Giovanni, Casa Editrice Abruzzese, 1914. Ladeur, Karl-Heinz, “ ‘We, the European People’—Relâche?,” European Law Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, 2008, pp. 147–67. Laïdi, Zaki, A World Without Meaning: The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics, trans. J. Burnham and J. Coulon, London, Routledge, 1998. Lametti, David, “The Morality of James Harris’s Theory of Property,” in The Properties of Law: Essays in Honour of James Harris, ed. T. Endicott et al., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006. Lauterpacht, Hersch, Recognition in International Law, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1947. Lerner, Max, America as a Civilization, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1957. Leroy, Maxime, “Citoyen ou Producteur?,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vol. 26, 1919, pp. 669–84. Levy, Jacob, “Indians in Madison’s Constitutional Order,” in James Madison and the Future of Limited Government, ed. J. Samples, Washington, DC, Cato Institute, 2002. Levy, Jacob, “Federalism, Liberalism, and the Separation of Loyalties,” American Political Science Review , vol. 101, no. 3, 2007, pp. 459–77. Lindemann, Thomas, Penser la guerre: L’apport constructiviste, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008. Linklater, Andrew, and Hidemi Suganami, The English School of International Relations: A Contemporary Reassessment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006. Lisle, Debbie, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006. Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government (1690), ed. P. Laslett, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

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250 • Bibliography Loubet del Bayle, J.-L., Les non-conformistes des années 30: Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique francaise, Paris, Seuil, 1969. Lovell, John, “Introduction,” in G.D.H. Cole, The World of Labour, ed. J. Lovell, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1973. Löwenthal, Leo, “The Triumph of Mass Idols,” in Löwenthal, Literature, Popular Culture, and Society, Palo Alto, CA, Pacific Books, 1968. Lu, Catherine, “Humanitarian intervention: moral ambition and political constraints,” International Journal, vol. 62, no. 4, 2007, pp. 942–951. Luhmann, Niklas, Die Politik der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2000. Lukes, Steven, Power: A Radical View, London and New York, Macmillan, 1974. Madison, James, “Parties” (1792), in The Writings of James Madison, vol. 6 (1790–1802), ed. G. Hunt, New York, Putnam, 1906. Majeed, Javed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal, Basingstoke, UK, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Majone, Giandomenico, Europe as the Would-Be World Power: The EU at Fifty, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Manganelli, Giorgio, Esperimento con l’India, Milan, Adelphi Edizioni, 1992. Manganelli, Giorgio, L’infinita trama di Allah: Viaggi nell’ Islam, 1973–1987, ed. G. Pulce, Rome, Quiritta, 2002. Manin, Bernard, The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston, Beacon Press, 1964. Marcuse, Herbert, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 1: Technology, War and Fascism, ed. D. Kellner, New York and London, Routledge, 1998. Markey, Daniel, “Prestige and the Origins of War: Returning to Realism’s Roots,” Security Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, 1999, pp. 126–72. Marx, Karl, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood” (1842), in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1975. Marx, Karl, “The British Rule in India” (1853), in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 12, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1979. Marx, Karl, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1857–58), Berlin, Dietz, 1974. Marx, Karl, Capital, vol. 1 (1876), Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin, 1976 Massing, Paul W., Fatherland (published under the pseudonym Karl Billinger), New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1935. Massing, Paul. W., Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany, New York, Harper, 1949. Matas, David, and David Kilgour, Bloody Harvest: Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China, Woodstock, Ontario, Seraphim Editions, 2009. Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925), trans. I. Cunnison, New York, W.W. Norton and Co., 1967. Memmi, Albert, Dependence: A Sketch for a Portrait of the Dependent, trans. P.A. Facey, Boston, Beacon Press, 1984. Metcalf, Thomas R., Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. Meyer, Thomas, Die Identität Europas: Der EU eine Seele?, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2004. Mill, John Stuart, “On Liberty,” in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. J. Gray, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. Miller, David, National Responsibility and Global Justice, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007. Mills, C. Wright, The Power Elite, New York, Oxford University Press, 1959. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, “Pensées,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. A. Masson, Paris, Nagel, 1950. Mouffe, Chantal, On the Political, London and New York, Routledge, 2005. Müller-Doohm, Stefan, Adorno: A Biography, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2005. Munzer, Stephen R., A Theory of Property, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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Bibliography • 251 Murphy, Liam, and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002. Nagel, Thomas, Equality and Partiality, New York, Oxford University Press, 1991. Narayan, R.K., My Dateless Diary: An American Journey (1960), New Delhi, Penguin, 1988. Nardin, Terry, “International Political Theory and the Question of Justice,” International Affairs, vol. 82, no. 3, 2006, pp. 449–65. Nasr, Joseph, “Egyptian paper: Israel-India nuke test caused tsunami,” The Jerusalem Post, January 6, 2005. Nelson, John S., “Conspiracy as a Hollywood Trope for System,” Political Communication, vol. 20, 2003, pp. 499–503. Neumann, Franz L., Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944, 2nd ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 1944. Neumann, Franz L., The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, ed. H. Marcuse, Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1957. Neumann, Iver B., Uses of the Other: “The East” in European Identity Formation, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999. Nicolson, Harold, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method, New York, Macmillan, 1954. Nietzsche, Friedrich, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the early 1870’s, ed. and trans. D. Breazeale, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press, 1979. Ninkovich, Frank A., Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. Novak, Maximilian E., “Robinson Crusoe’s Original Sin,” in Novak, The Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1962. Nussbaum, Martha C., Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Oakeshott, Michael, On Human Conduct, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975. Oakeshott, Michael, Morality and Politics in Modern Europe, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993. Oakeshott, Michael, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, ed. T. Fuller, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996. O’Neill, John, and Thomas Uebel, “Horkheimer and Neurath: Restarting a Disrupted Debate,” European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 12, 2004, pp. 77–105. O’Neill, Shane, and Caroline Walsh, “Recognition and Redistribution in Theories of Justice Beyond the State,” European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 8, no. 1, 2009, pp. 123–35. Orwell, George, “You and the Atom Bomb,” The Tribune, October 19, 1945. Owen, David, “Self-government and democracy as reflexive co-operation: On Honneth’s social and political ideal,” in Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, ed. B. van den Brink and D. Owen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Paalzow, Christian Ludwig, Über Aufgeklärtheit, Barbarei und Vorurtheile, Berlin, Schön’sche Buchhandlung, 1823. Paine, Thomas, Collected Writings, ed. E. Foner, New York, Library of America, 1995. Park, Robert E., “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 33, 1928, pp. 881–93. Parry, Jonathan, “On the moral perils of exchange,” in Money and the Morality of Exchange, ed. J. Parry and M. Bloch, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pellerin, Daniel, “Calvin: Militant or Man of Peace?,” The Review of Politics, vol. 65, 2003, pp. 35–59. Pensky, Max, “Globalizing Theory, Theorizing Globalization: Introduction,” in Globalizing Critical Theory, ed. Pensky, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Pipes, Daniel, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where it Comes From, New York, Free Press, 1997.

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252 • Bibliography Plato, The Laws, trans. T.J. Saunders, Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin, 1970. Pogge, Thomas, Realizing Rawls, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1989. Pollock, Friedrich, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt, New York, Continuum, 2002. Popitz, Heinrich, Phänomene der Macht, Tübingen, Mohr, 1992. Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies, London and New York, Routledge, 2003. Pöpping, Dagmar, Abendland: Christliche Akademiker und die Utopie der Antimoderne 1900–1945, Berlin, Metropol, 2002. Porter, Dennis, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991. Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London and New York, Routledge, 1992. Raustiala, Kal, and Christopher Sprigman, “The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design,” Virginia Law Review, vol. 92, no. 8, 2006, pp. 1687–777. Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999. Raz, Joseph, “Respecting people,” in Raz, Value, Respect and Attachment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Reichmann, Eva G., “Max Horkheimer the Jew: Critical Theory and Beyond,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, vol. 19, 1974, pp. 181–95. Rifkin, Jeremy, The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, New York, J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000. Ringen, Stein, What Democracy Is For: On Freedom and Moral Government, Oxford and Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007. Ringmar, Erik, “On the Ontological Status of the State,” European Journal of International Relations, vol. 2, 1996, pp. 439–66. Ritchie, Donald A., “Are you now or have you ever been? Opening the records of the McCarthy investigations,” Journal of Government Information, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 463–69. Rose, Carol M., “Propter Honoris Respectum: Property as the Keystone Right?,” Notre Dame Law Review, vol. 71, 1996, pp. 329–65. Roush, Sherrilyn, Tracking Truth: Knowledge, Evidence, and Science, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2005. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “On the Social Contract,” in The Basic Political Writings, trans. D.A. Cress, Indianapolis and Cambridge, Hackett, 1987. Rubiés, Joan-Pau, “Travel Writing as a Genre,” in Journeys, vol. 1, no. 1, 2000, pp. 5–35. Said, Edward W., Orientalism, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978. Said, Edward W., “A Tragic Convergence,” in Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969–1994, New York, Pantheon Books, 1994. Satia, Priya, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East, New York, Oxford University Press, 2008. Satter, David, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003. Scheuerman, William E., Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1997. Schriber, Mary Suzanne, Writing Home: American Women Abroad 1830–1920, Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia Press, 1997. Schwarzschild, Leopold, World in Trance: From Versailles to Pearl Harbor, New York, L.B. Fischer, 1942. Seglow, Jonathan, “Rights, Contribution, Achievement and the World: Some Thoughts on Honneth’s Recognitive Ideal,” European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 8, no. 1, 2009, pp. 61–75.

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Bibliography • 253 Shields, Rob, “Fancy footwork: Walter Benjamin’s notes on flânerie,” in The Flâneur, ed. K. Tester, London and New York, Routledge, 1994. Shklar, Judith N., After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957. Shklar, Judith N., The Faces of Injustice, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990. Showalter, Elaine, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture, New York, Columbia University Press, 1997. Siedentop, Larry, Democracy in Europe, Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin, 2000. Siegrist, Hannes, “Die Propertisierung von Gesellschaft und Kultur: Konstruktion und Institutionalisierung des Eigentums in der Moderne,” Comparativ (Leipzig), vol. 16, nos. 5/6, 2006, pp. 9–53. Simmel, Georg, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. K.H. Wolff, Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1950. Singer, Joseph William, Entitlement: The Paradoxes of Property, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000. Sisario, Ben, “Still Fighting for the Right to His Voice,” New York Times, January 20, 2006. Slezkine, Yuri, The Jewish Century, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004. Smith, Nicholas H., “Work and the Struggle for Recognition,” European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 8, no. 1, 2009, pp. 46–60. Stearns, Peter N., Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America, New York, New York University Press, 1999. Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Amateur Emigrant: From the Clyde to Sandy Hook, Chicago, Stone and Kimball, 1895. Stewart, Rory, The Places In Between, Orlando, FL, Harcourt, 2006. Stewart, Rory, The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, Orlando, FL, Harcourt, 2006. Streeck, Wolfgang, “Einleitung: Internationale Wirtschaft, nationale Demokratie?,” in Internationale Wirtschaft, nationale Demokratie: Herausforderungen für die Demokratietheorie, ed. W. Streeck, Frankfurt and New York, Campus, 1998. Strombeck, Andrew, None Dare Call It Masculinity: The Subject of Post-Kennedy Conspiracy Theory, Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Davis, 2003. Symonds, Michael, and Jason Pudsey, “The forms of brotherly love in Max Weber’s sociology of religion,” Sociological Theory, vol. 24, 2006, pp. 133–49. Taussig, Michael, “Maleficium: State Fetishism,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. E. Apter and W. Pietz, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1993. Theroux, Paul, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Thompson, Simon, The Political Theory of Recognition: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2006. Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, trans. A. Goldhammer, New York, Library of America, 2004. Todorov, Tzvetan, Nous et les autres: La réflexion francaise sur la diversité humaine, Paris, Seuil, 1989. “Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe,” Official Journal of the European Union, vol. 47, 16 December 2004. Tully, James, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Underkuffler, Laura S., The Idea of Property: Its Meaning and Power, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003. U.S. Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report 2007. Vidich, Arthur J., and Stanford M. Lyman, American Sociology: Worldly Rejections of Religion and Their Directions, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985. Vobruba, Georg, “Self-interested aid: belated modernization and interwoven interests between east and west,” Crime, Law and Social Change, vol. 25, no. 1, 1996, pp. 83–93. Wackwitz, Stephan, Osterweiterung: Zwölf Reisen, Frankfurt, Fischer, 2008. Walden, George, “A Greater Leap,” Times Literary Supplement, August 8, 2008.

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254 • Bibliography

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Walter-Busch, Emil, Geschichte der Frankfurter Schule: Kritische Theorie und Politik, Munich, Fink, 2010. Walzer, Michael, “Equality and Civil Society,” in Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society, ed. S. Chambers and W. Kymlicka, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002. Warren, Mark E., “What is Political?,” Journal of Theoretical Politics, vol. 11, no. 2, 1999, pp. 207–31. Weber, Max, Ancient Judaism, ed. H.H. Gerth and D. Martindale, New York, Free Press, 1952. Weber, Max, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, New York, Oxford University Press, 1958. Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1978. Weber, Max, Zur Neuordung Deutschlands: Schriften und Reden 1918–1920, Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, ed. W.J. Mommsen and W. Schwentker, vol. I/16, Tübingen, Mohr, 1988. Weber, Max, Political Writings, ed. P. Lassman and R. Speirs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. Weber, Max, Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit: Schriften und Reden 1908–1912, ed. W. Schluchter and S. Frommer, Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. I/11, Tübingen, Mohr, 1995. Weber, Max, Wirtschaft, Staat und Sozialpolitik: Schriften und Reden 1900–1912, ed. W. Schluchter et al., Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. I/8, Tübingen, Mohr, 1998. Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings, trans. P. Baehr and G.C. Wells, New York, Penguin, 2002. Wendt, Alexander, “Why a World State is Inevitable,” European Journal of International Relations, vol. 9, no. 4, 2003, pp. 491–542. Wilson, Elizabeth, “The Invisible Flaneur,” New Left Review, no. 191, 1992, pp. 90–110. Wittfogel, Karl August, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1957. Wittfogel, Karl August, Staatliches Konzentrationslager VII: eine “Erziehungsanstalt” im Dritten Reich (first published 1936 in London under the pseudonym Klaus Hinrichs), Bremen, Temmen, 1991. Wolf, Reinhard, “Respect and Disrespect in International Politics: The Significance of Status Recognition,” in: International Theory, vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, forthcoming. Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Ziege, Eva-Maria, Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie: Die Frankfurter Schule im amerikanischen Exil, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2009. Zuidervaart, Lambert, Social Philosophy after Adorno, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Index

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Adorno, Theodor W. 1–3, 5, 7–11, 13–18, 20–21, 29–53, 54–56, 61–66, 68–73, 74–76, 79, 80–83, 96, 99, 104, 105, 113, 120n, 124, 125, 126–127, 132, 143, 152, 185n, 189 advocacy 5, 15, 17, 18, 130, 211, 223 Alexander, Jeffrey 5n, 22n, 31, 33, 53, 61n, 109, 131n, 145n alienation, political 24, 55, 66–68, 70, 76 Aly, Götz 185 animality animal metaphors 7, 9, 124n, 152 as opposed to civility 39, 52, 117–122, 123, 124n, 153 anti-Semitism 30, 33–38, 55, 68, 201n, 202 Arato, Andrew 108, 126 Arendt, Hannah 37, 41, 47n, 57, 91, 114, 115n, 117, 123, 124, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 145, 171, 175n, 205 Bacon, Francis 83, 86 barbarism and nationalism 143 as opposed to Europe 83, 86, 120n as opposed to intellectuals 13–14, 80 neo-barbarism 130–132 of order 110–111, 122–126, 133 of disorder 110, 111–122, 133–134, 156 Baudrillard, Jean 82, 105 Beck, Ulrich 130–131, 141n Benjamin, Walter 2, 5, 12, 48, 78, 79, 82–84, 104, 105, 106 Bildung 44, 80 Bourdieu, Pierre 204 brotherliness, ethic of 125, 205–206, 208, 210 Brown, Wendy 3 Calvin, Jean 113–117, 119, 122, 198 Camus, Albert 14n capitalism 20, 36, 37, 44, 49, 58, 62, 72, 129, 142, 171–172, 174, 196 state capitalism 36, 62, 63, 66 Caruth, Cathy 31

China 30, 173, 175, 180, 192 civil society binary discourse of 14, 25, 108–136, 156 global 130–132, 136 Gramsci’s concept of 120–122, 125 institutions of 105 class class conflict 6, 7, 11, 14, 33, 34 “class discipline” 189 disintegration of classes 12 middle class 67, 98, 121, 130 class of experts 174 underclass 131, 195 working class/proletariat 6, 14–15, 34, 38, 49, 121, 131, 134 Cohen, Jean 108, 126 Colas, Dominique 112 Cold War 2, 37, 45, 69, 238 colonialism 43, 87, 94, 97, 124, 148–149, 159, 181, 202, 211, 234 Comte, Auguste 53 conspiracy thinking affinity with Critical Theory 61–65 as partly true 60 as fantasy 55, 74, 115n, 237 as “will to truth” 76 “conspiracy theory of society” 56n critique of 55, 56–60 psychology of 55, 66–77 culture culture industry 7–9, 64, 75 culture wars 17 cynicism 72, 76 “Cynic school” 53 Davis, David Brion 211 decisionism 16 Defoe, Daniel 80–81 De Gaulle, Charles 238 democracy and dictatorship 21n, 37, 113 “audience democracy” 9 deliberative 127, 135

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256 • Index “democracy of the streets” 118 moral foundations of 17, 63, 94–95, 110, 126–127, 130 theory of 16, 20, 63, 108, 128–130, 131 threats to 4, 9, 10, 11, 13, 35, 57, 76, 118, 135, 155 democratic pedagogy 32, 44–49 Deranty, Jean-Philippe 21n, 219 Derrida, Jacques 144, 150–151n Dewey, John 128–129 Döblin, Alfred 125 domestic analogy 11, 229, 229n Durkheim, Emile 41, 51, 109, 139, 158, 186, 235 Dworkin, Ronald 186 Ellickson, Robert 188 Elster, Jon 171–172n Eurocentrism 20, 139, 143, 146, 159 Eurofederalism 154–158, 164 European Union as opposed to America 138–139, 144–150, 151, 153 as a postwestern space 146 democratic deficit of 155, 155n ethical closure of 139, 156 symbolic deficit of 137 “Europeanization” 122n evil 10, 21, 33, 37, 39, 40–43, 46, 52, 73, 75, 80, 111, 129, 132, 150, 184 “sacred evil” 41 Eyerman, Ron 31, 47n

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fanaticism 111, 112–117, 122, 124n, 125 Feinberg, Joel 206 Foucault, Michel 10, 128n Fraenkel, Ernst 184 Fraser, Nancy 27, 166, 194, 208–209n, 210 Freud, Sigmund 67, 70–71n friend/foe opposition 4, 12, 14n, 14–18, 20, 21, 54, 110, 140, 161, 219 Gandhi, Mohandas K. 100, 101, 134, 136 Germany Weimar Germany 119, 129, 132n, 141, 142, 237–238, 238n Nazi Germany 12, 37, 39, 46, 185, 199, 215n, 217 West Germany 17, 32, 44, 45, 46, 49, 91, 143, 154, 238

Geuss, Raymond 18, 19, 198, 204 Gouldner, Alvin 2 Gramsci, Antonio 114, 117, 119, 120–122, 120n, 123, 125–126, 126n, 134 Greimas, A.J. 132–133 Habermas, Jürgen 1, 2, 4, 11, 17, 18–20, 22, 82n, 108, 133, 137–165, 174, 228, 229n Hamilton, Alexander 122–123, 171 Hardin, Garrett 187 Hardin, Russell 90 Harris, James 175–177, 181 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 21, 167, 170, 174, 177, 185, 231 Hesse, Hermann 96 Hobbes, Thomas 18, 19, 125, 194, 216, 229, 229n, 240 Hofstadter, Richard 57 Holocaust as social fact 32, 33, 40, 45, 46 as symbol 33, 39–41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 50 Homer 52, 79, 80 Honneth, Axel 2, 4, 19, 20–22, 48, 67n, 104n, 127, 135, 166, 174, 184, 189, 191, 192–213, 214–240 Horkheimer, Max 1, 5, 6, 7–12, 14, 29, 33, 34, 35–36, 40–41, 45, 55, 60–66, 70, 75, 76, 79–81, 83, 104, 105, 121, 123, 152, 173–174, 185n human rights 10, 21, 130, 138n, 149, 152, 159, 184, 190, 195, 196, 203, 206, 212, 219, 220–224, 226–227, 228, 240 Huntington, Samuel 147 Hussein, Saddam 231 idealpolitik 138 imagination 42, 67, 90, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 134, 137, 141, 154, 236 indifference 9, 160, 193, 238 individualism 72, 85, 145, 197, 219 cult of the individual 79 international society 155, 157, 214, 215, 216, 219, 225, 227, 228–232, 234, 238, 240 as a society sui generis 230 Internet 76 Jaspers, Karl 47 jazz 11n, 52, 80 Jews 14, 30, 34, 36, 38, 39, 45, 46, 47, 51, 57, 99, 142, 185, 202, 234, 236 Johnson, Lyndon B. 64

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Index • 257 justice 11, 20, 21, 22, 114, 159, 160, 166, 168, 169, 177, 183, 185–186, 188–191, 192, 194–201, 208–209n, 209, 215, 217, 222, 227, 228, 229, 231 theories of 22, 27, 169, 195, 197–199, 212, 222 justice-oriented foreign policy 204, 209, 212–213, 220, 232, 236 Kant, Immanuel 156, 157, 160, 219–220, 224, 225 Kateb, George 9 Kennedy, John F. 56, 64 Kierkegaard, Søren 15 Kirchheimer, Otto 5, 11, 13, 66–67 Kracauer, Siegfried 30 Kumar, Amitava 91, 102–103, 105, 106

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Labriola, Arturo 129 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 42 Lerner, Max 121, 124n Leroy, Maxime 128 Levy, Jacob 162 liberalism 34, 142 Liebknecht, Karl 119 Lisle, Debbie 84, 89–90 Locke, John 167, 174, 178, 179, 181 London, Jack 124, 125 Luhmann, Niklas 111–112 Luxemburg, Rosa 119 Machiavelli, Niccolo 18, 216 Madison, James 12, 63, 178, 187, 191 Malthusianism 43, 195 Manganelli, Giorgio 91, 95–97, 104 manipulation 7, 8, 13, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 64, 65, 69, 73, 80, 118, 172, 179 Mann, Thomas 132n Marcuse, Herbert 2, 7, 173 Markey, Daniel 232 Marx, Karl 43, 49, 120, 120n, 167, 171, 172, 174 Marxism 17, 21, 26, 33, 34, 43, 127, 168, 193, 195 Massing, Paul 30, 38, 39n, 201n Mauss, Marcel 198 meaning-making 24, 31, 43, 105, 137, 239–240 media 5, 6, 7, 8, 59, 72, 75, 86, 103, 156, 161, 183, 203 Melanchthon, Philipp 113 Meyer, Thomas 139, 146–150 Mill, John Stuart 9

modernization 20, 43–44, 122n, 124, 131, 132, 201, 205, 230 Montesquieu 169, 233 moral geography 79, 131, 140, 150, 150n, 158 Mouffe, Chantal 2 Nagel, Thomas 193 Narayan, R.K. 91, 99–102, 106 Nardin, Terry 189 nationalism 52, 98, 100, 143, 153, 155, 158, 239 nepotism 190 Neumann, Franz 5, 11, 12, 18, 33, 55, 60, 66–68, 70, 72, 126, 145, 215n Neumann, Iver 145 Neurath, Otto 65n Nietzsche, Friedrich 71, 240 Nixon, Richard 77 Nussbaum, Martha 227 Oakeshott, Michael 110, 115 Olson, Mancur 12 Orientalism 79, 87–89, 91, 95, 96–97, 98, 100, 103, 104, 141, 141n, 145, 146, 159 Orwell, George 123 other-regarding 16, 192, 210, 223 paranoia 55, 57, 59, 62, 65, 69, 71–73, 73–74n, 74–75, 123 perpetrator/victim opposition 4, 14–18, 20–21, 54, 219 persecution 14, 15, 32, 33, 34–35, 37–38, 52, 54, 74, 202 “persecutory anxiety” 67 person/state analogy 219, 228–229, 229n personification, fallacy of 74 Plato 80 Pogge, Thomas 195, 197, 199, 201, 203–204, 212 politics “affective politics” 118, 128 as activity 10 as sphere 3, 10, 11, 21, 127, 130 disdain for 2 dissemination of 4, 10–13, 20, 21, 23 moralization of 207, 220 narrative theory of 239–240 suppression of 4–9, 15, 20 “the right form of politics” 18 Pollock, Friedrich 36 Popper, Karl 56n postcolonialism 79, 89, 95, 102, 192

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258 • Index

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poverty 43, 93, 105, 159, 182, 188, 193, 196–197, 204 power as seduction 7, 8, 125 bureaucratic 10, 13, 48, 56, 64, 74, 94, 123–125, 129, 156, 175 dual face of 21 masculine 106 monopolization of 4–5, 54, 63, 67, 162 radical conception of 6–9 social 11, 34, 37, 51–52, 56, 61, 66, 167, 168, 173, 174, 176, 184 “soft power” 223, 236–237 total 15, 123, 124, 126 transformative 7, 90 Pratt, Mary Louise 92, 105 prestige 209, 215, 230–232, 240 “prestige order” 231 property as a “political phenomenon” 184 as human right 184–185 critique of 167, 168, 169–174, 187, 188–191 definition of 175–177 “disappearance of property” 175n intellectual 168, 181–183 struggles over 168, 169, 174–183 prophecy 13, 47n, 47–48, 53, 116 “iustes plaidoyeurs” 117 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 176 public sphere 19, 60, 67, 129, 150, 155, 161, 162, 164 rackets 11–13, 23, 24, 26, 54, 55, 61–64, 62n, 173, 215 Rawls, John 176n, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 203, 204, 212, 224–227, 228, 229n, 234, 235, 240 realism 17–22, 161 recognition and redistribution 166, 179, 184–186, 194, 195–199, 200, 212–213 anti-authoritarian thrust of 234 as esteem 174, 183, 200, 207–208, 211–212, 223, 230, 231 as love 200, 204–206, 213, 223 as legal respect 174, 184–186, 206–207, 213, 222, 223, 230 ideological 91, 104n, 227 internationalization of 84–85, 91, 191–192, 195, 203–208, 214–215, 222, 228–240 limits of the theory of 209–213, 216, 218–219, 223, 239–240 without knowledge 104, 104n

Renault, Emmanuel 219 Renner, Karl 184 Ringmar, Erik 239 romanticism, political 215, 216–224, 233 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 12, 63, 162–163, 232 sacrifice, concept of 15 Said, Edward 78, 79, 80, 86–89, 88n, 90, 95, 99, 104, 105 Sartre, Jean-Paul 202 Schmitt, Carl 15–16 Seglow, Jonathan 218 (self-)reeducation 17, 45 separation of powers 58, 63 Shils, Edward 101 Shklar, Judith 199, 215, 218, 219, 222 Showalter, Elaine 58 Siedentop, Larry 147 Simmel, Georg 86, 87 slavery 169–170, 178, 179, 199, 211 Smith, Nicholas 127, 211n Sorel, Georges 122n, 125, 128 Spengler, Oswald 142 state, the as “intervening abstraction” 215, 218, 222 as narrative institution 240 as threatened by rackets 12–13 authoritarian 111, 122, 157 concept of 235 “state fetishism” 215, 224–227 Stevenson, Robert Louis 85 Stewart, Rory 91–95, 106 struggle, concept of 14–15, 20–22, 34, 193–194, 223 systems theory 20 tact 227, 232–233, 236 Taussig, Michael 215 theodicy 32, 40–44, 195 Tocqueville, Alexis de 9, 9n Todorov, Tzvetan 104, 104n trauma cultural 31–32, 32–40, 46, 47, 49, 52 psychoanalytic theory of 45, 47 society as 32, 49–53 United States as benign power 153 as different from Europe 105, 138, 144, 146–150, 153 democratic virtues in 44 utopia 13, 65, 108, 159, 233 “mechanical utopianism” 121

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Index • 259 Vietnam War 46, 50

Yeats, William Butler 2 Ziege, Eva-Maria 37, 70–71n

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Wackwitz, Stephan 91, 97–99 Waits, Tom 183 Weber, Max 7, 21, 47–48, 49n, 70, 114, 116, 117, 118–119, 120, 121, 123–124, 125, 127n, 131, 134, 149n, 196, 205, 239 whistleblowers 77, 77n Wilson, Woodrow 236 wisdom statements 48–49 witness 15, 17, 32, 65, 89 moral 33, 38–40

secondary 40, 40n Wittfogel, Karl August 21n, 30, 38, 123, 173, 184 world opinion 238 work/labor 2, 36, 49, 50, 67, 117, 120, 121, 126–132, 133, 136, 167–168, 172, 208, 211n, 211–212 as “defining part of our life” 126–127

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